13146	----	[Illustration: "I beg your pardon. Is this a private raft?"] THE BEAUTY AND THE BOLSHEVIST By ALICE DUER MILLER _Author of_ "_ The Charm School_" "_Ladies must Live_" "_Come out of the Kitchen_" _etc_. Illustrated 1920 ILLUSTRATIONS "I beg your pardon. Is this a private raft?" "Mr. Moreton, the Newport boat leaves at five-thirty" "I'll be there in five minutes, in a little blue car" "Suppose you find you do hate being poor?" THE BEAUTY AND THE BOLSHEVIST CHAPTER I The editor of that much-abused New York daily, _Liberty_, pushed back his editorial typewriter and opened one letter in the pile which the office-boy--no respecter of persons--had just laid upon the desk while whistling a piercing tune between his teeth. The letter said: DEAR BEN,--I hate to think what your feelings will be on learning that I am engaged to be married to a daughter of the capitalistic class. Try to overcome your prejudices, however, and judge Eugenia as an individual and not as a member of a class. She has very liberal ideas, reads your paper, and is content to go with me to Monroe College and lead the life of an instructor's wife. You will be glad to know that Mr. Cord disapproves as much as you do, and will not give his daughter a cent, so that our life will be as hard on the physical side as you in your most affectionate moments could desire. Mr. Cord is under the impression that lack of an income will cool my ardor. You see he could not think worse of me if he were my own brother. Yours, DAVID. The fine face of the editor darkened. It was the face of an idealist--the deep-set, slowly changing eyes, the high cheek bones, but the mouth closed firmly, almost obstinately, and contradicted the rest of the face with a touch of aggressiveness, just as in Lincoln's face the dreamer was contradicted by the shrewd, practical mouth. He crossed his arms above the elbow so that one long hand dangled on one side of his knees and one on the other--a favorite pose of his--and sat thinking. The editor was often called a Bolshevist--as who is not in these days? For language is given us not only to conceal thought, but often to prevent it, and every now and then when the problems of the world become too complex and too vital, some one stops all thought on a subject by inventing a tag, like "witch" in the seventeenth century, or "Bolshevist" in the twentieth. Ben Moreton was not a Bolshevist; indeed, he had written several editorials to show that, in his opinion, their doctrines were not sound, but of course the people who denounced him never thought of reading his paper. He was a socialist, a believer in government ownership, and, however equably he attempted to examine any dispute between capital and labor, he always found for labor. He was much denounced by ultraconservatives, and perhaps their instinct was sound, for he was educated, determined, and possessed of a personality that attached people warmly, so that he was more dangerous than those whose doctrines were more militant. He was not wholly trusted by the extreme radicals. His views were not consistently agreeable to either group. For instance, he believed that the conscientious objectors were really conscientious, a creed for which many people thought he ought to be deported. On the other hand, he doubted that Wall Street had started the war for its own purposes, a skepticism which made some of his friends think him just fit for a bomb. The great problem of his life was how to hold together a body of liberals so that they could be effective. This problem was going to be immensely complicated by the marriage of his brother with the daughter of a conspicuous capitalist like William Cord. He pushed the buzzer on his desk and wrote out the following telegram: David Moreton, Care William Cord, Newport, R.I. Am taking boat Newport to-night. Meet me. Ben. No one answered his buzzer, but presently a boy came in collecting copy, and Moreton said to him: "Here, get this sent, and ask Klein to come here. He's in the composing room." And presently Mr. Klein entered, in the characteristic dress of the newspaper man--namely, shirt sleeves and a green shade over his eyes. "Look here, Ben!" he exclaimed in some excitement. "Here's a thousand-dollar check just come in for the strike fund. How's that for the second day?" "Good enough," said Ben, who would ordinarily have put in a good hour rejoicing over such unexpected good fortune, but whose mind was now on other things. "I have to go out of town to-night. You'll be here, won't you, to lock the presses? And, see here, Leo, what is the matter with our book page?" "Pretty rotten page," replied Klein. "I should say it was--all about taxes and strikes and economic crises. I told Green never to touch those things in the book reviews. Our readers get all they want of that from us in the news and the editorials--hotter, better stuff, too. I've told him not to touch 'em in the book page, and he runs nothing else. He ought to be beautiful--ought to talk about fairies, and poetry, and twelfth-century art. What's the matter with him?" "He doesn't know anything," said Klein. "That's his trouble. He's clever, but he doesn't know much. I guess he only began to read books a couple years ago. They excite him too much. He wouldn't read a fairy story. He'd think he was wasting time." "Get some one to help him out." "Who'd I get?" "Look about. I've got to go home and pack a bag. Ask Miss Cox what time that Newport boat leaves." "Newport! Great heavens, Ben! What is this? A little week-end?" "A little weak brother, Leo." "David in trouble again?" Moreton nodded. "He thinks he's going to marry William Cord's daughter." Klein, who was Ben's friend as well as his assistant, blanched at the name. "Cord's daughter!" he exclaimed, and if he had said Jack-the-ripper's, he could not have expressed more horror. "Now isn't it queer," he went on, musingly, "that David, brought up as he has been, can see anything to attract him in a girl like that?" Ben was tidying his desk preparatory to departure--that is to say, he was pushing all the papers far enough back to enable him to close the roller top, and he answered, absently: "Oh, I suppose they're all pretty much the same--girls." "Why, what do you mean?" said Leo, reproachfully. "How can a girl who's been brought up to be a parasite--to display the wealth of her father and husband, and has never done a useful thing since she was born--Why, a woman was telling me the other day--I got caught in a block in the subway and she was next me--awfully interesting, she was. She sewed in one of these fashionable dressmaking establishments--and the things she told me about what those women spend on their clothes--underclothes and furs and everything. Now there must be something wrong with a woman who can spend money on those things when she knows the agony of poverty right around her. You can't compare that sort of woman with a self-respecting, self-supporting girl--" At this moment the door opened and Miss Cox entered. She wore a short-sleeved, low-neck, pink-satin blouse, a white-satin skirt, open-work stockings, and slippers so high in the heels that her ankles turned inward. Her hair was treated with henna and piled untidily on the top of her head. She was exactly what Klein had described--a self-respecting, self-supporting girl, but, on a superficial acquaintance, men of Cord's group would have thought quite as badly of her as Klein did of fashionable women. They would have been mistaken. Miss Cox supported her mother, and, though only seventeen, denied herself all forms of enjoyment except dress and an occasional movie. She was conscientious, hard-working, accurate, and virtuous. She loved Ben, whom she regarded as wise, beautiful, and generous, but she would have died rather than have him or anyone know it. She undulated into the room, dropped one hip lower than the other, placed her hand upon it and said, with a good deal of enunciation: "Oh, Mr. Moreton, the Newport boat leaves at five-thirty." "Thank you very much, Miss Cox," said Ben, gravely, and she went out again. [Illustration: "Mr. Moreton, the Newport boat leaves at five-thirty"] "It would be a terrible thing for Dave to make a marriage like that," Klein went on as soon as she had gone, "getting mixed up with those fellows. And it would be bad for you, Ben--" "I don't mean to get mixed up with them," said Ben. "No, I mean having Dave do it. It would kill the paper; it would endanger your whole position; and as for leadership, you could never hope--" "Now, look here, Leo. You don't think I can stop my brother's marrying because it might be a poor connection for me? The point is that it wouldn't be good for Dave--to be a poorly tolerated hanger-on. That's why I'm going hot-foot to Newport. And while I'm away do try to do something about the book page. Get me a culture-hound--get one of these Pater specialists from Harvard. Or," he added, with sudden inspiration when his hand was already on the door, "get a woman--she'd have a sense of beauty and would know how to jolly Green into agreeing with her." And with this the editor was gone. It was the end of one of those burning weeks in August that New York often knows. The sun went down as red as blood every evening behind the Palisades, and before the streets and roofs had ceased to radiate heat the sun was up again above Long Island Sound, as hot and red as ever. As Ben went uptown in the Sixth Avenue Elevated he could see pale children hanging over the railings of fire escapes, and behind them catch glimpses of dark, crowded rooms which had all the disadvantages of caves without the coolness. But to-day he was too concentrated on his own problem to notice. Since Ben's sixteenth year his brother David had been dependent on him. Their father had been professor of economics in a college in that part of the United States which Easterners describe as the "Middle West." In the gay days when muck-raking was at its height Professor Moreton had lost his chair because he had denounced in his lecture room financial operations which to-day would be against the law. At that time they were well thought of, and even practiced by the eminent philanthropist who had endowed the very chair which Moreton occupied. The trustees felt that it was unkind and unnecessary to complicate their already difficult duties by such tactlessness, and their hearts began to turn against Moreton, as most of our hearts turn against those who make life too hard for us. Before long they asked him to resign on account of his age--he was just sixty and extremely vigorous; but immediately afterward, having been deeply surprised and hurt, he did what Goldsmith recommends to lovely woman under not dissimilar circumstances--he died. He left his two young sons--he had married late in life--absolutely unprovided for. Ben, the elder of the two, was sixteen, and just ready for college; but he could not give four precious years to an academic degree. He went to work. With the background of an educated environment and a very sound knowledge of economic questions, breathed in from his earliest days, he found a place at once on a new paper--or, rather, on an old paper just being converted into a new organ of liberalism--_Liberty_. It was independent in politics, and was supposed to be independent in economic questions, but by the time Ben worked up to the editorship it was well recognized to be an anticapitalist sheet. The salary of its editor, though not large, was sufficient to enable him to send his younger brother through college, with the result that David, a little weak, a little self-indulgent, a little--partly through physical causes--disinclined to effort, was now a poet, a classicist and an instructor in a fresh-water college. Ben made him an allowance to enable him to live--the college not thinking this necessary for its instructors. But during the war Ben had not been able to manage the allowance, because, to the surprise of many of his friends, Ben had volunteered early. Although the reasons for doing this seemed absurdly simple to him, the decision had been a difficult one. He was a pacifist--saw no virtue in war whatsoever. He wished to convert others to his opinion--unlike many reformers who prefer to discuss questions only with those who already agree with them. He argued that the speeches of a man who had been through war, or, better still, the posthumous writings of one who has been killed in war, would have more weight with the public than the best logic of one who had held aloof. But his radical friends felt that he was using this argument merely as an excuse for choosing the easy path of conformity, while the few ultraconservatives who mentioned the matter at all assumed that he had been drafted against his will. Afterward, when the war was over and his terrible book, _War_, appeared, no one was pleased, for the excellent reason that it was published at a moment when the whole world wanted to forget war entirely. The pay of a private, however, had not allowed him to continue David's allowance, and so David, displaying unusual energy, had found a job for himself as tutor for the summer to William Cord's son. Ben had not quite approved of a life that seemed to him slightly parasitical, but it was healthy and quiet and, above everything, David had found it for himself, and initiative was so rare in the younger man that Ben could not bear to crush it with disapproval. Increasingly, during the two years he was in France, Ben was displeased by David's letters. The Cords were described as kindly, well-educated people, fond one of another, considerate of the tutor, with old-fashioned traditions of American liberties. Ben asked himself if he would have been better pleased if David's employers had been cruel, vulgar, and blatant, and found the answer was in the affirmative. It would, he thought, have been a good deal safer for David's integrity if he had not been so comfortable. For two summers Ben had made no protest, but the third summer, when the war was over and the allowance again possible, he urged David not to go back to Newport. David flatly refused to yield. He said he saw no reason why he should go on taking Ben's money when this simple way of earning a full living was open to him. Wasn't Ben's whole theory that everyone should be self-supporting? Why not be consistent? Ignorant people might imagine that two affectionate brothers could not quarrel over an issue purely affectionate. But the Moretons did quarrel--more bitterly than ever before, and that is saying a great deal. With the extraordinary tenacity of memory that develops under strong emotion, they each contrived to recall and to mention everything which the other had done that was wrong, ridiculous, or humiliating since their earliest days. They parted with the impression on David's part that Ben thought him a self-indulgent grafter, and on Ben's side that David thought him a bully solely interested in imposing his will on those unfortunate enough to be dependent on him. It was after half past four when, having walked up five flights of stairs, he let himself into his modest flat on the top floor of an old-fashioned brownstone house. As he opened the door, he called, "Nora!" No beautiful partner of a free-love affair appeared, but an elderly woman in spectacles who had once been Professor Moreton's cook, and now, doing all the housework for Ben, contrived to make him so comfortable that the editor of a more radical paper than his own had described the flat as "a bourgeois interior." "Nora," said Ben, "put something in my bag for the night--I'm going to Newport in a few minutes." He had expected a flood of questions, for Nora was no looker-on at life, and he was surprised by her merely observing that she was glad he was getting away from the heat. The truth was that she knew far more about David than he did. She had consistently coddled David since his infancy, and he told her a great deal. Besides, she took care of his things when he was at Ben's. She had known of sachets, photographs, and an engraved locket that he wore on his watch-chain. She was no radical. She had seen disaster come upon the old professor and attributed it, not to the narrowness of the trustees, but to the folly of the professor. She disapproved of most of Ben's friends, and would have despised his paper if she ever read it. The only good thing about it in her estimation was, he seemed to be able "to knock a living out of it"--a process which Nora regarded with a sort of gay casualness. She did not blame him for making so little money and thus keeping her housekeeping cramped, but she never in her own mind doubted that it would be far better if he had more. The idea that David was about to marry money seemed to her simply the reward of virtue--her own virtue in bringing David up so well. She knew that Mr. Cord opposed the marriage, but she supposed that Ben would arrange all that. She had great confidence in Ben. Still he was very young, very young, so she gave him a word of advice as she put his bag into his hand. "Don't take any nonsense. Remember you're every bit as good as they. Only don't, for goodness' sake, Mr. Ben, talk any of your ideas to them. A rich man like Mr. Cord wouldn't like that." Ben laughed. "How would you like me to bring you home a lovely heiress of my own?" he said. She took a thread off his coat. "Only don't let her come interfering in my kitchen," she said, and hurried him away. He had a good deal of courage, but he had not enough to tell Nora he was going to Newport to stop her darling's marriage. The Newport boat gets to Newport about two o'clock in the morning, and experienced travelers, if any such choose this method of approach, go on to Fall River and take a train back to Newport, arriving in time for a comfortable nine-o'clock breakfast. But Ben was not experienced, and he supposed that when you took a boat for Newport and reached Newport the thing to do was to get off the boat. It had been a wonderful night on the Sound, and Ben had not been to bed, partly because, applying late on a Friday evening, he had not been able to get a room, but partly because the moon and the southerly breeze and the silver shores of Long Island and the red and white lighthouses had been too beautiful to leave. Besides, he had wanted to think out carefully what he was going to say to his brother. To separate a man from the woman he loves, however unwisely, has some of the same disadvantages as offering a bribe--one respects the other person less in proportion as one succeeds. What, Ben said to himself, could he urge against a girl he did not know? Yet, on the other hand, if he had known her, his objections would have seemed regrettably personal. Either way, it was difficult to know what to say. He wondered what Cord had said, and smiled to think that here was one object for which he and Cord were co-operating--only Cord would never believe it. That was one trouble with capitalists--they always thought themselves so damned desirable. And Ben did not stop to inquire how it was that capitalists had gained this impression. On the pier he looked about for David, but there was no David. Of course the boy had overslept, or hadn't received his telegram--Ben said this to himself, but somehow the vision of David comfortably asleep in a luxurious bed in the Cords's house irritated him. His meditations were broken in upon by a negro boy with an open hack, who volunteered to "take him up for fifty cents." It sounded reasonable. Ben got in and they moved slowly down the narrow pier, the horses' hoofs clumping lazily on the wooden pavement. Turning past the alley of Thames Street, still alight at three o'clock in the morning, Ben stopped at the suggestion of his driver and left his bag at a hotel, and then they went on up the hill, past the tower of the Skeleton in Armor, past old houses with tall, pillared porticoes, reminiscent of the days when the South patronized Newport, and turned into Bellevue Avenue--past shops with names familiar to Fifth Avenue, past a villa with bright-eyed owls on the gateposts, past many large, silent houses and walled gardens. The air was very cool, and now and then the scent of some flowering bush trailed like a visible cloud across their path. Then suddenly the whole avenue was full of little red lights, like the garden in "Faust" when Mephistopheles performs his magic on it. Here and there the huge headlights of a car shone on the roadway, magnifying every rut in the asphalt, and bringing out strange, vivid shades in the grass and the hydrangea bushes. They were passing a frowning palace set on a piece of velvet turf as small as a pocket handkerchief--so small that the lighted windows were plainly visible from the road. "Stop," said Ben to his driver. He had suddenly realized how long it must be before he could rouse the Cord household. He paid his driver, got out, and made his way up the driveway toward the house. Groups of chauffeurs were standing about their cars--vigorous, smartly dressed men, young for the most part. Ben wondered if it were possible that they were content with the present arrangement, and whether their wives and children were not stifling in the city at that very moment. He caught a sentence here and there as he passed. "And, believe me," one was saying, "as soon as he got into the box he did not do a thing to that fellar from Tiverton--" Ben's footsteps lagged a little. He was a baseball fan. He almost forgave the chauffeurs for being content. They seemed to him human beings, after all. He approached the house, and, walking past a narrow, unroofed piazza, he found himself opposite a long window. He looked straight into the ballroom. The ball was a fancy ball--the best of the season. It was called a Balkan Ball, which gave all the guests the opportunity of dressing pretty much as they pleased. The wood of the long paneled room was golden, and softened the light from the crystal appliques along the wall, and set off the bright dresses of the dancers as a gold bowl sets off the colors of fruit. Every now and then people stepped out on the piazza, and as they did they became audible to Ben for a few seconds. First, two middle-aged men, solid, bronzed, laughing rather wickedly together. Ben drew back, afraid of what he might overhear, but it turned out to be no very guilty secret. "My dear fellow," one was saying, "I gave him a stroke a hole, and he's twenty years younger than I am--well, fifteen anyhow. The trouble with these young men is that they lack--" Ben never heard what it was that young men lacked. Next came a boy and a girl, talking eagerly, the girl's hand gesticulating at her round, red lips. Ben had no scruples in overhearing them--theirs appeared to be the universal secret. But here again he was wrong. She was saying: "Round and round--not up and down. My dentist says that if you always brush them round and round--" Then two young men--boys, with cigarettes drooping from their lips; they were saying, "I haven't pitched a game since before the war, but he said to go in and get that Tiverton fellow, and so--" Ben saw that he was in the presence of the hero of the late game. He forgave him, too. As a matter of fact, he had never given the fashionable world enough attention to hate it. He knew that Leo Klein derived a very revivifying antagonism from reading about it, and often bought himself an entrance to the opera partly because he loved music, but partly, Ben always thought, because he liked to look up at the boxes and hate the occupants for their jewels and inattention. But Ben watched the spectacle with as much detachment as he would have watched a spring dance among the Indians. And then suddenly his detachment melted away, for a lovely girl came through the window--lovely with that particular and specific kind of loveliness which Ben thought of when he used the word--_his_ kind. He used to wonder afterward how he had known it at that first glimpse, for, in the dim light of the piazza, he could not see some of her greatest beauties--the whiteness of her skin, white as milk where her close, fine, brown hair began, or the blue of the eyes set at an angle which might have seemed Oriental in eyes less enchanting turquoise in color. But he could see her slenderness and grace. She was dressed in clinging blues and greens and she wore a silver turban. She leaned her hands on the railings--she turned them out along the railings; they were slender and full of character--not soft. Ben looked at the one nearest him. With hardly more than a turn of his head he could have kissed it. The idea appealed to him strongly; he played with it, just as when he was a child in a college town he had played with the idea of getting up in church and walking about on the backs of the pews. This would be pleasanter, and the subsequent getaway even easier. He glanced at the dark lawn behind him; there appeared to be no obstacle to escape. Perhaps, under the spell of her attraction for him, and the knowledge that he would never see her again, he might actually have done it, but she broke the trance by speaking to a tall, stolid young man who was with her. "No, Eddie," she said, as if answering something he had said some time ago, "I really was at home, at just the time I said, only this new butler does hate you so--" "You might speak to him about it--you might even get rid of him," replied the young man, in the tone of one deeply imposed upon. "Good butlers are so rare nowadays." "And are devoted friends so easy to find?" "No, but a good deal easier than butlers, Eddie dear." The young man gave an exclamation of annoyance. "Let us find some place out of the way. I want to speak to you seriously--" he began, and they moved out of earshot--presumably to a secluded spot of Eddie's choosing. When they had gone Ben felt distinctly lonely, and, what was more absurd, slighted, as if Eddie had deliberately taken the girl away from him--out of reach. How silly, he thought, for Eddie to want to talk to her, when it was so clear the fellow did not know how to talk to her. How silly to say, in the sulky tone, "Are devoted friends so easy to find?" Of course they were--for a girl like that--devoted friends, passionate lovers, and sentimental idiots undoubtedly blocked her path. It might have been some comfort to him to know that in the remote spot of his own choosing, a stone bench under a purple beech, Eddie was simply going from bad to worse. "Dear Crystal," he began, with that irritating reasonableness of manner which implies that the speaker is going to be reasonable for two, "I've been thinking over the situation. I know that you don't love me, but then I don't believe you will ever be deeply in love with any one. I don't think you are that kind of woman." "Oh, Eddie, how dreadful!" "I don't see that at all. Just as well, perhaps. You don't want to get yourself into such a position as poor Eugenia." "I do, I would. I'd give anything to be as much in love as Eugenia." "What? With a fellow like that! A complete outsider." "Outside of what? The human race?" "Well, no," said Eddie, as if he were yielding a good deal, "but outside of your traditions and your set." "My set! Good for him to be outside of it, I say. What have they ever done to make anyone want to be inside of it? Why, David is an educated gentleman. To hear him quote Horace--" "Horace who?" "Really, Eddie." "Oh, I see. You mean the poet. That's nothing to laugh at, Crystal. It was a natural mistake. I thought, of course, you meant some of those anarchists who want to upset the world." Crystal looked at him more honestly and seriously than she had yet done. "Well, don't you think there _is_ something wrong with the present arrangement of things, Eddie?" "No, I don't, and I hate to hear you talk like a socialist." "I am a socialist." "You're nothing of the kind." "I suppose I know what I am." "Not at all--not at all." "I certainly think the rich are too rich, while the poor are so horridly poor." "_You'd_ get on well without your maid and your car and your father's charge accounts at all the shops, wouldn't you?" Though agreeable to talk seriously if you agree, it is correspondingly dangerous if you disagree. Crystal stood up, trembling with an emotion which Eddie, although he was rather angry himself, considered utterly unaccountable. "Yes," she said, almost proudly, "I _am_ luxurious, I _am_ dependent on those things. But whose fault is that? It's the way I was brought up--it's all wrong. But, even though I am dependent on them, I believe I could exist without them. I'd feel like killing myself if I didn't think so. Sometimes I want to go away and find out if I couldn't live and be myself without all this background of luxury. But at the worst--I'm just one girl--suppose I were weak and couldn't get on without them? That wouldn't prove that they are right. I'm not so blinded that I can't see that a system by which I profit may still be absolutely wrong. But you always seem to think, Eddie, that it's part of the Constitution of the United States that you should have everything you've always had." Eddie rose, too, with the manner of a man who has allowed things to go far enough. "Look here, my dear girl," he said, "I am a man and I'm older than you, and have seen more of the world. I know you don't mean any harm, but I must tell you that this is very wicked, dangerous talk." "Dangerous, perhaps, Eddie, but I can't see how it can be wicked to want to give up your special privileges." "Where in the world do you pick up ideas like this?" "I inherited them from an English ancestor of mine, who gave up all that he had when he enlisted in Washington's army." "You got that stuff," said Eddie, brushing this aside, "from David Moreton, and that infernal seditious paper his brother edits--and that white-livered book which I haven't read against war. I'd like to put them all in jail." "It's a pity," said Crystal, "that your side can't think of a better argument than putting everyone who disagrees with you in jail." With this she turned and left him, and, entering the ballroom, flung herself into the arms of the first partner she met. It was a timid boy, who, startled by the eagerness with which she chose him, with her bright eyes and quickly drawn breath, was just coming to the conclusion that a lovely, rich, and admired lady, had fallen passionately in love with him, when with equal suddenness she stepped out of his arms and was presently driving her small, open car down the avenue. Under the purple beech Eddie, left alone, sank back on the stone bench and considered, somewhat as the persecutors of Socrates may have done, suitable punishments for those who put vile, revolutionary ideas into the heads of young and lovely women. In the meantime Ben, who had enjoyed the party more than most of the invited guests, and far more than the disconsolate Eddie, had left his vantage point at the window. He had suddenly become aware of a strange light stealing under the trees, and, looking up, he saw with surprise that the stars were growing small and the heavens turning steel-color--in fact, that it was dawn. Convinced that sunrise was a finer sight than the end of the grandest ball that ever was given, he made his way down a shabby back lane, and before long came out on the edge of the cliffs, with the whole panorama of sunrise over the Atlantic spread out before him. He stood there a moment, somebody's close, well-kept lawn under his feet, and a pale-pink sea sucking in and out on the rocks a hundred feet below. The same hot, red sun was coming up; there wasn't a steady breeze, but cool salt puffs came to him now and then with a breaking wave. It was going to be a hot day, and Ben liked swimming better than most things in life. He hesitated. If he had turned to the left, he would have come presently to a public beach and would have had his swim conventionally and in due time. But some impulse told him to turn to the right, and he began to wander westward along the edge of the cliffs--always on his left hand, space and the sea, and on his right, lawns or gardens or parapets crowned by cactus plants in urns, and behind these a great variety of houses--French chateaux and marble palaces and nice little white cottages, and, finally, a frowning Gothic castle. All alike seemed asleep, with empty piazzas and closed shutters, and the only sign of life he saw in any of them was one pale housemaid shaking a duster out of a window in an upper gable. At last he came to a break in the cliffs--a cove, with a beach in it, a group of buildings obviously bathing-houses. The sacredness of this pavilion did not occur to Ben; indeed, there was nothing to suggest it. He entered it light-heartedly and was discouraged to find the door of every cabin securely locked. The place was utterly deserted. But Ben was persistent, and presently he detected a bit of a garment hanging over a door, and, pulling it out, he found himself in possession of a man's bathing suit. A little farther on he discovered a telephone room unlocked. Here he undressed and a minute later was swimming straight out to sea. The level rays of the sun were doing to the water just what the headlights of the motors had done to the road; they were enlarging every ripple and edging the deep purple-blue with yellow light. Except for a fishing dory chunking out to its day's work, Ben had the sea and land to himself. He felt as if they were all his own, and, for a socialist, was guilty of the sin of pride of possession. He was enjoying himself so much that it was a long time before he turned to swim back. He was swimming with his head under water most of the time so that he did not at once notice that a raft he had passed on his way out was now occupied. As soon as he did see it his head came up. It was a female figure, and even from a distance he could see that she was unconscious of his presence and felt quite as sure of having the world to herself as he was. She was sitting on the edge of the raft, kicking a pair of the prettiest legs in the world in and out of the water. They were clad in the thinnest of blue-silk stockings, the same in which a few minutes before she had been dancing, but not being able to find any others in her bathhouse, she had just kept them on, recklessly ignoring the inevitable problem of what she should wear home. She was leaning back on her straightened arms, with her head back, looking up into the sky and softly whistling to herself. Ben saw in a second that she was the girl of the silver turban. He stole nearer and nearer, cutting silently through the water, and then, when he had looked his fill, he put his head down again, splashed a little, and did not look up until his hand was on the raft, when he allowed an expression of calm surprise to appear on his face. "I beg your pardon," he said. "Is this a private raft?" The young lady, who had had plenty of time since the splash to arrange her countenance, looked at him with a blank coldness, and then suddenly smiled. "I thought it was a private world," she replied. "It's certainly a very agreeable one," said Ben, climbing on the raft. "And what I like particularly about it is the fact that no one is alive but you and me. Newport appears to be a city of the dead." "It always was," she answered, contemptuously. "Oh, come. Not an hour ago you were dancing in blue and green and a silver turban at a party over there," and he waved his hand in the direction from which he had come. "Did you think it was a good ball?" "I enjoyed it," he answered, truthfully. Her face fell. "How very disappointing," she said. "I didn't see you there." "Disappointing that you did not see me there?" "No," she replied, and then, less positively; "No; I meant it was disappointing that you were the kind of man who went to parties--and enjoyed them." "It would be silly to go if you didn't enjoy them," he returned, lightly. She turned to him very seriously. "You're right," she said; "it is silly--very silly, and it's just what I do. I consider parties like that the lowest, emptiest form of human entertainment. They're dull; they're expensive; they keep you from doing intelligent things, like studying; they keep you from doing simple, healthy things, like sleeping and exercising; they make you artificial; they make you civil to people you despise--they make women, at least, for we must have partners--" "But why do you go, then?" She was silent, and they looked straight and long at each other. Then she said, gravely: "The answer's very humiliating. I go because I haven't anything else to do." He did not reassure her. "Yes, that's bad," he said, after a second. "But of course you could not expect to have anything else to do when all your time is taken up like that. 'When the half gods go,' you know, 'the gods arrive.'" The quotation was not new to Crystal; in fact, she had quoted it to Eddie not very long before, apropos of another girl to whom he had shown a mild attention, but it seemed to her as if she took in for the first time its real meaning. Whether it was the dawn, exhaustion, a stimulating personality, love, or mere accident, the words now came to her with all the beauty and truth of a religious conviction. They seemed to shake her and make her over. She felt as if she could never be sufficiently grateful to the person who had thus made all life fresh and new to her. "Ah," she said, very gently, "that's it. I see. You won't believe me, but I assure you from now on I mean to be entirely different." "Please, not too different." "Oh yes, yes, as different as possible. I've been so unhappy, and unhappy about nothing definite--that's the worst kind, only that I have not liked the life I was leading." She glanced at him appealingly. She had tried to tell this simple story to so many people, for she had many friends, and yet no one had ever really understood. Some had told her she was spoiled, more, that there was no use in trying to change her life because she would soon marry; most of them had advised her to marry and find out what real trouble was. Now, as she spoke she saw that this strange young man from the sea not only understood her discontent, but thought it natural, almost commonplace. She poured it all out. "Only the worst thing," she ended, "is that I'm not really any good. There isn't anything else that I know how to do." "I doubt that," he answered, and she began to doubt it, too. "I'm sure there are lots of things you could do if you put your mind on it. Did you ever try to write?" Now, indeed, she felt sure that he was gifted with powers more than mortal--to have guessed this secret which no one else had ever suspected. She colored deeply. "Why, yes," she answered, "I think I can--a little, only I've so little education." "So little education?" "Yes, I belong to the cultivated classes--three languages and nothing solid." "Well, you know, three languages seem pretty solid to me," said Ben, who had wrestled very unsuccessfully with the French tongue. "You speak three languages, and let me see, you know a good deal about painting and poetry and jade and Chinese porcelains?" She shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. "Oh, of course everyone knows about those things, but what good are they?" They were a good deal of good to Ben. He pressed on toward his final goal. "What is your attitude toward fairies?" he asked, and Miss Cox would have heard in his tone a faint memory of his voice when he engaged a new office-boy. Her attitude toward fairies was perfectly satisfactory, and he showed so much appreciation that she went on and told him her great secret in full. She had once had something published and been paid money for it--fifteen dollars--and probably never in her life had she spoken of any sum with so much respect. It had been, well, a sort of a review of a new illustrated edition of Hans Andersen's Tales, treating them as if they were modern stories, commenting on them from the point of view of morals and probability--making fun of people who couldn't give themselves up to the charm of a story unless it tallied with their own horrid little experiences of life. She told it, she said, very badly, but perhaps he could get the idea. He got it perfectly. "Good," he said. "I'll give you a job. I'm a newspaper editor." "Oh," she exclaimed, "you're not Mr. Munsey, are you, or Mr. Reid, or Mr. Ochs?" Her knowledge of newspaper owners seemed to come to a sudden end. "No," he answered, smiling, "nor even Mr. Hearst. I did not say I owned a newspaper. I edit it. I need some one just like you for my book page, only you'd have to come to New York and work hard, and there wouldn't be very much salary. Can you work?" "Anyone can." "Well, will you?" "Indeed I will." (It was a vow.) "And now I must go. I have to drive myself home in an open car, and the tourists do stare at one so--in fancy dress." "Yes, but when am I to see you again? I leave Newport to-night." "Telephone me--2079--and we'll arrange to do something this afternoon." "And whom shall I ask for?" "Telephone at two-fifteen to the minute, and I'll answer the telephone myself." She evidently rather enjoyed the mystery of their not knowing each other's names. But a black idea occurred to Ben. She had slid off the raft and swum a few strokes before he shouted to her: "Look here. Your name isn't Eugenia, is it?" She waved her hand. "No, I'm Crystal," she called back. "Good-by, Crystal." This time she did not wave, but, swimming on her side with long, easy strokes, she gave him a sweet, reassuring look. After she had gone he lay down on the raft with his face buried in his arms. A few moments before he had thought he could never see enough of the sunrise and the sea, but now he wanted to shut it out in favor of a much finer spectacle within him. So this was love. Strange that no one had ever been able to prepare you for it. Strange that poets had never been able to give you a hint of its stupendous inevitability. He wondered if all miracles were like that--so simple--so-- Suddenly he heard her voice near him. He lifted his head from his arms. She was there in the water below him, clinging to the raft with one hand. "I just came back to tell you something," she said. "I thought you ought to know it before things went any farther." He thought, "Good God! she's in love with some one else!" and the horror of the idea made him look at her severely. "I'm not perhaps just as I seem--I mean my views are rather liberal. In fact"--she brought it out with an effort--"I'm almost a socialist." The relief was so great that Ben couldn't speak. He bent his head and kissed the hand that had tempted him a few hours before. She did not resent his action. Her special technique in such matters was to pretend that such little incidents hardly came into the realm of her consciousness. She said, "At two-fifteen, then," and swam away for good. Later in the day a gentleman who owned both a bathing house and a bathing suit on Bailey's beach was showing the latter possession to a group of friends. "No one can tell me that Newport isn't damp," he said. "I haven't been in bathing for twenty-four hours, and yet I can actually wring the water out of my suit." CHAPTER II That same morning, about ten o'clock, Mr. William Cord was shut up in the study of his house--shut up, that is, as far as entrance from the rest of the house was concerned, but very open as to windows looking out across the grass to the sea. It was a small room, and the leather chairs which made up most of its furnishings were worn, and the bookshelves were filled with volumes like railroad reports and _Poor's Manual_, but somehow the total effect of the room was so agreeable that the family used it more than Mr. Cord liked. He was an impressive figure, tall, erect, and with that suggestion of unbroken health which had had something to do with his success in life. His hair must have been of a sandy brown, for it had turned, not gray nor white, but that queer no-color that sandy hair does turn, melting into all pale surroundings. His long face was not vividly colored, either, but was stamped with the immobility of expression that sensitive people in contact with violent life almost always acquire. The result was that there seemed to be something dead about his face until you saw his eyes, dark and fierce, as if all the fire and energy of the man were concentrated in them. He was dressed in gray golfing-clothes that smelled more of peat than peat does, and, though officially supposed to be wrestling with the more secret part of correspondence which even his own secretary was not allowed to see, he was actually wiggling a new golf-club over the rug, and toying with the romantic idea that it would enable him to drive farther than he had ever driven before. There was a knock at the door. Mr. Cord leaned the driver in a corner, clasped his hands behind his back, straddled his legs a trifle, so that they seemed to grow out of the rug as the eternal oak grows out of the sod, and said, "Come in," in the tone of a man who, considering the importance of his occupation, bears interruption exceedingly well. Tomes, the butler, entered. "Mr. Verriman, sir, to see you." "To see _me_?" "Yes, sir." Cord just nodded at this, which evidently meant that the visitor was to be admitted, for Tomes never made a mistake and Verriman presently entered. Mr. Cord had seen Eddie Verriman the night before at the ball, and had thought him a very fine figure of a man, so now, putting two and two together, he said to himself, "Is he here to ask my blessing?" Aloud he said nothing, but just nodded; it was a belief that had translated itself into a habit--to let the other man explain first. "I know I'm interrupting you, Mr. Cord," Verriman began. Mr. Cord made a lateral gesture with his hand, as if all he had were at the disposal of his friends, even his most precious asset--time. "It's something very important," Eddie went on. "I'm worried. I haven't slept. Mr. Cord, have you checked up Crystal's economic beliefs lately?" "Lately?" said Mr. Cord. "I don't know that I ever have. Have a cigar?" Eddie waved the cigar aside as if his host had offered it to him in the midst of a funeral service. "Well, I have," he said, as if some one had to do a parent's duty, "and I've been very much distressed--shocked. I had a long talk with her about it at the dance last night." "About economics?" "Yes, sir." "Why, Eddie, don't I seem to remember your telling me you were in love with Crystal?" "Yes, Mr. Cord, I am." "Then what do you want to talk economics for? Or is it done like that nowadays?" "I don't want to," answered Eddie, almost in a wail. "_She_ does. She gets me going and then we quarrel because she has terrible opinions. She talks wildly. I have to point out to her that she's wrong. And last night she told me"--Eddie glanced about to be sure he was not overheard--"she told me that she was a socialist." Mr. Cord had just lit the very cigar which Eddie had waved away, and he took the first critical puffs at it before he answered: "Did you ask her what that was?" "No--no--I didn't." "Missed a trick there, Eddie." It was impossible to accuse so masklike a magnate of frivolity, but Eddie was often dissatisfied with Mr. Cord's reactions to the serious problems of life. "But don't you think it's terrible," he went on, eagerly, "for Crystal to be a socialist? In this age of the world--civilization trembling on the brink--chaos"--Eddie made a gesture toward the perfectly ordered shelves containing _Poor's Manual_--"staring us in the face? You say that the half-baked opinions of an immature girl make no difference?" "No, I shouldn't say that--at least not to Crystal," murmured her father. "But the mere fact that she picks up such ideas proves that they are in the air about us and that terrifies me--terrifies me," ended Eddie, his voice rising as he saw that his host intended to remain perfectly calm. "Which terrifies you, Eddie--Crystal or the revolution?" "The general discontent--the fact that civilization is tr--" "Oh yes, that," said Mr. Cord, hastily. "Well, I wouldn't allow that to terrify me, Eddie. I should have more sympathy with you if it had been Crystal. Crystal is a good deal of a proposition, I grant you. The revolution seems to me simpler. If a majority of our fellow countrymen really want it, they are going to get it in spite of you and me; and if they don't want it, they won't have it no matter how Crystal talks to you at parties. So cheer up, Eddie, and have a cigar." "They can, they will," said Eddie, not even troubling to wave away the cigar this time. "You don't appreciate what an organized minority of foreign agitators can do in this country. Why, they can--" "Well, if a minority of foreigners can put over a revolution against the will of the American people, we ought to shut up shop, Eddie." "You're not afraid?" "No." "You mean you wouldn't fight it?" "You bet your life I'd fight it," said Mr. Cord, gayly, "but I fight lots of things without being afraid of them. What's the use of being afraid? Here I am sixty-five, conservative and trained to only one game, and yet I feel as if I could manage to make my own way even under soviet rule. Anyway, I don't want to die or emigrate just because my country changes its form of government. Only it would have to be the wish of the majority, and I don't believe it ever will be. In the meantime there is just one thing I _am_ afraid of--and that's the thing that you and most of my friends want to do first--suppressing free speech; if you suppress it, we won't know who wants what. Then you really do get an explosion." Eddie had got Mr. Cord to be serious now, with the unfortunate result that the older man was more shocking than ever. "Free speech doesn't mean treason and sedition," Eddie began. "It means the other man's opinion." There was a pause during which Eddie became more perturbed and Mr. Cord settled back to his habitual calm. "Wouldn't you suppress _anything_?" Verriman asked at length, willing to know the worst. "Not even such a vile sheet as _Liberty_?" "Do you ever see it, Eddie?" "Read a rotten paper like that? Certainly not. Do you?" "I subscribe to it." And, bending down, Mr. Cord unlocked a drawer in his desk and produced the issue of the preceding day. "I notice you keep it locked up," said Eddie, and felt that he had scored. "I have to," replied Mr. Cord, "or else Crystal gets hold of it and cuts it all up into extracts--she must have sent you some--before I get a chance to read it. Besides, it shocks Tomes. You ought to talk to Tomes, Eddie. He thinks about as you do--" At this moment the door opened and Tomes himself entered. "Mr. Moreton would like to see you, sir." Even Cord's calm was a little disturbed by this unexpected news. "Mr. Moreton!" he exclaimed. "Not--not--not--not?" "No, sir," said Tomes, always in possession of accurate information. "His brother, I believe." "Show him in here," said Cord, and added to Eddie, as Tomes left the room: "Well, here he is--the editor himself, Eddie. You can say it all to him." "I don't want to see such fellows," Verriman began. "Stay and protect me, Eddie. He may have a bomb in his pocket." "You don't really believe that he's come to--" "No, Eddie, I don't. I think he's come like young Lochinvar--to dance a little late at the wedding. To try to persuade me to accept that lazy, good-looking brother of his as a son-in-law. He'll have quite a job over that." Then, as the door opened, Mr. Cord's eyes concentrated on it and his manner became a shade sharper. "Ah, Mr. Moreton, good morning. Mr. Verriman--Mr. Moreton." Ben was a good-looking young man, but it was his expression--at once illuminated and determined--that made him unusual. And the effect of his night and morning had been to intensify this, so that now, as he stood a moment in the doorway, he was a very attractive and compelling figure. "I came to see my brother, Mr. Cord," he said, simply, "but I hear he's not here any more. If I could speak to you alone for a few minutes--" He glanced at Eddie, whom he instantly recognized as the man who had not known how to talk to the woman in the world best worth talking to. "Oh, you may speak before Mr. Verriman," said Cord. "He knows the situation--knows your brother--knows my children--knows about you. In fact, we were just speaking about your paper when you came in. However, I must tell you that Mr. Verriman doesn't approve of _Liberty_. At least, I believe I understood you right, Eddie." And Mr. Cord, having thus assured himself a few minutes to regain his poise, leaned back comfortably in his chair. "What's wrong with the paper, Mr. Verriman?" said Ben, pleasantly. Eddie did not love the adventure of mental combat, but he was no coward. "It seems to me," he said, "that it preaches such radical changes in our government that it is seditious. To be frank, Mr. Moreton, I think the government ought to suppress it." "But we don't break the law. The government can't suppress us." "Then the laws ought to be changed so that it can." "That's all we advocate, Mr. Verriman, the changing of the law. It isn't any more seditious for me to say it than for you to, is it?" Of course in Eddie's opinion it was--much, much more seditious. Only somehow it was a difficult point to make clear, if a person was so wrongheaded he couldn't see it for himself. The point was that he, Eddie, was right in wanting the laws changed and Moreton was wrong. Anyone, it seemed to Eddie, would agree to that, unless he happened to agree with Moreton beforehand, and those were just the people who ought to be deported, imprisoned, or even perhaps in rare instances, as examples, strung up to lamp-posts. Only each time he tried to put these very natural opinions in words, they kept sounding wrong and tyrannical and narrow--qualities which Eddie knew he was entirely without. In order to counteract this effect, he tried at first to speak very temperately and calmly, but, unhappily, this only had the effect of making him sound patronizing to Ben's ears. In short, it was hardly to be expected that the discussion would be amicable, and it was not. Each man began to be angry in his own way. Eddie shouted a little, and Ben expressed himself with turns of phrase quite needlessly insulting. Ben found Verriman's assumption that the profits of capital were bound up with patriotism, family life, and the Christian religion almost as irritating as Verriman found Ben's assumption that the government of labor as a class would be entirely without the faults that have always marked every form of class government. "And suppose you got socialism," said Eddie, at last, "suppose you did divide everything up equally, don't you suppose that in a few years the clever, strong, industrious men would have it all in their own hands?" "Very likely," said Ben, "but that would be quite a change from the present arrangement, wouldn't it?" Mr. Cord had a narrow escape from laughing out loud, which would have cost him the friendship of the man with whom on the whole he really agreed. He thought it was time to interfere. "This is very interesting, Mr. Moreton," he said, "but I fancy it wasn't about the general radical propaganda that you came to see me." "No," said Ben, turning slowly. He felt as a dog feels who is dragged out of the fight just as it begins to get exciting. "No, I came to see you about this unfortunate engagement of my brother's." "Unfortunate?" asked Mr. Cord, without criticism. "I should consider it so, and I understand you do, too." Cord did not move an eyelash; this was an absolutely new form of attack. It had certainly never crossed his mind that any objection could come from the Moreton family. "You consider it unfortunate?" said Eddie, as if it would be mere insolence on Ben's part to object to his brother's marrying anyone. "Will you give me your reasons for objecting?" said Cord. Ben smiled. "You ought to understand them," he said, "for I imagine they're pretty much the same as your own. I mean they are both founded on class consciousness. I feel that it will be destructive to the things I value most in David to be dependent on, or associated with, the capitalistic group. Just as you feel it will be destructive to your daughter to be married to a tutor--a fellow with radical views and a seditious brother--" "One moment, one moment," said Cord; "you've got this all wrong so far as I'm concerned. I do most emphatically disagree with the radical propaganda. I think the radical is usually just a man who hasn't got something he wants." "And the conservative is a man who wants to keep something he's got," said Ben, less hostilely than he had spoken to Eddie. "Exactly, exactly," said Cord. "In ideality there isn't much to choose between them, but, generally speaking, I have more respect for the man who has succeeded in getting something to preserve than for the man who hasn't got anything to lose." "If their opportunities were equal." "I say in general. There is not much to choose between the two types; but there is in my opinion a shade in favor of the conservative on the score of efficiency, and I am old-fashioned perhaps, but I like efficiency. If it came to a fight, I should fight on the conservative side. But this is all beside the point. My objections to your brother, Mr. Moreton, are not objections to his group or class. They are personal to him. Damned personal." "You don't like David?" "Why, he's an attractive young fellow, but, if you'll forgive my saying so, Mr. Moreton, I don't think he's any good. He's weak, he's idle, he entirely lacks that aggressive will that--whether we have your revolution or not--is the only bulwark a woman has in this world. Why, Mr. Moreton, you are evidently a very much more advanced and dangerous radical than your brother, but I should not have half the objection to you that I have to him. There is only one thing that makes a difference in this world--character. Your brother hasn't got it." For an instant the perfect accuracy of Cord's statements about David left Ben silent. Then he pulled himself together and said, with a firmness he did not wholly feel: "You hardly do David justice. He may not have great force, but he has talent, great sweetness, no vices--" "Oh, quite, quite, quite, quite," said Cord, with a gesture of his long hand that should somehow have recalled to Ben the motion of a hand he had recently kissed. "However," said Ben, "there is no use in arguing about our differences. The point is we are agreed that this marriage ought not to be. Let us co-operate on that. Where could I find David? I believe if I could see him I'd have some effect on him." "You mean you could talk him out of marrying the girl he loves?" "I might make him see the folly of it." "Well, I haven't said anything as bad about your brother as that, Mr. Moreton. But you do him injustice. You couldn't talk him out of it, and if you could, she'd talk him right back into it again. But there is one thing to consider. I understand you make him an allowance. How about stopping that?" "I wouldn't consider that for a moment," said Ben, with more temper than he had so far shown. "I don't make him that allowance so that I can force him to do what I think best. I give it to him because he needs it. I don't believe in force, Mr. Cord." "Oh yes, you do, Mr. Moreton." "What do you mean?" "You were proposing to use a much more pernicious kind of force when you proposed talking the boy out of his first love. However, to be candid with you, I must tell you that the issue is dead. They ran off yesterday and were married in Boston." There was a short silence and then Ben moved toward the door. "Won't you stay to lunch?" said Mr. Cord, politely. "Thank you, no," said Ben. He wanted to be alone. Like all dominating people who don't get their own way in an altruistic issue, his feelings were deeply wounded. He took his hat from the disapproving Tomes, and went out to the sea to think. He supposed he was going to think about David's future and the terrible blow his paper had just received. As the door closed behind him, Eddie turned to Mr. Cord with a world of reproach in his eyes. "Well," he said, "I must say, sir, I think you were unnecessarily gentle with that fellow." "Seemed to me a fine young fellow," said Mr. Cord. "Asking him to lunch," said Eddie. "I did that for Crystal," replied Cord, getting up and slapping his pockets--a gesture which in some subconscious way he hoped would make Eddie go home. "She's always so keen to meet new people. If she heard that the editor of _Liberty_ had been here while she was asleep and that I had not tried to keep him for her to see--whew!--she would make a scene." "But she oughtn't to see people like that," protested Eddie, as if he were trying to talk sense in a madhouse. "That was what I was just explaining to you, Mr. Cord, when--" "So you were, Eddie, so you were," said Mr. Cord. "Stay to lunch and tell Crystal. Or, rather," he added, hastily glancing at the clock, "come back to lunch in an hour. I have to go now and see--" Mr. Cord hesitated for the fraction of a second--"the gardener. If you don't see gardeners now and then and let them scold you about the weather and the Lord's arrangement of the seasons, they go mad and beat their wives. See you later, Eddie," and Mr. Cord stepped out through the French window. It was only great crises like these that led him to offer himself up to the attacks of his employees. A severe elderly man with a long, flat upper lip and side whiskers immediately sprang apparently from the earth and approached him. He had exactly the manner of resolute gloom that a small boy has when something has gone wrong at school and he wants his mother to drag it out of him. "Good morning, sir," he said. "Morning, McKellar," said Cord, gayly. "Everything's all right, I suppose." McKellar shook his head. Everything was about as far from all right as it well could be. The cook was a violent maniac who required peas to be picked so young that they weren't worth the picking. Tomes and his footman were a band of malicious pirates who took pleasure in cutting for the table the very buds which McKellar was cherishing for the horticultural show. And as for the season--McKellar could not remember such a devastatingly dry August since he was a lad at home. "Why, McKellar, we had rain two days ago." "You wouldn't call that little mist rain, sir." "And last week a perfect downpour." "Ah, that's the kind doesn't sink into the soil." Looking up critically at the heavens, McKellar expressed his settled conviction that in two weeks' time hardly a blade or a shrub would be alive in the island at Newport. "Well, that will save us all a lot of trouble, McKellar," said Mr. Cord, and presently left his gloomy gardener. He had attained his object. When he went back into the house, Eddie had gone, and he could go back to his new driver in peace. He was not interrupted until ten minutes past one, when Crystal came into the room, her eyes shining with exactly the same color that, beyond the lawn, the sea was displaying. Unlike Eddie, she looked better than in her fancy dress. She had on flat tennis shoes, a cotton blouse and a duck skirt, and a russet-colored sweater. Miss Cox would have rejected every item of her costume except the row of pearls, which just showed at her throat. She kissed her father rapidly, and said: "Good morning, dear. Are you ready for breakfast--lunch I mean?" She was a little bit flustered for the reason that it seemed to her as if any one would be able to see that she was an entirely different Crystal from the one of the evening before, and she was not quite sure what she was going to answer when her father said, as she felt certain he must say at any moment, "My dear child, what has come over you?" He did not say this, however. He held out his golf-club and said, "Got a new driver." "Yes, yes, dear, very nice," said Crystal. "But I want to have lunch punctually, to-day." Mr. Cord sighed. Crystal wasn't always very sympathetic. "I'm ready," he said, "only Eddie's coming." "_Eddie!_" exclaimed Crystal, drawing her shoulders up, as if at the sight of a cobra in her path. "Why is Eddie coming to lunch? I did not ask him." "No, my dear, I took that liberty," replied her father. "It seemed the only way of getting rid of him." "Well, I sha'n't wait for him," said Crystal, ringing the bell. "I have an engagement at a quarter past two." "At the golf club?" asked her father, his eye lighting a little. "You might drive me out, you know." "No, dear; quite in the other direction--with a man who was at the party last night." "You enjoyed the party?" "No, not a bit." "But you stayed till morning." "I stopped and took a swim." "You enjoyed that, I suppose?" His daughter glanced at him and turned crimson; but she did not have to answer, for at that moment Tomes came, in response to her ring, and she said: "We won't wait lunch for Mr. Verriman, Tomes." Then, as he went away, she asked, "And what was Eddie doing here this morning, anyhow?" "He was scolding me," replied Mr. Cord. "Have you noticed, Crystal, what a lot of scolding is going on in the world at present? I believe that that is why no one is getting any work done--everyone is so busy scolding everybody else. The politicians are scolding, and the newspapers are scolding, and most of the fellows I know are scolding. I believe I've got hold of a great truth--" "And may I ask what Eddie was scolding about?" asked Crystal, no more interested in great truths than most of us. "About you." Crystal moved her head about as if things had now reached a point where it wasn't even worth while to be angry. "About me?" "It seems you're a socialist, my dear. Eddie asked me how long it was since I had taken an inventory of your economic beliefs. I could not remember that I ever had, but perhaps you will tell them to me now. That is," Mr. Cord added, "if you can do it without scolding me--probably an impossible condition to impose nowadays." "It's a pity about Eddie," said Crystal, fiercely. "If only stupid people would be content to be stupid, instead of trying to run the world--" "Ah, my dear, it's only stupid people who are under the impression that they can. Good morning again, Eddie, we were just speaking of you." Mr. Cord added the last sentence without the slightest change of tone or expression as his guest was ushered in by Tomes, who, catching Crystal's eyes for a more important fact than Eddie's arrival, murmured that luncheon was served. "Well, Eddie," said Crystal, and there was a sort of gay vibration in her whole figure, and her tone was like a bright banner of war, "and so you came round to complain to my father, did you?" Mr. Cord laid his hand on her shoulder. "Do you think you could demolish Eddie just as well at table, my dear?" he said. "If so, there's no use in letting the food get cold." "Oh, she can do it anywhere," replied Eddie, bitterly, and then, striking his habitual note of warning, he went on, "but, honestly, Crystal, if you had heard what your father and I heard this morning--" "I had a visit from David's brother this morning," put in Mr. Cord, "the editor of your favorite morning paper." "Ben Moreton, here! Oh, _father_, why didn't you call me? Yes, I know," she added, as her father opened his mouth to say that she had left most particular instructions that she was to be allowed to sleep as late as she could, "I know, but you must have known I should have wanted to look David's brother over. Has he long hair? Does he wear a soft tie? Did you hate him?" "Eddie didn't take much of a fancy to him." "I should say not. A damned, hollow-eyed fanatic." "Is he as good-looking as David, father? What does he look like?" Mr. Cord hesitated. "Well, a little like my engraving of Thomas Jefferson as a young man." "He looks as if he might have a bomb in his pocket." "Oh, Eddie, do keep quiet, there's a dear, and let father give me one of his long, wonderful accounts. Go ahead, father." "Well," said Mr. Cord, helping himself from a dish that Tomes was presenting to him, "as I told you, Eddie had dropped in very kindly to scold me about you, when Tomes announced Mr. Moreton. Tomes thought he ought to be put straight out of the house. Didn't you, Tomes?" "No, sir," said Tomes, who was getting used to his employer, although he did not encourage this sort of thing, particularly before the footmen. "Well, Moreton came in and said, very simply--" "Has he good manners, father?" "He has no manners at all," roared Eddie. "Oh, how nice," said Crystal, of whom it might be asserted without flattery that she now understood in perfection the art of irritating Eddie. "He is very direct and natural," her father continued. "He has a lot more punch than your brother-in-law, my dear. In fact, I was rather impressed with the young fellow until he and Eddie fell to quarreling. Things did not go so well, then." "You mean," said Crystal, the gossip rather getting the best of the reformer in her, "that he lost his temper horribly?" "I should say he did," said Eddie. "Well, Eddie, you know you were not perfectly calm," answered Cord. "Let us say that they both lost their tempers, which is strange, for as far as I could see they were agreed on many essentials. They both believe that one class in the community ought to govern the other. They both believe the world is in a very bad way; only, according to Eddie, we are going to have chaos if capital loses its control of the situation; and according to Moreton we are going to have chaos if labor doesn't get control. So, as one or the other seems bound to happen, we ought to be able to adjust ourselves to chaos. In fact, Crystal, I have been interviewing McKellar about having a chaos cellar built in the garden." Eddie pushed back his plate; it was empty, but the gesture suggested that he could not go on choking down the food of a man who joked about such serious matters. "I must say, Mr. Cord," he began, "I really must say--" He paused, surprised to find that he really hadn't anything that he must say, and Crystal turned to her father: "But you haven't told me why he came. To see Eugenia, I suppose?" "No; he hadn't heard of the marriage. He came to talk to his brother." "For you must know," put in Eddie, hastily, "that Mr. Ben Moreton does not approve of the marriage--oh, dear, no. He would consider such a connection quite beneath his family. He disapproves of Eugenia as a sister-in-law." "How could any one disapprove of her?" asked her sister, hotly. "Jevver hear such nerve?" said Eddie. "It's not Eugenia; it's capital Moreton disapproves of," Mr. Cord went on, patiently explaining. "You see it never crossed our minds that the Moretons might object, but of course they do. They regard us as a very degrading connection. Doubtless it will hurt Ben Moreton with his readers to be connected with a financial pirate like myself, quite as much as it will hurt me in the eyes of most of my fellow board members when it becomes known that my son-in-law's brother is the editor of _Liberty_." "The Moretons disapprove," repeated Crystal, to whom the idea was not at all agreeable. "Disapprove, nonsense!" said Eddie. "I believe he came to blackmail you. To see what he could get out of you if he offered to stop the marriage. Well, why not? If these fellows believe all the money ought to be taken away from the capitalists, why should they care how it's done? I can't see much difference between robbing a man, and legislating his fortune out of--" "Well, I must tell you, father dear," said Crystal, exactly as if Eddie had not been speaking, "that I think it was horrid of you not to have me called when you must have known--" "Crystal, you're scolding me," wailed her father. "And most unjustly. I did ask him to lunch just for your sake, although I saw Eddie was shocked, and I was afraid Tomes would give warning. But I did ask him, only he wouldn't stay." Crystal rose from the table with her eye on the clock, and they began to make their way back to Mr. Cord's study, as she asked: "Why wouldn't he stay?" "I gathered because he didn't want to. Perhaps he was afraid he'd have to argue with Eddie about capital and labor all through lunch. And of course he did not know that I had another beautiful daughter sleeping off the effects of a late party, or very likely he would have accepted." Very likely he would. Just as they entered the study, the telephone rang. Crystal sprang to the instrument, brushing away her father's hand, which had moved toward it. "It's for me, dear," she said, and continued, speaking into the mouthpiece: "Yes, it's I." (A pause.) "Where are you?... Oh, yes, I know the place. I'll be there in five minutes, in a little blue car." She hung up the receiver, sprang up, and looked very much surprised to see Eddie and her father still there just as before. "Good-by, Eddie," she said, "I'm sorry, but I have an engagement. Good-by, father." "You don't want to run me out to the golf club first?" "Not possible, dear. The chauffeur can take you in the big car." "Yes, but he'll scold me all the way about there not being room enough in the garage." Crystal was firm. "I'm sorry, but I can't, dear. This is important. I may take a job. I'll tell you all about it this evening." And she left the room, with a smile that kept getting entirely beyond her control. "What's this? What's this?" cried Eddie as the door shut. "A job. You wouldn't let Crystal take a job, would you, Mr. Cord?" "I haven't been consulted," said Mr. Cord, taking out his new driver again. "But didn't you notice how excited she was. I'm sure it's decided." "Yes, I noticed, Eddie; but it looked to me more like a man than a job. How do you think we'd come out if I gave you a stroke and a half a hole?" Eddie was too perturbed even to answer. In the meantime, Crystal was spinning along Bellevue Avenue, forgetting to bow to her friends, and wondering why the car was going so badly until, her eye falling on the speedometer, she noticed that she was doing a mild thirty-five miles an hour. Sooner, therefore, than the law allowed, she reached a small park that surrounds a statue of Perry, and there she picked up a passenger. Ben got in and shut the little door almost before she brought the car to a standstill. [Illustration: "I'll be there in five minutes, in a little blue car"] "When you were little," he said, "did you ever imagine something wonderful that might happen--like the door's opening and a delegation coming to elect you captain of the baseball team, or whatever is a little girl's equivalent of that--and keep on imagining it and imagining it, until it seemed as if it really were going to happen? Well, I have been standing here saying to myself, Wouldn't it be wonderful if Crystal should come in a little blue car and take me to drive? And, by Heaven! you'll never believe me, but she actually did." "Tell me everything you've done since I saw you," she answered. "I haven't done anything but think about you. Oh yes, I have, too. I've reappraised the universe. You see, you've just made me a present of a brand-new world, and I've been pretty busy, I can tell you, untying the string and unwrapping the paper, and bless me, Crystal, it looks like a mighty fine present so far." "Oh," she said, "I think you talk charmingly." She had started to say, "you make love charmingly," but on second thoughts decided that the overt statement had better come from him. "Dear me," she went on, "we have so much to talk about. There's my job. Can't we talk a little about that?" They could and did. Their talk consisted largely in his telling her how much richer a service she could render his paper through having been unconsciously steeped in beauty than if she had been merely intellectually instructed--than if, as she more simply put it, she had known something. And as he talked, her mind began to expand in the warm atmosphere of his praise and to give off its perfume like a flower. But the idea of her working with him day after day, helping the development of the paper which had grown as dear as a child to him, was so desirable that he did not dare to contemplate it unless it promised realization. "Oh," he broke out, "you won't really do it. Your family will object, or something. Probably when I go away to-night, I shall never see you again." "You are still going away to-night?" "I must." She looked at him and slowly shook her head, as a mother shakes her head at the foolish plans of a child. "I thought I was going," he said, weakly. "Why?" He groaned, but did not answer. She thought, "Oh, dear, I wish when men want to be comforted they would not make a girl spend so much time and energy getting them to say that they do want it." Aloud she said: "You must tell me what's the matter." "It's a long story." "We have all afternoon." "That's it--we haven't all eternity." "Oh, eternity," said Crystal, dismissing it with the Cord wave of the hand. "Who wants eternity? 'Since we must die how bright the starry track,' you know." "No; what is that?" "I don't remember." "Oh." After this meeting of minds they drove for some time in silence. Ben was seeing a new aspect of Newport--bare, rugged country, sandy roads, a sudden high rock jutting out toward the sea, a rock on which tradition asserts that Bishop Berkeley once sat and considered the illusion of matter. They stopped at length at the edge of a sandy beach. Crystal parked her car neatly with a sharp turn of the wheel, and got out. "There's a tea basket," she called over her shoulder. Ben's heart bounded at the news--not that he was hungry, but as the hour was now but little past half after two a tea basket indicated a prolonged interview. He found it tucked away in the back of the car, and followed her. They sat down at the edge of the foam. He lit a pipe, clasped his hands about his knees and stared out to sea; she curled her feet backward, grasped an ankle in her hand, and, looking at him, said: "Now what makes you groan so?" "I haven't meant to be dishonest," he said, "but I have been obtaining your friendship--trying to--under false pretenses." "Trying to?" said Crystal. "Now isn't it silly to put that in." He turned and smiled at her. She was really incredibly sweet. "But, all the same," he went on, "there is a barrier, a real, tangible barrier between us." Crystal's heart suffered a chill convulsion at these words. "Good gracious!" she thought. "He's entangled with another woman--oh dear!--_marriage_"--But she did not interrupt him, and he continued: "I let you think that I was one of the men you might have known--that I was asked to your party last night, whereas, as a matter of fact, I only watched you--" Crystal's mind, working with its normal rapidity, invented, faced, and passed over the fact that he must have been one of the musicians. She said aloud: "I think I ought to tell you that I'm not much of a believer in barriers--between sensible people who want friendship." "Friendship!" exclaimed Ben, as if that were the last thing he had come out on a lovely summer afternoon to discuss. "There aren't any real barriers any more," Crystal continued. "Differences of position, and religion, and all those things don't seem to matter now. Romeo and Juliet wouldn't have paid any attention to the little family disagreement if they had lived to-day." "In the case of Romeo and Juliet, if I remember correctly," said Ben, "it was not exactly a question of friendship." She colored deeply, but he refused to modify his statement, for, after all, it was correct. "But difference of opinion _is_ an obstacle," he went on. "I have seen husbands and wives parted by differences of opinion in the late war. And as far as I'm concerned there's a war on now--a different war, and I came here to try to prevent my brother marrying into an enemy influence--" "Good Heavens!" cried Crystal. "You are Ben Moreton! Why didn't I see it sooner? I'm Crystal Cord," and, lifting up her chin, she laughed. That she could laugh as the gulf opened between them seemed to him terrible. He turned his head away. She stopped laughing. "You don't think it's amusing?" (He shook his head.) "That we're relations-in-law, when we thought it was all so unknown and romantic? No wonder I felt at home with you, when I've read so many of your letters to David--such nice letters, too--and I subscribe to your paper, and read every word of the editorials. And to think that you would not lunch with me to-day, when my father asked you." "To think that it was you I was being asked to lunch with, and didn't know it!" "Well, you dine with us to-morrow," she answered, stating a simple fact. "Crystal," he said, and put his hand on hers as if this would help him through his long explanation; but the continuity of his thought was destroyed and his spirit wounded by her immediately withdrawing it; and then--so exactly does the spring of love resemble the uncertain glory of an April day--he was rendered perfectly happy again by perceiving that her action was due to the publicity of their position and not to repugnance to the caress. Fortunately he was a man not without invention, and so when a few minutes later she suggested opening the tea basket, he insisted on moving to a more retired spot on the plea that the teakettle would burn better out of the wind; and Crystal, who must have known that Tomes never gave her a teakettle, but made the tea at home and put it in a thermos bottle, at once agreed to the suggestion. They moved back across the road, where irregular rocks sheltered small plots of grass and wild flowers, and here, instead of an Arcadian duet, they had, most unsuitably, their first quarrel. It began as quarrels are so apt to do, by a complete agreement. Of course he would stay over the next day, which was Sunday, and not very busy in the office of _Liberty_. In return he expected her undivided attention. She at once admitted that this was part of the plan--only there would have to be one little exception; she was dining out this evening. Oh, well, that could be broken, couldn't it? She would like to break it, but it happened to be one of those engagements that had to be kept. Ben could not understand that. At first she tried to explain it to him: She had chosen her own evening several weeks ago with these people, who wanted her to meet a friend of theirs who was motoring down specially from Boston. She felt she must keep her word. "I assure you I don't want to, but you understand, don't you?" If she had looked at his face she would not have asked the last question. He did not understand; indeed, he had resolved not to. "No," he said, "I must own, I don't. If you told me that you _wanted_ to go, that would be one thing. I shouldn't have a word to say then." "Oh yes, you would, Ben," said Crystal, but he did not notice her. "I can't understand your allowing yourself to be dragged there against your will. You say you despise this life, but you seem to take it pretty seriously if you can't break any engagement that you may make." "How absurd you are! Of course I often break engagements." "I see. You do when the inducement is sufficient. Well, that makes it all perfectly clear." She felt both angry and inclined to cry. She knew that to yield to either impulse would instantly solve the problem and bring a very unreasonable young man to reason. She ran over both scenes in her imagination. Registering anger, she would rise and say that, really, Mr. Moreton, if he would not listen to her explanation there was no use in prolonging the discussion. That would be the critical moment. He would take her in his arms then and there, or else he would let her go, and they would drive in silence, and part at the little park, where of course she might say, "Aren't you silly to leave me like this?"--only her experience was that it was never very practical to make up with an angry man in public. To burst into tears was a safer method, but she had a natural repugnance to crying, and perhaps she was subconsciously aware that she might be left, after the quarrel was apparently made up by this method, with a slight resentment against the man who had forced her to adopt so illogical a line of conduct. A middle course appealed to her. She laid her hand on Ben's. A few minutes before it would have seemed unbelievable to Ben that his own hand would have remained cold and lifeless under that touch, but such was now the case. "Ben," she said, "if you go on being disagreeable a second longer you must make up your mind how you will behave when I burst into tears." "How I should behave?" She nodded. His hands clasped hers. He told her how he should behave. He even offered to show her, without putting her to the trouble of tears. "You mean," she said, "that you would forgive me? Well, forgive me, anyhow. I'm doing what I think is right about this old dinner. Perhaps I'm wrong about it; perhaps you're mistaken and I'm not absolutely perfect, but if I were, think what a lot of fun you would miss in changing me. And you know I never meant to abandon you for the whole evening. I'll get away at half past nine and we'll take a little turn." So that was settled. CHAPTER III As they drove back she revealed another plan to him--she was taking him for a moment to see a friend of hers. He protested. He did not want to see anyone but herself, but Crystal was firm. He must see this woman; she was their celebrated parlor Bolshevist. Ben hated parlor Bolshevists. Did he know any? No. Well, then. Anyhow, Sophia would never forgive her if she did not bring him. Sophia adored celebrities. Sophia who? Sophia Dawson. The name seemed dimly familiar to Ben, and then he remembered. It was the name on the thousand-dollar check for the strike sufferers that had come in the day before. They drove up an avenue of little oaks to a formidable palace built of gray stone, so smoothly faced that there was not a crevice in the immense pale façade. Two men in knee-breeches opened the double doors and they went in between golden grilles and rows of tall white lilies. They were led through a soundless hall, and up stairs so thickly carpeted that the feet sank in as in new-fallen snow, and finally they were ushered through a small painted door into a small painted room, which had been brought all the way from Sienna, and there they found Mrs. Dawson--a beautiful, worn, world-weary Mrs. Dawson, with one streak of gray in the front of her dark hair, her tragic eyes, and her long violet and black draperies--a perfect Sibyl. Crystal did not treat her as a Sibyl, however. "Hullo, Sophie!" she said. "This is my brother-in-law's brother, Ben Moreton. He's crazy to meet you. You'll like him. I can't stay because I'm dining somewhere or other, but he's not." "Will he dine with me?" said Mrs. Dawson in a wonderful deep, slow voice--"just stay on and dine with me alone?" Ben began to say that he couldn't, but Crystal said yes, that he would be delighted to, and that she would stop for him again about half past nine, and that it was a wonderful plan, and then she went away. Mrs. Dawson seemed to take it all as a matter of course. "Sit down, Mr. Moreton," she said. "I have a quarrel with you." Ben could not help feeling a little disturbed by the way he had been injected into Mrs. Dawson's evening without her volition. He did not sit down. "You know," he said, "there isn't any reason why you should have me to dine just because Crystal says so. I do want to thank you for the check you sent in to us for the strike fund. It will do a lot of good." "Oh, that," replied Mrs. Dawson. "They are fighting all our battles for us." "It cheered us up in the office. I wanted to tell you, and now I think I'll go. I dare say you are dining out, anyhow--" Her eyes flashed at him. "Dining out!" she exclaimed, as if the suggestion insulted her. "You evidently don't know me. I never dine out. I have nothing in common with these people. I lead a very lonely life. You do me a favor by staying. You and I could exchange ideas. There is no one in Newport whom I can talk to--reactionaries." "Miss Cord is not exactly a reactionary," said Ben, sitting down. Mrs. Dawson smiled. "Crystal is not a reactionary; Crystal is a child," she replied. "But what can you expect of William Cord's daughter? He is a dangerous and disintegrating force--cold--cynical--he feels not the slightest public responsibility for his possessions." Mrs. Dawson laid her hand on her heart as if it were weighted with all her jewels and footmen and palaces. "Most Bourbons are cynical about human life, but he goes farther; he is cynical about his own wealth. And that brings me to my quarrel with you, Mr. Moreton. How could you let your brother spend his beautiful vigorous youth as a parasite to Cord's vapid son? Was that consistent with your beliefs?" This attack on his consistency from a lady whose consistency seemed even more flagrant amused Ben, but as he listened he was obliged to admit that there was a great deal of good sense in what she had to say about David, whom she had met once or twice at the Cords'. Ben was too candid and eager not to ask her before long the question that was in his mind--how it was possible for a woman holding her views to be leading a life so opposed to them. She was not at all offended, and even less at a loss for an answer. "I am not a free agent, Mr. Moreton," she said. "Unhappily, before I began to think at all, I had undertaken certain obligations. The law allows a woman to dispose of everything but her property while she is still a child. I married at eighteen." It was a story not without interest and Mrs. Dawson told it well. There does not live a man who would not have been interested. They dined, not in the great dining room downstairs, nor even in the painted room from Sienna, but in a sort of loggia that opened from it, where, beyond the shaded lights, Ben could watch the moon rise out of the sea. It was a perfect little meal, short, delicious, and quickly served by three servants. He enjoyed it thoroughly, although he found his hostess a strangely confusing companion. He would make up his mind that she was a sincere soul captured by her environment, when a freshly discovered jewel on her long fingers would shake his faith. And he would just decide that she was a melodramatic fraud, when she would surprise him by her scholarly knowledge of social problems. She had read deeply, knew several languages, and had known many of the European leaders. Such phrases as "Jaurès wrote me ten days before he died--" were frequent, but not too frequent, on her lips. By the time Crystal stopped for him Ben had begun to feel like a child who has lost his mother in a museum, or as Dante might have felt if he had missed Virgil from his side. When he bade Mrs. Dawson good night, she asked him to come back. "Come and spend September here," she said, as if it were a small thing. "You can work all day if you like. I sha'n't disturb you, and you need never see a soul. It will do you good." He was touched by the invitation, but of course he refused it. He tried to explain tactfully, but clearly, why it was that he couldn't do that sort of thing--that the editor of _Liberty_ did not take his holiday at Newport. She understood, and sighed. "Ah, yes," she said. "I'm like that man in mythology whom neither the sky nor the earth would receive. I'm very lonely, Mr. Moreton." He found himself feeling sorry for her, as he followed a footman downstairs, his feet sinking into the carpets at each step. Crystal in the blue car was at the door. She was bareheaded and the wind had been blowing her hair about. "Well," she said, as he got in, "did you have a good time? I'm sure you had a good dinner." "Excellent, but confusing. I don't quite get your friend." "You don't understand Sophia?" Crystal's tone expressed surprise. "You mean her jewels and her footmen? Why, Ben, it's just like the fathers of this country who talked about all men being equal and yet were themselves slaveholders. She sincerely believes those things in a way, and then it's such a splendid role to play, and she enjoys that; and then it teases Freddie Dawson. Freddie is rather sweet if he's thoroughly unhappy, and this keeps him unhappy almost all the time. Did she ask you to stay? I meant her to." "Yes, she did; but of course I couldn't." "Oh, Ben, why not?" This brought them once more to the discussion of the barrier. This time Ben felt he could make her see. He said that she must look at it this way--that in a war you could not go and stay in enemy country, however friendly your personal relations might be. Well, as far as he was concerned this was a war, a class war. They were headed for the Ocean Drive, and Crystal rounded a sharp turn before she answered seriously: "But I thought you didn't believe in war." "I don't," he answered. "I hate it--I hate all violence. We--labor, I mean--didn't initiate this, but when men won't see, when they have power and won't stop abusing it, there is only one way to make--" "Why, Ben," said Crystal, "you're just a pacifist in other people's quarrels, but as militaristic as can be in your own. I'm not a pacifist, but I'm a better one than you, because I don't believe in emphasizing any difference between human beings. That's why I want a League of Nations. I hate gangs--all women really do. Little girls don't form gangs like little boys. Every settlement worker knows that. I won't have you say that I belong to the other group. I won't be classified. I'm a human being--and I intend to behave as such." Since she had left him she had been immersed again in her old life--her old friends--and the result had been to make her wonder if her experience with Ben had been as wonderful as it had seemed. When she stopped for him she had been almost prepared to find that the wild joy of their meetings had been something accidental and temporary, and that only a stimulating and pleasant friendship was left. But as soon as she saw that he really regarded their differences seriously, all her own prudence and doubt melted away. She knew she was ready to make any sacrifices for him, and in view of that all talk of obstacles was folly. She stopped the car on the point of the island, with the open sea on one hand, the harbor on the other. In front of them the lightship was moving with a slow, majestic roll, and to the right was the long festoon of Narragansett lights, and as they stopped the lighted bulk of the New York boat appeared, making its way toward Point Judith. His prolonged silence began to frighten her. "Ben," she said, "do you seriously mean that you believe friendship between us is impossible?" "Friendship, nothing," answered Moreton. "I love you." He said it as if it had always been understood between them, as of course it had, but the instant he said it, he gave her a quick, appealing look to see how she would take so startling an assertion. If Crystal had poured out just what was in her mind at that second she would have answered: "Of course you do. I've known that longer than you have. And can't you see that if I had had any doubt about its being true, I'd have taken steps to make it true? But, as I really did not doubt it, I've been able to be quite passive and leave it mostly to you, which I so much prefer." But rigorous candor is rarely attained, and Crystal did not say this. In fact, for a few seconds she did not say anything, but merely allowed her eyes to shine upon him, with the inevitable result that at the end of precisely six seconds of their benevolent invitation he took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a very unprotected point, and several cars were standing not too far away, but Crystal, who had an excellent sense of proportion, made no objection whatever. She was being proved right in two important particulars--first, that she was a human being, and second, that there was no barrier between them. She was very generous about it. She did not say, "Where's your barrier now?" or anything like that; she simply said nothing, and the barrier passed out of the conversation and was no more seen. Very soon, alleging that she must get home at the time at which she usually did get home from dinners, she took him back; but she soothed him with the promise of an uninterrupted day to follow. Time--the mere knowledge of unbroken hours ahead--is a boon which real love cannot do without. Minor feelings may flourish on snatched interviews and stolen meetings, but love demands--and usually gets--protected leisure. The next day these lovers had it. They spent the morning, when Mr. Cord was known to be playing golf, at the Cords' house, and then when Mr. Cord telephoned that he was staying to luncheon at the club, if Crystal did not object (and Crystal did not), she and Ben arranged a picnic--at least Tomes did, and they went off about one o'clock in the blue car. They went to a pool in the rocks that Crystal had always known about, with high walls around it, and here, with a curtain of foam between them and the sea, for the waves were rising, they ate lunch, as much alone as on a desert island. It was here that Ben asked her to marry him, or, to be accurate, it was here that they first began talking about their life together, and whether Nora would become reconciled to another woman about the flat. The nearest approach to a definite proposal was Ben's saying: "You would not mind my saying something about all this to your father before I go this evening, would you?" And Crystal replied: "Poor father! It will be a blow, I'm afraid." "Well," said Ben, "he told me himself that he liked me better than David." "That's not saying much." At this Ben laughed lightly. He might have had his wrong-headed notions about barriers, but he was not so un-American as to regard a father as an obstacle. "But, oh, Crystal," he added, "suppose you find you do hate being poor. It is a bore in some ways." Crystal, who had been tucking away the complicated dishes of her luncheon basket, looked at Ben and lightly sucked one finger to which some raspberry jam from Tomes's supernal sandwiches had adhered. "I sha'n't mind it a bit, Ben," she said, "and for a good reason--because I'm terribly conceited." He did not understand at all, and she went on: "I believe I shall be just as much of a person--perhaps more--without money. The women who really mind being poor are the humble-minded ones, who think that they are made by their clothes and their lovely houses and their maids and their sables. When they lose them they lose all their personality, and of course that terrifies them. I don't think I shall lose mine. Does it shock you to know that I think such a lot of myself?" It appeared it did not shock him at all. [Illustration: "Suppose you find you do hate being poor?"] When they reached the house she established him in the drawing-room and went off to find her father. She was a true woman, by which is meant now and always that she preferred to allow a man to digest his dinner before she tried to bring him to a rational opinion. But in this case her hands were tied. The Cords dined at eight--or sometimes a little later, and Ben's boat left for New York at half past nine, so that it would be utterly impossible to postpone the discussion of her future until after dinner. It had to be done at once. Crystal ran up and knocked at his bedroom door. Loud splashings from the adjoining bathroom were all the answer she got. She sat down on the stairs and waited. Those are the moments that try men's and even women's souls. For the first time her enterprise seemed to her a little reckless. For an instant she had the surprising experience of recognizing the fact that Ben was a total stranger. She looked at the gray-stone stairway on which she was sitting and thought that her life had been as safe and sheltered as a cloister, and now, steered by this total stranger, she proposed to launch herself on an uncharted course of change. And to this program she was to bring her father's consent--for she knew very well that if she couldn't, Ben wouldn't be able to--in the comparatively short time between now and dinner. Then, the splashing having ceased, the sound of bureau drawers succeeded, and Crystal sprang up and knocked again. "That you, Peters?" said an unencouraging voice. (Peters was Mr. Cord's valet.) "No, dear, it's I," said Crystal. "Oh, come in," said Mr. Cord. He was standing in the middle of the room in his shirt sleeves and gloomily contemplating the shirt he wore. "What's this laundress, anyhow? A Bolshevist or a pastry-cook?" he said. "Did you ever see anything like this shirt?" Crystal approached and studied the shirt. It appeared to her to be perfectly done up, but she said: "Yes, dear, how terrible! I'll pack her off to-morrow, but you always look all right whatever you wear; that's some comfort." She saw that even this hadn't done much good, and, going to the heart of the problem, she asked, "How did your golf go?" Mr. Cord's gloom gathered as he answered, with resignation, "Oh, all right." His manner was exactly similar to Ben's in his recent moment of depression, and not unlike McKellar's when he had explained what he suffered under the good Lord's weather. "Is Eddie's game any better?" asked Crystal, feeling her way. "No," cried her father, contemptuously. "He's rotten, but I'm worse. And golf-clubs, Crystal! No one can make a club any more. Have you noticed that? But the truth of the matter is, I'm getting too old to play golf." And Mr. Cord sat down with a good but unconscious imitation of a broken old man. Of course Crystal swept this away. She scolded him a little, pointed out his recent prowess, and spoke slightingly of all younger athletes, but she really had not time to do the job thoroughly, for the thought of Ben, sitting so anxious in the drawing-room alone, hurried her on. "Anyhow, dear," she said, "I've come to talk to you about something terribly important. What would you say, father, if I told you I was engaged?" Mr. Cord was so startled that he said, what was rare for him, the first thing that came into his head: "Not to Eddie?" The true diplomatist, we have been told, simply takes advantage of chance, and Crystal was diplomatic. "And suppose it is?" she replied. "I should refuse my consent," replied her father. Crystal looked hurt. "Is there anything against Eddie," she asked, "except his golf?" "Yes," answered her father, "there are two of the most serious things in the world against him--first, that he doesn't amount to anything; and second, that you don't love him." "No," Crystal admitted, "I don't, but then--love--father, isn't love rather a serious undertaking nowadays? Is it a particularly helpful adjunct to marriage? Look at poor Eugenia. Isn't it really more sensible to marry a nice man who can support one, and then if in time one does fall in love with another man--" "Never let me hear you talk like that again, Crystal," said her father, with a severity and vigor he seldom showed outside of board meetings. "It's only your ignorance of life that saves you from being actually revolting. I'm an old man and not sentimental, you'll grant, but, take my word for it, love is the only hope of pulling off marriage successfully, and even then it's not easy. As for Eugenia, I think she's made a fool of herself and is going to be unhappy, but I'd rather do what she has done than what you're contemplating. At least she cared for that fellow--" "I'm glad you feel like that, darling," said Crystal, "because it isn't Eddie I'm engaged to, but Ben Moreton. He's waiting downstairs now." Mr. Cord started up--his eyes shining like black flames. "By God! Crystal," he said, "you sha'n't marry that fellow--Eugenia--perhaps--but not you." "But, father, you said yourself, you thought he was a fine--" "I don't care what I said," replied Mr. Cord, and, striding to the door, he flung it open and called in a voice that rolled about the stone hall: "Mr. Moreton, Mr. Moreton! Come up here, will you?" Ben came bounding up the stairs like a panther. Cord beckoned him in with a sharp gesture and shut the door. "This won't do at all, Moreton," he said. "You can't have Crystal." Ben did not answer; he looked very steadily at Cord, who went on: "You think I can't stop it--that she's of age and that you wouldn't take a penny of my money, anyhow. That's the idea, isn't it?" "That's it," said Ben. Cord turned sharply to Crystal. "Does what I think make any difference to you?" he asked. "A lot, dear," she answered, "but I don't understand. You never seemed so much opposed to the radical doctrine." "No, it's the radical, not the doctrine, your father objects to," said Ben. "Exactly," answered Mr. Cord. "You've put it in a nutshell. Crystal, I'm going to tell you what these radicals really are--they're failures--everyone of them. Sincere enough--they want the world changed because they haven't been able to get along in it as it is--they want a new deal because they don't know how to play their cards; and when they get a new hand, they'll play it just as badly. It's not their theories I object to, but them themselves. You think if you married Moreton you'd be going into a great new world of idealism. You wouldn't. You'd be going into a world of failure--of the pettiest, most futile quarrels in the world. The chief characteristic of the man who fails is that he always believes it's the other fellow's fault; and they hate the man who differs with them by one per cent more than they hate the man who differs by one hundred. Has there ever been a revolution where they did not persecute their fellow revolutionists worse than they persecuted the old order, or where the new rule wasn't more tyrannical than the old?" "No one would dispute that," said Ben. "It is the only way to win through to--" "Ah," said Cord, "I know what you're going to say, but I tell you, you win through to liberal practices when, and only when, the conservatives become converted to your ideas, and put them through for you. That's why I say I have no quarrel with radical doctrines--they are coming, always coming, but"--Cord paused to give his words full weight--"I hate the radical." There was a little pause. Crystal, who had sunk into a low chair, raised her eyes to Ben, as if she expected a passionate contradiction from him, but it did not come. "Yes," he said, after a moment, "that's all true, Mr. Cord--with limitations; but, granting it, you've put my side, too. What are we to say of the conservative--the man who has no vision of his own--who has to go about stealing his beliefs from the other side? He's very efficient at putting _them_ into effect--but efficient as a tool, as a servant. Look at the mess he makes of his own game when he tries to act on his own ideas. He crushes democracy with an iron efficiency, and he creates communism. He closes the door to trade-unionism and makes a revolution. That's efficiency for you. We radicals are not so damned inefficient, while we let the conservatives do our work for us." "Well, let it be revolution, then," said Cord. "I believe you're right. It's coming, but do you want to drag a girl like Crystal into it? Think of her! Say you take her, as I suppose a young fellow like you can do. She'd have perhaps ten years of an exciting division of allegiance between your ideas and the way she had been brought up, and the rest of her life (for, believe me, as we get older we all return to our early traditions)--the rest of her life she'd spend regretting the ties and environment of her youth. On the other hand, if she gives you up she will have regrets, too, I know, but they won't wreck her and embitter her the way the others will." Ben's face darkened. No man not a colossal egotist could hear such a prophesy with indifference. He did not at once answer, and then he turned to Crystal. "What do you think of that?" he asked. To the surprise of both men, Crystal replied with a laugh. "I was wondering," she said, "when either of you would get round to asking what I thought of it all." "Well, what do you think?" said Cord, almost harshly. Crystal rose, and, slipping her arm through his, leaned her head on the point of her father's shoulder--he was of a good height. "I think," she said, "you both talk beautifully. I was so proud of you both--saying such profound things so easily, and keeping your tempers so perfectly" (both brows smoothed out), "and it was all the more wonderful because, it seemed to me, you were both talking about things you knew nothing about." "What do you mean?" burst from both men with simultaneous astonishment. "Ben, dear, father doesn't know any radicals--except you, and he's only seen you twice. Father dear, I don't believe Ben ever talked five minutes with an able, successful conservative until he came here to-day." "You're going to throw me over, Crystal?" said Ben, seeing her pose more clearly than he heard her words. "No," said Mr. Cord, bitterly, "she's going to throw over an old man in favor of a young one." "You silly creatures," said Crystal, with a smile that made the words affectionate and not rude. "How can I ever throw either of you over? I'm going to be Ben's wife, and I am my father's daughter. I'm going to be those two things for all my life." Ben took her hand. She puzzled him, but he adored her. "But some day, Crystal," he said, "you will be obliged to choose between our views--mine or your father's. You must see that." "He's right," her father chimed in. "This is not a temporary difference of opinion, you know, Crystal. This cleavage is as old as mankind--the radical against the conservative. Time doesn't reconcile them." Again the idea came to her: "They do love to form gangs, the poor dears." Aloud she said: "Yes, but the two types are rarely pure ones. Why, father, you think Ben is a radical, but he's the most hidebound conservative about some things--much worse than you--about free verse, for instance. I read a long editorial about it not a month ago. He really thinks anyone who defends it ought to be deported to some poetic limbo. Ben, you think my father is conservative. But there's a great scandal in his mental life. He's a Baconian--" "He thinks Bacon wrote the plays!" exclaimed Ben, really shocked. "Certainly I do," answered Mr. Cord. "Every man who uses his mind must think so. There is nothing in favor of the Shakespeare theory, except tradition--" He would have talked for several hours upon the subject, but Crystal interrupted him by turning to Ben and continuing what she had meant to say: "When you said I should have to choose between your ideas, you meant between your political ideas. Perhaps I shall, but I won't make my choice, rest assured, until I have some reason for believing that each of you knows something--honestly knows something about the other one's point of view." "I don't get it, exactly," said Ben. She addressed Mr. Cord. "Father," she went on, "Ben has a little flat in Charles Street, and an old servant, and that's where I'm going to live." Her father, though bitterly wounded, had regained his sardonic calm. "Perhaps," he said, "you'll bring him up to Seventy-ninth Street for Sunday dinner now and then." Crystal shook her head. "No, dear," she said. "That isn't the way it's going to be. As soon as I get settled and have time to look about me, I shall take another little flat for you. You will live with us, for a few months in the winter, and get to know Ben's friends--his gang, as you would say--get to know them not as a philanthropist, or an employer, or an observer, but just as one of our friends--see if they really are the way you think they are. And then, in March you shall go off to Palm Beach or Virginia just as usual." "That's a fine idea," said Mr. Cord, sarcastically. "Do you realize that I shall hardly survive your marriage with the editor of _Liberty_. I shall be kicked off--requested to resign from half a dozen boards for having such a son-in-law--" "There's freedom for you," said Ben. "And," continued Mr. Cord, "if it were known that I consented to the marriage, and actually consorted with such fellows! You must realize, Crystal, that most of the most influential men in the country think the way Eddie does. Half my boards are composed of older Eddies." "You'll do better to resign from them, then," said Crystal. Ben had been very much struck by Crystal's suggestion. "Really, Mr. Cord," he said, "I believe that is a great idea of Crystal's. I really believe if capital had more idea of the real views of labor--as you said, you eventually adopt all our ideas, why wouldn't an intimate knowledge of individuals hurry that process?" "Simply because I should lose all influence with my own people by merely investigating you in a friendly spirit." "Glory!" exclaimed Ben, with open contempt for such people. "Think of penalizing the first honest attempt to understand!" "You see the point of my plan, don't you, Ben?" said Crystal. "You bet I do." "That's wonderful," she answered, "for you've only heard half of it. In July, August, and September, we will come here to Newport, and you will get to understand father's--" "Hold on," cried Ben, "just a moment. That is absolutely impossible, Crystal. You don't understand. The paper couldn't keep me a day if I did that." "Ha!" cried Mr. Cord, coming suddenly to life. "There's freedom for you!" "That would be very cruel of the owners, Ben, but if they did--" "It wouldn't be cruel at all," said Moreton. "They wouldn't have any choice. I should have lost all influence with my readers, if it were known--" "Glory!" said Mr. Cord. "Think of penalizing the first honest attempt to understand the capitalistic class!" Ben stood silent, caught in the grip of an intellectual dilemma which he felt every instant would dissolve itself and which didn't. Crystal for the first time moved away from her father. "Those are my terms," she said. "I stay with the man who agrees to them, and if you both decline them--well, I'll go off and try and open the oyster by myself." There was a long momentous pause, and then Tomes's discreet knock on the door. "Mr. Verriman on the telephone, madam." "I can't come," said Crystal. "Ask him to send a message." "Don't you see, Crystal, what your plan would do?" said her father. "Either it would make Moreton a red revolutionist and me a persecuting Bourbon, or else it would just ruin us both for either of our objectives." "It won't ruin you for my objectives," said Crystal, "and women are more human, you know, than men." Another knock at the door. Tomes's voice again: "Mr. Verriman wishes to know if he might dine here this evening?" "No," said Cord, looking at Crystal. Crystal raised her voice. "Certainly, Tomes. Say we shall be delighted to have him--at eight." Both men turned to her. "Why did you do that, Crystal? Verriman--here--to-night?" Crystal did not answer--the identity of their tones, their words, and their irritation with her should have told them the answer, but didn't. She knew that only opposition to Eddie and Eddie's many prototypes could weld her two men solidly together. THE END 
51565	----	George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara Credits for Temi Rose Production of GB Shaw's Major Barbara Directed by Temi Rose CAST: Andrew Undershaft - Laurence Cantor Lady Britomart Undershaft - Lucy McMichael (Major) Barbara Undershaft - Rin Allen Stephen Undershaft - Jonathan Horvath Sarah Undershaft - Shariffa Wilson Adolphus Cusins - Paul Singleton Charles Lomax - Philip T. Casale Bronterre O'Brien Price - Jason Daniel Siegel Rummy (Romola) Mitchens- Joan Shepard Peter Shirley - Jerry Sodgers Bill Walker - Matthew L. Imparato Jenny Hill - Nathalie Frederick Mrs. Baines - Eve Sorel Morrison & Bilton - Gardiner Comfort Narrator - Temi Rose MUSIC CREDITS Scene 1.1 Onward Christian Soldiers, Salvation Army Band Bands of the Salvation Army Album: Jerusalem Year 2003 Scene 1.5 Scanned/music for lungs and bellows. Will Duke, concertinas, voice; Dan Quinn, melodeons, voice. 2001, Hebemusic HEBE CD 003 and Onward Christian Soldiers, Salvation Army Band Bands of the Salvation Army Album: Jerusalem Year 2003 Scene 2.1 The Big Day In. Simon Thoumire, concertina; David Milligan, piano, 2001, Foot Stompin' Records CDFSR17B Scene 2.8 Bach Preludio Partita 3 http://www.concertinaconnection.com/partita3prelude.mp3 and Onward Christian Soldiers, Salvation Army Band Bands of the Salvation Army Album: Jerusalem Year 2003 Scene 3.1 Andante from Italian Concerto BWV 971 - Bach Catrin Finch (harp) http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen Scene 3.5 Orfeo ed Euridice (excerpt) - Gluck Paula Robison (flute) Mariko Anraku (harp) http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen Scene 3.9 same Recorded December 22, 2011 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York City. WEBSITE FOR THE PROJECT WITH ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND LINKS http://www.2cyberwhelm.org/2011/shaw/barbara 
15714	----	Proofreading Team. [Illustration: THIS WAS A NOVEL EXPERIENCE, THIS HAVING BOTH FATHER AND MOTHER IN THE NURSERY AT THE SAME TIME] The POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL by ELEANOR GATES [Illustration] GROSSET & DUNLAP Publishers NEW YORK The Poor Little Rich Girl CHAPTER I Halfway up the shining surface of the gilt-framed pier glass was a mark--a tiny ink-line that had been carefully drawn across the outer edge of the wide bevel. As Gwendolyn stared at the line, the reflection of her small face in the mirror grew suddenly all white, as if some rude hand had reached out and brushed away the pink from cheeks and lips. Arms rigid at her sides, and open palms pressed hard against the flaring skirts of her riding-coat, she shrank back from the glass. "Oo-oo!" she breathed, aghast. The gray eyes swam. After a moment, however, she blinked resolutely to clear her sight, stepped forward again, and, straightening her slender little figure to its utmost height, measured herself a second time against the mirror. But--as before--the top of her yellow head did not reach above the ink-mark--not by the smallest part of an inch! So there was no longer any reason to hope! The worst was true! She had drawn the tiny line across the edge of the bevel the evening before, when she was only six years old; now it was mid-morning of another day, and she was seven--_yet she was not a whit taller!_ The tears began to overflow. She pressed her embroidered handkerchief to her eyes. Then, stifling a sob, she crossed the nursery, stumbling once or twice as she made toward the long cushioned seat that stretched the whole width of the front window. There, among the down-filled pillows, with her loose hair falling about her wet cheeks and screening them, she lay down. For months she had looked forward with secret longing to this seventh anniversary. Every morning she had taken down the rose-embossed calendar that stood on the top of her gold-and-white writing-desk and tallied off another of the days that intervened before her birthday. And the previous evening she had measured herself against the pier glass without even a single misgiving. She rose at an early hour. Her waking look was toward the pier glass. Her one thought was to gauge her new height. But the morning was the usual busy one. When Jane finished bathing and dressing her, Miss Royle summoned her to breakfast. An hour in the school-room followed--an hour of quiet study, but under the watchful eye of the governess. Next, Gwendolyn changed her dressing-gown for a riding-habit, and with Jane holding her by one small hand, and with Thomas following, stepped into the bronze cage that dropped down so noiselessly from nursery floor to wide entrance-hall. Outside, the limousine was waiting. She and Jane entered it. Thomas took his seat beside the chauffeur. And in a moment the motor was speeding away. At the riding-school, her master gave her the customary lesson: She circled the tanbark on her fat brown pony--now to the right, at a walk; now to the left, at a trot; now back to the right again at a rattling canter, with her yellow hair whipping her shoulders, and her three-cornered hat working farther and farther back on her bobbing head, and tugging hard at the elastic under her dimpled chin. After nearly an hour of this walk, trot and canter she was very rosy, and quite out of breath. Then she was put back into the limousine and driven swiftly home. And it was not until after her arrival that she had a moment entirely to herself, and the first opportunity of comparing her height with the tiny ink-line on the edge of the mirror's bevel. Now as she lay, face down, on the window-seat, she know how vain had been all the longing of months. The realization, so sudden and unexpected, was a blow. The slender little figure among the cushions quivered under it. But all at once she sat up. And disappointment and grief gave place to apprehension. "I wonder what's the matter with me," she faltered aloud. "Oh, something awful, I guess." The next moment caution succeeded fear. She sprang to her feet and ran across the room. That tell-tale mark was still on the mirror, for nurse or governess to see and question. And it was advisable that no one should learn the unhappy truth. Her handkerchief was damp with tears. She gathered the tiny square of linen into a tight ball and rubbed at the ink-line industriously. She was not a moment too soon. Scarcely had she regained the window-seat, when the hall door opened and Thomas appeared on the sill, almost filling the opening with his tall figure. As a rule he wore his very splendid footman's livery of dark blue coat with dull-gold buttons, blue trousers, and striped buff waistcoat. Now he wore street clothes, and he had a leash in his hand. "Is Jane about, Miss Gwendolyn?" he inquired. Then, seeing that Gwendolyn was alone, "Would you mind tellin' her when she comes that I'm out takin' the Madam's dogs for a walk?" Gwendolyn had a new thought. "A--a walk?" she repeated. And stood up. "But tell Jane, if you please," continued he, "that I'll be back in time to go--well, _she_ knows where." This was said significantly. He turned. "Thomas!" Gwendolyn hastened across to him. "Wait till I put on my hat. I'm--I'm going with you." Her riding-hat lay among the dainty pink-and-white articles on her crystal-topped dressing-table. She caught it up. "Miss Gwendolyn!" exclaimed Thomas, astonished. "I'm seven," declared Gwendolyn, struggling with the hat-elastic. "I'm a whole year older than I was yesterday. And--and I'm grown-up." An exasperating smile lifted Thomas's lip. "Oh, _are_ you!" he observed. The hat settled, she met his look squarely. (Did he suspicion anything?) "_Yes_. And you take the dogs out to walk. So"--she started to pass him--"_I'm_ going to walk." His hair was black and straight. Now it seemed fairly to bristle with amazement. "I couldn't take you if you _was_ grown-up," he asserted firmly, blocking her advance; "--leastways not without Miss Royle or Jane'd say Yes. It'd be worth my job." Gwendolyn lowered her eyes, stood a moment in indecision, then pulled off the hat, tossed it aside, went back to the window, and sat down. At one end of the seat, swung high on its gilded spring, danced the dome-topped cage of her canary. Presently she raised her face to him. He was traveling tirelessly from perch to cage-floor, from floor to trapeze again. His wings were half lifted from his little body--the bright yellow of her own hair. It was as if he were ready for flight. His round black eyes were constantly turned toward the world beyond the window. He perked his head inquiringly, and cheeped. Now and then, with a wild beating of his pinions, he sprang sidewise to the shining bars of the cage, and hung there, panting. She watched him for a time; made a slow survey of the nursery next,--and sighed. "Poor thing!" she murmured. She heard the rustle of silk skirts from the direction of the school-room. Hastily she shook out the embroidered handkerchief and put it against her eyes. A door opened. "There will be no lessons this afternoon, Gwendolyn." It was Miss Royle's voice. Gwendolyn did not speak. But she lowered the handkerchief a trifle--and noted that the governess was dressed for going out--in a glistening black silk plentifully ornamented with jet _paillettes_. Miss Royle rustled her way to the pier-glass to have a last look at her bonnet. It was a poke, with a quilted ribbon circling its brim, and some lace arranged fluffily. It did not reach many inches above the spot where Gwendolyn had drawn the ink-line, for Miss Royle was small. When she had given the poke a pat here and a touch there, she leaned forward to get a better view of her face. She had a pale, thin face and thin faded hair. On either side of a high bony nose were set her pale-blue eyes. Shutting them in, and perched on the thinnest part of her nose, were silver-circled spectacles. "I'm very glad I can give you a half-holiday, dear," she went on. But her tone was somewhat sorrowful. She detached a small leaf of paper from a tiny book in her hand-bag and rubbed it across her forehead. "For my neuralgia is _much_ worse to-day." She coughed once or twice behind a lisle-gloved hand, snapped the clasp of her hand-bag and started toward the hall door. It was now that for the first time she looked at Gwendolyn--and caught sight of the bowed head, the grief-flushed cheeks, the suspended handkerchief. She stopped short. "Gwendolyn!" she exclaimed, annoyed. "I _hope_ you're not going to be cross and troublesome, and make it impossible for me to have a couple of hours to myself this afternoon--especially when I'm suffering." Then, coaxingly, "You can amuse yourself with one of your nice pretend-games, dear." From under long up-curling lashes Gwendolyn regarded her in silence. "I've planned to lunch out," went on Miss Royle. "But you won't mind, _will_ you, dear Gwendolyn?" plaintively. "For I'll be back at tea-time. And besides"--growing brighter--"you're to have--what do you think!--the birthday cake Cook has made." "I _hate_ cake!" burst out Gwendolyn; and covered her eyes once more. "_Gwen-do-lyn!_" breathed Miss Royle. Gwendolyn sat very still. "How _can_ you be so naughty! Oh, it's really wicked and ungrateful of you to be fretting and complaining--you who have _so_ many blessings! But you don't appreciate them because you've always had them. Well,"--mournfully solicitous--"I trust they'll never be taken from you, my child. Ah, _I_ know how bitter such a loss is! I haven't _always_ been in my present circumstances, compelled to go out among strangers to earn a scant living. Once--" Here she was interrupted. The door from the school-room swung wide with a bang. Gwendolyn, looking up, saw her nurse. Jane was in sharp contrast to Miss Royle--taller and stocky, with broad shoulders and big arms. As she halted against the open school-room door, her hair was as ruddy as the panel that made a background for it. And she had reddish eyes, and a full round face. In the midst of her face, and all out of proportion to it, was her short turned-up nose, which was plentifully sprinkled with freckles. "So you're goin' out?" she began angrily, addressing the governess. Miss Royle retreated a step. "Just for a--a couple of hours," she explained. Jane's face grew almost as red as her hair. Slamming the school-room door behind her, she advanced. "I suppose it's the neuralgia again," she suggested with quiet heat. The color stole into Miss Royle's pale cheeks. She coughed. "It _is_ a little worse than usual this afternoon," she admitted. "I thought so," said Jane. "It's always worse--_on bargain-days_." "How _dare_ you!" "You ask me that, do you?--you old snake-in-the-grass!" Now Jane grew pallid with anger. Gwendolyn, listening, contemplated her governess thoughtfully. She had often heard her pronounced a snake-in-the-grass. Miss Royle was also pale. "That will do!" she declared. "I shall report you to Madam." "Report!" echoed Jane, giving a loud, harsh laugh, and shaking her hair--the huge pompadour in front, the pug behind. "Well, go ahead. And I'll report _you_--and your handy neuralgia." "It's your duty to look after Gwendolyn when there are no lessons," reminded Miss Royle, but weakening noticeably. "On _week_-days?" shrilled Jane. "Oh, don't try to fool me with any of your schemin'! _I_ see. And I just laugh in my sleeve!" Gwendolyn fixed inquiring gray eyes upon that sleeve of Jane's dress which was the nearer. It was of black sateen. It fitted the stout arm sleekly. "This is the dear child's birthday, and I wish her to have the afternoon free." "A-a-ah! Then why don't you take her out with you? You like the auto_mo_bile nice enough,"--this sneeringly. Miss Royle tossed her head. "I thought perhaps _you'd_ be using the car," she answered, with fine sarcasm. Jane began to argue, throwing out both hands: "How was _I_ to know to-day was her birthday? You might've told me about it; instead, just all of a sudden, you shove her off on my hands." Gwendolyn's eyes narrowed resentfully. Miss Royle gave a quick look toward the window-seat. "You mean you've made plans?" she asked, concern supplanting anger in her voice. To all appearances Jane was near to tears. She did not answer. She nodded dejectedly. "Well, Jane, you shall have to-morrow afternoon," declared Miss Royle, soothingly. "Is _that_ fair? I didn't know you'd counted on to-day. So--" Here another glance shot window-ward. Then she beckoned Jane. They went into the hall. And Gwendolyn heard them whispering together. When Jane came back into the nursery she looked almost cheerful. "Now off with that habit," she called to Gwendolyn briskly. "And into something for your dinner." "I want to wear a plaid dress," announced Gwendolyn, getting down from her seat slowly. Jane was selecting a white muslin from a tall wardrobe. "Little girls ain't wearin' plaids this year," she declared shortly. "Come." "Well, then, I want a dress that's got a pocket," went on Gwendolyn, "--a pocket 'way down on this side." She touched the right skirt of her riding-coat. "They ain't makin' pockets in little girls' dresses this year," said Jane, "Come! Come!" "'They,'" repeated Gwendolyn. "Who are 'They'? I'd like to know; 'cause I could telephone 'em and--" "Hush your nonsense!" bade Jane. Then, catching at the delicate square of linen in Gwendolyn's hand, "How'd you git ink smeared over your handkerchief? What do you suppose your mamma'd say if she was to come upon it? _I'd_ be blamed--_as_ usual!" "Who are They'?" persisted Gwendolyn. "'They' do so _many_ things. And I want to tell 'em that I like pockets in _all_ my dresses." Jane ignored the question. "Yesterday you said 'They' would send us soda-water," went on Gwendolyn--talking to herself now, rather than to the nurse. "And I'd like to know where 'They' _find_ soda-water." Whereupon she fell to pondering the question. Evidently this, like many another propounded to Jane or Miss Royle; to Thomas; to her music-teacher, Miss Brown; to Mademoiselle Du Bois, her French teacher; and to her teacher of German, was one that was meant to remain a secret of the grown-ups. Jane, having unbuttoned the riding-coat, pulled at the small black boots. She was also talking to herself, for her lips moved. The moment Gwendolyn caught sight of her unshod feet, she had a new idea--the securing of a long-denied privilege by urging the occasion. "Oh, Jane," she cried. "May I go barefoot?--just for a _little_ while. I want to." Jane stripped off the cobwebby stockings. Gwendolyn wriggled her ten pink toes. "May I, Jane?" "You can go barefoot to _bed_," said Jane. Gwendolyn's bed stood midway of the nursery, partly hidden by a high tapestried screen. It was a beautiful bed, carved and enamelled, and panelled--head and foot--with woven cane. But to Gwendolyn it was, by day, a white instrument of torture. She gave it a glance of disfavor now, and refrained from pursuing her idea. When the muslin dress was donned, and a pink satin hair-bow replaced the black one that bobbed on Gwendolyn's head when she rode, she returned to the window and sat down. The seat was deep, and her shiny patent-leather slippers stuck straight out in front of her. In one hand she held a fresh handkerchief. She nibbled at it thoughtfully. She was still wondering about "They." Thomas looked cross when he came in to serve her noon dinner. He arranged the table with a jerk and a bang. "So old Royle up and outed, did she?" he said to Jane. "Hush!" counseled Jane, significantly, and rolled her eyes in the direction of the window-seat. Gwendolyn stopped nibbling her handkerchief. "And our plans is spoiled," went on Thomas. "Well, ain't that our luck! And I suppose you couldn't manage to leave a certain party--" Gwendolyn had been watching Thomas. Now she fell to observing the silver buckles on her slippers. She might not know who "They" were. But "a certain party"-- "Leave?" repeated Jane, "Who with? Not alone, surely you don't mean. For something's gone wrong already to-day, as you'll see if you'll use your eyes. And a fuss or a howl'd mean that somebody'd hear, and tattle to the Madam, and--" Thomas said something under his breath. "So we can't go after all," resumed Jane; "--leastways not like we'd counted on. And it's _too_ exasperatin'. Here I am, a person that likes my freedom once in a while, and a glimpse at the shop-windows,--exactly as much as old you-know-who does--and a bit of tea afterwards with a--a friend." At this point, Gwendolyn glanced up--just in time to see Thomas regarding Jane with a broad grin. And Jane was smiling back at him, her face so suffused with blushes that there was not a freckle to be seen. Now Jane sighed, and stood looking down with hands folded. "What good does it do to talk, though," she observed sadly. "Day in and day out, day _in_ and day out, I have to dance attendance." It was Gwendolyn's turn to color. She got down quickly and came forward. "Sh!" warned Thomas. He busied himself with laying the silver. Gwendolyn halted in front of Jane, and lifted a puzzled face. "But--but, Jane," she began defensively, "you don't ever _dance_." "Now, whatever do you think I was talkin' about?" demanded Jane, roughly. "You dance, don't you, at Monsoor Tellegen's, of a Saturday afternoon? Well, so do I when I get a' evenin' off,--which isn't often, as you well know, Miss. And now your dinner's ready. So eat it, without any more clackin'." Gwendolyn climbed upon the plump rounding seat of a white-and-gold chair. Jane settled down nearby, choosing an upholstered arm-chair--spacious, comfort-giving. She lolled in it, at ease but watchful. "You can't think how that old butler spies on me," said Thomas, addressing her. "He seen the tray when I put it on the dumb-waiter. And, 'Miss Royle is havin' her lunch out,' he says. Then would you _believe_ it, he took more'n half my dishes away!" Jane giggled. "Potter's a sharp one," she declared. "But, oh, you should've been behind a door just now when you-know-who and I had a little understandin'." "Eh?" he inquired, working his black brows excitedly. "How was that?" Gwendolyn went calmly on with her mutton-broth. She already knew each detail of the forth-coming recital. "Well," began Jane, "she played her usual trick of startin' off without so much as a word to me, and I just up and give her a tongue-lashin'." Gwendolyn's spoon paused half way to her expectant pink mouth. She stared at Jane. "Oh, I didn't see that," she exclaimed regretfully. "Jane, what is a tongue-lashing?" Jane sat up. "A tongue-lashin'," said she, "is what _you_ need, young lady. Look at the way you've spilled your soup! Take it, Thomas, and serve the rest of the dinner, I ain't goin' to allow you to be at the table _all_ day, Miss.... There, Thomas! That'll be all the minced chicken she can have." "But I took just one little spoonful," protested Gwendolyn, earnestly. "I wanted more, but Thomas held it 'way up, and--" "Do you want to be sick?" demanded Jane. "And have a doctor come?" Gwendolyn raised frightened eyes. A doctor had been called once in the dim past, when she was a baby, racked by colic and budding teeth. She did not remember him. But since the era of short clothes she had been mercifully spared his visits. "N-n-no!" she faltered. "Well, you look out or I'll git one on the 'phone. And you'll be sorry _the rest of your life_.... Take the chicken away, Thomas. 'Out of sight is'--you know the sayin'. (It's a pity there ain't some way to keep it hot.)" "A bit of cold fowl don't go so bad," said Thomas, reassuringly. And to Gwendolyn, "Here's more of the potatoes souffles, Miss Gwendolyn,--_very_ tasty and fillin'." Gwendolyn put up a hand and pushed the proffered dish aside. "Now, no temper," warned Jane, rising. "Too much meat ain't good for children. Your mamma herself would say that. Come! See that nice potatoes and cream gravy on your plate. And there you set cryin'!" Thomas had an idea. "Shall I fetch the cake?" he asked in a loud whisper. Jane nodded. He disappeared--to reappear at once with a round frosted cake that had a border of pink icing upon its glazed white top. And set within the circle of the border were seven pink candles, all alight. "Oh, look! Look!" cried Jane, excitedly, pulling Gwendolyn's hand away from her eyes. "Isn't it a beautiful cake! You shall have a bi-i-ig piece." Those seven small candles dispelled the gloom. With tears on her cheeks, but all eager and smiling once more, Gwendolyn blew the candles out. And as she bent forward to puff at each tiny one, Jane held her bright hair back, for fear that a strand might get too near a flame. "Oh, Jane," cried Gwendolyn, "when I blow like that, _where_ do all the little lights go?" "Did you ever _hear_ such a question?" exclaimed Jane, appealing to Thomas. He was cutting away at the cake. "Of course, Miss, you'd like _me_ to have a bite of this," he said. "You know it was me that reminded Cook about bakin'--" "Perhaps all the little lights go up under the big lamp-shade," went on Gwendolyn, too absorbed to listen to Thomas. "And make a big light." She started to get down from her chair to investigate. "Now look here," said Jane irritably, "you'll just finish your dinner before you leave the table. Here's your cake. _Eat_ it!" Gwendolyn ate her slice daintily, using a fork. Jane also ate a slice--holding it in her fingers. "There's ways of managin' a fairly jolly afternoon," she said from the depths of the arm-chair. "You're speakin' of--er--?" asked Thomas, picking up cake crumbs with a damp finger-tip. "Uh-huh." "A certain party would have to go along," he reminded. "_Of_ course. But a ride's better'n nothin'." "Shall I telephone for--?" Thomas brought a finger-bowl. Gwendolyn stood up. A ride meant the limousine, with its screening top and little windows. The limousine meant a long, tiresome run at good speed through streets that she longed to travel afoot, slowly, with a stop here and a stop there, and a poke into things in general. Her crimson cheeks spoke rebellion. "I want a walk this afternoon," she declared emphatically. "Use your finger-bowl," said Jane. "Can't you _never_ remember your manners?" "I'm seven to-day," Gwendolyn went on, the tips of her fingers in the small basin of silver while her face was turned to Jane. "I'm seven and--and I'm grown-up." "And you're splashin' water on the table-cloth. Look at you!" "So," went on Gwendolyn, "I'm going to walk. I haven't walked for a whole, whole week." "You can lean back in the car," began Jane enthusiastically, "and pretend you're a grand little Queen!" "I don't _want_ to be a Queen. I want to _walk_. "Rich little girls don't hike along the streets like common poor little girls," informed Jane. "I don't _want_ to be a rich little girl,"--voice shrill with determination. Jane went to shake her frilled apron into the gilded waste-basket beside Gwendolyn's writing-desk. "You can telephone any time now, Thomas," she said calmly. Gwendolyn turned upon Thomas. "But I don't _want_ to be shut up in the car this afternoon," she cried. "And I won't! I _won't!_ I WON'T!" Jane gave a gasp of smothered rage. The reddish eyes blazed. "Do you want me to send for a great black bear?" she demanded. At that Gwendolyn quailed. "No-o-o!" Jane shot a glance toward Thomas. It invited suggestion. "Let her take something along," he said under his breath, nodding toward a glass-fronted case of shelves that stood opposite Gwendolyn's bed. Each shelf of the case was covered with toys. Along one sat a line of daintily clad dolls--black-haired dolls; golden-haired dolls; dolls from China, with slanted eyes and a queue; dolls from Japan, in gayly figured kimonos; Dutch dolls--a boy and a girl; a French doll in an exquisite frock; a Russian; an Indian; a Spaniard. A second shelf held a shiny red-and-black peg-top, a black wooden snake beside its lead-colored pipe-like case; a tin soldier in an English uniform--red coat, and pill-box cap held on by a chin-strap; a second uniformed tin man who turned somersaults, but in repose stood upon his head; a black dog on wheels, with great floppy ears; and a half-dozen downy ducklings acquired at Easter. "Much good takin' anything'll do!" grumbled Jane. Then, plucking crossly at a muslin sleeve, "Well, what do you want? Your French doll? Speak up!" "I don't want anything," asserted Gwendolyn, "--long as I can't have my Puffy Bear any more." There was a wide vacant place beside the dog with the large ears. "The little beast got shabby," explained Thomas, "and I was compelled to throw him away along with the old linen-hamper. Like as not some poor little child has him now." She considered the statement, gray eyes wistful. Then, "I liked him," she said huskily. "He was old and squashy, and it wouldn't hurt him to walk up the Drive, right in the path where the horses go. The dirt is loose there, like it was in the road at Johnnie Blake's in the country. I could scuff it with my shoes." "You could scuff it and I could wear myself out cleanin', I suppose," retorted Jane. "And like as not run the risk of gittin' some bad germs on my hands, and dyin' of 'em. From what Rosa says, it was downright _shameful_ the way you muddied your clothes, and tore 'em, and messed in the water after nasty tad-poles that week you was up country. _I_ won't allow you to treat your beautiful dresses like that, or climb about, or let the hot sun git at you." "I'm going to _walk_." Silence; but silence palpitant with thought. Then Jane threw up her head--as if seized with an inspiration. "You're going to walk?" said she. "All right! _All_ right! Walk if you want to." She made as if to set out. "_Go_ ahead! But, my _dear_," (she dropped her voice in fear) "you'll no more'n git to the next corner when _somebody'll steal you!_" Gwendolyn was silent for a long moment. She glanced from Jane to Thomas, from Thomas to Jane, and crooked her fingers in and out of her twisted handkerchief. "But, Jane," she said finally, "the dogs go out walking--and--and nobody steals the dogs." "Hear the silly child!" cried Jane. "Nobody steals the dogs! Why, if anybody was to steal the dogs what good would it do 'em? They're only Pomeranians anyhow, and Madam could go straight out and buy more. Besides, like as not Pomeranians won't be stylish next year, and so Madam wouldn't care two snaps. She'd go buy the latest thing in poodles, or else a fine collie, or a spaniel or a Spitz." "But other little girls walk all the time," insisted Gwendolyn, "and nobody steals _them_." Jane crossed her knees, pursed her mouth and folded her arms. "Well, Thomas," she said, shaking her head, "I guess after all that I'll have to tell her." "Ah, yes, I suppose so," agreed Thomas. His tone was funereal. Gwendolyn looked from one to the other. "I haven't wanted to," continued Jane, dolefully. "_You_ know that. But now she forces me to do it. Though I'm as sorry as sorry can be." Thomas had just taken his portion of cake in one great mouthful. "Fo'm my," he chimed in. Gwendolyn looked concerned. "But I'm seven," she reiterated. "Seven?" said Jane. "What has that got to do with it? _Age_ don't matter." Gwendolyn did not flinch. "You said nobody steals other little girls," went on Jane. "It ain't true. Poor little girls and boys, _no_body steals. You can see 'em runnin' around loose everywheres. But it's different when a little girl's papa is made of money." "So much money," added Thomas, "that it fairly makes me palm itch." Whereat he fell to rubbing one open hand against a corner of the piano. Gwendolyn reflected a moment. Then, "But my fath-er isn't made of money,"--she lingered a little, tenderly, over the word father, pronouncing it as if it were two words. "I _know_ he isn't. When I was at Johnnie Blake's cottage, we went fishing, and fath-er rolled up his sleeves. And his arms were strong; and red, like Jane's." Thomas sniggered. But Jane gestured impatiently. Then, making scared eyes, "What has that _got to do_," she demanded, "_with the wicked men that keep watch of this house?_" Gwendolyn swallowed. "What wicked men?" she questioned apprehensively. "Ah-ha!" triumphed Jane. "I _thought_ that'd catch you! Now just let me ask you another question: _Why are there bars on the basement windows?_" Gwendolyn's lips parted to reply. But no words came. "You don't know," said Jane. "But I'll tell you something: There ain't no bars on the windows where _poor_ little girls live. For the simple reason that nobody wants to steal _them_." Gwendolyn considered the statement, her fingers still busy knotting and unknotting. "I tell you," Jane launched forth again, "that if you run about on the street, like poor children do, you'll be grabbed up by a band of kidnapers." "Are--are kidnapers worse than doctors?" asked Gwendolyn. "Worse than doctors!" scoffed Thomas, "_Heaps_ worse." "Worse than--than bears?" (The last trace of that rebellious red was gone.) Up and down went Jane's head solemnly. "Kidnapers carry knives--big curved knives." Now Gwendolyn recalled a certain terror-inspiring man with a long belted coat and a cap with a shiny visor. It was not his height that made her fear him, for her father was fully as tall; and it was not his brass-buttoned coat, or the dark, piercing eyes under the visor. She feared him because Jane had often threatened her with his coming; and, secondly, because he wore, hanging from his belt, a cudgel--long and heavy and thick. How that cudgel glistened in the sunlight as it swung to and fro by a thong! "Worse than a--a p'liceman?" she faltered. "Policeman? _Yes!_" "Than the p'liceman that's--that's always hanging around here?" Now Jane giggled, and blushed as red as her hair. "Hush!" she chided. Thomas poked a teasing finger at her. "Haw! Haw!" he laughed. "There's other people that's noticed a policeman hangin' round. _He's_ a dandy, he is!--_not_. He let that old hand organ man give him a black eye." "Pooh!" retorted Jane. "You know how much I care about that policeman! It's only that I like to have him handy for just such times as this." But Gwendolyn was dwelling on the newly discovered scourge of moneyed children. "What would the kidnapers do?" she inquired. "The kidnapers," promptly answered Jane, "would take you and shut you up in a nasty cellar, where there was rats and mice and things and--" Gwendolyn's mouth began to quiver. Hastily Jane put out a hand. "But we'll look sharp that nothin' of the kind happens," she declared stoutly; "for who can git you when you're in the car--_especially_ when Thomas is along to watch out. So"--with a great show of enthusiasm--"we'll go out, oh! for a _grand_ ride." She rose. "And maybe when we git into the country a ways, we'll invite Thomas to take the inside seat opposite," (another wink) "and he'll tell you about soldierin' in India, and camps, and marches, and shootin' elephants." "Aren't there kidnapers in the country, too?" asked Gwendolyn. "I--I guess I'd rather stay home." "You won't see 'em in the country this time of day," explained Jane. "They're all in town, huntin' rich little children. So on with the sweet new hat and a pretty coat!" She opened the door of the wardrobe. Gwendolyn did not move. But as she watched Jane the gray eyes filled with tears, which overflowed and trickled slowly down her cheeks. "If--if Thomas walked along with us," she began, "could--could anybody steal me then?" Jane was taking out coat, hat and gloves. "What would kidnapers care about _Thomas?_" she demanded contemptuously. "_Sure_, they'd steal you, and then they'd say to your father, 'Give! me a million dollars in cash if you want Miss Gwendolyn back.' And if your father didn't give the money on the spot, you'd be sold to gipsies, or--or _Chinamen_." But Gwendolyn persisted. "Thomas has killed el'phunts," she reminded. "Are--are kidnapers worse than el'phunts?" She drew on her gloves. Jane sat down and held out the coat. It was of velvet. "Now be still!" she commanded roughly. "You'll go in the machine if you go at _all_. Do you hear that?"--giving Gwendolyn a half-turn-about that nearly upset her. "Do you think I'm goin' to trapse over the hard pavements on my poor, tired feet just because _you_ take your notions?" Gwendolyn began to cry--softly. "Oh, I--I thought I wouldn't ever have to ride again wh-when I was seven," she faltered, putting one white-gloved hand to her eyes. "Stop that!" commanded Jane, again, "Dirtyin' your gloves, you wasteful little thing!" Now the big sobs came. Down went the yellow head. "Oh! Oh! Oh!" said Thomas. "Little _ladies_ never cry." "Walk! walk! walk!" scolded Jane, kneeling, and preparing to adjust the new hat. The hat had wide ribbons that tied under the chin--new, stiff ribbons. "Johnnie Bu-Blake didn't fasten _his_ hat on like this," wept Gwendolyn. She moved her chin from side to side. "He just had a--a sh-shoe-string." Jane had finished. "Johnnie Blake! Johnnie Blake! Johnnie Blake!" she mocked. She gave Gwendolyn a little push toward the front window. "Now, no more of your nonsense. Go and be quiet for a few minutes. And keep a' eye out, will you, to see that there's nobody layin' in wait for us out in front?" Gwendolyn went forward to the window-seat and climbed up among its cushions. From there she looked down upon the Drive with its sloping, evenly-cut grass, its smooth, tawny road and soft brown bridle-path, and its curving walk, stone-walled on the outer side. Beyond park and road and walk were tree-tops, bush-high above the wall. And beyond these was the broad, slow-flowing river, with boats going to and fro upon its shimmering surface. The farther side of the river was walled like the walk, only the wall was a cliff, sheer and dark and timber-edged. And through this timber could be seen the roofs and chimneys of distant houses. But Gwendolyn saw nothing of the beauty of the view. She did not even glance down to where, on its pedestal, stood the great bronze war-horse, its mane and tail flying, its neck arched, its lips curved to neigh. Astride the horse was her friend, the General, soldierly, valorous, his hat doffed--as if in silent greeting to the double procession of vehicles and pedestrians that was passing before him. Brave he might be, but what help was the General _now?_ When Jane was ready for the drive, Gwendolyn took a firm hold of one thick thumb. And, with Thomas following, they were soon in the entrance hall. There, waiting as usual, was Potter, the butler. He smiled at Gwendolyn. But Gwendolyn did not smile in return. As the cage had sunk swiftly down the long shaft, her heart had sunk, too. And now she thought how old Potter was; how thin and stooped. With kidnapers about, was _he_ a fit guardian for the front door? As Potter swung wide the heavy grille of wrought iron, with its silk-hung back of plate-glass, Gwendolyn pulled hard at Jane's hand, and went down the granite steps and across the sidewalk as quickly as possible, with a timid glance to right and left. For, even as she entered the car, might not that band of knife-men suddenly catch sight of her, and, rushing over walk and bridle-path and roadway, seize her and carry her off? She sank, trembling, upon the seat of the limousine. Jane followed her. Then Thomas closed the windowed door of the motor and took his place beside the chauffeur. Gwendolyn leaned forward for a swift glance at the lower windows, barred against intruders. The great house was of stone. On side and rear it stood flat against other houses. But it was built on a corner; and along its front and outer side, the tops of the basement windows were set a foot or more above the level of the sidewalk. To Gwendolyn those windows were huge eyes, peering out at her from under heavy lashes of iron. The automobile started. Jane arranged her skirts and leaned back luxuriously, her big hands folded on her lap. "My! but ain't this grand!" she exclaimed. Then to Gwendolyn: "You don't mind, do you, dearie, if Jane has a taste of gum as we go along?" Gwendolyn did not reply. She had not heard. She was leaning toward the little window on her side of the limousine. In front of Jane was the chauffeur, wide-backed and skillful, and crouched vigilantly over his wheel. But in front of her was Thomas, sitting in the proudly erect, stiff position peculiar to him whenever he fared abroad. He looked neither to right nor left. He seemed indifferent that danger lurked for her along the Drive. But she--! As the limousine joined others, all speeding forward merrily, her pale little face was pressed against the shield-shaped pane of glass, her frightened eyes roved continually, searching the moving crowds. CHAPTER II The nursery was on the top-most floor of the great stone house--this for sunshine and air. But the sunshine was gone when Gwendolyn returned from her drive, and a half-dozen silk-shaded lights threw a soft glow over the room. To shut out the chill of the spring evening the windows were down. Across them were drawn the heavy hangings of rose brocade. There was a lamp on the larger of the nursery tables, a tall lamp, almost flower-like with its petal-shaped ruffles of lace and chiffon. It made conspicuous two packages that flanked it--one small and square; the other large, and as round as a hat-box. Each was wrapped in white paper and tied with red string. "Birthday presents!" cried Jane, the moment she spied them; and sprang forward. "Oh, I wonder what they are! What do _you_ guess, Gwendolyn?" Gwendolyn followed slowly, blinking against the light. "I can't guess," she said without enthusiasm. The glass-fronted case was full of toys, none of which she particularly cherished. (Indeed, most of them were carefully wrapped from sight.) New ones would merely form an addition. "Well, what would you _like?_" queried Jane, catching up the small package and shaking it. Gwendolyn suddenly looked very earnest. "Most in the whole _world?_" she asked. "Yes, what?" Jane dropped the small package and shook the large one. "In the whole, whole big world?" went on Gwendolyn--to herself rather than to her nurse. She was not looking at the table, but toward a curtained window, and the gray eyes had a tender faraway expression. There was a faint conventional pattern in the brocade of the heavy hangings. It suggested trees with graceful down-growing boughs. She clasped her hands. "I want to live out in the woods," she said, "at Johnnie Blake's cottage by the stream that's got fish in it." Jane set the big package down with a thump. "That's _awful_ selfish of you," she declared warmly. "For you know right well that Thomas and _I_ wouldn't like to leave the city and live away out in the country. _Would_ we, Thomas?"--for he had just entered. "Cer-tain-ly _not_," said Thomas. "And it'd give poor Miss Royle the neuralgia," (Jane and Miss Royle might contend with each other; they made common cause against _her_.) "But none of you'd _have_ to" assured Gwendolyn. "When I was at Johnnie Blake's that once, just Potter went, and Rosa, and Cook. And Rosa buttoned my dresses and gave me my bath, and--" "So Rosa'll do _just_ as well as me," interrupted Jane, jealously. "--And Potter passed the dishes at table," resumed Gwendolyn, ignoring the remark; "and _he_ never hurried the best-tasting ones." "Hear that will you, Thomas!" cried Jane. "Mr. _Potter_ never hurried the best-tastin' ones!" Thomas gave her a significant stare. "I tell you, a certain person is growin' keen," he said in a low voice. Jane took Gwendolyn by the arm. "Put all that Johnnie Blake nonsense out of your head," she commanded. "Folks that live in the woods don't know nothin'. They're silly and pokey." Gwendolyn shook her head with deliberation. "Johnny Blake wasn't pokey," she denied. "He had a willow fishpole, and a string tied to it. And he caught shiny fishes on the end of the string." "Johnnie Blake!" sniffed Jane. "Oh, I know all about _him_. Rosa told me. He's a common, poor little boy. And"--severely--"I, for _one_, can't see why you was ever allowed to play with him!... "Now, darlin',"--softening--"here we stand fussin', and you ain't even guessed what your presents are. Guess something that's real fine: something you'd like in the city, pettie." She began to unwrap the larger of the packages. "Oh," said Gwendolyn. "What I'd like in the _city_. Well,"--suddenly between her brows there came a curious, strained little wrinkle--"I'd like--" The white paper fell away. A large, round box was disclosed. To it was tied a small card. "This is from your papa!" cried Jane. "Oh, let's see what it is!" The wrinkle smoothed. A smile broke,--like sudden sunlight after clouds, and shadow. Then there poured forth all that had filled her heart during the past months: "I'd like to eat at the grown-up table with my fath-er and my moth-er," she declared; "and I don't want to have a nurse any more like a baby! and I want to go to _day_-school." Jane gasped, and her big hands fell from the round box. Thomas stared, and reddened even to his ears, which were large and over-prominent. To both, the project cherished so long and constantly was in the nature of a bombshell. "Oh-ho!" said Jane, recovering herself after a moment. "So me and Thomas are to be thrown out of our jobs, are we?" Gwendolyn looked mild surprise. "But you don't _like_ to be here," she reminded. "And you and Thomas wouldn't have to work any more; you could just play all the time." She smiled up at them encouragingly. Thomas eyed Jane. "If we ain't careful," he warned in a low voice, "and let a certain party talk too much at headquarters--" The other nodded, comprehending "I'll look sharp," she promised. "Royle will, too." Whereupon, with a forced change to gayety, and a toss of the white card aside, she lifted the cover of the box and peeked in. It was a merry-go-round, canopied in gay stripes, and built to accommodate a party of twelve dolls. There were six deep seats, each lined with ruby plush, for as many lady dolls: There were six prancing Arab steeds--bay and chestnut and dappled gray--for an equal number of men. A small handle turned to wind up the merry-go-round. Whereupon the seats revolved gayly, the Arabs curvetted; and from the base of the stout canopy pole there sounded a merry tune. "Oh, darlin', what a grand thing!" cried Jane, lifting Gwendolyn to stand on the rounding seat of a white-and-gold chair (a position at other times strictly forbidden). "And what a pile of money it must've cost! Why, it's as natural as the big one in the Park!" The music and the horses appealed. Other considerations moved temporarily into the background as Gwendolyn watched and listened. Thomas broke the string of the smaller package. "This is the Madam's present," he declared. "And I'll warrant it's a beauty!" It proved a surprise. All paper shorn away, there stood revealed a green cabbage, topped by something fluffy and hairy and snow-white. This was a rabbit's head. And when Thomas had turned a key in the base of the cabbage, the rabbit gave a sudden hop, lifted a pair of long ears, munched at a bit of cabbage-leaf, turned his pink nose, now to the right, now to the left, and rolled two amber eyes. "And look! Look!" shouted Jane "The eyes light up" For each was glowing as yellowly as the tiny electric bulbs on either side of Gwendolyn's dressing-table. "Now what _more_ could a little lady want!" exclaimed Thomas. "It's as wonderful, _I_ say, as a wax figger." The rabbit, with a sharp click of farewell, popped back into the cabbage. Gwendolyn got down from the chair. "It _is_ nice," she conceded. "And I'm going to ask fath-er and moth-er to come up and see it." Neither Thomas nor Jane answered. But again he eyed the nurse, this time flashing a silent warning. After which she began to exclaim excitedly over the rabbit, while he wound up the merry-go-round. Then the ruby seats and the Arabs careened in a circle, the music played, the rabbit chewed and wriggled and rolled his luminous eyes. An interruption came in the shape of a ring at the telephone, which stood on the small table at the head of Gwendolyn's bed. Jane answered the summons, and received the message,--a brief one. It worked, however, a noticeable change. For when Jane turned round her face was sullen. Gwendolyn remarked the scowls. Also the fact that the moment Jane made Thomas her confidant--in an undertone--he showed plain signs of being annoyed. Gwendolyn saw the merry-go-round--cabbage and all--disappear into the large, round box without a trace of regret. So much ill-feeling on the part of nurse and man-servant undoubtedly meant that something of a decidedly pleasant nature was about to happen to herself. It was a usual--almost a daily--occurrence for her to visit the region of the grown-ups at the dinner-hour. On such occasions she saw one, though more often both, of her parents--as well as a varying number of guests. And the privilege was one held dear. She coveted a dearer. And her eyes roved to the larger of her two tables, where stood the tall lamp. There she ate all her meals, in the condescending company of Miss Royle. What if the telephone message meant that henceforth she was to eat _downstairs?_ Standing on one foot she waited developments, and concealed her eagerness by snapping her underlip against her teeth with one busy forefinger. Her spirits fell when Thomas appeared with the supper-tray. And she ate with no appetite--for all that she was eating alone--alone, that is, except for Thomas, who preserved a complete and stony silence. Miss Royle had not returned. Jane had disappeared toward her room, grumbling about never having a single evening to call her own. But at seven cheer returned with the realization that Jane was not getting ready the white-and-gold bed. Still in a very bad humor, and touched up smartly by a fresh cap and a dainty apron, the nurse put Gwendolyn into a rosebud-bordered mull frock and tied a white-satin bow atop her yellow hair. "Where am I going, Jane?" asked Gwendolyn. (She felt certain that this was one of the nights when she was invited downstairs: She hoped--with a throb in her throat that was like the beat of a heart--that the supper just past was only afternoon tea, and that there was waiting for her at the grown-up table--in view of her newly acquired year and dignity--_an empty chair_.) "You'll see soon enough," answered Jane, shortly. Next, a new thought! Her father and mother had not seen her for two whole days--not since she was six. "Wonder if I show I'm not taller," she mused under her breath. At precisely fifteen minutes to eight Jane took her by the hand. And she went down and down in the bronze cage, past the floor where were the guest chambers, past the library floor, which was where her mother and father lived, to the second floor of the great house. Here was the music-room, spacious and splendid, and the dining-room. The doors of this latter room were double. Before them the two halted. Not only the pause at this entrance betrayed whereto they were bound, but also Jane's manner. For the nurse was holding herself erect and proper--shoulders back, chin in, heels together. Gwendolyn had often noted that upon both Jane and Thomas her parents had a curious stiffening effect. The thought of that empty chair now forced itself uppermost. The gray eyes darkened with sudden anxiety. "Now, Gwendolyn" whispered Jane, leaning down, "put your best foot forward." Her face had lost some of its accustomed color. "But, Jane," whispered Gwendolyn back, "which _is_ my best foot?" Jane gave the small hand she was holding an impatient shake. "Hush your rubbishy questions," she commanded "We're goin' in!" She tapped one of the doors gently. Gwendolyn glanced down at her daintily slippered feet. With so little time for reflecting, she could not decide which one she should put forward. Both looked equally well. The next moment the doors swung open, and Potter, white-haired, grave and bent, stepped aside for them to pass. They crossed the threshold. The dining-room was wide and long and lofty. Its wainscot was somberly stained. Above the wainscot, the dull tapestried walls reached to a ceiling richly panelled. The center of this dark setting was a long table, glittering with china and crystal, bright with silver and roses, and lighted by clusters of silk-shaded candles that reflected themselves upon circular table mirrors. At the far end of the table sat Gwendolyn's father, pale in his black dress-clothes, and haggard-eyed; at the near end sat her mother, pink-cheeked and pretty, with jewels about her bare throat and in her fair hair. And between the two, filling the high-backed chairs on either side of the table, were strange men and women. Gwendolyn let go of Jane's hand and went toward her mother. Thither had gone her first glance; her second had swept the whole length of the board to her father's face. And now, without heeding any of the others, her look circled swiftly from chair to chair--searching. Not one was empty! The gray eyes blurred. Yet she tried to smile. Close to that dear presence, so delicately perfumed (with a haunting perfume that was a very part of her mother's charm and beauty) she halted; and curtsied--precisely as Monsieur Tellegen had taught her. And when the white-satin bow bobbed above the level of the table once more, she raised her face for a kiss. A murmur went up and down the double row of chairs. Gwendolyn's mother smiled radiantly. Her glance over the table was proud. "This is my little daughter's seventh birthday anniversary," she proclaimed. To Gwendolyn the announcement was unexpected. But she was quick. Very cautiously she lifted herself on her toes--just a little. Another buzz of comment circled the board. "_Too_ sweet!" said one; and, "_Cunning!_" and "Fine child, that!" "Now, dear," encouraged her mother. Gwendolyn would have liked to stand still and listen to the chorus of praise. But there was something else to do. She turned a corner of the table and started slowly along it, curtseying at each chair. As she curtsied she said nothing, only bobbed the satin bow and put out a small hand. And, "How do you do, darling!" said the ladies, and "Ah, little Miss Gwendolyn!" said the men. The last man on that side, however, said something different. (He, she had seen at the dinner-table often.) He slipped a hand into a pocket. When it came forth, it held an oblong box. "I didn't forget that this was your birthday," he half-whispered. "Here!"--as he laid the box upon Gwendolyn's pink palm--"that's for your sweet tooth!" Everyone was watching, the ladies beaming, the men intent and amused. But Gwendolyn was unaware both of the silence and the scrutiny. She glanced at the box. Then she looked up into the friendly eyes of the donor. "But," she began; "--but which _is_ my sweet tooth?" There was a burst of laughter, Gwendolyn's father and mother joining in. The man who had presented the box laughed heartiest of all; then rose. First he bowed to her mother, who acknowledged his salute graciously; next he turned to her father, whose pale face softened; last of all, he addressed her: "Miss Gwendolyn," said he, "a toast!" Gwendolyn looked at those bread-plates which were nearest her. There was no toast in sight, only some very nice dinner-rolls. Moreover, Potter and Thomas were not starting for the pantry, but were standing, the one behind her mother, the other behind her father, quietly listening. And what this friend of her father's had in his right hand was not anything to eat, but a delicate-stemmed glass wherein some champagne was bubbling--like amber soda-water. She was forced to conclude that he was unaccountably stupid--or only queer--or else indulging in another of those incomprehensible grown-up jokes. He made a little speech--which she could not understand, but which elicited much laughter and polite applause; though to her it did not seem brilliant, or even interesting. Reseating himself, he patted her head. She put the candy under her left arm, said a hasty, half-whispered Thank-you to him, went to the next high-backed chair, curtsied, bobbed the ribbon-bow and put out a hand. A pat on the head was dismissal: There was no need to wait for an answer to her question concerning her sweet tooth. Experience had taught her that whenever mirth greeted an inquiry, that inquiry was ignored. When one whole side of the table was finished, and she turned a second corner, her father brushed her soft cheek with his lips. "Did your dolls like the merry-go-round?" he asked kindly. "Yes, fath--er." "Was there something else my little girl wanted?" Now she raised herself so far on her toes that her lips were close to his ear. For there was a lady on either side of him. And both were plainly listening. "If--if you'd come up and make it go," she said, almost whispering. He nodded energetically. She went behind his chair. Thomas was in wait there still. Down here he seemed to raise a wall of aloofness between himself and her, to wear a magnificent air, all cold and haughty, that was quite foreign to the nursery. As she passed him, she dimpled up at him saucily. But it failed to slack the starchy tenseness of his visage. She turned another corner and curtsied her way along the opposite side of the table. On this side were precisely as many high-backed chairs as on the other. And now, "You _adorable_ child!" cried the ladies, and "Haw! Haw! Don't the rest of us get a smile?" said the men. When all the curtseying was over, and the last corner was turned, she paused. "And what is my daughter going to say about the rabbit in the cabbage?" asked her mother. There was a man seated on either hand. Gwendolyn gave each a quick glance. At Johnnie Blake's she had been often alone with her father and mother during that one glorious week. But in town her little confidences, for the most part, had to be made in just this way--under the eye of listening guests and servants, in a low voice. "I like the rabbit," she answered, "but my Puffy Bear was nicer, only he got old and shabby, and so--" At this point Jane took one quick step forward. "But if you'd come up to the nursery soon," Gwendolyn hastened to add. "_Would_ you, moth--er?" "Yes, indeed, dear." Gwendolyn went up to Jane, who was waiting, rooted and rigid, close by. The reddish eyes of the nurse-maid fairly bulged with importance. Her lips were sealed primly. Her face was so pale that every freckle she had stood forth clearly. How strangely--even direly--the great dining-room affected _her_--who was so at ease in the nursery! No smile, no wink, no remark, either lively or sensible, ever melted the ice of _her_ countenance. And it was with a look almost akin to pity that Gwendolyn held out a hand. Jane took it with a great show of affection. Then once more Potter swung wide the double doors. Gwendolyn turned her head for a last glimpse of her father, sitting, grave and haggard, at the far end of the table; at her beautiful, jeweled mother; at the double line of high-backed chairs that showed, now a man's stern black-and-white, next the gayer colors of a woman's dress; at the clustered lights; the glitter; the roses-- Then the doors closed, making faint the din of chatter and laughter. And the bronze cage carried Gwendolyn up and up. CHAPTER III There was a high wind blowing, and the newly washed garments hanging on the roofs of nearby buildings were writhing and twisting violently, and tugging at the long swagging clothes-lines. Gwendolyn, watching from the side window of the nursery, pretended that the garments were so many tortured creatures, vainly struggling to be free. And she wished that two or three of the whitest and prettiest might loose their hold and go flying away--across the crescent of the Drive and the wide river--to liberty and happiness in the forest beyond. Among the flapping lines walked maids--fully a score of them. Some were taking down wash that was dry and stuffing it into baskets. Others were busy hanging up limp pieces, first giving them a vigorous shake; then putting a small portion of each over the line and pinching all securely into place with huge wooden pins. It seemed cruel. Yet the faces of the maids were kind--kinder than the faces of Miss Royle and Jane and Thomas. Behind Gwendolyn the heavy brocade curtains hung touching. She parted them to make sure that she was alone in the nursery. After which she raised the window--just a trifle. The roofs that were white with laundry were not those directly across from the nursery, but over-looked the next street. Nevertheless, with the window up, Gwendolyn could hear the crack and snap of the whipping garments, and an indistinct chorus of cheery voices. One maid was singing a lilting tune. The rest were chattering back and forth. With all her heart Gwendolyn envied them--envied their freedom, and the fact that they were indisputably grown-up. And she decided that, later on, when she was as big and strong, she would be a laundry-maid and run about on just such level roofs, joyously hanging up wash. Presently she raised the window a trifle more, so that the lower sill was above her head. Then, "_Hoo_-hoo-oo-oo!" she piped in her clear voice. A maid heard her, and pointed her out to another. Soon a number were looking her way. They smiled at her, too, Gwendolyn smiled in return, and nodded. At that, one of a group snatched up a square of white cloth and waved it. Instantly Gwendolyn waved back. One by one the maids went. Then Gwendolyn suddenly recalled why she was waiting alone--while Miss Royle and Jane made themselves extra neat in their respective rooms; why she herself was dressed with such unusual care--in a pink muslin, white silk stockings, and black patent-leather pumps, the whole crowned by a pink-satin hair-bow. With the remembrance, the pretend-game was forgotten utterly: The lines of limp, white creatures on the roofs flung their tortured shapes about unheeded. At bed-time the previous evening Potter had telephoned that Madam would pay a morning visit to the nursery. The thought had kept Gwendolyn awake for a while, smiling into the dark, kissing her own hands for very happiness; it had made her heart beat wildly, too. For she reviewed all the things she intended broaching to her mother--about eating at the grown-up table, and not having a nurse any more, and going to day-school. Contrary to a secret plan of action, she slept late. At breakfast, excitement took away her appetite. And throughout the study-hour that followed, her eyes read, and her lips repeated aloud, several pages of standard literature for juveniles that her busy brain did not comprehend. Yet now as she waited behind the rose hangings for the supreme moment, she felt, strangely enough, no impatience. With three to attend her, privacy was not a common privilege, and, therefore, prized. She fell to inspecting the row of houses across the way--in search for other strange but friendly faces. There were exactly twelve houses opposite. The corner one farthest from the river she called the gray-haired house. An old lady lived there who knitted bright worsted; also a fat old gentleman in a gay skull-cap who showed much attention to a long-leaved rubber-plant that flourished behind the glass of the street door. Gwendolyn leaned out, chin on palm, to canvass the quaintly curtained windows--none of which at the moment framed a venerable head. Next the gray-haired house there had been--up to a recent date--a vacant lot walled off from the sidewalk by a high, broad bill-board. Now a pit yawned where formerly was the vacant space. And instead of the fascinating pictures that decorated the bill-board (one week a baby, rosy, dimpled and laughing; the next some huge lettering elaborately combined with a floral design; the next a mammoth bottle, red and beautiful, and flanked by a single gleaming word: "Catsup") there towered--above street and pit, and even above the chimneys of the gray-haired house--the naked girders of a new steel structure. The girders were black, but rusted to a brick-color in patches and streaks. They were so riveted together that through them could be seen small, regular spots of light. Later on, as Gwendolyn knew, floors and windowed walls and a tin top would be fitted to the framework. And what was now a skeleton would be another house! Directly opposite the nursery, on that part of the side street which sloped, were ten narrow houses, each four stories high, each with brown-stone fronts and brown-stone steps, each topped by a large chimney and a small chimney. In every detail these ten houses were precisely alike. Jane, for some unaccountable reason, referred to them as private dwellings. But since the roof of the second brown-stone house was just a foot lower than the roof of the first, the third roof just a foot lower than the roof of the second, and so on to the very tenth and last, Gwendolyn called these ten the step-houses. The step-houses were seldom interesting. As Gwendolyn's glances traveled now from brown-stone front to brown-stone front, not one presented even the relief of a visiting post-man. Her progress down the line of step-houses brought her by degrees to the brick house on the Drive--a large vine-covered house, the wide entrance of which was toward the river. And no sooner had she given it one quick glance than she uttered a little shout of pleased surprise. The brick-house people were back! All the shades were up. There was smoke rising from one of the four tall chimneys. And even as Gwendolyn gazed, all absorbed interest, the net curtains at an upper window were suddenly drawn aside and a face looked out. It was a face that Gwendolyn had never seen before in the brick house. But though it was strange, it was entirely friendly. For as Gwendolyn smiled it a greeting, it smiled her a greeting back! She was a nurse-maid--so much was evident from the fact that she wore a cap. But it was also plain that her duties differed in some way from Jane's. For her cap was different--shaped like a sugar-bowl turned upside-down; hollow, and white, and marred by no flying strings. And she was not a red-haired nurse-maid. Her hair was almost as fair as Gwendolyn's own, and it framed her face in a score of saucy wisps and curls. Her face was pretty--full and rosy, like the face of Gwendolyn's French doll. Also it seemed certain--even at such a distance--that she had no freckles. Gwendolyn waved both hands at her. She threw a kiss back. "Oh, thank you!" cried Gwendolyn, out loud. She threw kisses with alternating finger-tips. The nurse-maid shook the curtains at her. Then--they fell into place. She was gone. Gwendolyn sighed. The next moment she heard voices in the direction of the hall--first, Thomas's; next, a woman's--a strange one this. Disappointed, she turned to face the screening curtains. But she was in no mood to make herself agreeable to visiting friends of Miss Royle's--and who else could this be? She decided to remain quietly in seclusion; to emerge for no one except her mother. A door opened. A heavy step advanced, followed by the murmur of trailing skirts upon carpet. Then Thomas spoke--his tone that full and measured one employed, not to the governess, to Jane, to herself, or to any other common mortal, but to Potter, to her father and mother, and to guests. "This is Miss Gwendolyn's nursery," he announced. Beyond the curtains were persons of importance! She shrank against the window, taking care not to stir the brocade. "We will wait here,"--the voice was clear, musical. "Thank you." Thomas's heavy step retreated. A door closed. There was a moment of perfect stillness. Then that musical voice began again: "Where do you suppose that young one is?" A second voice rippled out a low laugh. Gwendolyn laughed too,--silently, her face against the glass. The fat old gentleman in the gray-haired house chanced to be looking in her direction. He caught the broad smile and joined in. "In the school-room likely,"--it was the first speaker, answering her own inquiry--"getting stuffed." Stuffed! Gwendolyn could appreciate _that_. She choked back a giggle with one small hand. Someone else thought the declaration amusing, for there was another well-bred ripple; then once more that murmur of trailing skirts, going toward the window-seat; going the opposite way also, as if one of the two was making a circuit of the room. Presently, "Just look at this dressing-table, Louise! Fancy such a piece of furniture for a _child!_ Ridiculous!" Gwendolyn cocked her yellow head to one side--after the manner of her canary. "Bad taste." Louise joined her companion. "_Crystal_, if you please! Must've cost a fabulous sum." One or two articles were moved on the dresser. Then, "Poor little girl!" observed the other woman. "Rich, but--" Gwendolyn puckered her brows gravely. Was the speaker referring to _her?_ Clasping her hands tight, she leaned forward a little, straining to catch every syllable. As a rule when gossip or criticism was talked in her hearing, it was insured against being understood by the use of strange terms, spellings, winks, nods, shrugs, or sudden stops at the most important point. But now, with herself hidden, was there not a likelihood of plain speech? It came. The voice went on: "This is the first time you've met the mother, isn't it?" "I think so,"--indifferently. "Who is she, anyhow?" "_No_body." Gwendolyn stared. "Nobody at all--_absolutely_. You know, they say--" She paused for emphasis. Now, Gwendolyn's eyes grew suddenly round; her lips parted in surprise. _They_ again! "Yes?" encouraged Louise. Lower--"They say she was just an ordinary country girl, pretty, and horribly poor, with a fair education, but no culture to speak of. She met him; he had money and fell in love with her; she married him. And, oh, _then!_" She chuckled. "Made the money fly?" The two were coming to settle themselves in chairs close to the side window. "Not exactly. Haven't you heard what's the matter with her?" Gwendolyn's face paled a little. There was something the matter with her mother?--her dear, beautiful, young mother! The clasped hands were pressed to her breast. "Ambitious?" hazarded Louise, confidently. "It's no secret. Everybody's laughing at her,--at the rebuffs she takes; the money she gives to charity (wedges, you understand); the quantities of dresses she buys; the way she slaps on the jewels. She's got the society bee in her bonnet!" Gwendolyn caught her breath. _The society bee in her bonnet?_ "Ah!" breathed Louise, as if comprehending. Then, "Dear! dear!" "She _talks_ nothing else. She _hears_ nothing else. She _sees_ nothing else." "Bad as that?" "Goes wherever she can shove in--subscription lectures and musicales, hospital teas, Christmas bazars. And she benches her Poms; has boxes at the Horse Show and the Opera; gives gold-plate dinners, and Heaven knows what!" "Ha! ha! _You_ haven't boosted her, dear?" "Not a bit of it! Make a point of never being seen _any_where with her." "And he?" Gwendolyn swallowed. _He_ was her father. "Well, it has kept the poor fellow in harness all the time, of course. You should have seen him when he _first_ came to town--straight and boyish, and _very_ handsome. (You know the type.) He's changed! Burns his candles at both ends." "Hm!" Gwendolyn blinked with the effort of making mental notes. "You haven't heard the latest about him?" "Trying to make some Club?" Whispering--"On the edge of a _crash_." "Who told you?" "Oh, a little bird." Up came both palms to cover Gwendolyn's mouth. But not to smother mirth. A startled cry had all but escaped her. A little bird! She knew of that bird! He had told things against _her_--true things more often than not--to Jane and Miss Royle. And now here he was chattering about her father! "It's the usual story," commented Louise calmly, "with these _nouveaux riches_." "Sh!" A moment of stillness, as if both were listening. Then, "_Sprechen Sie Deutsch?_" "I--er--read it fairly well." "_Parlez-vous Francais?_" "_Oh, oui! Oui!_" "_Allors._" And there followed, in undertones, a short, spirited conversation in the Gallic. Gwendolyn made a silent resolution to devote more time and thought to the peevish and staccato instruction of Miss Du Bois. The two were interrupted by a light, quick step outside. Again the hall door opened. "Oh, you'll pardon my having to desert you, _won't_ you?" It was Gwendolyn's mother. "I didn't intend being so long." Gwendolyn half-started forward, then stopped. "Why, of course!"--with sounds of rising. "_Cer_tainly!" "Differences below stairs, I find, require prompt action." "I fancy you have oceans of executive ability," declared Louise, warmly. "That Orphans' Home affair--I hear you managed it tre_men_dously!" "No! No!" "Really, my dear,"--it was the other woman--"to be _quite_ frank, we must confess that we haven't missed you! We've been enjoying our glimpse of the nursery." "It's simply _lovely!_" cried Louise. "And what a perfectly sweet dressing-table!" "Have you seen my little daughter?--Thomas!" "Yes, Madam." "There's a draught coming from somewhere--" "It's the side window, Madam." Instinctively Gwendolyn flattened herself against the wood-work at her back. Three or four steps brought Thomas across the floor. Then his two big hands appeared high up on the hangings. The next moment, the hands parted, sweeping the curtains with them. To escape detection was impossible. A quick thought made Gwendolyn raise a face upon which was a forced expression that bore only a faint resemblance to a smile. "Boo!" she said, jumping out at him. Startled, he fell back. "Why, Miss Gwendolyn!" "Gwendolyn?" repeated her mother, surprised. "Why, what were you doing there, darling?" "_Gwendolyn!_"--this in a faint gasp from both visitors. Gwendolyn came slowly forward. She did not raise her eyes; only curtsied. "So _this_ is your little daughter!" A gloved hand was reached out, and Gwendolyn was drawn forward. "How _cunning!_" Gwendolyn recognized the voice of Louise. Now, she looked up. And saw a pleasant face, young, but not so pretty as her mother's. She shook hands bashfully. Then shook again with an older woman, whose plain countenance was dimly familiar. After which, giving a sudden little bound, and putting up eager arms, she was caught to her mother. "My baby!" "_Moth-er!_" Cheek caressed cheek. "She's six, isn't she, my dear?" asked the plain, elderly one. "Oh, she's seven." A soft hand stroked the yellow hair. "As much as that? Really?" The inference was not lost upon Gwendolyn. She tightened her embrace. And turning her head on her mother's breast, looked frank resentment. The visitors were not watching her. They were exchanging glances--and smiles, faint and uneasy. Slowly now they began to move toward the hall door, which stood open. Beside it, waiting with an impressive air, was Miss Royle. "I think we must go, Louise." "Oh, we must,"--quickly. "Dear me! I'd almost forgot! We've promised to lunch with one or two people down-town." "I wish you were lunching here," said Gwendolyn's mother. She freed herself gently from the clinging arms and followed the two. "Miss Royle, will you take Gwendolyn?" As the governess promptly advanced, with a half-bow, and a set smile that was like a grimace, Gwendolyn raised a face tense with earnestness. Until half an hour before, her whole concern had been for herself. But now! To fail to grow up, to have her long-cherished hopes come short of fulfillment--that was _one_ thing. To know that her mother and father had real and serious troubles of their own, that was another! "Oh, moth-er! Don't _you_ go!" "Mother must tell the ladies good-by." "What touching affection!" It was the elder of the visiting pair. Miss Royle assented with a simper. "Will you come back?" urged Gwendolyn, dropping her voice. "Oh, I want to see you"--darting a look sidewise--"all by myself." There was a wheel and a flutter at the door--another silent exchange of comment, question and exclamation, all mingled eloquently. Then Louise swept back. "What a bright child!" she enthused. "Does she speak French?" "She is acquiring two tongues at present," answered Gwendolyn's mother proudly, "--French and German." "_Splendid!_" It was the elder woman. "I think every little girl should have those. And later on, I suppose, Greek and Latin?" "I've thought of Spanish and Italian." "_Eventually_," informed Miss Royle, with a conscious, sinuous shift from foot to foot, "Gwendolyn will have _seven_ tongues at her command." "How _chic!_" Once more the gloved hand was extended--to pat the pink-satin hair-bow. Gwendolyn accepted the pat stolidly. Her eyes were fixed on her mother's face. Now, the elder of the strangers drew closer. "I wonder," she began, addressing her hostess with almost a coy air, "if we could induce _you_ to take lunch with us down-town. Wouldn't that be jolly, Louise?"--turning. "_Awfully_ jolly!" "_Do_ come!" "Oh, _do_!" "Moth-er!" Gwendolyn's mother looked down. A sudden color was mounting to her cheeks. Her eyes shone. "We-e-ell," she said, with rising inflection. It was acceptance. Gwendolyn stepped back the pink muslin in a nervous grasp at either side. "Oh, _won't_ you stay?" she half-whispered. "Mother'll see you at dinnertime, darling. Tell Jane, Miss Royle." A bow. Louise led the way quickly, followed by the elderly lady. Gwendolyn's mother came last. A bronze gate slid between the three and Gwendolyn, watching them go. The cage lowered noiselessly, with a last glimpse of upturned faces and waving hands. Gwendolyn, lips pouting, crossed toward the school-room door. The door was slightly ajar. She gave it a smart pull. A kneeling figure rose from behind it. It was Jane, who greeted her with a nervous, and somewhat apprehensive grin. "I was waitin' to jump out at Miss Royle and give her a scare when she'd come through," she explained. Gwendolyn said nothing. CHAPTER IV It was a morning abounding in unexpected good fortune. For one thing, Miss Royle was indisposed--to an extent that was fully convincing--and was lying down, brows swathed by a towel, in her own room; for another, the bursting of a hot-water pipe on the same floor as the nursery required the prompt attention of a man in a greasy cap and Johnnie Blake overalls, who, as he hammered and soldered and coupled lengths of piping with his wrench, discussed various grown-up topics in a loud voice with Jane, thus levying on _her_ attention. Miss Royle's temporary incapacity set aside the program of study usual to each forenoon; and Jane's suddenly aroused interest in plumbing made the canceling of that day's riding-lesson seem advisable. It was Thomas who telephoned the postponement. And Gwendolyn found herself granted some little time to herself. But she was not playing any of the games she loved--the absorbing pretend-games with which she occupied herself on just such rare occasions. Her own pleasure, her own disappointment, too,--these were entirely put aside in a concern touching weightier matters. Slippers upheld by a hassock, and slender pink-frocked figure bent across the edge of the school-room table, she had each elbow firmly planted on a page of the wide-open, dictionary. At all times the volume was beguiling--this in spite of the fact that the square of black-board always carried along its top, in glaring chalk, the irritating reminder: _Use Your Dictionary!_ There was diversion in turning the leaves at random (blissfully ignoring the while any white list that might be inscribed down the whole of the board) to chance upon big, strange words. But the word she was now poring over was a small one. "B-double-e," she spelled; "Bee: a so-cial hon-ey-gath-er-ing in-sect." She pondered the definition with wrinkled forehead and worried eye. "Social"--the word seemed vaguely linked with that other word, "Society", which she had so fortunately overheard. But what of the remainder of that visitor's never-to-be-forgotten declaration of scorn? For the definition had absolutely nothing to say about any _bonnet_. She was shoving the pages forward with an impatient damp thumb in her search for Bonnet, when Thomas entered, slipping in around the edge of the hall door on soft foot--with a covert peek nursery-ward that was designed to lend significance to his coming. His countenance, which on occasion could be so rigorously sober, was fairly askew with a smile. Gwendolyn stood up straight on the hassock to look at him. And at first glance divined that something--probably in the nature of an edible--might be expected. For the breast-pocket of his liveried coat bulged promisingly. "Hello!" he saluted, tiptoeing genially across the room. "Hello!" she returned noncommittally. Near the table, he reached into the bulging pocket and drew out a small Manila bag. The bag was partly open at the top. He tipped his head to direct one black eye upon its contents. "Say, Miss Gwendolyn," he began, "_you_ like old Thomas, don't you?" Gwendolyn's nostrils widened and quivered, receiving the tempting fragrance of fresh-roasted peanuts. At the same time, her eyes lit with glad surprise. Since her seventh anniversary, she had noted a vast change for the better in the attitude of Miss Royle, Thomas and Jane; where, previous to the birthday, it had seemed the main purpose of the trio (if not the duty) to circumvent her at every turn--to which end, each had a method that was unique: the first commanded; the second threatened; Thomas employed sarcasm or bribery. But now this wave of thoughtfulness, generosity and smooth speech!--marking a very era in the history of the nursery. Here was fresh evidence that it was _continuing_. Yet--was it not too good to last? "Why, ye-e-es," she answered, more than half guessing that this time bribery was in the air. But the fragrant bag resolved itself into a friendly offering. Thomas let it drop to the table. Casting her last doubt aside, Gwendolyn caught it up eagerly. Miss Royle never permitted her to eat peanuts, which lent to them all the charm of the forbidden. She cracked a pod; and fell to crunching merrily. "And you wouldn't like to see me go away, _would_ you now," went on Thomas. Her mouth being crammed, she shook her head cordially. "Ah! I thought so!" He tore the bag down the side so that she could more easily get at its store. Then, leaning down confidentially, and pointing a teasing finger at her, "Ha! Ha! Who was it got caught spyin' yesterday?" The small jaws ceased grinding. She lifted her eyes. Their gray was suddenly clouded--remembering what, for a moment, her joy in the peanuts had blotted out. "But I _wasn't_ spying," she denied earnestly. "Then what _was_ you doin'?--still as mice behind them curtains." The mist cleared. Her face sunned over once more. "I was waving at the nurse in the brick house," she explained. At that, up went Thomas's head. His mouth opened. His ears grew red. "The nurse in the brick house!" he repeated softly. "The one with the curly hair," went on Gwendolyn, cracking more pods. Thomas turned his face toward the side window of the school-room. Through it could be seen the chimneys of the brick house. He smacked his lips. "You like peanuts, too," said Gwendolyn. She proffered the bag. He ignored it. His look was dreamy. "There's a fine Pomeranian at the brick house," he remarked. "It was the first time I'd ever seen her," said Gwendolyn, with the nurse still in mind. "Doesn't she smile nice!" Now, Thomas waxed enthusiastic. "And she's a lot prettier close to," he declared, "than she is with a street between. Ah, you ought--" That moment, Jane entered, fairly darting in. "Here!" she called sharply to Gwendolyn. "What're you eatin'?" "Peanuts, Jane,"--perfect frankness being the rule when concealment was not possible. Jane came over. "And where'd you git 'em?" she demanded, promptly seizing the bag as contraband. "Thomas." Sudden suspicion flamed in Jane's red glance. "Oh, you must've did Thomas a _grand_ turn," she observed. Thomas shifted from foot to foot. "I was--er--um--just tellin' Miss Gwendolyn"--he winked significantly--"that she wouldn't like to lose us." "So?" said Jane, still sceptical. Then to Gwendolyn, after a moment's reflection. "Let me close up your dictionary for you, pettie. Jane never likes to see one of your fine books lyin' open that way. It might put a strain on the back." Emboldened by that cooing tone, Gwendolyn eyed the Manila bag covetously. "I didn't eat many," she asserted, gently argumentative. "Oh, a peanut or two won't hurt you, lovie," answered Jane, kneeling to present the bag. Then drawing the pink-frocked figure close, "And you _didn't_ tell him what them two ladies had to say?" "No." It was decisive, "I told him about--" "I didn't ask her," interrupted Thomas. "No; I talked about how she loves us. And a-course, she does.... Jane, ain't it near twelve?" But Gwendolyn had no mind to be held as a tattler. "I told him," she continued, husking peanuts busily, "about the nurse-maid at the brick house." Jane sat back. "Ah?" She flashed a glance at Thomas, still shifting about uneasily mid-way between table and door. Then, "What _about_ the nurse-maid, dearie?" It was Gwendolyn's turn to wax enthusiastic. "Oh, she has _such_ sweet hair!" she exclaimed. "And she smiles nice!" Jealousy hardened the freckled visage of the kneeling Jane. "And she's taken with you, I suppose," said she. "She threw me kisses," recounted Gwendolyn, crunching happily the while. "And, oh, Jane, some day may I go over to the brick house?" "Some day you may--_not_." Gwendolyn recognized the sudden change to belligerence; and foreseeing a possible loss of the peanuts, commenced to eat more rapidly. "Well, then," she persisted, "she could come over here." Jane stared. "What do you mean?" she demanded crossly. "And don't you go botherin' your poor father and mother about this strange woman. Do you _hear?_" "But she takes care of a rich little girl. I _know_--'cause there are bars on the basement windows. And Thomas says--" "Oh, _come_" broke in Thomas, urging Jane hallward with a nervous jerk of the head. "Ah!" Now complete understanding brought Jane to her feet. She fixed Thomas with blazing eyes. "And _what_ does Thomas say, darlin'?" Thomas waited. His ears were a dead white. "There's a Pomeranian at the brick house," went on Gwendolyn, "and the pretty nurse takes it out to walk. And--" "And Thomas is a-walkin' our Poms at the same time." Jane was breathing hard. "And he says she's lots prettier close to--" A bell rang sharply. Thomas sprang away. With a gurgle, Jane flounced after. The next moment Gwendolyn, from the hassock--upon which she had settled in comfort--heard a wrangle of voices: First, Jane's shrill accusing, "It was _you_ put it into her head!--to come--and take my place from under me--and the food out of my very mouth--and break my hear-r-r-rt!" Next, Thomas's sonorous, "Stuff and fiddle-sticks!" then sounds of lamentation, and the slamming of a door. The last peanut was eaten. As Gwendolyn searched out some few remaining bits from the crevices of the bag, she shook her yellow hair hopelessly. Truly there was no fathoming grown-ups! The morning which had begun so propitiously ended in gloom. At the noon dinner, Thomas looked harassed. He had set the table for one. That single plate, as well as the empty arm-chair so popular with Jane, emphasized the infestivity. As for the heavy curtains at the side window, which--as near as Gwendolyn could puzzle it out--were the cause of the late unpleasantness, these were closely drawn. Having already eaten heartily, Gwendolyn had little appetite. Furthermore, again she was turning over and over the direful statements made concerning her parents. She employed the dinner-hour in formulating a plan that was simple but daring--one that would bring quick enlightenment concerning the things that worried. Miss Royle was still indisposed. Jane was locked in her own room, from which issued an occasional low bellow. When Thomas, too, was out of the way--gone pantry-ward with tray held aloft--she would carry it out. It called for no great amount of time: no searching of the dictionary. She would close all doors softly; then fly to the telephone--_and call up her father_. There were times when Thomas--as well as the two others--seemed to possess the power of divination. And during the whole of the dinner his manner showed distinct apprehension. The meal concluded, even to the use of the finger-bowl, and all dishes disposed upon the tray, he hung about, puttering with the table, picking up crumbs and pins, dusting this article and that with a napkin,--all the while working his lips with silent speech, and drawing down and lifting his black eye-brows menacingly. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn fretted. But found some small diversion in standing before the pier glass, at which, between the shining rows of her teeth, she thrust out a tip of scarlet. She was thinking about the discussion anent tongues held by her mother and the two visitors. "Seven," she murmured, and viewed the greater part of her own tongue thoughtfully; "_seven_." The afternoon was a French-and-music afternoon. Directly after dinner might be expected the Gallic teacher--undesired at any hour. Thomas puttered and frowned until a light tap announced her arrival. Then quickly handed Gwendolyn over to her company. Mademoiselle Du Bois was short and spare. And these defects she emphasized by means of a wide hat and a long feather boa. She led Gwendolyn to the school-room. There she settled down in a low chair, opened a black reticule, took out a thick, closely written letter, and fell to reading. Gwendolyn amused herself by experimenting with the boa, which she festooned, now over one shoulder, now over the other. "Mademoiselle," she began, "what kind of a bird owned these feathers?" "Dear me, Mees Gwendolyn," chided Mademoiselle, irritably (she spoke with much precision and only a slight accent), "how you talk!" _Talk_--the word was a cue! Why not make certain inquiries of Mademoiselle? "But do little _birds_ ever talk?" returned Gwendolyn, undaunted. The boa was thin at one point. She tied a knot in it. "And which little bird is it that tells things to--to people?" Then, more to herself than to Mademoiselle, who was still deep in her letter, "I shouldn't wonder if it wasn't the little bird that's in the cuckoo clock, though--" "_Ma foil!_" exclaimed Mademoiselle. She seized an end of the boa and drew Gwendolyn to her knee. "You make ze head buzz. Come!" She reached for a book on the school-room table. "_Attendez!_" "Mademoiselle," persisted Gwendolyn, twining and untwining, "if I do my French fast will you tell me something? What does _nouveaux riches_ mean?" "_Nouveaux riches_," said Mademoiselle, "is not on ziss page. _Attendez-vous!_" Miss Brown followed Mademoiselle Du Bois, the one coming upon the heels of the other; so that a loud _crescendo_ from the nursery, announcing the arrival of the music-teacher, drowned the last paragraph of French. To Gwendolyn an interruption at any time was welcome. This day it was doubly so. She had learned nothing from Mademoiselle. But Miss Brown--She made toward the nursery, doing her newest dance step. Miss Brown was stocky, with a firm tread and an eye of decision. As Gwendolyn appeared, she was seated at the piano, her face raised (as if she were seeking out some spot on the ceiling), and her solid frame swaying from side to side in the ecstasy of performance. Up and down the key-board of the instrument her plump hands galloped. Gwendolyn paused beside the piano-seat. The air was vibrant with melody. The lifted face, the rocking, the ardent touch--all these inspired hope. The gray eyes were wide with eagerness. Each corner of the rosy mouth was upturned. The resounding notes of a march ended with a bang. Miss Brown straightened--got to her feet--smiled down. That smile gave Gwendolyn renewed encouragement. They were alone. She stood on tiptoe. "Miss Brown," she began, "did you ever hear of a--a bee that some ladies carry in a--" Miss Brown's smile of greeting went. "Now, Gwendolyn," she interrupted severely, "are you going to begin your usual silly, silly questions?" Gwendolyn fell back a step. "But I didn't ask you a silly question day before yesterday," she plead. "I just wanted to know how _any_body could call my German teacher Miss _French_." "Take your place, if you please," bade Miss Brown curtly, "and don't waste my time." She pointed a stubby finger at the piano-seat. Gwendolyn climbed up, her cheeks scarlet with wounded dignity, her breast heaving with a rancor she dared not express. "Do I have to play that old piece?" she asked. "You must,"--with rising inflection. "Up at Johnnie Blake's it sounded nice. 'Cause my moth-er--" "Ready!" Miss Brown set the metronome to _tick-tocking_. Then she consulted a watch. Gwendolyn raised one hand to her face, and gulped. "Come! Come! Put your fingers on the keys." "But my cheek itches." "Get your position, I say." Gwendolyn struck a spiritless chord. Miss Brown gone, Gwendolyn sought the long window-seat and curled up among its cushions--at the side which commanded the best view of the General. Straight before that martial figure, on the bridle-path, a man with a dump-cart and a shaggy-footed horse was picking up leaves. He used a shovel. And each time he raised it to shoulder-height and emptied it into his cart, a few of the leaves went whirling away out of reach--like frightened butterflies. But she had no time to pretend anything of the kind. A new and a better plan!--this was what she must prepare. For--heart beating, hands trembling from haste--she had _tried_ the telephone--_and found it dead to every Hello!_ But she was not discouraged. She was only balked. The talking bird, the bee her mother kept in a bonnet, her father's harness, and the candles that burned at both ends--if she had _only_ known about them that evening of her seventh anniversary! Ignoring Miss Royle's oft-repeated lesson that "Nice little girls do not ask questions," or "worry father and mother," how easy it would have been to say, "Fath-er, what little bird tells things about you?" and, "Moth-er, have you _really_ got a bee in your bonnet?" But--the questions could still be asked. She was balked only temporarily. She got down and crossed the room to the white-and-gold writing-desk. Two photographs in silver frames stood upon it, flanking the rose-embossed calendar at either side. She took them down, one at a time, and looked at them earnestly. The first was of her mother, taken long, long ago, before Gwendolyn was born. The oval face was delicately lovely and girlish. The mouth curved in a smile that was tender and sweet. The second photograph showed a clean-shaven, boyish young man in a rough business-suit--this was her father, when he first came to the city. His lips were set together firmly, almost determinedly. But his face was unlined, his dark eyes were full of laughter. Despite all the well-remembered commands Miss Royle had issued; despite Jane's oft-repeated threats and Thomas's warnings, [and putting aside, too, any thought of what punishment might follow her daring] Gwendolyn now made a firm resolution: _To see at least one of her parents immediately and alone_. As she set the photographs back in their places, she lifted each to kiss it. She kissed the smiling lips of the one, the laughing eyes of the other. CHAPTER V The crescent of the Drive, never without its pageant; the broad river thronged with craft; the high forest-fringed precipice and the houses that could be glimpsed beyond--all these played their part in Gwendolyn's pretend-games. She crowded the Drive with the soldiers of the General, rank upon rank of marching men whom he reviewed with pride, while his great bronze steed pranced tirelessly; and she, a swordless Joan of Arc in a three-cornered hat and smartly-tailored habit, pranced close beside to share all honors from the wide back of her own mettlesome war-horse. As for the river vessels, she took long pretend-journeys upon them--every detail of which she carefully carried out. The companions selected were those smiling friends that appeared at neighboring windows; or she chose hearty, happy laundresses from the roofs; adding, by way of variety, some small, bashful acquaintances made at the dancing-school of Monsieur Tellegen. But more often, imagining herself a Princess, and the nursery a prison-tower from the loop-holes of which she viewed the great, free world, she liked to people the boats out of stories that Potter had told her on rare, but happy, occasions. A prosaic down-traveling steamer became the wonderful ship of Ulysses, his seamen bound to smokestacks and railing, his prow pointed for the ocean whereinto the River crammed its deep flood. A smaller boat, smoking its way up-stream, changed into the fabled bark of a man by the name of Jason, and at the bow of this Argo sat Johnnie Blake, fish-pole over the side, feet dangling, line trailing, and a silvery trout spinning at the hook. A third boat, smaller still, and driven forward by oars, bore a sad, level-lying, white-clad figure--Elaine, dead through the plotting of cruel servants, and now rowed by the hoary dumb toward a peaceful mooring at the foot of some far timbered slope. In each of the houses across the wide river, she often established a pretend-home. Her father was with her always; her mother, too,--in a silken gown, with a jeweled chaplet on her head. But her household was always blissfully free of those whose chief design it was to thwart and terrify her--Miss Royle, Jane, Thomas; her teachers [as a body]; also, Policemen, Doctors and Bears. Old Potter was, of course, the pretend-butler. And Rosa, notwithstanding the fact that she had once been, while at Johnnie Blake's, the herald of a hated bed-time went as maid. Gwendolyn had often secretly coveted the Superintendent's residence in the Park (so that, instead of straggling along a concrete pavement at rare intervals, held captive by the hand that was in Jane's, she might always have the right to race willy-nilly across the grass--chase the tame squirrels to shelter--_even climb a tree_). But more earnestly did she covet a house beyond the precipice. Were there not trees there? and rocks? Without doubt there were Johnnie Blake glades as well--glades bright with flowers, and green with lacy ferns. For of these glades Gwendolyn had received proof: Following a sprinkle on a cool day, a light west wind brought a butterfly against a pane of the front window. When Gwendolyn raised the sash, the butterfly fluttered in, throwing off a jeweled drop as he came and alighted upon the dull rose and green of a flower in the border of the nursery rug. His wings were flat together and he was tipped to one side, like a skiff with tinted sails. But when the sails were dry, and parted once more, and sunlight had replaced shower, he launched forth from the pink landing-place of Gwendolyn's palm--and sped away and away, due west! But the view from the _side_ window! Beyond the line of step-houses, and beyond the buildings where the maids hung their wash, were roofs. They seemed to touch, to have no streets between them anywhere. They reached as far as Gwendolyn could see. They were all heights, all shapes, all varieties as to tops--some being level, others coming to a point at one corner, a few ending in a tower. One tower, which was square, and on the outer-most edge of the roofs, had a clock in its summit. When night settled, a light sprang up behind the clock--a great, round light that was like a single shining eye. She did not know the proper name for all those acres of roof. But Jane called them Down-Town. At all times they were fascinating. Of a winter's day the snow whitened them into beauty. The rain washed them with its slanting down-pour till their metal sheeting glistened as brightly as the sides of the General's horse. The sea-fog, advanced by the wind, blotted out all but the nearest, wrapped these in torn shrouds, and heaped itself about the dun-breathed chimneys like the smoke of a hundred fires. She loved the roofs far more than Drive or River or wooded expanse; more because they meant so much--and that without her having to do much pretending. For across them, in some building which no one had ever pointed out to her, in a street through which she had never driven, was her father's office! She herself often selected the building he was in, placing him first in one great structure, then in another. Whenever a new one rose, as it often did, there she promptly moved his office. Once for a whole week he worked directly under the great glowing eye of the clock. Just now she was standing at the side window of the nursery looking away across the roofs. The fat old gentleman at the gray-haired house was sponging off the rubber-plant, and waving the long green leaves at her in greeting. Gwendolyn feigned not to see. Her lips were firmly set. A scarlet spot of determination burned round either dimple. Her gray eyes smouldered darkly--with a purpose that was unswerving. "I'm just going down there!" she said aloud. _Rustle! Rustle! Rustle!_ It was Miss Royle, entering. Though Saturday was yet two days away, the governess was preparing to go out for the afternoon, and was busily engaged in drawing on her gloves, her glance alternating between her task and the time-piece on the school-room mantel. "Gwendolyn dear," said she, "you can have such a _lovely_ long pretend-game between now and supper, _can't_ you?" Gwendolyn moved her head up and down in slow assent. Doing so, she rubbed the tip of her nose against the smooth glass. The glass was cool. She liked the feel of it. "You can travel!" enthused Miss Royle. "And _where_ do you think you'll go?" The gray eyes were searching the tiers of windows in a distant granite pile. "Oh, Asia, I guess," answered Gwendolyn, indifferently. (She had lately reviewed the latter part of her geography.) "Asia? Fine! And how will you travel, darling? In your sweet car?" A pause. Miss Royle was habitually honeyed in speech and full of suggestions when she was setting out thus. She deceived no one. Yet--it was just as well to humor her. "Oh, I'll ride a musk-ox. Or"--picking at random from the fauna of the world--"or a llama, or a'--a' el'phunt." She rubbed her nose so hard against the glass that it gave out a squeaking sound. "Then off you go!" and, _Rustle! Rustle! Rustle!_ Gwendolyn whirled. This was the moment, if ever, to make her wish known--to assert her will. With a running patter of slippers, she cut off Miss Royle's progress. "That tall building 'way, 'way down on the sky," she panted. "Yes, dear?"--with a simper. "Is _that_ where my father is?" The smirk went. Miss Royle stared down. "Er--why?" she asked. "'Cause"--the other's look was met squarely--"'cause I'm going down there to see him." "Ah!" breathed the governess. "I'm going to-day," went on Gwendolyn, passionately. "I want to!" Her lips trembled. "There's something--" "Something you want to tell him, dear?"--purringly. Confusion followed boldness. Gwendolyn dropped her chin, and made reply with an inarticulate murmur. "Hm!" coughed Miss Royle. (Her _hms_ invariably prepared the way for important pronouncements.) Gwendolyn waited--for all the familiar arguments: I can't let you go until you're sent for, dear; Your papa doesn't want to be bothered; and, This is probably his busy day. Instead, "Has anyone ever told you about that street, Gwennie?" "No,"--still with lowered glance. "Well, I wouldn't go down into it if _I_ were you." The tone was full of hidden meaning. There was a moment's pause. Then, "Why _not?_" asked Gwendolyn, back against the door. The question was put as a challenge. She did not expect an answer. An answer came, however. "Well, I'll tell you: The street is full of--bears." Gwendolyn caught her hands together in a nervous grasp. All her life she had heard about bears--and never any good of them. According to Miss Royle and Jane, these dread animals--who existed in all colors, and in nearly all climes--made it their special office to eat up little girls who disobeyed. She knew where several of the beasts were harbored--in cages at the Zoo, from where they sallied at the summons of outraged nurses and governesses. But as to their being Down-Town--! She lifted a face tense with earnestness "Is it _true?_" she asked hoarsely. "My dear," said Miss Royle, gently reproving, "ask _any_body." Gwendolyn reflected. Thomas was freely given to exaggeration. Jane, at times, resorted to bald falsehood. But Gwendolyn had never found reason to doubt Miss Royle. She moved aside. The governess turned to the school-room mirror to take a peep at her poke, and slung the chain of her hand-bag across her arm. Then, "I'll be home early," she said pleasantly. And went out by the door leading into the nursery. Bears! Gwendolyn stood bewildered. Oh, _why_ were the Zoo bears in her father's street? Did it mean that he was in danger? The thought sent her toward the nursery door. As she went she glanced back over a shoulder uneasily. Close to the door she paused. Miss Royle was not yet gone, for there was a faint rustling in the next room. And Gwendolyn could hear the quick _shoo-ish, shoo-ish, shoo-ish_ of her whispering, like the low purl of Johnnie Blake's trout-stream. Presently, silence. Gwendolyn went in. She found Jane standing in the center of the room, mouth puckered soberly, reddish eyes winking with disquiet, apprehension in the very set of her heavy shoulders. The sight halted Gwendolyn, and filled her with misgivings. Had _Jane_ just heard? When it came time to prepare for the afternoon motor-ride, Gwendolyn tested the matter--yet without repeating Miss Royle's dire statement. "Let's go past where my fath-er's office is to-day," she proposed. And tried to smile. Jane was tucking a small hand through a coat-sleeve. "Well, dearie," she answered, with a sigh and a shake of her red head, "you couldn't hire _me_ to go into that street. And I wouldn't like to see _you_ go." Gwendolyn paled. "Bears?" she asked. "_Truly?_" Jane made big eyes. Then turning the slender little figure carefully about, "Gwendolyn, lovie, _Jane_ thinks you'd better give the idear up." So it was true! Jane--who was happiest when standing in opposition to others; who was certain to differ if a difference was possible--Jane had borne it out! Moreover, she was frightened! For Gwendolyn was leaning against the nurse. And she could feel her shaking! Oh, how one terrible thing followed another! Gwendolyn felt utterly cast down. And the ride in the swift-flying car only increased her dejection. For she did not even have the entertainment afforded by Thomas's enlivening company. He stayed beside the chauffeur--as he had, indeed, ever since the memorable feast of peanuts--and avoided turning his haughty black head. Jane was morose. Now and then, for no apparent reason, she sniffled. Gwendolyn's mind was occupied by a terrifying series of pictures that Miss Royle's declaration called up. The central figure of each picture was her father, his safety threatened. Arrived home, she resolved upon still another course of action. She was forced to give up visiting her father at his office. But she would steal down to the grown-up part of the house--at a time _other_ than the dinner-hour--that very night! Evening fell, and she was not asked to appear in the great dining-room. That strengthened her determination. However, to give a hint of it would be folly. So, while Miss Royle picked at a chop and tittered over copious draughts of tea, and Thomas chattered unrebuked, she ate her supper in silence. Ordinarily she rebelled at being undressed. She was not sleepy. Or she wanted to watch the Drive. Or she did not believe it was seven--there was something wrong with the clock. But supper over, and seven o'clock on the strike, she went willingly to bed. When Gwendolyn was under the covers, and all the shades were down, Jane stepped into the school-room, leaving the door slightly ajar. She snapped on the lights above the school-room table. Then Gwendolyn heard the crackling of a news-paper. She lay thinking. Why had she not been asked to the great dining-room? At seven her father--if all were well--should be sitting down to his dinner. But was he ill to-night? or hurt? A half-hour dragged past. Jane left her paper and tiptoed into the nursery. Gwendolyn did not speak or move. When the nurse approached the bed and looked down, Gwendolyn shut her eyes. Jane tiptoed out, closing the door behind her. A moment later Gwendolyn heard another door open and shut, then the rumble of a man's deep voice, and the shriller tones of a woman. The chorus of indistinct voices made Gwendolyn sleepy. She found her eyelids drooping in spite of herself. That would never do! To keep herself awake, she got up cautiously, put on her slippers and dressing-gown, stole to the front window, climbed upon the long seat, and drew aside the shade--softly. The night was moonless. Clouds hid the stars. The street lamps disclosed the crescent of the Drive only dimly. Beyond the Drive the river stretched like a smooth wide ribbon of black satin. It undulated gently. Upon the dark water of the farther edge a procession of lights laid a fringe of gold. There were other lights--where, beyond the precipice, stood the forest houses; where moored boats rocked at a landing-place up-stream; and on boats that were plying past. A few lights made star-spots on the cliff-side. But most brilliant of all were those forming the monster letters of words. These words Gwendolyn did not pronounce. For Miss Royle, whenever she chanced to look out and see them, said "Shameful!" or "What a disgrace!" or "Abominable!" And Gwendolyn guessed that the words were wicked. As she knelt, peering out, sounds from city and river came up to her. There was the distant roll of street-cars, the warning; _honk! honk!_ of an automobile, the scream of a tug; and lesser sounds--feet upon the sidewalk under the window, low laughter from the dim, tree-shaded walk. She wondered about her father. Suddenly there rose to her window a long-drawn cry. She recognized it--the high-keyed, monotonous cry of a man who often hurried past with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. Now it startled her. It filled her with foreboding. "Uxtra! Uxtra! A-a-all about the lubble-lubble-lubble in ump Street!" Street! _What_ street? Gwendolyn strained her ears to catch the words. What if it were the street where her fath-- "Uxtra! Uxtra!" cried the voice again. It was nearer, yet the words were no clearer. "A-a-all about the lubble-lubble-lubble in ump Street!" He passed. His cry died in the distance. Gwendolyn let the window-shade go back into place very gently. To prepare properly for her trip downstairs meant running the risk of discovery. She tiptoed noiselessly to the school-room door. There she listened. Thomas's deep voice was still rumbling on. Punctuating it regularly was a sniffle. And the key-hole showed a spot of glinting red--Jane's hair. Gwendolyn left the school-room door for the one opening on the hall. In the hall were shaded lights. Light streamed up the bronze shaft. Gwendolyn put her face against the scrolls and peered down. The cage was far below. And all was still. The stairs wound their carpeted length before her. She slipped from one step to another warily, one hand on the polished banisters to steady herself, the other carrying her slippers. At the next floor she stopped before crossing the hall--to peer back over a shoulder, to peer ahead down the second flight. Outside the high carved door of the library she stopped and put on the slippers. And she could not forbear wishing that she knew which was really her best foot, so that she might put it forward. But there was no time for conjectures. She bore down with both hands on the huge knob, and pressed her light weight against the panels. The heavy door swung open. She stole in. The library had three windows that looked upon the side street. These windows were all set together, the middle one being built out farther than the other two, so as to form an embrasure. Over against these windows, in the shallow bow they formed, was a desk, of dark wood, and glass-topped. It was scattered with papers and books. Before it sat her father. The moment her eyes fell upon him she realized that she had not come any too soon. For his shoulders were bent as from a great weight. His head was bowed. His face was covered by his hands. She went forward swiftly. When she was between the desk and the windows she stopped, but did not speak. She kept her gray eyes on those shielding hands. Presently he sighed, straightened on his chair, and looked at her. For one instant Gwendolyn did not move--though her heart beat so wildly that it stirred the lace ruffles of her dressing-gown. Then, remembering dancing instructions, she curtsied. A smile softened the stern lines of her father's mouth. It traveled up his cheeks in little ripples, and half shut his tired eyes. He put out a hand. "Why, hello, daughter," he said wearily, but fondly. She felt an almost uncontrollable desire to throw out her arms to him, to clasp his neck, to cry, "Oh, daddy! daddy! I don't want them to hurt you!" But she conquered it, her underlip in her teeth, and put a small hand in his outstretched one gravely. "I--I heard the man calling," she began timidly. "And I--I thought maybe the bears down in your street--" "Ah, the bears!" He gave a bitter laugh. So Miss Royle had told the truth! The hand in his tightened its hold. "Have the bears ever frightened _you?_" she asked, her voice trembling. He did not answer at once, but put his head on one side and looked at her--for a full half-minute. Then he nodded. "Yes," he said; "yes, dear,--once or twice." She had planned to spy out at least a strap of the harness he wore; to examine closely what sort of candles, if any, he burned in the seclusion of the library. Now she forgot to do either; could not have seen if she had tried. For her eyes were swimming, blinding her. She swayed nearer him. "If--if you'd take Thomas along on your car," she suggested chokingly. "He hunted el'phunts once, and--and _I_ don't need him." Her father rose. He was not looking at her--but away, beyond the bowed windows, though the shades of these were drawn, the hangings were in place. And, "No!" he said hoarsely; "not yet! I'm not through fighting them _yet!_" "Daddy!" Fear for him wrung the cry from her. His eyes fell to her upturned face. And as if he saw the terror there, he knelt, suddenly all concern. "Who told you about the bears, Gwendolyn?"--with a note of displeasure. "Miss Royle." "That was wrong--she shouldn't have done it. There are things a little girl can't understand." His eyes were on a level with her brimming ones. The next moment--"Gwendolyn! _Gwen_dolyn! Oh, where's that child!" The voice was Jane's. She was pounding her way down the stairs. Before Gwendolyn could put a finger to his lips to plead for silence, "Here, Jane," he called, and stood up once more. Jane came in, puffing with her haste. "Oh, thank you, sir," she cried. "It give me _such_ a turn, her stealin' off like that! Madam doesn't like her to be up late, as she well knows. And I'll be blamed for this, sir, though I take pains to follow out Madam's orders exact," She seized Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn, eyes dry now, and defiant, pulled back with all the strength of her slender arm. "Oh, fath-er!" she plead. "Oh, _please_, I don't want to go!" "Why! Why! Why!" It was reproval; but tender reproval, mixed with mild amazement. "Oh, I want to tell you something," cried Gwendolyn. "Let me stay just a _minute_." "That's just the way she acts, sir, whenever it's bed-time," mourned Jane. He leaned to lift Gwendolyn's chin gently. "Father thinks she'd better go now," he said quietly. "And she's not to worry her blessed baby head any more." Then he kissed her. The kiss, the knowledge that strife was futile, the sadness of parting--these brought the great sobs. She went without resisting, but stumbling a little; the back of one hand was laid against her streaming eyes. Half a flight up the stairs, Jane turned her right about at a bend. Then she dropped the hand to look over the banisters. And through a blur of tears saw her father watching after her, his shoulders against the library door. He threw a kiss. Then another bend of the staircase hid his upturned face. CHAPTER VI Gwendolyn was lying on her back in the middle of the nursery floor. The skein of her flaxen hair streamed about her shoulders in tangles. Her head being unpillowed, her face was pink--and pink, too, with wrath. Her blue-and-white frock was crumpled. She was kicking the rug with both heels. It was noon. And Miss Royle was having her dinner. Her face, usually so pale, was dark with anger--held well in check. Her expression was that of one who had recently suffered a scare, and her faded eyes shifted here and there uneasily. Thomas, too, looked apprehensive as he moved between table and tray. Jane was just gone, showing, as she disappeared, lips nervously pursed, and a red, roving glance that betokened worry. Gwendolyn, watching out from under the arm that rested across her forehead, realized how her last night's breach of authority had impressed each one of them. And secretly rejoicing at her triumph, she kept up a brisk tattoo. Miss Royle ignored her. "I'll take a little more chocolate, Thomas," she said, with a fair semblance of calm. But cup and saucer rattled in her hand. Thomas, too, feigned indifference to the rat! tat! tat! of heels. He bent above the table attentively. And to Gwendolyn was wafted down a sweet aroma. "Thank you," said Miss Royle. "And cake, _too?_ Splendid! How did you manage it?" A knife-edge cut against china. She helped herself generously. Gwendolyn fell silent to listen. "Well, I haven't Mr. Potter to thank," said Thomas, warmly; "only my own forethoughtedness, as you might say. The first time I ever set eyes on it I seen it was the kind that'd keep, so--" From under the shielding arm Gwendolyn blinked with indignation. _Her birthday cake!_ "Say, Miss Royle," chuckled Thomas, replenishing the chocolate cup, "that was a' _awful_ whack you give Miss J--last night." At once Gwendolyn forgot the wrong put upon her in the matter of the cake--in astonishment at this new turn of affairs. Evidently Miss Royle and Thomas were leagued against Jane! The governess nodded importantly, "She _was_ only a cook before she came here," she declared contemptuously. "Down at the Employment Agency, where Madam got her, they said so. The common, two-faced thing!" This last was said with much vindictiveness. Following it, she proffered Thomas the cake-plate. "Thanks," said he; "I don't mind if I do have a slice." Now, of a sudden, wrath and resentment possessed Gwendolyn, sweeping her like a wave--at seeing her cake portioned out; at having her kicking ignored; at hearing these two openly abuse Jane. "I want some strawberries," she stormed, pounding the rug full force. "And an egg. I _won't_ eat dry bread!" Bang! Bang! Bang! Miss Royle half-turned. "Did you ask to go down to the library?" she inquired. She seemed totally undisturbed; yet her eyes glittered. "Did she ask?" snorted Thomas. "She's gettin' very forward, she is." "No, you knew better," went on Miss Royle. "You _knew_ I wouldn't permit you to bother your father when he didn't want you--" "He _did_ want me!"--choking with a sob. "Think," resumed the governess, inflecting her tones eloquently, "of the fortune he spends on your dresses, and your pony, and your beautiful car! And he hires all of us"--she swept a gesture--"to wait on you, you naughty girl, and try to make a little lady out of you--" "I hate ladies!" cried Gwendolyn, rapping her heels by way of emphasis. "Tale-bearing is _vulgar_," asserted Miss Royle. "Next year I'm going to _day_-school like Johnnie _Blake!_" "Oh, hush your nonsense!" commanded Thomas, irritably. Miss Royle glanced up at him. "That will do," she snapped. He bridled up. "What the little imp needs is a good paddlin'," he declared. "Well, _you_ have nothing to do with the disciplining of the child. That is _my_ business." "It's what she needs, all the same. The very idear of her bawlin' all the mornin' at the top of her lungs--" "I did _not_ at the top of my lungs," contradicted Gwendolyn. "I cried with my mouth." "--So's the whole house can hear," continued Thomas; "and beatin' about the floor. It's clear shameful, _I_ say, and enough to give a sensitive person the nerves. As I remarked to Jane only---" "You remark too many things to Jane," interposed the governess, curtly. Now he sobered. "I _hope_ you ain't displeased with me," he ventured. "_Ain't_ displeased?" repeated Miss Royle, more than ever fretful. "Oh, Thomas, _do_ stop murdering the King's English!" At that Gwendolyn sat up, shook back her hair, and raised a startled face to the row of toys in the glass-fronted case. Murdering the King's English! Had he _dared_ to harm her soldier with the scarlet coat? "I was urgin' your betterin', too, Miss Royle," reminded Thomas, gently. "I says to Jane, I says--" The soldier was in his place, safe. Relieved, Gwendolyn straightened out once more on her back. "--'The whole lot of us ought to be paid higher wages than we're gettin' for it's a real trial to have to be under the same roof with such a provokin'--'" Miss Royle interrupted by vigorously bobbing her head. "Oh, that I have to make my living in this way!" she exclaimed, voice deep with mournfulness. "I'd rather wash dishes! I'd rather scrub floors! I'd rather _star-r-ve!_" Something in the vehemence, or in the cadence, of Miss Royle's declaration again gave Gwendolyn that sense of triumph. With a sudden curling up of her small nose, she giggled. Miss Royle whirled with a rustle of silk skirts. "Gwendolyn," she said threateningly, "if you're going to act like that, I shall know there's something the matter with you, and I shall certainly call a doctor." Gwendolyn lay very still. As Thomas glanced down at her, smirking exultantly, her smile went, and the pink of wrath once more surged into her face. "And the doctor'll give nasty medicine," declared Thomas, "or maybe he'll cut out your appendix!" "Potter won't let him." "Potter! Huh!--He'll cut out your appendix, and charge your papa a thousand dollars. Oh, you bet, them that's naughty always pays the piper." Gwendolyn got to her feet. "I _won't_ pay the piper," she retorted. "I'm going to give all my money to the hand-organ man--_all_ of it. I like _him_," tauntingly. "But I hate--you." "_We_ hate a sneak," observed Miss Royle, blandly. The little figure went rigid. "And I hate _you_," she cried shrilly. Then buried her face in her hands. "_Gwen-do-lyn'!_" It was a solemn and horrified warning. Gwendolyn turned and walked slowly toward the window-seat. Her breast was heaving. "Come back and sit in this chair," bade the governess. Gwendolyn paused, but did not turn. "Shall I fetch you?" "Can't I even look out of the window?" burst forth Gwendolyn. "Oh, you--you--you--" (she yearned to say Snake-in-the--grass!--yet dared not) "you mean! _mean!_" Her voice rose to a scream. Miss Royle stood up. "I see that you want to go to bed," she declared. The torrent of Gwendolyn's anger and resentment surged and broke bounds. She pivoted, arms tossing, face aflame. There were those wicked words across the river that each night burned themselves upon the dark. She had never pronounced them aloud before; but-- "Starch!" she shrilled, stamping a foot, "Villa sites! Borax! _Shirts!_" Miss Royle gave Thomas a worried stare. He, in turn, fixed her with a look of alarm. So much Gwendolyn saw before she flung herself down again, sobbing aloud, but tearlessly, her cheek upon the rug. She heard Miss Royle rustle toward the school-room; heard Thomas close the door leading into the hall. There were times--the nursery had seen a few--when the trio found it well to let her severely alone. Now only a hoarse lamenting broke the quiet. It was an hour later when some one tapped on the school-room door--Miss French, doubtless, since it was her allotted time. The lamentations swelled then--and grew fainter only when the last foot-fall died away on the stairs. Then Gwendolyn slept. Awakening, she lay and watched out through the upper panes of the front window. Across the square of serene blue framed by curtains and casing, small clouds were drifting--clouds dazzlingly white. She pretended the clouds were fat, snowy sheep that were passing one by one. Thus had snowy flocks crossed above the trout-stream. Oh? where was that stream? the glade through which it flowed? the shingled cottage among the trees? With all her heart Gwendolyn wished she were a butterfly. Suddenly she sat up. She had found her way alone to the library. Why not put on hat and coat _and go to Johnnie Blake's?_ She was at the door of the wardrobe before she remembered the kidnapers, and realized that she dared not walk out alone. But Potter liked the country. Besides, he knew the way. She decided to ask him to go with her--old and stooped though he was. Perhaps she would also take the pretty nurse-maid at the corner. And those who were left behind--Miss Royle and Thomas and Jane--would all be sorry when she was gone. But let them fret! Let them weep, and wish her back! She-- That moment she caught sight of the photographs on the writing-desk. She stood still to look at them. As she looked, both pictured faces gradually dimmed. For tears had come at last--at the thought of leaving father and mother--quiet tears that flowed in erratic little S's between gray eyes and trembling mouth. How could she forsake _them?_ "Gwendolyn," she half-whispered, "s'pose we just pu-play the Johnnie Blake Pretend ... Oh, very well,"--this last with all of Miss Royle's precise intonation. The heavy brocade hangings were the forest trees. The piano was the mountain, richly inlaid. The table was the cottage, and she rolled it nearer the dull rose timber at the side window. The rug was the grassy, flowery glade; its border, the stream that threaded the glade. Beyond the stream twisted an unpaved and carefully polished road. The first part of this particular Pretend was the drive to the village--carved and enameled, and paneled with woven cane. A hassock did duty for a runabout that had no top to shut out the sun-light, no windows to bar the fragrant air. In front of the hassock, a pillow did duty as a stout dappled pony. Her father drove. And she sat beside him, holding on to the iron bar of the runabout seat with one hand, to a corner of his coat with the other; for not only were the turns sharp but the country road was uneven. The sun was just rising above the forest, and it warmed her little back. The fresh breeze caressed her cheeks into crimson, and swirled her hair about the down-sloping rim of her wreath-encircled hat. That breeze brought with it the perfume of opening flowers, the fragrance exhaled by the trees along the way, the essence of the damp ground stirred by hoof and wheel. Gwendolyn breathed through nostrils swelled to their widest. Following the drive to the village came the trip up the stream to trout-pools. Gwendolyn's father led the way with basket and reel. She trotted at his heels. And beside Gwendolyn trotted Johnnie Blake. The piano-seat was Johnnie. His eyes were blue, and full of laughter. His small nose was as freckled as Jane's. His brown hair disposed itself in several rough heaps, as if it had been winnowed by a tiny whirlwind. "Good-morning," said Gwendolyn, curtseying. "Hello!" returned Johnnie--while Gwendolyn smiled at herself in the pier-glass. Johnnie carried a long willow fishing-pole cut from the stream-side. Reel he had none, nor basket; and he did not own a belted outing-suit of hunter's-green, and high buckled boots. He wore a plaid gingham waist, starched so stiff that its round collar stood up and tickled his ears. His hat was of straw, and somewhat ragged. His brown jeans overalls, riveted and suspendered, reached to bare ankles fully as brown. The overalls were provided with three pockets. Bulging one was his round tin drinking-cup which was full of worms. "Are there p'liceman in these woods?" inquired Gwendolyn. "Nope," said Johnnie. "Are there bears?" "Nope." "Are there doctors?" "Nope. But there's snakes--some." "Oh, I'm not afraid of snakes. I've got one at home. It's long and black, and it's got a wooden tongue." "'Fraid to go barefoot?" "Oh, I wish I could!" Here she glanced over a shoulder toward the school-room; then toward the hall. Did she dare? "Well, you're little yet," explained Johnnie. "But just you wait till you grow up." "Are--are _you_ grown-up?"--a trifle doubtfully. "Of _course_, I'm grown up! Why, I'm _seven_." Whereat she strode up and down, hands on hips, in feeble imitation of Johnnie. But here the inclination for further make-believe died utterly--at a point where, usually, Johnnie threw back his head with a triumphant laugh, gave a squirrel-like leap into the air (from the top of the nursery table), caught the lower branch of a tall, slim tree (the chandelier), and swung himself to and fro with joyous abandon. For Gwendolyn suddenly remembered the cruel truth borne out by the ink-line on the pier-glass. And instead of climbing upon the table, she went to stand in front of her writing-desk. "I was seven my last birthday," she murmured, looking up at the rose-embossed calendar. Seven, and grown-up--and yet everything was just the same! She went to the front window and knelt on the cushioned seat. Across the river red smoke was pouring up from those chimneys on the water's edge that were assuredly a mile high. Red smoke meant that evening was approaching. Jane would enter soon. With two in the nursery, the advantage was for her who did not have to make the overtures of peace. She turned her back to the room. Jane came. She drew the heavy curtains at the side window and busied herself in the vicinity of the bed, moving about quietly, saying not a word. Presently she went out. Gwendolyn faced round. The bed was arranged for the night. At its head, on the small table, was a glass of milk, a sandwich, a cup of broth, a plate of cooked fruit. The western sky faded--to gray, to deep blue, to jade. The river flowed jade beneath. Along it the lights sprang up. Then came the stars. Gwendolyn worked at the buttons of her slippers. The tears were falling again; but not tears of anger or resentment--only of loneliness, of yearning. The little white-and-blue frock fastened down the front. She undid it, weeping softly the while, found her night-dress, put it on and climbed into bed. The food was close at hand. She did not touch it. She was not hungry, only worn with her day-long combat. She lay back among the pillows. And as she looked up at the stars, each sent out gay little flashes of light to every side. "Oh, moth-er!" she mourned. "Everybody hates me! Everybody hates me!" Then came a comforting thought: She would play the Dearest Pretend! It was easy to make believe that a girlish figure was seated in the dark beside the bed; that a tender face was bending down, a gentle hand touching the troubled forehead, stroking the tangled hair. "Oh, I want you all the time, moth-er!... And I want _you_, my precious baby.... How much do you love me, moth-er?... Love you?--oh, big as the sky!... Dear moth-er, may I eat at the grown-up table?... All the time, sweetheart.... Goody! And we'll just let Miss Royle eat with Jane and--" She caught a stealthy _rustle! rustle! rustle!_ from the direction of the hall. She spoke more low then, but continued to chatter, her pretend-conversation, loving, confidential, and consoling. Finally, "Moth-er," she plead, "will you please sing?" She sang. Her voice was husky from crying. More than once it quavered and broke. But the song was one she had heard in the long, raftered living-room at Johnnie Blake's. And it soothed. "Oh, it is not while beauty and youth are thine o-o-own, And thy cheek is unstained by a tear, That the fervor and faith of a soul can be kno-o-own--" It grew faint. It ended--in a long sigh. Then one small hand in the gentle make-believe grasp of another, she slept. CHAPTER VII Miss Royle looked sober as she sipped her orange-juice. And she cut off the top of her breakfast egg as noiselessly as possible. Her directions to Thomas, she half-whispered, or merely signaled them by a wave of her coffee-spoon. Now and then she glanced across the room to the white-and-gold bed. Then she beamed fondly. As for Thomas, he fairly stole from tray to table, from table to tray, his face all concern. Occasionally, if his glance followed Miss Royle's, he smiled--a broad, sympathetic smile. And Jane was subdued and solicitous. She sat beside the bed, holding a small hand--which from time to time she patted encouragingly. After the storm, calm. The more tempestuous the storm, the more perfect the calm. This was the rule of the nursery. Gwendolyn, lying among the pillows, wished she could always feel weak and listless. It made everyone so kind. "Thomas," said Miss Royle, as she folded her napkin and rustled to her feet, "you may call up the Riding School and say that Miss Gwendolyn will not ride to-day." "Yes, ma'am." "And, Jane, you may go out for the morning. I shall stay here." "Thanks," acknowledged Jane, in a tone quite unusual for her. She did not rise, however, but waited, striving to catch Thomas's eye. "And, Thomas," went on the governess, "when would _you_ like an hour?" Thomas advanced with a bow of appreciation. "If it's all the same to you, Miss Royle," said he, "I'll have a bit of an airin' directly after supper this evenin'." Jane glared. "Very well." Miss Royle rustled toward the school-room, taking a survey of herself in the pier-glass as she went. "Jane," she added, "you will be free to go in half an hour." She threw Gwendolyn a loud kiss. Thomas was directing his attention to the clearing of the breakfast-table. The moment the door closed behind the governess, Jane shot up from her chair and advanced upon him. "You ain't treatin' me fair," she charged, speaking low, but breathing fast. "You ain't takin' your hours off duty along with me no more. You're givin' me the cold shoulder." At that, Gwendolyn turned her head to look. Of late, she had heard not a few times of Thomas's cold shoulder--this in heated encounters between him and Jane. She wondered which of his shoulders was the cold one. Thomas lifted his upper lip in a sneer. "Indeed!" he replied. "I'm not treatin' you fair? Well," (with meaning) "I didn't think you was botherin' your head about anybody--except a certain policeman." Back jerked Jane's chin. "Can't I have a gentleman friend?" she demanded defensively. "Ha! ha! Gentleman friend!" Then, addressing no one in particular, "My! but don't a uniform take a woman's eye!" "Why, Thomas!" It was a sorrowful protest. "You misjudge, you really _do_." So far there was no fresh element in the misunderstanding. Thus the two argued time and again. Gwendolyn almost knew their quarrel by heart. But now Thomas came round upon Jane with a snarl. "You're not foolin' me," he declared. "Don't you think I know that policeman's heels over head?" He shook his crumb-knife at her. "_Heels over head!_" Then seizing the tray and swinging it up, he stalked out. Jane fell to pacing the floor. Her reddish eyes roved angrily. Heels over head! Gwendolyn, pondering, now watched the nurse, now looked across to where, on its shelf, was poised the toy somersault man. If one of the uniformed men she dreaded was heels over head-- "But, Jane." "Well? Well?" "I saw the p'liceman walking on his feet _yesterday_." "Hush your silly talk!" Gwendolyn hushed, her gray eyes wistful, her mouth drooping. The morning had been so peaceful. Now Jane had spoken the first rough word. Peace returned with Miss Royle, who came in with the morning paper, dismissed Jane, and settled down in the upholstered chair, silver-rimmed spectacles on nose. The brocade hangings of the front window were only partly drawn. Between them, Gwendolyn made out more of those fat sheep straying down the azure field of the sky. She lay very still and counted them; and, counting, slept, but restlessly, with eyes only half-shut and nervous starts. Awakening at noon the listlessness was gone, and she felt stronger. Her eyes were bright, too. There was a faint color in cheeks and lips. "Miss Royle!" "Yes, darling?" The governess leaned forward attentively. "I can understand why you call Thomas a footman. It's 'cause he runs around so much on his feet--" "You're better," said Miss Royle. She turned her paper inside out. "But one day you said he was all ears, and--" "Gwendolyn!" Miss Royle stared down over her glasses. "Never repeat what you hear me say, love. It's tattling, and tattling is ill-bred. Now, what can I give you?" Gwendolyn wanted a drink of water. When Thomas appeared with the dinner-tray, he gave an impressive wag of the head. "_What_ do you think I've got for you?" he asked--while Miss Royle propped Gwendolyn to a sitting position. Gwendolyn did not try to guess. She was not interested. She had no appetite. Thomas brought forward a silver dish. "It's a bird!" he announced, and lifted the cover. Gwendolyn looked. It was a small bird, richly browned. A tiny sprig of parsley garnished it on either side. A ribbon of bacon lay in crisp flutings across it. Its short round legs were up-thrust. On the end of each was a paper frill. "_Don't_ it look delicious!" said Thomas warmly. "Don't it tempt!" But Gwendolyn regarded it without enthusiasm. "What kind of a bird is it?" she asked. Thomas displayed a second dish--Bermuda potatoes the size of her own small fist. "Who knows?" said he. "It might be a robin, it might be a plover, it might be a quail." "It might be a--a talking-bird," said Gwendolyn. She poked the bird with a fork. "Not likely," declared Thomas. Gwendolyn turned away. "Ain't it to your likin'?" asked Thomas, surprised. He did not take the plate at once, in his usual fashion. "I--I don't want anything," she declared. "Oh, but maybe you'd fancy an egg." Gwendolyn took a glass of water. "It's just as well," said Miss Royle. When she resigned her place presently, she talked to Jane in undertones,--so that Gwendolyn could hear only disconnectedly: "...Think it would be the safest thing ... she gets any worse.... Never do, Jane ... find out by themselves.... She won't be home till late to-night ... some grand affair. But he ... though of course I'm sorry to have to." The moment Miss Royle was well away, Jane had a plan. "_I_ think you're gittin' on so fine that you can hop up and dress," she declared, noting how the gray eyes sparkled, and how pink were the round spots on Gwendolyn's cheeks. Gwendolyn had nothing to say. Jane ran to the wardrobe and took out a dress. It was a new one, of cream-white wool; and on a sleeve, as well as on the corners of the sailor collar and the tips of the broad tie, scarlet anchors were embroidered. Gwendolyn smiled. But it was not the anchors that charmed forth the smile. It was a pocket, set like a shield on the blouse--an adorable patch-pocket! "Oh!" she cried; "did They make me that pocket? Jane, how sweet!" "One, two, three," said Jane, briskly, "and we'll have this on! Let's see by the clock how quick you can jump into it!" The clock was a familiar method of inducing Gwendolyn to do hastily something she had not thought of doing at all. She shook her head. "Why, it'd do you _good_, pettie,"--this coaxingly. "It's too warm to dress," said Gwendolyn. Jane flung the garment back into the wardrobe without troubling to hang it up, and banged the wardrobe door. But she did not again broach the subject of getting up. A hint of uneasiness betrayed itself in her manner. She took a chair by the bed. Gwendolyn's whole face was gradually taking on a deep flush, for those flaming spots on her cheeks were spreading to throat and temples--to her very hair. She kept her hands in constant motion. Next, the small tongue began to babble uninterruptedly. It was the overlively talking that made Jane certain that Gwendolyn was ill. She leaned to feel of the busy hands, the throbbing forehead. Then she hastily telephoned Thomas. "Have we any more of that quietin' medicine?" she asked as he opened the door. "It's all gone. Why?" The two forgot their differences, and bent over Gwendolyn. She smiled up, and nodded. "All the clouds in the sky are filled with wind," she declared; "like automobile tires. Toy-balloons are, I know. Once I put a pin in one, and the wind blew right out. I s'pose the clouds in the South hold the south wind, and the clouds in the North hold the north wind, and the clouds--" "Jane," said Thomas, "we've got to have a doctor." Gwendolyn heard. She saw Jane spring to the telephone. The next instant, with a piercing scream that sent her canary fluttering to the top of its cage, she flung herself sidewise. "Jane! Oh, don't! Jane! He'll kill me! _Jane!_" Jane fell back, and caught Gwendolyn in her arms. The little figure was all a-tremble, both small hands were beating the air in wild protest. "Jane! Oh, I'll be good! I'll be good!" She hid her face against the nurse, shuddering. "But you're sick, lovie. And a doctor would make you well. There! There! Listen to Jane, dearie." Thomas laid an anxious hand on the yellow head. "The doctor won't hurt you," he declared. "He only gives bread-pills, anyhow." "_No-o-o!_" She flung herself back upon the bed, catching at the pillows as if to hide beneath them, writhing pitifully, moaning, beseeching with terrified eyes. Jane and Thomas stared helplessly at each other, their faces guilty and frightened. "Dearie!" cried Jane; "hush and we won't--Oh, Thomas, I'm fairly distracted!--Pettie, we _won't_ have the doctor." Gradually Gwendolyn quieted. Then carefully, and by degrees, Jane approached the matter of medical aid in a new way. "We'll just telephone," she declared, "We wont let any old doctor come here--not a _bit_ of it. We'll ask him to send something. Is _that_ all right. _Please_, darlin'." Reluctantly, Gwendolyn yielded. "The medicine'll be awful nasty," she faltered. To that Jane made no reply. Her every freckle was standing out clearly. Her reddish eyes bulged. She hunted a number in the telephone-directory with fumbling fingers. After which she held the receiver to her ear with a shaking hand. "Everything's goin' wrong," she mourned. Huddled into a little ball, and still as a frightened bird, Gwendolyn listened to the message. "Hello!... Hello! Is this the Doctor speakin'?... Oh, this is Miss Gwendolyn's nurse, sir.... _Yes_ sir. Well, Miss Gwendolyn's a little nervous to-day, sir. Not sick enough to call you in, sir.... But I was goin' to ask if you couldn't send something soothin'. She's been cryin' like, that's all.... Yes, sir, and wakeful--" "A little hysterical yesterday," prompted Thomas, in a low voice. "A little hysterical yesterday," went on Jane. "...Yes, sir, by messenger.... I'll be _most_ careful, sir.... Thank you, sir." Jane and Thomas combined to make the remainder of the afternoon less dull. One by one the favorite toys came down from the second shelf. And a miniature circus took place on the rug beside the bed--a circus in which each toy played a part. Gwendolyn's fear was charmed away. She laughed, and drank copious draughts of water--delicious bubbling water that Thomas poured from tall bottles. Jane had her own supper beside the white-and-gold bed--coffee and a sandwich only. Gwendolyn still had no appetite, but seemed almost her usual self once more. So much so that when she asked questions, Jane was cross, and counseled immediate sleep. "But I'm not a bit sleepy," declared Gwendolyn. "It'll be moonlight after while, Jane. May I look out at the Down-Town roofs?" "You may stop your botherin'," retorted Jane, "and make up your mind to go to sleep. You've give me a' awful day. Now try just forty winks." "Why do you always say forty?" inquired Gwendolyn. "Couldn't I take forty-one?" "_Hush!_" After supper came the medicine--a dark liquid. Gwendolyn eyed it anxiously. Thomas was gone. Jane opened the bottle and measured a teaspoonful into a drinking-glass. "Do I have to take it now?" asked Gwendolyn. "To-morrow you'll wake up as good as new," asserted Jane. She touched her tongue with the spoon, then smacked her lips. "Why, dearie, it's--" She was interrupted. From the direction of the side window there came a burst of instrumental music. With it, singing the words of a waltz from a popular opera, blended a thin, cracked voice. Before Jane could put out a restraining hand, Gwendolyn bounced to her knees. "Oh, it's the old hand-organ man!" she cried. "It's the old hand-organ man! Oh, where's some money? I want to give him some money!" Jane threw up both hands wildly. "Oh, did I ever have such luck!" she exclaimed. Then, between her teeth, and pressing Gwendolyn back upon the pillows, "You lay down or I'll shake you!" "Oh, please let him stay just this time!" begged Gwendolyn; "I like him, Jane!" "I'll stay him!" promised Jane, grimly. She marched to the side window, threw up the sash and leaned out. "Here, you!" she called down roughly. "You git!" "Oh, Jane!" plead Gwendolyn. The thin, cracked voice fell silent. The waltz slowed its tempo, then came to a gasping stop. "How's a body to git a child asleep with that old wheeze of yours goin'?" demanded Jane. "We don't _want_ you here. Move along!" "He could play me to sleep," protested Gwendolyn. A reply to Jane's order was shrilled up--something defiant. "He'd only excite you, darlin'," declared Jane. She was on her knees at the window, and turned her head to speak. "I can't have that rumpus in the street with you so nervous." Gwendolyn sighed. "Take your medicine, dearie," went on Jane. She stayed where she was. Promptly, Gwendolyn sat up and reached for the glass. To hold it, to shake it about and potter in the strange liquid with a spoon, would be some compensation for having to drink it. "If that mean old creature didn't make faces!" grumbled Jane. She was leaning forward to look out. "_How_ did he make faces, Jane?" asked Gwendolyn. "Were they nice ones?" She lifted the glass to take a whiff of its contents. "I'd like to see him make faces." She put the spoon into Jane's half-empty coffee-cup; then let the medicine run up the side of the glass until it was almost to her lips. She tasted it. It tasted good! She hesitated a second; then drained the glass. The street was quiet. Jane rose to her feet and came over. "Did you do as I said?" she asked. "Yes, Jane." "Now, _did_ you?" Jane picked up the glass, looked into it, then at Gwendolyn. "Honest?" "Yes,--every sip." "_Gwendolyn?_" Jane held her with doubting eyes. "I don't believe it!" "But I _did!_" Jane bent down to the cup, sniffed it, then smelled of the glass. "Gwendolyn," she said solemnly, "I know you did _not_ take your medicine. You poured it into this cup." "But I _didn't!_" "I _seen_." Jane pointed an accusing finger. "How _could_ you?" demanded Gwendolyn. "You were looking at the brick house." "I've got eyes in the back of my head. And I seen you _plain_ when I was lookin' straight the other way." "A-a-aw!" laughed Gwendolyn, skeptically. "They're hid by my braids," went on Jane, "but they're there. And I seen you throw away that medicine, you bad girl!" Again she leaned to examine the coffee-cup. "Miss Royle said you had two faces," admitted Gwendolyn. She stared hard at the coiled braids on the back of Jane's head. The braids were pinned close together. No pair of eyes was visible. Jane straightened resolutely, seized the medicine-bottle and the spoon, poured out a second dose, and proffered it. "Come, now!" she said firmly. "You ain't a-goin' to git ahead of me with your cuteness. Take this, and go to sleep." "Bu-but--" That moment a shrill whistle sounded from the street. "_There_ now!" cried Jane, triumphantly. "The policeman's right here. I can call him up whenever I like." Gwendolyn drank. Jane tossed the spoon aside, corked the bottle and went back to the open window. "You go to sleep," she commanded. Gwendolyn, lying flat, was murmuring to herself. "Oo-oo! How funny!" she said, "Oo-oo!" "Now, don't let me hear another word out of you!" warned Jane. Gwendolyn turned her head slowly from side to side. A great light of some kind was flaming against her eyes--a light shot through and through with black, whirling balls. Where did it come from? It stayed. And grew. Her eyes widened with wonderment. A smile curved her lips. Then suddenly she rose to a sitting posture, threw out both arms, and gave a little choking cry. CHAPTER VIII It was a cry of amazement. For suddenly--so suddenly that she did not have time to think how it had happened--she found herself _up and dressed_, and standing alone, gazing about her, _in the open air!_ But there were no high buildings on any side, no people passing to and fro, no motor-cars flashing by. And the grass underfoot was not the grass of a lawn, evenly cut and flowerless; it was tall, so that it brushed the hem of her dress, and blossom-dotted. She looked up at the sky. It was not the sky of the City, distant, and marbled with streaks of smoke. It was close and clear; starless, too; and no moon hung upon it. Yet though it was night there was light everywhere--warm, glowing, roseate. By that radiant glow she saw that she was in the midst of trees! Some were tall and slender and clean-barked; others were low and thick of trunk, but with the wide shapely spread of the great banyan in her geography; and, towering above the others, were the giants of that forest, unevenly branched, misshapen, aslant, and rugged with wart-like burls. "Is--is this the Park?" she said aloud, still looking around. "Or--or the woods across the River?" But there was no sign of a paved walk, such as traced patterns through the Park; nor of a chimney, to mark the whereabouts of a house. Behind her the ground sloped gently up to a wooded rise; in front of her it sloped as gently down to the edge of a narrow, noisy mountain stream. "Why, I'm at Johnnie Blake's!" she cried--then glanced over a shoulder cautiously. If this were indeed the place she had longed to revisit, it would be advisable to keep as quiet as possible, lest someone should hear her, and straightway come to take her home. Still watching backward apprehensively, she pushed through the grass to the edge of the stream. The moment she reached it she knew that it was not the trout-stream along which she had wandered while her father fished. It was, in fact, not ordinary water at all, but something lighter, more sparkling with color, swifter, and louder. It effervesced, so that a creamy mist lay along its surface--this the smoke of bursting bubbles. It was like the bottled water she drank at her nursery meals! Hands clasped, she leaned to stare down. "Isn't it _funny!_" she exclaimed half under her breath. A voice answered her--from close at hand. It was a thin, cracked voice. "This is where They get their soda-water," it said. She turned, and saw him. He was a queer little old thick-set, dark-skinned gentleman, with grizzled whiskers, a ragged hat and baggy trousers. His eyes were round and black under his brows, which were square and long-haired, and not unlike a certain new hand-brush that Jane wielded of a morning across Gwendolyn's small finger-tips. Over one shoulder, by a strap, hung a dark box, half-hidden by a piece of old carpet. In one hand he held a huge, curved knife. Though she could not remember ever having seen him at Johnnie Blake's; and though the curved knife was in pattern the true type of a kidnaper's weapon, and the look out of those round, dark eyes, as he strode toward her, was not at all friendly, she did not scamper away. She waited, her heart beating hard. When he halted, she curtsied. "I've--I've always wondered about soda-water," she faltered, trying to smile. "But when I asked--" "Um!" he grunted; then, with a sidewise jerk of the head, "Take a drink." She lifted eager eyes. "All I _want_ to?" she half-whispered. He nodded. "Sip! Lap! Tipple!" "Oo!" Fairly beaming with delight, she knelt down. For the first time in her life she could have all the soda-water she wanted! First, she put the tip of one finger into the rushing sparkle, slowly, to lengthen out her joy. Next, with a little laugh, she sank her whole hand. Bubbles formed upon it,--all sizes of them--standing out like dewdrops upon leaves. The bubbles cooled. And tempted her thirst. With a deep breath, she bent forward until her red mouth touched the shimmering surface. Thus, lying prone, with arms spread wide, she drank deep of the flow. When she straightened and sat back upon her heels, she made an astonishing discovery: The trees that studded the slope were not covered with leaves, like ordinary trees! Each branched to hold lights--myriads of lights! Some of these shone steadily; others burned with a hissing sound; others were silent enough, but rose and fell, jumped and flickered. It was these countless lights that illumed the forest like a pink sun. She rose. There was wonder in the gray eyes. "Are these Christmas trees?" she said. "Where am I?" "You've had your soda-water," he answered shortly. "You ought to know." "Yes, I--I ought to know. But--I don't." He grunted. "I s'pose," she ventured timidly, "that nobody ever answers questions here, either." He looked uncomfortable. "Yes," he retorted, "_every_body does." "Then,"--advancing an eager step--"why don't _you?_" He mopped his forehead. "Well--well--if I must, I must: This is where all the lights go when they're put out at night." "Oh!" And now as she glanced from tree to tree she saw that what he had said was true. For the greater part of the lights were electric bulbs; while many were gas-jets, and a few kerosene-flames. Still marveling, her look chanced to fall upon herself. And she found that she was not wearing a despised muslin frock! Her dress was gingham!--an adorable plaid with long sleeves, and a patch-pocket low down on the right side! "You darling!" she exclaimed happily, and thrust a hand into the pocket. "I guess They made it!" Next she looked down at her feet--and could scarcely believe! She had on no stockings! She did not even have on slippers. _She was barefoot!_ Then, still fearful that there was some mistake about it all, she put a hand to her head; and found her hair-bow gone! In its place, making a small floppy double knot, was a length of black shoe-string! "Oh, goody!" she cried. "Um!" grunted the little old gentleman. "And you can play in the water if you'd like to." That needed no urging! She was face about on the instant. From the standpoint of messing the soda-stream was ideal. It brawled around flat rocks, set at convenient jumping-distances from one another. (She leaped promptly to one of these and sopped her handkerchief.) It circled into sand-bottomed pools just shallow enough for wading; and from the pools, it spread out thinly to thread the grass, thus giving her an opportunity for squashing--a diverting pastime consisting in squirting equal parts of water and soil ticklishly through the toes. She hopped from rock to pool; she splashed from pool to long, wet, muddy grass. It was the water-play that brought the realization of all her new good-fortune--the being out of doors and plainly clad; free from the espionage of a governess; away from the tyranny of a motor-car; barefoot; and--chief blessing of all!--_nurseless_. Forgetting the little old gentleman, in a sudden excess of glee she seized a stick and bestrode it; seized another and belabored the quarters of a stout dappled pony; pranced, reared, kicked up her wet feet, shied wildly-- Then, both sticks cast aside, she began to dance; at first with deliberation, holding out the gingham dress at either side, and mincing through the steps taught by Monsieur Tellegen. But gradually she forsook rhythm and measure; capering ceased; the dance became fast and furious. Hallooing, she raced hither and thither among the trees, tossing her arms, darting down at the flowers and flinging them high, swishing her yellow hair from side to side, leaping exultantly toward the lights, pivoting-- Suddenly she found that she was dancing to music!--not the laboriously strummed notes of a piano, such as were beaten out by the firm-striding Miss Brown; not the clamorous, deafening, tuneless efforts of an orchestra. This was _real_ music--inviting, inspiring, heavenly! It was a hand-organ! She halted, spell-bound. He was playing, turning the crank with a swift, steady motion, his ragged hat tipped to one side. Now she understood the box hanging from its strap. She danced up to him, and held out a hand. "Why, you're the _hand-organ_ man!" she panted breathlessly. "And you got here as quick as I did!" He stopped playing, "I'm the hand-organ man when I'm in town," he corrected. "Here, in the Land of the Lights, I'm the Man-Who-Makes-Faces." The Man-Who-Makes-Faces! She looked at him with new interest. "Why, of course you are," she acknowledged. "Sometimes you make 'em in town." "Sometimes in town I make an ugly one," he retorted. Whereupon he shouldered the hand-organ, grasped the curved knife, and started away. As he walked, he called aloud to every side, like a huckster. "Here's where you get your ears sharpened!" he sang. "_Ears_ sharpened! _Eyes_ sharpened! Edges taken off of tongues!" She trotted beside him, head up, gray eyes wide, lips parted. He was ascending a gentle rise toward a low hill not far distant. As she drew away from the stream and the glade, she heard, from somewhere far behind, a shrill voice. It called a name--a name strangely familiar. She paid no heed. At the summit of the little hill, under some trees, he paused, and waved the kidnaper knife in circles. "_Ears_ to sharpen!" he shrilled again. "_Eyes_ to sharpen! Edges taken off of tongues!" She smiled up at him engagingly, noting how his gray hair hung over the back of his collar. She felt no fear of him whatever. "I think you're nice, Mr. Man-Who-Makes-Faces," she announced presently. "I'm so glad I can look straight at you. I didn't know you, 'cause your voice is different, and 'cause I'd never seen you before 'cept when I was looking _down_ at you." He had been ignoring her. But now, "Wasn't my fault that we didn't meet face to face," he retorted. Though his voice was still cross, his round, bright eyes were almost kind. "If you'll remember I often came under your window." "And I threw you money," she answered, nodding brightly. "I wanted to come down and talk to you, oh, lots of times, only--" At that, he relented altogether. And, reaching out, shook hands cordially. "Wouldn't you like," said he, "to have a look at my establishment?" He jerked a thumb over a shoulder. "Here's where I make faces." In the City she had seen many wonderful shops, catching glimpses of some from the little window of her car, visiting others with Miss Royle or Jane. Among the former were those fascinating ones, usually low of ceiling and dark with coal-dust, where grimy men in leather aprons tried shoes on horses; and those horrifying places past which she always drove with closed eyes--places where, scraped white and head downward, hung little pigs, pitiful husks of what they once had been, flanked on either hand by long-necked turkeys with poor glazed eyes; and once she had seen a wonderful shop in which men were sawing out flat pieces of stone, and writing words on them with chisels. But this shop of the Man-Who-Makes-Faces was the most interesting of all. It occupied a square of hard-packed ground--a square as broad as the nursery. And curiously enough, like the nursery, it had, marking it off all the way around its outer edge, a border of flowers! It was shaded by one huge tree. "Lime-tree," explained the little old gentleman. "And the lights--" "Don't tell me!" she cried. "I know! They're lime lights." These made the shop exceedingly bright. Full in their glare, neatly disposed, were two short-legged tables, a squat stool, and a high, broad bill-board. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces seated himself on the stool at one of the tables and began working industriously. But Gwendolyn could only stand and stare about her, so amazed that she was dumb. For in front of the little old gentleman, and spread handily, were ears and eyes, noses and mouths, cheeks and chins and foreheads. And upon the bill-board, pendant, were toupees and side-burns and mustaches, puffs, transformations and goatees--and one coronet braid (a red one) glossy and thick and handsome! The bill-board also held an assortment of tongues--long and scarlet. These, a score in all, were ranged in a shining row. And underneath them was a sign which bore this announcement: _Tongues In All Languages Dead or Modern Chic if Seven Are Purchased at Once_. Gwendolyn clapped her hands. "Oo! how _nice!_" she exclaimed, finding her voice again. "Quite so," said the little old gentleman, shoving away a tray of chins and cheeks and reaching for a forehead. "Welcome, convenient, and satisfactory." She saw her opportunity. "Please," she began, "I'd like to buy six." She counted on her fingers. "I'll have a French tongue, a German tongue, a Greek tongue, a Latin tongue, and--later, though, if you don't happen to have 'em on hand--a Spanish and an Italian." Then she heaved a sigh of relief. "I'm glad I saw these," she added. "They'll save me a lot of work. And they've helped me about a def'nition. I looked for 'lashing' in my big dictionary. And it said 'to whip.' But _I_ couldn't see how anybody could whip anybody else with a _tongue_. Now, though--" The Man-Who-Makes-Faces nodded. "Just wait till you see the King's English," he bragged. "The King's English? Will I see him?" "Likely to," he answered, selecting an eye. He had all his eyes about him in a circle, each looking as natural as life. There were blue eyes and brown eyes, hazel eyes and-- "Ah!" she exclaimed suddenly. "I remember! It was _you_ who gave the Policeman a black eye!" "One _fine_ black eye," he answered, chuckling as he poked about in a pile of noses and selected a large-sized one. "Yes! Yes! And recently I made a lovely blue pair for a bad-tempered child who'd cried her own eyes out." She assented. She had heard of just such a case. "Once I saw some eyes in a shop-window," she confided. "It was a shop where you could buy spectacles." He wagged his beard proudly. "I made every _one_ of 'em!" he boasted. "Oh, yes, indeed." And polished away at the tip of the large nose. She considered for a moment. "I'm glad I know," she said gravely. "I wanted to, awful much." After that she studied the bill-board for a time. And presently discovered that a second supply of eyes was displayed there, being set in it as jewels are set in brooches! She pointed. "What kind are those?" He looked surprised at the question. "The bill-board is the rear wall of my shop," said he. "And those eyes are wall-eyes." She flushed with pleasure. "That's _exactly_ what I thought!" she declared. She began to walk up and down, one hand in the patch-pocket--to make sure it was really there. For this was all too good to be true. Here, in this Land so new to her, and so wonderful, were things about which she had pondered, and puzzled, and asked questions--the tongues, for instance, and the lime-lights, and the soda-water. How simply and naturally each was now explained!--explained as she herself had imagined each would be. She felt a sudden pride in herself. So far had anything been really unexpected? As she went back to pause in front of the little old gentleman, it was with a delightful sense of understanding. Oh, this was one of her pretend-games, gloriously come true! Now she felt a very flood of questions surge to her lips. She pointed to a deep yellow bowl set on the table beside him. "Would you mind telling me what that is?" she asked. "That? That's a sauce-box." And he smiled. "Oh!--What's it full of, please?" "Full of mouths,"--cheerily. It was her turn to smile. She smiled into the sauce-box. At its center was a queer object, very like a short length of dried apple-peeling. "I s'pose that's part of a mouth?" she ventured. He picked up the object and balanced it across his thumb. "You've guessed it!" he declared. "And it's a fine thing to carry around with one. You see, it's a stiff upper lip." He tossed it back. "My!" She took a deep breath. "Once I asked and _asked_ about a stiff upper lip." He went on with his polishing. "Should think you'd be more interested in these," he observed, giving a nod of the ragged hat toward a shallow dish at his elbow. "Little girls generally are." She looked, and saw that the dish was heaped high with what seemed to be _white peanuts_--peanuts that tapered to a point at one end. She puckered her brows over them. "Can't guess?" said he. "Then you didn't drink enough of that soda-water. Well, ever hear of a sweet tooth?" At that she clapped her hands and jumped up and down. "Why, I've _got_ one!" she cried. "Oh?" said the little old gentleman. "Thought so. I _always_ keep a supply on hand. Carve 'em myself, out of cube sugar." "Oh, aren't they funny!" She leaned above the shallow dish. "Funny?" repeated the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "Not when they get into the wrong mouth!--a wry mouth, for instance, or an ugly mouth. A sweet tooth should go, you understand, only with a sweet face." "Is it a sweet tooth that makes a face sweet?" she inquired. "Quite so." He held up the nose to examine it critically. She watched him in silence for a while. Then, "You don't mind telling me who's going to have that?" she ventured, pointing a finger at the nose. "This? Oh, this is for a certain little boy's father." She blinked thoughtfully. "Is his name," she began--and stopped. "His father--the unfortunate man--has been keeping his own nose to the grindstone pretty steadily of late, and so--" "I can't just remember the name I'm thinking about," said Gwendolyn, troubled. He glanced up. And the round, bright eyes were grave as he searched her face. "I wonder," he said in a low voice, "if you know who _you_ are." She smiled. "Well, I've been acquainted with myself for seven years," she declared. "But do you know who you _are?_" (The round eyes were full of tears!) She felt uncertain. "I did just a little while ago. Now, though--" He reached to take her hand. "Shall I tell you?" "Yes,"--in a whisper. "You're the Poor Little Rich Girl." He patted her hand. "The Poor Little Rich Girl!" She nodded bravely, and stood looking up at him. He was old and unkempt. Out at elbows, too. And the bottoms of his baggy trousers hung in dusty shreds. But his lined and bearded face was kind! "I--I haven't been so very happy," she said falteringly. He shook his head. "Not happy! And no step-relations, either!" "Well,--er," (she felt uncertain) "there are some step-houses just across the street." "Not the same thing," he declared shortly. "But, _hm! hm!_"--as he coughed, he waved an arm cheerily. "Things will improve. Oh, yes. All you've got to do is follow my advice." The gray eyes were wistful, and questioning. "You've got a lot to do," he went on. "Oh, a _great_ deal. For instance"--here he paused, running his fingers through his long hair--"there's Miss Royle, and Thomas, and Jane." She was silent for a long moment. Miss Royle! Thomas! Jane! In the joy of being out of doors, of having real dirt to scuff in, and high grass through which to brush; of having a plaid gingham with a pocket, and all the fizzing drink she wished; of being able to dabble and wade; and of having good, squashy soda-mud for pies--in the joy at all this she had utterly forgotten them! She looked up at the tapered trees, and down at the flower-bordered ground; then at the bill-board, and the loaded tables of that marvelous establishment. There was still so much to see! And, oh, how many scores of questions to ask! He bent until his beard swept the sauce-box. "You'll just have to keep out of their _clutches_," he declared. Again she nodded, twisting and untwisting her fingers. "I thought maybe they didn't come here." "Come?" he grunted. "Won't they be hunting _you?_ Well, keep out of their clutches, I say. That's absolutely necessary. You'll see why--if you let 'em get you! For--how'll you ever find your father?" "_Oh!_" A sudden flush swept her face. She looked at the ground. She had forgotten Miss Royle and Thomas and Jane. Worse! Until that moment _she had forgotten her father and mother!_ "There's that harness of his," went on the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. He thought a moment, pursing his lips and twiddling his thumbs. "We'll have to consider how we can get rid of it." She glanced up. "Where does he come?" she asked huskily; "my fath-er?" "Um! Yes, where?" He seemed uneasy; scratched his jaw; and rearranged a row of chins. "Well, the fact is, he comes here to--er--buy candles that burn at both ends." "Of course. Is it far?" "Out in a new fashionable addition--yes, addition, subtraction, multiplication." "_You_ won't mind showing me the way?" Now her face grew pale with earnestness. He smiled sadly. "I? Your father thinks poorly of me. He's driven me off the block once or twice, you know. Though"--he looked away thoughtfully--"when you come to think of it there isn't such a lot of difference between your father and me. He makes money: I make faces." It was one of those unpleasant moments when there seemed very little to be said. She stood on the other foot. He began polishing once more. "Then there's that bee," he resumed-- "Moth-er." He went on as quickly as possible. "Of course there are lots of things worse than one of those so-cial hon-ey-gath-er-ing in-sects--" "She sees nothing else! She _hears_ nothing else!" "Um! We'll help her get rid of it!--_if!_" "If?" "You've got a lot to overcome. Recollect the Policeman?" She retreated a step. "Just suppose we meet _him!_ And the Bear that--" "My!" "Yes. And a certain Doctor." "Oh, _dear!_" "Bad! Pretty bad!" "Where does my moth-er come?"--timidly. The question embarrassed. "Er--the place is full of carriage-lamps," he began; "and--and side-lights, and search-lights, and--er--lanterns." She looked concerned. "I can't guess." "Just ordinary lanterns," he added. "You see, the Madam comes to--to Robin Hood's Barn." "Robin Hood's Barn!" "Exactly. Nice day, _isn't_ it?" By the expression on his face, Gwendolyn judged that Robin Hood's Barn--of which she had often heard--was a most undesirable spot. "Is it far?" she asked, swallowing. "No. Only--we'll have to go around it." Somehow, all at once, he seemed the one friend she had. She put out a hand to him. "You _will_ go with me?" she begged. "Oh, I want to find my fath-er, and my moth-er!" "You want to tell 'em the real truth about those three servants they're hiring. Unless I'm _much_ mistaken, your parents have never taken one good square look at those three." "Oh, let's start." Now, of a sudden, all the hopes and plans of the past months came crowding back into her mind. "I want to sit at the grown-up table," she declared. "And I want to live in the country, and go to day-school." He hung the hand-organ over a shoulder. "You can do every one of them," he said, "if we find your father and mother." "We'll find them," she cried determinedly. "We'll find 'em," he said, "if, as we go along, we don't leave one--single--stone--_unturned_." "Oh!" she glanced about her, searching the ground. "Not _one_," he repeated. "And now--we'll start." He picked up two or three small articles--an ear, a handful of hair, a plump cheek. "But there's a stone right here," said Gwendolyn. It was a small one, and lay at her feet, close to the table-leg. He peered over. "All right! Turn it!" She stooped--turned the rock--straightened. The next moment a chill swept her; the next, she felt a heavy hand upon her shoulder, and clumsy fingers busy with the buttons on the gingham dress. "_Tee! hee! hee! hee!_" It was the voice that had called from a distance. Hearing it now she felt a sudden, sickish, sinking feeling. She whirled. A strange creature was kneeling behind her--a creature dressed in black sateen, and like no human being that she had ever met before. For it was _two-faced!_ One face (the front) was blowzy and freckled, with a small pug nose and a quarrelsome mouth. The other (the face on what, with ordinary persons, was the back of the head) was dark and forbidding, its nose a large brick-colored pug, the mouth underneath shaped most extraordinarily--not unlike a _barrette_, for it was wide and long, and square at the corners, and full of shining tortoise-shell teeth! But the creature had only one tongue. This was loose at both ends, so that there was one tip for her front face, and one for the back. But she had only one pair of eyes. These were reddish. They watched Gwendolyn boldly from the front; then rolled quickly to the rear to stare at the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. At sight of the two-faced creature, Gwendolyn shrank away, frightened. "Oh!--oh, my!" she faltered. Both horrid mouths now bellowed hilariously. And the creature reached out a big hand. "Look here, Gwendolyn!" it ordered. "You ain't goin'!" Gwendolyn lifted terrified eyes for a second look at the brick-colored hair, the blowzy countenance. No possibility of doubt remained! It was Jane! CHAPTER IX Bobbing and swaying foolishly, the nurse-maid shuffled to her feet. And Gwendolyn, though she wanted to turn and flee beyond the reach of those big, clutching hands, found herself rooted to the ground, and could only stand and stare helplessly. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces stepped to her side hastily. His look was perturbed. "My! My!" he exclaimed under his breath. "She's worse than I thought!--_much_ worse." With a little gasp of relief at having him so near, Gwendolyn slipped her trembling fingers into his. "She's worse than _I_ thought," she managed to whisper back. Neither was given a chance to say more. For seeing them thus, hand in hand, Jane suddenly started forward--with a great boisterous hop and skip. Her front face was distorted with a jealous scowl. She gave Gwendolyn a rough sidewise shove. "Git away from that old beggar!" she commanded harshly. "Why, he'll kidnap you! Look at his knife!" Nimbly the little old gentleman thrust himself in front of her, barring her way, and shielding Gwendolyn. "Who told you where she was?" he asked angrily. "Who?" mocked Jane, impudently. "Well, who is it that tells people things?" "You mean the _Bird?_" Jane's front face broke into a pleased grin. "I mean the Bird," she bragged And balanced from foot to foot. Gwendolyn, peeking round at her, of a sudden felt a fresh concern. The Bird!--the same Bird that had repeated tales against her father! And now he was tattling on her! She saw all her hopes of finding her parents, all her happy plans, in danger of being blighted. "Oh, my goodness!" she said mournfully. She was holding tight to the little old gentleman's coat-tails. Now he leaned down. "We _must_ get rid of her," he declared. "You know what I said. She'll make us trouble!" "Here! None of that!" It was Jane once more, the grin replaced by a dark look. "I'll have you know this child is in _my_ charge." Again she tried to seize Gwendolyn. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces stood his ground resolutely--and swung the curved knife up to check any advance. "She doesn't need you," he declared "She's seven, and she's grown-up." And to Gwendolyn, "_Tell_ her so! Don't be afraid! Tell her!" Gwendolyn promptly opened her mouth. But try as she would, she could not speak. Her lips seemed dry. Her tongue refused to move. She could only swallow! As if he understood her plight, the little old gentleman suddenly sprang aside to where was the sauce-box, snatched something out of it, ran to the other table and picked up an oblong leather case (a case exactly like the gold-mounted one in which Miss Royle kept her spectacles), put the something out of the sauce-box into the case, closed the case with a snap, and put it, with a swift motion, into Gwendolyn's hand. "There!" he cried triumphantly. "There's that stiff upper lip! _Now_ you can answer." It was true! No sooner did she feel the leather case against her palm, than her fear, and her hesitation and lack of words, were gone! She assumed a determined attitude, and went up to Jane. "I don't need you," she said firmly. "'Cause I'm seven years old now, and I'm grown up. And--what are you here for _anyhow?_" At the very boldness of it, Jane's manner completely changed. That front countenance took on a silly simper. And she put her two-faced head, now on one side, now on the other, ingratiatingly. "What am I here for!" she repeated in an injured tone. "And you ask me that, Miss? Why, what _should_ I be doin' for you, lovie, but dancin' attendance." At that, she began to act most curiously, stepping to the right and pointing a toe, stepping to the left and pointing a toe; setting down one heel, setting down the other; then taking a waltzing turn. "Oh!" said Gwendolyn, understanding. (For dancing attendance was precisely what Jane was doing!) After observing the other's antics for a moment, she tossed her head. "Well, if _that's_ all you want to do," she said unconcernedly, "why, _dance_." "Yes, dance," broke in the Man-Who-Makes-Faces, snapping his fingers. "Frolic and frisk and flounce!" Jane obeyed. And waltzed up to the bill-board. "Say! what's the price of that big braid?" she called--between her tortoise-shell teeth. She had spied the red coronet, and was admiring its plaited beauty. From under those long, square brows, the little old gentleman frowned across the table at her. "I'll quote you no prices," he answered. "You haven't paid me yet for your extra face." Jane's reply was an impudent double-laugh. She was examining the different things on the bill-board, and hopping sillily from foot to foot. Gwendolyn tugged gently at a coat-tail. "Can't we run now?" she asked; "and hide?" _Boom-er-oom-er-oom!_ "Sh!" warned the Man-Who-Makes-Faces, not stirring. "What was that!" "I don't know." Both held their breath. And Gwendolyn took a more firm hold of the lip-case. After a moment the little old gentleman began to speak very low: "We shan't be able to steal away. She's watching us out of the back of her head!" "Yes. I can see 'em shine!" "I believe that when she rolled her eyes from one face to the other it made that _rumbley sound_." "Scares me," whispered Gwendolyn. "Ump!" he grunted. "Ought to cheer you up. For it's my opinion that her eyes rumble _because her head's empty_." "If it was hollow I think I'd know," she answered doubtfully. "You see she's been my nurse a long time. But--would it help?" "_Find out_," he advised. "And if it's a fact, your mother ought to know." _Boom-er-oom-er-oom!_ Gwendolyn, watching, saw two shining spots in Jane's back face grow suddenly small--to the size of glinting pin-points; then disappear. The nurse turned, and came dancing back. "You'd better let me have that braid, old man," she cried rudely. "I'll smooth down your saucy tongue," he threatened. "Tee! hee! hee! hee!" she tittered. "Ha! ha! ha!" Gwendolyn had heard her laugh before. But it was the first time she had _seen_ her laugh. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces, too. Now, at the same moment, both witnessed an extraordinary thing: As Jane chuckled, she lifted one stout arm so that a black sateen cuff was close to the mouth of the front face. And holding it there, actually _laughed in her sleeve!_ Laughed in her sleeve--_and a great deal more!_ For with each chuckle, from the top of her red head to her very feet, _she grew a trifle more plump!_ The little old gentleman warned her with one long finger. "You look out, young lady!" said he. "One of these days you'll laugh on the other side of your face." (Which made Gwendolyn wish that it was not impolite to correct those older than herself; for it was plain that he meant "you'll laugh on your _other_ face.") Jane put out a tongue-tip at him insolently. Then dancing near, "Come!" she bade Gwendolyn. "Come away with Nurse." The Man-Who-Makes-Faces made no effort to interpose. But he wagged his head significantly. "It's evident, Miss Jane," said he, "that you've forgotten all about--the Piper." She came short. And showed herself upset by what he had said, for she did a hop-schottische. He was not slow to take advantage. "We're sure to see him shortly," he went on. "And when we do--! Because your account with him is adding up _terrifically_. You're dancing a good deal, you know." "How can I help _that?_" demanded Jane. "Ain't I dancin' atten--" Gwendolyn forgot to listen to the remainder of the sentence. All at once she was a little apprehensive on her own account--remembering how _she_ had danced beside the soda-water, not half an hour before! "Mr. Man-Who-Makes-Faces," she began timidly, "do you mean the Piper that everybody has to pay?" "Exactly," replied the little old gentleman. "He's out collecting some pay for me now--from a dishonest fellow who didn't settle for two dozen ears that I boxed and sent him." At that, Jane began tittering harder than ever (hysterically, this time), holding up her arm as before--and filling out two or three wrinkles in the black sateen! And Gwendolyn, watching closely, saw that while the front face of her nurse was all a-grin, the face on the back of her head wore a nervous expression. (Evidently that front face was not always to be depended upon!) The little old gentleman also remarked the nervous expression. And followed up the advantage already won. "Now," said he, "perhaps you'll be willing to come along quietly. We're just starting, you understand." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Gwendolyn glanced in the direction he pointed. And saw--for the first time--that a wide, smooth road led away from the Face-Shop, a road as wide and smooth and curving as the Drive. Like the Drive it was well-lighted on either side (but lighted low-down) by a row of tiny electric bulbs with frosted shades, each resembling an incandescent toadstool. (She remembered having once caught a glimpse of something similar in a store-window.) These tiny lamps were set close together on short stems, precisely as white stones of a selected size edged all the paths at Johnnie Blake's. And each gave out a soft light. She did not have to ask about them. She guessed promptly what they were--lights to make plain the way for people's feet: in short, nothing more nor less than footlights! A few times in her life--so few that she could tell them off on her pink fingers--she had been taken to the theater, Jane accompanying her by right of nurse-maid, Miss Royle by her superior right as judge of all matters that partook of entertainment; Thomas coming also, though apparently for no reason whatever, to grace a rear seat along with the chauffeur. Seated in a box, close to the curved edge of the stage, she had seen the soft glow of the footlights. But for some reason which she could not fathom, the footlights had always been carefully concealed from everyone but the people on the stage. Trying to imagine them without any suggestions from Miss Royle or Jane, she had patterned them after a certain stuffed slipper-cushion that stood on Jane's dressing-table. How different was the reality, and how much more satisfactory! Jane looked up the road, between the lines of footlights. "You're just startin'," she repeated. "Where?" "To find her father and mother," answered the Man-Who-Makes-Faces, stoutly. At that Jane shook her huge pompadour. "Father and mother!" she cried. "Indeed, you won't! Not while _I'm_ a-takin' care of her." And reaching out, caught Gwendolyn--by a slender wrist. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces seized the other. And the next moment Gwendolyn was unpleasantly reminded of times in the nursery, times when, Miss Royle and Jane disagreeing about her, each pulled at an arm and quarreled. For here was the nurse, tugging one direction to drag her away, and the little old gentleman tugging the other with all his might. "Slap her hands! Slap her hands!" he shouted excitedly. "It'll start circulation." Both slapped--so hard that her hands stung. And with the result he sought. For instantly all three began going in circles, around and around, faster and faster and faster. It was Jane who first let go. She was puffing hard, and the perspiration was standing out upon her forehead. "I'm going to call the Policeman," she threatened shrilly. "Oh! Oh! Please don't!" Gwendolyn's cry was as shrill. "I don't want him to get me!" "_Call_ the Policeman then," retorted the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. And to Gwendolyn, soothingly, "Hush! Hush, child!" Jane danced away--sidewise, as if to keep watch as she went. "Help! Help!" she shouted. "Police! Police!! _Poli-i-i-ice!!!_" Gwendolyn was terribly frightened. But she could not run. One wrist was still in the grasp of the little old gentleman. With wildly throbbing heart she watched the road. "Is he coming?" called the little old gentleman. He, too, was looking up the curving road. A whistle sounded. It was long-drawn, piercing. And now Gwendolyn heard movements all about her in the forest--the soft _pad, pad_ of running paws, the _hushing_ sound of wings--as if small live things were fleeing before the sharp call. Jane hastened back, galloping a polka. "Turn a stone! Turn a stone!" she cried, rumbling her eyes. Gwendolyn clung to the little old gentleman. "Oh, don't let her!" she plead. "What if--" "We _must_." "Will a pebble-size do?" yelled Jane, excitedly. "Yes! Yes!" answered the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "You've seen stones in rings, haven't you? Aren't _they_ pebble-size?" The nurse stooped, picked up a small stone, and sent it spinning from the end of a thumb. Faint with fear, Gwendolyn thrust a trembling hand into the patch-pocket and took hold of the lip-case. Then leaning against the little old gentleman, her yellow head half-concealed by the dusty flap of his torn coat, she waited. CHAPTER X What she first saw was a face!--straight ahead, at the top of a steep rise, where the wide road narrowed to a point. The face was a man's, and upon it the footlights beat so strongly that each feature was startlingly vivid. But it was not the fact that she saw _only_ a face that set her knees to trembling weakly--nor the fact that the face was fearfully distorted; but because it was _upside down!_ She stared, feeling herself grow cold, her flesh creep. "Oh, I want to go home!" she gasped. The face began to move nearer, slowly, inch by inch. And there sounded a hoarse outcry: "_Hoo! hoo! Hoo! hoo!_" It was the little old gentleman who reassured her somewhat--by his even voice. "Ah!" said he with something of pride, yet as if to himself. "He realizes that the black eye is a beauty. And I shouldn't wonder if he isn't coming to match it!" But what temporary confidence she gained, fled when Jane, tettering from side to side, began to threaten in a most terrifying way. "_Now_, young Miss!" she cried. "_Now_, you're goin' to be sorry you didn't mind Jane! Oh, _I_ told you he'd git you some fine day!" The Man-Who-Makes-Faces retorted--what, Gwendolyn did not hear. She was sick with apprehension. "I guess I won't find my father and moth-er now," she whispered miserably. Then, all at once, she could see _more_ than a face! Silhouetted against the lighted sky was a figure--broad shouldered and belted, with swinging cudgel, and visored cap. It was like those dreaded figures that patroled the Drive--yet how different! For as the Policeman came on, his wild face peered between his coat-tails!--peered between his coat-tails for the reason that he was _upside down_, and walking _on his hands!_ "_Hoo! hoo!_ Hoo! hoo!" he clamored again. His coat flopped about his ears. His natural merino socks showed where his trousers fell away from his shoes. His club bumped the side of his head at every stride of his long blue-clad arms. His identification was complete. For precisely as Thomas had declared, he was _heels over head_. "My!" breathed Gwendolyn, so astonished that she almost forgot to be anxious for her own safety. (What a marvelous Land was this--where everything was really as it ought to be!) The Man-Who-Makes-Faces addressed her, smiling down. "You won't mind if we don't start for a minute or two, will you?" he inquired. "This Officer will probably want to discuss the prices of eyes. You see, I gave him his black one. If he wants another, though, I shall be obliged to ask the Piper to collect." "Aren't--aren't you afraid of him?" stammered Gwendolyn, in a whisper. "_Afraid?_" he echoed, surprised. "Why, no! Are _you?_" Somehow, she felt ashamed. "N-n-not very," she faltered. No sooner did she partly deny her fear than she experienced a most delicious feeling of security! And this feeling grew as she watched the nearing Policeman. For she saw that he was in a mournful state. It was worry and grief that distorted his face. The dark eyes above the visor (both the black eye and the other one) were streaming with tears, tears which, naturally enough, ran from the four corners of his eyes, down across his forehead, and on into his hair. And it was evident that he had been weeping for a long time, for his cap was full! And now she realized that the hoarse cries which had filled her with terror were the saddest of complaints!--were not "Hoo! hoo!" but "_Boo!_ hoo!" "Poor man!" sympathized the little old gentleman, wagging his beard. Jane, however, with characteristic lack of compassion, hopped about, _tee-heeing_ loudly--and straightening out any number of wrinkles. "Oh, ain't he a sight!" she chortled. She had entirely given over her threatening. Gwendolyn now felt secure enough. But she did not feel like laughing. She was sober to the point of pitying. For though he looked ridiculous, he was so absolutely helpless, so utterly unhappy. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" he exclaimed as he came on--hand over hand, legs held together, and swaying from side to side rhythmically, like the pendulum of the metronome. "What shall I do! What shall I do!" "Need any sharpening?" called out the Man-Who-Makes-Faces, brandishing the curved knife. "Is there something wrong?" "Wrong!" echoed the Policeman dolefully. "I should say so! Oh, _dear!_ Oh, dear!" And still weeping copiously, so that his forehead glistened with his tears, he plodded across the border of the Face-Shop. It was then that Gwendolyn recalled under what circumstances she had seen him last. Only two or three days before, when bound homeward in the limousine, she had spied him loitering beside the walled walk. "What makes his club shine so?" she had asked Jane, whispering. "Eh?" whispered Jane in return; "what else than _blood?_" The wind was blowing as the automobile swept past him: The breeze lifted the tail of his belted coat. And for one terrifying instant Gwendolyn caught a glimpse of steel! "And if he don't mean harm to anybody," Jane had added when Gwendolyn turned scared eyes to her, "why does he carry a _pistol?_" But there was no need to fear a weapon now. The falling away of his coat-tails had uncovered his trouser-pockets. And as he halted, Gwendolyn saw that his revolver was gone, his pistol-pocket empty. She took a timid step toward him. "How do you do, Mr. Officer," she said. "Can't you let your feet come down? Then you'd be on your back, and you could get up the right way." Up came his face between his coat-tails. He stared at her with his new black eye--with the other one, too. (She noted that it was blue.) "But I _am_ up the right way," he answered, "Oh, no! It isn't that! It isn't that!" His hands were encased in white cotton gloves. He rocked himself from one to the other. "No, it _isn't_ that," agreed the little old gentleman; "but I firmly believe that, you'd feel better if you'd order another eye." "Another eye!" said the Policeman, bitterly. "Would another eye help me to find him?" "Oh, I see." The Man-Who-Makes-Faces spoke with some concern. "Then he's flown?" Gwendolyn, puzzled, glanced from one to the other. "Who is 'he'?" she asked. The Policeman bumped his head against his night-stick. "The Bird!" he mourned. At that, Jane hopped up and down in evident delight. But Gwendolyn fell back, taking up a position beside the little old gentleman. That Bird again! And it was evident that the Policeman thought well of him! Pity swiftly merged into suspicion. "I s'pose you mean the Bird that tells people things," she ventured--to be sure that she was not misjudging him. He wiped his black eye on a coat-tail. "Aye," he answered. "That's the one. And, oh, but he could tell _you_ things!" Gwendolyn considered the statement. At last, "He's a tattletale!" she charged, and felt her cheeks crimson with sudden anger. He nodded--so vigorously that some of his tears splashed over the rim of his cap. "That's why the Police can't get along without him," he declared. "And, oh, here I've gone and lost him! And They'll put me off the Force!" (Bump! bump! bump!) "They?" she questioned. "Do you mean the soda-water They?" "And They know so much," explained the little old gentleman, "because the Bird tells 'em." "He tells 'em everything," grumbled the Officer. "They send him around the whole country hunting gossip--when he ought to be working exclusively in the interest of Law and Order." Law and Order--Gwendolyn wondered who these two were. "He knows everything _I_ do," asserted the Policeman, "and everything _she_ does--" Here he jerked his head sidewise at Jane. She retreated, an expression of guilt on that front face. "And everything _you_ do," he went on, indicating Gwendolyn. "I know that," she said in an injured tone. "He told Jane I was here." At that, the Policeman gave himself a quick half-turn. "You've _seen_ him?" he demanded of the nurse. She shifted from side to side nervously. "It ain't the same one," she protested. "It--" He interrupted. "You couldn't be mistaken," he declared. "Did he have a bumpy forehead? and a lumpy tail?" "You don't mean _a lump of salt_," said Gwendolyn, astonished. "He does," said the little old gentleman. "And the bumpy forehead is from having to remember so many things." She heaved a sigh of relief. "Well, I think I'd like _that_ Bird," she said. "And I don't believe he's far. 'Cause when you whistled I heard flying." "_Running_ and flying," corrected the Policeman; "--running and flying to _me_." (He said it proudly.) "The squirrels and the robin-redbreasts, and the sparrows, all follow me here from the Park of a night, knowing I protect 'em." "Oh?" murmured Gwendolyn. "You protect 'em?" She looked sidewise at Jane, reflecting that the nurse had given him quite another character. "Yes; and I protect old, old people." "Huh!" snorted the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "You protect old people, eh? Well, how about old _organ-grinders?_" "You ought to know," answered the Officer promptly. "I guess you didn't give me that black eye for nothing." Whereat the little old gentleman suddenly subsided into silence. "Yes, I protect old people," reiterated the other, "and the blind, of course, and the trees and the flowers and the fountains. Also, the statues. There's the General, for instance. If I didn't watch out, folks would scribble on him with chalk." Gwendolyn assented. Once more she was beginning to have belief in him. "Then," he resumed, "I look after the children, so that--" She started. The children!--_he?_ "But," she interrupted, "Jane's always told me that you grab little boys and girls _and carry 'em off_." Then, fairly shook at her own boldness. "I never!" denied Jane, sullenly. He laughed. "I _do_ carry 'em off. But _where?_" "I don't know,"--in a flutter. "Tell her," urged the little old gentleman. The Policeman leaned his feet against the bill-board. "I'm the man," said he, "that takes lost little kids to their fathers and mothers." To their fathers and mothers! Gwendolyn came round upon Jane, lifting accusing eyes, pointing an accusing finger, "So!" she breathed. "You told me he stole 'em! It isn't _true!_" And she wiggled the finger. Jane edged away, head on one side "Oh, I was jokin' you," she declared lightly. But--accidentally--- she turned aside her grinning front face and gave the others a glimpse of the back one. And each noted how the square mouth was trembling with anxiety. "Ah-ha!" exclaimed Gwendolyn, triumphantly. "I'm finding you out!" The Policeman crossed his feet against the bill-board, taking care not to injure any of the articles there displayed. "Yes, I've taken a lot of lost little kids to their fathers and mothers," he repeated. "And I was just wondering if you--" She gave him no chance to finish his sentence. In her joy at finding that here was another friend, she ran to him and leaned to smile into his face. "You'll help _me_ to find my fath-er and moth-er, won't you?" she cried. "_Cer_-tainly!" "We were starting just as you came," said the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "Well, let's be off!" His whistle hung by a thin chain from a button-hole of his coat. He swung it to his lips, _Toot! Toot!_ It was a cheery blast. The next moment, coming, as it were, on the heels of her sudden good fortune, Gwendolyn closed her right hand and found herself possessed of a bag of candy!--red-and-white stick-candy of the variety that she had often seen selling at street corners (out of show-cases that went on wheels). More than once she had longed, and in vain, to stop at one of these show-cases and purchase. Now she suddenly remembered having done so with a high hand. The sticks were striped spirally. Boldly she produced one and fell to sucking it, making more noise with her sucking than ever the strict proprieties of the nursery permitted. Then, candy in hand, and with the little old gentleman on her right, the Policeman on her left, and Jane trailing behind, doing a one-two-three-and-point, she set forward gayly along the wide, curving road. CHAPTER XI As she trotted along, pulling with great relish at a candy-stick, she glanced down at the Policeman every now and then--and glowed with pride. On some few well-remembered occasions her chauffeur had condescended to hold a short conversation with her; had even permitted her to sound the clarion of the limousine, with its bright, piercing tones. All of which had been keenly gratifying. But here she was, actually conversing with an Officer in full uniform! And on terms of perfect equality! She proffered him the bag of spiral sweets. He cocked his head side wise at it. "Is that the chewing kind?" he inquired. "Oh, I'm sorry!" However, he did not seem in the least disappointed. For he had a mouthful of gum, and this he cracked loudly from time to time--in a way that excited her admiration and envy. "I've watched you go by our house lots of times," she confided presently, eager to say something cordial. "Oh?" said he. "It's a beat that does well enough in summer. But in the wintertime I'd rather be Down-Town." Puffing a little,--for though he was upside down and walking on his hands, he had so far made good progress--he halted and rested his feet against the lowest limb of a tree that stood close to the road. Now his cap touched the ground, and his hands were free. With one white-gloved finger he drew three short lines in the packed dirt. "And you _ought_ to be Down-Town," declared the little old gentleman, halting too. "Because you're a Policeman with a level head." A level head? Gwendolyn stooped to look. And saw that it was indeed a fact! "If I hadn't one," answered the Policeman with dignity, "would I be able to stand up comfortably in this remarkable manner?" "Oh, tee! hee! hee! hee!" It was the nurse, her sleeve lifted, her blowzy face convulsed. As she laughed, Gwendolyn saw wrinkle after wrinkle in the black sateen taken up--with truly alarming rapidity. "My!" she exclaimed. "Jane's always been stout. But now--!" The Policeman was deepening the three short lines in the dirt, making a capital A. "Two streets come together," he said, placing his finger on the point of the letter. "And the block that connects 'em just before they meet, that's the beat for _me_." "I hope you'll get it," she said heartily. "Get it!" he repeated bitterly. "Well, I certainly won't if I don't find that Bird!" And he started forward once more. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces, trudging alongside, craned to peer ahead, his grizzled beard sticking straight out in front of him. "Now, let me see," he mused in a puzzled way. "Which route, I wonder, had we better take?" "That depends on where we're going," replied the Policeman, helplessly. "And with the Bird gone, of course I don't know." "I'll tell you," said the little old gentleman promptly. "First, we must cross the Glass--" Gwendolyn gave him a quick glance. Surely he meant cross the _grass_. "Yes, the Glass; go on," encouraged the Officer. "--And find _him_." Those round dark eyes darted a quick glance at Gwendolyn. Jane, capering at his heels, now interrupted. "Find him!" she taunted. "Gwendolyn'll never find her father if she don't listen to me." He ignored her. "Next," he went on "we'll steer straight for Robin Hood's Barn." "Oh!" exclaimed the Policeman "Then we have to go around." "_Every_body has to go around." Once more Jane broke in. "Gwendolyn," she called, "you'll never find your mother. This precious pair is takin' you the wrong way!" Gwendolyn paid no heed. Ahead the road divided--to the left in a narrow bridle-path, all loose soil and hoof-prints, and sharp turns; to the right in a level thoroughfare that held a straight course. She touched the little old gentleman's elbow. "Which?" she whispered. As the parting of the ways was reached, he pointed. And she saw a sign--a sign with an arrow directing travelers to the right. Under the arrow, plainly lettered, were the words: _To the Bear's Den_. Gwendolyn looked her concern. "Do we _have_ to go that road?" she asked him. He nodded. The next moment, with a loud rumbling of the eyes, Jane came alongside. "Oh, dearie," she cried, "you couldn't hire _me_ to go. And I wouldn't like to see _you_ go. I think too much of you, I do _indeed_." "Hold your tongue!" ordered the little old gentleman, crossly. Jane obeyed. Up came a hand, and she seized the tongue-tip in her front mouth. But since there was a second tongue-tip in that back face, she still continued her babbling: "Don't ask me to trapse over the hard pavements on my poor tired feet, dearie, just because you take your notions.... Come, I say! Your mother's nobody, anyhow.... You don't know what you're sayin' or doin', poor thing! You're just wanderin', that's all--just wanderin'." "I'm wandering in the right direction, anyhow," retorted Gwendolyn, stoutly. And to the little old gentleman, "I'm sorry we're going this way, though. I'm 'fraid of Bears,"--for the sign was past now; the four were on the level thoroughfare. The Policeman seemed not to have remarked her anxiety. "And after the Den, what do we pass?" he questioned. "The Big Rock," answered the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "Do we have to turn it?" The other spoke with some annoyance. "What's likely to come out? I suppose it won't be hiding that Bird." "There's a hollow under the Rock," said the little old gentleman. "We'll find _something_." His face grew grave. "And--and after we go by the Big Rock?" ventured Gwendolyn. The little old gentleman smiled. "Ah, then!" he said, "--then we come to the Pillery!" "Oh!" She considered the reply. Pillery--it was a word she had never chanced upon in the large Dictionary. Yet she felt she could hardly ask any questions about it. She had asked so many already. "It's kind of you to answer and answer and answer," she said aloud. "Nobody else ever did that." "Ask anything you want to know," he returned cordially. "I'll always give you prompt attention. Though of course, there are _some_ things--" He hesitated. "Yes?"--eagerly. "That only fathers and mothers can answer." "Oh!" "Didn't you know that?" demanded the Policeman, surprised. "Tee! hee! hee! hee!" snickered Jane. Though she was some few steps in the rear, her difficult breathing could be plainly heard. She had laughed so much into her sleeve, and had grown so stout, that by now not a single wrinkle remained in the black sateen; _worse_--she was beginning to try every square inch of the cloth sorely. And having danced every foot of the way, she was tiring. "Oh, fath-er-and-moth-er questions," said Gwendolyn. "Precisely," answered the little old gentleman; "--about my friends, Santa Claus and the Sand-Man, for instance--" "They're not friends of Potter's, I guess. 'Cause he--" "--And the fairies, and the gnomes, and the giants; and Mother Goose and _her_ crowd. Of course a nurse or a governess or a teacher of some sort might _try_ to explain. Wouldn't do any good, though. You wouldn't understand." The Policeman swung his head back and forth, nodding. "That's the worst," said he, "of being a Poor--" Here he fell suddenly silent, and spatted the dust with his palms in an embarrassed way. She understood. "A Poor Little Rich Girl," she said, "who doesn't see her fath-er and moth-er." "But you will," he declared determinedly, and forged ahead faster than ever, white hand following white hand. It was then that Gwendolyn heard the nurse muttering and chortling to herself. "Well, I never!" exclaimed the tongue-tip that was not being held. "If this ain't a' _automobile_ road! Why, it's a _fine_ auto_mo_bile road! Ha! ha! ha! _That makes a difference!_" Gwendolyn was startled. What did Jane mean? _What_ difference? Why so much satisfaction all at once? She wished the others would listen; would take note of the triumphant air. But both were busy, the little old gentleman chattering and pointing ahead, the Policeman straining to keep pace and look where his companion directed. To lessen her uneasiness, Gwendolyn hunted a second stick of candy. Then sidled in between her two friends. "Oh, please," she began appealingly, with a glance up and a glance down, "I'm 'fraid Jane's going to make us trouble. Can't we think of some way to get rid of her?" The Policeman twisted his neck around until he could wink at her with his black eye. "In town," said he meaningly, "we Policemen have a way." "Oh, tell us!" she begged. For the Man-Who-Makes-Faces looked keenly interested. "Well," resumed the Officer--and now he halted just long enough to raise a gloved finger to one side of his head with a significant gesture--"when we want to get rid of a person, we put a flea in his ear." Gwendolyn blushed rosy. A flea! It was an insect that Miss Royle had never permitted her to mention. Still-- "But--but where could we--er--find--a--a--?" She had stammered that far when she saw the little old gentleman turn his wrinkled face over a shoulder. Next, he jerked an excited thumb. And looking, she saw that Jane was _failing to keep up_. By now the nurse had swelled to astonishing proportions. Her body was as round as a barrel. Her face was round too, and more red than ever. Her cheeks were so puffed, the skin of her forehead was so tight and shiny, that she looked precisely like a monster copy of a sanitary rubber doll! "She can't last much longer! Her strength's giving out." It was the Policeman. And his voice ended in a sob. (Yet the sob meant nothing, for he was showing all his white teeth in a delighted smile.) "She must have help!"--this the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. His voice broke, too. But his round, dark eyes were brimming with laughter. "Who'll help her?" demanded Gwendolyn. "_Nobody_. So _one_ of that three is gone for good!" She halted now--on the summit of a rise. Up this, but at a considerable distance, Jane was toiling, with feeble hops to the right, and staggering steps to the left, and faint, fat gasps. "Oh, Gwendolyn darlin'!" she called weepingly. "Oh, don't leave your Jane! Oh! Oh!" "I've made up my mind," announced Gwendolyn, "to have the nurse-maid in the brick house. So, good-by--good-by." She began to descend rapidly, with the little old gentleman in a shuffling run, and the Policeman springing from hand to hand as if he feared pursuit, and swaying his legs from side to side with a _tick-tock, tick-tock_. The going was easy. Soon the bottom of the slope was reached. Then all stopped to look back. Jane had just gained the top. But was come to a standstill. Over the brow of the hill could be seen only her full face--like a big red moon. At the sight, Gwendolyn felt a thrill of joy--the joy of freedom found again. "Why, she's not coming up," she called out delightedly. "She's going down!" And she punctuated her words with a gay skip. That skip proved unfortunate. For as ill-luck would have it, she stumbled. And stumbling stubbed her toe. The toe struck two small stones that lay partly embedded in the road--dislodged them--turned them end for end--and sent them skimming along the ground. "_Two!_" cried the Policeman. "_Now_ who?" "If only the right kind come!" added the little old gentleman, each of his round eyes rimmed with sudden white. "I'll blow my whistle." Up swung the shining bit of metal on the end of its chain. "Blow it at the top of your lungs!" The Policeman had balanced himself on his head, thrown away his gum, and put the whistle against his lips. Now he raised it and placed it against his chest, just above his collar-button. Then he blew. And through the forest the blast rang and echoed and boomed--until all the tapers rose and fell, and all the footlights flickered. Instantly that red moon sank below the crest of the hill. Puffs of smoke rose in its place. Then there was borne to the waiting trio a sound of _chugging_. And the next instant, with a purr of its engine, and a whirr of its wheels, here into full sight shot forward the limousine! Gwendolyn paled. The half-devoured stick of candy slipped from her fingers. "Oh, I don't want to be shut up in the car!" she cried out. "And I won't! I _won't!_ I WON'T!" She scurried behind the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. The automobile came on. Its polished sides reflected the varied lights of the forest. Its hated windows glistened. One door swung wide, as if yawning for a victim! The little old gentleman, as he watched it, seemed interested rather than apprehensive. After a moment, "Recollect my speaking of the Piper?" he asked. "Y-y-yes." At the mention of the Piper, the Policeman stared up. "The Pip-Piper!" he protested, stammering, and beginning to back away. At that, Gwendolyn felt renewed anxiety. "The Piper!" she faltered. "Oh, I'll have to settle with him." And thrust a searching hand into the patch-pocket. The Policeman kept on retreating. "I don't want to see him," he declared. "He made me pay too dear for my whistle." And he bumped his head against his night-stick. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces hastened to him, and halted him by grasping him about his fast-swaying legs. "You can't run away from the Piper," he reminded. "So--" Gwendolyn was no longer frightened. In her search for money she had found the gold-mounted leather case. This she now clutched, receiving courage from the stiff upper-lip. But the Policeman was far from sanguine. Now perspiration and not tears glistened on his forehead. He grasped his club with one shaking hand. As for the little old gentleman, he held the curved knife out in front of him, all his thin fingers wound tightly around its hilt. "What's the Piper got beside him?" he asked in a tone full of wonder. "Is it a _rubber-plant?_" Gwendolyn looked. The Piper was leaning over the steering-wheel of the car. He was so near by now that she could make him out clearly--a lanky, lean-jawed young man in a greasy cap and Johnnie Blake overalls. Over his right shoulder, on a strap, was suspended a bundle. A tobacco-pipe hung from a corner of his mouth. But it was evidently not this pipe that had given him his title; but pipes of a different kind--all of lead, in varying lengths. These were arranged about his waist, somewhat like a long, uneven fringe. And among them was a pipe-wrench, a coupling or two, and a cutter. Beside him on the seat, in the foot man's place, was a queer object. It was tall, and dark-blue in color. (Or was it green?) On one side of it were what seemed to be seven long leaves. On the other side were seven similar leaves. And as the car rolled swiftly up, these fourteen long leaf-like projections waved gently. She had no chance to examine the object further. Something else claimed her attention. The windowed door of the limousine suddenly swung wide, and through it, toward her, was extended a long black beckoning arm. Next, a freckled face filled the whole of the opening, spying this way and that. It was Jane! "Come, dearie," she cooed. (She had let go the front tongue-tip.) "I wouldn't stay with them two any more. Here's your beautiful car, love. _This_ is what'll take you fast to your papa and mamma." "_No!_" cried Gwendolyn. And to the Man-Who-Makes-Faces, "She was 'fraid of the Piper just a little while ago. Now, she's riding around with him. _I_ think he's--" "Ssh!" warned the little old gentleman, speaking low. "We have to have him. And he has his good points." The Piper was staring at Gwendolyn impertinently. Now he climbed down from his seat, all his pipes _tinkling_ and _tankling_ as he moved, and gave her a mocking salute, quite as if he knew her--yet without removing the tobacco-pipe from between his lips, or the greasy cap from his hair. "Well, if here ain't the P.L.R.G.," he exclaimed rudely. As she got a better view of him she remembered that she _had_ met him before--in her nursery, that fortunate morning the hot-water pipe burst. He was the very Piper that had been called in to make plumbing repairs! "Good-evening," said Gwendolyn, nodding courteously--but staying close to the little old gentleman. For Jane had summoned strength enough to topple out of the limousine and teeter forward. Now she was kneeling in the road, crooking a coaxing finger, and gurgling invitingly. The Piper scowled at the nurse. "Say! What do you think you're doin'?" he demanded. "Singin' a duet with yourself?" Then turning upon the Policeman, "Off your beat, ain't you?" he inquired impudently; when, without waiting for an answer, he swung round upon the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "Old gent," he began tauntingly, "I can't collect real money for that dozen ears." And threw out an arm toward the object on the driver's seat. Gwendolyn looked a second time. And saw a horrid and unnatural sight. For the object was a man, straight enough, broad-shouldered enough, with arms and legs, feet and hands, and a small head; but a man shockingly disfigured. For down either side of him, projecting from head and shoulders and arms, were ears--long, hairy, mulish ears, that wriggled horribly, one moment unfolding themselves to catch every sound, the next flopping about ridiculously. "Why, he's all ears!" she gasped. The little old gentleman started forward. "It's that dozen I boxed!" he announced. "Hey! Come out of there!" Gwendolyn's heart sank. Now she knew. From the first her fear had been that one of the dreaded three would come and fetch her out of the Land before she could find her parents. And here, at the very moment when she hoped to leave the worst of the trio behind, here was another!--to hamper and tattle and thwart. For the rubber plant was Thomas! And now all at once there was the greatest excitement. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces seized Thomas by an ear and dragged him to the ground, all the while upbraiding him loudly. And while these two were occupied, the Piper swaggered toward the Policeman, his pipes and implements striking and jangling together. "I want my money," he bellowed. "I don't owe you anything!" retorted the Policeman. All this gave Jane the opportunity she wished. She advanced upon Gwendolyn. "Come, sweetie," she wheedled. "Rich little girls don't hike along the streets like common poor little girls. So jump in, and pretend you're a Queen, and have a grand ride--" Now all of a sudden a terrible inclination to obey seized Gwendolyn. There yawned that door--here burned those reddish eyes, compelling her forward into a dreaded grasp-- She screamed, covering her face. In that moment of danger it was the Policeman who came to her rescue. Eluding the Piper, he ran, hand over hand, to the side of the car, balanced himself on his level head, and waved his club. "Move on!" he ordered in a deep voice (precisely as Gwendolyn had heard officers order at crowded crossings); "move on, there!" The limousine obeyed! With no one touching the steering-gear, the engine began to _chug_, the wheels to whirr. And purring again, like some great good-natured live thing, it gained momentum, took the road in a cloud of pink dust, and, rounding a distant turn, disappeared from sight. CHAPTER XII It occurred to Gwendolyn that it would be a very good idea to stop turning stones. The first one set bottom-side up had resulted in the arrival of Jane. And whereas the Policeman had appeared when the second was dislodged, here, following the accidental stub of a toe, were these two--the Piper and Thomas. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces hurried across to her, his expression dubious. "Bitter pill!" he exclaimed, with a sidewise jerk of the ragged hat. "Gall and wormwood!" "Oh, yes!" For--sure enough!--there _was_ an ill-flavored taste on her lips--a taste that made her regret having lost the candy. Next, the Policeman came _tick-tocking_ up. "The scheme was to kidnap you," he declared wrathfully. "And keep me from finding my fath-er and moth-er," added Gwendolyn. Now she understood why Jane was so pleased with the choice of the automobile road! And she realized that all along there was never any danger of her being kidnaped by _strangers_, but by the two who, their past ill-feeling evidently forgotten, were at this very moment chuckling and chattering together, ugly heads touching--the eary head and the head with the double face! Seeing the Policeman and the little old gentleman in conversation with Gwendolyn, the Piper slouched over. "Look a-here!" he began roughly, addressing all three; "you're goin' to make a great big mistake if you antagonize a man that belongs to a Labor Union." (Just so had he spoken the day he fixed the broken hot-water pipe.) "Bosh!" cried the Policeman. "What do we care about _him!_ Why, he'll never even get through the Gate!" Gwendolyn was puzzled. _What_ Gate? And _why_ would Thomas not get through it? Then looking round to where he was conspiring with Jane, she saw what she believed was a very good explanation: He would never even get through the Gate because (a simple reason!) the _nurse_ would not be able to get through. For by now Jane was not only as _round_ as a barrel, but she was fully as _large_--what with so much happy giggling over Thomas's arrival. Moreover, having toppled sidewise, she _looked_ like a barrel--a barrel upholstered in black sateen, with a neat touch of white at collar and cuffs! "He's been in trouble before," continued the Policeman, stormily. "But _this_ time--!" And letting himself down flat upon his head, he shook both neatly shod feet in the Piper's face. It was now that Gwendolyn chanced, for the first time, to examine the latter's bundle. And was surprised to discover that it was nothing less than a large _poke-bonnet_--of the fluffy, lacy, ribbony sort. And she was admiring it, for it was of black silk, and handsome, _when something within it stirred!_ She retreated--until the night-stick and the kidnaper knife were between her and the poke. "Hadn't we better be st-starting?" she faltered nervously. The Piper marked her manner, and showed instant resentment of it. "This here thing was handed me once in part-payment," he explained. "And I ain't been able to get rid of it since. Every single day it's harder to lug around. Because, you see, he's growin'." At that, the Policeman and the Man-Who-Makes-Faces exchanged a glance full of significance. And both shrugged--the Policeman with such an emphatic upside-down shrug that his shoulders brushed the ground. Gwendolyn's curiosity emboldened her. "_He?_" she questioned. "The pig." _The pig!_ Gwendolyn's pink mouth opened in amazement. Here was the very pig that she heard _belonged_ in a poke! The Piper was glowering at Jane, who was rocking gently from side to side, displaying first one face, then the other. "Well, _I_ call that dancing," he declared. And pulling out a small, well-thumbed account-book, jotted down some figures. Gwendolyn tried to think of something to say--while feeling mistrust toward the Piper, and abhorrence toward the poke and its contents. At last she took refuge in polite inquiry. "When did you come out from town?" she asked. The Piper grunted rather ill-humoredly (or was it the pig?--she could not be certain), and colored up a little. "I didn't _come_ out," he answered in his surly fashion. Whereupon he fell to fitting a coupling upon the ends of two pipes. "No?"--inquisitively. "I--er--got run out." "Oh!" Again the Policeman and the Man-Who-Makes-Faces exchanged a significant glance. "You see," went on the Piper, "in the City everybody's in debt. Well, I have to have my money, don't I? So I dunned 'em all good. But maybe--er--a speck _too_ much. So--" "Oh, dear!" breathed Gwendolyn "Of course, I've never been what you might call popular. Who _would_ be--if everybody owed him money." "Huh!" snorted the Policeman. "You overcharge," asserted the little old gentleman. Gwendolyn hastened to forestall any heated reply from the Piper. "You don't think your pig had anything to do with it?" she suggested considerately. "'Cause do--do _nice_ people like pigs?" "The pig was never in sight," asserted the Piper. "Guess that's one reason why I can't sell him. What people don't see they don't want to buy--even when it's covered up stylish." (Here he regarded the poke with an expression of entire satisfaction.) The little company was well on its way by now--though Gwendolyn could not recall the moment of starting. The Piper had not waited to be invited, but strolled along with the others, his birch-stemmed tobacco-pipe in a corner of his mouth, his hands in his pockets, and the pig-poke a-swing at his elbow. Thomas, left to get Jane along as best he could, had managed most ingeniously. The nurse was cylindrical. All he had to do, therefore, was to give her momentum over the smooth windings of the road by an occasional smart shove with both hands. Which made it clear that the likelihood of losing Jane, of leaving her behind, was lessening with each moment! For now the more the nurse laughed _the easier it would be to get her along_. "Oh, dear!" sighed Gwendolyn, with a sad shake of her yellow head as Jane came trundling up, both fat arms folded to keep them out of the way. "If she stopped dancin' where would I come in?" demanded the Piper, resentfully. The pig moved in the poke. He trounced the poor thing irritably. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces now began to speak--in a curious, chanting fashion. "The mode of locomotion adapted by this woman," said he, "rather adds to, then detracts from, her value as a nurse. Think what facilities she has for amusing a child!--on, say, an extensive slope of lawn. And her ability to, see two ways--practically at once--gives her further value. Would _she_ ever let a young charge fall over a cliff?" The barrel was whopping over and over--noiselessly, except for the faint chatter of Jane's tortoise-shell teeth. Behind it was Thomas, limp-eared by now, and perspiring, but faithful to his task. "The _best_ thing," whispered Gwendolyn, reaching to touch a ragged sleeve, "would be to get rid of Thomas. Then she--" The Policeman heard. "Get rid of Thomas?" he repeated. "Easy enough. _Look on the ground_." She looked. "See the h's?" Sure enough, the road was fairly strewn with the sixth consonant!--both in small letters and capitals. "Been dropped," went on the Officer. She had heard the expression "dropping his h's." Now she understood it. "Oh, but how'll these help?" "Show 'em to Thomas!" She approached the barrel--and pointed down. Thomas followed her pointing. Instantly his expression became furious. And one by one his ears stood up alertly. "It's him!" he shouted. "Oh, wait till I get my hands on him!" Then heaving hard at the barrel, he raced off along the alphabetical trail. Gwendolyn was compelled to run to keep up with him. "What's the trouble?" she asked the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "A Dictionarial difference," he answered, his dark-skinned face very grave. "Oh!" (She resolved to hunt Dictionarial up the moment she was back in the school-room.) Thomas was shouting once more from where he labored in the lead. "I'll murder him!" he threatened. "This time I'll mur-r-der him!" Murder? That made matters clear! There was only one person against whom Thomas bore such hot ill-will. "It's the King's English," she panted. "It's the King's English," agreed the Policeman, _tick-tocking_ in rapid _tempo_. She reached again to tug gently at a ragged sleeve. "Do _you_ know him?" she asked. The round black eyes of the little old gentleman shone proudly down at her. "All nice people are well acquainted with the King's English," he declared--which statement she had often heard in the nursery. Now, however, it embarrassed her, for she was compelled to admit to herself that _she_ was not acquainted with the King's English--and he a personage of such consequence! The Piper hurried alongside, all his pipes rattling. "Just where are we goin', anyhow?" he asked petulantly. "We're going to the Bear's Den," informed the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "And here's the Zoo now," announced the Policeman. It was unmistakably the Zoo. Gwendolyn recognized the main entrance. For above it, in monster letters formed by electric lights, was a sign, bulbous and blinding-- _Villa Sites Borax Starch Shirts._ "So _this_ is the Gate you meant!" she called to the Policeman. The Gate was flung invitingly wide Thomas rushed toward it, his fourteen ears flopping horribly. "And here _he_ is!" cried the Policeman. "On guard." The next moment--"'Alt!" ordered a harsh voice--a voice with an English accent. There was a flash of scarlet before Gwendolyn's face--of scarlet so vivid that it blinded. She flung up a hand. But she was not frightened. She knew what it was. And rubbed at her eyes hastily to clear them. He stood in full view. As far as outward appearance was concerned, he was exactly the looking person she had pictured in her own mind--young and tall and lusty, with a florid countenance and hair as blonde as her own. And he wore the uniform of an English soldier--short coat of scarlet, all gold braid and brass buttons; dark trousers with stripes; and a little round cap with a chin strap. But he carried no cane. Instead, as he stepped forward, nose up, chin up, eyes very bold, he swung a most amazing weapon. It was as scarlet as his own coat, as long as he was tall, and polished to a high degree. But it was not unbending, like a sword: It was limber to whippiness, so that as he twirled it about his blonde head it snapped and whistled. And Gwendolyn remembered having seen others exactly like it hanging on the bill-board at the Face-Shop. For it was a tongue! "Aw! Mah word!" exclaimed the King's English, surveying the halted group. Gwendolyn could not imagine what word he had in mind, but she thought him very fine. With his air of proud self-assurance, and his fine brilliant uniform, he was strikingly like her own red-coated toy! Anxious to make a favorable impression upon him, she smoothed the gingham dress hastily, brushed back straying wisps of yellow, straightened her shoulders, and assumed a cordial expression of countenance. "How do you do," she said, curtseying. He saluted. But blocked the way. "May we go into the Zoo, please?" His hand jerked down to his side. "One at a time," he answered; "--all but Thomas." Thomas had come short with the others. Now as Gwendolyn looked at him she saw that he, also, was armed with a tongue--a warped and twisted affair, rough, but thin along its edges. "If you try to keep me out," he cried, "I certainly _will_ murder you!" At this juncture the Policeman pit-patted forward and took his station at the left of the Gate. Next, the King's English stepped back until he stood at the right. Between them, hand in hand once more, passed Gwendolyn and the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. The Piper came next. "Call that a' English tongue?" he asked, with an impudent grin at the soldier's shining weapon. "Yes, sir." "Pah!" Now Thomas gave Jane a quick shove forward--but a shove which sent her only as far as the Gate. The King's English stared down at her. "How are you?" he said coldly. "I'm awful uncomfortable," was the mournful answer. "Then take off your stays," he advised. Whereat the polished tongue glanced through the light, caught Jane fairly around the waist, and with a swift recoil brought her to her feet! And now Gwendolyn, astonished, saw that too much laughter had again remolded that sateen bulk. The nurse had grown woefully heavy about the shoulders--which put a fearful strain on the stitches of her bodice! and gave her the appearance of a gigantic humming-top! As she swayed a moment on her wide-toed shoes--shoes now utterly lacking buttons--the King's English again struck out, caught her, this time, around the neck, and sent her spinning through the Gate! "_Zing-g-g-g!_" she laughed dizzily--that laugh the high, persistent note of a top! Thomas attempted to follow. "I just _will_ come in," he cried, wielding his warped weapon with a flourish. "You shall _not!_" To bar the way, the King's English thrust out his polished tongue. "I _will!_" _Crack! Crack!_ "You won't!" _Crack! Crack!_ The fight was on! For the combatants, tongue's-length from each other, were prowling to and fro menacingly. "Oh, there's going to be a tongue-lashing," cried Gwendolyn, frightened. "I'm the King's Hinglish!"--it was the soldier's slogan. "This is me!" sang Thomas, saucily flicking at a brass button. His face was all cunning. Then how the tongues popped! "This is I!" corrected the King's English promptly. But his face got a trifle more florid. "Steady!" counseled the little old gentleman. "I'm hall right," the other cried back. "Oh, Piper!" said Gwendolyn; "which side are _you_ on?" The Piper shifted his tobacco pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other. "I'm for the man that's got the _cash_," he declared. There was no doubt about Jane's choice. Seeing Thomas's momentary advantage, she came spinning close to the Gate. "Use h-words, Thomas!" she hummed. "Use h-words!" Thomas acted upon her advice. "Hack and hit and hammer!" he charged. "Haggle and halve and hamper! Halt and hang and harass!" "'Ack and 'it and 'ammer!" struck back the King's English, beginning to breath hard. "Aggie and 'alve and 'amper! 'Alt and 'ang and 'arass!" As the tongues met, Gwendolyn saw small bright splinters fly this way and that--a shower of them! These splinters darted downward, falling upon the road. And each, as it lit, was an h! The Policeman was frightened. "Which is your best foot?" he called. The King's English indicated his right. "This!" "Then put it forward!" "My goodness!" exclaimed Gwendolyn. "Am I seeing this, or is it just Pretend?" Thomas now warmed to the fray. "Harm!" he scourged, "Harness! Hash! Hew! Hoodwink! Hurt and hurk!" "'Eavens!" breathed the King's English. "Turn your cold shoulder," advised the little old gentleman. The King's English thrust out the right. And it helped! "Oh, hayches don't matter," he panted. "I'm hall right has long has 'is grammar doesn't get too bad." And off came one of Thomas's ears--a large one--and blew along the ground like a great leaf. That was an unfortunate boast. For Thomas, enraged by the loss of an ear, fought with renewed zeal. "If you see he, just tell I!" he shouted. The King's English went pallid. "If you see 'im, just tell me," he gasped, meeting Thomas gallantly--with the loss of only one splinter. "Oh, I want you to win!" called Gwendolyn to him. But the contest was unequal. That was now plain. The King's English had polish and finish. Thomas had more: his tongue, newly sharpened, cut deep at each blow. Unequal as was the contest, Jane's interference a second time made it more so. For as the fighters trampled to and fro, seeking the better of each other, she twirled near again. "Try your _verbs_, Thomas!" she counseled. "Try your verbs!" Eagerly Thomas grasped this second hint. "By which I could was!" he cried, with a curling stroke of the warped tongue; "or shall am!" At that, the King's English showed distressing weakness. He seemed scarcely to have enough strength for another snap. "By w'ich I could be!" he whipped back feebly; "or shall 'ave been!" And staggered sidewise. Now the warped and twisted tongue began to chant past-participially: "I done! I done!! I done!!!" "'Elp!" implored the King's English, fairly wan. "Friends, this--this fellow 'as treated me houtrageously for--for yaaws!" "Oh, worser and worser and worser," pursued Thomas, changing suddenly to adverbs. "Rawly now--!" The King's English tottered to his knees. "I _did_," prompted Gwendolyn, eager to help him. "I did," repeated the King's English--but the polished tongue slipped from his grasp! "I seen!" followed up Thomas. "I sung!" _Crack! Crack!_ It was the last fatal onslaught. The scarlet-coated figure fell forward. Yet bravely he strove again to give tongue-lash for tongue-lash--by reaching out one palsied hand toward his weapon. "I--I--s-a-w!" he muttered; "I s-s-s-ing!"--And expired, with his last breath gasping good grammar. Instantly Thomas leaped the prostrate figure and strode to the Gate. He was breathing hard, but looking about him boldly. "Now _I_ come through," he boasted. "O-o-o!" It was Gwendolyn's cry. "Officer, don't let him! _Don't!_" In answer to her appeal, the Policeman seized Thomas by a lower ear and shoved him against a gate-post. "You've committed murder!" he cried. "And I arrest you!" "Tongue-tie him!" shouted the little old gentleman, springing to jerk Thomas's weapon out of his hand, and to snatch up the nicked and splintered weapon of the vanquished soldier. Under the great blazing sign of the Zoo entrance the capture was accomplished. And in a moment, from his feet to his very ears, Thomas was wrapped, arms tight against sides, in the scarlet toils of the tongues. "So!" exclaimed the little old gentleman as he tied a last knot. "Thomas'll never bother my little girl again." And taking Gwendolyn by the hand, he led her away. It was not until she had gone some distance that she turned to take a last look back. And saw, there beside the wide Gate, a rubber-plant, its long leaves waving gently. It was Thomas, bound securely, and abandoned. Yet she did not pity him. He had murdered the King's English, and he deserved his punishment. Furthermore, he looked so green, so cool, so ornamental! CHAPTER XIII So far, the Piper had seemed to be no one's friend--unless, perhaps, his own. He had lagged along, surly or boisterous by turns, and careless of his manners; not even showing respect to the Man-Who-Makes-Faces and the Policeman! But now Gwendolyn remarked a change in him. For as he spoke to her, he took his pipe out of his mouth--under the pretext of cleaning it. "Say!" he began in a cautious undertone: "I'll give you some advice about Jane." Gwendolyn was looking about her at the Zoo. Its roofs seemed countless. They touched, having no streets between them anywhere, and reached as far as she could see. They were all heights, all shapes, all varieties--some being level, others coming to a point at one corner, a few ending in a tower. One tower, on the outer-most edge of the Zoo, was square, and tapered. "Jane?" she said indifferently. "Oh, she's only a top." "Only a top!" It was the little old gentleman. "Why, that makes her all the _more_ dangerous!" "Because she's spinning so fast"--the Policeman balanced on one arm while he shook an emphatic finger--"that she'll stir up trouble!" "Well, then, what shall I do?" asked Gwendolyn. For, elated over seeing Thomas disposed of so completely--and yet with so much mercy--she was impatient at hearing that she still had reason to fear the nurse. The Piper took his time about replying. He sharpened one end of a match, thrust the bit of pine into the stem of his pipe, jabbed away industriously, threw away the match, blew through the stem once or twice, and turned the bowl upside down to make it _plop, plop_ against a palm. Then, "Keep Jane laughin'," he counseled, "--_and see what happens_." Jane was alongside, spinning comfortably on her shoe-leather point. Now, as if she had overheard, or guessed a plot, sudden uneasiness showed on both her countenances, and she increased her speed. "You done up Thomas, the lot of you," she charged, as she whirled away. "But you don't git _me_." "And we won't," declared Gwendolyn, "if we don't hurry up and trip her." "A _good_ idear!" chimed in the Piper. "If we only had some string!" cried the little old gentleman. "String won't do," said the Policeman. "We need rope." There was a high wind sweeping the roofs. And as the three began to run about, searching, it fluttered the Policeman's coat-tails, swelled out the Piper's cap, and tugged at the ragged garb of the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "Here's a piece of clothes-line!" The Policeman made the find--catching sight of the line where it dangled from the edge of a roof. The others hastened to join him. And each seized the rope in both hands, the Piper staying at one end of it, the little old gentleman at the opposite, while Gwendolyn and the Policeman posted themselves at proper distances between. Then forward in a row swept all, carrying the rope with them. It was a curious one of its kind--as black as if it had been tarred, thick at the middle, but noticeably thin at one end. Jane saw their design. "Ba-a-a!" she mocked. "_I'm_ not afraid of you! I'm goin' to turn the Big Rock. _Then_ you'll see!" And she made straight toward the square tower in the distance. "_Oh!_" It was the little old gentleman, beard blown sidewise by the wind. "We musn't let her!" The Piper, in his excitement, jounced the pig so hard that it squealed. "We ought to be able," he panted, "to manage a top." "Jane!" bellowed the Policeman, galloping hard. "You must _not_ injure that shaft!" Then Gwendolyn realized that the square _tower_ toward which the nurse was spinning was the Big Rock. And she recognized it as a certain great pillar of pink granite, up and down the sides of which, deep cut by chisels, were written strange words. It rose just ahead. Answering the Officer with a shrill, scoffing laugh, Jane bore down upon it. Aided by the wind, she made top speed. There was not a moment to lose. Her pursuers fairly tore after her. And the Piper, who made the fastest progress, gained--until he was at her very heels. Then with a final leap, he passed her, and circled, dragging the rope. It made a loop about the buttonless shoes--a loop that tightened as the little old gentleman came short, as the Piper halted. Each gave a pull-- With disastrous result! For as the line came taut, up Jane went!--caught bodily from the ground. And still spinning, whizzed forward in that high wind and struck the granite squarely. She fell to the ground, toppling sidewise, and bulking large. But the shaft! It began to move--slowly at first--to tip forward, farther and farther. When, gaining velocity, with a great grinding noise, down from off the massive cube upon which it stood it came crashing! Instantly a chorus of cries arose: "Oh, she's bumped over the obelisk! She's bumped over the obelisk!" With the cries, and sounding from beneath the tapered end of the Big Rock, mingled ferocious growls--"_Rar! Rar! Rar! Rar!_" And in that same moment, the four who were holding the rope felt it begin to writhe and twist in their grasp!--_like a live thing_. And its black length took on a scaly look, glittering in that pink glow as if it were covered with small ebon _paillettes_. It grew cold and clammy. At its thicker end Gwendolyn saw that the Piper was supporting a head--a head with small, fiery eyes and a tongue flame-like in its color and swift darting. Next, "_Hiss-s-s-s-s!_" And with one hideous contortion, the huge black body wrung itself free and coiled. Once Gwendolyn had boasted that she was not afraid of snakes. And now she did not flee, though the black coils were piled at her very feet. For she recognized the serpent. There was no mistaking that thin face and those small eyes. Moreover, a pocket-handkerchief was bound round the reptilian jaws and tied at the top of the head in a bow-knot. She had gotten rid of Thomas. But here was Miss Royle! There was no time for greetings. Again were sounding those furious growls--"_Rar! Rar! Rar!_" Jane swung round in a half-circle to warn the governess. "It's that Bear!" she hummed. "Can't you drive him away?" Miss Royle began to uncoil. The Policeman was _tick-tocking_ up and down. "The Den's damaged!" he lamented. "_Now_, who's goin' to pay?" demanded the Piper. "I'm afraid the Bear's hurt," declared the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. In her eagerness to trip Jane, Gwendolyn had utterly forgotten the Bear's Den. Now she saw it--a large cage, light in color, its bars woven closely together. And she saw too--with horror--that what the Policeman said was true: In falling, the Big Rock had broken the cover of the Den. This cover was flopping up and down on its hinges. "Oh, he's loose!" she gasped. "_Rar! Rar! Rar-r-r!_" The Bear himself was knocking the cover into the air. The top of his head could be seen as he hopped about, evidently in pain. And now an extraordinary thing happened: A black glittering body shot rustling through the grass to the side of the Den. Then up went a scaly head, and forth darted a flaming tongue--driving the Bear back under the cover! At which the Bear rebelled. For his growls turned into a muffled protest--"Now, you stop, Miss Royle! I _won't_ be treated like this! I _won't!_" Then Gwendolyn understood Jane's hum! And why the governess had obeyed it so swiftly. The light-colored cage with the loose cover was nothing else than the old linen-hamper! As for the Bear--! Hair flying, cheeks crimson, eyes shining with quick tears of joy, she darted past Jane, leaped the glittering snake-folds before the hamper, and swung the cover up on its hinges. "Puffy!" she cried. "Oh, Puffy!" It was indeed Puffy, with his plushy brown head, his bright, shoe-button eyes, his red-tipped, sharply pointed nose, his adorably tiny ears, and deep-cut, tightly shut, determined mouth. It was Puffy, as dear as ever! As old and as squashy! He stood up in the hamper to look at her, leaning his front paws--in rather a dignified manner--on the broken edge of the basketry. He was breathing hard from his contest, but smiling nevertheless. "Ah!" said he, affably. "The Poor Little Rich Girl, I see!" Gwendolyn's first impulse was to take him up in her arms. But his proud air, combined with the fact that he had grown tremendously, caused her to check the impulse. "How do you do?" she inquired politely. "I'm pretty shabby, thank you." "Oh, it's _so_ good to hear your voice again!" she exclaimed. "When you left, I didn't have a chance to tell you good-by." It was then that she noticed a white something fluttering at his breast, just under his left fore-leg. "Excuse me," she said apologetically, "but aren't you losing your pocket handkerchief?" Sadly he shook his head. "It's my stuffing," he explained. And gently withdrawing his paw from her eager grasp, laid it upon his breast. "You see, the Big Rock--" The little old gentleman was beside him, examining the wound; muttering to himself. "Can you mend him?" asked Gwendolyn. "Oh, Puffy!" The little old gentleman began to empty his pockets of the articles with which he had provided himself--the ear, the handful of hair, the plump cheek. "Ah! Ah!" he breathed as he examined each one; and to and fro wagged the grizzled beard. "I'm afraid--! I must have help. This is a case that will require a specialist." The tone was so solemn that it frightened her. "Oh, do you mean we need a _Doctor?_" Puffy was trembling weakly. "I lost some cotton-batting once before," he half-whispered to Gwendolyn. "It was when you were teething. Oh, I know it was unintentional! You were _so_ little. But--I can't spare any more." Down into the patch-pocket went her hand. Out came the lip-case. She thrust it into his furry grasp. "Keep this," she bade, "till I come back. _I'll_ go for the Doctor." The Man-Who-Makes-Faces leaned down. "Fly!" he urged. At that, Jane began to circle once more. "Lovie," she hummed, "don't you go! He'll give you nasty medicine!" "Hiss-s-s-s!" chimed in Miss Royle, her bandaged head rising and lowering in assent. "He'll cut out your appendix." One moment she hesitated, feeling the old fear drive the blood from her cheeks--to her wildly beating heart. Then she saw Puffy sway, half fainting. And obeying the command of the little old gentleman, she grasped her gingham dress at either side--held it out to its fullest width--and with the wind pouching the little skirt, left the high grass, passed up through the lights of the nearby trees--and rose into the higher air! She gave a glance down as she went. How excitedly Jane was circling! How Miss Royle was lashing the ground! But the faces of the other three were smiling encouragement. And she flew for her very life. Lightly she went--as if there were nothing to her but her little gingham dress; as if that empty dress, having tugged at some swagging clothes-line until it was free, were now being wafted across the roofs, the tree-tops, the smooth windings of a road, to-- A bake-shop, without doubt! For her nostrils caught the good smell of fresh bread. Suddenly the shop loomed ahead of her. She alighted to have a look at it. It was a round, high, stone building, with stone steps leading up to it from every side, and columns ranged in a circle at the top of the steps. Seated on the bottom step, engrossed in some task, was a man. As Gwendolyn looked at him she told herself that the Man-Who-Makes-Faces had given this customer such a nice face; the eyes, in particular, were kind. He had a large pan of bread-dough beside him. Out of it, now, he gouged a spoonful, which he began to roll between his palms. And as he rolled the dough, it became rounder and rounder, until it was ball-like. It turned browner and browner, too, precisely as if it were baking in his hands! When he was finished with it, he piled it to one side, atop other brown pellets. She advanced to speak. "Please," she began, pointing a small finger, "what is this place?" He glanced up. "This, little girl, is the Pillery." The Pillery! Instantly she knew what he was making--_bread-pills_. And the bread-pills helped her to recognize him. She dimpled cordially. "I haven't seen you since I had the colic," she said, nodding, "but I know you. You're the Doctor!" The Doctor was most cordial, shaking her hand gently; after which, naturally enough, he felt her pulse. "But there's nothing the matter with _me_," she protested. "It's my dear Puffy. _You_ remember." Now he rose solemnly, selected a fresh-baked pill, bowed to the right, again to the left, last of all, to her--and presented the pill. "In that case, Miss Gwendolyn," he said, smiling down, "a toast!" And--quite in contrast to the evening of her seventh birthday anniversary--toast there _was_, deliciously crisp and crunchy! "Oo! How good!" she exclaimed, not nibbling conventionally, but taking big bites. "'Cause I hate cake!" The next moment she became aware of the munching of others. And on looking round, found that she was back at the Den. She was not surprised. Things had a way of coming to pass in a pleasantly instantaneous fashion. And she was glad to see the little old gentleman, the Piper and the Policeman each fairly gobbling up a pellet. Miss Royle was eating, too, and Jane was stuffing _both_ mouths. But Puffy was having quite different fare. In front of him stood the Doctor, busily feeding filmy white bits into the tear just under a fore-leg. "I think you'll find," assured the latter, "that a proper amount of cotton-batting is most refreshing." "Once I wanted Jane to take me to the Doll Hospital," complained Puffy, his shoe-button eyes hard with resentment; "but she said I was only a little beast." Gwendolyn looked severe. "Jane, you'll be sorry for that," she scolded. "Ah-_ha!_ my dear!" said the Man-Who-Makes-Faces, addressing the nurse, "at last one of your chickens is coming home to roost!" Gwendolyn glanced up. And, sure enough, a chicken _was_ going past--a small blue hen, who looked exceedingly fagged. (This was an occurrence worth noting. How often had she heard the selfsame remark--and never seen as much as a feather!) Jane also saw the blue hen. And appeared much disconcerted. "I think I'll take forty winks," she hummed; "--twenty for the front face, and twenty for the back." Whereupon she made a few quick revolutions, landing up against the granite base of the obelisk. The Doctor had been sewing up the tear in Puffy's coat. Now he finished his seam and knotted the thread. "There!" said he, cheerily. "You're as good as new!" "Thank you," said Puffy. "And I feel so grateful to you, Miss Gwendolyn, that I must repay your kindness. You've always heard a certain statement about Jane, yonder. Well, I'm going to prove that it's _true_." "What's true?" asked Gwendolyn, puzzled. He made no answer. But after a short whispered conference with the Policeman, turned his back and began sniffing and snarling under his breath, while a fore-paw was busy in the region of his third rib. When he faced round again, the shoe-button eyes were shining triumphantly, and he was holding both fore-paws together tightly. "I found one!" he cried. And wabbling over to Jane, stationed himself on one side of her, at the same time motioning the Officer to steal round to the other side on quiet hands. And now Gwendolyn saw that Jane, though she was only feigning sleep, was ignorant of what was happening. For her double equipment of faces had its disadvantages. Even when upright she had not been able to roll one eye forward while its mate was on guard in the rear. And reclining flat upon her back, she could not rumble her eyes forward to her front face for the reason that they would not roll up-hill. Both stayed in the back of her head, where they could see only the ground. Very cautiously Puffy put his fore-paws to Jane's ear--suddenly separated them--and waited. A moment. Then, "Well, finding _this_ out, you can wager I don't stay heels over head no more!" cried the Policeman. And with a wriggle and a twist and a bound, he gave a half somersault and stood on his feet! At once, the bottoms of his trouser-legs came down over his shoes, his coat-tails fell about him properly, uncovering his shield and his belt, and his club took its place at his right side. "Ouch!" he exclaimed. And began to scratch hard at the spot just between his shoulder-blades. At the same time, the tears that were in his cap flowed out and down his face. So that he seemed to be weeping. The Doctor, leaning close beside Gwendolyn, was all sympathy. "There is no reason to feel bad," he said kindly. "The operation was successful." "Feel bad!" repeated the Policeman. "Why, I'm _laughing_. Ha! Ha! We put a flea in her ear!" At that, Jane began to laugh "Oh, laws!" she exclaimed, sleeve to mouth once more. "Oh, I never heard the like of it!" "_Rar!_" growled Puffy, delighted. "The plan is working! See her growl!" "That flea went in one ear and came out the other," declared the little old gentleman, poking Jane with the toe of a worn shoe. Jane laughed the harder. "Oh, it's awful funny!" she cried, rocking herself to and fro--and steadily increasing her girth. "Oh! Oh! Oh!" "We've proved that you're empty-headed," said Puffy. And now the nurse was seized by a very paroxysm of mirth. Both faces distorted, she whopped over and over. "That's right! Split your sides alaughin'," cried the Piper. At these words, sudden terror showed on her face. For the first time she saw the trap into which she had been led! Yet she could not check her laughter. "Oh, ho!" she gasped hysterically; "_oh!_--" It was her last. Black sateen could stand no more. She gave a final and feeble rock. Both revolving faces paled. Then there sounded a loud _pop_--like the bursting of an automobile tire. Next, a ripping-- "Look!" cried Gwendolyn. There were great rents down the front seams of Jane's waist! The nurse guessed what had happened, and clutched desperately at the gaping seams with both fat hands--now in front, now at the sides, striving to hold the rips together. To no avail! All the laughter was gone out of her. Quickly she collapsed, her sateen hanging in loose, ragged strips. Once more she was just ordinary nurse-maid size. "Oh, will she die?" asked Gwendolyn, anxiously. The Doctor knelt to grasp Jane's wrist. "No," he answered gravely; "she'll only have to go back to the Employment Agency." "I won't!" cried Jane. "_I_ won't!--Miss Royle!" "_Hiss-ss-ss!_" "Get you-know-what out of the way! A certain person musn't talk to it! If she does she'll find--" "I understand!" hissed back the snake. _You-know-what?_ Gwendolyn was troubled. Now the Policeman and the Piper, assisted by Puffy, picked the nurse up and packed her into the linen-hamper. Whereupon the little old gentleman slapped down the cover and tied a large tag to it. On the tag was written--_Employment Agency, Down-Town!_" "I'm done with _her_" said Gwendolyn; "--if she _is_ a perfectly good top." "You're rid of me," answered Jane, calling through the weave of the hamper "_Yes!_ But how about _Miss Royle?_" "We'll send her back too," declared the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "Here! Where _are_ you?" He ran about, searching. The others searched also--through the grass, behind the granite shift, everywhere. Concern sobered each face. For the snake-in-the-grass was gone! CHAPTER XIV Why had Miss Royle, sly reptile that she was, scuttled away without so much as a good-by? "Oh, dear!" sighed Gwendolyn; "just as soon as one trouble's finished, another one starts!" "We must get on her track!" declared the Policeman, patroling to and fro anxiously. "And let's hurry," urged the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "It's coming night in the City. And all these lights'll be needed soon." Very soon, indeed. For even as he spoke it happened--with a sharp click. Instantly the pink glow was blotted out. As suddenly thick blackness shut down. Except straight ahead! There Gwendolyn made out an oblong patch of sky in which were a few dim stars. "Never mind," went on the little old gentleman, soothingly. "Because we're close to the place where there's light all the time." "_All_ the time?" repeated Gwendolyn, surprised. "It's where light grows." "_Grows?_" "Well, it's where _candle_-light grows." "Candle-light!" she cried. "You mean--! Oh, it's where my fath-er comes!" "Sometimes." "Will he be there now?" "Only the Bird can tell us that." Then she understood Jane's last gasping admonition--"Get you-know-what out of the way! A certain person mustn't talk to it! If she does she'll find--" It was the Doctor's hand that steadied her as she hurried forward in the darkness. It was a big hand, and she was able to grasp only two fingers of it. But that clinging hold made her feel that their friendship was established. She was not at all surprised at her complete change of attitude toward him. It seemed to her now as if he and she had always been on good terms. The others were near. She could hear the _tinkle-tankle_ of the Piper's pipes, the scuff of Puffy's paws, the labored breathing of the little old gentleman as he trudged, the heavy tramp, tramp of the Policeman. She made her bare feet travel as fast as she could, and kept her look steadily ahead on the dim stars. And saw, moving from one to another of them, in quick darts--now up, now down--a small Something. She did not instantly guess what it was--flitting across that half-darkened sky. Until she heard the wild beating of tiny pinions! "Why, it's a bird!" she exclaimed. "A bird?" repeated the Policeman, all eagerness. "Must be _the_ Bird!" declared the Man-Who-Makes-Faces, triumphantly. It was. Even in the poor light her eager eyes made out the bumps on that small feathered head. And saw that on the down-drooping tail, nicely balanced, and gleaming whitely, was a lump. Remembering what she had heard about that bit of salt, she ran forward. At her approach, his wings half-lifted. And as she reached out to him, pointing a small finger, he sprang sidewise, alighting upon it. "Oh, I'm glad you've come!" he panted. He was no larger than a canary; and seemed to be brown--a sparrow-brown. Prejudiced against him she had been. He had tattled about her--_worse_, about her father. Yet seeing him now, so tiny and ruffled and frightened, she liked him. She brought him to a level with her eyes. "What's the matter?" she asked soothingly. "I'm afraid." He thrust out his head, pointing. "_Look_." She looked. Ahead the tops of the grass blades were swaying this way and that in a winding path--as if from the passage of some crawling thing! "She tried to get me out of the way!" "Oh, tell me where is my fath-er!" "Why, of _course_. They say he's--" He did not finish; or if he did she heard no end to the sentence. Of a sudden her face had grown almost painfully hot--as a great yellow light flamed against it, a light that shimmered up dazzlingly from the surface of a broad treeless field. This field was like none that she had ever imagined. For its acres were neatly sodded with _mirrors_. The little company was on the beveled edge of the field. To halt them, and conspicuously displayed, was a sign. It read-- _Keep off The Glass._ "'Keep off the glass,'" read Gwendolyn. "And I don't wonder. 'Cause we'd crack it." "We don't crack it, we cross it," reminded the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. And stepped boldly upon the gleaming plate. "My! My!" exclaimed the Piper. "Ain't there a _fine_ crop this year!" A fine crop? Gwendolyn glanced down. And saw for the first time that the mirrored acres were studded, flower-like, with countless silk-shaded candles! What curious candles they were! They did not grow horizontally, as she had imagined they must, but upright and candle-like. Above their sticks, which were of brass, silver and decorated porcelain, was a flame, ruddy of tip, sharply pointed, but fat and yellow at the base, where the soft white wax fed the fire; at the other end of the sticks, as like the top light as if it were a perfect reflection, was a second flame. These were candles that burned _at both ends_. And this was the region she had traveled so far to find! Her heart beat so wildly that it stirred the plaid of the little gingham dress. "Say! I hear a quacking!" announced Puffy, staring up into the sky. Gwendolyn heard it, too. It seemed to come from across the Field of Double-Ended Candles. She peered that way, to where a heavy fringe of trees walled the farther side greenily. She saw him first!--while the others (excepting the Bird) were still staring skyward. At the start, what she discerned was only a faint outline on the tree-wall--the outline of a man, broad-shouldered, tall, but a trifle stooped. It was faint for the reason that it blended with the trees. For the man was garbed in green. As he advanced into the field, the chorus of quacks grew louder. And presently Gwendolyn caught certain familiar expressions--"Oh, don't bozzer me!" "Sit up straight, Miss! Sit up straight!" (this a rather deep quack). "My dear child, you have no sense of time!" And, "What on earth ever put such a question into your head!" She concluded that the expressions were issuing from the large bell-shaped horn which was pointed her way over one shoulder of the man in green. The talking-machine to which the horn was attached--a handsome mahogany affair--he carried on his back. It was not unlike a hand-organ. Which made Gwendolyn wonder if he was not the Man-Who-Makes-Faces' brother. She glanced back inquiringly at the little old gentleman. Either the stranger _was_ a relation--and not a popular one--or else the quacking expressions annoyed. For the Man-Who-Makes-Faces was scowling. And, "Cavil, criticism, correction!" he scolded, half to himself. He in green now began to move about and gather silk-shaded candles, bending this way and that to pluck them, and paying not the slightest attention to the group of watchers in plain view. But not one of these was indifferent to _his_ presence. And all were acting in a most incomprehensible manner. With one accord, Doctor and Piper, Bear and Policeman, Face-maker and Bird, were rubbing hard at the palm of one hand. There being no trees close by, the men used the sole of a shoe, while Puffy raked away at one paw with the claws of the others, and the Bird pecked a foot with his beak. And yet Gwendolyn could not believe that it was really _he_. The Policeman drew near. "You've heard of Hobson's choice?" he inquired in a low voice. "Perhaps this is Hobson, or Sam Hill, or Punch, or Great Scott." The Man-Who-Makes-Faces shook his head. "You don't know him," he answered, "because recently, when the bears were bothering him a lot in his Street, I made him a long face." The man in green was pausing where the candles clustered thickest. Gwendolyn, still doubtful, went forward to greet him. "How do you do, sir," she began, curtseying. His face was long, as the Man-Who-Makes-Faces had pointed out--very long, and pale, and haggard. Between his sunken temples burned his dark-rimmed eyes. His nose was thin, and over it the skin was drawn so tightly that his nostrils were pinched. His lips were pressed together, driving out the blood. His cheeks were hollow, and shadowed bluely by a day-old beard. He had on a hat. Yet she was able (curiously enough!) to note that his hair was sparse over the top of his head, and streaked with gray. Nevertheless there was no denying that she recognized him dimly. Something knotted in her throat--at seeing weariness, anxiety, even torture, in those deep-set eyes. "I think I've met you before somewhere," she faltered. "Your--your long face--" The Bird was perched on the forefinger of one hand. She proffered the other. He did not even look at her. "My hands are full," he declared. And again, "My hands are full." She glanced at them. And saw that each was indeed full--of paper money. Moreover, the green of his coat was the green of new crisp bills. While his buff-colored trousers were made of yellowish ones, carefully creased. He was literally _made of money_. Now she felt reasonably certain of his identity. Yet she determined to make even more sure. "Would you mind just turning around for a moment?" she inquired. "But I'm busy to-day," he protested, "I can't be bothered with little girls. I'll see you when you're eight years old." Nevertheless he faced about accommodatingly. The moment he turned his back he displayed a detail of his dress that had not been visible before. This detail, at first glance, appeared to be a smart leather piping. On second glance it seemed a sort of shawl-strap contrivance by which the talking-machine was suspended. But in the end she knew what it was--a leather harness!--an exceedingly handsome, silver-buckled, hand-sewed harness! She went around him and raised a smiling face--caught at a hand, too; and felt her own happy tears make cool streaks down her cheeks. "I--I don't see you often," she said, "bu-but I know you just the same. You're--you're my fath-er!" At that, he glanced down at her--stooped--picked a candle--and held it close to her face. "Poor little girl!" he said. "Poor little girl!" "Poor little _rich_ girl," she prompted, noting that he had left out the word. She heard a sob! The next moment, _Rustle! Rustle! Rustle!_ And at her feet the gay-topped candles were bent this way and that--as Miss Royle, with an artful serpent-smile on her bandaged face, writhed her way swiftly between them! "Dearie," she hissed, making an affectionate half-coil about Gwendolyn, "what _do_ you think I'm going to say to you!" Gwendolyn only shook her head. "_Guess_, darling," encouraged the governess, coiling herself a little closer. "Maybe you're going to say, 'Use your dictionary,'" ventured Gwendolyn. "Oh, dearie!" chided Miss Royle, managing a very good blush for a snake. But now Gwendolyn guessed the reason for the other's sudden display of affection. For that scaly head was rising out of the grass, inch by inch, and those glittering serpent eyes were fixed upon the Bird! Unable to move, he watched her, plumage on end, round eyes fairly starting. "_Cheep! Cheep!_" At his cry of terror, the Doctor interposed. "I think we'd better take the Bird out of here," he said. "The less noise the better." And with that, he lifted the small frightened thing from Gwendolyn's finger. Miss Royle, quite thrown off her poise, sank hissing to the ground. "My neuralgia's worse than ever this evening," she complained, affecting not to notice his interference. "Huh!" he grunted. "Keep away from bargain counters." The Piper came jangling up. "That snake belongs in her case," he declared, addressing the Doctor. More than once Gwendolyn had wondered why the Piper had burdened himself--to all appearances uselessly and foolishly--with the various pieces of lead pipe. But now what wily forethought she granted him. For with a few quick flourishes of the wrench, she saw him join them, end to end, to form one length. This he threw to the ground, after which he gave a short, sharp whistle. In answer to it, the Bird fluttered down, and entered one end of the pipe, giving, as he disappeared from sight, one faint cheep. Miss Royle heard. Her scaly head glittered up once more. Her beady eyes shone. Her tongue darted hate. Then little by little, that long black body began to move--toward the pipe! A moment, and she entered it; another, and the last foot of rustling serpent had disappeared. Then out of the farther end of the pipe bounced the Bird. Whereat the Piper sprang to the Bird's side, produced a nut, and screwed it on the pipe-end. "How's that!" he cried triumphantly. The pipe rolled partly over. A muffled voice came from it, railing at him: "Be careful what you do, young man! _I_ saw you had that bonnet of mine!" "Oh, can a snake crawl backwards?" demanded Gwendolyn, excitedly. The Piper answered with a harsh laugh. And scrambling the length of the lead pipe, fell to hammering in a plug. Miss Royle was a prisoner! The Bird bounced very high. "That's a feather in _your_ cap," he declared joyously, advancing to the Piper. And suiting the action to the word, pulled a tiny plume from his own wing, fluttered up, and thrust it under the band of the other's greasy head-gear. "Think how that governess has treated me," growled Puffy. "When I was in your nursery, and was old and a little worn out, _how_ I would've appreciated care--and repair!" "The Employment Agency for her," said the Piper. "I'll attend to that," added the Policeman. Gwendolyn's father had been gathering candles, and had seemed not to see what was transpiring. Now as if he was satisfied with his load, he suddenly started away in the direction he had come. His firm stride jolted the talking-machine not a little. The quacking cries recommenced-- "Please to pay me.... Let me sell you...! Let me borrow...! Won't you hire...! _Quack! Quack! Quack!_" After him hurried the others in an excited group. The Piper led it, his plumbing-tools jangling, his pig-poke a-swing. And Gwendolyn saw him grin back over a shoulder craftily--then lay hold of her father and _tighten a strap_. She trudged in the rear. She had found her father--and he could see only the candles he sought, and the money in his grasp! She was out in the open with him once more, where she was free to gambol and shout--yet he was bound by his harness and heavily laden. "I might just as well be home," she said to Puffy, disheartened. "Wish your father'd let me sharpen his ears," whispered the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. He shifted the hand-organ to the other shoulder. The Doctor had a basket on his arm. He peered into it. "I haven't a thing about me," he declared, "but a bread-pill." "How would a glass of soda-water do?" suggested the Policeman, in an undertone. "Why, of _course!_" It had happened before that the mere mention of a thing brought that dying swiftly. Now it happened again. For immediately Gwendolyn heard the rush and bubble and brawl of a narrow mountain-stream. Next, looking down from the summit of a gentle rise, she saw the smoky windings of the unbottled soda! The Doctor was a man of action. Though the Policeman had made his suggestion only a second before, here was the former already leaning down to the stream; and, having dipped, was walking in the midst of the little company, glass in hand. Gwendolyn ran forward. "Fath-er!" she called; "_please_ have a drink!" Her father shook his head. "I'm not thirsty," he declared, utterly ignoring the proffered glass. "I--I was 'fraid he wouldn't," sighed Gwendolyn, head down again, and scuffing bare feet in the cool damp grass of the stream-side--yet not enjoying it! The lights had changed: The double-ended candles had disappeared. Filling the Land once more with a golden glow were countless tapers--electric, gas, and kerosene. She was back where she had started, threading the trees among which she had danced with joy. But she was far from dancing now! "Let's not give up hope," said a voice--the Doctor's. He was holding up the glass before his face to watch the bubbles creaming upon its surface. "There may be a sudden turn for the better." Before she could draw another breath--here was the turn! a sharp one. And she, felt a keen wind in her eyes,--blown in gusts, as if by the wings of giant butterflies. The cloud that held the wind lay just ahead--a pinky mass that stretched from sky to earth. The Bird turned his dark eyes upon Gwendolyn from where he sat, high and safe, on the Doctor's shoulder. "I think her little journey's almost done," he said. There was a rich canary note in his voice. "Oo! goody!" she cried. "You mean you have a solution?" asked the little old gentleman. "A solution?" called back the Piper. "Well--?" A moment's perfect stillness. Then, "It's simple," said the Bird. (Now his voice was strangely like the Doctor's.) "I suppose you might call it a salt solution." His last three words began to run through Gwendolyn's mind--"A salt solution! A salt solution! A salt solution!"--as regularly as the pulse that throbbed in her throat. "Yes,"--the Doctor's voice now, breathless, low, tremulous with anxiety. "If we want to save her--" "Am I _her?_" interrupted Gwendolyn. (And again somebody sobbed!) "--_It must be done!_" "There isn't anything to cry about," declared Gwendolyn, stoutly. She felt hopeful, even buoyant. It was all novel and interesting. The Doctor began by making grabs at the lump of salt on the Bird's tail. The lump loosened suddenly. He caught it between his palms, after which he began to roll it--precisely as he had rolled the dough at the Pillery. And as the salt worked into a more perfect ball, it slowly browned! Gwendolyn clapped her hands. "My father won't know the difference," she cried. "You get my idea exactly," answered the Bird. The Doctor uncovered the pill-basket, selected a fine, round, toasted example of his own baking, and presented it to the Man-Who-Makes-Faces; presented a second to Gwendolyn; thence went from one to another of the little company, whereat everyone fell to eating. At once Gwendolyn's father looked round the circle of picknickers--as if annoyed by the crunching; but when the Doctor held out the brown salt, he took it, examined it critically, turning it over and over, then lifted it--and bit. "Pretty slim lunch this," he observed. He ate heartily, until the last salt crumb was gone. Then, "I'm thirsty," he declared "Where's--?" Instantly the Doctor proffered the glass. And the other drank--in one great gasping mouthful. "Ah!" breathed Gwendolyn. And felt a grateful coolness on her lips, as if she had slaked her own thirst. The next moment her father turned. And she saw that the change had already come. First of all, he looked down at his hands, caught sight of the crumpled bills, and attempted to stuff them hurriedly into his pocket. But his pockets were already wedged tight with silk-shaded candles. He reached round and fed the bills into the mahogany case of the talking-machine. Next, he emptied his pockets of the double-ended candles, frowned at them, and threw them to one side to wilt. Last of all, he spied a bit of leather strap, and pulled at it impatiently. Whereupon, with a clear ring of its silver mountings, his harness fell about his feet. He smiled, and stepped out of it, as out of a cast-off garment. This quick movement shook up the talking-machine, and at once voices issued from the great horn shrilly protesting into his ear--"_Quack!_ Quack! _Kommt, Fraulein!_" "_Une fille stupider!_" "Gid-_dap!_" "_Honk! Honk! Honk!_"--and then, rippling upward, to the accompaniment of dancing feet, a scale on a piano. He peered into the horn. "When did I come by _this?_" he demanded. "Well, I shan't carry it another step!" And moving his shoulders as if they ached, let the talking-machine slip sidewise to the glass. There was a crank attached to one side of the machine. This he grasped. And while he continued to stuff bills into the mahogany box with one hand, he turned the crank with the other. Gwendolyn had often marveled at the way bands of music, voices of men and women, chimes of clocks, and bugle-calls could come out of the self-same place. Now this was made clear to her. For as her father whirled the crank, out of the horn, in a little procession, waddled the creatures who had quacked so persistently. There were six of them in all. One wore patent leather pumps; one had a riding-whip; the third was in motor-livery--buff and blue; another waddled with an air unmistakably French (feathers formed a boa about her neck); the next advanced firmly, a metronome swinging on a slender pince-nez chain; the last one of all carried a German dictionary. Her father observed them gloomily. "_That's_ the kind of ducks and drakes I've been making out of my money," he declared. The procession quacked loudly, as if glad to get out. And waddled toward the stream. "Why!" cried Gwendolyn; "there's Monsieur Tellegen, and my riding-master, and the chauffeur, and my French teacher, and my music-teacher, and my Ger--!" His eyes rested upon her then. And she saw that he knew her! "Oh, daddy!"--the tender name she loved to call him. "Little daughter! Little daughter!" She felt his arms about her, pressing her to him. His pale face was close. "When my precious baby is strong enough--," he began. "I'm strong _now_." She gripped his fingers. "We'll take a little jaunt together." "We must have moth-er with us, daddy. Oh, _dear_ daddy!" "We'll see mother soon," he said; "--_very_ soon." She brushed his cheek with searching fingers. "I think we'd better start right away," she declared. "'Cause--isn't this a rain-drop on your face?" CHAPTER XV Without another moment's delay Gwendolyn and her father set forth, traveling a road that stretched forward beside the stream of soda, winding as the stream wound, to the music of the fuming water--music with a bass of deep pool-notes. How sweet it all was! Underfoot the dirt was cool. It yielded itself deliciously to Gwendolyn's bare tread. Overhead, shading the way, were green boughs, close-laced, but permitting glimpses of blue. Upon this arbor, bouncing along with an occasional chirp of contentment, and with the air of one who has assumed the lead, went the Bird. Gwendolyn's father walked in silence, his look fixed far ahead. Trotting at his side, she glanced up at him now and then. She did not have to dread the coming of Jane, or Miss Royle, or Thomas. Yet she felt concern--on the score of keeping beside him; of having ready a remark, gay or entertaining, should he show signs of being bored. No sooner did the thought occur to her than the Bird was ready with a story. He fluttered down to the road, hunted a small brush from under his left wing and scrubbed carefully at the feathers covering his crop. "Now I can make a clean breast of it," he announced. "Oh, you're going to tell us how you got the lump?" asked Gwendolyn, eagerly. The feathers over his crop were spotless. He nodded--and tucked away the scrubbing brush. "Once upon a time," he began-- She dimpled with pleasure. "I like stories that start that way!" she interrupted. "Once upon a time," he repeated, "I was just an ordinary sparrow, hopping about under the kitchen-window of a residence, busily picking up crumbs. While I was thus employed, the cook in the kitchen happened to spill some salt on the floor. Being a superstitious creature she promptly threw a lump of it over her shoulder. Well, the kitchen window was open, and the salt went through it and lit on my tail," (Here he pointed his beak to where the crystal had been). "And no sooner did it get firmly settled on my feathers--" "The first person that came along could catch you!" cried Gwendolyn, "Jane told me _that_." "Jane?" said the Bird. "The fat two-faced woman that was my nurse." The Bird ruffled his plumage. "Well, of course she knew the facts," he admitted "You see, _she was the cook_." "Oh!" "As long as that lump was on my tail," resumed the Bird, "anybody could catch me, and send me anywhere. And nobody ever seemed to want to take the horrid load off--with salt so cheap." "Did you do errands for my fath-er?" Her father answered. "Messages and messages and messages," he murmured wearily. (There was a rustle, as of paper.) "Mostly financial," He sighed. "Sometimes my work has eased up a trifle," went on the Bird, more cheerily; "that's when They hired Jack Robinson, because he's so quick." "Oh, yes, you worked for They," said Gwendolyn. "Please, who are They? And what do They look like? And how many are there of 'em?" Ahead was a bend in the road. He pointed it out with his bill. "You know," said he, "it's just as good to turn a corner as a stone. For there They are now!" He gave an important bounce. She rounded the bend on tiptoe. But when she caught sight of They, it seemed as if she had seen them many times before. They were two in number, and wore top hats, and plum-covered coats with black piping. They were standing in the middle of the road, facing each other. About their feet fluttered dingy feathers. And between them was a half-plucked crow, which They were picking. Once she had wanted to thank They for the pocket in the new dress. Now she felt as if it would be ridiculous to mention patch-pockets to such stately personages. So, leaving her father, she advanced modestly and curtsied. "How do you do, They," she began. "I'm glad to meet you." They stared at her without replying. They were alike in face as well as in dress; even in their haughty expression of countenance. "I've heard about you so often," went on Gwendolyn. "I feel I almost know you. And I've heard lots of things that you've said. Aren't you always saying things?" "Saying things," They repeated. (She was astonished to find that They spoke in chorus!) "Well, it's often So-and-So that does the talking, but we get the blame." Now They glared. Gwendolyn, realizing that she had been unfortunate in the choice of a subject, hastened to reassure them. "Oh, I don't want to blame you," she protested, "for things you don't do." At that They smiled. "I blame him, and he blames me," They answered. "In that way we shift the responsibility." (At which Gwendolyn nodded understandingly.) "And since we always hunt as a couple" (here They pulled fiercely at the feathers of the captured bird between them) "nobody ever knows who really _is_ to blame." They cast aside the crow, then, and led the way along the road, walking briskly. Behind them walked the Policeman, one hand to his cap. "Say, please don't put me off the Force," he begged. Grass and flowers grew along the center of the road. No sooner did the Policeman make his request than They moved across this tiny hedge and traveled one side of the road, giving the other side over to the Officer. Whereupon he strode abreast of They, swinging his night-stick thoughtfully. The walking was pleasant there by the stream-side. The fresh breeze caressed Gwendolyn's cheeks, and swirled her yellow hair about her shoulders. She took deep breaths, through nostrils swelled to their widest. "Oh, I like this place best in the whole, whole world!" she said earnestly. The next moment she knew why! For rounding another bend, she caught sight of a small boyish figure in a plaid gingham waist and jeans overalls. His tousled head was raised eagerly. His blue eyes shone. "_Hoo_-hoo-oo-oo!" he called. She gave a leap forward. "Why, it's Johnnie Blake!" she cried. "Johnnie! Oh, Johnnie!" It was Johnnie. There was no mistaking that small freckled nose. "Say! Don't you want to help dig worms?" he invited. And proffered his drinking-cup. She needed no urging, but began to dig at once; and found bait in abundance, so that the cup was quickly filled, and she was compelled to use his ragged straw hat. "Oh, isn't this nice!" she exclaimed. "And after we fish let's hunt a frog!" "I know where there's tadpoles," boasted he. "And long-legged bugs that can walk on the water, and--" "Oh, I want to stay here always!" She had forgotten that there were others about. But now a voice--her father's--broke in upon her happy chatter: "Without your _mother?_" She had been sitting down. She rose, and brushed her hands on the skirt of her dress. "I'll find my moth-er," she said. The little old gentleman was beside Johnnie, patting his shoulder and thrusting something into a riveted pocket. "There!" he half-whispered. "And tell your father to be sure to keep this nose away from the grindstone." Gwendolyn wrinkled her brows. "But--but isn't Johnnie coming with _me?_" she asked. At that Johnnie shook his head vigorously. "Not away from _here_," he declared. "No!" "No," repeated Puffy. "Not away from the woods and the stream and fishing, and hunting frogs and tadpoles and water-bugs. Why, he's the Rich Little Poor Boy!" "Oh!--Well, then I'll come back!" She moved away slowly, looking over a shoulder at him as she went. "Don't forget! I'll come back!" "I'll be here," he answered. "And I'll let you use my willow fishpole." He waved a hand. There were carriage-lamps along the stream now. Alternating with these were automobile lights--brass side-lights, and larger brass search-lights, all like great glowing eyes. Again They were in advance. "We can't be very far from the Barn," They announced. And each waved his right arm in a half-circle. "Robin Hood's Barn?" whispered Gwendolyn. The Policeman nodded. "The first people to go around it," said he, "were ladies who used feather-dusters on the parlor furniture." "I s'pose it's been built a long time," said Gwendolyn. "Ah, a _long_ time!" Her father was speaking. Now he halted and pointed down--to a wide road that crossed the one she was traveling. "Just notice how _that's_ been worn." The wide road had deep ruts. Also, here and there upon it were great, bowl-like holes. But a level strip between the ruts and the holes shone as if it had been tramped down by countless feet. "Around Robin Hood's Barn!" went on her father sadly. "How many have helped to wear that road! Not only her mother, but _her_ mother before her, and then back and back as far as you can count." "I can't count back very far," said Gwendolyn, "'cause I never have any time for 'rithmatic. I have to study my French, and my German, and my music, and my--" Her father groaned. "I've traveled it, too," he admitted. She lifted her eyes then. And there, just across that wide road, was the Barn!--looming up darkly, a great framework of steel girders, all bolted together, and rusted in patches and streaks. Through these girders could be seen small regular spots of light. "Nobody _has_ to go round the Barn," she protested. "Anybody could just go right in at one side and right out at the other." "But the _road!_" said her father meaningly. "If ever one's feet touch it--!" She thought the road wonderful. It was river-wide, and full of gentle undulations. Where it was smoothest, it reflected the Barn and all the surrounding lights. Yet now (like the shining tin of a roof-top) it resounded--to a foot-fall! "Some one's coming!" announced the Piper. _Buzz-z-z-z!_ It was a low, angry droning. The next moment a figure came into sight at a corner of the Barn. It was a slender, girlish figure, and it came hurrying forward along the circular way with never a glance to right or left. Gwendolyn could see that whoever the traveler was, her dress was plain and scant. Nor were there ornaments shining in her pretty hair, which was unbound. She was shod in dainty, high-heeled slippers. And now she walked as fast as she could; again she broke into a run; but taking no note of the ruts and rough places, continually stumbled. "She's watching what's in her hand," said the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "Contemplation, speculation, perlustration." And he sighed. "She'll have a fine account to settle with me,"--this the Piper again. He whipped out his note-book. "That's what _I_ call a merry dance." "See what she's carrying," advised the Bird. In one hand the figure held a small dark something. Gwendolyn looked. "Why,--why," she began hesitatingly, "isn't it a _bonnet?_" A bonnet it was--a plain, cheap-looking piece of millinery. _BUZZ-Z-Z-Z-Z!_ The drone grew loud. The figure caught the bonnet close to her face and held it there, turning it about anxiously. Her eyes were eager. Her lips wore a proud smile. It was then that Gwendolyn recognized her. And leaned forward, holding out her arms. "Moth-er!" she plead. "_Mother!_" Her mother did not hear. Or, if she heard, did not so much as lift her eyes from the bonnet. She tripped, regained her balance, and rushed past, hair wind-tossed, dress fluttering. At either side of her, smoke curled away like silk veiling blown out by the swift pace. "Oh, she's burning!" cried Gwendolyn, in a panic of sudden distress. The Doctor bent down. "That's money," he explained; "--burning her pockets." "She can't see anything but the bee. She can't hear anything but the bee." It was Gwendolyn's father, murmuring to himself. "_The bee!_" Now the Bird came bouncing to Gwendolyn's side. "You've read that bees are busy little things, haven't you?" he asked. "Well, this particular so-cial hon-ey-gath-er-ing in-sect--" "That's the very one!" she declared excitedly. "--Is no exception." "We must get it away from her," declared Gwendolyn. "Oh, how _tired_ her poor feet must be!" (As she said it, she was conscious of the burning ache of her own feet; and yet the tears that swam in her eyes were tears of sympathy, not of pain.) "Puffy! Won't you eat it?" Puffy blinked as if embarrassed. "Well, you see, a bee--er--makes honey," he began lamely. The figure had turned a corner of the Barn. Now, on the farther side of the great structure, it was flitting past the openings. Gwendolyn rested a hand on the wing of the Bird. "Won't _you_ eat it?" she questioned. The Bird wagged his bumpy head. "It's against all the laws of this Land," he declared. "But this is a _society_ bee." "A bird isn't even allowed to eat a bad bee. But"--chirping low--"I'll tell you what _can_ be tried." "Yes?" "_Ask your mother to trade her bonnet for the Piper's poke_." Gwendolyn stared at him for a moment. Then she understood. "The poke's prettier," she declared. "Oh, if she only would! Piper!" The Piper swaggered up. "Some collecting on hand?" he asked. Swinging as usual from a shoulder was the poke. Gwendolyn thought she had never seen a prettier one. Its ribbon bows were fresh and smart; its lace was snow-white and neatly frilled. "Oh, I _know_ she'll make the trade!" she exclaimed happily. The Piper considered the matter, pursing his lips around the pipe-stem in his mouth; standing on one foot. Gwendolyn appealed to the Man-Who-Makes-Faces. "Maybe moth-er'll have to have her ears sharpened," she suggested. The little old gentleman shook his shaggy head. "_Don't let her hear that pig!_" he warned darkly. "She'll come round in another moment!" It was the Doctor, voice very cheery. At that, the Piper unslung the poke and advanced to the edge of the road. "I've never wanted this crazy poke," he asserted over a shoulder to Gwendolyn. "Now, I'll just get rid of it. And I'll present that bonnet with the bee" (here he laughed harshly) "to a woman that hasn't footed a single one of my bills. Ha! ha!" _Buzz-z-z-z!_ Again that high, strident note. Gwendolyn's mother was circling into sight once more. Fortunately, she was keeping close to the outer edge of the road. The Piper faced in the direction she was speeding, and prepared to race beside her. _BUZZ-Z-Z-Z!_ It was an exciting moment! She was holding out the bonnet as before. He thrust the poke between her face and it, carefully keeping the lace and the bows in front of her very eyes. "Madam!" he shouted. "Trade!" "Moth-er!" Her mother heard. Her look fell upon the poke. She slowed to a walk. "_Trade!_" shouted the Piper again, dangling the poke temptingly. She stopped short, gazing hard at the poke. "Trade?" she repeated coldly. (Her voice sounded as if from a great distance.) "Trade? Well, that depends upon what They say." Then she circled on--at such a terrible rate that the Piper could not keep pace. He ceased running and fell behind, breathing hard and complaining ill-temperedly. "Oh! Oh!" mourned Gwendolyn. The smoke blown back from that fleeing figure smarted her throat and eyes. She raised an arm to shield her face. Disappointed, and feeling a first touch of weariness, she could not choke back a great sob that shook her convulsively. The Man-Who-Makes-Faces, whiskers buried in his ragged collar, was nodding thoughtfully "By and by," he murmured; "--by and by, presently, later on." The Doctor was even more comforting. "There! There!" he said. "Don't cry." "But, oh," breathed Gwendolyn, her bosom heaving, "why don't you feel _her_ pulse?" "It's--it's terrible," faltered Gwendolyn's father. His agonized look was fixed upon the road. Now the road was indeed terrible. For there were great chasms in it--chasms that yawned darkly; that opened and closed as if by the rush and receding of water. Gwendolyn's mother crossed them in flitting leaps, as from one roof-top to another. Her daintily shod feet scarcely touched the road, so swift was her going. A second, and she was whipped from sight at the Barn's corner. About her slender figure, as it disappeared, dust mingled with the smoke--mingled and swirled, funnel-like in shape, with a wide base and a narrow top, like the picture of a water-spout in the back of Gwendolyn's geography. The Piper came back, wiping his forehead. "What does she care about a poke!" he scolded, flinging himself down irritably. "Huh! All she thinks about is what They say!" At that Gwendolyn's spirits revived. Somehow, instantly and clearly, she knew what should be done! But when she opened her mouth, she found that she could not speak. Her lips were dry. Her tongue would not move. She could only swallow. Then, just as she was on the point of throwing herself down and giving way utterly to tears, she felt a touch on her hand--a furry touch. Next, something was slipped into her grasp. It was the lip-case! "Well, Mr. Piper," she cried out, "what _do_ They say?" They were close by, standing side by side, gazing at nothing. For their eyes were wide open, their faces expression-less. Gwendolyn's father addressed them. "I never asked my wife to drop that sort of thing," he said gravely, "--for Gwendolyn's sake. _You_ might, I suppose." One hand was in his pocket. The two pairs of wide-open eyes blinked once. The two mouths spoke in unison: "Money talks." Gwendolyn's father drew his hand from his pocket. It was filled with bills. "Will these--?" he began. It was the Piper who snatched the money out of his hand and handed it to They. And thinking it over afterward, Gwendolyn felt deep gratitude for the promptness with which They acted. For having received the money, They advanced into that terrible road, faced half-about, and halted. The angry song of the bee was faint then. For the slender figure was speeding past those patches of light that could be seen through the girders of the Barn. But soon the buzzing grew louder--as Gwendolyn's mother came into sight, shrouded, and scarcely discernible. They met her as she came on, blocking her way. And, "Madam!" They shouted. "Trade your bonnet for the Piper's poke!" Gwendolyn held her breath. Her mother halted. Now for the first time she lifted her eyes and looked about--as if dazed and miserable. There was a flush on each smooth cheek. She was panting so that her lips quivered. The Piper rose and hurried forward. And seeing him, half-timidly she reached out a hand--a slender, white hand. Quickly he relinquished the poke, but when she took it, made a cup of his two hands under it, as if he feared she might let it fall. The poke was heavier than the bonnet. She held it low, but looked at it intently, smiling a little. Presently, without even a parting glance, she held the bonnet out to him. "Take it away," she commanded. "It isn't becoming." He received it; and promptly made off along the road, the bonnet held up before his face. "When it comes to chargin'," he called back, with an independent jerk of the head, "I'm the only chap that can keep ahead of a chauffeur." And he laughed uproariously. Gwendolyn's mother now began to admire the poke, turning it around, at the same time tilting her head to one side,--this very like the Bird! She fingered the lace, and picked at the ribbon. Then, having viewed it from every angle, she opened it--as if to put it on. There was a bounce and a piercing squeal. Then over the rim of the poke, with a thump as it hit the roadway, shot a small black-and-white pig. She dropped the poke and sprang back, frightened. And as the porker cut away among the trees, she wheeled, caught sight of Gwendolyn, and suddenly opened her arms. With a cry, Gwendolyn flung herself forward. No need now to fear harming an elegant dress, or roughing carefully arranged hair. "Moth-er!" She clasped her mother's neck, pressing a wet cheek against a cheek of satin. "Oh, my baby! My baby!--Look at mother!" "I _am_ looking at you," answered Gwendolyn, half sobbing and half laughing. "I've looked at you for a _long_ time. 'Cause I _love_ you so I love you!" The next moment the Man-Who-Makes-Faces dashed suddenly aside--to a nearby flower-bordered square of packed ground over which, blazing with lights, hung one huge tree. Under the tree was a high, broad bill-board, a squat stool, and two short-legged tables. The little old gentleman began to bang his furniture about excitedly. "The tables are turned!" he shouted. "The tables are turned!" "Of course the tables are turned," said Gwendolyn; "but what diff'rence'll _that_ make?" "Difference?" he repeated, tearing back; "it means that from now on everything's going to be exactly _opposite_ to what it has been." "Oo! Goody!" Then lifting a puzzled face. "But why didn't you turn the tables at first? And why didn't we stay here? My moth-er was here all the time. And--" The Man-Who-Makes-Faces regarded her solemnly. "Suppose we hadn't gone around," he said. "Just suppose." Before her, in a line, were They, the Doctor, the Policeman, Puffy and the Bird. He indicated them by a nod. She nodded too, comprehending. "But now," went on the little old gentleman, "we must all absquatulate." He took her hand. "Oh, must you?" she asked regretfully. Absquatulate was a big word, but she understood it, having come across it one day in the Dictionary. "Good-by." He leaned down. And she saw that his round black eyes were clouded, while his square brush-like brows were working with the effort of keeping back his tears. "Good-by!" He stepped back out of the waiting line, turned, and made off slowly, turning the crank of the hand-organ as he went. Now the voices of They spoke up. "We also bid you good-night," They said politely. "We shall have to go. People must hear about this." And shoulder to shoulder They wheeled and followed the little old gentleman. "But my Puffy!" said Gwendolyn. "I'd like to keep him. I don't care if he is shabby." For answer there was a crackling and crashing in the underbrush, as if some heavy-footed animal were lumbering away. "I think," explained her father, "that he's gone to make some poor little boy very happy." "Oh, the Rich Little Poor Boy, I guess," said Gwendolyn, contented. The Bird was just in front of her. He looked very handsome and bright as he flirted his rudder saucily, and darted, now up, now down. Presently, he began to sing--a glad, clear song. And singing, rose into the air. "Oh!" she breathed. "He's happy 'cause he got that salt off his tail." When she looked again at the line, the Policeman was nowhere to be seen. "Doctor!" "Yes." "Don't _you_ go." "The Doctor is right here," said her mother, soothingly. Gwendolyn smiled. And put one hand in the clasp of her mother's, the other in a bigger grasp. "Tired out--all tired out," murmured her father. She was sleepy, too--almost past the keeping open of her gray eyes. "Long as you both are with me," she whispered, "I wouldn't mind if I was back in the nursery." The glow that filled the Land now seemed suddenly to soften. The clustered tapers had lessened--to a single chandelier of four globes. Next, the forest trees began to flatten, and take on the appearance of a conventional pattern. The grass became rug-like in smoothness. The sky squared itself to the proportions of a ceiling. There was no mistaking the change at hand! "We're getting close!" she announced happily. The rose-colored light was dim, peaceful. Here and there through it she caught glints of white and gold. Then familiar objects took shape. She made out the pier-glass; flanking it, her writing-desk, upon which were the two silver-framed portraits. And there--between the portraits--was the flower-embossed calendar, with pencil-marks checking off each figure in the lines that led up to her birthday. She sighed--a deep, tremulous sigh of content. CHAPTER XVI She moved her head from side to side slowly. And felt the cool touch of the pillow against either cheek. Then she tried to lift her arms; but found that one hand was still in a big grasp, the other in a clasp that was softer. Little by little, and with effort, she opened her gray eyes. In the dimness she could see, to her left, scarcely more than an outline of a dark-clad figure, stooped and watchful; of that other slender figure opposite. After all the fatigue and worry of the night, her father and mother were with her yet! And someone was standing at the foot of her bed, leaning and looking down at her. That was the Doctor. She lay very still. This was a novel experience, this having both father and mother in the nursery at the same time--and plainly in no haste to depart! The heaviness of deep sleep was gradually leaving her. Yet she forbore to speak; and as each moment went she dreaded the passing of it, lest her wonderful new happiness come to an end. Presently she ventured a look around--at the pink-tinted ceiling, with its cluster of full-blown plaster roses out of which branched the chandelier; at the walls of soft rose, met here and there by the deeper rose of the brocade hangings; at the plushy rug, the piano, the large table--now scattered with an unusual assortment of bottles and glasses; at the dresser, crystal-topped and strewn daintily, the deep upholstered chair, and the long cushioned seat across the front window, over which, strangely enough, no dome-topped cage was swinging. And there was the tall toy-case. The shelves of it were unchanged. On that one below the line of prettily clad dolls were the toys she favored most--the black-and-red top, the handsome soldier in the scarlet coat, the jointed snake beside its pipe-like box, and the somersault man, poised heels over head. Beyond these, ranged in a buff row, were the six small ducks acquired at Easter. She gave each plaything a keen glance. They reminded her vividly of the long busy night just past! Her small nose wrinkled in a quizzical smile. At that the three waiting figures stirred. Her look came back to them, to rest first upon her father's face, noting how long and pale and haggard it was, how sunken the temples, how bloodless the tightly pressed lips, how hollow the unshaven cheeks. When she turned to gaze at her mother, as daintily clad as ever, and as delicately perfumed--showing no evidence of dusty travel--she saw how pitifully pale was that dear beautiful face. But the eyes were no longer proud!--only anxious, tender and purple-shadowed. Next, Gwendolyn lifted her eyes to the Doctor, and felt suddenly conscience-stricken, remembering how she had always dreaded him, had taken the mere thought of his coming as punishment; remembering, too, how helpful and kind he had been to her through the night. He began to speak, low and earnestly, and as if continuing something already half said: "Pardon my bluntness, but it's a bad thing when there's too much money spent on forcing the brain before the body is given a chance--or the soul. Does a child get food that is simple and nourishing, and enough of it? Is all exercise taken in the open? Too often, I find, where there's a motor at the beck and call of a nurse, the child in her charge is utterly cut off--and in the period of quickest growth--from a normal supply of plain walking. Every boy and girl has a right" (his voice deepened with feeling) "to the great world out of doors. Let the warm sun, and the fresh air, and God's good earth--" Gwendolyn moved. "Is--is he praying?" she whispered. There was a moment of silence. Then, "No, daughter," answered her father, while her mother leaned to lay a gentle hand on her forehead. The Doctor went aside to the larger table and busied himself with some bottles. When he came back, her father lifted her head a trifle by lifting the pillow--her mother rising quickly to assist--and the Doctor put a glass to Gwendolyn's lips. She drank dutifully, and was lowered. At once she felt stronger. "Is the sun up?" she asked. Her voice was weak, and somewhat hoarse. "Would you like to see the sky?" asked her father. And without waiting for her eager nod, crossed to the front window and drew aside the heavy silk hangings. Serenely blue was the long rectangle framed by curtains and casing. Across it not a single fat sheep was straying. "Moth-er!" "Yes, darling?" "Is--is always the same piece of Heaven right there through the window?" "No. The earth is turning all the time--just as your globe in the school-room turns. And so each moment you see a new square of sky." The Doctor nodded with satisfaction. "Um! Better, aren't we?" he inquired, smiling down. She returned the smile. "Well, _I_ am," she declared. "But--I didn't know you felt bad." He laughed. "Tell me something," he went on. "I sent a bottle of medicine here yesterday." "Yes. It was a little bottle." "How much of it did Jane give you? Can you remember?" "Well, first she poured out one teaspoonful--" The Doctor had been leaning again on the foot of the white-and-gold bed. Now he fell back of a sudden. "A _teaspoonful!_" he gasped. And to Gwendolyn's father, "Why, that wretched girl didn't read the directions on the bottle!" There was another silence. The two men stared at each other. But Gwendolyn's mother, her face paler than before, bent above the yellow head on the pillow. "After I drank _that_ teaspoonful," went on Gwendolyn, "Jane wouldn't believe me. And so she made me take the other." "_Another!_"--it was the Doctor once more. He pressed a trembling hand to his forehead. Her father rose angrily. "She shall be punished," he declared. And began to walk to and fro. "I won't let this pass." Gwendolyn's look followed him tenderly. "Well, you see, she didn't know about--about nursery work," she explained. "'Cause before she came here she was just a cook." "Oh, my baby daughter!" murmured Gwendolyn's mother, brokenly. She bent forward until her face was hidden against the silken cover of the bed. "Mother didn't know you were being neglected! She thought she was giving you the _best_ of care, dear!" "Two spoonfuls!" said the Doctor, grimly. "That explains everything!" "Oh, but I didn't want to take the last one," protested Gwendolyn, hastily, "--though it tasted good. She made me. She said if I didn't--" "So!" exclaimed the Doctor, interrupting. "She frightened the poor little helpless thing in order to get obedience!" "Gwendolyn!" whispered her mother. "She _frightened_ you?" The gray eyes smiled wisely. "It doesn't matter now," she said, a hint of triumph in her voice. "I've found out that P'licemen are nice. And so are--are Doctors"--she dimpled and nodded. "And all the bears in the world that are outside of cages are just Puffy Bears grown up." Then uncertainly, "But I didn't find out about--the other." "What other?" asked her father, pausing in his walk. The gray eyes were diamond-bright now. "Though I don't _really_ believe it," she hastened to add. "But--_do_ wicked men keep watch of this house." "_Wicked men?_" Her mother suddenly straightened. "Kidnapers." This innocent statement had an unexpected effect. Again her father began to stride up and down angrily, while her mother, head drooping once more, began to weep. "Oh, mother didn't know!" she sobbed. "Mother didn't guess what terrible things were happening! Oh, forgive her! Forgive her!" The Doctor came to her side. "Too much excitement for the patient," he reminded her. "Don't you think you'd better go and lie down for a while, and have a little rest?" A startled look. And Gwendolyn put out a staying hand to her mother. Then--"Moth-er _is_ tired," she assented. "She's tireder than I am. 'Cause it was hard work going round and round Robin Hood's Barn." The Doctor hunted a small wrist and felt the pulse in it. "That's all right," he said to her mother in an undertone. "Everything's still pretty real to her, you see. But her pulse is normal," He laid cool fingers across her forehead. "Temperature's almost normal too." Gwendolyn felt that she had not made herself altogether clear. She hastened to explain. "I mean," she said, "when moth-er was carrying that society bee in her bonnet." Confusion showed in the Doctor's quick glance from parent to parent. Then, "I think I'll just drop down into the pantry," he said hastily, "and see how that young nurse from over yonder is getting along." He jerked a thumb in the direction of the side window as he went out. Gwendolyn wondered just who the young nurse was. She opened her lips to ask; then saw how painfully her mother had colored at the mere mention of the person in question, and so kept silence. The Doctor gone, her father came to her mother's side and patted a shoulder. "Well, we shan't ever say anything more about that bee," he declared, laughing, yet serious enough. "_Shall_ we, Gwendolyn!" "No." She blinked, puzzling over it a little. "There! It's settled." He bent and kissed his wife. "You thought you were doing the best thing for our little girl--_I_ know that, dear. You had her future in mind. And it's natural--and _right_--for a mother to think of making friends--the right kind, too--and a place in the social world for her daughter. And I've been short-sighted, and neglectful, and--" "Ah!" She raised wet eyes to him. "You had your worries. You were doing _more_ than your share. You had to meet the question of money. While I--" He interrupted her. "We _both_ thought we were doing our very best," he declared. "We almost did our worst! Oh, what would it all have amounted to--what would _anything_ have mattered--if we'd lost our little girl!" The pink came rushing to Gwendolyn's cheeks. "Why, I wasn't lost at all!" she declared happily. "And, oh, it was so good to have my questions all answered, and understand so many things I didn't once--and to be where all the put-out lights go, and--and where soda-water comes from. And I was _so_ glad to get rid of Thomas and Jane and Miss Royle, and--" The hall-door opened. She checked herself to look that way. Someone was entering with a tray. It was a maid--_a maid wearing a sugar-bowl cap_. Gwendolyn knew her instantly--that pretty face, as full and rosy as the face of the French doll, and framed by saucy wisps and curls as fair as Gwendolyn's own--and freckleless! "Oh!" It was a low cry of delight. The nurse smiled. She had a tray in one hand. On the tray was a blue bowl of something steaming hot. She set the tray down and came to the bed-side. Gwendolyn's eyes were wide with wonder. "How--how--?" she began. Her mother answered. "Jane called down to the Policeman, and he ran to the house on the corner." Now the dimples sprang into place, "Goody!" exclaimed Gwendolyn, and gave a little chuckle. Her mother went on: "We never can feel grateful enough to her, because she was such a help. And we're so glad you're friends already." Gwendolyn nodded. "She's one of my window-friends," she explained. "I'm going to stay with you," said the nurse. She smoothed Gwendolyn's hair fondly. "Will you like that?" "It's fine! I--I wanted you!" The Doctor re-entered. "Well, how does our sharp little patient feel now?" he inquired. "I feel hungry." "I have some broth for you," announced the pretty nurse, and brought forward the tray. Gwendolyn looked down at the bowl. "M-m-m!" she breathed. "It smells good! Now"--to the Doctor--"if I had one of your nice bread-pills--" At that, curiously enough, everyone laughed, the Doctor heartiest of all. And "Hush!" chided her mother gently while the Doctor shook a teasing finger. "Just for that," said he, "we'll have eating--and _no_ conversation--for five whole minutes." Whereupon he began to scribble on a pad, laughing to himself every now and then as he wrote. "That must be a cheerful prescription," observed Gwendolyn's father. He himself looking happier than he had. "The country," answered the Doctor, "is always cheerful." Gwendolyn's spoon slipped from her fingers. She lifted eager, shining eyes. "Moth-er," she half-whispered, "does the Doctor mean _Johnnie Blake's?_" The Doctor assented energetically. "I _prescribe_ Johnnie Blake's," he declared. "A-a-ah!" It was a deep breath of happiness. "I _promised_ Johnnie that I'd come back!" "But if my little daughter isn't strong--" Her father gave a sidewise glance at the steaming bowl on the tray. Thus prompted, Gwendolyn fell to eating once more, turning her attention to the _croutons_ bobbing about on the broth Each was square and crunchy, but not so brown as a bread-pill. "I shall now read my Johnnie Blake prescription," announced the Doctor, and held up a leaf from the pad. "Hm! Hm!" Then, in a business-like tone; "_Take two pairs of sandals, a dozen cheap gingham dresses with plenty of pockets and extra pieces for patches, and a bottle of something good for wild black-berry scratches_." He bowed. "_Mix all together with one strong medium-sized garden-hoe_--" "Oh, fath-er," cried Gwendolyn, her hoarse voice wistful with pleading, "_you_ won't mind if I play with Johnnie, _will_ you?" "Play all the time," answered her father. "Play hard--and then play some more." "He _isn't_ a common little boy." Whereupon, satisfied, she returned to the blue bowl. "And now," went on the Doctor, "as to directions." He held up other leaves from the pad. "First week (you'll have to go easy the first week), use the prescription each day as follows; When driving; also when lying on back watching birds in trees (and have a nap out of doors if you feel like it); also when lighting the fire at sundown. Nurse, here, will watch out for fingers." At that, another pleased little chuckle. "Second week:" (the Doctor coughed, importantly) "When riding your own fat pony, or chasing butterflies--assisted by one good-natured, common, ordinary, long-haired dog; or when fishing (stream or bath-tub, it doesn't matter!) or carrying kindling in to Cook--whether you're tired or not!" "I _love_ it!" "Third week: When baking mudpies, or gathering ferns (but put 'em in water when you get home); when jaunting in old wagon to hay-field, orchard or vegetable-patch--this includes tomboy yelling. And go barefoot." Gwendolyn's spoon, _crouton_-laden, wabbled in mid-air. "Go _barefoot?_" she repeated, small face flushing to a pleased pink. "Right _away?_ Before I'm eight?" "Um!" assented the Doctor. "And shin up trees (but don't disturb eggs if you find 'em). Also do barefoot gardening,--where there isn't a plant to hurt! _And wade the creek_." Again the dimples came rushing to their places. "I like squashing," she declared, smiling round. "Then isn't there a hill to climb?" continued the Doctor, "with your hat down your back on a string? And stones to roll--?" The small face grew suddenly serious. "No, thank you," she said, with a slow shake of the head, "I'd rather not turn any stones." "Very well--hm! hm!" "Oh, and there'll be jolly times of an evening after supper," broke in her father, enthusiastically. The stern lines of his face were relaxed, and a score of tiny ripples were carrying a smile from his mouth to his tired eyes. "We'll light all the candles--" "Daddy!" She relinquished the bowl, and turned to him swiftly. "Not--not candles that burn at both ends--" "No." He stopped smiling. "You're a wise little body!" pronounced the Doctor, taking her hand. "How's the pulse now?" asked her mother. "Somehow"--with a nervous little laugh--"she makes me anxious." "Normal," answered the Doctor promptly. "Only thing that isn't normal about her is that busy brain, which is abnormally bright." Thereupon he shook the small hand he was holding, strode to the table, and picked up a leather-covered case. It was black, and held a number of bottles. In no way did it resemble the pill-basket. "And if a certain person is to leave for the country soon--" Gwendolyn's smile was knowing. "You mean 'a certain party.'" He was trying to tease her with that old nursery name! "--She'd better rest. Good-by." And with that mild advice, he beckoned the nurse to follow him, whispered with her a moment at the door, and was gone. Gwendolyn's father resumed his place beside the bed. "She _can_ rest," he declared, "--the blessed baby! Not a governess or a teacher is to show as much as a hat-feather." She nodded. "We don't want 'em quacking around." Someone tapped at the door then, and entered--Rosa, bearing a card-tray upon which were two square bits of pasteboard. "To see Madam," she said, presenting the tray. After which she showed her white teeth in greeting to Gwendolyn, then stooped, and touched an open palm with her lips. Gwendolyn's mother read the cards, and shook her head. "Tell the ladies--explain that I can't leave my little daughter even for a moment to-day--" "Oh, yes, Madam." "And that we're leaving for the country _very_ soon." Rosa bobbed her dark head as she backed away. "And, Rosa--" "Yes, Madam?" "You know what I need in the country--where we were before." A bow. "Pack, Rosa. And you will go, of course." "And Potter, Madam?" "Potter, too. You'll have to pack a few things up here also." A white hand indicated the wardrobe door. "Very well, Madam." As the door closed, the telephone rang. Gwendolyn's father rose to answer it. "I think it's the office, dear," he explained; and into the transmitter--"Yes?... Hello?... Yes. Good-morning!... Oh, thanks! She's better.... And by the way, just close out that line of stocks. Yes.... I shan't be back in the office for some time. I'm leaving for the country as soon as Gwendolyn can stand the trip. To-morrow, maybe, or the next day.... No; don't go into the market until I come back. I intend to reconstruct my policy a good deal. Yes.... Oh, yes.... Good-by." He went to the front window. And as he stood in the light, Gwendolyn lay and looked at him. He had worn green the night before. But now there was not a vestige of paper money showing anywhere in his dress. In fact, he was wearing the suit--a dark blue--he had worn that night she penetrated to the library. "Fath-er." "Well, little daughter?" "I was wondering has anybody scribbled on the General's horse?--with chalk?" Her father looked down at the Drive. "The General's there!" he announced, glancing back at her over a shoulder. "And his horse seems in _fine_ fettle this morning, prancing, and arching his neck. And nobody's scribbled on him, which seems to please the General very much, for he's got his hat off--" Gwendolyn sat up, her eyes rounding. "To hundreds and hundreds of soldiers!" she told her mother. "Only everybody can't see the soldiers." Her father came back to her. "_I_ can," he declared proudly. "Do you want to see 'em, too?--just a glimpse, mother! Come! We'll play the game together!" And the next moment, silk coverlet and all, Gwendolyn was swung up in his arms and borne to the window-seat. "And, oh, there's the P'liceman!" she cried out. "His name is Flynn," informed her father. "And _twice_ this morning he's asked after you." "Oh!" she stood up among the cushions to get a better view. "He takes lost little boys and girls to their fath-ers and moth-ers, daddy, and he takes care of the trees, and the flowers, and the fountains, and--- and the ob'lisk. But he only likes it up here in summer. In winter he likes to be Down-Town. And he _ought_ to be Down-Town, 'cause he's got a _really_ level head--" "Wave to him now," said her father. "There! He's swinging his cap!--When we're out walking one of these times we'll stop and shake hands with him!" "With the hand-organ man, too, fath-er? Oh, you like him, _don't_ you? And you won't send him away!" "Father won't." He laid her back among the pillows then. And she turned her face to her mother. "Can't you sleep, darling?--And don't dream!" "Well, I'm pretty tired." "We know what a hard long night it was." "Oh, I'm _so_ glad we're going back to Johnnie Blake's, moth-er. 'Cause, oh, I'm tired of pretending!" "Of pretending," said her father. "Ah, yes." Her mother nodded at him. "I'm tired of pretending, too," she said in a low voice. Gwendolyn looked pleased. "I didn't know you ever pretended," she said. "Well, of course, you know that _real_ things are so much nicer--" "Ah, yes, my little girl!" It was her father. His voice trembled. "Real grass,"--she smiled up at him--"and real trees, and real people." After that, for a while, she gave herself over to thinking. How wonderful that one single night could bring about the changes for which she had so longed!--the living in the country; the eating at the grown-up table, and having no governess. One full busy night had done all that! And yet-- She glanced down at herself. Under her pink chin was the lace and ribbon of a night-dress. She could not remember being put to bed--could not even recall coming up in the bronze cage. And was the plaid gingham with the patch-pocket now hanging in the wardrobe? Brows knit, she slipped one small foot sidewise until it was close to the edge of the bed-covers, then of a sudden thrust it out from beneath them. The foot was as white as if it had only just been bathed! Not a sign did it show of having waded any stream, pattered through mud, or trudged a forest road! Presently, "Moth-er,"--sleepily. "Yes, darling?" "_Who_ are Law and Order?" A moment's silence. Then, "Well--er--" "Isn't it a fath-er-and-moth-er question?" "Why, _yes_, my baby. But I--" "Father will tell you, dear." He was seated beside her once more. "You see it's this way:" "Can you tell it like a story, fath-er?" "Yes." "A once-upon-a-time story?" "I'll try. But first you must understand that law and order are not two people. Oh, no. And they aren't anything a little girl could see--as she can see the mirror, for instance, or a chair--" Gwendolyn looked at the mirror and the chair--thence around the room. These were the same things that had been there all the time. Now how different each appeared! There was the bed, for instance. She had never liked the bed, beautiful though it was. Yet to-day, even with the sun shining on the great panes of the wide front window, it seemed good to be lying in it. And the nursery, once a hated place--a very prison!--the nursery had never looked lovelier! Her father went on with his explaining, low and cheerily, and as confidentially as if to a grown-up. Across from him, listening, was her mother, one soft cheek lowered to rest close to the small face half-hidden in the pillow. When her father finished speaking, Gwendolyn gave a deep breath--of happiness and content. Then, "Moth-er!" "Yes?"--with a kiss as light as the touch of a butterfly. Her eyelids, all at once, seemed curiously heavy. She let them flutter down. But a drowsy smile curved the pink mouth. "Moth-er," she whispered; "moth-er, the Dearest Pretend has come true!" 
2186	----	"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS" A STORY OF THE GRAND BANKS by Rudyard Kipling TO JAMES CONLAND, M.D., Brattleboro, Vermont I ploughed the land with horses, But my heart was ill at ease, For the old sea-faring men Came to me now and then, With their sagas of the seas. Longfellow. CHAPTER I The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet. "That Cheyne boy's the biggest nuisance aboard," said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. "He isn't wanted here. He's too fresh." A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: "I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should imbort ropes' ends free under your dariff." "Pshaw! There isn't any real harm to him. He's more to be pitied than anything," a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the cushions under the wet skylight. "They've dragged him around from hotel to hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning. She's a lovely lady, but she don't pretend to manage him. He's going to Europe to finish his education." "Education isn't begun yet." This was a Philadelphian, curled up in a corner. "That boy gets two hundred a month pocket-money, he told me. He isn't sixteen either." "Railroads, his father, aind't it?" said the German. "Yep. That and mines and lumber and shipping. Built one place at San Diego, the old man has; another at Los Angeles; owns half a dozen railroads, half the lumber on the Pacific slope, and lets his wife spend the money," the Philadelphian went on lazily. "The West don't suit her, she says. She just tracks around with the boy and her nerves, trying to find out what'll amuse him, I guess. Florida, Adirondacks, Lakewood, Hot Springs, New York, and round again. He isn't much more than a second-hand hotel clerk now. When he's finished in Europe he'll be a holy terror." "What's the matter with the old man attending to him personally?" said a voice from the frieze ulster. "Old man's piling up the rocks. 'Don't want to be disturbed, I guess. He'll find out his error a few years from now. 'Pity, because there's a heap of good in the boy if you could get at it." "Mit a rope's end; mit a rope's end!" growled the German. Once more the door banged, and a slight, slim-built boy perhaps fifteen years old, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, leaned in over the high footway. His pasty yellow complexion did not show well on a person of his years, and his look was a mixture of irresolution, bravado, and very cheap smartness. He was dressed in a cherry-coloured blazer, knickerbockers, red stockings, and bicycle shoes, with a red flannel cap at the back of the head. After whistling between his teeth, as he eyed the company, he said in a loud, high voice: "Say, it's thick outside. You can hear the fish-boats squawking all around us. Say, wouldn't it be great if we ran down one?" "Shut the door, Harvey," said the New Yorker. "Shut the door and stay outside. You're not wanted here." "Who'll stop me?" he answered, deliberately. "Did you pay for my passage, Mister Martin? 'Guess I've as good right here as the next man." He picked up some dice from a checkerboard and began throwing, right hand against left. "Say, gen'elmen, this is deader'n mud. Can't we make a game of poker between us?" There was no answer, and he puffed his cigarette, swung his legs, and drummed on the table with rather dirty fingers. Then he pulled out a roll of bills as if to count them. "How's your mamma this afternoon?" a man said. "I didn't see her at lunch." "In her state-room, I guess. She's 'most always sick on the ocean. I'm going to give the stewardess fifteen dollars for looking after her. I don't go down more 'n I can avoid. It makes me feel mysterious to pass that butler's-pantry place. Say, this is the first time I've been on the ocean." "Oh, don't apologize, Harvey." "Who's apologizing? This is the first time I've crossed the ocean, gen'elmen, and, except the first day, I haven't been sick one little bit. No, sir!" He brought down his fist with a triumphant bang, wetted his finger, and went on counting the bills. "Oh, you're a high-grade machine, with the writing in plain sight," the Philadelphian yawned. "You'll blossom into a credit to your country if you don't take care." "I know it. I'm an American--first, last, and all the time. I'll show 'em that when I strike Europe. Piff! My cig's out. I can't smoke the truck the steward sells. Any gen'elman got a real Turkish cig on him?" The chief engineer entered for a moment, red, smiling, and wet. "Say, Mac," cried Harvey cheerfully, "how are we hitting it?" "Vara much in the ordinary way," was the grave reply. "The young are as polite as ever to their elders, an' their elders are e'en tryin' to appreciate it." A low chuckle came from a corner. The German opened his cigar-case and handed a skinny black cigar to Harvey. "Dot is der broper apparatus to smoke, my young friendt," he said. "You vill dry it? Yes? Den you vill be efer so happy." Harvey lit the unlovely thing with a flourish: he felt that he was getting on in grownup society. "It would take more 'n this to keel me over," he said, ignorant that he was lighting that terrible article, a Wheeling "stogie". "Dot we shall bresently see," said the German. "Where are we now, Mr. Mactonal'?" "Just there or thereabouts, Mr. Schaefer," said the engineer. "We'll be on the Grand Bank to-night; but in a general way o' speakin', we're all among the fishing-fleet now. We've shaved three dories an' near scalped the boom off a Frenchman since noon, an' that's close sailing', ye may say." "You like my cigar, eh?" the German asked, for Harvey's eyes were full of tears. "Fine, full flavor," he answered through shut teeth. "Guess we've slowed down a little, haven't we? I'll skip out and see what the log says." "I might if I vhas you," said the German. Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail. He was very unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and, since he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a turtle-back. The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of it, near the flag-pole. There he doubled up in limp agony, for the Wheeling "stogie" joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul. His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze. He was fainting from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the turtle-back. Then a low, gray mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep. He was roused by the sound of a dinner-horn such as they used to blow at a summer-school he had once attended in the Adirondacks. Slowly he remembered that he was Harvey Cheyne, drowned and dead in mid-ocean, but was too weak to fit things together. A new smell filled his nostrils; wet and clammy chills ran down his back, and he was helplessly full of salt water. When he opened his eyes, he perceived that he was still on the top of the sea, for it was running round him in silver-coloured hills, and he was lying on a pile of half-dead fish, looking at a broad human back clothed in a blue jersey. "It's no good," thought the boy. "I'm dead, sure enough, and this thing is in charge." He groaned, and the figure turned its head, showing a pair of little gold rings half hidden in curly black hair. "Aha! You feel some pretty well now?" it said. "Lie still so: we trim better." With a swift jerk he sculled the flickering boat-head on to a foamless sea that lifted her twenty full feet, only to slide her into a glassy pit beyond. But this mountain-climbing did not interrupt blue-jersey's talk. "Fine good job, I say, that I catch you. Eh, wha-at? Better good job, I say, your boat not catch me. How you come to fall out?" "I was sick," said Harvey; "sick, and couldn't help it." "Just in time I blow my horn, and your boat she yaw a little. Then I see you come all down. Eh, wha-at? I think you are cut into baits by the screw, but you dreeft--dreeft to me, and I make a big fish of you. So you shall not die this time." "Where am I?" said Harvey, who could not see that life was particularly safe where he lay. "You are with me in the dory--Manuel my name, and I come from schooner _We're Here_ of Gloucester. I live to Gloucester. By-and-by we get supper. Eh, wha-at?" He seemed to have two pairs of hands and a head of cast-iron, for, not content with blowing through a big conch-shell, he must needs stand up to it, swaying with the sway of the flat-bottomed dory, and send a grinding, thuttering shriek through the fog. How long this entertainment lasted, Harvey could not remember, for he lay back terrified at the sight of the smoking swells. He fancied he heard a gun and a horn and shouting. Something bigger than the dory, but quite as lively, loomed alongside. Several voices talked at once; he was dropped into a dark, heaving hole, where men in oilskins gave him a hot drink and took off his clothes, and he fell asleep. When he waked he listened for the first breakfast-bell on the steamer, wondering why his state-room had grown so small. Turning, he looked into a narrow, triangular cave, lit by a lamp hung against a huge square beam. A three-cornered table within arm's reach ran from the angle of the bows to the foremast. At the after end, behind a well-used Plymouth stove, sat a boy about his own age, with a flat red face and a pair of twinkling gray eyes. He was dressed in a blue jersey and high rubber boots. Several pairs of the same sort of foot-wear, an old cap, and some worn-out woollen socks lay on the floor, and black and yellow oilskins swayed to and fro beside the bunks. The place was packed as full of smells as a bale is of cotton. The oilskins had a peculiarly thick flavor of their own which made a sort of background to the smells of fried fish, burnt grease, paint, pepper, and stale tobacco; but these, again, were all hooped together by one encircling smell of ship and salt water. Harvey saw with disgust that there were no sheets on his bed-place. He was lying on a piece of dingy ticking full of lumps and nubbles. Then, too, the boat's motion was not that of a steamer. She was neither sliding nor rolling, but rather wriggling herself about in a silly, aimless way, like a colt at the end of a halter. Water-noises ran by close to his ear, and beams creaked and whined about him. All these things made him grunt despairingly and think of his mother. "Feelin' better?" said the boy, with a grin. "Hev some coffee?" He brought a tin cup full and sweetened it with molasses. "Isn't there milk?" said Harvey, looking round the dark double tier of bunks as if he expected to find a cow there. "Well, no," said the boy. "Ner there ain't likely to be till 'baout mid-September. 'Tain't bad coffee. I made it." Harvey drank in silence, and the boy handed him a plate full of pieces of crisp fried pork, which he ate ravenously. "I've dried your clothes. Guess they've shrunk some," said the boy. "They ain't our style much--none of 'em. Twist round an' see if you're hurt any." Harvey stretched himself in every direction, but could not report any injuries. "That's good," the boy said heartily. "Fix yerself an' go on deck. Dad wants to see you. I'm his son,--Dan, they call me,--an' I'm cook's helper an' everything else aboard that's too dirty for the men. There ain't no boy here 'cep' me sence Otto went overboard--an' he was only a Dutchy, an' twenty year old at that. How'd you come to fall off in a dead flat ca'am?" "'Twasn't a calm," said Harvey, sulkily. "It was a gale, and I was seasick. Guess I must have rolled over the rail." "There was a little common swell yes'day an' last night," said the boy. "But ef thet's your notion of a gale----" He whistled. "You'll know more 'fore you're through. Hurry! Dad's waitin'." Like many other unfortunate young people, Harvey had never in all his life received a direct order--never, at least, without long, and sometimes tearful, explanations of the advantages of obedience and the reasons for the request. Mrs. Cheyne lived in fear of breaking his spirit, which, perhaps, was the reason that she herself walked on the edge of nervous prostration. He could not see why he should be expected to hurry for any man's pleasure, and said so. "Your dad can come down here if he's so anxious to talk to me. I want him to take me to New York right away. It'll pay him." Dan opened his eyes as the size and beauty of this joke dawned on him. "Say, Dad!" he shouted up the foc'sle hatch, "he says you kin slip down an' see him ef you're anxious that way. 'Hear, Dad?" The answer came back in the deepest voice Harvey had ever heard from a human chest: "Quit foolin', Dan, and send him to me." Dan sniggered, and threw Harvey his warped bicycle shoes. There was something in the tones on the deck that made the boy dissemble his extreme rage and console himself with the thought of gradually unfolding the tale of his own and his father's wealth on the voyage home. This rescue would certainly make him a hero among his friends for life. He hoisted himself on deck up a perpendicular ladder, and stumbled aft, over a score of obstructions, to where a small, thick-set, clean-shaven man with gray eyebrows sat on a step that led up to the quarter-deck. The swell had passed in the night, leaving a long, oily sea, dotted round the horizon with the sails of a dozen fishing-boats. Between them lay little black specks, showing where the dories were out fishing. The schooner, with a triangular riding-sail on the mainmast, played easily at anchor, and except for the man by the cabin-roof--"house" they call it--she was deserted. "Mornin'--Good afternoon, I should say. You've nigh slep' the clock round, young feller," was the greeting. "Mornin'," said Harvey. He did not like being called "young feller"; and, as one rescued from drowning, expected sympathy. His mother suffered agonies whenever he got his feet wet; but this mariner did not seem excited. "Naow let's hear all abaout it. It's quite providential, first an' last, fer all concerned. What might be your name? Where from (we mistrust it's Noo York), an' where baound (we mistrust it's Europe)?" Harvey gave his name, the name of the steamer, and a short history of the accident, winding up with a demand to be taken back immediately to New York, where his father would pay anything any one chose to name. "H'm," said the shaven man, quite unmoved by the end of Harvey's speech. "I can't say we think special of any man, or boy even, that falls overboard from that kind o' packet in a flat ca'am. Least of all when his excuse is that he's seasick." "Excuse!" cried Harvey. "D'you suppose I'd fall overboard into your dirty little boat for fun?" "Not knowin' what your notions o' fun may be, I can't rightly say, young feller. But if I was you, I wouldn't call the boat which, under Providence, was the means o' savin' ye, names. In the first place, it's blame irreligious. In the second, it's annoyin' to my feelin's--an' I'm Disko Troop o' the _We're Here_ o' Gloucester, which you don't seem rightly to know." "I don't know and I don't care," said Harvey. "I'm grateful enough for being saved and all that, of course! but I want you to understand that the sooner you take me back to New York the better it'll pay you." "Meanin'--haow?" Troop raised one shaggy eyebrow over a suspiciously mild blue eye. "Dollars and cents," said Harvey, delighted to think that he was making an impression. "Cold dollars and cents." He thrust a hand into a pocket, and threw out his stomach a little, which was his way of being grand. "You've done the best day's work you ever did in your life when you pulled me in. I'm all the son Harvey Cheyne has." "He's bin favoured," said Disko, dryly. "And if you don't know who Harvey Cheyne is, you don't know much--that's all. Now turn her around and let's hurry." Harvey had a notion that the greater part of America was filled with people discussing and envying his father's dollars. "Mebbe I do, an' mebbe I don't. Take a reef in your stummick, young feller. It's full o' my vittles." Harvey heard a chuckle from Dan, who was pretending to be busy by the stump-foremast, and blood rushed to his face. "We'll pay for that too," he said. "When do you suppose we shall get to New York?" "I don't use Noo York any. Ner Boston. We may see Eastern Point about September; an' your pa--I'm real sorry I hain't heerd tell of him--may give me ten dollars efter all your talk. Then o' course he mayn't." "Ten dollars! Why, see here, I--" Harvey dived into his pocket for the wad of bills. All he brought up was a soggy packet of cigarettes. "Not lawful currency; an' bad for the lungs. Heave 'em overboard, young feller, and try agin." "It's been stolen!" cried Harvey, hotly. "You'll hev to wait till you see your pa to reward me, then?" "A hundred and thirty-four dollars--all stolen," said Harvey, hunting wildly through his pockets. "Give them back." A curious change flitted across old Troop's hard face. "What might you have been doin' at your time o' life with one hundred an' thirty-four dollars, young feller?" "It was part of my pocket-money--for a month." This Harvey thought would be a knock-down blow, and it was--indirectly. "Oh! One hundred and thirty-four dollars is only part of his pocket-money--for one month only! You don't remember hittin' anything when you fell over, do you? Crack agin a stanchion, le's say. Old man Hasken o' the East Wind"--Troop seemed to be talking to himself--"he tripped on a hatch an' butted the mainmast with his head--hardish. 'Baout three weeks afterwards, old man Hasken he would hev it that the "East Wind" was a commerce-destroyin' man-o'-war, an' so he declared war on Sable Island because it was Bridish, an' the shoals run aout too far. They sewed him up in a bed-bag, his head an' feet appearin', fer the rest o' the trip, an' now he's to home in Essex playin' with little rag dolls." Harvey choked with rage, but Troop went on consolingly: "We're sorry fer you. We're very sorry fer you--an' so young. We won't say no more abaout the money, I guess." "'Course you won't. You stole it." "Suit yourself. We stole it ef it's any comfort to you. Naow, abaout goin' back. Allowin' we could do it, which we can't, you ain't in no fit state to go back to your home, an' we've jest come on to the Banks, workin' fer our bread. We don't see the ha'af of a hundred dollars a month, let alone pocket-money; an' with good luck we'll be ashore again somewheres abaout the first weeks o' September." "But--but it's May now, and I can't stay here doin' nothing just because you want to fish. I can't, I tell you!" "Right an' jest; jest an' right. No one asks you to do nothin'. There's a heap as you can do, for Otto he went overboard on Le Have. I mistrust he lost his grip in a gale we f'und there. Anyways, he never come back to deny it. You've turned up, plain, plumb providential for all concerned. I mistrust, though, there's ruther few things you kin do. Ain't thet so?" "I can make it lively for you and your crowd when we get ashore," said Harvey, with a vicious nod, murmuring vague threats about "piracy," at which Troop almost--not quite--smiled. "Excep' talk. I'd forgot that. You ain't asked to talk more'n you've a mind to aboard the _We're Here_. Keep your eyes open, an' help Dan to do ez he's bid, an' sechlike, an' I'll give you--you ain't wuth it, but I'll give--ten an' a ha'af a month; say thirty-five at the end o' the trip. A little work will ease up your head, and you kin tell us all abaout your dad an' your ma an' your money afterwards." "She's on the steamer," said Harvey, his eyes filling with tears. "Take me to New York at once." "Poor woman--poor woman! When she has you back she'll forgit it all, though. There's eight of us on the _We're Here_, an' ef we went back naow--it's more'n a thousand mile--we'd lose the season. The men they wouldn't hev it, allowin' I was agreeable." "But my father would make it all right." "He'd try. I don't doubt he'd try," said Troop; "but a whole season's catch is eight men's bread; an' you'll be better in your health when you see him in the fall. Go forward an' help Dan. It's ten an' a ha'af a month, e I said, an' o' course, all f'und, same e the rest o' us." "Do you mean I'm to clean pots and pans and things?" said Harvey. "An' other things. You've no call to shout, young feller." "I won't! My father will give you enough to buy this dirty little fish-kettle"--Harvey stamped on the deck--"ten times over, if you take me to New York safe; and--and--you're in a hundred and thirty by me, anyhow." "Haow?" said Troop, the iron face darkening. "How? You know how, well enough. On top of all that, you want me to do menial work"--Harvey was very proud of that adjective--"till the Fall. I tell you I will not. You hear?" Troop regarded the top of the mainmast with deep interest for a while, as Harvey harangued fiercely all around him. "Hsh!" he said at last. "I'm figurin' out my responsibilities in my own mind. It's a matter o' jedgment." Dan stole up and plucked Harvey by the elbow. "Don't go to tamperin' with Dad any more," he pleaded. "You've called him a thief two or three times over, an' he don't take that from any livin' bein'." "I won't!" Harvey almost shrieked, disregarding the advice, and still Troop meditated. "Seems kinder unneighbourly," he said at last, his eye travelling down to Harvey. "I--don't blame you, not a mite, young feeler, nor you won't blame me when the bile's out o' your systim. Be sure you sense what I say? Ten an' a ha'af fer second boy on the schooner--an' all found--fer to teach you an' fer the sake o' your health. Yes or no?" "No!" said Harvey. "Take me back to New York or I'll see you--" He did not exactly remember what followed. He was lying in the scuppers, holding on to a nose that bled while Troop looked down on him serenely. "Dan," he said to his son, "I was sot agin this young feeler when I first saw him on account o' hasty jedgments. Never you be led astray by hasty jedgments, Dan. Naow I'm sorry for him, because he's clear distracted in his upper works. He ain't responsible fer the names he's give me, nor fer his other statements--nor fer jumpin' overboard, which I'm abaout ha'af convinced he did. You be gentle with him, Dan, 'r I'll give you twice what I've give him. Them hemmeridges clears the head. Let him sluice it off!" Troop went down solemnly into the cabin, where he and the older men bunked, leaving Dan to comfort the luckless heir to thirty millions. CHAPTER II "I warned ye," said Dan, as the drops fell thick and fast on the dark, oiled planking. "Dad ain't noways hasty, but you fair earned it. Pshaw! there's no sense takin' on so." Harvey's shoulders were rising and falling in spasms of dry sobbing. "I know the feelin'. First time Dad laid me out was the last--and that was my first trip. Makes ye feel sickish an' lonesome. I know." "It does," moaned Harvey. "That man's either crazy or drunk, and--and I can't do anything." "Don't say that to Dad," whispered Dan. "He's set agin all liquor, an'--well, he told me you was the madman. What in creation made you call him a thief? He's my dad." Harvey sat up, mopped his nose, and told the story of the missing wad of bills. "I'm not crazy," he wound up. "Only--your father has never seen more than a five-dollar bill at a time, and my father could buy up this boat once a week and never miss it." "You don't know what the _We're Here's_ worth. Your dad must hev a pile o' money. How did he git it? Dad sez loonies can't shake out a straight yarn. Go ahead." "In gold mines and things, West." "I've read o' that kind o' business. Out West, too? Does he go around with a pistol on a trick-pony, same ez the circus? They call that the Wild West, and I've heard that their spurs an' bridles was solid silver." "You are a chump!" said Harvey, amused in spite of himself. "My father hasn't any use for ponies. When he wants to ride he takes his car." "Haow? Lobster-car?" "No. His own private car, of course. You've seen a private car some time in your life?" "Slatin Beeman he hez one," said Dan, cautiously. "I saw her at the Union Depot in Boston, with three niggers hoggin' her run." (Dan meant cleaning the windows.) "But Slatin Beeman he owns 'baout every railroad on Long Island, they say, an' they say he's bought 'baout ha'af Noo Hampshire an' run a line fence around her, an' filled her up with lions an' tigers an' bears an' buffalo an' crocodiles an' such all. Slatin Beeman he's a millionaire. I've seen his car. Yes?" "Well, my father's what they call a multi-millionaire, and he has two private cars. One's named for me, the 'Harvey', and one for my mother, the 'Constance'." "Hold on," said Dan. "Dad don't ever let me swear, but I guess you can. 'Fore we go ahead, I want you to say hope you may die if you're lyin'." "Of course," said Harvey. "The ain't 'niff. Say, 'Hope I may die if I ain't speaking' truth.'" "Hope I may die right here," said Harvey, "if every word I've spoken isn't the cold truth." "Hundred an' thirty-four dollars an' all?" said Dan. "I heard ye talkin' to Dad, an' I ha'af looked you'd be swallered up, same's Jonah." Harvey protested himself red in the face. Dan was a shrewd young person along his own lines, and ten minutes' questioning convinced him that Harvey was not lying--much. Besides, he had bound himself by the most terrible oath known to boyhood, and yet he sat, alive, with a red-ended nose, in the scuppers, recounting marvels upon marvels. "Gosh!" said Dan at last from the very bottom of his soul when Harvey had completed an inventory of the car named in his honour. Then a grin of mischievous delight overspread his broad face. "I believe you, Harvey. Dad's made a mistake fer once in his life." "He has, sure," said Harvey, who was meditating an early revenge. "He'll be mad clear through. Dad jest hates to be mistook in his jedgments." Dan lay back and slapped his thigh. "Oh, Harvey, don't you spile the catch by lettin' on." "I don't want to be knocked down again. I'll get even with him, though." "Never heard any man ever got even with dad. But he'd knock ye down again sure. The more he was mistook the more he'd do it. But gold-mines and pistols--" "I never said a word about pistols," Harvey cut in, for he was on his oath. "Thet's so; no more you did. Two private cars, then, one named fer you an' one fer her; an' two hundred dollars a month pocket-money, all knocked into the scuppers fer not workin' fer ten an' a ha'af a month! It's the top haul o' the season." He exploded with noiseless chuckles. "Then I was right?" said Harvey, who thought he had found a sympathiser. "You was wrong; the wrongest kind o' wrong! You take right hold an' pitch in 'longside o' me, or you'll catch it, an' I'll catch it fer backin' you up. Dad always gives me double helps 'cause I'm his son, an' he hates favourin' folk. 'Guess you're kinder mad at dad. I've been that way time an' again. But dad's a mighty jest man; all the fleet says so." "Looks like justice, this, don't it?" Harvey pointed to his outraged nose. "Thet's nothin'. Lets the shore blood outer you. Dad did it for yer health. Say, though, I can't have dealin's with a man that thinks me or dad or any one on the _We're Here's_ a thief. We ain't any common wharf-end crowd by any manner o' means. We're fishermen, an' we've shipped together for six years an' more. Don't you make any mistake on that! I told ye dad don't let me swear. He calls 'em vain oaths, and pounds me; but ef I could say what you said 'baout your pap an' his fixin's, I'd say that 'baout your dollars. I dunno what was in your pockets when I dried your kit, fer I didn't look to see; but I'd say, using the very same words ez you used jest now, neither me nor dad--an' we was the only two that teched you after you was brought aboard--knows anythin' 'baout the money. Thet's my say. Naow?" The bloodletting had certainly cleared Harvey's brain, and maybe the loneliness of the sea had something to do with it. "That's all right," he said. Then he looked down confusedly. "'Seems to me that for a fellow just saved from drowning I haven't been over and above grateful, Dan." "Well, you was shook up and silly," said Dan. "Anyway, there was only dad an' me aboard to see it. The cook he don't count." "I might have thought about losing the bills that way," Harvey said, half to himself, "instead of calling everybody in sight a thief. Where's your father?" "In the cabin. What d' you want o' him again?" "You'll see," said Harvey, and he stepped, rather groggily, for his head was still singing, to the cabin steps where the little ship's clock hung in plain sight of the wheel. Troop, in the chocolate-and-yellow painted cabin, was busy with a note-book and an enormous black pencil which he sucked hard from time to time. "I haven't acted quite right," said Harvey, surprised at his own meekness. "What's wrong naow?" said the skipper. "Walked into Dan, hev ye?" "No; it's about you." "I'm here to listen." "Well, I--I'm here to take things back," said Harvey very quickly. "When a man's saved from drowning--" he gulped. "Ey? You'll make a man yet ef you go on this way." "He oughtn't begin by calling people names." "Jest an' right--right an' jest," said Troop, with the ghost of a dry smile. "So I'm here to say I'm sorry." Another big gulp. Troop heaved himself slowly off the locker he was sitting on and held out an eleven-inch hand. "I mistrusted 'twould do you sights o' good; an' this shows I weren't mistook in my jedgments." A smothered chuckle on deck caught his ear. "I am very seldom mistook in my jedgments." The eleven-inch hand closed on Harvey's, numbing it to the elbow. "We'll put a little more gristle to that 'fore we've done with you, young feller; an' I don't think any worse of ye fer anythin' the's gone by. You wasn't fairly responsible. Go right abaout your business an' you won't take no hurt." "You're white," said Dan, as Harvey regained the deck, flushed to the tips of his ears. "I don't feel it," said he. "I didn't mean that way. I heard what Dad said. When Dad allows he don't think the worse of any man, Dad's give himself away. He hates to be mistook in his jedgments too. Ho! ho! Onct Dad has a jedgment, he'd sooner dip his colours to the British than change it. I'm glad it's settled right eend up. Dad's right when he says he can't take you back. It's all the livin' we make here--fishin'. The men'll be back like sharks after a dead whale in ha'af an hour." "What for?" said Harvey. "Supper, o' course. Don't your stummick tell you? You've a heap to learn." "Guess I have," said Harvey, dolefully, looking at the tangle of ropes and blocks overhead. "She's a daisy," said Dan, enthusiastically, misunderstanding the look. "Wait till our mainsail's bent, an' she walks home with all her salt wet. There's some work first, though." He pointed down into the darkness of the open main-hatch between the two masts. "What's that for? It's all empty," said Harvey. "You an' me an' a few more hev got to fill it," said Dan. "That's where the fish goes." "Alive?" said Harvey. "Well, no. They're so's to be ruther dead--an' flat--an' salt. There's a hundred hogshead o' salt in the bins, an' we hain't more'n covered our dunnage to now." "Where are the fish, though?" "'In the sea they say, in the boats we pray,'" said Dan, quoting a fisherman's proverb. "You come in last night with 'baout forty of 'em." He pointed to a sort of wooden pen just in front of the quarter-deck. "You an' me we'll sluice that out when they're through. 'Send we'll hev full pens to-night! I've seen her down ha'af a foot with fish waitin' to clean, an' we stood to the tables till we was splittin' ourselves instid o' them, we was so sleepy. Yes, they're comm' in naow." Dan looked over the low bulwarks at half a dozen dories rowing towards them over the shining, silky sea. "I've never seen the sea from so low down," said Harvey. "It's fine." The low sun made the water all purple and pinkish, with golden lights on the barrels of the long swells, and blue and green mackerel shades in the hollows. Each schooner in sight seemed to be pulling her dories towards her by invisible strings, and the little black figures in the tiny boats pulled like clockwork toys. "They've struck on good," said Dan, between his half-shut eyes. "Manuel hain't room fer another fish. Low ez a lily-pad in still water, Aeneid he?" "Which is Manuel? I don't see how you can tell 'em 'way off, as you do." "Last boat to the south'ard. He fund you last night," said Dan, pointing. "Manuel rows Portugoosey; ye can't mistake him. East o' him--he's a heap better'n he rows--is Pennsylvania. Loaded with saleratus, by the looks of him. East o' him--see how pretty they string out all along--with the humpy shoulders, is Long Jack. He's a Galway man inhabitin' South Boston, where they all live mostly, an' mostly them Galway men are good in a boat. North, away yonder--you'll hear him tune up in a minute is Tom Platt. Man-o'-war's man he was on the old Ohio first of our navy, he says, to go araound the Horn. He never talks of much else, 'cept when he sings, but he has fair fishin' luck. There! What did I tell you?" A melodious bellow stole across the water from the northern dory. Harvey heard something about somebody's hands and feet being cold, and then: "Bring forth the chart, the doleful chart, See where them mountings meet! The clouds are thick around their heads, The mists around their feet." "Full boat," said Dan, with a chuckle. "If he give us 'O Captain' it's topping' too!" The bellow continued: "And naow to thee, O Capting, Most earnestly I pray, That they shall never bury me In church or cloister gray." "Double game for Tom Platt. He'll tell you all about the old Ohio tomorrow. 'See that blue dory behind him? He's my uncle,--Dad's own brother,--an' ef there's any bad luck loose on the Banks she'll fetch up agin Uncle Salters, sure. Look how tender he's rowin'. I'll lay my wage and share he's the only man stung up to-day--an' he's stung up good." "What'll sting him?" said Harvey, getting interested. "Strawberries, mostly. Pumpkins, sometimes, an' sometimes lemons an' cucumbers. Yes, he's stung up from his elbows down. That man's luck's perfectly paralyzin'. Naow we'll take a-holt o' the tackles an' hist 'em in. Is it true what you told me jest now, that you never done a hand's turn o' work in all your born life? Must feel kinder awful, don't it?" "I'm going to try to work, anyway," Harvey replied stoutly. "Only it's all dead new." "Lay a-holt o' that tackle, then. Behind ye!" Harvey grabbed at a rope and long iron hook dangling from one of the stays of the mainmast, while Dan pulled down another that ran from something he called a "topping-lift," as Manuel drew alongside in his loaded dory. The Portuguese smiled a brilliant smile that Harvey learned to know well later, and with a short-handled fork began to throw fish into the pen on deck. "Two hundred and thirty-one," he shouted. "Give him the hook," said Dan, and Harvey ran it into Manuel's hands. He slipped it through a loop of rope at the dory's bow, caught Dan's tackle, hooked it to the stern-becket, and clambered into the schooner. "Pull!" shouted Dan, and Harvey pulled, astonished to find how easily the dory rose. "Hold on, she don't nest in the crosstrees!" Dan laughed; and Harvey held on, for the boat lay in the air above his head. "Lower away," Dan shouted, and as Harvey lowered, Dan swayed the light boat with one hand till it landed softly just behind the mainmast. "They don't weigh nothin' empty. Thet was right smart fer a passenger. There's more trick to it in a sea-way." "Ah ha!" said Manuel, holding out a brown hand. "You are some pretty well now? This time last night the fish they fish for you. Now you fish for fish. Eh, wha-at?" "I'm--I'm ever so grateful," Harvey stammered, and his unfortunate hand stole to his pocket once more, but he remembered that he had no money to offer. When he knew Manuel better the mere thought of the mistake he might have made would cover him with hot, uneasy blushes in his bunk. "There is no to be thankful for to me!" said Manuel. "How shall I leave you dreeft, dreeft all around the Banks? Now you are a fisherman eh, wha-at? Ouh! Auh!" He bent backward and forward stiffly from the hips to get the kinks out of himself. "I have not cleaned boat to-day. Too busy. They struck on queek. Danny, my son, clean for me." Harvey moved forward at once. Here was something he could do for the man who had saved his life. Dan threw him a swab, and he leaned over the dory, mopping up the slime clumsily, but with great good-will. "Hike out the foot-boards; they slide in them grooves," said Dan. "Swab 'em an' lay 'em down. Never let a foot-board jam. Ye may want her bad some day. Here's Long Jack." A stream of glittering fish flew into the pen from a dory alongside. "Manuel, you take the tackle. I'll fix the tables. Harvey, clear Manuel's boat. Long Jack's nestin' on the top of her." Harvey looked up from his swabbing at the bottom of another dory just above his head. "Jest like the Injian puzzle-boxes, ain't they?" said Dan, as the one boat dropped into the other. "Takes to ut like a duck to water," said Long Jack, a grizzly-chinned, long-lipped Galway man, bending to and fro exactly as Manuel had done. Disko in the cabin growled up the hatchway, and they could hear him suck his pencil. "Wan hunder an' forty-nine an' a half-bad luck to ye, Discobolus!" said Long Jack. "I'm murderin' meself to fill your pockuts. Slate ut for a bad catch. The Portugee has bate me." Whack came another dory alongside, and more fish shot into the pen. "Two hundred and three. Let's look at the passenger!" The speaker was even larger than the Galway man, and his face was made curious by a purple cut running slant-ways from his left eye to the right corner of his mouth. Not knowing what else to do, Harvey swabbed each dory as it came down, pulled out the foot-boards, and laid them in the bottom of the boat. "He's caught on good," said the scarred man, who was Tom Platt, watching him critically. "There are two ways o' doin' everything. One's fisher-fashion--any end first an' a slippery hitch over all--an' the other's--" "What we did on the old Ohio!" Dan interrupted, brushing into the knot of men with a long board on legs. "Get out o' here, Tom Platt, an' leave me fix the tables." He jammed one end of the board into two nicks in the bulwarks, kicked out the leg, and ducked just in time to avoid a swinging blow from the man-o'-war's man. "An' they did that on the Ohio, too, Danny. See?" said Tom Platt, laughing. "Guess they was swivel-eyed, then, fer it didn't git home, and I know who'll find his boots on the main-truck ef he don't leave us alone. Haul ahead! I'm busy, can't ye see?" "Danny, ye lie on the cable an' sleep all day," said Long Jack. "You're the hoight av impidence, an' I'm persuaded ye'll corrupt our supercargo in a week." "His name's Harvey," said Dan, waving two strangely shaped knives, "an' he'll be worth five of any Sou' Boston clam-digger 'fore long." He laid the knives tastefully on the table, cocked his head on one side, and admired the effect. "I think it's forty-two," said a small voice overside, and there was a roar of laughter as another voice answered, "Then my luck's turned fer onct, 'caze I'm forty-five, though I be stung outer all shape." "Forty-two or forty-five. I've lost count," the small voice said. "It's Penn an' Uncle Salters caountin' catch. This beats the circus any day," said Dan. "Jest look at 'em!" "Come in--come in!" roared Long Jack. "It's wet out yondher, children." "Forty-two, ye said." This was Uncle Salters. "I'll count again, then," the voice replied meekly. The two dories swung together and bunted into the schooner's side. "Patience o' Jerusalem!" snapped Uncle Salters, backing water with a splash. "What possest a farmer like you to set foot in a boat beats me. You've nigh stove me all up." "I am sorry, Mr. Salters. I came to sea on account of nervous dyspepsia. You advised me, I think." "You an' your nervis dyspepsy be drowned in the Whale-hole," roared Uncle Salters, a fat and tubby little man. "You're comin' down on me agin. Did ye say forty-two or forty-five?" "I've forgotten, Mr. Salters. Let's count." "Don't see as it could be forty-five. I'm forty-five," said Uncle Salters. "You count keerful, Penn." Disko Troop came out of the cabin. "Salters, you pitch your fish in naow at once," he said in the tone of authority. "Don't spile the catch, Dad," Dan murmured. "Them two are on'y jest beginnin'." "Mother av delight! He's forkin' them wan by wan," howled Long Jack, as Uncle Salters got to work laboriously; the little man in the other dory counting a line of notches on the gunwale. "That was last week's catch," he said, looking up plaintively, his forefinger where he had left off. Manuel nudged Dan, who darted to the after-tackle, and, leaning far overside, slipped the hook into the stern-rope as Manuel made her fast forward. The others pulled gallantly and swung the boat in--man, fish, and all. "One, two, four-nine," said Tom Platt, counting with a practised eye. "Forty-seven. Penn, you're it!" Dan let the after-tackle run, and slid him out of the stern on to the deck amid a torrent of his own fish. "Hold on!" roared Uncle Salters, bobbing by the waist. "Hold on, I'm a bit mixed in my caount." He had no time to protest, but was hove inboard and treated like "Pennsylvania." "Forty-one," said Tom Platt. "Beat by a farmer, Salters. An' you sech a sailor, too!" "'Tweren't fair caount," said he, stumbling out of the pen; "an' I'm stung up all to pieces." His thick hands were puffy and mottled purply white. "Some folks will find strawberry-bottom," said Dan, addressing the newly risen moon, "ef they hev to dive fer it, seems to me." "An' others," said Uncle Salters, "eats the fat o' the land in sloth, an' mocks their own blood-kin." "Seat ye! Seat ye!" a voice Harvey had not heard called from the foc'sle. Disko Troop, Tom Platt, Long Jack, and Salters went forward on the word. Little Penn bent above his square deep-sea reel and the tangled cod-lines; Manuel lay down full length on the deck, and Dan dropped into the hold, where Harvey heard him banging casks with a hammer. "Salt," he said, returning. "Soon as we're through supper we git to dressing-down. You'll pitch to Dad. Tom Platt an' Dad they stow together, an' you'll hear 'em arguin'. We're second ha'af, you an' me an' Manuel an' Penn--the youth an' beauty o' the boat." "What's the good of that?" said Harvey. "I'm hungry." "They'll be through in a minute. Suff! She smells good to-night. Dad ships a good cook ef he do suffer with his brother. It's a full catch today, Aeneid it?" He pointed at the pens piled high with cod. "What water did ye hev, Manuel?" "Twenty-fife father," said the Portuguese, sleepily. "They strike on good an' queek. Some day I show you, Harvey." The moon was beginning to walk on the still sea before the elder men came aft. The cook had no need to cry "second half." Dan and Manuel were down the hatch and at table ere Tom Platt, last and most deliberate of the elders, had finished wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Harvey followed Penn, and sat down before a tin pan of cod's tongues and sounds, mixed with scraps of pork and fried potato, a loaf of hot bread, and some black and powerful coffee. Hungry as they were, they waited while "Pennsylvania" solemnly asked a blessing. Then they stoked in silence till Dan drew a breath over his tin cup and demanded of Harvey how he felt. "'Most full, but there's just room for another piece." The cook was a huge, jet-black negro, and, unlike all the negroes Harvey had met, did not talk, contenting himself with smiles and dumb-show invitations to eat more. "See, Harvey," said Dan, rapping with his fork on the table, "it's jest as I said. The young an' handsome men--like me an' Pennsy an' you an' Manuel--we're second ha'af, an' we eats when the first ha'af are through. They're the old fish; an' they're mean an' humpy, an' their stummicks has to be humoured; so they come first, which they don't deserve. Aeneid that so, doctor?" The cook nodded. "Can't he talk?" said Harvey in a whisper. "'Nough to get along. Not much o' anything we know. His natural tongue's kinder curious. Comes from the innards of Cape Breton, he does, where the farmers speak homemade Scotch. Cape Breton's full o' niggers whose folk run in there durin' aour war, an' they talk like farmers--all huffy-chuffy." "That is not Scotch," said "Pennsylvania." "That is Gaelic. So I read in a book." "Penn reads a heap. Most of what he says is so--'cep' when it comes to a caount o' fish--eh?" "Does your father just let them say how many they've caught without checking them?" said Harvey. "Why, yes. Where's the sense of a man lyin' fer a few old cod?" "Was a man once lied for his catch," Manuel put in. "Lied every day. Fife, ten, twenty-fife more fish than come he say there was." "Where was that?" said Dan. "None o' aour folk." "Frenchman of Anguille." "Ah! Them West Shore Frenchmen don't caount anyway. Stands to reason they can't caount. Ef you run acrost any of their soft hooks, Harvey, you'll know why," said Dan, with an awful contempt. "Always more and never less, Every time we come to dress," Long Jack roared down the hatch, and the "second ha'af" scrambled up at once. The shadow of the masts and rigging, with the never-furled riding-sail, rolled to and fro on the heaving deck in the moonlight; and the pile of fish by the stern shone like a dump of fluid silver. In the hold there were tramplings and rumblings where Disko Troop and Tom Platt moved among the salt-bins. Dan passed Harvey a pitchfork, and led him to the inboard end of the rough table, where Uncle Salters was drumming impatiently with a knife-haft. A tub of salt water lay at his feet. "You pitch to dad an' Tom Platt down the hatch, an' take keer Uncle Salters don't cut yer eye out," said Dan, swinging himself into the hold. "I'll pass salt below." Penn and Manuel stood knee deep among cod in the pen, flourishing drawn knives. Long Jack, a basket at his feet and mittens on his hands, faced Uncle Salters at the table, and Harvey stared at the pitchfork and the tub. "Hi!" shouted Manuel, stooping to the fish, and bringing one up with a finger under its gill and a finger in its eyes. He laid it on the edge of the pen; the knife-blade glimmered with a sound of tearing, and the fish, slit from throat to vent, with a nick on either side of the neck, dropped at Long Jack's feet. "Hi!" said Long Jack, with a scoop of his mittened hand. The cod's liver dropped in the basket. Another wrench and scoop sent the head and offal flying, and the empty fish slid across to Uncle Salters, who snorted fiercely. There was another sound of tearing, the backbone flew over the bulwarks, and the fish, headless, gutted, and open, splashed in the tub, sending the salt water into Harvey's astonished mouth. After the first yell, the men were silent. The cod moved along as though they were alive, and long ere Harvey had ceased wondering at the miraculous dexterity of it all, his tub was full. "Pitch!" grunted Uncle Salters, without turning his head, and Harvey pitched the fish by twos and threes down the hatch. "Hi! Pitch 'em bunchy," shouted Dan. "Don't scatter! Uncle Salters is the best splitter in the fleet. Watch him mind his book!" Indeed, it looked a little as though the round uncle were cutting magazine pages against time. Manuel's body, cramped over from the hips, stayed like a statue; but his long arms grabbed the fish without ceasing. Little Penn toiled valiantly, but it was easy to see he was weak. Once or twice Manuel found time to help him without breaking the chain of supplies, and once Manuel howled because he had caught his finger in a Frenchman's hook. These hooks are made of soft metal, to be rebent after use; but the cod very often get away with them and are hooked again elsewhere; and that is one of the many reasons why the Gloucester boats despise the Frenchmen. Down below, the rasping sound of rough salt rubbed on rough flesh sounded like the whirring of a grindstone--steady undertune to the "click-nick" of knives in the pen; the wrench and shloop of torn heads, dropped liver, and flying offal; the "caraaah" of Uncle Salters's knife scooping away backbones; and the flap of wet, open bodies falling into the tub. At the end of an hour Harvey would have given the world to rest; for fresh, wet cod weigh more than you would think, and his back ached with the steady pitching. But he felt for the first time in his life that he was one of the working gang of men, took pride in the thought, and held on sullenly. "Knife oh!" shouted Uncle Salters at last. Penn doubled up, gasping among the fish, Manuel bowed back and forth to supple himself, and Long Jack leaned over the bulwarks. The cook appeared, noiseless as a black shadow, collected a mass of backbones and heads, and retreated. "Blood-ends for breakfast an' head-chowder," said Long Jack, smacking his lips. "Knife oh!" repeated Uncle Salters, waving the flat, curved splitter's weapon. "Look by your foot, Harve," cried Dan below. Harvey saw half a dozen knives stuck in a cleat in the hatch combing. He dealt these around, taking over the dulled ones. "Water!" said Disko Troop. "Scuttle-butt's for'ard an' the dipper's alongside. Hurry, Harve," said Dan. He was back in a minute with a big dipperful of stale brown water which tasted like nectar, and loosed the jaws of Disko and Tom Platt. "These are cod," said Disko. "They ain't Damarskus figs, Tom Platt, nor yet silver bars. I've told you that ever single time since we've sailed together." "A matter o' seven seasons," returned Tom Platt coolly. "Good stowin's good stowin' all the same, an' there's a right an' a wrong way o' stowin' ballast even. If you'd ever seen four hundred ton o' iron set into the--" "Hi!" With a yell from Manuel the work began again, and never stopped till the pen was empty. The instant the last fish was down, Disko Troop rolled aft to the cabin with his brother; Manuel and Long Jack went forward; Tom Platt only waited long enough to slide home the hatch ere he too disappeared. In half a minute Harvey heard deep snores in the cabin, and he was staring blankly at Dan and Penn. "I did a little better that time, Danny," said Penn, whose eyelids were heavy with sleep. "But I think it is my duty to help clean." "'Wouldn't hev your conscience fer a thousand quintal," said Dan. "Turn in, Penn. You've no call to do boy's work. Draw a bucket, Harvey. Oh, Penn, dump these in the gurry-butt 'fore you sleep. Kin you keep awake that long?" Penn took up the heavy basket of fish-livers, emptied them into a cask with a hinged top lashed by the foc'sle; then he too dropped out of sight in the cabin. "Boys clean up after dressin' down an' first watch in ca'am weather is boy's watch on the _We're Here_." Dan sluiced the pen energetically, unshipped the table, set it up to dry in the moonlight, ran the red knife-blades through a wad of oakum, and began to sharpen them on a tiny grindstone, as Harvey threw offal and backbones overboard under his direction. At the first splash a silvery-white ghost rose bolt upright from the oily water and sighed a weird whistling sigh. Harvey started back with a shout, but Dan only laughed. "Grampus," said he. "Beggin' fer fish-heads. They up-eend the way when they're hungry. Breath on him like the doleful tombs, hain't he?" A horrible stench of decayed fish filled the air as the pillar of white sank, and the water bubbled oilily. "Hain't ye never seen a grampus up-eend before? You'll see 'em by hundreds 'fore ye're through. Say, it's good to hev a boy aboard again. Otto was too old, an' a Dutchy at that. Him an' me we fought consid'ble. 'Wouldn't ha' keered fer that ef he'd hed a Christian tongue in his head. Sleepy?" "Dead sleepy," said Harvey, nodding forward. "Mustn't sleep on watch. Rouse up an' see ef our anchor-light's bright an' shinin'. You're on watch now, Harve." "Pshaw! What's to hurt us? Bright's day. Sn-orrr!" "Jest when things happen, Dad says. Fine weather's good sleepin', an' 'fore you know, mebbe, you're cut in two by a liner, an' seventeen brass-bound officers, all gen'elmen, lift their hand to it that your lights was aout an' there was a thick fog. Harve, I've kinder took to you, but ef you nod onct more I'll lay into you with a rope's end." The moon, who sees many strange things on the Banks, looked down on a slim youth in knickerbockers and a red jersey, staggering around the cluttered decks of a seventy-ton schooner, while behind him, waving a knotted rope, walked, after the manner of an executioner, a boy who yawned and nodded between the blows he dealt. The lashed wheel groaned and kicked softly, the riding-sail slatted a little in the shifts of the light wind, the windlass creaked, and the miserable procession continued. Harvey expostulated, threatened, whimpered, and at last wept outright, while Dan, the words clotting on his tongue, spoke of the beauty of watchfulness and slashed away with the rope's end, punishing the dories as often as he hit Harvey. At last the clock in the cabin struck ten, and upon the tenth stroke little Penn crept on deck. He found two boys in two tumbled heaps side by side on the main hatch, so deeply asleep that he actually rolled them to their berths. CHAPTER III It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy fragments of fish--the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight. They cleaned up the plates and pans of the elder mess, who were out fishing, sliced pork for the midday meal, swabbed down the foc'sle, filled the lamps, drew coal and water for the cook, and investigated the fore-hold, where the boat's stores were stacked. It was another perfect day--soft, mild, and clear; and Harvey breathed to the very bottom of his lungs. More schooners had crept up in the night, and the long blue seas were full of sails and dories. Far away on the horizon, the smoke of some liner, her hull invisible, smudged the blue, and to eastward a big ship's top-gallant sails, just lifting, made a square nick in it. Disko Troop was smoking by the roof of the cabin--one eye on the craft around, and the other on the little fly at the main-mast-head. "When Dad kerflummoxes that way," said Dan in a whisper, "he's doin' some high-line thinkin' fer all hands. I'll lay my wage an' share we'll make berth soon. Dad he knows the cod, an' the Fleet they know Dad knows. 'See 'em comm' up one by one, lookin' fer nothin' in particular, o' course, but scrowgin' on us all the time? There's the _Prince Leboo_; she's a Chat-ham boat. She's crep' up sence last night. An' see that big one with a patch in her foresail an' a new jib? She's the _Carrie Pitman_ from West Chat-ham. She won't keep her canvas long onless her luck's changed since last season. She don't do much 'cep' drift. There ain't an anchor made 'll hold her. . . . When the smoke puffs up in little rings like that, Dad's studyin' the fish. Ef we speak to him now, he'll git mad. Las' time I did, he jest took an' hove a boot at me." Disko Troop stared forward, the pipe between his teeth, with eyes that saw nothing. As his son said, he was studying the fish--pitting his knowledge and experience on the Banks against the roving cod in his own sea. He accepted the presence of the inquisitive schooners on the horizon as a compliment to his powers. But now that it was paid, he wished to draw away and make his berth alone, till it was time to go up to the Virgin and fish in the streets of that roaring town upon the waters. So Disko Troop thought of recent weather, and gales, currents, food-supplies, and other domestic arrangements, from the point of view of a twenty-pound cod; was, in fact, for an hour a cod himself, and looked remarkably like one. Then he removed the pipe from his teeth. "Dad," said Dan, "we've done our chores. Can't we go overside a piece? It's good catchin' weather." "Not in that cherry-coloured rig ner them ha'af baked brown shoes. Give him suthin' fit to wear." "Dad's pleased--that settles it," said Dan, delightedly, dragging Harvey into the cabin, while Troop pitched a key down the steps. "Dad keeps my spare rig where he kin overhaul it, 'cause Ma sez I'm keerless." He rummaged through a locker, and in less than three minutes Harvey was adorned with fisherman's rubber boots that came half up his thigh, a heavy blue jersey well darned at the elbows, a pair of nippers, and a sou'wester. "Naow ye look somethin' like," said Dan. "Hurry!" "Keep nigh an' handy," said Troop "an' don't go visitin' raound the Fleet. If any one asks you what I'm cal'latin' to do, speak the truth--fer ye don't know." A little red dory, labelled Hattie S., lay astern of the schooner. Dan hauled in the painter, and dropped lightly on to the bottom boards, while Harvey tumbled clumsily after. "That's no way o' gettin' into a boat," said Dan. "Ef there was any sea you'd go to the bottom, sure. You got to learn to meet her." Dan fitted the thole-pins, took the forward thwart and watched Harvey's work. The boy had rowed, in a lady-like fashion, on the Adirondack ponds; but there is a difference between squeaking pins and well-balanced ruflocks--light sculls and stubby, eight-foot sea-oars. They stuck in the gentle swell, and Harvey grunted. "Short! Row short!" said Dan. "Ef you cramp your oar in any kind o' sea you're liable to turn her over. Ain't she a daisy? Mine, too." The little dory was specklessly clean. In her bows lay a tiny anchor, two jugs of water, and some seventy fathoms of thin, brown dory-roding. A tin dinner-horn rested in cleats just under Harvey's right hand, beside an ugly-looking maul, a short gaff, and a shorter wooden stick. A couple of lines, with very heavy leads and double cod-hooks, all neatly coiled on square reels, were stuck in their place by the gunwale. "Where's the sail and mast?" said Harvey, for his hands were beginning to blister. Dan chuckled. "Ye don't sail fishin'-dories much. Ye pull; but ye needn't pull so hard. Don't you wish you owned her?" "Well, I guess my father might give me one or two if I asked 'em," Harvey replied. He had been too busy to think much of his family till then. "That's so. I forgot your dad's a millionaire. You don't act millionary any, naow. But a dory an' craft an' gear"--Dan spoke as though she were a whaleboat--"costs a heap. Think your dad 'u'd give you one fer--fer a pet like?" "Shouldn't wonder. It would be 'most the only thing I haven't stuck him for yet." "Must be an expensive kinder kid to home. Don't slitheroo thet way, Harve. Short's the trick, because no sea's ever dead still, an' the swells 'll--" Crack! The loom of the oar kicked Harvey under the chin and knocked him backwards. "That was what I was goin' to say. I hed to learn too, but I wasn't more than eight years old when I got my schoolin'." Harvey regained his seat with aching jaws and a frown. "No good gettin' mad at things, Dad says. It's our own fault ef we can't handle 'em, he says. Le's try here. Manuel 'll give us the water." The "Portugee" was rocking fully a mile away, but when Dan up-ended an oar he waved his left arm three times. "Thirty fathom," said Dan, stringing a salt clam on to the hook. "Over with the doughboys. Bait same's I do, Harvey, an' don't snarl your reel." Dan's line was out long before Harvey had mastered the mystery of baiting and heaving out the leads. The dory drifted along easily. It was not worth while to anchor till they were sure of good ground. "Here we come!" Dan shouted, and a shower of spray rattled on Harvey's shoulders as a big cod flapped and kicked alongside. "Muckle, Harvey, muckle! Under your hand! Quick!" Evidently "muckle" could not be the dinner-horn, so Harvey passed over the maul, and Dan scientifically stunned the fish before he pulled it inboard, and wrenched out the hook with the short wooden stick he called a "gob-stick." Then Harvey felt a tug, and pulled up zealously. "Why, these are strawberries!" he shouted. "Look!" The hook had fouled among a bunch of strawberries, red on one side and white on the other--perfect reproductions of the land fruit, except that there were no leaves, and the stem was all pipy and slimy. "Don't tech 'em. Slat 'em off. Don't--" The warning came too late. Harvey had picked them from the hook, and was admiring them. "Ouch!" he cried, for his fingers throbbed as though he had grasped many nettles. "Now ye know what strawberry-bottom means. Nothin' 'cep' fish should be teched with the naked fingers, Dad says. Slat 'em off agin the gunnel, an' bait up, Harve. Lookin' won't help any. It's all in the wages." Harvey smiled at the thought of his ten and a half dollars a month, and wondered what his mother would say if she could see him hanging over the edge of a fishing-dory in mid-ocean. She suffered agonies whenever he went out on Saranac Lake; and, by the way, Harvey remembered distinctly that he used to laugh at her anxieties. Suddenly the line flashed through his hand, stinging even through the "nippers," the woolen circlets supposed to protect it. "He's a logy. Give him room accordin' to his strength," cried Dan. "I'll help ye." "No, you won't," Harvey snapped, as he hung on to the line. "It's my first fish. Is--is it a whale?" "Halibut, mebbe." Dan peered down into the water alongside, and flourished the big "muckle," ready for all chances. Something white and oval flickered and fluttered through the green. "I'll lay my wage an' share he's over a hundred. Are you so everlastin' anxious to land him alone?" Harvey's knuckles were raw and bleeding where they had been banged against the gunwale; his face was purple-blue between excitement and exertion; he dripped with sweat, and was half-blinded from staring at the circling sunlit ripples about the swiftly moving line. The boys were tired long ere the halibut, who took charge of them and the dory for the next twenty minutes. But the big flat fish was gaffed and hauled in at last. "Beginner's luck," said Dan, wiping his forehead. "He's all of a hundred." Harvey looked at the huge gray-and-mottled creature with unspeakable pride. He had seen halibut many times on marble slabs ashore, but it had never occurred to him to ask how they came inland. Now he knew; and every inch of his body ached with fatigue. "Ef Dad was along," said Dan, hauling up, "he'd read the signs plain's print. The fish are runnin' smaller an' smaller, an' you've took 'baout as logy a halibut's we're apt to find this trip. Yesterday's catch--did ye notice it?--was all big fish an' no halibut. Dad he'd read them signs right off. Dad says everythin' on the Banks is signs, an' can be read wrong er right. Dad's deeper'n the Whale-hole." Even as he spoke some one fired a pistol on the _We're Here_, and a potato-basket was run up in the fore-rigging. "What did I say, naow? That's the call fer the whole crowd. Dad's onter something, er he'd never break fishin' this time o' day. Reel up, Harve, an' we'll pull back." They were to windward of the schooner, just ready to flirt the dory over the still sea, when sounds of woe half a mile off led them to Penn, who was careering around a fixed point for all the world like a gigantic water-bug. The little man backed away and came down again with enormous energy, but at the end of each maneuver his dory swung round and snubbed herself on her rope. "We'll hev to help him, else he'll root an' seed here," said Dan. "What's the matter?" said Harvey. This was a new world, where he could not lay down the law to his elders, but had to ask questions humbly. And the sea was horribly big and unexcited. "Anchor's fouled. Penn's always losing 'em. Lost two this trip a'ready--on sandy bottom too--an' Dad says next one he loses, sure's fishin', he'll give him the kelleg. That 'u'd break Penn's heart." "What's a 'kelleg'?" said Harvey, who had a vague idea it might be some kind of marine torture, like keel-hauling in the storybooks. "Big stone instid of an anchor. You kin see a kelleg ridin' in the bows fur's you can see a dory, an' all the fleet knows what it means. They'd guy him dreadful. Penn couldn't stand that no more'n a dog with a dipper to his tail. He's so everlastin' sensitive. Hello, Penn! Stuck again? Don't try any more o' your patents. Come up on her, and keep your rodin' straight up an' down." "It doesn't move," said the little man, panting. "It doesn't move at all, and instead I tried everything." "What's all this hurrah's-nest for'ard?" said Dan, pointing to a wild tangle of spare oars and dory-roding, all matted together by the hand of inexperience. "Oh, that," said Penn proudly, "is a Spanish windlass. Mr. Salters showed me how to make it; but even that doesn't move her." Dan bent low over the gunwale to hide a smile, twitched once or twice on the roding, and, behold, the anchor drew at once. "Haul up, Penn," he said laughing, "er she'll git stuck again." They left him regarding the weed-hung flukes of the little anchor with big, pathetic blue eyes, and thanking them profusely. "Oh, say, while I think of it, Harve," said Dan when they were out of ear-shot, "Penn ain't quite all caulked. He ain't nowise dangerous, but his mind's give out. See?" "Is that so, or is it one of your father's judgments?" Harvey asked as he bent to his oars. He felt he was learning to handle them more easily. "Dad ain't mistook this time. Penn's a sure 'nuff loony." "No, he ain't thet exactly, so much ez a harmless ijut. It was this way (you're rowin' quite so, Harve), an' I tell you 'cause it's right you orter know. He was a Moravian preacher once. Jacob Boiler wuz his name, Dad told me, an' he lived with his wife an' four children somewheres out Pennsylvania way. Well, Penn he took his folks along to a Moravian meetin'--camp-meetin' most like--an' they stayed over jest one night in Johns-town. You've heered talk o' Johnstown?" Harvey considered. "Yes, I have. But I don't know why. It sticks in my head same as Ashtabula." "Both was big accidents--thet's why, Harve. Well, that one single night Penn and his folks was to the hotel Johnstown was wiped out. 'Dam bust an' flooded her, an' the houses struck adrift an' bumped into each other an' sunk. I've seen the pictures, an' they're dretful. Penn he saw his folk drowned all'n a heap 'fore he rightly knew what was comin'. His mind give out from that on. He mistrusted somethin' hed happened up to Johnstown, but for the poor life of him he couldn't remember what, an' he jest drifted araound smilin' an' wonderin'. He didn't know what he was, nor yit what he hed bin, an' thet way he run agin Uncle Salters, who was visitin' 'n Allegheny City. Ha'af my mother's folks they live scattered inside o' Pennsylvania, an' Uncle Salters he visits araound winters. Uncle Salters he kinder adopted Penn, well knowin' what his trouble wuz; an' he brought him East, an' he give him work on his farm." "Why, I heard him calling Penn a farmer last night when the boats bumped. Is your Uncle Salters a farmer?" "Farmer!" shouted Dan. "There ain't water enough 'tween here an' Hatt'rus to wash the furrer-mold off'n his boots. He's jest everlastin' farmer. Why, Harve, I've seen thet man hitch up a bucket, long towards sundown, an' set twiddlin' the spigot to the scuttle-butt same's ef 'twas a cow's bag. He's thet much farmer. Well, Penn an' he they ran the farm--up Exeter way 'twur. Uncle Salters he sold it this spring to a jay from Boston as wanted to build a summer-haouse, an' he got a heap for it. Well, them two loonies scratched along till, one day, Penn's church--he'd belonged to the Moravians--found out where he wuz drifted an' layin', an' wrote to Uncle Salters. 'Never heerd what they said exactly; but Uncle Salters was mad. He's a 'piscopolian mostly--but he jest let 'em hev it both sides o' the bow, 's if he was a Baptist; an' sez he warn't goin' to give up Penn to any blame Moravian connection in Pennsylvania or anywheres else. Then he come to Dad, towin' Penn,--thet was two trips back,--an' sez he an' Penn must fish a trip fer their health. 'Guess he thought the Moravians wouldn't hunt the Banks fer Jacob Boiler. Dad was agreeable, fer Uncle Salters he'd been fishin' off an' on fer thirty years, when he warn't inventin' patent manures, an' he took quarter-share in the _We're Here_; an' the trip done Penn so much good, Dad made a habit o' takin' him. Some day, Dad sez, he'll remember his wife an' kids an' Johnstown, an' then, like as not, he'll die, Dad sez. Don't ye talk abaout Johnstown ner such things to Penn, 'r Uncle Salters he'll heave ye overboard." "Poor Penn!" murmured Harvey. "I shouldn't ever have thought Uncle Salters cared for him by the look of 'em together." "I like Penn, though; we all do," said Dan. "We ought to ha' give him a tow, but I wanted to tell ye first." They were close to the schooner now, the other boats a little behind them. "You needn't heave in the dories till after dinner," said Troop from the deck. "We'll dress daown right off. Fix table, boys!" "Deeper'n the Whale-deep," said Dan, with a wink, as he set the gear for dressing down. "Look at them boats that hev edged up sence mornin'. They're all waitin' on Dad. See 'em, Harve?" "They are all alike to me." And indeed to a landsman, the nodding schooners around seemed run from the same mold. "They ain't, though. That yaller, dirty packet with her bowsprit steeved that way, she's the Hope of Prague. Nick Brady's her skipper, the meanest man on the Banks. We'll tell him so when we strike the Main Ledge. 'Way off yonder's the Day's Eye. The two Jeraulds own her. She's from Harwich; fastish, too, an' hez good luck; but Dad he'd find fish in a graveyard. Them other three, side along, they're the Margie Smith, Rose, and Edith S. Walen, all from home. 'Guess we'll see the Abbie M. Deering to-morrer, Dad, won't we? They're all slippin' over from the shaol o' 'Oueereau." "You won't see many boats to-morrow, Danny." When Troop called his son Danny, it was a sign that the old man was pleased. "Boys, we're too crowded," he went on, addressing the crew as they clambered inboard. "We'll leave 'em to bait big an' catch small." He looked at the catch in the pen, and it was curious to see how little and level the fish ran. Save for Harvey's halibut, there was nothing over fifteen pounds on deck. "I'm waitin' on the weather," he added. "Ye'll have to make it yourself, Disko, for there's no sign I can see," said Long Jack, sweeping the clear horizon. And yet, half an hour later, as they were dressing down, the Bank fog dropped on them, "between fish and fish," as they say. It drove steadily and in wreaths, curling and smoking along the colourless water. The men stopped dressing-down without a word. Long Jack and Uncle Salters slipped the windlass brakes into their sockets, and began to heave up the anchor; the windlass jarring as the wet hempen cable strained on the barrel. Manuel and Tom Platt gave a hand at the last. The anchor came up with a sob, and the riding-sail bellied as Troop steadied her at the wheel. "Up jib and foresail," said he. "Slip 'em in the smother," shouted Long Jack, making fast the jib-sheet, while the others raised the clacking, rattling rings of the foresail; and the foreboom creaked as the _We're Here_ looked up into the wind and dived off into blank, whirling white. "There's wind behind this fog," said Troop. It was wonderful beyond words to Harvey; and the most wonderful part was that he heard no orders except an occasional grunt from Troop, ending with, "That's good, my son!" "Never seen anchor weighed before?" said Tom Platt, to Harvey gaping at the damp canvas of the foresail. "No. Where are we going?" "Fish and make berth, as you'll find out 'fore you've been a week aboard. It's all new to you, but we never know what may come to us. Now, take me--Tom Platt--I'd never ha' thought--" "It's better than fourteen dollars a month an' a bullet in your belly," said Troop, from the wheel. "Ease your jumbo a grind." "Dollars an' cents better," returned the man-o'-war's man, doing something to a big jib with a wooden spar tied to it. "But we didn't think o' that when we manned the windlass-brakes on the Miss Jim Buck, I outside Beau-fort Harbor, with Fort Macon heavin' hot shot at our stern, an' a livin' gale atop of all. Where was you then, Disko?" "Jest here, or hereabouts," Disko replied, "earnin' my bread on the deep waters, an' dodgin' Reb privateers. Sorry I can't accommodate you with red-hot shot, Tom Platt; but I guess we'll come aout all right on wind 'fore we see Eastern Point." There was an incessant slapping and chatter at the bows now, varied by a solid thud and a little spout of spray that clattered down on the foc'sle. The rigging dripped clammy drops, and the men lounged along the lee of the house--all save Uncle Salters, who sat stiffly on the main-hatch nursing his stung hands. "Guess she'd carry stays'l," said Disko, rolling one eye at his brother. "Guess she wouldn't to any sorter profit. What's the sense o' wastin' canvas?" the farmer-sailor replied. The wheel twitched almost imperceptibly in Disko's hands. A few seconds later a hissing wave-top slashed diagonally across the boat, smote Uncle Salters between the shoulders, and drenched him from head to foot. He rose sputtering, and went forward only to catch another. "See Dad chase him all around the deck," said Dan. "Uncle Salters he thinks his quarter share's our canvas. Dad's put this duckin' act up on him two trips runnin'. Hi! That found him where he feeds." Uncle Salters had taken refuge by the foremast, but a wave slapped him over the knees. Disko's face was as blank as the circle of the wheel. "Guess she'd lie easier under stays'l, Salters," said Disko, as though he had seen nothing. "Set your old kite, then," roared the victim through a cloud of spray; "only don't lay it to me if anything happens. Penn, you go below right off an' git your coffee. You ought to hev more sense than to bum araound on deck this weather." "Now they'll swill coffee an' play checkers till the cows come home," said Dan, as Uncle Salters hustled Penn into the fore-cabin. "'Looks to me like's if we'd all be doin' so fer a spell. There's nothin' in creation deader-limpsey-idler'n a Banker when she ain't on fish." "I'm glad ye spoke, Danny," cried Long Jack, who had been casting round in search of amusement. "I'd clean forgot we'd a passenger under that T-wharf hat. There's no idleness for thim that don't know their ropes. Pass him along, Tom Platt, an' we'll larn him." "'Tain't my trick this time," grinned Dan. "You've got to go it alone. Dad learned me with a rope's end." For an hour Long Jack walked his prey up and down, teaching, as he said, "things at the sea that ivry man must know, blind, dhrunk, or asleep." There is not much gear to a seventy-ton schooner with a stump-foremast, but Long Jack had a gift of expression. When he wished to draw Harvey's attention to the peak-halyards, he dug his knuckles into the back of the boy's neck and kept him at gaze for half a minute. He emphasized the difference between fore and aft generally by rubbing Harvey's nose along a few feet of the boom, and the lead of each rope was fixed in Harvey's mind by the end of the rope itself. The lesson would have been easier had the deck been at all free; but there appeared to be a place on it for everything and anything except a man. Forward lay the windlass and its tackle, with the chain and hemp cables, all very unpleasant to trip over; the foc'sle stovepipe, and the gurry-butts by the foc'sle hatch to hold the fish-livers. Aft of these the foreboom and booby of the main-hatch took all the space that was not needed for the pumps and dressing-pens. Then came the nests of dories lashed to ring-bolts by the quarter-deck; the house, with tubs and oddments lashed all around it; and, last, the sixty-foot main-boom in its crutch, splitting things length-wise, to duck and dodge under every time. Tom Platt, of course, could not keep his oar out of the business, but ranged alongside with enormous and unnecessary descriptions of sails and spars on the old Ohio. "Niver mind fwhat he says; attind to me, Innocince. Tom Platt, this bally-hoo's not the Ohio, an' you're mixing the bhoy bad." "He'll be ruined for life, beginnin' on a fore-an'-after this way," Tom Platt pleaded. "Give him a chance to know a few leadin' principles. Sailin's an art, Harvey, as I'd show you if I had ye in the fore-top o' the--" "I know ut. Ye'd talk him dead an' cowld. Silince, Tom Platt! Now, after all I've said, how'd you reef the foresail, Harve? Take your time answerin'." "Haul that in," said Harvey, pointing to leeward. "Fwhat? The North Atlantuc?" "No, the boom. Then run that rope you showed me back there--" "That's no way," Tom Platt burst in. "Quiet! He's larnin', an' has not the names good yet. Go on, Harve." "Oh, it's the reef-pennant. I'd hook the tackle on to the reef-pennant, and then let down--" "Lower the sail, child! Lower!" said Tom Platt, in a professional agony. "Lower the throat and peak halyards," Harvey went on. Those names stuck in his head. "Lay your hand on thim," said Long Jack. Harvey obeyed. "Lower till that rope-loop--on the after-leach-kris--no, it's cringle--till the cringle was down on the boom. Then I'd tie her up the way you said, and then I'd hoist up the peak and throat halyards again." "You've forgot to pass the tack-earing, but wid time and help ye'll larn. There's good and just reason for ivry rope aboard, or else 'twould be overboard. D'ye follow me? 'Tis dollars an' cents I'm puttin' into your pocket, ye skinny little supercargo, so that fwhin ye've filled out ye can ship from Boston to Cuba an' tell thim Long Jack larned you. Now I'll chase ye around a piece, callin' the ropes, an' you'll lay your hand on thim as I call." He began, and Harvey, who was feeling rather tired, walked slowly to the rope named. A rope's end licked round his ribs, and nearly knocked the breath out of him. "When you own a boat," said Tom Platt, with severe eyes, "you can walk. Till then, take all orders at the run. Once more--to make sure!" Harvey was in a glow with the exercise, and this last cut warmed him thoroughly. Now he was a singularly smart boy, the son of a very clever man and a very sensitive woman, with a fine resolute temper that systematic spoiling had nearly turned to mulish obstinacy. He looked at the other men, and saw that even Dan did not smile. It was evidently all in the day's work, though it hurt abominably; so he swallowed the hint with a gulp and a gasp and a grin. The same smartness that led him to take such advantage of his mother made him very sure that no one on the boat, except, maybe, Penn, would stand the least nonsense. One learns a great deal from a mere tone. Long Jack called over half a dozen ropes, and Harvey danced over the deck like an eel at ebb-tide, one eye on Tom Platt. "Ver' good. Ver' good don," said Manuel. "After supper I show you a little schooner I make, with all her ropes. So we shall learn." "Fust-class fer--a passenger," said Dan. "Dad he's jest allowed you'll be wuth your salt maybe 'fore you're draownded. Thet's a heap fer Dad. I'll learn you more our next watch together." "Taller!" grunted Disko, peering through the fog as it smoked over the bows. There was nothing to be seen ten feet beyond the surging jib-boom, while alongside rolled the endless procession of solemn, pale waves whispering and lipping one to the other. "Now I'll learn you something Long Jack can't," shouted Tom Platt, as from a locker by the stern he produced a battered deep-sea lead hollowed at one end, smeared the hollow from a saucer full of mutton tallow, and went forward. "I'll learn you how to fly the Blue Pigeon. Shooo!" Disko did something to the wheel that checked the schooner's way, while Manuel, with Harvey to help (and a proud boy was Harvey), let down the jib in a lump on the boom. The lead sung a deep droning song as Tom Platt whirled it round and round. "Go ahead, man," said Long Jack, impatiently. "We're not drawin' twenty-five fut off Fire Island in a fog. There's no trick to ut." "Don't be jealous, Galway." The released lead plopped into the sea far ahead as the schooner surged slowly forward. "Soundin' is a trick, though," said Dan, "when your dipsey lead's all the eye you're like to hev for a week. What d'you make it, Dad?" Disko's face relaxed. His skill and honour were involved in the march he had stolen on the rest of the Fleet, and he had his reputation as a master artist who knew the Banks blindfold. "Sixty, mebbe--ef I'm any judge," he replied, with a glance at the tiny compass in the window of the house. "Sixty," sung out Tom Platt, hauling in great wet coils. The schooner gathered way once more. "Heave!" said Disko, after a quarter of an hour. "What d'you make it?" Dan whispered, and he looked at Harvey proudly. But Harvey was too proud of his own performances to be impressed just then. "Fifty," said the father. "I mistrust we're right over the nick o' Green Bank on old Sixty-Fifty." "Fifty!" roared Tom Platt. They could scarcely see him through the fog. "She's bust within a yard--like the shells at Fort Macon." "Bait up, Harve," said Dan, diving for a line on the reel. The schooner seemed to be straying promiscuously through the smother, her headsail banging wildly. The men waited and looked at the boys who began fishing. "Heugh!" Dan's lines twitched on the scored and scarred rail. "Now haow in thunder did Dad know? Help us here, Harve. It's a big un. Poke-hooked, too." They hauled together, and landed a goggle-eyed twenty-pound cod. He had taken the bait right into his stomach. "Why, he's all covered with little crabs," cried Harvey, turning him over. "By the great hook-block, they're lousy already," said Long Jack. "Disko, ye kape your spare eyes under the keel." Splash went the anchor, and they all heaved over the lines, each man taking his own place at the bulwarks. "Are they good to eat?" Harvey panted, as he lugged in another crab-covered cod. "Sure. When they're lousy it's a sign they've all been herdin' together by the thousand, and when they take the bait that way they're hungry. Never mind how the bait sets. They'll bite on the bare hook." "Say, this is great!" Harvey cried, as the fish came in gasping and splashing--nearly all poke-hooked, as Dan had said. "Why can't we always fish from the boat instead of from the dories?" "Allus can, till we begin to dress daown. Efter thet, the heads and offals 'u'd scare the fish to Fundy. Boatfishin' ain't reckoned progressive, though, unless ye know as much as dad knows. Guess we'll run aout aour trawl to-night. Harder on the back, this, than frum the dory, ain't it?" It was rather back-breaking work, for in a dory the weight of a cod is water-borne till the last minute, and you are, so to speak, abreast of him; but the few feet of a schooner's freeboard make so much extra dead-hauling, and stooping over the bulwarks cramps the stomach. But it was wild and furious sport so long as it lasted; and a big pile lay aboard when the fish ceased biting. "Where's Penn and Uncle Salters?" Harvey asked, slapping the slime off his oilskins, and reeling up the line in careful imitation of the others. "Git 's coffee and see." Under the yellow glare of the lamp on the pawl-post, the foc'sle table down and opened, utterly unconscious of fish or weather, sat the two men, a checker-board between them, Uncle Salters snarling at Penn's every move. "What's the matter naow?" said the former, as Harvey, one hand in the leather loop at the head of the ladder, hung shouting to the cook. "Big fish and lousy--heaps and heaps," Harvey replied, quoting Long Jack. "How's the game?" Little Penn's jaw dropped. "'Tweren't none o' his fault," snapped Uncle Salters. "Penn's deef." "Checkers, weren't it?" said Dan, as Harvey staggered aft with the steaming coffee in a tin pail. "That lets us out o' cleanin' up to-night. Dad's a jest man. They'll have to do it." "An' two young fellers I know'll bait up a tub or so o' trawl, while they're cleanin'," said Disko, lashing the wheel to his taste. "Um! Guess I'd ruther clean up, Dad." "Don't doubt it. Ye wun't, though. Dress daown! Dress daown! Penn'll pitch while you two bait up." "Why in thunder didn't them blame boys tell us you'd struck on?" said Uncle Salters, shuffling to his place at the table. "This knife's gum-blunt, Dan." "Ef stickin' out cable don't wake ye, guess you'd better hire a boy o' your own," said Dan, muddling about in the dusk over the tubs full of trawl-line lashed to windward of the house. "Oh, Harve, don't ye want to slip down an' git 's bait?" "Bait ez we are," said Disko. "I mistrust shag-fishin' will pay better, ez things go." That meant the boys would bait with selected offal of the cod as the fish were cleaned--an improvement on paddling bare-handed in the little bait-barrels below. The tubs were full of neatly coiled line carrying a big hook each few feet; and the testing and baiting of every single hook, with the stowage of the baited line so that it should run clear when shot from the dory, was a scientific business. Dan managed it in the dark, without looking, while Harvey caught his fingers on the barbs and bewailed his fate. But the hooks flew through Dan's fingers like tatting on an old maid's lap. "I helped bait up trawl ashore 'fore I could well walk," he said. "But it's a putterin' job all the same. Oh, Dad!" This shouted towards the hatch, where Disko and Tom Platt were salting. "How many skates you reckon we'll need?" "'Baout three. Hurry!" "There's three hundred fathom to each tub," Dan explained; "more'n enough to lay out to-night. Ouch! 'Slipped up there, I did." He stuck his finger in his mouth. "I tell you, Harve, there ain't money in Gloucester 'u'd hire me to ship on a reg'lar trawler. It may be progressive, but, barrin' that, it's the putterin'est, slimjammest business top of earth." "I don't know what this is, if 'tisn't regular trawling," said Harvey sulkily. "My fingers are all cut to frazzles." "Pshaw! This is just one o' Dad's blame experiments. He don't trawl 'less there's mighty good reason fer it. Dad knows. Thet's why he's baitin' ez he is. We'll hev her saggin' full when we take her up er we won't see a fin." Penn and Uncle Salters cleaned up as Disko had ordained, but the boys profited little. No sooner were the tubs furnished than Tom Platt and Long Jack, who had been exploring the inside of a dory with a lantern, snatched them away, loaded up the tubs and some small, painted trawl-buoys, and hove the boat overboard into what Harvey regarded as an exceedingly rough sea. "They'll be drowned. Why, the dory's loaded like a freight-car," he cried. "We'll be back," said Long Jack, "an' in case you'll not be lookin' for us, we'll lay into you both if the trawl's snarled." The dory surged up on the crest of a wave, and just when it seemed impossible that she could avoid smashing against the schooner's side, slid over the ridge, and was swallowed up in the damp dusk. "Take ahold here, an' keep ringin' steady," said Dan, passing Harvey the lanyard of a bell that hung just behind the windlass. Harvey rang lustily, for he felt two lives depended on him. But Disko in the cabin, scrawling in the log-book, did not look like a murderer, and when he went to supper he even smiled dryly at the anxious Harvey. "This ain't no weather," said Dan. "Why, you an' me could set thet trawl! They've only gone out jest far 'nough so's not to foul our cable. They don't need no bell reelly." "Clang! clang! clang!" Harvey kept it up, varied with occasional rub-a-dubs, for another half-hour. There was a bellow and a bump alongside. Manuel and Dan raced to the hooks of the dory-tackle; Long Jack and Tom Platt arrived on deck together, it seemed, one half the North Atlantic at their backs, and the dory followed them in the air, landing with a clatter. "Nary snarl," said Tom Platt as he dripped. "Danny, you'll do yet." "The pleasure av your comp'ny to the banquit," said Long Jack, squelching the water from his boots as he capered like an elephant and stuck an oil-skinned arm into Harvey's face. "We do be condescending to honour the second half wid our presence." And off they all four rolled to supper, where Harvey stuffed himself to the brim on fish-chowder and fried pies, and fell fast asleep just as Manuel produced from a locker a lovely two-foot model of the Lucy Holmes, his first boat, and was going to show Harvey the ropes. Harvey never even twiddled his fingers as Penn pushed him into his bunk. "It must be a sad thing--a very sad thing," said Penn, watching the boy's face, "for his mother and his father, who think he is dead. To lose a child--to lose a man-child!" "Git out o' this, Penn," said Dan. "Go aft and finish your game with Uncle Salters. Tell Dad I'll stand Harve's watch ef he don't keer. He's played aout." "Ver' good boy," said Manuel, slipping out of his boots and disappearing into the black shadows of the lower bunk. "Expec' he make good man, Danny. I no see he is any so mad as your parpa he says. Eh, wha-at?" Dan chuckled, but the chuckle ended in a snore. It was thick weather outside, with a rising wind, and the elder men stretched their watches. The hour struck clear in the cabin; the nosing bows slapped and scuffed with the seas; the foc'sle stove-pipe hissed and sputtered as the spray caught it; and the boys slept on, while Disko, Long Jack, Tom Platt, and Uncle Salters, each in turn, stumped aft to look at the wheel, forward to see that the anchor held, or to veer out a little more cable against chafing, with a glance at the dim anchor-light between each round. CHAPTER IV Harvey waked to find the "first half" at breakfast, the foc'sle door drawn to a crack, and every square inch of the schooner singing its own tune. The black bulk of the cook balanced behind the tiny galley over the glare of the stove, and the pots and pans in the pierced wooden board before it jarred and racketed to each plunge. Up and up the foc'sle climbed, yearning and surging and quivering, and then, with a clear, sickle-like swoop, came down into the seas. He could hear the flaring bows cut and squelch, and there was a pause ere the divided waters came down on the deck above, like a volley of buckshot. Followed the woolly sound of the cable in the hawse-hole; and a grunt and squeal of the windlass; a yaw, a punt, and a kick, and the _We're Here_ gathered herself together to repeat the motions. "Now, ashore," he heard Long Jack saying, "ye've chores, an' ye must do thim in any weather. Here we're well clear of the fleet, an' we've no chores--an' that's a blessin'. Good night, all." He passed like a big snake from the table to his bunk, and began to smoke. Tom Platt followed his example; Uncle Salters, with Penn, fought his way up the ladder to stand his watch, and the cook set for the "second half." It came out of its bunks as the others had entered theirs, with a shake and a yawn. It ate till it could eat no more; and then Manuel filled his pipe with some terrible tobacco, crotched himself between the pawl-post and a forward bunk, cocked his feet up on the table, and smiled tender and indolent smiles at the smoke. Dan lay at length in his bunk, wrestling with a gaudy, gilt-stopped accordion, whose tunes went up and down with the pitching of the _We're Here_. The cook, his shoulders against the locker where he kept the fried pies (Dan was fond of fried pies), peeled potatoes, with one eye on the stove in event of too much water finding its way down the pipe; and the general smell and smother were past all description. Harvey considered affairs, wondered that he was not deathly sick, and crawled into his bunk again, as the softest and safest place, while Dan struck up, "I don't want to play in your yard," as accurately as the wild jerks allowed. "How long is this for?" Harvey asked of Manuel. "Till she get a little quiet, and we can row to trawl. Perhaps to-night. Perhaps two days more. You do not like? Eh, wha-at?" "I should have been crazy sick a week ago, but it doesn't seem to upset me now--much." "That is because we make you fisherman, these days. If I was you, when I come to Gloucester I would give two, three big candles for my good luck." "Give who?" "To be sure--the Virgin of our Church on the Hill. She is very good to fishermen all the time. That is why so few of us Portugee men ever are drowned." "You're a Roman Catholic, then?" "I am a Madeira man. I am not a Porto Pico boy. Shall I be Baptist, then? Eh, wha-at? I always give candles--two, three more when I come to Gloucester. The good Virgin she never forgets me, Manuel." "I don't sense it that way," Tom Platt put in from his bunk, his scarred face lit up by the glare of a match as he sucked at his pipe. "It stands to reason the sea's the sea; and you'll get jest about what's goin', candles or kerosene, fer that matter." "'Tis a mighty good thing," said Long Jack, "to have a frind at coort, though. I'm o' Manuel's way o' thinkin'. About tin years back I was crew to a Sou' Boston market-boat. We was off Minot's Ledge wid a northeaster, butt first, atop of us, thicker'n burgoo. The ould man was dhrunk, his chin waggin' on the tiller, an' I sez to myself, 'If iver I stick my boat-huk into T-wharf again, I'll show the saints fwhat manner o' craft they saved me out av.' Now, I'm here, as ye can well see, an' the model of the dhirty ould Kathleen, that took me a month to make, I gave ut to the priest, an' he hung ut up forninst the altar. There's more sense in givin' a model that's by way o' bein' a work av art than any candle. Ye can buy candles at store, but a model shows the good saints ye've tuk trouble an' are grateful." "D'you believe that, Irish?" said Tom Platt, turning on his elbow. "Would I do ut if I did not, Ohio?" "Wa-al, Enoch Fuller he made a model o' the old Ohio, and she's to Calem museum now. Mighty pretty model, too, but I guess Enoch he never done it fer no sacrifice; an' the way I take it is--" There were the makings of an hour-long discussion of the kind that fishermen love, where the talk runs in shouting circles and no one proves anything at the end, had not Dan struck up this cheerful rhyme: "Up jumped the mackerel with his stripe'd back. Reef in the mainsail, and haul on the tack; _For_ it's windy weather--" Here Long Jack joined in: "_And_ it's blowy weather; _When_ the winds begin to blow, pipe all hands together!" Dan went on, with a cautious look at Tom Platt, holding the accordion low in the bunk: "Up jumped the cod with his chuckle-head, Went to the main-chains to heave at the lead; _For_ it's windy weather," etc. Tom Platt seemed to be hunting for something. Dan crouched lower, but sang louder: "Up jumped the flounder that swims to the ground. Chuckle-head! Chuckle-head! Mind where ye sound!" Tom Platt's huge rubber boot whirled across the foc'sle and caught Dan's uplifted arm. There was war between the man and the boy ever since Dan had discovered that the mere whistling of that tune would make him angry as he heaved the lead. "Thought I'd fetch yer," said Dan, returning the gift with precision. "Ef you don't like my music, git out your fiddle. I ain't goin' to lie here all day an' listen to you an' Long Jack arguin' 'baout candles. Fiddle, Tom Platt; or I'll learn Harve here the tune!" Tom Platt leaned down to a locker and brought up an old white fiddle. Manuel's eye glistened, and from somewhere behind the pawl-post he drew out a tiny, guitar-like thing with wire strings, which he called a machette. "'Tis a concert," said Long Jack, beaming through the smoke. "A reg'lar Boston concert." There was a burst of spray as the hatch opened, and Disko, in yellow oilskins, descended. "Ye're just in time, Disko. Fwhat's she doin' outside?" "Jest this!" He dropped on to the lockers with the push and heave of the _We're Here_. "We're singin' to kape our breakfasts down. Ye'll lead, av course, Disko," said Long Jack. "Guess there ain't more'n 'baout two old songs I know, an' ye've heerd them both." His excuses were cut short by Tom Platt launching into a most dolorous tune, like unto the moaning of winds and the creaking of masts. With his eyes fixed on the beams above, Disko began this ancient, ancient ditty, Tom Platt flourishing all round him to make the tune and words fit a little: "There is a crack packet--crack packet o' fame, She hails from Noo York, an' the _Dreadnought's_ her name. You may talk o' your fliers--Swallowtail and Black Ball-- But the _Dreadnought's_ the packet that can beat them all. "Now the _Dreadnought_ she lies in the River Mersey, Because of the tug-boat to take her to sea; But when she's off soundings you shortly will know (Chorus.) She's the Liverpool packet--O Lord, let her go! "Now the _Dreadnought_ she's howlin' crost the Banks o' Newfoundland, Where the water's all shallow and the bottom's all sand. Sez all the little fishes that swim to and fro: (Chorus.) 'She's the Liverpool packet--O Lord, let her go!'", There were scores of verses, for he worked the _Dreadnought_ every mile of the way between Liverpool and New York as conscientiously as though he were on her deck, and the accordion pumped and the fiddle squeaked beside him. Tom Platt followed with something about "the rough and tough McGinn, who would pilot the vessel in." Then they called on Harvey, who felt very flattered, to contribute to the entertainment; but all that he could remember were some pieces of "Skipper Ireson's Ride" that he had been taught at the camp-school in the Adirondacks. It seemed that they might be appropriate to the time and place, but he had no more than mentioned the title when Disko brought down one foot with a bang, and cried, "Don't go on, young feller. That's a mistaken jedgment--one o' the worst kind, too, becaze it's catchin' to the ear." "I orter ha' warned you," said Dan. "Thet allus fetches Dad." "What's wrong?" said Harvey, surprised and a little angry. "All you're goin' to say," said Disko. "All dead wrong from start to finish, an' Whittier he's to blame. I have no special call to right any Marblehead man, but 'tweren't no fault o' Ireson's. My father he told me the tale time an' again, an' this is the way 'twuz." "For the wan hundredth time," put in Long Jack under his breath "Ben Ireson he was skipper o' the Betty, young feller, comin' home frum the Banks--that was before the war of 1812, but jestice is jestice at all times. They fund the Active o' Portland, an' Gibbons o' that town he was her skipper; they fund her leakin' off Cape Cod Light. There was a terr'ble gale on, an' they was gettin' the Betty home 's fast as they could craowd her. Well, Ireson he said there warn't any sense to reskin' a boat in that sea; the men they wouldn't hev it; and he laid it before them to stay by the Active till the sea run daown a piece. They wouldn't hev that either, hangin' araound the Cape in any sech weather, leak or no leak. They jest up stays'l an' quit, nat'rally takin' Ireson with 'em. Folks to Marblehead was mad at him not runnin' the risk, and becaze nex' day, when the sea was ca'am (they never stopped to think o' that), some of the Active's folks was took off by a Truro man. They come into Marblehead with their own tale to tell, sayin' how Ireson had shamed his town, an' so forth an' so on, an' Ireson's men they was scared, seein' public feelin' agin' 'em, an' they went back on Ireson, an' swore he was respons'ble for the hull act. 'Tweren't the women neither that tarred and feathered him--Marblehead women don't act that way--'twas a passel o' men an' boys, an' they carted him araound town in an old dory till the bottom fell aout, and Ireson he told 'em they'd be sorry for it some day. Well, the facts come aout later, same's they usually do, too late to be any ways useful to an honest man; an' Whittier he come along an' picked up the slack eend of a lyin' tale, an' tarred and feathered Ben Ireson all over onct more after he was dead. 'Twas the only tune Whittier ever slipped up, an' 'tweren't fair. I whaled Dan good when he brought that piece back from school. You don't know no better, o' course; but I've give you the facts, hereafter an' evermore to be remembered. Ben Ireson weren't no sech kind o' man as Whittier makes aout; my father he knew him well, before an' after that business, an' you beware o' hasty jedgments, young feller. Next!" Harvey had never heard Disko talk so long, and collapsed with burning cheeks; but, as Dan said promptly, a boy could only learn what he was taught at school, and life was too short to keep track of every lie along the coast. Then Manuel touched the jangling, jarring little machette to a queer tune, and sang something in Portuguese about "Nina, innocente!" ending with a full-handed sweep that brought the song up with a jerk. Then Disko obliged with his second song, to an old-fashioned creaky tune, and all joined in the chorus. This is one stanza: "Now Aprile is over and melted the snow, And outer Noo Bedford we shortly must tow; Yes, out o' Noo Bedford we shortly must clear, We're the whalers that never see wheat in the ear." Here the fiddle went very softly for a while by itself, and then: "Wheat-in-the-ear, my true-love's posy blowin, Wheat-in-the-ear, we're goin' off to sea; Wheat-in-the-ear, I left you fit for sowin, When I come back a loaf o' bread you'll be!" That made Harvey almost weep, though he could not tell why. But it was much worse when the cook dropped the potatoes and held out his hands for the fiddle. Still leaning against the locker door, he struck into a tune that was like something very bad but sure to happen whatever you did. After a little he sang, in an unknown tongue, his big chin down on the fiddle-tail, his white eyeballs glaring in the lamplight. Harvey swung out of his bunk to hear better; and amid the straining of the timbers and the wash of the waters the tune crooned and moaned on, like lee surf in a blind fog, till it ended with a wail. "Jimmy Christmas! Thet gives me the blue creevles," said Dan. "What in thunder is it?" "The song of Fin McCoul," said the cook, "when he wass going to Norway." His English was not thick, but all clear-cut, as though it came from a phonograph. "Faith, I've been to Norway, but I didn't make that unwholesim noise. 'Tis like some of the old songs, though," said Long Jack, sighing. "Don't let's hev another 'thout somethin' between," said Dan; and the accordion struck up a rattling, catchy tune that ended: "It's six an' twenty Sundays sence las' we saw the land, With fifteen hunder quintal, An' fifteen hunder quintal, 'Teen hunder toppin' quintal, 'Twix' old 'Queereau an' Grand!" "Hold on!" roared Tom Platt. "D'ye want to nail the trip, Dan? That's Jonah sure, 'less you sing it after all our salt's wet." "No, 'tain't, is it, Dad? Not unless you sing the very las' verse. You can't learn me anything on Jonahs!" "What's that?" said Harvey. "What's a Jonah?" "A Jonah's anything that spoils the luck. Sometimes it's a man--sometimes it's a boy--or a bucket. I've known a splittin'-knife Jonah two trips till we was on to her," said Tom Platt. "There's all sorts o' Jonahs. Jim Bourke was one till he was drowned on Georges. I'd never ship with Jim Bourke, not if I was starvin'. There wuz a green dory on the Ezra Flood. Thet was a Jonah, too, the worst sort o' Jonah. Drowned four men, she did, an' used to shine fiery O, nights in the nest." "And you believe that?" said Harvey, remembering what Tom Platt had said about candles and models. "Haven't we all got to take what's served?" A mutter of dissent ran round the bunks. "Outboard, yes; inboard, things can happen," said Disko. "Don't you go makin' a mock of Jonahs, young feller." "Well, Harve ain't no Jonah. Day after we catched him," Dan cut in, "we had a toppin' good catch." The cook threw up his head and laughed suddenly--a queer, thin laugh. He was a most disconcerting nigger. "Murder!" said Long Jack. "Don't do that again, doctor. We ain't used to ut." "What's wrong?" said Dan. "Ain't he our mascot, and didn't they strike on good after we'd struck him?" "Oh! yess," said the cook. "I know that, but the catch iss not finish yet." "He ain't goin' to do us any harm," said Dan, hotly. "Where are ye hintin' an' edgin' to? He's all right." "No harm. No. But one day he will be your master, Danny." "That all?" said Dan, placidly. "He wun't--not by a jugful." "Master!" said the cook, pointing to Harvey. "Man!" and he pointed to Dan. "That's news. Haow soon?" said Dan, with a laugh. "In some years, and I shall see it. Master and man--man and master." "How in thunder d'ye work that out?" said Tom Platt. "In my head, where I can see." "Haow?" This from all the others at once. "I do not know, but so it will be." He dropped his head, and went on peeling the potatoes, and not another word could they get out of him. "Well," said Dan, "a heap o' things'll hev to come abaout 'fore Harve's any master o' mine; but I'm glad the doctor ain't choosen to mark him for a Jonah. Now, I mistrust Uncle Salters fer the Jonerest Jonah in the Fleet regardin' his own special luck. Dunno ef it's spreadin' same's smallpox. He ought to be on the _Carrie Pitman_. That boat's her own Jonah, sure--crews an' gear made no differ to her driftin'. Jiminy Christmas! She'll etch loose in a flat ca'am." "We're well clear o' the Fleet, anyway," said Disko. "_Carrie Pitman_ an' all." There was a rapping on the deck. "Uncle Salters has catched his luck," said Dan as his father departed. "It's blown clear," Disko cried, and all the foc'sle tumbled up for a bit of fresh air. The fog had gone, but a sullen sea ran in great rollers behind it. The _We're Here_ slid, as it were, into long, sunk avenues and ditches which felt quite sheltered and homelike if they would only stay still; but they changed without rest or mercy, and flung up the schooner to crown one peak of a thousand gray hills, while the wind hooted through her rigging as she zigzagged down the slopes. Far away a sea would burst into a sheet of foam, and the others would follow suit as at a signal, till Harvey's eyes swam with the vision of interlacing whites and grays. Four or five Mother Carey's chickens stormed round in circles, shrieking as they swept past the bows. A rain-squall or two strayed aimlessly over the hopeless waste, ran down 'wind and back again, and melted away. "Seems to me I saw somethin' flicker jest naow over yonder," said Uncle Salters, pointing to the northeast. "Can't be any of the fleet," said Disko, peering under his eyebrows, a hand on the foc'sle gangway as the solid bows hatcheted into the troughs. "Sea's oilin' over dretful fast. Danny, don't you want to skip up a piece an' see how aour trawl-buoy lays?" Danny, in his big boots, trotted rather than climbed up the main rigging (this consumed Harvey with envy), hitched himself around the reeling cross-trees, and let his eye rove till it caught the tiny black buoy-flag on the shoulder of a mile-away swell. "She's all right," he hailed. "Sail O! Dead to the no'th'ard, comin' down like smoke! Schooner she be, too." They waited yet another half-hour, the sky clearing in patches, with a flicker of sickly sun from time to time that made patches of olive-green water. Then a stump-foremast lifted, ducked, and disappeared, to be followed on the next wave by a high stern with old-fashioned wooden snail's-horn davits. The snails were red-tanned. "Frenchmen!" shouted Dan. "No, 'tain't, neither. Da-ad!" "That's no French," said Disko. "Salters, your blame luck holds tighter'n a screw in a keg-head." "I've eyes. It's Uncle Abishai." "You can't nowise tell fer sure." "The head-king of all Jonahs," groaned Tom Platt. "Oh, Salters, Salters, why wasn't you abed an' asleep?" "How could I tell?" said poor Salters, as the schooner swung up. She might have been the very Flying Dutchman, so foul, draggled, and unkempt was every rope and stick aboard. Her old-style quarterdeck was some or five feet high, and her rigging flew knotted and tangled like weed at a wharf-end. She was running before the wind--yawing frightfully--her staysail let down to act as a sort of extra foresail,--"scandalized," they call it,--and her foreboom guyed out over the side. Her bowsprit cocked up like an old-fashioned frigate's; her jib-boom had been fished and spliced and nailed and clamped beyond further repair; and as she hove herself forward, and sat down on her broad tail, she looked for all the world like a blouzy, frouzy, bad old woman sneering at a decent girl. "That's Abishai," said Salters. "Full o' gin an' Judique men, an' the judgments o' Providence layin' fer him an' never takin' good holt He's run in to bait, Miquelon way." "He'll run her under," said Long Jack. "That's no rig fer this weather." "Not he, 'r he'd'a done it long ago," Disko replied. "Looks 's if he cal'lated to run us under. Ain't she daown by the head more 'n natural, Tom Platt?" "Ef it's his style o' loadin' her she ain't safe," said the sailor slowly. "Ef she's spewed her oakum he'd better git to his pumps mighty quick." The creature threshed up, wore round with a clatter and raffle, and lay head to wind within ear-shot. A gray-beard wagged over the bulwark, and a thick voice yelled something Harvey could not understand. But Disko's face darkened. "He'd resk every stick he hez to carry bad news. Says we're in fer a shift o' wind. He's in fer worse. Abishai! Abi-shai!" He waved his arm up and down with the gesture of a man at the pumps, and pointed forward. The crew mocked him and laughed. "Jounce ye, an' strip ye an' trip ye!" yelled Uncle Abishai. "A livin' gale--a livin' gale. Yab! Cast up fer your last trip, all you Gloucester haddocks. You won't see Gloucester no more, no more!" "Crazy full--as usual," said Tom Platt. "Wish he hadn't spied us, though." She drifted out of hearing while the gray-head yelled something about a dance at the Bay of Bulls and a dead man in the foc'sle. Harvey shuddered. He had seen the sloven tilled decks and the savage-eyed crew. "An' that's a fine little floatin' hell fer her draught," said Long Jack. "I wondher what mischief he's been at ashore." "He's a trawler," Dan explained to Harvey, "an' he runs in fer bait all along the coast. Oh, no, not home, he don't go. He deals along the south an' east shore up yonder." He nodded in the direction of the pitiless Newfoundland beaches. "Dad won't never take me ashore there. They're a mighty tough crowd--an' Abishai's the toughest. You saw his boat? Well, she's nigh seventy year old, they say; the last o' the old Marblehead heel-tappers. They don't make them quarterdecks any more. Abishai don't use Marblehead, though. He ain't wanted there. He jes' drif's araound, in debt, trawlin' an' cussin' like you've heard. Bin a Jonah fer years an' years, he hez. 'Gits liquor frum the Feecamp boats fer makin' spells an' selling winds an' such truck. Crazy, I guess." "'Twon't be any use underrunnin' the trawl to-night," said Tom Platt, with quiet despair. "He come alongside special to cuss us. I'd give my wage an' share to see him at the gangway o' the old Ohio 'fore we quit floggin'. Jest abaout six dozen, an' Sam Mocatta layin' 'em on criss-cross!" The disheveled "heel-tapper" danced drunkenly down wind, and all eyes followed her. Suddenly the cook cried in his phonograph voice: "It wass his own death made him speak so! He iss fey--fey, I tell you! Look!" She sailed into a patch of watery sunshine three or four miles distant. The patch dulled and faded out, and even as the light passed so did the schooner. She dropped into a hollow and--was not. "Run under, by the Great Hook-Block!" shouted Disko, jumping aft. "Drunk or sober, we've got to help 'em. Heave short and break her out! Smart!" Harvey was thrown on the deck by the shock that followed the setting of the jib and foresail, for they hove short on the cable, and to save time, jerked the anchor bodily from the bottom, heaving in as they moved away. This is a bit of brute force seldom resorted to except in matters of life and death, and the little _We're Here_ complained like a human. They ran down to where Abishai's craft had vanished; found two or three trawl-tubs, a gin-bottle, and a stove-in dory, but nothing more. "Let 'em go," said Disko, though no one had hinted at picking them up. "I wouldn't hev a match that belonged to Abishai aboard. Guess she run clear under. Must ha' been spewin' her oakum fer a week, an' they never thought to pump her. That's one more boat gone along o' leavin' port all hands drunk." "Glory be!" said Long Jack. "We'd ha' been obliged to help 'em if they was top o' water." "'Thinkin' o' that myself," said Tom Platt. "Fey! Fey!" said the cook, rolling his eyes. "He haas taken his own luck with him." "Ver' good thing, I think, to tell the Fleet when we see. Eh, wha-at?" said Manuel. "If you runna that way before the 'wind, and she work open her seams--" He threw out his hands with an indescribable gesture, while Penn sat down on the house and sobbed at the sheer horror and pity of it all. Harvey could not realize that he had seen death on the open waters, but he felt very sick. Then Dan went up the cross-trees, and Disko steered them back to within sight of their own trawl-buoys just before the fog blanketed the sea once again. "We go mighty quick hereabouts when we do go," was all he said to Harvey. "You think on that fer a spell, young feller. That was liquor." "After dinner it was calm enough to fish from the decks,--Penn and Uncle Salters were very zealous this time,--and the catch was large and large fish. "Abishai has shorely took his luck with him," said Salters. "The wind hain't backed ner riz ner nothin'. How abaout the trawl? I despise superstition, anyway." Tom Platt insisted that they had much better haul the thing and make a new berth. But the cook said: "The luck iss in two pieces. You will find it so when you look. I know." This so tickled Long Jack that he overbore Tom Platt and the two went out together. Underrunning a trawl means pulling it in on one side of the dory, picking off the fish, rebaiting the hooks, and passing them back to the sea again--something like pinning and unpinning linen on a wash-line. It is a lengthy business and rather dangerous, for the long, sagging line may twitch a boat under in a flash. But when they heard, "And naow to thee, O Capting," booming out of the fog, the crew of the _We're Here_ took heart. The dory swirled alongside well loaded, Tom Platt yelling for Manuel to act as relief-boat. "The luck's cut square in two pieces," said Long Jack, forking in the fish, while Harvey stood open-mouthed at the skill with which the plunging dory was saved from destruction. "One half was jest punkins. Tom Platt wanted to haul her an' ha' done wid ut; but I said, "I'll back the doctor that has the second sight, an' the other half come up sagging full o' big uns. Hurry, Man'nle, an' bring's a tub o' bait. There's luck afloat to-night." The fish bit at the newly baited hooks from which their brethren had just been taken, and Tom Platt and Long Jack moved methodically up and down the length of the trawl, the boat's nose surging under the wet line of hooks, stripping the sea-cucumbers that they called pumpkins, slatting off the fresh-caught cod against the gunwale, rebaiting, and loading Manuel's dory till dusk. "I'll take no risks," said Disko then--"not with him floatin' around so near. Abishai won't sink fer a week. Heave in the dories an' we'll dress daown after supper." That was a mighty dressing-down, attended by three or four blowing grampuses. It lasted till nine o'clock, and Disko was thrice heard to chuckle as Harvey pitched the split fish into the hold. "Say, you're haulin' ahead dretful fast," said Dan, when they ground the knives after the men had turned in. "There's somethin' of a sea to-night, an' I hain't heard you make no remarks on it." "Too busy," Harvey replied, testing a blade's edge. "Come to think of it, she is a high-kicker." The little schooner was gambolling all around her anchor among the silver-tipped waves. Backing with a start of affected surprise at the sight of the strained cable, she pounced on it like a kitten, while the spray of her descent burst through the hawse-holes with the report of a gun. Shaking her head, she would say: "Well, I'm sorry I can't stay any longer with you. I'm going North," and would sidle off, halting suddenly with a dramatic rattle of her rigging. "As I was just going to observe," she would begin, as gravely as a drunken man addressing a lamp-post. The rest of the sentence (she acted her words in dumb-show, of course) was lost in a fit of the fidgets, when she behaved like a puppy chewing a string, a clumsy woman in a side-saddle, a hen with her head cut off, or a cow stung by a hornet, exactly as the whims of the sea took her. "See her sayin' her piece. She's Patrick Henry naow," said Dan. She swung sideways on a roller, and gesticulated with her jib-boom from port to starboard. "But-ez-fer me, give me liberty-er give me-death!" Wop! She sat down in the moon-path on the water, courtesying with a flourish of pride impressive enough had not the wheel-gear sniggered mockingly in its box. Harvey laughed aloud. "Why, it's just as if she was alive," he said. "She's as stiddy as a haouse an' as dry as a herrin'," said Dan enthusiastically, as he was slung across the deck in a batter of spray. "Fends 'em off an' fends 'em off, an' 'Don't ye come anigh me,' she sez. Look at her--jest look at her! Sakes! You should see one o' them toothpicks histin' up her anchor on her spike outer fifteen-fathom water." "What's a toothpick, Dan?" "Them new haddockers an' herrin'-boats. Fine's a yacht forward, with yacht sterns to 'em, an' spike bowsprits, an' a haouse that 'u'd take our hold. I've heard that Burgess himself he made the models fer three or four of 'em. Dad's sot agin 'em on account o' their pitchin' an' joltin', but there's heaps o' money in 'em. Dad can find fish, but he ain't no ways progressive--he don't go with the march o' the times. They're chock-full o' labour-savin' jigs an' sech all. 'Ever seed the Elector o' Gloucester? She's a daisy, ef she is a toothpick." "What do they cost, Dan?" "Hills o' dollars. Fifteen thousand, p'haps; more, mebbe. There's gold-leaf an' everything you kin think of." Then to himself, half under his breath, "Guess I'd call her Hattie S., too." CHAPTER V That was the first of many talks with Dan, who told Harvey why he would transfer his dory's name to the imaginary Burgess-modelled haddocker. Harvey heard a good deal about the real Hattie at Gloucester; saw a lock of her hair--which Dan, finding fair words of no avail, had "hooked" as she sat in front of him at school that winter--and a photograph. Hattie was about fourteen years old, with an awful contempt for boys, and had been trampling on Dan's heart through the winter. All this was revealed under oath of solemn secrecy on moonlit decks, in the dead dark, or in choking fog; the whining wheel behind them, the climbing deck before, and without, the unresting, clamorous sea. Once, of course, as the boys came to know each other, there was a fight, which raged from bow to stern till Penn came up and separated them, but promised not to tell Disko, who thought fighting on watch rather worse than sleeping. Harvey was no match for Dan physically, but it says a great deal for his new training that he took his defeat and did not try to get even with his conqueror by underhand methods. That was after he had been cured of a string of boils between his elbows and wrists, where the wet jersey and oilskins cut into the flesh. The salt water stung them unpleasantly, but when they were ripe Dan treated them with Disko's razor, and assured Harvey that now he was a "blooded Banker"; the affliction of gurry-sores being the mark of the caste that claimed him. Since he was a boy and very busy, he did not bother his head with too much thinking. He was exceedingly sorry for his mother, and often longed to see her and above all to tell her of this wonderful new life, and how brilliantly he was acquitting himself in it. Otherwise he preferred not to wonder too much how she was bearing the shock of his supposed death. But one day, as he stood on the foc'sle ladder, guying the cook, who had accused him and Dan of hooking fried pies, it occurred to him that this was a vast improvement on being snubbed by strangers in the smoking-room of a hired liner. He was a recognized part of the scheme of things on the We're Here; had his place at the table and among the bunks; and could hold his own in the long talks on stormy days, when the others were always ready to listen to what they called his "fairy-tales" of his life ashore. It did not take him more than two days and a quarter to feel that if he spoke of his own life--it seemed very far away--no one except Dan (and even Dan's belief was sorely tried) credited him. So he invented a friend, a boy he had heard of, who drove a miniature four-pony drag in Toledo, Ohio, and ordered five suits of clothes at a time and led things called "germans" at parties where the oldest girl was not quite fifteen, but all the presents were solid silver. Salters protested that this kind of yarn was desperately wicked, if not indeed positively blasphemous, but he listened as greedily as the others; and their criticisms at the end gave Harvey entirely new notions on "germans," clothes, cigarettes with gold-leaf tips, rings, watches, scent, small dinner-parties, champagne, card-playing, and hotel accommodation. Little by little he changed his tone when speaking of his "friend," whom Long Jack had christened "the Crazy Kid," "the Gilt-edged Baby," "the Suckin' Vanderpoop," and other pet names; and with his sea-booted feet cocked up on the table would even invent histories about silk pajamas and specially imported neckwear, to the "friend's" discredit. Harvey was a very adaptable person, with a keen eye and ear for every face and tone about him. Before long he knew where Disko kept the old greencrusted quadrant that they called the "hog-yoke"--under the bed-bag in his bunk. When he took the sun, and with the help of "The Old Farmer's" almanac found the latitude, Harvey would jump down into the cabin and scratch the reckoning and date with a nail on the rust of the stove-pipe. Now, the chief engineer of the liner could have done no more, and no engineer of thirty years' service could have assumed one half of the ancient-mariner air with which Harvey, first careful to spit over the side, made public the schooner's position for that day, and then and not till then relieved Disko of the quadrant. There is an etiquette in all these things. The said "hog-yoke," an Eldridge chart, the farming almanac, Blunt's "Coast Pilot," and Bowditch's "Navigator" were all the weapons Disko needed to guide him, except the deep-sea lead that was his spare eye. Harvey nearly slew Penn with it when Tom Platt taught him first how to "fly the blue pigeon"; and, though his strength was not equal to continuous sounding in any sort of a sea, for calm weather with a seven-pound lead on shoal water Disko used him freely. As Dan said: "'Tain't soundin's dad wants. It's samples. Grease her up good, Harve." Harvey would tallow the cup at the end, and carefully bring the sand, shell, sludge, or whatever it might be, to Disko, who fingered and smelt it and gave judgment As has been said, when Disko thought of cod he thought as a cod; and by some long-tested mixture of instinct and experience, moved the We're Here from berth to berth, always with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen board. But Disko's board was the Grand Bank--a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side--a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of the fishing-fleet. For days they worked in fog--Harvey at the bell--till, grown familiar with the thick airs, he went out with Tom Platt, his heart rather in his mouth. But the fog would not lift, and the fish were biting, and no one can stay helplessly afraid for six hours at a time. Harvey devoted himself to his lines and the gaff or gob-stick as Tom Platt called for them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the bell and Tom's instinct; Manuel's conch sounding thin and faint beside them. But it was an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea below ten feet from his straining eyes. A few days later he was out with Manuel on what should have been forty-fathom bottom, but the whole length of the roding ran out, and still the anchor found nothing, and Harvey grew mortally afraid, for that his last touch with earth was lost. "Whale-hole," said Manuel, hauling in. "That is good joke on Disko. Come!" and he rowed to the schooner to find Tom Platt and the others jeering at the skipper because, for once, he had led them to the edge of the barren Whale-deep, the blank hole of the Grand Bank. They made another berth through the fog, and that time the hair of Harvey's head stood up when he went out in Manuel's dory. A whiteness moved in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the grave, and there was a roaring, a plunging, and spouting. It was his first introduction to the dread summer berg of the Banks, and he cowered in the bottom of the boat while Manuel laughed. There were days, though, clear and soft and warm, when it seemed a sin to do anything but loaf over the hand-lines and spank the drifting "sun-scalds" with an oar; and there were days of light airs, when Harvey was taught how to steer the schooner from one berth to another. It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his band on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky. That was magnificent, in spite of Disko saying that it would break a snake's back to follow his wake. But, as usual, pride ran before a fall. They were sailing on the wind with the staysail--an old one, luckily--set, and Harvey jammed her right into it to show Dan how completely he had mastered the art. The foresail went over with a bang, and the foregaff stabbed and ripped through the staysail, which was, of course, prevented from going over by the mainstay. They lowered the wreck in awful silence, and Harvey spent his leisure hours for the next few days under Tom Platt's lee, learning to use a needle and palm. Dan hooted with joy, for, as he said, he had made the very same blunder himself in his early days. Boylike, Harvey imitated all the men by turns, till he had combined Disko's peculiar stoop at the wheel, Long Jack's swinging overhand when the lines were hauled, Manuel's round-shouldered but effective stroke in a dory, and Tom Platt's generous Ohio stride along the deck. "'Tis beautiful to see how he takes to ut," said Long Jack, when Harvey was looking out by the windlass one thick noon. "I'll lay my wage an' share 'tis more'n half play-actin' to him, an' he consates himself he's a bowld mariner. Watch his little bit av a back now!" "That's the way we all begin," said Tom Platt. "The boys they make believe all the time till they've cheated 'emselves into bein' men, an' so till they die--pretendin' an' pretendin'. I done it on the old Ohio, I know. Stood my first watch--harbor-watch--feelin' finer'n Farragut. Dan's full o' the same kind o' notions. See 'em now, actin' to be genewine moss-backs--very hair a rope-yarn an' blood Stockholm tar." He spoke down the cabin stairs. "Guess you're mistook in your judgments fer once, Disko. What in Rome made ye tell us all here the kid was crazy?" "He wuz," Disko replied. "Crazy ez a loon when he come aboard; but I'll say he's sobered up consid'ble sence. I cured him." "He yarns good," said Tom Platt. "T'other night he told us abaout a kid of his own size steerin' a cunnin' little rig an' four ponies up an' down Toledo, Ohio, I think 'twas, an' givin' suppers to a crowd o' sim'lar kids. Cur'us kind o' fairy-tale, but blame interestin'. He knows scores of 'em." "Guess he strikes 'em outen his own head," Disko called from the cabin, where he was busy with the logbook. "Stands to reason that sort is all made up. It don't take in no one but Dan, an' he laughs at it. I've heard him, behind my back." "Yever hear what Sim'on Peter Ca'houn said when they whacked up a match 'twix' his sister Hitty an' Lorin' Jerauld, an' the boys put up that joke on him daown to Georges?" drawled Uncle Salters, who was dripping peaceably under the lee of the starboard dory-nest. Tom Platt puffed at his pipe in scornful silence: he was a Cape Cod man, and had not known that tale more than twenty years. Uncle Salters went on with a rasping chuckie: "Sim'on Peter Ca'houn he said, an' he was jest right, abaout Lorin', 'Ha'af on the taown,' he said, 'an' t'other ha'af blame fool; an' they told me she's married a 'ich man.' Sim'on Peter Ca'houn he hedn't no roof to his mouth, an' talked that way." "He didn't talk any Pennsylvania Dutch," Tom Platt replied. "You'd better leave a Cape man to tell that tale. The Ca'houns was gypsies frum 'way back." "Wal, I don't profess to be any elocutionist," Salters said. "I'm comin' to the moral o' things. That's jest abaout what aour Harve be! Ha'af on the taown, an' t'other ha'af blame fool; an' there's some'll believe he's a rich man. Yah!" "Did ye ever think how sweet 'twould be to sail wid a full crew o' Salterses?" said Long Jack. "Ha'af in the furrer an' other ha'af in the muck-heap, as Ca'houn did not say, an' makes out he's a fisherman!" A little laugh went round at Salters's expense. Disko held his tongue, and wrought over the log-book that he kept in a hatchet-faced, square hand; this was the kind of thing that ran on, page after soiled page: "July 17. This day thick fog and few fish. Made berth to northward. So ends this day. "July 18. This day comes in with thick fog. Caught a few fish. "July 19. This day comes in with light breeze from N.E. and fine weather. Made a berth to eastward. Caught plenty fish. "July 20. This, the Sabbath, comes in with fog and light winds. So ends this day. Total fish caught this week, 3,478." They never worked on Sundays, but shaved, and washed themselves if it were fine, and Pennsylvania sang hymns. Once or twice he suggested that, if it was not an impertinence, he thought he could preach a little. Uncle Salters nearly jumped down his throat at the mere notion, reminding him that he was not a preacher and mustn't think of such things. "We'd hev him rememberin' Johns-town next," Salters explained, "an' what would happen then?" so they compromised on his reading aloud from a book called "Josephus." It was an old leather-bound volume, smelling of a hundred voyages, very solid and very like the Bible, but enlivened with accounts of battles and sieges; and they read it nearly from cover to cover. Otherwise Penn was a silent little body. He would not utter a word for three days on end sometimes, though he played checkers, listened to the songs, and laughed at the stories. When they tried to stir him up, he would answer: "I don't wish to seem unneighbourly, but it is because I have nothing to say. My head feels quite empty. I've almost forgotten my name." He would turn to Uncle Salters with an expectant smile. "Why, Pennsylvania Pratt," Salters would shout "You'll fergit me next!" "No--never," Penn would say, shutting his lips firmly. "Pennsylvania Pratt, of course," he would repeat over and over. Sometimes it was Uncle Salters who forgot, and told him he was Haskins or Rich or McVitty; but Penn was equally content--till next time. He was always very tender with Harvey, whom he pitied both as a lost child and as a lunatic; and when Salters saw that Penn liked the boy, he relaxed, too. Salters was not an amiable person (He esteemed it his business to keep the boys in order); and the first time Harvey, in fear and trembling, on a still day, managed to shin up to the main-truck (Dan was behind him ready to help), he esteemed it his duty to hang Salters's big sea-boots up there--a sight of shame and derision to the nearest schooner. With Disko, Harvey took no liberties; not even when the old man dropped direct orders, and treated him, like the rest of the crew, to "Don't you want to do so and so?" and "Guess you'd better," and so forth. There was something about the clean-shaven lips and the puckered corners of the eyes that was mightily sobering to young blood. Disko showed him the meaning of the thumbed and pricked chart, which, he said, laid over any government publication whatsoever; led him, pencil in hand, from berth to berth over the whole string of banks--Le Have, Western, Banquereau, St. Pierre, Green, and Grand--talking "cod" meantime. Taught him, too, the principle on which the "hog-yoke" was worked. In this Harvey excelled Dan, for he had inherited a head for figures, and the notion of stealing information from one glimpse of the sullen Bank sun appealed to all his keen wits. For other sea-matters his age handicapped him. As Disko said, he should have begun when he was ten. Dan could bait up trawl or lay his hand on any rope in the dark; and at a pinch, when Uncle Salters had a gurry-score on his palm, could dress down by sense of touch. He could steer in anything short of half a gale from the feel of the wind on his face, humouring the _We're Here_ just when she needed it. These things he did as automatically as he skipped about the rigging, or made his dory a part of his own will and body. But he could not communicate his knowledge to Harvey. Still there was a good deal of general information flying about the schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the foc'sle or sat on the cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and rattled in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of whaling voyages in the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and boiling-down, and that terrible "nip" of '71, when twelve hundred men were made homeless on the ice in three days--wonderful tales, all true. But more wonderful still were his stories of the cod, and how they argued and reasoned on their private businesses deep down below the keel. Long Jack's tastes ran more to the supernatural. He held them silent with ghastly stories of the "Yo-hoes" on Monomoy Beach, that mock and terrify lonely clam-diggers; of sand-walkers and dune-haunters who were never properly buried; of hidden treasure on Fire Island guarded by the spirits of Kidd's men; of ships that sailed in the fog straight over Truro township; of that harbor in Maine where no one but a stranger will lie at anchor twice in a certain place because of a dead crew who row alongside at midnight with the anchor in the bow of their old-fashioned boat, whistling--not calling, but whistling--for the soul of the man who broke their rest. Harvey had a notion that the east coast of his native land, from Mount Desert south, was populated chiefly by people who took their horses there in the summer and entertained in country-houses with hardwood floors and Vantine portires. He laughed at the ghost-tales,--not as much as he would have done a month before,--but ended by sitting still and shuddering. Tom Platt dealt with his interminable trip round the Horn on the old Ohio in flogging days, with a navy more extinct than the dodo--the navy that passed away in the great war. He told them how red-hot shot are dropped into a cannon, a wad of wet clay between them and the cartridge; how they sizzle and reek when they strike wood, and how the little ship-boys of the Miss Jim Buck hove water over them and shouted to the fort to try again. And he told tales of blockade--long weeks of swaying at anchor, varied only by the departure and return of steamers that had used up their coal (there was no chance for the sailing-ships); of gales and cold that kept two hundred men, night and day, pounding and chopping at the ice on cable, blocks, and rigging, when the galley was as red-hot as the fort's shot, and men drank cocoa by the bucket. Tom Platt had no use for steam. His service closed when that thing was comparatively new. He admitted that it was a specious invention in time of peace, but looked hopefully for the day when sails should come back again on ten-thousand-ton frigates with hundred-and-ninety-foot booms. Manuel's talk was slow and gentle--all about pretty girls in Madeira washing clothes in the dry beds of streams, by moonlight, under waving bananas; legends of saints, and tales of queer dances or fights away in the cold Newfoundland baiting-ports. Salters was mainly agricultural; for, though he read "Josephus" and expounded it, his mission in life was to prove the value of green manures, and specially of clover, against every form of phosphate whatsoever. He grew libellous about phosphates; he dragged greasy "Orange Judd" books from his bunk and intoned them, wagging his finger at Harvey, to whom it was all Greek. Little Penn was so genuinely pained when Harvey made fun of Salters's lectures that the boy gave it up, and suffered in polite silence. That was very good for Harvey. The cook naturally did not join in these conversations. As a rule, he spoke only when it was absolutely necessary; but at times a queer gift of speech descended on him, and he held forth, half in Gaelic, half in broken English, an hour at a time. He was especially communicative with the boys, and he never withdrew his prophecy that one day Harvey would be Dan's master, and that he would see it. He told them of mail-carrying in the winter up Cape Breton way, of the dog-train that goes to Coudray, and of the ram-steamer _Arctic_, that breaks the ice between the mainland and Prince Edward Island. Then he told them stories that his mother had told him, of life far to the southward, where water never froze; and he said that when he died his soul would go to lie down on a warm white beach of sand with palm-trees waving above. That seemed to the boys a very odd idea for a man who had never seen a palm in his life. Then, too, regularly at each meal, he would ask Harvey, and Harvey alone, whether the cooking was to his taste; and this always made the "second half" laugh. Yet they had a great respect for the cook's judgment, and in their hearts considered Harvey something of a mascot by consequence. And while Harvey was taking in knowledge of new things at each pore and hard health with every gulp of the good air, the We're Here went her ways and did her business on the Bank, and the silvery-gray kenches of well-pressed fish mounted higher and higher in the hold. No one day's work was out of common, but the average days were many and close together. Naturally, a man of Disko's reputation was closely watched--"scrowged upon," Dan called it--by his neighbours, but he had a very pretty knack of giving them the slip through the curdling, glidy fog-banks. Disko avoided company for two reasons. He wished to make his own experiments, in the first place; and in the second, he objected to the mixed gatherings of a fleet of all nations. The bulk of them were mainly Gloucester boats, with a scattering from Provincetown, Harwich, Chatham, and some of the Maine ports, but the crews drew from goodness knows where. Risk breeds recklessness, and when greed is added there are fine chances for every kind of accident in the crowded fleet, which, like a mob of sheep, is huddled round some unrecognized leader. "Let the two Jeraulds lead 'em," said Disko. "We're baound to lay among 'em for a spell on the Eastern Shoals; though ef luck holds, we won't hev to lay long. Where we are naow, Harve, ain't considered noways good graound." "Ain't it?" said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down. "Shouldn't mind striking some poor ground for a change, then." "All the graound I want to see--don't want to strike her--is Eastern Point," said Dan. "Say, Dad, it looks's if we wouldn't hev to lay more'n two weeks on the Shoals. You'll meet all the comp'ny you want then, Harve. That's the time we begin to work. No reg'lar meals fer no one then. 'Mug-up when ye're hungry, an' sleep when ye can't keep awake. Good job you wasn't picked up a month later than you was, or we'd never ha' had you dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin." Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there. But seeing the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her. He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other business and could even help others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power fog-horn--a machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant. They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble. "Square-rigger bellowin' fer his latitude," said Long Jack. The dripping red head-sails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the _We're Here_ rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand. The larger boat backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings. "Frenchman," said Uncle Salters, scornfully. "Miquelon boat from St. Malo." The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. "I'm 'most outer 'baccy, too, Disko." "Same here," said Tom Platt. "Hi! Backez vous--backez vous! Standez awayez, you butt-ended mucho-bono! Where you from--St. Malo, eh?" "Ah, ha! Mucho bono! Oui! oui! Clos Poulet--St. Malo! St. Pierre et Miquelon," cried the other crowd, waving woollen caps and laughing. Then all together, "Bord! Bord!" "Bring up the board, Danny. Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres, exceptin' America's fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-nine's good enough fer them; an' I guess it's abaout right, too." Dan chalked the figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging to a chorus of mercis from the bark. "Seems kinder uneighbourly to let 'em swedge off like this," Salters suggested, feeling in his pockets. "Hev ye learned French then sence last trip?" said Disko. "I don't want no more stone-ballast hove at us 'long o' your callin' Miquelon boats 'footy cochins,' same's you did off Le Have." "Harmon Rush he said that was the way to rise 'em. Plain United States is good enough fer me. We're all dretful short on terbakker. Young feller, don't you speak French?" "Oh, yes," said Harvey valiantly; and he bawled: "Hi! Say! Arretez vous! Attendez! Nous sommes venant pour tabac." "Ah, tabac, tabac!" they cried, and laughed again. "That hit 'em. Let's heave a dory over, anyway," said Tom Platt. "I don't exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that goes, I guess. Come on, Harve, an' interpret." The raffle and confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark's black side was indescribable. Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring coloured prints of the Virgin--the Virgin of Newfoundland, they called her. Harvey found his French of no recognized Bank brand, and his conversation was limited to nods and grins. But Tom Platt waved his arms and got along swimmingly. The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade began. They had tobacco, plenty of it--American, that had never paid duty to France. They wanted chocolate and crackers. Harvey rowed back to arrange with the cook and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and cracker-bags were counted out by the Frenchman's wheel. It looked like a piratical division of loot; but Tom Platt came out of it roped with black pigtail and stuffed with cakes of chewing and smoking tobacco. Then those jovial mariners swung off into the mist, and the last Harvey heard was a gay chorus: "Par derriere chez ma tante, Il'y a un bois joli, Et le rossignol y chante Et le jour et la nuit.... Que donneriez vous, belle, Qui l'amenerait ici? Je donnerai Quebec, Sorel et Saint Denis." "How was it my French didn't go, and your sign-talk did?" Harvey demanded when the barter had been distributed among the We're Heres. "Sign-talk!" Platt guffawed. "Well, yes, 'twas sign-talk, but a heap older'n your French, Harve. Them French boats are chockfull o' Freemasons, an' that's why." "Are you a Freemason, then?" "Looks that way, don't it?" said the man-o'-war's man, stuffing his pipe; and Harvey had another mystery of the deep sea to brood upon. CHAPTER VI The thing that struck him most was the exceedingly casual way in which some craft loafed about the broad Atlantic. Fishing-boats, as Dan said, were naturally dependent on the courtesy and wisdom of their neighbours; but one expected better things of steamers. That was after another interesting interview, when they had been chased for three miles by a big lumbering old cattle-boat, all boarded over on the upper deck, that smelt like a thousand cattle-pens. A very excited officer yelled at them through a speaking-trumpet, and she lay and lollopped helplessly on the water while Disko ran the _We're Here_ under her lee and gave the skipper a piece of his mind. "Where might ye be--eh? Ye don't deserve to be anywheres. You barn-yard tramps go hoggin' the road on the high seas with no blame consideration fer your neighbours, an' your eyes in your coffee-cups instid o' in your silly heads." At this the skipper danced on the bridge and said something about Disko's own eyes. "We haven't had an observation for three days. D'you suppose we can run her blind?" he shouted. "Wa-al, I can," Disko retorted. "What's come to your lead? Et it? Can't ye smell bottom, or are them cattle too rank?" "What d' ye feed 'em?" said Uncle Salters with intense seriousness, for the smell of the pens woke all the farmer in him. "They say they fall off dretful on a v'yage. Dunno as it's any o' my business, but I've a kind o' notion that oil-cake broke small an' sprinkled--" "Thunder!" said a cattle-man in a red jersey as he looked over the side. "What asylum did they let His Whiskers out of?" "Young feller," Salters began, standing up in the fore-rigging, "let me tell yeou 'fore we go any further that I've--" The officer on the bridge took off his cap with immense politeness. "Excuse me," he said, "but I've asked for my reckoning. If the agricultural person with the hair will kindly shut his head, the sea-green barnacle with the wall-eye may per-haps condescend to enlighten us." "Naow you've made a show o' me, Salters," said Disko, angrily. He could not stand up to that particular sort of talk, and snapped out the latitude and longitude without more lectures. "Well, that's a boat-load of lunatics, sure," said the skipper, as he rang up the engine-room and tossed a bundle of newspapers into the schooner. "Of all the blamed fools, next to you, Salters, him an' his crowd are abaout the likeliest I've ever seen," said Disko as the _We're Here_ slid away. "I was jest givin' him my jedgment on lullsikin' round these waters like a lost child, an' you must cut in with your fool farmin'. Can't ye never keep things sep'rate?" Harvey, Dan, and the others stood back, winking one to the other and full of joy; but Disko and Salters wrangled seriously till evening, Salters arguing that a cattle-boat was practically a barn on blue water, and Disko insisting that, even if this were the case, decency and fisher-pride demanded that he should have kept "things sep'rate." Long Jack stood it in silence for a time,--an angry skipper makes an unhappy crew,--and then he spoke across the table after supper: "Fwhat's the good o' bodderin' fwhat they'll say?" said he. "They'll tell that tale agin us fer years--that's all," said Disko. "Oil-cake sprinkled!" "With salt, o' course," said Salters, impenitent, reading the farming reports from a week-old New York paper. "It's plumb mortifyin' to all my feelin's," the skipper went on. "Can't see ut that way," said Long Jack, the peacemaker "Look at here, Disko! Is there another packet afloat this day in this weather cud ha' met a tramp an' over an' above givin' her her reckonin',--over an' above that, I say,--cud ha' discoorsed wid her quite intelligent on the management av steers an' such at sea? Forgit ut! Av coorse they will not. 'Twas the most compenjus conversation that iver accrued. Double game an' twice runnin'--all to us." Dan kicked Harvey under the table, and Harvey choked in his cup. "Well," said Salters, who felt that his honour had been somewhat plastered, "I said I didn't know as 'twuz any business o' mine, 'fore I spoke." "An' right there," said Tom Platt, experienced in discipline and etiquette--"right there, I take it, Disko, you should ha' asked him to stop ef the conversation wuz likely, in your jedgment, to be anyways--what it shouldn't." "Dunno but that's so," said Disko, who saw his way to an honourable retreat from a fit of the dignities. "Why, o' course it was so," said Salters, "you bein' skipper here; an' I'd cheerful hev stopped on a hint--not from any leadin' or conviction, but fer the sake o' bearin' an example to these two blame boys of aours." "Didn't I tell you, Harve, 'twould come araound to us 'fore we'd done? Always those blame boys. But I wouldn't have missed the show fer a half-share in a halibutter," Dan whispered. "Still, things should ha' been kep' sep'rate," said Disko, and the light of new argument lit in Salters's eye as he crumbled cut plug into his pipe. "There's a power av vartue in keepin' things sep'rate," said Long Jack, intent on stilling the storm. "That's fwhat Steyning of Steyning and Hare's f'und when he sent Counahan fer skipper on the _Marilla D. Kuhn_, instid o' Cap. Newton that was took with inflam'try rheumatism an' couldn't go. Counahan the Navigator we called him." "Nick Counahan he never went aboard fer a night 'thout a pond o' rum somewheres in the manifest," said Tom Platt, playing up to the lead. "He used to bum araound the c'mission houses to Boston lookin' fer the Lord to make him captain of a tow-boat on his merits. Sam Coy, up to Atlantic Avenoo, give him his board free fer a year or more on account of his stories. "Counahan the Navigator! Tck! Tck! Dead these fifteen year, ain't he?" "Seventeen, I guess. He died the year the _Caspar McVeagh_ was built; but he could niver keep things sep'rate. Steyning tuk him fer the reason the thief tuk the hot stove--bekaze there was nothin' else that season. The men was all to the Banks, and Counahan he whacked up an iverlastin' hard crowd fer crew. Rum! Ye cud ha' floated the _Marilla_, insurance an' all, in fwhat they stowed aboard her. They lef' Boston Harbour for the great Grand Bank wid a roarin' nor'wester behind 'em an' all hands full to the bung. An' the hivens looked after thim, for divil a watch did they set, an' divil a rope did they lay hand to, till they'd seen the bottom av a fifteen-gallon cask o' bug-juice. That was about wan week, so far as Counahan remembered. (If I cud only tell the tale as he told ut!) All that whoile the wind blew like ould glory, an' the _Marilla_--'twas summer, and they'd give her a foretopmast--struck her gait and kept ut. Then Counahan tuk the hog-yoke an' thrembled over it for a whoile, an' made out, betwix' that an' the chart an' the singin' in his head, that they was to the south'ard o' Sable Island, gettin' along glorious, but speakin' nothin'. Then they broached another keg, an' quit speculatin' about anythin' fer another spell. The _Marilla_ she lay down whin she dropped Boston Light, and she never lufted her lee-rail up to that time--hustlin' on one an' the same slant. But they saw no weed, nor gulls, nor schooners; an' prisintly they obsarved they'd bin out a matter o' fourteen days and they mis-trusted the Bank has suspinded payment. So they sounded, an' got sixty fathom. 'That's me,' sez Counahan. 'That's me iv'ry time! I've run her slat on the Bank fer you, an' when we get thirty fathom we'll turn in like little men. Counahan is the b'y,' sez he. 'Counahan the Navigator!' "Nex' cast they got ninety. Sez Counahan: 'Either the lead-line's tuk to stretchin' or else the Bank's sunk.' "They hauled ut up, bein' just about in that state when ut seemed right an' reasonable, and sat down on the deck countin' the knots, an' gettin' her snarled up hijjus. The _Marilla_ she'd struck her gait, an' she hild ut, an' prisintly along came a tramp, an' Counahan spoke her. "'Hev ye seen any fishin'-boats now?' sez he, quite casual. "'There's lashin's av them off the Irish coast,' sez the tramp. "'Aah! go shake yerself,' sez Counahan. 'Fwhat have I to do wid the Irish coast?' "'Then fwhat are ye doin' here?' sez the tramp. "'Sufferin' Christianity!' sez Counahan (he always said that whin his pumps sucked an' he was not feelin' good)--'Sufferin' Christianity!' he sez, 'where am I at?' "'Thirty-five mile west-sou'west o' Cape Clear,' sez the tramp, 'if that's any consolation to you.' "Counahan fetched wan jump, four feet sivin inches, measured by the cook. "'Consolation!' sez he, bould as brass. 'D'ye take me fer a dialect? Thirty-five mile from Cape Clear, an' fourteen days from Boston Light. Sufferin' Christianity, 'tis a record, an' by the same token I've a mother to Skibbereen!' Think av ut! The gall av um! But ye see he could niver keep things sep'rate. "The crew was mostly Cork an' Kerry men, barrin' one Marylander that wanted to go back, but they called him a mutineer, an' they ran the ould _Marilla_ into Skibbereen, an' they had an illigant time visitin' around with frinds on the ould sod fer a week. Thin they wint back, an' it cost 'em two an' thirty days to beat to the Banks again. 'Twas gettin' on towards fall, and grub was low, so Counahan ran her back to Boston, wid no more bones to ut." "And what did the firm say?" Harvey demanded. "Fwhat could they? The fish was on the Banks, an' Counahan was at T-wharf talkin' av his record trip east! They tuk their satisfaction out av that, an' ut all came av not keepin' the crew and the rum sep'rate in the first place; an' confusin' Skibbereen wid 'Queereau, in the second. Counahan the Navigator, rest his sowl! He was an imprompju citizen!" "Once I was in the Lucy Holmes," said Manuel, in his gentle voice. "They not want any of her feesh in Gloucester. Eh, wha-at? Give us no price. So we go across the water, and think to sell to some Fayal man. Then it blow fresh, and we cannot see well. Eh, wha-at? Then it blow some more fresh, and we go down below and drive very fast--no one know where. By and by we see a land, and it get some hot. Then come two, three nigger in a brick. Eh, wha-at? We ask where we are, and they say--now, what you all think?" "Grand Canary," said Disko, after a moment. Manuel shook his head, smiling. "Blanco," said Tom Platt. "No. Worse than that. We was below Bezagos, and the brick she was from Liberia! So we sell our feesh there! Not bad, so? Eh, wha-at?" "Can a schooner like this go right across to Africa?" said Harvey. "Go araound the Horn ef there's anythin' worth goin' fer, and the grub holds aout," said Disko. "My father he run his packet, an' she was a kind o' pinkey, abaout fifty ton, I guess,--the Rupert,--he run her over to Greenland's icy mountains the year ha'af our fleet was tryin' after cod there. An' what's more, he took my mother along with him,--to show her haow the money was earned, I presoom,--an' they was all iced up, an' I was born at Disko. Don't remember nothin' abaout it, o' course. We come back when the ice eased in the spring, but they named me fer the place. Kinder mean trick to put up on a baby, but we're all baound to make mistakes in aour lives." "Sure! Sure!" said Salters, wagging his head. "All baound to make mistakes, an' I tell you two boys here thet after you've made a mistake--ye don't make fewer'n a hundred a day--the next best thing's to own up to it like men." Long Jack winked one tremendous wink that embraced all hands except Disko and Salters, and the incident was closed. Then they made berth after berth to the northward, the dories out almost every day, running along the east edge of the Grand Bank in thirty- to forty-fathom water, and fishing steadily. It was here Harvey first met the squid, who is one of the best cod-baits, but uncertain in his moods. They were waked out of their bunks one black night by yells of "Squid O!" from Salters, and for an hour and a half every soul aboard hung over his squid-jig--a piece of lead painted red and armed at the lower end with a circle of pins bent backward like half-opened umbrella ribs. The squid--for some unknown reason--likes, and wraps himself round, this thing, and is hauled up ere he can escape from the pins. But as he leaves his home he squirts first water and next ink into his captor's face; and it was curious to see the men weaving their heads from side to side to dodge the shot. They were as black as sweeps when the flurry ended; but a pile of fresh squid lay on the deck, and the large cod thinks very well of a little shiny piece of squid tentacle at the tip of a clam-baited hook. Next day they caught many fish, and met the _Carrie Pitman_, to whom they shouted their luck, and she wanted to trade--seven cod for one fair-sized squid; but Disko would not agree at the price, and the _Carrie_ dropped sullenly to leeward and anchored half a mile away, in the hope of striking on to some for herself. Disco said nothing till after supper, when he sent Dan and Manuel out to buoy the _We're Here's_ cable and announced his intention of turning in with the broad-axe. Dan naturally repeated these remarks to the dory from the _Carrie_, who wanted to know why they were buoying their cable, since they were not on rocky bottom. "Dad sez he wouldn't trust a ferryboat within five mile o' you," Dan howled cheerfully. "Why don't he git out, then? Who's hinderin'?" said the other. "'Cause you've jest the same ez lee-bowed him, an' he don't take that from any boat, not to speak o' sech a driftin' gurry-butt as you be." "She ain't driftin' any this trip," said the man angrily, for the _Carrie Pitman_ had an unsavory reputation for breaking her ground-tackle. "Then haow d'you make berths?" said Dan. "It's her best p'int o' sailin'. An' ef she's quit driftin', what in thunder are you doin' with a new jib-boom?" That shot went home. "Hey, you Portugoosy organ-grinder, take your monkey back to Gloucester. Go back to school, Dan Troop," was the answer. "O-ver-alls! O-ver-alls!" yelled Dan, who knew that one of the _Carrie's_ crew had worked in an overall factory the winter before. "Shrimp! Gloucester shrimp! Git aout, you Novy!" To call a Gloucester man a Nova Scotian is not well received. Dan answered in kind. "Novy yourself, ye Scrabble-towners! ye Chatham wreckers! Git aout with your brick in your stockin'!" And the forces separated, but Chatham had the worst of it. "I knew haow 'twould be," said Disko. "She's drawed the wind raound already. Some one oughter put a deesist on thet packet. She'll snore till midnight, an' jest when we're gettin' our sleep she'll strike adrift. Good job we ain't crowded with craft hereaways. But I ain't goin' to up anchor fer Chatham. She may hold." The wind, which had hauled round, rose at sundown and blew steadily. There was not enough sea, though, to disturb even a dory's tackle, but the _Carrie Pitman_ was a law unto herself. At the end of the boys' watch they heard the crack-crack-crack of a huge muzzle-loading revolver aboard her. "Glory, glory, hallelujah!" sung Dan. "Here she comes, Dad; butt-end first, walkin' in her sleep same's she done on 'Queereau." Had she been any other boat Disko would have taken his chances, but now he cut the cable as the _Carrie Pitman_, with all the North Atlantic to play in, lurched down directly upon them. The _We're Here_, under jib and riding-sail, gave her no more room than was absolutely necessary,--Disko did not wish to spend a week hunting for his cable,--but scuttled up into the wind as the _Carrie_ passed within easy hail, a silent and angry boat, at the mercy of a raking broadside of Bank chaff. "Good evenin'," said Disko, raising his head-gear, "an' haow does your garden grow?" "Go to Ohio an' hire a mule," said Uncle Salters. "We don't want no farmers here." "Will I lend YOU my dory-anchor?" cried Long Jack. "Unship your rudder an' stick it in the mud," bawled Tom Platt. "Say!" Dan's voice rose shrill and high, as he stood on the wheel-box. "Sa-ay! Is there a strike in the o-ver-all factory; or hev they hired girls, ye Shackamaxons?" "Veer out the tiller-lines," cried Harvey, "and nail 'em to the bottom!" That was a salt-flavoured jest he had been put up to by Tom Platt. Manuel leaned over the stern and yelled: "Johanna Morgan play the organ! Ahaaaa!" He flourished his broad thumb with a gesture of unspeakable contempt and derision, while little Penn covered himself with glory by piping up: "Gee a little! Hssh! Come here. Haw!" They rode on their chain for the rest of the night, a short, snappy, uneasy motion, as Harvey found, and wasted half the forenoon recovering the cable. But the boys agreed the trouble was cheap at the price of triumph and glory, and they thought with grief over all the beautiful things that they might have said to the discomfited _Carrie_. CHAPTER VII Next day they fell in with more sails, all circling slowly from the east northerly towards the west. But just when they expected to make the shoals by the Virgin the fog shut down, and they anchored, surrounded by the tinklings of invisible bells. There was not much fishing, but occasionally dory met dory in the fog and exchanged news. That night, a little before dawn, Dan and Harvey, who had been sleeping most of the day, tumbled out to "hook" fried pies. There was no reason why they should not have taken them openly; but they tasted better so, and it made the cook angry. The heat and smell below drove them on deck with their plunder, and they found Disko at the bell, which he handed over to Harvey. "Keep her goin'," said he. "I mistrust I hear somethin'. Ef it's anything, I'm best where I am so's to get at things." It was a forlorn little jingle; the thick air seemed to pinch it off, and in the pauses Harvey heard the muffled shriek of a liner's siren, and he knew enough of the Banks to know what that meant. It came to him, with horrible distinctness, how a boy in a cherry-coloured jersey--he despised fancy blazers now with all a fisher-man's contempt--how an ignorant, rowdy boy had once said it would be "great" if a steamer ran down a fishing-boat. That boy had a stateroom with a hot and cold bath, and spent ten minutes each morning picking over a gilt-edged bill of fare. And that same boy--no, his very much older brother--was up at four of the dim dawn in streaming, crackling oilskins, hammering, literally for the dear life, on a bell smaller than the steward's breakfast-bell, while somewhere close at hand a thirty-foot steel stem was storming along at twenty miles an hour! The bitterest thought of all was that there were folks asleep in dry, upholstered cabins who would never learn that they had massacred a boat before breakfast. So Harvey rang the bell. "Yes, they slow daown one turn o' their blame propeller," said Dan, applying himself to Manuel's conch, "fer to keep inside the law, an' that's consolin' when we're all at the bottom. Hark to her! She's a humper!" "Aooo-whoo-whupp!" went the siren. "Wingle-tingle-tink," went the bell. "Graaa-ouch!" went the conch, while sea and sky were all mired up in milky fog. Then Harvey felt that he was near a moving body, and found himself looking up and up at the wet edge of a cliff-like bow, leaping, it seemed, directly over the schooner. A jaunty little feather of water curled in front of it, and as it lifted it showed a long ladder of Roman numerals-XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII., and so forth--on a salmon-coloured gleaming side. It tilted forward and downward with a heart-stilling "Ssssooo"; the ladder disappeared; a line of brass-rimmed port-holes flashed past; a jet of steam puffed in Harvey's helplessly uplifted hands; a spout of hot water roared along the rail of the _We're Here_, and the little schooner staggered and shook in a rush of screw-torn water, as a liner's stern vanished in the fog. Harvey got ready to faint or be sick, or both, when he heard a crack like a trunk thrown on a sidewalk, and, all small in his ear, a far-away telephone voice drawling: "Heave to! You've sunk us!" "Is it us?" he gasped. "No! Boat out yonder. Ring! We're goin' to look," said Dan, running out a dory. In half a minute all except Harvey, Penn, and the cook were overside and away. Presently a schooner's stump-foremast, snapped clean across, drifted past the bows. Then an empty green dory came by, knocking on the _We're Here's_ side, as though she wished to be taken in. Then followed something, face down, in a blue jersey, but--it was not the whole of a man. Penn changed colour and caught his breath with a click. Harvey pounded despairingly at the bell, for he feared they might be sunk at any minute, and he jumped at Dan's hail as the crew came back. "The Jennie Cushman," said Dan, hysterically, "cut clean in half--graound up an' trompled on at that! Not a quarter of a mile away. Dad's got the old man. There ain't any one else, and--there was his son, too. Oh, Harve, Harve, I can't stand it! I've seen--" He dropped his head on his arms and sobbed while the others dragged a gray-headed man aboard. "What did you pick me up for?" the stranger groaned. "Disko, what did you pick me up for?" Disko dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder, for the man's eyes were wild and his lips trembled as he stared at the silent crew. Then up and spoke Pennsylvania Pratt, who was also Haskins or Rich or McVitty when Uncle Salters forgot; and his face was changed on him from the face of a fool to the countenance of an old, wise man, and he said in a strong voice: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord! I was--I am a minister of the Gospel. Leave him to me." "Oh, you be, be you?" said the man. "Then pray my son back to me! Pray back a nine-thousand-dollar boat an' a thousand quintal of fish. If you'd left me alone my widow could ha' gone on to the Provident an' worked fer her board, an' never known--an' never known. Now I'll hev to tell her." "There ain't nothin' to say," said Disko. "Better lie down a piece, Jason Olley." When a man has lost his only son, his summer's work, and his means of livelihood, in thirty counted seconds, it is hard to give consolation. "All Gloucester men, wasn't they?" said Tom Platt, fiddling helplessly with a dory-becket. "Oh, that don't make no odds," said Jason, wringing the wet from his beard. "I'll be rowin' summer boarders araound East Gloucester this fall." He rolled heavily to the rail, singing: "Happy birds that sing and fly Round thine altars, O Most High!" "Come with me. Come below!" said Penn, as though he had a right to give orders. Their eyes met and fought for a quarter of a minute. "I dunno who you be, but I'll come," said Jason submissively. "Mebbe I'll get back some o' the--some o' the-nine thousand dollars." Penn led him into the cabin and slid the door behind. "That ain't Penn," cried Uncle Salters. "It's Jacob Boiler, an'--he's remembered Johnstown! I never seed such eyes in any livin' man's head. What's to do naow? What'll I do naow?" They could hear Penn's voice and Jason's together. Then Penn's went on alone, and Salters slipped off his hat, for Penn was praying. Presently the little man came up the steps, huge drops of sweat on his face, and looked at the crew. Dan was still sobbing by the wheel. "He don't know us," Salters groaned. "It's all to do over again, checkers and everything--an' what'll he say to me?" Penn spoke; they could hear that it was to strangers. "I have prayed," said he. "Our people believe in prayer. I have prayed for the life of this man's son. Mine were drowned before my eyes--she and my eldest and--the others. Shall a man be more wise than his Maker? I prayed never for their lives, but I have prayed for this man's son, and he will surely be sent him." Salters looked pleadingly at Penn to see if he remembered. "How long have I been mad?" Penn asked suddenly. His mouth was twitching. "Pshaw, Penn! You weren't never mad," Salters began "Only a little distracted like." "I saw the houses strike the bridge before the fires broke out. I do not remember any more. How long ago is that?" "I can't stand it! I can't stand it!" cried Dan, and Harvey whimpered in sympathy. "Abaout five year," said Disko, in a shaking voice. "Then I have been a charge on some one for every day of that time. Who was the man?" Disko pointed to Salters. "Ye hain't--ye hain't!" cried the sea-farmer, twisting his hands together. "Ye've more'n earned your keep twice-told; an' there's money owin' you, Penn, besides ha'af o' my quarter-share in the boat, which is yours fer value received." "You are good men. I can see that in your faces. But--" "Mother av Mercy," whispered Long Jack, "an' he's been wid us all these trips! He's clean bewitched." A schooner's bell struck up alongside, and a voice hailed through the fog: "O Disko! 'Heard abaout the Jennie Cushman?" "They have found his son," cried Penn. "Stand you still and see the salvation of the Lord!" "Got Jason aboard here," Disko answered, but his voice quavered. "There--warn't any one else?" "We've fund one, though. 'Run acrost him snarled up in a mess o' lumber thet might ha' bin a foc'sle. His head's cut some." "Who is he?" The _We're Here's_ heart-beats answered one another. "Guess it's young Olley," the voice drawled. Penn raised his hands and said something in German. Harvey could have sworn that a bright sun was shining upon his lifted face; but the drawl went on: "Sa-ay! You fellers guyed us consid'rable t'other night." "We don't feel like guyin' any now," said Disko. "I know it; but to tell the honest truth we was kinder--kinder driftin' when we run agin young Olley." It was the irrepressible _Carrie Pitman_, and a roar of unsteady laughter went up from the deck of the _We're Here_. "Hedn't you 'baout's well send the old man aboard? We're runnin' in fer more bait an' graound-tackle. Guess you won't want him, anyway, an' this blame windlass work makes us short-handed. We'll take care of him. He married my woman's aunt." "I'll give you anything in the boat," said Troop. "Don't want nothin', 'less, mebbe, an anchor that'll hold. Say! Young Olley's gittin' kinder baulky an' excited. Send the old man along." Penn waked him from his stupor of despair, and Tom Platt rowed him over. He went away without a word of thanks, not knowing what was to come; and the fog closed over all. "And now," said Penn, drawing a deep breath as though about to preach. "And now"--the erect body sank like a sword driven home into the scabbard; the light faded from the overbright eyes; the voice returned to its usual pitiful little titter--"and now," said Pennsylvania Pratt, "do you think it's too early for a little game of checkers, Mr. Salters?" "The very thing--the very thing I was goin' to say myself," cried Salters promptly. "It beats all, Penn, how ye git on to what's in a man's mind." The little fellow blushed and meekly followed Salters forward. "Up anchor! Hurry! Let's quit these crazy waters," shouted Disko, and never was he more swiftly obeyed. "Now what in creation d'ye suppose is the meanin' o' that all?" said Long Jack, when they were working through the fog once more, damp, dripping, and bewildered. "The way I sense it," said Disko, at the wheel, "is this: The Jennie Cushman business comin' on an empty stummick--" "H-he saw one of them go by," sobbed Harvey. "An' that, o' course, kinder hove him outer water, julluk runnin' a craft ashore; hove him right aout, I take it, to rememberin' Johnstown an' Jacob Boiler an' such-like reminiscences. Well, consolin' Jason there held him up a piece, same's shorin' up a boat. Then, bein' weak, them props slipped an' slipped, an' he slided down the ways, an' naow he's water-borne agin. That's haow I sense it." They decided that Disko was entirely correct. "'Twould ha' bruk Salters all up," said Long Jack, "if Penn had stayed Jacob Boilerin'. Did ye see his face when Penn asked who he'd been charged on all these years? How is ut, Salters?" "Asleep--dead asleep. Turned in like a child," Salters replied, tiptoeing aft. "There won't be no grub till he wakes, natural. Did ye ever see sech a gift in prayer? He everlastin'ly hiked young Olley outer the ocean. Thet's my belief. Jason was tur'ble praoud of his boy, an' I mistrusted all along 'twas a jedgment on worshippin' vain idols." "There's others jes as sot," said Disko. "That's difrunt," Salters retorted quickly. "Penn's not all caulked, an' I ain't only but doin' my duty by him." They waited, those hungry men, three hours, till Penn reappeared with a smooth face and a blank mind. He said he believed that he had been dreaming. Then he wanted to know why they were so silent, and they could not tell him. Disko worked all hands mercilessly for the next three or four days; and when they could not go out, turned them into the hold to stack the ship's stores into smaller compass, to make more room for the fish. The packed mass ran from the cabin partition to the sliding door behind the foc'sle stove; and Disko showed how there is great art in stowing cargo so as to bring a schooner to her best draft. The crew were thus kept lively till they recovered their spirits; and Harvey was tickled with a rope's end by Long Jack for being, as the Galway man said, "sorrowful as a sick cat over fwhat couldn't be helped." He did a great deal of thinking in those weary days, and told Dan what he thought, and Dan agreed with him--even to the extent of asking for fried pies instead of hooking them. But a week later the two nearly upset the Hattie S. in a wild attempt to stab a shark with an old bayonet tied to a stick. The grim brute rubbed alongside the dory begging for small fish, and between the three of them it was a mercy they all got off alive. At last, after playing blindman's-buff in the fog, there came a morning when Disko shouted down the foc'sle: "Hurry, boys! We're in taown!" CHAPTER VIII To the end of his days, Harvey will never forget that sight. The sun was just clear of the horizon they had not seen for nearly a week, and his low red light struck into the riding-sails of three fleets of anchored schooners--one to the north, one to the westward, and one to the south. There must have been nearly a hundred of them, of every possible make and build, with, far away, a square-rigged Frenchman, all bowing and courtesying one to the other. From every boat dories were dropping away like bees from a crowded hive, and the clamour of voices, the rattling of ropes and blocks, and the splash of the oars carried for miles across the heaving water. The sails turned all colours, black, pearly-gray, and white, as the sun mounted; and more boats swung up through the mists to the southward. The dories gathered in clusters, separated, reformed, and broke again, all heading one way; while men hailed and whistled and cat-called and sang, and the water was speckled with rubbish thrown overboard. "It's a town," said Harvey. "Disko was right. It IS a town!" "I've seen smaller," said Disko. "There's about a thousand men here; an' yonder's the Virgin." He pointed to a vacant space of greenish sea, where there were no dories. The _We're Here_ skirted round the northern squadron, Disko waving his hand to friend after friend, and anchored as nearly as a racing yacht at the end of the season. The Bank fleet pass good seamanship in silence; but a bungler is jeered all along the line. "Jest in time fer the caplin," cried the Mary Chilton. "'Salt 'most wet?" asked the King Philip. "Hey, Tom Platt! Come t' supper to-night?" said the Henry Clay; and so questions and answers flew back and forth. Men had met one another before, dory-fishing in the fog, and there is no place for gossip like the Bank fleet. They all seemed to know about Harvey's rescue, and asked if he were worth his salt yet. The young bloods jested with Dan, who had a lively tongue of his own, and inquired after their health by the town-nicknames they least liked. Manuel's countrymen jabbered at him in their own language; and even the silent cook was seen riding the jib-boom and shouting Gaelic to a friend as black as himself. After they had buoyed the cable--all around the Virgin is rocky bottom, and carelessness means chafed ground-tackle and danger from drifting--after they had buoyed the cable, their dories went forth to join the mob of boats anchored about a mile away. The schooners rocked and dipped at a safe distance, like mother ducks watching their brood, while the dories behaved like mannerless ducklings. As they drove into the confusion, boat banging boat, Harvey's ears tingled at the comments on his rowing. Every dialect from Labrador to Long Island, with Portuguese, Neapolitan, Lingua Franca, French, and Gaelic, with songs and shoutings and new oaths, rattled round him, and he seemed to be the butt of it all. For the first time in his life he felt shy--perhaps that came from living so long with only the _We're Heres_--among the scores of wild faces that rose and fell with the reeling small craft. A gentle, breathing swell, three furlongs from trough to barrel, would quietly shoulder up a string of variously painted dories. They hung for an instant, a wonderful frieze against the sky-line, and their men pointed and hailed. Next moment the open mouths, waving arms, and bare chests disappeared, while on another swell came up an entirely new line of characters like paper figures in a toy theatre. So Harvey stared. "Watch out!" said Dan, flourishing a dip-net "When I tell you dip, you dip. The caplin'll school any time from naow on. Where'll we lay, Tom Platt?" Pushing, shoving, and hauling, greeting old friends here and warning old enemies there, Commodore Tom Platt led his little fleet well to leeward of the general crowd, and immediately three or four men began to haul on their anchors with intent to lee-bow the _We're Heres_. But a yell of laughter went up as a dory shot from her station with exceeding speed, its occupant pulling madly on the roding. "Give her slack!" roared twenty voices. "Let him shake it out." "What's the matter?" said Harvey, as the boat flashed away to the southward. "He's anchored, isn't he?" "Anchored, sure enough, but his graound-tackle's kinder shifty," said Dan, laughing. "Whale's fouled it. . . . Dip Harve! Here they come!" The sea round them clouded and darkened, and then frizzed up in showers of tiny silver fish, and over a space of five or six acres the cod began to leap like trout in May; while behind the cod three or four broad gray-backs broke the water into boils. Then everybody shouted and tried to haul up his anchor to get among the school, and fouled his neighbour's line and said what was in his heart, and dipped furiously with his dip-net, and shrieked cautions and advice to his companions, while the deep fizzed like freshly opened soda-water, and cod, men, and whales together flung in upon the luckless bait. Harvey was nearly knocked overboard by the handle of Dan's net. But in all the wild tumult he noticed, and never forgot, the wicked, set little eye--something like a circus elephant's eye--of a whale that drove along almost level with the water, and, so he said, winked at him. Three boats found their rodings fouled by these reckless mid-sea hunters, and were towed half a mile ere their horses shook the line free. Then the caplin moved off, and five minutes later there was no sound except the splash of the sinkers overside, the flapping of the cod, and the whack of the muckles as the men stunned them. It was wonderful fishing. Harvey could see the glimmering cod below, swimming slowly in droves, biting as steadily as they swam. Bank law strictly forbids more than one hook on one line when the dories are on the Virgin or the Eastern Shoals; but so close lay the boats that even single hooks snarled, and Harvey found himself in hot argument with a gentle, hairy Newfoundlander on one side and a howling Portuguese on the other. Worse than any tangle of fishing-lines was the confusion of the dory-rodings below water. Each man had anchored where it seemed good to him, drifting and rowing round his fixed point. As the fish struck on less quickly, each man wanted to haul up and get to better ground; but every third man found himself intimately connected with some four or five neighbours. To cut another's roding is crime unspeakable on the Banks; yet it was done, and done without detection, three or four times that day. Tom Platt caught a Maine man in the black act and knocked him over the gunwale with an oar, and Manuel served a fellow-countryman in the same way. But Harvey's anchor-line was cut, and so was Penn's, and they were turned into relief-boats to carry fish to the _We're Here_ as the dories filled. The caplin schooled once more at twilight, when the mad clamour was repeated; and at dusk they rowed back to dress down by the light of kerosene-lamps on the edge of the pen. It was a huge pile, and they went to sleep while they were dressing. Next day several boats fished right above the cap of the Virgin; and Harvey, with them, looked down on the very weed of that lonely rock, which rises to within twenty feet of the surface. The cod were there in legions, marching solemnly over the leathery kelp. When they bit, they bit all together; and so when they stopped. There was a slack time at noon, and the dories began to search for amusement. It was Dan who sighted the Hope Of Prague just coming up, and as her boats joined the company they were greeted with the question: "Who's the meanest man in the Fleet?" Three hundred voices answered cheerily: "Nick Bra-ady." It sounded like an organ chant. "Who stole the lampwicks?" That was Dan's contribution. "Nick Bra-ady," sang the boats. "Who biled the salt bait fer soup?" This was an unknown backbiter a quarter of a mile away. Again the joyful chorus. Now, Brady was not especially mean, but he had that reputation, and the Fleet made the most of it. Then they discovered a man from a Truro boat who, six years before, had been convicted of using a tackle with five or six hooks--a "scrowger," they call it--in the Shoals. Naturally, he had been christened "Scrowger Jim"; and though he had hidden himself on the Georges ever since, he found his honours waiting for him full blown. They took it up in a sort of firecracker chorus: "Jim! O Jim! Jim! O Jim! Sssscrowger Jim!" That pleased everybody. And when a poetical Beverly man--he had been making it up all day, and talked about it for weeks--sang, "The _Carrie Pitman's_ anchor doesn't hold her for a cent" the dories felt that they were indeed fortunate. Then they had to ask that Beverly man how he was off for beans, because even poets must not have things all their own way. Every schooner and nearly every man got it in turn. Was there a careless or dirty cook anywhere? The dories sang about him and his food. Was a schooner badly found? The Fleet was told at full length. Had a man hooked tobacco from a mess-mate? He was named in meeting; the name tossed from roller to roller. Disko's infallible judgments, Long Jack's market-boat that he had sold years ago, Dan's sweetheart (oh, but Dan was an angry boy!), Penn's bad luck with dory-anchors, Salter's views on manure, Manuel's little slips from virtue ashore, and Harvey's ladylike handling of the oar--all were laid before the public; and as the fog fell around them in silvery sheets beneath the sun, the voices sounded like a bench of invisible judges pronouncing sentence. The dories roved and fished and squabbled till a swell underran the sea. Then they drew more apart to save their sides, and some one called that if the swell continued the Virgin would break. A reckless Galway man with his nephew denied this, hauled up anchor, and rowed over the very rock itself. Many voices called them to come away, while others dared them to hold on. As the smooth-backed rollers passed to the southward, they hove the dory high and high into the mist, and dropped her in ugly, sucking, dimpled water, where she spun round her anchor, within a foot or two of the hidden rock. It was playing with death for mere bravado; and the boats looked on in uneasy silence till Long Jack rowed up behind his countrymen and quietly cut their roding. "Can't ye hear ut knockin'?" he cried. "Pull for you miserable lives! Pull!" The men swore and tried to argue as the boat drifted; but the next swell checked a little, like a man tripping on a carpet. There was a deep sob and a gathering roar, and the Virgin flung up a couple of acres of foaming water, white, furious, and ghastly over the shoal sea. Then all the boats greatly applauded Long Jack, and the Galway men held their tongue. "Ain't it elegant?" said Dan, bobbing like a young seal at home. "She'll break about once every ha'af hour now, 'les the swell piles up good. What's her reg'lar time when she's at work, Tom Platt?" "Once ivry fifteen minutes, to the tick. Harve, you've seen the greatest thing on the Banks; an' but for Long Jack you'd seen some dead men too." There came a sound of merriment where the fog lay thicker and the schooners were ringing their bells. A big bark nosed cautiously out of the mist, and was received with shouts and cries of, "Come along, darlin'," from the Irishry. "Another Frenchman?" said Harvey. "Hain't you eyes? She's a Baltimore boat; goin' in fear an' tremblin'," said Dan. "We'll guy the very sticks out of her. Guess it's the fust time her skipper ever met up with the Fleet this way." She was a black, buxom, eight-hundred-ton craft. Her mainsail was looped up, and her topsail flapped undecidedly in what little wind was moving. Now a bark is feminine beyond all other daughters of the sea, and this tall, hesitating creature, with her white and gilt figurehead, looked just like a bewildered woman half lifting her skirts to cross a muddy street under the jeers of bad little boys. That was very much her situation. She knew she was somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Virgin, had caught the roar of it, and was, therefore, asking her way. This is a small part of what she heard from the dancing dories: "The Virgin? Fwhat are you talkin' of? 'This is Le Have on a Sunday mornin'. Go home an' sober up." "Go home, ye tarrapin! Go home an' tell 'em we're comin'." Half a dozen voices together, in a most tuneful chorus, as her stern went down with a roll and a bubble into the troughs: "Thay-aah-she-strikes!" "Hard up! Hard up fer your life! You're on top of her now." "Daown! Hard daown! Let go everything!" "All hands to the pumps!" "Daown jib an' pole her!" Here the skipper lost his temper and said things. Instantly fishing was suspended to answer him, and he heard many curious facts about his boat and her next port of call. They asked him if he were insured; and whence he had stolen his anchor, because, they said, it belonged to the _Carrie Pitman_; they called his boat a mud-scow, and accused him of dumping garbage to frighten the fish; they offered to tow him and charge it to his wife; and one audacious youth slipped up almost under the counter, smacked it with his open palm, and yelled: "Gid up, Buck!" The cook emptied a pan of ashes on him, and he replied with cod-heads. The bark's crew fired small coal from the galley, and the dories threatened to come aboard and "razee" her. They would have warned her at once had she been in real peril; but, seeing her well clear of the Virgin, they made the most of their chances. The fun was spoilt when the rock spoke again, a half-mile to windward, and the tormented bark set everything that would draw and went her ways; but the dories felt that the honours lay with them. All that night the Virgin roared hoarsely; and next morning, over an angry, white-headed sea, Harvey saw the Fleet with flickering masts waiting for a lead. Not a dory was hove out till ten o'clock, when the two Jeraulds of the Day's Eye, imagining a lull which did not exist, set the example. In a minute half the boats were out and bobbing in the cockly swells, but Troop kept the _We're Heres_ at work dressing down. He saw no sense in "dares"; and as the storm grew that evening they had the pleasure of receiving wet strangers only too glad to make any refuge in the gale. The boys stood by the dory-tackles with lanterns, the men ready to haul, one eye cocked for the sweeping wave that would make them drop everything and hold on for dear life. Out of the dark would come a yell of "Dory, dory!" They would hook up and haul in a drenched man and a half-sunk boat, till their decks were littered down with nests of dories and the bunks were full. Five times in their watch did Harvey, with Dan, jump at the foregaff where it lay lashed on the boom, and cling with arms, legs, and teeth to rope and spar and sodden canvas as a big wave filled the decks. One dory was smashed to pieces, and the sea pitched the man head first on to the decks, cutting his forehead open; and about dawn, when the racing seas glimmered white all along their cold edges, another man, blue and ghastly, crawled in with a broken hand, asking news of his brother. Seven extra mouths sat down to breakfast: A Swede; a Chatham skipper; a boy from Hancock, Maine; one Duxbury, and three Provincetown men. There was a general sorting out among the Fleet next day; and though no one said anything, all ate with better appetites when boat after boat reported full crews aboard. Only a couple of Portuguese and an old man from Gloucester were drowned, but many were cut or bruised; and two schooners had parted their tackle and been blown to the southward, three days' sail. A man died on a Frenchman--it was the same bark that had traded tobacco with the _We're Heres_. She slipped away quite quietly one wet, white morning, moved to a patch of deep water, her sails all hanging anyhow, and Harvey saw the funeral through Disko's spy-glass. It was only an oblong bundle slid overside. They did not seem to have any form of service, but in the night, at anchor, Harvey heard them across the star-powdered black water, singing something that sounded like a hymn. It went to a very slow tune. "La brigantine Qui va tourner, Roule et s'incline Pour m'entrainer. Oh, Vierge Marie, Pour moi priez Dieu! Adieu, patrie; Quebec, adieu!" Tom Platt visited her, because, he said, the dead man was his brother as a Freemason. It came out that a wave had doubled the poor fellow over the heel of the bowsprit and broken his back. The news spread like a flash, for, contrary to general custom, the Frenchman held an auction of the dead man's kit,--he had no friends at St Malo or Miquelon,--and everything was spread out on the top of the house, from his red knitted cap to the leather belt with the sheath-knife at the back. Dan and Harvey were out on twenty-fathom water in the Hattie S., and naturally rowed over to join the crowd. It was a long pull, and they stayed some little time while Dan bought the knife, which had a curious brass handle. When they dropped overside and pushed off into a drizzle of rain and a lop of sea, it occurred to them that they might get into trouble for neglecting the lines. "Guess 'twon't hurt us any to be warmed up," said Dan, shivering under his oilskins, and they rowed on into the heart of a white fog, which, as usual, dropped on them without warning. "There's too much blame tide hereabouts to trust to your instinks," he said. "Heave over the anchor, Harve, and we'll fish a piece till the thing lifts. Bend on your biggest lead. Three pound ain't any too much in this water. See how she's tightened on her rodin' already." There was quite a little bubble at the bows, where some irresponsible Bank current held the dory full stretch on her rope; but they could not see a boat's length in any direction. Harvey turned up his collar and bunched himself over his reel with the air of a wearied navigator. Fog had no special terrors for him now. They fished a while in silence, and found the cod struck on well. Then Dan drew the sheath-knife and tested the edge of it on the gunwale. "That's a daisy," said Harvey. "How did you get it so cheap?" "On account o' their blame Cath'lic superstitions," said Dan, jabbing with the bright blade. "They don't fancy takin' iron from off a dead man, so to speak. 'See them Arichat Frenchmen step back when I bid?" "But an auction ain't taking anythink off a dead man. It's business." "We know it ain't, but there's no goin' in the teeth o' superstition. That's one o' the advantages o' livin' in a progressive country." And Dan began whistling: "Oh, Double Thatcher, how are you? Now Eastern Point comes inter view. The girls an' boys we soon shall see, At anchor off Cape Ann!" "Why didn't that Eastport man bid, then? He bought his boots. Ain't Maine progressive?" "Maine? Pshaw! They don't know enough, or they hain't got money enough, to paint their haouses in Maine. I've seen 'em. The Eastport man he told me that the knife had been used--so the French captain told him--used up on the French coast last year." "Cut a man? Heave 's the muckle." Harvey hauled in his fish, rebaited, and threw over. "Killed him! Course, when I heard that I was keener'n ever to get it." "Christmas! I didn't know it," said Harvey, turning round. "I'll give you a dollar for it when I--get my wages. Say, I'll give you two dollars." "Honest? D'you like it as much as all that?" said Dan, flushing. "Well, to tell the truth, I kinder got it for you--to give; but I didn't let on till I saw how you'd take it. It's yours and welcome, Harve, because we're dory-mates, and so on and so forth, an' so followin'. Catch a-holt!" He held it out, belt and all. "But look at here. Dan, I don't see--" "Take it. 'Tain't no use to me. I wish you to hev it." The temptation was irresistible. "Dan, you're a white man," said Harvey. "I'll keep it as long as I live." "That's good hearin'," said Dan, with a pleasant laugh; and then, anxious to change the subject: "'Look's if your line was fast to somethin'." "Fouled, I guess," said Harve, tugging. Before he pulled up he fastened the belt round him, and with deep delight heard the tip of the sheath click on the thwart. "Concern the thing!" he cried. "She acts as though she were on strawberry-bottom. It's all sand here, ain't it?" Dan reached over and gave a judgmatic tweak. "Hollbut'll act that way 'f he's sulky. Thet's no strawberry-bottom. Yank her once or twice. She gives, sure. Guess we'd better haul up an' make certain." They pulled together, making fast at each turn on the cleats, and the hidden weight rose sluggishly. "Prize, oh! Haul!" shouted Dan, but the shout ended in a shrill, double shriek of horror, for out of the sea came the body of the dead Frenchman buried two days before! The hook had caught him under the right armpit, and he swayed, erect and horrible, head and shoulders above water. His arms were tied to his side, and--he had no face. The boys fell over each other in a heap at the bottom of the dory, and there they lay while the thing bobbed alongside, held on the shortened line. "The tide--the tide brought him!" said Harvey with quivering lips, as he fumbled at the clasp of the belt. "Oh, Lord! Oh, Harve!" groaned Dan, "be quick. He's come for it. Let him have it. Take it off." "I don't want it! I don't want it!" cried Harvey. "I can't find the bu-buckle." "Quick, Harve! He's on your line!" Harvey sat up to unfasten the belt, facing the head that had no face under its streaming hair. "He's fast still," he whispered to Dan, who slipped out his knife and cut the line, as Harvey flung the belt far overside. The body shot down with a plop, and Dan cautiously rose to his knees, whiter than the fog. "He come for it. He come for it. I've seen a stale one hauled up on a trawl and I didn't much care, but he come to us special." "I wish--I wish I hadn't taken the knife. Then he'd have come on your line." "Dunno as thet would ha' made any differ. We're both scared out o' ten years' growth. Oh, Harve, did ye see his head?" "Did I? I'll never forget it. But look at here, Dan; it couldn't have been meant. It was only the tide." "Tide! He come for it, Harve. Why, they sunk him six miles to south'ard o' the Fleet, an' we're two miles from where she's lyin' now. They told me he was weighted with a fathom an' a half o' chain-cable." "Wonder what he did with the knife--up on the French coast?" "Something bad. 'Guess he's bound to take it with him to the Judgment, an' so-- What are you doin' with the fish?" "Heaving 'em overboard," said Harvey. "What for? We sha'n't eat 'em." "I don't care. I had to look at his face while I was takin' the belt off. You can keep your catch if you like. I've no use for mine." Dan said nothing, but threw his fish over again. "Guess it's best to be on the safe side," he murmured at last. "I'd give a month's pay if this fog 'u'd lift. Things go abaout in a fog that ye don't see in clear weather--yo-hoes an' hollerers and such like. I'm sorter relieved he come the way he did instid o' walkin'. He might ha' walked." "Don't, Dan! We're right on top of him now. 'Wish I was safe aboard, hem' pounded by Uncle Salters." "They'll be lookin' fer us in a little. Gimme the tooter." Dan took the tin dinner-horn, but paused before he blew. "Go on," said Harvey. "I don't want to stay here all night" "Question is, haow he'd take it. There was a man frum down the coast told me once he was in a schooner where they darsen't ever blow a horn to the dories, becaze the skipper--not the man he was with, but a captain that had run her five years before--he'd drowned a boy alongside in a drunk fit; an' ever after, that boy he'd row along-side too and shout, 'Dory! dory!' with the rest." "Dory! dory!" a muffled voice cried through the fog. They cowered again, and the horn dropped from Dan's hand. "Hold on!" cried Harvey; "it's the cook." "Dunno what made me think o' thet fool tale, either," said Dan. "It's the doctor, sure enough." "Dan! Danny! Oooh, Dan! Harve! Harvey! Oooh, Haarveee!" "We're here," sung both boys together. They heard oars, but could see nothing till the cook, shining and dripping, rowed into them. "What iss happened?" said he. "You will be beaten at home." "Thet's what we want. Thet's what we're sufferin' for" said Dan. "Anything homey's good enough fer us. We've had kinder depressin' company." As the cook passed them a line, Dan told him the tale. "Yess! He come for hiss knife," was all he said at the end. Never had the little rocking _We're Here_ looked so deliciously home-like as when the cook, born and bred in fogs, rowed them back to her. There was a warm glow of light from the cabin and a satisfying smell of food forward, and it was heavenly to hear Disko and the others, all quite alive and solid, leaning over the rail and promising them a first-class pounding. But the cook was a black; master of strategy. He did not get the dories aboard till he had given the more striking points of the tale, explaining as he backed and bumped round the counter how Harvey was the mascot to destroy any possible bad luck. So the boys came override as rather uncanny heroes, and every one asked them questions instead of pounding them for making trouble. Little Penn delivered quite a speech on the folly of superstitions; but public opinion was against him and in favour of Long Jack, who told the most excruciating ghost-stories, till nearly midnight. Under that influence no one except Salters and Penn said anything about "idolatry," when the cook put a lighted candle, a cake of flour and water, and a pinch of salt on a shingle, and floated them out astern to keep the Frenchman quiet in case he was still restless. Dan lit the candle because he had bought the belt, and the cook grunted and muttered charms as long as he could see the ducking point of flame. Said Harvey to Dan, as they turned in after watch: "How about progress and Catholic superstitions?" "Huh! I guess I'm as enlightened and progressive as the next man, but when it comes to a dead St. Malo deck-hand scarin' a couple o' pore boys stiff fer the sake of a thirty-cent knife, why, then, the cook can take hold fer all o' me. I mistrust furriners, livin' or dead." Next morning all, except the cook, were rather ashamed of the ceremonies, and went to work double tides, speaking gruffly to one another. The _We're Here_ was racing neck and neck for her last few loads against the Parry Norman; and so close was the struggle that the Fleet took side and betted tobacco. All hands worked at the lines or dressing-down till they fell asleep where they stood--beginning before dawn and ending when it was too dark to see. They even used the cook as pitcher, and turned Harvey into the hold to pass salt, while Dan helped to dress down. Luckily a Parry Norman man sprained his ankle falling down the foc'sle, and the _We're Heres_ gained. Harvey could not see how one more fish could be crammed into her, but Disko and Tom Platt stowed and stowed, and planked the mass down with big stones from the ballast, and there was always "jest another day's work." Disko did not tell them when all the salt was wetted. He rolled to the lazarette aft the cabin and began hauling out the big mainsail. This was at ten in the morning. The riding-sail was down and the main- and topsail were up by noon, and dories came alongside with letters for home, envying their good fortune. At last she cleared decks, hoisted her flag,--as is the right of the first boat off the Banks,--up-anchored, and began to move. Disko pretended that he wished to accomodate folk who had not sent in their mail, and so worked her gracefully in and out among the schooners. In reality, that was his little triumphant procession, and for the fifth year running it showed what kind of mariner he was. Dan's accordion and Tom Platt's fiddle supplied the music of the magic verse you must not sing till all the salt is wet: "Hih! Yih! Yoho! Send your letters raound! All our salt is wetted, an' the anchor's off the graound! Bend, oh, bend your mains'l, we're back to Yankeeland-- With fifteen hunder' quintal, An' fifteen hunder' quintal, 'Teen hunder' toppin' quintal, 'Twix' old 'Queereau an' Grand." The last letters pitched on deck wrapped round pieces of coal, and the Gloucester men shouted messages to their wives and womenfolks and owners, while the _We're Here_ finished the musical ride through the Fleet, her headsails quivering like a man's hand when he raises it to say good-by. Harvey very soon discovered that the _We're Here_, with her riding-sail, strolling from berth to berth, and the _We're Here_ headed west by south under home canvas, were two very different boats. There was a bite and kick to the wheel even in "boy's" weather; he could feel the dead weight in the hold flung forward mightily across the surges, and the streaming line of bubbles overside made his eyes dizzy. Disko kept them busy fiddling with the sails; and when those were flattened like a racing yacht's, Dan had to wait on the big topsail, which was put over by hand every time she went about. In spare moments they pumped, for the packed fish dripped brine, which does not improve a cargo. But since there was no fishing, Harvey had time to look at the sea from another point of view. The low-sided schooner was naturally on most intimate terms with her surroundings. They saw little of the horizon save when she topped a swell; and usually she was elbowing, fidgeting, and coasting her steadfast way through gray, gray-blue, or black hollows laced across and across with streaks of shivering foam; or rubbing herself caressingly along the flank of some bigger water-hill. It was as if she said: "You wouldn't hurt me, surely? I'm only the little _We're Here_." Then she would slide away chuckling softly to herself till she was brought up by some fresh obstacle. The dullest of folk cannot see this kind of thing hour after hour through long days without noticing it; and Harvey, being anything but dull, began to comprehend and enjoy the dry chorus of wave-tops turning over with a sound of incessant tearing; the hurry of the winds working across open spaces and herding the purple-blue cloud-shadows; the splendid upheaval of the red sunrise; the folding and packing away of the morning mists, wall after wall withdrawn across the white floors; the salty glare and blaze of noon; the kiss of rain falling over thousands of dead, flat square miles; the chilly blackening of everything at the day's end; and the million wrinkles of the sea under the moonlight, when the jib-boom solemnly poked at the low stars, and Harvey went down to get a doughnut from the cook. But the best fun was when the boys were put on the wheel together, Tom Platt within hail, and she cuddled her lee-rail down to the crashing blue, and kept a little home-made rainbow arching unbroken over her windlass. Then the jaws of the booms whined against the masts, and the sheets creaked, and the sails filled with roaring; and when she slid into a hollow she trampled like a woman tripped in her own silk dress, and came out, her jib wet half-way up, yearning and peering for the tall twin-lights of Thatcher's Island. They left the cold gray of the Bank sea, saw the lumber-ships making for Quebec by the Straits of St. Lawrence, with the Jersey salt-brigs from Spain and Sicily; found a friendly northeaster off Artimon Bank that drove them within view of the East light of Sable Island,--a sight Disko did not linger over,--and stayed with them past Western and Le Have, to the northern fringe of George's. From there they picked up the deeper water, and let her go merrily. "Hattie's pulling on the string," Dan confided to Harvey. "Hattie an' Ma. Next Sunday you'll be hirin' a boy to throw water on the windows to make ye go to sleep. 'Guess you'll keep with us till your folks come. Do you know the best of gettin' ashore again?" "Hot bath?" said Harvey. His eyebrows were all white with dried spray. "That's good, but a night-shirt's better. I've been dreamin' o' night-shirts ever since we bent our mainsail. Ye can wiggle your toes then. Ma'll hev a new one fer me, all washed soft. It's home, Harve. It's home! Ye can sense it in the air. We're runnin' into the aidge of a hot wave naow, an' I can smell the bayberries. Wonder if we'll get in fer supper. Port a trifle." The hesitating sails flapped and lurched in the close air as the deep smoothed out, blue and oily, round them. When they whistled for a wind only the rain came in spiky rods, bubbling and drumming, and behind the rain the thunder and the lightning of mid-August. They lay on the deck with bare feet and arms, telling one another what they would order at their first meal ashore; for now the land was in plain sight. A Gloucester swordfish-boat drifted alongside, a man in the little pulpit on the bowsprit flourished his harpoon, his bare head plastered down with the wet. "And all's well!" he sang cheerily, as though he were watch on a big liner. "Wouverman's waiting fer you, Disko. What's the news o' the Fleet?" Disko shouted it and passed on, while the wild summer storm pounded overhead and the lightning flickered along the capes from four different quarters at once. It gave the low circle of hills round Gloucester Harbor, Ten Pound Island, the fish-sheds, with the broken line of house-roofs, and each spar and buoy on the water, in blinding photographs that came and went a dozen times to the minute as the _We're Here_ crawled in on half-flood, and the whistling-buoy moaned and mourned behind her. Then the storm died out in long, separated, vicious dags of blue-white flame, followed by a single roar like the roar of a mortar-battery, and the shaken air tingled under the stars as it got back to silence. "The flag, the flag!" said Disko, suddenly, pointing upward. "What is ut?" said Long Jack. "Otto! Ha'af mast. They can see us frum shore now." "I'd clean forgot. He's no folk to Gloucester, has he?" "Girl he was goin' to be married to this fall." "Mary pity her!" said Long Jack, and lowered the little flag half-mast for the sake of Otto, swept overboard in a gale off Le Have three months before. Disko wiped the wet from his eyes and led the _We're Here_ to Wouverman's wharf, giving his orders in whispers, while she swung round moored tugs and night-watchmen hailed her from the ends of inky-black piers. Over and above the darkness and the mystery of the procession, Harvey could feel the land close round him once more, with all its thousands of people asleep, and the smell of earth after rain, and the familiar noise of a switching-engine coughing to herself in a freight-yard; and all those things made his heart beat and his throat dry up as he stood by the foresheet. They heard the anchor-watch snoring on a lighthouse-tug, nosed into a pocket of darkness where a lantern glimmered on either side; somebody waked with a grunt, threw them a rope, and they made fast to a silent wharf flanked with great iron-roofed sheds fall of warm emptiness, and lay there without a sound. Then Harvey sat down by the wheel, and sobbed and sobbed as though his heart would break, and a tall woman who had been sitting on a weigh-scale dropped down into the schooner and kissed Dan once on the cheek; for she was his mother, and she had seen the _We're Here_ by the lightning flashes. She took no notice of Harvey till he had recovered himself a little and Disko had told her his story. Then they went to Disko's house together as the dawn was breaking; and until the telegraph office was open and he could wire his folk, Harvey Cheyne was perhaps the loneliest boy in all America. But the curious thing was that Disko and Dan seemed to think none the worse of him for crying. Wouverman was not ready for Disko's prices till Disko, sure that the _We're Here_ was at least a week ahead of any other Gloucester boat, had given him a few days to swallow them; so all hands played about the streets, and Long Jack stopped the Rocky Neck trolley, on principle, as he said, till the conductor let him ride free. But Dan went about with his freckled nose in the air, bung-full of mystery and most haughty to his family. "Dan, I'll hev to lay inter you ef you act this way," said Troop, pensively. "Sence we've come ashore this time you've bin a heap too fresh." "I'd lay into him naow ef he was mine," said Uncle Salters, sourly. He and Penn boarded with the Troops. "Oho!" said Dan, shuffling with the accordion round the backyard, ready to leap the fence if the enemy advanced. "Dad, you're welcome to your own judgment, but remember I've warned ye. Your own flesh an' blood ha' warned ye! 'Tain't any o' my fault ef you're mistook, but I'll be on deck to watch ye. An' ez fer yeou, Uncle Salters, Pharaoh's chief butler ain't in it 'longside o' you! You watch aout an' wait. You'll be plowed under like your own blamed clover; but me--Dan Troop--I'll flourish like a green bay-tree because I warn't stuck on my own opinion." Disko was smoking in all his shore dignity and a pair of beautiful carpet-slippers. "You're gettin' ez crazy as poor Harve. You two go araound gigglin' an' squinchin' an' kickin' each other under the table till there's no peace in the haouse," said he. "There's goin' to be a heap less--fer some folks," Dan replied. "You wait an' see." He and Harvey went out on the trolley to East Gloucester, where they tramped through the bayberry bushes to the lighthouse, and lay down on the big red boulders and laughed themselves hungry. Harvey had shown Dan a telegram, and the two swore to keep silence till the shell burst. "Harve's folk?" said Dan, with an unruffled face after supper. "Well, I guess they don't amount to much of anything, or we'd ha' heard from 'em by naow. His pop keeps a kind o' store out West. Maybe he'll give you 's much as five dollars, Dad." "What did I tell ye?" said Salters. "Don't sputter over your vittles, Dan." CHAPTER IX Whatever his private sorrows may be, a multimillionaire, like any other workingman, should keep abreast of his business. Harvey Cheyne, senior, had gone East late in June to meet a woman broken down, half mad, who dreamed day and night of her son drowning in the gray seas. He had surrounded her with doctors, trained nurses, massage-women, and even faith-cure companions, but they were useless. Mrs. Cheyne lay still and moaned, or talked of her boy by the hour together to any one who would listen. Hope she had none, and who could offer it? All she needed was assurance that drowning did not hurt; and her husband watched to guard lest she should make the experiment. Of his own sorrow he spoke little--hardly realized the depth of it till he caught himself asking the calendar on his writing-desk, "What's the use of going on?" There had always lain a pleasant notion at the back of his head that, some day, when he had rounded off everything and the boy had left college, he would take his son to his heart and lead him into his possessions. Then that boy, he argued, as busy fathers do, would instantly become his companion, partner, and ally, and there would follow splendid years of great works carried out together--the old head backing the young fire. Now his boy was dead--lost at sea, as it might have been a Swede sailor from one of Cheyne's big teaships; the wife dying, or worse; he himself was trodden down by platoons of women and doctors and maids and attendants; worried almost beyond endurance by the shift and change of her poor restless whims; hopeless, with no heart to meet his many enemies. He had taken the wife to his raw new palace in San Diego, where she and her people occupied a wing of great price, and Cheyne, in a veranda-room, between a secretary and a typewriter, who was also a telegraphist, toiled along wearily from day to day. There was a war of rates among four Western railroads in which he was supposed to be interested; a devastating strike had developed in his lumber camps in Oregon, and the legislature of the State of California, which has no love for its makers, was preparing open war against him. Ordinarily he would have accepted battle ere it was offered, and have waged a pleasant and unscrupulous campaign. But now he sat limply, his soft black hat pushed forward on to his nose, his big body shrunk inside his loose clothes, staring at his boots or the Chinese junks in the bay, and assenting absently to the secretary's questions as he opened the Saturday mail. Cheyne was wondering how much it would cost to drop everything and pull out. He carried huge insurances, could buy himself royal annuities, and between one of his places in Colorado and a little society (that would do the wife good), say in Washington and the South Carolina islands, a man might forget plans that had come to nothing. On the other hand-- The click of the typewriter stopped; the girl was looking at the secretary, who had turned white. He passed Cheyne a telegram repeated from San Francisco: Picked up by fishing schooner _We're Here_ having fallen off boat great times on Banks fishing all well waiting Gloucester Mass care Disko Troop for money or orders wire what shall do and how is Mama Harvey N. Cheyne. The father let it fall, laid his head down on the roller-top of the shut desk, and breathed heavily. The secretary ran for Mrs. Cheyne's doctor who found Cheyne pacing to and fro. "What--what d' you think of it? Is it possible? Is there any meaning to it? I can't quite make it out," he cried. "I can," said the doctor. "I lose seven thousand a year--that's all." He thought of the struggling New York practice he had dropped at Cheyne's imperious bidding, and returned the telegram with a sigh. "You mean you'd tell her? 'May be a fraud?" "What's the motive?" said the doctor, coolly. "Detection's too certain. It's the boy sure enough." Enter a French maid, impudently, as an indispensable one who is kept on only by large wages. "Mrs. Cheyne she say you must come at once. She think you are seek." The master of thirty millions bowed his head meekly and followed Suzanne; and a thin, high voice on the upper landing of the great white-wood square staircase cried: "What is it? What has happened?" No doors could keep out the shriek that rang through the echoing house a moment later, when her husband blurted out the news. "And that's all right," said the doctor, serenely, to the typewriter. "About the only medical statement in novels with any truth to it is that joy don't kill, Miss Kinzey." "I know it; but we've a heap to do first." Miss Kinzey was from Milwaukee, somewhat direct of speech; and as her fancy leaned towards the secretary, she divined there was work in hand. He was looking earnestly at the vast roller-map of America on the wall. "Milsom, we're going right across. Private car--straight through--Boston. Fix the connections," shouted Cheyne down the staircase. "I thought so." The secretary turned to the typewriter, and their eyes met (out of that was born a story--nothing to do with this story). She looked inquiringly, doubtful of his resources. He signed to her to move to the Morse as a general brings brigades into action. Then he swept his hand musician-wise through his hair, regarded the ceiling, and set to work, while Miss Kinzey's white fingers called up the Continent of America. "_K. H. Wade, Los Angeles--_ The 'Constance' is at Los Angeles, isn't she, Miss Kinzey?" "Yep." Miss Kinzey nodded between clicks as the secretary looked at his watch. "Ready? _Send 'Constance,' private car, here, and arrange for special to leave here Sunday in time to connect with New York Limited at Sixteenth Street, Chicago, Tuesday next_." Click-click-click! "Couldn't you better that?" "Not on those grades. That gives 'em sixty hours from here to Chicago. They won't gain anything by taking a special east of that. Ready? _Also arrange with Lake Shore and Michigan Southern to take 'Constance' on New York Central and Hudson River Buffalo to Albany, and B. and A. the same Albany to Boston. Indispensable I should reach Boston Wednesday evening. Be sure nothing prevents. Have also wired Canniff, Toucey, and Barnes._--Sign, Cheyne." Miss Kinzey nodded, and the secretary went on. "Now then. Canniff, Toucey, and Barnes, of course. Ready? _Canniff, Chicago. Please take my private car 'Constance' from Santa Fe at Sixteenth Street next Tuesday p. m. on N. Y. Limited through to Buffalo and deliver N. Y. C. for Albany._--Ever bin to N' York, Miss Kinzey? We'll go some day.--Ready? _Take car Buffalo to Albany on Limited Tuesday p. m._ That's for Toucey." "Haven't bin to Noo York, but I know that!" with a toss of the head. "Beg pardon. Now, Boston and Albany, Barnes, same instructions from Albany through to Boston. Leave three-five P. M. (you needn't wire that); arrive nine-five P. M. Wednesday. That covers everything Wade will do, but it pays to shake up the managers." "It's great," said Miss Kinzey, with a look of admiration. This was the kind of man she understood and appreciated. "'Tisn't bad," said Milsom, modestly. "Now, any one but me would have lost thirty hours and spent a week working out the run, instead of handing him over to the Santa Fe straight through to Chicago." "But see here, about that Noo York Limited. Chauncey Depew himself couldn't hitch his car to her," Miss Kinzey suggested, recovering herself. "Yes, but this isn't Chauncey. It's Cheyne--lightning. It goes." "Even so. Guess we'd better wire the boy. You've forgotten that, anyhow." "I'll ask." When he returned with the father's message bidding Harvey meet them in Boston at an appointed hour, he found Miss Kinzey laughing over the keys. Then Milsom laughed too, for the frantic clicks from Los Angeles ran: "We want to know why-why-why? General uneasiness developed and spreading." Ten minutes later Chicago appealed to Miss Kinzey in these words: "If crime of century is maturing please warn friends in time. We are all getting to cover here." This was capped by a message from Topeka (and wherein Topeka was concerned even Milsom could not guess): "Don't shoot, Colonel. We'll come down." Cheyne smiled grimly at the consternation of his enemies when the telegrams were laid before him. "They think we're on the warpath. Tell 'em we don't feel like fighting just now, Milsom. Tell 'em what we're going for. I guess you and Miss Kinsey had better come along, though it isn't likely I shall do any business on the road. Tell 'em the truth--for once." So the truth was told. Miss Kinzey clicked in the sentiment while the secretary added the memorable quotation, "Let us have peace," and in board rooms two thousand miles away the representatives of sixty-three million dollars' worth of variously manipulated railroad interests breathed more freely. Cheyne was flying to meet the only son, so miraculously restored to him. The bear was seeking his cub, not the bulls. Hard men who had their knives drawn to fight for their financial lives put away the weapons and wished him God-speed, while half a dozen panic-smitten tin-pot toads perked up their heads and spoke of the wonderful things they would have done had not Cheyne buried the hatchet. It was a busy week-end among the wires; for now that their anxiety was removed, men and cities hastened to accommodate. Los Angeles called to San Diego and Barstow that the Southern California engineers might know and be ready in their lonely roundhouses; Barstow passed the word to the Atlantic and Pacific; and Albuquerque flung it the whole length of the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe management, even into Chicago. An engine, combination-car with crew, and the great and gilded "Constance" private car were to be "expedited" over those two thousand three hundred and fifty miles. The train would take precedence of one hundred and seventy-seven others meeting and passing; despatchers and crews of every one of those said trains must be notified. Sixteen locomotives, sixteen engineers, and sixteen firemen would be needed--each and every one the best available. Two and one half minutes would be allowed for changing engines, three for watering, and two for coaling. "Warn the men, and arrange tanks and chutes accordingly; for Harvey Cheyne is in a hurry, a hurry, a hurry," sang the wires. "Forty miles an hour will be expected, and division superintendents will accompany this special over their respective divisions. From San Diego to Sixteenth Street, Chicago, let the magic carpet be laid down. Hurry! Oh, hurry!" "It will be hot," said Cheyne, as they rolled out of San Diego in the dawn of Sunday. "We're going to hurry, Mama, just as fast as ever we can; but I really don't think there's any good of your putting on your bonnet and gloves yet. You'd much better lie down and take your medicine. I'd play you a game of dominoes, but it's Sunday." "I'll be good. Oh, I will be good. Only--taking off my bonnet makes me feel as if we'd never get there." "Try to sleep a little, Mama, and we'll be in Chicago before you know." "But it's Boston, Father. Tell them to hurry." The six-foot drivers were hammering their way to San Bernardino and the Mohave wastes, but this was no grade for speed. That would come later. The heat of the desert followed the heat of the hills as they turned east to the Needles and the Colorado River. The car cracked in the utter drouth and glare, and they put crushed ice to Mrs. Cheyne's neck, and toiled up the long, long grades, past Ash Fork, towards Flagstaff, where the forests and quarries are, under the dry, remote skies. The needle of the speed-indicator flicked and wagged to and fro; the cinders rattled on the roof, and a whirl of dust sucked after the whirling wheels. The crew of the combination sat on their bunks, panting in their shirtsleeves, and Cheyne found himself among them shouting old, old stories of the railroad that every trainman knows, above the roar of the car. He told them about his son, and how the sea had given up its dead, and they nodded and spat and rejoiced with him; asked after "her, back there," and whether she could stand it if the engineer "let her out a piece," and Cheyne thought she could. Accordingly, the great fire-horse was "let 'ut" from Flagstaff to Winslow, till a division superintendent protested. But Mrs. Cheyne, in the boudoir stateroom, where the French maid, sallow-white with fear, clung to the silver door-handle, only moaned a little and begged her husband to bid them "hurry." And so they dropped the dry sands and moon-struck rocks of Arizona behind them, and grilled on till the crash of the couplings and the wheeze of the brake-hose told them they were at Coolidge by the Continental Divide. Three bold and experienced men--cool, confident, and dry when they began; white, quivering, and wet when they finished their trick at those terrible wheels--swung her over the great lift from Albuquerque to Glorietta and beyond Springer, up and up to the Raton Tunnel on the State line, whence they dropped rocking into La Junta, had sight of the Arkansaw, and tore down the long slope to Dodge City, where Cheyne took comfort once again from setting his watch an hour ahead. There was very little talk in the car. The secretary and typewriter sat together on the stamped Spanish-leather cushions by the plate-glass observation-window at the rear end, watching the surge and ripple of the ties crowded back behind them, and, it is believed, making notes of the scenery. Cheyne moved nervously between his own extravagant gorgeousness and the naked necessity of the combination, an unlit cigar in his teeth, till the pitying crews forgot that he was their tribal enemy, and did their best to entertain him. At night the bunched electrics lit up that distressful palace of all the luxuries, and they fared sumptuously, swinging on through the emptiness of abject desolation. Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the guttural voice of a Chinaman, the click-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp steel wheels, and the oath of a tramp chased off the rear-platform; now the solid crash of coal shot into the tender; and now a beating back of noises as they flew past a waiting train. Now they looked out into great abysses, a trestle purring beneath their tread, or up to rocks that barred out half the stars. Now scour and ravine changed and rolled back to jagged mountains on the horizon's edge, and now broke into hills lower and lower, till at last came the true plains. At Dodge City an unknown hand threw in a copy of a Kansas paper containing some sort of an interview with Harvey, who had evidently fallen in with an enterprising reporter, telegraphed on from Boston. The joyful journalese revealed that it was beyond question their boy, and it soothed Mrs. Cheyne for a while. Her one word "hurry" was conveyed by the crews to the engineers at Nickerson, Topeka, and Marceline, where the grades are easy, and they brushed the Continent behind them. Towns and villages were close together now, and a man could feel here that he moved among people. "I can't see the dial, and my eyes ache so. What are we doing?" "The very best we can, Mama. There's no sense in getting in before the Limited. We'd only have to wait." "I don't care. I want to feel we're moving. Sit down and tell me the miles." Cheyne sat down and read the dial for her (there were some miles which stand for records to this day), but the seventy-foot car never changed its long steamer-like roll, moving through the heat with the hum of a giant bee. Yet the speed was not enough for Mrs. Cheyne; and the heat, the remorseless August heat, was making her giddy; the clock-hands would not move, and when, oh, when would they be in Chicago? It is not true that, as they changed engines at Fort Madison, Cheyne passed over to the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers an endowment sufficient to enable them to fight him and his fellows on equal terms for evermore. He paid his obligations to engineers and firemen as he believed they deserved, and only his bank knows what he gave the crews who had sympathized with him. It is on record that the last crew took entire charge of switching operations at Sixteenth Street, because "she" was in a doze at last, and Heaven was to help any one who bumped her. Now the highly paid specialist who conveys the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Limited from Chicago to Elkhart is something of an autocrat, and he does not approve of being told how to back up to a car. None the less he handled the "Constance" as if she might have been a load of dynamite, and when the crew rebuked him, they did it in whispers and dumb show. "Pshaw!" said the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe men, discussing life later, "we weren't runnin' for a record. Harvey Cheyne's wife, she were sick back, an' we didn't want to jounce her. 'Come to think of it, our runnin' time from San Diego to Chicago was 57.54. You can tell that to them Eastern way-trains. When we're tryin' for a record, we'll let you know." To the Western man (though this would not please either city) Chicago and Boston are cheek by jowl, and some railroads encourage the delusion. The Limited whirled the "Constance" into Buffalo and the arms of the New York Central and Hudson River (illustrious magnates with white whiskers and gold charms on their watch-chains boarded her here to talk a little business to Cheyne), who slid her gracefully into Albany, where the Boston and Albany completed the run from tide-water to tide-water--total time, eighty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes, or three days, fifteen hours and one half. Harvey was waiting for them. After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food. They feasted the returned prodigal behind drawn curtains, cut off in their great happiness, while the trains roared in and out around them. Harvey ate, drank, and enlarged on his adventures all in one breath, and when he had a hand free his mother fondled it. His voice was thickened with living in the open, salt air; his palms were rough and hard, his wrists dotted with marks of gurrysores; and a fine full flavour of codfish hung round rubber boots and blue jersey. The father, well used to judging men, looked at him keenly. He did not know what enduring harm the boy might have taken. Indeed, he caught himself thinking that he knew very little whatever of his son; but he distinctly remembered an unsatisfied, dough-faced youth who took delight in "calling down the old man," and reducing his mother to tears--such a person as adds to the gaiety of public rooms and hotel piazzas, where the ingenuous young of the wealthy play with or revile the bell-boys. But this well set-up fisher-youth did not wriggle, looked at him with eyes steady, clear, and unflinching, and spoke in a tone distinctly, even startlingly, respectful. There was that in his voice, too, which seemed to promise that the change might be permanent, and that the new Harvey had come to stay. "Some one's been coercing him," thought Cheyne. "Now Constance would never have allowed that. Don't see as Europe could have done it any better." "But why didn't you tell this man, Troop, who you were?" the mother repeated, when Harvey had expanded his story at least twice. "Disko Troop, dear. The best man that ever walked a deck. I don't care who the next is." "Why didn't you tell him to put you ashore? You know Papa would have made it up to him ten times over." "I know it; but he thought I was crazy. I'm afraid I called him a thief because I couldn't find the bills in my pocket." "A sailor found them by the flagstaff that--that night," sobbed Mrs. Cheyne. "That explains it, then. I don't blame Troop any. I just said I wouldn't work--on a Banker, too--and of course he hit me on the nose, and oh! I bled like a stuck hog." "My poor darling! They must have abused you horribly." "Dunno quite. Well, after that, I saw a light." Cheyne slapped his leg and chuckled. This was going to be a boy after his own hungry heart. He had never seen precisely that twinkle in Harvey's eye before. "And the old man gave me ten and a half a month; he's paid me half now; and I took hold with Dan and pitched right in. I can't do a man's work yet. But I can handle a dory 'most as well as Dan, and I don't get rattled in a fog--much; and I can take my trick in light winds--that's steering, dear--and I can 'most bait up a trawl, and I know my ropes, of course; and I can pitch fish till the cows come home, and I'm great on old Josephus, and I'll show you how I can clear coffee with a piece of fish-skin, and--I think I'll have another cup, please. Say, you've no notion what a heap of work there is in ten and a half a month!" "I began with eight and a half, my son," said Cheyne. "That so? You never told me, sir." "You never asked, Harve. I'll tell you about it some day, if you care to listen. Try a stuffed olive." "Troop says the most interesting thing in the world is to find out how the next man gets his vittles. It's great to have a trimmed-up meal again. We were well fed, though. But mug on the Banks. Disko fed us first-class. He's a great man. And Dan--that's his son--Dan's my partner. And there's Uncle Salters and his manures, an' he reads Josephus. He's sure I'm crazy yet. And there's poor little Penn, and he is crazy. You mustn't talk to him about Johnstown, because-- "And, oh, you must know Tom Platt and Long Jack and Manuel. Manuel saved my life. I'm sorry he's a Portuguee. He can't talk much, but he's an everlasting musician. He found me struck adrift and drifting, and hauled me in." "I wonder your nervous system isn't completely wrecked," said Mrs. Cheyne. "What for, Mama? I worked like a horse and I ate like a hog and I slept like a dead man." That was too much for Mrs. Cheyne, who began to think of her visions of a corpse rocking on the salty seas. She went to her stateroom, and Harvey curled up beside his father, explaining his indebtedness. "You can depend upon me to do everything I can for the crowd, Harve. They seem to be good men on your showing." "Best in the Fleet, sir. Ask at Gloucester," said Harvey. "But Disko believes still he's cured me of being crazy. Dan's the only one I've let on to about you, and our private cars and all the rest of it, and I'm not quite sure Dan believes. I want to paralyze 'em to-morrow. Say, can't they run the 'Constance' over to Gloucester? Mama don't look fit to be moved, anyway, and we're bound to finish cleaning out by tomorrow. Wouverman takes our fish. You see, we're the first off the Banks this season, and it's four twenty-five a quintal. We held out till he paid it. They want it quick." "You mean you'll have to work to-morrow, then?" "I told Troop I would. I'm on the scales. I've brought the tallies with me." He looked at the greasy notebook with an air of importance that made his father choke. "There isn't but three--no--two ninety-four or five quintal more by my reckoning." "Hire a substitute," suggested Cheyne, to see what Harvey would say. "Can't, sir. I'm tally-man for the schooner. Troop says I've a better head for figures than Dan. Troop's a mighty just man." "Well, suppose I don't move the 'Constance' to-night, how'll you fix it?" Harvey looked at the clock, which marked twenty past eleven. "Then I'll sleep here till three and catch the four o'clock freight. They let us men from the Fleet ride free as a rule." "That's a notion. But I think we can get the 'Constance' around about as soon as your men's freight. Better go to bed now." Harvey spread himself on the sofa, kicked off his boots, and was asleep before his father could shade the electrics. Cheyne sat watching the young face under the shadow of the arm thrown over the forehead, and among many things that occurred to him was the notion that he might perhaps have been neglectful as a father. "One never knows when one's taking one's biggest risks," he said. "It might have been worse than drowning; but I don't think it has--I don't think it has. If it hasn't, I haven't enough to pay Troop, that's all; and I don't think it has." Morning brought a fresh sea breeze through the windows, the "Constance" was side-tracked among freight-cars at Gloucester, and Harvey had gone to his business. "Then he'll fall overboard again and be drowned," the mother said bitterly. "We'll go and look, ready to throw him a rope in case. You've never seen him working for his bread," said the father. "What nonsense! As if any one expected--" "Well, the man that hired him did. He's about right, too." They went down between the stores full of fishermen's oilskins to Wouverman's wharf where the _We're Here_ rode high, her Bank flag still flying, all hands busy as beavers in the glorious morning light. Disko stood by the main hatch superintending Manuel, Penn, and Uncle Salters at the tackle. Dan was swinging the loaded baskets inboard as Long Jack and Tom Platt filled them, and Harvey, with a notebook, represented the skipper's interests before the clerk of the scales on the salt-sprinkled wharf-edge. "Ready!" cried the voices below. "Haul!" cried Disko. "Hi!" said Manuel. "Here!" said Dan, swinging the basket. Then they heard Harvey's voice, clear and fresh, checking the weights. The last of the fish had been whipped out, and Harvey leaped from the string-piece six feet to a ratline, as the shortest way to hand Disko the tally, shouting, "Two ninety-seven, and an empty hold!" "What's the total, Harve?" said Disko. "Eight sixty-five. Three thousand six hundred and seventy-six dollars and a quarter. 'Wish I'd share as well as wage." "Well, I won't go so far as to say you hevn't deserved it, Harve. Don't you want to slip up to Wouverman's office and take him our tallies?" "Who's that boy?" said Cheyne to Dan, well used to all manner of questions from those idle imbeciles called summer boarders. "Well, he's kind o' supercargo," was the answer. "We picked him up struck adrift on the Banks. Fell overboard from a liner, he sez. He was a passenger. He's by way o' hem' a fisherman now." "Is he worth his keep?" "Ye-ep. Dad, this man wants to know ef Harve's worth his keep. Say, would you like to go aboard? We'll fix up a ladder for her." "I should very much, indeed. 'Twon't hurt you, Mama, and you'll be able to see for yourself." The woman who could not lift her head a week ago scrambled down the ladder, and stood aghast amid the mess and tangle aft. "Be you anyways interested in Harve?" said Disko. "Well, ye-es." "He's a good boy, an' ketches right hold jest as he's bid. You've heard haow we found him? He was sufferin' from nervous prostration, I guess, 'r else his head had hit somethin', when we hauled him aboard. He's all over that naow. Yes, this is the cabin. 'Tain't in order, but you're quite welcome to look araound. Those are his figures on the stove-pipe, where we keep the reckonin' mostly." "Did he sleep here?" said Mrs. Cheyne, sitting on a yellow locker and surveying the disorderly bunks. "No. He berthed forward, madam, an' only fer him an' my boy hookin' fried pies an muggin' up when they ought to ha' been asleep, I dunno as I've any special fault to find with him." "There weren't nothin' wrong with Harve," said Uncle Salters, descending the steps. "He hung my boots on the main-truck, and he ain't over an' above respectful to such as knows more'n he do, specially about farmin'; but he were mostly misled by Dan." Dan in the meantime, profiting by dark hints from Harvey early that morning, was executing a war-dance on deck. "Tom, Tom!" he whispered down the hatch. "His folks has come, an' Dad hain't caught on yet, an' they're pow-wowin' in the cabin. She's a daisy, an' he's all Harve claimed he was, by the looks of him." "Howly Smoke!" said Long Jack, climbing out covered with salt and fish-skin. "D'ye belave his tale av the kid an' the little four-horse rig was thrue?" "I knew it all along," said Dan. "Come an' see Dad mistook in his judgments." They came delightedly, just in time to hear Cheyne say: "I'm glad he has a good character, because--he's my son." Disko's jaw fell,--Long Jack always vowed that he heard the click of it,--and he stared alternately at the man and the woman. "I got his telegram in San Diego four days ago, and we came over." "In a private car?" said Dan. "He said ye might." "In a private car, of course." Dan looked at his father with a hurricane of irreverent winks. "There was a tale he told us av drivin' four little ponies in a rig av his own," said Long Jack. "Was that thrue now?" "Very likely," said Cheyne. "Was it, Mama?" "He had a little drag when we were in Toledo, I think," said the mother. Long Jack whistled. "Oh, Disko!" said he, and that was all. "I wuz--I am mistook in my jedgments--worse'n the men o' Marblehead," said Disko, as though the words were being windlassed out of him. "I don't mind ownin' to you, Mr. Cheyne, as I mistrusted the boy to be crazy. He talked kinder odd about money." "So he told me." "Did he tell ye anything else? 'Cause I pounded him once." This with a somewhat anxious glance at Mrs. Cheyne. "Oh, yes," Cheyne replied. "I should say it probably did him more good than anything else in the world." "I jedged 'twuz necessary, er I wouldn't ha' done it. I don't want you to think we abuse our boys any on this packet." "I don't think you do, Mr. Troop." Mrs. Cheyne had been looking at the faces--Disko's ivory-yellow, hairless, iron countenance; Uncle Salters's, with its rim of agricultural hair; Penn's bewildered simplicity; Manuel's quiet smile; Long Jack's grin of delight, and Tom Platt's scar. Rough, by her standards, they certainly were; but she had a mother's wits in her eyes, and she rose with out-stretched hands. "Oh, tell me, which is who?" said she, half sobbing. "I want to thank you and bless you--all of you." "Faith, that pays me a hunder time," said Long Jack. Disko introduced them all in due form. The captain of an old-time Chinaman could have done no better, and Mrs. Cheyne babbled incoherently. She nearly threw herself into Manuel's arms when she understood that he had first found Harvey. "But how shall I leave him dreeft?" said poor Manuel. "What do you yourself if you find him so? Eh, wha-at? We are in one good boy, and I am ever so pleased he come to be your son." "And he told me Dan was his partner!" she cried. Dan was already sufficiently pink, but he turned a rich crimson when Mrs. Cheyne kissed him on both cheeks before the assembly. Then they led her forward to show her the foc'sle, at which she wept again, and must needs go down to see Harvey's identical bunk, and there she found the nigger cook cleaning up the stove, and he nodded as though she were some one he had expected to meet for years. They tried, two at a time, to explain the boat's daily life to her, and she sat by the pawl-post, her gloved hands on the greasy table, laughing with trembling lips and crying with dancing eyes. "And who's ever to use the _We're Here_ after this?" said Long Jack to Tom Platt. "I feel as if she'd made a cathedral av ut all." "Cathedral!" sneered Tom Platt. "Oh, if it had bin even the Fish C'mmission boat instid of this bally-hoo o' blazes. If we only hed some decency an' order an' side-boys when she goes over! She'll have to climb that ladder like a hen, an' we--we ought to be mannin' the yards!" "Then Harvey was not mad," said Penn, slowly, to Cheyne. "No, indeed--thank God," the big millionaire replied, stooping down tenderly. "It must be terrible to be mad. Except to lose your child, I do not know anything more terrible. But your child has come back? Let us thank God for that." "Hello!" cried Harvey, looking down upon them benignly from the wharf. "I wuz mistook, Harve. I wuz mistook," said Disko, swiftly, holding up a hand. "I wuz mistook in my jedgments. Ye needn't rub in any more." "Guess I'll take care o' that," said Dan, under his breath. "You'll be goin' off naow, won't ye?" "Well, not without the balance of my wages, 'less you want to have the _We're Here_ attached." "Thet's so; I'd clean forgot"; and he counted out the remaining dollars. "You done all you contracted to do, Harve; and you done it 'baout's well as if you'd been brought up--" Here Disko brought himself up. He did not quite see where the sentence was going to end. "Outside of a private car?" suggested Dan, wickedly. "Come on, and I'll show her to you," said Harvey. Cheyne stayed to talk with Disko, but the others made a procession to the depot, with Mrs. Cheyne at the head. The French maid shrieked at the invasion; and Harvey laid the glories of the "Constance" before them without a word. They took them in in equal silence--stamped leather, silver door-handles and rails, cut velvet, plate-glass, nickel, bronze, hammered iron, and the rare woods of the continent inlaid. "I told you," said Harvey; "I told you." This was his crowning revenge, and a most ample one. Mrs. Cheyne decreed a meal, and that nothing might be lacking to the tale Long Jack told afterwards in his boarding-house, she waited on them herself. Men who are accustomed to eat at tiny tables in howling gales have curiously neat and finished manners; but Mrs. Cheyne, who did not know this, was surprised. She longed to have Manuel for a butler; so silently and easily did he comport himself among the frail glassware and dainty silver. Tom Platt remembered the great days on the Ohio and the manners of foreign potentates who dined with the officers; and Long Jack, being Irish, supplied the small talk till all were at their ease. In the _We're Here's_ cabin the fathers took stock of each other behind their cigars. Cheyne knew well enough when he dealt with a man to whom he could not offer money; equally well he knew that no money could pay for what Disko had done. He kept his own counsel and waited for an opening. "I hevn't done anything to your boy or fer your boy excep' make him work a piece an' learn him how to handle the hog-yoke," said Disko. "He has twice my boy's head for figgers." "By the way," Cheyne answered casually, "what d'you calculate to make of your boy?" Disko removed his cigar and waved it comprehensively round the cabin. "Dan's jest plain boy, an' he don't allow me to do any of his thinkin'. He'll hev this able little packet when I'm laid by. He ain't noways anxious to quit the business. I know that." "Mmm! 'Ever been West, Mr. Troop?" "'Bin's fer ez Noo York once in a boat. I've no use for railroads. No more hez Dan. Salt water's good enough fer the Troops. I've been 'most everywhere--in the nat'ral way, o' course." "I can give him all the salt water he's likely to need--till he's a skipper." "Haow's that? I thought you wuz a kinder railroad king. Harve told me so when--I was mistook in my jedgments." "We're all apt to be mistaken. I fancied perhaps you might know I own a line of tea-clippers--San Francisco to Yokohama--six of 'em--iron-built, about seventeen hundred and eighty tons apiece. "Blame that boy! He never told. I'd ha' listened to that, instid o' his truck abaout railroads an' pony-carriages." "He didn't know." "'Little thing like that slipped his mind, I guess." "No, I only capt--took hold of the 'Blue M.' freighters--Morgan and McQuade's old line--this summer." Disko collapsed where he sat, beside the stove. "Great Caesar Almighty! I mistrust I've been fooled from one end to the other. Why, Phil Airheart he went from this very town six year back--no, seven--an' he's mate on the San Jose--now--twenty-six days was her time out. His sister she's livin' here yet, an' she reads his letters to my woman. An' you own the 'Blue M.' freighters?" Cheyne nodded. "If I'd known that I'd ha' jerked the _We're Here_ back to port all standin', on the word." "Perhaps that wouldn't have been so good for Harvey." "If I'd only known! If he'd only said about the cussed Line, I'd ha' understood! I'll never stand on my own jedgments again--never. They're well-found packets. Phil Airheart he says so." "I'm glad to have a recommend from that quarter. Airheart's skipper of the San Jose now. What I was getting at is to know whether you'd lend me Dan for a year or two, and we'll see if we can't make a mate of him. Would you trust him to Airheart?" "It's a resk taking a raw boy--" "I know a man who did more for me." "That's diff'runt. Look at here naow, I ain't recommendin' Dan special because he's my own flesh an' blood. I know Bank ways ain't clipper ways, but he hain't much to learn. Steer he can--no boy better, if I say it--an' the rest's in our blood an' get; but I could wish he warn't so cussed weak on navigation." "Airheart will attend to that. He'll ship as boy for a voyage or two, and then we can put him in the way of doing better. Suppose you take him in hand this winter, and I'll send for him early in the spring. I know the Pacific's a long ways off--" "Pshaw! We Troops, livin' an' dead, are all around the earth an' the seas thereof." "But I want you to understand--and I mean this--any time you think you'd like to see him, tell me, and I'll attend to the transportation. 'Twon't cost you a cent." "If you'll walk a piece with me, we'll go to my house an' talk this to my woman. I've bin so crazy mistook in all my jedgments, it don't seem to me this was like to be real." They went blue-trimmed of nasturtiums over to Troop's eighteen-hundred-dollar, white house, with a retired dory full in the front yard and a shuttered parlour which was a museum of oversea plunder. There sat a large woman, silent and grave, with the dim eyes of those who look long to sea for the return of their beloved. Cheyne addressed himself to her, and she gave consent wearily. "We lose one hundred a year from Gloucester only, Mr. Cheyne," she said--"one hundred boys an' men; and I've come so's to hate the sea as if 'twuz alive an' listenin'. God never made it fer humans to anchor on. These packets o' yours they go straight out, I take it' and straight home again?" "As straight as the winds let 'em, and I give a bonus for record passages. Tea don't improve by being at sea." "When he wuz little he used to play at keeping store, an' I had hopes he might follow that up. But soon's he could paddle a dory I knew that were goin' to be denied me." "They're square-riggers, Mother; iron-built an' well found. Remember what Phil's sister reads you when she gits his letters." "I've never known as Phil told lies, but he's too venturesome (like most of 'em that use the sea). If Dan sees fit, Mr. Cheyne, he can go--fer all o' me." "She jest despises the ocean," Disko explained, "an' I--I dunno haow to act polite, I guess, er I'd thank you better." "My father--my own eldest brother--two nephews--an' my second sister's man," she said, dropping her head on her hand. "Would you care fer any one that took all those?" Cheyne was relieved when Dan turned up and accepted with more delight than he was able to put into words. Indeed, the offer meant a plain and sure road to all desirable things; but Dan thought most of commanding watch on broad decks, and looking into far-away harbours. Mrs. Cheyne had spoken privately to the unaccountable Manuel in the matter of Harvey's rescue. He seemed to have no desire for money. Pressed hard, he said that he would take five dollars, because he wanted to buy something for a girl. Otherwise--"How shall I take money when I make so easy my eats and smokes? You will giva some if I like or no? Eh, wha-at? Then you shall giva me money, but not that way. You shall giva all you can think." He introduced her to a snuffy Portuguese priest with a list of semi-destitute widows as long as his cassock. As a strict Unitarian, Mrs. Cheyne could not sympathize with the creed, but she ended by respecting the brown, voluble little man. Manuel, faithful son of the Church, appropriated all the blessings showered on her for her charity. "That letta me out," said he. "I have now ver' good absolutions for six months"; and he strolled forth to get a handkerchief for the girl of the hour and to break the hearts of all the others. Salters went West for a season with Penn, and left no address behind. He had a dread that these millionary people, with wasteful private cars, might take undue interest in his companion. It was better to visit inland relatives till the coast was clear. "Never you be adopted by rich folk, Penn," he said in the cars, "or I'll take 'n' break this checker-board over your head. Ef you forgit your name agin--which is Pratt--you remember you belong with Salters Troop, an' set down right where you are till I come fer you. Don't go taggin' araound after them whose eyes bung out with fatness, accordin' to Scripcher." CHAPTER X But it was otherwise with the _We're Here's_ silent cook, for he came up, his kit in a handkerchief, and boarded the "Constance." Pay was no particular object, and he did not in the least care where he slept. His business, as revealed to him in dreams, was to follow Harvey for the rest of his days. They tried argument and, at last, persuasion; but there is a difference between one Cape Breton and two Alabama negroes, and the matter was referred to Cheyne by the cook and porter. The millionaire only laughed. He presumed Harvey might need a body-servant some day or other, and was sure that one volunteer was worth five hirelings. Let the man stay, therefore; even though he called himself MacDonald and swore in Gaelic. The car could go back to Boston, where, if he were still of the same mind, they would take him West. With the "Constance," which in his heart of hearts he loathed, departed the last remnant of Cheyne's millionairedom, and he gave himself up to an energetic idleness. This Gloucester was a new town in a new land, and he purposed to "take it in," as of old he had taken in all the cities from Snohomish to San Diego of that world whence he hailed. They made money along the crooked street which was half wharf and half ship's store: as a leading professional he wished to learn how the noble game was played. Men said that four out of every five fish-balls served at New England's Sunday breakfast came from Gloucester, and overwhelmed him with figures in proof--statistics of boats, gear, wharf-frontage, capital invested, salting, packing, factories, insurance, wages, repairs, and profits. He talked with the owners of the large fleets whose skippers were little more than hired men, and whose crews were almost all Swedes or Portuguese. Then he conferred with Disko, one of the few who owned their craft, and compared notes in his vast head. He coiled himself away on chain-cables in marine junk-shops, asking questions with cheerful, unslaked Western curiosity, till all the water-front wanted to know "what in thunder that man was after, anyhow." He prowled into the Mutual Insurance rooms, and demanded explanations of the mysterious remarks chalked up on the blackboard day by day; and that brought down upon him secretaries of every Fisherman's Widow and Orphan Aid Society within the city limits. They begged shamelessly, each man anxious to beat the other institution's record, and Cheyne tugged at his beard and handed them all over to Mrs. Cheyne. She was resting in a boarding-house near Eastern Point--a strange establishment, managed, apparently, by the boarders, where the table-cloths were red-and-white-checkered and the population, who seemed to have known one another intimately for years, rose up at midnight to make Welsh rarebits if it felt hungry. On the second morning of her stay Mrs. Cheyne put away her diamond solitaires before she came down to breakfast. "They're most delightful people," she confided to her husband; "so friendly and simple, too, though they are all Boston, nearly." "That isn't simpleness, Mama," he said, looking across the boulders behind the apple-trees where the hammocks were slung. "It's the other thing, that what I haven't got." "It can't be," said Mrs. Cheyne quietly. "There isn't a woman here owns a dress that cost a hundred dollars. Why, we--" "I know it, dear. We have--of course we have. I guess it's only the style they wear East. Are you having a good time?" "I don't see very much of Harvey; he's always with you; but I ain't near as nervous as I was." "I haven't had such a good time since Willie died. I never rightly understood that I had a son before this. Harve's got to be a great boy. 'Anything I can fetch you, dear? 'Cushion under your head? Well, we'll go down to the wharf again and look around." Harvey was his father's shadow in those days, and the two strolled along side by side, Cheyne using the grades as an excuse for laying his hand on the boy's square shoulder. It was then that Harvey noticed and admired what had never struck him before--his father's curious power of getting at the heart of new matters as learned from men in the street. "How d'you make 'em tell you everything without opening your head?" demanded the son, as they came out of a rigger's loft. "I've dealt with quite a few men in my time, Harve, and one sizes 'em up somehow, I guess. I know something about myself, too." Then, after a pause, as they sat down on a wharf-edge: "Men can 'most always tell when a man has handled things for himself, and then they treat him as one of themselves." "Same as they treat me down at Wouverman's wharf. I'm one of the crowd now. Disko has told every one I've earned my pay." Harvey spread out his hands and rubbed the palms together. "They're all soft again," he said dolefully. "Keep 'em that way for the next few years, while you're getting your education. You can harden 'em up after." "Ye-es, I suppose so," was the reply, in no delighted voice. "It rests with you, Harve. You can take cover behind your mama, of course, and put her on to fussing about your nerves and your high-strungness and all that kind of poppycock." "Have I ever done that?" said Harvey, uneasily. His father turned where he sat and thrust out a long hand. "You know as well as I do that I can't make anything of you if you don't act straight by me. I can handle you alone if you'll stay alone, but I don't pretend to manage both you and Mama. Life's too short, anyway." "Don't make me out much of a fellow, does it?" "I guess it was my fault a good deal; but if you want the truth, you haven't been much of anything up to date. Now, have you?" "Umm! Disko thinks . . . Say, what d'you reckon it's cost you to raise me from the start--first, last and all over?" Cheyne smiled. "I've never kept track, but I should estimate, in dollars and cents, nearer fifty than forty thousand; maybe sixty. The young generation comes high. It has to have things, and it tires of 'em, and--the old man foots the bill." Harvey whistled, but at heart he was rather pleased to think that his upbringing had cost so much. "And all that's sunk capital, isn't it?" "Invested, Harve. Invested, I hope." "Making it only thirty thousand, the thirty I've earned is about ten cents on the hundred. That's a mighty poor catch." Harvey wagged his head solemnly. Cheyne laughed till he nearly fell off the pile into the water. "Disko has got a heap more than that out of Dan since he was ten; and Dan's at school half the year, too." "Oh, that's what you're after, is it?" "No. I'm not after anything. I'm not stuck on myself any just now--that's all. . . . I ought to be kicked." "I can't do it, old man; or I would, I presume, if I'd been made that way." "Then I'd have remembered it to the last day I lived--and never forgiven you," said Harvey, his chin on his doubled fists. "Exactly. That's about what I'd do. You see?" "I see. The fault's with me and no one else. All the same, something's got to be done about it." Cheyne drew a cigar from his vest-pocket, bit off the end, and fell to smoking. Father and son were very much alike; for the beard hid Cheyne's mouth, and Harvey had his father's slightly aquiline nose, close-set black eyes, and narrow, high cheek-bones. With a touch of brown paint he would have made up very picturesquely as a Red Indian of the story-books. "Now you can go on from here," said Cheyne, slowly, "costing me between six or eight thousand a year till you're a voter. Well, we'll call you a man then. You can go right on from that, living on me to the tune of forty or fifty thousand, besides what your mother will give you, with a valet and a yacht or a fancy-ranch where you can pretend to raise trotting-stock and play cards with your own crowd." "Like Lorry Tuck?" Harvey put in. "Yep; or the two De Vitre boys or old man McQuade's son. California's full of 'em, and here's an Eastern sample while we're talking." A shiny black steam-yacht, with mahogany deck-house, nickel-plated binnacles, and pink-and-white-striped awnings puffed up the harbour, flying the burgee of some New York club. Two young men in what they conceived to be sea costumes were playing cards by the saloon skylight; and a couple of women with red and blue parasols looked on and laughed noisily. "Shouldn't care to be caught out in her in any sort of a breeze. No beam," said Harvey, critically, as the yacht slowed to pick up her mooring-buoy. "They're having what stands them for a good time. I can give you that, and twice as much as that, Harve. How'd you like it?" "Caesar! That's no way to get a dinghy overside," said Harvey, still intent on the yacht. "If I couldn't slip a tackle better than that I'd stay ashore. . . . What if I don't?" "Stay ashore--or what?" "Yacht and ranch and live on 'the old man,' and--get behind Mama where there's trouble," said Harvey, with a twinkle in his eye. "Why, in that case, you come right in with me, my son." "Ten dollars a month?" Another twinkle. "Not a cent more until you're worth it, and you won't begin to touch that for a few years." "I'd sooner begin sweeping out the office--isn't that how the big bugs start?--and touch something now than--" "I know it; we all feel that way. But I guess we can hire any sweeping we need. I made the same mistake myself of starting in too soon." "Thirty million dollars' worth o' mistake, wasn't it? I'd risk it for that." "I lost some; and I gained some. I'll tell you." Cheyne pulled his beard and smiled as he looked over the still water, and spoke away from Harvey, who presently began to be aware that his father was telling the story of his life. He talked in a low, even voice, without gesture and without expression; and it was a history for which a dozen leading journals would cheerfully have paid many dollars--the story of forty years that was at the same time the story of the New West, whose story is yet to be written. It began with a kinless boy turned loose in Texas, and went on fantastically through a hundred changes and chops of life, the scenes shifting from State after Western State, from cities that sprang up in a month and--in a season utterly withered away, to wild ventures in wilder camps that are now laborious, paved municipalities. It covered the building of three railroads and the deliberate wreck of a fourth. It told of steamers, townships, forests, and mines, and the men of every nation under heaven, manning, creating, hewing, and digging these. It touched on chances of gigantic wealth flung before eyes that could not see, or missed by the merest accident of time and travel; and through the mad shift of things, sometimes on horseback, more often afoot, now rich, now poor, in and out, and back and forth, deck-hand, train-hand, contractor, boarding-house keeper, journalist, engineer, drummer, real-estate agent, politician, dead-beat, rum-seller, mine-owner, speculator, cattle-man, or tramp, moved Harvey Cheyne, alert and quiet, seeking his own ends, and, so he said, the glory and advancement of his country. He told of the faith that never deserted him even when he hung on the ragged edge of despair--the faith that comes of knowing men and things. He enlarged, as though he were talking to himself, on his very great courage and resource at all times. The thing was so evident in the man's mind that he never even changed his tone. He described how he had bested his enemies, or forgiven them, exactly as they had bested or forgiven him in those careless days; how he had entreated, cajoled, and bullied towns, companies, and syndicates, all for their enduring good; crawled round, through, or under mountains and ravines, dragging a string and hoop-iron railroad after him, and in the end, how he had sat still while promiscuous communities tore the last fragments of his character to shreds. The tale held Harvey almost breathless, his head a little cocked to one side, his eyes fixed on his father's face, as the twilight deepened and the red cigar-end lit up the furrowed cheeks and heavy eyebrows. It seemed to him like watching a locomotive storming across country in the dark--a mile between each glare of the open fire-door: but this locomotive could talk, and the words shook and stirred the boy to the core of his soul. At last Cheyne pitched away the cigar-butt, and the two sat in the dark over the lapping water. "I've never told that to any one before," said the father. Harvey gasped. "It's just the greatest thing that ever was!" said he. "That's what I got. Now I'm coming to what I didn't get. It won't sound much of anything to you, but I don't wish you to be as old as I am before you find out. I can handle men, of course, and I'm no fool along my own lines, but--but--I can't compete with the man who has been taught! I've picked up as I went along, and I guess it sticks out all over me." "I've never seen it," said the son, indignantly. "You will, though, Harve. You will--just as soon as you're through college. Don't I know it? Don't I know the look on men's faces when they think me a--a 'mucker,' as they call it out here? I can break them to little pieces--yes--but I can't get back at 'em to hurt 'em where they live. I don't say they're 'way 'way up, but I feel I'm 'way, 'way, 'way off, somehow. Now you've got your chance. You've got to soak up all the learning that's around, and you'll live with a crowd that are doing the same thing. They'll be doing it for a few thousand dollars a year at most; but remember you'll be doing it for millions. You'll learn law enough to look after your own property when I'm out o' the light, and you'll have to be solid with the best men in the market (they are useful later); and above all, you'll have to stow away the plain, common, sit-down-with-your chin-on your-elbows book-learning. Nothing pays like that, Harve, and it's bound to pay more and more each year in our country--in business and in politics. You'll see." "There's no sugar in my end of the deal," said Harvey. "Four years at college! 'Wish I'd chosen the valet and the yacht!" "Never mind, my son," Cheyne insisted. "You're investing your capital where it'll bring in the best returns; and I guess you won't find our property shrunk any when you're ready to take hold. Think it over, and let me know in the morning. Hurry! We'll be late for supper!" As this was a business talk, there was no need for Harvey to tell his mother about it; and Cheyne naturally took the same point of view. But Mrs. Cheyne saw and feared, and was a little jealous. Her boy, who rode rough-shod over her, was gone, and in his stead reigned a keen-faced youth, abnormally silent, who addressed most of his conversation to his father. She understood it was business, and therefore a matter beyond her premises. If she had any doubts, they were resolved when Cheyne went to Boston and brought back a new diamond marquise ring. "What have you two been doing now?" she said, with a weak little smile, as she turned it in the light. "Talking--just talking, Mama; there's nothing mean about Harvey." There was not. The boy had made a treaty on his own account. Railroads, he explained gravely, interested him as little as lumber, real estate, or mining. What his soul yearned after was control of his father's newly purchased sailing-ship. If that could be promised him within what he conceived to be a reasonable time, he, for his part, guaranteed diligence and sobriety at college for four or five years. In vacation he was to be allowed full access to all details connected with the line--he had not asked more than two thousand questions about it,--from his father's most private papers in the safe to the tug in San Francisco harbour. "It's a deal," said Cheyne at the last. "You'll alter your mind twenty times before you leave college, o' course; but if you take hold of it in proper shape, and if you don't tie it up before you're twenty-three, I'll make the thing over to you. How's that, Harve?" "Nope; never pays to split up a going concern. There's too much competition in the world anyway, and Disko says 'blood-kin hev to stick together.' His crowd never go back on him. That's one reason, he says, why they make such big fares. Say, the _We're Here_ goes off to the Georges on Monday. They don't stay long ashore, do they?" "Well, we ought to be going, too, I guess. I've left my business hung up at loose ends between two oceans, and it's time to connect again. I just hate to do it, though; haven't had a holiday like this for twenty years." "We can't go without seeing Disko off," said Harvey; "and Monday's Memorial Day. Let's stay over that, anyway." "What is this memorial business? They were talking about it at the boarding-house," said Cheyne weakly. He, too, was not anxious to spoil the golden days. "Well, as far as I can make out, this business is a sort of song-and-dance act, whacked up for the summer boarders. Disko don't think much of it, he says, because they take up a collection for the widows and orphans. Disko's independent. Haven't you noticed that?" "Well--yes. A little. In spots. Is it a town show, then?" "The summer convention is. They read out the names of the fellows drowned or gone astray since last time, and they make speeches, and recite, and all. Then, Disko says, the secretaries of the Aid Societies go into the back yard and fight over the catch. The real show, he says, is in the spring. The ministers all take a hand then, and there aren't any summer boarders around." "I see," said Cheyne, with the brilliant and perfect comprehension of one born into and bred up to city pride. "We'll stay over for Memorial Day, and get off in the afternoon." "Guess I'll go down to Disko's and make him bring his crowd up before they sail. I'll have to stand with them, of course." "Oh, that's it, is it," said Cheyne. "I'm only a poor summer boarder, and you're--" "A Banker--full-blooded Banker," Harvey called back as he boarded a trolley, and Cheyne went on with his blissful dreams for the future. Disko had no use for public functions where appeals were made for charity, but Harvey pleaded that the glory of the day would be lost, so far as he was concerned, if the _We're Heres_ absented themselves. Then Disko made conditions. He had heard--it was astonishing how all the world knew all the world's business along the water-front--he had heard that a "Philadelphia actress-woman" was going to take part in the exercises; and he mistrusted that she would deliver "Skipper Ireson's Ride." Personally, he had as little use for actresses as for summer boarders; but justice was justice, and though he himself (here Dan giggled) had once slipped up on a matter of judgment, this thing must not be. So Harvey came back to East Gloucester, and spent half a day explaining to an amused actress with a royal reputation on two seaboards the inwardness of the mistake she contemplated; and she admitted that it was justice, even as Disko had said. Cheyne knew by old experience what would happen; but anything of the nature of a public palaver was meat and drink to the man's soul. He saw the trolleys hurrying west, in the hot, hazy morning, full of women in light summer dresses, and white-faced straw-hatted men fresh from Boston desks; the stack of bicycles outside the post office; the come-and-go of busy officials, greeting one another; the slow flick and swash of bunting in the heavy air; and the important man with a hose sluicing the brick sidewalk. "Mother," he said suddenly, "don't you remember--after Seattle was burned out--and they got her going again?" Mrs. Cheyne nodded, and looked critically down the crooked street. Like her husband, she understood these gatherings, all the West over, and compared them one against another. The fishermen began to mingle with the crowd about the town-hall doors--blue-jowled Portuguese, their women bare-headed or shawled for the most part; clear-eyed Nova Scotians, and men of the Maritime Provinces; French, Italians, Swedes, and Danes, with outside crews of coasting schooners; and everywhere women in black, who saluted one another with gloomy pride, for this was their day of great days. And there were ministers of many creeds,--pastors of great, gilt-edged congregations, at the seaside for a rest, with shepherds of the regular work,--from the priests of the Church on the Hill to bush-bearded ex-sailor Lutherans, hail-fellow with the men of a score of boats. There were owners of lines of schooners, large contributors to the societies, and small men, their few craft pawned to the mastheads, with bankers and marine-insurance agents, captains of tugs and water-boats, riggers, fitters, lumpers, salters, boat-builders, and coopers, and all the mixed population of the water-front. They drifted along the line of seats made gay with the dresses of the summer boarders, and one of the town officials patrolled and perspired till he shone all over with pure civic pride. Cheyne had met him for five minutes a few days before, and between the two there was entire understanding. "Well, Mr. Cheyne, and what d'you think of our city?--Yes, madam, you can sit anywhere you please.--You have this kind of thing out West, I presume?" "Yes, but we aren't as old as you." "That's so, of course. You ought to have been at the exercises when we celebrated our two hundred and fiftieth birthday. I tell you, Mr. Cheyne, the old city did herself credit." "So I heard. It pays, too. What's the matter with the town that it don't have a first-class hotel, though?" "--Right over there to the left, Pedro. Heaps o' room for you and your crowd.--Why, that's what I tell 'em all the time, Mr. Cheyne. There's big money in it, but I presume that don't affect you any. What we want is--" A heavy hand fell on his broadcloth shoulder, and the flushed skipper of a Portland coal-and-ice coaster spun him half round. "What in thunder do you fellows mean by clappin' the law on the town when all decent men are at sea this way? Heh? Town's dry as a bone, an' smells a sight worse sence I quit. 'Might ha' left us one saloon for soft drinks, anyway." "Don't seem to have hindered your nourishment this morning, Carsen. I'll go into the politics of it later. Sit down by the door and think over your arguments till I come back." "What good is arguments to me? In Miquelon champagne's eighteen dollars a case and--" The skipper lurched into his seat as an organ-prelude silenced him. "Our new organ," said the official proudly to Cheyne. "Cost us four thousand dollars, too. We'll have to get back to high-license next year to pay for it. I wasn't going to let the ministers have all the religion at their convention. Those are some of our orphans standing up to sing. My wife taught 'em. See you again later, Mr. Cheyne. I'm wanted on the platform." High, clear, and true, children's voices bore down the last noise of those settling into their places. "O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him for ever!" The women throughout the hall leaned forward to look as the reiterated cadences filled the air. Mrs. Cheyne, with some others, began to breathe short; she had hardly imagined there were so many widows in the world; and instinctively searched for Harvey. He had found the _We're Heres_ at the back of the audience, and was standing, as by right, between Dan and Disko. Uncle Salters, returned the night before with Penn, from Pamlico Sound, received him suspiciously. "Hain't your folk gone yet?" he grunted. "What are you doin' here, young feller?" "O ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!" "Hain't he good right?" said Dan. "He's bin there, same as the rest of us." "Not in them clothes," Salters snarled. "Shut your head, Salters," said Disko. "Your bile's gone back on you. Stay right where ye are, Harve." Then up and spoke the orator of the occasion, another pillar of the municipality, bidding the world welcome to Gloucester, and incidentally pointing out wherein Gloucester excelled the rest of the world. Then he turned to the sea-wealth of the city, and spoke of the price that must be paid for the yearly harvest. They would hear later the names of their lost dead one hundred and seventeen of them. (The widows stared a little, and looked at one another here.) Gloucester could not boast any overwhelming mills or factories. Her sons worked for such wage as the sea gave; and they all knew that neither Georges nor the Banks were cow-pastures. The utmost that folk ashore could accomplish was to help the widows and the orphans, and after a few general remarks he took this opportunity of thanking, in the name of the city, those who had so public-spiritedly consented to participate in the exercises of the occasion. "I jest despise the beggin' pieces in it," growled Disko. "It don't give folk a fair notion of us." "Ef folk won't be fore-handed an' put by when they've the chance," returned Salters, "it stands in the nature o' things they hev to be 'shamed. You take warnin' by that, young feller. Riches endureth but for a season, ef you scatter them araound on lugsuries--" "But to lose everything, everything," said Penn. "What can you do then? Once I"--the watery blue eyes stared up and down as if looking for something to steady them--"once I read--in a book, I think--of a boat where every one was run down--except some one--and he said to me--" "Shucks!" said Salters, cutting in. "You read a little less an' take more int'rust in your vittles, and you'll come nearer earnin' your keep, Penn." Harvey, jammed among the fishermen, felt a creepy, crawly, tingling thrill that began in the back of his neck and ended at his boots. He was cold, too, though it was a stifling day. "That the actress from Philadelphia?" said Disko Troop, scowling at the platform. "You've fixed it about old man Ireson, hain't ye, Harve? Ye know why naow." It was not "Ireson's Ride" that the woman delivered, but some sort of poem about a fishing-port called Brixham and a fleet of trawlers beating in against storm by night, while the women made a guiding fire at the head of the quay with everything they could lay hands on. "They took the grandma's blanket, Who shivered and bade them go; They took the baby's cradle, Who could not say them no." "Whew!" said Dan, peering over Long Jack's shoulder. "That's great! Must ha' bin expensive, though." "Ground-hog case," said the Galway man. "Badly lighted port, Danny." * * * * * * "And knew not all the while If they were lighting a bonfire Or only a funeral pile." The wonderful voice took hold of people by their heartstrings; and when she told how the drenched crews were flung ashore, living and dead, and they carried the bodies to the glare of the fires, asking: "Child, is this your father?" or "Wife, is this your man?" you could hear hard breathing all over the benches. "And when the boats of Brixham Go out to face the gales, Think of the love that travels Like light upon their sails!" There was very little applause when she finished. The women were looking for their handkerchiefs, and many of the men stared at the ceiling with shiny eyes. "H'm," said Salters; "that 'u'd cost ye a dollar to hear at any theatre--maybe two. Some folk, I presoom, can afford it. 'Seems downright waste to me. . . . Naow, how in Jerusalem did Cap. Bart Edwardes strike adrift here?" "No keepin' him under," said an Eastport man behind. "He's a poet, an' he's baound to say his piece. 'Comes from daown aour way, too." He did not say that Captain B. Edwardes had striven for five consecutive years to be allowed to recite a piece of his own composition on Gloucester Memorial Day. An amused and exhausted committee had at last given him his desire. The simplicity and utter happiness of the old man, as he stood up in his very best Sunday clothes, won the audience ere he opened his mouth. They sat unmurmuring through seven-and-thirty hatchet-made verses describing at fullest length the loss of the schooner _Joan Hasken_ off the Georges in the gale of 1867, and when he came to an end they shouted with one kindly throat. A far-sighted Boston reporter slid away for a full copy of the epic and an interview with the author; so that earth had nothing more to offer Captain Bart Edwardes, ex-whaler, shipwright, master-fisherman, and poet, in the seventy-third year of his age. "Naow, I call that sensible," said the Eastport man. "I've bin over that graound with his writin', jest as he read it, in my two hands, and I can testify that he's got it all in." "If Dan here couldn't do better'n that with one hand before breakfast, he ought to be switched," said Salters, upholding the honor of Massachusetts on general principles. "Not but what I'm free to own he's considerable litt'ery--fer Maine. Still--" "Guess Uncle Salters's goin' to die this trip. Fust compliment he's ever paid me," Dan sniggered. "What's wrong with you, Harve? You act all quiet and you look greenish. Feelin' sick?" "Don't know what's the matter with me," Harvey implied. "Seems if my insides were too big for my outsides. I'm all crowded up and shivery." "Dispepsy? Pshaw--too bad. We'll wait for the readin', an' then we'll quit, an' catch the tide." The widows--they were nearly all of that season's making--braced themselves rigidly like people going to be shot in cold blood, for they knew what was coming. The summer-boarder girls in pink and blue shirt-waists stopped tittering over Captain Edwardes's wonderful poem, and looked back to see why all was silent. The fishermen pressed forward as that town official who had talked to Cheyne bobbed up on the platform and began to read the year's list of losses, dividing them into months. Last September's casualties were mostly single men and strangers, but his voice rang very loud in the stillness of the hall. "September 9th. Schooner _Florrie Anderson_ lost, with all aboard, off the Georges. "Reuben Pitman, master, 50, single, Main Street, City. "Emil Olsen, 19, single, 329 Hammond Street, City. Denmark. "Oscar Standberg, single, 25. Sweden. "Carl Stanberg, single, 28, Main Street. City. "Pedro, supposed Madeira, single, Keene's boardinghouse. City. "Joseph Welsh, alias Joseph Wright, 30, St. John's, Newfoundland." "No--Augusty, Maine," a voice cried from the body of the hall. "He shipped from St. John's," said the reader, looking to see. "I know it. He belongs in Augusty. My nevvy." The reader made a pencilled correction on the margin of the list, and resumed. "Same schooner, Charlie Ritchie, Liverpool, Nova Scotia, 33, single. "Albert May, 267 Rogers Street, City, 27, single. "September 27th.--Orvin Dollard, 30, married, drowned in dory off Eastern Point." That shot went home, for one of the widows flinched where she sat, clasping and unclasping her hands. Mrs. Cheyne, who had been listening with wide-opened eyes, threw up her head and choked. Dan's mother, a few seats to the right, saw and heard and quickly moved to her side. The reading went on. By the time they reached the January and February wrecks the shots were falling thick and fast, and the widows drew breath between their teeth. "February 14th.--Schooner _Harry Randolph_ dismasted on the way home from Newfoundland; Asa Musie, married, 32, Main Street, City, lost overboard. "February 23d.--Schooner _Gilbert Hope_; went astray in dory, Robert Beavon, 29, married, native of Pubnico, Nova Scotia." But his wife was in the hall. They heard a low cry, as though a little animal had been hit. It was stifled at once, and a girl staggered out of the hall. She had been hoping against hope for months, because some who have gone adrift in dories have been miraculously picked up by deep-sea sailing-ships. Now she had her certainty, and Harvey could see the policeman on the sidewalk hailing a hack for her. "It's fifty cents to the depot"--the driver began, but the policeman held up his hand--"but I'm goin' there anyway. Jump right in. Look at here, Al; you don't pull me next time my lamps ain't lit. See?" The side-door closed on the patch of bright sunshine, and Harvey's eyes turned again to the reader and his endless list. "April 19th.--Schooner _Mamie Douglas_ lost on the Banks with all hands. "Edward Canton, 43, master, married, City. "D. Hawkins, alias Williams, 34, married, Shelbourne, Nova Scotia. "G. W. Clay, coloured, 28, married, City." And so on, and so on. Great lumps were rising in Harvey's throat, and his stomach reminded him of the day when he fell from the liner. "May 10th.--Schooner _We're Here_ [the blood tingled all over him] Otto Svendson, 20, single, City, lost overboard." Once more a low, tearing cry from somewhere at the back of the hall. "She shouldn't ha' come. She shouldn't ha' come," said Long Jack, with a cluck of pity. "Don't scrowge, Harve," grunted Dan. Harvey heard that much, but the rest was all darkness spotted with fiery wheels. Disko leaned forward and spoke to his wife, where she sat with one arm round Mrs. Cheyne, and the other holding down the snatching, catching, ringed hands. "Lean your head daown--right daown!" he whispered. "It'll go off in a minute." "I ca-an't! I do-don't! Oh, let me--" Mrs. Cheyne did not at all know what she said. "You must," Mrs. Troop repeated. "Your boy's jest fainted dead away. They do that some when they're gettin' their growth. 'Wish to tend to him? We can git aout this side. Quite quiet. You come right along with me. Psha', my dear, we're both women, I guess. We must tend to aour men-folk. Come!" The _We're Heres_ promptly went through the crowd as a body-guard, and it was a very white and shaken Harvey that they propped up on a bench in an anteroom. "Favours his ma," was Mrs. Troop's only comment, as the mother bent over her boy. "How d'you suppose he could ever stand it?" she cried indignantly to Cheyne, who had said nothing at all. "It was horrible--horrible! We shouldn't have come. It's wrong and wicked! It--it isn't right! Why--why couldn't they put these things in the papers, where they belong? Are you better, darling?" That made Harvey very properly ashamed. "Oh, I'm all right, I guess," he said, struggling to his feet, with a broken giggle. "Must ha' been something I ate for breakfast." "Coffee, perhaps," said Cheyne, whose face was all in hard lines, as though it had been cut out of bronze. "We won't go back again." "Guess 'twould be 'baout's well to git daown to the wharf," said Disko. "It's close in along with them Dagoes, an' the fresh air will fresh Mrs. Cheyne up." Harvey announced that he never felt better in his life; but it was not till he saw the _We're Here_, fresh from the lumper's hands, at Wouverman's wharf, that he lost his all-overish feelings in a queer mixture of pride and sorrowfulness. Other people--summer boarders and such-like--played about in cat-boats or looked at the sea from pier-heads; but he understood things from the inside--more things than he could begin to think about. None the less, he could have sat down and howled because the little schooner was going off. Mrs. Cheyne simply cried and cried every step of the way and said most extraordinary things to Mrs. Troop, who "babied" her till Dan, who had not been "babied" since he was six, whistled aloud. And so the old crowd--Harvey felt like the most ancient of mariners dropped into the old schooner among the battered dories, while Harvey slipped the stern-fast from the pier-head, and they slid her along the wharf-side with their hands. Every one wanted to say so much that no one said anything in particular. Harvey bade Dan take care of Uncle Salters's sea-boots and Penn's dory-anchor, and Long Jack entreated Harvey to remember his lessons in seamanship; but the jokes fell flat in the presence of the two women, and it is hard to be funny with green harbour-water widening between good friends. "Up jib and fores'l!" shouted Disko, getting to the wheel, as the wind took her. "See you later, Harve. Dunno but I come near thinkin' a heap o' you an' your folks." Then she glided beyond ear-shot, and they sat down to watch her up the harbour, And still Mrs. Cheyne wept. "Pshaw, my dear," said Mrs. Troop: "we're both women, I guess. Like's not it'll ease your heart to hev your cry aout. God He knows it never done me a mite o' good, but then He knows I've had something to cry fer!" Now it was a few years later, and upon the other edge of America, that a young man came through the clammy sea fog up a windy street which is flanked with most expensive houses built of wood to imitate stone. To him, as he was standing by a hammered iron gate, entered on horseback--and the horse would have been cheap at a thousand dollars--another young man. And this is what they said: "Hello, Dan!" "Hello, Harve!" "What's the best with you?" "Well, I'm so's to be that kind o' animal called second mate this trip. Ain't you most through with that triple invoiced college of yours?" "Getting that way. I tell you, the Leland Stanford Junior, isn't a circumstance to the old _We're Here_; but I'm coming into the business for keeps next fall." "Meanin' aour packets?" "Nothing else. You just wait till I get my knife into you, Dan. I'm going to make the old line lie down and cry when I take hold." "I'll resk it," said Dan, with a brotherly grin, as Harvey dismounted and asked whether he were coming in. "That's what I took the cable fer; but, say, is the doctor anywheres araound? I'll draown that crazy nigger some day, his one cussed joke an' all." There was a low, triumphant chuckle, as the ex-cook of the _We're Here_ came out of the fog to take the horse's bridle. He allowed no one but himself to attend to any of Harvey's wants. "Thick as the Banks, ain't it, doctor?" said Dan, propitiatingly. But the coal-black Celt with the second-sight did not see fit to reply till he had tapped Dan on the shoulder, and for the twentieth time croaked the old, old prophecy in his ear. "Master--man. Man--master," said he. "You remember, Dan Troop, what I said? On the _We're Here_?" "Well, I won't go so far as to deny that it do look like it as things stand at present," said Dan. "She was a noble packet, and one way an' another I owe her a heap--her and Dad." "Me too," quoth Harvey Cheyne. 
2225	----	"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS" A STORY OF THE GRAND BANKS By Rudyard Kipling CHAPTER I The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet. "That Cheyne boy's the biggest nuisance aboard," said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. "He isn't wanted here. He's too fresh." A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: "I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should imbort ropes' ends free under your dariff." "Pshaw! There isn't any real harm to him. He's more to be pitied than anything," a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the cushions under the wet skylight. "They've dragged him around from hotel to hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning. She's a lovely lady, but she don't pretend to manage him. He's going to Europe to finish his education." "Education isn't begun yet." This was a Philadelphian, curled up in a corner. "That boy gets two hundred a month pocket-money, he told me. He isn't sixteen either." "Railroads, his father, aind't it?" said the German. "Yep. That and mines and lumber and shipping. Built one place at San Diego, the old man has; another at Los Angeles; owns half a dozen railroads, half the lumber on the Pacific slope, and lets his wife spend the money," the Philadelphian went on lazily. "The West don't suit her, she says. She just tracks around with the boy and her nerves, trying to find out what'll amuse him, I guess. Florida, Adirondacks, Lakewood, Hot Springs, New York, and round again. He isn't much more than a second-hand hotel clerk now. When he's finished in Europe he'll be a holy terror." "What's the matter with the old man attending to him personally?" said a voice from the frieze ulster. "Old man's piling up the rocks. 'Don't want to be disturbed, I guess. He'll find out his error a few years from now. 'Pity, because there's a heap of good in the boy if you could get at it." "Mit a rope's end; mit a rope's end!" growled the German. Once more the door banged, and a slight, slim-built boy perhaps fifteen years old, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, leaned in over the high footway. His pasty yellow complexion did not show well on a person of his years, and his look was a mixture of irresolution, bravado, and very cheap smartness. He was dressed in a cherry-coloured blazer, knickerbockers, red stockings, and bicycle shoes, with a red flannel cap at the back of the head. After whistling between his teeth, as he eyed the company, he said in a loud, high voice: "Say, it's thick outside. You can hear the fish-boats squawking all around us. Say, wouldn't it be great if we ran down one?" "Shut the door, Harvey," said the New Yorker. "Shut the door and stay outside. You're not wanted here." "Who'll stop me?" he answered deliberately. "Did you pay for my passage, Mister Martin? 'Guess I've as good right here as the next man." He picked up some dice from a checker-board and began throwing, right hand against left. "Say, gen'elmen, this is deader'n mud. Can't we make a game of poker between us?" There was no answer, and he puffed his cigarette, swung his legs, and drummed on the table with rather dirty fingers. Then he pulled out a roll of bills as if to count them. "How's your mamma this afternoon?" a man said. "I didn't see her at lunch." "In her state-room, I guess. She's 'most always sick on the ocean. I'm going to give the stewardess fifteen dollars for looking after her. I don't go down more 'n I can avoid. It makes me feel mysterious to pass that butler's-pantry place. Say, this is the first time I've been on the ocean." "Oh, don't apologise, Harvey." "Who's apologising? This is the first time I've crossed the ocean, gen'elmen, and, except the first day, I haven't been sick one little bit. No, sir!" He brought down his fist with a triumphant bang, wetted his finger, and went on counting the bills. "Oh, you're a high-grade machine, with the writing in plain sight," the Philadelphian yawned. "You'll blossom into a credit to your country if you don't take care." "I know it. I'm an American--first, last, and all the time. I'll show 'em that when I strike Europe. Pif! My cig's out. I can't smoke the truck the steward sells. Any gen'elman got a real Turkish cig on him?" The chief engineer entered for a moment, red, smiling, and wet. "Say, Mac," cried Harvey, cheerfully, "how are we hitting it?" "Vara much in the ordinary way," was the grave reply. "The young are as polite as ever to their elders, an' their elders are e'en tryin' to appreciate it." A low chuckle came from a corner. The German opened his cigar-case and handed a skinny black cigar to Harvey. "Dot is der broper apparatus to smoke, my young friendt," he said. "You vill dry it? Yes? Den you vill be efer so happy." Harvey lit the unlovely thing with a flourish: he felt that he was getting on in grown-up society. "It would take more 'n this to keel me over," he said, ignorant that he was lighting that terrible article, a Wheeling 'stogie'. "Dot we shall bresently see," said the German. "Where are we now, Mr. Mactonal'?" "Just there or thereabouts, Mr. Schaefer," said the engineer. "We'll be on the Grand Bank to-night; but in a general way o' speakin', we're all among the fishing-fleet now. We've shaved three dories an' near skelped the boom off a Frenchman since noon, an' that's close sailin', ye may say." "You like my cigar, eh?" the German asked, for Harvey's eyes were full of tears. "Fine, full flavour," he answered through shut teeth. "Guess we've slowed down a little, haven't we? I'll skip out and see what the log says." "I might if I vhas you," said the German. Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail. He was very unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and, since he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a turtle-back. The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of it, near the flagpole. There he doubled up in limp agony, for the Wheeling "stogie" joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul. His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze. He was fainting from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the turtle-back. Then a low, grey mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep. He was roused by the sound of a dinner-horn such as they used to blow at a summer-school he had once attended in the Adirondacks. Slowly he remembered that he was Harvey Cheyne, drowned and dead in mid-ocean, but was too weak to fit things together. A new smell filled his nostrils; wet and clammy chills ran down his back, and he was helplessly full of salt water. When he opened his eyes, he perceived that he was still on the top of the sea, for it was running round him in silver-coloured hills, and he was lying on a pile of half-dead fish, looking at a broad human back clothed in a blue jersey. "It's no good," thought the boy. "I'm dead, sure enough, and this thing is in charge." He groaned, and the figure turned its head, showing a pair of little gold rings half hidden in curly black hair. "Aha! You feel some pretty well now'?" it said. "Lie still so: we trim better." With a swift jerk he sculled the flickering boat-head on to a foamless sea that lifted her twenty full feet, only to slide her into a glassy pit beyond. But this mountain-climbing did not interrupt blue-jersey's talk. "Fine good job, I say, that I catch you. Eh, wha-at? Better good job, I say, your boat not catch me. How you come to fall out?" "I was sick," said Harvey; "sick, and couldn't help it." "Just in time I blow my horn, and your boat she yaw a little. Then I see you come all down. Eh, wha-at? I think you are cut into baits by the screw, but you dreeft--dreeft to me, and I make a big fish of you. So you shall not die this time." "Where am I?" said Harvey, who could not see that life was particularly safe where he lay. "You are with me in the dory--Manuel my name, and I come from schooner 'We're Here' of Gloucester. I live to Gloucester. By-and-by we get supper. Eh, wha-at?" He seemed to have two pairs of hands and a head of cast-iron, for, not content with blowing through a big conch-shell, he must needs stand up to it, swaying with the sway of the flat-bottomed dory, and send a grinding, thuttering shriek through the fog. How long this entertainment lasted, Harvey could not remember, for he lay back terrified at the sight of the smoking swells. He fancied he heard a gun and a horn and shouting. Something bigger than the dory, but quite as lively, loomed alongside. Several voices talked at once; he was dropped into a dark, heaving hole, where men in oilskins gave him a hot drink and took off his clothes, and he fell asleep. When he waked he listened for the first breakfast-bell on the steamer, wondering why his stateroom had grown so small. Turning, he looked into a narrow, triangular cave, lit by a lamp hung against a huge square beam. A three-cornered table within arm's reach ran from the angle of the bows to the foremast. At the after end, behind a well-used Plymouth stove, sat a boy about his own age, with a flat red face and a pair of twinkling grey eyes. He was dressed in a blue jersey and high rubber boots. Several pairs of the same sort of foot-wear, an old cap, and some worn-out woolen socks lay on the floor, and black and yellow oilskins swayed to and fro beside the bunks. The place was packed as full of smells as a bale is of cotton. The oilskins had a peculiarly thick flavour of their own which made a sort of background to the smells of fried fish, burnt grease, paint, pepper, and stale tobacco; but these, again, were all hooped together by one encircling smell of ship and salt water. Harvey saw with disgust that there were no sheets on his bed-place. He was lying on a piece of dingy ticking full of lumps and nubbles. Then, too, the boat's motion was not that of a steamer. She was neither sliding nor rolling, but rather wriggling herself about in a silly, aimless way, like a colt at the end of a halter. Water-noises ran by close to his ear, and beams creaked and whined about him. All these things made him grunt despairingly and think of his mother. "Feelin' better?" said the boy, with a grin. "Hev some coffee?" He brought a tin cup full, and sweetened it with molasses. "Is n't there milk?" said Harvey, looking round the dark double tier of bunks as if he expected to find a cow there. "Well, no," said the boy. "Ner there ain't likely to be till 'baout mid-September. 'Tain't bad coffee. I made it." Harvey drank in silence, and the boy handed him a plate full of pieces of crisp fried pork, which he ate ravenously. "I've dried your clothes. Guess they've shrunk some," said the boy. "They ain't our style much--none of 'em. Twist round an' see ef you're hurt any." Harvey stretched himself in every direction, but could not report any injuries. "That's good," the boy said heartily. "Fix yerself an' go on deck. Dad wants to see you. I'm his son,--Dan, they call me,--an' I'm cook's helper an' everything else aboard that's too dirty for the men. There ain't no boy here 'cep' me sence Otto went overboard--an' he was only a Dutchy, an' twenty year old at that. How'd you come to fall off in a dead flat ca'am?" "'Twasn't a calm," said Harvey, sulkily. "It was a gale, and I was seasick. Guess I must have rolled over the rail." "There was a little common swell yes'day an' last night," said the boy. "But ef thet's your notion of a gale----" He whistled. "You'll know more 'fore you're through. Hurry! Dad's waitin'." Like many other unfortunate young people, Harvey had never in all his life received a direct order--never, at least, without long, and sometimes tearful, explanations of the advantages of obedience and the reasons for the request. Mrs. Cheyne lived in fear of breaking his spirit, which, perhaps, was the reason that she herself walked on the edge of nervous prostration. He could not see why he should be expected to hurry for any man's pleasure, and said so. "Your dad can come down here if he's so anxious to talk to me. I want him to take me to New York right away. It'll pay him." Dan opened his eyes, as the size and beauty of this joke dawned on him. "Say, dad!" he shouted up the fo'c'sle hatch, "he says you kin slip down an' see him ef you're anxious that way. 'Hear, dad?" The answer came back in the deepest voice Harvey had ever heard from a human chest: "Quit foolin', Dan, and send him to me." Dan sniggered, and threw Harvey his warped bicycle shoes. There was something in the tones on the deck that made the boy dissemble his extreme rage and console himself with the thought of gradually unfolding the tale of his own and his father's wealth on the voyage home. This rescue would certainly make him a hero among his friends for life. He hoisted himself on deck up a perpendicular ladder, and stumbled aft, over a score of obstructions, to where a small, thick-set, clean-shaven man with grey eyebrows sat on a step that led up to the quarter-deck. The swell had passed in the night, leaving a long, oily sea, dotted round the horizon with the sails of a dozen fishing-boats. Between them lay little black specks, showing where the dories were out fishing. The schooner, with a triangular riding-sail on the mainmast, played easily at anchor, and except for the man by the cabin-roof--"house" they call it--she was deserted. "Mornin'--good afternoon, I should say. You've nigh slep' the clock around, young feller," was the greeting. "Mornin'," said Harvey. He did not like being called "young feller"; and, as one rescued from drowning, expected sympathy. His mother suffered agonies whenever he got his feet wet; but this mariner did not seem excited. "Naow let's hear all abaout it. It's quite providential, first an' last, fer all concerned. What might be your name? Where from (we mistrust it's Noo York), an' where baound (we mistrust it's Europe)?" Harvey gave his name, the name of the steamer, and a short history of the accident, winding up with a demand to be taken back immediately to New York, where his father would pay anything any one chose to name. "H'm," said the shaven man, quite unmoved by the end of Harvey's speech. "I can't say we think special of any man, or boy even, that falls overboard from that kind o' packet in a flat ca'am. Least of all when his excuse is thet he's seasick." "Excuse!" cried Harvey. "D'you suppose I'd fall overboard into your dirty little boat for fun?" "Not knowin' what your notions o' fun may be, I can't rightly say, young feller. But if I was you, I wouldn't call the boat which, under Providence, was the means o' savin' ye, names. In the first place, it's blame irreligious. In the second, it's annoyin' to my feelin's--an' I'm Disko Troop o' the "We're Here" o' Gloucester, which you don't seem rightly to know." "I don't know and I don't care," said Harvey. "I'm grateful enough for being saved and all that, of course; but I want you to understand that the sooner you take me back to New York the better it'll pay you." "Meanin'--haow?" Troop raised one shaggy eyebrow over a suspiciously mild blue eye. "Dollars and cents," said Harvey, delighted to think that he was making an impression. "Cold dollars and cents." He thrust a hand into a pocket, and threw out his stomach a little, which was his way of being grand. "You've done the best day's work you ever did in your life when you pulled me in. I'm all the son Harvey Cheyne has." "He's bin favoured," said Disko, drily. "And if you don't know who Harvey Cheyne is, you don't know much--that's all. Now turn her around and let's hurry." Harvey had a notion that the greater part of America was filled with people discussing and envying his father's dollars. "Mebbe I do, an' mebbe I don't. Take a reef in your stummick, young feller. It's full o' my vittles." Harvey heard a chuckle from Dan, who was pretending to be busy by the stump-foremast, and the blood rushed to his face. "We'll pay for that too," he said. "When do you suppose we shall get to New York?" "I don't use Noo York any. Ner Boston. We may see Eastern Point about September; an' your pa--I'm real sorry I hain't heerd tell of him--may give me ten dollars efter all your talk. Then o' course he mayn't." "Ten dollars! Why, see here, I--" Harvey dived into his pocket for the wad of bills. All he brought up was a soggy packet of cigarettes. "Not lawful currency, an' bad for the lungs. Heave 'em overboard, young feller, and try ag'in." "It's been stolen!" cried Harvey, hotly. "You'll hev to wait till you see your pa to reward me, then?" "A hundred and thirty-four dollars--all stolen," said Harvey, hunting wildly through his pockets. "Give them back." A curious change flitted across old Troop's hard face. "What might you have been doin' at your time o' life with one hundred an' thirty-four dollars, young feller?" "It was part of my pocket-money--for a month." This Harvey thought would be a knockdown blow, and it was--indirectly. Oh! One hundred and thirty-four dollars is only part of his pocket-money--for one month only! You don't remember hittin' anything when you fell over, do you? Crack ag'in' a stanchion, le's say. Old man Hasken o' the "East Wind"--Troop seemed to be talking to himself--"he tripped on a hatch an' butted the mainmast with his head--hardish. 'Baout three weeks afterwards, old man Hasken he would hev it that the "East Wind" was a commerce-destroyin' man-o'-war, an' so he declared war on Sable Island because it was Bridish, an' the shoals run aout too far. They sewed him up in a bed-bag, his head an' feet appearin', fer the rest o' the trip, an' now he's to home in Essex playin' with little rag dolls." Harvey choked with rage, but Troop went on consolingly: "We're sorry fer you. We're very sorry fer you--an' so young. We won't say no more abaout the money, I guess." "'Course you won't. You stole it." "Suit yourself. We stole it ef it's any comfort to you. Naow, abaout goin' back. Allowin' we could do it, which we can't, you ain't in no fit state to go back to your home, an' we've jest come on to the Banks, workin' fer our bread. We don't see the ha'af of a hundred dollars a month, let alone pocket-money; an' with good luck we'll be ashore again somewheres abaout the first weeks o' September." "But--but it's May now, and I can't stay here doin' nothing just because you want to fish. I can't, I tell you!" "Right an' jest; jest an' right. No one asks you to do nothin'. There's a heap as you can do, for Otto he went overboard on Le Have. I mistrust he lost his grip in a gale we f'und there. Anyways, he never come back to deny it. You've turned up, plain, plumb providential for all concerned. I mistrust, though, there's ruther few things you kin do. Ain't thet so?" "I can make it lively for you and your crowd when we get ashore," said Harvey, with a vicious nod, murmuring vague threats about "piracy," at which Troop almost--not quite--smiled. "Excep' talk. I'd forgot that. You ain't asked to talk more'n you've a mind to aboard the "We're Here". Keep your eyes open, an' help Dan to do ez he's bid, an' sechlike, an' I'll give you--you ain't wuth it, but I'll give--ten an' a ha'af a month; say thirty-five at the end o' the trip. A little work will ease up your head, an' you kin tell us all abaout your dad an' your ma n' your money efterwards." "She's on the steamer," said Harvey, his eyes fill-with tears. "Take me to New York at once." "Poor woman--poor woman! When she has you back she'll forgit it all, though. There's eight of us on the "We're Here", an' ef we went back naow--it's more'n a thousand mile--we'd lose the season. The men they wouldn't hev it, allowin' I was agreeable." "But my father would make it all right." "He'd try. I don't doubt he'd try," said Troop; "but a whole season's catch is eight men's bread; an' you'll be better in your health when you see him in the fall. Go forward an' help Dan. It's ten an' a ha'af a month, ez I said, an', o' course, all f'und, same ez the rest o' us." "Do you mean I'm to clean pots and pans and things?" said Harvey. "An' other things. You've no call to shout, young feller." "I won't! My father will give you enough to buy this dirty little fish-kettle"--Harvey stamped on the deck--"ten times over, if you take me to New York safe; and--and--you're in a hundred and thirty by me, anyway." "Ha-ow?" said Troop, the iron face darkening. "How? You know how, well enough. On top of all that, you want me to do menial work"--Harvey was very proud of that adjective--"till the Fall. I tell you I will not. You hear?" Troop regarded the top of the mainmast with deep interest for a while, as Harvey harangued fiercely all around him. "Hsh!" he said at last. "I'm figurin' out my responsibilities in my own mind. It's a matter o' jedgment." Dan Stole up and plucked Harvey by the elbow. "Don't go to tamperin' with dad any more," he pleaded. "You've called him a thief two or three times over, an' he don't take that from any livin' bein'." "I won't!" Harvey almost shrieked, disregarding the advice; and still Troop meditated. "Seems kinder unneighbourly," he said at last, his eye travelling down to Harvey. "I don't blame you, not a mite, young feller, nor you won't blame me when the bile's out o' your systim. 'Be sure you sense what I say? Ten an' a ha'af fer second boy on the schooner--an' all f'und--fer to teach you an' fer the sake o' your health. Yes or no?" "No!" said Harvey. "Take me back to New York or I'll see you--" He did not exactly remember what followed. He was lying in the scuppers, holding on to a nose that bled, while Troop looked down on him serenely. "Dan," he said to his son, "I was sot ag'in' this young feller when I first saw him, on account o' hasty jedgments. Never you be led astray by hasty jedgments, Dan. Naow I'm sorry for him, because he's clear distracted in his upper works. He ain't responsible fer the names he's give me, nor fer his other statements nor fer jumpin' overboard, which I'm abaout ha'af convinced he did. You be gentle with him, Dan, 'r I'll give you twice what I've give him. Them hemmeridges clears the head. Let him sluice it off!" Troop went down solemnly into the cabin, where he and the older men bunked, leaving Dan to comfort the luckless heir to thirty millions. CHAPTER II "I warned ye," said Dan, as the drops fell thick and fast on the dark, oiled planking. "Dad ain't noways hasty, but you fair earned it. Pshaw! there's no sense takin' on so." Harvey's shoulders were rising and falling in spasms of dry sobbing. "I know the feelin'. First time dad laid me out was the last--and that was my first trip. Makes ye feel sickish an' lonesome. I know." "It does," moaned Harvey. "That man's either crazy or drunk, and--and I can't do anything." "Don't say that to dad," whispered Dan. "He's set ag'in' all liquor, an'--well, he told me you was the madman. What in creation made you call him a thief? He's my dad." Harvey sat up, mopped his nose, and told the story of the missing wad of bills. "I'm not crazy," he wound up. "Only--your father has never seen more than a five-dollar bill at a time, and my father could buy up this boat once a week and never miss it." "You don't know what the "We're Here's" worth. Your dad must hey a pile o' money. How did he git it? Dad sez loonies can't shake out a straight yarn. Go ahead." "In gold-mines and things, West." "I've read o' that kind o' business. Out West, too? Does he go around with a pistol on a trick-pony, same ez the circus? They call that the Wild West, and I've heard that their spurs an' bridles was solid silver." "You are a chump!" said Harvey, amused in spite of himself. "My father hasn't any use for ponies. When he wants to ride he takes his car." "Haow? Lobster-car?" "No. His own private car, of course. You've seen a private car some time in your life?" "Slatin Beeman he hez one," said Dan, cautiously. "I saw her at the Union Depot in Boston, with three niggers hoggin' her run." (Dan meant cleaning the windows.) "But Slatin Beeman he owns 'baout every railroad on Long Island, they say; an' they say he's bought 'baout ha'af Noo Hampshire an' run a line-fence around her, an' filled her up with lions an' tigers an' bears an' buffalo an' crocodiles an' such all. Slatin Beeman he's a millionaire. I've seen his car. Yes?" "Well, my father's what they call a multi-millionaire; and he has two private cars. One's named for me, the 'Harvey,' and one for my mother, the 'Constance.'" "Hold on," said Dan. "Dad don't ever let me swear, but I guess you can. 'Fore we go ahead, I want you to say hope you may die if you're lying." "Of course," said Harvey. "Thet ain't 'nuff. Say, 'Hope I may die if I ain't speakin' truth.'" "Hope I may die right here," said Harvey, "if every word I've spoken isn't the cold truth." "Hundred an' thirty-four dollars an' all?" said Dan. "I heard ye talkin' to dad, an' I ha'af looked you'd be swallered up, same's Jonah." Harvey protested himself red in the face. Dan was a shrewd young person along his own lines, and ten minutes' questioning convinced him that Harvey was not lying--much. Besides, he had bound himself by the most terrible oath known to boyhood, and yet he sat, alive, with a red-ended nose, in the scuppers, recounting marvels upon marvels. "Gosh!" said Dan at last, from the very bottom of his soul, when Harvey had completed an inventory of the car named in his honour. Then a grin of mischievous delight overspread his broad face. "I believe you, Harvey. Dad's made a mistake fer once in his life." "He has, sure," said Harvey, who was meditating an early revenge. "He'll be mad clear through. Dad jest hates to be mistook in his jedgments." Dan lay back and slapped his thigh. "Oh, Harvey, don't you spile the catch by lettin' on." "I don't want to be knocked down again. I'll get even with him, though." "Never heard any man ever got even with dad. But he'd knock ye down again sure. The more he was mistook the more he'd do it. But gold-mines and pistols--" "I never said a word about pistols," Harvey cut in, for he was on his oath. "Thet's so; no more you did. Two private cars, then, one named fer you an' one fer her; an' two hundred dollars a month pocket-money, all knocked into the scuppers fer not workin' fer ten an' a ha'af a month! It's the top haul o' the season." He exploded with noiseless chuckles. "Then I was right? "said Harvey, who thought he had found a sympathiser. "You was wrong; the wrongest kind o' wrong! You take right hold an' pitch in 'longside o' me, or you'll catch it, an' I'll catch it fer backin' you up. Dad always gives me double helps 'cause I'm his son, an' he hates favourin' folk. 'Guess you're kinder mad at dad. I've been that way time an' again. But dad's a mighty jest man; all the fleet says so." "Looks like justice, this, don't it?" Harvey pointed to his outraged nose. "Thet's nothin'. Lets the shore blood outer you. Dad did it for yer health. Say, though, I can't have dealin's with a man that thinks me or dad or any one on the "We're Here's" a thief. We ain't any common wharf-end crowd by any manner o' means. We're fishermen, an' we've shipped together for six years an' more. Don't you make any mistake on that! I told ye dad don't let me swear. He calls 'em vain oaths, and pounds me; but ef I could say what you said 'baout your pap an' his fixin's, I'd say that 'baout your dollars. I dunno what was in your pockets when I dried your kit, fer I didn't look to see; but I'd say, using the very same words ez you used jest now, neither me nor dad--an' we was the only two that teched you after you was brought aboard--knows anythin' 'baout the money. Thet's my say. Naow?" The bloodletting had certainly cleared Harvey's brain, and maybe the loneliness of the sea had something to do with it. "That's all right," he said. Then he looked down confusedly. "'Seems to me that for a fellow just saved from drowning I haven't been over and above grateful, Dan." "Well, you was shook up and silly," said Dan. "Anyway, there was only dad an' me aboard to see it. The cook he don't count." "I might have thought about losing the bills that way," Harvey said, half to himself, "instead of calling everybody in sight a thief Where's your father?" "In the cabin What d' you want o' him again?" "You'll see," said Harvey, and he stepped, rather groggily, for his head was still singing, to the cabin steps, where the little ship's clock hung in plain sight of the wheel. Troop, in the chocolate-and-yellow painted cabin, was busy with a note-book and an enormous black pencil, which he sucked hard from time to time. "I haven't acted quite right," said Harvey, surprised at his own meekness. "What's wrong naow?" said the skipper "Walked into Dan, hev ye?" "No; it's about you." "I'm here to listen." "Well, I--I'm here to take things back," said Harvey, very quickly. "When a man's saved from drowning--" he gulped. "Ey? You'll make a man yet ef you go on this way." "He oughtn't begin by calling people names." "Jest an' right--right an' jest," said Troop, with the ghost of a dry smile. "So I'm here to say I'm sorry." Another big gulp. Troop heaved himself slowly off the locker he was sitting on and held out an eleven-inch hand. "I mistrusted 'twould do you sights o' good; an' this shows I weren't mistook in my jedgments." A smothered chuckle on deck caught his ear. "I am very seldom mistook in my jedgments." The eleven-inch hand closed on Harvey's, numbing it to the elbow. "We'll put a little more gristle to that 'fore we've done with you, young feller; an' I don't think any worse of ye fer anythin' thet's gone by. You wasn't fairly responsible. Go right abaout your business an' you won't take no hurt." "You're white," said Dan, as Harvey regained the deck, flushed to the tips of his ears. "I don't feel it," said he. "I didn't mean that way. I heard what dad said. When dad allows he don't think the worse of any man, dad's give himself away. He hates to be mistook in his jedgments, too. Ho! ho! Onct dad has a jedgment, he'd sooner dip his colours to the British than change it. I'm glad it's settled right eend up. Dad's right when he says he can't take you back. It's all the livin' we make here--fishin'. The men'll be back like sharks after a dead whale in ha'af an hour." "What for?" said Harvey. "Supper, o' course. Don't your stummick tell you? You've a heap to learn." "'Guess I have," said Harvey, dolefully, looking at the tangle of ropes and blocks overhead. "She's a daisy," said Dan, enthusiastically, misunderstanding the look. "Wait till our mainsail's bent, an' she walks home with all her salt wet. There's some work first, though." He pointed down into the darkness of the open main-hatch between the two masts. "What's that for? It's all empty," said Harvey. "You an' me an' a few more hev got to fill it," said Dan. "That's where the fish goes." "Alive?" said Harvey. "Well, no. They're so's to be ruther dead--an' flat--an' salt. There's a hundred hogshead o' salt in the bins; an' we hain't more'n covered our dunnage to now." "Where are the fish, though?" "'In the sea, they say; in the boats, we pray,'" said Dan, quoting a fisherman's proverb. "You come in last night with 'baout forty of 'em." He pointed to a sort of wooden pen just in front of the quarter-deck. "You an' me we'll sluice that out when they're through. 'Send we'll hev full pens to-night! I've seen her down ha'af a foot with fish waitin' to clean, an' we stood to the tables till we was splittin' ourselves instid o' them, we was so sleepy. Yes, they're comin' in naow." Dan looked over the low bulwarks at half a dozen dories rowing towards them over the shining, silky sea. "I've never seen the sea from so low down," said Harvey. "It's fine." The low sun made the water all purple and pinkish, with golden lights on the barrels of the long swells, and blue and green mackerel shades in the hollows. Each schooner in sight seemed to be pulling her dories towards her by invisible strings, and the little black figures in the tiny boats pulled like clockwork toys. "They've struck on good," said Dan, between his half-shut eyes. "Manuel hain't room fer another fish. Low ez a lily-pad in still water, ain't he?" "Which is Manuel? I don't see how you can tell 'em 'way off, as you do." "Last boat to the south'ard. He f'und you last night," said Dan, pointing. "Manuel rows Portugoosey; ye can't mistake him. East o' him--he's a heap better'n he rows--is Pennsylvania. Loaded with saleratus, by the looks of him. East o' him--see how pretty they string out all along with the humpy shoulders, is Long Jack. He's a Galway man inhabitin' South Boston, where they all live mostly, an' mostly them Galway men are good in a boat. North, away yonder--you'll hear him tune up in a minute--is Tom Platt. Man-o'-war's man he was on the old Ohio--first of our navy, he says, to go araound the Horn. He never talks of much else, 'cept when he sings, but he has fair fishin' luck. There! What did I tell you?" A melodious bellow stole across the water from the northern dory. Harvey heard something about somebody's hands and feet being cold, and then: "Bring forth the chart, the doleful chart; See where them mountings meet! The clouds are thick around their heads, The mists around their feet." "Full boat," said Dan, with a chuckle. "If he gives us 'O Captain' it's toppin' full." The bellow continued: "And naow to thee, O Capting, Most earnestly I pray That they shall never bury me In church or cloister grey." "Double game for Tom Platt. He'll tell you all about the old Ohio to-morrow. 'See that blue dory behind him? He's my uncle,--dad's own brother,--an' ef there's any bad luck loose on the Banks she'll fetch up ag'in' Uncle Salters, sure. Look how tender he's rowin'. I'll lay my wage and share he's the only man stung up to-day--an' he's stung up good." "What'll sting him?" said Harvey, getting interested. "Strawberries, mostly. Punkins, sometimes, an' sometimes lemons an' cucumbers. Yes, he's stung up from his elbows down. That man's luck's perfectly paralysin'. Naow we'll take a-holt o' the tackles an' h'ist 'em in. Is it true, what you told me jest now, that you never done a hand's turn o' work in all your born life? Must feel kinder awful, don't it?" "I'm going to try to work, anyway," Harvey replied stoutly. "Only it's all dead new." "Lay a-holt o' that tackle, then. Behind ye!" Harvey grabbed at a rope and long iron hook dangling from one of the stays of the mainmast, while Dan pulled down another that ran from something he called a "topping-lift," as Manuel drew alongside in his loaded dory. The Portuguese smiled a brilliant smile that Harvey learned to know well later, and a short-handled fork began to throw fish into the pen on deck. "Two hundred and thirty-one," he shouted. "Give him the hook," said Dan, and Harvey ran it into Manuel's hands. He slipped it through a loop of rope at the dory's bow, caught Dan's tackle, hooked it to the stern-becket, and clambered into the schooner. "Pull!" shouted Dan; and Harvey pulled, astonished to find how easily the dory rose. "Hold on; she don't nest in the crosstrees!" Dan laughed; and Harvey held on, for the boat lay in the air above his head. "Lower away," Dan shouted; and as Harvey lowered, Dan swayed the light boat with one hand till it landed softly just behind the mainmast. "They don't weigh nothin' empty. Thet was right smart fer a passenger. There's more trick to it in a sea-way." "Ah ha!" said Manuel, holding out a brown hand. "You are some pretty well now? This time last night the fish they fish for you. Now you fish for fish. Eh, wha-at?" "I'm--I'm ever so grateful," Harvey stammered, and his unfortunate hand stole to his pocket once more, but he remembered that he had no money to offer. When he knew Manuel better the mere thought of the mistake he might have made would cover him with hot, uneasy blushes in his bunk. "There is no to be thankful for to me!" said Manuel. "How shall I leave you dreeft, dreeft all around the Banks? Now you are a fisherman eh, wha-at? Ouh! Auh!" He bent backward and forward stiffly from the hips to get the kinks out of himself. "I have not cleaned boat to-day. Too busy. They struck on queek. Danny, my son, clean for me." Harvey moved forward at once. Here was something he could do for the man who had saved his life. Dan threw him a swab, and he leaned over the dory, mopping up the slime clumsily, but with great good-will. "Hike out the foot-boards; they slide in them grooves," said Dan. "Swab 'em an' lay 'em down. Never let a foot-board jam. Ye may want her bad some day. Here's Long Jack." A stream of glittering fish flew into the pen from a dory alongside. "Manuel, you take the tackle. I'll fix the tables. Harvey, clear Manuel's boat. Long Jack's nestin' on the top of her." Harvey looked up from his swabbing at the bottom of another dory just above his head. "Jest like the Injian puzzle-boxes, ain't they?" said Dan, as the one boat dropped into the other. "Takes to ut like a duck to water," said Long Jack, a grizzly-chinned, long-lipped Galway man, bending to and fro exactly as Manuel had done. Disko in the cabin growled up the hatchway, and they could hear him suck his pencil. "Wan hunder an' forty-nine an' a half--bad luck to ye, Discobolus!" said Long Jack. "I'm murderin' meself to fill your pockuts. Slate ut for a bad catch. The Portugee has bate me." Whack came another dory alongside, and more fish shot into the pen. "Two hundred and three. Let's look at the passenger!" The speaker was even larger than the Galway man, and his face was made curious by a purple cut running slantways from his left eye to the right corner of his mouth. Not knowing what else to do, Harvey swabbed each dory as it came down, pulled out the foot-boards, and laid them in the bottom of the boat. "He's caught on good," said the scarred man, who was Tom Platt, watching him critically. "There are two ways o' doin' everything. One's fisher-fashion--any end first an' a slippery hitch over all--an' the other's--" "What we did on the old Ohio!" Dan interrupted, brushing into the knot of men with a long board on legs. "Git out o' here, Tom Platt, an' leave me fix the tables." He jammed one end of the board into two nicks in the bulwarks, kicked out the leg, and ducked just in time to avoid a swinging blow from the man-o'-war's man. "An' they did that on the Ohio, too, Danny. See?" said Tom Platt, laughing. "'Guess they was swivel-eyed, then, fer it didn't git home, and I know who'll find his boots on the main-truck ef he don't leave us alone. Haul ahead! I'm busy, can't ye see?" "Danny, ye lie on the cable an' sleep all day," said Long Jack. "You're the hoight av impidence, an' I'm persuaded ye'll corrupt our supercargo in a week." "His name's Harvey," said Dan, waving two strangely shaped knives, "an' he'll be worth five of any Sou' Boston clam-digger 'fore long." He laid the knives tastefully on the table, cocked his head on one side, and admired the effect. "I think it's forty-two," said a small voice over-side, and there was a roar of laughter as another voice answered, "Then my luck's turned fer onct, 'caze I'm forty-five, though I be stung outer all shape." "Forty-two or forty-five. I've lost count," the small voice said. "It's Penn an' Uncle Salters caountin' catch. This beats the circus any day," said Dan. "Jest look at 'em!" "Come in--come in!" roared Long Jack. "It's wet out yondher, children." "Forty-two, ye said." This was Uncle Salters. "I'll count again, then," the voice replied meekly. The two dories swung together and bunted into the schooner's side. "Patience o' Jerusalem!" snapped Uncle Salters, backing water with a splash. "What possest a farmer like you to set foot in a boat beats me. You've nigh stove me all up." "I am sorry, Mr. Salters. I came to sea on account of nervous dyspepsia. You advised me, I think." "You an' your nervis dyspepsy be drowned in the Whale-hole," roared Uncle Salters, a fat and tubly little man. "You're comin' down on me ag'in. Did ye say forty-two or forty-five?" "I've forgotten, Mr. Salters. Let's count." "Don't see as it could be forty-five. I'm forty-five," said Uncle Salters. "You count keerful, Penn." Disko Troop came out of the cabin. "Salters, you pitch your fish in naow at once," he said in the tone of authority. "Don't spile the catch, dad," Dan murmured. "Them two are on'y jest beginnin'." "Mother av delight! He's forkin' them wan by wan," howled Long Jack, as Uncle Salters got to work laboriously; the little man in the other dory counting a line of notches on the gunwale. "That was last week's catch," he said, looking up plaintively, his forefinger where he had left off. Manuel nudged Dan, who darted to the after-tackle, and, leaning far overside, slipped the hook into the stern-rope as Manuel made her fast forward. The others pulled gallantly and swung the boat in--man, fish, and all. "One, two, four--nine," said Tom Platt, counting with a practised eye. "Forty-seven. Penn, you're it!" Dan let the after-tackle run, and slid him out of the stern on to the deck amid a torrent of his own fish. "Hold on!" roared Uncle Salters, bobbing by the waist. "Hold on, I'm a bit mixed in my caount." He had no time to protest, but was hove inboard and treated like "Pennsylvania." "Forty-one," said Tom Platt. "Beat by a farmer, Salters. An' you sech a sailor, too!" "'Tweren't fair caount," said he, stumbling out of the pen; "an' I'm stung up all to pieces." His thick hands were puffy and mottled purply white. "Some folks will find strawberry-bottom," said Dan, addressing the newly risen moon, "ef they hev to dive fer it, seems to me." "An' others," said Uncle Salters, "eats the fat o' the land in sloth, an' mocks their own blood-kin." "Seat ye! Seat ye!" a voice Harvey had not heard called from the fo'c'sle. Disko Troop, Tom Platt, Long Jack, and Salters went forward on the word. Little Penn bent above his square deep-sea reel and the tangled cod-lines; Manuel lay down full length on the deck, and Dan dropped into the hold, where Harvey heard him banging casks with a hammer. "Salt," he said, returning. "Soon as we're through supper we git to dressing-down. You'll pitch to dad. Tom Platt an' dad they stow together, an' you'll hear 'em arguin'. We're second ha'af, you an' me an' Manuel an' Penn--the youth an' beauty o' the boat." "What's the good of that?" said Harvey. "I'm hungry." "They'll be through in a minute. Sniff! She smells good to-night. Dad ships a good cook ef he do suffer with his brother. It's a full catch today, ain't it?" He pointed at the pens piled high with cod. "What water did ye hev, Manuel?" "Twenty-fife father," said the Portuguese, sleepily. "They strike on good an' queek. Some day I show you, Harvey." The moon was beginning to walk on the still sea before the elder men came aft. The cook had no need to cry "second half." Dan and Manuel were down the hatch and at table ere Tom Platt, last and most deliberate of the elders, had finished wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Harvey followed Penn, and sat down before a tin pan of cod's tongues and sounds, mixed with scraps of pork and fried potato, a loaf of hot bread, and some black and powerful coffee. Hungry as they were, they waited while "Pennsylvania" solemnly asked a blessing. Then they stoked in silence till Dan drew breath over his tin cup and demanded of Harvey how he felt. "'Most full, but there's just room for another piece." The cook was a huge, jet-black negro, and, unlike all the negroes Harvey had met, did not talk, contenting himself with smiles and dumb-show invitations to eat more. "See, Harvey," said Dan, rapping with his fork on the table, "it's jest as I said. The young an' handsome men--like me an' Pennsy an' you an' Manuel--we 're second ha'af, an' we eats when the first ha'af are through. They're the old fish; and they're mean an' humpy, an' their stummicks has to be humoured; so they come first, which they don't deserve. Ain't that so, doctor?" The cook nodded. "Can't he talk?" said Harvey, in a whisper. "'Nough to git along. Not much o' anything we know. His natural tongue's kinder curious. Comes from the in'ards of Cape Breton, he does, where the farmers speak home-made Scotch. Cape Breton's full o' niggers whose folk run in there durin' aour war, an' they talk like the farmers--all huffy-chuffy." "That is not Scotch," said "Pennsylvania." "That is Gaelic. So I read in a book." "Penn reads a heap. Most of what he says is so--'cep' when it comes to a caount o' fish--eh?" "Does your father just let them say how many they've caught without checking them?" said Harvey. "Why, yes. Where's the sense of a man lyin' fer a few old cod?" "Was a man once lied for his catch," Manuel put in. "Lied every day. Fife, ten, twenty-fife more fish than come he say there was." "Where was that?" said Dan. "None o' aour folk." "Frenchman of Anguille." "Ah! Them West Shore Frenchmen don't caount, anyway. Stands to reason they can't caount. Ef you run acrost any of their soft hooks, Harvey, you'll know why," said Dan, with an awful contempt. "Always more and never less, Every time we come to dress," Long Jack roared down the hatch, and the "second ha'af" scrambled up at once. The shadow of the masts and rigging, with the never-furled riding-sail, rolled to and fro on the heaving deck in the moonlight; and the pile of fish by the stern shone like a dump of fluid silver. In the hold there were tramplings and rumblings where Disko Troop and Tom Platt moved among the salt-bins. Dan passed Harvey a pitchfork, and led him to the inboard end of the rough table, where Uncle Salters was drumming impatiently with a knife-haft. A tub of salt water lay at his feet. "You pitch to dad an' Tom Platt down the hatch, an' take keer Uncle Salters don't cut yer eye out," said Dan, swinging himself into the hold. "I'll pass salt below." Penn and Manuel stood knee-deep among cod in the pen, flourishing drawn knives. Long Jack, a basket at his feet and mittens on his hands, faced Uncle Salters at the table, and Harvey stared at the pitchfork and the tub. "Hi!" shouted Manuel, stooping to the fish, and bringing one up with a finger under its gill and a finger in its eye. He laid it on the edge of the pen; the knife-blade glimmered with a sound of tearing, and the fish, slit from throat to vent, with a nick on either side of the neck, dropped at Long Jack's feet. "Hi!" said Long Jack, with a scoop of his mittened hand. The cod's liver dropped in the basket. Another wrench and scoop sent the head and offal flying, and the empty fish slid across to Uncle Salters, who snorted fiercely. There was another sound of tearing, the backbone flew over the bulwarks, and the fish, headless, gutted, and open, splashed in the tub, sending the salt water into Harvey's astonished mouth. After the first yell, the men were silent. The cod moved along as though they were alive, and long ere Harvey had ceased wondering at the miraculous dexterity of it all, his tub was full. "Pitch!" grunted Uncle Salters, without turning his head, and Harvey pitched the fish by twos and threes down the hatch. "Hi! Pitch 'em bunchy," shouted Dan. "Don't scatter! Uncle Salters is the best splitter in the fleet. Watch him mind his book!" Indeed, it looked a little as though the round uncle were cutting magazine pages against time. Manuel's body, cramped over from the hips, stayed like a statue; but his long arms grabbed the fish without ceasing. Little Penn toiled valiantly, but it was easy to see he was weak. Once or twice Manuel found time to help him without breaking the chain of supplies, and once Manuel howled because he had caught his finger in a Frenchman's hook. These hooks are made of soft metal, to be rebent after use; but the cod very often get away with them and are hooked again elsewhere; and that is one of the many reasons why the Gloucester boats despise the Frenchmen. Down below, the rasping sound of rough salt rubbed on rough flesh sounded like the whirring of a grindstone--a steady undertune to the "click-nick" of the knives in the pen; the wrench and schloop of torn heads, dropped liver, and flying offal; the "caraaah" of Uncle Salters's knife scooping away backbones; and the flap of wet, opened bodies falling into the tub. At the end of an hour Harvey would have given the world to rest; for fresh, wet cod weigh more than you would think, and his back ached with the steady pitching. But he felt for the first time in his life that he was one of a working gang of men, took pride in the thought, and held on sullenly. "Knife oh!" shouted Uncle Salters, at last. Penn doubled up, gasping among the fish, Manuel bowed back and forth to supple himself, and Long Jack leaned over the bulwarks. The cook appeared, noiseless as a black shadow, collected a mass of backbones and heads, and retreated. "Blood-ends for breakfast an' head-chowder," said Long Jack, smacking his lips. "Knife oh!" repeated Uncle Salters, waving the flat, curved splitter's weapon. "Look by your foot, Harve," cried Dan, below. Harvey saw half a dozen knives stuck in a cleat in the hatch combing. He dealt these around, taking over the dulled ones. "Water!" said Disko Troop. "Scuttle-butt's for'ard, an' the dipper's alongside. Hurry, Harve," said Dan. He was back in a minute with a big dipperful of stale brown water which tasted like nectar, and loosed the jaws of Disko and Tom Platt. "These are cod," said Disko. "They ain't Damarskus figs, Tom Platt, nor yet silver bars. I've told you that every single time sence we've sailed together." "A matter o' seven seasons," returned Tom Platt, coolly. "Good stowin's good stowin' all the same, an' there's a right an' a wrong way o' stowin' ballast even. If you'd ever seen four hundred ton o' iron set into the--" "Hi!" With a yell from Manuel the work began again, and never stopped till the pen was empty. The instant the last fish was down, Disko Troop rolled aft to the cabin with his brother; Manuel and Long Jack went forward; Tom Platt only waited long enough to slide home the hatch ere he too disappeared. In half a minute Harvey heard deep snores in the cabin, and he was staring blankly at Dan and Penn. "I did a little better that time, Danny," said Penn, whose eyelids were heavy with sleep. "But I think it is my duty to help clean." "'Wouldn't hev your conscience fer a thousand quintal," said Dan. "Turn in, Penn. You've no call to do boy's work. Draw a bucket, Harvey. Oh, Penn, dump these in the gurry-butt 'fore you sleep. Kin you keep awake that long?" Penn took up the heavy basket of fish-livers, emptied them into a cask with a hinged top lashed by the fo'c'sle; then he too dropped out of sight in the cabin. "Boys clean up after dressin' down, an' first watch in ca'am weather is boy's watch on the 'We're Here'." Dan sluiced the pen energetically, unshipped the table, set it up to dry in the moonlight, ran the red knife-blades through a wad of oakum, and began to sharpen them on a tiny grindstone, as Harvey threw offal and backbones overboard under his direction. At the first splash a silvery-white ghost rose bolt upright from the oily water and sighed a weird whistling sigh. Harvey started back with a shout, but Dan only laughed. "Grampus," said he. "Beggin' fer fish-heads. They up-eend thet way when they're hungry. Breath on him like the doleful tombs, hain't he?" A horrible stench of decayed fish filled the air as the pillar of white sank, and the water bubbled oilily. "Hain't ye never seen a grampus up-eend before? You'll see 'em by hundreds 'fore ye're through. Say, it's good to hev a boy aboard again. Otto was too old, an' a Dutchy at that. Him an' me we fought consid'ble. 'Wouldn't ha' keered fer thet ef he'd hed a Christian tongue in his head. Sleepy?" "Dead sleepy," said Harvey, nodding forward. "'Mustn't sleep on watch. Rouse up an' see ef our anchor-light's bright an' shinin'. You're on watch now, Harve." "Pshaw! What's to hurt us? Bright's day. Sn-orrr! "Jest when things happen, dad says. Fine weather's good sleepin', an' 'fore you know, mebbe, you're cut in two by a liner, an' seventeen brass-bound officers, all gen'elmen, lift their hand to it that your lights was aout an' there was a thick fog. Harve, I've kinder took to you, but ef you nod onct more I'll lay into you with a rope's end." The moon, who sees many strange things on the Banks, looked down on a slim youth in knickerbockers and a red jersey, staggering around the cluttered decks of a seventy-ton schooner, while behind him, waving a knotted rope, walked, after the manner of an executioner, a boy who yawned and nodded between the blows he dealt. The lashed wheel groaned and kicked softly, the riding-sail slatted a little in the shifts of the light wind, the windlass creaked, and the miserable procession continued. Harvey expostulated, threatened, whimpered, and at last wept outright, while Dan, the words clotting on his tongue, spoke of the beauty of watchfulness, and slashed away with the rope's end, punishing the dories as often as he hit Harvey. At last the clock in the cabin struck ten, and upon the tenth stroke little Penn crept on deck. He found two boys in two tumbled heaps side by side on the main-hatch, so deeply asleep that he actually rolled them to their berths. CHAPTER III It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy fragments of fish--the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight. They cleaned up the plates and pans of the elder mess, who were out fishing, sliced pork for the midday meal, swabbed down the fo'c'sle, filled the lamps, drew coal and water for the cook, and investigated the fore-hold, where the boat's stores were stacked. It was another perfect day--soft, mild, and clear; and Harvey breathed to the very bottom of his lungs. More schooners had crept up in the night, and the long blue seas were full of sails and dories. Far away on the horizon, the smoke of some liner, her hull invisible, smudged the blue, and to eastward a big ship's topgallantsails, just lifting, made a square nick in it. Disko Troop was smoking by the roof of the cabin--one eye on the craft around, and the other on the little fly at the mainmast-head. "When dad kerflummoxes that way," said Dan, in a whisper, "he's doin' some high-line thinkin' fer all hands. I'll lay my wage an' share we'll make berth soon. Dad he knows the cod, an' the fleet they know dad knows. 'See 'em comin' up one by one, lookin' fer nothin' in particular, o' course, but scrowgin' on us all the time? There's the Prince Leboa; she's a Chat-ham boat. She's crep' up sence last night. An' see that big one with a patch in her foresail an' a new jib? She's the Carrie Pitman from West Chatham. She won't keep her canvas long on less her luck's changed since last season. She don't do much 'cep' drift. There ain't an anchor made'll hold her. . . . When the smoke puffs up in little rings like that, dad's studyin' the fish. Ef we speak to him now, he'll git mad. Las' time I did, he jest took an' hove a boot at me." Disko Troop stared forward, the pipe between his teeth, with eyes that saw nothing. As his son said, he was studying the fish--pitting his knowledge and experience on the Banks against the roving cod in his own sea. He accepted the presence of the inquisitive schooners on the horizon as a compliment to his powers. But now that it was paid, he wished to draw away and make his berth alone, till it was time to go up to the Virgin and fish in the streets of that roaring town upon the waters. So Disko Troop thought of recent weather, and gales, currents, food-supplies, and other domestic arrangements, from the point of view of a twenty-pound cod; was, in fact, for an hour a cod himself, and looked remarkably like one. Then he removed the pipe from his teeth. "Dad," said Dan, "we've done our chores. Can't we go overside a piece? It's good catch-in' weather." "Not in that cherry-coloured rig ner them ha'afbaked brown shoes. Give him suthin' fit to wear." "Dad's pleased--that settles it," said Dan, delightedly, dragging Harvey into the cabin, while Troop pitched a key down the steps. "Dad keeps my spare rig where he kin overhaul it, 'cause ma sez I'm keerless." He rummaged through a locker, and in less than three minutes Harvey was adorned with fisherman's rubber boots that came half up his thigh, a heavy blue jersey well darned at the elbows, a pair of flippers, and a sou'wester. "Naow ye look somethin' like," said Dan. "Hurry!" "Keep nigh an' handy," said Troop, "an' don't go visitin' raound the fleet. Ef any one asks you what I'm cal'latin' to do, speak the truth--fer ye don't know." A little red dory, labelled Hattie S., lay astern of the schooner. Dan hauled in the painter, and dropped lightly on to the bottom boards, while Harvey tumbled clumsily after. "That's no way o' gettin' into a boat," said Dan. "Ef there was any sea you'd go to the bottom, sure. You got to learn to meet her." Dan fitted the thole-pins, took the forward thwart, and watched Harvey's work. The boy had rowed, in a ladylike fashion, on the Adirondack ponds; but there is a difference between squeaking pins and well-balanced rowlocks--light sculls and stubby, eight-foot sea-oars. They stuck in the gentle swell, and Harvey grunted. "Short! Row short!" said Dan. "Ef you cramp your oar in any kind o' sea you're liable to turn her over. Ain't she a daisy? Mine, too." The little dory was specklessly clean. In her bows lay a tiny anchor, two jugs of water, and some seventy fathoms of thin, brown dory-roding. A tin dinner-horn rested in cleats just under Harvey's right hand, beside an ugly-looking maul, a short gaff, and a shorter wooden stick. A couple of lines, with very heavy leads and double cod-hooks, all neatly coiled on square reels, were stuck in their place by the gunwale. "Where's the sail and mast?" said Harvey, for his hands were beginning to blister. Dan chuckled. "Ye don't sail fishin'-dories much. Ye pull; but ye needn't pull so hard. Don't you wish you owned her?" "Well, I guess my father might give me one or two if I asked 'em," Harvey replied. He had been too busy to think much of his family till then. "That's so. I forgot your dad's a millionaire. You don't act millionary any, naow. But a dory an' craft an' gear"--Dan spoke as though she were a whale-boat "costs a heap. Think your dad 'u'd give you one fer--fer a pet like?" "Shouldn't wonder. It would be 'most the only thing I haven't stuck him for yet." "Must be an expensive kinder kid to home. Don't slitheroo thet way, Harve. Short's the trick, because no sea's ever dead still, an' the swells'll--" Crack! The loom of the oar kicked Harvey under the chin and knocked him backward. "That was what I was goin' to say. I hed to learn too, but I wasn't more than eight years old when I got my schoolin'." Harvey regained his seat with aching jaws and a frown. "No good gettin' mad at things, dad says. It's our own fault ef we can't handle 'em, he says. Le's try here. Manuel'll give us the water." The "Portugee" was rocking fully a mile away, but when Dan up-ended an oar he waved his left arm three times. "Thirty fathom," said Dan, stringing a salt clam on to the hook. "Over with the dough-boys. Bait same's I do, Harve, an' don't snarl your reel." Dan's line was out long before Harvey had mastered the mystery of baiting and heaving out the leads. The dory drifted along easily. It was not worth while to anchor till they were sure of good ground. "Here we come!" Dan shouted, and a shower of spray rattled on Harvey's shoulders as a big cod flapped and kicked alongside. "Muckle, Harvey, muckle! Under your hand! Quick!" Evidently "muckle" could not be the dinner-horn, so Harvey passed over the maul, and Dan scientifically stunned the fish before he pulled it inboard, and wrenched out the hook with the short wooden stick he called a "gob-stick." Then Harvey felt a tug, and pulled up zealously. "Why, these are strawberries!" he shouted. "Look!" The hook had fouled among a bunch of strawberries, red on one side and white on the other--perfect reproductions of the land fruit, except that there were no leaves, and the stem was all pipy and slimy. "Don't tech 'em! Slat 'em off. Don't--" The warning came too late. Harvey had picked them from the hook, and was admiring them. "Ouch!" he cried, for his fingers throbbed as though he had grasped many nettles. "Naow ye know what strawberry-bottom means. Nothin' 'cep' fish should be teched with the naked fingers, dad says. Slat 'em off ag'in' the gunnel, an' bait up, Harve. Lookin' won't help any. It's all in the wages." Harvey smiled at the thought of his ten and a half dollars a month, and wondered what his mother would say if she could see him hanging over the edge of a fishing-dory in mid-ocean. She suffered agonies whenever he went out on Saranac Lake; and, by the way, Harvey remembered distinctly that he used to laugh at her anxieties. Suddenly the line flashed through his hand, stinging even through the "flippers," the woolen circlets supposed to protect it. "He's a logy. Give him room accordin' to his strength," cried Dan. "I'll help ye." "No, you won't," Harvey snapped, as he hung on to the line. "It's my first fish. Is--is it a whale?" "Halibut, mebbe." Dan peered down into the water alongside, and flourished the big "muckle," ready for all chances. Something white and oval flickered and fluttered through the green. "I'll lay my wage an' share he's over a hundred. Are you so everlastin' anxious to land him alone?" Harvey's knuckles were raw and bleeding where they had been banged against the gunwale; his face was purple-blue between excitement and exertion; he dripped with sweat, and was half blinded from staring at the circling sunlit ripples about the swiftly moving line. The boys were tired long ere the halibut, who took charge of them and the dory for the next twenty minutes. But the big flat fish was gaffed and hauled in at last. "Beginner's luck," said Dan, wiping his forehead. "He's all of a hundred." Harvey looked at the huge grey-and-mottled creature with unspeakable pride. He had seen halibut many times on marble slabs ashore, but it had never occurred to him to ask how they came inland. Now he knew; and every inch of his body ached with fatigue. "Ef dad was along," said Dan, hauling up, "he'd read the signs plain's print. The fish are runnin' smaller an' smaller, an' you've took baout as logy a halibut's we're apt to find this trip. Yesterday's catch--did ye notice it?--was all big fish an' no halibut. Dad he'd read them signs right off. Dad says everythin' on the Banks is signs, an' can be read wrong er right. Dad's deeper'n the Whale-hole." Even as he spoke some one fired a pistol on the "We're Here", and a potato-basket was run up in the fore-rigging. "What did I say, naow? That's the call fer the whole crowd. Dad's onter something, er he'd never break fishin' this time o' day. Reel up, Harve, an' we'll pull back." They were to windward of the schooner, just ready to flirt the dory over the still sea, when sounds of woe half a mile off led them to Penn, who was careering around a fixed point, for all the world like a gigantic water-bug. The little man backed away and came down again with enormous energy, but at the end of each manoeuvre his dory swung round and snubbed herself on her rope. "We'll hey to help him, else he'll root an' seed here," said Dan. "What's the matter?" said Harvey. This was a new world, where he could not lay down the law to his elders, but had to ask questions humbly. And the sea was horribly big and unexcited. "Anchor's fouled. Penn's always losing 'em. Lost two this trip a'ready,--on sandy bottom, too,--an' dad says next one he loses, sure's fish-in', he'll give him the kelleg. That 'u'd break Penn's heart." "What's a 'kelleg'?" said Harvey, who had a vague idea it might be some kind of marine torture, like keel-hauling in the story-books. "Big stone instid of an anchor. You kin see a kelleg ridin' in the bows fur's you can see a dory, an' all the fleet knows what it means. They'd guy him dreadful. Penn couldn't stand that no more'n a dog with a dipper to his tail. He's so everlastin' sensitive. Hello, Penn! Stuck again? Don't try any more o' your patents. Come up on her, and keep your rodin' straight up an' down." "It doesn't move," said the little man, panting. "It doesn't move at all, and indeed I tried everything." "What's all this hurrah's-nest for'ard?" said Dan, pointing to a wild tangle of spare oars and dory-roding, all matted together by the hand of inexperience. "Oh, that," said Penn, proudly, "is a Spanish windlass. Mr. Salters showed me how to make it; but even that doesn't move her." Dan bent low over the gunwale to hide a smile, twitched once or twice on the roding, and, behold, the anchor drew at once. "Haul up, Penn," he said, laughing, "er she 'll git stuck again." They left him regarding the weed-hung flukes of the little anchor with big, pathetic blue eyes, and thanking them profusely. "Oh, say, while I think of it, Harve," said Dan, when they were out of ear-shot, "Penn ain't quite all caulked. He ain't nowise dangerous, but his mind's give out. See?" "Is that so, or is it one of your father's judgments?" Harvey asked, as he bent to his oars. He felt he was learning to handle them more easily. "Dad ain't mistook this time. Penn's a sure'nuff loony. No, he ain't thet, exactly, so much ez a harmless ijjit. It was this way (you're rowin' quite so, Harve), an' I tell you 'cause it's right you orter know. He was a Moravian preacher once. Jacob Boller wuz his name, dad told me, an' he lived with his wife an' four children somewheres out Pennsylvania way. Well, Penn he took his folks along to a Moravian meetin',--camp-meetin', most like,--an' they stayed over jest one night in Johnstown. You've heered talk o' Johnstown?" Harvey considered. "Yes, I have. But I don't know why. It sticks in my head same as Ashtabula." "Both was big accidents--thet's why, Harve. Well, that one single night Penn and his folks was to the hotel Johnstown was wiped out. 'Dam bu'st an' flooded her, an' the houses struck adrift an' bumped into each other an' sunk. I've seen the pictures, an' they're dretful. Penn he saw his folk drowned all 'n a heap 'fore he rightly knew what was comin'. His mind give out from that on. He mistrusted somethin' hed happened up to Johnstown, but for the poor life of him he couldn't remember what, an' he jest drifted araound smilin' an' wonderin'. He didn't know what he was, nor yit what he hed bin, an' thet way he run ag'in' Uncle Salters, who was visitin' 'n Allegheny City. Ha'af my mother's folks they live scattered inside o' Pennsylvania, an' Uncle Salters he visits araound winters. Uncle Salters he kinder adopted Penn, well knowin' what his trouble wuz; an' he brought him East, an' he give him work on his farm." "Why, I heard him calling Penn a farmer last night when the boats bumped. Is your Uncle Salters a farmer?" "Farmer!" shouted Dan. "There ain't water enough 'tween here an' Hatt'rus to wash the furrer-mould off'n his boots. He's Jest everlastin' farmer. Why, Harve, I've seen thet man hitch up a bucket, long towards sundown, an' set twiddlin' the spigot to the scuttle-butt same's ef 'twuz a cow's bag. He's thet much farmer. Well, Penn an' he they ran the farm--up Exeter way, 'twuz. Uncle Salters he sold it this spring to a jay from Boston as wanted to build a summerhaouse, an' he got a heap for it. Well, them two loonies scratched along till, one day, Penn's church he'd belonged to--the Moravians--found out where he wuz drifted an' layin', an' wrote to Uncle Salters. 'Never heerd what they said exactly; but Uncle Salters was mad. He's a 'piscopalian mostly--but he jest let 'em hev it both sides o' the bow, 'sif he was a Baptist, an' sez he warn't goin' to give up Penn to any blame Moravian connection in Pennsylvania or anywheres else. Then he come to dad, towin' Penn,--thet was two trips back,--an' sez he an' Penn must fish a trip fer their health. 'Guess he thought the Moravians wouldn't hunt the Banks fer Jacob Boller. Dad was agreeable, fer Uncle Salters he'd been fishin' off an' on fer thirty years, when he warn't inventin' patent manures, an' he took quarter-share in the 'We're Here'; an' the trip done Penn so much good, dad made a habit o' takin' him. Some day, dad sez, he'll remember his wife an' kids an' Johnstown, an' then, like's not, he'll die, dad sez. Don't yer talk about Johnstown ner such things to Penn, 'r Uncle Salters he'll heave ye overboard." "Poor Penn!" murmured Harvey. "I shouldn't ever have thought Uncle Salters cared for him by the look of 'em together." "I like Penn, though; we all do," said Dan. "We ought to ha' give him a tow, but I wanted to tell ye first." They were close to the schooner now, the other boats a little behind them. "You needn't heave in the dories till after dinner," said Troop, from the deck. "We'll dress-daown right off. Fix table, boys!" "Deeper'n the Whale-deep," said Dan, with a wink, as he set the gear for dressing-down. "Look at them boats that hev edged up sence mornin'. They're all waitin' on dad. See 'em, Harve?" "They are all alike to me." And, indeed, to a landsman the nodding schooners around seemed run from the same mould. "They ain't, though. That yaller, dirty packet with her bowsprit steeved that way, she's the 'Hope of Prague'. Nick Brady's her skipper, the meanest man on the Banks. We'll tell him so when we strike the Main Ledge. 'Way off yander's the 'Day's Eye'. The two Jeraulds own her. She's from Harwich; fastish, too, an' hez good luck; but dad he'd find fish in a graveyard. Them other three, side along, they're the 'Margie Smith', 'Rose', and 'Edith S. Walen', all frum home. 'Guess we'll see the 'Abbie M. Deering' to-morrer, dad, won't we? They're all slippin' over from the shoal o' 'Queereau." "You won't see many boats to-morrow, Danny." When Troop called his son Danny, it was a sign that the old man was pleased. "Boys, we're too crowded," he went on, addressing the crew as they clambered inboard. "We'll leave 'em to bait big an' catch small." He looked at the catch in the pen, and it was curious to see how little and level the fish ran. Save for Harvey's halibut, there was nothing over fifteen pounds on deck. "I'm waitin' on the weather," he added. "Ye'll have to make it yourself, Disko, for there's no sign I can see," said Long Jack, sweeping the clear horizon. And yet, half an hour later, as they were dressing-down, the Bank fog dropped on them, "between fish and fish," as they say. It drove steadily and in wreaths, curling and smoking along the colourless water. The men stopped dressing-down without a word. Long Jack and Uncle Salters slipped the windlass-brakes into their sockets, and began to heave up the anchor, the windlass jarring as the wet hempen cable strained on the barrel. Manuel and Tom Platt gave a hand at the last. The anchor came up with a sob, and the riding-sail bellied as Troop steadied her at the wheel. "Up jib and foresail," said he. "Slip 'em in the smother," shouted Long Jack, making fast the jib-sheet, while the others raised the clacking, rattling rings of the foresail; and the fore-boom creaked as the "We're Here" looked up into the wind and dived off into blank, whirling white. "There's wind behind this fog," said Troop. It was all wonderful beyond words to Harvey; and the most wonderful part was that he heard no orders except an occasional grunt from Troop, ending with, "That's good, my son!" "'Never seen anchor weighed before?" said Tom Platt, to Harvey gaping at the damp canvas of the foresail. "No. Where are we going?" "Fish and make berth, as you'll find out 'fore you've bin a week aboard. It's all new to you, but we never know what may come to us. Now, take me--Tom Platt--I'd never ha' thought--" "It's better than fourteen dollars a month an' a bullet in your belly," said Troop, from the wheel. "Ease your jumbo a grind." "Dollars an' cents better," returned the man-o'-war's man, doing something to a big jib with a wooden spar tied to it. "But we didn't think o' that when we manned the windlass-brakes on the 'Miss Jim Buck',[1] outside Beaufort Harbor, with Fort Macon heavin' hot shot at our stern, an' a livin' gale atop of all. Where was you then, Disko?" "Jest here, or hereabouts," Disko replied, "earnin' my bread on the deep waters, and dodgin' Reb privateers. 'Sorry I can't accommodate you with red-hot shot, Tom Platt; but I guess we'll come aout all right on wind 'fore we see Eastern Point." There was an incessant slapping and chatter at the bows now, varied by a solid thud and a little spout of spray that clattered down on the fo'c'sle. The rigging dripped clammy drops, and the men lounged along the lee of the house--all save Uncle Salters, who sat stiffly on the main-hatch nursing his stung hands. [1] The Gemsbok, U. S. N.? "'Guess she'd carry stays'l," said Disko, rolling one eye at his brother. "Guess she wouldn't to any sorter profit. What's the sense o' wastin' canvas?" the farmer-sailor replied. The wheel twitched almost imperceptibly in Disko's hands. A few seconds later a hissing wave-top slashed diagonally across the boat, smote Uncle Salters between the shoulders, and drenched him from head to foot. He rose sputtering, and went forward, only to catch another. "See dad chase him, all around the deck," said Dan. "Uncle Salters he thinks his quarter-share's our canvas. Dad's put this duckin' act up on him two trips runnin'. Hi! That found him where he feeds." Uncle Salters had taken refuge by the foremast, but a wave slapped him over the knees. Disko's face was as blank as the circle of the wheel. "'Guess she'd lie easier under stays'l, Salters," said Disko, as though he had seen nothing. "Set your old kite, then," roared the victim, through a cloud of spray; "only don't lay it to me if anything happens. Penn, you go below right off an' git your coffee. You ought to hev more sense than to bum araound on deck this weather." "Now they'll swill coffee an' play checkers till the cows come home," said Dan, as Uncle Salters hustled Penn into the fore-cabin. "'Looks to me like's if we'd all be doin' so fer a spell. There's nothin' in creation deader-limpsey-idler'n a Banker when she ain't on fish." "I'm glad ye spoke, Danny," cried Long Jack, who had been casting round in search of amusement. "I'd clean forgot we'd a passenger under that T-wharf hat. There's no idleness for thim that don't know their ropes. Pass him along, Tom Platt, an' we'll l'arn him." "'Tain't my trick this time," grinned Dan. "You've got to go it alone. Dad learned me with a rope's end." For an hour Long Jack walked his prey up and down, teaching, as he said, "things at the sea that ivry man must know, blind, dhrunk, or asleep." There is not much gear to a seventy-ton schooner with a stump-foremast, but Long Jack had a gift of expression. When he wished to draw Harvey's attention to the peak-halyards, he dug his knuckles into the back of the boy's neck and kept him at gaze for half a minute. He emphasised the difference between fore and aft generally by rubbing Harvey's nose along a few feet of the boom, and the lead of each rope was fixed in Harvey's mind by the end of the rope itself. The lesson would have been easier had the deck been at all free; but there appeared to be a place on it for everything and anything except a man. Forward lay the windlass and its tackle, with the chain and hemp cables, all very unpleasant to trip over; the fo'c'sle stovepipe, and the gurry-butts by the fo'c'sle-hatch to hold the fish-livers. Aft of these the fore-boom and booby of the main-hatch took all the space that was not needed for the pumps and dressing-pens. Then came the nests of dories lashed to ring-bolts by the quarter-deck; the house, with tubs and oddments lashed all around it; and, last, the sixty-foot main-boom in its crutch, splitting things lengthwise, to duck and dodge under every time. Tom Platt, of course, could not keep his oar out of the business, but ranged alongside with enormous and unnecessary descriptions of sails and spars on the old Ohio. "Niver mind fwhat he says; attind to me, Innocince. Tom Platt, this bally-hoo's not the Ohio, an' you're mixing the bhoy bad." "He'll be ruined for life, beginnin' on a fore-an'-after this way," Tom Platt pleaded. "Give him a chance to know a few leadin' principles. Sailin's an art, Harvey, as I'd show you if I had ye in the foretop o' the--" "I know ut. Ye'd talk him dead an' cowld. Silince, Tom Platt! Now, after all I've said, how'd you reef the foresail, Harve'? Take your time answerin'." "Haul that in," said Harvey, pointing to leeward. "Fwhat? The North Atlantuc?" "No, the boom. Then run that rope you showed me back there--" "That's no way," Tom Platt burst in. "Quiet! He's l'arnin', an' has not the names good yet. Go on, Harve." "Oh, it's the reef-pennant. I'd hook the tackle on to the reef-pennant, and then let down--" "Lower the sail, child! Lower!" said Tom Platt, in a professional agony. "Lower the throat-and peak-halyards," Harvey went on. Those names stuck in his head. "Lay your hand on thim," said Long Jack. Harvey obeyed. "Lower till that rope-loop--on the after-leach--kris--no, it's cringle--till the cringle was down on the boom. Then I'd tie her up the way you said, and then I'd hoist up the peak-and throat-halyards again." "You've forgot to pass the tack-earing, but wid time and help ye'll l'arn. There's good and just reason for ivry rope aboard, or else 'twould be overboard. D'ye follow me? 'Tis dollars an' cents I'm puttin' into your pocket, ye skinny little supercargo, so that fwhin ye've filled out ye can ship from Boston to Cuba an' tell thim Long Jack l'arned you. Now I'll chase ye around a piece, callin' the ropes, an' you'll lay your hand on thim as I call." He began, and Harvey, who was feeling rather tired, walked slowly to the rope named. A rope's end licked round his ribs, and nearly knocked the breath out of him. "When you own a boat," said Tom Platt, with severe eyes, "you can walk. Till then, take all orders at the run. Once more--to make sure!" Harvey was in a glow with the exercise, and this last cut warmed him thoroughly. Now, he was a singularly smart boy, the son of a very clever man and a very sensitive woman, with a fine resolute temper that systematic spoiling had nearly turned to mulish obstinacy. He looked at the other men, and saw that even Dan did not smile. It was evidently all in the day's work, though it hurt abominably; so he swallowed the hint with a gulp and a gasp and a grin. The same smartness that led him to take such advantage of his mother made him very sure that no one on the boat, except, maybe, Penn, would stand the least nonsense. One learns a great deal from a mere tone. Long Jack called over half a dozen more ropes, and Harvey danced over the deck like an eel at ebb-tide, one eye on Tom Platt. "Ver' good. Ver' good done," said Manuel. "After supper I show you a little schooner I make, with all her ropes. So we shall learn." "Fust-class fer--a passenger," said Dan. "Dad he's jest allowed you'll be wuth your salt maybe 'fore you're draownded. Thet's a heap fer dad. I'll learn you more our next watch together." "Taller!" grunted Disko, peering through the fog as it smoked over the bows. There was nothing to be seen ten feet beyond the surging jib-boom, while alongside rolled the endless procession of solemn, pale waves whispering and upping one to the other. "Now I'll learn you something Long Jack can't," shouted Tom Platt, as from a locker by the stern he produced a battered deep-sea lead hollowed at one end, smeared the hollow from a saucer full of mutton tallow, and went forward. "I'll learn you how to fly the Blue Pigeon. Shooo!" Disko did something to the wheel that checked the schooner's way, while Manuel, with Harvey to help (and a proud boy was Harvey), let down the jib in a lump on the boom. The lead sung a deep droning song as Tom Platt whirled it round and round. "Go ahead, man," said Long Jack, impatiently. "We're not drawin' twenty-five fut off Fire Island in a fog. There's no trick to ut." "Don't be jealous, Galway." The released lead plopped into the sea far ahead as the schooner surged slowly forward. "Soundin' is a trick, though," said Dan, "when your dipsey lead's all the eye you're like to hev for a week. What d'you make it, dad?" Disko's face relaxed. His skill and honour were involved in the march he had stolen on the rest of the fleet, and he had his reputation as a master artist who knew the Banks blindfold. "Sixty, mebbe--ef I'm any judge," he replied, with a glance at the tiny compass in the window of the house. "Sixty," sung out Tom Platt, hauling in great wet coils. The schooner gathered way once more. "Heave!" said Disko, after a quarter of an hour. "What d'you make it?" Dan whispered, and he looked at Harvey proudly. But Harvey was too proud of his own performances to be impressed just then. "Fifty," said the father. "I mistrust we're right over the nick o' Green Bank on old Sixty-Fifty." "Fifty!" roared Tom Platt. They could scarcely see him through the fog. "She's bu'st within a yard--like the shells at Fort Macon." "Bait up, Harve," said Dan, diving for a line on the reel. The schooner seemed to be straying promiscuously through the smother, her head-sail banging wildly. The men waited and looked at the boys, who began fishing. "Heugh!" Dan's lines twitched on the scored and scarred rail. "Now haow in thunder did dad know? Help us here, Harve. It's a big un. Poke-hooked, too." They hauled together, and landed a goggle-eyed twenty-pound cod. He had taken the bait right into his stomach. "Why, he's all covered with little crabs," cried Harvey, turning him over. "By the great hook-block, they're lousy already," said Long Jack. "Disko, ye kape your spare eyes under the keel." Splash went the anchor, and they all heaved over the lines, each man taking his own place at the bulwarks. "Are they good to eat?" Harvey panted, as he lugged in another crab-covered cod. "Sure. When they're lousy it's a sign they've all been herdin' together by the thousand, and when they take the bait that way they're hungry. Never mind how the bait sets. They'll bite on the bare hook." "Say, this is great!" Harvey cried, as the fish came in gasping and splashing--nearly all poke-hooked, as Dan had said. "Why can't we always fish from the boat instead of from the dories?" "Allus can, till we begin to dress-daown. Efter thet, the heads and offals 'u'd scare the fish to Fundy. Boat-fishin' ain't reckoned progressive, though, unless ye know as much as dad knows. Guess we'll run aout aour trawl to-night. Harder on the back, this, than frum the dory, ain't it?" It was rather back-breaking work, for in a dory the weight of a cod is water-borne till the last minute, and you are, so to speak, abreast of him; but the few feet of a schooner's free-board make so much extra dead-hauling, and stooping over the bulwarks cramps the stomach. But it was wild and furious sport so long as it lasted; and a big pile lay aboard when the fish ceased biting. "Where's Penn and Uncle Salters?" Harvey asked, slapping the slime off his oilskins, and reeling up the line in careful imitation of the others. "Git's coffee and see." Under the yellow glare of the lamp on the pawl-post, the fo'c'sle table down and opened, utterly unconscious of fish or weather, sat the two men, a checker-board between them, Uncle Salters snarling at Penn's every move. "What's the matter naow?" said the former, as Harvey, one hand in the leather loop at the head of the ladder, hung shouting to the cook. "Big fish and lousy-heaps and heaps," Harvey replied, quoting Long Jack. "How's the game?" Little Penn's jaw dropped. "Tweren't none o' his fault," snapped Uncle Salters. "Penn's deef." "Checkers, weren't it?" said Dan, as Harvey staggered aft with the steaming coffee in a tin pail. "That lets us out o' cleanin' up to-night. Dad's a jest man. They'll have to do it." "An' two young fellers I know'll bait up a tub or so o' trawl, while they're cleanin'," said Disko, lashing the wheel to his taste. "Urn! 'Guess I'd ruther clean up, dad." "Don't doubt it. Ye wun't, though. Dress-daown! Dress-daown! Penn'll pitch while you two bait up." "Why in thunder didn't them blame boys tell us you'd struck on?" said Uncle Salters, shuffling to his place at the table. "This knife's gum-blunt, Dan." "Ef stickin' out cable don't wake ye, guess you'd better hire a boy o' your own," said Dan, muddling about in the dusk over the tubs full of trawl-line lashed to windward of the house. "Oh, Harve, don't ye want to slip down an' git's bait?" "Bait ez we are," said Disko. "I mistrust shag-fishin' will pay better, ez things go." That meant the boys would bait with selected offal of the cod as the fish were cleaned--an improvement on paddling barehanded in the little bait-barrels below. The tubs were full of neatly coiled line carrying a big hook each few feet; and the testing and baiting of every single hook, with the stowage of the baited line so that it should run clear when shot from the dory, was a scientific business. Dan managed it in the dark without looking, while Harvey caught his fingers on the barbs and bewailed his fate. But the hooks flew through Dan's fingers like tatting on an old maid's lap. "I helped bait up trawl ashore 'fore I could well walk," he said. "But it's a putterin' job all the same. Oh, dad!" This shouted towards the hatch, where Disko and Tom Platt were salting. "How many skates you reckon we'll need?" "Baout three. Hurry!" "There's three hundred fathom to each tub," Dan explained; "more'n enough to lay out tonight. Ouch! 'Slipped up there, I did." He stuck his finger in his mouth. "I tell you, Harve, there ain't money in Gloucester'u'd hire me to ship on a reg'lar trawler. It may be progressive, but, barrin' that, it's the putterin'est, slimjammest business top of earth." "I don't know what this is, if 'tisn't regular trawling," said Harvey, sulkily. "My fingers are all cut to frazzles." "Pshaw! This is jest one o' dad's blame experiments. He don't trawl 'less there's mighty good reason fer it. Dad knows. Thet's why he's baitin' ez he is. We'll hev her saggin' full when we take her up er we won't see a fin." Penn and Uncle Salters cleaned up as Disko had ordained, but the boys profited little. No sooner were the tubs furnished than Tom Platt and Long Jack, who had been exploring the inside of a dory with a lantern, snatched them away, loaded up the tubs and some small, painted trawl-buoys, and hove the boat overboard into what Harvey regarded as an exceedingly rough sea. "They'll be drowned. Why, the dory's loaded like a freight-car," he cried. "We'll be back," said Long Jack, "an' in case you'll not be lookin' for us, we'll lay into you both if the trawl's snarled." The dory surged up on the crest of a wave, and just when it seemed impossible that she could avoid smashing against the schooner's side, slid over the ridge, and was swallowed up in the damp dusk. "Take a-hold here, an' keep ringin' steady," said Dan, passing Harvey the lanyard of a bell that hung just behind the windlass. Harvey rang lustily, for he felt two lives depended on him. But Disko in the cabin, scrawling in the log-book, did not look like a murderer, and when he went to supper he even smiled drily at the anxious Harvey. "This ain't no weather," said Dan. "Why, you an' me could set thet trawl! They've only gone out jest far 'nough so's not to foul our cable. They don't need no bell reelly." "Clang! cling! clang!" Harvey kept it up, varied with occasional rub-a-dubs, for another half-hour. There was a bellow and a bump alongside. Manuel and Dan raced to the hooks of the dory-tackle; Long Jack and Tom Platt arrived on deck together, it seemed, one half the North Atlantic at their backs, and the dory followed them in the air, landing with a clatter. "Nary snarl," said Tom Platt, as he dripped. "Danny, you'll do yet." "The pleasure av your comp'ny to the banquit," said Long Jack, squelching the water from his boots as he capered like an elephant and stuck an oilskinned arm into Harvey's face. "We do be condescending to honour the second half wid our presence." And off they all four rolled to supper, where Harvey stuffed himself to the brim on fish-chowder and fried pies, and fell fast asleep just as Manuel produced from a locker a lovely two-foot model of the Lucy Holmes, his first boat, and was going to show Harvey the ropes. Harvey never even twiddled his fingers as Penn pushed him into his bunk. "It must be a sad thing--a very sad thing," said Penn, watching the boy's face, "for his mother and his father, who think he is dead. To lose a child--to lose a man-child!" "Git out o' this, Penn," said Dan. "Go aft and finish your game with Uncle Salters. Tell dad I'll stand Harve's watch ef he don't keer. He's played aout." "Ver' good boy," said Manuel, slipping out of his boots and disappearing into the black shadows of the lower bunk. "Expec' he make good man, Danny. I no see he is any so mad as your parpa he says. Eh, wha-at?" Dan chuckled, but the chuckle ended in a snore. It was thick weather outside, with a rising wind, and the elder men stretched their watches. The hours struck clear in the cabin; the nosing bows slapped and scuffled with the seas; the fo'c'sle stovepipe hissed and sputtered as the spray caught it; and the boys slept on, while Disko, Long Jack, Tom Plait, and Uncle Salters, each in turn, stumped aft to look at the wheel, forward to see that the anchor held, or to veer out a little more cable against chafing, with a glance at the dim anchor-light between each round. CHAPTER IV Harvey waked to find the "first half" at 'breakfast, the fo'c'sle door drawn to a crack, and every square inch of the schooner singing its own tune. The black bulk of the cook balanced behind the tiny galley over the glare of the stove, and the pots and pans in the pierced wooden board before it jarred and racketed to each plunge. Up and up the fo'c'sle climbed, yearning and surging and quivering, and then, with a clear, sickle-like swoop, came down into the seas. He could hear the flaring bows cut and squelch, and there was a pause ere the divided waters came down on the deck above, like a volley of buck-shot. Followed the woolly sound of the cable in the hawse-hole; a grunt and squeal of the windlass; a yaw, a punt, and a kick, and the "We're Here" gathered herself together to repeat the motions. "Now, ashore," he heard Long Jack saying, "ye've chores, an' ye must do thim in any weather. Here we're well clear of the fleet, an' we've no chores--an' that's a blessin'. Good night, all." He passed like a big snake from the table to his bunk, and began to smoke. Tom Platt followed his example; Uncle Salters, with Penn, fought his way up the ladder to stand his watch, and the cook set for the "second half." It came out of its bunks as the others had entered theirs, with a shake and a yawn. It ate till it could eat no more; and then Manuel filled his pipe with some terrible tobacco, crotched himself between the pawl-post and a forward bunk, cocked his feet up on the table, and smiled tender and indolent smiles at the smoke. Dan lay at length in his bunk, wrestling with a gaudy, gilt-stopped accordion, whose tunes went up and down with the pitching of the "We're Here". The cook, his shoulders against the locker where he kept the fried pies (Dan was fond of fried pies), peeled potatoes, with one eye on the stove in event of too much water finding its way down the pipe; and the general smell and smother were past all description. Harvey considered affairs, wondered that he was not deathly sick, and crawled into his bunk again, as the softest and safest place, while Dan struck up, "I don't want to play in your yard," as accurately as the wild jerks allowed. "How long is this for?" Harvey asked of Manuel. "Till she get a little quiet, and we can row to trawl. Perhaps to-night. Perhaps two days more. You do not like? Eh, wha-at?" "I should have been crazy sick a week ago, but it doesn't seem to upset me now--much." "That is because we make you fisherman, these days. If I was you, when I come to Gloucester I would give two, three big candles for my good luck." "Give who?" "To be sure--the Virgin of our Church on the Hill. She is very good to fishermen all the time. That is why so few of us Portugee men ever are drowned." "You're a Roman Catholic, then?" "I am a Madeira man. I am not a Porto Pico boy. Shall I be Baptist, then? Eh, wha-at? I always give candles--two, three more when I come to Gloucester. The good Virgin she never forgets me, Manuel." "I don't sense it that way," Tom Platt put in from his bunk, his scarred face lit up by the glare of a match as he sucked at his pipe. "It stands to reason the sea's the sea; and you'll git jest about what's goin', candles or kerosene, fer that matter." "Tis a mighty good thing," said Long Jack, "to have a fri'nd at coort, though. I'm o' Manuel's way o' thinkin'. About tin years back I was crew to a Sou' Boston market-boat. We was off Minot's Ledge wid a northeaster, butt first, atop of us, thicker'n burgoo. The ould man was dhrunk, his chin waggin' on the tiller, an' I sez to myself, 'If iver I stick my boat-huk into T-wharf again, I'll show the saints fwhat manner o' craft they saved me out av.' Now, I'm here, as ye can well see, an' the model of the dhirty ould Kathleen, that took me a month to make, I gave ut to the priest, an' he hung Ut up forninst the altar. There's more sense in givin' a model that's by way o' bein' a work av art than any candle. Ye can buy candles at store, but a model shows the good saints ye've tuk trouble an' are grateful." "D'you believe that, Irish?" said Tom Platt, turning on his elbow. "Would I do Ut if I did not, Ohio?" "Wa-al, Enoch Fuller he made a model o' the old Ohio, and she's to Salem museum now. Mighty pretty model, too, but I guess Enoch he never done it fer no sacrifice; an' the way I take it is--" There were the makings of an hour-long discussion of the kind that fishermen love, where the talk runs in shouting circles and no one proves anything at the end, had not Dan struck up this cheerful rhyme: "Up jumped the mackerel with his striped back. Reef in the mainsail, and haul on the tack; For it's windy weather--" Here Long Jack joined in: "And it's blowy weather; When the winds begin to blow, pipe all hands together!" Dan went on, with a cautious look at Tom Plait, holding the accordion low in the bunk: "Up jumped the cod with his chuckle-head, Went to the main-chains to heave at the lead; For it's windy weather," etc. Tom Platt seemed to be hunting for something. Dan crouched lower, but sang louder: "Up jumped the flounder that swims to the ground. Chuckle-head! Chuckle-head! Mind where ye sound!" Tom Platt's huge rubber boot whirled across the fo'c'sle and caught Dan's uplifted arm. There was war between the man and the boy ever since Dan had discovered that the mere whistling of that tune would make him angry as he heaved the lead. "Thought I'd fetch yer," said Dan, returning the gift with precision. "Ef you don't like my music, git out your fiddle. I ain't goin' to lie here all day an' listen to you an' Long Jack arguin' 'baout candles. Fiddle, Tom Platt; or I'll learn Harve here the tune!" Tom Platt leaned down to a locker and brought up an old white fiddle. Manuel's eye glistened, and from somewhere behind the pawl-post he drew out a tiny, guitar-like thing with wire strings, which he called a _machette_. "'Tis a concert," said Long Jack, beaming through the smoke. "A reg'lar Boston concert." There was a burst of spray as the hatch opened, and Disko, in yellow oilskins, descended. "Ye're just in time, Disko. Fwhat's she doin' outside?" "Jest this!" He dropped on to the lockers with the push and heave of the "We're Here". "We're singin' to kape our breakfasts down. Ye'll lead, av course, Disko," said Long Jack. "Guess there ain't more'n 'baout two old songs I know, an' ye've heerd them both." His excuses were cut short by Tom Platt launching into a most dolorous tune, like unto the moaning of winds and the creaking of masts. With his eyes fixed on the beams above, Disko began this ancient, ancient ditty, Tom Platt flourishing all round him to make the tune and words fit a little: "There is a crack packet--crack packet o' fame, She hails from Noo York, an' the Dreadnought's her name. You may talk o' your fliers--Swallow-tail and Black Ball-- But the Dreadnought's the packet that can beat them all. "Now the Dreadnought she lies in the River Mersey, Because of the tugboat to take her to sea; But when she's off soundings you shortly will know (Chorus.) She's the Liverpool packet--O Lord, let her go! "Now the Dreadnought she's howlin' 'crost the Banks o' Newfoundland, Where the water's all shallow and the bottom's all sand. Sez all the little fishes that swim to an' fro: (Chorus.) 'She's the Liverpool packet--O Lord, let her go!'" There were scores of verses, for he worked the Dreadnought every mile of the way between Liverpool and New York as conscientiously as though he were on her deck, and the accordion pumped and the fiddle squeaked beside him. Tom Platt followed with something about "the rough and tough McGinn, who would pilot the vessel in." Then they called on Harvey, who felt very flattered, to contribute to the entertainment; but all that he could remember were some pieces of "Skipper Ireson's Ride" that he had been taught at the camp-school in the Adirondacks. It seemed that they might be appropriate to the time and place, but he had no more than mentioned the title when Disko brought down one foot with a bang, and cried, "Don't go on, young feller. That's a mistaken jedgment--one o' the worst kind, too, becaze it's catchin' to the ear." "I orter ha' warned you," said Dan. "Thet allus fetches dad." "What's wrong?" said Harvey, surprised and a little angry. "All you're goin' to say," said Disko. "All dead wrong from start to finish, an' Whittier he's to blame. I have no special call to right any Marblehead man, but 'tweren't no fault o' Ireson's. My father he told me the tale time an' again, an' this is the way 'twuz." "For the wan hundreth time," put in Long Jack, under his breath. "Ben Ireson he was skipper o' the Betty, young feller, comin' home frum the Banks--that was before the war of 1812, but jestice is jestice at all times. They f'und the Active o' Portland, an' Gibbons o' that town he was her skipper; they f'und her leakin' off Cape Cod Light. There was a terr'ble gale on, an' they was gettin' the Betty home's fast as they could craowd her. Well, Ireson he said there warn't any sense to reskin' a boat in that sea; the men they wouldn't hev it; and he laid it before them to stay by the Active till the sea run daown a piece. They wouldn't hev that either, hangin' araound the Cape in any sech weather, leak or no leak. They jest up stays'l an' quit, nat'rally takin' Ireson with 'em. Folks to Marblehead was mad at him not runnin' the risk, and becaze nex' day, when the sea was ca'am (they never stopped to think o' that), some of the Active's folk was took off by a Truro man. They come into Marblehead with their own tale to tell, sayin' how Ireson had shamed his town, an' so forth an' so on; an' Ireson's men they was scared, seem' public feelin' ag'in' 'em, an' they went back on Ireson, an' swore he was respons'ble for the hull act. 'Tweren't the women neither that tarred and feathered him--Marblehead women don't act that way--'twas a passel o' men an' boys, an' they carted him araound town in an old dory till the bottom fell aout, an' Ireson he told 'em they'd be sorry for it some day. Well, the facts came aout later, same's they usually do, too late to be any ways useful to an honest man; an' Whittier he come along an' picked up the slack eend of a lyin' tale, an' tarred and feathered Ben Ireson all over onct more after he was dead. 'Twas the only time Whittier ever slipped up, an' 'tweren't fair. I whaled Dan good when he brought that piece back from school. You don't know no better, o' course; but I've give you the facts, hereafter an' evermore to be remembered. Ben Ireson weren't no sech kind o' man as Whittier makes aout; my father he knew him well, before an' after that business, an' you beware o' hasty jedgments, young feller. Next!" Harvey had never heard Disko talk so long, and collapsed with burning cheeks; but, as Dan said promptly, a boy could only learn what he was taught at school, and life was too short to keep track of every lie along the coast. Then Manuel touched the jangling, jarring little _machette_ to a queer tune, and sang something in Portuguese about "Nina, innocente!" ending with a full-handed sweep that brought the song up with a jerk. Then Disko obliged with his second song, to an old-fashioned creaky tune, and all joined in the chorus. This is one stanza: "Now Aprile is over and melted the snow, And outer Noo Bedford we shortly must tow; Yes, out o' Noo Bedford we shortly must clear, We're the whalers that never see wheat in the ear." Here the fiddle went very softly for a while by itself, and then: "Wheat-in-the-ear, my true-love's posy blowin'; Wheat-in-the-ear, we're goin' off to sea; Wheat-in-the-ear, I left you fit for sowin'; When I come back a loaf o' bread you'll be!" That made Harvey almost weep, though he could not tell why. But it was much worse when the cook dropped the potatoes and held out his hands for the fiddle. Still leaning against the locker door, he struck into a tune that was like something very bad but sure to happen whatever you did. After a little he sang in an unknown tongue, his big chin down on the fiddle-tail, his white eyeballs glaring in the lamplight. Harvey swung out of his bunk to hear better; and amid the straining of the timbers and the wash of the waters the tune crooned and moaned on, like lee surf in a blind fog, till it ended with a wail. "Jimmy Christmas! Thet gives me the blue creevles," said Dan. "What in thunder is it?" "The song of Fin McCoul," said the cook, "when he wass going to Norway." His English was not thick, but all clear-cut, as though it came from a phonograph. "Faith, I've been to Norway, but I didn't make that unwholesim noise. 'Tis like some of the old songs, though," said Long Jack, sighing. "Don't let's hev another 'thout somethin' between," said Dan; and the accordion struck up a rattling, catchy tune that ended: "It's six an' twenty Sundays sence las' we saw the land, With fifteen hunder quintal, An' fifteen hunder quintal, 'Teen hunder toppin' quintal, 'Twix' old 'Queereau an' Grand!" "Hold on!" roared Tom Plait "D'ye want to nail the trip, Dan? That's Jonah sure, 'less you sing it after all our salt's wet." "No, 'tain't. Is it, dad? Not unless you sing the very las' verse. You can't learn me anything on Jonahs!" "What's that?" said Harvey. "What's a Jonah?" "A Jonah's anything that spoils the luck. Sometimes it's a man--sometimes it's a boy--or a bucket. I've known a splittin'-knife Jonah two trips till we was on to her," said Tom Plait. "There's all sorts o' Jonahs. Jim Bourke was one till he was drowned on Georges. I'd never ship with Jim Bourke, not if I was starvin'. There wuz a green dory on the Ezra Flood. Thet was a Jonah too, the worst sort o' Jonah. Drowned four men she did, an' used to shine fiery o' nights in the nest." "And you believe that?" said Harvey, remembering what Tom Platt had said about candles and models. "Haven't we all got to take what's served?" A mutter of dissent ran round the bunks. "Outboard, yes; inboard, things can happen," said Disko. "Don't you go makin' a mock of Jonahs, young feller." "Well, Harve ain't no Jonah. Day after we catched him," Dan cut in, "we had a toppin' good catch." The cook threw up his head and laughed suddenly--a queer, thin laugh. He was a most disconcerting nigger. "Murder!" said Long Jack. "Don't do that again, doctor. We ain't used to Ut." "What's wrong?" said Dan. "Ain't he our mascot, and didn't they strike on good after we'd struck him?" "Oh! yess," said the cook. "I know that, but the catch iss not finish yet." "He ain't goin' to do us any harm," said Dan, hotly. "Where are ye hintin' an' edgin' to? He's all right." "No harm. No. But one day he will be your master, Danny." "That all?" said Dan, placidly. "He wun't--not by a jugful." "Master!" said the cook, pointing to Harvey. "Man!" and he pointed to Dan. "That's news. Haow soon?" said Dan, with a laugh. "In some years, and I shall see it. Master and man--man and master." "How in thunder d'ye work that out?" said Tom Platt. "In my head, where I can see." "Haow?" This from all the others at once. "I do not know, but so it will be." He dropped his head, and went on peeling the potatoes, and not another word could they get out of him. "Well," said Dan, "a heap o' things'll hev to come abaout 'fore Harve's any master o' mine; but I'm glad the doctor ain't choosen to mark him for a Jonah. Now, I mistrust Uncle Salters fer the Jonerest Jonah in the fleet regardin' his own special luck. Dunno ef it's spreadin' same's smallpox. He ought to be on the Carrie Pitman. That boat's her own Jonah, sure--crews an' gear make no differ to her driftin'. Jimmy Christmas! She'll etch loose in a flat ca'am." "We're well dear o' the fleet, anyway," said Disko, "Carrie Pitman an' all." There was a rapping on the deck. "Uncle Salters has catched his luck," said Dan, as his father departed. "It's blown clear," Disko cried, and all the fo'c'sle tumbled up for a bit of fresh air. The fog had gone, but a sullen sea ran in great rollers behind it. The "We're Here" slid, as it were, into long, sunk avenues and ditches which felt quite sheltered and homelike if they would only stay still; but they changed without rest or mercy, and flung up the schooner to crown one peak of a thousand grey hills, while the wind hooted through her rigging as she zigzagged down the slopes. Far away a sea would burst in a sheet of foam, and the others would follow suit as at a signal, till Harvey's eyes swam with the vision of interlacing whites and greys. Four or five Mother Carey's chickens stormed round in circles, shrieking as they swept past the bows. A rain-squall or two strayed aimlessly over the hopeless waste, ran down wind and back again, and melted away. "'Seems to me I saw somethin' flicker jest naow over yonder," said Uncle Salters, pointing to the northeast. "Can't be any of the fleet," said Disko, peering under his eyebrows, a hand on the fo'c'sle gangway as the solid bows hatcheted into the troughs. "Sea's oilin' over dretful fast. Danny, don't you want to skip up a piece an' see how aour trawl-buoy lays?" Danny, in his big boots, trotted rather than climbed up the main rigging (this consumed Harvey with envy), hitched himself around the reeling crosstrees, and let his eye rove till it caught the tiny black buoy-flag on the shoulder of a mile-away swell. "She's all right," he hailed. "Sail O! Dead to the no'th'ard, comin' down like smoke! Schooner she be, too." They waited yet another half-hour, the sky clearing in patches, with a flicker of sickly sun from time to time that made patches of olive-green water. Then a stump-foremast lifted, ducked, and disappeared, to be followed on the next wave by a high stern with old-fashioned wooden snail's-horn davits. The sails were red-tanned. "Frenchmen!" shouted Dan. "No, 'tain't, neither. Da-ad!" "That's no French," said Disko. "Salters, your blame luck holds tighter'n a screw in a keg-head." "I've eyes. It's Uncle Abishai." "You can't nowise tell fer sure." "The head-king of all Jonahs," groaned Tom Platt. "Oh, Salters, Salters, why wasn't you abed an' asleep? "How could I tell?" said poor Salters, as the schooner swung up. She might have been the very Flying Dutchman, so foul, draggled, and unkempt was every rope and stick aboard. Her old-style quarter-deck was some four or five feet high, and her rigging flew knotted and tangled like weed at a wharf-end. She was running before the wind--yawing frightfully--her staysail let down to act as a sort of extra foresail,--"scandalised," they call it,--and her fore-boom guyed out over the side. Her bowsprit cocked up like an old-fashioned frigate's; her jib-boom had been fished and spliced and nailed and clamped beyond further repair; and as she hove herself forward, and sat down on her broad tail, she looked for all the world like a blowzy, frousy, bad old woman sneering at a decent girl. "That's Abishai," said Salters. "Full o' gin an' Judique men, an' the judgments o' Providence layin' fer him an' never takin' good holt. He's run in to bait, Miquelon way." "He'll run her under," said Long Jack. "That's no rig fer this weather." "Not he, 'r he'd 'a' done it long ago," Disko replied. "Looks's if he cal'lated to run us under. Ain't she daown by the head more'n natural, Tom Platt?" "Ef it's his style o' loadin' her she ain't safe," said the sailor, slowly. "Ef she's spewed her oakum he'd better git to his pumps mighty quick." The creature thrashed up, wore round with a clatter and rattle, and lay head to wind within ear-shot. A greybeard wagged over the bulwark, and a thick voice yelled something Harvey could not understand. But Disko's face darkened. "He'd resk every stick he hez to carry bad news. Says we're in fer a shift o' wind. He's in fer worse. Abishai! Abishai!" He waved his arm up and down with the gesture of a man at the pumps, and pointed forward. The crew mocked him and laughed. "Jounce ye, an' strip ye, an' trip ye!" yelled Uncle Abishai. "A livin' gale--a livin' gale. Yah! Cast up fer your last trip, all you Gloucester haddocks. You won't see Gloucester no more, no more!" "Crazy full--as usual," said Tom Platt. "Wish he hadn't spied us, though." She drifted out of hearing while the greyhead yelled something about a dance at the Bay of Bulls and a dead man in the fo'c'sle. Harvey shuddered. He had seen the sloven tilled decks and the savage-eyed crew. "An' that's a fine little floatin' hell fer her draught," said Long Jack. "I wondher what mischief he's been at ashore." "He's a trawler," Dan explained to Harvey, "an' he runs in fer bait all along the coast. Oh, no, not home, he don't go. He deals along the south an' east shore up yonder." He nodded in the direction of the pitiless Newfoundland beaches. "Dad won't never take me ashore there. They're a mighty tough crowd--an' Abishai's the toughest. You saw his boat? Well, she's nigh seventy year old, they say; the last o' the old Marblehead heel-tappers. They don't make them quarter-decks any more. Abishai don't use Marblehead, though. He ain't wanted there. He jes' drif's araound, in debt, trawlin' an' cussin' like you've heard. Bin a Jonah fer years an' years, he hez. 'Gits liquor frum the Feecamp boats fer makin' spells an' selling winds an' such truck. Crazy, I guess." "Twon't be any use underrunnin' the trawl to-night," said Tom Platt, with quiet despair. "He come alongside special to cuss us. I'd give my wage an' share to see him at the gangway o' the old Ohio 'fore we quit floggin'. Jest abaout six dozen, an' Sam Mocatta layin' 'em on crisscross!" The dishevelled "heel-tapper" danced drunkenly down wind, and all eyes followed her. Suddenly the cook cried in his phonograph voice: "It wass his own death made him speak so! He iss fey--fey, I tell you! Look!" She sailed into a patch of watery sunshine three or four miles distant. The patch dulled and faded out, and even as the light passed so did the schooner. She dropped into a hollow and--was not. "Run under, by the great hook-block!" shouted Disko, jumping aft. "Drunk or sober, we've got to help 'em. Heave short and break her out! Smart!" Harvey was thrown on the deck by the shock that followed the setting of the jib and foresail, for they hove short on the cable, and to save time, jerked the anchor bodily from the bottom, heaving in as they moved away. This is a bit of brute force seldom resorted to except in matters of life and death, and the little "We're Here" complained like a human. They ran down to where Abishai's craft had vanished; found two or three trawl-tubs, a gin-bottle, and a stove-in dory, but nothing more. "Let 'em go," said Disko, though no one had hinted at picking them up. "I wouldn't hev a match that belonged to Abishai aboard. 'Guess she run clear under. 'Must ha' been spewin' her oakum fer a week, an' they never thought to pump her. That's one more boat gone along o' leavin' port all hands drunk." "Glory be!" said Long Jack. "We'd ha' been obliged to help 'em if they was top o' water." "'Thinkin' o' that myself," said Tom Platt. "Fey! Fey!" said the cook, rolling his eyes. "He hass taken his own luck with him." "Ver' good thing, I think, to tell the fleet when we see. Eh, wha-at'?" said Manuel. "If you runna that way before the wind, and she work open her seams--" He threw out his hands with an indescribable gesture, while Penn sat down on the house and sobbed at the sheer horror and pity of it all. Harvey could not realise that he had seen death on the open waters, but he felt very sick. Then Dan went up the crosstrees, and Disko steered them back to within sight of their own trawl-buoys just before the fog blanketed the sea once again. "We go mighty quick hereabouts when we do go," was all he said to Harvey. "You think on that for a spell, young feller. That was liquor." After dinner it was calm enough to fish from the decks,--Penn and Uncle Salters were very zealous this time,--and the catch was large and large fish. "Abishai has shorely took his luck with him," said Salters. "The wind hain't backed ner riz ner nothin'. How abaout the trawl? I despise superstition, anyway." Tom Platt insisted that they had much better haul the thing and make a new berth. But the cook said: "The luck iss in two pieces. You will find it so when you look. I know." This so tickled Long Jack that he overbore Tom Platt, and the two went out together. Underrunning a trawl means pulling it in on one side of the dory, picking off the fish, rebaiting the hooks, and passing them back to the sea again something like pinning and unpinning linen on a wash-line. It is a lengthy business and rather dangerous, for the long, sagging line may twitch a boat under in a flash. But when they heard, "And naow to thee, O Capting," booming out of the fog, the crew of the "We're Here" took heart. The dory swirled alongside well loaded, Tom Platt yelling for Manuel to act as relief-boat. "The luck's cut square in two pieces," said Long Jack, forking in the fish, while Harvey stood open-mouthed at the skill with which the plunging dory was saved from destruction. "One half was jest punkins. Tom Platt wanted to haul her an' ha' done wid ut; but I said, 'I'll back the doctor that has the second sight,' an' the other half come up sagging full o' big uns. Hurry, Man'nle, an' bring's a tub o' bait. There's luck afloat tonight." The fish bit at the newly baited hooks from which their brethren had just been taken, and Tom Platt and Long Jack moved methodically up and down the length of the trawl, the boat's nose surging under the wet line of hooks, stripping the sea-cucumbers that they called pumpkins, slatting off the fresh-caught cod against the gunwale, rebaiting, and loading Manuel's dory till dusk. "I'll take no risks," said Disko, then--"not with him floatin' around so near. Abishai won't sink fer a week. Heave in the dories, an' we'll dressdaown after supper." That was a mighty dressing-down, attended by three or four blowing grampuses. It lasted till nine o'clock, and Disko was thrice heard to chuckle as Harvey pitched the split fish into the hold. "Say, you're haulin' ahead dretful fast," said Dan, when they ground the knives after the men had turned in. "There's somethin' of a sea tonight, an' I hain't heard you make no remarks on it." "Too busy," Harvey replied, testing a blade's edge. "Come to think of it, she is a high-kicker." The little schooner was gambolling all around her anchor among the silver-tipped waves. Backing with a start of affected surprise at the sight of the strained cable, she pounced on it like a kitten, while the spray of her descent burst through the hawse-holes with the report of a gun. Shaking her head, she would say: "Well, I'm sorry I can't stay any longer with you. I'm going North," and would sidle off, halting suddenly with a dramatic rattle of her rigging. "As I was just going to observe," she would begin, as gravely as a drunken man addressing a lamp-post. The rest of the sentence (she acted her words in dumb-show, of course) was lost in a fit of the fidgets, when she behaved like a puppy chewing a string, a clumsy woman in a side-saddle, a hen with her head cut off, or a cow stung by a hornet, exactly as the whims of the sea took her. "See her sayin' her piece. She's Patrick Henry naow," said Dan. She swung sideways on a roller, and gesticulated with her jib-boom from port to starboard. "But-ez---fer-me, give me liberty--er give me-death!" Wop! She sat down in the moon-path on the water, courtesying with a flourish of pride impressive enough had not the wheel-gear sniggered mockingly in its box. Harvey laughed aloud. "Why, it's just as if she was alive," he said. "She's as stiddy as a haouse an' as dry as a herrin'," said Dan, enthusiastically, as he was stung across the deck in a batter of spray. "Fends 'em off an 'fends 'em off, an' 'Don't ye come anigh me,' she sez. Look at her--jest look at her! Sakes! You should see one o' them toothpicks h'istin' up her anchor on her spike outer fifteen-fathom water." "What's a toothpick, Dan?" "Them new haddockers an' herrin'-boats. Fine's a yacht forward, with yacht sterns to 'em, an' spike bowsprits, an' a haouse that u'd take our hold. I've heard that Burgess himself he made the models fer three or four of 'em, Dad's sot ag'in' 'em on account o' their pitchin' an' joltin', but there's heaps o' money in 'em. Dad can find fish, but he ain't no ways progressive--he don't go with the march o' the times. They're chock-full o' labour-savin' jigs an' sech all. 'Ever seed the Elector o' Gloucester? She's a daisy, ef she is a toothpick." "What do they cost, Dan?" "Hills o' dollars. Fifteen thousand, p'haps; more, mebbe. There's gold-leaf an' everything you kin think of." Then to himself, half under his breath "Guess I'd call her Hattie S., too." CHAPTER V That was the first of many talks with Dan, who told Harvey why he would transfer his dory's name to the imaginary Burgess-modelled haddocker. Harvey heard a good deal about the real Hattie at Gloucester; saw a lock of her hair--which Dan, finding fair words of no avail, had "hooked" as she sat in front of him at school that winter--and a photograph. Hattie was about fourteen years old, with an awful contempt for boys, and had been trampling on Dan's heart through the winter. All this was revealed under oath of solemn secrecy on moonlit decks, in the dead dark, or in choking fog; the whining wheel behind them, the climbing deck before, and without, the unresting, clamorous sea. Once, of course, as the boys came to know each other, there was a fight, which raged from bow to stern till Penn came up and separated them, but promised not to tell Disko, who thought fighting on watch rather worse than sleeping. Harvey was no match for Dan physically, but it says a great deal for his new training that he took his defeat and did not try to get even with his conqueror by underhand methods. That was after he had been cured of a string of boils between his elbows and wrists, where the wet jersey and oilskins cut into the flesh. The salt water stung them unpleasantly, but when they were ripe Dan treated them with Disko's razor, and assured Harvey that now he was a "blooded Banker"; the affliction of gurry-sores being the mark of the caste that claimed him. Since he was a boy and very busy, he did not bother his head with too much thinking. He was exceedingly sorry for his mother, and often longed to see her and above all to tell her of his wonderful new life, and how brilliantly he was acquitting himself in it. Otherwise he preferred not to wonder too much how she was bearing the shock of his supposed death. But one day, as he stood on the fo'c'sle ladder, guying the cook, who had accused him and Dan of hooking fried pies, it occurred to him that this was a vast improvement on being snubbed by strangers in the smoking-room of a hired liner. He was a recognised part of the scheme of things on the "We're Here"; had his place at the table and among the bunks; and could hold his own in the long talks on stormy days, when the others were always ready to listen to what they called his "fairy-tales" of his life ashore. It did not take him more than two days and a quarter to feel that if he spoke of his own life--it seemed very far away--no one except Dan (and even Dan's belief was sorely tried) credited him. So he invented a friend, a boy he had heard of, who drove a miniature four-pony drag in Toledo, Ohio, and ordered five suits of clothes at a time, and led things called "germans" at parties where the oldest girl was not quite fifteen, but all the presents were solid silver. Salters protested that this kind of yarn was desperately wicked, if not indeed positively blasphemous, but he listened as greedily as the others; and their criticisms at the end gave Harvey entirely new notions on "germans," clothes, cigarettes with gold-leaf tips, rings, watches, scent, small dinner-parties, champagne, card-playing, and hotel accommodation. Little by little he changed his tone when speaking of his "friend," whom Long Jack had christened "the Crazy Kid," "the Gilt-edged Baby," "the Suckin' Vanderpoop," and other pet names; and with his sea-booted feet cocked up on the table would even invent histories about silk pajamas and specially imported neckwear, to the "friend's" discredit. Harvey was a very adaptable person, with a keen eye and ear for every face and tone about him. Before long he knew where Disko kept the old green-crusted quadrant that they called the "hog-yoke"--under the bed-bag in his bunk. When he 'took the sun, and with the help of "The Old Farmer's" almanac found the latitude, Harvey would jump down into the cabin and scratch the reckoning and date with a nail on the rust of the stove-pipe. Now, the chief engineer of the liner could have done no more, and no engineer of thirty years' service could have assumed one half of the ancient-mariner air with which Harvey, first careful to spit over the side, made public the schooner's position for that day, and then and not till then relieved Disko of the quadrant. There is an etiquette in all these things. The said "hog-yoke," an Eldridge chart, the farming almanac, Blunt's "Coast Pilot," and Bowditch's "Navigator" were all the weapons Disko needed to guide him, except the deep-sea lead that was his spare eye. Harvey nearly slew Penn with it when Tom Platt taught him first how to "fly the blue pigeon"; and, though his strength was not equal to continuous sounding in any sort of a sea, for calm weather with a seven-pound lead on shoal water Disko used him freely. As Dan said: "'Tain't soundin's dad wants. It's samples. Grease her up good, Harve." Harvey would tallow the cup at the end, and carefully bring the sand, shell, sludge, or whatever it might be, to Disko, who fingered and smelt it and gave judgment. As has been said, when Disko thought of cod he thought as a cod; and by some long-tested mixture of instinct and experience, moved the "We're Here" from berth to berth, always with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen board. But Disko's board was the Grand Bank--a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of the fishing-fleet. For days they worked in fog--Harvey at the bell--till, grown familiar with the thick airs, he went out with Tom Platt, his heart rather in his mouth. But the fog would not lift, and the fish were biting, and no one can stay helplessly afraid for six hours at a time. Harvey devoted himself to his lines and the gaff or gob-stick as Tom Platt called for them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the bell and Tom's instinct; Manuel's conch sounding thin and faint beside them. But it was an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea below ten feet from his straining eyes. A few days later he was out with Manuel on what should have been forty-fathom bottom, but the whole length of the roding ran out, and still the anchor found nothing, and Harvey grew mortally afraid, for that his last touch with earth was lost. "Whale-hole," said Manuel, hauling in. "That is good joke on Disko. Come!" and he rowed to the schooner to find Tom Platt and the others jeering at the skipper because, for once, he had led them to the edge of the barren Whale-deep, the blank hole of the Grand Bank. They made another berth through the fog, and that time the hair of Harvey's head stood up when he went out in Manuel's dory. A whiteness moved in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the grave, and there was a roaring, a plunging, and spouting. It was his first introduction to the dread summer berg of the Banks, and he cowered in the bottom of the boat while Manuel laughed. There were days, though, clear and soft and warm, when it seemed a sin to do anything but loaf over the hand-lines and spank the drifting "sun-scalds" with an oar; and there were days of light airs, when Harvey was taught how to steer the schooner from one berth to another. It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his hand on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky. That was magnificent, in spite of Disko saying that it would break a snake's back to follow his wake. But, as usual, pride ran before a fall. They were sailing on the wind with the staysail--an old one, luckily--set, and Harvey jammed her right into it to show Dan how completely he had mastered the art. The foresail went over with a bang, and the foregaff stabbed and ripped through the stay-sail, which, was of course, prevented from going over by the mainstay. They lowered the wreck in awful silence, and Harvey spent his leisure hours for the next few days under Tom Platt's lee, learning to use a needle and palm. Dan hooted with joy, for, as he said, he had made the very same blunder himself in his early days. Boylike, Harvey imitated all the men by turns, till he had combined Disko's peculiar stoop at the wheel, Long Jack's swinging overhand when the lines were hauled, Manuel's round-shouldered but effective stroke in a dory, and Tom Platt's generous Ohio stride along the deck. "'Tis beautiful to see how he takes to ut," said Long Jack, when Harvey was looking out by the windlass one thick noon. "I'll lay my wage an' share 'tis more'n half play-actin' to him, an' he consates himself he's a bowld mariner. 'Watch his little bit av a back now!" "That's the way we all begin," said Tom Platt. "The boys they make believe all the time till they've cheated 'emselves into bein' men, an' so till they die--pretendin' an' pretendin'. I done it on the old Ohio, I know. Stood my first watch--harbor-watch--feelin' finer'n Farragut. Dan's full o' the same kind o' notions. See 'em now, actin' to be genewine moss-backs--every hair a rope-yarn an' blood Stockholm tar." He spoke down the cabin stairs. "'Guess you're mistook in your judgments fer once, Disko. What in Rome made ye tell us all here the kid was crazy?" "He wuz," Disko replied. "Crazy ez a loon when he come aboard; but I'll say he's sobered up consid'ble sence. I cured him." "He yarns good," said Tom Platt. "T'other night he told us abaout a kid of his own size steerin' a cunnin' little rig an' four ponies up an' down Toledo, Ohio, I think 'twas, an' givin' suppers to a crowd o' sim'lar kids. Cur'us kind o' fairy-tale, but blame interestin'. He knows scores of 'em." "'Guess he strikes 'em outen his own head," Disko called from the cabin, where he was busy with the log-book. "'Stands to reason that sort is all made up. It don't take in no one but Dan, an' he laughs at it. I've heard him, behind my back." "Y'ever hear what Sim'on Peter Ca'houn said when they whacked up a match 'twix' his sister Hitty an' Lorin' Jerauld, an' the boys put up that joke on him daown to Georges?" drawled Uncle Salters, who was dripping peaceably under the lee of the starboard dory-nest. Tom Platt puffed at his pipe in scornful silence: he was a Cape Cod man, and had not known that tale more than twenty years. Uncle Salters went on with a rasping chuckle: "Sim'on Peter Ca'houn he said, an' he was jest right, abaout Lorin', 'Ha'af on the taown,' he said, 'an' t'other ha'af blame fool; an' they told me she's married a 'ich man.' Sim'on Peter Ca'houn he hedn't no roof to his mouth, an' talked that way." "He didn't talk any Pennsylvania Dutch," Tom Platt replied. "You'd better leave a Cape man to tell that tale. The Ca'houns was gipsies frum 'way back." "Wal, I don't profess to be any elocutionist," Salters said. "I'm comin' to the moral o' things. That's jest abaout what aour Harve be! Ha'af on the taown, an' t'other ha'af blame fool; an' there's some'll believe he's a rich man. Yah!" "Did ye ever think how sweet 'twould be to sail wid a full crew o' Salterses?" said Long Jack. "Ha'af in the furrer an' other ha'af in the muck-heap, as Ca'houn did not say, an' makes out he's a fisherman!" A little laugh went round at Salters's expense. Disko held his tongue, and wrought over the log-book that he kept in a hatchet-faced, square hand; this was the kind of thing that ran on, page after soiled page: "July 17. This day thick fog and few fish. Made berth to northward. So ends this day. "July 18. This day comes in with thick fog. Caught a few fish. "July 19. This day comes in with light breeze from N. E. and fine weather. Made a berth to eastward. Caught plenty fish. "July 20. This, the Sabbath, comes in with fog and light winds. So ends this day. Total fish caught this week, 3,478." They never worked on Sundays, but shaved, and washed themselves if it were fine, and Pennsylvania sang hymns. Once or twice he suggested that, if it was not an impertinence, he thought he could preach a little. Uncle Salters nearly jumped down his throat at the mere notion, reminding him that he was not a preacher and mustn't think of such things. We'd hev him rememberin' Johnstown next," Salters explained, "an' what would happen then?" So they compromised on his reading aloud from a book called "Josephus." It was an old leather-bound volume, smelling of a hundred voyages, very solid and very like the Bible, but enlivened with accounts of battles and sieges; and they read it nearly from cover to cover. Otherwise Penn was a silent little body. He would not utter a word for three days on end sometimes, though he played checkers, listened to the songs, and laughed at the stories. When they tried to stir him up, he would answer. "I don't wish to seem unneighbourly, but it is because I have nothing to say. My head feels quite empty. I've almost forgotten my name." He would turn to Uncle Salters with an expectant smile. "Why, Pennsylvania Pratt," Salters would shout. "You'll fergit me next!" "No--never," Penn would say, shutting his lips firmly. "Pennsylvania Pratt, of course," he would repeat over and over. Sometimes it was Uncle Salters who forgot, and told him he was Haskins or Rich or McVitty; but Penn was equally content--till next time. He was always very tender with Harvey, whom he pitied both as a lost child and as a lunatic; and when Salters saw that Penn liked the boy, he relaxed, too. Salters was not an amiable person (he esteemed it his business to keep the boys in order); and the first time Harvey, in fear and trembling, on a still day, managed to shin up to the main-truck (Dan was behind him ready to help), he esteemed it his duty to hang Salters's big sea-boots up there--a sight of shame and derision to the nearest schooner. With Disko, Harvey took no liberties; not even when the old man dropped direct orders, and treated him, like the rest of the crew, to "Don't you want to do so and so?" and "Guess you'd better," and so forth. There was something about the clean-shaven lips and the puckered corners of the eyes that was mightily sobering to young blood. Disko showed him the meaning of the thumbed and pricked chart, which, he said, laid over any government publication whatsoever; led him, pencil in hand, from berth to berth over the whole string of banks--Le Have, Western, Banquereau, St. Pierre, Green, and Grand--talking "cod" meantime. Taught him, too, the principle on which the "hog-yoke" was worked. In this Harvey excelled Dan, for he had inherited a head for figures, and the notion of stealing information from one glimpse of the sullen Bank sun appealed to all his keen wits. For other sea-matters his age handicapped him. As Disko said, he should have begun when he was ten. Dan could bait up trawl or lay his hand on any rope in the dark; and at a pinch, when Uncle Salters had a gurry-sore on his palm, could dress down by sense of touch. He could steer in anything short of half a gale from the feel of the wind on his face, humouring the "We're Here" just when she needed it. These things he did as automatically as he skipped about the rigging, or made his dory a part of his own will and body. But he could not communicate his knowledge to Harvey. Still there was a good deal of general information flying about the schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the fo'c'sle or sat on the cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and rattled in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of whaling voyages in the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death agonies on the black, tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and boiling-down, and that terrible "nip" of '71, when twelve hundred men were made homeless on the ice in three days--wonderful tales, all true. But more wonderful still were his stories of the cod, and how they argued and reasoned on their private businesses deep down below the keel. Long Jack's tastes ran more to the supernatural. He held them silent with ghastly stories of the "Yo-hoes" on Monomoy Beach, that mock and terrify lonely clam-diggers; of sand-walkers and dune-haunters who were never properly buried; of hidden treasure on Fire Island guarded by the spirits of Kidd's men; of ships that sailed in the fog straight over Truro township; of that harbour in Maine where no one but a stranger will lie at anchor twice in a certain place because of a dead crew who row alongside at midnight with the anchor in the bow of their old-fashioned boat, whistling--not calling, but whistling--for the soul of the man who broke their rest. Harvey had a notion that the east coast of his native land, from Mount Desert south, was populated chiefly by people who took their horses there in the summer and entertained in country-houses with hardwood floors and Vantine portieres. He laughed at the ghost-tales,--not as much as he would have done a month before,--but ended by sitting still and shuddering. Tom Platt dealt with his interminable trip round the Horn on the old Ohio in the flogging days, with a navy more extinct than the dodo--the navy that passed away in the great war. He told them how red-hot shot are dropped into a cannon, a wad of wet clay between them and the cartridge; how they sizzle and reek when they strike wood, and how the little ship-boys of the Miss Jim Buck hove water over them and shouted to the fort to try again. And he told tales of blockade--long weeks of swaying at anchor, varied only by the departure and return of steamers that had used up their coal (there was no change for the sailing-ships); of gales and cold--cold that kept two hundred men, night and day, pounding and chopping at the ice on cable, blocks, and rigging, when the galley was as red-hot as the fort's shot, and men drank cocoa by the bucket. Tom Platt had no use for steam. His service closed when that thing was comparatively new. He admitted that it was a specious invention in time of peace, but looked hopefully for the day when sails should come back again on ten-thousand-ton frigates with hundred-and-ninety-foot booms. Manuel's talk was slow and gentle--all about pretty girls in Madeira washing clothes in the dry beds of streams, by moonlight, under waving bananas; legends of saints, and tales of queer dances or fights away in the cold Newfoundland baiting-ports. Salters was mainly agricultural; for, though he read "Josephus" and expounded it, his mission in life was to prove the value of green manures, and specially of clover, against every form of phosphate whatsoever. He grew libellous about phosphates; he dragged greasy "Orange Judd" books from his bunk and intoned them, wagging his finger at Harvey, to whom it was all Greek. Little Penn was so genuinely pained when Harvey made fun of Salters's lectures that the boy gave it up, and suffered in polite silence. That was very good for Harvey. The cook naturally did not join in these conversations. As a rule, he spoke only when it was absolutely necessary; but at times a queer gift of speech descended on him, and he held forth, half in Gaelic, half in broken English, an hour at a time. He was specially communicative with the boys, and he never withdrew his prophecy that one day Harvey would be Dan's master, and that he would see it. He told them of mail-carrying in the winter up Cape Breton way, of the dog-train that goes to Coudray, and of the ram-steamer Arctic, that breaks the ice between the mainland and Prince Edward Island. Then he told them stories that his mother had told him, of life far to the southward, where water never froze; and he said that when he died his soul would go to lie down on a warm white beach of sand with palm-trees waving above. That seemed to the boys a very odd idea for a man who had never seen a palm in his life. Then, too, regularly at each meal, he would ask Harvey, and Harvey alone, whether the cooking was to his taste; and this always made the "second half" laugh. Yet they had a great respect for the cook's judgment, and in their hearts considered Harvey something of a mascot by consequence. And while Harvey was taking in knowledge of new things at each pore and hard health with every gulp of the good air, the "We're Here" went her ways and did her business on the Bank, and the silvery-grey kenches of well-pressed fish mounted higher and higher in the hold. No one day's work was out of the common, but the average days were many and close together. Naturally, a man of Disko's reputation was closely watched--"scrowged upon," Dan called it--by his neighbours, but he had a very pretty knack of giving them the slip through the curdling, glidy fog-banks. Disko avoided company for two reasons. He wished to make his own experiments, in the first place; and in the second, he objected to the mixed gatherings of a fleet of all nations. The bulk of them were mainly Gloucester boats, with a scattering from Provincetown, Harwich, Chatham, and some of the Maine ports, but the crews drew from goodness knows where. Risk breeds recklessness, and when greed is added there are fine chances for every kind of accident in the crowded fleet, which, like a mob of sheep, is huddled round some unrecognised leader. "Let the two Jeraulds lead 'em," said Disko. "We're baound to lay among 'em fer a spell on the Eastern Shoals; though ef luck holds, we won't hev to lay long. Where we are naow, Harve, ain't considered noways good graound." "Ain't it?" said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down. "Shouldn't mind striking some poor ground for a change, then." "All the graound I want to see--don't want to strike her--is Eastern Point," said Dan. "Say, dad, it looks 's if we wouldn't hev to lay more'n two weeks on the Shoals. You'll meet all the comp'ny you want then, Harve. That's the time we begin to work. No reg'lar meals fer no one then. 'Mug-up when ye're hungry, an' sleep when ye can't keep awake. Good job you wasn't picked up a month later than you was, or we'd never ha' had you dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin." Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there. But seeing the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her. He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other business, and could even help others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power fog-horn--a machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant. They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble. "Squarerigger bellowin' fer his latitude," said Long Jack. The dripping red headsails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the "We're Here" rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand. The larger boat backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings. "Frenchman," said Uncle Salters, scornfully. "Miquelon boat from St. Malo." The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. "I'm most outer 'baccy, too, Disko." "Same here," said Tom Platt. "Hi! Backez vouz--backez vouz! Standez awayez, you butt-ended mucho-bono! Where you from--St. Malo, eh?" Ah, ha! Mucho bono! Oui! oui! Clos Poulet--St. Malo! St. Pierre et Miquelon," cried the other crowd, waving woollen caps and laughing. Then all together, "Bord! Bord!" "Bring up the board, Danny. Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres, exceptin' America's fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-nine's good enough fer them; an' I guess it's abaout right, too." Dan chalked the figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging to a chorus of mercis from the bark. "Seems kinder unneighbourly to let 'em swedge off like this," Salters suggested, feeling in his pockets. "Hev ye learned French then sence last trip'?" said Disko. "I don't want no more stone-ballast hove at us 'long o' your calm' Miquelon boats 'footy cochins,' same's you did off Le Have." "Harmon Rush he said that was the way to rise 'em. Plain United States is good enough fer me. We're all dretful short on terbakker. Young feller, don't you speak French?" "Oh, yes," said Harvey, valiantly; and he bawled: "Hi! Say! Arretez vous! Attendez! Nous sommes venant pour tabac." "Ah, tabac, tabac!" they cried, and laughed again. "That hit 'em. Let's heave a dory over, anyway," said Tom Platt. "I don't exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that goes, I guess. Come on, Harve, an' interpret." The raffle and confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark's black side was indescribable. Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring coloured prints of the Virgin--the Virgin of Newfoundland, they called her. Harvey found his French of no recognised Bank brand, and his conversation was limited to nods and grins. But Tom Platt waved his arms and got along swimmingly. The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade began. They had tobacco, plenty of it--American, that had never paid duty to France. They wanted chocolate and crackers. Harvey rowed back to arrange with the cook and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and cracker-bags were counted out by the Frenchman's wheel. It looked like a piratical division of loot; but Tom Platt came out of it roped with black pigtail and stuffed with cakes of chewing and smoking tobacco. Then those jovial mariners swung off into the mist, and the last Harvey heard was a gay chorus: "Par derriere chez ma tante, Il y a un bois joli, Et le rossignol y chante Et le jour et la nuit... Que donneriez vous, belle, Qui l'amènerait ici? Je donnerai Québec, Sorel et Saint Denis." "How was it my French didn't go, and your sign-talk did?" Harvey demanded when the barter had been distributed among the "We're Heres". "Sign-talk!" Platt guffawed. "Well, yes, 'twas sign-talk, but a heap older'n your French, Harve. Them French boats are chock-full o' Freemasons, an' that's why." "Are you a Freemason, then?" "Looks that way, don't it?" said the man-o'war's man, stuffing his pipe; and Harvey had another mystery of the deep sea to brood upon. CHAPTER VI The thing that struck him most was the exceedingly casual way in which some craft loafed about the broad Atlantic. Fishing-boats, as Dan said, were naturally dependent on the courtesy and wisdom of their neighbours; but one expected better things of steamers. That was after another interesting interview, when they had been chased for three miles by a big lumbering old cattle-boat, all boarded over on the upper deck, that smelt like a thousand cattle-pens. A very excited officer yelled at them through a speaking-trumpet, and she lay and lollopped helplessly on the water while Disko ran the "We're Here" under her lee and gave the skipper a piece of his mind. "Where might ye be--eh? Ye don't deserve to be anywheres. You barn-yard tramps go hoggin' the road on the high seas with no blame consideration fer your neighbours, an' your eyes in your coffee-cups instid o' in your silly heads." At this the skipper danced on the bridge and said something about Disko's own eyes. "We haven't had an observation for three days. D'you suppose we can run her blind?" he shouted. "Wa-al, I can," Disko retorted. "What's come to your lead'? Et it'? Can't ye smell bottom, or are them cattle too rank?" "What d'ye feed 'em?" said Uncle Salters with intense seriousness, for the smell of the pens woke all the farmer in him. "They say they fall off dretful on a v'yage. Dunno as it's any o' my business, but I've a kind o' notion that oil-cake broke small an' sprinkled--" "Thunder!" said a cattle-man in a red jersey as he looked over the side. "What asylum did they let His Whiskers out of?" "Young feller," Salters began, standing up in the fore-rigging, "let me tell yeou 'fore we go any further that I've--" The officer on the bridge took off his cap with immense politeness. "Excuse me," he said, "but I've asked for my reckoning. If the agricultural person with the hair will kindly shut his head, the sea-green barnacle with the wall-eye may perhaps condescend to enlighten us." "Naow you've made a show o' me, Salters," said Disko, angrily. He could not stand up to that particular sort of talk, and snapped out the latitude and longitude without more lectures. "'Well, that's a boat-load of lunatics, sure," said the skipper, as he rang up the engine-room and tossed a bundle of newspapers into the schooner. "Of all the blamed fools, next to you, Salters, him an' his crowd are abaout the likeliest I've ever seen," said Disko as the "We're Here" slid away. "I was jest givin' him my jedgment on lullsikin' round these waters like a lost child, an' you must cut in with your fool farmin'. Can't ye never keep things sep'rate?" Harvey, Dan, and the others stood back, winking one to the other and full of joy; but Disko and Salters wrangled seriously till evening, Salters arguing that a cattle-boat was practically a barn on blue water, and Disko insisting that, even if this were the case, decency and fisher-pride demanded that he should have kept "things sep'rate." Long Jack stood it in silence for a time,--an angry skipper makes an unhappy crew,--and then he spoke across the table after supper: "Fwhat's the good o' bodderin' fwhat they'll say?" said he. "They'll tell that tale ag'in' us fer years--that's all," said Disko. "Oil-cake sprinkled!" "With salt, o' course," said Salters, impenitent, reading the farming reports from a week-old New York paper. "It's plumb mortifyin' to all my feelin's," the skipper went on. "Can't see ut that way," said Long Jack, the peacemaker. "Look at here, Disko! Is there another packet afloat this day in this weather c'u'd ha' met a tramp an', over an' above givin' her her reckonin',--over an' above that, I say,--c'u'd ha' discoorsed wid her quite intelligent on the management av steers an' such at sea'? Forgit ut! Av coorse they will not. 'Twas the most compenjus conversation that iver accrued. Double game an' twice runnin'--all to us." Dan kicked Harvey under the table, and Harvey choked in his cup. "'Well," said Salters, who felt that his honour had been somewhat plastered, "I said I didn't know as 'twuz any business o' mine, 'fore I spoke." "An' right there," said Tom Platt, experienced in discipline and etiquette--"right there, I take it, Disko, you should ha' asked him to stop ef the conversation wuz likely, in your jedgment, to be anyways--what it shouldn't." "Dunno but that's so," said Disko, who saw his way to an honourable retreat from a fit of the dignities. "'Why, o' course it was so," said Salters, "you bein' skipper here; an' I'd cheerful hev stopped on a hint--not from any leadin' or conviction, but fer the sake o' bearin' an example to these two blame boys of aours." "Didn't I tell you, Harve, 'twould come araound to us 'fore we'd done'? Always those blame boys. But I wouldn't have missed the show fer a half-share in a halibutter," Dan whispered. "Still, things should ha' been kep' sep'rate," said Disko, and the light of new argument lit in Salters's eye as he crumbled cut plug into his pipe. "There's a power av vartue in keepin' things sep'rate," said Long Jack, intent on stilling the storm. "That's fwhat Steyning of Steyning and Hare's f'und when he sent Counahan fer skipper on the Marilla D. Kuhn, instid o' Cap. Newton that was took with inflam't'ry rheumatism an' couldn't go. Counahan the Navigator we called him." "Nick Counahan he never went aboard fer a night 'thout a pond o' rum somewheres in the manifest," said Tom Platt, playing up to the lead. "He used to bum araound the c'mission houses to Boston lookin' fer the Lord to make him captain of a towboat on his merits. Sam Coy, up to Atlantic Avenoo, give him his board free fer a year or more on account of his stories. Counahan the Navigator! Tck! Tck! Dead these fifteen year, ain't he?" "Seventeen, I guess. He died the year the Caspar McVeagh was built; but he could niver keep things sep'rate. Steyning tuk him fer the reason the thief tuk the hot stove--bekaze there was nothin' else that season. The men was all to the Banks, and Counahan he whacked up an iverlastin' hard crowd fer crew. Rum! Ye c'u'd ha' floated the Marilla, insurance and all, in fwhat they stowed aboard her. They lef' Boston Harbour for the great Grand Bank wid a roarin' nor'wester behind 'em an' all hands full to the bung. An' the hivens looked after thim, for divil a watch did they set, an' divil a rope did they lay hand to, till they'd seen the bottom av a fifteen-gallon cask o' bug-juice. That was about wan week, so far as Counahan remembered. (If' I c'u'd only tell the tale as he told ut!) All that whoile the wind blew like ould glory, an' the Marilla--'twas summer, and they'd give her a foretopmast--struck her gait and kept ut. Then Counahan tuk the hog-yoke an' thrembled over it for a whoile, an' made out, betwix' that an' the chart an' the singin' in his head, that they was to the south'ard o' Sable Island, gettin' along glorious, but speakin' nothin'. Then they broached another keg, an' quit speculatin' about anythin' fer another spell. The Marilla she lay down whin she dropped Boston Light, and she never lufted her lee-rail up to that time--hustlin' on one an' the same slant. But they saw no weed, nor gulls, nor schooners; an' prisintly they obsarved they'd been out a matter o' fourteen days, and they mistrusted the Bank had suspinded payment. So they sounded, an' got sixty fathom. 'That's me,' sez Counahan. 'That's me iv'ry time! I've run her slat on the Bank fer you, an' when we get thirty fathom we'll turn in like little men. Counahan is the b'y,' sez he. 'Counahan the Navigator!' "Nex' cast they got ninety. Sez Counahan: 'Either the lead-line's tuk too stretchin' or else the Bank's sunk.' "They hauled ut up, bein' just about in that state when ut seemed right an' reasonable, and sat down on the deck countin' the knots, an' gettin' her snarled up hijjus. The Marilla she'd struck her gait, and she hild ut, an' prisintly along come a tramp, an' Counahan spoke her. "'Hey ye seen any fishin'-boats now?' sez he, quite casual. "'There's lashin's av them off the Irish coast,' sez the tramp. "Aah! go shake yerself,' sez Counahan. 'Fwhat have I to do wid the Irish coast?' "'Then fwhat are ye doin' here?' sez the tramp. "'Sufferin' Christianity!' sez Counahan (he always said that whin his pumps sucked an' he was not feelin' good)--'Sufferin' Christianity!' he sez, 'where am I at?' "'Thirty-five mile west-sou'west o' Cape Clear,' sez the tramp, 'if that's any consolation to you.' "Counahan fetched wan jump, four feet sivin inches, measured by the cook. "'Consolation!' sez he, bould ez brass. 'D'ye take me fer a dialect? Thirty-five mile from Cape Clear, an' fourteen days from Boston Light. Sufferin' Christianity, 'tis a record, an' by the same token I've a mother to Skibbereen!' Think av ut! The gall av um! But ye see he could niver keep things sep'rate. "The crew was mostly Cork an' Kerry men, barrin' one Marylander that wanted to go back, but they called him a mutineer, an' they ran the ould Marilla into Skibbereen, an' they had an illigant time visitin' around with frinds on the ould sod fer a week. Thin they wint back, an' it cost 'em two an' thirty days to beat to the Banks again. 'Twas gettin' on towards fall, and grub was low, so Counahan ran her back to Boston, wid no more bones to ut." "And what did the firm say?" Harvey demanded. "Fwhat could they'? The fish was on the Banks, an' Counahan was at T-wharf talkin' av his record trip east! They tuk their satisfaction out av that, an' ut all came av not keepin' the crew and the rum sep'rate in the first place; an' confusin' Skibbereen wid 'Queereau, in the second. Counahan the Navigator, rest his sowl! He was an imprompju citizen! "Once I was in the Lucy Holmes," said Manuel, in his gentle voice. "They not want any of her feesh in Gloucester. Eh, wha-at? Give us no price. So we go across the water, and think to sell to some Fayal man. Then it blow fresh, and we cannot see well. Eh, wha-at? Then it blow some more fresh, and we go down below and drive very fast--no one know where. By-and-by we see a land, and it get some hot. Then come two, three nigger in a brick. Eh, wha-at? We ask where we are, and they say--now, what you all think?" "Grand Canary," said Disko, after a moment. Manuel shook his head, smiling. "Blanco," said Tom Platt. "No. Worse than that. We was below Bezagos, and the brick she was from Liberia! So we sell our feesh there! Not bad, so? Eh, wha-at?" "Can a schooner like this go right across to Africa?" said Harvey. "Go araound the Horn ef there's anythin' worth goin' fer, and the grub holds aout," said Disko. "My father he run his packet, an' she was a kind o' pinkey, abaout fifty ton, I guess,--the Rupert,--he run her over to Greenland's icy mountains the year ha'af our fleet was tryin' after cod there. An' what's more, he took my mother along with him,--to show her haow the money was earned, I presoom,--an' they was all iced up, an' I was born at Disko. Don't remember nothin' abaout it, o' course. We come back when the ice eased in the spring, but they named me fer the place. Kinder mean trick to put up on a baby, but we're all baound to make mistakes in aour lives." "Sure! Sure!" said Salters, wagging his head. "All baound to make mistakes, an' I tell you two boys here thet after you've made a mistake--ye don't make fewer'n a hundred a day--the next best thing's to own up to it like men." Long Jack winked one tremendous wink that embraced all hands except Disko and Salters, and the incident was closed. Then they made berth after berth to the northward, the dories out almost every day, running along the east edge of the Grand Bank in thirty-to forty-fathom water, and fishing steadily. It was here Harvey first met the squid, who is one of the best cod-baits, but uncertain in his moods. They were waked out of their bunks one black night by yells of "Squid O!" from Salters, and for an hour and a half every soul aboard hung over his squid-jig--a piece of lead painted red and armed at the lower end with a circle of pins bent backward like half-opened umbrella ribs. The squid--for some unknown reason--likes, and wraps himself round, this thing, and is hauled up ere he can escape from the pins. But as he leaves his home he squirts first water and next ink into his captor's face; and it was curious to see the men weaving their heads from side to side to dodge the shot. They were as black as sweeps when the flurry ended; but a pile of fresh squid lay on the deck, and the large cod thinks very well of a little shiny piece of squid-tentacle at the tip of a clam-baited hook. Next day they caught many fish, and met the Carrie Pitman, to whom they shouted their luck, and she wanted to trade--seven cod for one fair-sized squid; but Disko would not agree at the price, and the Carrie dropped sullenly to leeward and anchored half a mile away, in the hope of striking on to some for herself. Disko said nothing till after supper, when he sent Dan and Manuel out to buoy the "We're Here's" cable and announced his intention of turning in with the broad-axe. Dan naturally repeated these remarks to a dory from the Carrie, who wanted to know why they were buoying their cable, since they were not on rocky bottom. "Dad sez he wouldn't trust a ferryboat within five mile o' you," Dan howled cheerfully. "Why don't he git out, then'? Who's hinderin'?" said the other. "Cause you've jest the same ez lee-bowed him, an' he don't take that from any boat, not to speak o' sech a driftin' gurry-butt as you be." "She ain't driftin' any this trip," said the man, angrily, for the Carrie Pitman had an unsavoury reputation for breaking her ground-tackle. "Then haow d'you make berths?" said Dan. "It's her best p'int o' sailin'. An' ef she's quit driftin', what in thunder are you doin' with a new jib-boom?" That shot went home. "Hey, you Portugoosy organ-grinder, take your monkey back to Gloucester. Go back to school, Dan Troop," was the answer. "O-ver-alls! O-ver-alls!" yelled Dan, who knew that one of the Carrie's crew had worked in an overall factory the winter before. "Shrimp! Gloucester shrimp! Git aout, you Novy!" To call a Gloucester man a Nova Scotian is not well received. Dan answered in kind. "Novy yourself, ye Scrabble-towners! ye Chatham wreckers' Git aout with your brick in your stock in'!" And the forces separated, but Chatham had the worst of it. "I knew haow 'twould be," said Disko. "She's drawed the wind raound already. Some one oughter put a deesist on thet packet. She'll snore till midnight, an' jest when we're gittin' our sleep she'll strike adrift. Good job we ain't crowded with craft hereaways. But I ain't goin' to up anchor fer Chatham. She may hold." The wind, which had hauled round, rose at sundown and blew steadily. There was not enough sea, though, to disturb even a dory's tackle, but the Carrie Pitman was a law unto herself. At the end of the boys' watch they heard the crack-crack-crack of a huge muzzle-loading revolver aboard her. "Glory, glory, hallelujah!" sung Dan. "Here she comes, dad; butt-end first, walkin' in her sleep same's she done on 'Queereau." Had she been any other boat Disko would have taken his chances, but now he cut the cable as the Carrie Pitman, with all the North Atlantic to play in, lurched down directly upon them. The "We're Here", under jib and riding-sail, gave her no more room than was absolutely necessary,--Disko did not wish to spend a week hunting for his cable,--but scuttled up into the wind as the Carrie passed within easy hail, a silent and angry boat, at the mercy of a raking broadside of Bank chaff. "Good evenin'," said Disko, raising his headgear, "an' haow does your garden grow?" "Go to Ohio an' hire a mule," said Uncle Salters. "We don't want no farmers here." "Will I lend you my dory-anchor?" cried Long Jack. "Unship your rudder an' stick it in the mud," said Tom Platt. "Say!" Dan's voice rose shrill and high, as he stood on the wheel-box. "Sa-ay! Is there a strike in the o-ver-all factory; or hev they hired girls, ye Shackamaxons?" "Veer out the tiller-lines," cried Harvey, "and nail 'em to the bottom." That was a salt-flavoured jest he had been put up to by Tom Platt. Manuel leaned over the stern and yelled; "Johnna Morgan play the organ! Ahaaaa!" He flourished his broad thumb with a gesture of unspeakable contempt and derision, while little Penn covered himself with glory by piping up: "Gee a little! Hssh! Come here. Haw!" They rode on their chain for the rest of the night, a short, snappy, uneasy motion, as Harvey found, and wasted half the forenoon recovering the cable. But the boys agreed the trouble was cheap at the price of triumph and glory, and they thought with grief over all the beautiful things that they might have said to the discomfited Carrie. CHAPTER VII Next day they fell in with more sails, all circling slowly from the east northerly towards the west. But just when they expected to make the shoals by the Virgin the fog shut down, and they anchored, surrounded by the tinklings of invisible bells. There was not much fishing, but occasionally dory met dory in the fog and exchanged news. That night, a little before dawn, Dan and Harvey, who had been sleeping most of the day, tumbled out to "hook" fried pies. There was no reason why they should not have taken them openly; but they tasted better so, and it made the cook angry. The heat and smell below drove them on deck with their plunder, and they found Disko at the bell, which he handed over to Harvey. "Keep her goin'," said he. "I mistrust I hear somethin'. Ef it's anything, I'm best where I am so's to get at things." It was a forlorn little jingle; the thick air seemed to pinch it off; and in the pauses Harvey heard the muffled shriek of a liner's siren, and he knew enough of the Banks to know what that meant. It came to him, with horrible distinctness, how a boy in a cherry-coloured jersey--he despised fancy blazers now with all a fisherman's contempt--how an ignorant, rowdy boy had once said it would be "great" if a steamer ran down a fishing-boat. That boy had a state-room with a hot and cold bath, and spent ten minutes each morning picking over a gilt-edged bill of fare. And that same boy--no, his very much older brother--was up at four of the dim dawn in streaming, crackling oilskins, hammering, literally for the dear life, on a bell smaller than the steward's breakfast-bell, while somewhere close at hand a thirty-foot steel stem was storming along at twenty miles an hour! The bitterest thought of all was that there were folks asleep in dry, upholstered cabins who would never learn that they had massacred a boat before breakfast. So Harvey rang the bell. "Yes, they slow daown one turn o' their blame propeller," said Dan, applying himself to Manuel's conch, "fer to keep inside the law, an' that's consolin' when we're all at the bottom. Hark to her' She's a humper!" "Aoooo--whoooo--whupp!" went the siren. "Wingle--tingle--tink," went the bell. "Graaa--ouch!" went the conch, while sea and sky were all milled up in milky fog. Then Harvey felt that he was near a moving body, and found himself looking up and up at the wet edge of a cliff-like bow, leaping, it seemed, directly over the schooner. A jaunty little feather of water curled in front of it, and as it lifted it showed a long ladder of Roman numerals--XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII., and so forth--on a salmon-coloured, gleaming side. It tilted forward and downward with a heart-stilling "Ssssooo"; the ladder disappeared; a line of brass-rimmed port-holes flashed past; a jet of Steam puffed in Harvey's helplessly uplifted hands; a spout of hot water roared along the rail of the "We're Here", and the little schooner staggered and shook in a rush of screw-torn water, as a liner's stern vanished in the fog. Harvey got ready to faint or be sick, or both, when he heard a crack like a trunk thrown on a sidewalk, and, all small in his ear, a far-away telephone voice drawling: "Heave to! You've sunk us!" "Is it us?" he gasped. "No! Boat out yonder. Ring! We're goin' to look," said Dan, running out a dory. In half a minute all except Harvey, Penn, and the cook were overside and away. Presently a schooner's stump-foremast, snapped clean across, drifted past the bows. Then an empty green dory came by, knocking on the 'We're Here's' side, as though she wished to be taken in. Then followed something, face down, in a blue jersey, but it was not the whole of a man. Penn changed colour and caught his breath with a click. Harvey pounded despairingly at the bell, for he feared they might be sunk at any minute, and he jumped at Dan's hail as the crew came back. "The Jennie Cushman," said Dan, hysterically, "cut clean in half--graound up an' trompled on at that! Not a quarter of a mile away. Dad's got the old man. There ain't any one else, and--there was his son, too. Oh, Harve, Harve, I can't stand it! I've seen--" He dropped his head on his arms and sobbed while the others dragged a grey-headed man aboard. "What did you pick me up for?" the stranger groaned. "Disko, what did you pick me up for?" Disko dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder, for the man's eyes were wild and his lips trembled as he stared at the silent crew. Then up and spoke Pennsylvania Pratt, who was also Haskins or Rich or McVitty when Uncle Salters forgot; and his face was changed on him from the face of a fool to the countenance of an old, wise man, and he said in a strong voice: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord! I was--I am a minister of the Gospel. Leave him to me." "Oh, you be, be you?" said the man. "Then pray my son back to me! Pray back a nine-thousand-dollar boat an' a thousand quintal of fish. If you'd left me alone my widow could ha' gone on to the Provident an' worked fer her board, an' never known--an' never known. Now I'll hev to tell her." "There ain't nothin' to say," said Disko. "Better lie down a piece, Jason Olley." When a man has lost his only son, his summer's work, and his means of livelihood, in thirty counted seconds, it is hard to give consolation. "All Gloucester men, wasn't they," said Tom Platt, fiddling helplessly with a dory-becket. "Oh, that don't make no odds," said Jason, wringing the wet from his beard. "I'll be rowin' summer boarders araound East Gloucester this fall." He rolled heavily to the rail, singing. "Happy birds that sing and fly Round thine altars, O Most High!" "Come with me. Come below!" said Penn, as though he had a right to give orders. Their eyes met and fought for a quarter of a minute. "I dunno who you be, but I'll come," said Jason, submissively. "Mebbe I'll get back some o' the--some o' the--nine thousand dollars." Penn led him into the cabin and slid the door behind. "That ain't Penn," cried Uncle Salters. "It's Jacob Boiler, an'--he's remembered Johnstown! I never seed such eyes in any livin' man's head. What's to do naow? What'll I do naow?" They could hear Penn's voice and Jason's together. Then Penn's went on alone, and Salters slipped off his hat, for Penn was praying. Presently the little man came up the steps, huge drops of sweat on his face, and looked at the crew. Dan was still sobbing by the wheel. "He don't know us," Salters groaned. "It's all to do over again, checkers and everything--an' what'll he say to me?" Penn spoke; they could hear that it was to strangers. "I have prayed," said he. "Our people believe in prayer. I have prayed for the life of this man's son. Mine were drowned before my eyes--she and my eldest and--the others. Shall a man be more wise than his Maker? I prayed never for their lives, but I have prayed for this man's son, and he will surely be sent him." Salters looked pleadingly at Penn to see if he remembered. "How long have I been mad?" Penn asked suddenly. His mouth was twitching. "Pshaw, Penn! You weren't never mad," Salters began. "Only a little distracted like." "I saw the houses strike the bridge before the fires broke out. I do not remember any more. How long ago is that?" "I can't stand it! I can't stand it!" cried Dan, and Harvey whimpered in sympathy. "Abaout five year," said Disko, in a shaking voice. "Then I have been a charge on some one for every day of that time. Who was the man?" Disko pointed to Salters. "Ye hain't--ye hain't!" cried the sea-farmer, twisting his hands together. "Ye've more'n earned your keep twice-told; an' there's money owin' you, Penn, besides ha'af o' my quarter-share in the boat, which is yours fer value received." "You are good men. I can see that in your faces. But--" "Mother av Mercy," whispered Long Jack, "an' he's been wid us all these trips! He's clean bewitched." A schooner's bell struck up alongside, and a voice hailed through the fog: "O Disko! 'Heard abaout the Jennie Cushman?" "They have found his son," cried Penn. "Stand you still and see the salvation of the Lord!" "Got Jason aboard here," Disko answered, but his voice quavered. "There--warn't any one else?" "We've f'und one, though. 'Run acrost him snarled up in a mess o' lumber thet might ha' bin a fo'c'sle. His head's cut some." "Who is he?" The "We're Heres'" heart-beats answered one another. "Guess it's young Olley," the voice drawled. Penn raised his hands and said something in German. Harvey could have sworn that a bright sun was shining upon his lifted face; but the drawl went on: "Sa-ay! You fellers guyed us consid'rable t'other night." "We don't feel like guyin' any now," said Disko. "I know it; but to tell the honest truth we was kinder--kinder driftin' when we run ag'in' young Olley." It was the irrepressible Carrie Pitman, and a roar of unsteady laughter went up from the deck of the "We're Here". "Hedn't you 'baout's well send the old man aboard? We're runnin' in fer more bait an' graound-tackle. 'Guess you won't want him, anyway, an' this blame windlass work makes us short-handed. We'll take care of him. He married my woman's aunt." "I'll give you anything in the boat," said Troop. "Don't want nothin', 'less, mebbe, an anchor that'll hold. Say! Young Olley's gittin' kinder baulky an' excited. Send the old man along." Penn waked him from his stupor of despair, and Tom Platt rowed him over. He went away without a word of thanks, not knowing what was to come; and the fog closed over all. "And now," said Penn, drawing a deep breath as though about to preach. "And now"--the erect body sank like a sword driven home into the scabbard; the light faded from the overbright eyes; the voice returned to its usual pitiful little titter--"and now," said Pennsylvania Pratt, "do you think it's too early for a little game of checkers, Mr. Salters?" "The very thing--the very thing I was goin' to say myself," cried Salters, promptly. "It beats all, Penn, how you git on to what's in a man's mind." The little fellow blushed and meekly followed Salters forward. "Up anchor! Hurry! Let's quit these crazy waters," shouted Disko, and never was he more swiftly obeyed. "Now what in creation d'ye suppose is the meanin' o' that all?" said Long Jack, when they were working through the fog once more, damp, dripping, and bewildered. "The way I sense it," said Disko, at the wheel, "is this: The Jennie Cushman business comin' on an empty stummick--" "He--we saw one of them go by," sobbed Harvey. "An' that, o' course, kinder hove him outer water, Julluk runnin' a craft ashore; hove him right aout, I take it, to rememberin' Johnstown an' Jacob Boiler an' such-like reminiscences. Well, consolin' Jason there held him up a piece, same's shorin' up a boat. Then, bein' weak, them props slipped an' slipped, an' he slided down the ways, an' naow he's water-borne ag'in. That's haow I sense it." They decided that Disko was entirely correct. "'Twould ha' bruk Salters all up," said Long Jack, "if Penn had stayed Jacob Bollerin'. Did ye see his face when Penn asked who he'd been charged on all these years'? How is ut, Salters?" "Asleep--dead asleep. Turned in like a child," Salters replied, tiptoeing aft. "There won't be no grub till he wakes, natural. Did ye ever see sech a gift in prayer? He everlastin'ly hiked young Olley outer the ocean. Thet's my belief. Jason was tur'ble praoud of his boy, an' I mistrusted all along 'twas a jedgment on worshippin' vain idols." "There's others jest as sot," said Disko. "That's dif'runt," Salters retorted quickly. "Penn's not all caulked, an' I ain't only but doin' my duty by him." They waited, those hungry men, three hours, till Penn reappeared with a smooth face and a blank mind. He said he believed that he had been dreaming. Then he wanted to know why they were so silent, and they could not tell him. Disko worked all hands mercilessly for the next three or four days; and when they could not go out, turned them into the hold to stack the ship's stores into smaller compass, to make more room for the fish. The packed mass ran from the cabin partition to the sliding door behind the fo'c'sle stove; and Disko showed how there is great art in stowing cargo so as to bring a schooner to her best draft. The crew were thus kept lively till they recovered their spirits; and Harvey was tickled with a rope's end by Long Jack for being, as the Galway man said, "sorrowful as a sick cat over fwhat couldn't be helped." He did a great deal of thinking in those dreary days; and told Dan what he thought, and Dan agreed with him--even to the extent of asking for fried pies instead of hooking them. But a week later the two nearly upset the Hattie S. in a wild attempt to stab a shark with an old bayonet tied to a stick. The grim brute rubbed alongside the dory begging for small fish, and between the three of them it was a mercy they all got off alive. At last, after playing blindman's-buff in the fog, there came a morning when Disko shouted down the fo'c'sle: "Hurry, boys! We're in taown!" CHAPTER VIII To the end of his days, Harvey will never forget that sight. The sun was just clear of the horizon they had not seen for nearly a week, and his low red light struck into the riding-sails of three fleets of anchored schooners--one to the north, one to the westward, and one to the south. There must have been nearly a hundred of them, of every possible make and build, with, far away, a square-rigged Frenchman, all bowing and courtesying one to the other. From every boat dories were dropping away like bees from a crowded hive; and the clamour of voices, the rattling of ropes and blocks, and the splash of the oars carried for miles across the heaving water. The sails turned all colours, black, pearly-grey, and white, as the sun mounted; and more boats swung up through the mists to the southward. The dories gathered in clusters, separated, reformed, and broke again, all heading one way; while men hailed and whistled and cat-called and sang, and the water was speckled with rubbish thrown overboard. "It's a town," said Harvey. "Disko was right. It is a town!" "I've seen smaller," said Disko. "There's about a thousand men here; an' yonder's the Virgin." He pointed to a vacant space of greenish sea, where there were no dories. The "We're Here" skirted round the northern squadron, Disko waving his hand to friend after friend, and anchored as neatly as a racing yacht at the end of the season. The Bank fleet pass good seamanship in silence; but a bungler is jeered all along the line. "Jest in time fer the caplin," cried the Mary Chilton. "'Salt 'most wet?" asked the King Philip. "Hey, Tom Platt! Come t' supper to-night?" said the Henry Clay; and so questions and answers flew back and forth. Men had met one another before, dory-fishing in the fog, and there is no place for gossip like the Bank fleet. They all seemed to know about Harvey's rescue, and asked if he were worth his salt yet. The young bloods jested with Dan, who had a lively tongue of his own, and inquired after their health by the town--nicknames they least liked. Manuel's countrymen jabbered at him in their own language; and even the silent cook was seen riding the jib-boom and shouting Gaelic to a friend as black as himself. After they had buoyed the cable--all around the Virgin is rocky bottom, and carelessness means chafed ground-tackle and danger from drifting--after they had buoyed the cable, their dories went forth to join the mob of boats anchored about a mile away. The schooners rocked and dipped at a safe distance, like mother ducks watching their brood, while the dories behaved like mannerless ducklings. As they drove into the confusion, boat banging boat, Harvey's ears tingled at the comments on his rowing. Every dialect from Labrador to Long Island, with Portuguese, Neapolitan, Lingua Franca, French, and Gaelic, with songs and shoutings and new oaths, rattled round him, and he seemed to be the butt of it all. For the first time in his life he felt shy--perhaps that came from living so long with only the "We're Heres"--among the scores of wild faces that rose and fell with the reeling small craft. A gentle, breathing swell, three furlongs from trough to barrel, would quietly shoulder up a string of variously painted dories. They hung for an instant, a wonderful frieze against the sky-line, and their men pointed and hailed, Next moment the open mouths, waving arms, and bare chests disappeared, while on another swell came up an entirely new line of characters like paper figures in a toy theatre. So Harvey stared. "Watch out!" said Dan, flourishing a dip-net. "When I tell you dip, you dip. The caplin'll school any time from naow on. Where'll we lay, Tom Platt?" Pushing, shoving, and hauling, greeting old friends here and warning old enemies there, Commodore Tom Platt led his little fleet well to leeward of the general crowd, and immediately three or four men began to haul on their anchors with intent to lee-bow the "We're Heres". But a yell of laughter went up as a dory shot from her station with exceeding speed, its occupant pulling madly on the roding. "Give her slack!" roared twenty voices. "Let him shake it out." "What's the matter?" said Harvey, as the boat flashed away to the southward. "He's anchored, isn't he?" "Anchored, sure enough, but his graound-tackle's kinder shifty," said Dan, laughing. "Whale's fouled it. . . . Dip, Harve! Here they come!" The sea round them clouded and darkened, and then frizzed up in showers of tiny silver fish, and over a space of five or six acres the cod began to leap like trout in May; while behind the cod three or four broad grey-black backs broke the water into boils. Then everybody shouted and tried to haul up his anchor to get among the school, and fouled his neighbour's line and said what was in his heart, and dipped furiously with his dip-net, and shrieked cautions and advice to his companions, while the deep fizzed like freshly opened soda-water, and cod, men, and whales together flung in upon the luckless bait. Harvey was nearly knocked overboard by the handle of Dan's net. But in all the wild tumult he noticed, and never forgot, the wicked, set little eye--something like a circus elephant's eye--of a whale that drove along almost level with the water, and, so he said, winked at him. Three boats found their rodings fouled by these reckless mid-sea hunters, and were towed half a mile ere their horses shook the line free. Then the caplin moved off and five minutes later there was no sound except the splash of the sinkers overside, the flapping of the cod, and the whack of the muckles as the men stunned them. It was wonderful fishing. Harvey could see the glimmering cod below, swimming slowly in droves, biting as steadily as they swam. Bank law strictly forbids more than one hook on one line when the dories are on the Virgin or the Eastern Shoals; but so close lay the boats that even single hooks snarled, and Harvey found himself in hot argument with a gentle, hairy Newfoundlander on one side and a howling Portuguese on the other. Worse than any tangle of fishing-lines was the confusion of the dory-rodings below water. Each man had anchored where it seemed good to him, drifting and rowing round his fixed point. As the fish struck on less quickly, each man wanted to haul up and get to better ground; but every third man found himself intimately connected with some four or five neighbours. To cut another's roding is crime unspeakable on the Banks; yet it was done, and done without detection, three or four times that day. Tom Platt caught a Maine man in the black act and knocked him over the gunwale with an oar, and Manuel served a fellow-countryman in the same way. But Harvey's anchor-line was cut, and so was Penn's, and they were turned into relief-boats to carry fish to the "We're Here" as the dories filled. The caplin schooled once more at twilight, when the mad clamour was repeated; and at dusk they rowed back to dress down by the light of kerosene-lamps on the edge of the pen. It was a huge pile, and they went to sleep while they were dressing. Next day several boats fished right above the cap of the Virgin; and Harvey, with them, looked down on the very weed of that lonely rock, which rises to within twenty feet of the surface. The cod were there in legions, marching solemnly over the leathery kelp. When they bit, they bit all together; and so when they stopped. There was a slack time at noon, and the dories began to search for amusement. It was Dan who sighted the Hope of Prague just coming up, and as her boats joined the company they were greeted with the question: "Who's the meanest man in the Fleet?" Three hundred voices answered cheerily: "Nick Bra-ady." It sounded an organ chant. "Who stole the lamp-wicks?" That was Dan's contribution. "Nick Bra-ady," sang the boats. "Who biled the salt bait fer soup?" This was an unknown backbiter a quarter of a mile away. Again the joyful chorus. Now, Brady was not especially mean, but he had that reputation, and the Fleet made the most of it. Then they discovered a man from a Truro boat who, six years before, had been convicted of using a tackle with five or six hooks--a "scrowger," they call it--on the Shoals. Naturally, he had been christened "Scrowger Jim"; and though he had hidden himself on the Georges ever since, he found his honours waiting for him full blown. They took it up in a sort of fire-cracker chorus: "Jim! O Jim! Jim! O Jim! Sssscrowger Jim!" That pleased everybody. And when a poetical Beverly man--he had been making it up all day, and talked about it for weeks--sang, "The Carrie Pitman's anchor doesn't hold her for a cent!" the dories felt that they were indeed fortunate. Then they had to ask that Beverly man how he was off for beans, because even poets must not have things all their own way. Every schooner and nearly every man got it in turn. Was there a careless or dirty cook anywhere? The dories sang about him and his food. Was a schooner badly found? The Fleet was told at full length. Had a man hooked tobacco from a messmate? He was named in meeting; the name tossed from roller to roller. Disko's infallible judgments, Long Jack's market-boat that he had sold years ago, Dan's sweetheart (oh, but Dan was an angry boy!), Penn's bad luck with dory-anchors, Salters's views on manure, Manuel's little slips from virtue ashore, and Harvey's ladylike handling of the oar--all were laid before the public; and as the fog fell around them in silvery sheets beneath the sun, the voices sounded like a bench of invisible judges pronouncing sentence. The dories roved and fished and squabbled till a swell underran the sea. Then they drew more apart to save their sides, and some one called that if the swell continued the Virgin would break. A reckless Galway man with his nephew denied this, hauled up anchor, and rowed over the very rock itself. Many voices called them to come away, while others dared them to hold on. As the smooth-backed rollers passed to the south-ward, they hove the dory high and high into the mist, and dropped her in ugly, sucking, dimpled water, where she spun round her anchor, within a foot or two of the hidden rock. It was playing with death for mere bravado; and the boats looked on in uneasy silence till Long Jack rowed up behind his countrymen and quietly cut their roding. "Can't ye hear ut knockin'?" he cried. "Pull for your miserable lives! Pull!" The men swore and tried to argue as the boat drifted; but the next swell checked a little, like a man tripping on a carpet. There was a deep sob and a gathering roar, and the Virgin flung up a couple of acres of foaming water, white, furious, and ghastly over the shoal sea. Then all the boats greatly applauded Long Jack, and the Galway men held their tongue. "Ain't it elegant?" said Dan, bobbing like a young seal at home. "She'll break about once every ha'af hour now, 'less the swell piles up good. What's her reg'lar time when she's at work, Tom Platt?" "Once ivry fifteen minutes, to the tick. Harve, you've seen the greatest thing on the Banks; an' but for Long Jack you'd seen some dead men too." There came a sound of merriment where the fog lay thicker and the schooners were ringing their bells. A big bark nosed cautiously out of the mist, and was received with shouts and cries of, "Come along, darlin'," from the Irishry. "Another Frenchman?" said Harvey. "Hain't you eyes? She's a Baltimore boat; goin' in fear an' tremblin'," said Dan. "We'll guy the very sticks out of her. 'Guess it's the fust time her skipper ever met up with the Fleet this way." She was a black, buxom, eight-hundred-ton craft. Her mainsail was looped up, and her topsail flapped undecidedly in what little wind was moving. Now a bark is feminine beyond all other daughters of the sea, and this tall, hesitating creature, with her white and gilt figurehead, looked just like a bewildered woman half lifting her skirts to cross a muddy street under the jeers of bad little boys. That was very much her situation. She knew she was somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Virgin, had caught the roar of it, and was, therefore, asking her way. This is a small part of what she heard from the dancing dories: "The Virgin? Fwhat are you talk in' of'? This is Le Have on a Sunday mornin'. Go home an' sober up." "Go home, ye tarrapin! Go home an' tell 'em we're comin'." Half a dozen voices together, in a most tuneful chorus, as her stern went down with a roll and a bubble into the troughs: "Thay-aah--she--strikes!" "Hard up! Hard up fer your life! You're on top of her now." "Daown! Hard daown! Let go everything!" "All hands to the pumps!" "Daown jib an' pole her!" Here the skipper lost his temper and said things. Instantly fishing was suspended to answer him, and he heard many curious facts about his boat and her next port of call. They asked him if he were insured; and whence he had stolen his anchor, because, they said, it belonged to the Carrie Pitman; they called his boat a mud-scow, and accused him of dumping garbage to frighten the fish; they offered to tow him and charge it to his wife; and one audacious youth slipped almost under the counter, smacked it with his open palm, and yelled: "Gid up, Buck!" The cook emptied a pan of ashes on him, and he replied with cod-heads. The bark's crew fired small coal from the galley, and the dories threatened to come aboard and "razee" her. They would have warned her at once had she been in real peril; but, seeing her well clear of the Virgin, they made the most of their chances. The fun was spoilt when the rock spoke again, a half-mile to windward, and the tormented bark set everything that would draw and went her ways; but the dories felt that the honours lay with them. All that night the Virgin roared hoarsely and next morning, over an angry, white-headed sea, Harvey saw the Fleet with flickering masts waiting for a lead. Not a dory was hove out till ten o'clock, when the two Jeraulds of the 'Day's Eye', imagining a lull which did not exist, set the example. In a minute half the boats were out and bobbing in the cockly swells, but Troop kept the "We're Heres" at work dressing-down. He saw no sense in "dares"; and as the storm grew that evening they had the pleasure of receiving wet strangers only too glad to make any refuge in the gale. The boys stood by the dory-tackles with lanterns, the men ready to haul, one eye cocked for the sweeping wave that would make them drop everything and hold on for the dear life. Out of the dark would come a yell of "Dory, dory!" They would hook up and haul in a drenched man and a half-sunk boat, till their decks were littered down with nests of dories and the bunks were full. Five times in their watch did Harvey, with Dan, jump at the foregaff where it lay lashed on the boom, and cling with arms, legs, and teeth to rope and spar and sodden canvas as a big wave filled the decks. One dory was smashed to pieces, and the sea pitched the man head first on to the decks, cutting his forehead open; and about dawn, when the racing seas glimmered white all along their cold edges, another man, blue and ghastly, crawled in with a broken hand, asking news of his brother. Seven extra mouths sat down to breakfast: a Swede; a Chatham skipper; a boy from Hancock, Maine; one Duxbury, and three Provincetown men. There was a general sorting out among the Fleet next day; and though no one said anything, all ate with better appetites when boat after boat reported full crews aboard. Only a couple of Portuguese and an old man from Gloucester were drowned, but many were cut or bruised; and two schooners had parted their tackle and been blown to the southward, three days' sail. A man died on a Frenchman--it was the same bark that had traded tobacco with the "We're Heres". She slipped away quite quietly one wet, white morning, moved to a patch of deep water, her sails all hanging anyhow, and Harvey saw the funeral through Disko's spy-glass. It was only an oblong bundle slid overside. They did not seem to have any form of service, but in the night, at anchor, Harvey heard them across the star-powdered black water, singing something that sounded like a hymn. It went to a very slow tune. La brigantine Qui va tourner, Roule et s'incline Pour m'entrainer. Oh, Vierge Marie, Pour moi priez Dieu! Adieu, patrie; Québec, adieu! Tom Platt visited her, because, he said, the dead man was his brother as a Freemason. It came out that a wave had doubled the poor fellow over the heel of the bowsprit and broken his back. The news spread like a flash, for, contrary to general custom, the Frenchman held an auction of the dead man's kit,--he had no friends at St. Malo or Miquelon,--and everything was spread out on the top of the house, from his red knitted cap to the leather belt with the sheath-knife at the back. Dan and Harvey were out on twenty-fathom water in the Hattie S., and naturally rowed over to join the crowd. It was a long pull, and they stayed some little time while Dan bought the knife, which had a curious brass handle. When they dropped overside and pushed off into a drizzle of rain and a lop of sea, it occurred to them that they might get into trouble for neglecting the lines. "Guess 'twon't hurt us any to be warmed up," said Dan, shivering under his oilskins, and they rowed on into the heart of a white fog, which, as usual, dropped on them without warning. "There's too much blame tide hereabouts to trust to your instinks," he said. "Heave over the anchor, Harve, and we'll fish a piece till the thing lifts. Bend on your biggest lead. Three pound ain't any too much in this water. See how she's tightened on her rodin' already." There was quite a little bubble at the bows, where some irresponsible Bank current held the dory full stretch on her rope; but they could not see a boat's length in any direction. Harvey turned up his collar and bunched himself over his reel with the air of a wearied navigator. Fog had no special terrors for him now. They fished awhile in silence, and found the cod struck on well. Then Dan drew the sheath-knife and tested the edge of it on the gunwale. "That's a daisy," said Harvey. "How did you get it so cheap?" "On account o' their blame Cath'lic superstitions," said Dan, jabbing with the bright blade. "They don't fancy takin' iron frum off of a dead man, so to speak. 'See them Arichat Frenchmen step back when I bid?" "But an auction ain't taking anything off a dead man. It's business." "We know it ain't, but there's no goin' in the teeth o' superstition. That's one o' the advantages o' livin' in a progressive country." And Dan began whistling: "Oh, Double Thatcher, how are you? Now Eastern Point comes inter view. The girls an' boys we soon shall see, At anchor off Cape Ann!" "Why didn't that Eastport man bid, then? He bought his boots. Ain't Maine progressive?" "Maine? Pshaw! They don't know enough, or they hain't got money enough, to paint their haouses in Maine. I've seen 'em. The Eastport man he told me that the knife had been used--so the French captain told him--used up on the French coast last year." "Cut a man? Heave's the muckle." Harvey hauled in his fish, rebaited, and threw over. "Killed him! 'Course, when I heard that I was keener 'n ever to get it." "Christmas! I didn't know it," said Harvey, turning round. "I'll give you a dollar for it when I--get my wages. Say, I'll give you two dollars." "Honest? D'you like it as much as all that?" said Dan, flushing. "Well, to tell the truth, I kinder got it for you--to give; but I didn't let on till I saw how you'd take it. It's yours and welcome, Harve, because we're dory-mates, and so on and so forth, an' so followin'. Catch a-holt!" He held it out, belt and all. "But look at here. Dan, I don't see--" "Take it. 'Tain't no use to me. I wish you to hev it." The temptation was irresistible. "Dan, you're a white man," said Harvey. "I'll keep it as long as I live." "That's good hearin'," said Dan, with a pleasant laugh; and then, anxious to change the subject: "Look's if your line was fast to somethin'." "Fouled, I guess," said Harve, tugging. Before he pulled up he fastened the belt round him, and with deep delight heard the tip of the sheath click on the thwart. "Concern the thing!" he cried. "She acts as though she were on strawberry-bottom. It's all sand here, ain't it'?" Dan reached over and gave a judgmatic tweak. "Holibut'll act that way 'f he's sulky. Thet's no strawberry-bottom. Yank her once or twice. She gives, sure. 'Guess we'd better haul up an' make certain." They pulled together, making fast at each turn on the cleats, and the hidden weight rose sluggishly. "Prize, oh! Haul!" shouted Dan, but the shout ended in a shrill, double shriek of horror, for out of the sea came--the body of the dead Frenchman buried two days before! The hook had caught him under the right armpit, and he swayed, erect and horrible, head and shoulders above water. His arms were tied to his side, and--he had no face. The boys fell over each other in a heap at the bottom of the dory, and there they lay while the thing bobbed alongside, held on the shortened line. "The tide--the tide brought him!" said Harvey, with quivering lips, as he fumbled at the clasp of the belt. "Oh, Lord! Oh, Harve!" groaned Dan, "be quick. He's come for it. Let him have it. Take it off." "I don't want it! I don't want it!" cried Harvey. "I can't find the bu-buckle." "Quick, Harve! He's on your line!" Harvey sat up to unfasten the belt, facing the head that had no face under its streaming hair. "He's fast still," he whispered to Dan, who slipped out his knife and cut the line, as Harvey flung the belt far overside. The body shot down with a plop, and Dan cautiously rose to his knees, whiter than the fog. "He come for it. He come for it. I've seen a stale one hauled up on a trawl and I didn't much care, but he come to us special." "I wish--I wish I hadn't taken the knife. Then he'd have come on your line." "Dunno as thet would ha' made any differ. We're both scared out o' ten years' growth. Oh, Harve, did ye see his head?" "Did I'? I'll never forget it. But look at here, Dan; it couldn't have been meant. It was only the tide." "Tide! He come for it, Harve. Why, they sunk him six mile to south'ard o' the Fleet, an' we're two miles from where she's lyin' now. They told me he was weighted with a fathom an' a half o' chain-cable." "Wonder what he did with the knife--up on the French coast?" "Something bad. 'Guess he's bound to take it with him to the Judgment, an' so--What are you doin' with the fish?" "Heaving 'em overboard," said Harvey. "What for? We sha'n't eat 'em." "I don't care. I had to look at his face while I was takin' the belt off. You can keep your catch if you like. I've no use for mine." Dan said nothing, but threw his fish over again. "'Guess it's best to be on the safe side," he murmured at last. "I'd give a month's pay if this fog 'u'd lift. Things go abaout in a fog that ye don't see in clear weather--yo-hoes an' hollerers and such like. I'm sorter relieved he come the way he did instid o' walkin'. He might ha' walked." "Do-on't, Dan! We're right on top of him now. 'Wish I was safe aboard, bein' pounded by Uncle Salters." "They'll be lookin' fer us in a little. Gimme the tooter." Dan took the tin dinner-horn, but paused before he blew. "Go on," said Harvey. "I don't want to stay here all night." "Question is, haow he'd take it. There was a man frum down the coast told me once he was in a schooner where they darsen't ever blow a horn to the dories, becaze the skipper--not the man he was with, but a captain that had run her five years before--he'd drownded a boy alongside in a drunk fit; an' ever after, that boy he'd row alongside too and shout, 'Dory! dory!' with the rest." "Dory! dory!" a muffled voice cried through the fog. They cowered again, and the horn dropped from Dan's hand. "Hold on!" cried Harvey; "it's the cook." "Dunno what made me think o' thet fool tale, either," said Dan. "It's the doctor, sure enough." "Dan! Danny! Oooh, Dan! Harve! Harvey! Oooh, Haarveee!" "We're here," sung both boys together. They heard oars, but could see nothing till the cook, shining and dripping, rowed into them. "What iss happened?" said he. "You will be beaten at home." "Thet's what we want. Thet's what we're sufferin' for," said Dan. "Anything homey's good enough fer us. We've had kinder depressin' company." As the cook passed them a line, Dan told him the tale. "Yess! He come for hiss knife," was all he said at the end. Never had the little rocking "We're Here" looked so deliciously home--like as when the cook, born and bred in fogs, rowed them back to her. There was a warm glow of light from the cabin and a satisfying smell of food forward, and it was heavenly to hear Disko and the others, all quite alive and solid, leaning over the rail and promising them a first-class pounding. But the cook was a black master of strategy. He did not get the dories aboard till he had given the more striking points of the tale, explaining as he backed and bumped round the counter how Harvey was the mascot to destroy any possible bad luck. So the boys came overside as rather uncanny heroes, and every one asked them questions instead of pounding them for making trouble. Little Penn delivered quite a speech on the folly of superstitions; but public opinion was against him and in favour of Long Jack, who told the most excruciating ghost-stories to nearly midnight. Under that influence no one except Salters and Penn said anything about "idolatry" when the cook put a lighted candle, a cake of flour and water, and a pinch of salt on a shingle, and floated them out astern to keep the Frenchman quiet in case he was still restless. Dan lit the candle because he had bought the belt, and the cook grunted and muttered charms as long as he could see the ducking point of flame. Said Harvey to Dan, as they turned in after watch: "How about progress and Catholic superstitions?" "Huh! I guess I'm as enlightened and progressive as the next man, but when it comes to a dead St. Malo deck-hand scarin' a couple o' pore boys stiff fer the sake of a thirty-cent knife, why, then, the cook can take hold fer all o' me. I mistrust furriners, livin' or dead." Next morning all, except the cook, were rather ashamed of the ceremonies, and went to work double tides, speaking gruffly to one another. The "We're Here" was racing neck and neck for her last few loads against the "Parry Norman"; and so close was the struggle that the Fleet took sides and betted tobacco. All hands worked at the lines or dressing-down till they fell asleep where they stood--beginning before dawn and ending when it was too dark to see. They even used the cook as pitcher, and turned Harvey into the hold to pass salt, while Dan helped to dress down. Luckily a "Parry Norman" man sprained his ankle falling down the fo'c'sle, and the "We're Heres" gained. Harvey could not see how one more fish could be crammed into her, but Disko and Tom Platt stowed and stowed, and planked the mass down with big stones from the ballast, and there was always "jest another day's work." Disko did not tell them when all the salt was wetted. He rolled to the lazarette aft the cabin and began hauling out the big mainsail. This was at ten in the morning. The riding-sail was down and the main- and top-sail were up by noon, and dories came alongside with letters for home, envying their good fortune. At last she cleared decks, hoisted her flag,--as is the right of the first boat off the Banks,--up-anchored, and began to move. Disko pretended that he wished to accommodate folk who had not sent in their mail, and so worked her gracefully in and out among the schooners. In reality, that was his little triumphant procession, and for the fifth year running it showed what kind of mariner he was. Dan's accordion and Tom Platt's fiddle supplied the music of the magic verse you must not sing till all the salt is wet: "Hih! Yih! Yoho! Send your letters raound! All our salt is wetted, an' the anchor's off the graound! Bend, oh, bend your mains'l!, we're back to Yankeeland-- With fifteen hunder' quintal, An' fifteen hunder' quintal, 'Teen hunder' toppin' quintal, 'Twix' old 'Queereau an' Grand." The last letters pitched on deck wrapped round pieces of coal, and the Gloucester men shouted messages to their wives and womenfolk and owners, while the "We're Here" finished the musical ride through the Fleet, her head-sails quivering like a man's hand when he raises it to say good-bye. Harvey very soon discovered that the "We're Here", with her riding-sail, strolling from berth to berth, and the "We're Here" headed west by south under home canvas, were two very different boats. There was a bite and kick to the wheel even in "boy's" weather; he could feel the dead weight in the hold flung forward mightily across the surges, and the streaming line of bubbles overside made his eyes dizzy. Disko kept them busy fiddling with the sails; and when those were flattened like a racing yacht's, Dan had to wait on the big topsail, which was put over by hand every time she went about. In spare moments they pumped, for the packed fish dripped brine, which does not improve a cargo. But since there was no fishing, Harvey had time to look at the sea from another point of view. The low-sided schooner was naturally on most intimate terms with her surroundings. They saw little of the horizon save when she topped a swell; and usually she was elbowing, fidgeting, and coaxing her steadfast way through grey, grey-blue, or black hollows laced across and across with streaks of shivering foam; or rubbing herself caressingly along the flank of some bigger water-hill. It was as if she said: "You wouldn't hurt me, surely? I'm only the little 'We're Here'." Then she would slide away chuckling softly to herself till she was brought up by some fresh obstacle. The dullest of folk cannot see this kind of thing hour after hour through long days without noticing it; and Harvey, being anything but dull, began to comprehend and enjoy the dry chorus of wave-tops turning over with a sound of incessant tearing; the hurry of the winds working across open spaces and herding the purple-blue cloud-shadows; the splendid upheaval of the red sunrise; the folding and packing away of the morning mists, wall after wall withdrawn across the white floors; the salty glare and blaze of noon; the kiss of rain falling over thousands of dead, flat square miles; the chilly blackening of everything at the day's end; and the million wrinkles of the sea under the moonlight, when the jib-boom solemnly poked at the low stars, and Harvey went down to get a doughnut from the cook. But the best fun was when the boys were put on the wheel together, Tom Platt within hail, and she cuddled her lee-rail down to the crashing blue, and kept a little home-made rainbow arching unbroken over her windlass. Then the jaws of the booms whined against the masts, and the sheets creaked, and the sails filled with roaring; and when she slid into a hollow she trampled like a woman tripped in her own silk dress, and came out, her jib wet half-way up, yearning and peering for the tall twin-lights of Thatcher's Island. They left the cold grey of the Bank sea, saw the lumber-ships making for Quebec by the Straits of St. Lawrence, with the Jersey salt-brigs from Spain and Sicily; found a friendly northeaster off Artimon Bank that drove them within view of the East light of Sable Island,--a sight Disko did not linger over,--and stayed with them past Western and Le Have, to the northern fringe of George's. From there they picked up the deeper water, and let her go merrily. "Hattie's pulling on the string," Dan confided to Harvey. "Hattie an' ma. Next Sunday you'll be hirin' a boy to throw water on the windows to make ye go to sleep. 'Guess you'll keep with us till your folks come. Do you know the best of gettin' ashore again?" "Hot bath'?" said Harvey. His eyebrows were all white with dried spray. "That's good, but a night-shirt's better. I've been dreamin' o' night-shirts ever since we bent our mainsail. Ye can wiggle your toes then. Ma'll hev a new one fer me, all washed soft. It's home, Harve. It's home! Ye can sense it in the air. We're runnin' into the aidge of a hot wave naow, an' I can smell the bayberries. Wonder if we'll get in fer supper. Port a trifle." The hesitating sails flapped and lurched in the close air as the deep smoothed out, blue and oily, round them. When they whistled for a wind only the rain came in spiky rods, bubbling and drumming, and behind the rain the thunder and the lightning of mid-August. They lay on the deck with bare feet and arms, telling one another what they would order at their first meal ashore; for now the land was in plain sight. A Gloucester swordfish-boat drifted alongside, a man in the little pulpit on the bowsprit flourishing his harpoon, his bare head plastered down with the wet. "And all's well!" he sang cheerily, as though he were watch on a big liner. "Wouverman's waiting fer you, Disko. What's the news o' the Fleet?" Disko shouted it and passed on, while the wild summer storm pounded overhead and the lightning flickered along the capes from four different quarters at once. It gave the low circle of hills round Gloucester Harbour, Ten Pound Island, the fish-sheds, with the broken line of house-roofs, and each spar and buoy on the water, in blinding photographs that came and went a dozen times to the minute as the "We're Here" crawled in on half-flood, and the whistling-buoy moaned and mourned behind her. Then the storm died out in long, separated, vicious dags of blue-white flame, followed by a single roar like the roar of a mortar-battery, and the shaken air tingled under the stars as it got back to silence. "The flag, the flag!" said Disko, suddenly, pointing upward. "What is ut?" said Long Jack. "Otto! Ha'af mast. They can see us frum shore now." "I'd clean forgot. He's no folk to Gloucester, has he?" "Girl he was goin' to be married to this fall." "Mary pity her!" said Long Jack, and lowered the little flag half-mast for the sake of Otto, swept overboard in a gale off Le Have three months before. Disko wiped the wet from his eyes and led the "We're Here" to Wouverman's wharf, giving his orders in whispers, while she swung round moored tugs and night-watchmen hailed her from the ends of inky-black piers. Over and above the darkness and the mystery of the procession, Harvey could feel the land close round him once more, with all its thousands of people asleep, and the smell of earth after rain, and the familiar noise of a switching-engine coughing to herself in a freight-yard; and all those things made his heart beat and his throat dry up as he stood by the foresheet. They heard the anchor-watch snoring on a lighthouse-tug, nosed into a pocket of darkness where a lantern glimmered on either side; somebody waked with a grunt, threw them a rope, and they made fast to a silent wharf flanked with great iron-roofed sheds full of warm emptiness, and lay there without a sound. Then Harvey sat down by the wheel, and sobbed and sobbed as though his heart would break, and a tall woman who had been sitting on a weigh-scale dropped down into the schooner and kissed Dan once on the cheek; for she was his mother, and she had seen the "We're Here" by the lightning-flashes. She took no notice of Harvey till he had recovered himself a little and Disko had told her his story. Then they went to Disko's house together as the dawn was breaking; and until the telegraph office was open and he could wire to his folk, Harvey Cheyne was perhaps the loneliest boy in all America. But the curious thing was that Disko and Dan seemed to think none the worse of him for crying. Wouverman was not ready for Disko's prices till Disko, sure that the "We're Here" was at least a week ahead of any other Gloucester boat, had given him a few days to swallow them; so all hands played about the streets, and Long Jack stopped the Rocky Neck trolley, on principle, as he said, till the conductor let him ride free. But Dan went about with his freckled nose in the air, bungful of mystery and most haughty to his family. "Dan, I'll hev to lay inter you ef you act this way," said Troop, pensively. "Sence we've come ashore this time you've bin a heap too fresh." "I'd lay into him naow ef he was mine," said Uncle Salters, sourly. He and Penn boarded with the Troops. "Oho!" said Dan, shuffling with the accordion round the back-yard, ready to leap the fence if the enemy advanced. "Dad, you're welcome to your own jedgment, but remember I've warned ye. Your own flesh an' blood ha' warned ye! 'Tain't any o' my fault ef you're mistook, but I'll be on deck to watch ye. An' ez fer yeou, Uncle Salters, Pharaoh's chief butler ain't in it 'longside o' you! You watch aout an' wait. You'll be ploughed under like your own blamed clover; but me--Dan Troop--I'll flourish like a green bay-tree because I warn't stuck on my own opinion." Disko was smoking in all his shore dignity and a pair of beautiful carpet-slippers. "You're gettin' ez crazy as poor Harve. You two go araound gigglin' an' squinchin' an' kickin' each other under the table till there's no peace in the haouse," said he. "There's goin' to be a heap less--fer some folks," Dan replied. "You wait an' see." He and Harvey went out on the trolley to East Gloucester, where they tramped through the bayberry-bushes to the lighthouse, and lay down on the big red boulders and laughed themselves hungry. Harvey had shown Dan a telegram, and the two swore to keep silence till the shell burst. "Harve's folk?" said Dan, with an unruffled face after supper. "Well, I guess they don't amount to much of anything, or we'd ha' heard frum 'em by naow. His pop keeps a kind o' store out West. Maybe he'll give you's much as five dollars, dad." "What did I tell ye?" said Salters. "Don't sputter over your vittles, Dan." CHAPTER IX Whatever his private sorrows may be, a multimillionaire, like any other workingman, should keep abreast of his business. Harvey Cheyne, senior, had gone East late in June to meet a woman broken down, half mad, who dreamed day and night of her son drowning in the grey seas. He had surrounded her with doctors, trained nurses, massage-women, and even faith-cure companions, but they were useless. Mrs. Cheyne lay still and moaned, or talked of her boy by the hour together to any one who would listen. Hope she had none, and who could offer it? All she needed was assurance that drowning did not hurt; and her husband watched to guard lest she should make the experiment. Of his own sorrow he spoke little--hardly realised the depth of it till he caught himself asking the calendar on his writing-desk, "What's the use of going on?" There had always lain a pleasant notion at the back of his head that, some day, when he had rounded off everything and the boy had left college, he would take his son to his heart and lead him into his possessions. Then that boy, he argued, as busy fathers do, would instantly become his companion, partner, and ally, and there would follow splendid years of great works carried out together--the old head backing the young fire. Now his boy was dead--lost at sea, as it might have been a Swede sailor from one of Cheyne's big tea-ships; the wife was dying, or worse; he himself was trodden down by platoons of women and doctors and maids and attendants; worried almost beyond endurance by the shift and change of her poor restless whims; hopeless, with no heart to meet his many enemies. He had taken the wife to his raw new palace in San Diego, where she and her people occupied a wing of great price, and Cheyne, in a verandah-room, between a secretary and a typewriter, who was also a telegraphist, toiled along wearily from day to day. There was a war of rates among four Western railroads in which he was supposed to be interested; a devastating strike had developed in his lumber-camps in Oregon, and the legislature of the State of California, which has no love for its makers, was preparing open war against him. Ordinarily he would have accepted battle ere it was offered, and have waged a pleasant and unscrupulous campaign. But now he sat limply, his soft black hat pushed forward on to his nose, his big body shrunk inside his loose clothes, staring at his boots or the Chinese junks in the bay, and assenting absently to the secretary's questions as he opened the Saturday mail. Cheyne was wondering how much it would cost to drop everything and pull out. He carried huge insurances, could buy himself royal annuities, and between one of his places in Colorado and a little society (that would do the wife good), say in Washington and the South Carolina islands, a man might forget plans that had come to nothing. On the other hand... The click of the typewriter stopped; the girl was looking at the secretary, who had turned white. He passed Cheyne a telegram repeated from San Francisco: Picked up by fishing schooner "We're Here" having fallen off boat great times on Banks fishing all well waiting Gloucester Mass care Disko Troop for money or orders wire what shall do and how is mama Harvey N. Cheyne. The father let it fall, laid his head down on the roller-top of the shut desk, and breathed heavily. The secretary ran for Mrs. Cheyne's doctor, who found Cheyne pacing to and fro. "What-what d'you think of it? Is it possible? Is there any meaning to it? I can't quite make it out," he cried. "I can," said the doctor. "I lose seven thousand a year--that's all." He thought of the struggling New York practice he had dropped at Cheyne's imperious bidding, and returned the telegram with a sigh. "You mean you'd tell her? 'Maybe a fraud?" "What's the motive?" said the doctor, coolly. "Detection's too certain. It's the boy sure enough." Enter a French maid, impudently, as an indispensable one who is kept on only by large wages. "Mrs. Cheyne she say you must come at once. She think you are seek." The master of thirty millions bowed his head meekly and followed Suzanne; and a thin, high voice on the upper landing of the great white-wood square staircase cried: "What is it? what has happened?" No doors could keep out the shriek that rang through the echoing house a moment later, when her husband blurted out the news. "And that's all right," said the doctor, serenely, to the typewriter. "About the only medical statement in novels with any truth to it is that joy don't kill, Miss Kinzey." "I know it; but we've a heap to do first." Miss Kinzey was from Milwaukee, somewhat direct of speech; and as her fancy leaned towards the secretary, she divined there was work in hand. He was looking earnestly at the vast roller-map of America on the wall. "Milsom, we're going right across. Private car straight through--Boston. Fix the connections," shouted Cheyne down the staircase. "I thought so." The secretary turned to the typewriter, and their eyes met (out of that was born a story--nothing to do with this story). She looked inquiringly, doubtful of his resources. He signed to her to move to the Morse as a general brings brigades into action. Then he swept his hand. musician-wise through his hair, regarded the ceiling, and set to work, while Miss Kinzey's white fingers called up the Continent of America. "K. H. Wade, Los Angeles--The 'Constance' is at Los Angeles, isn't she, Miss Kinzey?" "Yep." Miss Kinzey nodded between clicks as the secretary looked at his watch. "Ready? Send 'Constance,' private car, here, and arrange for special to leave here Sunday in time to connect with New York Limited at Sixteenth Street, Chicago, Tuesday next." Click--click--click! "Couldn't you better that'?" "Not on those grades. That gives 'em sixty hours from here to Chicago. They won't gain anything by taking a special east of that. Ready? Also arrange with Lake Shore and Michigan Southern to take 'Constance' on New York Central and Hudson River Buffalo to Albany, and B. and A. the same Albany to Boston. Indispensable I should reach Boston Wednesday evening. Be sure nothing prevents. Have also wired Canniff, Toucey, and Barnes.--Sign, Cheyne." Miss Kinzey nodded, and the secretary went on. "Now then. Canniff, Toucey, and Barnes, of course. Ready? Canniff Chicago. Please take my private car 'Constance 'from Santa Fe at Sixteenth Street next Tuesday p. m. on N. Y. Limited through to Buffalo and deliver N. Y. C. for Albany.--Ever bin to N' York, Miss Kinzey? We'll go some day. Ready? Take car Buffalo to Albany on Limited Tuesday p. m. That's for Toucey." "Haven't bin to Noo York, but I know that!" with a toss of the head. "Beg pardon. Now, Boston and Albany, Barnes, same instructions from Albany through to Boston. Leave three-five P. M. (you needn't wire that); arrive nine-five P. M. Wednesday. That covers everything Wade will do, but it pays to shake up the managers." "It's great," said Miss Kinzey, with a look of admiration. This was the kind of man she understood and appreciated. "'Tisn't bad," said Milsom, modestly. "Now, any one but me would have lost thirty hours and spent a week working out the run, instead of handing him over to the Santa Fe straight through to Chicago." "But see here, about that Noo York Limited. Chauncey Depew himself couldn't hitch his car to her," Miss Kinzey suggested, recovering herself. "Yes, but this isn't Chauncey. It's Cheyne--lightning. It goes." "Even so. Guess we'd better wire the boy. You've forgotten that, anyhow." "I'll ask." When he returned with the father's message bidding Harvey meet them in Boston at an appointed hour, he found Miss Kinzey laughing over the keys. Then Milsom laughed too, for the frantic clicks from Los Angeles ran: "We want to know why--why--why? General uneasiness developed and spreading." Ten minutes later Chicago appealed to Miss Kinzey in these words: "If crime of century is maturing please warn friends in time. We are all getting to cover here." This was capped by a message from Topeka (and wherein Topeka was concerned even Milsom could not guess): "Don't shoot, Colonel. We'll come down." Cheyne smiled grimly at the consternation of his enemies when the telegrams were laid before him. "They think we're on the war-path. Tell 'em we don't feel like fighting just now, Milsom. Tell 'em what we're going for. I guess you and Miss Kinzey had better come along, though it isn't likely I shall do any business on the road. Tell 'em the truth--for once." So the truth was told. Miss Kinzey clicked in the sentiment while the secretary added the memorable quotation, "Let us have peace," and in board-rooms two thousand miles away the representatives of sixty-three million dollars' worth of variously manipulated railroad interests breathed more freely. Cheyne was flying to meet the only son, so miraculously restored to him. The bear was seeking his cub, not the bulls. Hard men who had their knives drawn to fight for their financial lives put away the weapons and wished him God-speed, while half a dozen panic-smitten tin-pot roads perked up their heads and spoke of the wonderful things they would have done had not Cheyne buried the hatchet. It was a busy week-end among the wires; for, now that their anxiety was removed, men and cities hastened to accommodate. Los Angeles called to San Diego and Barstow that the Southern California engineers might know and be ready in their lonely round-houses; Barstow passed the word to the Atlantic and Pacific; the Albuquerque flung it the whole length of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe management, even into Chicago. An engine, combination-car with crew, and the great and gilded "Constance" private car were to be "expedited" over those two thousand three hundred and fifty miles. The train would take precedence of one hundred and seventy-seven others meeting and passing; despatches and crews of every one of those said trains must be notified. Sixteen locomotives, sixteen engineers, and sixteen firemen would be needed--each and every one the best available. Two and one half minutes would be allowed for changing engines, three for watering, and two for coaling. "Warn the men, and arrange tanks and chutes accordingly; for Harvey Cheyne is in a hurry, a hurry-a hurry," sang the wires. "Forty miles an hour will be expected, and division superintendents will accompany this special over their respective divisions. From San Diego to Sixteenth Street, Chicago, let the magic carpet be laid down. Hurry! oh, hurry!" "It will be hot," said Cheyne, as they rolled out of San Diego in the dawn of Sunday. "We're going to hurry, mama, just as fast as ever we can; but I really don't think there's any good of your putting on your bonnet and gloves yet. You'd much better lie down and take your medicine. I'd play you a game o' dominoes, but it's Sunday." "I'll be good. Oh, I will be good. Only--taking off my bonnet makes me feel as if we'd never get there." "Try to sleep a little, mama, and we'll be in Chicago before you know." "But it's Boston, father. Tell them to hurry." The six-foot drivers were hammering their way to San Bernardino and the Mohave wastes, but this was no grade for speed. That would come later. The heat of the desert followed the heat of the hills as they turned east to the Needles and the Colorado River. The car cracked in the utter drought and glare, and they put crushed ice to Mrs. Cheyne's neck, and toiled up the long, long grades, past Ash Fork, towards Flagstaff, where the forests and quarries are, under the dry, remote skies. The needle of the speed-indicator flicked and wagged to and fro; the cinders rattled on the roof, and a whirl of dust sucked after the whirling wheels, The crew of the combination sat on their bunks, panting in their shirt-sleeves, and Cheyne found himself among them shouting old, old stories of the railroad that every trainman knows, above the roar of the car. He told them about his son, and how the sea had given up its dead, and they nodded and spat and rejoiced with him; asked after "her, back there," and whether she could stand it if the engineer "let her out a piece," and Cheyne thought she could. Accordingly, the great fire-horse was "let out" from Flagstaff to Winslow, till a division superintendent protested. But Mrs. Cheyne, in the boudoir state-room, where the French maid, sallow-white with fear, clung to the silver door-handle, only moaned a little and begged her husband to bid them "hurry." And so they dropped the dry sands and moon-struck rocks of Arizona behind them, and grilled on till the crash of the couplings and the wheeze of the brake-hose told them they were at Coolidge by the Continental Divide. Three bold and experienced men--cool, confident, and dry when they began; white, quivering, and wet when they finished their trick at those terrible wheels--swung her over the great lift from Albuquerque to Glorietta and beyond Springer, up and up to the Raton Tunnel on the State line, whence they dropped rocking into La Junta, had sight of the Arkansaw, and tore down the long slope to Dodge City, where Cheyne took comfort once again from setting his watch an hour ahead. There was very little talk in the car. The secretary and typewriter sat together on the stamped Spanish-leather cushions by the plate-glass observation-window at the rear end, watching the surge and ripple of the ties crowded back behind them, and, it is believed, making notes of the scenery. Cheyne moved nervously between his own extravagant gorgeousness and the naked necessity of the combination, an unlit cigar in his teeth, till the pitying crews forgot that he was their tribal enemy, and did their best to entertain him. At night the bunched electrics lit up that distressful palace of all the luxuries, and they fared sumptuously, swinging on through the emptiness of abject desolation. Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the guttural voice of a China-man, the clink-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp steel wheels, and the oath of a tramp chased off the rear platform; now the solid crash of coal shot into the tender; and now a beating back of noises as they flew past a waiting train. Now they looked out into great abysses, a trestle purring beneath their tread, or up to rocks that barred out half the stars. Now scaur and ravine changed and rolled back to jagged mountains on the horizon's edge, and now broke into hills lower and lower, till at last came the true plains. At Dodge City an unknown hand threw in a copy of a Kansas paper containing some sort of an interview with Harvey, who had evidently fallen in with an enterprising reporter, telegraphed on from Boston. The joyful journalese revealed that it was beyond question their boy, and it soothed Mrs. Cheyne for a while. Her one word "hurry" was conveyed by the crews to the engineers at Nickerson, Topeka, and Marceline, where the grades are easy, and they brushed the Continent behind them. Towns and villages were close together now, and a man could feel here that he moved among people. "I can't see the dial, and my eyes ache so. What are we doing?" "The very best we can, mama. There's no sense in getting in before the Limited. We'd only have to wait." "I don't care. I want to feel we're moving. Sit down and tell me the miles." Cheyne sat down and read the dial for her (there were some miles which stand for records to this day), but the seventy-foot car never changed its long, steamer-like roll, moving through the heat with the hum of a giant bee. Yet the speed was not enough for Mrs. Cheyne; and the heat, the remorseless August heat, was making her giddy; the clock-hands would not move, and when, oh, when would they be in Chicago? It is not true that, as they changed engines at Fort Madison, Cheyne passed over to the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers an endowment sufficient to enable them to fight him and his fellows on equal terms for evermore. He paid his obligations to engineers and firemen as he believed they deserved, and only his bank knows what he gave the crews who had sympathised with him. It is on record that the last crew took entire charge of switching operations at Sixteenth Street, because "she" was in a doze at last, and Heaven was to help any one who bumped her. Now the highly paid specialist who conveys the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Limited from Chicago to Elkhart is something of an autocrat, and he does not approve of being told how to back up to a car. None the less he handled the "Constance" as if she might have been a load of dynamite, and when the crew rebuked him, they did it in whispers and dumb show. "Pshaw!" said the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe men, discussing life later, "we weren't runnin' for a record. Harvey Cheyne's wife, she were sick back, an' we didn't want to jounce her. 'Come to think of it, our runnin' time from San Diego to Chicago was 57.54. You can tell that to them Eastern way-trains. When we're tryin' for a record, we'll let you know." To the Western man (though this would not please either city) Chicago and Boston are cheek by jowl, and some railroads encourage the delusion. The Limited whirled the "Constance" into Buffalo and the arms of the New York Central and Hudson River (illustrious magnates with white whiskers and gold charms on their watch-chains boarded her here to talk a little business to Cheyne), who slid her gracefully into Albany, where the Boston and Albany completed the run from tide-water to tide-water--total time, eighty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes, or three days, fifteen hours and one half. Harvey was waiting for them. After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food. They feasted the returned prodigal behind drawn curtains, cut off in their great happiness, while the trains roared in and out around them. Harvey ate, drank, and enlarged on his adventures all in one breath, and when he had a hand free his mother fondled it. His voice was thickened with living in the open, salt air; his palms were rough and hard, his wrists dotted with the marks of gurry-sores; and a fine full flavour of cod-fish hung round rubber boots and blue jersey. The father, well used to judging men, looked at him keenly. He did not know what enduring harm the boy might have taken. Indeed, he caught himself thinking that he knew very little whatever of his son; but he distinctly remembered an unsatisfied, dough-faced youth who took delight in "calling down the old man" and reducing his mother to tears--such a person as adds to the gaiety of public rooms and hotel piazzas, where the ingenuous young of the wealthy play with or revile the bell-boys. But this well set-up fisher-youth did not wriggle, looked at him with eyes steady, clear, and unflinching, and spoke in a tone distinctly, even startlingly, respectful. There was that in his voice, too, which seemed to promise that the change might be permanent, and that the new Harvey had come to stay. "Some one's been coercing him," thought Cheyne. "Now Constance would never have allowed that. Don't see as Europe could have done it any better." "But why didn't you tell this man, Troop, who you were?" the mother repeated, when Harvey had expanded his story at least twice. "Disko Troop, dear. The best man that ever walked a deck. I don't care who the next is." "Why didn't you tell him to put you ashore? You know papa would have made it up to him ten times over." "I know it; but he thought I was crazy. I'm afraid I called him a thief because I couldn't find the bills in my pocket." "A sailor found them by the flagstaff that--that night," sobbed Mrs. Cheyne. "That explains it, then. I don't blame Troop any. I just said I wouldn't work--on a Banker, too--and of course he hit me on the nose, and oh! I bled like a stuck hog." "My poor darling! They must have abused you horribly." "Dunno quite. Well, after that, I saw a light." Cheyne slapped his leg and chuckled. This was going to be a boy after his own hungry heart. He had never seen precisely that twinkle in Harvey's eye before. "And the old man gave me ten and a half a month; he's paid me half now; and I took hold with Dan and pitched right in. I can't do a man's work yet. But I can handle a dory 'most as well as Dan, and I don't get rattled in a fog--much; and I can take my trick in light winds--that's steering, dear--and I can 'most bait up a trawl, and I know my ropes, of course; and I can pitch fish till the cows come home, and I'm great on old Josephus, and I'll show you how I can clear coffee with a piece of fish-skin, and--I think I'll have another cup, please. Say, you've no notion what a heap of work there is in ten and a half a month!" "I began with eight and a half, my son," said Cheyne. "'That so? You never told me, sir." "You never asked, Harve. I'll tell you about it some day, if you care to listen. Try a stuffed olive." "Troop says the most interesting thing in the world is to find out how the next man gets his vittles. It's great to have a trimmed-up meal again. We were well fed, though. Best mug on the Banks. Disko fed us first-class. He's a great man. And Dan--that's his son--Dan's my partner. And there's Uncle Salters and his manures, an' he reads Josephus. He's sure I'm crazy yet. And there's poor little Penn, and he is crazy. You mustn't talk to him about Johnstown, because--And, oh, you must know Tom Platt and Long Jack and Manuel. Manuel saved my life. I'm sorry he's a Portugee. He can't talk much, but he's an everlasting musician. He found me struck adrift and drifting, and hauled me in." "I wonder your nervous system isn't completely wrecked," said Mrs. Cheyne. "What for, mama? I worked like a horse and I ate like a hog and I slept like a dead man." That was too much for Mrs. Cheyne, who began to think of her visions of a corpse rocking on the salty seas. She went to her state-room, and Harvey curled up beside his father, explaining his indebtedness. "You can depend upon me to do everything I can for the crowd, Harve. They seem to be good men on your showing." "Best in the Fleet, sir. Ask at Gloucester," said Harvey. "But Disko believes still he's cured me of being crazy. Dan's the only one I've let on to about you, and our private cars and all the rest of it, and I'm not quite sure Dan believes. I want to paralyse 'em to-morrow. Say, can't they run the 'Constance' over to Gloucester? Mama don't look fit to be moved, anyway, and we're bound to finish cleaning out by to-morrow. Wouverman takes our fish. You see, we're first off the Banks this season, and it's four twenty-five a quintal. We held out till he paid it. They want it quick." "You mean you'll have to work to-morrow, then?" "I told Troop I would. I'm on the scales. I've brought the tallies with me." He looked at the greasy notebook with an air of importance that made his father choke. "There isn't but three--no--two ninety-four or five quintal more by my reckoning." "Hire a substitute," suggested Cheyne, to see what Harvey would say. "Can't, sir. I'm tally-man for the schooner. Troop says I've a better head for figures than Dan. Troop's a mighty just man." "Well, suppose I don't move the 'Constance' to-night, how'll you fix it?" Harvey looked at the clock, which marked twenty past eleven. "Then I'll sleep here till three and catch the four o'clock freight. They let us men from the Fleet ride free, as a rule." "That's a notion. But I think we can get the 'Constance' around about as soon as your men's freight. Better go to bed now." Harvey spread himself on the sofa, kicked off his boots, and was asleep before his father could shade the electrics. Cheyne sat watching the young face under the shadow of the arm thrown over the forehead, and among many things that occurred to him was the notion that he might perhaps have been neglectful as a father. "One never knows when one's taking one's biggest risks," he said. "It might have been worse than drowning; but I don't think it has--I don't think it has. If it hasn't, I haven't enough to pay Troop, that's all; and I don't think it has." Morning brought a fresh sea breeze through the windows, the "Constance" was side-tracked among freight-cars at Gloucester, and Harvey had gone to his business. "Then he'll fall overboard again and be drowned," the mother said bitterly. "We'll go and look, ready to throw him a rope in case. You've never seen him working for his bread," said the father. "What nonsense! As if any one expected--" "Well, the man that hired him did. He's about right, too." They went down between the stores full of fishermen's oilskins to Wouverman's wharf, where the "We're Here" rode high, her Bank flag still flying, all hands busy as beavers in the glorious morning light. Disko stood by the main hatch superintending Manuel, Penn, and Uncle Salters at the tackle. Dan was swinging the loaded baskets inboard as Long Jack and Tom Platt filled them, and Harvey, with a notebook, represented the skipper's interests before the clerk of the scales on the salt-sprinkled wharf-edge. "Ready!" cried the voices below. "Haul!" cried Disko. "Hi!" said Manuel. "Here!" said Dan, swinging the basket. Then they heard Harvey's voice, clear and fresh, checking the weights. The last of the fish had been whipped out, and Harvey leaped from the string-piece six feet to a ratline, as the shortest way to hand Disko the tally, shouting, "Two ninety-seven, and an empty hold!" "What's total, Harve?" said Disko. "Eight sixty-five. Three thousand six hundred and seventy-six dollars and a quarter. 'Wish I'd share as well as wage." "Well, I won't go so far as to say you hevn't deserved it, Harve. Don't you want to slip up to Wouverman's office and take him our tallies?" "Who's that boy?" said Cheyne to Dan, well used to all manner of questions from those idle imbeciles called summer boarders. "Well, he's a kind o' supercargo," was the answer. "We picked him up struck adrift on the Banks. Fell overboard from a liner, he sez. He was a passenger. He's by way o' bein' a fisherman now." "Is he worth his keep?" "Ye-ep. Dad, this man wants to know ef Harve's worth his keep. Say, would you like to go aboard? We'll fix a ladder for her." "I should very much, indeed. 'Twon't hurt you, mama, and you'll be able to see for yourself." The woman who could not lift her head a week ago scrambled down the ladder, and stood aghast amid the mess and tangle aft. "Be you anyways interested in Harve?" said Disko. "Well, ye-es." "He's a good boy, an' ketches right hold jest as he's bid. You've heard haow we found him? He was sufferin' from nervous prostration, I guess, 'r else his head had hit somethin', when we hauled him aboard. He's all over that naow. Yes, this is the cabin. 'Tain't anyways in order, but you're quite welcome to look around. Those are his figures on the stove-pipe, where we keep the reckonin' mostly." "Did he sleep here?" said Mrs. Cheyne, sitting on a yellow locker and surveying the disorderly bunks. "No. He berthed forward, madam, an' only fer him an' my boy hookin' fried pies an' muggin' up when they ought to ha' been asleep, I dunno as I've any special fault to find with him." "There weren't nothin' wrong with Harve," said Uncle Salters, descending the steps. "He hung my boots on the main-truck, and he ain't over an' above respectful to such as knows more'n he do, especially about farmin'; but he were mostly misled by Dan." Dan, in the meantime, profiting by dark hints from Harvey early that morning, was executing a war-dance on deck. "Tom, Tom!" he whispered down the hatch. "His folks has come, an' dad hain't caught on yet, an' they're pow-wowin' in the cabin. She's a daisy, an' he's all Harve claimed he was, by the looks of him." "Howly Smoke!" said Long Jack, climbing out covered with salt and fish-skin. "D'ye belave his tale av the kid an' the little four-horse rig was thrue?" "I knew it all along," said Dan. "Come an' see dad mistook in his judgments." They came delightedly, just in time to hear Cheyne say: "I'm glad he has a good character, because--he's my son." Disko's jaw fell,--Long Jack always vowed that he heard the click of it,--and he stared alternately at the man and the woman. "I got his telegram in San Diego four days ago, and we came over." "In a private car?" said Dan. "He said ye might." "In a private car, of course." Dan looked at his father with a hurricane of irreverent winks. "There was a tale he tould us av drivin' four little ponies in a rig av his own," said Long Jack. "Was that thrue now?" "Very likely," said Cheyne. "Was it, mama?" "He had a little drag when we were in Toledo, I think," said the mother. Long Jack whistled. "Oh, Disko!" said he, and that was all. "I wuz--I am mistook in my jedgments--worse'n the men o' Marblehead," said Disko, as though the words were being windlassed out of him. "I don't mind ownin' to you, Mister Cheyne, as I mistrusted the boy to be crazy. He talked kinder odd about money." "So he told me." "Did he tell ye anything else? 'Cause I pounded him once." This with a somewhat anxious glance at Mrs. Cheyne. "Oh, yes," Cheyne replied. "I should say it probably did him more good than anything else in the world." "I jedged 'twuz necessary, er I wouldn't ha' done it. I don't want you to think we abuse our boys any on this packet." "I don't think you do, Mr. Troop." Mrs. Cheyne had been looking at the faces--Disko's ivory-yellow, hairless, iron countenance; Uncle Salters's, with its rim of agricultural hair; Penn's bewildered simplicity; Manuel's quiet smile; Long Jack's grin of delight; and Tom Platt's scar. Rough, by her standards, they certainly were; but she had a mother's wits in her eyes, and she rose with outstretched hands. "Oh, tell me, which is who?" said she, half sobbing. "I want to thank you and bless you--all of you." "Faith, that pays me a hunder time," said Long Jack. Disko introduced them all in due form. The captain of an old-time Chinaman could have done no better, and Mrs. Cheyne babbled incoherently. She nearly threw herself into Manuel's arms when she understood that he had first found Harvey. "But how shall I leave him dreeft?" said poor Manuel. "What do you yourself if you find him so? Eh, wha-at'? We are in one good boy, and I am ever so pleased he come to be your son." "And he told me Dan was his partner!" she cried. Dan was already sufficiently pink, but he turned a rich crimson when Mrs. Cheyne kissed him on both cheeks before the assembly. Then they led her forward to show her the fo'c'sle, at which she wept again, and must needs go down to see Harvey's identical bunk, and there she found the nigger cook cleaning up the stove, and he nodded as though she were some one he had expected to meet for years. They tried, two at a time, to explain the boat's daily life to her, and she sat by the pawl-post, her gloved hands on the greasy table, laughing with trembling lips and crying with dancing eyes. "And who's ever to use the "We're Here" after this?" said Long Jack to Tom Platt. "I feel it as if she'd made a cathedral av ut all." "Cathedral!" sneered Tom Platt. "Oh, ef it had bin even the Fish C'mmission boat instid o' this bally-hoo o' blazes. Ef we only hed some decency an' order an' side-boys when she goes over! She'll have to climb that ladder like a hen, an' we--we ought to be mannin' the yards!" "Then Harvey was not mad," said Penn, slowly, to Cheyne. "No, indeed--thank God," the big millionaire replied, stooping down tenderly. "It must be terrible to be mad. Except to lose your child, I do not know anything more terrible. But your child has come back? Let us thank God for that." "Hello!" said Harvey, looking down upon them benignly from the wharf. "I wuz mistook, Harve. I wuz mistook," said Disko, swiftly, holding up a hand. "I wuz mistook in my jedgments. Ye needn't rub it in any more." "'Guess I'll take care o' that," said Dan, under his breath. "You'll be goin' off naow, won't ye?" "Well, not without the balance of my wages, 'less you want to have the "We're Here" attached." "Thet's so; I'd clean forgot"; and he counted out the remaining dollars. "You done all you contracted to do, Harve; and you done it 'baout's well as ef you'd been brought up--" Here Disko brought himself up. He did not quite see where the sentence was going to end. "Outside of a private car?" suggested Dan, wickedly. "Come on, and I'll show her to you," said Harvey. Cheyne stayed to talk to Disko, but the others made a procession to the depot, with Mrs. Cheyne at the head. The French maid shrieked at the invasion; and Harvey laid the glories of the "Constance" before them without a word. They took them in in equal silence--stamped leather, silver door-handles and rails, cut velvet, plate-glass, nickel, bronze, hammered iron, and the rare woods of the Continent inlaid. "I told you," said Harvey; "I told you." This was his crowning revenge, and a most ample one. Mrs. Cheyne decreed a meal; and that nothing might be lacking to the tale Long Jack told afterwards in his boarding-house, she waited on them herself. Men who are accustomed to eat at tiny tables in howling gales have curiously neat and finished table-manners; but Mrs. Cheyne, who did not know this, was surprised. She longed to have Manuel for a butler; so silently and easily did he comport himself among the frail glassware and dainty silver. Tom Platt remembered great days on the Ohio and the manners of foreign potentates who dined with the officers; and Long Jack, being Irish, supplied the small talk till all were at their ease. In the "We're Here's" cabin the fathers took stock of each other behind their cigars. Cheyne knew well enough when he dealt with a man to whom he could not offer money; equally well he knew that no money could pay for what Disko had done. He kept his own counsel and waited for an opening. "I hevn't done anything to your boy or fer your boy excep' make him work a piece an' learn him how to handle the hog-yoke," said Disko. "He has twice my boy's head for figgers." "By the way," Cheyne answered casually, "what d'you calculate to make of your boy?" Disko removed his cigar and waved it comprehensively round the cabin. "Dan's jest plain boy, an' he don't allow me to do any of his thinkin'. He'll hev this able little packet when I'm laid by. He ain't noways anxious to quit the business. I know that." "Mmm! 'Ever been West, Mr. Troop?" "Bin's fer ez Noo York once in a boat. I've no use for railroads. No more hez Dan. Salt water's good enough fer the Troops. I've been 'most everywhere--in the nat'ral way, o' course." "I can give him all the salt water he's likely to need--till he's a skipper." "Haow's that? I thought you wuz a kinder railroad king. Harve told me so when--I was mistook in my jedgments." "We're all apt to be mistaken. I fancied perhaps you might know I own a line of tea-clippers--San Francisco to Yokohama--six of 'em--iron-built, about seventeen hundred and eighty tons apiece." "Blame that boy! He never told. I'd ha' listened to that, instid o' his truck abaout railroads an' pony-carriages." "He didn't know." "'Little thing like that slipped his mind, I guess." "No, I only capt--took hold of the 'Blue M.' freighters--Morgan and McQuade's old line--this summer." Disko collapsed where he sat, beside the stove. "Great Caesar Almighty! I mistrust I've bin fooled from one end to the other. Why, Phil Airheart he went from this very town six year back--no, seven--an' he's mate on the San José now--twenty-six days was her time out. His sister she's livin' here yet, an' she reads his letters to my woman. An' you own the 'Blue M.' freighters?" Cheyne nodded. "If I'd known that I'd ha' jerked the "We're Here" back to port all standin', on the word." "Perhaps that wouldn't have been so good for Harvey." "Ef I'd only known! Ef he'd only said about the cussed Line, I'd ha' understood! I'll never stand on my own jedgments again--never. They're well-found packets, Phil Airheart he says so." "I'm glad to have a recommend from that quarter. Airheart's skipper of the San José now. What I was getting at is to know whether you'd lend me Dan for a year or two, and we'll see if we can't make a mate of him. Would you trust him to Airheart?" "It's a resk taking a raw boy--" "I know a man who did more for me." "That's diff'runt. Look at here naow, I ain't recommendin' Dan special because he's my own flesh an' blood. I know Bank ways ain't clipper ways, but he hain't much to learn. Steer he can--no boy better, ef I say it--an' the rest's in our blood an' get; but I could wish he warn't so cussed weak on navigation." "Airheart will attend to that. He'll ship as a boy for a voyage or two, and then we can put him in the way of doing better. Suppose you take him in hand this winter, and I'll send for him early in the spring. I know the Pacific's a long ways off--" "Pshaw! We Troops, livin' an' dead, are all around the earth an' the seas thereof." "But I want you to understand--and I mean this--any time you think you'd like to see him, tell me, and I'll attend to the transportation. 'Twon't cost you a cent." "Ef you'll walk a piece with me, we'll go to my house an' talk this to my woman. I've bin so crazy mistook in all my jedgments, it don't seem to me this was like to be real." They went over to Troop's eighteen-hundred-dollar, blue-trimmed white house, with a retired dory full of nasturtiums in the front yard and a shuttered parlor which was a museum of oversea plunder. There sat a large woman, silent and grave, with the dim eyes of those who look long to sea for the return of their beloved. Cheyne addressed himself to her, and she gave consent wearily. "We lose one hundred a year from Gloucester only, Mr. Cheyne," she said--"one hundred boys an' men; and I've come so's to hate the sea as if 'twuz alive an' listenin'. God never made it fer humans to anchor on. These packets o' yours they go straight out, I take it, and straight home again?" "As straight as the winds let 'em, and I give a bonus for record passages. Tea don't improve by being at sea." "When he wuz little he used to play at keeping store, an' I had hopes he might follow that up. But soon's he could paddle a dory I knew that were goin' to be denied me." "They're square-riggers, mother; iron-built an' well found. Remember what Phil's sister reads you when she gits his letters." "I've never known as Phil told lies, but he's too venturesome (like most of 'em that use the sea). Ef Dan sees fit, Mr. Cheyne, he can go--fer all o' me." "She jest despises the ocean," Disko explained, "an' I--I dunno haow to act polite, I guess, er I'd thank you better." "My father--my own eldest brother--two nephews--an' my second sister's man," she said, dropping her head on her hand. "Would you care fer any one that took all those?" Cheyne was relieved when Dan turned up and accepted with more delight than he was able to put into words. Indeed, the offer meant a plain and sure road to all desirable things; but Dan thought most of commanding watch on broad decks, and looking into far-away harbours. Mrs. Cheyne had spoken privately to the unaccountable Manuel in the matter of Harvey's rescue. He seemed to have no desire for money. Pressed hard, he said that he would take five dollars, because he wanted to buy something for a girl. Otherwise--"How shall I take money when I make so easy my eats and smokes? You will giva some if I like or no? Eh, wha-at? Then you shall giva me money, but not that way. You shall giva all you can think." He introduced her to a snuffy Portuguese priest with a list of semi-destitute widows as long as his cassock. As a strict Unitarian, Mrs. Cheyne could not sympathise with the creed, but she ended by respecting the brown, voluble little man. Manuel, faithful son of the Church, appropriated all the blessings showered on her for her charity. "That letta me out," said he. "I have now ver' good absolutions for six months"; and he strolled forth to get a handkerchief for the girl of the hour and to break the hearts of all the others. Salters went West for a season with Penn, and left no address behind. He had a dread that these millionary people, with wasteful private cars, might take undue interest in his companion. It was better to visit inland relatives till the coast was clear. "Never you be adopted by rich folk, Penn," he said in the cars, "or I'll take 'n' break this checker-board over your head. Ef you forgit your name agin--which is Pratt--you remember you belong with Salters Troop, an' set down right where you are till I come fer you. Don't go taggin' araound after them whose eyes bung out with fatness, accordin' to Scripcher." CHAPTER X But it was otherwise with the "We're Here's" silent cook, for he came up, his kit in a handkerchief, and boarded the "Constance." Pay was no particular object, and he did not in the least care where he slept. His business, as revealed to him in dreams, was to follow Harvey for the rest of his days. They tried argument and, at last, persuasion; but there is a difference between one Cape Breton and two Alabama negroes, and the matter was referred to Cheyne by the cook and porter. The millionaire only laughed. He presumed Harvey might need a body-servant some day or other, and was sure that one volunteer was worth five hirelings. Let the man stay, therefore; even though he called himself MacDonald and swore in Gaelic. The car could go back to Boston, where, if he were still of the same mind, they would take him West. With the "Constance," which in his heart of hearts he loathed, departed the last remnant of Cheyne's millionairedom, and he gave himself up to an energetic idleness. This Gloucester was a new town in a new land, and he purposed to "take it in," as of old he had taken in all the cities from Snohomish to San Diego of that world whence he hailed. They made money along the crooked street which was half wharf and half ship's store: as a leading professional he wished to learn how the noble game was played. Men said that four out of every five fish-balls served at New England's Sunday breakfast came from Gloucester, and overwhelmed him with figures in proof--statistics of boats, gear, wharf-frontage, capital invested, salting, packing, factories, insurance, wages, repairs, and profits. He talked with the owners of the large fleets whose skippers were little more than hired men, and whose crews were almost all Swedes or Portuguese. Then he conferred with Disko, one of the few who owned their craft, and compared notes in his vast head. He coiled himself away on chain-cables in marine junk-shops, asking questions with cheerful, unslaked Western curiosity, till all the water-front wanted to know "what in thunder that man was after, anyhow." He prowled into the Mutual Insurance rooms, and demanded explanations of the mysterious remarks chalked up on the blackboard day by day; and that brought down upon him secretaries of every Fisherman's Widow and Orphan Aid Society within the city limits. They begged shamelessly, each man anxious to beat the other institution's record, and Cheyne tugged at his beard and handed them all over to Mrs. Cheyne. She was resting in a boarding-house near Eastern Point--a strange establishment, managed, apparently, by the boarders, where the table-cloths were red-and-white-checkered, and the population, who seemed to have known one another intimately for years, rose up at midnight to make Welsh rare-bits if it felt hungry. On the second morning of her stay Mrs. Cheyne put away her diamond solitaires before she came down to breakfast. "They're most delightful people," she confided to her husband; "so friendly and simple, too, though they are all Boston, nearly." "That isn't simpleness, mama," he said, looking across the boulders behind the apple-trees where the hammocks were slung. "It's the other thing, that we--that I haven't got." "It can't be," said Mrs. Cheyne, quietly. "There isn't a woman here owns a dress that cost a hundred dollars. Why, we--" "I know it, dear. We have--of course we have. I guess it's only the style they wear East. Are you having a good time?" "I don't see very much of Harvey; he's always with you; but I ain't near as nervous as I was." "I haven't had such a good time since Willie died. I never rightly understood that I had a son before this. Harve's got to be a great boy. 'Anything I can fetch you, dear? 'Cushion under your head? Well, we'll go down to the wharf again and look around." Harvey was his father's shadow in those days, and the two strolled along side by side, Cheyne using the grades as an excuse for laying his hand on the boy's square shoulder. It was then that Harvey noticed and admired what had never struck him before--his father's curious power of getting at the heart of new matters as learned from men in the street. "How d'you make 'em tell you everything without opening your head?" demanded the son, as they came out of a rigger's loft. "I've dealt with quite a few men in my time, Harve, and one sizes 'em up somehow, I guess. I know something about myself, too." Then, after a pause, as they sat down on a wharf-edge: "Men can 'most always tell when a man has handled things for himself, and then they treat him as one of themselves." "Same as they treat me down at Wouverman's wharf. I'm one of the crowd now. Disko has told every one I've earned my pay." Harvey spread out his hands and rubbed the palms together. "They're all soft again," he said dolefully. "Keep 'em that way for the next few years, while you're getting your education. You can harden 'em up after." "Ye-es, I suppose so," was the reply, in no delighted voice. "It rests with you, Harve. You can take cover behind your mama, of course, and put her on to fussing about your nerves and your highstrungness and all that kind of poppycock." "Have I ever done that?" said Harvey, uneasily. His father turned where he sat and thrust out a long hand. "You know as well as I do that I can't make anything of you if you don't act straight by me. I can handle you alone if you'll stay alone, but I don't pretend to manage both you and mama. Life's too short, anyway." "Don't make me out much of a fellow, does it?" "I guess it was my fault a good deal; but if you want the truth, you haven't been much of anything up to date. Now, have you?" "Umm! Disko thinks . . . Say, what d'you reckon it's cost you to raise me from the start--first, last, and all over?" Cheyne smiled. "I've never kept track, but I should estimate, in dollars and cents, nearer fifty than forty thousand; maybe sixty. The young generation comes high. It has to have things, and it tires of 'em, and--the old man foots the bill." Harvey whistled, but at heart he was rather pleased to think that his upbringing had cost so much. "And all that's sunk capital, isn't it?" "Invested, Harve. Invested, I hope." "Making it only thirty thousand, the thirty I've earned is about ten cents on the hundred. That's a mighty poor catch." Harvey wagged his head solemnly. Cheyne laughed till he nearly fell off the pile into the water. "Disko has got a heap more than that out of Dan since he was ten; and Dan's at school half the year, too." "Oh, that's what you're after, is it?" "No. I'm not after anything. I'm not stuck on myself any just now--that's all . . . . I ought to be kicked." "I can't do it, old man; or I would, I presume, if I'd been made that way." "Then I'd have remembered it to the last day I lived--and never forgiven you," said Harvey, his chin on his doubled fists. "Exactly. That's about what I'd do. You see?" "I see. The fault's with me and no one else. All the samey, something's got to be done about it." Cheyne drew a cigar from his vest-pocket, bit off the end, and fell to smoking. Father and son were very much alike; for the beard hid Cheyne's mouth, and Harvey had his father's slightly aquiline nose, close-set black eyes, and narrow, high cheek-bones. With a touch of brown paint he would have made up very picturesquely as a Red Indian of the story-books. "Now you can go on from here," said Cheyne, slowly, "costing me between six or eight thousand a year till you're a voter. Well, we'll call you a man then. You can go right on from that, living on me to the tune of forty or fifty thousand, besides what your mother will give you, with a valet and a yacht or a fancy-ranch where you can pretend to raise trotting stock and play cards with your own crowd." "Like Lorry Tuck?" Harvey put in. "Yep; or the two De Vitré boys or old man McQuade's son. California's full of 'em, and here's an Eastern sample while we're talking." A shiny black steam-yacht, with mahogany deck-house, nickel-plated binnacles, and pink-and-white-striped awnings, puffed up the harbour, flying the burgee of some New York club. Two young men, in what they conceived to be sea costumes, were playing cards by the saloon skylight; and a couple of women with red and blue parasols looked on and laughed noisily. "Shouldn't care to be caught out in her in any sort of a breeze. No, beam," said Harvey, critically, as the yacht slowed to pick up her mooring-buoy. "They're having what stands them for a good time. I can give you that, and twice as much as that, Harve. How'd you like it?" "Caesar! That's no way to get a dinghy over-side," said Harvey, still intent on the yacht. "If I couldn't slip a tackle better than that I'd stay ashore. . . . What if I don't?" "Stay ashore--or what?" "Yacht and ranch and live on 'the old man,' and--get behind mama when there's trouble," said Harvey, with a twinkle in his eye. "Why, in that case, you come right in with me, my son." "Ten dollars a month?" Another twinkle. "Not a cent more until you're worth it, and you won't begin to touch that for a few years." "I'd sooner begin sweeping out the office--isn't that how the big bugs start?--and touch something now than--" "I know it; we all feel that way. But I guess we can hire any sweeping we need. I made the same mistake myself of starting in too soon." "Thirty million dollars' worth o' mistake, wasn't it? I'd risk it for that." "I lost some; and I gained some. I'll tell you." Cheyne pulled his beard and smiled as he looked over the still water, and spoke away from Harvey, who presently began to be aware that his father was telling the story of his life. He talked in a low, even voice, without gesture and without expression; and it was a history for which a dozen leading journals would cheerfully have paid many dollars--the story of forty years that was at the same time the story of the New West, whose story is yet to be written. It began with a kinless boy turned loose in Texas, and went on fantastically through a hundred changes and chops of life, the scenes shifting from State after Western State, from cities that sprang up in a month and in a season utterly withered away, to wild ventures in wilder camps that are now laborious, paved municipalities. It covered the building of three railroads and the deliberate wreck of a fourth. It told of steamers, townships, forests, and mines, and the men of every nation under heaven, manning, creating, hewing, and digging these. It touched on chances of gigantic wealth flung before eyes that could not see, or missed by the merest accident of time and travel; and through the mad shift of things, sometimes on horseback, more often afoot, now rich, now poor, in and out, and back and forth, deck-hand, train-hand, contractor, boardinghouse keeper, journalist, engineer, drummer, real-estate agent, politician, dead-beat, rumseller, mine-owner, speculator, cattle-man, or tramp, moved Harvey Cheyne, alert and quiet, seeking his own ends, and, so he said, the glory and advancement of his country. He told of the faith that never deserted him even when he hung on the ragged edge of despair the faith that comes of knowing men and things. He enlarged, as though he were talking to himself, on his very great courage and resource at all times. The thing was so evident in the man's mind that he never even changed his tone. He described how he had bested his enemies, or forgiven them, exactly as they had bested or forgiven him in those careless days; how he had entreated, cajoled, and bullied towns, companies, and syndicates, all for their enduring good; crawled round, through, or under mountains and ravines, dragging a string and hoop-iron railroad after him, and in the end, how he had sat still while promiscuous communities tore the last fragments of his character to shreds. The tale held Harvey almost breathless, his head a little cocked to one side, his eyes fixed on his father's face, as the twilight deepened and the red cigar-end lit up the furrowed cheeks and heavy eyebrows. It seemed to him like watching a locomotive storming across country in the dark--a mile between each glare of the opened fire-door: but this locomotive could talk, and the words shook and stirred the boy to the core of his soul. At last Cheyne pitched away the cigar-butt, and the two sat in the dark over the lapping water. "I've never told that to any one before," said the father. Harvey gasped. "It's just the greatest thing that ever was!" said he. "That's what I got. Now I'm coming to what I didn't get. It won't sound much of anything to you, but I don't wish you to be as old as I am before you find out. I can handle men, of course, and I'm no fool along my own lines, but--but I can't compete with the man who has been taught! I've picked up as I went along, and I guess it sticks out all over me." "I've never seen it," said the son, indignantly. "You will, though, Harve. You will--just as soon as you're through college. Don't I know it? Don't I know the look on men's faces when they think me a--a 'mucker,' as they call it out here? I can break them to little pieces--yes--but I can't get back at 'em to hurt 'em where they live. I don't say they're 'way, 'way up, but I feel I'm 'way, 'way, 'way off, somehow. Now you've got your chance. You've got to soak up all the learning that's around, and you'll live with a crowd that are doing the same thing. They'll be doing it for a few thousand dollars a year at most; but remember you'll be doing it for millions. You'll learn law enough to look after your own property when I'm out o' the light, and you'll have to be solid with the best men in the market (they are useful later); and above all, you'll have to stow away the plain, common, sit-down-with-your-chin-on-your-elbows book-learning. Nothing pays like that, Harve, and it's bound to pay more and more each year in our country--in business and in politics. You'll see." "There's no sugar my end of the deal," said Harvey. "Four years at college! Wish I'd chosen the valet and the yacht!" "Never mind, my son," Cheyne insisted. "You're investing your capital where it'll bring in the best returns; and I guess you won't find our property shrunk any when you're ready to take hold. Think it over, and let me know in the morning. Hurry! We'll be late for supper!" As this was a business talk, there was no need for Harvey to tell his mother about it; and Cheyne naturally took the same point of view. But Mrs. Cheyne saw and feared, and was a little jealous. Her boy, who rode rough-shod over her, was gone, and in his stead reigned a keen-faced youth, abnormally silent, who addressed most of his conversation to his father. She understood it was business, and therefore a matter beyond her premises. If she had any doubts, they were resolved when Cheyne went to Boston and brought back a new diamond marquise-ring. "What have you two men been doing now?" she said, with a weak little smile, as she turned it in the light. "Talking--just talking, mama; there's nothing mean about Harvey." There was not. The boy had made a treaty on his own account. Railroads, he explained gravely, interested him as little as lumber, real estate, or mining. What his soul yearned after was control of his father's newly purchased sailing-ships. If that could be promised him within what he conceived to be a reasonable time, he, for his part, guaranteed diligence and sobriety at college for four or five years. In vacation he was to be allowed full access to all details connected with the line,--he had asked not more than two thousand questions about it,--from his father's most private papers in the safe to the tug in San Francisco harbour. "It's a deal," said Cheyne at the last. "You'll alter your mind twenty times before you leave college, o' course; but if you take hold of it in proper shape, and if you don't tie it up before you're twenty-three, I'll make the thing over to you. How's that, Harve?" "Nope; never pays to split up a going concern There's too much competition in the world anyway, and Disko says 'blood-kin hev to stick together.' His crowd never go back on him. That's one reason, he says, why they make such big fares. Say, the "We're Here" goes off to the Georges on Monday. They don't stay long ashore, do they?" "Well, we ought to be going, too, I guess. I've left my business hung up at loose ends between two oceans, and it's time to connect again. I just hate to do it, though; haven't had a holiday like this for twenty years." "We can't go without seeing Disko off," said Harvey; "and Monday's Memorial Day. Let's stay over that, anyway." "What is this memorial business? They were talking about it at the boarding-house," said Cheyne, weakly. He, too, was not anxious to spoil the golden days. "Well, as far as I can make out, this business is a sort of song-and-dance act, whacked up for the summer boarders. Disko don't think much of it, he says, because they take up a collection for the widows and orphans. Disko's independent. Haven't you noticed that?" "Well--yes. A little. In spots. Is it a town show, then?" "The summer convention is. They read out the names of the fellows drowned or gone astray since last time, and they make speeches, and recite, and all. Then, Disko says, the secretaries of the Aid Societies go into the back yard and fight over the catch. The real show, he says, is in the spring. The ministers all take a hand then, and there aren't any summer boarders around." "I see," said Cheyne, with the brilliant and perfect comprehension of one born into and bred up to city pride. "We'll stay over for Memorial Day, and get off in the afternoon." "Guess I'll go down to Disko's and make him bring his crowd up before they sail. I'll have to stand with them, of course." "Oh, that's it, is it," said Cheyne. "I'm only a poor summer boarder, and you're--" "A Banker--full-blooded Banker," Harvey called back as he boarded a trolley, and Cheyne went on with his blissful dreams for the future. Disko had no use for public functions where appeals were made for charity, but Harvey pleaded that the glory of the day would be lost, so far as he was concerned, if the "We're Heres" absented themselves. Then Disko made conditions. He had heard--it was astonishing how all the world knew all the world's business along the waterfront--he had heard that a "Philadelphia actress-woman" was going to take part in the exercises; and he mistrusted that she would deliver "Skipper Ireson's Ride." Personally, he had as little use for actresses as for summer boarders; but justice was justice, and though he himself (here Dan giggled) had once slipped up on a matter of judgment, this thing must not be. So Harvey came back to East Gloucester, and spent half a day explaining to an amused actress with a royal reputation on two seaboards the inwardness of the mistake she contemplated; and she admitted that it was justice, even as Disko had said. Cheyne knew by old experience what would happen; but anything of the nature of a public palaver was meat and drink to the man's soul. He saw the trolleys hurrying west, in the hot, hazy morning, full of women in light summer dresses, and white-faced straw-hatted men fresh from Boston desks; the stack of bicycles outside the post-office; the come-and-go of busy officials, greeting one another; the slow flick and swash of bunting in the heavy air; and the important man with a hose sluicing the brick sidewalk. "Mother," he said suddenly, "don't you remember--after Seattle was burned out--and they got her going again?" Mrs. Cheyne nodded, and looked critically down the crooked street. Like her husband, she understood these gatherings, all the West over, and compared them one against another. The fishermen began to mingle with the crowd about the town-hall doors--blue-jowled Portuguese, their women bare-headed or shawled for the most part; clear-eyed Nova Scotians, and men of the Maritime Provinces; French, Italians, Swedes, and Danes, with outside crews of coasting schooners; and everywhere women in black, who saluted one another with a gloomy pride, for this was their day of great days. And there were ministers of many creeds,--pastors of great, gilt-edged congregations, at the seaside for a rest, with shepherds of the regular work,--from the priests of the Church on the Hill to bush-bearded ex-sailor Lutherans, hail-fellow with the men of a score of boats. There were owners of lines of schooners, large contributors to the societies, and small men, their few craft pawned to the mastheads, with bankers and marine-insurance agents, captains of tugs and water-boats, riggers, fitters, lumpers, salters, boat-builders, and coopers, and all the mixed population of the water-front. They drifted along the line of seats made gay with the dresses of the summer boarders, and one of the town officials patrolled and perspired till he shone all over with pure civic pride. Cheyne had met him for five minutes a few days before, and between the two there was entire understanding. "Well, Mr. Cheyne, and what d'you think of our city?--Yes, madam, you can sit anywhere you please.--You have this kind of thing out West, I presume?" "Yes, but we aren't as old as you." "That's so, of course. You ought to have been at the exercises when we celebrated our two hundred and fiftieth birthday. I tell you, Mr. Cheyne, the old city did herself credit." "So I heard. It pays, too. What's the matter with the town that it don't have a first-class hotel, though?" "Right over there to the left, Pedro. Heaps o' room for you and your crowd.--Why, that's what I tell 'em all the time, Mr. Cheyne. There's big money in it, but I presume that don't affect you any. What we want is--" A heavy hand fell on his broadcloth shoulder, and the flushed skipper of a Portland coal-and-ice coaster spun him half round. "What in thunder do you fellows mean by clappin' the law on the town when all decent men are at sea this way? Heh? Town's dry's a bone, an' smells a sight worse sence I quit. 'Might ha' left us one saloon for soft drinks, anyway." "Don't seem to have hindered your nourishment this morning, Carsen. I'll go into the politics of it later. Sit down by the door and think over your arguments till I come back." "What good's arguments to me? In Miquelon champagne's eighteen dollars a case, and--" The skipper lurched into his seat as an organ-prelude silenced him. "Our new organ," said the official proudly to Cheyne. "Cost us four thousand dollars, too. We'll have to get back to high-licence next year to pay for it. I wasn't going to let the ministers have all the religion at their convention. Those are some of our orphans standing up to sing. My wife taught 'em. See you again later, Mr. Cheyne. I'm wanted on the platform." High, clear, and true, children's voices bore down the last noise of those settling into their places. "O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!" The women throughout the hall leaned forward to look as the reiterated cadences filled the air. Mrs. Cheyne, with some others, began to breathe short; she had hardly imagined there were so many widows in the world; and instinctively searched for Harvey. He had found the "We're Heres" at the back of the audience, and was standing, as by right, between Dan and Disko. Uncle Salters, returned the night before with Penn, from Pamlico Sound, received him suspiciously. "Hain't your folk gone yet?" he grunted. "What are you doin' here, young feller?" "O ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!" "Hain't he good right?" said Dan. "He's bin there, same as the rest of us." "Not in them clothes," Salters snarled. "Shut your head, Salters," said Disko. "Your bile's gone back on you. Stay right where ye are, Harve." Then up and spoke the orator of the occasion, another pillar of the municipality, bidding the world welcome to Gloucester, and incidentally pointing out wherein Gloucester excelled the rest of the world. Then he turned to the sea-wealth of the city, and spoke of the price that must be paid for the yearly harvest. They would hear later the names of their lost dead--one hundred and seventeen of them. (The widows stared a little, and looked at one another here.) Gloucester could not boast any overwhelming mills or factories. Her sons worked for such wage as the sea gave; and they all knew that neither Georges nor the Banks were cow-pastures. The utmost that folk ashore could accomplish was to help the widows and the orphans; and after a few general remarks he took this opportunity of thanking, in the name of the city, those who had so public-spiritedly consented to participate in the exercises of the occasion. "I jest despise the beggin' pieces in it," growled Disko. "It don't give folk a fair notion of us." "Ef folk won't be fore-handed an' put by when they've the chance," returned Salters, "it stands in the nature o' things they hev to be 'shamed. You take warnin' by that, young feller. Riches endureth but for a season, ef you scatter them araound on lugsuries--" "But to lose everything--everything," said Penn. "What can you do then? Once!"--the watery blue eyes stared up and down, as looking for something to steady them--"once I read--in a book, I think--of a boat where every one was run down--except some one--and he said to me--" "Shucks!" said Salters, cutting in. "You read a little less an' take more int'rust in your vittles, and you'll come nearer earnin' your keep, Penn." Harvey, jammed among the fishermen, felt a creepy, crawly, tingling thrill that began in the back of his neck and ended at his boots. He was cold, too, though it was a stifling day. "'That the actress from Philadelphia?" said Disko Troop, scowling at the platform. "You've fixed it about old man Ireson, hain't ye, Harve? Ye know why naow." It was not "Ireson's Ride" that the woman delivered, but some sort of poem about a fishing-port called Brixham and a fleet of trawlers beating in against storm by night, while the women made a guiding fire at the head of the quay with everything they could lay hands on. "They took the grandam's blanket, Who shivered and bade them go; They took the baby's cradle, Who could not say them no." "Whew!" said Dan, peering over Long Jack's shoulder. "That's great! Must ha' bin expensive, though." "Ground-hog case," said the Galway man. "Badly lighted port, Danny." "And knew not all the while If they were lighting a bonfire Or only a funeral pile." The wonderful voice took hold of people by their heartstrings; and when she told how the drenched crews were flung ashore, living and dead, and they carried the bodies to the glare of the fires, asking: "Child, is this your father?" or "Wife, is this your man?" you could hear hard breathing all over the benches. "And when the boats of Brixham Go out to face the gales, Think of the love that travels Like light upon their sails!" There was very little applause when she finished. The women were looking for their handkerchiefs, and many of the men stared at the ceiling with shiny eyes. "H'm," said Salters; "that 'u'd cost ye a dollar to hear at any theater--maybe two. Some folk, I presoom, can afford it. 'Seems downright waste to me. . . . Naow, how in Jerusalem did Cap Bart Edwardes strike adrift here?" "No keepin' him under," said an Eastport man behind. "He's a poet, an' he's baound to say his piece. 'Comes from daown aour way, too." He did not say that Captain B. Edwardes had striven for five consecutive years to be allowed to recite a piece of his own composition on Gloucester Memorial Day. An amused and exhausted committee had at last given him his desire. The simplicity and utter happiness of the old man, as he stood up in his very best Sunday clothes, won the audience ere he opened his mouth. They sat unmurmuring through seven-and-thirty hatchet-made verses describing at fullest length the loss of the schooner Joan Hasken off the Georges in the gale of 1867, and when he came to an end they shouted with one kindly throat. A far-sighted Boston reporter slid away for a full copy of the epic and an interview with the author; so that earth had nothing more to offer Captain Bart Edwardes, ex-whaler, shipwright, master-fisherman, and poet, in the seventy-third year of his age. "Naow, I call that sensible," said an Eastport man. "I've bin over that graound with his writin', jest as he read it, in my two hands, and I can testify that he's got it all in." "If Dan here couldn't do better'n that with one hand before breakfast, he ought to be switched," said Salters, upholding the honour of Massachusetts on general principles. "Not but what I'm free to own he's considerable litt'ery--fer Maine. Still--" "Guess Uncle Salters's goin' to die this trip. Fust compliment he's ever paid me," Dan sniggered. "What's wrong with you, Harve? You act all quiet and you look greenish. Feelin' sick?" "Don't know what's the matter with me," Harvey replied. "Seems if my insides were too big for my outsides. I'm all crowded up and shivery." "Dispepsy? Pshaw-too bad. We'll wait for the readin', an' then we'll quit, an' catch the tide." The widows--they were nearly all of that season's making--braced themselves rigidly like people going to be shot in cold blood, for they knew what was coming. The summer-boarder girls in pink and blue shirt-waists stopped tittering over Captain Edwardes's wonderful poem, and looked back to see why all was silent. The fishermen pressed forward as that town official who had talked with Cheyne bobbed up on the platform and began to read the year's list of losses, dividing them into months. Last September's casualties were mostly single men and strangers, but his voice rang very loud in the stillness of the hall. "September 9th.--Schooner "Florrie Anderson" lost, with all aboard, off the Georges. "Reuben Pitman, master, 50, single, Main Street, City. "Emil Olsen, 19, single, 329 Hammond Street, City; Denmark. "Oscar Stanberg, single, 25, Sweden. "Carl Stanberg, single, 28, Main Street, City. "Pedro, supposed Madeira, single, Keene's boarding-house, City. "Joseph Welsh, alias Joseph Wright, 30, St. John's, Newfoundland." "No--Augusty, Maine," a voice cried from the body of the hall. "He shipped from St. John's," said the reader, looking to see. "I know it. He belongs in Augusty. My nevvy." The reader made a pencilled correction on the margin of the list, and resumed: "Same schooner, Charlie Ritchie, Liverpool, Nova Scotia, 33, single. "Albert May, 267 Rogers Street, City, 27, single. "September 27th.--Orvin Dollard, 30, married, drowned in dory off Eastern Point." That shot went home, for one of the widows flinched where she sat, clasping and unclasping her hands. Mrs. Cheyne, who had been listening with wide-opened eyes, threw up her head and choked. Dan's mother, a few seats to the right, saw and heard and quickly moved to her side. The reading went on. By the time they reached the January and February wrecks the shots were falling thick and fast, and the widows drew breath between their teeth. "February 14th.--Schooner "Harry Randolph" dismasted on the way home from Newfoundland; Asa Musie, married, 32, Main Street, City, lost overboard. "February 23d.--Schooner "Gilbert Hope"; went astray in dory, Robert Beavon, 29, married, native of Pubnico, Nova Scotia." But his wife was in the hall. They heard a low cry, as though a little animal had been hit. It was stifled at once, and a girl staggered out of the hall. She had been hoping against hope for months, because some who have gone adrift in dories have been miraculously picked up by deep-sea sailing-ships. Now she had her certainty, and Harvey could see the policeman on the sidewalk hailing a hack for her. "It's fifty cents to the depot"--the driver began, but the policeman held up his hand--"but I'm goin' there anyway. Jump right in. Look at here, Alf; you don't pull me next time my lamps ain't lit. See?" The side-door closed on the patch of bright sunshine, and Harvey's eyes turned again to the reader and his endless list. "April 19th.--Schooner "Mamie Douglas" lost on the Banks with all hands. "Edward Canton," 43, master, married, City. "D. Hawkins," alias Williams, 34, married, Shelbourne, Nova Scotia. "G. W. Clay," coloured, 28, married, City." And so on, and so on. Great lumps were rising in Harvey's throat, and his stomach reminded him of the day when he fell from the liner. "May 10th.--Schooner "We're Here" [the blood tingled all over him]. Otto Svendson, 20, single, City, lost overboard." Once more a low, tearing cry from somewhere at the back of the hall. "She shouldn't ha' come. She shouldn't ha' come," said Long Jack, with a cluck of pity. "Don't scrowge, Harve," grunted Dan. Harvey heard that much, but the rest was all darkness spotted with fiery wheels. Disko leaned forward and spoke to his wife, where she sat with one arm round Mrs. Cheyne, and the other holding down the snatching, catching, ringed hands. "Lean your head daown--right daown!" she whispered. "It'll go off in a minute." "I ca-an't! I do-don't! Oh, let me--" Mrs. Cheyne did not at all know what she said. "You must," Mrs. Troop repeated. "Your boy's jest fainted dead away. They do that some when they're gettin' their growth. 'Wish to tend to him? We can git aout this side. Quite quiet. You come right along with me. Psha', my dear, we're both women, I guess. We must tend to aour men-folk. Come!" The "We're Heres" promptly went through the crowd as a body-guard, and it was a very white and shaken Harvey that they propped up on a bench in an anteroom. "Favours his ma," was Mrs. Troop's only comment, as the mother bent over her boy. "How d'you suppose he could ever stand it?" she cried indignantly to Cheyne, who had said nothing at all. "It was horrible--horrible! We shouldn't have come. It's wrong and wicked! It--it isn't right! Why--why couldn't they put these things in the papers, where they belong? Are you better, darling?" That made Harvey very properly ashamed. "Oh, I'm all right, I guess," he said, struggling to his feet, with a broken giggle. "Must ha' been something I ate for breakfast." "Coffee, perhaps," said Cheyne, whose face was all in hard lines, as though it had been cut out of bronze. "We won't go back again." "Guess 'twould be 'baout's well to git daown to the wharf," said Disko. "It's close in along with them Dagoes, an' the fresh air will fresh Mrs. Cheyne up." Harvey announced that he never felt better in his life; but it was not till he saw the "We're Here", fresh from the lumper's hands, at Wouverman's wharf, that he lost his all-overish feelings in a queer mixture of pride and sorrowfulness. Other people--summer boarders and such-like--played about in cat-boats or looked at the sea from pier-heads; but he understood things from the inside--more things than he could begin to think about. None the less, he could have sat down and howled because the little schooner was going off. Mrs. Cheyne simply cried and cried every step of the way, and said most extraordinary things to Mrs. Troop, who "babied" her till Dan, who had not been "babied" since he was six, whistled aloud. And so the old crowd--Harvey felt like the most ancient of mariners--dropped into the old schooner among the battered dories, while Harvey slipped the stern-fast from the pier-head, and they slid her along the wharf-side with their hands. Every one wanted to say so much that no one said anything in particular. Harvey bade Dan take care of Uncle Salters's sea-boots and Penn's dory-anchor, and Long Jack entreated Harvey to remember his lessons in seamanship; but the jokes fell flat in the presence of the two women, and it is hard to be funny with green harbour-water widening between good friends. "Up jib and fores'l!" shouted Disko, getting to the wheel, as the wind took her. "See you later, Harve. Dunno but I come near thinkin' a heap o' you an' your folks." Then she glided beyond ear-shot, and they sat down to watch her up the harbour. And still Mrs. Cheyne wept. "Psha', my dear," said Mrs. Troop; "we're both women, I guess. Like's not it'll ease your heart to hev your cry aout. God He knows it never done me a mite o' good; but then He knows I've had something to cry fer!" Now it was a few years later, and upon the other edge of America, that a young man came through the clammy sea-fog up a windy street which is flanked with most expensive houses built of wood to imitate stone. To him, as he was standing by a hammered iron gate, entered on horseback--and the horse would have been cheap at a thousand dollars--another young man. And this is what they said: "Hello, Dan!" "Hello, Harve!" "What's the best with you?" "Well, I'm so's to be that kind o' animal called second mate this trip. Ain't you most through with that triple-invoiced college o' yours?" "Getting that way. I tell you, the Leland Stanford Junior isn't a circumstance to the old "We're Here"; but I'm coming into the business for keeps next fall." "Meanin' aour packets?" "Nothing else. You just wait till I get my knife into you, Dan. I'm going to make the old line lie down and cry when I take hold." "I'll resk it," said Dan, with a brotherly grin, as Harvey dismounted and asked whether he were coming in. "That's what I took the cable fer; but, say, is the doctor anywheres araound? I'll draown that crazy nigger some day, his one cussed joke an' all." There was a low, triumphant chuckle, as the ex-cook of the "We're Here" came out of the fog to take the horse's bridle. He allowed no one but himself to attend to any of Harvey's wants. "Thick as the Banks, ain't it, doctor?" said Dan, propitiatingly. But the coal-black Celt with the second-sight did not see fit to reply till he had tapped Dan on the shoulder, and for the twentieth time croaked the old, old prophecy in his ear: "Master--man. Man--master," said he. "You remember, Dan Troop, what I said? On the 'We're Here'?" "Well, I won't go so far as to deny that it do look like it as things stand at present," said Dan. "She was an able packet, and one way an' another I owe her a heap--her and dad." "Me too," quoth Harvey Cheyne. 
3790	----	MAJOR BARBARA BERNARD SHAW ACT I It is after dinner on a January night, in the library in Lady Britomart Undershaft's house in Wilton Crescent. A large and comfortable settee is in the middle of the room, upholstered in dark leather. A person sitting on it [it is vacant at present] would have, on his right, Lady Britomart's writing table, with the lady herself busy at it; a smaller writing table behind him on his left; the door behind him on Lady Britomart's side; and a window with a window seat directly on his left. Near the window is an armchair. Lady Britomart is a woman of fifty or thereabouts, well dressed and yet careless of her dress, well bred and quite reckless of her breeding, well mannered and yet appallingly outspoken and indifferent to the opinion of her interlocutory, amiable and yet peremptory, arbitrary, and high-tempered to the last bearable degree, and withal a very typical managing matron of the upper class, treated as a naughty child until she grew into a scolding mother, and finally settling down with plenty of practical ability and worldly experience, limited in the oddest way with domestic and class limitations, conceiving the universe exactly as if it were a large house in Wilton Crescent, though handling her corner of it very effectively on that assumption, and being quite enlightened and liberal as to the books in the library, the pictures on the walls, the music in the portfolios, and the articles in the papers. Her son, Stephen, comes in. He is a gravely correct young man under 25, taking himself very seriously, but still in some awe of his mother, from childish habit and bachelor shyness rather than from any weakness of character. STEPHEN. What's the matter? LADY BRITOMART. Presently, Stephen. Stephen submissively walks to the settee and sits down. He takes up The Speaker. LADY BRITOMART. Don't begin to read, Stephen. I shall require all your attention. STEPHEN. It was only while I was waiting-- LADY BRITOMART. Don't make excuses, Stephen. [He puts down The Speaker]. Now! [She finishes her writing; rises; and comes to the settee]. I have not kept you waiting very long, I think. STEPHEN. Not at all, mother. LADY BRITOMART. Bring me my cushion. [He takes the cushion from the chair at the desk and arranges it for her as she sits down on the settee]. Sit down. [He sits down and fingers his tie nervously]. Don't fiddle with your tie, Stephen: there is nothing the matter with it. STEPHEN. I beg your pardon. [He fiddles with his watch chain instead]. LADY BRITOMART. Now are you attending to me, Stephen? STEPHEN. Of course, mother. LADY BRITOMART. No: it's not of course. I want something much more than your everyday matter-of-course attention. I am going to speak to you very seriously, Stephen. I wish you would let that chain alone. STEPHEN [hastily relinquishing the chain] Have I done anything to annoy you, mother? If so, it was quite unintentional. LADY BRITOMART [astonished] Nonsense! [With some remorse] My poor boy, did you think I was angry with you? STEPHEN. What is it, then, mother? You are making me very uneasy. LADY BRITOMART [squaring herself at him rather aggressively] Stephen: may I ask how soon you intend to realize that you are a grown-up man, and that I am only a woman? STEPHEN [amazed] Only a-- LADY BRITOMART. Don't repeat my words, please: It is a most aggravating habit. You must learn to face life seriously, Stephen. I really cannot bear the whole burden of our family affairs any longer. You must advise me: you must assume the responsibility. STEPHEN. I! LADY BRITOMART. Yes, you, of course. You were 24 last June. You've been at Harrow and Cambridge. You've been to India and Japan. You must know a lot of things now; unless you have wasted your time most scandalously. Well, advise me. STEPHEN [much perplexed] You know I have never interfered in the household-- LADY BRITOMART. No: I should think not. I don't want you to order the dinner. STEPHEN. I mean in our family affairs. LADY BRITOMART. Well, you must interfere now; for they are getting quite beyond me. STEPHEN [troubled] I have thought sometimes that perhaps I ought; but really, mother, I know so little about them; and what I do know is so painful--it is so impossible to mention some things to you--[he stops, ashamed]. LADY BRITOMART. I suppose you mean your father. STEPHEN [almost inaudibly] Yes. LADY BRITOMART. My dear: we can't go on all our lives not mentioning him. Of course you were quite right not to open the subject until I asked you to; but you are old enough now to be taken into my confidence, and to help me to deal with him about the girls. STEPHEN. But the girls are all right. They are engaged. LADY BRITOMART [complacently] Yes: I have made a very good match for Sarah. Charles Lomax will be a millionaire at 35. But that is ten years ahead; and in the meantime his trustees cannot under the terms of his father's will allow him more than 800 pounds a year. STEPHEN. But the will says also that if he increases his income by his own exertions, they may double the increase. LADY BRITOMART. Charles Lomax's exertions are much more likely to decrease his income than to increase it. Sarah will have to find at least another 800 pounds a year for the next ten years; and even then they will be as poor as church mice. And what about Barbara? I thought Barbara was going to make the most brilliant career of all of you. And what does she do? Joins the Salvation Army; discharges her maid; lives on a pound a week; and walks in one evening with a professor of Greek whom she has picked up in the street, and who pretends to be a Salvationist, and actually plays the big drum for her in public because he has fallen head over ears in love with her. STEPHEN. I was certainly rather taken aback when I heard they were engaged. Cusins is a very nice fellow, certainly: nobody would ever guess that he was born in Australia; but-- LADY BRITOMART. Oh, Adolphus Cusins will make a very good husband. After all, nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman. And my family, thank Heaven, is not a pig-headed Tory one. We are Whigs, and believe in liberty. Let snobbish people say what they please: Barbara shall marry, not the man they like, but the man I like. STEPHEN. Of course I was thinking only of his income. However, he is not likely to be extravagant. LADY BRITOMART. Don't be too sure of that, Stephen. I know your quiet, simple, refined, poetic people like Adolphus--quite content with the best of everything! They cost more than your extravagant people, who are always as mean as they are second rate. No: Barbara will need at least 2000 pounds a year. You see it means two additional households. Besides, my dear, you must marry soon. I don't approve of the present fashion of philandering bachelors and late marriages; and I am trying to arrange something for you. STEPHEN. It's very good of you, mother; but perhaps I had better arrange that for myself. LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense! you are much too young to begin matchmaking: you would be taken in by some pretty little nobody. Of course I don't mean that you are not to be consulted: you know that as well as I do. [Stephen closes his lips and is silent]. Now don't sulk, Stephen. STEPHEN. I am not sulking, mother. What has all this got to do with--with--with my father? LADY BRITOMART. My dear Stephen: where is the money to come from? It is easy enough for you and the other children to live on my income as long as we are in the same house; but I can't keep four families in four separate houses. You know how poor my father is: he has barely seven thousand a year now; and really, if he were not the Earl of Stevenage, he would have to give up society. He can do nothing for us: he says, naturally enough, that it is absurd that he should be asked to provide for the children of a man who is rolling in money. You see, Stephen, your father must be fabulously wealthy, because there is always a war going on somewhere. STEPHEN. You need not remind me of that, mother. I have hardly ever opened a newspaper in my life without seeing our name in it. The Undershaft torpedo! The Undershaft quick firers! The Undershaft ten inch! the Undershaft disappearing rampart gun! the Undershaft submarine! and now the Undershaft aerial battleship! At Harrow they called me the Woolwich Infant. At Cambridge it was the same. A little brute at King's who was always trying to get up revivals, spoilt my Bible--your first birthday present to me--by writing under my name, "Son and heir to Undershaft and Lazarus, Death and Destruction Dealers: address, Christendom and Judea." But that was not so bad as the way I was kowtowed to everywhere because my father was making millions by selling cannons. LADY BRITOMART. It is not only the cannons, but the war loans that Lazarus arranges under cover of giving credit for the cannons. You know, Stephen, it's perfectly scandalous. Those two men, Andrew Undershaft and Lazarus, positively have Europe under their thumbs. That is why your father is able to behave as he does. He is above the law. Do you think Bismarck or Gladstone or Disraeli could have openly defied every social and moral obligation all their lives as your father has? They simply wouldn't have dared. I asked Gladstone to take it up. I asked The Times to take it up. I asked the Lord Chamberlain to take it up. But it was just like asking them to declare war on the Sultan. They WOULDN'T. They said they couldn't touch him. I believe they were afraid. STEPHEN. What could they do? He does not actually break the law. LADY BRITOMART. Not break the law! He is always breaking the law. He broke the law when he was born: his parents were not married. STEPHEN. Mother! Is that true? LADY BRITOMART. Of course it's true: that was why we separated. STEPHEN. He married without letting you know this! LADY BRITOMART [rather taken aback by this inference] Oh no. To do Andrew justice, that was not the sort of thing he did. Besides, you know the Undershaft motto: Unashamed. Everybody knew. STEPHEN. But you said that was why you separated. LADY BRITOMART. Yes, because he was not content with being a foundling himself: he wanted to disinherit you for another foundling. That was what I couldn't stand. STEPHEN [ashamed] Do you mean for--for--for-- LADY BRITOMART. Don't stammer, Stephen. Speak distinctly. STEPHEN. But this is so frightful to me, mother. To have to speak to you about such things! LADY BRITOMART. It's not pleasant for me, either, especially if you are still so childish that you must make it worse by a display of embarrassment. It is only in the middle classes, Stephen, that people get into a state of dumb helpless horror when they find that there are wicked people in the world. In our class, we have to decide what is to be done with wicked people; and nothing should disturb our self possession. Now ask your question properly. STEPHEN. Mother: you have no consideration for me. For Heaven's sake either treat me as a child, as you always do, and tell me nothing at all; or tell me everything and let me take it as best I can. LADY BRITOMART. Treat you as a child! What do you mean? It is most unkind and ungrateful of you to say such a thing. You know I have never treated any of you as children. I have always made you my companions and friends, and allowed you perfect freedom to do and say whatever you liked, so long as you liked what I could approve of. STEPHEN [desperately] I daresay we have been the very imperfect children of a very perfect mother; but I do beg you to let me alone for once, and tell me about this horrible business of my father wanting to set me aside for another son. LADY BRITOMART [amazed] Another son! I never said anything of the kind. I never dreamt of such a thing. This is what comes of interrupting me. STEPHEN. But you said-- LADY BRITOMART [cutting him short] Now be a good boy, Stephen, and listen to me patiently. The Undershafts are descended from a foundling in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft in the city. That was long ago, in the reign of James the First. Well, this foundling was adopted by an armorer and gun-maker. In the course of time the foundling succeeded to the business; and from some notion of gratitude, or some vow or something, he adopted another foundling, and left the business to him. And that foundling did the same. Ever since that, the cannon business has always been left to an adopted foundling named Andrew Undershaft. STEPHEN. But did they never marry? Were there no legitimate sons? LADY BRITOMART. Oh yes: they married just as your father did; and they were rich enough to buy land for their own children and leave them well provided for. But they always adopted and trained some foundling to succeed them in the business; and of course they always quarrelled with their wives furiously over it. Your father was adopted in that way; and he pretends to consider himself bound to keep up the tradition and adopt somebody to leave the business to. Of course I was not going to stand that. There may have been some reason for it when the Undershafts could only marry women in their own class, whose sons were not fit to govern great estates. But there could be no excuse for passing over my son. STEPHEN [dubiously] I am afraid I should make a poor hand of managing a cannon foundry. LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense! you could easily get a manager and pay him a salary. STEPHEN. My father evidently had no great opinion of my capacity. LADY BRITOMART. Stuff, child! you were only a baby: it had nothing to do with your capacity. Andrew did it on principle, just as he did every perverse and wicked thing on principle. When my father remonstrated, Andrew actually told him to his face that history tells us of only two successful institutions: one the Undershaft firm, and the other the Roman Empire under the Antonines. That was because the Antonine emperors all adopted their successors. Such rubbish! The Stevenages are as good as the Antonines, I hope; and you are a Stevenage. But that was Andrew all over. There you have the man! Always clever and unanswerable when he was defending nonsense and wickedness: always awkward and sullen when he had to behave sensibly and decently! STEPHEN. Then it was on my account that your home life was broken up, mother. I am sorry. LADY BRITOMART. Well, dear, there were other differences. I really cannot bear an immoral man. I am not a Pharisee, I hope; and I should not have minded his merely doing wrong things: we are none of us perfect. But your father didn't exactly do wrong things: he said them and thought them: that was what was so dreadful. He really had a sort of religion of wrongness just as one doesn't mind men practising immorality so long as they own that they are in the wrong by preaching morality; so I couldn't forgive Andrew for preaching immorality while he practised morality. You would all have grown up without principles, without any knowledge of right and wrong, if he had been in the house. You know, my dear, your father was a very attractive man in some ways. Children did not dislike him; and he took advantage of it to put the wickedest ideas into their heads, and make them quite unmanageable. I did not dislike him myself: very far from it; but nothing can bridge over moral disagreement. STEPHEN. All this simply bewilders me, mother. People may differ about matters of opinion, or even about religion; but how can they differ about right and wrong? Right is right; and wrong is wrong; and if a man cannot distinguish them properly, he is either a fool or a rascal: that's all. LADY BRITOMART [touched] That's my own boy [she pats his cheek]! Your father never could answer that: he used to laugh and get out of it under cover of some affectionate nonsense. And now that you understand the situation, what do you advise me to do? STEPHEN. Well, what can you do? LADY BRITOMART. I must get the money somehow. STEPHEN. We cannot take money from him. I had rather go and live in some cheap place like Bedford Square or even Hampstead than take a farthing of his money. LADY BRITOMART. But after all, Stephen, our present income comes from Andrew. STEPHEN [shocked] I never knew that. LADY BRITOMART. Well, you surely didn't suppose your grandfather had anything to give me. The Stevenages could not do everything for you. We gave you social position. Andrew had to contribute something. He had a very good bargain, I think. STEPHEN [bitterly] We are utterly dependent on him and his cannons, then! LADY BRITOMART. Certainly not: the money is settled. But he provided it. So you see it is not a question of taking money from him or not: it is simply a question of how much. I don't want any more for myself. STEPHEN. Nor do I. LADY BRITOMART. But Sarah does; and Barbara does. That is, Charles Lomax and Adolphus Cusins will cost them more. So I must put my pride in my pocket and ask for it, I suppose. That is your advice, Stephen, is it not? STEPHEN. No. LADY BRITOMART [sharply] Stephen! STEPHEN. Of course if you are determined-- LADY BRITOMART. I am not determined: I ask your advice; and I am waiting for it. I will not have all the responsibility thrown on my shoulders. STEPHEN [obstinately] I would die sooner than ask him for another penny. LADY BRITOMART [resignedly] You mean that I must ask him. Very well, Stephen: It shall be as you wish. You will be glad to know that your grandfather concurs. But he thinks I ought to ask Andrew to come here and see the girls. After all, he must have some natural affection for them. STEPHEN. Ask him here!!! LADY BRITOMART. Do not repeat my words, Stephen. Where else can I ask him? STEPHEN. I never expected you to ask him at all. LADY BRITOMART. Now don't tease, Stephen. Come! you see that it is necessary that he should pay us a visit, don't you? STEPHEN [reluctantly] I suppose so, if the girls cannot do without his money. LADY BRITOMART. Thank you, Stephen: I knew you would give me the right advice when it was properly explained to you. I have asked your father to come this evening. [Stephen bounds from his seat] Don't jump, Stephen: it fidgets me. STEPHEN [in utter consternation] Do you mean to say that my father is coming here to-night--that he may be here at any moment? LADY BRITOMART [looking at her watch] I said nine. [He gasps. She rises]. Ring the bell, please. [Stephen goes to the smaller writing table; presses a button on it; and sits at it with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, outwitted and overwhelmed]. It is ten minutes to nine yet; and I have to prepare the girls. I asked Charles Lomax and Adolphus to dinner on purpose that they might be here. Andrew had better see them in case he should cherish any delusions as to their being capable of supporting their wives. [The butler enters: Lady Britomart goes behind the settee to speak to him]. Morrison: go up to the drawingroom and tell everybody to come down here at once. [Morrison withdraws. Lady Britomart turns to Stephen]. Now remember, Stephen, I shall need all your countenance and authority. [He rises and tries to recover some vestige of these attributes]. Give me a chair, dear. [He pushes a chair forward from the wall to where she stands, near the smaller writing table. She sits down; and he goes to the armchair, into which he throws himself]. I don't know how Barbara will take it. Ever since they made her a major in the Salvation Army she has developed a propensity to have her own way and order people about which quite cows me sometimes. It's not ladylike: I'm sure I don't know where she picked it up. Anyhow, Barbara shan't bully me; but still it's just as well that your father should be here before she has time to refuse to meet him or make a fuss. Don't look nervous, Stephen, it will only encourage Barbara to make difficulties. I am nervous enough, goodness knows; but I don't show it. Sarah and Barbara come in with their respective young men, Charles Lomax and Adolphus Cusins. Sarah is slender, bored, and mundane. Barbara is robuster, jollier, much more energetic. Sarah is fashionably dressed: Barbara is in Salvation Army uniform. Lomax, a young man about town, is like many other young men about town. He is affected with a frivolous sense of humor which plunges him at the most inopportune moments into paroxysms of imperfectly suppressed laughter. Cusins is a spectacled student, slight, thin haired, and sweet voiced, with a more complex form of Lomax's complaint. His sense of humor is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce impatience has set up a chronic strain which has visibly wrecked his constitution. He is a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person who by mere force of character presents himself as--and indeed actually is--considerate, gentle, explanatory, even mild and apologetic, capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness. By the operation of some instinct which is not merciful enough to blind him with the illusions of love, he is obstinately bent on marrying Barbara. Lomax likes Sarah and thinks it will be rather a lark to marry her. Consequently he has not attempted to resist Lady Britomart's arrangements to that end. All four look as if they had been having a good deal of fun in the drawingroom. The girls enter first, leaving the swains outside. Sarah comes to the settee. Barbara comes in after her and stops at the door. BARBARA. Are Cholly and Dolly to come in? LADY BRITOMART [forcibly] Barbara: I will not have Charles called Cholly: the vulgarity of it positively makes me ill. BARBARA. It's all right, mother. Cholly is quite correct nowadays. Are they to come in? LADY BRITOMART. Yes, if they will behave themselves. BARBARA [through the door] Come in, Dolly, and behave yourself. Barbara comes to her mother's writing table. Cusins enters smiling, and wanders towards Lady Britomart. SARAH [calling] Come in, Cholly. [Lomax enters, controlling his features very imperfectly, and places himself vaguely between Sarah and Barbara]. LADY BRITOMART [peremptorily] Sit down, all of you. [They sit. Cusins crosses to the window and seats himself there. Lomax takes a chair. Barbara sits at the writing table and Sarah on the settee]. I don't in the least know what you are laughing at, Adolphus. I am surprised at you, though I expected nothing better from Charles Lomax. CUSINS [in a remarkably gentle voice] Barbara has been trying to teach me the West Ham Salvation March. LADY BRITOMART. I see nothing to laugh at in that; nor should you if you are really converted. CUSINS [sweetly] You were not present. It was really funny, I believe. LOMAX. Ripping. LADY BRITOMART. Be quiet, Charles. Now listen to me, children. Your father is coming here this evening. [General stupefaction]. LOMAX [remonstrating] Oh I say! LADY BRITOMART. You are not called on to say anything, Charles. SARAH. Are you serious, mother? LADY BRITOMART. Of course I am serious. It is on your account, Sarah, and also on Charles's. [Silence. Charles looks painfully unworthy]. I hope you are not going to object, Barbara. BARBARA. I! why should I? My father has a soul to be saved like anybody else. He's quite welcome as far as I am concerned. LOMAX [still remonstrant] But really, don't you know! Oh I say! LADY BRITOMART [frigidly] What do you wish to convey, Charles? LOMAX. Well, you must admit that this is a bit thick. LADY BRITOMART [turning with ominous suavity to Cusins] Adolphus: you are a professor of Greek. Can you translate Charles Lomax's remarks into reputable English for us? CUSINS [cautiously] If I may say so, Lady Brit, I think Charles has rather happily expressed what we all feel. Homer, speaking of Autolycus, uses the same phrase. LOMAX [handsomely] Not that I mind, you know, if Sarah don't. LADY BRITOMART [crushingly] Thank you. Have I your permission, Adolphus, to invite my own husband to my own house? CUSINS [gallantly] You have my unhesitating support in everything you do. LADY BRITOMART. Sarah: have you nothing to say? SARAH. Do you mean that he is coming regularly to live here? LADY BRITOMART. Certainly not. The spare room is ready for him if he likes to stay for a day or two and see a little more of you; but there are limits. SARAH. Well, he can't eat us, I suppose. I don't mind. LOMAX [chuckling] I wonder how the old man will take it. LADY BRITOMART. Much as the old woman will, no doubt, Charles. LOMAX [abashed] I didn't mean--at least-- LADY BRITOMART. You didn't think, Charles. You never do; and the result is, you never mean anything. And now please attend to me, children. Your father will be quite a stranger to us. LOMAX. I suppose he hasn't seen Sarah since she was a little kid. LADY BRITOMART. Not since she was a little kid, Charles, as you express it with that elegance of diction and refinement of thought that seem never to desert you. Accordingly--er-- [impatiently] Now I have forgotten what I was going to say. That comes of your provoking me to be sarcastic, Charles. Adolphus: will you kindly tell me where I was. CUSINS [sweetly] You were saying that as Mr Undershaft has not seen his children since they were babies, he will form his opinion of the way you have brought them up from their behavior to-night, and that therefore you wish us all to be particularly careful to conduct ourselves well, especially Charles. LOMAX. Look here: Lady Brit didn't say that. LADY BRITOMART [vehemently] I did, Charles. Adolphus's recollection is perfectly correct. It is most important that you should be good; and I do beg you for once not to pair off into opposite corners and giggle and whisper while I am speaking to your father. BARBARA. All right, mother. We'll do you credit. LADY BRITOMART. Remember, Charles, that Sarah will want to feel proud of you instead of ashamed of you. LOMAX. Oh I say! There's nothing to be exactly proud of, don't you know. LADY BRITOMART. Well, try and look as if there was. Morrison, pale and dismayed, breaks into the room in unconcealed disorder. MORRISON. Might I speak a word to you, my lady? LADY BRITOMART. Nonsense! Show him up. MORRISON. Yes, my lady. [He goes]. LOMAX. Does Morrison know who he is? LADY BRITOMART. Of course. Morrison has always been with us. LOMAX. It must be a regular corker for him, don't you know. LADY BRITOMART. Is this a moment to get on my nerves, Charles, with your outrageous expressions? LOMAX. But this is something out of the ordinary, really-- MORRISON [at the door] The--er--Mr Undershaft. [He retreats in confusion]. Andrew Undershaft comes in. All rise. Lady Britomart meets him in the middle of the room behind the settee. Andrew is, on the surface, a stoutish, easygoing elderly man, with kindly patient manners, and an engaging simplicity of character. But he has a watchful, deliberate, waiting, listening face, and formidable reserves of power, both bodily and mental, in his capacious chest and long head. His gentleness is partly that of a strong man who has learnt by experience that his natural grip hurts ordinary people unless he handles them very carefully, and partly the mellowness of age and success. He is also a little shy in his present very delicate situation. LADY BRITOMART. Good evening, Andrew. UNDERSHAFT. How d'ye do, my dear. LADY BRITOMART. You look a good deal older. UNDERSHAFT [apologetically] I AM somewhat older. [With a touch of courtship] Time has stood still with you. LADY BRITOMART [promptly] Rubbish! This is your family. UNDERSHAFT [surprised] Is it so large? I am sorry to say my memory is failing very badly in some things. [He offers his hand with paternal kindness to Lomax]. LOMAX [jerkily shaking his hand] Ahdedoo. UNDERSHAFT. I can see you are my eldest. I am very glad to meet you again, my boy. LOMAX [remonstrating] No but look here don't you know--[Overcome] Oh I say! LADY BRITOMART [recovering from momentary speechlessness] Andrew: do you mean to say that you don't remember how many children you have? UNDERSHAFT. Well, I am afraid I--. They have grown so much--er. Am I making any ridiculous mistake? I may as well confess: I recollect only one son. But so many things have happened since, of course--er-- LADY BRITOMART [decisively] Andrew: you are talking nonsense. Of course you have only one son. UNDERSHAFT. Perhaps you will be good enough to introduce me, my dear. LADY BRITOMART. That is Charles Lomax, who is engaged to Sarah. UNDERSHAFT. My dear sir, I beg your pardon. LOMAX. Not at all. Delighted, I assure you. LADY BRITOMART. This is Stephen. UNDERSHAFT [bowing] Happy to make your acquaintance, Mr Stephen. Then [going to Cusins] you must be my son. [Taking Cusins' hands in his] How are you, my young friend? [To Lady Britomart] He is very like you, my love. CUSINS. You flatter me, Mr Undershaft. My name is Cusins: engaged to Barbara. [Very explicitly] That is Major Barbara Undershaft, of the Salvation Army. That is Sarah, your second daughter. This is Stephen Undershaft, your son. UNDERSHAFT. My dear Stephen, I beg your pardon. STEPHEN. Not at all. UNDERSHAFT. Mr Cusins: I am much indebted to you for explaining so precisely. [Turning to Sarah] Barbara, my dear-- SARAH [prompting him] Sarah. UNDERSHAFT. Sarah, of course. [They shake hands. He goes over to Barbara] Barbara--I am right this time, I hope. BARBARA. Quite right. [They shake hands]. LADY BRITOMART [resuming command] Sit down, all of you. Sit down, Andrew. [She comes forward and sits on the settle. Cusins also brings his chair forward on her left. Barbara and Stephen resume their seats. Lomax gives his chair to Sarah and goes for another]. UNDERSHAFT. Thank you, my love. LOMAX [conversationally, as he brings a chair forward between the writing table and the settee, and offers it to Undershaft] Takes you some time to find out exactly where you are, don't it? UNDERSHAFT [accepting the chair] That is not what embarrasses me, Mr Lomax. My difficulty is that if I play the part of a father, I shall produce the effect of an intrusive stranger; and if I play the part of a discreet stranger, I may appear a callous father. LADY BRITOMART. There is no need for you to play any part at all, Andrew. You had much better be sincere and natural. UNDERSHAFT [submissively] Yes, my dear: I daresay that will be best. [Making himself comfortable] Well, here I am. Now what can I do for you all? LADY BRITOMART. You need not do anything, Andrew. You are one of the family. You can sit with us and enjoy yourself. Lomax's too long suppressed mirth explodes in agonized neighings. LADY BRITOMART [outraged] Charles Lomax: if you can behave yourself, behave yourself. If not, leave the room. LOMAX. I'm awfully sorry, Lady Brit; but really, you know, upon my soul! [He sits on the settee between Lady Britomart and Undershaft, quite overcome]. BARBARA. Why don't you laugh if you want to, Cholly? It's good for your inside. LADY BRITOMART. Barbara: you have had the education of a lady. Please let your father see that; and don't talk like a street girl. UNDERSHAFT. Never mind me, my dear. As you know, I am not a gentleman; and I was never educated. LOMAX [encouragingly] Nobody'd know it, I assure you. You look all right, you know. CUSINS. Let me advise you to study Greek, Mr Undershaft. Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek; and none of them know anything else; but their position is unchallengeable. Other languages are the qualifications of waiters and commercial travellers: Greek is to a man of position what the hallmark is to silver. BARBARA. Dolly: don't be insincere. Cholly: fetch your concertina and play something for us. LOMAX [doubtfully to Undershaft] Perhaps that sort of thing isn't in your line, eh? UNDERSHAFT. I am particularly fond of music. LOMAX [delighted] Are you? Then I'll get it. [He goes upstairs for the instrument]. UNDERSHAFT. Do you play, Barbara? BARBARA. Only the tambourine. But Cholly's teaching me the concertina. UNDERSHAFT. Is Cholly also a member of the Salvation Army? BARBARA. No: he says it's bad form to be a dissenter. But I don't despair of Cholly. I made him come yesterday to a meeting at the dock gates, and take the collection in his hat. LADY BRITOMART. It is not my doing, Andrew. Barbara is old enough to take her own way. She has no father to advise her. BARBARA. Oh yes she has. There are no orphans in the Salvation Army. UNDERSHAFT. Your father there has a great many children and plenty of experience, eh? BARBARA [looking at him with quick interest and nodding] Just so. How did you come to understand that? [Lomax is heard at the door trying the concertina]. LADY BRITOMART. Come in, Charles. Play us something at once. LOMAX. Righto! [He sits down in his former place, and preludes]. UNDERSHAFT. One moment, Mr Lomax. I am rather interested in the Salvation Army. Its motto might be my own: Blood and Fire. LOMAX [shocked] But not your sort of blood and fire, you know. UNDERSHAFT. My sort of blood cleanses: my sort of fire purifies. BARBARA. So do ours. Come down to-morrow to my shelter--the West Ham shelter--and see what we're doing. We're going to march to a great meeting in the Assembly Hall at Mile End. Come and see the shelter and then march with us: it will do you a lot of good. Can you play anything? UNDERSHAFT. In my youth I earned pennies, and even shillings occasionally, in the streets and in public house parlors by my natural talent for stepdancing. Later on, I became a member of the Undershaft orchestral society, and performed passably on the tenor trombone. LOMAX [scandalized] Oh I say! BARBARA. Many a sinner has played himself into heaven on the trombone, thanks to the Army. LOMAX [to Barbara, still rather shocked] Yes; but what about the cannon business, don't you know? [To Undershaft] Getting into heaven is not exactly in your line, is it? LADY BRITOMART. Charles!!! LOMAX. Well; but it stands to reason, don't it? The cannon business may be necessary and all that: we can't get on without cannons; but it isn't right, you know. On the other hand, there may be a certain amount of tosh about the Salvation Army--I belong to the Established Church myself--but still you can't deny that it's religion; and you can't go against religion, can you? At least unless you're downright immoral, don't you know. UNDERSHAFT. You hardly appreciate my position, Mr Lomax-- LOMAX [hastily] I'm not saying anything against you personally, you know. UNDERSHAFT. Quite so, quite so. But consider for a moment. Here I am, a manufacturer of mutilation and murder. I find myself in a specially amiable humor just now because, this morning, down at the foundry, we blew twenty-seven dummy soldiers into fragments with a gun which formerly destroyed only thirteen. LOMAX [leniently] Well, the more destructive war becomes, the sooner it will be abolished, eh? UNDERSHAFT. Not at all. The more destructive war becomes the more fascinating we find it. No, Mr Lomax, I am obliged to you for making the usual excuse for my trade; but I am not ashamed of it. I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in watertight compartments. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals, cathedrals and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property. I have always done so; and I always shall. Therefore your Christmas card moralities of peace on earth and goodwill among men are of no use to me. Your Christianity, which enjoins you to resist not evil, and to turn the other cheek, would make me a bankrupt. My morality--my religion--must have a place for cannons and torpedoes in it. STEPHEN [coldly--almost sullenly] You speak as if there were half a dozen moralities and religions to choose from, instead of one true morality and one true religion. UNDERSHAFT. For me there is only one true morality; but it might not fit you, as you do not manufacture aerial battleships. There is only one true morality for every man; but every man has not the same true morality. LOMAX [overtaxed] Would you mind saying that again? I didn't quite follow it. CUSINS. It's quite simple. As Euripides says, one man's meat is another man's poison morally as well as physically. UNDERSHAFT. Precisely. LOMAX. Oh, that. Yes, yes, yes. True. True. STEPHEN. In other words, some men are honest and some are scoundrels. BARBARA. Bosh. There are no scoundrels. UNDERSHAFT. Indeed? Are there any good men? BARBARA. No. Not one. There are neither good men nor scoundrels: there are just children of one Father; and the sooner they stop calling one another names the better. You needn't talk to me: I know them. I've had scores of them through my hands: scoundrels, criminals, infidels, philanthropists, missionaries, county councillors, all sorts. They're all just the same sort of sinner; and there's the same salvation ready for them all. UNDERSHAFT. May I ask have you ever saved a maker of cannons? BARBARA. No. Will you let me try? UNDERSHAFT. Well, I will make a bargain with you. If I go to see you to-morrow in your Salvation Shelter, will you come the day after to see me in my cannon works? BARBARA. Take care. It may end in your giving up the cannons for the sake of the Salvation Army. UNDERSHAFT. Are you sure it will not end in your giving up the Salvation Army for the sake of the cannons? BARBARA. I will take my chance of that. UNDERSHAFT. And I will take my chance of the other. [They shake hands on it]. Where is your shelter? BARBARA. In West Ham. At the sign of the cross. Ask anybody in Canning Town. Where are your works? UNDERSHAFT. In Perivale St Andrews. At the sign of the sword. Ask anybody in Europe. LOMAX. Hadn't I better play something? BARBARA. Yes. Give us Onward, Christian Soldiers. LOMAX. Well, that's rather a strong order to begin with, don't you know. Suppose I sing Thou'rt passing hence, my brother. It's much the same tune. BARBARA. It's too melancholy. You get saved, Cholly; and you'll pass hence, my brother, without making such a fuss about it. LADY BRITOMART. Really, Barbara, you go on as if religion were a pleasant subject. Do have some sense of propriety. UNDERSHAFT. I do not find it an unpleasant subject, my dear. It is the only one that capable people really care for. LADY BRITOMART [looking at her watch] Well, if you are determined to have it, I insist on having it in a proper and respectable way. Charles: ring for prayers. [General amazement. Stephen rises in dismay]. LOMAX [rising] Oh I say! UNDERSHAFT [rising] I am afraid I must be going. LADY BRITOMART. You cannot go now, Andrew: it would be most improper. Sit down. What will the servants think? UNDERSHAFT. My dear: I have conscientious scruples. May I suggest a compromise? If Barbara will conduct a little service in the drawingroom, with Mr Lomax as organist, I will attend it willingly. I will even take part, if a trombone can be procured. LADY BRITOMART. Don't mock, Andrew. UNDERSHAFT [shocked--to Barbara] You don't think I am mocking, my love, I hope. BARBARA. No, of course not; and it wouldn't matter if you were: half the Army came to their first meeting for a lark. [Rising] Come along. Come, Dolly. Come, Cholly. [She goes out with Undershaft, who opens the door for her. Cusins rises]. LADY BRITOMART. I will not be disobeyed by everybody. Adolphus: sit down. Charles: you may go. You are not fit for prayers: you cannot keep your countenance. LOMAX. Oh I say! [He goes out]. LADY BRITOMART [continuing] But you, Adolphus, can behave yourself if you choose to. I insist on your staying. CUSINS. My dear Lady Brit: there are things in the family prayer book that I couldn't bear to hear you say. LADY BRITOMART. What things, pray? CUSINS. Well, you would have to say before all the servants that we have done things we ought not to have done, and left undone things we ought to have done, and that there is no health in us. I cannot bear to hear you doing yourself such an unjustice, and Barbara such an injustice. As for myself, I flatly deny it: I have done my best. I shouldn't dare to marry Barbara--I couldn't look you in the face--if it were true. So I must go to the drawingroom. LADY BRITOMART [offended] Well, go. [He starts for the door]. And remember this, Adolphus [he turns to listen]: I have a very strong suspicion that you went to the Salvation Army to worship Barbara and nothing else. And I quite appreciate the very clever way in which you systematically humbug me. I have found you out. Take care Barbara doesn't. That's all. CUSINS [with unruffled sweetness] Don't tell on me. [He goes out]. LADY BRITOMART. Sarah: if you want to go, go. Anything's better than to sit there as if you wished you were a thousand miles away. SARAH [languidly] Very well, mamma. [She goes]. Lady Britomart, with a sudden flounce, gives way to a little gust of tears. STEPHEN [going to her] Mother: what's the matter? LADY BRITOMART [swishing away her tears with her handkerchief] Nothing. Foolishness. You can go with him, too, if you like, and leave me with the servants. STEPHEN. Oh, you mustn't think that, mother. I--I don't like him. LADY BRITOMART. The others do. That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her. STEPHEN. He has not stolen our affection from you. It is only curiosity. LADY BRITOMART [violently] I won't be consoled, Stephen. There is nothing the matter with me. [She rises and goes towards the door]. STEPHEN. Where are you going, mother? LADY BRITOMART. To the drawingroom, of course. [She goes out. Onward, Christian Soldiers, on the concertina, with tambourine accompaniment, is heard when the door opens]. Are you coming, Stephen? STEPHEN. No. Certainly not. [She goes. He sits down on the settee, with compressed lips and an expression of strong dislike]. ACT II The yard of the West Ham shelter of the Salvation Army is a cold place on a January morning. The building itself, an old warehouse, is newly whitewashed. Its gabled end projects into the yard in the middle, with a door on the ground floor, and another in the loft above it without any balcony or ladder, but with a pulley rigged over it for hoisting sacks. Those who come from this central gable end into the yard have the gateway leading to the street on their left, with a stone horse-trough just beyond it, and, on the right, a penthouse shielding a table from the weather. There are forms at the table; and on them are seated a man and a woman, both much down on their luck, finishing a meal of bread [one thick slice each, with margarine and golden syrup] and diluted milk. The man, a workman out of employment, is young, agile, a talker, a poser, sharp enough to be capable of anything in reason except honesty or altruistic considerations of any kind. The woman is a commonplace old bundle of poverty and hard-worn humanity. She looks sixty and probably is forty-five. If they were rich people, gloved and muffed and well wrapped up in furs and overcoats, they would be numbed and miserable; for it is a grindingly cold, raw, January day; and a glance at the background of grimy warehouses and leaden sky visible over the whitewashed walls of the yard would drive any idle rich person straight to the Mediterranean. But these two, being no more troubled with visions of the Mediterranean than of the moon, and being compelled to keep more of their clothes in the pawnshop, and less on their persons, in winter than in summer, are not depressed by the cold: rather are they stung into vivacity, to which their meal has just now given an almost jolly turn. The man takes a pull at his mug, and then gets up and moves about the yard with his hands deep in his pockets, occasionally breaking into a stepdance. THE WOMAN. Feel better otter your meal, sir? THE MAN. No. Call that a meal! Good enough for you, props; but wot is it to me, an intelligent workin man. THE WOMAN. Workin man! Wot are you? THE MAN. Painter. THE WOMAN [sceptically] Yus, I dessay. THE MAN. Yus, you dessay! I know. Every loafer that can't do nothink calls isself a painter. Well, I'm a real painter: grainer, finisher, thirty-eight bob a week when I can get it. THE WOMAN. Then why don't you go and get it? THE MAN. I'll tell you why. Fust: I'm intelligent--fffff! it's rotten cold here [he dances a step or two]--yes: intelligent beyond the station o life into which it has pleased the capitalists to call me; and they don't like a man that sees through em. Second, an intelligent bein needs a doo share of appiness; so I drink somethink cruel when I get the chawnce. Third, I stand by my class and do as little as I can so's to leave arf the job for me fellow workers. Fourth, I'm fly enough to know wots inside the law and wots outside it; and inside it I do as the capitalists do: pinch wot I can lay me ands on. In a proper state of society I am sober, industrious and honest: in Rome, so to speak, I do as the Romans do. Wots the consequence? When trade is bad--and it's rotten bad just now--and the employers az to sack arf their men, they generally start on me. THE WOMAN. What's your name? THE MAN. Price. Bronterre O'Brien Price. Usually called Snobby Price, for short. THE WOMAN. Snobby's a carpenter, ain't it? You said you was a painter. PRICE. Not that kind of snob, but the genteel sort. I'm too uppish, owing to my intelligence, and my father being a Chartist and a reading, thinking man: a stationer, too. I'm none of your common hewers of wood and drawers of water; and don't you forget it. [He returns to his seat at the table, and takes up his mug]. Wots YOUR name? THE WOMAN. Rummy Mitchens, sir. PRICE [quaffing the remains of his milk to her] Your elth, Miss Mitchens. RUMMY [correcting him] Missis Mitchens. PRICE. Wot! Oh Rummy, Rummy! Respectable married woman, Rummy, gittin rescued by the Salvation Army by pretendin to be a bad un. Same old game! RUMMY. What am I to do? I can't starve. Them Salvation lasses is dear good girls; but the better you are, the worse they likes to think you were before they rescued you. Why shouldn't they av a bit o credit, poor loves? They're worn to rags by their work. And where would they get the money to rescue us if we was to let on we're no worse than other people? You know what ladies and gentlemen are. PRICE. Thievin swine! Wish I ad their job, Rummy, all the same. Wot does Rummy stand for? Pet name props? RUMMY. Short for Romola. PRICE. For wot!? RUMMY. Romola. It was out of a new book. Somebody me mother wanted me to grow up like. PRICE. We're companions in misfortune, Rummy. Both on us got names that nobody cawnt pronounce. Consequently I'm Snobby and you're Rummy because Bill and Sally wasn't good enough for our parents. Such is life! RUMMY. Who saved you, Mr. Price? Was it Major Barbara? PRICE. No: I come here on my own. I'm goin to be Bronterre O'Brien Price, the converted painter. I know wot they like. I'll tell em how I blasphemed and gambled and wopped my poor old mother-- RUMMY [shocked] Used you to beat your mother? PRICE. Not likely. She used to beat me. No matter: you come and listen to the converted painter, and you'll hear how she was a pious woman that taught me me prayers at er knee, an how I used to come home drunk and drag her out o bed be er snow white airs, an lam into er with the poker. RUMMY. That's what's so unfair to us women. Your confessions is just as big lies as ours: you don't tell what you really done no more than us; but you men can tell your lies right out at the meetins and be made much of for it; while the sort o confessions we az to make az to be wispered to one lady at a time. It ain't right, spite of all their piety. PRICE. Right! Do you spose the Army'd be allowed if it went and did right? Not much. It combs our air and makes us good little blokes to be robbed and put upon. But I'll play the game as good as any of em. I'll see somebody struck by lightnin, or hear a voice sayin "Snobby Price: where will you spend eternity?" I'll ave a time of it, I tell you. RUMMY. You won't be let drink, though. PRICE. I'll take it out in gorspellin, then. I don't want to drink if I can get fun enough any other way. Jenny Hill, a pale, overwrought, pretty Salvation lass of 18, comes in through the yard gate, leading Peter Shirley, a half hardened, half worn-out elderly man, weak with hunger. JENNY [supporting him] Come! pluck up. I'll get you something to eat. You'll be all right then. PRICE [rising and hurrying officiously to take the old man off Jenny's hands] Poor old man! Cheer up, brother: you'll find rest and peace and appiness ere. Hurry up with the food, miss: e's fair done. [Jenny hurries into the shelter]. Ere, buck up, daddy! She's fetchin y'a thick slice o breadn treacle, an a mug o skyblue. [He seats him at the corner of the table]. RUMMY [gaily] Keep up your old art! Never say die! SHIRLEY. I'm not an old man. I'm ony 46. I'm as good as ever I was. The grey patch come in my hair before I was thirty. All it wants is three pennorth o hair dye: am I to be turned on the streets to starve for it? Holy God! I've worked ten to twelve hours a day since I was thirteen, and paid my way all through; and now am I to be thrown into the gutter and my job given to a young man that can do it no better than me because I've black hair that goes white at the first change? PRICE [cheerfully] No good jawrin about it. You're ony a jumped-up, jerked-off, orspittle-turned-out incurable of an ole workin man: who cares about you? Eh? Make the thievin swine give you a meal: they've stole many a one from you. Get a bit o your own back. [Jenny returns with the usual meal]. There you are, brother. Awsk a blessin an tuck that into you. SHIRLEY [looking at it ravenously but not touching it, and crying like a child] I never took anything before. JENNY [petting him] Come, come! the Lord sends it to you: he wasn't above taking bread from his friends; and why should you be? Besides, when we find you a job you can pay us for it if you like. SHIRLEY [eagerly] Yes, yes: that's true. I can pay you back: it's only a loan. [Shivering] Oh Lord! oh Lord! [He turns to the table and attacks the meal ravenously]. JENNY. Well, Rummy, are you more comfortable now? RUMMY. God bless you, lovey! You've fed my body and saved my soul, haven't you? [Jenny, touched, kisses her] Sit down and rest a bit: you must be ready to drop. JENNY. I've been going hard since morning. But there's more work than we can do. I mustn't stop. RUMMY. Try a prayer for just two minutes. You'll work all the better after. JENNY [her eyes lighting up] Oh isn't it wonderful how a few minutes prayer revives you! I was quite lightheaded at twelve o'clock, I was so tired; but Major Barbara just sent me to pray for five minutes; and I was able to go on as if I had only just begun. [To Price] Did you have a piece of bread? PAIGE [with unction] Yes, miss; but I've got the piece that I value more; and that's the peace that passeth hall hannerstennin. RUMMY [fervently] Glory Hallelujah! Bill Walker, a rough customer of about 25, appears at the yard gate and looks malevolently at Jenny. JENNY. That makes me so happy. When you say that, I feel wicked for loitering here. I must get to work again. She is hurrying to the shelter, when the new-comer moves quickly up to the door and intercepts her. His manner is so threatening that she retreats as he comes at her truculently, driving her down the yard. BILL. I know you. You're the one that took away my girl. You're the one that set er agen me. Well, I'm goin to av er out. Not that I care a curse for her or you: see? But I'll let er know; and I'll let you know. I'm goin to give er a doin that'll teach er to cut away from me. Now in with you and tell er to come out afore I come in and kick er out. Tell er Bill Walker wants er. She'll know what that means; and if she keeps me waitin it'll be worse. You stop to jaw back at me; and I'll start on you: d'ye hear? There's your way. In you go. [He takes her by the arm and slings her towards the door of the shelter. She falls on her hand and knee. Rummy helps her up again]. PRICE [rising, and venturing irresolutely towards Bill]. Easy there, mate. She ain't doin you no arm. BILL. Who are you callin mate? [Standing over him threateningly]. You're goin to stand up for her, are you? Put up your ands. RUMMY [running indignantly to him to scold him]. Oh, you great brute-- [He instantly swings his left hand back against her face. She screams and reels back to the trough, where she sits down, covering her bruised face with her hands and rocking and moaning with pain]. JENNY [going to her]. Oh God forgive you! How could you strike an old woman like that? BILL [seizing her by the hair so violently that she also screams, and tearing her away from the old woman]. You Gawd forgive me again and I'll Gawd forgive you one on the jaw that'll stop you prayin for a week. [Holding her and turning fiercely on Price]. Av you anything to say agen it? Eh? PRICE [intimidated]. No, matey: she ain't anything to do with me. BILL. Good job for you! I'd put two meals into you and fight you with one finger after, you starved cur. [To Jenny] Now are you goin to fetch out Mog Habbijam; or am I to knock your face off you and fetch her myself? JENNY [writhing in his grasp] Oh please someone go in and tell Major Barbara--[she screams again as he wrenches her head down; and Price and Rummy, flee into the shelter]. BILL. You want to go in and tell your Major of me, do you? JENNY. Oh please don't drag my hair. Let me go. BILL. Do you or don't you? [She stifles a scream]. Yes or no. JENNY. God give me strength-- BILL [striking her with his fist in the face] Go and show her that, and tell her if she wants one like it to come and interfere with me. [Jenny, crying with pain, goes into the shed. He goes to the form and addresses the old man]. Here: finish your mess; and get out o my way. SHIRLEY [springing up and facing him fiercely, with the mug in his hand] You take a liberty with me, and I'll smash you over the face with the mug and cut your eye out. Ain't you satisfied--young whelps like you--with takin the bread out o the mouths of your elders that have brought you up and slaved for you, but you must come shovin and cheekin and bullyin in here, where the bread o charity is sickenin in our stummicks? BILL [contemptuously, but backing a little] Wot good are you, you old palsy mug? Wot good are you? SHIRLEY. As good as you and better. I'll do a day's work agen you or any fat young soaker of your age. Go and take my job at Horrockses, where I worked for ten year. They want young men there: they can't afford to keep men over forty-five. They're very sorry--give you a character and happy to help you to get anything suited to your years--sure a steady man won't be long out of a job. Well, let em try you. They'll find the differ. What do you know? Not as much as how to beeyave yourself--layin your dirty fist across the mouth of a respectable woman! BILL. Don't provoke me to lay it acrost yours: d'ye hear? SHIRLEY [with blighting contempt] Yes: you like an old man to hit, don't you, when you've finished with the women. I ain't seen you hit a young one yet. BILL [stung] You lie, you old soupkitchener, you. There was a young man here. Did I offer to hit him or did I not? SHIRLEY. Was he starvin or was he not? Was he a man or only a crosseyed thief an a loafer? Would you hit my son-in-law's brother? BILL. Who's he? SHIRLEY. Todger Fairmile o Balls Pond. Him that won 20 pounds off the Japanese wrastler at the music hall by standin out 17 minutes 4 seconds agen him. BILL [sullenly] I'm no music hall wrastler. Can he box? SHIRLEY. Yes: an you can't. BILL. Wot! I can't, can't I? Wot's that you say [threatening him]? SHIRLEY [not budging an inch] Will you box Todger Fairmile if I put him on to you? Say the word. BILL. [subsiding with a slouch] I'll stand up to any man alive, if he was ten Todger Fairmiles. But I don't set up to be a perfessional. SHIRLEY [looking down on him with unfathomable disdain] YOU box! Slap an old woman with the back o your hand! You hadn't even the sense to hit her where a magistrate couldn't see the mark of it, you silly young lump of conceit and ignorance. Hit a girl in the jaw and ony make her cry! If Todger Fairmile'd done it, she wouldn't a got up inside o ten minutes, no more than you would if he got on to you. Yah! I'd set about you myself if I had a week's feedin in me instead o two months starvation. [He returns to the table to finish his meal]. BILL [following him and stooping over him to drive the taunt in] You lie! you have the bread and treacle in you that you come here to beg. SHIRLEY [bursting into tears] Oh God! it's true: I'm only an old pauper on the scrap heap. [Furiously] But you'll come to it yourself; and then you'll know. You'll come to it sooner than a teetotaller like me, fillin yourself with gin at this hour o the mornin! BILL. I'm no gin drinker, you old liar; but when I want to give my girl a bloomin good idin I like to av a bit o devil in me: see? An here I am, talkin to a rotten old blighter like you sted o givin her wot for. [Working himself into a rage] I'm goin in there to fetch her out. [He makes vengefully for the shelter door]. SHIRLEY. You're goin to the station on a stretcher, more likely; and they'll take the gin and the devil out of you there when they get you inside. You mind what you're about: the major here is the Earl o Stevenage's granddaughter. BILL [checked] Garn! SHIRLEY. You'll see. BILL [his resolution oozing] Well, I ain't done nothin to er. SHIRLEY. Spose she said you did! who'd believe you? BILL [very uneasy, skulking back to the corner of the penthouse] Gawd! There's no jastice in this country. To think wot them people can do! I'm as good as er. SHIRLEY. Tell her so. It's just what a fool like you would do. Barbara, brisk and businesslike, comes from the shelter with a note book, and addresses herself to Shirley. Bill, cowed, sits down in the corner on a form, and turns his back on them. BARBARA. Good morning. SHIRLEY [standing up and taking off his hat] Good morning, miss. BARBARA. Sit down: make yourself at home. [He hesitates; but she puts a friendly hand on his shoulder and makes him obey]. Now then! since you've made friends with us, we want to know all about you. Names and addresses and trades. SHIRLEY. Peter Shirley. Fitter. Chucked out two months ago because I was too old. BARBARA [not at all surprised] You'd pass still. Why didn't you dye your hair? SHIRLEY. I did. Me age come out at a coroner's inquest on me daughter. BARBARA. Steady? SHIRLEY. Teetotaller. Never out of a job before. Good worker. And sent to the knockers like an old horse! BARBARA. No matter: if you did your part God will do his. SHIRLEY [suddenly stubborn] My religion's no concern of anybody but myself. BARBARA [guessing] I know. Secularist? SHIRLEY [hotly] Did I offer to deny it? BARBARA. Why should you? My own father's a Secularist, I think. Our Father--yours and mine--fulfils himself in many ways; and I daresay he knew what he was about when he made a Secularist of you. So buck up, Peter! we can always find a job for a steady man like you. [Shirley, disarmed, touches his hat. She turns from him to Bill]. What's your name? BILL [insolently] Wot's that to you? BARBARA [calmly making a note] Afraid to give his name. Any trade? BILL. Who's afraid to give his name? [Doggedly, with a sense of heroically defying the House of Lords in the person of Lord Stevenage] If you want to bring a charge agen me, bring it. [She waits, unruffled]. My name's Bill Walker. BARBARA [as if the name were familiar: trying to remember how] Bill Walker? [Recollecting] Oh, I know: you're the man that Jenny Hill was praying for inside just now. [She enters his name in her note book]. BILL. Who's Jenny Hill? And what call has she to pray for me? BARBARA. I don't know. Perhaps it was you that cut her lip. BILL [defiantly] Yes, it was me that cut her lip. I ain't afraid o you. BARBARA. How could you be, since you're not afraid of God? You're a brave man, Mr. Walker. It takes some pluck to do our work here; but none of us dare lift our hand against a girl like that, for fear of her father in heaven. BILL [sullenly] I want none o your cantin jaw. I suppose you think I come here to beg from you, like this damaged lot here. Not me. I don't want your bread and scrape and catlap. I don't believe in your Gawd, no more than you do yourself. BARBARA [sunnily apologetic and ladylike, as on a new footing with him] Oh, I beg your pardon for putting your name down, Mr. Walker. I didn't understand. I'll strike it out. BILL [taking this as a slight, and deeply wounded by it] Eah! you let my name alone. Ain't it good enough to be in your book? BARBARA [considering] Well, you see, there's no use putting down your name unless I can do something for you, is there? What's your trade? BILL [still smarting] That's no concern o yours. BARBARA. Just so. [very businesslike] I'll put you down as [writing] the man who--struck--poor little Jenny Hill--in the mouth. BILL [rising threateningly] See here. I've ad enough o this. BARBARA [quite sunny and fearless] What did you come to us for? BILL. I come for my girl, see? I come to take her out o this and to break er jaws for her. BARBARA [complacently] You see I was right about your trade. [Bill, on the point of retorting furiously, finds himself, to his great shame and terror, in danger of crying instead. He sits down again suddenly]. What's her name? BILL [dogged] Er name's Mog Abbijam: thats wot her name is. BARBARA. Oh, she's gone to Canning Town, to our barracks there. BILL [fortified by his resentment of Mog's perfidy] is she? [Vindictively] Then I'm goin to Kennintahn arter her. [He crosses to the gate; hesitates; finally comes back at Barbara]. Are you lyin to me to get shut o me? BARBARA. I don't want to get shut of you. I want to keep you here and save your soul. You'd better stay: you're going to have a bad time today, Bill. BILL. Who's goin to give it to me? You, props. BARBARA. Someone you don't believe in. But you'll be glad afterwards. BILL [slinking off] I'll go to Kennintahn to be out o the reach o your tongue. [Suddenly turning on her with intense malice] And if I don't find Mog there, I'll come back and do two years for you, selp me Gawd if I don't! BARBARA [a shade kindlier, if possible] It's no use, Bill. She's got another bloke. BILL. Wot! BARBARA. One of her own converts. He fell in love with her when he saw her with her soul saved, and her face clean, and her hair washed. BILL [surprised] Wottud she wash it for, the carroty slut? It's red. BARBARA. It's quite lovely now, because she wears a new look in her eyes with it. It's a pity you're too late. The new bloke has put your nose out of joint, Bill. BILL. I'll put his nose out o joint for him. Not that I care a curse for her, mind that. But I'll teach her to drop me as if I was dirt. And I'll teach him to meddle with my Judy. Wots iz bleedin name? BARBARA. Sergeant Todger Fairmile. SHIRLEY [rising with grim joy] I'll go with him, miss. I want to see them two meet. I'll take him to the infirmary when it's over. BILL [to Shirley, with undissembled misgiving] Is that im you was speakin on? SHIRLEY. That's him. BILL. Im that wrastled in the music all? SHIRLEY. The competitions at the National Sportin Club was worth nigh a hundred a year to him. He's gev em up now for religion; so he's a bit fresh for want of the exercise he was accustomed to. He'll be glad to see you. Come along. BILL. Wots is weight? SHIRLEY. Thirteen four. [Bill's last hope expires]. BARBARA. Go and talk to him, Bill. He'll convert you. SHIRLEY. He'll convert your head into a mashed potato. BILL [sullenly] I ain't afraid of him. I ain't afraid of ennybody. But he can lick me. She's done me. [He sits down moodily on the edge of the horse trough]. SHIRLEY. You ain't goin. I thought not. [He resumes his seat]. BARBARA [calling] Jenny! JENNY [appearing at the shelter door with a plaster on the corner of her mouth] Yes, Major. BARBARA. Send Rummy Mitchens out to clear away here. JENNY. I think she's afraid. BARBARA [her resemblance to her mother flashing out for a moment] Nonsense! she must do as she's told. JENNY [calling into the shelter] Rummy: the Major says you must come. Jenny comes to Barbara, purposely keeping on the side next Bill, lest he should suppose that she shrank from him or bore malice. BARBARA. Poor little Jenny! Are you tired? [Looking at the wounded cheek] Does it hurt? JENNY. No: it's all right now. It was nothing. BARBARA [critically] It was as hard as he could hit, I expect. Poor Bill! You don't feel angry with him, do you? JENNY. Oh no, no, no: indeed I don't, Major, bless his poor heart! [Barbara kisses her; and she runs away merrily into the shelter. Bill writhes with an agonizing return of his new and alarming symptoms, but says nothing. Rummy Mitchens comes from the shelter]. BARBARA [going to meet Rummy] Now Rummy, bustle. Take in those mugs and plates to be washed; and throw the crumbs about for the birds. Rummy takes the three plates and mugs; but Shirley takes back his mug from her, as there it still come milk left in it. RUMMY. There ain't any crumbs. This ain't a time to waste good bread on birds. PRICE [appearing at the shelter door] Gentleman come to see the shelter, Major. Says he's your father. BARBARA. All right. Coming. [Snobby goes back into the shelter, followed by Barbara]. RUMMY [stealing across to Bill and addressing him in a subdued voice, but with intense conviction] I'd av the lor of you, you flat eared pignosed potwalloper, if she'd let me. You're no gentleman, to hit a lady in the face. [Bill, with greater things moving in him, takes no notice]. SHIRLEY [following her] Here! in with you and don't get yourself into more trouble by talking. RUMMY [with hauteur] I ain't ad the pleasure o being hintroduced to you, as I can remember. [She goes into the shelter with the plates]. BILL [savagely] Don't you talk to me, d'ye hear. You lea me alone, or I'll do you a mischief. I'm not dirt under your feet, anyway. SHIRLEY [calmly] Don't you be afeerd. You ain't such prime company that you need expect to be sought after. [He is about to go into the shelter when Barbara comes out, with Undershaft on her right]. BARBARA. Oh there you are, Mr Shirley! [Between them] This is my father: I told you he was a Secularist, didn't I? Perhaps you'll be able to comfort one another. UNDERSHAFT [startled] A Secularist! Not the least in the world: on the contrary, a confirmed mystic. BARBARA. Sorry, I'm sure. By the way, papa, what is your religion--in case I have to introduce you again? UNDERSHAFT. My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion. BARBARA. Then I'm afraid you and Mr Shirley wont be able to comfort one another after all. You're not a Millionaire, are you, Peter? SHIRLEY. No; and proud of it. UNDERSHAFT [gravely] Poverty, my friend, is not a thing to be proud of. SHIRLEY [angrily] Who made your millions for you? Me and my like. What's kep us poor? Keepin you rich. I wouldn't have your conscience, not for all your income. UNDERSHAFT. I wouldn't have your income, not for all your conscience, Mr Shirley. [He goes to the penthouse and sits down on a form]. BARBARA [stopping Shirley adroitly as he is about to retort] You wouldn't think he was my father, would you, Peter? Will you go into the shelter and lend the lasses a hand for a while: we're worked off our feet. SHIRLEY [bitterly] Yes: I'm in their debt for a meal, ain't I? BARBARA. Oh, not because you're in their debt; but for love of them, Peter, for love of them. [He cannot understand, and is rather scandalized]. There! Don't stare at me. In with you; and give that conscience of yours a holiday [bustling him into the shelter]. SHIRLEY [as he goes in] Ah! it's a pity you never was trained to use your reason, miss. You'd have been a very taking lecturer on Secularism. Barbara turns to her father. UNDERSHAFT. Never mind me, my dear. Go about your work; and let me watch it for a while. BARBARA. All right. UNDERSHAFT. For instance, what's the matter with that out-patient over there? BARBARA [looking at Bill, whose attitude has never changed, and whose expression of brooding wrath has deepened] Oh, we shall cure him in no time. Just watch. [She goes over to Bill and waits. He glances up at her and casts his eyes down again, uneasy, but grimmer than ever]. It would be nice to just stamp on Mog Habbijam's face, wouldn't it, Bill? BILL [starting up from the trough in consternation] It's a lie: I never said so. [She shakes her head]. Who told you wot was in my mind? BARBARA. Only your new friend. BILL. Wot new friend? BARBARA. The devil, Bill. When he gets round people they get miserable, just like you. HILL [with a heartbreaking attempt at devil-may-care cheerfulness] I ain't miserable. [He sits down again, and stretches his legs in an attempt to seem indifferent]. BARBARA. Well, if you're happy, why don't you look happy, as we do? BILL [his legs curling back in spite of him] I'm appy enough, I tell you. Why don't you lea me alown? Wot av I done to you? I ain't smashed your face, av I? BARBARA [softly: wooing his soul] It's not me that's getting at you, Bill. BILL. Who else is it? BARBARA. Somebody that doesn't intend you to smash women's faces, I suppose. Somebody or something that wants to make a man of you. BILL [blustering] Make a man o ME! Ain't I a man? eh? ain't I a man? Who sez I'm not a man? BARBARA. There's a man in you somewhere, I suppose. But why did he let you hit poor little Jenny Hill? That wasn't very manly of him, was it? BILL [tormented] Av done with it, I tell you. Chock it. I'm sick of your Jenny Ill and er silly little face. BARBARA. Then why do you keep thinking about it? Why does it keep coming up against you in your mind? You're not getting converted, are you? BILL [with conviction] Not ME. Not likely. Not arf. BARBARA. That's right, Bill. Hold out against it. Put out your strength. Don't let's get you cheap. Todger Fairmile said he wrestled for three nights against his Salvation harder than he ever wrestled with the Jap at the music hall. He gave in to the Jap when his arm was going to break. But he didn't give in to his salvation until his heart was going to break. Perhaps you'll escape that. You haven't any heart, have you? BILL. Wot dye mean? Wy ain't I got a art the same as ennybody else? BARBARA. A man with a heart wouldn't have bashed poor little Jenny's face, would he? BILL [almost crying] Ow, will you lea me alown? Av I ever offered to meddle with you, that you come noggin and provowkin me lawk this? [He writhes convulsively from his eyes to his toes]. BARBARA [with a steady soothing hand on his arm and a gentle voice that never lets him go] It's your soul that's hurting you, Bill, and not me. We've been through it all ourselves. Come with us, Bill. [He looks wildly round]. To brave manhood on earth and eternal glory in heaven. [He is on the point of breaking down]. Come. [A drum is heard in the shelter; and Bill, with a gasp, escapes from the spell as Barbara turns quickly. Adolphus enters from the shelter with a big drum]. Oh! there you are, Dolly. Let me introduce a new friend of mine, Mr Bill Walker. This is my bloke, Bill: Mr Cusins. [Cusins salutes with his drumstick]. BILL. Goin to marry im? BARBARA. Yes. BILL [fervently] Gawd elp im! Gawd elp im! BARBARA. Why? Do you think he won't be happy with me? BILL. I've only ad to stand it for a mornin: e'll av to stand it for a lifetime. CUSINS. That is a frightful reflection, Mr Walker. But I can't tear myself away from her. BILL. Well, I can. [To Barbara] Eah! do you know where I'm goin to, and wot I'm goin to do? BARBARA. Yes: you're going to heaven; and you're coming back here before the week's out to tell me so. BILL. You lie. I'm goin to Kennintahn, to spit in Todger Fairmile's eye. I bashed Jenny Ill's face; and now I'll get me own face bashed and come back and show it to er. E'll it me ardern I it er. That'll make us square. [To Adolphus] Is that fair or is it not? You're a genlmn: you oughter know. BARBARA. Two black eyes wont make one white one, Bill. BILL. I didn't ast you. Cawn't you never keep your mahth shut? I ast the genlmn. CUSINS [reflectively] Yes: I think you're right, Mr Walker. Yes: I should do it. It's curious: it's exactly what an ancient Greek would have done. BARBARA. But what good will it do? CUSINS. Well, it will give Mr Fairmile some exercise; and it will satisfy Mr Walker's soul. BILL. Rot! there ain't no sach a thing as a soul. Ah kin you tell wether I've a soul or not? You never seen it. BARBARA. I've seen it hurting you when you went against it. BILL [with compressed aggravation] If you was my girl and took the word out o me mahth lawk thet, I'd give you suthink you'd feel urtin, so I would. [To Adolphus] You take my tip, mate. Stop er jawr; or you'll die afore your time. [With intense expression] Wore aht: thets wot you'll be: wore aht. [He goes away through the gate]. CUSINS [looking after him] I wonder! BARBARA. Dolly! [indignant, in her mother's manner]. CUSINS. Yes, my dear, it's very wearing to be in love with you. If it lasts, I quite think I shall die young. BARBARA. Should you mind? CUSINS. Not at all. [He is suddenly softened, and kisses her over the drum, evidently not for the first time, as people cannot kiss over a big drum without practice. Undershaft coughs]. BARBARA. It's all right, papa, we've not forgotten you. Dolly: explain the place to papa: I haven't time. [She goes busily into the shelter]. Undershaft and Adolpbus now have the yard to themselves. Undershaft, seated on a form, and still keenly attentive, looks hard at Adolphus. Adolphus looks hard at him. UNDERSHAFT. I fancy you guess something of what is in my mind, Mr Cusins. [Cusins flourishes his drumsticks as if in the art of beating a lively rataplan, but makes no sound]. Exactly so. But suppose Barbara finds you out! CUSINS. You know, I do not admit that I am imposing on Barbara. I am quite genuinely interested in the views of the Salvation Army. The fact is, I am a sort of collector of religions; and the curious thing is that I find I can believe them all. By the way, have you any religion? UNDERSHAFT. Yes. CUSINS. Anything out of the common? UNDERSHAFT. Only that there are two things necessary to Salvation. CUSINS [disappointed, but polite] Ah, the Church Catechism. Charles Lomax also belongs to the Established Church. UNDERSHAFT. The two things are-- CUSINS. Baptism and-- UNDERSHAFT. No. Money and gunpowder. CUSINS [surprised, but interested] That is the general opinion of our governing classes. The novelty is in hearing any man confess it. UNDERSHAFT. Just so. CUSINS. Excuse me: is there any place in your religion for honor, justice, truth, love, mercy and so forth? UNDERSHAFT. Yes: they are the graces and luxuries of a rich, strong, and safe life. CUSINS. Suppose one is forced to choose between them and money or gunpowder? UNDERSHAFT. Choose money and gunpowder; for without enough of both you cannot afford the others. CUSINS. That is your religion? UNDERSHAFT. Yes. The cadence of this reply makes a full close in the conversation. Cusins twists his face dubiously and contemplates Undershaft. Undershaft contemplates him. CUSINS. Barbara won't stand that. You will have to choose between your religion and Barbara. UNDERSHAFT. So will you, my friend. She will find out that that drum of yours is hollow. CUSINS. Father Undershaft: you are mistaken: I am a sincere Salvationist. You do not understand the Salvation Army. It is the army of joy, of love, of courage: it has banished the fear and remorse and despair of the old hellridden evangelical sects: it marches to fight the devil with trumpet and drum, with music and dancing, with banner and palm, as becomes a sally from heaven by its happy garrison. It picks the waster out of the public house and makes a man of him: it finds a worm wriggling in a back kitchen, and lo! a woman! Men and women of rank too, sons and daughters of the Highest. It takes the poor professor of Greek, the most artificial and self-suppressed of human creatures, from his meal of roots, and lets loose the rhapsodist in him; reveals the true worship of Dionysos to him; sends him down the public street drumming dithyrambs [he plays a thundering flourish on the drum]. UNDERSHAFT. You will alarm the shelter. CUSINS. Oh, they are accustomed to these sudden ecstasies of piety. However, if the drum worries you-- [he pockets the drumsticks; unhooks the drum; and stands it on the ground opposite the gateway]. UNDERSHAFT. Thank you. CUSINS. You remember what Euripides says about your money and gunpowder? UNDERSHAFT. No. CUSINS [declaiming] One and another In money and guns may outpass his brother; And men in their millions float and flow And seethe with a million hopes as leaven; And they win their will; or they miss their will; And their hopes are dead or are pined for still: But whoe'er can know As the long days go That to live is happy, has found his heaven. My translation: what do you think of it? UNDERSHAFT. I think, my friend, that if you wish to know, as the long days go, that to live is happy, you must first acquire money enough for a decent life, and power enough to be your own master. CUSINS. You are damnably discouraging. [He resumes his declamation]. Is it so hard a thing to see That the spirit of God--whate'er it be-- The Law that abides and changes not, ages long, The Eternal and Nature-born: these things be strong. What else is Wisdom? What of Man's endeavor, Or God's high grace so lovely and so great? To stand from fear set free? to breathe and wait? To hold a hand uplifted over Fate? And shall not Barbara be loved for ever? UNDERSHAFT. Euripides mentions Barbara, does he? CUSINS. It is a fair translation. The word means Loveliness. UNDERSHAFT. May I ask--as Barbara's father--how much a year she is to be loved for ever on? CUSINS. As Barbara's father, that is more your affair than mine. I can feed her by teaching Greek: that is about all. UNDERSHAFT. Do you consider it a good match for her? CUSINS [with polite obstinacy] Mr Undershaft: I am in many ways a weak, timid, ineffectual person; and my health is far from satisfactory. But whenever I feel that I must have anything, I get it, sooner or later. I feel that way about Barbara. I don't like marriage: I feel intensely afraid of it; and I don't know what I shall do with Barbara or what she will do with me. But I feel that I and nobody else must marry her. Please regard that as settled.--Not that I wish to be arbitrary; but why should I waste your time in discussing what is inevitable? UNDERSHAFT. You mean that you will stick at nothing not even the conversion of the Salvation Army to the worship of Dionysos. CUSINS. The business of the Salvation Army is to save, not to wrangle about the name of the pathfinder. Dionysos or another: what does it matter? UNDERSHAFT [rising and approaching him] Professor Cusins you are a young man after my own heart. CUSINS. Mr Undershaft: you are, as far as I am able to gather, a most infernal old rascal; but you appeal very strongly to my sense of ironic humor. Undershaft mutely offers his hand. They shake. UNDERSHAFT [suddenly concentrating himself] And now to business. CUSINS. Pardon me. We were discussing religion. Why go back to such an uninteresting and unimportant subject as business? UNDERSHAFT. Religion is our business at present, because it is through religion alone that we can win Barbara. CUSINS. Have you, too, fallen in love with Barbara? UNDERSHAFT. Yes, with a father's love. CUSINS. A father's love for a grown-up daughter is the most dangerous of all infatuations. I apologize for mentioning my own pale, coy, mistrustful fancy in the same breath with it. UNDERSHAFT. Keep to the point. We have to win her; and we are neither of us Methodists. CUSINS. That doesn't matter. The power Barbara wields here--the power that wields Barbara herself--is not Calvinism, not Presbyterianism, not Methodism-- UNDERSHAFT. Not Greek Paganism either, eh? CUSINS. I admit that. Barbara is quite original in her religion. UNDERSHAFT [triumphantly] Aha! Barbara Undershaft would be. Her inspiration comes from within herself. CUSINS. How do you suppose it got there? UNDERSHAFT [in towering excitement] It is the Undershaft inheritance. I shall hand on my torch to my daughter. She shall make my converts and preach my gospel. CUSINS. What! Money and gunpowder! UNDERSHAFT. Yes, money and gunpowder; freedom and power; command of life and command of death. CUSINS [urbanely: trying to bring him down to earth] This is extremely interesting, Mr Undershaft. Of course you know that you are mad. UNDERSHAFT [with redoubled force] And you? CUSINS. Oh, mad as a hatter. You are welcome to my secret since I have discovered yours. But I am astonished. Can a madman make cannons? UNDERSHAFT. Would anyone else than a madman make them? And now [with surging energy] question for question. Can a sane man translate Euripides? CUSINS. No. UNDERSHAFT [reining him by the shoulder] Can a sane woman make a man of a waster or a woman of a worm? CUSINS [reeling before the storm] Father Colossus--Mammoth Millionaire-- UNDERSHAFT [pressing him] Are there two mad people or three in this Salvation shelter to-day? CUSINS. You mean Barbara is as mad as we are! UNDERSHAFT [pushing him lightly off and resuming his equanimity suddenly and completely] Pooh, Professor! let us call things by their proper names. I am a millionaire; you are a poet; Barbara is a savior of souls. What have we three to do with the common mob of slaves and idolaters? [He sits down again with a shrug of contempt for the mob]. CUSINS. Take care! Barbara is in love with the common people. So am I. Have you never felt the romance of that love? UNDERSHAFT [cold and sardonic] Have you ever been in love with Poverty, like St Francis? Have you ever been in love with Dirt, like St Simeon? Have you ever been in love with disease and suffering, like our nurses and philanthropists? Such passions are not virtues, but the most unnatural of all the vices. This love of the common people may please an earl's granddaughter and a university professor; but I have been a common man and a poor man; and it has no romance for me. Leave it to the poor to pretend that poverty is a blessing: leave it to the coward to make a religion of his cowardice by preaching humility: we know better than that. We three must stand together above the common people: how else can we help their children to climb up beside us? Barbara must belong to us, not to the Salvation Army. CUSINS. Well, I can only say that if you think you will get her away from the Salvation Army by talking to her as you have been talking to me, you don't know Barbara. UNDERSHAFT. My friend: I never ask for what I can buy. CUSINS [in a white fury] Do I understand you to imply that you can buy Barbara? UNDERSHAFT. No; but I can buy the Salvation Army. CUSINS. Quite impossible. UNDERSHAFT. You shall see. All religious organizations exist by selling themselves to the rich. CUSINS. Not the Army. That is the Church of the poor. UNDERSHAFT. All the more reason for buying it. CUSINS. I don't think you quite know what the Army does for the poor. UNDERSHAFT. Oh yes I do. It draws their teeth: that is enough for me--as a man of business-- CUSINS. Nonsense! It makes them sober-- UNDERSHAFT. I prefer sober workmen. The profits are larger. CUSINS. --honest-- UNDERSHAFT. Honest workmen are the most economical. CUSINS. --attached to their homes-- UNDERSHAFT. So much the better: they will put up with anything sooner than change their shop. CUSINS. --happy-- UNDERSHAFT. An invaluable safeguard against revolution. CUSINS. --unselfish-- UNDERSHAFT. Indifferent to their own interests, which suits me exactly. CUSINS. --with their thoughts on heavenly things-- UNDERSHAFT [rising] And not on Trade Unionism nor Socialism. Excellent. CUSINS [revolted] You really are an infernal old rascal. UNDERSHAFT [indicating Peter Shirley, who has just came from the shelter and strolled dejectedly down the yard between them] And this is an honest man! SHIRLEY. Yes; and what av I got by it? [he passes on bitterly and sits on the form, in the corner of the penthouse]. Snobby Price, beaming sanctimoniously, and Jenny Hill, with a tambourine full of coppers, come from the shelter and go to the drum, on which Jenny begins to count the money. UNDERSHAFT [replying to Shirley] Oh, your employers must have got a good deal by it from first to last. [He sits on the table, with one foot on the side form. Cusins, overwhelmed, sits down on the same form nearer the shelter. Barbara comes from the shelter to the middle of the yard. She is excited and a little overwrought]. BARBARA. We've just had a splendid experience meeting at the other gate in Cripps's lane. I've hardly ever seen them so much moved as they were by your confession, Mr Price. PRICE. I could almost be glad of my past wickedness if I could believe that it would elp to keep hathers stright. BARBARA. So it will, Snobby. How much, Jenny? JENNY. Four and tenpence, Major. BARBARA. Oh Snobby, if you had given your poor mother just one more kick, we should have got the whole five shillings! PRICE. If she heard you say that, miss, she'd be sorry I didn't. But I'm glad. Oh what a joy it will be to her when she hears I'm saved! UNDERSHAFT. Shall I contribute the odd twopence, Barbara? The millionaire's mite, eh? [He takes a couple of pennies from his pocket.] BARBARA. How did you make that twopence? UNDERSHAFT. As usual. By selling cannons, torpedoes, submarines, and my new patent Grand Duke hand grenade. BARBARA. Put it back in your pocket. You can't buy your Salvation here for twopence: you must work it out. UNDERSHAFT. Is twopence not enough? I can afford a little more, if you press me. BARBARA. Two million millions would not be enough. There is bad blood on your hands; and nothing but good blood can cleanse them. Money is no use. Take it away. [She turns to Cusins]. Dolly: you must write another letter for me to the papers. [He makes a wry face]. Yes: I know you don't like it; but it must be done. The starvation this winter is beating us: everybody is unemployed. The General says we must close this shelter if we cant get more money. I force the collections at the meetings until I am ashamed, don't I, Snobby? PRICE. It's a fair treat to see you work it, miss. The way you got them up from three-and-six to four-and-ten with that hymn, penny by penny and verse by verse, was a caution. Not a Cheap Jack on Mile End Waste could touch you at it. BARBARA. Yes; but I wish we could do without it. I am getting at last to think more of the collection than of the people's souls. And what are those hatfuls of pence and halfpence? We want thousands! tens of thousands! hundreds of thousands! I want to convert people, not to be always begging for the Army in a way I'd die sooner than beg for myself. UNDERSHAFT [in profound irony] Genuine unselfishness is capable of anything, my dear. BARBARA [unsuspectingly, as she turns away to take the money from the drum and put it in a cash bag she carries] Yes, isn't it? [Undershaft looks sardonically at Cusins]. CUSINS [aside to Undershaft] Mephistopheles! Machiavelli! BARBARA [tears coming into her eyes as she ties the bag and pockets it] How are we to feed them? I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes. [Almost breaking down] It's frightful. JENNY [running to her] Major, dear-- BARBARA [rebounding] No: don't comfort me. It will be all right. We shall get the money. UNDERSHAFT. How? JENNY. By praying for it, of course. Mrs Baines says she prayed for it last night; and she has never prayed for it in vain: never once. [She goes to the gate and looks out into the street]. BARBARA [who has dried her eyes and regained her composure] By the way, dad, Mrs Baines has come to march with us to our big meeting this afternoon; and she is very anxious to meet you, for some reason or other. Perhaps she'll convert you. UNDERSHAFT. I shall be delighted, my dear. JENNY [at the gate: excitedly] Major! Major! Here's that man back again. BARBARA. What man? JENNY. The man that hit me. Oh, I hope he's coming back to join us. Bill Walker, with frost on his jacket, comes through the gate, his hands deep in his pockets and his chin sunk between his shoulders, like a cleaned-out gambler. He halts between Barbara and the drum. BARBARA. Hullo, Bill! Back already! BILL [nagging at her] Bin talkin ever sense, av you? BARBARA. Pretty nearly. Well, has Todger paid you out for poor Jenny's jaw? BILL. NO he ain't. BARBARA. I thought your jacket looked a bit snowy. BILL. So it is snowy. You want to know where the snow come from, don't you? BARBARA. Yes. BILL. Well, it come from off the ground in Parkinses Corner in Kennintahn. It got rubbed off be my shoulders see? BARBARA. Pity you didn't rub some off with your knees, Bill! That would have done you a lot of good. BILL [with your mirthless humor] I was saving another man's knees at the time. E was kneelin on my ed, so e was. JENNY. Who was kneeling on your head? BILL. Todger was. E was prayin for me: prayin comfortable with me as a carpet. So was Mog. So was the ole bloomin meetin. Mog she sez "O Lord break is stubborn spirit; but don't urt is dear art." That was wot she said. "Don't urt is dear art"! An er bloke--thirteen stun four!--kneelin wiv all is weight on me. Funny, ain't it? JENNY. Oh no. We're so sorry, Mr Walker. BARBARA [enjoying it frankly] Nonsense! of course it's funny. Served you right, Bill! You must have done something to him first. BILL [doggedly] I did wot I said I'd do. I spit in is eye. E looks up at the sky and sez, "O that I should be fahnd worthy to be spit upon for the gospel's sake!" a sez; an Mog sez "Glory Allelloolier!"; an then a called me Brother, an dahned me as if I was a kid and a was me mother washin me a Setterda nawt. I adn't just no show wiv im at all. Arf the street prayed; an the tother arf larfed fit to split theirselves. [To Barbara] There! are you settisfawd nah? BARBARA [her eyes dancing] Wish I'd been there, Bill. BILL. Yes: you'd a got in a hextra bit o talk on me, wouldn't you? JENNY. I'm so sorry, Mr. Walker. BILL [fiercely] Don't you go bein sorry for me: you've no call. Listen ere. I broke your jawr. JENNY. No, it didn't hurt me: indeed it didn't, except for a moment. It was only that I was frightened. BILL. I don't want to be forgive be you, or be ennybody. Wot I did I'll pay for. I tried to get me own jawr broke to settisfaw you-- JENNY [distressed] Oh no-- BILL [impatiently] Tell y'I did: cawn't you listen to wot's bein told you? All I got be it was bein made a sight of in the public street for me pains. Well, if I cawn't settisfaw you one way, I can another. Listen ere! I ad two quid saved agen the frost; an I've a pahnd of it left. A mate n mine last week ad words with the Judy e's goin to marry. E give er wot-for; an e's bin fined fifteen bob. E ad a right to it er because they was goin to be marrid; but I adn't no right to it you; so put anather fawv bob on an call it a pahnd's worth. [He produces a sovereign]. Ere's the money. Take it; and let's av no more o your forgivin an prayin and your Major jawrin me. Let wot I done be done and paid for; and let there be a end of it. JENNY. Oh, I couldn't take it, Mr. Walker. But if you would give a shilling or two to poor Rummy Mitchens! you really did hurt her; and she's old. BILL [contemptuously] Not likely. I'd give her anather as soon as look at er. Let her av the lawr o me as she threatened! She ain't forgiven me: not mach. Wot I done to er is not on me mawnd--wot she [indicating Barbara] might call on me conscience--no more than stickin a pig. It's this Christian game o yours that I won't av played agen me: this bloomin forgivin an noggin an jawrin that makes a man that sore that iz lawf's a burdn to im. I won't av it, I tell you; so take your money and stop throwin your silly bashed face hup agen me. JENNY. Major: may I take a little of it for the Army? BARBARA. No: the Army is not to be bought. We want your soul, Bill; and we'll take nothing less. BILL [bitterly] I know. It ain't enough. Me an me few shillins is not good enough for you. You're a earl's grendorter, you are. Nothin less than a underd pahnd for you. UNDERSHAFT. Come, Barbara! you could do a great deal of good with a hundred pounds. If you will set this gentleman's mind at ease by taking his pound, I will give the other ninety-nine [Bill, astounded by such opulence, instinctively touches his cap]. BARBARA. Oh, you're too extravagant, papa. Bill offers twenty pieces of silver. All you need offer is the other ten. That will make the standard price to buy anybody who's for sale. I'm not; and the Army's not. [To Bill] You'll never have another quiet moment, Bill, until you come round to us. You can't stand out against your salvation. BILL [sullenly] I cawn't stend aht agen music all wrastlers and artful tongued women. I've offered to pay. I can do no more. Take it or leave it. There it is. [He throws the sovereign on the drum, and sits down on the horse-trough. The coin fascinates Snobby Price, who takes an early opportunity of dropping his cap on it]. Mrs Baines comes from the shelter. She is dressed as a Salvation Army Commissioner. She is an earnest looking woman of about 40, with a caressing, urgent voice, and an appealing manner. BARBARA. This is my father, Mrs Baines. [Undershaft comes from the table, taking his hat off with marked civility]. Try what you can do with him. He won't listen to me, because he remembers what a fool I was when I was a baby. [She leaves them together and chats with Jenny]. MRS BAINES. Have you been shown over the shelter, Mr Undershaft? You know the work we're doing, of course. UNDERSHAFT [very civilly] The whole nation knows it, Mrs Baines. MRS BAINES. No, Sir: the whole nation does not know it, or we should not be crippled as we are for want of money to carry our work through the length and breadth of the land. Let me tell you that there would have been rioting this winter in London but for us. UNDERSHAFT. You really think so? MRS BAINES. I know it. I remember 1886, when you rich gentlemen hardened your hearts against the cry of the poor. They broke the windows of your clubs in Pall Mall. UNDERSHAFT [gleaming with approval of their method] And the Mansion House Fund went up next day from thirty thousand pounds to seventy-nine thousand! I remember quite well. MRS BAINES. Well, won't you help me to get at the people? They won't break windows then. Come here, Price. Let me show you to this gentleman [Price comes to be inspected]. Do you remember the window breaking? PRICE. My ole father thought it was the revolution, ma'am. MRS BAINES. Would you break windows now? PRICE. Oh no ma'm. The windows of eaven av bin opened to me. I know now that the rich man is a sinner like myself. RUMMY [appearing above at the loft door] Snobby Price! SNOBBY. Wot is it? RUMMY. Your mother's askin for you at the other gate in Crippses Lane. She's heard about your confession [Price turns pale]. MRS BAINES. Go, Mr. Price; and pray with her. JENNY. You can go through the shelter, Snobby. PRICE [to Mrs Baines] I couldn't face her now; ma'am, with all the weight of my sins fresh on me. Tell her she'll find her son at ome, waitin for her in prayer. [He skulks off through the gate, incidentally stealing the sovereign on his way out by picking up his cap from the drum]. MRS BAINES [with swimming eyes] You see how we take the anger and the bitterness against you out of their hearts, Mr Undershaft. UNDERSHAFT. It is certainly most convenient and gratifying to all large employers of labor, Mrs Baines. MRS BAINES. Barbara: Jenny: I have good news: most wonderful news. [Jenny runs to her]. My prayers have been answered. I told you they would, Jenny, didn't I? JENNY. Yes, yes. BARBARA [moving nearer to the drum] Have we got money enough to keep the shelter open? MRS BAINES. I hope we shall have enough to keep all the shelters open. Lord Saxmundham has promised us five thousand pounds-- BARBARA. Hooray! JENNY. Glory! MRS BAINES. --if-- BARBARA. "If!" If what? MRS BAINES. If five other gentlemen will give a thousand each to make it up to ten thousand. BARBARA. Who is Lord Saxmundham? I never heard of him. UNDERSHAFT [who has pricked up his ears at the peer's name, and is now watching Barbara curiously] A new creation, my dear. You have heard of Sir Horace Bodger? BARBARA. Bodger! Do you mean the distiller? Bodger's whisky! UNDERSHAFT. That is the man. He is one of the greatest of our public benefactors. He restored the cathedral at Hakington. They made him a baronet for that. He gave half a million to the funds of his party: they made him a baron for that. SHIRLEY. What will they give him for the five thousand? UNDERSHAFT. There is nothing left to give him. So the five thousand, I should think, is to save his soul. MRS BAINES. Heaven grant it may! Oh Mr. Undershaft, you have some very rich friends. Can't you help us towards the other five thousand? We are going to hold a great meeting this afternoon at the Assembly Hall in the Mile End Road. If I could only announce that one gentleman had come forward to support Lord Saxmundham, others would follow. Don't you know somebody? Couldn't you? Wouldn't you? [her eyes fill with tears] oh, think of those poor people, Mr Undershaft: think of how much it means to them, and how little to a great man like you. UNDERSHAFT [sardonically gallant] Mrs Baines: you are irresistible. I can't disappoint you; and I can't deny myself the satisfaction of making Bodger pay up. You shall have your five thousand pounds. MRS BAINES. Thank God! UNDERSHAFT. You don't thank me? MRS BAINES. Oh sir, don't try to be cynical: don't be ashamed of being a good man. The Lord will bless you abundantly; and our prayers will be like a strong fortification round you all the days of your life. [With a touch of caution] You will let me have the cheque to show at the meeting, won't you? Jenny: go in and fetch a pen and ink. [Jenny runs to the shelter door]. UNDERSHAFT. Do not disturb Miss Hill: I have a fountain pen. [Jenny halts. He sits at the table and writes the cheque. Cusins rises to make more room for him. They all watch him silently]. BILL [cynically, aside to Barbara, his voice and accent horribly debased] Wot prawce Selvytion nah? BARBARA. Stop. [Undershaft stops writing: they all turn to her in surprise]. Mrs Baines: are you really going to take this money? MRS BAINES [astonished] Why not, dear? BARBARA. Why not! Do you know what my father is? Have you forgotten that Lord Saxmundham is Bodger the whisky man? Do you remember how we implored the County Council to stop him from writing Bodger's Whisky in letters of fire against the sky; so that the poor drinkruined creatures on the embankment could not wake up from their snatches of sleep without being reminded of their deadly thirst by that wicked sky sign? Do you know that the worst thing I have had to fight here is not the devil, but Bodger, Bodger, Bodger, with his whisky, his distilleries, and his tied houses? Are you going to make our shelter another tied house for him, and ask me to keep it? BILL. Rotten drunken whisky it is too. MRS BAINES. Dear Barbara: Lord Saxmundham has a soul to be saved like any of us. If heaven has found the way to make a good use of his money, are we to set ourselves up against the answer to our prayers? BARBARA. I know he has a soul to be saved. Let him come down here; and I'll do my best to help him to his salvation. But he wants to send his cheque down to buy us, and go on being as wicked as ever. UNDERSHAFT [with a reasonableness which Cusins alone perceives to be ironical] My dear Barbara: alcohol is a very necessary article. It heals the sick-- BARBARA. It does nothing of the sort. UNDERSHAFT. Well, it assists the doctor: that is perhaps a less questionable way of putting it. It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning. Is it Bodger's fault that this inestimable gift is deplorably abused by less than one per cent of the poor? [He turns again to the table; signs the cheque; and crosses it]. MRS BAINES. Barbara: will there be less drinking or more if all those poor souls we are saving come to-morrow and find the doors of our shelters shut in their faces? Lord Saxmundham gives us the money to stop drinking--to take his own business from him. CUSINS [impishly] Pure self-sacrifice on Bodger's part, clearly! Bless dear Bodger! [Barbara almost breaks down as Adolpbus, too, fails her]. UNDERSHAFT [tearing out the cheque and pocketing the book as he rises and goes past Cusins to Mrs Baines] I also, Mrs Baines, may claim a little disinterestedness. Think of my business! think of the widows and orphans! the men and lads torn to pieces with shrapnel and poisoned with lyddite [Mrs Baines shrinks; but he goes on remorselessly]! the oceans of blood, not one drop of which is shed in a really just cause! the ravaged crops! the peaceful peasants forced, women and men, to till their fields under the fire of opposing armies on pain of starvation! the bad blood of the fierce little cowards at home who egg on others to fight for the gratification of their national vanity! All this makes money for me: I am never richer, never busier than when the papers are full of it. Well, it is your work to preach peace on earth and goodwill to men. [Mrs Baines's face lights up again]. Every convert you make is a vote against war. [Her lips move in prayer]. Yet I give you this money to help you to hasten my own commercial ruin. [He gives her the cheque]. CUSINS [mounting the form in an ecstasy of mischief] The millennium will be inaugurated by the unselfishness of Undershaft and Bodger. Oh be joyful! [He takes the drumsticks from his pockets and flourishes them]. MRS BAINES [taking the cheque] The longer I live the more proof I see that there is an Infinite Goodness that turns everything to the work of salvation sooner or later. Who would have thought that any good could have come out of war and drink? And yet their profits are brought today to the feet of salvation to do its blessed work. [She is affected to tears]. JENNY [running to Mrs Baines and throwing her arms round her] Oh dear! how blessed, how glorious it all is! CUSINS [in a convulsion of irony] Let us seize this unspeakable moment. Let us march to the great meeting at once. Excuse me just an instant. [He rushes into the shelter. Jenny takes her tambourine from the drum head]. MRS BAINES. Mr Undershaft: have you ever seen a thousand people fall on their knees with one impulse and pray? Come with us to the meeting. Barbara shall tell them that the Army is saved, and saved through you. CUSINS [returning impetuously from the shelter with a flag and a trombone, and coming between Mrs Baines and Undershaft] You shall carry the flag down the first street, Mrs Baines [he gives her the flag]. Mr Undershaft is a gifted trombonist: he shall intone an Olympian diapason to the West Ham Salvation March. [Aside to Undershaft, as he forces the trombone on him] Blow, Machiavelli, blow. UNDERSHAFT [aside to him, as he takes the trombone] The trumpet in Zion! [Cusins rushes to the drum, which he takes up and puts on. Undershaft continues, aloud] I will do my best. I could vamp a bass if I knew the tune. CUSINS. It is a wedding chorus from one of Donizetti's operas; but we have converted it. We convert everything to good here, including Bodger. You remember the chorus. "For thee immense rejoicing--immenso giubilo--immenso giubilo." [With drum obbligato] Rum tum ti tum tum, tum tum ti ta-- BARBARA. Dolly: you are breaking my heart. CUSINS. What is a broken heart more or less here? Dionysos Undershaft has descended. I am possessed. MRS BAINES. Come, Barbara: I must have my dear Major to carry the flag with me. JENNY. Yes, yes, Major darling. CUSINS [snatches the tambourine out of Jenny's hand and mutely offers it to Barbara]. BARBARA [coming forward a little as she puts the offer behind her with a shudder, whilst Cusins recklessly tosses the tambourine back to Jenny and goes to the gate] I can't come. JENNY. Not come! MRS BAINES [with tears in her eyes] Barbara: do you think I am wrong to take the money? BARBARA [impulsively going to her and kissing her] No, no: God help you, dear, you must: you are saving the Army. Go; and may you have a great meeting! JENNY. But arn't you coming? BARBARA. No. [She begins taking off the silver brooch from her collar]. MRS BAINES. Barbara: what are you doing? JENNY. Why are you taking your badge off? You can't be going to leave us, Major. BARBARA [quietly] Father: come here. UNDERSHAFT [coming to her] My dear! [Seeing that she is going to pin the badge on his collar, he retreats to the penthouse in some alarm]. BARBARA [following him] Don't be frightened. [She pins the badge on and steps back towards the table, showing him to the others] There! It's not much for 5000 pounds is it? MRS BAINES. Barbara: if you won't come and pray with us, promise me you will pray for us. BARBARA. I can't pray now. Perhaps I shall never pray again. MRS BAINES. Barbara! JENNY. Major! BARBARA [almost delirious] I can't bear any more. Quick march! CUSINS [calling to the procession in the street outside] Off we go. Play up, there! Immenso giubilo. [He gives the time with his drum; and the band strikes up the march, which rapidly becomes more distant as the procession moves briskly away]. MRS BAINES. I must go, dear. You're overworked: you will be all right tomorrow. We'll never lose you. Now Jenny: step out with the old flag. Blood and Fire! [She marches out through the gate with her flag]. JENNY. Glory Hallelujah! [flourishing her tambourine and marching]. UNDERSHAFT [to Cusins, as he marches out past him easing the slide of his trombone] "My ducats and my daughter"! CUSINS [following him out] Money and gunpowder! BARBARA. Drunkenness and Murder! My God: why hast thou forsaken me? She sinks on the form with her face buried in her hands. The march passes away into silence. Bill Walker steals across to her. BILL [taunting] Wot prawce Selvytion nah? SHIRLEY. Don't you hit her when she's down. BILL. She it me wen aw wiz dahn. Waw shouldn't I git a bit o me own back? BARBARA [raising her head] I didn't take your money, Bill. [She crosses the yard to the gate and turns her back on the two men to hide her face from them]. BILL [sneering after her] Naow, it warn't enough for you. [Turning to the drum, he misses the money]. Ellow! If you ain't took it summun else az. Were's it gorn? Blame me if Jenny Ill didn't take it arter all! RUMMY [screaming at him from the loft] You lie, you dirty blackguard! Snobby Price pinched it off the drum wen e took ap iz cap. I was ap ere all the time an see im do it. BILL. Wot! Stowl maw money! Waw didn't you call thief on him, you silly old mucker you? RUMMY. To serve you aht for ittin me acrost the face. It's cost y'pahnd, that az. [Raising a paean of squalid triumph] I done you. I'm even with you. I've ad it aht o y--. [Bill snatches up Shirley's mug and hurls it at her. She slams the loft door and vanishes. The mug smashes against the door and falls in fragments]. BILL [beginning to chuckle] Tell us, ole man, wot o'clock this morrun was it wen im as they call Snobby Prawce was sived? BARBARA [turning to him more composedly, and with unspoiled sweetness] About half past twelve, Bill. And he pinched your pound at a quarter to two. I know. Well, you can't afford to lose it. I'll send it to you. BILL [his voice and accent suddenly improving] Not if I was to starve for it. I ain't to be bought. SHIRLEY. Ain't you? You'd sell yourself to the devil for a pint o beer; ony there ain't no devil to make the offer. BILL [unshamed] So I would, mate, and often av, cheerful. But she cawn't buy me. [Approaching Barbara] You wanted my soul, did you? Well, you ain't got it. BARBARA. I nearly got it, Bill. But we've sold it back to you for ten thousand pounds. SHIRLEY. And dear at the money! BARBARA. No, Peter: it was worth more than money. BILL [salvationproof] It's no good: you cawn't get rahnd me nah. I don't blieve in it; and I've seen today that I was right. [Going] So long, old soupkitchener! Ta, ta, Major Earl's Grendorter! [Turning at the gate] Wot prawce Selvytion nah? Snobby Prawce! Ha! ha! BARBARA [offering her hand] Goodbye, Bill. BILL [taken aback, half plucks his cap off then shoves it on again defiantly] Git aht. [Barbara drops her hand, discouraged. He has a twinge of remorse]. But thet's aw rawt, you knaow. Nathink pasnl. Naow mellice. So long, Judy. [He goes]. BARBARA. No malice. So long, Bill. SHIRLEY [shaking his head] You make too much of him, miss, in your innocence. BARBARA [going to him] Peter: I'm like you now. Cleaned out, and lost my job. SHIRLEY. You've youth an hope. That's two better than me. That's hope for you. BARBARA. I'll get you a job, Peter, the youth will have to be enough for me. [She counts her money]. I have just enough left for two teas at Lockharts, a Rowton doss for you, and my tram and bus home. [He frowns and rises with offended pride. She takes his arm]. Don't be proud, Peter: it's sharing between friends. And promise me you'll talk to me and not let me cry. [She draws him towards the gate]. SHIRLEY. Well, I'm not accustomed to talk to the like of you-- BARBARA [urgently] Yes, yes: you must talk to me. Tell me about Tom Paine's books and Bradlaugh's lectures. Come along. SHIRLEY. Ah, if you would only read Tom Paine in the proper spirit, miss! [They go out through the gate together]. ACT III Next day after lunch Lady Britomart is writing in the library in Wilton Crescent. Sarah is reading in the armchair near the window. Barbara, in ordinary dresss, pale and brooding, is on the settee. Charley Lomax enters. Coming forward between the settee and the writing table, he starts on seeing Barbara fashionably attired and in low spirits. LOMAX. You've left off your uniform! Barbara says nothing; but an expression of pain passes over her face. LADY BRITOMART [warning him in low tones to be careful] Charles! LOMAX [much concerned, sitting down sympathetically on the settee beside Barbara] I'm awfully sorry, Barbara. You know I helped you all I could with the concertina and so forth. [Momentously] Still, I have never shut my eyes to the fact that there is a certain amount of tosh about the Salvation Army. Now the claims of the Church of England-- LADY BRITOMART. That's enough, Charles. Speak of something suited to your mental capacity. LOMAX. But surely the Church of England is suited to all our capacities. BARBARA [pressing his hand] Thank you for your sympathy, Cholly. Now go and spoon with Sarah. LOMAX [rising and going to Sarah] How is my ownest today? SARAH. I wish you wouldn't tell Cholly to do things, Barbara. He always comes straight and does them. Cholly: we're going to the works at Perivale St. Andrews this afternoon. LOMAX. What works? SARAH. The cannon works. LOMAX. What! Your governor's shop! SARAH. Yes. LOMAX. Oh I say! Cusins enters in poor condition. He also starts visibly when he sees Barbara without her uniform. BARBARA. I expected you this morning, Dolly. Didn't you guess that? CUSINS [sitting down beside her] I'm sorry. I have only just breakfasted. SARAH. But we've just finished lunch. BARBARA. Have you had one of your bad nights? CUSINS. No: I had rather a good night: in fact, one of the most remarkable nights I have ever passed. BARBARA. The meeting? CUSINS. No: after the meeting. LADY BRITOMART. You should have gone to bed after the meeting. What were you doing? CUSINS. Drinking. LADY BRITOMART. }{ Adolphus! SARAH. }{ Dolly! BARBARA. }{ Dolly! LOMAX. }{ Oh I say! LADY BRITOMART. What were you drinking, may I ask? CUSINS. A most devilish kind of Spanish burgundy, warranted free from added alcohol: a Temperance burgundy in fact. Its richness in natural alcohol made any addition superfluous. BARBARA. Are you joking, Dolly? CUSINS [patiently] No. I have been making a night of it with the nominal head of this household: that is all. LADY BRITOMART. Andrew made you drunk! CUSINS. No: he only provided the wine. I think it was Dionysos who made me drunk. [To Barbara] I told you I was possessed. LADY BRITOMART. You're not sober yet. Go home to bed at once. CUSINS. I have never before ventured to reproach you, Lady Brit; but how could you marry the Prince of Darkness? LADY BRITOMART. It was much more excusable to marry him than to get drunk with him. That is a new accomplishment of Andrew's, by the way. He usen't to drink. CUSINS. He doesn't now. He only sat there and completed the wreck of my moral basis, the rout of my convictions, the purchase of my soul. He cares for you, Barbara. That is what makes him so dangerous to me. BARBARA. That has nothing to do with it, Dolly. There are larger loves and diviner dreams than the fireside ones. You know that, don't you? CUSINS. Yes: that is our understanding. I know it. I hold to it. Unless he can win me on that holier ground he may amuse me for a while; but he can get no deeper hold, strong as he is. BARBARA. Keep to that; and the end will be right. Now tell me what happened at the meeting? CUSINS. It was an amazing meeting. Mrs Baines almost died of emotion. Jenny Hill went stark mad with hysteria. The Prince of Darkness played his trombone like a madman: its brazen roarings were like the laughter of the damned. 117 conversions took place then and there. They prayed with the most touching sincerity and gratitude for Bodger, and for the anonymous donor of the 5000 pounds. Your father would not let his name be given. LOMAX. That was rather fine of the old man, you know. Most chaps would have wanted the advertisement. CUSINS. He said all the charitable institutions would be down on him like kites on a battle field if he gave his name. LADY BRITOMART. That's Andrew all over. He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it. CUSINS. He convinced me that I have all my life been doing improper things for proper reasons. LADY BRITOMART. Adolphus: now that Barbara has left the Salvation Army, you had better leave it too. I will not have you playing that drum in the streets. CUSINS. Your orders are already obeyed, Lady Brit. BARBARA. Dolly: were you ever really in earnest about it? Would you have joined if you had never seen me? CUSINS [disingenuously] Well--er--well, possibly, as a collector of religions-- LOMAX [cunningly] Not as a drummer, though, you know. You are a very clearheaded brainy chap, Cholly; and it must have been apparent to you that there is a certain amount of tosh about-- LADY BRITOMART. Charles: if you must drivel, drivel like a grown-up man and not like a schoolboy. LOMAX [out of countenance] Well, drivel is drivel, don't you know, whatever a man's age. LADY BRITOMART. In good society in England, Charles, men drivel at all ages by repeating silly formulas with an air of wisdom. Schoolboys make their own formulas out of slang, like you. When they reach your age, and get political private secretaryships and things of that sort, they drop slang and get their formulas out of The Spectator or The Times. You had better confine yourself to The Times. You will find that there is a certain amount of tosh about The Times; but at least its language is reputable. LOMAX [overwhelmed] You are so awfully strong-minded, Lady Brit-- LADY BRITOMART. Rubbish! [Morrison comes in]. What is it? MORRISON. If you please, my lady, Mr Undershaft has just drove up to the door. LADY BRITOMART. Well, let him in. [Morrison hesitates]. What's the matter with you? MORRISON. Shall I announce him, my lady; or is he at home here, so to speak, my lady? LADY BRITOMART. Announce him. MORRISON. Thank you, my lady. You won't mind my asking, I hope. The occasion is in a manner of speaking new to me. LADY BRITOMART. Quite right. Go and let him in. MORRISON. Thank you, my lady. [He withdraws]. LADY BRITOMART. Children: go and get ready. [Sarah and Barbara go upstairs for their out-of-door wrap]. Charles: go and tell Stephen to come down here in five minutes: you will find him in the drawing room. [Charles goes]. Adolphus: tell them to send round the carriage in about fifteen minutes. [Adolphus goes]. MORRISON [at the door] Mr Undershaft. Undershaft comes in. Morrison goes out. UNDERSHAFT. Alone! How fortunate! LADY BRITOMART [rising] Don't be sentimental, Andrew. Sit down. [She sits on the settee: he sits beside her, on her left. She comes to the point before he has time to breathe]. Sarah must have 800 pounds a year until Charles Lomax comes into his property. Barbara will need more, and need it permanently, because Adolphus hasn't any property. UNDERSHAFT [resignedly] Yes, my dear: I will see to it. Anything else? for yourself, for instance? LADY BRITOMART. I want to talk to you about Stephen. UNDERSHAFT [rather wearily] Don't, my dear. Stephen doesn't interest me. LADY BRITOMART. He does interest me. He is our son. UNDERSHAFT. Do you really think so? He has induced us to bring him into the world; but he chose his parents very incongruously, I think. I see nothing of myself in him, and less of you. LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: Stephen is an excellent son, and a most steady, capable, highminded young man. YOU are simply trying to find an excuse for disinheriting him. UNDERSHAFT. My dear Biddy: the Undershaft tradition disinherits him. It would be dishonest of me to leave the cannon foundry to my son. LADY BRITOMART. It would be most unnatural and improper of you to leave it to anyone else, Andrew. Do you suppose this wicked and immoral tradition can be kept up for ever? Do you pretend that Stephen could not carry on the foundry just as well as all the other sons of the big business houses? UNDERSHAFT. Yes: he could learn the office routine without understanding the business, like all the other sons; and the firm would go on by its own momentum until the real Undershaft--probably an Italian or a German--would invent a new method and cut him out. LADY BRITOMART. There is nothing that any Italian or German could do that Stephen could not do. And Stephen at least has breeding. UNDERSHAFT. The son of a foundling! nonsense! LADY BRITOMART. My son, Andrew! And even you may have good blood in your veins for all you know. UNDERSHAFT. True. Probably I have. That is another argument in favor of a foundling. LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: don't be aggravating. And don't be wicked. At present you are both. UNDERSHAFT. This conversation is part of the Undershaft tradition, Biddy. Every Undershaft's wife has treated him to it ever since the house was founded. It is mere waste of breath. If the tradition be ever broken it will be for an abler man than Stephen. LADY BRITOMART [pouting] Then go away. UNDERSHAFT [deprecatory] Go away! LADY BRITOMART. Yes: go away. If you will do nothing for Stephen, you are not wanted here. Go to your foundling, whoever he is; and look after him. UNDERSHAFT. The fact is, Biddy-- LADY BRITOMART. Don't call me Biddy. I don't call you Andy. UNDERSHAFT. I will not call my wife Britomart: it is not good sense. Seriously, my love, the Undershaft tradition has landed me in a difficulty. I am getting on in years; and my partner Lazarus has at last made a stand and insisted that the succession must be settled one way or the other; and of course he is quite right. You see, I haven't found a fit successor yet. LADY BRITOMART [obstinately] There is Stephen. UNDERSHAFT. That's just it: all the foundlings I can find are exactly like Stephen. LADY BRITOMART. Andrew!! UNDERSHAFT. I want a man with no relations and no schooling: that is, a man who would be out of the running altogether if he were not a strong man. And I can't find him. Every blessed foundling nowadays is snapped up in his infancy by Barnardo homes, or School Board officers, or Boards of Guardians; and if he shows the least ability, he is fastened on by schoolmasters; trained to win scholarships like a racehorse; crammed with secondhand ideas; drilled and disciplined in docility and what they call good taste; and lamed for life so that he is fit for nothing but teaching. If you want to keep the foundry in the family, you had better find an eligible foundling and marry him to Barbara. LADY BRITOMART. Ah! Barbara! Your pet! You would sacrifice Stephen to Barbara. UNDERSHAFT. Cheerfully. And you, my dear, would boil Barbara to make soup for Stephen. LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: this is not a question of our likings and dislikings: it is a question of duty. It is your duty to make Stephen your successor. UNDERSHAFT. Just as much as it is your duty to submit to your husband. Come, Biddy! these tricks of the governing class are of no use with me. I am one of the governing class myself; and it is waste of time giving tracts to a missionary. I have the power in this matter; and I am not to be humbugged into using it for your purposes. LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: you can talk my head off; but you can't change wrong into right. And your tie is all on one side. Put it straight. UNDERSHAFT [disconcerted] It won't stay unless it's pinned [he fumbles at it with childish grimaces]-- Stephen comes in. STEPHEN [at the door] I beg your pardon [about to retire]. LADY BRITOMART. No: come in, Stephen. [Stephen comes forward to his mother's writing table.] UNDERSHAFT [not very cordially] Good afternoon. STEPHEN [coldly] Good afternoon. UNDERSHAFT [to Lady Britomart] He knows all about the tradition, I suppose? LADY BRITOMART. Yes. [To Stephen] It is what I told you last night, Stephen. UNDERSHAFT [sulkily] I understand you want to come into the cannon business. STEPHEN. _I_ go into trade! Certainly not. UNDERSHAFT [opening his eyes, greatly eased in mind and manner] Oh! in that case--! LADY BRITOMART. Cannons are not trade, Stephen. They are enterprise. STEPHEN. I have no intention of becoming a man of business in any sense. I have no capacity for business and no taste for it. I intend to devote myself to politics. UNDERSHAFT [rising] My dear boy: this is an immense relief to me. And I trust it may prove an equally good thing for the country. I was afraid you would consider yourself disparaged and slighted. [He moves towards Stephen as if to shake hands with him]. LADY BRITOMART [rising and interposing] Stephen: I cannot allow you to throw away an enormous property like this. STEPHEN [stiffly] Mother: there must be an end of treating me as a child, if you please. [Lady Britomart recoils, deeply wounded by his tone]. Until last night I did not take your attitude seriously, because I did not think you meant it seriously. But I find now that you left me in the dark as to matters which you should have explained to me years ago. I am extremely hurt and offended. Any further discussion of my intentions had better take place with my father, as between one man and another. LADY BRITOMART. Stephen! [She sits down again; and her eyes fill with tears]. UNDERSHAFT [with grave compassion] You see, my dear, it is only the big men who can be treated as children. STEPHEN. I am sorry, mother, that you have forced me-- UNDERSHAFT [stopping him] Yes, yes, yes, yes: that's all right, Stephen. She wont interfere with you any more: your independence is achieved: you have won your latchkey. Don't rub it in; and above all, don't apologize. [He resumes his seat]. Now what about your future, as between one man and another--I beg your pardon, Biddy: as between two men and a woman. LADY BRITOMART [who has pulled herself together strongly] I quite understand, Stephen. By all means go your own way if you feel strong enough. [Stephen sits down magisterially in the chair at the writing table with an air of affirming his majority]. UNDERSHAFT. It is settled that you do not ask for the succession to the cannon business. STEPHEN. I hope it is settled that I repudiate the cannon business. UNDERSHAFT. Come, come! Don't be so devilishly sulky: it's boyish. Freedom should be generous. Besides, I owe you a fair start in life in exchange for disinheriting you. You can't become prime minister all at once. Haven't you a turn for something? What about literature, art and so forth? STEPHEN. I have nothing of the artist about me, either in faculty or character, thank Heaven! UNDERSHAFT. A philosopher, perhaps? Eh? STEPHEN. I make no such ridiculous pretension. UNDERSHAFT. Just so. Well, there is the army, the navy, the Church, the Bar. The Bar requires some ability. What about the Bar? STEPHEN. I have not studied law. And I am afraid I have not the necessary push--I believe that is the name barristers give to their vulgarity--for success in pleading. UNDERSHAFT. Rather a difficult case, Stephen. Hardly anything left but the stage, is there? [Stephen makes an impatient movement]. Well, come! is there anything you know or care for? STEPHEN [rising and looking at him steadily] I know the difference between right and wrong. UNDERSHAFT [hugely tickled] You don't say so! What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you're a genius, master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too! STEPHEN [keeping his temper with difficulty] You are pleased to be facetious. I pretend to nothing more than any honorable English gentleman claims as his birthright [he sits down angrily]. UNDERSHAFT. Oh, that's everybody's birthright. Look at poor little Jenny Hill, the Salvation lassie! she would think you were laughing at her if you asked her to stand up in the street and teach grammar or geography or mathematics or even drawingroom dancing; but it never occurs to her to doubt that she can teach morals and religion. You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter; but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! what a world! LADY BRITOMART [uneasily] What do you think he had better do, Andrew? UNDERSHAFT. Oh, just what he wants to do. He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. Get him a private secretaryship to someone who can get him an Under Secretaryship; and then leave him alone. He will find his natural and proper place in the end on the Treasury bench. STEPHEN [springing up again] I am sorry, sir, that you force me to forget the respect due to you as my father. I am an Englishman; and I will not hear the Government of my country insulted. [He thrusts his hands in his pockets, and walks angrily across to the window]. UNDERSHAFT [with a touch of brutality] The government of your country! _I_ am the government of your country: I, and Lazarus. Do you suppose that you and half a dozen amateurs like you, sitting in a row in that foolish gabble shop, can govern Undershaft and Lazarus? No, my friend: you will do what pays US. You will make war when it suits us, and keep peace when it doesn't. You will find out that trade requires certain measures when we have decided on those measures. When I want anything to keep my dividends up, you will discover that my want is a national need. When other people want something to keep my dividends down, you will call out the police and military. And in return you shall have the support and applause of my newspapers, and the delight of imagining that you are a great statesman. Government of your country! Be off with you, my boy, and play with your caucuses and leading articles and historic parties and great leaders and burning questions and the rest of your toys. _I_ am going back to my counting house to pay the piper and call the tune. STEPHEN [actually smiling, and putting his hand on his father's shoulder with indulgent patronage] Really, my dear father, it is impossible to be angry with you. You don't know how absurd all this sounds to ME. You are very properly proud of having been industrious enough to make money; and it is greatly to your credit that you have made so much of it. But it has kept you in circles where you are valued for your money and deferred to for it, instead of in the doubtless very oldfashioned and behind-the-times public school and university where I formed my habits of mind. It is natural for you to think that money governs England; but you must allow me to think I know better. UNDERSHAFT. And what does govern England, pray? STEPHEN. Character, father, character. UNDERSHAFT. Whose character? Yours or mine? STEPHEN. Neither yours nor mine, father, but the best elements in the English national character. UNDERSHAFT. Stephen: I've found your profession for you. You're a born journalist. I'll start you with a hightoned weekly review. There! Stephen goes to the smaller writing table and busies himself with his letters. Sarah, Barbara, Lomax, and Cusins come in ready for walking. Barbara crosses the room to the window and looks out. Cusins drifts amiably to the armchair, and Lomax remains near the door, whilst Sarah comes to her mother. SARAH. Go and get ready, mamma: the carriage is waiting. [Lady Britomart leaves the room.] UNDERSHAFT [to Sarah] Good day, my dear. Good afternoon, Mr. Lomax. LOMAX [vaguely] Ahdedoo. UNDERSHAFT [to Cusins] quite well after last night, Euripides, eh? CUSINS. As well as can be expected. UNDERSHAFT. That's right. [To Barbara] So you are coming to see my death and devastation factory, Barbara? BARBARA [at the window] You came yesterday to see my salvation factory. I promised you a return visit. LOMAX [coming forward between Sarah and Undershaft] You'll find it awfully interesting. I've been through the Woolwich Arsenal; and it gives you a ripping feeling of security, you know, to think of the lot of beggars we could kill if it came to fighting. [To Undershaft, with sudden solemnity] Still, it must be rather an awful reflection for you, from the religious point of view as it were. You're getting on, you know, and all that. SARAH. You don't mind Cholly's imbecility, papa, do you? LOMAX [much taken aback] Oh I say! UNDERSHAFT. Mr Lomax looks at the matter in a very proper spirit, my dear. LOMAX. Just so. That's all I meant, I assure you. SARAH. Are you coming, Stephen? STEPHEN. Well, I am rather busy--er-- [Magnanimously] Oh well, yes: I'll come. That is, if there is room for me. UNDERSHAFT. I can take two with me in a little motor I am experimenting with for field use. You won't mind its being rather unfashionable. It's not painted yet; but it's bullet proof. LOMAX [appalled at the prospect of confronting Wilton Crescent in an unpainted motor] Oh I say! SARAH. The carriage for me, thank you. Barbara doesn't mind what she's seen in. LOMAX. I say, Dolly old chap: do you really mind the car being a guy? Because of course if you do I'll go in it. Still-- CUSINS. I prefer it. LOMAX. Thanks awfully, old man. Come, Sarah. [He hurries out to secure his seat in the carriage. Sarah follows him]. CUSINS. [moodily walking across to Lady Britomart's writing table] Why are we two coming to this Works Department of Hell? that is what I ask myself. BARBARA. I have always thought of it as a sort of pit where lost creatures with blackened faces stirred up smoky fires and were driven and tormented by my father? Is it like that, dad? UNDERSHAFT [scandalized] My dear! It is a spotlessly clean and beautiful hillside town. CUSINS. With a Methodist chapel? Oh do say there's a Methodist chapel. UNDERSHAFT. There are two: a primitive one and a sophisticated one. There is even an Ethical Society; but it is not much patronized, as my men are all strongly religious. In the High Explosives Sheds they object to the presence of Agnostics as unsafe. CUSINS. And yet they don't object to you! BARBARA. Do they obey all your orders? UNDERSHAFT. I never give them any orders. When I speak to one of them it is "Well, Jones, is the baby doing well? and has Mrs Jones made a good recovery?" "Nicely, thank you, sir." And that's all. CUSINS. But Jones has to be kept in order. How do you maintain discipline among your men? UNDERSHAFT. I don't. They do. You see, the one thing Jones won't stand is any rebellion from the man under him, or any assertion of social equality between the wife of the man with 4 shillings a week less than himself and Mrs Jones! Of course they all rebel against me, theoretically. Practically, every man of them keeps the man just below him in his place. I never meddle with them. I never bully them. I don't even bully Lazarus. I say that certain things are to be done; but I don't order anybody to do them. I don't say, mind you, that there is no ordering about and snubbing and even bullying. The men snub the boys and order them about; the carmen snub the sweepers; the artisans snub the unskilled laborers; the foremen drive and bully both the laborers and artisans; the assistant engineers find fault with the foremen; the chief engineers drop on the assistants; the departmental managers worry the chiefs; and the clerks have tall hats and hymnbooks and keep up the social tone by refusing to associate on equal terms with anybody. The result is a colossal profit, which comes to me. CUSINS [revolted] You really are a--well, what I was saying yesterday. BARBARA. What was he saying yesterday? UNDERSHAFT. Never mind, my dear. He thinks I have made you unhappy. Have I? BARBARA. Do you think I can be happy in this vulgar silly dress? I! who have worn the uniform. Do you understand what you have done to me? Yesterday I had a man's soul in my hand. I set him in the way of life with his face to salvation. But when we took your money he turned back to drunkenness and derision. [With intense conviction] I will never forgive you that. If I had a child, and you destroyed its body with your explosives--if you murdered Dolly with your horrible guns--I could forgive you if my forgiveness would open the gates of heaven to you. But to take a human soul from me, and turn it into the soul of a wolf! that is worse than any murder. UNDERSHAFT. Does my daughter despair so easily? Can you strike a man to the heart and leave no mark on him? BARBARA [her face lighting up] Oh, you are right: he can never be lost now: where was my faith? CUSINS. Oh, clever clever devil! BARBARA. You may be a devil; but God speaks through you sometimes. [She takes her father's hands and kisses them]. You have given me back my happiness: I feel it deep down now, though my spirit is troubled. UNDERSHAFT. You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. BARBARA. Well, take me to the factory of death, and let me learn something more. There must be some truth or other behind all this frightful irony. Come, Dolly. [She goes out]. CUSINS. My guardian angel! [To Undershaft] Avaunt! [He follows Barbara]. STEPHEN [quietly, at the writing table] You must not mind Cusins, father. He is a very amiable good fellow; but he is a Greek scholar and naturally a little eccentric. UNDERSHAFT. Ah, quite so. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. [He goes out]. Stephen smiles patronizingly; buttons his coat responsibly; and crosses the room to the door. Lady Britomart, dressed for out-of-doors, opens it before he reaches it. She looks round far the others; looks at Stephen; and turns to go without a word. STEPHEN [embarrassed] Mother-- LADY BRITOMART. Don't be apologetic, Stephen. And don't forget that you have outgrown your mother. [She goes out]. Perivale St Andrews lies between two Middlesex hills, half climbing the northern one. It is an almost smokeless town of white walls, roofs of narrow green slates or red tiles, tall trees, domes, campaniles, and slender chimney shafts, beautifully situated and beautiful in itself. The best view of it is obtained from the crest of a slope about half a mile to the east, where the high explosives are dealt with. The foundry lies hidden in the depths between, the tops of its chimneys sprouting like huge skittles into the middle distance. Across the crest runs a platform of concrete, with a parapet which suggests a fortification, because there is a huge cannon of the obsolete Woolwich Infant pattern peering across it at the town. The cannon is mounted on an experimental gun carriage: possibly the original model of the Undershaft disappearing rampart gun alluded to by Stephen. The parapet has a high step inside which serves as a seat. Barbara is leaning over the parapet, looking towards the town. On her right is the cannon; on her left the end of a shed raised on piles, with a ladder of three or four steps up to the door, which opens outwards and has a little wooden landing at the threshold, with a fire bucket in the corner of the landing. The parapet stops short of the shed, leaving a gap which is the beginning of the path down the hill through the foundry to the town. Behind the cannon is a trolley carrying a huge conical bombshell, with a red band painted on it. Further from the parapet, on the same side, is a deck chair, near the door of an office, which, like the sheds, is of the lightest possible construction. Cusins arrives by the path from the town. BARBARA. Well? CUSINS. Not a ray of hope. Everything perfect, wonderful, real. It only needs a cathedral to be a heavenly city instead of a hellish one. BARBARA. Have you found out whether they have done anything for old Peter Shirley. CUSINS. They have found him a job as gatekeeper and timekeeper. He's frightfully miserable. He calls the timekeeping brainwork, and says he isn't used to it; and his gate lodge is so splendid that he's ashamed to use the rooms, and skulks in the scullery. BARBARA. Poor Peter! Stephen arrives from the town. He carries a fieldglass. STEPHEN [enthusiastically] Have you two seen the place? Why did you leave us? CUSINS. I wanted to see everything I was not intended to see; and Barbara wanted to make the men talk. STEPHEN. Have you found anything discreditable? CUSINS. No. They call him Dandy Andy and are proud of his being a cunning old rascal; but it's all horribly, frightfully, immorally, unanswerably perfect. Sarah arrives. SARAH. Heavens! what a place! [She crosses to the trolley]. Did you see the nursing home!? [She sits down on the shell]. STEPHEN. Did you see the libraries and schools!? SARAH. Did you see the ballroom and the banqueting chamber in the Town Hall!? STEPHEN. Have you gone into the insurance fund, the pension fund, the building society, the various applications of co-operation!? Undershaft comes from the office, with a sheaf of telegrams in his hands. UNDERSHAFT. Well, have you seen everything? I'm sorry I was called away. [Indicating the telegrams] News from Manchuria. STEPHEN. Good news, I hope. UNDERSHAFT. Very. STEPHEN. Another Japanese victory? UNDERSHAFT. Oh, I don't know. Which side wins does not concern us here. No: the good news is that the aerial battleship is a tremendous success. At the first trial it has wiped out a fort with three hundred soldiers in it. CUSINS [from the platform] Dummy soldiers? UNDERSHAFT. No: the real thing. [Cusins and Barbara exchange glances. Then Cusins sits on the step and buries his face in his hands. Barbara gravely lays her hand on his shoulder, and he looks up at her in a sort of whimsical desperation]. Well, Stephen, what do you think of the place? STEPHEN. Oh, magnificent. A perfect triumph of organization. Frankly, my dear father, I have been a fool: I had no idea of what it all meant--of the wonderful forethought, the power of organization, the administrative capacity, the financial genius, the colossal capital it represents. I have been repeating to myself as I came through your streets "Peace hath her victories no less renowned than War." I have only one misgiving about it all. UNDERSHAFT. Out with it. STEPHEN. Well, I cannot help thinking that all this provision for every want of your workmen may sap their independence and weaken their sense of responsibility. And greatly as we enjoyed our tea at that splendid restaurant--how they gave us all that luxury and cake and jam and cream for threepence I really cannot imagine!--still you must remember that restaurants break up home life. Look at the continent, for instance! Are you sure so much pampering is really good for the men's characters? UNDERSHAFT. Well you see, my dear boy, when you are organizing civilization you have to make up your mind whether trouble and anxiety are good things or not. If you decide that they are, then, I take it, you simply don't organize civilization; and there you are, with trouble and anxiety enough to make us all angels! But if you decide the other way, you may as well go through with it. However, Stephen, our characters are safe here. A sufficient dose of anxiety is always provided by the fact that we may be blown to smithereens at any moment. SARAH. By the way, papa, where do you make the explosives? UNDERSHAFT. In separate little sheds, like that one. When one of them blows up, it costs very little; and only the people quite close to it are killed. Stephen, who is quite close to it, looks at it rather scaredly, and moves away quickly to the cannon. At the same moment the door of the shed is thrown abruptly open; and a foreman in overalls and list slippers comes out on the little landing and holds the door open for Lomax, who appears in the doorway. LOMAX [with studied coolness] My good fellow: you needn't get into a state of nerves. Nothing's going to happen to you; and I suppose it wouldn't be the end of the world if anything did. A little bit of British pluck is what you want, old chap. [He descends and strolls across to Sarah]. UNDERSHAFT [to the foreman] Anything wrong, Bilton? BILTON [with ironic calm] Gentleman walked into the high explosives shed and lit a cigaret, sir: that's all. UNDERSHAFT. Ah, quite so. [To Lomax] Do you happen to remember what you did with the match? LOMAX. Oh come! I'm not a fool. I took jolly good care to blow it out before I chucked it away. BILTON. The top of it was red hot inside, sir. LOMAX. Well, suppose it was! I didn't chuck it into any of your messes. UNDERSHAFT. Think no more of it, Mr Lomax. By the way, would you mind lending me your matches? LOMAX [offering his box] Certainly. UNDERSHAFT. Thanks. [He pockets the matches]. LOMAX [lecturing to the company generally] You know, these high explosives don't go off like gunpowder, except when they're in a gun. When they're spread loose, you can put a match to them without the least risk: they just burn quietly like a bit of paper. [Warming to the scientific interest of the subject] Did you know that Undershaft? Have you ever tried? UNDERSHAFT. Not on a large scale, Mr Lomax. Bilton will give you a sample of gun cotton when you are leaving if you ask him. You can experiment with it at home. [Bilton looks puzzled]. SARAH. Bilton will do nothing of the sort, papa. I suppose it's your business to blow up the Russians and Japs; but you might really stop short of blowing up poor Cholly. [Bilton gives it up and retires into the shed]. LOMAX. My ownest, there is no danger. [He sits beside her on the shell]. Lady Britomart arrives from the town with a bouquet. LADY BRITOMART [coming impetuously between Undershaft and the deck chair] Andrew: you shouldn't have let me see this place. UNDERSHAFT. Why, my dear? LADY BRITOMART. Never mind why: you shouldn't have: that's all. To think of all that [indicating the town] being yours! and that you have kept it to yourself all these years! UNDERSHAFT. It does not belong to me. I belong to it. It is the Undershaft inheritance. LADY BRITOMART. It is not. Your ridiculous cannons and that noisy banging foundry may be the Undershaft inheritance; but all that plate and linen, all that furniture and those houses and orchards and gardens belong to us. They belong to me: they are not a man's business. I won't give them up. You must be out of your senses to throw them all away; and if you persist in such folly, I will call in a doctor. UNDERSHAFT [stooping to smell the bouquet] Where did you get the flowers, my dear? LADY BRITOMART. Your men presented them to me in your William Morris Labor Church. CUSINS [springing up] Oh! It needed only that. A Labor Church! LADY BRITOMART. Yes, with Morris's words in mosaic letters ten feet high round the dome. NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH TO BE ANOTHER MAN'S MASTER. The cynicism of it! UNDERSHAFT. It shocked the men at first, I am afraid. But now they take no more notice of it than of the ten commandments in church. LADY BRITOMART. Andrew: you are trying to put me off the subject of the inheritance by profane jokes. Well, you shan't. I don't ask it any longer for Stephen: he has inherited far too much of your perversity to be fit for it. But Barbara has rights as well as Stephen. Why should not Adolphus succeed to the inheritance? I could manage the town for him; and he can look after the cannons, if they are really necessary. UNDERSHAFT. I should ask nothing better if Adolphus were a foundling. He is exactly the sort of new blood that is wanted in English business. But he's not a foundling; and there's an end of it. CUSINS [diplomatically] Not quite. [They all turn and stare at him. He comes from the platform past the shed to Undershaft]. I think--Mind! I am not committing myself in any way as to my future course--but I think the foundling difficulty can be got over. UNDERSHAFT. What do you mean? CUSINS. Well, I have something to say which is in the nature of a confession. SARAH. } LADY BRITOMART. } Confession! BARBARA. } STEPHEN. } LOMAX. Oh I say! CUSINS. Yes, a confession. Listen, all. Until I met Barbara I thought myself in the main an honorable, truthful man, because I wanted the approval of my conscience more than I wanted anything else. But the moment I saw Barbara, I wanted her far more than the approval of my conscience. LADY BRITOMART. Adolphus! CUSINS. It is true. You accused me yourself, Lady Brit, of joining the Army to worship Barbara; and so I did. She bought my soul like a flower at a street corner; but she bought it for herself. UNDERSHAFT. What! Not for Dionysos or another? CUSINS. Dionysos and all the others are in herself. I adored what was divine in her, and was therefore a true worshipper. But I was romantic about her too. I thought she was a woman of the people, and that a marriage with a professor of Greek would be far beyond the wildest social ambitions of her rank. LADY BRITOMART. Adolphus!! LOMAX. Oh I say!!! CUSINS. When I learnt the horrible truth-- LADY BRITOMART. What do you mean by the horrible truth, pray? CUSINS. That she was enormously rich; that her grandfather was an earl; that her father was the Prince of Darkness-- UNDERSHAFT. Chut! CUSINS.--and that I was only an adventurer trying to catch a rich wife, then I stooped to deceive about my birth. LADY BRITOMART. Your birth! Now Adolphus, don't dare to make up a wicked story for the sake of these wretched cannons. Remember: I have seen photographs of your parents; and the Agent General for South Western Australia knows them personally and has assured me that they are most respectable married people. CUSINS. So they are in Australia; but here they are outcasts. Their marriage is legal in Australia, but not in England. My mother is my father's deceased wife's sister; and in this island I am consequently a foundling. [Sensation]. Is the subterfuge good enough, Machiavelli? UNDERSHAFT [thoughtfully] Biddy: this may be a way out of the difficulty. LADY BRITOMART. Stuff! A man can't make cannons any the better for being his own cousin instead of his proper self [she sits down in the deck chair with a bounce that expresses her downright contempt for their casuistry.] UNDERSHAFT [to Cusins] You are an educated man. That is against the tradition. CUSINS. Once in ten thousand times it happens that the schoolboy is a born master of what they try to teach him. Greek has not destroyed my mind: it has nourished it. Besides, I did not learn it at an English public school. UNDERSHAFT. Hm! Well, I cannot afford to be too particular: you have cornered the foundling market. Let it pass. You are eligible, Euripides: you are eligible. BARBARA [coming from the platform and interposing between Cusins and Undershaft] Dolly: yesterday morning, when Stephen told us all about the tradition, you became very silent; and you have been strange and excited ever since. Were you thinking of your birth then? CUSINS. When the finger of Destiny suddenly points at a man in the middle of his breakfast, it makes him thoughtful. [Barbara turns away sadly and stands near her mother, listening perturbedly]. UNDERSHAFT. Aha! You have had your eye on the business, my young friend, have you? CUSINS. Take care! There is an abyss of moral horror between me and your accursed aerial battleships. UNDERSHAFT. Never mind the abyss for the present. Let us settle the practical details and leave your final decision open. You know that you will have to change your name. Do you object to that? CUSINS. Would any man named Adolphus--any man called Dolly!--object to be called something else? UNDERSHAFT. Good. Now, as to money! I propose to treat you handsomely from the beginning. You shall start at a thousand a year. CUSINS. [with sudden heat, his spectacles twinkling with mischief] A thousand! You dare offer a miserable thousand to the son-in-law of a millionaire! No, by Heavens, Machiavelli! you shall not cheat me. You cannot do without me; and I can do without you. I must have two thousand five hundred a year for two years. At the end of that time, if I am a failure, I go. But if I am a success, and stay on, you must give me the other five thousand. UNDERSHAFT. What other five thousand? CUSINS. To make the two years up to five thousand a year. The two thousand five hundred is only half pay in case I should turn out a failure. The third year I must have ten per cent on the profits. UNDERSHAFT [taken aback] Ten per cent! Why, man, do you know what my profits are? CUSINS. Enormous, I hope: otherwise I shall require twenty-five per cent. UNDERSHAFT. But, Mr Cusins, this is a serious matter of business. You are not bringing any capital into the concern. CUSINS. What! no capital! Is my mastery of Greek no capital? Is my access to the subtlest thought, the loftiest poetry yet attained by humanity, no capital? my character! my intellect! my life! my career! what Barbara calls my soul! are these no capital? Say another word; and I double my salary. UNDERSHAFT. Be reasonable-- CUSINS [peremptorily] Mr Undershaft: you have my terms. Take them or leave them. UNDERSHAFT [recovering himself] Very well. I note your terms; and I offer you half. CUSINS [disgusted] Half! UNDERSHAFT [firmly] Half. CUSINS. You call yourself a gentleman; and you offer me half!! UNDERSHAFT. I do not call myself a gentleman; but I offer you half. CUSINS. This to your future partner! your successor! your son-in-law! BARBARA. You are selling your own soul, Dolly, not mine. Leave me out of the bargain, please. UNDERSHAFT. Come! I will go a step further for Barbara's sake. I will give you three fifths; but that is my last word. CUSINS. Done! LOMAX. Done in the eye. Why, _I_ only get eight hundred, you know. CUSINS. By the way, Mac, I am a classical scholar, not an arithmetical one. Is three fifths more than half or less? UNDERSHAFT. More, of course. CUSINS. I would have taken two hundred and fifty. How you can succeed in business when you are willing to pay all that money to a University don who is obviously not worth a junior clerk's wages!--well! What will Lazarus say? UNDERSHAFT. Lazarus is a gentle romantic Jew who cares for nothing but string quartets and stalls at fashionable theatres. He will get the credit of your rapacity in money matters, as he has hitherto had the credit of mine. You are a shark of the first order, Euripides. So much the better for the firm! BARBARA. Is the bargain closed, Dolly? Does your soul belong to him now? CUSINS. No: the price is settled: that is all. The real tug of war is still to come. What about the moral question? LADY BRITOMART. There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals. UNDERSHAFT [determinedly] No: none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don't come in here. CUSINS. What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer? UNDERSHAFT. To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes. The first Undershaft wrote up in his shop IF GOD GAVE THE HAND, LET NOT MAN WITHHOLD THE SWORD. The second wrote up ALL HAVE THE RIGHT TO FIGHT: NONE HAVE THE RIGHT TO JUDGE. The third wrote up TO MAN THE WEAPON: TO HEAVEN THE VICTORY. The fourth had no literary turn; so he did not write up anything; but he sold cannons to Napoleon under the nose of George the Third. The fifth wrote up PEACE SHALL NOT PREVAIL SAVE WITH A SWORD IN HER HAND. The sixth, my master, was the best of all. He wrote up NOTHING IS EVER DONE IN THIS WORLD UNTIL MEN ARE PREPARED TO KILL ONE ANOTHER IF IT IS NOT DONE. After that, there was nothing left for the seventh to say. So he wrote up, simply, UNASHAMED. CUSINS. My good Machiavelli, I shall certainly write something up on the wall; only, as I shall write it in Greek, you won't be able to read it. But as to your Armorer's faith, if I take my neck out of the noose of my own morality I am not going to put it into the noose of yours. I shall sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to whom I please. So there! UNDERSHAFT. From the moment when you become Andrew Undershaft, you will never do as you please again. Don't come here lusting for power, young man. CUSINS. If power were my aim I should not come here for it. YOU have no power. UNDERSHAFT. None of my own, certainly. CUSINS. I have more power than you, more will. You do not drive this place: it drives you. And what drives the place? UNDERSHAFT [enigmatically] A will of which I am a part. BARBARA [startled] Father! Do you know what you are saying; or are you laying a snare for my soul? CUSINS. Don't listen to his metaphysics, Barbara. The place is driven by the most rascally part of society, the money hunters, the pleasure hunters, the military promotion hunters; and he is their slave. UNDERSHAFT. Not necessarily. Remember the Armorer's Faith. I will take an order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the rascals, don't blame me. I can make cannons: I cannot make courage and conviction. Bah! You tire me, Euripides, with your morality mongering. Ask Barbara: SHE understands. [He suddenly takes Barbara's hands, and looks powerfully into her eyes]. Tell him, my love, what power really means. BARBARA [hypnotized] Before I joined the Salvation Army, I was in my own power; and the consequence was that I never knew what to do with myself. When I joined it, I had not time enough for all the things I had to do. UNDERSHAFT [approvingly] Just so. And why was that, do you suppose? BARBARA. Yesterday I should have said, because I was in the power of God. [She resumes her self-possession, withdrawing her hands from his with a power equal to his own]. But you came and showed me that I was in the power of Bodger and Undershaft. Today I feel--oh! how can I put it into words? Sarah: do you remember the earthquake at Cannes, when we were little children?--how little the surprise of the first shock mattered compared to the dread and horror of waiting for the second? That is how I feel in this place today. I stood on the rock I thought eternal; and without a word of warning it reeled and crumbled under me. I was safe with an infinite wisdom watching me, an army marching to Salvation with me; and in a moment, at a stroke of your pen in a cheque book, I stood alone; and the heavens were empty. That was the first shock of the earthquake: I am waiting for the second. UNDERSHAFT. Come, come, my daughter! Don't make too much of your little tinpot tragedy. What do we do here when we spend years of work and thought and thousands of pounds of solid cash on a new gun or an aerial battleship that turns out just a hairsbreadth wrong after all? Scrap it. Scrap it without wasting another hour or another pound on it. Well, you have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won't scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. What's the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year. Don't persist in that folly. If your old religion broke down yesterday, get a newer and a better one for tomorrow. BARBARA. Oh how gladly I would take a better one to my soul! But you offer me a worse one. [Turning on him with sudden vehemence]. Justify yourself: show me some light through the darkness of this dreadful place, with its beautifully clean workshops, and respectable workmen, and model homes. UNDERSHAFT. Cleanliness and respectability do not need justification, Barbara: they justify themselves. I see no darkness here, no dreadfulness. In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage. BARBARA. And their souls? UNDERSHAFT. I save their souls just as I saved yours. BARBARA [revolted] You saved my soul! What do you mean? UNDERSHAFT. I fed you and clothed you and housed you. I took care that you should have money enough to live handsomely--more than enough; so that you could be wasteful, careless, generous. That saved your soul from the seven deadly sins. BARBARA [bewildered] The seven deadly sins! UNDERSHAFT. Yes, the deadly seven. [Counting on his fingers] Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. I lifted them from your spirit. I enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara; and I saved her from the crime of poverty. CUSINS. Do you call poverty a crime? UNDERSHAFT. The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty. Pah! [turning on Barbara] you talk of your half-saved ruffian in West Ham: you accuse me of dragging his soul back to perdition. Well, bring him to me here; and I will drag his soul back again to salvation for you. Not by words and dreams; but by thirty-eight shillings a week, a sound house in a handsome street, and a permanent job. In three weeks he will have a fancy waistcoat; in three months a tall hat and a chapel sitting; before the end of the year he will shake hands with a duchess at a Primrose League meeting, and join the Conservative Party. BARBARA. And will he be the better for that? UNDERSHAFT. You know he will. Don't be a hypocrite, Barbara. He will be better fed, better housed, better clothed, better behaved; and his children will be pounds heavier and bigger. That will be better than an American cloth mattress in a shelter, chopping firewood, eating bread and treacle, and being forced to kneel down from time to time to thank heaven for it: knee drill, I think you call it. It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Mahometanism on the same terms. Try your hand on my men: their souls are hungry because their bodies are full. BARBARA. And leave the east end to starve? UNDERSHAFT [his energetic tone dropping into one of bitter and brooding remembrance] I was an east ender. I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a fullfed free man at all costs--that nothing should stop me except a bullet, neither reason nor morals nor the lives of other men. I said "Thou shalt starve ere I starve"; and with that word I became free and great. I was a dangerous man until I had my will: now I am a useful, beneficent, kindly person. That is the history of most self-made millionaires, I fancy. When it is the history of every Englishman we shall have an England worth living in. LADY BRITOMART. Stop making speeches, Andrew. This is not the place for them. UNDERSHAFT [punctured] My dear: I have no other means of conveying my ideas. LADY BRITOMART. Your ideas are nonsense. You got oil because you were selfish and unscrupulous. UNDERSHAFT. Not at all. I had the strongest scruples about poverty and starvation. Your moralists are quite unscrupulous about both: they make virtues of them. I had rather be a thief than a pauper. I had rather be a murderer than a slave. I don't want to be either; but if you force the alternative on me, then, by Heaven, I'll choose the braver and more moral one. I hate poverty and slavery worse than any other crimes whatsoever. And let me tell you this. Poverty and slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading articles: they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't preach at them: don't reason with them. Kill them. BARBARA. Killing. Is that your remedy for everything? UNDERSHAFT. It is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system, the only way of saying Must. Let six hundred and seventy fools loose in the street; and three policemen can scatter them. But huddle them together in a certain house in Westminster; and let them go through certain ceremonies and call themselves certain names until at last they get the courage to kill; and your six hundred and seventy fools become a government. Your pious mob fills up ballot papers and imagines it is governing its masters; but the ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it. CUSINS. That is perhaps why, like most intelligent people, I never vote. UNDERSHAFT Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new. Is that historically true, Mr Learned Man, or is it not? CUSINS. It is historically true. I loathe having to admit it. I repudiate your sentiments. I abhor your nature. I defy you in every possible way. Still, it is true. But it ought not to be true. UNDERSHAFT. Ought, ought, ought, ought, ought! Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists? Turn your oughts into shalls, man. Come and make explosives with me. Whatever can blow men up can blow society up. The history of the world is the history of those who had courage enough to embrace this truth. Have you the courage to embrace it, Barbara? LADY BRITOMART. Barbara, I positively forbid you to listen to your father's abominable wickedness. And you, Adolphus, ought to know better than to go about saying that wrong things are true. What does it matter whether they are true if they are wrong? UNDERSHAFT. What does it matter whether they are wrong if they are true? LADY BRITOMART [rising] Children: come home instantly. Andrew: I am exceedingly sorry I allowed you to call on us. You are wickeder than ever. Come at once. BARBARA [shaking her head] It's no use running away from wicked people, mamma. LADY BRITOMART. It is every use. It shows your disapprobation of them. BARBARA. It does not save them. LADY BRITOMART. I can see that you are going to disobey me. Sarah: are you coming home or are you not? SARAH. I daresay it's very wicked of papa to make cannons; but I don't think I shall cut him on that account. LOMAX [pouring oil on the troubled waters] The fact is, you know, there is a certain amount of tosh about this notion of wickedness. It doesn't work. You must look at facts. Not that I would say a word in favor of anything wrong; but then, you see, all sorts of chaps are always doing all sorts of things; and we have to fit them in somehow, don't you know. What I mean is that you can't go cutting everybody; and that's about what it comes to. [Their rapt attention to his eloquence makes him nervous] Perhaps I don't make myself clear. LADY BRITOMART. You are lucidity itself, Charles. Because Andrew is successful and has plenty of money to give to Sarah, you will flatter him and encourage him in his wickedness. LOMAX [unruffled] Well, where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered, don't you know. [To Undershaft] Eh? What? UNDERSHAFT. Precisely. By the way, may I call you Charles? LOMAX. Delighted. Cholly is the usual ticket. UNDERSHAFT [to Lady Britomart] Biddy-- LADY BRITOMART [violently] Don't dare call me Biddy. Charles Lomax: you are a fool. Adolphus Cusins: you are a Jesuit. Stephen: you are a prig. Barbara: you are a lunatic. Andrew: you are a vulgar tradesman. Now you all know my opinion; and my conscience is clear, at all events [she sits down again with a vehemence that almost wrecks the chair]. UNDERSHAFT. My dear, you are the incarnation of morality. [She snorts]. Your conscience is clear and your duty done when you have called everybody names. Come, Euripides! it is getting late; and we all want to get home. Make up your mind. CUSINS. Understand this, you old demon-- LADY BRITOMART. Adolphus! UNDERSHAFT. Let him alone, Biddy. Proceed, Euripides. CUSINS. You have me in a horrible dilemma. I want Barbara. UNDERSHAFT. Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another. BARBARA. Quite true, Dolly. CUSINS. I also want to avoid being a rascal. UNDERSHAFT [with biting contempt] You lust for personal righteousness, for self-approval, for what you call a good conscience, for what Barbara calls salvation, for what I call patronizing people who are not so lucky as yourself. CUSINS. I do not: all the poet in me recoils from being a good man. But there are things in me that I must reckon with: pity-- UNDERSHAFT. Pity! The scavenger of misery. CUSINS. Well, love. UNDERSHAFT. I know. You love the needy and the outcast: you love the oppressed races, the negro, the Indian ryot, the Pole, the Irishman. Do you love the Japanese? Do you love the Germans? Do you love the English? CUSINS. No. Every true Englishman detests the English. We are the wickedest nation on earth; and our success is a moral horror. UNDERSHAFT. That is what comes of your gospel of love, is it? CUSINS. May I not love even my father-in-law? UNDERSHAFT. Who wants your love, man? By what right do you take the liberty of offering it to me? I will have your due heed and respect, or I will kill you. But your love! Damn your impertinence! CUSINS [grinning] I may not be able to control my affections, Mac. UNDERSHAFT. You are fencing, Euripides. You are weakening: your grip is slipping. Come! try your last weapon. Pity and love have broken in your hand: forgiveness is still left. CUSINS. No: forgiveness is a beggar's refuge. I am with you there: we must pay our debts. UNDERSHAFT. Well said. Come! you will suit me. Remember the words of Plato. CUSINS [starting] Plato! You dare quote Plato to me! UNDERSHAFT. Plato says, my friend, that society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek. CUSINS. Oh, tempter, cunning tempter! UNDERSHAFT. Come! choose, man, choose. CUSINS. But perhaps Barbara will not marry me if I make the wrong choice. BARBARA. Perhaps not. CUSINS [desperately perplexed] You hear-- BARBARA. Father: do you love nobody? UNDERSHAFT. I love my best friend. LADY BRITOMART. And who is that, pray? UNDERSHAFT. My bravest enemy. That is the man who keeps me up to the mark. CUSINS. You know, the creature is really a sort of poet in his way. Suppose he is a great man, after all! UNDERSHAFT. Suppose you stop talking and make up your mind, my young friend. CUSINS. But you are driving me against my nature. I hate war. UNDERSHAFT. Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated. Dare you make war on war? Here are the means: my friend Mr Lomax is sitting on them. LOMAX [springing up] Oh I say! You don't mean that this thing is loaded, do you? My ownest: come off it. SARAH [sitting placidly on the shell] If I am to be blown up, the more thoroughly it is done the better. Don't fuss, Cholly. LOMAX [to Undershaft, strongly remonstrant] Your own daughter, you know. UNDERSHAFT. So I see. [To Cusins] Well, my friend, may we expect you here at six tomorrow morning? CUSINS [firmly] Not on any account. I will see the whole establishment blown up with its own dynamite before I will get up at five. My hours are healthy, rational hours eleven to five. UNDERSHAFT. Come when you please: before a week you will come at six and stay until I turn you out for the sake of your health. [Calling] Bilton! [He turns to Lady Britomart, who rises]. My dear: let us leave these two young people to themselves for a moment. [Bilton comes from the shed]. I am going to take you through the gun cotton shed. BILTON [barring the way] You can't take anything explosive in here, Sir. LADY BRITOMART. What do you mean? Are you alluding to me? BILTON [unmoved] No, ma'am. Mr Undershaft has the other gentleman's matches in his pocket. LADY BRITOMART [abruptly] Oh! I beg your pardon. [She goes into the shed]. UNDERSHAFT. Quite right, Bilton, quite right: here you are. [He gives Bilton the box of matches]. Come, Stephen. Come, Charles. Bring Sarah. [He passes into the shed]. Bilton opens the box and deliberately drops the matches into the fire-bucket. LOMAX. Oh I say! [Bilton stolidly hands him the empty box]. Infernal nonsense! Pure scientific ignorance! [He goes in]. SARAH. Am I all right, Bilton? BILTON. You'll have to put on list slippers, miss: that's all. We've got em inside. [She goes in]. STEPHEN [very seriously to Cusins] Dolly, old fellow, think. Think before you decide. Do you feel that you are a sufficiently practical man? It is a huge undertaking, an enormous responsibility. All this mass of business will be Greek to you. CUSINS. Oh, I think it will be much less difficult than Greek. STEPHEN. Well, I just want to say this before I leave you to yourselves. Don't let anything I have said about right and wrong prejudice you against this great chance in life. I have satisfied myself that the business is one of the highest character and a credit to our country. [Emotionally] I am very proud of my father. I-- [Unable to proceed, he presses Cusins' hand and goes hastily into the shed, followed by Bilton]. Barbara and Cusins, left alone together, look at one another silently. CUSINS. Barbara: I am going to accept this offer. BARBARA. I thought you would. CUSINS. You understand, don't you, that I had to decide without consulting you. If I had thrown the burden of the choice on you, you would sooner or later have despised me for it. BARBARA. Yes: I did not want you to sell your soul for me any more than for this inheritance. CUSINS. It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. I have sold it to escape being imprisoned for refusing to pay taxes for hangmen's ropes and unjust wars and things that I abhor. What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles? What I am now selling it for is neither money nor position nor comfort, but for reality and for power. BARBARA. You know that you will have no power, and that he has none. CUSINS. I know. It is not for myself alone. I want to make power for the world. BARBARA. I want to make power for the world too; but it must be spiritual power. CUSINS. I think all power is spiritual: these cannons will not go off by themselves. I have tried to make spiritual power by teaching Greek. But the world can never be really touched by a dead language and a dead civilization. The people must have power; and the people cannot have Greek. Now the power that is made here can be wielded by all men. BARBARA. Power to burn women's houses down and kill their sons and tear their husbands to pieces. CUSINS. You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes. This power which only tears men's bodies to pieces has never been so horribly abused as the intellectual power, the imaginative power, the poetic, religious power that can enslave men's souls. As a teacher of Greek I gave the intellectual man weapons against the common man. I now want to give the common man weapons against the intellectual man. I love the common people. I want to arm them against the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist, and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous, and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals, and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish. BARBARA. Is there no higher power than that [pointing to the shell]? CUSINS. Yes: but that power can destroy the higher powers just as a tiger can destroy a man: therefore man must master that power first. I admitted this when the Turks and Greeks were last at war. My best pupil went out to fight for Hellas. My parting gift to him was not a copy of Plato's Republic, but a revolver and a hundred Undershaft cartridges. The blood of every Turk he shot--if he shot any--is on my head as well as on Undershaft's. That act committed me to this place for ever. Your father's challenge has beaten me. Dare I make war on war? I dare. I must. I will. And now, is it all over between us? BARBARA [touched by his evident dread of her answer] Silly baby Dolly! How could it be? CUSINS [overjoyed] Then you--you--you-- Oh for my drum! [He flourishes imaginary drumsticks]. BARBARA [angered by his levity] Take care, Dolly, take care. Oh, if only I could get away from you and from father and from it all! if I could have the wings of a dove and fly away to heaven! CUSINS. And leave me! BARBARA. Yes, you, and all the other naughty mischievous children of men. But I can't. I was happy in the Salvation Army for a moment. I escaped from the world into a paradise of enthusiasm and prayer and soul saving; but the moment our money ran short, it all came back to Bodger: it was he who saved our people: he, and the Prince of Darkness, my papa. Undershaft and Bodger: their hands stretch everywhere: when we feed a starving fellow creature, it is with their bread, because there is no other bread; when we tend the sick, it is in the hospitals they endow; if we turn from the churches they build, we must kneel on the stones of the streets they pave. As long as that lasts, there is no getting away from them. Turning our backs on Bodger and Undershaft is turning our backs on life. CUSINS. I thought you were determined to turn your back on the wicked side of life. BARBARA. There is no wicked side: life is all one. And I never wanted to shirk my share in whatever evil must be endured, whether it be sin or suffering. I wish I could cure you of middle-class ideas, Dolly. CUSINS [gasping] Middle cl--! A snub! A social snub to ME! from the daughter of a foundling! BARBARA. That is why I have no class, Dolly: I come straight out of the heart of the whole people. If I were middle-class I should turn my back on my father's business; and we should both live in an artistic drawingroom, with you reading the reviews in one corner, and I in the other at the piano, playing Schumann: both very superior persons, and neither of us a bit of use. Sooner than that, I would sweep out the guncotton shed, or be one of Bodger's barmaids. Do you know what would have happened if you had refused papa's offer? CUSINS. I wonder! BARBARA. I should have given you up and married the man who accepted it. After all, my dear old mother has more sense than any of you. I felt like her when I saw this place--felt that I must have it--that never, never, never could I let it go; only she thought it was the houses and the kitchen ranges and the linen and china, when it was really all the human souls to be saved: not weak souls in starved bodies, crying with gratitude or a scrap of bread and treacle, but fullfed, quarrelsome, snobbish, uppish creatures, all standing on their little rights and dignities, and thinking that my father ought to be greatly obliged to them for making so much money for him--and so he ought. That is where salvation is really wanted. My father shall never throw it in my teeth again that my converts were bribed with bread. [She is transfigured]. I have got rid of the bribe of bread. I have got rid of the bribe of heaven. Let God's work be done for its own sake: the work he had to create us to do because it cannot be done by living men and women. When I die, let him be in my debt, not I in his; and let me forgive him as becomes a woman of my rank. CUSINS. Then the way of life lies through the factory of death? BARBARA. Yes, through the raising of hell to heaven and of man to God, through the unveiling of an eternal light in the Valley of The Shadow. [Seizing him with both hands] Oh, did you think my courage would never come back? did you believe that I was a deserter? that I, who have stood in the streets, and taken my people to my heart, and talked of the holiest and greatest things with them, could ever turn back and chatter foolishly to fashionable people about nothing in a drawingroom? Never, never, never, never: Major Barbara will die with the colors. Oh! and I have my dear little Dolly boy still; and he has found me my place and my work. Glory Hallelujah! [She kisses him]. CUSINS. My dearest: consider my delicate health. I cannot stand as much happiness as you can. BARBARA. Yes: it is not easy work being in love with me, is it? But it's good for you. [She runs to the shed, and calls, childlike] Mamma! Mamma! [Bilton comes out of the shed, followed by Undershaft]. I want Mamma. UNDERSHAFT. She is taking off her list slippers, dear. [He passes on to Cusins]. Well? What does she say? CUSINS. She has gone right up into the skies. LADY BRITOMART [coming from the shed and stopping on the steps, obstructing Sarah, who follows with Lomax. Barbara clutches like a baby at her mother's skirt]. Barbara: when will you learn to be independent and to act and think for yourself? I know as well as possible what that cry of "Mamma, Mamma," means. Always running to me! SARAH [touching Lady Britomart's ribs with her finger tips and imitating a bicycle horn] Pip! Pip! LADY BRITOMART [highly indignant] How dare you say Pip! pip! to me, Sarah? You are both very naughty children. What do you want, Barbara? BARBARA. I want a house in the village to live in with Dolly. [Dragging at the skirt] Come and tell me which one to take. UNDERSHAFT [to Cusins] Six o'clock tomorrow morning, my young friend. 
20717	----	THE GIRL ON THE BOAT BY P. G. WODEHOUSE HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED 3 YORK STREET LONDON S.W.1 [Illustration: A HERBERT JENKINS BOOK] _Tenth printing, completing 95,781 copies_ Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London WHAT THIS STORY IS ABOUT It was Sam Marlowe's fate to fall in love with a girl on the R.M.S. "Atlantic" (New York to Southampton) who had ideals. She was looking for a man just like Sir Galahad, and refused to be put off with any inferior substitute. A lucky accident on the first day of the voyage placed Sam for the moment in the Galahad class, but he could not stay the pace. He follows Billie Bennett "around," scheming, blundering and hoping, so does the parrot faced young man Bream Mortimer, Sam's rival. There is a somewhat hectic series of events at Windles, a country house in Hampshire, where Billie's ideals still block the way and Sam comes on in spite of everything. Then comes the moment when Billie.... It is a Wodehouse novel in every sense of the term. ONE MOMENT! Before my friend Mr. Jenkins--wait a minute, Herbert--before my friend Mr. Jenkins formally throws this book open to the public, I should like to say a few words. You, sir, and you, and you at the back, if you will kindly restrain your impatience.... There is no need to jostle. There will be copies for all. Thank you. I shall not detain you long. I wish to clear myself of a possible charge of plagiarism. You smile. Ah! but you don't know. You don't realise how careful even a splendid fellow like myself has to be. You wouldn't have me go down to posterity as Pelham the Pincher, would you? No! Very well, then. By the time this volume is in the hands of the customers, everybody will, of course, have read Mr. J. Storer Clouston's "The Lunatic at Large Again." (Those who are chumps enough to miss it deserve no consideration.) Well, both the hero of "The Lunatic" and my "Sam Marlowe" try to get out of a tight corner by hiding in a suit of armour in the hall of a country-house. Looks fishy, yes? And yet I call on Heaven to witness that I am innocent, innocent. And, if the word of Northumberland Avenue Wodehouse is not sufficient, let me point out that this story and Mr. Clouston's appeared simultaneously in serial form in their respective magazines. This proves, I think, that at these cross-roads, at any rate, there has been no dirty work. All right, Herb., you can let 'em in now. P. G. WODEHOUSE. Constitutional Club, Northumberland Avenue. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. A DISTURBING MORNING 11 II. GALLANT RESCUE BY WELL-DRESSED YOUNG MAN 27 III. SAM PAVES THE WAY 56 IV. SAM CLICKS 69 V. PERSECUTION OF EUSTACE 95 VI. SCENE AT A SHIP'S CONCERT 104 VII. SUNDERED HEARTS 111 VIII. SIR MALLABY OFFERS A SUGGESTION 126 IX. ROUGH WORK AT A DINNER TABLE 144 X. TROUBLE AT WINDLES 159 XI. MR. BENNETT HAS A BAD NIGHT 180 XII. THE LURID PAST OF JOHN PETERS 193 XIII. SHOCKS ALL ROUND 207 XIV. STRONG REMARKS BY A FATHER 217 XV. DRAMA AT A COUNTRY HOUSE 227 XVI. WEBSTER, FRIEND IN NEED 242 XVII. A CROWDED NIGHT 257 THE GIRL ON THE BOAT CHAPTER I A DISTURBING MORNING Through the curtained windows of the furnished flat which Mrs. Horace Hignett had rented for her stay in New York, rays of golden sunlight peeped in like the foremost spies of some advancing army. It was a fine summer morning. The hands of the Dutch clock in the hall pointed to thirteen minutes past nine; those of the ormolu clock in the sitting-room to eleven minutes past ten; those of the carriage clock on the bookshelf to fourteen minutes to six. In other words, it was exactly eight; and Mrs. Hignett acknowledged the fact by moving her head on the pillow, opening her eyes, and sitting up in bed. She always woke at eight precisely. Was this Mrs. Hignett _the_ Mrs. Hignett, the world-famous writer on Theosophy, the author of "The Spreading Light," "What of the Morrow," and all the rest of that well-known series? I'm glad you asked me. Yes, she was. She had come over to America on a lecturing tour. About this time there was a good deal of suffering in the United States, for nearly every boat that arrived from England was bringing a fresh swarm of British lecturers to the country. Novelists, poets, scientists, philosophers, and plain, ordinary bores; some herd instinct seemed to affect them all simultaneously. It was like one of those great race movements of the Middle Ages. Men and women of widely differing views on religion, art, politics, and almost every other subject; on this one point the intellectuals of Great Britain were single-minded, that there was easy money to be picked up on the lecture-platforms of America, and that they might just as well grab it as the next person. Mrs. Hignett had come over with the first batch of immigrants; for, spiritual as her writings were, there was a solid streak of business sense in this woman, and she meant to get hers while the getting was good. She was half way across the Atlantic with a complete itinerary booked, before ninety per cent. of the poets and philosophers had finished sorting out their clean collars and getting their photographs taken for the passport. She had not left England without a pang, for departure had involved sacrifices. More than anything else in the world she loved her charming home, Windles, in the county of Hampshire, for so many years the seat of the Hignett family. Windles was as the breath of life to her. Its shady walks, its silver lake, its noble elms, the old grey stone of its walls--these were bound up with her very being. She felt that she belonged to Windles, and Windles to her. Unfortunately, as a matter of cold, legal accuracy, it did not. She did but hold it in trust for her son, Eustace, until such time as he should marry and take possession of it himself. There were times when the thought of Eustace marrying and bringing a strange woman to Windles chilled Mrs. Hignett to her very marrow. Happily, her firm policy of keeping her son permanently under her eye at home and never permitting him to have speech with a female below the age of fifty, had averted the peril up till now. Eustace had accompanied his mother to America. It was his faint snores which she could hear in the adjoining room as, having bathed and dressed, she went down the hall to where breakfast awaited her. She smiled tolerantly. She had never desired to convert her son to her own early-rising habits, for, apart from not allowing him to call his soul his own, she was an indulgent mother. Eustace would get up at half-past nine, long after she had finished breakfast, read her correspondence, and started her duties for the day. Breakfast was on the table in the sitting-room, a modest meal of rolls, porridge, and imitation coffee. Beside the pot containing this hell-brew, was a little pile of letters. Mrs. Hignett opened them as she ate. The majority were from disciples and dealt with matters of purely theosophical interest. There was an invitation from the Butterfly Club, asking her to be the guest of honour at their weekly dinner. There was a letter from her brother Mallaby--Sir Mallaby Marlowe, the eminent London lawyer--saying that his son Sam, of whom she had never approved, would be in New York shortly, passing through on his way back to England, and hoping that she would see something of him. Altogether a dull mail. Mrs. Hignett skimmed through it without interest, setting aside one or two of the letters for Eustace, who acted as her unpaid secretary, to answer later in the day. She had just risen from the table, when there was a sound of voices in the hall, and presently the domestic staff, a gaunt Irish lady of advanced years, entered the room. "Ma'am, there was a gentleman." Mrs. Hignett was annoyed. Her mornings were sacred. "Didn't you tell him I was not to be disturbed?" "I did not. I loosed him into the parlour." The staff remained for a moment in melancholy silence, then resumed. "He says he's your nephew. His name's Marlowe." Mrs. Hignett experienced no diminution of her annoyance. She had not seen her nephew Sam for ten years, and would have been willing to extend the period. She remembered him as an untidy small boy who once or twice, during his school holidays, had disturbed the cloistral peace of Windles with his beastly presence. However, blood being thicker than water, and all that sort of thing, she supposed she would have to give him five minutes. She went into the sitting-room, and found there a young man who looked more or less like all other young men, though perhaps rather fitter than most. He had grown a good deal since she had last met him, as men so often do between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and was now about six feet in height, about forty inches round the chest, and in weight about thirteen stone. He had a brown and amiable face, marred at the moment by an expression of discomfort somewhat akin to that of a cat in a strange alley. "Hullo, Aunt Adeline!" he said awkwardly. "Well, Samuel!" said Mrs. Hignett. There was a pause. Mrs. Hignett, who was not fond of young men and disliked having her mornings broken into, was thinking that he had not improved in the slightest degree since their last meeting; and Sam, who imagined that he had long since grown to man's estate and put off childish things, was embarrassed to discover that his aunt still affected him as of old. That is to say, she made him feel as if he had omitted to shave and, in addition to that, had swallowed some drug which had caused him to swell unpleasantly, particularly about the hands and feet. "Jolly morning," said Sam, perseveringly. "So I imagine. I have not yet been out." "Thought I'd look in and see how you were." "That was very kind of you. The morning is my busy time, but ... yes, that was very kind of you!" There was another pause. "How do you like America?" said Sam. "I dislike it exceedingly." "Yes? Well, of course, some people do. Prohibition and all that. Personally, it doesn't affect me. I can take it or leave it alone. I like America myself," said Sam. "I've had a wonderful time. Everybody's treated me like a rich uncle. I've been in Detroit, you know, and they practically gave me the city and asked me if I'd like another to take home in my pocket. Never saw anything like it. I might have been the missing heir! I think America's the greatest invention on record." "And what brought you to America?" said Mrs. Hignett, unmoved by this rhapsody. "Oh, I came over to play golf. In a tournament, you know." "Surely at your age," said Mrs. Hignett, disapprovingly, "you could be better occupied. Do you spend your whole time playing golf?" "Oh, no! I play cricket a bit and shoot a bit and I swim a good lot and I still play football occasionally." "I wonder your father does not insist on your doing some useful work." "He is beginning to harp on the subject rather. I suppose I shall take a stab at it sooner or later. Father says I ought to get married, too." "He is perfectly right." "I suppose old Eustace will be getting hitched up one of these days?" said Sam. Mrs. Hignett started violently. "Why do you say that?" "Eh?" "What makes you say that?" "Oh, well, he's a romantic sort of fellow. Writes poetry, and all that." "There is no likelihood at all of Eustace marrying. He is of a shy and retiring temperament, and sees few women. He is almost a recluse." Sam was aware of this, and had frequently regretted it. He had always been fond of his cousin in that half-amused and rather patronising way in which men of thews and sinews are fond of the weaker brethren who run more to pallor and intellect; and he had always felt that if Eustace had not had to retire to Windles to spend his life with a woman whom from his earliest years he had always considered the Empress of the Washouts, much might have been made of him. Both at school and at Oxford, Eustace had been--if not a sport--at least a decidedly cheery old bean. Sam remembered Eustace at school, breaking gas globes with a slipper in a positively rollicking manner. He remembered him at Oxford playing up to him manfully at the piano on the occasion when he had done that imitation of Frank Tinney which had been such a hit at the Trinity smoker. Yes, Eustace had had the makings of a pretty sound egg, and it was too bad that he had allowed his mother to coop him up down in the country, miles away from anywhere. "Eustace is returning to England on Saturday," said Mrs. Hignett. She spoke a little wistfully. She had not been parted from her son since he had come down from Oxford; and she would have liked to keep him with her till the end of her lecturing tour. That, however, was out of the question. It was imperative that, while she was away, he should be at Windles. Nothing would have induced her to leave the place at the mercy of servants who might trample over the flowerbeds, scratch the polished floors, and forget to cover up the canary at night. "He sails on the 'Atlantic.'" "That's splendid!" said Sam. "I'm sailing on the 'Atlantic' myself. I'll go down to the office and see if we can't have a state-room together. But where is he going to live when he gets to England?" "Where is he going to live? Why, at Windles, of course. Where else?" "But I thought you were letting Windles for the summer?" Mrs. Hignett stared. "Letting Windles!" She spoke as one might address a lunatic. "What put that extraordinary idea into your head?" "I thought father said something about your letting the place to some American." "Nothing of the kind!" It seemed to Sam that his aunt spoke somewhat vehemently, even snappishly, in correcting what was a perfectly natural mistake. He could not know that the subject of letting Windles for the summer was one which had long since begun to infuriate Mrs. Hignett. People had certainly asked her to let Windles. In fact, people had pestered her. There was a rich, fat man, an American named Bennett, whom she had met just before sailing at her brother's house in London. Invited down to Windles for the day, Mr. Bennett had fallen in love with the place, and had begged her to name her own price. Not content with this, he had pursued her with his pleadings by means of the wireless telegraph while she was on the ocean, and had not given up the struggle even when she reached New York. She had not been in America two days when there had arrived a Mr. Mortimer, bosom friend of Mr. Bennett, carrying on the matter where the other had left off. For a whole week Mr. Mortimer had tried to induce her to reconsider her decision, and had only stopped because he had had to leave for England himself, to join his friend. And even then the thing had gone on. Indeed, this very morning, among the letters on Mrs. Hignett's table, the buff envelope of a cable from Mr. Bennett had peeped out, nearly spoiling her breakfast. No wonder, then, that Sam's allusion to the affair had caused the authoress of "The Spreading Light" momentarily to lose her customary calm. "Nothing will induce me ever to let Windles," she said with finality, and rose significantly. Sam, perceiving that the audience was at an end--and glad of it--also got up. "Well, I think I'll be going down and seeing about that state-room" he said. "Certainly. I am a little busy just now, preparing notes for my next lecture." "Of course, yes. Mustn't interrupt you. I suppose you're having a great time, gassing away--I mean--well, good-bye!" "Good-bye!" Mrs. Hignett, frowning, for the interview had ruffled her and disturbed that equable frame of mind which is so vital to the preparation of lectures on Theosophy, sat down at the writing-table and began to go through the notes which she had made overnight. She had hardly succeeded in concentrating herself when the door opened to admit the daughter of Erin once more. "Ma'am, there was a gentleman." "This is intolerable!" cried Mrs. Hignett. "Did you tell him that I was busy?" "I did not. I loosed him into the dining-room." "Is he a reporter from one of the newspapers?" "He is not. He has spats and a tall-shaped hat. His name is Bream Mortimer." "Bream Mortimer!" "Yes, ma'am. He handed me a bit of a kyard, but I dropped it, being slippy from the dishes." Mrs. Hignett strode to the door with a forbidding expression. This, as she had justly remarked, was intolerable. She remembered Bream Mortimer. He was the son of the Mr. Mortimer who wanted Windles. This visit could only have to do with the subject of Windles, and she went into the dining-room in a state of cold fury, determined to squash the Mortimer family, in the person of their New York representative, once and for all. "Good morning, Mr. Mortimer." Bream Mortimer was tall and thin. He had small bright eyes and a sharply curving nose. He looked much more like a parrot than most parrots do. It gave strangers a momentary shock of surprise when they saw Bream Mortimer in restaurants, eating roast beef. They had the feeling that he would have preferred sunflower seeds. "Morning, Mrs. Hignett." "Please sit down." Bream Mortimer looked as though he would rather have hopped on to a perch, but he sat down. He glanced about the room with gleaming, excited eyes. "Mrs. Hignett, I must have a word with you alone!" "You _are_ having a word with me alone." "I hardly know how to begin." "Then let me help you. It is quite impossible. I will never consent." Bream Mortimer started. "Then you have heard about it?" "I have heard about nothing else since I met Mr. Bennett in London. Mr. Bennett talked about nothing else. Your father talked about nothing else. And now," cried Mrs. Hignett, fiercely, "you come and try to re-open the subject. Once and for all, nothing will alter my decision. No money will induce me to let my house." "But I didn't come about that!" "You did not come about Windles?" "Good Lord, no!" "Then will you kindly tell me why you have come?" Bream Mortimer seemed embarrassed. He wriggled a little, and moved his arms as if he were trying to flap them. "You know," he said, "I'm not a man who butts into other people's affairs...." He stopped. "No?" said Mrs. Hignett. Bream began again. "I'm not a man who gossips with valets...." "No?" "I'm not a man who...." Mrs. Hignett was never a very patient woman. "Let us take all your negative qualities for granted," she said curtly. "I have no doubt that there are many things which you do not do. Let us confine ourselves to issues of definite importance. What is it, if you have no objection to concentrating your attention on that for a moment, that you wish to see me about?" "This marriage." "What marriage?" "Your son's marriage." "My son is not married." "No, but he's going to be. At eleven o'clock this morning at the Little Church Round the Corner!" Mrs. Hignett stared. "Are you mad?" "Well, I'm not any too well pleased, I'm bound to say," admitted Mr. Mortimer. "You see, darn it all, I'm in love with the girl myself!" "Who is this girl?" "Have been for years. I'm one of those silent, patient fellows who hang around and look a lot but never tell their love...." "Who is this girl who has entrapped my son?" "I've always been one of those men who...." "Mr. Mortimer! With your permission we will take your positive qualities, also, for granted. In fact, we will not discuss you at all. You come to me with this absurd story...." "Not absurd. Honest fact. I had it from my valet who had it from her maid." "Will you please tell me who is the girl my misguided son wishes to marry?" "I don't know that I'd call him misguided," said Mr. Mortimer, as one desiring to be fair. "I think he's a right smart picker! She's such a corking girl, you know. We were children together, and I've loved her for years. Ten years at least. But you know how it is--somehow one never seems to get in line for a proposal. I thought I saw an opening in the summer of nineteen-twelve, but it blew over. I'm not one of these smooth, dashing chaps, you see, with a great line of talk. I'm not...." "If you will kindly," said Mrs. Hignett impatiently, "postpone this essay in psycho-analysis to some future occasion, I shall be greatly obliged. I am waiting to hear the name of the girl my son wishes to marry." "Haven't I told you?" said Mr. Mortimer, surprised. "That's odd. I haven't. It's funny how one doesn't do the things one thinks one does. I'm the sort of man...." "What is her name?" "... the sort of man who...." "What is her name?" "Bennett." "Bennett? Wilhelmina Bennett? The daughter of Mr. Rufus Bennett? The red-haired girl I met at lunch one day at your father's house?" "That's it. You're a great guesser. I think you ought to stop the thing." "I intend to." "Fine!" "The marriage would be unsuitable in every way. Miss Bennett and my son do not vibrate on the same plane." "That's right. I've noticed it myself." "Their auras are not the same colour." "If I've thought that once," said Bream Mortimer, "I've thought it a hundred times. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've thought it. Not the same colour. That's the whole thing in a nutshell." "I am much obliged to you for coming and telling me of this. I shall take immediate steps." "That's good. But what's the procedure? It's getting late. She'll be waiting at the church at eleven." "Eustace will not be there." "You think you can fix it?" "Eustace will not be there," repeated Mrs. Hignett. Bream Mortimer hopped down from his chair. "Well, you've taken a weight off my mind." "A mind, I should imagine, scarcely constructed to bear great weights." "I'll be going. Haven't had breakfast yet. Too worried to eat breakfast. Relieved now. This is where three eggs and a rasher of ham get cut off in their prime. I feel I can rely on you." "You can!" "Then I'll say good-bye." "Good-bye." "I mean really good-bye. I'm sailing for England on Saturday on the 'Atlantic.'" "Indeed? My son will be your fellow-traveller." Bream Mortimer looked somewhat apprehensive. "You won't tell him that I was the one who spilled the beans?" "I beg your pardon?" "You won't wise him up that I threw a spanner into the machinery?" "I do not understand you." "You won't tell him that I crabbed his act ... gave the thing away ... gummed the game?" "I shall not mention your chivalrous intervention." "Chivalrous?" said Bream Mortimer a little doubtfully. "I don't know that I'd call it absolutely chivalrous. Of course, all's fair in love and war. Well, I'm glad you're going to keep my share in the business under your hat. It might have been awkward meeting him on board." "You are not likely to meet Eustace on board. He is a very indifferent sailor and spends most of his time in his cabin." "That's good! Saves a lot of awkwardness. Well, good-bye." "Good-bye. When you reach England, remember me to your father." "He won't have forgotten you," said Bream Mortimer, confidently. He did not see how it was humanly possible for anyone to forget this woman. She was like a celebrated chewing-gum. The taste lingered. Mrs. Hignett was a woman of instant and decisive action. Even while her late visitor was speaking, schemes had begun to form in her mind like bubbles rising to the surface of a rushing river. By the time the door had closed behind Bream Mortimer she had at her disposal no fewer than seven, all good. It took her but a moment to select the best and simplest. She tiptoed softly to her son's room. Rhythmic snores greeted her listening ears. She opened the door and went noiselessly in. CHAPTER II GALLANT RESCUE BY WELL-DRESSED YOUNG MAN § 1 The White Star liner "Atlantic" lay at her pier with steam up and gangway down, ready for her trip to Southampton. The hour of departure was near, and there was a good deal of mixed activity going on. Sailors fiddled about with ropes. Junior officers flitted to and fro. White-jacketed stewards wrestled with trunks. Probably the captain, though not visible, was also employed on some useful work of a nautical nature and not wasting his time. Men, women, boxes, rugs, dogs, flowers, and baskets of fruits were flowing on board in a steady stream. The usual drove of citizens had come to see the travellers off. There were men on the passenger-list who were being seen off by fathers, by mothers, by sisters, by cousins, and by aunts. In the steerage, there was an elderly Jewish lady who was being seen off by exactly thirty-seven of her late neighbours in Rivington Street. And two men in the second cabin were being seen off by detectives, surely the crowning compliment a great nation can bestow. The cavernous Customs sheds were congested with friends and relatives, and Sam Marlowe, heading for the gang-plank, was only able to make progress by employing all the muscle and energy which Nature had bestowed upon him, and which during the greater part of his life he had developed by athletic exercise. However, after some minutes of silent endeavour, now driving his shoulder into the midriff of some obstructing male, now courteously lifting some stout female off his feet, he had succeeded in struggling to within a few yards of his goal, when suddenly a sharp pain shot through his right arm, and he spun round with a cry. It seemed to Sam that he had been bitten, and this puzzled him, for New York crowds, though they may shove and jostle, rarely bite. He found himself face to face with an extraordinarily pretty girl. She was a red-haired girl, with the beautiful ivory skin which goes with red hair. Her eyes, though they were under the shadow of her hat, and he could not be certain, he diagnosed as green, or may be blue, or possibly grey. Not that it mattered, for he had a catholic taste in feminine eyes. So long as they were large and bright, as were the specimens under his immediate notice, he was not the man to quibble about a point of colour. Her nose was small, and on the very tip of it there was a tiny freckle. Her mouth was nice and wide, her chin soft and round. She was just about the height which every girl ought to be. Her figure was trim, her feet tiny, and she wore one of those dresses of which a man can say no more than that they look pretty well all right. Nature abhors a vacuum. Samuel Marlowe was a susceptible young man, and for many a long month his heart had been lying empty, all swept and garnished, with "Welcome" on the mat. This girl seemed to rush in and fill it. She was not the prettiest girl he had ever seen. She was the third prettiest. He had an orderly mind, one capable of classifying and docketing girls. But there was a subtle something about her, a sort of how-shall-one-put-it, which he had never encountered before. He swallowed convulsively. His well-developed chest swelled beneath its covering of blue flannel and invisible stripe. At last, he told himself, he was in love, really in love, and at first sight, too, which made it all the more impressive. He doubted whether in the whole course of history anything like this had ever happened before to anybody. Oh, to clasp this girl to him and.... But she had bitten him in the arm. That was hardly the right spirit. That, he felt, constituted an obstacle. "Oh, I'm so sorry!" she cried. Well, of course, if she regretted her rash act.... After all, an impulsive girl might bite a man in the arm in the excitement of the moment and still have a sweet, womanly nature.... "The crowd seems to make Pinky-Boodles so nervous." Sam might have remained mystified, but at this juncture there proceeded from a bundle of rugs in the neighbourhood of the girl's lower ribs, a sharp yapping sound, of such a calibre as to be plainly audible over the confused noise of Mamies who were telling Sadies to be sure and write, of Bills who were instructing Dicks to look up old Joe in Paris and give him their best, and of all the fruit-boys, candy-boys, magazine-boys, American-flag-boys, and telegraph boys who were honking their wares on every side. "I hope he didn't hurt you much. You're the third person he's bitten to-day." She kissed the animal in a loving and congratulatory way on the tip of his black nose. "Not counting waiters at the hotel, of course," she added. And then she was swept from him in the crowd, and he was left thinking of all the things he might have said--all those graceful, witty, ingratiating things which just make a bit of difference on these occasions. He had said nothing. Not a sound, exclusive of the first sharp yowl of pain, had proceeded from him. He had just goggled. A rotten exhibition! Perhaps he would never see this girl again. She looked the sort of girl who comes to see friends off and doesn't sail herself. And what memory of him would she retain? She would mix him up with the time when she went to visit the deaf-and-dumb hospital. § 2 Sam reached the gang-plank, showed his ticket, and made his way through the crowd of passengers, passengers' friends, stewards, junior officers, and sailors who infested the deck. He proceeded down the main companion-way, through a rich smell of india-rubber and mixed pickles, as far as the dining saloon; then turned down the narrow passage leading to his state-room. State-rooms on ocean liners are curious things. When you see them on the chart in the passenger-office, with the gentlemanly clerk drawing rings round them in pencil, they seem so vast that you get the impression that, after stowing away all your trunks, you will have room left over to do a bit of entertaining--possibly an informal dance or something. When you go on board, you find that the place has shrunk to the dimensions of an undersized cupboard in which it would be impossible to swing a cat. And then, about the second day out, it suddenly expands again. For one reason or another the necessity for swinging cats does not arise, and you find yourself quite comfortable. Sam, balancing himself on the narrow, projecting ledge which the chart in the passenger-office had grandiloquently described as a lounge, began to feel the depression which marks the second phase. He almost wished now that he had not been so energetic in having his room changed in order to enjoy the company of his cousin Eustace. It was going to be a tight fit. Eustace's bag was already in the cabin, and it seemed to take up the entire fairway. Still, after all, Eustace was a good sort, and would be a cheerful companion. And Sam realised that if the girl with the red hair was not a passenger on the boat, he was going to have need of diverting society. A footstep sounded in the passage outside. The door opened. "Hullo, Eustace!" said Sam. Eustace Hignett nodded listlessly, sat down on his bag, and emitted a deep sigh. He was a small, fragile-looking young man with a pale, intellectual face. Dark hair fell in a sweep over his forehead. He looked like a man who would write _vers libre_, as indeed he did. "Hullo!" he said, in a hollow voice. Sam regarded him blankly. He had not seen him for some years, but, going by his recollections of him at the University, he had expected something cheerier than this. In fact, he had rather been relying on Eustace to be the life and soul of the party. The man sitting on the bag before him could hardly have filled that role at a gathering of Russian novelists. "What on earth's the matter?" said Sam. "The matter?" Eustace Hignett laughed mirthlessly. "Oh, nothing. Nothing much. Nothing to signify. Only my heart's broken." He eyed with considerable malignity the bottle of water in the rack above his head, a harmless object provided by the White Star Company for clients who might desire to clean their teeth during the voyage. "If you would care to hear the story...?" he said. "Go ahead." "It is quite short." "That's good." "Soon after I arrived in America, I met a girl...." "Talking of girls," said Sam with enthusiasm, "I've just seen the only one in the world that really amounts to anything. It was like this. I was shoving my way through the mob on the dock, when suddenly...." "Shall I tell you my story, or will you tell yours?" "Oh, sorry! Go ahead." Eustace Hignett scowled at the printed notice on the wall, informing occupants of the state-room that the name of their steward was J. B. Midgeley. "She was an extraordinarily pretty girl...." "So was mine! I give you my honest word I never in all my life saw such...." "Of course, if you prefer that I postponed my narrative?" said Eustace coldly. "Oh, sorry! Carry on." "She was an extraordinarily pretty girl...." "What was her name?" "Wilhelmina Bennett. She was an extraordinarily pretty girl, and highly intelligent. I read her all my poems, and she appreciated them immensely. She enjoyed my singing. My conversation appeared to interest her. She admired my...." "I see. You made a hit. Now get on with the story." "Don't bustle me," said Eustace querulously. "Well, you know, the voyage only takes eight days." "I've forgotten where I was." "You were saying what a devil of a chap she thought you. What happened? I suppose, when you actually came to propose, you found she was engaged to some other johnny?" "Not at all! I asked her to be my wife and she consented. We both agreed that a quiet wedding was what we wanted--she thought her father might stop the thing if he knew, and I was dashed sure my mother would--so we decided to get married without telling anybody. By now," said Eustace, with a morose glance at the porthole, "I ought to have been on my honeymoon. Everything was settled. I had the licence and the parson's fee. I had been breaking in a new tie for the wedding." "And then you quarrelled?" "Nothing of the kind. I wish you would stop trying to tell me the story. I'm telling _you_. What happened was this: somehow--I can't make out how--mother found out. And then, of course, it was all over. She stopped the thing." Sam was indignant. He thoroughly disliked his Aunt Adeline, and his cousin's meek subservience to her revolted him. "Stopped it? I suppose she said 'Now, Eustace, you mustn't!' and you said 'Very well, mother!' and scratched the fixture?" "She didn't say a word. She never has said a word. As far as that goes, she might never have heard anything about the marriage." "Then how do you mean she stopped it?" "She pinched my trousers!" "Pinched your trousers!" Eustace groaned. "All of them! The whole bally lot! She gets up long before I do, and she must have come into my room and cleaned it out while I was asleep. When I woke up and started to dress, I couldn't find a single damned pair of bags in the whole place. I looked everywhere. Finally, I went into the sitting-room where she was writing letters and asked if she had happened to see any anywhere. She said she had sent them all to be pressed. She said she knew I never went out in the mornings--I don't as a rule--and they would be back at lunch-time. A fat lot of use that was! I had to be at the church at eleven. Well, I told her I had a most important engagement with a man at eleven, and she wanted to know what it was, and I tried to think of something, but it sounded pretty feeble, and she said I had better telephone to the man and put it off. I did it, too. Rang up the first number in the book and told some fellow I had never seen in my life that I couldn't meet him because I hadn't any trousers! He was pretty peeved, judging from what he said about my being on the wrong number. And mother, listening all the time, and I knowing that she knew--something told me that she knew--and she knowing that I knew she knew.... I tell you, it was awful!" "And the girl?" "She broke off the engagement. Apparently she waited at the church from eleven till one-thirty, and then began to get impatient. She wouldn't see me when I called in the afternoon, but I got a letter from her saying that what had happened was all for the best, as she had been thinking it over and had come to the conclusion that she had made a mistake. She said something about my not being as dynamic as she had thought I was. She said that what she wanted was something more like Lancelot or Sir Galahad, and would I look on the episode as closed." "Did you explain about the trousers?" "Yes. It seemed to make things worse. She said that she could forgive a man anything except being ridiculous." "I think you're well out of it," said Sam, judicially. "She can't have been much of a girl." "I feel that now. But it doesn't alter the fact that my life is ruined. I have become a woman-hater. It's an infernal nuisance, because practically all the poetry I have ever written rather went out of its way to boost women, and now I'll have to start all over again and approach the subject from another angle. Women! When I think how mother behaved and how Wilhelmina treated me, I wonder there isn't a law against them. 'What mighty ills have not been done by Woman! Who was't betrayed the Capitol....'" "In Washington?" said Sam, puzzled. He had heard nothing of this. But then he generally confined his reading of the papers to the sporting page. "In Rome, you ass! Ancient Rome." "Oh, as long ago as that?" "I was quoting from Thomas Otway's 'Orphan.' I wish I could write like Otway. He knew what he was talking about. 'Who was't betrayed the Capitol? A woman. Who lost Marc Anthony the world? A woman. Who was the cause of a long ten years' war and laid at last old Troy in ashes? Woman! Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!'" "Well, of course, he may be right in a way. As regards some women, I mean. But the girl I met on the dock...." "Don't!" said Eustace Hignett. "If you have anything bitter and derogatory to say about women, say it and I will listen eagerly. But if you merely wish to gibber about the ornamental exterior of some dashed girl you have been fool enough to get attracted by, go and tell it to the captain or the ship's cat or J. B. Midgeley. Do try to realise that I am a soul in torment. I am a ruin, a spent force, a man without a future. What does life hold for me? Love? I shall never love again. My work? I haven't any. I think I shall take to drink." "Talking of that," said Sam, "I suppose they open the bar directly we pass the three-mile limit. How about a small one?" Eustace shook his head gloomily. "Do you suppose I pass my time on board ship in gadding about and feasting? Directly the vessel begins to move, I go to bed and stay there. As a matter of fact, I think it would be wisest to go to bed now. Don't let me keep you if you want to go on deck." "It looks to me," said Sam, "as if I had been mistaken in thinking that you were going to be a ray of sunshine on the voyage." "Ray of sunshine!" said Eustace Hignett, pulling a pair of mauve pyjamas out of the kit-bag. "I'm going to be a volcano!" Sam left the state-room and headed for the companion. He wanted to get on deck and ascertain if that girl was still on board. About now, the sheep would be separating from the goats; the passengers would be on deck and their friends returning to the shore. A slight tremor in the boards on which he trod told him that this separation must have already taken place. The ship was moving. He ran lightly up the companion. Was she on board or was she not? The next few minutes would decide. He reached the top of the stairs, and passed out on to the crowded deck. And, as he did so, a scream, followed by confused shouting, came from the rail nearest the shore. He perceived that the rail was black with people hanging over it. They were all looking into the water. Samuel Marlowe was not one of those who pass aloofly by when there is excitement toward. If a horse fell down in the street, he was always among those present: and he was never too busy to stop and stare at a blank window on which were inscribed the words, "Watch this space!" In short, he was one of Nature's rubbernecks, and to dash to the rail and shove a fat man in a tweed cap to one side was with him the work of a moment. He had thus an excellent view of what was going on--a view which he improved the next instant by climbing up and kneeling on the rail. There was a man in the water, a man whose upper section, the only one visible, was clad in a blue jersey. He wore a bowler hat, and from time to time, as he battled with the waves, he would put up a hand and adjust this more firmly on his head. A dressy swimmer. Scarcely had he taken in this spectacle when Marlowe became aware of the girl he had met on the dock. She was standing a few feet away, leaning out over the rail with wide eyes and parted lips. Like everybody else, she was staring into the water. As Sam looked at her, the thought crossed his mind that here was a wonderful chance of making the most tremendous impression on this girl. What would she not think of a man who, reckless of his own safety, dived in and went boldly to the rescue? And there were men, no doubt, who would be chumps enough to do it, he thought, as he prepared to shift back to a position of greater safety. At this moment, the fat man in the tweed cap, incensed at having been jostled out of the front row, made his charge. He had but been crouching, the better to spring. Now he sprang. His full weight took Sam squarely in the spine. There was an instant in which that young man hung, as it were, between sea and sky: then he shot down over the rail to join the man in the blue jersey, who had just discovered that his hat was not on straight and had paused to adjust it once more with a few skilful touches of the finger. § 3 In the brief interval of time which Marlowe had spent in the state-room chatting with Eustace about the latter's bruised soul, some rather curious things had been happening above. Not extraordinary, perhaps, but curious. These must now be related. A story, if it is to grip the reader, should, I am aware, go always forward. It should march. It should leap from crag to crag like the chamois of the Alps. If there is one thing I hate, it is a novel which gets you interested in the hero in chapter one and then cuts back in chapter two to tell you all about his grandfather. Nevertheless, at this point we must go back a space. We must return to the moment when, having deposited her Pekinese dog in her state-room, the girl with the red hair came out again on deck. This happened just about the time when Eustace Hignett was beginning his narrative. The girl went to the rail and gazed earnestly at the shore. There was a rattle, as the gang-plank moved in-board and was deposited on the deck. The girl uttered a little cry of dismay. Then suddenly her face brightened, and she began to wave her arm to attract the attention of an elderly man with a red face made redder by exertion, who had just forced his way to the edge of the dock and was peering up at the passenger-lined rail. The boat had now begun to move slowly out of its slip, backing into the river. It was now that the man on the dock sighted the girl. She gesticulated at him. He gesticulated at her. He produced a handkerchief, swiftly tied up a bundle of currency bills in it, backed to give himself room, and then, with all the strength of his arm, hurled the bills in the direction of the deck. The handkerchief with its precious contents shot in a graceful arc towards the deck, fell short by a good six feet, and dropped into the water, where it unfolded like a lily, sending twenty-dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, five-dollar bills, and an assortment of ones floating out over the wavelets. It was at this moment that Mr. Oscar Swenson, one of the thriftiest souls who ever came out of Sweden, perceived that the chance of a lifetime had arrived for adding substantially to his little savings. By profession he was one of those men who eke out a precarious livelihood by rowing dreamily about the water-front in skiffs. He was doing so now: and, as he sat meditatively in his skiff, having done his best to give the liner a good send off by paddling round her in circles, the pleading face of a twenty-dollar bill peered up at him. Mr. Swenson was not the man to resist the appeal. He uttered a sharp bark of ecstasy, pressed his bowler hat firmly upon his brow, and dived in. A moment later he had risen to the surface, and was gathering up money with both hands. He was still busy with this congenial task when a tremendous splash at his side sent him under again: and, rising for a second time, he observed with not a little chagrin that he had been joined by a young man in a blue flannel suit with an invisible stripe. "Svensk!" exclaimed Mr. Swenson, or whatever it is that natives of Sweden exclaim in moments of justifiable annoyance. He resented the advent of this newcomer. He had been getting along fine and had had the situation well in hand. To him Sam Marlowe represented Competition, and Mr. Swenson desired no competitors in his treasure-seeking enterprise. He travels, thought Mr. Swenson, the fastest who travels alone. Sam Marlowe had a touch of the philosopher in him. He had the ability to adapt himself to circumstances. It had been no part of his plans to come whizzing down off the rail into this singularly soup-like water which tasted in equal parts of oil and dead rats; but, now that he was here he was prepared to make the best of the situation. Swimming, it happened, was one of the things he did best, and somewhere among his belongings at home was a tarnished pewter cup which he had won at school in the "Saving Life" competition. He knew exactly what to do. You get behind the victim and grab him firmly under his arms, and then you start swimming on your back. A moment later, the astonished Mr. Swenson who, being practically amphibious, had not anticipated that anyone would have the cool impertinence to try to save him from drowning, found himself seized from behind and towed vigorously away from a ten-dollar bill which he had almost succeeded in grasping. The spiritual agony caused by this assault rendered him mercifully dumb; though, even had he contrived to utter the rich Swedish oaths which occurred to him, his remarks could scarcely have been heard, for the crowd on the dock was cheering as one man. They had often paid good money to see far less gripping sights in the movies. They roared applause. The liner, meanwhile, continued to move stodgily out into mid-river. The only drawback to these life-saving competitions at school, considered from the standpoint of fitting the competitors for the problems of afterlife, is that the object saved on such occasions is a leather dummy, and of all things in this world a leather dummy is perhaps the most placid and phlegmatic. It differs in many respects from an emotional Swedish gentleman, six foot high and constructed throughout of steel and india-rubber, who is being lugged away from cash which he has been regarding in the light of a legacy. Indeed, it would be hard to find a respect in which it does not differ. So far from lying inert in Sam's arms and allowing himself to be saved in a quiet and orderly manner, Mr. Swenson betrayed all the symptoms of one who feels that he has fallen among murderers. Mr. Swenson, much as he disliked competition, was ready to put up with it, provided that it was fair competition. This pulling your rival away from the loot so that you could grab it yourself--thus shockingly had the man misinterpreted Sam's motives--was another thing altogether, and his stout soul would have none of it. He began immediately to struggle with all the violence at his disposal. His large, hairy hands came out of the water and swung hopefully in the direction where he assumed his assailant's face to be. Sam was not unprepared for this display. His researches in the art of life-saving had taught him that your drowning man frequently struggles against his best interests. In which case, cruel to be kind, one simply stunned the blighter. He decided to stun Mr. Swenson, though, if he had known that gentleman more intimately and had been aware that he had the reputation of possessing the thickest head on the water-front, he would have realised the magnitude of the task. Friends of Mr. Swenson, in convivial moments, had frequently endeavoured to stun him with bottles, boots and bits of lead piping and had gone away depressed by failure. Sam, ignorant of this, attempted to do the job with clenched fist, which he brought down as smartly as possible on the crown of the other's bowler hat. It was the worst thing he could have done. Mr. Swenson thought highly of his hat and this brutal attack upon it confirmed his gloomiest apprehensions. Now thoroughly convinced that the only thing to do was to sell his life dearly, he wrenched himself round, seized his assailant by the neck, twined his arms about his middle, and accompanied him below the surface. By the time he had swallowed his first pint and was beginning his second, Sam was reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that this was the end. The thought irritated him unspeakably. This, he felt, was just the silly, contrary way things always happened. Why should it be he who was perishing like this? Why not Eustace Hignett? Now there was a fellow whom this sort of thing would just have suited. Broken-hearted Eustace Hignett would have looked on all this as a merciful release. He paused in his reflections to try to disentangle the more prominent of Mr. Swenson's limbs from about him. By this time he was sure that he had never met anyone he disliked so intensely as Mr. Swenson--not even his Aunt Adeline. The man was a human octopus. Sam could count seven distinct legs twined round him and at least as many arms. It seemed to him that he was being done to death in his prime by a solid platoon of Swedes. He put his whole soul into one last effort ... something seemed to give ... he was free. Pausing only to try to kick Mr. Swenson in the face, Sam shot to the surface. Something hard and sharp prodded him in the head. Then something caught the collar of his coat; and, finally, spouting like a whale, he found himself dragged upwards and over the side of a boat. The time which Sam had spent with Mr. Swenson below the surface had been brief, but it had been long enough to enable the whole floating population of the North River to converge on the scene in scows, skiffs, launches, tugs, and other vessels. The fact that the water in that vicinity was crested with currency had not escaped the notice of these navigators, and they had gone to it as one man. First in the race came the tug "Reuben S. Watson," the skipper of which, following a famous precedent, had taken his little daughter to bear him company. It was to this fact that Marlowe really owed his rescue. Women often have a vein of sentiment in them where men can only see the hard business side of a situation; and it was the skipper's daughter who insisted that the family boat-hook, then in use as a harpoon for spearing dollar bills, should be devoted to the less profitable but humaner end of extricating the young man from a watery grave. The skipper had grumbled a bit at first but had given way--he always spoiled the girl--with the result that Sam found himself sitting on the deck of the tug, engaged in the complicated process of restoring his faculties to the normal. In a sort of dream he perceived Mr. Swenson rise to the surface some feet away, adjust his bowler hat, and, after one long look of dislike in his direction, swim off rapidly to intercept a five which was floating under the stern of a near-by skiff. Sam sat on the deck and panted. He played on the boards like a public fountain. At the back of his mind there was a flickering thought that he wanted to do something, a vague feeling that he had some sort of an appointment which he must keep; but he was unable to think what it was. Meanwhile, he conducted tentative experiments with his breath. It was so long since he had last breathed that he had lost the knack of it. "Well, aincher wet?" said a voice. The skipper's daughter was standing beside him, looking down commiseratingly. Of the rest of the family all he could see was the broad blue seats of their trousers as they leaned hopefully over the side in the quest for wealth. "Yes, sir! You sure are wet! Gee! I never seen anyone so wet! I seen wet guys but I never seen anyone so wet as you. Yessir, you're certainly _wet_!" "I _am_ wet," admitted Sam. "Yessir, you're wet! Wet's the word all right. Good and wet, that's what you are!" "It's the water," said Sam. His brain was still clouded; he wished he could remember what that appointment was. "That's what has made me wet." "It's sure made you wet all right," agreed the girl. She looked at him interestedly. "Wotcha do it for?" she asked. "Do it for?" "Yes, wotcha do it for? Wotcha do a Brodie for off'n that ship? I didn't see it myself, but pa says you come walloping down off'n the deck like a sack of potatoes." Sam uttered a sharp cry. He had remembered. "Where is she?" "Where's who?" "The liner." "She's off down the river, I guess. She was swinging round, the last I seen of her." "She's not gone!" "Sure she's gone. Wotcha expect her to do? She's gotta get over to the other side, ain't she? Cert'nly she's gone." She looked at him interested. "Do you want to be on board her?" "Of course I do." "Then, for the love of Pete, wotcha doin' walloping off'n her like a sack of potatoes?" "I slipped. I was pushed or something." Sam sprang to his feet and looked wildly about him. "I must get back. Isn't there any way of getting back?" "Well, you could ketch up with her at quarantine out in the bay. She'll stop to let the pilot off." "Can you take me to quarantine?" The girl glanced doubtfully at the seat of the nearest pair of trousers. "Well, we _could_," she said. "But pa's kind of set in his ways, and right now he's fishing for dollar bills with the boat hook. He's apt to get sorta mad if he's interrupted." "I'll give him fifty dollars if he'll put me on board." "Got it on you?" inquired the nymph coyly. She had her share of sentiment, but she was her father's daughter and inherited from him the business sense. "Here it is." He pulled out his pocket book. The book was dripping, but the contents were only fairly moist. "Pa!" said the girl. The trouser-seat remained where it was, deaf to its child's cry. "Pa! Cummere! Wantcha!" The trousers did not even quiver. But this girl was a girl of decision. There was some nautical implement resting in a rack convenient to her hand. It was long, solid, and constructed of one of the harder forms of wood. Deftly extracting this from its place, she smote her inattentive parent on the only visible portion of him. He turned sharply, exhibiting a red, bearded face. "Pa, this gen'man wants to be took aboard the boat at quarantine. He'll give you fifty berries." The wrath died out of the skipper's face like the slow turning down of a lamp. The fishing had been poor, and so far he had only managed to secure a single two-dollar bill. In a crisis like the one which had so suddenly arisen you cannot do yourself justice with a boat-hook. "Fifty berries!" "Fifty seeds!" the girl assured him. "Are you on?" "Queen," said the skipper simply, "you said a mouthful!" Twenty minutes later Sam was climbing up the side of the liner as it lay towering over the tug like a mountain. His clothes hung about him clammily. He squelched as he walked. A kindly-looking old gentleman who was smoking a cigar by the rail regarded him with open eyes. "My dear sir, you're very wet," he said. Sam passed him with a cold face and hurried through the door leading to the companion way. "Mummie, why is that man wet?" cried the clear voice of a little child. Sam whizzed by, leaping down the stairs. "Good Lord, sir! You're very wet!" said a steward in the doorway of the dining saloon. "You _are_ wet," said a stewardess in the passage. Sam raced for his state-room. He bolted in and sank on the lounge. In the lower berth Eustace Hignett was lying with closed eyes. He opened them languidly, then stared. "Hullo!" he said. "I say! You're wet!" § 4 Sam removed his clinging garments and hurried into a new suit. He was in no mood for conversation and Eustace Hignett's frank curiosity jarred upon him. Happily, at this point, a sudden shivering of the floor and a creaking of woodwork proclaimed the fact that the vessel was under way again, and his cousin, turning pea-green, rolled over on his side with a hollow moan. Sam finished buttoning his waistcoat and went out. He was passing the inquiry bureau on the C-deck, striding along with bent head and scowling brow, when a sudden exclamation caused him to look up, and the scowl was wiped from his brow as with a sponge. For there stood the girl he had met on the dock. With her was a superfluous young man who looked like a parrot. "Oh, _how_ are you?" asked the girl breathlessly. "Splendid, thanks," said Sam. "Didn't you get very wet?" "I did get a little damp." "I thought you would," said the young man who looked like a parrot. "Directly I saw you go over the side I said to myself: 'That fellow's going to get wet!'" There was a pause. "Oh!" said the girl. "May I--Mr.----?" "Marlowe." "Mr. Marlowe. Mr. Bream Mortimer." Sam smirked at the young man. The young man smirked at Sam. "Nearly got left behind," said Bream Mortimer. "Yes, nearly." "No joke getting left behind." "No." "Have to take the next boat. Lose a lot of time," said Mr. Mortimer, driving home his point. The girl had listened to these intellectual exchanges with impatience. She now spoke again. "Oh, Bream!" "Hello?" "Do be a dear and run down to the saloon and see if it's all right about our places for lunch." "It is all right. The table steward said so." "Yes, but go and make certain." "All right." He hopped away and the girl turned to Sam with shining eyes. "Oh, Mr. Marlowe, you oughtn't to have done it! Really, you oughtn't! You might have been drowned! But I never saw anything so wonderful. It was like the stories of knights who used to jump into lions' dens after gloves!" "Yes?" said Sam a little vaguely. The resemblance had not struck him. It seemed a silly hobby, and rough on the lions, too. "It was the sort of thing Sir Lancelot or Sir Galahad would have done! But you shouldn't have bothered, really! It's all right, now." "Oh, it's all right now?" "Yes. I'd quite forgotten that Mr. Mortimer was to be on board. He has given me all the money I shall need. You see it was this way. I had to sail on this boat in rather a hurry. Father's head clerk was to have gone to the bank and got some money and met me on board and given it to me, but the silly old man was late and when he got to the dock they had just pulled in the gang-plank. So he tried to throw the money to me in a handkerchief and it fell into the water. But you shouldn't have dived in after it." "Oh, well!" said Sam, straightening his tie, with a quiet, brave smile. He had never expected to feel grateful to that obese bounder who had shoved him off the rail, but now he would have liked to seek him out and shake him by the hand. "You really are the bravest man I ever met!" "Oh, no!" "How modest you are! But I suppose all brave men are modest!" "I was only too delighted at what looked like a chance of doing you a service." "It was the extraordinary quickness of it that was so wonderful. I do admire presence of mind. You didn't hesitate for a second. You just shot over the side as though propelled by some irresistible force!" "It was nothing, nothing really. One just happens to have the knack of keeping one's head and acting quickly on the spur of the moment. Some people have it, some haven't." "And just think! As Bream was saying...." "It _is_ all right," said Mr. Mortimer, reappearing suddenly. "I saw a couple of the stewards and they both said it was all right. So it's all right." "Splendid," said the girl. "Oh, Bream!" "Hello?" "Do be an angel and run along to my state-room and see if Pinky-Boodles is quite comfortable." "Bound to be." "Yes. But do go. He may be feeling lonely. Chirrup to him a little." "Chirrup?" "Yes, to cheer him up." "Oh, all right." "Run along!" Mr. Mortimer ran along. He had the air of one who feels that he only needs a peaked cap and a uniform two sizes too small for him to be a properly equipped messenger boy. "And, as Bream was saying," resumed the girl, "you might have been left behind." "That," said Sam, edging a step closer, "was the thought that tortured me, the thought that a friendship so delightfully begun...." "But it hadn't begun. We have never spoken to each other before now." "Have you forgotten? On the dock...." Sudden enlightenment came into her eyes. "Oh, you are the man poor Pinky-Boodles bit!" "The lucky man!" Her face clouded. "Poor Pinky is feeling the motion of the boat a little. It's his first voyage." "I shall always remember that it was Pinky who first brought us together. Would you care for a stroll on deck?" "Not just now, thanks. I must be getting back to my room to finish unpacking. After lunch, perhaps." "I will be there. By the way, you know my name, but...." "Oh, mine?" She smiled brightly. "It's funny that a person's name is the last thing one thinks of asking. Mine is Bennett." "Bennett!" "Wilhelmina Bennett. My friends," she said softly as she turned away, "call me Billie!" CHAPTER III SAM PAVES THE WAY For some moments Sam remained where he was, staring after the girl as she flitted down the passage. He felt dizzy. Mental acrobatics always have an unsettling effect, and a young man may be excused for feeling a little dizzy when he is called upon suddenly and without any warning to re-adjust all his preconceived views on any subject. Listening to Eustace Hignett's story of his blighted romance, Sam had formed an unflattering opinion of this Wilhelmina Bennett who had broken off her engagement simply because on the day of the marriage his cousin had been short of the necessary wedding garment. He had, indeed, thought a little smugly how different his goddess of the red hair was from the object of Eustace Hignett's affections. And now they had proved to be one and the same. It was disturbing. It was like suddenly finding the vampire of a five-reel feature film turn into the heroine. Some men, on making the discovery of this girl's identity, might have felt that Providence had intervened to save them from a disastrous entanglement. This point of view never occurred to Samuel Marlowe. The way he looked at it was that he had been all wrong about Wilhelmina Bennett. Eustace, he felt, had been to blame throughout. If this girl had maltreated Eustace's finer feelings, then her reason for doing so must have been excellent and praiseworthy. After all ... poor old Eustace ... quite a good fellow, no doubt in many ways ... but, coming down to brass tacks, what was there about Eustace that gave him any claim to monopolise the affections of a wonderful girl? Where, in a word, did Eustace Hignett get off? He made a tremendous grievance of the fact that she had broken off the engagement, but what right had he to go about the place expecting her to be engaged to him? Eustace Hignett, no doubt, looked upon the poor girl as utterly heartless. Marlowe regarded her behaviour as thoroughly sensible. She had made a mistake, and, realising this at the eleventh hour, she had had the force of character to correct it. He was sorry for poor old Eustace, but he really could not permit the suggestion that Wilhelmina Bennett--her friends called her Billie--had not behaved in a perfectly splendid way throughout. It was women like Wilhelmina Bennett--Billie to her intimates--who made the world worth living in. Her friends called her Billie. He did not blame them. It was a delightful name and suited her to perfection. He practised it a few times. "Billie ... Billie ... Billie...." It certainly ran pleasantly off the tongue. "Billie Bennett." Very musical. "Billie Marlowe." Still better. "We noticed among those present the charming and popular Mrs. 'Billie' Marlowe...." A consuming desire came over him to talk about the girl to someone. Obviously indicated as the party of the second part was Eustace Hignett. If Eustace was still capable of speech--and after all the boat was hardly rolling at all--he would enjoy a further chat about his ruined life. Besides, he had another reason for seeking Eustace's society. As a man who had been actually engaged to marry this supreme girl, Eustace Hignett had an attraction for Sam akin to that of some great public monument. He had become a sort of shrine. He had taken on a glamour. Sam entered the state-room almost reverentially, with something of the emotions of a boy going into his first dime museum. The exhibit was lying on his back, staring at the roof of the berth. By lying absolutely still and forcing himself to think of purely inland scenes and objects, he had contrived to reduce the green in his complexion to a mere tinge. But it would be paltering with the truth to say that he felt debonair. He received Sam with a wan austerity. "Sit down!" he said. "Don't stand there swaying like that. I can't bear it." "Why, we aren't out of the harbour yet. Surely you aren't going to be sea-sick already." "I can issue no positive guarantee. Perhaps if I can keep my mind off it.... I have had good results for the last ten minutes by thinking steadily of the Sahara. There," said Eustace Hignett with enthusiasm, "is a place for you! That is something like a spot. Miles and miles of sand and not a drop of water anywhere!" Sam sat down on the lounge. "You're quite right. The great thing is to concentrate your mind on other topics. Why not, for instance, tell me some more about your unfortunate affair with that girl--Billie Bennett I think you said her name was." "Wilhelmina Bennett. Where on earth did you get the idea that her name was Billie?" "I had a notion that girls called Wilhelmina were sometimes Billie to their friends." "I never called her anything but Wilhelmina. But I really cannot talk about it. The recollection tortures me." "That's just what you want. It's the counter-irritation principle. Persevere, and you'll soon forget that you're on board ship at all." "There's something in that," admitted Eustace reflectively. "It's very good of you to be so sympathetic and interested." "My dear fellow ... anything that I can do ... where did you meet her first, for instance?" "At a dinner...." Eustace Hignett broke off abruptly. He had a good memory and he had just recollected the fish they had served at that dinner--a flabby and exhausted looking fish half sunk beneath the surface of a thick white sauce. "And what struck you most forcibly about her at first? Her lovely hair, I suppose?" "How did you know she had lovely hair?" "My dear chap, I naturally assumed that any girl with whom you fell in love would have nice hair." "Well, you are perfectly right, as it happens. Her hair was remarkably beautiful. It was red...." "Like autumn leaves with the sun on them!" said Marlowe ecstatically. Hignett started. "What an extraordinary thing! That is an absolutely exact description. Her eyes were a deep blue...." "Or, rather, green." "Blue." "Green. There is a shade of green that looks blue." "What the devil do you know about the colour of her eyes?" demanded Eustace heatedly. "Am I telling you about her, or are you telling me?" "My dear old man, don't get excited. Don't you see I am trying to construct this girl in my imagination, to visualise her? I don't pretend to doubt your special knowledge, but after all green eyes generally do go with red hair and there are all shades of green. There is the bright green of meadow grass, the dull green of the uncut emerald, the faint yellowish green of your face at the present moment...." "Don't talk about the colour of my face! Now you've gone and reminded me just when I was beginning to forget." "Awfully sorry. Stupid of me. Get your mind off it again--quick. What were we saying? Oh, yes, this girl. I always think it helps one to form a mental picture of people if one knows something about their tastes--what sort of things they are interested in, their favourite topics of conversation, and so on. This Miss Bennett now, what did she like talking about?" "Oh, all sorts of things." "Yes, but what?" "Well, for one thing she was very fond of poetry. It was that which first drew us together." "Poetry!" Sam's heart sank a little. He had read a certain amount of poetry at school, and once he had won a prize of three shillings and sixpence for the last line of a Limerick in a competition in a weekly paper; but he was self-critic enough to know that poetry was not his long suit. Still there was a library on board the ship, and no doubt it would be possible to borrow the works of some standard bard and bone them up from time to time. "Any special poet?" "Well, she seemed to like my stuff. You never read my sonnet-sequence on Spring, did you?" "No. What other poets did she like besides you?" "Tennyson principally," said Eustace Hignett with a reminiscent quiver in his voice. "The hours we have spent together reading the Idylls of the King!" "The which of what?" inquired Sam, taking a pencil from his pocket and shooting out a cuff. "'The Idylls of the King.' My good man, I know you have a soul which would be considered inadequate by a common earthworm but you have surely heard of Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King?'" "Oh, _those_! Why, my dear old chap! Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King?' Well, I should say! Have I heard of Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King?' Well, really? I suppose you haven't a copy with you on board by any chance?" "There is a copy in my kit bag. The very one we used to read together. Take it and keep it or throw it overboard. I don't want to see it again." Sam prospected among the shirts, collars, and trousers in the bag and presently came upon a morocco-bound volume. He laid it beside him on the lounge. "Little by little, bit by bit," he said, "I am beginning to form a sort of picture of this girl, this--what was her name again? Bennett--this Miss Bennett. You have a wonderful knack of description. You make her seem so real and vivid. Tell me some more about her. She wasn't keen on golf, by any chance, I suppose?" "I believe she did play. The subject came up once and she seemed rather enthusiastic. Why?" "Well, I'd much sooner talk to a girl about golf than poetry." "You are hardly likely to be in a position to have to talk to Wilhelmina Bennett about either, I should imagine." "No, there's that, of course. I was thinking of girls in general. Some girls bar golf, and then it's rather difficult to know how to start the conversation. But, tell me, were there any topics which got on this Miss Bennett's nerves, if you know what I mean? It seems to me that at one time or another you may have said something that offended her. I mean, it seems curious that she should have broken off the engagement if you had never disagreed or quarrelled about anything." "Well, of course, there was always the matter of that dog of hers. She had a dog, you know, a snappy brute of a Pekinese. If there was ever any shadow of disagreement between us, it had to do with that dog. I made rather a point of it that I would not have it about the home after we were married." "I see!" said Sam. He shot his cuff once more and wrote on it: "Dog--conciliate." "Yes, of course, that must have wounded her." "Not half so much as he wounded me. He pinned me by the ankle the day before we--Wilhelmina and I, I mean--were to have been married. It is some satisfaction to me in my broken state to remember that I got home on the little beast with considerable juiciness and lifted him clean over the Chesterfield." Sam shook his head reprovingly. "You shouldn't have done that," he said. He extended his cuff and added the words "Vitally Important" to what he had just written. "It was probably that which decided her." "Well, I hate dogs," said Eustace Hignett querulously. "I remember Wilhelmina once getting quite annoyed with me because I refused to step in and separate a couple of the brutes, absolute strangers to me, who were fighting in the street. I reminded her that we were all fighters nowadays, that life itself was in a sense a fight; but she wouldn't be reasonable about it. She said that Sir Galahad would have done it like a shot. I thought not. We have no evidence whatsoever that Sir Galahad was ever called upon to do anything half as dangerous. And, anyway, he wore armour. Give me a suit of mail, reaching well down over the ankles, and I will willingly intervene in a hundred dog fights. But in thin flannel trousers, no!" Sam rose. His heart was light. He had never, of course, supposed that the girl was anything but perfect; but it was nice to find his high opinion of her corroborated by one who had no reason to exhibit her in a favourable light. He understood her point of view and sympathised with it. An idealist, how could she trust herself to Eustace Hignett? How could she be content with a craven who, instead of scouring the world in the quest for deeds of derring-do, had fallen down so lamentably on his first assignment? There was a specious attractiveness about poor old Eustace which might conceivably win a girl's heart for a time; he wrote poetry, talked well, and had a nice singing voice; but, as a partner for life ... well, he simply wouldn't do. That was all there was to it. He simply didn't add up right. The man a girl like Wilhelmina Bennett required for a husband was somebody entirely different ... somebody, felt Samuel Marlowe, much more like Samuel Marlowe. Swelled almost to bursting point with these reflections, he went on deck to join the ante-luncheon promenade. He saw Billie almost at once. She had put on one of those nice sacky sport-coats which so enhance feminine charms, and was striding along the deck with the breeze playing in her vivid hair like the female equivalent of a Viking. Beside her walked young Mr. Bream Mortimer. Sam had been feeling a good deal of a fellow already, but at the sight of her welcoming smile his self-esteem almost caused him to explode. What magic there is in a girl's smile! It is the raisin which, dropped in the yeast of male complacency, induces fermentation. "Oh, there you are, Mr. Marlowe!" "Oh, _there_ you are," said Bream Mortimer with a slightly different inflection. "I thought I'd like a breath of fresh air before lunch," said Sam. "Oh, Bream!" said the girl. "Hello?" "Do be a darling and take this great heavy coat of mine down to my state-room, will you? I had no idea it was so warm." "I'll carry it," said Bream. "Nonsense! I wouldn't dream of burdening you with it. Trot along and put it on the berth. It doesn't matter about folding it up." "All right," said Bream moodily. He trotted along. There are moments when a man feels that all he needs in order to be a delivery wagon is a horse and a driver. Bream Mortimer was experiencing such a moment. "He had better chirrup to the dog while he's there, don't you think?" suggested Sam. He felt that a resolute man with legs as long as Bream's might well deposit a cloak on a berth and be back under the half-minute. "Oh yes! Bream!" "Hello?" "While you're down there, just chirrup a little more to poor Pinky. He does appreciate it so!" Bream disappeared. It is not always easy to interpret emotion from a glance at a man's back; but Bream's back looked like that of a man to whom the thought has occurred that, given a couple of fiddles and a piano, he would have made a good hired orchestra. "How is your dear little dog, by the way?" inquired Sam solicitously, as he fell into step by her side. "Much better now, thanks. I've made friends with a girl on board--did you ever hear her name--Jane Hubbard--she's a rather well-known big-game hunter, and she fixed up some sort of a mixture for Pinky which did him a world of good. I don't know what was in it except Worcester Sauce, but she said she always gave it to her mules in Africa when they had the botts ... it's very nice of you to speak so affectionately of poor Pinky when he bit you." "Animal spirits!" said Sam tolerantly. "Pure animal spirits. I like to see them. But, of course, I love all dogs." "Oh, do you? So do I!" "I only wish they didn't fight so much. I'm always stopping dog-fights." "I do admire a man who knows what to do at a dog-fight. I'm afraid I'm rather helpless myself. There never seems anything to catch hold of." She looked down. "Have you been reading? What is the book?" "The book? Oh, this. It's a volume of Tennyson." "Are you fond of Tennyson?" "I worship him," said Sam reverently. "Those----" he glanced at his cuff--"those 'Idylls of the King!' I do not like to think what an ocean voyage would be if I had not my Tennyson with me." "We must read him together. He is my favourite poet!" "We will! There is something about Tennyson...." "Yes, isn't there! I've felt that myself so often." "Some poets are whales at epics and all that sort of thing, while others call it a day when they've written something that runs to a couple of verses, but where Tennyson had the bulge was that his long game was just as good as his short. He was great off the tee and a marvel with his chip-shots." "That sounds as though you play golf." "When I am not reading Tennyson, you can generally find me out on the links. Do you play?" "I love it. How extraordinary that we should have so much in common. You seem to like all the things I like. We really ought to be great friends." He was pausing to select the best of three replies when the lunch bugle sounded. "Oh dear!" she cried. "I must rush. But we shall see one another again up here afterwards?" "We will," said Sam. "We'll sit and read Tennyson." "Fine! Er--you and I and Mortimer?" "Oh no, Bream is going to sit down below and look after poor Pinky." "Does he--does he know he is?" "Not yet," said Billie. "I'm going to tell him at lunch." CHAPTER IV SAM CLICKS § 1 It was the fourth morning of the voyage. Of course, when this story is done in the movies they won't be satisfied with a bald statement like that; they will have a Spoken Title or a Cut-Back Sub-Caption or whatever they call the thing in the low dens where motion-picture scenario-lizards do their dark work, which will run:-- AND SO, CALM AND GOLDEN, THE DAYS WENT BY, EACH FRAUGHT WITH HOPE AND YOUTH AND SWEETNESS, LINKING TWO YOUNG HEARTS IN SILKEN FETTERS FORGED BY THE LAUGHING LOVE-GOD. and the males in the audience will shift their chewing gum to the other cheek and take a firmer grip of their companion's hands and the man at the piano will play "Everybody wants a key to my cellar," or something equally appropriate, very soulfully and slowly, with a wistful eye on the half-smoked cigarette which he has parked on the lowest octave and intends finishing as soon as the picture is over. But I prefer the plain frank statement that it was the fourth day of the voyage. That is my story and I mean to stick to it. Samuel Marlowe, muffled in a bathrobe, came back to the state-room from his tub. His manner had the offensive jauntiness of the man who has had a cold bath when he might just as easily have had a hot one. He looked out of the porthole at the shimmering sea. He felt strong and happy and exuberant. It was not merely the spiritual pride induced by a cold bath that was uplifting this young man. The fact was that, as he towelled his glowing back, he had suddenly come to the decision that this very day he would propose to Wilhelmina Bennett. Yes, he would put his fortune to the test, to win or lose it all. True, he had only known her for four days, but what of that? Nothing in the way of modern progress is more remarkable than the manner in which the attitude of your lover has changed concerning proposals of marriage. When Samuel Marlowe's grandfather had convinced himself, after about a year and a half of respectful aloofness, that the emotion which he felt towards Samuel Marlowe's grandmother-to-be was love, the fashion of the period compelled him to approach the matter in a roundabout way. First, he spent an evening or two singing sentimental ballads, she accompanying him on the piano and the rest of the family sitting on the side-lines to see that no rough stuff was pulled. Having noted that she drooped her eyelashes and turned faintly pink when he came to the "Thee--only thee!" bit, he felt a mild sense of encouragement, strong enough to justify him in taking her sister aside next day and asking if the object of his affections ever happened to mention his name in the course of conversation. Further _pour-parlers_ having passed with her aunt, two more sisters, and her little brother, he felt that the moment had arrived when he might send her a volume of Shelley, with some of the passages marked in pencil. A few weeks later, he interviewed her father and obtained his consent to the paying of his addresses. And finally, after writing her a letter which began "Madam, you will not have been insensible to the fact that for some time past you have inspired in my bosom feelings deeper than those of ordinary friendship...." he waylaid her in the rose-garden and brought the thing off. How different is the behaviour of the modern young man. His courtship can hardly be called a courtship at all. His methods are those of Sir W. S. Gilbert's Alphonso. "Alphonso, who for cool assurance all creation licks, He up and said to Emily who has cheek enough for six: 'Miss Emily, I love you. Will you marry? Say the word!' And Emily said: 'Certainly, Alphonso, like a bird!'" Sam Marlowe was a warm supporter of the Alphonso method. He was a bright young man and did not require a year to make up his mind that Wilhelmina Bennett had been set apart by Fate from the beginning of time to be his bride. He had known it from the moment he saw her on the dock, and all the subsequent strolling, reading, talking, soup-drinking, tea-drinking, and shuffle-board-playing which they had done together had merely solidified his original impression. He loved this girl with all the force of a fiery nature--the fiery nature of the Marlowes was a by-word in Bruton Street, Berkeley Square--and something seemed to whisper that she loved him. At any rate she wanted somebody like Sir Galahad, and, without wishing to hurl bouquets at himself, he could not see where she could possibly get anyone liker Sir Galahad than himself. So, wind and weather permitting, Samuel Marlowe intended to propose to Wilhelmina Bennett this very day. He let down the trick basin which hung beneath the mirror and, collecting his shaving materials, began to lather his face. "I am the Bandolero!" sang Sam blithely through the soap. "I am, I am the Bandolero! Yes, yes, I am the Bandolero!" The untidy heap of bedclothes in the lower berth stirred restlessly. "Oh, God!" said Eustace Hignett thrusting out a tousled head. Sam regarded his cousin with commiseration. Horrid things had been happening to Eustace during the last few days, and it was quite a pleasant surprise each morning to find that he was still alive. "Feeling bad again, old man?" "I was feeling all right," replied Hignett churlishly, "until you began the farmyard imitations. What sort of a day is it?" "Glorious! The sea...." "Don't talk about the sea!" "Sorry! The sun is shining brighter than it has ever shone in the history of the race. Why don't you get up?" "Nothing will induce me to get up." "Well, go a regular buster and have an egg for breakfast." Eustace Hignett shuddered. He eyed Sam sourly. "You seem devilish pleased with yourself this morning!" he said censoriously. Sam dried the razor carefully and put it away. He hesitated. Then the desire to confide in somebody got the better of him. "The fact is," he said apologetically, "I'm in love!" "In love!" Eustace Hignett sat up and bumped his head sharply against the berth above him. "Has this been going on long?" "Ever since the voyage started." "I think you might have told me," said Eustace reproachfully. "I told you my troubles. Why did you not let me know that this awful thing had come upon you?" "Well, as a matter of fact, old man, during these last few days I had a notion that your mind was, so to speak, occupied elsewhere." "Who is she?" "Oh, a girl I met on board." "Don't do it!" said Eustace Hignett solemnly. "As a friend I entreat you not to do it. Take my advice, as a man who knows women, and don't do it!" "Don't do what?" "Propose to her. I can tell by the glitter in your eye that you are intending to propose to this girl--probably this morning." "Not this morning--after lunch. I always think one can do oneself more justice after lunch." "Don't do it. Women are the devil, whether they marry you or jilt you. Do you realise that women wear black evening dresses that have to be hooked up in a hurry when you are late for the theatre, and that, out of sheer wanton malignity, the hooks and eyes on those dresses are also made black? Do you realise...?" "Oh, I've thought it all out." "And take the matter of children. How would you like to become the father--and a mere glance around you will show you that the chances are enormously in favour of such a thing happening--of a boy with spectacles and protruding front teeth who asks questions all the time? Out of six small boys whom I saw when I came on board, four wore spectacles and had teeth like rabbits. The other two were equally revolting in different styles. How would you like to become the father...?" "There is no need to be indelicate," said Sam stiffly. "A man must take these chances." "Give her the miss in baulk," pleaded Hignett. "Stay down here for the rest of the voyage. You can easily dodge her when you get to Southampton. And, if she sends messages, say you're ill and can't be disturbed." Sam gazed at him, revolted. More than ever he began to understand how it was that a girl with ideals had broken off her engagement with this man. He finished dressing, and, after a satisfying breakfast, went on deck. § 2 It was, as he had said, a glorious morning. The sample which he had had through the porthole had not prepared him for the magic of it. The ship swam in a vast bowl of the purest blue on an azure carpet flecked with silver. It was a morning which impelled a man to great deeds, a morning which shouted to him to chuck his chest out and be romantic. The sight of Billie Bennett, trim and gleaming in a pale green sweater and white skirt had the effect of causing Marlowe to alter the programme which he had sketched out. Proposing to this girl was not a thing to be put off till after lunch. It was a thing to be done now and at once. The finest efforts of the finest cooks in the world could not put him in better form than he felt at present. "Good morning, Miss Bennett." "Good morning, Mr. Marlowe." "Isn't it a perfect day?" "Wonderful!" "It makes all the difference on board ship if the weather is fine." "Yes, doesn't it?" How strange it is that the great emotional scenes of history, one of which is coming along almost immediately, always begin in this prosaic way. Shakespeare tries to conceal the fact, but there can be little doubt that Romeo and Juliet edged into their balcony scene with a few remarks on the pleasantness of the morning. "Shall we walk round?" said Billie. Sam glanced about him. It was the time of day when the promenade deck was always full. Passengers in cocoons of rugs lay on chairs, waiting in a dull trance till the steward should arrive with the eleven o'clock soup. Others, more energetic, strode up and down. From the point of view of a man who wished to reveal his most sacred feelings to a beautiful girl, the place was practically a tube station during the rush hour. "It's so crowded," he said. "Let's go on to the upper deck." "All right. You can read to me. Go and fetch your Tennyson." Sam felt that fortune was playing into his hands. His four-days' acquaintance with the bard had been sufficient to show him that the man was there forty ways when it came to writing about love. You could open his collected works almost anywhere and shut your eyes and dab down your finger on some red-hot passage. A proposal of marriage is a thing which it is rather difficult to bring neatly into the ordinary run of conversation. It wants leading up to. But, if you once start reading poetry, especially Tennyson's, almost anything is apt to give you your cue. He bounded light-heartedly into the state-room, waking Eustace Hignett from an uneasy dose. "Now what?" said Eustace. "Where's that copy of Tennyson you gave me? I left it--ah, here it is. Well, see you later!" "Wait! What are you going to do?" "Oh, that girl I told you about," said Sam making for the door. "She wants me to read Tennyson to her on the upper deck." "Tennyson?" "Yes." "On the upper deck?" "Yes." "This is the end," said Eustace Hignett, turning his face to the wall. Sam raced up the companion-way as far as it went; then, going out on deck, climbed a flight of steps and found himself in the only part of the ship which was ever even comparatively private. The main herd of passengers preferred the promenade deck, two layers below. He threaded his way through a maze of boats, ropes, and curious-shaped steel structures which the architect of the ship seemed to have tacked on at the last moment in a spirit of sheer exuberance. Above him towered one of the funnels, before him a long, slender mast. He hurried on, and presently came upon Billie sitting on a garden seat, backed by the white roof of the smoke-room; beside this was a small deck which seemed to have lost its way and strayed up here all by itself. It was the deck on which one could occasionally see the patients playing an odd game with long sticks and bits of wood--not shuffleboard but something even lower in the mental scale. This morning, however, the devotees of this pastime were apparently under proper restraint, for the deck was empty. "This is jolly," he said sitting down beside the girl and drawing a deep breath of satisfaction. "Yes, I love this deck. It's so peaceful." "It's the only part of the ship where you can be reasonably sure of not meeting stout men in flannels and nautical caps. An ocean voyage always makes me wish that I had a private yacht." "It would be nice." "A private yacht," repeated Sam, sliding a trifle closer. "We would sail about, visiting desert islands which lay like jewels in the heart of tropic seas." "We?" "Most certainly we. It wouldn't be any fun if you were not there." "That's very complimentary." "Well, it wouldn't. I'm not fond of girls as a rule...." "Oh, aren't you?" "No!" said Sam decidedly. It was a point which he wished to make clear at the outset. "Not at all fond. My friends have often remarked upon it. A palmist once told me that I had one of those rare spiritual natures which cannot be satisfied with substitutes but must seek and seek till they find their soul-mate. When other men all round me were frittering away their emotions in idle flirtations which did not touch their deeper natures, I was ... I was ... well, I wasn't, if you see what I mean." "Oh, you wasn't ... weren't?" "No. Some day I knew I should meet the only girl I could possibly love, and then I would pour out upon her the stored-up devotion of a lifetime, lay an unblemished heart at her feet, fold her in my arms and say 'At last!'" "How jolly for her. Like having a circus all to oneself." "Well, yes," said Sam after a momentary pause. "When I was a child I always thought that that would be the most wonderful thing in the world." "The most wonderful thing in the world is love, a pure and consuming love, a love which...." "Oh, hello!" said a voice. All through this scene, right from the very beginning of it, Sam had not been able to rid himself of a feeling that there was something missing. The time and the place and the girl--they were all present and correct; nevertheless there was something missing, some familiar object which seemed to leave a gap. He now perceived that what had caused the feeling was the complete absence of Bream Mortimer. He was absent no longer. He was standing in front of them with one leg, his head lowered as if he were waiting for someone to scratch it. Sam's primary impulse was to offer him a nut. "Oh, hello, Bream!" said Billie. "Hullo!" said Sam. "Hello!" said Bream Mortimer. "Here you are!" There was a pause. "I thought you might be here," said Bream. "Yes, here we are," said Billie. "Yes, we're here," said Sam. There was another pause. "Mind if I join you?" said Bream. "N--no," said Billie. "N--no," said Sam. "No," said Billie again. "No ... that is to say ... oh no, no at all." There was a third pause. "On second thoughts," said Bream, "I believe I'll take a stroll on the promenade deck if you don't mind." They said they did not mind. Bream Mortimer, having bumped his head twice against overhanging steel ropes, melted away. "Who is that fellow?" demanded Sam wrathfully. "He's the son of father's best friend." Sam started. Somehow this girl had always been so individual to him that he had never thought of her having a father. "We have known each other all our lives," continued Billie. "Father thinks a tremendous lot of Bream. I suppose it was because Bream was sailing by her that father insisted on my coming over on this boat. I'm in disgrace, you know I was cabled for and had to sail at a few days' notice. I...." "Oh, hello!" "Why, Bream!" said Billie looking at him as he stood on the old spot in the same familiar attitude with rather less affection than the son of her father's best friend might have expected. "I thought you said you were going down to the promenade deck. "I did go down to the promenade deck. And I'd hardly got there when a fellow who's getting up the ship's concert to-morrow night nobbled me to do something for it. I said I could only do conjuring tricks and juggling and so on, and he said all right, do conjuring tricks and juggling, then. He wanted to know if I knew anyone else who would help. I came up to ask you," he said to Sam, "if you would do something." "No," said Sam. "I won't." "He's got a man who's going to lecture on deep-sea fish and a couple of women who both want to sing 'The Rosary' but he's still a turn or two short. Sure you won't rally round?" "Quite sure." "Oh, all right." Bream Mortimer hovered wistfully above them. "It's a great morning, isn't it?" "Yes," said Sam. "Oh, Bream!" said Billie. "Hello?" "Do be a pet and go and talk to Jane Hubbard. I'm sure she must be feeling lonely. I left her all by herself down on the next deck." A look of alarm spread itself over Bream's face. "Jane Hubbard! Oh, say, have a heart!" "She's a very nice girl." "She's so darned dynamic. She looks at you as if you were a giraffe or something and she would like to take a pot at you with a rifle." "Nonsense! Run along. Get her to tell you some of her big-game hunting experiences. They are most interesting." Bream drifted sadly away. "I don't blame Miss Hubbard," said Sam. "What do you mean?" "Looking at him as if she wanted to pot at him with a rifle. I should like to do it myself." "Oh, don't let's talk about Bream. Read me some Tennyson." Sam opened the book very willingly. Infernal Bream Mortimer had absolutely shot to pieces the spell which had begun to fall on them at the beginning of their conversation. Only by reading poetry, it seemed to him, could it be recovered. And when he saw the passage at which the volume had opened he realised that his luck was in. Good old Tennyson! He was all right. He had the stuff. You could rely on him every time. He cleared his throat. "Oh let the solid ground Not fail beneath my feet Before my life has found What some have found so sweet; Then let come what come may, What matter if I go mad, I shall have had my day. Let the sweet heavens endure, Not close and darken above me Before I am quite quite sure That there is one to love me...." This was absolutely topping. It was like diving off a spring-board. He could see the girl sitting with a soft smile on her face, her eyes, big and dreamy, gazing out over the sunlit sea. He laid down the book and took her hand. "There is something," he began in a low voice, "which I have been trying to say ever since we met, something which I think you must have read in my eyes." Her head was bent. She did not withdraw her hand. "Until this voyage began," he went on, "I did not know what life meant. And then I saw you! It was like the gate of heaven opening. You're the dearest girl I ever met, and you can bet I'll never forget...." He stopped. "I'm not trying to make it rhyme," he said apologetically. "Billie, don't think me silly ... I mean ... if you had the merest notion, dearest ... I don't know what's the matter with me ... Billie, darling, you are the only girl in the world! I have been looking for you for years and years and I have found you at last, my soul-mate. Surely this does not come as a surprise to you? That is, I mean, you must have seen that I've been keen.... There's that damned Walt Mason stuff again!" His eyes fell on the volume beside him and he uttered an exclamation of enlightenment. "It's those poems!" he cried. "I've been boning them up to such an extent that they've got me doing it too. What I'm trying to say is, Will you marry me?" She was drooping towards him. Her face was very sweet and tender, her eyes misty. He slid an arm about her waist. She raised her lips to his. § 3 Suddenly she drew herself away, a cloud on her face. "Darling," she said, "I've a confession to make." "A confession? You? Nonsense!" "I can't get rid of a horrible thought. I was wondering if this will last." "Our love? Don't be afraid that it will fade ... I mean ... why, it's so vast, it's bound to last ... that is to say, of course it will." She traced a pattern on the deck with her shoe. "I'm afraid of myself. You see, once before--and it was not so very long ago,--I thought I had met my ideal, but...." Sam laughed heartily. "Are you worrying about that absurd business of poor old Eustace Hignett?" She started violently. "You know!" "Of course! He told me himself." "Do you know him? Where did you meet him?" "I've known him all my life. He's my cousin. As a matter of fact, we are sharing a state-room on board now." "Eustace is on board! Oh, this is awful! What shall I do when I meet him?" "Oh, pass it off with a light laugh and a genial quip. Just say: 'Oh, here you are!' or something. You know the sort of thing." "It will be terrible." "Not a bit of it. Why should you feel embarrassed? He must have realised by now that you acted in the only possible way. It was absurd his ever expecting you to marry him. I mean to say, just look at it dispassionately ... Eustace ... poor old Eustace ... and _you_! The Princess and the Swineherd!" "Does Mr. Hignett keep pigs?" she asked, surprised. "I mean that poor old Eustace is so far below you, darling, that, with the most charitable intentions, one can only look on his asking you to marry him in the light of a record exhibition of pure nerve. A dear, good fellow, of course, but hopeless where the sterner realities of life are concerned. A man who can't even stop a dog-fight! In a world which is practically one seething mass of fighting dogs, how could you trust yourself to such a one? Nobody is fonder of Eustace Hignett than I am, but ... well, I mean to say!" "I see what you mean. He really wasn't my ideal." "Not by a mile!" She mused, her chin in her hand. "Of course, he was quite a dear in a lot of ways." "Oh, a splendid chap," said Sam tolerantly. "Have you ever heard him sing? I think what first attracted me to him was his beautiful voice. He really sings extraordinarily well." A slight but definite spasm of jealousy afflicted Sam. He had no objection to praising poor old Eustace within decent limits, but the conversation seemed to him to be confining itself too exclusively to one subject. "Yes?" he said. "Oh yes, I've heard him sing. Not lately. He does drawing-room ballads and all that sort of thing still, I suppose?" "Have you ever heard him sing 'My love is like a glowing tulip that in an old-world garden grows'?" "I have not had that advantage," replied Sam stiffly. "But anyone can sing a drawing-room ballad. Now something funny, something that will make people laugh, something that really needs putting across ... that's a different thing altogether." "Do you sing that sort of thing?" "People have been good enough to say...." "Then," said Billie decidedly, "you must certainly do something at the ship's concert to-morrow! The idea of your trying to hide your light under a bushel! I will tell Bream to count on you. He is an excellent accompanist. He can accompany you." "Yes, but ... well, I don't know," said Sam doubtfully. He could not help remembering that the last time he had sung in public had been at a house-supper at school, seven years before, and that on that occasion somebody whom it was a lasting grief to him that he had been unable to identify had thrown a pat of butter at him. "Of course you must sing," said Billie. "I'll tell Bream when I go down to lunch. What will you sing?" "Well--er--" "Well, I'm sure it will be wonderful whatever it is. You are so wonderful in every way. You remind me of one of the heroes of old!" Sam's discomposure vanished. In the first place, this was much more the sort of conversation which he felt the situation indicated. In the second place he had remembered that there was no need for him to sing at all. He could do that imitation of Frank Tinney which had been such a hit at the Trinity smoker. He was on safe ground there. He knew he was good. He clasped the girl to him and kissed her sixteen times. § 4 Billie Bennett stood in front of the mirror in her state-room dreamily brushing the glorious red hair that fell in a tumbled mass about her shoulders. On the lounge beside her, swathed in a business-like grey kimono, Jane Hubbard watched her, smoking a cigarette. Jane Hubbard was a splendid specimen of bronzed, strapping womanhood. Her whole appearance spoke of the open air and the great wide spaces and all that sort of thing. She was a thoroughly wholesome, manly girl, about the same age as Billie, with a strong chin and an eye that had looked leopards squarely in the face and caused them to withdraw abashed into the undergrowth, or where-ever it is that leopards withdraw when abashed. One could not picture Jane Hubbard flirting lightly at garden parties, but one could picture her very readily arguing with a mutinous native bearer, or with a firm touch putting sweetness and light into the soul of a refractory mule. Boadicea in her girlhood must have been rather like Jane Hubbard. She smoked contentedly. She had rolled her cigarette herself with one hand, a feat beyond the powers of all but the very greatest. She was pleasantly tired after walking eighty-five times round the promenade deck. Soon she would go to bed and fall asleep the moment her head touched the pillow. But meanwhile she lingered here, for she felt that Billie had something to confide in her. "Jane," said Billie, "have you ever been in love?" Jane Hubbard knocked the ash off her cigarette. "Not since I was eleven," she said in her deep musical voice. "He was my music-master. He was forty-seven and completely bald, but there was an appealing weakness in him which won my heart. He was afraid of cats, I remember." Billie gathered her hair into a molten bundle and let it run through her fingers. "Oh, Jane!" she exclaimed. "Surely you don't like weak men. I like a man who is strong and brave and wonderful." "I can't stand brave men," said Jane, "it makes them so independent. I could only love a man who would depend on me in everything. Sometimes, when I have been roughing it out in the jungle," she went on rather wistfully, "I have had my dreams of some gentle clinging man who would put his hand in mine and tell me all his poor little troubles and let me pet and comfort him and bring the smiles back to his face. I'm beginning to want to settle down. After all there are other things for a woman to do in this life besides travelling and big-game hunting. I should like to go into Parliament. And, if I did that, I should practically have to marry. I mean, I should have to have a man to look after the social end of life and arrange parties and receptions and so on, and sit ornamentally at the head of my table. I can't imagine anything jollier than marriage under conditions like that. When I came back a bit done up after a long sitting at the House, he would mix me a whisky-and-soda and read poetry to me or prattle about all the things he had been doing during the day.... Why, it would be ideal!" Jane Hubbard gave a little sigh. Her fine eyes gazed dreamily at a smoke ring which she had sent floating towards the ceiling. "Jane," said Billie. "I believe you're thinking of somebody definite. Who is he?" The big-game huntress blushed. The embarrassment which she exhibited made her look manlier than ever. "I don't know his name." "But there is really someone?" "Yes." "How splendid! Tell me about him." Jane Hubbard clasped her strong hands and looked down at the floor. "I met him on the Subway a couple of days before I left New York. You know how crowded the Subway is at the rush hour. I had a seat, of course, but this poor little fellow--_so_ good-looking, my dear! he reminded me of the pictures of Lord Byron--was hanging from a strap and being jerked about till I thought his poor little arms would be wrenched out of their sockets. And he looked so unhappy, as though he had some secret sorrow. I offered him my seat, but he wouldn't take it. A couple of stations later, however, the man next to me got out and he sat down and we got into conversation. There wasn't time to talk much. I told him I had been down-town fetching an elephant-gun which I had left to be mended. He was so prettily interested when I showed him the mechanism. We got along famously. But--oh, well, it was just another case of ships that pass in the night--I'm afraid I've been boring you." "Oh, Jane! You haven't! You see ... you see, I'm in love myself." "I had an idea you were," said her friend looking at her critically. "You've been refusing your oats the last few days, and that's a sure sign. Is he that fellow that's always around with you and who looks like a parrot?" "Bream Mortimer? Good gracious, no!" cried Billie indignantly. "As if I should fall in love with Bream!" "When I was out in British East Africa," said Miss Hubbard, "I had a bird that was the living image of Bream Mortimer. I taught him to whistle 'Annie Laurie' and to ask for his supper in three native dialects. Eventually he died of the pip, poor fellow. Well, if it isn't Bream Mortimer, who is it?" "His name is Marlowe. He's tall and handsome and very strong-looking. He reminds me of a Greek god." "Ugh!" said Miss Hubbard. "Jane, we're engaged." "No!" said the huntress, interested. "When can I meet him?" "I'll introduce you to-morrow I'm so happy." "That's fine!" "And yet, somehow," said Billie, plaiting her hair, "do you ever have presentiments? I can't get rid of an awful feeling that something's going to happen to spoil everything." "What could spoil everything?" "Well, I think him so wonderful, you know. Suppose he were to do anything to blur the image I have formed of him." "Oh, he won't. You said he was one of those strong men, didn't you? They always run true to form. They never do anything except be strong." Billie looked meditatively at her reflection in the glass. "You know I thought I was in love once before, Jane." "Yes?" "We were going to be married and I had actually gone to the church. And I waited and waited and he didn't come; and what do you think had happened?" "What?" "His mother had stolen his trousers." Jane Hubbard laughed heartily. "It's nothing to laugh at," said Billie seriously "It was a tragedy. I had always thought him romantic, and when this happened the scales seemed to fall from my eyes. I saw that I had made a mistake." "And you broke off the engagement?" "Of course!" "I think you were hard on him. A man can't help his mother stealing his trousers." "No. But when he finds they're gone, he can 'phone to the tailor for some more or borrow the janitor's or do _something_. But he simply stayed where he was and didn't do a thing. Just because he was too much afraid of his mother to tell her straight out that he meant to be married that day." "Now that," said Miss Hubbard, "is just the sort of trait in a man which would appeal to me. I like a nervous, shrinking man." "I don't. Besides, it made him seem so ridiculous, and--I don't know why it is--I can't forgive a man for looking ridiculous. Thank goodness, my darling Sam couldn't look ridiculous, even if he tried. He's wonderful, Jane. He reminds me of a knight of the Round Table. You ought to see his eyes flash." Miss Hubbard got up and stretched herself with a yawn. "Well, I'll be on the promenade deck after breakfast to-morrow. If you can arrange to have him flash his eyes then--say between nine-thirty and ten--I shall be delighted to watch them." CHAPTER V PERSECUTION OF EUSTACE "Good God!" cried Eustace Hignett. He stared at the figure which loomed above him in the fading light which came through the porthole of the state-room. The hour was seven-thirty, and he had just woken from a troubled doze, full of strange nightmares, and for the moment he thought that he must still be dreaming, for the figure before him could have walked straight into any nightmare and no questions asked. Then suddenly he became aware that it was his cousin, Samuel Marlowe. As in the historic case of father in the pigstye, he could tell him by his hat. But why was he looking like that? Was it simply some trick of the uncertain light, or was his face really black and had his mouth suddenly grown to six times its normal size and become a vivid crimson? Sam turned. He had been looking at himself in the mirror with a satisfaction which, to the casual observer, his appearance would not have seemed to justify. Hignett had not been suffering from a delusion. His cousin's face was black; and, even as he turned, he gave it a dab with a piece of burnt cork and made it blacker. "Hullo! You awake?" he said, and switched on the light. Eustace Hignett shied like a startled horse. His friend's profile, seen dimly, had been disconcerting enough. Full face, he was a revolting object. Nothing that Eustace Hignett had encountered in his recent dreams--and they had included such unusual fauna as elephants in top hats and running shorts--had affected him so profoundly. Sam's appearance smote him like a blow. It seemed to take him straight into a different and a dreadful world. "What ... what ... what...?" he gurgled. Sam squinted at himself in the glass and added a touch of black to his nose. "How do I look?" Eustace Hignett began to fear that his cousin's reason must have become unseated. He could not conceive of any really sane man, looking like that, being anxious to be told how he looked. "Are my lips red enough? It's for the ship's concert, you know. It starts in half-an-hour, though I believe I'm not on till the second part. Speaking as a friend, would you put a touch more black round the ears, or are they all right?" Curiosity replaced apprehension in Hignett's mind. "What on earth are you doing performing at the ship's concert?" "Oh, they roped me in. It got about somehow that I was a valuable man, and they wouldn't take no." Sam deepened the colour of his ears. "As a matter of fact," he said casually, "my fiancée made rather a point of my doing something." A sharp yelp from the lower berth proclaimed the fact that the significance of the remark had not been lost on Eustace. "Your fiancée?" "The girl I'm engaged to. Didn't I tell you about that? Yes, I'm engaged." Eustace sighed heavily. "I feared the worst. Tell me, who is she?" "Didn't I tell you her name?" "No." "Curious! I must have forgotten." He hummed an airy strain as he blackened the tip of his nose. "It's rather a curious coincidence, really. Her name is Bennett." "She may be a relation." "That's true. Of course, girls do have relations." "What is her first name?" "That is another rather remarkable thing. It's Wilhelmina." "Wilhelmina!" "Of course, there must be hundreds of girls in the world called Wilhelmina Bennett, but still it is a coincidence." "What colour is her hair?" demanded Eustace Hignett in a hollow voice. "Her hair! What colour is it?" "Her hair? Now, let me see. You ask me what colour is her hair. Well, you might call it auburn ... or russet ... or you might call it Titian...." "Never mind what I might call it. Is it red?" "Red? Why, yes. That is a very good description of it. Now that you put it to me like that, it _is_ red." "Has she a trick of grabbing at you suddenly, when she gets excited, like a kitten with a ball of wool?" "Yes. Yes, she has." Eustace Hignett uttered a sharp cry. "Sam," he said, "can you bear a shock?" "I'll have a dash at it." "Brace up!" "I'm ready." "The girl you are engaged to is the same girl who promised to marry _me_." "Well, well!" said Sam. There was a silence. "Awfully sorry, of course, and all that," said Sam. "Don't apologise to _me_!" said Eustace. "My poor old chap, my only feeling towards you is one of the purest and profoundest pity." He reached out and pressed Sam's hand. "I regard you as a toad beneath the harrow!" "Well, I suppose that's one way of offering congratulations and cheery good wishes." "And on top of that," went on Eustace, deeply moved, "you have got to sing at the ship's concert." "Why shouldn't I sing at the ship's concert?" "My dear old man, you have many worthy qualities, but you must know that you can't sing. You can't sing for nuts! I don't want to discourage you, but, long ago as it is, you can't have forgotten what an ass you made of yourself at that house-supper at school. Seeing you up against it like this, I regret that I threw a lump of butter at you on that occasion, though at the time it seemed the only course to pursue." Sam started. "Was it you who threw that bit of butter?" "It was." "I wish I'd known! You silly chump, you ruined my collar." "Ah, well, it's seven years ago. You would have had to send it to the wash anyhow by this time. But don't let us brood on the past. Let us put our heads together and think how we can get you out of this terrible situation." "I don't want to get out of it. I confidently expect to be the hit of the evening." "The hit of the evening! You! Singing!" "I'm not going to sing. I'm going to do that imitation of Frank Tinney which I did at the Trinity smoker. You haven't forgotten that? You were at the piano taking the part of the conductor of the orchestra. What a riot I was--we were! I say, Eustace, old man, I suppose you don't feel well enough to come up now and take your old part? You could do it without a rehearsal. You remember how it went.... 'Hullo, Ernest!' 'Hullo, Frank!' Why not come along?" "The only piano I will ever sit at will be one firmly fixed on a floor that does not heave and wobble under me." "Nonsense! The boat's as steady as a rock now. The sea's like a mill-pond." "Nevertheless, thanking you for your suggestion, no!" "Oh, well, then I shall have to get on as best I can with that fellow Mortimer. We've been rehearsing all the afternoon, and he seems to have the hang of the thing. But he won't be really right. He has no pep, no vim. Still, if you won't ... well, I think I'll be getting along to his state-room. I told him I would look in for a last rehearsal." The door closed behind Sam, and Eustace Hignett, lying on his back, gave himself up to melancholy meditation. He was deeply disturbed by his cousin's sad story. He knew what it meant being engaged to Wilhelmina Bennett. It was like being taken aloft in a balloon and dropped with a thud on the rocks. His reflections were broken by the abrupt opening of the door. Sam rushed in. Eustace peered anxiously out of his berth. There was too much burnt cork on his cousin's face to allow of any real registering of emotion, but he could tell from his manner that all was not well. "What's the matter?" Sam sank down on the lounge. "The bounder has quit!" "The bounder? What bounder?" "There is only one! Bream Mortimer, curse him! There may be others whom thoughtless critics rank as bounders, but he is the only man really deserving of the title. He refuses to appear! He has walked out on the act! He has left me flat! I went into his state-room just now, as arranged, and the man was lying on his bunk, groaning." "I thought you said the sea was like a mill-pond." "It wasn't that! He's perfectly fit. But it seems that the silly ass took it into his head to propose to Billie just before dinner--apparently he's loved her for years in a silent, self-effacing way--and of course she told him that she was engaged to me, and the thing upset him to such an extent that he says the idea of sitting down at a piano and helping me give an imitation of Frank Tinney revolts him. He says he intends to spend the evening in bed, reading Schopenhauer I hope it chokes him!" "But this is splendid! This lets you out." "What do you mean? Lets me out?" "Why, now you won't be able to appear. Oh, you will be thankful for this in years to come." "Won't I appear! Won't I dashed well appear! Do you think I'm going to disappoint that dear girl when she is relying on me? I would rather die." "But you can't appear without a pianist." "I've got a pianist." "You have?" "Yes. A little undersized shrimp of a fellow with a green face and ears like water-wings." "I don't think I know him." "Yes, you do. He's you!" "Me!" "Yes, you. You are going to sit at the piano to-night." "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but it's impossible. I gave you my views on the subject just now." "You've altered them." "I haven't." "Well, you soon will, and I'll tell you why. If you don't get up out of that damned berth you've been roosting in all your life, I'm going to ring for J. B. Midgeley and I'm going to tell him to bring me a bit of dinner in here and I'm going to eat it before your eyes." "But you've had dinner." "Well, I'll have another. I feel just ready for a nice fat pork chop...." "Stop! Stop!" "A nice fat pork chop with potatoes and lots of cabbage," repeated Sam firmly. "And I shall eat it here on this very lounge. Now how do we go?" "You wouldn't do that!" said Eustace piteously. "I would and will." "But I shouldn't be any good at the piano. I've forgotten how the thing used to go." "You haven't done anything of the kind. I come in and say 'Hullo, Ernest!' and you say 'Hullo, Frank!' and then you help me tell the story about the Pullman car. A child could do your part of it." "Perhaps there is some child on board...." "No. I want you. I shall feel safe with you. We've done it together before." "But, honestly, I really don't think ... it isn't as if...." Sam rose and extended a finger towards the bell. "Stop! Stop!" cried Eustace Hignett. "I'll do it!" Sam withdrew his finger. "Good!" he said. "We've just got time for a rehearsal while you're dressing. 'Hullo, Ernest!'" "'Hullo, Frank,'" said Eustace Hignett brokenly as he searched for his unfamiliar trousers. CHAPTER VI SCENE AT A SHIP'S CONCERT Ships' concerts are given in aid of the Seamen's Orphans and Widows, and, after one has been present at a few of them, one seems to feel that any right-thinking orphan or widow would rather jog along and take a chance of starvation than be the innocent cause of such things. They open with a long speech from the master of the ceremonies--so long, as a rule, that it is only the thought of what is going to happen afterwards that enables the audience to bear it with fortitude. This done, the amateur talent is unleashed, and the grim work begins. It was not till after the all too brief intermission for rest and recuperation that the newly-formed team of Marlowe and Hignett was scheduled to appear. Previous to this there had been dark deeds done in the quiet saloon. The lecturer on deep-sea fish had fulfilled his threat and spoken at great length on a subject which, treated by a master of oratory, would have palled on the audience after ten or fifteen minutes; and at the end of fifteen minutes this speaker had only just got past the haddocks and was feeling his way tentatively through the shrimps. "The Rosary" had been sung and there was an uneasy doubt as to whether it was not going to be sung again after the interval--the latest rumour being that the second of the rival lady singers had proved adamant to all appeals and intended to fight the thing out on the lines she had originally chosen if they put her in irons. A young man had recited "Gunga Din" and, wilfully misinterpreting the gratitude of the audience that it was over for a desire for more, had followed it with "Fuzzy-Wuzzy." His sister--these things run in families--had sung "My Little Gray Home in the West"--rather sombrely, for she had wanted to sing "The Rosary," and, with the same obtuseness which characterised her brother, had come back and rendered plantation songs. The audience was now examining its programmes in the interval of silence in order to ascertain the duration of the sentence still remaining unexpired. It was shocked to read the following:-- 7. A Little Imitation......S. Marlowe. All over the saloon you could see fair women and brave men wilting in their seats. Imitation...! The word, as Keats would have said, was like a knell! Many of these people were old travellers and their minds went back wincingly, as one recalls forgotten wounds, to occasions when performers at ships' concerts had imitated whole strings of Dickens' characters or, with the assistance of a few hats and a little false hair, had endeavoured to portray Napoleon, Bismarck, Shakespeare, and other of the famous dead. In this printed line on the programme there was nothing to indicate the nature or scope of the imitation which this S. Marlowe proposed to inflict upon them. They could only sit and wait and hope that it would be short. There was a sinking of hearts as Eustace Hignett moved down the room and took his place at the piano. A pianist! This argued more singing. The more pessimistic began to fear that the imitation was going to be one of those imitations of well-known opera artistes which, though rare, do occasionally add to the horrors of ships' concerts. They stared at Hignett apprehensively. There seemed to be something ominous in the man's very aspect. His face was very pale and set, the face of one approaching a task at which his humanity shudders. They could not know that the pallor of Eustace Hignett was due entirely to the slight tremor which, even on the calmest nights, the engines of an ocean liner produce in the flooring of a dining saloon, and to that faint, yet well-defined, smell of cooked meats which clings to a room where a great many people have recently been eating a great many meals. A few beads of cold perspiration were clinging to Eustace Hignett's brow. He looked straight before him with unseeing eyes. He was thinking hard of the Sahara. So tense was Eustace's concentration that he did not see Billie Bennett, seated in the front row. Billie had watched him enter with a little thrill of embarrassment. She wished that she had been content with one of the seats at the back. But Jane Hubbard had insisted on the front row. She always had a front-row seat at witch dances in Africa, and the thing had become a habit. In order to avoid recognition for as long as possible, Billie now put up her fan and turned to Jane. She was surprised to see that her friend was staring eagerly before her with a fixity almost equal to that of Eustace. Under her breath she muttered an exclamation of surprise in one of the lesser-known dialects of Northern Nigeria. "Billie!" she whispered sharply. "What _is_ the matter, Jane?" "Who is that man at the piano? Do you know him?" "As a matter of fact, I do," said Billie. "His name is Hignett. Why?" "It's the man I met on the Subway!" She breathed a sigh. "Poor little fellow, how miserable he looks!" At this moment their conversation was interrupted. Eustace Hignett, pulling himself together with a painful effort, raised his hands and struck a crashing chord, and, as he did so, there appeared through the door at the far end of the saloon a figure at the sight of which the entire audience started convulsively with the feeling that a worse thing had befallen them than even they had looked for. The figure was richly clad in some scarlet material. Its face was a grisly black and below the nose appeared what seemed a horrible gash. It advanced towards them, smoking a cigar. "Hullo, Ernest," it said. And then it seemed to pause expectantly, as though desiring some reply. Dead silence reigned in the saloon. "Hullo, Ernest!" Those nearest the piano--and nobody more quickly than Jane Hubbard--now observed that the white face of the man on the stool had grown whiter still. His eyes gazed out glassily from under his damp brow. He looked like a man who was seeing some ghastly sight. The audience sympathised with him. They felt like that, too. In all human plans there is ever some slight hitch, some little miscalculation which just makes all the difference. A moment's thought should have told Eustace Hignett that a half-smoked cigar was one of the essential properties to any imitation of the eminent Mr. Tinney; but he had completely overlooked the fact. The cigar came as an absolute surprise to him and it could not have affected him more powerfully if it had been a voice from the tomb. He stared at it pallidly, like Macbeth at the ghost of Banquo. It was a strong, lively young cigar, and its curling smoke played lightly about his nostrils. His jaw fell. His eyes protruded. He looked for a long moment like one of those deep-sea fishes concerning which the recent lecturer had spoken so searchingly. Then with the cry of a stricken animal, he bounded from his seat and fled for the deck. There was a rustle at Billie's side as Jane Hubbard rose and followed him. Jane was deeply stirred. Even as he sat, looking so pale and piteous, at the piano, her big heart had gone out to him, and now, in his moment of anguish, he seemed to bring to the surface everything that was best and manliest in her nature. Thrusting aside with one sweep of her powerful arm a steward who happened to be between her and the door, she raced in pursuit. Sam Marlowe had watched his cousin's dash for the open with a consternation so complete that his senses seemed to have left him. A general, deserted by his men on some stricken field, might have felt something akin to his emotion. Of all the learned professions, the imitation of Mr. Frank Tinney is the one which can least easily be carried through single-handed. The man at the piano, the leader of the orchestra, is essential. He is the life-blood of the entertainment. Without him, nothing can be done. For an instant Sam stood there, gaping blankly. Then the open door of the saloon seemed to beckon an invitation. He made for it, reached it, passed through it. That concluded his efforts in aid of the Seamen's Orphans and Widows. The spell which had lain on the audience broke. This imitation seemed to them to possess in an extraordinary measure the one quality which renders amateur imitations tolerable, that of brevity. They had seen many amateur imitations, but never one as short as this. The saloon echoed with their applause. It brought no balm to Samuel Marlowe. He did not hear it. He had fled for refuge to his state-room and was lying in the lower berth, chewing the pillow, a soul in torment. CHAPTER VII SUNDERED HEARTS There was a tap at the door. Sam sat up dizzily. He had lost all count of time. "Who's that?" "I have a note for you, sir." It was the level voice of J. B. Midgeley, the steward. The stewards of the White Star Line, besides being the civillest and most obliging body of men in the world, all have soft and pleasant voices. A White Star steward, waking you up at six-thirty, to tell you that your bath is ready, when you wanted to sleep on till twelve, is the nearest human approach to the nightingale. "A what?" "A note, sir." Sam jumped up and switched on the light. He went to the door and took the note from J. B. Midgeley, who, his mission accomplished, retired in an orderly manner down the passage. Sam looked at the letter with a thrill. He had never seen the handwriting before, but, with the eye of love, he recognised it. It was just the sort of hand he would have expected Billie to write, round and smooth and flowing, the writing of a warm-hearted girl. He tore open the envelope. "Please come up to the top deck. I want to speak to you." Sam could not disguise it from himself that he was a little disappointed. I don't know if you see anything wrong with the letter, but the way Sam looked at it was that, for a first love-letter, it might have been longer and perhaps a shade warmer. And, without running any risk of writer's cramp, she might have signed it. However, these were small matters. No doubt the dear girl had been in a hurry and so forth. The important point was that he was going to see her. When a man's afraid, sings the bard, a beautiful maid is a cheering sight to see; and the same truth holds good when a man has made an exhibition of himself at a ship's concert. A woman's gentle sympathy, that was what Samuel Marlowe wanted more than anything else at the moment. That, he felt, was what the doctor ordered. He scrubbed the burnt cork off his face with all possible speed and changed his clothes and made his way to the upper deck. It was like Billie, he felt, to have chosen this spot for their meeting. It would be deserted and it was hallowed for them both by sacred associations. She was standing at the rail, looking out over the water. The moon was quite full. Out on the horizon to the south its light shone on the sea, making it look like the silver beach of some distant fairy island. The girl appeared to be wrapped in thought and it was not till the sharp crack of Sam's head against an overhanging stanchion announced his approach, that she turned. "Oh, is that you?" "Yes." "You've been a long time." "It wasn't an easy job," explained Sam, "getting all that burnt cork off. You've no notion how the stuff sticks. You have to use butter...." She shuddered. "Don't!" "But I did. You have to with burnt cork." "Don't tell me these horrible things." Her voice rose almost hysterically. "I never want to hear the words burnt cork mentioned again as long as I live." "I feel exactly the same." Sam moved to her side. "Darling," he said in a low voice, "it was like you to ask me to meet you here. I know what you were thinking. You thought that I should need sympathy. You wanted to pet me, to smooth my wounded feelings, to hold me in your arms and tell me that, as we loved each other, what did anything else matter?" "I didn't." "You didn't?" "No, I didn't." "Oh, you didn't? I thought you did!" He looked at her wistfully. "I thought," he said, "that possibly you might have wished to comfort me. I have been through a great strain. I have had a shock...." "And what about me?" she demanded passionately. "Haven't I had a shock?" He melted at once. "Have you had a shock too? Poor little thing! Sit down and tell me all about it." She looked away from him, her face working. "Can't you understand what a shock I have had? I thought you were the perfect knight." "Yes, isn't it?" "Isn't what?" "I thought you said it was a perfect night." "I said I thought _you_ were the perfect knight." "Oh, ah!" A sailor crossed the deck, a dim figure in the shadows, went over to a sort of raised summerhouse with a brass thingummy in it, fooled about for a moment, and went away again. Sailors earn their money easily. "Yes?" said Sam when he had gone. "I forget what I was saying." "Something about my being the perfect knight." "Yes. I thought you were." "That's good." "But you're not!" "No?" "No!" "Oh!" Silence fell. Sam was feeling hurt and bewildered. He could not understand her mood. He had come up expecting to be soothed and comforted and she was like a petulant iceberg. Cynically, he recalled some lines of poetry which he had had to write out a hundred times on one occasion at school as a punishment for having introduced a white mouse into chapel. "Oh, woman, in our hours of ease, Un-something, something, something, please. When tiddly-umpty umpty brow, A something something something thou!" He had forgotten the exact words, but the gist of it had been that Woman, however she might treat a man in times of prosperity, could be relied on to rally round and do the right thing when he was in trouble. How little the poet had known woman. "Why not?" he said huffily. She gave a little sob. "I put you on a pedestal and I find you have feet of clay. You have blurred the image which I formed of you. I can never think of you again without picturing you as you stood in that saloon, stammering and helpless...." "Well, what can you do when your pianist runs out on you?" "You could have done _something_!" The words she had spoken only yesterday to Jane Hubbard came back to her. "I can't forgive a man for looking ridiculous. Oh, what, what," she cried, "induced you to try to give an imitation of Bert Williams?" Sam started, stung to the quick. "It wasn't Bert Williams. It was Frank Tinney!" "Well, how was I to know?" "I did my best," said Sam sullenly. "That is the awful thought." "I did it for your sake." "I know. It gives me a horrible sense of guilt." She shuddered again. Then suddenly, with the nervous quickness of a woman unstrung, thrust a small black golliwog into his hand. "Take it!" "What's this?" "You bought it for me yesterday at the barber's shop. It is the only present which you have given me. Take it back." "I don't want it. I shouldn't know what to do with it." "You must take it," she said in a low voice. "It is a symbol." "A what?" "A symbol of our broken love." "I don't see how you make that out. It's a golliwog." "I can never marry you now." "What! Good heavens! Don't be absurd." "I can't!" "Oh, go on, have a dash at it," he said encouragingly, though his heart was sinking. She shook her head. "No, I couldn't." "Oh, hang it all!" "I couldn't. I'm a very strange girl...." "You're a very silly girl...." "I don't see what right you have to say that," she flared. "I don't see what right you have to say you can't marry me and try to load me up with golliwogs," he retorted with equal heat. "Oh, can't you understand?" "No, I'm dashed if I can." She looked at him despondently. "When I said I would marry you, you were a hero to me. You stood to me for everything that was noble and brave and wonderful. I had only to shut my eyes to conjure up the picture of you as you dived off the rail that morning. Now--" her voice trembled "--if I shut my eyes now, I can only see a man with a hideous black face making himself the laughing stock of the ship. How could I marry you, haunted by that picture?" "But, good heavens, you talk as though I made a habit of blacking up! You talk as though you expected me to come to the altar smothered in burnt cork." "I shall always think of you as I saw you to-night." She looked at him sadly. "There's a bit of black still on your left ear." He tried to take her hand. But she drew it away. He fell back as if struck. "So this is the end," he muttered. "Yes. It's partly on your ear and partly on your cheek." "So this is the end," he repeated. "You had better go below and ask your steward to give you some more butter." He laughed bitterly. "Well, I might have expected it. I might have known what would happen! Eustace warned me. Eustace was right. He knows women--as I do now. Women! What mighty ills have not been done by woman? Who was't betrayed the what's-its-name? A woman! Who lost ... lost ... who lost ... who--er--and so on? A woman.... So all is over! There is nothing to be said but good-bye?" "No." "Good-bye, then, Miss Bennett!" "Good-bye," said Billie sadly. "I--I'm sorry." "Don't mention it!" "You do understand, don't you?" "You have made everything perfectly clear." "I hope--I hope you won't be unhappy." "Unhappy!" Sam produced a strangled noise from his larynx like the cry of a shrimp in pain. "Unhappy! Ha! ha! I'm not unhappy! Whatever gave you that idea? I'm smiling! I'm laughing! I feel I've had a merciful escape. Oh, ha, ha!" "It's very unkind and rude of you to say that." "It reminds me of a moving picture I saw in New York. It was called 'Saved from the Scaffold.'" "Oh!" "I'm not unhappy! What have I got to be unhappy about? What on earth does any man want to get married for? I don't. Give me my gay bachelor life! My Uncle Charlie used to say 'It's better luck to get married than it is to be kicked in the head by a mule.' But _he_ was a man who always looked on the bright side. Good-night, Miss Bennett. And good-bye--for ever." He turned on his heel and strode across the deck. From a white heaven the moon still shone benignantly down, mocking him. He had spoken bravely; the most captious critic could not but have admitted that he had made a good exit. But already his heart was aching. As he drew near to his state-room, he was amazed and disgusted to hear a high tenor voice raised in song proceeding from behind the closed door. "I fee-er naw faw in shee-ining arr-mor, Though his lance be sharrrp and--er keen; But I fee-er, I fee-er the glah-mour Therough thy der-rooping lashes seen: I fee-er, I fee-er the glah-mour...." Sam flung open the door wrathfully. That Eustace Hignett should still be alive was bad--he had pictured him hurling himself overboard and bobbing about, a pleasing sight in the wake of the vessel; that he should be singing was an outrage. Remorse, Sam felt, should have stricken Eustace Hignett dumb. Instead of which, here he was comporting himself like a blasted linnet. It was all wrong. The man could have no conscience whatever. "Well," he said sternly, "so there you are!" Eustace Hignett looked up brightly, even beamingly. In the brief interval which had elapsed since Sam had seen him last, an extraordinary transformation had taken place in this young man. His wan look had disappeared. His eyes were bright. His face wore that beastly self-satisfied smirk which you see in pictures advertising certain makes of fine-mesh underwear. If Eustace Hignett had been a full-page drawing in a magazine with "My dear fellow, I always wear Sigsbee's Super-fine Featherweight!" printed underneath him, he could not have looked more pleased with himself. "Hullo!" he said. "I was wondering where you had got to." "Never mind," said Sam coldly, "where I had got to! Where did you get to and why? You poor, miserable worm," he went on in a burst of generous indignation, "what have you to say for yourself? What do you mean by dashing away like that and killing my little entertainment?" "Awfully sorry, old man. I hadn't foreseen the cigar. I was bearing up tolerably well till I began to sniff the smoke. Then everything seemed to go black--I don't mean you, of course. You were black already--and I got the feeling that I simply must get on deck and drown myself." "Well, why didn't you?" demanded Sam with a strong sense of injury. "I might have forgiven you then. But to come down here and find you singing...." A soft light came into Eustace Hignett's eyes. "I want to tell you all about that," he said. "It's the most astonishing story. A miracle, you might almost call it. Makes you believe in Fate and all that kind of thing. A week ago I was on the Subway in New York...." He broke off while Sam cursed him, the Subway, and the city of New York in the order named. "My dear chap, what is the matter?" "What is the matter? Ha!" "Something is the matter," persisted Eustace Hignett. "I can tell it by your manner. Something has happened to disturb and upset you. I know you so well that I can pierce the mask. What is it? Tell me!" "Ha, ha!" "You surely can't still be brooding on that concert business? Why, that's all over. I take it that after my departure you made the most colossal ass of yourself, but why let that worry you? These things cannot affect one permanently." "Can't they? Let me tell you that, as a result of that concert, my engagement is broken off." Eustace sprang forward with outstretched hand. "Not really? How splendid! Accept my congratulations! This is the finest thing that could possibly have happened. These are not idle words. As one who has been engaged to the girl himself, I speak feelingly. You are well out of it, Sam." Sam thrust aside his hand. Had it been his neck he might have clutched it eagerly, but he drew the line at shaking hands with Eustace Hignett. "My heart is broken," he said with dignity. "That feeling will pass, giving way to one of devout thankfulness. I know. I've been there. After all ... Wilhelmina Bennett ... what is she? A rag and a bone and a hank of hair!" "She is nothing of the kind," said Sam, revolted. "Pardon me," said Eustace firmly, "I speak as an expert. I know her and I repeat, she is a rag and a bone and a hank of hair!" "She is the only girl in the world, and, owing to your idiotic behaviour, I have lost her." "You speak of the only girl in the world," said Eustace blithely. "If you want to hear about the only girl in the world, I will tell you. A week ago I was on the Subway in New York...." "I'm going to bed," said Sam brusquely. "All right. I'll tell you while you're undressing." "I don't want to listen." "A week ago," said Eustace Hignett, "I will ask you to picture me seated after some difficulty in a carriage in the New York Subway. I got into conversation with a girl with an elephant gun." Sam revised his private commination service in order to include the elephant gun. "She was my soul-mate," proceeded Eustace with quiet determination. "I didn't know it at the time, but she was. She had grave brown eyes, a wonderful personality, and this elephant gun." "Did she shoot you with it?" "Shoot me? What do you mean? Why, no!" "The girl must have been a fool!" said Sam bitterly. "The chance of a lifetime and she missed it. Where are my pyjamas?" "I haven't seen your pyjamas. She talked to me about this elephant gun, and explained its mechanism. She told me the correct part of a hippopotamus to aim at, how to make a nourishing soup out of mangoes, and what to do when bitten by a Borneo wire-snake. You can imagine how she soothed my aching heart. My heart, if you recollect, was aching at the moment--quite unnecessarily if I had only known--because it was only a couple of days since my engagement to Wilhelmina Bennett had been broken off. Well, we parted at Sixty-sixth Street, and, strange as it may seem, I forgot all about her." "Do it again!" "Tell it again?" "Good heavens, no! Forget all about her again." "Nothing," said Eustace Hignett gravely, "could make me do that. Our souls have blended. Our beings have called to one another from their deepest depths, saying.... There are your pyjamas, over in the corner ... saying 'You are mine!' How could I forget her after that? Well, as I was saying, we parted. Little did I know that she was sailing on this very boat! But just now she came to me as I writhed on the deck...." "Did you writhe?" asked Sam with a flicker of moody interest. "I certainly did!" "That's good!" "But not for long." "That's bad!" "She came to me and healed me. Sam, that girl is an angel." "Switch off the light when you've finished." "She seemed to understand without a word how I was feeling. There are some situations which do not need words. She went away and returned with a mixture of some description in a glass. I don't know what it was. It had Worcester Sauce in it. She put it to my lips. She made me drink it. She said it was what she always used in Africa for bull-calves with the staggers. Well, believe me or believe me not ... are you asleep?" "Yes." "Believe me or believe me not, in under two minutes I was not merely freed from the nausea caused by your cigar. I was smoking myself! I was walking the deck with her without the slightest qualm. I was even able to look over the side from time to time and comment on the beauty of the moon on the water.... I have said some mordant things about women since I came on board this boat. I withdraw them unreservedly. They still apply to girls like Wilhelmina Bennett, but I have ceased to include the whole sex in my remarks. Jane Hubbard has restored my faith in Woman. Sam! Sam!" "What?" "I said that Jane Hubbard had restored my faith in Woman." "Oh, all right." Eustace Hignett finished undressing and got into bed. With a soft smile on his face he switched off the light. There was a long silence, broken only by the distant purring of the engines. At about twelve-thirty a voice came from the lower berth. "Sam!" "What is it now?" "There is a sweet womanly strength about her, Sam. She was telling me she once killed a panther with a hat-pin." Sam groaned and tossed on his mattress. Silence fell again. "At least I think it was a panther," said Eustace Hignett at a quarter past one. "Either a panther or a puma." CHAPTER VIII SIR MALLABY OFFERS A SUGGESTION § 1 A week after the liner "Atlantic" had docked at Southampton Sam Marlowe might have been observed--and was observed by various of the residents--sitting on a bench on the esplanade of that rising watering-place, Bingley-on-the-Sea, in Sussex. All watering-places on the south coast of England are blots on the landscape, but though I am aware that by saying it I shall offend the civic pride of some of the others--none are so peculiarly foul as Bingley-on-the-Sea. The asphalte on the Bingley esplanade is several degrees more depressing than the asphalte on other esplanades. The Swiss waiters at the Hotel Magnificent, where Sam was stopping, are in a class of bungling incompetence by themselves, the envy and despair of all the other Swiss waiters at all the other Hotels Magnificent along the coast. For dreariness of aspect Bingley-on-the-Sea stands alone. The very waves that break on its shingle seem to creep up the beach reluctantly, as if it revolted them to have to come to such a place. Why, then, was Sam Marlowe visiting this ozone-swept Gehenna? Why, with all the rest of England at his disposal, had he chosen to spend a week at breezy, blighted Bingley? Simply because he had been disappointed in love. Nothing is more curious than the myriad ways in which reaction from an unfortunate love-affair manifests itself in various men. No two males behave in the same way under the spur of female fickleness. _Archilochum_, for instance, according to the Roman writer, _proprio rabies armavit iambo_. It is no good pretending out of politeness that you know what that means, so I will translate. _Rabies_--his grouch--_armavit_--armed--_Archilochum_--Archilochus--_iambo_--with the iambic--_proprio_--his own invention. In other words, when the poet Archilochus was handed his hat by the lady of his affections, he consoled himself by going off and writing satirical verse about her in a new metre which he had thought up immediately after leaving the house. That was the way the thing affected him. On the other hand, we read in a recent issue of a London daily paper that John Simmons (31), a meat-salesman, was accused of assaulting an officer while in the discharge of his duty, at the same time using profane language whereby the officer went in fear of his life. Constable Riggs deposed that on the evening of the eleventh instant while he was on his beat, prisoner accosted him and, after offering to fight him for fourpence, drew off his right boot and threw it at his head. Accused, questioned by the magistrate, admitted the charge and expressed regret, pleading that he had had words with his young woman, and it had upset him. Neither of these courses appealed to Samuel Marlowe. He had sought relief by slinking off alone to the Hotel Magnificent at Bingley-on-the-Sea. It was the same spirit which has often moved other men in similar circumstances to go off to the Rockies to shoot grizzlies. To a certain extent the Hotel Magnificent had dulled the pain. At any rate, the service and cooking there had done much to take his mind off it. His heart still ached, but he felt equal to going to London and seeing his father, which of course he ought to have done seven days before. He rose from his bench--he had sat down on it directly after breakfast--and went back to the hotel to inquire about trains. An hour later he had begun his journey and two hours after that he was at the door of his father's office. The offices of the old-established firm of Marlowe, Thorpe, Prescott, Winslow and Appleby are in Ridgeway's Inn, not far from Fleet Street. The brass plate, let into the woodwork of the door, is misleading. Reading it, you get the impression that on the other side quite a covey of lawyers await your arrival. The name of the firm leads you to suppose that there will be barely standing-room in the office. You picture Thorpe jostling you aside as he makes for Prescott to discuss with him the latest case of demurrer, and Winslow and Appleby treading on your toes, deep in conversation on replevin. But these legal firms dwindle. The years go by and take their toll, snatching away here a Prescott, there an Appleby, till, before you know where you are, you are down to your last lawyer. The only surviving member of the firm of Marlowe, Thorpe--what I said before--was, at the time with which this story deals, Sir Mallaby Marlowe, son of the original founder of the firm and father of the celebrated black-face comedian, Samuel of that ilk; and the outer office, where callers were received and parked till Sir Mallaby could find time for them, was occupied by a single clerk. When Sam opened the door this clerk, John Peters by name, was seated on a high stool, holding in one hand a half-eaten sausage, in the other an extraordinarily large and powerful-looking revolver. At the sight of Sam he laid down both engines of destruction and beamed. He was not a particularly successful beamer, being hampered by a cast in one eye which gave him a truculent and sinister look; but those who knew him knew that he had a heart of gold and were not intimidated by his repellent face. Between Sam and himself there had always existed terms of great cordiality, starting from the time when the former was a small boy and it had been John Peters' mission to take him now to the Zoo, now to the train back to school. "Why, Mr. Samuel!" "Hullo, Peters!" "We were expecting you back a week ago." "Oh, I had something to see to before I came to town," said Sam carelessly. "So you got back safe!" said John Peters. "Safe! Why, of course." Peters shook his head. "I confess that, when there was this delay in your coming here, I sometimes feared something might have happened to you. I recall mentioning it to the young lady who recently did me the honour to promise to become my wife." "Ocean liners aren't often wrecked nowadays." "I was thinking more of the brawls on shore. America's a dangerous country. But perhaps you were not in touch with the underworld?" "I don't think I was." "Ah!" said John Peters significantly. He took up the revolver, gave it a fond and almost paternal look, and replaced it on the desk. "What on earth are you doing with that thing?" asked Sam. Mr. Peters lowered his voice. "I'm going to America myself in a few days' time, Mr. Samuel. It's my annual holiday, and the guv'nor's sending me over with papers in connection with The People _v._ Schultz and Bowen. It's a big case over there. A client of ours is mixed up in it, an American gentleman. I am to take these important papers to his legal representative in New York. So I thought it best to be prepared." The first smile that he had permitted himself for nearly two weeks flitted across Sam's face. "What on earth sort of place do you think New York is?" he asked. "It's safer than London." "Ah, but what about the Underworld? I've seen these American films that they send over here, Mr. Samuel. Did you ever see 'Wolves of the Bowery?' There was a man in that in just my position, carrying important papers, and what they didn't try to do to him! No, I'm taking no chances, Mr. Samuel!" "I should have said you were, lugging that thing about with you." Mr. Peters seemed wounded. "Oh, I understand the mechanism perfectly, and I am becoming a very fair shot. I take my little bite of food in here early and go and practise at the Rupert Street Rifle Range during my lunch hour. You'd be surprised how quickly one picks it up. When I get home of a night I try how quickly I can draw. You have to draw like a flash of lightning, Mr. Samuel. If you'd ever seen a film called 'Two-Gun-Thomas,' you'd realise that. You haven't time to wait loitering about." Mr. Peters picked up a speaking-tube and blew down it. "Mr. Samuel to see you, Sir Mallaby. Yes, sir, very good. Will you go right in, Mr. Samuel?" Sam proceeded to the inner office, and found his father dictating into the attentive ear of Miss Milliken, his elderly and respectable stenographer, replies to his morning mail. Sir Mallaby Marlowe was a dapper little man, with a round, cheerful face and a bright eye. His morning coat had been cut by London's best tailor, and his trousers perfectly creased by a sedulous valet. A pink carnation in his buttonhole matched his healthy complexion. His golf handicap was twelve. His sister, Mrs. Horace Hignett, considered him worldly. "DEAR SIRS,--We are in receipt of your favour and in reply beg to state that nothing will induce us ... will induce us ... where did I put that letter? Ah!... nothing will induce us ... oh, tell 'em to go to blazes, Miss Milliken." "Very well, Sir Mallaby." "That's that. Ready? Messrs. Brigney, Goole and Butterworth. What infernal names these people have. SIRS,--On behalf of our client ... oh, hullo, Sam!" "Good morning, father." "Take a seat. I'm busy, but I'll be finished in a moment. Where was I, Miss Milliken?" "'On behalf of our client....'" "Oh, yes. On behalf of our client Mr. Wibblesley Eggshaw.... Where these people get their names I'm hanged if I know. Your poor mother wanted to call you Hyacinth, Sam. You may not know it, but in the 'nineties when you were born, children were frequently christened Hyacinth. Well, I saved you from that." His attention now diverted to his son, Sir Mallaby seemed to remember that the latter had just returned from a long journey and that he had not seen him for many weeks. He inspected him with interest. "Very glad you're back, Sam. So you didn't win?" "No, I got beaten in the semi-finals." "American amateurs are a very hot lot, the best ones. I suppose you were weak on the greens. I warned you about that. You'll have to rub up your putting before next year." At the idea that any such mundane pursuit as practising putting could appeal to his broken spirit now, Sam uttered a bitter laugh. It was as if Dante had recommended some lost soul in the Inferno to occupy his mind by knitting jumpers. "Well, you seem to be in great spirits," said Sir Mallaby approvingly. "It's pleasant to hear your merry laugh again. Isn't it, Miss Milliken?" "Extremely exhilarating," agreed the stenographer, adjusting her spectacles and smiling at Sam, for whom there was a soft spot in her heart. A sense of the futility of life oppressed Sam. As he gazed in the glass that morning, he had thought, not without a certain gloomy satisfaction, how remarkably pale and drawn his face looked. And these people seemed to imagine that he was in the highest spirits. His laughter, which had sounded to him like the wailing of a demon, struck Miss Milliken as exhilarating. "On behalf of our client, Mr. Wibblesley Eggshaw," said Sir Mallaby, swooping back to duty once more, "we beg to state that we are prepared to accept service ... what time did you dock this morning?" "I landed nearly a week ago." "A week ago! Then what the deuce have you been doing with yourself? Why haven't I seen you?" "I've been down at Bingley-on-the-Sea." "Bingley! What on earth were you doing at that God-forsaken place?" "Wrestling with myself," said Sam with simple dignity. Sir Mallaby's agile mind had leaped back to the letter which he was answering. "We should be glad to meet you.... Wrestling, eh? Well, I like a boy to be fond of manly sports. Still, life isn't all athletics. Don't forget that. Life is real! Life is ... how does it go, Miss Milliken?" Miss Milliken folded her hands and shut her eyes, her invariable habit when called upon to recite. "Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; dust thou art to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul. Art is long and time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still like muffled drums are beating, Funeral marches to the grave. Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footsteps on the sands of Time. Let us then ..." said Miss Milliken respectfully, ... "be up and doing...." "All right, all right, all right!" said Sir Mallaby. "I don't want it all. Life is real! Life is earnest, Sam. I want to speak to you about that when I've finished answering these letters. Where was I? 'We should be glad to meet you at any time, if you will make an appointment....' Bingley-on-the-Sea! Good heavens! Why Bingley-on-the-Sea? Why not Margate while you were about it?" "Margate is too bracing. I did not wish to be braced. Bingley suited my mood. It was grey and dark and it rained all the time, and the sea slunk about in the distance like some baffled beast...." He stopped, becoming aware that his father was not listening. Sir Mallaby's attention had returned to the letter. "Oh, what's the good of answering the dashed thing at all?" said Sir Mallaby. "Brigney, Goole and Butterworth know perfectly well that they've got us in a cleft stick. Butterworth knows it better than Goole, and Brigney knows it better than Butterworth. This young fool, Eggshaw, Sam, admits that he wrote the girl twenty-three letters, twelve of them in verse, and twenty-one specifically asking her to marry him, and he comes to me and expects me to get him out of it. The girl is suing him for ten thousand." "How like a woman!" Miss Milliken bridled reproachfully at this slur on her sex. Sir Mallaby took no notice of it whatever. "... if you will make an appointment, when we can discuss the matter without prejudice. Get those typed, Miss Milliken. Have a cigar, Sam. Miss Milliken, tell Peters as you go out that I am occupied with a conference and can see nobody for half an hour." When Miss Milliken had withdrawn Sir Mallaby occupied ten seconds of the period which he had set aside for communion with his son in staring silently at him. "I'm glad you're back, Sam," he said at length. "I want to have a talk with you. You know, it's time you were settling down. I've been thinking about you while you were in America and I've come to the conclusion that I've been letting you drift along. Very bad for a young man. You're getting on. I don't say you're senile, but you're not twenty-one any longer, and at your age I was working like a beaver. You've got to remember that life is--dash it! I've forgotten it again." He broke off and puffed vigorously into the speaking tube. "Miss Milliken, kindly repeat what you were saying just now about life.... Yes, yes, that's enough!" He put down the instrument. "Yes, life is real, life is earnest," he said, gazing at Sam seriously, "and the grave is not our goal. Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime. In fact, it's time you took your coat off and started work." "I am quite ready, father." "You didn't hear what I said," exclaimed Sir Mallaby, with a look of surprise. "I said it was time you began work." "And I said I was quite ready." "Bless my soul! You've changed your views a trifle since I saw you last." "I have changed them altogether." Long hours of brooding among the red plush settees in the lounge of the Hotel Magnificent at Bingley-on-the-Sea had brought about this strange, even morbid, attitude of mind in Samuel Marlowe. Work, he had decided, was the only medicine for his sick soul. Here, he felt, in this quiet office, far from the tumult and noise of the world, in a haven of torts and misdemeanours and Vic. I. cap. 3's, and all the rest of it, he might find peace. At any rate, it was worth taking a stab at it. "Your trip has done you good," said Sir Mallaby approvingly. "The sea air has given you some sense. I'm glad of it. It makes it easier for me to say something else that I've had on my mind for a good while. Sam, it's time you got married." Sam barked bitterly. His father looked at him with concern. "Swallow some smoke the wrong way?" "I was laughing," explained Sam with dignity. Sir Mallaby shook his head. "I don't want to discourage your high spirits, but I must ask you to approach this matter seriously. Marriage would do you a world of good, Sam. It would brace you up. You really ought to consider the idea. I was two years younger than you are when I married your poor mother, and it was the making of me. A wife might make something of you." "Impossible!" "I don't see why she shouldn't. There's lots of good in you, my boy, though you may not think so." "When I said it was impossible," said Sam coldly, "I was referring to the impossibility of the possibility.... I mean, that it was impossible that I could possibly ... in other words, father, I can never marry. My heart is dead." "Your what?" "My heart." "Don't be a fool. There's nothing wrong with your heart. All our family have had hearts like steam-engines. Probably you have been feeling a sort of burning. Knock off cigars and that will soon stop." "You don't understand me. I mean that a woman has treated me in a way that has finished her whole sex as far as I am concerned. For me, women do not exist." "You didn't tell me about this," said Sir Mallaby, interested. "When did this happen? Did she jilt you?" "Yes." "In America, was it?" "On the boat." Sir Mallaby chuckled heartily. "My dear boy, you don't mean to tell me that you're taking a shipboard flirtation seriously? Why, you're expected to fall in love with a different girl every time you go on a voyage. You'll get over this in a week. You'd have got over it by now if you hadn't gone and buried yourself in a depressing place like Bingley-on-the-Sea." The whistle of the speaking-tube blew. Sir Mallaby put the instrument to his ear. "All right," he turned to Sam. "I shall have to send you away now, Sam. Man waiting to see me. Good-bye. By the way, are you doing anything to-night?" "No." "Not got a wrestling match on with yourself, or anything like that? Well, come to dinner at the house. Seven-thirty. Don't be late." Sam went out. As he passed through the outer office, Miss Milliken intercepted him. "Oh, Mr. Sam!" "Yes?" "Excuse me, but will you be seeing Sir Mallaby again to-day?" "I'm dining with him to-night." "Then would you--I don't like to disturb him now, when he is busy--would you mind telling him that I inadvertently omitted a stanza? It runs," said Miss Milliken, closing her eyes, "'Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act, act, in the living present, Heart within and God o'erhead!' Thank you so much. Good afternoon." § 2 Sam, reaching Bruton Street at a quarter past seven, was informed by the butler who admitted him that his father was dressing and would be down in a few minutes. The butler, an old retainer of the Marlowe family, who, if he had not actually dandled Sam on his knees when an infant, had known him as a small boy, was delighted to see him again. "Missed you very much, Mr. Samuel, we all have," he said affectionately, as he preceded him to the drawing-room. "Yes?" said Sam absently. "Very much indeed, sir. I happened to remark only the other day that the place didn't seem the same without your happy laugh. It's good to see you back once more, looking so well and merry." Sam stalked into the drawing-room with the feeling that comes to all of us from time to time, that it is hopeless to struggle. The whole damned circle of his acquaintance seemed to have made up their minds that he had not a care in the world, so what was the use? He lowered himself into a deep arm-chair and lit a cigarette. Presently the butler reappeared with a cocktail on a tray. Sam drained it, and scarcely had the door closed behind the old retainer when an abrupt change came over the whole outlook. It was as if he had been a pianola and somebody had inserted a new record. Looking well and happy! He blew a smoke ring. Well, if it came to that, why not? Why shouldn't he look well and happy? What had he got to worry about? He was a young man, fit and strong, in the springtide of life, just about to plunge into an absorbing business. Why should he brood over a sentimental episode which had ended a little unfortunately? He would never see the girl again. If anything in this world was certain, that was. She would go her way, and he his. Samuel Marlowe rose from his chair a new man, to greet his father, who came in at that moment fingering a snowy white tie. Sam started at his parent's splendour in some consternation. "Great Scot, father! Are you expecting a lot of people? I thought we were dining alone." "That's all right, my boy. A dinner-jacket is perfectly in order. We shall be quite a small party. Six in all. You and I, a friend of mine and his daughter, a friend of my friend's friend and my friend's friend's son." "Surely that's more than six!" "No." "It sounded more." "Six," said Sir Mallaby firmly. He raised a shapely hand with the fingers outspread. "Count 'em for yourself." He twiddled his thumb. "Number one--Bennett." "Who?" cried Sam. "Bennett. Rufus Bennett. He's an American over here for the summer. Haven't I ever mentioned his name to you? He's a great fellow. Always thinking he's at death's door, but keeps up a fine appetite. I've been his legal representative in London for years. Then--" Sir Mallaby twiddled his first finger--"there's his daughter Wilhelmina, who has just arrived in England." A look of enthusiasm came into Sir Mallaby's face. "Sam, my boy, I don't intend to say a word about Miss Wilhelmina Bennett, because I think there's nothing more prejudicial than singing a person's praises in advance. I merely remark that I fancy you will appreciate her! I've only met her once, and then only for a few minutes, but what I say is, if there's a girl living who's likely to make you forget whatever fool of a woman you may be fancying yourself in love with at the moment, that girl is Wilhelmina Bennett! The others are Bennett's friend, Henry Mortimer, also an American--a big lawyer, I believe, on the other side--and his son Bream. I haven't met either of them. They ought to be here any moment now." He looked at his watch. "Ah! I think that was the front door. Yes, I can hear them on the stairs." CHAPTER IX ROUGH WORK AT A DINNER TABLE § 1 After the first shock of astonishment, Sam Marlowe had listened to his father's harangue with a growing indignation which, towards the end of the speech, had assumed proportions of a cold fury. If there is one thing the which your high-spirited young man resents, it is being the toy of Fate. He chafes at the idea that Fate had got it all mapped out for him. Fate, thought Sam, had constructed a cheap, mushy, sentimental, five-reel film scenario, and without consulting him had had the cool cheek to cast him for one of the puppets. He seemed to see Fate as a thin female with a soppy expression and pince-nez, sniffing a little as she worked the thing out. He could picture her glutinous satisfaction as she re-read her scenario and gloated over its sure-fire qualities. There was not a flaw in the construction. It started off splendidly with a romantic meeting, had 'em guessing half-way through when the hero and heroine quarrelled and parted--apparently for ever, and now the stage was all set for the reconciliation and the slow fade-out on the embrace. To bring this last scene about, Fate had had to permit herself a slight coincidence, but she did not jib at that. What we call coincidences are merely the occasions when Fate gets stuck in a plot and has to invent the next situation in a hurry. Sam Marlowe felt sulky and defiant. This girl had treated him shamefully and he wanted to have nothing more to do with her. If he had had his wish, he would never have met her again. Fate, in her interfering way, had forced this meeting on him and was now complacently looking to him to behave in a suitable manner. Well, he would show her! In a few seconds now, Billie and he would be meeting. He would be distant and polite. He would be cold and aloof. He would chill her to the bone, and rip a hole in the scenario six feet wide. The door opened, and the room became full of Bennetts and Mortimers. § 2 Billie, looking, as Marlowe could not but admit, particularly pretty, headed the procession. Following her came a large red-faced man whose buttons seemed to creak beneath the strain of their duties. After him trotted a small, thin, pale, semi-bald individual who wore glasses and carried his nose raised and puckered as though some faintly unpleasant smell were troubling his nostrils. The fourth member of the party was dear old Bream. There was a confused noise of mutual greetings and introductions, and then Bream got a good sight of Sam and napped forward with his right wing outstretched. "Why, hello!" said Bream. "How are you, Mortimer?" said Sam coldly. "What, do you know my son?" exclaimed Sir Mallaby. "Came over in the boat together," said Bream. "Capital!" said Sir Mallaby. "Old friends, eh? Miss Bennett," he turned to Billie, who had been staring wide-eyed at her late fiancé, "let me present my son, Sam. Sam, this is Miss Bennett." "How do you do?" said Sam. "How do you do?" said Billie. "Bennett, you've never met my son, I think?" Mr. Bennett peered at Sam with protruding eyes which gave him the appearance of a rather unusually stout prawn. "How _are_ you?" he asked, with such intensity that Sam unconsciously found himself replying to a question which does not as a rule call for any answer. "Very well, thanks." Mr. Bennett shook his head moodily. "You are lucky to be able to say so! Very few of us can assert as much. I can truthfully say that in the last fifteen years I have not known what it is to enjoy sound health for a single day. Marlowe," he proceeded, swinging ponderously round on Sir Mallaby like a liner turning in the river, "I assure you that at twenty-five minutes past four this afternoon I was very nearly convinced that I should have to call you up on the 'phone and cancel this dinner engagement. When I took my temperature at twenty minutes to six...." At this point the butler appeared at the door announcing that dinner was served. Sir Mallaby Marlowe's dinner table, which, like most of the furniture in the house had belonged to his deceased father and had been built at a period when people liked things big and solid, was a good deal too spacious to be really ideal for a small party. A white sea of linen separated each diner from the diner opposite and created a forced intimacy with the person seated next to him. Billie Bennett and Sam Marlowe, as a consequence, found themselves, if not exactly in a solitude of their own, at least sufficiently cut off from their kind to make silence between them impossible. Westward, Mr. Mortimer had engaged Sir Mallaby in a discussion on the recent case of Ouseley _v._ Ouseley, Figg, Mountjoy, Moseby-Smith and others, which though too complicated to explain here, presented points of considerable interest to the legal mind. To the east, Mr. Bennett was relating to Bream the more striking of his recent symptoms. Billie felt constrained to make at least an attempt at conversation. "How strange meeting you here," she said. Sam, who had been crumbling bread in an easy and debonair manner, looked up and met her eye. Its expression was one of cheerful friendliness. He could not see his own eye, but he imagined and hoped that it was cold and forbidding, like the surface of some bottomless mountain tarn. "I beg your pardon?" "I said, how strange meeting you here. I never dreamed Sir Mallaby was your father." "I knew it all along," said Sam, and there was an interval caused by the maid insinuating herself between them and collecting his soup plate. He sipped sherry and felt a sombre self-satisfaction. He had, he considered, given the conversation the right tone from the start. Cool and distant. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Billie bite her lip. He turned to her again. Now that he had definitely established the fact that he and she were strangers, meeting by chance at a dinner-party, he was in a position to go on talking. "And how do you like England, Miss Bennett?" Billie's eye had lost its cheerful friendliness. A somewhat feline expression had taken its place. "Pretty well," she replied. "You don't like it?" "Well, the way I look at it is this. It's no use grumbling. One has got to realise that in England one is in a savage country, and one should simply be thankful one isn't eaten by the natives." "What makes you call England a savage country?" demanded Sam, a staunch patriot, deeply stung. "What would you call a country where you can't get ice, central heating, corn-on-the-cob, or bathrooms? My father and Mr. Mortimer have just taken a house down on the coast and there's just one niggly little bathroom in the place." "Is that your only reason for condemning England?" "Oh no, it has other drawbacks." "Such as?" "Well, Englishmen, for instance. Young Englishmen in particular. English young men are awful! Idle, rude, conceited, and ridiculous." Marlowe refused hock with a bitter intensity which nearly startled the old retainer, who had just offered it to him, into dropping the decanter. "How many English young men have you met?" Billie met his eye squarely and steadily. "Well, now that I come to think of it, not many. In fact, very few. As a matter of fact, only...." "Only?" "Well, very few," said Billie. "Yes," she said meditatively, "I suppose I really have been rather unjust. I should not have condemned a class simply because ... I mean, I suppose there _are_ young Englishmen who are not rude and ridiculous?" "I suppose there are American girls who have hearts." "Oh, plenty." "I'll believe that when I meet one." Sam paused. Cold aloofness was all very well, but this conversation was developing into a vulgar brawl. The ghosts of dead and gone Marlowes, all noted for their courtesy to the sex, seemed to stand beside his chair, eyeing him reprovingly. His work, they seemed to whisper, was becoming raw. It was time to jerk the interchange of thought back into the realm of distant civility. "Are you making a long stay in London, Miss Bennett?" "No, not long. We are going down to the country almost immediately. I told you my father and Mr. Mortimer had taken a house there." "You will enjoy that." "I'm sure I shall. Mr. Mortimer's son Bream will be there. That will be nice." "Why?" said Sam, backsliding. There was a pause. "_He_ isn't rude and ridiculous, eh?" said Sam gruffly. "Oh, no. His manners are perfect, and he has such a natural dignity," she went on, looking affectionately across the table at the heir of the Mortimers, who, finding Mr. Bennett's medical confidences a trifle fatiguing, was yawning broadly, and absently balancing his wine glass on a fork. "Besides," said Billie in a soft and dreamy voice, "we are engaged to be married!" § 3 Sam didn't care, of course. We, who have had the privilege of a glimpse into his iron soul, know that. He was not in the least upset by the news--just surprised. He happened to be raising his glass at the moment, and he registered a certain amount of restrained emotion by snapping the stem in half and shooting the contents over the tablecloth: but that was all. "Good heavens, Sam!" ejaculated Sir Mallaby, aghast. His wine glasses were an old and valued set. Sam blushed as red as the stain on the cloth. "Awfully sorry, father! Don't know how it happened." "Something must have given you a shock," suggested Billie kindly. The old retainer rallied round with napkins, and Sir Mallaby, who was just about to dismiss the affair with the polished ease of a good host, suddenly became aware of the activities of Bream. That young man, on whose dreamy calm the accident had made no impression whatever, had successfully established the equilibrium of the glass and the fork, and was now cautiously inserting beneath the latter a section of a roll, the whole forming a charming picture in still life. "If that glass is in your way...." said Sir Mallaby as soon as he had hitched up his drooping jaw sufficiently to enable him to speak. He was beginning to feel that he would be lucky if he came out of this dinner-party with a mere remnant of his precious set. "Oh, Sir Mallaby," said Billie, casting an adoring glance at the juggler, "you needn't be afraid that Bream will drop it. _He_ isn't clumsy! He is wonderful at that sort of thing, simply wonderful! I think it's so splendid," said Billie, "when men can do things like that. I'm always trying to get Bream to do some of his tricks for people, but he's so modest, he won't." "Refreshingly different," Sir Mallaby considered, "from the average drawing-room entertainer." "Yes," said Billie emphatically. "I think the most terrible thing in the world is a man who tries to entertain when he can't. Did I tell you about the man on board ship, father, at the ship's concert? Oh, it was the most awful thing you ever saw. Everybody was talking about it!" She beamed round the table, and there was a note of fresh girlish gaiety in her voice. "This man got up to do an imitation of somebody--nobody knows to this day who it was meant to be--and he came into the saloon and directly he saw the audience he got stage fright. He just stood there gurgling and not saying a word, and then suddenly his nerve failed him altogether and he turned and tore out of the room like a rabbit. He absolutely ran! And he hadn't said a word! It was the most ridiculous exhibition I've ever seen!" The anecdote went well. Of course there will always be a small minority in any audience which does not appreciate a funny story, and there was one in the present case. But the bulk of the company roared with laughter. "Do you mean," cried Sir Mallaby, choking, "the poor idiot just stood there dumb?" "Well, he made a sort of yammering noise," said Billie, "but that only made him look sillier." "Deuced good!" chuckled Sir Mallaby. "Funniest thing I ever heard in my life!" gurgled Mr. Bennett, swallowing a digestive capsule. "May have been half-witted," suggested Mr. Mortimer. Sam leaned across the table with a stern set face. He meant to change the conversation if he had to do it with a crowbar. "I hear you have taken a house in the country, Mr. Mortimer," he said. "Yes," said Mr. Mortimer. He turned to Sir Mallaby. "We have at last succeeded in persuading your sister, Mrs. Hignett, to let us rent her house for the summer." Sir Mallaby gasped. "Windles! You don't mean to tell me that my sister has let you have Windles!" Mr. Mortimer nodded triumphantly. "Yes. I had completely resigned myself to the prospect of spending the summer in some other house, when yesterday I happened to run into your nephew, young Eustace Hignett, on the street, and he said he was just coming round to see me about that very thing. To cut a long story short, he said that it would be all right and that we could have the house." Mr. Mortimer took a sip of burgundy. "He's a curious boy, young Hignett. Very nervous in his manner." "Chronic dyspepsia," said Mr. Bennett authoritatively, "I can tell it at a glance." "Is Windles a very lovely place, Sir Mallaby?" asked Billie. "Charming. Quite charming. Not large, of course, as country houses go. Not a castle, I mean, with hundreds of acres of park land. But nice and compact and comfortable and very picturesque." "We do not require a large place," said Mr. Mortimer. "We shall be quite a small party. Bennett and myself, Wilhelmina, Bream...." "Don't forget," said Billie, "that you have promised to invite Jane Hubbard down there." "Ah, yes. Wilhelmina's friend, Miss Hubbard. She is coming. That will be all, except young Hignett himself." "Hignett!" cried Mr. Bennett. "Mr. Hignett!" exclaimed Billie. There was an almost imperceptible pause before Mr. Mortimer spoke again, and for an instant the demon of embarrassment hovered, unseen but present, above the dinner table. Mr. Bennett looked sternly at Billie; Billie turned a shade pinker and gazed at the tablecloth; Bream started nervously. Even Mr. Mortimer seemed robbed for a moment of his legal calm. "I forgot to tell you that," he said. "Yes, one of the stipulations--to which I personally was perfectly willing to agree--was that Eustace Hignett was to remain on the premises during our tenancy. Such a clause in the agreement was, I am quite aware, unusual, and, had the circumstances been other than they were, I would have had a good deal to say about it. But we wanted the place, and we couldn't get it except by agreeing, so I agreed. I'm sure you will think that I acted rightly, Bennett, considering the peculiar circumstances." "Well," said Mr. Bennett reluctantly, "I certainly did want that house...." "And we couldn't have had it otherwise," said Mr. Mortimer, "so that is all there is to it." "Well, it need make no difference to you," said Sir Mallaby. "I am sure you will find my nephew Eustace most unobtrusive. He may even be an entertaining companion. I believe he has a nice singing voice. With that and the juggling of our friend here and my sister's late husband's orchestrion, you will have no difficulty in amusing yourselves during the evenings. You remember the orchestrion, Sam?" said Sir Mallaby, on whom his son's silence had been weighing rather heavily for some time. "Yes," said Sam, and returned to the silence once more. "The late Mr. Hignett had it put in. He was very fond of music. It's a thing you turn on by pressing a button in the wall," continued Sir Mallaby. "How you stop it, I don't know. When I was down there last it never seemed to stop. You mustn't miss the orchestrion!" "I certainly shall," said Mr. Bennett decidedly. "Music of that description happens to be the one thing which jars unendurably on my nerves. My nervous system is thoroughly out of tune." "So is the orchestrion," said Sir Mallaby. "I remember once when I was down there...." "I hope you will come down there again, Sir Mallaby," said Mr. Mortimer, "during our occupancy of the house. And you, too," he said, addressing Sam. "I am afraid," said Sam frigidly, "that my time will be very much occupied for the next few months. Thank you very much," he added, after a moment's pause. "Sam's going to work," said Sir Mallaby. "Yes," said Sam with dark determination. "Work is the only thing in life that matters!" "Oh, come, Sam!" said Sir Mallaby. "At your age I used to think love was fairly important, too!" "Love!" said Sam. He jabbed at his soufflé with a spoon. You could see by the scornful way he did it that he did not think much of love. § 4 Sir Mallaby, the last cigar of the night between his lips, broke a silence which had lasted a quarter of an hour. The guests had gone, and he and Sam were alone together. "Sam," he said, "do you know what I think?" "No," said Sam. Sir Mallaby removed his cigar and spoke impressively. "I've been turning the whole thing over in my mind, and the conclusion I have come to is that there is more in this Windles business than meets the eye. I've known your Aunt Adeline all my life, and I tell you it isn't in that woman to change her infernal pig-headed mind, especially about letting her house. She is a monomaniac on that subject. If you want to know my opinion, I am quite certain that your cousin Eustace has let the place to these people without her knowledge, and intends to pocket the cheque and not say a word about it. What do you think?" "Eh?" said Sam absently. "I said, what do you think?" "What do I think about what?" "About Eustace Hignett and Windles." "What about them?" Sir Mallaby regarded him disaprovingly. "I'm hanged if I know what's the matter with you to-night, Sam. You seem to have unhitched your brain and left it in the umbrella stand. You hadn't a word to say for yourself all through dinner. You might have been a Trappist monk. And with that delightful girl Miss Bennett, there, too. She must have thought you infernally dull." "I'm sorry." "It's no good being sorry now. The mischief's done. She has gone away thinking you an idiot. Do you realise," said Sir Mallaby warmly, "that when she told that extremely funny story about the man who made such a fool of himself on board the ship, you were the only person at the table who was not amused? She must have thought you had no sense of humour!" Sam rose. "I think I'll be going," he said. "Good night!" A man can bear just so much. CHAPTER X TROUBLE AT WINDLES § 1 Mr. Rufus Bennett stood at the window of the drawing-room of Windles, looking out. From where he stood he could see all those natural and artificial charms which had made the place so desirable to him when he first beheld them. Immediately below, flower beds, bright with assorted blooms, pressed against the ivied stone wall of the house. Beyond, separated from these by a gravel pathway, a smooth lawn, whose green and silky turf rivalled the lawns of Oxford colleges, stretched to a picturesque shrubbery, not so dense as to withhold altogether from the eye of the observer an occasional silvery glimpse of the lake that lay behind it. To the left, through noble trees, appeared a white suggestion of old stable yards; while to the right, bordering on the drive as it swept round to a distant gate, nothing less than a fragment of a ruined castle reared itself against a background of firs. It had been this sensational fragment of Old England which had definitely captured Mr. Bennett on his first visit to the place. He could not have believed that the time would ever come when he could gaze on it without any lightening of the spirits. The explanation of his gloom was simple. In addition to looking at the flower beds, the lawn, the shrubbery, the stable yard, and the castle, Mr. Bennett was also looking at the fifth heavy shower that had fallen since breakfast. This was the third afternoon of his tenancy. The first day it had rained all the time. The second day it had rained from eight till twelve-fifteen, from twelve-thirty till four, and from five till eleven. And on this, the third day, there had been no intermission longer than ten minutes. It was a trying Summer. Even the writers in the daily papers seemed mildly surprised, and claimed that England had seen finer Julys. Mr. Bennett, who had lived his life in a country of warmth and sunshine, the thing affected in much the same way as the early days of the Flood must have affected Noah. A first startled resentment had given place to a despair too militant to be called resignation. And with the despair had come a strong distaste for his fellow human beings, notably and in particular his old friend Mr. Mortimer, who at this moment broke impatiently in on his meditations. "Come along, Bennett. It's your deal. It's no good looking at the rain. Looking at it won't stop it." Mr. Mortimer's nerves also had become a little frayed by the weather. Mr. Bennett returned heavily to the table, where, with Mr. Mortimer as partner he was playing one more interminable rubber of bridge against Bream and Billie. He was sick of bridge, but there was nothing else to do. Mr. Bennett sat down with a grunt, and started to deal. Half-way through the operation the sound of rather stertorous breathing began to proceed from beneath the table. Mr. Bennett glanced agitatedly down, and curled his legs round his chair. "I have fourteen cards," said Mr. Mortimer. "That's the third time you've mis-dealt." "I don't care how many cards you've got!" said Mr. Bennett with heat. "That dog of yours is sniffing at my ankles!" He looked malignantly at a fine bulldog which now emerged from its cover and, sitting down, beamed at the company. He was a sweet-tempered dog, handicapped by the outward appearance of a canine plug-ugly. Murder seemed the mildest of the desires that lay behind that rugged countenance. As a matter of fact, what he wanted was cake. His name was Smith, and Mr. Mortimer had bought him just before leaving London to serve the establishment as a watch-dog. "He won't hurt you," said Mr. Mortimer carelessly. "You keep saying that!" replied Mr. Bennett pettishly. "How do you know? He's a dangerous beast, and if I had had any notion that you were buying him, I would have had something to say about it!" "Whatever you might have said would have made no difference. I am within my legal rights in purchasing a dog. You have a dog. At least, Wilhelmina has." "Yes, and Pinky-Boodles gets on splendidly with Smith," said Billie. "I've seen them playing together." Mr. Bennett subsided. He was feeling thoroughly misanthropic. He disliked everybody, with perhaps the exception of Billie, for whom a faint paternal fondness still lingered. He disliked Mr. Mortimer. He disliked Bream, and regretted that Billie had become engaged to him, though for years such an engagement had been his dearest desire. He disliked Jane Hubbard, now out walking in the rain with Eustace Hignett. And he disliked Eustace. Eustace, he told himself, he disliked rather more than any of the others. He resented the young man's presence in the house; and he resented the fact that, being in the house, he should go about, pale and haggard, as though he were sickening for something. Mr. Bennett had the most violent objection to associating with people who looked as though they were sickening for something. He got up and went to the window. The rain leaped at the glass like a frolicking puppy. It seemed to want to get inside and play with Mr. Bennett. § 2 Mr. Bennett slept late on the following morning. He looked at his watch on the dressing table when he got up, and found that it was past ten. Taking a second look to assure himself that he had really slumbered to this unusual hour, he suddenly became aware of something bright and yellow resting beside the watch, and paused, transfixed, like Robinson Crusoe staring at the footprint in the sand. If he had not been in England, he would have said that it was a patch of sunshine. Mr. Bennett stared at the yellow blob with the wistful mistrust of a traveller in a desert who has been taken in once or twice by mirages. It was not till he had pulled up the blind and was looking out on a garden full of brightness and warmth and singing birds that he definitely permitted himself to accept the situation. It was a superb morning. It was as if some giant had uncorked a great bottle full of the distilled scent of grass, trees, flowers, and hay. Mr. Bennett rang the bell joyfully, and presently there entered a grave, thin, intellectual-looking man who looked like a duke, only more respectable. This was Webster, Mr. Bennett's valet. He carried in one hand a small mug of hot water, reverently, as if it were a present of jewellery. "Good morning, sir." "Morning, Webster," said Mr. Bennett. "Rather late, eh?" "It is" replied Webster precisely, "a little late, sir. I would have awakened you at the customary hour, but it was Miss Bennett's opinion that a rest would do you good." Mr. Bennett's sense of well-being deepened. What more could a man want in this world than fine weather and a dutiful daughter? "She did, eh?" "Yes, sir. She desired me to inform you that, having already breakfasted, she proposed to drive Mr. Mortimer and Mr. Bream Mortimer into Southampton in the car. Mr. Mortimer senior wished to buy a panama hat." "A panama hat!" exclaimed Mr. Bennett. "A panama hat, sir." Mr. Bennett's feeling of satisfaction grew still greater. It was a fine day; he had a dutiful daughter; and he was going to see Henry Mortimer in a panama hat. Providence was spoiling him. The valet withdrew like a duke leaving the Royal Presence, not actually walking backwards but giving the impression of doing so; and Mr. Bennett, having decanted the mug of water into the basin, began to shave himself. Having finished shaving, he opened the drawer in the bureau where lay his white flannel trousers. Here at last was a day worthy of them. He drew them out, and as he did so, something gleamed pinkly up at him from a corner of the drawer. His salmon-coloured bathing-suit. Mr. Bennett started. He had not contemplated such a thing, but, after all, why not? There was the lake, shining through the trees, a mere fifty yards away. What could be more refreshing? He shed his pyjamas, and climbed into the bathing-suit. And presently, looking like the sun on a foggy day, he emerged from the house and picked his way with gingerly steps across the smooth surface of the lawn. At this moment, from behind a bush where he had been thriftily burying a yesterday's bone, Smith the bulldog waddled out on to the lawn. He drank in the exhilarating air through an upturned nose which his recent excavations had rendered somewhat muddy. Then he observed Mr. Bennett, and moved gladly towards him. He did not recognise Mr. Bennett, for he remembered his friends principally by their respective bouquets, so he cantered silently across the turf to take a sniff at him. He was half-way across the lawn when some of the mud which he had inhaled when burying the bone tickled his lungs and he paused to cough. Mr. Bennett whirled round; and then with a sharp exclamation picked up his pink feet from the velvet turf and began to run. Smith, after a momentary pause of surprise, lumbered after him, wheezing contentedly. This man, he felt, was evidently one of the right sort, a merry playfellow. Mr. Bennett continued to run; but already he had begun to pant and falter, when he perceived looming upon his left the ruins of that ancient castle which had so attracted him on his first visit. On that occasion, it had made merely an aesthetic appeal to Mr. Bennett; now he saw in a flash that its practical merits also were of a sterling order. He swerved sharply, took the base of the edifice in his stride, clutched at a jutting stone, flung his foot at another, and, just as his pursuer arrived and sat panting below, pulled himself on to a ledge, where he sat with his feet hanging well out of reach. The bulldog Smith, gazed up at him expectantly. The game was a new one to Smith, but it seemed to have possibilities. He was a dog who was always perfectly willing to try anything once. Mr. Bennett now began to address himself in earnest to the task of calling for assistance. His physical discomfort was acute. Insects, some winged, some without wings but--through Nature's wonderful law of compensation--equipped with a number of extra pairs of legs, had begun to fit out exploring expeditions over his body. They roamed about him as if he were some newly opened recreation ground, strolled in couples down his neck, and made up jolly family parties on his bare feet. And then, first dropping like the gentle dew upon the place beneath, then swishing down in a steady flood, it began to rain again. It was at this point that Mr. Bennett's manly spirit broke and time ceased to exist for him. Aeons later, a voice spoke from below. "Hullo!" said the voice. Mr. Bennett looked down. The stalwart form of Jane Hubbard was standing beneath him, gazing up from under a tam o'shanter cap. Smith, the bulldog, gambolled about her shapely feet. "Whatever are you doing up there?" said Jane. "I say, do you know if the car has come back?" "No. It has not." "I've got to go to the doctor's. Poor little Mr. Hignett is ill. Oh, well, I'll have to walk. Come along, Smith!" She turned towards the drive, Smith caracoling at her side. Mr. Bennett, though free now to move, remained where he was, transfixed. That sinister word "ill" held him like a spell. Eustace Hignett was ill! He had thought all along that the fellow was sickening for something, confound him! "What's the matter with him?" bellowed Mr. Bennett after Jane Hubbard's retreating back. "Eh?" queried Jane, stopping. "What's the matter with Hignett?" "I don't know." "Is it infectious?" "I expect so." "Great Heavens!" cried Mr. Bennett, and, lowering himself cautiously to the ground, squelched across the dripping grass. In the hall, Webster the valet, dry and dignified, was tapping the barometer with the wrist action of an ambassador knocking on the door of a friendly monarch. "A sharp downpour, sir," he remarked. "Have you been in the house all the time?" demanded Mr. Bennett. "Yes, sir." "Didn't you hear me shouting?" "I did fancy I heard something, sir." "Then why the devil didn't you come to me?" "I supposed it to be the owls, sir, a bird very frequent in this locality. They make a sort of harsh, hooting howl, sir. I have sometimes wondered," said Webster, pursuing a not uninteresting train of thought, "whether that might be the reason of the name." Before Mr. Bennett could join him in the region of speculation into which he had penetrated, there was a grinding of brakes on the gravel outside, and the wettest motor car in England drew up at the front door. § 3 From Windles to Southampton is a distance of about twenty miles; and the rain had started to fall when the car, an open one lacking even the poor protection of a cape hood, had accomplished half the homeward journey. For the last ten miles Mr. Mortimer had been nursing a sullen hatred for all created things; and, when entering the house, he came upon Mr. Bennett hopping about in the hall, endeavouring to detain him and tell him some long and uninteresting story, his venom concentrated itself upon his erstwhile friend. "Oh, get out of the way!" he snapped, shaking off the other's hand. "Can't you see I'm wet?" "Wet! Wet!" Mr. Bennett's voice quivered with self-pity. "So am I wet!" "Father dear," said Billie reprovingly, "you really oughtn't to have come into the house after bathing without drying yourself. You'll spoil the carpet." "I've _not_ been bathing! I'm trying to tell you...." "Hullo!" said Bream, with amiable innocence, coming in at the tail-end of the party. "Been having a jolly bathe?" Mr. Bennett danced with silent irritation, and, striking a bare toe against the leg of a chair, seized his left foot and staggered into the arms of Webster, who had been preparing to drift off to the servants' hall. Linked together, the two proceeded across the carpet in a movement which suggested in equal parts the careless vigour of the cake-walk and the grace of the old-fashioned mazurka. "What the devil are you doing, you fool?" cried Mr. Bennett. "Nothing, sir. And I should be glad if you would accept my week's notice," replied Webster calmly. "What's that?" "My notice sir, to take effect at the expiration of the current week. I cannot acquiesce in being cursed and sworn at." "Oh, go to blazes!" "Very good, sir." Webster withdrew like a plenipotentiary who has been handed his papers on the declaration of war, and Mr. Bennett, sprang to intercept Mr. Mortimer, who had slipped by and was making for the stairs. "Mortimer!" "Oh, what _is_ it?" "That infernal dog of yours. I insist on your destroying it." "What's it been doing?" "The savage brute chased me all over the garden and kept me sitting up on that damned castle the whole of the morning!" "Father darling," interposed Billie, pausing on her way up the stairs, "you mustn't get excited. You know it's bad for you. I don't expect poor old Smith meant any harm," she added pacifically, as she disappeared in the direction of the landing. "Of course he didn't," snapped Mr. Mortimer. "He's as quiet as a lamb." "I tell you he chased me from one end of the garden to the other! I had to run like a hare!" The unfortunate Bream, whose sense of the humorous was simple and childlike, was not proof against the picture thus conjured up. "C'k!" giggled Bream helplessly. "C'k, c'k, c'k!" Mr. Bennett turned on him. "Oh, it strikes you as funny, does it? Well, let me tell you that if you think you can laugh at me with--with--er--with one hand and--and--marry my daughter with the other, you're wrong! You can consider your engagement at an end." "Oh, I say!" ejaculated Bream, abruptly sobered. "Mortimer!" bawled Mr. Bennett, once more arresting the other as he was about to mount the stairs. "Do you or do you not intend to destroy that dog?" "I do not." "I insist on your doing so. He is a menace." "He is nothing of the kind. On your own showing he didn't even bite you once. And every dog is allowed one bite by law. The case of Wilberforce _v._ Bayliss covers that point thoroughly." "I don't care about the case of Wilberforce and Bayliss...." "You will find that you have to. It is a legal precedent." There is something about a legal precedent which gives pause to the angriest man. Mr. Bennett felt, as every layman feels when arguing with a lawyer, as if he were in the coils of a python. "Say, Mr. Bennett...." began Bream at his elbow. "Get out!" snarled Mr. Bennett. "Yes, but, say...!" The green baize door at the end of the hall opened, and Webster appeared. "I beg your pardon, sir," said Webster, "but luncheon will be served within the next few minutes. Possibly you may wish to make some change of costume." "Bring me my lunch on a tray in my room," said Mr. Bennett. "I am going to bed." "Very good, sir." "But, say, Mr. Bennett...." resumed Bream. "Grrh!" replied his ex-prospective-father-in-law, and bounded up the stairs like a portion of the sunset which had become detached from the main body. § 4 Even into the blackest days there generally creeps an occasional ray of sunshine, and there are few crises of human gloom which are not lightened by a bit of luck. It was so with Mr. Bennett in his hour of travail. There were lobsters for lunch, and his passion for lobsters had made him the talk of three New York clubs. He was feeling a little happier when Billie came in to see how he was getting on. "Hullo, father. Had a nice lunch?" "Yes," said Mr. Bennett, cheering up a little at the recollection. "There was nothing wrong with the lunch." How little we fallible mortals know! Even as he spoke, a tiny fragment of lobster shell, which had been working its way silently into the tip of his tongue, was settling down under the skin and getting ready to cause him the most acute mental distress which he had ever known. "The lunch," said Mr. Bennett, "was excellent. Lobsters!" He licked his lips appreciatively. "And, talking of lobsters," he went on, "I suppose that boy Bream has told you that I have broken off your engagement?" "Yes." "You don't seem very upset," said Mr. Bennett, who was in the mood for a dramatic scene and felt a little disappointed. "Oh, I've become a fatalist on the subject of my engagements." "I don't understand you." "Well, I mean, they never seem to come to anything." Billie gazed wistfully at the counterpane. "Do you know, father, I'm beginning to think that I'm rather impulsive. I wish I didn't do silly things in such a hurry." "I don't see where the hurry comes in as regards that Mortimer boy. You took ten years to make up your mind." "I was not thinking of Bream. Another man." "Great Heavens! Are you still imagining yourself in love with young Hignett?" "Oh, no! I can see now that I was never in love with poor Eustace. I was thinking of a man I got engaged to on the boat!" Mr. Bennett sat bolt upright in bed, and stared incredulously at his surprising daughter. His head was beginning to swim. "Of course I've misunderstood you," he said. "There's a catch somewhere and I haven't seen it. But for a moment you gave me the impression that you had promised to marry some man on the boat!" "I did!" "But...!" Mr. Bennett was doing sums on his fingers. "Do you mean to tell me," he demanded, having brought out the answer to his satisfaction, "do you mean to tell me that you have been engaged to three men in three weeks?" "Yes," said Billie in a small voice. "Great Godfrey! Er----?" "No, only three." Mr. Bennett sank back on to his pillow with a snort. "The trouble is," continued Billie, "one does things and doesn't know how one is going to feel about it afterwards. You can do an awful lot of thinking afterwards, father." "I'm doing a lot of thinking now," said Mr. Bennett with austerity. "You oughtn't to be allowed to go around loose!" "Well, it doesn't matter. I shall never get engaged again. I shall never love anyone again." "Don't tell me you are still in love with this boat man?" Billie nodded miserably. "I didn't realise it till we came down here. But, as I sat and watched the rain, it suddenly came over me that I had thrown away my life's happiness. It was as if I had been offered a wonderful jewel and had refused it. I seemed to hear a voice reproaching me and saying, 'You have had your chance. It will never come again!'" "Don't talk nonsense!" said Mr. Bennett. Billie stiffened. She had thought she had been talking rather well. Mr. Bennett was silent for a moment. Then he started up with an exclamation. The mention of Eustace Hignett had stirred his memory. "What's young Hignett got wrong with him?" he asked. "Mumps." "Mumps! Good God! Not mumps!" Mr. Bennett quailed. "I've never had mumps! One of the most infectious ... this is awful!... Oh, heavens! Why did I ever come to this lazar-house!" cried Mr. Bennett, shaken to his depths. "There isn't the slightest danger, father, dear. Don't be silly. If I were you, I should try to get a good sleep. You must be tired after this morning." "Sleep! If I only could!" said Mr. Bennett, and did so five minutes after the door had closed. He awoke half an hour later with a confused sense that something was wrong. He had been dreaming that he was walking down Fifth Avenue at the head of a military brass band, clad only in a bathing suit. As he sat up in bed, blinking in the dazed fashion of the half-awakened, the band seemed to be playing still. There was undeniably music in the air. The room was full of it. It seemed to be coming up through the floor and rolling about in chunks all round his bed. Mr. Bennett blinked the last fragments of sleep out of his system, and became filled with a restless irritability. There was only one instrument in the house which could create this infernal din--the orchestrion in the drawing-room, immediately above which, he recalled, his room was situated. He rang the bell for Webster. "Is Mr. Mortimer playing that--that damned gas-engine in the drawing-room?" "Yes, sir. Tosti's 'Good-bye.' A charming air, sir." "Go and tell him to stop it!" "Very good, sir." Mr. Bennett lay in bed and fumed. Presently the valet returned. The music still continued to roll about the room. "I am sorry to have to inform you, sir," said Webster, "that Mr. Mortimer declines to accede to your request." "Oh, he said that, did he?" "That is the gist of his remarks, sir." "Very good! Then give me my dressing-gown!" Webster swathed his employer in the garment indicated, and returned to the kitchen, where he informed the cook that, in his opinion, the guv'nor was not a force, and that, if he were a betting man, he would put his money in the forthcoming struggle on Consul, the Almost-Human--by which affectionate nickname Mr. Mortimer senior was generally alluded to in the servants' hall. Mr. Bennett, meanwhile, had reached the drawing-room, and found his former friend lying at full length on a sofa, smoking a cigar, a full dozen feet away from the orchestrion, which continued to thunder out its dirge on the passing of Summer. "Will you turn that infernal thing off!" said Mr. Bennett. "No!" said Mr. Mortimer. "Now, now, now!" said a voice. Jane Hubbard was standing in the doorway with a look of calm reproof on her face. "We can't have this, you know!" said Jane Hubbard. "You're disturbing my patient." She strode without hesitation to the instrument, explored its ribs with a firm finger, pushed something, and the orchestrion broke off in the middle of a bar. Then, walking serenely to the door, she passed out and closed it behind her. The baser side of his nature urged Mr. Bennett to triumph over the vanquished. "Now, what about it!" he said, ungenerously. "Interfering girl!" mumbled Mr. Mortimer, chafing beneath defeat. "I've a good mind to start it again." "I dare you!" whooped Mr. Bennett, reverting to the phraseology of his vanished childhood. "Go on! I dare you!" "I've a perfect legal right.... Oh well," he said, "there are lots of other things I can do!" "What do you mean?" exclaimed Mr. Bennett, alarmed. "Never mind!" said Mr. Mortimer, taking up a book. Mr. Bennett went back to bed in an uneasy frame of mind. He brooded for half an hour, and, at the expiration of that period, rang for Webster and requested that Billie should be sent to him. "I want you to go to London," he said, when she appeared. "I must have legal advice. I want you to go and see Sir Mallaby Marlowe. Tell him that Henry Mortimer is annoying me in every possible way and sheltering himself behind his knowledge of the law, so that I can't get at him. Ask Sir Mallaby to come down here. And, if he can't come himself, tell him to send someone who can advise me. His son would do, if he knows anything about the business." "Oh, I'm sure he does!" "Eh? How do you know?" "Well, I mean, he looks as if he does!" said Billie hastily. "He looks so clever!" "I didn't notice it myself. Well, he'll do, if Sir Mallaby's too busy to come himself. I want you to go up to-night, so that you can see him first thing to-morrow morning. You can stop the night at the Savoy. I've sent Webster to look out a train." "There's a splendid train in about an hour. I'll take that." "It's giving you a lot of trouble," said Mr. Bennett, with belated consideration. "Oh, _no_!" said Billie. "I'm only too glad to be able to do this for you, father dear!" CHAPTER XI MR. BENNETT HAS A BAD NIGHT The fragment of a lobster-shell which had entered Mr. Bennett's tongue at twenty minutes to two in the afternoon was still in occupation at half-past eleven that night, when that persecuted gentleman blew out his candle and endeavoured to compose himself for a night's slumber. Its unconscious host had not yet been made aware of its presence. He had a vague feeling that the tip of his tongue felt a little sore, but his mind was too engrossed with the task of keeping a look-out for the preliminary symptoms of mumps to have leisure to bestow much attention on this phenomenon. The discomfort it caused was not sufficient to keep him awake, and presently he turned on his side and began to fill the room with a rhythmical snoring. How pleasant if one could leave him so--the good man taking his rest. Facts, however, are facts; and, having crept softly from Mr. Bennett's side with the feeling that at last everything is all right with him, we are compelled to return three hours later to discover that everything is all wrong. It is so dark in the room that our eyes can at first discern nothing; then, as we grow accustomed to the blackness, we perceive him sitting bolt upright in bed, staring glassily before him, while with the first finger of his right hand he touches apprehensively the tip of his protruding tongue. At this point Mr. Bennett lights his candle--one of the charms of Windles was the old-world simplicity of its lighting system--and we are enabled to get a better view of him. Mr. Bennett sat in the candlelight with his tongue out and the first beads of a chilly perspiration bedewing his forehead. It was impossible for a man of his complexion to turn pale, but he had turned as pale as he could. Panic gripped him. A man whose favourite reading was medical encyclopædias, he needed no doctor to tell him that this was the end. Fate had dealt him a knockout blow; his number was up; and in a very short while now people would be speaking of him in the past tense and saying what a pity it all was. A man in Mr. Bennett's position experiences strange emotions, and many of them. In fact, there are scores of writers, who, reckless of the cost of white paper, would devote two chapters at this point to an analysis of the unfortunate man's reflections and be glad of the chance. It is sufficient, however, merely to set on record that there was no stint. Whatever are the emotions of a man in such a position, Mr. Bennett had them. He had them all, one after another, some of them twice. He went right through the list from soup to nuts, until finally he reached remorse. And, having reached remorse, he allowed that to monopolise him. In his early days, when he was building up his fortune, Mr. Bennett had frequently done things to his competitors in Wall Street which would not have been tolerated in the purer atmosphere of a lumber-camp, and, if he was going to be remorseful about anything, he might well have started by being remorseful about that. But it was on his most immediate past that his wistful mind lingered. He had quarrelled with his lifelong friend, Henry Mortimer. He had broken off his daughter's engagement with a deserving young man. He had spoken harsh words to his faithful valet. The more Mr. Bennett examined his conduct, the deeper the iron entered into his soul. Fortunately, none of his acts were irreparable. He could undo them. He could make amends. The small hours of the morning are not perhaps the most suitable time for making amends, but Mr. Bennett was too remorseful to think of that. Do It Now had ever been his motto, so he started by ringing the bell for Webster. The same writers who would have screamed with joy at the chance of dilating on Mr. Bennett's emotions would find a congenial task in describing the valet's thought-processes when the bell roused him from a refreshing sleep at a few minutes after three a.m. However, by the time he entered his employer's room he was his own calm self again. "Good morning, sir," he remarked equably. "I fear that it will be the matter of a few minutes to prepare your shaving water. I was not aware," said Webster in manly apology for having been found wanting, "that you intended rising so early." "Webster," said Mr. Bennett, "I'm a dying man!" "Indeed, sir?" "A dying man!" repeated Mr. Bennett. "Very good, sir. Which of your suits would you wish me to lay out?" Mr. Bennett had the feeling that something was going wrong with the scene. "Webster," he said, "this morning we had an unfortunate misunderstanding. I'm sorry." "Pray don't mention it, sir." "I was to blame. Webster, you have been a faithful servant! You have stuck to me, Webster, through thick and thin!" said Mr. Bennett, who had half persuaded himself by this time that the other had been in the family for years instead of having been engaged at a registry-office a little less than a month ago. "Through thick and thin!" repeated Mr. Bennett. "I have endeavoured to give satisfaction, sir." "I want to reward you, Webster." "Thank you very much, sir." "Take my trousers!" Webster raised a deprecating hand. "No, no, sir, thanking you exceedingly, I couldn't really! You will need them, sir, and I assure you I have an ample supply." "Take my trousers," repeated Mr. Bennett, "and feel in the right-hand pocket. There is some money there." "I'm sure I'm very much obliged, sir," said Webster, beginning for the first time to feel that there was a bright side. He embarked upon the treasure-hunt. "The sum is sixteen pounds eleven shillings and threepence, sir." "Keep it!" "Thank you very much, sir. Would there be anything further, sir?" "Why, no," said Mr. Bennett, feeling dissatisfied nevertheless. There had been a lack of the deepest kind of emotion in the interview, and his yearning soul resented it. "Why, no." "Good-night, sir." "Stop a moment. Which is Mr. Mortimer's room?" "Mr. Mortimer, senior, sir? It is at the further end of this passage, on the left facing the main staircase. Good-night, sir. I am extremely obliged. I will bring you your shaving-water when you ring." Mr. Bennett, left alone, mused for awhile, then, rising from his bed, put on his dressing-gown, took his candle, and went down the passage. In a less softened mood, the first thing Mr. Bennett would have done on crossing the threshold of the door facing the staircase would have been to notice resentfully that Mr. Mortimer, with his usual astuteness, had collared the best bedroom in the house. The soft carpet gave out no sound as Mr. Bennett approached the wide and luxurious bed. The light of the candle fell on the back of a semi-bald head. Mr. Mortimer was sleeping with his face buried in the pillow. It cannot have been good for him, but that was what he was doing. From the portion of the pillow in which his face was buried strange gurgles proceeded, like the distant rumble of an approaching train on the Underground. "Mortimer," said Mr. Bennett. The train stopped at a station to pick up passengers, and rumbled on again. "Henry!" said Mr. Bennett, and nudged his sleeping friend in the small of the back. "Leave it on the mat," mumbled Mr. Mortimer, stirring slightly and uncovering one corner of his mouth. Mr. Bennett began to forget his remorse in a sense of injury. He felt like a man with a good story to tell who can get nobody to listen to him. He nudged the other again, more vehemently this time. Mr. Mortimer made a noise like a gramophone when the needle slips, moved restlessly for a moment, then sat up, staring at the candle. "Rabbits! Rabbits! Rabbits!" said Mr. Mortimer, and sank back again. He had begun to rumble before he touched the pillow. "What do you mean, rabbits?" said Mr. Bennett sharply. The not unreasonable query fell on deaf ears. Mr. Mortimer was already entering a tunnel. "Much too pink!" he murmured as the pillow engulfed him. What steps Mr. Bennett would have taken at this juncture, one cannot say. Probably he would have given the thing up in despair and retired, for it is weary work forgiving a sleeping man. But, as he bent above his slumbering friend, a drop of warm grease detached itself from the candle and fell into Mr. Mortimer's exposed ear. The sleeper wakened. "What? What? What?" he exclaimed, bounding up. "Who's that?" "It's me--Rufus," said Mr. Bennett. "Henry, I'm dying!" "Drying?" "Dying!" Mr. Mortimer yawned cavernously. The mists of sleep were engulfing him again. "Eight rabbits sitting on the lawn," he muttered. "But too pink! Much too pink!" And, as if considering he had borne his full share in the conversation and that no more could be expected of him, he snuggled down into the pillow again. Mr. Bennett's sense of injury became more acute. For a moment he was strongly tempted to try the restorative effects of candle-grease once more, but, just as he was on the point of succumbing, a shooting pain, as if somebody had run a red-hot needle into his tongue, reminded him of his situation. A dying man cannot pass his last hours dropping candle-grease into people's ears. After all, it was perhaps a little late, and there would be plenty of time to become reconciled to Mr. Mortimer to-morrow. His task now was to seek out Bream and bring him the glad news of his renewed engagement. He closed the door quietly, and proceeded upstairs. Bream's bedroom, he knew, was the one just off the next landing. He turned the handle quietly, and went in. Having done this, he coughed. "Drop that pistol!" said the voice of Jane Hubbard immediately, with quiet severity. "I've got you covered!" Mr. Bennett had no pistol, but he dropped the candle. It would have been a nice point to say whether he was more perturbed by the discovery that he had got into the wrong room, and that room a lady's, or by the fact that the lady whose wrong room it was had pointed what appeared to be a small cannon at him over the foot of the bed. It was not, as a matter of fact, a cannon but the elephant gun, which Miss Hubbard carried with her everywhere--a girl's best friend. "My dear young lady!" he gasped. On the five occasions during recent years on which men had entered her tent with the object of murdering her, Jane Hubbard had shot without making inquiries. What strange feminine weakness it was that had caused her to utter a challenge on this occasion, she could not have said. Probably it was due to the enervating effects of civilisation. She was glad now that she had done so, for, being awake and in full possession of her faculties, she perceived that the intruder, whoever he was, had no evil intentions. "Who is it?" she asked. "I don't know how to apologise!" "That's all right! Let's have a light." A match flared in the darkness. Miss Hubbard lit her candle, and gazed at Mr. Bennett with quiet curiosity. "Walking in your sleep?" she inquired. "No, no!" "Not so loud! You'll wake Mr. Hignett. He's next door. That's why I took this room, in case he was restless in the night." "I want to see Bream Mortimer," said Mr. Bennett. "He's in my old room, two doors along the passage. What do you want to see him about?" "I wish to inform him that he may still consider himself engaged to my daughter." "Oh, well, I don't suppose he'll mind being woken up to hear that. But what's the idea?" "It's a long story." "That's all right. Let's make a night of it." "I am a dying man. I awoke an hour ago with a feeling of acute pain...." Miss Hubbard listened to the story of his symptoms with interest but without excitement. "What nonsense!" she said at the conclusion. "I assure you...." "I'd like to bet it's nothing serious at all." "My dear young lady," said Mr. Bennett, piqued. "I have devoted a considerable part of my life to medical study...." "I know. That's the trouble. People oughtn't to be allowed to read medical books." "Well, we need not discuss it," said Mr. Bennett stiffly. He resented being dragged out of the valley of the shadow of death by the scruff of his neck like this. A dying man has his dignity to think of. "I will leave you now, and go and see young Mortimer." He clung to a hope that Bream Mortimer at least would receive him fittingly. "Good-night!" "But wait a moment!" Mr. Bennett left the room, unheeding. He was glad to go. Jane Hubbard irritated him. His expectation of getting more satisfactory results from Bream was fulfilled. It took some time to rouse that young man from a slumber almost as deep as his father's; but, once roused, he showed a gratifying appreciation of the gravity of affairs. Joy at one half of his visitor's news competed with consternation and sympathy at the other half. He thanked Mr. Bennett profusely, showed a fitting concern on learning of his terrible situation, and evinced a practical desire to help by offering him a bottle of liniment which he had found useful for gnat-stings. Declining this, though not ungratefully, Mr. Bennett withdrew and made his way down the passage again with something approaching a glow in his heart. The glow lasted till he had almost reached the landing, when it was dissipated by a soft but compelling voice from the doorway of Miss Hubbard's room. "Come here!" said Miss Hubbard. She had put on a blue bath-robe, and looked like a pugilist about to enter the ring. "Well?" said Mr. Bennett coldly, coming nevertheless. "I'm going to have a look at that tongue of yours," said Jane firmly. "It's my opinion that you're making a lot of fuss over nothing." Mr. Bennett drew himself up as haughtily as a fat man in a dressing-gown can, but the effect was wasted on his companion, who had turned and gone into her room. "Come in here," she said. Tougher men than Mr. Bennett had found it impossible to resist the note of calm command in that voice, but for all that he reproached himself for his weakness in obeying. "Sit down!" said Jane Hubbard. She indicated a low stool beside the dressing-table. "Put your tongue out!" she said, as Mr. Bennett, still under her strange influence, lowered himself on to the stool. "Further out! That's right. Keep it like that!" "Ouch!" exclaimed Mr. Bennett, bounding up. "Don't make such a noise! You'll wake Mr. Hignett. Sit down again!" "I...." "Sit down!" Mr. Bennett sat down. Miss Hubbard extended once more the hand holding the needle which had caused his outcry. He winced away from it desperately. "Baby!" said Miss Hubbard reprovingly. "Why, I once sewed eighteen stitches in a native bearer's head, and he didn't make half the fuss you're making. Now, keep quite still." Mr. Bennett did--for perhaps the space of two seconds. Then he leaped from his seat once more. It was a tribute to the forceful personality of the fair surgeon, if one were needed, that the squeal he uttered was a subdued one. He was just about to speak--he had framed the opening words of a strong protest--when suddenly he became aware of something in his mouth, something small and hard. He removed it and examined it as it lay on his finger. It was a minute fragment of lobster-shell. And at the same time he became conscious of a marked improvement in the state of his tongue. The swelling had gone. "I told you so!" said Jane Hubbard placidly. "What is it?" "It--it appears to be a piece of...." "Lobster-shell. And we had lobster for lunch. Good-night." Half-way down the stairs, it suddenly occurred to Mr. Bennett that he wanted to sing. He wanted to sing very loud, and for quite some time. He restrained the impulse, and returned to bed. But relief such as his was too strong to keep bottled up. He wanted to tell someone all about it. He needed a confidant. Webster, the valet, awakened once again by the ringing of his bell, sighed resignedly and made his way downstairs. "Did you ring, sir?" "Webster," cried Mr. Bennett, "it's all right! I'm not dying after all! I'm not dying after all, Webster!" "Very good, sir," said Webster. "Will there be anything further?" CHAPTER XII THE LURID PAST OF JNO. PETERS "That's right!" said Sir Mallaby Marlowe. "Work while you're young, Sam, work while you're young." He regarded his son's bent head with affectionate approval. "What's the book to-day?" "Widgery on Nisi Prius Evidence," said Sam, without looking up. "Capital!" said Sir Mallaby. "Highly improving and as interesting as a novel--some novels. There's a splendid bit on, I think, page two hundred and fifty-four where the hero finds out all about Copyhold and Customary Estates. It's a wonderfully powerful situation. It appears--but I won't spoil it for you. Mind you don't skip to see how it all comes out in the end!" Sir Mallaby suspended conversation while he addressed an imaginary ball with the mashie which he had taken out of his golf-bag. For this was the day when he went down to Walton Heath for his weekly foursome with three old friends. His tubby form was clad in tweed of a violent nature, with knickerbockers and stockings. "Sam!" "Well?" "Sam, a man at the club showed me a new grip the other day. Instead of overlapping the little finger of the right hand.... Oh, by the way, Sam." "Yes?" "I should lock up the office to-day if I were you, or anxious clients will be coming in and asking for advice, and you'll find yourself in difficulties. I shall be gone, and Peters is away on his holiday. You'd better lock the outer door." "All right," said Sam absently. He was finding Widgery stiff reading. He had just got to the bit about Raptu Haeredis, which--as of course you know, is a writ for taking away an heir holding in socage. Sir Mallaby looked at his watch. "Well, I'll have to be going. See you later, Sam." "Good-bye." Sir Mallaby went out, and Sam, placing both elbows on the desk and twining his fingers in his hair, returned with a frown of consternation to his grappling with Widgery. For perhaps ten minutes the struggle was an even one, then gradually Widgery got the upper hand. Sam's mind, numbed by constant batterings against the stony ramparts of legal phraseology, weakened, faltered, and dropped away; and a moment later his thoughts, as so often happened when he was alone, darted off and began to circle round the image of Billie Bennett. Since they had last met, at Sir Mallaby's dinner-table, Sam had told himself perhaps a hundred times that he cared nothing about Billie, that she had gone out of his life and was dead to him; but unfortunately he did not believe it. A man takes a deal of convincing on a point like this, and Sam had never succeeded in convincing himself for more than two minutes at a time. It was useless to pretend that he did not still love Billie more than ever, because he knew he did; and now, as the truth swept over him for the hundred and first time, he groaned hollowly and gave himself up to the grey despair which is the almost inseparable companion of young men in his position. So engrossed was he in his meditation that he did not hear the light footstep in the outer office, and it was only when it was followed by a tap on the door of the inner office that he awoke with a start to the fact that clients were in his midst. He wished that he had taken his father's advice and locked up the office. Probably this was some frightful bore who wanted to make his infernal will or something, and Sam had neither the ability nor the inclination to assist him. Was it too late to escape? Perhaps if he did not answer the knock, the blighter might think there was nobody at home. But suppose he opened the door and peeped in? A spasm of Napoleonic strategy seized Sam. He dropped silently to the floor and concealed himself under the desk. Napoleon was always doing that sort of thing. There was another tap. Then, as he had anticipated, the door opened. Sam, crouched like a hare in its form, held his breath. It seemed to him that he was going to bring this delicate operation off with success. He felt he had acted just as Napoleon would have done in a similar crisis. And so, no doubt, he had to a certain extent; only Napoleon would have seen to it that his boots and about eighteen inches of trousered legs were not sticking out, plainly visible to all who entered. "Good morning," said a voice. Sam thrilled from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. It was the voice which had been ringing in his ears through all his waking hours. "Are you busy, Mr. Marlowe?" asked Billie, addressing the boots. Sam wriggled out from under the desk like a disconcerted tortoise. "Dropped my pen," he mumbled, as he rose to the surface. He pulled himself together with an effort that was like a physical exercise. He stared at Billie dumbly. Then, recovering speech, he invited her to sit down, and seated himself at the desk. "Dropped my pen!" he gurgled again. "Yes?" said Billie. "Fountain-pen," babbled Sam, "with a broad nib." "Yes?" "A broad _gold_ nib," went on Sam, with the painful exactitude which comes only from embarrassment or the early stages of intoxication. "Really?" said Billie, and Sam blinked and told himself resolutely that this would not do. He was not appearing to advantage. It suddenly occurred to him that his hair was standing on end as the result of his struggle with Widgery. He smoothed it down hastily, and felt a trifle more composed. The old fighting spirit of the Marlowes now began to assert itself to some extent. He must make an effort to appear as little of a fool as possible in this girl's eyes. And what eyes they were! Golly! Like stars! Like two bright planets in.... However, that was neither here nor there. He pulled down his waistcoat and became cold and business-like,--the dry young lawyer. "Er--how do you do, Miss Bennett?" he said with a question in his voice, raising his eyebrows in a professional way. He modelled this performance on that of lawyers he had seen on the stage, and wished he had some snuff to take or something to tap against his front teeth. "Miss Bennett, I believe?" The effect of the question upon Billie was disastrous. She had come to this office with beating heart, prepared to end all misunderstandings, to sob on her soul-mate's shoulder and generally make everything up; but at this inane exhibition the fighting spirit of the Bennetts--which was fully as militant as that of the Marlowes--became roused. She told herself that she had been mistaken in supposing that she still loved this man. She was a proud girl and refused to admit herself capable of loving any man who looked at her as if she was something that the cat had brought in. She drew herself up stiffly. "Yes," she replied. "How clever of you to remember me." "I have a good memory." "How nice! So have I!" There was a pause, during which Billie allowed her gaze to travel casually about the room. Sam occupied the intermission by staring furtively at her profile. He was by now in a thoroughly overwrought condition, and the thumping of his heart sounded to him as if workmen were mending the street outside. How beautiful she looked, with that red hair peeping out beneath her hat and.... However! "Is there anything I can do for you?" he asked in the sort of voice Widgery might have used. Sam always pictured Widgery as a small man with bushy eyebrows, a thin face, and a voice like a rusty file. "Well, I really wanted to see Sir Mallaby." "My father has been called away on important business to Walton Heath. Cannot I act as his substitute?" "Do you know anything about the law?" "Do I know anything about the law!" echoed Sam, amazed. "Do I know----! Why, I was reading my Widgery on Nisi Prius Evidence when you came in." "Oh, were you?" said Billie, interested. "Do you always read on the floor?" "I told you I dropped my pen," said Sam coldly. "And of course you couldn't read without that! Well, as a matter of fact, this has nothing to do with Nisi--what you said." "I have not specialised exclusively on Nisi Prius Evidence. I know the law in all its branches." "Then what would you do if a man insisted on playing the orchestrion when you wanted to get to sleep?" "The orchestrion?" "Yes." "The orchestrion, eh? Ah! H'm!" said Sam. "You still haven't made it quite clear," said Billie. "I was thinking." "Oh, if you want to _think_!" "Tell me the facts," said Sam. "Well, Mr. Mortimer and my father have taken a house together in the country...." "I knew that." "_What_ a memory you have!" said Billie kindly. "Well, for some reason or other they have quarrelled, and now Mr. Mortimer is doing everything he can to make father uncomfortable. Yesterday afternoon father wanted to sleep, and Mr. Mortimer started this orchestrion just to annoy him." "I think--I'm not quite sure--I think that's a tort," said Sam. "A what?" "Either a tort or a malfeasance." "Why, you do know something about it after all!" cried Billie, startled into a sort of friendliness in spite of herself. And at the words and the sight of her quick smile Sam's professional composure reeled on its foundations. He had half risen, with the purpose of springing up and babbling of the passion that consumed him, when the chill reflection came to him that this girl had once said that she considered him ridiculous. If he let himself go, would she not continue to think him ridiculous? He sagged back into his seat; and at that moment there came another tap on the door which, opening, revealed the sinister face of the holiday-making Peters. "Good morning, Mr. Samuel," said Jno. Peters. "Good morning, Miss Milliken. Oh!" He vanished as abruptly as he had appeared. He perceived that what he had taken at first glance for the stenographer was a client, and that the junior partner was engaged on a business conference. He left behind him a momentary silence. "What a horrible-looking man!" said Billie, breaking it with a little gasp. Jno. Peters often affected the opposite sex like that at first sight. "I beg your pardon?" said Sam absently. "What a dreadful-looking man! He quite frightened me!" For some moments Sam sat without speaking. If this had not been one of his Napoleonic mornings, no doubt the sudden arrival of his old friend, Mr. Peters, whom he had imagined at his home in Putney packing for his trip to America, would have suggested nothing to him. As it was, it suggested a great deal. He had had a brain-wave, and for fully a minute he sat tingling under its impact. He was not a young man who often had brain-waves, and, when they came, they made him rather dizzy. "Who is he?" asked Billie. "He seemed to know you? And who," she demanded after a slight pause, "is Miss Milliken?" Sam drew a deep breath. "It's rather a sad story," he said. "His name is John Peters. He used to be clerk here." "But he isn't any longer?" "No." Sam shook his head. "We had to get rid of him." "I don't wonder. A man looking like that...." "It wasn't that so much," said Sam. "The thing that annoyed father was that he tried to shoot Miss Milliken." Billie uttered a cry of horror. "He tried to shoot Miss Milliken!" "He _did_ shoot her--the third time," said Sam, warming to his work. "Only in the arm, fortunately," he added. "But my father is rather a stern disciplinarian and he had to go. I mean, we couldn't keep him after that." "Good gracious!" "She used to be my father's stenographer, and she was thrown a good deal with Peters. It was quite natural that he should fall in love with her. She was a beautiful girl, with rather your own shade of hair. Peters is a man of volcanic passions, and, when, after she had given him to understand that his love was returned, she informed him one day that she was engaged to a fellow at Ealing West, he went right off his onion--I mean, he became completely distraught. I must say that he concealed it very effectively at first. We had no inkling of his condition till he came in with the pistol. And, after that ... well, as I say, we had to dismiss him. A great pity, for he was a good clerk. Still, it wouldn't do. It wasn't only that he tried to shoot Miss Milliken. The thing became an obsession with him, and we found that he had a fixed idea that every red-haired woman who came into the office was the girl who had deceived him. You can see how awkward that made it. Red hair is so fashionable now-a-days." "My hair is red!" whispered Billie pallidly. "Yes, I noticed it myself. I told you it was much the same shade as Miss Milliken's. It's rather fortunate that I happened to be here with you when he came." "But he may be lurking out there still!" "I expect he is," said Sam carelessly. "Yes, I suppose he is. Would you like me to go and send him away? All right." "But--but is it safe?" Sam uttered a light laugh. "I don't mind taking a risk or two for your sake," he said, and sauntered from the room, closing the door behind him. Billie followed him with worshipping eyes. Jno. Peters rose politely from the chair in which he had seated himself for the more comfortable perusal of the copy of _Home Whispers_ which he had brought with him to refresh his mind in the event of the firm being too busy to see him immediately. He was particularly interested in the series of chats with Young Mothers. "Hullo, Peters," said Sam. "Want anything?" "Very sorry to have disturbed you, Mr. Samuel. I just looked in to say good-bye. I sail on Saturday, and my time will be pretty fully taken up all the week. I have to go down to the country to get some final instructions from the client whose important papers I am taking over. I'm sorry to have missed your father, Mr. Samuel." "Yes, this is his golf day. I'll tell him you looked in." "Is there anything I can do before I go?" "Do?" "Well--"--Jno. Peters coughed tactfully--"I see that you are engaged with a client, Mr. Samuel, and I was wondering if any little point of law had arisen with which you did not feel yourself quite capable of coping, in which case I might perhaps be of assistance." "Oh, that lady," said Sam. "That was Miss Milliken's sister." "Indeed? I didn't know Miss Milliken had a sister." "No?" said Sam. "She is not very like her in appearance." "No. This one is the beauty of the family, I believe. A very bright, intelligent girl. I was telling her about your revolver just before you came in, and she was most interested. It's a pity you haven't got it with you now, to show to her." "Oh, but I have it! I have, Mr. Samuel!" said Peters, opening a small handbag and taking out a hymn-book, half a pound of mixed chocolates, a tongue sandwich, and the pistol, in the order named. "I was on my way to the Rupert Street range for a little practice. I should be glad to show it to her." "Well, wait here a minute or two," said Sam. "I'll have finished talking business in a moment." He returned to the inner office. "Well?" cried Billie. "Eh? Oh, he's gone," said Sam. "I persuaded him to go away. He was a little excited, poor fellow. And now let us return to what we were talking about. You say...." He broke off with an exclamation, and glanced at his watch. "Good Heavens! I had no idea of the time. I promised to run up and see a man in one of the offices in the next court. He wants to consult me on some difficulty which has arisen with one of his clients. Rightly or wrongly he values my advice. Can you spare me for a short while? I shan't be more than ten minutes." "Certainly." "Here is something you may care to look at while I'm gone. I don't know if you have read it? Widgery on Nisi Prius Evidence. Most interesting." He went out. Jno. Peters looked up from his _Home Whispers_. "You can go in now," said Sam. "Certainly, Mr. Samuel, certainly." Sam took up the copy of _Home Whispers_ and sat down with his feet on the desk. He turned to the serial story and began to read the synopsis. In the inner room Billie, who had rejected the mental refreshment offered by Widgery and was engaged on making a tour of the office, looking at the portraits of whiskered men whom she took correctly to be the Thorpes, Prescotts, Winslows, and Applebys mentioned on the contents-bill outside, was surprised to hear the door open at her back. She had not expected Sam to return so instantaneously. Nor had he done so. It was not Sam who entered. It was a man of repellent aspect whom she recognised instantly, for Jno. Peters was one of those men who, once seen, are not easily forgotten. He was smiling a cruel, cunning smile--at least, she thought he was; Mr. Peters himself was under the impression that his face was wreathed in a benevolent simper; and in his hand he bore the largest pistol ever seen outside a motion-picture studio. "How do you do, Miss Milliken?" he said. CHAPTER XIII SHOCKS ALL ROUND Billie had been standing near the wall, inspecting a portrait of the late Mr. Josiah Appleby, of which the kindest thing one can say is that one hopes it did not do him justice. She now shrank back against this wall, as if she were trying to get through it. The edge of the portrait's frame tilted her hat out of the straight, but in this supreme moment she did not even notice it. "Er--how do you do?" she said. If she had not been an exceedingly pretty girl, one would have said that she spoke squeakily. The fighting spirit of the Bennetts, though it was considerable fighting spirit, had not risen to this emergency. It had ebbed out of her, leaving in its place a cold panic. She had seen this sort of thing in the movies--there was one series of pictures, "The Dangers of Diana," where something of the kind had happened to the heroine in every reel--but she had not anticipated that it would ever happen to her; and consequently she had not thought out any plan for coping with such a situation. A grave error. In this world one should be prepared for everything, or where is one? "I've brought the revolver," said Mr. Peters. "So--so I see!" said Billie. Mr. Peters nursed the weapon affectionately in his hand. He was rather a shy man with women as a rule, but what Sam had told him about her being interested in his revolver had made his heart warm to this girl. "I was just on my way to have a little practice at the range," he said. "Then I thought I might as well look in here." "I suppose--I suppose you're a good shot?" quavered Billie. "I seldom miss," said Jno. Peters. Billie shuddered. Then, reflecting that the longer she engaged this maniac in conversation, the more hope there was of Sam coming back in time to save her, she essayed further small-talk. "It's--it's very ugly!" "Oh, no!" said Mr. Peters, hurt. Billie perceived that she had said the wrong thing. "Very deadly-looking, I meant," she corrected herself hastily. "It may have deadly work to do, Miss Milliken," said Mr. Peters. Conversation languished again. Billie had no further remarks to make of immediate interest, and Mr. Peters was struggling with a return of the deplorable shyness which so handicapped him in his dealings with the other sex. After a few moments, he pulled himself together again, and, as his first act was to replace the pistol in the pocket of his coat, Billie became conscious of a faint stirring of relief. "The great thing," said Jno. Peters, "is to learn to draw quickly. Like this!" he added producing the revolver with something of the smoothness and rapidity with which Billie, in happier moments, had seen Bream Mortimer take a bowl of gold fish out of a tall hat. "Everything depends on getting the first shot! The first shot, Miss Milliken, is vital." Suddenly Billie had an inspiration. It was hopeless, she knew, to try to convince this poor demented creature, obsessed with his _idée fixe_, that she was not Miss Milliken. Denial would be a waste of time, and might even infuriate him into precipitating the tragedy. It was imperative that she should humour him. And, while she was humouring him, it suddenly occurred to her, why not do it thoroughly? "Mr. Peters," she cried, "you are quite mistaken!" "I beg your pardon," said Jno. Peters, with not a little asperity. "Nothing of the kind!" "You are!" "I assure you I am not. Quickness in the draw is essential...." "You have been misinformed." "Well, I had it direct from the man at the Rupert Street range," said Mr. Peters stiffly. "And if you have ever seen a picture called 'Two-Gun Thomas'...." "Mr. Peters," cried Billie desperately. He was making her head swim with his meaningless ravings. "Mr. Peters, hear me! I am not married to a man at Ealing West!" Mr. Peters betrayed no excitement at the information. This girl seemed for some reason to consider her situation an extraordinary one, but many women, he was aware, were in a similar position. In fact, he could not at the moment think of any of his feminine acquaintances who _were_ married to men at Ealing West. "Indeed?" he said politely. "Won't you believe me?" exclaimed Billie wildly. "Why, certainly, certainly," said Jno. Peters. "Thank God!" said Billie. "I'm not even engaged! It's all been a terrible mistake!" When two people in a small room are speaking on two distinct and different subjects and neither knows what on earth the other is driving at, there is bound to be a certain amount of mental confusion; but at this point Jno. Peters, though still not wholly equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation, began to see a faint shimmer of light behind the clouds. In a nebulous kind of way he began to understand that the girl had come to consult the firm about a breach-of-promise action. Some unknown man at Ealing West had been trifling with her heart--hardened lawyer's clerk as he was, that poignant cry "I'm not even engaged!" had touched Mr. Peters--and she wished to start proceedings. Mr. Peters felt almost in his depth again. He put the revolver in his pocket, and drew out a note-book. "I should be glad to hear the facts," he said with professional courtesy. "In the absence of the guv'nor...." "I have told you the facts!" "This man at Ealing West," said Mr. Peters, moistening the point of his pencil, "he wrote you letters proposing marriage?" "No, no, no!" "At any rate," said Mr. Peters, disappointed but hopeful, "he made love to you before witnesses?" "Never! Never! There is no man at Ealing West! There never was a man at Ealing West!" It was at this point that Jno. Peters began for the first time to entertain serious doubts of the girl's mental balance. The most elementary acquaintance with the latest census told him that there were any number of men at Ealing West. The place was full of them. Would a sane woman have made an assertion to the contrary? He thought not, and he was glad that he had the revolver with him. She had done nothing as yet actively violent, but it was nice to feel prepared. He took it out and laid it nonchalantly in his lap. The sight of the weapon acted on Billie electrically. She flung out her hands, in a gesture of passionate appeal, and played her last card. "I love _you_!" she cried. She wished she could have remembered his first name. It would have rounded off the sentence neatly. In such a moment she could hardly call him "Mr. Peters." "You are the only man I love." "My gracious goodness!" ejaculated Mr. Peters, and nearly fell over backwards. To a naturally shy man this sudden and wholly unexpected declaration was disconcerting; and the clerk was, moreover, engaged. He blushed violently. And yet, even in that moment of consternation, he could not check a certain thrill. No man thinks he is as plain as he really is, but Jno. Peters had always come fairly near to a correct estimate of his charms, and it had always seemed to him, that, in inducing his fiancée to accept him, he had gone some. He now began to wonder if he were not really rather a devil of a chap after all. There must be precious few men going about capable of inspiring devotion like this on the strength of about six and a half minutes casual conversation. Calmer thoughts succeeded this little flicker of complacency. The girl was mad. That was the fact of the matter. He got up and began to edge towards the door. Mr. Samuel would be returning shortly, and he ought to be warned. "So that's all right, isn't it!" said Billie. "Oh, quite, quite!" said Mr. Peters. "Er--Thank you very much!" "I thought you would be pleased," said Billie, relieved but puzzled. For a man of volcanic passions, as Sam Marlowe had described him, he seemed to be taking the thing very calmly. She had anticipated a strenuous scene. "Oh, it's a great compliment!" Mr. Peters assured her. At this point Sam came in, interrupting the conversation at a moment when it had reached a somewhat difficult stage. He had finished the instalment of the serial story in _Home Whispers_, and, looking at his watch, he fancied that he had allowed sufficient time to elapse for events to have matured along the lines which his imagination had indicated. The atmosphere of the room seemed to him, as he entered, a little strained. Billie looked pale and agitated. Mr. Peters looked rather agitated, too. Sam caught Billie's eye. It had an unspoken appeal in it. He gave an imperceptible nod, a reassuring nod, the nod of a man who understood all and was prepared to handle the situation. "Come, Peters," he said in a deep, firm, quiet voice, laying a hand on the clerk's arm. "It's time that you went." "Yes, indeed, Mr. Samuel! Yes, yes, indeed!" "I'll see you out," said Sam soothingly, and led him through the outer office and on to the landing outside. "Well, good luck, Peters," he said, as they stood at the head of the stairs. "I hope you have a pleasant trip. Why, what's the matter? You seem upset." "That girl, Mr. Samuel! I really think--really, she cannot be quite right in her head." "Nonsense, nonsense!" said Sam firmly. "She's all right! Well, good-bye." "Good-bye, Mr. Samuel." "When did you say you were sailing?" "Next Saturday, Mr. Samuel. But I fear I shall have no opportunity of seeing you again before then. I have packing to do and I have to see this gentleman down in the country...." "All right. Then we'll say good-bye now. Good-bye, Peters. Mind you have a good time in America. I'll tell my father you called." Sam watched him out of sight down the stairs, then turned and made his way back to the inner office. Billie was sitting limply on the chair which Jno. Peters had occupied. She sprang to her feet. "Has he really gone?" "Yes. He's gone this time." "Was he--was he violent?" "A little," said Sam. "A little. But I calmed him down." He looked at her gravely. "Thank God I was in time!" "Oh, you are the bravest man in the world!" cried Billie, and, burying her face in her hands, burst into tears. "There, there!" said Sam. "There, there! Come, come! It's all right now! There, there, there!" He knelt down beside her. He slipped one arm round her waist. He patted her hands. "There, there, there!" he said. I have tried to draw Samuel Marlowe so that he will live on the printed page. I have endeavoured to delineate his character so that it will be as an open book. And, if I have succeeded in my task, the reader will by now have become aware that he was a young man with the gall of an Army mule. His conscience, if he had ever had one, had become atrophied through long disuse. He had given this sensitive girl the worst fright she had had since a mouse had got into her bedroom at school. He had caused Jno. Peters to totter off to the Rupert Street range making low, bleating noises. And did he care? No! All he cared about was the fact that he had erased for ever from Billie's mind that undignified picture of himself as he had appeared on the boat, and substituted another which showed him brave, resourceful, gallant. All he cared about was the fact that Billie, so cold ten minutes before, had just allowed him to kiss her for the forty-second time. If you had asked him, he would have said that he had acted for the best, and that out of evil cometh good, or some sickening thing like that. That was the sort of man Samuel Marlowe was. His face was very close to Billie's, who had cheered up wonderfully by this time, and he was whispering his degraded words of endearment into her ear, when there was a sort of explosion in the doorway. "Great Godfrey!" exclaimed Mr. Rufus Bennett, gazing on the scene from this point of vantage and mopping with a large handkerchief a scarlet face, which, as the result of climbing three flights of stairs, had become slightly soluble. "Great Heavens above! Number four!" CHAPTER XIV STRONG REMARKS BY A FATHER Mr. Bennett advanced shakily into the room, and supported himself with one hand on the desk, while with the other he still plied the handkerchief on his over-heated face. Much had occurred to disturb him this morning. On top of a broken night he had had an affecting reconciliation scene with Mr. Mortimer, at the conclusion of which he had decided to take the first train to London in the hope of intercepting Billie before she reached Sir Mallaby's office on her mission of war. The local train-service kept such indecently early hours that he had been compelled to bolt his breakfast, and, in the absence of Billie, the only member of the household who knew how to drive the car, to walk to the station, a distance of nearly two miles, the last hundred yards of which he had covered at a rapid gallop, under the erroneous impression that an express whose smoke he had seen in the distance was the train he had come to catch. Arrived on the platform, he had had a trying wait, followed by a slow journey to Waterloo. The cab which he had taken at Waterloo had kept him in a lively state of apprehension all the way to the Savoy, owing to an apparent desire to climb over motor-omnibuses when it could not get round them. At the Savoy he found that Billie had already left, which had involved another voyage through the London traffic under the auspices of a driver who appeared to be either blind or desirous of committing suicide. He had three flights of stairs to negotiate. And, finally, arriving at the office, he had found his daughter in the circumstances already described. "Why, father!" said Billie. "I didn't expect you." As an explanation of her behaviour this might, no doubt, have been considered sufficient, but as an excuse for it Mr. Bennett thought it inadequate and would have said so, had he had enough breath. This physical limitation caused him to remain speechless and to do the best he could in the way of stern fatherly reproof by puffing like a seal after a long dive in search of fish. Having done this, he became aware that Sam Marlowe was moving towards him with outstretched hand. It took a lot to disconcert Sam, and he was the calmest person present. He gave evidence of this in a neat speech. He did not in so many words congratulate Mr. Bennett on the piece of luck which had befallen him, but he tried to make him understand by his manner that he was distinctly to be envied as the prospective father-in-law of such a one as himself. "I am delighted to see you, Mr. Bennett," said Sam. "You could not have come at a more fortunate moment. You see for yourself how things are. There is no need for a long explanation. You came to find a daughter, Mr. Bennett, and you have found a son!" And he would like to see the man, thought Sam, who could have put it more cleverly and pleasantly and tactfully than that. "What are you talking about?" said Mr. Bennett, recovering breath. "I haven't got a son." "I will be a son to you! I will be the prop of your declining years...." "What the devil do you mean, my declining years?" demanded Mr. Bennett with asperity. "He means when they do decline, father dear," said Billie. "Of course, of course," said Sam. "When they do decline. Not till then, of course. I wouldn't dream of it. But, once they do decline, count on me! And I should like to say for my part," he went on handsomely, "what an honour I think it, to become the son-in-law of a man like Mr. Bennett. Bennett of New York!" he added spaciously, not so much because he knew what he meant, for he would have been the first to admit that he did not, but because it sounded well. "Oh!" said Mr. Bennett. "You do, do you?" Mr. Bennett sat down. He put away his handkerchief, which had certainly earned a rest. Then he fastened a baleful stare upon his newly-discovered son. It was not the sort of look a proud and happy father-in-law-to-be ought to have directed at a prospective relative. It was not, as a matter of fact, the sort of look which anyone ought to have directed at anybody, except possibly an exceptionally prudish judge at a criminal in the dock, convicted of a more than usually atrocious murder. Billie, not being in the actual line of fire, only caught the tail end of it, but it was enough to create a misgiving. "Oh, father! You aren't angry!" "Angry!" "You _can't_ be angry!" "Why can't I be angry?" declared Mr. Bennett, with that sense of injury which comes to self-willed men when their whims are thwarted. "Why the devil shouldn't I be angry? I _am_ angry! I come here and find you like--like this, and you seem to expect me to throw my hat in the air and give three rousing cheers! Of course I'm angry! You are engaged to be married to an excellent young man of the highest character, one of the finest young men I have ever known...." "Oh, well!" said Sam, straightening his tie modestly. "It's awfully good of you...." "But that's all over, father." "What's all over?" "You told me yourself that you had broken off my engagement to Bream." "Well--er--yes, I did," said Mr. Bennett, a little taken aback. "That is--to a certain extent--so. But," he added, with restored firmness, "it's on again!" "But I don't want to marry Bream!" "Naturally!" said Sam. "Naturally! Quite out of the question. In a few days we'll all be roaring with laughter at the very idea." "It doesn't matter what you want! A girl who gets engaged to a dozen men in three weeks...." "It wasn't a dozen!" "Well, four--five--six--you can't expect me not to lose count.... I say a girl who does that does not know what she wants, and older and more prudent heads must decide for her. You are going to marry Bream Mortimer!" "All wrong! All wrong!" said Sam, with a reproving shake of the head. "All wrong! She's going to marry me." Mr. Bennett scorched him with a look compared with which his earlier effort had been a loving glance. "Wilhelmina," he said, "go into the outer office." "But, father, Sam saved my life!" "Go into the outer office and wait for me there." "There was a lunatic in here...." "There will be another if you don't go." "He had a pistol." "Go into the outer office!" "I shall always love you, Sam!" said Billie, pausing mutinously at the door. "I shall always love _you_!" said Sam cordially. "Nobody can keep us apart!" "They're wasting their time, trying." "You're the most wonderful man in the world!" "There never was another girl like you!" "Get _out_!" bellowed Mr. Bennett, on whose equanimity this love-scene, which I think beautiful, was jarring profoundly. "Now, sir!" he said to Sam, as the door closed. "Yes, let's talk it over calmly," said Sam. "I will not talk it over calmly!" "Oh, come! You can do it if you try. In the first place, whatever put this silly idea into your head about that sweet girl marrying Bream Mortimer?" "Bream Mortimer is the son of Henry Mortimer." "I know," said Sam. "And, while it is no doubt unfair to hold that against him, it's a point you can't afford to ignore. Henry Mortimer! You and I have Henry Mortimer's number. We know what Henry Mortimer is like! A man who spends his time thinking up ways of annoying you. You can't seriously want to have the Mortimer family linked to you by marriage." "Henry Mortimer is my oldest friend." "That makes it all the worse. Fancy a man who calls himself your friend treating you like that!" "The misunderstanding to which you allude has been completely smoothed over. My relations with Mr. Mortimer are thoroughly cordial." "Well, have it your own way. Personally, I wouldn't trust a man like that. And, as for letting my daughter marry his son...!" "I have decided once and for all...." "If you'll take my advice, you will break the thing off." "I will not take your advice." "I wouldn't expect to charge you for it," explained Sam reassuringly. "I give it you as a friend, not as a lawyer. Six-and-eightpence to others, free to you." "Will you understand that my daughter is going to marry Bream Mortimer? What are you giggling about?" "It sounds so silly. The idea of anyone marrying Bream Mortimer, I mean." "Let me tell you he is a thoroughly estimable young man." "And there you put the whole thing in a nutshell. Your daughter is a girl of spirit. She would hate to be tied for life to an estimable young man." "She will do as I tell her." Sam regarded him sternly. "Have you no regard for her happiness?" "I am the best judge of what is best for her." "If you ask me," said Sam candidly, "I think you're a rotten judge." "I did not come here to be insulted!" "I like that! You have been insulting me ever since you arrived. What right have you to say that I'm not fit to marry your daughter?" "I did not say that." "You've implied it. And you've been looking at me as if I were a leper or something the Pure Food Committee had condemned. Why? That's what I ask you," said Sam, warming up. This he fancied, was the way Widgery would have tackled a troublesome client. "Why? Answer me that!" "I...." Sam rapped sharply on the desk. "Be careful, sir. Be very careful!" He knew that this was what lawyers always said. Of course, there is a difference in position between a miscreant whom you suspect of an attempt at perjury and the father of the girl you love, whose consent to the match you wish to obtain, but Sam was in no mood for these nice distinctions. He only knew that lawyers told people to be very careful, so he told Mr. Bennett to be very careful. "What do you mean, be very careful?" said Mr. Bennett. "I'm dashed if I know," said Sam frankly. The question struck him as a mean attack. He wondered how Widgery would have met it. Probably by smiling quietly and polishing his spectacles. Sam had no spectacles. He endeavoured, however, to smile quietly. "Don't laugh at me!" roared Mr. Bennett. "I'm not laughing at you." "You are!" "I'm not! I'm smiling quietly." "Well, don't then!" said Mr. Bennett. He glowered at his young companion. "I don't know why I'm wasting my time, talking to you. The position is clear to the meanest intelligence. I have no objection to you personally...." "Come, this is better!" said Sam. "I don't know you well enough to have any objection to you or any opinion of you at all. This is only the second time I have ever met you in my life." "Mark you," said Sam, "I think I am one of those fellows who grow on people...." "As far as I am concerned, you simply do not exist. You may be the noblest character in London or you may be wanted by the police. I don't know. And I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. You mean nothing in my life. I don't know you." "You must persevere," said Sam. "You must buckle to and get to know me. Don't give the thing up in this half-hearted way. Everything has to have a beginning. Stick to it, and in a week or two you will find yourself knowing me quite well." "I don't want to know you!" "You say that now, but wait!" "And thank goodness I have not got to!" exploded Mr. Bennett, ceasing to be calm and reasonable with a suddenness which affected Sam much as though half a pound of gunpowder had been touched off under his chair. "For the little I have seen of you has been quite enough! Kindly understand that my daughter is engaged to be married to another man, and that I do not wish to see or hear anything of you again! I shall try to forget your very existence, and I shall see to it that Wilhelmina does the same! You're an impudent scoundrel, sir! An impudent scoundrel! I don't like you! I don't wish to see you again! If you were the last man in the world I wouldn't allow my daughter to marry you! If that is quite clear, I will wish you good morning!" Mr. Bennett thundered out of the room, and Sam, temporarily stunned by the outburst, remained where he was, gaping. A few minutes later life began to return to his palsied limbs. It occurred to him that Mr. Bennett had forgotten to kiss him good-bye, and he went into the outer office to tell him so. But the outer office was empty. Sam stood for a moment in thought, then he returned to the inner office, and, picking up a time-table, began to look out trains to the village of Windlehurst in Hampshire, the nearest station to his aunt Adeline's charming old-world house, Windles. CHAPTER XV DRAMA AT A COUNTRY HOUSE As I read over the last few chapters of this narrative, I see that I have been giving the reader rather too jumpy a time. To almost a painful degree I have excited his pity and terror; and, though that is what Aristotle says one ought to do, I feel that a little respite would not be out of order. The reader can stand having his emotions tortured up to a certain point; after that he wants to take it easy for a bit. It is with pleasure, therefore, that I turn now to depict a quiet, peaceful scene in domestic life. It won't last long--three minutes, perhaps, by a good stop-watch--but that is not my fault. My task is to record facts as they happened. The morning sunlight fell pleasantly on the garden of Windles, turning it into the green and amber Paradise which Nature had intended it to be. A number of the local birds sang melodiously in the undergrowth at the end of the lawn, while others, more energetic, hopped about the grass in quest of worms. Bees, mercifully ignorant that, after they had worked themselves to the bone gathering honey, the proceeds of their labour would be collared and consumed by idle humans, buzzed industriously to and fro and dived head foremost into flowers. Winged insects danced sarabands in the sunshine. In a deck-chair under the cedar-tree Billie Bennett, with a sketching-block on her knee, was engaged in drawing a picture of the ruined castle. Beside her, curled up in a ball, lay her Pekinese dog, Pinky-Boodles. Beside Pinky-Boodles slept Smith, the bulldog. In the distant stable-yard, unseen but audible, a boy in shirt-sleeves was washing the car and singing as much as a treacherous memory would permit of a popular sentimental ballad. You may think that was all. You may suppose that nothing could be added to deepen the atmosphere of peace and content. Not so. At this moment, Mr. Bennett emerged from the French windows of the drawing-room, clad in white flannels and buckskin shoes, supplying just the finishing touch that was needed. Mr. Bennett crossed the lawn, and sat down beside his daughter. Smith, the bulldog, raising a sleepy head, breathed heavily; but Mr. Bennett did not quail. Since their last unfortunate meeting, relations of distant, but solid, friendship had come to exist between pursuer and pursued. Sceptical at first, Mr. Bennett had at length allowed himself to be persuaded of the mildness of the animal's nature and the essential purity of his motives; and now it was only when they encountered each other unexpectedly round sharp corners that he ever betrayed the slightest alarm. So now, while Smith slept on the grass, Mr. Bennett reclined in the chair. It was the nearest thing modern civilisation has seen to the lion lying down with the lamb. "Sketching?" said Mr. Bennett. "Yes," said Billie, for there were no secrets between this girl and her father. At least, not many. She occasionally omitted to tell him some such trifle as that she had met Samuel Marlowe on the previous morning in a leafy lane, and intended to meet him again this afternoon, but apart from that her mind was an open book. "It's a great morning," said Mr. Bennett. "So peaceful," said Billie. "The eggs you get in the country in England," said Mr. Bennett, suddenly striking a lyrical note, "are extraordinary. I had three for breakfast this morning which defied competition, simply defied competition. They were large and brown, and as fresh as new-mown hay!" He mused for a while in a sort of ecstasy. "And the hams!" he went on. "The ham I had for breakfast was what I call ham! I don't know when I've had ham like that. I suppose it's something they feed the pigs on!" he concluded, in soft meditation. And he gave a little sigh. Life was very beautiful. Silence fell, broken only by the snoring of Smith. Billie was thinking of Sam, and of what Sam had said to her in the lane yesterday; of his clean-cut face, and the look in his eyes--so vastly superior to any look that ever came into the eyes of Bream Mortimer. She was telling herself that her relations with Sam were an idyll; for, being young and romantic, she enjoyed this freshet of surreptitious meetings which had come to enliven the stream of her life. It was pleasant to go warily into deep lanes where forbidden love lurked. She cast a swift side-glance at her father--the unconscious ogre in her fairy-story. What would he say if he knew? But Mr. Bennett did not know, and consequently continued to meditate peacefully on ham. They had sat like this for perhaps a minute--two happy mortals lulled by the gentle beauty of the day--when from the window of the drawing-room there stepped out a white-capped maid. And one may just as well say at once--and have done with it--that this is the point where the quiet, peaceful scene in domestic life terminates with a jerk, and pity and terror resume work at the old stand. The maid--her name, not that it matters, was Susan, and she was engaged to be married, though the point is of no importance, to the second assistant at Green's Grocery Stores in Windlehurst--approached Mr. Bennett. "Please, sir, a gentleman to see you." "Eh?" said Mr. Bennett, torn from a dream of large pink slices edged with bread-crumbed fat. "A gentleman to see you, sir. In the drawing-room. He says you are expecting him." "Of course, yes. To be sure." Mr. Bennett heaved himself out of the deck-chair. Beyond the French windows he could see an indistinct form in a grey suit, and remembered that this was the morning on which Sir Mallaby Marlowe's clerk--who was taking those Schultz and Bowen papers for him to America--had written that he would call. To-day was Friday; no doubt the man was sailing from Southampton to-morrow. He crossed the lawn, entered the drawing-room, and found Mr. Jno. Peters with an expression on his ill-favoured face, which looked like one of consternation, of uneasiness, even of alarm. "Morning, Mr. Peters," said Mr. Bennett. "Very good of you to run down. Take a seat, and I'll just go through the few notes I have made about the matter." "Mr. Bennett," exclaimed Jno. Peters. "May--may I speak?" "What do you mean? Eh? What? Something to say? What is it?" Mr. Peters cleared his throat awkwardly. He was feeling embarrassed at the unpleasantness of the duty which he had to perform, but it was a duty, and he did not intend to shrink from performing it. Ever since, gazing appreciatively through the drawing-room windows at the charming scene outside, he had caught sight of the unforgettable form of Billie, seated in her chair with the sketching-block on her knee, he had realised that he could not go away in silence, leaving Mr. Bennett ignorant of what he was up against. One almost inclines to fancy that there must have been a curse of some kind on this house of Windles. Certainly everybody who entered it seemed to leave his peace of mind behind him. Jno. Peters had been feeling notably happy during his journey in the train from London, and the subsequent walk from the station. The splendour of the morning had soothed his nerves, and the faint wind that blew inshore from the sea spoke to him hearteningly of adventure and romance. There was a jar of pot-pourri on the drawing-room table, and he had derived considerable pleasure from sniffing at it. In short, Jno. Peters was in the pink, without a care in the world, until he had looked out of the window and seen Billie. "Mr. Bennett," he said, "I don't want to do anybody any harm, and, if you know all about it, and she suits you, well and good; but I think it is my duty to inform you that your stenographer is not quite right in her head. I don't say she's dangerous, but she isn't compos. She decidedly is _not_ compos, Mr. Bennett!" Mr. Bennett stared at his well-wisher dumbly for a moment. The thought crossed his mind that, if ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, this was it. His opinion of Jno. Peters' sanity went down to zero. "What are you talking about? My stenographer? What stenographer?" It occurred to Mr. Peters that a man of the other's wealth and business connections might well have a troupe of these useful females. He particularised. "I mean the young lady out in the garden there, to whom you were dictating just now. The young lady with the writing-pad on her knee." "What! What!" Mr. Bennett spluttered. "Do you know who that is?" he exclaimed. "Oh, yes, indeed!" said Jno. Peters. "I have only met her once, when she came into our office to see Mr. Samuel, but her personality and appearance stamped themselves so forcibly on my mind, that I know I am not mistaken. I am sure it is my duty to tell you exactly what happened when I was left alone with her in the office. We had hardly exchanged a dozen words, Mr. Bennett, when--"--here Jno. Peters, modest to the core, turned vividly pink--"when she told me--she told me that I was the only man she loved!" Mr. Bennett uttered a loud cry. "Sweet spirits of nitre! What!" "Those were her exact words." "Five!" ejaculated Mr. Bennett, in a strangled voice. "By the great horn spoon, number five!" Mr. Peters could make nothing of this exclamation, and he was deterred from seeking light by the sudden action of his host, who, bounding from his seat with a vivacity of which one would not have believed him capable, charged to the French window and emitted a bellow. "Wilhelmina!" Billie looked up from her sketching-block with a start. It seemed to her that there was a note of anguish, of panic, in that voice. What her father could have found in the drawing-room to be frightened at, she did not know; but she dropped her block and hurried to his assistance. "What is it, father?" Mr. Bennett had retired within the room when she arrived; and, going in after him, she perceived at once what had caused his alarm. There before her, looking more sinister than ever, stood the lunatic Peters; and there was an ominous bulge in his right coat-pocket which to her excited senses betrayed the presence of the revolver. What Jno. Peters was, as a matter of fact, carrying in his right coat-pocket was a bag of mixed chocolates which he had purchased in Windlehurst. But Billie's eyes, though bright, had no X-ray quality. Her simple creed was that, if Jno. Peters bulged at any point, that bulge must be caused by a pistol. She screamed, and backed against the wall. Her whole acquaintance with Jno Peters had been one constant backing against walls. "Don't shoot!" she cried, as Mr. Peters absent-mindedly dipped his hand into the pocket of his coat. "Oh, please don't shoot!" "What the deuce do you mean?" said Mr. Bennett irritably. "Wilhelmina, this man says that you told him you loved him." "Yes, I did, and I do. Really, really, Mr. Peters, I do!" "Suffering cats!" Mr. Bennett clutched at the back of his chair. "But you've only met him once," he added almost pleadingly. "You don't understand, father dear," said Billie desperately. "I'll explain the whole thing later, when...." "Father!" ejaculated Jno. Peters feebly. "Did you say 'father?'" "Of course I said 'father!'" "This is my daughter, Mr. Peters." "My daughter! I mean, your daughter! Are--are you sure?" "Of course I'm sure. Do you think I don't know my own daughter?" "But she called me Mr. Peters!" "Well, it's your name, isn't it?" "But, if she--if this young lady is your daughter, how did she know my name?" The point seemed to strike Mr. Bennett. He turned to Billie. "That's true. Tell me, Wilhelmina, when did you and Mr. Peters meet?" "Why, in--in Sir Mallaby Marlowe's office, the morning you came there and found me when I was talking to Sam." Mr. Peters uttered a subdued gargling sound. He was finding this scene oppressive to a not very robust intellect. "He--Mr. Samuel--told me your name was Miss Milliken," he said dully. Billie stared at him. "Mr. Marlowe told you my name was Miss Milliken!" she repeated. "He told me that you were the sister of the Miss Milliken who acts as stenographer for the guv'--for Sir Mallaby, and sent me in to show you my revolver, because he said you were interested and wanted to see it." Billie uttered an exclamation. So did Mr. Bennett, who hated mysteries. "What revolver? Which revolver? What's all this about a revolver? Have you a revolver?" "Why, yes, Mr. Bennett. It is packed now in my trunk, but usually I carry it about with me everywhere in order to take a little practice at the Rupert Street range. I bought it when Sir Mallaby told me he was sending me to America, because I thought I ought to be prepared--because of the Underworld, you know." A cold gleam had come into Billie's eyes. Her face was pale and hard. If Sam Marlowe--at that moment carolling blithely in his bedroom at the Blue Boar in Windlehurst, washing his hands preparatory to descending to the coffee-room for a bit of cold lunch--could have seen her, the song would have frozen on his lips. Which, one might mention, as showing that there is always a bright side, would have been much appreciated by the travelling gentleman in the adjoining room, who had had a wild night with some other travelling gentlemen, and was then nursing a rather severe headache, separated from Sam's penetrating baritone only by the thickness of a wooden wall. Billie knew all. And, terrible though the fact is as an indictment of the male sex, when a woman knows all, there is invariably trouble ahead for some man. There was trouble ahead for Samuel Marlowe. Billie, now in possession of the facts, had examined them and come to the conclusion that Sam had played a practical joke on her, and she was a girl who strongly disapproved of practical humour at her expense. "That morning I met you at Sir Mallaby's office, Mr. Peters," she said in a frosty voice, "Mr. Marlowe had just finished telling me a long and convincing story to the effect that you were madly in love with a Miss Milliken, who had jilted you, and that this had driven you off your head, and that you spent your time going about with a pistol, trying to shoot every red-haired woman you saw, because you thought they were Miss Milliken. Naturally, when you came in and called me Miss Milliken, and brandished a revolver, I was very frightened. I thought it would be useless to tell you that I wasn't Miss Milliken, so I tried to persuade you that I was and hadn't jilted you after all." "Good gracious!" said Mr. Peters, vastly relieved; and yet--for always there is bitter mixed with the sweet--a shade disappointed. "Then--er--you don't love me after all?" "No!" said Billie. "I am engaged to Bream Mortimer, and I love him and nobody else in the world!" The last portion of her observation was intended for the consumption of Mr. Bennett, rather than that of Mr. Peters, and he consumed it joyfully. He folded Billie in his ample embrace. "I always thought you had a grain of sense hidden away somewhere," he said, paying her a striking tribute. "I hope now that we've heard the last of all this foolishness about that young hound Marlowe." "You certainly have! I don't want ever to see him again! I hate him!" "You couldn't do better, my dear," said Mr. Bennett, approvingly. "And now run away. Mr. Peters and I have some business to discuss." A quarter of an hour later, Webster, the valet, sunning himself in the stable-yard, was aware of the daughter of his employer approaching him. "Webster," said Billie. She was still pale. Her face was still hard, and her eyes still gleamed coldly. "Miss?" said Webster politely, throwing away the cigarette with which he had been refreshing himself. "Will you do something for me?" "I should be more than delighted, miss." Billie whisked into view an envelope which had been concealed in the recesses of her dress. "Do you know the country about here well, Webster?" "Within a certain radius, not unintimately, miss. I have been for several enjoyable rambles since the fine weather set in." "Do you know the place where there is a road leading to Havant, and another to Cosham? It's about a mile down...." "I know the spot well, miss." "Well, straight in front of you when you get to the sign-post there is a little lane...." "I know it, miss," said Webster, with a faint smile. Twice had he escorted Miss Trimblett, Billie's maid, thither. "A delightfully romantic spot. What with the overhanging trees, the wealth of blackberry bushes, the varied wild-flowers...." "Yes, never mind about the wild-flowers now. I want you after lunch, to take this note to a gentleman you will find sitting on the gate at the bottom of the lane...." "Sitting on the gate, miss. Yes, miss." "Or leaning against it. You can't mistake him. He is rather tall and ... oh, well, there isn't likely to be anybody else there, so you can't make a mistake. Give him this, will you?" "Certainly, miss. Er--any message?" "Any what?" "Any verbal message, miss?" "No, certainly not! You won't forget, will you, Webster?" "On no account whatever, miss. Shall I wait for an answer?" "There won't be any answer," said Billie, setting her teeth for an instant. "Oh, Webster!" "Miss?" "I can rely on you to say nothing to anybody?" "Most undoubtedly, miss. Most undoubtedly." "Does anybody know anything about a feller named S. Marlowe?" inquired Webster, entering the kitchen. "Don't all speak at once! S. Marlowe. Ever heard of him?" He paused for a reply, but nobody had any information to impart. "Because there's something jolly well up! Our Miss B. is sending me with notes for him to the bottom of lanes." "And her engaged to young Mr. Mortimer!" said the scullery-maid, shocked. "The way they go on. Chronic!" said the scullery-maid. "Don't you go getting alarmed! And don't you," added Webster, "go shoving your oar in when your social superiors are talking! I've had to speak to you about that before. My remarks were addressed to Mrs. Withers here." He indicated the cook with a respectful gesture. "Yes, here's the note, Mrs. Withers. Of course, if you had a steamy kettle handy, in about half a moment we could ... but no, perhaps it's wiser not to risk it. And, come to that, I don't need to unstick the envelope to know what's inside here. It's the raspberry, ma'am, or I've lost all my power to read the human female countenance. Very cold and proud-looking she was! I don't know who this S. Marlowe is, but I do know one thing; in this hand I hold the instrument that's going to give it him in the neck, proper! Right in the neck, or my name isn't Montagu Webster!" "Well!" said Mrs. Withers, comfortably, pausing for a moment from her labours. "Think of that!" "The way I look at it," said Webster, "is that there's been some sort of understanding between our Miss B. and this S. Marlowe, and she's thought better of it and decided to stick to the man of her parent's choice. She's chosen wealth and made up her mind to hand the humble suitor the mitten. There was a rather similar situation in 'Cupid or Mammon,' that Nosegay Novelette I was reading in the train coming down here, only that ended different. For my part I'd be better pleased if our Miss B. would let the cash go, and obey the dictates of her own heart; but these modern girls are all alike! All out for the stuff, they are! Oh, well, it's none of my affair," said Webster, stifling a not unmanly sigh. For beneath that immaculate shirt-front there beat a warm heart. Montagu Webster was a sentimentalist. CHAPTER XVI WEBSTER, FRIEND IN NEED At half-past two that afternoon, full of optimism and cold beef, gaily unconscious that Webster with measured strides was approaching ever nearer with the note that was to give it him in the neck, proper, Samuel Marlowe dangled his feet from the top bar of the gate at the end of the lane, and smoked contentedly as he waited for Billie to make her appearance. He had had an excellent lunch; his pipe was drawing well, and all Nature smiled. The breeze from the sea across the meadows tickled pleasantly the back of his head, and sang a soothing song in the long grass and ragged-robins at his feet. He was looking forward with a roseate glow of anticipation to the moment when the white flutter of Billie's dress would break the green of the foreground. How eagerly he would jump from the gate! How lovingly he would.... The elegant figure of Webster interrupted his reverie. Sam had never seen Webster before, and it was with no pleasure that he saw him now. He had come to regard this lane as his own private property, and he resented trespassers. He tucked his legs under him, and scowled at Webster under the brim of his hat. The valet advanced towards him with the air of an affable executioner stepping daintily to the block. "Mr. Marlowe, sir?" he inquired politely. Sam was startled. He could making nothing of this. "Eh? What?" "Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. S. Marlowe?" "Yes, that's my name." "Mine is Webster, sir. I am Mr. Bennett's personal gentleman's gentleman. Miss Bennett entrusted me with this note to deliver to you, sir." Sam began to grasp the position. For some reason or other, the dear girl had been prevented from coming this afternoon, and she had written to explain and relieve his anxiety. It was like her. It was just the sweet, thoughtful thing he would have expected her to do. His contentment with the existing scheme of things returned. The sun shone out again, and he found himself amiably disposed towards the messenger. "Fine day," he said, as he took the note. "Extremely, sir," said Webster, outwardly unemotional, inwardly full of a grave pity. It was plain to him that there had been no previous little rift to prepare the young man for the cervical operation which awaited him, and he edged a little nearer, in order to be handy to catch Sam if the shock knocked him off the gate. As it happened, it did not. Having read the opening words of the note, Sam rocked violently; but his feet were twined about the lower bars and this saved him from overbalancing. Webster stepped back, relieved. The note fluttered to the ground. Webster, picking it up and handing it back, was enabled to get a glimpse of the first two sentences. They confirmed his suspicions. The note was hot stuff. Assuming that it continued as it began, it was about the warmest thing of its kind that pen had ever written. Webster had received one or two heated epistles from the sex in his time--your man of gallantry can hardly hope to escape these unpleasantnesses--but none had got off the mark quite so swiftly, and with quite so much frigid violence as this. "Thanks," said Sam mechanically. "Not at all, sir. You are very welcome." Sam resumed his reading. A cold perspiration broke out on his forehead. His toes curled, and something seemed to be crawling down the small of his back. His heart had moved from its proper place and was now beating in his throat. He swallowed once or twice to remove the obstruction, but without success. A kind of pall had descended on the landscape, blotting out the sun. Of all the rotten sensations in this world, the worst is the realisation that a thousand-to-one chance has come off, and caused our wrong-doing to be detected. There had seemed no possibility of that little ruse of his being discovered, and yet here was Billie in full possession of the facts. It almost made the thing worse that she did not say how she had come into possession of them. This gave Sam that feeling of self-pity, that sense of having been ill-used by Fate, which makes the bringing home of crime so particularly poignant. "Fine day!" he muttered. He had a sort of subconscious feeling that it was imperative to keep engaging Webster in light conversation. "Yes, sir. Weather still keeps up," agreed the valet suavely. Sam frowned over the note. He felt injured. Sending a fellow notes didn't give him a chance. If she had come in person and denounced him it would not have been an agreeable experience, but at least it would have been possible then to have pleaded and cajoled and--and all that sort of thing. But what could he do now? It seemed to him that his only possible course was to write a note in reply, begging her to see him. He explored his pockets and found a pencil and a scrap of paper. For some moments he scribbled desperately. Then he folded the note. "Will you take this to Miss Bennett?" he said, holding it out. Webster took the missive, because he wanted to read it later at his leisure; but he shook his head. "Useless, I fear, sir," he said gravely. "What do you mean?" "I am afraid it would effect little or nothing, sir, sending our Miss B. notes. She is not in the proper frame of mind to appreciate them. I saw her face when she handed me the letter you have just read, and I assure you, sir, she is not in a malleable mood." "You seem to know a lot about it!" "I have studied the sex, sir," said Webster modestly. "I mean, about my business, confound it! You seem to know all about it!" "Why, yes, sir, I think I may say that I have grasped the position of affairs. And, if you will permit me to say so, sir, you have my respectful sympathy." Dignity is a sensitive plant which nourishes only under the fairest conditions. Sam's had perished in the bleak east wind of Billie's note. In other circumstances he might have resented this intrusion of a stranger into his most intimate concerns. His only emotion now, was one of dull but distinct gratitude. The four winds of Heaven blew chilly upon his raw and unprotected soul, and he wanted to wrap it up in a mantle of sympathy, careless of the source from which he borrowed that mantle. If Webster felt disposed, as he seemed to indicate, to comfort him, let the thing go on. At that moment Sam would have accepted condolences from a coal-heaver. "I was reading a story--one of the Nosegay Novelettes; I do not know if you are familiar with the series, sir?--in which much the same situation occurred. It was entitled 'Cupid or Mammon.' The heroine, Lady Blanche Trefusis, forced by her parents to wed a wealthy suitor, despatches a note to her humble lover, informing him it cannot be. I believe it often happens like that, sir." "You're all wrong," said Sam. "It's not that at all." "Indeed, sir? I supposed it was." "Nothing like it! I--I----." Sam's dignity, on its death-bed, made a last effort to assert itself. "I don't know what it's got to do with you!" "Precisely, sir!" said Webster, with dignity. "Just as you say! Good afternoon, sir!" He swayed gracefully, conveying a suggestion of departure without moving his feet. The action was enough for Sam. Dignity gave an expiring gurgle, and passed away, regretted by all. "Don't go!" he cried. The idea of being left alone in this infernal lane, without human support, overpowered him. Moreover, Webster had personality. He exuded it. Already Sam had begun to cling to him in spirit, and rely on his support. "Don't go!" "Certainly not, if you do not wish it, sir." Webster coughed gently, to show his appreciation of the delicate nature of the conversation. He was consumed with curiosity, and his threatened departure had been but a pretence. A team of horses could not have moved Webster at that moment. "Might I ask, then, what...?" "There's been a misunderstanding," said Sam. "At least, there was, but now there isn't, if you see what I mean." "I fear I have not quite grasped your meaning, sir." "Well, I--I--played a sort of--you might almost call it a sort of trick on Miss Bennett. With the best motives, of course!" "Of course, sir!" "And she's found out! I don't know how she's found out, but she has! So there you are!" "Of what nature would the trick be, sir? A species of ruse, sir,--some kind of innocent deception?" "Well, it was like this." It was a complicated story to tell, and Sam, a prey to conflicting emotions, told it badly; but such was the almost superhuman intelligence of Webster, that he succeeded in grasping the salient points. Indeed, he said that it reminded him of something of much the same kind in the Nosegay Novelette, "All for Her," where the hero, anxious to win the esteem of the lady of his heart, had bribed a tramp to simulate an attack upon her in a lonely road. "The principle's the same," said Webster. "Well, what did he do when she found out?" "She did not find out, sir. All ended happily, and never had the wedding-bells in the old village church rung out a blither peal than they did at the subsequent union." Sam was thoughtful. "Bribed a tramp to attack her, did he?" "Yes, sir. She had never thought much of him till that moment, sir. Very cold and haughty she had been, his social status being considerably inferior to her own. But, when she cried for help, and he dashed out from behind a hedge, well, it made all the difference." "I wonder where I could get a good tramp," said Sam, meditatively. Webster shook his head. "I really would hardly recommend such a procedure, sir." "No, it would be difficult to make a tramp understand what you wanted." Sam brightened. "I've got it! _You_ pretend to attack her, and I'll...." "I couldn't, sir! I couldn't, really! I should jeopardise my situation." "Oh, come. Be a man!" "No, sir, I fear not. There's a difference between handing in your resignation--I was compelled to do that only recently, owing to a few words I had with the guv'nor, though subsequently prevailed upon to withdraw it--I say there's a difference between handing in your resignation and being given the sack, and that's what would happen--without a character, what's more, and lucky if it didn't mean a prison cell! No, sir, I could not contemplate such a thing." "Then I don't see that there's anything to be done," said Sam, morosely. "Oh, I shouldn't say that, sir," said Webster encouragingly. "It's simply a matter of finding the way. The problem confronting us--you, I should say...." "Us," said Sam. "Most decidedly us." "Thank you very much, sir. I would not have presumed, but if you say so.... The problem confronting us, as I envisage it, resolves itself into this. You have offended our Miss B. and she has expressed a disinclination ever to see you again. How, then, is it possible, in spite of her attitude, to recapture her esteem?" "Exactly," said Sam. "There are several methods which occur to one...." "They don't occur to _me_!" "Well, for example, you might rescue her from a burning building, as in 'True As Steel'...." "Set fire to the house, eh?" said Sam reflectively. "Yes, there might be something in that." "I would hardly advise such a thing," said Webster, a little hastily--flattered at the readiness with which his disciple was taking his advice, yet acutely alive to the fact that he slept at the top of the house himself. "A little drastic, if I may say so. It might be better to save her from drowning, as in 'The Earl's Secret.'" "Ah, but where could she drown?" "Well, there is a lake in the grounds...." "Excellent!" said Sam. "Terrific! I knew I could rely on you. Say no more! The whole thing's settled. You take her out rowing on the lake, and upset the boat. I plunge in.... I suppose you can swim?" "No, sir." "Oh? Well, never mind. You'll manage somehow, I expect. Cling to the upturned boat or something, I shouldn't wonder. There's always a way. Yes, that's the plan. When is the earliest you could arrange this?" "I fear such a course must be considered out of the question, sir. It really wouldn't do." "I can't see a flaw in it." "Well, in the first place, it would certainly jeopardise my situation...." "Oh, hang your situation! You talk as if you were Prime Minister or something. You can easily get another situation. A valuable man like you," said Sam ingratiatingly. "No, sir," said Webster firmly. "From boyhood up I've always had a regular horror of the water. I can't so much as go paddling without an uneasy feeling." The image of Webster paddling was arresting enough to occupy Sam's thoughts for a moment. It was an inspiring picture, and for an instant uplifted his spirits. Then they fell again. "Well, I don't see what there _is_ to be done," he said, gloomily. "It's no good my making suggestions, if you have some frivolous objection to all of them." "My idea," said Webster, "would be something which did not involve my own personal and active co-operation, sir. If it is all the same to you, I should prefer to limit my assistance to advice and sympathy. I am anxious to help, but I am a man of regular habits, which I do not wish to disturb. Did you ever read 'Footpaths of Fate,' in the Nosegay series, sir? I've only just remembered it, and it contains the most helpful suggestion of the lot. There had been a misunderstanding between the heroine and the hero--their names have slipped my mind, though I fancy his was Cyril--and she had told him to hop it...." "To what?" "To leave her for ever, sir. And what do you think he did?" "How the deuce do I know?" "He kidnapped her little brother, sir, to whom she was devoted, kept him hidden for a bit, and then returned him, and in her gratitude all was forgotten and forgiven, and never...." "I know. Never had the bells of the old village church...." "Rung out a blither peal. Exactly, sir. Well, there, if you will allow me to say so, you are, sir! You need seek no further for a plan of action." "Miss Bennett hasn't got a little brother." "No, sir. But she has a dog, and is greatly attached to it." Sam stared. From the expression on his face it was evident that Webster imagined himself to have made a suggestion of exceptional intelligence. It struck Sam as the silliest he had ever heard. "You mean I ought to steal her dog?" "Precisely, sir." "But, good heavens! Have you seen that dog?" "The one to which I allude is a small brown animal with a fluffy tail." "Yes, and a bark like a steam-siren, and, in addition to that, about eighty-five teeth, all sharper than razors. I couldn't get within ten feet of that dog without its lifting the roof off, and, if I did, it would chew me into small pieces." "I had anticipated that difficulty, sir. In 'Footpaths of Fate' there was a nurse who assisted the hero by drugging the child." "By Jove!" said Sam, impressed. "He rewarded her," said Webster, allowing his gaze to stray nonchalantly over the countryside, "liberally, very liberally." "If you mean that you expect me to reward you if you drug the dog," said Sam, "don't worry. Let me bring this thing off, and you can have all I've got, and my cuff-links as well. Come now, this is really beginning to look like something. Speak to me more of this matter. Where do we go from here?" "I beg your pardon, sir?" "I mean, what's the next step in the scheme? Oh, Lord!" Sam's face fell. The light of hope died out of his eyes. "It's all off! It can't be done! How could I possibly get into the house? I take it that the little brute sleeps in the house?" "That need constitute no obstacle, sir, no obstacle at all. The animal sleeps in a basket in the hall.... Perhaps you are familiar with the interior of the house, sir?" "I haven't been inside it since I was at school. I'm Mr. Hignett's cousin, you know." "Indeed, sir? I wasn't aware. Mr. Hignett has the mumps, poor gentleman." "Has he?" said Sam, not particularly interested. "I used to stay with him," he went on, "during the holidays sometimes, but I've practically forgotten what the place is like inside. I remember the hall vaguely. Fireplace at one side, one or two suits of armour standing about, a sort of window-ledge near the front door...." "Precisely, sir. It is close beside that window-ledge that the animal's basket is situated. If I administer a slight soporific...." "Yes, but you haven't explained yet how I am to get into the house in the first place." "Quite easily, sir. I can admit you through the drawing-room windows while dinner is in progress." "Fine!" "You can then secrete yourself in the cupboard in the drawing-room. Perhaps you recollect the cupboard to which I refer, sir?" "No, I don't remember any cupboard. As a matter of fact, when I used to stay at the house the drawing-room was barred. Mrs. Hignett wouldn't let us inside it for fear we should smash her china. Is there a cupboard?" "Immediately behind the piano, sir. A nice, roomy cupboard. I was glancing into it myself in a spirit of idle curiosity only the other day. It contains nothing except a few knick-knacks on an upper shelf. You could lock yourself in from the interior, and be quite comfortably seated on the floor till the household retired to bed." "When would that be?" "They retire quite early, sir, as a rule. By half-past ten the coast is generally clear. At that time I would suggest that I came down and knocked on the cupboard door to notify you that all was well." Sam was glowing with frank approval. "You know, you're a master-mind!" he said, enthusiastically. "You're very kind, sir!" "One of the lads, by Jove!" said Sam. "And not the worst of them! I don't want to flatter you, but there's a future for you in crime, if you cared to go in for it." "I am glad that you appreciate my poor efforts, sir. Then we will regard the scheme as passed and approved?" "I should say we would! It's a bird!" "Very good, sir." "I'll be round at about a quarter to eight. Will that be right?" "Admirable, sir." "And, I say, about that soporific.... Don't overdo it. Don't go killing the little beast." "Oh, no, sir." "Well," said Sam, "you can't say it's not a temptation. And you know what you Napoleons of the Underworld are!" CHAPTER XVII A CROWDED NIGHT § 1 If there is one thing more than another which weighs upon the mind of a story-teller as he chronicles the events which he has set out to describe, it is the thought that the reader may be growing impatient with him for straying from the main channel of his tale and devoting himself to what are, after all, minor developments. This story, for instance, opened with Mrs. Horace Hignett, the world-famous writer on Theosophy, going over to America to begin a lecturing-tour; and no one realises more keenly than I do that I have left Mrs. Hignett flat. I have thrust that great thinker into the background and concentrated my attention on the affairs of one who is both her mental and her moral inferior, Samuel Marlowe. I seem at this point to see the reader--a great brute of a fellow with beetling eyebrows and a jaw like the ram of a battleship, the sort of fellow who is full of determination and will stand no nonsense--rising to remark that he doesn't care what happened to Samuel Marlowe and that what he wants to know is, how Mrs. Hignett made out on her lecturing-tour. Did she go big in Buffalo? Did she have 'em tearing up the seats in Schenectady? Was she a riot in Chicago and a cyclone in St. Louis? Those are the points on which he desires information, or give him his money back. I cannot supply the information. And, before you condemn me, let me hastily add that the fault is not mine but that of Mrs. Hignett herself. The fact is, she never went to Buffalo. Schenectady saw nothing of her. She did not get within a thousand miles of Chicago, nor did she penetrate to St. Louis. For the very morning after her son Eustace sailed for England in the liner "Atlantic," she happened to read in the paper one of those abridged passenger-lists which the journals of New York are in the habit of printing, and got a nasty shock when she saw that, among those whose society Eustace would enjoy during the voyage, was "Miss Wilhelmina Bennett, daughter of J. Rufus Bennett of Bennett, Mandelbaum and Co.". And within five minutes of digesting this information, she was at her desk writing out telegrams cancelling all her engagements. Iron-souled as this woman was, her fingers trembled as she wrote. She had a vision of Eustace and the daughter of J. Rufus Bennett strolling together on moonlit decks, leaning over rails damp with sea-spray and, in short, generally starting the whole trouble all over again. In the height of the tourist season it is not always possible for one who wishes to leave America to spring on to the next boat. A long morning's telephoning to the offices of the Cunard and the White Star brought Mrs. Hignett the depressing information that it would be a full week before she could sail for England. That meant that the inflammable Eustace would have over two weeks to conduct an uninterrupted wooing, and Mrs. Hignett's heart sank, till suddenly she remembered that so poor a sailor as her son was not likely to have had leisure for any strolling on the deck during the voyage on the "Atlantic." Having realised this, she became calmer and went about her preparations for departure with an easier mind. The danger was still great, but there was a good chance that she might be in time to intervene. She wound up her affairs in New York, and on the following Wednesday, boarded the "Nuronia" bound for Southampton. The "Nuronia" is one of the slowest of the Cunard boats. It was built at a time when delirious crowds used to swoon on the dock if an ocean liner broke the record by getting across in nine days. It rolled over to Cherbourg, dallied at that picturesque port for some hours, then sauntered across the Channel and strolled into Southampton Water in the evening of the day on which Samuel Marlowe had sat in the lane plotting with Webster, the valet. At almost the exact moment when Sam, sidling through the windows of the drawing-room, slid into the cupboard behind the piano, Mrs. Hignett was standing at the Customs barrier telling the officials that she had nothing to declare. Mrs. Hignett was a general who believed in forced marches. A lesser woman might have taken the boat-train to London and proceeded to Windles at her ease on the following afternoon. Mrs. Hignett was made of sterner stuff. Having fortified herself with a late dinner, she hired a car and set out on the cross-country journey. It was only when the car, a genuine antique, had broken down three times in the first ten miles, that she directed the driver to take her instead to the "Blue Boar" in Windlehurst, where she arrived, tired but thankful to have reached it at all, at about eleven o'clock. At this point many, indeed most, women would have gone to bed; but the familiar Hampshire air and the knowledge that half an hour's walking would take her to her beloved home acted on Mrs. Hignett like a restorative. One glimpse of Windles she felt that she must have before she retired for the night, if only to assure herself that it was still there. She had a cup of coffee and a sandwich brought to her by the night-porter whom she had roused from sleep, for bedtime is early in Windlehurst, and then informed him that she was going for a short walk and would ring when she returned. Her heart leaped joyfully as she turned in at the drive gates of her home and felt the well-remembered gravel crunching under her feet. The silhouette of the ruined castle against the summer sky gave her the feeling which all returning wanderers know. And, when she stepped on to the lawn and looked at the black bulk of the house, indistinct and shadowy with its backing of trees, tears came into her eyes. She experienced a rush of emotion which made her feel quite faint, and which lasted until, on tiptoeing nearer to the house in order to gloat more adequately upon it, she perceived that the French windows of the drawing-room were standing ajar. Sam had left them like this in order to facilitate departure, if a hurried departure should by any mischance be rendered necessary, and drawn curtains had kept the household from noticing the fact. All the proprietor in Mrs. Hignett was roused. This, she felt indignantly, was the sort of thing she had been afraid would happen the moment her back was turned. Evidently laxity--one might almost say anarchy--had set in directly she had removed the eye of authority. She marched to the window and pushed it open. She had now completely abandoned her kindly scheme of refraining from rousing the sleeping house and spending the night at the inn. She stepped into the drawing-room with the single-minded purpose of routing Eustace out of his sleep and giving him a good talking-to for having failed to maintain her own standard of efficiency among the domestic staff. If there was one thing on which Mrs. Horace Hignett had always insisted it was that every window in the house must be closed at lights-out. She pushed the curtains apart with a rattle and, at the same moment, from the direction of the door there came a low but distinct gasp which made her resolute heart jump and flutter. It was too dark to see anything distinctly, but, in the instant before it turned and fled, she caught sight of a shadowy male figure, and knew that her worst fears had been realised. The figure was too tall to be Eustace, and Eustace, she knew, was the only man in the house. Male figures, therefore, that went flitting about Windles, must be the figures of burglars. Mrs. Hignett, bold woman though she was, stood for an instant spell-bound, and for one moment of not unpardonable panic tried to tell herself that she had been mistaken. Almost immediately, however, there came from the direction of the hall a dull chunky sound as though something soft had been kicked, followed by a low gurgle and the noise of staggering feet. Unless he were dancing a _pas seul_ out of sheer lightness of heart, the nocturnal visitor must have tripped over something. The latter theory was the correct one. Montagu Webster was a man who, at many a subscription ball, had shaken a gifted dancing-pump, and nothing in the proper circumstances pleased him better than to exercise the skill which had become his as the result of twelve private lessons at half-a-crown a visit; but he recognised the truth of the scriptural adage that there is a time for dancing, and that this was not it. His only desire when, stealing into the drawing-room he had been confronted through the curtains by a female figure, was to get back to his bedroom undetected. He supposed that one of the feminine members of the house-party must have been taking a stroll in the grounds, and he did not wish to stay and be compelled to make laborious explanations of his presence there in the dark. He decided to postpone the knocking on the cupboard door, which had been the signal arranged between himself and Sam, until a more suitable occasion. In the meantime he bounded silently out into the hall, and instantaneously tripped over the portly form of Smith, the bulldog, who, roused from a light sleep to the knowledge that something was going on, and being a dog who always liked to be in the centre of the maelstrom of events, had waddled out to investigate. By the time Mrs. Hignett had pulled herself together sufficiently to feel brave enough to venture into the hall, Webster's presence of mind and Smith's gregariousness had combined to restore that part of the house to its normal nocturnal condition of emptiness. Webster's stagger had carried him almost up to the green baize door leading to the servants' staircase, and he proceeded to pass through it without checking his momentum, closely followed by Smith who, now convinced that interesting events were in progress which might possibly culminate in cake, had abandoned the idea of sleep, and meant to see the thing through. He gambolled in Webster's wake up the stairs and along the passage leading to the latter's room, and only paused when the door was brusquely shut in his face. Upon which he sat down to think the thing over. He was in no hurry. The night was before him, promising, as far as he could judge from the way it had opened, excellent entertainment. Mrs. Hignett had listened fearfully to the uncouth noises from the hall. The burglars--she had now discovered that there were at least two of them--appeared to be actually romping. The situation had grown beyond her handling. If this troupe of terpsichorean marauders was to be dislodged she must have assistance. It was man's work. She made a brave dash through the hall mercifully unmolested; found the stairs; raced up them; and fell through the doorway of her son Eustace's bedroom like a spent Marathon runner staggering past the winning-post. § 2 At about the moment when Mrs. Hignett was crunching the gravel of the drive, Eustace was lying in bed, listening to Jane Hubbard as she told the story of how an alligator had once got into her tent while she was camping on the banks of the Issawassi River in Central Africa. Ever since he had become ill, it had been the large-hearted girl's kindly practice to soothe him to rest with some such narrative from her energetic past. "And what happened then?" asked Eustace, breathlessly. He had raised himself on one elbow in his bed. His eyes shone excitedly from a face which was almost the exact shape of an Association football; for he had reached the stage of mumps when the patient begins to swell as though somebody were inflating him with a bicycle-pump. "Oh, I jabbed him in the eye with a pair of nail-scissors, and he went away!" said Jane Hubbard. "You know, you're wonderful!" cried Eustace. "Simply wonderful!" Jane Hubbard flushed a little beneath her tan. She loved his pretty enthusiasm. He was so genuinely stirred by what were to her the merest commonplaces of life. "Why, if an alligator got into _my_ tent," said Eustace, "I simply wouldn't know what to do! I should be nonplussed." "Oh, it's just a knack," said Jane, carelessly. "You soon pick it up." "Nail-scissors!" "It ruined them, unfortunately. They were never any use again. For the rest of the trip I had to manicure myself with a hunting-spear." "You're a marvel!" Eustace lay back in bed and gave himself up to meditation. He had admired Jane Hubbard before, but the intimacy of the sick-room and the stories which she had told him to relieve the tedium of his invalid state had set the seal on his devotion. It has always been like this since Othello wooed Desdemona. For three days Jane Hubbard had been weaving her spell about Eustace Hignett, and now she monopolised his entire horizon. She had spoken, like Othello, of antres vast and deserts idle, rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touched heaven, and of the cannibals that each other eat, the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear would Eustace Hignett seriously incline, and swore, in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange, 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful. He loved her for the dangers she had passed, and she loved him that he did pity them. In fact, one would have said that it was all over except buying the licence, had it not been for the fact that his very admiration served to keep Eustace from pouring out his heart. It seemed incredible to him that the queen of her sex, a girl who had chatted in terms of equality with African head-hunters and who swatted alligators as though they were flies, could ever lower herself to care for a man who looked like the "after-taking" advertisement of a patent food. But even those whom Nature has destined to be mates may misunderstand each other, and Jane, who was as modest as she was brave, had come recently to place a different interpretation on his silence. In the last few days of the voyage she had quite made up her mind that Eustace Hignett loved her and would shortly intimate as much in the usual manner; but, since coming to Windles, she had begun to have doubts. She was not blind to the fact that Billie Bennett was distinctly prettier than herself and far more the type to which the ordinary man is attracted. And, much as she loathed the weakness and despised herself for yielding to it, she had become distinctly jealous of her. True, Billie was officially engaged to Bream Mortimer, but she had had experience of the brittleness of Miss Bennett's engagements, and she could by no means regard Eustace as immune. "Do you suppose they will be happy?" she asked. "Eh? Who?" said Eustace, excusably puzzled, for they had only just finished talking about alligators. But there had been a pause since his last remark, and Jane's thoughts had flitted back to the subject that usually occupied them. "Billie and Bream Mortimer." "Oh!" said Eustace. "Yes, I suppose so." "She's a delightful girl." "Yes," said Eustace without much animation. "And, of course, it's nice their fathers being so keen on the match. It doesn't often happen that way." "No. People's people generally want people to marry people people don't want to marry," said Eustace, clothing in words a profound truth which from the earliest days of civilisation has deeply affected the youth of every country. "I suppose your mother has got somebody picked out for you to marry?" said Jane casually. "Mother doesn't want me to marry anybody," said Eustace with gloom. It was another obstacle to his romance. "What, never?" "No." "Why ever not?" "As far as I can make out, if I marry, I get this house and mother has to clear out. Silly business!" "Well, you wouldn't let your mother stand in the way if you ever really fell in love?" said Jane. "It isn't so much a question of _letting_ her stand in the way. The tough job would be preventing her. You've never met my mother!" "No, I'm looking forward to it!" "You're looking forward...!" Eustace eyed her with honest amazement. "But what could your mother do? I mean, supposing you had made up your mind to marry somebody." "What could she do? Why, there isn't anything she wouldn't do. Why, once...." Eustace broke off. The anecdote which he had been about to tell contained information which, on reflection, he did not wish to reveal. "Once--...?" said Jane. "Oh, well, I was just going to show you what mother is like. I--I was going out to lunch with a man, and--and--" Eustace was not a ready improvisator--"and she didn't want me to go, so she stole all my trousers!" Jane Hubbard started, as if, wandering through one of her favourite jungles, she had perceived a snake in her path. She was thinking hard. That story which Billie had told her on the boat about the man to whom she had been engaged, whose mother had stolen his trousers on the wedding morning ... it all came back to her with a topical significance which it had never had before. It had lingered in her memory, as stories will, but it had been a detached episode, having no personal meaning for her. But now.... "She did that just to stop you going out to lunch with a man?" she said slowly. "Yes, rotten thing to do, wasn't it?" Jane Hubbard moved to the foot of the bed, and her forceful gaze, shooting across the intervening counterpane, pinned Eustace to the pillow. She was in the mood which had caused spines in Somaliland to curl like withered leaves. "Were you ever engaged to Billie Bennett?" she demanded. Eustace Hignett licked dry lips. His face looked like a hunted melon. The flannel bandage, draped around it by loving hands, hardly supported his sagging jaw. "Why--er--" "_Were_ you?" cried Jane, stamping an imperious foot. There was that in her eye before which warriors of the lower Congo had become as chewed blotting-paper. Eustace Hignett shrivelled in the blaze. He was filled with an unendurable sense of guilt. "Well--er--yes," he mumbled weakly. Jane Hubbard buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. She might know what to do when alligators started exploring her tent, but she was a woman. This sudden solution of steely strength into liquid weakness had on Eustace Hignett the stunning effects which the absence of the last stair has on the returning reveller creeping up to bed in the dark. It was as though his spiritual foot had come down hard on empty space and caused him to bite his tongue. Jane Hubbard had always been to him a rock of support. And now the rock had melted away and left him wallowing in a deep pool. He wallowed gratefully. It had only needed this to brace him to the point of declaring his love. His awe of this girl had momentarily vanished. He felt strong and dashing. He scrambled down the bed and peered over the foot of it at her huddled form. "Have some barley-water," he urged. "Try a little barley-water." It was all he had to offer her except the medicine which, by the doctor's instructions, he took three times a day in a quarter of a glass of water. "Go away!" sobbed Jane Hubbard. The unreasonableness of this struck Eustace. "But I can't. I'm in bed. Where could I go?" "I hate you!" "Oh, don't say that!" "You're still in love with her!" "Nonsense! I never was in love with her." "Then why were you going to marry her?" "Oh, I don't know. It seemed a good idea at the time." "Oh! Oh! Oh!" Eustace bent a little further over the end of the bed and patted her hair. "Do have some barley-water," he said. "Just a sip!" "You _are_ in love with her!" sobbed Jane. "I'm _not_! I love _you_!" "You don't!" "Pardon _me_!" said Eustace firmly. "I've loved you ever since you gave me that extraordinary drink with Worcester sauce in it on the boat." "They why didn't you say so before?" "I hadn't the nerve. You always seemed so--I don't know how to put it--I always seemed such a worm. I was just trying to get the courage to propose when I caught the mumps, and that seemed to me to finish it. No girl could love a man with three times the proper amount of face." "As if that could make any difference! What does your outside matter? I have seen your inside!" "I beg your pardon?" "I mean...." Eustace fondled her back hair. "Jane! Queen of my soul! Do you really love me?" "I've loved you ever since we met on the Subway." She raised a tear-stained face. "If only I could be sure that you really loved me!" "I can prove it!" said Eustace proudly. "You know how scared I am of my mother. Well, for your sake I overcame my fear, and did something which, if she ever found out about it, would make her sorer than a sunburned neck! This house. She absolutely refused to let it to old Bennett and old Mortimer. They kept after her about it, but she wouldn't hear of it. Well, you told me on the boat that Wilhelmina Bennett had invited you to spend the summer with her, and I knew that, if they didn't come to Windles, they would take some other place, and that meant I wouldn't see you. So I hunted up old Mortimer, and let it to him on the quiet, without telling my mother anything about it!" "Why, you darling angel child," cried Jane Hubbard joyfully. "Did you really do that for my sake? Now I know you love me!" "Of course, if mother ever got to hear of it...!" Jane Hubbard pushed him gently into the nest of bedclothes, and tucked him in with strong, calm hands. She was a very different person from the girl who so short a while before had sobbed on the carpet. Love is a wonderful thing. "You mustn't excite yourself," she said. "You'll be getting a temperature. Lie down and try to get to sleep." She kissed his bulbous face. "You have made me so happy, Eustace darling." "That's good," said Eustace cordially. "But it's going to be an awful jar for mother!" "Don't you worry about that. I'll break the news to your mother. I'm sure she will be quite reasonable about it." Eustace opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. "Lie back quite comfortably, and don't worry," said Jane Hubbard. "I'm going to my room to get a book to read you to sleep. I shan't be five minutes. And forget about your mother. I'll look after her." Eustace closed his eyes. After all, this girl had fought lions, tigers, pumas, cannibals, and alligators in her time with a good deal of success. There might be a sporting chance of victory for her when she moved a step up in the animal kingdom and tackled his mother. He was not unduly optimistic, for he thought she was going out of her class; but he felt faintly hopeful. He allowed himself to drift into pleasant meditation. There was a scrambling sound outside the door. The handle turned. "Hullo! Back already?" said Eustace, opening his eyes. The next moment he opened them wider. His mouth gaped slowly like a hole in a sliding cliff. Mrs. Horace Hignett was standing at his bedside. § 3 In the moment which elapsed before either of the two could calm their agitated brains to speech, Eustace became aware, as never before, of the truth of that well-known line--"Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away." There was certainly little hope of peace with loved ones in his bedroom. Dully, he realised that in a few minutes Jane Hubbard would be returning with her book, but his imagination refused to envisage the scene which would then occur. "Eustace!" Mrs. Hignett gasped, hand on heart. "Eustace!" For the first time Mrs. Hignett seemed to become aware that it was a changed face that confronted hers. "Good gracious! How stout you've grown!" "It's mumps." "Mumps!" "Yes, I've got mumps." Mrs. Hignett's mind was too fully occupied with other matters to allow her to dwell on this subject. "Eustace, there are men in the house!" This fact was just what Eustace had been wondering how to break to her. "I know," he said uneasily. "You know!" Mrs. Hignett stared. "Did you hear them?" "Hear them?" said Eustace, puzzled. "The drawing-room window was left open, and there are two burglars in the hall!" "Oh, I say, no! That's rather rotten!" said Eustace. "I saw them and heard them! I--oh!" Mrs. Hignett's sentence trailed off into a suppressed shriek, as the door opened and Jane Hubbard came in. Jane Hubbard was a girl who by nature and training was well adapted to bear shocks. Her guiding motto in life was that helpful line of Horace--_Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem_. (For the benefit of those who have not, like myself, enjoyed an expensive classical education,--memento--Take my tip--servare--preserve--aequam--an unruffled--mentem--mind--rebus in arduis--in every crisis). She had only been out of the room a few minutes, and in that brief period a middle-aged lady of commanding aspect had apparently come up through a trap. It would have been enough to upset most girls, but Jane Hubbard bore it calmly. All through her vivid life her bedroom had been a sort of cosy corner for murderers, alligators, tarantulas, scorpions, and every variety of snake, so she accepted the middle-aged lady without comment. "Good evening," she said placidly. Mrs. Hignett, having rallied from her moment of weakness, glared at the new arrival dumbly. She could not place Jane. From the airy way in which she had strolled into the room, she appeared to be some sort of a nurse; but she wore no nurse's uniform. "Who are you?" she asked stiffly. "Who are _you_?" asked Jane. "I," said Mrs. Hignett portentously, "am the owner of this house, and I should be glad to know what you are doing in it. I am Mrs. Horace Hignett." A charming smile spread itself over Jane's finely-cut face. "I'm so glad to meet you," she said. "I have heard so much about you." "Indeed?" said Mrs. Hignett coldly. "And now I should like to hear a little about you." "I've read all your books," said Jane. "I think they're wonderful." In spite of herself, in spite of a feeling that this young woman was straying from the point, Mrs. Hignett could not check a slight influx of amiability. She was an authoress who received a good deal of incense from admirers, but she could always do with a bit more. Besides, most of the incense came by post. Living a quiet and retired life in the country, it was rarely that she got it handed to her face to face. She melted quite perceptibly. She did not cease to look like a basilisk, but she began to look like a basilisk who has had a good lunch. "My favourite," said Jane, who for a week had been sitting daily in a chair in the drawing-room adjoining the table on which the authoress's complete works were assembled, "is 'The Spreading Light.' I _do_ like 'The Spreading Light!'" "It was written some years ago," said Mrs. Hignett with something approaching cordiality, "and I have since revised some of the views I state in it, but I still consider it quite a good text-book." "Of course, I can see that 'What of the Morrow?' is more profound," said Jane. "But I read 'The Spreading Light' first, and of course that makes a difference." "I can quite see that it would," agreed Mrs. Hignett. "One's first step across the threshold of a new mind, one's first glimpse...." "Yes, it makes you feel...." "Like some watcher of the skies," said Mrs. Hignett, "when a new planet swims into his ken, or like...." "Yes, doesn't it!" said Jane. Eustace, who had been listening to the conversation with every muscle tense, in much the same mental attitude as that of a peaceful citizen in a Wild West Saloon who holds himself in readiness to dive under a table directly the shooting begins, began to relax. What he had shrinkingly anticipated would be the biggest thing since the Dempsey-Carpentier fight seemed to be turning into a pleasant social and literary evening not unlike what he imagined a meeting of old Girton students must be. For the first time since his mother had come into the room he indulged in the luxury of a deep breath. "But what are you doing here?" asked Mrs. Hignett, returning almost reluctantly to the main issue. Eustace perceived that he had breathed too soon. In an unobtrusive way he subsided into the bed and softly pulled the sheets over his head, following the excellent tactics of the great Duke of Wellington in his Peninsular campaign. "When in doubt," the Duke used to say, "retire and dig yourself in." "I'm nursing dear Eustace," said Jane. Mrs. Hignett quivered, and cast an eye on the hump in the bedclothes which represented dear Eustace. A cold fear had come upon her. "'Dear Eustace!'" she repeated mechanically. "We're engaged," said Jane. "Engaged! Eustace, is this true?" "Yes," said a muffled voice from the interior of the bed. "And poor Eustace is so worried," continued Jane, "about the house." She went on quickly. "He doesn't want to deprive you of it, because he knows what it means to you. So he is hoping--we are both hoping--that you will accept it as a present when we are married. We really shan't want it, you know. We are going to live in London. So you will take it, won't you--to please us?" We all of us, even the greatest of us, have our moments of weakness. Only a short while back, in this very room, we have seen Jane Hubbard, that indomitable girl, sobbing brokenly on the carpet. Let us then not express any surprise at the sudden collapse of one of the world's greatest female thinkers. As the meaning of this speech smote on Mrs. Horace Hignett's understanding, she sank weeping into a chair. The ever-present fear that had haunted her had been exorcised. Windles was hers in perpetuity. The relief was too great. She sat in her chair and gulped; and Eustace, greatly encouraged, emerged slowly from the bedclothes like a worm after a thunderstorm. How long this poignant scene would have lasted, one cannot say. It is a pity that it was cut short, for I should have liked to dwell upon it. But at this moment, from the regions downstairs, there suddenly burst upon the silent night such a whirlwind of sound as effectually dissipated the tense emotion in the room. Somebody appeared to have touched off the orchestrion in the drawing-room, and that willing instrument had begun again in the middle of a bar at the point where Jane Hubbard had switched it off four afternoons ago. Its wailing lament for the passing of Summer filled the whole house. "That's too bad!" said Jane, a little annoyed. "At this time of night!" "It's the burglars!" quavered Mrs. Hignett. In the stress of recent events she had completely forgotten the existence of those enemies of Society. "They were dancing in the hall when I arrived, and now they're playing the orchestrion!" "Light-hearted chaps!" said Eustace, admiring the sang-froid of the criminal world. "Full of spirits!" "This won't do," said Jane Hubbard, shaking her head. "We can't have this sort of thing. I'll go and fetch my gun." "They'll murder you, dear!" panted Mrs. Hignett, clinging to her arm. Jane Hubbard laughed. "Murder _me_!" she said amusedly. "I'd like to catch them at it!" Mrs. Hignett stood staring at the door as Jane closed it softly behind her. "Eustace," she said solemnly, "that is a wonderful girl!" "Yes! She once killed a panther--or a puma, I forget which--with a hat-pin!" said Eustace with enthusiasm. "I could wish you no better wife!" said Mrs. Hignett. She broke off with a sharp wail. Out in the passage something like a battery of artillery had roared. The door opened and Jane Hubbard appeared, slipping a fresh cartridge into the elephant-gun. "One of them was popping about outside here," she announced. "I took a shot at him, but I'm afraid I missed. The visibility was bad. At any rate he went away." In this last statement she was perfectly accurate. Bream Mortimer, who had been aroused by the orchestrion and who had come out to see what was the matter, had gone away at the rate of fifty miles an hour. He had been creeping down the passage when he found himself suddenly confronted by a dim figure which, without a word, had attempted to slay him with an enormous gun. The shot had whistled past his ears and gone singing down the corridor. This was enough for Bream. He had returned to his room in three strides, and was now under the bed. The burglars might take everything in the house and welcome, so that they did not molest his privacy. That was the way Bream looked at it. And very sensible of him, too, I consider. "We'd better go downstairs," said Jane. "Bring the candle. Not you, Eustace darling. You stay where you are or you may catch a chill. Don't stir out of bed!" "I won't," said Eustace obediently. § 4 Of all the leisured pursuits, there are few less attractive to the thinking man than sitting in a dark cupboard waiting for a house-party to go to bed; and Sam, who had established himself in the one behind the piano at a quarter to eight, soon began to feel as if he had been there for an eternity. He could dimly remember a previous existence in which he had not been sitting in his present position, but it seemed so long ago that it was shadowy and unreal to him. The ordeal of spending the evening in this retreat had not appeared formidable when he had contemplated it that afternoon in the lane; but, now that he was actually undergoing it, it was extraordinary how many disadvantages it had. Cupboards, as a class, are badly ventilated, and this one seemed to contain no air at all; and the warmth of the night, combined with the cupboard's natural stuffiness, had soon begun to reduce Sam to a condition of pulp. He seemed to himself to be sagging like an ice-cream in front of a fire. The darkness, too, weighed upon him. He was abominably thirsty. Also he wanted to smoke. In addition to this, the small of his back tickled, and he more than suspected the cupboard of harbouring mice. Not once or twice but many hundred times he wished that the ingenious Webster had thought of something simpler. His was a position which would just have suited one of those Indian mystics who sit perfectly still for twenty years, contemplating the Infinite, but it reduced Sam to an almost imbecile state of boredom. He tried counting sheep. He tried going over his past life in his mind from the earliest moment he could recollect, and thought he had never encountered a duller series of episodes. He found a temporary solace by playing a succession of mental golf-games over all the courses he could remember, and he was just teeing up for the sixteenth at Muirfield, after playing Hoylake, St. Andrew's, Westward Ho, Hanger Hill, Mid-Surrey, Walton Heath, and Sandwich, when the light ceased to shine through the crack under the door, and he awoke with a sense of dull incredulity to the realisation that the occupants of the drawing-room had called it a day and that his vigil was over. But was it? Once more alert, Sam became cautious. True, the light seemed to be off, but did that mean anything in a country-house, where people had the habit of going and strolling about the garden to all hours? Probably they were still popping about all over the place. At any rate, it was not worth risking coming out of his lair. He remembered that Webster had promised to come and knock an all-clear signal on the door. It would be safer to wait for that. But the moments went by, and there was no knock. Sam began to grow impatient. The last few minutes of waiting in a cupboard are always the hardest. Time seemed to stretch out again interminably. Once he thought he heard footsteps but they led to nothing. Eventually, having strained his ears and finding everything still, he decided to take a chance. He fished in his pocket for the key, cautiously unlocked the door, opened it by slow inches, and peered out. The room was in blackness. The house was still. All was well. With the feeling of a life-prisoner emerging from the Bastille, he began to crawl stiffly forward; and it was just then that the first of the disturbing events occurred which were to make this night memorable to him. Something like a rattlesnake suddenly went off with a whirr, and his head, jerking up, collided with the piano. It was only the cuckoo-clock, which now, having cleared its throat as was its custom before striking, proceeded to cuck eleven times in rapid succession before subsiding with another rattle; but to Sam it sounded like the end of the world. He sat in the darkness, massaging his bruised skull. His hours of imprisonment in the cupboard had had a bad effect on his nervous system, and he vacillated between tears of weakness and a militant desire to get at the cuckoo-clock with a hatchet. He felt that it had done it on purpose and was now chuckling to itself in fancied security. For quite a minute he raged silently, and any cuckoo-clock which had strayed within his reach would have had a bad time of it. Then his attention was diverted. So concentrated was Sam on his private vendetta with the clock that no ordinary happening would have had the power to distract him. What occurred now was by no means ordinary, and it distracted him like an electric shock. As he sat on the floor, passing a tender hand over the egg-shaped bump which had already begun to manifest itself beneath his hair, something cold and wet touched his face, and paralysed him so completely both physically and mentally that he did not move a muscle but just congealed where he sat into a solid block of ice. He felt vaguely that this was the end. His heart had stopped beating and he simply could not imagine it ever starting again, and, if your heart refuses to beat, what hope is there for you? At this moment something heavy and solid struck him squarely in the chest, rolling him over. Something gurgled asthmatically in the darkness. Something began to lick his eyes, ears, and chin in a sort of ecstasy; and, clutching out, he found his arms full of totally unexpected bulldog. "Get out!" whispered Sam tensely, recovering his faculties with a jerk. "Go away!" Smith took the opportunity of Sam's lips having opened to lick the roof of his mouth. Smith's attitude in the matter was that Providence in its all-seeing wisdom had sent him a human being at a moment when he had reluctantly been compelled to reconcile himself to a total absence of such indispensable adjuncts to a good time. He had just trotted downstairs in rather a disconsolate frame of mind after waiting with no result in front of Webster's bedroom door, and it was a real treat to him to meet a man, especially one seated in such a jolly and sociable manner on the floor. He welcomed Sam like a long-lost friend. Between Smith and the humans who provided him with dog-biscuits and occasionally with sweet cakes there had always existed a state of misunderstanding which no words could remove. The position of the humans was quite clear; they had elected Smith to his present position on a straight watch-dog ticket. They expected him to be one of those dogs who rouse the house and save the spoons. They looked to him to pin burglars by the leg and hold on till the police arrived. Smith simply could not grasp such an attitude of mind. He regarded Windles not as a private house but as a social club, and was utterly unable to see any difference between the human beings he knew and the strangers who dropped in for a late chat after the place was locked up. He had no intention of biting Sam. The idea never entered his head. At the present moment what he felt about Sam was that he was one of the best fellows he had ever met and that he loved him like a brother. Sam, in his unnerved state, could not bring himself to share these amiable sentiments. He was thinking bitterly that Webster might have had the intelligence to warn him of bulldogs on the premises. It was just the sort of woollen-headed thing fellows did, forgetting facts like that. He scrambled stiffly to his feet and tried to pierce the darkness that hemmed him in. He ignored Smith, who snuffled sportively about his ankles, and made for the slightly less black oblong which he took to be the door leading into the hall. He moved warily, but not warily enough to prevent his cannoning into and almost upsetting a small table with a vase on it. The table rocked and the vase jumped, and the first bit of luck that had come to Sam that night was when he reached out at a venture and caught it just as it was about to bound on to the carpet. He stood there, shaking. The narrowness of the escape turned him cold. If he had been an instant later, there would have been a crash loud enough to wake a dozen sleeping houses. This sort of thing could not go on. He must have light. It might be a risk; there might be a chance of somebody upstairs seeing it and coming down to investigate; but it was a risk that must be taken. He declined to go on stumbling about in this darkness any longer. He groped his way with infinite care to the door, on the wall adjoining which, he presumed, the electric-light switch would be. It was nearly ten years since he had last been inside Windles, and it never occurred to him that in this progressive age even a woman like his Aunt Adeline, of whom he could believe almost anything, would still be using candles and oil-lamps as a means of illumination. His only doubt was whether the switch was where it was in most houses, near the door. It is odd to reflect that, as his searching fingers touched the knob, a delicious feeling of relief came to Samuel Marlowe. This misguided young man actually felt at that moment that his troubles were over. He positively smiled as he placed a thumb on the knob and shoved. He shoved strongly and sharply, and instantaneously there leaped at him out of the darkness a blare of music which appeared to his disordered mind quite solid. It seemed to wrap itself round him. It was all over the place. In a single instant the world had become one vast bellow of Tosti's "Good-bye." How long he stood there, frozen, he did not know; nor can one say how long he would have stood there had nothing further come to invite his notice elsewhere. But, suddenly, drowning even the impromptu concert, there came from somewhere upstairs the roar of a gun; and, when he heard that, Sam's rigid limbs relaxed and a violent activity descended upon him. He bounded out into the hall, looking to right and to left for a hiding-place. One of the suits of armour which had been familiar to him in his boyhood loomed up in front of him, and with the sight came the recollection of how, when a mere child on his first visit to Windles, playing hide and seek with his cousin Eustace, he had concealed himself inside this very suit, and had not only baffled Eustace through a long summer evening but had wound up by almost scaring him into a decline by booing at him through the vizor of the helmet. Happy days, happy days! He leaped at the suit of armour. Having grown since he was last inside it, he found the helmet a tight fit, but he managed to get his head into it at last, and the body of the thing was quite roomy. "Thank heaven!" said Sam. He was not comfortable, but comfort just then was not his primary need. Smith the bulldog, well satisfied with the way the entertainment had opened, sat down, wheezing slightly, to await developments. § 5 He had not long to wait. In a few minutes the hall had filled up nicely. There was Mr. Mortimer in his shirt-sleeves, Mr. Bennett in blue pyjamas and a dressing-gown, Mrs. Hignett in a travelling costume, Jane Hubbard with her elephant-gun, and Billie in a dinner dress. Smith welcomed them all impartially. Somebody lit a lamp, and Mrs. Hignett stared speechlessly at the mob. "Mr. Bennett! Mr. Mortimer!" "Mrs. Hignett! What are you doing here?" Mrs. Hignett drew herself up stiffly. "What an odd question, Mr. Mortimer! I am in my own house!" "But you rented it to me for the summer. At least, your son did." "Eustace let you Windles for the summer!" said Mrs. Hignett incredulously. Jane Hubbard returned from the drawing-room, where she had been switching off the orchestrion. "Let us talk all that over cosily to-morrow," she said. "The point now is that there are burglars in the house." "Burglars!" cried Mr. Bennett aghast. "I thought it was you playing that infernal instrument, Mortimer." "What on earth should I play it for at this time of night?" said Mr. Mortimer irritably. "It woke me up," said Mr. Bennett complainingly. "And I had had great difficulty in dropping off to sleep. I was in considerable pain. I believe I've caught the mumps from young Hignett." "Nonsense! You're always imagining yourself ill," snapped Mr. Mortimer. "My face hurts," persisted Mr. Bennett. "You can't expect a face like that not to hurt," said Mr. Mortimer. It appeared only too evident that the two old friends were again on the verge of one of their distressing fallings-out; but Jane Hubbard intervened once more. This practical-minded girl disliked the introducing of side-issues into the conversation. She was there to talk about burglars, and she intended to do so. "For goodness sake stop it!" she said, almost petulantly for one usually so superior to emotion. "There'll be lots of time for quarrelling to-morrow. Just now we've got to catch these...." "I'm not quarrelling," said Mr. Bennett. "Yes, you are," said Mr. Mortimer. "I'm not!" "You are!" "Don't argue!" "I'm not arguing!" "You are!" "I'm not!" Jane Hubbard had practically every noble quality which a woman can possess with the exception of patience. A patient woman would have stood by, shrinking from interrupting the dialogue. Jane Hubbard's robuster course was to raise the elephant-gun, point it at the front door, and pull the trigger. "I thought that would stop you," she said complacently, as the echoes died away and Mr. Bennett had finished leaping into the air. She inserted a fresh cartridge, and sloped arms. "Now, the question is...." "You made me bite my tongue!" said Mr. Bennett, deeply aggrieved. "Serve you right!" said Jane placidly. "Now, the question is, have the fellows got away or are they hiding somewhere in the house? I think they're still in the house." "The police!" exclaimed Mr. Bennett, forgetting his lacerated tongue and his other grievances. "We must summon the police!" "Obviously!" said Mrs. Hignett, withdrawing her fascinated gaze from the ragged hole in the front door, the cost of repairing which she had been mentally assessing. "We must send for the police at once." "We don't really need them, you know," said Jane. "If you'll all go to bed and just leave me to potter round with my gun...." "And blow the whole house to pieces!" said Mrs. Hignett tartly. She had begun to revise her original estimate of this girl. To her, Windles was sacred, and anyone who went about shooting holes in it forfeited her esteem. "Shall I go for the police?" said Billie. "I could bring them back in ten minutes in the car." "Certainly not!" said Mr. Bennett. "My daughter gadding about all over the countryside in an automobile at this time of night!" "If you think I ought not to go alone, I could take Bream." "Where _is_ Bream?" said Mr. Mortimer. The odd fact that Bream was not among those present suddenly presented itself to the company. "Where can he be?" said Billie. Jane Hubbard laughed the wholesome, indulgent laugh of one who is broad-minded enough to see the humour of the situation even when the joke is at her expense. "What a silly girl I am!" she said. "I do believe that was Bream I shot at upstairs. How foolish of me making a mistake like that!" "You shot my only son!" cried Mr. Mortimer. "I shot _at_ him," said Jane. "My belief is that I missed him. Though how I came to do it beats me. I don't suppose I've missed a sitter like that since I was a child in the nursery. Of course," she proceeded, looking on the reasonable side, "the visibility wasn't good, but it's no use saying I oughtn't at least to have winged him, because I ought." She shook her head with a touch of self-reproach. "I shall get chaffed about this if it comes out," she said regretfully. "The poor boy must be in his room," said Mr. Mortimer. "Under the bed, if you ask me," said Jane, blowing on the barrel of her gun and polishing it with the side of her hand. "_He's_ all right! Leave him alone, and the housemaid will sweep him up in the morning." "Oh, he can't be!" cried Billie, revolted. A girl of high spirit, it seemed to her repellent that the man she was engaged to marry should be displaying such a craven spirit. At that moment she despised and hated Bream Mortimer. I think she was wrong, mind you. It is not my place to criticise the little group of people whose simple annals I am relating--my position is merely that of a reporter--; but personally I think highly of Bream's sturdy common-sense. If somebody loosed off an elephant-gun at me in a dark corridor, I would climb on to the roof and pull it up after me. Still, rightly or wrongly, that was how Billie felt; and it flashed across her mind that Samuel Marlowe, scoundrel though he was, would not have behaved like this. And for a moment a certain wistfulness added itself to the varied emotions then engaging her mind. "I'll go and look, if you like," said Jane agreeably. "You amuse yourselves somehow till I come back." She ran easily up the stairs, three at a time. Mr. Mortimer turned to Mr. Bennett. "It's all very well your saying Wilhelmina mustn't go, but, if she doesn't, how can we get the police? The house isn't on the 'phone, and nobody else can drive the car." "That's true," said Mr. Bennett, wavering. "Of course, we could drop them a post-card first thing to-morrow morning," said Mr. Mortimer in his nasty sarcastic way. "I'm going," said Billie resolutely. It occurred to her, as it has occurred to so many women before her, how helpless men are in a crisis. The temporary withdrawal of Jane Hubbard had had the effect which the removal of the rudder has on a boat. "It's the only thing to do. I shall be back in no time." She stepped firmly to the coat-rack, and began to put on her motoring-cloak. And just then Jane Hubbard came downstairs, shepherding before her a pale and glassy-eyed Bream. "Right under the bed," she announced cheerfully, "making a noise like a piece of fluff in order to deceive burglars." Billie cast a scornful look at her fiancé. Absolutely unjustified, in my opinion, but nevertheless she cast it. But it had no effect at all. Terror had stunned Bream Mortimer's perceptions. His was what the doctors call a penumbral mental condition. "Bream," said Billie, "I want you to come in the car with me to fetch the police." "All right," said Bream. "Get your coat." "All right," said Bream. "And cap." "All right," said Bream. He followed Billie in a docile manner out through the front door, and they made their way to the garage at the back of the house, both silent. The only difference between their respective silences was that Billie's was thoughtful, while Bream's was just the silence of a man who has unhitched his brain and is getting along as well as he can without it. In the hall they had left, Jane Hubbard once more took command of affairs. "Well, that's something done," she said, scratching Smith's broad back with the muzzle of her weapon. "Something accomplished, something done, has earned a night's repose. Not that we're going to get it yet. I think those fellows are hiding somewhere, and we ought to search the house and rout them out. It's a pity Smith isn't a bloodhound. He's a good cake-hound, but as a watch-dog he doesn't finish in the first ten." The cake-hound, charmed at the compliment, frisked about her feet like a young elephant. "The first thing to do," continued Jane, "is to go through the ground-floor rooms...." She paused to strike a match against the suit of armour nearest to her, a proceeding which elicited a sharp cry of protest from Mrs. Hignett, and lit a cigarette. "I'll go first, as I've got a gun...." She blew a cloud of smoke. "I shall want somebody with me to carry a light, and...." "Tchoo!" "What?" said Jane. "I didn't speak," said Mr. Mortimer. "Who am I to speak?" he went on bitterly. "Who am I that it should be supposed that I have anything sensible to suggest?" "Somebody spoke," said Jane. "I...." "Achoo!" "Do you feel a draught, Mr. Bennett?" cried Jane sharply, wheeling round on him. "There _is_ a draught," began Mr. Bennett. "Well, finish sneezing and I'll go on." "I didn't sneeze!" "Somebody sneezed." "It seemed to come from just behind you," said Mrs. Hignett nervously. "It couldn't have come from just behind me," said Jane, "because there isn't anything behind me from which it could have...." She stopped suddenly, in her eyes the light of understanding, on her face the set expression which was wont to come to it on the eve of action. "Oh!" she said in a different voice, a voice which was cold and tense and sinister. "Oh, I see!" She raised her gun, and placed a muscular forefinger on the trigger. "Come out of that!" she said. "Come out of that suit of armour and let's have a look at you!" "I can explain everything," said a muffled voice through the vizor of the helmet. "I can--_achoo_!" The smoke of the cigarette tickled Sam's nostrils again, and he suspended his remarks. "I shall count three," said Jane Hubbard, "One--two--" "I'm coming! I'm coming!" said Sam petulantly. "You'd better!" said Jane. "I can't get this dashed helmet off!" "If you don't come quick, I'll blow it off." Sam stepped out into the hall, a picturesque figure which combined the costumes of two widely separated centuries. Modern as far as the neck, he slipped back at that point to the Middle Ages. "Hands up!" commanded Jane Hubbard. "My hands _are_ up!" retorted Sam querulously, as he wrenched at his unbecoming head-wear. "Never mind trying to raise your hat," said Jane. "If you've lost the combination, we'll dispense with the formalities. What we're anxious to hear is what you're doing in the house at this time of night, and who your pals are. Come along, my lad, make a clean breast of it and perhaps you'll get off easier. Are you a gang?" "Do I look like a gang?" "If you ask me what you look like...." "My name is Marlowe ... Samuel Marlowe...." "Alias what?" "Alias nothing! I say my name is Samuel Marlowe...." An explosive roar burst from Mr. Bennett. "The scoundrel! I know him! I forbade him the house, and...." "And by what right did you forbid people my house, Mr. Bennett?" said Mrs. Hignett with acerbity. "I've rented the house, Mortimer and I rented it from your son...." "Yes, yes, yes," said Jane Hubbard. "Never mind about that. So you know this fellow, do you?" "I don't know him!" "You said you did." "I refuse to know him!" went on Mr. Bennett. "I won't know him! I decline to have anything to do with him!" "But you identify him?" "If he says he's Samuel Marlowe," assented Mr. Bennett grudgingly, "I suppose he is. I can't imagine anybody saying he was Samuel Marlowe if he didn't know it could be proved against him." "_Are_ you my nephew Samuel?" said Mrs. Hignett. "Yes," said Sam. "Well, what are you doing in my house?" "It's _my_ house," said Mr. Bennett, "for the summer, Henry Mortimer's and mine. Isn't that right, Henry?" "Dead right," said Mr. Mortimer. "There!" said Mr. Bennett. "You hear? And when Henry Mortimer says a thing, it's so. There's nobody's word I'd take before Henry Mortimer's." "When Rufus Bennett makes an assertion," said Mr. Mortimer, highly flattered by these kind words, "you can bank on it. Rufus Bennett's word is his bond. Rufus Bennett is a white man!" The two old friends, reconciled once more, clasped hands with a good deal of feeling. "I am not disputing Mr. Bennett's claim to belong to the Caucasian race," said Mrs. Hignett testily. "I merely maintain that this house is m...." "Yes, yes, yes, yes!" interrupted Jane. "You can thresh all that out some other time. The point is, if this fellow is your nephew, I don't see what we can do. We'll have to let him go." "I came to this house," said Sam, raising his vizor to facilitate speech, "to make a social call...." "At this hour of the night!" snapped Mrs. Hignett. "You always were an inconsiderate boy, Samuel." "I came to inquire after poor Eustace's mumps. I've only just heard that the poor chap was ill." "He's getting along quite well," said Jane, melting. "If I had known you were so fond of Eustace...." "All right, is he?" said Sam. "Well, not quite all right, but he's going on very nicely." "Fine!" "Eustace and I are engaged, you know!" "No, really? Splendid! I can't see you very distinctly--how those Johnnies in the old days ever contrived to put up a scrap with things like this on their heads beats me--but you sound a good sort. I hope you'll be very happy." "Thank you ever so much, Mr. Marlowe. I'm sure we shall." "Eustace is one of the best." "How nice of you to say so." "All this," interrupted Mrs. Hignett, who had been a chaffing auditor of this interchange of courtesies, "is beside the point. Why did you dance in the hall, Samuel, and play the orchestrion?" "Yes," said Mr. Bennett, reminded of his grievance, "waking people up." "Scaring us all to death!" complained Mr. Mortimer. "I remember you as a boy, Samuel," said Mrs. Hignett, "lamentably lacking in consideration for others and concentrated only on your selfish pleasures. You seem to have altered very little." "Don't ballyrag the poor man," said Jane Hubbard. "Be human! Lend him a sardine opener!" "I shall do nothing of the sort," said Mrs. Hignett. "I never liked him and I dislike him now. He has got himself into this trouble through his own wrong-headedness." "It's not his fault his head's the wrong size," said Jane. "He must get himself out as best he can," said Mrs. Hignett. "Very well," said Sam with bitter dignity. "Then I will not trespass further on your hospitality, Aunt Adeline. I have no doubt the local blacksmith will be able to get this damned thing off me. I shall go to him now. I will let you have the helmet back by parcel-post at the earliest opportunity. Good-night!" He walked coldly to the front door. "And there are people," he remarked sardonically, "who say that blood is thicker than water! I'll bet they never had any aunts!" He tripped over the mat and withdrew. § 6 Billie meanwhile, with Bream trotting docilely at her heels, had reached the garage and started the car. Like all cars which have been spending a considerable time in secluded inaction, it did not start readily. At each application of Billie's foot on the self-starter, it emitted a tinny and reproachful sound and then seemed to go to sleep again. Eventually, however, the engines began to revolve and the machine moved reluctantly out into the drive. "The battery must be run down," said Billie. "All right," said Bream. Billie cast a glance of contempt at him out of the corner of her eyes. She hardly knew why she had spoken to him except that, as all motorists are aware, the impulse to say rude things about their battery is almost irresistible. To a motorist the art of conversation consists in rapping out scathing remarks either about the battery or the oiling-system. Billie switched on the head-lights and turned the car down the dark drive. She was feeling thoroughly upset. Her idealistic nature had received a painful shock on the discovery of the yellow streak in Bream. To call it a yellow streak was to understate the facts. It was a great belt of saffron encircling his whole soul. That she, Wilhelmina Bennett, who had gone through the world seeking a Galahad, should finish her career as the wife of a man who hid under beds simply because people shot at him with elephant guns was abhorrent to her. Why, Samuel Marlowe would have perished rather than do such a thing. You might say what you liked about Samuel Marlowe--and, of course, his habit of playing practical jokes put him beyond the pale--but nobody could question his courage. Look at the way he had dived overboard that time in the harbour at New York! Billie found herself thinking wistfully about Samuel Marlowe. There are only a few makes of car in which you can think about anything except the actual driving without stalling the engines, and Mr. Bennett's Twin-Six Complex was not one of them. It stopped as if it had been waiting for the signal.... The noise of the engine died away. The wheels ceased to revolve. The car did everything except lie down. It was a particularly pig-headed car and right from the start it had been unable to see the sense in this midnight expedition. It seemed now to have the idea that if it just lay low and did nothing, presently it would be taken back to its cosy garage. Billie trod on the self-starter. Nothing happened. "You'll have to get down and crank her," she said curtly. "All right," said Bream. "Well, go on," said Billie impatiently. "Eh?" "Get out and crank her." Bream emerged for an instant from his trance. "All right," he said. The art of cranking a car is one that is not given to all men. Some of our greatest and wisest stand helpless before the task. It is a job towards the consummation of which a noble soul and a fine brain help not at all. A man may have all the other gifts and yet be unable to accomplish a task which the fellow at the garage does with one quiet flick of the wrist without even bothering to remove his chewing gum. This being so, it was not only unkind but foolish of Billie to grow impatient as Bream's repeated efforts failed of their object. It was wrong of her to click her tongue, and certainly she ought not to have told Bream that he was not fit to churn butter. But women are an emotional sex and must be forgiven much in moments of mental stress. "Give it a good sharp twist," she said. "All right," said Bream. "Here, let me do it," cried Billie. She jumped down and snatched the thingummy from his hand. With bent brows and set teeth she wrenched it round. The engine gave a faint protesting mutter, like a dog that has been disturbed in its sleep, and was still once more. "May I help?" It was not Bream who spoke but a strange voice--a sepulchral voice, the sort of voice someone would have used in one of Edgar Allen Poe's cheerful little tales if he had been buried alive and were speaking from the family vault. Coming suddenly out of the night it affected Bream painfully. He uttered a sharp exclamation and gave a bound which, if he had been a Russian dancer would undoubtedly have caused the management to raise his salary. He was in no frame of mind to bear up under sudden sepulchral voices. Billie, on the other hand, was pleased. The high-spirited girl was just beginning to fear that she was unequal to the task which she had chided Bream for being unable to perform and this was mortifying her. "Oh, would you mind? Thank you so much. The self-starter has gone wrong." Into the glare of the headlights there stepped a strange figure, strange, that is to say, in these tame modern times. In the Middle Ages he would have excited no comment at all. Passers by would simply have said to themselves, "Ah, another of those knights off after the dragons!" and would have gone on their way with a civil greeting. But in the present age it is always somewhat startling to see a helmeted head pop up in front of your motor car. At any rate, it startled Bream. I will go further. It gave Bream the shock of a lifetime. He had had shocks already that night, but none to be compared with this. Or perhaps it was that this shock, coming on top of those shocks, affected him more disastrously than it would have done if it had been the first of the series instead of the last. One may express the thing briefly by saying that, as far as Bream was concerned, Sam's unconventional appearance put the lid on it. He did not hesitate. He did not pause to make comments or ask questions. With a single cat-like screech which took years off the lives of the abruptly wakened birds roosting in the neighbouring trees, he dashed away towards the house and, reaching his room, locked the door and pushed the bed, the chest of drawers, two chairs, the towel stand, and three pairs of boots against it. Out on the drive Billie was staring at the man in armour who had now, with a masterful wrench which informed the car right away that he would stand no nonsense, set the engine going again. "Why--why," she stammered, "why are you wearing that thing on your head?" "Because I can't get it off." Hollow as the voice was, Billie recognised it. "S--Mr. Marlowe!" she exclaimed. "Get in," said Sam. He had seated himself at the steering wheel. "Where can I take you?" "Go away!" said Billie. "Get in!" "I don't want to talk to you." "I want to talk to _you_! Get in!" "I won't." Sam bent over the side of the car, put his hands under her arms, lifted her like a kitten, and deposited her on the seat beside him. Then throwing in the clutch, he drove at an ever-increasing speed down the drive and out into the silent road. Strange creatures of the night came and went in the golden glow of the head-lights. § 7 "Put me down," said Billie. "You'd get hurt if I did, travelling at this pace." "What are you going to do?" "Drive about till you promise to marry me." "You'll have to drive a long time." "Right ho!" said Sam. The car took a corner and purred down a lane. Billie reached out a hand and grabbed at the steering wheel. "Of course, if you _want_ to smash up in a ditch!" said Sam, righting the car with a wrench. "You're a brute!" said Billie. "Caveman stuff," explained Sam, "I ought to have tried it before." "I don't know what you expect to gain by this." "That's all right," said Sam, "I know what I'm about." "I'm glad to hear it." "I thought you would be." "I'm not going to talk to you." "All right. Lean back and doze off. We've the whole night before us." "What do you mean?" cried Billie, sitting up with a jerk. "Have you ever been to Scotland?" "What do you mean?" "I thought we might push up there. We've got to go somewhere and, oddly enough, I've never been to Scotland." Billie regarded him blankly. "Are you crazy?" "I'm crazy about you. If you knew what I've gone through to-night for your sake you'd be more sympathetic. I love you," said Sam, swerving to avoid a rabbit. "And what's more, you know it." "I don't care." "You will!" said Sam confidently. "How about North Wales? I've heard people speak well of North Wales. Shall we head for North Wales?" "I'm engaged to Bream Mortimer." "Oh no, that's all off," Sam assured her. "It's not!" "Right off!" said Sam firmly. "You could never bring yourself to marry a man who dashed away like that and deserted you in your hour of need. Why, for all he knew, I might have tried to murder you. And he ran away! No, no, we eliminate Bream Mortimer once and for all. He won't do!" This was so exactly what Billie was feeling herself that she could not bring herself to dispute it. "Anyway, I hate _you_!" she said, giving the conversation another turn. "Why? In the name of goodness, why?" "How dared you make a fool of me in your father's office that morning?" "It was a sudden inspiration. I had to do something to make you think well of me, and I thought it might meet the case if I saved you from a lunatic with a pistol. It wasn't my fault that you found out." "I shall never forgive you!" "Why not Cornwall?" said Sam. "The Riviera of England! Let's go to Cornwall. I beg your pardon. What were you saying?" "I said I should never forgive you and I won't." "Well, I hope you're fond of motoring," said Sam, "because we're going on till you do." "Very well! Go on, then!" "I intend to. Of course, it's all right now while it's dark. But have you considered what is going to happen when the sun gets up? We shall have a sort of triumphal procession. How the small boys will laugh when they see a man in a helmet go by in a car! I shan't notice them myself because it's a little difficult to notice anything from inside this thing, but I'm afraid it will be rather unpleasant for you.... I know what we'll do. We'll go to London and drive up and down Piccadilly! That will be fun!" There was a long silence. "Is my helmet on straight?" said Sam. Billie made no reply. She was looking before her down the hedge-bordered road. Always a girl of sudden impulses, she had just made a curious discovery, to wit that she was enjoying herself. There was something so novel and exhilarating about this midnight ride that imperceptibly her dismay and resentment had ebbed away. She found herself struggling with a desire to laugh. "Lochinvar!" said Sam suddenly. "That's the name of the chap I've been trying to think of! Did you ever read about Lochinvar? 'Young Lochinvar' the poet calls him rather familiarly. He did just what I'm doing now, and everybody thought very highly of him. I suppose in those days a helmet was just an ordinary part of what the well-dressed man should wear. Odd how fashions change!" Till now dignity and wrath combined had kept Billie from making any inquiries into a matter which had excited in her a quite painful curiosity. In her new mood she resisted the impulse no longer. "_Why_ are you wearing that thing?" "I told you. Purely and simply because I can't get it off. You don't suppose I'm trying to set a new style in gents' head-wear, do you?" "But why did you ever put it on?" "Well, it was this way. After I came out of the cupboard in the drawing-room...." "What!" "Didn't I tell you about that? Oh yes, I was sitting in the cupboard in the drawing-room from dinner-time onwards. After that I came out and started cannoning about among Aunt Adeline's china, so I thought I'd better switch the light on. Unfortunately I switched on some sort of musical instrument instead. And then somebody started shooting. So, what with one thing and another, I thought it would be best to hide somewhere. I hid in one of the suits of armour in the hall." "Were you inside there all the time we were...?" "Yes. I say, that was funny about Bream, wasn't it? Getting under the bed, I mean." "Don't let's talk about Bream." "That's the right spirit! I like to see it! All right, we won't. Let's get back to the main issue. Will you marry me?" "But why did you come to the house at all?" "To see you." "To see me! At that time of night?" "Well, perhaps not actually to see you." Sam was a little perplexed for a moment. Something told him that it would be injudicious to reveal his true motive and thereby risk disturbing the harmony which he felt had begun to exist between them. "To be near you! To be in the same house with you!" he went on vehemently feeling that he had struck the right note. "You don't know the anguish I went through after I read that letter of yours. I was mad! I was ... well, to return to the point, will you marry me?" Billie sat looking straight before her. The car, now on the main road, moved smoothly on. "Will you marry me?" Billie rested her hand on her chin and searched the darkness with thoughtful eyes. "Will you marry me?" The car raced on. "Will you marry me?" said Sam. "Will you marry me? Will you marry me?" "Oh, don't talk like a parrot," cried Billie. "It reminds me of Bream." "But will you?" "Yes," said Billie. Sam brought the car to a standstill with a jerk, probably very bad for the tyres. "Did you say 'yes'?" "Yes!" "Darling!" said Sam, leaning towards her. "Oh, curse this helmet!" "Why?" "Well, I rather wanted to kiss you and it hampers me." "Let me try and get it off. Bend down!" "Ouch!" said Sam. "It's coming. There! How helpless men are!" "We need a woman's tender care," said Sam depositing the helmet on the floor of the car and rubbing his smarting ears. "Billie!" "Sam!" "You angel!" "You're rather a darling after all," said Billie. "But you want keeping in order," she added severely. "You will do that when we're married. When we're married!" he repeated luxuriously. "How splendid it sounds!" "The only trouble is," said Billie, "father won't hear of it." "No, he won't. Not till it is all over," said Sam. He started the car again. "What are you going to do?" said Billie. "Where are you going?" "To London," said Sam. "It may be news to you but the old lawyer like myself knows that, by going to Doctors' Commons or the Court of Arches or somewhere or by routing the Archbishop of Canterbury out of bed or something, you can get a special licence and be married almost before you know where you are. My scheme--roughly--is to dig this special licence out of whoever keeps such things, have a bit of breakfast, and then get married at our leisure before lunch at a registrar's." "Oh, not a registrar's!" said Billie. "No?" "I should hate a registrar's." "Very well, angel. Just as you say. We'll go to a church. There are millions of churches in London. I've seen them all over the place." He mused for a moment. "Yes, you're quite right," he said. "A church is the thing. It'll please Webster." "Webster?" "Yes, he's rather keen on the church bells never having rung out so blithe a peal before. And we must consider Webster's feelings. After all, he brought us together." "Webster? How?" "Oh, I'll tell you all about that some other time," said Sam. "Just for the moment I want to sit quite still and think. Are you comfortable? Fine! Then off we go." The birds in the trees fringing the road stirred and twittered grumpily as the noise of the engine disturbed their slumbers. But, if they had only known it, they were in luck. At any rate, the worst had not befallen them, for Sam was too happy to sing. THE END 
32374	----	[Illustration: "THE IDEA OF LEAVING THAT BIG FORTUNE TO A BOY LIKE YOU." _Dick Hamilton's Fortune._ (Frontispiece.)] DICK HAMILTON'S FORTUNE OR THE STIRRING DOINGS OF A MILLIONAIRE'S SON BY HOWARD R. GARIS AUTHOR OF "FROM OFFICE BOY TO REPORTER," "LARRY DEXTER, REPORTER," "LARRY DEXTER'S GREAT SEARCH," ETC. _ILLUSTRATED_ THE GOLDSMITH PUBLISHING CO. CLEVELAND MADE IN U. S. A. Copyright, 1909, by Grosset & Dunlap PRESS OF THE COMMERCIAL BOOKBINDING CO. CLEVELAND PREFACE My Dear Boys: Allow me to introduce to you my friend, Dick Hamilton. Dick, here are the boys, thousands of them. Boys, here is Dick Hamilton. Now I hope you will shake hands and become good friends; not doing as I have sometimes seen boys do, when introduced, hang back and size each other up, as if distrusting each other. Go right up to Dick, get a good grip on his hand, and squeeze for all you're worth. I'll wager you can't make him cry "enough!" I know he will like you, boys, and I hope you'll like Dick. He's a fine fellow, if I do say it myself, for I'm a sort of relation to him. He's got lots of money, but he uses it in the right way, to help his friends, and it doesn't keep him from getting into trouble. I have endeavored to give you a story of Dick and his fortune; how he tried to fulfil the strange condition of his mother's will; how he escaped the toils of the sharper, was the target for many cranks, as well as well-meaning persons; how he aided the "fresh-air kids," and, finally, when the gold mines had failed, how he worked hard to escape the clutches of his uncle Ezra. As you have taken kindly to some of the other books I have been privileged to write for you, I hope you will like this one; and now, if you have read thus far, you may turn the pages and find out what Dick had to do in order to retain his millions. Yours sincerely, Howard R. Garis. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. Dick is in a Hurry 1 II. A Strange Will 12 III. Uncle Ezra Threatens 20 IV. Dick Becomes Celebrated 34 V. Dick Aids Henry 44 VI. A Trip to New York 50 VII. A Sharper Foiled 59 VIII. Dick and the Reporter 69 IX. A Circus Comes to Town 79 X. Dick Invests in Happiness 85 XI. Hank Darby in Business 96 XII. Gold Mine Stock 105 XIII. Dick's Brave Act 114 XIV. Dick Gives a Party 125 XV. The Conspiracy 135 XVI. Dick Turns Detective 141 XVII. Grit's Revenge 150 XVIII. Uncle Ezra's Visit 156 XIX. The Fresh-Air Youngsters 164 XX. Tim's Disclosure 173 XXI. In Which Mr. Vanderhoof Vanishes 183 XXII. Off for the West 189 XXIII. At the Mines 197 XXIV. A Night Trip 205 XXV. Down in a Gold Mine 215 XXVI. Simon's Confession 223 XXVII. The Panic 232 XXVIII. Henry in Trouble 242 XXIX. The Flying Machine 249 XXX. A Disastrous Flight 256 XXXI. Good News--Conclusion 264 DICK HAMILTON'S FORTUNE CHAPTER I DICK IS IN A HURRY "Here comes Dick Hamilton!" exclaimed a flashily-dressed youth to his companion, no less gaily attired, as the two stood in front of a building from which sounded a peculiar clicking noise. "So it is, Guy," was the answer. "Let's get him into a game. Maybe I can win a little money. I need it, for I'm nearly dead broke." "I thought you always had all the cash you wanted, Simon," remarked Guy Fletcher, with something like a sneer in his voice. "I know I loaned you some the other day." "Do you think that lasted until now?" inquired Simon Scardale, glancing down at his patent leather shoes. "I'm short of ready money now, and if we can get your friend Hamilton into a game of billiards I think I can beat him." "He's no friend of mine," returned Guy, with a short laugh. "He isn't my kind, even if his father is a millionaire." "That's the main reason why you ought to cultivate his acquaintance," returned Simon. "It pays to keep in with such fellows. But here he is. Let me do the talking. You needn't play if you don't want to." The two boys, who in spite of their fine clothes, did not have an air of good breeding, watched the approach of Dick Hamilton as he sauntered down the main street of the town that pleasant afternoon late in June. Dick was a boy a little above the average height, well built, with curling brown hair and eyes of the same hue. The eyes were bright and clear, and, when he looked at you they seemed to glint like moss agates, as some of his friends used to say. "And you ought to see them when he's excited," one of Dick's acquaintances once remarked. "His eyes sparkle and seem to look right through you." It needed but a glance to see that Dick was well dressed, with that careless air of studied negligence which so marks the person accustomed to fine raiment. Dick wore his garments as if he was "used to them and not dressed up," as Fred Murdock remarked. There was that about him which at once proclaimed him for what he was--the son of a very wealthy man, for his father, Mortimer Hamilton, counted his fortune in the millions. As Dick came opposite the place whence issued that peculiar sound, produced by ivory balls hitting against one another, he was hailed by Simon Scardale. "I say, Dick, come in and have a little game of billiards?" Dick paused and looked at the speaker with a quizzical glance. "Who's going to play?" he asked. "Why--er--I--am--for one," replied Simon. "And maybe Guy, here, will take a cue. I'll bet I can beat you, and I'll give you twenty-five points to start with. I'll bet you ten dollars----" "No, thanks," answered Dick, in rather languid tones, but the sparkle in his brown eyes showed there was more spirit in the words than at first might be apparent. "I don't believe I care to play." "Afraid I'll beat you!" exclaimed Simon, with a sneer. "You were very far from doing that the last time you played at my house," retorted Dick, quickly. "Oh, well, that--er--that was on a table you were used to, and----" "He's worried about losing the money!" interrupted Guy Fletcher. "Come on, Simon, I'll play you. I'm not afraid of ten dollars, even if my father isn't quite as wealthy as his." As a matter of fact Guy's father was very far from being as well off as Mr. Hamilton, but Guy took upon himself as much importance, and gave himself as many airs, as though his parent was a multi-millionaire. "Hold on!" exclaimed Dick sharply, straightening up and thrusting his hands in the pockets of his well-fitting coat. "Now don't you fellows get any wrong notions into your heads. Go a little slow. You asked me to come into a public billiard-room and play a game with you. I----" "Yes, and you refused because you're afraid!" retorted Guy. "That's where you're wrong," replied Dick coolly. "I refused because, in the first place, I don't play billiards in a public resort like this. I like the game, but I have a fine table at home, and I see no reason why I should waste my time hanging around in a place that's thick with tobacco smoke, and where the language isn't the most polite, not to put it too strong. Besides, the tables are in such poor condition that----" "Oh, so you've turned Miss Nancy!" exclaimed Simon, with a mean smirk. "If you think so just come up to my gymnasium and put on the boxing gloves with me," invited Dick with a meaning smile; but Simon knew better than to accept. He had once boxed a friendly round with Dick and had been sore for a week afterward, for Simon was "soft." "Another reason," continued Dick, "is that I never gamble, whether it's over a game of billiards or something else. I don't believe it's right. It isn't a question of money at all. In fact, if you need a little cash, I don't mind lending it to you. But I'll not gamble for it. "However," went on the wealthy youth, "don't let me stand in the way of you two having a good time. 'Every one to their notion,' as the old lady said when she kissed the cow," and Dick laughed. "What's the cow got to do with it?" inquired Simon, who did not see the point of Dick's joke. "Afraid," murmured Guy, but so low that Dick did not hear him. "The cow," retorted Dick, with a glance at Simon, "is a second cousin to the one that jumped over the moon. But, aside from all this," he continued, more seriously, "if I did feel like playing billiards with you in there, I couldn't do it this afternoon, for I promised my father I'd be home early. He has an appointment with me--a very important one--and I'm in a hurry to keep it." "Didn't look so, by the way you were walking along the street a moment ago," sneered Simon. "I was just looking at some new fishing tackle in White's window," answered Dick. "I have my horse tied in front of the post-office, and I guess you know he goes fast enough to take me home in a hurry. Now I think I'll say ta-ta, and get along. Try to work some one else into your billiard game," and, with a nod that had in it not the least sign of displeasure, in spite of his firm words, Dick turned and walked off. "Well, if he ain't the limit!" ejaculated Guy. "He makes me tired. Come on in, I'll play you a game; but not for ten dollars. Dad growled the other day because I asked him for money, and I've got to go slow." "I wish I'd taken him at his word and borrowed about twenty-five dollars from him," remarked Simon, as he followed Guy into the billiard-room. Meanwhile Dick had reached the post-office, where his horse, a handsome bay of fine spirit, but gentle disposition, was waiting him. The animal whinnied with pleasure as the lad came up, and when he patted the black muzzle, the horse showed every evidence of delight. "I wonder if they think I can't get home in a hurry on you, Rex?" asked Dick, as he loosened the strap and vaulted into the saddle. "Come on, now, show 'em how you can go!" The splendid animal was off like a shot, many persons in the street turning to look at the pleasing picture the well-built youth made on his handsome steed. Past the billiard parlor Dick rode at a fast pace, and several youths inside hurried to the door. "There he goes," remarked Simon, with a sneer. "I'd like to take some of the starch out of him." "Who?" inquired another player, chalking his cue. "Dick Hamilton." "He hasn't any starch in him," was the answer. "He's one of the best fellows in the world. One of the very few who has not been spoiled by their father's wealth. You don't know Dick Hamilton, or you wouldn't say he's stiff or proud." "We don't want to know him," put in Guy. "Well, I'd be proud to," went on the player at the next table. "He isn't in my class, or, rather, I'm not in his, but he always bows pleasantly and speaks to me every time we meet. He's a real sport, he is. None of your tin-horn variety." Through the main street of the town Dick rode, waving his hand now and then to acquaintances who saluted him. To some he called out cheery words of greeting, and to several elderly men he bowed respectfully. As Dick turned out of the main thoroughfare into one that led to the handsome mansion where he and his father lived, he came in sight of a spectacle that made him pause. It was a rattletrap of a wagon, drawn by a horse that seemed as much in danger of falling apart as did the vehicle. In the wagon was a miscellaneous collection of scrap iron, broken pipes, pieces of stoves, fractured pulleys and bent shafting mingling in a confused mass. On the seat sat a pleasant-faced, bright-looking youth, about Dick's age, and nearly of his size. "Hello, Henry!" called Dick. "What in the world have you got there?" "Scrap iron, scrap wagon and a scrap horse," replied Henry Darby, with a grin. "What are you doing?" "Well, I'm in a sort of new venture," was the answer. "I'm collecting old iron, wherever I can find it, and selling it again. I bought up a lot out in the country, and I hired this rig to get it back to town with; only I'm afraid I'm not going to arrive." "What's the matter?" "Why, this horse--if you can call such an animal a dignified name like that--has the heaves, a spavin, spring-halt, blind-staggers, and a few other things. It got tired a few minutes ago, and went on a strike. I'm afraid to do anything to it to make it go for fear it'll fall apart right here in the road." Dick, who had brought his steed to a stop, laughed heartily. "Well, you are in a fix," he said. "But I don't understand about this old iron business." "I've got to do something to make a living," answered Henry Darby, who seemed confused about something. "I have been doing it on a small scale for quite a while. Now I'm trying to branch out a bit. There's money in old iron, if I could sell enough of it. But I don't see how I'm going to get this load home. You might lend me your horse," he added with a laugh; for in spite of the poverty of Henry Darby, and the wealth of Dick Hamilton, the two boys were good friends. "I'm sorry I can't do that, Henry," said Dick; and his voice showed that he was sincere. "The fact is, I'm in a hurry to get home. When I went out this morning father told me to be sure to be in at three o'clock, as he had something important to tell me." "Maybe he's going to reduce your allowance," suggested Henry, with a laugh. "No, I can't imagine what it is," and Dick spoke soberly "But that it's important I know by the way he acted. Otherwise I'd lend you my horse to pull that load back with. I'll tell you what I'll do, however. As soon as I get home I'll send one of the grooms out here with one of the work horses. They'll think that load is a feather. But now I am in a hurry, so I must gallop on. It won't do to keep dad waiting, especially when he laid so much stress on my being home on time." "Oh, don't trouble about a horse. I guess I can get this--this animal to go after a while," and Henry laughed; for he was of a happy disposition, and trouble rolled away from him "like water off a duck's back," as he used to say. "But it's no trouble at all," insisted Dick. "You wait here and I'll send a man back with a horse. You can drive him home to-morrow, or to-night, if you like." "All right. It's very kind of you," said Henry, but Dick did not stay to listen to the thanks before he had called to Rex, under whose flying feet the dust of the road arose in a cloud. "He must be in a hurry to ride like that," thought Henry, as he tried to lead on his apology for a horse. "I wonder what it is that his father is going to tell him? It must be about money I guess, for Mr. Hamilton has so much he doesn't know what to do with all of it." Dick was also wondering, as he galloped along, what the important matter might be that his parent was to speak to him about. He only had a hint of it in what Mr. Hamilton had said that morning. "This is your birthday," Dick's father had remarked, when he and his son were at breakfast in the Hamilton mansion. "I wish you many happy returns, and I will add that I have something very important to say to you this afternoon--something that may have a great influence on your future life. I will meet you here in the library at three o'clock, and communicate to you certain portions of your dear mother's will." For a moment emotion had overcame Mr. Hamilton, for his wife, of whom he had been devotedly fond, though dead some years, was ever a living memory to him. Dick's eyes filled with tears as he recalled the sweet-faced woman to whom he had lisped "mother," for he was only a small chap when she died. "So, if you will be here on time, Dick," his father finally went on, "I will read to you an important document, in accordance with your mother's final instructions. Now don't be late. I am a busy man, and if I make an appointment for a certain time, I like the other fellow to be there also," and he smiled at his son. "I'll be there, father," promised Dick. So now he was hurrying on to keep his appointment. His home was about two miles from the town of Hamilton Corners, in one of our eastern states, the place having been named in honor of Mr. Hamilton, who, as will be told later, was at the head of many industries that gave the town its importance. "I wonder what it can all be about?" mused Dick, as he turned his horse into the driveway that led to the mansion. In a vague way he knew that his mother had been very wealthy in her own right; almost as wealthy as Mr. Hamilton, who was many times a millionaire. But Dick had no idea of the provisions of his mother's will. He had often heard his father speak of what a wise and far-seeing woman Mrs. Hamilton was; but Dick, who was a healthy, happy youth, fond of all kinds of sports, had not up to this time given much thought to the future. Now, to-day, he was to be given a glimpse into it, and he was not a little sobered by the thoughts of the coming interview. CHAPTER II A STRANGE WILL "Well, I'm glad to see you are on time, Dick," said Mr. Hamilton, as his son, having left Rex at the stables, and sent one of the grooms on a horse to the aid of Henry, entered the handsome library. "Right to the minute. That is what I like to see. It speaks well for what we have in hand." Dick had never known his father to be quite so solemn save on one former occasion, and that was the dreadful day when the house was dark and in confusion, followed by a strange stillness, and then his loving mother was seen no more. She had gone away--somewhere--he did not understand where until long afterward, and it now made him a little sad to recall the scene. But his thoughts were interrupted by a sudden rush of feet, and a big bulldog, with fore legs arched almost grotesquely, and with two big teeth showing from under the upper lip, leaped joyously upon him. "Grit, old boy!" exclaimed Dick, as he caressed the brute, handsome in its very ugliness, a dog, the look of which impressed strangers with fear as to its temper, but which, to all friends, was as gentle as a kitten. It was a fine specimen of the bulldog, of good stock and very valuable. "My son," began Mr. Hamilton, as he drew from his pocket a folded paper, "I asked you to meet me here to-day to listen to some of the provisions of your dear, departed mother's will. I have a copy of it, the original being on file at the court house according to law. Soon after you were born she had it drawn up, and, having told me the nature of it, asked if I was satisfied. I told her I was, absolutely. "You may have heard, in a general way, that your mother was very wealthy in her own right. She was, more so than you have any idea of, perhaps. It is not necessary to go into figures now, but sufficient to say that her fortune was a very large one, and that it can be counted in the millions. Part of it was left her by her father, and the rest accumulated through wise investments. "In fact, your mother was a great believer in wise and paying investments, as you will see. She was worried lest her only son, when he grew up, would not appreciate the value of money; nor understand how much good can be done with it. "Therefore, in order to make sure that you would not do as so many rich youths have done--wasted the wealth left to them--she has seen fit to make certain provisions and restrictions. You are to inherit her great wealth--if you fulfill these conditions." "What are they?" asked Dick, who was not a little impressed by what his father had said. "Down, Grit, down," he commanded gently, for the dog was trying to clamber all over its master, so glad was it to see Dick. "Down, Grit," and the noble animal obeyed, crouching at the youth's feet, but ever keeping a watchful eye on his face, ready to begin the demonstration again at the first sign of encouragement. "You are to inherit your mother's wealth on this condition, among others," went on Mr. Hamilton. "Beginning with this, your birthday, which is the time she set, you are to be supplied with a large amount of cash. You are to be allowed to spend it as you please, when you please, and for what you please, subject, of course, to certain common-sense restrictions, of which I am to be the judge." "Does that mean I'll have all the money I want to spend just as I please?" asked Dick joyfully. "Practically so. But here is the restriction: You are required to make, within one year from date, one wise and paying investment with some of the money you spend. It may be a large one or it may be a small one, but at the end of the year it must show a respectable profit." "And if it doesn't?" "Then you will lose considerable," went on Mr. Hamilton. "In the event of your failure to make such an investment within twelve months your mother's fortune will be tied up so that you can not touch it, or derive any benefit from it, for a certain period, which will be disclosed later." "Does that mean I will have to be--be poor?" "Well, not exactly poor, but you will have to put up with a good deal less than you have now. You see, your mother's idea was to have you avoid the pitfalls and snares into which fall many wealthy youths with millionaire parents. She wanted to make you appreciate the value of money, to know how to spend it, and to learn, above everything else, that money begets money. "That is why she made such a peculiar will, and, I think, she did wisely. So, for a year, at least, you are to live as do other millionaires' sons who are older. In fact, you are to have more money to spend than you ever had before, for, though I have been liberal with you, I wanted you to have something still better to look forward to. So, now, your fortune is your own to make. "If you devote some of the money you are to have to a wise and paying investment, you will, comparatively soon, come into possession of your mother's vast wealth, though, of course, the executors of the will, of whom I am one, are to have certain control over you. You have twelve months from to-day in which to make your try, Dick, my boy." "A year to make money out of money. But how, father? I have no knowledge of business." "That is just it. You must gain some knowledge of business or you will never be able to take care of your fortune. That is one reason your mother made such a will. I need not say I hope you will be successful. I shall aid you all I can, but I would rather you relied on yourself. I had to do it when I was your age, and I see no reason why you should not take some responsibility." "Are these all the restrictions?" asked Dick, his mind somewhat confused by the sudden news. "No, not all. There are a number of provisions of the will, governing your future life, aside from the matter of the investment. I will not read them to you now, but as soon as the occasion arises you will be made acquainted with them." "And can I start in and have the money at once? I know a lot of things I want." Dick was walking about excitedly. He had visions of a big automobile and a fine motor boat, two things his father, up to the present, had not allowed him to own. "One of the provisions of the will," went on Mr. Hamilton, "is that on this date there is to be placed a large sum to your credit in the local national bank, of which you know I am president. You will be given a check book and allowed to draw upon it as you please, subject, as I said before, to certain reasonable restrictions on my part." "Where is the check book?" asked Dick. "I've always wanted to have one." "Not so fast," continued his father, with a smile. "You must first go to the bank and be identified by the proper officials, and also leave your signature there. Then you shall have the check book, Dick. But there is another matter," and Mr. Hamilton turned to the second page of the document in his hand. Dick's heart sank. Perhaps, after all, he was not to have the wealth with which his imagination was already building fairy castles in the air. "In case you fail to make this paying investment," went on Mr. Hamilton, "not only do you lose control of the money for a long time, but you have to undergo a sort of penance. It is this. You will have to go and live with your Uncle Ezra Larabee at Dankville----" "Uncle Ezra!" exclaimed Dick, and his face fell. "Yes, your Uncle Ezra and Aunt Samanthy. You will have to remain in their charge for a certain period and attend any boarding school they may select for you. That is done to teach you the value of money, and I think, from what I know of your Uncle Ezra, it will be a good place to learn," and Mr. Hamilton smiled rather grimly. "In order that you may fully appreciate the situation, your mother has provided," proceeded Dick's father, "that you are to spend a week with your Uncle Ezra, beginning to-morrow. Her idea was that you should get better acquainted with her only brother, who, as you may have heard, is quite well off, and one of the wisest men in the matter of money I ever met. He is very conservative about investments, but he makes them pay. Your dear mother thought it would be a good school for you, and I have no doubt but what you will see that for yourself if you spend a week with him. If you should not be able, in the year, to make the paying investment, you will, of course, pass under the control of Mr. Larabee. "I think I have now told you enough for the present. As I said, there are other provisions in the will regarding you, but we can discuss them when the time comes. I have written to your uncle, and he expects you to-morrow. "Now, Dick, my son, having gotten this somewhat sad business over--for it makes me sad to recall your dear mother, and the careful way she made provision that you should grow up to be a wise and good man--I think we will have a little lunch. I am hungry and I think you are, so I arranged a little birthday dinner for you." Mr. Hamilton led the way to the large dining room, where, upon the mahogany table, cut glass and silver sparkled in profusion. There were places for two and, as soon as father and son entered, a solemn butler rang a chiming bell, and servants brought in a dainty but bountiful meal. "Roast duck!" exclaimed Dick, as he caught sight of it. "That's like you, dad, to remember how fond I am of it. And I'll bet he's ordered frozen pudding for dessert; hasn't he, Mary?" turning to the smiling maid who was arranging some dishes on the sideboard. "That he has, Master Dick," was the reply. "Well, I thought I'd give you a good meal before you went to Uncle Ezra's house," said Mr. Hamilton, with a queer smile. "You may not get--But there, Dick, I wish you all the luck in the world, and may we both be as happy on your next birthday," and Mr. Hamilton stood up and gravely shook hands with his son. "Um," murmured Dick. "Maybe I'll be at Uncle Ezra's a year from now--if I don't make that paying investment. I wonder what sort of a place he has, anyhow? Well, there's no use worrying now. I must take some of that roast duck while it's hot," and he began to investigate his well-filled plate with no little interest. "You leave for your uncle's on the eight o'clock train to-morrow morning," said Mr. Hamilton. "Have your things all packed to-night, and don't be late, for your uncle is a very particular man--a--very--particular--man," and again that grim smile came over Mr. Hamilton's face; a smile which puzzled Dick. But he was to know the meaning of it soon enough. CHAPTER III UNCLE EZRA THREATENS Dick had not paid a visit to his Uncle Ezra since he could remember. He dimly recalled being there when a small boy, and had a hazy memory of a fine big house, but very gloomy, standing in the midst of large grounds that seemed more like a cemetery than anything else. Of his uncle and aunt he had but a faint recollection, and when he stood on the depot platform the next morning, waiting for his train, he was in no very happy frame of mind. For Dick liked fun, and jolly companions, and did not relish being sent off to visit relatives who were almost strangers to him, even though Mr. Larabee was his mother's only brother. "I don't fancy I'm going to have a very good time," mused the youth, as the train was whizzing him along toward Dankville. "Still, I'm going to fulfill the conditions of the will as far as I can. Make a paying investment, eh? I wonder if I can do it? But, of course, I can. I'll buy some building lots, stocks or bonds, and sell 'em at a profit. I'll do it as soon as I get home, and then I'll not have to worry about the matter any more," he added lightly, as if making money was the easiest thing in the world. Dankville was a country village about a hundred miles from Hamilton Corners. When Dick alighted at the station he looked around in some surprise. The place seemed to be absolutely deserted. There was no one in sight but the station agent, and, as soon as the train pulled out, he disappeared into his office. "Not a very pleasant reception," mused Dick, as he sat down on the upturned end of his dress-suit case. "Not exactly a brass band out to meet me. I wonder how I get to Uncle Ezra's place? Guess I'll ask the man." He started toward the ticket office, but, as he approached it, he saw a carriage driving up to the platform. In the vehicle sat an elderly man with a little tuft of white chin whiskers, which moved to and fro in a curious manner every time he spoke to the horse, which was frequently necessary, as the animal seemed to need much urging to induce it to continue its journey. "Whoa!" exclaimed the man, though there was no occasion for the command, as the horse was glad enough to stop. "Are you Richard Hamilton, son of Mortimer Hamilton?" "I'm Dick. Are you Uncle Ezra?" "Dick!" fairly snorted the elderly man. "You're Richard, that's what you were christened and that's what you must be called! I can't abide nicknames and I won't have 'em. You're Richard, do you hear?" "Yes, sir," answered Dick, meekly enough, though there was an angry light in his eyes. "Now, then, Richard, you've come to visit us for a certain purpose," went on his uncle. "What it is we needn't discuss now. The train was a little ahead of time or I'd been here sooner." Mr. Larabee did not seem to think that he might be a little late. "I always make it a point to be on time," he added. "Now, jump in. Your aunt has a meal ready and she musn't be kept waiting. I want you to understand from the start that everything is done on time in my house. We rise at a certain hour, and we have our meals at certain hours. Folks that come to see us have to do as we do or they don't get any meals. I hope you understand that." "Yes, sir," replied Dick, his heart sinking down deeper than ever. It was worse than he had thought. Still the idea of a meal, after his long ride, seemed good. Mr. Larabee's fine country home was considered one of the best places in that part of the state. There was not a crooked fence on it, the gravel walks were as trim as though no one had ever stepped on their surface, and the grass was always cut to a certain length. The house was always painted at a certain time of the year, as were also the barns, and the place looked almost like a picture in a book. In fact, Mr. Larabee's neighbors used to say he never took any pleasure in it, as he was always so busy looking to see if a stick or a stone had not become misplaced, or if the paint on the house or barn was not chipping off. "So this is Nephew Richard, is it?" asked a small, prim, rather thin-faced woman, as she came to the door when the carriage containing Dick and his uncle drove up the path. "I'm glad to see you, Nephew Richard," she went on, extending a cold and clammy hand, and giving Dick a little peck that seemed more like a nip from a bird than a kiss. "Is dinner ready?" asked Mr. Larabee. "You know it is, Ezra," replied his wife. "I'll serve it as soon as you put the horse up. Come in, Nephew Richard, but be sure and wipe your feet." She watched Dick while he scraped off an invisible quantity of dust from his shoes that had scarcely touched the ground that morning. After giving them what he thought was a good polishing on the mat, he started to enter the front hall. "Wait!" almost screamed his aunt. "There's a little mud on that left heel!" Dick obligingly gave it another scrape on the mat and started in. "One moment, Nephew Richard," said Mrs. Larabee, in almost imploring accents. "Let me wipe your satchel off before you go in. I'm afraid it's dusty from the drive, and I can't bear dust in my house." She kept Dick waiting on the front steps while she went in and got a cloth, with which she carefully wiped off the dress-suit case, though Dick did not see how there could be any dust on it, as it had been covered with the lap robe all the way. "Now you may come in," Aunt Samantha said, as graciously as was possible. "Welcome to The Firs. We call our place The Firs," she went on, "because there are so many fir trees around it. It makes it dark and keeps the flies out." It certainly made it dark, for as Dick entered the hall he could hardly see, and had to proceed by the sense of feeling. "We never open this part of the house, except for company," Mrs. Larabee went on. "Ezra and I use the back door, as it saves wear and tear. Now, if you'll come with me, I'll show you to your room and you can take off your good clothes and put on a rough suit." "I haven't any rougher suit than this," said Dick, looking at the garments he wore. "I've got another suit in the case, but it's newer than this." "Mercy, child!" exclaimed his aunt. "Would you wear such clothes around every day?" "I always have," replied Dick simply. "Well, I never heard tell the like of that! What does your father--but, there, I forgot. I know Mortimer Hamilton. He doesn't care how he throws money away!" "My father never throws money away!" exclaimed Dick, always ready to champion his parent. "He thinks it pays to buy good clothes, as they wear better than cheap ones." "Such wastefulness," sighed the aunt, as she led the way upstairs. "But it's no use talking. However, if you come to live here----" She did not finish the sentence, but Dick registered a mental vow that it would be a long day before he would voluntarily come to live at The Firs. He was shown into a small room, plainly furnished, containing a small cot bed. "As you are only to stay a week, I thought it would make less work for me if you had this room," said Mrs. Larabee. "It used to be the servant's, but I don't keep any now. They are too expensive. Now be very careful. Always take your shoes off when you come upstairs, as I can't be always cleaning and dusting. Don't throw your things around, and keep the shutters closed so the flies won't get in. When you are ready come down to dinner." "Well, if this doesn't get me!" exclaimed Dick, when his aunt had left him alone and he had dropped down on the edge of the cot. "This certainly is the limit. If I didn't know differently I'd say Uncle Ezra had lost all his money. I guess he's got it salted down and hates to take it out of the brine. Well, I'll see what they have for dinner before I make up my mind any further." The meal, though plain, was good, and to a boy with Dick's appetite, nothing came amiss. But it was small pleasure to dine when two pair of eyes were almost constantly watching him. "Don't get any of the gravy on the table cloth," cautioned Mrs. Larabee. "It was clean this week, and I don't want to have to put another one on before Sunday." Dick felt a guilty flush come over his face as he saw that he had dropped a small piece of butter on the cloth. But he thought it wisest to say nothing. "Aren't you going to eat that crust of bread?" asked his uncle, as Dick laid aside a portion that was burned black. "It's a little too--too brown," replied the boy, who did not fancy burned bread. "That makes it all the better," said Mr. Larabee. "Bread should be well cooked to be digestible. Always eat your crusts. 'Sinful waste makes woeful want,' as the proverb says. I had to eat my crusts when I was young." Dick managed to get it down, and the meal finally came to a close. He felt considerably better after it, and when his uncle proposed a walk around the place, he was ready to accompany Mr. Larabee. Dick found much to admire in the well-kept grounds. Several men were at work, and the manner in which they hastened with their tasks when their employer approached spoke volumes for the way in which they regarded him. Dick paused in the stable to admire the horses, of which his uncle kept several. Without thinking he pulled a wisp of hay from a bale and offered it to one of the animals. "Don't do that!" exclaimed his uncle sharply. "You'll scatter it all over the barn. The man has just swept the place up, and I don't like a litter of dirt around." He stopped to pick up some pieces of hay Dick had inadvertently dropped, and looked so cross that the boy wished he had kept out of the stable. However, Mr. Larabee seemed a bit ashamed of himself a little later, for he showed Dick where he could find some withered apples to feed to the pigs. "Only don't scatter 'em on the ground," he cautioned. "I hate to see apples thrown about. I keep a man to look after the orchard, and I like it nice and tidy." Now Dick was not a careless youth, but he thought this was carrying things a little too far. However, he brightened up a bit when his uncle announced that he had to leave his nephew to his own devices for a time, as he had some duties to attend to. Dick managed to while away the afternoon looking at the sights around the place, for his uncle had a large farm, though he was wealthy enough not to need the income from it. Still he was the kind of a man who can not own the smallest bit of land without putting it to some use. Dick looked about for a sight of some lads of his own age with whom he might become acquainted and enjoy his enforced visit to Dankville, but boys seemed a scarce article around The Firs. He strolled back to the house, and, not seeing his aunt about, and being desirous of exploring the rather stately mansion, he started on a tour of it. Through the darkened hall he went until he came to what he thought would be the parlor. He opened the door, though it creaked on rusty hinges. The room was so dark he could see nothing, and, having heard his father say that there were some choice oil paintings at The Firs, he opened a window to get light enough to view them. He had a hard task, as it seemed the sash and shutters had not been moved since they were built, but finally a stream of light entered the gloomy apartment, with the horse-hair furniture arranged stiffly against the wall. Dick caught sight of a large painting and was going closer to examine it when he heard a shriek in the open doorway. "Mercy sakes, Richard! Whatever have you done?" he heard his aunt call. "Why, I just opened a window to let some light in, so I could see the pictures," he answered. "Light? In this room? Why, Richard Hamilton! This room hasn't been opened in years! We never think of letting light in the parlor. The carpet might fade. Oh, Richard, I am so sorry! If I thought you would have opened a window I would have locked the door. Shut it and come out at once! Mercy sakes!" Much abashed, Dick closed the shutters and window and walked out. His aunt ran and got a broom, with which she brushed the carpet where he had stepped, though how she could see any dust in that gloom was more than the boy could understand. "Never, never go in there again," cautioned his aunt. "We never open that room except--for funerals." "I guess that's all it's good for," thought Dick. He sat around, very miserable, the remainder of the afternoon, and had little appetite for supper, which was rather a scant meal; some preserves, bread and weak tea making up the repast. "I think I'll take a stroll to the village," remarked the youth, as he arose from the table. "Where?" asked his aunt, as if she had not heard aright. "To the village. I'd like to see what's going on." "There's nothing going on," replied his uncle. "The village is five miles from here. Besides, we go to bed early, and I don't allow any one in my house, visitor or otherwise, to come in with a latch key. You'd better stay here, read some good book to improve your mind, and retire early. That's what I do, and I find it pays." Dick groaned. He now knew the meaning of his father's queer smile. "Then I'll walk around outside the house for a while to get some air," proposed Dick. "I'd rather you wouldn't," came from Mr. Larabee, as he squirmed uneasily in his chair. "The gravel walks have just been raked smooth, and I hate to have 'em disturbed." Dick did not answer, but sat in his chair silently, while his aunt cleared off the supper table. When the lamps were lighted, which was not done until it was quite dark, Mr. Larabee handed Dick a book. The boy hoped it might be some tale of adventures that would help pass away the hours, but on looking at the title he saw it was "Pilgrim's Progress." "I guess I'll go to bed," he announced, and his aunt and uncle gave an audible sigh of relief. The next morning Dick, without saying anything to Mr. or Mrs. Larabee, walked to the railroad station. There he sent a telegram to his father. It read: "Dear Dad. This place is fierce. Can't I come home? Wire me quick." He said he would wait at the station for an answer, and he was a little sorry when it came, as it meant he would have to go back to the dismal house. His father's reply was: "Dear Dick. To fulfill the conditions you must remain a week. Do the best you can and let it be a lesson to you." "Be a lesson to me?" mused Dick. "Oh, I see! He means I must make that investment so I won't have to come here and live." On his return Dick entered the house at the rear door, pausing momentarily to wipe his feet. But his aunt was watching for him. "Richard," she said severely. "They're not half clean. I can see dirt on them." "Oh," he began, but he kept silent, and, instead of entering, turned into the orchard. There, at least, he would not be corrected. His uncle found him there a little later, as Dick was sitting idly under a tree. "Haven't you anything to occupy yourself with?" asked Mr. Larabee severely. "No," answered Dick. "There's no one to get up a baseball game with around here, as far as I can see." "Boys shouldn't always be playing," commented Mr. Larabee. "You should labor to improve your mind. Why don't you read that book I gave you last night?" "I don't care for it." "That's the way with the rising generation. Frivolous! frivolous!" "School has closed for the term," said Dick. "I'm done with studying, and that book looked as if it was to be studied." "It was," replied his uncle. "It merits being well studied. But it's what I expected of you. It's the way that you have been brought up." "I guess my father brought me up in the way he thought best," fired back Dick. "Well, his way is very different from mine--very different," and Mr. Larabee shook his head as though to indicate that a great mistake had been made. "Then there's your mother's will," he went on. "The idea of leaving that big fortune to a boy like you. It's wicked! It's a terrible risk! A terrible risk! What a foolish woman she was! But then it's all you can expect of a woman!" "Look here, Uncle Ezra!" exclaimed Dick, rising to his feet, his brown eyes sparkling in a dangerous way, and a red flush showing on his cheeks. "I don't want you to speak that way of my mother!" "She was my sister, and I say she made a foolish will!" stormed the old man. "She was my mother!" replied Dick hotly, "and I'll not have her spoken of in that way! She knew what she was doing! She was the best woman that ever lived and--and much better than you are with your ideas of what is good. You musn't speak so of her! I'll not stand it!" "Look here, young man!" exclaimed Mr. Larabee. "I guess you forget who you're talking to." "No, I don't!" "I won't have such language used toward me. I say your mother made a foolish will, and I know what I'm talking about." "If you say that again I'll--I'll--" and then Dick paused. After all this man was his mother's brother, and he knew how his parent would have gently reproved him had she been alive. The memory of her took all the hard feeling out of his heart. "I'm sorry I spoke so hastily, Uncle Ezra," he said in a low voice. "But I can't bear to have my mother referred to in that way. I think she did what was right, and I know my father does also." "Humph, little he knows about it," snorted Mr. Larabee. "Just you wait until you come under my care, young man, and I'll show you what's what! I'll teach you how to behave to your elders," and, in great indignation, the old man trudged off. Dick started. He had, for the moment, forgotten that portion of his mother's will which, under certain conditions, would compel him to live with his uncle and aunt. "Live with them?" thought the boy. "Go to a boarding school they might select? Not much! I must make some kind of a paying investment within a year, if only to escape their clutches!" CHAPTER IV DICK BECOMES CELEBRATED Dick managed to live through the week at his uncle's place, but it was hard work. He was corrected from morning until night. Almost everything he did while in the house, if it was only to pick up a book in the hope of finding something to read, met with a reproof from Aunt Samantha. "Don't do that," she would say. "You'll make the dust fly about if you disturb the books, and I can't abide dust." If he wandered about the grounds his uncle would covertly watch him. "Don't pick up stones to throw," Mr. Larabee would caution the lad. "You might break a window, or take the bark off my favorite apple trees. I never saw such a boy! Why can't you sit still and think? I'm sure you've got enough responsibilities hanging over you, with all that money your mother so foolishly----" But he had the sense to stop there, for the angry flash in Dick's brown eyes warned him this was a subject he had better not mention to his nephew. There was never a more happy boy than Dick when the week of probation was up and he could start for home. "You are going back to that wasteful life of idleness," said his aunt, as she condescended to shake hands with him, and give him her little bird-like kiss. "I hope your visit here has done you good. You may make us a longer one--some day." "Not if I can help it," thought Dick to himself. "Come, now," grumbled Uncle Ezra. "I don't want to keep the horse out of the stable any longer than I can help. He might take cold and I'd have to buy some medicine. Saving money is like earning it, as I hope you'll learn, Nephew Richard. I'll teach it to you when you come under my control, as I'm sure you will, for you never can comply with the task your mother so foolishly----" Dick's hands clinched, and it was lucky that at that moment the horse shied at a piece of paper, requiring all Mr. Larabee's attention to control him, or there might have been a renewal of the quarrel. Dick breathed a sigh of relief as the gloomy house in the midst of the fir trees was left behind, and he gave vent to an audible exclamation of satisfaction when he was in the train and speeding away from Dankville, for even the name of the place seemed to have an unhappy influence over him. "Well, are you glad to get back?" asked Mr. Hamilton, as he greeted his son that afternoon. "Glad, father? Say, give me some of that money, quick! I want to make that paying investment. I never could stand it at The Firs!" Mr. Hamilton laughed. "Well, in spite of his queer ways, your Uncle Ezra is a man of sterling character," he said. "He is as true as steel----" "And just about as hard," interrupted Dick, with a smile. "But now to business," went on Mr. Hamilton. "I have deposited a large sum to your credit in our bank, and if you will come downtown with me now I'll introduce you to the cashier and see that you get a check book. Then--well, the world is before you, and it's yours--to conquer or be conquered by." On their way to the bank father and son were greeted by many acquaintances, for Mr. Hamilton was a person of great importance in Hamilton Corners. The town was a good-sized one, situated on the shore of Lake Dunkirk, a large body of water. Mr. Hamilton, besides being president of the Hamilton National Bank, was vice-president of the Hamilton Trust Company, and owned a stone quarry, a brass foundry, large woolen mills, and a lumber concern, all in the town or its immediate vicinity. He was also a director of the Hamilton, Dorchester and Hatfield Railroad, which ran through the town, and president of the Hamilton Trolley Company. These were all sources of Mr. Hamilton's wealth, and, as he employed many men in the various industries, which he controlled or was interested in, he was regarded as the most important man in the place. But this did not make him overbearing in character. In fact, he was a very kind man, always ready to help the poor, and as he had begun as a poor boy and made his money by hard work, he had a great sympathy for those not so well off in this world's goods. Dick took after his father. Though surrounded by wealth all his life, and accustomed to luxury, he was a lad of democratic spirit. He cared little for money in itself, though he appreciated what could be done with it, and he was always willing to use what he had for the benefit or pleasure of himself and his friends. He was ambitious in no small degree, and anxious to succeed in whatever he undertook. It did not take long to get through with the formalities at the bank, and Dick's eyes sparkled when he saw the substantial balance to his credit. He took the little red check book with an air as though he had used one all his life, put it into his pocket, and, nodding to his father, walked out. "Well," remarked Mr. Hamilton, with a little sigh, "I hope money doesn't spoil him, for he is a fine lad. But I guess the remembrance of his Uncle Ezra may have a large influence on what he does." The first person Dick met on emerging from the bank was Henry Darby. He hailed the poorer lad. "Well, Henry, did you get that load of iron home safe?" "Yes, and I sold it the next day. I'm much obliged to you for sending that horse. I couldn't get the one I hired from the man, of whom I bought the iron, to go another step. I'd have been there all night if it hadn't been for you." "That's all right. The next time I meet you in a fix like that I'll tow you home myself." "What do you mean?" "Why, I'm going to get an automobile." "An automobile?" and Henry's eyes opened as wide as possible. The machines were rarely seen in Hamilton Corners. "Yes. You see, Henry, I've come into some property, and I can spend as much money as I like--of course, not waste it. I've always wanted an auto, and I'm going to get one. I'm going for it now." "Whew, I wish I was you," exclaimed Henry, with a sigh, as he started down the street after some more old iron he had heard was for sale. Henry was an energetic lad, always looking for a chance to make money. He lived with his father, who was never called anything else than "Hank" Darby, and who was known as the most "shiftless" man in town. Mr. Darby was always talking of big schemes he was going to put into operation as soon as he could command the capital, but he never got the money. As a consequence he never did anything, but lived off what his son earned. Dick had decided that his first purchase with his new wealth should be an automobile. He wanted to get a big touring car, but his father suggested that he had better start with a runabout. "It will be less expensive if you have a smash-up learning how to run it," counseled Mr. Hamilton, and Dick wisely agreed with him. "When I get my car I'll take a run about the country and see what sort of an investment I'll make," said Dick. "I may want to go in for real estate. There's money in that, isn't there, dad?" "Yes, if you buy right and sell right. But that business is like everything else, you've got to learn it. However, you are your own master to a certain extent. Good luck to you." Dick went to a neighboring city that same afternoon and purchased his runabout. He wanted to drive it home alone, but the manager of the garage sent a helper with the boy. But the man did not have much to do, for Dick was very quick and soon learned the different points. In a few days he was able to operate the machine with considerable skill, and he took a number of his boy friends for a spin in the country. "Want to take a trip?" he called one afternoon to Simon Scardale and Guy Fletcher, whom he saw in front of the billiard room, which place they seemed to frequent very much of late. "Sure," replied Simon. "Maybe we can get a race with some car along the road. That will be sport." "Not for me," replied Dick quietly. "I sha'n't race until I know the car better. But come along." In spite of their rather flashy manners, Dick liked Simon and Guy, as he did nearly everyone, in fact--for Dick Hamilton was a large-hearted youth. He accepted all his acquaintances "at one hundred cents on the dollar" until he learned to value them differently. The three boys spent a pleasant time whirring about on the country roads. "What do you think of that property?" asked Dick at length, pointing to a low, swampy tract. "Why?" asked Guy. "Thinking of buying it?" "Maybe," replied Dick. "I have a chance to get it cheap. Do you think I could sell it again?" "Search me," answered Simon. "It looks to be good for ducks, that's all." "It only needs draining," objected Dick. "I think it would be a good investment, and I came out here to look at it." "Going into business?" asked Guy, with a sneer. "I thought you didn't have to work." "Of course I'm going into business, as soon as I finish at school," said Dick, for the term at the academy, where he attended, had recently closed. "I've come into some money lately," he said modestly, for he had not spoken of his fortune to any one yet, "and I want to invest some of my spare cash." "I'll tell you the very thing!" exclaimed Simon. "I know a stock that's bound to go up ten points in a few days." "No stocks or bonds for me until I know a little more about them," objected Dick. "But this is a sure thing," insisted Simon. "I got a tip on it from a friend in New York." "I've read of too many 'sure things' going wrong," said Dick with a laugh. "I think I'll try real estate for a starter." Simon looked a little disappointed, but he made up his mind he would try Dick again on that subject, and a strange, cunning look came into his face. During the trip back Simon tried to learn from the millionaire's son more about his new wealth, but Dick did not give him much satisfaction. However, Simon was sharp, and by dint of skillful hints and questions learned more than Dick thought he had told. Guy, too, was much interested, and a visible change came over his manner. Guy's father, Peter Fletcher, was president of the Hamilton Trust Company, and, though Mr. Hamilton owned most of the stock of the concern, and had only placed Mr. Fletcher at the head of the institution for business reasons, Guy gave himself as many airs as though his father owned the bank. Learning that Dick had come into possession of some wealth on his own account, though he did not know the source, Guy was somewhat inclined to toady to the youth with whom he was on more or less friendly terms. It was two days after this, when the evening papers arrived in Hamilton Corners, that a mild sensation was created. There, on the front pages, was what purported to be a picture of Dick Hamilton, while under it was the caption, in big letters: THE MILLIONAIRE YOUTH. Then followed a garbled, but fairly correct, account of how Dick, through the will of his mother, had come into possession of fabulous wealth. Of course the figure was put much higher than it really was. In fact, no one but Mr. Hamilton was aware of the exact amount, but this did not stop the writer of the article from guessing at it. Dick was described as a modern King Midas, and he was credited with sleeping in an ivory bed and eating off of gold plates and the rarest of cut glass. Nothing was said about the peculiar provisions of the will regarding the investment he was to make; but the boundless opportunities open to a youth with unlimited wealth at his disposal were all pointed out. "Well, if that isn't the limit!" exclaimed Dick, when he saw the paper. "I wonder who did it?" Perhaps if he had asked Simon Scardale that question that youth might have been confused, but Dick never thought of it. "It certainly is very unpleasant notoriety," remarked Mr. Hamilton, "but you'll have to put up with it. You are a sort of ward of the public now, and the newspapers think they have a proprietary interest in you. I have been through it all, and so has nearly every other person of wealth. The best way is to pay no attention to it, and to treat with courtesy any newspaper men who may wish to interview you. They have a hard enough life, and if our doings, to a certain extent, interest them, why I, for one, am willing to oblige them as far as I can. I suppose the transferring to your name of some stocks and bonds, that were your mother's, has started this piece of news. Well, you have achieved a certain degree of fame, Dick, my boy." And Dick found this out to his cost. The article in one paper was followed by others in various journals, until Dick's wealth had been made the comment of newspaper reporters and editors in many cities. But, through it all the youth kept a level head. CHAPTER V DICK AIDS HENRY "Where are you going to-day, Dick?" asked Mr. Hamilton after breakfast one morning. "I thought of taking a run in my car. I've bought that property I was telling you about. I think it will be a good investment, and it only took five hundred dollars to secure it. I talked to the agent, and he said I was sure to be able to sell it for a thousand at the end of the year." "Humph! Well--er--of course, you can't believe all that a real-estate agent says, Dick." "No, of course. I'm making allowances for that, and I figure that it ought to be worth at least eight hundred a year from now. That will clear me three hundred." "Well, you can do as you like about it. By the way, I had a visit at the bank yesterday from an agent for a motor boat concern. He said you had ordered a boat from them, and he wanted to know if it was all right." "I did, dad. I've always wanted one. I hope you told him it was all right." "I told him to see you about it. I have no objection to you purchasing one of the craft. Only be careful when you go out on the lake. There are sudden storms on it, and you might be in danger." "I'll be careful, dad. I guess I'll just run over to the motor boat place in my car and see if the boat is ready to deliver. They had to order one from the factory for me." As Dick was riding through the town at an easy pace he passed a rather dilapidated looking house, in front of which stood a youth, at the sight of whom Dick called: "Hello, Henry! Want a ride?" "Thanks, Dick," was Henry Darby's answer. "But I can't go." "Why not?" asked the millionaire's son, as he brought his runabout to a stop. "Well, I'm engaged in a little business deal, and I'm so bothered over it that I wouldn't enjoy a ride. Besides, I have to go see a man." "What's the business about, Henry? That same old iron?" "That's it." "But what are you bothered about?" "Well, the truth is I have a chance to get hold of a lot of scrap at a very low figure. But the trouble is I must pay cash for it. I looked at it the other day, and told the man I'd take it. I figured then on having the money. Now I find I haven't got it." "Did you lose it?" "No," and Henry spoke hesitatingly. "But you see my father had an idea he could make some money by becoming agent for a new kind of soap. He borrowed my cash and sent for a big supply; but when he got it no one would buy it. So he has it on hand, and my money is gone. Of course what I have is my father's until I'm of age, but----" Henry stopped. In spite of the selfish and lazy character of his parent he was not going to utter any complaint against him. "How much money do you need to buy this iron?" asked Dick, a sudden resolve coming into his mind. "It will take fifty dollars; but it might just as well be five hundred as far as I'm concerned. I could get it together in about a month, but it's out of the question now. I'm just on my way to tell the man I can't take the iron. It's too bad, as it's a bargain, and I could easily make considerable on the deal." While Henry was speaking Dick had drawn a little red book from his pocket, and was busily writing in it with a fountain pen. He tore out a slip of paper and handed it to his friend. "There, Henry," he said, "if you take that to the Hamilton National Bank they'll give you cash for it." "But what is it--I don't understand--a check for fifty dollars!" exclaimed the other youth. "That's what it is," replied Dick smiling. "It's a present from me, Henry." "A present! I'm sorry, but I can't take it, Dick. I'm very much obliged to you, but it wouldn't be business, you know. I don't want anything I don't earn." "But I have lots more," insisted Dick. "In fact, I'd never miss that sum." "I can't help it. I couldn't take it, though I thank you very much," and Henry handed back the little slip. "Wait!" exclaimed Dick. "Will you take it as a loan, Henry?" "A loan?" "Yes; to be paid back--whenever you get good and ready. Do take it--as a loan." "A loan," repeated Henry in a low tone. "Well, I might do that. But if you're in any hurry for the money you'd better not let me take it. I don't know when I can pay it back." "That's all right. Keep it as long as you like." "But there's another objection," said Henry, who appeared to be very conscientious about it. "You have no security for it." "I don't need any from you, Henry." "But it wouldn't be right to take it without security. Wait, I'll tell you what I'll do." He hurried back into his house, to return in a few minutes with a folded paper which he handed to Dick. "What is this?" "That," said Henry proudly, "is my personal note for fifty dollars, payable in one month, with interest at six per cent., as security for this loan. You can have it discounted at the bank," he added with a laugh; "that is if you can get your father, or somebody with some money, to indorse it. Anyhow, it's my note. The first one I ever gave. Now you needn't worry about your money, Dick." "I'm not worrying about it. In fact, I've got a deal of my own on hand that I expect to make some profit on. Besides, I'm going to buy a new motor boat, and I've got to go see about it. Will you come along?" "No, indeed. I'm going to buy that old iron now," and as Dick started up his auto, Henry hurried into the house for his hat to go and complete his business transaction. Dick rode on for about a mile, when he saw coming toward him a man in a carriage. The man held up his hand as he approached, indicating that he wanted the automobilist to stop. "I wonder what's the matter?" thought Dick. "I can't be going so fast that I'm in danger of scaring his horse. Why, it's Mr. Bruce," as he recognized the real-estate agent of whom he had purchased the land he had been looking at with Guy and Simon one day. "How are you?" asked Mr. Bruce. "I was just coming over to see you, Mr. Hamilton;" for he had been quite respectful to Dick since he learned of his wealth. "To see me? What about?" "About that land deal. In fact, I have bad news for you." "Bad news?" "Yes, I have just learned that they are going to put a fertilizer factory up on the property adjoining that which you bought, and yours will be valueless to sell for building lots. No one will want to live next to a fertilizer factory." "Then it means----" faltered Dick. "It means that your investment hasn't turned out well," went on the agent. "In fact, your land is worth less than half what you paid for it." CHAPTER VI A TRIP TO NEW YORK Dick was keenly disappointed, not so much at the news of the loss of his money as he was over the fact that his first investment had proved a failure. He began to realize that it was not as easy to make money as he had supposed, even if you have a large amount to invest. "It's too bad," continued Mr. Bruce. "Of course I did not know when I sold you the land that the factory was liable to go up near it." "Oh, it's not your fault," replied Dick. "I guess the best thing I can do is to sell out and look for another investment. What do you think?" "I believe I would do that. I'll sell the land for you and get the best price I can. When I first heard about it I tried to get the fertilizer concern to buy it, but they had all they wanted and stopped right next to your property. It's too bad." "Well, it might be worse," said Dick cheerfully. "It's not going to make me poor, that's one consolation." But, as he started up his runabout again, bidding the agent good-bye, his mind was busy with thoughts of what line he ought next to invest in so that he might fulfil the conditions of his mother's will. "I guess I'll let real estate alone after this," he said. "It's too risky until you know what's going to be built on the property next to yours." But the somewhat disappointing thoughts over his failure were soon dispelled when he saw the fine motor boat the firm had secured for him from the factory. It was complete in every detail, from a small whistle, worked by compressed air, to two small folding bunks in which passengers could sleep should the craft remain out on Lake Dunkirk all night. Dick arranged to have the boat taken to the lake and floated, and, a few days later, he had the pleasure of starting it up for the initial spin. It ran at fast speed, and beat several more powerful boats. Dick did not enjoy this pleasure all alone. He invited Guy Fletcher, Simon Scardale, Frank Bender, Fred Murdock and Chandler Norton, the latter known as "Bricktop," because of his red hair, to take a trip with him. "This is great!" exclaimed Frank, as the boat cut through the water. "Say, Dick, you're all right, even if you are a millionaire's son and have money to burn." "In fact, he's all the better for it," put in Guy, who had resolved to be very friendly to that fortunate youth. "Three cheers for Dick Hamilton!" "Drop that!" commanded Dick, who disliked Guy's manner. But the boys responded heartily, and if Guy and Simon joined in with sneers in their hearts, which did not show on their faces, they alone were aware of it. "Here, where are you going, Frank?" asked Dick, a few minutes later as he saw one of his guests climbing out on the narrow bow of the boat. "Watch me," replied Frank Bender, and, a moment later, he was standing on his head in his rather insecure place, his feet waving aloft in the air. "Come back here!" cried Dick, as he slowed down the engine. "Do you want to fall off and drown?" "No," replied Frank, as he assumed his normal position. "But, you see, I never stood on my head on a motor boat before and I wanted to do it. I want to get all sorts of practice, for I'm going to join a circus some day, and there's no telling what stunts they may want me to do." "Oh, you and your circus!" exclaimed "Bricktop." "You're always talking about it!" Which was the truth, for Frank took every chance that came to him to indulge in acrobatics of one form or another. He was continually turning cart wheels, standing on his head or his hands, twisting himself into knots, from which it seemed impossible that he could ever get loose, or bending himself until he resembled an animated horse shoe. He was "as limber as an eel," the boys used to say. "That's all right," responded the amateur circus performer, "I'll be in a show some day, with a suit of green and gold spangles, and you fellows will be paying money to see me. All except Dick. I'll give him a free pass." "Thanks," answered Dick with a laugh, as he started the engine on full speed again. "Say, wouldn't it be great if we could only make a trip to New York this way," remarked Fred Murdock. "Yes, this boat would look nice traveling over dry land the best part of the way," said Dick with a smile. "If this lake only opened into a river or a canal we might do it, but it's out of the question now." "Why don't you go in your automobile?" suggested Simon, with a curious look at Guy. "That's so, I never thought of it," replied Dick. "I believe I will if dad will let me." "Take us along?" asked Frank. "Maybe I could get an engagement there in one of the theatres. I can do quite a lot of turns now." "My car's too small for this bunch," replied the millionaire's son. "Hire a touring car; you have lots of money," spoke up Guy, with a covert sneer. "Good idea!" exclaimed Dick, not noticing the tone of the remark. "I believe I will. Would you fellows all go?" "Would we!" was shouted in a chorus. "Don't ask us twice," said Fred. "All right; it's a go!" went on Dick. "I'll see about it at once." With Dick, to think was to act shortly afterward, and that night he asked his father for permission to take a crowd of his friends to the metropolis, which could easily be reached in a day by using a swift touring car. "Besides," added Dick, as an added reason for the permission being given, "I may hear of some investment there." "What's the matter with the land you bought?" asked Mr. Hamilton. "Oh, that failed," and Dick told the story of the fertilizer factory. "Well, it's a good lesson to you, my son," was all Mr. Hamilton said by way of reproof. "No, I've no objection to you going to New York. Hire the car you wish, and be sure they supply a good driver. You're not quite capable of managing one of those ponderous machines yet. But be careful. Don't go to buying any gold bricks," and he laughed. "No danger," replied Dick. "I've cut my eye teeth." It was arranged that they should start in three days. Dick engaged the largest and finest car in the garage of a neighboring city, and told his friends to get ready. "Are you going?" asked Guy of Simon, the day before that set for the trip. "Am I? Well, you can make up your mind to that. I can see something good in this for us." "Good? What do you mean?" "Money, of course." "Don't get the idea that Dick is going to distribute five-dollar gold pieces along the route, Simon." "I'm not; but I've got a plan of my own. If this wealthy young greenhorn doesn't drop a few hundreds in New York, and if I don't get my share, I'm very much mistaken. You can just as well have some as not." "How you going to do it?" "That's my secret," replied Simon, with a wink. "I didn't live five years in New York for nothing. I've got some friends there who will help me. Just you wait." "But you want to be careful. Dick is no fool, even if he is wealthy." "Don't you worry. I know what I'm about." The pair, who were well matched, whispered for some time together, and when they separated, Simon, with many winks, gave his companion renewed assurances that Dick's trip to New York would prove financially beneficial to both of them. Guy knew little of Simon, who had come to Hamilton Corners about six months before this story opens. He had met him in the billiard room, where several youths of the town, who might better have been at something else, frequently gathered. Simon never appeared to work, but generally had plenty of money. He dressed flashily, and his conversation was filled with allusions to this or that "sport." Guy, who aspired to be thought a gilded youth of the city, rather than a plain country lad, with a father moderately well off, at once made fast friends with Simon. Because of the business relations of Dick's and Guy's fathers, the two lads had been more or less friendly for several years, and, when Guy took up with Simon, Dick did not hesitate to admit him to his house, where the boys frequently assembled to play billiards or other games, or practice in the fine gymnasium Mr. Hamilton had provided for his son. Thus, though Dick was aware of the rather sporty character of Guy and Simon, he was frank and pleasant with them, for he was a youth of rather free and easy ways, in spite of his wealth. Dick would have been glad to take all his boy friends of Hamilton Corners with him to New York, but the capacity of the automobile was limited to seven; so, besides Dick, Simon and Guy, there went along "Bricktop," Frank Bender and Walter Mead. Early on the appointed morning the big touring car, in charge of a skillful driver, drew up in front of Dick's house, where the boys had assembled. "Get in!" called Dick, from the window of his room. "I'll be right down as soon as I can get my valise shut. I've got to say good-bye to Grit. Poor fellow, he knows something's in the wind and he's trying to break his chain to come along. But I'm afraid something will happen to him in New York, so he's got to stay home." "He thinks as much of that dog as if it was a brother," remarked Guy with something of a sneer, as the five youths entered the tonneau, for Dick had elected to ride with the driver. "I don't blame him," said "Bricktop." "Grit's a dog worth having." "I hope Dick brings plenty of money along with him," whispered Simon to Guy, as they followed Frank Bender into the machine. "Why?" asked Guy, also in a whisper. "Because I've got everything all planned for a neat trick. I guess he'll not bring back as much as he takes away. I heard from my friend in New York. He'll meet us at the hotel, and then--well, we'll see what will happen." Dick came running down the steps of the mansion. "Good-bye!" he called to his father. "Yes, I'll be careful--good-bye!" There was a tooting of the automobile horn, a throbbing of the powerful engine, a grinding sound as the gears were thrown into place, and the boys were off on their trip to New York, Dick with his heart full of happiness and anticipation, while Simon and Guy were thinking over the plot they had made to get away from the millionaire's son a little of his wealth. CHAPTER VII A SHARPER FOILED Through Hamilton Corners the big car shot, its progress watched by throngs who had heard of Dick's trip. His conduct was commented on in various ways. "Good land!" exclaimed Hank Darby. "If I had the money that spendthrift will get rid of before he gets back here I could make my fortune. All I need is a little capital and I'd be rich inside of a week. I have a great scheme on." "Ain't goin' t' buy any more soap, be ye, Hank?" asked Porter Heavydale, a little, thin, wisp of a man, who was fully as lazy as Hank, but who made no secret of it. "Guess you had some slip-up there." "Oh, that--that was an accident, such as is liable to happen to any business man," and Hank carefully whittled a stick until there was nothing left of it. "Wa'al, a fool an' his money is soon parted, the proverb says," commented Porter. "Give Dick rope enough an' he'll come t' th' end of it sooner or later." "Dick's no fool," retorted Hank. "But I do hate to see him spend money." "Hasn't he a right to it, father?" asked Henry, always ready to come to Dick's defense. "It's his, and I'm sure he has been kind enough to me. Why, he loaned me fifty dollars the other day." "He did! Land sakes, where is it now, Henry? If I knowed that I could have made a deal with it. Git it for me right away." "I can't," replied Henry. "I bought some old iron with it and I'm waiting for a raise in the market. Besides, it's only a loan." "He'll never miss it," said Mr. Darby. "Good land! I wished I a-knowed you had it! I could 'a' bought some oil well stock. It's awful cheap now." "Yes, an' it would be a heap sight cheaper after you'd bought it," put in Porter with a laugh. New York was reached by those in the touring car at nightfall, and Dick registered himself and his friends at one of the finest hotels, the manager of which his father knew. The boys had adjoining rooms in the best part of the big building, and "Bricktop," Frank and Walter were so excited over the beautifully fitted-up apartments that they could do nothing but stare about. "Oh, they're not so bad," remarked Simon, in a patronizing tone when appealed to by "Bricktop," who demanded to know if this wasn't "the best ever." Simon had never been in such a fine hotel, but he wanted to pretend he was used to the luxuries. Guy followed his crony's example and affected to sneer at the accommodations. "My father and I generally put up at one of the better hotels," he said affectedly. "But, of course, this is all right for roughing it." "Roughing it!" exclaimed Walter. "Come off! Why, it's good enough for a king here." "Oh, well, wait until you've been about a bit," answered Simon languidly. After supper Dick took his friends to a theatre, where a war-time play was in progress, and even Simon and Guy enthused over the stirring scenes. The next day was spent in visiting Central Park, the big zoo at Bronx Park, and the Museums of Art and Natural History. Simon acted as escort, for he was fairly well acquainted with objects of interest in New York, and Dick good-naturedly let him pilot the boys about as though Simon was paying for it all instead of the millionaire's son footing the bills. It was not long before a keen reporter had learned of the presence in New York of the wealthy youth of whom the papers had recently contained so much, and there appeared several items telling of the trip. There were a number of incorrect stories in print, and Dick was credited with having expended nearly ten thousand dollars on his simple little pleasure jaunt. The result of this was that Dick was visited by a number of cranks, or, rather, they came to the hotel; but the wise manager, who had been telephoned to by Mr. Hamilton, had an eye to the wealthy youth's comfort, and few of the bothersome ones got beyond the lobby. "I say," spoke Guy to Simon, on the afternoon of the third day in New York, when Dick was in the far end of the room, writing a letter home, "when are you going to pull off that trick, Simon?" "This evening," was the cautious answer. "I've seen Colonel Dendon, and he's coming here to-night. I'm going to introduce him to Dick. The colonel says he'll whack up with me whatever he gets out of him, and I'll see that you get your share." "But, say," went on Guy. "This is no gold-brick swindle, is it? I wouldn't do anything wrong--or--er--criminal--you know. Is it all right?" "Of course it is!" exclaimed Simon, with a show of indignation. "Do you think I'd do anything that wasn't right, or for which I could be--er--get into trouble?" "I didn't know," ventured Guy. "Of course I wouldn't," continued Simon, with a great show of indignation that any one should suspect him. "This thing is perfectly legitimate. I know a certain party here--Colonel Dendon by name--who has all kinds of stocks and bonds for sale. Some are better than others. On some he can make a large profit. They may not be quite as good as those some other men have, but that's not the fault of Colonel Dendon, or you or me. It's the fault of the market. "He's often said to me that if I could introduce him to somebody with money--somebody who'd buy some of his stocks--he'd give me twenty-five per cent. of what he made. It's a regular business deal. It's done every day. Colonel Dendon is a sort of a promotor. I'm only helping him. It's perfectly honest--that is, as honest--well, it's as honest as lots of things I know about. I wouldn't get you into any trouble, Guy." "I hope not," answered the weak youth, who believed nearly all that Simon told him. "But if these stocks are good ones won't Dick make money on them? And if he does how is the colonel going to make any?" "I didn't say for sure that the stocks were good," replied Simon. "They may be good for all I know. Maybe Dick will have to hold them for some time before he can realize on them. I don't bother with all those details. The colonel has stocks to sell--all kinds--I simply introduce Dick to him and he does the rest, and pays me and you for our trouble." "Then I guess it's all right," assented Guy, a little doubtfully. "Of course it is," declared Simon very positively. That evening, as Dick and his friends sat in the private parlor of their suite of rooms, there was a knock at the door. Simon, being nearest it, answered, and, as soon as he had opened the portal, he exclaimed: "Why, Colonel Dendon. Come right in. Richard, let me introduce you to Colonel Dendon, an old friend of mine," Simon added with a grand air. "Come right in, Colonel, I'm sure we're glad to see you," and Simon winked at the man who entered. The colonel was not at all war-like looking. He had shifty eyes, and a nervous manner. His white hair would seem to have indicated that he was elderly, but his white beard, which was stained by tobacco juice, did not tend to gain for him that respect for which silver locks generally call. "I'll come in just for a minute--can't stay long--very busy," said the colonel jerkily, as he gave Dick a rather limp and flabby hand. "I suppose you have some big deal on that won't keep," put in Guy, who was playing his part in the plot. "That's it. Yes, I've got an appointment with some bank directors for seven o'clock, and one with the president of Pennsylvania Railroad at eight. A big bond sale involved. I heard you were in town, Simon, and I thought I'd look you up." "Glad you did. But, by the way, I don't suppose you have anything in the line of investment that you would care to recommend to my friend, Mr. Hamilton, here? You've heard about him, I think." "Is this the young man who has so much money?" asked the colonel, with a start of seeming surprise. "Well, I don't know that it's such an awful pile," said Dick with a laugh, for he disliked having his wealth talked about by strangers. "I've read lots about you," went on Colonel Dendon. "No, I'm afraid I haven't anything that you would care for. I only deal in big sums." "Well, Dick can command large sums," put in Guy, with an uneasy laugh. "I don't suppose you would care to take a hundred thousand dollars worth of mining securities of a gilt-edge kind?" asked the colonel, looking at Dick. "No, I'm hardly up to that yet. I intend to do some investing sooner or later; but I'm going to begin small. A hundred thousand is a little too large for me just yet." "I was afraid so," replied Colonel Dendon, with a queer smile. "Well, I must be going. I'm a very busy man." He turned as if about to leave the room, and then he suddenly seemed to remember something. "Now I think of it, I have a few securities that I might let your friend have as a favor to you," he said, addressing Simon. "They are mining stocks. I took them from a man who failed, and I know they are valuable. They are worth to-day half as much again as I paid for them. But, as a favor to Mr. Hamilton, I'd let him have them at a small advance over what I paid. I have to do business on business principles," he added, with an air meant to be very important. "Here's your chance, Dick," whispered Guy. "This man is a big stock operator. You can almost double your money and make up all you spent on this trip." Dick was doing some rapid thinking. The loss of the money he had invested in the land was something of a disappointment to him. Then, too, he felt under the necessity of making some kind of a paying investment. He had a vision of Uncle Ezra and the house at Dankville, and the memory of that gloomy place made him wish to comply as soon as possible with the terms of his mother's will. "I don't mind investing some money, say five hundred or a thousand dollars, in good mining stocks--if you are sure they are good," he said, turning to Colonel Dendon. "Good! My dear young man, do you wish to insult me? As if I would deal in stocks that were anything but the best. I shall leave at once!" and, puffing up like an angry toad, the colonel again turned as if to go. "Wait!" exclaimed Simon. "I'm sure my friend Dick didn't mean anything, Colonel. You see, he has never bought mining stocks before, and he doesn't know much about them." "I know enough to want to be sure they are good!" replied Dick sharply, for he rather resented Simon's tone. "I'm not going to be swindled." "Of course not," said the colonel, in less aggrieved tones. "I was a little too hasty. But I can assure you, Mr. Hamilton, that these securities are the very best of their kind. They are gilt-edged." As he spoke he drew from his pocket a bundle of certificates which, as far as appearances went, were "gilt-edged," for there was a broad band of gilt all around them. "I can let you have these for eight hundred dollars," he said; "and they will be worth a thousand inside of a month. I would keep them myself only I have bigger schemes on hand. I will let you have them as a special favor, Mr. Hamilton." Dick examined the certificates. They certainly looked just like those he had often seen in his father's bank. They bore a number of flourishing signatures and a printed notice to the effect that they were listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They called for a number of shares of stock in a Pennsylvania oil well concern. Dick felt impelled to take them. It seemed all right, even if he did have some lingering suspicion regarding the colonel. Still, appearances might be against him, and certainly Simon seemed to know the man. Dick saw a vision of his investment turning out well, so he would have no further worry about fulfilling the conditions of the will. Once they were met he could enjoy his new wealth. "I think I'll take these," he said, reaching for his pocket-book, where he carried several hundred dollars, though he had left some of his money in the hotel safe. "I will give you part cash and a check." "It will be a fine investment," said Colonel Dendon; but he did not say for whom. "I can assure you, Mr. Hamilton, that I never sold such gilt-edged securities before. I am glad----" At that instant the door of Dick's apartments opened, and a quietly-dressed man entered. He looked at the group of boys, noted the bundle of stock certificates, and then his glance rested on Colonel Dendon. "I must ask you to leave this hotel at once," he said sharply, to the white-haired man. "If you don't go I shall be under the necessity of putting you under arrest." CHAPTER VIII DICK AND THE REPORTER For a few moments after the surprising announcement, no one spoke. The boys and Colonel Dendon stared at the newcomer. The colonel was the first to recover himself. "What is the meaning of this unwarranted intrusion?" he demanded, in pompous tones. "These young gentlemen and myself were discussing some financial matters when you interrupt us. You have doubtless made a mistake, and I will overlook it this time. Withdraw at once, sir, or I shall have to call the servants and have you thrown out of these private apartments, sir!" "Better go easy," suggested the quiet-looking man, with just the suggestion of a smile. "If there's any throwing out to be done I reckon I'll take a hand in it." "What do you mean, sir? Leave the room at once!" exclaimed the colonel, getting red in the face. "I mean just this, William Jackson, _alias_ Colonel Dendon, _alias_ Bond Broker Bill!" said the man sharply, "that you must leave this hotel at once or I shall arrest you. You can't conduct any of your swindling games here--trying to sell fake stocks and bonds. I saw you come in, and learned that you were calling on this young man," and he nodded to Dick, who was much surprised at the proceeding. "I got up here in time to warn him, I see. I hope you haven't given him any money?" he asked of the millionaire's son. "I--I was just going to--for some bonds he had." "Lucky I came in," was the man's reply. "Now beat it, Bill," and he waved his hand toward the door. "Take your trash with you," he added, sweeping the bonds from the table. Dick and the other boys, with the possible exception of Simon, expected to see the colonel defend himself and indignantly reply to the stranger. Instead he hurriedly gathered up his papers and fairly raced from the room. "Is he--is he a swindler?" asked Dick, faintly. "One of the slickest in New York," was the answer. "His game is to sell fake bonds in companies that never existed, though some of them are legally organized. Once in a while, just to fool the police, he deals in regular stocks, but the kind he usually sells are fake ones. I'm the hotel detective," the man went on. "We have to be always on the lookout for such chaps as he is, especially when we have young millionaires stopping at the house," and he smiled at Dick. "I'm much obliged to you," answered Dick heartily. "You've saved me a considerable sum." "That's what I'm here for," returned the detective cheerfully. "Don't go buying any gold bricks, now," and, with a nod at the boys, he was gone. "Well, wouldn't that rattle your teeth!" exclaimed "Bricktop." "I've read about those confidence men and green-goods swindlers, but I never saw one before." "Me, either," remarked Frank Bender. "Say, this will be something to tell the folks back home," and, in the excitement of his spirits he tried to stand on his head in a washbowl on the stand. It was full of water, and his acrobatic feat was brought to an abrupt end as he lifted his head, dripping wet. "That's a new way to do it!" exclaimed Walter Mead, with a laugh. "Ugh! Burrrr! Wow! Whew! Give me a towel, quick!" yelled Frank. "The water had soap in it, and it's got in my eyes!" He groped around with outstretched hands, seeking a towel, which, after he was able to stop laughing, Dick handed him. "Did you know that Colonel Dendon was a swindler?" asked Walter of Simon, when the excitement had somewhat subsided. "Me? No, of course not!" exclaimed Simon hastily. "All I knew was that he sold bonds, and I thought it would be a good chance for Dick to make money. He said he wanted to learn business and make money. I--I was as much surprised as any of you," concluded Simon, with an injured air. "I hope you don't think, Dick, that I would have had anything to do with that man if I had known what he was?" "I'm not blaming you any," replied Dick. "Mistakes will happen in the best of regulated financial affairs. Glad that detective happened to come in when he did or I might have been badly stung." It was now too late to go out to any amusement and the boys, after discussing the recent happenings, went to bed, planning to visit many points of interest the next day. "Well, your scheme didn't work out, did it?" said Guy to Simon, as they went to their rooms. "Not exactly," was the answer. "But I give you my word I didn't know the colonel was such a swindler as that. Never mind, though, I'll make money out of Dick--somehow." Dick and his chums had scarcely finished their breakfast the next morning, and were preparing to go out, when the bell boy brought up a card reading: +------------------------+ | LAWRENCE DEXTER | | | | _New York Leader_ | +------------------------+ "Who is it?" asked "Bricktop," "another man to sell bonds?" Dick handed over the card. "_New York Leader_, eh? I wonder what he leads, a band or some political party?" "That's a reporter," said Walter. "Going to let him in, Dick?" "Yes, I guess so. I'm tired of having stuff in the papers about me; but these reporters have to get the stories they're sent after, and it's no use making it any harder for them than they have it. Tell him to come up," he said to the waiting bell boy. A tall, good-looking youth, with a pleasant, manly air, entered the room. To those who have read some of my other books he will not be a stranger, for he was none other than Larry Dexter, whose various adventures I have described in "The Great Newspaper Series," starting with "From Office Boy to Reporter." "Which one is the millionaire's son, with money to burn?" Larry asked, with a laugh that showed in his eyes. He was a little older than Dick. "I suppose I am," answered the wealthy youth. "I'm from the _Leader_," said Larry Dexter. "I've been sent to get your impressions of New York, and to ask whether you find it a good place to spend money. Do you mind talking for publication?" There was such a winning way about this reporter, so different from that noticeable in many of the newspaper men Dick had been inflicted with, that the millionaire's son liked him at once. Larry did not take it for granted that Dick must submit to the questions, but, in a gentlemanly way, asked for permission to "write him up." "I don't know that I can tell you anything that will be of interest to the paper," said Dick, "but I'll do my best." "That's a relief," returned Larry. "I just came from a crusty old man--a professor who has discovered a new way of making milk keep--and he was so grouchy I couldn't get a word out of him. It's a big change to find somebody who will talk." "Please don't make up a lot of silly, sensational stuff?" pleaded Dick. "I'm tired of all that. I'm no different from other fellows." "Oh, yes, you are!" interrupted Larry with a laugh. "You have millions of money, and you'll find that makes all the difference in the world. It will gain you friends, position--in fact, almost anything. At least so they tell me," he added with another smile. "I never had a million myself. But now let's get down to business. What do you think of New York? Can you spend money here as fast as you want to?" "He came pretty near spending it faster than he wanted to last night," put in "Bricktop." "How was that?" asked Larry quickly, feeling that there was "in the air," so to speak, a story out of the usual run. Thereupon Dick told about the attempted bond swindle. "Say, this is great!" exclaimed Larry. "This is the best yet! This beats having you talk about New York. Do me a favor, will you?" "What is it?" inquired Dick. "If it's to buy some gilt-edged bonds, I'm afraid I'll have to decline." "No, it's only this. Don't say anything about this bond business to any other reporters." "I'm not likely to, unless they ask me to," replied Dick. "But why?" "Because I want to get a beat out of it." "A beat?" inquired "Bricktop," while the other boys looked puzzled. "Yes. An exclusive story. I don't want the reporters for any other papers to get hold of it. If I have it all alone in the _Leader_ it will be a feather in my cap. News that no other paper has is the very best kind."? "Gilt-edged, I suppose," put in Dick. "That's it," replied Larry quickly. "Now don't tell any other reporters, will you?" "Well, if they come here and ask about it, I can't say it wasn't so." "No, I suppose not," assented Larry. "But, I tell you what you can do." "What?" "Go for a walk, and don't come back to the hotel until after my paper is out with the story. We publish in the afternoon and go to press about noon for the first edition. Would it be asking too much of you to do that?" "No, for we were going out anyhow." "Then come with me," suggested Larry. "I'll take you to the _Leader_ office and have a man show you how we make a newspaper. I guess no other reporters will come in there to get the story out of you," and he laughed in delight at the "beat" he had secured. Dick and his friends were only too glad to get a chance to see a big paper printed, and soon they were on their way to the _Leader_ office, escorted by Larry. "If any other reporters see me they'll think I'm taking some young men's club on a tour of the city," the young journalist remarked, as the little throng walked along. "Well, if they do, it will be a good way to throw them off the scent." Larry reported to his city editor about having most unexpectedly come across a "big" story in connection with the young millionaire, and was told to "let it run for all it's worth." "I'll see to it that the modern Croesus and his friends are entertained," said Mr. Newton, another reporter, who was told by Mr. Emberg, the city editor, to show Dick and his chums around the newspaper plant. It was getting close to edition time, and they noticed, with much amazement, how the reporters came hurrying in with the news they had gathered; how they sat down at typewriters and rattled it off; how it was corrected and edited; sent to the composing room in pneumatic tubes; set up on type-setting machines that seemed almost human; the type put into "forms" or strong steel frames; how a soft sheet of wet paper was pressed on the type and baked by steam until it took every impression and was the exact counterpart of a printed page. The boys watched and saw that these baked sheets of paper, called "matrices," were sent to the stereotyping room, where, bent into a half-circle in a machine, they were filled with hot melted lead, which, hardening, took every impression of the cardboard. Then the curved metal plates, each one representing a page of the paper, were clamped on a big press, that worked with a noise like thunder, and, in an instant, it seemed, white paper from a big roll, which was fed it at one end, came out printed, pasted, and folded newspapers at the other end of the machine. A grimy boy gathered up an armful of them, as they kept piling up at the foot of a chute, which extended somewhere up inside the press. Mr. Newton, who had escorted Dick and his friends about, took up one of the journals. "There you are!" he shouted, above the rumble and roar of the press, as he handed Dick a paper. The wealthy youth unfolded it. On the front page was the story of himself and "Colonel Dendon." It was under a "scare" head, which announced: ATTEMPTED SWINDLE OF YOUNG MILLIONAIRE! SHARPER TRIES TO SELL TO DICK HAMILTON, WHO RECENTLY INHERITED VAST WEALTH, WORTHLESS BONDS! DETECTIVE ACTS IN TIME "Humph!" murmured Dick, when he saw what a big story Larry had made of it. "If my father saw this he'd be worried." "You're getting more famous than ever!" exclaimed Walter Mead. "Looks so," admitted the young millionaire. "Well, I'm glad Larry got his beat, anyhow." And it was a beat, for, when Dick got back to the hotel, the manager told him half the newspapers in New York had been calling him up to ask about the story. CHAPTER IX A CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN Dick and his friends went home in the big automobile a few days later, having crowded into their stay as much sight-seeing as was possible. Dick had just finished telling his father, the evening of his arrival, of his various adventures, including the one with the swindler, when the servant announced: "Some one to see you, Master Dick." "Who is it?" "Henry Darby." "Ah, there's a young man who will make his mark some day!" exclaimed Mr. Hamilton. "If his father was only like him Henry would have more chances." "That's right," admitted Dick. "I wonder what he wants?" "Well, I'll leave you together," said Dick's father, as he left the library, and a little later Henry was ushered in by the servant. "Hello, Henry!" exclaimed Dick. "Same to you and more of it," was Henry's greeting. "I've come to see if you don't want a particularly fine line of gold bricks," he went on with a laugh, for he had read in the papers of the attempted bond swindle. "You'll have to see my secretary," spoke Dick, joining in the spirit of the talk. "He buys all my gold bricks. But, to change the subject, how's the old iron business?" "Pretty good. In fact, I came to see you about it, if you're not too busy," and Henry tried to look as though he had come to discuss the investment of millions. "No, I guess I can spare you a few minutes. What is it?" "I came to take up my note and pay it off," went on the young iron merchant, drawing a roll of much-crumpled bills from his pocket. "Want to save interest, you know. I managed to sell that iron I bought, and I made a profit on it. So I'll pay that fifty-dollar note now." "Well, you certainly know how to make money," spoke Dick admiringly. "I'll have to take lessons from you. But say, Henry, I'm in no hurry for that money. If you can use it, why, just keep it." "No--no," went on Henry, with rather a sorrowful air, Dick thought. "I'd better pay you while I have it. I might not be able to get it together again. You take it," and he shoved the bills over toward Dick with an air of desperation. "But, I don't need it," persisted Dick. "You might just as well keep it a while, Henry." "Do you mean that?" asked Henry earnestly. "Sure." "Then I will," and Henry appeared much relieved. "In fact, if you want more I'll lend it to you," continued the millionaire's son. "Are you in earnest?" "Of course I am. Why?" "Well, to tell you the truth I hated to pay back that fifty dollars. I mean I still had a use for it. In fact, if I had a little more I could branch out--I'm a sort of a little tree now--like one of those saplings they set out. I need branches." "Tell me about it," suggested Dick. "Well, if I had two hundred dollars more I could buy out the business of Moses Cohen, who deals in old metal. He's getting too feeble to carry it on, and I heard it was for sale. I made some inquiries and I found I can get it for about five hundred dollars." "But you said two hundred and fifty was all you needed." "So it is. I'm only going to pay half cash, and give a mortgage for the balance. That's the safest way. So I was in hopes you wouldn't take that fifty. I might induce him to take this on account and wait a while for the two hundred." "He needn't wait at all," interrupted Dick. "I'll let you have two hundred more, with pleasure," and he drew out his check book with a little flourish. "I can't give you any security but my note," said Henry. "Even that wouldn't be good in law, as I am not of age. But it shows I mean to pay you back." "Of course it does." "I'll get my father to give you his, also," went on the young lad of business. "Though I guess it isn't worth much more than mine," and he sighed a little, for Henry was aware of his father's failing. "Yours is all I want," said Dick. "Tear up this old note and make out one for two hundred and fifty dollars. Then you can buy out Cohen's business." Henry tore up the fifty-dollar promissory note Dick handed him and soon had made out another for the larger amount. "There's the check," went on Dick, handing it over. "I'll get dad to draw up some kind of a paper giving you a share in the business," continued Henry. "He heard about me going to buy out old Cohen, and he wants me to incorporate and make him one of the officers. I guess that's what he's best fitted for," and once more Henry smiled rather sadly. "Well, I wish you good luck," returned Dick as he shook hands with Henry. "I'm going to put through some business deals myself soon, as for certain reasons, I've got to make a good investment," and he thought of his failure in the land scheme, while a vision of his Uncle Ezra came to him like the memory of a bad dream. It was several days after this that Dick met Frank Bender on the street. Frank was attired in his "Sunday clothes" and seemed in a hurry. "Where you going?" asked Dick. "Circus." "Where is it?" "Over to Parkertown. They have some good acrobats in it, and I want to get a few points." "I wonder why a circus never comes here," mused Dick, half to himself. "It's quite a trip to Parkertown." "This place is too small," replied Frank. "They have to have a big crowd to make it pay. A circus will never come here." "No, I s'pose not," answered Dick. "Well, I wish I was going, but I've got to go down to dad's bank. I've got a little business on hand." "So long," called Frank. "I must hurry to catch the train." "I wish they'd have a circus here some time," continued Dick, as he walked along. "Hamilton Corners is too quiet. It needs stirring up." Just then he caught sight of a curious procession. It was composed of a number of boys and girls, mostly little tots, walking along the street, two by two, led by three matronly ladies. "The orphan asylum out for an airing," commented Dick. "Poor little kids! Poor little kids!" There was a county orphan asylum in Hamilton Corners, and it was usually well filled with small unfortunates. Twice a week they were taken for a walk by some of the matrons in charge. "Poor little kids!" repeated Dick. "I'll bet they never saw a circus in their lives. And they're not likely to. A circus will never come here. The place is too small. No, they'll never see a circus--unless----" He came to a sudden stop in his musings. Then a light broke over his face. "By Jimminy Crickets! I'll do it!" he exclaimed, so loudly that several persons in the street turned to look at him. "I'll do it! That's what I will!" He looked at his watch. "I've just got time to catch the train to Parkertown if I hustle," he added as he set off on a run. CHAPTER X DICK INVESTS IN HAPPINESS Dick managed to swing aboard the last car as the train for Parkertown was pulling out of the station at Hamilton Corners. There was quite a crowd on it, as many were going to the circus. "Hello!" exclaimed Frank Bender, as he caught sight of Dick walking up the aisle of the car in which he was. "I thought you weren't going." "I wasn't, but I changed my mind. This is a free country." "Of course," assented Frank, with a laugh. "We'll go together and have some fun." "Oh, I'm going on business." "That's too bad." "Well, it's business connected with fun," explained Dick. "Maybe I'll have a chance to see the show with you later." "See the show! Why, that's the main object of going to Parkertown," responded Frank. "I wouldn't miss it for anything. They've got a fellow in it, according to the pictures, who can stand on his head, hold a man in each hand, balance two others on his legs, hold one by a strap in his mouth--and all the while he's on a trapeeze at the top of the tent. It's great!" "Well, maybe he can give you a few pointers," said Dick. It was about an hour's run to Parkertown, and when the train reached the circus grounds there was a general rush to the big tents. It lacked about an hour to noon, and though the show had not opened yet there was much of interest to see. Dick and Frank watched the men putting finishing touches to the immense canvas shelters, while others were feeding the animals, getting the big gilded wagons into place, and arranging the sideshows. In one tent hundreds of the performers and helpers were at dinner, while a curious crowd looked on under the raised flaps. The two boys, in company with scores of others, watched the cooks of the circus at work over the portable ranges and soup kettles, where it seemed as though enough food for an army was being prepared. "Say, it's great, isn't it!" exclaimed Frank. "I can hardly wait until it's time to begin. Let's go get a hot frankfurter sausage somewhere." "I'm afraid I've got to leave you," replied Dick. "I have some business on hand. I'll see you later. Maybe in the main tent." "All right," assented Frank, a little disappointed, but he soon forgot about that in watching the many scenes of interest. "Where can I find the manager?" asked Dick, of a man who wore a uniform and seemed to be some one in authority. "In the ticket wagon," was the reply. "But you needn't think you can deadhead in. The free list is suspended." "I've no intention of asking for a pass," replied Dick, with a smile. "Is the manager in?" he asked, a moment later, of the man who looked out of the high ticket wagon. "I guess so. What do you want?" "I want to see him in regard to the next town where he is to play." "Who is it?" inquired a voice from within the vehicle. "Some lad from our next town. Maybe the mayor's sent to say he's going to raise the license fee. I never see such a hold-up game as these country mayors try to pull off," and the ticket seller looked disgusted. "No, I'm not from the mayor," said Dick. "I want to see the manager on my own account." At this another man joined the one at the ticket window. He was large and fat, and wore a red necktie, in which sparkled a pin with a large stone. He had on a tall hat and a frock coat. "Come around to the side door," he said, in no very gracious tones, and Dick noticed that a pair of steps at the side gave access to the wagon. He was soon inside the place, which was fitted up like a small office, with desks, and even a typewriter, at which a young man was busy pounding the keys. "What is it?" asked the manager, abruptly. "I've come to see if you won't give a show in Hamilton Corners," began Dick. "I think the town would like to see it." "Maybe the town would, but I wouldn't," replied the manager quickly. "I'm not in business for my health. I want to make a little money, and Hamilton Corners is too small. We couldn't clear expenses." "How much do you have to clear to make it worth your while to show in a town?" asked Dick. "Well, a thousand dollars is fair business." "If you were sure of a thousand dollars clear, would you come to Hamilton Corners?" "Yes, or any place else within traveling distance. But what are you? A newspaper reporter? If you are, you want to see our press agent. He's in that tent over there." "No, I want to do business with you," rejoined Dick, with a smile. "I live in Hamilton Corners. I'd like to see a circus there. In fact, I'm willing to pay for having one come there. I have a certain reason for it. If I give you a thousand-dollar guarantee will you bring the show there?" "Yes, of course." The manager seemed a little dazed. Dick drew out a thin red book. "I'll give you the guarantee now," he said. "Can you come to-morrow?" and he began to use his fountain pen. "Whom shall I make it out to?" and he looked at the manager. "Say," suddenly whispered the manager to the ticket seller. "Is the marshall out there? He is? All right. Call him here." Then in soothing tones he spoke to Dick. "That's all right," he said. "Never mind the check. We'll come to Hamilton Corners, anyhow. Now don't get excited. Here, take a drink of water and you'll feel better. The sun is very hot to-day. In fact, it makes my head buzz. Just put that red book away. Red is very heating, you know." He paused, and looked rather helplessly about him. Then in a whisper he again asked the ticket seller: "Is the marshall there? Tell him to come in before he gets violent." The side door opened, and a town marshall, with a big nickel-plated star on his coat, entered the wagon. "What's the matter?" asked Dick, somewhat surprised at the sudden turn of events. "There! there!" spoke the manager, soothingly. "It's all right. Don't get excited. You're with friends." "Don't you want this check?" asked Dick. "I'm in earnest. I want your circus to come to Hamilton Corners." "Yes, yes, of course, my dear boy. We'll come. I'll let you ride on one of the elephants. You can feed the monkeys, and tickle the hippopotamus, if you like. Poor boy," in lower tones, "so young, too." "Say," demanded Dick, standing up, "do you think I'm crazy?" "There! there!" repeated the manager, in that soothing tone he had suddenly adopted. "Please don't get excited. It's the worst thing in the world for you." Dick glanced up at the man in uniform. Then a smile came over his face that had assumed a rather angry look. "Why, Marshall Hinckly!" he exclaimed. "How did you come to be here?" "Dick Hamilton!" exclaimed the officer in surprise, "I didn't know you at first. You see the authorities in Parkertown, being a little short-handed, asked me to help out on circus day, and so I came over from Hamilton Corners. But what in the name of green turtles is the trouble here?" "I don't know," replied the millionaire's son. "I merely offered to guarantee this manager a thousand dollars if he would bring his circus to Hamilton Corners, and he acts as though he thought I was crazy." "And isn't he?" burst out the manager, less frightened, now that an officer of the law was present. "Isn't he, Mr. Policeman? The idea of a boy like him offering to make out a check for a thousand dollars to have a circus come to town! In the first place, I don't believe he has the money; and in the second, what does he want to hire a circus for? Say, honest, hasn't he got away from some asylum?" "Dick Hamilton broke out of an asylum!" exclaimed the marshall. "Well, I rather guess not! As for him not having the money, you're wrong there. Why, that's Mortimer Hamilton's son," and he showed his pride at being acquainted with Dick. "Mortimer Hamilton, president of the Hamilton National Bank?" asked the manager, incredulously. "That's him," replied the marshall. "Say!" exclaimed the manager rather faintly, sitting limply down in a chair. "Give me a glass of water, will you, please. Mortimer Hamilton, the multi-millionaire! And I thought his son didn't have a thousand dollars! Excuse me, Mr. Hamilton," he said, heartily, as he held out his hand to Dick. "I beg your pardon." "That's all right," replied Dick, with a smile. "Whom shall I make the check out to?" "Me," replied the manager. "Wellington Dappleton. But say," he added, "would you mind telling me what you want of the circus?" "I'll tell you," answered Dick, with something of a serious air. "When I was out walking this morning I saw a procession from the orphan asylum. I heard about the circus being over here, and I knew those poor youngsters couldn't go. I made up my mind that if I could, I'd have the circus come to town and I'd take those kids free. It's the only chance they'll ever get, maybe, and I--well, I've got plenty of money. I can just as well spend some of it this way as in having a good time myself. When can you come?" "We'll be there to-morrow and play the afternoon and evening," said the manager. "And I'll tell you what I'll do. You needn't make out that check now. We'll wait until after the last performance, and all I'll ask you to do will be to make good whatever I'm short of a thousand-dollar profit. Maybe we can get enough admissions in the town to make up part of the sum. I'll not see a lad do the only good turn in these parts. I'll meet you half way, and there's my hand on it," and once more he gripped Dick's fingers in a hold that made them tingle. "But the orphans come in free," insisted Dick. "The orphans come in free," repeated the manager, "and any other boys or girls you like. We'll only charge the grown folks." So it was arranged. Dick and the manager had a long talk, so long that Dick had time only to see the closing acts in the big tent. "Well, you missed it," said Frank, as he met Dick on his way out. "You should have seen that fellow hold all those others. It was great! I'm going to join a circus." "Better wait," advised Dick, with a smile. "Have a talk with that acrobat. The show is coming to Hamilton Corners to-morrow, and you can ask him how he likes the life." "The show coming to Hamilton Corners?" "Yes," and then Dick told of the arrangements. Hamilton Corners hardly knew itself when it awoke the next morning. The town was gay with many colored posters, showing fierce animals wandering together over vast treeless plains, and many-hued lithographs of men risking their lives on the high trapeze. Before the boys had fairly gotten the idea into their heads that the circus was coming the cavalcade of wagons began arriving. Dick had seen the town authorities and secured the necessary permits. Then Hamilton Corners really woke up as the news became known that Dick was responsible for the whole affair. "Say, he spends money like water," observed Simon to Guy. "I wish I had some of what he's throwing away." "I suppose you'd buy oil stock with it," observed Guy, with a peculiar smile. Simon did not answer. The orphans at the asylum--hundreds of them--could hardly believe the joyous news when, after Dick had told those in charge, it was announced to them by the matrons. Some of the poor little tots cried in very happiness. One little boy, who remembered once seeing some of the gay lithographs of a circus, was discovered running around in a circle. "What are you doing?" asked a matron. "Playing I'm a circus horse," was the answer. "I'se got to do suffin to make de time pass. I'm so happy!" Long before the time set for the performance, crowds of boys and girls were headed for the big tents. Dick had generously arranged so that no boy or girl need pay, and hundreds of those in Hamilton Corners, as well as those in the surrounding suburbs, besides the orphans, saw the show free. Dick wanted to go off with some of his chums and view the performance, but the head matron of the asylum asked him to sit with her in the midst of her little charges. "They want to see you," she explained. "They think you own the circus, and that you are the most wonderful person in the world." "Oh, pshaw! It isn't anything at all," declared Dick, with a blush. "I just happened to think of it when I saw the little children out walking and saw how sad some of 'em looked. Besides, it's time we had a circus in Hamilton Corners." The antics of the clowns, the "hair-raising, death-defying evolutions in mid-air," as the programme called them, the performing horses and elephants, the pony races, the chariot contests, the trick dogs, pigs, monkeys, and other animals, the glittering pageant, the music and excitement--all this was as a happy dream to the orphans. They sat in ecstasy, now and then some of them looking at Dick, who sat in their midst, as though, like some good fairy, they feared he might disappear any minute. "Well," remarked the manager to Dick in the library of the Hamilton mansion, when the show was over. "You had your circus all right. I guess about four hundred dollars will square us. There were quite a few paid admissions." "There's your check," answered Dick, passing over a slip of paper, and the manager took his departure. That night, as the rumble of circus wagons leaving the town came faintly to the ears of Dick and his father, as they sat in the library, Mr. Hamilton remarked: "Well, did you get your money's worth, Dick?" "I certainly did, dad. The look on the faces of those orphans was worth twice as much as I spent." "Still, you might have invested four hundred dollars in some business and gotten large returns from it." "I invested it in happiness, dad," was Dick's answer. And then Mr. Hamilton turned away, loving his son more than ever. But still he wondered if Dick would ever be able to fulfil the conditions of his mother's will. CHAPTER XI "HANK" DARBY IN BUSINESS Hamilton Corners did not cease talking of the circus, and Dick's part in it, for several weeks. Among the boys, Dick was more of a hero than ever and many were his champions. Only Simon and Guy sneered, but they took care to do it when no one else was present. The truth was, Simon hated to see Dick spend money unless he had a chance to get some of it, and, since the failure of the bond scheme, this did not seem very likely to happen. For Mr. Hamilton had warned his son not to get too intimate with Simon. A youth, he said, who had as a friend a man of the character of Colonel Dendon was not a safe chum. Dick promised not to have too much to do with either Simon or Guy, but he was too independent a boy to cut them altogether. "Are you going to be busy this afternoon, dad?" asked Dick of his father one morning. "Because if you're not, I'd like to come down to the bank and talk over a little business with you. I think it's about time I made some large investment in order to comply with mother's will, and I want to ask your advice." "Come along," answered Mr. Hamilton, good-naturedly. "I will aid you all I can, but I'd rather you would learn to depend on yourself. Experience is the best teacher, but her lessons come a trifle high." Several days previous to this Dick had been in correspondence with a New York firm, and he wanted some advice before he went any further into a certain scheme. Accordingly, at the time appointed, he went to his father's bank, carrying a lot of printed matter and some letters. "Well, what is it?" asked Mr. Hamilton, when he and his son were seated in the private office. "I was thinking of investing in this company, formed to supply a new kind of preserved milk," said Dick. "Some one has discovered a process by which milk can be made to keep a long time, and yet it tastes like fresh. They state that the milk problem, in big cities, is one that many have tried to solve. By their method any family can have fresh milk with little trouble, and it is almost as cheap as that which comes right from a cow. Of course, in a big city it's impossible to supply fresh milk to everyone. "They are offering to sell some stock cheap, and it is guaranteed to double in value in six months. They are all ready to put the milk on the market. I was thinking of investing some money in this concern. What do you think of it?" Mr. Hamilton looked over the mass of circulars, statements of the business that could be done in New York alone, to say nothing of the rest of the country, and glanced at the pictures of machines for making the milk so it would keep for a long time, without ice, even in the hottest weather. "Well, Dick," he said slowly. "This company has some well-known men connected with it, and the scheme looks all right. That is as far as you can tell from this. If you want to invest some of your money in it I have no objections. How much did you figure on?" "I thought about five thousand dollars." Mr. Hamilton uttered a low whistle. "I'd say two thousand," he remarked. "If you find it's good you can put the other three in later. Better go slow on a new thing. Of course, I don't know anything about it, and if it fails I don't want you to hold me responsible. I'm willing that you should try it--that's all." "Then I'll send for two thousand dollars' worth of stock," decided Dick; and he made out a check, had it certified, and sent it to New York. "Now that's done, and I'm in a fair way to make a large profit, I think I'll begin to look around for something else," he said. "It's a good thing to have several investments; isn't it, dad? I think I've heard you say not to have all your eggs in one basket." "That's right," assented Mr. Hamilton. "Only you want to be sure you have good eggs, and not bad ones; also, that the baskets are strong enough to carry them." At that moment there came a knock on the door of the private office, and when Mr. Hamilton had called out an invitation to enter, Archibald Spreckles McIverson, to give him his complete name, the messenger of the bank, announced: "A gentleman to see you, Mr. Hamilton. I beg your pardon for interrupting you, but he says his business is very important and he will not detain you long. He also wishes to see Mr. Dick, and he has a young man with him." "Show him in," said Mr. Hamilton. "Must be somebody with money," he added to his son as the messenger departed, "or McIverson would never be so puffed up. He loves to announce anyone whom he believes is wealthy, but I don't know of anyone, with any great amount of cash, who is coming to see me to-day." "Mr. Henry Darby, senior and junior," announced Archibald Spreckles McIverson with a grand air, as he held the door of the private office open so that "Hank" Darby and Henry might enter. Then McIverson softly closed the portal. "Ahem!" remarked Hank, almost as pompously as had the bank messenger. "Fine day, Mr. Hamilton." Dick looked at Henry's father in amazement. The man was dressed in a new suit of black, and wore a silk hat. He had a necktie of vivid purple, and a red pink was in his buttonhole. He took off his tall hat and wiped his shining bald head with a big red silk handkerchief. No wonder he had impressed McIverson. Henry looked a little embarrassed, but Dick nodded at him in a friendly way, and made room for him on the sofa upon which he was sitting. "I have called upon a little matter of business," said Mr. Darby, carefully depositing his hat on the carpet. "I and my son here," and he nodded in Henry's direction. "I may also add that your son is interested--er--to a considerable extent. In fact, I may say to an equal extent with ourselves." "I wonder what's coming?" thought Mr. Hamilton, who had never seen Hank so well dressed, and who knew the man to be the laziest fellow in Hamilton Corners. "Your son, Mr. Hamilton," went on Hank Darby, with a grand air that was strangely in contrast with his former attitude when one met him about town, "your son, I may state, has been the means of doing something which I long have desired to see done. He has enabled me and my son to start in business--a business that, while it is small, is capable of enormous possibilities--_enormous possibilities_," and Mr. Darby looked as if he would puff up like a balloon and float out of the window. "In short," he went on, "he has loaned my son two hundred and fifty dollars, for which Henry has given his note. Of course, that is no legal security, and when I heard about it I at once set about putting the matter on a business basis." "I don't understand," said Mr. Hamilton. "Henry is in the old iron business, dad," explained Dick. "Exactly," went on Mr. Darby. "The old metal business, to be more exact. I am also in it with him. Between us we have formed a company--a corporation to be more exact. I have called it The International and Consolidated Old Metal Corporation. We have a capital stock of one million dollars----" "With two hundred and twenty-five paid in," interrupted Henry, with a smile. "Dad took twenty-five of your two hundred and fifty, Dick, to get himself some new clothes." "Exactly," interrupted Mr. Darby. "As president of the International and Consolidated Old Metal Corporation I felt that it was due to the public to look the part. I don't mind old clothes myself, but the public is apt to judge a man by them. So I bought these. I think it will go a great way in impressing the public; do you not agree with me, sir?" "Perfectly," answered Mr. Hamilton, trying not to smile. "So you are president?" asked Dick. "I am," replied Mr. Darby, with a grand air. "I am the president and you, sir, are the treasurer," and he bowed to Dick. "It is with your capital that we--my son and I--have been able to make this humble beginning. But all things must have a beginning. The possibilities are enormous, sir--_enormous_!" and once more Mr. Darby swelled up. "We are going to begin active operations at once, sir; in fact, my son has already begun them. We expect to do a large trade in metals of all description. I shall devote my time to the market abroad in a few weeks, as I shall have exhausted the possibilities on this side of the Atlantic. Then, sir, we shall be truly what the name indicated, _international_!" "What do you do, Henry?" asked Dick. "Me? Oh, I drive the wagon, collect the old iron and sell it again," said the lad, with just the suspicion of a smile, as he glanced in his father's direction. "I bought out old Moses Cohen, and he had a horse and wagon, which I took. "At least, it's called a horse and wagon in the mortgage which I had to sign," went on Henry, "but sometimes I have my doubts about both," and he laughed a little. "However, it will do for a while--until I can make money enough to get a better rig." "Yes, we are going a bit slow at first," put in Mr. Darby. "As soon as I get things in good shape I shall take a trip to England. I understand they use a great deal of iron there. Perhaps I shall buy up a large amount abroad and ship it here. I have a number of schemes on as soon as I get this one in such shape that Henry can run it--with the assistance of Mr. Dick, of course," he hastened to add. "What we came here for to-day," said Henry, "was to give you these papers, Dick," and he handed over a large bundle. "What are they?" asked Mr. Hamilton. "The prospectus and incorporation papers of The International and Consolidated Old Metal Corporation," interrupted Mr. Darby. "I drew them up myself, and I know they are right. They show the interest you have in the concern," turning to Dick, "and your interests are fully looked after. I wish, also, to endorse the note my son gave you." "It isn't necessary," declared Dick. "Pardon me, young man, but it is," insisted Mr. Darby. "Business is business," he continued, with a grand air, and, when Dick produced the note, Mr. Darby, with a flourish, put his name on the back of it. "It has doubled in value," he remarked, without the ghost of a smile. "Now, our matters being concluded, I will bid you good-afternoon," he said, and with a low bow to Mr. Hamilton and Dick, he backed out, attended by McIverson. "If he'd let Henry alone the business might amount to something," commented Mr. Hamilton when the visitors had gone. "Yes, the idea of his taking some of the money to buy a new suit," observed Dick. "Well, I guess Henry can manage it if he only has half a chance." "I wouldn't give you much for that note," said Mr. Hamilton. "You'll not discount it; eh, dad?" "Not much! It's worse than ever since Hank put his signature on it. I guess your two hundred and fifty dollars are gone." "Never mind, I helped Henry, anyhow. Maybe he'll pull through. He's a hard worker." "Gentleman to see you, sir," interrupted McIverson, putting his head into the office. "Says he has an appointment with you." "What is the name?" asked Mr. Hamilton. "Mr. Franklin Vanderhoof," announced the messenger, with a rolling tone that denoted the person to be of apparent importance. "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten. I'll see him at once. Dick, will you excuse me. I have some business to discuss with Mr. Vanderhoof." As Dick bade his father good-bye and left the office he saw entering it a man, well dressed, and with a very black moustache. At the sight of the man's face Dick started. "Where have I seen him before?" the youth asked himself. "There is something strange about that man. I wish I knew what his business was." CHAPTER XII GOLD MINE STOCK Dick looked sharply at the stranger as he passed the man. Mr. Vanderhoof smiled, but when he did Dick thought the attempted pleasantry resembled the grin of a cat when it is about to pounce upon a helpless mouse. With a scarcely perceptible nod to Dick, Mr. Vanderhoof entered Mr. Hamilton's private office and closed the door. "I've seen you before, I'm sure of it," mused Dick, as he left the bank. "I can't just think where, but there's something familiar about you. I don't like your looks, though I suppose you must be all right or dad wouldn't have much to do with you. I must ask him about you." Dick found an opportunity a few evenings later. He saw his father looking over some papers in the library at home, and, going in, inquired if Mr. Hamilton was busy. "Not very," replied the millionaire. "I'm just looking over some new stock I bought to-day. Dick, I'm part owner in a gold mine, in addition to my many other lines of industry," and he laughed pleasantly. "A gold mine, dad?" "Yes, a gold mine in--let's see where is it now--oh, in Yazoo City, Nevada. Of course, I don't own the whole mine, I've only bought some stock in it. There it is. I own a thousand shares in the Hop Toad Mine, and I hope they do as toads do, and 'jump' in value." "A gold mine," repeated Dick. "That would suit me. Why didn't I think of it before." "How do you mean, Dick?" "I mean, why didn't I invest in something like that." "Well, it's not too late, I suppose." "Do you mean I can get some shares, dad?" "I don't know that you can in the Hop Toad Mine, as I understand they're all sold out, but I guess Mr. Vanderhoof has shares in other mines just as good." "Oh, is that what Mr. Vanderhoof is--a mining man?" "Well, not exactly a mining man. He sells stock in mines. He's what they call a promoter. Why, do you know him?" "No, but somehow his face seemed familiar. I was sure that day I saw him in the bank that I had met him somewhere else, but when I tried to think I couldn't recall anyone with such a black moustache as he has." "It is black," admitted Mr. Hamilton. "And when he smiles he looks like--a cat," went on Dick. "I can't say that I fancy his looks," agreed the millionaire, with a chuckle. "But I don't do business on looks. I go by facts." "Is this mining stock good?" "I think so. I wrote to some men in Yazoo City and I made other investigations, so that I think it as safe an investment as any are in these days. Of course, nothing is a sure thing in this world, but I believe this Hop Toad Mine has one of the richest veins of ore of any mine in that vicinity." "Then I'm going to invest some of my money in a gold mine," decided Dick. "Where can I find Mr. Vanderhoof?" "He'll be at the bank to-morrow and you can see him there. Remember, you are doing this on your own responsibility, and if it turns out a failure you've got to chalk it up against yourself." "All right, dad." "It will be an experience for the boy, anyhow," murmured the millionaire, as his son left the room. "He's got to learn, the same as I did. I think between his mother's will, his Uncle Ezra, and what I can show him, we'll make a fine man of him in spite of his wealth, which is a mighty handicap--a mighty handicap," and shaking his head doubtfully Mr. Hamilton proceeded to look over some business papers, which task he was at when Dick went to bed. Dick received a letter the next morning which rather disquieted him. It was from the firm of whom he had purchased his milk stock, and informed him that owing to certain contingencies in the market they were obliged to ask for an assessment on his stock. "What's an assessment on stock, dad?" he asked of his father, when he had called at the bank and shown the letter to Mr. Hamilton. "It means that the company needs more money to run the business, and that you, being part of the company, have to put up your share. Let's see, they want a hundred dollars from you. Well, I guess you'll have to pay it." "But that's a queer way to do business," grumbled Dick. "I thought I was going to make money, and, instead, I have to pay out more." "Oh, well, new concerns frequently have to call for an assessment, instead of paying dividends," consoled his father. "The stock may pay well yet. Milk is something every family has to have, you know, and they have to have it every day. The company may be all right when it gets well started. I wouldn't worry now. I've had to pay assessments on many a stock that afterward turned out well." "I'm glad I thought of that gold mine stock," said Dick. "I guess that will be the best thing yet. When will Mr. Vanderhoof be here?" "Almost any minute now. Ah, there he comes," and, as Mr. Hamilton spoke, the man with the very black moustache came down the corridor that led to the private office and walked through the open doorway. "Ah, two captains of industry," he remarked, with a nod at Dick and his father. "The young and the--ah--er--I was about to say old--I will change it to junior and senior," with a bow to Mr. Hamilton. "Dick thinks he'd like to buy some gold mine stock," said the millionaire. "I telephoned you about it, you recall, and explained my son's position." "I understand," remarked Mr. Vanderhoof. "He wants to make a good paying investment." "That's it," put in Dick, as he thought of his Uncle Ezra and what would happen if he did not comply with the terms of his mother's will. "Well, I think I can find him some good stock," went on the promoter. "It won't be in the same mine you're in, Mr. Hamilton. That stock was too valuable to last long. But I have some nearly as good. It is in the same neighborhood. In fact, it is in the next mine to the Hop Toad--the Dolphin. We think it very good. You can make the same inquiries that you did in regard to the other stock. It will bear the closest investigation." "We'll take it, subject to a report from Yazoo City," said Mr. Hamilton, with a look at Dick, who nodded an assent, for he knew very little about buying stock. "Then I suppose you'll pay enough to bind the bargain?" asked Mr. Vanderhoof. "Of course," replied Dick, producing his check book. "How much?" "Five hundred dollars will do as a starter. But about how much stock would you want?" "Oh, I guess two thousand dollars' worth will do," replied Dick, with a look at his father, who, by a nod of his head, assented. Mr. Vanderhoof smiled, looking, Dick thought, more than ever like a cat about to pounce on a mouse, and when the check was made out the promoter handed him a document, showing that he was entitled to a certain number of shares of stock in a gold mine bearing the name Dolphin. "Well, Dick," remarked his father, when Mr. Vanderhoof had left, "you are certainly getting right into business. How do you like it?" "Very much. I only hope some of my investments pan out." "Well, you haven't made very many, but what you have gone into you have loaded up pretty well with. However, that may be a good way. Of course, if they fail, the money loss will not make much difference to you, but I don't want to see you lose. It would show a poor head for business if you did, and I hope you haven't got that." "So do I," remarked his son. "Oh, I'm going to make a success some way or other," and once more the vision of his uncle's home, the gloomy house set in the midst of the dark fir trees, like some residence in a cemetery, came to him as the memory of a bad dream. "Where are you going now?" asked his father, as Dick started to leave the private office. "I thought I'd take a ride with some of the boys in my motor boat. I haven't been out for some time." "All right, only be careful." "I will, dad. Good-bye." Dick stopped, on his way home, and called for Bricktop, Frank Bender and Walter Mead, inviting them to go for a ride in his trim little craft, which was in the boat house on Lake Dunkirk. "Let's take our lunch and stay the rest of the day," suggested Bricktop. "It's too fine out doors to be around the house." "Good idea," assented Dick. "I'll have our cook put us up a basket of stuff." The eyes of the other boys glistened, for they knew from experience the good things that came from the Hamilton kitchen, and they had visions of cold chicken and turkey, fine cakes and big, thick, juicy pies. As Dick and his friends entered the side yard, they saw, standing on the driveway, a rather dilapidated wagon, drawn by a very bony horse. In the wagon was something covered with a sheet, while on the seat sat a grizzled, dried-up sort of a man, with a little bunch of whiskers on his chin. Beside him was a woman in a calico dress, and she looked worried. "Are you Mr. Richard Hamilton?" asked the man, looking at Bricktop. "No; he is," was the answer, and Bricktop pointed at Dick. "Hum! Well, I'm glad to meet you. I've been waitin' some time, an' the hired man, the one with his shirt front all showin', where his vest is wore out (for thus he described the butler's dress suit), said he didn't know when you'd come home. But I brought it along with me, jest as I said I would, an' I'll show ye how it works. Mandy, jest hold th' hoss until I git th' machine out," and though the animal did not seem in need of any restraint the woman grasped the reins her husband gave her. Then, before Dick could remonstrate, the man got down from the wagon, and began tugging at the object covered with a sheet. It seemed quite heavy. "Would one of you young gentlemen mind givin' me a hand?" he asked, and Walter and Frank assisted him in lifting the object down to the ground. "There ye be!" exclaimed the man, in an excited manner, while his eyes glittered in a strange way. "There she is. Now watch, everybody, when she gits goin'. Mandy, drive th' hoss up towards th' stable; it might git frightened. "Now," he went on, "ye're about t' witness one of th' wonders of th' age. Look out, everybody!" and, with a flourish, he pulled the sheet away. CHAPTER XIII DICK'S BRAVE ACT "Hold on!" cried Dick, as he saw revealed a maze of wheels, levers, belts and cranks. "What is this? Who are you?" For an instant he thought the thing might be an infernal machine. "Who am I?" asked the man. "Why, I'm Silas Kendall, of Manlius Centre, an' this is my perpetual motion machine. Wait until I take th' chain off so's it can git inter motion an' ye'll open yer eyes, I reckon." "Is it dangerous?" asked Bricktop, preparing to run. "Not a bit, if ye don't put yer fingers in th' wheels. It wouldn't harm a baby." He drew from his pocket a key, which he proceeded to insert into a big lock that held together the ends of a chain which was twisted about the biggest wheel on the machine. "Have t' keep it chained up," he said, with a queer sort of smile, "or it would keep on workin' all th' while. I'll show ye--Silas Kendall--he'll astonish th' world. Ye got my letter, I reckon," turning to Dick. "Letter? No. What letter?" "Th' one I writ ye about this machine." "I don't remember--oh, yes," added Dick, quickly. He did recall among the many letters he had received recently (begging epistles most of them), one in which the writer said he would soon call to exhibit a new machine he had invented, and one which was destined to make all interested in it rich for life. But Dick thought it was just like lots of other missives he had been receiving from cranks since the advent of his wealth, and he threw it away. Now, it seemed, the letter was from Mr. Kendall. "Is that really a perpetual motion machine?" asked Frank, who, with the other boys, was much interested in such things. "Of course it is," replied the man. "I invented it all by myself. I'll tell ye a little about it before I unchain th' critter an' let it git t' work. Did ye fasten th' hoss, Mandy?" he asked, as his wife approached. "Yep, Silas. Now, do be careful of that contraption. I ain't got no faith in it," she said, turning to the boys. "No, that's jest th' way with wimmin," remarked Silas. "Yet I really invented it for her." "How?" asked Dick. "Wa'al, I was watchin' her churn one day, an' I thought how awful it was that wimmin had t' work so hard. So I decided, if I could invent a machine that would do th' work it would be a great labor-savin' device. Wa'al, I went t' work on it----" "An' he never give up fer a year," interrupted his wife. "He neglected th' farm until it ain't worth shucks. He spent all he had saved up t' buy machinery, an' he ain't hardly slept nights with worryin' over perpetual motion. I wish he'd throw it away an' go back t' farmin'. He made money that way." "Farmin's too hard work, Mandy," joined in Mr. Kendall. "We'll be rich now, fer this machine is destined t' revolutionize th' world. I come, jest as I writ ye," he went on, turning to Dick, "t' give ye th' fust chance t' git stock in th' new company I'm goin' t' form t' make th' machines. They don't cost much, and we'll be millionaires in a year. If you've got a leetle t' invest you'll git big dividends out of this." "Let's see how it works," suggested Walter. "All right," assented Silas. "I'm goin' t' unchain th' perpetual motion machine. She'll begin t' whizz as soon as I take th' shackles off, an' then--wa'al, watch out, that's all." He sprung open the padlock with a click and the chain rattled to the ground. As it did so Mr. Kendall sprang back, as though the machine might bite him. He stooped down and peered toward it as if it might spring at him. But nothing happened. The machine was as motionless as a hitching post. "Hum! Suthin's wrong," murmured the inventor. "Guess it got a leetle stiff comin' over in th' wagon. I'll jest give it a start. Where's a pole? Mandy, git me a clothes pole." His wife went to the back yard, where she had noticed some, and while she was gone the boys looked at the apparatus. It consisted of a big wheel, with spokes made in zig-zag fashion. The spokes were shaped like a trough and contained a number of metal balls, which were prevented from falling out, as the wheel turned, by some strips of wood. There were other smaller wheels connected with the big one, and a tall chute, with a sort of endless chain, to which were attached hooks and buckets. There were also several heavy springs. "Ye see th' way it works," explained Mr. Kendall, "is by them balls. They roll down the spokes of th' wheel, toward the tire, so t' speak, an', of course, their weight makes th' wheel go 'round. Then, when they git t' th' end of th' spokes they drop out an' roll toward th' high chute. Soon as th' balls git thar th' endless chain an' th' hooks an' buckets on it catches hold of th' balls an' lifts 'em t' th' top. Then they drop inter th' hollow spokes agin an' th' same process goes on over agin. It goes on forever, like th' brook that poetry feller writ about--I forgit his name. It's perpetual motion as sure as ye're a foot high. Ah, here comes Mandy with th' clothes pole. Now I'll jest give th' big wheel a start, 'count of it gittin' stuck, an' you'll see suthin' worth watchin'." With the long clothes pole Silas gave the big wheel a cautious poke. It began to move slowly, and he released a big spring. "Stand back, everybody!" he called. "She vibrates suthin' terrible when she gits goin', an' I don't want nobody t' git hurt!" At first the wheel barely turned. Silas gave it another prod with the clothes pole and it moved more quickly. Then it released another spring and began to gather speed. Faster and faster it went, the iron balls rolling along the hollow spokes and dropping out with a noise like distant thunder. "There she goes!" cried the old man, his chin whiskers vibrating in the intensity of his excitement. "There she goes!" Faster and faster the wheel whizzed around. The balls began dropping with such a continuous noise that one had to shout to be heard. "How do you stop it?" called Dick. "No, it won't stop," replied Mr. Kendall, misunderstanding the question. "Well, how you going to get it home?" shouted Bricktop. "Oh, when I want to stop it I jest throw th' chain at it, an' it tangles up in th' wheel, an' slows up enough so I can fasten it. If I didn't it would go on--forever--jest like that there brook." The machine did seem to be working well, although only on account of the strong springs. The balls, as they rolled down the inclined spokes, imparted a swift motion to the wheel. The released balls ran down an incline to the foot of the chute, and the lifting belt began to slowly turn over on the wheels on which it worked. Then something happened. Whether Silas had not built his machine strong enough to stand the strain, or whether the perpetual motion was too much for it, was never disclosed. At any rate, when the big wheel was revolving at a rapid rate, and the balls were dropping out like immense hail stones, there was a sudden rending, splitting, breaking and cracking of wood. Then the machine seemed to creak and groan in agony. Next there was a snapping sound and the air was filled with a shower of black iron balls, as though a bombshell had burst. "Duck, everybody!" yelled Dick. "The thing's exploded!" The machine fairly flew apart, splinters of wood, bits of iron, belts, spokes, chute, inclines and everything was scattered to the thirty-two points of the compass. "Oh, Silas!" exclaimed Mrs. Kendall. "There it goes!" "Yep," answered Silas, as he ran to get under a tree. "Thar she goes, sure enough, Mandy!" There sounded dull thuds as the balls struck the earth. Fortunately no one was hit. Then it began to rain bits of wood. "I guess it's all over," said Dick, as he and his chums looked down from the porch where they had taken refuge. "What happened, Mr. Kendall?" "Everything," replied the inventor, in gloomy tones. "I see what th' matter was. Th' big wheel was too strong for th' rest of th' machine. Them balls give it too much power an' it jest naturally went to flinders. I see my mistake now. I'll build it all of iron next time. Wa'al, they say experience teaches us, an' this sure has been a great experience!" "It sure has, Silas," remarked his wife. "You'd better give it up now, an' go back t' farmin'. That'll pay." "No, sir," replied Silas, firmly. "I'm goin' t' make a perpetual motion machine before I die, an' don't ye forgit it. I see where I made a mistake an' I'll profit by it. I don't s'pose ye'll want t' invest any thin' in it until I make my new model?" he asked Dick. "No, I think not," answered the millionaire's son. "Wa'al, I'll call on ye agin when I git it rebuilt," promised Silas, as he piled the bits of his broken machine into the wagon and drove off. "Say, Dick, what'll it be next?" asked Walter, as they watched the disappointed farmer driving away. "I never knew it was so exciting to be rich." "Oh, it's exciting, all right," answered Dick, and he added: "I don't think that was a real perpetual motion machine. The springs made it work. But, come on, or it will be too late for our motor boat ride." With a big basket, filled with good things to eat, which the cook obligingly put up for them, the four boys were soon at the dock where Dick's craft was moored. "Let's go to Handell's Island," proposed Bricktop. "I heard there was a cave there that no one ever got to the end of." "That'll be fun. We'll explore it," said Dick, always ready for any sort of an adventure. Heading the boat toward the island, which was about ten miles away, the boys stretched out on the cushions to enjoy the trip. It was a beautiful July day, hot enough to make a ride on the lake the height of enjoyment. They reached the island in quick time, for the boat was a fast one, but, to their disappointment, the cave did not prove so mysterious as they had hoped. They managed to get to the end of it, though the way was choked with dirt and rocks, and found nothing of interest. "This cave is a regular lemon," announced Bricktop. "What did you hope for? To find some of Captain Kidd's treasure?" asked Walter. "Well, it might have been used by the Indians once," was the red-haired youth's answer. "Some day I'm going to bring a lantern and see if I can't find a few arrow heads or the graves of some dead Indians." In spite of their disappointment, the boys managed to have a good time, to which the fine lunch added not a little. It was getting dusk when they started for home, with Dick at the steering wheel. As they approached the dock at Hamilton Corners they saw, when a mile away, that the lake in the vicinity of the boat-house was lighted up. "What's going on?" asked Walter. "Oh, it's carnival night," replied Dick. "I forgot all about it. They're going to have a procession of boats on the lake. We'll hurry up and join in. I wish I'd thought to decorate my boat." He speeded up the craft, anxious, as were the other boys, to take part in the water pageant. They bore down on a little fleet of boats, gaily decorated, and filled with merry, laughing, young persons. The procession was just forming. Suddenly there sounded a sharp report aboard Dick's boat. "The motor back-fired," he said. "Take the wheel, Walter, while I look after it." But, a moment later, it was seen that it was no mere back-fire in a cylinder. A sheet of flame arose from the bottom of the craft. "The gasolene tank has exploded!" yelled Dick. "Jump for your lives, boys! The boat's afire!" Above the hissing, crackling flames the motor still puffed away, sending the boat straight toward a confused flotilla of other craft, the occupants of which set up screams of terror as they saw what had happened. "Jump!" cried Dick again, as he crawled aft and tried to shut off the engine. Three splashes in the water told that his companions had leaped overboard and were comparatively out of danger. "Come on, Dick!" cried Bricktop, rising to the surface. "Jump, or you'll be burned to death." "I can't!" yelled back Dick, shielding his face from the awful flames with his arm. "I've got to shut off the engine, or the boat'll run into some other one and set it afire!" Once more he bravely tried to work his way to the engine. He could not reach the gasolene cock from where he was. He cast a look ahead, and saw that his boat was approaching, at swift speed, a knot of other boats, the steersmen of which were too confused to know what to do. Some were getting out of the way, but others were in the direct course of the burning craft. "What can I do?" Dick asked himself in a hoarse whisper. "I must stop the boat, or steer it out of the way--but how?" He could neither reach the engine nor the wheel, for the fire was now raging in bow and stern. He stood in a little cockpit amidships, where, for the moment, there were no flames. Dick looked desperately about him. Nearer and nearer his craft shot to the boats containing girls in their light summer dresses. Once the burning motor boat touched the craft in which the young women were their clothes would envelop them in flames. "I must stop my boat!" thought Dick, desperately. Then a brilliant idea came to him. He gave one look at the whirring fly-wheel of the motor. Then, seizing a heavy monkey wrench he opened the jaws and fastened it on a boat hook, so that it stood at right angles to it. Then he thrust the wrench right into the fly-wheel. There was a grinding, crashing sound, and, a moment later, the whizzing wheel spokes had caught the wrench, and, with resistless force, had driven it through the bottom of the craft. Dick had scuttled his own boat! CHAPTER XIV DICK GIVES A PARTY. Lurching to one side, as the water rushed in through the ragged hole in the bottom, the boat, with Dick in it, began to lose headway. The water acted as a brake, and, so large was the opening the wrench had torn, that, in a few seconds, all danger was past of the burning boat colliding with other craft, the steersmen of which were too bewildered to get out of the course. Foot by foot the scuttled boat sank. The water covered the engine now, but the motor still kept going, for enough gasolene remained in the pipe running from the exploded tank to keep it in motion. But the boat was merely floating along, all speed gone. "Jump, Dick!" cried Bricktop, who, with the other boys, was swimming toward shore. "Jump!" Dick stood up in the boat he had sacrificed to save the lives of others. The water was up to his knees, and, casting a look about him, he prepared to leap overboard. There was no further need of his remaining, as his brave deed had accomplished what he intended it should. But now a new danger was presented. The blazing gasolene, forced from the bottom of the boat by the rising water that came through the jagged hole, was floating on the surface of the lake. All about the sinking craft was a pool of flame, ten feet in diameter. A cry of horror arose from those in the surrounding boats that had quickly congregated near the scene. The gathering dusk was lighted up by the licking tongues of flame, which hissed hungrily, as though angry at being cheated of their prey. "Wait!" called a man in a large motor boat. "I'll see if I can't get near enough to save you." He started to steer his craft toward Dick, but the latter cried out: "No! Keep away. The gasolene is spreading! I'll jump!" He was standing on the gunwale of the boat now, that part alone being above water. The motor had stopped, and the boat was floating amid a small sea of flame. In just the little patch where Dick stood there was, for the present, at least, no fire. Dick crouched for a spring. He saw a place where the surrounding ring of flame was the thinnest, and he aimed for that. He was going to try to jump across the belt of fire. Suddenly he straightened up. Then, with a spring, which lost much of its power because of the uncertain footing the tilting gunwale gave him, he launched himself upward and outward. Arching his hands over his head to cleave the water, and hoping in his heart that he would clear the ring of flames, Dick felt himself moving through the air. Then, with a sudden change in the little breeze that was blowing, the flames shifted so that they were wider in extent at the place for which he aimed. Those in the outer fringe of motor boats caught their breaths as they saw what had happened. Dick was headed for the center of a leaping mass of fire. An instant later he had struck the water, covered with the blazing gasolene, and had disappeared beneath the surface. "Now to save him, if we can!" cried Captain Bailey, of the large motor boat _Cypress_, as he urged his craft forward. Those in it, as they approached the outer ring of fire, looked at the luridly illuminated waters, anxious to catch the first glimpse of Dick. A dark body came to the surface. Two hands shot out, and Dick made an attempt to swim. But he ceased almost as soon as he made the first strokes, and sank back, his head going beneath the waves. Then sounded a splash from the stern of the boat. "What was that?" cried Captain Bailey. "Chandler Norton leaped after him!" was the answer. And it was Bricktop who, in swimming to shore, had been picked up by the _Cypress_, and who had leaped after Dick when he saw him sink back. Bricktop had removed most of his heavy clothing and shoes, and was more prepared than any of the others to attempt a rescue. It seemed a very long time that both he and Dick were lost to view, but it was only a few seconds ere Bricktop arose to the surface, one arm about the unconscious form of the millionaire's son. "Help me get him aboard!" Bricktop gasped. "I'm afraid something has happened to him!" Willing hands were extended to raise the silent form. Then, when the brave rescuer had been pulled over the stern, all speed was made to shore, which the other two boys had reached some time since in boats that picked them up. Fortunately there was, in the gathering of merrymakers, a physician, who at once hurried to Dick's side. He carefully examined the youth. "I'm afraid he inhaled some of the flames," he said, "or he may have struck his head on something when he went overboard. We must get him home, and into bed, as soon as possible." There were several automobiles at the lake front, and in one of these Dick was taken to the Hamilton mansion at a speed which broke the law--but no one minded that. Mr. Hamilton was much startled, but he calmly gave orders to have his son cared for. Another physician was summoned, and the two worked over the unconscious form together, while Mr. Hamilton, his face drawn and white, paced anxiously up and down in the hall outside the room. Suddenly there sounded the patter of feet on the stairs, and, a moment later, something was muzzling Mr. Hamilton's legs, while a gentle whine begged his attention. "What is it, Grit, old boy?" he asked, huskily, as he reached over and patted the big bulldog's head. "You know something's wrong, don't you? Well--maybe it--maybe it will be all right." The dog whined and sniffed at the door of the room where the unconscious form of his master lay. "No--no--not now, Grit, old boy," said Mr. Hamilton, softly, and Grit with a look as much as to say that he knew what was going on, stretched out--a grim guardian at the portal of the silent chamber. Then, from the room, came a voice, at the sound of which the dog gave a joyous bark, and then, as though conscious that he had done wrong, he changed it to a whine. Mr. Hamilton, with wildly beating heart, heard his son murmur: "Oh, it's cold, so cold! Where am I? Is the fire out? Did I run down any boats?" Then came the calm voices of the doctors, urging their patient to be quiet. But this was more than Grit could do. His whining was like the cry of a child, and he scratched frantically at the door. "That's Grit. Let him in," Dick said, in stronger tones, and Mr. Hamilton uttered a silent prayer of thanksgiving. The portal was swung and Grit bounded into the room, followed by the millionaire. One of Dick's hands hung over the side of the bed, and Grit began licking it frantically. "Good--old Grit," murmured Dick, and Grit was content. "How is he?" asked Mr. Hamilton, in a whisper. "I'm all right, dad," answered Dick, unexpectedly. "Not as bad as we feared," answered one of the physicians. "He has inhaled no flames, but he struck his head on something as he jumped. Probably on a bit of floating wreckage. He will be all right after a few days' rest. But he must be kept quiet. No excitement. I congratulate you on your brave son, Mr. Hamilton." The millionaire silently wrung the hand the physician held out to him. "It wasn't anything," murmured Dick, in sleepy tones. "I had to stop the boat, and the only way I saw was to put a hole in the bottom. Too bad; it was a fine boat." "You can have another, if we can't raise her," interrupted Mr. Hamilton. "Then I knew I'd have to swim under water to avoid the flames," went on Dick. "I held my breath as long as I could, and then I hit something. I can't remember any more." He sank into a doze, with Grit still licking the drooping hand. "I think he will sleep now," said the physician who had examined Dick at the lake. "We will go out, and the dog had better come, too." "Come, Grit," called Mr. Hamilton, but Grit paid no attention. "I'll bring him," said the physician, as he reached for the bulldog's collar. Grit growled menacingly. "Better not," advised the millionaire. "No one but Dick can do anything with him." So they had to leave Grit there, but he was not in the least in the way, being content to rest beneath the bed, though whenever anyone--nurse or doctor--approached, the dog was ever on the watch. Dick had to stay in bed three days, and for three days more was a sort of semi-invalid in an easy-chair. Then, the physicians having pronounced all danger past, he was allowed to go out. In the meantime the motor boat was raised and taken away to be repaired. "Say, I never knew what nice sunshine and fine air we had in this town," said the youth to his father, as he walked down the street with him. "It's worth while being under the weather a bit just to appreciate it when you get out." "I never knew you had so many friends, Dick," answered his father. "Friends? How?" "Why, we had to keep one of the maids busy answering the bell while you were in bed. I guess every boy, and lots of the girls, in Hamilton Corners called to see how you were getting on." "I'm glad they thought of me," replied the millionaire's son. "I wish I could show I appreciate it." "Well, I think you can, Dick." "How?" "I was going to suggest that you hold a little reception--give a sort of party. That's what we called 'em when I was a boy." "The very thing!" exclaimed Dick. "That will be sport. But--where could I have it?" "In the house, of course. Isn't it large enough?" "That's just it. It's too big and fine. I'm afraid some of the boys wouldn't have a good time, for fear of dropping some cake or ice-cream on the carpets." "Well, what would you suggest? You might give it in the barn." "I was thinking of hiring a big tent and having a party out doors on the lawn. That would be unconventional and rather jolly, I think." "Good idea," answered the millionaire. "I'll order a tent at once and see to the refreshments." "Let me do that," begged Dick. "I know what boys and girls like to eat." "Very well," assented his father, with a laugh. "You can do just as you please, and--er--send the bills to me." "Not much!" exclaimed Dick, proudly. "I'm paying my own way now." A week later a big white tent was erected on the spacious lawn at the Hamilton mansion. Dick had spent a busy seven days in making the arrangements, and every boy and girl in Hamilton Corners, whom Dick had the least acquaintance with, was invited. Seldom had there been so much excitement in the town, not even when the circus came, for on this occasion the girls, at least, could "dress up," and we all know what that means to a girl. Nor were the boys behindhand in looking over their best suits and putting an extra shine on their shoes. The big tent was gay with Chinese lanterns, and a corps of white-suited waiters were in attendance to dispense the good things when, as darkness began to gather, the young people of the town began to assemble at the party. They came from all directions, some of them awkward and shy, for it was their first big affair, while others were more self-possessed. "Well, are you ready?" asked Simon Scardale, as he called at Guy Fletcher's house, for both had been invited to the gathering. "Yes, but I don't care much about going. We'll have a slow time." "Maybe we will, but I've got a little thing I want to plan out, and I can do it there, I think. The fact is, I need money badly, and I've got to get some." "I hope you're not going to rob the house," remarked Guy, with a nervous laugh. "Of course not, but I've got a scheme that may work. Come along." CHAPTER XV THE CONSPIRACY Dick stood at the entrance to the tent receiving his guests. He was a little pale from his recent experience, but otherwise did not seem to have suffered any ill effects. "Well, Bricktop," he called heartily, as the sandy-haired youth approached, his face almost the color of his locks, "I was afraid you wouldn't come. If it hadn't been for Bricktop there wouldn't have been any party here to-night," he went on, turning to a group of young people. "No, nor any Dick Hamilton, either. He pulled me out in the nick of time." "Oh, pshaw! I didn't do anything," protested Bricktop, who hated praise. "I think he was perfectly splendid!" exclaimed Mabel Ford, looking at Bricktop with her big blue eyes in a way that made that modest hero blush more fiercely than before. "It was perfectly grand!" declared Bertha Lee, known as "Birdy" among her friends. "How I wish I was a big, strong young man," and she gazed admiringly at Bricktop. "Why not a strong lady," suggested Simon Scardale, with a grin, as he joined the group. At his approach several girls moved away, as they did not like him. Guy was close in Simon's wake, and both boys nodded to Dick. "Feeling pretty fit now, old chap?" asked Simon. "Oh, I'm all right," answered Dick. "Feel like having a game of billiards?" went on Simon. "I'll bet you ten dollars I can beat you on your own table." "No, thank you," replied Dick, with a laugh. "I'm too busy looking after my guests to-night. Besides, I don't play for money. Come over some other time and I'll play you all you like, for fun." "Stingy beast," muttered Simon, as Dick moved away to greet some newcomers, "and I need the money, too." "Maybe you'd lose," suggested Guy. "I don't play to lose," replied Simon, with an ugly leer. The little feeling of strangeness which many of the boys and girls at first experienced gradually wore off, and soon the party was in full swing. All sorts of games were played, and Dick and his closest chums saw to it that there was no lack of liveliness. A number of the fathers and mothers of the younger children had accompanied them, and to these older folks Dick was attentive, seeing that they had seats, and sending the waiters to them to ask if they wouldn't have a cup of coffee or some ices before supper was served. "Say," observed one man to his wife, after Dick had found them chairs, "you'd never know he was a millionaire, would you?" "Why not?" "Why, because he's just like other boys--he's like one of our own folks." "Of course he is," answered his wife. "It's only the wrong kind of people that money makes any difference to. Dick Hamilton can't help being nice. His money hasn't spoiled him," which view was shared by more than one that night. And such a supper as there was! Long years afterward some of the boys and girls, who were quite small when they attended Dick's party, used to tell of it as though it was a visit to fairyland. Dick fairly outdone himself in seeing that everyone had a good time, and from the faces around the long tables, set within the tent, it was evident that the way to young people's hearts, or, at least, to their good spirits, is through their stomachs. Dick walked about, like a perfect host, seeing that everyone was served, before sitting down himself. At his heels followed Grit, who was unhappy when away from his master. "Oh, what a perfect darling of a dog!" exclaimed Birdy Lee, as she stopped over to pat Grit, which indignity he suffered in disdainful silence. "Isn't he sweet!" chorused several other girls. "Well, he's no beauty, judged by young ladies' standards," said Dick, with a gallant look at his girl friends. "But beauty in a bulldog is more than skin deep," he added. "Grit is pure gold when it comes to being a friend." "What makes his two teeth stick up that way? Don't they hurt his lip?" asked Alice. "I never heard him complain," replied Dick. "But I'd better move along, I guess. Grit is getting hungry, and I don't want him to begin on any of the waiters. He doesn't take to colored men very well. One of them started to run when Grit growled at him a while ago as the man was bringing in a roast chicken." After supper there were more games, and the fun increased as the hours passed. Dick was congratulated on every side, not only for the success of his party, but on his speedy recovery from the boat accident. As the millionaire's son was crossing the tent, with Grit following at his heels, he met Guy and Simon, who had been together all the evening, and who had not mingled much with the other guests. "Hello, Grit, old boy!" exclaimed Simon, but the dog must have detected the insincerity in the youth's tones, for he uttered a low growl and showed his strong teeth. "Oh, I'm not going to hurt you," sneered Simon. "No, I don't think it would be exactly healthy," remarked Dick. "Is he a very valuable dog?" Simon went on, paying no further attention to Grit. "Well, he's rated at a thousand dollars in the records of the Kennel Club," answered Dick. "I don't know that any dog is worth so much from a financial standpoint, but I know I wouldn't sell him for that; would I, Grit?" and the bulldog almost wagged his stump of a tail off in delight at Dick's caressing words. "Humph! I'd look at a thousand dollars a good while before I'd give it for a dog," cried Simon. "You don't know Grit," was Dick's quiet answer, as he turned away. "Come on, Guy," said Simon, a little later. "I'm going to clear out of here." "What for? Let's have some more ice-cream. It's bully." "No," replied Simon, shortly. "I've got a scheme on for making some money out of Dick, and taking him down a peg. I owe him something for spoiling that bond sale." "But he didn't spoil it," replied Guy, who, in spite of certain mean traits of character, was inclined to be fair. "Besides, you wouldn't have sold Dick worthless bonds, would you?" "How was I to know they were worthless?" asked Simon, with a short laugh. "He has to take chances in this world. But this time there'll be no slip-up. Come on, I've got to see a man to-night." As the two walked from the tent, where the merry-making was still going on, Guy saw something dangling from Simon's pocket. It looked like a small black snake. "What's that?" he asked, in some alarm. "Hush!" whispered Simon. "That's the leash thong of Dick Hamilton's bulldog. Come along!" CHAPTER XVI DICK TURNS DETECTIVE "Well, Dick," remarked Mr. Hamilton at breakfast the next morning, "your party was a great success." "I hope they all had a good time. They seemed to. I know I did." "Yes, they were a fine lot of young people," went on the millionaire. "Oh, by the way, I had a letter from the man in Yazoo City I wrote to about your gold mine stock. Nick Smith, his name is. He's an old forty-niner, I understand." "What does he say?" "The mine is all right. He sent me a report from the government assay office, and I guess the Dolphin is as good as the Hop Toad." "Then I'd better finish paying for the stock when Mr. Vanderhoof comes to town again," said Dick. "It will be mine then, and all I'll have to do is to wait for it to increase and pay me big dividends." "I hope it does," answered Mr. Hamilton. "I also had a letter from Vanderhoof yesterday. He also had heard from Smith, it appears, and as he learned the mine was favorably reported on, he sent word that he'd call to-day for the fifteen hundred dollars." "He can have it, dad," said Dick. "I guess I'll go down to the bank with you. What time will Mr. Vanderhoof be there?" "At eleven, his letter said. Well, if you have finished breakfast, come along. You're getting to be quite a financier." "I'm going to make that a paying investment if it's a possible thing," answered Dick, as he walked through the well-kept grounds toward the street and thought of Uncle Ezra's place. Mr. Vanderhoof was promptly on time, and had the bonds ready for Dick, who paid for them with a check. The youth, who had about given up trying to recall where he had seen Vanderhoof before, thought the mining promoter smiled more than ever like a cat as he handed over the securities and took the money. "I'm sure I hope you double your capital," he remarked, with a smirk that showed nearly all his teeth. "Oh, if I make twenty-five per cent. I'll be satisfied," answered Dick. "Well, I'll be in town for a few days," Mr. Vanderhoof went on, "and if either of you would like to take some more mining stock I'll be glad to accommodate you." "I have enough," replied the millionaire, and Dick answered that he wanted to see how this investment turned out before venturing another. "Well, I'll be in town, at any rate," was the promoter's parting remark. Dick felt quite like a man of business as he looked over his check book a little later and noted what he had paid out. True, he had taken in nothing since he had come into his fortune, but he knew the wealth his mother had left him was accumulating interest all the while--faster, in fact, than he had spent it so far. Still he wished that he was receiving an income from some efforts of his own. "Never mind, wait until my stock in the gold mine and the milk company begins to boom," he told himself. "That is, if that milk concern doesn't demand another assessment," he added, dubiously. Dick walked slowly home, and, passing around the side of the house, approached the stable. He intended taking a gallop on Rex that afternoon and wanted the groom to have the horse in readiness. As he neared Grit's kennel he noticed that the chain was thrown over the top of the house, as it usually was when the dog was loose. "Where's Grit?" he asked of Peters, the groom. "Grit, Master Dick?" inquired the man, in great surprise. "Sure an' didn't you send for him about an hour ago?" "Me send for him?" repeated Dick in some alarm, for Grit, even if he was unchained, would not stray away from the stable. He was nowhere in sight, and Dick at once became worried. "Sure, Master Dick," went on the groom. "About an hour ago a youngish chap came here and said you'd sent him for Grit." "And you let him take him?" "Why, sure, I thought you'd sent for him, as you did once." "Yes, but then I sent a note, Peters." "That's so, but the young man had Grit's leash, sir; and, though the dog was inclined to be a bit ugly, he seemed to know the leash and went along after a bit." "What sort of a man got him?" asked Dick, quietly, though he was much excited over what seemed to be the theft of his pet. "A young man, not very nice-looking, Master Dick, and smelling very strong of the stables. In fact, that's what made Grit finally take to him. Grit's very fond of horses and stables, sir. He'll let almost anyone come near him as long as they've been around a barn." "That's so. Did the man say anything, or give any name?" "No. He just said you were going for a walk and wanted Grit to go 'long. Said you was too busy to come and had sent the leash so's he'd have no trouble. He didn't have--that is, not very much--barring that Grit wanted to get hold of his leg first. But when the dog had sniffed at the leash, probably knowin' it came from you, he was quiet enough. But I could see the man was askeered of him, Master Dick. He walked to one side like. Why, Master Dick, is anything wrong?" "Wrong? I should say so! Grit's been stolen, Peters." "You don't say so, Master Dick!" exclaimed the man, much alarmed at his part in the matter. "Yes, he's been stolen, and by a clever trick," went on Dick. "But I don't blame you, Peters. I remember now, I lost the leash thong last night. I had it on Grit and I took it off and put it in my pocket. Then I missed it after the party, and I was too tired to look for it. Someone must have found it, and, knowing it belonged to Grit, made up his mind to steal him. The fellow must have known he'd come more willingly after smelling his own leash." "But you must have lost it somewhere around here," went on Peters. "Someone at the party may have found it." "If they had they would have known it was mine," answered Dick. "No, I think someone outside found it and he stole Grit. Well, I've got to find him, that's all. Saddle Rex, and I'll make some inquiries about town." "But it's near dinner-time, Master Dick." "I don't care. I can't eat if Grit is gone," and with a heavy heart Dick waited for the horse to be saddled. He whistled shrilly his favorite call to Grit, hoping the dog might have broken away not far from the stable, and be in hiding somewhere, but no Grit appeared. On the back of Rex, Dick made a hasty tour of the immediate neighborhood, inquiring of various persons he met if they had seen the bulldog. Grit was well known about Hamilton Corners, for he was often seen in his master's company. But this time no one had noticed him being led off in leash by a young man who seemed quite afraid of the brute that was so handsome for his very ugliness. "He's been stolen for a reward," was Mr. Hamilton's opinion when he came home to lunch and heard Dick's woeful story. "You'll hear from him sooner or later. Better advertise in the county papers." Dick put in several notices that afternoon, offering to pay a reward of a hundred dollars for the return of Grit. "Now we'll have to wait," said the millionaire. "Never mind, Dick; if Grit is gone you can get another dog," for Mr. Hamilton was as fond of animals as was his son. "There'll never be another Grit," answered Dick, sorrowfully. Meanwhile, Grit was being led across the country fields which stretched out back of the Hamilton mansion. "I've got to keep off the roads," muttered the youth who had hold of the leash. "There's too many people as knows a dorg like this. I wish I hadn't gone into this game. It's too risky, not only at bein' caught, but I don't like the way this dorg looks at my legs. He looks hungry." Indeed, Grit was in no amiable frame of mind. He consented to be led along because he recognized his old leash, and the man leading him had the familiar smell of horses, which Grit loved so well. The dog was a little suspicious, but once before Dick had sent a stranger for him and the man had smelled of horses, so Grit, though he had grave doubts, was willing to go along. But he was getting anxious to see his master, as his uneasy growls from time to time indicated, to the no small alarm of the somewhat ragged youth leading him. "Easy now, old boy," he said. "That's a good dorg. We'll soon be there," he added, as he cast an uneasy look around. "The wagon must be waiting somewheres about here." He cut through a little clump of trees and emerged upon an unfrequented road that led to Leonardville, a distant settlement. "There's the rig!" he exclaimed, as he caught sight of a wagon and a horse hitched to the fence. "The worst of it's over." "Did you get 'im?" asked a man in the wagon. "Yep, an' I'll be glad to git rid of 'im. He's a little too anxious to see what my legs is made of." Grit was led toward the wagon. He seemed to think something was not just right, for he growled menacingly and hung back. "Hold 'im a minute now, until I git the bag," ordered the man in the wagon, and, as the ragged youth did so, the man suddenly threw a big sack over Grit's head. Then, hastily wrapping him up in it and tying several turns of rope about it, the sack and dog were tossed into the wagon. "Quick's the word!" exclaimed the man, as he and the youth got up on the seat and drove off. "Now to get our share of the reward. I hope that young feller what put up this job knows what he's about." Poor Grit, whining and growling alternately in the bottom of the wagon, tried to work the suffocating bag off his head, but it was too tightly fastened. The mail the next day brought Dick a badly-written and worse-spelled missive, in which it was stated that if he wanted Grit returned he could have him by paying two hundred dollars' reward. No names were signed, and the handwriting was unfamiliar. "I told you so," said Mr. Hamilton. "But who's got him?" "The letter doesn't say. I'm to leave two hundred dollars to-night under a flat stone, near the stump just where the county road crosses Butternut Creek. Then, the letter says, the dog will be back at the stables to-morrow morning." "Well," remarked Mr. Hamilton, "that's a hundred more than you advertised to pay. I guess you can't help yourself. You'd better do as the letter says." "I'll not!" exclaimed Dick. "What are you going to do? Inform the police? They won't be able to do much. Besides, they'll never bother over a dog, no matter how valuable he is." "No," replied Dick. "I'm not going to tell the police." "What then?" "I'm going to turn detective myself and find Grit! See, here is the first clue," and he held up the envelope of the letter. "This was mailed in Leonardville. I'm going there for a starter, and I'll find Grit!" With flashing eyes Dick hurried to the stables to order Rex saddled. CHAPTER XVII. GRIT'S REVENGE. Peters soon had the horse ready, and as Dick leaped into the saddle his father came hurrying out to the stables. "Now be careful, Dick," he cautioned. "Don't do anything rash. What are your plans?" "I'm going to ride in the direction of Leonardville. That's about ten miles by the main road. I'll inquire as I go along; but what I'll do after I get there I can't tell." "Well, be careful, that's all," concluded Mr. Hamilton. "The fellows who stole Grit are no common thieves, I imagine, and I hope you don't get into trouble with them." "I'm not worrying about trouble. Once I get where Grit is, he and I can take care of the thieves all right," and Dick laughed grimly. He started off at an easy canter, though Rex was full of mettle and wanted to gallop. "No, Rex," said Dick, for he had a habit of talking to his horse as he did to Grit. "We'll take it easy. We've got a long day ahead of us." It was about ten o'clock, and Dick decided to ride several miles without stopping to make inquiries, as the day previous he had pretty well covered the neighborhood near his home. But in about an hour, having reached a small village, he asked several persons he met if they had seen anything of his dog. No one had, and he pushed on. Mile after mile he rode, stopping every little while to make inquiries, but without avail. He got dinner at a wayside hotel and then resumed his trip. It was about three o'clock when, as he stopped at a watering trough under a big chestnut tree on the edge of the road, he saw a wagon coming toward him. "I'll ask this man," thought Dick. He waited until the vehicle and the driver were in plainer view through the cloud of dust raised and then he exclaimed: "Why, Henry! How'd you get out here?" "Oh, I've been after some old iron," replied the secretary and general man-of-all-work of the International and Consolidated Old Metal Corporation. "I heard of a farmer who had a lot of scrap for sale and I went after it." "Did you get it?" "Sure. It's in the wagon," and Henry nodded toward the rear of his vehicle, which was filled with a mass of broken iron. "I started away from home yesterday afternoon expecting to get back last night, but I had a breakdown and I had to stay until morning. But what are you doing out here?" "Looking for Grit," and then Dick told about the theft of his dog. "I don't s'pose you've seen anything of him, have you?" "Where did you say that letter came from?" asked Henry, showing some excitement. "Leonardville. That's where I'm headed for. Why?" "Then I saw your dog!" exclaimed Henry. "Where?" asked Dick, excitedly. "I was driving along last night," went on the young representative of the old metal concern, "and, just before I had my breakdown, I saw a wagon pass me. I looked in the back and saw something covered with a blanket. It was moving, and I wondered what it could be when I heard a dog bark. I thought it was rather funny to cover a dog up that way on a hot day. One of the men leaned back, and, when it barked, he hit the dog with a whip." "Poor Grit!" murmured Dick. "Wait till I get hold of those fellows. Where did they go, Henry?" "I'll tell you. I was thinking that was a pretty mean way to treat a dog, but I never thought they might have stolen him, and were trying to keep him hid. I watched their wagon until it was out of sight and then----" "Did you lose sight of them?" broke in Dick. "I went on a little farther," continued Henry, "and one of the springs of my wagon broke. I knew I couldn't get it fixed until morning, so I unhitched the horse and drove him along until I came to a hotel. This was at Maysville, and when I got to the tavern I saw the same two fellows. They were just driving away, and I heard one say it wasn't far to the Eagle Hotel. Now there's an Eagle hotel in Leonardville, and I'll bet you'll find your men and dog there. I'd like to go back with you and help----" "That's all right, Henry," interrupted Dick. "I guess I can manage," and, calling back his thanks to the young iron merchant, and promising to see him later, Dick urged his horse off at a gallop, disappearing in a cloud of dust. "Now there's a good example for you to follow, old bag of bones," said Henry, addressing his own steed. "Why don't you try that for a change and you'd get home to supper quicker. Well, I s'pose you'll last longer if you don't go so fast," and, with that comforting reflection, Henry managed, after a time, to get his horse in motion, the beast having almost gone to sleep during its driver's talk with Dick. "Now to find Grit!" exclaimed the millionaire's son, as he galloped on. "Poor dog, I hope they haven't abused you very much." Dick did not stop along the road to make any further inquiries. He reached Leonardville in good time and soon found his way to the Eagle Hotel. He let Rex trot into the stable yard, and, dismounting, told one of the hostlers to feed and water the animal when it had cooled off. As Dick started up the steps to the porch, intending to make some inquiries of the landlord, he suddenly started back in surprise, for, coming out of the main entrance, was Simon Scardale. "Hello, Simon!" exclaimed Dick. "Why-er-w-w-why, hello--Dick," stammered Simon. "Have you come to--what are you doing here?" he managed to say, with an attempt at pleasantry. "I might ask you the same thing," responded Dick. But Simon did not wait to hear anything further. He darted back into the hotel murmuring: "Wait a minute--I've forgotten something--see you right away----" "He acts as though he was afraid to meet me," thought Dick, as he walked on. "I wonder what he's doing here?" An instant later he was surprised to see Simon come out of a side door and fairly run to the stables. At the same instant a man appeared in the door of the barn, and to him Simon made frantic gestures to remain hidden. Then, as Dick watched this by-play with a bewildered air, there came from the stable the bark of a dog. "Grit!" exclaimed Dick. "Grit! Grit, old boy!" The barks became a howl of rage and there sounded the rattle of a chain. "Grit! Grit!" cried Dick, running toward the stable. There was the noise of a chain snapping. Then came frightened shouts. An instant later Simon, followed by a ragged man and a youth, dashed from the barn with the bulldog in close pursuit. Out of the hotel yard they raced, with Grit growling and barking and making fierce leaps for them. "Grit!" called Dick, but, for once, Grit refused to obey his master's voice. His heart was too full of revenge for the insults he had suffered. Out into the highway ran Simon and the two others, with the dog gaining at every leap. "Help! Save me!" cried Simon, as Dick ran out to see what the end would be. He was fearful that Grit would get one of the fleeing ones down and set his teeth into his throat. "Grit! Grit!" he called, frantically, but the bulldog never heeded. Simon turned, hoping to get out of the path of the maddened beast, but he did not reckon on Grit's quickness. The dog made a grab for Simon's trousers and caught them at the seat. There was a ripping sound, a frantic yell from Simon, and he fell, rolling over and over in a cloud of dust. "Grit! Don't bite him!" shouted Dick, fearful of what might happen. CHAPTER XVIII. UNCLE EZRA'S VISIT. But Grit had no intentions of wasting time on Simon when his revenge was not complete. He dropped the large piece of cloth he had torn from Simon's trousers and kept on after the two other fleeing individuals. The ragged youth was the faster runner, and the man, lagging behind, turned as if to beat off the dog. But Grit was fearless. Right at the man he sprang, and the fellow gave a yell of agony as he saw the brute launched at his throat. But Grit was not blood-thirsty. He caught the man by the lapel of his ragged coat, and, in an instant, had pulled him to the ground. Then, having worried him until the thief must have thought he was being eaten alive, Grit left him and set off after the third of the trio. The youth was becoming exhausted, but Grit was as fresh as ever. There was no give-up to him. He caught the ragged lad before he had gone a hundred feet farther and soon had him down. He fairly tore the coat off his back, and, after standing over him a few seconds, growling as though he was about to tear him into little pieces, Grit, with a satisfied shake of his head, started back on the run toward Dick. "Grit! Grit, old boy! So they tried to steal you, did they?" murmured Dick, as the dog bounded up on him and frantically licked his face. "Well, I guess they wish they hadn't." Grit nearly shook himself apart trying to wag his stump of a tail to show his delight at again being with his master. Dick fairly hugged his pet, but the tears almost came to his eyes as he saw several cruel welts on the dog's satin-like coat, where he had been beaten. "So they struck you, eh?" asked Dick, a fierce light coming into his brown eyes. "I don't blame you for taking after them as soon as you broke loose. I guess I'll have a score to settle with Simon and his cronies." But there was no chance to do this. Simon gave one look at Dick and Grit as they walked back to the hotel. Then, trying to pull his coat down so as to conceal the big hole in his trousers, he hurried away up the road, after the man and youth, who had continued their interrupted escape as soon as they were assured that Grit had left each two legs on which to run. "Well, Grit, old boy," went on Dick, as he entered the hotel. "I got you back without putting any two hundred dollars under a stone at Butternut Creek, didn't I? But I guess Henry is entitled to his hundred of the reward. Now to make some inquiries." The landlord soon told all he knew of the case. Late the previous night, he said, the ragged youth and his companion had arrived at the hotel, bringing the dog in the wagon. They said they had purchased it and were taking it to a man in the country. They paid for the keep of themselves and their horse and remained all night. "This morning the well-dressed young fellow came along," went on the landlord. "That was Simon," murmured Dick. "He registered as Thomas Henderson," said the hotel keeper. "I didn't much like his looks, but I'm here to hire rooms and furnish meals to travelers, not to criticise 'em. I was a leetle s'prised that he seemed to know them other two, but I thought that was his business. He seemed to know the dog, too, but the beast didn't take much of a notion to him. They stayed here all day, and one of my hostlers says the dog tried to break loose several times. They kept him chained in the stable, and they licked him more than once, I guess. They said he was savage and had to be beat to make him mind." "Poor Grit," murmured Dick, and the dog barked joyfully at being again with his master. "Wa'al," resumed the hotel man, "Simon, as you call him, an' the other two, they had several talks together. I heard 'em say suthin' about expectin' someone with money." "That was me," interposed Dick, with a smile. "Only I determined to get my dog, if I could, without paying them anything." "And you did it," said the landlord, with a laugh. "I did," replied Dick. "But I never suspected Simon would try such a desperate game as this. He must have found the leash the night of the party," he went on, after telling the landlord what had happened. "Then he got in with these fellows and had them steal Grit. The letter they mailed gave me a clue, and Henry told me enough more to enable me to find Grit. Well, I guess I've seen the last of Simon Scardale." It was not exactly the last, but Simon did not reappear in Hamilton Corners, and, though he afterward played a part in Dick's life, he had dropped out of it for the present. The horse and wagon, which the man and youth left behind, was called for that evening by an individual of the tramp variety, but, as he brought the cash to pay the last of the hotel bill, the landlord let him take the rig. Dick decided to stay at the Eagle Hotel all night, and he sent a telegram to his father explaining his absence and telling of his success. He decided he would not follow up Simon or his cronies to prosecute them for the theft. As the journey was a little too long for Grit to make afoot, and as Dick could not take him in the saddle with him, he sent Rex home in care of a man he hired, and engaged a carriage for himself and the dog, arriving home the next day at noon. "Well," remarked Mr. Hamilton, as his son came in with Grit, "your detective work was all right." "Yes, thanks to Henry Darby," answered the son. "I'm going to send him a check for a hundred dollars," which he proceeded to do. "Here are a couple of letters for you," went on the millionaire, handing the missives to his son. One proved to be a note from Guy Fletcher. He had heard what had occurred regarding the dog, for Mr. Hamilton told several friends of his son's telegram, and Guy hastened to assure Dick that he had no idea of Simon's scheme. "He told me he was only going to play a joke on you," wrote Guy, in the note which was delivered by a messenger. "He took the leash from your pocket the night of the party, and said he was going to hide Grit and make you believe he was stolen. I hope you don't believe I'd have anything to do with Simon if I thought he intended to really steal your dog. He has gone out West, I hear, somewhere in the gold mine region. My father has forbidden me to ever speak to Simon again." "I guess you'll not get a chance right away," murmured Dick. The whole thing was plain to him now. Simon wanted money, and thought he could make it by getting the man and youth to steal Grit, and then making Dick put the two hundred dollars under the stone. Everything had gone well up to a certain point. The dog had been taken away, carried in the wagon to Leonardville, and thither Simon had gone to make the final arrangements. The unexpected appearance of Dick had spoiled the scheme. Simon had hurried to the barn to warn his confederates, but at that instant Grit, excited by a beating he was getting, had broken loose. "No," mused Dick, "I don't believe Simon will show up around here for some time." "Who is the other letter from?" asked Mr. Hamilton. "I don't know. I'll open it." Dick rapidly scanned the contents. "Uncle Ezra Larabee is coming to pay us a visit," he announced. "He'll be here to-morrow." "Uncle Ezra, eh?" repeated Mr. Hamilton. "I suppose he wants to see how you are getting on--with your investments." "Hum!" exclaimed Dick, with an uneasy laugh, "maybe he thinks the year is up and I'm to go back with him. But it isn't--I'm glad to say." "Well, we must make his visit pleasant," said Mr. Hamilton. "It isn't often he comes to Hamilton Corners." Uncle Ezra Larabee arrived the next day. Dick was in the library reading when he heard the door bell ring and the butler answered it. "Is Mr. Hamilton in?" he heard a voice ask, and he knew it was his uncle. The boy hastened to greet his relative. "Why didn't you let us know what train you were coming on and I would have met you with the carriage," asked Dick, politely. "No, thank you, Nephew Richard," replied Uncle Ezra, in rasping tones. "I'm not too old to walk, and it's well to save the horse all you can." "And you carried that heavy valise?" asked Dick. "Of course I did, Nephew Richard. You didn't suppose I was going to pay twenty-five cents to have a boy carry it, did you? Lots of them wanted to, but twenty-five cents isn't earned every day, so I brought it myself," and with an expression of pain that he could not conceal Mr. Larabee set the heavy satchel down. His arm was stiff from carrying it, but he smiled grimly with satisfaction when he thought of the quarter of a dollar he had saved. "Come right upstairs and I'll show you to your room," invited Dick. "Then I'll telephone father you are here." "No, no, don't waste any money telephoning, Nephew Richard," said Uncle Ezra, hastily. "Why it doesn't cost anything, uncle. We have to pay for the telephone by the year." "Well, don't do it. They might charge you something this time. You never can tell. Besides, you might interrupt your father in some business deal and make him lose some money. No, I'll wait until he comes home." "Very well," assented Dick. "Gracious! What's that?" exclaimed Uncle Ezra, as a low growl came from a dark corner by the stairs. "Have you any wild beasts in here?" "No, that's only my dog, Grit, uncle. He'll not hurt anyone." "A dog? In the house?" exclaimed Mr. Larabee. "Why, he might chew a hole in the carpet. Besides, I can't bear dogs. Get out, you brute!" he exclaimed, aiming a kick at Grit, who walked toward Dick. The bulldog, with an ugly growl, crouched for a leap at Mr. Larabee. CHAPTER XIX. THE FRESH-AIR YOUNGSTERS. "Hold him back! Hold him! Let me hide! He'll bite me!" exclaimed Uncle Ezra, as he saw Grit's wicked-looking teeth. "Grit!" spoke Dick, softly, and in a reproving voice. "This is my Uncle Ezra," he went on. "Don't you know any better than that?" Instantly Grit's manner changed. He showed that he was sorry for the mistake he had made of growling at one of the family visitors. He even approached Uncle Ezra as if to make friends, but Mr. Larabee shrunk away. "I can't bear dogs," he said. Grit acted as if he understood, for he turned away. Nor did he seem to miss a caress from Mr. Larabee. Grit was a wise dog, and he well knew that the man disliked him. "If you keep that dog in the house I'm afraid I can't stay, Nephew Richard," Dick's uncle went on. "I wouldn't sleep a wink thinking of him." "Gibbs, take Grit to the stable," said Dick to the butler, with a little sigh, and the dog, with a somewhat reproachful look at his master, allowed himself to be led away. Nor was he permitted to come into the house during Uncle Ezra's visit, which quarantine he seemed to resent, for he always growled menacingly whenever Mr. Larabee came near him out doors. But this was not often, as Dick's uncle was very much afraid of Grit. Mr. Hamilton soon came home, and warmly greeted his wife's brother. "I'm glad to see you," said the millionaire. "How would you like to take a run to Hazelton this evening to the theatre? They have a good summer company playing there and we can make a quick trip in Dick's runabout." "I never go to theatres," said Mr. Larabee, in severe tones. "It's sinful, and a wicked waste of money. If there is a good instructive lecture in the village I would much rather go to that." "I'm afraid there isn't," replied Mr. Hamilton, trying not to smile, for he respected his brother-in-law's scruples. "But we can spend the evening pleasantly at home--talking." "Pleasantly!" repeated Dick to himself, with a sort of groan. "Pleasantly, with Uncle Ezra? Never!" After supper Mr. Larabee and Dick's father chatted in the library. The talk ranged from business matters to subjects in Dankville, where Mr. Hamilton knew several families. "Perhaps you'd like to take a look about the house," suggested Mr. Hamilton, after a pause "I've been putting in some improvements lately, and enlarging the conservatory. Dick will show you around." "What? Tramp through the house just to look at it? I don't believe in doing that," replied Uncle Ezra, firmly. "Things wear out fast enough as it is without using them when it isn't necessary. No use walking on the best carpets when there isn't a need for it. Besides, I don't believe in spending money on a house when it's good enough. Your place was very nice without adding to it. Think of the money you could have saved." "But I didn't have to save it," responded Mr. Hamilton. "I made lots this year, and I thought it was a wise thing to put it into something permanent. I have increased the value of my house." "Much better put it in the bank," advised Uncle Ezra, with a disapproving sniff. Mr. Hamilton and Dick tried to entertain their visitor, but it was hard work. He cared nothing for the things they were interested in, and was somewhat inclined to dictate what Mr. Hamilton should do with his money. "You burn too many lights," he said, noting that several incandescents were aglow in the library where they sat. "One would do as well," and he turned out all but one. "I contract for it by the year," said Mr. Hamilton. "It doesn't cost me any more to burn five lamps than it does one." "But the lamps wear out," was Uncle Ezra's answer. "And speaking of things wearing out reminds me. We got a letter the other day and it almost made Samanthy sick. She hasn't got over the shock of it yet." "What was it?" asked Dick. "Why, it was from some crazy society in New York, wanting us to take twenty-five 'fresh-air children,' the letter said, to board at our house for a few weeks. Said they heard we had a big farmhouse and could accommodate 'em." "Are you going to take them?" inquired Mr. Hamilton. "I think your house would be just the place for them. You have lots of room, and you can't eat all that you raise on the farm. It would do the poor things good." "Are--we--going--to--take--them?" repeated Mr. Larabee. "I'm surprised at you, Mortimer Hamilton. The idea of taking twenty-five street-arabs in our house! Why, the very idea of it made Samanthy sick a bed for a day. Those rapscallions wouldn't leave a carpet on the floor! They'd tear the house apart! I know! I've read about 'fresh-air children' before." "You might take the carpets up," suggested Dick, with a smile. "What?" almost shouted Uncle Ezra. "Nephew Richard, there's carpets in our house that hasn't been up for years. Why the spare room hasn't been opened since sister Jane's funeral, and that was--let me see--that was the year when Ruth Enderby got married. Take 'fresh-air children' into our house! Why, we wouldn't have any house left at the end of the week." "Oh, I guess not as bad as that," replied Mr. Hamilton, indulgently. "But, of course, you know your own business best. I hope Mrs. Larabee soon recovers." "She may, but it was quite a shock," replied Uncle Ezra. "Well, I think I'll go to bed. I must be up early in the morning. I came here to transact a little business, and the sooner it's over the sooner I can get back home. I'm afraid my hired man will burn too much kindling wood starting the fires. He's the most wasteful man I ever saw." And, sighing deeply at the depravity of hired men in general and his own in particular, Uncle Ezra went to bed. Dick offered to take him for a spin in the runabout the next day, but his uncle declined, on the ground that there might be an accident. "You might run somebody down and hurt them," he said. "Then they'd sue you for damages and I'd be liable for a share. I haven't any money to throw away on automobile accidents." "All right," said Dick. "But I'm very careful." "You can come walking with me instead," suggested his uncle. "You and I ought to be friends. We may have to live together some day, you know," and he tried to smile, but it was only a forced grin. "Not much!" thought Dick, as, with rather a heavy heart, he prepared to accompany his uncle on the walk. "No, no, Grit, you can't go," he said, as the dog jumped about in delightful anticipation, for he always went with Dick. "You might bite Uncle Ezra," he added, as, much against his wish, he chained Grit in the kennel. Dick could not bear to look back at his pet, who gazed reproachfully after him. Dick showed his uncle such sights as there were in Hamilton Corners. It was a hot day, and, as they tramped along, Dick got quite thirsty. "Come in here, Uncle Ezra," he suggested, as they passed a drug store, "and we'll get some soda water." "What? Pay for a drink of water?" asked Mr. Larabee, horrified. "Well, it's got ice-cream in it," replied Dick. "It's a sinful waste of money!" declared his uncle. "We can get all the water we want to drink at home. But, as I am a little thirsty, I'll go in and ask the man for a glass of plain water. He'll be glad to give it to us." Dick was a little doubtful on this score, and he felt that it would be rather embarrassing to have his uncle ask for water in the drug store, where Dick was well known. But he was too polite to object to what Mr. Larabee did. The latter walked into the store, and, in his rasping voice, asked for two glasses of water. "Do you mean soda water?" inquired the clerk. "No, plain water. I don't drink such trash as soda water," replied Mr. Larabee. The clerk looked at him in much astonishment, and then glanced at Dick. The latter managed to wink, and the clerk seemed to understand. He went to the back part of the store, and presently came back with two glasses of water. "There, nephew," said Mr. Larabee, triumphantly, as he sipped the plain beverage. "You see our thirst is quenched and we have saved our money. Young men should economize, and when they are old they will not want." "Yes, sir," replied Dick, dutifully, but when they went out he managed to lay ten cents on the counter where the clerk would see it. Dick wasn't going to be made fun of the next time he went in for a glass of soda. "Now, I think we'll go home, Nephew Richard," suggested Mr. Larabee, when they had walked an hour longer. "There is no use wearing out our shoes any more than we can help. Besides, I have some business to transact this afternoon, and I must get the papers out of my valise." Dick was glad enough to return, and gladder still, when, the next morning, Uncle Ezra announced that he was going back to Dankville. "You must come and see me and your Aunt Samantha," he said to Dick, as he bade the lad good-bye, and Dick murmured something that might be taken as an expression of a fervent desire to pay another visit to The Firs, but it was not. "Dad," said Dick that night, "do you know what I'm thinking of?" "Not exactly, you think of so many things." "I'm thinking of those poor little fresh-air kids, and how disappointed they must be not to get a trip to the country. I don't know as I want them to go to Uncle Ezra's, but--er--say, dad, I'd like to give a bunch of fresh-air kids some sort of an outing. Think of the poor little tots shut up in sizzling New York this kind of weather." "Well, you can bring them here, I suppose," began Mr. Hamilton, doubtfully, with a look around his handsomely furnished house, "only this isn't exactly the country." "Oh, I didn't mean here," said Dick, hastily. "I was thinking we could have a crowd of 'em out to Sunnyside." This was the name of a large farm which Mr. Hamilton owned on the outskirts of the country village of Prattville. "The very thing!" exclaimed Mr. Hamilton, with as much fervor as Dick had shown. "That's the ticket, Dick. I'll write to Foster at once and ask him if he and his wife can take a crowd of the waifs at Sunnyside for a few weeks. Then you will have to manage the other end yourself. Foster will do as I say, I guess, for he loves children and he has a heart as big as a barrel. You'll have to furnish the children." "I'll do it!" exclaimed Dick, delightedly. "I'll write to Uncle Ezra and ask him the address of that committee in New York. Hurrah for the fresh-air kids! I hope they have a good time!" "I guess they will if he has anything to do with it," mused Mr. Hamilton, with a fond look at his son as Dick went to get writing material to pen a letter to Uncle Ezra. CHAPTER XX TIM'S DISCLOSURE Two days later Dick received a reply from Mr. Larabee. In the meanwhile Mr. Hamilton had written to Foster, the man he hired to take charge of Sunnyside farm, and had told him to have the place in readiness for twenty-five youngsters. "Did your Uncle Ezra give you the address of the Fresh-Air Committee?" asked Dick's father. "Yes, and he sent me a letter of advice along with it." "What does he say?" "I'll read it to you," and Dick turned over the pages of the missive. "This is what he says about my plan of trying to give those kids a little fun: "'I send you the address of the committee, as you requested, but, Nephew Richard, I want to warn you against taking them. In the first place, they will be no better off than they are at home. They will not appreciate what you do for them. Then, too, they might bring some terrible epidemic to this part of the country. Sunnyside is not so far from Dankville but that a disease might carry to my place, and you know my health is not strong. "'If I had control of you (as I may have some day), I would not let you do this. But it is not for me to say at this time what you should do. I think you are throwing the money away, and you had much better put the amount you intend spending into the church missionary box and so aid the heathens. They need it.' "As if those poor kids in the hot tenements of New York didn't need it, too," commented Dick. "Well, Uncle Ezra is certainly a queer man. I suppose he'll keep his house filled with disinfectants while the waifs are at Sunnyside, though it's many miles away." In about a week Dick had completed arrangements with the committee in New York, the president of which wrote to thank him for aiding in the work they were doing. Dick was told that twenty-five youngsters, ten boys and fifteen girls, none of whom had ever been to the country before, would be sent to Sunnyside in charge of a matron. Dick had forwarded money to buy the tickets, and had planned with Foster to have a big stage meet the train on which the "fresh-air kids," as he called them, would arrive at the nearest station to the country home. "Well, dad," remarked Dick, the day before the waifs from New York were to arrive, "you've seen the last of me for a week." "Why; where are you going?" "To Sunnyside. I want to see that the kids are started right, and I think I'll stay about a week to see that they have a good time. I'll take my runabout, and I can come back in a hurry if I need to. I'll bring a batch over to see you, maybe." "Do," said Mr. Hamilton. "I like children. Poor things! I hope the trip to the country does them good." Dick had read about fresh-air children who were much impressed by their first visit to the country, but this did not prepare him for the awed look on the faces of the twenty-five as they tumbled from the train at the little country depot, and made for the waiting stage. "Now, children," said the matron, as Dick came up and introduced himself, "this is the gentleman who was so kind as to bring you out to this beautiful place," and she shook hands with the millionaire's son. "Is dat de rich guy?" asked one boy, but though his words might sound disrespectful he did not intend them so. "Hush!" exclaimed a girl in a much-patched red dress. "He'll hear you." "What do I care! If I wuz as rich as him I wouldn't care who knowed it," retorted the boy. "No more do I, old chap," replied Dick, with a laugh, as he patted the youngster on the back. "Now, boys and girls, the stage is waiting for you." "Oh, Nellie!" cried a little tot with light hair, "we're goin' to ride in a real wagon with real horses!" "Don't speak so loud!" was the whispered answer of her companion. "It's like a dream, an' maybe we'll wake up an' find it all gone." The children, in spite of the fact that they came from the slums of New York, were all neat and clean, for that was one of the requirements of the committee that took charge of the fresh-air work. And, though their manners might be considered a little rough, they did not intend them so. It was due to the influence of their surroundings. Soon they had all piled into the stage, and the driver from Sunnyside started the four horses. "Look, will yer! It's a regular tally-ho like de swells on Fif' Avenoo drives!" exclaimed the boy who had called Dick the "rich guy." The ride to the farm was one continuous series of exclamations of delight from the boys and girls, who looked at the green fields on either side of the country road, at the comfortable farmhouses they passed, or at the range of mountains that towered off to the west. "Look!" exclaimed one boy, who had kept tight hold of his sister's hand from the time he got off the train. "See, Maggie, that's where the sun goes to sleep. I never saw it before." "Where?" asked the girl. "Over there," and he pointed to the mountains behind which the golden orb was sinking to rest. "Yes, dear," spoke the matron, who had overheard what was said, "and in the morning he'll get up and shine on the fields where you can run around and get strong. "He's a sickly child," the matron added in a whisper to Dick. "I'm afraid he never will be strong. He has such queer fancies at times. His mother is a widow and goes out washing. The sister stays home and takes care of her little brother. It was a real charity that they could come, and I'm sure the committee doesn't know how to thank you for your generosity." "Oh, pshaw! That's nothing," replied Dick, blushing like a girl at the praise. "I ought to do something with my money. I'm glad I heard about this fresh-air plan. I'll have some of the youngsters out next year if----" Then he stopped. He happened to think that if his investments did not succeed he would not have much money to spend the next year, and, besides, he might be living with his Uncle Ezra at Dankville. But the matron did not notice his hesitation, for, at that moment, the stage turned into the drive leading up to Sunnyside, and Dick was besieged by several inquiries. "Say, mister, is dis a park?" asked one boy, as he saw the well-kept drive. "No, this is the place where you are going to stay," Dick replied. "Can we get out an' walk?" asked another, and this seemed to strike a popular chord, for that request became general. The matron nodded an assent and the children jumped out of the stage, some boys going by way of the windows. "You can drive on and tell them we are coming," said Dick to the driver. "Oh, I guess they'll know it fast enough," responded the man, with a grin. "You can hear them kids a mile." Which was true enough, for the boys and girls were fairly yelling in pure delight. Dick and the matron walked on behind the crowd, the millionaire's son watching with interest the antics of the waifs. "Johnny! Johnny!" yelled a slip of a girl to her bigger brother. "Come right off the grass this minute! Do youse want a cop to put you out? He don't know no better, mister," she said, turning to Dick. "He didn't mean nothin'. Johnny, do you hear me? Come off that grass right away, or the man will have youse arrested." "No, no! Nothing of the sort!" exclaimed Dick, with a laugh. "You can eat the grass if you want to. Do just as you please. There isn't a policeman within twenty miles." Then there was a mad rush over the big lawn that led up to Sunnyside. The children yelled, laughed, shouted, and fairly tumbled over each other in the very joy of being in the country. Pale cheeks reddened as the little lungs breathed in the pure, fresh air, dull eyes lighted up with pleasure, and little hands trembled with eagerness as they plucked buttercups, dandelions and daisies that grew on the far edges of the lawns. "Wow!" yelled one lad. "Wow! I've got to do somethin' or I'll bust!" And that is the way most of them felt it seemed, for they raced, ran, jumped and tumbled like children just let out after being kept in after school. And such a supper as Mrs. Foster had provided for the waifs! Their eyes bulged as they came to the table that was fairly groaning under the weight of good things. "Now," called Dick, when they sat down, "let me see how you can eat." "They do not need any coaxing," replied the matron, and Dick soon saw that she was right. That was only the beginning of a happy two weeks for the youngsters. They fairly went wild on the farm, for it had a hundred delights for them, from watching the cows being milked, to hunting for eggs in the big barn. Dick took them for automobile rides in relays, bringing several over to Hamilton Corners to see his father, who further delighted the childish hearts by gifts of dimes and nickels. On one of these trips the millionaire's son brought Tim Muldoon, the boy who had commented on Dick's riches that day the two met. "An' does your governor own dat bank?" Tim asked, as Dick stopped the runabout in front of the institution. "Well, most of it, I guess." "An' can he go in dere an' git money whenever he wants it?" "Yes, I guess he can." "Say!" exclaimed Tim, as he looked weakly at Dick, "an youse is his son?" "Yes." "An' youse is takin' me an' dese (indicating some of the other youngsters) out fer a ride in dis gasolene gig? Us what ain't got a cent?" "Yes; why not?" asked Dick, with a smile. "Well, all I've got t' say is dat dis is as near bein' rich as I ever expects t' be, an' say, it's dead white of youse; dat's what it is. Why, dem rich guys in N' York would no more t'ink of treatin' us dis way dan dey would jump off de dock. Dat's straight!" "Oh, I guess they would if they thought about it, but they probably don't know how many boys and girls would like to get out and see the country," said Dick, not wanting to take too much credit to himself. "Like pie!" was Tim's contemptuous rejoinder. Then, as he was gazing rapturously at the entrance to the bank, he suddenly started as he saw a man coming down the steps. "Say," he whispered to Dick, grabbing his arm, "is dat guy in your governor's bank?" "Which man? What do you mean?" "I mean dat one wid de black moustache, jest comin' down de steps. Is he in de bank?" "Oh, that's Mr. Vanderhoof," replied Dick, recognizing the mining promoter. "Mr. who?" asked Tim. "Vanderhoof. Why, do you know him?" "Not by dat name. But say, if he's got anyt'ing to do wit de bank it'll soon be on de blink." "What do you mean?" "I mean put out of business. On de blink, excuse my slang. But youse had better tell your governor to keep his peepers open." "Why?" inquired Dick, a vague suspicion coming into his mind. "Because," replied Tim, earnestly. "Dat man's name ain't Vanderhoof any more dan mine is." "Who is he?" "Why, he's William Jackson, or Bond Broker Bill. I seen him in de police court in N' York. I sells papers, an' I knows lots of de cops an' detectives. I saw 'em arrest dat man once, only he had a white beard an' moustache den. Now he's shaved off de whiskers an' colored his moustache, but I knowed him de minute I set me peepers on him. I seen his mug in de papers lots of times. Youse wants to be on lookout fer him or he'll put de bank on de blink. He's a gold-brick swindler, an' I guess up to any other woozy game he can make pay!" "Bond Broker Bill! William Jackson! Colonel Dendon!" murmured Dick, in a daze. "No wonder I thought I had seen Mr. Vanderhoof before. It was in the New York hotel, where he tried to swindle me! And he sold dad and me some gold mining stock! I must tell dad right away!" Dick looked after the retreating form of Mr. Vanderhoof. Then turning to Tim, who had made the startling disclosure, he said: "Wait here for me! I must see my father at once," and getting out of the auto he hurried into the bank. CHAPTER XXI IN WHICH MR. VANDERHOOF VANISHES Dick found his father busy, looking over some books and papers. He waited until the millionaire had finished and looked up, remarking: "Well, Dick, what is it now? Some more of the fresh-air kids outside?" "Yes, dad, but I've got something more important to tell you than about them. Was Mr. Vanderhoof just in here?" "He was, and I took some more stock in the Hop Toad Mine. I had an additional report from the government assayer at Yazoo City, and the ore is richer than ever." "You bought more stock, dad?" "Yes. Why?" "Because that man is a swindler! I just learned of it! His name is not Vanderhoof at all. He's the same man who tried to swindle me in New York. He goes by the name of Colonel Dendon. I thought there was something familiar about him the first day I saw him in here, but I couldn't place him on account of his dyed moustache. He's a swindler!" "Who told you so?" "Tim Muldoon, one of the fresh-air children. He saw him under arrest in New York. Probably he got out on bail. Oh, dad, I'm afraid we've both been swindled!" "Well, don't get excited," counseled Mr. Hamilton, who was used to facing business troubles. "He may be a swindler, but I think our mining stock is good. The reports of it are all from reliable men. But I'll make an investigation at once." "What will you do?" "I think I'll send for Mr. Vanderhoof and ask him to explain. We'll have your friend Tim in here. No doubt it is all a mistake. I wouldn't place too much faith in what a boy says." "You don't know Tim," responded Dick. "He's as bright as they make 'em. I guess all New York newsboys are. But where does Mr. Vanderhoof live?" "He is stopping at the Globe Hotel. He told me he would remain in town about two weeks longer, as he had some business to transact. I'll just call up the hotel and ask him to come here. Meanwhile, tell Tim to come in." "Don't 'phone, dad," advised Dick. "I'll run down to the hotel in my auto. If you call him on the wire he may suspect something. I'll bring him here in the machine." "All right, Dick. Maybe that's a good plan. But don't get excited. Be calm. This may be only a boy's excited imagination. Mr. Vanderhoof certainly seemed like a business man and not like a swindler. Of course, I may be fooled. I have been, once or twice, in my time, but you've got to take those chances. However, we'll not decide anything until we talk to him. Go ahead." "What will I do with the youngsters?" asked Dick. "I've got five of them with me." "Give 'em a quarter apiece and let 'em buy ice-cream," advised the millionaire, with a laugh. "That is, all but Tim. Let him come in here and wait." "Twenty-five cents' worth of ice-cream each would put them all in the hospital," explained Dick. "I'll make 'em distribute their wealth," and, in a few moments he had sent the four boys off to see the sights of the town, happy in the possession of a quarter of a dollar each, and with strict injunctions not to get lost, and to be back at the bank in an hour. "Me to go inside de bank?" asked Tim, when Dick told him what was wanted. "Say, I'm gittin' real swell, I am! If de kids on Hester Street could see me now dey'd t'ink I was president of a railroad," and, with a laugh he went into Mr. Hamilton's private office. While Dick was gone the millionaire questioned the newsboy, who stuck to his story that the man he had seen was a swindler, who had been under arrest in New York. Dick made fast time to the Globe Hotel. When he jumped from the auto, and hurried inside, the manager, who knew him, nodded a greeting. "Is Mr. Vanderhoof about?" asked Dick, trying to keep his voice calm. "Mr. Vanderhoof?" repeated the manager. "No, he went out a little while ago." "Where?" "Why, he said he was going back to New York," was the rather surprising answer. "A telegram came for him as soon as he got here and he left in a hurry. He just caught the express, and didn't even have time to take his baggage. He paid me his bill and rushed out in a hurry, telling me he'd send word where to forward his trunk. Did you want to see him about anything important?" "It was, but I guess it will keep," replied Dick, trying not to show any alarm. His worst fears were realized. Vanderhoof, _alias_ Bond Broker Bill, had been warned by some confederates, perhaps, and had fled, after securing large sums of money from Dick and his father. "And maybe we're not the only victims," thought Dick, as he left the hotel and turned the auto toward the bank. "Well, what luck?" asked Mr. Hamilton, as his son entered. "He's skipped out, dad!" "He has, eh? Now to find out how badly we have been bitten. Dick, my boy, it looks as though there was a hoodoo hanging over your investments. Still, this mine stock may be all right. I'll wire to a lawyer in Yazoo City." "Oh, he's a foxy guy, is Bond Broker Bill," said Tim, when Dick told him what had taken place. "I wish I'd a spotted him before. Maybe he seen me an' flew de coop." "No, I don't believe he would have known you were on his trail," replied Dick, with an uneasy laugh. "I think he left on general principles." It was several hours before Mr. Hamilton received a reply from the lawyer in Yazoo City, Nevada. When it came the telegram stated that the Hop Toad and Dolphin mines were producing a quantity of ore, and were generally believed to be good mines. "Not much known about them here, though," the telegram went on. "Would advise a personal inspection. Believed that some promotor has a lot of stock and is trying to sell it in the East. Better look into it." "Well, there's a chance yet," said Mr. Hamilton. "As I said, Vanderhoof may be a swindler, but the mines seem to be good. I'll have someone right on the ground look them up. We must make our plans carefully." "Whom will you get, dad?" "I don't know yet. I must write to this lawyer." "Dad!" exclaimed Dick, suddenly. "Let me take a trip out West! Let me look up those mines! If they're no good I want to know it soon, so I can make some other investment. Can't I go to Nevada?" CHAPTER XXII OFF FOR THE WEST Mr. Hamilton glanced at his son. Dick was all excited over the events of the last hour and by the sudden desire that had come to him. "You go to Nevada?" repeated the millionaire. "Yes, dad, and look up this mining business. I could see the lawyer and find out whether we have been swindled. The trip would do me good," he added, with a smile. "I haven't any doubt of that, Dick," replied his father. "And, after thinking it over, I don't know but you could make whatever investigation would be needed. I think I'll let you go. How soon can you be ready?" "To-night." "Well, there's no such rush as that. If we've been swindled, finding it out now isn't going to help matters any. If, on the other hand, as I hope may be the case, the mines are all right, there's no need of hurrying out there. You'd better make good preparations for the trip. It isn't going to be much fun traveling alone." "But, dad, I needn't travel alone. I was thinking I could take some of my chums with me. Bricktop, Frank Bender and Walter Mead would think it bully fun to go along. Why couldn't I take them?" "I suppose you could if their parents did not object. They would be your guests, of course--that is, you would have to pay all expenses." "I'd be willing to. I've got two thousand dollars invested in the Dolphin mine, and I've got to spend some more to see if I've thrown that money away. I might as well have some fun out of it, if I can." "Four lads will make a nice party. I'll have McIverson go to the depot and get some time-tables. Meanwhile you had better get the fresh-air boys back to Sunnyside. It's getting near supper-time, and the matron may be worried about them." "Say, is youse really goin' out where they make gold mines?" asked Tim Muldoon, as he and Dick went back to the automobile, around which the other lads, having spent all their money, and seen all the sights, were waiting. "Are youse goin' out West among de Indians an' cowboys?" "Well, yes, but I guess there aren't any Indians left." "Sure dere is! Didn't I read about in a book? It's a crackerjack! I'll lend it to youse. It's 'Three-Fingered Harry; or, De Scourge of de Redskins!'" "No, thanks," answered Dick, with a laugh. "I wouldn't read such trash if I were you. There are very few Indians left out West and they're too scarce to kill off." "Well," spoke Tim, with a sigh, "it's in de book. Say," he added, "does it cost much to go out West?" "Well, I'm not sure just how much it does take, but I guess it's rather costly." Tim sighed heavily. "What's the matter?" asked Dick. "I've got three dollars an' nineteen cents salted down in de dime savings bank," replied the newsboy. "I was savin' it fer a new overcoat, but I'd rather go out West. How far could I go fer three dollars an' nineteen cents? Could I travel wit youse as far as it lasted?" The boy looked wistfully at Dick, and there was a world of longing in the blue eyes of Tim Muldoon as they met the brown orbs of the millionaire's son. Then Dick came to a sudden resolve. "Would you like to go with me and the other boys?" he asked. "Would I? Say, Mr. Dick, would a cat eat clams? Would I? Don't spring dat on me agin," he added, with an attempt at a laugh. "I've got a weak heart an' I might faint. It's back to little ole N' York an' Hester Street fer mine, I guess." "No," said Dick. "I mean it. You may have rendered me and my father a great service, Tim, in telling us about Vanderhoof. If he proves to be what you say he is, a swindler, it is a good thing we found it out when we did. We may be able to save some of our money. If you can arrange to go I'll take you out West with me. Do you think you can?" "Can I go? Well, I should say I can. Where's me ticket? I ain't got no trunk to pack." "But what will your folks say?" "I ain't got no folks, Mr. Dick. I'm all dere is," and, though he spoke flippantly, there was a suspicion of tears in Tim's eyes. "Then, if the matron who brought you here says it is all right, you shall go," decided Dick. Dick was actuated by two motives. He wanted to give pleasure to the little waif, to whom he had taken a great liking, and he also felt that Tim might be of service to him. If Vanderhoof turned up out in Nevada, it might be well to have Tim on hand to confront him. Then, too, Tim was a bright, quick lad, and Dick felt he would be useful on the trip. Dick returned his charges to Sunnyside, and the matron, after hearing of the plans for the western trip, readily consented that Tim should go. He was an orphan, she explained, who had been taken in charge by a philanthropic society in New York. The boy was good-hearted and honest, she said, and had proved that he could be trusted. While his talk might be a bit rough and slangy a true heart beat under Tim's patched but neat jacket. In spite of the prospective trip Dick did not forget the fresh-air children. It was found that it would require several days to get the through tickets for Yazoo City, and, in the meanwhile, the millionaire's son arranged for a big outdoor clambake for the youngsters. He and the three boys, whom he had invited to make the long journey with him, attended, and helped the waifs to have a good time--if they needed such assistance, which was doubtful. Then, after arranging for another lot of the little unfortunates to come to Sunnyside when the first crowd had reached New York, Dick bade good-bye to those into whose lives he had been able to bring much happiness because of his wealth. Tim was taken to the Hamilton mansion, where he was fitted up in a manner that made him think he had fallen heir to some vast treasure, such as those he read about in dime novels. "If me Hester Street friends could see me now," he murmured, as he looked at the new suit Dick had bought him, "dey would sure take me for a swell." "Don't think too much of good clothes," warned Dick. "Well, it's de first time I ever had any to t'ink about," replied Tim, "an' youse must let me look at dem till I gits used to 'em," which Dick laughingly agreed to do. "I hear you're going out West," remarked Henry Darby to Dick, when he met him on the street the day before that set for the start. "Yes. Going to look up some gold mines," and Dick laughed. "If you find any lying around loose, or one that no one else wants--or even an old one that someone has thrown away--why just express it back to me," requested Henry. "I'd rather have a good gold mine than this old metal business, I think." "How is it going?" asked Dick. "Pretty well. Say, I don't think I ought to keep that hundred-dollar check you sent me for telling you that I'd seen Grit in the man's wagon." "Of course you've got to keep it!" exclaimed Dick. "I would have paid it to the first person who gave me the right clue, and I'm sure I couldn't give it to anyone I like better than you." "It certainly came in mighty handy," said Henry. "Why?" "I had a chance to buy up the refuse from an old boiler factory just before I got it and I hadn't any cash. Dad had taken all the surplus. He's got some scheme on hand, and he won't tell me what it is. He says there's lots of money in it. There may be," went on Henry, with an odd smile, "but what's worrying me is whether dad is going to get the money out of it. That's mostly the trouble with his schemes. There's thousands of dollars in 'em, but the cash generally stays there for all of him. But maybe this one will turn out all right. I hope so, because he's got all the surplus. But I used the hundred dollars to buy some old iron, and I think I can dispose of it at a profit. Well, I hope you have good luck." "Thanks," answered Dick. "I'll remember what you said about a gold mine." "Well, I'll not insist on a gold mine," called back Henry, as he started his horse up, a task that required some time, for the animal seemed to take advantage of every stop to go to sleep. "I'm not prejudiced in favor of a gold mine. A good-paying silver mine will do pretty nearly as well." "I'll remember, Henry. Good-bye until I get back." Early the next morning Dick and his four boy friends were on their way to the West. Their train was an express and the first stop was at a large city, where several railroads formed a junction. As the boys were looking from the window of the parlor car, Tim, who managed to take his eyes away from the gorgeous fittings long enough to notice what was going on up and down the long station platform, suddenly uttered an exclamation, and grabbed Dick's arm. "Look! Dere he is!" he whispered. "Who?" "Vanderhoof! Colonel Dendon! Bond Broker Bill!" "Where? I don't see anyone." "Dat slick-lookin' man, wid de brown hat on," and Tim pointed to him. "But he hasn't any black moustache," objected Dick, thinking Tim's imagination was getting the best of him. "Of course not. He's cut it off. But I'd know him anywhere by dat scar on his left cheek. Dat's de swindler all right!" As Dick looked he saw that the man with the brown hat did have a large scar on his cheek. It had been hidden by the moustache before. Then, just as the train pulled out, the man looked toward the parlor car. His eyes met Dick's, and, an instant later, the man with the scar was on the run toward the telegraph office. CHAPTER XXIII AT THE MINES "Hold on!" cried Dick, jumping up. "Stop the train!" The cars were rapidly acquiring speed, and Dick ran toward the door with the evident intention of getting off. "Don't jump, Dick!" called Walter Mead. "We're going too fast!" "Dat's right," chimed in Tim. "It's too late!" "Yes, I guess it is," assented Dick. "But, Tim, how do you know that was Vanderhoof? To me he didn't look a bit like him. Besides, how did you know he had a scar under his moustache?" "I've seen him wid his whiskers an' moustache off before," replied the newsboy. "I used to run errands for de sleuths at police headquarters, an' I seen lots of criminals." "But are you sure you saw this man there?" "Cert. He was brought in lots of times fer some kind of crooked game, but most times he was let go, 'cause they couldn't prove anyt'ing agin him. Sometimes he'd have a white beard an' agin a black moustache, but dem fly cops, dem gum-shoe sleuths, dey knowed him every time. I'll stake me reputation dat was him on de platform." "But what can he be doing here?" asked Dick, "and why should he make a bee-line for the telegraph office when he saw me? I'm positive he knew who I was." "Course he did," replied Tim. "He's probably sendin' a telegram to some of his friends in Yazoo City t' be on de lookout for youse." "Do you think so? But how would he know I had started for there?" "Say," inquired Tim, in drawling tones, "don't de hull town where you live know dat Millionaire Hamilton's son is goin' off on a journey in a palace car, an' takin' some friends, includin' Tim Muldoon, wid him? In course dey does. An' youse can bet your bottom dollar dat everybody in Hamilton Corners is talkin' about it. Vanderhoof, or Bond Broker Bill, knowed it as soon as anybody, an' if he's been puttin' up a crooked deal he's gittin' ready t' fix t'ings on de other end--at Yazoo City, I mean." "Then, if he has warned his confederates out West," went on Dick, "there's not much use in my going there to make an investigation. They'd be sure to have things fixed up to deceive me. I depended on finding out about the mines before those in charge knew who I was." "You can do dat yet," said Tim. "How?" "Why, lay low, dat's how. Don't go out dere wid de idea of handin' your visitin' card t' every guy you meet. Drift int' town easy like an' look about on de quiet fer a few days. Den youse kin see how de land lays an' git a line on de fakers. After dat youse can go up to de villain like de hero does in de play an' say: 'Now den, Red-Handed Mike, I have caught youse at last! You shall give me dose paper-r-r-r-s er I'll shoot you down like a dog!'" and Tim laughed with the others at his imitation of the methods of the actors on the stage when a cheap melodrama is being performed. "I don't know but your advice is good," agreed Dick. "I can't catch Vanderhoof now, but perhaps we can spoil his plans. Let's have a consultation and decide what's best to do." The boys had the parlor car pretty much to themselves, and their talk was not likely to be overheard by the other passengers who were in the farther end. The journey was a pleasant one, and the boys enjoyed every hour of it. The country through which they passed presented, almost constantly, something new in the way of scenery, and as they proceeded farther and farther west the boys were wild with delight at the beautiful prospect, the wild stretches of country and the glimpses of the free life on the plains. Sleeping in the berths, eating in the dining-car and looking out of the windows of the big Pullman were keen delights to Dick's companions, none of whom had ever traveled in such a fashion before, though to the millionaire's son it was more or less familiar. When they reached the last stage of their journey and were within a few hours' ride of Yazoo City the five boys, at Tim's suggestion, changed from the parlor car to an ordinary one. "It'll look better t' climb down out of a poor man's car dan from de coach wid de velvet curtains at de windows," he said. "Students ain't supposed t' be lookin' fer places t' t'row money away." For they had agreed to pass themselves off as students, come West to look at mines in general. Thus it was that no unusual comments were made by the crowd at the station in Yazoo City when the five boys and a few other passengers alighted from the train. It was a typical Western town, rather larger than an ordinary one, for it was the centre for a prosperous mining section. Across from the station were two hotels, one called the Imperial Inn and the other the Royal Hotel. "Doesn't seem to be much choice," observed Frank Bender. "Neither one looks as if royalty was in the habit of stopping at it." "We'll go to the Royal," decided Dick. "The lawyer, whom dad wrote to about the mine, stops there, and I want to see him." Accordingly the five boys walked across the street and entered the lobby of the hotel. It was even less pretentious on the inside than viewed from without, but it looked clean. Dick led the way up to the desk, to engage rooms for himself and friends. "Glad t' see you, strangers," greeted the man behind the desk with easy familiarity. "What might yo' uns be, if I might make so bold as to ask? Travelin' show or capitalists lookin' fer a good payin' mine?" "We're studying mining conditions," replied Dick. "Traveling for information." "Ah, I see," interrupted the hotel proprietor, who also acted as clerk. "We've had some of you college boys out here before. Welcome to Yazoo City," and Dick and his companions were glad that the man had put his own interpretation on their object in coming West. He swung the book around to them and Dick signed first. The pen was poor and the ink worse, so it was no wonder that his name, when he had scratched it down, looked like anything but Dick Hamilton. Nor did the others do any better. They were shown to their rooms, and, as it was late afternoon, they decided to defer beginning their investigations until the next day. The supper was good but plain, though the boys were more interested in watching the men about them, and hearing them talk, than they were in eating, hungry as they were. They slept soundly, though Dick was awakened once or twice by revolver shots and loud yelling. He thought someone had been hurt, but on inquiring from a porter, passing through the hall, learned that he need have no cause for alarm. "Land love yo', son!" said the porter, a burly Westerner. "Them's only th' boys gittin' rid of some of their animal spirits. Don't worry none. They seldom shoots this way, an' if they does they aims high, so they only busts the top window lights. Yo' ain't got nothin' t' be askeered of." But though Dick was not exactly easy in his mind his rest was not disturbed by any bullets coming through his window, though there was considerable shooting all night. "I think we'll take a trip out to the mines right after breakfast," decided Dick, when the boys had gathered in his room after dressing. "I'll hire a big carriage and we can all go. I inquired about them, and I learned that the Dolphin and Hop Toad mines are close together, a few miles outside of town." "I think I'll stay around here," decided Tim. "Why?" asked Dick. "Because I want to see if anyt'ing happens. Youse kin go out to de holes in de ground. I'll see 'em later if dere worth lookin' at. But I t'ink I'll mosey around de hotel a while." "Well, maybe it will be a good plan," agreed Dick. "We can't tell what sort of a game Vanderhoof is up to. Now, come on down to breakfast, boys." After the meal Dick hired a large three-seated buckboard, and he and his chums were driven off toward the mines. The news had quickly gone around that they were young college students, who had come West to get practical illustrations bearing on their studies. Tim stood on the hotel steps looking after Dick and his chums. As the carriage disappeared around a turn in the road someone came up to the newsboy and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned quickly and saw, standing beside him, a well-dressed lad about his own age. The youth wore a showy watch chain and assumed a confident air that was not at all in keeping with his years. "How's my friend, Dick Hamilton?" he asked, nodding in the direction of the carriage. "Dick Hamilton," spoke Tim, in a sort of daze. "Yes, Dick Hamilton, of Hamilton Corners. I suppose he came out here to see about the mines he and his millionaire father invested in." "Mines," repeated Tim, somewhat surprised to thus learn that Dick's object was already discovered. "Yes, mines," went on the other youth. "Oh, I know all about it. Dick thought he was cute, pretending to come here with a bunch of college lads. But I'm on to him, and so are the others." "Who are you?" asked Tim, boldly. "Just tell Dick that Simon Scardale was asking for him," replied the flashily-dressed youth, as he moved away. "I'll not give him my address, because I don't believe he'd like to call on me, but just tell him Simon Scardale was asking for him," and, with a mocking bow, Simon jumped on a pony and galloped off down the street. CHAPTER XXIV A NIGHT TRIP Dick and his chums saw many interesting sights on their drive to the mines. All about them were evidences of the hustling West, and the noise of the stamping mills, or machines, which crush up the rocks and ore to enable the precious metals to be extracted from them could be heard on every side. They met many teams hauling ore from the mines to distant "stamps," and saw throngs of miners in their rough, but picturesque, garb, tramping along. "Do you think they'll let us visit the mines?" asked Dick of the driver. "We want to find out all we can about 'em." "Oh, I guess so. This is a free and easy country. Visitors are always welcome, providin' they don't want to know too much," and the driver winked his eye. "Too much?" repeated Dick. "Yes. Lots of men out here don't care to have their past history raked over. It ain't always healthy, son, to ask a man where he came from, or why he left there. There's secrets, you understand, that a man don't like strangers to know." "I understand," replied Dick, with a laugh. "But we only want to see how they get the gold out of mines." "Oh, yes, you can see that," was the driver's answer. "But there's lots of mines nearer than the Hop Toad and the Dolphin; lots of 'em." "Aren't those good mines?" asked Dick, anxious to get the opinion of what might be presumed to be an unprejudiced observer. "Well, so folks say," was the cautious answer. "All mines is good--until they're found out to be bad. I guess they're getting gold out of both mines. Leastways, that's what the men that's working 'em say." When the buckboard with its passengers arrived at the Hop Toad mine the driver called to a man who seemed to be in charge: "Say, Nick, here's a crowd of college students that want to see how you make gold. Any objections?" The man addressed looked up quickly. Dick knew at once, from a description the lawyer had sent to Mr. Hamilton, that the man was Nick Smith, commonly known as "Forty-niner Smith," an old-time miner, who was in charge of the active operations at the two mines Dick and his father were interested in. But Dick resolved not to disclose his own identity unless it became necessary to do so. "Come on, and welcome," responded Forty-niner Smith, with an assumed heartiness, but Dick did not like the look on the man's face. "We're just settin' off a blast," the miner went on. "Th' tenderfeet kin see a bucket full of gold in a minute." The boys joined a group of waiting miners, who regarded them curiously. All about were piles of ore and, not far away, were the ruins of a stamp-mill. "Our stamp's out of business," said Smith, noting Dick's glance at it. "We send our ore, and that from the Dolphin, down to the Wild Tiger mill. They're crushing it for us. Ah, boys, there she goes!" There was a dull rumble from a hole in the ground, and the earth seemed to tremble. Then some smoke lazily floated from the mouth of the mine. "As soon as it clears away they'll send up some gold ore," went on Smith, and, in a short time, a big iron bucket came to the surface on a strong, wire cable. It was filled with what looked like pieces of stone, but Smith, taking some of the fragments, passed them to Dick. "See that yellow stuff!" he exclaimed, pointing to numerous shining particles. "That's pure gold! Here, take some samples along," he added, in a burst of generosity. "We'll never miss 'em," and he filled the hands of the four boys with the precious metal. "This is one of the richest mines in this locality," he added. "Now come on over and I'll show you the Dolphin," and he led the way toward the ruins of the stamp-mill. "Somebody dropped a dynamite cartridge near it," he explained as he passed it. "But we don't mind. We've ordered two new ones. I guess they've got through blasting here. Yes, here comes some ore," he went on as a bucket of the stuff that looked like broken cobblestones came to the surface. Dick's heart beat fast. At last he was looking at the mine in which he had invested two thousand dollars. And, best of all, real gold was being taken from it. At least it looked like real gold, and had the same appearance as that from the Hop Toad mine. Besides, if it was not gold, why would the men work so hard to get it up? "Maybe I'm having all my trouble for my pains," thought Dick. "I guess these mines are good, after all. Vanderhoof may have been a swindler, but this looks as if dad and I had made good investments." "Here, have some of this ore," added Smith, with another show of generosity. "We'll never miss it. Have it made into watch charms or scarf pins. That's what lots of 'em do." "Can we go down in the mine?" asked Frank Bender. "Not to-day," replied Smith, with a sharp look at Dick. "You see it's a little dangerous, so soon after a blast, unless you've had some experience. Come out some other day and maybe you can. Glad to see visitors any time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll have to go and see about sending some of this ore to the stamp-mill. It's so rich we have to send a guard with it to protect it from thieves," he added, in a burst of confidence. "Well, I guess we've seen enough," spoke Dick. "Come on, boys." As they rode back to the hotel, Dick soon decided on a plan of action. He would take to a government assayer the ore he and his companions had received, and learn whether the mine was or was not a good one. This time there would be no chance for deception, he thought. He had seen, with his own eyes, the ore taken from the mine. The government assayer, he knew, would tell the truth about the value of it. Then he could be satisfied that his investment, as well as his father's, was a good one. Explaining his purpose to the boys they readily gave Dick their samples of ore, though he suggested they save small pieces for souvenirs, which they did. "Maybe you'd better see the lawyer your father wrote to," suggested Walter Mead, when they were almost at the hotel. "Good idea," declared Dick, but he could not carry it out, for, on inquiring, he learned that the lawyer had gone on a journey and would not be back for a month. "I'll go ahead on my own responsibility," Dick decided. "I think I'll hunt up the government assayer. I wonder where Tim is?" The newsboy was not about the hotel, and, thinking he had gone off to see the sights, Dick did not look for him. He got the address of the assayer from the hotel proprietor, and was soon at the official's office. "So you want some of this Hop Toad, and Dolphin ore tested, eh?" inquired the assayer. "Well, you're not the first person who has brought me some. I tested some for a man named Hamilton, away out East, some time ago. His lawyer brought it to me. I found it good then and I guess it's good yet." "Was it really good?" asked Dick, eagerly, and then, judging the government official could be trusted, he told the object of his western trip. "Young man," said the assayer, when Dick had finished, "I'll tell you all I know. This ore is good. It's very rich. In fact, I don't need to assay it to tell that it runs many dollars to the ton. But one thing I can't tell you to a certainty is that it came from the Hop Toad or Dolphin mine. You see we assayers have to take the word of the miners as to where the ore comes from. All we do is to make a test, and, by finding out how much gold there is to a certain amount of ore, figure out how much it will assay to a ton of the same ore. That's the basis on which mines are valued." "I can assure you that this ore we have came from the Dolphin and Hop Toad mines," said Dick. "We saw it taken out." "Seeing isn't always believing, when it comes to mines," replied the assayer. "Still it may have been taken directly from the drifts. I wouldn't say it to everyone," he went on, "but I believe there is something crooked about those mines. I have thought so for some time, but I can't decide just what it is. They have a reputation of being very rich, and the ore assays well, but I don't like the actions of the men running them." "Do you think I have been cheated?" asked Dick. "I do, but I can't give my reasons for it." "Then what would you advise?" "Well, you're out here to investigate. Keep on investigating. I'm a government official and I can't take either side. But if I were you," and he came close to Dick and spoke in a low tone, "I'd visit that mine when none of the men were around. I think they knew you were coming and prepared for you." "Why?" asked Dick, much surprised. "Well, I can't tell you all my reasons now. Do as I advise, and try to inspect the mines when no one is around." "When would be the best time for that?" "At night. That's the only time it would be safe. But be very careful. This is a queer country. Men act quickly out here and they don't always stop to ask questions before they shoot. But you boys are quick and sharp and--well, good luck to you, that's all I can say." "I'm much obliged to you," answered Dick. "I'll do as you advise." As he and his chums left the assayer's office they met Tim, who had returned to the hotel, and, on inquiring, had learned where they had gone. "Have a good time?" asked Dick, of his newsboy friend. "Not so very," replied Tim, rather solemnly. "Why not?" "Because I was chasin' after a fellow what called himself Simon Scardale, and I couldn't catch him." "Simon Scardale here?" exclaimed Dick. "That's what he is, and he's on to our game," replied Tim. "Dick, youse has got to act quick, I guess." For a few moments Dick was too surprised to know what to say. He began to see through it now. Simon was a friend of Vanderhoof, and, though he might not be mixed up in the swindling games, he had, likely, given information that would prevent the millionaire's son from accomplishing his object. Dick was in a maze. He was not altogether sure that the mines were a swindle, but he strongly suspected it. Simon's presence in the western city seemed to argue that some strange game was about to be played. "We must talk this over," decided Dick. "Come on, boys. We'll go back to the hotel and have a conference. Then we can decide what to do." In Dick's room the chums went over all the points of the matter. But, try as they did, they could not see a reason for Simon's presence in Yazoo City, nor for his remarks to Tim. "But dat government feller give youse good advice," declared the newsboy. "Why don't youse go out to de mine? Maybe youse kin git on to der game. I'm wid youse." "I believe I will," decided Dick. "Tim, you and Frank and I will go. Yes, Walter, you and Bricktop had better stay at the hotel," he added, as he saw a look of disappointment come over the faces of the other two boys. "Five would be too many, and, by some of us staying here, there will be less liability of suspicion. We'll make a night trip to the mine and, if it's at all possible, I'll go down inside." "Dat's de way to talk!" exclaimed Tim. Cautiously they made their plans. Dick decided he and his two companions would walk to the mines, as, if they hired a rig, it would become known to Smith or Simon, who were probably spying on their actions. Tim related how he had tried to follow Simon when he rode off on the pony, but had been unsuccessful. "It's a nice moonlight night," said Dick, when the plans had been made. "We can take some candles with us and I guess we can get down the cable at the mine. Then we'll see if there's any crooked work going on." After supper Tim, Frank and Dick started off. They little realized what was before them, or perhaps they would not have been so light-hearted. CHAPTER XXV DOWN IN A GOLD MINE "It's going to take over two hours to get out there," said Dick, as he and his companions tramped on. "I don't know how long we'll stay. It all depends on circumstances. If they discover us we'll not stay as long as we otherwise would," and he laughed. "But I guess it's an all-night job. Well, the road is a good one, and it's a nice night." "That's what it is," answered Frank. "That moon looks as if it was pure silver, hung up there in the sky." "You're getting poetical," commented Dick. "Dat oughter be a gold moon to be right in de swim," was Tim's opinion. "What do you expect to do when you get to the mine?" asked Frank, as, now that they were beyond the borders of Yazoo City, they were not afraid to talk of their object. "I hardly know," answered Dick. "What I want to find out is whether or not that mine is a fake one." "How do youse tell a fake gold mine?" asked Tim. "Is it like a lead nickel or counterfeit money so youse can tell by bitin' a chunk of it?" "Hardly," replied Dick, with a laugh. "I've been reading up about mines lately, and, according to the book, the most common way of making a fake mine is to 'salt' it, or 'sweat' it." "Salt it?" repeated Frank. "I've heard of salting cattle, but never mines." "That doesn't describe it very well," went on Dick, "but that's what they call it. Sometimes it is termed 'sweating.' By either way it means making the ore in the mine look as if it was filled with gold, when, in fact, the gold had only been put there by some man who wanted a worthless mine to look like a good one." "How do they do it?" asked Tim. "The most common way is to take some real gold dust, put it into a shotgun, load it heavily with powder and shoot it at the side of the mine. The gold particles are shot into the rock a little way and it appears like real ore. They do this several times down the sides of a rocky mine and it looks very much like the real thing. After a man has bought the mine and begins to dig, he discovers it's all a fake." "Wow!" exclaimed Tim. "T'ink of shootin' gold out of a gun. I wish somebody'd take a few shots at me. Easy ones, of course, so's I could live to enjoy it." "There are other ways of making fake mines," went on Dick, "but I didn't read much about them." "Do you think the Hop Toad and Dolphin mines are fakes?" asked Frank. "That's what I'm afraid of. But I'm pretty sure Smith and his confederates didn't use any such method as shooting the gold into the rocks. It's in too deep for that, and they could hardly hope to fool the assayer that way. No, they must have some new scheme, and maybe I can discover it." The boys walked along briskly, and, almost before they realized it, they saw that they were approaching the mine. "Now, go easy," advised Dick. "We first want to see if there is anyone in sight. If not, we'll take a trip down." Near the mouth of the shaft was some machinery used to lift the bucket from the mine. The boys could see the dull gleam of the coals under the boiler of the hoisting apparatus, for the fire had been banked. But there was no sign of anyone around, and, after peering cautiously about, the boys reached the edge of the shaft. "Now, if dey had an elevator fer us it would be dead easy," spoke Tim. "But I don't see how youse is goin' to git down." "Wait until I take a look," replied Dick. He approached the mouth of the mine and uttered an exclamation that brought the other boys to his side. "There's a ladder leading down," he said. "We can use that. Now to explore a gold mine." Seeing that he had his candles and matches ready, Dick began to descend. The other boys waited until he was down some distance and then followed. The ladder, as they could see, was built against the side of the shaft, and it was far enough away so that the ascending or descending bucket did not touch it. "Hold on!" cried Dick, from the dark depths. "I'm going to light a candle." Presently a faint gleam came up the shaft, and Tim and Frank could make out Dick's form standing below them on a rung of the ladder. They also lighted candles, and the descent continued. In about a minute Dick called again: "Easy now, fellows; I've struck bottom. Got down to the first level, I guess." In a little while Tim and Frank joined him. They found they were standing in a sort of cave, hollowed out under ground. Resting at the foot of the shaft was a big bucket, attached to the wire cable that extended to the hoisting drum. "Is dis all dere is to de mine?" asked Tim. "No, there seems to be a gallery leading off to no one knows where," replied Dick, pointing to a gloomy hole. "Come on, boys, I haven't seen any gold yet," and he waved his candle to and fro. It flickered over the rocky walls of the mine. They glistened with water that oozed from many crevices, but there was no glitter of the precious metal. The boys walked cautiously along the gallery, or tunnel, that extended at right angles to the perpendicular shaft. Suddenly, Dick, who was in the lead, stopped short. "Hush!" he exclaimed, in a whisper. "I hear voices." The boys listened. From somewhere in the darkness ahead of them came an indistinct murmur. "Come ahead, easy!" whispered the millionaire's son. They advanced on tiptoes. The murmur of voices became louder. Then, as the boys made a turn in the tunnel, a strange scene was suddenly presented to them. In a sort of cave, formed by the widening of the gallery, a number of men stood in a group. Several torches, stuck into cracks in the rocky wall, gave light. But, strangest of all, was the occupation of the men. One of them was stirring what seemed like a mass of mortar in a wooden box, such as masons use. Into it another was pouring from a sack, gleaming, golden, yellow particles, which, as the light gleamed on them, glittered like gold. "Seems like throwing the yellow stuff away," remarked the man who held the sack. "What of it. We'll get it back five times over," replied the one who, with a hoe, was stirring the stuff. "It's like planting gold in a garden. It grows, you know. This mine is our garden." "They're 'salting' the mine," whispered Dick to his companions. Off to one side another man was drilling holes in the soft rock. The musical clink of his hammer on the drill sounded faint and far off, so muffled was it. "Haven't you got that stuff ready yet?" called the man with the drill. "I've got all the holes bored. Hurry up and get it in or it won't be hard by to-morrow, and there's no telling when that Hamilton kid may take a notion to drop in and visit his mine," and he laughed. "Oh, I guess I can keep him away for a few days yet," answered one, whom Dick recognized as Forty-niner Smith. "I've got a game I haven't played. But I guess this stuff is mixed enough. Say, it's the best scheme I've struck yet for 'sweating' a mine. Beats the shotguns all to pieces." From their hiding place the boys watched what the men did. The mixture with the gold particles in it was poured into the holes the man had dug. The boys could see now that it was not mortar, but concrete, which was being used. To Dick the whole scheme was now plain. The men poured a lot of gold dust into some concrete, and mixed it up with water until it was about as thick as paste. Then they put it into holes drilled in the rocky walls of the mine. The concrete hardened and became almost like the rock itself. Then, when a blast was set off, the rock, concrete and gold was all blown into small pieces, so that it looked as if the ore was of good, gold-bearing quality, whereas it was nothing but ordinary rock "salted." That was how the men were working to fool investors. They had taken an abandoned mine, from which all the gold had been dug, and, by this ingenious method, made it look, to the ignorant, as though it was a regular bonanza. "Well," remarked Dick, in a whisper, "we've discovered the trick. I guess dad's money and mine, too, is 'gone up the flume,' as the miners say. But I'm glad----" At that moment, Frank, who was balancing himself on a bit of rock, in order to see better, stumbled and fell, making quite a noise. The men turned as if a shot had been fired. "What's that?" asked Smith, in a hoarse whisper. "Some loose rock caving in," answered one of the men. "Come on, finish up. We've only got one more hole to fill, and by that time Nash will be ready to hoist us up." "That wasn't falling rock!" declared Smith. "Boys, I believe someone is spying on us. I'm going to take a look." Seizing one of the torches he started toward where Dick and his companions were hiding. "Come on!" exclaimed the millionaire's son, pulling Tim and Frank by the arm. "We've got to get out of this!" They turned and ran, their footsteps echoing on the rocky floor of the mine. They could hear Smith coming after them. His torch flashed around the turn in the gallery. He caught sight of them. "Stop!" he cried. "Stop or I'll shoot!" CHAPTER XXVI SIMON'S CONFESSION Dick gave a hurried look behind him. He could see something shining in Smith's hand--something that the light from the torch glinted on. "Keep on!" hoarsely whispered Tim. "He can't hit us down here. Keep on!" Stumbling, almost falling, their candles showing but faint blue points of light as the flame flickered away from the wicks because of their speed, the boys ran toward the bottom of the shaft. "If we reach the ladder I think we can get away," said Frank, panting from his exertion. It seemed as if it was a mile back to the shaft, but it was only a few hundred feet. The boys expected every minute to hear the shot ring out. They caught the sounds of the footfalls of their pursuer and they sounded nearer and nearer. He was familiar with the gallery and his torch gave him better light to go by than did the candles give the boys. Once more the angry miner's voice called: "Hold on, whoever you are, or I'll shoot!" "Quick! There's the shaft!" exclaimed Dick, pointing to where the big bucket rested at the bottom of the opening. The boys made a rush for it. At the same instant a shot rang out in the darkness, the flash from the revolver lighting up the mine cavern with sudden glare. They could hear the bullet strike far above their heads with a vicious "ping!" Clearly, Smith was only firing to scare them, and did not want to run any chances of hurting them, as he had aimed high. Then a strange thing happened. The cable, attached to the bucket, began to wind upward. There was considerable slack to it and the bucket did not immediately follow. It was evident that the machinery at the shaft mouth had started and that the ore-carrier was about to be hoisted up. An inspiration came to Dick. "Into the bucket!" he called. "It's big enough to hold us all and we'll be hauled to the top! We can escape that way!" Tim and Frank needed no further urging. They clambered over the iron sides of the bucket, followed by Dick. And not a second too soon, for, as he set his feet on the iron bottom, the cable tauted and the bucket started upward. "Come back here!" yelled Smith, reaching the bottom of the shaft just in time to see the conveyor disappearing. He made an ineffectual grab for it, but, as his torch flared up when he threw it on the ground, the better to use his hands, Dick, looking over the edge of the iron receptacle, saw that the ugly miner was fifteen feet below them. "Pull your head in!" advised Frank. "He might shoot!" But Smith had no such intentions. Making a sort of megaphone of his hands, he shouted up the shaft: "Nash! Nash! Stop the engine! Don't hoist the bucket! We're not in it!" But the engineer at the mouth of the shaft never heard him. Higher and higher went the bucket, carrying the boys. They looked up the black opening and could see the moon shining overhead. "Lucky escape!" murmured Dick. "I wonder how that bucket came to go up just when we needed it most?" He learned a minute later. As the conveyor reached the surface and stopped, Dick and his friends stepped out. They saw that the fire under the boiler was burning brightly, and that a man, who had not been there when they arrived, was attending to the hoisting engine. As he caught sight of them he exclaimed: "Who are you? Where's Smith?" "Down there," replied Dick, not caring to go into details. "Come on, boys." "But something's wrong," went on Nash, the engineer. "I was told to come here about one o'clock, get up steam and be ready to hoist the bucket when I heard a revolver shot. I heard it and I hoisted away. But where's Smith and his men? He told me he'd fire a shot when he was ready to come up. I heard it plain enough, but who are you?" "Smith will explain," replied Dick. "We came up first, that's all," he added, coolly. "Come on, boys." Leaving behind them a much-puzzled engineer, the three boys hurried away from the mine. They were soon on the road leading back to Yazoo City. "Do you think they'll chase us?" asked Frank. "I don't believe so," replied Dick. "I guess Smith is worried enough as it is. He may suspect who we were, but I don't believe he knows for certain. However, we'll keep in the shadows for a way." This they did, but there was no need of apprehension, for none of the miners pursued them. "Well, youse had your money's worth of excitement, anyway," commented Tim. "Say, I t'ought it was all up wid me dere, one spell. But youse had your nerve wid you, Mr. Dick." "Well, we had some luck with us, too," replied the millionaire's son. "Those fellows played right into our hands. They must have gone down the mine early in the evening, and arranged with the engineer to come back, when they were finished with their 'salting' process, to hoist up their tools and things so as to leave nothing suspicious around. When Smith fired at us the engineer, who arrived after we had gone down the mine, thought it was the signal agreed upon and he hoisted away. I guess he was surprised when he saw us get out of the bucket." "And I guess Smith will be surprised when he finds out you know how he and his gang fixed up the fake mine," remarked Frank. "I guess the best plan will be to say nothing to him about it," said Dick. "I don't see anything for me to do but go back home and report to dad. We've been swindled, and I'm out two thousand dollars. I don't know how much he lost. The Hop Toad and Dolphin mines aren't worth anything, I'm afraid." "Did youse lose two t'ousand dollars?" asked Tim, as the boys hurried along the moonlit road. "I'm afraid so." "An' youse ain't agoin' to faint over it? Say, youse has got nerve, youse has," added the newsboy, admiringly. "Youse oughter be in N' York. How'd you come to put so much money in a fake mine?" "I didn't know it was a fake," replied the wealthy youth. The boys reached their hotel in the gray dawn of the early morning. They were worn out and tired from their long tramp and the excitement of the night. As they entered the lobby, where a sleepy clerk was on duty behind the desk, the latter called to them: "I say, is one of you named Dick Hamilton?" "I am," replied the millionaire's son. "Well, I've got a message for you from a lad named Simon Scardale." "Simon Scardale?" repeated Dick. "Yes. He was badly hurt last night by a fall from a horse he was riding. He's over at the other hotel, and he sent word that he wanted to see Dick Hamilton as soon as he came in. I looked over the register, but I couldn't see anyone by that name, and I thought he'd made a mistake." Dick recalled his scrawling signature on the book, and did not wonder that the clerk could not make it out. Telling Tim and Frank to go upstairs and notify Bricktop and Walter of their safe arrival, Dick started for the Imperial Inn. He found the night clerk on duty, and, telling his object, was shown upstairs by a sleepy bell-boy. As he entered the room he saw Simon in bed. The youth's face was pale, and his head was covered with bandages. Two doctors were within call. "Is that you, Dick Hamilton?" he asked in a weak voice. "Yes. What do you want, Simon?" inquired Dick, softly, for the sight of Simon's sufferings banished all resentment. "I'm afraid I'm badly hurt," went on Simon, "and I want to tell you something before--before I go away from here. Come closer." "Now don't excite yourself," advised one of the doctors. "I won't, but I must tell Dick," went on Simon. "I'm sorry I put up that game to steal Grit," he said, almost in a whisper. "But I needed money very much and I didn't see any other way to get it. Guy didn't have anything to do with it." "I know," said Dick, softly. "I played another mean trick on you," went on the injured youth. "I've been spying on you for Vanderhoof. After I got Grit and you saw me that day at the hotel, I was afraid. I knew Vanderhoof, or Colonel Dendon, as he sometimes calls himself, and I went to him. He said he could give me a job out West and he sent me here. Then, I guess it must have been the day you started, he telegraphed me to be on the lookout for you, and to inform Forty-niner Smith when you arrived. I did." "Were you in the game to help work off a worthless mine on me?" asked Dick, a little resentfully. "No, no," replied Simon, earnestly. "I only learned of that by accident. When I found out the mines were no good I was going to have nothing more to do with any of the gang. But Smith told me your father had once got the best of Vanderhoof in a business deal and that this was the only way they could get their money back--to sell him a worthless mine. They said it was done every day and--and I believed them. I only kept them informed of your movements so they could fix things up to--to deceive you, I suppose." "Yes," assented Dick. "But I'm done with 'em now," went on Simon. "I was riding out to the mine to-night, after I saw you three start for it. Oh, I kept close watch on you," he said in answer to Dick's look of surprise. "I started for the mine to warn them you were coming, as I knew they were going to do some 'salting.' My horse threw me before I'd gone far and--well, I'm pretty badly hurt, I guess." "Now that will do," interrupted one of the physicians. "You can tell the rest another time. You must be quiet now." "There isn't any more to tell," said Simon, in a whisper. "That's all, Dick, but I feel better for having told you." "Well, Simon," said the millionaire's son, "I'm sorry you are hurt. I forgive you. I guess you didn't realize what you were doing." "That's it. I never realized what bad men Vanderhoof, Smith and the others were. I'm done with them forever. I guess I can go to sleep now." He turned over and closed his eyes. Dick softly left the room, followed by one of the doctors. "Is he badly hurt?" he asked of the medical man, when they were out in the corridor. "Well, he is hurt internally. I think we can pull him through with careful nursing. Is he a friend of yours?" "I used to think he was," answered Dick. "I guess he got into bad company, that's the trouble. I'd like to help him if I could. Here, doctor, take this and see that he has good nursing, will you, please," and Dick thrust a hundred-dollar bill into the physician's hand. "But this--this is quite a sum of money." "Well, I guess dad would want me to spend it," replied Dick. "I've got lots more. Anyhow, I couldn't bear to think of Simon suffering, even if he did do me some mean turns. Will you look after him, doctor? I've got to go back East." "I will, young man, and he can thank you for befriending him. I guess those men won't have anything more to do with him after this, and it's hard for a lad like him to be sick in a wild country like this. I'll see that he has the best of care." Pondering over the strange events of the last few hours, Dick went back to his hotel. It was now nearly breakfast-time and he was ready for the meal, especially the hot coffee. Tim and Frank, also, did full justice to it, and then, being very sleepy, they went to bed, as did Dick. "We'll start back home to-morrow," the millionaire's son said to his chums as he went to his room. CHAPTER XXVII THE PANIC Although a little apprehensive that Smith and his gang might make trouble for him, Dick leisurely made his preparations for going back East, when, late in the afternoon, after a long slumber, he awoke much refreshed. But the miner and his men did not appear in Yazoo City. Dick called on the government assayer and told him what he and his chums had seen. "That's a new way of 'salting' a mine," the official said. "A very good one, too, from a swindler's standpoint. Now, if you want to, you can make a complaint against those men and have them arrested." "I'm afraid it wouldn't make the mines any good, or save the money dad and I put into them," said Dick. "No, I don't believe it would. Besides, they are a slick crowd, I suppose, and you'd have trouble convicting them. Perhaps it is better to let it drop. I'll be on the watch, however, and if I hear of anyone about to invest in the stock of any mines Smith and his men are interested in I'll warn him." Dick called to say good-bye to Simon. He found the bad boy a little improved, and when informed that he would be well taken care of the tears came into the eyes of the youth who had done so much to injure Dick. "You--you're a brick!" he stammered. "I don't deserve it, but if--if I ever get well maybe I can do something for you." "Oh, that's all right," replied Dick, somewhat affected by Simon's misery. "You'll soon be as well as ever, and when you do get around again, you'd better steer clear of such men as Colonel Dendon." "I will," promised Simon, and he tried to return the pressure of Dick's hand, but it was hard work, for he was very weak. Early the next morning Dick and his friends started for home. Dick was a little thoughtful, and Frank asked: "Worrying about your lost money, Dick?" "Well, not so much about the money as I am over the consequences. I counted on this mine investment being a good one. But, I have another. I guess my stock in the milk concern will pan out pretty well." "If it don't youse had better come to N' York wid me, an' sell papes," advised Tim. "I'll think of it," promised Dick, with a smile. The ride back home was uneventful. Tim decided he would not go back to Hamilton Corners, as he was anxious to get to New York. "Got to look after me paper business," he said, with a laugh. "I left me pardner in charge an' he's a little chap. Some of de big guys might drive him offen de swell corner we has. It's de best corner in N' York fer doin' business," he explained. "I stands in wid de cop on de beat an' he sees I ain't bothered. But I'm gittin' worried. I see some of de yellow journals is predictin' bad times an' I wants to be prepared for 'em. Besides, I've got some customers what owe me--one man run up a bill of a quarter jest 'fore I went on dat fresh-air racket, an' I want to collect it. So I t'ink I'll git back to little old N' York." The boys parted from Tim with regret, for they liked his sterling character, which shone out through a coat of rough manners. He changed at a junction point for a train that went direct to the big city, and gaily waved his hand to them as it departed. He had profited much by coming to Hamilton Corners, for Dick had fitted him up with some good clothes, and, at parting, had slipped a bank bill into his hand. Mr. Hamilton was glad to see his son back, and listened with interest to the account of the western trip. "And so our money is gone," finished Dick. "Well, there's no use crying over spilled milk, as the farmer's wife used to say," remarked the millionaire, with a calmness that Dick could not help envying. "It isn't the first time I've lost money by unwise speculation, but it's all in the game. I'm sorry for you, though, Dick." "I'm sorry for myself. It looks as if I had a poor head for business." "Oh, you'll learn," consoled his father. "It takes time." "Yes, and there's Uncle Ezra waiting for me," went on Dick, as though he could see the harsh old man outside in a carriage, waiting to carry him off to the gloomy Firs. "When he hears of this he'll think sure I'm doomed to go and board with him." "The year is quite a way from being completed," said Mr. Hamilton. "Lots of things may happen before your next birthday." "I hope they do," said Dick, rather ruefully. "Anyway, I have my milk stock. They didn't send for another assessment while I was away, did they?" "No, and I see the stock has advanced in value a point or two." "Then I may be all right, after all. But I think I'll be on the lookout for another investment, and it's not going to be a gold mine, either," finished Dick. It was about a week after this that, coming down to breakfast one morning, Dick was met by the butler. "There's a gentleman waiting to see you, Master Dick," said the servant. "To see me, Gibbs? Who is it?" "I don't know, but he came very early and he says he has something to show you. He says he wants you to help him with it." "Maybe it's another of those reporters," said Dick. "I will see him right after breakfast." "I'd rather you see me now," interrupted a voice, and to Dick's astonishment there walked into the dining-room, from the library where he had been waiting, a little man, whose hair seemed to stick out at every point of the compass. His clothes were rather ragged, and, as he advanced, he kept running his hands through his hair. To do this he had to transfer, first from one arm to the other, a large box he carried. "I'll not take much of your time," said the little man. "All I want is your assistance in having a lot of these machines made. You see how this one works," and, stooping over, he placed the box on the floor. From it came a clicking sound, as the little man, with his head tilted to one side, waited with watch in hand. "It will go off in three minutes," he said. Following the startling announcement of the little man Dick and Gibbs, the butler, seemed paralyzed. The room was so still that the ticking of the machine on the floor sounded like an immense alarm clock. Then, as the seconds passed and the stranger stood calmly looking alternately at Dick, Gibbs, and the box, the butler, with a sudden start back to life, exclaimed: "Jump out of the window, Master Dick! I'll attend to this lunatic!" "I'm not a lunatic!" shouted the little man. "I'm Professor Messapatomia!" "Jump!" shouted Gibbs to Dick. "It isn't far to the ground. This thing will go off in a minute!" "Half a minute," calmly corrected the stranger, as he snapped his watch shut. At that instant Mary, the waitress, came into the room with a large pitcher of water. As Dick turned to flee, for he realized that he might be courting death to remain, should the lunatic's infernal apparatus go off, Gibbs grabbed the pitcher. "I'll fix it!" the butler cried, throwing the water at the ticking machine. "But jump, all the same, Master Dick!" As Dick prepared to jump from one of the dining-room windows, believing that, as he had often read of such things occurring, he was to be made the victim of a crank, the machine gave a louder click. Professor Messapatomia, with a sudden motion of his arm, diverted the aim of Gibbs, and the water flew to one side of the box. At the same moment there was a jar, as from a heavy spring, and a shower of white objects scattered about the room. "There!" exclaimed the professor, triumphantly, "that's how it works! Very simple, you see, and it scatters the bait all around. Then all you have to do is to take your pole and line and catch all the fish you want." "Fish!" repeated Dick, somewhat in a daze. He had expected the house to be half-blown apart, yet the machine only scattered harmless pieces of paper about. "Fish, of course," replied the professor, "What did you think this was?" "Aren't you an Anarchist, and isn't that an infernal machine?" demanded Gibbs, wiping away some of the water he had accidentally spilled over his head when the professor knocked up his arm. "Anarchist? Infernal machine?" repeated Professor Messapatomia. "Why, my dear sir, that is my latest invention of a fish-catching device. You see, you wind up the spring, and you set it to go off at any hour you wish. Then you put some finely chopped pieces of meat in this top pan. That is the bait. Only in this case, as I didn't want to muss up the room, I used bits of paper. At the proper time the machine, which you have set beside the stream where you desire to fish, goes off. The bait is thrown all over the surface of the water. It attracts the fish, and when you throw in your line you have no end of bites. It's the greatest idea of the age! It will revolutionize fishing! It's simply marvelous! "I have just perfected the invention, but I need money to put the machine on the market. You, sir," turning to Dick, "are just the person to help me. I read of your immense wealth and that you are fond of all sports. Fishing is a sport, therefore I came to you. All I need is ten thousand dollars and it will make both of us rich in a year. Now, if you will kindly write me out a check for that amount, I'll bid you good-morning, and you can go on with your breakfast which I have interrupted." He began to pick up the scattered bits of paper, Mary helping him, while Gibbs gazed rather stupidly at the queer figure with the bristling hair. Then Dick laughed. "Well, you certainly gave me a scare," he said. "I thought you wanted to blow the place up. But I'm sorry I can't invest ten thousand dollars in that machine. It seems to me it would be just as easy to stand on the shore and throw the pieces of meat in the water by hand." "Yes, of course, you could do it that way," admitted the professor, "but it isn't half so scientific. However, I'll not urge you," and, picking up his apparatus, he left the room after a low bow to Dick. "He went away with less trouble than I expected," remarked Dick, as he looked at the wet place on the floor and at some of the bits of paper that still remained. "Well, Gibbs, I admit I was scared for a minute." "So was I, Master Dick. I shouldn't have let him in, only you had given orders that all respectable-looking visitors were to be treated nicely, and I'm sure he looked respectable in spite of his queer hair." "Oh, yes, he was respectable, all right. It's not your fault, Gibbs. I guess I'll have to draw the line about callers a little closer," concluded Dick as he sat down to breakfast. The summer passed away and fall came. Dick returned to the academy, where he renewed his studies. Several times he was on the point of making another investment, but, as the stock of the milk company went up in value, he felt that this would answer the requirements of his mother's will, and furnish the profit called for. So, though he investigated many schemes that seemed to promise well, he did not take any stock in them. It was in May of the following spring, when, having looked at a quotation of his milk stock, and found that it was a little higher than it had ever been before, Dick walked down to his father's bank to consult him about certain matters. He found Mr. Hamilton in his private office, but the millionaire did not have a cheerful smile on his face. Instead he looked troubled. "What's the matter, dad?" asked Dick. "Well, I don't like the way the money market looks in New York," was the answer. "I've just heard by telegraph that several large banks have failed." "Does it involve you?" "To a certain extent, yes. Things look like a panic, such as we had a few years ago. Still, it may blow over." "I wonder if it will affect the milk company?" "It might. But there, Dick, don't go to worrying. You'll have enough of that to do when you get older. Things may turn out all right." But the worried look did not leave Mr. Hamilton's face, in spite of his attempt to cheer up his son. The next morning when Dick came down to breakfast he saw his father at the table. But, instead of eating, the millionaire was eagerly looking at a newspaper. Dick glanced over his father's shoulder. There, staring at him, in big black letters, was the heading of a long article: GREAT MONEY PANIC! "Are things--are things in bad shape, dad?" asked Dick. "Pretty much so," replied Mr. Hamilton, not looking up. "It's not as bad as I feared, though, and our bank will not suffer. However, lots of small concerns, and some big ones, have failed." Then Dick caught sight of another part of the paper. He could hardly believe his eyes, for, in a prominent part of the page, was an article telling of the failure of the big milk concern in which he had invested. "Dad!" he exclaimed, taking hold of the paper, and pointing to the account. "Yes," replied Mr. Hamilton. "I saw it. Your investment is a failure, Dick." CHAPTER XXVIII HENRY IN TROUBLE For a few moments father and son looked at each other. Dick hardly knew what to say, but the millionaire was evidently used to harder business disappointments than the present one, for he laughed and remarked: "Never mind, Dick. You made a good attempt, but you failed. You have over a month yet in which to comply with the terms of the will. In that time you ought to be able to find some good, paying investment. Look over the paper. There's lots of bad financial news in it, but you may find some good. I must hurry to the bank. This panic will affect a number of our customers. I'm going to be very busy for some days to come." Mr. Hamilton continued with his breakfast as if nothing had happened, but poor Dick's appetite vanished. He had counted so much on his shares in the milk company paying well that he had never thought of failure. Particularly as, of late, they had seemingly increased in value. But, as he learned by looking over the paper after his father left, many older and stronger concerns than the milk company in which he was interested had failed. "Panics are bad things," murmured Dick, which sentiment was echoed by many another person that day. Still Dick was not too much cast down. He knew he was a very wealthy young man, and he had no fear that his father's millions would be disturbed in the general hard times that would be sure to follow. But it hurt his pride that, with all his wealth, he could not do as much as little Tim Muldoon had done--start with nothing and make money. "I'm almost ready to sell papers," mused Dick, with a smile. However, he decided to do nothing rash. He still had more than a month until his birthday--the time limit for making the paying investment--and he felt that in that period something would occur that would enable him to fulfil the conditions of his mother's will. "At any rate, I've got to go to school to-day," he said to himself, as he finished what, for him, was rather a slim breakfast. "I guess I'll come out right in the end. In fact, I've got to if I want to escape Uncle Ezra's clutches." As Dick was coming home from his classes that afternoon, turning over in his mind various plans for making a good investment--from growing mushrooms or raising squabs to starting a brass band or becoming proprietor of a small circus--he saw coming toward him a dilapidated rig. He knew it could be none other than that of Henry Darby. As the horse and wagon approached it seemed to Dick to look, more than ever, ready to fall apart. "Well, Henry," he remarked. "I see you're still in business. The panic hasn't bothered you, has it?" "Not me, so much as it has the horse and wagon," replied Henry, with a laugh. "Don't you think that beast's ribs are nearer caving in than they were the last time you saw it?" "He does look thinner, for a fact," admitted Dick. "He is," and Henry spoke with solemn earnestness. "They were almost touching on either side this morning, but I gave him all the hay I could afford and that sort of spread them apart. As for the wagon--well, I don't need any bell or automobile horn to tell people I'm coming. It rattles enough to be heard two blocks off." "Why don't you get a better outfit?" suggested Dick. "I should think it would pay." "It might pay, but I couldn't. I'll have to get along with this for a while," and Henry looked at the odd assortment of old metal he had collected and was taking to his storage yard. "Isn't the business paying as well as you thought it would, Henry?" "Oh, the business is all right. The trouble is the way the president manages it," and Henry smiled ruefully. "You remember I told you dad had taken most of the surplus capital for one of his schemes," and he looked inquiringly at Dick. "Yes, I remember, you said he thought there were thousands of dollars in it." "Well, they're still there," said Henry, with dry humor. "Dad hasn't been able to induce 'em to come forth and nestle in his or my pockets. That's why I haven't enough money to buy a new horse and wagon. If I had it I could cover more ground in a day and do more business. As for this--this--well, I don't know what to call him. He reminds me of a heap of old iron, sticking out seven ways from Sunday, as the old saying is. You see his bones stick out like so many points." "They do, for a fact," and Dick looked at the horse, that presented more angles than he had ever before imagined a horse possessed. "There's one consolation," went on Henry. "He's cheap, but there's another disadvantage, he looks it. So does the wagon. Whenever I start away from home to collect old metal I always tell dad not to worry if I don't get back that night. There's no telling which will break down first--the horse or the wagon. It's like taking a voyage in a sailing ship, no telling when you'll arrive. "Still," he went on, "there's one advantage. It keeps my journeys from being monotonous. Nothing like having a horse that may develop spavin, ring bone or heaves on the road any minute, or a wagon that may drop all four wheels at once and break every spring. It keeps me from getting lonesome." "I'm sorry to hear the old metal business is so poor," remarked Dick. "What caused the trouble?" "Well, dad got an idea that he knew a lot about old iron and such things. He started in to do the buying and I was to go after the stuff, when he had purchased it, and bring it home. He did buy some iron scrap and a lot of old horseshoes that I made a profit on. Then he heard of some metal at an old factory. Someone told him it had a lot of platinum in it. Now, platinum is very valuable. Dad thought he had struck a bargain. He paid a big price for the stuff. In fact, he used up every cent I had put away in order to get hold of that metal he thought had platinum in it." "Didn't it?" asked Dick, as Henry stopped. "Not a bit. Someone worked off a lot of steel and iron mixed, on poor old dad. I can't sell it anywhere. It's a peculiar mixture of metal. Some new company had it made for their machinery and they busted up. I've got the stuff back in the storage yard now. Can't get rid of it, though I've tried all over. That's where all my money is. So I have to begin all over again." "It's too bad," said Dick, with ready sympathy. "Yes, dad felt quite cut-up over it--for a few days. Then he thought of a new scheme. He says it'll make our fortune if he can only work it. But he hasn't any capital to start it, and, until I work some up in a small way, I haven't any, either. But there, I'm sorry I bothered you with all my troubles. I guess you have enough of your own. I'll pull out somehow." And calling to the horse, that had gone to sleep, Henry managed to arouse the animal and started off, the wagon rattling like a load of steel girders. "Everything seems to be going wrong," murmured Dick, as he walked toward home. "I guess I'll have to help Henry along some more. He deserves it. And I must do something about my own investment. The time is getting shorter." For two weeks Dick thought over many plans, but as fast as he made them he rejected them. Some his father advised him against, and others, after consideration, he decided would not give an adequate return for money invested. He was getting worried, for it was only a little more than a month until his birthday, when, if he had not complied with the provisions of the will, he must spend a year with his Uncle Ezra. The thought of that made him gloomy indeed. He had almost decided, one afternoon, to put some money in a small ice-cream store, which he heard was being started at Lake Dunkirk for the summer excursion season. "There ought to be good money in that," reasoned Dick. "I could get a lot of my friends to buy ice-cream there and it would help me to make a profit. I think I'll look up the manager and see if he'll take a partner." He was about to go out, to put his newly-formed resolution into operation, when the maid announced a gentleman to see him. "Who is it?" asked Dick. "He won't tell me his name. He insists on seeing you at once." "Another crank, I suppose. I thought they were done coming here. Well, show him in." A moment later there entered the room a little man, with a long white beard and snow-white hair. He had the jolliest face imaginable, and looked just like a picture of Santa Claus. "Allow me to introduce myself," he said, with a German accent. "I am Herr Wilhelm Doodlebrod, und I haf de airship at der freight station. When can I gif you an exhibition?" "Airship?" murmured Dick, in bewilderment, While Herr Doodlebrod nodded several times and chuckled, as if it was the best joke in the world. CHAPTER XXIX. THE FLYING MACHINE. Dick looked closely at Herr Doodlebrod, as if to see if the German had a bomb concealed about him, for the millionaire's son believed the man was another of the unfortunate persons who had some impossible scheme he wanted aid in perfecting. "You vill like der airship, yes?" went on the smiling, little, old man. "Ah, he is a beautiful airship!--so strong, so graceful, und he sails along so just like a bird!" Again he smiled, and then he laughed, as though he had just told Dick a very funny story. The German's good nature was catching, and Dick also smiled. "I'm afraid I don't quite understand you," the boy said. "Ach! Dot is easy!" replied Herr Doodlebrod. "See, listen, it is dis vay. I am de greatest inventor of an airships vot efer vas," and he said it as if he meant it, with child-like directness, "I haf der ship vot all der scientists haf long been vaiting for. I haf bring him to your town und I show you how he vorks." "But why did you bring it to me?" asked Dick. "Vhy? Because, listen," and the little man approached closer and began whispering. "I read about you in der papers. Iss it nod so?" and he smiled broadly. "You are der richest young man vot efer vos. Ach, I know!" and he winked one eye at Dick, as though the millionaire's son had tried to conceal something. "So, now I proceed. I hear of your great wealth. I learn you vos a young mans. You are bright, quick, smart. Yes, iss it not? Vell, I invent der airships. I am a shoemaker in my city, many miles from here. Vun day der great ideas comes to me. I see a bat fly. Quick, I say, I will make me a airships like der bat. He is heavier as a bird, yet he flies. So I stop making shoes und I make airships. Iss it not so?" and once more the smile illuminated the kindly face. "Did you succeed?" asked Dick. "Not at first," replied the German, gravely. "Many, many times I t'ink I fly into der air, but I falls to der ground. Sometimes it hurts. Vunce I breaks my leg. But dot iss noddings. Ven I get vell I make improvements. Now I haf der great machine vot flies; yes?" "Where is it?" asked Dick, becoming interested in the queer little man. Then Herr Doodlebrod proceeded to explain. He said he had heard of Dick's wealth, and, needing money to make some improvements in his ship, he had taken it apart, shipped it to Hamilton Corners, and followed the machine. The airship was now at the freight station, he added, and he was about to put it together and give a demonstration. "What for?" asked Dick. "To show you how he vorks. Den you vill believe. You vill invest some money in it, I shall make der improvements, get a better motor, und ve win der government prize of ten thousand dollars." "Government prize?" repeated Dick. The German explained at greater length. The United States Government, in common with other nations, recognizing the future in flying machines for war purposes, had established a sort of competitive test, with a substantial prize for the machine which successfully fulfilled the conditions. The chief ones were that the apparatus must move through the air at a certain distance above the ground, must carry two passengers, must be under perfect control, and must stay up a certain length of time. The German said his machine answered nearly all these requirements, but that he needed some new materials in it, and, more than anything else, a new motor. He had used up all his savings and had tried in vain to get someone to help him. So, hearing of Dick, he had decided to appeal to the millionaire's son. "It iss not so much dot I need," he went on. "If I had five hundred dollars it would be enough. My dear young frient, I appeal to you. I do not ask you for dot moneys. I say just invest it in my machine und ve vill be successful und get der ten thousand dollars. You shall haf five thousand. Iss not dot a good investment?" A sudden idea came to Dick. An investment, promising quick returns was just what he needed. He had tried in vain to find one, and the time was daily growing shorter. Here might be the very chance he desired. But there was one important thing. He must be sure that the airship would fly. If it did not the prize would not be won and he would be out five hundred dollars. Herr Doodlebrod saw the doubt pictured on Dick's face. "I do not ask you to take my word," he said, gravely. "I only ask for a chance to show you. See, I vill bring my machine here. I vill put him togeder und I vill fly in him. Der trouble iss dot I cannot go far enough or stay up long enough vid der motor dot I haf. Wid a new vun I can. I need der money for der new motor. Vill you invest it?" "I will!" exclaimed Dick, suddenly. "Ach! Bless you, my young friend!" and Herr Doodlebrod rushed over to the millionaire's son and threw his arms about Dick, an embrace somewhat difficult to escape from, so hearty was it. "But I must first talk to my father," went on Dick, when Herr Doodlebrod's enthusiasm had somewhat cooled down. "If the ship is a success so far, and by investing five hundred dollars a better one can be entered for the prize, so that I can win part of it, I'm sure he would have no objections." "I go for my airship," said the German. "I bring him here und in two days he is ready to fly." "Better not bring it here," advised Dick. "There isn't much room to try it around the house, and too big a crowd would gather. We'll go off in the country somewhere. My father owns some property about five miles from here. It's a big level field, and I think that will be the best place." "Der very t'ing," assented the German, and Dick told him how to get to it. Herr Doodlebrod hurried off to the freight station to arrange for having his dismantled flying machine brought to the place where the test was to be made. "This may be the very thing I've been looking for," reasoned Dick. "Winning five thousand dollars on an investment of five hundred is pretty good. I guess that will fulfill the conditions of mother's will. The question is: will it fly? But if it doesn't at the first test I'm out nothing. And if it flies with his present engine it surely will with a better one. I must tell dad about it." Mr. Hamilton was not much impressed with Herr Doodlebrod's plan. He admitted that the government had offered a prize for a successful airship, but he thought an old shoemaker was hardly a possible person to win it. "Scientific men have devoted many years of study to the problem," he said, "and they have not solved it yet. Still, of course, there's a chance. As you say, you're out nothing if it doesn't work the first time. But how about after you have put the five hundred dollars in, and the ship doesn't sail?" "If it sails with the old engine it surely ought to with the new," declared Dick, repeating his favorite argument. Mr. Hamilton consented that Dick might make the investment. It was a queer one, he said, but he agreed that if Herr Doodlebrod won the prize, and gave Dick half, the terms of Mrs. Hamilton's will would have been complied with. "I'll get out of going to Uncle Ezra's yet," said the millionaire's son. "The mine failed, the milk company failed, but the airship will beat them all." Herr Doodlebrod was a quick worker. In less time than Dick had believed possible he had the parts of the machine at the place decided on for the test. There, under the inventor's directions, men aided him in putting it together. In shape it looked like a huge bat, and was built on the principle of an aeroplane. At the stern an immense rudder was turned by a small gasolene motor, and there were several smaller rudders for directing the course of the apparatus. There was a little car, of basket-work, amidships, where the operator sat. It was three days before the German was satisfied that all was in readiness for the preliminary test that was to tell if Dick would spend five hundred dollars on improvements. In spite of the attempt to keep the matter quiet the news leaked out, and a big crowd gathered to see Herr Doodlebrod make an attempt to fly. "I do not promise so much to-day," he said, as he saw that all was in readiness. "I vill go up, circle about for a vile, und den I haf to come down. My engine iss not powerful enough. But vid der new one! Ach, den ve vill fly far und vin der prize!" He climbed into the little basket-car. Giving a look over the various handles and levers, and seeing that all was clear ahead, Herr Doodlebrod started the motor. It began to revolve rapidly, crackling like a battery of Gatling guns. "Now I fly!" exclaimed the German, as he threw on the clutch that operated the propeller. The big airship trembled as the massive blades whizzed through the air, and all eyes were fixed on it to detect the moment when it might leave the earth and sail aloft. CHAPTER XXX A DISASTROUS FLIGHT "There it goes!" cried a score of voices, Dick's among them. And, sure enough, the airship moved. Slowly, but gathering speed, like some ungainly creature, it rose into the air in a slanting direction. Up and up it went, until it was about two hundred feet above the earth. Then Herr Doodlebrod shifted a rudder and the machine flew along on a level keel. "Look at her go!" cried Frank Bender, for he and all of Dick's boy chums had been invited to the test. "Gee, but I wish I was in her!" "You'd stand on your head on one of the propeller blades, I suppose," commented Walter Mead. "Look, he's turning around!" exclaimed Frank, to change the subject from his acrobatic abilities, concerning which he was a bit sensitive. Sure enough, Herr Doodlebrod was flying around in a circle. He seemed to be able to manage the ship perfectly, and Dick was delighted. He already saw the prize won with the improved craft, and himself holder of half the money. "Look out, he's falling!" yelled Bricktop, suddenly, and the crowd of men, women, boys and girls strained their eyes to see what was happening. The airship was certainly coming down. "Oh, he'll be killed! Isn't it terrible!" exclaimed Birdy Lee, who, with some of her girl friends, had come to watch the test. "I'm going to faint!" declared Nettie Henderson, covering her eyes with her hands. "No, he isn't falling; he's steering it down!" declared Dick. "He's all right!" This announcement relieved the feelings of all. Herr Doodlebrod was indeed coming down. But he had his ship under perfect control, as shown by the manner in which he steered it in a half circle so as to return to the place from which he had started. In a few minutes he allowed it to come to a stop on the ground, in the midst of the throng, where it alighted as gently as a bird. "Vot I tell you?" he asked of Dick, triumphantly. "I could haf stayed longer, but my engine he vill not stand it. Ven ve gets der new motor--den ve two vill sail in der clouds." "I guess you'll have to excuse me from the first trip," objected Dick, with a smile. "I want to see it tried first." "It iss as safe as on der ground. Vait, I vill show you. But now, are you satisfied?" "Yes," replied Dick. "I'm willing to invest five hundred dollars in a new motor. Then we'll see how she works." "Und den ve vin der grand prize," announced the German. "But I haf much to do. Ven can you spare der money?" "As soon as you want it. Perhaps you had better come back to town with me and we can talk it over with my father." The airship was taken to a big barn near the scene of the test and some workmen left in charge to guard it from the curious crowd that gathered. Herr Doodlebrod was as calm and collected as though flying was an every-day accomplishment of his, but Dick was quite excited over what had taken place. Not only did he see the conditions of his mother's will fulfilled, but he was glad of the opportunity of taking part in helping to solve the problem of aerial navigation. Mr. Hamilton was informed of the test and its success. A form of agreement was drawn up to protect the interests of all parties, and Dick gave Herr Doodlebrod a check for five hundred dollars, taking a mortgage on the machine as security, a proposition the inventor himself suggested. "Now I go to New York for der engine," he announced. Three days later a letter arrived from the German. He said he was having some difficulties in getting the engine made, but expected to be back at Hamilton Corners in a week. "You'll have to hustle, Dick, to win that prize before the year expires," said his father, with a smile. "Aren't you getting anxious?" "A little, but I guess it will all come out right. It won't take long to install the engine once we get it." At the end of the week the German arrived with the engine. He was enthusiastic over it, and declared the government prize was already his. He had communicated with a representative of the War Department, who promised to be on hand when the test was made, to see if Herr Doodlebrod's machine answered the requirements. "But haf no fears," boasted the inventor to Dick. "It vill, und ve vill reap der reward." "I hope so," answered Dick. "I haven't much time left." There were several delays in getting the ship in shape for the decisive test. Herr Doodlebrod was not satisfied with one of the rudders and ordered a new one made. Dick urged haste, as he had in mind the year limit fixed in his mother's will. "Easy, easy," counseled the German. "I haf spent fifteen years on der machine; vot iss a few days?" "Much, to me," said Dick. "Do not vorry, my young friend," comforted the inventor. "You shall haf made der finest investment vot effer vos. I, Herr Doodlebrod, say so. Dot uncle of yours shall nefer get you." For Dick had told the German about the conditions of the will. But, in spite of all their haste, it was some time longer ere the machine was ready for the test. The new motor had been put in, and, though it was not tried in the air, worked perfectly. The propeller revolved twice as fast, and this, the inventor said, meant twice as much speed. "To-morrow ve haf der test," announced the German one evening, as he completed the last change on the airship. "Will the government official be here?" asked Dick. "He has promised. I go to bed early dot my nerves may be in good shape. Haf no fears, I vill fly, und fly far. Der requirements vill all be met; I, Herr Doodlebrod, say so." True to his promise, the government expert on aerial matters arrived at Hamilton Corners the next day. He sought out Herr Doodlebrod and Dick, and said he was ready to see their machine tested. The preparations had all been made and there was no delay. In Dick's runabout he, his father, the inventor and the representative from the War Department, Colonel Claflin, went out to the big field where the airship awaited them. A large crowd was waiting. It seemed that everyone in Hamilton Corners, who could, by any possibility get away from work, was there. The airship was hauled from the barn where it had been during the night, closely guarded against possible accidents. It looked larger than ever as, almost at the last minute, the inventor had increased the size of some of the bat-like wings that extended on either side. Herr Doodlebrod was the calmest person in the big crowd. He went about looking at the wheels, levers, rods, rudders and the propeller as if he was merely a spectator. But his sharp eyes did not miss anything. He detected a loose screw in the motor and called for a tool to adjust it. Then, having seen that the gasolene tank was filled, and that the various handles for controlling the machine worked smoothly, he took his place in the basket-car, which had been enlarged. "Vould you not like to come?" he asked of Dick. But Dick shook his head in dissent. "You come," the inventor invited Colonel Claflin, but the government representative begged to be excused. "I may try it with you after your first flight," he said. As the specifications called for the carrying of two passengers the absence of one was made up by some bags of sand to give the necessary weight. "Iss all clear?" asked Herr Doodlebrod. "Clear she is," replied his chief helper. "Den here I goes!" exclaimed the inventor as he started the motor and threw in the clutch operating the propeller. The big arms beat the air and hummed shrilly as they whizzed around. The new motor made the frail airship tremble. There was a moment's hesitation, as if the craft hated to leave the earth, and then, with a little jerk, it soared aloft. "Hurrah!" yelled the crowd. "She works! She works!" cried Dick, capering about in delight. He thought the prize already won. Even Colonel Claflin looked pleased. Herr Doodlebrod deflected one of the rudders and the airship went up at a sharp angle. In a few seconds it was several hundred feet high. Then it started to move about in a circle. "Wonderful!" murmured several. "He seems to know his business," remarked Mr. Hamilton. "I didn't believe it would work. I haven't much faith in airships." "Well, it has gone, so far," replied Colonel Claflin. "But the test is not completed. Let's watch him." In a great circle Herr Doodlebrod sent his ship around. He turned and twisted this way and that. Then he set off in a straight line, as called for by the government requirements. But suddenly something happened. There was a sharp sound, like an explosion, up on the airship. The big propellor was seen to fly to pieces and come fluttering down, a mass of twisted wire and cloth. Then came another ominous sound. It was a louder explosion, and a sheet of fire was seen to envelop the ship. "His gasolene tank has gone up!" exclaimed Colonel Claflin. "He'll be killed!" The airship seemed rent apart. The two big, bat-like wings soared off to one side. Rudders, wheels, levers and parts of machinery came raining down. The bat wings settled to the earth more slowly. "Where is the inventor?" asked Mr. Hamilton. "Has he been blown to pieces?" "It looks so," replied the colonel. "Poor chap! I'm afraid he didn't know so much about airships as he thought." There came a cry from the crowd, not a cry of horror, but of wonder. The colonel, Dick and Mr. Hamilton looked toward where they pointed. There, falling through space from his wrecked airship, was Herr Doodlebrod. CHAPTER XXXI GOOD NEWS--CONCLUSION "Look! Look!" cried the crowd, again and again. And there was no small cause for wonder; for, though the inventor was falling to earth, he had hold of one of the immense bat-like wings. It acted exactly as a parachute, the air catching under the curved surface. Thus the inventor came down so slowly that he was not in the slightest danger. It was a wonderful escape. No sooner had he alighted than he hurried up to where Dick stood, his face showing the sorrow he felt. "Vell, my young friend," said Herr Doodlebrod, "ve haf made vun grand mistake. But I know vat der trouble vas. I need a stronger propellor. Ve vill make vun at vunce, und haf anodder test." "I'm afraid it will be too late for me," remarked Dick, ruefully. "Ach, dot iss so," assented the German. "But neffer mind. I shall yet fly. I vill at once proceed to build a new machine. I vill make some more shoes until I haf saved money enough, und den I try again," and he smiled as though what had just happened was the thing he had always desired. The crowd gathered about the disabled airship, which was mostly consumed by the flames before it had reached the earth. Herr Doodlebrod had the men save what they could, and, not a bit discouraged, he set about packing up the remnants to take away. "Too bad," remarked Colonel Claflin, "but such accidents will happen. He's a cool fellow, at any rate." Dick and his father went home together in the runabout, the colonel declining their invitation to pay them a visit. The German inventor went away and that was the last seen of him. Swiftly the days passed, and in sheer desperation Dick invested several hundred dollars in three different schemes. But none of them paid. In one he lost all his money and in the others he got his money back and that was all. "It's no use!" he groaned to himself. "I guess it takes a brighter fellow than I to make money." Mr. Hamilton did not say much, but he was almost as anxious as his son, for he did not wish to see Dick fail. One morning Mr. Hamilton went out with Dick in the youth's runabout. "Well, my son, to-morrow is your birthday," remarked the parent, after speaking of many things in general. "I know it, dad," was the gloomy answer. And then Dick went on: "I suppose there is no way of getting clear of the provisions of that will?" "I know of none. Your dear departed mother's wishes must be respected." "Oh, dear!" Dick gave a long sigh. "Well, perhaps I can stand Uncle Ezra, but it's going to be a--er--a stiff proposition." "I'm sorry," commented Mr. Hamilton. "But perhaps it will be a good thing for you. Your Uncle Ezra has excellent discipline, and he's a good man of business." "I don't doubt that, dad." Father and son did not say much during the ride home, as each was busy with his thoughts. As Dick went up the steps of the Hamilton mansion the butler met him at the door. "Your Uncle Ezra is here," he announced. "Oh, dear!" commented Dick, with a groan. "Ah, Nephew Richard," was Mr. Larabee's greeting when Dick found him in the library. "I've come to pay _you_ a little visit, you see. I happened to remember that to-morrow is your birthday, and, according to the--to the provisions of your mother's will you may be going to pay _me_ a visit. I can't say I altogether approve of that will, still we will not discuss that now. The main thing is, Have you made the paying investment called for?" "No, I haven't, Uncle Ezra." "Hum, well, I didn't think you would. Boys have no head for business nowadays. I knew your money would do you little good. So you are to come and live a year with me, eh?" "I suppose so. Yes, of course, Uncle Ezra," and Dick tried to make his voice sound cheerful, but it was hard work when he thought of the gloomy house. "Well, I told Samanthy I'd bring you back with me, and she's going to have your room all ready. Then, too, I've arranged to send you to a good boarding school. It is taught by a friend of mine; a man who doesn't believe in nonsense." Dick could see, in fancy, the kind of a school Uncle Ezra would pick out, and he could also fancy the principal of it, a harsh, stern old man. He sighed, but there was no help for it. "So I will take you away with me to-morrow," went on Mr. Larabee, rubbing his hands as if delighted at the prospect. "I shall--Gracious goodness! What's that?" he exclaimed, jumping from his chair, as a loud growl sounded from under the library table. "Have you a wild animal in here, Nephew Richard?" "I guess it's my bulldog, Grit," replied Dick. "Here, Gibbs," calling the butler, "have Grit taken to the stable." Grit was led away, growling out a protest. "I can't bear dogs," said Uncle Ezra. "You'll not be allowed to have one at The Firs, so you had better get rid of this one." "Oh, I suppose I can leave Grit home," answered Dick, with a sigh. "Can I get you something to eat, Uncle Ezra?" he asked, trying to be hospitable. "No, thank you, Nephew Richard. I never eat between meals, nor do I allow it at my house. Three times a day is enough to eat." "Maybe you would like some lemonade; it's quite warm to-day." Dick was both hungry and thirsty. "No, lemonade is bad for the liver, I have heard. You may get me some plain water, if you please." "And I've got to live a year with him," mused Dick as he went out to get his uncle a drink. "Why, oh why, didn't some of my investments succeed?" Dick spent a miserable evening with his uncle. Mr. Hamilton came home from the bank, whither he had gone after the ride, and greeted his brother-in-law. "Well, I guess you'll have to take Dick back with you," said the millionaire, with an attempt at cheerfulness. "I intend to, and when he comes back from living with me he'll be a different lad," said Mr. Larabee, grimly. "I guess that's true enough," thought Dick. He dreamed that night that he went to his uncle's house in an airship, and when they got there it turned into a vault in a cemetery and he was made a prisoner in it. He awoke with a start to find his uncle calling to him from the hall outside his door. "Come, Nephew Richard," said Mr. Larabee. "It's six o'clock, and you'll have to get up early when you're at my house. Might as well begin now." "Oh, this is a beautiful birthday," said Dick, with a groan, as he began to dress. "Six o'clock! Ugh!" It was arranged that they were to take an early train to Dankville, and, soon after breakfast, Dick, having packed his suitcase, and arranged to have his trunk forwarded to him at The Firs, went to the library where his father and uncle were waiting for him. "Well, Dick," remarked Mr. Hamilton, with a little catch in his voice, for he hated to part with his son, though he knew the experience might be good for him. "I guess it's time to say good-bye." "I suppose so," replied Dick, trying to keep back the tears, which, in spite of all he could do, would come to his eyes. "Yes, we must be going," agreed Mr. Larabee. "I'll write to you, Mortimer, and let you know how Dick gets along. I have no doubt but I'll make a fine man of him. Too much wealth is bad for a young man. Come along, Nephew Richard." Dick started to leave the room. At that instant the doorbell rang and Gibbs, answering it, came into the library and announced: "Mr. Henry Darby and his son, to see Mr. Dick." "I guess they have come to say good-bye," said the millionaire's son. "Show them in, Gibbs." "Hank" Darby did not need any "showing." He was in the library as Gibbs turned to go back to the door. "Excuse this intrusion," he began, "but I am in a hurry. I have a very important scheme on and I must attend to it at once. But my son insisted that we come and tell Mr. Dick what has happened, he being a partner in our enterprise--The International and Consolidated Old Metal Corporation." "Yes, Dick!" cried Henry, unable to wait for his father to tell the news in his slow, pompous way. "Things are in fine shape. In fact the old metal business can now pay a dividend." "A dividend?" "Yes, you remember me telling you about a lot of old scrap-iron and steel dad bought, thinking it had platinum in it?" "Yes, and it didn't have any in." "Merely an error in judgment," murmured Mr. Darby. "Any business man, with large schemes on hand, is liable to make them." "Well, while the metal didn't have any platinum in it, it had a peculiar quality of steel. It is very valuable, and I--that is we"--turning toward his father--"have just sold it to a large firm that wants it to make some very fine springs with." "Yes, the deal is just completed," broke in Mr. Darby. "My judgment in that old metal is confirmed. I have accepted an offer of two thousand dollars for it. Under the terms of the incorporation papers one-half of that goes to Dick. I now take pleasure in handing you my check for that amount, as president of The International and Consolidated Old Metal Corporation," and with a grand air "Hank" handed Dick a slip of paper. "Is this mine?" asked the millionaire's son, in some bewilderment. "It is," replied Mr. Darby. "It is part of the return from your investment of two hundred and fifty dollars which you put into the firm of which I am president, you treasurer, and my son secretary and general manager." "That is, I collect the old iron and sell it," explained Henry, seeing that Mr. Larabee looked puzzled. "Dick was kind enough to invest some money with our company last year, and I am glad I can make a return for him--or, rather, dad can, for he bought the metal that turned out so valuable." "Then--then--" began Dick, a light slowly breaking over him, "without intending it, I have made a good, paying investment. A thousand dollars for two hundred and fifty is good, isn't it, dad?" "Fine, I would say," cried Mr. Hamilton, with a smile. "And this is my birthday! The year is just up!" went on Dick. "I--I won't have to go and live with Uncle----" He stopped in some confusion. "Do you mean to tell me that this is a bona-fide investment, Mortimer?" asked Mr. Larabee, turning to his brother-in-law. "Perfectly legal and legitimate," interrupted Mr. Darby. "Here is a copy of the incorporation agreement." "Well," remarked Uncle Ezra, with a disappointed air, "I suppose you have fulfilled the conditions of your mother's will, Nephew Richard. I congratulate you," and he shook hands rather stiffly. "Well, who would have thought it?" gasped Dick, hardly able to believe his good fortune. "I never gave that investment a thought--in fact, I never considered it an investment, Henry." "It was, all the same, and I'm glad I am able to do you a favor, for you did me a mighty good turn. The old metal business is in fine shape, and I have more than I can attend to." "Yes, we must be going, I have a big scheme on hand," put in Mr. Darby. "A very big scheme, there are enormous possibilities in it. _Enormous_, sir!" "If they only come out," said Henry, with a laugh, as he and his father withdrew. "Well, if you are not to come back with me, I suppose I may as well be going," remarked Uncle Ezra, after a pause. "Samanthy will be looking for me. I'll say good-bye." He turned to go, and at that instant an ominous growl came from under the library table. "What's that?" asked Mr. Larabee in alarm. "I--I think it's Grit," replied Dick, trying not to laugh. "That bulldog again!" exclaimed Mr. Larabee. "I hate dogs! I wish----" But what he wished he never said, for Grit, seeming to know that an enemy of his master was present, rushed from under the table, and, with opened mouth, though he probably would not have bitten him, rushed at Uncle Ezra. "Here, Grit!" cried Dick. "Come back here this instant!" But, with a wild yell, Mr. Larabee ran from the room, followed by the dog. Out through the hall and down the steps Dick's uncle ran, the dog growling behind him. But Gibbs captured Grit at the front door and held him. "Grit! Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" asked Dick, trying not to laugh. But Grit growled in a way that seemed to say he was not in the least ashamed. Mr. Larabee hurried off down the street, not once looking back. "Well, that was a narrow escape," murmured Dick. "Eh, dad?" "I suppose so. Still a visit to your uncle's house might have done you good," added the millionaire, with a twinkle in his eyes. "Now, dad," went on Dick, "I suppose that as I have fulfilled all the conditions of the will I may do pretty nearly as I please." "Not altogether," and the millionaire spoke rather gravely. "It is true you will have a certain control of your money left you by your mother, but you remember I told you, a year ago, there were certain other provisions of the will. One of them is that you attend a good military school." "A military school!" exclaimed Dick, his eyes sparkling. "That will be fine." "Yes, but wait. The conditions are that you attend there and become popular with the students in spite of your wealth. In short, that you make your own way up without the aid of your millions, and become one of the upper classmen through your own efforts. It is not going to be as easy as you think, but I trust you can do it. There is no great hurry about it. I will give you a few months of leisure and then you must get ready for a new life." "Oh, dad, I think it will be fine!" exclaimed Dick; "I've always wanted to go to a military academy!" But he little knew of what was in store for him. Those who wish to follow the further adventures of the young millionaire will find them set forth in the second volume of this series, entitled "Dick Hamilton's Cadet Days; or the Handicap of a Millionaire's Son." "Well, Grit, you certainly routed Uncle Ezra," said Dick, as he patted the ugly head of his pet. "I don't know as I blame you. But it's all over now, though I had some stirring times while it lasted." And, whistling gaily, Dick went out to deposit in the bank his thousand-dollar check, the profits of his one paying investment. THE END THE DICK HAMILTON SERIES BY HOWARD R. GARIS A NEW LINE OF CLEVER TALES FOR BOYS DICK HAMILTON'S FORTUNE Or The Stirring Doings of a Millionaire's Son Dick, the son of a millionaire, has a fortune left to him by his mother. But before he can touch the bulk of this money it is stipulated in his mother's will that he must do certain things, in order to prove that he is worthy of possessing such a fortune. The doings of Dick and his chums make the liveliest kind of reading. DICK HAMILTON'S CADET DAYS Or The Handicap of a Millionaire's Son The hero, a very rich young man, is sent to a military academy to make his way without the use of money. A fine picture of life at an up-to-date military academy is given, with target shooting, broad-sword exercise, trick riding, sham battles, and all. Dick proves himself a hero in the best sense of the word. DICK HAMILTON'S STEAM YACHT Or A Young Millionaire and the Kidnappers A series of adventures while yachting in which our hero's wealth plays a part. Dick is marooned on an island, recovers his yacht and foils the kidnappers. The wrong young man is spirited away, Dick gives chase and there is a surprising rescue at sea. DICK HAMILTON'S AIRSHIP Or A Young Millionaire in the Clouds This new book is just brimming over with hair-raising adventures of Dick Hamilton in his new airship. DICK HAMILTON'S TOURING CAR Or A Young Millionaire's Race for Fortune A series of thrilling adventures. Dick and his friends see the country in a huge touring car. Their exciting trip across the country, how they saved a young man's fortune and other exciting incidents are very cleverly told. Price 50 cents each The Goldsmith Publishing Co. Cleveland, O. 
14204	----	[Photo, from the play, of Shirley appealing to Mr. Ryder] "Go to Washington and save my father's life."--Act III. _Frontispiece._ THE LION AND THE MOUSE BY CHARLES KLEIN A Story _of_ American Life NOVELIZED FROM THE PLAY BY ARTHUR HORNBLOW "Judges and Senators have been bought for gold; Love and esteem have never been sold."--POPE * * * * * ILLUSTRATED BY STUART TRAVIS AND SCENES FROM THE PLAY * * * * * GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS--NEW YORK G.W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY _Entered at Stationers' Hall, London_ Issued August, 1906 CONTENTS Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI _The Lion and the Mouse_ CHAPTER I There was unwonted bustle in the usually sleepy and dignified New York offices of the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad Company in lower Broadway. The supercilious, well-groomed clerks who, on ordinary days, are far too preoccupied with their own personal affairs to betray the slightest interest in anything not immediately concerning them, now condescended to bestir themselves and, gathered in little groups, conversed in subdued, eager tones. The slim, nervous fingers of half a dozen haughty stenographers, representing as many different types of business femininity, were busily rattling the keys of clicking typewriters, each of their owners intent on reducing with all possible despatch the mass of letters which lay piled up in front of her. Through the heavy plate-glass swinging doors, leading to the elevators and thence to the street, came and went an army of messengers and telegraph boys, noisy and insolent. Through the open windows the hoarse shouting of news-venders, the rushing of elevated trains, the clanging of street cars, with the occasional feverish dash of an ambulance--all these familiar noises of a great city had the far-away sound peculiar to top floors of the modern sky-scraper. The day was warm and sticky, as is not uncommon in early May, and the overcast sky and a distant rumbling of thunder promised rain before night. The big express elevators, running smoothly and swiftly, unloaded every few moments a number of prosperous-looking men who, chatting volubly and affably, made their way immediately through the outer offices towards another and larger inner office on the glass door of which was the legend "Directors Room. Private." Each comer gave a patronizing nod in recognition of the deferential salutation of the clerks. Earlier arrivals had preceded them, and as they opened the door there issued from the Directors Room a confused murmur of voices, each different in pitch and tone, some deep and deliberate, others shrill and nervous, but all talking earnestly and with animation as men do when the subject under discussion is of common interest. Now and again a voice was heard high above the others, denoting anger in the speaker, followed by the pleading accents of the peace-maker, who was arguing his irate colleague into calmness. At intervals the door opened to admit other arrivals, and through the crack was caught a glimpse of a dozen directors, some seated, some standing near a long table covered with green baize. It was the regular quarterly meeting of the directors of the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad Company, but it was something more than mere routine that had called out a quorum of such strength and which made to-day's gathering one of extraordinary importance in the history of the road. That the business on hand was of the greatest significance was easily to be inferred from the concerned and anxious expression on the directors' faces and the eagerness of the employés as they plied each other with questions. "Suppose the injunction is sustained?" asked a clerk in a whisper. "Is not the road rich enough to bear the loss?" The man he addressed turned impatiently to the questioner: "That's all you know about railroading. Don't you understand that this suit we have lost will be the entering wedge for hundreds of others. The very existence of the road may be at stake. And between you and me," he added in a lower key, "with Judge Rossmore on the bench we never stood much show. It's Judge Rossmore that scares 'em, not the injunction. They've found it easy to corrupt most of the Supreme Court judges, but Judge Rossmore is one too many for them. You could no more bribe him than you could have bribed Abraham Lincoln." "But the newspapers say that he, too, has been caught accepting $50,000 worth of stock for that decision he rendered in the Great Northwestern case." "Lies! All those stories are lies," replied the other emphatically. Then looking cautiously around to make sure no one overheard he added contemptuously, "The big interests fear him, and they're inventing these lies to try and injure him. They might as well try to blow up Gibraltar. The fact is the public is seriously aroused this time and the railroads are in a panic." It was true. The railroad, which heretofore had considered itself superior to law, had found itself checked in its career of outlawry and oppression. The railroad, this modern octopus of steam and steel which stretches its greedy tentacles out over the land, had at last been brought to book. At first, when the country was in the earlier stages of its development, the railroad appeared in the guise of a public benefactor. It brought to the markets of the East the produce of the South and West. It opened up new and inaccessible territory and made oases of waste places. It brought to the city coal, lumber, food and other prime necessaries of life, taking back to the farmer and the woodsman in exchange, clothes and other manufactured goods. Thus, little by little, the railroad wormed itself into the affections of the people and gradually became an indispensable part of the life it had itself created. Tear up the railroad and life itself is extinguished. So when the railroad found it could not be dispensed with, it grew dissatisfied with the size of its earnings. Legitimate profits were not enough. Its directors cried out for bigger dividends, and from then on the railroad became a conscienceless tyrant, fawning on those it feared and crushing without mercy those who were defenceless. It raised its rates for hauling freight, discriminating against certain localities without reason or justice, and favouring other points where its own interests lay. By corrupting government officials and other unlawful methods it appropriated lands, and there was no escape from its exactions and brigandage. Other roads were built, and for a brief period there was held out the hope of relief that invariably comes from honest competition. But the railroad either absorbed its rivals or pooled interests with them, and thereafter there were several masters instead of one. Soon the railroads began to war among themselves, and in a mad scramble to secure business at any price they cut each other's rates and unlawfully entered into secret compacts with certain big shippers, permitting the latter to enjoy lower freight rates than their competitors. The smaller shippers were soon crushed out of existence in this way. Competition was throttled and prices went up, making the railroad barons richer and the people poorer. That was the beginning of the giant Trusts, the greatest evil American civilization has yet produced, and one which, unless checked, will inevitably drag this country into the throes of civil strife. From out this quagmire of corruption and rascality emerged the Colossus, a man so stupendously rich and with such unlimited powers for evil that the world has never looked upon his like. The famous Croesus, whose fortune was estimated at only eight millions in our money, was a pauper compared with John Burkett Ryder, whose holdings no man could count, but which were approximately estimated at a thousand millions of dollars. The railroads had created the Trust, the ogre of corporate greed, of which Ryder was the incarnation, and in time the Trust became master of the railroads, which after all seemed but retributive justice. John Burkett Ryder, the richest man in the world--the man whose name had spread to the farthest corners of the earth because of his wealth, and whose money, instead of being a blessing, promised to become not only a curse to himself but a source of dire peril to all mankind--was a genius born of the railroad age. No other age could have brought him forth; his peculiar talents fitted exactly the conditions of his time. Attracted early in life to the newly discovered oil fields of Pennsylvania, he became a dealer in the raw product and later a refiner, acquiring with capital, laboriously saved, first one refinery, then another. The railroads were cutting each other's throats to secure the freight business of the oil men, and John Burkett Ryder saw his opportunity. He made secret overtures to the road, guaranteeing a vast amount of business if he could get exceptionally low rates, and the illegal compact was made. His competitors, undersold in the market, stood no chance, and one by one they were crushed out of existence. Ryder called these manoeuvres "business"; the world called them brigandage. But the Colossus prospered and slowly built up the foundations of the extraordinary fortune which is the talk and the wonder of the world to-day. Master now of the oil situation, Ryder succeeded in his ambition of organizing the Empire Trading Company, the most powerful, the most secretive, and the most wealthy business institution the commercial world has yet known. Yet with all this success John Burkett Ryder was still not content. He was now a rich man, richer by many millions that he had dreamed he could ever be, but still he was unsatisfied. He became money mad. He wanted to be richer still, to be the richest man in the world, the richest man the world had ever known. And the richer he got the stronger the idea grew upon him with all the force of a morbid obsession. He thought of money by day, he dreamt of it at night. No matter by what questionable device it was to be procured, more gold and more must flow into his already overflowing coffers. So each day, instead of spending the rest of his years in peace, in the enjoyment of the wealth he had accumulated, he went downtown like any twenty-dollar-a-week clerk to the tall building in lower Broadway and, closeted with his associates, toiled and plotted to make more money. He acquired vast copper mines and secured control of this and that railroad. He had invested heavily in the Southern and Transcontinental road and was chairman of its board of directors. Then he and his fellow-conspirators planned a great financial coup. The millions were not coming in fast enough. They must make a hundred millions at one stroke. They floated a great mining company to which the public was invited to subscribe. The scheme having the endorsement of the Empire Trading Company no one suspected a snare, and such was the magic of John Ryder's name that gold flowed in from every point of the compass. The stock sold away above par the day it was issued. Men deemed themselves fortunate if they were even granted an allotment. What matter if, a few days later, the house of cards came tumbling down, and a dozen suicides were strewn along Wall Street, that sinister thoroughfare which, as a wit has said, has a graveyard at one end and the river at the other! Had Ryder any twinges of conscience? Hardly. Had he not made a cool twenty millions by the deal? Yet this commercial pirate, this Napoleon of finance, was not a wholly bad man. He had his redeeming qualities, like most bad men. His most pronounced weakness, and the one that had made him the most conspicuous man of his time, was an entire lack of moral principle. No honest or honourable man could have amassed such stupendous wealth. In other words, John Ryder had not been equipped by Nature with a conscience. He had no sense of right, or wrong, or justice where his own interests were concerned. He was the prince of egoists. On the other hand, he possessed qualities which, with some people, count as virtues. He was pious and regular in his attendance at church and, while he had done but little for charity, he was known to have encouraged the giving of alms by the members of his family, which consisted of a wife, whose timid voice was rarely heard, and a son Jefferson, who was the destined successor to his gigantic estate. Such was the man who was the real power behind the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad. More than anyone else Ryder had been aroused by the present legal action, not so much for the money interest at stake as that any one should dare to thwart his will. It had been a pet scheme of his, this purchase for a song, when the land was cheap, of some thousand acres along the line, and it is true that at the time of the purchase there had been some idea of laying the land out as a park. But real estate values had increased in astonishing fashion, the road could no longer afford to carry out the original scheme, and had attempted to dispose of the property for building purposes, including a right of way for a branch road. The news, made public in the newspapers, had raised a storm of protest. The people in the vicinity claimed that the railroad secured the land on the express condition of a park being laid out, and in order to make a legal test they had secured an injunction, which had been sustained by Judge Rossmore of the United States Circuit Court. These details were hastily told and re-told by one clerk to another as the babel of voices in the inner room grew louder, and more directors kept arriving from the ever-busy elevators. The meeting was called for three o'clock. Another five minutes and the chairman would rap for order. A tall, strongly built man with white moustache and kindly smile emerged from the directors room and, addressing one of the clerks, asked: "Has Mr. Ryder arrived yet?" The alacrity with which the employé hastened forward to reply would indicate that his interlocutor was a person of more than ordinary importance. "No, Senator, not yet. We expect him any minute." Then with a deferential smile he added: "Mr. Ryder usually arrives on the stroke, sir." The senator gave a nod of acquiescence and, turning on his heel, greeted with a grasp of the hand and affable smile his fellow-directors as they passed in by twos and threes. Senator Roberts was in the world of politics what his friend John Burkett Ryder was in the world of finance--a leader of men. He started life in Wisconsin as an errand boy, was educated in the public schools, and later became clerk in a dry-goods store, finally going into business for his own account on a large scale. He was elected to the Legislature, where his ability as an organizer soon gained the friendship of the men in power, and later was sent to Congress, where he was quickly initiated in the game of corrupt politics. In 1885 he entered the United States Senate. He soon became the acknowledged leader of a considerable majority of the Republican senators, and from then on he was a figure to be reckoned with. A very ambitious man, with a great love of power and few scruples, it is little wonder that only the practical or dishonest side of politics appealed to him. He was in politics for all there was in it, and he saw in his lofty position only a splendid opportunity for easy graft. He did not hesitate to make such alliances with corporate interests seeking influence at Washington as would enable him to accomplish this purpose, and in this way he had met and formed a strong friendship with John Burkett Ryder. Each being a master in his own field was useful to the other. Neither was troubled with qualms of conscience, so they never quarrelled. If the Ryder interests needed anything in the Senate, Roberts and his followers were there to attend to it. Just now the cohort was marshalled in defence of the railroads against the attacks of the new Rebate bill. In fact, Ryder managed to keep the Senate busy all the time. When, on the other hand, the senators wanted anything--and they often did--Ryder saw that they got it, lower rates for this one, a fat job for that one, not forgetting themselves. Senator Roberts was already a very rich man, and although the world often wondered where he got it, no one had the courage to ask him. But the Republican leader was stirred with an ambition greater than that of controlling a majority in the Senate. He had a daughter, a marriageable young woman who, at least in her father's opinion, would make a desirable wife for any man. His friend Ryder had a son, and this son was the only heir to the greatest fortune ever amassed by one man, a fortune which, at its present rate of increase, by the time the father died and the young couple were ready to inherit, would probably amount to over _six billions of dollars_. Could the human mind grasp the possibilities of such a colossal fortune? It staggered the imagination. Its owner, or the man who controlled it, would be master of the world! Was not this a prize any man might well set himself out to win? The senator was thinking of it now as he stood exchanging banal remarks with the men who accosted him. If he could only bring off that marriage he would be content. The ambition of his life would be attained. There was no difficulty as far as John Ryder was concerned. He favoured the match and had often spoken of it. Indeed, Ryder desired it, for such an alliance would naturally further his business interests in every way. Roberts knew that his daughter Kate had more than a liking for Ryder's handsome young son. Moreover, Kate was practical, like her father, and had sense enough to realize what it would mean to be the mistress of the Ryder fortune. No, Kate was all right, but there was young Ryder to reckon with. It would take two in this case to make a bargain. Jefferson Ryder was, in truth, an entirely different man from his father. It was difficult to realize that both had sprung from the same stock. A college-bred boy with all the advantages his father's wealth could give him, he had inherited from the parent only those characteristics which would have made him successful even if born poor--activity, pluck, application, dogged obstinacy, alert mentality. To these qualities he added what his father sorely lacked--a high notion of honour, a keen sense of right and wrong. He had the honest man's contempt for meanness of any description, and he had little patience with the lax so-called business morals of the day. For him a dishonourable or dishonest action could have no apologist, and he could see no difference between the crime of the hungry wretch who stole a loaf of bread and the coal baron who systematically robbed both his employés and the public. In fact, had he been on the bench he would probably have acquitted the human derelict who, in despair, had appropriated the prime necessary of life, and sent the over-fed, conscienceless coal baron to jail. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." This simple and fundamental axiom Jefferson Ryder had adopted early in life, and it had become his religion--the only one, in fact, that he had. He was never pious like his father, a fact much regretted by his mother, who could see nothing but eternal damnation in store for her son because he never went to church and professed no orthodox creed. She knew him to be a good lad, but to her simple mind a conduct of life based merely on a system of moral philosophy was the worst kind of paganism. There could, she argued, be no religion, and assuredly no salvation, outside the dogmatic teachings of the Church. But otherwise Jefferson was a model son and, with the exception of this bad habit of thinking for himself on religious matters, really gave her no anxiety. When Jefferson left college, his father took him into the Empire Trading Company with the idea of his eventually succeeding him as head of the concern, but the different views held by father and son on almost every subject soon led to stormy scenes that made the continuation of the arrangement impossible. Senator Roberts was well aware of these unfortunate independent tendencies in John Ryder's son, and while he devoutly desired the consummation of Jefferson's union with his daughter, he quite realized that the young man was a nut which was going to be exceedingly hard to crack. "Hello, senator, you're always on time!" Disturbed in his reflections, Senator Roberts looked up and saw the extended hand of a red-faced, corpulent man, one of the directors. He was no favourite with the senator, but the latter was too keen a man of the world to make enemies uselessly, so he condescended to place two fingers in the outstretched fat palm. "How are you, Mr. Grimsby? Well, what are we going to do about this injunction? The case has gone against us. I knew Judge Rossmore's decision would be for the other side. Public opinion is aroused. The press--" Mr. Grimsby's red face grew more apoplectic as he blurted out: "Public opinion and the press be d----d. Who cares for public opinion? What is public opinion, anyhow? This road can manage its own affairs or it can't. If it can't I for one quit railroading. The press! Pshaw! It's all graft, I tell you. It's nothing but a strike! I never knew one of these virtuous outbursts that wasn't. First the newspapers bark ferociously to advertise themselves; then they crawl round and whine like a cur. And it usually costs something to fix matters." The senator smiled grimly. "No, no, Grimsby--not this time. It's more serious than that. Hitherto the road has been unusually lucky in its bench decisions--" The senator gave a covert glance round to see if any long ears were listening. Then he added: "We can't expect always to get a favourable decision like that in the Cartwright case, when franchise rights valued at nearly five millions were at stake. Judge Stollmann proved himself a true friend in that affair." Grimsby made a wry grimace as he retorted: "Yes, and it was worth it to him. A Supreme Court judge don't get a cheque for $20,000 every day. That represents two years' pay." "It might represent two years in jail if it were found out," said the senator with a forced laugh, Grimsby saw an opportunity, and he could not resist the temptation. Bluntly he said: "As far as jail's concerned, others might be getting their deserts there too." The senator looked keenly at Grimsby from under his white eyebrows. Then in a calm, decisive tone he replied: "It's no question of a cheque this time. The road could not buy Judge Rossmore with $200,000. He is absolutely unapproachable in that way." The apoplectic face of Mr. Grimsby looked incredulous. It was hard for these men who plotted in the dark, and cheated the widow and the orphan for love of the dollar, to understand that there were in the world, breathing the same air as they, men who put honour, truth and justice above mere money-getting. With a slight tinge of sarcasm he asked: "Is there any man in our public life who is unapproachable from some direction or other?" "Yes, Judge Rossmore is such a man. He is one of the few men in American public life who takes his duties seriously. In the strictest sense of the term, he serves his country instead of serving himself. I am no friend of his, but I must do him that justice." He spoke sharply, in an irritated tone, as if resenting the insinuation of this vulgarian that every man in public life had his price. Roberts knew that the charge was true as far as he and the men he consorted with were concerned, but sometimes the truth hurts. That was why he had for a moment seemed to champion Judge Rossmore, which, seeing that the judge himself was at that very moment under a cloud, was an absurd thing for him to do. He had known Rossmore years before when the latter was a city magistrate in New York. That was before he, Roberts, had become a political grafter and when the decent things in life still appealed to him. The two men, although having few interests in common, had seen a good deal of one another until Roberts went to Washington when their relations were completely severed. But he had always watched Rossmore's career, and when he was made a judge of the Supreme Court at a comparatively early age he was sincerely glad. If anything could have convinced Roberts that success can come in public life to a man who pursues it by honest methods it was the success of James Rossmore. He could never help feeling that Rossmore had been endowed by Nature with certain qualities which had been denied to him, above all that ability to walk straight through life with skirts clean which he had found impossible himself. To-day Judge Rossmore was one of the most celebrated judges in the country. He was a brilliant jurist and a splendid after-dinner speaker. He was considered the most learned and able of all the members of the judiciary, and his decisions were noted as much for their fearlessness as for their wisdom. But what was far more, he enjoyed a reputation for absolute integrity. Until now no breath of slander, no suspicion of corruption, had ever touched him. Even his enemies acknowledged that. And that is why there was a panic to-day among the directors of the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad. This honest, upright man had been called upon in the course of his duty to decide matters of vital importance to the road, and the directors were ready to stampede because, in their hearts, they knew the weakness of their case and the strength of the judge. Grimsby, unconvinced, returned to the charge. "What about these newspaper charges? Did Judge Rossmore take a bribe from the Great Northwestern or didn't he? You ought to know." "I do know," answered the senator cautiously and somewhat curtly, "but until Mr. Ryder arrives I can say nothing. I believe he has been inquiring into the matter. He will tell us when he comes." The hands of the large clock in the outer room pointed to three. An active, dapper little man with glasses and with books under his arm passed hurriedly from another office into the directors room. "There goes Mr. Lane with the minutes. The meeting is called. Where's Mr. Ryder?" There was a general move of the scattered groups of directors toward the committee room. The clock overhead began to strike. The last stroke had not quite died away when the big swinging doors from the street were thrown open and there entered a tall, thin man, gray-headed, and with a slight stoop, but keen eyed and alert. He was carefully dressed in a well-fitting frock coat, white waistcoat, black tie and silk hat. It was John Burkett Ryder, the Colossus. CHAPTER II At fifty-six, John Burkett Ryder was surprisingly well preserved. With the exception of the slight stoop, already noted, and the rapidly thinning snow-white hair, his step was as light and elastic, and his brain as vigorous and alert, as in a man of forty. Of old English stock, his physical make-up presented all those strongly marked characteristics of our race which, sprung from Anglo-Saxon ancestry, but modified by nearly 300 years of different climate and customs, has gradually produced the distinct and true American type, as easily recognizable among the family of nations as any other of the earth's children. Tall and distinguished-looking, Ryder would have attracted attention anywhere. Men who have accomplished much in life usually bear plainly upon their persons the indefinable stamp of achievement, whether of good or evil, which renders them conspicuous among their fellows. We turn after a man in the street and ask, Who is he? And nine times out of ten the object of our curiosity is a man who has made his mark--a successful soldier, a famous sailor, a celebrated author, a distinguished lawyer, or even a notorious crook. There was certainly nothing in John Ryder's outward appearance to justify Lombroso's sensational description of him: "A social and physiological freak, a degenerate and a prodigy of turpitude who, in the pursuit of money, crushes with the insensibility of a steel machine everyone who stands in his way." On the contrary, Ryder, outwardly at least, was a prepossessing-looking man. His head was well-shaped, and he had an intellectual brow, while power was expressed in every gesture of his hands and body. Every inch of him suggested strength and resourcefulness. His face, when in good humour, frequently expanded in a pleasant smile, and he had even been known to laugh boisterously, usually at his own stories, which he rightly considered very droll, and of which he possessed a goodly stock. But in repose his face grew stern and forbidding, and when his prognathous jaw, indicative of will-power and bull-dog tenacity, snapped to with a click-like sound, those who heard it knew that squalls were coming. But it was John Ryder's eyes that were regarded as the most reliable barometer of his mental condition. Wonderful eyes they were, strangely eloquent and expressive, and their most singular feature was that they possessed the uncanny power of changing colour like a cat's. When their owner was at peace with the world, and had temporarily shaken off the cares of business, his eyes were of the most restful, beautiful blue, like the sky after sunrise on a Spring morning, and looking into their serene depths it seemed absurd to think that this man could ever harm a fly. His face, while under the spell of this kindly mood, was so benevolent and gentle, so frank and honest that you felt there was nothing in the world--purse, honour, wife, child--that, if needs be, you would not entrust to his keeping. When this period of truce was ended, when the plutocrat was once more absorbed in controlling the political as well as the commercial machinery of the nation, then his eyes took on a snakish, greenish hue, and one could plainly read in them the cunning, the avariciousness, the meanness, the insatiable thirst for gain that had made this man the most unscrupulous money-getter of his time. But his eyes had still another colour, and when this last transformation took place those dependent on him, and even his friends, quaked with fear. For they were his eyes of anger. On these dreaded occasions his eyes grew black as darkest night and flashed fire as lightning rends the thundercloud. Almost ungovernable fury was, indeed, the weakest spot in John Ryder's armour, for in these moments of appalling wrath he was reckless of what he said or did, friendship, self-interest, prudence--all were sacrificed. Such was the Colossus on whom all eyes were turned as he entered. Instantly the conversations stopped as by magic. The directors nudged each other and whispered. Instinctively, Ryder singled out his crony, Senator Roberts, who advanced with effusive gesture: "Hello, Senator!" "You're punctual as usual, Mr. Ryder. I never knew you to be late!" The great man chuckled, and the little men standing around, listening breathlessly, chuckled in respectful sympathy, and they elbowed and pushed one another in their efforts to attract Ryder's notice, like so many cowardly hyenas not daring to approach the lordly wolf. Senator Roberts made a remark in a low tone to Ryder, whereupon the latter laughed. The bystanders congratulated each other silently. The great man was pleased to be in a good humour. And as Ryder turned with the senator to enter the Directors Room the light from the big windows fell full on his face, and they noticed that his eyes were of the softest blue. "No squalls to-day," whispered one. "Wait and see," retorted a more experienced colleague. "Those eyes are more fickle than the weather." Outside the sky was darkening, and drops of rain were already falling. A flash of lightning presaged the coming storm. Ryder passed on and into the Directors Room followed by Senator Roberts and the other directors, the procession being brought up by the dapper little secretary bearing the minutes. The long room with its narrow centre table covered with green baize was filled with directors scattered in little groups and all talking at once with excited gesture. At the sight of Ryder the chattering stopped as if by common consent, and the only sound audible was of the shuffling of feet and the moving of chairs as the directors took their places around the long table. With a nod here and there Ryder took his place in the chairman's seat and rapped for order. Then at a sign from the chair the dapper little secretary began in a monotonous voice to read the minutes of the previous meeting. No one listened, a few directors yawned. Others had their eyes riveted on Ryder's face, trying to read there if he had devised some plan to offset the crushing blow of this adverse decision, which meant a serious loss to them all. He, the master mind, had served them in many a like crisis in the past. Could he do so again? But John Ryder gave no sign. His eyes, still of the same restful blue, were fixed on the ceiling watching a spider marching with diabolical intent on a wretched fly that had become entangled in its web. And as the secretary ambled monotonously on, Ryder watched and watched until he saw the spider seize its helpless prey and devour it. Fascinated by the spectacle, which doubtless suggested to him some analogy to his own methods, Ryder sat motionless, his eyes fastened on the ceiling, until the sudden stopping of the secretary's reading aroused him and told him that the minutes were finished. Quickly they were approved, and the chairman proceeded as rapidly as possible with the regular business routine. That disposed of, the meeting was ready for the chief business of the day. Ryder then calmly proceeded to present the facts in the case. Some years back the road had acquired as an investment some thousands of acres of land located in the outskirts of Auburndale, on the line of their road. The land was bought cheap, and there had been some talk of laying part of it out as a public park. This promise had been made at the time in good faith, but it was no condition of the sale. If, afterwards, owing to the rise in the value of real estate, the road found it impossible to carry out the original idea, surely they were masters of their own property! The people of Auburndale thought differently and, goaded on by the local newspapers, had begun action in the courts to restrain the road from diverting the land from its alleged original purpose. They had succeeded in getting the injunction, but the road had fought it tooth and nail, and finally carried it to the Supreme Court, where Judge Rossmore, after reserving his opinion, had finally sustained the injunction and decided against the railroad. That was the situation, and he would now like to hear from the members of the board. Mr. Grimsby rose. Self-confident and noisily loquacious, as most men of his class are in simple conversation, he was plainly intimidated at speaking before such a crowd. He did not know where to look nor what to do with his hands, and he shuffled uneasily on his feet, while streams of nervous perspiration ran down his fat face, which he mopped repeatedly with a big coloured handkerchief. At last, taking courage, he began: "Mr. Chairman, for the past ten years this road has made bigger earnings in proportion to its carrying capacity than any other railroad in the United States. We have had fewer accidents, less injury to rolling stock, less litigation and bigger dividends. The road has been well managed and"--here he looked significantly in Ryder's direction--"there has been a big brain behind the manager. We owe you that credit, Mr. Ryder!" Cries of "Hear! Hear!" came from all round the table. Ryder bowed coldly, and Mr. Grimsby continued: "But during the last year or two things have gone wrong. There has been a lot of litigation, most of which has gone against us, and it has cost a heap of money. It reduced the last quarterly dividend very considerably, and the new complication--this Auburndale suit, which also has gone against us--is going to make a still bigger hole in our exchequer. Gentlemen, I don't want to be a prophet of misfortune, but I'll tell you this--unless something is done to stop this hostility in the courts you and I stand to lose every cent we have invested in the road. This suit which we have just lost means a number of others. What I would ask our chairman is what has become of his former good relations with the Supreme Court, what has become of his influence, which never failed us. What are these rumours regarding Judge Rossmore? He is charged in the newspapers with having accepted a present from a road in whose favour he handed down a very valuable decision. How is it that our road cannot reach Judge Rossmore and make him presents?" The speaker sat down, flushed and breathless. The expression on every face showed that the anxiety was general. The directors glanced at Ryder, but his face was expressionless as marble. Apparently he took not the slightest interest in this matter which so agitated his colleagues. Another director rose. He was a better speaker than Mr. Grimsby, but his voice had a hard, rasping quality that smote the ears unpleasantly. He said: "Mr. Chairman, none of us can deny what Mr. Grimsby has just put before us so vividly. We are threatened not with one, but with a hundred such suits, unless something is done either to placate the public or to render its attacks harmless. Rightly or wrongly, the railroad is hated by the people, yet we are only what railroad conditions compel us to be. With the present fierce competition, no fine question of ethics can enter into our dealings as a business organization. With an irritated public and press on one side, and a hostile judiciary on the other, the outlook certainly is far from bright. But is the judiciary hostile? Is it not true that we have been singularly free from litigation until recently, and that most of the decisions were favourable to the road? Judge Rossmore is the real danger. While he is on the bench the road is not safe. Yet all efforts to reach him have failed and will fail. I do not take any stock in the newspaper stories regarding Judge Rossmore. They are preposterous. Judge Rossmore is too strong a man to be got rid of so easily." The speaker sat down and another rose, his arguments being merely a reiteration of those already heard. Ryder did not listen to what was being said. Why should he? Was he not familiar with every possible phase of the game? Better than these men who merely talked, he was planning how the railroad and all his other interests could get rid of this troublesome judge. It was true. He who controlled legislatures and dictated to Supreme Court judges had found himself powerless when each turn of the legal machinery had brought him face to face with Judge Rossmore. Suit after suit had been decided against him and the interests he represented, and each time it was Judge Rossmore who had handed down the decision. So for years these two men had fought a silent but bitter duel in which principle on the one side and attempted corruption on the other were the gauge of battle. Judge Rossmore fought with the weapons which his oath and the law directed him to use, Ryder with the only weapons he understood--bribery and trickery. And each time it had been Rossmore who had emerged triumphant. Despite every manoeuvre Ryder's experience could suggest, notwithstanding every card that could be played to undermine his credit and reputation, Judge Rossmore stood higher in the country's confidence than when he was first appointed. So when Ryder found he could not corrupt this honest judge with gold, he decided to destroy him with calumny. He realized that the sordid methods which had succeeded with other judges would never prevail with Rossmore, so he plotted to take away from this man the one thing he cherished most--his honour. He would ruin him by defaming his character, and so skilfully would he accomplish his work that the judge himself would realize the hopelessness of resistance. No scruples embarrassed Ryder in arriving at this determination. From his point of view he was fully justified. "Business is business. He hurts my interests; therefore I remove him." So he argued, and he considered it no more wrong to wreck the happiness of this honourable man than he would to have shot a burglar in self-defence. So having thus tranquillized his conscience he had gone to work in his usually thorough manner, and his success had surpassed the most sanguine expectations. This is what he had done. Like many of our public servants whose labours are compensated only in niggardly fashion by an inconsiderate country, Judge Rossmore was a man of but moderate means. His income as Justice of the Supreme Court was $12,000 a year, but for a man in his position, having a certain appearance to keep up, it little more than kept the wolf from the door. He lived quietly but comfortably in New York City with his wife and his daughter Shirley, an attractive young woman who had graduated from Vassar and had shown a marked taste for literature. The daughter's education had cost a good deal of money, and this, together with life insurance and other incidentals of keeping house in New York, had about taken all he had. Yet he had managed to save a little, and those years when he could put by a fifth of his salary the judge considered himself lucky. Secretly, he was proud of his comparative poverty. At least the world could never ask him "where he got it." Ryder was well acquainted with Judge Rossmore's private means. The two men had met at a dinner, and although Ryder had tried to cultivate the acquaintance, he never received much encouragement. Ryder's son Jefferson, too, had met Miss Shirley Rossmore and been much attracted to her, but the father having more ambitious plans for his heir quickly discouraged all attentions in that direction. He himself, however, continued to meet the judge casually, and one evening he contrived to broach the subject of profitable investments. The judge admitted that by careful hoarding and much stinting he had managed to save a few thousand dollars which he was anxious to invest in something good. Quick as the keen-eyed vulture swoops down on its prey the wily financier seized the opportunity thus presented. And he took so much trouble in answering the judge's inexperienced questions, and generally made himself so agreeable, that the judge found himself regretting that he and Ryder had, by force of circumstances, been opposed to each other in public life so long. Ryder strongly recommended the purchase of Alaskan Mining stock, a new and booming enterprise which had lately become very active in the market. Ryder said he had reasons to believe that the stock would soon advance, and now there was an opportunity to get it cheap. A few days after he had made the investment the judge was surprised to receive certificates of stock for double the amount he had paid for. At the same time he received a letter from the secretary of the company explaining that the additional stock was pool stock and not to be marketed at the present time. It was in the nature of a bonus to which he was entitled as one of the early shareholders. The letter was full of verbiage and technical details of which the judge understood nothing, but he thought it very liberal of the company, and putting the stock away in his safe soon forgot all about it. Had he been a business man he would have scented peril. He would have realized that he had now in his possession $50,000 worth of stock for which he had not paid a cent, and furthermore had deposited it when a reorganization came. But the judge was sincerely grateful for Ryder's apparently disinterested advice and wrote two letters to him, one in which he thanked him for the trouble he had taken, and another in which he asked him if he was sure the company was financially sound, as the investment he contemplated making represented all his savings. He added in the second letter that he had received stock for double the amount of his investment, and that being a perfect child in business transactions he had been unable to account for the extra $50,000 worth until the secretary of the company had written him assuring him that everything was in order. These letters Ryder kept. From that time on the Alaskan Mining Company underwent mysterious changes. New capitalists gained control and the name was altered to the Great Northwestern Mining Company. Then it became involved in litigation, and one suit, the outcome of which meant millions to the company, was carried to the Supreme Court, where Judge Rossmore was sitting. The judge had by this time forgotten all about the company in which he owned stock. He did not even recall its name. He only knew vaguely that it was a mine and that it was situated in Alaska. Could he dream that the Great Northwestern Mining Company and the company to which he had entrusted his few thousands were one and the same? In deciding on the merits of the case presented to him right seemed to him to be plainly with the Northwestern, and he rendered a decision to that effect. It was an important decision, involving a large sum, and for a day or two it was talked about. But as it was the opinion of the most learned and honest judge on the bench no one dreamed of questioning it. But very soon ugly paragraphs began to appear in the newspapers. One paper asked if it were true that Judge Rossmore owned stock in the Great Northwestern Mining Company which had recently benefited so signally by his decision. Interviewed by a reporter, Judge Rossmore indignantly denied being interested in any way in the company. Thereupon the same paper returned to the attack, stating that the judge must surely be mistaken as the records showed a sale of stock to him at the time the company was known as the Alaskan Mining Company. When he read this the judge was overwhelmed. It was true then! They had not slandered him. It was he who had lied, but how innocently--how innocently! His daughter Shirley, who was his greatest friend and comfort, was then in Europe. She had gone to the Continent to rest, after working for months on a novel which she had just published. His wife, entirely without experience in business matters and somewhat of an invalid, was helpless to advise him. But to his old and tried friend, ex-Judge Stott, Judge Rossmore explained the facts as they were. Stott shook his head. "It's a conspiracy!" he cried. "And John B. Ryder is behind it." Rossmore refused to believe that any man could so deliberately try to encompass another's destruction, but when more newspaper stories came out he began to realize that Stott was right and that his enemies had indeed dealt him a deadly blow. One newspaper boldly stated that Judge Rossmore was down on the mining company's books for $50,000 more stock than he had paid for, and it went on to ask if this were payment for the favourable decision just rendered. Rossmore, helpless, child-like as he was in business matters, now fully realized the seriousness of his position. "My God! My God!" he cried, as he bowed his head down on his desk. And for a whole day he remained closeted in his library, no one venturing near him. As John Ryder sat there sphinx-like at the head of the directors' table he reviewed all this in his mind. His own part in the work was now done and well done, and he had come to this meeting to-day to tell them of his triumph. The speaker, to whom he had paid such scant attention, resumed his seat, and there followed a pause and an intense silence which was broken only by the pattering of the rain against the big windows. The directors turned expectantly to Ryder, waiting for him to speak. What could the Colossus do now to save the situation? Cries of "the Chair! the Chair!" arose on every side. Senator Roberts leaned over to Ryder and whispered something in his ear. [Pencil illustration of the meeting] He had come to this meeting to-day to tell them of his triumph.--_Page 46._ With an acquiescent gesture, John Ryder tapped the table with his gavel and rose to address his fellow directors. Instantly the room was silent again as the tomb. One might have heard a pin drop, so intense was the attention. All eyes were fixed on the chairman. The air itself seemed charged with electricity, that needed but a spark to set it ablaze. Speaking deliberately and dispassionately, the Master Dissembler began. They had all listened carefully, he said, to what had been stated by previous speakers. The situation no doubt was very critical, but they had weathered worse storms and he had every reason to hope they would outlive this storm. It was true that public opinion was greatly incensed against the railroads and, indeed, against all organized capital, and was seeking to injure them through the courts. For a time this agitation would hurt business and lessen the dividends, for it meant not only smaller annual earnings but that a lot of money must be spent in Washington. The eyes of the listeners, who were hanging on every word, involuntarily turned in the direction of Senator Roberts, but the latter, at that moment busily engaged in rummaging among a lot of papers, seemed to have missed this significant allusion to the road's expenses in the District of Columbia. Ryder continued: In his experience such waves of reform were periodical and soon wear themselves out, when things go on just as they did before. Much of the agitation, doubtless, was a strike for graft. They would have to go down in their pockets, he supposed, and then these yellow newspapers and these yellow magazines that were barking at their heels would let them go. But in regard to the particular case now at issue--this Auburndale decision--there had been no way of preventing it. Influence had been used, but to no effect. The thing to do now was to prevent any such disasters in future by removing the author of them. The directors bent eagerly forward. Had Ryder really got some plan up his sleeve after all? The faces around the table looked brighter, and the directors cleared their throats and settled themselves down in their chairs as audiences do in the theatre when the drama is reaching its climax. The board, continued Ryder with icy calmness, had perhaps heard, and also seen in the newspapers, the stories regarding Judge Rossmore and his alleged connection with the Great Northwestern Company. Perhaps they had not believed these stories. It was only natural. He had not believed them himself. But he had taken the trouble to inquire into the matter very carefully, and he regretted to say that the stories were true. In fact, they were no longer denied by Judge Rossmore himself. The directors looked at each other in amazement. Gasps of astonishment, incredulity, satisfaction were heard all over the room. The rumours were true, then? Was it possible? Incredible! Investigation, Ryder went on, had shown that Judge Rossmore was not only interested in the company in whose favour, as Judge of the Supreme Court, he had rendered an important decision, but what was worse, he had accepted from that company a valuable gift--that is, $50,000 worth of stock--for which he had given absolutely nothing in return unless, as some claimed, the weight of his influence on the bench. These facts were very ugly and so unanswerable that Judge Rossmore did not attempt to answer them, and the important news which he, the chairman, had to announce to his fellow-directors that afternoon, was that Judge Rossmore's conduct would be made the subject of an inquiry by Congress. This was the spark that was needed to ignite the electrically charged air. A wild cry of triumph went up from this band of jackals only too willing to fatten their bellies at the cost of another man's ruin, and one director, in his enthusiasm, rose excitedly from his chair and demanded a vote of thanks for John Ryder. Ryder coldly opposed the motion. No thanks were due to him, he said deprecatingly, nor did he think the occasion called for congratulations of any kind. It was surely a sad spectacle to see this honoured judge, this devoted father, this blameless citizen threatened with ruin and disgrace on account of one false step. Let them rather sympathize with him and his family in their misfortune. He had little more to tell. The Congressional inquiry would take place immediately, and in all probability a demand would be made upon the Senate for Judge Rossmore's impeachment. It was, he added, almost unnecessary for him to remind the Board that, in the event of impeachment, the adverse decision in the Auburndale case would be annulled and the road would be entitled to a new trial. Ryder sat down, and pandemonium broke loose, the delighted directors tumbling over each other in their eagerness to shake hands with the man who had saved them. Ryder had given no hint that he had been a factor in the working up of this case against their common enemy, in fact he had appeared to sympathise with him, but the directors knew well that he and he alone had been the master mind which had brought about the happy result. On a motion to adjourn, the meeting broke up, and everyone began to troop towards the elevators. Outside the rain was now coming down in torrents and the lights that everywhere dotted the great city only paled when every few moments a vivid flash of lightning rent the enveloping gloom. Ryder and Senator Roberts went down in the elevator together. When they reached the street the senator inquired in a low tone: "Do you think they really believed Rossmore was influenced in his decision?" Ryder glanced from the lowering clouds overhead to his electric brougham which awaited him at the curb and replied indifferently: "Not they. They don't care. All they want to believe is that he is to be impeached. The man was dangerous and had to be removed--no matter by what means. He is our enemy--my enemy--and I never give quarter to my enemies!" As he spoke his prognathous jaw snapped to with a click-like sound, and in his eyes now coal-black were glints of fire. At the same instant there was a blinding flash, accompanied by a terrific crash, and the splinters of the flag-pole on the building opposite, which had been struck by a bolt, fell at their feet. "A good or a bad omen?" asked the senator with a nervous laugh. He was secretly afraid of lightning; but was ashamed to admit it. "A bad omen for Judge Rossmore!" rejoined Ryder coolly, as he slammed to the door of the cab, and the two men drove rapidly off in the direction of Fifth Avenue. CHAPTER III Of all the spots on this fair, broad earth where the jaded globe wanderer, surfeited with hackneyed sight-seeing, may sit in perfect peace and watch the world go by, there is none more fascinating nor one presenting a more brilliant panorama of cosmopolitan life than that famous corner on the Paris boulevards, formed by the angle of the Boulevard des Capucines and the Place de l'Opéra. Here, on the "terrace" of the Café de la Paix, with its white and gold façade and long French windows, and its innumerable little marble-topped tables and rattan chairs, one may sit for hours at the trifling expense of a few _sous_, undisturbed even by the tip-seeking _garçon_, and, if one happens to be a student of human nature, find keen enjoyment in observing the world-types, representing every race and nationality under the sun, that pass and re-pass in a steady, never ceasing, exhaustless stream. The crowd surges to and fro, past the little tables, occasionally toppling over a chair or two in the crush, moving up or down the great boulevards, one procession going to the right, in the direction of the Church of the Madeleine, the other to the left heading toward the historic Bastille, both really going nowhere in particular, but ambling gently and good humouredly along enjoying the sights--and life! Paris, queen of cities! Light-hearted, joyous, radiant Paris--the playground of the nations, the Mecca of the pleasure-seekers, the city beautiful! Paris--the siren, frankly immoral, always seductive, ever caressing! City of a thousand political convulsions, city of a million crimes--her streets have run with human blood, horrors unspeakable have stained her history, civil strife has scarred her monuments, the German conqueror insolently has bivouaced within her walls. Yet, like a virgin undefiled, she shows no sign of storm and stress, she offers her dimpled cheek to the rising sun, and when fall the shadows of night and a billion electric bulbs flash in the siren's crown, her resplendent, matchless beauty dazzles the world! As the supreme reward of virtue, the good American is promised a visit to Paris when he dies. Those, however, of our sagacious fellow countrymen who can afford to make the trip, usually manage to see Lutetia before crossing the river Styx. Most Americans like Paris--some like it so well that they have made it their permanent home--although it must be added that in their admiration they rarely include the Frenchman. For that matter, we are not as a nation particularly fond of any foreigner, largely because we do not understand him, while the foreigner for his part is quite willing to return the compliment. He gives the Yankee credit for commercial smartness, which has built up America's great material prosperity; but he has the utmost contempt for our acquaintance with art, and no profound respect for us as scientists. Is it not indeed fortunate that every nation finds itself superior to its neighbour? If this were not so each would be jealous of the other, and would cry with envy like a spoiled child who cannot have the moon to play with. Happily, therefore, for the harmony of the world, each nation cordially detests the other and the much exploited "brotherhood of man" is only a figure of speech. The Englishman, confident that he is the last word of creation, despises the Frenchman, who, in turn, laughs at the German, who shows open contempt for the Italian, while the American, conscious of his superiority to the whole family of nations, secretly pities them all. The most serious fault which the American--whose one god is Mammon and chief characteristic hustle--has to find with his French brother is that he enjoys life too much, is never in a hurry and, what to the Yankee mind is hardly respectable, has a habit of playing dominoes during business hours. The Frenchman retorts that his American brother, clever person though he be, has one or two things still to learn. He has, he declares, no philosophy of life. It is true that he has learned the trick of making money, but in the things which go to satisfy the soul he is still strangely lacking. He thinks he is enjoying life, when really he is ignorant of what life is. He admits it is not the American's fault, for he has never been taught how to enjoy life. One must be educated to that as everything else. All the American is taught is to be in a perpetual hurry and to make money no matter how. In this mad daily race for wealth, he bolts his food, not stopping to masticate it properly, and consequently suffers all his life from dyspepsia. So he rushes from the cradle to the grave, and what's the good, since he must one day die like all the rest? And what, asks the foreigner, has the American hustler accomplished that his slower-going Continental brother has not done as well? Are finer cities to be found in America than in Europe, do Americans paint more beautiful pictures, or write more learned or more entertaining books, has America made greater progress in science? Is it not a fact that the greatest inventors and scientists of our time--Marconi, who gave to the world wireless telegraphy, Professor Curie, who discovered radium, Pasteur, who found a cure for rabies, Santos-Dumont, who has almost succeeded in navigating the air, Professor Röntgen who discovered the X-ray--are not all these immortals Europeans? And those two greatest mechanical inventions of our day, the automobile and the submarine boat, were they not first introduced and perfected in France before we in America woke up to appreciate their use? Is it, therefore, not possible to take life easily and still achieve? The logic of these arguments, set forth in _Le Soir_ in an article on the New World, appealed strongly to Jefferson Ryder as he sat in front of the Café de la Paix, sipping a sugared Vermouth. It was five o'clock, the magic hour of the _apéritif_, when the glutton taxes his wits to deceive his stomach and work up an appetite for renewed gorging. The little tables were all occupied with the usual before-dinner crowd. There were a good many foreigners, mostly English and Americans and a few Frenchmen, obviously from the provinces, with only a sprinkling of real Parisians. Jefferson's acquaintance with the French language was none too profound, and he had to guess at half the words in the article, but he understood enough to follow the writer's arguments. Yes, it was quite true, he thought, the American idea of life was all wrong. What was the sense of slaving all one's life, piling up a mass of money one cannot possibly spend, when there is only one life to live? How much saner the man who is content with enough and enjoys life while he is able to. These Frenchmen, and indeed all the Continental nations, had solved the problem. The gaiety of their cities, and this exuberant joy of life they communicated to all about them, were sufficient proofs of it. Fascinated by the gay scene around him Jefferson laid the newspaper aside. To the young American, fresh from prosaic money-mad New York, the City of Pleasure presented indeed a novel and beautiful spectacle. How different, he mused, from his own city with its one fashionable thoroughfare--Fifth Avenue--monotonously lined for miles with hideous brownstone residences, and showing little real animation except during the Saturday afternoon parade when the activities of the smart set, male and female, centred chiefly in such exciting diversions as going to Huyler's for soda, taking tea at the Waldorf, and trying to outdo each other in dress and show. New York certainly was a dull place with all its boasted cosmopolitanism. There was no denying that. Destitute of any natural beauty, handicapped by its cramped geographical position between two rivers, made unsightly by gigantic sky-scrapers and that noisy monstrosity the Elevated Railroad, having no intellectual interests, no art interests, no interest in anything not immediately connected with dollars, it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to _live_ in. The millionaires were building white-marble palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls--and Jefferson insisted that in this one important particular New York had no peer--in spite of its comfortable theatres and its wicked Tenderloin, and its Rialto made so brilliant at night by thousands of elaborate electric signs, New York still had the subdued air of a provincial town, compared with the exuberant gaiety, the multiple attractions, the beauties, natural and artificial, of cosmopolitan Paris. The boulevards were crowded, as usual at that hour, and the crush of both vehicles and pedestrians was so great as to permit of only a snail-like progress. The clumsy three-horse omnibuses--Madeleine-Bastille--crowded inside and out with passengers and with their neatly uniformed drivers and conductors, so different in appearance and manner from our own slovenly street-car rowdies, were endeavouring to breast a perfect sea of _fiacres_ which, like a swarm of mosquitoes, appeared to be trying to go in every direction at once, their drivers vociferating torrents of vituperous abuse on every man, woman or beast unfortunate enough to get in their way. As a dispenser of unspeakable profanity, the Paris _cocher_ has no equal. He is unique, no one can approach him. He also enjoys the reputation of being the worst driver in the world. If there is any possible way in which he can run down a pedestrian or crash into another vehicle he will do it, probably for the only reason that it gives him another opportunity to display his choice stock of picturesque expletives. But it was a lively, good-natured crowd and the fashionably gowned women and the well-dressed men, the fakirs hoarsely crying their catch-penny devices, the noble boulevards lined as far as the eye could reach with trees in full foliage, the magnificent Opera House with its gilded dome glistening in the warm sunshine of a June afternoon, the broad avenue directly opposite, leading in a splendid straight line to the famous Palais Royal, the almost dazzling whiteness of the houses and monuments, the remarkable cleanliness and excellent condition of the sidewalks and streets, the gaiety and richness of the shops and restaurants, the picturesque kiosks where they sold newspapers and flowers--all this made up a picture so utterly unlike anything he was familiar with at home that Jefferson sat spellbound, delighted. Yes, it was true, he thought, the foreigner had indeed learned the secret of enjoying life. There was assuredly something else in the world beyond mere money-getting. His father was a slave to it, but he would never be. He was resolved on that. Yet, with all his ideas of emancipation and progress, Jefferson was a thoroughly practical young man. He fully understood the value of money, and the possession of it was as sweet to him as to other men. Only he would never soil his soul in acquiring it dishonourably. He was convinced that society as at present organized was all wrong and that the feudalism of the middle ages had simply given place to a worse form of slavery--capitalistic driven labour--which had resulted in the actual iniquitous conditions, the enriching of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor. He was familiar with the socialistic doctrines of the day and had taken a keen interest in this momentous question, this dream of a regenerated mankind. He had read Karl Marx and other socialistic writers, and while his essentially practical mind could hardly approve all their programme for reorganizing the State, some of which seemed to him utopian, extravagant and even undesirable, he realised that the socialistic movement was growing rapidly all over the world and the day was not far distant when in America, as to-day in Germany and France, it would be a formidable factor to reckon with. But until the socialistic millennium arrived and society was reorganized, money, he admitted, would remain the lever of the world, the great stimulus to effort. Money supplied not only the necessities of life but also its luxuries, everything the material desire craved for, and so long as money had this magic purchasing power, so long would men lie and cheat and rob and kill for its possession. Was life worth living without money? Could one travel and enjoy the glorious spectacles Nature affords--the rolling ocean, the majestic mountains, the beautiful lakes, the noble rivers--without money? Could the book-lover buy books, the art-lover purchase pictures? Could one have fine houses to live in, or all sorts of modern conveniences to add to one's comfort, without money? The philosophers declared contentment to be happiness, arguing that the hod-carrier was likely to be happier in his hut than the millionaire in his palace; but was not that mere animal contentment, the happiness which knows no higher state, the ignorance of one whose eyes have never been raised to the heights? No, Jefferson was no fool. He loved money for what pleasure, intellectual or physical, it could give him, but he would never allow money to dominate his life as his father had done. His father, he knew well, was not a happy man, neither happy himself nor respected by the world. He had toiled all his life to make his vast fortune and now he toiled to take care of it. The galley slave led a life of luxurious ease compared with John Burkett Ryder. Baited by the yellow newspapers and magazines, investigated by State committees, dogged by process-servers, haunted by beggars, harassed by blackmailers, threatened by kidnappers, frustrated in his attempts to bestow charity by the cry "tainted money"--certainly the lot of the world's richest man was far from being an enviable one. That is why Jefferson had resolved to strike out for himself. He had warded off the golden yoke which his father proposed to put on his shoulders, declining the lucrative position made for him in the Empire Trading Company, and he had gone so far as to refuse also the private income his father offered to settle on him. He would earn his own living. A man who has his bread buttered for him seldom accomplishes anything he had said, and while his father had appeared to be angry at this open opposition to his will, he was secretly pleased at his son's grit. Jefferson was thoroughly in earnest. If needs be, he would forego the great fortune that awaited him rather than be forced into questionable business methods against which his whole manhood revolted. Jefferson Ryder felt strongly about these matters, and gave them more thought than would be expected of most young men with his opportunities. In fact, he was unusually serious for his age. He was not yet thirty, but he had done a great deal of reading, and he took a keen interest in all the political and sociological questions of the hour. In personal appearance, he was the type of man that both men and women like--tall and athletic looking, with smooth face and clean-cut features. He had the steel-blue eyes and the fighting jaw of his father, and when he smiled he displayed two even rows of very white teeth. He was popular with men, being manly, frank and cordial in his relations with them, and women admired him greatly, although they were somewhat intimidated by his grave and serious manner. The truth was that he was rather diffident with women, largely owing to lack of experience with them. He had never felt the slightest inclination for business. He had the artistic temperament strongly developed, and his personal tastes had little in common with Wall Street and its feverish stock manipulating. When he was younger, he had dreamed of a literary or art career. At one time he had even thought of going on the stage. But it was to art that he turned finally. From an early age he had shown considerable skill as a draughtsman, and later a two years' course at the Academy of Design convinced him that this was his true vocation. He had begun by illustrating for the book publishers and for the magazines, meeting at first with the usual rebuffs and disappointments, but, refusing to be discouraged, he had kept on and soon the tide turned. His drawings began to be accepted. They appeared first in one magazine, then in another, until one day, to his great joy, he received an order from an important firm of publishers for six wash-drawings to be used in illustrating a famous novel. This was the beginning of his real success. His illustrations were talked about almost as much as the book, and from that time on everything was easy. He was in great demand by the publishers, and very soon the young artist, who had begun his career of independence on nothing a year so to speak, found himself in a handsomely appointed studio in Bryant Park, with more orders coming in than he could possibly fill, and enjoying an income of little less than $5,000 a year. The money was all the sweeter to Jefferson in that he felt he had himself earned every cent of it. This summer he was giving himself a well-deserved vacation, and he had come to Europe partly to see Paris and the other art centres about which his fellow students at the Academy raved, but principally--although this he did not acknowledge even to himself--to meet in Paris a young woman in whom he was more than ordinarily interested--Shirley Rossmore, daughter of Judge Rossmore, of the United States Supreme Court, who had come abroad to recuperate after the labours on her new novel, "The American Octopus," a book which was then the talk of two hemispheres. Jefferson had read half a dozen reviews of it in as many American papers that afternoon at the _New York Herald's_ reading room in the Avenue de l'Opéra, and he chuckled with glee as he thought how accurately this young woman had described his father. The book had been published under the pseudonym "Shirley Green," and he alone had been admitted into the secret of authorship. The critics all conceded that it was the book of the year, and that it portrayed with a pitiless pen the personality of the biggest figure in the commercial life of America. "Although," wrote one reviewer, "the leading character in the book is given another name, there can be no doubt that the author intended to give to the world a vivid pen portrait of John Burkett Ryder. She has succeeded in presenting a remarkable character-study of the most remarkable man of his time." He was particularly pleased with the reviews, not only for Miss Rossmore's sake, but also because his own vanity was gratified. Had he not collaborated on the book to the extent of acquainting the author with details of his father's life, and his characteristics, which no outsider could possibly have learned? There had been no disloyalty to his father in doing this. Jefferson admired his father's smartness, if he could not approve his methods. He did not consider the book an attack on his father, but rather a powerfully written pen picture of an extraordinary man. Jefferson had met Shirley Rossmore two years before at a meeting of the Schiller Society, a pseudo-literary organization gotten up by a lot of old fogies for no useful purpose, and at whose monthly meetings the poet who gave the society its name was probably the last person to be discussed. He had gone out of curiosity, anxious to take in all the freak shows New York had to offer, and he had been introduced to a tall girl with a pale, thoughtful face and firm mouth. She was a writer, Miss Rossmore told him, and this was her first visit also to the evening receptions of the Schiller Society. Half apologetically she added that it was likely to be her last, for, frankly, she was bored to death. But she explained that she had to go to these affairs, as she found them useful in gathering material for literary use. She studied types and eccentric characters, and this seemed to her a capital hunting ground. Jefferson, who, as a rule, was timid with girls and avoided them, found this girl quite unlike the others he had known. Her quiet, forceful demeanour appealed to him strongly, and he lingered with her, chatting about his work, which had so many interests in common with her own, until refreshments were served, when the affair broke up. This first meeting had been followed by a call at the Rossmore residence, and the acquaintance had kept up until Jefferson, for the first time since he came to manhood, was surprised and somewhat alarmed at finding himself strangely and unduly interested in a person of the opposite sex. The young artist's courteous manner, his serious outlook on life, his high moral principles, so rarely met with nowadays in young men of his age and class, could hardly fail to appeal to Shirley, whose ideals of men had been somewhat rudely shattered by those she had hitherto met. Above all, she demanded in a man the refinement of the true gentleman, together with strength of character and personal courage. That Jefferson Ryder came up to this standard she was soon convinced. He was certainly a gentleman: his views on a hundred topics of the hour expressed in numerous conversations assured her as to his principles, while a glance at his powerful physique left no doubt possible as to his courage. She rightly guessed that this was no _poseur_ trying to make an impression and gain her confidence. There was an unmistakable ring of sincerity in all his words, and his struggle at home with his father, and his subsequent brave and successful fight for his own independence and self-respect, more than substantiated all her theories. And the more Shirley let her mind dwell on Jefferson Ryder and his blue eyes and serious manner, the more conscious she became that the artist was encroaching more upon her thoughts and time than was good either for her work or for herself. So their casual acquaintance grew into a real friendship and comradeship. Further than that Shirley promised herself it should never go. Not that Jefferson had given her the slightest hint that he entertained the idea of making her his wife one day, only she was sophisticated enough to know the direction in which run the minds of men who are abnormally interested in one girl, and long before this Shirley had made up her mind that she would never marry. Firstly, she was devoted to her father and could not bear the thought of ever leaving him; secondly, she was fascinated by her literary work and she was practical enough to know that matrimony, with its visions of slippers and cradles, would be fatal to any ambition of that kind. She liked Jefferson immensely--more, perhaps, than any man she had yet met--and she did not think any the less of him because of her resolve not to get entangled in the meshes of Cupid. In any case he had not asked her to marry him--perhaps the idea was far from his thoughts. Meantime, she could enjoy his friendship freely without fear of embarrassing entanglements. When, therefore, she first conceived the idea of portraying in the guise of fiction the personality of John Burkett Ryder, the Colossus of finance whose vast and ever-increasing fortune was fast becoming a public nuisance, she naturally turned to Jefferson for assistance. She wanted to write a book that would be talked about, and which at the same time would open the eyes of the public to this growing peril in their midst--this monster of insensate and unscrupulous greed who, by sheer weight of his ill-gotten gold, was corrupting legislators and judges and trying to enslave the nation. The book, she argued, would perform a public service in awakening all to the common danger. Jefferson fully entered into her views and had furnished her with the information regarding his father that she deemed of value. The book had proven a success beyond their most sanguine expectations, and Shirley had come to Europe for a rest after the many weary months of work that it took to write it. The acquaintance of his son with the daughter of Judge Rossmore had not escaped the eagle eye of Ryder, Sr., and much to the financier's annoyance, and even consternation, he had ascertained that Jefferson was a frequent caller at the Rossmore home. He immediately jumped to the conclusion that this could mean only one thing, and fearing what he termed "the consequences of the insanity of immature minds," he had summoned Jefferson peremptorily to his presence. He told his son that all idea of marriage in that quarter was out of the question for two reasons: One was that Judge Rossmore was his most bitter enemy, the other was that he had hoped to see his son, his destined successor, marry a woman of whom he, Ryder, Sr., could approve. He knew of such a woman, one who would make a far more desirable mate than Miss Rossmore. He alluded, of course, to Kate Roberts, the pretty daughter of his old friend, the Senator. The family interests would benefit by this alliance, which was desirable from every point of view. Jefferson had listened respectfully until his father had finished and then grimly remarked that only one point of view had been overlooked--his own. He did not care for Miss Roberts; he did not think she really cared for him. The marriage was out of the question. Whereupon Ryder, Sr., had fumed and raged, declaring that Jefferson was opposing his will as he always did, and ending with the threat that if his son married Shirley Rossmore without his consent he would disinherit him. Jefferson was cogitating on these incidents of the last few months when suddenly a feminine voice which he quickly recognised called out in English: "Hello! Mr. Ryder." He looked up and saw two ladies, one young, the other middle aged, smiling at him from an open _fiacre_ which had drawn up to the curb. Jefferson jumped from his seat, upsetting his chair and startling two nervous Frenchmen in his hurry, and hastened out, hat in hand. "Why, Miss Rossmore, what are you doing out driving?" he asked. "You know you and Mrs. Blake promised to dine with me to-night. I was coming round to the hotel in a few moments." Mrs. Blake was a younger sister of Shirley's mother. Her husband had died a few years previously, leaving her a small income, and when she had heard of her niece's contemplated trip to Europe she had decided to come to Paris to meet her and incidentally to chaperone her. The two women were stopping at the Grand Hotel close by, while Jefferson had found accommodations at the Athénée. Shirley explained. Her aunt wanted to go to the dressmaker's, and she herself was most anxious to go to the Luxembourg Gardens to hear the music. Would he take her? Then they could meet Mrs. Blake at the hotel at seven o'clock and all go to dinner. Was he willing? Was he? Jefferson's face fairly glowed. He ran back to his table on the _terrasse_ to settle for his Vermouth, astonished the waiter by not stopping to notice the short change he gave him, and rushed back to the carriage. A dirty little Italian girl, shrewd enough to note the young man's attention to the younger of the American women, wheedled up to the carriage and thrust a bunch of flowers in Jefferson's face. "_Achetez des fleurs, monsieur, pour la jolie dame?_" Down went Jefferson's hand in his pocket and, filling the child's hand with small silver, he flung the flowers in the carriage. Then he turned inquiringly to Shirley for instructions so he could direct the _cocher_. Mrs. Blake said she would get out here. Her dressmaker was close by, in the Rue Auber, and she would walk back to the hotel to meet them at seven o'clock. Jefferson assisted her to alight and escorted her as far as the _porte-cochère_ of the modiste's, a couple of doors away. When he returned to the carriage, Shirley had already told the coachman where to go. He got in and the _fiacre_ started. "Now," said Shirley, "tell me what you have been doing with yourself all day." Jefferson was busily arranging the faded carriage rug about Shirley, spending more time in the task perhaps than was absolutely necessary, and she had to repeat the question. "Doing?" he echoed with a smile, "I've been doing two things--waiting impatiently for seven o'clock and incidentally reading the notices of your book." CHAPTER IV "Tell me, what do the papers say?" Settling herself comfortably back in the carriage, Shirley questioned Jefferson with eagerness, even anxiety. She had been impatiently awaiting the arrival of the newspapers from "home," for so much depended on this first effort. She knew her book had been praised in some quarters, and her publishers had written her that the sales were bigger every day, but she was curious to learn how it had been received by the reviewers. In truth, it had been no slight achievement for a young writer of her inexperience, a mere tyro in literature, to attract so much attention with her first book. The success almost threatened to turn her head, she had told her aunt laughingly, although she was sure it could never do that. She fully realized that it was the subject rather than the skill of the narrator that counted in the book's success, also the fact that it had come out at a timely moment, when the whole world was talking of the Money Peril. Had not President Roosevelt, in a recent sensational speech, declared that it might be necessary for the State to curb the colossal fortunes of America, and was not her hero, John Burkett Ryder, the richest of them all? Any way they looked at it, the success of the book was most gratifying. While she was an attractive, aristocratic-looking girl, Shirley Rossmore had no serious claims to academic beauty. Her features were irregular, and the firm and rather thin mouth lines disturbed the harmony indispensable to plastic beauty. Yet there was in her face something far more appealing--soul and character. The face of the merely beautiful woman expresses nothing, promises nothing. It presents absolutely no key to the soul within, and often there is no soul within to have a key to. Perfect in its outlines and coloring, it is a delight to gaze upon, just as is a flawless piece of sculpture, yet the delight is only fleeting. One soon grows satiated, no matter how beautiful the face may be, because it is always the same, expressionless and soulless. "Beauty is only skin deep," said the philosopher, and no truer dictum was ever uttered. The merely beautiful woman, who possesses only beauty and nothing else, is kept so busy thinking of her looks, and is so anxious to observe the impression her beauty makes on others, that she has neither the time nor the inclination for matters of greater importance. Sensible men, as a rule, do not lose their hearts to women whose only assets are their good looks. They enjoy a flirtation with them, but seldom care to make them their wives. The marrying man is shrewd enough to realize that domestic virtues will be more useful in his household economy than all the academic beauty ever chiselled out of block marble. Shirley was not beautiful, but hers was a face that never failed to attract attention. It was a thoughtful and interesting face, with an intellectual brow and large, expressive eyes, the face of a woman who had both brain power and ideals, and yet who, at the same time, was in perfect sympathy with the world. She was fair in complexion, and her fine brown eyes, alternately reflective and alert, were shaded by long dark lashes. Her eyebrows were delicately arched, and she had a good nose. She wore her hair well off the forehead, which was broader than in the average woman, suggesting good mentality. Her mouth, however, was her strongest feature. It was well shaped, but there were firm lines about it that suggested unusual will power. Yet it smiled readily, and when it did there was an agreeable vision of strong, healthy-looking teeth of dazzling whiteness. She was a little over medium height and slender in figure, and carried herself with that unmistakable air of well-bred independence that bespeaks birth and culture. She dressed stylishly, and while her gowns were of rich material, and of a cut suggesting expensive modistes, she was always so quietly attired and in such perfect taste, that after leaving her one could never recall what she had on. At the special request of Shirley, who wanted to get a glimpse of the Latin Quarter, the driver took a course down the Avenue de l'Opéra, that magnificent thoroughfare which starts at the Opéra and ends at the Théâtre Français, and which, like many others that go to the beautifying of the capital, the Parisians owe to the much-despised Napoleon III. The cab, Jefferson told her, would skirt the Palais Royal and follow the Rue de Rivoli until it came to the Châtelet, when it would cross the Seine and drive up the Boulevard St. Michel--the students' boulevard--until it reached the Luxembourg Gardens. Like most of his kind, the _cocher_ knew less than nothing of the art of driving, and he ran a reckless, zig-zag flight, in and out, forcing his way through a confusing maze of vehicles of every description, pulling first to the right, then to the left, for no good purpose that was apparent, and averting only by the narrowest of margins half a dozen bad collisions. At times the _fiacre_ lurched in such alarming fashion that Shirley was visibly perturbed, but when Jefferson assured her that all Paris cabs travelled in this crazy fashion and nothing ever happened, she was comforted. "Tell me," he repeated, "what do the papers say about the book?" "Say?" he echoed. "Why, simply that you've written the biggest book of the year, that's all!" "Really! Oh, do tell me all they said!" She was fairly excited now, and in her enthusiasm she grasped Jefferson's broad, sunburnt hand which was lying outside the carriage rug. He tried to appear unconscious of the contact, which made his every nerve tingle, as he proceeded to tell her the gist of the reviews he had read that afternoon. "Isn't that splendid!" she exclaimed, when he had finished. Then she added quickly: "I wonder if your father has seen it?" Jefferson grinned. He had something on his conscience, and this was a good opportunity to get rid of it. He replied laconically: "He probably has read it by this time. I sent him a copy myself." The instant the words were out of his mouth he was sorry, for Shirley's face had changed colour. "You sent him a copy of 'The American Octopus'?" she cried. "Then he'll guess who wrote the book." "Oh, no, he won't," rejoined Jefferson calmly. "He has no idea who sent it to him. I mailed it anonymously." Shirley breathed a sigh of relief. It was so important that her identity should remain a secret. As daughter of a Supreme Court judge she had to be most careful. She would not embarrass her father for anything in the world. But it was smart of Jefferson to have sent Ryder, Sr., the book, so she smiled graciously on his son as she asked: "How do you know he got it? So many letters and packages are sent to him that he never sees himself." "Oh, he saw your book all right," laughed Jefferson. "I was around the house a good deal before sailing, and one day I caught him in the library reading it." They both laughed, feeling like mischievous children who had played a successful trick on the hokey-pokey man. Jefferson noted his companion's pretty dimples and fine teeth, and he thought how attractive she was, and stronger and stronger grew the idea within him that this was the woman who was intended by Nature to share his life. Her slender hand still covered his broad, sunburnt one, and he fancied he felt a slight pressure. But he was mistaken. Not the slightest sentiment entered into Shirley's thoughts of Jefferson. She regarded him only as a good comrade with whom she had secrets she confided in no one else. To that extent and to that extent alone he was privileged above other men. Suddenly he asked her: "Have you heard from home recently?" A soft light stole into the girl's face. Home! Ah, that was all she needed to make her cup of happiness full. Intoxicated with this new sensation of a first literary success, full of the keen pleasure this visit to the beautiful city was giving her, bubbling over with the joy of life, happy in the almost daily companionship of the man she liked most in the world after her father, there was only one thing lacking--home! She had left New York only a month before, and she was homesick already. Her father she missed most. She was fond of her mother, too, but the latter, being somewhat of a nervous invalid, had never been to her quite what her father had been. The playmate of her childhood, companion of her girlhood, her friend and adviser in womanhood, Judge Rossmore was to his daughter the ideal man and father. Answering Jefferson's question she said: "I had a letter from father last week. Everything was going on at home as when I left. Father says he misses me sadly, and that mother is ailing as usual." She smiled, and Jefferson smiled too. They both knew by experience that nothing really serious ailed Mrs. Rossmore, who was a good deal of a hypochondriac, and always so filled with aches and pains that, on the few occasions when she really felt well, she was genuinely alarmed. The _fiacre_ by this time had emerged from the Rue de Rivoli and was rolling smoothly along the fine wooden pavement in front of the historic Conciergerie prison where Marie Antoinette was confined before her execution. Presently they recrossed the Seine, and the cab, dodging the tram car rails, proceeded at a smart pace up the "Boul' Mich'," which is the familiar diminutive bestowed by the students upon that broad avenue which traverses the very heart of their beloved _Quartier Latin_. On the left frowned the scholastic walls of the learned Sorbonne, in the distance towered the majestic dome of the Panthéon where Rousseau, Voltaire and Hugo lay buried. Like most of the principal arteries of the French capital, the boulevard was generously lined with trees, now in full bloom, and the sidewalks fairly seethed with a picturesque throng in which mingled promiscuously frivolous students, dapper shop clerks, sober citizens, and frisky, flirtatious little _ouvrières_, these last being all hatless, as is characteristic of the workgirl class, but singularly attractive in their neat black dresses and dainty low-cut shoes. There was also much in evidence another type of female whose extravagance of costume and boldness of manner loudly proclaimed her ancient profession. On either side of the boulevard were shops and cafés, mostly cafés, with every now and then a _brasserie_, or beer hall. Seated in front of these establishments, taking their ease as if beer sampling constituted the only real interest in their lives, were hundreds of students, reckless and dare-devil, and suggesting almost anything except serious study. They all wore frock coats and tall silk hats, and some of the latter were wonderful specimens of the hatter's art. A few of the more eccentric students had long hair down to their shoulders, and wore baggy peg-top trousers of extravagant cut, which hung in loose folds over their sharp-pointed boots. On their heads were queer plug hats with flat brims. Shirley laughed outright and regretted that she did not have her kodak to take back to America some idea of their grotesque appearance, and she listened with amused interest as Jefferson explained that these men were notorious _poseurs_, aping the dress and manners of the old-time student as he flourished in the days of Randolph and Mimi and the other immortal characters of Murger's Bohemia. Nobody took them seriously except themselves, and for the most part they were bad rhymesters of decadent verse. Shirley was astonished to see so many of them busily engaged smoking cigarettes and imbibing glasses of a pale-green beverage, which Jefferson told her was absinthe. "When do they read?" she asked. "When do they attend lectures?" "Oh," laughed Jefferson, "only the old-fashioned students take their studies seriously. Most of the men you see there are from the provinces, seeing Paris for the first time, and having their fling. Incidentally they are studying life. When they have sown their wild oats and learned all about life--provided they are still alive and have any money left--they will begin to study books. You would be surprised to know how many of these young men, who have been sent to the University at a cost of goodness knows what sacrifices, return to their native towns in a few months wrecked in body and mind, without having once set foot in a lecture room, and, in fact, having done nothing except inscribe their names on the rolls." Shirley was glad she knew no such men, and if she ever married and had a son she would pray God to spare her that grief and humiliation. She herself knew something about the sacrifices parents make to secure a college education for their children. Her father had sent her to Vassar. She was a product of the much-sneered-at higher education for women, and all her life she would be grateful for the advantages given her. Her liberal education had broadened her outlook on life and enabled her to accomplish the little she had. When she graduated her father had left her free to follow her own inclinations. She had little taste for social distractions, and still she could not remain idle. For a time she thought of teaching to occupy her mind, but she knew she lacked the necessary patience, and she could not endure the drudgery of it, so, having won honors at college in English composition, she determined to try her hand at literature. She wrote a number of essays and articles on a hundred different subjects which she sent to the magazines, but they all came back with politely worded excuses for their rejection. But Shirley kept right on. She knew she wrote well; it must be that her subjects were not suitable. So she adopted new tactics, and persevered until one day came a letter of acceptance from the editor of one of the minor magazines. They would take the article offered--a sketch of college life--and as many more in similar vein as Miss Rossmore could write. This success had been followed by other acceptances and other commissions, until at the present time she was a well-known writer for the leading publications. Her great ambition had been to write a book, and "The American Octopus," published under an assumed name, was the result. The cab stopped suddenly in front of beautiful gilded gates. It was the Luxembourg, and through the tall railings they caught a glimpse of well-kept lawns, splashing fountains and richly dressed children playing. From the distance came the stirring strains of a brass band. The coachman drove up to the curb and Jefferson jumped down, assisting Shirley to alight. In spite of Shirley's protest Jefferson insisted on paying. "_Combien?_" he asked the _cocher_. The jehu, a surly, thick-set man with a red face and small, cunning eyes like a ferret, had already sized up his fares for two _sacré_ foreigners whom it would be flying in the face of Providence not to cheat, so with unblushing effrontery he answered: "_Dix francs, Monsieur!_" And he held up ten fingers by way of illustration. Jefferson was about to hand up a ten-franc piece when Shirley indignantly interfered. She would not submit to such an imposition. There was a regular tariff and she would pay that and nothing more. So, in better French than was at Jefferson's command, she exclaimed: "Ten francs? _Pourquoi dix francs?_ I took your cab by the hour. It is exactly two hours. That makes four francs." Then to Jefferson she added: "Give him a franc for a _pourboire_--that makes five francs altogether." Jefferson, obedient to her superior wisdom, held out a five-franc piece, but the driver shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. He saw that the moment had come to bluster so he descended from his box fully prepared to carry out his bluff. He started in to abuse the two Americans whom in his ignorance he took for English. "Ah, you _sale Anglais_! You come to France to cheat the poor Frenchman. You make me work all afternoon and then pay me nothing. Not with this coco! I know my rights and I'll get them, too." All this was hurled at them in a patois French, almost unintelligible to Shirley, and wholly so to Jefferson. All he knew was that the fellow's attitude was becoming unbearably insolent and he stepped forward with a gleam in his eye that might have startled the man had he not been so busy shaking his fist at Shirley. But she saw Jefferson's movement and laid her hand on his arm. "No, no, Mr. Ryder--no scandal, please. Look, people are beginning to come up! Leave him to me. I know how to manage him." With this the daughter of a United States Supreme Court judge proceeded to lay down the law to the representative of the most lazy and irresponsible class of men ever let loose in the streets of a civilised community. Speaking with an air of authority, she said: "Now look here, my man, we have no time to bandy words here with you. I took your cab at 3.30. It is now 5.30. That makes two hours. The rate is two francs an hour, or four francs in all. We offer you five francs, and this includes a franc _pourboire_. If this settlement does not suit you we will get into your cab and you will drive us to the nearest police-station where the argument can be continued." The man's jaw dropped. He was obviously outclassed. These foreigners knew the law as well as he did. He had no desire to accept Shirley's suggestion of a trip to the police-station, where he knew he would get little sympathy, so, grumbling and giving vent under his breath to a volley of strange oaths, he grabbed viciously at the five-franc piece Jefferson held out and, mounting his box, drove off. Proud of their victory, they entered the gardens, following the sweet-scented paths until they came to where the music was. The band of an infantry regiment was playing, and a large crowd had gathered. Many people were sitting on the chairs provided for visitors for the modest fee of two sous; others were promenading round and round a great circle having the musicians in its centre. The dense foliage of the trees overhead afforded a perfect shelter from the hot rays of the sun, and the place was so inviting and interesting, so cool and so full of sweet perfumes and sounds, appealing to and satisfying the senses, that Shirley wished they had more time to spend there. She was very fond of a good brass band, especially when heard in the open air. They were playing Strauss's _Blue Danube_, and the familiar strains of the delightful waltz were so infectious that both were seized by a desire to get up and dance. There was constant amusement, too, watching the crowd, with its many original and curious types. There were serious college professors, with gold-rimmed spectacles, buxom _nounous_ in their uniform cloaks and long ribbon streamers, nicely dressed children romping merrily but not noisily, more queer-looking students in shabby frock coats, tight at the waist, trousers too short, and comical hats, stylishly dressed women displaying the latest fashions, brilliantly uniformed army officers strutting proudly, dangling their swords--an attractive and interesting crowd, so different, thought the two Americans, from the cheap, evil-smelling, ill-mannered mob of aliens that invades their own Central Park the days when there is music, making it a nuisance instead of a pleasure. Here everyone belonged apparently to the better class; the women and children were richly and fashionably dressed, the officers looked smart in their multi-coloured uniforms, and, no matter how one might laugh at the students, there was an atmosphere of good-breeding and refinement everywhere which Shirley was not accustomed to see in public places at home. A sprinkling of workmen and people of the poorer class were to be seen here and there, but they were in the decided minority. Shirley, herself a daughter of the Revolution, was a staunch supporter of the immortal principles of Democracy and of the equality of man before the law. But all other talk of equality was the greatest sophistry and charlatanism. There could be no real equality so long as some people were cultured and refined and others were uneducated and vulgar. Shirley believed in an aristocracy of brains and soap. She insisted that no clean person, no matter how good a democrat, should be expected to sit close in public places to persons who were not on speaking terms with the bath-tub. In America this foolish theory of a democracy, which insists on throwing all classes, the clean and the unclean, promiscuously together, was positively revolting, making travelling in the public vehicles almost impossible, and it was not much better in the public parks. In France--also a Republic--where they likewise paraded conspicuously the clap-trap "Egalité, Fraternité," they managed these things far better. The French lower classes knew their place. They did not ape the dress, nor frequent the resorts of those above them in the social scale. The distinction between the classes was plainly and properly marked, yet this was not antagonistic to the ideal of true democracy; it had not prevented the son of a peasant from becoming President of the French Republic. Each district in Paris had its own amusement, its own theatres, its own parks. It was not a question of capital refusing to fraternize with labour, but the very natural desire of persons of refinement to mingle with clean people rather than to rub elbows with the Great Unwashed. "Isn't it delightful here?" said Shirley. "I could stay here forever, couldn't you?" "With you--yes," answered Jefferson, with a significant smile. Shirley tried to look angry. She strictly discouraged these conventional, sentimental speeches which constantly flung her sex in her face. "Now, you know I don't like you to talk that way, Mr. Ryder. It's most undignified. Please be sensible." Quite subdued, Jefferson relapsed into a sulky silence. Presently he said: "I wish you wouldn't call me Mr. Ryder. I meant to ask you this before. You know very well that you've no great love for the name, and if you persist you'll end by including me in your hatred of the hero of your book." Shirley looked at him with amused curiosity. "What do you mean?" she asked. "What do you want me to call you?" "Oh, I don't know," he stammered, rather intimidated by this self-possessed young woman who looked him calmly through and through. "Why not call me Jefferson? Mr. Ryder is so formal." Shirley laughed outright, a merry, unrestrained peal of honest laughter, which made the passers-by turn their heads and smile, too, commenting the while on the stylish appearance of the two Americans whom they took for sweethearts. After all, reasoned Shirley, he was right. They had been together now nearly every hour in the day for over a month. It was absurd to call him Mr. Ryder. So, addressing him with mock gravity, she said: "You're right, Mr. Ryder--I mean Jefferson. You're quite right. You are Jefferson from this time on, only remember"--here she shook her gloved finger at him warningly--"mind you behave yourself! No more such sentimental speeches as you made just now." Jefferson beamed. He felt at least two inches taller, and at that moment he would not have changed places with any one in the world. To hide the embarrassment his gratification caused him he pulled out his watch and exclaimed: "Why, it's a quarter past six. We shall have all we can do to get back to the hotel and dress for dinner." Shirley rose at once, although loath to leave. "I had no idea it was so late," she said. "How the time flies!" Then mockingly she added: "Come, Jefferson--be a good boy and find a cab." They passed out of the Gardens by the gate facing the Théâtre de l'Odéon, where there was a long string of _fiacres_ for hire. They got into one and in fifteen minutes they were back at the Grand Hotel. At the office they told Shirley that her aunt had already come in and gone to her room, so she hurried upstairs to dress for dinner while Jefferson proceeded to the Hotel de l'Athénée on the same mission. He had still twenty-five minutes before dinner time, and he needed only ten minutes for a wash and to jump into his dress suit, so, instead of going directly to his hotel, he sat down at the Café de la Paix. He was thirsty, and calling for a vermouth _frappé_ he told the _garçon_ to bring him also the American papers. The crowd on the boulevard was denser than ever. The business offices and some of the shops were closing, and a vast army of employés, homeward bound, helped to swell the sea of humanity that pushed this way and that. But Jefferson had no eyes for the crowd. He was thinking of Shirley. What singular, mysterious power had this girl acquired over him? He, who had scoffed at the very idea of marriage only a few months before, now desired it ardently, anxiously! Yes, that was what his life lacked--such a woman to be his companion and helpmate! He loved her--there was no doubt of that. His every thought, waking and sleeping, was of her, all his plans for the future included her. He would win her if any man could. But did she care for him? Ah, that was the cruel, torturing uncertainty! She appeared cold and indifferent, but perhaps she was only trying him. Certainly she did not seem to dislike him. The waiter returned with the vermouth and the newspapers. All he could find were the London _Times_, which he pronounced T-e-e-m-s, and some issues of the _New York Herald_. The papers were nearly a month old, but he did not care for that. Jefferson idly turned over the pages of the _Herald_. His thoughts were still running on Shirley, and he was paying little attention to what he was reading. Suddenly, however, his eyes rested on a headline which made him sit up with a start. It read as follows: JUDGE ROSSMORE IMPEACHED JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT TO BE TRIED ON BRIBERY CHARGES The despatch, which was dated Washington two weeks back, went on to say that serious charges affecting the integrity of Judge Rossmore had been made the subject of Congressional inquiry, and that the result of the inquiry was so grave that a demand for impeachment would be at once sent to the Senate. It added that the charges grew out of the recent decision in the Great Northwestern Mining Company case, it being alleged that Judge Rossmore had accepted a large sum of money on condition of his handing down a decision favourable to the company. Jefferson was thunderstruck. He read the despatch over again to make sure there was no mistake. No, it was very plain--Judge Rossmore of Madison Avenue. But how preposterous, what a calumny! The one judge on the bench at whom one could point and say with absolute conviction: "There goes an honest man!" And this judge was to be tried on a charge of bribery! What could be the meaning of it? Something terrible must have happened since Shirley's departure from home, that was certain. It meant her immediate return to the States and, of course, his own. He would see what could be done. He would make his father use his great influence. But how could he tell Shirley? Impossible, he could not! She would not believe him if he did. She would probably hear from home in some other way. They might cable. In any case he would say nothing yet. He paid for his vermouth and hurried away to his hotel to dress. It was just striking seven when he re-entered the courtyard of the Grand Hotel. Shirley and Mrs. Blake were waiting for him. Jefferson suggested having dinner at the Café de Paris, but Shirley objected that as the weather was warm it would be more pleasant to dine in the open air, so they finally decided on the Pavilion d'Armonville where there was music and where they could have a little table to themselves in the garden. They drove up the stately Champs Elysées, past the monumental Arc de Triomphe, and from there down to the Bois. All were singularly quiet. Mrs. Blake was worrying about her new gown, Shirley was tired, and Jefferson could not banish from his mind the terrible news he had just read. He avoided looking at Shirley until the latter noticed it and thought she must have offended him in some way. She was more sorry than she would have him know, for, with all her apparent coldness, Jefferson was rapidly becoming very indispensable to her happiness. They dined sumptuously and delightfully with all the luxury of surroundings and all the delights of cooking that the French culinary art can perfect. A single glass of champagne had put Shirley in high spirits and she had tried hard to communicate some of her good humour to Jefferson who, despite all her efforts, remained quiet and preoccupied. Finally losing patience she asked him bluntly: "Jefferson, what's the matter with you to-night? You've been sulky as a bear all evening." Pleased to see she had not forgotten their compact of the afternoon in regard to his name, Jefferson relaxed somewhat and said apologetically: "Excuse me, I've been feeling a bit seedy lately. I think I need another sea voyage. That's the only time when I feel really first-class--when I'm on the water." The mention of the sea started Shirley to talk about her future plans. She wasn't going back to America until September. She had arranged to make a stay of three weeks in London and then she would be free. Some friends of hers from home, a man and his wife who owned a steam yacht, were arranging a trip to the Mediterranean, including a run over to Cairo. They had asked her and Mrs. Blake to go and she was sure they would ask Jefferson, too. Would he go? There was no way out of it. Jefferson tried to work up some enthusiasm for this yachting trip, which he knew very well could never come off, and it cut him to the heart to see this poor girl joyously making all these preparations and plans, little dreaming of the domestic calamity which at that very moment was hanging over her head. [Photo, from the play, of the Ryder household as Jefferson is introduced to Miss Green.] "Father, I've changed my mind, I'm not going away."--Act II. It was nearly ten o'clock when they had finished. They sat a little longer listening to the gipsy music, weird and barbaric. Very pointedly, Shirley remarked: "I for one preferred the music this afternoon." "Why?" inquired Jefferson, ignoring the petulant note in her voice. "Because you were more amiable!" she retorted rather crossly. This was their first misunderstanding, but Jefferson said nothing. He could not tell her the thoughts and fears that had been haunting him all night. Soon afterward they re-entered their cab and returned to the boulevards which were ablaze with light and gaiety. Jefferson suggested going somewhere else, but Mrs. Blake was tired and Shirley, now quite irritated at what she considered Jefferson's unaccountable unsociability, declined somewhat abruptly. But she could never remain angry long, and when they said good-night she whispered demurely: "Are you cross with me, Jeff?" He turned his head away and she saw that his face was singularly drawn and grave. "Cross--no. Good-night. God bless you!" he said, hoarsely gulping down a lump that rose in his throat. Then grasping her hand he hurried away. Completely mystified, Shirley and her companion turned to the office to get the key of their room. As the man handed it to Shirley he passed her also a cablegram which had just come. She changed colour. She did not like telegrams. She always had a dread of them, for with her sudden news was usually bad news. Could this, she thought, explain Jefferson's strange behaviour? Trembling, she tore open the envelope and read: _Come home at once,_ _Mother._ CHAPTER V Rolling, tumbling, splashing, foaming water as far as the eye could reach in every direction. A desolate waste, full of life, movement and colour, extending to the bleak horizon and like a vast ploughed field cut up into long and high liquid ridges, all scurrying in one direction in serried ranks and with incredible speed as if pursued by a fearful and unseen enemy. Serenely yet boisterously, gracefully yet resistlessly, the endless waves passed on--some small, others monstrous, with fleecy white combs rushing down their green sides like toy Niagaras and with a seething, boiling sound as when flame touches water. They went by in a stately, never ending procession, going nowhere, coming from nowhere, but full of dignity and importance, their breasts heaving with suppressed rage because there was nothing in their path that they might destroy. The dancing, leaping water reflected every shade and tint--now a rich green, then a deep blue and again a dirty gray as the sun hid for a moment behind a cloud, and as a gust of wind caught the top of the combers decapitating them at one mad rush, the spray was dashed high in the air, flashing out all the prismatic colours. Here and yonder, the white caps rose, disappeared and came again, and the waves grew and then diminished in size. Then others rose, towering, became larger, majestic, terrible; the milk-like comb rose proudly, soared a brief moment, then fell ignominiously, and the wave diminished passed on humiliated. Over head, a few scattered cirrus clouds flitted lazily across the blue dome of heaven, while a dozen Mother Carey chickens screamed hoarsely as they circled in the air. The strong and steady western breeze bore on its powerful pinions the sweet and eternal music of the wind and sea. Shirley stood at the rail under the bridge of the ocean greyhound that was carrying her back to America with all the speed of which her mighty engines were capable. All day and all night, half naked stokers, so grimed with oil and coal dust as to lose the slightest semblance to human beings, feverishly shovelled coal, throwing it rapidly and evenly over roaring furnaces kept at a fierce white heat. The vast boilers, shaken by the titanic forces generating in their cavern-like depths, sent streams of scalding, hissing steam through a thousand valves, cylinders and pistons, turning wheels and cranks as it distributed the tremendous power which was driving the steel monster through the seas at the prodigious speed of four hundred miles in the twenty-four hours. Like a pulsating heart in some living thing, the mammoth engines throbbed and panted, and the great vessel groaned and creaked as she rose and fell to the heavy swell, and again lurched forward in obedience to each fresh propulsion from her fast spinning screws. Out on deck, volumes of dense black smoke were pouring from four gigantic smoke stacks and spread out in the sky like some endless cinder path leading back over the course the ship had taken. They were four days out from port. Two days more and they would sight Sandy Hook, and Shirley would know the worst. She had caught the North German Lloyd boat at Cherbourg two days after receiving the cablegram from New York. Mrs. Blake had insisted on coming along in spite of her niece's protests. Shirley argued that she had crossed alone when coming; she could go back the same way. Besides, was not Mr. Ryder returning home on the same ship? He would be company and protection both. But Mrs. Blake was bent on making the voyage. She had not seen her sister for many years and, moreover, this sudden return to America had upset her own plans. She was a poor sailor, yet she loved the ocean and this was a good excuse for a long trip. Shirley was too exhausted with worry to offer further resistance and by great good luck the two women had been able to secure at the last moment a cabin to themselves amidships. Jefferson, less fortunate, was compelled, to his disgust, to share a stateroom with another passenger, a fat German brewer who was returning to Cincinnati, and who snored so loud at night that even the thumping of the engines was completely drowned by his eccentric nasal sounds. The alarming summons home and the terrible shock she had experienced the following morning when Jefferson showed her the newspaper article with its astounding and heart rending news about her father had almost prostrated Shirley. The blow was all the greater for being so entirely unlooked for. That the story was true she could not doubt. Her mother would not have cabled except under the gravest circumstances. What alarmed Shirley still more was that she had no direct news of her father. For a moment her heart stood still--suppose the shock of this shameful accusation had killed him? Her blood froze in her veins, she clenched her fists and dug her nails into her flesh as she thought of the dread possibility that she had looked upon him in life for the last time. She remembered his last kind words when he came to the steamer to see her off, and his kiss when he said good-bye and she had noticed a tear of which he appeared to be ashamed. The hot tears welled up in her own eyes and coursed unhindered down her cheeks. What could these preposterous and abominable charges mean? What was this lie they had invented to ruin her father? That he had enemies she well knew. What strong man had not? Indeed, his proverbial honesty had made him feared by all evil-doers and on one occasion they had gone so far as to threaten his life. This new attack was more deadly than all--to sap and destroy his character, to deliberately fabricate lies and calumnies which had no foundation whatever. Of course, the accusation was absurd, the Senate would refuse to convict him, the entire press would espouse the cause of so worthy a public servant. Certainly, everything would be done to clear his character. But what was being done? She could do nothing but wait and wait. The suspense and anxiety were awful. Suddenly she heard a familiar step behind her, and Jefferson joined her at the rail. The wind was due West and blowing half a gale, so where they were standing--one of the most exposed parts of the ship--it was difficult to keep one's feet, to say nothing of hearing anyone speak. There was a heavy sea running, and each approaching wave looked big enough to engulf the vessel, but as the mass of moving water reached the bow, the ship rose on it, light and graceful as a bird, shook off the flying spray as a cat shakes her fur after an unwelcome bath, and again drove forward as steady and with as little perceptible motion as a railway train. Shirley was a fairly good sailor and this kind of weather did not bother her in the least, but when it got very rough she could not bear the rolling and pitching and then all she was good for was to lie still in her steamer chair with her eyes closed until the water was calmer and the pitching ceased. "It's pretty windy here, Shirley," shouted Jefferson, steadying himself against a stanchion. "Don't you want to walk a little?" He had begun to call her by her first name quite naturally, as if it were a matter of course. Indeed, their relations had come to be more like those of brother and sister than anything else. Shirley was too much troubled over the news from home to have a mind for other things, and in her distress she had turned to Jefferson for advice and help as she would have looked to an elder brother. He had felt this impulse to confide in him and consult his opinion and it had pleased him more than he dared betray. He had shown her all the sympathy of which his warm, generous nature was capable, yet secretly he did not regret that events had necessitated this sudden return home together on the same ship. He was sorry for Judge Rossmore, of course, and there was nothing he would not do on his return to secure a withdrawal of the charges. That his father would use his influence he had no doubt. But meantime he was selfish enough to be glad for the opportunity it gave him to be a whole week alone with Shirley. No matter how much one may be with people in city or country or even when stopping at the same hotel or house, there is no place in the world where two persons, especially when they are of the opposite sex, can become so intimate as on shipboard. The reason is obvious. The days are long and monotonous. There is nowhere to go, nothing to see but the ocean, nothing to do but read, talk or promenade. Seclusion in one's stuffy cabin is out of the question, the public sitting rooms are noisy and impossible, only a steamer chair on deck is comfortable and once there snugly wrapped up in a rug it is surprising how quickly another chair makes its appearance alongside and how welcome one is apt to make the intruder. Thus events combined with the weather conspired to bring Shirley and Jefferson more closely together. The sea had been rough ever since they sailed, keeping Mrs. Blake confined to her stateroom almost continuously. They were, therefore, constantly in one another's company, and slowly, unconsciously, there was taking root in their hearts the germ of the only real and lasting love--the love born of something higher than mere physical attraction, the nobler, more enduring affection that is born of mutual sympathy, association and companionship. "Isn't it beautiful?" exclaimed Shirley ecstatically. "Look at those great waves out there! See how majestically they soar and how gracefully they fall!" "Glorious!" assented Jefferson sharing her enthusiasm. "There's nothing to compare with it. It's Nature's grandest spectacle. The ocean is the only place on earth that man has not defiled and spoiled. Those waves are the same now as they were on the day of creation." "Not the day of creation. You mean during the aeons of time creation was evolving," corrected Shirley. "I meant that of course," assented Jefferson. "When one says 'day' that is only a form of speech." "Why not be accurate?" persisted Shirley. "It was the use of that little word 'day' which has given the theologians so many sleepless nights." There was a roguish twinkle in her eye. She well knew that he thought as she did on metaphysical questions, but she could not resist teasing him. Like Jefferson, she was not a member of any church, although her nature was deeply religious. Hers was the religion the soul inculcates, not that which is learned by rote in the temple. She was a Christian because she thought Christ the greatest figure in world history, and also because her own conduct of life was modelled upon Christian principles and virtues. She was religious for religion's sake and not for public ostentation. The mystery of life awed her and while her intelligence could not accept all the doctrines of dogmatic religion she did not go so far as Jefferson, who was a frank agnostic. She would not admit that we do not know. The longings and aspirations of her own soul convinced her of the existence of a Supreme Being, First Cause, Divine Intelligence--call it what you will--which had brought out of chaos the wonderful order of the universe. The human mind was, indeed, helpless to conceive such a First Cause in any form and lay prostrate before the Unknown, yet she herself was an enthusiastic delver into scientific hypothesis and the teachings of Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel had satisfied her intellect if they had failed to content her soul. The theory of evolution as applied to life on her own little planet appealed strongly to her because it accounted plausibly for the presence of man on earth. The process through which we had passed could be understood by every intelligence. The blazing satellite, violently detached from the parent sun starting on its circumscribed orbit--that was the first stage, the gradual subsidence of the flames and the cooling of the crust--the second stage: the gases mingling and forming water which covered the earth--the third stage; the retreating of the waters and the appearance of the land--the fourth stage; the appearance of vegetation and animal life--the fifth stage; then, after a long interval and through constant evolution and change the appearance of man, which was the sixth stage. What stages still to come, who knows? This simple account given by science was, after all, practically identical with the biblical legend! It was when Shirley was face to face with Nature in her wildest and most primitive aspects that this deep rooted religious feeling moved her most strongly. At these times she felt herself another being, exalted, sublimated, lifted from this little world with its petty affairs and vanities up to dizzy heights. She had felt the same sensation when for the first time she had viewed the glories of the snow clad Matterhorn, she had felt it when on a summer's night at sea she had sat on deck and watched with fascinated awe the resplendent radiance of the countless stars, she felt it now as she looked at the foaming, tumbling waves. "It is so beautiful," she murmured as she turned to walk. The ship was rolling a little and she took Jefferson's arm to steady herself. Shirley was an athletic girl and had all the ease and grace of carriage that comes of much tennis and golf playing. Barely twenty-four years old, she was still in the first flush of youth and health, and there was nothing she loved so much as exercise and fresh air. After a few turns on deck, there was a ruddy glow in her cheeks that was good to see and many an admiring glance was cast at the young couple as they strode briskly up and down past the double rows of elongated steamer chairs. They had the deck pretty much to themselves. It was only four o'clock, too early for the appetite-stimulating walk before dinner, and their fellow passengers were basking in the sunshine, stretched out on their chairs in two even rows like so many mummies on exhibition. Some were reading, some were dozing. Two or three were under the weather, completely prostrated, their bilious complexion of a deathly greenish hue. At each new roll of the ship, they closed their eyes as if resigned to the worst that might happen and their immediate neighbours furtively eyed each of their movements as if apprehensive of what any moment might bring forth. A few couples were flirting to their heart's content under the friendly cover of the lifeboats which, as on most of the transatlantic liners, were more useful in saving reputations than in saving life. The deck steward was passing round tea and biscuits, much to the disgust of the ill ones, but to the keen satisfaction of the stronger stomached passengers who on shipboard never seem to be able to get enough to eat and drink. On the bridge, the second officer, a tall, handsome man with the points of his moustache trained upwards à la Kaiser Wilhelm, was striding back and forth, every now and then sweeping the horizon with his glass and relieving the monotony of his duties by ogling the better looking women passengers. "Hello, Shirley!" called out a voice from a heap of rugs as Shirley and Jefferson passed the rows of chairs. They stopped short and discovered Mrs. Blake ensconced in a cozy corner, sheltered from the wind. "Why, aunt Milly," exclaimed Shirley surprised. "I thought you were downstairs. I didn't think you could stand this sea." "It is a little rougher than I care to have it," responded Mrs. Blake with a wry grimace and putting her hand to her breast as if to appease disturbing qualms. "It was so stuffy in the cabin I could not bear it. It's more pleasant here but it's getting a little cool and I think I'll go below. Where have you children been all afternoon?" Jefferson volunteered to explain. "The children have been rhapsodizing over the beauties of the ocean," he laughed. With a sly glance at Shirley, he added, "Your niece has been coaching me in metaphysics." Shirley shook her finger at him. "Now Jefferson, if you make fun of me I'll never talk seriously with you again." "_Wie geht es, meine damen?_" Shirley turned on hearing the guttural salutation. It was Captain Hegermann, the commander of the ship, a big florid Saxon with great bushy golden whiskers and a basso voice like Edouard de Reszké. He was imposing in his smart uniform and gold braid and his manner had the self-reliant, authoritative air usual in men who have great responsibilities and are accustomed to command. He was taking his afternoon stroll and had stopped to chat with his lady passengers. He had already passed Mrs. Blake a dozen times and not noticed her, but now her pretty niece was with her, which altered the situation. He talked to the aunt and looked at Shirley, much to the annoyance of Jefferson, who muttered things under his breath. "When shall we be in, captain?" asked Mrs. Blake anxiously, forgetting that this was one of the questions which according to ship etiquette must never be asked of the officers. But as long as he could ignore Mrs. Blake and gaze at Shirley Capt. Hegermann did not mind. He answered amiably: "At the rate we are going, we ought to sight Fire Island sometime to-morrow evening. If we do, that will get us to our dock about 11 o'clock Friday morning, I fancy." Then addressing Shirley direct he said: "And you, fraulein, I hope you won't be glad the voyage is over?" Shirley sighed and a worried, anxious look came into her face. "Yes, Captain, I shall be very glad. It is not pleasure that is bringing me back to America so soon." The captain elevated his eyebrows. He was sorry the young lady had anxieties to keep her so serious, and he hoped she would find everything all right on her arrival. Then, politely saluting, he passed on, only to halt again a few paces on where his bewhiskered gallantry met with more encouragement. Mrs. Blake rose from her chair. The air was decidedly cooler, she would go downstairs and prepare for dinner. Shirley said she would remain on deck a little longer. She was tired of walking, so when her aunt left them she took her chair and told Jefferson to get another. He wanted nothing better, but before seating himself he took the rugs and wrapped Shirley up with all the solicitude of a mother caring for her first born. Arranging the pillow under her head, he asked: "Is that comfortable?" She nodded, smiling at him. "You're a good boy, Jeff. But you'll spoil me." "Nonsense," he stammered as he took another chair and put himself by her side. "As if any fellow wouldn't give his boots to do a little job like that for you!" She seemed to take no notice of the covert compliment. In fact, she already took it as a matter of course that Jefferson was very fond of her. Did she love him? She hardly knew. Certainly she thought more of him than of any other man she knew and she readily believed that she could be with him for the rest of her life and like him better every day. Then, too, they had become more intimate during the last few days. This trouble, this unknown peril had drawn them together. Yes, she would be sorry if she were to see Jefferson paying attention to another woman. Was this love? Perhaps. These thoughts were running through her mind as they sat there side by side isolated from the main herd of passengers, each silent, watching through the open rail the foaming water as it rushed past. Jefferson had been casting furtive glances at his companion and as he noted her serious, pensive face he thought how pretty she was. He wondered what she was thinking of and suddenly inspired no doubt by the mysterious power that enables some people to read the thoughts of others, he said abruptly: "Shirley, I can read your thoughts. You were thinking of me." She was startled for a moment but immediately recovered her self possession. It never occurred to her to deny it. She pondered for a moment and then replied: "You are right, Jeff, I was thinking of you. How did you guess?" He leaned over her chair and took her hand. She made no resistance. Her delicate, slender hand lay passively in his big brown one and met his grasp frankly, cordially. He whispered: "What were you thinking of me--good or bad?" "Good, of course. How could I think anything bad of you?" She turned her eyes on him in wonderment. Then she went on: "I was wondering how a girl could distinguish between the feeling she has for a man she merely likes, and the feeling she has for a man she loves." Jefferson bent eagerly forward so as to lose no word that might fall from those coveted lips. "In what category would I be placed?" he asked. "I don't quite know," she answered, laughingly. Then seriously, she added: "Jeff, why should we act like children? Your actions, more than your words, have told me that you love me. I have known it all along. If I have appeared cold and indifferent it is because"--she hesitated. "Because?" echoed Jefferson anxiously, as if his whole future depended on that reason. "Because I was not sure of myself. Would it be womanly or honourable on my part to encourage you, unless I felt I reciprocated your feelings? You are young, one day you will be very rich, the whole world lies before you. There are plenty of women who would willingly give you their love." "No--no!" he burst out in vigorous protest, "it is you I want, Shirley, you alone." Grasping her hand more closely, he went on, passion vibrating in every note of his voice. "I love you, Shirley. I've loved you from the very first evening I met you. I want you to be my wife." Shirley looked straight up into the blue eyes so eagerly bent down on hers, so entreating in their expression, and in a gentle voice full of emotion she answered: "Jefferson, you have done me the greatest honour a man can do a woman. Don't ask me to answer you now. I like you very much--I more than like you. Whether it is love I feel for you--that I have not yet determined. Give me time. My present trouble and then my literary work--" "I know," agreed Jefferson, "that this is hardly the time to speak of such matters. Your father has first call on your attention. But as to your literary work. I do not understand." "Simply this. I am ambitious. I have had a little success--just enough to crave for more. I realize that marriage would put an extinguisher on all aspirations in that direction." "Is marriage so very commonplace?" grumbled Jefferson. "Not commonplace, but there is no room in marriage for a woman having personal ambitions of her own. Once married her duty is to her husband and her children--not to herself." "That is right," he replied; "but which is likely to give you greater joy--a literary success or a happy wifehood? When you have spent your best years and given the public your best work they will throw you over for some new favorite. You'll find yourself an old woman with nothing more substantial to show as your life work than that questionable asset, a literary reputation. How many literary reputations to-day conceal an aching heart and find it difficult to make both ends meet? How different with the woman who married young and obeys Nature's behest by contributing her share to the process of evolution. Her life is spent basking in the affection of her husband and the chubby smiles of her dimpled babes, and when in the course of time she finds herself in the twilight of her life, she has at her feet a new generation of her own flesh and blood. Isn't that better than a literary reputation?" He spoke so earnestly that Shirley looked at him in surprise. She knew he was serious but she had not suspected that he thought so deeply on these matters. Her heart told her that he was uttering the true philosophy of the ages. She said: "Why, Jefferson, you talk like a book. Perhaps you are right, I have no wish to be a blue stocking and deserted in my old age, far from it. But give me time to think. Let us first ascertain the extent of this disaster which has overtaken my father. Then if you still care for me and if I have not changed my mind," here she glanced slyly at him, "we will resume our discussion." Again she held out her hand which he had released. "Is it a bargain?" she asked. "It's a bargain," he murmured, raising the white hand to his lips. A fierce longing rose within him to take her in his arms and kiss passionately the mouth that lay temptingly near his own, but his courage failed him. After all, he reasoned, he had not yet the right. A few minutes later they left the deck and went downstairs to dress for dinner. That same evening they stood again at the rail watching the mysterious phosphorescence as it sparkled in the moonlight. Her thoughts travelling faster than the ship, Shirley suddenly asked: "Do you really think Mr. Ryder will use his influence to help my father?" Jefferson set his jaw fast and the familiar Ryder gleam came into his eyes as he responded: "Why not? My father is all powerful. He has made and unmade judges and legislators and even presidents. Why should he not be able to put a stop to these preposterous proceedings? I will go to him directly we land and we'll see what can be done." So the time on shipboard had passed, Shirley alternately buoyed up with hope and again depressed by the gloomiest forebodings. The following night they passed Fire Island and the next day the huge steamer dropped anchor at Quarantine. CHAPTER VI A month had passed since the memorable meeting of the directors of the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad in New York and during that time neither John Burkett Ryder nor Judge Rossmore had been idle. The former had immediately set in motion the machinery he controlled in the Legislature at Washington, while the judge neglected no step to vindicate himself before the public. Ryder, for reasons of his own--probably because he wished to make the blow the more crushing when it did fall--had insisted on the proceedings at the board meeting being kept a profound secret and some time elapsed before the newspapers got wind of the coming Congressional inquiry. No one had believed the stories about Judge Rossmore but now that a quasi-official seal had been set on the current gossip, there was a howl of virtuous indignation from the journalistic muck rakers. What was the country coming to? they cried in double leaded type. After the embezzling by life insurance officers, the rascality of the railroads, the looting of city treasuries, the greed of the Trusts, the grafting of the legislators, had arisen a new and more serious scandal--the corruption of the Judiciary. The last bulwark of the nation had fallen, the country lay helpless at the mercy of legalized sandbaggers. Even the judges were no longer to be trusted, the most respected one among them all had been unable to resist the tempter. The Supreme Court, the living voice of the Constitution, was honeycombed with graft. Public life was rotten to the core! Neither the newspapers nor the public stopped to ascertain the truth or the falsity of the charges against Judge Rossmore. It was sufficient that the bribery story furnished the daily sensation which newspaper editors and newspaper readers must have. The world is ever more prompt to believe ill rather than good of a man, and no one, except in Rossmore's immediate circle of friends, entertained the slightest doubt of his guilt. It was common knowledge that the "big interests" were behind the proceedings, and that Judge Rossmore was a scapegoat, sacrificed by the System because he had been blocking their game. If Rossmore had really accepted the bribe, and few now believed him spotless, he deserved all that was coming to him. Senator Roberts was very active in Washington preparing the case against Judge Rossmore. The latter being a democrat and "the interests" controlling a Republican majority in the House, it was a foregone conclusion that the inquiry would be against him, and that a demand would at once be made upon the Senate for his impeachment. Almost prostrated by the misfortune which had so suddenly and unexpectedly come upon him, Judge Rossmore was like a man demented. His reason seemed to be tottering, he spoke and acted like a man in a dream. Naturally he was entirely incapacitated for work and he had applied to Washington to be temporarily relieved from his judicial duties. He was instantly granted a leave of absence and went at once to his home in Madison Avenue, where he shut himself up in his library, sitting for hours at his desk wrestling with documents and legal tomes in a pathetic endeavour to find some way out, trying to elude this net in which unseen hands had entangled him. What an end to his career! To have struggled and achieved for half a century, to have built up a reputation year by year, as a man builds a house brick by brick, only to see the whole crumble to his feet like dust! To have gained the respect of the country, to have made a name as the most incorruptible of public servants and now to be branded as a common bribe taker! Could he be dreaming? It was too incredible! What would his daughter say--his Shirley? Ah, the thought of the expression of incredulity and wonder on her face when she heard the news cut him to the heart like a knife thrust. Yet, he mused, her very unwillingness to believe it should really be his consolation. Ah, his wife and his child--they knew he had been innocent of wrong doing. The very idea was ridiculous. At most he had been careless. Yes, he was certainly to blame. He ought to have seen the trap so carefully prepared and into which he had walked as if blindfolded. That extra $50,000 worth of stock, on which he had never received a cent interest, had been the decoy in a carefully thought out plot. They, the plotters, well knew how ignorant he was of financial matters and he had been an easy victim. Who would believe his story that the stock had been sent to him with a plausibly-worded letter to the effect that it represented a bonus on his own investment? Now he came to think of it, calmly and reasonably, he would not believe it himself. As usual, he had mislaid or destroyed the secretary's letter and there was only his word against the company's books to substantiate what would appear a most improbable if not impossible occurrence. It was his conviction of his own good faith that made his present dilemma all the more cruel. Had he really been a grafter, had he really taken the stock as a bribe he would not care so much, for then he would have foreseen and discounted the chances of exposure. Yes, there was no doubt possible. He was the victim of a conspiracy, there was an organized plot to ruin him, to get him out of the way. The "interests" feared him, resented his judicial decisions and they had halted at nothing to accomplish their purpose. How could he fight them back, what could he do to protect himself? He had no proofs of a conspiracy, his enemies worked in the dark, there was no way in which he could reach them or know who they were. He thought of John Burkett Ryder. Ah, he remembered now. Ryder was the man who had recommended the investment in Alaskan stock. Of course, why did he not think of it before? He recollected that at the time he had been puzzled at receiving so much stock and he had mentioned it to Ryder, adding that the secretary had told him it was customary. Oh, why had he not kept the secretary's letter? But Ryder would certainly remember it. He probably still had his two letters in which he spoke of making the investment. If those letters could be produced at the Congressional inquiry they would clear him at once. So losing no time, and filled with renewed hope he wrote to the Colossus a strong, manly letter which would have melted an iceberg, urging Mr. Ryder to come forward now at this critical time and clear him of this abominable charge, or in any case to kindly return the two letters he must have in his possession, as they would go far to help him at the trial. Three days passed and no reply from Ryder. On the fourth came a polite but frigid note from Mr. Ryder's private secretary. Mr. Ryder had received Judge Rossmore's letter and in reply begged to state that he had a vague recollection of some conversation with the judge in regard to investments, but he did not think he had advised the purchase of any particular stock, as that was something he never did on principle, even with his most intimate friends. He had no wish to be held accountable in case of loss, etc. As to the letter which Judge Rossmore mentioned as having written to Mr. Ryder in regard to having received more stock than he had bought, of that Mr. Ryder had no recollection whatsoever. Judge Rossmore was probably mistaken as to the identity of his correspondent. He regretted he could not be of more service to Judge Rossmore, and remained his very obedient servant. It was very evident that no help was to be looked for in that quarter. There was even decided hostility in Ryder's reply. Could it be true that the financier was really behind these attacks upon his character, was it possible that one man merely to make more money would deliberately ruin his fellow man whose hand he had grasped in friendship? He had been unwilling to believe it when his friend ex-judge Stott had pointed to Ryder as the author of all his misfortunes, but this unsympathetic letter with its falsehoods, its lies plainly written all over its face, was proof enough. Yes, there was now no doubt possible. John Burkett Ryder was his enemy and what an enemy! Many a man had committed suicide when he had incurred the enmity of the Colossus. Judge Rossmore, completely discouraged, bowed his head to the inevitable. His wife, a nervous, sickly woman, was helpless to comfort or aid him. She had taken their misfortune as a visitation of an inscrutable Deity. She knew, of course, that her husband was wholly innocent of the accusations brought against him and if his character could be cleared and himself rehabilitated before the world, she would be the first to rejoice. But if it pleased the Almighty in His wisdom to sorely try her husband and herself and inflict this punishment upon them it was not for the finite mind to criticise the ways of Providence. There was probably some good reason for the apparent cruelty and injustice of it which their earthly understanding failed to grasp. Mrs. Rossmore found much comfort in this philosophy, which gave a satisfactory ending to both ends of the problem, and she was upheld in her view by the rector of the church which she had attended regularly each Sunday for the past five and twenty years. Christian resignation in the hour of trial, submission to the will of Heaven were, declared her spiritual adviser, the fundamental principles of religion. He could only hope that Mrs. Rossmore would succeed in imbuing her husband with her Christian spirit. But when the judge's wife returned home and saw the keen mental distress of the man who had been her companion for twenty-five long years, the comforter in her sorrows, the joy and pride of her young wifehood, she forgot all about her smug churchly consoler, and her heart went out to her husband in a spontaneous burst of genuine human sympathy. Yes, they must do something at once. Where men had failed perhaps a woman could do something. She wanted to cable at once for Shirley, who was everything in their household--organizer, manager, adviser--but the judge would not hear of it. No, his daughter was enjoying her holiday in blissful ignorance of what had occurred. He would not spoil it for her. They would see; perhaps things would improve. But he sent for his old friend ex-Judge Stott. They were life-long friends, having become acquainted nearly thirty years ago at the law school, at the time when both were young men about to enter on a public career. Stott, who was Rossmore's junior, had begun as a lawyer in New York and soon acquired a reputation in criminal practice. He afterwards became assistant district attorney and later, when a vacancy occurred in the city magistrature, he was successful in securing the appointment. On the bench he again met his old friend Rossmore and the two men once more became closely intimate. The regular court hours, however, soon palled on a man of Judge Stott's nervous temperament and it was not long before he retired to take up once more his criminal practice. He was still a young man, not yet fifty, and full of vigor and fight. He had a blunt manner but his heart was in the right place, and he had a record as clean as his close shaven face. He was a hard worker, a brilliant speaker and one of the cleverest cross-examiners at the bar. This was the man to whom Judge Rossmore naturally turned for legal assistance. Stott was out West when he first heard of the proceedings against his old friend, and this indignity put upon the only really honest man in public life whom he knew, so incensed him that he was already hurrying back to his aid when the summons reached him. Meantime, a fresh and more serious calamity had overwhelmed Judge Rossmore. Everything seemed to combine to break the spirit of this man who had dared defy the power of organized capital. Hardly had the news of the Congressional inquiry been made public, than the financial world was startled by an extraordinary slump in Wall Street. There was nothing in the news of the day to justify a decline, but prices fell and fell. The bears had it all their own way, the big interests hammered stocks all along the line, "coppers" especially being the object of attack. The market closed feverishly and the next day the same tactics were pursued. From the opening, on selling orders coming from no one knew where, prices fell to nothing, a stampede followed and before long it became a panic. Pandemonium reigned on the floor of the Stock Exchange. White faced, dishevelled brokers shouted and struggled like men possessed to execute the orders of their clients. Big financial houses, which stood to lose millions on a falling market, rallied and by rush orders to buy, attempted to stem the tide, but all to no purpose. One firm after another went by the board unable to weather the tempest, until just before closing time, the stock ticker announced the failure of the Great Northwestern Mining Co. The drive in the market had been principally directed against its securities, and after vainly endeavoring to check the bear raid, it had been compelled to declare itself bankrupt. It was heavily involved, assets nil, stock almost worthless. It was probable that the creditors would not see ten cents on the dollar. Thousands were ruined and Judge Rossmore among them. All the savings of a lifetime--nearly $55,000 were gone. He was practically penniless, at a time when he needed money most. He still owned his house in Madison Avenue, but that would have to go to settle with his creditors. By the time everything was paid there would only remain enough for a modest competence. As to his salary, of course he could not touch that so long as this accusation was hanging over his head. And if he were impeached it would stop altogether. The salary, therefore, was not to be counted on. They must manage as best they could and live more cheaply, taking a small house somewhere in the outskirts of the city where he could prepare his case quietly without attracting attention. Stott thought this was the best thing they could do and he volunteered to relieve his friend by taking on his own hands all the arrangements of the sale of the house and furniture, which offer the judge accepted only too gladly. Meantime, Mrs. Rossmore went to Long Island to see what could be had, and she found at the little village of Massapequa just what they were looking for--a commodious, neatly-furnished two-story cottage at a modest rental. Of course, it was nothing like what they had been accustomed to, but it was clean and comfortable, and as Mrs. Rossmore said, rather tactlessly, beggars cannot be choosers. Perhaps it would not be for long. Instant possession was to be had, so deposit was paid on the spot and a few days later the Rossmores left their mansion on Madison Avenue and took up their residence in Massapequa, where their advent created quite a fluster in local social circles. Massapequa is one of the thousand and one flourishing communities scattered over Long Island, all of which are apparently modelled after the same pattern. Each is an exact duplicate of its neighbour in everything except the name--the same untidy railroad station, the same sleepy stores, the same attractive little frame residences, built for the most part on the "Why pay Rent? Own your own Home" plan. A healthy boom in real estate imparts plenty of life to them all and Massapequa is particularly famed as being the place where the cat jumped to when Manhattan had to seek an outlet for its congested population and ever-increasing army of home seekers. Formerly large tracts of flat farm lands, only sparsely shaded by trees, Massapequa, in common with other villages of its kind, was utterly destitute of any natural attractions. There was the one principal street leading to the station, with a few scattered stores on either side, a church and a bank. Happily, too, for those who were unable to survive the monotony of the place, it boasted of a pretty cemetery. There were also a number of attractive cottages with spacious porches hung with honeysuckle and of these the Rossmores occupied one of the less pretentious kind. But although Massapequa, theoretically speaking, was situated only a stone's throw from the metropolis, it might have been situated in the Great Sahara so far as its inhabitants took any active interest in the doings of gay Gotham. Local happenings naturally had first claim upon Massapequa's attention--the prowess of the local baseball team, Mrs. Robinson's tea party and the highly exciting sessions of the local Pinochle Club furnishing food for unlimited gossip and scandal. The newspapers reached the village, of course, but only the local news items aroused any real interest, while the women folk usually restricted their readings to those pages devoted to Daily Hints for the Home, Mrs. Sayre's learned articles on Health and Beauty and Fay Stanton's Daily Fashions. It was not surprising, therefore, that the fame of Judge Rossmore and the scandal in which he was at present involved had not penetrated as far as Massapequa and that the natives were considerably mystified as to who the new arrivals in their midst might be. Stott had been given a room in the cottage so that he might be near at hand to work with the judge in the preparation of the defence, and he came out from the city every evening. It was now June. The Senate would not take action until it convened in December, but there was a lot of work to be done and no time to be lost. The evening following the day of their arrival they were sitting on the porch enjoying the cool evening air after dinner. The judge was smoking. He was not a slave to the weed, but he enjoyed a quiet pipe after meals, claiming that it quieted his nerves and enabled him to think more clearly. Besides, it was necessary to keep at bay the ubiquitous Long Island mosquito. Mrs. Rossmore had remained for a moment in the dining-room to admonish Eudoxia, their new and only maid-of-all-work, not to wreck too much of the crockery when she removed the dinner dishes. Suddenly Stott, who was perusing an evening paper, asked: "By the way, where's your daughter? Does she know of this radical change in your affairs?" Judge Rossmore started. By what mysterious agency had this man penetrated his own most intimate thoughts? He was himself thinking of Shirley that very moment, and by some inexplicable means--telepathy modern psychologists called it--the thought current had crossed to Stott, whose mind, being in full sympathy, was exactly attuned to receive it. Removing the pipe from his mouth the judge replied: "Shirley's in Paris. Poor girl, I hadn't the heart to tell her. She has no idea of what's happened. I didn't want to spoil her holiday." He was silent for a moment. Then, after a few more puffs he added confidentially in a low tone, as if he did not care for his wife to hear: "The truth is, Stott, I couldn't bear to have her return now. I couldn't look my own daughter in the face." A sound as of a great sob which he had been unable to control cut short his speech. His eyes filled with tears and he began to smoke furiously as if ashamed of this display of emotion. Stott, blowing his nose with suspicious vigor, replied soothingly: "You mustn't talk like that. Everything will come out all right, of course. But I think you are wrong not to have told your daughter. Her place is here at your side. She ought to be told even if only in justice to her. If you don't tell her someone else will, or, what's worse, she'll hear of it through the newspapers." "Ah, I never thought of that!" exclaimed the judge, visibly perturbed at the suggestion about the newspapers. "Don't you agree with me?" demanded Stott, appealing to Mrs. Rossmore, who emerged from the house at that instant. "Don't you think your daughter should be informed of what has happened?" "Most assuredly I do," answered Mrs. Rossmore determinedly. "The judge wouldn't hear of it, but I took the law into my own hands. I've cabled for her." "You cabled for Shirley?" cried the judge incredulously. He was so unaccustomed to seeing his ailing, vacillating wife do anything on her own initiative and responsibility that it seemed impossible. "You cabled for Shirley?" he repeated. "Yes," replied Mrs. Rossmore triumphantly and secretly pleased that for once in her life she had asserted herself. "I cabled yesterday. I simply couldn't bear it alone any longer." "What did you say?" inquired the judge apprehensively. "I just told her to come home at once. To-morrow; we ought to get an answer." Stott meantime had been figuring on the time of Shirley's probable arrival. If the cablegram had been received in Paris the previous evening it would be too late to catch the French boat. The North German Lloyd steamer was the next to leave and it touched at Cherbourg. She would undoubtedly come on that. In a week at most she would be here. Then it became a question as to who should go to meet her at the dock. The judge could not go, that was certain. It would be too much of an ordeal. Mrs. Rossmore did not know the lower part of the city well, and had no experience in meeting ocean steamships. There was only one way out--would Stott go? Of course he would and he would bring Shirley back with him to Massapequa. So during the next few days while Stott and the judge toiled preparing their case, which often necessitated brief trips to the city, Mrs. Rossmore, seconded with sulky indifference by Eudoxia, was kept busy getting a room ready for her daughter's arrival. Eudoxia, who came originally from County Cork, was an Irish lady with a thick brogue and a husky temper. She was amiable enough so long as things went to her satisfaction, but when they did not suit her she was a termagant. She was neither beautiful nor graceful, she was not young nor was she very clean. Her usual condition was dishevelled, her face was all askew, and when she dressed up she looked like a valentine. Her greatest weakness was a propensity for smashing dishes, and when reprimanded she would threaten to take her traps and skidoo. This news of the arrival of a daughter failed to fill her with enthusiasm. Firstly, it meant more work; secondly she had not bargained for it. When she took the place it was on the understanding that the family consisted only of an elderly gentleman and his wife, that there was practically no work, good wages, plenty to eat, with the privilege of an evening out when she pleased. Instead of this millennium she soon found Stott installed as a permanent guest and now a daughter was to be foisted on her. No wonder hard working girls were getting sick and tired of housework! As already hinted there was no unhealthy curiosity among Massapequans regarding their new neighbors from the city but some of the more prominent people of the place considered it their duty to seek at least a bowing acquaintance with the Rossmores by paying them a formal visit. So the day following the conversation on the porch when the judge and Stott had gone to the city on one of their periodical excursions, Mrs. Rossmore was startled to see a gentleman of clerical appearance accompanied by a tall, angular woman enter their gate and ring the bell. The Rev. Percival Pontifex Deetle and his sister Miss Jane Deetle prided themselves on being leaders in the best social circle in Massapequa. The incumbent of the local Presbyterian church, the Rev. Deetle, was a thin, sallow man of about thirty-five. He had a diminutive face with a rather long and very pointed nose which gave a comical effect to his physiognomy. Theology was written all over his person and he wore the conventional clerical hat which, owing to his absurdly small face, had the unfortunate appearance of being several sizes too large for him. Miss Deetle was a gaunt and angular spinster who had an unhappy trick of talking with a jerk. She looked as if she were constantly under self-restraint and was liable at any moment to explode into a fit of rage and only repressed herself with considerable effort. As they came up the stoop, Eudoxia, already instructed by Mrs. Rossmore, was ready for them. With her instinctive respect for the priestly garb she was rather taken back on seeing a clergyman, but she brazened it out: "Mr. Rossmore's not home." Then shaking her head, she added: "They don't see no visitors." Unabashed, the Rev. Deetle drew a card from a case and handing it to the girl said pompously: "Then we will see Mrs. Rossmore. I saw her at the window as we came along. Here, my girl, take her this card. Tell her that the Reverend Pontifex Deetle and Miss Deetle have called to present their compliments." Brushing past Eudoxia, who vainly tried to close the door, the Rev. Deetle coolly entered the house, followed by his sister, and took a seat in the parlour. "She'll blame me for this," wailed the girl, who had not budged and who stood there fingering the Rev. Deetle's card. "Blame you? For what?" demanded the clerical visitor in surprise. "She told me to say she was out--but I can't lie to a minister of the Gospel--leastways not to his face. I'll give her your card, sir." The reverend caller waited until Eudoxia had disappeared, then he rose and looked around curiously at the books and pictures. "Hum--not a Bible or a prayer book or a hymn book, not a picture or anything that would indicate the slightest reverence for holy things." He picked up a few papers that were lying on the table and after glancing at them threw them down in disgust. "Law reports--Wall Street reports--the god of this world. Evidently very ordinary people, Jane." He looked at his sister, but she sat stiffly and primly in her chair and made no reply. He repeated: "Didn't you hear me? I said they are ordinary people." "I've no doubt," retorted Miss Deetle, "and as such they will not thank us for prying into their affairs." "Prying, did you say?" said the parson, resenting this implied criticism of his actions. "Just plain prying," persisted his sister angrily. "I don't see what else it is." The Rev. Pontifex straightened up and threw out his chest as he replied: "It is protecting my flock. As Leader of the Unified All Souls Baptismal Presbytery, it is my duty to visit the widows and orphans of this community." "These people are neither widows or orphans," objected Miss Deetle. "They are strangers," insisted the Rev. Pontifex, "and it is my duty to minister to them--if they need it. Furthermore it is my duty to my congregation to find out who is in their midst. No less than three of the Lady Trustees of my church have asked me who and what these people are and whence they came." "The Lady Trustees are a pack of old busybodies," growled his sister. Her brother raised his finger warningly. "Jane, do you know you are uttering a blasphemy? These Rossmore people have been here two weeks. They have visited no one, no one visits them. They have avoided a temple of worship, they have acted most mysteriously. Who are they? What are they hiding? Is it fair to my church, is it fair to my flock? It is not a bereavement, for they don't wear mourning. I'm afraid it may be some hidden scandal--" Further speculations on his part were interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Rossmore, who thought rightly that the quickest way to get rid of her unwelcome visitors was to hurry downstairs as quickly as possible. "Miss Deetle--Mr. Deetle. I am much honoured," was her not too effusive greeting. The Reverend Pontifex, anxious to make a favourable impression, was all smiles and bows. The idea of a possible scandal had for the moment ceased to worry him. "The honour is ours," he stammered. "I--er--we--er--my sister Jane and I called to--" "Won't you sit down?" said Mrs. Rossmore, waving him to a chair. He danced around her in a manner that made her nervous. "Thank you so much," he said with a smile that was meant to be amiable. He took a seat at the further end of the room and an awkward pause followed. Finally his sister prompted him: "You wanted to see Mrs. Rossmore about the festival," she said. "Oh, of course, I had quite forgotten. How stupid of me. The fact is, Mrs. Rossmore," he went on, "we are thinking of giving a festival next week--a festival with strawberries--and our trustees thought, in fact it occurred to me also that if you and Mr. Rossmore would grace the occasion with your presence it would give us an opportunity--so to speak--get better acquainted, and er--" Another awkward pause followed during which he sought inspiration by gazing fixedly in the fireplace. Then turning on Mrs. Rossmore so suddenly that the poor woman nearly jumped out of her chair he asked: "Do you like strawberries?" "It's very kind of you," interrupted Mrs. Rossmore, glad of the opportunity to get a word in edgeways. "Indeed, I appreciate your kindness most keenly but my husband and I go nowhere, nowhere at all. You see we have met with reverses and--" "Reverses," echoed the clerical visitor, with difficulty keeping his seat. This was the very thing he had come to find out and here it was actually thrown at him. He congratulated himself on his cleverness in having inspired so much confidence and thought with glee of his triumph when he returned with the full story to the Lady Trustees. Simulating, therefore, the deepest sympathy he tried to draw his hostess out: "Dear me, how sad! You met with reverses." Turning to his sister, who was sitting in her corner like a petrified mummy, he added: "Jane, do you hear? How inexpressibly sad! They have met with reverses!" He paused, hoping that Mrs. Rossmore would go on to explain just what their reverses had been, but she was silent. As a gentle hint he said softly: "Did I interrupt you, Madam?" "Not at all, I did not speak," she answered. Thus baffled, he turned the whites of his eyes up to the ceiling and said: "When reverses come we naturally look for spiritual consolation. My dear Mrs. Rossmore, in the name of the Unified All Souls Baptismal Presbytery I offer you that consolation." Mrs. Rossmore looked helplessly from one to the other embarrassed as to what to say. Who were these strangers that intruded on her privacy offering a consolation she did not want? Miss Deetle, as if glad of the opportunity to joke at her brother's expense, said explosively: "My dear Pontifex, you have already offered a strawberry festival which Mrs. Rossmore has been unable to accept." "Well, what of it?" demanded Mr. Deetle, glaring at his sister for the irrelevant interruption. "You are both most kind," murmured Mrs. Rossmore; "but we could not accept in any case. My daughter is returning home from Paris next week." "Ah, your daughter--you have a daughter?" exclaimed Mr. Deetle, grasping at the slightest straw to add to his stock of information. "Coming from Paris, too! Such a wicked city!" He had never been to Paris, he went on to explain, but he had read enough about it and he was grateful that the Lord had chosen Massapequa as the field of his labours. Here at least, life was sweet and wholesome and one's hopes of future salvation fairly reasonable. He was not a brilliant talker when the conversation extended beyond Massapequa but he rambled on airing his views on the viciousness of the foreigner in general, until Mrs. Rossmore, utterly wearied, began to wonder when they would go. Finally he fell back upon the weather. "We are very fortunate in having such pleasant weather, don't you think so, Madam? Oh, Massapequa is a lovely spot, isn't it? We think it's the one place to live in. We are all one happy family. That's why my sister and I called to make your acquaintance." "You are very good, I'm sure. I shall tell my husband you came and he'll be very pleased." Having exhausted his conversational powers and seeing that further efforts to pump Mrs. Rossmore were useless, the clerical visitor rose to depart: "It looks like rain. Come, Jane, we had better go. Good-bye, Madam, I am delighted to have made this little visit and I trust you will assure Mr. Rossmore that All Souls Unified Baptismal Presbytery always has a warm welcome for him." They bowed and Mrs. Rossmore bowed. The agony was over and as the door closed on them Mrs. Rossmore gave a sigh of relief. That evening Stott and the judge came home earlier than usual and from their dejected appearance Mrs. Rossmore divined bad news. The judge was painfully silent throughout the meal and Stott was unusually grave. Finally the latter took her aside and broke it to her gently. In spite of their efforts and the efforts of their friends the Congressional inquiry had resulted in a finding against the judge and a demand had already been made upon the Senate for his impeachment. They could do nothing now but fight it in the Senate with all the influence they could muster. It was going to be hard but Stott was confident that right would prevail. After dinner as they were sitting in silence on the porch, each measuring the force of this blow which they had expected yet had always hoped to ward off, the crunching sound of a bicycle was heard on the quiet country road. The rider stopped at their gate and came up the porch holding out an envelope to the judge, who, guessing the contents, had started forward. He tore it open. It was a cablegram from Paris and read as follows: _Am sailing on the Kaiser Wilhelm to-day._ _Shirley._ CHAPTER VII The pier of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, at Hoboken, fairly sizzled with bustle and excitement. The Kaiser Wilhelm had arrived at Sandy Hook the previous evening and was now lying out in midstream. She would tie up at her dock within half an hour. Employés of the line, baggage masters, newspaper reporters, Custom House officers, policemen, detectives, truck drivers, expressmen, longshoremen, telegraph messengers and anxious friends of incoming passengers surged back and forth in seemingly hopeless confusion. The shouting of orders, the rattling of cab wheels, the shrieking of whistles was deafening. From out in the river came the deep toned blasts of the steamer's siren, in grotesque contrast with the strident tooting of a dozen diminutive tugs which, puffing and snorting, were slowly but surely coaxing the leviathan into her berth alongside the dock. The great vessel, spick and span after a coat of fresh paint hurriedly put on during the last day of the voyage, bore no traces of gale, fog and stormy seas through which she had passed on her 3,000 mile run across the ocean. Conspicuous on the bridge, directing the docking operations, stood Capt. Hegermann, self satisfied and smiling, relieved that the responsibilities of another trip were over, and at his side, sharing the honours, was the grizzled pilot who had brought the ship safely through the dangers of Gedney's Channel, his shabby pea jacket, old slouch hat, top boots and unkempt beard standing out in sharp contrast with the immaculate white duck trousers, the white and gold caps and smart full dress uniforms of the ship's officers. The rails on the upper decks were seen to be lined with passengers, all dressed in their shore going clothes, some waving handkerchiefs at friends they already recognized, all impatiently awaiting the shipping of the gangplank. Stott had come early. They had received word at Massapequa the day before that the steamer had been sighted off Fire Island and that she would be at her pier the next morning at 10 o'clock. Stott arrived at 9.30 and so found no difficulty in securing a front position among the small army of people, who, like himself, had come down to meet friends. As the huge vessel swung round and drew closer, Stott easily picked out Shirley. She was scanning eagerly through a binocular the rows of upturned faces on the dock, and he noted that a look of disappointment crossed her face at not finding the object of her search. She turned and said something to a lady in black and to a man who stood at her side. Who they might be Stott had no idea. Fellow passengers, no doubt. One becomes so intimate on shipboard; it seems a friendship that must surely last a lifetime, whereas--the custom officers have not finished rummaging through your trunks when these easily-made steamer friends are already forgotten. Presently Shirley took another look and her glass soon lighted on him. Instantly she recognized her father's old friend. She waved a handkerchief and Stott raised his hat. Then she turned quickly and spoke again to her friends, whereupon they all moved in the direction of the gangplank, which was already being lowered. Shirley was one of the first to come ashore. Stott was waiting for her at the foot of the gangplank and she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him. He had known her ever since she was a little tot in arms, and bystanders who noticed them meet had no doubt that they were father and daughter. Shirley was deeply moved; a great lump in her throat seemed to choke her utterance. So far she had been able to bear up, but now that home was so near her heart failed her. She had hoped to find her father on the dock. Why had he not come? Were things so bad then? She questioned Judge Stott anxiously, fearfully. He reassured her. Both her mother and father were well. It was too long a trip for them to make, so he had volunteered. "Too long a trip," echoed Shirley puzzled. "This is not far from our house. Madison Avenue is no distance. That could not have kept father away." "You don't live on Madison Avenue any longer. The house and its contents have been sold," replied Stott gravely, and in a few words he outlined the situation as it was. Shirley listened quietly to the end and only the increasing pallor of her face and an occasional nervous twitching at the corner of her mouth betrayed the shock that this recital of her father's misfortunes was to her. Ah, this she had little dreamed of! Yet why not? It was but logic. When wrecked in reputation, one might as well be wrecked in fortune, too. What would their future be, how could that proud, sensitive man her father bear this humiliation, this disgrace? To be condemned to a life of obscurity, social ostracism, and genteel poverty! Oh, the thought was unendurable! She herself could earn money, of course. If her literary work did not bring in enough, she could teach and what she earned would help out. Certainly her parents should never want for anything so long as she could supply it. She thought bitterly how futile now were plans of marriage, even if she had ever entertained such an idea seriously. Henceforward, she did not belong to herself. Her life must be devoted to clearing her father's name. These reflections were suddenly interrupted by the voice of Mrs. Blake calling out: "Shirley, where have you been? We lost sight of you as we left the ship, and we have been hunting for you ever since." Her aunt, escorted by Jefferson Ryder, had gone direct to the Customs desk and in the crush they had lost trace of her. Shirley introduced Stott. "Aunt Milly, this is Judge Stott, a very old friend of father's. Mrs. Blake, my mother's sister. Mother will be surprised to see her. They haven't met for ten years." "This visit is going to be only a brief one," said Mrs. Blake. "I really came over to chaperone Shirley more than anything else." "As if I needed chaperoning with Mr. Ryder for an escort!" retorted Shirley. Then presenting Jefferson to Stott she said: "This is Mr. Jefferson Ryder--Judge Stott. Mr. Ryder has been very kind to me abroad." The two men bowed and shook hands. "Any relation to J.B.?" asked Stott good humouredly. "His son--that's all," answered Jefferson laconically. Stott now looked at the young man with more interest. Yes, there was a resemblance, the same blue eyes, the righting jaw. But how on earth did Judge Rossmore's daughter come to be travelling in the company of John Burkett Ryder's son? The more he thought of it the more it puzzled him, and while he cogitated Shirley and her companions wrestled with the United States Customs, and were undergoing all the tortures invented by Uncle Sam to punish Americans for going abroad. Shirley and Mrs. Blake were fortunate in securing an inspector who was fairly reasonable. Of course, he did not for a moment believe their solemn statement, already made on the ship, that they had nothing dutiable, and he rummaged among the most intimate garments of their wardrobe in a wholly indecent and unjustifiable manner, but he was polite and they fared no worse than all the other women victims of this, the most brutal custom house inspection system in the world. Jefferson had the misfortune to be allotted an inspector who was half seas over with liquor and the man was so insolent and threatening in manner that it was only by great self-restraint that Jefferson controlled himself. He had no wish to create a scandal on the dock, nor to furnish good "copy" for the keen-eyed, long-eared newspaper reporters who would be only too glad of such an opportunity for a "scare head," But when the fellow compelled him to open every trunk and valise and then put his grimy hands to the bottom and by a quick upward movement jerked the entire contents out on the dock he interfered: "You are exceeding your authority," he exclaimed hotly. "How dare you treat my things in this manner?" The drunken uniformed brute raised his bloodshot, bleary eyes and took Jefferson in from tip to toe. He clenched his fist as if about to resort to violence, but he was not so intoxicated as to be quite blind to the fact that this passenger had massive square shoulders, a determined jaw and probably a heavy arm. So contenting himself with a sneer, he said: "This ain't no country for blooming English dooks. You're not in England now you know. This is a free country. See?" "I see this," replied Jefferson, furious "that you are a drunken ruffian and a disgrace to the uniform you wear. I shall report your conduct immediately," with which he proceeded to the Customs desk to lodge a complaint. He might have spared himself the trouble. The silver haired, distinguished looking old officer in charge knew that Jefferson's complaint was well founded, he knew that this particular inspector was a drunkard and a discredit to the government which employed him, but at the same time he also knew that political influence had been behind his appointment and that it was unsafe to do more than mildly reprimand him. When, therefore, he accompanied Jefferson to the spot where the contents of the trunks lay scattered in confusion all over the dock, he merely expostulated with the officer, who made some insolent reply. Seeing that it was useless to lose further time, Jefferson repacked his trunks as best he could and got them on a cab. Then he hurried over to Shirley's party and found them already about to leave the pier. "Come and see us, Jeff," whispered Shirley as their cab drove through the gates. "Where," he asked, "Madison Avenue?" She hesitated for a moment and then replied quickly: "No, we are stopping down on Long Island for the Summer--at a cute little place called Massapequa. Run down and see us." He raised his hat and the cab drove on. There was greater activity in the Rossmore cottage at Massapequa than there had been any day since the judge and his wife went to live there. Since daybreak Eudoxia had been scouring and polishing in honour of the expected arrival and a hundred times Mrs. Rossmore had climbed the stairs to see that everything was as it should be in the room which had been prepared for Shirley. It was not, however, without a passage at arms that Eudoxia consented to consider the idea of an addition to the family. Mrs. Rossmore had said to her the day before: "My daughter will be here to-morrow, Eudoxia." A look expressive of both displeasure and astonishment marred the classic features of the hireling. Putting her broom aside and placing her arms akimbo she exclaimed in an injured tone: "And it's a dayther you've got now? So it's three in family you are! When I took the place it's two you tould me there was!" "Well, with your kind permission," replied Mrs. Rossmore, "there will be three in future. There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that says we can't have a daughter without consulting our help, is there?" The sarcasm of this reply did not escape even the dull-edged wits of the Irish drudge. She relapsed into a dignified silence and a few minutes later was discovered working with some show of enthusiasm. The judge was nervous and fidgety. He made a pretence to read, but it was plain to see that his mind was not on his book. He kept leaving his chair to go and look at the clock; then he would lay the volume aside and wander from room to room like a lost soul. His thoughts were on the dock at Hoboken. By noon every little detail had been attended to and there was nothing further to do but sit and wait for the arrival of Stott and Shirley. They were to be expected any moment now. The passengers had probably got off the steamer by eleven o'clock. It would take at least two hours to get through the Customs and out to Massapequa. The judge and his wife sat on the porch counting the minutes and straining their ears to catch the first sound of the train from New York. "I hope Stott broke the news to her gently," said the judge. "I wish we had gone to meet her ourselves," sighed his wife. The judge was silent and for a moment or two he puffed vigorously at his pipe, as was his habit when disturbed mentally. Then he said: "I ought to have gone, Martha, but I was afraid. I'm afraid to look my own daughter in the face and tell her that I am a disgraced man, that I am to be tried by the Senate for corruption, perhaps impeached and turned off the bench as if I were a criminal. Shirley won't believe it, sometimes I can't believe it myself. I often wake up in the night and think of it as part of a dream, but when the morning comes it's still true--it's still true!" He smoked on in silence. Then happening to look up he noticed that his wife was weeping. He laid his hand gently on hers. "Don't cry, dear, don't make it harder for me to bear. Shirley must see no trace of tears." "I was thinking of the injustice of it all," replied Mrs. Rossmore, wiping her eyes. "Fancy Shirley in this place, living from hand to mouth," went on the judge. "That's the least," answered his wife. "She's a fine, handsome girl, well educated and all the rest of it. She ought to make a good marriage." No matter what state of mind Mrs. Rossmore might be in, she never lost sight of the practical side of things. "Hardly with her father's disgrace hanging over her head," replied the judge wearily. "Who," he added, "would have the courage to marry a girl whose father was publicly disgraced?" Both relapsed into another long silence, each mentally reviewing the past and speculating on the future. Suddenly Mrs. Rossmore started. Surely she could not be mistaken! No, the clanging of a locomotive bell was plainly audible. The train was in. From the direction of the station came people with parcels and hand bags and presently there was heard the welcome sound of carriage wheels crunching over the stones. A moment later they saw coming round the bend in the road a cab piled up with small baggage. "Here they are! Here they are!" cried Mrs. Rossmore. "Come, Eudoxia!" she called to the servant, while she herself hurried down to the gate. The judge, fully as agitated as herself, only showing his emotion in a different way, remained on the porch pale and anxious. The cab stopped at the curb and Stott alighted, first helping out Mrs. Blake. Mrs. Rossmore's astonishment on seeing her sister was almost comical. "Milly!" she exclaimed. They embraced first and explained afterwards. Then Shirley got out and was in her mother's arms. "Where's father?" was Shirley's first question. "There--he's coming!" The judge, unable to restrain his impatience longer, ran down from the porch towards the gate. Shirley, with a cry of mingled grief and joy, precipitated herself on his breast. "Father! Father!" she cried between her sobs. "What have they done to you?" "There--there, my child. Everything will be well--everything will be well." Her head lay on his shoulder and he stroked her hair with his hand, unable to speak from pent up emotion. Mrs. Rossmore could not recover from her stupefaction on seeing her sister. Mrs. Blake explained that she had come chiefly for the benefit of the voyage and announced her intention of returning on the same steamer. "So you see I shall bother you only a few days," she said. "You'll stay just as long as you wish," rejoined Mrs. Rossmore. "Happily we have just one bedroom left." Then turning to Eudoxia, who was wrestling with the baggage, which formed a miniature Matterhorn on the sidewalk, she gave instructions: "Eudoxia, you'll take this lady's baggage to the small bedroom adjoining Miss Shirley's. She is going to stop with us for a few days." Taken completely aback at the news of this new addition, Eudoxia looked at first defiance. She seemed on the point of handing in her resignation there and then. But evidently she thought better of it, for, taking a cue from Mrs. Rossmore, she asked in the sarcastic manner of her mistress: "Four is it now, M'm? I suppose the Constitootion of the United States allows a family to be as big as one likes to make it. It's hard on us girls, but if it's the law, it's all right, M'm. The more the merrier!" With which broadside, she hung the bags all over herself and staggered off to the house. Stott explained that the larger pieces and the trunks would come later by express. Mrs. Rossmore took him aside while Mrs. Blake joined Shirley and the judge. "Did you tell Shirley?" asked Mrs. Rossmore. "How did she take it?" "She knows everything," answered Stott, "and takes it very sensibly. We shall find her of great moral assistance in our coming fight in the Senate," he added confidently. [Pencil illustration of Shirley embracing her father at the gate of the cottage at Massapequa.] "Father! Father! What have they done to you?"--_Page 161_. Realizing that the judge would like to be left alone with Shirley, Mrs. Rossmore invited Mrs. Blake to go upstairs and see the room she would have, while Stott said he would be glad of a washup. When they had gone Shirley sidled up to her father in her old familiar way. "I've just been longing to see you, father," she said. She turned to get a good look at him and noticing the lines of care which had deepened during her absence she cried: "Why, how you've changed! I can scarcely believe it's you. Say something. Let me hear the sound of your voice, father." The judge tried to smile. "Why, my dear girl, I--" Shirley threw her arms round his neck. "Ah, yes, now I know it's you," she cried. "Of course it is, Shirley, my dear girl. Of course it is. Who else should it be?" "Yes, but it isn't the same," insisted Shirley. "There is no ring to your voice. It sounds hollow and empty, like an echo. And this place," she added dolefully, "this awful place--" She glanced around at the cracked ceilings, the cheaply papered walls, the shabby furniture, and her heart sank as she realized the extent of their misfortune. She had come back prepared for the worst, to help win the fight for her father's honour, but to have to struggle against sordid poverty as well, to endure that humiliation in addition to disgrace--ah, that was something she had not anticipated! She changed colour and her voice faltered. Her father had been closely watching for just such signs and he read her thoughts. "It's the best we can afford, Shirley," he said quietly. "The blow has been complete. I will tell you everything. You shall judge for yourself. My enemies have done for me at last." "Your enemies?" cried Shirley eagerly. "Tell me who they are so I may go to them." "Yes, dear, you shall know everything. But not now. You are tired after your journey. To-morrow sometime Stott and I will explain everything." "Very well, father, as you wish," said Shirley gently. "After all," she added in an effort to appear cheerful, "what matter where we live so long as we have each other?" She drew away to hide her tears and left the room on pretence of inspecting the house. She looked into the dining-room and kitchen and opened the cupboards, and when she returned there were no visible signs of trouble in her face. "It's a cute little house, isn't it?" she said. "I've always wanted a little place like this--all to ourselves. Oh, if you only knew how tired I am of New York and its great ugly houses, its retinue of servants and its domestic and social responsibilities! We shall be able to live for ourselves now, eh, father?" She spoke with a forced gaiety that might have deceived anyone but the judge. He understood the motive of her sudden change in manner and silently he blessed her for making his burden lighter. "Yes, dear, it's not bad," he said. "There's not much room, though." "There's quite enough," she insisted. "Let me see." She began to count on her fingers. "Upstairs--three rooms, eh? and above that three more--" "No," smiled the judge, "then comes the roof?" "Of course," she laughed, "how stupid of me--a nice gable roof, a sloping roof that the rain runs off beautifully. Oh, I can see that this is going to be awfully jolly--just like camping out. You know how I love camping out. And you have a piano, too." She went over to the corner where stood one of those homely instruments which hardly deserve to be dignified by the name piano, with a cheap, gaudily painted case outside and a tin pan effect inside, and which are usually to be found in the poorer class of country boarding houses. Shirley sat down and ran her fingers over the keys, determined to like everything. "It's a little old," was her comment, "but I like these zither effects. It's just like the sixteenth century spinet. I can see you and mother dancing a stately minuet," she smiled. "What's that about mother dancing?" demanded Mrs. Rossmore, who at that instant entered the room. Shirley arose and appealed to her: "Isn't it absurd, mother, when you come to think of it, that anybody should accuse father of being corrupt and of having forfeited the right to be judge? Isn't it still more absurd that we should be helpless and dejected and unhappy because we are on Long Island instead of Madison Avenue? Why should Manhattan Island be a happier spot than Long Island? Why shouldn't we be happy anywhere; we have each other. And we do need each other. We never knew how much till to-day, did we? We must stand by each other now. Father is going to clear his name of this preposterous charge and we're going to help him, aren't we, mother? We're not helpless just because we are women. We're going to work, mother and I." "Work?" echoed Mrs. Rossmore, somewhat scandalized. "Work," repeated Shirley very decisively. The judge interfered. He would not hear of it. "You work, Shirley? Impossible!" "Why not? My book has been selling well while I was abroad. I shall probably write others. Then I shall write, too, for the newspapers and magazines. It will add to our income." "Your book--'The American Octopus,' is selling well?" inquired the judge, interested. "So well," replied Shirley, "that the publishers wrote me in Paris that the fourth edition was now on the press. That means good royalties. I shall soon be a fashionable author. The publishers will be after me for more books and we'll have all the money we want. Oh, it is so delightful, this novel sensation of a literary success!" she exclaimed with glee. "Aren't you proud of me, dad?" The judge smiled indulgently. Of course he was glad and proud. He always knew his Shirley was a clever girl. But by what strange fatality, he thought to himself, had his daughter in this book of hers assailed the very man who had encompassed his own ruin? It seemed like the retribution of heaven. Neither his daughter nor the financier was conscious of the fact that each was indirectly connected with the impeachment proceedings. Ryder could not dream that "Shirley Green," the author of the book which flayed him so mercilessly, was the daughter of the man he was trying to crush. Shirley, on the other hand, was still unaware of the fact that it was Ryder who had lured her father to his ruin. Mrs. Rossmore now insisted on Shirley going to her room to rest. She must be tired and dusty. After changing her travelling dress she would feel refreshed and more comfortable. When she was ready to come down again luncheon would be served. So leaving the judge to his papers, mother and daughter went upstairs together, and with due maternal pride Mrs. Rossmore pointed out to Shirley all the little arrangements she had made for her comfort. Then she left her daughter to herself while she hurried downstairs to look after Eudoxia and luncheon. When, at last, she could lock herself in her room where no eye could see her, Shirley threw herself down on the bed and burst into a torrent of tears. She had kept up appearances as long as it was possible, but now the reaction had set in. She gave way freely to her pent up feelings, she felt that unless she could relieve herself in this way her heart would break. She had been brave until now, she had been strong to hear everything and see everything, but she could not keep it up forever. Stott's words to her on the dock had in part prepared her for the worst, he had told her what to expect at home, but the realization was so much more vivid. While hundreds of miles of ocean still lay between, it had all seemed less real, almost attractive as a romance in modern life, but now she was face to face with the grim reality--this shabby cottage, cheap neighbourhood and commonplace surroundings, her mother's air of resignation to the inevitable, her father's pale, drawn face telling so eloquently of the keen mental anguish through which he had passed. She compared this pitiful spectacle with what they had been when she left for Europe, the fine mansion on Madison Avenue with its rich furnishings and well-trained servants, and her father's proud aristocratic face illumined with the consciousness of his high rank in the community, and the attention he attracted every time he appeared on the street or in public places as one of the most brilliant and most respected judges on the bench. Then to have come to this all in the brief space of a few months! It was incredible, terrible, heart rending! And what of the future? What was to be done to save her father from this impeachment which she knew well would hurry him to his grave? He could not survive that humiliation, that degradation. He must be saved in the Senate, but how--how? She dried her eyes and began to think. Surely her woman's wit would find some way. She thought of Jefferson. Would he come to Massapequa? It was hardly probable. He would certainly learn of the change in their circumstances and his sense of delicacy would naturally keep him away for some time even if other considerations, less unselfish, did not. Perhaps he would be attracted to some other girl he would like as well and who was not burdened with a tragedy in her family. Her tears began to flow afresh until she hated herself for being so weak while there was work to be done to save her father. She loved Jefferson. Yes, she had never felt so sure of it as now. She felt that if she had him there at that moment she would throw herself in his arms crying: "Take me, Jefferson, take me away, where you will, for I love you! I love you!" But Jefferson was not there and the rickety chairs in the tiny bedroom and the cheap prints on the walls seemed to jibe at her in her misery. If he were there, she thought as she looked into a cracked mirror, he would think her very ugly with her eyes all red from crying. He would not marry her now in any case. No self-respecting man would. She was glad that she had spoken to him as she had in regard to marriage, for while a stain remained upon her father's name marriage was out of the question. She might have yielded on the question of the literary career, but she would never allow a man to taunt her afterwards with the disgrace of her own flesh and blood. No, henceforth her place was at her father's side until his character was cleared. If the trial in the Senate were to go against him, then she could never see Jefferson again. She would give up all idea of him and everything else. Her literary career would be ended, her life would be a blank. They would have to go abroad, where they were not known, and try and live down their shame, for no matter how innocent her father might be the world would believe him guilty. Once condemned by the Senate, nothing could remove the stigma. She would have to teach in order to contribute towards the support, they would manage somehow. But what a future, how unnecessary, how unjust! Suddenly she thought of Jefferson's promise to interest his father in their case and she clutched at the hope this promise held out as a drowning man clutches at a drifting straw. Jefferson would not forget his promise and he would come to Massapequa to tell her of what he had done. She was sure of that. Perhaps, after all, there was where their hope lay. Why had she not told her father at once? It might have relieved his mind. John Burkett Ryder, the Colossus, the man of unlimited power! He could save her father and he would. And the more she thought about it, the more cheerful and more hopeful she became, and she started to dress quickly so that she might hurry down to tell her father the good news. She was actually sorry now that she had said so many hard things of Mr. Ryder in her book and she was worrying over the thought that her father's case might be seriously prejudiced if the identity of the author were ever revealed, when there came a knock at her door. It was Eudoxia. "Please, miss, will you come down to lunch?" CHAPTER VIII A whirling maelstrom of human activity and dynamic energy--the city which above all others is characteristic of the genius and virility of the American people--New York, with its congested polyglot population and teeming millions, is assuredly one of the busiest, as it is one of the most strenuous and most noisy places on earth. Yet, despite its swarming streets and crowded shops, ceaselessly thronged with men and women eagerly hurrying here and there in the pursuit of business or elusive pleasure, all chattering, laughing, shouting amid the deafening, multisonous roar of traffic incidental to Gotham's daily life, there is one part of the great metropolis where there is no bustle, no noise, no crowd, where the streets are empty even in daytime, where a passer-by is a curiosity and a child a phenomenon. This deserted village in the very heart of the big town is the millionaires' district, the boundaries of which are marked by Carnegie hill on the north, Fiftieth Street on the south, and by Fifth and Madison Avenues respectively on the west and east. There is nothing more mournful than the outward aspect of these princely residences which, abandoned and empty for three-quarters of the year, stand in stately loneliness, as if ashamed of their isolation and utter uselessness. Their blinds drawn, affording no hint of life within, enveloped the greater part of the time in the stillness and silence of the tomb, they appear to be under the spell of some baneful curse. No merry-voiced children romp in their carefully railed off gardens, no sounds of conversation or laughter come from their hermetically closed windows, not a soul goes in or out, at most, at rare intervals, does one catch a glimpse of a gorgeously arrayed servant gliding about in ghostly fashion, supercilious and suspicious, and addressing the chance visitor in awed whispers as though he were the guardian of a house of affliction. It is, indeed, like a city of the dead. So it appeared to Jefferson as he walked up Fifth Avenue, bound for the Ryder residence, the day following his arrival from Europe. Although he still lived at his father's house, for at no time had there been an open rupture, he often slept in his studio, finding it more convenient for his work, and there he had gone straight from the ship. He felt, however, that it was his duty to see his mother as soon as possible; besides he was anxious to fulfil his promise to Shirley and find what his father could do to help Judge Rossmore. He had talked about the case with several men the previous evening at the club and the general impression seemed to be that, guilty or innocent, the judge would be driven off the bench. The "interests" had forced the matter as a party issue, and the Republicans being in control in the Senate the outcome could hardly be in doubt. He had learned also of the other misfortunes which had befallen Judge Rossmore and he understood now the reason for Shirley's grave face on the dock and her little fib about summering on Long Island. The news had been a shock to him, for, apart from the fact that the judge was Shirley's father, he admired him immensely as a man. Of his perfect innocence there could, of course, be no question: these charges of bribery had simply been trumped up by his enemies to get him off the bench. That was very evident. The "interests" feared him and so had sacrificed him without pity, and as Jefferson walked along Central Park, past the rows of superb palaces which face its eastern wall, he wondered in which particular mansion had been hatched this wicked, iniquitous plot against a wholly blameless American citizen. Here, he thought, were the citadels of the plutocrats, America's aristocracy of money, the strongholds of her Coal, Railroad, Oil, Gas and Ice barons, the castles of her monarchs of Steel, Copper, and Finance. Each of these million-dollar residences, he pondered, was filled from cellar to roof with costly furnishings, masterpieces of painting and sculpture, priceless art treasures of all kinds purchased in every corner of the globe with the gold filched from a Trust-ridden people. For every stone in those marble halls a human being, other than the owner, had been sold into bondage, for each of these magnificent edifices, which the plutocrat put up in his pride only to occupy it two months in the year, ten thousand American men, women and children had starved and sorrowed. Europe, thought Jefferson as he strode quickly along, pointed with envy to America's unparalleled prosperity, spoke with bated breath of her great fortunes. Rather should they say her gigantic robberies, her colossal frauds! As a nation we were not proud of our multi-millionaires. How many of them would bear the searchlight of investigation? Would his own father? How many millions could one man make by honest methods? America was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, not because of her millionaires, but in spite of them. The United States owed its high rank in the family of nations to the country's vast natural resources, its inexhaustible vitality, its great wheat fields, the industrial and mechanical genius of its people. It was the plain American citizen who had made the greatness of America, not the millionaires who, forming a class by themselves of unscrupulous capitalists, had created an arrogant oligarchy which sought to rule the country by corrupting the legislature and the judiciary. The plutocrats--these were the leeches, the sores in the body politic. An organized band of robbers, they had succeeded in dominating legislation and in securing control of every branch of the nation's industry, crushing mercilessly and illegally all competition. They were the Money Power, and such a menace were they to the welfare of the people that, it had been estimated, twenty men in America had it in their power, by reason of the vast wealth which they controlled, to come together, and within twenty-four hours arrive at an understanding by which every wheel of trade and commerce would be stopped from revolving, every avenue of trade blocked and every electric key struck dumb. Those twenty men could paralyze the whole country, for they controlled the circulation of the currency and could create a panic whenever they might choose. It was the rapaciousness and insatiable greed of these plutocrats that had forced the toilers to combine for self-protection, resulting in the organization of the Labor Unions which, in time, became almost as tyrannical and unreasonable as the bosses. And the breach between capital on the one hand and labour on the other was widening daily, masters and servants snarling over wages and hours, the quarrel ever increasing in bitterness and acrimony until one day the extreme limit of patience would be reached and industrial strikes would give place to bloody violence. Meantime the plutocrats, wholly careless of the significant signs of the times and the growing irritation and resentment of the people, continued their illegal practices, scoffing at public opinion, snapping their fingers at the law, even going so far in their insolence as to mock and jibe at the President of the United States. Feeling secure in long immunity and actually protected in their wrong doing by the courts--the legal machinery by its very elaborateness defeating the ends of justice--the Trust kings impudently defied the country and tried to impose their own will upon the people. History had thus repeated itself. The armed feudalism of the middle ages had been succeeded in twentieth century America by the tyranny of capital. Yet, ruminated the young artist as he neared the Ryder residence, the American people had but themselves to blame for their present thralldom. Forty years before Abraham Lincoln had warned the country when at the close of the war he saw that the race for wealth was already making men and women money-mad. In 1864 he wrote these words: "Yes, we may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its close. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the nation might live. It has been indeed a trying hour for the Republic, but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Truly prophetic these solemn words were to-day. Forgetting the austere simplicity of their forebears, a love of show and ostentation had become the ruling passion of the American people. Money, MONEY, MONEY! was to-day the only standard, the only god! The whole nation, frenzied with a wild lust for wealth no matter how acquired, had tacitly acquiesced in all sorts of turpitude, every description of moral depravity, and so had fallen an easy victim to the band of capitalistic adventurers who now virtually ruled the land. With the thieves in power, the courts were powerless, the demoralization was general and the world was afforded the edifying spectacle of an entire country given up to an orgy of graft--treason in the Senate--corruption in the Legislature, fraudulent elections, leaks in government reports, trickery in Wall Street, illegal corners in coal, meat, ice and other prime necessaries of life, the deadly horrors of the Beef and Drug Trusts, railroad conspiracies, insurance scandals, the wrecking of savings banks, police dividing spoils with pickpockets and sharing the wages of prostitutes, magistrates charged with blackmailing--a foul stench of social rottenness and decay! What, thought Jefferson, would be the outcome--Socialism or Anarchy? Still, he mused, one ray of hope pierced the general gloom--the common sense, the vigour and the intelligence of the true American man and woman, the love for a "square deal" which was characteristic of the plain people, the resistless force of enlightened public opinion. The country was merely passing through a dark phase in its history, it was the era of the grafters. There would come a reaction, the rascals would be exposed and driven off, and the nation would go on upward toward its high destiny. The country was fortunate, too, in having a strong president, a man of high principles and undaunted courage who had already shown his capacity to deal with the critical situation. America was lucky with her presidents. Picked out by the great political parties as mere figureheads, sometimes they deceived their sponsors, and showed themselves men and patriots. Such a president was Theodore Roosevelt. After beginning vigorous warfare on the Trusts, attacking fearlessly the most rascally of the band, the chief of the nation had sounded the slogan of alarm in regard to the multi-millionaires. The amassing of colossal fortunes, he had declared, must be stopped--a man might accumulate more than sufficient for his own needs and for the needs of his children, but the evil practice of perpetuating great and ever-increasing fortunes for generations yet unborn was recognized as a peril to the State. To have had the courage to propose such a sweeping and radical restrictive measure as this should alone, thought Jefferson, ensure for Theodore Roosevelt a place among America's greatest and wisest statesmen. He and Americans of his calibre would eventually perform the titanic task of cleansing these Augean stables, the muck and accumulated filth of which was sapping the health and vitality of the nation. Jefferson turned abruptly and went up the wide steps of an imposing white marble edifice, which took up the space of half a city block. A fine example of French Renaissance architecture, with spire roofs, round turrets and mullioned windows dominating the neighbouring houses, this magnificent home of the plutocrat, with its furnishings and art treasures, had cost John Burkett Ryder nearly ten millions of dollars. It was one of the show places of the town, and when the "rubber neck" wagons approached the Ryder mansion and the guides, through their megaphones, expatiated in awe-stricken tones on its external and hidden beauties, there was a general craning of vertebrae among the "seeing New York"-ers to catch a glimpse of the abode of the richest man in the world. Only a few privileged ones were ever permitted to penetrate to the interior of this ten-million-dollar home. Ryder was not fond of company, he avoided strangers and lived in continual apprehension of the subpoena server. Not that he feared the law, only he usually found it inconvenient to answer questions in court under oath. The explicit instructions to the servants, therefore, were to admit no one under any pretext whatever unless the visitor had been approved by the Hon. Fitzroy Bagley, Mr. Ryder's aristocratic private secretary, and to facilitate this preliminary inspection there had been installed between the library upstairs and the front door one of those ingenious electric writing devices, such as are used in banks, on which a name is hastily scribbled, instantly transmitted elsewhere, immediately answered and the visitor promptly admitted or as quickly shown the door. Indeed the house, from the street, presented many of the characteristics of a prison. It had massive doors behind a row of highly polished steel gates, which would prove as useful in case of attempted invasion as they were now ornamental, and heavily barred windows, while on either side of the portico were great marble columns hung with chains and surmounted with bronze lions rampant. It was unusual to keep the town house open so late in the summer, but Mr. Ryder was obliged for business reasons to be in New York at this time, and Mrs. Ryder, who was one of the few American wives who do not always get their own way, had good-naturedly acquiesced in the wishes of her lord. Jefferson did not have to ring at the paternal portal. The sentinel within was at his post; no one could approach that door without being seen and his arrival and appearance signalled upstairs. But the great man's son headed the list of the privileged ones, so without ado the smartly dressed flunkey opened wide the doors and Jefferson was under his father's roof. "Is my father in?" he demanded of the man. "No, sir," was the respectful answer. "Mr. Ryder has gone out driving, but Mr. Bagley is upstairs." Then after a brief pause he added: "Mrs. Ryder is in, too." In this household where the personality of the mistress was so completely overshadowed by the stronger personality of the master the latter's secretary was a more important personage to the servants than the unobtrusive wife. Jefferson went up the grand staircase hung on either side with fine old portraits and rare tapestries, his feet sinking deep in the rich velvet carpet. On the first landing was a piece of sculptured marble of inestimable worth, seen in the soft warm light that sifted through a great pictorial stained-glass window overhead, the subject representing Ajax and Ulysses contending for the armour of Achilles. To the left of this, at the top of another flight leading to the library, was hung a fine full-length portrait of John Burkett Ryder. The ceilings here as in the lower hall were richly gilt and adorned with paintings by famous modern artists. When he reached this floor Jefferson was about to turn to the right and proceed direct to his mother's suite when he heard a voice near the library door. It was Mr. Bagley giving instructions to the butler. The Honourable Fitzroy Bagley, a younger son of a British peer, had left his country for his country's good, and in order to turn an honest penny, which he had never succeeded in doing at home, he had entered the service of America's foremost financier, hoping to gather a few of the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table and disguising the menial nature of his position under the high-sounding title of private secretary. His job called for a spy and a toady and he filled these requirements admirably. Excepting with his employer, of whom he stood in craven fear, his manner was condescendingly patronizing to all with whom he came in contact, as if he were anxious to impress on these American plebeians the signal honour which a Fitzroy, son of a British peer, did them in deigning to remain in their "blarsted" country. In Mr. Ryder's absence, therefore, he ran the house to suit himself, bullying the servants and not infrequently issuing orders that were contradictory to those already given by Mrs. Ryder. The latter offered no resistance, she knew he was useful to her husband and, what to her mind was a still better reason for letting him have his own way, she had always had the greatest reverence for the British aristocracy. It would have seemed to her little short of vulgarity to question the actions of anyone who spoke with such a delightful English accent. Moreover, he dressed with irreproachable taste, was an acknowledged authority on dinner menus and social functions and knew his Burke backwards--altogether an accomplished and invaluable person. Jefferson could not bear the sight of him; in fact, it was this man's continual presence in the house that had driven him to seek refuge elsewhere. He believed him to be a scoundrel as he certainly was a cad. Nor was his estimate of the English secretary far wrong. The man, like his master, was a grafter, and the particular graft he was after now was either to make a marriage with a rich American girl or to so compromise her that the same end would be attained. He was shrewd enough to realize that he had little chance to get what he wanted in the open matrimonial market, so he determined to attempt a raid and carry off an heiress under her father's nose, and the particular proboscis he had selected was that of his employer's friend, Senator Roberts. The senator and Miss Roberts were frequently at the Ryder House and in course of time the aristocratic secretary and the daughter had become quite intimate. A flighty girl, with no other purpose in life beyond dress and amusement and having what she termed "a good time," Kate thought it excellent pastime to flirt with Mr. Bagley, and when she discovered that he was serious in his attentions she felt flattered rather than indignant. After all, she argued, he was of noble birth. If his two brothers died he would be peer of England, and she had enough money for both. He might not make a bad husband. But she was careful to keep her own counsel and not let her father have any suspicion of what was going on. She knew that his heart was set on her marrying Jefferson Ryder and she knew better than anyone how impossible that dream was. She herself liked Jefferson quite enough to marry him, but if his eyes were turned in another direction--and she knew all about his attentions to Miss Rossmore--she was not going to break her heart about it. So she continued to flirt secretly with the Honourable Fitzroy while she still led the Ryders and her own father to think that she was interested in Jefferson. "Jorkins," Mr. Bagley was saying to the butler, "Mr. Ryder will occupy the library on his return. See that he is not disturbed." "Yes, sir," replied the butler respectfully. The man turned to go when the secretary called him back. "And, Jorkins, you will station another man at the front entrance. Yesterday it was left unguarded, and a man had the audacity to address Mr. Ryder as he was getting out of his carriage. Last week a reporter tried to snapshot him. Mr. Ryder was furious. These things must not happen again, Jorkins. I shall hold you responsible." "Very good, sir." The butler bowed and went downstairs. The secretary looked up and saw Jefferson. His face reddened and his manner grew nervous. "Hello! Back from Europe, Jefferson? How jolly! Your mother will be delighted. She's in her room upstairs." Declining to take the hint, and gathering from Bagley's embarrassed manner that he wanted to get rid of him, Jefferson lingered purposely. When the butler had disappeared, he said: "This house is getting more and more like a barracks every day. You've got men all over the place. One can't move a step without falling over one." Mr. Bagley drew himself up stiffly, as he always did when assuming an air of authority. "Your father's personality demands the utmost precaution," he replied. "We cannot leave the life of the richest and most powerful financier in the world at the mercy of the rabble." "What rabble?" inquired Jefferson, amused. "The common rabble--the lower class--the riff-raff," explained Mr. Bagley. "Pshaw!" laughed Jefferson. "If our financiers were only half as respectable as the common rabble, as you call them, they would need no bars to their houses." Mr. Bagley sneered and shrugged his shoulders. "Your father has warned me against your socialistic views." Then, with a lofty air, he added: "For four years I was third groom of the bedchamber to the second son of England's queen. I know my responsibilities." "But you are not groom of the bedchamber here," retorted Jefferson. "Whatever I am," said Mr. Bagley haughtily, "I am answerable to your father alone." "By the way, Bagley," asked Jefferson, "when do you expect father to return? I want to see him." "I'm afraid it's quite impossible," answered the secretary with studied insolence. "He has three important people to see before dinner. There's the National Republican Committee and Sergeant Ellison of the Secret Service from Washington--all here by appointment. It's quite impossible." "I didn't ask you if it were possible. I said I wanted to see him and I will see him," answered Jefferson quietly but firmly, and in a tone and manner which did not admit of further opposition. "I'll go and leave word for him on his desk," he added. He started to enter the library when the secretary, who was visibly perturbed, attempted to bar his way. "There's some one in there," he said in an undertone. "Someone waiting for your father." "Is there?" replied Jefferson coolly. "I'll see who it is," with which he brushed past Mr. Bagley and entered the library. He had guessed aright. A woman was there. It was Kate Roberts. "Hello, Kate! how are you?" They called each other by their first names, having been acquainted for years, and while theirs was an indifferent kind of friendship they had always been on good terms. At one time Jefferson had even begun to think he might do what his father wished and marry the girl, but it was only after he had met and known Shirley Rossmore that he realized how different one woman can be from another. Yet Kate had her good qualities. She was frivolous and silly as are most girls with no brains and nothing else to do in life but dress and spend money, but she might yet be happy with some other fellow, and that was why it made him angry to see this girl with $100,000 in her own right playing into the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer. He had evidently disturbed an interesting _tête-à-tête_. He decided to say nothing, but mentally he resolved to spoil Mr. Bagley's game and save Kate from her own folly. On hearing his voice Kate turned and gave a little cry of genuine surprise. "Why, is it you, Jeff? I thought you were in Europe." "I returned yesterday," he replied somewhat curtly. He crossed over to his father's desk where he sat down to scribble a few words, while Mr. Bagley, who had followed him in scowling, was making frantic dumb signs to Kate. "I fear I intrude here," said Jefferson pointedly. "Oh, dear no, not at all," replied Kate in some confusion. "I was waiting for my father. How is Paris?" she asked. "Lovely as ever," he answered. "Did you have a good time?" she inquired. "I enjoyed it immensely. I never had a better one." "You probably were in good company," she said significantly. Then she added: "I believe Miss Rossmore was in Paris." "Yes, I think she was there," was his non-committal answer. To change the conversation, which was becoming decidedly personal, he picked up a book that was lying on his father's desk and glanced at the title. It was "The American Octopus." "Is father still reading this?" he asked. "He was at it when I left." "Everybody is reading it," said Kate. "The book has made a big sensation. Do you know who the hero is?" "Who?" he asked with an air of the greatest innocence. "Why, no less a personage than your father--John Burkett Ryder himself! Everybody says it's he--the press and everybody that's read it. He says so himself." "Really?" he exclaimed with well-simulated surprise. "I must read it." "It has made a strong impression on Mr. Ryder," chimed in Mr. Bagley. "I never knew him to be so interested in a book before. He's trying his best to find out who the author is. It's a jolly well written book and raps you American millionaires jolly well--what?" "Whoever wrote the book," interrupted Kate, "is somebody who knows Mr. Ryder exceedingly well. There are things in it that an outsider could not possibly know." "Phew!" Jefferson whistled softly to himself. He was treading dangerous ground. To conceal his embarrassment, he rose. "If you'll excuse me, I'll go and pay my filial respects upstairs. I'll see you again," He gave Kate a friendly nod, and without even glancing at Mr. Bagley left the room. The couple stood in silence for a few moments after he disappeared. Then Kate went to the door and listened to his retreating footsteps. When she was sure that he was out of earshot she turned on Mr. Bagley indignantly. "You see what you expose me to. Jefferson thinks this was a rendezvous." "Well, it was to a certain extent," replied the secretary unabashed. "Didn't you ask me to see you here?" "Yes," said Kate, taking a letter from her bosom, "I wanted to ask you what this means?" "My dear Miss Roberts--Kate--I"--stammered the secretary. "How dare you address me in this manner when you know I and Mr. Ryder are engaged?" No one knew better than Kate that this was not true, but she said it partly out of vanity, partly out of a desire to draw out this Englishman who made such bold love to her. "Miss Roberts," replied Mr. Bagley loftily, "in that note I expressed my admiration--my love for you. Your engagement to Mr. Jefferson Ryder is, to say the least, a most uncertain fact." There was a tinge of sarcasm in his voice that did not escape Kate. "You must not judge from appearances," she answered, trying to keep up the outward show of indignation which inwardly she did not feel. "Jeff and I may hide a passion that burns like a volcano. All lovers are not demonstrative, you know." The absurdity of this description as applied to her relations with Jefferson appealed to her as so comical that she burst into laughter in which the secretary joined. "Then why did you remain here with me when the Senator went out with Mr. Ryder, senior?" he demanded. "To tell you that I cannot listen to your nonsense any longer," retorted the girl. "What?" he cried, incredulously. "You remain here to tell me that you cannot listen to me when you could easily have avoided listening to me without telling me so. Kate, your coldness is not convincing." "You mean you think I want to listen to you?" she demanded. "I do," he answered, stepping forward as if to take her in his arms. "Mr. Bagley!" she exclaimed, recoiling. "A week ago," he persisted, "you called me Fitzroy. Once, in an outburst of confidence, you called me Fitz." "You hadn't asked me to marry you then," she laughed mockingly. Then edging away towards the door she waved her hand at him playfully and said teasingly: "Good-bye, Mr. Bagley, I am going upstairs to Mrs. Ryder. I will await my father's return in her room. I think I shall be safer." He ran forward to intercept her, but she was too quick for him. The door slammed in his face and she was gone. Meantime Jefferson had proceeded upstairs, passing through long and luxuriously carpeted corridors with panelled frescoed walls, and hung with grand old tapestries and splendid paintings, until he came to his mother's room. He knocked. "Come in!" called out the familiar voice. He entered. Mrs. Ryder was busy at her escritoire looking over a mass of household accounts. "Hello, mother!" he cried, running up and hugging her in his boyish, impulsive way. Jefferson had always been devoted to his mother, and while he deplored her weakness in permitting herself to be so completely under the domination of his father, she had always found him an affectionate and loving son. "Jefferson!" she exclaimed when he released her. "My dear boy, when did you arrive?" "Only yesterday. I slept at the studio last night. You're looking bully, mother. How's father?" Mrs. Ryder sighed while she looked her son over proudly. In her heart she was glad Jefferson had turned out as he had. Her boy certainly would never be a financier to be attacked in magazines and books. Answering his question she said: "Your father is as well as those busybodies in the newspapers will let him be. He's considerably worried just now over that new book 'The American Octopus.' How dare they make him out such a monster? He's no worse than other successful business men. He's richer, that's all, and it makes them jealous. He's out driving now with Senator Roberts. Kate is somewhere in the house--in the library, I think." "Yes, I found her there," replied Jefferson dryly. "She was with that cad, Bagley. When is father going to find that fellow out?" "Oh, Jefferson," protested his mother, "how can you talk like that of Mr. Bagley. He is such a perfect gentleman. His family connections alone should entitle him to respect. He is certainly the best secretary your father ever had. I'm sure I don't know what we should do without him. He knows everything that a gentleman should." "And a good deal more, I wager," growled Jefferson. "He wasn't groom of the backstairs to England's queen for nothing." Then changing the topic, he said suddenly: "Talking about Kate, mother, we have got to reach some definite understanding. This talk about my marrying her must stop. I intend to take the matter up with father to-day." "Oh, of course, more trouble!" replied his mother in a resigned tone. She was so accustomed to having her wishes thwarted that she was never surprised at anything. "We heard of your goings on in Paris. That Miss Rossmore was there, was she not?" "That has got nothing to do with it," replied Jefferson warmly. He resented Shirley's name being dragged into the discussion. Then more calmly he went on: "Now, mother, be reasonable, listen. I purpose to live my own life. I have already shown my father that I will not be dictated to, and that I can earn my own living. He has no right to force this marriage on me. There has never been any misunderstanding on Kate's part. She and I understand each other thoroughly." "Well, Jefferson, you may be right from your point of view," replied his mother weakly. She invariably ended by agreeing with the last one who argued with her. "You are of age, of course. Your parents have only a moral right over you. Only remember this: it would be foolish of you to do anything now to anger your father. His interests are your interests. Don't do anything to jeopardize them. Of course, you can't be forced to marry a girl you don't care for, but your father will be bitterly disappointed. He had set his heart on this match. He knows all about your infatuation for Miss Rossmore and it has made him furious. I suppose you've heard about her father?" "Yes, and it's a dastardly outrage," blurted out Jefferson. "It's a damnable conspiracy against one of the most honourable men that ever lived, and I mean to ferret out and expose the authors. I came here to-day to ask father to help me." "You came to ask your father to help you?" echoed his mother incredulously. "Why not?" demanded Jefferson. "Is it true then that he is selfishness incarnate? Wouldn't he do that much to help a friend?" "You've come to the wrong house, Jeff. You ought to know that. Your father is far from being Judge Rossmore's friend. Surely you have sense enough to realize that there are two reasons why he would not raise a finger to help him. One is that he has always been his opponent in public life, the other is that you want to marry his daughter." Jefferson sat as if struck dumb. He had not thought of that. Yes, it was true. His father and the father of the girl he loved were mortal enemies. How was help to be expected from the head of those "interests" which the judge had always attacked, and now he came to think of it, perhaps his own father was really at the bottom of these abominable charges! He broke into a cold perspiration and his voice was altered as he said: "Yes, I see now, mother. You are right." Then he added bitterly: "That has always been the trouble at home. No matter where I turn, I am up against a stone wall--the money interests. One never hears a glimmer of fellow-feeling, never a word of human sympathy, only cold calculation, heartless reasoning, money, money, money! Oh, I am sick of it. I don't want any of it. I am going away where I'll hear no more of it." His mother laid her hand gently on his shoulder. "Don't talk that way, Jefferson. Your father is not a bad man at heart, you know that. His life has been devoted to money making and he has made a greater fortune than any man living or dead. He is only what his life has made him. He has a good heart. And he loves you--his only son. But his business enemies--ah! those he never forgives." Jefferson was about to reply when suddenly a dozen electric bells sounded all over the house. "What's that?" exclaimed Jefferson, alarmed, and starting towards the door. "Oh, that's nothing," smiled his mother. "We have had that put in since you went away. Your father must have just come in. Those bells announce the fact. It was done so that if there happened to be any strangers in the house they could be kept out of the way until he reached the library safely." "Oh," laughed Jefferson, "he's afraid some one will kidnap him? Certainly he would be a rich prize. I wouldn't care for the job myself, though. They'd be catching a tartar." His speech was interrupted by a timid knock at the door. "May I come in to say good-bye?" asked a voice which they recognized as Kate's. She had successfully escaped from Mr. Bagley's importunities and was now going home with the Senator. She smiled amiably at Jefferson and they chatted pleasantly of his trip abroad. He was sincerely sorry for this girl whom they were trying to foist on him. Not that he thought she really cared for him, he was well aware that hers was a nature that made it impossible to feel very deeply on any subject, but the idea of this ready-made marriage was so foreign, so revolting to the American mind! He thought it would be a kindness to warn her against Bagley. "Don't be foolish, Kate," he said. "I was not blind just now in the library. That man is no good." As is usual when one's motives are suspected, the girl resented his interference. She knew he hated Mr. Bagley and she thought it mean of him to try and get even in this way. She stiffened up and replied coldly: "I think I am able to look after myself, Jefferson. Thanks, all the same." He shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. She said good-bye to Mrs. Ryder, who was again immersed in her tradespeople bills, and left the room, escorted by Jefferson, who accompanied her downstairs and on to the street where Senator Roberts was waiting for her in the open victoria. The senator greeted with unusual cordiality the young man whom he still hoped to make his son-in-law. "Come and see us, Jefferson," he said. "Come to dinner any evening. We are always alone and Kate and I will be glad to see you." "Jefferson has so little time now, father. His work and--his friends keep him pretty busy," Jefferson had noted both the pause and the sarcasm, but he said nothing. He smiled and the senator raised his hat. As the carriage drove off the young man noticed that Kate glanced at one of the upper windows where Mr. Bagley stood behind a curtain watching. Jefferson returned to the house. The psychological moment had arrived. He must go now and confront his father in the library. CHAPTER IX The library was the most important room in the Ryder mansion, for it was there that the Colossus carried through his most important business deals, and its busiest hours were those which most men devote to rest. But John Burkett Ryder never rested. There could be no rest for any man who had a thousand millions of dollars to take care of. Like Macbeth, he could sleep no more. When the hum of business life had ceased down town and he returned home from the tall building in lower Broadway, then his real work began. The day had been given to mere business routine; in his own library at night, free from inquisitive ears and prying eyes, he could devise new schemes for strengthening his grip upon the country, he could evolve more gigantic plans for adding to his already countless millions. Here the money Moloch held court like any king, with as much ceremony and more secrecy, and having for his courtiers some of the most prominent men in the political and industrial life of the nation. Corrupt senators, grafting Congressmen, ambitious railroad presidents, insolent coal barons who impudently claimed they administered the coal lands in trust for the Almighty, unscrupulous princes of finance and commerce, all visited this room to receive orders or pay from the head of the "System." Here were made and unmade governors of States, mayors of cities, judges, heads of police, cabinet ministers, even presidents. Here were turned over to confidential agents millions of dollars to overturn the people's vote in the National elections; here were distributed yearly hundreds of thousands of dollars to grafters, large and small, who had earned it in the service of the "interests." Here, secretly and unlawfully, the heads of railroads met to agree on rates which by discriminating against one locality in favour of another crushed out competition, raised the cost to the consumer, and put millions in the pockets of the Trust. Here were planned tricky financial operations, with deliberate intent to mislead and deceive the investing public, operations which would send stocks soaring one day, only a week later to put Wall Street on the verge of panic. Half a dozen suicides might result from the coup, but twice as many millions of profits had gone into the coffers of the "System." Here, too, was perpetrated the most heinous crime that can be committed against a free people--the conspiring of the Trusts abetted by the railroads, to arbitrarily raise the prices of the necessaries of life--meat, coal, oil, ice, gas--wholly without other justification than that of greed, which, with these men, was the unconquerable, all-absorbing passion. In short, everything that unscrupulous leaders of organized capital could devise to squeeze the life blood out of the patient, defenceless toiler was done within these four walls. It was a handsome room, noble in proportions and abundantly lighted by three large and deeply recessed, mullioned windows, one in the middle of the room and one at either end. The lofty ceiling was a marvellously fine example of panelled oak of Gothic design, decorated with gold, and the shelves for books which lined the walls were likewise of oak, richly carved. In the centre of the wall facing the windows was a massive and elaborately designed oak chimney-piece, reaching up to the ceiling, and having in the middle panel over the mantel a fine three-quarter length portrait of George Washington. The room was furnished sumptuously yet quietly, and fully in keeping with the rich collection of classic and modern authors that filled the bookcases, and in corners here and there stood pedestals with marble busts of Shakespeare, Goethe and Voltaire. It was the retreat of a scholar rather than of a man of affairs. When Jefferson entered, his father was seated at his desk, a long black cigar between his lips, giving instructions to Mr. Bagley. Mr. Ryder looked up quickly as the door opened and the secretary made a movement forward as if to eject the intruder, no matter who he might be. They were not accustomed to having people enter the sanctum of the Colossus so unceremoniously. But when he saw who it was, Mr. Ryder's stern, set face relaxed and he greeted his son amiably. "Why, Jeff, my boy, is that you? Just a moment, until I get rid of Bagley, and I'll be with you." Jefferson turned to the book shelves and ran over the titles while the financier continued his business with the secretary. "Now, Bagley. Come, quick. What is it?" He spoke in a rapid, explosive manner, like a man who has only a few moments to spare before he must rush to catch a train. John Ryder had been catching trains all his life, and he had seldom missed one. "Governor Rice called. He wants an appointment," said Mr. Bagley, holding out a card. "I can't see him. Tell him so," came the answer, quick as a flash. "Who else?" he demanded. "Where's your list?" Mr. Bagley took from the desk a list of names and read them over. "General Abbey telephoned. He says you promised--" "Yes, yes," interrupted Ryder impatiently, "but not here. Down town, to-morrow, any time. Next?" The secretary jotted down a note against each name and then said: "There are some people downstairs in the reception room. They are here by appointment." "Who are they?" "The National Republican Committee and Sergeant Ellison of the Secret Service from Washington," replied Mr. Bagley. "Who was here first?" demanded the financier. "Sergeant Ellison, sir." "Then I'll see him first, and the Committee afterwards. But let them all wait until I ring. I wish to speak with my son." He waved his hand and the secretary, knowing well from experience that this was a sign that there must be no further discussion, bowed respectfully and left the room. Jefferson turned and advanced towards his father, who held out his hand. "Well, Jefferson," he said kindly, "did you have a good time abroad?" "Yes, sir, thank you. Such a trip is a liberal education in itself." "Ready for work again, eh? I'm glad you're back, Jefferson. I'm busy now, but one of these days I want to have a serious talk with you in regard to your future. This artist business is all very well--for a pastime. But it's not a career--surely you can appreciate that--for a young man with such prospects as yours. Have you ever stopped to think of that?" Jefferson was silent. He did not want to displease his father; on the other hand, it was impossible to let things drift as they had been doing. There must be an understanding sooner or later. Why not now? "The truth is, sir," he began timidly, "I'd like a little talk with you now, if you can spare the time." Ryder, Sr., looked first at his watch and then at his son, who, ill at ease, sat nervously on the extreme edge of a chair. Then he said with a smile: "Well, my boy, to be perfectly frank, I can't--but--I will. Come, what is it?" Then, as if to apologize for his previous abruptness, he added, "I've had a very busy day, Jeff. What with Trans-Continental and Trans-Atlantic and Southern Pacific, and Wall Street, and Rate Bills, and Washington I feel like Atlas shouldering the world." "The world wasn't intended for one pair of shoulders to carry, sir," rejoined Jefferson calmly. His father looked at him in amazement. It was something new to hear anyone venturing to question or comment upon anything he said. "Why not?" he demanded, when he had recovered from his surprise. "Julius Caesar carried it. Napoleon carried it--to a certain extent. However, that's neither here nor there. What is it, boy?" Unable to remain a moment inactive, he commenced to pick among the mass of papers on his desk, while Jefferson was thinking what to say. The last word his father uttered gave him a cue, and he blurted out protestingly: "That's just it, sir. You forget that I'm no longer a boy. It's time to treat me as if I were a man." Ryder, Sr., leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily. "A man at twenty-eight? That's an excellent joke. Do you know that a man doesn't get his horse sense till he's forty?" "I want you to take me seriously," persisted Jefferson. Ryder, Sr., was not a patient man. His moments of good humour were of brief duration. Anything that savoured of questioning his authority always angered him. The smile went out of his face and he retorted explosively: "Go on--damn it all! Be serious if you want, only don't take so long about it. But understand one thing. I want no preaching, no philosophical or socialistic twaddle. No Tolstoi--he's a great thinker, and you're not. No Bernard Shaw--he's funny, and you're not. Now go ahead." This beginning was not very encouraging, and Jefferson felt somewhat intimidated. But he realized that he might not have another such opportunity, so he plunged right in. "I should have spoken to you before if you had let me," he said. "I often--" "If I let you?" interrupted his father. "Do you expect me to sit and listen patiently to your wild theories of social reform? You asked me one day why the wages of the idle rich was wealth and the wages of hard work was poverty, and I told you that I worked harder in one day than a tunnel digger works in a life-time. Thinking is a harder game than any. You must think or you won't know. Napoleon knew more about war than all his generals put together. I know more about money than any man living to-day. The man who knows is the man who wins. The man who takes advice isn't fit to give it. That's why I never take yours. Come, don't be a fool, Jeff--give up this art nonsense. Come back to the Trading Company. I'll make you vice-president, and I'll teach you the business of making millions." Jefferson shook his head. It was hard to have to tell his own father that he did not think the million-making business quite a respectable one, so he only murmured: "It's impossible, father. I am devoted to my work. I even intend to go away and travel a few years and see the world. It will help me considerably." Ryder, Sr., eyed his son in silence for a few moments; then he said gently: "Don't be obstinate, Jeff. Listen to me. I know the world better than you do. You mustn't go away. You are the only flesh and blood I have." He stopped speaking for a moment, as if overcome by a sudden emotion over which he had no control. Jefferson remained silent, nervously toying with a paper cutter. Seeing that his words had made no effect, Ryder thumped his desk with his fist and cried: "You see my weakness. You see that I want you with me, and now you take advantage--you take advantage--" "No, father, I don't," protested Jefferson; "but I want to go away. Although I have my studio and am practically independent, I want to go where I shall be perfectly free--where my every move will not be watched--where I can meet my fellow-man heart to heart on an equal basis, where I shall not be pointed out as the son of Ready Money Ryder. I want to make a reputation of my own as an artist." "Why not study theology and become a preacher?" sneered Ryder. Then, more amiably, he said: "No, my lad, you stay here. Study my interests--study the interests that will be yours some day." "No," said Jefferson doggedly, "I'd rather go--my work and my self-respect demand it." "Then go, damn it, go!" cried his father in a burst of anger. "I'm a fool for wasting my time with an ungrateful son." He rose from his seat and began to pace the room. "Father," exclaimed Jefferson starting forward, "you do me an injustice." "An injustice?" echoed Mr. Ryder turning round. "Ye gods! I've given you the biggest name in the commercial world; the most colossal fortune ever accumulated by one man is waiting for you, and you say I've done you an injustice!" "Yes--we are rich," said Jefferson bitterly. "But at what a cost! You do not go into the world and hear the sneers that I get everywhere. You may succeed in muzzling the newspapers and magazines, but you cannot silence public opinion. People laugh when they hear the name Ryder--when they do not weep. All your millions cannot purchase the world's respect. You try to throw millions to the public as a bone to a dog, and they decline the money on the ground that it is tainted. Doesn't that tell you what the world thinks of your methods?" Ryder laughed cynically. He went back to his desk, and, sitting facing his son, he replied: "Jefferson, you are young. It is one of the symptoms of youth to worry about public opinion. When you are as old as I am you will understand that there is only one thing which counts in this world--money. The man who has it possesses power over the man who has it not, and power is what the ambitious man loves most." He stopped to pick up a book. It was "The American Octopus." Turning again to his son, he went on: "Do you see this book? It is the literary sensation of the year. Why? Because it attacks me--the richest man in the world. It holds me up as a monster, a tyrant, a man without soul, honour or conscience, caring only for one thing--money; having but one passion--the love of power, and halting at nothing, not even at crime, to secure it. That is the portrait they draw of your father." Jefferson said nothing. He was wondering if his sire had a suspicion who wrote it and was leading up to that. But Ryder, Sr., continued: "Do I care? The more they attack me the more I like it. Their puny pen pricks have about the same effect as mosquito bites on the pachyderm. What I am, the conditions of my time made me. When I started in business a humble clerk, forty years ago, I had but one goal--success; I had but one aim--to get rich. I was lucky. I made a little money, and I soon discovered that I could make more money by outwitting my competitors in the oil fields. Railroad conditions helped me. The whole country was money mad. A wave of commercial prosperity swept over the land and I was carried along on its crest. I grew enormously rich, my millions increasing by leaps and bounds. I branched out into other interests, successful always, until my holdings grew to what they are to-day--the wonder of the twentieth century. What do I care for the world's respect when my money makes the world my slave? What respect can I have for a people that cringe before money and let it rule them? Are you aware that not a factory wheel turns, not a vote is counted, not a judge is appointed, not a legislator seated, not a president elected without my consent? I am the real ruler of the United States--not the so-called government at Washington. They are my puppets and this is my executive chamber. This power will be yours one day, boy, but you must know how to use it when it comes." "I never want it, father," said Jefferson firmly. "To me your words savour of treason. I couldn't imagine that American talking that way." He pointed to the mantel, at the picture of George Washington. Ryder, Sr., laughed. He could not help it if his son was an idealist. There was no use getting angry, so he merely shrugged his shoulders and said: "All right, Jeff. We'll discuss the matter later, when you've cut your wisdom teeth. Just at present you're in the clouds. But you spoke of my doing you an injustice. How can my love of power do you an injustice?" "Because," replied Jefferson, "you exert that power over your family as well as over your business associates. You think and will for everybody in the house, for everyone who comes in contact with you. Yours is an influence no one seems able to resist. You robbed me of my right to think. Ever since I was old enough to think, you have thought for me; ever since I was old enough to choose, you have chosen for me. You have chosen that I should marry Kate Roberts. That is the one thing I wished to speak to you about. The marriage is impossible." Ryder, Sr., half sprang from his seat. He had listened patiently, he thought, to all that his headstrong son had said, but that he should repudiate in this unceremonious fashion what was a tacit understanding between the two families, and, what was more, run the risk of injuring the Ryder interests--that was inconceivable. Leaving his desk, he advanced into the centre of the room, and folding his arms confronted Jefferson. "So," he said sternly, "this is your latest act of rebellion, is it? You are going to welsh on your word? You are going to jilt the girl?" "I never gave my word," answered Jefferson hotly. "Nor did Kate understand that an engagement existed. You can't expect me to marry a girl I don't care a straw about. It would not be fair to her." "Have you stopped to think whether it would be fair to me?" thundered his father. His face was pale with anger, his jet-black eyes flashed, and his white hair seemed to bristle with rage. He paced the floor for a few moments, and then turning to Jefferson, who had not moved, he said more calmly: "Don't be a fool, Jeff. I don't want to think for you, or to choose for you, or to marry for you. I did not interfere when you threw up the position I made for you in the Trading Company and took that studio. I realized that you were restless under the harness, so I gave you plenty of rein. But I know so much better than you what is best for you. Believe me I do. Don't--don't be obstinate. This marriage means a great deal to my interests--to your interests. Kate's father is all powerful in the Senate. He'll never forgive this disappointment. Hang it all, you liked the girl once, and I made sure that--" He stopped suddenly, and the expression on his face changed as a new light dawned upon him. "It isn't that Rossmore girl, is it?" he demanded. His face grew dark and his jaw clicked as he said between his teeth: "I told you some time ago how I felt about her. If I thought that it was Rossmore's daughter! You know what's going to happen to him, don't you?" Thus appealed to, Jefferson thought this was the most favourable opportunity he would have to redeem his promise to Shirley. So, little anticipating the tempest he was about to unchain, he answered: "I am familiar with the charges that they have trumped up against him. Needless to say, I consider him entirely innocent. What's more, I firmly believe he is the victim of a contemptible conspiracy. And I'm going to make it my business to find out who the plotters are. I came to ask you to help me. Will you?" For a moment Ryder was speechless from utter astonishment. Then, as he realized the significance of his son's words and their application to himself he completely lost control of himself. His face became livid, and he brought his fist down on his desk with a force that shook the room. "I will see him in hell first!" he cried. "Damn him! He has always opposed me. He has always defied my power, and now his daughter has entrapped my son. So it's her you want to go to, eh? Well, I can't make you marry a girl you don't want, but I can prevent you throwing yourself away on the daughter of a man who is about to be publicly disgraced, and, by God, I will." "Poor old Rossmore," said Jefferson bitterly. "If the history of every financial transaction were made known, how many of us would escape public disgrace? Would you?" he cried. Ryder, Sr., rose, his hands working dangerously. He made a movement as if about to advance on his son, but by a supreme effort he controlled himself. "No, upon my word, it's no use disinheriting you, you wouldn't care. I think you'd be glad; on my soul, I do!" Then calming down once more, he added: "Jefferson, give me your word of honour that your object in going away is not to find out this girl and marry her unknown to me. I don't mind your losing your heart, but, damn it, don't lose your head. Give me your hand on it." Jefferson reluctantly held out his hand. "If I thought you would marry that girl unknown to me, I'd have Rossmore sent out of the country and the woman too. Listen, boy. This man is my enemy, and I show no mercy to my enemies. There are more reasons than one why you cannot marry Miss Rossmore. If she knew one of them she would not marry you." "What reasons?" demanded Jefferson. "The principal one," said Ryder, slowly and deliberately, and eyeing his son keenly as if to judge of the effect of his words, "the principal one is that it was through my agents that the demand was made for her father's impeachment." "Ah," cried Jefferson, "then I guessed aright! Oh, father, how could you have done that? If you only knew him!" Ryder, Sr., had regained command of his temper, and now spoke calmly enough. "Jefferson, I don't have to make any apologies to you for the way I conduct my business. The facts contained in the charge were brought to my attention. I did not see why I should spare him. He never spared me. I shall not interfere, and the probabilities are that he will be impeached. Senator Roberts said this afternoon that it was a certainty. You see yourself how impossible a marriage with Miss Rossmore would be, don't you?" "Yes, father, I see now. I have nothing more to say." "Do you still intend going away?" "Yes," replied Jefferson bitterly. "Why not? You have taken away the only reason why I should stay." "Think it well over, lad. Marry Kate or not, as you please, but I want you to stay here." "It's no use. My mind is made up," answered Jefferson decisively. The telephone rang, and Jefferson got up to go. Mr. Ryder took up the receiver. "Hallo! What's that? Sergeant Ellison? Yes, send him up." Putting the telephone down, Ryder, Sr., rose, and crossing the room accompanied his son to the door. "Think it well over, Jeff. Don't be hasty." "I have thought it over, sir, and I have decided to go." A few moments later Jefferson left the house. Ryder, Sr., went back to his desk and sat for a moment in deep thought. For the first time in his life he was face to face with defeat; for the first time he had encountered a will as strong as his own. He who could rule parliaments and dictate to governments now found himself powerless to rule his own son. At all costs, he mused, the boy's infatuation for Judge Rossmore's daughter must be checked, even if he had to blacken the girl's character as well as the father's, or, as a last resort, send the entire family out of the country. He had not lost sight of his victim since the carefully prepared crash in Wall Street, and the sale of the Rossmore home following the bankruptcy of the Great Northwestern Mining Company. His agents had reported their settlement in the quiet little village on Long Island, and he had also learned of Miss Rossmore's arrival from Europe, which coincided strangely with the home-coming of his own son. He decided, therefore, to keep a closer watch on Massapequa now than ever, and that is why to-day's call of Sergeant Ellison, a noted sleuth in the government service, found so ready a welcome. The door opened, and Mr. Bagley entered, followed by a tall, powerfully built man whose robust physique and cheap looking clothes contrasted strangely with the delicate, ultra-fashionably attired English secretary. "Take a seat, Sergeant," said Mr. Ryder, cordially motioning his visitor to a chair. The man sat down gingerly on one of the rich leather-upholstered chairs. His manner was nervous and awkward, as if intimidated in the presence of the financier. "Are the Republican Committee still waiting?" demanded Mr. Ryder. "Yes, sir," replied the secretary. "I'll see them in a few minutes. Leave me with Sergeant Ellison." Mr. Bagley bowed and retired. "Well, Sergeant, what have you got to report?" He opened a box of cigars that stood on the desk and held it out to the detective. "Take a cigar," he said amiably. The man took a cigar, and also the match which Mr. Ryder held out. The financier knew how to be cordial with those who could serve him. "Thanks. This is a good one," smiled the sleuth, sniffing at the weed. "We don't often get a chance at such as these." "It ought to be good," laughed Ryder. "They cost two dollars apiece." The detective was so surprised at this unheard of extravagance that he inhaled a puff of smoke which almost choked him. It was like burning money. Ryder, with his customary bluntness, came right down to business. "Well, what have you been doing about the book?" he demanded. "Have you found the author of 'The American Octopus'?" "No, sir, I have not. I confess I'm baffled. The secret has been well kept. The publishers have shut up like a clam. There's only one thing that I'm pretty well sure of." "What's that?" demanded Ryder, interested. "That no such person as Shirley Green exists." "Oh," exclaimed the financier, "then you think it is a mere _nom de plume_?" "Yes, sir." "And what do you think was the reason for preserving the anonymity?" "Well, you see, sir, the book deals with a big subject. It gives some hard knocks, and the author, no doubt, felt a little timid about launching it under his or her real name. At least that's my theory, sir." "And a good one, no doubt," said Mr. Ryder. Then he added: "That makes me all the more anxious to find out who it is. I would willingly give this moment a check for $5,000 to know who wrote it. Whoever it is, knows me as well as I know myself. We must find the author." The sleuth was silent for a moment. Then he said: "There might be one way to reach the author, but it will be successful only in the event of her being willing to be known and come out into the open. Suppose you write to her in care of the publishers. They would certainly forward the letter to wherever she may be. If she does not want you to know who she is she will ignore your letter and remain in the background. If, on the contrary, she has no fear of you, and is willing to meet you, she will answer the letter." "Ah, I never thought of that!" exclaimed Ryder. "It's a good idea. I'll write such a letter at once. It shall go to-night." He unhooked the telephone and asked Mr. Bagley to come up. A few seconds later the secretary entered the room. "Bagley," said Mr. Ryder, "I want you to write a letter for me to Miss Shirley Green, author of that book 'The American Octopus.' We will address it care of her publishers, Littleton & Co. Just say that if convenient I should like a personal interview with her at my office, No. 36 Broadway, in relation to her book, 'The American Octopus.' See that it is mailed to-night. That's all." Mr. Bagley bowed and retired. Mr. Ryder turned to the secret service agent. "There, that's settled. We'll see how it works. And now, Sergeant, I have another job for you, and if you are faithful to my interests you will not find me unappreciative. Do you know a little place on Long Island called Massapequa?" "Yes," grinned the detective, "I know it. They've got some fine specimens of 'skeeters' there." Paying no attention to this jocularity, Mr. Ryder continued: "Judge Rossmore is living there--pending the outcome of his case in the Senate. His daughter has just arrived from Europe. My son Jefferson came home on the same ship. They are a little more friendly than I care to have them. You understand. I want to know if my son visits the Rossmores, and if he does I wish to be kept informed of all that's going on. You understand?" "Perfectly, sir. You shall know everything." Mr. Ryder took a blank check from his desk and proceeded to fill it up. Then handing it to the detective, he said: "Here is $500 for you. Spare neither trouble or expense." "Thank you, sir," said the man as he pocketed the money. "Leave it to me." "That's about all, I think. Regarding the other matter, we'll see how the letter works." He touched a bell and rose, which was a signal to the visitor that the interview was at an end. Mr. Bagley entered. "Sergeant Ellison is going," said Mr. Ryder. "Have him shown out, and send the Republican Committee up." CHAPTER X "What!" exclaimed Shirley, changing colour, "you believe that John Burkett Ryder is at the bottom of this infamous accusation against father?" It was the day following her arrival at Massapequa, and Shirley, the judge and Stott were all three sitting on the porch. Until now, by common consent, any mention of the impeachment proceedings had been avoided by everyone. The previous afternoon and evening had been spent listening to an account of Shirley's experiences in Europe and a smile had flitted across even the judge's careworn face as his daughter gave a humorous description of the picturesque Paris students with their long hair and peg-top trousers, while Stott simply roared with laughter. Ah, it was good to laugh again after so much trouble and anxiety! But while Shirley avoided the topic that lay nearest her heart, she was consumed with a desire to tell her father of the hope she had of enlisting the aid of John Burkett Ryder. The great financier was certainly able to do anything he chose, and had not his son Jefferson promised to win him over to their cause? So, to-day, after Mrs. Rossmore and her sister had gone down to the village to make some purchases Shirley timidly broached the matter. She asked Stott and her father to tell her everything, to hold back nothing. She wanted to hear the worst. Stott, therefore, started to review the whole affair from the beginning, explaining how her father in his capacity as Judge of the Supreme Court had to render decisions, several of which were adverse to the corporate interests of a number of rich men, and how since that time these powerful interests had used all their influence to get him put off the Bench. He told her about the Transcontinental case and how the judge had got mysteriously tangled up in the Great Northern Mining Company, and of the scandalous newspaper rumours, followed by the news of the Congressional inquiry. Then he told her about the panic in Wall Street, the sale of the house on Madison Avenue and the removal to Long Island. "That is the situation," said Stott when he had finished. "We are waiting now to see what the Senate will do. We hope for the best. It seems impossible that the Senate will condemn a man whose whole life is like an open book, but unfortunately the Senate is strongly Republican and the big interests are in complete control. Unless support comes from some unexpected quarter we must be prepared for anything." Support from some unexpected quarter! Stott's closing words rang in Shirley's head. Was that not just what she had to offer? Unable to restrain herself longer and her heart beating tumultuously from suppressed emotion, she cried: "We'll have that support! We'll have it! I've got it already! I wanted to surprise you! Father, the most powerful man in the United States will save you from being dishonoured!" The two men leaned forward in eager interest. What could the girl mean? Was she serious or merely jesting? But Shirley was never more serious in her life. She was jubilant at the thought that she had arrived home in time to invoke the aid of this powerful ally. She repeated enthusiastically: "We need not worry any more. He has but to say a word and these proceedings will be instantly dropped. They would not dare act against his veto. Did you hear, father, your case is as good as won!" "What do you mean, child? Who is this unknown friend?" "Surely you can guess when I say the most powerful man in the United States? None other than John Burkett Ryder!" She stopped short to watch the effect which this name would have on her hearers. But to her surprise neither her father nor Stott displayed the slightest emotion or even interest. Puzzled at this cold reception, she repeated: "Did you hear, father--John Burkett Ryder will come to your assistance. I came home on the same ship as his son and he promised to secure his father's aid." The judge puffed heavily at his pipe and merely shook his head, making no reply. Stott explained: "We can't look for help from that quarter, Shirley. You don't expect a man to cut loose his own kite, do you?" "What do you mean?" demanded Shirley, mystified. "Simply this--that John Burkett Ryder is the very man who is responsible for all your father's misfortunes." The girl sank back in her seat pale and motionless, as if she had received a blow. Was it possible? Could Jefferson's father have done them such a wrong as this? She well knew that Ryder, Sr., was a man who would stop at nothing to accomplish his purpose--this she had demonstrated conclusively in her book--but she had never dreamed that his hand would ever be directed against her own flesh and blood. Decidedly some fatality was causing Jefferson and herself to drift further and further apart. First, her father's trouble. That alone would naturally have separated them. And now this discovery that Jefferson's father had done hers this wrong. All idea of marriage was henceforth out of the question. That was irrevocable. Of course, she could not hold Jefferson to blame for methods which he himself abhorred. She would always think as much of him as ever, but whether her father emerged safely from the trial in the Senate or not--no matter what the outcome of the impeachment proceedings might be, Jefferson could never be anything else than a Ryder and from now on there would be an impassable gulf between the Rossmores and the Ryders. The dove does not mate with the hawk. "Do you really believe this, that John Ryder deliberately concocted the bribery charge with the sole purpose of ruining my father?" demanded Shirley when she had somewhat recovered. "There is no other solution of the mystery possible," answered Stott. "The Trusts found they could not fight him in the open, in a fair, honest way, so they plotted in the dark. Ryder was the man who had most to lose by your father's honesty on the bench. Ryder was the man he hit the hardest when he enjoined his Transcontinental Railroad. Ryder, I am convinced, is the chief conspirator." "But can such things be in a civilized community?" cried Shirley indignantly. "Cannot he be exposed, won't the press take the matter up, cannot we show conspiracy?" "It sounds easy, but it isn't," replied Stott. "I have had a heap of experience with the law, my child, and I know what I'm talking about. They're too clever to be caught tripping. They've covered their tracks well, be sure of that. As to the newspapers--when did you ever hear of them championing a man when he's down?" "And you, father--do you believe Ryder did this?" "I have no longer any doubt of it," answered the judge. "I think John Ryder would see me dead before he would raise a finger to help me. His answer to my demand for my letters convinced me that he was the arch plotter." "What letters do you refer to?" demanded Shirley. "The letters I wrote to him in regard to my making an investment. He advised the purchase of certain stock. I wrote him two letters at the time, which letters if I had them now would go a long way to clearing me of this charge of bribery, for they plainly showed that I regarded the transaction as a _bona fide_ investment. Since this trouble began I wrote to Ryder asking him to return me these letters so I might use them in my defence. The only reply I got was an insolent note from his secretary saying that Mr. Ryder had forgotten all about the transaction, and in any case had not the letters I referred to." "Couldn't you compel him to return them?" asked Shirley. "We could never get at him," interrupted Stott. "The man is guarded as carefully as the Czar." "Still," objected Shirley, "it is possible that he may have lost the letters or even never received them." "Oh, he has them safe enough," replied Stott. "A man like Ryder keeps every scrap of paper, with the idea that it may prove useful some day. The letters are lying somewhere in his desk. Besides, after the Transcontinental decision he was heard to say that he'd have Judge Rossmore off the Bench inside of a year." "And it wasn't a vain boast--he's done it," muttered the judge. Shirley relapsed into silence. Her brain was in a whirl. It was true then. This merciless man of money, this ogre of monopolistic corporations, this human juggernaut had crushed her father merely because by his honesty he interfered with his shady business deals! Ah, why had she spared him in her book? She felt now that she had been too lenient, not bitter enough, not sufficiently pitiless. Such a man was entitled to no mercy. Yes, it was all clear enough now. John Burkett Ryder, the head of "the System," the plutocrat whose fabulous fortune gave him absolute control over the entire country, which invested him with a personal power greater than that of any king, this was the man who now dared attack the Judiciary, the corner stone of the Constitution, the one safeguard of the people's liberty. Where would it end? How long would the nation tolerate being thus ruthlessly trodden under the unclean heels of an insolent oligarchy? The capitalists, banded together for the sole purpose of pillage and loot, had already succeeded in enslaving the toiler. The appalling degradation of the working classes, the sordidness and demoralizing squalor in which they passed their lives, the curse of drink, the provocation to crime, the shame of the sweat shops--all which evils in our social system she had seen as a Settlement worker, were directly traceable to Centralized Wealth. The labor unions regulated wages and hours, but they were powerless to control the prices of the necessaries of life. The Trusts could at pleasure create famine or plenty. They usually willed to make it famine so they themselves might acquire more millions with which to pay for marble palaces, fast motor cars, ocean-going yachts and expensive establishments at Newport. Food was ever dearer and of poorer quality, clothes cost more, rents and taxes were higher. She thought of the horrors in the packing houses at Chicago recently made the subject of a sensational government report--putrid, pestiferous meats put up for human food amid conditions of unspeakable foulness, freely exposed to deadly germs from the expectorations of work people suffering from tuberculosis, in unsanitary rotten buildings soaked through with blood and every conceivable form of filth and decay, the beef barons careless and indifferent to the dictates of common decency so long as they could make more money. And while our public gasped in disgust at the sickening revelations of the Beef scandal and foreign countries quickly cancelled their contracts for American prepared meats, the millionaire packer, insolent in the possession of wealth stolen from a poisoned public, impudently appeared in public in his fashionable touring car, with head erect and self-satisfied, wholly indifferent to his shame. These and other evidences of the plutocracy's cruel grip upon the nation had ended by exasperating the people. There must be a limit somewhere to the turpitudes of a degenerate class of _nouveaux riches_. The day of reckoning was fast approaching for the grafters and among the first to taste the vengeance of the people would be the Colossus. But while waiting for the people to rise in their righteous wrath, Ryder was all powerful, and if it were true that he had instituted these impeachment proceedings her father had little chance. What could be done? They could not sit and wait, as Stott had said, for the action of the Senate. If it were true that Ryder controlled the Senate as he controlled everything else her father was doomed. No, they must find some other way. And long after the judge and Stott had left for the city Shirley sat alone on the porch engrossed in thought, taxing her brain to find some way out of the darkness. And when presently her mother and aunt returned they found her still sitting there, silent and preoccupied. If they only had those two letters, she thought. They alone might save her father. But how could they be got at? Mr. Ryder had put them safely away, no doubt. He would not give them up. She wondered how it would be to go boldly to him appeal to whatever sense of honour and fairness that might be lying latent within him. No, such a man would not know what the terms "honour," "fairness" meant. She pondered upon it all day and at night when she went tired to bed it was her last thought as she dropped off to sleep. The following morning broke clear and fine. It was one of those glorious, ideal days of which we get perhaps half a dozen during the whole summer, days when the air is cool and bracing, champagne-like in its exhilarating effect, and when Nature dons her brightest dress, when the atmosphere is purer, the grass greener, the sky bluer, the flowers sweeter and the birds sing in more joyous chorus, when all creation seems in tune. Days that make living worth while, when one can forget the ugliness, the selfishness, the empty glitter of the man-made city and walk erect and buoyant in the open country as in the garden of God. Shirley went out for a long walk. She preferred to go alone so she would not have to talk. Hers was one of those lonely, introspective natures that resent the intrusion of aimless chatter when preoccupied with serious thoughts. Long Island was unknown territory to her and it all looked very flat and uninteresting, but she loved the country and found keen delight in the fresh, pure air and the sweet scent of new mown hay wafted from the surrounding fields. In her soft, loose-fitting linen dress, her white canvas shoes, garden hat trimmed with red roses, and lace parasol, she made an attractive picture and every passer-by--with the exception of one old farmer and he was half blind--turned to look at this good-looking girl, a stranger in those parts and whose stylish appearance suggested Fifth Avenue rather than the commonplace purlieus of Massapequa. Every now and then Shirley espied in the distance the figure of a man which she thought she recognized as that of Jefferson. Had he come, after all? The blood went coursing tumultuously through her veins only a moment later to leave her face a shade paler as the man came nearer and she saw he was a stranger. She wondered what he was doing, if he gave her a thought, if he had spoken to his father and what the latter had said. She could realize now what Mr. Ryder's reply had been. Then she wondered what her future life would be. She could do nothing, of course, until the Senate had passed upon her father's case, but it was imperative that she get to work. In a day or two, she would call on her publishers and learn how her book was selling. She might get other commissions. If she could not make enough money in literary work she would have to teach. It was a dreary outlook at best, and she sighed as she thought of the ambitions that had once stirred her breast. All the brightness seemed to have gone out of her life, her father disgraced, Jefferson now practically lost to her--only her work remained. As she neared the cottage on her return home she caught sight of the letter carrier approaching the gate. Instantly she thought of Jefferson, and she hurried to intercept the man. Perhaps he had written instead of coming. "Miss Shirley Rossmore?" said the man eyeing her interrogatively. "That's I," said Shirley. The postman handed her a letter and passed on. Shirley glanced quickly at the superscription. No, it was not from Jefferson; she knew his handwriting too well. The envelope, moreover, bore the firm name of her publishers. She tore it open and found that it merely contained another letter which the publishers had forwarded. This was addressed to Miss Shirley Green and ran as follows: _Dear Madam._--If convenient, I should like to see you at my office, No. 36 Broadway, in relation to your book "The American Octopus." Kindly inform me as to the day and hour at which I may expect you. Yours truly, JOHN BURKETT RYDER, per B. Shirley almost shouted from sheer excitement. At first she was alarmed--the name John Burkett Ryder was such a bogey to frighten bad children with, she thought he might want to punish her for writing about him as she had. She hurried to the porch and sat there reading the letter over and over and her brain began to evolve ideas. She had been wondering how she could get at Mr. Ryder and here he was actually asking her to call on him. Evidently he had not the slightest idea of her identity, for he had been able to reach her only through her publishers and no doubt he had exhausted every other means of discovering her address. The more she pondered over it the more she began to see in this invitation a way of helping her father. Yes, she would go and beard the lion in his den, but she would not go to his office. She would accept the invitation only on condition that the interview took place in the Ryder mansion where undoubtedly the letters would be found. She decided to act immediately. No time was to be lost, so she procured a sheet of paper and an envelope and wrote as follows: MR. JOHN BURKETT RYDER, _Dear Sir._--I do not call upon gentlemen at their business office. Yours, etc., SHIRLEY GREEN. Her letter was abrupt and at first glance seemed hardly calculated to bring about what she wanted--an invitation to call at the Ryder home, but she was shrewd enough to see that if Ryder wrote to her at all it was because he was most anxious to see her and her abruptness would not deter him from trying again. On the contrary, the very unusualness of anyone thus dictating to him would make him more than ever desirous of making her acquaintance. So Shirley mailed the letter and awaited with confidence for Ryder's reply. So certain was she that one would come that she at once began to form her plan of action. She would leave Massapequa at once, and her whereabouts must remain a secret even from her own family. As she intended to go to the Ryder house in the assumed character of Shirley Green, it would never do to run the risk of being followed home by a Ryder detective to the Rossmore cottage. She would confide in one person only--Judge Stott. He would know where she was and would be in constant communication with her. But, otherwise, she must be alone to conduct the campaign as she judged fit. She would go at once to New York and take rooms in a boarding house where she would be known as Shirley Green. As for funds to meet her expenses, she had her diamonds, and would they not be filling a more useful purpose if sold to defray the cost of saving her father than in mere personal adornment? So that evening, while her mother was talking with the judge, she beckoned Stott over to the corner where she was sitting: "Judge Stott," she began, "I have a plan." He smiled indulgently at her. "Another friend like that of yesterday?" he asked. "No," replied the girl, "listen. I am in earnest now and I want you to help me. You said that no one on earth could resist John Burkett Ryder, that no one could fight against the Money Power. Well, do you know what I am going to do?" There was a quiver in her voice and her nostrils were dilated like those of a thoroughbred eager to run the race. She had risen from her seat and stood facing him, her fists clenched, her face set and determined. Stott had never seen her in this mood and he gazed at her half admiringly, half curiously. "What will you do?" he asked with a slightly ironical inflection in his voice. "I am going to fight John Burkett Ryder!" she cried. Stott looked at her open-mouthed. "You?" he said. "Yes, I," said Shirley. "I'm going to him and I intend to get those letters if he has them." Stott shook his head. [Photo, from the play, of Shirley discussing her book with Mr. Ryder] "How do you classify him?" "As the greatest criminal the world has ever produced."--Act III. "My dear child," he said, "what are you talking about? How can you expect to reach Ryder? We couldn't." "I don't know just how yet," replied Shirley, "but I'm going to try. I love my father and I'm going to leave nothing untried to save him." "But what can you do?" persisted Stott. "The matter has been sifted over and over by some of the greatest minds in the country." "Has any woman sifted it over?" demanded Shirley. "No, but--" stammered Stott. "Then it's about time one did," said the girl decisively. "Those letters my father speaks of--they would be useful, would they not?" "They would be invaluable." "Then I'll get them. If not--" "But I don't understand how you're going to get at Ryder," interrupted Stott. "This is how," replied Shirley, passing over to him the letter she had received that afternoon. As Stott recognized the well-known signature and read the contents the expression of his face changed. He gasped for breath and sank into a chair from sheer astonishment. "Ah, that's different!" he cried, "that's different!" Briefly Shirley outlined her plan, explaining that she would go to live in the city immediately and conduct her campaign from there. If she was successful it might save her father and if not no harm could come of it. Stott demurred at first. He did not wish to bear alone the responsibility of such an adventure. There was no knowing what might happen to her, visiting a strange house under an assumed name. But when he saw how thoroughly in earnest she was and that she was ready to proceed without him he capitulated. He agreed that she might be able to find the missing letters or if not that she might make some impression on Ryder himself. She could show interest in the judge's case as a disinterested outsider and so might win his sympathies. From being a sceptic, Stott now became enthusiastic. He promised to co-operate in every way and to keep Shirley's whereabouts an absolute secret. The girl, therefore, began to make her preparations for departure from home by telling her parents that she had accepted an invitation to spend a week or two with an old college chum in New York. That same evening her mother, the judge, and Stott went for a stroll after dinner and left her to take care of the house. They had wanted Shirley to go, too, but she pleaded fatigue. The truth was that she wanted to be alone so she could ponder undisturbed over her plans. It was a clear, starlit night, with no moon, and Shirley sat on the porch listening to the chirping of the crickets and idly watching the flashes of the mysterious fireflies. She was in no mood for reading and sat for a long time rocking herself engrossed in her thoughts. Suddenly she heard someone unfasten the garden gate. It was too soon for the return of the promenaders; it must be a visitor. Through the uncertain penumbra of the garden she discerned approaching a form which looked familiar. Yes, now there was no doubt possible. It was, indeed, Jefferson Ryder. She hurried down the porch to greet him. No matter what the father had done she could never think any the less of the son. He took her hand and for several moments neither one spoke. There are times when silence is more eloquent than speech and this was one of them. The gentle grip of his big strong hand expressed more tenderly than any words the sympathy that lay in his heart for the woman he loved. Shirley said quietly: "You have come at last, Jefferson." "I came as soon as I could," he replied gently. "I saw father only yesterday." "You need not tell me what he said," Shirley hastened to say. Jefferson made no reply. He understood what she meant. He hung his head and hit viciously with his walking stick at the pebbles that lay at his feet. She went on: "I know everything now. It was foolish of me to think that Mr. Ryder would ever help us." "I can't help it in any way," blurted out Jefferson. "I have not the slightest influence over him. His business methods I consider disgraceful--you understand that, don't you, Shirley?" The girl laid her hand on his arm and replied kindly: "Of course, Jeff, we know that. Come up and sit down." He followed her on the porch and drew up a rocker beside her. "They are all out for a walk," she explained. "I'm glad," he said frankly. "I wanted a quiet talk with you. I did not care to meet anyone. My name must be odious to your people." Both were silent, feeling a certain awkwardness. They seemed to have drifted apart in some way since those delightful days in Paris and on the ship. Then he said: "I'm going away, but I couldn't go until I saw you." "You are going away?" exclaimed Shirley, surprised. "Yes," he said, "I cannot stand it any more at home. I had a hot talk with my father yesterday about one thing and another. He and I don't chin well together. Besides this matter of your father's impeachment has completely discouraged me. All the wealth in the world could never reconcile me to such methods! I'm ashamed of the rôle my own flesh and blood has played in that miserable affair. I can't express what I feel about it." "Yes," sighed Shirley, "it is hard to believe that you are the son of that man!" "How is your father?" inquired Jefferson. "How does he take it?" "Oh, his heart beats and he can see and hear and speak," replied Shirley sadly, "but he is only a shadow of what he once was. If the trial goes against him, I don't think he'll survive it." "It is monstrous," cried Jefferson. "To think that my father should be responsible for this thing!" "We are still hoping for the best," added Shirley, "but the outlook is dark." "But what are you going to do?" he asked. "These surroundings are not for you--" He looked around at the cheap furnishings which he could see through the open window and his face showed real concern. "I shall teach or write, or go out as governess," replied Shirley with a tinge of bitterness. Then smiling sadly she added: "Poverty is easy; it is unmerited disgrace which is hard." The young man drew his chair closer and took hold of the hand that lay in her lap. She made no resistance. "Shirley," he said, "do you remember that talk we had on the ship? I asked you to be my wife. You led me to believe that you were not indifferent to me. I ask you again to marry me. Give me the right to take care of you and yours. I am the son of the world's richest man, but I don't want his money. I have earned a competence of my own--enough to live on comfortably. We will go away where you and your father and mother will make their home with us. Do not let the sins of the fathers embitter the lives of the children." "Mine has not sinned," said Shirley bitterly. "I wish I could say the same of mine," replied Jefferson. "It is because the clouds are dark about you that I want to come into your life to comfort you." The girl shook her head. "No, Jefferson, the circumstances make such a marriage impossible. Your family and everybody else would say that I had inveigled you into it. It is even more impossible now than I thought it was when I spoke to you on the ship. Then I was worried about my father's trouble and could give no thought to anything else. Now it is different. Your father's action has made our union impossible for ever. I thank you for the honour you have done me. I do like you. I like you well enough to be your wife, but I will not accept this sacrifice on your part. Your offer, coming at such a critical time, is dictated only by your noble, generous nature, by your sympathy for our misfortune. Afterwards, you might regret it. If my father were convicted and driven from the bench and you found you had married the daughter of a disgraced man you would be ashamed of us all, and if I saw that it would break my heart." Emotion stopped her utterance and she buried her face in her hands weeping silently. "Shirley," said Jefferson gently, "you are wrong. I love you for yourself, not because of your trouble. You know that. I shall never love any other woman but you. If you will not say 'yes' now, I shall go away as I told my father I would and one day I shall come back and then if you are still single I shall ask you again to be my wife." "Where are you going?" she asked. "I shall travel for a year and then, may be, I shall stay a couple of years in Paris, studying at the Beaux Arts. Then I may go to Rome. If I am to do anything worth while in the career I have chosen I must have that European training." "Paris! Rome!" echoed Shirley. "How I envy you! Yes, you are right. Get away from this country where the only topic, the only thought is money, where the only incentive to work is dollars. Go where there are still some ideals, where you can breathe the atmosphere of culture and art." Forgetting momentarily her own troubles, Shirley chatted on about life in the art centres of Europe, advised Jefferson where to go, with whom to study. She knew people in Paris, Rome and Munich and she would give him letters to them. Only, if he wanted to perfect himself in the languages, he ought to avoid Americans and cultivate the natives. Then, who could tell? if he worked hard and was lucky, he might have something exhibited at the Salon and return to America a famous painter. "If I do," smiled Jefferson, "you shall be the first to congratulate me. I shall come and ask you to be my wife. May I?" he added, Shirley smiled gravely. "Get famous first. You may not want me then." "I shall always want you," he whispered hoarsely, bending over her. In the dim light of the porch he saw that her tear-stained face was drawn and pale. He rose and held out his hand. "Good-bye," he said simply. "Good-bye, Jefferson." She rose and put her hand in his. "We shall always be friends. I, too, am going away." "You going away--where to?" he asked surprised. "I have work to do in connection with my father's case," she said. "You?" said Jefferson puzzled. "You have work to do--what work?" "I can't say what it is, Jefferson. There are good reasons why I can't. You must take my word for it that it is urgent and important work." Then she added: "You go your way, Jefferson; I will go mine. It was not our destiny to belong to each other. You will become famous as an artist. And I--" "And you--" echoed Jefferson. "I--I shall devote my life to my father. It's no use, Jefferson--really--I've thought it all out. You must not come back to me--you understand. We must be alone with our grief--father and I. Good-bye." He raised her hand to his lips. "Good-bye, Shirley. Don't forget me. I shall come back for you." He went down the porch and she watched him go out of the gate and down the road until she could see his figure no longer. Then she turned back and sank into her chair and burying her face in her handkerchief she gave way to a torrent of tears which afforded some relief to the weight on her heart. Presently the others returned from their walk and she told them about the visitor. "Mr. Ryder's son, Jefferson, was here. We crossed on the same ship. I introduced him to Judge Stott on the dock." The judge looked surprised, but he merely said: "I hope for his sake that he is a different man from his father." "He is," replied Shirley simply, and nothing more was said. Two days went by, during which Shirley went on completing the preparations for her visit to New York. It was arranged that Stott should escort her to the city. Shortly before they started for the train a letter arrived for Shirley. Like the first one it had been forwarded by her publishers. It read as follows: MISS SHIRLEY GREEN, _Dear Madam._--I shall be happy to see you at my residence--Fifth Avenue--any afternoon that you will mention. Yours very truly, JOHN BURKETT RYDER, per B. Shirley smiled in triumph as, unseen by her father and mother, she passed it over to Stott. She at once sat down and wrote this reply: MR. JOHN BURKETT RYDER, _Dear Sir._--I am sorry that I am unable to comply with your request. I prefer the invitation to call at your private residence should come from Mrs. Ryder. Yours, etc., SHIRLEY GREEN. She laughed as she showed this to Stott: "He'll write me again," she said, "and next time his wife will sign the letter." An hour later she left Massapequa for the city. CHAPTER XI The Hon. Fitzroy Bagley had every reason to feel satisfied with himself. His _affaire de coeur_ with the Senator's daughter was progressing more smoothly than ever, and nothing now seemed likely to interfere with his carefully prepared plans to capture an American heiress. The interview with Kate Roberts in the library, so awkwardly disturbed by Jefferson's unexpected intrusion, had been followed by other interviews more secret and more successful, and the plausible secretary had contrived so well to persuade the girl that he really thought the world of her, and that a brilliant future awaited her as his wife, that it was not long before he found her in a mood to refuse him nothing. Bagley urged immediate marriage; he insinuated that Jefferson had treated her shamefully and that she owed it to herself to show the world that there were other men as good as the one who had jilted her. He argued that in view of the Senator being bent on the match with Ryder's son it would be worse than useless for him, Bagley, to make formal application for her hand, so, as he explained, the only thing which remained was a runaway marriage. Confronted with the _fait accompli_, papa Roberts would bow to the inevitable. They could get married quietly in town, go away for a short trip, and when the Senator had gotten over his first disappointment they would be welcomed back with open arms. Kate listened willingly enough to this specious reasoning. In her heart she was piqued at Jefferson's indifference and she was foolish enough to really believe that this marriage with a British nobleman, twice removed, would be in the nature of a triumph over him. Besides, this project of an elopement appealed strangely to her frivolous imagination; it put her in the same class as all her favourite novel heroines. And it would be capital fun! Meantime, Senator Roberts, in blissful ignorance of this little plot against his domestic peace, was growing impatient and he approached his friend Ryder once more on the subject of his son Jefferson. The young man, he said, had been back from Europe some time. He insisted on knowing what his attitude was towards his daughter. If they were engaged to be married he said there should be a public announcement of the fact. It was unfair to him and a slight to his daughter to let matters hang fire in this unsatisfactory way and he hinted that both himself and his daughter might demand their passports from the Ryder mansion unless some explanation were forthcoming. Ryder was in a quandary. He had no wish to quarrel with his useful Washington ally; he recognized the reasonableness of his complaint. Yet what could he do? Much as he himself desired the marriage, his son was obstinate and showed little inclination to settle down. He even hinted at attractions in another quarter. He did not tell the Senator of his recent interview with his son when the latter made it very plain that the marriage could never take place. Ryder, Sr., had his own reasons for wishing to temporize. It was quite possible that Jefferson might change his mind and abandon his idea of going abroad and he suggested to the Senator that perhaps if he, the Senator, made the engagement public through the newspapers it might have the salutary effect of forcing his son's hand. So a few mornings later there appeared among the society notes in several of the New York papers this paragraph: "The engagement is announced of Miss Katherine Roberts, only daughter of senator Roberts of Wisconsin, to Jefferson Ryder, son of Mr. John Burkett Ryder." Two persons in New York happened to see the item about the same time and both were equally interested, although it affected them in a different manner. One was Shirley Rossmore, who had chanced to pick up the newspaper at the breakfast table in her boarding house. "So soon?" she murmured to herself. Well, why not? She could not blame Jefferson. He had often spoken to her of this match arranged by his father and they had laughed over it as a typical marriage of convenience modelled after the Continental pattern. Jefferson, she knew, had never cared for the girl nor taken the affair seriously. Some powerful influences must have been at work to make him surrender so easily. Here again she recognized the masterly hand of Ryder, Sr., and more than ever she was eager to meet this extraordinary man and measure her strength with his. Her mind, indeed, was too full of her father's troubles to grieve over her own however much she might have been inclined to do so under other circumstances, and all that day she did her best to banish the paragraph from her thoughts. More than a week had passed since she left Massapequa and what with corresponding with financiers, calling on editors and publishers, every moment of her time had been kept busy. She had found a quiet and reasonable priced boarding house off Washington Square and here Stott had called several times to see her. Her correspondence with Mr. Ryder had now reached a phase when it was impossible to invent any further excuses for delaying the interview asked for. As she had foreseen, a day or two after her arrival in town she had received a note from Mrs. Ryder asking her to do her the honour to call and see her, and Shirley, after waiting another two days, had replied making an appointment for the following day at three o'clock. This was the same day on which the paragraph concerning the Ryder-Roberts engagement appeared in the society chronicles of the metropolis. Directly after the meagre meal which in New York boarding houses is dignified by the name of luncheon, Shirley proceeded to get ready for this portentous visit to the Ryder mansion. She was anxious to make a favourable impression on the financier, so she took some pains with her personal appearance. She always looked stylish, no matter what she wore, and her poverty was of too recent date to make much difference to her wardrobe, which was still well supplied with Paris-made gowns. She selected a simple close-fitting gown of gray chiffon cloth and a picture hat of Leghorn straw heaped with red roses, Shirley's favourite flower. Thus arrayed, she sallied forth at two o'clock--a little gray mouse to do battle with the formidable lion. The sky was threatening, so instead of walking a short way up Fifth Avenue for exercise, as she had intended doing, she cut across town through Ninth Street, and took the surface car on Fourth Avenue. This would put her down at Madison Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street, which was only a block from the Ryder residence. She looked so pretty and was so well dressed that the passers-by who looked after her wondered why she did not take a cab instead of standing on a street corner for a car. But one's outward appearance is not always a faithful index to the condition of one's pocketbook, and Shirley was rapidly acquiring the art of economy. It was not without a certain trepidation that she began this journey. So far, all her plans had been based largely on theory, but now that she was actually on her way to Mr. Ryder all sorts of misgivings beset her. Suppose he knew her by sight and roughly accused her of obtaining access to his house under false pretences and then had her ejected by the servants? How terrible and humiliating that would be! And even if he did not how could she possibly find those letters with him watching her, and all in the brief time of a conventional afternoon call? It had been an absurd idea from the first. Stott was right; she saw that now. But she had entered upon it and she was not going to confess herself beaten until she had tried. And as the car sped along Madison Avenue, gradually drawing nearer to the house which she was going to enter disguised as it were, like a burglar, she felt cold chills run up and down her spine--the same sensation that one experiences when one rings the bell of a dentist's where one has gone to have a tooth extracted. In fact, she felt so nervous and frightened that if she had not been ashamed before herself she would have turned back. In about twenty minutes the car stopped at the corner of Seventy-fourth Street. Shirley descended and with a quickened pulse walked towards the Ryder mansion, which she knew well by sight. There was one other person in New York who, that same morning, had read the newspaper item regarding the Ryder-Roberts betrothal, and he did not take the matter so calmly as Shirley had done. On the contrary, it had the effect of putting him into a violent rage. This was Jefferson. He was working in his studio when he read it and five minutes later he was tearing up-town to seek the author of it. He understood its object, of course; they wanted to force his hand, to shame him into this marriage, to so entangle him with the girl that no other alternative would be possible to an honourable man. It was a despicable trick and he had no doubt that his father was at the back of it. So his mind now was fully made up. He would go away at once where they could not make his life a burden with this odious marriage which was fast becoming a nightmare to him. He would close up his studio and leave immediately for Europe. He would show his father once for all that he was a man and expected to be treated as one. He wondered what Shirley was doing. Where had she gone, what was this mysterious work of which she had spoken? He only realized now, when she seemed entirely beyond his reach, how much he loved her and how empty his life would be without her. He would know no happiness until she was his wife. Her words on the porch did not discourage him. Under the circumstances he could not expect her to have said anything else. She could not marry into John Ryder's family with such a charge hanging over her own father's head, but, later, when the trial was over, no matter how it turned out, he would go to her again and ask her to be his wife. On arriving home the first person he saw was the ubiquitous Mr. Bagley, who stood at the top of the first staircase giving some letters to the butler. Jefferson cornered him at once, holding out the newspaper containing the offending paragraph. "Say, Bagley," he cried, "what does this mean? Is this any of your doing?" The English secretary gave his employer's son a haughty stare, and then, without deigning to reply or even to glance at the newspaper, continued his instructions to the servant: "Here, Jorkins, get stamps for all these letters and see they are mailed at once. They are very important." "Very good, sir." The man took the letters and disappeared, while Jefferson, impatient, repeated his question: "My doing?" sneered Mr. Bagley. "Really, Jefferson, you go too far! Do you suppose for one instant that I would condescend to trouble myself with your affairs?" Jefferson was in no mood to put up with insolence from anyone, especially from a man whom he heartily despised, so advancing menacingly he thundered: "I mean--were you, in the discharge of your menial-like duties, instructed by my father to send that paragraph to the newspapers regarding my alleged betrothal to Miss Roberts? Yes or No?" The man winced and made a step backward. There was a gleam in the Ryder eye which he knew by experience boded no good. "Really, Jefferson," he said in a more conciliatory tone, "I know absolutely nothing about the paragraph. This is the first I hear of it. Why not ask your father?" "I will," replied Jefferson grimly. He was turning to go in the direction of the library when Bagley stopped him. "You cannot possibly see him now," he said. "Sergeant Ellison of the Secret Service is in there with him, and your father told me not to disturb him on any account. He has another appointment at three o'clock with some woman who writes books." Seeing that the fellow was in earnest, Jefferson did not insist. He could see his father a little later or send him a message through his mother. Proceeding upstairs he found Mrs. Ryder in her room and in a few energetic words he explained the situation to his mother. They had gone too far with this match-making business, he said, his father was trying to interfere with his personal liberty and he was going to put a stop to it. He would leave at once for Europe. Mrs. Ryder had already heard of the projected trip abroad, so the news of this sudden departure was not the shock it might otherwise have been. In her heart she did not blame her son, on the contrary she admired his spirit, and if the temporary absence from home would make him happier, she would not hold him back. Yet, mother like, she wept and coaxed, but nothing would shake Jefferson in his determination and he begged his mother to make it very plain to his father that this was final and that a few days would see him on his way abroad. He would try and come back to see his father that afternoon, but otherwise she was to say good-bye for him. Mrs. Ryder promised tearfully to do what her son demanded and a few minutes later Jefferson was on his way to the front door. As he went down stairs something white on the carpet attracted his attention. He stooped and picked it up. It was a letter. It was in Bagley's handwriting and had evidently been dropped by the man to whom the secretary had given it to post. But what interested Jefferson more than anything else was that it was addressed to Miss Kate Roberts. Under ordinary circumstances, a king's ransom would not have tempted the young man to read a letter addressed to another, but he was convinced that his father's secretary was an adventurer and if he were carrying on an intrigue in this manner it could have only one meaning. It was his duty to unveil a rascal who was using the Ryder roof and name to further his own ends and victimize a girl who, although sophisticated enough to know better, was too silly to realize the risk she ran at the hands of an unscrupulous man. Hesitating no longer, Jefferson tore open the envelope and read: My dearest wife that is to be: I have arranged everything. Next Wednesday--just a week from to-day--we will go to the house of a discreet friend of mine where a minister will marry us; then we will go to City Hall and get through the legal part of it. Afterwards, we can catch the four o'clock train for Buffalo. Meet me in the ladies' room at the Holland House Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. I will come there with a closed cab. Your devoted FITZ. "Phew!" Jefferson whistled. A close shave this for Senator Roberts, he thought. His first impulse was to go upstairs again to his mother and put the matter in her hands. She would immediately inform his father, who would make short work of Mr. Bagley. But, thought Jefferson, why should he spoil a good thing? He could afford to wait a day or two. There was no hurry. He could allow Bagley to think all was going swimmingly and then uncover the plot at the eleventh hour. He would even let this letter go to Kate, there was no difficulty in procuring another envelope and imitating the handwriting--and when Bagley was just preparing to go to the rendezvous he would spring the trap. Such a cad deserved no mercy. The scandal would be a knock-out blow, his father would discharge him on the spot and that would be the last they would see of the aristocratic English secretary. Jefferson put the letter in his pocket and left the house rejoicing. While the foregoing incidents were happening John Burkett Ryder was secluded in his library. The great man had come home earlier than usual, for he had two important callers to see by appointment that afternoon. One was Sergeant Ellison, who had to report on his mission to Massapequa; the other was Miss Shirley Green, the author of "The American Octopus," who had at last deigned to honour him with a visit. Pending the arrival of these visitors the financier was busy with his secretary trying to get rid as rapidly as possible of what business and correspondence there was on hand. The plutocrat was sitting at his desk poring over a mass of papers. Between his teeth was the inevitable long black cigar and when he raised his eyes to the light a close observer might have remarked that they were sea-green, a colour they assumed when the man of millions was absorbed in scheming new business deals. Every now and then he stopped reading the papers to make quick calculations on scraps of paper. Then if the result pleased him, a smile overspread his saturnine features. He rose from his chair and nervously paced the floor as he always did when thinking deeply. "Five millions," he muttered, "not a cent more. If they won't sell we'll crush them--" Mr. Bagley entered. Mr. Ryder looked up quickly. "Well, Bagley?" he said interrogatively. "Has Sergeant Ellison come?" "Yes, sir. But Mr. Herts is downstairs. He insists on seeing you about the Philadelphia gas deal. He says it is a matter of life and death." "To him--yes," answered the financier dryly. "Let him come up. We might as well have it out now." Mr. Bagley went out and returned almost immediately, followed by a short, fat man, rather loudly dressed and apoplectic in appearance. He looked like a prosperous brewer, while, as a matter of fact, he was president of a gas company, one of the shrewdest promoters in the country, and a big man in Wall Street. There was only one bigger man and that was John Ryder. But, to-day, Mr. Herts was not in good condition. His face was pale and his manner flustered and nervous. He was plainly worried. "Mr. Ryder," he began with excited gesture, "the terms you offer are preposterous. It would mean disaster to the stockholders. Our gas properties are worth six times that amount. We will sell out for twenty millions--not a cent less." Ryder shrugged his shoulders. "Mr. Herts," he replied coolly, "I am busy to-day and in no mood for arguing. We'll either buy you out or force you out. Choose. You have our offer. Five millions for your gas property. Will you take it?" "We'll see you in hell first!" cried his visitor exasperated. "Very well," replied Ryder still unruffled, "all negotiations are off. You leave me free to act. We have an offer to buy cheap the old Germantown Gas Company which has charter rights to go into any of the streets of Philadelphia. We shall purchase that company, we will put ten millions new capital into it, and reduce the price of gas in Philadelphia to sixty cents a thousand. Where will you be then?" The face of the Colossus as he uttered this stand and deliver speech was calm and inscrutable. Conscious of the resistless power of his untold millions, he felt no more compunction in mercilessly crushing this business rival than he would in trampling out the life of a worm. The little man facing him looked haggard and distressed. He knew well that this was no idle threat. He was well aware that Ryder and his associates by the sheer weight of the enormous wealth they controlled could sell out or destroy any industrial corporation in the land. It was plainly illegal, but it was done every day, and his company was not the first victim nor the last. Desperate, he appealed humbly to the tyrannical Money Power: "Don't drive us to the wall, Mr. Ryder. This forced sale will mean disaster to us all. Put yourself in our place--think what it means to scores of families whose only support is the income from their investment in our company." "Mr. Herts," replied Ryder unmoved, "I never allow sentiment to interfere with business. You have heard my terms. I refuse to argue the matter further. What is it to be? Five millions or competition? Decide now or this interview must end!" He took out his watch and with his other hand touched a bell. Beads of perspiration stood on his visitor's forehead. In a voice broken with suppressed emotion he said hoarsely: "You're a hard, pitiless man, John Ryder! So be it--five millions. I don't know what they'll say. I don't dare return to them." "Those are my terms," said Ryder coldly. "The papers," he added, "will be ready for your signature to-morrow at this time, and I'll have a cheque ready for the entire amount. Good-day." Mr. Bagley entered. Ryder bowed to Herts, who slowly retired. When the door had closed on him Ryder went back to his desk, a smile of triumph on his face. Then he turned to his secretary: "Let Sergeant Ellison come up," he said. The secretary left the room and Mr. Ryder sank comfortably in his chair, puffing silently at his long black cigar. The financier was thinking, but his thoughts concerned neither the luckless gas president he had just pitilessly crushed, nor the detective who had come to make his report. He was thinking of the book "The American Octopus," and its bold author whom he was to meet in a very few minutes. He glanced at the clock. A quarter to three. She would be here in fifteen minutes if she were punctual, but women seldom are, he reflected. What kind of a woman could she be, this Shirley Green, to dare cross swords with a man whose power was felt in two hemispheres? No ordinary woman, that was certain. He tried to imagine what she looked like, and he pictured a tall, gaunt, sexless spinster with spectacles, a sort of nightmare in the garb of a woman. A sour, discontented creature, bitter to all mankind, owing to disappointments in early life and especially vindictive towards the rich, whom her socialistic and even anarchistical tendencies prompted her to hate and attack. Yet, withal, a brainy, intelligent woman, remarkably well informed as to political and industrial conditions--a woman to make a friend of rather than an enemy. And John Ryder, who had educated himself to believe that with gold he could do everything, that none could resist its power, had no doubt that with money he could enlist this Shirley Green in his service. At least it would keep her from writing more books about him. The door opened and Sergeant Ellison entered, followed by the secretary, who almost immediately withdrew. "Well, sergeant," said Mr. Ryder cordially, "what have you to tell me? I can give you only a few minutes. I expect a lady friend of yours." The plutocrat sometimes condescended to be jocular with his subordinates. "A lady friend of mine, sir?" echoed the man, puzzled. "Yes--Miss Shirley Green, the author," replied the financier, enjoying the detective's embarrassment. "That suggestion of yours worked out all right. She's coming here to-day." "I'm glad you've found her, sir." "It was a tough job," answered Ryder with a grimace. "We wrote her half a dozen times before she was satisfied with the wording of the invitation. But, finally, we landed her and I expect her at three o'clock. Now what about that Rossmore girl? Did you go down to Massapequa?" "Yes, sir, I have been there half a dozen times. In fact, I've just come from there. Judge Rossmore is there, all right, but his daughter has left for parts unknown." "Gone away--where?" exclaimed the financier. This was what he dreaded. As long as he could keep his eye on the girl there was little danger of Jefferson making a fool of himself; with her disappeared everything was possible. "I could not find out, sir. Their neighbours don't know much about them. They say they're haughty and stuck up. The only one I could get anything out of was a parson named Deetle. He said it was a sad case, that they had reverses and a daughter who was in Paris--" "Yes, yes," said Ryder impatiently, "we know all that. But where's the daughter now?" "Search me, sir. I even tried to pump the Irish slavey. Gee, what a vixen! She almost flew at me. She said she didn't know and didn't care." Ryder brought his fist down with force on his desk, a trick he had when he wished to emphasize a point. "Sergeant, I don't like the mysterious disappearance of that girl. You must find her, do you hear, you must find her if it takes all the sleuths in the country. Had my son been seen there?" "The parson said he saw a young fellow answering his description sitting on the porch of the Rossmore cottage the evening before the girl disappeared, but he didn't know who he was and hasn't seen him since." "That was my son, I'll wager. He knows where the girl is. Perhaps he's with her now. Maybe he's going to marry her. That must be prevented at any cost. Sergeant, find that Rossmore girl and I'll give you $1,000." The detective's face flushed with pleasure at the prospect of so liberal a reward. Rising he said: "I'll find her, sir. I'll find her." Mr. Bagley entered, wearing the solemn, important air he always affected when he had to announce a visitor of consequence. But before he could open his mouth Mr. Ryder said: "Bagley, when did you see my son, Jefferson, last?" "To-day, sir. He wanted to see you to say good-bye. He said he would be back." Ryder gave a sigh of relief and addressing the detective said: "It's not so bad as I thought." Then turning again to his secretary he asked: "Well, Bagley, what is it?" "There's a lady downstairs, sir--Miss Shirley Green." The financier half sprang from his seat. "Oh, yes. Show her up at once. Good-bye, sergeant, good-bye. Find that Rossmore woman and the $1,000 is yours." The detective went out and a few moments later Mr. Bagley reappeared ushering in Shirley. The mouse was in the den of the lion. CHAPTER XII Mr. Ryder remained at his desk and did not even look up when his visitor entered. He pretended to be busily preoccupied with his papers, which was a favourite pose of his when receiving strangers. This frigid reception invariably served its purpose, for it led visitors not to expect more than they got, which usually was little enough. For several minutes Shirley stood still, not knowing whether to advance or to take a seat. She gave a little conventional cough, and Ryder looked up. What he saw so astonished him that he at once took from his mouth the cigar he was smoking and rose from his seat. He had expected a gaunt old maid with spectacles, and here was a stylish, good-looking young woman, who could not possibly be over twenty-five. There was surely some mistake. This slip of a girl could not have written "The American Octopus." He advanced to greet Shirley. "You wish to see me, Madame?" he asked courteously. There were times when even John Burkett Ryder could be polite. "Yes," replied Shirley, her voice trembling a little; in spite of her efforts to keep cool. "I am here by appointment. Three o'clock, Mrs. Ryder's note said. I am Miss Green." "_You_--Miss Green?" echoed the financier dubiously. "Yes, I am Miss Green--Shirley Green, author of 'The American Octopus.' You asked me to call. Here I am." For the first time in his life, John Ryder was nonplussed. He coughed and stammered and looked round for a place where he could throw his cigar. Shirley, who enjoyed his embarrassment, put him at his ease. "Oh, please go on smoking," she said; "I don't mind it in the least." Ryder threw the cigar into a receptacle and looked closely at his visitor. "So you are Shirley Green, eh?" "That is my _nom-de-plume_--yes," replied the girl nervously. She was already wishing herself back at Massapequa. The financier eyed her for a moment in silence as if trying to gauge the strength of the personality of this audacious young woman, who had dared to criticise his business methods in public print; then, waving her to a seat near his desk, he said: "Won't you sit down?" "Thank you," murmured Shirley. She sat down, and he took his seat at the other side of the desk, which brought them face to face. Again inspecting the girl with a close scrutiny that made her cheeks burn, Ryder said: "I rather expected--" He stopped for a moment as if uncertain what to say, then he added: "You're younger than I thought you were, Miss Green, much younger." "Time will remedy that," smiled Shirley. Then, mischievously, she added: "I rather expected to see Mrs. Ryder." There was the faintest suspicion of a smile playing around the corners of the plutocrat's mouth as he picked up a book lying on his desk and replied: "Yes--she wrote you, but I--wanted to see you about this." Shirley's pulse throbbed faster, but she tried hard to appear unconcerned as she answered: "Oh, my book--have you read it?" "I have," replied Ryder slowly and, fixing her with a stare that was beginning to make her uncomfortable, he went on: "No doubt your time is valuable, so I'll come right to the point. I want to ask you, Miss Green, where you got the character of your central figure--the Octopus, as you call him--John Broderick?" "From imagination--of course," answered Shirley. Ryder opened the book, and Shirley noticed that there were several passages marked. He turned the leaves over in silence for a minute or two and then he said: "You've sketched a pretty big man here--" "Yes," assented Shirley, "he has big possibilities, but I think he makes very small use of them." Ryder appeared not to notice her commentary, and, still reading the book, he continued: "On page 22 you call him '_the world's greatest individualized potentiality, a giant combination of materiality, mentality and money--the greatest exemplar of individual human will in existence to-day._' And you make indomitable will and energy the keystone of his marvellous success. Am I right?" He looked at her questioningly. "Quite right," answered Shirley. Ryder proceeded: "On page 26 you say '_the machinery of his money-making mind typifies the laws of perpetual unrest. It must go on, relentlessly, resistlessly, ruthlessly making money--making money and continuing to make money. It cannot stop until the machinery crumbles._'" Laying the book down and turning sharply on Shirley, he asked her bluntly: "Do you mean to say that I couldn't stop to-morrow if I wanted to?" She affected to not understand him. "_You?_" she inquired in a tone of surprise. "Well--it's a natural question," stammered Ryder, with a nervous little laugh; "every man sees himself in the hero of a novel just as every woman sees herself in the heroine. We're all heroes and heroines in our own eyes. But tell me what's your private opinion of this man. You drew the character. What do you think of him as a type, how would you classify him?" "As the greatest criminal the world has yet produced," replied Shirley without a moment's hesitation. The financier looked at the girl in unfeigned astonishment. "Criminal?" he echoed. "Yes, criminal," repeated Shirley decisively. "He is avarice, egotism, and ambition incarnate. He loves money because he loves power, and he loves power more than his fellow man." Ryder laughed uneasily. Decidedly, this girl had opinions of her own which she was not backward to express. "Isn't that rather strong?" he asked. "I don't think so," replied Shirley. Then quickly she asked: "But what does it matter? No such man exists." "No, of course not," said Ryder, and he relapsed into silence. Yet while he said nothing, the plutocrat was watching his visitor closely from under his thick eyebrows. She seemed supremely unconscious of his scrutiny. Her aristocratic, thoughtful face gave no sign that any ulterior motive had actuated her evidently very hostile attitude against him. That he was in her mind when she drew the character of John Broderick there was no doubt possible. No matter how she might evade the identification, he was convinced he was the hero of her book. Why had she attacked him so bitterly? At first, it occurred to him that blackmail might be her object; she might be going to ask for money as the price of future silence. Yet it needed but a glance at her refined and modest demeanour to dispel that idea as absurd. Then he remembered, too, that it was not she who had sought this interview, but himself. No, she was no blackmailer. More probably she was a dreamer--one of those meddling sociologists who, under pretence of bettering the conditions of the working classes, stir up discontent and bitterness of feeling. As such; she might prove more to be feared than a mere blackmailer whom he could buy off with money. He knew he was not popular, but he was no worse than the other captains of industry. It was a cut-throat game at best. Competition was the soul of commercial life, and if he had outwitted his competitors and made himself richer than all of them, he was not a criminal for that. But all these attacks in newspapers and books did not do him any good. One day the people might take these demagogic writings seriously and then there would be the devil to pay. He took up the book again and ran over the pages. This certainly was no ordinary girl. She knew more and had a more direct way of saying things than any woman he had ever met. And as he watched her furtively across the desk he wondered how he could use her; how instead of being his enemy, he could make her his friend. If he did not, she would go away and write more such books, and literature of this kind might become a real peril to his interests. Money could do anything; it could secure the services of this woman and prevent her doing further mischief. But how could he employ her? Suddenly an inspiration came to him. For some years he had been collecting material for a history of the Empire Trading Company. She could write it. It would practically be his own biography. Would she undertake it? Embarrassed by the long silence, Shirley finally broke it by saying: "But you didn't ask me to call merely to find out what I thought of my own work." "No," replied Ryder slowly, "I want you to do some work for me." He opened a drawer at the left-hand side of his desk and took out several sheets of foolscap and a number of letters. Shirley's heart beat faster as she caught sight of the letters. Were her father's among them? She wondered what kind of work John Burkett Ryder had for her to do and if she would do it whatever it was. Some literary work probably, compiling or something of that kind. If it was well paid, why should she not accept? There would be nothing humiliating in it; it would not tie her hands in any way. She was a professional writer in the market to be employed by whoever could pay the price. Besides, such work might give her better opportunities to secure the letters of which she was in search. Gathering in one pile all the papers he had removed from the drawer, Mr. Ryder said: "I want you to put my biography together from this material. But first," he added, taking up "The American Octopus," "I want to know where you got the details of this man's life." "Oh, for the most part--imagination, newspapers, magazines," replied Shirley carelessly. "You know the American millionaire is a very overworked topic just now--and naturally I've read--" "Yes, I understand," he said, "but I refer to what you haven't read--what you couldn't have read. For example, here." He turned to a page marked in the book and read aloud: "_As an evidence of his petty vanity, when a youth he had a beautiful Indian girl tattooed just above the forearm._" Ryder leaned eagerly forward as he asked her searchingly: "Now who told you that I had my arm tattooed when I was a boy?" "Have you?" laughed Shirley nervously. "What a curious coincidence!" "Let me read you another coincidence," said Ryder meaningly. He turned to another part of the book and read: "_the same eternal long black cigar always between his lips_ ..." "General Grant smoked, too," interrupted Shirley. "All men who think deeply along material lines seem to smoke." "Well, we'll let that go. But how about this?" He turned back a few pages and read: "_John Broderick had loved, when a young man, a girl who lived in Vermont, but circumstances separated them._" He stopped and stared at Shirley a moment and then he said: "I loved a girl when I was a lad and she came from Vermont, and circumstances separated us. That isn't coincidence, for presently you make John Broderick marry a young woman who had money. I married a girl with money." "Lots of men marry for money," remarked Shirley. "I said _with_ money, not for money," retorted Ryder. Then turning again to the book, he said: "Now, this is what I can't understand, for no one could have told you this but I myself. Listen." He read aloud: "_With all his physical bravery and personal courage, John Broderick was intensely afraid of death. It was on his mind constantly._" "Who told you that?" he demanded somewhat roughly. "I swear I've never mentioned it to a living soul." "Most men who amass money are afraid of death," replied Shirley with outward composure, "for death is about the only thing that can separate them from their money." Ryder laughed, but it was a hollow, mocking laugh, neither sincere nor hearty. It was a laugh such as the devil may have given when driven out of heaven. "You're quite a character!" He laughed again, and Shirley, catching the infection, laughed, too. "It's me and it isn't me," went on Ryder flourishing the book. "This fellow Broderick is all right; he's successful and he's great, but I don't like his finish." "It's logical," ventured Shirley. "It's cruel," insisted Ryder. "So is the man who reverses the divine law and hates his neighbour instead of loving him," retorted Shirley. She spoke more boldly, beginning to feel more sure of her ground, and it amused her to fence in this way with the man of millions. So far, she thought, he had not got the best of her. She was fast becoming used to him, and her first feeling of intimidation was passing away. "Um!" grunted Ryder, "you're a curious girl; upon my word you interest me!" He took the mass of papers lying at his elbow and pushed them over to her. "Here," he said, "I want you to make as clever a book out of this chaos as you did out of your own imagination." Shirley turned the papers over carelessly. "So you think your life is a good example to follow?" she asked with a tinge of irony. "Isn't it?" he demanded. The girl looked him square in the face. "Suppose," she said, "we all wanted to follow it, suppose we all wanted to be the richest, the most powerful personage in the world?" "Well--what then?" he demanded. "I think it would postpone the era of the Brotherhood of man indefinitely, don't you?" "I never thought of it from that point of view," admitted the billionaire. "Really," he added, "you're an extraordinary girl. Why, you can't be more than twenty--or so." "I'm twenty-four--or so," smiled Shirley. Ryder's face expanded in a broad smile. He admired this girl's pluck and ready wit. He grew more amiable and tried to gain her confidence. In a coaxing tone he said: "Come, where did you get those details? Take me into your confidence." "I have taken you into my confidence," laughed Shirley, pointing at her book. "It cost you $1.50!" Turning over the papers he had put before her she said presently: "I don't know about this." "You don't think my life would make good reading?" he asked with some asperity. "It might," she replied slowly, as if unwilling to commit herself as to its commercial or literary value. Then she said frankly: "To tell you the honest truth, I don't consider mere genius in money-making is sufficient provocation for rushing into print. You see, unless you come to a bad end, it would have no moral." Ignoring the not very flattering insinuation contained in this last speech, the plutocrat continued to urge her: "You can name your own price if you will do the work," he said. "Two, three or even five thousand dollars. It's only a few months' work." "Five thousand dollars?" echoed Shirley. "That's a lot of money." Smiling, she added: "It appeals to my commercial sense. But I'm afraid the subject does not arouse my enthusiasm from an artistic standpoint." Ryder seemed amused at the idea of any one hesitating to make five thousand dollars. He knew that writers do not run across such opportunities every day. "Upon my word," he said, "I don't know why I'm so anxious to get you to do the work. I suppose it's because you don't want to. You remind me of my son. Ah, he's a problem!" Shirley started involuntarily when Ryder mentioned his son. But he did not notice it. "Why, is he wild?" she asked, as if only mildly interested. "Oh, no, I wish he were," said Ryder. "Fallen in love with the wrong woman, I suppose," she said. "Something of the sort--how did you guess?" asked Ryder surprised. Shirley coughed to hide her embarrassment and replied indifferently. "So many boys do that. Besides," she added with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, "I can hardly imagine that any woman would be the right one unless you selected her yourself!" Ryder made no answer. He folded his arms and gazed at her. Who was this woman who knew him so well, who could read his inmost thoughts, who never made a mistake? After a silence he said: "Do you know you say the strangest things?" "Truth is strange," replied Shirley carelessly. "I don't suppose you hear it very often." "Not in that form," admitted Ryder. Shirley had taken on to her lap some of the letters he had passed her, and was perusing them one after another. "All these letters from Washington consulting you on politics and finance--they won't interest the world." "My secretary picked them out," explained Ryder. "Your artistic sense will tell you what to use." "Does your son still love this girl? I mean the one you object to?" inquired Shirley as she went on sorting the papers. "Oh, no, he does not care for her any more," answered Ryder hastily. "Yes, he does; he still loves her," said Shirley positively. "How do _you_ know?" asked Ryder amazed. "From the way you say he doesn't," retorted Shirley. Ryder gave his caller a look in which admiration was mingled with astonishment. "You are right again," he said. "The idiot does love the girl." "Bless his heart," said Shirley to herself. Aloud she said: "I hope they'll both outwit you." Ryder laughed in spite of himself. This young woman certainly interested him more than any other he had ever known. "I don't think I ever met anyone in my life quite like you," he said. "What's the objection to the girl?" demanded Shirley. "Every objection. I don't want her in my family." "Anything against her character?" To better conceal the keen interest she took in the personal turn the conversation had taken, Shirley pretended to be more busy than ever with the papers. "Yes--that is no--not that I know of," replied Ryder. "But because a woman has a good character, that doesn't necessarily make her a desirable match, does it?" "It's a point in her favor, isn't it?" "Yes--but--" He hesitated as if uncertain what to say. "You know men well, don't you, Mr. Ryder?" "I've met enough to know them pretty well," he replied. "Why don't you study women for a change?" she asked. "That would enable you to understand a great many things that I don't think are quite clear to you now." Ryder laughed good humouredly. It was decidedly a novel sensation to have someone lecturing him. "I'm studying you," he said, "but I don't seem to make much headway. A woman like you whose mind isn't spoiled by the amusement habit has great possibilities--great possibilities. Do you know you're the first woman I ever took into my confidence--I mean at sight?" Again he fixed her with that keen glance which in his business life had taught him how to read men. He continued: "I'm acting on sentiment--something I rarely do, but I can't help it. I like you, upon my soul I do, and I'm going to introduce you to my wife--my son--" He took the telephone from his desk as if he were going to use it. "What a commander-in-chief you would have made--how natural it is for you to command," exclaimed Shirley in a burst of admiration that was half real, half mocking. "I suppose you always tell people what they are to do and how they are to do it. You are a born general. You know I've often thought that Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander must have been great domestic leaders as well as imperial rulers. I'm sure of it now." Ryder listened to her in amazement. He was not quite sure if she were making fun of him or not. "Well, of all--" he began. Then interrupting himself he said amiably: "Won't you do me the honour to meet my family?" Shirley smiled sweetly and bowed. "Thank you, Mr. Ryder, I will." She rose from her seat and leaned over the manuscripts to conceal the satisfaction this promise of an introduction to the family circle gave her. She was quick to see that it meant more visits to the house, and other and perhaps better opportunities to find the objects of her search. Ryder lifted the receiver of his telephone and talked to his secretary in another room, while Shirley, who was still standing, continued examining the papers and letters. "Is that you, Bagley? What's that? General Dodge? Get rid of him. I can't see him to-day. Tell him to come to-morrow. What's that? My son wants to see me? Tell him to come to the phone." At that instant Shirley gave a little cry, which in vain she tried to suppress. Ryder looked up. "What's the matter?" he demanded startled. "Nothing--nothing!" she replied in a hoarse whisper. "I pricked myself with a pin. Don't mind me." She had just come across her father's missing letters, which had got mixed up, evidently without Ryder's knowledge, in the mass of papers he had handed her. Prepared as she was to find the letters somewhere in the house, she never dreamed that fate would put them so easily and so quickly into her hands; the suddenness of their appearance and the sight of her father's familiar signature affected her almost like a shock. Now she had them, she must not let them go again; yet how could she keep them unobserved? Could she conceal them? Would he miss them? She tried to slip them in her bosom while Ryder was busy at the 'phone, but he suddenly glanced in her direction and caught her eye. She still held the letters in her hand, which shook from nervousness, but he noticed nothing and went on speaking through the 'phone: "Hallo, Jefferson, boy! You want to see me. Can you wait till I'm through? I've got a lady here. Going away? Nonsense! Determined, eh? Well, I can't keep you here if you've made up your mind. You want to say good-bye. Come up in about five minutes and I'll introduce you to a very interesting person," He laughed and hung up the receiver. Shirley was all unstrung, trying to overcome the emotion which her discovery had caused her, and in a strangely altered voice, the result of the nervous strain she was under, she said: "You want me to come here?" She looked up from the letters she was reading across to Ryder, who was standing watching her on the other side of the desk. He caught her glance and, leaning over to take some manuscript, he said: "Yes, I don't want these papers to get--" His eye suddenly rested on the letters she was holding. He stopped short, and reaching forward he tried to snatch them from her. "What have you got there?" he exclaimed. He took the letters and she made no resistance. It would be folly to force the issue now, she thought. Another opportunity would present itself. Ryder locked the letters up very carefully in the drawer on the left-hand side of his desk, muttering to himself rather than speaking to Shirley: "How on earth did they get among my other papers?" "From Judge Rossmore, were they not?" said Shirley boldly. "How did you know it was Judge Rossmore?" demanded Ryder suspiciously. "I didn't know that his name had been mentioned." "I saw his signature," she said simply. Then she added: "He's the father of the girl you don't like, isn't he?" "Yes, he's the--" A cloud came over the financier's face; his eyes darkened, his jaws snapped and he clenched his fist. "How you must hate him!" said Shirley, who observed the change. "Not at all," replied Ryder recovering his self-possession and suavity of manner. "I disagree with his politics and his methods, but--I know very little about him except that he is about to be removed from office." "About to be?" echoed Shirley. "So his fate is decided even before he is tried?" The girl laughed bitterly. "Yes," she went on, "some of the newspapers are beginning to think he is innocent of the things of which he is accused." "Do they?" said Ryder indifferently. "Yes," she persisted, "most people are on his side." She planted her elbows on the desk in front of her, and looking him squarely in the face, she asked him point blank: "Whose side are you on--really and truly?" Ryder winced. What right had this woman, a stranger both to Judge Rossmore and himself, to come here and catechise him? He restrained his impatience with difficulty as he replied: "Whose side am I on? Oh, I don't know that I am on any side. I don't know that I give it much thought. I--" "Do you think this man deserves to be punished?" she demanded. She had resumed her seat at the desk and partly regained her self-possession. "Why do you ask? What is your interest in this matter?" "I don't know," she replied evasively; "his case interests me, that's all. Its rather romantic. Your son loves this man's daughter. He is in disgrace--many seem to think unjustly." Her voice trembled with emotion as she continued: "I have heard from one source or another--you know I am acquainted with a number of newspaper men--I have heard that life no longer has any interest for him, that he is not only disgraced but beggared, that he is pining away slowly, dying of a broken heart, that his wife and daughter are in despair. Tell me, do you think he deserves such a fate?" Ryder remained thoughtful a moment, and then he replied: "No, I do not--no--" Thinking that she had touched his sympathies, Shirley followed up her advantage: "Oh, then, why not come to his rescue--you, who are so rich, so powerful; you, who can move the scales of justice at your will--save this man from humiliation and disgrace!" Ryder shrugged his shoulders, and his face expressed weariness, as if the subject had begun to bore him. "My dear girl, you don't understand. His removal is necessary." Shirley's face became set and hard. There was a contemptuous ring to her words as she retorted: "Yet you admit that he may be innocent!" "Even if I knew it as a fact, I couldn't move." "Do you mean to say that if you had positive proof?" She pointed to the drawer in the desk where he had placed the letters. "If you had absolute proof in that drawer, for instance? Wouldn't you help him then?" Ryder's face grew cold and inscrutable; he now wore his fighting mask. "Not even if I had the absolute proof in that drawer?" he snapped viciously. "Have you absolute proof in that drawer?" she demanded. "I repeat that even if I had, I could not expose the men who have been my friends. Its _noblesse oblige_ in politics as well as in society, you know." He smiled again at her, as if he had recovered his good humour after their sharp passage at arms. "Oh, it's politics--that's what the papers said. And you believe him innocent. Well, you must have some grounds for your belief." "Not necessarily--" "You said that even if you had the proofs, you could not produce them without sacrificing your friends, showing that your friends are interested in having this man put off the bench--" She stopped and burst into hysterical laughter. "Oh, I think you're having a joke at my expense," she went on, "just to see how far you can lead me. I daresay Judge Rossmore deserves all he gets. Oh, yes--I'm sure he deserves it." She rose and walked to the other side of the room to conceal her emotion. Ryder watched her curiously. "My dear young lady, how you take this matter to heart!" "Please forgive me," laughed Shirley, and averting her face to conceal the fact that her eyes were filled with tears. "It's my artistic temperament, I suppose. It's always getting me into trouble. It appealed so strongly to my sympathies--this story of hopeless love between two young people--with the father of the girl hounded by corrupt politicians and unscrupulous financiers. It was too much for me. Ah! ah! I forgot where I was!" She leaned against a chair, sick and faint from nervousness, her whole body trembling. At that moment there was a knock at the library door and Jefferson Ryder appeared. Not seeing Shirley, whose back was towards him, he advanced to greet his father. "You told me to come up in five minutes," he said. "I just wanted to say--" "Miss Green," said Ryder, Sr., addressing Shirley and ignoring whatever it was that the young man wanted to say, "this is my son Jefferson. Jeff--this is Miss Green." Jefferson looked in the direction indicated and stood as if rooted to the floor. He was so surprised that he was struck dumb. Finally, recovering himself, he exclaimed: "Shirley!" "Yes, Shirley Green, the author," explained Ryder, Sr., not noticing the note of familiar recognition in his exclamation. Shirley advanced, and holding out her hand to Jefferson, said demurely: "I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Ryder." Then quickly, in an undertone, she added: "Be careful; don't betray me!" Jefferson was so astounded that he did not see the outstretched hand. All he could do was to stand and stare first at her and then at his father. "Why don't you shake hands with her?" said Ryder, Sr. "She won't bite you." Then he added: "Miss Green is going to do some literary work for me, so we shall see a great deal of her. It's too bad you're going away!" He chuckled at his own pleasantry. "Father!" blurted out Jefferson, "I came to say that I've changed my mind. You did not want me to go, and I feel I ought to do something to please you." "Good boy," said Ryder pleased. "Now you're talking common sense," He turned to Shirley, who was getting ready to make her departure: "Well, Miss Green, we may consider the matter settled. You undertake the work at the price I named and finish it as soon as you can. Of course, you will have to consult me a good deal as you go along, so I think it would be better for you to come and stay here while the work is progressing. Mrs. Ryder can give you a suite of rooms to yourself, where you will be undisturbed and you will have all your material close at hand. What do you say?" Shirley was silent for a moment. She looked first at Ryder and then at his son, and from them her glance went to the little drawer on the left-hand side of the desk. Then she said quietly: "As you think best, Mr. Ryder. I am quite willing to do the work here." Ryder, Sr., escorted her to the top of the landing and watched her as she passed down the grand staircase, ushered by the gorgeously uniformed flunkies, to the front door and the street. CHAPTER XIII Shirley entered upon her new duties in the Ryder household two days later. She had returned to her rooms the evening of her meeting with the financier in a state bordering upon hysteria. The day's events had been so extraordinary that it seemed to her they could not be real, and that she must be in a dream. The car ride to Seventy-fourth Street, the interview in the library, the discovery of her father's letters, the offer to write the biography, and, what to her was still more important, the invitation to go and live in the Ryder home--all these incidents were so remarkable and unusual that it was only with difficulty that the girl persuaded herself that they were not figments of a disordered brain. But it was all true enough. The next morning's mail brought a letter from Mrs. Ryder, who wrote to the effect that Mr. Ryder would like the work to begin at once, and adding that a suite of rooms would be ready for her the following afternoon. Shirley did not hesitate. Everything was to be gained by making the Ryder residence her headquarters, her father's very life depended upon the successful outcome of her present mission, and this unhoped for opportunity practically ensured success. She immediately wrote to Massapequa. One letter was to her mother, saying that she was extending her visit beyond the time originally planned. The other letter was to Stott. She told him all about the interview with Ryder, informed him of the discovery of the letters, and after explaining the nature of the work offered to her, said that her address for the next few weeks would be in care of John Burkett Ryder. All was going better than she had dared to hope. Everything seemed to favour their plan. Her first step, of course, while in the Ryder home, would be to secure possession of her father's letters, and these she would dispatch at once to Massapequa, so they could be laid before the Senate without delay. So, after settling accounts with her landlady and packing up her few belongings, Shirley lost no time in transferring herself to the more luxurious quarters provided for her in the ten-million-dollar mansion uptown. At the Ryder house she was received cordially and with every mark of consideration. The housekeeper came down to the main hall to greet her when she arrived and escorted her to the suite of rooms, comprising a small working library, a bedroom simply but daintily furnished in pink and white and a private bathroom, which had been specially prepared for her convenience and comfort, and here presently she was joined by Mrs. Ryder. "Dear me," exclaimed the financier's wife, staring curiously at Shirley, "what a young girl you are to have made such a stir with a book! How did you do it? I'm sure I couldn't. It's as much as I can do to write a letter, and half the time that's not legible." "Oh, it wasn't so hard," laughed Shirley. "It was the subject that appealed rather than any special skill of mine. The trusts and their misdeeds are the favourite topics of the hour. The whole country is talking about nothing else. My book came at the right time, that's all." Although "The American Octopus" was a direct attack on her own husband, Mrs. Ryder secretly admired this young woman, who had dared to speak a few blunt truths. It was a courage which, alas! she had always lacked herself, but there was a certain satisfaction in knowing there were women in the world not entirely cowed by the tyrant Man. "I have always wanted a daughter," went on Mrs. Ryder, becoming confidential, while Shirley removed her things and made herself at home; "girls of your age are so companionable." Then, abruptly, she asked: "Do your parents live in New York?" Shirley's face flushed and she stooped over her trunk to hide her embarrassment. "No--not at present," she answered evasively. "My mother and father are in the country." She was afraid that more questions of a personal nature would follow, but apparently Mrs. Ryder was not in an inquisitive mood, for she asked nothing further. She only said: "I have a son, but I don't see much of him. You must meet my Jefferson. He is such a nice boy." Shirley tried to look unconcerned as she replied: "I met him yesterday. Mr. Ryder introduced him to me." "Poor lad, he has his troubles too," went on Mrs. Ryder. "He's in love with a girl, but his father wants him to marry someone else. They're quarrelling over it all the time." "Parents shouldn't interfere in matters of the heart," said Shirley decisively. "What is more serious than the choosing of a life companion, and who are better entitled to make a free selection than they who are going to spend the rest of their days together? Of course, it is a father's duty to give his son the benefit of his riper experience, but to insist on a marriage based only on business interests is little less than a crime. There are considerations more important if the union is to be a happy or a lasting one. The chief thing is that the man should feel real attachment for the woman he marries. Two people who are to live together as man and wife must be compatible in tastes and temper. You cannot mix oil and water. It is these selfish marriages which keep our divorce courts busy. Money alone won't buy happiness in marriage." "No," sighed Mrs. Ryder, "no one knows that better than I." The financier's wife was already most favourably impressed with her guest, and she chatted on as if she had known Shirley for years. It was rarely that she had heard so young a woman express such common-sense views, and the more she talked with her the less surprised she was that she was the author of a much-discussed book. Finally, thinking that Shirley might prefer to be alone, she rose to go, bidding her make herself thoroughly at home and to ring for anything she might wish. A maid had been assigned to look exclusively after her wants, and she could have her meals served in her room or else have them with the family as she liked. But Shirley, not caring to encounter Mr. Ryder's cold, searching stare more often than necessary, said she would prefer to take her meals alone. Left to herself, Shirley settled down to work in earnest. Mr. Ryder had sent to her room all the material for the biography, and soon she was completely absorbed in the task of sorting and arranging letters, making extracts from records, compiling data, etc., laying the foundations for the important book she was to write. She wondered what they would call it, and she smiled as a peculiarly appropriate title flashed through her mind--"The History of a Crime." Yet she thought they could hardly infringe on Victor Hugo; perhaps the best title was the simplest "The History of the Empire Trading Company." Everyone would understand that it told the story of John Burkett Ryder's remarkable career from his earliest beginnings to the present time. She worked feverishly all that evening getting the material into shape, and the following day found her early at her desk. No one disturbed her and she wrote steadily on until noon, Mrs. Ryder only once putting her head in the door to wish her good morning. After luncheon, Shirley decided that the weather was too glorious to remain indoors. Her health must not be jeopardized even to advance the interests of the Colossus, so she put on her hat and left the house to go for a walk. The air smelled sweet to her after being confined so long indoor, and she walked with a more elastic and buoyant step than she had since her return home. Turning down Fifth Avenue, she entered the park at Seventy-second Street, following the pathway until she came to the bend in the driveway opposite the Casino. The park was almost deserted at that hour, and there was a delightful sense of solitude and a sweet scent of new-mown hay from the freshly cut lawns. She found an empty bench, well shaded by an overspreading tree, and she sat down, grateful for the rest and quiet. She wondered what Jefferson thought of her action in coming to his father's house practically in disguise and under an assumed name. She must see him at once, for in him lay her hope of obtaining possession of the letters. Certainly she felt no delicacy or compunction in asking Jefferson to do her this service. The letters belonged to her father and they were being wrongfully withheld with the deliberate purpose of doing him an injury. She had a moral if not a legal right to recover the letters in any way that she could. She was so deeply engrossed in her thoughts that she had not noticed a hansom cab which suddenly drew up with a jerk at the curb opposite her bench. A man jumped out. It was Jefferson. "Hello, Shirley," he cried gaily; "who would have expected to find you rusticating on a bench here? I pictured you grinding away at home doing literary stunts for the governor." He grinned and then added: "Come for a drive. I want to talk to you." Shirley demurred. No, she could not spare the time. Yet, she thought to herself, why was not this a good opportunity to explain to Jefferson how he came to find her in his father's library masquerading under another name, and also to ask him to secure the letters for her? While she pondered Jefferson insisted, and a few minutes later she found herself sitting beside him in the cab. They started off at a brisk pace, Shirley sitting with her head back, enjoying the strong breeze caused by the rapid motion. "Now tell me," he said, "what does it all mean? I was so startled at seeing you in the library the other day that I almost betrayed you. How did you come to call on father?" Briefly Shirley explained everything. She told him how Mr. Ryder had written to her asking her to call and see him, and how she had eagerly seized at this last straw in the hope of helping her father. She told him about the letters, explaining how necessary they were for her father's defence and how she had discovered them. Mr. Ryder, she said, had seemed to take a fancy to her and had asked her to remain in the house as his guest while she was compiling his biography, and she had accepted the offer, not so much for the amount of money involved as for the splendid opportunity it afforded her to gain possession of the letters. "So that is the mysterious work you spoke of--to get those letters?" said Jefferson. "Yes, that is my mission. It was a secret. I couldn't tell you; I couldn't tell anyone. Only Judge Stott knows. He is aware I have found them and is hourly expecting to receive them from me. And now," she said, "I want your help." His only answer was to grasp tighter the hand she had laid in his. She knew that she would not have to explain the nature of the service she wanted. He understood. "Where are the letters?" he demanded. "In the left-hand drawer of your father's desk," she answered. He was silent for a few moments, and then he said simply: "I will get them." The cab by this time had got as far as Claremont, and from the hill summit they had a splendid view of the broad sweep of the majestic Hudson and the towering walls of the blue palisades. The day was so beautiful and the air so invigorating that Jefferson suggested a ramble along the banks of the river. They could leave the cab at Claremont and drive back to the city later. Shirley was too grateful to him for his promise of coöperation to make any further opposition, and soon they were far away from beaten highways, down on the banks of the historic stream, picking flowers and laughing merrily like two truant children bent on a self-made holiday. The place they had reached was just outside the northern boundaries of Harlem, a sylvan spot still unspoiled by the rude invasion of the flat-house builder. The land, thickly wooded, sloped down sharply to the water, and the perfect quiet was broken only by the washing of the tiny surf against the river bank and the shrill notes of the birds in the trees. Although it was late in October the day was warm, and Shirley soon tired of climbing over bramble-entangled verdure. The rich grass underfoot looked cool and inviting, and the natural slope of the ground affording an ideal resting-place, she sat there, with Jefferson stretched out at her feet, both watching idly the dancing waters of the broad Hudson, spangled with gleams of light, as they swept swiftly by on their journey to the sea. "Shirley," said Jefferson suddenly, "I suppose you saw that ridiculous story about my alleged engagement to Miss Roberts. I hope you understood that it was done without my consent." "If I did not guess it, Jeff," she answered, "your assurance would be sufficient. Besides," she added, "what right have I to object?" "But I want you to have the right," he replied earnestly. "I'm going to stop this Roberts nonsense in a way my father hardly anticipates. I'm just waiting a chance to talk to him. I'll show him the absurdity of announcing me engaged to a girl who is about to elope with his private secretary!" "Elope with the secretary?" exclaimed Shirley. Jefferson told her all about the letter he had found on the staircase, and the Hon. Fitzroy Bagley's plans for a runaway marriage with the senator's wealthy daughter. "It's a godsend to me," he said gleefully. "Their plan is to get married next Wednesday. I'll see my father on Tuesday; I'll put the evidence in his hands, and I don't think," he added grimly, "he'll bother me any more about Miss Roberts." "So you're not going away now?" said Shirley, smiling down at him. He sat up and leaned over towards her. "I can't, Shirley, I simply can't," he replied, his voice trembling. "You are more to me than I dreamed a woman could ever be. I realize it more forcibly every day. There is no use fighting against it. Without you, my work, my life means nothing." Shirley shook her head and averted her eyes. "Don't let us speak of that, Jeff," she pleaded gently. "I told you I did not belong to myself while my father was in peril." "But I must speak of it," he interrupted. "Shirley, you do yourself an injustice as well as me. You are not indifferent to me--I feel that. Then why raise this barrier between us?" A soft light stole into the girl's eyes. Ah, it was good to feel there was someone to whom she was everything in the world! "Don't ask me to betray my trust, Jeff," she faltered. "You know I am not indifferent to you--far from it. But I--" He came closer until his face nearly touched hers. "I love you--I want you," he murmured feverishly. "Give me the right to claim you before all the world as my future wife!" Every note of his rich, manly voice, vibrating with impetuous passion, sounded in Shirley's ear like a soft caress. She closed her eyes. A strange feeling of languor was stealing over her, a mysterious thrill passed through her whole body. The eternal, inevitable sex instinct was disturbing, for the first time, a woman whose life had been singularly free from such influences, putting to flight all the calculations and resolves her cooler judgment had made. The sensuous charm of the place--the distant splash of the water, the singing of the birds, the fragrance of the trees and grass--all these symbols of the joy of life conspired to arouse the love-hunger of the woman. Why, after all, should she not know happiness like other women? She had a sacred duty to perform, it was true; but would it be less well done because she declined to stifle the natural leanings of her womanhood? Both her soul and her body called out: "Let this man love you, give yourself to him, he is worthy of your love." Half unconsciously, she listened to his ardent wooing, her eyes shut, as he spoke quickly, passionately, his breath warm upon her cheek: "Shirley, I offer you all the devotion a man can give a woman. Say the one word that will make me the happiest or the most wretched of men. Yes or no! Only think well before you wreck my life. I love you--I love you! I will wait for you if need be until the crack of doom. Say--say you will be my wife!" She opened her eyes. His face was bent close over hers. Their lips almost touched. "Yes, Jefferson," she murmured, "I do love you!" His lips met hers in a long, passionate kiss. Her eyes closed and an ecstatic thrill seemed to convulse her entire being. The birds in the trees overhead sang in more joyful chorus in celebration of the betrothal. CHAPTER XIV It was nearly seven o'clock when Shirley got back to Seventy-fourth Street. No one saw her come in, and she went direct to her room, and after a hasty dinner, worked until late into the night on her book to make up for lost time. The events of the afternoon caused her considerable uneasiness. She reproached herself for her weakness and for having yielded so readily to the impulse of the moment. She had said only what was the truth when she admitted she loved Jefferson, but what right had she to dispose of her future while her father's fate was still uncertain? Her conscience troubled her, and when she came to reason it out calmly, the more impossible seemed their union from every point of view. How could she become the daughter-in-law of the man who had ruined her own father? The idea was preposterous, and hard as the sacrifice would be, Jefferson must be made to see it in that light. Their engagement was the greatest folly; it bound each of them when nothing but unhappiness could possibly come of it. She was sure now that she loved Jefferson. It would be hard to give him up, but there are times and circumstances when duty and principle must prevail over all other considerations, and this she felt was one of them. The following morning she received a letter from Stott. He was delighted to hear the good news regarding her important discovery, and he urged her to lose no time in securing the letters and forwarding them to Massapequa, when he would immediately go to Washington and lay them before the Senate. Documentary evidence of that conclusive nature, he went on to say, would prove of the very highest value in clearing her father's name. He added that the judge and her mother were as well as circumstances would permit, and that they were not in the least worried about her protracted absence. Her Aunt Milly had already returned to Europe, and Eudoxia was still threatening to leave daily. Shirley needed no urging. She quite realized the importance of acting quickly, but it was not easy to get at the letters. The library was usually kept locked when the great man was away, and on the few occasions when access to it was possible, the lynx-eyed Mr. Bagley was always on guard. Short as had been her stay in the Ryder household, Shirley already shared Jefferson's antipathy to the English secretary, whose manner grew more supercilious and overbearing as he drew nearer the date when he expected to run off with one of the richest catches of the season. He had not sought the acquaintance of his employer's biographer since her arrival, and, with the exception of a rude stare, had not deigned to notice her, which attitude of haughty indifference was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the Hon. Fitzroy usually left nothing unturned to cultivate a flirtatious intimacy with every attractive female he met. The truth was that what with Mr. Ryder's demands upon his services and his own preparations for his coming matrimonial venture, in which he had so much at stake, he had neither time nor inclination to indulge his customary amorous diversions. Miss Roberts had called at the house several times, ostensibly to see Mrs. Ryder, and when introduced to Shirley she had condescended to give the latter a supercilious nod. Her conversation was generally of the silly, vacuous sort, concerning chiefly new dresses or bonnets, and Shirley at once read her character--frivolous, amusement-loving, empty-headed, irresponsible--just the kind of girl to do something foolish without weighing the consequences. After chatting a few moments with Mrs. Ryder she would usually vanish, and one day, after one of these mysterious disappearances, Shirley happened to pass the library and caught sight of her and Mr. Bagley conversing in subdued and eager tones. It was very evident that the elopement scheme was fast maturing. If the scandal was to be prevented, Jefferson ought to see his father and acquaint him with the facts without delay. It was probable that at the same time he would make an effort to secure the letters. Meantime she must be patient. Too much hurry might spoil everything. So the days passed, Shirley devoting almost all her time to the history she had undertaken. She saw nothing of Ryder, Sr., but a good deal of his wife, to whom she soon became much attached. She found her an amiable, good-natured woman, entirely free from that offensive arrogance and patronizing condescension which usually marks the parvenue as distinct from the thoroughbred. Mrs. Ryder had no claims to distinguished lineage; on the contrary, she was the daughter of a country grocer when the then rising oil man married her, and of educational advantages she had had little or none. It was purely by accident that she was the wife of the richest man in the world, and while she enjoyed the prestige her husband's prominence gave her, she never allowed it to turn her head. She gave away large sums for charitable purposes and, strange to say, when the gift came direct from her, the money was never returned on the plea that it was "tainted." She shared her husband's dislike for entertaining, and led practically the life of a recluse. The advent of Shirley, therefore, into her quiet and uneventful existence was as welcome as sunshine when it breaks through the clouds after days of gloom. Quite a friendship sprang up between the two women, and when tired of writing, Shirley would go into Mrs. Ryder's room and chat until the financier's wife began to look forward to these little impromptu visits, so much she enjoyed them. Nothing more had been said concerning Jefferson and Miss Roberts. The young man had not yet seen his father, but his mother knew he was only waiting an opportunity to demand an explanation of the engagement announcements. Her husband, on the other hand, desired the match more than ever, owing to the continued importunities of Senator Roberts. As usual, Mrs. Ryder confided these little domestic troubles to Shirley. "Jefferson," she said, "is very angry. He is determined not to marry the girl, and when he and his father do meet there'll be another scene." "What objection has your son to Miss Roberts?" inquired Shirley innocently. "Oh, the usual reason," sighed the mother, "and I've no doubt he knows best. He's in love with another girl--a Miss Rossmore." "Oh, yes," answered Shirley simply. "Mr. Ryder spoke of her." Mrs. Ryder was silent, and presently she left the girl alone with her work. The next afternoon Shirley was in her room busy writing when there came a tap at her door. Thinking it was another visit from Mrs. Ryder, she did not look up, but cried out pleasantly: "Come in." John Ryder entered. He smiled cordially and, as if apologizing for the intrusion, said amiably: "I thought I'd run up to see how you were getting along." His coming was so unexpected that for a moment Shirley was startled, but she quickly regained her composure and asked him to take a seat. He seemed pleased to find her making such good progress, and he stopped to answer a number of questions she put to him. Shirley tried to be cordial, but when she looked well at him and noted the keen, hawk-like eyes, the cruel, vindictive lines about the mouth, the square-set, relentless jaw--Wall Street had gone wrong with the Colossus that day and he was still wearing his war paint--she recalled the wrong this man had done her father and she felt how bitterly she hated him. The more her mind dwelt upon it, the more exasperated she was to think she should be there, a guest, under his roof, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that she remained civil. "What is the moral of your life?" she demanded bluntly. He was quick to note the contemptuous tone in her voice, and he gave her a keen, searching look as if he were trying to read her thoughts and fathom the reason for her very evident hostility towards him. "What do you mean?" he asked. "I mean, What can you show as your life work? Most men whose lives are big enough to call for biographies have done something useful--they have been famous statesmen, eminent scientists, celebrated authors, great inventors. What have you done?" The question appeared to stagger him. The audacity of any one putting such a question to a man in his own house was incredible. He squared his jaws and his clenched fist descended heavily on the table. "What have I done?" he cried. "I have built up the greatest fortune ever accumulated by one man. My fabulous wealth has caused my name to spread to the four corners of the earth. Is that not an achievement to relate to future generations?" Shirley gave a little shrug of her shoulders. "Future generations will take no interest in you or your millions," she said calmly. "Our civilization will have made such progress by that time that people will merely wonder why we, in our day, tolerated men of your class so long. Now it is different. The world is money-mad. You are a person of importance in the eyes of the unthinking multitude, but it only envies you your fortune; it does not admire you personally. When you die people will count your millions, not your good deeds." He laughed cynically and drew up a chair near her desk. As a general thing, John Ryder never wasted words on women. He had but a poor opinion of their mentality, and considered it beneath the dignity of any man to enter into serious argument with a woman. In fact, it was seldom he condescended to argue with anyone. He gave orders and talked to people; he had no patience to be talked to. Yet he found himself listening with interest to this young woman who expressed herself so frankly. It was a decided novelty for him to hear the truth. [Photo, from the play, of Mr. Ryder discussing his son with Miss Green.] "Marry Jefferson yourself."--Act III. "What do I care what the world says when I'm dead?" he asked with a forced laugh. "You do care," replied Shirley gravely. "You may school yourself to believe that you are indifferent to the good opinion of your fellow man, but right down in your heart you do care--every man does, whether he be multi-millionaire or a sneak thief." "You class the two together, I notice," he said bitterly. "It is often a distinction without a difference," she rejoined promptly. He remained silent for a moment or two toying nervously with a paper knife. Then, arrogantly, and as if anxious to impress her with his importance, he said: "Most men would be satisfied if they had accomplished what I have. Do you realize that my wealth is so vast that I scarcely know myself what I am worth? What my fortune will be in another fifty years staggers the imagination. Yet I started with nothing. I made it all myself. Surely I should get credit for that." "_How_ did you make it?" retorted Shirley. "In America we don't ask how a man makes his money; we ask if he has got any." "You are mistaken," replied Shirley earnestly. "America is waking up. The conscience of the nation is being aroused. We are coming to realize that the scandals of the last few years were only the fruit of public indifference to sharp business practice. The people will soon ask the dishonest rich man where he got it, and there will have to be an accounting. What account will you be able to give?" He bit his lip and looked at her for a moment without replying. Then, with a faint suspicion of a sneer, he said: "You are a socialist--perhaps an anarchist!" "Only the ignorant commit the blunder of confounding the two," she retorted. "Anarchy is a disease; socialism is a science." "Indeed!" he exclaimed mockingly, "I thought the terms were synonymous. The world regards them both as insane." Herself an enthusiastic convert to the new political faith that was rising like a flood tide all over the world, the contemptuous tone in which this plutocrat spoke of the coming reorganization of society which was destined to destroy him and his kind spurred her on to renewed argument. "I imagine," she said sarcastically, "that you would hardly approve any social reform which threatened to interfere with your own business methods. But no matter how you disapprove of socialism on general principles, as a leader of the capitalist class you should understand what socialism is, and not confuse one of the most important movements in modern world-history with the crazy theories of irresponsible cranks. The anarchists are the natural enemies of the entire human family, and would destroy it were their dangerous doctrines permitted to prevail; the socialists, on the contrary, are seeking to save mankind from the degradation, the crime and the folly into which such men as you have driven it." She spoke impetuously, with the inspired exaltation of a prophet delivering a message to the people. Ryder listened, concealing his impatience with uneasy little coughs. "Yes," she went on, "I am a socialist and I am proud of it. The whole world is slowly drifting toward socialism as the only remedy for the actual intolerable conditions. It may not come in our time, but it will come as surely as the sun will rise and set tomorrow. Has not the flag of socialism waved recently from the White House? Has not a President of the United States declared that the State must eventually curb the great fortunes? What is that but socialism?" "True," retorted Ryder grimly, "and that little speech intended for the benefit of the gallery will cost him the nomination at the next Presidential election. We don't want in the White House a President who stirs up class hatred. Our rich men have a right to what is their own; that is guaranteed them by the Constitution." "Is it their own?" interrupted Shirley. Ryder ignored the insinuation and proceeded: "What of our boasted free institutions if a man is to be restricted in what he may and may not do? If I am clever enough to accumulate millions who can stop me?" "The people will stop you," said Shirley calmly. "It is only a question of time. Their patience is about exhausted. Put your ear to the ground and listen to the distant rumbling of the tempest which, sooner or later, will be unchained in this land, provoked by the iniquitous practices of organized capital. The people have had enough of the extortions of the Trusts. One day they will rise in their wrath and seize by the throat this knavish plutocracy which, confident in the power of its wealth to procure legal immunity and reckless of its danger, persists in robbing the public daily. But retribution is at hand. The growing discontent of the proletariat, the ever-increasing strikes and labour disputes of all kinds, the clamour against the Railroads and the Trusts, the evidence of collusion between both--all this is the writing on the wall. The capitalistic system is doomed; socialism will succeed it." "What is socialism?" he demanded scornfully. "What will it give the public that it has not got already?" Shirley, who never neglected an opportunity to make a convert, no matter how hardened he might be, picked up a little pamphlet printed for propaganda purposes which she had that morning received by mail. "Here," she said, "is one of the best and clearest definitions of socialism I have ever read: "Socialism is common ownership of natural resources and public utilities, and the common operation of all industries for the general good. Socialism is opposed to monopoly, that is, to private ownership of land and the instruments of labor, which is indirect ownership of men; to the wages system, by which labor is legally robbed of a large part of the product of labor; to competition with its enormous waste of effort and its opportunities for the spoliation of the weak by the strong. Socialism is industrial democracy. It is the government of the people by the people and for the people, not in the present restricted sense, but as regards all the common interests of men. Socialism is opposed to oligarchy and monarchy, and therefore to the tyrannies of business cliques and money kings. Socialism is for freedom, not only from the fear of force, but from the fear of want. Socialism proposes real liberty, not merely the right to vote, but the liberty to live for something more than meat and drink. "Socialism is righteousness in the relations of men. It is based on the fundamentals of religion, the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of men. It seeks through association and equality to realize fraternity. Socialism will destroy the motives which make for cheap manufacturers, poor workmanship and adulterations; it will secure the real utility of things. Use, not exchange, will be the object of labour. Things will be made to serve, not to sell. Socialism will banish war, for private ownership is back of strife between men. Socialism will purify politics, for private capitalism is the great source of political corruption. Socialism will make for education, invention and discovery; it will stimulate the moral development of men. Crime will have lost most of its motive and pauperism will have no excuse. That," said Shirley, as she concluded, "is socialism!" Ryder shrugged his shoulders and rose to go. "Delightful," he said ironically, "but in my judgment wholly Utopian and impracticable. It's nothing but a gigantic pipe dream. It won't come in this generation nor in ten generations if, indeed, it is ever taken seriously by a majority big enough to put its theories to the test. Socialism does not take into account two great factors that move the world--men's passions and human ambition. If you eliminate ambition you remove the strongest incentive to individual effort. From your own account a socialistic world would be a dreadfully tame place to live in--everybody depressingly good, without any of the feverish turmoil of life as we know it. Such a world would not appeal to me at all. I love the fray--the daily battle of gain and loss, the excitement of making or losing millions. That is my life!" "Yet what good is your money to you?" insisted Shirley. "You are able to spend only an infinitesimal part of it. You cannot even give it away, for nobody will have any of it." "Money!" he hissed rather than spoke, "I hate money. It means nothing to me. I have so much that I have lost all idea of its value. I go on accumulating it for only one purpose. It buys power. I love power--that is my passion, my ambition, to rule the world with my gold. Do you know," he went on and leaning over the desk in a dramatic attitude, "that if I chose I could start a panic in Wall Street to-morrow that would shake to their foundations every financial institution in the country? Do you know that I practically control the Congress of the United States and that no legislative measure becomes law unless it has my approval?" "The public has long suspected as much," replied Shirley. "That is why you are looked upon as a menace to the stability and honesty of our political and commercial life." An angry answer rose to his lips when the door opened and Mrs. Ryder entered. "I've been looking for you, John," she said peevishly. "Mr. Bagley told me you were somewhere in the house. Senator Roberts is downstairs." "He's come about Jefferson and his daughter, I suppose," muttered Ryder. "Well, I'll see him. Where is he?" "In the library. Kate came with him. She's in my room." They left Shirley to her writing, and when he had closed the door the financier turned to his wife and said impatiently: "Now, what are we going to do about Jefferson and Kate? The senator insists on the matter of their marriage being settled one way or another. Where is Jefferson?" "He came in about half an hour ago. He was upstairs to see me, and I thought he was looking for you," answered the wife. "Well," replied Ryder determinedly, "he and I have got to understand each other. This can't go on. It shan't." Mrs. Ryder put her hand on his arm, and said pleadingly: "Don't be impatient with the boy, John. Remember he is all we have. He is so unhappy. He wants to please us, but--" "But he insists on pleasing himself," said Ryder completing the sentence. "I'm afraid, John, that his liking for that Miss Rossmore is more serious than you realize--" The financier stamped his foot and replied angrily: "Miss Rossmore! That name seems to confront me at every turn--for years the father, now the daughter! I'm sorry, my dear," he went on more calmly, "that you seem inclined to listen to Jefferson. It only encourages him in his attitude towards me. Kate would make him an excellent wife, while what do we know about the other woman? Are you willing to sacrifice your son's future to a mere boyish whim?" Mrs. Ryder sighed. "It's very hard," she said, "for a mother to know what to advise. Miss Green says--" "What!" exclaimed her husband, "you have consulted Miss Green on the subject?" "Yes," answered his wife, "I don't know how I came to tell her, but I did. I seem to tell her everything. I find her such a comfort, John. I haven't had an attack of nerves since that girl has been in the house." "She is certainly a superior woman," admitted Ryder. "I wish she'd ward that Rossmore girl off. I wish she--" He stopped abruptly as if not venturing to give expression to his thoughts, even to his wife. Then he said: "If she were Kate Roberts she wouldn't let Jeff slip through her fingers." "I have often wished," went on Mrs. Ryder, "that Kate were more like Shirley Green. I don't think we would have any difficulty with Jeff then." "Kate is the daughter of Senator Roberts, and if this marriage is broken off in any way without the senator's consent, he is in a position to injure my interests materially. If you see Jefferson send him to me in the library. I'll go and keep Roberts in good humour until he comes." He went downstairs and Mrs. Ryder proceeded to her apartments, where she found Jefferson chatting with Kate. She at once delivered Ryder Sr.'s message. "Jeff, your father wants to see you in the library." "Yes, I want to see him," answered the young man grimly, and after a few moments more badinage with Kate he left the room. It was not a mere coincidence that had brought Senator Roberts and his daughter and the financier's son all together under the Ryder roof at the same time. It was part of Jefferson's well-prepared plan to expose the rascality of his father's secretary, and at the same time rid himself of the embarrassing entanglement with Kate Roberts. If the senator were confronted publicly with the fact that his daughter, while keeping up the fiction of being engaged to Ryder Jr., was really preparing to run off with the Hon. Fitzroy Bagley, he would have no alternative but to retire gracefully under fire and relinquish all idea of a marriage alliance with the house of Ryder. The critical moment had arrived. To-morrow, Wednesday, was the day fixed for the elopement. The secretary's little game had gone far enough. The time had come for action. So Jefferson had written to Senator Roberts, who was in Washington, asking him if it would be convenient for him to come at once to New York and meet himself and his father on a matter of importance. The senator naturally jumped to the conclusion that Jefferson and Ryder had reached an amicable understanding, and he immediately hurried to New York and with his daughter came round to Seventy-fourth Street. When Ryder Sr. entered the library, Senator Roberts was striding nervously up and down the room. This, he felt, was an important day. The ambition of his life seemed on the point of being attained. "Hello, Roberts," was Ryder's cheerful greeting. "What's brought you from Washington at a critical time like this? The Rossmore impeachment needs every friend we have." "Just as if you didn't know," smiled the senator uneasily, "that I am here by appointment to meet you and your son!" "To meet me and my son?" echoed Ryder astonished. The senator, perplexed and beginning to feel real alarm, showed the financier Jefferson's letter. Ryder read it and he looked pleased. "That's all right," he said, "if the lad asked you to meet us here it can mean only one thing--that at last he has made up his mind to this marriage." "That's what I thought," replied the senator, breathing more freely. "I was sorry to leave Washington at such a time, but I'm a father, and Kate is more to me than the Rossmore impeachment. Besides, to see her married to your son Jefferson is one of the dearest wishes of my life." "You can rest easy," said Ryder; "that is practically settled. Jefferson's sending for you proves that he is now ready to meet my wishes. He'll be here any minute. How is the Rossmore case progressing?" "Not so well as it might," growled the senator. "There's a lot of maudlin sympathy for the judge. He's a pretty sick man by all accounts, and the newspapers seem to be taking his part. One or two of the Western senators are talking Corporate influence and Trust legislation, but when it comes to a vote the matter will be settled on party lines." "That means that Judge Rossmore will be removed?" demanded Ryder sternly. "Yes, with five votes to spare," answered the senator. "That's not enough," insisted Ryder. "There must be at least twenty. Let there be no blunders, Roberts. The man is a menace to all the big commercial interests. This thing must go through." The door opened and Jefferson appeared. On seeing the senator talking with his father, he hesitated on the threshold. "Come in, Jeff," said his father pleasantly. "You expected to see Senator Roberts, didn't you?" "Yes, sir. How do you do, Senator?" said the young man, advancing into the room. "I got your letter, my boy, and here I am," said the senator smiling affably. "I suppose we can guess what the business is, eh?" "That he's going to marry Kate, of course," chimed in Ryder Sr. "Jeff, my lad, I'm glad you are beginning to see my way of looking at things. You're doing more to please me lately, and I appreciate it. You stayed at home when I asked you to, and now you've made up your mind regarding this marriage." Jefferson let his father finish his speech, and then he said calmly: "I think there must be some misapprehension as to the reason for my summoning Senator Roberts to New York. It had nothing to do with my marrying Miss Roberts, but to prevent her marriage with someone else." "What!" exclaimed Ryder, Sr. "Marriage with someone else?" echoed the senator. He thought he had not heard aright, yet at the same time he had grave misgivings. "What do you mean, sir?" Taking from his pocket a copy of the letter he had picked up on the staircase, Jefferson held it out to the girl's father. "Your daughter is preparing to run away with my father's secretary. To-morrow would have been too late. That is why I summoned you. Read this." The senator took the letter, and as he read his face grew ashen and his hand trembled violently. At one blow all his ambitious projects for his daughter had been swept away. The inconsiderate act of a silly, thoughtless girl had spoiled the carefully laid plans of a lifetime. The only consolation which remained was that the calamity might have been still more serious. This timely warning had saved his family from perhaps an even greater scandal. He passed the letter in silence to Ryder, Sr. The financier was a man of few words when the situation called for prompt action. After he had read the letter through, there was an ominous silence. Then he rang a bell. The butler appeared. "Tell Mr. Bagley I want him." The man bowed and disappeared. "Who the devil is this Bagley?" demanded the senator. "English--blue blood--no money," was Ryder's laconic answer. "That's the only kind we seem to get over here," growled the senator. "We furnish the money--they furnish the blood--damn his blue blood! I don't want any in mine." Turning to Jefferson, he said: "Jefferson, whatever the motives that actuated you, I can only thank you for this warning. I think it would have broken my heart if my girl had gone away with that scoundrel. Of course, under the circumstances, I must abandon all idea of your becoming my son-in-law. I release you from all obligations you may have felt yourself bound by." Jefferson bowed and remained silent. Ryder, Sr. eyed his son closely, an amused expression hovering on his face. After all, it was not so much he who had desired this match as Roberts, and as long as the senator was willing to withdraw, he could make no objection. He wondered what part, if any, his son had played in bringing about this sensational denouement to a match which had been so distasteful to him, and it gratified his paternal vanity to think that Jefferson after all might be smarter than he had given him credit for. At this juncture Mr. Bagley entered the room. He was a little taken aback on seeing the senator, but like most men of his class, his self-conceit made him confident of his ability to handle any emergency which might arise, and he had no reason to suspect that this hasty summons to the library had anything to do with his matrimonial plans. "Did you ask for me, sir?" he demanded, addressing his employer. "Yes, Mr. Bagley," replied Ryder, fixing the secretary with a look that filled the latter with misgivings. "What steamers leave to-morrow for England?" "To-morrow?" echoed Mr. Bagley. "I said to-morrow," repeated Ryder, slightly raising his voice. "Let me see," stammered the secretary, "there is the White Star, the North German Lloyd, the Atlantic Transport--" "Have you any preference?" inquired the financier. "No, sir, none at all." "Then you'll go on board one of the ships to-night," said Ryder. "Your things will be packed and sent to you before the steamer sails to-morrow." The Hon. Fitzroy Bagley, third son of a British peer, did not understand even yet that he was discharged as one dismisses a housemaid caught kissing the policeman. He could not think what Mr. Ryder wanted him to go abroad for unless it were on some matter of business, and it was decidedly inconvenient for him to sail at this time. "But, sir," he stammered. "I'm afraid--I'm afraid--" "Yes," rejoined Ryder promptly, "I notice that--your hand is shaking." "I mean that I--" "You mean that you have other engagements!" said Ryder sternly. "Oh no--no but--" "No engagement at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning?" insisted Ryder. "With my daughter?" chimed in the senator. Mr. Bagley now understood. He broke out in a cold perspiration and he paled visibly. In the hope that the full extent of his plans were not known, he attempted to brazen it out. "No, certainly not, under no circumstances," he said. Ryder, Sr. rang a bell. "Perhaps she has an engagement with you. We'll ask her." To the butler, who entered, he said: "Tell Miss Roberts that her father would like to see her here." The man disappeared and the senator took a hand in cross-examining the now thoroughly uncomfortable secretary. "So you thought my daughter looked pale and that a little excursion to Buffalo would be a good thing for her? Well, it won't be a good thing for you, young man, I can assure you of that!" The English aristocrat began to wilt. His assurance of manner quite deserted him and he stammered painfully as he floundered about in excuses. "Not with me--oh dear, no," he said. "You never proposed to run away with my daughter?" cried the irate father. "Run away with her?" stammered Bagley. "And marry her?" shouted the senator, shaking his fist at him. "Oh say--this is hardly fair--three against one--really--I'm awfully sorry, eh, what?" The door opened and Kate Roberts bounced in. She was smiling and full of animal spirits, but on seeing the stern face of her father and the pitiable picture presented by her faithful Fitz she was intelligent enough to immediately scent danger. "Did you want to see me, father?" she inquired boldly. "Yes, Kate," answered the senator gravely, "we have just been having a talk with Mr. Bagley, in which you were one of the subjects of conversation. Can you guess what it was?" The girl looked from her father to Bagley and from him to the Ryders. Her aristocratic lover made a movement forward as if to exculpate himself, but he caught Ryder's eye and remained where he was. "Well?" she said, with a nervous laugh. "Is it true" asked the senator, "that you were about to marry this man secretly?" She cast down her eyes and answered: "I suppose you know everything." "Have you anything to add?" asked her father sternly. "No," said Kate shaking her head. "It's true. We intended to run away, didn't we Fitz?" "Never mind about Mr. Bagley," thundered her father. "Haven't you a word of shame for this disgrace you have brought upon me?" "Oh papa, don't be so cross. Jefferson did not care for me. I couldn't be an old maid. Mr. Bagley has a lovely castle in England, and one day he'll sit in the House of Lords. He'll explain everything to you." "He'll explain nothing," rejoined the senator grimly. "Mr. Bagley returns to England to-night. He won't have time to explain anything." "Returns to England?" echoed Kate dismayed. "Yes, and you go with me to Washington at once." The senator turned to Ryder. "Good-bye Ryder. The little domestic comedy is ended. I'm grateful it didn't turn out a drama. The next time I pick out a son-in-law I hope I'll have better luck." He shook hands with Jefferson, and left the room followed by his crestfallen daughter. Ryder, who had gone to write something at his desk, strode over to where Mr. Bagley was standing and handed him a cheque. "Here, sir, this settles everything to date. Good-day." "But I--I--" stammered the secretary helplessly. "Good-day, sir." Ryder turned his back on him and conversed with, his son, while Mr. Bagley slowly, and as if regretfully, made his exit. CHAPTER XV It was now December and the Senate had been in session for over a week. Jefferson had not forgotten his promise, and one day, about two weeks after Mr. Bagley's spectacular dismissal from the Ryder residence, he had brought Shirley the two letters. She did not ask him how he got them, if he forced the drawer or procured the key. It sufficed for her that the precious letters--the absolute proof of her father's innocence--were at last in her possession. She at once sent them off by registered mail to Stott, who immediately acknowledged receipt and at the same time announced his departure for Washington that night. He promised to keep her constantly informed of what he was doing and how her father's case was going. It could, he thought, be only a matter of a few days now before the result of the proceedings would be known. The approach of the crisis made Shirley exceedingly nervous, and it was only by the exercise of the greatest self-control that she did not betray the terrible anxiety she felt. The Ryder biography was nearly finished and her stay in Seventy-fourth Street would soon come to an end. She had a serious talk with Jefferson, who contrived to see a good deal of her, entirely unsuspected by his parents, for Mr. and Mrs. Ryder had no reason to believe that their son had any more than a mere bowing acquaintance with the clever young authoress. Now that Mr. Bagley was no longer there to spy upon their actions these clandestine interviews had been comparatively easy. Shirley brought to bear all the arguments she could think of to convince Jefferson of the hopelessness of their engagement. She insisted that she could never be his wife; circumstances over which they had no control made that dream impossible. It were better, she said, to part now rather than incur the risk of being unhappy later. But Jefferson refused to be convinced. He argued and pleaded and he even swore--strange, desperate words that Shirley had never heard before and which alarmed her not a little--and the discussion ended usually by a kiss which put Shirley completely _hors de combat_. Meantime, John Ryder had not ceased worrying about his son. The removal of Kate Roberts as a factor in his future had not eliminated the danger of Jefferson taking the bit between his teeth one day and contracting a secret marriage with the daughter of his enemy, and when he thought of the mere possibility of such a thing happening he stormed and raved until his wife, accustomed as she was to his choleric outbursts, was thoroughly frightened. For some time after Bagley's departure, father and son got along together fairly amicably, but Ryder, Sr. was quick to see that Jefferson had something on his mind which was worrying him, and he rightly attributed it to his infatuation for Miss Rossmore. He was convinced that his son knew where the judge's daughter was, although his own efforts to discover her whereabouts had been unsuccessful. Sergeant Ellison had confessed absolute failure; Miss Rossmore, he reported, had disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed her, and further search was futile. Knowing well his son's impulsive, headstrong disposition, Ryder, Sr. believed him quite capable of marrying the girl secretly any time. The only thing that John Ryder did not know was that Shirley Rossmore was not the kind of a girl to allow any man to inveigle her into a secret marriage. The Colossus, who judged the world's morals by his own, was not of course aware of this, and he worried night and day thinking what he could do to prevent his son from marrying the daughter of the man he had wronged. The more he pondered over it, the more he regretted that there was not some other girl with whom Jefferson could fall in love and marry. He need not seek a rich girl--there was certainly enough money in the Ryder family to provide for both. He wished they knew a girl, for example, as attractive and clever as Miss Green. Ah! he thought, there was a girl who would make a man of Jefferson--brainy, ambitious, active! And the more he thought of it the more the idea grew on him that Miss Green would be an ideal daughter-in-law, and at the same time snatch his son from the clutches of the Rossmore woman. Jefferson, during all these weeks, was growing more and more impatient. He knew that any day now Shirley might take her departure from their house and return to Massapequa. If the impeachment proceedings went against her father it was more than likely that he would lose her forever, and if, on the contrary, the judge were acquitted, Shirley never would be willing to marry him without his father's consent; and this, he felt, he would never obtain. He resolved, therefore, to have a final interview with his father and declare boldly his intention of making Miss Rossmore his wife, regardless of the consequences. The opportunity came one evening after dinner. Ryder, Sr. was sitting alone in the library, reading, Mrs. Ryder had gone to the theatre with a friend, Shirley as usual was writing in her room, giving the final touches to her now completed "History of the Empire Trading Company." Jefferson took the bull by the horns and boldly accosted his redoubtable parent. "May I have a few minutes of your time, father?" Ryder, Sr. laid aside the paper he was reading and looked up. It was unusual for his son to come to him on any errand, and he liked to encourage it. "Certainly, Jefferson. What is it?" "I want to appeal to you, sir. I want you to use your influence, before it is too late, to save Judge Rossmore. A word from you at this time would do wonders in Washington." The financier swung half-round in his chair, the smile of greeting faded out of his face, and his voice was hard as he replied coldly: "Again? I thought we had agreed not to discuss Judge Rossmore any further?" "I can't help it, sir," rejoined Jefferson undeterred by his sire's hostile attitude, "that poor old man is practically on trial for his life. He is as innocent of wrongdoing as a child unborn, and you know it. You could save him if you would." "Jefferson," answered Ryder, Sr., biting his lip to restrain his impatience, "I told you before that I could not interfere even if I would; and I won't, because that man is my enemy. Important business interests, which you cannot possibly know anything about, demand his dismissal from the bench." "Surely your business interests don't demand the sacrifice of a man's life!" retorted Jefferson. "I know modern business methods are none too squeamish, but I should think you'd draw the line at deliberate murder!" Ryder sprang to his feet and for a moment stood glaring at the young man. His lips moved, but no sound came from them. Suppressed wrath rendered him speechless. What was the world coming to when a son could talk to his father in this manner? "How dare you presume to judge my actions or to criticise my methods?" he burst out; finally. "You force me to do so," answered Jefferson hotly. "I want to tell you that I am heartily ashamed of this whole affair and your connection with it, and since you refuse to make reparation in the only way possible for the wrong you and your associates have done Judge Rossmore--that is by saving him in the Senate--I think it only fair to warn you that I take back my word in regard to not marrying without your consent. I want you to know that I intend to marry Miss Rossmore as soon as she will consent to become my wife, that is," he added with bitterness, "if I can succeed in overcoming her prejudices against my family--" Ryder, Sr. laughed contemptuously. "Prejudices against a thousand million dollars?" he exclaimed sceptically. "Yes," replied Jefferson decisively, "prejudices against our family, against you and your business practices. Money is not everything. One day you will find that out. I tell you definitely that I intend to make Miss Rossmore my wife." Ryder, Sr. made no reply, and as Jefferson had expected an explosion, this unnatural calm rather startled him. He was sorry he had spoken so harshly. It was his father, after all. "You've forced me to defy you, father," he added. "I'm sorry--" Ryder, Sr. shrugged his shoulders and resumed his seat. He lit another cigar, and with affected carelessness he said: "All right, Jeff, my boy, we'll let it go at that You're sorry--so am I. You've shown me your cards--I'll show you mine." His composed unruffled manner vanished. He suddenly threw off the mask and revealed the tempest that was raging within. He leaned across the desk, his face convulsed with uncontrollable passion, a terrifying picture of human wrath. Shaking his fist at his son he shouted: "When I get through with Judge Rossmore at Washington, I'll start after his daughter. This time to-morrow he'll be a disgraced man. A week later she will be a notorious woman. Then we'll see if you'll be so eager to marry her!" "Father!" cried Jefferson. "There is sure to be something in her life that won't bear inspection," sneered Ryder. "There is in everybody's life. I'll find out what it is. Where is she to-day? She can't be found. No one knows where she is--not even her own mother. Something is wrong--the girl's no good!" Jefferson started forward as if to resent these insults to the woman he loved, but, realizing that it was his own father, he stopped short and his hands fell powerless at his side. "Well, is that all?" inquired Ryder, Sr. with a sneer. "That's all," replied Jefferson, "I'm going. Good-bye." "Good-bye," answered his father indifferently; "leave your address with your mother." Jefferson left the room, and Ryder, Sr., as if exhausted by the violence of his own outburst, sank back limp in his chair. The crisis he dreaded had come at last. His son had openly defied his authority and was going to marry the daughter of his enemy. He must do something to prevent it; the marriage must not take place, but what could he do? The boy was of age and legally his own master. He could do nothing to restrain his actions unless they put him in an insane asylum. He would rather see his son there, he mused, than married to the Rossmore woman. Presently there was a timid knock at the library door. Ryder rose from his seat and went to see who was there. To his surprise it was Miss Green. "May I come in?" asked Shirley. "Certainly, by all means. Sit down." He drew up a chair for her, and his manner was so cordial that it was easy to see she was a welcome visitor. "Mr. Ryder," she began in a low, tremulous voice, "I have come to see you on a very important matter. I've been waiting to see you all evening--and as I shall be here only a short time longer I--want to ask you a great favour--perhaps the greatest you were ever asked--I want to ask you for mercy--for mercy to--" She stopped and glanced nervously at him, but she saw he was paying no attention to what she was saying. He was puffing heavily at his cigar, entirely preoccupied with his own thoughts. Her sudden silence aroused him. He apologized: "Oh, excuse me--I didn't quite catch what you were saying." She said nothing, wondering what had happened to render him so absent-minded. He read the question in her face, for, turning towards her, he exclaimed: "For the first time in my life I am face to face with defeat--defeat of the most ignominious kind--incapacity--inability to regulate my own internal affairs. I can rule a government, but I can't manage my own family--my own son. I'm a failure. Tell me," he added, appealing to her, "why can't I rule my own household, why can't I govern my own child?" "Why can't you govern yourself?" said Shirley quietly. Ryder looked keenly at her for a moment without answering her question; then, as if prompted by a sudden inspiration, he said: "You can help me, but not by preaching at me. This is the first time in my life I ever called on a living soul for help. I'm only accustomed to deal with men. This time there's a woman in the case--and I need your woman's wit--" "How can I help you?" asked Shirley. "I don't know," he answered with suppressed excitement. "As I told you, I am up against a blank wall. I can't see my way." He gave a nervous little laugh and went on: "God! I'm ashamed of myself--ashamed! Did you ever read the fable of the Lion and the Mouse? Well, I want you to gnaw with your sharp woman's teeth at the cords which bind the son of John Burkett Ryder to this Rossmore woman. I want you to be the mouse--to set me free of this disgraceful entanglement." "How?" asked Shirley calmly. "Ah, that's just it--how?" he replied. "Can't you think--you're a woman--you have youth, beauty--brains." He stopped and eyed her closely until she reddened from the embarrassing scrutiny. Then he blurted out: "By George! marry him yourself--force him to let go of this other woman! Why not? Come, what do you say?" This unexpected suggestion came upon Shirley with all the force of a violent shock. She immediately saw the falseness of her position. This man was asking for her hand for his son under the impression that she was another woman. It would be dishonorable of her to keep up the deception any longer. She passed her hand over her face to conceal her confusion. "You--you must give me time to think," she stammered. "Suppose I don't love your son--I should want something--something to compensate." "Something to compensate?" echoed Ryder surprised and a little disconcerted. "Why, the boy will inherit millions--I don't know how many." "No--no, not money," rejoined Shirley; "money only compensates those who love money. It's something else--a man's honour--a man's life! It means nothing to you." He gazed at her, not understanding. Full of his own project, he had mind for nothing else. Ignoring therefore the question of compensation, whatever she might mean by that, he continued: "You can win him if you make up your mind to. A woman with your resources can blind him to any other woman." "But if--he loves Judge Rossmore's daughter?" objected Shirley. "It's for you to make him forget her--and you can," replied the financier confidently. "My desire is to separate him from this Rossmore woman at any cost. You must help me." His sternness relaxed somewhat and his eyes rested on her kindly. "Do you know, I should be glad to think you won't have to leave us. Mrs. Ryder has taken a fancy to you, and I myself shall miss you when you go." "You ask me to be your son's wife and you know nothing of my family," said Shirley. "I know you--that is sufficient," he replied. "No--no you don't," returned Shirley, "nor do you know your son. He has more constancy--more strength of character than you think--and far more principle than you have." "So much the greater the victory for you," he answered good humouredly. "Ah," she said reproachfully, "you do not love your son." "I do love him," replied Ryder warmly. "It's because I love him that I'm such a fool in this matter. Don't you see that if he marries this girl it would separate us, and I should lose him. I don't want to lose him. If I welcomed her to my house it would make me the laughing-stock of all my friends and business associates. Come, will you join forces with me?" Shirley shook her head and was about to reply when the telephone bell rang. Ryder took up the receiver and spoke to the butler downstairs: "Who's that? Judge Stott? Tell him I'm too busy to see anyone. What's that? A man's life at stake? What's that to do with me? Tell him--" On hearing Stott's name, Shirley nearly betrayed herself. She turned pale and half-started up from her chair. Something serious must have happened to bring her father's legal adviser to the Ryder residence at such an hour! She thought he was in Washington. Could it be that the proceedings in the Senate were ended and the result known? She could hardly conceal her anxiety, and instinctively she placed her hand on Ryder's arm. "No, Mr. Ryder, do see Judge Stott! You must see him. I know who he is. Your son has told me. Judge Stott is one of Judge Rossmore's advisers. See him. You may find out something about the girl. You may find out where she is. If Jefferson finds out you have refused to see her father's friend at such a critical time it will only make him sympathize more deeply with the Rossmores, and you know sympathy is akin to love. That's what you want to avoid, isn't it?" Ryder still held the telephone, hesitating what to do. What she said sounded like good sense. "Upon my word--" he said. "You may be right and yet--" "Am I to help you or not?" demanded Shirley. "You said you wanted a woman's wit." "Yes," said Ryder, "but still--" "Then you had better see him," she said emphatically. Ryder turned to the telephone. "Hello, Jorkins, are you there? Show Judge Stott up here." He laid the receiver down and turned again to Shirley. "That's one thing I don't like about you," he said. "I allow you to decide against me and then I agree with you." She said nothing and he went on looking at her admiringly. "I predict that you'll bring that boy to your feet within a month. I don't know why, but I seem to feel that he is attracted to you already. Thank Heaven! you haven't a lot of troublesome relations. I think you said you were almost alone in the world. Don't look so serious," he added laughing. "Jeff is a fine fellow, and believe me an excellent catch as the world goes." Shirley raised her hand as if entreating him to desist. "Oh, don't--don't--please! My position is so false! You don't know how false it is!" she cried. At that instant the library door was thrown open and the butler appeared, ushering in Stott. The lawyer looked anxious, and his dishevelled appearance indicated that he had come direct from the train. Shirley scanned his face narrowly in the hope that she might read there what had happened. He walked right past her, giving no sign of recognition, and advanced direct towards Ryder, who had risen and remained standing at his desk. "Perhaps I had better go?" ventured Shirley, although tortured by anxiety to hear the news from Washington. "No," said Ryder quickly, "Judge Stott will detain me but a very few moments." Having delivered himself of this delicate hint, he looked towards his visitor as if inviting him to come to the point as rapidly as possible. "I must apologize for intruding at this unseemly hour, sir," said Stott, "but time is precious. The Senate meets to-morrow to vote. If anything is to be done for Judge Rossmore it must be done to-night." "I fail to see why you address yourself to me in this matter, sir," replied Ryder with asperity. "As Judge Rossmore's friend and counsel," answered Stott, "I am impelled to ask your help at this critical moment." "The matter is in the hands of the United States Senate, sir," replied Ryder coldly. "They are against him!" cried Stott; "not one senator I've spoken to holds out any hope for him. If he is convicted it will mean his death. Inch by inch his life is leaving him. The only thing that can save him is the good news of the Senate's refusal to find him guilty." Stott was talking so excitedly and loudly that neither he nor Ryder heard the low moan that came from the corner of the room where Shirley was standing listening. "I can do nothing," repeated Ryder coldly, and he turned his back and began to examine some papers lying on his desk as if to notify the caller that the interview was ended. But Stott was not so easily discouraged. He went on: "As I understand it, they will vote on strictly party lines, and the party in power is against him. He's a marked man. You have the power to help him." Heedless of Ryder's gesture of impatience he continued: "When I left his bedside to-night, sir, I promised to return to him with good news; I have told him that the Senate ridicules the charges against him. I must return to him with good news. He is very ill to-night, sir." He halted for a moment and glanced in Shirley's direction, and slightly raising his voice so she might hear, he added: "If he gets worse we shall send for his daughter." "Where is his daughter?" demanded Ryder, suddenly interested. "She is working in her father's interests," replied Stott, and, he added significantly, "I believe with some hope of success." He gave Shirley a quick, questioning look. She nodded affirmatively. Ryder, who had seen nothing of this by-play, said with a sneer: "Surely you didn't come here to-night to tell me this?" "No, sir, I did not." He took from his pocket two letters--the two which Shirley had sent him--and held them out for Ryder's inspection. "These letters from Judge Rossmore to you," he said, "show you to be acquainted with the fact that he bought those shares as an investment--and did not receive them as a bribe." When he caught sight of the letters and he realized what they were, Ryder changed colour. Instinctively his eyes sought the drawer on the left-hand side of his desk. In a voice that was unnaturally calm, he asked: "Why don't you produce them before the Senate?" "It was too late," explained Stott, handing them to the financier. "I received them only two days ago. But if you come forward and declare--" Ryder made an effort to control himself. "I'll do nothing of the kind. I refuse to move in the matter. That is final. And now, sir," he added, raising his voice and pointing to the letters, "I wish to know how comes it that you had in your possession private correspondence addressed to me?" "That I cannot answer," replied Stott promptly. "From whom did you receive these letters?" demanded Ryder. Stott was dumb, while Shirley clutched at her chair as if she would fall. The financier repeated the question. "I must decline to answer," replied Stott finally. Shirley left her place and came slowly forward. Addressing Ryder, she said: "I wish to make a statement." The financier gazed at her in astonishment. What could she know about it, he wondered, and he waited with curiosity to hear what she was going to say. But Stott instantly realized that she was about to take the blame upon herself, regardless of the consequences to the success of their cause. This must be prevented at all hazards, even if another must be sacrificed, so interrupting her he said hastily to Ryder: "Judge Rossmore's life and honour are at stake and no false sense of delicacy must cause the failure of my object to save him. These letters were sent to me by--your son." "From my son!" exclaimed Ryder, starting. For a moment he staggered as if he had received a blow; he was too much overcome to speak or act. Then recovering himself, he rang a bell, and turned to Stott with renewed fury: "So," he cried, "this man, this judge whose honour is at stake and his daughter, who most likely has no honour at stake, between them have made a thief and a liar of my son! false to his father, false to his party; and you, sir, have the presumption to come here and ask me to intercede for him!" To the butler, who entered, he said: "See if Mr. Jefferson is still in the house. If he is, tell him I would like to see him here at once." The man disappeared, and Ryder strode angrily up and down the room with the letters in his hand. Then, turning abruptly on Stott, he said: "And now, sir, I think nothing more remains to be said. I shall keep these letters, as they are my property." "As you please. Good night, sir." "Good night," replied Ryder, not looking up. With a significant glance at Shirley, who motioned to him that she might yet succeed where he had failed, Stott left the room. Ryder turned to Shirley. His fierceness of manner softened down as he addressed the girl: "You see what they have done to my son--" "Yes," replied Shirley, "it's the girl's fault. If Jefferson hadn't loved her you would have helped the judge. Ah, why did they ever meet! She has worked on his sympathy and he--he took these letters for her sake, not to injure you. Oh, you must make some allowance for him! One's sympathy gets aroused in spite of oneself; even I feel sorry for--these people." "Don't," replied Ryder grimly, "sympathy is often weakness. Ah, there you are!" turning to Jefferson, who entered the room at that moment. "You sent for me, father?" "Yes," said Ryder, Sr., holding up the letters. "Have you ever seen these letters before?" Jefferson took the letters and examined them, then he passed them back to his father and said frankly: "Yes, I took them out of your desk and sent them to Mr. Stott in the hope they would help Judge Rossmore's case." Ryder restrained himself from proceeding to actual violence only with the greatest difficulty. His face grew white as death, his lips were compressed, his hands twitched convulsively, his eyes flashed dangerously. He took another cigar to give the impression that he had himself well under control, but the violent trembling of his hands as he lit it betrayed the terrific strain he was under. "So!" he said, "you deliberately sacrificed my interests to save this woman's father--you hear him, Miss Green? Jefferson, my boy, I think it's time you and I had a final accounting." Shirley made a motion as if about to withdraw. He stopped her with a gesture. "Please don't go, Miss Green. As the writer of my biography you are sufficiently well acquainted with my family affairs to warrant your being present at the epilogue. Besides, I want an excuse for keeping my temper. Sit down, Miss Green." Turning to Jefferson, he went on: "For your mother's sake, my boy, I have overlooked your little eccentricities of character. But now we have arrived at the parting of the ways--you have gone too far. The one aspect of this business I cannot overlook is your willingness to sell, your own father for the sake of a woman." "My own father," interrupted Jefferson bitterly, "would not hesitate to sell me if his business and political interests warranted the sacrifice!" Shirley attempted the rôle of peacemaker. Appealing to the younger man, she said: "Please don't talk like that, Mr. Jefferson." Then she turned to Ryder, Sr.: "I don't think your son quite understands you, Mr. Ryder, and, if you will pardon me, I don't think you quite understand him. Do you realize that there is a man's life at stake--that Judge Rossmore is almost at the point of death and that favourable news from the Senate to-morrow is perhaps the only thing that can save him?" "Ah, I see," sneered Ryder, Sr. "Judge Stott's story has aroused your sympathy." "Yes, I--I confess my sympathy is aroused. I do feel for this father whose life is slowly ebbing away--whose strength is being sapped hourly by the thought of the disgrace--the injustice that is being done him! I do feel for the wife of this suffering man!" "Ah, its a complete picture!" cried Ryder mockingly. "The dying father, the sorrowing mother--and the daughter, what is she supposed to be doing?" "She is fighting for her father's life," cried Shirley, "and you, Mr. Jefferson, should have pleaded--pleaded--not demanded. It's no use trying to combat your father's will." "She is quite right, father. I should have implored you. I do so now. I ask you for God's sake to help us!" Ryder was grim and silent. He rose from his seat and paced the room, puffing savagely at his cigar. Then he turned and said: "His removal is a political necessity. If he goes back on the bench every paltry justice of the peace, every petty official will think he has a special mission to tear down the structure that hard work and capital have erected. No, this man has been especially conspicuous in his efforts to block the progress of amalgamated interests." "And so he must be sacrificed?" cried Shirley indignantly. "He is a meddlesome man," insisted Ryder "and--" "He is innocent of the charges brought against him," urged Jefferson. "Mr. Ryder is not considering that point," said Shirley bitterly. "All he can see is that it is necessary to put this poor old man in the public pillory, to set him up as a warning to others of his class not to act in accordance with the principles of Truth and Justice--not to dare to obstruct the car of Juggernaut set in motion by the money gods of the country!" "It's the survival of the fittest, my dear," said Ryder coldly. "Oh!" cried Shirley, making a last appeal to the financier's heart of stone, "use your great influence with this governing body for good, not evil! Urge them to vote not in accordance with party policy and personal interest, but in accordance with their consciences--in accordance with Truth and Justice! Ah, for God's sake, Mr. Ryder! don't permit this foul injustice to blot the name of the highest tribunal in the Western world!" Ryder laughed cynically. "By Jove! Jefferson, I give you credit for having secured an eloquent advocate!" "Suppose," went on Shirley, ignoring his taunting comments, "suppose this daughter promises that she will never--never see your son again--that she will go away to some foreign country!" "No!" burst in Jefferson, "why should she? If my father is not man enough to do a simple act of justice without bartering a woman's happiness and his son's happiness, let him find comfort in his self-justification!" Shirley, completely unnerved, made a move towards the door, unable longer to bear the strain she was under. She tottered as though she would fall. Ryder made a quick movement towards his son and took him by the arm. Pointing to Shirley he said in a low tone: "You see how that girl pleads your cause for you! She loves you, my boy!" Jefferson started. "Yes, she does," pursued Ryder, Sr. "She's worth a thousand of the Rossmore woman. Make her your wife and I'll--" "Make her my wife!" cried Jefferson joyously. He stared at his parent as if he thought he had suddenly been bereft of his senses. "Make her my wife?" he repeated incredulously. "Well, what do you say?" demanded Ryder, Sr. The young man advanced towards Shirley, hands outstretched. "Yes, yes, Shir--Miss Green, will you?" Seeing that Shirley made no sign, he said: "Not now, father; I will speak to her later." "No, no, to-night, at once!" insisted Ryder. Addressing Shirley, he went on: "Miss Green, my son is much affected by your disinterested appeal in his behalf. He--he--you can save him from himself--my son wishes you--he asks you to become his wife! Is it not so, Jefferson?" "Yes, yes, my wife!" advancing again towards Shirley. The girl shrank back in alarm. "No, no, no, Mr. Ryder, I cannot, I cannot!" she cried. "Why not?" demanded Ryder, Sr. appealingly. "Ah, don't--don't decide hastily--" Shirley, her face set and drawn and keen mental distress showing in every line of it, faced the two men, pale and determined. The time had come to reveal the truth. This masquerade could go on no longer. It was not honourable either to her father or to herself. Her self-respect demanded that she inform the financier of her true identity. "I cannot marry your son with these lies upon my lips!" she cried. "I cannot go on with this deception. I told you you did not know who I was, who my people were. My story about them, my name, everything about me is false, every word I have uttered is a lie, a fraud, a cheat! I would not tell you now, but you trusted me and are willing to entrust your son's future, your family honour in my keeping, and I can't keep back the truth from you. Mr. Ryder, I am the daughter of the man you hate. I am the woman your son loves. I am Shirley Rossmore!" Ryder took his cigar from his lips and rose slowly to his feet. "You? You?" he stammered. [Photo, from the play, of Jefferson and Shirley appealing to Mr. Ryder] "For God's sake, Mr. Ryder, don't permit this foul injustice."--Act III. "Yes--yes, I am the Rossmore woman! Listen, Mr. Ryder. Don't turn away from me. Go to Washington on behalf of my father, and I promise you I will never see your son again--never, never!" "Ah, Shirley!" cried Jefferson, "you don't love me!" "Yes, Jeff, I do; God knows I do! But if I must break my own heart to save my father I will do it." "Would you sacrifice my happiness and your own?" "No happiness can be built on lies, Jeff. We must build on truth or our whole house will crumble and fall. We have deceived your father, but he will forgive that, won't you?" she said, appealing to Ryder, "and you will go to Washington, you will save my father's honour, his life, you will--?" They stood face to face--this slim, delicate girl battling for her father's life, arrayed against a cold-blooded, heartless, unscrupulous man, deaf to every impulse of human sympathy or pity. Since this woman had deceived him, fooled him, he would deal with her as with everyone else who crossed his will. She laid her hand on his arm, pleading with him. Brutally, savagely, he thrust her aside. "No, no, I will not!" he thundered. "You have wormed yourself into my confidence by means of lies and deceit. You have tricked me, fooled me to the very limit! Oh, it is easy to see how you have beguiled my son into the folly of loving you! And you--you have the brazen effrontery to ask me to plead for your father? No! No! No! Let the law take its course, and now Miss Rossmore--you will please leave my house to-morrow morning!" Shirley stood listening to what he had to say, her face white, her mouth quivering. At last the crisis had come. It was a fight to the finish between this man, the incarnation of corporate greed and herself, representing the fundamental principles of right and justice. She turned on him in a fury: "Yes, I will leave your house to-night! Do you think I would remain another hour beneath the roof of a man who is as blind to justice, as deaf to mercy, as incapable of human sympathy as you are!" She raised her voice; and as she stood there denouncing the man of money, her eyes flashing and her head thrown back, she looked like some avenging angel defying one of the powers of Evil. "Leave the room!" shouted Ryder, beside himself, and pointing to the door. "Father!" cried Jefferson, starting forward to protect the girl he loved. "You have tricked him as you have me!" thundered Ryder. "It is your own vanity that has tricked you!" cried Shirley contemptuously. "You lay traps for yourself and walk into them. You compel everyone around you to lie to you, to cajole you, to praise you, to deceive you! At least, you cannot accuse me of flattering you. I have never fawned upon you as you compel your family and your friends and your dependents to do. I have always appealed to your better nature by telling you the truth, and in your heart you know that I am speaking the truth now." "Go!" he commanded. "Yes, let us go, Shirley!" said Jefferson. "No, Jeff, I came here alone and I'm going alone!" "You are not. I shall go with you. I intend to make you my wife!" Ryder laughed scornfully. "No," cried Shirley. "Do you think I'd marry a man whose father is as deep a discredit to the human race as your father is? No, I wouldn't marry the son of such a merciless tyrant! He refuses to lift his voice to save my father. I refuse to marry his son!" She turned on Ryder with all the fury of a tiger: "You think if you lived in the olden days you'd be a Caesar or an Alexander. But you wouldn't! You'd be a Nero--a Nero! Sink my self-respect to the extent of marrying into your family!" she exclaimed contemptuously. "Never! I am going to Washington without your aid. I am going to save my father if I have to go on my knees to every United States Senator. I'll go to the White House; I'll tell the President what you are! Marry your son--no, thank you! No, thank you!" Exhausted by the vehemence of her passionate outburst, Shirley hurried from the room, leaving Ryder speechless, staring at his son. CHAPTER XVI When Shirley reached her rooms she broke down completely, she threw herself upon a sofa and burst into a fit of violent sobbing. After all, she was only a woman and the ordeal through which she had passed would have taxed the strongest powers of endurance. She had borne up courageously while there remained the faintest chance that she might succeed in moving the financier to pity, but now that all hopes in that direction were shattered and she herself had been ordered harshly from the house like any ordinary malefactor, the reaction set in, and she gave way freely to her long pent-up anguish and distress. Nothing now could save her father--not even this journey to Washington which she determined to take nevertheless, for, according to what Stott had said, the Senate was to take a vote that very night. She looked at the time--eleven o'clock. She had told Mr. Ryder that she would leave his house at once, but on reflection it was impossible for a girl alone to seek a room at that hour. It would be midnight before she could get her things packed. No, she would stay under this hated roof until morning and then take the first train to Washington. There was still a chance that the vote might be delayed, in which case she might yet succeed in winning over some of the senators. She began to gather her things together and was thus engaged when she, heard a knock at her door. "Who's there?" she called out. "It's I," replied a familiar voice. Shirley went to the door and opening it found Jefferson on the threshold. He made no attempt to enter, nor did she invite him in. He looked tired and careworn. "Of course, you're not going to-night?" he asked anxiously. "My father did not mean to-night." "No, Jeff," she said wearily; "not to-night. It's a little too late. I did not realize it. To-morrow morning, early." He seemed reassured and held out his hand: "Good-night, dearest--you're a brave girl. You made a splendid fight." "It didn't do much good," she replied in a disheartened, listless way. "But it set him thinking," rejoined Jefferson. "No one ever spoke to my father like that before. It did him good. He's still marching up and down the library, chewing the cud--" Noticing Shirley's tired face and her eyes, with great black circles underneath, he stopped short. "Now don't do any more packing to-night," he said. "Go to bed and in the morning I'll come up and help you. Good night!" "Good night, Jeff," she smiled. He went downstairs, and after doing some more packing she went to bed. But it was hours before she got to sleep, and then she dreamed that she was in the Senate Chamber and that she saw Ryder suddenly rise and denounce himself before the astonished senators as a perjurer and traitor to his country, while she returned to Massapequa with the glad news that her father was acquitted. Meantime, a solitary figure remained in the library, pacing to and fro like a lost soul in Purgatory. Mrs. Ryder had returned from the play and gone to bed, serenely oblivious of the drama in real life that had been enacted at home, the servants locked the house up for the night and still John Burkett Ryder walked the floor of his sanctum, and late into the small hours of the morning the watchman going his lonely rounds, saw a light in the library and the restless figure of his employer sharply silhouetted against the white blinds. For the first time in his life John Ryder realized that there was something in the world beyond Self. He had seen with his own eyes the sacrifice a daughter will make for the father she loves, and he asked himself what manner of a man that father could be to inspire such devotion in his child. He probed into his own heart and conscience and reviewed his past career. He had been phenomenally successful, but he had not been happy. He had more money than he knew what to do with, but the pleasures of the domestic circle, which he saw other men enjoy, had been denied to him. Was he himself to blame? Had his insensate craving for gold and power led him to neglect those other things in life which contribute more truly to man's happiness? In other words, was his life a mistake? Yes, it was true what this girl charged, he had been merciless and unscrupulous in his dealings with his fellow man. It was true that hardly a dollar of his vast fortune had been honestly earned. It was true that it had been wrung from the people by fraud and trickery. He had craved for power, yet now he had tasted it, what a hollow joy it was, after all! The public hated and despised him; even his so-called friends and business associates toadied to him merely because they feared him. And this judge--this father he had persecuted and ruined, what a better man and citizen he was, how much more worthy of a child's love and of the esteem of the world! What had Judge Rossmore done, after all, to deserve the frightful punishment the amalgamated interests had caused him to suffer? If he had blocked their game, he had done only what his oath, his duty commanded him to do. Such a girl as Shirley Rossmore could not have had any other kind of a father. Ah, if he had had such a daughter he might have been a better man, if only to win his child's respect and affection. John Ryder pondered long and deeply and the more he ruminated the stronger the conviction grew upon him that the girl was right and he was wrong. Suddenly, he looked at his watch. It was one o'clock. Roberts had told him that it would be an all night session and that a vote would probably not be taken until very late. He unhooked the telephone and calling "central" asked for "long distance" and connection with Washington. It was seven o'clock when the maid entered Shirley's room with her breakfast and she found its occupant up and dressed. "Why you haven't been to bed, Miss!" exclaimed the girl, looking at the bed in the inner room which seemed scarcely disturbed. "No, Theresa I--I couldn't sleep." Hastily pouring out a cup of tea she added. "I must catch that nine o'clock train to Washington. I didn't finish packing until nearly three." "Can I do anything for you, Miss?" inquired the maid. Shirley was as popular with the servants as with the rest of the household. "No," answered Shirley, "there are only a few things to go in my suit case. Will you please have a cab here in half an hour?" The maid was about to go when she suddenly thought of something she had forgotten. She held out an envelope which she had left lying on the tray. "Oh, Miss, Mr. Jorkins said to give you this and master wanted to see you as soon as you had finished your breakfast." Shirley tore open the envelope and took out the contents. It was a cheque, payable to her order for $5,000 and signed "John Burkett Ryder." A deep flush covered the girl's face as she saw the money--a flush of annoyance rather than of pleasure. This man who had insulted her, who had wronged her father, who had driven her from his home, thought he could throw his gold at her and insolently send her her pay as one settles haughtily with a servant discharged for impertinence. She would have none of his money--the work she had done she would make him a present of. She replaced the cheque in the envelope and passed it back to Theresa. "Give this to Mr. Ryder and tell him I cannot see him." "But Mr. Ryder said--" insisted the girl. "Please deliver my message as I give it," commanded Shirley with authority. "I cannot see Mr. Ryder." The maid withdrew, but she had barely closed the door when it was opened again and Mrs. Ryder rushed in, without knocking. She was all flustered with excitement and in such a hurry that she had not even stopped to arrange her toilet. "My dear Miss Green," she gasped; "what's this I hear--going away suddenly without giving me warning?" "I wasn't engaged by the month," replied Shirley drily. "I know, dear, I know. I was thinking of myself. I've grown so used to you--how shall I get on without you--no one understands me the way you do. Dear me! The whole house is upset. Mr. Ryder never went to bed at all last night. Jefferson is going away, too--forever, he threatens. If he hadn't come and woke me up to say good-bye, I should never have known you intended to leave us. My boy's going--you're going--everyone's deserting me!" Mrs. Ryder was not accustomed to such prolonged flights of oratory and she sank exhausted on a chair, her eyes filling with tears. "Did they tell you who I am--the daughter of Judge Rossmore?" demanded Shirley. It had been a shock to Mrs. Ryder that morning when Jefferson burst into his mother's room before she was up and acquainted her with the events of the previous evening. The news that the Miss Green whom she had grown to love, was really the Miss Rossmore of whose relations with Jefferson her husband stood in such dread, was far from affecting the financier's wife as it had Ryder himself. To the mother's simple and ingenuous mind, free from prejudice and ulterior motive, the girl's character was more important than her name, and certainly she could not blame her son for loving such a woman as Shirley. Of course, it was unfortunate for Jefferson that his father felt this bitterness towards Judge Rossmore, for she herself could hardly have wished for a more sympathetic daughter-in-law. She had not seen her husband since the previous evening at dinner so was in complete ignorance as to what he thought of this new development, but the mother sighed as she thought how happy it would make her to see Jefferson happily married to the girl of his own choice, and in her heart she still entertained the hope that her husband would see it that way and thus prevent their son from leaving them as he threatened. "That's not your fault, my dear," she replied answering Shirley's question. "You are yourself--that's the main thing. You mustn't mind what Mr. Ryder says? Business and worry makes him irritable at times. If you must go, of course you must--you are the best judge of that, but Jefferson wants to see you before you leave." She kissed Shirley in motherly fashion, and added: "He has told me everything, dear. Nothing would make me happier than to see you become his wife. He's downstairs now waiting for me to tell him to come up." "It's better that I should not see him," replied Shirley slowly and gravely. "I can only tell him what I have already told him. My father comes first. I have still a duty to perform." "That's right, dear," answered Mrs. Ryder. "You're a good, noble girl and I admire you all the more for it. I'll let Jefferson be his own advocate. You'll see him for my sake!" She gave Shirley another affectionate embrace and left the room while the girl proceeded with her final preparations for departure. Presently there was a quick, heavy step in the corridor outside and Jefferson appeared in the doorway. He stood there waiting for her to invite him in. She looked up and greeted him cordially, yet it was hardly the kind of reception he looked for or that he considered he had a right to expect. He advanced sulkily into the room. "Mother said she had put everything right," he began. "I guess she was mistaken." "Your mother does not understand, neither do you," she replied seriously. "Nothing can be put right until my father is restored to honour and position." "But why should you punish me because my father fails to regard the matter as we do?" demanded Jefferson rebelliously. "Why should I punish myself--why should we punish those nearest and dearest?" answered Shirley gently, "the victims of human injustice always suffer where their loved ones are tortured. Why are things as they are--I don't know. I know they are--that's all." The young man strode nervously up and down the room while she gazed listlessly out of the window, looking for the cab that was to carry her away from this house of disappointment. He pleaded with her: "I have tried honourably and failed--you have tried honourably and failed. Isn't the sting of impotent failure enough to meet without striving against a hopeless love?" He approached her and said softly: "I love you Shirley--don't drive me to desperation. Must I be punished because you have failed? It's unfair. The sins of the fathers should not be visited upon the children." "But they are--it's the law," said Shirley with resignation. "The law?" he echoed. "Yes, the law," insisted the girl; "man's law, not God's, the same unjust law that punishes my father--man's law which is put into the hands of the powerful of the earth to strike at the weak." She sank into a chair and, covering up her face, wept bitterly. Between her sobs she cried brokenly: "I believed in the power of love to soften your father's heart, I believed that with God's help I could bring him to see the truth. I believed that Truth and Love would make him see the light, but it hasn't. I stayed on and on, hoping against hope until the time has gone by and it's too late to save him, too late! What can I do now? My going to Washington is a forlorn hope, a last, miserable, forlorn hope and in this hour, the darkest of all, you ask me to think of myself--my love, your love, your happiness, your future, my future! Ah, wouldn't it be sublime selfishness?" Jefferson kneeled down beside the chair and taking her hand in his, tried to reason with her and comfort her: "Listen, Shirley," he said, "do not do something you will surely regret. You are punishing me not only because I have failed but because you have failed too. It seems to me that if you believed it possible to accomplish so much, if you had so much faith--that you have lost your faith rather quickly. I believed in nothing, I had no faith and yet I have not lost hope." She shook her head and gently withdrew her hand. "It is useless to insist, Jefferson--until my father is cleared of this stain our lives--yours and mine--must lie apart." Someone coughed and, startled, they both looked up. Mr. Ryder had entered the room unobserved and stood watching them. Shirley immediately rose to her feet indignant, resenting this intrusion on her privacy after she had declined to receive the financier. Yet, she reflected quickly, how could she prevent it? He was at home, free to come and go as he pleased, but she was not compelled to remain in the same room with him. She picked up the few things that lay about and with a contemptuous toss of her head, retreated into the inner apartment, leaving father and son alone together. "Hum," grunted Ryder, Sr. "I rather thought I should find you here, but I didn't quite expect to find you on your knees--dragging our pride in the mud." "That's where our pride ought to be," retorted Jefferson savagely. He felt in the humor to say anything, no matter what the consequences. "So she has refused you again, eh?" said Ryder, Sr. with a grin. "Yes," rejoined Jefferson with growing irritation, "she objects to my family. I don't blame her." The financier smiled grimly as he answered: "Your family in general--me in particular, eh? I gleaned that much when I came in." He looked towards the door of the room in which Shirley had taken refuge and as if talking to himself he added: "A curious girl with an inverted point of view--sees everything different to others--I want to see her before she goes." He walked over to the door and raised his hand as if he were about to knock. Then he stopped as if he had changed his mind and turning towards his son he demanded: "Do you mean to say that she has done with you?" "Yes," answered Jefferson bitterly. "Finally?" "Yes, finally--forever!" "Does she mean it?" asked Ryder, Sr., sceptically. "Yes--she will not listen to me while her father is still in peril." There was an expression of half amusement, half admiration on the financier's face as he again turned towards the door. "It's like her, damn it, just like her!" he muttered. He knocked boldly at the door. "Who's there?" cried Shirley from within. "It is I--Mr. Ryder. I wish to speak to you." "I must beg you to excuse me," came the answer, "I cannot see you." Jefferson interfered. "Why do you want to add to the girl's misery? Don't you think she has suffered enough?" "Do you know what she has done?" said Ryder with pretended indignation. "She has insulted me grossly. I never was so humiliated in my life. She has returned the cheque I sent her last night in payment for her work on my biography. I mean to make her take that money. It's hers, she needs it, her father's a beggar. She must take it back. It's only flaunting her contempt for me in my face and I won't permit it." [Photo, from the play, of Mr. Ryder holding out a cheque to Shirley.] "So I contaminate even good money?"--Act IV. "I don't think her object in refusing that money was to flaunt contempt in your face, or in any way humiliate you," answered Jefferson. "She feels she has been sailing under false colours and desires to make some reparation." "And so she sends me back my money, feeling that will pacify me, perhaps repair the injury she has done me, perhaps buy me into entering into her plan of helping her father, but it won't. It only increases my determination to see her and her--" Suddenly changing the topic he asked: "When do you leave us?" "Now--at once--that is--I--don't know," answered Jefferson embarrassed. "The fact is my faculties are numbed--I seem to have lost my power of thinking. Father," he exclaimed, "you see what a wreck you have made of our lives!" "Now, don't moralize," replied his father testily, "as if your own selfishness in desiring to possess that girl wasn't the mainspring of all your actions!" Waving his son out of the room he added: "Now leave me alone with her for a few moments. Perhaps I can make her listen to reason." Jefferson stared at his father as if he feared he were out of his mind. "What do you mean? Are you--?" he ejaculated. "Go--go leave her to me," commanded the financier. "Slam the door when you go out and she'll think we've both gone. Then come up again presently." The stratagem succeeded admirably. Jefferson gave the door a vigorous pull and John Ryder stood quiet, waiting for the girl to emerge from sanctuary. He did not have to wait long. The door soon opened and Shirley came out slowly. She had her hat on and was drawing on her gloves, for through her window she had caught a glimpse of the cab standing at the curb. She started on seeing Ryder standing there motionless, and she would have retreated had he not intercepted her. "I wish to speak to you Miss--Rossmore," he began. "I have nothing to say," answered Shirley frigidly. "Why did you do this?" he asked, holding out the cheque. "Because I do not want your money," she replied with hauteur. "It was yours--you earned it," he said. "No, I came here hoping to influence you to help my father. The work I did was part of the plan. It happened to fall my way. I took it as a means to get to your heart." "But it is yours, please take it. It will be useful." "No," she said scornfully, "I can't tell you how low I should fall in my own estimation if I took your money! Money," she added, with ringing contempt, "why, that's all there is to _you!_ It's your god! Shall I make your god my god? No, thank you, Mr. Ryder!" "Am I as bad as that?" he asked wistfully. "You are as bad as that!" she answered decisively. "So bad that I contaminate even good money?" He spoke lightly but she noticed that he winced. "Money itself is nothing," replied the girl, "it's the spirit that gives it--the spirit that receives it, the spirit that earns it, the spirit that spends it. Money helps to create happiness. It also creates misery. It's an engine of destruction when not properly used, it destroys individuals as it does nations. It has destroyed you, for it has warped your soul!" "Go on," he laughed bitterly, "I like to hear you!" "No, you don't, Mr. Ryder, no you don't, for deep down in your heart you know that I am speaking the truth. Money and the power it gives you, has dried up the well-springs of your heart." He affected to be highly amused at her words, but behind the mask of callous indifference the man suffered. Her words seared him as with a red hot iron. She went on: "In the barbaric ages they fought for possession, but they fought openly. The feudal barons fought for what they stole, but it was a fair fight. They didn't strike in the dark. At least, they gave a man a chance for his life. But when you modern barons of industry don't like legislation you destroy it, when you don't like your judges you remove them, when a competitor outbids you you squeeze him out of commercial existence! You have no hearts, you are machines, and you are cowards, for you fight unfairly." "It is not true, it is not true," he protested. "It is true," she insisted hotly, "a few hours ago in cold blood you doomed my father to what is certain death because you decided it was a political necessity. In other words he interfered with your personal interests--your financial interests--you, with so many millions you can't count them!" Scornfully she added: "Come out into the light--fight in the open! At least, let him know who his enemy is!" "Stop--stop--not another word," he cried impatiently, "you have diagnosed the disease. What of the remedy? Are you prepared to reconstruct human nature?" Confronting each other, their eyes met and he regarded her without resentment, almost with tenderness. He felt strangely drawn towards this woman who had defied and accused him, and made him see the world in a new light. "I don't deny," he admitted reluctantly, "that things seem to be as you describe them, but it is part of the process of evolution." "No," she protested, "it is the work of God!" "It is evolution!" he insisted. "Ah, that's it," she retorted, "you evolve new ideas, new schemes, new tricks--you all worship different gods--gods of your own making!" He was about to reply when there was a commotion at the door and Theresa entered, followed by a man servant to carry down the trunk. "The cab is downstairs, Miss," said the maid. Ryder waved them away imperiously. He had something further to say which he did not care for servants to hear. Theresa and the man precipitately withdrew, not understanding, but obeying with alacrity a master who never brooked delay in the execution of his orders. Shirley, indignant, looked to him for an explanation. "You don't need them," he exclaimed with a quiet smile in which was a shade of embarrassment. "I--I came here to tell you that I--" He stopped as if unable to find words, while Shirley gazed at him in utter astonishment. "Ah," he went on finally, "you have made it very hard for me to speak." Again he paused and then with an effort he said slowly: "An hour ago I had Senator Roberts on the long distance telephone, and I'm going to Washington. It's all right about your father. The matter will be dropped. You've beaten me. I acknowledge it. You're the first living soul who ever has beaten John Burkett Ryder." Shirley started forward with a cry of mingled joy and surprise. Could she believe her ears? Was it possible that the dreaded Colossus had capitulated and that she had saved her father? Had the forces of right and justice prevailed, after all? Her face transfigured, radiant she exclaimed breathlessly: "What, Mr. Ryder, you mean that you are going to help my father?" "Not for his sake--for yours," he answered frankly. Shirley hung her head. In her moment of triumph, she was sorry for all the hard things she had said to this man. She held out her hand to him. "Forgive me," she said gently, "it was for my father. I had no faith. I thought your heart was of stone." Impulsively Ryder drew her to him, he clasped her two hands in his and looking down at her kindly he said, awkwardly: "So it was--so it was! You accomplished the miracle. It's the first time I've acted on pure sentiment. Let me tell you something. Good sentiment is bad business and good business is bad sentiment--that's why a rich man is generally supposed to have such a hard time getting into the Kingdom of Heaven." He laughed and went on, "I've given ten millions apiece to three universities. Do you think I'm fool enough to suppose I can buy my way? But that's another matter. I'm going to Washington on behalf of your father because I--want you to marry my son. Yes, I want you in the family, close to us. I want your respect, my girl. I want your love. I want to earn it. I know I can't buy it. There's a weak spot in every man's armour and this is mine--I always want what I can't get and I can't get your love unless I earn it." Shirley remained pensive. Her thoughts were out on Long Island, at Massapequa. She was thinking of their joy when they heard the news--her father, her mother and Stott. She was thinking of the future, bright and glorious with promise again, now that the dark clouds were passing away. She thought of Jefferson and a soft light came into her eyes as she foresaw a happy wifehood shared with him. "Why so sober," demanded Ryder, "you've gained your point, your father is to be restored to you, you'll marry the man you love?" "I'm so happy!" murmured Shirley. "I don't deserve it. I had no faith." Ryder released her and took out his watch. "I leave in fifteen minutes for Washington," he said. "Will you trust me to go alone?" "I trust you gladly," she answered smiling at him. "I shall always be grateful to you for letting me convert you." "You won me over last night," he rejoined, "when you put up that fight for your father. I made up my mind that a girl so loyal to her father would be loyal to her husband. You think," he went on, "that I do not love my son--you are mistaken. I do love him and I want him to be happy. I am capable of more affection than people think. It is Wall Street," he added bitterly, "that has crushed all sentiment out of me." Shirley laughed nervously, almost hysterically. "I want to laugh and I feel like crying," she cried. "What will Jefferson say--how happy he will be!" "How are you going to tell him?" inquired Ryder uneasily. "I shall tell him that his dear, good father has relented and--" "No, my dear," he interrupted, "you will say nothing of the sort. I draw the line at the dear, good father act. I don't want him to think that it comes from me at all." "But," said Shirley puzzled, "I shall have to tell him that you--" "What?" exclaimed Ryder, "acknowledge to my son that I was in the wrong, that I've seen the error of my ways and wish to repent? Excuse me," he added grimly, "it's got to come from him. He must see the error of _his_ ways." "But the error of his way," laughed the girl, "was falling in love with me. I can never prove to him that that was wrong!" The financier refused to be convinced. He shook his head and said stubbornly: "Well, he must be put in the wrong somehow or other! Why, my dear child," he went on, "that boy has been waiting all his life for an opportunity to say to me: 'Father, I knew I was in the right, and I knew you were wrong,' Can't you see," he asked, "what a false position it places me in? Just picture his triumph!" "He'll be too happy to triumph," objected Shirley. Feeling a little ashamed of his attitude, he said: "I suppose you think I'm very obstinate." Then, as she made no reply, he added: "I wish I didn't care what you thought." Shirley looked at him gravely for a moment and then she replied seriously: "Mr. Ryder, you're a great man--you're a genius--your life is full of action, energy, achievement. But it appears to be only the good, the noble and the true that you are ashamed of. When your money triumphs over principle, when your political power defeats the ends of justice, you glory in your victory. But when you do a kindly, generous, fatherly act, when you win a grand and noble victory over yourself, you are ashamed of it. It was a kind, generous impulse that has prompted you to save my father and take your son and myself to your heart. Why are you ashamed to let him see it? Are you afraid he will love you? Are you afraid I shall love you? Open your heart wide to us--let us love you." Ryder, completely vanquished, opened his arms and Shirley sprang forward and embraced him as she would have embraced her own father. A solitary tear coursed down the financier's cheek. In thirty years he had not felt, or been touched by, the emotion of human affection. The door suddenly opened and Jefferson entered. He started on seeing Shirley in his father's arms. "Jeff, my boy," said the financier, releasing Shirley and putting her hand in his son's, "I've done something you couldn't do--I've convinced Miss Green--I mean Miss Rossmore--that we are not so bad after all!" Jefferson, beaming, grasped his father's hand. "Father!" he exclaimed. "That's what I say--father!" echoed Shirley. They both embraced the financier until, overcome with emotion, Ryder, Sr., struggled to free himself and made his escape from the room crying: "Good-bye, children--I'm off for Washington!" THE END Transcriber's Notes: The following words used an 'ae' or 'oe' ligature in the original: Croesus, manoeuvre, subpoena, _coeur_, vertebrae, Caesar. There were a number of faded/missing letters and some transposition errors in the edition this eBook was taken from. The following corrections were made: Chapter headers standardised: V-VII previously had a trailing full-stop. Opening quote inserted: "Yes, and it was worth it to him... Typo "determinatioin": ...arriving at this determination. Opening quote inserted: "Tell me, what do the papers say?" Single quote moved: "You sent him a copy of 'The American Octopus'?" Single quote doubled: ...hatred of the hero of your book." Acute accent inserted: ...proceeded to the Hotel de l'Athénée... Typo "I'ts": ...life to my father. It's no use... Quote moved/reversed: ...said Shirley decisively. "What is more... Closing quote inserted: ...What account will you be able to give?" Typo "Rosmore": ...Judge Rossmore--that is by saving him... Closing quote inserted: "How?" asked Shirley calmly. Closing quote inserted: "Upon my word--" he said. Opening quote inserted: "The dying father, the sorrowing mother... Opening quote inserted: ...a meddlesome man," insisted Ryder "and... Opening quote inserted: ...she replied seriously. "Nothing can be... Closing quote inserted: ...a hopeless love?" He approached her... Quote moved/reversed: ...answered Jefferson embarrassed. "The fact... 
33926	----	[Illustration: "ALLOW ME TO PRESENT MY FRIEND, DICK HAMILTON." _Page_ 175. _Dick Hamilton's Cadet Days._] DICK HAMILTON'S CADET DAYS OR THE HANDICAP OF A MILLIONAIRE'S SON BY HOWARD R. GARIS AUTHOR OF "DICK HAMILTON'S FORTUNE," "FROM OFFICE BOY TO REPORTER," "LARRY DEXTER, REPORTER," "LARRY DEXTER'S GREAT SEARCH," ETC. _ILLUSTRATED_ THE WORLD SYNDICATE PUBLISHING CO. CLEVELAND, O. NEW YORK, N. Y. Copyright, 1910, by GROSSET & DUNLAP _Printed in the United States of America_ by THE COMMERCIAL BOOKBINDING CO. CLEVELAND, O. PREFACE. MY DEAR BOYS: When I had finished the first volume of this series, telling of the doings of Dick Hamilton, the young millionaire, I was in some doubt as to just how you would like it. I hoped that you would be pleased with it, and interested in Dick and his chums, and what they did, but I could not be sure of it. That you did care for it, I am now assured, and I am glad to be able to give you the second volume, relating some of Dick's experiences while at a leading military school. You will recall that, after he had come into possession of his great fortune, by fulfilling certain conditions of his mother's will, there were still other things for him to do; matters that his mother had planned before her death. One of these was to make sure that her son would get a good military training. Dick went to Kentfield Academy, but, to his surprise, he met with a very cold reception from the other cadets. Ray Dutton, not understanding that, in spite of our hero's wealth, he was a fine chap, influenced the other students against Dick, and, for a time, the young millionaire was very lonely in the big school. But he resolved to fight his own battles, and become popular in spite of his wealth. Uncle Ezra brought him bad news, but it was the means of great good luck for Dick, though Grit, the bulldog, seemed to regard the crabbed old man as his master's enemy, and chased him from the school. All this you will find set down in the present volume, and also an account of how Dick was instrumental in locating a long missing soldier, and how, when the society house of the Sacred Pig burned down, without any insurance being in force, Dick, with his wealth, came to the aid of the surprised cadets. Yours sincerely, HOWARD R. GARIS. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. DICK GETS A TELEGRAM 1 II. A CHANGE IN PLANS 14 III. GRIT ROUTS UNCLE EZRA 25 IV. IN WHICH DICK STARTS OFF 35 V. AN ODD CHARACTER 42 VI. THE HAZING 51 VII. DICK THINKS HE HAS A CLUE 62 VIII. DICK GETS A FALL 72 IX. WHO FIRED THE GUN 78 X. DICK HAS A FIGHT 85 XI. DICK GIVES A SPREAD 92 XII. AN ANGRY FARMER 100 XIII. A NARROW ESCAPE 108 XIV. CAPTAIN HANDLEE'S VISIT 117 XV. ON THE GRIDIRON 121 XVI. FOR THE PRIZE TROOP 128 XVII. DICK IN TROUBLE 135 XVIII. A DISMAL CHRISTMAS 144 XIX. THE MARKSMAN'S MEDAL 152 XX. DICK DOESN'T TELL 159 XXI. THE FANCY DRESS BALL 170 XXII. THE CHALLENGE 181 XXIII. A WINTER MARCH 190 XXIV. THE RESCUE OF DUTTON 199 XXV. OFF TO CAMP 208 XXVI. THE SHAM BATTLE 215 XXVII. DICK WINS THE CONTEST 228 XXVIII. UNCLE EZRA AT KENTFIELD 235 XXIX. DICK'S GREAT RUN 243 XXX. A BROADSWORD COMBAT 251 XXXI. DICK WRITES A CHECK--CONCLUSION 261 DICK HAMILTON'S CADET DAYS CHAPTER I DICK GETS A TELEGRAM "Hi boys! Here goes for a double summersault!" "Bet you don't do it, Frank." "You watch." "Every time you try it you come down on your back," added another lad of the group of those who were watching one of their companions poised on the end of a spring-board. "Well, this time I'm going to do it just like that circus chap did," and Frank Bender, who had an ambition to become an acrobat, raised his hands above his head and crouched for a spring. "If you do it I'll follow," said another boy, clad in a bright red bathing suit. "Good for you, Dick!" exclaimed Walter Mead. "Don't let Frank stump you." "Here I go!" cried Frank, and, a moment later, he sprang from the spring-board, leaped high into the air, and, turning over twice, came down in true diver style, his hands cleaving the water beneath which he disappeared. "Good!" cried the boys on the shore. "I didn't think he'd do it," remarked "Bricktop" Norton, so called from his shock of red hair. "Me either," added Fred Murdock. "Now it's up to you, Dick." "That's right." Dick Hamilton rose from a log on which he was sitting. He was a tall, clean-cut chap, straight as an arrow, with an easy grace about him, and it needed but a glance to show that he was of athletic build. His red bathing suit, from which protruded bronzed arms and legs, was particularly becoming to him. "There--let's--see--you--do--that!" spluttered Frank, as he came up, some distance from where he had gone down. He shook his head to rid his eyes and ears of water, and struck out for shore. "Stay there!" called Dick. "I'll swim out farther than you did." "Dick's cutting out some work for himself," remarked Bricktop, in a low tone to Bill Johnson. "Frank's a dandy swimmer." "Yes, but Dick Hamilton usually does what he sets out to do," replied Bill. "There he goes." Dick walked to the end of the spring-board. He teetered up and down on it two or three times, testing the balance of the long plank. Then he took a few steps backward, poised for an instant, and ran forward. "There he goes!" called Walter. Like a rubber ball Dick Hamilton arose in the air. He curled himself up into a lump as he leaped, and then, to the surprise of his companions, he turned over not twice, but three times ere he struck the water, which closed up over his feet as they disappeared. "Well--wouldn't that sizzle your side combs!" cried Bricktop. "Three times!" "A triple!" added Walter Mead. "Whoever would think Dick could do it!" "Aw, he's been practicing," called Frank, as he circled about in the water, watching for Dick to come up. "He's been doing it on the sly, and he's kept quiet about it." "Just like Dick," added Bill. "He isn't satisfied to do ordinary stunts." "Well, he's done a good one this time," said Fred Murdock. "Say, isn't he staying under a long time?" There was no sight of the millionaire youth. "Maybe he hit his head on a rock," suggested Bricktop, in some alarm. "That's so," went on Fred. "This place isn't any too deep, and he came down hard." "Maybe we'd better go in after him," remarked Walter. "Dive down!" called Bill to Frank. The boys were becoming frightened. Not a ripple, save the little waves made by Frank, as he stood upright, treading water, disturbed the expanse of the swimming hole. There was no sign of Dick Hamilton. Frank prepared for a dive, when, suddenly, at some distance from shore something shot up through the water. It was the hand and arm of a boy. An instant later his head and shoulders popped into view. "There he is!" cried Walter. "It's about time he came up," said Bill, somewhat sharply, for Dick's long under-water swim had frightened the boys. "How's that, fellows?" asked Dick, as he shook the water from his face, and struck out for shore. "You win!" cried Frank, "but please don't give us heart disease again." "Why; what's the matter?" "We'd thought you'd struck on a stone and weren't going to come up again." "No danger of that," answered Dick, with a laugh. "I'm having too much fun at camp here, to stay down there. Did I make a good dive?" "Did you? Say, you've got us all beat to a pig's whisper on Fourth of July," admitted Bricktop. "How'd you do it?" "Yes, I wish you'd show me," added Frank. "You must have been practicing it." "I have," admitted Dick. "It's easy when you know how. After you do a double summersault, all you have to do--is to make another one, making three in all, and you can see that I had nothing concealed up my sleeve, and----" "And you did it without the aid of a net," added Fred, after the fashion of the ringmaster in a circus announcing some marvelous feat. "I'm going to try it," said Frank, as he clambered out on the bank. "No, I think we've been in the water long enough this morning," said Dick. "Besides it's most grub time. I don't know how you feel about it, but I think I could nibble at a bit of roast chicken, which I happen to know that our esteemed cook, Hannibal Cæsar Erastus Jones, has in the oven." "Ah! Um!" murmured Bill Johnson. "That's it! Make a noise like a lunch-grabber!" objected Fred. "I should think you'd be ashamed of yourself." "Oh, listen to the professor at the breakfast table!" cried Bill with a laugh. "I don't s'pose you're going to nibble at any; art thou, Reginald?" "Well, you just watch him," advised Fred. "He's got me beat, all right." "Come on!" cried Dick suddenly. "First fellow at the dining tent gets most of the white meat!" He started off at a fast clip, the others sprinting after him, and he would have won, but that he stubbed his bare toe on a stone, and had to finish the rest of the distance on one leg, holding the injured member in his hands, making, the while, wry faces at the pain. Bill Johnson won the impromptu race. "Hurt much?" asked Walter, as Dick limped up. "Like sin. Say, Hannibal Cæsar Erastus Jones, will you do me a favor?" he asked, as the colored cook, who did the camp cooking, came from his tent. "Ob co'se, Massa Dick. What am it?" "Just go back there in the woods and bring me the pieces of that stone I broke with my toe. I want 'em for souveniers." "Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! Massa Dick, doan yo' go to playin' no tricks on me! Not jest at de present auspicious moment," and the colored man grinned broadly, showing a big expanse of white teeth, in an area of blackness. "Why not, Rastus?" "'Case as how de chicken am all done, an' if it ain't partook of immejeet----" "Never mind those souveniers," said Dick. "We'll be with you in the twinkling of a flea's left hand eyelash," and he hopped into his tent, and began to dress, an example followed by the other boys. "Humph!" murmured Hannibal Cæsar Erastus Jones, as he stood in the midst of the camp, rapidly blinking his eyes. "Fust I eber knowed a flea had a eyelash. But Massa Dick, he must know, 'case he's po'ful smart. But I 'spects I'd better git ready to serb up de grub, as dey calls it, 'case dey's allers pow'ful hungry when dey's been in swimmin'. Come t' t'ink ob it, dough, dey's most allers ready t' eat." And, chuckling to himself, Hannibal started toward the cook tent. It did not take the boys long to dress, and as they emerged from the tents, their faces glowing with health, and bronzed from their life in the open, they were as fine a group of lads as you would meet in a day's travel, or, maybe a day and a half. They were all guests of Dick Hamilton, who, as had been his custom for several years past, had taken a crowd of his chums off to camp on the shores of Lake Dunkirk, a large body of water near Hamilton Corners, where Dick lived. "Ah! Um! Smell that chicken!" murmured Bill Johnson, as he lifted his nose high in the air. "There you go again! Displaying your lack of manners!" objected Fred. "Why don't you wait in patience and dignity, as I do." "Well, wouldn't that melt your collar button!" remarked Bricktop. "Where's the glass case they took you out of, Fred?" "Manners?" asked Dick, as he approached Fred from the side. "Excuse me, but there's something sticking out there." As he spoke he slyly extended his foot, and, a moment later Fred measured his length on the carpet of soft, pine needles of the woods. "Goodness me! Did you fall?" asked Dick, as he looked down, in apparent surprise at his chum. "How careless of you." "Ha! Ha! Ha!" laughed Bill. "Come here, Fred, and I'll pick you up." Fred arose, smiling rather sheepishly, but not at all angry. He brushed off his clothes, and joined in the laugh that followed. "It's your turn next," observed the young millionaire. "I'll have to keep my weather eye open, Fred." "All right," said the lad who had been tripped. "Well, Hannibal--Alphabet--Jones; art ready for the gathering of the clans who hunger after the flesh-pots of Egypt?" asked Dick. "All ready, Massa Dick," replied the colored cook. "Come on." "First down! One wish-bone to gain!" called Walter Mead, as he took his place at the table set under the tent fly. For the next five minutes the boys were so busy eating the roast chicken, corn bread and other good things that Hannibal-and-the-rest-of-it-Jones, with his knowledge of Southern cookery had provided, that they said not a word. Then, with a long-drawn sigh of satisfaction, Bill observed: "There certainly is nothing like a good meal." "Unless it's two," added Bricktop. "I didn't much fancy Dick's plan of taking a professional cook along when we came to camp this year, because it used to be fun to do it ourselves, but our cooking was never like this." "Never, never, never!" exclaimed Fred. "I'll have a little more chicken, if you don't mind, Dick." "Certainly not. There's plenty." "Yes, this is better than having to do it ourselves," said Frank Bender, as he finished polishing off a juicy leg. "No dishes to wash, nothing to bother with after you're through, only have a good time. Dick, you're a brick!" "As long as I'm not a gold one, it's all right," said the millionaire's son. "But I thought you'd agree with me that it was best to take a cook along." "It sure is all to the pancake batter," observed Bricktop. "Well, I don't mind if I do have a little more of the white meat, if you insist," he added, though no one had asked him to pass his plate. Dick laughed as he helped his chum to some choice bits. Matters were moving more slowly, now that the first edge of hunger was dulled, and the boys were taking occasional stops to make remarks. "What's the program for this afternoon?" asked Walter, as he drained his coffee cup. "Are we going fishing?" "Whatever you say," replied Dick, who, like a true host, always consulted the wishes of his guests. "We can fish, take a walk, or go out in the motor boat." "The motor boat for mine," said Bill. "I want to get on a pile of cushions and take a snooze." "Well, wouldn't that give you the nightmare!" came from Bricktop. "You're getting lazier every day, Bill." "Help yourself," spoke the sleepy youth, as he slumped from the table and stretched out under a tree. "I guess a trip in the motor boat would suit us all best," observed Dick. "Hannibal 'Rastus, just fill up the gasolene tank, will you?" "Oh, why wasn't I born rich instead of handsome," murmured Bricktop, who never would have taken a prize in a beauty show. "But my fatal gift of----" "Cut it out!" cried Walter, throwing a pine cone with such good aim, that it went right into Bricktop's open mouth. "Oh! Ah! Ug! Blug! Chug! Hum!" spluttered the discomfitted one. "Who threw that?" he demanded, when he could speak. Nobody answered, and, feeling in no mood to get up and chastise Walter, whose sly grin proclaimed him the culprit, Bricktop stretched out again. "Hark! That sounds like a wagon coming," observed Fred, as he sat up, after a few minutes of silence. "Guess it's the ice man," said Dick, for he had arranged to have a supply left at the camp. He believed in having all the comforts possible when he went into the woods. "Doesn't rumble like an ice wagon," commented Bill. "Sounds more like a load of steel girders," added Walter. At this, Dick arose. He peered through the trees toward a seldom-used wagon road, which ran near the camp. He caught sight of something moving. "It's a wagon, all right," he said, "but it isn't the ice man." A few moments later a remarkable rig hove into sight. It consisted of a rattle-trap of a wagon, loaded with all sorts of scrap iron, and drawn by a horse that looked as if it had escaped from the bone yard. It just crawled along. On the seat was a bright-faced youth, who was doing his best to excite the animal into a speed a little better than that of a snail. He jerked on the reins, called at the horse, and cracked his whip, but all to no purpose. "It's no use!" he exclaimed, as he looked through the trees and caught sight of Dick and his chums. "He's got the pip, or something like that." "Why, hello, Henry," called Dick. "What brings you away off here? There's no scrap around here." "I thought maybe you boys might have had one or two that you'd sell cheap," said the young dealer in old iron, and there was a twinkle in his eyes. "They're all too lazy to fight, except me," observed Bricktop, "and I'm too good." "Stow that!" commanded Fred, making a pass at his chum, who jumped back out of reach. "Aren't you quite a way from home?" asked Dick, as he went up and shook hands with Henry Darby. "Yes, I am. But you see I'm driving around the country, collecting old iron. This is my dull season, and I took my oldest rig, and started off day before yesterday. I'm taking it easy--have to you know, on account of my horse's health. His delicate constitution makes it necessary. There doesn't seem to be much old iron about, and I've got this far, without picking up a full load." "Why don't you give some to your horse. Iron is good for the constitution," said Dick. "I thought of it, but you see all the iron I have is in long pieces and sticks out all sorts of ways. If my horse swallowed any of it he'd have more fine points than he's got now. So I guess I'll keep him on grain." "But you haven't told me why you're away off here in the woods," went on Dick. "Is there any iron about here?" "No, not that I know of. I came to find you." "To find me?" "Yes. I have a telegram for you. I happened to stop in the village back there, and while I was making some inquiries in the post-office, which is also the telegraph station, a message came for you. The operator had no one he could send with it, and, as I happened to know where you were camping, I said I'd take it. He gave me a quarter for bringing it out, and so I've made some profit to-day." "A telegram!" cried Dick. "Why didn't you say so at first? Give it here," and he held out his hand. "I didn't want to scare you," said Henry. "I was breaking the news gently." He handed over the yellow envelope. Dick tore it open, and, as he read the short message, he gave a start. "No bad news I hope," remarked Walter. "No, I guess not," replied Dick slowly. "But I've got to leave for home at once." "Leave for home!" cried his chums. "Yes. This is from dad. It says: 'Dear Dick. Come home as soon as you get this. Important.'" CHAPTER II A CHANGE IN PLANS Following Dick's reading of the telegram there was silence among the campers. They all imagined something had happened to Mr. Hamilton, Dick's father, and they hesitated to give voice to their thoughts. "Well, I'd offer to take you home in my chariot," said Henry Darby, with a suggestion of a smile, "only I know you'd be two days on the road. Though it might be a good thing," he added "for your father would hear us coming long before he could see us, with the way this old iron rattles. I wish some one would invent noiseless scrap iron." "Do you--do you s'pose your father is--is hurt?" asked Walter, finally putting into words what all the others thought. "Not a bit of it," replied Dick, stoutly. "Dad knows me well enough to say right out what he means. He wants me home, for some reason or other, but I don't know what it can be," and he looked at the telegram in a puzzled sort of way, as if the slip of paper would solve the mystery for him. "Maybe--maybe he's lost all his money," suggested Frank "and you've got to give up the camp." "No, I guess there's no danger of dad losing all his money so quickly," relied the young millionaire. "He had plenty when I came away, two weeks ago, and he's got so many investments that he couldn't lose it all at once, even if he tried. No, it's something else. I wonder what it is?" "I s'pose the best way to find out, is to go and ask him, about it," suggested Henry. "That's it," assented Dick. "I could telegraph, but he might be away from home, and wouldn't get it. I guess I'll have to leave camp, fellows." "Then we'll go, too," said Bricktop. "No, there's no need of that. I invited you out for three weeks, and that time isn't up yet. You might as well stay. Hannibal will cook for you, and if I can come back I will. Otherwise you stay here and enjoy yourselves." "We won't enjoy ourselves very much if you leave," said Walter regretfully, and the others echoed his sentiment. "Well, that's a compliment to me," declared Dick, with a smile, "but I guess you'll manage to exist. Now I wonder how I'd better go? Henry, I s'pose I could ride with you to the village, and take a train." "I should advise you to," remarked the young iron merchant. "This nag went to sleep four times coming out, and he's snoring now. No telling what he'll do on the way back. He seems to like life in the woods. I guess he must have been a wild horse once, and he's going back to nature." "He's not very wild now," observed Bricktop, tickling the animal with a switch. "He won't even move." "No, it takes quite a while to get him started," said Henry. "Usually I have to begin the day before, to get him into action. No, Dick, I shouldn't advise you to ride with me." "What's the matter with the motor boat?" asked Frank. "You can go to the village in that." "That's so," agreed Dick. "You fellows can take me over, and bring her back. We'll do it." "Well," remarked Henry, as he began to take in the slack of the reins, preparatory to starting the horse, "I guess I'll be going. I hope you find everything all right at home, Dick." "I guess I will. Probably this has something to do with business matters. But, say, don't you want a bite to eat? We just finished grub, and there's a little that these cannibals didn't stow away." "Well, I do begin to feel the need of something," said the young dealer in old iron. "The crackers and cheese I got in the village weren't very filling." "Tie your horse, and sit down to the table. Hannibal-and-half-a-dozen-other-names will get you something. Ho! Rastus!" called Dick. "No need to tie this horse," said Henry with grim smile. "If I did he'd imagine he was home in the stable, and go so sound to sleep that it would take two days to wake him. I'll just put some oats down in front of him, and, maybe he'll rouse up enough to eat them. That will keep him from taking naps." The youthful iron merchant did this, and, while he was making a bountiful meal from what the colored cook set before him, Dick was preparing to start for home, wondering, meanwhile, why his father had sent for him so suddenly. Those of you who have read the first book of this series entitled "Dick Hamilton's Fortune," will need no introduction to the millionaire youth and his chums. But you boys and girls who have not previously met him, may desire a little introduction. Dick Hamilton was the only son of Mortimer Hamilton, of Hamilton Corners, not far from New York. The town was named after Mr. Hamilton because he was financially interested in many of the industries of the place. He was president of the national bank, owned large woolen mills, a brass foundry, a lumber concern, and was head of a railroad and a trolley line that added much of importance to the place. Mr. Hamilton counted his fortune by the millions, and his son, who had inherited a large sum from his mother, was also the possessor of substantial bank accounts. In the first volume there was told how, on a certain birthday Dick came into control of a large part of his wealth, subject to a peculiar condition of his mother's will. That is, he was to make, inside of a year, a wise and paying investment of some of his funds, under penalty of losing control of his fortune for a time, and having to live with a miserly uncle. This uncle, Ezra Larabee by name, of the town of Dankville, was Mrs. Hamilton's brother. One of the conditions of her will was that Dick should spend a week with his uncle before entering into possession of the money, that he might see what sort of a life he was likely to lead, in case he did not comply with the provisions. Dick had a miserable time at Mr. Larabee's. He was not allowed to have any fun, and his uncle even objected to him walking on the paths, for fear he would disturb the newly-raked gravel. Dick returned home, determined to make a paying investment if only to escape his uncle's clutches. He did make several investments, by buying real estate, some stock in a milk company, and some shares in a gold mine. But they all turned out badly, and, while investigating the mine by means of which he had been swindled, he had, with his chums, some exciting adventures. In Hamilton Corners, dwelt "Hank" Darby, a shiftless sort of man, and his son, Henry, who was as energetic as his father was lazy. Henry started to make money, in a small way, by collecting scrap iron, and selling it, but his shiftless parent nearly brought the business to grief. Dick became interested in Henry's efforts, and, as the young millionaire had plenty of money, he loaned Henry two hundred and fifty dollars, to buy out the iron business of a man who wished to retire. "Hank" Darby, with an exaggerated idea of his own importance, elected himself president of the old iron company, made Dick treasurer, and Henry secretary. Dick gave little thought to the money he had loaned his young friend, but the time came when it was to prove of great benefit to him. One after another his various investments failed, and he saw the time approaching when he must go to live with his miserly uncle. His last venture was to invest five hundred dollars in an airship, the inventor of which hoped to win a government prize, which he promised to divide with Dick. But the airship blew up, and Dick saw his next birthday dawn, without, as he thought, having made his paying investment. Uncle Ezra, who was much opposed to his nephew having so much money, came, according to agreement, to get Dick to take him to Dankville with him. But, at the last moment, something quite unexpected happened and it was found that Dick had, after all, complied with the terms of his mother's will, and he was, therefore, allowed to keep control of his fortune. But, as told in the first volume, there were still other stipulations with which he must comply. Following the events told of in "Dick Hamilton's Fortune," our millionaire hero had completed his course at a local academy. When summer came he took some of his chums off to camp in the woods, and it was there that Henry, who was still in the old iron business, found him. "Well, I guess I'm ready," remarked Dick, as he came from his tent, one of several that formed the camp. "I'll not take any of my things, for I may be able to come back and finish out the vacation." "I certainly hope so," said Bricktop fervently. "Same here," added Walter and the others. By this time Henry had made a good meal, and, as his horse showed some signs of life, he remarked that he thought he would start, before the beast got to sleep again. "Did you gasolene the motor boat, Rastus?" asked Dick of the colored cook. "Yais sah, Massa Dick." "All right. Now see that these poor kids don't get hungry while I'm gone. Let 'em take pieces of pie to bed with 'em, to keep 'em quiet." "Ho! Ho! Massa Dick. Deed an' I will. Pie to bed wif 'em! Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho!" The boys entered the motor boat, leaving Hannibal in charge of camp, and they soon reached the village, whence Dick could take a train for home. "Now, fellows, enjoy yourselves," he called to them, as they watched him board the train at the depot. "I'll come back if I can. Better practice that triple summersault, Frank." "I will. I'll stump you, when you come back." "I wish I didn't have to leave them," thought Dick, as he settled himself in his seat. "I wonder what dad wants of me? But there's no use worrying. I'll be home in about two hours." He exhibited his pass, on which he was traveling, as his father was president of the railroad, and then sat looking at the scenery, vainly wondering, in spite of his efforts not to dwell on it, why he had been summoned home. "Well, Dick," greeted his father, when the young millionaire entered the house. "You got back sooner than I expected." "Yes, dad. I started as soon as I got your message. I hope nothing is the matter." "Nothing serious. The fact is I have to leave for Europe next week----" "For Europe! And are you going to take me?" "No, I'm sorry to say I can't. But I have other plans for you, which I hope you will like. I unexpectedly received a call to England, to settle some large financial matters in which I am interested, and, as I shall have to be gone six months or more I decided to close the house up and let the servants go. As that would make no place for you to stay, unless you boarded, which you might not like, I decided to send for you, and tell you what I propose. The reason I telegraphed for you is that I will be so busy after to-day that I will have no time to attend to anything." "What are you going to do with me?" asked Dick. "You remember," went on Mr. Hamilton, "that in her will, your mother specified, in addition to making a good investment, that you must attend a military academy----" "That's so!" cried Dick. "I'd forgotten about that. Say, when can I go? This beats camp!" "Not so fast," cautioned his father. "There are certain conditions to be fulfilled. Your mother had peculiar ideas regarding money. She wished her son to become a success in spite of it. So she provided, under certain penalties, which you will learn of later, that you were to go to a good military academy to complete your education. "There, as I told you once before, though you may have forgotten it, you are to become popular with the students in spite of your wealth. You are to make your own way without the aid of your millions. And this is no easy matter. While many persons have a false notion of wealth, by far the larger class attach to it only the importance it deserves. A rich lad can, to a certain extent, become popular, but he will never have the real, solid friends that some youth not so well off would win. So you've got to make friends in spite of your money." "That ought to be easy," said Dick, but he was to find it a harder task than he had supposed it would be. "So, as I have to go away, and close up the house," went on Mr. Hamilton, "I have arranged that you are to go to the academy a little ahead of time, about two weeks before the term opens. That will give you a chance to find your way around the place." "Where is it?" "It is the Kentfield Military Academy, located in one of the middle western states, and is near Lake Wagatook. Colonel James Masterly, a friend of mine, is the superintendent, and I have written to him concerning you. He gave me permission to send you on ahead of time, and that is what I propose to do. You will have to get ready to go at the end of this week. I hope you do not object." "Not in the least, dad. We were having lots of fun at camp, but I'll have more fun at Kentfield. Shoulder arms! present arms! Halt! parade rest! Wow! Say, dad, this is the best yet!" "Wait until you've spent a term there," advised his father. "If I don't have to start until the end of the week, I might as well go back to camp," said Dick, when he had calmed down a bit. "Just as you like. From now on I shall be too busy to see much of you, but I will make all arrangements." "All right, dad. I'll go back to camp then. I can get a late train," and Dick went to see what time it left, meanwhile whistling a succession of military airs, from "The Girl I left Behind Me," to "Yankee Doodle." He reached camp late that night, somewhat to the surprise of his chums, and they spent the next few days in crowding in as much pleasure as possible. When it became time for Dick to leave, the others decided to go back home with him, as the three weeks were nearly up. CHAPTER III GRIT ROUTS UNCLE EZRA "There's a man out in the vestibule who wants to see you, Master Dick," said Gibbs, the butler, one evening, a few days before the time of departure to the academy. "Who is it?" "Captain Handlee." "Tell him to come in." Dick knew Captain Handlee as an old soldier, who lived in a tumble-down house on the outskirts of the village. The veteran, escorted by the butler, entered shyly. Dick greeted him kindly, and the old man began almost abruptly: "Did you ever hear that I had a son?" "No, I never knew that. Where is he?" "That is what I want you to help me to find out." "You want me to help you? Why, how can I?" asked Dick. "I don't know that you can. I only hope so. Will you?" "I will do all I can for you, but perhaps you want to see my father," for Dick had an idea that the old man wanted some money for some purpose. "No, I want to see you, Mr. Dick. You see you are going to a military academy, and that is why I think you can help me." "But I don't understand." "Listen, and I will tell you. As you know, I am an old soldier, but few persons around here know that my only son was a soldier, too." "I certainly did not. I never knew that you had a son." "Well, I did, and he was a fine chap, too. He enlisted in the regular army, where I served my time, but for many years I have heard nothing about him." "What happened?" "He was among the missing after his company was sent to quell an uprising among the Indians, out west, many years ago. No word was ever received from him, and I don't know whether he was killed, or taken captive. I never heard anything about him, and now I think you can aid me in locating him." "But how can I?" "By making inquiries at the military academy." "But it is not likely that any one at Kentfield would know of your son." "They might. When your father told me you were going there, he mentioned that Major Franklin Webster, a retired army officer, was in charge of military tactics at the school. Now Major Webster is an old Indian fighter, and I thought that if you asked him, he might be able to get some news of my son. Will you do this for me?" "I will, gladly, but I have not much hope of the result." "Perhaps it will amount to nothing," said the old soldier with a sigh, "but it is the first chance I have had in many years. All my inquiries of the war department resulted in nothing. Perhaps you may have better luck." "I hope so," replied Dick gently. "I will make some inquiries. What is your son's name?" "He was christened William, but his friends in the army called him Corporal Bill." "How would Major Webster know him?" "Oh, easily enough. I have his picture." The veteran drew a faded photograph from his pocket, and held the card so that Dick could see it. "That's him," said the old man proudly. The young millionaire saw the photograph of a youthful soldier in uniform. "Your son would be much older than that now; wouldn't he, Captain Handlee?" "Yes, I suppose so. I think he must have been injured in some way, and forgotten his name. Otherwise he would have written to me. But I know another way in which you could recognize him." "How?" "He was the best shot in his company. He was a sharpshooter, and one of the finest. So if you can get track of a soldier, who is a good shot, that may be my son, Corporal Bill. Will you try?" "I will, Captain, I'll do my best." "God bless you," said the veteran fervently. "And now I'll leave you. I'd let you take this photograph, only it's--it's all I have to remember--my son by," and his voice choked. "I don't believe I'll need that," answered Dick. "I'll speak to Major Webster, and see what I can do." The old soldier, murmuring his thanks, left the house. "Well," mused Dick, as he went to his room, "I'll soon be at Kentfield. It'll be lonesome, at first, I expect, but the cadets will soon arrive. And I'll try to find the captain's son. "I wonder how I'll make out with the cadets? I don't see why I should have any trouble making friends, or becoming popular, no matter if I am a millionaire, and the son of one. Money ought not to make such a difference. Still, as dad says, I may find it a handicap." He looked around the room where he had spent so many pleasant hours. It was an ideal boy's apartment, with everything the most exacting youth could desire. "I think I'll make out all right," Dick mused on. "But if worst comes to worst, I have a plan up my sleeve which I think will work." His eyes sparkled, and it was evident that he had just thought of some scheme. "That ought to do it," he said, speaking half aloud. "If I can't win any other way, I'll try that." "Well, Dick," remarked his father, the next morning, "I suppose you are all ready to go to Kentfield?" "Yes. I've got everything packed. What will be your address on the other side?" "Oh, yes, I must leave you that. Here it is. You can forward me letters in care of my London bankers, and they will see that I get them. I may have to put in some time on the continent. By the way, Dick, I hear that Captain Handlee called to see you last night." "Yes, he wants me to help him locate his missing son," and Dick told his father of the interview with the old soldier. "Poor man," remarked Mr. Hamilton, shaking his head, "I fear there is little hope for him. I once aided him in making some inquiries, but they came to nothing." "Do you know him?" "Oh, yes, I have often aided him, and I would do more for him, but he is too proud to accept charity. He is rather odd at times, and does not remain at any employment long, or I could give him a good place. His whole mind is set on finding his son. If the missing corporal could be located it would be the making of Captain Handlee, for he would settle down then." "I don't suppose I can help him." "No, I'm afraid not. Still, do all you can. It is barely possible that Major Webster, or some of the officers who are stationed at Kentfield, may be able to put you on the track, but I doubt it. Well, I think I'll have to go down to the bank now. I'll see you to-night, and say good-bye in the morning." Not long after Mr. Hamilton had left, and while Dick was in his room, packing some of his belongings, a maid who was new in the house came to inform him that a visitor was in the library. "Who is it?" he asked. "I don't know, but it's someone, Master Dick, who your dog doesn't like, for he's growling something fierce." "I'll come down," said the young millionaire, and he hurried to the library. As he entered a tall, thin man, with a curious little bunch of whiskers on his chin, arose. "Well, I must say, Nephew Richard," he began, in a rasping voice, "that this is a nice reception for me. Your horrible beast nearly bit me. The house is no place for dogs." "I'm sorry that Grit annoyed you, Uncle Ezra," said Dick as he recognized the miserly man whom he had once visited. "Hum!" grunted the old man. "If I hadn't stood on a chair he would have bit me, and then I'd get hydrophobia, and die. Your father would have had to pay damages, too." "I'm glad no such thing as that happened, Uncle Ezra." "Hum! Where's your father?" "Down to the bank. I can telephone, and let him know that you are here." "It isn't necessary. No need of wearing out the wires that way. I can wait. I hear he has some foolish notion of sending you to a military school." "I am going to a military academy, Uncle Ezra, in accordance with my mother's wishes." "Stuff and nonsense! A wicked waste of money! The ordinary schools were good enough for me, and they ought to be good enough for you. It's a sinful waste of money. Mortimer Hamilton ought to be ashamed of himself. The money ought to go to the heathen. It's foolish." "My father doesn't think so," replied Dick as quietly as he could, though he was fast becoming angry at the dictatorial tone of his crabbed uncle. "Hum! Much he knows about it! The idea of putting such ideas into boys' heads as fighting and killing. Hu!" "But it might be useful in case of war." "Stuff and nonsense! It's positively wicked, I tell you. I've come to remonstrate with Mortimer about it. If he has to go to Europe, which is another waste of money, he could leave you with me. I'd bring you up in the way you should go. There's no nonsense about me, nor my wife, either. If your father consents to having you come to my place, you'll learn more than you would at any military academy. Stuff and nonsense! Don't talk to me! I know!" Dick could not repress a shudder as he thought of his uncle's gloomy home in Dankville, a house amid a clump of fir trees, so dark, so quiet and so lonesome that it reminded him of a vault in the cemetery. "I think my father has made up his mind to send me to the military academy," said the boy. "Well, perhaps I can make him change his mind. He doesn't know what's good for boys." How Uncle Ezra Larabee could understand what lads needed, never having had any sons of his own, was more than Dick could fathom, but he said nothing. "I'll wait and see your father," went on the crabbed man. "I can get my automobile and take you to the bank," suggested Dick. "No, you might burst a tire, and that would cost something to fix." Dick could hardly repress a smile at the idea of a possible injured tire standing in the way of an auto ride. "What's that girl walking back and forth so much for in the next room?" asked Uncle Ezra suddenly. "That's the maid, clearing away the breakfast things." "Hum! She'll wear the carpet out," commented the old man. "I must speak to Mortimer about it. I think I'll caution her now." He rose, to do this, but accidentally stepped on one of Grit's legs, as the animal was reposing under a chair, where Dick had sent him to get him out of the way. The dog let out a howl, and then a savage growl, and made for the man he felt had purposely injured him. "Hold him! Catch him!" cried Uncle Ezra, as he sprang away. "Hold him, Nephew Richard!" "Grit!" called Dick. "Come here!" But the dog refused to mind. Growling and snarling, he ran after Uncle Ezra. The latter did not stop to speak to the maid about wearing out the carpet. Instead he kept on to the front hall, and to the entrance door, which was, fortunately, open. Down the steps, three at a time, jumped Mr. Larabee, the dog close behind him. But, by this time Dick had caught up to his pet, and grasped him by the collar. "Grit! Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" he asked, but he could hardly keep from smiling, while, as for Grit, he nearly wagged off his stump of a tail, so glad was he at having routed Uncle Ezra. "I'll go down and see your father at the bank!" cried the excited man, turning when he was safely on the sidewalk. "The idea of having a savage beast like that in the house. I'll see Mortimer and make him change his plans. And I tell you one thing, Nephew Richard, if you come to live with me you'll have to get rid of that bulldog," and, angrily shaking his head, Uncle Ezra tramped down the street, walking slowly to save shoe leather, though he was a very rich man. "I hope dad doesn't allow himself to be influenced by Uncle Ezra," thought Dick, as he went back into the house with the dog. "We never could stand it at Dankville; could we, Grit?" And the animal whined as if he understood. CHAPTER IV IN WHICH DICK STARTS OFF Mr. Hamilton came home early that afternoon, bringing Mr. Larabee, his brother-in-law, with him. Dick was anxiously awaiting their arrival. "Is that fierce beast in the house?" demanded the boy's uncle, as he stood on the front steps. "If he is I'll not come in." "I've sent him to the stable, uncle," replied the young millionaire. "That's the proper place for him. Dogs are no good. They eat as much as a man, and what you spend on keeping them would provide for a heathen child in Africa." Dick wondered if Uncle Ezra provided for any heathen children, from his wealth, but did not think it wise to ask. "Well, Dick," said Mr. Hamilton, when they were all three in the library, "your uncle thinks it would be a good plan for me to leave you with him, while I'm away." "Yes?" remarked Dick, his heart beating faster than usual. "It's the only sensible plan," said Uncle Ezra with a snort. "Your idea of a military academy, where he'll learn to shoot and stab his fellow citizens, is a foolish one, Mortimer." "It is not altogether my plan," said Mr. Hamilton softly as he thought of his dead wife. "Dick's mother provided for his future in her will, and I must see that her wishes are carried out. Besides, I think a military training is good for a young man." "Stuff and nonsense!" exclaimed Uncle Ezra. "Neither you nor I had it, Mortimer, and we got along. We're both well off." "Money isn't everything," said Mr. Hamilton. "No, Ezra, I'm much obliged for your offer, but I think Dick will go to Kentfield. He is to start in the morning." "Hum! It's a foolish idea," again snorted Uncle Ezra. "You'll live to see the day you'll both be sorry for it." "I hope not, Ezra." "Well, you will." "We'll not discuss that now. Will you have a cigar before dinner?" "I never smoke. It's a dangerous and expensive habit." "Slightly dangerous, perhaps, but I smoke very little. As for the expense, I think I can afford it. This has been quite a prosperous year for me--and Dick." "What you spend for cigars would pay the interest on a large loan," went on Mr. Larabee. "Yes, but I don't need the loan," declared Mr. Hamilton with a smile, "and I do feel that I need a cigar to rest me after my day's work. However, I don't advocate tobacco for young men, and Dick has promised not to smoke until he is of age, and that will not be for a few years yet." "Stuff and nonsense!" exclaimed Uncle Ezra, as he could thing of nothing else to say. "Perhaps you'd like a glass of lemonade before dinner," suggested Dick. "No," replied the austere man. "I don't think I'll stop for dinner. My visit here has resulted in no good, and the sooner I get back home the better. Besides I've got a new hired man, and I'm almost certain he'll set the barn afire; he's so careless." "Oh, I hope not, Ezra," said Mr. Hamilton. "So do I, but I'd be nervous all night and I wouldn't sleep. Then I might get sick, and have to pay out money for a doctor, or some medicine. No; I'll take the late train home." "But that won't get you there until after midnight." "That's all right. It'll be cooler then, and there won't be so much danger of overheating the horse. When you overheat a horse you sometimes have to buy medicine for him, and horse medicine is expensive." Seeing that his brother-in-law could not be prevailed upon to remain, Mr. Hamilton bade him good-bye, and Dick offered to take his uncle to the depot in the auto, but Mr. Larabee would not hear of it. He would walk, he said, and save the car fare. "He's a queer man--your uncle," said Mr. Hamilton that night. "I guess you wouldn't fancy staying with him; eh Dick?" "No, indeed, dad. A military academy for mine, as Bricktop would say." Dick was up early the next morning, when both he and his father were to go away from home, each for a considerable time. The servants had been provided for, and the handsome Hamilton mansion would be closed for several months. Dick accompanied his father to the bank after breakfast, and planned to go to the depot from there, some of his chums having arranged to meet him at the station. "Ah, good morning, gentlemen!" exclaimed a pompous voice, as Dick and his father entered the institution, and the young millionaire saw "Hank" Darby, ready to greet them. "I understand you are about to become a soldier," he went on to Dick. "Well, a sort of one," replied our hero. "Ah, that's a grand and noble calling. I once thought I would be one of the defenders of my country, but I was called into other lines of activity," said the father of the young proprietor of the scrap iron business. He did not specify what the other lines were. "It is indeed noble to fight for one's flag," went on the shiftless man, "but it is also noble to accumulate wealth with which to fit out armies. That is what I am doing. I am accumulating wealth." "How is it going?" asked Mr. Hamilton, who, as well as did Dick, knew that Henry, the son, made all the money, which "Hank" spent as fast as he could get any of it. "Well, it might be better," said the shiftless one. "But I have a scheme on hand." "Another scheme, eh?" "Yes, this is a very good one. There are enormous possibilities in it, sir, _enormous_!" and "Hank" fairly stood on his tiptoes to get this last word out with much emphasis. "Well, I hope you succeed," said Mr. Hamilton, as he and his son went to the millionaire's private office. The final details for the trips of father and son were arranged. Dick had his own bank account, and would not want for money. His father gave him some advice, and then the two said good-bye to each other, Dick having to leave before his father did, as the latter was to take an express to New York, where he would get a steamer for Europe. Grit, the dog, was to be left in charge of Henry Darby. "Well, my boy," said Mr. Hamilton, as he shook hands with Dick, "remember what you are going for. You're under a big handicap, but I guess you will win. You did the other time, though it was a close shave." "Good-bye," said Dick, unable to keep back the suspicion of a tear. "Good-bye," replied Mr. Hamilton, turning hastily to his desk, and fumbling among some papers, which seemed to rattle unnecessarily loud. On the way to the depot Dick met Captain Handlee. The veteran greeted the lad cordially. "So you're off to learn to be a soldier?" he asked. "Well, I don't know that the military part of it amounts to much," admitted Dick, who had no false ideas about where he was going, "but dad thinks the discipline will be good for me, I guess." "That's right. Nothing like discipline of the right sort for lads. We didn't have to learn to be soldiers in my time." "No, I s'pose you just went right in and fought," said Dick. "Indeed we did. That's what my boy did. Poor Bill! I wish I could see him, or even hear of him again. You'll not forget your promise; will you?" "No, Captain Handlee." "Remember he was the best shot in his company. He could drive a tack in a board at a hundred yards. You make some inquiries, and I think you'll get on the track of him." "I will," promised Dick, but he had no idea in what a strange way fate was to bring about the old captain's desires through him. Dick found a crowd of his chums awaiting for him at the railroad station. "Here he comes!" cried Frank Bender, as he caught sight of Dick. "Aren't you going to take your rifle with you?" asked Fred Murdock. "I guess they'll provide me with a gun at Kentfield," answered Dick. "But they won't give you such grub as we had at camp," remarked Bricktop. "Oh, I guess they will, but maybe it won't taste so good," replied the young millionaire. "Well, boys, I guess this is my train." All his chums tried to shake hands with Dick at once as the locomotive pulled into the station. "Don't forget to send me a souvenier postal," called Bill Johnson. "Tell us how you like it," chimed in Walter. "Maybe my dad will send me," added Bricktop. "Tell us if you meet any girls as pretty as those here," was Fred's contribution. "Get on the football team," advised Frank. "And the baseball nine," chimed in Bricktop. By this time a number of passengers had their heads out of the windows, to see who was getting such a send-off. Dick's chums shook him by the hand, clapped him on the back, and fairly carried him up the steps of the coach. Then, amid a chorus of good-byes, the train pulled out, and Dick was started on his way to become a cadet. CHAPTER V AN ODD CHARACTER It was evening when Dick arrived at Kentfield, which, from the scenes about the station, he judged to be quite a town of little importance. There were few signs of life, scarcely anyone being at the depot, and only a few passengers alighting. "I wonder if I can get a carriage to take me out to the academy?" mused Dick, as he looked about. "This doesn't strike me as being much of a place, but the catalogue dad got showed quite an academy. I wonder where it is?" He saw a rather dilapidated hack standing near the platform, and, walking up to it, addressed the driver. "Can you take me out to the military academy?" he asked. "Sure," replied the man, "but there's nothing to see. It isn't open yet. Term doesn't begin until next week." "I know," replied Dick. "But I'm going to attend there." "You?" The man seemed much surprised, but there was a noticeable change in his manner. "Going to be a student there?" he asked respectfully. "Yes. I had to come on ahead of time." "All right. Take you out there in a jiffy," went on the hack driver briskly. "Got any baggage?" Dick handed over his checks, and the man soon returned with his trunk and suitcase. "This doesn't appear to be a very lively place; not as much so as I expected," remarked the young millionaire as he got into the vehicle. "Oh, bless your heart, sir, you just wait until next week," said the man. "Then this town will sit up and take notice. This is our off season, when the military school is closed. But when the boys arrive--wow! Say, then's when you got to look out. My! Oh my! But it's fierce!" "Do they--do they cut up much?" asked Dick, secretly glad that he was to have a hand in it if the students did. "Do they? Say, young man, when I start to drive a party of them cadets anywhere I don't never know if we're going to arrive. Never can tell when a wheel is coming off, or when my horses will start up, and leave the coach behind. That's why I always use quiet animals. Them cadets has life enough and to spare. Cut up? Say, jest you wait!" "Well, maybe it won't be so bad after I get started, and make the acquaintance of some of the boys," thought Dick. But he little knew what was ahead of him. "Is the academy far out?" asked Dick, for, as the hack was an open one, he could converse with the driver. "About a mile. We'll be there in a jiffy." A "jiffy" must be quite a period of time, or else the driver's estimate of a mile was different from the accepted five thousand two hundred and eighty feet, for dusk changed to darkness before the hackman turned in between two big, stone pillars, and the man announced: "Here we are." "I don't see anything," objected Dick. "It's too dark. But the buildings are right ahead of you." Then the lad was able to make out the dim forms of a number of structures located in a sort of park. "Where's the lake?" asked Dick. "I thought the academy was on a lake." "So it is. That's on the other side. We're sort of coming in from the back, but that's the shortest road from the depot. I'll take you right to Colonel Masterly's quarters. He's the one you want to see, I guess, being as you're a new cadet, and he's the superintendent." "I suppose so," answered Dick. A little later he alighted in front of a large brick structure, and the hackman lifted down his trunk and suitcase. "Do they expect you?" asked the driver. "I think so," replied our hero, hoping that some arrangements had been made for him. A moment later a door opened, and a flood of light streamed out from a broad hall. A man in semi-military uniform appeared. "Who's there?" he asked, and, having spoken he began to whistle a few bars from "Marching Through Georgia," ending up with a bugle call. "Got a cadet for you, Toots," replied the hackman. "A cadet?" and once more the man in the hall whistled a martial air. "That's what I said, Toots. Give me a hand with this trunk, will you, and tell Colonel Masterly that he's going to have company." "My name's Hamilton," began Dick. "I believe my father arranged----" "Oh yes, the colonel told me to look out for you," said the man who looked like a soldier. "Come right in. The colonel will be here directly. I'll take your baggage." "Thank you--er Mr.----" and Dick hesitated, for he did not just know how to address the person in the hall, and wanted to make no mistake in bestowing a military title. "Me? Oh I'm Sam Sander," said the man in the blue suit, apparently surprised that his identity was not known. "Yes, that's Sam," went on the hack driver, with easy familiarity, "but nobody calls him that; do they, Toots?" The other, who was helping to carry in Dick's trunk did not answer. Instead he whistled the bugle call for "Taps," or lights out. "Do they, Toots?" repeated the hack driver. "Do they what?" inquired the soldier, who seemed to be rather absent minded. "Do they call you anything but Toots?" "Nope. That's what they call me. I don't mind. I've almost forgotten what my real name is. Toots is good enough I expect." "He's a queer chap," whispered the hackman to Dick, as our hero paid him. "Queer, but all right. He's a sort of general helper around the grounds. Well, good night. I'll see you again maybe, when some of the other lads begin to arrive. And then won't there be lively times! Wow! My! Oh my! But them students certainly know how to have fun!" The hackman appeared to relish the prospect, and Dick could hear him chuckling to himself as he drove off in the darkness. "Right this way, Mr. Hamilton," said Toots, which name we shall adopt for him. "I will find the colonel for you----" He stopped suddenly, straightened up, in spite of the suitcase which he was carrying, and gave a stiff military salute. "Mr. Hamilton has arrived, sir," he said, and at that Dick caught sight of a tall thin man, with an iron gray moustache and imperial, coming down the broad, well-lighted hall. "Ah, Hamilton, glad to see you," said the soldierly-looking gentleman, extending his hand. "I'm Colonel Masterly. You are a little early, but I understand the case. Have you had dinner?" Dick had not, and said so. "Then you can dine with me," went on Colonel Masterly. "Sam, take Mr. Hamilton's baggage to the room I told you to get ready for him. I'll quarter you here for the present," he added, "until the boys arrive, and then you will have a roommate. How is your father?" "Quite well," replied Dick, and then he followed the superintendent into a reception room. There two other military-looking men sat reading books. They looked up at the entrance of Dick and the colonel, who introduced them to the new student as Major Henry Rockford, commandant of the academy, and Major Franklin Webster, U. S. A., retired, who was in charge of military tactics at the school. "That's the man of whom I must inquire about Captain Handlee's missing son," thought Dick, as the two instructors shook hands with him. "But I guess I'll wait a few days." Dinner was rather a formal affair, and our hero did not in the least enjoy it. The three men talked of matters connected with the prospective opening of the school, occasionally addressing a question to Dick, or making some general remark. The academy more than came up to Dick's expectations when he saw it the next morning. The school was made up of several buildings, consisting of a main barracks, which was where he had spent the night, and which contained the executive offices and class rooms, two other barracks, a gymnasium, a large mess hall, a riding hall, a small hospital and other structures. They were grouped on a large plain, that lay at the foot of quite a mountain range, but, what pleased Dick more than anything else, was a large lake that came right to the edge of the academy grounds. It was a beautiful sheet of water, and, from the appearance of a large boathouse near at hand, Dick guessed rightly that the cadet-students spent considerable time rowing and sailing. After breakfast, under the guidance of Toots, who was detailed by Colonel Masterly for that purpose, Dick was taken on a tour of the grounds. He was particularly pleased with the big stable, which contained a fine lot of horses. "Are those for the cadets to use?" he asked Toots. "Of course. Do you know how to ride?" "A little," replied Dick, who did not believe in boasting, though, in reality, he was a fine horseman. "I'll certainly have a swell time here," he thought, as he strolled about. He obtained permission to row out on the lake, and then was left to his own resources. After the first novelty of seeing the buildings had worn off, Dick began to feel a little lonesome, and he wished that the week was up, and that the other students would begin to arrive. But he found much to interest him, and made friends with Toots, who told him many and various stories of student life. "Why do they call you Toots?" asked Dick one day. "Well, I s'pose it's because I've got in the habit of tooting my whistle all the while. I'm always whistling war tunes or bugle calls, the boys say." "That's so. What makes you?" "I don't know, except that I'm fond of a military life. Some day I'm going to war." "Well, I hope you don't get shot," said Dick, as Toots left him, still whistling. It was a few days after this that Dick saw a new student arrive. The lad, for reasons similar to those affecting our hero, had been sent to the academy in advance of the opening of the term. Dick soon made his acquaintance, and he found the newcomer rather an odd character. His name was William Schoop, but he was called "William the Silent" by the other cadets, so Major Webster said, from the fact that he did not talk much. He used only single words where others would take a sentence, and he often made gestures answer for words. Dick and Will soon became friends, and the latter, who had spent a previous term at the school, showed the young millionaire about the buildings and grounds. CHAPTER VI THE HAZING One morning, two days after the arrival of the silent lad, when Dick had moved his baggage to his permanent room in the south barracks, the two lads were strolling about the campus. Dick was beginning to wish his companion was more sociable, when Will, with a sudden gesture, pointed off toward the town, along the main road that led from the station. Dick looked, and saw a cloud of dust approaching. "What's that?" he inquired. "Fellows coming," was all Will replied. He started off toward the main gate, and Dick followed. The dust clouds became larger, and approached closer. Then Dick saw that they were made by two large stages, and, a little later, he could discern that the vehicles were crowded with youths. Above the rumble of the wheels could be heard laughing, joyous voices. There were shouts, yells, cheers, whoops and cries. "Three cheers for Kentfield!" called some one, and the resulting yells caused the horses of the stage to prance more madly than ever. A few moments later the vehicles had halted at the gate, and from them, pell-mell leaped the cadets, returning to the academy after the long, summer vacation. "There's William the Silent!" cried one lad, rushing up to Dick's odd friend, and shaking hands with him. "Hello, Will! How are you? Are you the only one here, so far?" William merely nodded. Then he waved his hand toward our hero. "Dick Hamilton," he said. Dick stepped forward to greet the students, expecting them to tell him their names. From the group of cadets that had gathered around Will, a tall, good looking chap, but with rather a hard, cruel gleam in his dark eyes, stepped forth. "What's your name, new chap?" he asked somewhat sneeringly. "Hamilton--Dick Hamilton," replied the young millionaire. "Oh, Hamilton--Millionaire Hamilton's son, eh?" asked Dick's questioner, with an unpleasant air. "I believe so," answered Dick, trying to smile good-naturedly in spite of the overbearing air of the lad, who was no older than himself. "I've heard about you," went on the other. "Fellows," he said, turning to those surrounding him, "this is the young hostage of fortune who has consented to dwell a while in our midst. I saw a little paragraph in the paper a few days ago to the effect that Millionaire Hamilton's son had decided to take a course at Kentfield Military Academy. That is he condescended to inflict his presence on us. I'm sure the academy is highly honored," and the lad made a mocking bow. Dick felt the hot flush rising to his face. He had never been so insulted before. An angry reply was on his lips. "Millions don't go here, Hamilton," said another youth. "Your money won't count, and the sooner you find that out the better. Come on, fellows, let's see if old Toots is still alive, and then we'll have some fun." "Ta-ta, Hamilton, I suppose you brought a solid gold bedstead with you," said the lad who had first spoken, as he turned on his heel, and followed the others. "Maybe you'd like to buy the place," he fired back over his shoulder. "You--you----" began Dick angrily. He was stopped by a touch on his shoulder. He looked around, to see William the Silent standing near him. "Take it easy," was all Will said, but Dick understood. Choking down, as best he could, his righteous wrath at the mean treatment accorded him, Dick strolled down to the lake. Will did not attempt to follow, for he understood. Sorely puzzled over the conduct of those whom he hoped would be his friends, Dick got into a boat, and went out for a solitary row. He wanted to be alone and think. "It's queer they should treat me that way," he mused. "I'm sure I don't make any fuss about my money. Maybe they are afraid I'll try to, and they're taking no chances. But they ought to give a fellow a show first." After rowing about for an hour Dick felt better. He resolved not to force his friendship on the students, but to let matters take their course. He had expected a little "stand-offishness" on the part of the older cadets, who were always, more or less, inclined to be on their dignity with freshmen. "Well, I'll wait until some new fellows arrive," thought Dick. "I guess I can make friends with them." When he returned to shore he found that many more students had come in, the next day marking the opening of the term. Among the lads were a number of new cadets, as Dick could easily tell by their bashful, diffident manners. He felt that he had somewhat the advantage of them, for he had been at the place more than a week. "Still, my only acquaintances, outside of the teachers are William the Silent, Toots and the hostler," he reflected. There was a notice posted on the campus bulletin board to the effect that all new students were to report at the south barrack. Thither Dick went, finding Captain Hayden, the head master in charge, showing the boys to their rooms. "Ah, Hamilton," called the captain, as he caught sight of Dick, "you are to room with Paul Drew, on the second floor. Room Twenty-six is yours. I think you can find your way there. Go up and take Drew with you." A tall quiet youth greeted Dick with a smile. "I'm Drew," he said. "I suppose you're Hamilton?" "What there is of me," answered the millionaire youth. "Is this your first term?" He knew it was, but he wanted to say something. "Yes. I'm from Kentucky." "I'm a York Stater. Come on and I'll show you where we bunk." The two made their way through crowds of new boys and were soon in their apartment. It was like all the others provided for the use of the students. It contained two small iron beds, and was simply furnished. "Here's where we'll be at home," observed Dick. "Have you any choice as to a bed?" "No, either one will suit me." "All right, we'll toss up for it. Heads is the one nearest the window. You call." Dick spun a coin in the air. "Tails!" cried young Drew. "Tails it is," announced Dick. "Then I'll take the bed away from the window. It's likely to be cold in the winter." "I don't mind. I like a cool breeze now and then. But stow away your things and come on down. There's lots to see. I hope we get into our uniforms soon. You've got yours, haven't you?" "Yes," replied Dick's roommate. Dick had been provided with the necessary dress uniform before leaving home, and he was anxious to don it. The other uniforms were to be obtained at the academy. The two boys, after hastily putting away their things, went down on the campus, which was fairly swarming with old and new students. More boys were arriving with every stage, and the shouts and cries, as former acquaintances greeted one another, made the green sound like an athletic ground with a championship match in progress. As Dick and Paul stood looking about them, the young millionaire felt some one touch him on the arm. He turned and saw William Schoop. Will nodded his head to indicate that he wanted Dick to step aside for a moment. Excusing himself from his roommate Dick walked a little distance, following William the Silent. "Don't mind Dutton," said William. "Who's Dutton?" inquired Dick. "Fellow that rigged you. He's an uppish chap, but he's a leader with the upper classmen. Don't let him worry you." This was a longer speech than Will usually made. "But why should he be down on me because I've got money?" asked Dick. "It isn't my fault." "Very exclusive school, this," explained Will. "Patronized by old, blue-blooded families, who pretend to have a horror of the newly-rich." "But my father has been wealthy many years." Will shrugged his shoulders. "They seem to have a prejudice against you," he went on. "Don't mind. It'll wear off. Dutton--Ray Dutton's put 'em up to it. He's a cad. Don't mind him," and with that Will turned and walked away. "Well, I guess I can get along without Dutton and his crowd," thought Dick. "Queer, I never supposed money would make this sort of a difference. It didn't at home. Well, I'll try to get along, but it's evidently going to be up-hill work. Still, I'll do it, and, if money stands in the way--well----" Dick shrugged his shoulders in a sort of helpless fashion, and rejoined Paul. The two strolled about, noting the scenes taking place on every hand. They saw many cadets, obviously freshmen, and some of the latter introduced themselves to Dick and his companion. They were Franklin Boardman, Stanley Booker, Lyndon Butler and Eugene Graham. "Let's stick together for a while," proposed 'Gene, as the boys called him. "It'll soon be grub time, I understand, and we'll sit near each other." This suited the others, and, when the gong rang, summoning them to the mess hall, the six lads went in a body, finding seats in a row on one side of the long tables, which were served by colored waiters. Discipline had not yet been put into force, and no one was in uniform. The mess hall was a lively place, for the older cadets were continually calling jokes back and forth to their chums, or jollying the waiters whom they knew of old. Dick and his new acquaintances conversed together, and, in spite of their rather awkward feelings, managed to partake of a good meal, for Kentfield Academy was noted for the excellence of its cuisine. When the meal was nearly over Toots appeared in the hall, with a hammer, and a piece of paper. He tacked a notice up on the bulletin board. "Hey, Toots; what's that?" called Ray Dutton. "Notice about appearing in uniform, Mr. Dutton," replied the odd soldier. "When's it to be?" "To-morrow morning." "Aw, tear that down, Toots, you imitation brigadier general you!" called another youth. "Sure. We don't want to tog up until the first of the week," added another. "Swallow that, Toots, and tell the commandant you lost it." "Orders is orders," said Toots firmly, hammering in the last tack, and leaving the hall. The afternoon was spent in assigning the new cadets to their classes, and arranging for the courses of study. They were told that formal drills would not begin until Monday, this being Thursday, nor would any recitations be heard until then. After supper, or dinner as it was called at the academy, the new boys strolled about in little groups, Dick and his five friends keeping together. "I wonder where all the older cadets are?" said Dick, as he looked about, and noticed that none was in sight. "That's so, they have disappeared," added Lyndon Butler. "I wonder what that means?" They did not have long to wait for an answer. A figure slid up to Dick, and, almost without turning he knew it to be Will. The silent youth spoke but one word: "Hazing!" Then he walked away as silently as he had approached, and Dick turned to his companions. "I guess they're getting ready to haze us freshmen," he remarked. "I thought they didn't haze here," said 'Gene Graham quickly. He was rather a small chap, and seemed very nervous. "I guess they do it in spite of the rules," said Dick. "Well, the best way is to take what's coming, and bear it as well as you can. If you don't it will be unpleasant for you. I don't believe it will be very bad." "Are you going to let 'em haze you?" asked Paul Drew. "Sure," answered Dick. "Then I guess I will, too." "Well, I s'pose it's got to be," said little 'Gene with a sigh. "I hope they don't toss us in a blanket, though." "If they do, just lie still, and you'll come down easy," advised Dick. "It'll soon be over." That night, in their room, Dick and Paul heard the sound of footsteps along the corridor. Then came smothered cries, and strange sounds in the apartments adjoining. "They're coming," whispered Paul. Dick nodded grimly. A moment later there came a soft knock on their portal. "Well?" asked Dick, though he knew who it was. "Open, in the name of the Ancient and Honorable Order of the Mystic Pig," came the demand in a whisper. Dick opened the door, and in rushed several of the older cadets, led by Ray Dutton. "Oh, we've drawn a millionaire!" Dutton cried, in sneering tones. "Well, take the other chap first, fellows. Lively, now, we've got a heap of 'em to initiate!" Several lads seized Paul, who submitted with as good grace as possible. CHAPTER VII DICK THINKS HE HAS A CLUE "What's it to be, Ray, the blanket, outside, or the ordeal of the pitcher?" asked one of the cadets holding Paul. "The pitcher, I guess," answered Dutton. "The blanket's getting too tame, and we have so many to look after that we can't take 'em outside. Any water in the jug, Beeby?" "Full," replied a fat lad, taking up one of the two pitchers in the room. "Up with him!" commanded Dutton, and several cadets seized Paul in an instant. Before he knew what was happening they had stood him on his head, two of them holding each of his rather long legs upright. "Hold open his trouser legs," said Dutton. "I'll do the pouring." He had the pitcher full of water, and, as his fellow hazers made a sort of funnel of the two legs of the victim's trousers, Ray poured the contents of the water pitcher down them. The fluid spurted out at the unlucky new student's waist and collar, and ran in a little stream over the floor. Paul struggled but could not escape. "Sop that up, fellows!" cried Dutton. "We don't want it to ruin the ceilings below. Use the bed clothes." The other cadets, who were not holding Paul, grabbed the sheets and spreads from the neatly made beds, and piled them in the little pond of water on the floor. "Hand me the other pitcher, Naylor," commanded the leader. "Better save it for----" and Naylor glanced at Dick, who was standing quietly in a corner, under guard of several cadets, awaiting his turn. "We'll not need it for him," replied Dutton. "Give it here." Some one handed him the other pitcher full of water, and the fluid in that, a moment later, went gurgling down the inside of Paul's clothes, spurting out as had the other. "You're initiated into the Ancient and Honorable Order of the Mystic Pig," announced Dutton, making a sign to his comrades to let Paul regain his feet. "Do you solemnly promise to be most respectful to your superiors, and not to partake of ham and eggs or any form of pork until after Christmas?" "You'd better promise," said one of the cadets to Paul, who hesitated. "Oh, I promise all right," he said, with a rueful smile as he looked down at his soaked garments, and surveyed the confusion in the room. There was not a dry article of bed clothing left. "Now for the other one!" cried Beeby, making a grab for Dick. The young millionaire was ready to submit to any form of hazing that might be inflicted, but, to his surprise Dutton said: "Never mind him. We'll let him go." "Why he's a freshman," objected several of the cadets, evidently thinking Dutton imagined Dick to be immune. "I know it, but he's in a different class," went on the leader with a covert sneer. "He might buy up the police authorities and have us arrested for having a little fun. We'll let him alone. We're only after common mortals." Dick flushed. "You're mistaken," he said as calmly as he could. "If hazing is in order I'm ready to take my share. I assure you I won't squeal. I'm not that kind." It hurt him, to think that he should be taken for a "squealer." He, Dick Hamilton, who had done his own share of hazing in the academy at home. "No, thank you. It's too risky monkeying with millionaires," said Dutton. "Come on, fellows." The band of hazing cadets filed out of Dick's room, bent on subjecting other students to their harmless pranks. As they left, Dick heard one of them say: "Aw, Dutton, why didn't we try the rope and window game on him? It would have been sport. He looks like an all-right sort." "He isn't in our class," replied the leader of the hazers. "He thinks his money can get him anything he wants, but he'll find out he's mistaken. It's a shame the faculty allowed him to come here, where only the best families are represented." Dick heard it all plainly. He realized how he had been misjudged, but he resolved to live down the wrong opinion the other students seemed to have formed of him. Or perhaps they merely followed Dutton's leadership. And so Dick was not hazed, though he was the only freshman in all the academy who escaped the ordeal, and, though many lads would gladly have dispensed with the ceremony, Dick Hamilton felt as if he would have parted with some of his fortune to have been included in the unfortunate class. For, had he been, it would have meant that he was considered as a future chum and comrade of the upperclassmen. But he had been left severely alone. "Well, you got off lucky," commented Paul, as he began to remove his wet garments. "Do you think so?" asked Dick, somewhat bitterly. "I rather wish they had given me what you got." "Why?" asked his roommate. Dick told his reasons. "I don't see why they hold my money against me," he added. "I heard some talk about it," admitted Paul. "Some of the older cadets have read the things printed in the papers about you; when you went out west to investigate that gold mine, and when you hired the circus to come to Hamilton Corners. They evidently think you depend on your money to win popularity, and I heard some of them say you were to be taught a lesson." "They're beginning already," said Dick. "Perhaps you would rather not room with such an unpopular chap as I seem to be. I guess I could get an apartment alone, by paying double rates," he added, sarcastically. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Paul. "I'm not that sort, and I don't believe you'll find many cadets who are. I don't care for money, one way or the other. I wish my dad had a little more. Don't let Dutton and his cronies worry you. You'll have friends among the freshmen, anyway." "Not if Dutton has his say." "Well, perhaps he won't have it. He comes of a very old family, I'm told, who have not much money, but who are very proud. I don't care for him myself, but he's considered a leader here." "My, you certainly got a soaking," commented Dick, as Paul stripped. He was glad to change the unpleasant subject. "I sure did," admitted the other "and what's more we've got to sleep in a damp bed, unless we ask the housekeeper for other covers." "No, don't do that. I would give the hazing away, and I might become more unpopular than I am," and Dick laughed a little uneasily. "I don't fancy sleeping between damp sheets, though." "I've got an extra suit of pajamas in my case," said Dick. "You can put them on, and we'll stretch out on the beds without covers. "It's not cold. We'll take our medicine. Or, rather, I'll share part of yours." They passed a rather uncomfortable night, but did not think of complaining. In the morning they compared notes with the other freshmen, many of whom had had the same experience. That day was spent in forming the new cadets into companies, and, to Dick's disgust he found that he was in the company of which Ray Dutton was the cadet captain, and John Stiver, a crony of the captain, was lieutenant. Paul Drew was in Company B, Dick's being designated as Company A. But our hero took some consolation from the fact that his odd friend William the Silent was a sergeant in his company. The new cadets were given their rifles, made to don uniforms, put through a preliminary drill that afternoon, and told something of the routine that would be in order when matters had settled down into their usual grooves. Dick picked out his line of studies, received his text books and took them to his room, where he found Paul. The next day being Saturday the cadets had the afternoon free and they strolled about the grounds, went off on horseback or rowing, as they desired. Somewhat to his regret Dick noticed that a rule was posted forbidding freshmen to go out rowing or riding alone after Saturday. They must be accompanied by a teacher or cadet officer. "They must think we're babies," he murmured. "Well, when we get to know the ropes a little better," said Paul, "we'll go out together." That evening, when the mail was distributed, Dick received a letter from his father, posted just as the ship was sailing. There were also several missives from his chums at home, and quite a bulky letter, which when the young millionaire opened it, he saw was from aged Captain Handlee, and contained a photograph. With many words, and a somewhat lengthy explanation, the old soldier stated that he had had copies made of the photograph of his son, and was sending one to Dick, to aid him in tracing the missing man. "There, I nearly forgot about my promise," said Dick, recalling it as he saw the picture. "I must make some inquiries of Major Webster as soon as possible." He took the photograph to his room, and placed it on a shelf, where he would be sure to see it, to remind him of his quest, though he had little hopes that it would amount to anything. It was Sunday morning when Dick, who had awakened rather early, heard steps coming along the corridor, and then came the whistled strains of "Just Before the Battle, Mother," followed by the reveille, cheerily warbled. "That's Toots," said Dick to Paul, who awakened just then. Toots stopped outside Dick's door and knocked. "Come," cried the young millionaire, and Toots, the odd character, entered, carrying a pail of hot water. "One of the janitors is sick," he explained, "and I'm helping out. You can use this for shaving or drink it, just as you like," he added with a smile. He filled the boys' hot water pitchers, and was about to leave the room, when he caught sight of the photograph of Corporal Bill Handlee on the shelf. "Where--where did you get that?" he asked, turning quickly to the two lads. "Why?" asked Dick, much impressed by the manner of Toots. "Because I--I think I know him--or did once," and the man set down his pail of water, and drew his hand across his forehead, as if trying to brush away some cobwebs. Dick noticed that there was a scar on the man's brow. "Where did you see him? When was it? Where was it?" asked Dick rapidly, thinking he had stumbled on a clue. "I don't know--I can't recollect, but the face--that face seems familiar," and Toots, taking up the photo, gazed earnestly at it. "That is the picture of the missing son of an old soldier who lives in Hamilton Corners," said Dick. "Captain Handlee asked me to make some inquiries about him. It's queer you should think you recognized it, Toots. Were you ever in the army?" The man shook his head slowly. "I don't know," he said. "I'm a fine shot though. I ought to be in the army." Dick felt a new hope. The missing man said he was an expert marksman. But then Dick recalled what he had heard about Toots; that the man had a delusion that he was a sharpshooter, but that he could scarcely hit the outer edge of a big target. "Can't you recall where you have seen this man?" asked Dick earnestly. Toots slowly shook his head. "What was his name?" he asked. "Corporal Bill Handlee." "No, that name doesn't sound familiar. But I'm sure I've seen him somewhere. I can't think--something seems to stop me here," and the man again passed his hand across his forehead. "Try," urged Dick. Toots made a strong effort to recall the past, but it was of no avail. He shook his head once more, picked up his pail, and started out. "I guess I'm mistaken," he said. "But some day you boys must come and see me shoot. I'm a dandy at it." Then he went down the corridor whistling "The Star Spangled Banner," and ending up with a spirited rendition of the bugle call to charge. "That's queer," murmured Dick. "I thought I was going to get some news for Captain Handlee. Well, I must inquire of Major Webster." "Hark," exclaimed Paul, as a bugle sounded clear and crisp on the morning air. "Reveille--first call! Ten minutes to dress and turn out," said Dick, who had been studying the rules, and he began to get into his uniform. CHAPTER VIII DICK GETS A FALL At the chapel service, which the cadets were required to attend, Dick saw, for the first time, all his fellow students gathered together under one roof. They were a fine body of young men, and he felt proud that he was one of them. Every one was in full dress uniform, and a spick and span appearance the lads made, as they marched to and from chapel, to the music of the cadet band. Sunday seemed quite long to Dick, but he managed to spend some pleasant hours, strolling about with Paul Drew, and some other new cadets. He was glad, however, when Monday came, bringing with it many duties. For the next two weeks Dick was kept so busy, being initiated into the mysteries of the drill, guard mounting, parade, marching in different formations, learning the meaning of the military commands, his studies and preparing for inspection, that he had little time to think of other matters. He found opportunity to ask Major Webster concerning missing Bill Handlee, and the tactical officer made some inquiries of the war office, but all to no effect. All trace of the veteran's son seemed to have vanished. "But what do you suppose made Toots--I mean Sam Sander--think he recognized the photo?" asked Dick. "Well, you know poor Sam isn't quite right in his head," replied the major kindly. "He received an injury some years ago, I understand. You can see the scar on his forehead now. That made him rather simple minded, though he is a good worker, and very useful." "Then I'm afraid I can't send Captain Handlee any good news." "I'm afraid not, Hamilton." Dick had to write the sorrowful tidings to the old soldier, much to his regret. The young millionaire also sent a missive to his father, telling something of the life at the academy, but saying nothing of the manner in which he had been treated. Dick bravely resolved to fight his own battles. He found the studies anything but easy, but as he applied himself to his books, he stood well in his class. In the meantime matters were beginning to move with military regularity, and the cadets in their natty uniforms, presented at drill, or inspection, inspiring pictures. At first Dick, and all the new cadets, were rather awkward at drill, but this was to be expected, and little was thought of it. On several occasions though, Captain Dutton, who was in command over Dick, made sneering remarks evidently intended for our hero, who, however, did not reply. With the exception of Sunday and Monday, the same general routine was followed. Reveille was sounded at six o'clock, with a second call ten minutes later. Then came "police" inspection, and woe betide the youth who was not spick and span. Sick call followed, but usually it was a mere form, for the cadets were as healthy as Spartans. On Monday there was always general inspection, when it behooved Dick and his fellows to have their quarters in good order. Plenty of time was allowed for study and recitation, and there was much attention given to military life. There were lectures on tactics, and they were followed by practical illustrations. "I wish they'd let us have a chance at the horses," remarked Dick, to Paul, when they were studying in their room one evening. "The older cadets have plenty of cavalry drill, but we have to march around, carrying heavy guns, and doing all sorts of stunts like that." "I understand we're to have our innings next week." "Is that so? Good!" Dick, and many other of the new cadets who loved horses were pleased to see a notice posted, a few days after this, stating that instructions in riding, and cavalry exercises, were to be given in the big shed and would begin the following Monday. "Now we'll have some fun," said Dick. "Aren't you glad, Paul?" "Well, I don't care much about horses. I feel safer on my feet." "Oh, you'll get used to a horse soon enough, and then you'll never want to walk." There were good horses in the academy stables, and, to his delight, a fine mount was assigned to Dick. He made friends with the animal at once, and when the "awkward squad" was put through their paces, Dick earned commendation from the drill master for the excellent seat he maintained. For a week or more Dick and his fellow freshmen practiced every day in the riding hall. The cadets who at first sat insecurely in the saddle were beginning to learn how to maintain themselves, and one afternoon the drill master announced that the next day they would be allowed to go out on the cavalry plain. "That's the stuff!" cried Dick. "I've been wanting a good gallop for a long time." "Guess we won't have much chance to gallop," replied Paul, who had been transferred to Dick's company. "Dutton's so mean he'll probably keep us at an easy walk. He thinks no one knows how to ride but him." "I'll show him, if I get a chance," murmured Dick. The cadets were formed into four companies the next day, and sent out on the cavalry plain for practice. "Now I don't want any exhibitions of fancy riding," announced Ray Dutton, as he led the cadets over whom he had charge out from the drill hall. "You've got to creep before you walk, you know. Just take it easy, and we'll make a few circuits of the grounds." "Pity he wouldn't let us gallop," said Dick, in a low voice to Paul, beside whom he was riding. "Silence in the ranks!" exclaimed the cadet captain sharply. "Hamilton, if you speak again I'll report you." Dick felt the hot blood mount to his face, but he kept his temper. They went around at a slow pace, many of the lads chaffing under the restraint. Then Dutton gave the command to trot, and they let their horses out a trifle. Whether something frightened Dick's horse, or whether the animal wanted to take a good run and show the others what he could do, it was impossible to say. At any rate our hero's steed gave a sudden spring, and, rushing through the opened ranks of the cadet horsemen ahead of him, sailed past Captain Dutton at a fast gait. "Halt!" cried the leading cadet. "Where are you going, Hamilton? Come back here at once! I'll report you! Come back!" Dick tried to rein his horse in, but the animal had the bit in his teeth, and it was useless to pull on the leather. Still the young millionaire was not frightened. He knew he could manage the animal. But Dutton, with a muttered exclamation, spurred after Dick. "Halt!" he cried again. "Halt, or I'll place you under arrest for disobeying orders!" "I can't stop him!" Dick flung back, over his shoulder. Dutton's horse was a fast one, and he soon caught up to the young cadet. He crossed in front of him, wheeled about and, a moment later the two horses collided violently. Dick was flung up in the air, and, the next instant, came heavily to the ground, where he lay quiet, while his horse bolted. Dutton, who had retained his seat, looked down on the prostrate figure. "Come. Get up," he said. "No shamming." Dick did not move. "Here, Drew, Butler, Graham!" called Captain Dutton. "Here's a chance to practice first aid to the injured. See what's the matter with him." The three cadets he had named galloped forward, while the remainder of the company came to a halt. CHAPTER IX WHO FIRED THE GUN? "Pick him up, and see if he's hurt," ordered Dutton though he did not take the trouble to get off his horse to ascertain. "Very likely he's only shamming." But is needed only a look at Dick's pale face to show that he had had a hard fall. The breath was knocked out of him. The three cadets bent over him, and, while one raised him to a sitting position, the others chaffed his hands. Dick opened his eyes, and stared wonderingly about him. "What--what--where am I?" he asked, and then he saw the mounted students, he added, "I fell." "Are you hurt?" asked Graham. "No--no, I guess not." But when Dick tried to stand he found he was so dizzy that his fellow cadets had to support him. "Take him back to the hospital," ordered Dutton, "and then you three rejoin your company." At that moment Major Webster, who had been drilling some of the older cadets, in advanced tactics on a distant part of the field, came galloping up. "What has happened?" he asked. "Ah, Hamilton, eh? Are you hurt?" "I fell off my horse. He bolted with me," replied Dick. "Are you sure you're not hurt?" "Yes; only a trifle dizzy." "I'm sending him back to the hospital," announced Dutton. "That's proper. Are you sure you'll be all right, Hamilton?" asked the major kindly. "Oh, yes. I believe I can ride now." "No, I can't allow it. You must take a rest." On the way back with the cadets, Dick insisted that he could go alone, and did not need help. "Orders are orders," replied Graham with a smile. "Dutton might make a fuss if we didn't do as he said." "It was all his fault," added Paul Drew. "He deliberately collided with you, Dick." "Oh, no; I hardly think he would do that!" "But he did," insisted Butler. "He didn't need to gallop in front of you that way. I looked just as if he wanted to unseat you, didn't it, fellows?" "That's right," added Paul. "I'd report him if I were you." "Oh, no," answered Dick quickly. "There's no use making trouble. Even if he did do it on purpose, I wouldn't gain anything by reporting him. I'm no squealer." "But you might have been badly hurt," said Butler. "I wasn't though, and a miss is as good as a mile." "That's a good way of looking at it," commented Paul. "I'd feel like fighting him, if he did that to me." "Say, I'm all right. There's no need for you fellows to come back with me," went on Dick. "If we don't Dutton may make a row," objected Butler. "We'd better do it." Not wanting to get his fellow cadets into trouble, Dick allowed them to accompany him to the hospital, which was maintained by the academy. There the surgeon in charge, a grizzled war veteran, felt of our hero's bones, and announced, gruffly, that he was all right, but that he had better rest a while. Which Dick was glad enough to do, as his head was beginning to ache. "Dutton must want to get rid of me," he thought, as he stretched out on the bed in his room. "If he keeps on I shall certainly have a clash with him, and then I s'pose there'll be trouble. I don't want to fight, but I'm not going to submit to his meanness. I certainly am under a handicap here. I wish I could ask dad to send me to some other school. No, I don't either. I'll fight it out here, and I'll win, too, or I'll know the reason why!" Major Webster, when he returned from the drill, inquired how Dick felt, and received the assurance that the lad was all right. "We must give you a quieter horse," he said with a smile. "Oh, no, I can manage him all right," said Dick. "Captain Dutton--er--he and I happened to collide, or it never would have happened." "Strange, Dutton is an excellent rider," commented the major as he walked away. A slight headache the next day was all the ill effect that Dick experienced from his tumble. He appeared at chapel, and took part in all the day's duties. For a week or more life went on rather uneventfully at the academy. Dick had a letter from his father, stating that business was likely to keep him abroad longer than he expected. Dick also got a letter from Henry Darby, giving some news of Hamilton Corners, and telling how Dick's chums missed him. The letter closed with this: "Grit misses you very much. He doesn't eat hardly anything, and he lies in his kennel all day." "Poor Grit," said Dick to Paul, and he told of his bulldog. "I wish I could have him here with me." "Why don't you?" suggested his roommate. "Some of the other cadets are allowed special privileges, why don't you ask if you can bring Grit here? You could keep him in the stable." "I believe I will," said Dick, and he sought and received permission from Colonel Masterly to do this. A few days later Grit arrived, and he was probably the happiest dog living, as Dick took him out of the shipping crate. The animal bounded about, and fairly leaped over his master's head in the excess of his joy. Grit made friends with such few chums as Dick had among the freshmen, and they were not many, for Dutton's influence seemed even to extend to them. The advent of the bulldog appeared to further arouse the ire of the young captain. "I expect our millionaire cadet will be having a private menagerie next," he said with a sneer. "But I tell you one thing, Hamilton, if I catch the brute around my quarters I'll kick him out." "I shouldn't advise you to try it," said Dick coolly. "It might not be healthy--for you." "Do you mean that you'd attack me?" asked Dutton, taking a step toward Dick. "No, but Grit might; eh, Grit, old boy." The dog growled in a menacing manner, and Dutton, turning on his heel, made off up the campus, but the scowl he gave Dick augured anything but well for the young millionaire. It was about a week after this when, one evening, Dick, who was sitting in his room, studying with Paul, suddenly exclaimed: "There, I've left my algebra out under the three elms. I was studying there this afternoon." The three elms were a clump of giant trees on the campus, and a recognized stamping ground for the freshmen, who frequently studied there, when it was too hot in their rooms. "Better go out and get it," advised Paul. "It looks like rain, and you know it means a demerit to have soiled books." "Guess I'll slip out and get it," decided Dick. "I'll have just about time enough before taps." He started down the long corridor, but he had not taken a dozen steps before taps was sounded on the bugle, the plaintive call of "lights out" vibrating clearly on the night air. "Better come back," advised Paul, from the open door of their room, as he prepared to turn out the electric lamp. "No, I think I'll chance it," decided Dick. "No one is likely to see me, and I might as well get a demerit for this as for having a rain-soaked algebra. Leave the door open so I can find the place in the dark." He kept on, stealing quietly down the hall. Paul went to bed, and was just dozing off when he was startled by the loud report of the cannon used for firing the sunrise and sunset guns. The echoes thundered among the academy buildings, and were re-echoed from the distant hills. Paul arose. Clearly some of the cadets were up to a trick, and had fired the gun. A few minutes later Dick came running into the room. "Did you get the book? Who fired the gun?" asked Paul in a whisper. "Yes, I got the algebra, and, just as I did the gun went off. I saw some of the fellows running, and of course I was running too, but, just as I was coming in, Stiver, who is doing guard duty, saw me." "What did he say?" "Called to me halt, but I didn't." "He'll report you, and you may be blamed for--" An instant later the tramp of feet was heard in the corridor. "It's inspection!" gasped Paul. "Undress quick, and get into bed!" CHAPTER X DICK HAS A FIGHT But it was too late. The door of Dick's room was pushed open, and, in the light of the incandescent that burned in the hall, the two cadets could see Captain Hayden and several of the instructors looking in. "Hamilton--Drew--are you here?" asked Captain Hayden sharply. "Yes, sir," replied Dick, but an instant later the light revealed him fully dressed, whereas he should have been in bed at taps. "Ha!" exclaimed the head master. "This will bear investigation. Why aren't you in bed, Hamilton?" "I went down to get my algebra, which I left under the elms." "Did you have anything to do with firing the saluting gun?" "No, sir." "I will have to investigate. Report in my room in ten minutes." Captain Hayden marched on, and the two cadets could hear distant sounds that indicated a general inspection of quarters. "I guess you're in for it, Dick," said Paul. "I can prove what I went out for." "Maybe. But I wonder who fired that gun?" "I don't know. Some of the older cadets likely. Well, I s'pose I've got to go to Captain Hayden's room." Dick found several other students gathered in the reception apartment of the head master. They were lads who had been found still up when their rooms were hurriedly entered after the blowing of taps, and the firing of the gun. "Who was captain of the guard?" asked Captain Hayden, when he came in and faced a rather frightened lot of cadets. "I was, sir," replied John Stiver. "What did you see?" "I was on duty, sir, near the main entrance of the south barracks, and the first I knew I saw the flash of the gun, and heard it go off." "What else did you see?" "I saw a cadet run from the campus into the barracks. He would not halt when I called to him." "Who was it?" "I don't like to say, sir." "Very likely not, but you must." "It was--it was Hamilton, sir." "Ha!" exclaimed the head master. "I went to the three elms to get my algebra which I had forgotten," said Dick. "After taps?" "Yes, sir." "Then you broke one of the rules." "Yes, sir, but I thought that if it rained, and my book got wet, I'd get a demerit for that, so I decided I would take a chance on going after taps. I started before the bugle sounded." "Ha! I will look into that afterward. You are sure you were not near the gun?" "Yes, sir." "I might add," went on Stiver, "that, after I called to Hamilton to halt, and he would not, I saw his dog running after him, and the animal seemed to have something tied to its tail." "To it's tail?" "Yes, sir." "What was it?" "It seemed like a piece of string." "A piece of string. That may explain it. Hamilton, what do you know of this?" "Nothing, Captain Hayden. Grit was not with me. I left him in his kennel, in the stable, chained up." "We must look into this. Lieutenant Stiver, tell Sander to bring the bulldog here." "Perhaps I had better go along," suggested Dick. "Grit might make a fuss." "If he goes, you had better make sure he doesn't slip the string off the dog's tail," put in Dutton, with a sneer. Dick started, and looked angrily at his enemy. "That will do, Dutton," said Captain Hayden quietly. "You may accompany Sander, Hamilton." Toots, who was on hand, started for the stables, followed by Dick. "Are you going to get into trouble?" asked the old man, who had taken quite a fancy to our hero. "I hope not. If Grit had anything to do with firing the gun, by means of a string tied to his tail, some one who had a grudge against me is responsible for it." "I'm sure of it, Mr. Hamilton," and Toots marched on, whistling "Dixy Land," ending up with a series of bugle calls. They found Grit cowering in his kennel, as if much frightened. Dick and Toots looked him over. Sure enough there was a stout piece of cord tied to his stump of a tail. "It looks bad," commented Toots. "I'm not worried," declared Dick. Captain Hayden looked grave, when Toots handed him the bit of cord. He sent Sander to the saluting gun, and Toots returned presently with same cord, which matched that taken from Grit's tail. "Was this on the gun?" asked the head master. "Attached to a primer, that had been fired," replied Toots. "Hamilton," began Captain Hayden, "I don't like to accuse you on such circumstantial evidence, but it looks--" "I had nothing to do with firing the gun," said Dick quickly. "If my dog did it, some one else tied the string to his tail." "Whom do you suspect?" "I don't know." "If you please, sir," spoke up Graham, "I don't think Hamilton had anything to do with firing the gun." "Why not?" "Because my window is right opposite it. I was looking out, just before it went off, and I saw a crowd of students near it. They had a dog, for I could hear him growl, and I heard some one say 'look out or the brute will put his teeth in you.' Then some one else said, 'I guess I can manage him.' If Hamilton had been there I don't believe Grit would have growled." "He certainly would not," said Dick, noticing that Dutton was scowling at Graham. "Ha! Hum," mused the head master. "I believe you are right, Graham. Hamilton, you are practically exonerated, but this matter will not be allowed to drop. Firing the gun was a serious infraction of the rules, and dangerous in the bargain. Whoever fired it must have stolen into the ammunition house, which is a risky thing to do, especially in the dark." "I am glad you don't think I did it, sir," said Dick to Captain Hayden. "I am glad, also, but I shall have to mark you five off for being out after taps. When I find out who fired the gun I shall punish them severely. It seems as though it was done to throw suspicion on you." "That is what I think," said Dick quickly. "Whom do you suspect?" "I had rather not say, sir." "Of course not, no, I wouldn't want you to on mere suspicion. You young gentlemen may retire to your rooms, now. I will look into this matter further." The cadets filed out, all of them breathing easier. As Dutton passed Dick in the hall, he said: "Did you refer to me when you said you suspected some one?" "Not particularly." "You looked at me," said the cadet captain angrily. "Well, a cat may look at a king, I suppose." "None of your impertinence." "I'm not impertinent, but I don't propose to have you dictate to me." "You'll have to, as long as you're a freshman. I say you intimated that I fired that gun and tried to throw the blame on you." "I can't help what you say." "Do you believe I did it?" "I refuse to answer." "Then I'll make you! Take that!" and before Dick could step back Dutton had hit him a blow in the face. "You know what that means, I suppose," said Dutton with a sneer. "A fight?" asked Dick quietly. "Of course. I'll send a friend to you to-morrow and we'll see if you'll back up your words." "Don't worry. I'll be on hand," replied Dick, as he went to his room. He told Paul of what had happened, and the latter consented to act as second to him in the fight. The matter was quietly arranged, and, the next afternoon Dick, and the few chums he had, slipped off after the evening parade to a secluded spot, where all the fistic battles of the academy took place. Dutton and a large throng of his supporters were on hand, and the preliminaries were soon settled. "Time!" called Lieutenant Stiver, who acted as Dutton's second. The two youths faced each other, but dispensed with the ceremony of shaking hands. The next moment Dutton aimed a blow at Dick's face, but our hero cleverly dodged and sent a stiff right hander to the cadet captain's jaw. CHAPTER XI DICK GIVES A SPREAD The shock of the blow made Dutton stagger back, but he quickly regained his balance, and rushed at Dick, raising his foot to give him a kick. "Hold on, that's not fair!" cried Paul. "Do you stand for that, Stiver?" Stiver plainly wanted to side with Dutton, but there were cries of "Shame! That's not fair!" from several in the crowd and Dutton's second was forced to caution his man. "Don't do that, Dutton," he said. "You can lick him with your fists." "Yes, and I'll fix him, all right!" exclaimed the angry cadet captain. Dick, who had stepped back, out of reach of his opponent's foot, now stood up to meet the rush of Dutton. "There! I guess that will teach you to make insinuations about me!" spluttered the angry lad, as he aimed a fierce blow at Dick. Our hero easily dodged it, however, and countered with a stiff upper cut, which gave Dutton quite a jolt. Dick was not quite quick enough in getting away, however, and received a blow on the chest, which he did not mind, much. Then Dutton closed in, and both boys exchanged several severe blows, but Dick had the best of it, for he had taken boxing lessons from an experienced instructor at home. "Go in and do him!" called Dutton's friends. "Stand up to him, Dick," advised Paul, in low tones at the conclusion of the first round. "You've got him going." Dutton tried to be calm as he came up the second time, but he speedily lost his temper, as he saw how easily Dick parried his blows. "Why don't you stand up and fight?" he asked. "Why don't you hit me?" retorted Dick, as he tapped his antagonist on the nose, making it bleed slightly. "I'll pay you for that!" cried Dutton, rushing forward. "Not so loud!" cautioned Stiver. "You'll bring some of the professors down on us." Once more Dick dodged a straight left hander, and, in return, sent in a terrific right, that caught Dutton on the point of the jaw. The cadet went down like a log, and lay still. "You've knocked him out, Hamilton," remarked one of the older cadets, who acted as referee. "I congratulate you." "Yes, he fought well," added another, but there was no heartiness in his tones, and, to Dick, it seemed almost as if they were sorry he had won. For won he had, as Dutton did not arise. He had been fairly, but harmlessly, knocked out. "Do you throw up the sponge?" asked Paul, of Stiver. "I guess so," was the rather surly response. "Your man wins." "I hope I didn't hurt him," said Dick. "I didn't mean to hit so hard, but he rushed right into it." "You didn't hurt me!" suddenly exclaimed Dutton, as he struggled to his feet. "I'm game yet." "You've had enough," said his second. "You can have another try later." "I can do him," mumbled Dutton, but even his friends were forced to admit that he had been well beaten. "Will you shake hands?" asked Dick, advancing toward his antagonist. "No!" exclaimed Dutton, surlily. A hot flush came to Dick's face, and he was about to turn away when, the older cadet, who had complimented him said: "Shake hands, Dutton. Don't be a cad." This was equivalent to a command, and Dutton grudingly complied. "Do you think he will be better friends with you after this?" asked Paul, as he and Dick walked away together. "I hope so, but I doubt it." Dick was right. Though he had gained the victory he had whipped one of the most popular cadets, which Dutton was, in spite of his caddishness. Our hero's victory took nothing away from the regard in which Dutton was held, while, as for Dick, save a few friends whom he had made among the younger lads, he was not admitted to the comradeship of the older cadets, to which place, of right, he belonged. The fight had not made him popular, as he had hoped it would, after he had won it, though the sporting element in the academy could not but admire his fistic abilities. "I don't seem to be making much progress," remarked Dick to his roommate, one afternoon. "You have more friends than I have." "Oh, I don't think so." "Yes, you have. It would be different, if I was at home, but here, everyone seems to follow Dutton's lead, and turns a cold shoulder to me." "Maybe you'll have more acquaintances next term." "I doubt it. I wish I could get in with the fellows. They'll be making up the football eleven, soon, and I'd like a chance to play." "Do you play?" "I did at home. I was right half-back. But I don't s'pose I'll have any show here." "I tell you what you might do," said Paul, after a pause. "Why don't you give a spread?" "A spread?" "Yes, a feast, you know. You can get permission to have it in one of the rooms, and you can invite a lot of the fellows. Several of the new fellows have done that, and some of them got proposed for membership in the Sacred Pig society." This was one of the exclusive secret organizations of the academy, and Dick, as well as many others, wished to join. But one had to be invited to apply for membership, and only those students on whom the seal of approval was set by the older cadets had this honor. "Do you think that would do any good?" asked Dick. "It might." "Then I'll try. Here's a chance where I can use some of my money. If this plan doesn't work, I have another that I'll spring." "What is it?" "Well, I don't want to say yet. I may want to get you to help me at it, though." "I'll do anything I can." "I know you will, Paul. I wish there were more like you." Dick obtained permission from Colonel Masterly to give a spread in one of the barrack rooms, and he made elaborate preparations for it. A town caterer was given orders to supply a fine supper, and then Dick sent out his invitations. He included all the lads in his class, and every member of the so-called "sporting crowd." "Are you going to invite Dutton?" asked Paul. "Of course. I want him more than all the others. If he would drop his hard feelings we could be friends." "After he tried to get you into trouble about your dog, and the firing of the cannon?" "Do you think he did?" "I'm sure of it, and so are lots of others." "Captain Hayden can't seem to find out anything about it." "No, because all of Dutton's cronies are keeping mum. But I'm sure he did it." "Well, I'll forgive him, if he'll be friends. I got even by whipping him, I guess." "Perhaps, though I don't believe he thinks so." Dick received acceptances from nearly all the lads in his class, but regarding the others he heard nothing, and did not know whether they would come or not. He hoped they would--particularly Dutton and his chums. On the afternoon of the evening on which Dick's spread was to come off, he met Dutton and Stiver on the campus. "Let's see, isn't your spread to-morrow night?" asked Stiver, with studied carelessness. "It's to-night," said Dick, pleasantly. "I hope you are both coming." "I'll see," answered Stiver. "Is there going to be anything to drink?" asked Dutton with a covert sneer. "Lemonade," replied Dick promptly. "Is that all? I should think a millionaire cadet like you would provide champagne; or at least beer." "It's against the rules," said Dick. "Then you'll have some cigars." "No." "Cigarettes then?" "No." "I suppose you'll give us malted milk and crackers," sneered Dutton, as he turned aside. "I don't think that will suit us. Eh, Stiver?" "No indeed. I thought you wanted to be a sport, Hamilton?" "I don't care about breaking rules," replied Dick. "Besides, I don't use tobacco or liquor." "Ah, he's a regular Sunday school brand of millionaire," remarked Dutton, with a mean laugh. "He gives his money to the heathen, instead of buying cigars. Come on, Stiver." At Dick's spread, that night, only a few freshmen came, and, though they tried to be jolly, the affair was a dismal failure, after the elaborate preparations that had been made. None of Dutton's friends came, and not a member of the sporting element. "Dutton told 'em to stay away," said Paul, as he and Dick went to their room, after it was all over. "I suppose so," answered Dick gloomily, and there was a heavy feeling in his heart, that the thought of all his wealth could not lighten. He was beginning to realize what it meant to fulfill the conditions of his mother's will. CHAPTER XII AN ANGRY FARMER "Say, Dick," remarked Paul, the next morning, as they leaped out of bed at the sound of the bugle giving the first call, "that spread must have cost you a pretty penny." "I don't mind that a bit," replied the young millionaire, as he struggled into his uniform. "I'd be willing to spend a lot more if only the fellows would have come. But there's no use crying over spilled milk, as my dad says. Hurry up, Paul. Get this room in shape, or we'll be in for some bad marks at inspection." The cadets quickly had their apartment in good order, and then got ready for breakfast. They were a fine lot of cadets who filed into the mess hall a little later, well set-up young fellows, each with his uniform spick and span, marching with regular step that nearly approached the perfection of the trained soldier. For, such was the discipline at Kentfield, that even green lads quickly fell into the routine, and by this time Dick and the other freshmen carried themselves almost as well as did the senior students. "Ah, that'll be some fun," remarked Paul, as they were leaving the mess-hall after the meal. "What?" asked Dick. "Target practice. There's a notice on the bulletin board that we're to have it right after the first study period. Are you a good shot?" "I used to be, but the guns here are heavier than I'm accustomed to. I don't believe I can do as well." "Oh, I guess you can. I hear that some of the third year lads can't do very extra." There were two target ranges at Kentfield, one for long distance shooting, in the open, and the other in a rifle pit, indoors. It was there that a number of the cadets and their officers assembled a little later. Toots, who was a sort of janitor about the pits, was on hand. "Ah, Toots, going to show us how to shoot to-day?" asked a student. "Sure," replied Sam. "I'll give you a few lessons. Lend me your gun." "Here you go, Tootsy old chap," added another cadet, passing over his rifle. As all the cadets had not yet arrived discipline was rather lax, and the officers made no objection. "Here's where I crack the bullseye first shot!" exclaimed Toots. He handled the gun as though he had long been used to it, and took quick aim. A sharp report followed, but there was no corresponding "ping" of the target to indicate a shot. "Ha! Ha! Toots, you missed it altogether," cried Russell Glen, a first-year and somewhat sporty student in Dick's class. "No, I didn't neither!" objected Sam. "It went clean through the target, that's why you didn't hear it. I'm a crack shot I am." He really appeared to believe it, and was much disappointed when the marker called back that the bullet had gone about a foot over the target. "Try again, Toots," said Glen. "I will. This time I'll go right in the center." Once more he fired, and the resulting laugh told that he had again missed. "I guess this is your off day," observed Captain Dutton. "Looks like it," remarked Toots ruefully, as he walked off, whistling "In a Prison Cell I Sit," and ending with the bugle call to charge. The target practice soon began, and Dick, to his own surprise, made a good score, getting forty-nine out of a possible fifty. "We have decided to have a practice march, around the lake, to-morrow," Major Webster announced to the cadets after target practice was over. "Fatigue uniforms of khaki will be worn, and the affair will last all day. Lunch will be taken in the field. You know the regulations, Captain Dutton, so inform your command of them, and be ready after reveille to-morrow." The major paused, Captain Dutton saluted, and his superior officer turned away, his sword clanking at his heels. "A practice march!" exclaimed Paul to Dick. "That will be sport." "It sure will," added Dick. "Silence in the ranks;" cried Dutton, in a dictatorial manner. "Lieutenant Stiver, watch Hamilton, I think he talks altogether too much." It was an unjust accusation, but Dick knew better than to answer back. That afternoon further instructions were issued regarding the practice march. The cadets would take one ration with them, and a wagon containing utensils for making coffee, etc., would accompany the amateur soldiers. They would have their rifles with them, and, during the day would have practice in skirmish firing, in throwing up trenches, and advancing on an imaginary enemy. They started off soon after breakfast, led by Colonel Masterly, Major Rockford and Major Webster, while the cadet officers were in charge of the four companies, A, B, C and D. It was a fine day in October, just right for a march, and the cadets presented a neat appearance, as, headed by the superior officers on horseback, they marched along the shores of the lake, off towards a wooded plain. The boys were attired in blue flannel shirts, khaki trousers and leggings. "I hope they have more of these hikes before winter," remarked Paul to Dick. "'Hike?' is that what you call 'em?" "That's what the regulars do. It's a good name, I think." "It sure is. Say, you get a fine view of the lake here." The boys talked on, for there were no rules against it, and the experience of the march was a new one for many of them, including Dick. They reached some suitable ground about ten o'clock and on orders from Major Webster the companies were formed into one command, under his direction. Then, an imaginary enemy having been located in a clump of woodland, the cadets were sent forward on the run, in skirmish parties, firing at will, and in volleys. "Advance, and form trenches!" suddenly ordered the major. The lads, using their bayonets as spades, and scooping the dirt up with their hands, soon formed shallow ditches, with an embankment of earth in front, and, lying prone behind this, ruthlessly mowed down the ranks of the enemy who still refused to show himself. The rattle and bang of the rifles, the clouds of smoke, the flashes of fire, mingled with the hoarse commands of the major who was a war veteran; the rushing forward of the cadets, and their activity in digging trenches, made the scene one of excitement. It was glorious sport, Dick thought. Tired, dusty and warm, though willing to keep at this war game indefinitely, the young soldiers finally reached the edge of the woods, where, having dislodged the enemy, they were conceded to have won a victory, and the march was again taken up. A halt for dinner was made beside a little brook. Toots, who had charge of the provision wagon brought it up, and proceeded to build fires to make coffee. "Toots, you old scoundrel," affectionately exclaimed a senior cadet, "did you bring the cream for my coffee?" "Yes, Mr. Morton. I brought a jug full," replied Toots, who entered into the spirit of the fun. "And I want a white table cloth," stipulated another. "I've got one up my sleeve," answered Toots, busying himself about the wagon. Campfires were soon ablaze, and the appetizing smell of coffee and steaks filled the air. The cadets opened their haversacks, and were preparing to eat, having formed into little informal groups, each company by itself. "Say, Stiver," remarked Dutton, to his lieutenant, looking at a field of late sweet corn, which was near where they were camped, "I'd like a few of those ears to roast. How about you?" "Sure's you're a foot high; but you know the orders. Mustn't do any foraging." "Ah, what's the rule between friends? Besides, Colonel Masterly and Major Webster are away over on the other side of the woods. Send some of the freshmen after some corn." "I'm not going to. You can if you want to." "I will. Here, Boardman, you and Booker and Hamilton go and get some of that green corn." "I'll not," replied Dick promptly, who knew that this refusal to obey his superior officer would be upheld, if, indeed, Dutton would dare prefer a charge against him. "Afraid, eh?" sneered the young captain. "Very well, then, you take Hamilton's place, Butler." The three lads designated, either being afraid to incur Dutton's displeasure, or because they wanted some of the corn, quietly sneaked into the field, and quickly returned with big armsful, which were soon put to roast, the husks being concealed under the leaves in the woods. "Maybe, you'll have some?" asked Dutton, in sneering tones, of Dick, as the captain and his cronies began eating the roast corn. "No thank you. Not that I don't like it, but I prefer to get it another way." Dick felt that he was putting himself further than ever beyond the pale of his comrades' liking by his conduct, but he could not help it. The lunch was almost over, and most of the corn had disappeared, when an elderly man, evidently a farmer, crawled through the fence near where Dick's company was. There was an angry look on his face. "Which of you lads stole my corn?" he demanded. "And besides that you trampled down a lot. Who done it? That's what I want to know." There was no need to answer. The evidences of the stolen corn were all about. "I'm going to report this to Colonel Masterly," said the farmer, striding off toward where the superintendent was talking to the two majors. CHAPTER XIII A NARROW ESCAPE "Hold on!" cried Dutton, springing to his feet. "Wait a minute, Mr.--er--Mr.--" "No, you can't come any game like that over me!" cried the angry farmer. "You stole my corn, and trampled a lot of it down. That's agin orders, an' I know it. I'll report to your superior officers, and we'll see how you'll like it." "But--er--but I say--" stammered Dutton, wishing he could do something to placate the man, for he knew that all the blame would fall on him, and that he would be severely dealt with; perhaps reduced to the ranks. "No. I'll not listen to you," replied the farmer. "I'm going to report to Colonel Masterly." "Now look at the mess you've got us into, Dutton," said Stiver. "Why couldn't you let the corn alone." "Shut up!" retorted the cadet captain. "I say, Mr.--Mr. Farmer," he called after the man. "My name's not Farmer, but I know what yours will be; it'll be Mud, soon. I'll teach you tin soldiers to spoil my corn." There were murmurs among the cadets. They feared lest the whole company might be punished. But a scheme had come into Dick Hamilton's mind. Without asking permission from Dutton he hurried after the farmer. "How much will pay for the damage to your corn, and what the boys took," he asked quietly, holding out a roll of bills, for Dick never was without a substantial sum. "Now you're talking, sonny," said the farmer, a different look coming into his face. "Why didn't that captain of yours say so at first?" "What's the damage?" asked Dick. From experience he had learned that cash will make up for almost any kind of a hurt. "Wa'al, seein' as that was particularly fine corn, I'll have to charge you ten dollars for what ye took, and what damage ye done." "Ten dollars! That's too much!" cried Paul Drew. "Don't pay it, Dick." "Wa'al, then I'll see the colonel. I guess he'll pay that, rather than have his school sued," said the angry man. "Here are ten dollars," said Dick quietly, handing over a bill. "I guess the boys found the corn worth it," he added with a smile. "That's all right," said the farmer, as he pocketed the money. "I wouldn't 'a made a fuss if I'd a knowed you was goin' to pay for it. I'm reasonable, I am." "Not at selling corn," murmured Paul, as the man went back into his field. "Hurrah for Hamilton!" cried several cadets, who realized what Dick's action meant for them. "He's all right." "He got us out of a bad scrape," observed Lieutenant Stiver. "My record won't stand many more demerits." But instead of thanking Dick, Dutton turned aside. He acted as if he disliked to be under any obligations to the cadet who he so unreasonably hated. "Hamilton wanted to show off, and let us see that he had money," said the captain, contemptuously. "I suppose we ought to vote him a medal--a gold one, studded with diamonds, seeing that he's a millionaire." "That's not right, Ray," murmured Stiver in a low tone. "He's got us out of a hole." "I don't care! I wish he'd take himself out of this academy. We don't want millionaires here." Probably most of Dutton's feeling toward Dick, was due to jealousy, for Ray's father, though wealthy, was far from being as rich as Mr. Hamilton. Dick bit his lip, to keep back a sharp reply at the unjust construction put upon his act. "I shouldn't do anything for him again," whispered Paul. "Well, I did it for the whole company, as much as for him," replied the young millionaire. "In another minute Colonel Masterly would have heard the row, and there'd been the mischief to pay." The march was resumed after dinner and academy was reached in time for supper. The cadets were much pleased with their practice "hike," while the officers were complimented on the order they had maintained. "I guess the colonel would preach a different sort of a sermon if he knew about the corn," remarked Paul, as he and Dick started for their quarters. "Well, as long as he doesn't know, there's no harm done." "My, but I'm tired," announced Paul, as he undressed. "I'm glad we don't have any lessons to-morrow." "What do we have?" "Artillery drill. Have you forgotten?" "That's so. I had. I've got to ride one of the leading horses too. Guess there'll be plenty of excitement." "Shouldn't wonder. I'm on the gun-carriage, where I reckon I'll be shaken so my liver pin will fall out." "I'll try not to let it. There go taps. Douse the glim." The two cadets crawled into bed and were soon asleep. Artillery drill at the Kentfield academy was as near like the real article as possible. The guns were four-inch field pieces, each drawn by six horses, the two leaders being ridden by cadets, while seven men were on the gun itself, an arrangement somewhat different from that in the regular army. Real ammunition was used in practice, the pieces being directed at target placed against a hill of soft dirt, in which the balls buried themselves. The artillery practice began soon after morning inspection. The cadets had all been instructed in how to load, aim and fire the field pieces, and had also had practice in driving the artillery into place. For the first time, however, they were now to indulge in this under the critical eye of an officer from the regular army, who was visiting the academy. The first part of the drill consisted in firing at targets, before horses were hitched to the guns. The cadets did well at this, the different squads making good scores. Dick, who was detailed at the breech, had a chance to aim. He thought he sighted perfectly, but when it was fired the ball did not hit the target cleanly. It was the last shot in that particular part of the tactics, and it left Dick's squad with the lowest record. "That's all your fault, Hamilton!" cried Captain Dutton angrily. "Why didn't you aim that right? Then we'd have had a chance to make a good score." "I did aim it right, but the gun must have shifted. Maybe one of the wheels was on a small stone." "Nonsense. It's your stupidity. You've lost us a good mark." Dutton angrily slammed the breech-block shut. Dick gave a start, but stifled the cry of pain that he was ready to give utterance to, for one of his fingers was caught in the breech, and the blood spurted from it, as the angry captain closed the gun. "Open the breech! Quick!" cried Paul, who had seen what had happened. "What's that?" asked Dutton, who had turned aside. Dick's roommate did not answer. Instead he took hold of the block with both hands, and wrenched it open, releasing our hero, whose white face showed the pain he suffered. "Sorry I hurt you," said Dutton, calmly. "You shouldn't have had your finger there. I suppose you can't drive now, in the next test." "I'll drive," said Dick, grimly, as he bound his handkerchief tightly around his finger, to stop the bleeding. The nail was smashed, and it was very painful. "Then hurry up, and get the horses. They're ready to begin." This test was a difficult one. In turn the different gun squads were to approach a certain spot on the gallop. They were to go through a narrow passage, indicated by stakes stuck into the ground, and, at the end were to suddenly wheel the gun, fire three shots, and continue on at a gallop to the end of the course. If any of the stakes were touched it counted against the squad, and other points were won or lost by the speed and accuracy of firing. In spite of his pain Dick mounted his horse, and was soon ready, with 'Gene Graham, who was to ride the other steed, to start off with the field piece. A squad from Company B went first. They cleared the stakes nicely, and did good work in wheeling and firing. "I hope we beat them," murmured Captain Dutton, who was on the gun carriage. Dick grimly resolved that if he had anything to do with it they would. Company C's team came next, and did well, but the off horse struck a stake. "Don't let that happen, Hamilton," cautioned Captain Dutton, as it came their turn. Dick and Graham urged their animals to a gallop, and with a deep rumble the gun followed after them. On and on they went, toward the narrow lane formed by the upright stakes. Dick's heart was beating hard as he neared them. Would he clear them? With unerring eye the young millionaire guided his animal, and so did Graham. With folded arms, and almost as stiff as ramrods, the cadets sat on the gun carriage. The leading horses were at the first stakes now, but the real test would come when the wide gun carriage reached them. "Go on!" yelled Dick to his horse, a swift pace being most essential in order to keep on a straight course. Dick gave a glance back. One wheel seemed about to hit a stake, but he quickly swerved his horse and the danger was averted. They got through without touching, and at a swifter pace than had any of their competitors. A burst of cheers from the watching cadets, and some visitors, rewarded them. "Careful now!" cautioned Captain Dutton, as Dick wheeled his horse about. Whether the animal was frightened at the cheering, or whether Dick, because of his injured finger, did not have a proper hold of the reins, was never known but, at that instant, the horse suddenly swerved, turning almost at right angles, and pulling off the course. So quickly was it done that it seemed as if the gun and carriage would upset, injuring several of the lads. But Dick was equal to the occasion. Though the strain, which he had to put on the reins hurt his wounded hand very much, he never flinched. With a steady pull, and a sharp word of command, he swung his horse's head around, and just in time to avoid sending the gun over sideways. Then, with a smart blow of his hand on the animal's flank Dick set him to a sharp gallop. Graham's steed, which had been pulled from his stride, regained it, and the horses behind, straightening out of the confusion into which they had been thrown, leaped forward, pulling the rumbling gun after them. Through it all, and in spite of their narrow escape, the cadets on the carriage had not so much as unfolded their arms. On toward the place where they were to fire Dick and Graham rushed their horses. A moment later they wheeled them, the cadets leaped down, the gun was unlimbered, a shot rammed home, and the men stood at attention. "Fire!" cried Captain Dutton. A puff of white smoke, a sliver of flame and then a deep boom, while a black ball was hurled toward the distant target. Twice more this was repeated, and then the gun was limbered, or attached to the limber, the forward part of the carriage, and the horses galloped off with it. Dick's squad had made a perfect score, in spite of the actions of his horse, and the cadets that came after them failed, so Captain Dutton's men won in the test. But Dick felt sick and faint from the pain in his finger which had started to bleeding again, because of the strain caused by the reins. CHAPTER XIV CAPTAIN HANDLEE'S VISIT "Very well done, young gentlemen--very well done indeed," complimented Colonel Masterly, as Dick and his fellow cadets came driving slowly past where the head of the academy sat with some visitors, and the army officer. "Indeed, the regulars will have to look to their laurels when such lads as these are doing as well as that," observed the officer. "I thought they were going to have a spill there, at one time. But the lad on the off horse saved the day. Who is he?" "Millionaire Hamilton's son," said the superintendent in a low voice, yet not so low but that Dick heard him. "I wish they wouldn't refer to me that way," he thought. "I'd like to be myself once in a while--just Dick Hamilton. Money isn't what it's cracked up to be." "Why, Hamilton, are you hurt?" asked Major Webster, as Dick guided his horse to the place where the animals would be unhitched. He looked at the red-stained handkerchief around the young millionaire's hand. "Just a scratch," replied Dick bravely, though the pain of his crushed finger made him wince. "I caught it in the gun. It doesn't amount to anything." He saw Dutton looking at him, and he fancied he detected a sneer on the cadet captain's face. "Well, go to the surgeon, and have it dressed," said the major. "We don't want you to get blood poison. Is yours the only injury of the day?" "I guess so," replied Dick, with an attempted laugh. "A scratch!" exclaimed the surgeon, when Dick had so characterized the wound, as he came to have it dressed. "Well, I wouldn't want many scratches like that. Why the top of the finger is crushed. You shouldn't have kept on after you got this." "I'd have to if we were fighting in earnest," was all Dick said, and he gritted his teeth hard to keep from screaming out when the surgeon dressed the wound. Fortunately the remainder of the week was devoted to the more quieter forms of military life, the cadets spending considerable time in studying, drilling and reciting. One afternoon word was sent to Dick, who was studying in his room, that a visitor desired to see him. "Who is it?" he asked the housekeeper, who brought the message. "I don't know. It's a gentleman from Hamilton Corners." "I hope it's some of the boys," murmured Dick. "Or even a sight of 'Hank' Darby would be welcome," for, in spite of the activities at Kentfield, Dick was a bit homesick. He found waiting for him Captain Handlee. "I come to see if you had any news of my son," said the veteran pitifully. "I'm about to go out west on a clue I have, but I thought I'd stop off here." "No," replied Dick, "I'm sorry, but I haven't any news for you. I wrote you about my inquiries." "Yes, I know, but I hoped something might have happened since then." "No, I regret to say, there hasn't. But how does it come that you're going out west?" "Well, I have an idea I can get some clues there. I'm going to look up some old soldiers who were in my son's company. Your father gave me the money to go." "My father? Is he home?" asked Dick quickly, hoping his parent had unexpectedly returned from abroad. "Oh, no. He gave it to me before he left. I mentioned that I'd like to go out west, and he gave me a good sum. I don't know what I'd do but for him." "When are you going west?" asked Dick. "Right away. I guess I'd better be leaving here now." "If you have any time to spare, captain, perhaps you'd like to stay and see the cadets go through some drills." "I think I would, if the commander will let me." "Of course he will. Old soldiers are always welcome here. We're going to have some wall-scaling drills just before parade this evening. I'd like to have you stay and see them." "I will, thanks." Dick spoke to Colonel Masterly about Captain Handlee, and the veteran not only received a cordial invitation to remain, but was taken in charge by Major Webster, who asked him to occupy his quarters, and take his meals there. The wall-scaling drills were always enjoyed by the cadets as they offered chances for rough and ready fun. The walls were structures of boards, between ten and fifteen feet high, placed on the open field, and the object was for the lads, by means of a pyramid formation, to get all their comrades over the top, while the men left behind, who had assisted their fellows over, would either scramble up by means of a rope, anchored by lads on the other side, or would be pulled up by their comrades who leaned over the high fence. CHAPTER XV ON THE GRIDIRON When the exercises for the day were over, Dick sought out Captain Handlee, and inquired how he liked the wall-scaling. "Fine! Fine!" exclaimed the veteran. "We never had such practice when I was in the army, but we did pretty near the same in real life. I remember one occasion at Chancellorsville--" "Now Captain Handlee," interrupted Major Webster, who had constituted himself host to the veteran, "you keep all such stories for me. If you get telling them to the cadets, first thing I know I'll have to be providing big brick walls for them to scale." He led the veteran away, the aged captain bidding good-bye to Dick. "I hope you'll be successful on your trip," said the young millionaire. "I hope so, too, Dick, for I miss my son more and more as I grow older." In spite of the good record he made in the drills, at artillery practice and in his class, Dick found as the weeks went by, that he was making no progress in becoming popular with the main body of students at Kentfield. He had a few chums among the freshmen, and of course was on speaking terms with all the others, but aside from Paul Drew, his roommate, he had no close friends. This state of affairs made him feel sad, for at home he had been the most popular lad in town. "I'm not succeeding as I thought I would," he said to himself, one day. "I guess I'll have to put my plan into operation. But perhaps I'd better wait a while yet. I'll give this way a fair show." As fall advanced there began to be talk about forming the football eleven. A number of new players were needed, because some of the best had graduated the previous year. "I hope I can make the team," said Dick to Paul one evening during their study period. "I used to be considered a good player at home." "I don't see why you can't get on. Fortunately Dutton has nothing to say about who shall play, though he's considered one of the team's supporters and backers." "Still he may influence Captain Rutledge. I hear they are going to pick candidates this week." "Yes, I heard Harry Hale, the coach, talking about it. I hope you make the eleven, Dick." It was the following day, when Dick was out in the field, with some other cadets of his class, getting instruction in survey work, that he overheard something which made him feel more than ever like giving up the fight against his handicap. He was standing near a thick hedge, holding the scale rod, while another cadet was reading it through the instrument, when he heard voices behind the shrubbery. "Looks to me like Hamilton would make a good player," he caught, and he knew that Coach Hale was speaking. "You're right," said Captain Rutledge. "He's got the right build, and I hear he played at home." "Aw, you don't want him on the team," expostulated a voice which Dick knew at once belonged to Captain Dutton. "Why not?" asked the coach, in some surprise. "Well, none of the other fellows like him. You wouldn't get good team work if he played." "Are you sure?" asked Captain Rutledge. "Sure. He's not popular." "What's the matter with him?" "Well, he's got too much money, and he's always trying to make it known. He gives himself as many airs as if he came of an old family." This was an unjust accusation, but the coach and captain did not know it, as they were upper-class cadets, and did not mingle much with the freshmen. "Well, we won't want to get an unpopular fellow on the eleven," said the coach, dubiously. "No, indeed," agreed the captain. "Still, we need good players. Suppose we give him a trial?" "You'll be sorry if you do," Dutton assured them. Dick longed to drop the rod, leap over the hedge and give a well-deserved threshing to Dutton, but he knew he would lose more than he would gain. He was brought quickly out of his fit of righteous anger by the sharp command of the officer in charge of the surveying party. "Plumb east there! Hamilton!" was the cry, and Dick saw that he had allowed the rod to slant too much. He straightened it, and, glancing at the hedge saw the three cadets who had been talking, moving away. But, before they got out of earshot Dick heard Dutton say: "I wouldn't put him on the team, if I were you, for I don't think he'll be here long." "Why not? Doesn't he like it?" asked Captain Rutledge. "Oh, I guess he likes it all right, but we don't like him. I shouldn't wonder but what something would happen to make him leave," and Dutton laughed sarcastically. "I guess I'd better be on my guard," thought Dick as he moved the rod to another place, in obedience to the instructions from the cadet at the instrument. A few days after this, a notice was posted on the bulletin board in the gymnasium, telling all candidates for the football team to report on the gridiron that afternoon, as selections for the regular and scrub teams would be made. Members of the scrub would act as substitutes on the regular. "Here's where I get my chance," said Dick to Paul. "Well, I hope you make the regular team," replied his roommate, as the young millionaire went to submit himself for examination. Coach Hale, Captain Rutledge, and a number of the former players were on hand, as was Dutton, and some of his cronies. All the candidates were looked over, sized up physically, and put through a course of "sprouts" in running, leaping, and tackling. Then their football history was inquired into. "I guess you'll do, Hamilton," said the coach, and Dick was delighted. A moment later, however, he saw his hopes dashed to the ground. Dutton called Harry Hale over to him, whispered a bit, and then Captain Rutledge joined them. "You'll be on the scrub, Hamilton," said Hale, a little later. "You'll probably have a chance to play in several games, however, for I like your form. You've got to be regular at practice however." Though much disappointed, Dick vowed to do his best at practice. This was started a few days later, and, when the regular team lined up against the substitutes, Dick resolved that they would make no gains through him, for he was playing at left guard, though he preferred being back of the line. "Well, how are we making out," Dick overheard Captain Rutledge asking the coach, one afternoon, following some hard scrimmages. "Pretty good. That Hamilton is like a brick wall, though. We can't gain a foot through him. I wish we had him on the regular." "Well, you know what Dutton said." "Yes, I know, but I don't believe all Dutton says. He's got queer notions. I think Hamilton is every bit as good as he is. Besides, Dutton doesn't play football." "I know it, but he has lots of influence." Dick fully subscribed to this, for he knew it was due to Dutton that he was on the scrub instead of on the regular team. But he resolved to have patience. As Dick walked off the gridiron, following the practice, he was met, before he reached his barracks, by Grit, who had been let out of his kennel in the stables. "Hello, Grit old fellow!" exclaimed Dick, and the dog nearly dislocated his stump of a tail, so excited was he. Since rejoining his master he had picked up wonderfully. "I've got you for a friend, even if I haven't many others," said Dick, as he bent over to fondle the dog. As he did so he saw some marks on the animal's smooth, satin-like coat, that made him start. "Grit, you've been fighting!" he exclaimed. "How did that happen?" He knew there were no other dogs near the academy with whom his pet would quarrel. He asked the stableman about it. "Sure Grit's been in a fight," replied one of the hostlers. "I thought you matched him in a scrap wid a dorg in town. Grit won, anyhow. It was a couple a' nights ago." "Matched him in a fight? Why, did some one--some of the cadets take Grit to town, and let him fight?" "Thot's what they done, Muster Hamilton, an' they won a pot of money on him too, I understand." "Who took him?" asked Dick, trying to speak calmly. "Why, uts no secret. Muster Dutton an' Muster Stiver tuck him one night. Ut was a foin foight, I heard 'em say." Dick started away, after chaining Grit up, a set look on his face. "I'll have it out with Dutton," he said. CHAPTER XVI FOR THE PRIZE TROOP After a bath and rub down in the gymnasium Dick dressed for evening parade. When this was over he sought out Dutton, who was strolling off the campus with some chums. "Captain Dutton, I wish to speak to you," said Dick, formally saluting. "Well, I don't know that I wish to speak to you. What is it?" asked the young snob, barely acknowledging Dick's courtesy. "Did you take my bulldog to town, and match him to fight another?" Dutton started, then looked insolently at Dick. "What of it?" he asked sneeringly. "This much. That you haven't any right to do that, even if you are my superior officer. Grit is my personal property, and I won't have him fighting." "Aw, what's the harm, Hamilton. He put up a dandy fight and licked a bigger dog than he is," put in one of the cadets. "I don't care, I don't want him to fight." "Oh, you don't?" asked Dutton coolly. "No; and if you take him again----" "Well, what will you do? Report me, I suppose?" said the captain. "No, but I'll thrash you worse than I did the other time, Captain Dutton, that's what I'll do!" exclaimed Dick, hotly. "You leave Grit alone! If you take him again you know what to expect!" Dutton turned pale. He strode toward Dick, but at that moment Captain Grantly, one of the instructors, strolled past. Dutton turned aside. "You haven't heard the last of this--my fresh millionaire," he said in a whisper to Dick, as he and his cronies walked off. "You'll wish you hadn't insulted me." Dick saluted, as the rules required, and marched back to quarters. He felt that he would have enjoyed a good stiff fight with his mean enemy. "I don't suppose this will add to my popularity, among the sporting element," he said to himself. "But I don't care; they shan't fight Grit!" Football practice went on every afternoon, and Dick and the other scrubs were faithful at it. The regular eleven was being whipped into shape, and the first game was close at hand. When it was played Dick found himself wishing he could have a chance, but no such thing happened. The opponents of Kentfield were light-weight players, and the cadets had no difficulty in piling up a big score. "But it will be different next week," Captain Rutledge warned them. "We tackle Mooretown then, and you'll find your work cut out for you." This game was indeed a stiff one, and several players were hurt. The cadets were slightly ahead in the second half, when the right half-back was knocked out, and, as there had been one substitute already put in at that position, there was a call for another one. "Try Hamilton," suggested the coach, after a hurried consultation with the captain. Dick's heart gave a wild throb, as he was called, and, stripping off his sweater, he bounded in from the side line. He was given the ball for a play around the left end, and, getting clear of the opposing players started down the field on a run. But, alas for his hopes of making a touchdown! The referee's whistle blew when he was on the thirty-five yard line, ending the game, in favor of Kentfield. There was rejoicing among the cadets, for Mooretown was an ancient rival, and they played three games with the students of that non-military academy every year, for the local championship. "You didn't get much of a show, Hamilton," said Coach Hale, as the team was in the dressing room. "But you started off well. I guess you'll get into a game yet." Dick was grateful for this praise. He knew he could do good work if he had half a chance. "This is Saturday," observed Paul Drew, as he crawled out of bed the next morning. "Not so many lessons to-day, and lots of fun for you, I suppose on the horses. It's rough-riding to-day." "So it is," agreed Dick. "I like that best of all, except, maybe, hiking on a practice march, and firing from the trenches. I hope I get the horse I had last time." "To-day's the last of the tests," went on Paul, as he slipped into his uniform. "How do you mean?" "I mean the officers are going to choose from those who ride to-day, the cadets who can take part in the tests for joining the prize troop." "Right you are. Say, I'm going to make that troop or bust a leg." "Well, I hope you don't break any bones. But I guess there's no danger. You seem right at home on a horse." "I ought to. I've been riding ever since I was a kid. I'm going to do my best to-day." As Paul had said, this was the final weeding out of candidates among the cadets, who had no chance in the tests that would be held later, to determine who should be members of the prize troop. This troop consisted of the best riders at the academy, and took part in several state evolutions and parades, having won a number of trophies. Scores of cadets, in their service uniforms, reported on the cavalry plain for practice. They were required to vault into the saddle while their horse was standing still, and at varying speeds, up to a smart gallop. Many failed in this, but Dick did not. Then came mounting and dismounting at hurdles, which was more difficult, and weeded out a number, and then, the last of the semifinals, was the feat of standing astride on two horses, driving a steed on either side, and, while doing this, to take a difficult hurdle. More than a score did not succeed at this, and Dick was not a little nervous when it came his turn, as, though he was an expert, he had not practiced this evolution much. On his steeds thundered over the ground, one being a skittish horse, and hard to manage. "If they don't jump together," thought Dick, "I'm done for. If one of them knocks down the hurdle bar it's all up with my chances." He called encouragingly to the animals, and took a tighter hold on the reins, while he shifted his weight on the backs of the horses. "Over you go now, boys!" he exclaimed at the take-off, and he fairly lifted the four animals as one, over the bar, clearing it cleanly. "Good, Hamilton!" was the quiet praise of Major Webster, who acted as judge. "That was finely done." So Dick qualified for the finals. But there was more hard work ahead of him. Thus far not many of the freshmen had kept up to Dick, and there were envious eyes cast at him. But those who envied him his good fortune realized that he had earned it. "Now, gentlemen, ready for the finals," ordered Major Webster. "I want you all to be careful, and take no unnecessary risks, at the same time, don't be afraid, for no one ever became a good horseman who was afraid." The final tests consisted in riding bareback, in different postures, such as might become necessary during a battle, in riding at different speeds, in removing the saddle from the horse while at full gallop, in leaping hurdles, and taking water jumps. Other tests were in leaping hurdles four feet high, and as the cadets vaulted, taking a suspending ring on a lance, in leaping clean over a running horse and in forming pyramids, with ten cadets on four horses. The last test was, perhaps, the most difficult of all. It consisted in one cadet lying on the ground, and another riding toward him at full speed. The one on the horse had to pick up his comrade from the earth, by leaning over and grasping his up-stretched hand, and then assisting him up behind him on his horse, continuing to gallop away. When it came Dick's turn he noticed, with some uneasiness, that the cadet he was to pick up, was one of the heaviest in the school, but he resolved to succeed, and he braced himself for the ordeal, as his horse galloped toward the prostrate youth. As he neared the recumbent figure Dick leaned over, holding on as tightly as he could with his legs. His hand grasped the belt and part of the clothing of the cadet, and then Dick's arm felt as if it would be torn from the socket. He feared he would be dragged from his horse. But, with a sudden pull, he lifted the lad from the ground and swung him upon his horse. There was some applause at Dick's feat, as his steed galloped on over the course. "Guess I'm something of a load, old chap," said the cadet to Dick. "You're no feather," was Dick's comment, as he halted his horse. CHAPTER XVII DICK IN TROUBLE "Well, Hamilton, I think we shall admit you to membership in the prize troop," said Major Webster. "It was a severe test, and you did well." "I'm glad you think so, sir," replied Dick, saluting. There were some further trials, in some of them Dick acting the part of the reclining cadet. 'Gene Graham could not succeed in the test, and was rejected, much to his disappointment. Dick was delighted to be a member of the prize troop for it brought with it many privileges; and there was a chance to take part in parades and similar affairs to which the other cadets were not admitted. Very few freshmen had won the coveted honor, but it can not be said that Dick was received with open arms into the troop. Dutton and many of his friends belonged, and they had lost none of their unreasonable feeling against Dick. Still they did nothing more than turn a cold shoulder toward him, though this was enough to make the young millionaire miserable. However, he managed to forget some of his bad feeling in anticipation of another football game, which was to take place two days later. He hoped to get a chance to play, as, following a rather tame affair with a team which the Kentfield eleven "walked all over," there was to be the second of the championship contests with Mooretown. This was a lively and strenuous game. Mooretown put in some new players, and, though they did not score in the first half, when Kentfield made one touchdown, the opponents of the cadet warriors of the gridiron took such a brace in the second that the score was ten to four, in favor of Mooretown, when the referee's whistle blew. "What's the matter with your men?" asked Coach Hale of Captain Rutledge, after the game. "They couldn't hold those fellows for a cent." "Too much beef for us," replied the captain. "Yes, and they tore holes in your line that you could drive an ice wagon through," went on the coach. "Both your guards were weak. Hamilton should have been put in." "I couldn't very well do it, when no men were hurt." "No, I suppose not. But if the next game doesn't go better than this one did, I'll make a change. We can't afford to lose it." "We shan't lose it," promised the captain, and Dick, who overheard what was said, hoped he would get a chance to play. Meanwhile he reported regularly for practice, and was a tower of strength to the scrub eleven, many of the players on which, regardless of Dutton's influence, made of Dick a better friend than heretofore. Several unimportant games followed, one of which resulted in a tie, Kentfield winning the others, and then came the occasion of the final struggle with Mooretown. It was the greatest game of the season, as it meant much to both academies. The day before the contest Dick was surprised to receive a visit from Russell Glen, one of the freshmen cadets, who, hitherto, had scarcely taken the trouble to nod to him. Glen wanted to be considered a "sport," and Dick had heard that he had had a hand in taking Grit off to the dog fight. "I had a letter from a friend of mine to-day," said Glen, by way of introduction, as he lolled in one of Dick's easy chairs. "It contained some surprising news." "Yes?" asked Dick politely. "Yes, it was from Guy Fletcher, of Hamilton Corners. He spoke of you, and asked me if I knew you." "Well?" asked Dick, wondering what was coming. "I was quite surprised to know that you and Guy were friends," went on Glen. "Oh, yes, I've known Guy for some time," said Dick, not caring to go into particulars, and tell what a mean trick Guy, in company with Simon Scardale, had once played on him. "So he says. He speaks very highly of you. I've known him for some time. He and I used to be quite chummy. But I had no idea you and he lived in the same town, until he spoke of it in his letter. He mentioned that you attended this academy, and asked if I was acquainted with you. I wrote back and said that I was." Dick looked rather surprised at this, as well he might, for, beyond a mere nod, Glen had never shown that he knew him. "I don't suppose I am as well acquainted with you as I might be," went on the young "sport," calmly, "and that's my fault. I've been so busy attending to my studies, that I haven't had much time for social calls." Neither had many of the other cadets, Dick thought bitterly. "But I'll make amends now," went on Glen. "I want to get to know you better, because we both have the same friend in Guy Fletcher." Dick didn't think it worth while to state that Guy was no particular friend of his, since certain happenings told of in the first volume of this series. But Glen continued: "I wish you'd come to a little spread I'm giving to-night. Just a small affair for some of the freshmen." "I'll come," promised our hero, glad of the chance to meet some of his classmates informally. "It won't be as elaborate as the one I hear you gave," went on Glen, "for I'm not a millionaire," and he laughed. "But I'll do the best I can." At first Dick thought he was going to have a good time at the affair, for the guests, most of whom were of the "sporting" element, greeted him cordially enough. But when Glen produced several bottles of beer, and some cigars, Dick felt uneasy. It was an offense, calling for severe punishment, to have intoxicants or tobacco in the academy, and Dick realized that discovery might come any moment. Still, he did not want to bring upon himself ridicule, and perhaps anger, by leaving. "Have some beer, Hamilton," urged Glen. "It's the right sort of stuff. I had it smuggled in from town. And these are prime cigars. I snibbled some from dad's stock before I came away." "No, thank you," replied Dick. "I don't care for any." "What, don't you drink?" "No." "Aw, you don't know what life is. Have a cigar then." "No, I don't smoke, either." "Humph! You're a regular molly-coddle, you are," said Glen, with a brutal laugh. Dick flushed. "Maybe," he admitted, as pleasantly as he could, "but I have an idea I shouldn't drink or smoke while in training, if for no other reason." "Your training doesn't seem to be doing you much good," said another cadet. "You haven't had a show in any of the games yet. Better quit training and have some beer." "No, thank you. Maybe I'll get a chance to play to-morrow." But Dick's refusal had no effect on Glen's other guests. They drank more than was good for them, and smoked considerable. They were becoming rather noisy and silly, and Dick was in momentary terror lest some guard or instructor should come along and discover the violation of the rules. The spread was held in an unused room, in the basement of the east barrack, and, though permission for it had been given, the officer in charge of the building was supposed to keep a sort of lookout over such affairs. If one of the cadet officers discovered the beer and cigars he would hardly "squeal" on his comrades, but one of the academy staff would not be so lenient. The fun became more and more noisy, and Dick was thinking of withdrawing, no matter if he did offend his host, when he was saved the trouble by something that happened. A cadet officer, who was on night guard knocked on the door, and when there came a sudden hush to the merry-making, he whispered that Major Webster was approaching, and would almost certainly discover the breach of rules. "Quick fellows, get this stuff out of the way, and then skip!" cried Glen, and the boys quickly hid the beer bottles, and threw away their cigars. Then, by opening the windows, the smoke was gotten rid of, and the cadets prepared to disperse. "I say, Hamilton," began Glen, a bit thickly, as he walked alongside Dick, to his room, "you couldn't lend me twenty-five dollars; could you? I spent more on this racket than I intended, and I'm a bit short until I get my next allowance. I want to bet a little on the game to-morrow." "I guess I can let you have it," said Dick good naturedly. "Come to my room, and I'll get it." It was after ten o'clock, but as Dick had received permission to attend the spread, he had a permit to be out after taps. Paul, who had not been invited, was asleep when Dick and Glen entered. "I say, Hamilton, you keep your room looking nice," said the "sport" as he looked around the neat apartment. "I'm always getting a mark at police inspection, for having something out of kilter. You and Drew are as neat as girls." "Hush! Not so loud," cautioned Dick. "You'll wake, Paul." "Aw, what's the odds. He'll go to sleep again. It's early yet. Be a sport!" Glen was noisy from the beer which he had taken. "Here is the money," said Dick, handing over some bills. "Thanks, old chap. I'll see that you get it back all right." "There's no hurry." "All right; if I win, though, I'll pay you to-morrow. Do you think we'll lick Mooretown?" "I hope so. But you'd better go to bed now." "Me? Go to bed? Wha' for?" "Well, it's getting late, and some one might come along. You'd better go." "That's a' right. I'm goin'. You're a' right, Ham'ton. You're a' right. You're sport!" And, rather unsteady on his legs, poor, foolish Glen went away, much to Dick's relief. "I don't much care for friends, such as he is," thought Dick, as he got into bed. In his generousness it never occurred to him that Glen had cultivated his acquaintance merely that he might borrow money from him. Dick was awakened by the clear, sweet notes of the bugle sounding reveille. He and Paul jumped out of bed, and were soon in their uniforms. Then they got their room in order for police inspection, which, on some days, was made while they were at breakfast. This was one of those occasions. "There, I guess they can't find any fault with that," observed Dick, as he and his roommate, putting the finishing touches to their apartment, descended to form in line to march to the mess hall. Dick was leaving the table, to attend chapel, when Cadet Captain Naylor, who was in charge of the police inspection, tapped him on the shoulder. "Hamilton, report to Major Rockford," he said curtly. "To Major Rockford? What for?" "Room out of order." "Room out of order?" Dick knew that he and Paul had left their apartment in perfect trim. But Captain Naylor did not answer, and Dick, with a heavy heart, started for the commandant's office. It was the first time he had been made to report for a breach of discipline of this sort. CHAPTER XVIII A DISMAL CHRISTMAS "You are reported as not having your room in order, Hamilton," began Major Rockford, as Dick entered. "I don't see how that can be, sir," replied Dick, saluting. "When Paul Drew and I left it for breakfast it was in order." "Drew's side is yet, but your bureau is stated by Captain Naylor to be in great disorder." "I--I left it in order, sir." "Very well, we will go and take a look at it." Accompanied by the commandant, Dick went to his apartment. To his surprise his neat bureau was in great disorder, the objects on it being scattered all about. "Well?" asked Major Rockford. "Some one--some one must have been in here, sir," said Dick. "Ha! Do you wish to accuse any one?" Dick went closer to his bureau. Something on it caught his eye. It was a note written in pencil. It read: "DEAR HAMILTON: I am awfully sick this morning. I lost that twenty-five you loaned me. Can you let me have some more? I called but you were out, so I wrote this note here. Please let me have the money. "RUSSELL GLEN." Then Dick understood. Glen, suffering from the effects of his dissipation the night before, had called at the room after our hero and Paul had left to go to breakfast. In writing the note Glen had, probably unthinkingly, disarranged the things on Dick's bureau, where he wrote and left the missive. Then he had gone away, and, Captain Naylor, on police inspection, had seen the disorder, and reported Dick. "Do you wish to accuse any one?" went on Major Rockford. Dick thought rapidly. To tell the true circumstances, and show Glen's note, would mean that the facts of the spread would come out. Glen and his chums would be punished, and Dick might be censured. It would be better to accept the blame for having his room in disorder, rather than incur the displeasure of his comrades by being the means of informing on Glen. So Dick answered: "I--I guess I was mistaken, sir. I am sorry my room was out of order." "So am I, Hamilton, for you have a good record. Still there have been several violations of late, among the cadets, and I must make an example. But, in view of your good conduct, and record I will not give you any demerits." "Thank you, sir." "Still, I must inflict some punishment You will not be allowed to attend the football game this afternoon, but must remain in your room." That was punishment indeed, for Dick felt that he would have a chance to play. Still, like a good soldier, he did not murmur. He concealed Glen's note in his hand, saluted the major and then, as chapel was over, he marched to his classroom, with a heavy heart. "I wonder if that was part of a plot to get me into trouble," thought Dick, as he recalled what he had overheard Dutton say. "They're trying to force me to leave the academy. But I'll not go! I'll fight it out!" He felt very lonesome as he had to retire to his room that afternoon, and heard the merry shouts of the football eleven, the substitutes, and the other cadets leaving for the final battle on the gridiron with Mooretown. "How I wish I could go!" thought Dick. "I'm punished for something I didn't do. It isn't right. Still, perhaps Glen was so sick he didn't know what he was doing." He had already sent Glen some more money, for he did not want to refuse one of the few favors that had been asked of him since coming to the academy. As he was moping in his room, Toots came along, whistling "Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue," and giving a succession of bugle calls. "What? Not at the game, Mister Hamilton?" asked the jolly janitor. "No; I'm a prisoner." "That's nothing. Many a time I got out of the guard house. There's no one around now, and I won't look, nor squeal. You can easily slip out, and go to the game." "No," said Dick, though the temptation was strong. "By the way, Toots, did you ever call to mind about this picture?" and he showed him the one of missing Bill Handlee, which was still on the mantle. "No," replied Toots, again striving hard to remember about it. "It's clean gone from me, Mr. Hamilton. But, are you sure you don't want to escape? I can find some work to do at the other side of the barracks, if you want to go." "No. I'll stay." And stay Dick did, all that long afternoon. It was dusk when the players and the other cadets came back, and there was an ominous silence about their return. "It doesn't sound as if they'd won," thought Dick. "If they did they're celebrating very quietly." Paul Drew came in a little later. "How about the game?" asked Dick eagerly. "We lost," said Paul. "We might have won, only Henderson, who had a chance to score a winning touchdown, couldn't run fast enough with the ball, and he was downed on the five-yard line, too late for another try to cross the Mooretown goal. I wish you had played. You'd have won the game for us." "Oh, I guess not." "Yes, you would. Captain Rutledge admitted as much." "Well, maybe I'll get a chance next time." "There won't be any next time this year. The game is over for the season, and Mooretown did us two contests out of three. It's too bad. The fellows are all cut up over it. Say, have you any idea who mussed up your bureau? Was it Dutton?" "No, it wasn't Dutton," said Dick quietly, and that was all he could be induced to say about it. Discipline, which had been somewhat relaxed during the football season, was now in force again, and the cadets found they were kept very busy with their studies and drills. Dick was standing well in his classes, but he made no more progress in gaining the friendship of the students, other than a few freshmen. Even Glen showed no disposition to make much of Dick. He did not repay the money borrowed, on the plea that he was in debt quite heavily, and had lost much on the football game. Still he had the cheek to ask Dick for more, and when the young millionaire properly refused Glen called him a "tight-wad," and sneered at him, making no pretense of retaining his friendship. One night, following several spreads, to none of which was Dick invited, he wrote a rather discouraged letter to his father, hinting that he wished he could attend some other school. In due time there came an answer, part of which was as follows: "You know the terms were that you were to remain at least a full term. Still, if you do not wish to, you have the choice of going to your Uncle Ezra. He will send you to a boarding school of his own selection. Let me know what you will do. I will not be able to get home by Christmas, as I expected, and you had better remain at the academy over the holidays. I know it will be lonesome for you, but it can't be helped." "Go to a boarding school selected by Uncle Ezra," murmured Dick. "Never! I'll stay here a full term, even if no one but the teachers speak to me. I never could stand Uncle Ezra and Dankville. This is bad enough, but there are some bright spots in it. The sun never shines where Uncle Ezra is." Yet the time was coming when Uncle Ezra was to do Dick a great favor, though he himself was not aware of it. So Dick sent word to his father that he would remain at Kentfield. Fall merged into winter, and overcoats were the order of the day at all out-door exercises. Much of the drilling and parading was omitted, and more study and recitation was indulged in. What maneuvers on horseback and afoot were held, took place mainly in the big riding hall or drill room, and they were not as attractive as when held out of doors. "Well, are you going home for Christmas?" asked Paul, about a week before the holiday vacation. "Guess not," replied Dick, somewhat gloomily. "Our house is shut up, and I don't care about spending Christmas at a hotel in Hamilton Corners." "Come home with me." "No, thank you. I was thinking of visiting some of my chums at home. I believe I'll do that. I'll be glad to see them again." Dick knew he would be welcomed at the homes of any of his friends, and he planned to go to Hamilton Corners and surprise them. But alas for his hopes! When the last day of school came, and the other cadets made hurried preparations to leave for home, poor Dick was taken with a heavy cold. The surgeon forbade him leaving his room, as the weather was cold and stormy, and our hero was forced to remain at Kentfield, in charge of the housekeeper and the doctor, while the other cadets joyfully departed to happy firesides. "Sorry to leave you, old chap," said Paul, sympathetically, "but my folks wouldn't know what to do if I didn't come home over the holidays." "That's all right," said Dick, hoarsely, but as cheerfully as he could. "I'll see you after New Year's. Have a good time." "I will. Hope you get better." It was a gloomy Christmas for the young millionaire, and, as a fever set in with his cold, he couldn't even enjoy the good things which the kind housekeeper, under orders from Colonel Masterly, provided for the patient. The academy was a very lonely place indeed, Christmas day, for all the officers and cadets had gone, leaving only the housekeeper, and some of the janitors, including Toots, in charge. Dick received some tokens from abroad, sent by his father, and a cheery letter, which he answered in the same strain. "But it isn't much like Christmas," thought Dick, as he sat up in bed. Then a bright thought came to him. "Can't Toots have dinner up here with me?" he asked Mrs. Fitzpatrick. "Of course he can," she said. "Maybe it will cheer you up," and she sent for the jolly janitor. CHAPTER XIX THE MARKSMAN MEDAL Toots' advance along the corridor leading to Dick's room was announced by his rendering of the tune "The Star Spangled Banner," which he ended with a spirited bugle call. "Did you send for me, Mr. Hamilton?" he asked as he came in. "I did, Toots," said Dick. "I thought maybe you would like to have dinner with me here. I'm lonesome, and I suppose you are, too." "Bless your heart, not exactly lonesome, Mr. Hamilton, but I'm glad to come just the same. You see I'm too busy to be lonesome. I've got lots to do, cleaning up all the rooms against the cadets coming back in a couple of weeks." "Then maybe you haven't time to spend an hour or so here." "Oh, I reckon I have. But it's agin the regulations for me to eat here. I'm supposed to eat with the other servants." "We'll make our own regulations for the time being," said Dick. "Here comes Mrs. Fitzpatrick with the grub. I hope you're hungry, for I'm not particularly." "Well, I can eat a bit," admitted Toots. "I say, though, that is a spread!" he exclaimed, as he saw the good things the housekeeper was bringing into Dick's room, where she set them on a table. "Well, it's Christmas," observed Dick, "though I can't eat much myself. However, it'll do me good to see you put it away." "And I can do that same," admitted Toots cheerfully. Dick, under the doctor's orders was allowed only a bit of the white meat of the turkey, and none of the "stuffing," so he could not make a very substantial meal, but Toots ate enough for three. "I don't suppose you got this sort of thing in the army," ventured Dick, wishing to have his odd friend talk somewhat of his experiences, for he had learned that Toots had once been janitor at a military post. "No, indeed," replied Toots. "We did get a little extra at holiday times, but nothing like this." "How did you come to be at the military post?" asked Dick. "Blessed if I know. I was always a sort of a rover, and I suppose I wandered out west. I'm going to join the army some time. I'm a good shot, you know. Did you ever see me shoot?" "Yes," replied Dick, trying not to smile, as he thought of how far Toots had come from hitting the target. "Yes, I'm a good shot," went on the janitor. "But I'm going to improve. I'll practice on the range this winter at odd times. You're a pretty good shot yourself, ain't you?" "Fair," admitted Dick, as he watched Toots put away the roast turkey and the "fixings." "A-ker-choo!" suddenly sneezed Toots, pulling out his handkerchief. "Aker-choo-choo! Guess I put too much pepper on my potatoes," he said. Something fell to the floor, as Toots pulled out his handkerchief. It lay in sight of Dick, who was propped up in bed. "What's that?" he asked. "You dropped something." The man picked it up, and Dick saw that it was a marksman's bronze medal. "Let me see that," he said, quickly, and the janitor passed it over. "Why this was given to some soldier, for good shooting," went on our hero, as he tried to decipher the name on it. "Where did you get it, Toots?" "Blessed if I know, Mr. Hamilton. I've had it a long time. It was given to me by some friend, I expect. I found it the other day in my trunk. I'd forgotten I had it. But if it's a marksman's badge, I'm going to wear it. I'm a good shot." Dick looked more closely at it. Besides the name of some soldier the badge contained the name of the command to which he had belonged, but everything save the letters "mie, Wyo." were obliterated by dents and scratches. A sudden thought came to Dick. It was in connection with Toot's half-recognition of the picture of missing Bill Handlee. It was evident that Toots knew something of the captain's son, but he could not straighten out the kink in his memory, and possibly this marksman's badge might be a clue. Dick hoped so, and he decided to try to learn from what fort or command the medal had been given. "I wish you'd let me take this for a few days, Toots," he said. "I'll take good care of it." "All right, Mr. Hamilton, but don't lose it. If it's what you say it is, I'm going to wear it, to show I'm a good shot. Then I won't have to be telling people all the while. They can see it for themselves." "Can't you recollect where you got it?" asked Dick again. Toots shook his head. "It's like--like the time you asked me about his picture," he said, pointing to the photo on the mantle. "I get all sort of confused in my head. Maybe I always had it. Maybe someone gave it to me when I was janitor at the fort out west." "What fort was that?" "I've forgotten. It's a good while ago. But don't lose that medal, Mr. Hamilton. I'm going to wear it." "Poor Toots," thought Dick. "All the medals in the world will never make you a good shot." He put the badge carefully away, resolving to ask Major Webster, at the first opportunity, from what military post it was likely to have come. Thanks to the jolly companionship of Toots, Christmas was not as gloomy as Dick had feared it would be. The dinner over the janitor left Dick to himself, and our hero fell into a refreshing sleep. When he awoke he felt much better, and the doctor said he could be out in a couple of days, if the weather moderated. The first of the year dawned; a fine bracing day, and, as there was no biting wind, Dick was allowed to stroll about the campus a short time. This brought the color to his cheeks, and completed the cure begun by the surgeon's medicine. "Well, things will be lively a week from to-night," said Toots one day, as he came in to make up Dick's room. "Why?" "The boys will be back then. Vacation will be over." "I'm glad of it," commented Dick, and then, with pain in his heart, he wondered if the coming term would bring him more fellowship than had the preceding one. Major Webster was among the first of the instructors to arrive, in anticipation of the return of the students, and to him Dick showed the medal. "Why, yes; that's one given out years ago, at Fort Laramie, Wyoming," he said. "I can send it to a friend of mine for you, if you like. Possibly they may be able to trace the illegible name from the fort records." "I wish you would," said Dick. "Maybe I can get a trace of Captain Handlee's son for him." "I doubt it," replied the major, shaking his head. "I tried all the sources of information I knew, and it was useless. Still you may have better luck." The medal was sent off, but, fearing nothing would come of it, Dick did not say anything to Captain Handlee about it, though he wrote to the veteran in answer to a letter the old soldier sent him. The holiday vacation came to a close, and, one morning Dick awoke to a realization that, on that day, the cadets would come pouring back. It was nearly noon when the first of them arrived. Among them was Paul Drew. "Well, how are you, old chap?" he cried, rushing into Dick's room. "Pretty good. How about you?" "Oh, I had a dandy time, home. I almost hated to come back, but I wanted to see you, and then I know we'll have some sport this winter. Say, there are a lot of new fellows. We're not so fresh as we were. There are others. There's going to be hazing to-night, I understand. Thank fortune they won't bother me. I don't fancy cold water down my back on a winter night." "Hazing, eh?" remarked Dick. And he wondered if his turn would come. CHAPTER XX DICK DOESN'T TELL All the rest of that day cadets continued to arrive at Kentfield Academy, and there were lively scenes on the snow-covered campus, in the assembly auditoriums, students' rooms, and in the mess hall. Several new cadets stood about, looking rather miserable, Dick thought, and he spoke to some of them, telling them where to report, and what to do, for he appreciated what it meant to be a stranger among a lot of lads who ignored new-comers, not because they were heartless so much as that they were thoughtless. Dick rather hoped Dutton would not return, but that cadet was among the first he encountered as he strolled over the white campus. Dutton nodded coolly, and Dick as coolly acknowledged the bow. Then Dutton saw a freshman standing near the saluting cannon. It was one of the unwritten rules of the school that none below the grade of sophomores might stand near the cannon. "Here, fresh!" cried Dutton roughly, "stand away from that gun!" The lad, a small chap, did not seem to comprehend. Dick put in a word. "You can't stand near there until you're a second year," he told the lad. "It's a school rule, that's all." "I say, Hamilton, I guess I can manage my own affairs," said Dutton, angrily. "You mind your own business; will you?" "I guess I've got as much right to speak as you have," said Dick hotly. "I was only telling him what to do." The freshman looked from one to the other. Quite a group had gathered by this time, attracted by Dutton's loud voice. The new lad moved a short distance away from the gun. "Don't you know enough to mind when you're spoken to?" demanded Dutton, advancing toward him. "I'll teach you manners, you young cub! Why don't you salute when an officer speaks to you? Now get back," and, with that he gave the lad such a shove that he went over backward into a snow bank, made by shoveling the white crystals away from the gun. "That's not right, Dutton!" exclaimed Dick. "You mind your own affairs, or I'll do the same to you, Hamilton," retorted the bully. "You'd better try it," said Dick quietly. "If you want to fight with me, you know what to do. Just lay a finger on me." He took a step toward his enemy, and stood waiting for him. But Dutton knew better than to attack Dick. He had felt the weight of his fists once, and he knew he had no chance in a fair fight. So he strode away, muttering to the lad whom he had knocked down: "You keep away from this gun, after this, fresh." Dick did not think it wise to say anything further on the side of the mistreated one. Already he saw some unpleasant looks directed toward him by Dutton's friends, and he realized that by interfering in what was considered one of the rights of upper classmen, to assume a bullying attitude toward those in the lower grades, he was not adding to his popularity. I am glad to say that such characters as Dutton were in the small majority at Kentfield, and that though some of his cronies applauded his action in knocking the newcomer down, most of the lads were not in sympathy with the bully. But there were so many things occurring, so many cadets arriving, some of whom wanted to change their apartments, to get new roommates, or be quartered in other sections of the barracks, that all was in seeming confusion. Colonel Masterly and his aides, however, had matters well in hand, and by night, when the cadets lined up for the march to mess, affairs were in some sort of order. "Do you want to make a shift, Paul?" asked Dick, as they went to their room early that evening. "A shift? What do you mean?" "Why some of your friends have changed over to the east barrack, I hear. I thought maybe you'd want to go too?" "Do you want me to go?" "Indeed I don't!" and Dick spoke very earnestly. "All right. When I want to leave you I'll let you know," and Paul slapped Dick on the back in a fashion that told what his feelings were in the matter. A little later mysterious steps in the corridor, and subdued knockings on nearby doors told Paul and Dick that something unusual was going on. "Hazing," said Paul. "We're immune. Let's take it in." "I don't like to haze fellows," said Dick. "It's all right when they're your size, but all the chaps who came in lately are smaller than I am." "That won't make any difference to Dutton and his crowd. They'll haze 'em anyhow, and we might as well see the fun. A fellow who can't stand a little hazing is no good." "That's so. Guess I'll go. I don't mind it if it isn't too rough. I wouldn't mind being hazed myself. It would give me a chance to make a rough house for Dutton and his cronies." "Come on then. Let's go to the gym. I heard that they're going to haze a bunch of 'em there." "What about Major Rockford?" "Well, I guess he and the colonel know about it, but they won't interfere unless it gets too strenuous." Dick and Paul found a large crowd of the older cadets already gathered in the gymnasium. In one corner was huddled a rather frightened group of freshmen, who were waiting their turn to be grilled. They had been rounded up from their rooms by a committee appointed for that purpose. "Now, fellows," said Dutton, who, as usual, assumed the leadership, "we'll work 'em off in bunches. Put two or three of 'em in a blanket and toss 'em up for a starter." "Some of 'em may get hurt," objected Stiver. "We'd better take 'em one at a time." "Aw, you're afraid! Besides, we haven't time. Here, Beeby, grab a couple of 'em and pass 'em over." Captain Beeby of Company B grasped a cadet in either hand, and shoved them toward Dutton The latter already had one, and the three lads were pushed down into a large blanket which had been spread for that purpose. "Grab the corners and up with 'em!" called Dutton. "Toss 'em as high as you can." "Suppose they fall out?" objected Lieutenant Jim Watkins. "It won't matter. There's a gym. mat under 'em." Up into the air went the unfortunate lads, clinging together in a sort of bunch, and struggling to see which one was to be underneath in the fall. Down they came into the blanket, but the impact was so heavy that it was torn from the grasp of the cadets holding it, and the freshmen landed on the mat with a thump and many squeals. "That's the way!" cried Dutton with a laugh. "Now, once more." "Let's take some others," proposed Beeby. "No, they haven't had enough." So, in spite of their struggles and protests, the lads were tossed again. Then three more took their places. They, too, had a hard time, one falling over the edge of the blanket and partly off the mat. But he was game and never made a sound. "Now for the slide of death!" cried Dutton. "What's that?" asked several of his cronies. "I'll show you," he said. From the top of the gymnasium there hung a long rope, running over a pulley. Dutton made a loop in one end, and then took hold of the other. "Tie a couple of 'em up in blankets," he ordered, and two of the struggling cadets were made up into a rough bundle. Dutton then passed several coils of the long rope about them. "Pull 'em up!" he ordered next, and willing hands aided him in hoisting the lads toward the roof of the gymnasium. "You are now about to take the slide of death!" called Dutton, when the freshmen were close against the pulley, and fully forty feet above the floor. "We're going to let you come down on the run----" A scream from one of the lads in the blanket high up in the air interrupted him. "You'll frighten him!" called Dick. "What's that to you? Mind your own affairs, and we'll run this," said Dutton. "Or maybe you'll get your hazing, which we omitted last time." "Go ahead," said Dick. "But that's too risky." "Aw, cut it out, Hamilton," said Stiver. "We ain't going to hurt 'em." But this assurance could not be heard by the lads in the blanket, who could not see. "Let her slide!" cried Dutton, and he and his chums released their grasp on the rope, which was wound about a post. Down, on the run, came the unfortunate cadets, and from the cries they uttered they must have imagined that they were about to be dashed to the floor. Then Dick saw that several mats were right under them, in case of accident. But it was not the intention of Dutton to run any risks. At first the rope was paid out swiftly, and then it was gradually tightened against the post, until the speed of the falling cadets was slackened, and they came to a stop a few inches above the mats. "The next batch won't get off so lucky!" announced Dutton, as he commanded that some more be wrapped up in the blanket. "We'll bump them." This news was sufficient to cause a panic among the candidates still remaining, but their protests were of no avail, and they came down with considerable force on the mats, but no one was hurt. Then the water cure was administered to a number, the streams being poured down their trouser legs, amid the laughter of the unfortunate ones who were exempt. As the gymnasium was kept quite warm this ordeal was not so bad as might be supposed. Still, it was not pleasant, but it was part of the game. A particularly tall freshman was stretched out, or, rather suspended on the flying rings, until he looked like some soaring eagle. He struggled, but to no effect, and had to take his medicine. Others were blindfolded, and made to fight with blown-up bladders, some were tied in pairs on trapezes, and a number were made to do ridiculous stunts, to the more or less enjoyment of the older cadets. "Well, I guess that's all," announced Dutton, a little before it was time for taps to sound. "Unless we take Hamilton." "I'm willing," said Dick, with a grim smile. "He's too willing. He'd knock a lot of us around," whispered Stiver to Dutton. "We'll postpone your initiation," remarked the Captain of Company A. "Come on, fellows, there goes tattoo. Half an hour to lights out." Matters more quickly adjusted themselves following the opening of the winter term, than they did at the beginning of the fall one, as there were fewer new cadets. Lessons were quickly under way, together with a few drills, out of doors when the weather permitted it, otherwise in the big hall. The lake froze over, and Dick and the other lads had their fill of skating, races being held every afternoon. In a number of these, particularly the long distance ones, Dick came in a winner. Then there were snowball fights between the different companies, both on foot and mounted on horses, with wooden shields. These were lively affairs, and were enjoyed by all. Dick took his part in the winter sports, but, though he had increased his friends by the addition of several freshmen, particularly Payson Emery, the lad whose knocking down by Dutton he had resented, he made no progress toward getting intimate with the upperclassmen. "But I've got half a term yet," thought Dick. With the advent of winter, affairs in the town of Kentfield, which was about two miles from where the academy was located, became more lively. There were theatrical and other entertainments, and the cadets, when they could not get permission to attend these, used to run the guard. Usually there was little risk in this, as the cadet officers would not report their friends, unless some member of the academy faculty happened to hear a late-staying party come sneaking in, and then the young officer on guard knew he had to make some sort of a report or be punished himself. One night there was a large and rather fashionable dance given in town, by some friends of Dutton's family. He was invited, together with some of his cronies, but he was refused permission to go, as he had broken several rules of late. "Well, I'm going anyhow," he announced to Stiver. "I guess I can run the guard all right, and get back. There are some girls I want to meet." So Dutton and Stiver, and one or two others, went. Dick was on guard, as it happened, at the barracks where Dutton and the others had their rooms. He was patrolling his post long after midnight, expecting soon to be relieved, when he saw some shadowy forms stealing along the hedge. "Halt!" he cried, bringing his rifle up. "Gee! It's Hamilton!" he heard some one say, and he recognized Stiver's voice. "Then I guess it's all up with us," announced Dutton, straightening up, and, with his chums, approaching Dick. The young millionaire said nothing. "Are you going to let us in? We haven't the countersign," said Dutton, with an uneasy laugh. "You can go in," replied Dick, producing the key to the front door. "And I suppose you'll squeal in the morning," went on Dutton, as he and his cronies entered. Dick didn't answer. "You should have known better than to risk going, Dutton," said Stiver. "Of course he'll tell. He owes you too much not to." But Dick didn't tell, and Dutton's breach of discipline was not discovered. CHAPTER XXI THE FANCY DRESS BALL "Well, Dick," remarked Paul Drew, one afternoon, as he and his roommate came in from drill, "I see you're on the ball committee." "What ball, and what committee?" "The fancy dress ball, if I have to go into all the details. You know the academy has one every year, and it's a swell affair, let me tell you. Lights, gay music, pretty girls----" "Especially pretty girls," said Dick with a smile. "But what committee am I on?" "Arrangements. Didn't you see the list posted in the mess hall? I don't envy you. There will be lots to do." "Suppose you take pity on my ignorance, and go a little more into details." Whereupon Paul did, describing the affair at length. It was to take place, as usual, in February, and this time would be held on Washington's birthday. "Maybe we won't have fun!" exclaimed Paul. "There'll be all sorts of costumes, and the decorations will be immense. You'll have to help with them." "Then I'd better get busy," declared Dick. "I must see who's chairman of my committee, and report for work. What character are you going to portray, Paul?" "I think I shall go as a Colonial officer. I always did like a powdered wig." "Talcum powder, instead of gun powder," retorted Dick. "That's the calibre of such tin soldiers as you." "Halt!" called Paul, as Dick prepared to run away. "As punishment I'll not introduce you to a certain pretty girl I know, who is coming to the dance." "Then I'll surrender and beg your pardon!" cried Dick. "What part will you play?" asked Paul. "You'd look swell dressed as an Indian." "I think I'll take the part of a cannon swab, and then I'll not have to bother about a suit. But more of that later. I'm going to see what I have to do." Dick found out from the chairman of his committee that there was plenty of work to prepare for the fête, and he did his share. One day he had to go to a nearby town to purchase some of the decorations. It was two days before the fancy dress ball was to take place, and, having made his purchases, Dick prepared to return to the Academy. As he was about to board a trolley car, which ran near Kentfield, he heard a voice calling: "How are you, Dick Hamilton?" He turned, to see a tall, well-built lad, of about his own age, who was smiling at him in a friendly fashion. At first he did not recognize the youth. "You don't know me, I see," went on the other. "I once had the pleasure of interviewing you about a gold brick game----" "Why, Larry Dexter! How are you?" cried Dick, turning aside from the car, and holding out his hand to the other. "I did not get a good look at you, or I would have known you at once. What good wind blows you here? Can't you stay and come over to our Academy? Where have you been? How is the newspaper business?" "My, you'd do for a reporter yourself!" exclaimed Larry Dexter, with a smile. "I'm glad you haven't forgotten me though. Have you been swindled lately? I'd like a good story. The one I came down here after didn't pan out." Those of you who have read my books in the "Newspaper Series" will at once recognize the lad who greeted Dick. He was Lawrence Dexter, a reporter on the New York _Leader_, and, as related in the volume called "Dick Hamilton's Fortune," he had met our hero when the latter had narrowly escaped being swindled by a sharper in the metropolis. Larry, as all his friends called him, had managed to get a good "story" from the experience of Dick, who was on a visit to New York, with a number of boy friends. The incident is mentioned in the third volume of the Newspaper Series, "Larry Dexter's Great Search," where the young reporter does some detective work. After Dick had given Larry the story of the attempted swindle, the young reporter took the millionaire's son to the newspaper office, and showed him something of how a great daily is published. The two lads had struck up quite a friendship, and they had pleasant memories of each other. "What are you doing here?" asked Dick, as they walked up the street with his newspaper acquaintance. "Oh, I came here on a peculiar robbery yarn, but it turned out to be an ordinary affair, and not worth much of a story. I sent in the account by wire, and, as a reward for my past valuable services to the paper, I have been given a couple of days' leave of absence. You see, the managing editor thinks quite highly of me," and Larry made a mock bow. "Then you're just in time," said Dick. "How so?" "Why, you can spend a few days with me. There's going to be a big masked ball at the military academy where I attend, and perhaps you'd like to see it." "I think I would, if the military authorities will admit a mere civilian." "I'm sure they will. Come along back with me. I'll introduce you to Colonel Masterly, and you can bunk in with Drew and me. Paul Drew is my roommate--a fine fellow." "Oh, I'm afraid I'll put you out." "You couldn't do that, Larry. Come on. We'll have some fun." So Larry Dexter accompanied Dick back to the Academy, where he was speedily made welcome by Colonel Masterly and members of the latter's staff. "We would be very glad to have you remain and witness some evolutions of the cadets, a day or so after the ball," invited the colonel. "They will possibly interest you." "I should be glad to," replied Larry, "but I can't stay long enough. It is very kind of you to invite me to the ball." Possibly Colonel Masterly had a purpose in seconding Dick's invitation to this affair. The head of the military school was not averse to a little free advertising for the Academy, and he thought perhaps Larry might "write up" an account of the ball. Which, as a matter of fact, Larry did, and a fine account it was. The reporter, though Dick invited him to don a costume, thought it better not to, and, when the night of the gay affair came, Larry was in sober black, forming a strange contrast to the lads in gay uniforms. The dresses of the young ladies and the uniforms or costumes of the cadets, with the hundreds of electric lights, the gay streamers and flags festooned about the gymnasium, made the apartment a brilliant picture. The Academy cadet band struck up a lively march, and the dancers paraded around the room, two by two. Dick was not in this, as he had not yet made the acquaintance of any of the girls, and after ascertaining that Larry Dexter was in a position where he could see well, our hero retired rather disconsolately to a secluded corner. He saw Paul Drew dancing with a very pretty girl, and was just beginning to envy him, when his roommate walked up, and introduced her to Dick. "Allow me to present my friend, Dick Hamilton," said Paul with a low bow. "Mr. Hamilton--Miss Fordice. Dick is a better dancer than I am," added Paul. It was plainly a hint to Dick, who at once took advantage of it, and asked: "May I have the honor?" "If it pleases you, sir," replied the girl, with a mischievous smile, and an old-fashioned courtesy. Dick led her into a two-step, and they were soon whirling about. But Dick was not selfish, and he knew better than to keep Paul's partner away from him for long, so, making some excuse, he led Miss Fordice back to his roommate. "I'll introduce you to some other girls, after this dance, Hamilton," Paul called back to him. Dick noticed that a tall, dark girl, who was standing near one of the pillars, started at the sound of his name. A moment later she advanced toward him, appeared to hesitate, and then came forward. "Excuse me," she said, "but are you Dick Hamilton?" "I am," said our hero, secretly delighted at the chance of talking to the girl. "I thought I heard Mr. Drew call you that. You must think it dreadfully forward of me to speak to you without an introduction----" "Nothing of the sort," said Dick promptly. "But I know friends of yours," went on the girl. "I am Miss Mabel Hanford, and I know Birdy Lee, who lives in your town--I mean in the place where you come from. She and I used to be great chums. We went to school together." "Indeed," said Dick. "Birdy Lee and I are well acquainted." "So she said when I wrote to her, telling her I was coming to this ball. She suggested that I might meet you, and when I heard your name mentioned, I couldn't help speaking." "I am glad you did," said Dick, smiling. "Won't you come over and let me introduce you to my mother?" went on Miss Hanford. "I feel as if I had known you a long time, for Birdy often spoke of you in her letters to me." "I am glad she did," said Dick, gallantly. Mrs. Hanford greeted him kindly, evidently approving of her daughter's action. "May I have the next dance?" asked Dick of the daughter. "Yes," said Miss Hanford, blushing a little. "But I hope you don't think I spoke to you just to have you dance with me----" "Not at all," Dick hastened to say. "Because my card is nearly filled now," she went on. "I hope I may find room to put my name down in several places." "You may look. I think the next waltz is open." "It seems to be the only one," said Dick, ruefully. A little later he and the girl were sailing about the room to the strains of a dreamy waltz. Dick was a fine dancer, Miss Hanford was his equal, and the two made a pleasing appearance on the big ballroom floor. "Where were you?" asked Paul, as Dick came walking up to him after the young millionaire had taken his partner back to her mother. "I was looking for you to introduce a girl to you." "I managed to meet one myself." "Who?" "Miss Mabel Hanford." Paul whistled. "What's the matter?" asked Dick. "Isn't she all right?" "I should say so! Every fellow here is anxious to dance with her, but Dutton seems to monopolize her. He seems to think he's engaged to her." "I don't believe he has any right to think that," spoke Dick warmly. "She's a very nice girl. I wish I had met her earlier in the evening." The band was playing another waltz. "So do lots of other fellows, I guess. But you're doing pretty well. There goes Dutton with her now," continued Paul. Dick looked on, with envious eyes. Though Dutton and Miss Hanford were waltzing about, she did not seem at ease. Her face was flushed, and Dutton looked angry. When the dance came to an end he left her abruptly. Dick strolled over, casually, though his heart was beating faster than usual. "You look warm," he said to the girl. "Yes, the room is very close," she replied, and she fanned her face with a filmy lace handkerchief. "Perhaps you would like an ice." "Indeed I should." "I'll get you one," promised Dick. Then, waxing bold, he looked at her program. "What are you looking for?" she asked with a laugh. "To see what sort of ice I prefer? It's not there, but I'll take orange, if you can get one." "I was looking to see, if by any good fortune you had another vacant place on your card." "I'll make one for you," she said with a smile, as she crossed out a name. "Tantrell can look for another partner," she added. "Who may Tantrell be?" asked Dick, as he put his name in place of the erased one. "My cousin. He brought me here, but he doesn't care much for dancing. I know he'll be glad to have you relieve him." "Not half so glad as I am," retorted Dick quickly. "Now I'll get you the ice." As he walked away he saw Dutton eyeing him angrily. "Probably he doesn't like me to be talking to her," thought Dick. There was quite a crush in the refreshment room, and, in spite of the fact that he was a member of the arrangement committee, Dick had some difficulty in getting an ice for Miss Hanford. As he struggled through the crush of gay dancers with it he tripped, and, to save himself, involuntarily threw his hands forward. The ice slipped from the plate, and went splashing full against the back of a cadet dressed in an elaborate Colonial uniform, with a white satin coat. The highly-colored ice made a big, blotchy stain on the garment. The cadet whirled like a flash. It was Dutton. "Who did that?" he cried, as he saw a little puddle forming at his feet, where the fast melting ice lay. "I did," answered Dick promptly. "It was an accident, Captain Dutton." "An accident?" There was a sneer in the other's tone. "An accident," retorted Dick, as he turned away. "Here! Where are you going?" cried Dutton. Several turned to stare at him, for his manner toward Dick was most insulting. "I am going after another ice for Miss Hanford," said the young millionaire quickly. "Wait a minute!" ordered Dutton, in the voice he used on parade. "Not now," drawled Dick. "Wait until I get another ice." "You wait, I say!" spluttered Dutton. "It's too hot," replied Dick, for he could not help but notice the insulting tones. "I'll see you later. I'm sorry about the accident." "That was no accident," declared Dutton. "You did that on purpose, and I--I want----" But Dick passed on. He saw Miss Hanford looking at him from among the fringe of spectators, and, as he walked back to the refreshment room, he noticed that Dutton had one of the mess-hall attendants wiping off as much as possible of the stain from the white satin coat. CHAPTER XXII THE CHALLENGE When Dick secured another ice, and took it to Miss Hanford, he found her sitting in a quiet corner. She was rather pale, and did not seem to care much for the ice which he had had such trouble in securing. "I'm not quite so warm now," she said, in explanation. "It was very kind of you to get this for me. Do you--do you think Captain Dutton will be very angry at you?" She seemed anxious. "I don't see why he should be," replied Dick. "It was an accident. I could not help tripping." "After you went back the second time, he talked loudly about you having done it on purpose, and he said he was going to demand satisfaction," went on the girl. "Will he?" "Well, he can demand it, I suppose," said Dick slowly, "but I don't know what I can do, except to say I'm sorry, and offer to pay for his coat." "Do you--do you think he will do anything--anything desperate?" asked Miss Hanford, and she looked at Dick sharply. "Of course not," he replied. "But if we are going to dance, would you mind if we began now? I think this is my two-step." She arose, and they went whirling about the room. But she was strangely quiet. Dick's enjoyment of the dance was not a bit lessened by seeing Dutton once more scowling at him from behind a draped pillar. The cadet captain had doffed his gay coat, and wore one belonging to his uniform. It formed a strange contrast to his otherwise Colonial costume. When the dance was over Dick saw him beckoning, and, excusing himself from his fair partner, he walked to where Dutton stood. "You wished to speak to me?" asked Dick. "Yes. Come outside." "What for?" "I wish to speak to you." "Won't it do in here?" "No!" snapped Dutton. Dick hesitated a moment, and, not wishing to quarrel with the captain in the ballroom, he followed him out on a verandah. "What do you mean by insulting me, and making me ridiculous?" demanded Dutton fiercely. "Insulting you?" repeated Dick. "That's what I said. You refused to come back when I called you. I'm your superior officer." "Not on an occasion like this!" exclaimed Dick, and he drew himself up, and looked Dutton straight in the eyes. "We are all equal here to-night, Captain Dutton. I take no orders from you!" "We'll see about that. Why did you deliberately spill that ice over me? You wanted to make me the laughing stock of everyone in the room!" "I did not. You have no right to say that. It was an accident, pure and simple, and I have already apologized to you for it." "That is not enough. No one can insult me with impunity. I demand satisfaction!" "I don't see what satisfaction I can give you--unless I buy you a new coat. If that is what you what you want I will be happy to send you a check for whatever amount----" "Hold on, Hamilton!" cried Dutton hoarsely. "This is going too far! You're getting mighty fresh. I suppose because you are a millionaire you think your money will do anything. But I tell you it won't. You can't buy a gentleman with money, nor make one either. You come here with a lot of millions behind you, and you think all you need to do is to insult a gentleman, and then offer to pay for it. I tell you I'll not stand it. You did that on purpose and----" "I have already told you that I did not." "And I say you did." There was no mistaking Dutton's meaning. Dick took a step forward. His face was slightly pale. "That will do!" he said sternly. "Are you aware that you have practically accused me of telling an untruth?" "That's what I meant to do," answered Dutton fiercely. "You're a cad--a sneak--you threw that ice at me on purpose!" "If you say that again," exclaimed Dick, "I'll----" "Well, what will you do?" sneered Dutton. "I think I shall have to buy you two coats," spoke Dick calmly, for he saw that Dutton was losing control of his temper, and the young millionaire wanted to end the affair. "Don't you give me any of your fresh talk!" cried the captain. "I shall say what I please on an occasion like this," responded Dick. "I have that privilege." "You have, eh? Then look out for yourself!" Dutton fairly leaped forward, and endeavored to strike Dick, but the young millionaire was too quick for him, and stepped to one side, at the same time involuntarily shooting out his fist, which caught the bully in the side. Dutton stopped short. "I suppose you know what striking a gentleman means," he said slowly. "I do when I hit one. I haven't struck any gentleman to-night," said Dick coolly. "You're adding insult to it. You've got to give me satisfaction for this!" "I suppose so. You recall how it turned out last time." "This time will be different. You won't get off so easily." "Have your own way about it. I guess Paul Drew will be my second again, but I should think you'd had enough of fighting." "Not with you! I'll never be satisfied until I've beaten you!" "Then you'll wait a long time." The two had talked in rather low but tense tones, and they were not aware that they were directly beneath a window that had been opened to let in the fresh air. Nor did they see the frightened face of a girl at the casement. "Will after the ball suit you?" asked Dutton, as he turned aside. "Any time." Dick remained in the cool winter air a little longer, filling his lungs with the oxygen, and when he returned to the ballroom he saw no sign of Dutton. Nor did he see Miss Hanford, though he looked for her, as he had another dance coming. Supper was served soon after this, and Dick had no sooner risen from the table than Paul Drew signalled him to step one side. "Dutton has sent a challenge to you by Stiver," he said. "I expected it." "Yes, but what do you think he wants?" "What?" "To fight with swords." "Swords?" "Yes. Like the students do in German schools. Heads and body protected so you can't either be more than scratched. I think it's silly, but of course I said I'd tell you." "That's right. Swords, eh? Well, with football helmets on, and a baseball chest protector, and heavy gloves, I guess it won't be dangerous. But what's the use of fighting if some one doesn't get hurt? I prefer my fists." "Dutton's idea seems to be for you both to be rigged out as we are when we practice with broadswords on horses," said Paul, referring to one of the drills taught at the school. "Well, I don't like to object," said Dick, "but it strikes me that as the challenged party, I have the choice of weapons." "So you have. I forgot that. Then you don't want swords?" "I'll tell you later. You can inform Dutton I'll fight him when and where he pleases, and that, as it's my right, I'll name the weapons when we meet." "All right. Give him a good lesson, Dick." Paul went off to carry the message, and Dick, seeing Miss Hanford, went up to her for the waltz. She gave him a place made vacant by the inability of her partner to claim her, as he was on the supper committee. Dick thought the girl seemed nervous and alarmed, but he did not speak of it. The dance lasted until two o'clock in the morning, and then the guests began leaving. Dick was somewhat surprised to see Miss Hanford in apparently earnest conversation with grizzled Major Webster, but he concluded that she was only telling him what a good time she had had. "Won't you call and see me sometime?" she asked Dick, as she bade him good-night. "I will be pleased to," he said. "And don't--don't have any quarrel with Captain Dutton," she said, with a little smile. "Er--oh, no, I--I--er--I won't," was all Dick could stammer. He resolved that he would have no more quarrels, but it was too late to stop this one. As the last of the guests were leaving, Paul sought out his roommate. "The clump of trees, down by the lagoon," he whispered. "In an hour. What about weapons? Dutton wants to know." "He'll have to wait. I'll bring them with me. It's my privilege." A little later Dick went to his room, where he was busy for some time. When he emerged he was accompanied by Paul. He wore his long cape overcoat, and something bulged beneath it. "I guess he'll be surprised," commented Paul. The clump of trees, which Dutton had selected as the place for the duel, was located on a little point of land that jutted out into the lake, and near a small lagoon. It was some distance from the academy buildings, and out of sight. The trees had kept most of the snow from the ground, and it was a sheltered place. As there was a full moon there was no need of other light. As Dick and Paul approached the place they saw several dark figures moving about. "They're on time," whispered Paul. "Yes. I hope the Colonel doesn't hear of it." As they drew nearer, Stiver stepped forward and said: "Is your man ready, Drew?" "All ready." "Then we demand to know the weapons. My principal will object to pistols, as they make too much noise." "My principal has the choice of weapons, as you know, and unless he is allowed to exercise it we must decline to fight." Paul spoke as though it was very serious. "I know, but, hang it all, man, we can't fight with pistols. We'd have the whole crowd down on us," objected Stiver, in some alarm. "I'll not fight with pistols," put in Dutton, which was a wrong thing for a brave duelist to do. "Don't be worried," replied Dick coolly "I have not selected pistols. But we are delaying too long. I am ready." "So are we," said Stiver, but it was observed that his voice was not very steady. He was beginning to wish he had had nothing to do with this. It seemed to be getting serious, and he, as well as Dutton, wondered what Dick could be carrying under his overcoat. "Take your places," said Paul. "But the weapons," insisted Stiver. "My principal will hand one to your principal as soon as he takes his place," went on Paul. "We seconds must retire to a safe distance." "They--they aren't rifles, are they?" asked Stiver, and this time his voice was very shaky. "They are not rifles," said Dick, somewhat solemnly. "Come, I can't stay here all night. I want to write an account of this to Miss Hanford." "Don't you dare!" cried Dutton. "Hush! Take your place," said his second. Dutton approached Dick, and held out his hand to receive his weapon. Dick unfolded his coat and extended--not a sword or gun, but a big bladder, fully blown up, and tied to a short stick. He kept a similar one for himself. "These are my weapons," he said. "I won't fight with those! It's an insult! I demand satisfaction!" fairly shouted Dutton. "Hush!" cried Stiver. "Someone is coming!" But it was too late. Several figures could be seen running over the snow toward the duelists. CHAPTER XXIII A WINTER MARCH "Quick! Here comes Major Webster!" cried Stiver. There was no mistaking the soldierly figure who was approaching. "And Colonel Masterly is with him!" added Paul. "Some one has squealed!" added Dutton, but he seemed rather glad than otherwise that the duel had been interrupted. "Cut for it!" said Dick. "Across the ice, and into the grove! We can get in the back way, and they won't know who it was out here." "Say, if they were tipped off that something like this was going to take place, they know who was in it," said Paul, as he and Dick headed across the ice which covered the inlet at one side of the wooded point. Dick thought of the conversation he had seen taking place between Miss Hanford and the major, and a light came to him. "She must have overheard the talk about swords, and she got frightened," he said to himself. "That's how the major knew." On came the dark figures over the snow, but the cadets had a good start. Across the ice they went, and were soon lost in the depths of a little grove of trees. From there they managed to gain the barracks. "Queer they didn't call after us," said Dick, as he and Paul were safe in their room. "That is sort of funny. Say, where's the other bladder?" "Dutton must have it." But Dutton didn't have it. He had dropped it as he ran, and Major Webster picked it up a little later on the dueling ground. The major held it out to Colonel Masterly. "What's this?" asked the colonel. "One of their weapons, I fancy." "Then it was all a joke. What Miss Hanford told you about the duel, she must have dreamed." "No, she says she overheard Dutton challenge Hamilton, and later on, some talk between Hamilton and Drew. She was very much frightened, and came and told me. Of course I know the cadets will fight once in a while. They wouldn't be any good if they didn't, and, though you and I know that it's against the rules, it's no more than you and I used to do. But when she spoke of swords I thought it time to take a hand." "But they didn't have swords." "Evidently not. Hamilton reserved to himself the choice of weapons, as the challenged party, she said, and it seems that he selected bladders." "But why?" "I fancy he wanted to teach Dutton a lesson. There is bad blood between them, I have heard in roundabout ways, and once Hamilton administered a good drubbing to Dutton." "Hum! Well, I don't see that there is anything for us to do." "No, only go to bed. I'm sleepy. The time was when I could stay up at a ball all night, and attend a duel at sunrise, but those days are past. I think we'd better say nothing about this." "Just as you like, major. You are in charge of the cadets. But perhaps we had better let Miss Hanford know that there was no bloody conflict." "I will. Poor little girl! She was quite worried." So that was how the duel between Dick and Dutton turned out. It did not add to the good feeling between the two cadets. Dick would have been glad to be on friendly terms, but Dutton considered that he had been made the butt of a joke, and he hated Dick more than ever. He threatened to get even until Dick sent word to him that if he liked he would meet him with bare fists as weapons, and have the matter out. Dutton knew better than to agree to this. Of course Larry Dexter heard about the duel, but at Dick's request the young reporter sent no account of it to his paper, which described the fancy dress ball at some length. Larry remained Dick's guest three days, and greatly enjoyed his visit to the academy. In order to give the cadets a taste of as many varieties of military life as possible, and to show them that they could not always expect summer weather and sunny skies, Major Webster decided to have a winter practice march. This was announced for a date late in January, and some novel features were to be incorporated. The cadets were to be divided into several small squads, and were to set off at different times from the academy, to reach a certain point ten miles distant, report there for dinner, and march back. Various routes were selected, with officers stationed at checking points, and the squad which made the best time was to receive a trophy. As the ground was quite thickly covered with snow, and as certain landmarks, plainly visible in summer, were now obliterated, the march would prove no easy one. It was to be made on horses, and only the best riders were allowed to participate. "That's the kind of a stunt I like," said Dick, the morning of the proposed winter march. "We'll have some fun to-day, Paul, old boy." "Yes, if we don't get caught in a blizzard. It looks like snow." "So much the better. That will make it all the harder. I wish I was going to lead a squad." "I don't. Who is in charge of ours?" "Allen Rutledge. He's a good rider. Well, it's almost time to start. Whew! But it's cold!" Dick's squad, in charge of Captain Rutledge of the football team, was the third to start off. They set their horses into a gentle canter, as they knew they would need all the strength of the animals ere the day was over. At first it was pleasant enough, moving along over the snow, but, as it grew colder, it was not quite so much fun. Still the lads did not complain, as they knew the training was good for them. When they had gone about five miles some flakes of snow sifted lazily down from the gray, leaden clouds overhead. "I guess we're going to be in for it before we get back," observed Captain Rutledge. "Close up the ranks, behind there. Don't straggle." They kept to their route, were checked at the proper point by an officer, and then started for the turning station. This was a hotel in a small town ten miles from the academy, and glad enough the cadets were to reach it, and find a hot dinner waiting for them. An hour was allowed for luncheon, and the feeding of the horses, and then the start back was made. This was the most difficult part of the march, as the way led through an uninhabited part of the country, at the edge of the mountain range, and the roads were seldom traveled, and not of the best. About three miles from where they had dinner was another checking station. Dick's squad reached this in the midst of quite a snowstorm. "I guess it will only be a squall," observed Rutledge, as he went in the house, where the checking officer was stationed, to report. "A squall?" observed Dick. "If this doesn't keep up until we get back, and for some time after, I'm a Dutchman." Rutledge came out of the house, followed by the checking officer, Captain Nelton. Both looked worried. "We'll keep watch for them," said Rutledge as he prepared to vault into the saddle. "Yes, I wish you would," said Captain Nelton. "They may have straggled behind, and lost the road. Have them join your squad if you see them." "What's up?" asked Dick, for an air of familiar fellowship was permitted on the practice marches. "Dutton and Stiver didn't report in with their squad, which is just ahead of ours," replied Rutledge. "We're to look out for them." "Most likely they sneaked off to have a good time somewhere," said Dick in a low voice to Paul. The pace was slower now, for the snow was deeper, and the horses were beginning to feel the strain of the long march. The flakes were falling thicker and faster, and from the rear the leader of the squad could not be seen. "Come, boys, close ranks!" called Rutledge several times. "If you stray off now you'll be in danger. Keep together." They tried to, but some horses went better than others, and it was impossible for the stragglers to keep up with the leaders at all times. Rutledge saw this and called to Dick: "Here, Hamilton, you and Drew are good riders. You take the rear, and keep it as close to me as you can. This storm is getting fierce." It was almost a blizzard now, with the wind sobbing and moaning in the trees, and the white flakes cutting into one's face with stinging force. "Take the next turn to the right," called Rutledge to Dick and Paul, as they wheeled their horses and started for the rear. They heard faintly through the noise of the storm, and answered back. They succeeded for a time in keeping the end riders up toward the front, urging their somewhat jaded horses to a trot. Then, all at once, they found themselves out of sight of the tails of the end animals. "Hit is up a little," suggested Dick to Paul. "They're leaving us." They spurred their horses ahead, but they never noticed as they bent their heads to avoid the blast that they kept straight on, instead of taking the turn to the right, where the road divided. So fast was the snow falling, drifting as it did so, that the tracks of the horses just ahead of them were almost blotted out. "They must be galloping," said Dick. "Come on, Paul." They urged their wearied horses to a gallop, expecting soon to come within sight of the rear of the squad. But, as they went on and on, the road became more impassable. The snow was at least two feet deep now, and more was falling every minute. "I can't see anything of them," said Paul, peering ahead into the white mist. "Me either. Let's give a yell." They called, but the echo was their only reply. "Can you see any tracks?" asked Dick, leaning over in the saddle, and scanning the ground. "No. Can you?" "Not a one." The lads straightened up, and looked at each other. Their steeds whinnied helplessly, complaining thus of the cold. "Dick," said Paul, "I believe we've taken the wrong turn." "I didn't see any turn to take. We've come a straight road." "I don't believe so. Rutledge said something about turning to the right." "I know he did, but I didn't see any turn." "Neither did I, but we're certainly on the wrong road now. This hasn't been traveled this winter." "Looks that way. Say, we've come up the side of the mountain. I wondered what made the horses so blown." It needed but a glance to show that this was so. Unconsciously they had taken a path leading up the mountain, and they were now on what was evidently a wood-road, in the midst of a forest. As they stood there, vainly starting about, there came a fiercer burst of the storm, and on the wings of a stinging, cold wind there came such a cloud of snow flakes that they could not see ten feet ahead of them. "We're caught in a blizzard!" shouted Dick. "We must keep close together, Paul." CHAPTER XXIV THE RESCUE OF DUTTON Through the blinding snow the two cadets tried to peer, in order to see which way they should take to get back to the academy. Neither of them was very familiar with the country, though they had been over part of it in drills and practice marches in the fall. But things wore a different aspect now. "Which way had we better go?" asked Paul, after a pause. He had to shout to be heard above the noise of the gale. "I guess the best plan is to keep down the mountain," replied Dick. "We'll strike a road sooner or later leading to Kentfield." The horses did not like to face the blast, but the young cadets forced them about, and the unwilling steeds started down the slope. Protected though they were by their heavy winter clothing and overcoats, the two lads felt the cold bitterly. But they were too plucky to give up. The horses could not be urged to more than a walk, and, indeed, faster pace was not safe, as they did not know what the snow might conceal. As they went down the mountain side they kept a watch for the sight of any objects that would indicate a road, or tell them their whereabouts. But all they could see was an expanse of snow, a whirling, white cloud of flakes, with here and there the black trunks of trees standing up like grim sentinels. "We might as well be a thousand miles from nowhere," called Dick. "That's right," answered his companion. "I wonder if we're going straight?" "Isn't much choice. We'll be on level ground in a little while, anyhow. Then the going will be better." They emerged from the thickly wooded side of the big hill, and came upon a plain, which did not look familiar. It was open country, however, and this was better than being in the woods, though the cold wind had more of a sweep over it. "Now, which way?" asked Paul. "I've lost all sense of direction." "And I'm not much better. Suppose we let the horses go as they please? Maybe they'll have sense enough to head toward their stables." "Good idea, we'll do it." They let the reins hang loose on the necks of the animals. The steeds hesitated for a moment, sniffed the air, and then started off to the left. "I hope that's right, but it doesn't seem so," said Dick ruefully. "However, anything's better than standing still in this storm." There was no let-up to the blizzard, which fairly enveloped the lads in its icy grasp. They had traveled for perhaps a mile when Dick, who was a little in the lead, suddenly cried out: "Hi, Paul! Here's a house, anyhow!" "A house?" "Yes. Straight ahead." Paul looked through the whirling clouds of snow, and saw something dark looming up about thirty yards away. "Maybe it's a barn," he said. "Even that's all right; but where there's a barn there's most likely to be a house. I guess we're all right now." Their horses stumbled on, over the uneven ground, and soon another big object loomed up through the snow. "There's the house!" cried Dick. "Come on." They managed to urge their horses to a trot, and, a few moments later, were knocking at the door of a large, white farmhouse. A pretty girl who opened it exclaimed: "Come right in. I expect you're most frozen, aren't you?" "Pretty nearly," replied Dick, as he entered with Paul. They were soon near a warm fire, partaking of hot tea, though they declined the offer of some hard cider, an invitation slyly given by the farmer, who introduced himself as Enos Weatherby. His place was about eight miles from Kentfield, and, in the course of his talk, Dick and Paul learned that Captain Dutton and Lieutenant Stiver had been at the house a little while before, and had not refused the cider. This was news to Dick, but he at once saw how matters stood. Dutton and his companion, he learned, knew the two daughters of the farmer, and had called on them during the practice march. It was on this account that they had not reported at the checking point. Probably they thought they could make a circuit, visit their friends, and join their squad in time to report at the academy, trusting to luck to explain their temporary absence. They had been gone about an hour, Mr. Weatherby said, and he showed Dick and Paul the road they had taken, a short cut to the school. "Ride down this road," explained the farmer, "cut across my big meadow, and you will come to the main highway. Keep along that until you come to the first cross road, turn to the left and you'll get to the road that leads around the lake. Then it's only a mile to the school. But you're welcome to stay all night. The storm is getting worse." "Thank you, very much," replied Dick, "but we couldn't stay. Colonel Masterly would be worried about us. We'll take the short cut home. I guess they'll call the march a dead heat as far as picking a winner is concerned." The girls added their entreaties to those of their father and Mrs. Weatherby, who had been busy at household duties, entered the dining room, to urge the cadets to remain, as she had plenty of room. But Dick and Paul would not. There was obvious disappointment in the good-byes of the two girls, but Dick and Paul cared little for that, though the two Miss Weatherbys were rather pretty, even if they were a bit silly. The two wayfarers thanked their hosts, and, feeling much refreshed and warmed, while the horses, too, had improved by the halt, they set off again. The snow was not coming down so fast, but it was much colder, and they hastened on, anxious to get to the academy. "Queer about Dutton, wasn't it?" asked Dick. "It sure was," agreed Paul. "He'll get into trouble if he doesn't look out." "Somehow he always seems to escape, but I s'pose he'll do it once too often. This must be where we turn." "I guess so. Go ahead." They turned into the big meadow, crossed it, and came out into a road that showed some signs of travel. It was deserted now, however, as the winter night was settling down. "A few more miles, and then for a good, hot supper," commented Dick "Don't talk about it," said Paul. "It makes me hungry." Suddenly his horse shied, and the cadet, looking to see what caused it, beheld a dark object, half buried in the snow, at the side of the road. "What's that?" called Dick, who had dropped a little to the rear. "I don't know. Better take a look." Dick forced his rather unwilling steed up to the object. The next moment he uttered a cry. "It's a man!" he exclaimed. He leaped off his horse, and bent closely to the black, huddled mass. Then he reached over and took hold of it. "Here, Paul!" cried Dick. "Help me!" "What is it?" "It's Dutton, and he's unconscious and half frozen. Must have fallen from his horse and struck on his head! We must get him to shelter in a hurry." Paul was quickly at his companion's side. He helped Dick lift the unconscious youth from the pile of snow. Dutton seemed to be trying to say something, but though his lips moved no sound came from them. "What's the matter? Are you hurt?" asked Dick. "How did it happen?" Dutton murmured something, but the words "horse" and "Stiver" were all they could distinguish. "Maybe he's only fainted," suggested Paul. "Rub some snow on his face." Dick tried this, but it was evident that Dutton was semi-conscious from the effects of some injury. "What shall we do?" asked Paul, who was not used to acting in emergencies. "We've got to get him to the academy as soon as possible." "Maybe we had better take him back to the Weatherbys. That's nearer." "Yes, but they wouldn't know how to take care of him. He needs a doctor. No, what we've got to do is to get him on my horse. He's stronger than yours, and can carry double. Then you ride on ahead and tell them to send a carriage." Paul realized that this was the best thing to do, and the two, after some difficulty, hoisted Dutton to the back of Dick's steed. Then Dick mounted behind him, and, supporting in his arms the unconscious cadet, he set off through the snow. Paul galloped on ahead, urging his horse to a sharp gait, and made good time in reaching the academy. There he found considerable confusion, and no little alarm, not only over the absence of Dutton, but over that of Dick and himself. Paul quickly explained how he and his chum had become lost, and told how they had found Dutton. A carriage was at once sent out, and soon the injured lad was in the hospital, where an examination showed that he was not badly hurt, having merely received a severe blow on the head. "We feared something had happened when Dutton's horse came in without him," said Colonel Masterly. "Lieutenant Stiver said that he and Dutton became separated, after losing their way, and that he could not find him. So he came here to get help, and arrived just as Dutton's horse galloped in." Dick told the colonel how he had found the young captain, but did not think it necessary to mention about the farmhouse and the two girls. "I should have stopped the march when I saw that the weather was likely to be bad," the colonel said. "However, I am glad it is no worse." Because of the incidents of the march it was called off, as far as a contest was concerned, and so no inquiry was made as to why Dutton and Stiver had failed to report at the checking point. "I tell you what I think happened," said Paul, when he and Dick were discussing it in their room that night. "Well, what?" "I think Dutton and Stiver had more hard cider than was good for them. They must have quarreled, and Stiver left Dutton, who later fell from his horse. There was no excuse for them losing each other after they left Weatherby's house, and Dutton is too good a horseman to fall off, unless he couldn't take care of himself." "Maybe you're right. I'm glad we found him, though." "So am I, though I don't believe he'll treat you any better for saving his life." "Oh, I don't know as I did that. Some one would have found him before he froze to death," said Dick. Paul's idea of what had taken place between Dutton and Stiver seemed borne out by the coldness that sprang up between the two former cronies, as soon as Dutton could leave the hospital. He hardly spoke to the lieutenant of his company. Nor was he specially cordial to our hero. In a stiff sort of fashion he thanked him for what he had done, but there was no semblance of real friendship, and Dutton's crowd did not take up with Dick, as they might, reasonably, have been expected to. With the approach of spring the baseball fever began to stir in the veins of the cadets, and several nines were formed. Dick managed to get on a freshman team, much to his delight, for he was an excellent pitcher. Nor did the members of the nine regret their choice, for Dick pulled them out of several close games by his excellent twirling, which offset the errors made by his companions. CHAPTER XXV OFF TO CAMP "Hurray!" yelled Paul Drew one afternoon, as he fairly jumped into the room which he and Dick shared. "What's the matter?" asked his chum. "Matter? Why, lots. You've passed, and so have I. We're going to be corporals from now on. That's for making good records in the spring examinations. Dutton and Hale are to be majors, I heard. I'm glad for Hale's sake, but it's going to be bad for us to have Dutton given so much authority." "Why?" "Because he'll lord it over us worse than ever. Well, it can't be helped. And there's more good news. Get up and have a war dance, you old buzzard!" "Hold on!" cried Dick protestingly, as Paul yanked him from the easy chair. "What's up?" "Lots. We're going to camp!" "Camp?" "Yes; it's just been announced. We're to go and spend one week under canvas; with no lessons to worry about, and lots of chance to skylark and have fun." "I guess there'll be instructions in tactics, and recitations, won't there?" asked Dick. "It won't be all pie." "Oh, of course we'll have to do some studying, I think." "Of course. We'll have to tell what we'd do if, leading a small force of men, we happened to meet with an overwhelming army in a mountain pass, hemmed in on every side." "I'd surrender," said Paul, with a laugh. "I wouldn't; I'd fight," said Dick grimly, and he squared his jaw after the manner of Grit, his bulldog. "Oh, well, we'll have lots of sport," went on Paul. "Of course it's for military instruction we're going, but I think we can manage to slip in a good time now and again." "Sure," replied Dick, his eyes brightening. "When do we go?" "Day after to-morrow. Orders are to get our kits in shape. We're to go in light marching order. The tents and grub will be carried in a wagon." "That's good. I hate to pack my house, and all I want to eat, on my back." The two chums fell to discussing the pleasant prospects ahead of them, some of the freshman cadets in neighboring rooms dropping in occasionally to get points on what to do and how to do it. They were interrupted by a knock on Dick's door, and for a moment the buzz of voices ceased, as if the owners had been caught in some breach of the rules. Then, as the whistled strains of "In the Prison Cell I Sit," came to them, Dick exclaimed: "It's Toots. Come on in, you old Horse Marine." Toots entered, whistling a reveille with great precision. "Major Webster wants to see you, Mr. Hamilton," he said, saluting. "Me?" repeated Dick. "Yes. In his office." "You're in for a wigging," consoled Paul. "Court martial for yours," added 'Gene Graham. "No, I'm going to be promoted to take entire command of the camp," said Dick with a laugh as he went out. He had come nearer the truth than he thought in his jesting words. He saluted the major, who returned it, and bade him be seated. "Ah, Hamilton, by the way, before I forget it, let me say that I haven't heard anything about that marksman's medal yet," said Major Webster, referring to the one that had fallen from the pocket of Toots. "When I hear anything I'll let you know. But that wasn't why I sent for you." Dick thought it couldn't be anything serious, or the major wouldn't have begun in this fashion, so he waited. "I have been looking up your record, Hamilton," went on the old soldier, "and I am very much pleased with it. So much so, in fact, that I am going to promote you, temporarily, and give you a command." Dick's heart began to beat rapidly. "During this encampment," went on the major, "we wish the new cadets to get a good idea of the value of military training, and what this academy stands for. I think that by this plan of mine they will gain more knowledge in a week than they otherwise would in two months. Now I am going to take all the cadets who recently arrived and form them into two companies. One you will have entire charge of, as captain. The other I will select a captain for. Yours will be known as Number One Company, to distinguish it from the regular lettered commands I want you to give the freshmen as good an idea as you can of what a military life here means." "What am I to do?" asked Dick. "Take entire charge of them. See that they are shown everything, from how to load a gun, vault upon a horse, put up a tent, build a camp fire, mount guard and so on. At the end of the week's camp we are going to have a sham battle." "A sham battle?" "Yes, off in the woods. The cadets will be divided into two armies, and we will play the war game just as the regulars and volunteers do. In a sense the lads in your care will be volunteers, and perhaps they will do better than the regular cadets. That part is up to you." Dick resolved that if he could bring it about his company would gain some honors. "Your command will be part of the fighting force in the sham battle," went on the major, "and it will depend on yourself how they behave. The rules of the sham battle will be announced later, but I want you to get ready for your shoulder straps," and he smiled at our hero. "Well," thought Dick, as he left the major a little later, "I got to a captain's stripes before I knew it--but it won't last very long," he added, somewhat regretfully. Dick thought ruefully that, even with this temporary promotion, he was hardly fulfilling the conditions of his mother's will. He was certainly not popular with the great body of students, and he began worrying lest he be sent to his Uncle Ezra. As he walked back to his room, he recalled a letter he had received from his father that day, stating that Mr. Hamilton would remain abroad longer than he had originally planned. "It doesn't look as if I was going to make good," thought Dick, gloomily, as he entered his apartment. "What was it?" asked his chums eagerly, as he came back. Dick told them. "A sham battle!" cried Paul. "That's the stuff! Hold me down, somebody, or I'll stand on my head, and if I do I'll split my new uniform. Hold me, somebody, do." "I will," volunteered 'Gene Graham, and he obligingly tilted Paul up, so that he turned a neat summersault over his bed. "I guess that'll hold you for a few moments," observed Stanley Booker. "Now tell us more about it, Dick." Which the young millionaire proceeded to do. Never was there such excitement in Kentfield academy as when it became known that, in addition to the camp there was to be a sham battle. On every side was heard talk of ambuscades, skirmishing parties, rear attacks, retrograde movements, waiting for reinforcements, deploys and bases of supplies. Dutton sneered openly when he heard of Dick's promotion. "I suppose he thinks he'll do wonders with those freshies," he said. "Maybe he hopes he'll win the battle by coming up with them as reinforcements." "Well a small force has turned the tide more than once, Dutton," Allen Rutledge reminded him. "I don't think Hamilton can do it, though," was the reply of the bully. The start for camp was made on a bright, sunny morning, and the line of cadets, in field uniforms, with their guns over their shoulders, the sun glinting from the polished barrels, made an inspiring picture. "Isn't this glorious?" said Dick to Paul, near whom he was marching. "Silence in the ranks!" snapped Major Dutton, though there was no need for the command. CHAPTER XXVI THE SHAM BATTLE Forward marched the cadets, keeping step to the lively air of the fifes, and the accompanying rattle and boom of the drums. But regular formation and step were not maintained for long, only until the young soldiers were on the main road, when they were allowed to break step, and proceed as they pleased, the companies, however, keeping together. It was an all day's tramp to camp, and they stopped midway on the road for lunch, the baggage wagons having been halted while the regular cooks of the academy, who had been taken along, prepared the meal. "Wait until we get the tents up," said Dick, "then we'll have some fun. Nothing like life under canvas in the summer." "Right, Captain Dick," replied Paul, trying to talk with part of a chicken sandwich in his mouth. Dick had not yet assumed his new command, but would as soon as camp was pitched. They got to the place about five o'clock, and found that the tents had been unloaded from the wagons, and that the cooks had their white shelter already set up, and were preparing supper. "Now, boys," said Major Webster, "I want to see how soldierly you can do things. You have had considerable practice in putting up tents, at least you older cadets have; now let's see how you have profited by your instruction." In a short time the scene was one of great activity. Cadets were straightening out folds of canvas, laying out ropes, driving in tent pegs and, in less than half an hour, where there had been a green field, it was now dotted with spotless white peaked-roof houses of canvas. "Very well done," complimented Colonel Masterly, who came out of the headquarters tent to look at the sight. "Very fine, indeed, major." "Yes, I think they did well." The next work was to dig a trench about each tent so that rain water could not settle about it, and this was quickly accomplished. This done the camp had a fine appearance, the tents being arranged in rows or company "streets." By this time supper was announced, and the way the cadets put away the good things which the cooks had provided made those servants open their eyes. They were used to hungry boys eating, but they almost forgot to allow for the extra appetites created by work in the open air. It was some time since a general camp had been held at the academy. After guard mount, sentinels were posted and orders given that no cadet would be allowed to leave camp. In spite of this some of Dutton's crowd, including himself, ran the guard that night and were nearly caught. However, this was to be expected, and it was considered no great crime. The next day Dick was given charge of forty freshmen, and he took great delight in starting their instruction. There were drills to attend, lessons in tactics to learn, the best method to observe on a march, and illustrations given in artillery firing, for several field pieces had been brought along to use in the sham battle. Cavalry exercises occupied a part of every day, and though the cadets had plenty of leisure they found that their time was pretty fully occupied, for Colonel Masterly and his staff wanted practical benefit to be derived from the camp life. Target practice in the open proved to many a cadet who had done well on the ranges that he had plenty yet to learn. "I wish they'd hurry up and have that sham battle," remarked Paul to Dick one night. "Heard anything about it?" "It takes place to-morrow," replied our hero. "Blank ammunition will be served out the first thing in the morning, and final instructions given. My company is to form part of the attacking party." "That's good. I wonder where my bunch will be stationed? I wish I was an officer." "It will come in time. You're to be on the defense, I believe. So is the company of freshmen that Foraker has charge of." "Well, it won't make much difference. I'll not fire on you, if I can help it." "That's good." The plan for the sham battle was announced the next morning, after each cadet had been supplied with many rounds of blank cartridges. The young soldiers were divided into two equal commands. Somewhat to Dick's disgust Major Dutton was given charge of the attacking party, of which the millionaire's son and his young lads formed a part. Harry Hale, the football coach, who had also been elected a major, was to be on the defensive. The latter army was to occupy a wooded hill, back of the camp. At the foot of it ran a small stream, and to get at the defenders of the mound the attacking party would have to build a temporary bridge, which work was included in the instruction imparted at the academy. To cover this operation, the artillery of the attacking party would be brought up, but, at the same time, the field pieces of the defenders might pour a devastating fire on the bridge builders from above. The holders of the hill were to be stationed at the rear limits of it, while the attackers were to start their march about two miles from the foot of the slope. It was figured out that if the defenders could bring up their artillery, and other forces, and attack the enemy before a bridge could be built across the stream, the holders of the hill would win the battle. On the other hand, if the attackers could succeed in getting a body of cadets across the stream before a heavy artillery or rifle fire could be poured into them, they would win. The promptness of firing, the number of shots and general quickness were to count. At the appointed time, Major Hale and his force took possession of the hill, and Major Dutton led his army two miles back, on the plain in front of it. Dutton issued his orders. "We'll try to surprise them," he said to his young officers. "We'll swing around in a half circle, and instead of building the bridge at the easiest place to cross the stream we'll try it farther down. They won't suspect that we'll come there, and we'll gain some time." "But they'll have their pickets out," observed Russell Glen. "They'll see us." "I'll send some of you to another point to pretend to build a bridge," decided Dutton. "That'll draw their fire, and they'll start their artillery toward that place. Before they find out that it's only a bluff we'll have the real bridge half done." As the cadets had a record of building a thirty-foot bridge of the "A" style inside of four minutes, it seemed that Dutton's plan might be a good one. "How are you going to carry the planks and spars for the bridge?" asked Glen. "On the field piece carriages?" "No, we'll carry them ourselves. We can close up ranks so they won't see the boards." This looked like a good plan, and the cadets made ready to carry it out. "Hamilton," said Dutton sharply to our hero, "you'll take the rear guard, and stay there until you get orders to come up." This was rather hard on Dick. It practically put him and his freshmen out of the battle, unless Dutton should order them to the front, and he was not very likely to do this. Still Dick could not object, and he made the best of it. "Won't we see any of the fighting?" asked one of his command. "Maybe so," replied the young millionaire. "They may need us for reinforcements." Dick could not help but give Dutton credit for making his plans well. The young major led his men to the designated point, taking advantage of such inequalities of the ground as there were to conceal his movements. The ropes, beams and planks for the bridge were distributed among the cadets, several of them being required to carry the heavier pieces. The strongest lads were used for this work, and their rifles were taken in charge by their less-burdened comrades. Then, when all was in readiness, Dutton gave the command to advance. He led the way, at the head of a company of infantry, while back of that came his cavalry force, and to the rear of that was massed his artillery, while Dick led the rear guard of freshmen. Straight at the hill advanced the attacking army, while from convenient points Colonel Masterly and his staff of officers watched to decide who won. "Skirmishers, advance!" ordered Dutton, and several cadets detached themselves from the cavalry and rode forward. As they approached there were puffs of white smoke from the slope of the hill, and the sharp crack of rifles announced that the pickets of Major Hale's force were on the alert. The skirmishers returned the fire, and then galloped back to report. "They're waiting for us," Dutton was informed. "So I see," he replied. "Now, then, we'll halt here a moment. You fellows that are to pretend to build the bridge, get ready to rush when I give the word. I'll send one field piece as if to cover your movements. Are you all ready there, Stiver?" for Lieutenant Stiver, with whom Dutton had again gotten on friendly terms, was to lead the fake movement. "All ready," was the answer. "Then go!" Out from the attacking force rushed a squad of cadets, bearing light planks. Of course, from the hill, it looked as if they were the advance guard of bridge builders. Particularly when there dashed out a field piece, drawn by galloping horses. As the cadets approached the bank of the stream, and began to arrange their planks, the lads in charge of the cannon quickly wheeled it, unlimbered and fired the first shot. There was a white puff of smoke, a burst of flame, and a great bang went rattling and echoing among the hills. The battle had opened. As Dutton had expected, his ruse deceived Hale. The latter quickly ordered up his entire artillery to shell the intrepid bridge builders. Dutton, watching through a field glass, saw the approach of the cannon. "Forward march!" he cried to his main command. "Double quick!" Quickness was everything now. Off they started, the real bridge builders and nearly his entire force, including Dick and his youngsters in the rear. They circled around a turn in the stream, and, for a time, were out of sight of the small force left to bear the attack. "Build the bridge here!" ordered Dutton. "Lively now, boys. See if you can't break the record." The cadets needed no urging. Two of them quickly plunged into the stream, and, partly swimming, partly wading, carried over some ropes. By means of these they pulled over spars and planks, which, when several of their companions hurriedly joined them, they proceeded to lash together. The same operation was going on among the cadets on the other side of the brook. Two long spars were laid down on the ground, at right angles to the stream. At the further extremity of these spars a cross piece was lashed, projecting on either side. Ropes were attached to the projections, and the unconnected ends of the long spars, being held down to the ground by several lads, the others quickly raised the connected ends, just as a painter hoists a long ladder. The same thing took place on the farther side of the brook, and, when both squads were ready, the two parts of the bridge that were to form the two slanting sides of a double letter "A" were allowed to incline toward each other, from either side of the water, cadets having hold of the ropes, regulating and guiding the long spars. The big sticks met in mid air, over the centre of the stream, and, being well braced at the bottom, held. Then cadets climbed up on either side, and united them more firmly by lashing them. Something like a double letter "A," but without the cross piece, now spanned the brook. Or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say that it was a double inverted "V." It was necessary to put on cross spars, and lay planks on these, or the artillery and cavalry could not get over. And, as there were no spars long enough to reach all the way across the stream, two sections had to be used on either side of the bridge. They were to be tied together, and supported at the centre, or place of joining, by long ropes, attached to the apex of the letter "A." Though up to this time the main attacking party had not been fired on, they could not hope to escape much longer. Already puffs of white smoke from the hillside indicated that they had been seen by pickets. A minute later Dutton's trick was discovered, and Hale ordered his artillery to cease firing on the fake bridge builders, and to turn their attack on the others. But Dutton was ready for this. He had his field pieces in position, and, as soon as he saw that his soldiers had the bridge well under way, he began shelling the defenders, who were rushing down the hill to the attack. The infantry also began to pour in a withering fire. The ropes, by which the long spars had been lowered and inclined across the stream, now served as guys to hold them steady and in place, while the floor beams were being put in position. "Lively!" cried Dutton. "They're making it too hot for us! We must cross soon, or we'll lose! They came at us quicker than I expected!" Meanwhile the little force that had started to build the fake bridge had (theoretically) been killed. Now the long floor timbers were in place, being supported at the centre by long ropes, hanging from the point of the "A," and the cadets were beginning to lay cross planks on them. "Tell the cavalry to get ready to advance, to protect our crossing," ordered Dutton, to one of his captains, and the troop of lads on their restless steeds prepared to rush across the bridge at the first possible moment. It had only been a little over three minutes since the building of the structure was started, but a heavy artillery fire was being concentrated on the attackers, and, in accordance with instructions previously given, cadets began dropping out, being supposed to be killed. Dutton's field pieces were pounding away, and there was a thick cloud of smoke, which partly concealed the movements of his cadets. "Bridge is ready, major!" reported a smoke-begrimed lad, running up, and saluting. Then he hastened back to continue firing on Hale's soldiers. "Advance, cavalry!" shouted Dutton. "Lively now! Charge!" The horses, urged on by their shouting riders, thundered over the frail bridge. It trembled and swayed, but it supported them. "Forward, the infantry!" cried the young major. "On the double quick! Here they come down the hill at you! Fire at will! Charge!" Down the slope of the hill came rushing the defenders. Behind them thundered and rumbled their artillery, which was supporting their brave advance in the face of the enemy. "Artillery, forward!" shouted Dutton, waving his sword, and hoping, by throwing his entire force suddenly upon Hale's army, to overpower it, and get in more shots than could his opponent. That meant he would win the battle. "Shall I stay here?" cried Dick, for he had received no orders what to do with his force, and was still on the farther side of the bridge. "Yes! Until I send for you, or you see that you are needed," called back Dutton. "I guess I can get along without you." Louder roared the cannon; and the cracks of the rifles of the infantry, and the carbines of the cavalry, was like the explosion of pack after pack of giant firecrackers. Then something happened. As the three field pieces rumbled across the bridge, there was an ominous cracking and splintering sound. Dutton heard it and turned back from his rush, which he had started on to be in readiness to lead the charge of his artillery. He saw the bridge swaying. "Come on! Come on!" he cried, waving his sword. "Come on!" But it was too late. The middle supporting ropes had slipped, and the bridge collapsed at the centre, letting horses, cannon and cadets down into the stream, which, fortunately, was not deep. Dutton had, at one blow, lost all his artillery, while Hale's was advancing to annihilate him and his force. The boom of the defenders' field pieces sounded nearer and nearer, while their rifle fire became hotter than ever. Dutton saw himself defeated by the inopportune collapse of the bridge, which had been insecurely lashed together. But he would not give up. "Forward! Forward!" he cried. "Split up and attack 'em on both sides." His cavalry and infantry rushed forward, firing as they ran. Dick Hamilton, left with his little body of troops on the other side of the stream, saw his opportunity. "Quick!" he cried to his lads. "We'll go back and get the guns at the fake bridge. Then we'll pull it across and we'll see if we can execute a flank movement." "That's the stuff!" cried some of the lads, who had begun to fear they would never get a chance to fire their rifles. Dick led his men on the double quick to where the field piece, from which only a few shots had been fired, had been left. He saw a chance to turn defeat into victory. CHAPTER XXVII DICK WINS THE CONTEST Dutton was desperate when he saw the most efficient arm of his little force thus wiped out. He did not turn back to help the cadets in charge of the horses and guns, however, as he knew they could look after themselves. And this they did, though they had to cut the traces to get the horses loose from the guns, and then haul the field pieces out by hand. This took some time, and when the cannon were safe on the other shore they could not be used because the harness was cut and the horses could not pull them. Besides the guns had turned over and the working parts were all wet. But Major Dutton had not yet given up. He divided his cavalry and infantry into two divisions, giving Captain Beeby charge of one, and taking the other himself. Dutton took advantage of a little hollow which, for a few moments hindered the advance of the defenders, to execute this move, and he hoped to be able to turn the flank of Hale. "Make as wide a swing as you can," he advised Beeby, "and maybe you can get to him before we have to give up," for according to the rules of the sham battle about half of Dutton's force was now wiped out. It showed his spirit when he was unwilling to send for Dick's reinforcements, but he decided he would not owe victory to the lad he hated, if he could help it. Beeby got well away with his cadets before Hale and his forces appeared around a little mound on the big hill. Then, though it was hard work to handle his artillery there, the major of the defenders made a stand and gave pitched battle to the contingent led by Dutton. For a time the fight waged furiously, but it was unequal, as Dutton had no cannon with which to reply to the bombardment he was suffering. Nor could his cavalry advance to good advantage up the slope, while Hale's had no difficulty in coming down. "Now, if Beeby would only get there," thought Dutton, "we might win yet!" Alas for his hopes! Hale had suspected some such movement, and had held back a reserve force. Skirmishers saw Beeby advancing through the woods, and gave the alarm. Then Hale brought up a field piece he had not yet used, and opened fire on Beeby's contingent, which Dutton hoped would have saved him. There was no help for it. He was on the point of ordering a retreat, as the only way of saving a part of his force. Still he had a considerable number of cadets left, and they had plenty of ammunition. Meanwhile Dick and his freshmen cadets had not been idle. Under his directions they unhitched the six horses from the cannon, and, by attaching ropes to the piece they pulled it across the stream on a raft they improvised from the boards used to construct the fake bridge. Thus the piece was saved from getting wet. The fake bridge builders, who had (theoretically) been killed, offered no objection. They could take no further part in the battle. "Who are the best riders?" asked Dick, and several lads modestly offered themselves. "You'll be the cavalry," said the young commander. "You are only six, but you'll do for what I want, which is mostly bluff." He gave the artillery horses to six lads, and bade them ride across the stream, which they easily did. "Wade and swim for the rest of us," said Dick grimly. "Hold your rifles above your heads, for, though the cartridges are water-proof, it doesn't do the mechanism of a gun any good to get it wet. Lively now. We'll be too late if we don't hurry. They're keeping up quite a heavy artillery fire." The eager cadets needed no urging. They crossed the stream in good order, not being observed by either Dutton's force, or by the defenders of the hill. On the other side Dick looked for the easiest and best way of climbing the hill, and going to Dutton's aid. He saw a sort of trail leading up, and, from the direction of the firing, he knew that he could, if undiscovered, take Hale on his left flank, Beeby having tried to turn the right unsuccessfully, though Dick did not know this then. It was hard work urging the horses up the steep hill, and harder still for the cadets to drag up the field piece, and the limber filled with ammunition, little of which had been used. But they did it, and on they went. Dick, coming out on a little projection, could see the battle in progress between Dutton and Hale. The latter had all but won, and the attackers were fast being driven back. They were a mere handful of cadets now, many having been "killed" by the merciless fire. Being "killed" in theory meant that a certain number had to drop out every minute, and could take no further part in the battle. Of course Hale had a number of soldiers "killed" also. "Hurry!" cried Dick to his lads. "We're only just in time. A little farther and we'll plant the field piece and open fire. Then we'll charge down." The lads dragged the cannon a few hundred feet farther up the hill. Then, screening it behind some bushes, Dick told off a number of cadets to work the gun, they having had previous practice. "Ready!" he called, and to the surprise of Hale, no less than that of Dutton, the woods echoed to the report of artillery where none was supposed to be. A white puff of smoke on Hale's left flank told him that some movement was in progress over there. He was about to order one of his guns to reply to the unexpected bombardment, when there came a ringing shout from the same quarter, and, above the cheer, Dick Hamilton yelled: "Charge!" Down upon the all but victorious defenders of the hill rushed the little force of six cavalrymen. Behind them, leading about thirty cadets, who were as fresh as daisies, came Dick. "Charge! Charge!" he yelled, and then he ordered the lads to open fire. They did it with a will, for they had not had a chance to use their guns yet, and they were wild to do so. What a fire they poured into the ranks of the defenders. How the one lone field piece, well screened by bushes, sent shell after shell (theoretically) screaming into the midst of the enemy. Hale was all but demoralized. He had seen victory just within his grasp, and now he was attacked by fresh reinforcements. Dutton had been too much for him, after all, he thought. As for Dutton, he hardly knew what to make of it. He could not understand how Dick had been able to lead up his forces, to execute a successful flank movement, and, above all, to bring a field piece to bear. Hale was now in desperate straits. Encouraged by seeing reinforcements Dutton's men turned with cries of gladness to renew the attack. Hale tried to reply to them, but his ammunition was getting low. Closer in came Dick and his lads, pressing on Hale's flank. On the other side Beeby, with the few cadets he had left, returned to the attack. In front Dutton and a handful of soldiers poured in a fire. But Dick's was the fiercest, aided as it was by the cannon. There was nothing for Hale to do but to retreat, and he had his bugler sound this mournful call. Up the hill he and his men went--what was left of them--while after them rushed Dick, now leading the attack. "Surrender! Surrender!" cried Dutton. "We've got you!" "I guess you have," admitted Hale. "But if Hamilton hadn't come when he did there'd been a different story." Dutton did not reply, nor did he glance at Dick, who, seeing that the battle was over, had ordered his command to cease firing. But, though Major Dutton did not acknowledge that Dick had saved the day, he knew it, and so did his men. Major Webster, however, did not withhold his praise. "Hamilton, you did splendidly!" he cried enthusiastically. "That was a master stroke to ford the stream, take the gun over, and use the horses for cavalry. Major Dutton, thanks to Captain Hamilton, your forces have the honor of having won the sham battle. I congratulate you. I am proud of my cadets, even the losers." "Three cheers for Major Hale!" called Dutton, who was politic, if a bully. The camp rang with the shouts. "Now three cheers for Major Dutton!" called Hale, and the huzzahs were louder than before, for Dutton had a magnetic attractiveness in spite of his mean ways with those whom he did not like. "Three cheers for Captain Hamilton!" called Paul Drew, but, though Dick's freshmen nearly yelled the tops of their heads off, the cheer for our hero was noticeably weaker than either of the two preceding ones. Dick smiled grimly, but he knew he had done good work that day. CHAPTER XXVIII UNCLE EZRA AT KENTFIELD The rest of that day, and far into the night, ignoring the warning of tattoo and taps, the cadets discussed the sham battle. It had been a glorious affair, and they fought it all over again in their tents, the defeated ones explaining that if "this" had happened, "that" wouldn't have taken place. "But for all that, you can't deny but that Dick saved the day for Dutton," argued Paul. "He certainly did," was the general reply. The battle practically ended the military instruction at camp. The next day was devoted to resting and light drills. Several lads had received severe sprains or bruises, due to their haste or enthusiasm, and one horse had a cut leg caused by the accident to the bridge. There was some disposition to criticize Dutton for not seeing that the structure was secure before sending his artillery over, but Major Webster declared that as no serious accident had resulted no fault could be found. As for the young major it was bitter for him to have to admit, as he grudgingly did, that he would have failed but for Dick Hamilton. Another day spent in camp, when all discipline was relaxed, and the cadets were allowed to do about as they pleased, brought the outing to a close. Then all sorts of tricks were played, and more than one crowd of freshmen found their tent coming down unexpectedly about their heads that night, as the mischief makers loosened the pegs. Bright and early the next morning the tents were struck, the baggage was loaded into the wagons, and the "hike" to the academy was begun. The cadets fell into line, and with swinging step, to the tune of "The Girl I Left Behind Me," paraded off the camping ground. It was rather hard to settle down again to the grind of lessons, but Colonel Masterly and his colleague knew how to handle boys, and in between study and recitation periods were drills and cavalry and infantry exercises so that gradually the routine was resumed again, and every one felt better for the outing. One day, as Dick and Paul came in from the campus, they saw a notice on the bulletin board. It was to the effect that candidates for the 'Varsity baseball team would report in the gymnasium that night. "That's the stuff!" cried Dick enthusiastically. "Are you going to play?" asked Paul. "Sure. Why not?" "Well, you didn't get much show at football last year." "Can't help it. I may this time." "Dutton is just as much against you as ever." "I know it, but I may get a chance just the same. I'm going to begin training, and I'll keep at it until the last game." Dick was as good as his word. He rather hoped he might make the regular nine, but he learned that Dutton and his set were against him, and the best he could do was to be named as a substitute shortstop. The season opened rather badly for Kentfield, for they lost the first game, and that against a small college team. It was because Captain Rutledge was so confident that he did not play his men with any vim, and several bad fumbles cost them the game. They won the first of the championship contests with Mooretown academy, and lost the second, making it a tie, and so the third game, which would be played at Kentfield that spring, would be an important and the deciding one. Dick got an opportunity to play on the regular team once during the last few innings, but as the game, which was with a small college, was won by the cadets before he went into it, his performance did not receive much credit. "If I only get a chance to play against Mooretown," he said to Paul, "I'll be satisfied. Anyhow, I'm one of the subs." It was the day of the great and deciding game with Mooretown. Dick was struggling into his trousers and blouse in his room, when Toots brought him word that there was a visitor for him in the reception room. "Who is it, Toots?" he asked. "I haven't much time. Most of the fellows are already on the diamond." "He says his name is Honeybee, as near as I can make out." "Honeybee," repeated Dick, much puzzled. "Oh, it must be Larabee. It's my Uncle Ezra!" Then a look of annoyance came over his face. "If I go down to see him he'll keep me from the game," he thought. "I haven't any time to spare. He'll lecture me about the waste of time in playing baseball, or the danger of it, or something like that. Or he may want me to show him around the academy. No, he's not likely to do that, for fear he'd wear out his shoes. I wonder what in the world he can want, anyhow? But if I see him now I'll never get a chance to play. I'll not see him." "Toots," he said, "tell my uncle that I have an important engagement, and ask him to wait until I come back." "All right, Mr. Hamilton," replied the janitor. "Shall I tell him what it is? Maybe he'd like to see the game," and Toots softly whistled "Just Before the Battle, Mother." "No! No! Don't tell him!" exclaimed Dick. "He thinks baseball is wicked. Just say--say anything you like except that. I'll come back as soon as the game's over--if I'm alive. He won't mind waiting. It will give him a chance to think." Which perhaps was not exactly polite on Dick's part. He hurried off, leaving Uncle Ezra in the reception room, wondering what important business his nephew had that kept him so long. And, by not seeing his Uncle Ezra, Dick missed hearing a bit of news that was destined to make a great change in his affairs. But he heard it later, as you will see. While our hero was on his way to the field, hoping that he would get a chance to play, Uncle Ezra sat in the reception room. He was not very impatient at the delay. As Dick had said, it gave him a chance to think. Presently the door opened, and Russell Glen looked in the apartment. He was in search of Dutton, having been told the young major was there. Not seeing his friend, he was about to withdraw, with an apology for having disturbed Mr. Larabee. "Are you one of the students here?" asked Dick's uncle, who was getting rather tired waiting. "Yes. I'm in my second year." "Ah, then you must know my nephew, Richard Hamilton?" "Oh, yes, I know Dick." "Richard is his proper name," corrected Mr. Larabee stiffly. Glen nodded, and was about to go out. "If you see him, I wish you would tell him to hurry," went on Mr. Larabee. "I have been waiting for some time for him, but he sent word that he had an important engagement, and would see me later." Glen guessed what the "engagement" was, so he merely nodded. "I want to see him very particularly," continued the aged man, "as I have some important news for him. It may make a great difference in his life. In fact, I'm sure it will." Glen opened his eyes at this, and decided not to go just yet. "Has some one left him some more millions?" he asked in a joking tone. "Far from it," said Mr. Larabee in solemn accents. "Eh?" asked Glen, wondering what was coming. "I always said it was foolish for my sister to leave Richard so much money," went on Mr. Larabee severely, "and I told Mortimer Hamilton that he was risking his money to go to Europe. Now, what I said would happen has happened." "Is Mr. Hamilton in trouble?" asked Glen, not a little rejoiced to find that difficulties were in store for Dick. "Well, I'd call it trouble to lose nearly all my fortune. But it serves Mortimer right, and Richard also." "Has Mr. Hamilton lost his money?" inquired Glen, coming closer to Mr. Larabee. "Practically so." "And Dick?" "A large part of his is gone also. It was invested with Mr. Hamilton's. I received word of it yesterday, and I hurried to come here and tell him. A New York bank, in which Mr. Hamilton was largely interested, and in which were most of Dick's funds, as well his father's, has failed." "Then Mr. Hamilton isn't a millionaire any longer?" "I fear not." "And Dick?" asked Glen eagerly. "He has very little left." "Whew!" whistled the cadet. This would be news indeed to the students. He must hasten and tell them. "That's what I came to see my nephew about," went on Mr. Larabee. "I want him to come away from this expensive school, and live with me until his father returns. Oh, the money that young man has wasted! It is awful! Terrible!" and Uncle Ezra seemed about to faint with the horror of it. "Shall I find Dick for you?" asked Glen. "I wish you would, young man. I want to tell him this news, and take him back with me. I have a return ticket on the railroad, and if I stay over night it will be no good. Besides I am afraid my hired man will use kerosene oil in starting the fire if I am not home by morning, and he might burn down the house. One can not be too careful of money. Mortimer and my nephew are a terrible example. Find him for me, if you will, please." "I will," promised Glen, hurrying away. "My word!" he exclaimed as he ran out on the campus. "Hamilton's money all gone! Then he's no better than the rest of us now. He'll come down a peg or two." Considering that Dick had never tried to hang himself on a "peg," this seemed a useless as well as cruel remark. "I wish I had borrowed a hundred from him yesterday, instead of fifty," mused Glen, as he hurried on toward the baseball field. As he neared it he heard shouts and cheers. "The game's started," he exclaimed, as he broke into a run. CHAPTER XXIX DICK'S GREAT RUN Dick Hamilton hurried across to the players' bench, tightening his belt as he ran. "If I only get a chance to play," he kept thinking. "I don't care what happens after that, nor what Uncle Ezra may want." The game soon started, and it began to look bad for Kentfield, for the outfielders made several costly errors, and at the ending of the sixth inning the score was eight to three, in favor of Mooretown. "Looks rather bad," said Captain Rutledge to the coach. "Nonsense," replied Hale. "You can win yet. Take a brace, that's all." Kentfield had elected to be last at the bat, and, in the beginning of the seventh inning, when Mooretown was up, Perkins, the regular short stop, split his hand in stopping a "hot" ball. The other players gathered about him. "I guess it's all up with us now," remarked Dutton, from his seat in the grandstand. "We haven't got anyone who can play like Perkins. Hamilton is green. Our goose is cooked." "Say, I've got some news about Hamilton," spoke Russell Glen, worming his way to Dutton's side, during the lull in the contest following the injury of Perkins. "I don't care. I want to see how this game is coming out." Perkins walked to the bench, blood dripping from his hand. "Hamilton!" cried Captain Rutledge, and Dick sprang from the bench, pulling off his sweater. His chance had come. "Hamilton's going to play," said Dutton. "Oh, what a score they'll roll up against us! They'll knock all their balls at him, and he'll miss them. What were you saying about Hamilton?" he went on, turning to Glen. "This is tough luck, though!" "Hamilton has lost all his money!" cried Glen, and his tone seemed to show that he relished the news. "No!" "Fact. His uncle told me," and Glen related the story he had received from Mr. Larabee. Dutton was greatly surprised, and so were several other cadets who overheard what Glen had said. But there was little time to speculate on it, as the game was under way again. Whether it was Dick's presence at shortstop, or because the other players on his team braced up, was not evident. At any rate, Mooretown was held down to a goose egg in that inning, and when it came the turn of Kentfield to show what the nine could do in the ending of the seventh inning, there were three runs to the credit of the cadets, Dick having made one. "The score is six to eight!" murmured Glen to Dutton. "Hamilton isn't doing so bad." "No, but he would if he knew all his money was gone, I guess." "Maybe we ought to tell him," suggested the sporty student. "I wish I could," murmured Dutton. The game went on fiercely. It was nip and tuck all the while now, for Kentfield's chances had improved wonderfully, and they were fighting hard to win. In the eighth inning neither side scored. There was an anxious look on the faces of all the players as the ninth opened. Mooretown could afford to smile, however, as she was still two runs ahead. At first it looked as if she would pile up several more tallies on this score, for the Kentfield pitcher gave two men their bases on balls, and the next man got to first on an easy fly. A heavy hitter was up next, and at the first crack he sent a "hot liner" straight at Dick. Our hero did not flinch, though the impact was terrific. He caught the ball squarely, and the batter was out. Then, by a neat double play, Dick and the third baseman put out another man who was trying to steal home. The next batter struck out, retiring Mooretown without a run, but still leaving them two ahead. "Now, fellows, we must show them what we're made of!" cried the captain. "We want three runs this inning!" Captain Rutledge did his share by getting one, and another was brought in by a narrow margin, tying the score. "One to win!" cried the coach. "Hamilton up!" announced the score keeper. "And two out!" added Dutton to Glen. "He can never do it. We're dumped already." Dick took his place at the plate. It was a trying ordeal for a substitute player, and the eyes of all the spectators were upon him. The result of the game, in a great measure, depended on him. If he did not get the winning run, it meant that the game would go another inning, and the chances of Kentfield would not be improved. For their pitcher's arm was going "back on him," and Mooretown's man was still good for much twirling. Amid a silence that was almost painful, Dick waited for the first ball. It came, but he did not move his bat. "One strike!" called the umpire, and there was something like a groan among the Kentfield players. The next was a ball, and the following one looked as if it was going fairly over the plate. But Dick did not attempt to hit it. "Two strikes!" It was like a death knell. "He's cutting it pretty fine," murmured the captain nervously. "Hamilton's all right," said Coach Hale confidently. A moment later there came a resounding crack, as Dick's bat met the ball fairly. The horsehide went up in a graceful curve, and then sailed far out toward right field. "Go on! Go on! Go on!" yelled Captain Rutledge, but his voice was lost in the roar that greeted Dick's hit. The young millionaire was leaping toward first base, while the right fielder was sprinting after the ball. "A home run! A home run!" begged the coach, and it looked as if Dick would do it. He got to third, and started for home. The fielder had the ball by this time, and relayed it to second. The man there threw it to third just as Dick left. Possibly it was an error of judgment, but Dick kept on. He could distinguish no coaching instructions now above the yells, though Hale was calling to him to remain on the bag. But Dick kept on. Then, by some curious chance, the third baseman, instead of sending the ball home, held it in his hand, and raced after Dick. It was a contest of legs now. The baseman ignored the demands of the catcher to throw the ball, and leaped after Dick, who ran as he had never run before. He saw a vision of the game won, and, though his breath was coming in labored gasps, he did not stop. There was a mist before his eyes. His legs were tottering. "Jove! But he can run!" whispered Dutton. "I never saw anything like it!" "You bet!" agreed Glen fervidly. On and on ran Dick. One quick glance over his shoulder showed him the baseman at his heels. He expected every moment to see the catcher get the ball, and put him out. But the horsehide did not come, and, the next instant, when Dick felt as if he could not go another inch, or draw another breath, he dropped, and slid home in a cloud of dust. "Safe!" cried the umpire, and, as he spoke, the baseman, realizing the proper play, threw the ball. But it was too late. Dick had brought in the winning run. "Wow! Wow! Wow! Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton! Whoop!" yelled the frenzied players. Above their shouts could be heard the shrill cries of many girls. From the stands burst forth mighty cheers. A crowd of the cadet players surrounded Dick and would have carried him on their shoulders had he allowed them. They patted him on the back, and even punched him in their uncontrollable joy. "Hamilton, you're entitled to the thanks of the entire school!" cried Coach Hale, rushing up, and wringing Dick's hand. "We never could have won but for you!" admitted the captain. "Wow! but it was a fierce game!" and he sat down on the grass to recover his wind, after his lusty cheers. They escorted Dick back to the dressing room in a sort of triumphal procession, scores of cadets pouring from the stands to join it. Never did a hero takes his honors more modestly. It was enough for Dick that he had helped win the victory, and he saw coming to him now what he had waited nearly a year for--fellowship. Through the throng came Dutton and Glen. "I say, Hamilton," called Glen, "your uncle's waiting for you." "I know it," answered Dick. "But I couldn't talk to him until after the game." "He's got news for you--bad news," went on Glen, with the relish some persons seem to take in telling of calamities. "What is it?" inquired Dick, alarmed by the cadet's words and manner. "Your father's fortune is wiped out, and so's yours! The New York bank has failed!" For an instant Dick stared at the speaker. Then a changed look came over his face. He stepped forward, his suit covered with dirt, his face bleeding from a scratch, and still panting from his great run. "My fortune lost?" he said. "I don't care a hang! We've won the game!" There was a moment of silence so surprised were the cadets at the manner in which Dick took the news. Then Glen cried out: "My word, but you're plucky! Three cheers for Hamilton--who used to be a millionaire--but isn't any longer," he added, and Dick's ears rang with the joyous shouts. CHAPTER XXX A BROADSWORD COMBAT "Well, Nephew Richard, I've been waiting some time for you," said Uncle Ezra Larabee a little later, when Dick, having gotten out of his suit and donned his cadet uniform, went into the reception room. "I've been here for some time, and very likely I've lost my train, but I couldn't go back without seeing you." "I'm sorry I kept you so long, Uncle Ezra," replied Dick, "but you see I was in a baseball game, and I couldn't leave until we won. It was very important to win." "Stuff and nonsense!" exclaimed the old man. "Baseball is a dangerous and wicked game. It leads to all sorts of trouble. When I was a boy we played such sensible games as tag and blind-man's buff. Baseball! The idea!" "The cadets of Kentfield would look pretty playing tag," thought Dick, but he did not say anything. "I have some bad news for you, Nephew Richard," went on Uncle Ezra. "I suppose you wonder what it is." "I know." "You know?" "Yes, Glen told me." "Oh, he must be the young man whom I was talking to. Well, I regret very much to be the bearer of such ill tidings," went on Mr. Larabee, "but, if you are hoping that it is not true, you are much mistaken. I received word from New York yesterday that the bank in which was most of your father's wealth, as well as your own, which your mother, my sister, so foolishly left you----" "Sir!" cried Dick, for he could not bear to hear his mother spoken of in that way. "Well, I think it foolish to leave a youth so much money," said Mr. Larabee, "and now my judgment is confirmed. You are no longer a millionaire." "I don't know as I care much," said Dick coolly. "My money didn't do as much as I expected it would." "Foolish, perverse youth," murmured his uncle. "But you must make a change in your plans. You can no longer stay at this expensive school. You had better pack up your things and come home with me to Dankville. I will look after you until your father comes home from Europe. Doubtless I may be able to get you a position in a woolen mill in which I am interested. If you hurry we can take the late train, and I will be able to use the excursion ticket I bought." Dick considered matters a moment. Then he said: "I don't think I'll go with you, Uncle Ezra." "Not go with me? Why, what will you do?" "Stay here and finish out the spring term. I'm just beginning to enjoy himself. There are only a few weeks left." "But how can you? You have very little, if any, money." "My tuition and board are paid up to the end of this term," said Dick calmly. "I have considerable money on deposit in the Kentfield bank, that I drew out from my funds at Hamilton Corners, when I came here. That will last me for some time. I think I prefer staying here to going back to--to Dankville." "Well, of all the foolish, idiotic, senseless, rash proceedings I ever heard of!" exclaimed Uncle Ezra. "The idea! You will stay here and use up what little money is saved from the wreck of your fortune! Why, maybe you could get a rebate on what has been paid for board and tuition." "I shouldn't think of asking for it," said Dick. "No, I think I'll stick it out here." There was a movement at the door, and something came into the room, something that slid up to Dick, and began wiggling at his feet. "Quiet, Grit, old boy," he said. "Is that your bulldog?" asked Uncle Ezra. "Yes; he was too lonesome at home without me, so I sent for him. He stays in the stable." "Another foolish and useless expense," murmured the old man. "Oh, what is the world coming to!" Dick didn't know, so he didn't answer. "Think well," went on Mr. Larabee. "You had better come home with me. I can get you work in the woolen mill." "I'll stay here," replied Dick firmly. "Then I wash my hands of you!" exclaimed the aged man. "Never appeal to me for help! I am done with you! Of all the foolish, thoughtless, rash youths I ever met, you are the worst; and your father----" What Mr. Larabee would have said about Mr. Hamilton he never finished, for Grit, hearing the voice of a man he considered his enemy, made a rush from under the table where he was lying, and growled as though he was going to sample Uncle Ezra's legs. "Take that brute away!" exclaimed Dick's crabbed relative, but before the order could be executed Mr. Larabee turned and fled from the room, Grit pursuing him as far as the hall. "I guess we've seen the last of him for a while," mused Dick. "Eh, Grit, old boy?" The bulldog nearly shook off his stump of a tail. "Well, I guess I had better write to dad, and find out how bad things really are," he went on. "Still, there's no use worrying. I got along all right before I knew I was a millionaire, and I guess I can now when I'm not." Someone looked in the reception room. It was Glen. "I say, Hamilton," he remarked, "the boys are looking all over for you. They want you to lead a procession. We're going to have a grand celebration, burn the uniforms, and break training to celebrate the victory. Hurry up!" "This is worth losing one's money for," thought Dick, as he took his place at the head of the procession of merry, shouting, laughing cadets. "I'm getting to be popular, I guess." Indeed, whether it was his victory on the diamond or the loss of his money, it would be hard to say, but, at any rate, more cadets made friends with Dick that night than had done so in his whole previous time at Kentfield. But though Dick had won the hearts of the baseball nine and their friends, he was still far from being one of the really popular lads in the school. Dutton and his cronies held aloof from him, and many followed their example. But, unexpectedly, there came a great change in Dick's life, and Dutton was partly responsible for it. Dick and some of his companions were at broadsword exercise on horseback one day, while, on the farther side of the cavalry plain, there was a class drilling in artillery, under the direction of Dutton. Dick was fencing with Lyndon Butler, when suddenly Dutton's steed, frightened by the discharge of a cannon near it, reared, throwing the young major off. Dutton's foot caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged along, unable to release himself, while six artillery horses, drawing a heavy gun, dashed down the field and seemed about to collide with the youthful major's animal. Dick saw a chance to save his enemy, and turned his horse quickly, to make a dash. So rapid was his movement that Butler's sword gave him a gash in the face, Dick forgetting, in the excitement of the moment, to guard himself. With the blood streaming from a cut on his cheek Dick urged his horse at a gallop until he had caught Dutton's runaway mount. He did it only just in time, for, as he pulled the beast, still dragging the young major, to one side, the artillery steeds dashed over the spot. Dutton would have been killed but for Dick's prompt act. Major Webster rode up quickly, and was glad to find that neither Dick nor Dutton was seriously hurt. "Who caught my horse?" asked Dutton, as he struggled to his feet. "The last I remember was seeing him running toward the artillery animals, and I made up my mind there'd be quite a smash when they met." "They didn't meet, thanks to Dick Hamilton," said the elderly major. "He stopped your horse just in time." "And got a nasty cut into the bargain," added another cadet. Dick was beginning to feel a trifle dizzy. He turned aside. Dutton took a step forward, in spite of his strained ankle. "Hamilton," he said, and there was a husky note in his voice. Dick turned back. "Hamilton--I--er--I--I--will you shake hands?" asked Dutton suddenly, and he seemed much affected. Dick grasped the outstretched hand, and the two, one of whom had been an unrelenting enemy of the other, looked into each other's eyes. "Hamilton," went on Dutton, still holding Dick's hand, "I don't know how to thank you. Will you--will you forgive me?" "Oh--there's nothing to forgive," said Dick. "Yes, there is," said Dutton huskily. "I've treated you--I've been a cad, that's what I have! I didn't like you at first--I thought you were proud of your millions. I didn't like the idea of you being here--I was jealous, I guess. I wanted to make you quit. It was I who tied your dog to the saluting gun, and tried to throw the blame on you. I've done other mean things. I--I----" "Forget it!" said Dick so heartily that the other cadets laughed, and thus broke what was becoming quite a strain. Major Webster, when he heard the beginning of Dutton's confession, walked away. He was a wise old soldier, and he knew that the lads could best settle those things among themselves. "And you don't bear me any grudge?" asked Dutton, after a pause. "Not a bit. But you'd better get back to the hospital and have your ankle looked after," for Dutton was limping. "Oh, that isn't anything. It might just as well have been my head. But, say, you got a nasty dig." "Only a scratch," replied Dick with a happy laugh. He would have welcomed another one if it could have insured him such an outcome as had followed this. "I guess we'd better take you both to the hospital," said Butler, who had ridden up, fearful lest he had seriously injured Dick. And thither the two wounded cadets were taken, though their stay there was brief. It was a week after the sensational rescue of Dutton that a meeting of the exclusive society of the Sacred Pig was held in the cosy little club-house which had been built by contributions and donations of the cadets themselves or their fathers. Dutton arose and proposed Dick for membership, the election being unanimous. The next day being Saturday, was an occasion for the cadets enjoying considerable freedom. It was after the evening parade, when Dick and some of his new chums had received permission to go to town to a theatrical performance, that Major Webster sent for our hero. "I'll not keep you a moment, Hamilton," he said, "as I know your friends are waiting for you. But you remember that battered marksman's medal that Toots had, and which you requested me to investigate for you?" "Yes; have you any information about it?" "I have. I sent it to a friend of mine, an officer at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and he has just returned it. With it he sends some surprising news." "What is it?" "That medal was issued to Corporal William Handlee, a number of years ago." "Corporal Handlee--the missing soldier--Captain Handlee's son?" "The very same." "Why, how--where did Toots get it, I wonder? Is it possible that he----" "We must ask him. I will question him to-night, and let you know the result. Hark, there he comes now." Someone was coming down the corridor, whistling the lively strains of "Yankee Doodle." "That's Toots," said Dick with a smile. "I wonder how he came to have Handlee's medal. Can he possibly be----" But at that instant there came a series of excited shouts from outside. "Fire! Fire! Fire!" Dick and the major rushed to the window. "Fire! Fire!" shouted Toots, as he ran back along the corridor. Dick saw a black pall of smoke, through which shot red tongues of flame. "It's the society house of the Sacred Pig," he cried. And it was from the windows of the meeting place of the cadets' society that the flames were shooting. CHAPTER XXXI DICK WRITES A CHECK--CONCLUSION As Dick, followed by the major, rushed from the barracks to go to the fire, the housekeeper thrust an envelope into the young millionaire's hand. "It is a telegram that just came for you," she explained. Dick shoved it into his pocket without opening it. Then he joined the throng of excited and alarmed students that had gathered about the burning society headquarters. A small fire department was maintained at the academy, but as the buildings of the school were all fireproof, the brigade was not a very large one, and was only equipped with chemical apparatus. "We must telephone for the town fire department," cried Dutton. "They won't get here in time to do much," said Major Webster. "Better save what you can inside, boys." They saw that what he said was true. There was a stiff wind blowing, fanning the flames to furnace heat. The blaze had started on the upper floor, and had already eaten its way through the roof. No one knew what had caused the fire, as there was no one in the place when it started, and it had burned for some time before breaking out. Fortunately, the structure was well away from any of the academy buildings, and there was little danger to them. "Let's save what we can!" cried Dick, and the boys began running in, carrying out such of the trophies as they could find on the lower floor. But it soon became too hot for them, and Major Webster, fearing someone would get hurt, ordered the work of salvage to cease. "Too bad!" observed Russell Glen, as he and others watched the handsome brick and stone building crumbling into ruins. "And we counted on having such sport there next term." "Well, it's insured, isn't it?" asked Dick. "We can collect the money, and build a better one." "Insured!" suddenly cried Dutton. "There, I meant to attend to that, but it slipped my mind!" "What did?" asked Allen Rutledge. "The insurance. It expired the day before yesterday." "And do you mean to say you forgot to get it renewed?" "I forgot all about it." "And haven't we a cent of insurance on it?" asked Paul Drew. "Not a penny. It's all my fault. I meant to get new policies, but I put it off and now----" "Now it's too late," said Rutledge. "You're a fine treasurer, you are." Amazement and chagrin made Dutton incapable of replying. The cadets looked on sorrowfully, as they saw their society house being destroyed, knowing that it would be no easy matter to get the money for a new one. Suddenly there was an explosion from within, and a shower of stones from one of the walls flew into the air. "Look out!" cried Dick. He and the others leaped back in time, but Toots, who was in the front rank of spectators, having helped to carry out many valued relics, did not seem to hear. A moment later a fragment of stone struck him on the head, and he fell down. "Toots is hurt!" cried Dick, running up to the odd janitor, whom all the cadets liked because of his pleasant ways. "Carry him to the hospital, boys," said the major. "I'll have the surgeon attend to him. Maybe he isn't hurt much." But from the blood on the head of poor Toots, it would seem that the wound was not a small one. Sorrowfully Dick and his chums carried the unconscious man. There was little use remaining at the fire now, for it was almost out, having consumed everything save the walls. "He isn't badly hurt," announced the surgeon cheerfully, when he had examined Toots. "Only a cut on the head. He'll be all right in a few days." Suddenly the injured man, who had been placed on a couch in the hospital, sat up. He felt of the bandage on his head. Then he looked around wildly. "Did we beat the red imps off?" he asked. "Why is it I don't hear the firing? Have they retreated? Am I badly hurt? Let me get at 'em again! I'm a good shot! I can pick 'em off!" He started from his couch, but the surgeon gently pressed him back. "What's the matter, Toots?" he asked. "Where do you think you are?" "Toots? Who's Toots? I'm Corporal Bill Handlee, and I must get back to my post. I'm a sharpshooter, and the Indians are attacking us." The surgeon looked at the injured man in amazement. He thought Toots was delirious. But to Dick the thrilling words meant much. He pressed forward. In his hand he held the battered marksman's medal which Major Webster had returned to him. "Is this yours, Corporal Handlee?" he asked. "Yes; where did you get it?" asked Toots. "But why don't some of you speak? Have we beaten off the red imps?" "Yes," said Dick gently, understanding the whole story now. "They were beaten back some years ago, Toots. Oh, I've found you at last! Won't your father be glad!" "My father?" and Toots, or, as we must call him now, Corporal Handlee, looked dazed. "My father knows where I am." "He doesn't, but he soon will," said Dick joyfully, and by degrees, he told the story of how he had agreed to help Captain Handlee locate his missing son, and how, by a strange trick of fate, he had been found. And that Toots was this missing son there was no doubt. His memory, a blank for many years, because of a bullet wound on the head, received in a fight with the Indians out west, had been restored to him. The surgeon explained it by saying that the blow from the stone, which exploded from the heat, had undone the injury caused by the bullet, by relieving the pressure of a certain bone on the brain. Such cases are rare, but not altogether unknown, he added, and persons who had forgotten for many years who they were suddenly recalled the past. Of course Toots, or, Corporal Handlee, as we must now call him, could not tell where he had been all the years that he was missing. The last he remembered was taking part in an Indian fight, and being wounded. When he recovered consciousness from the blow of the hot stone, he thought he was still at Fort Lamarie. He had forgotten all the intervening time, including several years spent at Kentfield. It was surmised that he must have wandered away after the Indian fight, recovered, though with his memory gone, taken another name, and then drifted about, until he secured a place at the military academy. That, the officers recalled, was five years ago. The corporal had not recognized his own photograph, though something in his hazy memory made him think he knew the man the picture represented. His own medal as a marksman he had supposed belong to another. "I must send Captain Handlee a telegram at once," said Dick, when the excitement had calmed down. "It will be great news for him." Leaving Corporal Handlee in charge of the surgeon, the old soldier being quite weak, and hardly able to understand all that had happened, Dick started for the telegraph office, which was not far from the school. He sent the message to the old captain, and, in getting out his money to pay for it, he put his hand in the pocket into which he had thrust the telegram the housekeeper had given him. "Guess I'd better read it," he murmured. "The fire and finding Corporal Handlee made me forget all about it." It was from his father, and was very short, but the news it contained made Dick throw his cap up into the air, and yell out in pure delight. "Wow!" he cried. "Wow! Wow! Wow!" The operator came running from his little office. "Got bad news?" he asked. "Bad?" repeated Dick "No, it's the best in the world! My dad's coming home!" "Seems to me you're making quite a fuss about it." "So would you if you knew what else he said," spoke Dick, as he rushed from the building. He found most of his chums grouped around the ruins of the society house. They were talking about the fire. "It's all my fault," Dutton was saying. "I guess I'll resign as treasurer." "I guess we won't have any society, if we can't have a meeting place," observed Hale, sorrowfully. "Say, Dutton, have you a fountain pen?" asked Dick, as he came up beside his former enemy. "I guess so. What do you want it for?" "I'll show you." Dick sat down on a pile of debris. From his pocket he took a thin, red book, and commenced writing in it by the light of the embers of the ruined society house. Presently he tore out a slip of paper and handed it to Dutton. "What--what's this?" stammered the treasurer of the Sacred Pig. "Why--why--Hamilton!" "What is it?" demanded a score of voices, as the cadets crowded up. "It's a check--a check," stammered Dutton, as he saw the figures which Dick had written in, and noted that they occupied four places. "It's a check!" "To rebuild the society house of the Sacred Pig," said our hero simply. "But I--I thought you lost all your money, Hamilton," said Dutton. "I thought so, too," replied Dick. "So did Uncle Ezra, but I cabled to dad, and it's all a mistake. He took all our funds from the bank that failed before he went abroad. We didn't lose a cent." "Then you're a millionaire yet, aren't you?" asked Dutton. "I'm--I'm afraid so," answered Dick. There was silence for a moment, and then the cadets seemed to understand what Dick had done. They looked at the piece of paper fluttering in Dutton's hand. It meant that they could have a new and better headquarters for their society. "Three cheers for Dick Hamilton!" called several, and Dick's ears rang to the sweetest music he had ever heard. They all wanted to shake hands with him at once, and they made so much noise that Colonel Masterly sent one of the teachers out to see if the fire had started afresh. "It's only the cadets cheering Mr. Hamilton, sir," replied the instructor, when he returned. "Hum! He's getting to be quite popular," said the colonel, with a smile, for he understood about Dick's handicap. And there was abundant evidence of his popularity a little later on, for they insisted on carrying Dick on their shoulders to the saluting cannon, where all important events were celebrated, and there they did a sort of war dance about him. Dick would have been glad to escape, but they would not let him. "We don't want your money, honey, we want you!" they sang. And Dick knew that they spoke the truth. He had fulfilled another condition of his mother's will, and become popular in spite of his wealth, though for a time he feared this would never happen. He had thought of a plan to pretend that he had suddenly grown poor, but Uncle Ezra's mistake made this unnecessary. "I don't know whether it's more fun to be rich or poor," thought Dick, as he went to bed that night. But he had other adventures, in which his great wealth played a part, and those of you who care to follow Dick Hamilton's fortunes further may read of them in the next volume of this series, to be called: "Dick Hamilton's Steam Yacht; or, A Young Millionaire and the Kidnappers." "Well, how are you feeling this morning, Toots--I mean Corporal?" asked Dick, about a week later, when the janitor was able to leave the hospital. "Fine. I'd never know I'd been sick. That was a lucky thing to get hit with a stone, so I could know who I really was. But I'm anxious to get home and see my father, since you say he's not well." "Oh, he's not seriously ill," said Dick. "I had a letter from Henry Darby about him. He's so pleased that you have been located, that a sight of you is about all the medicine he needs." "I can go home to him in a few days, Colonel Masterly says." "You want to give us an exhibition of shooting before you go," suggested Dick. "I'm afraid I'm all out of practice," objected the former corporal. But he was not, as he very quickly proved, when he and some chums of Dick went to the rifle range. There the soldier made bullseye after bullseye with an ease that made the cadets fairly gasp, and he did all sorts of fancy shooting, including driving a tack in a board from even a greater distance than even Captain Handlee had boasted that his son could do it. "I guess it must have been that my eyes were affected by that Indian bullet," said the corporal. "They got all right again when the stone from the fire hit me." Later, the surgeon admitted that this was probably true. A short time after this Corporal Bill Handlee joined his aged father in Hamilton Corners, and the two enjoyed many happy years together, thanks to Mr. Hamilton's generosity, and what Dick had done to solve the mystery. "Well, Grit, old boy," said our hero one day near the close of the term, as he was strolling over the campus, followed by his ugly pet, and with Paul Drew, William the Silent and some other cadets at his side, "well, Grit, I think you and I will go home soon. Dad will be home next week, and say, maybe we won't have some good times; eh, Grit?" The bulldog nearly turned a summersault to show how glad, he was. A few days later Dick and his dog were at Hamilton Corners, ready for the summer vacation. THE END Transcriber's Note: Punctuation and hyphenation have been standardised. Changes to the original publication have been made as follows: Page 2 I'll swin out farther than _changed to_ I'll swim out farther than Page 11 crawled alone _changed to_ crawled along Page 15 as well stay. Hanniabal _changed to_ as well stay. Hannibal Page 18 exicting adventures _changed to_ exciting adventures Page 29 Catpain Handlee called _changed to_ Captain Handlee called Page 33 but accidently stepped _changed to_ but accidentally stepped Page 41 amid a chorous of _changed to_ amid a chorus of Page 49 for reasons similiar _changed to_ for reasons similar Page 58 rather akward feelings _changed to_ rather awkward feelings Page 75 transfered to Dick's company _changed to_ transferred to Dick's company Page 79 annouced Dutton _changed to_ announced Dutton Page 83 suddently exclaimed _changed to_ suddenly exclaimed Page 88 asked the odd man _changed to_ asked the old man Page 95 have more acquaintences _changed to_ have more acquaintances Page 105 having disloged the enemy _changed to_ having dislodged the enemy Page 106 Very well, then, You _changed to_ Very well, then, you Page 110 He got us out of bad scrape _changed to_ He got us out of a bad scrape Page 113 stiffled the cry of pain _changed to_ stifled the cry of pain Page 115 was never know, but _changed to_ was never known, but Page 120 enjoyed by the cadtes _changed to_ enjoyed by the cadets Page 120 they offered changes _changed to_ they offered chances Page 125 All the candiates _changed to_ All the candidates Page 128 asked Dutton colly _changed to_ asked Dutton coolly Page 131 slippen into his _changed to_ slipped into his Page 146 in view of your god conduct _changed to_ in view of your good conduct Page 147 and there was an omnious _changed to_ and there was an ominous Page 149 discouraged letter to his gather _changed to_ discouraged letter to his father Page 150 were not as atractive _changed to_ were not as attractive Page 151 even enjoy the good thinks _changed to_ even enjoy the good things Page 156 the suregon's medicine _changed to_ the surgeon's medicine Page 156 preceeding one _changed to_ preceding one Page 162 Dick that something unusal _changed to_ Dick that something unusual Page 163 them toward Duton _changed to_ them toward Dutton Page 163 Suppose the fall out _changed to_ Suppose they fall out Page 166 comanded that some more _changed to_ commanded that some more Page 166 trapeezes, and a number _changed to_ trapezes, and a number Page 167 few drils, out of doors _changed to_ few drills, out of doors Page 168 patroling his post _changed to_ patrolling his post Page 183 I that is what you what you _changed to_ If that is what you what you Page 188 "Don't be worried," replied Dick cooly _changed to_ "Don't be worried," replied Dick coolly Page 204 Dutton seeemd to be _changed to_ Dutton seemed to be Page 205 what we've got to is to get him _changed to_ what we've got to do is to get him Page 208 asked hi chum _changed to_ asked his chum Page 208 as Paul yanked his from _changed to_ as Paul yanked him from Page 211 and I am very much pleased with _changed to_ and I am very much pleased with it Page 211 regular lettered comands _changed to_ regular lettered commands Page 217 to use in the shame battle _changed to_ to use in the sham battle Page 222 he cried to his main comand _changed to_ he cried to his main command Page 227 advancing to annihiliate _changed to_ advancing to annihilate Page 230 defeners of the hill _changed to_ defenders of the hill Page 240 said Mr. Larabee in solmen accents _changed to_ said Mr. Larabee in solemn accents Page 257 throw the blame on yuo _changed to_ throw the blame on you Page 264 but the suregon gently _changed to_ but the surgeon gently Page 267 Why--why--Hamitlon _changed to_ Why--why--Hamilton 
37269	----	The Triumph of Jill By F.E. Mills Young Published by John Long, London. This edition dated 1903. The Triumph of Jill, by F.E. Mills Young. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ THE TRIUMPH OF JILL, BY F.E. MILLS YOUNG. CHAPTER ONE. "Art," said the man, regarding lingeringly a half finished canvas standing on an easel in the middle of the poorly furnished room, and then the very insignificant little girl beside him, who had posed for him ever since she had dispensed with long clothes, and subsequently taken to them, again, and had always proved an unsatisfactory model from an artistic point of view, "is the only thing really worth living for, and yet it's the most bally rotten thing to take up--as a bread winning profession, you understand. When you've got the bread, and plenty of it, it's a very fine way of getting butter to it, and in exceptional cases preserves as well. I'm sorry," with a smothered sigh of regret, "that I didn't go in for something more satisfactory for your sake; I should have felt easier in my mind when it came to pegging out." But the girl was enthusiastic upon the subject as well as himself. "It was your life's work," she answered; "you could not have done otherwise." "Perhaps you are right," he said, turning his head restlessly upon the cushion. "My life's work! And what a poor thing I have made of it. What a grind it has been, and what a failure." "Don't, dear," she whispered, slipping her hand into his with a caressing, protecting gesture; "it hurts me to hear you. And after all there is nothing to regret. We have been very happy together, you and I; I wouldn't have had it different. If you had been more successful in a worldly sense we might not have been all in all to one another as we have been. We have always managed to get along." "Yes," he answered with a touch of masculine arrogance, "it was all right so long as I was well, but I shall never finish that canvas, Jill, though I've forced myself to work to the last; but I'm pegging out fast now--two legs in the grave," with a flash of humour and the old light of mirth in his eyes again, "though I'm hanging on to the upper ground with both hands like the tenacious beggar I always was; but the sods are giving way, and I shall suddenly drop out of sight one day, and then-- and then," the sad look coming back to his face, "you'll be left to fight the battle of life alone." The girl's lip quivered, and she turned away her head to hide her emotion, fearful that any display of grief would hurt him, and sadden his last few hours on earth. "I shall manage," she answered confidently, "I shall teach; you have often said I was quite competent of doing that, and occasionally I sell my own work, you know." "Yes," he said, "you have my talent, and I have taught you all I could. But I wish that I had more to leave you; there will be so little after all the expenses are paid." "There are the models--my art school stocked," she replied with assumed cheerfulness. "I shall be only awaiting the pupils, and they will come after a while." The speech was a brave one, but her heart sank nevertheless. She was fairly self-reliant, but she had seen enough of the seamy side of life to realise how difficult it was, added to which she was devoted to her father, who was all she had in the world, and the knowledge that he was leaving her just when she seemed to need him most was very bitter. They had been comrades ever since she could remember, a bond that had made the roving, Bohemian life very pleasant, and the severing of which meant a loss that nothing could ever replace--a void no one else could fill. And yet she continued cheerful and bright, even gay at times, though each day found him weaker, and her own heart heavier, and more hopeless. But she choked down the lump that was always rising in her throat, and maintained a smiling exterior, despite her grief, until there was no need to conceal her feelings any longer, and then sorrow had its way, and found vent in a wild burst of uncontrollable weeping, which after half an hour exhausted both itself and her, and ended in a kind of general collapse. But there was very little time in which to indulge the luxury of grief. There was the future to think about; for it was necessary to live even if one did not feel greatly inclined to; and so Jill left her tiny bedroom with its sloping ceiling, and stole into the studio, bare, save for its model throne, and casts, its easel, table, and couple of cane-bottomed chairs, its smell of stale tobacco, and cheese, and the memory of the dear presence that once had sat there working and would work no more. With eyes blinded by tears, and hands that trembled she proceeded to dust the models, and put the room to rights, and as she did so her glance fell upon the still unfinished picture--her father's last work--and, letting the dusting brush fall from her hand, she threw her arms about the neck of the Apollo Belvidere and wept afresh. Her next move, when this new outburst had subsided, was to take down the bust of Clytie from the shelf on which it stood and tenderly remove the specks of dust that had been allowed to gather there through the inevitable neglect of the past sad days. This had been her father's favourite model. He had liked it on account of a certain worldliness of expression--a touch of the old Eve, he had been wont to say--which the others lacked! and so henceforth Clytie would possess an added attraction, a new interest for her born of pure sentiment. When she had arranged the room to her satisfaction she set about writing out her advertisement, no very lengthy matter, for she had thought about it so continually of late that she knew exactly how to word it. She had come to the conclusion that it would be better not to let people know that she was just starting, so expressed herself in a noncommittal sort of way as follows:--"Miss Erskine's Art School will re-open on January 15th. Classes, Tuesdays and Fridays 9:30 to 12:30 p.m., and 2:30--4:30 p.m., Geometry Classes every Wednesday evening from 7:30 to 9 o'clock." Then followed the address and date, and the advertisement was completed and ready to appear. So far everything was easy, but Jill herself felt by no means sanguine of results. For one thing the locality was not very desirable, and the Art School commanded what many people in house hunting insist upon, a lofty situation, but in the latter instance, of course, it has nothing to do with stairs. Miss Erskine's establishment was four storeys high, and the shape of the ceiling hinted unkindly at being in close communication with the slates. Would anybody who was able to pay for tuition be willing to climb those stairs twice a week, narrow and steep, and dark enough to be dangerous, not to mention the dust, which the obscurity hid, but which one's olfactory organ detected unmistakably as one wended one's way wearily up or down? No, it did not seem very probable, and yet it was just possible enough to leave a margin of hope in her otherwise despondent reasoning. The next day, Jill had the sorry satisfaction of seeing her advertisement in print. It was stuck away in a corner of one of the least important columns, and did not look very imposing, but it occasioned her a little thrill of pride all the same, and gave her fresh heart to return to work, though she had endeavoured to sell a small canvas that morning for a proportionally small sum and had failed, a fact, considering the state of her exchequer, not conducive to great exhilaration. Fortunately, the rent was settled for the next six months, and she had still some funds in hand, and after that--well, something would turn up. For the sake of economy Jill sat at work with a jacket on and her back turned towards the empty grate, but the weather was particularly cold, and her hands became so numbed, that she could not hold the brushes; and on the third day she was obliged to give in and indulge in a fire again. Soon after that, she sold a picture and received a commission for another, which she set to work on at once; and for the first time since her father's death she felt almost light hearted. But fortune's wheel is seldom stationary long, and after she had completed the second canvas there seemed no further demand upon her energies. This was discouraging, but still she persevered, painting all morning, and spending the afternoons trying to sell her work, returning after nightfall, cold and weary to a dark, cheerless room, and creeping early to bed for the sake of warmth, and the saving of unnecessary illumination. One morning as she sat at work in a by no means cheerful frame of mind, having made only a very scant breakfast, and unless she sold something that day, seeing but small chance of making a more substantial meal later on, she was interrupted by the sound of a footstep on the stairs, a blundering heavy footstep, that kicked each stair it mounted, and finally came down with a stamp at the top, having taken a step too many in the gloom of a fourth storey landing. It was enough to try anybody's temper, and the owner of the footstep said "damn!" audibly enough to reach Miss Erskine's ear as she sat before her easel. She rose as promptly as though he had knocked and opened the door. She had climbed those stairs so often herself that she found it easy to make allowances. Not for one moment did she suppose that the visit was intended for her,--it was a mistake that had happened before, but not often; as a rule people preferred to make those mistakes lower down,--neither did it cross her mind to imagine that it might mean pupils; she had given up all hope of anything in that line, had almost forgotten the poor little advertisement that she had felt so proud to read in print; it seemed so long ago since it had been written; and yet it was not quite three weeks. A young man stood outside in the narrow passage at the head of the stairs, a big young man--disproportionately big he appeared to Jill, but that was only because his surroundings were disproportionately cramped. He was in reality a very fine young man, with a good deal of muscular development, and a pair of long legs. He was not seen to advantage just at that moment for he was looking decidedly out of humour, and his brows were drawn together over his eyes until he appeared to scowl. He bowed gravely on seeing Jill, and his face relaxed a little. "I beg your pardon," he began, but Jill cut him short. "Don't mention it," she answered promptly. "I wasn't surprised in the least; I have felt that way myself sometimes--just at first, you know." He stared rather. Not being acquainted with the quality and thickness of the lath and plaster of that locality, he did not connect her speech with the mild ejaculation that had apprised her of the fact that he had reached the top, and had mounted those stairs for the first time, and he rather inclined to the belief that he had chanced upon a lunatic. "I was informed that Miss Erskine lives here," he continued, glancing at the palette and mhalstick in her hand, which in her haste she had forgotten to put down. Instantly she perceived that he had not followed her train of thought, and regretted her former speech. Then she said "Oh!" because she did not know what else to say, and felt glad that she had a fire. "Won't you come inside?" she asked. He took her for one of Miss Erskine's pupils, and followed her in silence. She shut the door behind him, and then he saw that there was no one else in the room. "The--the servant,"--he had narrowly escaped saying `slavey'--"told me to come straight up," he went on explanatorily, "she said Miss Erskine was in. Can I see her if she is not engaged?" Jill smiled a little bitterly. Engaged! "I am Miss Erskine," she answered with a touch of dignity that sat very quaintly on her, for she was small, and, in her black dress with the big white painting apron falling straight from the yoke like a child's pinafore, looked ridiculously school-girlish and young; in addition to which she wore her hair in a plait, the end doubled underneath and tied with a black velvet bow. No wonder that he had taken her for a pupil. The information seemed to surprise him, and he regarded her somewhat dubiously for a moment. Then he bowed. "I am fortunate to find you disengaged," he said. "_I_ should be fortunate if you had found me otherwise," Jill answered ruefully, but he did not smile; probably he considered her flippant. "I read your advertisement in the paper a short while since," he continued gravely, "and came to--" he hesitated, and glanced round the room till his eye fell upon the canvas on which she was engaged, and the sight of it seemed to decide him, "to enquire your terms. I wish to study act." Jill gasped. She had never connected him for a moment with the advertisement; this was not the sort of applicant that she had expected at all; the mere idea of teaching this dreadfully big young man appalled her. Apparently the incongruity of the situation did not appeal to him, or perhaps he was too much engrossed with the main object to think of anything else; for he went on quite coolly as though her acceptance of him as a pupil were a foregone conclusion. "I have long wanted to take up art as a hobby for leisure moments, but I have never had the pluck to go to one of the big studios as I know absolutely nothing, and I'm not quite sure, dubiously, whether I have much talent that way." "That is soon proved," she answered. "But you will never do anything at it if you intend only to make a `hobby' of it." He smiled. "You think the term ill-advised?" he said. "I think it inapplicable." "And when shall I come?" he asked. "To-morrow?" "Good gracious, no!" she exclaimed vehemently; then checked herself and continued in a slightly apologetic tone, "That is I mean if you will leave your address I will write. I must have a little while in which to decide." "Certainly," he replied, and he took out a card and laid it on the table, and the next thing Miss Erskine knew was, that she was bowing her visitor out, and keeping the studio door obligingly open to light him down to the next landing. There was no more work for her that morning; she sat in front of the fire with his card in her hand, and went over the interview in her mind till she laughed aloud. On the card was engraved in neat copper plate, "Mr John St. John, 13 Bedford Square," and below that again was another address at Henley. Evidently Mr St. John was fairly well to do. And he wished to dabble in art. Well, why shouldn't he? Jill could see no reason why he shouldn't, but she saw a great many why she should not be his instructress. It was a great temptation nevertheless; she was badly in want of money for one thing, but on the other hand he was so tremendously big that the thought of undertaking him as a pupil filled her with a strange shyness. She felt that she could not do it, and determined to write and tell him so. As luck would have it that afternoon she sold three canvasses. They did not fetch much it is true, still it was something, and the dealer further intimated that he would be glad of more work from her in the future. This was encouraging, and Jill went home in the best of spirits. That night she wrote to Mr St. John stating as briefly as possible that she regretted any inconvenience to which he had been put, but on consideration she discovered that she could not possibly take any fresh pupils just at present. Then she tossed his card into the fire with a sigh of relief, and, watching it consume, saw the last, as she supposed, of Mr John St. John. The next day she did not go out at all, but sat at home working busily, and endeavouring her hardest not to think with regret of last night's now irrevocable decision. What a pity it was that instead of Mr St. John it had not been some lanky school girl with short dresses and a pigtail; it would have been so nice to have someone to talk to occasionally. At present her conversation was restricted to the man who bought her pictures, and the hard-worked, lodging-house slavey on the not too numerous occasions when she brought up the coals. The following afternoon she went out as usual to try and get a few fresh orders, and if possible sell some of her present work. Neither attempt however proved successful, and she arrived home tired and worried with a distinct disinclination to climb the stairs. The ascent had to be made nevertheless, and so she trudged wearily up, and pushed open the studio door with a long drawn sigh of sheer fatigue. That night she crept into bed supperless because she did not feel hungry, and as a natural sequence cried herself to sleep. CHAPTER TWO. The following morning Jill received another visit. It was a case of history repeating itself so to speak. She was seated in much the same attitude as on the former occasion, only this time she waited and allowed the visitor to stumble up the stairs as best he could and knock before she rose to open the door. It was the same quick blundering step, and, when she confronted him, the same slightly scowling face that met her glance; apparently Mr St. John did not find the stairs less intricate on further acquaintance. He held his hat in his hand and Jill noticed that he looked rather diffident. "You got my note?" she queried with a clearly perceptible inflection of surprise in her voice. "Yes," he answered, "that is why I am here. I must apologise, though, for calling on your class day. As a matter of fact I came yesterday afternoon but found I had just missed you; you were out." "Yes," she replied, "I was out, but I never heard that you had been. It was courageous of you to attempt those stairs a second time. Will you come in?" He entered, and then looked round in surprise. The room was just the same as on the former occasion unoccupied save by themselves and with no visible preparation for anyone else. Jill detected the look and resented it. "You are wondering where my pupils are," she said quickly, "I am expecting--no," with a proud upraising of her small chin, "I am _not_ expecting--How could I expect anyone to mount those stairs?--I am _hoping_ that some may turn up eventually." "And yet," he said in a distinctly offended tone, "you refuse the first who presents himself. But perhaps you mistrusted my claim to respectability?" Jill blushed uncomfortably. She had forgotten for the moment that she had refused him as a pupil on the ground of having no vacancy. "It--it isn't that," she tried to explain. "I can quite believe that you are _very_ respectable but--Oh! can't you understand?--I wanted to teach children?" Apparently he did not consider that sufficient reason to preclude her from teaching him also; he did not seem to think that there might be other reasons which had led up to this--to him--very trivial one. "I don't know any more than a child would," he replied, "and I should pay three times the fee--double for being an adult, treble for being a male adult which some ladies seem to consider an additional inconvenience." "Excuse me," put in Jill severely, "if I undertook to teach you my charge would be the same for you as for any other pupil, but I am afraid I must decline." "Very well," he answered huffily, "the decision of course rests with you, but I won't attempt to disguise the fact that I am very disappointed." He walked towards the door, but stopped, and came back a little way. "If it is anything to do with--that is I mean to say--I will pay in advance," he blurted out. The girl bit her lip. "It has nothing to do with that," she cried sharply. "Oh, dear me, how very dense you are! Don't you see that it wouldn't do for me to teach you?" He stared at her. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "you don't mean to say that you're afraid of Mrs Grundy? She would never get up those stairs I can assure you, and if she did why we'd stick her on the model throne and paint her." Jill laughed in spite of herself. It sounded very ridiculous put into plain English, and yet after all he had pretty well hit upon the truth. "It isn't only Mrs Grundy," she replied, "but I--I don't feel equal to undertaking you. I think it would be better if you went to someone-- older." "When I read your advertisement," he said stiffly, "I imagined that you would be older. But I don't see that it much matters. I want to study art. You wish to teach it and have no other pupils. Why not try me for a quarter and see how it works?" It was a great temptation, Jill still hesitated. Absurd as she felt it to be she was unmistakably nervous at the thought of teaching this big young man, while he, noting her indecision, stood waiting anxiously for her to speak, too engrossed with his project to consider her at all; she merely represented a means to an end, the object through which he might accomplish the only real ambition of his life. "I don't know," she said slowly after a long pause, "I think perhaps I might try as you suggest, for the quarter but--I wish you had been a girl." "Thank you," he answered. "I am sorry that I cannot agree with you. Shall I stay this morning?" Jill looked rather alarmed at this proposal, but, she reasoned within herself, if he were coming at all he might as well begin at once, so, after another long pause, and a dubious look round the none too tidy studio, she gave an ungracious assent, whereupon he immediately commenced divesting himself of his overcoat, an action he regretted when it was too late, and, but for fear of hurting her feelings, he would have slipped into it again for the fire was nearly out and the room struck chill; he wondered how she sat there painting with her small hands almost blue with cold. "The servant," explained Jill airily with the astuteness of a very observant nature, "will be here with the coals shortly; she usually brings them up at about eleven." He looked rather disconcerted. "Oh, I'm not cold in the least," he exclaimed untruthfully, "it is quite warm to-day." "Yes," replied the girl shortly, "the thermometer is below Zero, I should say. Will you sit here please?" She placed him as near the fire as possible and provided him with drawing-materials, then going over to a shelf began to rummage among endless books and papers for a suitable copy simple enough for him to start on. "I wish to go in for the figure from life," he modestly observed. Jill fairly gasped at his audacity; she had understood him to say that he was a novice. "How much," she asked, pausing in her search and regarding him critically the while she put the question, "or how little drawing did I understand you to say you had done up to the present?" "I haven't done any," he answered meekly. Jill went on with her search again. "We will commence with flat copies," she crushingly remarked, "after that we will attempt the cast, and then--but there is ample time in which to think about such lofty aspirations." Mr St. John was not the mildest tempered of mortals but he sat mute under the rebuff and took the copy which she handed him without comment. It was an easy outline of a woman's head, absurdly easy the new pupil considered it, and yet, to use his own vulgar phraseology after he had been working laboriously for ten minutes and had succeeded in rubbing a hole in the paper where the prominent feature should have been, it stumped him. Miss Erskine rose and stood over him with a disagreeable, I-told-you-so expression on her face. "I can hardly accuse you of idleness," she said, "you have been most energetic as the paper evinces. I think we had better start again on a fresh piece." She fetched another sheet of drawing paper and, taking the seat he had vacated, pinned it on the board, while he stood behind her, his brows drawn together in the old scowl, and a gleam of angry resentment in his eyes. "The paper," Jill continued in measured cutting tones, "was not wasted; it has served its purpose; for you have learnt your first lesson in art. It is a useful lesson, too, as it applies to other things that are worth mastering. The will to accomplish a thing is not the accomplishment, remember; it is necessary to the accomplishment, of course, but one must work hard, fight against difficulty, and defeat defeat. Now that you have acknowledged the difficulty we will see what we can do to overcome it." The young man stared at her with, it must be confessed, a certain amount of vexed amusement in his gaze. He wondered what sort of an old woman she would be, and finally decided that she would develop into an acidulated spinster. "If you will kindly give me your attention," she began with the new dignity which was so unbecoming to her, and so very unpleasant to her pupil, "I will--" But here an interruption occurred in the welcome sound of someone mounting the stairs, followed by much shuffling and the flop of something heavy outside the door. "Coals!" purred Jill with evident relief, and then he noticed that she was shivering slightly. "Come in," she cried. The shuffling re-continued but instead of the appearance of the coals the sound merely heralded a retreat, whoever it was had commenced the descent, of that there could be no shadow of a doubt. Jill sprang up and went to the door, and St. John heard her remonstrating at some length with a person named Isobel, an obdurate person seemingly, and one who used the expression aint a good deal, and found some difficulty with her aspirates. After a long and subdued warfare of words the shuffling feet recommenced their descent, and then the door flew open and Miss Erskine appeared dragging in the scuttle. St. John strode swiftly to her assistance but Jill waved him peremptorily back. "Thank you," she said, "I can manage; it is not at all heavy." "No," he answered, giving her a straight look as he grasped the handle, "not more than quarter of a ton I should say. Allow me if you please." Jill released her hold and watched him with limp resignation; that deft usage of her own weapons had been too much for her. It was ungenerous of him, she considered, and to do him justice he was rather of the same opinion. "There!" he exclaimed, as he threw on fresh coals, and, going down on his knees, raked out the dead ashes from the lower bars, "it will soon burn up now. Had the cold upset Isobel's equilibrium too?" It was an unlucky slip, but fortunately for his own peace of mind, Mr St. John did not notice the offensive and unnecessary little word at the end of his query, nor, having his back towards her, could he see Jill's quick flush of annoyance. "I don't understand you," she answered curtly. "I beg your pardon," he remarked, nettled by her tone. "I hope you don't think me impertinent; but I thought there had been a little difficulty about bringing in the coals." "So there was," she replied, and smiled involuntarily at the recollection. Then she glanced at her art student as he knelt upon the hearth, and from him to the models showing up white and still against the dingy curtain which formed their background; Mars Borghese, the Apollo Belvidere, the Venus de Medici, and a smaller figure of the Venus de Milo; a good collection, a collection which both she and her father had loved and been proud of, and which had taken many years to gather together. "You were the cause," she continued, bringing her gaze back again to the kneeling figure in front of the grate; "Isobel's modesty would not permit her to enter the studio with a strange man present; ignorance is always self-conscious, you know." He gave her a quick look. "I am sorry," he said, "to have been the innocent cause of so much perturbation. Hadn't you better arrange with the Abigail to bring the coals a little earlier?" Jill shook her head, but she was still smiling. "You forget," she said, "that I'm only the attics; it is a favour that I get them brought at all. I fear it will end in your always having to carry them in if you won't let me; that and the stairs will soon put to flight your desire for studying art." He got up, and bending, began to dust the ash off his clothes with angry vehemence. Did she wish to annoy him, or was it merely that she was cursed with a particularly disagreeable manner? Jill feigned not to note his displeasure, but, returning to the table, resumed her seat and went on with the lesson as though there had been no interruption, explaining and illustrating her remarks with the care and precision that she remembered her father to have used when first instructing her. Mr St. John listened with grave attention; he was at any rate unaffectedly interested in the matter in hand, and had, if not the talent, an unmistakable love for art. When she relinquished the seat he took it and made a second, and this time less futile attempt. It is true that his drawing bore so little resemblance to the copy that it could not possibly be taken for the same head, nevertheless it was a wonderful creation in the artist's eyes, and possessed a power and boldness of conception which the original lacked, he considered. He put his idea into words, and again Miss Erskine marvelled at his audacity. "Not bad, is it?" he queried in a tone the self-complacency of which he did not even attempt to disguise. "I strengthened it a bit--thought it would be an improvement, don't you know." "Yes," agreed Jill, regarding his work with dubious appreciation, "character in a face is greatly to be desired." He nodded approvingly. "I'm glad you think that," he remarked with increasing satisfaction; "but of course you would." "Of course. And, after all, a few inches on to one's nose hardly signifies, does it? not to mention a jaw that no woman ever possessed outside a show. Your drawing puts me in mind of somebody or other's criticism on Pope's translation of Homer--`a very pretty story, Mr Pope, but it is not Homer.' Yours is a very wonderful creation, Mr St. John, but it in no wise resembles the copy." St. John glared. "I thought you said you admired character?" he exclaimed. "So I do; and there is a great deal of character in the original, I consider; but if you wish for a candid opinion, I think your head is simply a masculine monstrosity. But, come, you need not look so angry; we do not win our spurs at the first charge, you know. Must I praise your failures as well as your successes, eh?" "You don't think me quite such a conceited fool, I hope," he said somewhat deprecatingly, though he still looked a little dissatisfied and aggrieved. "I only meant that it wasn't altogether bad for a first attempt." But it was not Jill's intention to flatter. "It isn't altogether _good_ for a first attempt," she said. "You are not very encouraging," he remarked a trifle reproachfully. "Had you been my pupil and I had said so much--" "I should have thought you very disagreeable," she interrupted, laughing. He laughed also; for despite her contrariety her mirth was most infectious, and put him more at ease with her. It was the first glimpse of her natural self that she had vouchsafed him, and he liked it infinitely better than the half-aggressive dignity she assumed in her capacity of teacher. "Do you think," he ventured again after a pause, and with a decided increase of diffidence, "that I am likely to be any good at it?" Jill took up a pencil and penknife with the intent to sharpen the former but laid them down again suddenly and looked him squarely in the face. "If you mean have you any talent for art?" she said coolly, "I am afraid I cannot give you much encouragement. You have a liking for it, and, I should say, possess a certain amount of perseverance; therefore in time you ought to turn out some fairly decent work, but you have not talent." He looked displeased, and fell to contemplating his work anew from the distinctly irritating standpoint of its not being quite such a success as he had deemed it. "You are very candid," he remarked, not altogether gratefully; "I suppose I should feel obliged to you. But, to be frank in my turn, you would do well not to be quite so candid with your pupils; you will never get on if you are." She laughed, and shrugged her shoulders with a careless, half-bitter gesture. "Your advice is rather superfluous," she answered; "I am not likely to get any pupils." "Why not?" he queried. "You have one." "Very true," she replied, "I had not forgotten that; it is too gigantic a fact to be overlooked. Nevertheless, as I believe I remarked before, the coals and the stairs are likely to prove too great odds; facts--even gigantic ones--have a way of vanishing before great personal discomfort." He reached down his overcoat and thrust his arms into the sleeves without passing any comment on her last remark; there was such an extreme possibility, not in the stairs, or the coals, but in herself proving too much for him that he refrained from contradicting her. Jill watched him busily without appearing to do so until he was ready to go, and stood, hat in hand, apparently undecided whether to shake hands or no. "Good morning," she said, and bowed in so distant a manner, that, regretting his former indecision, he bowed back, and turning round went out with an equally brief salutation. When he had gone Jill sat down in his seat and fell to studying his work. "`Shall I be any good at it?'" she mimicked, and then she laughed aloud. "`Do you think that I am likely to be any good at it?' No, I do not, Mr St. John, I don't indeed." CHAPTER THREE. When St. John left the studio it was with so sore a feeling of resentment against Miss Erskine that it seemed to him most unlikely that he would ever re-enter it. It was not that he disliked her; he did not, but he had an uncomfortable conviction that she disliked him, and felt aggrieved at his presence even while she suffered it on account of the fee. He remembered with some vexation that he had almost forced her into accepting him as a pupil, for poor as she undoubtedly was she had plainly evinced that she had no desire to instruct him. Never mind, he would atone for his persistence by sending her his cheque and troubling the studio no more; that at any rate would show her that he had no wish to intrude. This decision being final he dismissed the matter from his mind, and, as a proof of the consistency of human nature, on Friday morning at the specified hour he stood on the dirty steps outside Miss Erskine's lodgings knocking with his walking-stick on the knockerless door. The modest Isobel opened it after a wait of some five minutes-- minutes in which he had time to recall his past determination and to wonder at himself for having so speedily altered his mind--and having opened it startled him considerably by firing at him without giving him time for speech the vague yet all comprehensive information. "She's hout." "Miss Erskine?" he queried in very natural astonishment. "Yus; been gone over 'arf a nour." "But," remonstrated St. John, "the Art School opens at half past nine, it is after that now." "Carnt 'elp it, she's hout." "It is a very strange procedure," he exclaimed in visible annoyance. "I come to the Art School at the hour it should open and Miss Erskine is out." "Well!" snapped the damsel waxing impatient in her turn, "wot of that? The Art School aint hout, is it? You can go up if yer want to." The permission was not very gracious but St. John accepted it nevertheless, and striding past her into the narrow passage began the ascent. He had not mounted two stairs however, before the slipshod Isobel called him back, and he noticed with surprise that her manner was altogether different, her tone softer, and in the obscurity of the dingy passage she looked less dirty and untidy. "Ere's the key," she said, holding it towards him. He advanced his hand but immediately her own was withdrawn and thrust behind her. "Wouldn't yer like to git it?" she said. He mildly answered that he would and stood waiting expectantly, but she made no move unless a facial contortion could come under such heading. "Then take if," she returned with arch playfulness, and a broad grin, but still she kept her hand behind her and stared up in his face with impudent meaning, and a leer that was evidently intended to be captivating. He understood her perfectly but his mood did not fit in with hers; to do Mr St. John bare justice he was rather above that sort of thing, and he remained stationary with one hand grasping the greasy banister, and one foot on the lowest stair. The girl gave it up then, and with another grimace, and a little scornful giggle approached him with the key held at arm's length between a grimy finger and thumb. "'Ere greeny," she said, then laughed again as he took it from her with a word of thanks and turned to go upstairs, "I don't wonder Miss Herskine went out," she said. But St. John went on feigning not to hear though a flush of annoyance dyed his cheek, and he had rather the appearance of a man who with difficulty restrained a swear. When he opened the studio door the first thing that struck him was its untidiness, the next, that the fire was out, two facts which filled him with an irritating sense of discomfort and half inclined him to return whence he came; but for the desire to occasion Miss Erskine some slight embarrassment and thwart her plans by remaining, he assuredly would have done so. That the fire had been lighted that morning was evident, he discovered on closer inspection, by a thin line of smoke still issuing from the seemingly dead embers; it had not been purposely omitted then but had gone out for want of attention. The knowledge appeased his wrath somewhat, and feeling more disposed to remain he drew a chair up to the table and looked round for his drawing-board with the intention of commencing work before Miss Erskine returned. The board stood against the wall with a fresh sheet of paper stretched ready for use, but there was no copy, so going over to the shelf from which Jill had taken the former one he commenced turning it over in search of another. He did not find what he wanted, however, because before doing so he tumbled accidentally upon what he was not looking for, what he had never dreamed of finding there, and what, when he had found it, caused him anything but pleasure. It was, in short, a very clever, and considering the length of the acquaintance a very impertinent sketch of himself. He had not seen her doing it, but there could be no doubt who was responsible for the thing, besides he knew the writing at the bottom of the sketch--small legible writing that he had seen on one other occasion in the curt little note which had refused him as a pupil. She must have drawn him while he sat working, and had achieved an admirable likeness, indeed as a specimen of artistic skill the caricature--for such it was-- was perfect. The whole thing was not larger than a cabinet photograph, just the head as far as the shoulders with eyes downcast, and an absurdly exaggerated rapture of expression on the face. The height of his collar had also been exaggerated and above the bent head encircling his brow was a nimbus. Beneath the drawing Miss Erskine had scribbled, `Saint John the Beloved,' and St. John looked at it, and failing to appreciate the unmistakable talent it betrayed stood scowling at his own portrait. How long he remained thus he knew not, but the next thing he was aware of was the opening of the studio door, and Miss Erskine herself appeared while he still stood there with the drawing in his hand. She looked pale and hurried, and was panting a little as if she had been walking very fast. She bowed to St. John, and glanced from him to the drawing-board, and then back again to the paper in his hand. "I am so sorry that you should have found me out," she exclaimed; "I started early with the intention of being back in time, but--well accidents will happen, won't they? It was unfortunate but I am glad to see that you were going to begin without me. Have you found a copy?" "Yes," he answered coolly, keeping his glance fixed full upon her face, "a Biblical one; but I am afraid it is rather beyond me." He held it towards her, and, all unconscious of what it was, she took it from him, glanced at it, then bent her head lower to conceal her features and the vivid blush which overspread her face. "It's--it's decidedly beyond you," she said, and there was a note of defiance in her voice, he even fancied that he detected a ring of laughter in it also, but that might have been his imagination. "Yes," he agreed, "so I thought." "It's very strange but it seems to me to be a little--a little like-- you," she continued, and then she raised her eyes to scan his face looking from him to the sketch and back again with her head on one side and a gleam of mischievous amusement in her glance. Evidently she intended braving it out; though it was easily seen that she was feeling both awkward and uncomfortable. "Not a little," he corrected, "but _very much_ like me." "Ah! so you perceive it also? Yes, it _is_ very much like you. Strange! I wonder how it got there?" "So do I," he answered dryly. "It is also a case for speculation how your handwriting got on the bottom of the paper." "Why, so it is, `Saint John the Beloved,' whose beloved, I wonder, that's a case for speculation also." She tossed the sketch on to the table and stood facing him with such an assured, audacious air that he could find nothing to say, so fell to scowling again in lieu of any verbal expression of his opinion concerning her. She had perfect control of herself now, and meant to give him no further satisfaction, indeed she was vexed to know that he had managed to confuse her at all; but it had been such an altogether unexpected contretemps and had taken her so entirely aback. She smiled at the angry young man, and began slowly pulling off her gloves. "If you wish to copy that, Mr St. John," she began, "you are welcome to make the attempt, but it is rather advanced. I should advise you to give your attention to something simpler." As she finished speaking she turned to a portfolio against the wall and abstracted thence a series of heads in outline, showing the method of working. These she placed on the table before him and ran through a brief explanation of the method, and how he should follow it, while he watched her in gloomy silence, and reluctantly admired the easy mastery with which she sketched in the first head for him to see. "There," she exclaimed, "now you know how to go on so I will leave you for a moment while I go and take off my outdoor things." She disappeared behind the old green curtain partitioning off a part of the room that had served her father for a sleeping apartment, and was now kept as a dressing-room but seldom used, and from thence into the tiny chamber which she called her bedroom. When she returned, in the big studio apron that he had first seen her in, she found St. John very deeply engrossed; he did not even glance up as she appeared, but bending his head lower over his board went diligently on with his work. The sketch of himself, she noticed, had vanished but hardly had she time to regret this fact before her attention was caught by the fireless grate which on her first entry, heated with her rapid walk, and enveloped in a thick jacket had escaped her observation. Seeing it now she turned to him with a very injured air. "Why, you've let the fire out," she said reproachfully. "I beg your pardon," he answered stiffly, "it was out when I arrived." Jill bit her lip and walked swiftly across the room to the fireplace. There were sticks and paper in a cupboard beside it, and, getting some out, she knelt down before the hearth and commenced laying the fire anew. "I beg _your_ pardon," she said somewhat crestfallen. "It happened, I suppose, through my being out so much longer than I intended; but that was quite an accident, and not my fault at all. I hope you will excuse all this inconvenience." "Don't mention it," he exclaimed, "the inconvenience is greater for you than for me." He glanced round as he spoke and watched her while she began to arrange the sticks. Something struck him as unusual about her, and after a time he discovered what it was, she was working with one hand, the right one, and on the left wrist was a very neat and very new looking bandage. In a moment all his resentment against her vanished, the caricature was forgotten, and with it her former ungraciousness of manner. He recalled how pale and weary she had looked on entering, and how he had endeavoured to embarrass her by showing her what he had found. He rose and joined her where she knelt upon the hearth. "Excuse me," he began in a slightly apologetic tone, "I see that you have hurt your wrist; won't you let me do that for you?" "Thank you," she answered, "but I can manage very well; it is nothing-- much." The much was a concession to conscience, and was thrown in with an unwilling jerk at the end. Then he did a very bold thing; he went down on his knees beside her and took the sticks out of her hand. "I'm a don hand at building up fires," he said; "there's never any difficulty about my fires burning." "I should think not," replied Jill, watching the reckless way in which he threw on the sticks; "a fire that wouldn't burn with all that wood ought to be ashamed of itself. Mr St. John, please; you'll ruin me." St. John desisted then and put on coals instead, piling them up with an equally lavish hand; then he struck a match and set light to the erection which was soon blazing and cracking merrily. "I told you so," he cried triumphantly looking up at her as she stood a little behind him regarding with a somewhat rueful smile the very unnecessary extravagance. "That will be as hot as blazes before long. Come a little nearer; you look cold." He fetched her a chair and Jill sat down and held her hands to the warmth. She was cold--cold, and tired, and shaken. Her head ached badly too, and all the fight seemed taken out of her; she could only sit there enjoying the rest, experiencing the pleasurable novelty of being waited upon, and of having someone to talk to again. "And now," exclaimed St. John, taking his stand before her with his grimy hands held at awkward angles from his clothes, "tell me how you managed to hurt yourself. Is it a sprain?" "I don't know what it is, a mere scratch, I think," she answered. "It happened when I was out this morning." "Indeed! an accident then?" His tone was sympathetic and interested. Jill expanded further. "Yes," she replied, sinking her chin in the palm of her right hand and resting her elbow on her knee. "A female horror on wheels rode over me." "What, a cyclist?" Jill nodded. "You don't approve of biking then?" "Oh! I don't know," she answered. "I suppose I should if I had one of my own. It isn't the machine that I'm disparaging now but the rider. Some people seem to think that the metropolis belongs to them, and that you ought to apply to them for the privilege of residing in it. She was one of that sort." "But it was not purposely done?" "No, I suppose not, as it occasioned her the great inconvenience of stepping off into the mud, but it was sheer carelessness all the same. I was crossing the road, and it was a case of being run over by a hansom, or biked over; I preferred the latter." "Did you find out who she was?" he asked. "Yes," replied Jill, feeling in her pocket. "I have her card. She was very gracious, and wished me to apply to her if I wanted money, hinting delicately at a doctor's fee, or something of the sort. I took her card out of curiosity, and walked into the nearest chemists', having the satisfaction of hearing her say to someone as I went, that she would see that I had compensation, poor girl! so stupid to have run right in front of her wheel." "Prig!" muttered St. John. "There's the card. You can throw it into the fire when you've done with it; I shall make no application." He took it from her, glanced at it, and then gave vent to an involuntary exclamation of surprise. Jill looked up. "You know the name?" she questioned. "Rather!" "A friend of yours?" "Well--yes, I suppose so; she's a sort of connection." Jill compressed her mouth, and stared fixedly at the fire; the situation was a little awkward. "Being a relation of yours," she began in a slightly strained voice, "I'm sorry that I said what I did, but--well, you yourself, called her a prig, didn't you?" "Yes," he admitted, and then he tore the card in two, angrily, and threw it into the flames. "She couldn't, perhaps, have avoided the accident," Jill went on, "and she meant to kind, but she doesn't possess much tact." "No," he agreed, "she doesn't. You must allow me to apologise for her. After all there is some slight excuse for her gaucherie; she has been spoilt with a superabundance of this world's goods--quarter of a million of money is rather inclined to blunt the finer sensibilities." "Quarter of a million!" gasped Jill. "Oh, dear me, I would like the chance of having my finer sensibilities blunted." She laughed a little, but St. John was looking so gloomy that her mirth died away almost as soon as it had risen. "Come!" she said, jumping up. "I will get you some water to wash your hands, and then we must go to work; it will never do to waste a whole morning like this." He allowed her to go without hindrance, and when quite alone stood glaring at the charred embers of Miss Bolton's card. "Just like Evie," he soliloquised. "That girl is always making a blithering idiot of herself, though I--H'm! I wonder what little Miss Erskine would say if she knew that I--" He broke off abruptly and kicked savagely at an inoffensive lump of coal lying near to his boot left there by his own carelessness when making the fire. "Oh, hang it!" he mentally ejaculated, "what a confounded ass I am." "The water and soap are on the table," said Jill's voice at his elbow, such a small friendly voice, so very different from her former tone--the tone that was always associated in his mind in connection with her--that he turned and faced her involuntarily, looking down at her with a smile. "It is awfully good of you to trouble," he said. "I am afraid that I and my relations are putting you to a lot of bother." "By no means," she answered, with a return to her former distance of voice and manner. "When a student of mine soils his hands in my service, the least I can do is to provide him with the means of cleansing them again." St. John immediately retreated within himself, and taking the towel which she offered him, walked over to the table. When he had finished his ablutions, Miss Erskine removed the basin, while he took his former seat and quietly resumed work. The rest of the time passed pretty well in silence, Miss Erskine's manner continuing as distant as ever. In all likelihood she would have bowed him out as before, had he not boldly put hesitation on one side, and marching straight up to her held out his hand. Jill, in unwilling acquiescence, placed hers in it. "You mustn't treat me altogether as a stranger," he said. "Because we are teacher and pupil it doesn't follow that we need be enemies also. Good morning, Miss Erskine; believe me, I am sincerely sorry for the injury that you have received." Jill smiled and a gleam of mischief shone in her eyes. "I seem to have received so many this morning that I hardly know which you mean," she said. "Do you allude to the hurt wrist or the very ungenerous manner in which you greeted me on my return?" He coloured a little. Then he laughed. "I was rather wild," he admitted. "Saint John with my face, twentieth century get-up, and a nimbus, was a bit too much." "Indeed! I thought it rather clever," Jill modestly remarked. "Clever, yes; so it was, no doubt. If it hadn't been so clever, it wouldn't have been so annoying." "It has gone!" she cried, glancing at the table, though she knew already that it was not there. "You are not taking it with you?" "Yes," he answered coolly, "I am." "But, Mr St. John," she remonstrated, "I think that I have some claim to my own work." "But, Miss Erskine," he retorted, "I think that I have some claim to my own portrait." "Well, never mind," said Jill. "I can sketch it again if I want to." "Yes," he replied, "but I don't think you will." "Perhaps not. I am not fond of wasting my time; it is too precious." St. John laughed and took up his hat. "Good-bye again," he said. "I hope by the next time I come that the hand will be quite well." "Thank you," she answered. "I hope it will." He had not been gone half an hour when a most unusual thing occurred-- unusual, that is, for number 144. It was, indeed, an unprecedented event within the memory of the present owners of the establishment, and quite a shock to the slovenly Isobel who opened the door to the very peremptory knock. It was, in short, a florist's messenger with a large and magnificent basket of hot-house flowers for Miss Erskine. Not being the locality for such dainty gifts, it was not surprising that, to quote Isobel verbatim, it struck her all of a heap. She carried the basket up to the studio, another unusual event; on the very rare occasions when a parcel arrived for Miss Erskine it was left on the dirty hall table until she descended in quest of it. But Isobel's femininity detected sentiment amid the fragrant scent of the delicate blossoms, and the vulgar side of her nature was all on the alert. No doubt she expected Miss Erskine to be equally excited and curious with herself, but Miss Erskine was not in the habit of gratifying other people at her own expense. She was standing in front of her easel roughly sketching with a piece of charcoal when Isobel bounced into the room, and only paused in her occupation to give a very casual glance at the flowers, and to evince some surprise at sight of them, and still more at having them brought up. "One would think that I was a first floor lodger," she exclaimed, turning back to her work again, "instead of merely the attics. You'll be charging me for attendance soon, Isobel, if it goes on at this rate. Put it down on the table, please." Isobel looked distinctly disappointed. "But you ain't looked at 'em yet," she said. "I've seen flowers before," Jill answered. "They look very pretty and smell nice; but they'll soon die in this turpentine atmosphere." "Then you can keep the barskit," giggled the other. "I expect 'e thought o' that; 'e aint so green as I took 'im to be. Fancy you 'avin' a young man, Miss Herskine!" Jill did look round then, and her glance was withering in the extreme. "Explain your meaning, please," she said. "I don't understand jests like those." "It aint no jest," replied Isobel somewhat abashed but grinning still despite the snub. "I didn't mean no 'arm neither, only," edging toward the door and preparing for flight, "when a gent takes to sendin' flowers it's like when the lodgers begins complainin' o' the charges--the beginnin' of the hend, so to speak." The studio door slammed on her retreating figure, and her footsteps could be heard asserting themselves triumphantly in her descent--verily some people are born to make a noise in the world! Jill listened to them until they reached the next landing, then she laid down her charcoal and approached the table. For a minute she stood motionless regarding the flowers, then she smiled a little and bending forward drew out from among them a card though she hardly needed that to tell her from whom they came. "With Saint John's compliments," she read, and the smile on her lips widened until it broadened into a laugh. "If all your relations possessed the same amount of tact," she soliloquised, "what a model family yours would be." She laid her face against the flowers and laughed again, a soft quiet laugh full of enjoyment. "What a bright patch of sunshine in the old studio," she continued, smilingly caressing the blossoms, "and what a bright patch of sunshine in somebody's heart, my dear saint, what a warm, brilliant, altogether delightful patch to be sure." CHAPTER FOUR. On the next occasion that St. John made his appearance at the studio there was a visible constraint in his manner as there was also in Miss Erskine's. Jill had rehearsed a grateful little speech to deliver on his entry, but when their hands met there was silence; the speech, like many another rehearsed effect, had taken to itself wings, and all she could find to say after an awkward pause was,-- "Good morning. The weather seems to have turned milder, doesn't it?" And St. John's remarkably original answer was,-- "Really! Do you think so?" And then they commenced work. Yet St. John knew that she had received his flowers, and was pleased with them before even he caught sight of them, withered and dead now, in their basket on the window ledge; and she was equally aware that he understood all that she felt and yet had failed to express in words. The words came later when the sudden fit of embarrassment had worn off, and the lesson was nearing its termination, and there was no doubt as to the genuineness of her pleasure when she did thank him. She was sitting in his seat correcting his work, and he was standing over her with his hands on the back of the chair. When she said. "It was more than kind of you, Mr St. John, to send me those lovely flowers," he let his hands slip forward a little until they touched the sleeves of her gown. Jill, unconscious of the slight contact, continued gravely,-- "I can't very well tell you how I enjoyed them because you could hardly understand how anyone loving such luxuries and yet unaccustomed to them could appreciate them. It was like a peep of sunshine on a rainy day to me." St. John drew himself up and stood with his hands clasped behind him. There was something about this girl, small, poorly clad, and friendless though she was, that commanded his respect, and he felt instinctively that his former lounging position had been an insult to her. "I am glad," he answered simply. "It gives me pleasure to know that you enjoyed them." When he left the Art school that morning, he carried away with him a pleasanter remembrance of it than he had ever had before, nor was he again to feel the same annoyance and resentment that he had experienced on every former occasion. Jill had let fall the mantle of reserve which at first it had pleased her to gather round her, and though she might later repent having done so she could never don it again with the same efficacy. The next day Jill paid a visit to the dealer who bought her pictures, and, having managed to dispose of a canvas, spent the rest of the morning shopping; eventually turning her steps in the direction of home laden with sundry small and not over tidy parcels. When passing Shoolbred's she encountered St. John in company with Miss Bolton. They met face to face, and though Jill, unhappily aware that she was looking shabby and insignificant, would have slipped by without recognising him, he saw her and raised his hat with a pleased smile. Jill returned a very slight inclination of the head and hurried on conscious only of Miss Bolton's cold stare, and her haughty, disapproving question before even the object of her enquiry had time to get out of earshot. "Who are you bowing to, Jack? I wish that you would remember that you are walking with me." Jill did not hear the answer; she had walked too fast, but her cheek burned, and she experienced the very unholy desire to upset Miss Bolton off her bike. Having once heard of Miss Bolton it seemed fated that she should both hear and see more; the heiress appeared to cross her path at every turn, and for some reason which she could not altogether explain Jill entertained a very lively antipathy for her. Next Friday when St. John arrived at the Art School as usual her name again cropped up, and this time it was he who introduced it. "I have found you a fresh pupil," he said, "if you care about bothering with another almost as great a novice as myself, what do you say, eh?" "Oh!" cried Jill, "I shall be delighted. But did you explain all the disadvantages people patronising my studio have to battle with? Did you mention the stairs?" St. John laughed. "Yes," he answered. "But indeed you over-estimate the inconvenience of those stairs; they are nothing when you get accustomed to them. I am growing quite attached to them myself." "I am glad of that," Jill answered smiling. "Do you know I was rather afraid at first that they would drive you away." "_Afraid_!" he repeated incredulously. "I thought you were hoping that they would." "Then how ungenerous of you to have kept on coming. But tell me about my new pupil,--masculine or feminine gender?--minor or adult?" "It is my cousin Miss Bolton," he answered, "the lady who was unfortunate enough to run you down last week." Jill's face fell; he could not help seeing it though he pretended not to. "The lady who had run her down!" Yes, she had indeed "run her down" in more senses than one. She turned away to hide her disappointment, and stood looking out of the window at the dirty roofs of the opposite houses. St. John watched her in silence. At length she spoke. "I hope Miss Bolton doesn't think that that trifling accident which was as much my fault as hers necessitates a step of such great condescension?" she said. "I cannot look at it in any other light for a lady in her position could study under the best masters how and where she pleased; her coming here, therefore, is a great condescension and I should be sorry to think that she inconvenienced herself under the mistaken idea that she owed me some slight reparation." St. John worked perturbed. This small person had a way of making him feel decidedly uncomfortable at times. "Miss Bolton's fancy to study art is a merely temporary whim," he answered. He did not add that the whim had been adopted at his instigation, and with a desire to please him rather than any enthusiasm on the subject, but went on gravely. "Her resolve to attend here is, I am conceited enough to believe, more on account of my doing so than any wish to obligate you. However as it has vexed you I am sorry that I mentioned the matter." "Not at all," replied Jill coldly, flushing with quick annoyance; his speech for some reason or other had not pleased her. "Since Miss Bolton's desire is not simply to benefit me I shall be only too glad to get another pupil. I am very much obliged to you for recommending my establishment." "Indeed!" he mentally ejaculated, "I shouldn't have thought so." Aloud he said,-- "Don't mention it. I will tell Miss Bolton your decision; no doubt she will come with me next time." The advent of this new pupil made a good deal of difference to Jill's simple arrangements. Hitherto two chairs had sufficed, now it was necessary to procure a third, but from where? Eventually she dragged to light an old packing case used for keeping odd papers in, and turning it on end, draped it with a piece of Turkey Twill which once a brilliant scarlet was now owing to having reached a respectable old age subdued to a more artistic shade. This erection would provide sitting accommodation for herself at any rate, and St. John could use the chair with the hole in it. This difficulty solved, Jill set to work to alter the position of the curtain, which partitioned off the end of the room, so as to include the door; thus making a small room in which to receive her pupils instead of ushering them straightway into the studio; if necessary the curtain could be drawn back afterwards to make the art school larger. The rest of the preparations were postponed until Monday, and consisted of a thorough turning out of the room, and dusting and rearranging the models. And on Tuesday morning Jill sat on her box and surveyed the scene of her labour with much inward satisfaction. There was a nice fire burning in the grate and everything was in apple pie order, even to Jill, herself, who had twisted her hair up into a loose teapot-handle arrangement at the back of her head, and had dispensed with the studio apron as too childish for so important an occasion. She wore also her best frock, and had gone to the expense of new collar and cuffs; and altogether felt thoroughly equal to receiving even the heiress to quarter of a million. The heiress came late as was only to be expected. When St. John had turned up alone he had been generally sharp on time, but regularity was at an end now, Jill mentally supposed, as she arranged St. John's drawing-board and copy, and sharpened a pencil for him. It doesn't do to judge by appearances, to quote a trite truism, therefore Jill might really have been highly delighted at the prospect of an additional pupil, but she certainly did not look pleased. It was ten o'clock before the new pupil arrived rather breathless, and clutching desperately at St. John's arm. The latter was looking worried, and seemed greatly relieved when once inside Jill's ante-chamber, an innovation that evidently met with his approval; for he glanced round with great satisfaction and having greeted Miss Erskine, and presented his cousin, he suddenly disappeared round the curtain into the art school, leaving the two alone. Miss Bolton was tall, pretty, and well dressed; she was also bent on being polite, and was almost effusive in her manner to Jill, but Miss Erskine was as cold as the North polar region, and equally distant. "I am so glad to see you again?" gushed the heiress; "I have so wanted to apologise to you for my stupidity that morning--" "_My_ stupidity," corrected Jill. "Oh, no! because there was heaps of room the other side of me, only I didn't notice that horrid cab. Cabs and busses are a nuisance in London, aren't they?" "It would be a greater nuisance if London were without them," Jill answered. "Do you think so? Oh! I don't--But of course, yes; I was forgetting the working classes." "Yes," responded Miss Erskine in her North Pole tone; "because you don't belong to them, I do." But Miss Bolton was not in the least disconcerted. "Ah, no, you're an artist," she replied, "a genius; that's heavenly, you know. Don't you recollect that an Emperor stooped for an artist's paint brush because `Titian was worthy to be served by Caesar?'" Jill's lip curled. "I am not a Titian," she answered. "Perhaps not," continued Miss Bolton in a I-know-better tone of voice. "Anyway Jack says that you are terribly clever. He considers your paintings superior to many of those on the line this year." "Mr St. John is very kind but I am afraid his criticism wouldn't avail me much. Will you tell me how far advanced you are. Of course you have studied drawing before?" "Oh, yes! And painting also. My friends considered it a pity for me to drop it altogether with my other studies so I thought that perhaps I would take it up again. Like music it is a very useful accomplishment `pour passer le temps,' you know. I am considered fairly good at it." "Ah!" responded Jill with uncomplimentary vagueness. "And what do you wish to go in for? Mr St. John is studying the figure--" Miss Bolton interrupted with a little scream. "How horrid of him," she cried. "Not the nude, Miss Erskine, surely?" Jill stared. "Well, at present," she said, "he is drawing the human foot in outline, and it certainly hasn't a stocking on." "But you don't teach--that sort of thing, do you?" "It is usually taught in Art Schools," Jill answered frigidly. "So far as I am concerned I have only just commenced teaching. You do not wish to go in for the figure then?" "Certainly not; flowers are my forte; I adore nature." Apparently she did not consider that the human form reckoned in this category, and certainly her own, thanks to the aid of the costumiere, had deviated somewhat from the natural laws of contour; nevertheless nature is at the root of our being and no matter how we attempt to disguise and ignore the fact she will not be denied. It was on the tip of Jill's tongue to remark that flowers alone did not constitute nature but she restrained herself, and endeavoured to check her increasing irritability. "You are quite right not to go in for the figure," she said; "feeling as you do about it nature becomes coarse, and artificiality--or shall we say the conventional customs of circumstances?--preferable. Will you come into the studio?" It just flashed through her mind to wonder what this young lady whose modesty was only to be equalled by Isobel's would say to the models when she saw them, and it must be confessed that the thought of them caused her a certain malicious satisfaction, but when she held aside the curtain for Miss Bolton to enter she perceived to her unspeakable astonishment that all the models had been carefully draped with the dust covers in which they were kept encased when not in use, and which she had herself taken off that morning, and had folded and placed on the shelf. She glanced towards St. John in wrathful indignation, but St. John was busy measuring the length of the big toe in the copy and comparing it with his own drawing, which, taking into consideration the fact that he was not supposed to be making an enlargement, was not altogether satisfactory. "May I enquire," asked Jill with relentless irony, "the meaning of all these preparations? Was it fear of the models taking cold that induced you to cover them so carefully or a desire to study drapery, Mr St. John?" She paused expectantly, but St. John made no sign of having heard beyond an alarming increase of colour in the back of his neck, a mute appeal to her generosity, which she was not, however, in the mood to heed. Miss Bolton watched her in bewildered fascination, astonished at her displeasure and unable to understand the reason thereof. So entirely unprepared was she for what followed that it was probably a greater shock than if she had walked straight in amongst the models, it could not certainly have embarrassed her more. Jill, during the pause, had approached one of the figures, and now catching impatiently at the covering drew it off to the scandalised consternation of the new pupil, who, without waiting for more, burst into a very unexpected flood of tears, and fled precipitately from the room. Jill stared after her open-mouthed, and for a moment there was dead silence. Then St. John pushed back his chair and rose noisily to his feet. "Con--excuse me," he corrected himself, "but I think that I had better go and see after my cousin." He caught up his hat with marked annoyance, and Jill stood gaping now at him still too astonished for words. She watched him go in silence, and then sat down on the twill covered box and drew a long breath--a sort of letting off steam in order to prevent an explosion. "Well of all the inconceivable, incomparable, extraordinary, and revolting imbeciles that I have ever come across that girl is the worst," she ejaculated. "Thank heaven that my mind is not of that grovelling order which sees vulgarity in nature and coarseness where there should only be refinement. What agonies such people must endure at times; they can never go to a gallery that's certain, and I suppose they would blush at sight of a doll. Oh! my dear saint, why ever did you bring such a person here, I wonder?" And then she sat and stared at his empty chair and saw in retrospection the expression of vexed reproach in his eyes as he had risen to his feet, their mute enquiry. "Could you not have spared me this? Was it necessary?" And in equally mute response her heart made answer,-- "Not necessary perhaps; but I'm not a bit sorry that it happened all the same." CHAPTER FIVE. Jill did not anticipate the return of either of her pupils that morning--did not, indeed, expect Miss Bolton to return at all; in both of which surmises she proved correct. St. John had been obliged to hail a four-wheeler and drive with his cousin home, and a most unpleasant drive she made it; it was as much as he could do to sit quiet under her shower of tearful reproaches. He ought to have known better than to have taken her to such a low place. She might have guessed after having seen her what sort of creature the girl was. It would have been much better to have acted as she wished to in the first place--given some suitable donation or commissioned her for a painting; that would have been quite sufficient; it wasn't her fault that the stupid girl got in front of her wheel, etc: etc: St. John said,-- "Shut up, Evie; don't talk rot." But when you tell some people to shut up it has a contrary effect and serves as an incentive to talk more, it was so with Miss Bolton. She was not violent because it was not her nature to be demonstrative, nor was she in the slightest degree vulgar; but her command over the English language could not fail to excite the astonishment of her listener; to quote St. John's euphonism, "it made him sick." "I daresay," retorted Miss Bolton disagreeably; "my remarks generally have a nauseating effect upon you, I notice; yet that disgraceful girl without any sense of decency--" "_In_decency, you mean," he interrupted. "You are very horrid," sobbed his cousin, subsiding into tears again, and St. John devoutly wished that he had held his peace. The rest of the journey was very watery, and at its termination he felt too demoralised to do anything except go for a stroll; the house with Miss Bolton in it was too small for him. Miss Bolton was Mr St. John senior's ward; she was a kind of fifth cousin twice removed, which was the nearest kinship that she could claim on earth--that is to say with anyone worth claiming kinship with. There were cousins who kept a haberdashery, and spoke of the `heiress' with a big `h' but Evie Bolton didn't know them; though according to the genealogical tree they were only once removed, but that remove had been so distant that it made all the difference in the world. Mr St. John, senior, both admired and loved his ward, Mr St. John, junior, was expected to follow the paternal example, and Miss Bolton, herself, was quite willing to present her big, good-looking cousin with her hand, and her fortune, and as much of her heart as she could conveniently spare. It would be difficult to ascertain whether St. John appreciated her generosity as it deserved. He had appeared thoroughly acquiescent up to the present when a possible engagement had been mooted by his father, but had so far refrained from putting his luck to the test. But in Mr St. John, senior's, eyes the affair was a settled fact, and had anyone suggested the probability of its coming to nothing he would have scouted the idea. The following Friday when St. John entered the Art School he found a very subdued little figure waiting for him--the old style of Jill with her hair tied with ribbon, and the big pinafore over her shabby frock. But not altogether the old style either; there was no attempt at dignity here, no self-sufficiency of manner but that she was so thoroughly composed he would have thought her nervous. She shook hands with a slightly deprecating smile, and remarked interrogatively,-- "Miss Bolton has not come? I am sorry." "No," he answered with an assumption at indifference which he was far from feeling. "I told you art was a temporary whim with her, and I fancy the stairs rather appalled her; she is not very strong." His desire to spare her embarrassment was altogether too palpable. Jill turned away to hide a smile, or a blush, or something feminine which she did not wish him to perceive. He watched her in some amusement and waited for her to break the silence. He would have liked to have helped her out, but could think of nothing to say. "I behaved foolishly last Tuesday;" she remarked at length, speaking with her back impolitely turned towards him, and a mixture of shame and triumph on the face which he could not see. "I lost my temper which was ill bred; and," turning round and laughingly openly, "I'm afraid that I'm not so sorry as I ought to be. Don't," putting up her hand as he essayed to speak, "go on making excuses--your very apologies but condemn me further. It was most ungracious on my part after Miss Bolton's condescension in coming; yet how was I to know that she was so supersensitive?" "I ought to have warned you," he answered. "But never mind now; there is very little harm done, only I am afraid that you have lost a pupil." "And isn't that highly deplorable," cried Jill, "considering how few I have?" But St. John was not to be drawn into any expression of sympathy; personally he felt no inconvenience, and he shrewdly suspected that Miss Erskine was not particularly distressed herself. He sat down and work commenced as usual. St. John was getting on more quickly than his teacher had imagined that he would. He was not likely to ever make an artist but still he progressed very fairly in amateur fashion. His eye unfortunately was not true; he could never see when a thing was out of drawing, but he was always ready to listen to advice, and correct his work under supervision. His greatest fault was a desire to get on too quickly; and Jill had to assert her authority on more than one occasion to restrain him, and keep his ambition in check. One day, several weeks after the Bolton episode, he suggested that it was time he commenced painting; he was tired of black and white. He was then drawing from the bust of Clytie, and had only just begun working from the cast. Jill was not in a good temper that morning--things had not been prospering with her lately--and so St. John's ill-timed suggestion met with scant consideration. "You want to run before you can walk," she returned with ill-humoured sarcasm. "Some people are like that. I knew of a girl once who was learning riding and insisted on cantering the second time she went out. The result was not altogether satisfactory; for it left her sitting in the middle of the road. Last week I yielded to your insane desire to attempt Clytie; the attempt is a failure; and so you want to begin painting." "Well," he answered not exactly pleased by her manner of refusing his petition. "I certainly should like to vary the monotony. I don't see why I shouldn't paint one day a week and draw on the other." "That's not my system," replied Jill, and the curt finality of tone and manner irritated him exceedingly. He felt like saying `Damn your system,' and only refrained by biting fiercely at his moustache, and jerking back his drawing-board with such vehemence that, coming into violent contact with the cast from which he had been working, and which stood on a box in the centre of the table, it upset the whole erection, and with a terrible crash Jill's favourite model was shivered into fragments. Jill, herself, flew into such a rage as baffles description, and, alas to have to record it! springing forward boxed St. John's ears. It was by no means a lady-like thing to do; but it seemed to occasion her some slight relief. She was positively quivering with passion, and stood glaring at the offender as though he had been guilty of a crime. St. John flushed crimson, and as if fearful of further assault dodged behind the model of the Venus de Medici. He could hardly be reproached with taking refuge behind a woman's petticoats; anyone knowing the figure could vouch for the impracticability of that; but he felt decidedly safer screened by the white limbs which had so scandalised his cousin, and betrayed no disposition to emerge again in a hurry; he was very big and Jill was very little but he most certainly felt afraid of her just then. "How clumsy of you!" she cried. "I wouldn't have had it happen for the world--I believe you did it on purpose." "I did not," he protested indignantly. "How can you say such a thing? I am as sorry as you can be that it happened." He was not though, and he knew it. He considered her vexation altogether disproportionate, and absurd to a degree verging on affectation. Had the damage been irreparable he could have understood her loss of self-control; but it was only a plaster cast which she must assuredly know that he would replace. Being a man he did not take sentiment into consideration at all, but merely thought her ill-tempered and ungovernable. "How dare you equal your sorrow to mine?" Jill demanded fiercely. "You can't know how I feel. I don't believe you care." Her lip trembled and she turned quickly away. Never had she looked so forlorn, so little, so shabby, he thought, as at that moment, and perhaps never in his life before had he felt so uncomfortable--such a brute. Vacating his position of safety he approached until he was close behind her where she stood with her back to the debris, and he saw that her hands were picking nervously at the paint-soiled apron. "Don't," he said, and his voice sounded strangely unlike his usual tones. "You make me feel such a beast. You know that I care--you must know it. I would rather anything had happened than have vexed you like this." "It doesn't matter," answered Jill a little unsteadily, and then one of the two big tears which had been welling slowly in her eyes fell with a splash upon the floor, and he started as though she had struck him a second time. "Don't," he entreated again. And then without waiting for more he took his hat and slipped quietly out of the studio. Jill scarcely noticed his departure, did not even speculate as to his object in thus unceremoniously leaving, nor wonder whether he was likely to return or not. She was rather relieved at finding herself alone, and able to give vent to the emotion she could no longer repress. Sitting down at the table in the seat which St. John had so suddenly vacated she laid her head upon his drawing-board and wept all over the paper. The outburst, which was purely neurotic,--such outbursts usually are--had been gathering for days past, and had culminated with the fall of Clytie--the breaking of the bust which her father had so loved. Alas! for the sweet, sad, absurd associations which cling about the things that the dead have touched. St. John was not away very long; he had been to a shop that he knew of quite handy, and had driven there and back thanks to the stupid cabs that Miss Bolton found so inconvenient. He had bought another bust of Clytie, an altogether superior article in Parian marble which he carried back to the studio in triumph quite expecting to see Jill's grief vanish at sight of it, and tears give place to smiles. He found her still seated at the table; she was not crying any longer; but the traces of recent emotion were sufficiently apparent for him to detect at a glance. The sight sobered him instantly, and he approached with less confidence in the efficiency of his purchase than had possessed him when out of her presence. "It's all right," he exclaimed, speaking as cheerfully as he could, and placing the new Clytie on the table among the ruins of her predecessor, "I managed to get another. I hope you'll like it as well as the one I broke. It was confoundedly clumsy of me. But you aren't angry with me still?" "No," answered Jill, raising her head to view the Clytie as he drew off the paper wrapping for her to see. "Oh!" she cried, "it is far too good; mine was only plaster." "Was it?" he said slowly. "And yet, I fancy, you preferred it infinitely to this one." Jill's lips quivered ominously again, and half unconsciously as it were she fingered one of the broken pieces in lingering regret. "It had associations," she said simply. He stooped forward so that he could see her face, and his hand sought hers where it rested upon the table, and with a kindly pressure imprisoned it while he spoke. "Can't you form associations round this one too?" he asked. For a moment there was silence. Then she looked back at him and smiled faintly. "I have commenced doing so already," she answered, and, quietly withdrawing her hand, rose and stood back a little the better to admire his purchase. "It was dreadfully extravagant of you to buy a thing like that just for an art school model," she exclaimed. "It ought to be in some drawing-room instead of here." "It looks very well where it is," he answered coolly. "But I think I'll give over trying to draw it for a time; I can't catch that sadly contemplative, sweetly scornful expression at all; I make a sneer of it which is diabolical. Don't insist, please; because it makes me nervous just to look at her." That was the beginning of things--at any rate the perceptible commencement; though it might have begun with the flowers as Isobel had insinuated. Never a word did St. John utter that Jill could possibly have turned or twisted into a betrayal of the growing regard which she felt in her heart he entertained for her, and never a sign did Jill make that she understood, or in any way reciprocated his unspoken liking. She knew that he loved her by instinct, and the knowledge made her glad, so that her life was no longer lonely, nor the occasional privations, the incessant work, the petty, carking, almost daily worries so hard to bear. Life was one long pleasant day-dream; though sometimes Miss Bolton "biked" through the dreaming, and then it became a night-mare, and Jill was consumed with a fierce burning jealousy that lasted until a new-born, audacious, delicious conceit--her woman's intuition--assured her that poor and insignificant though she was St. John was far more fond of her than he would ever be of his pretty, elegant, and wealthy cousin. CHAPTER SIX. St. John had attended Miss Erskine's studio for two quarters, and was now into the third. He was still her sole pupil; though she had had another student, a long-legged girl of fifteen who had attended for three weeks and then been taken away in a hurry because her mother had discovered that Miss Erskine was very young, and had, besides her daughter, only one other pupil--_a man_--and no chaperone. She wrote Miss Erskine very plainly on the subject of the impropriety of her conduct, and gave her a good deal of advice, but omitted to enclose the fee. Jill showed the letter to St. John as the best way of explaining his fellow-student's absence, and St. John laughed over it immoderately; he was so glad that the long-legged girl was gone. "It's rather rough on you though," he remarked as he returned the missive which Jill put into her pocket to keep for a curiosity. "If you get another pupil of that description you'll have to get rid of me, that's certain. Poor little snub-nosed Flossie! I hope we didn't demoralise her altogether. How I do detest the respectable British matron, don't you?" "No," answered Jill. "I detest the vulgar, narrow-minded order though, like the writer of this letter. That poor child! I used to think her a giggling little idiot. She did giggle, and she wasn't very wise; but she is greatly to be commiserated all the same." Jill had no fresh pupils after that, only St. John trudged manfully up the steep, narrow stairs with unfailing regularity, and once, when she was ill and obliged to stay in bed with a bad cold on her chest, he sent her fruit and flowers, but carefully refrained from going near the studio himself until he received a little note from her thanking him and saying that she was well enough to resume work. Independent of the fee he paid for tuition, and the pleasure she derived from his society Jill enjoyed many advantages through his being at the studio which she could not herself have afforded. For one thing when he started painting he insisted upon employing a model; he wanted to paint from life; and Jill had to pose the model and paint from him or her--as the case might be--at the same time. She made good use of her opportunities, and many of the canvasses sold, but she had to dispose of them far below their market value at a merely nominal profit which just paid her and that was all. St. John offered her a hundred and fifty pounds for one picture--a female figure against a background of sea and sky, the whole veiled in a kind of white mist--a vapoury shroud which softened yet did not conceal. Jill had christened this picture "The Pride of the Morning," and for some reason, perhaps because St. John so greatly admired it, she felt loth to let it go for the ridiculous price which she had accepted for the other canvasses; yet when St. John wished to purchase it she refused. She would not sell it to him though she offered it as a gift, but he would not take it, and so "The Pride of the Morning" was stood in a corner of the studio facing the wall just as though it was in disgrace. Just about this time Jill had a regular run of ill luck. In the first instance the man who always bought her canvasses became bankrupt and was sold up, and Jill, who didn't know anything about sending in claims, and had no one to advise her; for she never consulted St. John on purely personal matters for fear of his finding out how very poor she really was, lost the price of three canvasses which he had taken of her and never paid for, besides having nowhere now to dispose of her work. He had paid her poorly but it had been a certain market, and although she tramped London over, as it seemed to her weary feet, she could find no one to give her an order, or even a promise of work in the future; she had plenty of time for dreaming now. Besides this, the rent of her rooms was due again, and it was absolutely expedient that she should have new boots. And then came the climax--at least it seemed the climax to Jill's overwrought and tired brain, but it was not so; as a matter of fact that fell later when she had not conceived it possible that greater trouble could fall to human lot. She became ill again--off her head, as Isobel informed St. John when she received him one Tuesday with the intimation that he could not go up as usual. The heat of summer, together with the continual atmosphere of white lead and turpentine had been too much for Jill, and she had collapsed, and, becoming rambling and incoherent in her talk the landlady had taken things into her own hands and sent for the doctor, when it was only rest and a little nursing and relief from mental worry that the invalid stood in need of, and not physic, a doctor's bill, and impossible advice. The doctor came. She was thoroughly run down, he said; and he ordered her things that she could not buy, and change of air which she could not afford either, though she told him that she would see about it for fear he should think that she was hoping he would not charge her for attendance, which was very foolish and proud, just as foolish as her refusal to sell St. John the picture. When she was well enough to get out again she took a holiday and spent it at Hampden Court, going by steam-boat and returning in the evening by train after a long, solitary, but on the whole fairly enjoyable day. That was all the change of air she took, and greatly it benefitted her, far more than anyone would imagine so short a time could do. On her way home when she was crossing the road where Bedford Square merges into Gower Street a private hansom passed her with St. John and his cousin in it both in evening dress. Jill had fancied that Miss Bolton was out of town, and the sight of her quite upset all the pleasure she had derived from her jaunt. They did not see her, for it was dark in the road, but a street lamp shining full in their faces as they drove past revealed them plainly to her, and she noticed that St. John was looking both bored and worried, a fact which compensated somewhat for the shock of disappointment she had experienced on seeing the heiress. When she reached home there was a package of books addressed to her on the hall table, and a note in the bold, familiar handwriting she had learnt to know so well. She carried them up to her room and sat on the edge of her bed while she read the latter without waiting to take off her hat, or put in water the knot of wild flowers, faded now, which she had gathered and thrust into her belt. "Dear Miss Erskine," it ran,-- "I am sending you some literature on the chance of your being well enough now to do a little reading, and time, I know, hangs heavy when one is convalescent. Don't worry about the lessons; I am enjoying the holiday; but when may I be allowed to call and see you? I have something to say to you which will not keep. "Yours very truly, J. St. John." Jill's heart gave a little jump as her eye took in the last sentence, and she made a shy guess at what the `something' might be, a guess which sent the blood to her face in a warm rich glow, and set her pulses tingling in ecstatic enjoyment. She was curious to hear that something, so curious that she could hardly wait, and yet she was determined not to let St. John suspect how curious she really was. Going into the studio she sat down at the table and wrote her reply, a carefully worded little note thanking him for the books, and appointing Friday morning at the usual hour for him to visit her; stating that she was quite well and anxious to begin work. It was Wednesday so that there would be the whole of Thursday to get through, but Jill felt that she could manage that now that the letter was written, and tired though she was she went out again and posted it. The next morning by the same post that St. John got his letter, Jill received her doctor's account which was considerably heavier than she had expected. It is an expensive luxury being ill. She sighed as she looked at the bill, and wondered where the money was coming from. She had not got it just then that was certain; the settlement must be deferred for a while. How hard it was to want to pay and not be able to do so! Later in the morning as she sat huddled up near the window poring over one of the books St. John had sent--for she could not work with the thought of the morrow before her; her sense of the fitness of things had bidden her take a last holiday and give herself up thoroughly to the enjoyment of the present--her attention was diverted from the novel by the sound of a footstep on the stairs, a heavy, uncertain, unmistakably masculine step which reminded her with a strange thrill of St. John's first visit when he had stumbled up those stairs in the darkness eight months ago. She waited where she was until the visitor knocked, a loud, imperative, double knock on the door with his stick, then she rose, laid aside her book, and slowly crossed the room. Outside on the narrow landing stood an elderly man, tall and gaunt, with shoulders slightly bent, and iron grey hair and beard. He eyed Jill uncertainly, very much as St. John had done, and, also like St. John, concluded that she must be a pupil; she looked so very childish, much more like a child, indeed, than had the lanky, short-frocked, girl-student who had studied there so brief a time. "I wish to speak with Miss Erskine," he said. And Jill, in vague foreboding, and with a dull repetition of her information on that former occasion, answered quietly,-- "I am Miss Erskine." "Good God!" exclaimed her visitor, and without waiting for an invitation he strode past her into the studio. Jill followed him wondering, and standing opposite to him, watched him closely, waiting for more. "My name is St. John," he said--the bomb had fallen. "My son--h'm!-- studies art here." He looked round superciliously as though he wondered how anyone could study anything in so mean a place; no doubt he considered that his son's explanation had been merely a plausible excuse. "Yes," Jill answered, and that was all. He felt irritated with her that she was so quiet, so reserved, and so thoroughly self-possessed. He had expected something different; his ward had spoken of her as a horrid, designing, low-minded creature, his son had told him plainly only the night before that she was the one woman he loved, or ever could love; he had put the two descriptions together, and had pictured something handsome and sophisticated, bold perhaps, and necessarily charming, but nothing like what he found; not an ill-dressed, white-faced, ordinary-looking child-woman, whose great grey eyes watched him with such wistful, apprehensive, piteous anxiety that he turned away from their scrutiny with ill-concealed vexation. "I have come on an unpleasant errand," he went on, "and naturally feel rather upset. But these unpleasant things must happen so long as men are imprudent and women over anxious. Have you no one belonging to you?--no one to advise you?" "Thank you," Jill answered drawing herself up proudly, "I do not want advice." "So most young people think," he said irascibly; "but they do well to accept it all the same. My son has been studying under you for some time, I believe?" "Yes," replied Jill, "since last January." "And have you any more pupils?" "Not now; I had one other for a short time. But the locality is against my forming an extensive connection." "And you and my son work here alone two mornings a week?" he continued staring hard at her under his bushy brows, "_Entirely_ alone?" "Yes," she answered, and his tone brought the blood to her pale cheeks in a great wave of colour; but she looked him steadily in the face notwithstanding. It did not seem to occur to her to resent this cross examination; she just listened to his queries and answered them as though he had a right to catechise her, and she must of necessity reply. "Do you consider that altogether discreet, Miss Erskine?" he enquired. Jill flushed painfully again, and her breath came more quickly. It is so easy to wound another's feelings that sometimes the inflicter of so much pain hardly realises the anguish that he causes. "Mr St. John," the girl said quickly, speaking as though she were anxious to say what she wished to, before her suddenly acquired courage deserted her again, "I don't quite understand what it is you want with me, and I can hardly believe that you have come here with no other intention than that of insulting me. Your last question was an insult. Do you think that I am in a position to be discreet entirely dependent as I am on my own exertions? Art with the many does not pay well. But I can assure you had your son been other than he is--a gentleman--I should not, as you so graphically put it, have worked here with him two mornings a week entirely alone." Mr St. John was rather taken aback; she was evidently not such a child as she looked. "Excuse me," he said, "but you mistake me altogether. I know my son thoroughly, and though I have never had the privilege of meeting you before to-day, yet once seeing is quite sufficient to disabuse my mind of any prejudice I may have entertained towards you. In speaking of indiscretion I was thinking entirely of outside criticism." Jill smiled faintly, contemptuously, incredulously. She had him at a disadvantage, and the knowledge gave her a gratifying sense of superiority. "I am too insignificant a unit in this little world to excite criticism, captious or the reverse," she answered. "I thought, myself, at first that it wouldn't do, but have since been humbled into learning that my actions pass unheeded by the outside world. A great many actions of bigger people than myself pass unnoticed if they were only big-minded enough to realise it. Humanity does not spend its time solely in watching the doings of its neighbour; that is left for the little minds who have nothing more important to occupy themselves with. But you didn't come here to warn me of my indiscretion. Would you mind telling me what the `unpleasant errand' is?" "No," he answered bluntly coming to the point. "I was merely anxious not to be too abrupt. I want to induce my son to give up coming here, and I can't persuade him. Will you?" He did not look at her, but drawing a cheque-book from his pocket with unnecessary display placed it upon the table. Jill watched him comprehensively, and the blood seemed to freeze in her veins as she did so. "Why," she asked, and could have bitten out her tongue because the word choked in her throat, "why should he give up coming?" "This is absurd," exclaimed Mr St. John. "Let us give over fencing and understand one another. My son is infatuated--he generally is, by the way, it is a failing of his,"--Jill felt this to be untrue even while he said it, but she made no sign. "You, of course, are quite aware of his infatuation? But, Miss Erskine, he is a beggar; he has nothing in the world save what I allow him." "How degrading!" cried Jill. "I should have credited him with possessing more manhood than that. Everyone should be independent who can be." He smiled and tapped the cheque-book with his fingers. He fancied that she would be sensible. "It would not be wise to marry a pauper, would it?" he queried. "For a man who marries against his relative's wishes when he looks to them for every penny, would be a pauper, without doubt." "No," Jill answered with unnatural quietness, "it would not be wise. I don't think anyone would contradict that." "You would not yourself, for instance?" "Most certainly I should not." "Now we begin to understand one another," he resumed almost cheerfully. He had greatly feared a scene; but she was so absolutely unemotional that he felt relieved. "Personally, you will understand I should have no objection to you as a daughter-in-law at all, only I have made other arrangements for my son, arrangements so highly advantageous that it would be the height of folly to reject them as he proposes doing. He must marry his cousin, the young lady whose acquaintance, I learn, you have already made--" "What! The young lady with a soul above nature?" interrupted Jill, thoroughly astonished, and for the first time off her guard. "Oh, he'll never marry her." "Indeed he will; there is nothing else for him to do. You forget that I can cut him off without a shilling, and will do so if he does not conform to my wishes." "Yes," Jill acquiesced as though she were discussing something entirely disconnected with herself, "Of course, I had forgotten that." "The long and the short of the matter is this, Miss Erskine, if you insist upon encouraging my son in his mad infatuation you ruin his prospects and do yourself no good; for I believe that you agreed that you would not marry a pauper?" "No," she answered, staring stonily out of the window with a gaze which saw nothing. "I would not marry a pauper; I don't think it would be wise, and I don't think it would be right to do so." "A very sensible decision," returned Mr St. John, senior, approvingly. "You have taken a great weight off my mind, my dear young lady; and I am greatly indebted to you. How greatly you alone are in a position to say," and he tapped the cheque-book again with reassuring delicacy, but Jill did not notice the action and for once failed to follow the drift of his speech. A dull, heavy, aching despair had fallen upon her which she could not shake off. She seemed hardly to be listening to him now and only imperfectly comprehended his meaning. "I am to understand then," Mr St. John resumed, straightening himself, and looking about him with an urbane benevolence that was most irritating, "that you will work in conjunction with us? Disillusion him a little, and--" "Oh, stop!" cried Jill, with the first real display of feeling that she had shown throughout the interview. "I cannot bear it. Do you think that because I have adopted art as a profession that I have turned into a lay figure and have no heart at all? You have robbed existence of its only pleasure so far as I am concerned. Can you not spare me the rest? I won't impoverish him by marrying him but I am glad that he loves me, and I won't try to lessen his love--I can't do that." He regarded her with angry impatience, frowning heavily the while. It was a try on--a diplomatic ruse, he considered; he had wondered rather at her former impassiveness; but apparently she was not very quickwitted and had been unprepared. "My dear Miss--Erskine," he exclaimed, endeavouring to adapt himself to the new mood with but little success however, "you are too sensible altogether to indulge in heroics. I don't wish to appear harsh, and I am quite certain that you have your feelings like anyone else, but there are Miss Bolton's feelings also to be taken into consideration, and, though I greatly regret having myself to announce his dishonourable behaviour, she has been engaged to my son for some months past." Jill stared at him in dumb, unquestioning anguish. Engaged! Perhaps that had been the `something' he wished to communicate to her. He had never, given her any reason to suppose otherwise; it had only been her vanity that had led her to imagine what she had. "He has not behaved dishonourably," she answered with difficulty; "he has never made love to me. It was you who told me that he cared; I did not know." He looked surprised. "I am glad to learn that that is so," he said. "I had feared things had gone further. And now, my dear young lady, I must apologise for the intrusion, and will finish up this very unpleasant business as speedily as possible." He opened the cheque-book and took up a pen to write with. "You will allow me," he began; but Jill took the pen quickly and replaced it in the stand. She was white to the very lips, and trembled all over like a person with the ague. "Go," she said hoarsely, "before I say what I might regret all my life. My God! what have I done or said that you should take me for a thing like that? Go, please; oh! go away at once." CHAPTER SEVEN. The climax had come. It had rushed upon her with an unexpectedness that was overwhelming and had left her too stunned to even think connectedly. Only the night before she had been so full of glad expectation, and now everything seemed at an end and all the gladness vanished. She walked unsteadily back to her old seat by the window, and fingered absently the book St. John had sent. It was a new volume, and had been a gift; for he had written her name on the fly leaf. The fact had given her pleasure last night, now she wondered why he had done it, and laid the book down again wearily, all her former interest gone. There were other evidences of his gifts about the room in the shape of baskets once containing fruit and flowers. The fruit had been all eaten, and the flowers were dead; a bunch of them, fading fast, drooped in a vase upon the table; the rest, dried and discoloured, with all their beauty perished, were hidden away in Jill's little bedroom where only she could see them, and recall the pleasure they had given; and from her exalted position on on the bracket which she occupied alone, Clytie looked down white, and pure, and pensive, seeming to understand. Oh! it was hard, and cruel, and bitter,--all the more bitter, that the mistake had been her own. She drew from the bosom of her frock St. John's brief note, the note that had made her so happy, and read it again by the light of her new understanding, `Don't worry about the lessons; I am enjoying the holiday.' Perhaps he had meant it literally and not, as she had imagined, penned the clause solely with a thoughtful desire to save her anxiety. How vain she had been!--how mad! `I have something to say to you which will not keep.' So vague a sentence, and yet she had fancied that she had guessed his meaning rightly. He might have meant a hundred things, and what more probable than the announcement of his engagement? Jill crouched by the window for the rest of the morning hugging this new trouble which had dwarfed all the others into insignificance. At first she was too dazed to feel anything much, then gradually the anguish of mind grew keener until it seemed unbearable, and finally exhausted itself by its own violence. After that came a lull, and then followed resentment, fierce, active, healthy resentment that left absolutely no room for any other emotion; resentment against her recent visitor, angry, contemptuous, indignant; resentment against Miss Bolton of the fiercely jealous order; but keenest of all resentment against St. John, the cold, inflexible, heartsore resentment of wounded love. He ought to have told her of his engagement; if not actually dishonourable it was mean of him to have suppressed the fact when he must have seen that he was becoming necessary to her, when he knew, too, that she was more than, under the circumstances, she should have been to him; for that he did care for her she did not doubt--infatuation his father had called it, and it might be that he was right. At any rate St. John should have left the Art School before it had grown too late. This feeling of anger acted as a tonic to Jill; it braced her nerves and put her on her mettle, so that she determined to face her trouble and conquer it, and if possible show St. John what a poor opinion she had of him. But then came the remembrance of her small debts and her poverty. It had been a bad thing for her this acquaintance with St. John; she had not relied sufficiently on herself. When he was gone the fee would cease, and she had not sold any work for weeks. The last canvas that she had been engaged upon before her illness, painting from a model St. John had employed, stood against the wall unfinished and there were others ready for sale but nowhere to dispose of them. In the afternoon she went out--there was no time for holidays now--in search of a market, and returned in the evening weary, footsore, miserable, having had no luck at all with her canvasses, but--oh! the degradation to Jill's artist-soul--having been obliged to accept as the only thing going an order for half-a-dozen nightdress sachets--`pyjama bags' as the oily, leering, facetious individual who had given her the commission called them. "There was a run on 'em," he had added, "the swells like painted satin things to keep their night-gear in." Jill had agreed to do the work, but she looked far from happy over it, and very nearly cried as she turned to leave the shop. The facetious individual had chucked her under the chin, and told her to `buck up,' and he would look round and see if there wasn't something else he could find her to `daub.' Then he winked at her, and Jill had broken away in haste fearing that these overtures would lead to an embrace. And so she reached home, and that night went early to bed, and Thursday ended unhappily even as it had begun. The next morning when she rose, the feeling of anger was still paramount. She had suffered so keenly yesterday that she did not think it possible that she could feel any greater pain, and she found it difficult to realise yet all that this sudden breaking with St. John must mean. She steeled herself to meet her old pupil with composure though she had not yet determined upon what she should say or do. At first she had thought of writing and forbidding him ever to come to the Art School again, but had subsequently rejected this plan as impracticable; what reason had she to offer? She could not say on account of your engagement, such an excuse would have placed her in a false position, and given St. John a right to put what construction he chose upon her motive. The only thing that remained for her was to receive him, and by saying as little as possible convince him how indifferent she was, and how very determined at the same time. And at nine thirty sharp he arrived, clattering up the steep stairs like a noisy schoolboy and marching through the open door straight into the studio where Jill stood white and nervous, but outwardly calm, waiting to receive him. There was a pleased, eager, confident air about him in striking contrast to the chilling quiet of her manner, and he grasped her hand before she could prevent him with a very hearty grip of genuine sincerity. "This is good to see you about again," he began. Then he stopped short struck by something in her face, and exclaimed anxiously. "Nothing the matter I hope, Miss Erskine?" Jill was standing with her back to the light so that she had the advantage of him that way; but St. John's sight was good and he detected at once the suppressed agitation of her manner; though she, herself, was unaware of it there was a whole life's tragedy in the depths of her grey eyes. "No," she answered; "nothing beyond a trifling annoyance that I have been subjected to lately, and which I have determined to put an end to for good and all. It is absurd of course and really not worth discussing, but these petty worries are even more trying than big ones." "If it is not worth discussion," he said, "we'll let it slide for to-day at any rate. I have got so much to say that is worth discussing, that I want to say it at once. I give you fair warning that I haven't come to work." As a matter of fact there was no work put ready for him; but he had not time to notice that. He was so boyish and impulsive, so gay and self-complacent that her anger gathered strength from his sheer light-heartedness. "Come and sit beside me on the stool by the window, Jill," he said, "and then we can talk at our ease." It was the first time that he had addressed her by her Christian name, and he glanced at her half smiling, half diffident, to see how she would take it. "No," she answered coldly, "what I have to say can very well be said where I am, and it will be as well to get through with it at once. You will think it rather sudden no doubt after my note of Wednesday, but, as I told you, I have been subjected to a great deal of annoyance lately and what I experienced yesterday has decided me to put an end to the existing state of affairs. I regret having to spring this upon you so abruptly, and in the middle of a quarter too, but I wish you to understand that I cannot teach you any longer, I wish you to leave this Art School." St. John looked mystified and incredulous, he was astounded at her request, at the cold precision of her voice, and the apathy of her expression. He felt annoyed with her and not a little hurt. "May I enquire why you dismiss me thus suddenly?" he asked schooling himself to keep his vexation in check. "I should like to know what has induced you to act so precipitately." "No, you may not," Jill answered crossly; "I only took you on trial, remember." "For a quarter yes, but then the probation was over, and it is hardly etiquette to dismiss a pupil in the middle of a term without vouchsafing any reason." "I consider it quite sufficient that I do dismiss you," Miss Erskine responded. "We will not discuss the matter further, if you please." "Oh! yes, we will," he answered, his temper like her own beginning to get the upper hand. "In fact I refuse to leave without an alleged complaint before my term is expired; you are bound to give a proper notice." "Not if I expel you," Jill retorted. "Expel me!" he scoffed. "What would you expel me for? You couldn't do that without a reason." "But I have a reason." "A reason!" he repeated aghast, "a reason sufficient to expel me? What reason pray?" "Making love to me." Silence followed--a depressing silence during which neither of them moved. She had spoken in the heat of the moment, the next she could have bitten out her tongue for her indiscretion. St. John stared at her fully a minute. Then he smiled rudely. "Making love to you!" he repeated. "Absurd! I have never spoken a word of love to you in my life." It was true; he had not, and Jill's cup of humiliation was full. What had induced her to make such an egregious error? "You'll be running me in for breach of promise, I suppose?" he continued ruthlessly. "Don't you think that you're a little--a little--well, conceited to be so premature?" Jill turned upon him wrathfully. "How dare you speak to me like that?" she cried. "It is only what people think. For myself it wouldn't have mattered whether you had made love to me or not; I should soon have settled that." He changed from angry crimson to dead white, and gazed at her in hurt displeasure. "You mean that?" he asked. "Certainly," she answered with vindictive and unnecessary emphasis, "I am not in the habit of prevaricating." "Very well," he said in a tone of forced calm which contrasted ill with the pained expression of his face, "I believe you. And under the circumstances am quite of your opinion that further acquaintance had better cease. It was a mistake my coming at all both for you and for me. Good morning, Miss Erskine, and good-bye." He paused, thinking that perhaps her mood had been prompted by caprice, and that she might relent yet and call him back; but she made no movement at all beyond a bend of the head, and her voice was no kinder when she wished him farewell. Then he went, striding down the stairs and out into the street, resentful, angry, heartsore, little guessing how very much greater was the unhappiness he had left behind him where Jill, alone now in every sense of the word, stood battling with her grief and her emotion, and trying to face the difficulties which seemed crowding upon her on every side. She got out her satin work when he had gone and started upon the sachets with eager haste, glad of the miserable order now; for it kept her employed, and diverted the train of her thoughts. And all that day she sat working, working feverishly, dining, when the light failed so that she could see to paint no longer, off a crust of bread, the best her larder had to offer--indeed the only thing. The next morning by the early post she received a letter from St. John. Her hand trembled so violently as she took it up that she could hardly unfasten the envelope, but, finally tearing it open she withdrew the contents, a sheet of notepaper with St. John's compliments inscribed thereon, and enclosed within a cheque for the fee paid in full up to the end of the present quarter. The cheque fell to the ground unheeded but the sheet of paper Jill spread out on the table before her and then sat staring at it as though she could not take it in. It was the first brief missive of the sort that she had received; its very brevity chilled her. "With Mr St. John's compliments." So he had accepted his dismissal? It was better so, of course; but it was very hard to bear all the same. CHAPTER EIGHT. It was the Tuesday following that miserable and never to be forgotten Friday. Jill had been out in the morning to take back two of the sachets which she had finished, but had brought them back to make some alterations that the oily individual had pointed out to her in a playfully amorous fashion; a circumstance that had put her into as bad a temper as her grief stricken soul would allow. She sat on the red stool before her easel working, not at the sachets--she was too disgusted to touch them--but at her last canvas, with a lay figure posed in lieu of the model she could no longer employ. When the sound of someone mounting the stairs caused her heart to quicken its beating, and the tell-tale colour to come and go in her cheeks. It was St. John, she knew at once; very few men ascended those stairs, and only one with that quick decision born of familiarity. He knocked before entering, a ceremony that he had dispensed with altogether on class days when he had been a student; he did not, however, wait for permission to enter, but opened the door for himself. Jill's mouth hardened obstinately as she glanced casually over her shoulder, and then, feigning not to see the bunch of flowers that he brought and laid humbly on the table as a peace-offering, went unmoved on with her work. She did not rise, did not even offer a word of greeting. St. John spoke first, awkwardly, deprecatingly, uncertain, what to make of her mood. "Good morning," he said hesitatingly, "I--I was passing and thought I would call." "Passing here?" interposed Jill incredulously, "what a circuitous route you must have taken to accomplish that." "Not at all," he answered, "you aren't so very out of the way. Besides I wanted to come." "So I supposed," she retorted disagreeably. "But you might have saved yourself the trouble; you were quite safe paying by cheque, you know." "What do you mean?" he asked. "Mean! Why haven't you called for your receipt? I own to having been remiss in not sending it, but I had my reasons; and after all it was only three days since, and a cheque is always pretty safe." "You know that I haven't called for that," he said angrily. "If I thought you really believed me capable of such an act I would--" "Well, what?" she asked derisively. "I don't know," he answered lamely, "clear perhaps. I had forgotten even that a receipt was customary, and certainly never looked for one from you." "Nothing so business like, I suppose?" snapped Jill. "I should have sent one though if I had not intended returning the cheque instead. I have no right to that money; I turned you away at a moment's notice, you did not leave of your own accord." "That's true enough," he ruefully agreed. "Nevertheless the money is due to you; I received the tuition." "It is not due," replied Jill firmly. "You are making me a present of it, Mr St. John, and I will not accept such a gift. There is your cheque, take it back if you please." He took it from her, tore it savagely into pieces, and threw them on the floor. "So be it," he answered wrathfully. "You must indeed be succeeding as you deserve, to reject what you have lawfully earned." Jill went white as she generally did when in a rage, and favoured him with a glance that he was not likely to forget in a hurry. "I have not earned it," she responded, "neither am I succeeding; two facts which you are thoroughly well acquainted with. Does _that_ look like success?" And she drew from the cardboard box the sachets she had brought home again from the shop that morning, and threw them on the table in front of him. "That's the kind of work that I have come to do, and I daresay I shall sink lower yet;--Xmas cards no doubt. Oh! yes, I have sunk pretty low. The man who gave me that order superintends the work, and corrects errors of detail. He does not like female figures in atmospheric drapery like those. He said the public wouldn't buy them that way; a nude figure on a nightdress bag--he didn't use the word nude, by the way, but plain vulgar English--was too suggestive, and requested me to take them home and paint in a garment--`Just a small one'--as though he were alluding to a vest. Ugh! it makes me sick--it makes me _blush_. He wears his hair oiled, too," she continued retrospectively, forgetting for the minute her resentment against St. John in disgust at her latest patron, "and--further degradation--makes love to me which for the sake of the miserable commission I dare not resent." What followed was unpardonable on St. John's part but for the life of him he could not resist retaliating for the thrusts that she had given him. "Perhaps the last is a hallucination," he suggested ungenerously; "You have a tendency to imagine that sort of thing you know." She eyed him for a moment in stony displeasure, then pointed imperiously to the door. "You may consider that remark worthy of a gentleman, Mr St. John," she said, "I don't. You will oblige me by leaving the studio at once; I--I shall be rude to you if you don't." Her voice broke, and she turned to her work again abruptly, painting with feverish haste as thought she had not a moment to lose. In two strides St. John was behind her, and stooping he put his arms about her with a swift movement for which she was entirely unprepared, and which imprisoned her so firmly that she could not escape. "Rude to me if you like," he cried; "but not unkind, Jill--never any more." Jill had dropped her utensils, and the palette lay paint side downwards on the floor. She put her small hands on St. John's wrists and tried to free herself from his embrace, but the attempt was ineffectual, his arms Only tightened round her, and his face bent lower until it was on a level with her own. She looked into his eyes and read in them a laughing mastery that defied her efforts to escape, and, even while it angered her, set her pulses leaping in a wild excitement that was half fear, half gladness. She breathed quickly, and pulled at his wrists again. "Let me go," she whispered. "How dare you touch me?" But he only laughed in answer and held her closer to him, and for the first time Jill felt his warm kisses on her lips. "It's not a bit of good," he said; "you can't get away. I feel as though I could hold you to my heart for ever. You expelled me for a fault that I was not guilty of; I am now going to justify your accusation. Jill, Jill, you foolish child, what are you thinking? Don't shrink away like that, dear. I love you, my darling, my little independent, high-spirited girl. I love every tone of your voice, every fresh mood, wound and vex me though they may at the time. Jill will you marry me?" "No," Jill answered with curt abruptness. He shook his head at her reprovingly, but looked not the least whit disconcerted. "Oh! yes, you will," he returned with confidence; "you must if I have to carry you all the way to the Church in my arms like this. I can't let you go again; these last four days have been unbearable. Answer me truly, haven't you found them so too, dear?--just a little sad and lonely, eh Jill?" "Stand back," she cried still struggling futilely to shake him off. "You are mad to talk to me the way you are doing, and I should be worse than mad to listen." "Oh! no, you wouldn't," he replied with gay audacity. "You can't help listening, sweetheart, any more than you can prevent my kissing you. Come, Jill, end this farce and be candid. Is it pique, dear, or what? Why won't you own that you care for me? I know you do." "Yes. Oh, my God, yes!" she answered, and she broke into violent sobs. "I wish from my heart that I could answer truthfully that I do not." He was startled at her outburst, and drew back in consternation letting his hands fall to his sides. She was free enough now, but she hardly seemed to realise the fact and made no attempt to rise. "Jill," he exclaimed, "what is it? What has happened, dear? Won't you tell me?" But Jill only buried her face in her hands and sobbed on. She would have given anything to have preserved her composure throughout this interview; but once having broken down there was no stemming the torrent; the flood must have its way, and a regular deluge it proved. St. John watched her uneasily for a while, then unable to stand it longer he went up to her again, and putting his arm around her neck, tried to draw her hands away. In a moment she was on her feet facing him, grief changed to indignation, scorn and anger in her eyes, while the tear drops glistened still upon her flushed cheeks, and trembled wet and sparkling on her lashes. "Don't come near me," she panted; "your touch is hateful to me--keep away, do you hear?" "Don't worry yourself, my dear girl," he retorted a trifle impatiently it must be confessed. "I have no wish to approach any nearer; indeed I'd rather remain where I am. If you would only tell me what it is all about, instead of flying off at a tangent we might arrive at a better understanding. Have I done anything to forfeit your regard?" "Yes," she answered petulantly, "you know you have." "Should I ask for information which I had already?" he questioned coolly. "Information moreover which is presumably hardly creditable to myself. What is the something, please?" Jill looked at him coldly, but he bore her scrutiny well. He was grave, but he certainly did not appear apprehensive, nor was he in the least embarrassed or perturbed. "What is the something?" he repeated. "I think I have a right to know." But Jill seemed to find a difficulty in answering, or a disinclination to do so; for she drew herself up and remained silent, an angry spot of colour in either cheek. St. John tapped the floor impatiently with his boot. "Come, come," he cried, "this is childish to accuse a fellow of some possibly imaginary wrong, and not give him the chance of refuting it. What heinous offence do you fancy me guilty of? Robbing a bank? I haven't I assure you." He was turning her doubts of him to ridicule which only angered her the more. There was a gleam of amusement in his eyes and his moustache twitched ever so slightly. "What! sceptical of that even?" he continued ironically. "So it's my honesty that's called into question, eh?" "Yes," Jill flashed back with a fierceness born of wounded pride, "your honesty, Mr St. John. Is it honest of you to come and make love to me? No, you know it is not, it is dishonourable, despicable--" "Stop a bit," he interrupted with a quietness and control which surprised himself; "don't let us lose ourselves in a labyrinth of adjectives, and so get away from the main subject altogether. Why is it dishonourable for me to make love to you? For, though you will insist to the contrary, I am absolutely ignorant of any prohibitive reason." "That is impossible," Jill replied, and he flushed at her want of faith in his veracity. "But as you are determined to keep your counsel until you discover how much I know I had better speak out I suppose. You are not free to propose matrimony to me." St. John's eyebrows went up with a jerk. "Indeed!" he said. "Your statement is news to me, so also is the very low idea you have formed of my character. In what way am I not free? Do you mean that there is someone else?" Jill nodded; she could find no words. "And the lady's name?" he questioned in peremptory tones. "Miss Bolton," she answered with a visible effort. "I have recently learnt from unquestionable authority that you have been engaged to your cousin for some months." St. John started, pulled thoughtfully at his moustache for a moment, and then looking up sharply,-- "The name of your informant?" he asked. "Never mind that," Jill answered, "my informant was in a position to know. I have tried to but cannot doubt the assertion." "And yet you seem to find it easy enough to doubt mine," he said. She made no reply; and striding up to her he caught her by the shoulders and transfixed her with a gaze at once stern and reproachful. "Speak," he exclaimed. "I will know who is the lying, interfering mischief-maker who has spread such abominable reports about me." Jill swayed slightly in his grip, and her glance met his in wide-eyed questioning as though she would read his very soul. "Ah!" she cried, "if it were false! if it were only false!" "The name?" he repeated impatiently, and almost shook her in his excitement. She hesitated still for a minute, then the answer came unwillingly, more as though his glance compelled the truth than that she gave it voluntarily. "It was your father," she half-whispered, and her eyes sought the floor and stayed there as though she dreaded reading what she might see in his face. He stared at her for a moment, then he pushed her from him with a laugh. "Unquestionable authority certainly," he said moodily, and laughed again. Jill remained motionless watching him, uncertain whether he intended denying the allegation or not, and he stood opposite in a towering rage glowering back at her with his brows drawn together in the old bad-tempered scowl. "I suppose," he went on after a pause, "that he communicated this intelligence to you between the time of your writing to me and my first appearance at the art school after your illness?" "Yes," she replied, "on the Thursday." "That accounts for your inexplicable bad temper that Friday," he resumed unpleasantly. "Information from such a source must certainly have been convincing, far more convincing than my contradiction. But did it not strike you to doubt the authenticity of the signature?" "It was a word of mouth communication," Jill answered coldly, "Mr St. John honoured me with a visit." "He came here?" repeated her hearer aghast. "My father? Impossible!" "It does sound rather improbable I admit," agreed Jill. "It was going to a great deal of trouble over a small matter, wasn't it?--when a penny postage stamp would have done as well. But he seemed more concerned about it than either you or I. Was it likely, do you think, that I should question his statement? Had there been no truth in it why should he have bothered?" "The only reason I can think of," answered St. John, "was that he merely anticipated his desire. But for you I can find no excuse, not even one so flimsy as that. Why should you place perfect reliance on the word of a man you did not know, and, putting the worse possible construction on my actions, refuse to give me even the chance of justifying myself?" "I don't know," retorted Jill ungraciously. "Looked at from your point of view I suppose it appears monstrous, but from my point it seems natural enough. I had no reason to doubt your father's word, and, as you, yourself, informed me that morning you had never spoken a word of love to me in your life. There was no necessity for you to mention your engagement; men not infrequently prefer to conceal the fact from girls of inferior social standing--" "Stop," he cried, angrily. "This is too much. I could have forgiven the rest, but you go too far." "I didn't know that I had entreated your forgiveness," she said with a smile which mocked his indignation. "`I love every tone of your voice,'" she mimicked, "`every fresh mood, wound and vex me though they may at the time.' You have a strange way of showing your affection, Mr Saint John, an admirable way of disguising it, I should say." St. John looked furious, and his tormentor continued relentlessly. "Or is it that now it is wounding and vexing you? To-morrow, I suppose, you will be enamoured of all that I have said and done to-day?" Then, her mood changing abruptly as the love in her heart reproached her for doubting and vexing him as she had, she went up to the table and buried her face shyly in the flowers he had brought. "Go away now, my dear Saint," she whispered, "and come to-morrow instead; for I like you enamoured best." But St. John was angry still, and not so ready to be propitiated. His hat lay on the table where he had placed it near the flowers, and Jill's hand rested beside it--her fingers touching the brim, it may have been by accident though it looked more like design. "I think I _had_ better go," he agreed, reaching out for it; "your opinion of me is not easy to forget, and--" He had taken hold of his hat; but Jill's small fingers had closed upon the brim on the other side, and kept their hold determinedly. St. John desisted at once; it was incompatible with his dignity to struggle over his headgear. "At your pleasure, Miss Erskine," he said. "It's very strange," mused Jill in a tone of innocent speculation; "do you know that until to-day I had always considered you handsome? What a difference it makes to a face whether it is smiling or glum." "One can't keep up a perpetual grin," he retorted, but his countenance relaxed a little despite his effort to appear unmoved, and seeing her advantage she followed it up, turning a scene which had been growing painfully strained into a comedy by her deft handling of the situation. "No; not unless it is natural to one, which is even a greater affliction. I once heard of a man who had his nose broken for laughing at a quarrelsome individual in the street. As a matter of fact he wasn't laughing; it was only that Nature had endowed him with a perpetual and unavoidable grin. But you are not at all likely to get your nose broken from a similar cause." "I should hope not," he returned with disagreeable emphasis. "Is mine on my face still?" enquired Jill putting up her hand to feel. "Why! it actually is. Funny, but I thought you had snapped it off. It is there, isn't it?" She went quite close to him and held up her face for inspection with a look in her eyes that St. John would have been more than human, or at any rate not genuinely in love, had he resisted. He made no attempt to; he just took the small face between his two hands and kissed it. And then they sat down together on the twill covered box to spoon a little, and afterwards talk matters over from a practical, common sense view, as Jill declared; though it would have been more sensible had they left the spooning and talked matters over first. CHAPTER NINE. "I wonder," mused St. John, stroking Jill's tumbled hair with his right hand, and holding both hers in his left, "why the governor should have come here and told you what he did? It was putting us all in such a false position, and--well, I should have considered it an act altogether beneath him." Jill sighed and nestled unconsciously a little closer to him. "Can't we forget all that for to-day," she asked, "and just think only of our two selves? I quite believe you when you say that you are not engaged to your cousin. I think I believed it all along only I was so horribly jealous. I'm jealous still, jealous that she can see you when I can't, and that she has a right to call you Jack--" "But you have got that right too," he interrupted, "a better right than she has. You will call me Jack, won't you? I call you Jill." She laughed. "Doesn't it put you in mind of the nursery rhyme?" she said. "I never thought of it before." "Yes; let's see, how does it go? We must alter it a little to fit the case, `Jack and Jill went up the hill to--' we can't say `fetch a pail of water.'" "In search of fame together," put in Jill. "Ah, yes! Jack and Jill went up the hill In search of fame together, Jack fell down and broke his crown, And--" "No," interrupted Jill, "I won't come tumbling after. You can say that I went on alone." "But that's so unkind," he objected; "besides it doesn't rhyme." "Oh! well," she answered after a pause devoted to thinking out a finish to the verse, "put, `But Jill goes climbing ever.' That rhymes, and it's true; I'm not going to stop in the valley trying to haul you up." "You're a disagreeable little prig," he exclaimed. "I should as likely as not be obliged to haul you." "And I daresay you could manage that," she answered rubbing her cheek against his coat sleeve; "you're big enough goodness knows. I should like to be hauled up and have no more climbing to do, Jack; it would be such a change. But that's too good to come true I'm afraid, it will always be more kicks than coppers it seems to me." "What do you mean?" asked St. John in astonishment. "There will be no more kicks, Jill, when you are once married to me; I shall take all those." Jill went on caressing his coat sleeve vigorously, and her hand pressed his with tender warmth. "We shall never marry, Jack," she said; "we can't." "Why?" he asked amazed. "Because we can't live on love, dear; I never did like sweet things much, and you don't like bread and cheese, and stout. I don't much either; but I have to go in for it; it's cheap. Only now I do without the stout--and the cheese also the last day or two." "But, darling," he exclaimed, not quite certain whether she was joking or not, "you are making troubles where they don't exist. There will be no need to live on bread and cheese and affection--though I should be equal to that even if necessary--I have five hundred a year from my father, and he has promised to increase it when I marry." "Providing you marry your cousin," Jill interposed. "He would certainly decrease it if you married me. Oh! I know quite well all about it. You forget that he called upon me; he told me so then. And though you love me and I love you we shouldn't be such fools, Jack, as to marry on nothing." St. John looked glum. He entertained no doubt that his father had resolved upon this plan of deterring him from marrying the girl he wished to, and he determined to thwart him if possible. "We could get married, and I could come and live here," he suggested brilliantly, "and we could work together; that would be jolly." Jill smiled at this proposal but shook her head decisively. "It's no good; it wouldn't answer," she said. "We should fight dreadfully in a month, and then the models would get smashed. And you'd never earn anything at painting, you know; your pictures always require explaining, and your figures are atrocious. I can't think why you will persist in going in for the human form divine; it's most difficult; for any fool can see when a figure's out of drawing except the one who draws it, and you never will learn that green isn't a becoming tint for flesh even in the deep shadows." St. John heaved a sigh which seemed to proceed from the bottom of his boots. He was too genuinely despondent to resent her slighting criticism of his abilities, or too well aware of its truth perhaps. He rose impatiently, and walked restlessly up and down trying to think. Jill watched him, her own brows knit in a hopeless attempt to solve the difficulty. "This is a pretty kettle of fish," he exclaimed swinging round so suddenly that he nearly upset the model. "I'm hanged if I see what we are to do." "My dear boy," remonstrated Jill in tones of apprehension, "do mind the lay figure. I am trying to finish this canvas with its sole aid," pointing to the work that she had been engaged upon at his entry--a female figure recumbent on a night rainbow. "I can't possibly employ a model, unless perhaps for a final sitting when I know that I shall see so many mistakes it will be a case of repainting it." Then St. John had a happy inspiration. "Wouldn't I do?" he asked in all good faith. "I'm bigger, of course; but I'd be better than a lay figure, and I don't mind posing for you a bit." Jill broke into a laugh, the first laugh of thorough enjoyment that she had had for days. "Ye gods!" she cried, "what next I wonder?" Then she got up and put her two arms about his neck. "Dear old boy," she said gratefully, "I believe you'd stand on your head if I wanted you to. But no, dear, I won't pose you as `The Shepherd's Delight,' I'm sore afraid you wouldn't do at all." Well the end of it all was that Jill absolutely refused to marry St. John on the understanding that they should pick up a precarious livelihood by their combined artistic efforts, though she was quite willing that he should speak to his father again on the subject if he deemed it of any use. She also thought that Miss Bolton should be apprised of what had taken place, and for the rest things would go on just as usual, only he would attend the Art School again, and, as he himself stipulated, pop in as often as he chose. Then Jill went and put her hat on at his request, and they strolled out to lunch somewhere, and afterwards spent the rest of the day as they liked, which wasn't among pictures as one would have imagined from two such lovers of art. In the first place St. John drove to a jewellers and placed a handsome solitaire ring on the third finger of Jill's left hand, then they attended a matinee at one of the theatres, and in the evening he took her to Frascatti's to dinner. There were several men there whom he knew and saluted in passing. They bowed back and stared hard at the dowdy little girl he escorted, wondering where he had unearthed her, and why? That night Jill tasted champagne for the first time, and its effect upon her spirits was decidedly exhilarating. She liked champagne, she said, and St. John laughed at the naivete of both manner and remark. When he asked her where she would like to finish up the evening she suggested a Music Hall; for there one could talk while the performance was going on. So they drove to Shaftsbury Avenue, and St. John got one of the comfortable little curtained boxes at the Palace where one can enjoy the stage if one wishes to, or sit back and not pay any attention to it at all. Jill liked the Living Pictures best. She almost forgot in the delight of watching that they were actually animate and not marvellously painted canvasses by some master hand. But St. John rather spoiled the effect by remarking that they were `leggy,' whereat she told him that he was horrid; nevertheless she noticed how very quietly the house received these artistic representations; but it was the quietness of appreciation had she known it--the appreciation which enjoys, yet with a very common mock modesty fears to be detected enjoying. Jill glanced at her lover as he sat back watching her instead of the stage with a smile of quiet amusement on his face. "They are lovely, Jack," she said. "I should like to carry them all home in reality as I shall in my mind's eye. But this is the wrong audience to exhibit such things to." And St. John agreed with her, though he was by no means certain as to the soundness of her logic, but he would have agreed to anything just then; he was in the idiotic, inconsequent stage of love sickness, and had got it fairly badly. When the Music Hall was over he suggested a late supper somewhere, but Jill was firm in her refusal; so they drove straight to her lodgings where St. John alighted and opened the door for her, and embraced her several times in the dirty passage before he finally allowed her to shut him out and go on up to her room. And that night she fell asleep with her cheek pressed to the diamond ring, and a smile of perfect happiness parting her lips. The next morning Jill went to work on the sachets again, though it was with the utmost difficulty that she managed to concentrate her thoughts upon anything at all save Jack and the new ring. As it was, her ideas kept wandering, and she caught herself every now and again breaking off into song--snatches of Music Hall choruses that she had heard the night before. And then in the midst of it in walked St. John, and seeing what she was doing he took the satin away from her in his masterful fashion, and crumpled it up in his hands before her horrified gaze. "You said that the smirking idiot who gave you these to do made love to you," he said. "I won't brook any oily rivals of that description." Jill laughed. She rather enjoyed the idea of his being jealous. "I thought you said that that was a hallucination," she retorted. "I was almost prepared to believe you and to think that the next time he chucked me under the chin, or put his arm round my waist that it was only my vivid imagination." "He did that?" cried St. John fiercely. "Oh, dear! yes; several times." "Give me his address," commanded her lover. "I'll stop his love-making propensities. Where does this greasy Lothario hang out?" But Jill was too discreet to say. "I forget," she answered lamely; "I never was good at locality. Don't look so savage, Jack; he only chucked me under the chin once, and I washed my face well directly I got back, indeed I did; I scrubbed so hard that I rubbed the skin off, I remember, and it was sore for two days." "You ought to have returned the work at once," grumbled St. John. "I am surprised at your taking it after that." "Surprised!" she repeated. "You wouldn't have been so astonished had you lived for a few days on a stale crust, and expected to dine the next off the crumbs if by good luck there happened to be any crumbs left." "Oh! Jill," he exclaimed, "I'm a brute dear. Has it ever been as bad as that, my poor little girl?" Jill nodded affirmatively, and then let her head recline contentedly against his shoulder, glad to nestle within the comforting security of his strong arms, and feel that there she could find both shelter and defence. "Have you told your father yet?" she asked a little nervously. "No, dear," he answered. Then added quickly, "I will some time to-day, though." "Yes," she said, "don't put it off any longer; I think that he ought to know; and yet I feel somehow that his knowing will put an end to all this pleasant fooling. Oh! Jack, I'm such a horrid little coward, I know I am." She lifted her face, and he saw that she was laughing even though the tears stood in her eyes. "If you feel like that," he said tenderly, kissing the upturned face, "why not get married first and tell him afterwards?" "Oh! Jack, fie," she cried; "you are turning coward too." "Not I," he contradicted stoutly, then added with a smile, "I think I am though; I'm so terribly afraid of your slipping through my fingers, you eel." "Oh, you dear!" whispered Jill softly. "It _is_ nice to have someone wanting you so badly as all that. I won't slip through though; I am far too comfortable where I am." CHAPTER TEN. The following day, St. John entered the studio with a face the gravity of which boded no good for their plans, Jill feared. She knew at once that his father had refused to countenance the match, and although she had not dared to hope for his sanction, the knowledge that he had positively denied it came upon her with a sense of shock. Not for one moment did she think of resenting his objection, nor of questioning his right to forbid the marriage, she just crept within the shelter of St. John's arms and stayed there, her face, with its flush of mortification, hidden against his breast. "The governor's a silly old fool," St. John exclaimed savagely, thinking less, perhaps, of the girl's discomfort than his own personal grievances. "He's cut me off with nothing--at least five hundred pounds; he gave me a cheque for that amount before giving me the kick out." "We won't take it," Jill cried wrathfully with the improvident contempt of the penniless, "We won't touch a farthing of it, will we?" "Oh; yes, we will," he answered. "We'll get married on it in the first place, and then live on the rest for so long as it will last." "I wouldn't get married on that five hundred pounds for anything," Jill said firmly. "Well, I'm going to," he replied, "I'm going to see about it now. We'll go before a Registrar--much nicer than Church, you know, doesn't take so long. And then I'm going to invest the rest with a little capital that I have by me in a snug little business--haberdashery, or something of the kind; I'm not quite sure what, though I thought about nothing else all last night." Jill gave a quiet laugh. "My dear old boy," she said, "you must allow me a say in that matter if you please. I wouldn't let you have a haberdashery; I'd sooner that you were a pork butcher at once." "No good," he answered. "I've thought of that too; but I couldn't kill a pig for love or money. I could measure out a yard or two of ribbon though, and sell worsted stockings to old women. I say, Jill, what do you think of a photographic studio?--That's the next best thing to art." Jill had a fine contempt for photography, and said so, but St. John was rather taken with the new idea, and as he pointed out while he did the mechanical work she could paint portraits and enlargements, and have a kind of Art Gallery as well. He spoke with a cheery confidence that showed that he fully expected her to fall in with his plan immediately and be struck as he was with the brilliance of the idea. But for once Jill's spirit seemed to have deserted her, and she turned away with a catch in her voice, and quite a forlorn expression in the grey eyes which a moment ago had been smiling into his. "Oh, Jack, don't!" she cried. "I can't bear to listen to you. My poor old saint, I wish that you had never met me." "Stop that," commanded St. John sharply. "You make me feel such a beastly cad--the son of a beastlier cad--" She turned and laid her hand upon his lips, shaking her head at him reprovingly. "Your language isn't fit for a stable," she said in her elder sister, teacher-to-pupil tone. "I can't have you calling people names here. Besides what I said need not have excited your risability like that. I meant it in all sincerity; it is a pity as things have turned out; I was quite happy here working by myself, and got along fairly comfortably, and I think now that we have had our pleasant fooling and the crisis is reached I should like to offer you your freedom." "Thank you," he answered grimly, and he stood looking down from his six feet of brawny manhood upon the small determined figure in front of him busily engaged in withdrawing the ring--her sole article of jewellery-- from the third finger of her left hand. She held the shining circlet, emblem of their mutual love, towards him with a smile upon her lips, but he made no attempt to take it though he understood the significance of her action well enough. "Wouldn't you like to keep it to wear on the other hand?" he enquired sarcastically. "It isn't etiquette, I know; but ladies do it sometimes, I believe." "But your freedom?" Jill persisted, still holding the ring before his eyes. "Won't you take that?" "Oh, certainly," he replied disagreeably, "but _that_ doesn't constitute my freedom, does it?" with a contemptuous glance at the small golden hoop in her hand. "No, I suppose not," the girl answered in a voice of such blank disappointment that St. John grinned despite his ill-humour; her lugubrious expression aroused his mirth. Jill saw nothing to laugh at. The situation had assumed for her quite a tragic aspect, and her eyes blazed with a very wrathful light as she gazed witheringly up into his broadly smiling face. "I don't see," she observed icily, "that my remark called for any violent ebullition of mirth. I wasn't aware that I had said anything funny. Is there insanity in your family?" "Not that I know of," he replied, taking possession of both ring and hand as he spoke, and keeping his hold despite her angry attempt to free herself. "'Pon my word, Jill, you're enough to try a fellow's patience. You deserved to be taken at your word just now, and didn't expect to be, that's the joke. And now I've got to put this ring back in its place, I suppose. The next time that you take it off for the childish satisfaction of dangling it an inch from my nose I shall keep it and give it to some other girl." "Miss Bolton perhaps?" remarked Jill in her nastiest tone. "Don't you think it would be better," he suggested without looking at her, "to leave Evie's name out of our disputes?" "I don't know whether you consider it gentlemanly," Jill cried fiercely, "to try and make me feel mean?" "I'm glad if I have succeeded in making you feel it," he answered imperturbably, patting the ring in place, and slowly releasing her hand, "for you certainly are mean. Your meanness is, in fact, only to be equalled by your bad temper and that exceeds it. I am not blind to your faults you may observe; they are as plentiful as flies in summer, and equally irritating." "And to think," exclaimed Jill in exasperation, "that I was going to give you up just for your personal benefit! I won't now; if you try to back out of it I'll have you up for breach of promise." "You will, will you? Jove! I almost believe you would. And you'd win your case too, for if you looked as belligerent as you do at present the jury would be afraid to give it against you. It isn't a bit of use, Jill, getting nasty; I'm in such an angelic frame of mind myself that not even you could put me out. Get your hat on, old girl, and let's go and look for our shop together. We are going to become public benefactors, and hand down to posterity the idealised representatives of the present generation." Jill smiled scornfully. "I am sorry for the idealisation if you are going to operate; they'll be more like caricatures I'm thinking. What do you know about photography?" "Know about it!" echoed St. John indignantly. "Why I've got a camera of my own; Evie and I used to dabble a good deal in photography at one time." "It strikes me that you _dabbled_ in a great many things," retorted Jill. "Perhaps that accounts for the very indifferent manner in which you do everything. If you are counting on your amateur efforts solely, I fear we shall end in the bankruptcy court." "Jill," he said very gravely, and in such an altered tone that Jill looked up in surprise, "are you afraid to throw in your lot with mine now that my circumstances are almost as destitute and uncertain as your own?" Jill gave a gasp. For a moment she looked as if about to offer an indignant protest, the next she dissolved into tears. St. John's half-formed suspicions faded immediately. His father had planted them in his mind the night before. He had said "tell her that you are penniless and see how sincere her love will prove." The girl's uncertain mood had recalled the words to his memory but he knew as soon as he had spoken by the look in her eyes that he had entirely misjudged her. "How can you say such unkind things?" she cried. "I believe you are trying to make me hate you." "Darling," he said contritely, slipping his arm about her, and holding her closely to him, "forgive me; I didn't mean it, indeed I didn't." "You did," sobbed Jill. "You thought that I had been running after you as a good speculation--" "Don't, dear," he entreated, "you make me feel so ashamed of myself." "And so you ought to," she answered, drying her eyes on the corner of her painting apron, and looking up at him with a very woebegone face. "I shall never forget that, I'm afraid; I have a horrid memory for cruel things, and I have loved you so truly all the time. I would go through a dozen bankruptcy courts with you, and--and--and end up in the work-house even sooner than lose you now." She dropped her head again with a fresh burst of tears, and St. John felt as intensely miserable as it is possible for a man to feel, intensely ashamed of himself also for giving voice to such an unjust suspicion. He racked his brains in search of something soothing, but the only thing he could find to say was,-- "Don't keep hitting a fellow when he's down, Jill." It wasn't a very brilliant, nor a very original remark, but it was the very luckiest thing he could have hit upon. Its effect on Jill was marvellous; she recollected what she might have remembered sooner, that he had been passing through very stormy times lately, and all on her account. A man does not generally relish breaking with his family and throwing up a luxurious home for the doubtful prospect of earning his own living when he has not been brought up to any profession, and hasn't a superabundance of capital to launch him into a going concern. St. John had certainly not relished it, but he had made no complaint and had met his ill fortune with a cheerfulness and pluck which did him infinite credit. Jill mopped her eyes again vigorously and put both arms around his neck. "I have been horrid," she said; "I have done nothing but worried you ever since you came, and you were worried enough before. Jack dear, I'm afraid we shall quarrel dreadfully after we are married. I really am bad-tempered, and you are not--not altogether amiable, are you?" St. John laughed. "I don't care," he said, "so long as we make it up again. Rows are like hills in cycling, beastly at first, but when you're used to 'em a flat road seems dreadfully monotonous." Jill saw very little of her fiance during the next week. He was busy looking for something to do! for she had declared that until he found permanent occupation their marriage must be postponed; she was not going to take such a serious plunge on the strength of the five hundred pounds. St. John acknowledged the wisdom of her decision but chafed at the delay. Having been ejected from the paternal roof he was anxious to have a home of his own, and more than anxious to see Jill at the head of his frugal board. He was not quite sure how Jill existed; it worried him rather to think of her poverty; but she would take no assistance from him. Once he deprecatingly offered her a ten pound note which she however firmly refused. She would not allow him to support her until he had the right to do so. "Don't you think that that's rather straining at a gnat?" he said. "Perhaps," she answered smiling. "But you would not like to think that your coming had lessened my pride and independence, and made me lazy and unselfreliant, would you? If I actually need assistance I will come to you, dear old boy." And so he had gone forth in search of a livelihood more than ever anxious for the ceremony to come off, and not a little eager to commence the new life of independence and hard work. St. John had a friend who knew everything. There is a difference between a man who knows everything and the man who thinks he does; St. John's friend was the right sort, and he put him in the way of the very thing he was looking for. A photographer of the firm of Thompkins and Co, having recently dissolved partnership through the Co, setting up for himself was advertising through the regular channels for a new partner. St. John's friend having some slight acquaintance with Thompkins introduced the two, and eventually St. John invested his capital and returned to the studio in triumph to inform Jill with much pride and satisfaction that he represented the Co in "Thompkins and Co.--photographers." CHAPTER ELEVEN. "And now, Mrs St. John, I think we'll go and have lunch," Jill's new husband remarked as they stood together outside the Registrar's office, the sun shining brightly on the two faces, his quietly amused, hers a little grave and wondering at the importance of the now irrevocable step which they had taken. At the sound of her new name Jill smiled. "It will be our wedding breakfast," she said. "So it will. We'll have fizz and go a buster--a man doesn't get married every day. I didn't sleep a wink last night, Jill for thinking of it." Jill hadn't slept either. In morbid retrospection, half sweet, half painful, she had spent the night in the empty studio--empty because St. John had had every stick of hers removed to her new home, even to the remains of the Clytie that he had broken, and which had been carefully preserved among Jill's other treasures as too sacred to be thrown away. She looked up at him, the memory of all his thoughtfulness adding an increased tenderness to the loving smile that chased the momentary sadness from her face. "You're a goose, my big boy," she said slipping her hand through his arm as she spoke with a very unwonted display of affection. "And how nice to feel that you are my boy--my very own. No one can part us now, Jack; not all the spiteful machinations of the tyrannical, disagreeable, up-to-date parent can come between you and me, dear, nor alter the fact that we are man and wife." "That's true," replied St. John with mock resignation. "There's no getting out of it edgeways; for there is a helpless finality about matrimony that carries its own conviction. Jill, my dear, you look uncommonly nice in that gown." Jill laughed contentedly. He had told her that three times already but she had not the least objection to hearing him say it again. She patted the grey folds of her dress with her grey-gloved hand, and tried to get a glimpse of herself in the shop windows as they passed. It was a very simple costume, and a very serviceable one in light tweed. She had managed to dispose of some work lately and had felt justified in being a little extravagant; though the extravagance had not gone further than buying the necessary materials; her own busy fingers had fashioned the costume with the aid of experience and a paper pattern, and the result was highly satisfactory and very creditable from the top of the smart little toque to the soles of her neat new walking-shoes. "Where shall we go?" enquired Jill serenely. "To Frascatti's," he answered, and to Frascatti's they went accordingly. St. John ordered a very recherche little lunch although he was fully aware that even in small matters it was necessary to practise the strictest economy, but, as he argued in answer to Jill's expostulations, it was out of all reason to expect a man to be economical on his wedding day. "I'm afraid it's out of all reason to expect you to be economical at all, my dear saint," remarked his wife sweetly, slowly withdrawing her gloves, and regarding her very new wedding ring with marked complacency. "I shall have to keep the purse, that's evident, and dole you out an allowance." "It'll put me in mind of my schoolboy days," laughed St. John, "when I received sixpence a week, and very often had that confiscated in payment of fines." "I can quite imagine it," retorted Jill with a grave little shake of the head. "It is strange considering what horrid little wretches boys generally are how really nice some of them grow up." St. John laughed again; the compliment was intended for him, and he appropriated it. He paused in the act of taking his soup to look across at his small wife. Never had he felt more supremely happy and contented than he did at that moment. He had a careless habit of living solely in the present, turning his back on the past, and deliberately refusing to look into the future--that future which with its work, its independence, and its possible poverty meant so much to them both, and would prove not only a test to the strength of his manhood but to the sincerity of their mutual love. To-day he was determined to put such thoughts on one side; it was his wedding morning and he meant to enjoy himself. He turned his attention from his wife's face to the study of the wine card, and ran his eye quickly down the list. "Do you like your wine dry?" he asked. "Um?" queried Jill. "Do you like dry wines?" "How funny!" she said. "I didn't know there was such a thing. I don't think I should; I'm so thirsty." St. John looked the tiniest shade put out, the waiter stared, and a good-looking man with a lightish moustache who happened to be passing their table at the moment glanced down at the small grey figure in careless amusement. Jill flushed, suddenly conscious of having said the wrong thing, and the man behind her, looking from her to her companion and recognising the latter, wondered what country cousin St. John had got hold of now. "I don't know much about it," she admitted in a slightly vexed tone, "but I liked what we had here before." St. John gave his order; then he looked into the troubled grey eyes opposite and smiled reassuringly. As he did so he caught sight of the man near Jill's chair; he was about to seat himself at the next table, but before he could do so St. John rose and intercepted him. "Markham!" he exclaimed. "This is luck. I thought you were abroad." "Only returned last night," the other answered shaking hands. "Glad to see you again, St. John. All well at home?" "I don't know," St. John replied; "haven't been there lately. Come over to our table, old boy; we wanted someone to drink our health." Markham elevated his eyebrows in a show of surprise. St. John had hold of him by the arm, and he allowed himself to be drawn forward until he stood facing the little girl in grey, not quite clear even then as to how matters stood. "Jill," exclaimed her husband, "allow me to introduce you to Mr Markham, a very old pal of mine." Jill held out her hand with a smile. She was a little disappointed that St. John had so readily ended their tete-a-tete luncheon, but she carefully refrained from letting him see it, and graciously seconded the invitation which the stranger appeared by no means reluctant to accept. He took the seat on her right hand and looked her over with a glance that was at once curious and puzzled. She was a lady that was evident, though different in most respects to those he was accustomed to meet; what he could not rightly fix was the relationship between her and St. John. When he left England he had understood that the latter was to marry his cousin--it had been for that reason that he had gone abroad-- and yet a moment ago St. John had distinctly asked him to `drink our health.' Whose health? And why? "This is a very festive occasion you are participating in, Markham," St. John observed gaily. "It is my wedding day. As the only guest present we look to you for a speech." Mr Markham stared incredulously first at St. John, and then at his wife. Suddenly he caught sight of Jill's new ring--the plain gold circlet seemed to carry conviction with it. He bowed to Jill and impulsively held out his hand to St. John. "My congratulations, old fellow," he cried warmly, "my very sincere and hearty congratulations. By jove! I am surprised. But--" He paused. He had been going to ask `what about Miss Bolton?' but bethought him in time that it might not be a welcome topic to the bride. "You don't congratulate _me_" said Jill smiling, "and yet you might do that more readily because you know Jack and you don't know me. I feel quite apprehensive; I've taken him for better and _worse_, you know." Mr Markham laughed. "I think your having done so does infinite credit to your judgment, Mrs St. John," he said. "I wish you both every happiness and success." "Thank you," Jill answered: "I feel reassured and good wishes are always most acceptable." "To wish success in our case is very appropriate too," struck in St. John. "I'm going to give you another surprise now, old fellow; I've set up in business on my own." "Eh?" enquired Mr Markham, putting down his wineglass and staring at his friend. St. John whipped a card out of his pocket and laid it on the table cloth. "When you want your photograph taken," he observed in some amusement, "go to that address, my boy, and you'll get taken as you never were before. I'm the Co, and I go into harness a week from to-day." To say that Mr Markham was astonished would be to express his sensations very inadequately he was astounded--almost incredulous. He looked at St. John's smiling face, and then at Jill's grave, matter-of-fact one, and ejaculated "By George!" in a tone that made St. John laugh more than ever. "It's a fact," observed the latter. "Put the card in your pocket and advertise the firm a bit at the club and elsewhere. Besides you'll know my address then, though, of course, it is quite permissible for you to forget that if you want to." Mr Markham took up the card in silence, read it, placed it carefully in his pocket-book, and sitting back in his chair fell to laughing immoderately as though it were a huge joke. He had grasped the situation immediately when he had quite taken in the news. He had wondered that Jack and his wife should be having their wedding breakfast at Frascatti's, and alone; but now he understood. He knew that St. John, Senior, was bent on marrying his son to Miss Bolton, and he also knew that St. John possessed no private means. He had evidently run contrary to the paternal wishes and this was the outcome. What a fool he was to be sure! To chuck up quarter of a million and pretty Evie Bolton for-- "You must really excuse me, Mrs St. John," he exclaimed meeting Jill's surprised, and slightly disapproving glance with easy frankness, "but it's just immense to hear Jack talk about work; I don't suppose he has done a hand's turn in his life." Jill lifted her eyes to her husband's with unconcealed pride in her look. "It doesn't follow that he won't be able to do it," she answered confidently. "You none of you seem to have understood him. He is full of pluck and perseverance, only he has always been discouraged." "We understood the old Jack well enough," Markham responded. "But there comes a crisis in some men's lives when their whole nature undergoes a complete change. It doesn't always last; they often go back to the original state which means disappointment, and sometimes disillusionment too. I don't mean that St. John is likely to go back, I was merely--" "Preparing me," suggested Jill. "No; wandering off into personal experience--a mistake at any time, unpardonable under existing circumstances. I won't forget to advertise the show, old man," he continued turning to St. John, "and, if I may, will book to-day fortnight for a sitting. I rather enjoy having my portrait taken, and don't mind promising to become a regular customer. I think I can bring some others as well." "Thanks awfully," answered St. John. "It will be good for me if I can introduce some fresh customers. I have posted the old man a card. Wouldn't it be a huge joke if I had the honour of photographing my own father?" Jill made a little grimace, and then the three of them laughed uproariously till Markham, raising his glass on high, drank to the health and prosperity of bride and bridegroom, and confusion to their enemies. "It is rather unfortunate having enemies at the outset of one's married life, don't you think?" observed Jill a little wistfully. "Well, I don't know; I always fancy an enemy or two enhance, by comparison, the value of one's friends." "Yes, perhaps--if one has friends." "You cannot persuade me that _you_ will not find plenty as you go through life," Markham answered gallantly. "They are a long time coming," she rejoined with a smile, "but that is generally the case where money is scarce, isn't it? And Jack and I are horribly poor. We are going to live over the shop, you know, in three rooms and a kitchen. We are lucky to get so many; old Thompkins--" "My dear Jill," interposed her husband, "you must really learn to speak more respectfully of the head of the firm." "Old Thompkins," went on Jill imperturbably, "has only two. But then, of course, he's a bachelor. I think I shall flirt with him! it might be a stroke of business, eh?" Markham and St. John both laughed. "You're all right," ejaculated the former. "You can safely leave yourself in your wife's hands; it is not difficult to foresee that old Thompkins will be speedily bowled out." "He might be a misogynist," suggested Jill. "They are the easiest to get over because they imagine themselves invulnerable," he replied. "I knew one once, but he married long ago. I forgot to ask him to explain the inconsistency, but it seems to have answered very well." "I'm glad of that," said Jill gravely. Then catching his eye she smiled. "It would have been such a strong point against us if he had found it a mistake after all," she explained. He smiled too. There was something about St. John's small wife that unconsciously attracted him; he could not help thinking what a capital friend she would make if a fellow were in trouble and in need of advice, though why he should arrive at such a conclusion he could not guess; so far they had exchanged nothing but very slight commonplaces. "I feel I must contradict you there," he said. "Had he found it a mistake it would most probably have been his fault; people with decided principles are generally difficult." "Don't," cried Jill, "you make me nervous. Jack may have decided principles for aught I know--he's got a decided temper, and I'm horribly afraid Ilfracombe will make it worse." "So you propose spending the week at Ilfracombe?" "Yes. I stayed there with my father once while he painted the Coast, so Jack is taking me there for auld lang syne." "It's bracing," struck in St. John, with a commendable determination to have nothing sad, not even reminiscences, on his wedding day. "Any place would do me, but the little woman really wants setting up." "You will be putting up at the `Ilfracombe,' I suppose?" observed Mr Markham, conversationally. "My dear fellow," returned St. John, "you don't seem to quite realise our position. We belong to the working-class, and will have to hunt out cheap rooms when we get there." "Ah! Well, diggings are more convenient in many ways, and more private, too." And Mr Markham, raising his wineglass to his lips, drained it quickly, as though he were swallowing something beside Heidsieck, as no doubt he was. CHAPTER TWELVE. Cheap apartments are not easily obtainable at watering places in the summer, that is apartments which combine cheapness with a certain amount of comfort. It was Jill who pointed out the likeliest locality to search in, and who finally discovered what they wanted after many fruitless enquiries. They did not suit St. John's taste, however much they might his pocket. He would have pronounced them impossible at once had not Jill firmly maintained that they would do. She had had to study economy so much all her life that she was easily pleased, and really considered the rooms quite good enough for what they required. "They are," she observed cheerfully as soon as they were alone together, "clean and comfortable. To me, after my old attic, they are more--they are luxurious. And the air is perfectly delightful." St. John glanced round the tiny sitting-room with its cheap saddle-bag suite, and uncompromisingly hard sofa, and endeavoured to see things from her point of view, but with no very marked success. He was losing sight of the romance of poverty, in the realisation of its sordidness. He hated cheap lodgings and all their attendant discomforts, and his dissatisfaction was written plainly on his face. "It might have been worse," he answered disparagingly. Jill bit her lip and turned to look out of the window. He followed her example, and his discontent increased. "Not much of an outlook on somebody's bean patch," he grumbled. "Deuce of a nuisance we didn't go nearer the sea." "Sea view apartments are beyond our figure," she returned. "Besides you ought not to want any outlook, nor anything else except me." St. John's ill-humour vanished, and he smiled as he put his arm round her shoulders and drew her nearer to his side. "I don't," he asseverated. "Then what are you grumbling at?" "I wasn't; I was only wishing that things were a little nicer for you." "That's very kind of you, dear, but you might wait until I complain before you begin throwing a damper on things. I think that everything is lovely, only--who is to manage the landlady, Jack? I'm sure I daren't; she looks as if she would stick on the extras. We must do our own marketing, and she won't like that, I suppose." St. John looked uneasy. "You always said," he remarked in a reminiscent manner, "that you would never allow your husband to interfere in domestic concerns; it wasn't a man's work." "Well, you are a coward," cried Jill; "big men generally are. And she's only a little woman, not any bigger than I." "Little women are so vindictive," he retorted. "I shouldn't have minded how big she had been, but I did mind the way in which she looked us over and said, `You'll have breakfast at eight-thirty, I suppose? I can let you have some butter that I've got in house.' Eight-thirty is such a commonplace plebeian hour, and sums up one's social status so exactly, and why couldn't she say in `the' house?" "Oh! don't be so ridiculous," replied Jill, "she is a Devonshire woman, of course, which makes a difference. But I don't want her butter; I'm sure it isn't good and that's why she is anxious to get rid of it." "Then why didn't you tell her so instead of saying thank you?" "I hadn't the moral courage to," Jill admitted frankly. "I don't know why you didn't help me out. If you were half a man you wouldn't allow me to be worried on my honeymoon." "It's my honeymoon too," protested St. John. "I don't see why I should be worried either. Jill, dear, run and put your hat on we can't stay all the evening in this pokey room. Let's go out catering for to-morrow and have a peep at the sea." So with a laugh Jill went to do his bidding and together they sallied forth like a pair of children, or two sea-side trippers who having come for a week's holiday, intend making the most of their time. They turned their footsteps towards the sea, and sauntered along the steep winding path up the cliff for the sake of the view, and the breezes, and to catch sight of the little paddle steamers passing in the distance. They talked a great deal of nonsense, and St. John painted a golden future as background to the rosy present till Jill almost believed that the insignificant firm of Thompkins and Co. was the gilded gate to fortune, and Jack's the lucky hand to hold the key. Markham's name cropped up in the course of conversation. St. John introduced it, as he had the owner, unexpectedly, and apropos of nothing that had gone before. "How did you like Markham?" he enquired. "Not a bad sort, is he?" Jill looked dubious, and puckered her brows thoughtfully. "I don't know," she answered. "I am not sure whether if I knew him better I should like him a little, or dislike him a great deal. Why did you ask him to come and spoil our lunch?" "I didn't, I asked him to come and drink our health." "But why?" she protested. "We didn't want any horrid third person. What would you have thought if I had asked a girl?" "I should have thought it inconsiderate of you from a monetary point of view, otherwise a charming arrangement." "You are a brute," cried Mrs St. John pettishly. "I'm not enjoying my honeymoon a bit." "People never do," he rejoined; "It isn't fashionable, besides its bad taste. I am afraid that I'm going to prove an exception to the rule though; for I don't know when I have enjoyed anything so much as to-day. Beastly form on my part to admit it, I know. But to return to Markham, I asked him to join us for several reasons, not the least important being a natural desire to introduce my wife--" "Yes, dear, I'll excuse the preliminaries," interposed Jill. "I want to know the real reason." "You aggravating monkey, I've a good mind not to satisfy you. And I daresay you will be aggrieved when you hear it because it concerns Evie." "Oh! Was he in love with _her_?" St. John laughed at the disparaging tone and teasingly pinched her ear. "Incredible as it may sound he was," he replied. "I believe she refused him a little while ago but he has been out of England since then and I never heard the rights of the case. He's an old college chum of mine, and an awfully good sort; I don't know why Evie doesn't have him." "Oh, yes, you do," rejoined Jill sagely. "And so you thought you would let Mr Markham see that you were married and out of the runnings, you conceited old humbug; and that's why he laughed so much, and was so very polite to me. He'll send us a wedding present, Jack, I feel convinced of that." "You've always got your eye open for the main chance," observed St. John, "and ought to make a good business woman. You'll be pondering the intrinsic value of that present within half-an-hour. Personally, I shall be thoroughly satisfied if I hear that he wins Evie." Jill looked up at him swiftly, and slipped her hand into his with a smile. "I don't mind who wins Evie now," she said, "but I was horribly anxious once. I don't believe that I really felt quite safe until this little gold band was placed on my finger, and then I knew that not even Miss Bolton could take you away from me." "Possession is only nine-tenths of the law," interposed St. John; but he squeezed the small hand lovingly, lying so confidingly in his, so that, feeling the pressure, and meeting his earnest gaze, Jill was too thoroughly happy even to retort. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Mr St. John, Senior's, wrath knew no bounds when he received his son's note and learnt that he had taken the irrevocable step and actually married the art mistress. He passed the letter on to his niece with Thompkins and Co.'s card, and turned away from the lunch-table too disgusted to eat his food. Evie Bolton took things more quietly. She had realised her defeat from the first, and accepted it as she did the announcement of her cousin's marriage with a composure that did more credit to her head than to her heart. She read the letter through without comment, and studied the card. Then she looked up with a little laugh. "How funny," she said. "I will go and have my photograph taken there." Mr St. John said nothing. He just wheeled about shortly and left the room, but when he got outside his language was more forcible than polite, and he kicked Miss Bolton's pet pug right across the hall. For the first time he saw the heiress with his son's eyes. "Jack is a fool," mused Miss Bolton complacently, tapping the pasteboard in a meditative fashion. "He will hate it all three months hence, and then they will quarrel horribly. A photographer indeed! What possessed him, I wonder?" When Miss Bolton flippantly observed that she intended having her photograph taken at Thompkins and Co.'s, she did not mean it seriously; for she had not considered the matter, and only spoke upon impulse. Some months later, however, the idea returning to her mind, she determined, after thinking it over for a little while, to act upon it, and judge for herself how Jack adapted himself to his changed circumstances. It was characteristic of her that she should don her richest attire for the occasion, and drive there in style instead of going in the quietest and most unobtrusive manner; and it was also characteristic that on arriving and entering the shop she should haughtily demand to see Mr St. John, entirely ignoring Jill, who, on her entry, had risen from her seat at the desk, and now in her usual philosophic manner walked quietly out of the shop to call her husband St. John was in the studio endeavouring to snap an infant in its vest, and only succeeding in making it howl. He was looking worried and annoyed, and welcomed Jill's advent with relief. "You are better at this kind of thing than I am," he said in an aside to her; "just see if you can pacify the little beast." "All right," answered Jill shortly. "You can go and do the agreeable to Evie Bolton; she's in the shop waiting to see you." St. John whistled, and the infant stopped yelling to listen; it was noted for its love of music. "How jolly nice of her," he cried. "Perhaps she'll stay and have tea with us." "Perhaps she won't," Jill answered rather bitterly; but St. John was not paying any attention; he was busy adjusting the collar of his coat, and failed to detect the chagrin in his wife's tone and manner. Jill turned her back on him quickly to hide her annoyance, and walked over to make friends with the baby, while St. John, unconscious that anything was amiss, strode through the studio into the shop where Evie Bolton awaited him. She turned at his entry and advanced to greet him, recognising with a little pang of envy as she did so, what a fine, manly, handsome fellow this cousin of hers was. St. John, too, realised for the first time how very pretty and stylish Evie was. When he had lived with stylish women he had not noticed these things, now that his lot was cast among the working-classes, he perceived and appreciated the difference. His glance rested on Miss Bolton's well groomed prettiness with a kind of tired relief, and the sordidness of his own surroundings became more apparent. "It is good of you to look us up," he cried. "I half feared that I was going to get the cold shoulder altogether." He had taken the girl's outstretched hand in both of his, and now looked into her eyes with a smile of pleased gratitude. Evie smiled back. "You should never have thought that of me," she said. "You might have known I would come eventually. If uncle hadn't been so furious about it I should have come sooner, but I had to use my discretion and wait. The first time I suggested a visit he flung out of the room in a temper. I fear you have done for yourself, dear, so far as your father is concerned." St. John looked moody, and seeing his change of countenance, she hastened to turn the subject. "Jack," she said, "I am awfully low-spirited--I suppose I have missed you rather. I want you to take me out to tea somewhere and cheer me up if you can." St. John swallowed the bait. The idea of a diversion was pleasing to him, and the knowledge that he had been missed gratified his vanity. "Dear little girl, of course I will," he answered. "I'll just go and put it all right with Thompkins, and then I'll be at your service. Jill's in the studio. You saw her though, didn't you?" Miss Bolton flushed. "Ye-es," she answered hesitatingly, "for a minute. Make haste, Jack dear; I am so impatient to be off. While you are gone I will look at these abominable photographs. I meant to let you take mine to-day, but I object to being caricatured." "You must let Jill paint you," he said, "She's first class at portrait painting and would like to get some customers." "One day," the girl answered vaguely, "perhaps I will." St. John hurried out, and Miss Bolton turned with languid interest to inspect the portraits round the walls. When her cousin returned he discovered her intently scrutinising a cabinet photograph of Mr Markham. "What a libel," she cried holding it up. "This is your handiwork, I should imagine. When did you take it?" "Oh! I don't know," he answered carelessly, "Jill took it one day. She has taken him lots of times; he often calls in." Evie's eyebrows went up with a show of surprise. "Is he a friend of--Mrs St. John?" she asked. "I suppose so; Jill likes him. He and I were always rather chummy, and he drops in in to talk about--oh! well, about old times and--friends, you know." "He never told me," she rejoined slowly. "I saw him yesterday and he mentioned very casually that he met you recently; he did not say that he was intimate here." "Perhaps he didn't think that it would interest you," he suggested. "Or he might have thought the subject tabooed." "With me?" she cried. "Impossible! I am always talking about you." "Very flattering of you, my dear Evie," he laughingly rejoined, "but you'll never persuade me that you are so one idead." Miss Bolton put the photograph back in its place, and turned towards the entrance with an evident desire to get away. "I am," she said. "I've only got one idea at present and that's tea. Don't let us waste more time, Jack, but come along at once." "It's an awful pity Jill can't come with us," he remarked as he followed her out, "but we couldn't both leave together." "Yes," acquiesced Evie, none too heartily, "it is a pity. Never mind she sees plenty of you now and I don't. She can't begrudge me a few hours now and then. I am seriously thinking of getting married myself, Jack; it is so deadly dull since you went." Thinking of Markham, St. John looked pleased. "Why don't you?" he asked. "I am going to," she answered settling herself in a corner of the carriage with an airy laugh. "I am looking about for a title." "Oh!" observed St. John disapprovingly, "I shouldn't bother about that. Why not look about for someone you can give your heart to?" "Because I haven't got one to bestow," she retorted. "If I ever possessed such an uncomfortable organ it must have been stolen from me long ago, but I don't feel the want of it so don't miss it at all. I suppose you flatter yourself that Jill has given her heart to you?" "Yes," he answered smiling, and patting his left side, "I have it here safe enough in place of the one I gave to her." "Ah!" returned Miss Bolton coolly, "a pretty fancy no doubt, but a fancy all the same, my dear Jack, and absolutely ridiculous." "Don't be cynical," he said; "it's a sign of the times, and unbecoming." "And cynical women are generally old maids," laughed Evie. "That won't do for I must have my title. I won't die an old maid if I have to advertise in a matrimonial journal." CHAPTER FOURTEEN. When St. John returned after seeing his cousin safely home it was late in the afternoon, and though the place still remained open business was apparently over for the day. Thompkins and Co. were not over-burdened with customers at any time, and their number since the advent of the new Co. had been steadily on the decrease. Business was slack, the returns were very small, and St. John felt by no means sanguine as to the success of his venture. He had been married a little over four months, and it was only by exercising the greatest care that they managed to pay their way even. Jill was a thrifty housewife--she always had been,--but St. John forgot his straightened circumstances at times, and launched out a little recklessly. He had not been altogether careful that afternoon, and the consciousness of the fact gave him an unpleasant twinge of remorse as he mounted the steep stairs to their little sitting-room. Jill was alone standing looking out of the window with her back towards the door, nor did she turn round at his entry. She was displeased. "You have been a long time," she said. "I'm afraid I have," he admitted. "You weren't lonely I hope?" "No; I was too busy for that. And afterwards Mr Markham came in. He has just left." "Why, he was here yesterday. He surely didn't want his photo taken again?" "No, I think he wanted a chat, and when he found I was alone he stayed on for company. Have you had a pleasant time? Where did you go?" "We went and had tea," he answered. He didn't say where; he was ashamed to; it was one of the places where you pay for locality and Miss Bolton had not once offered to share expenses. "And then we spent a little time at the Academy--Evie's fond of pictures you know." "Oh, yes, I know," agreed Jill drily. "I have a vivid recollection of her passion for art; it was so upsetting. I suppose she shut her eyes occasionally? Some people take art like they do physic--shut their eyes and hold their noses except when nobody's looking." "Jill dear, don't be nasty," he said. Jill laughed. "I can't help it," she answered. "I'm afraid my nature must be warped I have such a knack of being disagreeable. I could have pinched that horrid little baby this afternoon, it irritated me so; and yet I am fond of children. And I could have been exceedingly rude to Miss Bolton if she hadn't been rude to me first;--of course I wouldn't follow her example in anything." "Rude to you?--Evie? How?" "Oh! in an entirely lady-like manner. She merely gave me to understand that she didn't intend to recognise me, and treated me as she would any other shop assistant. Miss Bolton means taking you up and cutting your wife. I suppose she is perfectly justified." "Don't be ridiculous, Jill," St. John cried sharply. "Evie means nothing of the sort. She spoke of you most kindly, and said it was a pity you couldn't go with us." "Ah!" rejoined Jill queerly. "My mistake again. Evie has a mystifying way of showing her kindness, but doubtless she means well. You, I suppose, understand her better than I do, but I shouldn't advise you to try arranging an excursion for three." "Very well," he returned, "I won't go with her again. I wouldn't have to-day if I had thought it would annoy you. We were like brother and sister always and it was pleasant for me to see her again." Jill heaved a deep sigh, and leaned her forehead against the window pane. She knew that he had no intention of wounding her feelings yet these unconscious allusions to the sacrifice that he had made in marrying her hurt her more than they need have done. And St. John never guessed. Not for a moment had he regretted the step he had taken, and it did not occur to him that Jill should imagine he might. "I am not annoyed," she said after a brief pause. "I am irritable this evening, that's all. Mr Markham said that I wasn't looking well; perhaps I am a little out of sorts. Are the pictures good this year, Jack?" "Good enough. But none of them to come up to yours in my eyes as I told Evie. It's scandalous to think that real talent should get overlooked, yet it's often enough the case." "Mr Markham," jerked out Jill suddenly, "wishes me to paint his portrait." St. John laughed. "Markham is getting vain," he said. "No doubt he purposes presenting it to Evie. When is the first sitting to be?" "I don't know, nothing is definitely settled, I thought I would speak to you about it first." St. John looked at her in astonishment. "Why?" he asked. Jill hesitated. She had no real reason to offer, but when Mr Markham made the proposal she felt that she would like to consult Jack before deciding. She had consulted him, and now regretted having done so. "I wasn't sure whether the arrangement would be agreeable to Mr Thompkins," she answered. "He expects me to be available for the studio at all times and seasons you know, and, of course, undertaking this would mean giving a good deal of my time--" "To hear you one would think," interposed her husband, "that you contemplated painting a multitude. You know as well as I do that Thompkins will be quite agreeable. I should have thought you would have settled the matter out of hand." "I am not at all sure that I will undertake it," retorted Jill pettishly. "I hate painting men; they make such horribly uninteresting subjects; and I'm sick to death of the sound of Evie Bolton's name. Fancy listening for a solid hour to the extolling of her virtues! I don't think I could stand it." "Oh! that's it, is it?" laughed St. John. "Well, of course, you must please yourself, old girl, but I shouldn't let Evie do me out of a fiver if I were you. Besides I have thought lately that Markham avoids the subject I suppose he twigs that you're not so fond of it as he is." Jill said nothing. She had noticed the same thing; and could not help wondering why their visitor came so frequently when he no longer cared to discuss the once all sufficing topic. Jack had formerly declared that he only came to talk Evie, but that could hardly be said of him now. Sometimes Mrs Jack fancied that his suit did not progress altogether as he could have wished, and in her womanly, whole-hearted way felt sorry for him. She had been so happy in her own love that she would have pitied anyone less fortunate than herself. Besides she liked Markham and admired his perseverance, though she wondered occasionally whether he would have been quite so devoted had Miss Bolton been penniless like herself. "I saw the Governor on my way home," observed St. John at length, breaking the silence with a short laugh. Mrs St. John's heart gave a sudden jump. "He didn't--cut you?" she queried. "Oh, dear no! bowed to me almost as though he considered me on an equality. Feels jolly rum being treated by one's father like that." "I call it abominable of him," Jill cried hotly. "He seems absolutely heartless." St. John looked amused. "Well, I don't quite see what else he could have done under the circumstances," said he. "I don't blame him for giving me the kick out and all that as I disappointed him, but I do for not bringing me up to some profession; it's beastly rough luck for me." Jill laid one small hand upon his shoulder, ever so light a touch but it carried great comfort with it. "You don't make a good poor man, dear," she said gently. "You should have known my father; he was always cheerful even in his poorest moments; yet no one would have called him careless nor improvident. He was simply brave and self-reliant." "Little mentor," answered her husband gravely, drawing her face down to his. "I accept the rebuke; there shall be no more complaints. I will be `up and doing--learn to labour and to wait.'" CHAPTER FIFTEEN. Notwithstanding her former reluctance Jill eventually undertook the commission for Mr Markham's portrait, though some time elapsed before she started on the work, Markham, himself, being out of town staying as a guest at a house where Evie Bolton was also visiting, a circumstance that filled St. John with pleasurable anticipation, though Jill, less sanguine as to the result, was more inclined to foresee troubles ahead, and looked forward with no great joy to their friend's return. Yet his manner, when he did put in an appearance, conveyed absolutely no impression; as St. John afterwards informed his wife he believed that Markham had funked it. "When shall we have the first sitting, Mrs St. John?" he exclaimed after the usual greetings were over. "I am quite anxious to begin." "Why not fix Monday?" suggested St. John amicably. "Monday!" cried Jill. "It's washing day. How can you be so inconsiderate?" "Oh, ah! washing day! I forgot. The atmosphere is composed of soap-suds, and we have cold meat. Not Monday, my dear boy; it is the most ungodly day of the week." "Tuesday would do," said Jill, "if that suits, and I think three o'clock would be the most convenient hour for me. The light, of course, is best in the mornings, but I am always busy then." "Any time will suit me," Markham answered promptly, "and any day." "Ah," said Jill with a little smile, "Jack was like that once. Why don't you get something to do?" "Because it isn't necessary." "But independence is such a grand thing," she persisted. "Exactly. I inherited it, and I like it best that way." Jill laughed. "We can't all be workers, I suppose," she said, "yet I fancy if I had been given my choice I should have chosen that kind of independence. Work is necessary to me." "From a selfish point of view I am glad that it is; otherwise you wouldn't paint portraits." "What makes you fancy that?" she asked. "No one who paints as you do would undertake portraits if they could avoid it. I know a man who has always one canvas at least in the academy, but he can't afford to paint pictures now; they don't sell; so he does portraits." Jill sighed. "I am sorry for that man," she said, "his life must be a disappointment. The people who want to be painted are generally so impossible." "My dear girl," remonstrated St. John, "considering the circumstances that is one of the things better left unsaid." "I am speaking from the artistic sense," she replied; "besides I said `generally.'" "I quite understand," interposed Markham laughing, "and entirely agree with you. But that won't interfere with the sitting on Tuesday, eh?" "I hope not," she answered gravely; "I should be doubly sorry now if you didn't come." "There is no fear of that," he said. "I enjoy seeing myself reproduced. It is so often an improvement, you know, yet one invariably flatters oneself that it is as one habitually looks." "We haven't done much to foster your conceit so far," she observed. "Oh! I don't know," he answered. "I really thought that that last portrait was a bit like me. Somebody told me I did look like that sometimes when I had a liver attack." "Evie said it was a libel," St. John remarked tentatively. "Ah! Well, I should be sorry to contradict her," he replied, and Jill fancied, though she could not be quite sure, that he looked slightly displeased at the mention of Miss Bolton's name. Why should a name that had once been his sole subject of conversation excite his annoyance now? It was not consistent. Had it been a case of unrequited affection she could have understood his being hurt, but displeasure was something she could not account for; it irritated her, why she could not have explained. She was not accustomed to analyse her sensations even to herself; it would have been wiser if she had; for her instinct was wonderfully true, and her nature peculiarly observant. "You put me on my mettle," she said, smiling. "It shan't be a libel this time I promise you if infinite pains can prevent." "I am not afraid to trust myself in your hands," he said. Jill laughed. "That's very fulsome flattery," she answered. "I was responsible for the libel, remember. Mr Thompkins declares that I shall ruin the firm yet. It is so humiliating because I was so positive at first that I was going to become one of those celebrated lady photographers who have all the best people sitting to them, and can charge any price they like." "It's just as well as it is, perhaps," St. John rejoined with conviction. "Success would make you a horrid little prig, Jill; very few people can stand it." "If Mr Markham were not here," Jill returned, "I would tell you what I think of you." CHAPTER SIXTEEN. Jill had got her canvas and everything in readiness, and was waiting for her model. She had been waiting for about ten minutes, and was growing slightly impatient; she hated wasting her time. St. John was busy in the studio, unusually busy, so that he could not possibly get away even for a few minutes. He wanted her badly, she knew; he always wanted a mate, and she felt rather as if she were shirking. She looked at the canvas in a dissatisfied kind of way, and then out of the window at the people in the street. "I believe," she mused, thinking of the absent Markham, "that I could draw his face from memory." Fetching a piece of paper she seated herself at the table and made a rough sketch in pencil as she had once done of St. John, only in St. John's case she had not trusted to memory. Markham arrived while she was thus employed, and he stood by the table watching her, as she put in the finishing strokes. He smiled while he watched as though he were amused. Jill was grave and very much absorbed. "What a wonderful little head it is," he said. "Do you think so?" she asked, lifting the head he alluded to the better to regard the one on paper which he was not even looking at. "I don't call it wonderful, but I had an idea that I could catch the likeness; some faces are quite easily remembered." "Yes," he acquiesced, "yours is." "Mine? I don't agree with you; my features are too indescribable. There. It's finished. I have caught the expression, haven't! But I haven't done justice to the nose. Will you sit in this chair near the window, please? you are dreadfully late, so we mustn't waste further time." Jill worked rapidly, and there could not possibly be any question as to her ability. Markham watched her with interest, and every now and again he rose from his seat to have a look how the work progressed, notwithstanding her protest that it spoilt the pose. "I can't help that," he declared, "it fascinates me, I must look." "I had no idea before that you were so vain," she said. "I'm not," he answered. "It isn't the subject that interests me but the work. I could stand behind you and watch you all day." "Not having eyes at the back of my head I shouldn't make much progress with the portrait in that case," she retorted. "Do you mind going back to your seat, please, and allowing me to study your physiognomy again?" He obeyed reluctantly, and for a time the work continued in silence; Jill was too engrossed to talk, and Markham apparently had no desire to. He sat quite motionless watching her with a strained, intent, unfathomable expression in his glance that Jill in unconscious accuracy was transmitting to the painted eyes on the canvas, though the expression was by no means habitual to him, and gave the portrait an unlifelike appearance. She shook her head over it despondently, and stood back from the easel in order to take a better look. "I must leave the eyes alone to-day," she said, "I am making a muddle of them. They are your eyes, and yet they are not yours. I don't understand it." "Oh, bother the portrait," he exclaimed. "Put it up for to-day and let's talk." "It wouldn't get finished very quickly at that rate," she answered. "I don't want it finished quickly," he said. "No?" Jill's tone was expressive of surprise, and she looked at him very straightly as she spoke. "What are you going to do with it when it _is_ finished?" she asked. "Give it to you if you will accept it." "Don't be ridiculous! that's not what you had it painted for." "Now, how do you know that?" he enquired. He had risen, and coming forward took the palette and paint brushes out of her hand; then, receiving no remonstrance, he began to untie the strings of her painting apron. "Shut up shop for to-day," he pleaded. "I am going to stay to tea." It was rather an unfortunate moment for St. John to choose for putting in an appearance. Had he been married as many years as he had months it would not have mattered, but under existing circumstances it was regrettable that he should open the door when he did Jill, all unconscious of the suspicious proximity of Mr Markham's arm to her shoulder, smiled serenely as she encountered St. John's sharp, surprised glance, and noting that he looked displeased, presumed that he had spent a wearisome afternoon in the studio. "Leisurable at last?" she queried cheerfully. "I am so glad, dear. Come and make yourself agreeable while I see about the kettle; Mr Markham is going to stay to tea." "Sorry, but I can't," he answered shortly. "I have to be in the dark room in a few minutes, and have enough developing to keep me engaged for some time. How's the sitting getting on? You don't appear to be very busy. Is Markham tired already?" "We've been at it a solid three quarters of an hour," rejoined Markham aggrieved, "and as for not being busy, look at the canvas, man." St. John did look; he stood a little way off, and studied it earnestly for several minutes, but he did not speak. "Well, what do you think of it?" enquired the other. "I never presume to criticise Jill's work until it is finished," he answered. "At present I don't like it." "Neither do I," acquiesced Jill, "that's why I was not loth to give up for to-day. It's the eyes, I think; they have a sinister expression that makes him look like a stage villain. And yet I'm sure the expression was there at the time." "I hope not," St. John rejoined, looking fixedly at his friend in a rather disconcerting manner; "the eyes never lie, you know." Jill took the canvas down from the easel and leaned it with its face hidden against the wall. "Don't utter uncomfortable platitudes," she remarked. "If you can't be more cheerful I hope you'll retire to your dark room speedily; Mr Markham and I were enjoying ourselves till you came." To her surprise he took her literally, and, muttering something about `sorry to be a wet blanket,' wheeled about abruptly and left the room. Jill looked at Markham, and her eyes were both angry and concerned. "I can't think what's the matter with Jack," she said half apologetically; "he is not often such a bear. Do you know that I think you had almost better not stay this evening. It wouldn't be very hilarious if he were in that mood, would it?" "Of course I won't stay; I was only joking. Jack is a bit huffed about something no doubt, but you'll soon coax him into a better temper," he responded, "I'll come to-morrow for another sitting, shall I?" "No," Jill answered slowly; "the same day and hour next week, if you please." On the following Tuesday when Markham turned up for the arranged sitting he found Jill alone as on the former occasion, St. John having purposely gone out to spend the afternoon with Evie Bolton. The latter had written to him during the past week asking him if he could manage to meet her somewhere as she had something of importance to impart to him, and St. John, in his fit of suddenly awakened jealousy had settled on the day that Jill had fixed upon for the second sitting, taking a very malicious satisfaction in her evident annoyance when he stated his intention. She said little enough at the time, but her manner betrayed her vexation, and the strained relationship that had existed between them during the past few days grew more apparent. When Markham arrived, she was feeling more hurt than angry, and her mood was softened and subdued, and nearer akin to tears than it had been since her marriage. "Jack has gone out," she said in answer to his enquiry, not so much explanatorily, but because she felt she must say something, and that was the only thing she could think of at the moment. It was the one miserable refrain that kept repeating itself in her mind--"Jack has gone out--back to his own people." "He won't be home till late," she went on apathetically. "He said he was going to take a journey into the past, and forget the sordid present for a time. I don't think it altogether wise of him, do you? Where is the use in looking back when the sordid present has to be lived through, and the uncertain future to be faced?" "Mrs St. John," Markham answered gravely. "St. John--_our_ St. John was never wise; the only noteworthy action of his life was when he married you." "Ah!" said Jill with a very pathetic smile, "I often fancy that that was the most unwise thing he ever did." Markham looked at her speculatively, and failed to make an immediate reply. Was it St. John, himself, who had given her cause to think so, he wondered. Was she finding out so soon that their marriage had been a mistake? "You are depressed," he said, leaning towards her, his hands lightly grasping the arms of his chair. "It isn't good for you to feel like that. Jack is a brute to leave you to yourself. What can I do to cheer you up, I wonder? After all we are both in the same boat; for if you are lonely, so am I." "_You_!" echoed Jill in a tone which implied that her listener did not know what loneliness meant. "How can you talk of loneliness? At least you have Evie--" "No," he interrupted shortly; "Evie is nothing to me, and less than nothing. She is engaged to marry a marquis. I should have thought you would have heard of that by now." At his words, Jill's face visibly brightened. It flashed upon her with a certain amount of conviction that this was why her husband had gone to his cousin; possibly she had sent for him to consult him on the subject, and the trouble that had oppressed her lightened instantly with the thought. How could she have doubted him even for a moment? But he ought to have taken her into his confidence; it was a mistake to make a secret of so simple a thing. Markham misinterpreted the sudden brightening of her countenance, and when in her impulsive, sympathetic way she laid her small fingers compassionately over his, he grasped the little hand feverishly between both his eager palms, and held it against his breast while he drew her nearer to him and stared into her face with burning, compelling eyes. She thought his manner strange but pardonable under the circumstances. "I am so sorry," she said gently, "so very sorry." "Sorry for what?" he asked. "Oh, the--the--your disappointment," she rejoined with an awkward deepening of the colour in her cheeks. She felt that she was getting on to delicate ground, and did not know very well how to proceed; but he relieved the situation by a short, impatient laugh. "There wasn't any disappointment," he returned. "You must have known that I was off that long ago. Don't humbug, Jill; you must have perceived that ever since I knew you I have cared for no one else. I should not have mentioned it only I see now that you care a little also--that your marriage is not altogether a success. You are lonely as well as I, dear. Why not let us console one another?" CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. For a few seconds Jill sat mute, too thoroughly taken by surprise even to move. No lurking suspicion had ever entered her pure, wholesome, unspoilt mind that any man could so insult a decent woman. Even then it struck her that in some way she must have unconsciously given him an opening. How else would he have dared to make love to her, and to seem so assured that his love would be returned? She drew herself away from him, not violently, but with a cold displeasure that carried more weight than any fierce resentment could have done, and in a voice that trembled slightly with repressed anger exclaimed as she rose and faced him,-- "Mr Markham, you have insulted me past forgiveness. If any action or word of mine has led you to speak as you have done I deplore it with my whole heart--I couldn't feel more humiliated even if such were the case; I feel so abjectly debased as it is. How dare you imply that I do not get on with my husband? I love him with the whole force of my being. I doubt if you could understand or appreciate such love as ours." "I doubt it too," he sneered. "My love is not of the kind that can so readily efface itself. You are rather unreasonable, I think; a man can't help his feelings. Some women would take it as a compliment." "I am sorry for the sort of women you seem acquainted with," she answered rather sadly. "You have formed a very low opinion of the sex. It is not a compliment that you have paid me, and you know it. Don't say anything more please; I decline to discuss that, or any other subject with you. I must request you to leave my rooms, and never to enter them again. You have made further intercourse an impossibility, and our past friendship something to be remembered only with regret." "Don't say that," he began pleadingly; but Jill cut him short. "Please understand that I am quite in earnest," she said. "When Jack comes home I shall explain to him what has happened; it is well that he should understand the true character of his friend. I can never thank heaven sufficiently that my husband is both a man of honour, and a gentleman." "For that matter so should I have been if I had met you first," he answered gloomily. "You are rather hard on me, Jill. Perhaps I have been too precipitate; but I love you so madly, and to-day you seemed so sad, and sweet, and lonely, that I wanted to comfort you." "Enough!" exclaimed Jill excitedly. "If you don't go I shall ask Mr Thompkins to come and protect me from further indignity. How contemptible you are!--how mean! Why don't you insult me when my husband is at home? The sight of you is hateful to me. Why won't you go?" "I will," he answered quietly, "as you wish it. I do not want to frighten you; but remember--always remember that I love you with all my heart." Jill stood quite still and watched him as he gravely quitted her presence, and then listened dully to his footsteps clattering down the stairs. When they died away along the narrow passage and she heard the street door bang behind him she put her hand to her forehead in a dazed kind of way, and glanced vaguely round the little room seeing nothing but Markham's cynical face with the ugly expression in his eyes that was in the painted eyes of the canvas on the easel. Her glance travelled to the portrait, and rested there for a moment. The sight of it seemed to rouse her into action, and, with a catch in her voice that sounded like an angry sob, she took up a brush, and in a few vigorous strokes painted the whole thing out again as she would have liked to blot the incident from her memory. To Jill the fact that Markham loved her was anything but a congratulatory matter. The red blood surged to her temples in a flood of indignant colour at the mere thought of such an outrage to her wifehood. She was very angry; her calmness and self-possession had entirely deserted her leaving her excited and wholly unlike herself. She did not expect St. John home for some time; he had told her not to wait tea, he should be late; and so she seated herself in the big chair by the window to watch for his return, too upset to think of getting tea for herself, too miserable to feel the need of it. St. John was not very late however. He had promised Thompkins to be back by six, and at a few minutes to the hour he arrived. Jill saw him coming but she did not move. She remained where she was until she heard his footstep on the stairs, then she rose and walking quickly to the door threw it open. He was going into the bedroom to change his coat for the old one he did his work in. Jill called to him softly, but he went on as though he had not heard. She set her lips tightly and followed him, determined to clear up the misunderstanding that existed between them at any cost, and to tell him what had occurred during the afternoon. "Jack," she said, "I want to talk to you." "Sorry," he answered, "but I haven't time. I have a lot of work to do." His manner was anything but encouraging. At another time she would have turned away and allowed the breach to widen, but to-day she was sick of quarrelling about nothing, and longed for a complete reconciliation, and so she persevered. "You are not very kind to me, dear," she said. "I think the work can wait a few minutes longer, and what I have to say is most important. I have had a very unpleasant experience to-day, Jack, and feel quite worried and upset about it--if you only knew how worried I am sure you would give me your attention." St. John turned towards her, an expression of surprise on his face. He was in his shirt sleeves, and looked handsome, bad-tempered and ill at ease, his afternoon with Evie had apparently not conduced to exhilaration of spirits. "What on earth can be worrying you?" he exclaimed. "Didn't Markham turn up?" "Yes, he turned up," answered Jill sharply. "That is the trouble. I had to send him away again. You, who knew him so intimately, had no right to leave me alone with such a man--no right to introduce me to him at all. He insulted me--he actually tried to make _love_ to me." She broke off abruptly. Her voice shook a little, and she put up a hand to her burning face. St. John swore. He dropped the jacket he was holding on to the floor, and began struggling fiercely into his outdoor coat again. Jill watched him anxiously. Then she laid a restraining hand upon his arm. "What are you going to do?" she asked. "Find him and--give him a lesson." He looked so fierce and determined that Jill felt frightened. She was nervous and unstrung with the excitement of the afternoon, and she trembled slightly as she clung tenaciously to his arm. "Let him alone," she cried quickly. "I will not have my name dragged into any dispute. We have done with him; that is enough. The matter must end there." "That is all very well," he retorted, "but do you suppose I am going to stand quietly by and allow any cad to make love to my wife?" "If you had not stood quietly by it might never have happened," she answered. "I don't quite know what it is we have been quarrelling about, but I do know that lately we have drifted apart, and he noticed it--he said so. He thought that I had found out that our marriage had been a mistake." She looked up to meet St. John's gaze riveted upon her face, with an expression in his eyes that puzzled her, it was so unlike anything she had seen in them before. He looked as a man might look when someone he has loved and trusted deals him a blow on the face, so stern and white and miserable, and so full of an unspeakable shame. "Jack," she half-whispered, "what is it? What is the matter, dear?" "Forgive me," he cried brokenly, "If I have misjudged you; but I thought--as Markham thinks. And, my God, I think so still." Jill drew away from him, wounded into silence by what she heard. For a few moments she stood irresolute, struck motionless with an anguish too deep for words; then with a half articulate cry she tottered forward, and fell, a forlorn little bundle, at his feet St. John stooped swiftly, and gathering her up, laid her tenderly upon the bed, and, bending over her with a face even whiter than her own, stared down, awed and humbled, at the motionless, unconscious form. He was almost too stunned at first to realise that there was anything serious the matter; but it gradually dawned upon him that she ought not to be allowed to lie there as she was without calling in some assistance, and so, not pausing to put on his coat, he ran out of the bedroom on to the landing, and stood there in his shirt sleeves, in terrified and breathless anxiety. "Thompkins!" he cried excitedly. "Thompkins!" "Hallo!" answered a voice from the bottom of the stairs, a voice of calm and unruffled serenity. "For God's sake run for the doctor," St. John called back. There was silence for a few seconds; then the street door was opened and banged to again, and St. John returned to the room to watch by his wife and wait. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. It was not many weeks after her sudden and unusual attack of unconsciousness that Jill presented her husband with a little son. The small stranger appeared upon the scene rather too soon, and was delicate and puny in consequence, and a great source of anxiety to its parents. Jill, herself, was very ill for a long while after its birth, so that St. John had a trying and expensive time of it, the only beneficial result being that every minor worry was forgotten in the all absorbing one of his wife's health. After the child's birth he wrote a brief note to his father acquainting him with the news. He considered it his duty to do so, though he neither expected nor hoped for any reply to the letter; and he was not disappointed; Mr St. John, Senior, might never have received it for all the sign he made, and Jill, being ill and low-spirited at the time, cried with annoyance to think that her husband should have written to him at all. "He will only imagine that you want something out of him," she exclaimed pettishly. "Never mind what he imagines," answered St. John, bending over the speaker's couch, and touching the baby's smooth cheek with his finger. "It needn't bother us so long as we are satisfied that we have done what is right. You wouldn't like to think that one day this little man might fail in his duty to _his_ father, would you?" Jill looked down at the wee, mottled face, and laughed softly, though the tears stood in her eyes still, and would not be blinked away. "How absurd it seems," she said, "to think that this will one day be a man. It's so small and frail that I'm half afraid of it, Jack. And it's dreadfully ugly too, isn't it, dear? Not even you could call it pretty." "Never mind it's looks," St. John answered reassuringly. "They're all putty-faced at first, you know. If he only grows up with but half his mother's charm and goodness he'll do all right." Jill laughed again; the extravagance of the compliment amused her. "I hope he won't grow up with his mother's temper," she said, adding with a mischievous look at St. John, "nor his father's either for that matter; I'd like him to strike out an original line there, Jack." "Too late, I'm afraid," St. John answered ruefully as the baby screwed up its face preparatory to howling. "He always yells for nothing just when we're having a quiet chat." Jill sat up a little and rocked the child gently in her arms. "He is jealous," she explained; "he takes after you in that." "I think the less _you_ say about it the better," he retorted. "I remember some rather uncomfortable half hours spent on Evie's account." She smiled, her face close pressed to the baby's, her lips caressing it's hair. "How ridiculous it all seems now!" she exclaimed--"How small! What a pair of geese we were!" "Yes," he said, and he straightened himself and walked away to the window to hide the mortification in his eyes. His jealousy had been of a far graver nature than hers, and he did not like to hear it referred to even. He was very much ashamed of himself, and rather embarrassed by a generosity that forgave so quickly and entirely as Jill had done. "Yes," he repeated softly more to himself than her, "we were a pair of geese. How I wish we had found it out sooner than we did. What an infinitude of suffering it might have saved us both!" The next important event in their lives, which took place as soon as Jill was well enough to walk to Church, was the baby's christening. He was called John after his father as the eldest sons of the St. John's had been from time immemorial. It was Jill's wish that this should be, St. John, himself, having no idea on the subject. It was also Jill's wish that Mr Thompkins should stand Godfather, and, upon being asked, the senior partner gave a somewhat reluctant consent. He was a practical, hard-working old bachelor, and babies were not much in his line, but he had an unbounded admiration and respect for this baby's mother, so when she informed him of her desire very much after the manner of one conferring an inestimable favour he had not the pluck nor the cruelty to say her nay. The honour cost him a guinea in the shape of a christening present, but the guinea weighed lightly in the balance compared with the interest that he was expected to take in his Godson. Jill had a way of putting it in his arms, and watching him nurse it which not only embarrassed but annoyed him greatly; and sometimes St. John would come in and look on with a grin, observing the while that he was quite a family man, or something equally idiotic. St. John _was_ idiotic in those days. He thought so much of his ugly offspring, as the infant's Godfather mentally called it, and spoilt as many plates in attempting to photograph it as would have served for all the babies that came to the studio in a year. Mr Thompkins groaned, but Jill laughed happily; this tiny link between herself and Jack seemed the one thing necessary to make her life perfect. Its advent had closed a chapter in their history and commenced a new one altogether brighter and happier than the last. The last had known Evie Bolton, and Markham; but now the name of the one was seldom mentioned, the other never. Jill had not seen Markham from the hour she sent him from her presence-- neither had St. John--but a few days after the affair she had received a letter from him, just a short note of apology which ran as follows:-- "Dear Mrs St. John,-- "I cannot, I fear, convey to you my heartfelt sorrow at the indiscretion I was guilty of last Tuesday. I have been reproaching myself for my folly ever since. The fault was mine, as is also the loss. I made a mistake. Try to forgive me and to forget. I go abroad next week indefinitely. Goodbye." Jill offered it to her husband when she had finished reading, but St. John put her hand aside, and shook his head decisively. "You know that that isn't necessary between you and me," he said reproachfully. "I think he would like you to see it," she answered. He took it then and read it through; when he had done so he handed it back again with a grave half-troubled smile. "Considering how I, myself, was mistaken," he said, "I don't think that I have the right to censure him at all." Jill tore the note up slowly, watching the fragments intently as they fluttered from her fingers. The knowledge that her husband had misjudged her was the bitterest part of all. And yet in her heart she did not blame him; she even found excuses for him, but the pain was none the less acute because she refused to admit its reason, though no doubt it was easier borne, and would be more readily forgotten. "I am very much afraid," she said gently, with a slight hesitation of tone and manner, "that I, also, must have been at fault to cause two men to make the same mistake. I don't suppose that I have any right to blame him either. I think the wisest course would be to do as he suggests--forgive everything, and forget." And as St. John was of the same opinion the matter ended there, and if not entirely forgotten was at least never referred to between them again. CHAPTER NINETEEN. It was just two years after Jill's baby had been born that a very wonderful thing occurred; Mr St. John senior visited Thompkins and Co. for no less a purpose than calling upon his son's wife. He did not come unexpectedly; he wrote a week beforehand apprising them of the fact, and duly on the appointed date he pushed open the outer door and entered the mean little shop, standing in it, as it were, protestingly, his hat off, his shoulders slightly bowed; tall, and cross, and dignified--frowning at his son. St. John came forward quickly. He was expecting his father but pride forbade his making any preparation. He had been in the studio during the early part of the afternoon and was still in his working clothes though Jill had suggested to him the propriety of changing, but he had chosen to ignore the suggestion, arguing that that which was good enough for his wife should be good enough for his father too; and so he came forward as he was and stood in front of the visitor just as he might have done had he been any ordinary customer. The old man's glance travelled slowly from the strong face with its proud smile to the shabby suit of clothes, the stains upon them testifying to the nature of the wearer's work, and his carelessness as an operator. As he looked he smiled also. It was not a pleasant smile, and the younger man silently resented it. "Photography does not appear a very lucrative employment," he observed. "No," answered St. John. "At least I do not find it so." "Ah! Well, no doubt that assists you to realise the mistake you made." "I made no mistake," the other interrupted shortly. "If you refer to my marriage that is the one thing I have never--and shall never regret." "Yet it has been the means of reducing you to your present strait." "Pardon me," retorted the younger man, "want of a profession, and not my marriage, has been the means of my poverty. If I failed in my duty to you as a son remember that you in the first place failed in your duty to me." The grey brows drew together over the high-bridged nose, and the old eyes glared angrily into the young, indignant ones. "I brought you up to the profession of a gentleman," Mr St. John remarked. "If by the `profession of a gentleman' you mean a dependent beggar--a parasite--a less than menial," rejoined the son, "you did. And until I met Jill I was not man enough to feel the degradation of it." "Until you met Jill you were not a fool," snapped his father. "We won't discuss that point further," St. John rejoined; "it is one on which we are never likely to agree. You wanted, your note said, to see Jill. I can't imagine why, but if you still wish to see her we will go upstairs at once." Mr St. John having intimated that a two minutes' uncomfortable conversation with his son had not altered his intention in coming, the latter turned impatiently upon his heel and led the way to the sitting-room where Jill was waiting with her little boy, striving, in her efforts to amuse him, to stifle her own nervousness and vague misgivings. The child was simply and daintily dressed in white, and had grown from a puny infant into a sturdy, healthy little man, with more than an ordinary share of good looks and good spirits, and a very charming and lovable disposition. Jill idolised him, but she was wise in her love, and the spoiling--if spoiling it could be called--was of a very judicious kind, tending chiefly to bring out the best qualities in the impressionable baby-nature, so that surrounded, as this baby was, with love and care and tenderness, he bade fair to turn out a generous, affectionate, happy little fellow; and if he were not as well off as some babies, at least he had been born without the silver spoon, and so was not likely to feel the deprivation. Jill had been playing with him on the floor, doing her best to keep him good-tempered before his grandfather's arrival; for with her mother-instinct she associated this visit with the child, and was naturally anxious that he should appear at his best. When she heard their steps upon the stairs she scrambled hastily to a more dignified position, and stood with bright eyes, and flushed cheeks waiting to receive her former enemy. She had not forgotten his first and only other visit to her; she was not likely to forget it, nor to forgive him the pain he made her suffer then, and the insult which he had offered her. But she was content to ignore the past for her husband's sake more than her own, and equally ready to treat her father-in-law with a politeness and consideration that he had no right to expect at her hands. Doubtless he remembered the incident also; he certainly did not anticipate a welcome, for he returned her cool little bow with equal distance--indeed hardly appeared to notice her at all. It was evident that if she had not forgiven him neither had he forgiven her; to her he owed the upsetting of all his plans, and his present lonely, childless condition, and he was not the sort of man who easily forgot an injury, nor readily pardoned the offender. His supercilious gaze rested for an instant on the mother's face, and then wandered away to the child's, taking in every detail of the baby-features from the wide, curious eyes, so absurdly like Jill's both in expression and colouring, to the pretty curved lips, and rounded chin which even then gave promise of being as square and obstinate as his father's. What he saw apparently pleased him; his features relaxed a little, Jill even fancied that he smiled back when the child in his friendly, confiding fashion smiled up at him, though if such were the case, which was doubtful, he made no further advance. He had never cared for children, and he did not now pretend to feel any interest in this one more than another. He had not come to see his grandson, but merely to make a proposal concerning him, and this proposal he forthwith expounded to the baby's parents to their no small astonishment and dismay. His offer--and it was a good one from a worldly point of view--was to adopt the child altogether; to take him at the age of seven from his present surroundings and bring him up as he had brought up the father, bequeathing, at his death, his entire fortune to him unconditionally. He made no stipulation against the child seeing his parents as often as the latter wished, but he was not to live with them, nor to stay beneath their roof for any length of time. When he had finished speaking he looked towards his son, but St. John shook his head decisively, and turned abruptly away; he could not answer such a question; he felt that he had not the right to do so. "Ask his mother," was all he said. "Petticoat government, eh?" sneered the old man. "I appealed to you because I hoped that you would have profited by your own experience and been glad of the opportunity of giving your son a chance. With women it is different; they are so beastly selfish in their love; they always want the object of their affection near them." "Ask his mother," St. John repeated in a hard voice. "A mother has more right than anyone else to decide the future of her child." Jill, who had remained till now impassive, listening open-eyed to all she heard, came forward as her husband finished speaking and stood between the old man and the baby on the floor as though she would protect the child from his grandfather's designs. She was quite calm and collected; St. John wondered rather at her evident self-control. "It is very good of you, Mr St. John," she said, "to make Baby such a handsome offer. But you are wrong in thinking that a mother's love is selfish; it is not where it is real; and it is entirely in my baby's interests that I am going to regard your proposal." "Going to refuse it you mean," he snapped. Jill smiled. "Going to refuse it if you like to put it that way," she said. "Of course it would be splendid for Baby in one sense, but I don't think it would be kind. I have never approved of bringing children up in a different position to their parents. My boy, no matter how good-hearted he turned out, would grow to look down upon his father, and the poor little shop with its poorer photographs, and upon the kind old man who stood Godfather to him, and drops his h's, but loves the child almost as though he were his own. I have heard of such things before. Children who are exalted to very different positions to their parents learn to despise them, and feel ashamed of them, and then, of course, they despise themselves for doing so; and altogether it is very hopeless, and rather cruel, I think. "Don't fancy me ungrateful; it is not that. It isn't that I wouldn't spare my boy if I considered it all for the best; but I don't I think he will be a much happier, and a better little boy if he is brought up just as well as we can manage, with no more brilliant prospect than the knowledge that he has to make his own way in the world as his father did before him." "So you are going to make an independent beggar of him as you did of his father, eh? Well, I would have made him an independent gentleman. But no matter. You possess the right unfortunately of ruining both their futures. Perhaps one day you will remember my offer with regret, but understand, please that I shall not renew it; neither will you or yours benefit from me in any way." "I had never expected that we should," Jill answered with proud simplicity. "I have not been accustomed to luxury and so don't feel the need of it. It is harder for my husband than for me, harder for him than it will be for the boy; but I don't fancy that Jack minds it much." "Jack is a fool," his father answered bitterly. "He could have been anything almost if he had followed out my wishes." St. John smiled faintly. He did not resent the slighting epithet applied to himself; he understood in a way, the old man's keen disappointment, and felt more sorry than chagrined at his unrelenting harshness. "Don't think too much about it, sir," he said; "I should have been bound to fail you somehow. I was never one of those brainy ambitious fellows, you know; it takes more than money to make a great career." "It takes a _man_," Mr St. John answered sententiously. He had not sat down throughout the brief interview, although his son had placed a chair for him, and now he turned to go with less ceremony than when he entered. He even omitted the courtesy of bowing to Jill; he simply walked out without looking at her. St. John followed him and opened the shop door for him to pass through. "Good-bye," he said earnestly. "I regret the breach between us with all my heart--though that will hardly bridge it over, will it? If at any time you want me you have only to command." "You have always obeyed my commands so readily, eh?" retorted his father. "I am not likely to trouble you again. By the way you need not consider it necessary in future to make a kind of family Bible of me for the chronicling of domestic events. Our intercourse is at an end from this date. I neither wish to hear of, nor to see you again." CHAPTER TWENTY. When St. John had closed the door after his father he walked into the studio and busied himself unnecessarily shifting back scenes and rearranging everything in order to work off the depression the recent interview had left behind. He thoroughly understood that this was the final break with his father, and the realisation cost him more than one pang of bitter regret. He felt that to a certain extent he had been wanting in duty, and yet he knew that he could not have acted otherwise; the whole thing was as deplorable as it was inevitable; and it might have been so different had it not been for the obstinate pride of one ambitious old man. In the midst of his sad reflections he forgot Jill altogether. Sorrow inclines one to be selfish, and St. John just then was dwelling so much upon his own wounded feelings that he had no room for any other thought. That Jill, too, might be hurt, and that very possibly she was worrying on his account did not occur to him or he would have gone to her at once, instead he seated himself on a little rustic bench that had so often served to pose a difficult subject, and leaned his head dejectedly upon his open palm. And thus Jill found him later when, having left her baby in his Godfather's charge, she came in search of him wondering at his continued absence. The sight brought the tears to her eyes, and she drew back with the half-formed resolve of going away unseen, but changing her mind almost immediately she dropped the shabby curtain which formed the exit behind her, and running forward put both her arms about his neck. "Oh! my saint, my dear old saint, don't take it to heart so," she cried imploringly. And at the sound of her voice, the voice that was dearer to him than any other in all the world, he lifted his head and smiled up at her, a loving, reassuring smile. "I am not taking it to heart," he said. "I was a little bit hipped, that's all." "You don't think that I acted wrongly?" queried Jill diffidently. "You are not vexed that I declined his offer for baby?" "Good Lord, no!" he answered vehemently. "I could never have reconciled myself to giving the little beggar up. We managed very well without him before he came, Jill dear; but we couldn't manage now after once having him, could we? You did what was right as I knew you would. In any serious matter I should invariably leave the decision to you." "How good you are to me, Jack," she whispered gratefully. "How unselfish! It doesn't seem fair that you should have had to give up so much for me. And now comes this fresh trouble. We have had one or two worries, haven't we dear?" "Yes," he answered brightly, rising, and putting his arm protectingly around her waist, "we have, but fortunately we are both sufficiently self-respecting, and single-purposed to trust one another implicitly, and so the worries don't affect us very much. Some people would have magnified them into tragedies, but we have managed to shake them off somehow, and come up smiling. So long as we have each other, and health--" "And Baby," supplemented Jill. "And Baby, of course; there is nothing much we need worry about. The business manages to keep on its feet somehow; I think one day it may possibly even walk." "You are brave and confident," Jill whispered a little wistfully, "but you will never be well off now dear." And St. John with his arm still round her, drew her nearer to him and kissed her upon the lips. The feeling of sadness had passed, a deep happiness and contentment had risen in its place. "I _am_ well off," he answered. "No man, whatever his social standing or the size of his banking account, could be better off. I wouldn't swop you and the boy, Jill, for the untold wealth of the world." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The End. 
14491	----	THE TWENTY-FOURTH OF JUNE Midsummer's Day by GRACE S RICHMOND 1914 CONTENTS CHAPTER I. The Curtain Rises on a Home II. Richard Changes His Plans III. While It Rains IV. Pictures V. Richard Pricks His Fingers VI. Unsustained Application VII. A Traitorous Proceeding VIII. Roses Red IX. Mr. Kendrick Entertains X. Opinions and Theories XI. "The Taming of the Shrew" XII. Blankets XIII. Lavender Linen XIV. Rapid Fire XV. Making Men XVI. Encounters XVII. Intrigue XVIII. The Nailing of a Flag XIX. In the Morning XX. Side Lights XXI. Portraits XXII. Roberta Wakes Early XXIII. Richard Has Waked Earlier XXIV. The Pillars of Home XXV. A Stout Little Cabin CHAPTER I THE CURTAIN RISES ON A HOME None of it might ever have happened, if Richard Kendrick had gone into the house of Mr. Robert Gray, on that first night, by the front door. For, if he had made his first entrance by that front door, if he had been admitted by the maidservant in proper fashion and conducted into Judge Calvin Gray's presence in the library, if he had delivered his message, from old Matthew Kendrick, his grandfather, and had come away again, ushered out of that same front door, the chances are that he never would have gone again. In which case there would have been no story to tell. It all came about--or so it seems--from its being a very rainy night in late October, and from young Kendrick's wearing an all-concealing motoring rain-coat and cap. He had been for a long drive into the country, and had just returned, mud-splashed, when his grandfather, having taken it into his head that a message must be delivered at once, requested his grandson to act as his messenger. So the young man had impatiently bolted out with the message, had sent his car rushing through the city streets, and had become a still muddier and wetter figure than before when he stood upon the porch of the old Gray homestead, well out in the edge of the city, and put thumb to the bell. His hand was stayed by the shrill call of a small boy who dashed up on the porch out of the dusk. "You can't get in that way," young Ted Gray cried. "Something's happened to the lock--they've sent for a man to fix it. Come round to the back with me--I'll show you." So this was why Richard Kendrick came to be conducted by way of the tall-pillared rear porch into the house through the rear door of the wide, central hall. There was no light at this end of the hall, and the old-fashioned, high-backed settee which stood there was in shadow. With a glance at the caller's muddy condition the young son of the house decided it the part of prudence to assign him this waiting-place, while he himself should go in search of his uncle. The lad had seen the big motor-car at the gate; quite naturally he took its driver for a chauffeur. Ted looked in at the library door; his uncle was not there. He raced off upstairs, not noting the change which had already taken place in the visitor's appearance with the removal of the muddy coat and cap. Richard Kendrick now looked a particularly personable young man, well built, well dressed, of the brown-haired, gray-eyed, clear-skinned type. The eyes were very fine; the nose and mouth had the lines of distinction; the chin was--positive. Altogether the young man did not look the part he had that day been playing--that of the rich young idler who drives a hundred and fifty miles in a powerful car, over the worst kind of roads, merely for the sake of diversion and a good luncheon. While he waited Richard considered the hall, at one end of which he sat in the shadow. There was something very homelike about this hall. The quaint landscape paper on the walls, the perceptibly worn and faded crimson Turkey carpeting on the floors, the wide, spindle-balustrade staircase with the old clock on its landing; more than all, perhaps, on an October night like this, the warm glow from a lamp with crystal pendants which stood on the table of polished mahogany near the front door--all these things combined to give the place a quite distinctive look of home. There were one or two other touches in the picture worth mentioning, the touches which spoke of human life. An old-fashioned hat-tree just opposite the rear door was hung full with hats. A heavy ulster lay over a chair close by, and two umbrellas stood in the corner. And over hat-rack, hats, ulster, and chair, with one end of silken fringe caught upon one of the umbrella ribs, had been flung by some careless hand, presumably feminine, a long silken scarf of the most intense rose-colour, a hue so vivid, as the light caught it from the landing above, that it seemed almost to be alive. From various parts of the house came sounds--of voices and of footsteps, more than once of distant laughter. Far above somewhere a child's high call rang out. Nearer at hand some one touched the keys of a piano, playing snatches of Schumann--_Der Nussbaum, Mondnacht, Die Lotosblume_. Richard recognized the airs which thus reached his ears, and was sorry when they ceased. Now there might be nothing in all this worth describing if the effect upon the observer had not been one to him so unaccustomed. Though he had lived to the age of twenty-eight years, he had never set foot in a place which seemed so curiously like a vague dream he had somewhere at the back of his head. For the last two years he had lived with his grandfather in the great pile of stone which they called home. If this were no real home, the young man had never had one. He had spent periods of his life in various sorts of dwelling-places; in private rooms at schools and college--always the finest of their kind--in clubs, on ships, in railway trains; but no time at all in any place remotely resembling the house in which he now waited, a stranger in every sense of the word, more strange to the everyday, fine type of home known to the American of good birth and breeding than may seem credible as it is set down. "Hold on there!" suddenly shouted a determined male voice from somewhere above Richard. A door banged, there was a rush of light-running feet along the upper hall, closely followed by the tread of heavier ones. A burst of the gayest laughter was succeeded by certain deep grunts, punctuated by little noises as of panting breath and half-stifled merriment. It was easy to determine that a playful scuffle of some sort was going on overhead, which seemed to end only after considerable inarticulate but easily translatable protest on the part of the weaker person involved. Then came an instant's silence, a man's ringing laugh of triumph; next, in a girl's voice, a little breathless but of a quality to make the listener prick up ears already alert, these most unexpected words: "'O, it is _excellent_ To have a giant's strength; but it is _tyrannous_ To use it like a giant!'" "Is it, indeed, Miss Arrogance?" mocked the deeper voice. "Well, if you had given it back at once, as all laws of justice, not to mention propriety, demanded, I should not have had to force it away from you. Oh, I say, did I really hurt that wrist, or are you shamming?" "Shamming! You big boys have no idea how brutally violent you are when you want some little thing you ought not to have. It aches like anything," retorted the other voice, its very complaints uttered in such melodious tones of contralto music that the listener found himself wishing with all his might to know if the face of its owner could by any possibility match the loveliness of her voice. Dark, he fancied she must be, and young, and strong--of education, of a gay wit, yet of a temper--all this the listener thought he could read in the voice. "Poor little wilful girl! Did she get hurt, then, trying to have her own way? Come in here, jade, and I'll fix it up for you," the deeper tones declared. Footsteps again; a door closed. Silence succeeded for a minute; then the Schumann music began again, a violin accompanying. And suddenly, directly opposite the settee, a door swung slowly open, the hand upon the knob invisible. A picture was presented to the stranger's eyes as if somebody had meant to show it to him. He could but look. Anybody, seeing the picture, would have looked and found it hard to turn his eyes away. For it was the heart of the house, right here, so close at hand that even a stranger could catch a glimpse of it by chance. A great, wide-throated fireplace held a splendid fire of burning logs, the light from it illumining the whole room, otherwise dark in the October twilight. Before it on the hearth-rug were silhouetted, in distinct lines against its rich background, two figures. One was that of a woman in warm middle life, sitting in a big chair, her face full of both brightness and peace; at her feet knelt a young girl, her arm upon her mother's knees, her face uplifted. The two faces were smiling into each other. Somebody--it looked to be a tall young man against the fire-glow--came and abruptly closed the door from within, and the picture was gone. The fitful music ceased again; the house was quiet. Thereupon Richard Kendrick grew impatient. Fully ten minutes must have elapsed since his youthful conductor had disappeared. He looked about him for some means of summoning attention, but discovered none. Suddenly a latchkey rattled uselessly in the lock of the front door; then came lusty knocks upon its stout panels, accompanied by the whirring of a bell somewhere in the distance. A maidservant came hurriedly into the hall through a door near Richard, and at the same moment a boy of ten or eleven came tearing down the front stairs. As the lad shouted through the door, Richard recognized his late conductor. "You can't get in, Daddy; the lock's gone queer. Come around to the back. I'll see to him, Mary," the boy called to the maid, who, nodding, disappeared. At this moment the door opposite Richard opened again, and the mother of the household came out, her comely waist closely clasped by the arm of the young girl. The two were followed by the tall young man. Richard stood up, and was, of course, instantly upon the road to the delivery of his message. Ted, ushering in his father, and spying the waiting messenger, cried repentantly, "Oh, I forgot!" and the tall young man responded gravely, "You usually do, don't you, Cub?" This elder son of the house, waving the small boy aside, attended to taking Richard to the library, and to summoning Judge Calvin Gray. In five minutes the business had been dispatched, Judge Gray had made friendly inquiry into the condition of his old friend's health, and Richard was ready to take his departure. Curiously enough he did not now want to go. As he stood for a moment near the open library door, while Judge Gray returned to his desk for a newspaper clipping, the caller was listening to the eager greetings taking place in the hall just out of his sight. The father of the family appeared to have returned from an absence of some length, and the entire household had come rushing to meet and welcome him. Richard listened for the contralto notes he had heard above, and presently detected them declaring with vivid emphasis: "Mother has been a dear, splendid martyr. Nobody would have guessed she was lonely, but--we knew!" "She couldn't possibly have been more lonely than I. Next time I'll take her with me!" was the emphatic response. Then the whole group swept by the library door, down the hall, and into the room of the great fireplace. Nobody looked his way, and Richard Kendrick had one swift view of them all. Vigorous young men, graceful young women, a child or two, the mother of them all on the arm of her husband--there were plenty to choose from, but he could not find the one he looked for. Then, quite by itself, another figure flashed past him. He had a glimpse of a dusky mass of hair, of a piquant profile, of a round arm bared to the elbow. As the figure passed the hat-tree he saw the arm reach out and catch the rose-coloured scarf, flinging it over one shoulder. Then the whole vision had vanished, and he stood alone in the library doorway, with Judge Gray saying behind him: "I cannot find the clipping. I will mail it to your grandfather when I come upon it." "I knew that scarf was hers," Richard was thinking as he went out into the night by way of the rear door, Judge Gray having accompanied him to the threshold and given him a cordial hand of farewell. What a voice! She could make a fortune with it on the stage, if she couldn't sing a note. The stage! What had the stage to do with people who lived together in a place like that? He looked curiously back at the house as he went down the box-bordered path which led, curving, from it to the street. It was obviously one of the old-time mansions of the big city, preserved in the midst of its grounds in a neighbourhood now rampant with new growth. It was outside, on this chill October night, as hospitable in appearance as it was inside; there was hardly a window which did not glow with a mellow light. As Richard drove down the street, he was recalling vividly the picture of the friendly-looking hall with its faded Turkey carpet worn with the tread of many rushing feet, its atmosphere of welcoming warmth--and the rose-hued scarf flung over the dull masculine belongings as if typifying the fashion in which the women of the household cast their bright influence over the men. It suddenly occurred to Richard Kendrick that if he had lived in such a home even until he went away to school, if he had come back to such a home from college and from the wanderings over the face of the earth with which he had filled in his idle days since college was over, he should be perhaps a better, surely a different, man than he was now. * * * * * Louis Gray, coming into the hall precisely as Richard Kendrick, again enveloped in his muddy motoring coat, was releasing Judge Gray's hand and disappearing into the night, looked curiously after the departing figure. His sister Roberta, following him into the hall a moment after, rose-coloured scarf still drifting across white-clad shoulder, was in time to receive his comment: "Seems rather odd to see that chap departing humbly by any door but the front one." "You knew him, then. Who was he?" inquired his sister. "Didn't you? He's a familiar figure enough about town. Why, he's Rich Kendrick. Grandson of Matthew Kendrick, of Kendrick & Company, you know. Only Rich doesn't take much interest in the business. You'll find his doings carefully noticed in certain columns in certain society journals." "I don't read them, thank you. Do you?" "Don't need to. Kendrick's a familiar figure wherever the gay and youthful rich disport themselves--when he's in the country at all. He's doing his best to get away with the money his father left him. Fortunately the bulk of the family fortune is still in the hands of his grandfather, who seems an uncommonly healthy and vigorous old man." Louis laughed. "Can't think what Rich Kendrick can be doing here with Uncle Cal. I believe, though, he and old Matthew Kendrick are good friends. Probably grandson Richard came on an errand. It certainly behooves him to do grandfather's errands with as good a grace as he can muster." "He was sitting in the hall quite a while before Uncle Cal saw him," volunteered Ted, who had tagged at Roberta's heels, and was listening with interest. "Sitting in the hall, eh--like any district messenger?" Louis was clearly delighted with this news. "How did it happen, Cub? Mary take him for an everyday, common person?" "I let him in. I thought he was a chauffeur," admitted Ted. "He was awfully wet and muddy. Steve took him in to Uncle Cal." An explosion of laughter from his interested elder brother interrupted him. "I wish I'd come along and seen him. So he had the bad manners to sit in our hall in a wet and muddy motoring coat, and go in to see Uncle Cal--" "The young man had on no muddy coat when Stephen brought him in to see me," declared Judge Calvin Gray, coming out and catching the last sentence. "He put it on in the hall before going out. What are you saying? That was the grandson of my good friend, Matthew Kendrick, and so had claim upon my good will from the start, though I haven't laid eyes upon the boy since his schooldays. He was rather a restless and obstreperous youngster then, I'll admit. What he is now seems pleasing enough to the eye, certainly, though of course that may not be sufficient. A fine, mannerly young fellow he appeared to me, and I was glad to see that he seemed willing enough to run upon his grandfather's errands, though they took him out upon a raw night like this." But Louis Gray, though he did not pursue the subject further, was still smiling to himself as he obeyed a summons to dinner. At opposite ends of the long table sat Mr. and Mrs. Robert Gray. The head of the house looked his part: fine of face, crisp of speech, authoritative yet kindly of manner. His wife may be described best by saying that one had but to look upon her to know that here sat the Queen of the little realm, the one whose gentle rule covered them all as with the brooding wing of wise motherhood. Down the sides of the board sat the three sons: Stephen, tall and slender, grave-faced, quiet but observant; Louis, of a somewhat lesser height but broad of shoulder and deep of chest, his bright face alert, every motion suggesting vigour of body and mind; Ted--Edgar--the youngest, a slim, long-limbed lad with eyes eager as a collie's for all that might concern him--this was the tale of the sons of the house. There were the two daughters: Roberta, she of the rose-coloured scarf--it was still about her shoulders, seeming to draw all the light in the room to its vivid hue, reflecting itself in her cheeks--Roberta, the elder daughter, dusky of hair, adorable of face, her round white throat that of a strong and healthy girl, her laugh a song to listen to; the other daughter, Ruth, a fair-haired, sober-eyed creature of growing sixteen, as different as if of other blood. One would not have said the two were sisters. There was one more girl at the table; no, not a girl, yet she looked younger than Roberta--a little person with a wild-rose, charming face, and the sweetest smile of them all--Rosamond, Stephen's wife, quite incredibly mother of two children of nursery age, at this moment already properly asleep upstairs. Last but far from least, loved and honoured of them all above the lot of average man to command such tribute, was the elder brother of the master of the house, his handsome white head and genial face drawing toward him all eyes whenever he might choose to speak--Judge Calvin Gray. All in all they were a goodly family, just such a family as is to be found beneath many a fortunate roof; yet a family with an individuality all its own and a richness of life such as is less common than it ought to be. CHAPTER II RICHARD CHANGES HIS PLANS The next time Richard Kendrick went to the Gray home was a fortnight later, when old Matthew Kendrick was sending some material for which Judge Gray had written to ask him--books and pamphlets, and a set of maps. This time he would have sent a servant, but his grandson Richard heard him giving directions and came into the affair with a careless suggestion that he was driving that way and might as well take the stuff if Mr. Kendrick wished it. The old man glanced curiously at him across the table where the two sat at luncheon. "Glad to have you, of course," he commented, "but you made so many objections when I asked you before I thought I wouldn't interfere with your time again. Did you meet any of the family when you went?" "Only Judge Gray and two of his nephews," responded Richard, truthfully enough. So he went with the big package. This time, it being a fine, sunny, summerlike day almost as warm as September, he went clad in careful dress with only a light motoring coat on over all to preserve the integrity of his attire. He left this in the car when he leaped out of it, and appeared upon the doorstep looking not at all like his own chauffeur, but quite his comely self. The door-lock was in full working order now, and he was admitted by the same little maid whom he remembered seeing before. Upon his inquiry for Judge Gray he was told that that gentleman was receiving another caller and had asked to be undisturbed for a short time, but if he could wait-- Now there was no reason in the world for his waiting, since the package of books, pamphlets, and maps was under his arm and he had only to bestow it upon the maid and give her the accompanying directions. But, at this precise moment, Richard caught sight of a figure running down the staircase; concluded in one glance, as he had concluded in one glance before, that if a personality could be expressed by a speaking voice, a laugh, and a rose-hued scarf, this must be the one they expressed; and decided in the twinkling of an eye to wait. The maid conducted him toward the room on the right of the hall and he followed her, passing as he did so the person who had reached the foot of the stairs and who went by him in such haste that he had only time to give her one short but--it must be described as--concentrated look straight in the eyes. She in turn bestowed upon him the one glance necessary to inform her whether she knew him and so must stay long enough in her rapid progress to greet him. Their eyes therefore met at rather close range, lingered for the space of two running seconds, and parted. Richard Kendrick accepted the chair offered him and sat upon it for the space of some eighteen-odd minutes; they might have been hours or seconds, he could not have told which. He could hardly have described the room to which he had been shown, unless to say that it was a square, old-fashioned reception room, a little formal, decidedly quaint, and dignified, and clearly not used by the family as other rooms were used. Certainly the piano, from which he had heard the Schumann music on his former visit, was not here, and certainly there were no rose-hued scarfs flung carelessly about. It was undoubtedly a place kept for the use of strange callers like himself, and had small part in the life of the household. At length he was summoned to Judge Gray's library. He was met with the same pleasant courtesy as before, delivered his parcel, and lingered as long as might be, listening politely to his host's remarks, and looking, looking--for a chance to make a reason to come again. Quite unexpectedly it was offered him by the Judge himself. "I wonder if you could recommend to me," said Judge Gray as Richard was about to take his leave, "a capable young man--college-bred, of course--to come here daily or weekly as I might need him, to assist me in the work of preparing my book. My eyes, as you see, will not allow me to use them for much more than the reading of a paragraph, and while my family are very ready to help whenever they have the time, mine is so serious a task, likely to continue for so long a period, that I shall need continuous and prolonged assistance. Do you happen to know--?" Well, it can hardly be explained. This was a rich man's heir and the grandson of millions more, in need--according to his own point of view--of no further education along the lines of work, and he had a voyage to the Far East in prospect. Certainly, a fortnight earlier the thing furthest from his thoughts would have been the engaging of himself as amanuensis and general literary assistant to an ex-judge upon so prosaic a task as the history of the Supreme Court of the State. To say that a rose-hued scarf, a laugh, and an alluring speaking voice explain it seems absurd, even when you add to these that which the young man saw during that moment of time when he looked into the face of their owner. Rather would I declare that it was the subtle atmosphere of that which in all his travels he had never really seen before--a home. At all events a new force of some sort had taken hold upon him, and was leading him whither he had never thought to go. If Judge Gray was surprised that the grandson of his old friend Matthew Kendrick should thus offer himself for the obscure and comparatively unremunerative post of secretary, he gave no evidence of it. Possibly it did not seem strange to him that this young man should show interest in the work the Judge himself had laid out with an absorbing enthusiasm. Therefore a trial arrangement was soon made, and Richard Kendrick agreed to present himself in Judge Gray's library on the following morning at ten o'clock. The only stipulation he made was that if, for any reason, he should decide suddenly to go upon a journey he had had some time in contemplation, he should be allowed to provide a substitute. He had not yet so completely surrendered to his impulse that he was not careful to leave himself a loophole of escape. The young man laughed to himself all the way down the avenue. What would his grandfather say? What would his friends say? His friends should not know--confound them!--it was none of their business. He would have his evenings; he would appear at his clubs as usual. If comments were made upon his absence at other hours he would quietly inform the observing ones that he had gone to work, but would refuse to say where. It certainly was a joke, his going to work; not that his grandfather had not often and strenuously recommended it, saying that the boy would never know happiness until he shook hands with labour; not that he himself had not fully intended some day to go into the training necessary to the assuming of the cares incident to the handling of a great fortune. But thus far--well, he had never been ready to begin. One journey more, one more long voyage-- Her eyes--had they been blue or black? Blue, he was quite sure, although the masses of her hair had been like night for dusky splendour, and her cheeks of that rich bloom which denotes young vigour and radiant health. He could hear her voice now, quoting a serious poet to fit a madcap mood--and quoting him in such a voice! What were the words? He remembered her mockingly exaggerated inflection: "'O, it is _excellent_ To have a giant's strength; but it is _tyrannous_ To use it like a giant!'" Well, from his flash-fire observation of her he should say that a man might need a giant's strength to overcome her, if she chose to oppose him, in any situation whatever. What a glorious task--to overcome her--to teach that lovely, teasing voice gentler words-- He laughed again. Since he had left college he had not been so interested in what was coming next--not even on the day he met Amelie Penstoff in St. Petersburg--nor on the day, in Japan, when his friend Rogers made an appointment with him to meet that little slant-eyed girl, half Japanese, half French, and whole minx--the beauty!--he could not even recall her name at this moment--with whom he had had an absorbing experience he should be quite unwilling to repeat. And now, here was a girl--a very different sort of girl--who interested him more than any of them. He wondered what was her name. Whatever it was, he would know it soon--call her by it--soon. He went home. He did not tell his grandfather that night. There was not much use in putting it off, but--somehow--he preferred to wait till morning. Business sounds more like business--in the morning. * * * * * The first result of his telling his grandfather in the morning was a note from old Matthew Kendrick to old Judge Gray. The note, which almost chuckled aloud, was as follows: MY DEAR CALVIN GRAY: Work him--work the rascal hard! He's a lazy chap with a way with him which plays the deuce with my foolish old heart. I could make my own son work, and did; but this son of his--that seems to be another matter. Yet I know well enough the dangers of idleness--know them so well that I'm tickled to death at the mere thought of his putting in his time at any useful task. He did well enough in college; there are brains there unquestionably. I didn't object seriously to his travelling--for a time--after his graduation; but that sort of life has gone on long enough, and when I talk to him of settling down at some steady job it's always "after one more voyage." I don't yet understand what has given him the impulse--whim--caprice--I don't venture to give it any stronger name--to accept this literary task from you. He vows he's not met the women of your household, or I should think that might explain it. I hope he will meet them--all of them; they'll be good for him--and so will you, Cal. Do your best by the boy for my sake, and believe me, now as always, Gratefully your old friend, MATTHEW. "Eleanor, have you five minutes to spare for me?" Judge Gray, his old friend's note in hand, hailed his brother's wife as she passed the open door of his library. She came in at once, and, though she was in the midst of household affairs, sat down with that delightful air of having all the time in the world to spare for one who needed her, which was one of her endearing characteristics. When she had heard the note she nodded her head thoughtfully. "I think the grandfather may well congratulate himself that the grandson has fallen into your hands, Calvin," said she. "The work you give him may not be to him the interesting task it would be to some men, but it will undoubtedly do him good to be harnessed to any labour which means a bit of drudgery. By all means do as Mr. Kendrick bids you--'work him hard.'" She smiled. "I wonder what the boy would think of Louis's work." "He would take to his heels, probably, if it were offered him. It's plain that Matthew's pleased enough at having him tackle a gentleman's task like this, and hopes to make it a stepping-stone to something more muscular. I shall do my best by Richard, as he asks. You note that he wants the young man to meet us all. Are you willing to invite him to dinner some time--perhaps next week--as a special favour to me?" "Certainly, Calvin, if you consider young Mr. Kendrick in every way fit to know our young people." Her fine eyes met his penetratingly, and he smiled in his turn. "That's like you, Eleanor," said he, "to think first of the boy's character and last of his wealth." "A fig for his wealth!" she retorted with spirit. "I have two daughters." "I have made inquiries," said he with dignity, "of Louis, who knows young Kendrick as one young man knows another, which is to the full. He considers him to be more or less of an idler, and as much of a spendthrift as a fellow in possession of a large income is likely to be in spite of the cautions of a prudent grandfather. He has a passion for travel and is correspondingly restless at home. But Louis thinks him to be a young man of sufficiently worthy tastes and standards to have escaped the worst contaminations, and he says he has never heard anything to his discredit. That is considerable to say of a young man in his position, Eleanor, and I hope it may constitute enough of a passport to your favour to permit of your at least inviting him to dinner. Besides--let me remind you--your daughters have standards of their own which you have given them. Ruth is a girl yet, of course, but a mighty discerning one for sixteen. As for Roberta, I'll wager no young millionaire is any more likely to get past her defences than any young mechanic--unless he proves himself fit." "I am confident of that," she agreed, and with her charming gray head held high went on about her household affairs. CHAPTER III WHILE IT RAINS The advanced age of the Honourable Calvin Gray, and the precarious state of his eyesight, made it possible for him to work at his beloved self-appointed task for only a scant number of hours daily. His new assistant, therefore, found his own working hours not only limited but variable. Beginning at ten in the morning, by four in the afternoon Judge Gray was usually too weary to proceed farther; sometimes by the luncheon hour he was ready to lay aside his papers and dismiss his assistant. On other days he would waken with a severe headache, the result of the overstrain he was constantly tempted to give his eyes, in spite of all the aid that was offered him. On such days Richard could not always find enough to do to occupy his time, and would be obliged to leave the house so early that many hours were on his hands. When this happened, he would take the opportunity to drop in at one or two of his clubs, and so convey the impression that only caprice kept him away on other days. Curiously enough, this still seemed to him an object; he might have found it difficult to explain just why, for he assuredly was not ashamed of his new occupation. Rather unexplainably to Richard, nearly the first fortnight of his new experience went by without his meeting any members of the family except the heads thereof and the younger son, Edgar, familiarly called by every one "Ted." With this youthful scion of the house he was destined to form the first real acquaintance. It came about upon a particularly rainy November day. Richard had found Judge Gray suffering from one of his frequent headaches, as a result of the overwork he had not been able wholly to avoid. Therefore a long day's work of research in various ancient volumes had been turned over to his assistant by an employer who left him to return to a seclusion he should not have forsaken. Richard was accustomed to run down to an excellent hotel for his luncheon, and was preparing to leave the house for this purpose when Ted leaped at him from the stairs, tumbling down them in great haste. "Mr. Kendrick, won't you stay and have lunch with me? It's pouring 'great horn spoons' and I'm all alone." "Alone, Ted? Nobody here at all?" "Not a soul. Uncle Cal's going to have his upstairs and he says I may ask you. Please stay. I don't go to school in the afternoon and maybe I can help you, if you'll show me how." Richard smiled at the notion, but accepted the eager invitation, and presently found himself sitting alone with the lad at a big, old-fashioned mahogany table, being served with a particularly tempting meal. "You see," Ted explained, spooning out grapefruit with an energetic hand, "father and mother and Steve and Rosy have gone to the country to a funeral--a cousin of ours. Louis and Rob aren't home till night except Saturdays and Sundays, and Ruth is at school till Friday nights. It makes it sort of lonesome for me. Wednesdays, though, every other week, Rob's home all day. When she's here I don't mind who else is away." "I was just going to ask if you had three brothers," observed Richard. "Do I understand 'Rob' is a girl?" "Sure, Rob's a girl all right, and I'm mighty glad of it. I wouldn't be a girl myself, not much; but I wouldn't have Rob anything else--I should say not. Name's Roberta, you know, after father. She's a peach of a sister, I tell you. Ruth's all right, too, of course, but she's different. She's a girl all through. But Rob's half boy, or--I should say there's just enough boy about her to make her exactly right, if you know what I mean." He looked inquiringly at Richard, who nodded gravely. "I think I get something of your idea," he agreed. "It makes a fine combination, does it?" "I should say it did. You know a girl that's all girl is too much girl. But one that likes some of the things boys like--well, it helps out a lot. Through with the grapefruit, Mary," he added, over his shoulder, to the maid. "Have you any brothers or sisters, Mr. Kendrick?" he inquired interestedly, when he had assured himself that the clam broth with which he was now served was unquestionably good to eat. "Not one--living. I had a brother, but he died when I was a little chap." "That was too bad," said Ted with ready sympathy. He looked straight across the table at Richard out of sea-blue eyes shaded by very heavy black lashes, which, it struck Richard quite suddenly, were much like another pair which he had had one very limited opportunity of observing. The boy also possessed a heavy thatch of coal-black hair, a lock of which was continually falling over his forehead and having to be thrust back. "Because father says," Ted went, on, "it's a whole lot better for children to be brought up together, so they will learn to be polite to each other. I'm the youngest, so I'm most like an only child. But, you see," he added hurriedly, "the older ones weren't allowed to give up to me, and I had to be polite to them, so perhaps"--he looked so in earnest about it that Richard could not possibly laugh at him--"I won't turn out as badly as some youngest ones do." There was really nothing priggish about this statement, however it may sound. And the next minute the boy had turned to a subject less suggestive of parental counsels. He launched into an account of his elder brother Louis's prowess on the football fields of past years, where, it seemed, that young man had been a remarkable right tackle. He gave rather a vivid account of a game he had witnessed last year, talking, as Richard recognized, less because he was eager to talk than from a sense of responsibility as to the entertainment of his guest. "But he won't play any more," he added mournfully. "He took his degree last year and he's in father's office now, learning everything from the beginning. He's just a common clerk, but he won't be long," he asserted confidently. "No, not long," agreed Richard. "The son of the chief won't be a common clerk long, of course." "I mean," explained Ted, buttering a hot roll with hurried fingers, "he'll work his way up. He won't be promoted until he earns it; he doesn't want to be." Richard smiled. The boy's ideals had evidently been given a start by some person or persons of high moral character. He was considering the subject in some further detail with the lad when the dining-room door suddenly opened and the owner of the black-lashed blue eyes, which in a way matched Ted's, came most unexpectedly in upon them. She was in street dress of dark blue, and her eyes looked out at them from under the wide gray brim of a sombrero-shaped hat with a long quill in it, the whole effect of which was to give her the breezy look of having literally blown in on the November wind which was shaking the trees outside. Her cheeks had been stung into a brilliant rose colour. Two books were tucked under her arm. "Why, Rob!" cried her younger brother. "What luck! What brought you home?" Rising from his chair Richard observed that Ted had risen also, and he now heard Ted's voice presenting him to his sister with the ease of the well-bred youngster. From this moment Richard owed the boy a debt of gratitude. He had been waiting impatiently for a fortnight for this presentation and had begun to think it would never come. Roberta Gray came forward to give the guest her hand with a ready courtesy which Richard met with the explanation of his presence. "I was asked to keep your brother company in the absence of the family. I can't help being glad that you didn't come in time to forestall me." "I'm sure Ted's hospitality might have covered us both," she said, pulling off her gloves. He recognized the voice. At close range it was even more delightful than he had remembered. "I doubt it, since he tells me that when you're here he doesn't mind who else is away." "Did you say that, Teddy?" she asked, smiling at the boy. "Then you'll surely give me lunch, though it isn't my day at home. I'm so hungry, walking in this wind. But the air is glorious." She went away to remove her hat and coat, and came back quickly, her masses of black hair suggesting but not confirming the impression that the wind had lately had its way with them. Her eyes scanned the table eagerly like those of a hungry boy. "Some of your scholars sick?" inquired Ted. "Two--and one away. So I'm to have a whole beautiful afternoon, though I may have to see them Wednesday to make up. I am a teacher in Miss Copeland's private school," she explained to Richard as simply as one of the young women he knew would have explained. "I have singing lessons of Servensky." This gave the young man food for thought, in which he indulged while Miss Roberta Gray told Ted of an encounter she had had that morning with a special friend of his own. This daughter of a distinguished man--of a family not so rich as his own, but still of considerable wealth and unquestionably high social position--was a teacher in a school for girls; a most exclusive school, of course--he knew the one very well--but still in a school and for a salary. To Richard the thing was strange enough. She must surely do it from choice, not from necessity; but why from choice? With her face and her charm--he felt the charm already; it radiated from her--why should she want to tie herself down to a dull round of duty like that instead of giving her thoughts to the things girls of her position usually cared for? Taking into consideration the statement Ted had lately made about his elder brother, it struck Richard Kendrick that this must be a family of rather eccentric notions. Somewhat to his surprise he discovered that the idea interested him. He had found people of his own acquaintance tiresomely alike; he congratulated himself on having met somebody who seemed likely to prove different. "So you rejoice in your half-holiday, Miss Gray," Richard observed when he had the chance. "I suppose you know exactly what you are going to do with it?" "Why do you think I do?" she asked with an odd little twist of the lip. "Do you always plan even unexpected holidays so carefully?" It occurred to Richard that up to the last fortnight his days since he left college had been all holidays, and there had been plenty of them throughout college life itself. But he answered seriously: "I don't believe I do. But I had the idea that teachers were so in the habit of living on schedules scientifically made out that even their holidays were conscientiously lived up to, with the purpose of getting the full value out of them." Even as he said it he could have laughed aloud at the thought of these straitlaced principles being applicable to the young person who sat at the table with himself and Ted. She a teacher? Never! He had known no women teachers since his first governess had been exchanged for a tutor, the sturdy youngster having rebelled, at an extraordinarily early age, against petticoat government. His acquaintance included but one woman of that profession--and she was a college president. He and she had not got on well together, either, during the brief period in which they had been thrown together--on an ocean voyage. But he had seen plenty of teachers, crossing the Atlantic in large parties, surveying cathedrals, taking coach drives, inspecting art galleries--all with that conscientious air of making the most of it. Miss Roberta Gray one of that serious company? It was incredible! "Dear me," laughed Roberta, "what a keen observer you are! I am almost afraid to admit that I have no conscientiously thought-out plan--but one. I am going to put myself in Ted's hands and let him personally conduct my afternoon." Blue eyes met blue eyes at that and flashed happy fire. Lucky Ted! "Oh, jolly!" exclaimed that delighted youth. "Will you play basket-ball in the attic?" "Of course I will. Just the thing for a rainy day." "Bowls?" "Yes, indeed." "Take a cross-country tramp?" His eyes were sparkling. Roberta glanced out of the window. The rain was dashing hard against the pane. "If you won't go through the West Wood marshes," she stipulated. "Sure I won't. They'd be pretty wet even for me on a day like this. Is there anything you'd specially like to do yourself?" he bethought himself at this stage to inquire. Roberta shrugged her shoulders. "Of course it seems tame to propose settling down by the living-room fire and popping corn, after we get back and have got into our dry clothes," said she, "but--" Ted grinned. "That's the stuff," he acknowledged. "I knew you'd think of the right thing to end up the lark with." He looked across at Richard with a proud and happy face. "Didn't I tell you she was a peach of a sister?" he challenged his guest. Richard nodded. "You certainly did," he said. "And I see no occasion to question the statement." His eyes met Roberta's. Never in his life had the thought of a cross-country walk in the rain so appealed to him. At the moment he would have given his eagerly planned trip to the Far East for the chance to march by her side to-day, even though the course should lie through the marshes of West Wood, unquestionably the wettest place in the country on that particular wet afternoon. But nobody would think of inviting him to go--of course not. And while Roberta and Ted were dashing along country lanes--he could imagine how her cheeks would look, stung with rain, drops clinging to those bewildering lashes of hers--he himself would be looking up references in dry and dusty State Supreme Court records, and making notes with a fountain pen--a fountain pen--symbol of the student. What abominable luck! Roberta was laughing as his eyes met hers. The gay curve of her lips recalled to him one of the things Ted had said about her, concerning a certain boyish quality in her makeup, and he was strongly tempted to tell her of it. But he resisted. "I can see you two are great chums," said he. "I envy you both your afternoon, clear through to the corn-popping." "If you are still at work when we reach that stage we will--send you in some of it," she promised, and laughed again at the way his face fell. "I thought perhaps you were going to invite me in to help pop," he suggested boldly. "I understand you are engaged in the serious labour of collecting material for a book on a most serious subject," she replied. "We shouldn't dare to divert your mind; and besides I am told that Uncle Calvin intends to introduce you formally to the family by inviting you to dinner some evening next week. Do you think you ought to steal in by coming to a corn-popping beforehand? You see now I can quite truthfully say to Uncle Calvin that I don't yet know you, but after I had popped corn with you--" She paused, and he eagerly filled out the sentence: "You would know me? I hope you would! Because, to tell the honest truth, literary research is a bit new and difficult to me as yet, and any diversion--" But she would not ask him to the corn-popping. And he was obliged to finish his luncheon in short order because Roberta and Ted, plainly anxious to begin the afternoon's program, made such short work of it themselves. They bade him farewell at the door of the dining-room like a pair of lads who could hardly wait to be ceremonious in their eagerness to be off, and the last he saw of them they were running up the staircase hand in hand like the comrades they were. During his intensely stupid researches Richard Kendrick could hear faintly in the distance the thud of the basket-ball and the rumble of the bowls. But within the hour these tantalizing sounds ceased, and, in the midst of the fiercest dash of rain against the library window-panes that had yet occurred that day, he suddenly heard the bang of the back-hall entrance-door. He jumped to his feet and ran to reconnoitre, for the library looked out through big French windows upon the lawn behind the house, and he knew that the pair of holiday makers would pass. There they were! What could the rain matter to them? Clad in high hunting boots and gleaming yellow oilskin coats, and with hunters' caps on their heads, they defied the weather. Anything prettier than Roberta's face under that cap, with the rich yellow beneath her chin, her face alight with laughter and good fellowship, Richard vowed to himself he had never seen. He wanted to wave a farewell to them, but they did not look up at his window, and he would not knock upon the pane--like a sick schoolboy shut up in the nursery enviously watching his playmates go forth to valiant games. When they had disappeared at a fast walk down the gravelled path to the gate at the back of the grounds, taking by this route a straight course toward the open country which lay in that direction not more than a mile away, the grandson of old Matthew Kendrick went reluctantly back to his work. He hated it, yet--he was tremendously glad he had taken the job. If only there might be many oases in the dull desert such as this had been! * * * * * "How do you like him, Rob?" inquired the young brother, splashing along at his sister's side down the country road. "Like whom?" Roberta answered absently, clearing her eyes of raindrops by the application of a moist handkerchief. "Mr. Kendrick." "I think Uncle Cal might have looked a long way and not picked out a less suitable secretary," said she with spirit. "Is that what he is? What is a seccertary anyway?" demanded Ted. "Several things Mr. Kendrick is not." "Oh, I say, Rob! I can't understand--" "It is a person who has learned how to be eyes, ears, hands, and brain for another," defined Roberta. "Gee! Hasn't Uncle Cal got all those things himself--except eyes?" "Yes, but anybody who serves him needs them all, too. I don't believe Mr. Kendrick ever helped anybody before in his life." "Maybe he has. He's got loads of money, Louis says." "Oh, money! Anybody can give away money." "They don't all, I guess," declared Ted, with boyish shrewdness. "Say, Rob, why wouldn't you ask him to the corn-pop frolic?" Roberta looked round at him. Drenched violets would have been dull and colourless beside the living tint of her eyes, the raindrops clinging to her lashes. "Because he was too busy," she replied, and looked away again. "I didn't think he seemed so very much in a hurry to get back to the library," observed Ted. "When I went down to the kitchen after the corn I looked in the door and he was sitting at the desk looking out of the window. But then I look out of the window myself at school," he admitted. "Ted, shall we take this path or the other?" asked his sister, halting where three trails across the meadow diverged. "This one will be the wettest," said he promptly. "But I like it best." "Then we'll take it." And she plunged ahead. "I say, Rob, but you're a true sport!" acknowledged her young brother with admiration. "Any girl I know would have wanted the dry path." "Dry?" Roberta showed him a laughing profile over her shoulder. "Where all paths are soaking, why be fastidious? The wetter we are the more credit for keeping jolly, as Mark Tapley would say. Lead on, MacDuff!" "You seem to be leading yourself," shouted Ted, as she unexpectedly broke into a run. "It's only seeming, Ted," she called back. "Whenever a woman seems to be leading, you may take my word for it she's only following the course pointed out by some man. But--when she seems to be following, look out for her!" But of this oracular statement Ted could make nothing and wisely did not try. He was quite content to splash along in Rob's wake, thinking complacently how hot and buttery the popped corn would be an hour hence. CHAPTER IV PICTURES Richard Kendrick had been guest at a good many dinners in the course of his experience, dinners of all sorts and of varying degrees of formality. Club dinners, college-class dinners, "stag" dinners at imposing hotels and cafés, impromptu dinners hurriedly arranged by three or four fellows in for a good time, dinners at which women were present, more at which they were not--these were everyday affairs with him. But, strange to say, the one sort of dinner with which he was not familiar was that of the family type--the quiet gathering in the home of the members of the household, plus one or two fortunate guests. He had never sat at such a table under his own roof, and when he was entertained in the homes of his friends the occasion was invariably made one for summoning many other guests, and for elaborate feasting and diversion of all kinds. It will be seen, therefore, that Richard looked forward to a totally new experience, without in the least realizing that he did so. His principal thought concerning the invitation to the Grays' was that he should at last have the chance to meet again the niece of his employer, in a way that would show him considerably more of her as a woman than he had been able to observe on the occasion when they had so hurriedly finished a luncheon together, and she had escaped from him as fast as possible in order to set forth on a madcap adventure with her small brother. On the day of which he expected to spend the evening with the Grays he found it not a little difficult to keep his mind upon his work with the Judge, and that gentleman seemed to him extraordinarily particular, even fussy, about having every fact brought to him painstakingly verified down to the smallest detail. When at last he was released, and he rushed home in his car to dress, he discovered that his spirits were dancing as he could not remember having felt them dance for a year. And all over a simple invitation to a family dinner! As he dressed it might have been said of him that he also could be particular, even fussy. When, at length, he was ready, he was as carefully attired as ever he had been in his life--and this not only in body but in mind. It was curious, to his own observation of himself, how differently he felt, in what different mood he was, than had ever been the case when he had left his room for the scene of some accustomed pleasure-making. He could not just define this difference to himself, though he was conscious of it; but there was in it a sense of wishing the people he was to meet to think well of him, according to their own standards, and he was somehow rather acutely aware that their standards were not likely to be those with which he was most intimate. When he entered the now familiar door of the Gray homestead he was surprised to hear sounds which seemed to indicate that the affair was, after all, much larger and more formal than he had been led to suppose. Strains of music fell upon his ears--music from a number of stringed instruments remarkably well played--and this continued as he made his entrance into the long drawing-room at the left of the hall, of whose interior he had as yet caught only tempting glimpses. As he greeted his hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Gray, Judge Calvin Gray, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Gray, wondering a little where the rest of the family could be, his eye fell upon the musicians, and the problem was solved. Ruth, the sixteen-year-old, sat before a harp; Louis, the elder son, cherished a violin under his chin; Roberta--ah, there she was! wearing a dull-blue evening frock above which gleamed her white neck, her half-uncovered arms showing exquisite curves as she handled the bow which was drawing long, rich notes from the violoncello at her knee. Not one of the trio looked up until the nocturne they were playing was done. Then they rose together, laying aside their instruments, and made the guest welcome. He had a vivid impression of being done peculiar honour by their recognition of him as a new friend, for so they received him. As he looked from one to another of their faces he experienced another of those curious sensations which had from time to time assailed him ever since he had first put his head inside the door of this house, the sensation of looking in upon a new world of which he had known nothing, and of being strangely drawn by all he saw there. It was not alone the effect of meeting a more than ordinarily alluring girl, for each member of the family had for him something of this drawing quality. As he studied them it was clear to him that they belonged together, that they loved each other, that the very walls of this old home were eloquent of the life lived here. He had of course seen and noted families before, noted them carelessly enough: rich families, poor families, big families, little, newly begun families; but of a certain sort of family of which this was the interesting and inviting type he knew as little as the foreigner, newly landed on American shores, knows of the depths of the great country's interior. And as he studied these people the desire grew and grew within him to know as much of them as they would let him know. The very grouping of them, against the effective background of the fine old drawing-room, made, it seemed to him, a remarkable picture, full of a certain richness of colour and harmony such as he had never observed anywhere. The evening did not contain as much of gay encounter with Roberta as he had anticipated--but, somehow, as he afterwards looked back upon it, he could not feel that there had been any lack. He had fancied himself, in prospect, sitting beside her at the table, exchanging that pleasant, half-foolish badinage with which young men are wont to entertain girls who are their companions at dinners, both nearly oblivious of the rest of the company. But it turned out that his seat was between his hostess and her younger daughter, Ruth, and though Roberta was nearly opposite him at the table and he could look at her to his full content--conservatively speaking--he was obliged to give himself to playing the part of the deferential younger man where older and more distinguished men are present. Yet--to his surprise, it must be admitted--he found himself not bored by that table-talk. It was such table-talk, by the way, as is not to be had under ordinary roofs. He now recognized that he had only partially appreciated the qualities of mind possessed by Judge Gray--certainly not his capacity for brilliant conversation. Mr. Robert Gray was quite his elder brother's match, however, and more than once Kendrick caught Louis Gray's eye meeting his own with the glance which means delighted pride in the contest of wits which is taking place. All three young men enjoyed it to the full, and even Ted listened with eyes full of eager desire to comprehend that which he understood to be worth trying hard for. "They enjoy these encounters keenly," said Mrs. Gray, beside Richard, as a telling story by Mr. Robert Gray, in illustration of a point he had made, came to a conclusion amid a burst of appreciative laughter. "They relish them quite as much, we think, as if they often succeeded in convincing each other, which they seldom do." "Are they always in such form?" asked Richard, looking into the fresh, attractive face of the lady who was the mistress of this home, and continuing to watch her with eyes as deferential as they were admiring. She, too, represented a type of woman and mother with which he was unfamiliar. Grace and charm in women who presided at dinner-tables he had often met, but he could not remember when before he had sat at the right hand of a woman who had made him begin, for almost the first time in his life, to wonder what his own mother had been like. "Nearly always, at night, I think," said she, her eyes resting upon her husband's face. Richard, observing, saw her smile, and guessed, without looking, that there had been an exchange of glances. He knew, because he had twice before noted the exchange, as if there existed a peculiarly strong sympathy between husband and wife. This inference, too, possessed a curious new interest for the young man--he had not been accustomed to see anything of that sort between married people of long standing--not in the world he knew so well. He seemed to be learning strange new possibilities of existence at every step, since he had discovered the Grays--he who at twenty-eight had not thought there was very much left in human experience to be discovered. "Is it different in the morning?" Richard inquired. "Quite different. They are rather apt to take things more seriously in the morning. The day's work is just before them and they are inclined to discuss grave questions and dispose of them. But at night, when the lights are burning and every one comes home with a sense of duty done, it is natural to throw off the weights and be merry over the same matters which, perhaps, it seemed must be argued over in the morning. We all look forward to the dinner-table." "I should think you might," agreed Richard, looking about him once more at the faces which surrounded him. He caught Roberta's eye, as he did so--much to his satisfaction--and she gave him a straightforward, steady look, as if she were taking his measure for the first time. Then, quite suddenly, she smiled at him and turned away to speak to Ted, who sat by her side. Richard continued to watch, and saw that immediately Ted looked his way and also smiled. He wanted so much to know what this meant, that, as soon as dinner was over and they were all leaving the room, he fell in with the boy and, putting his hand through Ted's arm, whispered with artful intent: "Was my tie under my left ear?" Ted stared up at him. "Your tie's all right, Mr. Kendrick." "Then it wasn't that. Perhaps my coat collar was turned up?" "Why, no," the boy laughed. "You look as right as anything. What made you think--" "I saw you and your sister laughing at me and it worried me. I thought I must be looking the guy some way." Ted considered. "Oh, no!" he said. "She asked me if I thought you were enjoying the dinner as well as you would have liked the corn-popping." "And what did you decide?" "I said I couldn't tell, because I never saw you at a corn-popping. I asked her that day we went to walk why she wouldn't ask you to it, but she just said you were too busy to come. I didn't think you acted too busy to come," he said naïvely, glancing up into Richard's down-bent face. "Didn't I? Haven't I looked very busy whenever you have seen me in your uncle's library?" Ted shook his head. "I don't think you have--not the way Louis looks busy in father's office, nor the way father does." Richard laughed, but somehow the frank comment stung him a little, as he would not have imagined the comment of an eleven-year-old boy could have done. "See here, Ted," he urged, "tell me why you say that. I think myself I've done a lot of work since I've been here, and I can't see why I haven't looked it." But Ted shook his head. "I don't think it would be polite to tell you," he said, which naturally did not help matters much. Still holding the lad's arm, Richard walked over to Roberta, who had gone to the piano and was arranging some sheets of music there. "Miss Gray," he said, "have you accomplished a great deal to-day?" She looked up, puzzled. "A great deal of what?" she asked. "Work--endeavour--strenuous endeavour." "The usual amount. Lessons--and lessons--and one more lesson. I have really more pupils than I can do justice to, but I am promised an assistant if the work grows too heavy," she answered. "Why, please?" "I've been wondering if the motto of the Gray family might be 'Let us, then, be up and doing.' Ted gives me that notion." Roberta glanced at Ted, whose face had grown quite grave. "Can you tell him what the motto is, Ted?" "Of course I can," responded Ted proudly. "It's _Hoc age_." Richard hastily summoned his Latin, but the verb bothered him for a minute. "_This do_," he presently evolved. "Well, I should say I came pretty near it." "What's yours?" the boy now inquired. "My family motto? I believe it is _Crux mihi ancora_; but that doesn't just suit me, so I've adopted one of my own"--he looked straight at Roberta--"_Dum vivimus, vivamus_. Isn't that a pleasanter one in this workaday world?" Ted was struggling hard, but his two months' experience with the rudiments of Latin would not serve him. "What do they mean?" he asked eagerly. "The second one means," said Roberta, with her arm about the slim young shoulders, "'While we live, let us live--well.'" Her eyes met Richard's with a shade of defiance in them. "Thank you," said he. "Do you expect me to adopt the amendment?" "Why not?" "Even you--take cross-country runs." She nodded. "And am all the better teacher for them next day." He laughed. "I should like to take one with you some time," said he. He saw Judge Gray coming toward them. "I wonder if I'm likely ever to have the chance," he added hurriedly. "_You_ take a cross-country run when you could have a sixty-mile spin in that motor-car of yours instead?" "I couldn't go cross-country in that. You see I've been by the beaten track so much I should like to try exploring something new." He was eager to say more, but Judge Gray, coming up to them, laid an affectionate hand on his niece's shoulder. "She doesn't look the part she plays by day, does she?" he said to Richard. "Curious, how times have changed. In my day a teacher looked a teacher every minute of her time. One stood in awe of her--or him--particularly of her. A prim, stuff gown, hair parted in the middle and drawn smoothly away"--his glance wandered from Roberta's ivory neck to the dusky masses of her hair--"spectacles, more than likely--with steel bows. And a manner--ye gods--the manner! How we were impressed by it! Well, well! Fine women they were and true to their profession. These modern girls who look younger than their pupils--" He shook his head with an air of being quite in despair about them. "Uncle Calvin," said Roberta, demurely, with her hand upon his arm, "do tell Mr. Kendrick about your teaching school 'across the river' when you were only sixteen years old." And, of course, that settled the chance of Richard's hearing anything about Roberta's teaching, for, though Judge Gray was called out of the room in the midst of his story, Stephen and Louis came up and joined the group and switched the talk a thousand miles away from schools and school-teaching. Presently there was music again, and this time Richard found himself sitting beside young Mrs. Stephen Gray. Between numbers he found questions to ask, which she answered with evident pleasure. "These three must have been playing together a good many years?" "Dear me, yes--ever since they were born, I think. They do make real harmony, don't they?" "They do--in more ways than one. Is that colour scheme intentional, do you think?" Mrs. Stephen's glance followed his as it dwelt upon the group. "I hadn't noticed," she admitted, "but I see it now; it's perfect. And I've no doubt Ruth thought it out. She's quite a wonderful eye for colour, and she worships Rob and likes to dress so as to offset her--always giving Rob the advantage--though of course she would have that, anyway, by virtue of her own colouring." "Blue and corn-colour--should you call it?--and gold. Dull tints in the background, and the candle-light on Miss Ruth's hair and her sister's cheek. It makes the prettiest picture yet in my new collection of family groups." Mrs. Stephen looked at him curiously. "Are you making a collection of family groups?" she inquired. "Beginning away back with your first memories?" "My first memories are not of family groups--only of nurses and tutors, with occasional portraits of my grandfather making inquiries as to how I was getting on. And my later memories are all of school and college--then of travel. Not a home scene among them." "You poor boy!" There was something maternal in Mrs. Stephen's tone, though she looked considerably younger than the object of her pity. "But you must have looked at plenty of other family groups, if you had none of your own." "That's exactly what I haven't done." "But you've lived--in the world," she cried under her breath, puzzled. A curious expression came into the young man's face. "That's exactly what I have done," he said quietly. "In the world, not in the home. I've not even _seen_ homes--like this one. The sight of brother and sisters playing violin and harp and 'cello together, with the father and mother and brother and uncle looking on, is absolutely so new to me that it has a fascination I can't explain. I find myself continually watching you all--if you'll forgive me--in your relations to each other. It's a new interest," he admitted, smiling, "and I can't tell you what it means to me." She shook her head. "It sounds like a strange tale to me," said she, "but I suppose it must be true. How much you have missed!" "I'm just beginning to realize it. I never knew it till I began to come here. I thought I was well enough off--it seems I'm pretty poor." It was rather a strange speech for a young man of his class to make. Possibly it indicated the existence of those "brains" with which his grandfather had credited him. "Well, Rob, do you think he had as dull a time as you said he would have?" The inquirer was Ruth. She stood, still in the corn-coloured frock, in the doorway of her sister's room, from which her own opened. "Please unhook me," she requested, approaching Roberta and turning her back invitingly. Roberta, already out of the blue-silk gown, released her young sister from the imprisonment of her hooks and eyes. "His manners are naturally too good to make it clear whether he had a dull time or not," was Roberta's non-committal reply. "I don't believe his manners are too good to cover up his being bored, if he was bored," Ruth went on. "He certainly wasn't bored _all_ the time, anybody could tell that. He's very good-looking, isn't he?" "If you care for that sort of good looks--yes." "What sort?" "The kind that doesn't express anything--except having had a good time every minute of one's life." "Why, Rob, what's the matter with you? Anybody would think you had something against poor Mr. Kendrick." "If he were 'poor Mr. Kendrick' there might be a chance of liking him, for he would have had to _do_ something." Roberta was pulling out hairpins with energy, and now let the whole dark mass tumble about her shoulders. The half-curling locks were very thick and soft, and as she shook them away from her face she reminded Ruth of a certain wild little Arabian pony of her own. "You throw back your head just like Sheik when he's going to bolt," Ruth cried, laughing. "I wish my hair were like that. It looks perfectly dear whatever you do with it, and mine's only pretty when it's been put just right." "It certainly was put just right to-night then," said a third voice, and Rosamond, Stephen's wife, appeared in Roberta's half-open door. "May I come in? Steve hasn't come up yet, and I'm so comfortable in this loose thing I want to sit up a while and enjoy it." Rosamond looked hardly older than Roberta; there were times when she looked younger, being small and fair. Ruth considered her quite as much of a girl as either herself or Roberta, and welcomed her eagerly to the discussion in which she herself was so much interested. "Rosy," was her first question, "did _you_ think our guest was bored to-night?" "Bored?" exclaimed Mrs. Stephen in surprise. "Why should he be? He didn't look it whenever I observed him. And if you had seen him when the trio was playing you wouldn't have thought so. By the way, he has an eye for colour. He noticed how your frock and Rob's went together in the candle-light, with the harp to give a touch of gold." "Did he say so?" cried Ruth in delight. "He asked if the colour scheme was intentional. I said I thought it probably was--on your part. Rob never thinks of colour schemes." "Neither does any _man_," murmured Roberta from the depths of the hair she was brushing with an energetic arm. "Unless it happens to be his business," she amended. "Rob doesn't like him," declared Ruth, "just because he has money and good looks and doesn't work for his living, and likes pretty colour schemes. He probably gets that from having seen so much wonderful art in his travels. Aren't painters just as good as bridge-builders? Rob doesn't think so. She wants every man to get his hands grubby." Roberta turned about, laughing. "This one isn't even a painter. Go to bed, you foolish, analytical child. And don't dream of the beautiful guest who admired your corn-coloured frock." "He only liked it because it set off your blue one," Ruth shot back. "He said nothing whatever about my lovely new white gown," Rosamond called after her. Roberta came up to her sister-in-law from behind and put both arms about her. "Stephen came and whispered in my ear to-night," said she, "and wanted to know if I had ever seen Rosy look sweeter. I said I had--an hour before. He asked what you had on, and I said, 'A gray kimono--and the baby on her arm.' He smiled and nodded--and I saw the look in his eyes." "Rob, you're the dearest sister a girl ever had given to her," Rosamond answered, returning the embrace. "And yet you two say I don't care for colour schemes," Roberta reminded her as she returned to her hair-brushing. "I care enough for them to want them made up of colours that will wash--warranted not to fade--that will stand sun and rain and only grow the more beautiful!" "What _are_ you talking about now, dear?" laughed Rosamond happily, still thinking of what Stephen had said to Roberta. CHAPTER V RICHARD PRICKS HIS FINGERS Hoofbeats on the driveway outside the window! Beside the window stood the desk at which Richard was accustomed to work at Judge Gray's dictation. And at the desk on this most alluring of all alluring Indian-summer days in middle November sat a young man with every drop of blood in his vigorous body shouting to him to drop his work and rush out, demanding: "Take me with you!" For there, walking their horses along the driveway from the distant stables, were three figures on horseback. There was one with sunny hair--Ruth--her brown habit the colour of the pretty mare she rode; one with russet-gaitered legs astride of the little Arabian pony called Sheik--Ted; one, all in dark, beautifully tailored green, with a soft gray hat pulled over masses of dusky hair, her face--Richard could see her face now as the horses drew nearer--all gay and eager for the ride--Roberta. Judge Gray, his glance following his companion's, looked out also. He rose and came and stood behind Richard at the window and tapped upon the pane, waving his hand as the riders looked up. Instantly all three faces lighted with happy recognition and acknowledgment. Ruth waved and nodded. Ted pulled off his cap and swung it. Roberta gave a quick military salute, her gray-gauntleted hand at her hat brim. Richard smiled with the Judge at the charming sight, and sighed with the next breath. What a fool he had been to tie himself down to this desk when other people were riding into the country! Yet--if he hadn't been tied to that desk he would neither have known nor cared who rode out from the old Gray stables, or where they went. The Judge caught the slight escaping breath and smiled again as the riders passed out of sight. "It makes you wish for the open country, doesn't it?" said he. "I don't blame you. I should have gone with the young folks myself if I had been ten years younger. It _is_ a fine day, isn't it? I've been so absorbed I hadn't observed. Suppose we stop work at three and let ourselves out into God's outdoors? Not a bad idea, eh?" "Not bad," agreed Richard with a leap of spirits, "if it pleases you, sir. I'm ready to work till the usual time if you prefer." "Well spoken. But I don't prefer. I shall enjoy a stroll down the avenue myself in this sunshine. What sunshine--for November!" It was barely three when the Judge released his assistant, two hours after the riding party had left. As he opened the front door and ran to his waiting car, Richard was wondering how many miles away they were and in what direction they had gone. He wanted nothing so much as to meet them somewhere on the road--better yet, to overtake and come upon them unawares. A powerful car driven by a determined and quick-witted young man may scour considerable country while three horses, trotting in company, are covering but a few short miles. Richard was sure of one thing: whichever road appealed to the young Grays as most picturesque and secluded on this wonderful Indian-summer afternoon would be their choice. Not the main highways of travel, but some enticing by-way. Where would that be? He decided on a certain course, with a curious feeling that he could follow wherever Roberta led, by the invisible trail of her radiant personality. He would see! Mile after mile--he took them swiftly, speeding out past the West Wood marshes with assurance of the fact that this was certainly one of the favourite ways. Twelve miles out he came to a fork in the road. Which trail? One led up a steep hill, the other down into the river valley, soft-veiled in the late sunshine. Which trail? He could seem to see Roberta choosing the hill and putting her horse up it, while Ruth called out that the valley road was better. With a sense of exhilaration he sent the car up the hill, remembering that from the top was a broad view sure to be worth while on a day like this. Besides, up here he might be able to see far ahead and discern the party somewhere in the distance. Just over the brow he came upon them where they had camped by the roadside. It was a road quite off the line of travel and they were a hundred feet back among a clump of pine trees, their horses tied to the fence-rail. A bonfire sent up a pungent smoke half veiling the figures. But the car had come roaring up the hill, and they were all looking his way. Two of the horses had plunged a little at the sudden noise, and Ted ran forward. Richard stopped his engine, triumphant, his pulses quickening with a bound. "Oh, hullo!" cried Ted in joyful excitement. "Where'd you come from, Mr. Kendrick? Isn't this luck!" "This is certainly luck," responded Richard, doffing his hat as the figures by the fire moved his way, the one in brown coming quickly, the one in green rather more slowly. "Your uncle released me at three and I rushed for the open. What a day!" "Isn't it wonderful?" Ruth came up to the brown mare, which was eying the big car with some resentment. She patted the velvet nose as she spoke. "Don't you mind, Bess," she reproached the mare. "It's nothing but a puffing, noisy car. It's not half so nice as you." She smiled up at Richard and he smiled back. "I rather think you're right," he admitted. "I used to think myself there was nothing like a good horse. I'd like to exchange the car for one just now; I'm sure of that." "It wouldn't buy any one of ours." Roberta, coming up, glanced from the big machine to the trio of interested animals, all of which were keeping watchful eyes on the intruder. "Nonsense, Colonel,--stand still!" "I don't want to buy one of yours; I want one of my own, to ride back with you--if you'd let me." "Anyhow, you can stop and have a bite with us," said Ted, with a sudden thought. "Can't he, Rob?" Roberta smiled. "If he is as hungry as he looks." "Do I look hungry?" "Starving. So do we, no doubt. Come and have some sandwiches." "We're going to toast them," explained Ruth, walking back to the fire with Richard when he had leaped with alacrity over the fence, his hat left behind, his brown head shining in the sun, his face happier than any of his fellow-clubmen had seen it in a year, as they would have been quick to notice if any of them had come upon him now. "We have ginger ale, too; do you like ginger ale?" "Immensely!" Richard eyed the preparations with interest. "How do you toast your sandwiches?" "On forks of wood; Ted's going to cut them." "Please let me." And the guest fell to work. He found a keen enjoyment in preparing these implements, and afterward in the process of toasting, which was done every-one-for-himself, with varying degrees of success. The sandwiches were filled with a rich cheese mixture, and the result of toasting them was a toothsome morsel most gratifying to the hungry palate. "One more?" urged Ruth, offering Richard the nearly empty box which had contained a good supply. "Thank you--no; I've had seven," he refused, laughing. "Nothing ever tasted quite so good. And I'm an interloper." "Here's to the interloper!" Ruth raised her glass and drank the last of her ginger ale. "We always provide for one. Usually it's a small boy." "More often a pair of them. And always there are Bess, Colonel, and Sheik." Roberta rose to her feet, the last three sandwiches in hand, and walked away to the horses tied to the fence-rail. Richard's eyes followed her. In the austere lines of her riding-habit he could see more clearly than he had yet done what a superb young image of health and energy she was. "Rob adores horses," Ruth remarked, looking after her sister also. "You ought to see her ride cross-country. My Bess can't jump, but her Colonel can. I don't believe there's anything in sight Rob and Colonel couldn't jump. But I can never get used to seeing her; I have to shut my eyes when Colonel rises, and I don't open them till I hear him land. But he's never fallen with her, and she says he never will." "He won't." "Why not? Any horse might, you know, if he slipped on wet ground or something." "He never will with her on his back. He's more likely to jump so high he'll never come down." Ruth laughed. "Look at Colonel rub his nose against her, now he's had the sandwich. Don't you wish you had a picture of them?" "Indeed I do!" The tone was fervent. Then a thought struck him and he jumped to his feet. "By all luck, I believe there's a little camera in the car. If there is we'll have it." He ran to the fence, took a flying leap over, and fell to searching. In a moment he produced something which he waved at Ruth. She and Ted went to meet him as he returned. Roberta, busy with the horses, had not seen. "There are only two exposures left on the film, but they'll do, if she'll be good. Will she mind if I snap her, or must I ask her permission?" "I think you'd better ask it," counselled Ruth doubtfully. "If it were one of us she wouldn't mind--" "I see." He set the little instrument with a skilled touch and rapidly, then walked toward Roberta and the horses. He aimed it with care, then he called: "You won't mind if I take a picture of the horses, will you?" Roberta turned quickly, her hand on Colonel's snuggling nose. "Not at all," she answered, and took a quick step to one side. But before she had taken it the sharp-eyed little lens of the camera had caught her, her attitude at the instant one of action, the expression of her face that of vivacious response. She flew out of range and before she could speak the camera clicked again, this time the lens so obviously pointed at the animals, and not at herself, that the intent of the operator could not be called in question. She looked at him with indignant suspicion, but his glance in return was innocent, though his eyes sparkled. "They'll make the prettiest kind of a picture, won't they?" he observed, sliding the small black box back into its case. "I wish I had another film; I'd take a lot of pictures about this place. I mean always to be loaded, but November isn't usually the time for photographs, and I'd forgotten all about it." "If you find you have a picture of me on one of those shots I can trust you not to keep it?" "I may have caught you on that first shot. I'll bring it to you to see. If your hat is tilted too much or you don't like your own expression--" "I shall not like it, whatever it is. You stole it. That wasn't fair--and when you had just been treated to sandwiches and ginger ale!" He looked into her brilliant face and could not tell what he saw there. He opened the camera box again and took out the instrument. He removed the roll of films carefully from its position, sealed it, and held it out to her. His manner was the perfection of courtesy. "There are other pictures on the roll, I suppose?" she said doubtfully, without accepting it. "Certainly. I forget what they are. But it doesn't matter." "Of course it matters. Have them developed--and give me back my own." "If I develop them I shall be obliged to see yours--if you are on it. If I once see it I may not have the force of character to give it back. Your only safe course is to take it now." Ted burst into the affair with a derisive shout. "Oh, Rob! What a silly to care about that little bit of a picture! Let him have it. It was only the horses he wanted anyway!" The two pairs of eyes met. His were full of deference, yet compelling. Hers brimmed with restrained laughter. With a gesture she waved back the roll and walked away toward the fire. "Thank you," said he behind her. "I'll try to prove myself worthy of the trust." "Rufus! Dare you to run down the hill to that big tree with me!" Ted, no longer interested in this tame conclusion of what had promised to be an exciting encounter, challenged his sister. Ruth accepted, and the pair were off down a long, inviting slope none too smooth, with a stiff stubble, but not the less attractive for that. Richard and Roberta were left standing at the top of the hill near the place where the fire was smouldering into dulness. Before them stretched the valley, brown and yellow and dark green in the November sunlight, with a gray-blue river winding its still length along. In the far distance a blue-and-purple haze enveloped the hills; above all stretched a sky upon whose fairness wisps of clouds were beginning to show here and there, while in the south the outlines of a rising bank of gray gave warning that those who gazed might look their fill to-day--to-morrow there would be neither sunlight nor purple haze. The two looked in silence for a minute, not at the boy and girl shouting below, but at the beauty in the peaceful landscape. "An Indian-summer day," said Roberta gravely, as if her mood had changed with the moment, "is like the last look at something one is not sure one shall ever see again." At the words Richard's gaze shifted from the hill to the face of the girl beside him. The sunshine was full upon the rich bloom of her cheek, upon the exquisite line of her dark eyebrow. What was the beauty of an Indian-summer landscape compared with the beauty of budding summer in that face? But he answered her in the same quiet way in which she had spoken: "Yes, it's hard to have faith that winter can sweep over all this and not blot it out forever. But it won't." "No, it won't. And after all I like the storms. I should like to stand just here, some day when Nature was simply raging, and watch. I wish I could build a stout little cabin right on this spot and come up here and spend the worst night of the winter in it. I'd love it." "I believe you would. But not alone? You'd want company?" "I don't think I'd even mind being alone--if I had a good fire for company--and a dog. I should be glad of a dog," she owned. "But not one good comrade, one who liked the same sort of thing?" "So few people really do. It would have to be somebody who wouldn't talk when I wanted to listen to the wind, or wouldn't mind my not talking--and yet who wouldn't mind my talking either, if I took a sudden notion." She began to laugh at her own fancy, with the low, rich note which delighted his ear afresh every time he heard it. "Comrades who are tolerant of one's every mood are not common, are they? Mr. Kendrick, what do you suppose those dots of bright scarlet are, halfway down the hill? They must be rose haws, mustn't they? Nothing else could have that colour in November." "I don't know what 'rose haws' are. Do you want them--whatever they are? I'll go and get them for you." "I'll go, too, to see if they're worth picking. They're thorny things; you won't like them, but I do." "You think I don't like thorny things?" he asked her as they went down the hillside, up which Ted and Ruth were now struggling. It was steep and he held out his hand to her, but she ignored it and went on with sure, light feet. "No, I think you like them soft and rounded." "And you prefer them prickly?" "Prickly enough to be interesting." They reached the scraggly rosebush, bare except for the bright red haws, their smooth hard surfaces shining in the sun. Richard got out his knife, and by dint of scratching his hands in a dozen places, succeeded in gathering quite a cluster. Then he went to work at getting rid of the thorns. "You may like things prickly, but you'll be willing to spare a few of these," he observed. He succeeded in time in pruning the cluster into subordination, bound them with a tough bit of dried weed which he found at his feet, and held out the bunch. "Will you do me the honour of wearing them?" She thrust the smooth stems into the breast of her riding-coat, where they gave the last picturesque touch to her attire. "Thank you," she acknowledged somewhat tardily. "I can do no less after seeing you scarify yourself in my service. You might have put on your gloves." "I might--and suffered your scarifying mirth, which would have been much worse. 'He jests at scars that never felt a wound,' but he who jests at them after he has felt them is the hero. Observe that I still jest." He put his lips to a bleeding tear on his wrist as he spoke. "My only regret is that the rose haws were not where they are now when I photographed the horses. Only, mine is not a colour camera. I must get one and have it with me when I drive, in case of emergencies like this one." A whimsical expression touching his lips, he gazed off over the landscape as he spoke, and she glanced at his profile. She was obliged to admit to herself that she had seldom noted one of better lines. Curiously enough, to her observation there did not lack a suggestion of ruggedness about his face, in spite of the soft and easy life she understood him to have led. Ted and Ruth now came panting up to them, and the four climbed together to the hilltop. Roberta turned and scanned the sun. Immediately she decreed that it was time to be off, reminding her protesting young brother that the November dusk falls early and that it would be dark before they were at home. Richard put both sisters into their saddles with the ease of an old horseman. "I've often regretted selling a certain black beauty named Desperado," he remarked as he did so, "but never more than at this minute. My motor there strikes me as disgustingly overadequate to-day. I can't keep you company by any speed adjustment in my control, and if I could your steeds wouldn't stand it. I'll let you start down before me and stay here for a bit. It's too pleasant a place to leave. And even then I shall be at home before you--worse luck!" "We're sorry, too," said Ruth, and Ted agreed, vociferously. As for Roberta, she let her eyes meet his for a moment in a way so rare with her, whose heavy lashes were forever interfering with any man's direct gaze, that Richard made the most of his opportunity. He saw clearly at last that those eyes were of the deepest sea blue, darkened almost to black by the shadowing lashes. If by some hard chance he should never see them again he knew he could not forget them. With beat of impatient hoofs upon the hard road the three were off, their chorusing farewells coming back to him over their shoulders. When they were out of sight he went back to the place on the hilltop where he had stood beside Roberta, and thought it all over. In that way only could he make shift to prolong the happiness of the hour. The happiness of the hour! What had there been about it to make it the happiest hour he could recall? Such a simple, outdoor encounter! He had spent many an hour which had lingered in his memory--hours in places made enchanting to the eye by every device of cunning, in the society of women chosen for their beauty, their wit, their power to allure, to fascinate, to intoxicate. He had had his senses appealed to by every form of attraction a clever woman can fabricate, herself a miracle of art in dress, in smile, in speech. He had gone from more than one door with his head swimming, the vivid recollection of the hour just past a drug more potent than the wine that had touched his lips. His head was not swimming now, thank heaven, though his pulses were unquestionably alive. It was the exhilaration of healthy, powerful attraction, of which his every capacity for judgment approved. He had not been drugged by the enchantment which is like wine--he had been stimulated by the charm which is like the feel of the fresh wind upon the brow. Here was a girl who did not need the background of artificiality, one who could stand the sunlight on her clear cheek--and the sunlight on her soul--he knew that, without knowing how he knew. It was written in her sweet, strong, spirited face, and it was there for men to read. No man so blind but he can read a face like that. The darkness had almost fallen when he forced himself to leave the spot. But--reward for going while yet a trace of dusky light remained--he had not reached the bottom of the hill road, up which his car had roared an hour before, when he saw something fallen there which made him pull the motor up upon its throbbing cylinders. He jumped out and ran to rescue what had fallen. It was the bunch of rose haws he had so carefully denuded of thorns, and which she had worn upon her breast for at least a short time before she lost it. She had not thrown it away intentionally, he was sure of that. If she had she would not have flung it contemptuously into the middle of the road for him to see. He put it into the pocket of his coat, where it made a queer bulge, but he could not risk losing it by trusting it to the seat beside him. Until he had won something that had been longer hers, it was a treasure not to be lost. Four miles toward town he passed the riding party and exchanged a fire of gay salutations with them. When he had left them behind he could not reach home too soon. He hurried to his rooms, hunted out a receptacle of silver and crystal and filled it with water, placed the bunch of rose haws in it and set the whole on his reading-table, under the electric drop-light, where it made a spot of brilliant colour. He had an invitation for the evening; he had cared little to accept it when it had been given him; he was sorry now that he had not refused it. As the hour drew near, his distaste grew upon him, but there was no way in which he could withdraw without giving disappointment and even offence. He went forth, therefore, with reluctance, to join precisely such a party as he had many times made one of with pleasure and elation. To-night, however, he found the greatest difficulty in concealing his boredom, and he more than once caught himself upon the verge of actual discourtesy, because of his tendency to become absent-minded and let the merry-making flow by him without taking part in it. Altogether, it was with a strong sense of relief and freedom that he at last escaped from what had seemed to him an interminable period of captivity to the uncongenial moods and manners of other people. He opened the door of his rooms with a sense of having returned to a place where he could be himself--his new self--that strange new self who singularly failed to enjoy the companionship of those who had once seemed the most satisfying of comrades. The first thing upon which his eager glance fell was the bunch of scarlet rose haws under the softly illumining radiance of the drop-light. His eyes lighted, his lips broke into a smile--the lips which had found it, all evening, so hard to smile with anything resembling spontaneity. Hat in hand, he addressed his treasure: "I've come back to stay with you!" he said. CHAPTER VI UNSUSTAINED APPLICATION "Mr. Kendrick, do you understand typewriting?" Judge Gray's assistant looked up, a slight surprise on his face. "No, sir, I do not," he said. "I am sorry. These sheets I am sending to the Capitol to be looked over and criticised ought to be typewritten. I could send them downtown, but I want the typist here at my elbow." He sat frowning a little with perplexity, and presently he reached for the telephone. Then he put it down, his brow clearing. "This is Saturday," he murmured. "If Roberta is at home--" He left the room. In five minutes he was back, his niece beside him. Richard Kendrick had not set eyes upon her for a fortnight; he rose at her appearance and stood waiting her recognition. She gave it, stopping to offer him her hand as she passed him, smiling. But, this little ceremony over, she became on the instant the business woman. Richard saw it all, though he did his best to settle down to his work again and pursue it with an air of absorption. Roberta went to a cupboard which opened from under bookshelves, and drew therefrom a small portable typewriter. This she set upon a table beside a window at right angles from Richard and all of twenty feet away from him; she could hardly have put a greater distance between them. The Judge drew up a chair for her; she removed the cover from the compact little machine, and nodded at him. He placed his own chair beside her table and sat down, copy in hand. "This is going to be a rather difficult business," said he. "There are many points where I wish to indicate slight changes as we go along. I can't attempt to read the copy to you, but should like to have you give me the opening words of each paragraph as you come to it. I think I can recall those which contain the points for revision." The work began. That is to say, work at the typewriter side of the room began, and in earnest. From the first stroke of the keys it was evident that the Judge had called to his aid a skilled worker. The steady, smooth clicking of the machine was interrupted only at the ends of paragraphs, when the Judge listened to the key words of the succeeding lines. Roberta sat before that "typer" as if she were accustomed to do nothing else for her living, her eyes upon the keys, her profile silhouetted against the window beside her. As far as the mechanical part of the labour was concerned, Richard had never seen a task get under way more promptly nor proceed with greater or smoother dispatch. As he sat beside his own window he nearly faced the pair at the other window. Try as he would he could not keep his mind upon his work. It was a situation unique in his experience. That he, Richard Kendrick, should be employed in serious work in the same room with the niece of a prosperous and distinguished gentleman, a girl who had not hesitated to learn a trade in which she had become proficient, and that the three of them should spend the morning in this room together, taking no notice of each other beyond that made necessary by the task in hand--it was enough to make him burst out laughing. At the same time he felt a genuine satisfaction in the situation. If he could but work in the same room with her every day, though she should vouchsafe him no word, how far from drudgery would the labour be then removed! He managed to keep up at least the appearance of being closely engaged, turning the leaves of books, making notes, arising to consult other books upon the shelves. But he could not resist frequent furtive glances at the profile outlined against the window. It was a distracting outline, it must be freely admitted. Even upon the hill, seen against the blue-and-purple haze, it had hardly been more so. What indeed could a young man do but steal a look at it as often as he might? There was no knowing when he should have such another chance. Things proceeded in this course without interruption until eleven o'clock. The Judge, finding it possible to get ahead so satisfactorily by this new method, decided to send on considerably more material to be passed upon by his critical coadjutor at the Capitol than he had originally intended to do at this time. But as the clock struck the hour a caller's card was sent in to him, and with a word to Roberta he left the room to see his visitor elsewhere. Roberta finished her paragraph, then sat studying the next one. She did not look up, nor did Richard. The moments passed and the Judge did not return. Roberta rose and threw open the window beside her, letting in a great sweep of December air. Richard seized his opportunity. "Good for you!" he applauded. "Shall I open mine?" "Please. It will warm up again very quickly. It began to seem stifling." "Not much like the place where you want to build a cabin and stay alone in a storm. Or--not alone. You are willing to have a dog with you. What sort of a dog?" "A Great Dane, I think. I have a friend who owns one. They are inseparable." By the worst of luck the Judge chose this moment to return, and the windows went down with a rush. The Judge shivered, smiling at the pair. "You young things, all warmth and vitality! You are never so happy as when the wind is lifting your hair. Now I think I'm pretty vigorous for my years, but I wouldn't sit and talk in a room with two open windows, in December." "Neither can we--hang it!" thought Richard. "Why couldn't that chap have stayed a few minutes longer--when we'd just got started?" At luncheon-time Roberta's part in the work was not completed. Her uncle asked for two hours more of her time and she cheerfully promised it. So at two o'clock the stage was again set as a business office, the actors again engaged in their parts. But at three the situation was abruptly changed. "I believe there are no more revisions to be made," declared Judge Gray with a sigh of weariness. "I have taxed you heavily, my dear, but if you are equal to finishing these eleven sheets for me by yourself I shall be grateful. My eyes have reached the limit of endurance, even with all the help you have given me. I must go to my room." He paused by Richard's desk on his way out. "Have you finished the abstract of the chapter on Judge Cahill?" he asked. "No? I thought you would perhaps have covered that this morning. But--I do not mean to exact too much. It will be quite satisfactory if you can complete it this afternoon." "I am sorry," said his assistant, flushing in a quite unaccustomed manner. "I have been working more slowly than I realized. I will finish it as rapidly as I can, sir." "Don't apologize, Mr. Kendrick. We all have our slow days. I undoubtedly underestimated the amount of time the chapter would require. Good afternoon to you." Richard sat down and plunged into the task he now saw he had merely played with during the morning. By a tremendous effort he kept his eyes from lifting to the figure at the typewriter, whose steady clicking never ceased but for a moment at a time, putting him to shame. Yet try as he would he could not apply himself with any real concentration; and the task called for concentration, all he could command. "You are probably not used to working in the same room with a typewriter," said his companion, quite unexpectedly, after a full half hour of silence. She had stopped work to oil a bearing in her machine. There was an odd note in her voice; it sounded to Richard as if she meant: "You are not used to doing anything worth while." "I don't mind it in the least," he protested. "I'm sorry not to take my work to another room," Roberta went on, tipping up her machine and manipulating levers with skill as she applied the oil. "But I shall soon be through." "Please don't hurry. I ought to be able to work under any conditions. And I certainly enjoy having you at work in the same room," he ventured to add. It was odd how he found himself merely venturing to say to this girl things which he would have said without hesitation--putting them much more strongly withal--to any other girl he knew. "One needs to be able to forget there's anybody in the same room." There was a little curl of scorn about her lips. "That might be easier to do under some conditions than others." He did not mean to be trampled upon. But Roberta finished her oiling in silence and again applied herself to her typing with redoubled energy. He went at his abstract, suddenly furious with himself. He would show her that he could work as persistently as she. He could not pretend to himself that she was not absorbed. Only entire absorption could enable her to reel off those pages without more than an infrequent stop for the correction of an error. Turning a page in the big volume of records of speeches in the State Legislature, which he was consulting, Richard came upon a sheet of paper on which was written something in verse. His eye went to the bottom of the sheet to see there the source of the quotation--Browning--with reference to title and page. No harm to read a quoted poem, certainly; his eyes sought it eagerly as a relief from the sonorous phrasing of the speech he was attempting to read. He had never seen the words before; the first line--and he must read to the end. What a thing to find in a dusty volume of forgotten speeches of a date long past! Such a starved bank of moss Till, that May-morn, Blue ran the flash across: Violets were born! Sky--what a scowl of cloud Till, near and far, Ray on ray split the shroud: Splendid, a star! World--how it walled about Life with disgrace Till God's own smile came out: That was thy face! Speeches were forgotten; he devoured the words over and over again. They seemed to him to have been made expressly for him. A starved bank of moss--that was exactly what he had been, only he had not known it, but had fancied himself a garden of rich resource. He knew better now, starved he was, and starved he would remain--unless he could make the violets his own. No doubt but he had found them! He followed an impulse. Rising, the sheet of yellowed paper in his hand, he walked over to the typewriter. Without apology he laid the sheet upon the pile of typed ones at her side. "See what I've found in an old volume of state speeches." Roberta's busy hand stopped. Her eyes scanned the yellow page upon which the stiff, fine handwriting, clearly that of a man, stood out legibly as print. Business woman she might be, but she could not so far abstract herself as not to be touched by the hint of romance involved in finding such words in such a place. "How strange!" she owned. "And they've been there a long time, by the look of the paper and ink. I never saw the handwriting before. Perhaps Uncle Calvin lent the book to somebody long ago and the 'somebody' left this in it." "Shall I put it back, or show it to Judge Gray?" He remained beside her though she had handed back the paper. "Put it back, don't you think? If you wrote out such words and left them in a book, you would want them to stay there, not to be looked at curiously by other eyes fifty years after." "That's somebody's heart there on that sheet of old paper," said he. Apparently he was looking at the paper; in reality he was stealing a glance past it at her down-bent face. "Not necessarily. Somebody may merely have been attracted by the music of the lines. Put it back, Mr. Secretary, and concern yourself with Judge Cahill. It's to be hoped that you won't find any more distracting verse between his pages." "Why not? Oughtn't one to get all the poetry one can out of life?" "Not in business hours." He laughed in spite of himself at the failure of his effort to make her self-conscious by any reading of such lines in his presence. Clearly she meant to allow no personal relation to arise between them while they were thrown together by Judge Gray's need of them. She fell to typing again with even more energy than before, if that were possible, while he--it must be confessed that before he laid the verses away between the pages for another fifty years' sleep he had made note of their identity, that he might look them up again in a seldom opened copy of the English poet on his shelves at home. They belonged to him now! In half an hour more Roberta's machine stopped clicking. Swiftly she covered it, set it away in the book-cupboard, and put her table in order. She laid the typewritten sheets together upon Judge Gray's desk in a straight-edged pile, a paperweight on top. In her simple dress of dark blue, trim as any office woman's attire, she might have been a hired stenographer--of a very high class--putting her affairs in order for the day. Richard waited till she approached his desk, which she had to pass on her way out. Then he rose to his feet. "Allow me to congratulate you," said he, "on having accomplished a long task in the minimum length of time possible. I am lost in wonder that a hand which can play the 'cello with such art can play the typewriter with such skill." "Thank you." There was a flash of mirth in her eyes. "There's music in both if you have ears to hear." "I have recognized that to-day." "You never heard it before? Music in the hammer on the anvil, in the throb of the engine, in the hum of the dynamo." "And in the scratch of the pen, the pounding of the boiler shop, and the--the--slide and grind of the trolley-car, I suppose?" "Indeed, yes--even in those. And there'll surely be melody in the closing of the door which shuts you in to solitude after this distracting day. Listen to it! Good-bye." He long remembered the peculiar parting look she gave him, satiric, mischievous, yet charmingly provocative. She was keen of mind, she was brilliant of wit, but she was all woman--no doubt of that. He was suddenly sure that she had known well enough all day the effect that she had had upon him, and that it had amused her. His cheek reddened at the thought. He wondered why on earth he should care to pursue an attempt at acquaintance with one whose manner with him was frequently so disturbing to his self-conceit. Well, at least he must forget her now, and redeem himself with an hour's solid effort. But, strange to say, although he had found it difficult to work in her presence, in her absence he found it impossible to work at all. He stuck doggedly to his desk for the appointed hour, then gave over the attempt and departed. The moral of all this, which he discovered he could not escape, was that though he had taken his university degree, and had supplemented the academic education with the broader one of travel and observation, he had not at his command that first requisite for efficient labour: the power of sustained application. In a way he had been dimly suspicious of this since the day he had begun this pretence of work for his grandfather's old friend. To-day, at sight of a girl's steady concentration upon a wearisome task in spite of his own supposably diverting presence, it had been brought home to him with force that he was unquestionably reaping that inevitable product of protracted idleness: the loss of the power to work. As he drove away it suddenly occurred to him that on the morrow, instead of coming to the house in his car, he would leave it in the garage and walk. Between the discovery of his inefficiency and his resolution to dispense with a hitherto accustomed luxury there may have been a subtler connection than appears to the eye. CHAPTER VII A TRAITOROUS PROCEEDING "We shall have to make our work count this week, Mr. Kendrick. Next week I anticipate that there will be no chance whatever to do a stroke." So spoke Judge Gray to his assistant on one Monday morning as he shook hands with him in greeting. "Very well, sir," replied the young man, with, however, a sense of its not being at all well. It was to him a regrettable fact that he seldom saw much of the various members of the household, and of one particular member so little that he was tempted to wonder if she ever took the trouble to evade him. But, of course, there was always the chance of an encounter, and he never opened the house door without the feeling that just inside might be a certain figure on its way out. "Next week is Christmas week," explained Judge Gray. He stood upon the hearth-rug, his back to the open fire, warming his hands preparatory to taking up his pen. His fingers were apt to be a little stiff on these December mornings. "During Christmas week this house is always given over to such holiday doings as I don't imagine another house in town ever knows. Christmas house-parties are plenty, I believe, but not the sort of house-party we indulge in. I am inclined to think ours beats the world." He chuckled, running his hand through the thick white locks above his brow with a gesture which Richard had come to know meant special satisfaction. "You have so many and such delightful people?" suggested his assistant. The white head nodded. "The house would hardly hold more, nor could they be more delightful. You see, there are five brothers of us. I am the eldest, Robert the youngest. Rufus, Henry, and Philip come between. Henry and Philip live in small towns, Rufus in the country proper. Each has a good-sized family, with several married sons and daughters who have children of their own. It has been my brother Robert's custom for twenty years to ask them all here for Christmas week." He began to laugh. "If the family keeps on growing much larger I don't know that there will be room to accommodate them all, but so far my sister has always managed. Fortunately this is an even more roomy old homestead than it looks. But you may easily imagine, Mr. Kendrick, that there is very little chance for solitude and quiet work during that week." "I can fully imagine," agreed Richard. "And yet I can't imagine," he amended. "I never saw such a gathering in my life." "Never did, eh? You must come in some time during the week and get a glimpse of it. We have fine times, I can tell you. My old head sometimes whirls a bit," the Judge admitted, "before the week is over, but--it's worth it. Particularly on the night of the party. The children always have a party on Christmas Eve in the attic. It's a great affair. No dancing-parties nor balls in other places can be mentioned in the same breath with it. You should see brother Rufus taking out my niece Roberta, and brother Henry dancing with Stephen's little wife. The girls accommodate themselves to the old-fashioned steps in great style." "I certainly should like to see it," Richard said, wondering if there were any possible chance of his being invited. But Judge Gray offered no suggestion of the sort, and Richard made up his mind that the Christmas Eve dance would be a strictly family affair. "Probably the country relatives are a queer lot," he decided, "and the Grays don't care to show them off. Still--that's not like them, either. It's certainly like them to do such an eccentric thing as to get their cousins all here and try to give them a good time. I should like to see it. I should!" He found his thoughts wandering many times during the morning's work to the image of Roberta dancing with the old uncle from the country. He had never met her at any of the society dances which were now and then honoured by his presence. Unquestionably the Grays moved in a circle with which he was not familiar--a circle made up of people distinguished rather for their good birth and the things which they had done than for their wealth. Nobody in the city stood upon a higher social level than the Grays, but they lived in a world in which the gay and fashionable set Richard knew were totally unknown and unhonoured. The more he thought about it the more he wished that, if only for a week, he were at least a sixteenth cousin of the Gray family, that he might be present at that Christmas party. But during the week chance did not even throw him in the way of meeting the various members of the family proper, and when Saturday night came he had discovered no prospect of attaining his wish. He knew that the guests were to arrive on the following Monday. Christmas Day was on Saturday; the night of the party then would be Friday night. And the Judge, in taking leave of him, did not even mention again his wish that Richard might see the guests together. He was coming out of the library, on his way to the hall door, hope having died hard and his spirits being correspondingly depressed, when Fate at last intervened in his behalf. Fate took the form of young Mrs. Stephen Gray, descending the stairs with a two-year-old child in her arms, such a rosy, brown-eyed cherub of a child that an older and more hardened bachelor than Richard Kendrick need not have been suspected of dissimulation if he had stopped short in his course as Richard did, to admire and wonder. "Is that a real, live boy?" cried the young man softly. "Or have you stolen him out of a frame somewhere?" Mrs. Stephen stood still, smiling, on the bottom stair, and Richard approached with eager interest. He came close and stood looking into the small face with eyes which took in every exquisite feature. "Jove!" he said, under his breath, and looked up at the young mother. "I didn't know they made them like that." She laughed softly, with a mother's happy pride. "His little sister really ought to have had his looks," she said. "But we're hoping she'll develop them, and he'll grow plain in time to save him from being spoiled." "Do you really hope that?" he laughed incredulously. "Don't hope it too fast. See here, Boy, are you real? Come here and let me see." He held out his arms. "He's very shy," began Mrs. Stephen in explanation of the situation she now expected to have develop. It did develop in so far that the child shyly buried his head in her shoulder. But in a moment he peeped out again. Richard continued to hold out his arms, smiling, and suddenly the little fellow leaned forward. Richard gently drew him away from his mother, and, though he looked back at her as if to make sure that she was there, he presently seemed to surrender himself with confidence into the stranger's care and gave him back smile for smile. Richard sat down with little Gordon Gray on his knee, and then ensued such a conversation between the two, such a frolic of games and smiles, as his mother could only regard in wonder. "He never makes friends easily," she said. "I can't understand it. You must have had plenty of experience with little children somehow, in spite of those statements about your never having seen a family like ours before." "I never held a child like this one before in my life," said Richard Kendrick. He looked up at her as he spoke. "If Roberta could see him now," thought Mrs. Stephen, "she wouldn't be so hard on him. No man who isn't worth knowing can win a baby's confidence like that. I think he has one of the nicest faces I ever saw--even though it isn't lined with care." Aloud she said: "It surprises me that you should care to begin now." "It's one of those new experiences I'm getting from time to time under this roof; that's the only way I can account for it. I never even guessed at the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a small chap like this. But I've no right to keep you while I taste new experiences. Thank you for this one. I shan't forget it." He surrendered the boy with evident reluctance. "I hear you are to have a houseful of guests next week," he ventured to add. "Do they include any first cousins of this little man?" "Two--of his own age--and any number of older ones. I'll take you up to the playroom some afternoon next week and show you the babies together, if you're interested, and if Uncle Calvin will let me interrupt his work for a few minutes." "Thank you; I'll gladly come to the house for that special purpose, if you'll let me know when. Judge Gray has decided not to try to work at all next week; he's giving me a holiday I really don't want." "Are you so interested in your labours with him?" Their eyes met. There was something very sweet and womanly in Mrs. Stephen's face and in the eyes which scanned his, or he would never have dared to say what he said next. "Not in the work itself," he confessed frankly, "though I don't find it as hard as I did at first. But--the association with Judge Gray, the--well, I suppose it's really having something definite to do with my time. Above all, just being in this house, though I don't belong to it, is getting to seem so interesting to me that I'm afraid I shall hardly know what to do with myself all next week." She could not doubt the genuineness of his admission, strange as it sounded. So the young aristocrat was really dreading a week's vacation, he who had done nothing but idle away his time. She felt a touch of pity for him; yet how absurd it was! "I wish you could meet some of the people who will be here next week," she said. "I wonder if you would care to?" "If they're anything like those of the Gray family, I already know I should care immensely." He spoke with enthusiasm. "I think some of them are the most interesting people I have ever met. My husband's Uncle Rufus, Judge Gray's brother--why, you must meet Uncle Rufus. I'll speak to Mrs. Robert Gray about it. I'm sure if she thought you cared she'd be delighted to have you know him. Then there's the Christmas Eve dance. I wonder if you would enjoy that? We don't usually have many people outside of the family, but there are always some of Rob's and Louis's special friends asked for the dance, and I'm sure I can arrange it. I'll mention it to Roberta." "Must it--er--rest with Miss Roberta? I'm afraid she won't ask me," declared Richard anxiously. "Won't she? Why? She will probably say that she doesn't believe you will enjoy it, but if I assure her that you want to come I think she will trust me. She's very exacting as to the qualifications of the guests at this dance, and will have nobody who isn't ready for a good time in every unconventional way. I warn you, Mr. Kendrick, who are used to leading cotillions, you may have to dance the Virginia reel with one of the dear little country cousins. I wonder if you will have the discernment to see that some of them are better worth meeting than a good many of the girls you probably know." She gave him a keen, analyzing look. Small and sweet as she was, clearly she belonged to this singular Gray family as if she had been born in it. He met her look unflinchingly. Then his glance fell to little Gordon. "You trusted me with the boy," said he. "I think you may trust me with the little country cousin--if she will do me the honour." "I will see that you have the chance," she assured him, and he went away feeling like a boy who has been promised a long-desired and despaired-of treat. But it was not of the Virginia reel he was thinking as he went swinging away down the wintry street. * * * * * They were sitting, most of them, before the living-room fire, discussing the plans for the week of the house-party, when Rosamond broke the news. "I've taken a great liberty," said she serenely, "for which I hope you'll all forgive me. I've--tentatively--promised Mr. Kendrick an invitation to the Christmas dance." There was a shout from Louis and Ted together. Ruth beamed with delight. Across the fireplace Roberta shot at her sister-in-law one rebellious glance. "I knew I had no right to do it," admitted Rosamond gayly. "But I knew we always asked a few young people to swell the company to the dancing size, and I was sure you couldn't ask anybody who would appreciate it more." "Hasn't the poor fellow a chance at any other merry-making?" mocked Louis. "Poor little millionaire! Won't anybody invite him to lead a Christmas Eve cotillion? I believe there's to be a most gorgeous affair of the sort at Mrs. Van Tassel Grieve's that night. Has he been inadvertently overlooked? Not with Miss Gladys Grieve to oversee the list of the lucky ones, I'll wager. It's a wonder he hadn't accepted that invitation before you got in yours." "I didn't get mine in," was Rosamond's demure rejoinder. "I laid it in an humbly beseeching hand." "How on earth did he know there was to be a dance here?" Stephen inquired. "I mentioned it." "I had already told him of it," put in Judge Gray from the background, where he was listening with interest. "I'm glad you asked him, Rosamond, and I'll answer for your forgiveness. While you are inviting I should like to invite his grandfather also. Christmas Eve is a lonely time for him, I'll be bound, and it would do him good to meet Rufus and Phil, and the rest again." "I'll tell you what we're going to end by being," murmured Louis to Roberta:--"a 'Discontented Millionaires' Home.'" * * * * * On the stairs an hour afterward a brief but significant colloquy took place between Rosamond Gray and her sister-in-law, Roberta. "Why do you mind having him come, Rob? Haven't you any charity for the poor at Christmas time?" "Poor! He's poor enough, but he doesn't know it." "Doesn't he? The night he was here at dinner he told me he felt poor." Rosamond's look was triumphant. "He feels it very much; he's never known what family life meant." "Do you imagine he can adapt himself to the conditions of the Christmas party? If I catch him laughing--ever so covertly--I'll send him home!" "You savage person! You don't expect to catch him laughing! He's a gentleman. And I believe he's enough of a man to appreciate the aunts and uncles and cousins, even those of them who don't patronize city tailors and dressmakers. Why, they're perfectly delightful people, every one of them, and he will have the discernment to see it." "I don't believe it. Where have you seen him that you have so much more confidence than I have?" "I've had one or two little talks with him that have told me a good deal. And this afternoon he met me as I was coming downstairs with Gordon. Rob, what do you think? Gordon went to him exactly as he goes to Stephen; they had the greatest time. Gordon knows better than you do whom to trust." "You and Gordon are very discerning. A handsome face and a wheedling manner--and you think you have a fine, strong character. Handsome is as handsome does, Rosy Gray of the soft heart, and a wheedling manner is dust and ashes compared with the ability to accomplish something worth effort. But--bring your nice young man to the party if you like; only take care of him. I shall be busy with the real men!" CHAPTER VIII ROSES RED It was certainly rather a curious coincidence that when Mr. Matthew Kendrick and his grandson Richard entered upon the scene of the Grays' Christmas Eve party it should be at the moment when Mr. Rufus Gray and his niece Roberta were dancing a quadrille together. Richard had just been received by his hosts and had turned from them to look about him, when his searching eye caught sight of the pair. This was the precise moment--he always afterward recalled it--when his heart gave its first great, disconcerting leap at sight of her, such a leap as he had never known could shake a man to the foundations. He had never seen precisely this Roberta before; he explained it to himself in that way. It was a good explanation. Any sane man who saw her for the first time that night must instantly have fallen under her spell. The Christmas party was the event of the year dearest to Roberta's heart. The planning for it, since she had been old enough to take her part, had been in her hands; it was she who was responsible for every detail of decoration. The great attic room, which was a glorious playroom the rest of the year, was transformed on Christmas into a fairyland. The results were brought about in much the same way as in other places of revelry, with lighting and draping and the use of evergreens and flowers; but somehow one felt that no drawing-room similarly treated could have been half so charming as the big attic spaces with their gables. And the company! At first Richard saw only the pair who danced together in the quadrille. If he had glanced about him he might have observed that the gaze of nearly all who were not dancing was centred upon those two. Uncle Rufus was the plumpest, jolliest, most altogether delightful specimen of the country gentleman that Richard had ever seen. His ruddy face was clean-shaven, his heavy gray hair waved a little with a boyish effect about his ears. He was carefully dressed in a frock coat of a cut not so ancient as to be at all odd, and it fitted his broad shoulders with precision. He wore a white waistcoat and a flowing black tie, which helped to carry out the impression of his being a boy whose hair had accidentally turned gray. As he danced he put every possible embellishment of posture and step into his task, and when he bowed to Roberta his attitude expressed the deepest reverence, offset only by his laughing face as he advanced to take her hand. But as for the girl herself--what was she? A beauty stepping out of a portrait by one of the masters? She wore her grandmother's ball gown of rose-coloured brocade, and her hair was arranged in the fashion that went with it, small curls escaping from the knot at the back of her head, a style which set off her radiant face with peculiarly piquant effect. Her cheeks matched her frock, and her eyes--what were her eyes? Black stars, or wells of darkness into which a man might fall and drown himself? She seemed to draw to herself, as she danced, among the soberer colours of her elders and the white frocks of the country cousins, all the light in the room. "I would look at something else if I could," thought Richard to himself, "but it would be only a blur to me after looking at her." When Roberta returned Uncle Rufus's bow it was with a posturing such as Richard had seen only in plays; it struck him now that the graceful droop of her whole figure to the floor was the most perfect thing he had ever seen; and when her head came up and he saw her laughing face lift again to meet her partner's, he considered the boyish old gentleman who took her hand and led her on in the intricate figures of the dance a person to be envied. "Aren't Rob and Uncle Rufus the greatest couple you ever laid eyes on?" exulted Louis Gray, coming up to greet him. "The next is going to be a waltz. Will you ask Mrs. Stephen? We'll let you begin easily, but shall expect you to end by dancing with Aunt Ruth, Uncle Rufus's wife--which will be no hardship when you really know her, I assure you. We indulge in no ultra-modern dances on Christmas Eve, you see, and have no dance-cards; it's always part of the fun to watch the scramble for partners when the number is announced." So presently Richard found himself upon the floor with little Mrs. Stephen Gray, waltzing with her according to his own discretion, though all around them were dancers whose steps ranged from present-day methods to the ancient fashion of turning round and round without ever a reverse. He saw Roberta herself revolving in slow circles in an endless spiral, piloted by the proud arm of Mr. Philip Gray. She nodded at him past her uncle's shoulder, and he wondered seriously if she meant to dance with elderly uncles all the evening. Before he could approach her she was off in the next dance with a young cousin, a lad of seventeen. Richard himself took out one of the country cousins to whom Mrs. Stephen had presented him, a very pretty, fair-haired girl in white muslin and blue ribbons; and he did his best to give her a good time. He found her pleasant company, as Mrs. Stephen had prophesied, and at another time--any time--before he came into the attic room to-night, he might have found no little enjoyment in her bright society. But in his present condition his one hope and endeavour was to get the queen of the revels, the rose of the garden, into his possession. With this end in view he faithfully devoted himself to whatever partner was given him by Louis, who had taken him in charge and was enjoying to the full the spectacle of "Rich" Kendrick exerting himself, as he had probably never done before, to give pleasure to those with whom he was thrown. At last Fate and Roberta were kind to him. It was Louis, however, who manipulated Fate in his behalf. Catching his sister as one of her cousins, a young son of Uncle Henry, released her, Louis drew her into a corner--as much of a corner as one could get into with a sister at whom, wherever she turned, half the company was looking. "See here, Rob, you're not playing fair with the guest. Here's the evening half over and you haven't given him a solitary chance. What's the matter? You're not afraid of His Highness?" "This is a dance for the uncles and cousins," retorted Roberta, "not for society young men." "But he's done his duty like a man and a brother. He's danced with aunts and cousins, too, and has done it as if it were the joy of his life. But I know what he wants and I think he deserves a reward. The next waltz will be a peach, 'Roses Red.' Give it to the poor young millionaire, Robby; there's a good girl." "Bring him here," said she with an air of resignation, and she turned to a group of young people who had followed her as bees follow their queen. "Not this time, dears," said she. "I'm engaged for this dance to a poor young man who has wandered in here and must be made to feel at home." "Is that the one?" asked one of the pretty country cousins, indicating Richard, who, obeying Louis's beckoning hand, was crossing the floor in their direction. "Oh, you won't mind dancing with him. He's as nice as he is good-looking, too." "I'm delighted to hear it," said Roberta. The next minute "the poor young man" was before her. "Am I really to have it?" he asked her. "Will you give me the whole of it and not cut it in two, as I saw you do with the last one?" "It would be rather a pity to cut 'Roses Red' in two, wouldn't it?" said she. "The greatest pity in the world." He was looking at her cheek in the last instant before they were off. Talk of roses! Was there ever a rose like that cheek? Then the music sent them away upon its wings and for a space measured by the strains of "Roses Red" Richard Kendrick knew no more of earth. Not a word did he speak to her as they circled the great room again and again. He did not want to mar the beauty of it by speech--ordinary exchange of comment such as dancers feel that they must make. He wanted to dream instead. "Look at Rob and Mr. Kendrick," said Ruth in Rosamond's ear. "Aren't they the most wonderful pair you ever saw? They look as if they were made for each other." "Don't tell Rob that," Rosamond warned her enthusiastic sister-in-law. "She would never dance with him again." "I can't think what makes her dislike him so. Look at her face--turned just as far away as she can get it. And she never speaks to him at all. I've been watching them." "It won't hurt him to be disliked a little," declared Mrs. Stephen wisely. "It's probably the first time in his life a girl has ever turned away her head--except to turn it back again instantly to see if he observed." "What would Forbes Westcott say if he could see them? Do you know he's coming back soon? Then Rob will have her hands full! Do you suppose she will marry him?" "Little matchmaker! I don't know. Nobody ever knows what Rob is going to do." Nobody ever did, least of all her newest acquaintance. If he was to have a moment with her after the dance he realized that he must be clever enough to manage it in spite of her. He laid his plans, and when the last strains of "Roses Red" were hastening to a delirious finish he had Roberta at the far end of the room, at a point fairly deserted and close to one of the gable corners where rugs and chairs made a resting-place half hidden by a screen of holly. "Please give me just a fraction of your time," he begged. "You've been dancing steadily all the evening; surely you're ready for a bit of quiet." "I'm not as tired as I was before that dance," said she, and let him seat her, though she still looked like some spirited creature poised for flight. "Aren't you really?" His face lighted with pleasure. "I feel as if I had had a draught of--well, something both soothing and exhilarating, but I didn't dare to hope you enjoyed it, too." "Oh, yes, you did," said she coolly, looking up at him for an instant. "You know perfectly well that you're one of the best dancers who ever made a girl feel as if she had wings. Of course I knew you would be. The leader of cotillions--" "That's the second time I've had that accusation flung at me under this roof," said he, and his face clouded as quickly as it had lighted. "I am beginning to wonder what kind of a crime you people think it to be a leader of cotillions. As a matter of fact, I'm not one, for I never accept the part when I can by any chance get out of it." "You have the enviable reputation of being the most accomplished person in that rôle the town can produce. You should be proud of it." He pulled up a chair in front of her and sat down, looking--or trying to look--straight into her eyes. "See here, Miss Gray," said he with sudden earnestness, "if that's the only thing you think I can do you're certainly rating me pretty low." "I'm not rating you at all. I don't know enough about you." "That's a harder blow than the other one." He tried to speak lightly, but chagrin was in his face. "If you'd just added 'and don't want to know' you'd have finished your work of making me feel about three feet high." "Would you prefer to be made to feel eight feet? Plenty of people will do that for you. You see I so often find a yardstick measures my own height, I know the humiliating sensation it is. And I'm never more convinced of my own smallness than when I see my uncles and their families at Christmas, especially Uncle Rufus. Do you know which one he is?" "You were dancing with him when I came in." "I didn't see you come in." "I might have known that," he admitted with a rueful laugh. "Well, did you dance an old-fashioned square dance with him, and is he a delightful looking, elderly gentleman with a face like a jolly boy?" "Exactly that--and he's a boy in heart, too, but a man in mind. I wonder if--" "He'd care to meet me? I'm sure you weren't going to ask if I'd care to meet him. But I'd consider it an honour if he'd let me be presented to him." "Now you're talking properly," said she. "It is an honour to be allowed to know Uncle Rufus, and I think you'll feel it so." She rose. He got up reluctantly. "Thank you, I certainly shall," said he quite soberly. "But--must we go this minute? Surely you can sit out one number, and I'll promise after that to stand on my head and dance with a broomstick if it will please your guests." "I've a mind to hold you to that offer," said she, with mischief in her eyes. "But the next number is the old-time 'Lancers,' and I'm needed. Should you like to dance it?" "With you? I--" "Of course not. With--well, with Aunt Ruth, Uncle Rufus's wife. You ought to know her if you're to know him. She's just a bit lame, but we always get her to dance the 'Lancers' once on Christmas Eve, and if you want the dearest partner in the room you shall have her." "I'll be delighted, if you'll tell me how it goes. If it's like the thing I saw you dancing I can manage it, I'm sure." "It's enough like it so you'll have no trouble. I'll dance opposite you and keep you straight. See here--" and she gave him a hasty outline of the figures. His eyes were sparkling as he followed her out of the alcove. To be allowed to dance opposite Roberta and be "kept straight" by her through the figures of an unfamiliar, old-fashioned affair like the "Lancers" was a privilege indeed. He laughed to himself to think what certain people he knew would say to his new idea of privilege. He bent before Mrs. Rufus Gray, offered her his arm, and took her out upon the floor, accommodating his step to the little limp of his partner. As he stood waiting with her he was observing her as he had never before observed a woman of her years. Of all, the sweet faces, of all the bright eyes, of all the pleasant voices--Aunt Ruth captured his interest and admiration from the moment when she first smiled at him. He threw himself into the dance with the greatest heartiness. The music was played rather slowly, to give Aunt Ruth time to get about, and the result was almost the stately effect of a minuet. Never had he put more grace and finish into his steps, and when he bowed to Aunt Ruth it was as a courtier drops knee before a queen. His unfamiliarity with the figures gave him excuse to keep his eyes upon Roberta, and she found him a pupil to whom she had only to nod or make the slightest gesture of the hand to show his part. "Did you ever see anything so fascinating as Aunt Ruth and Mr. Kendrick?" asked Mrs. Stephen in her husband's ear as they stood looking on. "There's certainly no criticism of his manner toward her," Stephen replied. "I'll say for him that he's a pastmaster at adaptation. I'll wager he's enjoying himself, too. It's a new experience for the society youth." "Stevie, why do you all insist on making a 'society youth' of him? It's his misfortune to have been born to that sort of thing, but I don't believe he cares half as much for it as he does for--just this sort." "This is a novelty to him, that's all. And he's clever enough to see that to please Rob he must be polite to her family. Rob is the stake he's playing for--till some other pretty girl takes his fancy." Rosamond shook her head. "You all do him injustice, I believe. Of course he admires Rob; men always do if they've any discrimination whatever. But--there are other things that appeal to him. Stephen"--her appealing face flushed with interest--"when you have a chance, slip out with Mr. Kendrick and take him upstairs to see Gordon and Dorothy asleep. I just went up; they look too dear!" "Why, Rosy, you don't imagine he'd care--" "Try him--just to please me. I could take him myself, but I'd rather you would. I want you to look at his face when he looks at them." "He _has_ got round you--" began her husband, but she made him promise. When Stephen came upon Richard the guest was with Uncle Rufus and Aunt Ruth. The young man was entering with great spirit into his conversation with the pair, and they were evidently enjoying him. "I'll have to give him credit for possessing genuine courtesy," thought Stephen. At this moment a group of young people came up and demanded the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray in another part of the room, and Richard was set at liberty. Stephen took him by the arm. "Before you engage again in the antic whirl I have a special exhibit to show you outside the ballroom. Spare me five minutes?" "Spare you anything," responded the guest, following Stephen out of the room as if he wanted nothing so much as to do whatever might be suggested to him. In two minutes they were downstairs and at the far end of a long corridor which led to the rooms in a wing of the big house occupied by the Stephen Grays. Richard was led through a pleasant living-room where a maid was reading a book under the drop-light. She rose at their appearance and Stephen nodded an "All right" to her. He conducted Richard to the door of an inner room, which, as he opened it, let a rush of cold air upon the two men entering. "Turn up your collar; it's winter in here," said Stephen softly. He switched on a shaded light which revealed a nursery containing two small beds side by side. Two large windows at the farther end of the room were wide open, and all the breezes of the December night were playing about the sleepers. The sleepers! Richard bent over them, one after the other, scanning each rosy face. The baby girl lay upon her side, a round little cheek, a fringe of dark eyelashes, and a tangle of fair curls showing against the pillow. The boy was stretched upon his back, his arms outflung, his head turned toward the light so that his face was fully visible. If he had been attractive with his wonderful eyes open, he was even more winsome with them closed. He looked the picture of the sleeping angel who has never known contact with earth. "I thought he would never be done looking," Stephen acknowledged afterward when he told his exulting wife about the scene. "I was half frozen, but he acted like a man hypnotized. Finally he looked up at me. 'Gray, you're a rich man,' said he. 'I suppose you know it or you wouldn't have brought me up here to show me your wealth.' 'I believe I know it,' said I. 'What does it feel like,' he asked, 'to look at these and know they're yours?' I told him that that was a thing I couldn't express. 'Forgive me for asking,' said he. 'No man would want to try to express it--to another.' I began to like him after that, Rosy--I really did. The fellow seems to have a heart that hasn't been altogether spoiled by the sort of life he's lived. On our way upstairs he said nothing until we were nearly back to the attic. Then he put his hand on my arm. 'Thank you for taking me, Gray,' he said. I told him you wanted me to do it. He only gave me a look in answer to that; but I fancy you would have liked the look, little susceptible girl." It was Ted who got hold of the guest next. "I hope you're having a good time, Mr. Kendrick," said the young son of the house, politely. "I've been so busy myself, dancing with all my girl cousins, I haven't had time to ask you." "I've been having the time of my life, Ted. I can't remember when I've enjoyed anything so much." "I saw you once with Rob. You're lucky to get her. She hasn't had time to dance once with me and I'd rather have her than any girl here, she's so jolly. She always keeps me laughing. You and she didn't seem to be laughing at all, though." "Did we look so serious? Perhaps she felt like laughing inside, though, at my awkward steps." Ted stared. "Why, you're a bully dancer," he declared. "What girl are you going to have for the Virginia reel? We always end with that--at twelve o'clock, you know." "I haven't a partner, Ted. I wish you'd get me the one I want." "Tell me who it is and I'll try. We're going down to bring up supper now, we fellows. Want to help?" "Of course I do. How is it done?" "Everything's in the dining-room and some of the younger ones go down. But we boys and men go and bring up everything for the older folks. Maybe I oughtn't to ask you, though," he hesitated. "You're company." "Let me be one of the family to-night," urged Richard. "I'll bring up supper for Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray and pretend they're my aunt and uncle, too. I wish they were." "I don't blame you; they _are_ the jolliest ever, aren't they? Come on, then. Rosy's looking at us; maybe she'll tell you not to go." They hurried away downstairs, racing with each other to the first floor. "Hullo! you, too?" Louis greeted the guest from the farther side of the table filled with all manner of toothsome viands, where he was piling up a tray to carry aloft. "Glad to see you're game for the whole show. Take one of those trays and load it with discretion--weight equally distributed, or you'll get into trouble on the stairs. You're new at this job, and it takes training." "I'll manage it," and the young man fell to work, capably assisted by a maid, who showed him what to take first and how to insure its safe delivery. On his way up, walking cautiously on account of the cups of smoking bouillon which he was concerned lest he spill, he encountered a rose-coloured brocade frock on its way down. "Good for you, Mr. Kendrick," hailed Roberta's voice, full and sweet. He paused, balancing his tray. "Why are you going down? Won't you let me bring up yours when I've given this to Unc--to Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray?" "Are you enjoying your task so well? Look out, keep your eye on the tray! There's nothing so treacherous to carry as cups so full as those." "Stop laughing at me and I'll get through all right. All I need is a little practice. Next time I come up I'm going to try balancing the whole thing on my hand and carrying it shoulder-high." "Please practice that some time when you're all alone in your own house." "I'll remember. And please remember I'm going to bring up your supper--and my own. May we have it in the place where we were after the dance?" "Yes, with six others who are waiting there already. That will be lovely, thank you. I'll be back by the time you have everything up." "Of all the hard creatures to corner," thought Richard, going on upward with his tray. "Anyhow, I can have the satisfaction of waiting on her, which is better than nothing." He found it so. The six people in the gable corner proved to be of the younger boys and girls, and, though they were all eyes and ears for himself and Roberta, he had a sufficient sense of being paired off with the person he wanted to keep him contented. They ate and drank merrily enough, and the food upon his plate seemed to Richard the best he had ever tasted at an affair of the kind. The evening was gone before he knew it. He could secure no more dances with Roberta, but he had one with Ruth, during which he made up for his silence with her sister by exchanging every comment possible during their exhilarating occupation. He began it himself: "It's a real sorrow to me, Miss Ruth, to be warned that this party is nearly over." "Is it, Mr. Kendrick? It would be to me if to-morrow weren't Christmas Day. It's worth having this stop to get to that. You see, to-night we hang up our stockings." "Good heavens, Miss Ruth--where? Not in front of any one chimney?" "No, each in our own room, at the foot of the bed. The things that won't go into the stockings are on the breakfast-table." "I'll think of you when I'm waking to my solitary dressing. I never hung up my stocking in my life." "You haven't!" Ruth's tone was all dismay. "But you must have had heaps of Christmas presents?" "Oh, yes, I've a friend or two who present me with all sorts of interesting articles I seldom find a use for. And when I was a little chap I remember they always had a tree for me." "I don't care much for trees," Ruth confided. "I like them better in shop windows than I do at home. But to hang up your stocking and then find it all stuffed and knobby in the morning, with always something perfectly delightful in the toe for the very last! Oh, I love it!" "I wish I were a cousin of yours, so I could look after that toe present myself," said Richard daringly. "You do miss a lot of fun, not having a jolly family Christmas like ours." "I'm convinced of it. See here, Miss Ruth, there's something I want you to do for me if you will. When you waken to-morrow morning send me--a Christmas thought. Will you? I'll be looking for it." Ruth drew back her head in order to look up into his face for an instant. "A Christmas thought?" she repeated, surprised. He nodded. "As if I were a brother, you know, far away at the other side of the world--and lonely. I'll really be as far away from all your merry-making as if I were at the other side of the world, you see--and I'm not sure but I'll be as lonely." "Why, Mr. Kendrick! You--lonely! I can't believe it!" Ruth almost forgot to keep step in her surprise. "But--of course, just you and your grandfather! Only--I've heard how popular--" She paused, not venturing to tell him all she had heard of his gay and fashionable friends and how they were always inviting and pursuing him. "Are you always lonely at Christmas?" she ended. "Always; though I've never realized what was the matter with me till this year. Do you care about finishing this dance? Let's stop in this nice corner and talk about it a minute." It was the same corner, deserted now, where he had twice tried to keep her elusive sister. Ruth was easier to manage, for she was genuinely interested. "Just this year," he explained, "I've found out why I've never cared for Christmas. It's a beastly day to me. I spend it as I should Sunday--get through with it somehow. At last I go out to dinner somewhere in the evening, and so end the day." "We all go to church on Christmas morning," Ruth told him. "That's a lovely way to spend part of the morning, I think. It gives you the real Christmas feeling. Don't you ever do it?" He shook his head. "Never have; but I will to-morrow if you'll tell me where you go." "To St. Luke's. The service is so beautiful, and we all have been there since we were old enough to go. I'm sure you'll like it. Wouldn't your grandfather like to go with you?" Richard stared at her. "Why, I shouldn't have thought of it. Possibly he would. We never go anywhere together, to tell the truth." "That's queer, when you're both so lonely. He must be lonely, too, mustn't he?" "I never thought about it," said the young man. "I suppose he is. He never says so." "You never say so either, do you?" suggested the girl naïvely. The two looked at each other for a minute without speaking. "Miss Ruth," said her companion at length, lowering his eyes to the floor and speaking thoughtfully, "I believe, to tell the truth, I'm a selfish beast. You've put a totally new idea into my head--more shame to me that it should be new. It strikes me that I'll try a new way of spending Christmas; I'll see to it that whoever is lonely grandfather isn't--if I can keep him from it." "You can!" cried Ruth, beaming at him. "He thinks the world of you; anybody can see that. And you won't be lonely yourself!" "Won't I? I'm not so sure of that--after to-night. But I admit it's worth trying. May I report to you how it works?" he asked, smiling. Ruth agreed delightedly, and, when they separated, watched with interest to see that the new idea had already begun to work, as indicated by the way the younger Kendrick approached the elder, who was making his farewells. "Going now, grandfather?" said he, with his hand on old Matthew Kendrick's arm. "We'll go together. I'll call James." "You going too, Dick?" inquired his grandfather, evidently surprised. "That's good." As he took leave of Roberta, Richard found opportunity to exchange with her ever so brief a conversation. "This has been quite a wonderful experience to me, Miss Gray," said he. "I shall not forget it." Her eyes searched his for an instant, but found there only sincerity. "You have done your part better than could have been expected," she admitted. "What grudging commendation! What should you have expected? That I should sulk in a corner because I couldn't have things all my own way?" She coloured richly, and he rejoiced at having put her in confusion for an instant. "Of course not. But every one wouldn't have eyes to see the beauties of a family party where all the fun wasn't for the young people." "There was only one dance I enjoyed better than the one with Mrs. Rufus Gray." He lowered his tone so that she could hear. "Since you have commended me for doing as your brother bade me--be all things to all partners--will you give me my reward by letting me tell you that I shall never hear 'Roses Red' again without thinking of the most perfect dance I ever had?" "That sounds like an appropriate farewell from the cotillion leader," said Roberta. Then instantly she knew that in her haste to cover a very girlish sense of pleasure in the thing he had said she herself had said an unkind one. She knew it as a slow red came into her guest's handsome face and his eyes darkened. Before he could speak--though, indeed, he did not seem in haste to speak--she added, putting out her hand impulsively: "Forgive me; I didn't mean it. You have been lovely to every one to-night, and I have appreciated it. I am wrong; I think you are much more--and have in you far more--than--as if you were only--the thing I said." He made no immediate reply, though he took the hand she gave him. He continued to look at her for so long that her own eyes fell. When he did speak it was in a low, odd tone which she could not quite understand. "Miss Gray," said he, "if you want to cut a man to the quick, insist on thinking him that which he has never had any love for being, and which he has grown to detest the thought of. But perhaps it's a salutary sort of surgery, for--by the powers! if I can't make you think differently of me it won't be for lack of will. So--thank you for being hard on me, thank you for everything. Good-night!" As she looked at him march away with his head up, her hand was aching with the force of the almost brutally hard grip he had given it with that last speech. Her final glimpse of him showed him with a tinge of the angry red still lingering on his cheek, and a peculiar set to his finely cut mouth which she had never noticed there before. But, in spite of this, anything more courtly than his leave-taking of her mother and her Aunt Ruth she had never seen from one of the young men of the day. CHAPTER IX MR. KENDRICK ENTERTAINS On their way downstairs, Matthew Kendrick and his grandson, escorted by Louis Gray, encountered a small company of people apparently just arrived from a train. Louis stopped for a moment to greet them, turned them over to his brother Stephen, whom he signalled from a stair-landing above, and went on down to the entrance-hall with the Kendricks. "Too bad they're late for the party," he observed. "They had written they couldn't come, I believe. Mother will have to do a bit of figuring to dispose of them. But the more the merrier under this roof, every time." "It's rather late to be putting people up for the night," Richard observed. "Your mother will be sending some of them to a hotel, I imagine. Couldn't we"--he glanced at his grandfather--"have the pleasure of taking them in our car? or of sending it back for them, if there are too many?" "Thank you, but I've no doubt mother can arrange--" Louis Gray began, when old Matthew Kendrick interrupted him: "We can do better than that, Dick," said he. He turned to Louis. "We will wait," said he, "while you present my compliments to your mother and say that it will give me great satisfaction if she will allow me to entertain an overflow party of her guests." Hardly able to believe his ears, Richard stared at his grandfather. What had come over him, who had lived in such seclusion for so many years, that he should be offering hospitality at midnight to total strangers? He smiled to himself. But the next moment a thought struck him. "Grandfather," he said hurriedly, "why not specially invite that delightful couple--the one they call 'Uncle Rufus' and his wife?" "An excellent idea," Mr. Kendrick agreed, "though they might not be willing to make the change at so late an hour." "People who were dancing with spirit ten minutes ago will be ready to travel right now," prophesied Richard. He took flying leaps up the stairs in pursuit of Louis. Catching him on the next floor, he made his request known. Louis received it without sign of surprise, but inwardly, as he hurried away, he was speculating upon what agencies could be at work with the young man, that he should be so eager to do this deed of extraordinary friendliness. Mrs. Gray hesitated over Matthew Kendrick's invitation, although her hospitable home was already crowded to the roof-tree. But, taking Judge Calvin Gray into her counsels, she was so strongly advised by him to accept the offer that she somewhat reluctantly consented to do so. "It's great, Eleanor, simply great!" he urged. "It will do my friend Matthew mere good than anything that has happened to him in a twelvemonth. As for young Richard--from what I've seen to-night you've nothing to fear from his part in the affair. Let them have Rufus and Ruth--they'll enjoy it hugely. And give them as many more as will relieve the congestion. Matthew could take care of a regiment in that stone barracks of his." "Sending Rufus and Ruth would give me quite space enough," she declared. "Rufus has the largest room in the house, and I could put this last party there. It is really very kind of Mr. Kendrick, and I shall be glad to solve my problem in that way, since you think it best." Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray, having the question put to them, acceded to it with readiness. Both had been warmly drawn toward Richard, and though his grandfather had seemed to them a figure of somewhat unnecessarily dignified reserve, the mere fact of his extending the invitation at all was to them sufficient proof of his cordiality. "It's nothing at all to pack up," Mrs. Rufus asserted. "I'll just take what I need for the night, and we'll be coming over for the tree in the morning, so I can get my other things then. I shall call it a real treat to be inside the home of such a wealthy man. How lonely he must be, living in such a great house, with only his grandson!" So Aunt Ruth descended the stairs, wearing her little gray silk bonnet and a heavy cape of gray cloth, her hand on her husband's arm, her bright eyes shining with anticipation. Aunt Ruth dearly loved a bit of excitement and seldom found much in her quiet life upon the farm. As Matthew Kendrick looked up and saw her coming slowly down, her husband carefully adjusting himself to the dip and swing of her step as she put always the same foot foremost, he found himself distinctly glad of his grandson's suggestion, since it gave him so charming a guest to entertain as Mrs. Rufus Gray. In the interval Richard had retired to a telephone, and had made the wires between his present position and the stone pile warm with his orders. In consequence a certain gray-haired housekeeper, lately returned from some family festivities of her own and about to retire, found herself galvanized into activity by the sound of a well-known and slightly imperious voice issuing upsetting instructions to have the best suite of rooms in the house made ready within half an hour for occupancy, and the house itself lighted for the reception of the guests. Other commands to butler and Mr. Richard's own manservant followed in quick succession, and when the young man turned away from the telephone he was again smiling to himself at thought of the consternation he was causing in a household accustomed to be run upon such lines of conservatism and well defined routine that any deviation therefrom was likely to prove most unacceptable. He himself was at home there such a small portion of his time, and during the periods he spent there was so careful never to bring within its walls any festival-making of his own, he knew just how astonishing to the middle-aged housekeeper, the solemn-faced old butler, and the rest of them, would be these midnight orders. He was enjoying the giving of such orders all the more for that! Old Matthew Kendrick assisted Mrs. Rufus Gray into his luxuriously fitted, electric-lighted town-car as if she had been a royal personage, wrapping about her soft, thick rugs until she was almost lost to view. "Why, I couldn't be cold in this shut-in place," she protested. "Not a breath could touch any one in here, I should say." "I should call it pretty snug," Rufus Gray agreed with his wife, looking about him at the comfortable appointments of the car. "But there's just one thing a carriage like this wouldn't be good for, and that's taking a party of young folks on a sleigh ride, on a snapping winter's night!" His bright brown eyes regarded those of Matthew Kendrick with some curiosity. "I reckon you never took that sort of a ride, when you were a boy?" he queried. "Yes, yes, I have--many a time," Mr. Kendrick insisted. "And great times we had. Boys and girls needed no electricity to keep them comfortable on the coldest of nights. It's my grandson Richard who feels this sort of thing a necessity. Until he came home a carriage and pair had been all the equipage I needed." "Grandfather is getting where a little extra warmth on a blustering winter's day is essential to his comfort," Richard declared, feeling a curious necessity, somehow, to justify the use of the expensive and commodious equipage in the eyes of the country gentleman who seemed to regard it so lightly. "It's very nice," Mrs. Gray said quickly. "I should hardly know I was outdoors at all. And how smoothly it runs along over the streets. The young man out there in front must be a very good driver, I should think. He doesn't seem to mind the car-tracks at all." "No, Rogers doesn't bother much about car-tracks," Richard agreed gravely. "His idea is to get home and to bed." "It is pretty late--and I'm afraid waiting for us has made you a good deal later than you would have been," said Mrs. Gray regretfully. "Not a bit--no, no." "We'll go right to our room as soon as we get there," said she, "and you mustn't trouble to do a thing extra for us." "It's going to be a great pleasure to have you under our roof," the young man assured her, smiling. Arrived at the great stone mansion which was the well-known residence of Matthew Kendrick, as it had been of his family for several generations, Richard stared up at it with a sense of strangeness. Except for the halls and dining-room, his grandfather's quarters and his own, he could not remember seeing it lighted as other homes were lighted, with rows of gleaming windows here and there, denoting occupancy by many people. Now, one whole wing, where lay the special suite of guest-rooms used at long intervals for particularly distinguished persons, was brilliantly shining out upon the December night. The car drew up beneath a massive covered entrance-porch, and a great door swung back. A heavy-eyed, elderly butler admitted the party, which were ushered into an impressive but gloomy and inhospitable looking reception-room. Matthew Kendrick glanced somewhat uncertainly at his nephew, who promptly took things in charge. "I thought perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Gray would have some sandwiches and--er--something more--with us, before they go to their rooms," Richard suggested, nodding at Parks, the heavy-eyed. "Yes, yes--" agreed Mr. Kendrick, but Mrs. Rufus broke in upon him. "Oh, no, Mr. Kendrick!" she cried softly, much distressed. "Please don't think of such a thing--at this hour. And we've just had refreshments at Eleanor's. Don't let us keep you up a minute. I'm sure you must be tired after this long evening." "Not at all, Madam. Nor do you yourself look so," responded Matthew Kendrick, in his somewhat stately manner. "But you may be feeling like sleep, none the less. If you prefer you shall go to your rest at once." He turned to his grandson again. "Dick--" "I'll take them up," said that young man, eagerly. He offered his arm to Aunt Ruth. Uncle Rufus looked about him for the hand-bag which his wife had so hurriedly packed. "We had a little grip--" said he, uncertainly. "We'll find it upstairs, I think," Richard assured him, and led the way with Aunt Ruth. "I'm sorry we have no lift," he said to her, "but the stairs are rather easy, and we'll take them slowly." Aunt Ruth puzzled a little over this speech, but made nothing of it and wisely let it go. The stairs were easy, extremely easy, and so heavily padded that she seemed to herself merely to be walking up a slight, velvet-floored incline. The whole house, it may be explained, was fitted and furnished after the style of that period in the latter half of the last century, when heavily carpeted floors, heavily shrouded windows, heavily decorated walls, and heavily upholstered chairs were considered the essentials of luxury and comfort. Old Matthew Kendrick had never cared to make any changes, and his grandson had had too little interest in the place to recommend them. The younger man's own private rooms he had altered sufficiently to express his personal tastes, but the rest of the house was to him outside the range of his concern. The whole place, including his own quarters, was to him merely a sort of temporary habitation. He had no plans in relation to it, no sense of responsibility in regard to it. When he had ordered the finest suite of rooms in the house to be put in readiness for the guests, it was precisely as he would have requested the management of a great hotel to place at his disposal the best they had to offer. To tell the truth, he had no recollection at all of how the rooms looked or what their dimensions were. Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray, entering the first room of the series, a large and elaborately furnished apartment with the effect of a drawing-room, much gilt and brocade and many mirrors in evidence, looked at Richard in some surprise, as he seated them. He himself went to the door of a second room, glanced in, nodded, and returned to his guests. "I hope you will find everything you want in there," he said. "If you don't, please ring. You will see your dressing-room on the left, Mr. Gray. I will send you my man in the morning to see if he can do anything for you." "I shan't need any man, thank you," protested Mr. Gray. When, after lingering a minute or two, their young host had bade them good-night and left them, the elderly pair looked at each other. Uncle Rufus's eyes were twinkling, but in his wife's showed a touch of soft indignation. "It seems like making a joke of us," said she, "to put us in such a place as this, when he can guess what we're used to." "He doesn't mean it as a joke," her husband protested good-humouredly. "He wants to give us the best he's got. I don't mind a mite. To be sure, I could get along with one looking-glass to shave myself in, but it's kind of interesting to know how many some folks think necessary when they aren't limited. Let's go look in our sleeping-room. Maybe that's a little less princely." Aunt Ruth limped slowly across the Persian carpet, and stood still in the doorway of the room Richard had designated as hers. Uncle Rufus stared in over her small shoulder. "Well, well," he chuckled. "I reckon Napoleon Bonaparte wouldn't have thought this any too fine for him, but it sort of dazzles me. I'm glad somebody's got that bed ready to sleep in. I shouldn't have been sure 'twas meant for that, if they hadn't. There seems to be another room on behind this one--what's that?" He marched across and looked in. "Now, if I was rich, I wouldn't mind having one of these opening right out of my room. What there isn't in here for keeping yourself clean can't be thought of." "Rufus," said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled bathroom, "I want you should look at these bath-towels. I never in my life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost--I don't know what they cost--I didn't know there were such bath-towels made!" "I don't want to wrap myself in a blanket," asserted her husband. "I want to know I've got a towel in my hand, that I can whisk round me and slap myself with. Look here, let's get to bed. We could sit up all night examining round into our accommodations. For my part, Eleanor's style of living suits me a good deal better than this kind of elegance. Her house is fine and comfortable, but no foolishness. There's one thing I do like, though. This carpet feels mighty good to your bare feet, I'll make sure!" He presently made sure, walking back and forth barefooted across the soft floor, chuckling like a boy, and making his toes sink into the heavy pile of the great rug. He surveyed his small wife, in her dressing-gown, sitting before the wide mirror of an elaborate dressing-table, putting her white locks into crimping pins. "Ruth," said he, with sudden solemnity, "I forgot to undress in my dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take 'em off again in there?" He pointed across to an adjoining room, brilliant with lights and equipped with all manner of furnishings adapted to masculine uses. His wife turned about, laughing like a girl. "Maybe in there," she suggested, "you could find a chair small enough to hang your coat across the back of. I'm afraid it'll get all wrinkled, folded like that." Uncle Rufus explored. After a minute he came back. "There's a queer sort of bureau-thing in there all filled with coat-and-pants hangers," he announced. "I'm going to put my things in it. It'll keep 'em from getting wrinkled, as you say." When he returned: "There's another bed in there," he said. "I don't know what it's for. It's got the covers all turned back, too, just like this one. Maybe we've made a mistake. Maybe there's somebody that has that room, and he hasn't come in yet. Do you suppose I'd better shut the door between?" "Maybe you had," agreed his wife anxiously. "It would be dreadful if he should come in after a while. Still--young Mr. Kendrick called it your dressing-room." "And my clothes are in there," added Uncle Rufus. "It's all right. Probably the girl made a mistake when she fixed that bed--thought there was a child with us, maybe." "You might just shut the door," Aunt Ruth suggested. "Then if anybody did come in--" Uncle Rufus shook his head. "It's meant for us," he asserted with conviction as he climbed into bed. "He said 'dressing-room' and pointed. The girl's made a mistake, that's all. It's a good place for my clothes, and I'm going to leave 'em there. Will you put out the lights?" Aunt Ruth looked around the wall. "I can never get used to electric lights at Eleanor's," said she. "And I don't see the place here, at all." She searched for the switches some time in vain, but at length discovered them and succeeded in extinguishing the lights of the room the pair were in. But the lights of the adjoining rooms still burned with brilliancy. "Oh, dear!" she sighed softly. Then she appealed to her husband. Uncle Rufus, who had nearly fallen asleep while his wife had been searching, spoke without opening his eyes. "Shut all the doors and leave 'em going," he advised, "Oh, no, I can't do that! Think of the cost, running all night so." "I reckon they can afford it," he commented drowsily. But Aunt Ruth continued to hunt, first in the large outer room which looked like a drawing-room, and possessed an elaborate central electrolier whose control, even after she discovered the switch, caused the little lady considerable perplexity. When she had at length succeeded in extinguishing the illumination she returned, guided by the lights in the other rooms. The bathroom keys were soon found, and then she applied herself to discovering those in the dressing-room. These eluded her for some minutes, but at length, all lights being turned off, Aunt Ruth found herself in total darkness. She groped about in it for some time without success, for the heavy curtains had been closely drawn, and not a ray of light penetrated the spacious rooms from any quarter. After having followed the wall for what seemed an interminable distance without reaching a recognizable position, she was forced to call to her husband. He was asleep, and responded only after being many times addressed. Then he sat up in bed. "Hey? What? What's the matter?" he inquired anxiously, peering into the darkness. "Nothing, dear--only I couldn't find the bed after I turned the lights out. Keep on talking, and I'll work my way to you," answered his wife's voice from some distance. Guided by his voice--he found plenty to say on the subject of putting people to bed in the midst of large, unfamiliar spaces--she groped her way to his side. He put out a gentle hand to welcome her, and as she took her place the two fell to laughing softly over the whole situation. "Why," said Uncle Rufus, "for all I've slept for forty years in the same room--and a pretty sizable room I've always thought it--I've never got so I could plough a straight furrow through it in the dark. I reckon a lifetime would be too short to get to know my way round this plantation." He could with difficulty be restrained from telling Richard about the incident next morning, when that young man came to their rooms to escort them down to breakfast. "I'm glad to have somebody pilot me," Uncle Rufus declared, his eyes twinkling as he followed after his wife, who leaned on Richard's arm. "A man must have a pretty good sense of direction to keep his bearings in a house as big as this." Richard laughed. "It's rather a straight road to the dining-room. I think I must have worn a path there since I came. Here we are--and here's grandfather down before us. He's the first one in the house to be up, always." Matthew Kendrick advanced to meet his guests, shaking hands with great cordiality. "It seems very wonderful, Madam Gray," said he, "to have a lady in the house on Christmas morning. Will you do me the honour to take this seat?" He put her in a chair before a massive silver urn, under which burned a spirit lamp. "And will you pour our coffee? It's many a year since we've had coffee served from the table, poured by a woman's hand." "Why, I should be greatly pleased to pour the coffee," cried Aunt Ruth happily. Her bright glance was fastened upon a mass of scarlet flowers in the centre of the table, for which Richard had sent between dark and daylight. He smiled across the table at her. "Are they real?" she breathed. "Absolutely! Splendid colour, aren't they? I can't remember the name, but they look like Christmas." Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Rufus Gray had ever in their lives eaten such a breakfast as was now served to them. Such extraordinary fruits, such perfectly cooked game, such delicious food of various sorts--they could only taste and wonder. Richard, with a young man's healthy appetite, kept them company, but his grandfather made a frugal meal of toast, coffee, and a single egg, quite as if he were more accustomed to such simple fare than to any other. The breakfast over, Mr. Kendrick took them to his own private rooms, to show them a painting of which he had been telling them. Richard accompanied them, having constituted himself chief assistant to Mrs. Gray, to whom he had taken a boyish liking which was steadily growing. Establishing her in a comfortable armchair, he sat down beside her. "Now, Mr. Richard," said she, presently, while Mr. Matthew Kendrick and her husband were discussing an interesting question over their cigars in an adjoining room--Mr. Kendrick's adherence to the code of an earlier day making it impossible for him to think of smoking in the presence of a lady--"I wonder if there isn't something you would let me do for you. You and your grandfather living alone, so, you must have things that need a woman's hand. While I sit here I'd enjoy mending some socks or gloves for you." Richard looked at her. The sincerity of her offer was so evident that he could not turn it aside with an evasion or a refusal. But he had not an article in the world that needed mending. When things of his reached that stage they were invariably turned over to his man, Bliss. He considered. "That's certainly awfully kind of you, Mrs. Gray," said he. "But--have you--" She put her hand into a capacious pocket and produced therefrom a tiny "housewife," stocked with thimble, needles, and all necessary implements. "I never go without it," said she. "There's always somebody to be mended up when you least expect it. My niece Roberta tripped on one of her flounces last night, dancing--and not being used to dancing in such full, old-fashioned skirts. Rosy was starting to pin it up, but I whipped out my kit--and how they laughed, to see a pocket in a best dress!" She laughed herself, at the recollection. "But I had Robby sewed up in less time than it takes to tell it--much better than pinning!" "How beautifully she danced those old-fashioned dances," Richard observed eagerly. "It was a great pleasure to see her." "Yes, it's generally a pleasure to see Robby do things," Roberta's aunt agreed. "She goes into them with so much vim. When she comes out to visit us on the farm it's the same way. She must have a hand in the churning, or the sweeping, or something that'll keep her busy. Aren't you going to get me the things, Mr. Richard?" The young man hastened away. Arrived before certain drawers and receptacles, he turned over piles of hosiery with a thoughtful air. Presently selecting a pair of black silk socks of particularly fine texture, he deliberately forced his thumb through either heel, taking care to make the edges rough as possible. Laughing to himself, he then selected a pair of gray street gloves, eyed them speculatively for a moment, then, taking out a penknife, cut the stitches in several places, making one particularly long rent down the side of the left thumb. He regarded these damages doubtfully, wondering if they looked entirely natural and accidental; then, shaking his head, he gathered up the socks and gloves and returned with them to Aunt Ruth. She looked them over. "For pity's sake," said she, "you wear out your things in queer ways! How did you ever manage to get holes in your heels right on the bottom, like that? All the folks I ever knew wear out their heels on the back or side." Richard examined a sock. "That is rather odd," he admitted. "I must have done it dancing." "I shall have to split my silk to darn these places," commented Aunt Ruth. "These must be summer socks, so thin as this." She glanced at the trimly shod foot of her companion and shook her head. "You young folks! In my day we never thought silk cobwebs' warm enough for winter." "Tell me about your day, won't you, please?" the young man urged. "Those must have been great days, to have produced such results." The little lady found it impossible to resist such interest, and was presently talking away, as she mended, while her listener watched her flying fingers and enjoyed every word of her entertaining discourse. He artfully led her from the past to the present, brought out a tale or two of Roberta's visits at the farm, and learned with outward gravity but inward exultation that that young person had actually gone to the lengths of begging to be allowed to learn to milk a cow, but had failed to achieve success. "I can't imagine Miss Roberta's failing in anything she chose to attempt," was his joyous comment. "She certainly failed in that." Aunt Ruth seemed rather pleased herself at the thought. "But then she didn't really go into it seriously--it was because Louis put her up to it--told her she couldn't do it. She only really tried it once--and then spent the rest of the morning washing her hair. Such a task--it's so heavy and curly--" Aunt Ruth suddenly stopped talking about Roberta, as if it had occurred to her that this young man looked altogether too interested in such trifles as the dressing of certain thick, dark locks. Presently, the mending over, the Grays were taken, according to promise, back to the Christmas celebrations in the other house, and Richard, returning to his grandfather, proposed, with some unwonted diffidence of manner, that the two attend service together at St. Luke's. The old man looked up at his grandson, astonishment in his face. "Church, Dick--with you?" he repeated. "Why, I--" He hesitated. "Did the little lady we entertained last night put that into your head?" "She put several things into my head," Richard admitted, "but not that. Will you go, sir? It's fully time now, I believe." Matthew Kendrick's keen eyes continued to search his grandson's face, to Richard's inner confusion. Outwardly, the younger man maintained an attitude of dignified questioning. "I am willing to go," said Mr. Kendrick, after a moment. At St. Luke's, that morning, from her place in the family pew, Ruth Gray, remembering a certain promise, looked about her as searchingly as was possible. Nowhere within her line of vision could she discern the figure of Richard Kendrick, but she was none the less confident that somewhere within the stately walls of the old church he was taking part in the impressive Christmas service. When it ended and she turned to make her way up the aisle, leading a bevy of young cousins, her eyes, beneath a sheltering hat-brim, darted here and there until, unexpectedly near-by, they encountered the half-amused but wholly respectful recognition of those they sought. As Ruth made her slow progress toward the door she was aware that the Kendricks, elder and younger, were close behind her, and just before the open air was reached she was able to exchange with Richard a low-spoken question and answer. "Wasn't it beautiful? Aren't you glad you came?" "It _was_ beautiful, Miss Ruth--and I'm more than glad I came." * * * * * Several hours earlier, on that same Christmas morning, Ruth had rushed into Roberta's room, crying out happily: "Flowers--flowers--flowers! For you and Rosy and mother and me! They just came. Mr. Richard Loring Kendrick's card is in ours; of course it's in yours. Here are yours; do open the box and let me see! Mother's are orchids, perfectly wonderful ones. Rosy's are mignonette, great clusters, a whole armful--I didn't know florists grew such richness--they smell like the summer kind. She's so pleased. Mine are violets and lilies-of-the-valley. I'm perfectly crazy over them. Yours--" Roberta had the cover off. Roses! Somehow she had known they would be roses--after last night. But such roses! Ruth cried out in ecstasy, bending to bury her face in the glorious mass. "They're exactly the colour of the old brocade frock, Robby," she exulted. She picked up the card in its envelope. "May I look at it?" she asked, with her fingers already in the flap. "Ours all have some Christmas wish on, and Rosy's adds something about Gordon and Dorothy." "You might just let me see first," said Roberta carelessly, stretching out her hand for the card. Ruth handed it over. Roberta turned her head. "Who's calling?" she murmured, and ran to the door, card in hand. "I didn't hear any one," Ruth called after her. But Roberta disappeared. Around the turn of the hall she scanned her card. "_Thorns to the thorny_," she read, and stood staring at the unexpected words written in a firm, masculine hand. That was all. Did it sting? Yet, curiously enough, Roberta rather liked that odd message. When she came back, Ruth, in the excitement of examining many other Christmas offerings, had rushed on, leaving the box of roses on Roberta's bed. The recipient took out a single rose and examined its stem. Thorns! She had never seen sharper ones--and not one had been removed. But the rose itself was perfection. CHAPTER X OPINIONS AND THEORIES Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray were the last to leave the city, after the house-party. They returned to their brother Robert's home for a day, when the other guests had gone, and it was on the evening before their departure that they related their experiences while at the house of Matthew Kendrick. With most of the members of the Gray household, they were sitting before the fire in the living-room when Aunt Ruth suddenly spoke her mind. "I don't know when I've felt so sorry for the too rich as I felt in that house," said she. She was knitting a gray silk mitten, and her needles were flying. "Why, Aunt Ruth?" inquired her nephew Louis, who sat next her, revelling in the comfort of home after a particularly harassing day at the office. "Did they seem to lack anything in particular?" "I should say they did," she replied. "Nothing that money can buy, of course, but about everything that it can't." "For instance?" he pursued, turning affectionate eyes upon his aunt's small figure in its gray gown, as the firelight played upon it, touching her abundant silvering locks and making her eyes seem to sparkle almost as brilliantly as her swiftly moving needles. Aunt Ruth put down her knitting for an instant, looking at her nephew. "Why, you know," said she. "You're sitting in the very middle of it this minute!" Louis looked about him, smiling. He was, indeed, in the midst of an accustomed scene of both home-likeness and beauty. The living-room was of such generous proportions that even when the entire family were gathered there they could not crowd it. On a wide couch, at one side of the fireplace, sat his father and mother, talking in low tones concerning some matter of evident interest, to judge by their intent faces. Rosamond, like the girl she resembled, sat, girl fashion, on a pile of cushions close by the fire; and Stephen, her husband, not far away, by a table with a drop-light, was absorbed in a book. Uncle Rufus was examining a pile of photographs on the other side of the table. Ted sprawled on a couch at the far end of the room, deep in a boy's magazine, a reading light at his elbow. At the opposite end of the room, where the piano stood, Roberta, music rack before her, was drawing her bow across nearly noiseless strings, while Ruth picked softly at her harp: indications of intention to burst forth into musical strains when a hush should chance to fall upon the company. Judge Calvin Gray alone was absent from the gathering, and even as Louis's eyes wandered about the pleasant room, his uncle's figure appeared in the doorway. As if he were answering his sister Ruth, Judge Gray spoke his thought. "I wonder," said he, advancing toward the fireside, "if anywhere in this wide world there is a happier family life than this!" Louis sprang up to offer Judge Gray the chair he had been occupying--a favourite, luxuriously cushioned armchair, with a reading light beside it ready to be switched on at will, which was Uncle Calvin's special treasure, of an evening. Louis himself took up his position on the hearth-rug, opposite Rosamond. Aunt Ruth answered her brother energetically: "None happier, Calvin, I'll warrant, and few half as happy. I can't help wishing those two people Rufus and I've been visiting could look in here just now." "Why make them envious?" suggested Louis, who loved to hear his Aunt Ruth's crisp speeches. "The question is--would they be envious?" This came from Stephen, whose absorption in his book evidently admitted of penetration from the outside. "Why, of course they would!" declared Aunt Ruth. "You should have seen the way they had me pour the coffee and tea, all the while I was there. That young man Richard was always getting me to pour something--said he liked to see me do it. And he was always sending a servant off and doing things for me himself. If I'd been a young girl he couldn't have hovered round any more devotedly." A general laugh greeted this, for Aunt Ruth's expression of face as she told it was provocative. "We can readily believe that, Ruth," declared Judge Gray, and his brother Robert nodded. The low-voiced talk between Mr. Robert Gray and his wife had ceased; Stephen had laid down his book; Ruth had stopped plucking at her harp strings; and only Roberta still seemed interested in anything but Aunt Ruth and her experiences and opinions. "I mended his socks and gloves for him," announced Aunt Ruth contentedly. "You needn't tell me they don't miss a woman's hand about the house, over there." "She mended Rich Kendrick's socks and gloves!" murmured Louis, with a laughing, incredulous glance at Rosamond, who lifted delighted eyes to him. "I can't believe it. He must have made holes in them on purpose." "Why, not even a spendthrift would do that!" Aunt Ruth promptly denied the possibility of such folly. "I don't say but they are lavish with things there. Rufus and I were a good deal bothered by all their lights. We couldn't seem to get them all put out. And every time we put them out, anywhere, somebody'd turn them on again for us." Uncle Rufus broke in here, narrating their experience with the various switch-buttons in the suite of rooms, and the company laughed until they wept over his comments. "But all that's neither here nor there," said he, finally. "Of course we weren't up to such elaborate arrangements, and it made us feel sort of rustic. But I can tell you they didn't spare any pains to make us comfortable and at home--if, as Ruth says, you can make anybody feel at home in a great place like that. I feel, as she does, sorry for 'em both. They're pretty fine gentlemen, if I'm any judge, and I don't know which I like better, the older or the younger." "There can be no question about the older," said his brother, Robert Gray, joining in the talk with evident interest. "Mr. Matthew Kendrick made his place long ago in the business world as one of the great and just. He has taught that world many fine lessons of truth and honour, as well as of success." Judge Gray nodded. "I'm glad to hear that you appreciate him, Robert," said he. "Few know better than I how deserved that is. And still fewer recognize the fine and sensitive nature behind the impression of power he has always given. He is the type of man, as sister Ruth here is quick to discern, who must be lonely in the midst of his great wealth, for the lack of just such a privilege as this we have here to-night, the close association with people whom we love, and with whom we sympathize in all that matters most. Matthew Kendrick was a devoted husband and father. In spite of his grandson's presence, of late, he must sorely long for companionship." "His grandson's going to give him more of that than he has," declared Aunt Ruth, smiling over her knitting as if recalling a pleasant memory. "He and I had quite a bit of talk while I was there, and he's beginning to realize that he owes his grandfather more than he's given him. I had a good chance to see what was in that boy's heart, and I know there's plenty of warmth there. And there's real character in him, too. I've had enough sons of my own to know the signs, and the fact that they were poor in this world's goods, and he is rich--too rich--doesn't make a mite of difference in the signs!" Mrs. Robert Gray, who had been listening with an intent expression in eyes whose beauty was not more appealing than their power of observation was keen, now spoke, and all turned to her. She was a woman whose opinion on any subject of common interest was always waited for and attended upon. Her voice was rich and low--her family did not fully know how dear to their ears was the sound of that voice. "Young Mr. Kendrick," said she, "couldn't wish, Ruth, for a more powerful advocate than you. To have you approve him, after seeing him under more intimate circumstances than we are likely to do, must commend him to our good will. To tell the frank truth, I have been rather afraid to admit him to my good graces, lest there be really no great force of character, or even promise of it, behind that handsome face and winning manner. But if you see the signs--as you say--we must look more hopefully upon him." "She's not the only one who sees signs," asserted Judge Gray. "He's coming on--he's coming on well, in his work with me. He's learning really to work. I admit he didn't know how when he came to me. Something has waked him up. I'm inclined to think," he went on, with a mischievous glance toward the end of the room where sat the noiseless musicians, "it might have been my niece Roberta's shining example of industry when she spent a day with us in my library, typing work for me back in October. Never was such a sight to serve as an inspiration for a laggardly young man!" There was a general laugh, and all eyes were turned toward that end of the room devoted to the users of the musical instruments. In response came a deep, resonant note from Roberta's 'cello, over which the silent bow had been for some time suspended. There followed a minor scale, descending well into the depths and vibrating dismally as it went. Louis, a mocking light in his eye, strolled down the room to his sisters. "That's the way you feel about it, eh?" he queried, regarding Roberta with brotherly interest. "Consigning the poor, innocent chap to the bottom of the ladder, when he's doing his best to climb up to the sunshine of your smile. Have you no respect for the opinion of your betters?" "Get out your fiddle and play the Grieg _Danse Caprice_, with us," was her reply, and Louis obeyed, though not without a word or two more in her ear which made her lift her bow threateningly. Presently the trio were off, playing with a spirit and dash which drew all ears, and at the close of the _Danse_ hearty applause called for more. After this diversion, naturally enough, new subjects came up for discussion. Returning to the living-room in search of a dropped letter, after the family had dispersed for the night, Roberta found her mother lingering there alone. She had drawn a low chair close to the fire, and, having extinguished all other lights, was sitting quietly looking into the still glowing embers. Roberta, forgetting her quest, came close, and flinging a cushion at her mother's knee dropped down there. This was a frequent happening, and the most intimate hours the two spent together were after this fashion. There was no speech for a little, though Mrs. Gray's hand wandered caressingly about her daughter's neck in a way Roberta dearly loved, drawing the loosened dark locks away from the small ears, or twisting a curly strand about her fingers. Suddenly the girl burst out: "Mother, what are you to do when you find all your theories upset?" "_All_ upset?" repeated Mrs. Gray, in her rich and quiet voice. "That would be a calamity indeed. Surely there must be one or two of yours remaining stable?" "It seems not, just now. One disproved overturns another. They all hinge on one another--at least mine do." "Perhaps not as closely as you think. What is it, dear? Can you tell me anything about it?" "Not much, I'm afraid. Oh, it's nothing very real, I suppose--just a sort of vague discomfort at feeling that certain ideals I thought were as fixed as the stars in the heavens seem to be wobbling as if they might shoot downward any minute, and--and leave only a trail of light behind!" The last words came on a note of rather shaky laughter. Roberta's arm lay across her mother's knee, her head upon it. She turned her head downward for an instant, burying her face in the angle of her arm. Mrs. Gray regarded the mass of dark locks beneath her hand with a look amused yet sympathetic. "That sort of discomfort attacks us all, at times," she said. "Ideals change and develop with our growth. One would not want the same ones to serve her all her life." "I know. But when it's not a new and better ideal which displaces the old one, but only--an attraction--" "An attraction not ideal?" Roberta shook her head. "I'm afraid not. And I don't see why it should be an attraction at all. It ought not to be, if my ideals have been what they should have been. And they have. Why, you gave them to me, mother, many of them--or at least helped me to work them out for myself. And I--I had confidence in them!" "And they're shaken?" "Not the ideals--they're all the same. Only--they don't seem to be proof against--assault. Oh, I'm talking in riddles, I know. I don't want to put any of it into words, it makes it seem more real. And it's only a shadowy sort of difficulty. Maybe that's all it will be." Mothers are wonderful at divination; why should they not be, when all their task is a training in understanding young natures which do not understand themselves. From these halting phrases of mystery Mrs. Gray gathered much more than her daughter would have imagined. But she did not let that be seen. "If it is only a shadowy difficulty the rising of the sun will put it to flight," she predicted. Roberta was silent for a space. Then suddenly she sat up. "I had a long letter from Forbes Westcott to-day," she said, in a tone which tried to be casual. "He's staying on in London, getting material for that difficult Letchworth case he's so anxious to win. It's a wonderfully interesting letter, though he doesn't say much about the case. He's one of the cleverest letter writers I ever knew--in the flesh. It's really an art with him. If he hadn't made a lawyer of himself he would have been a man of letters, his literary tastes are so fine. It's quite an education in the use of delightfully spirited English, a correspondence with him. I've appreciated that more with each letter." She produced the letter. "Just listen to this account of an interview he had with a distinguished Member of Parliament, the one who has just made that daring speech in the House that set everybody on fire." And she read aloud from several closely written pages, holding the sheets toward the still bright embers, and giving the words the benefit of her own clear and understanding interpretation. Her mother listened with interest. "That is, indeed, a fine description," she agreed. "There is no question that Forbes has a brilliant mind. The position he already occupies testifies to that, and the older men all acknowledge that he is rising more rapidly than could be expected of any ordinary man. He will be one of the great men of the legal profession, your father and uncle think, I know." "One of the great men," repeated Roberta, her face still bent over her letter. "I suppose there's no doubt at all of that. And, mother--you may imagine that when he sets himself to persuade--any one--to--any course, he knows how to put it as irresistibly as words can." "Yes, I should imagine that, dear," said her mother, her eyes on the down-bent profile, whose outlines, against the background of the firelight, would have held a gaze less loving than her own. "His age makes him interesting, you know," pursued Roberta. "He's just enough older--and maturer--than any of the men I know, to make him seem immensely more worth while. His very looks--that thin, keen face of his--it's plain, yet attractive, and his eyes look as if they could see through stone walls. It flatters you to have him seem to find the things you say worth listening to. I can't just explain his peculiar--fascination--I really think it is that, except that it's his splendid mind that grips yours, somehow. Oh, I sound like a, schoolgirl," she burst out, "in spite of my twenty-four years. I wonder if you see what I mean." "I think I do," said her mother, smiling a little. "You mean that your judgment approves him, but that your heart lags a little behind?" "How did you know?" Roberta folded her arms upon her mother's lap, and looked up eagerly into her face. "I didn't say anything about my heart." "But you did, dear. The very fact that you can discuss him so coolly tells me that your heart isn't seriously involved as yet. Is it?" "That's what I don't know," said the girl. "When he writes like this--the last two pages I can't read to you--I don't know what I think. And I'm not used to not knowing what I think! It's disconcerting. It's like being taken off your feet and--not set down again. Yet, when I'm with him--I'm not at all sure I should ever want him nearer than--well, than three feet away. And he's so insistent--persistent. He wants an answer--now, by mail." "Are you ready to give it?" "No. I'm afraid to give it--at long distance." "Then do not. You are under no obligation to do that. The test of actual presence is the only one to apply. Let him wait till he comes home. It will not hurt him." She spoke with spirit, and her daughter responded to the tone. "I know that's the best advice," Roberta said, getting to her feet. "Mother, you like him?" "Yes, I have always liked Forbes," said Mrs. Gray, with cordiality. "Your father likes him, and trusts him, as a man of honour, in his profession. That is much to say. Whether he is a man who would make you happy--that is a different question. No one can answer that but yourself." "I haven't wanted any one to make me happy." Roberta stood upon the hearth-rug, a figure of charm among the lights and shadows. "I've been absorbed in my work--and my play. I enjoy my men friends--and am glad when they go away and leave me. Life is so full--and rich--just of itself. There are so many wonderful people, of all sorts. The world is so interesting--and home is so dear!" She lifted her arms, her head up. "Mother, let's play the Bach _Air_," she said. "That always takes the fever out of me, and makes me feel calm and rational. Is it very late?--are you too tired? Nobody will be disturbed at this distance." "I should love to play it," said Mrs. Gray, and together the two went down the room to the great piano which stood there in the darkness. Roberta switched on one hooded light, produced the music for her mother, and tuned her 'cello, sitting at one side away from the light, with no notes before her. Presently the slow, deep, and majestic notes of the "Air for the G String" were vibrating through the quiet room, the 'cello player drawing her bow across and across the one string with affection for each rich note in her very touch. The other string tones followed her with exquisite sympathy, for Mrs. Gray was a musician from whom three of her four children had inherited an intense love for harmonic values. But a few bars had sounded when a tall figure came noiselessly into the room, and Mr. Robert Gray dropped into the seat before the fire which his wife had lately occupied. With head thrown back he listened, and when silence fell at the close of the performance, his deep voice was the first to break it. "To me," he said, "that is the slow flowing and receding of waves upon a smooth and rocky shore. The sky is gray, but the atmosphere is warm and friendly. It is all very restful, after a day of perturbation." "Oh, is it like that to you?" queried Roberta softly, out of the darkness. "To me it's as if I were walking down the nave of a great cathedral--Westminster, perhaps--big and bare and wonderful, with the organ playing ever so far away. The sun is shining outside and so it's not gloomy, only very peaceful, and one can't imagine the world at the doors." She looked over at her mother, whose face was just visible in the shaded light. "What is it to you, lovely lady?" "It is a prayer," said her mother slowly, "a prayer for peace and purity in a restless world, yet a prayer for service, too. The one who prays lies very low, with his face concealed, and his spirit is full of worship." The light was put out; the three, father, mother, and daughter, came together in the fading fire-glow. Roberta laid a warm young hand upon the shoulder of each. "You dears," she said, "what fortunate and happy children your four are, to be the children of you!" Her father placed his firm fingers under her chin, lifting her face. "Your mother and I," said he, "consider ourselves fairly fortunate and happy to be the parents of you. You are an interesting quartette. 'Age cannot wither nor custom stale' your 'infinite variety.' But age will wither you if you often sit up to play Bach at midnight, when you must teach school next day. Therefore, good-night, Namesake!" Yet when she had gone, her father and mother lingered by the last embers of the fire. "God give her wisdom!" said Roberta's mother. "He will--with you to ask Him," replied Roberta's father, with his arms about his wife. "I think He never refuses you anything! I don't see how He could!" CHAPTER XI "THE TAMING OF THE SHREW" "School again, Rob! Don't you hate it?" "No, of course I don't hate it. I'm much, much happier when I'm teaching Ethel Revell to forget her important young self and remember the part she is supposed to play, than I am when I am merely dusting my room or driving downtown on errands." As she spoke Roberta pushed into place the last hairpin in the close and trim arrangement of her dark hair, briefly surveyed the result with a hand-glass, and rose from her dressing-table. Ruth, at a considerably earlier stage of her dressing, regarded her sister's head with interest. "I can always tell the difference between a school day and another day, just by looking at your hair," she observed, sagely. "How, Miss Big Eyes, if you please?" "You never leave a curl sticking out, on school days. They sometimes work out before night, but that's not your fault. You look like one of Jane Austen's heroines, now." Roberta laughed a laugh of derision. "Miss Austen's heroines undoubtedly had ringlets hanging in profusion on either side of their oval faces." "Yes, but I mean every hair of theirs was in order, and so are yours." "Thank you. Only so can I command respect when I lecture my girls on their frenzied coiffures. Oh, but I'm thankful I can live at home and don't have to spend the nights with them! Some of them are dears, but to be responsible for them day and night would harrow my soul. Hook me up, will you, Rufus, please?" "You look just like a smooth feathered bluebird in this," commented Ruth, as she obediently fastened the severely simple school dress of dark blue, relieved only by its daintily fresh collar and cuffs of embroidered white lawn. "I mean to. Miss Copeland wouldn't have a fluffy, frilly teacher in her school--and I don't blame her. It's difficult enough to train fluffy, frilly girls to like simplicity, even if one's self is a model of plainness and repose." "And you're truly glad to go back, after this lovely vacation? Shouldn't you sort of like to keep on typing for Uncle Calvin, with Mr. Richard Kendrick sitting close by, looking at you over the top of his book?" Roberta wheeled, answering with vehemence: "I should say not, you romantic infant! When I work I want to work with workers, not with drones! A person who can only dawdle over his task is of no use at all. How Uncle Calvin gets on with a mere imitation of a secretary, I can't possibly see. Why, Ted himself could cover more ground in a morning!" "I don't think you do him justice," Ruth objected, with all the dignity of her sixteen years in evidence. "Of course he couldn't work as well with you in the room--he isn't used to it. And you are--you certainly are, awfully nice to look at, Rob." "Nonsense! It's lucky you're going back to school yourself, child, to get these sentimental notions out of your head. Come, vacation's over! Let's not sigh for more dances; let's go at our work with a will. I've plenty before me. The school play comes week after next, and I haven't as good material this year as last. How I'm ever going to get Olivia Cartwright to put sufficient backbone into her _Petruchio_, I don't know. I only wish I could play him myself!" "Rob! Couldn't you?" "It's never done. My part is just to coach and coach, to go over the lines a thousand times and the stage business ten thousand, and then to stay behind the scenes and hiss at them: 'More spirit! More life! Throw yourself into it!' and then to watch them walk it through like puppets! Well, _The Taming of the Shrew_ is pretty stiff work for amateurs, no doubt of that--there's that much to be said. Breakfast time, childie! You must hurry, and I must be off." Half an hour later Ruth watched her sister walk away down the street with Louis, her step as lithe and vigorous as her brother's. Ruth herself was accustomed to drive with her father to the school which she attended--a rival school, as it happened, of the fashionable one at which Roberta taught. She was not so strong as her sister, and a two-mile walk to school was apt to overtire her. But Roberta chose to walk every day and all days, and the more stormy the weather the surer was she to scorn all offers of a place beside Ruth in the brougham. Louis's comment on the return of his sister to her work at Miss Copeland's school was much like that of Ruth. "Sorry vacation's over, Rob? That's where I have the advantage of you. The office never closes for more than a day; therefore I'm always in training." "That's an advantage, surely enough. But I'm ready to go back. As I was telling Ruth this morning, I'm anxious to know whether Olivia Cartwright has forgotten her lines, and whether she's going to be able to infuse a bit of life into her _Petruchio_. This trying to make a schoolgirl play a big man's part--" "You could do it, yourself," observed Louis, even as Ruth had done. "And shouldn't I love to! I'm just longing to stride about the stage in _Petruchio's_ boots." "I'll wager you are. I'd like to see you do it. But the part of _Katherine_ would be the thing for you--fascinating shrew that you could be." "This--from a brother! Yes, I'd like to play _Katherine_, too. But give me the boots, if you please. Do you happen to remember Olivia Cartwright?" "Of course I do. And a mighty pretty and interesting girl she is. I should think she might make a _Petruchio_ for you." "I thought she would. But the boots seem to have a devastating effect. The minute she gets them on--even in imagination, for we haven't had a dress rehearsal yet--her voice grows softer and her manner more lady-like. It's the funniest thing I ever knew, to hear her say the lines-- "'What is this? mutton?... 'Tis burnt, and so is all the meat. What dogs are these? Where is the rascal cook? "How durst you, villains, bring it from the dresser, And serve it thus to me that love it not? There, take it to you, trenchers, cups and all, You heedless joltheads and unmannered slaves!'" Passersby along the street beheld a young man consumed with mirth as Louis Gray heard these stirring words issuing from his sister's pretty mouth in a clever imitation of the schoolgirl _Petruchio's_ "lady-like" tones. "Now speak those lines as you would if you wore the boots," he urged, when he had recovered his gravity. Roberta waited till they were at a discreet distance from other pedestrians, then delivered the lines as she had already spoken them for her pupil twenty times or more, with a spirit and temper which gave them their character as the assumed bluster they were meant to picture. "Good!" cried Louis. "Great! But you see, Sis, you have learned the absolute control of your voice, and that's a thing few schoolgirls have mastered. Besides, not every girl has a throat like yours." "I mean to be patient," said Roberta soberly. "And Olivia has really a good speaking voice. It's the curious effect of the imaginary boots that stirs my wonder. She actually speaks in a higher key with them on than off. But we shall improve that, in the fortnight before the play. They are really doing very well, and our _Katherine_--Ethel Revell--is going to forget herself completely in her part, if I can manage it. In spite of the hard work I thoroughly enjoy the rehearsing of the yearly play--it's a relief from the routine work of the class. And the girls appreciate the best there is, in the great writers and dramatists, as you wouldn't imagine they could do." "On the whole, you would rather be a teacher than an office stenographer?" suggested Louis, with a touch of mischief in his tone. "You know, I've always been a bit disappointed that you didn't come into our office, after working so hard to make an expert of yourself." "That training wasn't wasted," defended Roberta. "I'm able to make friends with my working girls lots better on account of the stenography and typewriting I know. And I may need that resource yet. I'm not at all sure that I mean to be a teacher all my days." "I'm very sure you'll not," said her brother, with a laughing glance, which Roberta ignored. It was a matter of considerable amusement to her brothers the serious way in which she had set about being independent. They fully approved of her decision to spend her time in a way worth the while, but when it came to planning for a lifetime--there were plenty of reasons for skepticism as to her needing to look far ahead. Indeed, it was well known that Roberta might have abandoned all effort long ago, and have given any one of several extremely eligible young men the greatly desired opportunity of taking care of her in his own way. The pair separated at a street corner, and, as it happened, Louis heard little more about the progress of the school rehearsals for _The Taming of the Shrew_ until the day before its public performance--if a performance could be called public which was to be given in so private a place as the ballroom in the home of one of the wealthiest patrons of the school, the audience composed wholly of invited guests, and admission to the affair for others extremely difficult to procure on any ground whatever. Appearing at the close of the final rehearsal to escort his sister home--for the hour, like that of all final rehearsals, was late--Louis found a flushed and highly wrought Roberta delivering last instructions even as she put on her wraps. "Remember, Olivia," he heard her say to a tall girl wrapped in a long cloak which evidently concealed male trappings, "I'm not going to tone down my part one bit to fit yours. If I'm stormy you must be blustering; if I'm furious you must be fierce. You can do it, I know." "I certainly hope so, Miss Gray," answered a none-too-confident voice. "But I'm simply frightened to death to play opposite you." "Nonsense! I'll stick pins into you--metaphorically speaking," declared Roberta. "I'll keep you up to it. Now go straight to bed--no sitting up to talk it over with Ethel--poor child! Good-night, dear, and don't you dare be afraid of me!" "Are you going to play the boots, after all?" Louis queried as he and Roberta started toward home, walking at a rapid pace, as usual after rehearsals. "I wish I were, if I must play some part. No, it's _Katherine_. Ethel Revell has come down with tonsilitis, just at the last minute. It was to be expected, of course--somebody always does it. But I did hope it wouldn't be one of the principals. Of course there's nobody who could possibly get up the part overnight except the coach, so I'm in for it. And the worst of it is that unless I'm very careful I shall over-_Katherine_ my _Petruchio_! If Olivia will only keep her voice resonant! She can stride and gesture pretty well now, but highly dramatic moments always cause her to raise her key--and then the boots only serve to make the effect grotesque." "Never mind; unconscious humour is always interesting to the audience. And we shall all be there to see your _Katherine_. I had thought of cutting the performance for a rather important address, but nothing would induce me to miss my sister as the _Shrew_." Roberta laughed. "Nobody will question my fitness for the part, I fear. Well, if I teach expression, in a girls' school, I must take the consequences, and be willing to express anything that comes along." If Roberta had expected any sympathy from her family in the exigency of the hour, she was disappointed. Instead of condoling with her, the breakfast-table hearers of the news, next morning, were able only to congratulate themselves upon the augmented interest the school play would now have for Roberta's friends, confident that the presence of one clever actress of maturer powers would compensate for much amateurishness in the others. Ruth, young devotee of her sister, was delighted beyond measure with the prospect, and joyfully spent the day taking necessary stitches in the apparel Roberta was to wear, considerable alteration being necessary to adapt the garments intended for the slim and girlish _Katherine_ of Ethel Revell's proportions to the more perfectly rounded lines of her teacher. Late in the afternoon, something was needed to complete Roberta's preparations which could be procured only in a downtown shop, and Ruth volunteered to order the brougham--now on runners--and go down for it. She left the house alone, but she did not complete her journey alone, for halfway down the two-mile boulevard she passed a figure she knew, and turned to bestow a girlish bow and smile. Richard Kendrick not only took off his hat but waved it with a gesture of entreaty, as he quickened his steps, and Ruth, much excited by the encounter, bade Thomas stop the horses. "Would you take a passenger?" he asked as he came up; "unless, of course, you're going to stop for some one else?" "Do get in," she urged shyly. "No, I'm all alone--going on an errand." "I guessed it--not the errand, but the being alone. You looked so small, wrapped up in all these furs, I felt you needed company," explained Richard, smiling down into the animated young face, with its delicate colour showing fresh and fair in the frosty air. There was something very attractive to the young man in this girl, who seemed to him the embodiment of sweetness and purity. He never saw her without feeling that he would have liked just such a little sister. He would have done much to please her, quite as he had followed her suggestion about the church-going on Christmas Day. "I'm rushing down to find a scarf of a certain colour for Rob," explained Ruth, too full of her commission to keep it to herself. "You see, she's playing _Katherine_ to-night. The girl who was to have played it--Ethel Revell--is ill. Do you know any of Miss Copeland's girls? Olivia Cartwright plays _Petruchio_." "Olivia Cartwright? Is she to be in some play? She's a distant cousin of mine." "It's a school play--Miss Copeland's school, where Rob teaches, you know. The play is to be in the Stuart Hendersons' ballroom." And Ruth made known the situation to a listener who gave her his undivided attention. "Well, well,--seems to me I should have had an invitation for that play," mused Richard, searching his memory. "I wish I'd had one. I should like to see your sister act _Katherine_. I suppose it's quite impossible to get one at this late hour?" "I'm afraid so. It's really not at all strange that any one is left out of the list of invitations," Ruth hastened to make clear. "You see, each girl is allowed only six, and that usually takes just her family or nearest friends. And if you are only a distant cousin of Olivia's--" "It's not at all strange that she shouldn't ask me, for I'm afraid I've neglected to avail myself of former invitations of hers," admitted Richard, ruefully. "Too bad. Punishment for such neglect usually follows--and I certainly have it now. I know the Stuart Hendersons, though--I wonder--Never mind, Miss Ruth, don't look so sorry. You'll tell me about it afterward, some time, won't you?" "Indeed I will. Oh, it's been such an exciting day. Rob's been rehearsing her lines all day--when she wasn't trying on. She says she could have played _Petruchio_ much better, because she's had to coach Olivia Cartwright for that part so much more than she's had to coach Ethel for _Katherine_. But, then, she knows the whole play--she could take any part. She would have loved to play _Petruchio_, though, on account of the boots and the slashing round the stage the way he does. But I think it's just as well, for _Katherine_ certainly slashes, too--and Rob's not quite tall enough for _Petruchio_." "I'm glad she plays _Katherine_," said Richard Kendrick decidedly. "I can't imagine your sister in boots! I've no doubt, though, she'd make them different from other boots--if she wore them!" "Of course she would," agreed Ruth. Then she began to talk about something else, for a bit of fear had come into her mind that Rob wouldn't enjoy all this discussion of herself, if she should know about it. She was such an honest young person, however, that she had a good deal of difficulty, when she had done her errand and was at home again, in not telling Roberta of her meeting with Richard Kendrick. She did venture to ask a question. "Is Mr. Kendrick invited for to-night, Rob?" "Not by me," Roberta responded promptly. "He might be, by one of the girls, I suppose?" "The girls invite whom they like. I haven't seen the list. I don't imagine he would be on it. I hope not, certainly." "Why? Don't you think he would enjoy it?" "No, I do not. Musical comedies are probably more to his taste than amateur productions of Shakespeare. But I'm not thinking about the audience--the players are enough for me." Then, suddenly, an idea which flashed into her mind caused her to turn and scan Ruth's ingenuous young face. "You haven't been inviting Mr. Kendrick yourself, Rufus?" "Why, how could I?" But the girl flushed rosily in a way which betrayed her interest. "I just--wondered." "How did you come to wonder? Have you seen him?" Ruth being Ruth, there was nothing to do but to tell Roberta of the encounter with Richard. "He said he was glad you were to play _Katherine_, because he couldn't imagine you in boots," she added, hoping this news might appease her sister. But it did nothing of the sort. "As if it made the slightest difference to him! But if he feels that way, I wish I were to wear the boots, and I wish he might be there to see me do it. As it is, I hope Mrs. Stuart Henderson will be deaf to his audacity, if he dares to ask an invitation. It would be quite like him!" "I don't see why--" began Ruth. But Roberta interrupted her. "There are lots of things you don't see, little sister," said she, with a swift and impetuous embrace of the slender form beside her. Then she turned, frowned, flung out her arm, and broke into one of _Katherine's_ flaming speeches: _"'Why, sir, I trust, I may have leave to speak: And speak I will: I am no child, no babe: Your betters have endured me say my mind And if you cannot, best you stop your ears.'"_ "Oh, but you do have such a lovely voice!" cried Ruth. "You can't make even the _Shrew_ sound shrewish--in her tone, I mean." "Can't I, indeed? Wait till to-night! If your friend Mr. Kendrick is to be there I'll be more shrewish than you ever dreamed--it will be a real stimulus!" Ruth shook her head in dumb wonder that any one could be so impervious to the charms of the young man who so appealed to her youthful imagination. Three hours afterward, when she turned in her chair, in the Stuart Henderson ballroom, at the summons of a low voice in her ear, to find Richard Kendrick in the row behind her, she wondered afresh what there could possibly be about him to rouse her sister's antagonism. His face was such an interesting one, his eyes so clear and their glance so straightforward, his fresh colour so pleasant to note, his whole personality so attractive, Ruth could only answer him in the happiest way at her command with a subdued but eager: "Oh, I'm so glad you came!" "That's due to Mrs. Cartwright's wonderful kindness. She's the mother of _Petruchio_, you know," explained Richard, with a smiling glance at the gorgeously gowned woman beside him, who leaned forward also to say to Ruth: "What is one to do with a sweetly apologetic young cousin who begs to be allowed to come, at the last moment, to view his cousin in doublet and hose? But I really didn't venture to tell Olivia. She would have fled from the stage if she had guessed that cousin Richard, whom she greatly admires, was to be here. I can only hope she will not hear of it till the play is over." "If his being here is going to make _Petruchio_ tremble more, and _Katherine_ act naughtier, I shall feel dreadfully guilty," thought Ruth. But somehow when the curtain went up she could not help being glad that he was there, behind her. Roberta had said much, in hours of relaxation after long and tense rehearsals, of the difficulty of making schoolgirls forget themselves in any part. It had been difficult, indeed, to train her pupils to speak and act with naturalness in rôles so foreign to their experience. But she had been much more successful than she had dared to believe, and her own enthusiasm, her tireless drilling, above all her inspiring example as she spoke her girls' lines for them and demonstrated to them each telling detail of stage business, had done the work with astonishing effect. The hardest task of all had been to find and develop a satisfactory delineator of the difficult part of the _Tamer of the Shrew_, but Roberta had persevered, even taking a journey of some hours with Olivia Cartwright to have her see and study one of the greatest of _Petruchios_ at two successive performances. She had succeeded in stimulating Olivia to a real determination to be worthy of her teacher's expressed belief in her, even to the mastering of her girlish tendency to let her voice revert to a high-keyed feminine quality just when it needed to be deepest and most stern. The audience, as the play began, was in the customary benevolent mood of audiences beholding amateur productions, ready to see good if possible, anxious to show favour to all the young actors and to praise without discrimination, aware of the proximity of proud fathers and mothers. But this audience soon found itself genuinely interested and amused, and with the first advent of the enchanting _Shrew_ herself became absorbed in her personality and her fortunes quite as it might have been in those of any talented actress of reputation. To Ruth, sitting wide eyed and hot cheeked, her sister seemed the most spirited and bewitching _Katherine_ ever played. Her shrewishness was that of the wilful madcap girl who has never been crossed rather than that of the inherently ill-tempered woman, and her every word and gesture, her every expression of face and tone of voice, were worth noting and watching. By no means finished work--as how should it be, in a young teacher but few years out of school herself--it yet had an originality and freshness of interpretation all its own, and the applause which praised it was very spontaneous and genuine. Roberta had been the joy of her class in college dramatics, and several of her former classmates, in her audience to-night, gleefully told one another that she was surpassing anything she had formerly done. "It's simply superb, you know, don't you?--your sister's acting," said Richard Kendrick's voice in Ruth's ear again at the end of the first act, and she turned her burning cheek his way as she answered happily: "It seems so to me--but then I'm prejudiced, you know." "We're all prejudiced, when it comes to that--made so by this performance. I'm pretty proud of my cousin _Petruchio_, too," he went on, including Mrs. Cartwright at his side. "I'd no idea boots could be so becoming to any girl--outside of a chorus. Olivia's splendid. Do you suppose"--he was addressing Ruth again--"you and I might go behind the scenes and tell them how we feel about it?" "Oh, no, indeed, Mr. Kendrick," Ruth replied, much shocked. "It's lots different, a girls' play like this, from the regular theatre. They'd be so astonished to see you. Rob's told me, heaps of times, how they go perfectly crazy after every act, and she has all she can do to keep them cool enough for the next. She'd never forgive us. And besides, Olivia Cartwright's not to know you're here, you know." "That's true. I'd forgotten how disturbing my presence is supposed to be," and Richard leaned back again to laugh with Mrs. Cartwright. But, behind the scenes, the news had penetrated, nobody knew just how. Roberta learned, to her surprise and distraction, that Richard Kendrick was somehow a particularly interesting figure in the eyes of her young players, and she speedily discovered that they were all more or less excited at the knowledge that he was somewhere below the footlights. Olivia, indeed, was immediately in a flutter, quite as her mother had predicted, at the thought of Cousin Richard's eyes upon her in her masculine attire; and Roberta, in the brief interval she could spare for the purpose, had to take her sternly in hand. An autocratic _Katherine_ might, then, have been overheard addressing a flurried _Petruchio_, in a corner: "For pity's sake, child, who is he that you need be afraid of him? He's no critic, I'll wager, and if he's your cousin he'll be sure to think you act like a veteran, anyhow. Forget him, and go ahead. You're doing splendidly. Don't you dare slump just because you're remembering your audience!" "Oh, of course I'll try, Miss Gray," replied an extremely feminine voice from beneath _Petruchio's_ fierce mustachios. "But Richard Kendrick really is awfully sort of upsetting, don't you know?" "Of course I don't know," denied Roberta promptly. "As long as Miss Copeland herself is pleased with us, nobody else matters. And Miss Copeland is delighted--she sent me special word just now. So stiffen your backbone, _Petruchio_, and make this next dialogue with me as rapid as you know. Come back at me like flash-fire--don't lag a breath--we'll stir the house to laughter, or know the reason why. Ready?" Her firm hand on Olivia's arm, her bracing words in Olivia's ear, put courage back into her temporarily stage-struck "leading man," and Olivia returned to the charge determined to play up to her teacher without lagging. In truth, Roberta's actual presence on the stage was proving a distinct advantage to those of the players who had parts with her. She warmed and held them to their tasks with the flash of her own eyes, not to mention an occasional almost imperceptible but pregnant gesture, and they found themselves somehow able to "forget the audience," as she had so many times advised them to do, the better that she herself seemed so completely to have forgotten it. The work of the young actors grew better with each act, and at the end of the fourth, when the curtain went down upon a scene which had been all storm on the part of the players and all laughter on the part of the audience, the applause was long and hearty. There were calls for the entire cast, and when they had several times responded there was a special and persistent demand for _Katherine_ herself, in the character of the producer of the play. She refused it until she could no longer do so without discourtesy; then she came before the curtain and said a few winsome words of gratitude on behalf of her "company." Ruth, staring up at her sister's face brilliant with the mingled exertion and emotion of the hour, and thinking her the prettiest picture there against the great dull-blue silk curtain of the stage she had ever seen, had no notion that just behind her somebody was thinking the same thing with a degree of fervour far beyond her own. Richard Kendrick's heart was thumping vigorously away in his breast as he looked his fill at the figure before the curtain, secure in the darkness of the house from observation at the moment. When he had first met this girl he had told himself that he would soon know her well, would soon call her by her name. He wondered at himself that he could possibly have fancied conquest of her so easy. He was not a whit nearer knowing her, he was obliged to acknowledge, than on that first day, nor did he see any prospect of getting to know her--beyond a certain point. Her chosen occupation seemed to place her beyond his reach; she was not to be got at by the ordinary methods of approach. Twice he had called and asked for her, to be told that she was busy with school papers and must be excused. Once he had ventured to invite her to go with Mrs. Stephen and himself to a carefully chosen play and a supper, but she had declined, gracefully enough--but she had declined, and Mrs. Stephen also. He could not make these people out, he told himself. Did they and he live in such different worlds that they could never meet on common ground? _The Taming of the Shrew_ came to a triumphant end; the curtain fell upon the effective closing scene in which the lovely _Shrew_, become a richly loving and tender wife, without, somehow, surrendering a particle of her exquisite individuality, spoke her words of wisdom to other wives. Richard smiled to himself as he heard the lines fall from Roberta's lips. And beneath his breath he said: "I don't see how you can bring yourself to say them, you modern girl. You'd never let a real husband feel his power that way, I'll wager. If you did--well--it would go to his head, I'm sure of that. What an idiot I am to think I could ever make her look at me the way she looked even at that schoolgirl _Petruchio_--with a clever imitation of devotion. O Roberta Gray! But I'd rather worship you across the footlights than take any other girl in my arms. And somehow--somehow I've got to make you at least respect me. At least that, Roberta! Then--perhaps--more!" At Ruth's side, when the play was ended, Richard hoped to attain at least the chance to speak to Ruth's sister. The young players all appeared upon the stage, the curtain being raised for the rest of the evening, and the audience came up, group by group, to offer congratulations and pour into gratified ears the praise which was the reward of labour. Richard succeeded in getting by degrees into the immediate vicinity of Roberta, who was continuously surrounded by happy parents bent on presenting their felicitations. But just as he was about to make his way to her side a diversion occurred which took her completely away from him. A girl near by, who on account of physical frailty had had a minor part, grew suddenly faint, and in a trice Roberta had impressed into her service a strong pair of male arms, nearer at hand than Richard's, and had had the slim little figure carried behind the scenes, herself following. Ten minutes later he learned from Ruth that Roberta had gone back to Miss Copeland's school with the girl, recovered but weak. "Couldn't anybody else have gone?" he inquired, considerable impatience in his voice. "Of course--lots of people could, and would. Only it's just like Rob to seize the chance to get away from this, and not come back. You'll see--she won't. She hates being patted on the back, as she calls it. I never can see why, when people mean it, as I'm sure they do to-night. She's the queerest girl. She never wants what you'd think she would, or wants it the way other people do. But she's awfully dear, just the same," Ruth hastened to add, fearful lest she seem to criticise the beloved sister. "And somehow you don't get tired of her, the way you do of some people. Perhaps that's just because she's different." "I suspect it is," Richard agreed with conviction. Certainly, a girl who would run away from such adulation as she had been receiving must be, he considered, decidedly and interestingly "different." He only wished he might hit upon some "different" way to pique her interest. CHAPTER XII BLANKETS There was destined to be a still longer break in the work which had been going on in Judge Calvin Gray's library than was intended. He and his assistant had barely resumed their labours after the Christmas house-party when the Judge was called out of town for a period whose limit when he left he was unable to fix. He could leave little for Richard to do, so that young man found his time again upon his hands and himself unable to dispose of it to advantage. His mind at this period was in a curious state of dissatisfaction. Ever since the evening of the Christmas dance, when a girl's careless word had struck home with such unexpected force he had been as restless and uneasy as a fish out of water. His condition bore as much resemblance to that of the gasping fish as this: in the old element of life about town, as he had been in the habit of living it, he now had the sensation of not being able to breathe freely. It was with the intention of getting into the open, both mentally and physically, that on the second day following the Judge's departure Richard started on a long drive in his car. Beyond a certain limit he knew that the roads were likely to prove none too good, though the winter had thus far been an open one and there was little chance of his encountering blocking snowdrifts "up State." He took no one with him. He could think of no one with whom he cared to go. As he drove his mind was busy with all sorts of speculations. In his hurt pride he had said to a girl: "If I can't make you think differently of me it won't be for lack of will." That meant--what did it mean? That he had recognized the fact that she despised idlers--and that young rich men who spent a few hours, on an average of five days of the week, in assisting elderly gentlemen bereft of their eyesight in looking up old records, did not thereby in her estimation remove themselves from the class of those who do nothing in the world but attend to the spending of their incomes. What should he do--how prove himself fit to deserve her approval? Unquestionably he must devote himself seriously to some serious occupation. All sorts of ideas chased one another through his mind in response to this stimulus. What was he fitted to do? He had a certain facility in the use of the pen, as he had proved in the service of Judge Calvin Gray. Should he look for a job as reporter on one of the city dailies? He certainly could not offer himself for any post higher than that of the rawest scribe on the force; he had had no experience. The thought of seeking such a post made his lip curl with the absurdity of the notion. They would make a society reporter of him; it would be the first idea that would occur to them. It was the only thing for which they would think him fit! The thing he should like to do would be to travel on some interesting commission for his grandfather. On what commission, for instance? The purchasing of rare works of art for the picture-gallery of the great store? No mean exhibition it was they had there. But he had not the training for such a commission; he would be cheated out of hand when it came to buying! They sent skilled buyers on such quests. He thought of rushing off to the far West and buying a ranch. That was a fit and proper thing for a fellow like himself; plenty of rich men's sons had done it. If she could see him in cowboy garb, rough-clad, sunburnt, muscular, she would respect him then perhaps. There would be no more flinging at him that he was a cotillion leader! How he hated the term! The day was fair and cold, the roads rather better than he had expected, and by luncheon-time he had reached a large town, seventy miles away from his own city, where he knew of an exceptionally good place to obtain a refreshing meal. With this end in view, he was making more than ordinary village speed when disaster befell him in the shape of a break in his electric connections. Two blocks away from the hotel he sought, the car suddenly went dead. While he was investigating, fingers blue with cold, a voice he knew hailed him. It came from a young man who advanced from the doorway of a store, in front of which the car had chanced to stop. "Something wrong, Rich?" Richard stood up. He gripped his friend's hand cordially, glancing up at the sign above the store as he did so. "Mighty glad to see you, Benson," he responded. "I didn't realize I'd stopped in front of your father's place of business." Hugh Benson was a college classmate. In spite of the difference between their respective estates in the college world, the two had been rather good friends during the four years of their being thrown together. Since graduation, however, they had seldom met, and for the last two years Richard Kendrick had known no more of his former friend than that the good-sized dry-goods store, standing on a prominent corner in the large town through which he often motored without stopping, still bore the name of Hugh Benson's father. When the car was running again Benson climbed in and showed Richard the way to his own home, where he prevailed on his friend to remain for lunch with himself and his mother. Richard learned for the first time that Benson's father had died within the last year. "And you're going on with the business?" questioned Richard, as the two lingered alone together in Benson's hall before parting. The talk during the meal had been mostly of old college days, of former classmates, and of the recent history of nearly every mutual acquaintance except that of the speakers themselves. "There was nothing else for me to do when father left us," Benson responded in a low tone. "I'm not as well adapted to it as he was, but I expect to learn." "I remember you thought of doing graduate work along scientific lines. Did you give that up?" "Yes. I found father needed me at home; his health must have been failing even then, though I didn't realize it. I've been in the store with him ever since. I'm glad I have--now." "It's not been good for you," declared Richard, scrutinizing his friend's pale and rather worn face critically. It would have seemed to him still paler and more worn if he could have seen it in contrast with his own fresh-tinted features, ruddy with his morning's drive. "Better come with me for an afternoon spin farther up State, and a good dinner at a place I know. Get you back by bedtime." "There's nothing I'd like better, Rich," said Benson longingly; "but--I can't leave the store. I have rather a short force of clerks--and on a sunny day--" "You'd sell more goods to-morrow," urged Richard, feeling increasingly anxious to do something which might bring light into a face he had not remembered as so sombre. But Benson shook his head again. Afterward, in front of the store to which the two had returned in the car, Richard could only give his friend a warm grip of the hand and an urgent invitation to visit him in the city. "I suppose you come down often to buy goods," he suggested. "Or do you send buyers? I don't know much about the conduct of business in a town like this--or much about it at home, for that matter," he owned. "Though I'm not sure I'm proud of my ignorance." "It doesn't matter whether you know anything about it or not, of course," said Benson, looking up at him with a queer expression of wistfulness. "No, I'm my own buyer. And I don't buy of a great, high-grade firm like yours; I go to a different class of fellows for my stuff." Richard drove on, thinking hard about Benson. What a pity for a fellow of twenty-six or seven to look like that, careworn and weary. He wondered whether it was the loss of his father and the probably sorrowful atmosphere at home that accounted for the look in Benson's eyes, or whether his business was not a particularly successful one. He recalled that the one careless glance he had given the windows of Benson's store had brought to his mind the fleeting impression that village shopkeepers had not much art in the dressing of their windows as a means of alluring the public. As he drove on he felt in his pockets for a cigar and found his case unexpectedly empty. He turned back to a drugstore, went in and supplied himself from the best in stock--none too good for his fastidious taste. "What's your best dry-goods shop here?" he inquired casually. "Artwell & Chatford's the best--now," responded the druggist, glancing across the street, where a sign bearing those names met the eye. "Chaffee Brothers has run 'em a close second since Benson's dropped out of the competition. Benson's used to be the best, but it's fallen way behind. Look at Artwell's window display over there and see the reason," he added, pointing across the street with the citizen's pride in a successful enterprise in no way his own rival. "Gorgeous!" responded Richard, eying an undoubtedly eye-catching arrangement of blankets of every hue and quality piled about a centre figure consisting of a handsome brass bed made up as if for occupancy, the carefully folded-back covers revealing immaculate and downy blankets with pink borders, the whole suggestive of warmth and comfort throughout the most rigorous winter season. "Catchy--on a day like this!" suggested the druggist, with a chuckle. "I'll admit they gave me the key for my own windows." Richard's gaze followed the other's glance and rested on piles of scarlet flannel chest-protectors, flanked by small brass tea-kettles with alcohol lamps beneath. "We carry a side line of spirit-lamp stuff," explained the dealer. "It sells well this time of year. Got to keep track of the popular thing. Afternoon teas are all the go among the women of this town now. The hardware's the only other place they can get these--and they don't begin to keep the variety we do." Richard congratulated the dealer on his window. Lingering by it, his hand on the door, he said: "I noticed Benson's as I came by, and I see now the force of what you say about window display. I'm not sure I can tell what was in their windows." "Nor anybody else," declared the druggist, chuckling, "unless he went with a notebook and made an inventory. Since the old man died last year the windows have been a hodgepodge of stuff that attracts nobody. It's merely an index to the way the place is running behind. Young Benson doesn't know how to buy nor how to sell; he'll never succeed. The store began to go down when the old man got too feeble to take the whole responsibility. Hugh began to overstock some departments and understock others. It's not so much lack of capital that'll be responsible for Hugh's failure when it comes--and I guess it's not far off--as it is lack of business experience. Why, he's got so little trade he's turned off half his salespeople; and you know that talks!" It did indeed. It talked louder now in the light of the druggist's shrewd commentaries than it had when Benson had spoken of his "short force." Richard wondered just how short it was, that the proprietor could not venture to leave for even a few hours. He drove on thoughtfully. He wanted to go back and look those windows over again, wanted to go through the whole store, but recognized that though he could have done this when he first arrived, he could not go back and do it now without exciting his friend's suspicion that sympathy was his motive. He turned about at a point far short of the one he had intended to reach, and made record time back to the city, impelled by an odd wish he could hardly explain, to go by the windows of the great department stores of Kendrick & Company and examine their window displays. Since he was ordinarily accustomed to select any other streets than those upon which these magnificent places of custom were situated, merely because he not only had no interest in them but a positive distaste for seeing his own name emblazoned--though ever so chastely--above their princely portals, it may be understood that an entirely new idea was working in his brain. Speed as he would, however, running the risk as he approached the city streets of being stopped by some watchful authority for exceeding the limits, he could not get back to the broad avenue upon which the stores stood before six o'clock. There was all the better chance on that account, nevertheless, for examining the windows before which belated shoppers were still stopping to wonder and admire. Well, looking at them with Benson's forlorn windows in his mind as a foil, he saw them as he never had before. What beauty, what originality, what art they showed! And at a time of year when, the holiday season past, it might seem as if there could be no real summons for anybody to go shopping. They were fairly dazzling, some of them, although many of them showed only white goods. His car came to a standstill before one great plate-glass frame behind which was a representation of a sewing-room with several people busily at work. So perfect were the figures that it hardly seemed as if they could be of wax. One pretty girl was sewing at a machine; another, on her knees, was fitting a frock to a little girl who laughed over her shoulder at a second child who was looking on. The mother of the family sewed by a drop-light on a work-table. The whole scene was really charming, combining precisely the element of domesticity with that of accomplishment which strikes the eye of the average passer as "looking like home," no matter of what sort the home might be. "By heavens! if poor Ben had something like that people wouldn't pass him by for the blanket store," he said to himself; and drove on, still thinking. The next day, at an hour before the morning tide of shopping at Kendrick & Company's had reached the flood, two pretty glove clerks were suddenly tempted into a furtive exchange of conversation at an unoccupied end of their counter. "Look quick! See the young man coming this way? It's Rich Kendrick." "It is? They told me he never came here. Say, but he's the real thing!" "I should say. Never saw him so close myself. Wish he'd stop here." "Bet you couldn't keep your head if he spoke to you!" "Bet I could! Don't you worry; he don't buy his gloves in his own department store. He--" "Sh! Granger's looking!" There was really nothing about Richard Kendrick to attract attention except his wholesome good looks, for he dressed with exceptional quietness, and his manner matched his clothes. A floorwalker recognized him and bowed, but the elevator man did not know him, and on his way to the offices he passed only one clerk who could lay claim to a speaking acquaintance with the grandson of the owner. But at the office of the general manager he was met by an office boy who knew and worshipped him from afar, and in five minutes he was closeted with that official, who gave him his whole attention. "Mr. Henderson, I wish you could give me"--was the substance of Richard's remarks--"somebody who would go up to Eastman with me and tell me what's the matter with a dry-goods store there that's on the verge of failure." The general manager was, to put it mildly, astonished. He was a mighty man of valour himself, so mighty that his yearly salary would have been to the average American citizen a small fortune. The office was one to fill which similar houses had often scoured the country without avail. Other business owners had been forced to remain at the helm long after health and happiness demanded retirement. Among these, Henderson was held to be so competent a man that Matthew Kendrick was considered incredibly lucky to keep his hold upon him. To Matthew Kendrick's grandson Henderson put a number of pertinent inquiries concerning the store in question which Richard found he could not intelligently answer. He flushed a little under the fire. "I suppose you think I might have investigated a bit for myself," said he. "But that's just what I don't want to do. I want to send a man up there whom the owner doesn't know; then we can get at things without giving ourselves away." The general manager inferred from this that philanthropy, not business interest, was at the bottom of young Kendrick's quest and his surprise vanished. The young man was known as kind-hearted and generous; he was undoubtedly merely carrying out a careless impulse, though he certainly seemed much in earnest in the doing of it. "You might take Carson, assistant buyer for the dress-goods department, with you," suggested Henderson after a little consideration. "He could probably give you a day just now. Alger, his head, is back from London this week. Carson's a bright man--in line for promotion. He'll put his finger on the trouble without hesitation--if it lies in the lack of business experience, buying and selling, as you say. I'll send for him." In two minutes Richard Kendrick and Alfred Carson were face to face, and an appointment had been made for the following day. Richard took a liking to the assistant buyer on the spot. He felt as if he were selecting a competent physician for his friend, and was glad to send him a man whose personality was both prepossessing and inspiring of confidence. As for Carson, it was an interesting experience for him, too. He thoroughly enjoyed the seventy-mile drive at the side of the young millionaire, who sent his powerful car flying over the frozen roads at a pace which made his passenger's face sting. Carson was more accustomed to travel in subways and sleeping-cars than by long motor drives, and by the time Eastman was reached he was glad that the return drive would be preceded by a hot luncheon. "We won't go past the store," Richard explained, making a détour from the main street of the town, regardless of the fact that he forsook a good road for a poor one. "I don't want him to see me to-day." He pressed upon his guest the best that the hotel afforded, then sent him to the corner store with instructions to let nothing escape his attention. "Though I don't need to tell you that," he added with a laugh. "You'll see more in a minute than I should in a month." Then he lighted a cigar--from his own case this time, though he strolled in to see his friend the druggist when he had finished it, and bought of him various other sundries. He did not venture to mention Benson to-day, but the druggist did. Evidently Benson's imminent failure was the talk of the town, and the regret, as well, of those who were not his rivals. "Man can't succeed at a thing he picks up so late, and when he'd rather do something else," volunteered the druggist. "Now I began in this shop by sweeping out, mornings, and running errands, delivering goods. Got interested--came to be a clerk after a while. Always saw myself making up dope, compounding prescriptions. Went off to a school of pharmacy--came back--showed the old man I could look after the prescription business. Finally bought him out. Trained for the trade from the cradle as you might say." "I wonder if I'm going to be useless," thought Richard, "because I'm not trained from the cradle. Carson says he began as a wrapper at fifteen. At my age--he looks my age--he's assistant buyer for one of Kendrick & Company's biggest departments, and 'in line for promotion,' as Henderson says. Rich Kendrick, do you think you're in line for promotion--anywhere? I wonder!" He had gone back to the hotel and was impatiently awaiting Carson for some time before the buyer appeared. Carson came in with a look of great interest and eagerness on his face. The assistant buyer had, Richard thought, one of the brightest faces he had ever seen. He was sure he had asked the right man to diagnose the case of the invalid business, even before Carson began to talk. As the talk progressed he was convinced of it. Yet Carson began at the human, not the business, end of the matter. Richard Kendrick, himself full of concern for his friend Hugh Benson, liked that, too. "I never felt sorrier for a man in my life," said Carson. "He shows a lot of pluck; he never once owned that the thing was too much for him. But I got him to talking--a little. Didn't need to talk much; the whole place was shouting at me--every counter, every showcase. Thunder!" "How did you get him to talking?" Richard asked eagerly. "Represented myself as an ex-travelling man--the dry-goods line. It's true enough, if not just the way he took it. Of course he didn't give me any facts about his business, but we discussed present conditions of the trade pretty well, and he owned that a good many things puzzled him just as much as when he was a little chap and used to listen to his father giving orders. What's going to be wanted and how much? When to load up and when to unload? How to catch the public fancy and not get caught yourself? In short, how to turn over the stock in season and out of season--turn it over and get out from under! He knows no more than a man who can't swim how to keep his head above water. Nice fellow, too; I could see it in every word he said. He'd be a success in, say, a professorship in a college--and not a business college, either." "If the place were yours," Richard, alive with interest, put it to him, "now, this minute, what would be the first thing you would do?" Carson laughed--not derisively, but like a boy who sees a chance at a game he likes to play. "Have a bonfire, I'd like to say," he vowed. "But that wouldn't be good business, and I wouldn't do it if I had the chance--unless there was insurance to cover! And there's money in the stock. Part of it could be got out. But it ought to be got out before the moon is old. Then I'd like the fun of stocking up with new lines, new departments, things the town never heard of. I'd make that blanket window you told me about look sick. That is," he added modestly, "I think I could. Any good general buyer could. I'm a dress-goods man myself, only I've grown up under Kendrick & Company's roof and I've been watching other lines than my own. It interests me--the possibilities of that store. Why, the man ought not to fail! He has the best location in town, the biggest windows, the best fixtures, judging by the outside of the places I saw as I came along. I looked at the blanket-window place. That's a dark store when you get back a dozen feet. Benson's, being on the corner, is fairly light to the back door. That counts more than any other thing about the building itself. And the fellow has his underwear in the brightest spot in the shop and the dress goods in the darkest! His heavy lines by the door and his notions and fancy stuff way back where you've got to hunt for them! And his windows--oh, blazes! I wanted to climb up and jump on the mess and then throw it out!" Richard drove Carson back to town, his heart afire with longing to do something, he did not yet know what. He could not consult Carson about the matter further than to find out from him what was wrong with the business from the standpoint of the customer; why the place did not attract the customer. Details of this phase of the question Carson had given him in plenty, all leading back to the one trouble--Benson had not understood how to appeal to the class of custom at his doors. He had not the right goods, nor the right means of display; he had not the right salespeople; in brief, he had nothing, according to Carson, that he ought to have, and everything, poor fellow, that he ought not! It was a hard case. As to actual business foundations and resources, neither of the young men could judge. They had no means of knowing how deeply Benson was in debt, nor what were his assets beyond the visible stock. Yet his fellow shopkeepers considered him on the verge of bankruptcy; they must know. "I've enjoyed this trip, Mr. Kendrick," Carson said at parting, "in more ways than I can tell you. If I can be of use to you in any way, call on me, please. I'm honestly interested in your friend Mr. Benson. I'd like to see him win out." "So should I." Richard shook hands heartily. "I've enjoyed the trip, too, Mr. Carson. I never had better company. Thank you for going--and for teaching me a lot of things I wanted to know." As he drove away he was thinking, "Carson's a success; I'm not. Odd thing, that I should find myself envying a chap whose place I couldn't be hired to take. I envy him--not exactly his knowledge and skill, but his being a definite factor, his being a man who carries responsibilities and makes good, so that--well, so that he's 'in line for promotion.' That phrase takes hold of me somehow; I wonder why? Well, the next thing is to see grandfather." * * * * * Old Matthew Kendrick was alone. His grandson had just left him. He was marching up and down his private library. His hands were clasped tightly behind his back; above his flushed brow his white hair stood erect from frequent thrustings of his agitated fingers; even his cravat, slightly awry, bore witness to his excitement. "Gad!" he was saying to himself. "The boy's alive after all! The boy's waked up! He's taking notice! And the thing that's waked him up is a country store--by cricky! a country store! I believe I'm dreaming yet!" If the citizens of the thriving town of Eastman, almost of a size to call itself a young city and boast of a mayor, could have heard him they might not have been flattered. Yet when they remembered that this was the owner of a business so colossal that its immense buildings and branches were to be found in three great cities, they might have understood that to him the corner store of Hugh Benson looked like a toy concern, indeed. But he liked the look of it, as it had been presented to his mind's eye that night; no doubt but he liked the look of it! "Give him Carson to go up there and manage the business for those two infants-in-arms? Gad! yes, go myself and make change at the desk for the new firm," he chuckled, "if that would keep Dick interested. But I guess he's interested enough or he wouldn't have agreed to my ruling that he must go into the thing himself, not stand off and throw out a rope to his drowning friend Benson. If young Benson's the man Dick makes him out, it's as I told Dick: he wouldn't grasp the rope. But if Dick goes in after him, that's business. Bless the rascal! I wish his father could see him now. Sitting on the edge of my table and talking window-dressing to me as if he'd been born to it, which he was, only he wouldn't accept his birthright, the proud beggar! Talking about moving one of our show-windows up there bodily for a white-goods sale in February; date a trifle late for Kendrick & Company, but advance trade for Eastman, undoubtedly. Says he knows they can start every mother's daughter of 'em sewing for dear life, if they can get their eye on that sewing-room scene. Well"--he paused to chuckle again--"he says Carson says that window cost us five hundred dollars; but if it did it's cheap at the price, and I'll make the new firm a present of it. Benson & Company--and a grandson of Matthew Kendrick the Company!" He laughed heartily, then paused to stand staring down into the jewelled shade of his electric drop-light as if in its softly blending colourings he saw the outlines of a new future for "the boy." "I wonder what Cal will say to losing his literary assistant," he mused, smiling to himself. "I doubt if Dick's proved himself invaluable, and I presume the man he speaks of will give Cal much better service; but I shall be sorry not to have him going to the Grays' every day; it seemed like a safe harbour. Well, well, I never thought to find myself interested again in the fortunes of a country store. Gad! I can't get over that. The fellow's been too proud to walk down the aisles of Kendrick & Company to buy his silk socks at cost--preferred to pay two prices at an exclusive haberdasher's instead! And now--he's going to have a share in the sale of socks that retail for a quarter, five pairs for a dollar! O Dick, Dick, you rascal, your old grandfather hasn't been so happy since you were left to him to bring up. If only you'll stick! But you're your father's son, after all--and my grandson; I can't help believing you'll stick!" CHAPTER XIII LAVENDER LINEN "I'm going to drive into town. Any of you girls want to go with me?" Mr. Rufus Gray addressed his wife and their two guests, his nieces, Roberta and Ruth Gray. It was the midwinter vacation at the school where Roberta taught and at the equally desirable establishment where Ruth was taking a carefully selected course of study. Uncle Rufus and Aunt Ruth had invited them to spend the four days of this vacation at their country home, according to a custom they had of decoying one or another of the young people of Rufus's brothers' families to come and visit the aunt and uncle whose own children were all married and gone, sorely missed by the young-hearted pair. Roberta and Ruth had accepted eagerly, always delighted to spend a day or a month at the "Gray Farm," a most attractive place even in winter, and in summer a veritable pleasure-ground of enjoyment. They all wanted to go to town, the three "girls," including the white-haired one whose face was almost as young as her nieces' as she looked out from the rear seat of the comfortable double sleigh driven by her husband and drawn by a pair of the handsomest horses the countryside could boast. It was only two miles from the fine old country homestead to the centre of the neighbouring village, and though the air was keen nobody was cold among the robes and rugs with which the sleigh overflowed. "You folks want to do any shopping?" inquired Uncle Rufus, as he drove briskly along the lower end of Eastman's principal business street. "I suppose there's no need of asking that. When doesn't a woman want to go shopping?" "Of course we do," Ruth responded, without so much as consulting the back seat. "I meant to bring some lavender linen with me to work on," said Roberta to Aunt Ruth. "Where do you suppose I could find any, here?" "Why, I don't know, dearie," responded Aunt Ruth doubtfully. "White linen you ought to get anywhere; but lavender--you might try at Artwell & Chatford's. We'll go past Benson's, but it's no use looking there any more. Everybody's expecting poor Hugh to fail any day." "Oh, I'm sorry," said Roberta warmly. "I always liked Hugh Benson. Mr. Westcott told me some time ago that he was afraid Hugh wasn't succeeding." "The store's been closed to the public a fortnight now," explained Uncle Rufus over his shoulder. "Hugh hasn't failed yet, and something's going on there; nobody seems to know just what. Inventory, maybe, or getting ready for a bankrupt sale. The Benson sign's still up just as it was before Hugh's father died. Windows covered with white soap or whitewash. Some say the store's going to open up under new parties--guess nobody knows exactly. Hullo! who's that making signs?" He indicated a tall figure on the sidewalk coming toward them at a rapid rate, face alight, hat waving in air. "It's Mr. Forbes Westcott," exulted Ruth, twisting around to look at her sister. "Funny how he always happens to be visiting his father and mother just as Rob is visiting you, isn't it, Aunt Ruth?" Uncle Rufus drew up to the sidewalk, and the whole party shook hands with a tall man of dark, keen features, who bore an unmistakable air of having come from a larger world than that of the town of Eastman. "Mrs. Gray--Miss Roberta--Miss Ruth--Mr. Gray--why, this is delightful. When did you come? How long are you going to stay? It seems a thousand years since I saw you last!" He was like an eager boy, though he was clearly no boy in years. He included them all in this greeting, but his eyes were ardently on Roberta as he ended. Ruth, screwed around upon the front seat and watching interestedly, could hardly blame him. Roberta, in her furry wrappings, was as vivid as a flower. Her eyes looked black beneath their dusky lashes, and her cheeks were brilliant with the touch of the winter wind. "When did you come? How did you find your father and mother?" inquired Roberta demurely. "Well and hearty as ever, and apparently glad to see their son--as he was to see them. I've been devoting myself to them for three days now, and mean to give them the whole week. It's only fair--isn't it?--after being away so long. How fortunate for me that I should meet you; I might not have found it out till I had missed much time." "You've missed much time already," put in Uncle Rufus. "They came last night." "Put your hat on, Forbes," was Aunt Ruth's admonition as Westcott continued to stand beside Roberta, exchanging question and answer concerning the long interval which had intervened since they last met. "Come over to supper to-night, and then you young people can talk without danger of catching your death of cold." Westcott laughed and accepted, but the hat was not replaced upon his smooth, dark head until the sleigh had gone on. "Subjects always keep uncovered before their queen," whispered Ruth in Uncle Rufus's ear, and he laughed and nodded. "Times have changed since I was a young man," said he. "A fellow would have looked queer in my day unwinding his comforter and pulling off his coonskin cap and standing holding those things while he talked on a February morning. He'd have gone home and taken some pepper-tea to ward off the effects of the chill!" "There's Benson's," Roberta interrupted, "and it's open. Why, look at the people in front of the windows! Look at the windows themselves. There must be a new firm. Poor Hugh!" "There's a new sign over the old one; a '_Successors to_,' I think; but Benson's name is on it, '_Benson & Company_,'" announced Ruth, straining her eyes to make it out. "Somebody must have come to the rescue," said Uncle Rufus with joyous interest. "Well, well; the thing has been kept surprisingly still, and I can't think who it can be, but I'm certainly glad. I hated to see the boy fail. I suppose you all want to go in?" They unquestionably did, but they wanted first to sit still and look at the windows from their vantage point above the passers-by on foot, who were all stopping as they came along. It was small wonder that they should stop. The town of Eastman had never in its experience seen within its borders window displays like these. Benson's possessed the advantage of having larger fronts of clear plate-glass than any store in town. As it was a corner store, there were not only two big windows on the front but one equally large upon the side. Each of these showed an artful arrangement of fresh and alluring white goods, and in the centre of each was a special scheme arranged with figures and furnishings to form a charming tableau. In one was the sewing-room scene, adapted from that one which had first challenged Richard's interest in his grandfather's store; in a second a children's tea-party drew many admiring comments from the crowd; and in the side window the figure of a pretty bride with veil and orange blossoms suggested that the surrounding draperies were fit for uses such as hers. The clever adaptability of Carson's art showed in the fact that the figure wore no longer the costly French robe with which she had been draped when she stood in a glass case at _Kendrick & Company's_, but a delicate frock of simpler materials, such as any village girl might afford, yet so cunningly fashioned that a princess might have worn it as well, and not have been ashamed. Aunt Ruth and her nieces went enthusiastically in, and Uncle Rufus, declaring that he must go also and congratulate Hugh on this extraordinary transformation, tied his horses across the street where they could not interfere with the view of passing sleighs. Entering, the visitors found inside the same atmosphere of successful, timely display of fresh and attractive goods as had been promised by the outside. The store did not look like a village store at all; its whole air was metropolitan. The smallest counter carried out this effect; on every hand were goods selected with rare skill, and this description held good of the cheaper articles as well as of those more expensive. "Well, Hugh, we don't understand, but we are very glad," said Aunt Ruth heartily, shaking hands with the young man who advanced to meet them. "That's kind of you. It goes without saying that I am very glad, too," responded the proprietor of the place. His thin face flushed a little as he greeted the others, and his eyes, like Westcott's, dwelt a trifle longer on the face of one of the party than on any of the others. "Rob, I believe you'll find your lavender linen here," said Ruth in her sister's ear, as Uncle Rufus came in and Benson began to show them all about the store. "Look, there are all kinds of white linens; let's stop and ask." With a word of explanation, Roberta delayed at the counter Ruth had indicated, making inquiry for the goods she sought. It chanced that this department was next to an inclosure which was partially of glass, the new office of the firm. The old firm had had no office, only a desk in a dark corner. In this place two men were talking. One was facing the store, his glance even as he spoke upon the way things were going outside; the other's back was turned. But Ruth, gazing interestedly around as her sister examined linens, discovered something familiar about the set of one of the heads just beyond the glass partition, though she could not see the face. When this head was suddenly thrown back with a peculiar motion she had noted when its owner was particularly amused over something, Ruth said to herself: "Why, that's Mr. Richard Kendrick! What in the world is he doing out here at Eastman?" As if she had called him Richard turned about and his look encountered Ruth's. The next instant he was out of the glass inclosure and at her side. Roberta, hearing Ruth's low but eager, "Why, Mr. Kendrick, who ever expected to see you in Eastman!" turned about with an expression of astonishment, which was reflected in both the faces before her. An interested village salesgirl now looked on at a little scene the like of which had never come within the range of her experience. That three people, clearly so surprised to meet in this particular spot, should not proceed voluminously to explain to each other within her hearing the cause of their surprise, was to her an extraordinary thing. But after the first moment's expression of wonder the three seemed to accept the fact as a matter of course, and began to exchange observations concerning the weather, the roads, and various other matters of comparatively small importance. It was not until Uncle Rufus, rounding a high-piled counter with his wife and Hugh Benson, came upon the group, that anything was said of which the curious young person behind the counter could make enough to guess at the situation. "Well, well, if it isn't Mr. Kendrick!" he exclaimed, after one keen look, and hastened forward, hand outstretched. So the group now became doubled in size, and Uncle Rufus expressed great pleasure at seeing again the young man whose hospitality he had enjoyed during the Christmas house-party. "But I didn't suppose we should ever see you up here in our town," said he, "especially in winter. Come by the morning train?" "I've been here for a month, most of the time," Richard told him. "You have? And didn't come to see us? Well, now--" "I didn't know this was your home, Mr. Gray," admitted the young man frankly. "I don't remember your mentioning the name of Eastman while you and Mrs. Gray were with us. Probably you did, and if I had realized you were here--" "You'd have come? Well, you know now, and I hope you'll waste no time in getting out to the 'Gray Farm.' Only two miles out, and the trolley runs by within a few rods of our turn of the road--conductor'll tell you. Better come to-night," he urged genially, "seeing my nieces are here and can help make you feel at home. They'll be going back in a day or two." Richard, smiling, looked at Aunt Ruth, then at Roberta. "Do come," urged Aunt Ruth as cordially as her husband, and Roberta gave a little nod of acquiescence. "I shall be delighted to come," he agreed. "Putting up at the hotel?" inquired Uncle Rufus. "I'm staying for the present with my friend Mr. Benson," Richard explained, with a glance toward Benson himself, who had moved aside to speak to a clerk. "We were classmates at college. We have--gone into business together here." It was out. As he spoke the words his face changed colour a little, but his eyes remained steadily fixed on Uncle Rufus. "Well, well," exclaimed Mr. Rufus Gray. "So it's you who have come to the rescue of--" But Richard interrupted him quickly. "I beg your pardon, not at all," said he. "It is my friend who has come to my rescue--given me the biggest interest I have yet discovered--the game of business. I'm having the time of my life. With the help of our mutual friend, Mr. Carson, who is to be the business manager of the new house, we hope to make a success." Roberta was looking curiously at him, and his eyes suddenly met hers. For an instant the encounter lasted, and it ended by her glance dropping from his. There was something new to her in his face, something she could not understand. Instead of its former rather studiedly impassive expression there was an awakened look, a determined look, as if he had something on hand he meant to do--and to do as soon as the present interview should be over. Strangely enough, it was the first time she had met him when he seemed not wholly occupied with herself, but rather on his way to some affair of strong interest in which she had no concern and from which she was detaining him. It was not that he was failing in the extreme courtesy she had learned to expect from him under all conditions. But--well, it struck her that he would return to his companion in the glass-screened office and immediately forget her. This was a change, indeed! "However you choose to put it," declared Uncle Rufus kindly, "it's a mighty fine thing for Hugh, and we wish you both success." "You will have it. I have found my lavender linen," said Roberta, turning back to the counter. Richard came around to her side. "Didn't you expect to find it?" he inquired with interest. "I really didn't at all. We seldom find summer goods shown in a town like this till spring is well along, least of all coloured dress linens. But you have several shades, besides a beautiful lot of white." "That's Carson's buying," said he, fingering a corner of the lilac-tinted goods she held up. "I shouldn't know it from gingham. I didn't know what gingham was till the other day. But I can recognize it now on sight, and am no end proud of my knowledge." "I suppose you are familiar with silk," said she with a quick glance. He returned it. "Aren't you?" "I'm not specially fond of it." "What fabrics do you like best?" "Thin, sheer things, fine but durable." "Linens?" "No, cottons, batistes, voiles--that sort of thing." "I'm afraid you've got me now," he owned, looking puzzled. "Perhaps I'd know them if I saw them. If Benson has any--I mean, if we have any," he amended quickly, "I'd like to have you see them. Let me go and ask Carson." He was off to consult the man in the office and was back in a minute. When Roberta had purchased the yard of lavender linen he led her into another aisle and requested the clerk to show her his finest goods. Roberta looked on, much amused, while the display was made, and praised liberally. But suddenly she pounced upon a piece of white material with a tiny white flower embroidered upon its delicate surface. "That's one of the prettiest pieces of Swiss muslin I ever saw," said she. "And at such a reasonable price. It looks like one of the finest imported Swisses. I'm going to have that pattern this minute." She gave the order without hesitation. "I didn't know women ever shopped like that," said Richard in her ear. "Like what?" "Why, bought the thing right off without asking to see everything in the store. That's what--I've been told they did." "Not if they're wise--when they see a thing like that. There was only the one pattern. Why, another woman might have walked up and said right over my shoulder that she would take it." "If she had I'd have seen that you got it," declared Richard. He accompanied the party to the door when they went; he saw them to the sleigh and tucked them in. "Bareheaded again," observed Uncle Rufus, regarding him with interest. "Again?" queried Richard. "All the young men we meet this morning insist on standing round outdoors with their hats off," explained the elder man. "It looks reckless to me." "It would be more reckless not to, I imagine," returned Richard, laughing with Ruth and Roberta. "We'll see you to-night," Uncle Rufus reminded him as he drove off. "Bring Hugh with you. I asked him in the store, but he seemed to hesitate. It will do him good to get out." When the sleigh was a quarter of a mile up the road Ruth turned to her uncle. "Do you imagine, Uncle Rufus," said she, "that all those men you've asked for to-night will be grateful--when they see one another?" CHAPTER XIV RAPID FIRE "Well, now, we're glad to see you at our place, Mr. Kendrick," was Mr. Rufus Gray's hearty greeting. He had heard the sound of the motor-car as it came to a standstill just outside his window, and was in the doorway to receive his guests. "As for Hugh, he knows he's always welcome, though it's a good while since he took advantage of it. Sit down here by the fire and warm up before we send you out again. You see," he explained enjoyingly, "we have instructions what to do with you." Richard Kendrick noted the pleasant room with its great fireplace roaring with logs ablaze; he noted also its absence of occupants. Only Aunt Ruth, coming forward with an expression of warm hospitality on her face, was to be discovered. "They're all down at the river, skating," she told the young men. "Forbes Westcott is just home again, and he and Robby had so much to talk over we asked him out to supper. He and the girls--and Anna Drummond, one of our neighbours' daughters," she explained to Kendrick, "were taken with the idea of going skating. They didn't wait for you, because they wanted to get a fire built. When you're warmed up you can go down." "There'll be a girl apiece for you," observed Uncle Rufus. "Hugh knows Anna--went to school with her. She's a fine girl, eh, Hugh?" "She certainly is," agreed Benson heartily. "But I don't see how either of us is to skate with her or with anybody without--" "Oh, that's all right. Look there," and Uncle Rufus pointed to a long row of skates lying on the floor in a corner. "All the nieces and nephews leave their skates here to have 'em handy when they come." So presently the two young men were rushing down the winding, snowy road which led through pasture and meadow for a quarter of a mile toward a beckoning bonfire. "I don't know when I've gone skating," said Hugh Benson. "The last time I skated was two years ago on the Neva at St. Petersburg. Jove! but it was a carnival!" And Richard's thoughts went back for a minute to the face of the girl he had skated with. He had not cared much for skating since that night. All other opportunities had seemed tame after that. "You've travelled a great deal--had a lot of experiences," Benson said, with a suppressed sigh. "A few. But they don't prevent my looking forward to a new one to-night. I never went skating on a river in the country before. How far can you go?" "Ten miles, if you like, down. Two miles up. There they are, coming round the bend four abreast. Westcott has more than his share of girls." "More than he wants, probably. He'll cling to one and joyfully hand over the others." "You'll like Anna Drummond; we're old school friends. Forbes and Miss Roberta naturally seem to get together wherever they are. And Miss Ruth is a mighty nice little girl." Across the blazing bonfire two men scrutinized each other: Forbes Westcott, one of the cleverest attorneys of a large city, a man with a rising reputation, who held himself as a man does who knows that every day advances his success; Richard Kendrick, well-known young millionaire, hitherto a travelled idler and spender of his income, now a newly fledged business man with all his honours yet to be won. They looked each other steadily in the eye as they grasped hands by the bonfire, and in his inmost heart each man recognized in the other an antagonist. Richard skated away with Miss Drummond, a wholesomely gay and attractive girl who could skate as well as she could talk and laugh. He devoted himself to her for half an hour; then, with a skill of which he was master from long exercise, he brought about a change of partners. The next time he rounded the bend into a path which led straight down the moonlight it was in the company he longed for. Richard's heart leaped exultantly as he skated around the river bend in the moonlight with Roberta. And when his hands gathered hers into his close grasp it was somehow as if he had taken hold of an electric battery. He distinctly felt the difference between her hands and those of the other girl. It was very curious and he could not wholly understand it. "What kind of gloves do you wear?" was his first inquiry. He held up the hand which was not in Roberta's muff and tried to see it in the dim light. "You _are_ deep in the new business, aren't you?" she mocked. "Whatever they are, will you put them into your stock?" "Don't you dare make fun of my new business. I'm in it for scalps and have no time for joking. Of course I want to put this make in stock. I never took hold of so warm a hand on so cold a night. The warmth comes right through your glove and mine to my hand, runs up my arm, and stirs up my circulation generally. It was running a little cold with some of the things Miss Drummond was telling me." "What could they be?" "About how all the rest of you know each other so well. She described all sorts of good times you have all had together on this river in the summer. It seems odd that Benson never told me about any of them while we were together at college." "They have happened mostly in the last two summers, since Mr. Benson left college. We always spend at least part of our summers here, and we have had worlds of fun on the river and beside it--and in it." "I'm glad I'm a business man in Eastman. I can imagine what this river is like in summer. It's wonderful to-night, isn't it? Let's skate on down to the mouth and out to sea. What do you say?" "A beautiful plan. We have a good start; we must make time or it will be moonset before we come to the sea." "This is a glorious stroke; let's hit it up a little, swing a little farther--and make for the mouth of the river. No talking till we come in sight. We're off!" It was ten miles to the mouth of the river, as they both understood, so this was nonsense of the most obvious sort. But the imagination took hold of them and they swung away on over the smooth, shining floor with the long vigorous strokes which are so exhilarating to the accomplished skater. In silence they flew, only the warm, clasped hands making a link between them, their faces turned straight toward the great golden disk in the eastern heavens. Richard was feeling that he could go on indefinitely, and was exulting in his companion's untiring progress, when he felt her slowing pull upon his hands. "Tired?" he asked, looking down at her. "Not much, but we've all the way back to go--and we ought not to be away so long." "Oughtn't we? I'd like to be away forever--with you!" She looked straight up at him. His eyes were like black coals in the dim light. His hands would have tightened on hers, but she drew them away. "Oh, no, you wouldn't, Mr. Richard Kendrick," said she, as quietly as one can whose breath comes with some difficulty after long-sustained exertion. "By the time we reached--even the mouth of the river, you'd be tired of my company." "Should I? I think not. I've thought of nothing but you since the day I saw you first." "Really? That's--how long? Was it November when you came to help Uncle Calvin? This is February. And you've never spent so much as a whole hour alone with me. You see, you don't even know me. What a foolish thing to say to a girl you barely know!" "Foolish, is it?" He felt his heart racing now. What other girl he knew would have answered him like that? "Then you shall hear something that backs it up. I've loved you since that day I saw you first. What will you do with that?" She was silent for a moment. Then she turned, striking out toward home. He was instantly after her, reached for her hands, and took her along with him. But he forced her to skate slowly. "You'll trample on that, too, will you?" said he, growing wrathful under her silence. But she answered, quite gently, now: "No, Mr. Kendrick, I don't trample on that. No girl would. I simply--know you are mistaken." "In what? My own feeling? Do you think I don't know--" "I _know_ you don't know. I'm not your kind of a girl, Mr. Kendrick. You think I am, because--well, perhaps because my eyes are blue and my eyelashes black; just such things as that do mislead people. I can dance fairly well--" He smothered an angry exclamation. "And skate well--and play the 'cello a little--and--that's nearly all you know about me. You don't even know whether I can teach well--or talk well--or what is stored away in my mind. And I know just as little about you." "I've learned one thing about you in this last minute," he muttered. "You can keep your head." "Why not?" There was a note of laughter in her voice. "There needs to be one who keeps her head when the other loses his--all because of a little winter moonlight. What would the summer moonlight do to you, I wonder?" "Roberta Gray"--his voice was rough--"the moonlight does it no more than the sunlight. Whatever you think, I'm not that kind of fellow. The day I saw you first you had just come in out of the rain. You went back into it and I saw you go--and wanted to go with you. I've been wanting it ever since." They moved on in silence which lasted until they were within a quarter-mile of the bonfire, whose flashing light they could see above the banks which intervened. Then Roberta spoke: "Mr. Kendrick"--and her voice was low and rich with its kindest inflections--"I don't want you to think me careless or hard because I have treated what you have said to-night in a way that you don't like. I'm only trying to be honest with you. I'm quite sure you didn't mean to say it to me when you came to-night, and--we all do and say things on a night like this that we should like to take back next day. It's quite true--what I said--that you hardly know me, and whatever it is that takes your fancy it can't be the real Roberta Gray, because you don't know her!" "What you say is," he returned, staring straight ahead of him, "that I can't possibly know what you really are, at all; but you know so well what I am that you can tell me exactly what my own thoughts and feelings are." "Oh, no, I didn't mean--" "That's precisely what you do mean. I'm so plainly labelled 'worthless' that you don't have to stop to examine me. You--" "I didn't--" "I beg your pardon. I can tell you exactly what you think of me: A young fool who runs after the latest sensation, to drop it when he finds a newer one. His head turned by every pretty girl--to whom he says just the sort of thing he has said to you to-night. Superficial and ordinary, incapable of serious thought on any of the subjects that interest you. As for this business affair in Eastman--that's just a caprice, a game to be dropped when he tires of it. Everything in life will be like that to him, including his very friends. Come, now--isn't that what you've been thinking? There's no use denying it. Nearly every time I've seen you you've said some little thing that has shown me your opinion of me. I won't say there haven't been times in my life when I may have deserved it, but on my honour I don't think I deserve it now." "Then I won't think it," said Roberta promptly, looking up. "I truly don't want to do you an injustice. But you are so different from the other men I have known--my brothers, my friends--that I can hardly imagine your seeing things from my point of view--" "But you can see things from mine without any difficulty!" "It isn't fair, is it?" Her tone was that of the comrade, now. "But you know women are credited with a sort of instinct--even intuition--that leads them safely where men's reasoning can't always follow." "It never leads them astray, by any chance?" "Yes, I think it does sometimes," she owned frankly. "But it's as well for the woman to be on her guard, isn't it? Because, sometimes, you know, she loses her head. And when that happens--" "All is lost? Or does a man's reasoning, slower and not so infallible, but sometimes based on greater knowledge, step in and save the day?" "It often does. But, in this case--well, it's not just a case of reasoning, is it?" "The case of my falling in love with a girl I've only known--slightly--for four months? It has seemed to me all along it was just that. It's been a case of the head sanctioning the heart--and you probably know it's not always that way with a young man's experiences. Every ideal I've ever known--and I've had a few, though you might not think it--every good thought and purpose, have been stimulated by my contact with the people of your father's house. And since I have met you some new ideals have been born. They have become very dear to me, those new ideals, Miss Roberta, though they've had only a short time to grow. It hurts to have you treat me as if you thought me incapable of them." "I'm sorry," she said simply, and her hands gave his a little quick pressure which meant apology and regret. His heart warmed a very little, for he had been sure she was capable of great generosity if appealed to in the right way. But justice and generosity were not all he craved, and he could see quite clearly that they were all he was likely to get from her as yet. "You think," he said, pursuing his advantage, "we know too little of each other to be even friends. You are confident my tastes and pleasures are entirely different from yours; especially that my notions of real work are so different that we could never measure things with the same footrule." He looked down at her searchingly. She nodded. "Something like that," she admitted. "But that doesn't mean that either tastes or notions in either case are necessarily unworthy, only that they are different." "I wonder if they are? What if we should try to find out? I'm going to stick pretty closely to Eastman this winter, but of course I shall be in town more or less. May I come to see you, now and then, if I promise not to become bothersome?" It was her turn to look up searchingly at him. If he had expected the usual answer to such a request, he began, before she spoke, to realize that it was by no means a foregone conclusion that he should receive usual answers from her to any questioning whatsoever. But her reply surprised him more than he had ever been surprised by any girl in his life. "Mr. Kendrick," said she slowly, "I wish that you need not see me again till--suppose we say Midsummer Day,[A] the twenty-fourth of June, you know." [Footnote A: Midsummer comes at the time of the summer solstice, about June 21st, but Midsummer Day, the Feast of St. John the Baptist, is the 24th of June.] He stared at her. "If you put it that way," he began stiffly, "you certainly need not--" "But I didn't put it that way. I said I wished that you need not see me. That is quite different from wishing I need not see you. I don't mind seeing you in the least--" "That's good of you!" "Don't be angry. I'm going to be quite frank with you--" "I'm prepared for that. I can't remember that you've ever been anything else." "Please listen to me, Mr. Kendrick. When I say that I wish you would not see me--" "You said 'need not.'" "I shall have to put it 'would not' to make you understand. When I say I wish you would not see me until Midsummer I am saying the very kindest thing I can. Just now you are under the impression--hallucination--that you want to see much of me. To prove that you are mistaken I'm going to ask this of you--not to have anything whatever to do with me until at least Midsummer. If you carry out my wish you will find out for yourself what I mean--and will thank me for my wisdom." "It's a wish, is it? It sounds to me more like a decree." "It's not a decree. I'll not refuse to see you if you come. But if you will do as I ask I shall appreciate it more than I can tell you." "It is certainly one of the cleverest schemes of getting rid of a fellow I ever heard. Hang it all! do you expect me not to understand that you are simply letting me down easy? It's not in reason to suppose that you're forbidding all other men the house. I beg your pardon; I know that's none of my business; but it's not in human nature to keep from saying it, because of course that's bound to be the thing that cuts. If you were going into a convent, and all other fellows were cooling their heels outside with me, I could stand it." "My dear Mr. Kendrick, you can stand it in any case. You're going to put all this out of mind and work at building up this business here in Eastman with Mr. Benson. You will find it a much more interesting game than the old one of--" "Of what? Running after every pretty girl? For of course that's what you think I've done." She did not answer that. He said something under his breath, and his hands tightened on hers savagely. They were rounding the last bend but one in the river, and the bonfire was close at hand. "Can't you understand," he ground out, "that every other thought and feeling and experience I've ever had melts away before this? You can put me under ban for a year if you like; but if at the end of that time you're not married to another man you'll find me at your elbow. I told you I'd make you respect me; I'll do more, I'll make you listen to me. And--if I promise not to come where you have to look at me till Midsummer, till the twenty-fourth of June--heaven knows why you pick out that day--I'll not promise not to make you think of me!" "Oh, but that's part of what I mean. You mustn't send me letters and books and flowers--" "Oh--thunder!" "Because those things will help to keep this idea before your mind. I want you to forget me, Mr. Kendrick--do you realize that?--forget me absolutely all the rest of the winter and spring. By that time--" "I'll wonder who you are when we do meet, I suppose?" "Exactly. You--" "All right. I agree to the terms. No letters, no books, no--ye gods! if I could only send the flowers now! Who would expect to win a girl without orchids? You do, you certainly do, rate me with the light-minded, don't you? Music also is proscribed, of course; that's the one other offering allowed at the shrine of the fair one. All right--all right--I'll vanish, like a fairy prince in a child's story. But before I go I--" With a dig of his steel-shod heel he brought himself and Roberta to a standstill. He bent over her till his face was rather close to hers. She looked back at him without fear, though she both saw and felt the tenseness with which he was making his farewell speech. "Before I go, I say, I'm going to tell you that if you were any other girl on the old footstool I'd have one kiss from you before I let go of you if I knew it meant I'd never have another. I could take it--" She did not shrink from him by a hair's breadth, but he felt her suddenly tremble as if with the cold. "--but I want you to know that I'm going to wait for it till--Midsummer Day. Then"--he bent still closer--"you will give it to me yourself. I'm saying this foolhardy sort of thing to give you something to remember all these months--I've got to. You'll have so many other people saying things to you when I can't that I've got to startle you in order to make an impression that will stick. That one will, won't it?" A reluctant smile touched her lips. "It's quite possible that it may," she conceded. "It probably would, whoever had the audacity to say it. But--to know a fate that threatens is to be forewarned. And--fortunately--a girl can always run away." "You can't run so far that I can't follow. Meanwhile, tell me just one thing--" "I'll tell you nothing more. We've been gone for ages now--there come the others--please start on." "Good-bye, dear," said he, under his breath. "Good-bye--till Midsummer. But then--" "No, no, you must _not_ say it--or think it." "I'm going to think it, and so are you. I defy you to forget it. You may see that lawyer Westcott every day, and no matter what you're saying to him, every once in a while will bob up the thought--Midsummer Day!" "Hush! I won't listen! Please skate faster!" "You _shall_ listen--to just one thing more. Just halfway between now and Midsummer may I come to see you--just once?" "No." "Why?" "Because--I shall not want to see you." "That's good," said he steadily. "Then let me tell you that I should not come even if you would let me. I wanted you to know that." A little, half-smothered laugh came from her in spite of herself, in which he rather grimly joined. Then the others, calling questions and reproaches, bore down upon them, and the evening for Richard Kendrick was over. But the fight he meant to win was just begun. CHAPTER XV MAKING MEN "Grandfather, have you a good courage for adventure?" Matthew Kendrick looked up from his letters. His grandson Richard stood before him, his face lighted by that new look of expectancy and enthusiasm which the older man so often noted now. It was early in the day, Mr. Kendrick having but just partaken of his frugal breakfast. He had eaten alone this morning, having learned to his surprise that Richard was already off. "Why, Dick? What do you want of me?" his grandfather asked, laying down his letters. They were important, but not so important, to his mind, as the giving ear to his grandson. It was something about the business, he had no doubt. The boy was always talking about the business these days, and he found always a ready listener in the old man who was such a pastmaster in the whole difficult subject. "It's the mildest sort of weather--bright sun, good roads most of the way, and something worth seeing at the other end. Put on your fur-lined coat, sir, will you? and come with me up to Eastman. I want to show you the new shop." Mr. Kendrick's eye brightened. So the boy wanted him, did he? Wanted to take him off for the day, the whole day, with himself. It was pleasant news. But he hesitated a little, looking toward the window, where the late March sun was, surely enough, streaming in warmly. The bare branches outside were motionless; moreover, there was no wind, such as had prevailed of late. "I can keep you perfectly warm," Richard added, seeing the hesitation. "There's an electric foot-warmer in the car, and you shall have a heavy rug. I'll have you there in a couple of hours, and you'll not be even chilled. If the weather changes, you can come back by train. Please come--will you?" "I believe I will, Dick, if you'll not drive too fast. I should like to see this wonderful new store, to be sure." "We'll go any pace you like, sir. I've been looking for a day when you could make the trip safely, and this is it." He glanced at the letters. "Could you be ready in--half an hour?" "As soon as I can dictate four short replies. Ring for Mr. Stanton, please, and I'll soon be with you." Richard went out as his grandfather's private secretary came in. Although Matthew Kendrick no longer felt it necessary to go to his office in the great store every day, he was accustomed to attend to a certain amount of selected correspondence, and ordinarily spent an hour after breakfast in dictation to a young stenographer who came to him for the purpose. Within a half hour the two were off, Mr. Kendrick being quite as alert in the matter of dispatching business and getting under way toward fresh affairs as he had ever been. It was with an expression of interested anticipation that the old man, wrapped from head to foot, took his place in the long, low-hung roadster, beneath the broad hood which Richard had raised, that his passenger might be as snug as possible. For many miles the road was of macadam, and they bowled along at a rate which consumed the distance swiftly, though not too fast for Mr. Kendrick's comfort. Richard artfully increased his speed by fractional degrees, so that his grandfather, accustomed to being conveyed at a very moderate mileage about the city in his closed car, should not be startled by the sense of flight which he might have had if the young man had started at his usual break-neck pace. They did not talk much, for Matthew Kendrick was habitually cautious about using his voice in winter air, and Richard was too engaged with the car and with his own thoughts to attempt to keep up a one-sided conversation. More than once, however, a brief colloquy took place. One of the last of these, before approaching their destination, was as follows: "Keeping warm, grandfather?" "Perfectly, Dick, thanks to your foot-warmer." "Tired, at all?" "Not a particle. On the contrary, I find the air very stimulating." "I thought you would. Wonderful day for March, isn't it?" "Unusually fine." "We'll be there before you know it. There's one bad stretch of a couple of miles, beyond the turn ahead, and another just this side of Eastman, but Old Faithful here will make light work of 'em. She could plough through a quicksand if she had to, not to mention spring mud to the hubs." "The car seems powerful," said the old man, smiling behind his upturned fur collar. "I suppose a young fellow like you wouldn't be content with anything that couldn't pull at least ten times as heavy a load as it needed to." "I suppose not," laughed Richard. "Though it's not so much a question of a heavy load as of plenty of power when you want it, and of speed--all the time. Suppose we were being chased by wild Indians right now, grandfather. Wouldn't it be a satisfaction to walk away from them like--this?" The car shot ahead with a long, lithe spring, as if she had been using only a fraction of her power, and had reserves greater than could be reckoned. Her gait increased as she flew down the long straightaway ahead until her speedometer on the dash recorded a pace with which the fastest locomotive on the track which ran parallel with the road would have had to race with wide-open throttle to keep neck to neck. Richard had not meant to treat his grandfather to an exhibition of this sort, being well aware of the older man's distaste for modern high speed, but the sight of the place where he was in the habit of racing with any passing train was too much for his young blood and love of swift flight, and he had covered the full two-mile stretch before he could bring himself to slow down to a more moderate gait. Then he turned to look at as much of his grandfather's face as he could discern between cap-brim and collar. The eagle eyes beneath their heavy brows were gazing straight ahead, the firmly moulded lips were close-set, the whole profile, with its large but well-cut nose, suggested grim endurance. Matthew Kendrick had made no remonstrance, nor did he now complain, but Richard understood. "You didn't like that, did you, grandfather? I had no business to do it, when I said I wouldn't. Did I chill you, sir? I'm sorry," was his quick apology. "You didn't chill my body, Dick," was the response. "You did make me realize the difference between--youth and age." "That's not what I ever want to do," declared the young man, with swift compunction. "Not when your age is worth a million times my youth, in knowledge and power. And of course I'm showing up a particularly unfortunate trait of youth--to lose its head! Somehow all the boy in me comes to the top when I see that track over there, even when there's no competing train. Did you ever know a boy who didn't want to be an engine driver?" "I was a boy once," said Matthew Kendrick. "Trains in my day were doing well when they made twenty-five miles an hour. I shouldn't mind your racing with one of those." "I'm racing with one of the fastest engines ever built when I set up a store in Eastman and try to appropriate some of your methods. I wonder what you'll think of it?" said Richard gayly. "Well, here's the bad stretch. Sit tight, grandfather. I'll pick out the best footing there is, but we may jolt about a good bit. I'm going to try what can be done to get these fellows to put a bottom under their spring mud!" When the town was reached Richard convoyed his companion straight to the best hotel, saw that he had a comfortable chair and as appetizing a meal as the house could afford, and let him rest for as long a time afterward as he himself could brook waiting. When Mr. Kendrick professed himself in trim for whatever might come next Richard set out with him for the short walk to the store of Benson & Company. The young man's heart was beating with surprising rapidity as the two approached the front of the brick building which represented his present venture into the business world. He knew just how keen an eye was to inspect the place, and what thorough knowledge was to pass judgment upon it. "Here we are," he said abruptly, with an effort to speak lightly. "These are our front windows. Carson dresses them himself. He seems a wonder to me--I can't get hold of it at all. Rather a good effect, don't you think?" He was distinctly nervous, and he could not conceal it, as Matthew Kendrick turned to look at the front of the building, taking it all in, it seemed, with one sweeping glance which dwelt only for a minute apiece on the two big windows, and then turned to the entrance, above which hung the signs, old and new. The visitor made no comment, only nodded, and made straight for the door. As it swung open under Richard's hand, the young man's first glance was for the general effect. He himself was looking at everything as if for the first time, intensely alive to the impression it was to make upon his judge. He found that the general effect was considerably obscured by the number of people at the counters and in the aisles, more, it seemed to him, than he had ever seen there before. His second observation was that the class of shoppers seemed particularly good, and he tried to recall the special feature of Carson's advertisement of the evening before. There were several different lines, he remembered, to which Carson had called special attention, with the assertion that the values were absolute and the quality guaranteed. But his attention was very quickly diverted from any study of the store itself to the even more interesting and instructive study of the old man who accompanied him. He had invited an expert to look the situation over, there could be no possible doubt of that. And the expert was looking it over--there could be no doubt of that, either. As they passed down one aisle and up another, Richard could see how the eagle eyes noted one point after another, yet without any disturbing effect of searching scrutiny. Here and there Mr. Kendrick's gaze lingered a trifle longer, and more than once he came close to a counter and brought an eyeglass to bear on the goods there displayed, nodding pleasantly at the salespeople as he did so. And everywhere he went glances followed him. It seemed to Richard that he had never realized before what a distinguished looking old man his grandfather was. He was not of more than average height; he was dressed, though scrupulously, as unobtrusively as is any quiet gentleman of his years and position; but none the less was there something about him which spoke of the man of affairs, of the leader, the organizer, the general. Alfred Carson came hurrying out of the little office as the two Kendricks came in sight. Matthew Kendrick greeted him with distinct evidence of pleasure. "Ah, Mr. Carson," he said, "I am very glad to see you again. I have missed you from your department. How do you find the new business? More interesting than the old, eh?" "It is always interesting, sir," responded Carson, "to enlarge one's field of operations." Mr. Kendrick laughed heartily at this, turning to Richard as he did so. "That's a great compliment to you, Dick," he said, "that Mr. Carson feels he has enlarged his field by coming up here to you, and leaving me." "Don't you think it's true, grandfather?" challenged Richard boldly. "To be sure it's true," agreed Mr. Kendrick. "But it sometimes takes a wise man to see that a swing from the centre of things to the rim is the way to swing back to the centre finally. Well, I've looked about quite a bit,--what next, Dick?" "Won't you come into the office, sir, and ask us any questions that you like? We want your criticism and your suggestions," declared Richard. "Where's Mr. Benson, Mr. Carson? I'd like him to meet my grandfather right away. I thought we'd find him somewhere about the place before now." "He's just come into the office," said Carson, leading the way. "He'll be mightily pleased to see Mr. Kendrick." This prophecy proved true. Hugh Benson, who had not known of his partner's intention to bring Mr. Kendrick, Senior, to visit the store, flushed with pleasure and a little nervousness when he saw him, and gave evidence of the latter as he cleared a chair for his guest and knocked down a pile of small pasteboard boxes as he did so. "We don't usually keep such things in here," he apologized, and sent post-haste for a boy to take the offending objects away. Then the party settled down for a talk, Richard carefully closing the door, after notifying a clerk outside to prevent interruption for so long as it should remain closed. "Now, grandfather, talk business to us, will you?" he begged. "Tell us what you think of us, and don't spare us. That's what we want, isn't it?" And he appealed to his two associates with a look which bade them speak out. "We certainly do, Mr. Kendrick," Hugh Benson assured the visitor eagerly. "It's our chance to have an expert opinion." "It will be even more than that," said Alfred Carson. "It will be the opinion of the master of all experts in the business world." "Fie, Mr. Carson," said the old man, with, however, a kind look at the young man, who, he knew, did not mean to flatter him but to speak the undeniable truth, "you must remember the old saying about praise to the face. Still, I must break that rule myself when I tell you all that I am greatly pleased with the appearance of the place, and with all that meets the eye in a brief visit." Richard glowed with satisfaction at this, but both Benson and Carson appeared to be waiting for more. The old man looked at them and nodded. "You have both had much more experience than this boy of mine," said he, "and you know that all has not been said when due acknowledgment has been made of the appearance of a place of business. What I want to know, gentlemen, is--does the appearance tell the absolute truth about the integrity of the business?" Richard looked at him quickly, for with the last words his grandfather's tone had changed from mere suavity to a sudden suggestion of sternness. Instinctively he straightened in his chair, and his glance at the other two young men showed that they had quite as involuntarily straightened in theirs. As the head of the firm, Hugh Benson, after a moment's pause, answered, in a quietly firm tone which made Richard regard him with fresh respect: "If it didn't, Mr. Kendrick, I shouldn't want to be my father's successor. He may have been a failure in business, but it was not for want of absolute integrity." The keen eyes softened as they rested on the young man's face, and Mr. Kendrick bent his head, as if he would do honour to the memory of a father who, however unsuccessful as the world judges success, could make a son speak as this son had spoken. "I am sure that is true, Mr. Benson," he said, and paused for a moment before he went on: "It is the foundation principle of business--that a reputation for trustworthiness can be built only on the rock of real merit. The appearance of the store must not tell one lie--not one--from front door to back--not even the shadow of a lie. Nothing must be left to the customer's discretion. If he pays so much money he must get so much value, whether he knows it or not." He stopped abruptly, waited for a little, his eyes searching the faces before him. Then he said, with a change of tone: "Do you want to tell me something about the management of the business, gentlemen?" "We want to do just that, Mr. Kendrick," Benson answered. So they set it before him, he and Alfred Carson, as they had worked it out, Richard remaining silent, even when appealed to, merely saying quietly: "I'm only the crudest kind of a beginner--you fellows will have to do the talking," and so leaving it all to the others. They showed Mr. Kendrick the books of the firm, they explained to him their system of buying, of analyzing their sales that they might learn how to buy at best advantage and sell at greatest profit; of getting rid of goods quickly by attractive advertising; of all manner of details large and small, such as pertain to the conduct of a business of the character of theirs. They grew eager, enthusiastic, as they talked, for they found their listener ready of understanding, quick of appreciation, kindly of criticism, yet so skilful at putting a finger on their weak places that they could only wonder and take earnest heed of every word he said. As Richard watched him, he found himself understanding a little Matthew Kendrick's extraordinary success. If his personality was still one to make a powerful impression on all who came in contact with him, what must it have been, Richard speculated, in his prime, in those wonderful years when he was building the great business, expanding it with a daring of conception and a rapidity of execution which had fairly taken away the breath of his contemporaries. He had introduced new methods, laid down new principles, defied old systems, and created better ones having no precedent anywhere but in his own productive brain. It might justly be said that he had virtually revolutionized the mercantile world, for when the bridges that he built were found to hold, in spite of all dire prophecy to the contrary, others had crossed them, too, and profited by his bridge building. The three young men did their best to lead Mr. Kendrick to talk of himself, but of that he would do little. Constantly he spoke of the work of his associates, and when it became necessary to allude to himself it was always as if they had been identified with every move of his own. It was Alfred Carson who best recognized this trait of peculiar modesty in the old man, and who understood most fully how often the more impersonal "we" of his speech really stood for the "I" who had been the mainspring of all action in the growth of the great affairs he spoke of. Carson was the son of a man who had been one of the early heads of a newly created department, in the days when departments were just being tried, and he had heard many a time of the way in which Matthew Kendrick had held to his course of introducing innovations which had startled the men most closely associated with him, and had made them wonder if he were not going too far for safety or success. "Well, well, gentlemen," said Mr. Kendrick, rising abruptly at last, "you have beguiled me into long speech. It takes me back to old days to sit and discuss a young business like this one with young men like you. It has been very interesting, and it delights me to find you so ready to take counsel, while at the same time you show a healthy belief in your own judgment. You will come along--you will come along. You will make mistakes, but you will profit by them. And you will remember always, I hope, a motto I am going to give you." He paused and looked searchingly into each face before him: Hugh Benson's, serious and sincere; Alfred Carson's, energy and purpose showing in every line; his own boy's, Richard's, keen interest and a certain proud wonder looking out of his fine eyes as he watched the old man who seemed to him to-day, somehow, almost a stranger in his unwontedly aroused speech. "The most important thing a business can do," said Matthew Kendrick slowly, "is to make men of those who make the business." He let the words sink in. He saw, after an instant, the response in each face, and he nodded, satisfied. He held out his hand to each in turn, including his grandson, and received three hearty grips of gratitude and understanding. As he drove away with Richard his eyes were bright under their heavy brows. It had done him good, this visit to the place where his thoughts had often been of late, and he was pleased with the way Richard had borne himself throughout the interview. He could not have asked better of the heir to the Kendrick millions than the unassuming and yet quietly assured manner Richard had shown. It had a certain quality, the old man proudly considered, which was lacking in that of both Benson and Carson, fine fellows though they were, and well-mannered in every way. It reminded Matthew Kendrick of the boy's own father, who had been a man among men, and a gentleman besides. "Grandfather, we shall pass Mr. Rufus Gray's farm in a minute. Don't you want to stop and see them?" "Rufus Gray?" questioned Mr. Kendrick. "The people we entertained at Christmas? I should like to stop, if it will not delay us too long. It seems a colder air than it did this morning." "There's a bit of wind, and it's usually colder, facing this way. If you prefer, after the call, I'll take you back to the station and run down alone." "We'll see. Is this the place we're coming to? A pleasant old place enough, and it looks like the right home for such a pair," commented Mr. Kendrick, gazing interestedly ahead as the car swung in at a stone gateway, and followed a winding roadway toward a low-lying, hospitable looking white house, with long porches beyond masses of bare shrubbery. It seemed that the welcoming look of the house was justified in the attitude of its inmates, for the car had but stopped when the door flew open, and Rufus Gray, his face beaming, bade them enter. Inside, his wife came forward with her well-remembered sunny smile, and in a trice Matthew Kendrick and his grandson found themselves sitting in front of a blazing fire upon a wide hearth, receiving every evidence that their presence brought delight. Richard looked on with inward amusement and satisfaction at the unwonted sight of his grandfather partaking of a cup of steaming coffee rich with country cream, and eating with the appetite of a boy a huge, sugar-coated doughnut which his hostess assured him could not possibly hurt him. "They're the real old-fashioned kind, Mr. Kendrick," said she. "Raised like bread, you know, and fried in lard we make ourselves in a way I have so that not a bit of grease gets inside. My husband thinks they're the only fit food to go with coffee." "They are the most delicious food I ever ate, certainly, Madam Gray, and I find myself agreeing with him, now that I taste them," declared Mr. Kendrick, and Richard, disposing with zest of a particularly huge, light specimen of Mrs. Gray's art, seconded his grandfather's appreciation. They made a long call, Mr. Kendrick appearing to enjoy himself as Richard could not remember seeing him do before. He and Mr. Gray found many subjects to discuss with mutual interest, and the nodding of the two heads in assent at frequent intervals proved how well they found themselves agreeing. Richard, as at the time of the Grays' brief visit at his own home, devoted himself to the lady whom he always thought of as "Aunt Ruth," secretly dwelling on the hope that he might some day acquire the right to call her by that pleasant title. He led her, by artful circumlocutions, always tending toward one object, to speak of her nieces and nephews, and when he succeeded in drawing from her certain all too meagre news of Roberta, he exulted in his ardent soul, though he did his best not to betray himself. "Maybe," said she, quite suddenly, "you'd enjoy looking at the family album. Robby and Ruth always get it out when they come here--they like to see their father and mother the way they used to look. There's some of themselves, too, though the photographs folks have now are too big to go in an old-fashioned album like this, and the ones they've sent me lately aren't in here." Never did a modern young man accept so eagerly the chance to scan the collection of curious old likenesses such as is found between the covers of the now despised "album" of the days of their grandfathers. Richard turned the pages eagerly, scanning them for faces he knew, and discovered much satisfaction in one charming picture of Roberta's mother at eighteen, because of its suggestion of the daughter. "Eleanor was the beauty of the family, and is yet, I always say," asserted Aunt Ruth. "Robby's like her, they all think, but she can't hold a candle to her mother. She's got more spirit in her face, maybe, but her features aren't equal to Eleanor's." Richard did not venture to disagree with this opinion, but he privately considered that, enchanting as was the face of Mrs. Robert Gray at eighteen, that of her daughter Roberta, at twenty-four, dangerously rivalled it. "I could tell better about the likeness if I saw a late picture of Miss Roberta," he observed, his eyes and mouth grave, but his voice expectant. Aunt Ruth promptly took the suggestion, and limping daintily away, returned after a minute with a framed photograph of Roberta and Ruth, taken by one of those masters of the art who understand how to bring out the values of the human face, yet to leave provocative shadows which make for mystery and charm. Richard received it with a respectful hand, and then had much ado to keep from showing how the sight of her pictured face made his heart throb. When the two visitors rose to go Aunt Ruth put in a plea for their remaining overnight. "It's turned colder since you came up this morning, Mr. Kendrick," said she. "Why not stay with us and go back in the morning? We'd be so pleased to entertain you, and we've plenty of room--too much room for us two old folks, now the children are all married and gone." To Richard's surprise his grandfather did not immediately decline. He looked at Aunt Ruth, her rosy, smiling face beaming with hospitality, then he glanced at Richard. "Do stay," urged Uncle Rufus. "Remember how you took us in at midnight, and what a good time you gave us the two days we stayed? It would make us mighty happy to have you sleep under our roof, you and your grandson both, if he'll stay, too." "I confess I should like to sleep under this roof," admitted Matthew Kendrick. "It reminds me of my father's old home. It's very good of you, Madam Gray, to ask us, and I believe I shall remain. As to Richard--" "I'd like nothing better," declared that young man promptly. So it was settled. Richard drove back to the store and gathered together various articles for his own and his grandfather's use, and returned to the Gray fireside. The long and pleasant evening which followed the hearty country supper gave him one more new experience in the long list of them he was acquiring. Somehow he had seldom been happier than when he followed his hostess into the comfortable room upstairs she assigned him, opening from that she had given the elder man. Cheerful fires burned in old-fashioned, open-hearthed Franklin stoves, in both rooms, and the atmosphere was fragrant with the mingled breath of crackling apple-wood, and lavender from the fine old linen with which both beds had been freshly made. "Sleep well, my dear friends," said Aunt Ruth, in her quaintly friendly way, as she bade her guests good-night and shook hands with them, receiving warm responses. "One must find sweet repose under your roof," said Matthew Kendrick, and Richard, attending his hostess to the door, murmured, "You look as if you'd put two small boys to bed and tucked them in!" at which Aunt Ruth laughed with pleasure, nodding at him over her shoulder as she went away. Presently, as Matthew Kendrick lay down in the soft bed, his face toward the glow of his fire that he might watch it, Richard knocked and came in from his own room and, crossing to the bed, stood leaning on the foot-board. "Too sleepy to talk, grandfather?" he asked. "Not at all, my boy," responded the old man, his heart stirring in his breast at this unwonted approach at an hour when the two were usually far apart. Never that he could remember had Richard come into his room after he had retired. "I wanted to tell you," said the young man, speaking very gently, "that you've been awfully kind, and have done us all a lot of good to-day. And you've done me most of all." "Why, that's pleasant news, Dick," answered old Matthew Kendrick, his eyes fixed on the shadowy outlines of the face at the foot of the bed. "Sit down and tell me about it." So Richard sat down, and the two had such a talk as they had had never before in their lives--a long, intimate talk, with the barriers down--the barriers which both felt now never should have existed. Lying there in the soft bed of Aunt Ruth's best feathers, with the odour of her lavender in his nostrils, and the sound of the voice he loved in his ears, the old man drank in the delight of his grandson's confidence, and the wonder of something new--the consciousness of Richard's real affection, and his heart beat with slow, heavy throbs of joy, such as he had never expected to feel again in this world. "Altogether," said Richard, rising reluctantly at last, as the tall old clock on the landing near-by slowly boomed out the hour of midnight, "it's been a great day for me. I'd been looking forward with quite a bit of dread to bringing you up, I knew you'd see so plainly wherever we were lacking; but you were so splendidly kind about it--" "And why shouldn't I be kind, Dick?" spoke his grandfather eagerly. "What have I in the world to interest me as you and your affairs interest me? Can any possible stroke of fortune seem so great to me as your development into a manhood of accomplishment? And when it is in the very world I know so well and have so near my heart--" Richard interrupted him, not realizing that he was doing so, but full of longing to make all still further clear between them. "Grandfather, I want to make a confession. This world of yours--I didn't want to enter it." "I know you didn't, Dick. And I know why. But you are getting over that, aren't you? You are beginning to realize that it isn't what a man does, but the way he does it, that matters." "Yes," said Richard slowly. "Yes, I'm beginning to realize that. And do you want to know what made me realize it to-day, as never before?" The old man waited. "It was the sight of you, sir--and--the recognition of the power you have been all your life;--and the--sudden appreciation of the"--he stumbled a little, but he brought the words out forcefully at the end--"of the very great gentleman you are!" He could not see the hot tears spring into the old eyes which had not known such a sign of emotion for many years. But he could feel the throb in the low voice which answered him after a moment. "I may not deserve that, Dick, but--it touches me, coming from you." When Richard had gone back to his own room, Matthew Kendrick lay for a long time, wide awake, too happy to sleep. In the next room his grandson, before he slept, had formulated one more new idea: "There's something in the association with people like these that makes a fellow feel like being absolutely honest with them, with everybody--most of all with himself. What is it?" And pondering this, he was lost in the world of dreams. CHAPTER XVI ENCOUNTERS "By the way, Rob, I saw Rich Kendrick to-day." Louis Gray detained his sister Roberta on the stairs as they stopped to exchange greetings on a certain evening in March. "It struck me suddenly that I hadn't seen him for a blue moon, and I asked him why he didn't come round when he was in town. He said he was sticking tight to that new business of his up in Eastman, but he admitted he was to be here over Sunday. I invited him round to-night, but to my surprise he wouldn't come. Said he had another engagement, of course--thanked me fervently and all that--but there was no getting him. It made me a bit suspicious of you, Bobby." "I can't imagine why." But, in spite of herself, Roberta coloured. "He came here when he was helping Uncle Calvin. There's no reason for his coming now." Her brother regarded her with the observing eye which sisters find it difficult to evade. "He would have taken a job as nursemaid for Rosy, if it would have given him a chance to go in and out of this old house, I imagine. Rosy stuck to it, it was his infatuation for the home and the members thereof, particularly Gordon and Dorothy. He undoubtedly was struck with them--it would have been a hard heart that wasn't touched by the sight of the boy--but if it was the kiddies he wanted, why didn't he keep coming? Steve and Rosy would have welcomed him." "You had better ask him his reasons, next time you see him," Roberta suggested, and escaped. It was two months since she had seen Richard Kendrick. He seemed never so much as to pass the house, although it stood directly on his course when he drove back and forth from Eastman in his car. She wondered if he really did make a détour each time, to avoid the very chance of meeting her. It was impossible not to think of him, rather disturbingly often, and to wonder how he was getting on. The month of March in the year of this tale was on the whole an extraordinarily mild and springlike piece of substitution for the rigorous, wind-swept season it should by all rights have been. On one of its most beguiling days Roberta Gray was walking home from Miss Copeland's school. Usually she came by way of the broad avenue which led straight home. To-day, out of sheer unwillingness to reach that home and end the walk, she took a quite different course. This led her up a somewhat similar street, parallel to her own but several blocks beyond, a street of more than ordinary attractiveness in that it was less of a thoroughfare than any other of equal beauty in the residential portion of the city. She was walking slowly, drawing in the balmy air and noting with delight the beds of crocuses which were beginning to show here and there on lawns and beside paths, when a peculiar sound far up the avenue caught her ear. She recognized it instantly, for she had heard it often and she had never heard another quite like it. It was the warning song of a coming motor-car and it was of unusual and striking musical quality. So Roberta knew, even before she caught sight of the long, low, powerful car which had stood many times before her own door during certain weeks of the last year, that she was about to meet for the first time in two months the person upon whom she had put a ban. Would he see her? He could hardly help it, for there was not another pedestrian in sight upon the whole length of the block, and the March sunshine was full upon her. As the car came on the girl who walked sedately to meet it found that her pulses had somehow curiously accelerated. So this was the route he took, not to go by her home. Did he see her? Evidently as far away as half a block, for at that distance his motor-cap was suddenly pulled off, and it was with bared head that he passed her. At the moment the car was certainly not running as fast as it had been doing twenty rods back; it went by at a pace moderate enough to show the pair to each other with distinctness. Roberta saw clearly Richard Kendrick's intent eyes upon her, saw the flash of his smile and the grace of his bow, and saw--as if written upon the blue spring sky--the word he had left with her, "Midsummer." If he had shouted it at her as he passed, it could not have challenged her more definitely. He was obeying her literally--more literally than she could have demanded. Not to slow down, come to a standstill beside her, exchange at least a few words of greeting--this was indeed a strict interpretation of her edict. Evidently he meant to play the game rigorously. Still, he had been a compellingly attractive figure as he passed; that instant's glimpse of him was likely to remain with her quite as long as a more protracted interview. Did he guess that? "I wonder how I looked?" was her first thought as she walked on--a purely feminine one, it must be admitted. When she reached home she glanced at herself in the hall mirror on her way upstairs--a thing she seldom took the trouble to do. A figure got hastily to its feet and came out into the hall to meet her as she passed the door of the reception-room. "Miss Roberta!" said an eager voice. "Why, Mr. Westcott! I didn't know you were in town!" "I didn't intend to be until next month, as you knew. But this wonderful weather was too much for me." He held her hand and looked down into her face from his tall height. He told her what he thought of her appearance--in detail with his eyes, in modified form with his lips. "In my old school clothes?" laughed Roberta. "How draggy winter things seem the first warm days. This velvet hat weighs like lead on my head to-day." She took it off. "I'll run up and make myself presentable," said she. "Please don't. You're exactly right as you are. And--I want you to go for a walk if you're not too tired. The road that leads out by the West Wood marshes--it will be sheer spring out there to-day. I want to share it with you." So Roberta put on her hat again and went to walk with Forbes Westcott out the road that led by the West Wood marshes. There was not a more romantic road to be found in a long way. When they were well out into the country he began to press a question which she had heard before, and to which he had had as yet no answer. "Still undecided?" said he, with a very sober face. "You can't make up your mind as to my qualifications?" "Your qualifications are undoubted," said she, with a face as sober as his. "They are more than any girl could ask. But I--how can I know? I care so much for you--as a friend. Why can't we keep on being just good friends and let things develop naturally?" "If I thought they would ever develop the way I want them," he said earnestly, "I would wait patiently a great while longer. But I don't seem to be making any progress. In fact, I seem to have gone backward a bit in your good graces. Since I saw that young prince of shopkeepers in your company over at Eastman, I've been wondering--" "Prince of shopkeepers! What an extraordinary characterization! I thought he was a most amateurish shopkeeper. He didn't even know the name of his own batiste, much less where it was kept." "He knew how to skate and to take you along with him. I beg your pardon! But ever since that night I've been experiencing a most disconcerting sense of jealousy whenever I think of that young man. He was such a magnificent figure there in the firelight; he made me feel as old as the Pyramids. And when you two were gone so long and came back with such an odd look, both of you--oh, I beg your pardon again! This is most unworthy of me, I know. But--set me straight if you can! Have you seen much of him since that night?" "Absolutely nothing," said Roberta quickly, with a sense of great relief. "To-day he passed me in his car, on my way home from school, over on Egerton Avenue, and didn't even stop." He scanned her face closely. "And you are not even interested in him?" "Mr. Forbes Westcott," said Roberta desperately, "I have told you often and often that I'm not interested in any man except as one or two are my very good friends. Why can't all girls be allowed to live along in peace and comfort until they are at least thirty years old? You didn't have anybody besieging you to marry before you were thirty. If anybody had you'd have said 'No' quickly enough. You had that much of your life comfortably to yourself." He bit his lip, but he was obliged to laugh. His thin, keen face was more attractive when he laughed, but there was an odd, tense expression on it which did not leave it even then. "I can see you are still hopeless," he owned. "But so long as you are hopeless for other men I can endure it, I suppose. I really meant not to speak again for a long time, as I promised you. But the thought of that embryo plutocrat making after you, as he has after so many girls--" "How many girls, I wonder?" queried Roberta quite carelessly. "Do you happen to know? Has his fame spread so far?" "I know nothing about him, of course, except that he's a gay young spendthrift. It goes without saying that he's made love to every pretty face, for that kind invariably do." "If it goes without saying, why say it?--particularly as you don't know it. I dare say he has--what serious harm? I presume it's quite as likely they've run after him. I'm sure it's a matter of no concern to me, for I know him very little and am likely to know him much less now that he doesn't come to work with Uncle Calvin any more. Let's go back, Mr. Westcott. I came out to look for pussy-willows, not for Robby-will-you's!" With which piece of audacity she dismissed the subject. It certainly was not a subject which harmonized well with that of Midsummer Day, and the thought of Midsummer Day, quickened into active life by the unexpected sight of the person who had made a certain preposterous prophecy concerning it, was a thought which was refusing to down. CHAPTER XVII INTRIGUE "Hi!--Mr. Kendrick!--I say, Mr. Kendrick! Wait a minute!" The car, about to leave the curb in front of one of Kendrick & Company's great city stores, halted. Its driver turned to see young Ted Gray tearing across the sidewalk in hot pursuit. "Well, well--glad to see you, Ted, boy. Jump in and I'll take you along." Ted jumped in. He gave Richard Kendrick's welcoming hand a hard squeeze. "I haven't seen you for an awful while," said he reproachfully. "Aren't you ever coming to our house any more?" "I hope so, Ted. But, you see," explained Richard carefully, "I'm a man of business now and I can't have much time for calls. I'm in Eastman most of the time. How are you, Ted? Tell me all about it. Can you go for a spin with me? I had to come into town in a hurry, but there's no great hurry about getting back. I'll take you out into the country and show you the prettiest lot of apple trees in full bloom you ever saw in May." "I'd like to first-rate, but could you take me home first? I have to let mother know where I am after school." "All right." And away they flew. But Richard turned off the avenue three blocks below the corner upon which stood Ted's home and ran up the street behind it. "Run in the back way, will you, Ted?" he requested. "I want to do a bit of work on the car while you're in." So while Ted dashed up through the garden to the back of the house Richard got out and unscrewed a nut or two, which he screwed again into place without having accomplished anything visible to the eye, and was replacing his wrench when the boy returned. "This is jolly," Ted declared. "I'll bet Rob envies me. This is her Wednesday off from teaching, and she was just going for a walk. She wanted me to go with her, but of course she let me go with you instead. I--I suppose I could ride on the running board and let you take her if you want to," he proposed with some reluctance. "I'd like nothing better, but she wouldn't go." "Maybe not. Perhaps Mr. Westcott is coming for her. They walk a lot together." "I thought Mr. Westcott practised law with consuming zeal." "With what? Anyhow, he's here a lot this spring. About every Wednesday, I think. I say, this is a bully car! If I were Rob I'd a lot rather ride with you than go walking with old Westcott--especially when it's so warm." "I'm afraid," said Richard soberly, "that walking in the woods in May has its advantages over bowling along the main highway in any kind of a car." Nevertheless he managed to make the drive a fascinating experience to Ted and a diverting one to himself. And on the way home they stopped at the West Wood marshes to gather a great bunch of trilliums as big as Ted's head. "I'll take 'em to Rob," said her younger brother. "She likes 'em better than any spring flower." "Take my bunch to Mrs. Stephen Gray then. And be sure you don't get them mixed." "What if I did? They're exactly the same size." Ted held up the two nosegays side by side as the car sped on toward home. "I know, but it's of the greatest importance that you keep them straight. That left-hand one is yours; be sure and remember that." Ted looked piercingly at his friend, but Richard's face was perfectly grave. "Must be you don't like Rob, if you're so afraid your flowers will get to her," he reflected. "Or else you think so much of Rosy you can't bear to let anybody else have the flowers you picked for her. I'll have to tell Steve that." "Do, by all means. Mere words could never express my admiration for Mrs. Stephen." "She is pretty nice," agreed Ted. "I like her myself. But she isn't in it with Rob. Why, Rosy's afraid of lots of things, regularly afraid, you know, so Steve has to laugh her out of them. But Rob--she isn't afraid of a thing in the world." "Except one." "One?" Ted pricked up his ears. "What's that? I'll bet she isn't really afraid of it--just shamming. She does that sometimes. What is it? Tell me, and I'll tell you if she's shamming." "I'd give a good deal to know, but I'm afraid I can't tell you what it is." "Why not? If she isn't really afraid of it she won't mind my knowing. And if she is maybe I can laugh her out of it, the way Steve does Rosy." "I don't believe you're competent to treat the case, Ted. It's not a thing to be laughed out of, you see. The thing for you to remember is which bunch of trilliums you are to give Mrs. Stephen Gray from me." "This one." Ted waved his left arm. "Not a bit of it. The left one is yours." "No, because mine was a little the biggest, and you see this right one is." "You are mistaken," Richard assured him positively. "You give Mrs. Stephen the right one, and I'll take the consequences." "Did yours have a red one in?" "Has that right one?" "No, the left one has. I remember seeing you pick it." "But afterward I threw it out. You picked one and left it in. The right is mine." "You've got me all mixed up," vowed Ted discontentedly, at which his companion laughed, delight in his eye. The left-hand bunch was unquestionably his own, but if he could only convince Ted of the contrary he should at least have the satisfaction of knowing that the flowers he had plucked had reached his lady, though they would have no significance to her. When the lad jumped out of the car at his own rear gate he had agreed that the bunch with the one deep red trillium was to go to Roberta. Ted turned to wave both white clusters at his friend as the car went on, then he proceeded straight to his sister's room. Finding her absent, he laid one great white-and-green mass in a heap upon her bed and went his way with the other to Mrs. Stephen's room. Here he found both Roberta and Rosamond playing with little Gordon and Dorothy, whom their nurse had just brought in from an airing. "Here's some trilliums for you, Rosy," announced Ted. "Mr. Kendrick sent 'em to you. I left yours on your bed, Rob. I picked yours; at least I think I did. He was awfully particular that his went to Rosy, but we got sort of mixed up about which picked which, so I can't be sure. I don't see any use of making such a fuss about a lot of trilliums, anyhow." Roberta and Rosamond looked at each other. "I think you are decidedly mixed, Ted," said Rosamond. "It was Rob Mr. Kendrick meant to send his to." Ted shook his head positively. "No, it wasn't. He said something about you that I told him I was going to tell Steve, only--I don't know as I can remember it. Something about his admiring you a whole lot." "Delightful! And he didn't say anything about Rob?" "Not very much. Said she was afraid of something. I said she wasn't afraid of anything, and he said she was--of one thing. I tried to make him say what it was, because I knew he was all off about that, but he wouldn't tell." "Evidently you and Mr. Kendrick talked a good deal of nonsense," was Roberta's comment, on her way from the room. She found the mass of green and white upon her bed and stood contemplating it for a moment. The one deep red trillium glowed richly against its snowy brethren, and she picked it out and examined it thoughtfully, as if she expected it to tell her whereof Richard Kendrick thought she was afraid. But as it vouchsafed no information she gathered up the whole mass and disposed it in a big crystal bowl which she set upon a small table by an open window. "If I thought that really was the bunch he picked," said she to herself, "I should consider he had broken his promise and I should feel obliged to throw it away. Perhaps I'd better do it anyhow. Yet--it seems a pity to throw away such a beautiful bowlful of white and green, and--very likely they were of Ted's picking after all. But I don't like that one red one against all the white." She laid fingers upon it to draw it out. But she did not draw it out. "I wonder if that represents the one thing I'm afraid of?" she considered whimsically. "What does his majesty mean--himself? Or--myself? Or--of--of--Yes, I suppose that's it! Am I afraid of it?" She stood staring down at the one deep red flower, the biggest, finest bloom of them all. It really did not belong there with the others in their cool, chaste whiteness. Quite suddenly she drew it out. She made the motion of throwing it out the window, but it seemed to cling to her fingers. "Poor little flower," said she softly, "why should you have to go? Perhaps you're sorry because you're not white like the rest. But you can't help it; you were made that way." If Richard Kendrick could have seen her standing there, staring down at the flower he had picked, he would have found it harder than ever to go on his appointed course. For this was what she was thinking: "I ought--I ought--to like best the white flowers of intellect--and ability--and training--and every sort of fitness. I try and try to like them best. But, oh!--they are so white--compared with this red, red one. I like the white ones; they are pure and cool and beautiful. But--the red one is warm, warm! Oh, I don't know--I don't know. And how am I going to know? Tell me that, red flower. Did he pick you? Shall I keep you--on the doubt? Well--but not where you will show. Yes, I'll keep you, but away down in the middle, where no one will see you, and where you won't distract my attention from the beautiful white flowers that are so different from you." She bent over the bowlful of snowy spring blossoms, drew them apart, and sunk the red flower deep among them, drawing them together again so that not a hint of their alien brother should show against their whiteness. "There," said she, turning away with a little laugh, but speaking over her shoulder, "you ought to be satisfied with that. That's certainly much better than being thrown out of the window, to wilt in the sun!" CHAPTER XVIII THE NAILING OF A FLAG "Well--well--well!" drawled a voice at Richard Kendrick's elbow. "How are you, old man? Haven't seen you since before the days of Noah! Off to that country shop of yours? I say, take me along, will you? Time hangs heavy on my hands just now, and I want to see you anyhow, about a plan of mine." "Hop in, Lorimer. Mighty glad to see you. Want to go all the way to Eastman? That's fine! This is great weather, eh?" Belden Lorimer hopped in, if that word may be used to express his eager acceptance rather than the alacrity of his movements, for he was accustomed to act with as much deliberation as he spoke. He was one of Richard's college friends, also one of his late intimate companions at clubs and in social affairs. Lorimer possessed as much money in his own right as Richard himself, though his expectations were hardly as great. "To tell the truth," said Lorimer, when the car had left the city and was bowling along the main travelled highway "up the State," "I wanted to see you as much as anything to get a good look at you. Fellows say you've changed. Say you have that 'captain-of-industry' expression now. Say you've acquired that broad brow--alert eye--stern mouth--dominant chin--and so forth, that goes with indomitable determination to 'get there.' To be sure, I'd have thought you'd arrived, or your family before you, but they say you've started out to arrive some more. It's a wonderful example for a chap like me--fellows say. Think so myself. Mind imparting--" Richard broke in on Lorimer's drawl. It was rather an engaging drawl, by the way, and he had always enjoyed hearing it, but it struck upon his ears now with a certain futility. In a world of pressing affairs why should a man cultivate a tone like that? But he liked Lorimer too much to mind how he talked. "I'm delighted if I've acquired that expression," said he, letting out the car another notch, although it was already in swift flight. "It's been a lot of trouble. I've had to practise before a mirror a good deal. It was the chin bothered me most. It sticks out pretty well, but not as far as my grandfather's. Could you advise any method of--" "What I want to know is," proceeded Lorimer calmly, "how you came to go into it. Understand you wanted to help fellow out of the ditch--good old Benson--most worthy. Couldn't help him out without getting in yourself? But going to get out soon as possible, of course? Unthinkable for Rich Kendrick to be a country shopkeeper!" "Unthinkable, is it? Wait till you see the shop. It's the most fun I ever had. Get out? Not by a long shot. I'm in for keeps." "Not you. With the Kendrick establishments waiting for you to come into your own? Which will mean, in your case, becoming the nominal head of a great system, while it continues to be run for you, as now, by a lot of trained heads under salary--big salary." "Great idea of my future you have, Lorry, haven't you? Well, I can't wonder. I've been doing my best for all the years of my life to implant that idea in your mind. But, what about you? What are you at, yourself? You said you had a plan." "He asks what I'm 'at,'" remarked Belden Lorimer to the rural landscape through which the car was passing. "Ever know me to be 'at' anything? It's as much as I can do to support life until I can be off on my next little travel-plan. It's me for a leisurely cruise around the world, in the governor's little old boat--the _Ariel_--painted up within an inch of her life, brass all shining, lockers filled, a first-class cook engaged, and a brand-new skipper and crew--picked men. Sounds pretty good to me. How about you? Shop keeping in it with that, me lord?" His usually languid glance was sharp, as he eyed his friend. "Jove!" ejaculated Richard Kendrick, under his breath. "I thought so. 'Jove!' it is, too--and also Jupiter! You've always said you'd be ready when I was. Well, I'm ready." Richard was silent for a long minute, while his friend waited confidently. Then, "Good luck to you, old Lorry," he said. "It's mighty fine of you to remember our ancient vow to do that trick some day. And I'd like to go--you know that. But--I've a previous engagement." "Not with that fool store up in the backwoods? Can't make me believe that, you know." Richard's face was a study. "Believe it or not, it's a fact. That store is the joint property of Benson & Company. I'm the Company. I can't desert my partner just as we're getting the ground under our feet." "Well--I'll--be--hanged," drawled Lorimer, more heavily than ever, as was his custom when opposed, "if I see it. You go and help a fellow out with capital and set him on his feet. You save his pride, I suppose, by making yourself a partner. Fine, sporty thing to do. But you've done it. You've contributed the capital. Can't reasonably suppose you contribute anything else. If you don't mind my saying it, your--previous--training--" "Doesn't make me indispensable to the success of the business? Hardly, as yet. But for the very reason that I lack training, I've got to stay and get it." "Take lessons in shopkeeping from Hugh Benson?" "Exactly. And from Alf Carson. He's our manager." "Don't know him. But from the way you allude to him I judge he has the details at his fingers-ends. That's all right. Leave--him--on--the--job." "I will--and stay myself." Richard's eyes were straight ahead, as the eyes of a man must be whose powerful car is running at high speed along a none too smoothly surfaced portion of state road. Therefore the glances of the two young men could not meet. But Lorimer's eyes could silently scan the well-cut profile presented to his view against the green of the fields beyond. "Never observed," said he, with a peculiar inflection, "just how--rock-like--that chin of yours is, Rich. Reminds me of your grandfather's, for fair." "Glad to hear it." "You know," pursued Lorimer presently, "you gave me your promise, once, that you'd be with me on this cruise, whenever it came off. That's where the chin ought to come in. Man of your word, you know, and all that." "I'm mighty sorry, my dear fellow. Let's not talk about it." And clearly he was sorry. It had been a pleasant plan, and he had not forgotten the circumstances of the laughing yet serious pledge the two had given each other one evening less than two years ago. They kept on their way with a change of conversation, and at the rate of speed which Richard maintained were running into Eastman before they were half done with asking each other questions concerning the months during which they had seldom met. "This the busy mart?" queried Lorimer, as the car came to a standstill before the corner store. "Well, beside Kendrick & Company's massive edifices of stone and marble--" "Luckily, it's not beside them," retorted Richard, maintaining his good humour. "Will you come in?" "Thanks, I will. That's what I came for. Curiosity leads me to want to view you behind the--No, no, of course it's behind the office glass partition that I'll view you, my boy. I want to hear Rich Kendrick talking business--with a big B." "I'll talk business to you, if you don't let up," declared his friend. "You've got to be cured of the idea that this is some kind of a joke, Lorry. Will you be kind enough to take me seriously?" "Find--that--impossible," drawled Lorimer, under his breath, as he followed Richard into the store. But once there, of course, his manner changed to the most courteous of which he was master. He was taken to the office and there shook hands with Hugh Benson with cordiality, having known him at college as a man who commanded respect for high scholarship and modest but assured manners, though of a quite different class of comradeship from his own. He talked pleasantly with Alfred Carson, and listened with evident interest to a business discussion between Richard and his associates, in the course of which he discovered that however much or little Richard had learned, he could speak intelligently concerning the matters then in hand. He went to lunch with Richard and Hugh Benson at a hotel, and listened again, for a decision was to be made which called for haste, and no time could be lost in the consideration of it. He spent the afternoon driving Richard's car on up the state, returning in time to pick up his friend at the appointed hour, late in the afternoon, at which they were to start back to the city. Up to the last moment of their departure business still had the upper hand, and it was not until Benson and Kendrick parted at the curb that it ended for the day, as far as Richard's part in it was concerned. "Six hours you've been at it," remarked Lorimer, as the car swung away under Richard's hand. "It makes me fatigued all over to contemplate such zeal." "Tell that to the men who really work. I'm getting off easy, to cut and run at the end of six hours." "Rich--" began his friend, then he paused. "By the Lord Harry, I'd like to know what's got you. I can't make you and the old Rich fit together at all. You and your books--you and your music--and your pictures--your polo--your 'wine, women, and song'--" "Take that last back," commanded Richard Kendrick, with sudden heat. "You know I've never gone in for that sort of thing, except as all our old crowd went in together. Personally, I haven't cared for it, and you know it. It's travel and adventure I've cared for--" "And that you're throwing over now for a country shop." "That I'm throwing over now to learn the ABC in the training school of responsibility for the big load that's to come on my shoulders. I've been asleep all these years. Thank Heaven I've waked up in time. It's no merit of mine--" "Mind telling me whose it is, then?" "I should mind, very much--if you'll excuse me." "Oh--beg pardon," drawled Lorimer. Silence followed for a brief space, broken by Richard's voice, in its old, genial tone. "Tell me more about the cruise. It's great that you can have your father's yacht. I thought he always used it through the summer." "He's gone daffy on monoplanes--absolutely daffy. Can't see anything else." "I don't blame him. I might have gone in for aviation myself, if I hadn't got this bigger game on my hands." "Bigger--there you go again! Well, every man to his taste. The governor's lost interest in the _Ariel_--let me have her without a reservation as to time limit. Don't care for flying myself. Necessary to sit up. Like to lie on my back too well for that." "You do yourself injustice." "Now, now--don't preach. I've been expecting it." "You needn't. I'm too busy with my own case to attend to yours." "Lucky for me. I feel you'd be a zealous preacher if you ever got started." "What route do you expect to take?" pursued Richard, steering away from dangerous ground. Lorimer outlined it, in his most languid manner. One would have thought he had little real interest in his plan, after all. "It's great! You'll have the time of your life!" "I might have had." "You will have--you can't help it." "Not without the man I want in the bunk next mine," said Belden Lorimer, gazing through half-shut eyes at nothing in particular. Richard experienced the severest pang of regret he had yet known. "If that's true, old Lorry," said he slowly, "I'm sorrier than I can tell you." "Then--_come along_!" Lorimer looked waked up at last. He laid a persuasive hand on Richard's arm. There was a moment of tensity. Then: "If I should do it," said Richard, regarding steadily a dog in the road some hundred yards ahead, "would you feel any respect whatever for me?" "Dead loads of it, I assure you." "Sure of that?" "Why not?" "Be honest. Would you?" "You promised me first," said Lorimer. "I know I did. Such idle promises to play don't count when real life asks for work--it's no good reminding me of that promise. Answer me straight, now, Lorry--on your honour. If I should give in and go with you, you'd rejoice for a little, perhaps. Then, some day, when you and I were lying on deck, you'd look at me and think of me--against your will--I don't say it wouldn't be against your will--you'd think of me as a quitter. And you wouldn't like me quite as well as you do now. Eh? Be honest." Lorimer was silent for a minute. Then, to Richard's surprise, he gave an assenting grunt, and followed it up with a reluctant, "Hang it all, I suppose you're right. But I'm badly disappointed, just the same. We'll let that go." And let it go they did, parting, when they reached town, with the friendliest of grips, and a new, if not wholly comprehended, interest between them. As for Richard, he felt, somehow, as if he had nailed his flag to the mast! CHAPTER XIX IN THE MORNING "By George, Carson, what do you think's happened now?" Richard Kendrick had come into the store's little office like a thunderbolt. "Well, Mr. Kendrick?" "Benson's down with typhoid. Came back with it from the trip to Chicago. What do you think of that?" "I thought he was looking a little seedy before he went. Well, well, that's too bad. Right in the May trade, too. Is he pretty sick?" "So the doctor says. He's been keeping up on that trip when he ought to have been in bed. He's in bed now, all right. I took him in with a nurse to the City Hospital on the 10:40 Limited; stretcher in the baggage-car." "Don't see where he got typhoid around here at this time of year," mused Carson. "Nobody sees, but that doesn't matter. He has it, and it's up to us to pull him through--and to get along without him." They sat down to talk it over. While they were at it the telephone came into the discussion with a summons of Richard to a long-distance connection. To his amazement, when communication was established between himself and his distant interlocutor, clear and vibrant came to him over the wire a voice he had dreamed of but had not heard for four months: "Mr. Kendrick?" "Yes. Is it--it isn't--" "This is Miss Gray. Mr. Kendrick, your grandfather wants you very much, at our home. He has had an accident." "An accident? What sort of an accident? Is he much hurt, Miss Gray?" "We can't tell yet. He fell down the porch steps; he had been calling on Uncle Calvin. He--is quite helpless, but the doctor thinks there are no bones broken. Doctor Thomas wouldn't allow Mr. Kendrick to be moved, so we have him here with a nurse. He is very anxious to see you." "I'll be there as soon as I can get there in the car. I think I can make it quicker than by train at this hour. Thank you for calling me, Miss Gray. Please--give my love to grandfather and tell him I'm coming." "I will, Mr. Kendrick. I--we are all--so sorry. Good-bye." Richard turned back to Carson with an anxious face. The manager was on his feet, concern in his manner. "Something happened to old Mr. Kendrick, Mr. Richard?" "A fall--can't move--wants me right away. It never rains but it pours, Carson--even in May. I thought Benson's illness was the worst thing that could happen to us, but this is worse yet. I'll have to leave everything to you to settle while I run down to the old gentleman. A fall, Carson--isn't that likely to be pretty serious at his age?" "Depends on what caused it, I should say," Carson answered cautiously. "If it was any kind of shock--" "Oh--it can't be that!" Richard Kendrick's voice showed his alarm at the thought. "Grandfather's been such an active old chap--no superfluous fat--he's not at all a high liver--takes his cold plunge just as he always has. It can't be that! But I'm off to see. Good-bye, Carson. I'll 'phone you when I know the situation. Meanwhile--wish grandfather safely out of it, will you?" "Of course I will; I think a great deal of Mr. Kendrick. Good-bye--and don't worry about things here." Carson wrung his employer's hand, then went out with him to the curb, where the car stood, and saw him off. "He really cares," he was thinking. "Nobody could fake that anxiety. He doesn't want the old man to die--and he's his heir--to millions. Well, I like him better than ever for it. I believe if I got typhoid he'd personally carry me to the hospital or do any other thing that came into his head. Well, now it's for me to find a competent salesman for this May sale that's on with such a rush. It's going to be hard to manage without Benson." The long, low car had never made faster time to the city, and it was in the early dusk that it came to a standstill before the porch of the Gray home. Doors and windows were wide open, lights gleamed everywhere, but the house was very quiet. The car had stolen up as silently as a car of fine workmanship may in these days of motor perfection, but it had been heard, and Mrs. Robert Gray came out to meet Richard before he could ring. "My dear Mr. Richard," she said, pressing his hand, her face very grave and sweet, "you have come quickly. I am glad, for we are anxious. Your grandfather has dropped into a strange, drowsy state, from which it seems impossible to rouse him. But I hope you may be able to do so. He has wanted you from the first moment." "Tell me which way to go," cried Richard, under his breath. "Is he upstairs?" She kept her hold upon his hand, and he gripped it tight as she led him up the stairs. It was as if he felt a mother's clasp for the first time since his babyhood and could not let it go. "In here," she indicated softly, and the young man went in, his head bent, his lips set. * * * * * Two hours afterward he came out. She was waiting for him, though it was midnight. Louis and Stephen were waiting, too, and they in turn grasped his hand, their faces pitiful for the keen grief they saw in his. Then Mrs. Gray took him down to the porch, where the warm May night folded them softly about. She sat down beside him on a wide settle. "He is all I have in the world!" cried Richard Kendrick. "If he goes--" He could not say more, and, turning, put his arms down upon the back of the seat and his head upon them. Great, tearless sobs shook him. Mrs. Gray laid her kind hand upon his shoulder, and spoke gentle, motherly words--a few words, not many--and kept her hand there until he had himself under control again. By and by Mrs. Stephen Gray came out with a little tray upon which was set forth a simple lunch, daintily served. The young man tried to eat, to show her how much this touched him, but succeeded in swallowing only a portion of the delicate food. Then he got up. "You are all so good," said he gratefully. "You have helped me more than I can tell you. I will go back now. I want to stay with him to-night, if you will allow me." They gave him a room across the hall from that in which his grandfather lay, but he did not occupy it. All night he sat, a silent figure on the opposite side of the bed from that where the nurse was on guard. His grandfather's regular physician was in attendance the greater part of the night at his request, though there seemed nothing to do but await the issue. Another distinguished member of the profession had seen the case in consultation early in the evening, and the two had found themselves unable between them to discover a remote possibility of hope. In the early morning the watcher stole downstairs, feeling as if he must for at least a few moments get into the outer world. His eyes were heavy with his vigil, yet there was no sleep behind them, and he could not bear to be long away lest a change come suddenly. The old man had not roused when he had first spoken to him, and the nurse had said that his last conscious words had been a call for his grandson. Goaded by this thought, Richard turned back before he had so much as reached the foot of the garden, where he had thought he should spend at least a quarter of an hour. As he came in at the door he was met by Roberta, cool and fresh in blue. It was but five in the morning; surely she did not commonly rise at this hour, even in May. The thought made his heart leap. She came straight to him and put both hands in his, saying in her friendly, low voice: "Mr. Kendrick, I'm sorry--sorry!" He looked long and hungrily into her face, holding her hands with such a fierce grasp that he hurt her cruelly, though she made no sign. He did not even thank her--only held her until every detail of her face had been studied. She let him do it, and only dropped her eyes and stood colouring warmly under the inquisition. It was as if she understood that the sight of her was a moment's sedative for an aching heart, and she must yield it or be more unkind than it was in the heart of woman to be. When he released her it was with a sigh that came up from the depths, and as she left him he stood and watched her until she was out of sight. * * * * * When Matthew Kendrick opened his eyes at ten o'clock on the morning after his fall the first thing they rested upon was the face he loved best in the world. It came instantly nearer, the eyes meeting his imploringly, as if begging him to speak. So with some little effort he did speak. "Well, Dick," he said slowly, "I'm glad you came, boy. I wanted you; I didn't know but I was about getting through. But--I believe I'm still here, after all." Then he saw a strange sight. Great tears leaped into the eyes he was looking at, tears that rolled unheeded down the fresh-coloured cheeks of his boy. Richard tried to speak, but could not. He could only gently grasp his grandfather's hand and press it tightly in both his own. "I feel pretty well battered up," the old man continued, his voice growing stronger, "but I think I can move a little." He stirred slightly under his blanket, a fact the nurse noted with joyful intentness. "So I think I'm all here. Are you so glad, Dick, that you can cry about it?" The smile came then upon his grandson's lighting face. "Glad, grandfather?" said he, with some difficulty. "Why, you're all I have in the world! I shouldn't know how to face it without you." The old man dropped off to sleep again, his hand contentedly resting in his grandson's. Presently the doctor looked in, studied the situation in silence, held a minute's whispered colloquy with the nurse, then moved to Richard's side. The young man looked up at him and he nodded. He bent to Richard's ear. "Things look different," he whispered succinctly. At the slight sibilance of the whisper the old man opened his eyes again. His glance travelled up the distinguished physician's body to his face. He smiled in quite his own whimsical way. "Fooled even a noted person like you, did I, Winston?" he chuckled feebly. "Just because I chose to go to sleep and didn't fidget round much you thought I'd got my quietus, did you?" "I think you're a pretty vigorous personality," responded the physician, "and I'm quite willing to be fooled by you. Now I want you to take a little nourishment and go to sleep again. If you think so much of this young man of yours you can have him again in an hour, but I'm going to send him away now. You see, he's been sitting right there all night." Matthew Kendrick's eyes rested fondly again upon Richard's smiling face. "You rascal!" he sighed. "You always did give me trouble about being up o' nights!" * * * * * Richard Kendrick ran downstairs three steps at a bound. At the bottom he met Judge Calvin Gray. He seized the hand of his grandfather's old-time friend and wrung it. The expression of heavy sadness on the Judge's face changed to one of bewilderment, and as he scanned the radiant countenance of Matthew Kendrick's grandson he turned suddenly pale with joy. "You don't mean--" Then he comprehended that Richard was finding it as hard to speak good news as if it had been bad. But in an instant the young man was in command of himself again. "It wasn't apoplexy--it wasn't paralysis--it was only the shock of the fall and the bruises. He's been talking to me; he's been twitting the doctor on having been fooled. Oh, he's as alive as possible, and I--Judge Gray, I never was so happy in my life!" With congratulations in his heart for his old friend on the possession of this young love which was as genuine as it was strong, the Judge said: "Well, my dear fellow, let us thank God and breathe again. This has been the darkest night I've spent in many a year--and this is the brightest morning." Everybody in the house was presently rejoicing in the news. But if Richard expected Roberta to be as generous with him in his joy as she had been in his grief he found himself disappointed. She did not fail to express to him her sympathy with his relief, but she did it with reinforcements of her family at hand, and with Ruth's arm about her waist. She had trusted him when torn with anxiety; clearly she did not trust him now in the reaction from that anxiety. He was in wild spirits, no doubt of that; she could see it in his brilliant eyes. It still lacked six weeks of Midsummer. CHAPTER XX SIDE LIGHTS Louis Gray sat in a capacious willow easy-chair beside the high white iron hospital bed upon which lay Hugh Benson, convalescing from his attack of fever. "Pretty comfortable they make you here," Louis observed, glancing about. "I didn't know their private rooms were as big and airy as this one." Benson smiled. "I don't imagine they all are. I didn't realize what sort of quarters I was in till I began to get better and mother told me. According to her I have the best in the place. That's Rich. Whatever he looks after is sure to be gilt-edged. I wonder if you know what a prince of good fellows he is, anyway." "I always knew he was a good fellow," Louis agreed. "He has that reputation, you know--kind-hearted and open-handed. I should know he would be a substantial friend to his college classmate and business partner." "He's much more than that." Benson's slow and languid speech took on a more earnest tone. "Do you know, I think if any young man in this city has been misjudged and underrated it's Rich. I know the reputation you speak of; it's another way of calling a man a spendthrift, to say he's free with his money among his friends. But I don't believe anybody knows how free Rich Kendrick is with it among people who have no claim on him. I never should have known if I hadn't come here. One of my nurses has told me a lot of things she wasn't supposed ever to tell; but once she had let a word drop I got it out of her. Why, Louis, for three years Rich has paid the expenses of every sick child that came into this hospital, where the family was too poor to pay. He's paid for several big operations, too, on children that he wanted to see have the best. There are four special private rooms he keeps for those they call his patients, and he sees that whoever occupies them has everything they need--and plenty of things they may not just need, but are bound to enjoy--including flowers like those." He pointed to a splendid bowlful of blossoms on a stand behind Louis, such blossoms as even in June grow only in the choicest of gardens. "All this is news to me," declared Louis; "mighty good news, too. But how has he been able to keep it so quiet?" "Hospital people all pledged not to tell; so of course you and I mustn't be responsible for letting it out, since he doesn't want it known. I'm glad I know it, though, and I felt somehow that you ought to know. I used to think a lot of Rich at college, but now that he's my partner I think so much more I can't be happy unless other people appreciate him. And in the business--I can't tell you what he is. He's more like a brother than a partner." His thin cheeks flushed, and Louis suddenly bethought himself. "I'm letting you talk too much, Hugh," he said self-accusingly. "Convalescents mustn't overexert themselves. Suppose you lie still and let me read the morning paper to you." "Thank you, my nurse has done it. Talking is really a great luxury and it does me good, a little of it. I want to tell you this about Rich--" The door opened quietly as he spoke and Richard Kendrick himself came in. Quite as usual, he looked as if he had that moment left the hands of a most scrupulous valet. No wonder Louis's first thought was, as he looked at him, that people gave him credit for caring only for externals. One would not have said at first glance that he had ever soiled his hands with any labour more tiring than that of putting on his gloves. And yet, studying him more closely in the light of the revelations his friend had made, was there not in his attractive face more strength and force than Louis had ever observed before? "How goes it this morning, Hugh?" was the new-comer's greeting. He grasped the thin hand of the convalescent, smiling down at him. Then he shook hands with Louis, saying, "It's good of such a busy man to come in and cheer up this idle one," and sat down as if he had come to stay. But he had no proprietary air, and when a nurse looked in he only bowed gravely, as if he had not often seen her before. If Louis had not known he would not have imagined that Richard's hand in the affair of Benson's illness had been other than that of a casual caller. Louis Gray went away presently, thinking it over. He was thinking of it again that evening as he sat upon the big rear porch of the Gray home, which looked out upon the lawn and tennis court where he and Roberta had just been having a bout lasting into the twilight. "I heard something to-day that surprised me more than anything for a long time," he began, and when his sister inquired what the strange news might be he repeated to her as he could remember it Hugh Benson's outline of the extraordinary story about Richard Kendrick. When she had heard it she observed: "I suppose there is much more of that sort of thing done by the very rich than we dream of." "By old men, yes--and widows, and a few other classes of people. But I don't imagine it's so common as to be noticeable among the young men of his class, do you?" "Perhaps not. Though you do hear of wonderful things the bachelors do at Christmas for the poor children." "At Christmas--that's another story. Hearts get warmed up at Christmas, that, like old Scrooge's, are cold and careless the rest of the year. But for a fellow like Rich Kendrick to keep it up all the year round--you'll find that's not so commonplace a tale." "I don't know much about rich young men." "You've certainly kept this one at a distance," Louis observed, eying his sister curiously in the twilight. She was sitting in a boyish attitude, racket on lap, elbows on knees, chin on clasped hands, eyes on the shadowy garden. "He's been coming here evening after evening until now that his grandfather has gone home, and never once has anybody seen you so much as standing on the porch with him, to say nothing of strolling into the garden. What's the matter with you, Rob? Any other girl would be following him round and getting into his path. Not that you would need to, judging by the way I've seen him look at you once or twice. Have you drawn an imaginary circle around yourself and pointed out to him the danger of crossing it? I should take him for a fellow who would cross it then anyhow!" "Imaginary circles are sometimes bigger barriers than stone walls," she admitted, smiling to herself, "Besides, Lou, I thought somebody else was the person you wanted to see walking in the garden with me." "Forbes? The person I expected to see, you mean. Well, I don't know about Forbes Westcott. He's a mighty clever chap, but I sometimes think his blood is a little thin--like his body. I can't imagine his bothering about a sick child at a hospital, can you? I've never seen him take a minute's notice of Steve's pair; and they're little trumps, if ever children were. Corporations are more in his line than children." * * * * * One thing leads to another in this interesting world. It was not two days after this talk that Roberta herself had a private view of a little affair which proved more illuminating to her understanding of a certain fellow mortal than might have been all the evidence of other witnesses than her own eyes. Returning from school on one of the last days of the term, weary of walls and longing for the soothing stillness and refreshment of outdoors, Roberta turned aside some distance from her regular course to pass through a large botanical park, originally part of a great estate, and newly thrown open to the public. It was, as yet, less frequented than any other of the city parks. Much of it, according to the decree of its donor, a nature lover of discrimination, had been left in a state not far removed from wildness, and it was toward this portion that Roberta took her way; experiencing, with each step along a winding, secluded path she had recently discovered, that sense of escape into luxurious freedom which comes only after enforced confinement when the world outside is at its most alluring. At a point where the path swept high above a long, descending slope, at the foot of which lay a tiny pool surrounded by thick and beautifully kept turf, Roberta paused, and after looking about her for a minute to make sure that there was no one near, turned aside from the path and threw herself down beside a great clump of ferns, breathing a deep sigh of restful relief. She sat gazing dreamily down at the pool, in which was mirrored an exquisite reflection of tree and sky, the scene as silent and still as though drawn upon canvas. She had many things to think of, in these days, and a place like this was an ideal one in which to think. Was it? Far below her she heard the low hum of a motor. None could come near her, but the road beneath wound near the pool, though out of sight except at one point. In spite of this, the girl drew back further into the shelter of the tall ferns, thinking as she did so that it was the first time she had seen this remoter part of the park invaded by either motorist or pedestrian. Watching the point at which the car must appear she saw it come slowly into sight and stop. There were two occupants, a man and a boy, but at the distance she could not discern their faces. The man stepped out, and coming around to the other side of the car put out his arms and lifted the boy. He did not set him down, but carried him, seeming to hold him with peculiar care, and brought him through the surrounding trees and shrubbery to the pool itself, coming, as he did so, into full view of the unseen eyes above. Roberta experienced a sudden strange leap of the heart as she saw that the supple figure of the man was Richard Kendrick's own, and that the slight frame he bore was that of a crippled child. She could see now the iron braces on the legs, like pipe stems, which stuck straight out from the embrace of the strong young arm which held them. She could discern clearly the pallor and emaciation of the small face, in pitiful contrast to the ruggedly healthy one of the child's bearer. Fascinatedly she watched as Richard set his burden carefully down upon the grass, close to the edge of the pool, the boy's back against a big white birch trunk. The two were not so far below her but that she could see the expression on their faces, though she could not hear their words. Richard ran back to the car, returning with a rug and something in a long and slender case. He arranged a cushion behind the little back. Roberta judged the boy to be about eight or nine years old, though small for his age, as such children are. Richard undid the case and produced a small fishing-rod, which he fell to preparing for use, talking gayly as he did so, watched eagerly by his youthful companion. Evidently the boy was to have a great and unaccustomed pleasure. Well, it was certainly in line with that which Roberta had heard of this young man, but somehow to see something of it with her own eyes was singularly more convincing. She could not bring herself to get up and go away--surely there could be no need to feel that she was spying if she stayed to watch the interesting scene. If Richard had chosen a spot which he fancied entirely secluded from observation, it was undoubtedly wholly on the boy's own account. She could easily imagine how such a child as this one would shrink from observation in a public place, particularly when he was to try the dearly imagined but wholly unknown delight of fishing. It was plain that he was very shy, even with this kind friend, for it was only now and then that he replied in words to Richard's talk, though the response in the white face and big black eyes was eloquent enough. It seemed in every way remarkable that a young man of Richard Kendrick's sort should devote himself to a poor and crippled child as he was doing now. Not a gesture or act of his was lost upon the girl who watched. Clearly he was taking all possible pains to please and interest his little protégé, and he was doing it in a way which showed much skill, suggesting previous practice in the art. This was no such interest as he had shown in Gordon and Dorothy Gray, whose beauty had been so powerful an appeal to his fancy. There was nothing about this child to take hold upon any one except his helplessness and need. But Richard was as gentle with him, as patient with his awkward attempts at holding the light rod in the proper position for fishing, and as full of resources for entertaining him when the fish--if there were any--failed to bite, as he could have been with a small brother of his own. There was another thing which it was impossible not to note: Never had Roberta seen this young man in circumstances so calculated to impress upon her the potency of his personality. Unconscious of the scrutiny of any other human being, wholly absorbed in the task of making a small boy happy, he was naturally showing her himself precisely as he was. In place of his usual careful manners when in her presence was entire freedom from restraint and therefore an effect uncoloured by conventional environment. The tones of his voice, the frank smile upon his lips, the touch of his hand upon the little lad's--all these combined to set him before Roberta in a light so different from any she had seen him in before that she must needs admit she had been far from knowing him. She stole away at length, feeling suddenly that she had seen enough, and that her defences against the siege being made upon her heart and judgment were weakening perilously. If she were to hold out before it she must hear of no more affairs to Richard Kendrick's credit, especially such affairs as these. Not all his efforts at establishing a successful career in the world of achievement could touch her imagination as did the knowledge of his brotherly kindness toward the unfortunate. That was what meant most to Roberta, in a world which she had early discovered to be a hard place for the greater part of its inhabitants. Forgetfulness of self, devotion to the need of others--these were the qualities she most strove to cultivate in herself, and most rejoiced at seeing developed in those for whom she cared. Unluckily for his cause, if there had been a possible chance for its success, Forbes Westcott chose the evening of this same day to come again to Roberta Gray with his question burning on his lips. He arrived at a moment when, to his temporary satisfaction, Roberta was said to be playing a set of singles in the court with Ruth by the light of a fast-fading afterglow; and he took his way thither without delay. It was a simple matter, of course, to a man of his resource, to dispose of the young sister, in spite of the elder's attempt to foil him at his own game. So presently he had Roberta to himself, with every advantage of time and place and summer beauty all about. Louis Gray, looking down the lawn from the rear porch, upon whose steps he sat with Rosamond and Stephen, descried the tall figure strolling by their sister's side along a stretch of closely shaven turf between rows of slim young birches. "Forbes is persistent, eh?" he observed. "Think he has a fighting chance?" "Oh, I hope not!" cried Rosamond impulsively. Stephen's grave eyes followed the others, to dwell upon the distant pair. "Forbes stands to win a big place among men," was his comment. "Oh, really big?" Rosamond's tender eyes came to meet her husband's. "Stephen, do you think he is quite--scrupulous?--wholly honourable?" "I have no reason to think otherwise, Rosy." She shook her head. "Somehow I--could never quite trust him. He would live strictly by the letter of the law--but the spirit--" "Expect people to live by the spirit--these days, little girl?" inquired Louis, with an affectionate glance at her. She gazed straight back. "Yes. You do it--and so does Stephen--and Father Gray--and Uncle Calvin." The eyes of the brothers met above her fair head, and they smiled. "That's high distinction, from you, dear," said her husband. "But you must not do Westcott injustice. He has the reputation of being sharp as a knife blade, and of outwitting men in fair contest in court and out of it, but no shadow has ever touched his character." Still she shook her head. "I can't help it. I don't want Rob to marry him." The young men laughed together, and Rosamond smiled with them. "There you have it," said Louis. "There's no going behind those returns. The county votes no, and the candidate is defeated. Let him console himself with the vote from other counties--if he can." The three were still upon the porch half an hour later, with others of the family, when the two figures came again up the stretch of lawn between the slim white birches, showing ghostlike now in the June moonlight. They came in silence, as far as any sound of their voices reached the porch, and they disappeared like two shades toward the front of the house. "He's not coming even to speak to us," whispered Rosamond to Stephen. "That's very unlike him. Do you suppose--" "It may be a case of the voice sticking in the throat," returned her husband, under his breath. "I fancy he'll take it hard when Rob disposes of him--as she certainly ought to do by this time, if she's not going to take him. But she'd better think twice. He's a brilliant fellow, and he has no rivals within hailing distance, in his line." But Rosamond shook her head again. "He would never make her happy," she breathed, with conviction. "Oh, I hope--I hope!" Her hopes grew with Roberta's absence. Westcott had gone, for Ruth, appearing at Rosamond's side, announced that Roberta was in her own room, and would not be down again to-night. "I think she has a headache," said the little sister. "Queer, for I never knew Rob to have a headache before." "The headache," murmured Louis, in Rosamond's ear, "is the feminine defence against the world. A timely headache, now and then, is suffered by the best of men--and women. Well--let her rest, Rufus. She'll be all right in the morning." Above them, by her open window, sat Roberta, for a little while, elbows on sill, chin in hands. Then, presently, she stole downstairs again, out by a side entrance, and away among the shrubbery, to the furthest point of the grounds--not far, in point of actual distance, but quite removed by its environment from contact with the world around. Here, stretched upon the warm turf, her arms outflung, her eyes gazing up at the star-set heavens above her, the girl rested from her encounter with a desperate besieging force. For a time, the last words she had heard that evening were ringing in her ears--sombre words, uttered in a deep tone of melancholy, by a voice which commanded cadences that had often reached the minds and hearts of men and swayed them. "Is that all--_all_, Roberta? Must I go away with _that_?" She had sent him away, and her heart ached for him, for she could not doubt the depth and sincerity of his feeling for her. Being a woman, with a warm and kindly nature, she was sad with the disquieting thought that anywhere under that starry sky was one whose spirit was heavy to-night because of her. But--there had been no help for it. She knew now, beyond a doubt, that there had been no help. CHAPTER XXI PORTRAITS Revelations were in order in these days. Another of a quite different sort came to Roberta within the week. On a morning when she knew Richard Kendrick to be in Eastman she consented to drive with Mrs. Stephen to make a call upon Mr. Matthew Kendrick, now at home and recovering satisfactorily from his fall, but still confined to his room. With a basketful of splendid garden roses upon her arm she followed Rosamond into the great stone pile. They seemed to have left the sunlight and the summer day itself outside as they sat waiting in the stiff and formal reception-room, which looked as if no woman's hand or foot had touched it for a decade. As they were conducted to Mr. Kendrick's room upon the floor above they noted with observant eyes the cheerless character of every foot of the way--lofty hall, sombre staircase, gloomy corridor. Even Mr. Kendrick's own room, filled though it was with costly furniture, its walls hung with portraits and heavy oil paintings, after the fashion of the rich man who wants his home comfortable and attractive but does not know how to make it so, was by no means homelike. "This is good of you--this is good of you," the old man said happily, as they approached his couch. He held out his hands to them, and when Roberta presented her roses, exclaimed over them like a pleased child, and sent his man hurrying about to find receptacles for them. He lay looking from the flowers to the faces while he talked, as if he did not know which were the more refreshing to his eyes, weary of the surroundings to which they had been so long accustomed. "These will be the first thing Dick will spy when he comes to-morrow," he prophesied. "I never saw a fellow so fond of roses. The last time he was down he found time to tell me about somebody's old garden up there in Eastman, where they have some kind of wonderful, old-fashioned rose with the sweetest fragrance he ever knew. He had one in his coat; the sight of it took me back to my boyhood. But he wasn't all roses and gardens, not a bit of it! I never thought to see him so absorbed in such a subject as the management of a business. But he's full of it--he's full of it! You can't imagine how it delights me." He was full of it himself. Though he more than once apologized for talking of his grandson and his pleasure in the way "the boy" was throwing himself into the real merits of the problems presented to the new firm in Eastman, he kept returning to this fascinating subject. It was not of interest to himself alone, and though Roberta only listened, Mrs. Stephen led him on, asking questions which he answered with eager readiness. But all at once he pulled himself up short. "Dick would be the first person to hush my garrulous old tongue," said he. "But I feel like father and mother and grandfather all combined, in the matter of his success. I wouldn't have you think his making good--as they say in these days--in the world I am used to is my only idea of success. No, no, he has a world of his own besides. I should like you to see--there are several things I should like you to see. Last winter Dick begged from me a portrait of his mother which I had done when he was a year old; she lived only six months after that. He has it now over his desk. His father's portrait is on the opposite wall. Should you care to step across the hall into my grandson's rooms? The portraits I speak of are in the second room of the suite. Stop and examine anything else that interests you; I am sure he would be proud; and he has brought back many interesting things, principally pictures, from his travels. I should like to go with you, but if you will be so kind--" There was no refusing the enthusiastic old man. He sent his housekeeper to see that the rooms were open of window and ready for inspection, then waved his guests away. Mrs. Stephen went with alacrity; Roberta followed more slowly, as if she somehow feared to go. Of all the odd happenings!--that she should be walking into Richard Kendrick's own habitation, with all the intimate revelations it was bound to make to her. She wondered what he would say if he knew. The first room was precisely what she might have expected, quite obviously the apartment of a modern young man whose wishes lacked no opportunity to satisfy themselves. The room was not in bad taste; on the contrary, its somewhat heavy furnishings had an air of dignity in harmony with an earlier day than that more ostentatious period in which the rest of the house had been fitted. Upon its walls was a choice collection of pictures of various styles and schools of art, some of them unquestionably of much value. At one end of the room stood a closed grand piano. But, like the grandfather's room, the place could not by any stretch of the imagination be called homelike, and to this fact Rosamond called her companion's attention. "It's really very interesting," said she, "and quite impressive, but I don't wonder in the least at his saying that he had no home. This might be a room in a fine hotel; there's nothing to make you feel as if anybody really lives here, in spite of the beautiful paintings. But Mr. Kendrick said the portraits were in the second room." On her way into the second room, however, Rosamond's attention was attracted by a picture beside the door opening thereto, and with an exclamation, "Oh, this looks like Gordon! Where did he get it?" she paused. Roberta glanced that way, but a quite different object in the inner room had caught her eye, and leaving Rosamond to her wonder over a rather remarkable resemblance to her own little son in the rarely exquisite colour-drawing of a child of similar age, she went on, to stand still in the doorway, surprised out of all restraint as to the use of her interested eyes. For this, contrary to all possible expectations, was either the room of a man of literary tastes, and of one who also preferred simplicity and utility to display of any sort, or it was an extremely clever imitation of such a room. And there were certain rather trustworthy evidences of the former. The room, although smaller than the outer one, was a place of good size, with several large windows. Its walls to a height of several feet were lined with bookshelves filled to overflowing, the whole representing no less than three or four thousand books; Roberta could hardly guess at their number. Several comfortable easy-chairs and a massive desk were almost the only other furnishings, unless one included a few framed foreign photographs and the two portraits which hung on opposite walls. These presently called for study. Rosamond came in and stood beside her sister, regarding the portraits with curiosity. "The father has a remarkably fine face, hasn't he?" she observed, turning from one to the other. "Unusually fine; and I think his son resembles him. But he is more like his mother. Isn't she beautiful? And he never knew her; she died when he was such a little fellow. Isn't it touching to see how he has her there above his desk as if he wanted to know her? How many books! I didn't know he cared for books, did you? Perhaps they were his father's; though his father was a business man. Yet I don't know why we never credit business men with any interest in books. Perhaps they study them more than we imagine; they must study something. Rob, did you see the picture in the other room that looks so like Gordon? It seems almost as if it must have been painted from him." She flitted back into the outer room. Roberta stood still before the desk, above which hung the portrait of the lovely young woman who had been Richard's mother. Younger than Roberta herself she looked; such a girl to pass away and leave her baby, her first-born! And he had her here in the place of honour above his desk, where he sat to write and read. For he did read, she grew sure of it as she looked about her. Though the room was obviously looked after by a servant, it was probable that there were orders not to touch the contents of the desk-top itself, for this was as if it had been lately used. Books, a foreign review or two, a pile of letters, various desk furnishings in a curious design of wrought copper, and--what was this?--a little photograph in a frame! Horses, three of them, saddled and tied to a fence; at one side, in an attitude of arrested attention, a girl's figure in riding dress. A wave of colour surged over Roberta's face as she picked up the picture to examine it. She had never thought again of the shot he had snapped; he had never brought it to her. Instead he had put it into this frame--she noted the frame, of carved ivory and choice beyond question--and had placed it upon his desk. There were no other photograph's of people in the room, not one. If she had found herself one among many she might have had more--or less--reason for displeasure; it was hard to say which. But to be the only one! Yet doubtless--in his bedroom, the most intimate place of all, which she was not to see, would be found his real treasures--photographs of beauties he had known, married women, girls, actresses--She caught herself up! Rosamond, eager over the colour-drawing, had taken it from its place on the wall and gone with it across the hall to discuss its extraordinary likeness with the old man, who had sent for little Gordon several times during his stay at the Gray home and would be sure to appreciate the resemblance. Roberta, again engaged with the portrait above the desk, had not noticed her sister's departure. There was something peculiarly fascinating about this pictured face of Richard Kendrick's mother. Whether it was the illusive likeness to the son, showing first in the eyes, then in the mouth, which was one of extraordinary sweetness, it was hard to tell. But the attempt to _analyze_ it was absorbing. The sound of a quick step in the outer room, as it struck a bit of bare floor between the costly rugs which lay thickly upon it, arrested her attention. That was not Rosy's step! Roberta turned, a sudden fear upon her, and saw the owner of the room standing, as if surprised out of power to proceed, in the doorway. Now, it was manifestly impossible for Roberta to know just how she looked, standing there, as he had seen her for the instant before she turned. From her head to her feet she was dressed in white, therefore against the dull background of books and heavy, plain panelling above, her figure stood out with the effect of a cameo. Her dusky hair under her white hat-brim was the only shadowing in a picture which was to his gaze all light and radiance. He stood staring at it, his own face glowing. Then: "Oh--_Roberta_!" he exclaimed, under his breath. Then he came forward, both hands outstretched. She let him have one of hers for an instant, but drew it away again--with some difficulty. "You must be surprised to find me here." Roberta strove for her usual cool control. "Rosy and I came to see your grandfather. He sent us in here to look at these portraits. Rosy has gone back to him with a picture she thought looked like Gordon. I--was staying a minute to see this; it is very beautiful." He laughed happily. "You have explained it all away. I wish you had let me go on thinking I was dreaming. To find you--_here_!" He smothered an exultant breath and went on hastily:--"I'm glad you find my mother beautiful. I never knew how beautiful she was till I brought her up here and put her where I could look at her. Such a little, girlish mother for such a strapping son! But she has the look--somehow she has the look! Don't you think she has? I was a year old when that was painted--just in time, for she died six months afterward. But she had had time to get the look, hadn't she?" "Indeed she had. I can imagine her holding her little son. Is there no picture of her with you?" "None at all that I can find. I don't know why. There's one of me on my father's knee, four years old--just before he went, too. I am lucky to have it. I can just remember him, but not my mother at all. Do you mind my telling you that it was after I saw your mother I brought this portrait of mine up from the drawing-room and put it here? It seemed to me I must have one somehow, if only the picture of one." His voice lowered. "I can't tell you what it has done for me, the having her here." "I can guess," said Roberta softly, studying the young, gently smiling, picture face. Somehow her former manner with this young man had temporarily deserted her. The appeal of the portrait seemed to have extended to its owner. "You--don't want to disappoint her," she added thoughtfully. "That's it--that's just it," he agreed eagerly. "How did you know?" "Because that's the way I feel about mine. They care so much, you know." She moved slowly toward the door. "I must go back to your grandfather." "Why? He has Mrs. Stephen, you say. And I--like to see you here. There are a lot of things I want to show you." His eager gaze dropped to the desk-top and fell upon the ivory-framed photograph. He looked quickly at her. Her cheeks were of a rich rose hue, her eyes--he could not tell what her eyes were like. But she moved on toward the door. He followed her into the other room. "Won't you stay a minute here, then? I don't care for it as I do the other, but--it's a place to talk in. And I haven't talked to you for--four months. It's the middle of June.... Let me show you this picture over here." He succeeded in detaining her for a few minutes, which raced by on wings for him. He did it only by keeping his speech strictly upon the subject of art, and presently, in spite of his endeavours, she was off across the room and out of the door, through the hall and in the company of Mrs. Stephen and Mr. Matthew Kendrick. The pair, the old man and the girlish young mother, looked up from a collection of miniatures, brought out in continuance of the discussion over child faces begun by Rosamond's interest in the colour-drawing found upon Richard's walls. They saw a flushed and heart-disturbing face under a drooping white hat-brim, and eyes which looked anywhere but at them, though Roberta's voice said quite steadily: "Rosy, do you know how long we are staying?" In explanation of this sudden haste another face appeared, seen over Roberta's shoulder. This face was also of a somewhat warm colouring, but these eyes did not hide; they looked as if they were seeing visions and noted nothing earthly. "Why, Dick!" exclaimed Mr. Kendrick. "I didn't expect you till to-morrow." Gladness was in his voice. He held out welcoming hands, and his grandson came to him and took the hands and held them while he explained the errand which had brought him and upon which he must immediately depart. But he would come again upon the morrow, he promised. It was clear that the closest relations existed between the two; it was a pleasant thing to see. And when Richard turned out again toward the visitors he had his face in order. Some imperceptible signalling had been exchanged between Roberta and Rosamond, and the call came shortly to an end, in spite of the old man's urgent invitation to them to remain. "Do you see the roses they brought me, Dick?" He indicated the bowls and vases which stood about the room. "I told them you would notice them directly you came in. Where are your eyes, boy?" "Do you really blame me for not seeing them, grandfather?" retorted his grandson audaciously. "But I recognize them now; they are wonderful. I suppose they have thorns?" His eyes met Roberta's for one daring instant. "You wouldn't like them if they didn't," said she. "Shouldn't I? I'd like to find one with the thorns off; I'd wear it--if I might. May I have one, grandfather?" "Of course, Dick. They're mine now to give away, Miss Roberta? Perhaps you'll put it on for him." Since the suggestion was made by an old man, who might or might not have been wholly innocent of taking sides in a game in which his boy was playing for high stakes, Roberta could do no less than hurriedly to select a splendid crimson bud without regard to thorns--she was aware of more than one as she handled it--and fasten it upon a gray coat, intensely conscious of the momentary nearness of a personality whose influence upon her was the strangest, most perturbing thing she had ever experienced. The flower in place, she could not get away too fast. Rosamond, understanding now that the air was electric and that her sister wanted nothing so much as to escape to a safer atmosphere, aided her by taking the lead and engaging Richard Kendrick in conversation all the way downstairs to the door and out to the waiting carriage. As they drove away Rosamond looked back at the figure leaping up the steps, with the crimson rose showing brilliantly in the June sunshine. "Rob, he's splendid, simply splendid," she whispered, so that the old family coachman in front, driving the old family horses, could not hear. "I don't wonder his grandfather is so proud of him. One can see that he's going to go right on now and make himself a man worth anybody's while. He's that now, but he's going to be more." "I don't see how you can tell so much from hearing him make a few foolish remarks about some roses!" Roberta's face was carefully averted. "Oh, it wasn't what he said, it's what he is! It shows in his face. I never saw purpose come out so in a face as it has in his in the time that we've known him. Besides, we began by taking him for nothing but a society man, and we were mistaken in that from the beginning. Stephen has been telling me some things Louis told him." "I know. About the hospital and the children." "Yes. Isn't it interesting? And that's been going on for years; it's not a new pose for our benefit. I've no doubt there are lots of other things, if we knew them. But--oh, Rob, his grandfather says he bought the little head in colour because he thought it looked like Gordon. I'm going to send him the last photograph right away. Rob, there's Forbes Westcott!" "Where?" "Right ahead. Shall we stop and take him in? Of course he's on his way to see you, as usual. How he does anything in his own office--" "James!" Roberta leaned forward and spoke to the coachman. "Turn down this street--quickly, please. Don't look, Rosy--don't! Let's not go straight home; let's drive a while. It--it's such a lovely day!" "Why, Rob! I thought--" "Please don't think anything. I'm trying not to." Rosamond impulsively put her white-gloved hand on Roberta's. "I don't believe you are succeeding," she whispered daringly. "Particularly since--this morning!" CHAPTER XXII ROBERTA WAKES EARLY Midsummer Day! Roberta woke with the thought in her mind, as it had been the last in her mind when she had gone to sleep. She had lain awake for a long time the night before, watching a strip of moonlight which lay like flickering silver across her wall. Who would have found it easy to sleep, with the consciousness beating at her brain that on the morrow something momentous was as surely going to happen as that the sun would rise? Did she want it to happen? Would she rather not run away and prevent its happening? There was no doubt that, being a woman, she wanted to run away. At the same time--being a woman--she knew that she would not run. Something would stay her feet. With wide-open eyes on this Midsummer morning she lay, as she had lain the night before, regarding without attention the early sunlight flooding the room where moonlight had lain a few hours ago. Her bare, round arms, from which picturesque apologies for sleeves fell back, were thrown wide upon her pillows, her white throat and shoulders gleamed below the loose masses of her hair, her heart was beating a trifle more rapidly than was natural after a night of repose. It was very early, as a little clock upon a desk announced--half after five. Yet some one in the house was up, for Roberta heard a light footfall outside her door. There followed a soft sound which drew her eyes that way; she saw something white appear beneath the door--in the old house the sills were not tight. The white rectangle was obviously a letter. Her curiosity alive, she lay looking at this apparition for some time, unwilling to be heard to move even by a maidservant. But at length she arose, stole across the floor, picked up the missive, and went back to her bed. She examined the envelope--it was of a heavy plain paper; the address--it was in a hand she had seen but once, on the day when she had copied many pages of material upon the typewriter for her Uncle Calvin--a rather compact, very regular and positive hand, unmistakably that of a person of education and character. She opened the letter with fingers that hesitated. Midsummer Day was at hand; it had begun early! Two closely written sheets appeared. Sitting among her pillows, her curly, dusky locks tumbling all about her face, her pulses beating now so fast they shook the paper in her fingers, she read his letter: * * * * * My Roberta: I can't begin any other way, for, even though you should never let me use the words again, you have become such a part of me, both of the man I am and of the man I want and mean to become, that in some degree you will always belong to me in spite of yourself. Why do I write to you to-day? Because there are things I want to say to you which I could never wait to say when I see you, but which I want you to know before you answer me. I don't want to tell you "the story of my life," but I do feel that you must understand a few of my thoughts, for only so can I be sure that you know me at all. Before I came to your home, one night last October, I had unconsciously settled into a way of living which as a rule seemed to me all-sufficient. My friends, my clubs, my books--yes, I care for my books more than you have ever discovered--my plans for travel, made up a life which satisfied me--a part of the time. Deep down somewhere was a sense of unrest, a knowledge that I was neither getting nor giving all that I was meant to. But this I was accustomed to stifle--except at unhappy hours when stifling would not work, and then I was frankly miserable. Mostly, however, my time was so filled with diversion of one sort or another that I managed to keep such hours from over-whelming me; I worried through them somehow and forgot them as soon as I could. From the first day that I came through your door my point of view was gradually and strangely altered. I saw for the first time in my life what a home might be. It attracted me; more, it showed me how empty my own life was, that I had thought so full. The sight of your mother, of your brothers, of your sisters, of your brother's little children--each of these had its effect on me. As for yourself--Roberta, I don't know how to tell you that; at least I don't know how to tell you on paper. I can imagine finding words to tell you, if--you were very much nearer to me than you are now. I hardly dare think of that! Yet I must try, for it's part of the story; it's all of it. With my first sight of you, I realized that here was what I had dreamed of but never hoped to find: beauty and charm and--character. I had seen many women who possessed two of these attributes; it seemed impossible to discover one who had all three. Many women I had admired--and despised; many I had respected--and disliked. I am not good at analysis, but perhaps you can guess at what I mean. I may have been unfortunate; I don't know. There may be many women who are both beautiful and good. No, that is not what I mean! The combination I am trying to describe as impossibly desirable is that not only of beauty and goodness--I suppose there are really many who have those; but--goodness and fascination! That's what a man wants. Can you possibly understand? I wonder if I had better stop writing? I am showing myself up as hopelessly awkward at expression; probably because my heart is pounding so as I write that it is taking the blood from my brain. But--I'll make one more try at it. I had no special purpose in life last October. I meant to do a little good in the world if I could--without too much trouble. Some time or other I supposed I should marry--intended to put it off as long as I could. I saw no reason why I shouldn't travel all I wanted to; it was the one thing I really cared for with enthusiasm. I didn't appreciate much what a selfish life I was leading, how I was neglecting the one person in the world who loved me and was anxious about me. Your little sister, Ruth, opened my eyes to that, by the way. I shall always thank her for it. I hadn't known what I was missing. I don't know how the change came about. You charmed me, yet you made me realize every time I was with you that I was not the sort of man you either admired or respected. I felt it whenever I looked at any of the people in your home. Every one of them was busy and happy; every one of them was leading a life worth while. Slowly I waked up. I believe I'm wide awake now. What's more, nothing could ever tempt me to go to sleep again. I've learned to _like_ being awake! You decreed that I should keep away from you all these months. I agreed, and I have kept my word. All the while has been the fear bothering me beyond endurance that you did it to be rid of me. I said some bold words to you--to make you remember me. Roberta, I am humbler to-day than I was then. I shouldn't dare say them to you now. I was madly in love with you then; I dared say anything. I am not less in love now--great heavens! not less--but I have grown to worship you so that I have become afraid. When I saw you in my room before my mother's portrait I could have knelt at your feet. From the beginning I have felt that I was not worthy of you, but I feel it so much more deeply now that I don't know how to offer myself to you. I have written as if I wanted to persuade you that I am more of a man than when you knew me first, and therefore more worthy of you. I _am_ more of a man, but by just so much more do I realize my own unworthiness. And yet--it is Midsummer Day; this is the twenty-fourth of June--and I am on fire with love and longing for you, and I must know whether you care. If I were strong enough I would offer to wait longer before asking you to tell me--but I'm not strong enough for that. I have a plan which I am hoping you will let me carry out, whatever answer you are going to give me. If you will allow it I will ask Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Gray to go with us on a long horseback ride this afternoon, to have supper at a place I know. I could take you all in my car if you prefer, but I hope you will not prefer it. You have never seemed like a motoring girl to me every other one I know is--and ever since I saw you on Colonel last November I've been hoping to have a ride with you. If I can have it to-day--Midsummer--it will be a dream fulfilled. If only I dared hope my other--and dearer--dream were to come true! Roberta, are we really so different? I have thought a thousand times of your "_stout little cabin on the hilltop_," where you would like to spend "_the worst night of the winter_." All alone? "_Well, with a fire for company, and--perhaps--a dog_." But not with a good comrade? "_There are so few good comrades--who can be tolerant of one's every mood_." You were right; there are few. And--this one might not be so clever as to understand every mood of yours, but--Roberta, Roberta--he would love you so much that you wouldn't mind if he didn't always understand. That is--you wouldn't mind if, in return, you--But I dare not say it--I can only hope--hope! Unless you send me word to the contrary by ten o'clock, I will then ask Mr. and Mrs. Stephen, and arrange to come for you at four this afternoon. You are committed to nothing by agreeing to this arrangement. But I--am committed to everything for as long as I live. RICHARD. * * * * * It was well that it was not yet six o'clock in the morning and that Roberta had two long hours to herself before she need come forth from her room. She needed them, every minute of them, to get herself in hand. It was a good letter, no doubt of that. It was neither clever nor eloquent, but it was better: it was manly and sincere. It showed self-respect; it showed also humility, a proud humility which rejoiced that it could feel its own unworthiness and know thereby that it would strive to be more fit. And it showed--oh, unquestionably it showed!--the depth of his feeling. Quite clearly he had restrained a pen that longed to pour forth his heart, yet there were phrases in which his tenderness had been more than he could hold back, and it was those phrases which made the recipient hold her breath a little as she read them, wondering how, if the written words were almost more than she could bear, she could face the spoken ones. And now she really wanted to run away! If she could have had a week, a month, between the reading of this letter and the meeting of its writer, it seemed to her that it would have been the happiest month of her life. To take the letter with her into exile, to read it every day, but to wait--wait--for the real crisis till she could quiet her racing emotions. One sweet at a time--not an armful of them. But the man--true to his nature--the man wanted the armful, and at once. And she had made him wait all these months; she could not, knowing her own heart, put him off longer now. The cool composure with which, last winter, she had answered his first declaration that he loved her was all gone; the months, of waiting had done more than show him whether his love was real: they had shown her that she wanted it to be real. The day was a hard one to get through. The hours lagged--yet they flew. At eight o'clock she went down, feeling as if it were all in her face; but apparently nobody saw anything beyond the undoubted fact that in her white frock she looked as fresh and as vivid as a flower. At half after ten Rosamond came to her to know if she had received an invitation from Richard Kendrick to go for a horseback ride, adding that she herself was delighted at the thought and had telephoned Stephen, to find that he also was pleased and would be up in time. "I wonder where he's going to take us," speculated Rosamond, in a flutter of anticipation. "Without doubt it will be somewhere that's perfectly charming; he knows how to do such things. Of course it's all for you, but I shall love to play chaperon, and Stevie and I shall have a lovely time out of it. I haven't been on a horse since Dorothy came; I hope I haven't grown too stout for my habit. What are you going to wear, Rob? The blue cloth? You are perfectly irresistible in that! Do wear that rakish-looking soft hat with the scarf; it's wonderfully becoming, if it isn't quite so correct; and I'm sure Richard Kendrick won't take us to any stupid fashionable hotel. He'll arrange an outdoor affair, I'm confident, with the Kendrick chef to prepare it and the Kendrick servants to see that it is served. Oh, it's such a glorious June day! Aren't you happy, Rob?" "If I weren't it would make me happy to look at you, you dear married child," and Roberta kissed her pretty sister-in-law, who could be as womanly as she was girlish, and whose companionship, with that of Stephen's, she felt to be the most discriminating choice of chaperonage Richard could have made. Stephen and Rosamond, off upon a holiday like this, would be celebrating a little honeymoon anniversary of their own, she knew, for they had been married in June and could never get over congratulating themselves on their own happiness. CHAPTER XXIII RICHARD HAS WAKED EARLIER Twelve o'clock, one o'clock, two o'clock. Roberta wondered afterward what she had done with the hours! At three she had her bath; at half after she put up her hair, hardly venturing to look at her own face in her mirror, so flushed and shy was it. Roberta shy?--she who, according to Ted, "wasn't afraid of anything in the world!" But she _had_ been afraid of one thing, even as Richard Kendrick had averred. Was she not afraid of it now? She could not tell. But she knew that her hands shook as she put up her hair, and that it tumbled down twice and had to be done over again. Afraid! She was afraid, as every girl worth winning is, of the sight of her lover! Yet when she heard hoofbeats on the driveway could have kept her from peeping out. The rear porch, from which the riding party would start, was just below her window, the great pillars rising past her. She had closed one of her blinds an hour before; she now made use of its sheltering interstices. She saw Richard on a splendid black horse coming up the drive, looking, as she had foreseen he would look, at home in the saddle and at his best. She saw the colour in his cheeks, the brightness in his eyes, caught his one quick glance upward--did he know her window? He could not possibly see her, but she drew back, happiness and fear fighting within her for the ascendency. Could she ever go down and face him out there in the strong June light, where he could see every curving hair of eyelash? note the slightest ebb and flow of blood in cheek? Rosamond was calling: "Come, Rob! Mr. Kendrick is here and Joe is bringing round the horses. Can I help you?" Roberta opened her door. "I couldn't do my hair at all; does it look a fright under this hat?" Rosamond surveyed her. "Of course it doesn't. You're the most bewitching thing I ever saw in that blue habit, and your hair is lovely, as it always is. Rob, I have grown stout; I had to let out two bands before I could get this on; it was made before I was married. Steve's been laughing at me. Here he is; now do let's hurry. I want every bit of this good time, don't you?" There was no delaying longer. Rosamond, all eagerness, was leading the way downstairs, her little riding-boots tapping her departure. Stephen was waiting for Roberta; she had to precede him. The next she knew she was down and out upon the porch, and Richard Kendrick, hat and crop in hand, was meeting her halfway, his expectant eyes upon her face. One glance at him was all she was giving him, and he was mercifully making no sign that any one looking on could have recognized beyond his eager scrutiny as his hand clasped hers. And then in two minutes they were off, and Roberta, feeling the saddle beneath her and Colonel's familiar tug on the bit at the start-off--he was always impatient to get away--was realizing that the worst, at least for the present, was over. "Which way?" called Stephen, who was leading with Rosamond. "Out the road past the West Wood marshes, please--straight out. Take it moderately; we're going about twelve miles and it's pretty warm yet." There was not much talking while they were within the city limits--nor after they were past, for that matter. Rosamond, ahead with her husband, kept up a more or less fitful conversation with him, but the pair behind said little. Richard made no allusion to his letter of the morning beyond a declaration of his gratitude to the whole party for falling in with his plans. But the silence was somehow more suggestive of the great subject waiting for expression than any exchange of words could have been, out here in the open. Only once did the man's impatience to begin overcome his resolution to await the fitting hour. Turning in his saddle as Colonel fell momentarily behind, passing the West Wood marshes, Richard allowed his eyes to rest upon horse and rider with full intent to take in the picture they made. "I haven't ventured to let myself find out just how you look," he said. "The atmosphere seems to swim around you; I see you through a sort of haze. Do you suppose there can be anything the matter with my eyesight?" "I should think there must be," she replied demurely. "It seems a serious symptom. Hadn't you better turn back?" "While you go on? Not if I fall off my horse. I have a suspicion that it's made up of a curious compound of feelings which I don't dare to describe. But--may I tell you?--I _must_ tell you--I never saw anything so beautiful in my life as--yourself, to-day. I--" He broke off abruptly. "Do you see that old rosebush there by those burnt ruins of a house? Amber-white roses, and sweet as--I saw them there yesterday when I went by. Let me get them for you." He rode away into the deserted yard and up to a tangle of neglected shrubbery. He had some difficulty in getting Thunderbolt--who was as restless a beast as his name implied--to stand still long enough to allow him to pick a bunch of the buds; he would have nothing but buds just breaking into bloom. These he presently brought back to Roberta. She fancied that he had planned to stop here for this very purpose. Clearly he had the artist's eye for finishing touches. He watched her fasten the roses upon the breast of the blue-cloth habit, then he turned determinedly away. "If I don't look at you again," said he, his eyes straight before him, "it's because I can't do it--and keep my head. You accused me once of losing it under a winter moon; this is a summer sun--more dangerous yet.... Shall we talk about the crops? This is fine weather for growing things, isn't it?" "Wonderful. I haven't been out this road this season--as far as this. I'm beginning to wonder where you are taking us." "To the hill where you and Miss Ruth and Ted and I toasted sandwiches last November. Could there be a better place for the end--of our ride? You haven't been out here this season--are you sure?" "No, indeed. I've been too busy with the close of school to ride anywhere--much less away out here." "You like my choice, then? I hoped you would." "Very much." It was a queer, breathless sort of talking; Roberta hardly knew what she was saying. She much preferred to ride along in silence. The hour was at hand--so close at hand! And there was now no getting away. She knew perfectly that her agreeing to come at all had told him his answer; none but the most cruel of women would allow a man to bring her upon such a ride, in the company of other interested people, only to refuse him at the end of it. But she had to admit to herself that if he were now exulting in the sure hope of possessing her he was keeping it well out of sight. There was now none of the arrogant self-confidence in his manner toward her which there had been on the February night when he had made a certain prophecy concerning Midsummer. Instead there was that in his every word and look which indicated a fine humility--almost a boyish sort of shyness, as if even while he knew the treasure to be within his grasp he could neither quite believe it nor feel himself fit to take it. From a young man of the world such as he had been it was the most exquisite tribute to her power to rouse the best in him that he could have given and she felt it to the inmost soul of her. "Here are the forks," said Richard suddenly, and Roberta recognized with a start that they were nearly at the end of their journey. "Which way?" Stephen was shouting back, and Richard was waving toward the road at the left, which led up the steep hill. "Here is where you dropped the bunch of rose haws," said he, with a quick glance as they began the ascent. "I have them yet--brown and dry. Did you know you dropped them?" "I remember. But I didn't suppose anybody--" "Found them? By the greatest luck--and stopped my car in a hurry. They were bright on my desk for a month after that; I cared more for them than for anything I owned. I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my man from throwing them away, though. You see, he hadn't my point of view! Roberta--here we are! Will you forgive what will seem like a piece of the most unwarrantable audacity?" He was speaking fast as they came up over the crown of the hill: "I didn't do it because I was sure of anything at all, but because--it was something to make myself think I could carry out a wish of yours. Do you remember the '_stout little cabin on the hilltop_', Roberta? Could you--_could_ you care for it, as I do?" The last words were almost a whisper, but she heard them. Her eyes were riveted on the outlines, two hundred feet away through the trees, of a small brown building at the very crest of the hill over-looking the valley. Very small, very rough, with its unhewn logs--the "stout little cabin" stood there waiting. Well! What was she to think? He _had_ been sure, to build this and bring her to it! And yet--it was no house for a home; no expensive bungalow; not even a summer cottage. Only a "stout little cabin," such as might house a hunter on a winter's night; the only thing about it which looked like luxury the chimney of cobblestones taken from the hillside below, which meant the possibility of the fire inside without which one could hardly spend an hour in the small shelter on any but a summer day. Suddenly she understood. It was the sheer romance of the thing which had appealed to him; there was no audacity about it. He was watching her anxiously as she stared at the cabin; she came suddenly to the realization of that. Then he threw himself off his horse as they neared the rail fence, fastened him, and came back to Roberta. Near-by, Stephen was taking Rosamond down and she was exclaiming over the charm of the place. Richard came close, looking straight up into Roberta's face, which was like a wild-rose for colouring, but very sober. Her eyes would not meet his. His own face had paled a little, in spite of all its healthy, outdoor hues. "Oh, don't misunderstand me," he whispered. "Wait--till I can tell you all about it. I was wild to do something--anything--that would make you seem nearer. Don't misunderstand--_dear_!" Stephen's voice, calling a question about the horses, brought him back to a realization of the fact that his time was not yet, and that he must continue to act the part of the sane and responsible host. He turned, summoning all his social training, and replied to the question in his usual quiet tone. But, as he took her from her horse, Roberta recognized the surge of his feeling, though he controlled his very touch of her, and said not another word in her ear. She had all she could do, herself, to maintain an appearance of coolness under the shock of this extraordinary surprise. She had no doubt that Rosamond and Stephen comprehended the situation, more or less. Let them not be able to guess just how far things had developed, as yet. Rosamond came to her aid with her own freely manifested pleasure in the place. Clever Rosy! her sister-in-law was grateful to her for expressing that which Roberta could not trust herself to speak. "What a dear little house, a real log cabin!" cried Rosamond as the four drew near. "It's evidently just finished; see the chips. It opens the other way, doesn't it? Isn't that delightful! Not even a window on this side toward the road, though it's back so far. I suppose it looks toward the valley. A window on this end; see the solid shutters; it looks as if one could fortify one's self in it. Oh, and here's a porch! What a view--oh, what a view!" They came around the end of the cabin together and stood at the front, surveying the wide porch, its thick pillars of untrimmed logs, its balustrade solid and sheltering, its roof low and overhanging. From the road everything was concealed; from this aspect it was open to the skies; its door and two front windows wide, yet showing, door as well as windows, the heavy shutters which would make the place a stronghold through what winter blasts might assault it. From the porch one could see for miles in every direction; at the sides, only the woods. "It's an ideal spot for a camp," declared Stephen with enthusiasm. "Is it yours, Kendrick? I congratulate you. Invite me up here in the hunting season, will you? I can't imagine anything snugger. May we look inside?" "By all means! It's barely finished--it's entirely rough inside--but I thought it would do for our supper to-night." "Do!" Rosamond gave a little cry of delight as she looked in at the open door. "Rough! You don't want it smoother. Does he, Rob? Look at the rustic table and benches! And will you behold that splendid fireplace? Oh, all you want here is the right company!" "And that I surely have." Richard made her a little bow, his face emphasizing his words. He went over to a cupboard in the wall, of which there were two, one on either side of the fireplace. He threw it open, disclosing hampers. "Here is our supper, I expect. Are you hungry? It's up to us to serve it. I didn't have the man stay; I thought it would be more fun to see to things ourselves." "A thousand times more," Rosamond assured him, looking to Roberta for confirmation, who nodded, smiling. They fell to work. Hats were removed, riding skirts were fastened out of the way, hampers were opened and the contents set forth. Everything that could possibly be needed was found in the hampers, even to coffee, steaming hot in the vacuum bottles as it had been poured into them. "Some other time we'll come up and rough it," Richard explained, when Stephen told him he was no true camper to have everything prepared for him in detail like this; "but to-night I thought we'd spend as little time in preparations as possible and have the more of the evening. It will be a Midsummer Night's Dream on this hill to-night," said he, with a glance at Roberta which she would not see. Presently they sat down, Roberta finding herself opposite their host, with the necessity upon her of eating and drinking like a common mortal, though she was dwelling in a world where it seemed as if she did not know how to do the everyday things and do them properly. It was a delicious meal, no doubt of that, and at least Stephen and Rosamond did justice to it. "But you're not eating anything yourself, man," remonstrated Stephen, as Richard pressed upon him more cold fowl and delicate sandwiches supplemented by a salad such as connoisseurs partake of with sighs of appreciation, and with fruit which one must marvel to look upon. "You haven't been watching me, that's evident," returned Richard, demonstrating his ability to consume food with relish by seizing upon a sandwich and making away with it in short order. Roberta rose. "I can eat no more," she said, "with that wonderful sky before me out there." She escaped to the porch. They all turned to exclaim at a gorgeous colouring beginning in the west, heralding the sunset which was coming. Rosamond ran out also, Stephen following. Richard produced cigars. "Have a smoke out here, Gray," said he, "while I put away the stuff. No, no help, thank you. James will be here, by and by, to pack it properly." "Stephen"--Rosamond stood at the edge of the hill below the porch--"bring your cigar down here; it's simply perfect. You can lie on your side here among the pine needles and watch the sky." They went around a clump of trees to a spot where the pine needles were thick, just out of sight of the cabin door. No doubt but Rosamond and Stephen liked to have things to themselves; there was no pretence about that. It was almost the anniversary of their marriage--their most happy marriage. Roberta stood still upon the porch, looking, or appearing to look, off at the sunset. Once again she would have liked to run away. But--where to go? Rosamond and Stephen did not want her; it would have been absurd to insist on following them. If she herself should stroll away among the pine trees, she would, of course, be instantly pursued. The porch was undoubtedly the most open and therefore the safest spot she could be in. So she leaned against the pillar and waited, her heart behaving disturbingly meanwhile. She could hear Richard, within the cabin hurriedly clearing the table and stuffing everything away into the cupboards on either side of the fireplace--he was making short work of it. Before she could have much time to think, his step was upon the porch behind her; he was standing by her shoulder. "It's a wonderful effect, isn't it? Must we talk about it?" he inquired softly. "Don't you think it deserves to be talked about?" she answered, trying to speak naturally. "No. There's only one thing in the world I want to talk about. I can't even see that sky, for looking at--you. I've stood at the top of this slope more times than I can tell you, wondering if I should dare to build this little cabin. The idea possessed me, I couldn't get away from it. I bought the land--and still I was afraid. I gave the order to the builder--and all but took it back. I knew I ran every kind of risk that you wouldn't understand me--that you would think I still had that abominable confidence that I was fool enough to express to you last--February. Does it look so?" She nodded slowly without turning her head. His voice grew even more solicitous; she could hear a little tremble in it, such as surely had not been there last February, such as she had never heard there before. "But it isn't so! With every log that's gone in, a fresh fear has gone in with it. Even on the way here to-day I had all I could do not to turn off some other way. The only thing that kept me coming on to meet my fate here, and nowhere else, was the hope that you loved the spot itself so well that you--that your heart would be a bit softer here than--somewhere else. O Roberta--I'm not half good enough for you, but--I love you--love you--" His voice broke on the words. It surely was a very far from confident suitor who pleaded his case in such phrases as these. He did not so much as take her hand, only waited there, a little behind her, his head bent so that he might see as much as he could of the face turned away from him. She did not answer; something seemed to hold her from speech. One of her arms was twined about the rough, untrimmed pillar of the porch; her clasp tightened until she held it as if it were a bulwark against the human approach ready to take her from it at a word from her lips. "I told you in my letter all I knew I couldn't say now. You know what you mean to me. I'm going to make all I can out of what there is in me whether you help me or not. But--if I could do it for you--" Still she could not speak. She clung to the pillar, her breath quickening. He was silent until he could withstand no longer, then he spoke so urgently in her ear that he broke in upon that queer, choking reserve of hers which had kept her from yielding to him: "Roberta--I _must_ know--I can't bear it." She turned, then, and put out her hand. He grasped it in both his own. "What does that mean, dear? May I--may I have the rest of you?" It was only a tiny nod she gave, this strange girl, Roberta, who had been so afraid of love, and was so afraid of it yet. And as if he understood and appreciated her fear, he was very gentle with her. His arms came about her as they might have come about a frightened child, and drew her away from the pillar with a tender insistence which all at once produced an extraordinary effect. When she found that she was not to be seized with that devastating grasp of possession which she had dreaded, she was suddenly moved to desire it. His humbleness touched and melted her--his humbleness, in him who had been at first so arrogant--and with the first exquisite rush of response she was taken out of herself. She gave herself to his embrace as one who welcomes it, and let him have his way--all his way--a way in which he quite forgot to be gentle at all. When this had happened, Roberta remembered, entirely too late, that it was this which, whatever else she gave him, she had meant to refuse him--at least until to-morrow. Because to-day was undeniably the twenty-fourth of June--Midsummer's Day! CHAPTER XXIV THE PILLARS OF HOME "Listen, grandfather--they're playing! We'll catch them at it. Here's an open window." Matthew Kendrick followed his grandson across the wide porch to a French window opening into the living-room of the Gray home, at the opposite end from that where stood the piano, and from which the strains of 'cello and harp were proceeding. The two advanced cautiously to take up their position just within that far window, gazing down the room at the pair at the other end. Roberta, in hot-weather white, with a bunch of blue corn-flowers thrust into her girdle, sat with her 'cello at her knee, her dark head bent as she played. Ruth, a gay little figure in pink, was fingering her harp, and the poignantly rich harmonies of Saint-Säens' _Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix_ were filling the room. Upon the great piano stood an enormous bowl of summer bloom; the air was fragrant with the breath of it. The room was as cool and fresh with its summer draperies and shaded windows as if it were not fervid July weather outside. Richard flung one exulting glance at his grandfather, for the sight was one to please the eyes of any man even if he had no such interest in the performers as these two had. The elder man smiled, for he was very happy in these days, happier than he had been for a quarter of a century. The music ceased with the last slow harp-tones, the 'cello's earlier upflung bow waving in a gesture of triumph. "Splendid, Rufus!" she commended. "You never did it half so well." "She never did," agreed a familiar voice from the other end of the room, and the sisters turned with a start. Richard advanced down the room, Mr. Kendrick following more slowly. "You look as cool as a pond-lily, love," said Richard, "in spite of this July weather." His approving eyes regarded Roberta's cheek at close range. "Is it as cool as it looks?" he inquired, and placed his own cheek against it for an instant, regardless of the others present. Roberta laid her hand in Mr. Kendrick's, and the old man raised it to his lips, in a stately fashion he sometimes used. "That was very beautiful music you were making," he said. "It seems a pity to bring it to an end. Richard and I want you for a little drive, to show you something which interests us very much. Will you go--and will Ruth go, too?" "Oh, do you really want me?" cried Ruth eagerly. "Of course we want you, little sister," Richard told her. "I'll get our hats," offered Ruth, and was off. So presently the four had taken their places in Mr. Kendrick's car, its windows open, its luxurious winter cushioning covered with dust-proof, cool-feeling materials. Richard sat opposite Roberta, and it was easy for her to see by the peculiar light in his eyes that there was something afoot which was giving him more than ordinary joy in her companionship. His lips could hardly keep themselves in order, the tones of his voice were vibrant, his glance would have met hers every other minute if she would have allowed it. The car rolled along a certain aristocratic boulevard leading out of the city, past one stately residence after another. As the distance became greater from the centre of affairs, the places took on a more and more comfortable aspect, with less majesty of outline, and more home-likeness. Surrounding grounds grew more extensive, the houses themselves lower spreading and more picturesque. It was a favourite drive, but there were comparatively few abroad on this July morning. Nearly every residence was closed, and the inhabitants away, though the beauty of the environment was as carefully preserved as if the owners were there to observe and enjoy. "We're the only people in the city this summer," observed Richard, "except ninety-nine-hundredths of the population, which fails to count, of course, in the eyes of these residents. Curious custom, isn't it? to close such homes as these, just when they're at their most attractive, and go off to a country house. They'd be twice as comfortable at home, in this weather--just as we are. And this is the first summer I ever tried it! Robin, that's a pleasant place, isn't it?" He indicated one of the houses they were passing, an unusually interesting combination of wood and stone, half hidden beneath spreading vines. "Yes, that's charming," she agreed. "And I like the next even better, don't you?" The next was of a different style entirely, less ambitious and more friendly of appearance, with long reaches of porch and pergola, and more than usually well-arranged masses of shrubbery enhancing the whole effect of withdrawal from the public gaze. "I do, I think, for some reasons. You choose the least pretentious houses, every time, don't you? Don't care a bit for show places?" "Not a bit," owned the girl. "Here's one, now," Richard pointed it out. "The owner spent a lot of money on that. Would you live in it?" "Not--willingly." Richard glanced at his grandfather. "I wonder just how much she would suffer," he suggested, with sparkling eyes. "Suppose we should drive in there and tell her we'd bought it!" Mr. Kendrick turned to the figure in white at his side. The eyes of the old man and the young woman met with understanding, and the two smiled affectionately before the meeting was over. Richard looked on approvingly. But he complained. "I'd like one like that, myself," said he. "Robin has looked at me only three times this morning, and once was when we met, for purposes of identification!" He had a glance of his own, then, and apparently it went to his head, for he became more animated than ever in calling the party's attention to each piece, of property passed by. "These are all modern," he commented presently. "There's something about your really old house that can't be copied. Your own home, Robin--that's the type of antique beauty that's come to seem to me more desirable than any other. Isn't there one along here somewhere that reminds one of it?" "There's the General Armitage place," Roberta said. "That must be close by, now. It used to be far out in the country. It was built by the same architect who built ours. General Armitage and my great-grandfather were intimate friends--they were in the Civil War together." "Here it is." Ruth pointed it out eagerly. "I always like to go by it, because it looks quite a little like ours, only the grounds are much larger, and it has a wonderful old garden behind it. Mother has often said she wished she could transplant the Armitage garden bodily, now that the house has been closed so long. She says the old gardener is still here, and looks after the garden--or his grandsons do." "Shall we drive in and see it?" proposed Richard. "A garden like that ought to have some one to admire it now and then." He gave the order, and the car rolled in through the old stone gateway. The place, though of a noble old type, was far from a pretentious one, and there was no lodge at the gate, as with most of its neighbours. The house was no larger than the comfortable home of the Gray family, but its closed blinds and empty white-pillared portico gave it a deserted air. The grounds about it were not indicative of present day, fastidious landscape gardening, but suggested an old-time country gentleman's estate, sufficiently kept up to prevent wild and alien growth, though needing the supervision of an interested owner to suggest beneficial changes here and there. "It's a beautiful old place, isn't it?" Richard looked to Roberta for confirmation, and saw it in her kindling eyes. "It has always been our whole family's ideal of a home," she said. "Ours is so much nearer the centre of things, we haven't the acres we should like, and whenever we have driven past this place we have looked longingly at it. Since General and Mrs. Armitage died, and their family became scattered, father has often said that he was watching anxiously to see it come on the market, for there was no place he more coveted the right ownership for, even though he couldn't think of living here himself. It seems such a pity when homes like this go to people who don't appreciate them, and alter and spoil them." "So it does," agreed Richard, and now he had much ado to keep his soaring spirits from betraying the happy secret which he saw his betrothed did not remotely suspect. He knew she expected to dwell hereafter in the "stone pile" which had been the home of the Kendricks for many years, and she had never by a word or look made him feel that such a prospect tried her spirit. That it was not to her a wholly happy prospect he had divined, as he might have divined that a wild bird would not be happy in a cage, nor a deer in a close corral. "Oh, the garden!" breathed Roberta, and clasped her hands with an unconscious gesture of pleasure, as the car swept round the house and past the tall box borders of what was, indeed, such an old-time memorial, tended by faithful and loving hands, as must stir the interest of any admirer of the stately conceptions of an earlier day. A bowed figure, at work in a great bed of rosy phlox, straightened painfully as the car stopped, and the visitors looked into the seamed, tanned face of the presiding spirit of the place, the old gardener who had served General Armitage all his life. All four alighted, and walked through the winding paths, talked with old Symonds, and studied the charming spot with growing delight. Richard, managing to get Roberta to himself for a brief space, eagerly questioned her. "You find this prettier than any picture in any gallery, don't you?" "Oh, it has great charm for me. I can hardly express the curious content it gives me, to wander about such an old garden. The fragrance of the box is particularly pleasant to me, and I love the old-fashioned flowers better than any of the wonders the modern gardeners show. Just look at that mass of larkspur--did you ever see such a satisfying blue?" "I have. The first time I came to your house to dinner you wore blue, the softest, richest blue imaginable, and you sat where the shaded light made a picture of you I shall never forget. I've never seen that peculiar blue since without thinking of you. It's one of the shades of that larkspur, isn't it?" "I made fun of you, afterward, for telling Rosy you noticed the colours we wore," confessed Roberta, with a mischievous glance. "You did--you rascal! Look up at me a minute--please. The blue of your eyes, with those black lashes, is another larkspur shade, in this light. I've called it sea-blue. Rob--dearest--the nights I've dreamed about those eyes of yours!" He got no further chance to observe them just then, as he might have expected, for Roberta immediately turned their light on the garden and away from his worshipful regard. She engaged the old gardener in conversation, and made his dull gaze brighten with her praise. Meanwhile Richard went off to the house, and presently returning, drew his party into a group and put a question, striving to maintain an appearance of indifference. "It occurred to me you might care to look into the house itself. It's rather interesting inside, I believe. There seems to be a caretaker there, and she says we may come in. She'll meet us at the front. Shall we take a minute to do it?" "I should like it very much," agreed Roberta promptly. "I've heard mother speak of the fine old hall with its staircase--a different type from ours, and very interesting." "There certainly is a remarkable attraction to me in this place," said Matthew Kendrick, walking beside Roberta with hands clasped behind his back and head well up. "It has a homelike look, in spite of its deserted state, which appeals to me. I wonder that the remnant of the family does not care to retain it." "I hear the remnant is all but gone," his grandson informed him, with sober lips but dancing eyes. He was delighted with his grandfather for his assistance in playing the part of the casual observer. He led the way up the steps of the white-pillared portico, and wheeled to see the others ascending. He watched Roberta as she preceded him over the threshold of the opened door. "Shall I see you coming in that door, you beautiful thing, years and years from now?" he asked her in his heart, and smiled happily to himself. And now, indeed, old Matthew Kendrick played his part nobly and with skill. When the party had admired the distinction of the hall, and the stately sweep of its staircase, he led Ruth into a room on the left at the same moment that Richard summoned Roberta to look at something he had described in the room on the right. A question drew the caretaker after Mr. Kendrick, senior, and the younger man had the moment he was playing for. "This fireplace, Robin--isn't it the very counter-part of the one in your own living-room?" He asked it with his hand on the chimney-piece, and his glowing eyes studying hers. Roberta looked, and nodded delightedly. "It certainly is, only still wider and higher. What a splendid one! And what a room! Oh, how could they leave it? Imagine it furnished, and lived in." "Imagine it! And a great fire on this hearth. It would take in an immense log, wouldn't it?" "Poor hearth!" She turned again to it, and her glance sobered. "So cold now, even on a July day, after having been warmed with so many fires." "Shall we warm it?" He took an eager step toward her. "Shall we build our own home fires upon it?" Startled, she stared at him, the blue of her eyes growing deep. He smiled into them, his own gleaming with satisfaction. "Richard! What do you--mean?" "What I say, darling. Could you be happy here? Should you like it better than the Kendrick house?--gloomy old place that that is!" "But--your grandfather! We--we couldn't possibly leave him lonely!" "Bless your kind heart, dear--we couldn't. Shall we make a home for him here?" "Would he be content?" "So content that he's only waiting to know that you like it, and he'll tell you so. The plan is this, Robin--if you approve it. Three months of the year grandfather will stay in the old home, the hard, winter months, and if you are willing, we'll stay with him. The rest of the year--here, in our own home. Eh? Do you like it?" She stood a moment, staring into the empty fireplace, her eyes shining with a sudden hint of most unwonted tears. Then she turned to him. "Oh, you dear!" she whispered, and was swept into his arms. "Then you do like it?" he insisted, presently. "Like it! Oh, I can't tell you. To have such a home as this, so like the old one, yet so wonderful of itself. To make it ours--to put our own individuality into it, yet never hurt it. And that garden! What will mother say? Oh, Richard--I was never so happy in my life!" He knew that was true of himself, for his heart was full to bursting, with the success of his scheming. They walked the length of the long room, looked out of each window, returned to the fireplace. He held her fast and whispered in her ear: "Robin, I can see all sorts of things in this room. I saw them the minute I came into it first, a month ago. I've stood here, dreaming, more than once since then. I see ourselves, living here, and--I see--Robin--I see--little figures!" She nodded, with her face against his breast. He lifted her face, and his lips met hers in such a meeting as they had not yet known. Richard's heart beat hard with the sure knowledge of that which he had only dared before to believe would be true--that his wife would rejoice to be the mother of his children. Not in vain had this young man looked into child faces and brought joy to their eyes; he had learned that life would never be complete without children of his own. And now he knew, certainly, that this woman whom he loved would gladly join her superb young life with his in the bringing of other lives into the world, with their full heritage, and not a drop withheld. It was a wondrous moment. They went out together, in search of Mr. Kendrick and Ruth, and then the party proceeded over the house. With a word and a fee Richard dismissed the caretaker, and the four were free to talk of their affairs. Ruth was wild with delight at the news; Mr. Kendrick quietly happy at Roberta's words to him, and her clasp of his hand. "Richard was sure you would be pleased, my dear," he said, "and I myself could not doubt that, brought up in the atmosphere you have been, you must prefer such a home as this, so like your own. And if you would really care to have me here with you, a part of the year, I could but be gratified and contented." They assured him of their joy at this: they mounted the stairs with him and searched for the apartments which should be his. In spite of his protests they insisted on his occupying those which were obviously the choicest of the house, declaring that nothing could be too good for him. He was deeply touched at their devotion, and they were as glad as he. The time passed rapidly in these momentous affairs. "I suppose we must be off," admitted Richard reluctantly, discovering the hour. "Robin, how can you bear to leave it so long untenanted? From July to Christmas--what an interminable stretch of time!" "Not with all you have planned to do," Roberta reminded him. "Think what it will mean to get it all in order." "I do think what it will mean. Don't I, though! It will mean--shopping with my love, choosing rugs and furniture--and plates and cups, Robin--plates and cups to eat and drink from. The fun of that! Will you help us, Rufus?" He turned, laughing, to the young girl beside him. "Will you come and eat and drink from our plates and cups? Ah, but this is a great old world--yes? you three dear people! And I'm the happiest fellow in it!" There seemed small doubt that there could be few happier, just then, as standing at the top of his own staircase and gazing down into the wide and empty hall toward the open door which led out upon the white-pillared portico of his home-that-was-to-be, Richard Kendrick flung up one arm, lifting an imaginary cup high in the air, and calling joyously: _"Here's hoping!"_ CHAPTER XXV A STOUT LITTLE CABIN Christmas morning! and the bells in St. Luke's pealing the great old hymn, dear for scores of years to those who had heard it chiming from the ivy-grown towers--"_Adeste, Fideles_." _"Oh, come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant!"_ Joyful and triumphant, indeed, though yet subdued and humble, since this paradox may be at times in human hearts, was Richard Kendrick, as he stood waiting in the vestibule of St. Luke's, on Christmas morning, for a tryst he had made. Not with Roberta, for it was not possible for her to be present to-day, but with Ruth Gray, that young sister who had become so like a sister by blood to Richard that, at her suggestion, it had seemed to him the happiest thing in the world to go to church with her on Christmas morning--the morning of the day which was to see his marriage. The Gray homestead was full of wedding guests, the usual family guests of the Christmas house-party. On the evening before had occurred the Christmas dance, and Richard had led the festivities, with his bride-elect at his side. It had been a glorious merry-making and his pulses had thrilled wildly to the rapture of it. But to-day--to-day was another story. A slender young figure, in brown velvet with a tiny twig of holly perched among furry trimmings, hurried up the steps and into the vestibule. Richard met Ruth halfway, his face alight, his hand clasping hers eagerly. "I'm so sorry I am late," she whispered. "Oh, it's so fine of you to come. Isn't it a lovely, lovely way to begin this Day--your and Rob's day, too?" He nodded, smiling down at her with eyes full of brotherly affection for a most lovable girl. He followed her into the church and took his place beside her, feeling that he would rather be here, just now, than anywhere in the world. It must be admitted that he hardly heard the service, except for the music, which was of a sort to make its own way into the most abstracted consciousness. But the quiet spirit of the place had its effect upon him, and when he knelt beside Ruth it seemed the most natural thing in the world to form a prayer in his heart that he might be a fit husband for the wife he was so soon to take to himself. Once, during a long period of kneeling, Ruth's hand slipped shyly into his, and he held it fast, with a quickening perception of what it meant to have a pure young spirit like hers beside him in this sacred hour. His soul was full of high resolve to be a son and brother to this rare family into which he was entering such as might do them honour. For it was a very significant fact that to him the people who stood nearest to Roberta were of great consequence; and that a source of extraordinary satisfaction to him, from the first, had been his connection with a family which seemed to him ideal, and association with which made up to him for much of which his life had been empty. A proof of this had been his invitation, through his grandfather, who had warmly seconded his wish, to Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray, to come and stay with the Kendricks throughout this Christmas party, precisely as they had done the year before. To have Aunt Ruth preside at breakfast on this auspicious morning had given Richard the greatest pleasure, and the kiss he had bestowed upon her had been one which she recognized as very like the tribute of a son. From her side he had gone to St. Luke's. "Good-bye, dear, for a few hours," he whispered to Ruth, as he put her into the brougham, driven by the old family coachman, in which she had come alone to church. "When I see you next I'll be almost your brother. And in just a few minutes after that--" "Oh, Richard--are you happy?" she whispered back, scanning his face with brimming eyes. "So happy I can't tell even you. Give my love, my dearest love, to--" "I will--" as he paused on the name, as if he could not speak it just then. "She was so glad to have us go to church together. She wanted to come herself--so much." He pressed the small gloved hand held out to him. He knew that Ruth idealized him far beyond his worth--he could read it in her gaze, which was all but reverential. He said to himself, as he turned away, that a man never had so many motives to be true to the girl he was to marry. To bring the first shade of distrust into this little sister's tender eyes would be punishment enough for any disloyalty, no matter what the cause might be. The wedding was to be at six o'clock. There was nothing about the whole affair, as it had been planned by Roberta, with his full assent, to make it resemble any event of the sort in which he had ever taken part. Not one consideration of custom or of vogue had had weight with her, if it differed from her carefully wrought-out views of what should be. Her ruling idea had been to make it all as simple and sincere as possible, to invite no guests outside her large family and his small one except such personal friends as were peculiarly dear to both. When Richard had been asked to submit his list of these, he had been taken aback to find how pitifully few people he could put upon it. Half a dozen college classmates, a small number of fellow clubmen--these painstakingly considered from more than one standpoint--the Cartwrights, his cousins, whom he really knew but indifferently well; two score easily covered the number of those whom by any stretch of the imagination he could call friends. The long roll of his fashionable acquaintance he dismissed as out of the question. If he had been married in church there would have been several hundreds of these who must unquestionably have been bidden; but since Roberta wanted as she put it, "only those who truly care for us," he could but choose those who seemed to come somewhere near that ideal. To be quite honest, he was aware that his real friends were among those who could not be bidden to his marriage. The crippled children in the hospitals; the suffering poor who would send him their blessing when they read in to-morrow's paper that he was married; the shop-people in Eastman who knew him for the kindest employer they had ever had:--these were they who "truly cared"; and the knowledge was warm at his heart, as with a ruthless hand he scored off names of the mighty in the world of society and finance. "Dick, my boy, you've grown--you've grown!" was his grandfather's comment, when Richard, with a rueful laugh, had shown the old man the finished list, upon which, well toward the top, had been the names of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Carson. Of Hugh Benson, as best man, Matthew Kendrick heartily approved. "You've chosen the nugget of pure gold, Dick," he said, "where you might have been expected to take one with considerable alloy. He's worth all the others put together." Richard had never realized this more thoroughly than when, on Christmas afternoon, he invited Benson to drive with him for a last inspection of a certain spot which had been prepared for the reception of the bridal pair at the first stage of their journey. He could not, as Hugh took his place beside him and the two whirled away down the frost-covered avenue, imagine asking any other man in the world to go with him on such a visit. There was no other man he knew who would not have made it the occasion for more or less distasteful raillery; but Hugh Benson was of the rarely few, he felt, who would understand what that "stout little cabin" meant to him. They came upon it presently, standing bleak and bare as to exterior upon its hilltop, with only a streaming pillar of smoke from its big chimney to suggest that it might be habitable within. But when the heavy door was thrown open, an interior of warmth and comfort presented itself such as brought an exclamation of wonder from the guest, and made Richard's eyes shine with satisfaction. The long, low room had been furnished simply but fittingly with such hangings, rugs, and few articles of furniture as should suggest home-likeness and service. Before the wide hearth stood two big winged chairs, and a set of bookshelves was filled with a carefully chosen collection of favourite books. The colourings were warm but harmonious, and upon a heavy table, now covered with a rich, dull red cloth, stood a lamp of generous proportions and beauty of design. "I've tried to steer a line between luxury and austerity," Richard explained, as Hugh looked about him with pleased observation. "We shall not be equipped for real roughing it--not this time, though sometimes we may like to come here dressed as hunters and try living on bare boards. I just wanted it to seem like a bit of home, when she comes in to-night. There'll be some flowers here then, of course--lots of them, and that ought to give it the last touch. There are always flowers in her home, bowls of them, everywhere--it was one of the first things I noticed. Do you think she will like it here?" he ended, with a hint of almost boyish diffidence in his tone. "Like it? It's wonderful. I never heard of anything so--so--all it should be for--a girl like her," Hugh exclaimed, lamely enough, yet with a certain eloquence of inflection which meant more than his choice of words. He turned to Richard. "I can't tell you," he went on, flushing with the effort to convey to his friend his deep feeling, "how fortunate I think you are, and how I hope--oh, I hope you and she will be--the happiest people in the world!" "I'm sure you hope that, old fellow," Richard answered, more touched by this difficult voicing of what he knew to be Hugh's genuine devotion than he should have been by the most felicitous phrasing of another's congratulations. "And I can tell you this. There's nobody else I know whom I would have brought here to see my preparations--nobody else who would have understood how I feel about--what I'm doing to-day. I never should have believed it would have seemed so--well, so sacred a thing to take a girl away from all the people who love her, and bring her to a place like this. I wish--wish I were a thousand times more fit for her." "Rich Kendrick--" Benson was taken out of himself now. His voice was slightly tremulous, but he spoke with less difficulty than before. "You are fitter than you know. You've developed as I never thought any man could in so short a time. I've been watching you and I've seen it. There was always more in you than people gave you credit for--it was your inheritance from a father and grandfather who have meant a great deal in their world. You've found out what you were meant for, and you're coming up to new and finer standards every day. You _are_ fit to take this girl--and that means much, because I know a little of what a--" Now _he_ was floundering again, and his fine, then face flamed more hotly than before--"of what she is!" he ended, with a complete breakdown in the style of his phraseology, but with none at all in the conveyance of his meaning. Richard flung out his hand, catching Hugh's, and gripping it. "Bless you for a friend and a brother!" he cried, his eyes bright with sudden moisture. "You're another whom I mustn't disappoint. Disappoint? I ought to be flayed alive if I ever forget the people who believe in me--who are trusting me with--Roberta!" It was a pity she could not have heard him speak her name, have seen the way he looked at his friend as he spoke it, and have seen the way his friend looked back at him. There was a quality in their mentioning of her, here in this place where she was soon to be, which was its own tribute to the young womanhood she so radiantly imaged. In spite of all these devices to make the hours pass rapidly, they seemed to Richard to crawl. That one came, at last, however, which saw him knocking at the door of his grandfather's suite, dressed for his marriage, and eager to depart. Bidden by Mr. Kendrick's man to enter, he presented himself in the old gentleman's dressing-room, where its occupant, as scrupulously attired as himself, stood ready to descend to the waiting car. Richard closed the door behind him, and stood looking at his grandfather with a smile. "Well, Dick, boy--ready? Ah, but you look fresh and fine! Clean in body and mind and heart for her--eh? That's how you look, sir--as a man should look--and feel--on his wedding day. Well, she's worth it, Dick--worth the best you can give." "Worth far better than I can give, grandfather," Richard responded, the glow in his smooth cheek deepening. "Well, I don't mean to overrate you," said the old man, smiling, "but you seem to me pretty well worth while any girl's taking. Not that you can't become more so--and will, I thoroughly believe. It's not so much what you've done this last year as what you show promise of doing--great promise. That's all one can ask at your age. Ten years later--but we won't go into that. To-night's enough--eh, my dear boy? My dear boy!" he repeated, with a sudden access of tenderness in his voice. Then, as if afraid of emotion for them both, he pressed his grandson's hand and abruptly led the way into the outer room, where Thompson stood waiting with his fur-lined coat and muffler. From this point on it seemed to Richard more or less like a rapidly shifting series of pictures, all wonderfully coloured. The first was that of the electric light of the big car's interior shining on the faces of Uncle Rufus and Aunt Ruth, on Mr. Kendrick and Hugh Benson--the latter a little pale but quite composed. Hugh had owned that he felt seriously inadequate for the role which was his to-night, being no society man and unaccustomed to taking conspicuous parts anywhere but in business. But Richard had assured him that it was all a very simple matter, since it was just a question of standing by a friend in the crisis of his life! And Hugh had responded that it would be a pity indeed if he were unwilling to do that. The next picture was that of the wide hall at the Gray home--as he came into it a vivid memory flashed over Richard of his first entrance there--less honoured than to-night! Soft lights shone upon him; the spicy fragrance of the ropes and banks of Christmas "greens," bright with holly, saluted his nostrils; and the glimpse of a great fire burning, quite as usual, on the broad hearth of the living-room--a place which had long since come to typify his ideal of a home--served to make him feel that there could be no spot more suitable for the beginning of a new home, because there could be nothing in the world finer or more beautiful to model it upon. Nothing seemed afterward clear in his memory until the moment when he came from his room upstairs, with Hugh close behind him, and met the rector of St. Luke's, who was to marry him. There followed a hazy impression of a descent of the staircase, of coming from a detour through the library out into the full lights and of standing interminably facing a large gathering of people, the only face at which he could venture to glance that of Judge Calvin. Gray, standing dignified and stately beside another figure of equal dignity and stateliness--probably that of Mr. Matthew Kendrick. Then, at last--there was Roberta, coming toward him down a silken lane, her eyes fixed on his--such eyes, in such a face! He fixed his own gaze upon it, and held it--and forgot everything else, as he had hoped he should. Then there were the grave words of the clergyman, and his own voice responding--and sounding curiously unlike his own, of course, as the voice of the bridegroom has sounded in his own ears since time began. Then Roberta's--how clearly she spoke, bless her! Then, before he knew it, it was done, and he and she were rising from their knees, and there were smiles and pleasant murmurings all about them--and little Ruth was sobbing softly with her cheek against his! It was here that he became conscious again of the family--Roberta's family, and of what it meant to have such people as these welcome him into their circle. When he looked into the face of Roberta's mother and felt her tender welcoming kiss upon his lips, his heart beat hard with joy. When Roberta's father, his voice deep with feeling, said to him, "Welcome to our hearts, my son," he could only grasp the firm hand with an answering, passionate pressure which meant that he had at last that which he had consciously or unconsciously longed for all his life. All down the line his overcharged spirit responded to the warmth of their reception of him--Stephen and Rosamond, Louis and Ruth and young Ted, smiling at him, saying the kindest things to him, making him one of them as only those can who are blessed with understanding natures. To be sure, it was all more or less confused in his memory, when he tried to recall it afterward, but enough of it remained vivid to assure him that it had been all he could have asked or hoped--and that it was far, far more than he deserved! "The boy bears up pretty well, eh?" observed old Matthew Kendrick to his lifelong friend, Judge Calvin Gray, as the two stood aside, having gone through their own part in the greeting of the bridal pair. Mr. Kendrick's hand was still tingling with the wringing grip of his grandson's; his heart was warm with the remembrance of the way Richard's brilliant eyes had looked into his as he had said, low in the old man's ear--"I'm not less yours, grandfather--and she's yours, too." Roberta had put both arms about his neck, whispering: "Indeed I am, dear grandfather--if you'll have me." Well, it had been happiness enough, and it was good to watch them as they went on with their joyous task, knowing that he had a large share in their lives, and would continue to have it. "Bears up? I should say he did. He looks as if he could assist in steadying the world upon the shoulders of old Atlas," answered Judge Gray happily. "It's a trying position for any man, and some of them only just escape looking craven." "The man who could stand beside that young woman and look craven would deserve to be hamstrung," was the other's verdict. "Cal, she's enough to turn an old man's head; we can't wonder that a young one's is swimming. And the best of it is that it isn't all looks, it's real beauty to the core. She's rich in the qualities that stand wear in a wearing world--and her goodness isn't the sort that will ever pall on her husband. She'll keep him guessing to the end of time, but the answer will always give him fresh delight in her." "You analyze her well," admitted Roberta's uncle. "But that's to be expected of a man who's been a pastmaster all his life in understanding and dealing with human nature." "When it was not too near me, Cal. When it came to the dearest thing I had in the world, I made a mistake with it. It was only when the boy came under this roof that he received the stimulus that has made him what he is. That was sure to tell in the end." "Ah, but he had your blood in him," declared Calvin Gray heartily. Thus, all about them, in many quarters, were the young pair affectionately discussed. Not the least eloquent in their praise were the youngest members of the company. "I say, but I'm proud of my new brother," declared Ted Gray, the picture of youthful elegance, with every hair in place, and a white rose on the lapel of his short evening-jacket. He was playing escort to the prettiest of his girl cousins. "Isn't he a stunner to-night?" "He always was--that is, since I've known him," responded Esther, Uncle Philip's daughter. "I can't help laughing when I think of the Christmas party last year, and how Rob made us all think he was a poor young man, and she didn't like him at all. All of us girls thought she was so queer not to want to dance with him, when he was so handsome and danced so beautifully. I suppose she was just pretending she didn't care for him." "Nobody ever'll know when Rob did change her mind about him," Ted assured her. "She can make you think black's green when she wants to." "Isn't she perfectly wonderful to-night?" sighed the pretty cousin, with a glance from her own home-made frock--in which, however, she looked like a freshly picked rose--to Roberta's bridal gown, shimmering through mistiness, simplicity itself, yet, as the little cousin well knew, the product of such art as she herself might never hope to command. "I always thought she was perfectly beautiful, but she's absolutely fascinating to-night." "Tell that to Rich. I'm afraid he doesn't appreciate her," laughed Ted, indicating his new brother-in-law, who, at the moment being temporarily unemployed, was to be observed following his bride with his eyes with a wistful gaze indicating helplessness without her even for a fraction of time. Roberta had been drawn a little away by her husband's best man, who had something to tell her which he had reserved for this hour. "Mrs. Kendrick," he was beginning--at which he was bidden to remember that he had known the girl Roberta for many years; and so began again, smiling with gratitude: "Roberta, have you any idea what is happening in Eastman to-night?" "Indeed I haven't, Hugh. Anything I ought to know of?" "I think it's time you did. Every employee in our store is sitting down to a great dinner, served by a caterer from this city, with a Christmas favour at every plate. The place cards have a K and G on them in monogram. There are such flowers for decorations as most of those people never saw. I don't need to tell you whose doing this is." He had the reward he had anticipated for the telling of this news--Roberta's cheek coloured richly, and her eyes fell for a moment to hide the surprise and happiness in them. "That may seem like enough," he went on gently, "but it wasn't enough for him. At every children's hospital in this city, and in every children's ward, there is a Christmas tree to-night, loaded with gifts. And I want you to know that, busy as he has been until to-day, he picked out every gift himself, and wrote the name on the card with his own hand." It was too much to tell her all at once, and he knew it when he saw her eyes fill, though she smiled through the shining tears as she murmured: "And he didn't tell me!" "No, nor meant to. When I remonstrated with him he said you might think it a posing to impress you, whereas it simply meant the overflow of his own happiness. He said if he didn't have some such outlet he should burst with the pressure of it!" Her moved laughter provided some sort of outlet for her own pressure of feeling about these tidings. When she had recovered control of herself she turned to glance toward her husband, and Hugh's heart stirred within him at the starry radiance of that look, which she could not veil successfully from him, who knew the cause of it. It was the Alfred Carsons who came to her last; the young manager beaming with pleasure in the honour done him by his invitation to this family wedding, to which the great of the city were mostly intentionally unbidden; his pretty young wife, in effective modishness of attire by no means ill-chosen, glowing with pride and rosy with the effort to comport herself in keeping with the standards of these "democratically aristocratic" people, as her husband had shrewdly characterized them. As they stood talking with the bride, two of Richard's friends standing near by, former close associates in the life of the clubs he was now too busy to pursue, exchanged a brief colloquy which would mightily have interested the subject of it if he could have heard it. "Who are these?" demanded one of the other, gazing elsewhere as he spoke. "Partner or manager or something, in that business of Rich's up in Eastman. So Belden Lorimer says." "Bright looking chap--might be anybody, except for the wife. A bit too conscious, she." "You might not notice that except in contrast with the new Mrs. Kendrick. There's the real thing, yes? Rich knew what he was doing when he picked her out." "Undoubtedly he did. The whole family's pretty fine--not the usual sort. Watch Mrs. Clifford Cartwright. Even she's impressed. Odd, eh?--with all the country cousins about, too." "I know. It's in the air. And of course everybody knows the family blood is of the bluest. Unostentatious but sure of itself. The Cartwrights couldn't get that air, not in a thousand years." "Rich himself has it, though--and the grandfather." "True enough. I'm wondering which class we belong in!" The two laughed and moved closer. Neither could afford to miss a chance of observing their old friend under these new conditions, for he had been a subject of their speculations ever since the change in him had begun. And though they had deplored the loss of him from their favourite haunts, they had been some time since forced to admit that he had never been so well worth knowing as now that he was virtually lost to them. "Oh, Robby, darling--I can never, never let you go!" So softly wailed Ruth, her slim young form clinging to her sister's, regardless of her bridesmaid's crushed finery, daintily cherished till this moment. Over her head Roberta's eyes looked into her mother's. There were no tears in the fine eyes which met hers, but somehow Roberta knew that Ruth's heartache was a tiny pain beside that other's. Richard, looking on, standing ready to take his bride away, wondered once more within himself how he could have the heart to do it. But it was done, and he and Roberta were off together down the steps; and he was putting her into Mr. Kendrick's closed car; and she was leaning past him to wave and wave again at the dear faces on the porch. Under the lights here and there one stood out more clearly than the rest--Louis's, flushed and virile; Rosamond's, lovely as a child's; old Mr. Kendrick's, intent and grave, forgetting to smile. The father and the mother were in the shadow--but little Gordon, Stephen's boy, made of himself a central figure by running forward at the last to fling up a sturdy arm and cry: "Good-bye, Auntie Wob--come back soon!" It had been a white Christmas, and the snow had fallen lightly all day long. It was coming faster now, and the wind was rising, to Richard's intense satisfaction. He had been fairly praying for a gale, improbable though that seemed. There was a considerable semblance of a storm, however, through which to drive the twelve miles to the waiting cabin on the hilltop, and when the car stopped and the door was opened, a heavy gust came swirling in. The absence of lights everywhere made the darkness seem blacker, out here in the country, and the general effect of outer desolation was as near this strange young man's desire as could have been hoped. "Good driving, Rogers. It was a quick trip, in spite of the heavy roads at the last. Thank you--and good-night." "Thank you, sir. Good-night, Mr. Kendrick--and Mrs. Kendrick, if I may." "Good-night, Rogers," called the voice Rogers had learned greatly to admire, and he saw her face smiling at him as the lights of the car streamed out upon it. Then the great car was gone, and Richard was throwing open the door of the cabin, letting all the warmth and glow and fragrance of the snug interior greet his bride, as he led her in and shut the door with a resounding force against the winter night and storm. It had been a dream of his that he should put her into one of the big, cushioned, winged chairs, and take his own place on the hearth-rug at her feet. Together they should sit and look into the fire, and be as silent or as full of happy speech as might seem to befit the hour. Now, when he had bereft her of her furry wraps and welcomed her as he saw fit, he made his dream come true. He told her of it as he put her in her chair, and saw her lean back against the comfortable cushioning with a long breath of inevitable weariness after many hours of tension. "And you wondered which it would be, speech or silence?" queried Roberta, as he took that place he had meant to take, at her knee, and looked up, smiling, into her down-bent face. "I did wonder, but I don't wonder now. I know. There aren't any words, are there?" "No," she answered, looking now into the fire, yet seeing, as clearly as before, his fine and ardent, yet reverent face, "I think there are no words." 
35866	----	[Frontispiece: _The Captain tore at the shoulders and neck of the gray horse with his gleaming teeth_. Page 96] "I Conquered" By HAROLD TITUS With Frontispiece in Colors By CHARLES M. RUSSELL A. L. BURT COMPANY Publishers New York Published by Arrangements with Rand, McNally & Company _Copyright, 1916,_ By Rand McNally & Company THE CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Denunciation II. A Young Man Goes West III. "I've Done My Pickin'" IV. The Trouble Hunter V. Jed Philosophizes VI. Ambition Is Born VII. With Hoof and Tooth VIII. A Head of Yellow Hair IX. Pursuit X. Capture XI. A Letter and a Narrative XII. Woman Wants XIII. VB Fights XIV. The Schoolhouse Dance XV. Murder XVI. The Candle Burns XVII. Great Moments XVIII. The Lie XIX. Through the Night XX. The Last Stand XXI. Guns Crash XXII. Tables Turn; and Turn Again XXIII. Life, the Trophy XXIV. Victory XXV. "The Light!" XXVI. To the Victor "__I CONQUERED" CHAPTER I Denunciation Danny Lenox wanted a drink. The desire came to him suddenly as he stood looking down at the river, burnished by bright young day. It broke in on his lazy contemplation, wiped out the indulgent smile, and made the young face serious, purposeful, as though mighty consequence depended on satisfying the urge that had just come up within him. He was the sort of chap to whom nothing much had ever mattered, whose face generally bore that kindly, contented smile. His grave consideration had been aroused by only a scant variety of happenings from the time of a pampered childhood up through the gamut of bubbling boyhood, prep school, university, polo, clubs, and a growing popularity with a numerous clan until he had approached a state of established and widely recognized worthlessness. Economics did not bother him. It mattered not how lavishly he spent; there had always been more forthcoming, because Lenox senior had a world of the stuff. The driver of his taxicab--just now whirling away--seemed surprised when Danny waved back change, but the boy did not bother himself with thought of the bill he had handed over. Nor did habits which overrode established procedure for men cause him to class himself apart from the mass. He remarked that the cars zipping past between him and the high river embankment were stragglers in the morning flight businessward; but he recognized no difference between himself and those who scooted toward town, intent on the furtherance of serious ends. What might be said or thought about his obvious deviation from beaten, respected paths was only an added impulse to keep smiling with careless amiability. It might be commented on behind fans in drawing rooms or through mouths full of food in servants' halls, he knew. But it did not matter. However--something mattered. He wanted a drink. And it was this thought that drove away the smile and set the lines of his face into seriousness, that sent him up the broad walk with swinging, decisive stride, his eyes glittering, his lips taking moisture from a quick-moving tongue. He needed a drink! Danny entered the Lenox home up there on the sightly knoll, fashioned from chill-white stone, staring composedly down on the drive from its many black-rimmed windows. The heavy front door shut behind him with a muffled sound like a sigh, as though it had been waiting his coming all through the night, just as it had through so many nights, and let suppressed breath slip out in relief at another return. A quick step carried him across the vestibule within sight of the dining-room doorway. He flung his soft hat in the general direction of a cathedral bench, loosed the carelessly arranged bow tie, and with an impatient jerk unbuttoned the soft shirt at his full throat. Of all things, from conventions to collars, Danny detested those which bound. And just now his throat seemed to be swelling quickly, to be pulsing; and already the glands of his mouth responded to the thought of that which was on the buffet in a glass decanter--amber--and clear--and-- At the end of the hallway a door stood open, and Danny's glance, passing into the room it disclosed, lighted on the figure of a man stooping over a great expanse of table, fumbling with papers--fumbling a bit slowly, as with age, the boy remarked even in the flash of a second his mind required to register a recognition of his father. Danny stopped. The yearning of his throat, the call of his tightening nerves, lost potency for the moment; the glitter of desire in his dark eyes softened quickly. He threw back his handsome head with a gesture of affection that was almost girlish, in spite of its muscular strength, and the smile came back, softer, more indulgent. His brow clouded a scant instant when he turned to look into the dining room as he walked down the long, dark, high-ceilinged hall, and his step hesitated. But he put the impulse off, going on, with shoulders thrown back, rubbing his palms together as though wholesomely happy. So he passed into the library. "Well, father, it's a good morning to you!" At the spontaneous salutation the older man merely ceased moving an instant. He remained bent over the table, one hand arrested in the act of reaching for a document. It was as though he held his breath to listen--or to calculate quickly. The son walked across to him, approaching from behind, and dropped a hand on the stooping, black-clothed shoulder. "How go--" Danny broke his query abruptly, for the other straightened with a half-spoken word that was, at the least, utmost impatience; possibly a word which, fully uttered, would have expressed disgust, perhaps--even loathing! And on Danny was turned such a mask as he had never seen before. The cleanly shaven face was dark. The cold blue eyes flashed a chill fire and the grim slit of a tightly closed mouth twitched, as did the fingers at the skirts of the immaculate coat. Lenox senior backed away, putting out a hand to the table, edging along until a corner of it was between himself and his heir. Then the hand, fingers stiffly extended, pressed against the table top. It trembled. The boy flushed, then smiled, then sobered. On the thought of what seemed to him the certain answer to the strangeness of this reception, his voice broke the stillness, filled with solicitude. "Did I startle you?" he asked, and a smile broke through his concern. "You jumped as though--" Again he broke short. His father's right hand, palm outward, was raised toward him and moved quickly from side to side. That gesture meant silence! Danny had seen it used twice before--once when a man of political power had let his angered talk rise in the Lenox house until it became disquieting; once when a man came there to plead. And the gesture on those occasions had carried the same quiet, ominous conviction that it now impressed on Danny. The voice of the old man was cold and hard, almost brittle for lack of feeling. "How much will you take to go?" he asked, and breathed twice loudly, as though struggling to hold back a bursting emotion. Danny leaned slightly forward from his hips and wrinkled his face in his inability to understand. "What?" He drawled out the word. "Once more, please?" "How much will you take to go?" Again the crackling, colorless query, by its chill strength narrowing even the thought which must transpire in the presence of the speaker. "How much will I take to go?" repeated Danny. "How much what? To go where?" Lenox senior blinked, and his face darkened. His voice lost some of its edge, became a trifle muffled, as though the emotion he had breathed hard to suppress had come up into his throat and adhered gummily to the words. "How much money--how much money will you take to go away from here? Away from me? Away from New York? Out of my sight--out of my way?" Once more the fingers pressed the table top and the fighting jaw of the gray-haired man protruded slowly as the younger drew nearer a faltering step, two--three, until he found support against the table. There across the corner of the heavy piece of furniture they peered at each other; one in silent, mighty rage; the other with eyes widening, quick, confusing lights playing across their depths as he strove to refuse the understanding. "How much money--to go away from New York--from you? Out of your _way_?" Young Danny's voice rose in pitch at each word as with added realization the strain on his emotions increased. His body sagged forward and the hands on the table bore much of its weight; so much that the elbows threatened to give, as had his knees. "To go away--why? Why--is this?" In his query was something of the terror of a frightened child; in his eyes something of the look of a wounded beast. "You ask me why!" Lenox senior straightened with a jerk and followed the exclamation with something that had been a laugh until, driven through the rage within him, it became only a rattling rasp in his throat. "You ask me why!" he repeated. "You ask me why!" His voice dropped to a thin whisper; then, anger carrying it above its normal tone: "You stand here in this room, your face like suet from months and years of debauchery, your mind unable to catch my idea because of the poison you have forced on it, because of the stultifying thoughts you have let occupy it, because of the ruthless manner in which you have wasted its powers of preception, of judgment, and ask me why!" In quick gesture he leveled a vibrating finger at the face of his son and with pauses between the words declared: "_You_--are--why!" Danny's elbows bent still more under the weight on them, and his lips worked as he tried to force a dry throat through the motions of swallowing. On his face was reflected just one emotion--surprise. It was not rage, not resentment, not shame, not fear--just surprise. He was utterly confused by the abruptness of his father's attack; he was unable to plumb the depths of its significance, although an inherent knowledge of the other's moods told him that he faced disaster. Then the older man was saying: "You have stripped yourself of everything that God and man could give you. You have thrown the gems of your opportunity before your swinish desires. You have degenerated from the son your mother bore to a worthless, ambitionless, idealless, thoughtless--drunkard!" Danny took a half-step closer to the table, his eyes held on those others with mechanical fixity. "Father--but, dad--" he tried to protest. Again the upraised, commanding palm. "I have stood it as long as I can. I have suggested from time to time that you give serious consideration to things about you and to your future; suggested, when a normal young man would have gone ahead of his own volition to meet the exigencies every individual must face sooner or later. "But you would have none of it! From your boyhood you have been a waster. I hoped once that all the trouble you gave us was evidence of a spirit that would later be directed toward a good end. But I was never justified in that. "You wasted your university career. Why, you weren't even a good athlete! You managed to graduate, but only to befog what little hope then remained to me. "You have had everything you could want; you had money, friends, and your family name. What have you done? Wasted them! You had your polo string and the ability to play a great game, but what came of it? You'd rather sit in the clubhouse and saturate yourself with drink and with the idle, parasitic thoughts of the crowd there! "You have dropped low and lower until, everything else gone, you are now wasting the last thing that belongs to you, the fundamental thing in life--your vitality! "Oh, don't try to protest! Those sacks under your eyes! Your shoulders aren't as straight as they were a year ago; you don't think as quickly as you did when making a pretense of playing polo; your hand isn't steady for a man of twenty-five. You're going; you're on the toboggan slide. "You have wasted yourself, flung yourself away, and not one act or thought of your experience has been worth the candle! Now--what will you take to get out?" The boy before him moved a slow step backward, and a flush came up over his drawn face. "You--" he began. Then he stopped and drew a hand across his eyes, beginning the movement slowly and ending with a savage jerk. "You never said a word before! You never intimated you thought this! You never--you--" He floundered heavily under the stinging conviction that of such was his only defense! "No!" snapped his father, after waiting for more to come. "I never said anything before--not like this. You smiled away whatever I suggested. Nothing mattered--nothing except debauchery. Now you've passed the limit You're a common drunk!" His voice rose high and higher; he commenced to gesticulate. "You live only to wreck yourself. Yours is the fault--and the blame! "It is natural for me to be concerned. I've hung on now too long, hoping that you would right yourself and justify the hopes people have had in you. I planned, years ago, to have you take up my work where I must soon leave off--to go on in my place, to finish my life for me as I began yours for you! I've had faith that you would do this, but you won't--you can't! "That isn't all. You're holding _me_ back. I must push on now harder than ever, but with the stench of your misdeeds always in my nostrils it is almost an impossibility." Danny raised his hands in a half-gesture of pleading, but the old man motioned him back. "Don't be sorry; don't try to explain. This had to come. It's an accumulation of years. I have no more faith in you. If I thought you could ever rally I'd give up everything and help you, but not once in your life have you shown me that you possessed one impulse to be of use." His voice dropped with each word, and its return to the cold normal sent a stiffness into the boy's spine. His head went up, his chin out; his hands closed slowly. "How much money will you take to get out?" The old man moved from behind the table corner and approached Danny, walking slowly, with his hands behind him. He came to a stop before the boy, slowly unbuttoned his coat, reached to an inner pocket, and drew out a checkbook. "How much?" Danny's gesture, carried out, surely would have resulted in a blow strong enough to send the book spinning across the room; but he stopped it halfway. His eyes were puffed and bloodshot; his pulse hammered loudly under his ears, and the rush of blood made his head roar. Before him floated a mist, fogging thought as it did his vision. The boy's voice was scarcely recognizable as he spoke. It was hard and cold--somewhat like the one which had so scourged him. "Keep your money," he said, looking squarely at his father at the cost of a peculiar, unreal effort. "I'll get out--and without your help. Some day I'll--I'll show you what a puny thing this faith of yours is!" The elder Lenox, buttoning his coat with brisk motions, merely said, "Very well." He left the room. Danny heard his footsteps cross the hall, heard the big front door sigh when it closed as though it rejoiced at the completion of a distasteful task. Then he shut his eyes and struck his thighs twice with stiff forearms. He was boiling, blood and brain! At first he thought it anger; perhaps anger had been there, but it was not the chief factor of that tumult. It was humiliation. The horrid, unanswerable truth had seared Danny's very body--witness the anguished wrinkles on his brow--and his molten consciousness could find no argument to justify himself, even to act as a balm! "He never _said_ it before," the boy moaned, and in that spoken thought was the nearest thing to comfort that he could conjure. He stood in the library a long time, gradually cooling, gradually nursing the bitterness that grew up in the midst of conflicting impulses. The look in his eyes changed from bewilderment to a glassy cynicism, and he began to walk back and forth unsteadily. He paced the long length of the room a dozen times. Then, with a quickened stride, he passed into the hall, crossed it, and entered the dining room, the tip of his tongue caressing his lips. On the buffet stood a decanter, a heavy affair of finely executed glassworker's art. The dark stuff in it extended halfway up the neck, and as he reached for it Danny's lips parted. He lifted the receptacle and clutched at a whisky glass that stood on the same tray. He picked it up, looked calculatingly at it, set it down, and picked up a _tumbler_. The glass stopper of the bottle thudded on the mahogany; his nervous hand held the tumbler under its gurgling mouth. Half full, two-thirds, three-quarters, to within a finger's breadth of the top he filled it. Then, setting the decanter down, he lifted the glass to look through the amber at the morning light; his breath quick, his eyes glittering, Danny Lenox poised. A smile played about his eager lips--a smile that brightened, and lingered, and faded--and died. The hand holding the glass trembled, then was still; trembled again, so severely that it spilled some of the liquor; came gradually down from its upraised position, down below his mouth, below his shoulder, and waveringly sought the buffet. As the glass settled to the firm wood Danny's shoulders slacked forward and his head drooped. He turned slowly from the buffet, the aroma of whisky strong in his dilated nostrils. After the first faltering step he faced about, gazed at his reflection in the mirror, and said aloud: "And it's not been worth--the candle!" Savagery was in his step as he entered the hall, snatched up his hat, and strode to the door. As the heavy portal swung shut behind the hurrying boy it sighed again, as though hopelessly. The future seemed hopeless for Danny. He had gone out to face a powerful foe. CHAPTER II A Young Man Goes West From the upper four hundreds on Riverside Drive to Broadway where the lower thirties slash through is a long walk. Danny Lenox walked it this June day. As he left the house his stride was long and nervously eager, but before he covered many blocks his gait moderated and the going took hours. Physical fatigue did not slow down his progress. The demands upon his mental machinery retarded his going. He needed time to think, to plan, to bring order out of the chaos into which he had been plunged. Danny had suddenly found that many things in life are to be considered seriously. An hour ago they could have been numbered on his fingers; now they were legion. It was a newly recognized fact, but one so suddenly obvious that the tardiness of his realization became of portentous significance. Through all the hurt and shame and rage the great truth that his father had hammered home became crystal clear. He had been merely a waster, and a sharp bitterness was in him as he strode along, hands deep in pockets. The first flash of his resentment had given birth to the childish desire to "show 'em," and as he crowded his brain against the host of strange facts he found this impulse becoming stronger, growing into a healthy determination to adjust his standard of values so that he could, even with this beginning, justify his existence. Oh, the will to do was strong in his heart, but about it was a clammy, oppressive something. He wondered at it--then traced it back directly to the place in his throat that cried out for quenching. As he approached a familiar haunt that urge became more insistent and the palms of his hands commenced to sweat. He crossed the street and made on down the other side. He had wasted his ability to do, had let this desire sap his will. He needed every jot of strength now. He would begin at the bottom and call back that frittered vitality. He shut his teeth together and doggedly stuck his head forward just a trifle. The boy had no plan; there had not been time to become so specific. His whole philosophy had been stood on its head with bewildering suddenness. He knew, though, that the first thing to do was to cut his environment, to get away, off anywhere, to a place where he could build anew. The idea of getting away associated itself with one thing in his mind: means of transportation. So, when his eyes without conscious motive stared at the poster advertising a railroad system that crosses the continent, Danny Lenox stopped and let the crowd surge past him. A man behind the counter approached the tall, broad-shouldered chap who fumbled in his pockets and dumped out their contents. He looked with a whimsical smile at the stuff produced: handkerchiefs, pocket-knife, gold pencil, tobacco pouch, watch, cigarette case, a couple of hat checks, opened letters, and all through it money--money in bills and in coins. The operation completed, Danny commenced picking out the money. He tossed the crumpled bills together in a pile and stacked the coins. That done, he swept up the rest of his property, crammed it into his coat pockets, and commenced smoothing the bills. The other man, meanwhile, stood and smiled. "Cleaning up a bit?" he asked. Danny raised his eyes. "That's the idea," he said soberly. "To clean up--a bit." The seriousness of his own voice actually startled him. "How far will that take me over your line?" he asked, indicating the money. The man stared hard; then smiled. "You mean you want that much worth of ticket?" "Yes, ticket and berth--upper berth. Less this." He took out a ten-dollar bill. "I'll eat on the way," he explained gravely. The other counted the bills, turning them over with the eraser end of his pencil, then counted the silver and made a note of the total. "Which way--by St. Louis or Chicago?" he asked. "We can send you through either place." Danny lifted a dollar from the stack on the counter and flipped it in the air. Catching it, he looked at the side which came up and said: "St. Louis." Again the clerk calculated, referring to time-tables and a map. "Denver," he muttered, as though to himself. Then to Danny: "Out of Denver I can give you the Union Pacific, Denver and Rio Grande, or Santa Fé." "The middle course." "All right--D. and R.G." Then more referring to maps and time-tables, more figuring, more glances at the pile of money. "Let's see--that will land you at--at--" as he ran his finger down the tabulation--"at Colt, Colorado." Danny moved along the counter to the glass-covered map, a new interest in his face. "Where's that--Colt, Colorado?" he asked, leaning his elbows on the counter. "See?" The other indicated with his pencil. "You go south from Denver to Colorado Springs; then on through Pueblo, through the Royal Gorge here, and right in here--" he put the lead point down on the red line of the railroad and Danny's head came close to his--"is where you get off." The boy gazed lingeringly at the white dot in the red line and then looked up to meet the other's smile. "Mountains and more mountains," he said with no hint of lightness. "That's a long way from this place." He gazed out on to flowing Broadway with a look somewhat akin to pleading, and heard the man mutter: "Yes, beyond easy walking from downtown, at least." Danny straightened and sighed. That much was settled. He was going to Colt, Colorado. He looked back at the map again, possessed with an uneasy foreboding. Colt, Colorado! "Well, when can I leave?" he asked, as he commenced putting his property back into the proper pockets. "You can scarcely catch the next train," said the clerk, glancing at the clock, "because it leaves the Grand Central in nineteen min--" "Yes, I can!" broke in Danny. "Get me a ticket and I'll get there!" Then, as though to himself, but still in the normal speaking tone: "I'm through putting things off." Eighteen and three-quarters minutes later a tall, young man trotted through the Grand Central train shed to where his Pullman waited. The porter looked at the length of the ticket Danny handed the conductor. "Ain't y'll carryin' nothin', boss?" he asked. "Yes, George," Danny muttered as he passed into the vestibule, "but nothing you can help me with." With the grinding of the car wheels under him Danny's mind commenced going round and round his knotty problem. His plan had called for nothing more than a start. And now--Colt, Colorado! Behind him he was leaving everything of which he was certain, sordid though it might be. He was going into the unknown, ignorant of his own capabilities, realizing only that he was weak. He thought of those burned bridges, of the uncertainty that lay ahead, of the tumbling of the old temple about his ears-- And doubt came up from the ache in his throat, from the call of his nerves. He had not had a drink since early last evening. He needed--No! That was the last thing he needed. He sat erect in his seat with the determination and strove to fight down the demands which his wasting had made so steely strong. He felt for his cigarette case. It was empty, but the tobacco pouch held a supply, and as he walked toward the smoking compartment he dusted some of the weed into a rice paper. Danny pushed aside the curtain to enter, and a fat man bumped him with a violent jolt. "Oh, excuse me!" he begged, backing off. "Sorry. I'll be back in a jiffy with more substantial apologies." Three others in the compartment made room for Danny, who lighted his cigarette and drew a great gasp of smoke into his lungs. In a moment the fat man was back, his eyes dancing. In his hand was a silver whisky flask. "Now if you don't say this is the finest booze ever turned out of a gin mill, I'll go plumb!" he declared. "Drink, friend, drink!" He handed the flask to one of the others. "Here's to you!" the man saluted, raising the flask high and then putting its neck to his mouth. Danny's tongue went again to his lips; his breath quickened and the light in his eyes became a greedy glitter. He could hear the gurgle of the liquid; his own throat responded in movement as he watched the swallowing. He squeezed his cigarette until the thin paper burst and the tobacco sifted out. "Great!" declared the man with a sigh as he lowered the flask. "Great!" He smacked his lips and winked. "Ah! No whisky's bad, but this's better'n most of it!" Then, extending the flask toward Danny, he said: "Try it, brother; it's good for a soul." But Danny, rising to his feet with a suddenness that was almost a spring, strode past him to the door. His face suddenly had become tight and white and harried. He paused at the entry, holding the curtain aside, and turned to see the other, flask still extended, staring at him in bewilderment. "I'm not drinking, you know," said Danny weakly, "not drinking." Then he went out, and the fat man who had produced the liquor said soberly: "Not drinking, and havin' a time staying off it. But say--ain't that some booze?" Long disuse of the power to plan concretely, to think seriously of serious facts, had left it weak. Danny strove to route himself through to that new life he knew was so necessary, but he could not call back the ability of tense thinking with a word or a wish. And while he tried for that end the boy commenced to realize that perhaps he had not so far to seek for his fresh start. Perhaps it was not waiting for him in Colt, Colorado. Perhaps it was right here in his throat, in his nerves. Perhaps the creature in him was not a thing to be cleared away before he could begin to fight--perhaps it was the proper object at which to direct his whole attack. Enforced idleness was an added handicap. Physical activity would have made the beginning much easier, for before he realized it Danny was in the thick of battle. A system that had been stimulated by poison in increasing proportion to its years almost from boyhood began to make unequivocal demands for the stuff that had held it to high pitch. Tantalizingly at first, with the thirsting throat and jumping muscles; then with thundering assertions that warped the vision and numbed the intellect and toyed with the will. He gave up trying to think ahead. His entire mental force went into the grapple with that desire. Where he had thought to find possible distress in the land out yonder, it had come to meet him--and of a sort more fearful, more tremendous, than any which he had been able to conceive. Through the rise of that fevered fighting the words of his father rang constantly in Danny's mind. "He was right--right, right!" the boy declared over and over. "It was brutal; but he was right! I've wasted, I've gone the limit. And he doesn't think I can come back!" While faith would have been as a helping hand stretched down to pull him upward, the denial of it served as a stinging goad, driving him on. A chord deep within him had been touched by the raining blows from his father, and the vibrations of that chord became quicker and sharper as the battle crescendoed. The unbelief had stirred a retaliating determination. It was this that sent a growl of defiance into Danny's throat at sight of a whisky sign; it was the cause of his cursing when, walking up and down a station platform at a stop, he saw men in the buffet car lift glasses to their lips and smile at one other. It was this that drew him away from an unfinished meal in the diner when a man across the table ordered liquor and Danny's eyes ached for the sight of it, his nostrils begged for the smell. So on every hand came the suggestions that made demands upon his resistance, that made the weakness gnaw the harder at his will. But he fought against it, on and on across a country, out into the mountains, toward the end of his ride. The unfolding of the marvels of a continent's vitals had a peculiar effect on Danny. Before that trip he had held the vaguest notions of the West, but with the realization of the grandeur of it all he was torn between a glorified inspiration and a suffocating sense of his own smallness. He had known only cities, and cities are, by comparison, such puny things. They froth and ferment and clatter and clang and boast, and yet they are merely flecks, despoiled spots, on an expanse so vast that it seems utterly unconscious of their presence. The boy realized this as the big cities were left behind, as the stretches between stations became longer, the towns more flimsy, newer. A species of terror filled him as he gazed moodily from his Pullman window out across that panorama to the north. Why, he could see as far as to the Canadian boundary, it seemed! On and on, rising gently, ever flowing, never ending, went the prairie. Here and there a fence; now a string of telephone poles marching out sturdily, bravely, to reduce distance by countless hours. There a house, alone, unshaded, with a woman standing in the door watching his speeding train. Yonder a man shacking along on a rough little horse, head down, listless--a crawling jot under that endless sky. Even his train, thing of steel and steam, was such a paltry particle, screaming to a heaven that heard not, driving at a distance that cared not. Then the mountains! Danny awoke in Denver, to step from his car and look at noble Evans raising its craggy, hoary head into the salmon pink of morning, defiant, ignoring men who fussed and puttered down there in its eternal shadow; at Long's Peak, piercing the sky as though striving to be away from humans; at Pike, shimmering proudly through its sixty miles of crystal distance, taking a heavy, giant delight in watching beings worry their way through its hundred-mile dooryard. Then along the foothills the train tore with the might of which men are so proud; yet it only crawled past those mountains. Stock country now, more and more cattle in sight. Blasé, white-faced Herefords lifted their heads momentarily toward the cars. They heeded little more than did the mountains. Then, to the right and into the ranges, twisting, turning, climbing, sliding through the narrow defiles at the grace of the towering heights which--so alive did they seem--could have whiffed out that thing, those lives, by a mere stirring on their complacent bases. And Danny commenced to draw parallels. Just as his life had been artificial, so had his environment. Manhattan--and this! Its complaining cars, its popping pavements, its echoing buildings--it had all seemed so big, so great, so mighty! And yet it was merely a little mud village, the work of a prattling child, as compared with this country. The subway, backed by its millions in bonds, planned by constructive genius, executed by master minds, a thing to write into the history of all time, was a mole-passage compared to this gorge! The Woolworth, labor of years, girders mined on Superior, stones quarried elsewhere, concrete, tiling, cables, woods, all manner of fixtures contributed by continents; donkey engines puffing, petulant whistles screaming, men of a dozen tongues crawling and worming and dying for it; a nation standing agape at its ivory and gold attainments! And what was it? Put it down here and it would be lost in the rolling of the prairie as it swelled upward to meet honest heights! No wonder Danny Lenox felt inconsequential. And yet he sensed a friendly something in that grandeur, an element which reached down for him like a helping hand and offered to draw him out of his cramped, mean little life and put him up with stalwart men. "If this rotten carcass of mine, with its dry throat and fluttering hands, will only stick by me I'll show 'em yet!" he declared, and held up one of those hands to watch its uncertainty. And in the midst of one of those bitter, griping struggles to keep his vagrant mind from running into vinous paths, the brakes clamped down and the porter, superlatively polite, announced: "This is Colt, sah." A quick interest fired Danny. He hurried to the platform, stood on the lowest step, and watched the little clump of buildings swell to natural size. He reached into his pocket, grasped the few coins remaining there, and gave them to the colored boy. The train stopped with a jolt, and Danny stepped off. The conductor, who had dropped off from the first coach as it passed the station, ran out of the depot, waved his hand, and the grind of wheels commenced again. As the last car passed, Danny Lenox stared at it, and for many minutes his gaze followed its departure. After it had disappeared around the distant curve he retained a picture of the white-clad servant, leaning forward and pouring some liquid from a bottle. The roar of the cars died to a murmur, a muttering, and was swallowed in the cañon. The sun beat down on the squat, green depot and cinder platform, sending the quivering heat rays back to distort the outlines of objects. Everywhere was a white, blinding light. From behind came a sound of waters, and Danny turned about to gaze far down into a ragged gorge where a river tumbled and protested through the rocky way. Beyond the stream was stretching mesa, quiet and flat and smooth looking in the crystal distance, dotted with pine, shimmering under the heat. For five minutes he stared almost stupidly at that grand sweep of still country, failing to comprehend the fact of arrival. Then he walked to the end of the little station and gazed up at the town. A dozen buildings with false fronts, some painted, some without pretense of such nicety, faced one another across a thoroughfare four times as wide as Broadway. Sleeping saddle ponies stood, each with a hip slumped and nose low to the yellow ground. A scattering of houses with their clumps of outbuildings and fenced areas straggled off behind the stores. Scraggly, struggling pine stood here and there among the rocks, but shade was scant. Behind the station were acres of stock pens, with high and unpainted fences. Desolation! Desolation supreme! Danny felt a sickening, a revulsion. But lo! his eyes, lifting blindly for hope, for comfort, found the thing which raised him above the depression of the rude little town. A string of cliffs, ranging in color from the bright pink of the nearest to the soft violet of those which might be ten or a hundred miles away, stretched in mighty columns, their varied pigments telling of the magnificent distances to which they reached. All were plastered up against a sky so blue that it seemed thick, and as though the color must soon begin to drip. Glory! The majesty of the earth's ragged crust, the exquisite harmony of that glorified gaudiness! Danny pulled a great chestful of the rare air into his lungs. He threw up his arms in a little gesture that indicated an acceptance of things as they were, and in his mind flickered the question: "The beginning--or the end?" CHAPTER III "I've Done My Pickin'" Then he felt his gaze drawn away from those vague, alluring distances. It was one of those pulls which psychologists have failed to explain with any great clarity; but every human being recognizes them. Danny followed the impulse. He had not seen the figure squatting there on his spurs at the shady end of the little depot, for he had been looking off to the north. But as he yielded to the urge he knew its source--in those other eyes. The figure was that of a little man, and his doubled-up position seemed to make his frame even more diminutive. The huge white angora chaps, the scarlet kerchief about his neck and against the blue of his shirt, the immense spread of his hat, his drooping gray mustache, all emphasized his littleness. Yet Danny saw none of those things. He looked straight into the blue eyes squinting up at him--eyes deep and comprehensive, set in a copper-colored face, surrounded by an intricate design of wrinkles in the clear skin; eyes that had looked at incalculably distant horizons for decades, and had learned to look at men with that same long-range gaze. A light was in those eyes--a warm, kindly, human light--that attracted and held and created an atmosphere of stability; it seemed as though that light were tangible, something to which a man could tie--so prompt is the flash from man to man that makes for friendship and devotion; and to Danny there came a sudden comfort. That was why he did not notice the other things about the little man. That was why he wanted to talk. "Good morning," he said. "'Mornin'." Then a pause, while their eyes still held one another. After a moment Danny looked away. He had a stabbing idea that the little man was reading him with that penetrating gaze. The look was kindly, sincere, yet--and perhaps because of it--the boy cringed. The man stirred and spat. "To be sure, things kind of quiet down when th' train quits this place," he remarked with a nasal twang. "Yes, indeed. I--I don't suppose much happens here--except trains." Danny smiled feebly. He took his hat off and wiped the brow on which beads of sweat glistened against the pallor. The little man still looked up, and as he watched Danny's weak, uncertain movements the light in his eyes changed. The smile left them, but the kindliness did not go; a concern came, and a tenderness. Still, when he spoke his nasal voice was as it had been before. "Take it you just got in?" "Yes--just now." Then another silence, while Danny hung his head as he felt those searching eyes boring through him. "Long trip this hot weather, ain't it?" "Yes, very long." Danny looked quickly at his interrogator then and asked: "How did you know?" "Didn't. Just guessed." He chuckled. "Ever think how many men's been thought wise just guessin'?" But Danny caught the evasion. He looked down at his clothes, wrinkled, but still crying aloud of his East. "I suppose," he muttered, "I do look different--_am_ different." And the association of ideas took him across the stretches to Manhattan, to the life that was, to-- He caught his breath sharply. The call of his throat was maddening! The little man had risen and, with thumbs hooked in his chap belt, stumped on his high boot heels close to Danny. A curious expression softened the lines of his face, making it seem queerly out of harmony with his garb. "You lookin' for somebody?" he ventured, and the nasal quality of his voice seemed to be mellowed, seemed to invite, to compel confidence. "Looking for somebody?" Danny, only half consciously, repeated the query. Then, throwing his head back and following that range of flat tops off to the north, he muttered: "Yes, looking for somebody--looking for myself!" The other shifted his chew, reached for his hat brim, and pulled it lower. "No baggage?" he asked. "To be sure, an' ain't you got no grip?" Danny looked at him quickly again, and, meeting the honest query in that face, seeing the spark there which meant sympathy and understanding--qualities which human beings can recognize anywhere and to which they respond unhesitatingly--he smiled wanly. "Grip?" he asked, and paused. "Grip? Not the sign of one! That's what I'm here for--in Colt, Colorado--to get a fresh grip!" After a moment he extended an indicating finger and asked: "Is that all of Colt--Colt, Colorado?" The old man did not follow the pointing farther than the uncertain finger. And when he answered his eyes had changed again, changed to searching, ferreting points that ran over every puff and seam and hollow in young Danny's face. Then the older man set his chin firmly, as though a grim conclusion had been reached. "That's th' total o' Colt," he answered. "It ain't exactly astoundin', is it?" Danny shook his head slowly. "Not exactly," he agreed. "Let's go up and look it over." An amused curiosity drove out some of the misery that had been in his pallid countenance. "Sure, come along an' inspect our metropolis!" invited the little man, and they struck off through the sagebrush. Danny's long, free stride made the other hustle, and the contrast between them was great; the one tall and broad and athletic of poise in spite of the shoulders, which were not back to their full degree of squareness; the other, short and bowlegged and muscle-bound by years in the saddle, taking two steps to his pacemaker's one. They attracted attention as they neared the store buildings. A man in riding garb came to the door of a primitive clothing establishment, looked, stepped back, and emerged once more. A moment later two others joined him, and they stared frankly at Danny and his companion. A man on horseback swung out into the broad street, and as he rode away from them turned in his saddle to look at the pair. A woman ran down the post-office steps and halted her hurried progress for a lingering glance at Danny. The boy noticed it all. "I'm attracting attention," he said to the little man, and smiled as though embarrassed. "Aw, these squashies ain't got no manners," the other apologized. "They set out in there dog-gone hills an' look down badger holes so much that they git loco when somethin' new comes along." Then he stopped, for the tall stranger was not beside him. He looked around. His companion was standing still, lips parted, fingers working slowly. He was gazing at the front of the Monarch saloon. From within came the sound of an upraised voice. Then another in laughter. The swinging doors opened, and a man lounged out. After him, ever so faint, but insidiously strong and compelling, came an odor! For a moment, a decade, a generation--time does not matter when a man chokes back temptation to save himself--Danny stood in the yellow street, under the white sunlight, making his feet remain where they were. They would have hurried him on, compelling him to follow those fumes to their source, to push aside the flapping doors and take his throat to the place where that burning spot could be cooled. In Colt, Colorado! It had been before him all the way, and now he could not be quit of its physical presence! But though his will wavered, it held his feet where they were, because it was stiffened by the dawning knowledge that his battle had only commenced; that the struggle during the long journey across country had been only preliminary maneuvering, only the mobilizing of his forces. When he moved to face the little Westerner his eyes were filmed. The other drew a hand across his mouth calculatingly and jerked his hat-brim still lower. "As I was sayin'," he went on a bit awkwardly as they resumed their walk, "these folks ain't got much manners, but they're good hearted." Danny did not hear. He was casting around for more resources, more reserves to reinforce his front in the battle that was raging. He looked about quickly, a bit wildly, searching for some object, some idea to engage his thoughts, to divert his mind from that insistent calling. His eyes spelled out the heralding of food stuffs. The sun stood high. It was time. It was not an excuse; it was a Godsend! "Let's eat," he said abruptly. "I'm starving." "That's a sound idee," agreed the other, and they turned toward the restaurant, a flat-roofed building of rough lumber. A baby was playing in the dirt before the door and a chained coyote puppy watched them from the shelter of a corner. On the threshold Danny stopped, confusion possessing him. He stammered a moment, tried to smile, and then muttered: "Guess I'd better wait a little. It isn't necessary to eat right away, anyhow." He stepped back from the doorway with its smells of cooking food and the other followed him quickly, blue eyes under brows that now drew down in determination. "Look here, boy," the man said, stepping close, "you was crazy for chuck a minute ago, an' now you make a bad excuse not to eat. To be sure, it ain't none of my business, but I'm old enough to be your daddy; I ain't afraid to ask you what's wrong. Why don't you want to eat?" The sincerity of it, the unalloyed interest that precluded any hint of prying or sordid curiosity, went home to Danny and he said simply: "I'm broke." "You didn't need to tell me. I knowed it. I ain't, though. You eat with me." "I can't! I can't do that!" "Expect to starve, I s'pose?" "No--not exactly. That is," he hastened to say, "not if I'm worth my keep. I came out here to--to get busy and take care of myself. I'll strike a job of some sort--anything, I don't care what it is or where it takes me. When I'm ready to work, I'll eat. I ought to get work right away, oughtn't I?" In his voice was a sudden pleading born of the fear awakened by his realization of absolute helplessness, as though he looked for assurance to strengthen his feeble hopes, but hardly dared expect it. The little man looked him over gravely from the heels of his flat shoes to the crown of his rakishly soft hat. He pushed his Stetson far back on his gray hair. "To be sure, and I guess you won't have to look far for work," he said. "I've been combin' this town dry for a hand all day. If you'd like to take a chance workin' for me I'd be mighty glad to take you on--right off. I'm only waitin' to find a man--can't go home till I do. Consider yourself hired!" He turned on his heel and started off. But Danny did not follow. He felt distrust; he thought the kindness of the other was going too far; he suspected charity. "Come on!" the man snapped, turning to look at the loitering Danny. "Have I got to rope an' drag you to grub?" "But--you see it's--this way," the boy stammered. "Do you really want me? Can I do your work? How do you know I'm worth even a meal?" A slow grin spread over the Westerner's countenance. "Friend," he drawled in his high, nasal tone, "it's a pretty poor polecat of a man who ain't worth a meal; an' it's a pretty poor specimen who goes hirin' without makin' up his mind sufficient. They ain't many jobs in this country, but just now they's fewer men. We've got used to bein' careful pickers. I've done my pickin'. Come on." Only half willingly the boy followed. They walked through the restaurant, the old man saluting the lone individual who presided over the place, which was kitchen and dining room in one. "Hello, Jed," the proprietor cried, waving a fork. "How's things?" "Finer 'n frog's hair!" the other replied, shoving open the broken screen door at the rear. "This is where we abolute," he remarked, indicating the dirty wash-basin, the soap which needed a boiling out itself, and the discouraged, service-stiffened towel. Danny looked dubiously at the array. He had never seen as bad, to say nothing of having used such; but the man with him sloshed water into the basin from a tin pail and said: "You're next, son, you're next." And Danny plunged his bared wrists into the water. It was good, it was cool; and he forgot the dirty receptacle in the satisfaction that came with drenching his aching head and dashing the cooling water over his throat. The other stood and watched, his eyes busy, his face reflecting the rapid workings of his mind. They settled in hard-bottomed, uncertain-legged chairs, and Jed--whoever he might be, Danny thought, as he remembered the name--gave their order to the man, who was, among other things, waiter and cook. "Make it two sirloins," he said; "one well done an' one--" He lifted his eyebrows at Danny. "Rare," the boy said. "An' some light bread an' a pie," concluded the employer-host. Danny saw that the cook wore a scarf around his neck and down his back, knotted in three places. When he moved on the floor it was evident that he wore riding boots. On his wrists were the leather cuffs of the cowboy. Danny smiled. A far cry, indeed, this restaurant in Colt, Colorado, from his old haunts along the dark thoroughfare that is misnamed a lighted way! The other was talking: "We'll leave soon's we're through an' make it on up th' road to-night. It'll take us four days to get to th' ranch, probably, an' we might's well commence. Can you ride?" Danny checked a short affirmative answer on his lips. "I've ridden considerably," he said. "You people wouldn't call it riding, though. You'll have to teach me." "Well, that's a good beginnin'. To be sure it is. Them as has opinions is mighty hard to teach--'cause opinions is like as not to be dead wrong." He smeared butter on a piece of bread and poked it into his mouth. Then: "I brought out my last hand--I come with him, I mean. Th' sheriff brought him. His saddle an' bed's over to th' stable. You can use 'em." "Sheriff?" asked Danny. "Get into trouble?" "Oh, a little. He's a good boy, mostly--except when he gets drinkin'." Danny shoved his thumb down against the tines of the steel fork he held until they bent to uselessness. CHAPTER IV The Trouble Hunter Knee to knee, at a shacking trot, they rode out into the glory of big places, two horses before them bearing the light burden of a Westerner's bed. "My name's Jed Avery," the little man broke in when they were clear of the town. "I'm located over on Red Mountain--a hundred an' thirty miles from here. I run horses--th' VB stuff. They call me Jed--or Old VB; mostly Jed now, 'cause th' fellers who used to call me Old VB has got past talkin' so you can hear 'em, or else has moved out. Names don't matter, anyhow. It ain't a big outfit, but I have a good time runnin' it. Top hands get thirty-five a month." Danny felt that there was occasion for answer of some sort. In those few words Avery had given him as much information as he could need, and had given it freely, not as though he expected to open a way for the satisfaction of any curiosity. He wanted to forget the past, to leave it entirely behind him; did not want so much as a remnant to cling to him in this new life. Still, he did not deem it quite courteous to let the volunteered information come to him and respond with merely an acknowledgment. He cleared his throat. "I'm from Riverside Drive, New York City," he said grimly. "Names don't matter. I don't know how to do a thing except waste time--and strength. If you'll give me a chance, I'll get to be a top hand." An interval of silence followed. "I never heard of th' street you mention. I know New York's on th' other slope an' considerable different from this here country. Gettin' to be a top hand's mostly in makin' up your mind--just like gettin' anywhere else." Then more wordless travel. Behind them Colt dwindled to a bright blotch. The road ran close against the hills, which rose abruptly and in scarred beauty. The way was ever upward, and as they progressed more of the country beyond the river spread out to their view, mesas and mountains stretching away to infinite distance, it seemed. Even back of the sounds of their travel the magnificent silence impressed itself. It was weird to Danny Lenox, unlike anything his traffic-hardened ears had ever experienced, and it made him uneasy--it, and the ache in his throat. That ache seemed to be the last real thing left about him, anyhow. Events had come with such unreasonable rapidity in those last few days that his harassed mind could not properly arrange the impressions. Here he was, hired out to do he knew not what, starting a journey that would take him a hundred and thirty miles from a place called Colt, in the state of Colorado, through a country as unknown to him as the regions of mythology, beside a man whose like he had never seen before, traveling in a fashion that on his native Manhattan had worn itself to disuse two generations ago! Out of the whimsical reverie he came with a jolt. Following the twisting road, coming toward them at good speed, was the last thing he would have associated with this place--an automobile. He reined his horse out of the path, saw the full-figured driver throw up his arm in salutation to Jed, and heard Jed shout an answering greeting. The driver looked keenly at Danny as he passed, and touched his broad hat. "Who was that?" the boy asked, as he again fell in beside his companion. "That's Bob Thorpe," the other explained. "He's th' biggest owner in this part of Colorado--mebby in th' whole state. Cattle. S Bar S mostly, but he owns a lot of brands." "Can he get around through these mountains in a car?" "He seems to. An' his daughter! My! To be sure, she'd drive that dog-gone bus right up th' side of that cliff! You'll see for yourself. She'll be home 'fore long--college--East somewheres." The boy looked at him questioningly but said nothing. "College--East--home 'fore long--" Might it not form a link between this new and that old--a peculiar sort of link--as peculiar as this sudden, unwarranted interest in this girl? Through the long afternoon Danny eagerly awaited the coming of more events, more distractions. When they came--such as informative bursts from Jed or the passing of the automobile--he forgot for the brief passage of time the throb in his throat, that wailing of the creature in him. But when the two rode on at the shambling trot, with the silence and the immense grandeur all about them, the demands of his appetite were made anew, intensified perhaps by a feeling of his own inconsequence, by the knowledge that should he fail once in standing off those assaults it would mean only another beginning, and harder by far than this one he was experiencing. Every hour of sober reflection, of sordid struggle, added to his estimate of the strength of that self he must subdue. He was going away into the waste places, and a sneaking fear of being removed from the stuff that had kept him keyed commenced to grow, adding to the fleshly wants. If he should be whipped and a surrender be forced? What then? He realized that that doubting was cowardice. He had come out here to have freedom, a new beginning, and now he found himself begging for a way back should the opposition be too great. It was sheer weakness! Cautiously Jed Avery had watched Danny's face, and when he saw anxiety show there as doubt rose, he broke into words: "Yes, sir, Charley was sure a good boy, but th' booze got him." He looked down at his horse's withers so he could not see the start this assertion gave Danny. "He didn't want to be bad, but it's so easy to let go. To be sure, it is. Anyhow, Charley never had a chance, never a look-in. He was good hearted an' meant well--but he didn't have th' backbone." And Danny found that a rage commenced to rise within him, a rage which drove back those queries that had made him weak. Day waned. The sun slid down behind the string of cliffs which stretched on before them at their left. Distances took on their purple veils, a canopy of virgin silver spread above the earth, and the stillness became more intense. "Right on here a bit now we'll stop," Jed said. "This's th' Anchor Ranch. They're hayin', an' full up. We'll get somethin' to eat, though, an' feed for th' ponies. Then we'll sleep on th' ground. Ever do it?" "Never." "Well, you've got somethin' comin', then. With a sky for a roof a man gets close to whatever he calls his God--an' to himself. Some fellers out here never seem to see th' point. Funny. I been sleepin' out, off an' on, for longer than I like to think about--an' they's a feelin' about it that don't come from nothin' else in th' world." "You think it's a good thing, then, for a man to get close to himself?" "To be sure I do." "What if he's trying to get away from himself?" Jed tugged at his mustache while the horses took a dozen strides. Then he said: "That ain't right. When a man thinks he wants to get away from himself, that's th' coyote in him talkin'. Then he wants to get closer'n ever; get down close an' fight again' that streak what's come into him an' got around his heart. Wants to get down an' fight like sin!" He whispered the last words. Then, before Danny could form an answer, he said, a trifle gruffly: "Open th' gate. I'll ride on an' turn th' horses back." They entered the inclosure and rode on toward a clump of buildings a half-mile back from the road. Off to their right ran a strip of flat, cleared land. It was dotted with new haystacks, and beyond them they could see waving grass that remained to be cut. At the corral the two dismounted, Danny stiffly and with necessary deliberation. As they commenced unsaddling, a trio of hatless men, bearing evidences of a strenuous day's labor, came from the door of one of the log houses to talk with Jed. That is, they came ostensibly to talk with Jed; in reality, they came to look at the Easterner who fumbled awkwardly with his cinch. Danny looked at them, one after the other, then resumed his work. Soon a new voice came to his ears, speaking to Avery. He noticed that where the little man's greeting to the others had been full-hearted and buoyant, it was now curt, almost unkind. Curious, Danny looked up again--looked up to meet a leer from a pair of eyes that appeared to be only half opened; green eyes, surrounded by inflamed lids, under protruding brows that boasted but little hair, above high, sunburned cheek bones; eyes that reflected all the small meanness that lived in the thin lips and short chin. As he looked, the eyes leered more ominously. Then the man spoke: "Long ways from home, ain't you?" Although he looked directly at Danny, although he put the question to him and to him alone, the boy pretended to misunderstand--chose to do so because in the counter question he could express a little of the quick contempt, the instinctive loathing that sprang up for this man who needed not to speak to show his crude, unreasoning, militant dislike for the stranger, and whose words only gave vent to the spirit of the bully. "Are you speaking to me?" Danny asked, and the cool simplicity of his expression carried its weight to those who stood waiting to hear his answer. The other grinned, his mouth twisting at an angle. "Who else round here'd be far from home?" he asked. Danny turned to Jed. "How far is it?" he asked. "A hundred an' ten," Jed answered, a swift pleasure lighting his serious face. Danny turned back to his questioner. "I'm a hundred and ten miles from home," he said with the same simplicity, and lifted the saddle from his horse's back. It was the sort of clash that mankind the world over recognizes. No angry word was spoken, no hostile movement made. But the spirit behind it could not be misunderstood. The man turned away with a forced laugh which showed his confusion. He had been worsted, he knew. The smiles of those who watched and listened told him that. It stung him to be so easily rebuffed, and his laugh boded ugly things. "Don't have anything to do with him," cautioned Jed as they threw their saddles under a shed. "His name's Rhues, an' he's a nasty, snaky cuss. He'll make trouble every chance he gets. Don't give him a chance!" They went in to eat with the ranch hands. A dozen men sat at one long table and bolted immense quantities of food. The boiled beef, the thick, lumpy gravy, the discolored potatoes, the coarse biscuit were as strange to Danny as was his environment. His initiation back at Colt had not brought him close to such crudity as this. He tasted gingerly, and then condemned himself for being surprised to find the food good. "You're a fool!" he told himself. "This is the real thing; you've been dabbling in unrealities so long that you've lost sense of the virtue of fundamentals. No frills here, but there's substance!" He looked up and down at the low-bent faces, and a new joy came to him. He was out among men! Crude, genuine, real men! It was an experience, new and refreshing. But in the midst of his contemplation it was as though fevered fingers clutched his throat. He dropped his fork, lifted the heavy cup, and drank the coffee it contained in scorching gulps. Once more his big problem had pulled him back, and he wrestled with it--alone among men! After the gorging the men pushed back their chairs and yawned. A desultory conversation waxed to lively banter. A match flared, and the talk came through fumes of tobacco smoke. "Anybody got th' makin's?" asked Jed. "Here," muttered Danny beside him, and thrust pouch and papers into his hand. Danny followed Jed in the cigarette rolling, and they lighted from the same match with an interchange of smiles that added another strand to the bond between them. "That's good tobacco," Jed pronounced, blowing out a whiff of smoke. "Ought to be; it cost two dollars a pound." Jed laughed queerly. "Yes, it ought to," he agreed, "but we've got a tobacco out here they call Satin. Ten cents a can. _It_ tastes mighty good to us." Danny sensed a gentle rebuke, but he somehow knew that it was given in all kindliness, that it was given for his own good. "While I fight up one way," he thought, "I must fight down another." And then aloud: "We'll stock up with your tobacco. What's liked by one ought to be good enough for--" He let the sentence trail off. Jed answered with: "Both." And the spirit behind that word added more strength to their uniting tie. The day had been a hard one. Darkness came quickly, and the workers straggled off toward the bunk house. Tossing away the butt of his cigarette, Jed proposed that they turn in. "I'm tired, and you've got a right to be," he declared. They walked out into the cool of evening. A light flared in the bunk house, and the sound of voices raised high came to them. "Like to look in?" Avery asked, and Danny thought he would. Men were in all stages of undress. Some were already in their beds; others, in scant attire, stood in mid-floor and talked loudly. From one to another passed Rhues. In his hand he held a bottle, and to the lips of each man in turn he placed the neck. He faced Jed and Danny as they entered. At sight of the stranger a quick hush fell. Rhues stood there, bottle in hand, leering again. "Jed, you don't drink," he said in his drawling, insinuating voice, "but mebby yer friend here 'uld like a nightcap." He advanced to Danny, bottle extended, an evil smile on his face. Jed raised a hand as though to interfere; then dropped it. His jaw settled in grim resolution, his nostrils dilated, and his eyes fixed themselves fast on Danny's face. Oh, the wailing eagerness of those abused nerves! The cracking of that tortured throat! All the weariness of the day, of the week; all the sagging of spirit under the assault of the demon in him were concentrated now. A hot wave swept his body. The fumes set the blood rushing to his eyes, to his ears; made him reel. His hand wavered up, half daring to reach for the bottle, and the strain of his drawn face dissolved in a weak smile. Why hold off? Why battle longer? Why delay? Why? Why? Why? Of a sudden his ears rang with memory of his father's brittle voice in cold denunciation, and the quick passing of that illusion left another talking there, in nasal twang, carrying a great sympathy. "No, thanks," he said just above a whisper. "I'm not drinking." He turned quickly and stepped out the door. Through the confusion of sounds and ideas he heard the rasping laughter of Rhues, and the tone of it, the nasty, jeering note, did much to clear his brain and bring him back to the fighting. Jed walked beside him and they crossed to where their rolls of bedding had been dropped, speaking no word. As they stooped to pick up the stuff the older man's hand fell on the boy's shoulder. His fingers squeezed, and then the palm smote Danny between the shoulder blades, soundly, confidently. Oh, that assurance! This man understood. And he had faith in this wreck of a youth that he had seen for the first time ten hours before! Shaken, tormented though he was, weakened by the sharp struggle of a moment ago, Danny felt keenly and with something like pride that it had been worth the candle. He knew, too, with a feeling of comfort, that an explanation to Jed would never be necessary. Silently they spread the blankets and, with a simple "Good night," crawled in between. Danny had never before slept with his clothes on--when sober. He had never snuggled between coarse blankets in the open. But somehow it did not seem strange; it was all natural, as though it should be so. His mind went round and round, fighting away the tingling odor that still clung in his nostrils, trying to blot out the wondering looks on the countenances of those others as they watched his struggle to refuse the stuff his tormentor held out to him. He did not care about forgetting how Rhues's laughter sounded. Somehow the feeling of loathing for the man for a time distracted his thought from the pleading of his throat, augmented the singing of that chord his father had set in motion, bolstered his will to do, to conquer this thing! But the effect was not enduring. On and on through the narrow channels that the fevered condition made went his thinking; forever and forever it must be so--the fighting, fighting, fighting; the searching for petty distractions that would make him forget for the moment! Suddenly he saw that there were stars--millions upon countless millions of them dusted across the dome of the pale heavens as carelessly as a baker might dust silvered sugar over the icing of a festal cake. Big stars and tiny stars and mere little diffusive glows of light that might come from a thousand worlds, clustering together out there in infinite void. Blue stars and white stars, orange stars, and stars that glowed red. Stars that sent beams through incalculable space and stars that swung low, that seemed almost attainable. Stars that blinked sleepily and stars that stared without wavering, purposeful, attentive. Stars alone and lonely; stars in bunches. Stars in rows and patterns, as though put there with design. Danny breathed deeply, as though the pure air were stuffy and he needed more of it, for the vagary of his wandering mind had carried him back to the place where light points were arranged by plan. He saw again the electric-light kitten and the spool of thread, the mineral-water clock, the cigarette sign with flowing border, the-- Whisky again! He moved his throbbing head from side to side. "Is it a blank wall?" he asked quite calmly. "Shall I always come up against it? Is there no way out?" CHAPTER V Jed Philosophizes Morning: a flickering in the east that gives again to the black hold of night. Another attempt, a longer glimmer. It recedes, returns stronger; struggles, bursts from the pall of darkness, and blots out the stars before it. And after that first silver white come soft colors--shoots of violet, a wave of pink, then the golden glory of a new day. Jed Avery yawned loud and lingeringly, pushing the blankets away from his chin with blind, fumbling motions. He thrust both arms from the covers and reached above his head, up and up and--up! until he ended with a satisfied groan. He sat erect, opening and shutting his mouth, rubbed his eyes--and stopped a motion half completed. Danny Lenox slept with lips parted. His brown hair--the hair that wanted to curl so badly--was well down over the brow, and the skin beneath those locks was damp. One hand rested on the tarpaulin covering of the bed, the fingers in continual motion. "Poor kid!" Jed muttered under his breath. "Poor son of a gun! He's in a jack-pot, all right, an' it'll take all any man ever had to pull--" "'Mornin', sonny!" he cried as Danny opened his eyes and raised his head with a start. For a moment the boy stared at him, evidencing no recognition. Then he smiled and sat up. "How are you, Mr. Avery?" "Well," the other began grimly, looking straight before him, "Mr. Avery's in a bad way. He died about thirty year ago." Danny looked at him with a grin. "But Old Jed--Old VB," he went on, "he's alive an' happy. Fancy wrappin's is for boxes of candy an' playin' cards," he explained. "They ain't necessary to men." "I see--all right, Jed!" Danny stared about him at the freshness of the young day. "Wouldn't it be slick," Jed wanted to know, "if we was all fixed like th' feller who makes th' days? If yesterday's was a bad job he can start right in on this one an' make it a winner! Now, if this day turns out bad he can forget it an' begin to-morrow at sun-up to try th' job all over again!" "Yes, it would be fine to have more chances," agreed Danny. Jed sat silent a moment. "Mebby so, an' mebby no," he finally recanted. "It would be slick an' easy, all right; but mebby we'd get shiftless. Mebby we'd keep puttin' off tryin' hard until next time. As 'tis, we have to make every chance our only one, an' work ourselves to th' limit. Never let a chance get away! Throw it an' tie it an' hang on!" "In other words, think it's now or never?" Jed reached for a boot and declared solemnly: "It's th' only thing that keeps us onery human bein's on our feet an' movin' along!" Breakfast was a brief affair, brief but enthusiastic. The gastronomic feats performed at that table were things at which to marvel, and Danny divided his thoughts between wonder at them and recalling the events of the night before. Only once did he catch Rhues's eyes, and then the leer which came from them whipped a flush high in his cheeks. Jed and Danny rode out into the morning side by side, smoking some of the boy's tobacco. As the sun mounted and the breeze did not rise, the heat became too intense for a coat, and Danny stripped his off and tied it behind the saddle. Jed looked at the pink silk shirt a long time. "To be sure an' that's a fine piece of goods," he finally declared. Danny glanced down at the gorgeous garment with a mingled feeling of amusement and guilt. But he merely said: "I thought so, too, when I bought it." And even that little tendency toward foppishness which has been handed down to men from those ancestors who paraded in their finest skins and paints before the home of stalwart cave women seemed to draw the two closer to each other. As though he could sense the young chap's bewilderment and wonder at the life about him, Jed related much that pertained to his own work. "Yes, I raise some horses," he concluded, "but I sell a lot of wild ones, too. It's fun chasin' 'em, and it gets to be a habit with a feller. I like it an' can make a livin' at it, so why should I go into cattle? Those horses are out there in th' hills, runnin' wild, like some folks, an' doin' nobody no good. I catch 'em an' halter-break 'em an' they go to th' river an' get to be of use to somebody." "Isn't it a job to catch them?" Danny asked. "Well, I guess so!" Jed's eyes sparkled. "Some of 'em are wiser than a bad man. Why, up in our country's a stallion that ain't never had a rope on him. Th' Captain we've got to call him. He's th' wildest an' wisest critter, horse or human, you ever see. Eight years old, an' all his life he's been chased an' never touched. He's big--not so big in weight; big like this here man Napoleon, I mean. He rules th' range. He has th' best mares on th' mountain in his bunch, an' he handles 'em like a king. We've tossed down our whole hand time an' again, but he always beats us out. We're no nearer catchin' him to-day than we was when he run a yearlin'." The little man's voice rose shrilly and his eyes flashed until Danny, gazing on him, caught some of his fever and felt it run to the ends of his body. "Oh, but that's a horse!" Jed went on. "Why, just to see him standin' up on the sky line, head up, tail arched-like, ready to run, not scared, just darin' us to come get him--well, it's worth a hard ride. There's somethin' about th' Captain that keeps us from hatin' him. By all natural rights somebody ought to shoot a stallion that'll run wild so long an' drive off bunches of gentle mares an' make 'em crazy wild. But no. Nobody on Red Mountain or nobody who ever chased th' Captain has wanted to harm him; yet I've heard men swear until it would make your hair curl when they was runnin' him! He's that kind. He gets to somethin' that's in real men that makes 'em light headed. I guess it's his strength. He's bigger'n tricks, that horse. He's learned all about traps an' such, an' th' way men generally catch wild horses don't bother him at all. Lordy, boy, but th' Captain's somethin' to set up nights an' talk about!" His voice dropped on that declaration, almost in reverence. "Well, he's so wise and strong that he'll just keep right on running free; is that the idea?" asked Danny. Jed gnawed off a fresh chew and repocketed the plug, shifted in his saddle, and shook his head. "Nope, I guess not," he said gravely. "I don't reckon so, because it ain't natural; it ain't th' way things is done in this world. Did you ever stop to think that of all th' strong things us men has knowed about somethin' has always turned up to be a little bit stronger? We've been all th' time pattin' ourselves on th' back an' sayin', 'There, we've gone an' done it; that'll last forever!' an' then watchin' a wind or a rain carry off what we've thought was so strong. Either that, I say, or else we've been fallin' down on our knees an' prayin' for help to stop somethin' new an' powerful that's showed up. An' when prayin' didn't do no good up pops somebody with an idea that th' Lord wants us folks to carry th' heavy end of th' load in such matters, an' gets busy workin'. An' his job ends up by makin' somethin' so strong that it satisfied all them prayers--folks bein' that unparticular that they don't mind where th' answer comes from so long as it comes an' they gets th' benefits! "That's th' way it is all th' time. We wake up in th' mornin' an' see somethin' so discouragin' that we want to crawl back to bed an' quit tryin'; then we stop to think that nothin' has ever been so great or so strong that it kept right on havin' its own way all th' time; an' we get our sand up an' pitch in, an' pretty soon we're on top! "All we need is th' sand to tackle big jobs; just bein' sure that they's some way of doin' or preventin' an' makin' a reg'lar hunt for that one thing. So 'tis with th' Captain. He's fooled us a long time now, but some day a man'll come along who's wiser than th' Captain, an' he'll get caught. "Nothin' strange about it. Just th' workin' out of things. 'Course, it'll all depend on th' man. Mebby some of us on th' mountain has th' brains; mebby some others has th' sand, but th' combination ain't been struck yet. We ain't _men_ enough. Th' feller who catches that horse has got to be all man, just like th' feller who beats out anythin' else that's hard; got to be man all th' way through. If he's only part man an' tackles th' job he's likely to get tromped on; if he's all man, he'll do th' ridin'." Jed stopped talking and gazed dreamily at the far horizon; dreamily, but with an eye which moved a trifle now and then to take into its range the young chap who rode beside him. Danny's head was down, facing the dust which rose from the feet of the horses ahead. The biting particles irritated the membrane of his throat, but for the moment he did not heed. "Am I a man--all the way through?" he kept asking himself. "All the way through?" And then his nerves stung him viciously, shrieking for the stimulant which had fed them so long and so well. His aching muscles pleaded for it; his heart, miserable and lonely, missed the close, reckless friendships of those days so shortly removed, in spite of his realization of what those relations had meant; he yearned for the warming, heedless thrills; his eyes ached and called out for just the one draft that would make them alert, less hurtful. From every joint in his body came the begging! But that chord down in his heart still vibrated; his father's arraignment was in his ears, its truth ringing clearly. The incentive to forge ahead, to stop the wasting, grew bigger, and his will stood stanch in spite of the fact that his spinning brain played such tricks as making the click of pebbles sound like the clink of ice in glasses! Then, too, there was Jed, the big-hearted, beside him. And Jed was saying, after a long silence, as though he still thought of his theme: "Yes, sir, us men can do any old thing if we only think so! Nothin' has ever been too much for us; nothin' ever will--if we only keep on thinkin' as men ought to think an' respectin' ourselves." Thus they traveled, side by side, the one fighting, the other uttering his homely truths and watching, always watching, noting effects, detecting temptations when the strain across the worried brow and about the tight mouth approached the breaking point. With keen intuition he went down into the young fellow and found the vibrating chord, the one that had been set humming by scorn and distrust. But instead of abusing it, instead of goading it on, Jed nursed it, fed it, strengthening the chord itself with his philosophy and his optimism. They went on down Ant Creek, past the ranches which spread across the narrow valley. Again they slept under the open skies, and Danny once more marveled at the stars. That second morning was agony, but Jed knew no relenting. "You're sore an' stiff," he said, "but keepin' at a thing when it hurts is what counts, is what gets a feller well--an' that applies to more things than saddle sores, too." He said the last as though aside, but the point carried. At the mouth of the creek, where it flows into Clear River, they swung to the west and went downstream. Danny's condition became only semi-conscious. His head hung, his eyes were but half opened. Living resolved itself into three things. First and second: the thundering demands and the stubborn resistance of his will. When Jed spoke and roused him the remaining element come to the fore: his physical suffering. That agony became more and more acute as the miles passed, but in spite of its sharpness it required the influence of his companion's voice to awaken him to its reality. Always, in a little back chamber of his mind, was a bit of glowing warmth--his newly born love for the man who rode beside him. It was night when they reached the ranch. "We're arrived, sonny! This is home!" cried Jed, slapping Danny on the shoulder. "Our home." The boy mastered his senses with an effort. When he dismounted he slumped to one knee and Jed had to help him stand erect. Danny remembered nothing of the bed going, nor could he tell how long the little, gray-haired man stood over him, muttering now and then, rubbing his palms together; nor of how, when he turned toward the candle on the table, burning steadily and brightly there in the night like a young Crusader fighting back the shadows into the veriest corner of the room, his eyes were misted. It was a strange awakening, that which followed. Danny felt as though he had slept through a whole phase of his existence. At first he was not conscious of his surroundings, did not try to remember where he was or what had gone before. He lay on his back, mantled in a strange peace, wonderfully content. Torture seemed to have left him, bodily torments had fled. His heart pumped slowly; a vague, pleasing weakness was in his bones. It was rest--rest after achievement, the achievement of stability, the arrival at a goal. Then, breaking into full consciousness, his nostrils detected odors. He sniffed slightly, scarcely knowing that he did so. Cooking! It was unlike other smells from places of cookery that he had known; it was attractive, compelling. All that had happened since his departure from Colt came back to him with his first movement. His body was a center of misery, as though it were shot full of needles, as though it had been stretched on a rack, then blistered. Dressing was accomplished to the accompaniment of many grunts and quick intakings of breath. When he tried to walk he found that the process was necessarily slow--slower than it had ever been before. Setting each foot before the other gingerly, as if in experiment, he walked across the tiny room toward the larger apartment of the cabin. "Mornin'!" cried Jed, closing the oven door with a gentleness that required the service of both hands. "I allowed you'd be up about now. Just step outside an' wash an' it'll be about ready. Can you eat? Old VB sure can build a breakfast, an' he's never done better than this." "By the smell, I judge so," said Danny. The warm breath of baking biscuits came to him from the oven. A sputtering gurgle on the stove told that something fried. The aroma of coffee was in the air, too, and Jed lifted eggs from a battered pail to drop them into a steaming kettle. The table, its plain top scrubbed to whiteness, was set for two, and the sunlight that streamed through the window seemed to be all caught and concentrated in a great glass jar of honey that served as a centerpiece. Danny's eyes and nostrils and ears took it all in as he moved toward the outer doorway. When he gained it he paused, a hand on the low lintel, and looked out upon his world. Away to the south stretched the gulch, rolling of bottom, covered with the gray-green sage. Over east rose the stern wall, scarred and split, with cedars clinging in the interstices, their forms dark green against the saffron of the rocks. Up above, towering into the unstained sky of morning, a rounded, fluted peak, like the crowning achievement of some vast cathedral. The sun was just in sight above the cliff, but Danny knew that day was aging, and felt, with his peace, a sudden sharp affection for the old man who, with an indulgence that was close to motherly, had let him sleep. It made him feel young and incompetent, yet it was good, comforting--like the peace of that great stillness about him. Except for the soft sounds from the stove, there was no break. Above, on the ridges, a breeze might be blowing; but not an intimation of it down here. Just quiet--silvery and holy. The sun shoved itself clear of the screening trees. A jack rabbit, startled by nothing at all, sprang from its crouching under a brush shelter and made off across the gulch with the jerky lightness of a stone skipping on water. As he bobbed the grass and bushes dewdrops flew from them, catching sunbeams as they hurtled out to their death, for one instant of wondrous glory flashing like gems. Danny Lenox, late of New York, drew a deep, quivering breath and leaned his head against the crude doorway. He was sore and weak and felt almost hysterical, but perhaps this was only because he was so happy! CHAPTER VI Ambition is Born And then began Danny's apprenticeship. Jed, the wise, did not delay activity. He commenced with the boy as soon as breakfast had been eaten and the dishes washed. That first day they shod a horse, Danny doing nothing really, but taking orders from Jed as though the weight of a vast undertaking rested on his shoulders. The next day they mended fences from early morning until evening. Gradually the realization came to Danny that he was doing something, that he was filling a legitimate place--small, surely: nevertheless he was being of use, he was creating. A pleasing sensation! One of the few truly wholesome delights he had ever experienced. Danny thought about it with almost childish happiness; then, letting his mind return again to the established rut, he was surprised to know that mere thinking about his simple, homely duties had stilled for the time it endured the restless creature within him. The boy's bodily hurts righted themselves. Long hours of sleep did more than anything else to speed recovery. Those first two nights he was between covers before darkness came to the gulch, and Jed let him sleep until the sun was well up. On the third evening they sat outside, Danny watching Jed put a new half-sole on a cast-off riding boot. "They're your size," the old man said, "an' you'll have to wear boots, to be sure. Them things you got on ain't what I'd call exactly fitted to ridin' a horse." Danny looked down at his modish Oxfords and smiled. Then he glanced up at the man beside him, who hammered and cut and grunted while he worked as though his very immortality depended on getting those boots ready for his new hand to wear. Oh, the boy from the city could not then appreciate the big feeling of man for mankind which prompted such humble labor. It was a labor of love, the mere mending of that stiff old boot! In it Jed Avery found the encompassing happiness which comes to those who understand, happiness of the same sort he had felt back there at Colt when he saw that there was a human being who needed help and that it was in his power to give him that help. And the peace this happiness engendered created an atmosphere which soothed and made warm the heart of the boy, though he did not know why. "Guess we'd better move inside an' get a light," Jed muttered finally. "I'll shut the corral gate. You light th' candle, will you? It's on th' shelf over th' table--stickin' in a bottle." Danny watched him go away into the dusk and heard the creak of the big gate swinging shut before he stepped into the house and groped his way along for the shelf. He found it after a moment and fumbled along for the candle Jed had said was there. His fingers closed on something hard and cold and cylindrical. He slid his fingers upward; then staggered back with a half-cry. "What's wrong?" asked Jed, coming into the house. Danny did not answer him, so the old man stepped forward toward the shelf. In a moment a match flared; the cold wick of the candle took the flame, warmed, sent it higher, and a glow filled the room. The boy looked out from eyes that were dark and wide and filled with the old horror. The hand held near his lips shook, and he turned on Jed a look that pleaded, then gazed back at the light. The candle was stuck in the neck of a whisky bottle. Danny opened his lips to speak, but the words would not come. That terror was back again, shattering his sense of peace, melting the words in his throat with its heat. Jed moved near to him. "It's a bright light--for such a little candle," he said slowly, and a stout assurance was in his tone. "But I--I touched the bottle--in the dark!" Danny's voice was high and strained, and the words, when finally they did come, tripped over one another in nervous haste. His knees were weak under him. Such was the strength of the tentacles which reached up to stay his struggles and to drag him back into the depths from which he willed to rise. Such was the weakness of the nervous system on which the strain of the ordeal was placed. Jed put a hand on the boy's shoulder and gazed into the drawn face. "It's all right, sonny," he said softly, his voice modulating from twang to tenderness in the manner it had. "Most men touches it in th' dark. But don't you see what this bottle's for? Don't you see that candle? Burnin' away there, corkin' up th' bottle, givin' us light so we can see?" Then the other hand went up to the boy's other shoulder, and the little old rancher shook young Danny Lenox gently, as though to joggle him back to himself. "I know, sonny," he said softly. "I know--" Then he turned away quickly and smote his palms together with a sharp crack. "Now get to bed. I'll finish these here boots to-night and in th' mornin' we ride. If you're goin' to get to be a top hand, we've got to quit foolin' around home an' get to learn th' country. They's a lot of colts we got to brand an' a bunch of wild ones to gather. It means work--lots of it--for you an' me!" He set to work, busily thumping on the boot. In the morning, Danny was subdued, subdued and shaking. The spontaneity that had characterized his first days on the ranch had departed. He was still eager for activity, but not for the sake of the new experiences in themselves. That gnawing was again in his throat, tearing his flesh, it seemed, and to still the trembling of his hand it was necessary for him to clutch the saddle horn and keep his fingers clamped tightly about it as they rode along. They climbed out of the gulch, horses picking their way up an almost impossible trail, and on a high ridge, where country rolled and tossed about them for immeasurable distances, Jed stopped and pointed out the directions to his companion. Thirty miles to the south was Clear River with its string of ranches, and the town of Ranger, their post office. Twenty miles to the southeast was the S Bar S Ranch, the center of the country's cattle activity, and over west, on Sand Creek, a dozen miles' ride across the hills and double that distance by road, was another scattering of ranches where Dick Worth, deputy sheriff for that end of Clear River County, lived. "An' to th' north of us," continued Jed, with a sweep of his hand, "they's nothin' but hills--clean to Wyoming! We're on th' outskirts of settlements. South of th' river it's all ranches, but north--nothin'. Couple of summer camps but no ranches. It's a great get-away country, all right!" The riding was easy that day, and in spite of his stiffness Danny wished it were harder, because the turmoil kept up within him, and even the unbroken talk of Jed, giving him an intelligent, interesting idea of the country, could not crowd out his disquieting thoughts. But it was easier the next day, and Danny took a deep interest in the hunt for a band of mares with colts that should be branded. Jed's low, warning "H-s-s-t! There they are!" set his heart pounding wildly, and he listened eagerly to the directions the old man gave him; then he waited in high excitement while Jed circled and got behind the bunch. The horses came toward him, and Danny, at Jed's shout, commenced to ride for the ranch. It was a new, an odd, an interesting game. The horses came fast and faster. Now and then to his ears floated Jed's repeated cry: "Keep goin'! Keep ahead!" And he spurred on, wondering at every jump how his horse could possibly keep his feet longer in that awful footing. But he had faith in the stout little beast he rode, and his spirit was of the sort that would not question when a man as skilled in the game as was Jed urged him along. The mares with their colts pressed closely, but Danny kept going, kept urging speed. Straight on for the ranch he headed, and when they reached the level bottom of the gulch the race waxed warm. "Into th' round corral!" cried Jed. "Keep goin'! You're doin' fine!" And into the round corral Danny headed his mount, while the nose of the lead mare reached out at his pony's flank. The gate swung shut; the mares trotted around the inclosure, worried, for there their offspring had been taken from them before. The colts hung close to their mothers, snorting and rolling their wide eyes, while the saddle horses stood with legs apart, getting their wind. Danny's eyes sparkled. "That's sport!" he declared. "But, say, will these horses always follow a rider that way?" Jed loosed his cinch before he answered: "Horses is like some men. As long as they're bein' pushed from behind an' they's somebody goin' ahead of 'em, they'll follow--follow right through high water! But once let 'em get past th' rider who's supposed to be holdin' 'em up--why, then they's no handlin' 'em at all. They scatter an' go their own way, remainin' free. "As I said, they're like men. To be sure, lots of men has got to give that what's leadin' 'em such a run that they beat it to death an' get a chance to go free!" Danny rubbed his horse's drenched withers and agreed with a nod as Jed walked over to the gate and fumbled with the fastening. "Say," he said, turning round, "I like th' way you ride!" Danny looked up quickly, pleased. "I'm glad," he said, but in the simple assertion was a great self-pride. "Most fellers strange in th' country wouldn't fancy takin' that kind of a bust down off a point. No, sir. Not such a ride for us old heads, but for a greenhorn-- Well, I guess you'll get to be a top hand some day, all right!" And the influence which more than all else was to help Danny become a top hand, which was to set up in his heart the great ambition, which was to hold itself up as a blazing ideal, came early in his novitiate as a horse hunter--came in a fitting setting, on a day richly golden, when the air seemed filled with a haze of holy incense, holy with the holiness of beauty. It was one of those mountain days when the immensity of nature becomes so obvious and so potent that even the beasts leave off their hunting or their grazing to gaze into wondrous distances. The sage is green and brash in the near sunlight, soft and purple out yonder; the hills sharp and hard and detailed under the faultless sky for unthinkable miles about, then soft and vague, melting in color and line, rolling, reaching, tossing in a repetition of ranges until eyes ache in following them and men are weak about their middles from the feeling of vastnesses to which measurements by figures are profane. Jed and Danny searched for horses along two parallel ridges. Now and then they saw each other, but for the most part it had been a day of solitary riding. Late afternoon arrived, and Danny had about abandoned hope of success. He was considering the advisability of mounting the ridge above the gulch into which he had ridden and locating Jed, though loath to leave the solitudes. His pony picked them out and stopped before Danny's eyes registered the sight. The boy searched quickly, and over against a clump of cedars, halfway up the rise, he saw horses. "No, that's not they," he muttered. "Jed said there were two white mares among them. Not--" His pony started under him, gave a sharp little shudder, then moved a step backward and stood still, a barely perceptible tremor shaking his limbs. Then a sound new and strange came to Danny. He did not know its origin, but it contained a quality that sent a thrill pulsing from his heart. Shrill it was, but not sharply cut, wavering but not breaking; alarm, warning, concern, caution--the whistle of a stallion! Then silence, while the mares stood rigid and the saddle horse held his breath. Again it came, and a quick chill struck down Danny's spine. His searching eyes encountered the source. There, halfway between the mares and the crown of the ridge he stood, out on a little rim-rock that made a fitting pedestal, alert, defiant, feet firmly planted, with the poise of a proud monarch. Even across the distance his coat showed the glossiness seen only on fine, short hair; his chest, turned halfway toward the rider, was splendid in breadth and depth, indicating superb strength, endurance, high courage. Danny looked with a surge of appreciation at the arch of the neck, regal in its slim strength, at the fine, straight limbs, clean as a dancing girl's; at the long, lithe barrel with its fine symmetry. A wandering breath of breeze came up the gulch, fluttering the wealth of tail, lifting the heavy mane and forelock. The horse raised a front foot and smote the ledge on which he stood as though wrath rose that a mere man should ride into his presence, and he would demand departure or homage from Danny Lenox. He shook his noble head impatiently, to clear his eyes of the hair that blew about them. And once more came the whistle. The mares stirred. One, a bright buckskin, trotted up the rise a dozen yards, and stopped to turn and look. The others moved slowly, eyes and ears for Danny. Again the whistle; a clatter of loosened stones as the black leader bounded up the hillside; and the bunch was away in his wake. "The Captain!" Danny breathed, and then, in a cry which echoed down the gulch--"The Captain!" He was scarcely conscious of his movements, but his quirt fell, his spurs raked the sides of his pony, and the sturdy little animal, young and not yet fully developed, doing his best in making up the ridge, labored effectively, perhaps drawn on by that same raw desire which went straight to the roots of Danny's spirit and came back to set the fires glowing in his eyes. The boy rode far forward in his saddle, his gaze on the plunging band that scattered stones and dirt as they strove for the top. But he was many lengths behind when the last mare disappeared over the rim. He fanned his pony again, and the beast grunted in his struggles for increased speed in the climbing, lunging forward with mighty efforts which netted so little ground. As he toiled up the last yards Danny saw the Captain again, standing there against the sky, watching, waiting, mane and tail blowing about him. His strong, full, ever delicate body quivered with the singing spirit of confidence within him and communicated itself to the weakling pursuer. Just a glimpse of the man was all that the black horse wanted, then--he was off. As Danny's horse caught the first stride in the run down the ridge he saw the Captain stretch that fine nose out to the flank of a lagging mare, and saw the animal throw her head about in pain as the strong teeth nipped her flesh, commanding more speed. Danny Lenox was mad! He pulled off his hat and beat his pony's withers with it. He cried aloud the Captain's name. He went on and on, dropping far down on his horse's side as they brushed under the cedars, settling firmly to the seat when the animal leaped over rocks. His shirt was open at the neck, and his throat was chilled with the swift rush of air, while hot blood swirled close to the skin. His eyes glowed with the fire set there by this new fascination, the love of beautiful strength; and through his body sang the will to conquer! It was an unfair race. Danny and his light young horse had no chance. Off and away drew the stallion and his bunch, without effort after that first crazy break down the ridge. The last Danny saw of him was with head turned backward, nose lifted, as though he breathed disdainful defiance at the man who would come in his wake with the thirst for possession high within him! And so the boy pulled up, dropped off, and let his breathing pony rest. His legs were uncertain under him, and he knew that his pulses raced. For many minutes he strove to analyze his emotion but could not. Jed slid off the next ridge and came up at a trot. His face was radiant. "Well, he got you, didn't he?" He laughed aloud. "I thought he would, all along; and I knowed he had you when I see you break up over th' ridge. You've got th' fever now, like a lot of th' rest of us! Mebby you'll chase horses here for years, but you'll always have an eye out for just one thing--th' Captain. You won't be satisfied until you've got him--like all of us; not satisfied until we've done th' biggest thing there is in sight to do." Then, as though parenthetically: "An' when we've done that we've only h'isted ourselves up to where we can see that they's a hunderd times as much to do." "Gad, but he goes right into a fellow's heart!" breathed Danny, looking into the sunset. "I didn't know I was following him, Jed, until the pony here commenced to tire." He laughed apologetically, as though confessing a foolishness, but his face was glowing with a new light. A fresh incentive had come to him with this awakening admiration, inciting him to emulation. The spirit of the stallion stirred in him again that vibrant chord which had been urging him to fight on, not to give up. His ambition to overcome his weakness began to take quick, definite direction. Added to the effort of overcoming his vices would henceforth be the endeavor to achieve, to compass some worthy object. This was his aim: to be a leader to whom men would turn for inspiration; to be unconquerable among men, as the Captain was unconquerable among his kind. As the ideal took shape, springing full-born from his excitement, Danny Lenox felt lifted above himself, felt stronger than human strength, felt as though he were forever beyond human weaknesses. When they had ridden twenty minutes in silence Jed broke out: "Sonny, I don't want to act like 'n old woman, but I guess I'm gettin' childish! I've knowed you less than a month. I don't even know who you was when you come. We don't ask men about theirselves when they come in here. What a feller wants to tell, we take; what he keeps to hisself we wonder at without mentionin' it. "But you, sonny--you couldn't keep it from me. I know what it is, I know. I seen it when you got off th' train at Colt--seen that somethin' had got you down. I knowed for sure what it was when you stopped by th' saloon there. I knowed how honest you was with yourself in that little meetin' with Rhues. I know all about it--'cause I've been through th' same thing--alone, an' years ago." After a pause he went on: "An' just now, when I seen you comin' down that ridge after th' Captain, I knowed th' right stuff was in you--because when a thing like that horse touches a man off it's a sign he's th' right kind, th' kind that wants to do things for th' sake of knowin' his own strength. You've got th' stuff in you to be a man, but you're fightin' an awful fight. You need help; you ought to have friends--you ought to have a daddy!" He gulped, and for a dozen strides there were no more words. "I feel like adoptin' you, sonny, 'cause I know. I feel like makin' you a part of this here outfit, which ain't never branded a colt that didn't belong to it, which ain't never done nothin' but go straight ahead an' be honest with itself, good times an' bad. "I used to be proud when they called me Old VB, 'cause they all knowed th' brand was on th' level, an' when they, as you might say, put it on me, I felt like I was wearin' some sort of medal. I feel just like makin' you part of th' VB--Young VB--'cause I can help you here an'--an' 'fore God A'mighty you need help, man that you are!" An hour and a half later, when the last dish had been wiped, when the dishpan had been hung away, Danny spoke the next words. He walked close to the old man, his face quiet under the new consciousness of how far he must go to approach this new ideal. He took the hard old hand in his own, covered its back with the other, and muttered in a voice that was far from clear: "Good night, Old VB." And the other, to cover the tenderness in his tone, snapped back: "Get to bed, Young VB; they's that ahead of you to-morrow which'll take every bit of your courage and strength!" CHAPTER VII With Hoof and Tooth So it came to pass that Danny Lenox of New York ceased to exist, and a new man took his place--Young VB, of Clear River County, Colorado. "Who's your new hand?" a passing rider asked Jed one morning, watching with interest as the stranger practiced with a rope in the corral. "Well, sir, he's th' ridin'est tenderfoot you ever see!" Jed boasted. "I picked him up out at Colt an' put him to work--after Charley went away." "Where'd he come from? What's his name?" the other insisted. "From all appearances, he ain't of these parts," replied Jed, squinting at a distant peak. "An' around here we've got to callin' him Young VB." The rider, going south, told a man he met that Jed had bestowed his brand on a human of another generation. Later, he told it in Ranger. The man he met on the road told it on Sand Creek; those who heard it in Ranger bore it off into the hills, for even such a small bit of news is a meaty morsel for those who sit in the same small company about bunk-house stoves months on end. The boy became known by name about the country, and those who met him told others what the stranger was like. Men were attracted by his simplicity, his desire to learn, by his frank impulse to be himself yet of them. "Oh, yes, he's th' feller," they would recall, and then recite with the variations that travel gives to tales the incident that transpired in the Anchor bunk house. Young VB fitted smoothly into the work of the ranch. He learned to ride, to rope, to shoot, to cook, and to meet the exigencies of the range; he learned the country, cultivated the instinct of directions. And, above all, he learned to love more than ever the little old man who fathered and tutored him. And Young VB became truly useful. It was not all smooth progress. At times--and they were not infrequent--the thirst came on him with vicious force, as though it would tear his will out by the roots. The fever which that first run after the Captain aroused, and which made him stronger than doubtings, could not endure without faltering. The ideal was ever there, but at times so elusive! Then the temptings came, and he had to fight silently, doggedly. Some of these attacks left him shaking in spite of his mending nerves--left him white in spite of the brown that sun and wind put on him. During the daytime it was bad enough, but when he woke in the night, sleep broken sharply, and raised unsteady hands to his begging throat, there was not the assuring word from Jed, or the comfort of his companionship. The old man took a lasting pride in Danny's adaptability. His comments were few indeed, but when the boy came in after a day of hard, rough, effective toil, having done all that a son of the hills could be expected to do, the little man whistled and sang as though the greatest good fortune in the world had come to him. One morning Jed went to the corral to find VB snubbing up an unbroken sorrel horse they had brought in the day before. He watched from a distance, while the young man, after many trials, got a saddle on the animal's back. "Think you can?" he asked, his eyes twinkling, as he crawled up on the aspen poles to watch. "I don't know, Jed, but it's time I found out!" was the answer, and in it was a click of steely determination. It was not a nice ride, not even for the short time it lasted. Young VB "went and got it" early in the mêlée. He clung desperately to the saddle horn with one hand, but with the other he plied his quirt and between every plunge his spurs raked the sides of the bucking beast. He did not know the art of such riding, but the courage was there and when he was thrown it was only at the moment when the sorrel put into the battle his best. VB got to his feet and wiped the dust from his eyes. "Hurt?" asked Jed. "Nothing but my pride," muttered the boy. He grasped the saddle again, got one foot in the stirrup, and, after being dragged around the inclosure, got to the seat. Again he was thrown, and when he arose and made for the horse a third time Jed slipped down from the fence to intervene. "Not again to-day," he said, with a pride that he could not suppress. "Take it easy; try him again to-morrow." "But I don't want to give up!" protested the boy. "I _can_ ride that horse." "You ain't givin' up; I made you," the other smiled. "You ought to have been born in the hills. You'd have made a fine bronc twister. Ain't it a shame th' way men are wasted just by bein' born out of place?" VB seemed not to hear. He rubbed the nose of the frantic horse a moment, then said: "If I could get this near the Captain-- Jed, if I could ever get a leg over that stallion he'd be mine or I'd die trying!" "Still thinkin' of him?" "All the time! I never forget him. That fellow has got into my blood. He's the biggest thing in this country--the strongest--and I want to show him that there's something a little stronger, something that can break the power he's held so long--and that _I_ am that something!" "That's considerable ambition," Jed said, casually, though he wanted to hug the boy. "I know it. Most people out here would think me a fool if they heard me talk this way. Me, a greenhorn, a tenderfoot, talking crazily about doing what not one of you has ever been able to do!" "Not exactly, VB. It's th' wantin' to do things bad enough that makes men do 'em, remember. This feller busted you twice, but you've got th' stuff under your belt that makes horses behave. That's th' only stuff that'll ever make th' Captain anything but th' wild thing he is now. Sand! _Grit!_ Th' _wantin'_ to do it!" A cautious whistle from Jed that afternoon called VB into a thicket of low trees, from where he looked down on a scene that drove home even more forcibly the knowledge of the strength of spirit that was incased in the glossy coat of the great stallion. "Look!" the old man said in a low voice, pointing into the gulch. "It's a Percheron--one of Thorpe's stallions. He's come into th' Captain's band an' they're goin' to fight!" VB looked down on the huge gray horse, heavier by three hundred pounds than the black, stepping proudly along over the rough gulch bottom, tossing his head, twisting it about on his neck, his ears flat, his tail switching savagely. Up the far rise huddled the mares. The Captain was driving the last of them into the bunch as VB came in sight. That done, he turned to watch the coming of the gray. Through the stillness the low, malicious, muffled crying of the Percheron came to them clearly as he pranced slowly along, parading his graces for the mares up there, displaying his strength to their master, who must come down and battle for his sovereignty. The Captain stood and watched as though mildly curious, standing close to his mares. His tail moved slowly, easily, from side to side. His ears, which had been stiffly set forward at first, slowly dropped back. The gray drew nearer, to within fifty yards, forty, thirty. He paused, pawed the ground, and sent a great puff of dust out behind him. Then he swung to the left and struck up the incline, headed directly for the Captain, striding forward to humble him under the very noses of his mares--the band that would be the prize of that coming conflict! He stopped again and pawed spitefully. He rose on his hind legs slowly, head shaking, forefeet waving in the air, as though flexing his muscles before putting them to the strain of combat. He settled to the ground barely in time, for with a scream of rage the black horse hurtled. He seemed to be under full speed at the first leap, and the speed was terrific! Foam had gathered on his lips, and the rush down the pitch flung it spattering against his glossy chest. His shrilling did not cease from the time he left his tracks until, with front hoofs raised, a catapult of living, quivering hate, he hurled himself at the gray. It ended then in a wail of frenzy--not of fear, but of royal rage at the thought of any creature offering challenge! The gray dropped back to all fours, whirled sharply, and took the impact at a glancing blow, a hip cringing low as the ragged hoofs of the black crashed upon it. The Captain stuck his feet stiffly into the ground, plowing great ruts in the earth in his efforts to stop and turn and meet the rush of the other, as he recovered from the first shock, gathered headway, and bore down on him. He overcame his momentum, turning as he came to a stop, lifted his voice again, and rose high to meet hoof for hoof the ponderous attack that the bigger animal turned on him. The men above heard the crash of their meeting. The impact of flesh against flesh was terrific. For the catch of an instant the horses seemed to poise, the Captain holding against the fury that had come upon him, holding even against the odds of lightness and up-hill fighting. Then they swayed to one side, and VB uttered a low cry of joy as the Captain's teeth buried themselves in the back of the Percheron's neck. Close together then they fought, throwing dirt and stones, ripping up the brush as their rumbling feet found fresh hold and then tore away the earth under the might that was brought to bear in the assault and resistance. A dozen times they rushed upon each other, a dozen times they parted and raised for fresh attack. And each time the gray body and the black met in smacking crash it was the former that gave way, notwithstanding his superior weight. "Look at him!" whispered Jed. "Look at that cuss! He hates that gray so that he's got th' fear of death in him! Look at them ears! Hear him holler! He's too quick. Too quick, an' he's got th' spirit that makes up th' difference in weight--an' more, too!" He stopped with a gasp as the Captain, catching the other off balance, smote him on the ribs with his hoofs until the blows sounded like the rumble of a drum. The challenger threw up his head in agony and cringed beneath the torment, running sidewise with bungling feet. "He like to broke his back!" cried Jed. "And look at him bite!" whispered VB. The Captain tore at the shoulders and neck of the gray horse with his gleaming, malevolent teeth. Again and again they found fleshhold, and his neck bowed with the strength he put into the wrenching, while his feet kept up their terrific hammering. No pride of challenge in the gray now; no display of graces for the onlooking mares; no attacking; just impotent resistance, as the Captain drove him on and on down the gulch, humbled, terrified, routed. The sounds of conflict became fainter as the Percheron strove to make his escape and the Captain relentlessly followed him, the desire to kill crying from his every line. The battling beasts rounded a point of rocks, and the two men sprang to their horses to follow the moving fight. But they were no more than mounted when the Captain came back, swinging along in his wonderful trot, ears still flat, head still shaking, anger possessing him--anger and pride. He was unmarked by the conflict, save with sweat and dust and foam; he was still possessed of his superb strength. He went up the pitch to his band with all the vigor of stride he had displayed in flying from it to answer the presumption of the gray. And the mares, watching him, seemed to draw long breaths, dropped their heads to the bunch grass, and, one by one, moved along in their grazing. Jed looked at VB. What he saw in the boy's face made him nod his head slowly in affirmation. "You're that sort, too," he whispered exultingly. "You're that sort! _His_ kind!" CHAPTER VIII A Head of Yellow Hair The next day Jed declared for a trip to Ranger after grub. The trip was necessary, and it would be an education for VB, he said with a chuckle, to see the town. But when they were ready to start a rider approached the ranch. "If it ain't Kelly!" Jed cried. Then, in explanation: "He's a horse buyer, an' must be comin' to see me." And the man's desire to look over the VB stuff was so strong that Jed declared it would be business for him to stay at home. In a way, Danny was glad of the opportunity to go alone. It fed the glowing pride in his ability to do things, to be of use, and after a short interchange of drolleries with the man Kelly, whom he instinctively liked, the boy mounted to the high wagon seat and drove off down the gulch. It was a long drive, and hours alone are conducive to thought. Danny's mind went back over the days that had passed, wandering along those paths he had followed since that July morning in the luxuriously dim house on Riverside Drive. And the reason for his departing from the old way came back to him now, because he was alone, with nothing to divert his attention. The old turbulence arose; it wore and wore with the miles, eating down to his will, teasing, coaxing, threatening, pleading, fuming. "Will it always be so?" he asked the distances. "When it comes to challenge me, to take away all that I hold dear, shall I always be afraid? Shan't I be able to stand and fight and triumph, merely raging because it dares tempt me instead of fearing this thing itself?" And he spoke as he thought in terms of his ideal, as materialized in the Captain. "But will it always be so with him?" he asked again. "Won't some horse come to challenge him some day and batter him down and make defeat all the more bitter because of the supremacy he has enjoyed? Would it then be--worth the candle?" And as he bowed his head he thought once more of the beacon in the bottle, corking it up, driving back the shadows, making a livable place in the darkness. Nothing is ever intrinsically curious. Curiousness comes solely from relationships. Time and place are the great factors in creating oddities. Five miles farther on VB saw a curious thing. This was at the forks of the road. To his right it went off behind the long, rocky point toward Sand Creek; to the left it wandered through the sage brush over toward the S Bar S Ranch, and ahead it ran straight on to Ranger. Along the prong that twisted to the left went an automobile. Nothing curious about that to VB, for many times he had seen Bob Thorpe driving his car through the country. But at the wheel was a lone figure crowned by a mass of yellow hair. That was the curious thing he saw! All VB could distinguish at that distance with his hot eyes was yellow hair. The machine picked its way carefully along the primitive road, checking down here, shooting ahead there, going on toward the horizon, bearing the yellow hair away from him, until it was only a crawling thing with a long, floating tail of dust. But it seemed to him he could still make out that bright fleck even after the automobile had become indistinguishable. "She's alone," muttered VB. "She's driving that car alone--and out here!" Then he wondered with a laugh why he should think it so strange. Many times he had ridden down Fifth Avenue in the afternoon traffic congestion beside a woman who piloted her own car. Surely the few hazards of this thoroughfare were not to be compared with that! But it was the incongruity which his association of ideas brought up that made him tingle a little. That hair! It did not belong out here. He had not been near enough to see the girl's face--he was sure it was a girl, not a grown woman--but the color of her crowning adornment suggested many and definite things. And those things were not of these waste places; were not rough and primal. They were finer, higher. Once before he had experienced this nameless, pleasurable sensation of being familiar with the unknown. That had been when Jed had sketched with a dozen unrelated words a picture of the daughter of the house of Thorpe. The motor car with its fair-haired pilot had been gone an hour when Danny, watching a coyote skulk among distant rocks, said aloud: "East--college--I'll bet--I--I wonder--" Dusk had come when Young VB entered Ranger and put up at the ranch, which made as much pretense of buildings as did the town itself. Morning found him weak and drawn, as it always did after a night of the conflict, yet he was up with the sun, eager to be through with his task and back with Jed. Purchasing supplies is something of a rite in Ranger, and under other conditions, on another day perhaps, it might have amused VB; but with the unrest within him he found little about the procedure that did not irritate. In the store there one may buy everything in hardware from safety pins to trace chains; groceries range from canned soup to wormy nuts; in drugs anything, bounded on one end by horse liniment and on the other extreme by eye-drops guaranteed to prevent cataracts, is for sale; and overalls and sewing silk are alike popular commodities. All is in fine order, and the manager is a walking catalogue of household necessities. VB was relieved when the buying had been accomplished. He crowded a can of ten-cent tobacco into the pocket of his new overalls and started for the team. A dozen strides away from the store building he paused to look about. It was his first inspection of Ranger in daylight, and now as he surveyed its extent his sense of humor rose above the storm within him, and he grinned. The store, with its conventional false front, stood beside the post office, which was built as a lean-to. Next to it was a building of red corrugated iron, and sounds of blacksmithing issued from it. Behind VB was a tiny house, with a path running from it to the store, the home of the manager. Next it a log cabin. Down at the left, near the river, was another house, deserted, the ranch where he had stayed, and beyond it a trio of small shacks on the river bank. "Ranger," he muttered, and chuckled. The road, brown and soft with fine dust, stretched on and on toward Utah, off to the west where silence was supreme. The buildings were all on the north side of the road. "A south front was the idea, I suppose," VB murmured. "Mere matter of--" His gaze had traveled across the road to a lone building erected there, far back against a sharp rise of ground. It stood apart, as though consciously aloof from the rest, a one-story structure, and across its front a huge white sign, on which in black characters was painted the word: [Illustration: SALOON] Unconsciously his tongue came out to wet the parched lips and his fingers plucked at the seams of the new overalls. Why not? the insidious self argued, why not? All changes must come gradually. Nothing can be accomplished in a moment. Just one drink to cool his throat, to steady his nerves, and brace him for the fight he would make--later. As he stood there listening to that inner voice, yet holding it off, he did not hear the fall of hoofs behind him or the jingle of spurs as a rider dismounted and approached. But he did hear the voice--drawling, nasty, jeering: "Was you considerin' havin' a bit o' refreshment, stranger?" VB wheeled quickly and looked straight into the green glitter of Rhues's red-lidded eyes. The cruel mouth was stretched in an angular grin, and the whole countenance expressed the incarnate spirit of the bully. Into Danny's mind leaped the idea that this thing before him, this evil-eyed, jeering, leering, daring being, typified all that was foul in his heart--just as the Captain typified all that was virtuous. The intuitive repulsion surged to militant hate. He wanted to smother the breath which kept alive such a spirit, wanted to stamp into the dust the body that housed it--because it mocked him and tempted him! But Young VB only turned and brushed past the man without a word. He heard Rhues's laughter behind him, and heard him call: "Ranger ain't no eastern Sunday school. Better have one an' be a man, like th' rest o' th' boys!" However, when Rhues turned back to his pony the laugh was gone and he was puzzling over something. After he had mounted, he looked after the boy again maliciously. VB was on the road in half an hour, driving the horses as fast as he dared. He wanted to be back in Jed's cabin, away from Ranger. This thing had followed him across the country to Colt; from Colt to the Anchor; and now It lurked for him in Ranger. The ranch was his haven. The settlement by the river reached its claws after him as he drove, fastening them in his throat and shaking his will until it seemed as though it had reached the limit of its endurance. It was dark when he reached home. A mile away he had seen the light and smiled weakly at thought of it, and the horses, more than willing, carried the wagon over the remaining distance with a bouncing that threatened its contents. When VB pulled up before the outer gate Jed hurried from the cabin. "VB," he called, "are you all right?" "All right, Jed," he answered, dropping from the seat. And the boy thought he heard the older man thank his God. Without words, they unharnessed and went to the cabin. Kelly was sleeping loudly in the adjoining room. The table had been moved from its usual place nearer to the window, and the bottle with its burning candle was close against the pane. Jed looked at the candle, then at VB. "I'm sorry," he said, seeing the strain about the boy's mouth. "I never thought about it until come night, Young VB. I never thought about it. I--I guess I'm an old fool, gettin' scared th' way I do. So I shoved this candle up against th' window--because I'm an old fool and thought--it might help a little." And VB answered: "It does help, Jed! Every little thing helps. And oh, God, how I need it!" He turned away. CHAPTER IX Pursuit Summer drew toward its close and the work became more exacting. Jed was sure that more of his colts ran the range without brands, and the two rode constantly, searching every gulch and break for the strays. One day they went far to the east, and at noon encountered three of Bob Thorpe's men building fence. "It's his new drift fence," Jed explained. "He's goin' to have a lot of winter pasture, to be sure he is. It'll help us, too. When we come takin' these here willow tails off this ridge they'll find somethin' new. It's so close up to the foot of the rise that they can't jump it." "Thorpe must be rich," remarked Young VB as they went on along the fence. "Rich don't say it! He's rollin' in money, an' he sure knows how to enjoy it. Every winter, when things gets squared away, he takes his wife an' goes to California. I s'pose he'll be takin' his girl, too--now that she's quit goin' to school." The boy wanted to ask questions about this daughter of Bob Thorpe's, but a diffidence, for which there was no accounting, held him back. He was curious as he had been whenever he heard of or thought of her, and as he had been when he had once seen her. But somehow he did not care to admit that curiosity even to Jed, and when he tried to analyze the reason for his reticence there was no doing so. Now came more knowledge of the waste places with weeks of riding; more knowledge of the barren area in his own heart with self-study; more pertinent, that which the Captain typified. And all the time that struggle continued, which at times seemed only the hopeless floundering of a man in quicksands--life on the river bank so close; death below, certain, mocking his efforts. "He has faith in himself because he is physically equipped," VB murmured one day as he saw the Captain standing against the sky on a distant ridge. "His belief in himself is justified. But I--what do I know about my own capabilities?" Yet a latent quality in the boy was the sort that offsets doubts, else why this emulation of the stallion, why this feeling that was almost love, constant, always growing, never hesitating? Like most men, Young VB was unprepared for the big moments of his life. Could we only foresee them, is the plaint of men! Could we only know and go out to meet them in spirit proper! And yet that very state of preparation might take from the all-encompassing grandeur of those passages a potent element. After all, this scheme of things has its compensations, and inability to foretell the future may be one of the greatest. With fear in his heart and black discouragement and lack of faith, Young VB went out to meet what proved to be his first great moment. Jed had gone to the railroad, bound for the Springs, to untangle a mess of red tape that had snarled about his filing on some land. VB was left alone, and for days the young fellow saw no one. In the natural loneliness that followed, the assault came upon him with manifold force. He could not sleep, could not eat, could not remain in one place or keep his mind on a fixed purpose. He walked about, talking to himself in the silence, trying ineffectually to do the necessary work of the ranch, trying to stifle the loud voice that begged him to forego all the struggle and let his impulses carry him where they would. But were not his impulses carrying him? Was it not his first impulse to go on with the fight? He did not think of that. At times it was hard indeed to differentiate between the real and the unreal. The voice that wheedled was such a twister of words and terms, and its ally, the thirst, raged with such virility that he was forced to do something with his body. To remain an unresisting victim to the torture would only invite disaster. Throwing a saddle on his "top" horse, Young VB set out, leaving the half-prepared dinner as it was, unable even to wait for food. He rode swiftly up the gulch to where it forked, and then to the right, letting the stanch animal under him cover the ground at a swinging trot. In three hours he was miles from the ranch, far back in the hills, and climbing to the top of a stretching ridge. He breathed through his mouth, to let the air on his burning throat, and twisted his bridle reins until the stout leather was misshapen, utterly lost in the conflict which went on within, heedless of all else. Suddenly he realized that his horse had come a long distance without rest. He dismounted in a thicket of cedars, sharply repentant that his own torment had led him to forget the beast that served him, and even the distraction of that concern brought relief. With the cinch eased the horse stood and breathed gratefully. But he was not fagged, he was still alert and eager. His ears were set stiffly forward, and he gazed upwind, sniffing softly now and then. "What you see, cayuse?" VB asked, trying to make out the cause of that attentiveness. Again the sniffing, and of a sudden the horse froze, stopped his breathing, and VB, a hand on the beast's hip, felt a quick tremor run through him. Then the man saw that which had caused the animal to tremble, and the sight set him tingling just as it always did. A hundred yards up the ridge, sharp against the sky, commanding, watchful, stood the Captain. He had not seen or scented VB, for he looked in other directions, moving his head from point to point, scanning every nook of the country below him. Something mannish there was about that beast, a comprehensive, planned vigilance. Down below him in a sag fed the mares. As VB looked at that watcher he felt the lust to possess crawling up, surging through him, blotting out that other desire, that torment, making his breath congest, making his mouth dry. He tightened his cinch and mounted. The Captain did not see VB until the rider came clear of the cover in which he had halted. For the instant only, as the rushing horseman broke through the cedars, a scudding, fluttering object hurtling across the low brush, the black stallion stood as though his feet were imbedded in the rock under him, his head full toward the rushing rider, nose up, astonishment in the very angle of his stiff ears. Then those ears went flat; the sleek body pivoted on its dainty hind feet, and a scream of angered warning came from the long throat. Even as the Captain's front hoofs clawed the ground in his first leap, the mares were running. They drew close together, frightened by the abruptness of the alarm, scuttling away from the punishment they knew would be coming from their master if they wasted seconds. VB was possessed again. His reason told him that a single horseman had no chance in the world with that bunch, that he could not hope to keep up even long enough to scatter the band, that he would only run his mount down, good horse that he was. But the lust urged him on, tugging at his vitals, and he gave vent to his excitement in sharp screams of joy, the joy of the hunt--and the joy of honest attempt at supreme accomplishment. The dust trailed behind the bunch, enveloping the rushing Captain in a dun mantle, finally to be whipped away by the breeze. They tore down stiff sagebrush in their flight; and so great was the strain that their bellies skimmed incredibly close to the ground. VB's horse caught the spirit of the chase, as do all animals when they follow their kind. He extended himself to the last fiber, and with astonishment--a glad astonishment that brought a whoop of triumph--the boy saw that the mares were not drawing away--that he was crawling up on them! But the Captain! Ah, he was running away from the man who gave chase, was putting more distance between them at every thundering leap, was drawing closer to his slower mares, lip stretched back over his gleaming teeth, jaws working as he strained to reach them and make that band go still faster. VB's quirt commenced to sing its goading tune, slashing first on one side, then on the other. He hung far forward over the fork of his saddle, leaning low to offer the least possible resistance to the wind. Now and then he called aloud to his pony, swearing with glad savagery. The Captain reached his bunch, closing in on them with a burst of speed that seemed beyond the abilities of blood and bone. The man behind thought he heard those long teeth pop as they caught the rump of a scurrying mare; surely he heard the stallion's scream of rage as, after nipping mare after mare, running to and fro behind them, he found that they had opened their hearts to the last limit and could go no faster. They _could not_ do it--and the rider behind was crawling up, jump for jump, gaining a yard, losing a foot, gaining again, steadily, relentlessly. VB did not know that Kelly, the horse buyer, and one of Dick Worth's riders had given the outlaws a long, tedious race that morning as they were coming in from the dry country to the west for water and better feed. He did not know that the band had been filling their bellies with great quantities of water, crowding them still more with grasses, until there was no room left for the working of lungs, for the stretching of taxed muscles. He saw only the one fact: that he was gaining on the Captain. He did not stop even to consider the obvious ending of such a chase. He might scatter the band, but what of it? When the last hope had been cast the Captain would strike out alone, would turn all the energy that now went to driving his mares to making good his own escape, and then there would be no more race--just a widening of a breach that could not be closed. But VB did not think of anything beyond the next stride. His mind was possessed with the idea that every leap of the laboring beast under him must bring him closer to the huddle of frantic horses, nearer to the flying hindquarters of the jet leader who tried so hard to make his authority override circumstance. The slashing of the quirt became more vicious. VB strained farther forward. His lips were parted, his eyes strained open with excitement, and the tears started by that rushing streamed over his cheeks. "E-e-eyah!" he shrieked. The buckskin mare found a hole. Her hind legs went into the air, sticking toward the sky above that thundering clump of tossing, rushing bodies with its fringes of fluttering hair. Her legs seemed to poise a moment; then they went down slowly. The Captain leaped her prostrate body, to sink his teeth into the flank of a sorrel that lagged half a length behind the others. VB passed so near the buckskin as she gained her faltering feet that he could have slashed her with his quirt. Yet he had no eyes for her, had no heed for any of the mares. He was playing for the bigger game. The sorrel quit, unable to respond to that punishment, fearful of her master. She angled off to the right, to be rid of him, and disappeared through a clump of trees. The stallion shrilled his anger and disgust, slowing his gallop a half-dozen jumps as though he wanted to follow and punish her cruelly. Then he glanced backward, threw his nose in the air and, stretching to his own tremendous speed again, stormed on. The huddle of mares became less compact, seemed to lose also its unity of purpose. The Captain had more to do. His trips from flank to flank of the band were longer. By the time he had spurred the gray at the left back into the lead the brown three-year-old on the other wing was a loiterer by a length. Then, when she was sent ahead, the gray was lagging again. And another by her side, perhaps. "E-e-eyah!" VB's throat was raw from the screaming, but he did not know it--no more than he knew that his hat was gone or that his nerves still yearned for their stinging stimulant. The cry, coming again and again, worried the Captain. Each time it crackled from VB's lips the black nose was flung high and an eye which glared orange hate even at that distance rolled back to watch this yelling pursuer. VB saw, and began to shout words at the animal, to cry his challenge, to curse. The galloping gray quit, without an attempt to rally. The Captain brought to bear a terrific punishment, dropping back to within thirty yards of the man who pressed him, but it was useless, for she was spent. The water and luscious grass in her dammed up the reservoirs of her vitality, would not let her respond. When the stallion gave her up and tore on after the others she dropped even her floundering gallop, and as VB raced past her he heard the breath sob down her throat. On and across they tore, dropping into sags of the ridge, climbing sharp little pitches, swinging now to the right and bending back to the left again in a sweeping curve. The uneven galloping of the horse under him, the gulps for breath the pony made as the footing fooled him and he jolted sharply, the shiftings and duckings and quick turnings as they stormed through groups of trees, the rattle of brush as it smote his boot toes and stirrups were all unheeded by VB. Once his shoulder met a tough cedar bough, and the blow wrenched it from its trunk. His face was whipped to rawness by smaller branches, and one knee throbbed dully where it had skimmed a bowlder as they shot past. But he saw only that floundering band ahead. The buckskin was gone, the sorrel, the gray; next, two mares quit together, and the Captain, seeing them go, did not slacken his speed, did not even scream his rage. Only four remained, and he gambled on them as against the slight chance of recovering any of those others; for that screaming rider was closing in on him all the time. Oh, water and grass! How necessary both are to life, but how dangerous at a time like this! Pop-pop! The teeth closed on those running hips. The vainness of it all! They could go no faster. They had tried first from instinct, then from willingness; now they tried from fear as their lord tortured them. But though the will was there, the ability could not come, not even when the Captain pushed through them, and in a desperate maneuver set the pace, showing them his fine heels and clean limbs, demonstrating how easy it was to go on and on and draw away from that rider who tugged at his muffler that wind might find and cool his throat, burning now from unalloyed hope. And so VB, the newest horse runner on the range, scattered the Captain's band, accomplishing all that the best of the men who rode that country had ever been able to boast. The stallion tried once more to rally his mates into escape, but their hearts were bursting, their lungs clogged. They could do no more. Then away he went alone, head high and turning from side to side, mane flaunting, tail trailing gracefully behind him, beauty in every regal line and curve, majestic superiority in each stride he took. He raced off into the country that stretched eastward, the loser for the time of one set of conquests but free--free to go on and make himself more high, more powerful, more a thing to be emulated even by man. He ran lightly, evenly, without effort, and the gap between him and the rider behind, narrowed by such tremendous exertion from that lathered pony, widened with scarce an added effort. But VB went on, driving his reeking pony mercilessly. He had ceased yelling now. His face was set; blood that had been whipped into it by his frenzy, by the rushing of the wind, by the smiting of branches, left the skin. It became white, and from that visage two eyes glowed abnormally brilliant. For the Captain was taking off the ridge where it bent and struck into the north, was plunging down over the pitch into the shadows. He was going his best, in long, keen strides that would carry him to the bottom with a momentum so tremendous that on the flat he would be running himself into a blur. And VB's face was colorless, with eyes brilliant, because he knew that along the bottom of the drop ran the new drift fence that Bob Thorpe's men were erecting. He began to plead with his pony, to talk to him childishly, to beg him to keep his feet, to coax him to last, to pray him to follow--and in control of himself, and on time! As they dropped off the ridge, down through the sliding shale and scattered brush, VB's right hand, upraised to keep his balance, held the loop of his rope, and the other, flung behind the cantle of his saddle, grasped the coils of the sturdy hemp. Oh, Captain, your speed was against you! You took off that ridge with those ground-covering leaps, limbs flying, heart set on reaching the bottom with a swirl of speed that would dishearten your follower. But you did not reckon on an obstruction, on the thing your eyes encountered when halfway down that height and going with all the power within you. Those fresh posts and the wires strung between them! A fence! Men had invaded your territory with their barriers, and at such a time! You knew, too, that there was no jumping it; they had set the posts so far up on the pitch that no take-off had been left. So the Captain tried to stop. With haunches far under him, front feet straight before, belly scrubbing the brush, he battled to overcome the awful impetus his body had received up above. Sprawling, sliding, feet shooting in any direction as the footing gave, he struggled to stop his progress. It was no simple matter; indeed, checking that flight was far more difficult than the attaining of that speed. In the midst of rolling, bounding stones, sliding dust, breaking brush, the great stallion gradually slowed his going. Slow and more slowly he went on toward the bottom; almost stopped, but still was unable to bring his muscles into play for a dash to right or left. On behind, pony floundering in the wake of the Captain, rode VB, right hand high, snapping back and forth to hold him erect, rope dangling from it crazily. He breathed through his mouth, and at every exhalation his vocal chords vibrated. Perhaps even then the Captain might have won. The odds of the game were all against him, it is true, for breaking down the pitch as he did, it required longer for him to reach the bottom in possession of his equilibrium than it did the slower-moving horse that bore VB. It would have been a tight squeeze for the horse, but the man was in a poor position to cast his loop with any degree of accuracy. But a flat sliding stone discounted all other factors. Nothing else mattered. The Captain came to a stop, eyes wild, ears back. With a slow-starting, mighty lunge, he made as though to turn and race down along the line of fence before VB could get within striking distance. The great muscles contracted, his ragged hoofs sought a hold. The hind legs straightened, that mighty force bore on his footing--and the stone slipped! The Captain was outlucked. His hind legs shot backward, staggering him. His hindquarters slipped downhill, throwing his head up to confront VB. His nostrils flared, that orange hate in his eyes met the glow from his pursuer's, who came down upon him--only half a dozen lengths away! CHAPTER X Capture It does not take a horse that is bearing a rider downhill an appreciable length of time to take one more stride. Gravity does the work. The horse jerks his fore legs from under his body and then shoots them out again for fresh hold to keep his downward progress within reason. VB's pony went down the drop with much more rapidity than safety, in short, jerky, stiff-legged plunges, hindquarters scrooged far under his body; alert, watching his footing, grunting in his care not to take too great risks. When the Captain, fooled by false footing, was whirled about to face the down-coming rider, the pony's fore feet had just drawn themselves out of the way to let his body farther down the slope. And when the sturdy legs again shot out to strike rock and keep horse and VB upright, the black stallion had started to wheel. But in the split second which intervened between the beginning and ending of that floundering jump, eyes met eyes. The eyes of a man met the eyes of a beast, and heart read heart. The eyes of a man who had frittered his life, who had flaunted his heritage of strength in body and bone until he had become a weakling, a cringing, whining center of abnormal nervous activities, fearing himself, met the eyes of a beast that knew himself to be a paragon of his kind, the final achievement of his strain, a commanding force that had never been curbed, that had defied alike his own kingdom and the race from which had sprung the being now confronting him. The eyes of him who had been a weakling met the eyes of that which had been superstrong and without a waver; they held, they penetrated, and, suddenly born from the purposeless life of Danny Lenox, flamed Young VB's soul. All the emulation, all the lust this beast before him had roused in his heart, became amalgamated with that part of him which subtly strove to drag him away from debauchery, and upon those blending elements of strength was set the lasting stamp of his individuality. His purpose flamed in his eyes and its light was so great that the horse read, and, reading, set his ears forward and screamed--not so much a scream of anger as of wondering terror. For the beast caught the significance of that splendid determination which made for conquest with a power equal to his own strength, which was making for escape. The telepathic communication from the one to the other was the same force that sends a jungle king into antics at the pleasure of his trainer--the language that transcends species! The pony's hoofs dug shale once more, and the upraised right arm whipped about the tousled head. The rope swished angrily as it slashed the air. Once it circled--and the Captain jumped, lunging off to the left. Twice it cut its disk--and the stallion's quivering flanks gathered for a second leap. It writhed; it stretched out waveringly, seekingly, feelingly as though uncertain, almost blindly, but swiftly--so swiftly! The loop flattened and spread and undulated, drawing the long stretch of hemp after it teasingly. It stopped, as though suddenly tired. It poised with uncanny deliberation. Then, as gently as a maiden's sigh, it settled--settled--drooped--and the Captain's nose, reaching out for liberty, to be free of this man whose eyes flamed a determination so stanch that it went down to his beast heart, thrust itself plumb through the middle. The hoarse rip of the hard-twist coming through its hondu, the whistle of breath from the man's tight teeth, the rattle of stone on stone; then the squeal from the stallion as for the first time in his life a bond tightened on him! He shook his head angrily, and even as he leaped a third time back toward his free hills one forefoot was raised to strike from him the snaring strand. The pawing hoof did not reach its mark, did not find the thin, lithe thing which throttled down on him, for the Captain's momentum carried him to the end of the rope. They put the strain on the hemp, both going away, those horses. VB struggled with his mount to have him ready for the shock, but before he could bring about a full stop that shock arrived. It seemed as though it would tear the horn from the saddle. The pony, sturdy little beast, was yanked to his knees and swung half about, and VB recovered himself only by grabbing the saddle fork. The black stallion again faced the man--faced him because his heels had been cracked in a semicircle through the air by the force of that burning thing about his neck. For ten long seconds the Captain stood braced against the rope, moving his head slowly from side to side for all the world as a refractory, gentled colt might do, with as much display of fight as would be shown by a mule that dissented at the idea of being led across a ditch. He just stood there stupidly, twisting his head. The thick mane rumpled up under the tightening rope, some of the drenched hair of the neck was pulled out as the hemp rolled upward, drawing closer, shutting down and down. The depression in the flesh grew deeper. One hind foot lost its hold in the shale and shot out; the Captain lifted it and moved it forward again slowly, cautiously, for fresh, steady straining. Then it came. The windpipe closed; he coughed, and like the sudden fury of a mountain thunderstorm the Captain turned loose his giant forces. The thing had jerked him back in his rush toward freedom. It held him where he did not want to be held! And it choked! Forefeet clawing, rearing to his hind legs with a quivering strength of lift that dragged the bracing pony through the shale, the great, black horse-regal screamed and coughed his rage and beat upon that vibrating strand which made him prisoner--that web--that fragile thing! Again and again he struck it, but it only danced--only danced, and tightened its clutch on his throat! He reached for it with his long teeth and clamped them on it, but the thing would not yield. He settled to all fours again, threw his head from side to side, and strove to move backward with a frenzied floundering that sent the pebbles rattling yards about him. It was a noble effort. Into the attempt to drag away from that anchorage the Captain put his very spirit. He struggled and choked and strained. And all the time that man sat there on his horse, tense, watching silently, moving his free hand slightly to and fro, as though beating time to music. His lips were parted, his face still blanched. And in his eyes glowed that purpose which knows no defeat! System departed. Like a hot blast wickedness came. Teeth bared, ears flat, with sounds like an angered child's ranting coming from his throat, the stallion charged his man enemy just as he had charged the powerful Percheron who had come to challenge him a month ago. The saddle horse, seeing it, avoided the brunt of the first blind rush, taking the Captain's shoulder on his rump as the black hurtler went past, striking thin air. VB felt the Captain's breath, saw from close up the lurid flame in his eyes, sensed the power of those teeth, the sledge-hammer force behind those untrimmed hoofs. And he came alive, the blood shooting close under his skin again and making the gray face bronze, then deeper than bronze. His eyes puffed under the stress of that emotion, and he felt a primitive desire to growl as the Captain whirled and came again. It was man to beast, and somewhere down yonder through the generations a dead racial memory came back and Young VB, girded for the conflict, ached to have his forest foe in reach, to have the fight run high, to have his chance to dare and do in fleshly struggle! It was not long in coming. The near hoof, striking down to crush his chest, fell short, and the hair of VB's chap leg went ripping from the leather, while along his thigh crept a dull, spreading ache. He did not notice that, though, for he was raised in his stirrups, right hand lifted high, its fingers clutched about the lash of his loaded quirt. He felt the breath again, hot, wet, and a splatter of froth from the flapping lips struck his cheek. Then the right hand came down with a snap and a jerk, with all the vigor of muscular force that VB could summon. His eye had been good, his judgment true. The Captain's teeth did not sink into his flesh, for the quirt-butt, a leaden slug, crunched on the horse's skull, right between the ears! The fury of motion departed, like the going of a cyclone. The Captain dropped to all fours and hung his head, staggered a half-dozen short paces drunkenly, and then sighed deeply-- He reached the end of the rope. It came tight again, and with the tightening--the battle! Thrice more he charged the man with all the hate his wild heart could summon, but not once did those dreadful teeth find that which they sought. Again the front hoof met its mark and racked the flesh of VB's leg, but that did not matter. He could stand that punishment, for he was winning! He was countering the stallion's efforts, which made the contest an even break; and his rope was on and he had dealt one telling blow with his quirt. Two points! And the boy screamed his triumph as the missile he swung landed again, on the soft nose this time, the nose so wrinkled with hateful desire--and the Captain swung off to one side from the stinging force of it. Not in delight at punishment was that cry. The blow on the skull, the slug at the nose stabbed VB to his tenderest depths. But he knew it must be so, and his shout was a shout of conquest--of the first man asserting primal authority, of the last man coming into his own! The dust they stirred rose stiflingly. Down there under the hill no moving breath of air would carry it off. The pony under VB grunted and strained, but was jerked sharply about by the rushes of the heavier stallion, heavier and built of things above mere flesh and bone and tendon. The Captain's belly dripped water; VB's face was glossy with it, his hair plastered down to brow and temple. The three became tired. In desperation the Captain dropped the fight, turned to run, plunged out as though to part the strands. VB's heart leaped as his faith in the rope faltered--but it held, and the stallion, pulled about, lost his footing, floundered, stumbled, went down, and rolled into the shale, feet threshing the air. It was an opening--the widest VB had had, wider than he could have hoped for, and he rushed in, stabbing his horse shamelessly with spurs and babbling witlessly as he strove to make slack in the rope. The slack came. Then the quick jerk of the wrist--the trick he had perfected back there in Jed's corral--and a potential half-hitch traveled down the rope. The Captain floundered to get his feet under him, and the loop in the rope dissolved. Again the wrist twitch, again the shooting loop and-- "Scotched!" screamed Young VB. "Scotched! You're my property!" Scotched! The rope had found its hold about the off hind ankle of the soiled stallion, and there it clung in a tight, relentless grasp. The rope from neck to limb was so short that it kept the foot clear of the ground, crippling the Captain, and as the great horse floundered to his feet VB had him powerless. The stallion stood dazed, looking down at the thing which would not let him kick, which would not let him step. Then he sprang forward, and when the rope came tight he was upended, a shoulder plowing the shale. "It's no use!" the man cried, his voice crackling in excitement. "I've got you right--right--_right!_" But the Captain would not quit. He tried even then to rise to his hind legs and make assault, but the effort only sent him falling backward, squealing--and left him on his side, moaning for his gone liberty. For he knew. He knew that his freedom was gone, even as he made his last floundering, piteous endeavors. He got up and tried to run, but every series of awkward moves only sent his black body down into the dust and dirt, and at last he rested there, head up, defiance still in his eyes, but legs cramped under him. And then VB wanted to cry. He went through all the sensations--the abrupt drop of spirits, the swelling in the throat, the tickling in the nostrils. "Oh, Captain!" he moaned. "Captain, don't you see I wouldn't harm you? Only you had to be mine! I had to get bigger than you were, Captain--for my own salvation. It was the only way, boy; it was the only way!" And he sat there for a long time, his eyes without the light of triumph, on his captive. His heart-beats quickened, a new warmth commenced to steal through his veins, a new faith in self welled up from his innermost depths, making his pulses sharp and hard, making his muscles swell, sending his spirit up and up. He had fought his first big fight and he had won! Blood began to drip from the stallion's nose. "It's where I struck you!" whispered VB, the triumph all gone again, solicitation and a vast love possessing him. "It's where I struck you, Captain. Oh, it hurts me, too--but it must be so, because things are as they are. There will be more hurts, boy, before we're through. But it must be!" His voice gritted on the last. Sounds from behind roused VB, and he looked around. The sunlight was going even from the ridge up there, and the whole land was in shadow. He was a long way from the ranch with this trophy--his, but still ready to do battle at the end of his rope. "Got one?" a man cried, coming up, and VB recognized him as one of the trio of fence builders, riding back to their camp. "Yes--one," muttered VB, and turned to look at the Captain. Then the man cried: "You've got th' Captain!" "It's the Captain," said VB unsteadily, as though too much breath were in his lungs. "He's mine--you know--mine!" The others looked at him in silent awe. CHAPTER XI A Letter and a Narrative Jed Avery had been away from Young VB almost two weeks, and he had grown impatient in the interval. So he pushed his bay pony up the trail from Ranger, putting the miles behind him as quickly as possible. The little man had fretted over every step of the journey homeward, and from Colt on into the hills it was a conscious effort that kept him from abusing his horse by overtravel. "If he should have gone an' busted over while I was away I'd--I'd never forgive myself--lettin' that boy go to th' bad just for a dinky claim!" It was the thousandth time he had made the declaration, and as he spoke the words a thankfulness rose in his heart because of what he had not heard in Ranger. He knew that VB had kept away from town. Surely that was a comfort, an assurance, a justification for his faith that was firm even under the growling. Still, there might have been a wanderer with a bottle-- And as he came in sight of his own buildings Jed put the pony to a gallop for the first time during that long journey. Smoke rose from the chimney, the door stood open, an atmosphere of habitation was about the place, and that proved something. He crowded his horse close against the gate, leaned low, unfastened the hasp, and rode on through. "Oh, VB!" he called, and from the cabin came an answering hail, a scraping of chair legs, and the young fellow appeared in the doorway. "How's th'--" Jed did not finish the question then--or ever. His eagerness for the meeting, the light of anticipation that had been in his face, disappeared. He reined up his horse with a stout jerk, and for a long moment sat there motionless, eyes on the round corral. Then his shoulders slacked forward and he raised a hand to scratch his chin in bewilderment. For yonder, his nose resting on one of the gate bars, watching the newcomer, safe in the inclosure, alive, just as though he belonged there, stood the Captain! After that motionless moment Jed turned his eyes back to Young VB, and stared blankly, almost witlessly. Then he raised a limp hand and half pointed toward the corral, while his lips formed a soundless question. VB stepped from the doorway and walked toward Jed, smiling. "Yes," he said with soft pride, as though telling of a sacred thing, "the Captain is there--in our corral." Jed drew a great breath. "Did you do it--and alone?" "Well, there wasn't any one else about," VB replied modestly. Again Jed's chest heaved. "Well, I'm a--" He ended in inarticulate distress, searching for a proper expletive, mouth open and ready, should he find one. Then he was off his horse, both hands on the boy's shoulders, looking into the eyes that met his so steadily. "You done it, Young VB!" he cried brokenly. "You done it! Oh, I'm proud of you! Your old adopted daddy sure is! You done it all by yourself, an' it's somethin' that nobody has ever been able to do before!" Then they both laughed aloud, eyes still clinging. "Come over and get acquainted," suggested VB. "He's waiting for us." They started for the corral, Jed's eyes, now flaming as they took in the detail of that wonderful creature, already seen by him countless times, but now for the first time unfree. The stallion watched them come, moving his feet up and down uneasily and peering at them between the bars. VB reached for the gate fastening, and the horse was away across the corral, snorting, head up, as though fearful. "Why, Captain!" the boy cried. "What ails you?" "What ails him?" cried Jed. "Man alive, I'd expect to see him tryin' to tear our hearts out!" "Oh, but he's like a woman!" VB said softly, watching the horse as he swung the gate open. They stepped inside, Jed with caution. VB walked straight across to the horse and laid his hand on the splendid curve of the rump. "Well, I'm a--" Again Jed could find no proper word to express his astonishment. He simply took off his hat and swung it in one hand, like an embarrassed schoolgirl. "Come over and meet the boss, Captain," VB laughed, drawing the black head around by its heavy forelock. And the Captain came--unexpectedly. The boy realized the danger with the first plunge and threw his arms about the animal's neck, crying to him to be still. And Jed realized, too. He slipped outside, putting bars between himself and those savage teeth which reached out for his body. Foiled, the stallion halted. "Captain," exclaimed VB, "what ails you?" "To be sure, nothin' ails him," said Jed sagely. "You're his master; you own him, body and soul; but you ain't drove th' hate for men out of his heart. He seems to love you--but not others--yes--" His voice died out as he watched the black beast make love to the tall young chap who scolded into his dainty ear. The soft, thin lips plucked at VB's clothing, nuzzling about him as he stood with arms clasped around the glossy neck. The great cheek rubbed against the boy's side until it pushed him from his tracks, though he strained playfully against the pressure. Such was the fierceness of that horse's allegiance. His nostrils fluttered, but no sound came from them: the beast whisperings of affection. All the time VB scolded softly, as a father might banter with a child. And when the boy looked up a great pride was in his face, and Jed understood. "That's right, Young VB--be proud of it! Be proud that he's yours; be proud that he's yours, an' yours only. Keep him that way; to be sure, an' you've earned it!" Then he stepped close to the bars and gazed at the animal with the critical look of a connoisseur. "Not a hair that ain't black," he muttered. "Black from ankle to ear; hoofs almost black, black in th' nostrils. Black horses generally have brown eyes, but you can't even tell where th' pupil is in his! "Say, VB, he makes th' ace of spades look like new snow, don't he?" "He does that!" cried VB, and putting his hands on the animal's back, he leaped lightly up, sitting sidewise on the broad hips and playing with the heavy tail. "VB, I'm a-- Lord, a thousand dollars for a new oath!" At VB's suggestion they started back to the cabin. "Why, boy, you're limpin'!" the old man exclaimed. "An' in both legs!" He stopped and looked the young fellow over from hat to heel. "One side of your face's all skinned. Looks as though your left hand'd all been smashed up, it's that swelled. You move like your back hurt, too--like sin. VB?" The boy stopped and looked down at the ground. Then his eyes met those of the old rancher, and Jed Avery understood--he had seen the bond between man and horse; he realized what must have transpired between them. And he knew the love that men can have for animals, something which, if you have never felt it, is far beyond comprehension. So he asked just this question: "How long?" And VB answered: "Six days--from dawn till dark. One to get a halter on him, another to get my hand on his head; three days in the Scotch hobble, and the last--to ride him like a hand-raised colt." Jed replaced his hat, pulling it low to hide his eyes. "Ain't I proud to be your daddy?" he whispered. An overwhelming pride--a pride raised to the _n_th degree, of the sort that is above the understanding of most men--was in the tone _timbre_ of the question. They went on into the house. "Jed," VB said, as though he had waited to broach something of great import, "I've written a letter this morning, and I want to read it to you, just to see how it sounds out loud." He sat down in a chair and drew sheets of small tablet paper toward him. Jed, without answer, leaned against the table and waited. VB read: "My Dear Father: "I am writing merely to say that I know you were right and I was wrong. "I am in a new life, where men do big, real things which justify their own existence. I am finding myself. I am getting that perspective which lets me see just how right you were and how wrong I was. "Since coming here I have done something real. I have captured and made mine the wildest horse that ever ran these hills. I am frankly proud of it. I may live to do things of more obvious greatness, but that will be because men have had their sense of values warped. For me, this attainment is a true triumph. "I am now in the process of taming another beast, more savage than the one I have mastered, and possessing none of his noble qualities. It is a beast not of the sort we can grapple with, though we can see it in men. It is giving me a hard battle, but try to believe that my efforts are sincere and, though it may take my whole lifetime, I am bound to win in the end. "This letter will be mailed in Kansas City by a friend. I am many days' travel from that point. When I am sure of the other victory I shall let you know where I am. "Your affectionate son," He tossed the sheets back to the table top. "I'm going to get it over to Ant Creek and let some of the boys take it to the river when they go with beef," he explained. "Now, how does it sound?" "Fine, VB, fine!" Jed muttered, rubbing one cheek. "To be sure, it ain't so much what you say as th' way you say it--makin' a party feel as though you meant it from th' bottom of your feet to th' tip of th' longest hair on your head!" "Well, Jed, I do mean it just that way. That horse out there--he--he stands for so much now. He stands for everything I haven't been, and for all that I want to be. He ran free as the birds, but it couldn't always be so. He had to succumb, had to give up that sort of liberty. "I took his power from him, made him my own, made him my servant. Yet it didn't scathe his spirit. It has changed all that bitterness into love, all that wasted energy into doing something useful. I didn't break him, Jed; I converted him. Understand?" "I do, VB; but we won't convert this here other beast. We'll bust him wide open, won't we? Break him, body an' spirit!" The boy smiled wanly. "That's what we're trying to do." He pointed to the candle in its daubed bottle. "Just to keep the light burning, Jed--just to keep its light fighting back the darkness. The little flame of that candle breaks the power of the black thing which would shut it in--like a heart being good and true in spite of the rotten body in which it beats. And when my body commences to want the old things--to want them, oh, so badly--I just think of this little candle here, calm and quiet and steady, sticking out of what was once a cesspool, a poison pot, and making a place in the night where men can see." While a hundred could have been counted slowly they remained motionless, quiet, not a sound breaking the silence. Then Jed began talking in a half-tone: "I know, Young VB; I know. You've got time now to light it and nurse th' flame up so's it won't need watchin'--an' not miss things that go by in th' dark. Some of us puts it off too long--like a man I know--now. I didn't know him then--when it happened. He was wanderin' around in a night that never turned to day, thinkin' he knowed where he was goin', but all th' time just bein' fooled by th' dark. "And there was a girl back in Kansas. He started after her, but it was so dark he couldn't find th' way, an' when he did-- "Some folks is fools enough to say women don't die of broken hearts. But--well, when a feller knows some things he wants to go tell 'em to men who don't know; to help 'em to understand, if he can; to give 'em a hand if they do see but can't find their way out--" He stopped, staring at the floor. VB had no cause to search for identities. From the corral came a shrill, prolonged neighing. VB arose and laid a hand gently on Jed's bowed shoulder. "That's the Captain," he said solemnly; "and he calls me when he's thirsty." While he was gone Jed remained as he had been left, staring at the floor. CHAPTER XII Woman Wants Gail Thorpe rose from the piano in the big ranch house of the S Bar S, rearranged the mountain flowers that filled a vase on a tabouret, then knocked slowly, firmly, commandingly, on a door that led from the living room. "Well, I don't want you; but I s'pose you might as well come in and get it off your mind!" The voice from the other side spoke in feigned annoyance. It continued to grumble until a lithe figure, topped by a mass of hair like pulled sunshine, flung itself at him, twining warm arms about his neck and kissing the words from the lips of big Bob Thorpe as he sat before his desk in the room that served as the ranch office. "Will you ever say it again--that you don't want me?" she demanded. "No--but merely because I'm intimidated into promising," he answered. His big arms went tight about the slender body and he pulled his daughter up on his lap. A silence, while she fussed with his necktie. Her blue eyes looked into his gray ones a moment as though absently, then back to the necktie. Her fingers fell idle; her head snuggled against his neck. Bob Thorpe laughed loud and long. "Well, what is it this morning?" he asked between chuckles. The girl sat up suddenly, pushed back the hair that defied fastenings, and tapped a stretched palm with the stiff forefinger of the other hand. "I'm not a Western girl," she declared deliberately; and then, as the brown face before her clouded, hastened: "Oh, I'm not wanting to go away! I mean, I'm not truly a Western girl, but I want to be. I want to fit better. "When we decided that I should graduate and come back here with my mommy and daddy for the rest of my life, I decided. There was nothing halfway about it. Some of the other girls thought it awful; but I don't see the attraction in their way of living. "When I was a little girl I was a sort of tom-cow-boy. I could do things as well as any of the boys I ever knew could do them. But after ten years, mostly away in the East, where girls are like plants, I've lost it all. Now I want to get it back." "Well, go to it!" "Wait! I want to start well--high up. I want to have the best that there is to have. I--want--a--horse!" "Horse? Bless me, _bambino_, there are fifty broken horses running in the back pasture now, besides what the boys have on the ride. Take your pick!" "Oh, I know!" she said with gentle scoffing. "That sort of a horse--just cow-ponies. I love 'em, but I guess--well--" "You've been educated away from 'em, you mean?" he chuckled. "Well, whatever it is--I want something better. I, as a daughter of the biggest, best man in Colorado, want to ride the best animal that ever felt a cinch." "Well?" "And I want to have him now, so I can get used to him this fall and look forward to coming back to him in the spring." Bob Thorpe took both her hands in one of his. "And if a thing like that will make my bambino happy, I guess she'll have it." The girl kissed him and held her cheek close against his for a breath. "When I go to Denver for the stock show I'll pick the best blue ribbon--" "Denver!" she exclaimed indignantly, sitting straight and tossing her head. "I want a real horse--a horse bred and raised in these mountains--a horse I can trust. None of your blue-blooded stock. They're like the girls I went to college with!" Bob Thorpe let his laughter roll out. "Well, what do you expect to find around here? Have you seen anything you like?" She pulled her hands from his grasp and stretched his mouth out of shape with her little fingers until he squirmed. "No, I haven't seen him; but I've heard the cowboys talking. Over at Mr. Avery's ranch they've caught a black horse--" Bob Thorpe set her suddenly up on the arm of his chair and shook her soundly. "Look here, young lady!" he exclaimed. "You're dreaming! I know what horse you're talking about. He's a wild devil that has run these hills for years. I heard he'd been caught. Get the notion of having him out of your head. I've never seen him but once, and then he was away off; but I've heard tales of him. Why-- "Nonsense! In the first place, he couldn't be broken to ride. Men aren't made big enough to break the spirit of a devil like that! They're bigger than humans. So we can end this discussion in peace. It's impossible!" "All right," Gail said sweetly. "I just let you go on and get yourself into a corner. You don't know what you're talking about. He has been ridden. So there! I want him!" He thrust her to one side, rose, and commenced to pace the room, gesticulating wildly. But it all came to the invariable end of such discussions, and twenty minutes later Gail Thorpe, her smoking, smiling dad at her side, piloted the big touring car down the road, bound for Jed Avery's ranch. Young VB sat on a box behind the cabin working with a boot-heel that insisted on running over. He lifted the boot, held it before his face, and squinted one eye to sight the effect of his work--then started at a cry from the road. The boot still in his hands, VB stopped squinting to listen. Undoubtedly whoever it was wanted Jed; but Jed was away with the horse buyer, looking over his young stuff. So Young VB, boot in hand, its foot clad in a service-worn sock, made his uneven way around the house to make any necessary explanations. "That must be he!" The light, high voice of the girl gave the cry just as VB turned the corner and came in sight, and her hand, half extended to point toward the corral, pointed directly into the face of the young man. He did not hear what she had said, did not venture a greeting. He merely stood and stared at her, utterly without poise. In a crimson flash he realized that this was Gail Thorpe, that she was pretty, and that his bootless foot was covered by a sock that had given way before the stress of walking in high heels, allowing his great toe, with two of its lesser conspirators, to protrude. To his confusion, those toes seemed to be swelling and for the life of him he could make them do nothing but stand stiffly in the air almost at right angles with the foot. His breeding cried out for a retreat, for a leap into shelter; but his wits had lost all grace. He lifted the half-naked foot and carefully brushed the dirt from the sock. Then, leaning a shoulder against the corner of the cabin, he drew the boot on. Stamping it to the ground to settle his foot into place, he said, "Good morning," weakly and devoid of heartiness. Bob Thorpe had not noticed this confusion, for his eyes were on the corral. But Gail, a peculiar twinkle in her eyes, had seen it all--and with quick intuition knew that it was something more than the embarrassment of a cow-puncher--and struggled to suppress her smiles. "Good afternoon," Thorpe corrected. "Jed here?" "No; he's riding," VB answered. The cattleman moved a pace to the left and tilted his head to see better the Captain, who stormed around and around the corral, raising a great dust. "We came over to look at a horse I heard was here--this one, I guess. Isn't he the wild stallion?" "Used to be wild." "He looks it yet. Watch him plunge!" Thorpe cried. "He's never seen an automobile before," VB explained, as the three moved nearer the corral. The horse was frightened. He quivered when he stood in one place, and the quivering always grew more violent until it ended in a plunge. He rose to his hind legs, head always toward the car, and pawed the air; then settled back and ran to the far side of the inclosure, with eyes for nothing but that machine. They halted by the bars, Thorpe and his daughter standing close together, Young VB nearer the gate. The boy said something to the horse and laughed softly. "Why, look, daddy," the girl cried, "he's beginning to calm down!" The Captain stopped his antics and, still trembling, moved gingerly to the bars. Twice he threw up his head, looked at the machine, and breathed loudly, and once a quick tremor ran through his fine limbs, but the terror was no longer on him. Bob Thorpe turned a slow gaze on VB. The girl stood with lips parted. A flush came under her fine skin and she clasped her hands at her breast. "Oh, daddy, what a horse!" she breathed. And Bob Thorpe echoed: "Lord, what a horse! Anybody tried to ride him?" he asked a moment later. "He gets work every day," VB answered. "_Work?_ Don't tell me you work that animal!" The young chap nodded. "Yes; he works right along." The Captain snorted loudly and tore away in a proud circle of the corral, as though to flaunt his graces. "Oh, daddy, it took a _man_ to break that animal!" the girl breathed. The bronze of VB's face darkened, then paled. He turned a steady look on the sunny-haired woman, and the full thanks that swelled in his throat almost found words. He wanted to cry out to her, to tell her what such things meant; for she was of his sort, highly bred, capable of understanding. And he found himself thinking: "You are! You are! You're as I thought you must be!" Then he felt Thorpe's gaze and turned to meet it, a trifle guiltily. "Yours?" the man asked. "Mine." Thorpe turned back to the Captain. Gail drew a quick breath and turned away from him--to the man. "I thought so when he commenced to quiet," muttered Thorpe. He looked then at his daughter and found her standing still, hands clasped, lips the least trifle parted, gazing at Young VB. Something in him urged a quick step forward. It was an alarm, something primal in the fathers of women. But Bob Thorpe put the notion aside as foolishness--or tenderness--and walked closer to the corral, chewing his cigar speculatively. The stallion wrinkled his nose and dropped the ears flat, the orange glimmer coming into his eyes. "Don't like strangers, I see." "Not crazy about them," VB answered. Thorpe walked off to the left, then came back. He removed his cigar and looked at Gail. She fussed with her rebellious hair and her face was flushed; she no longer looked at the horse--or at VB. He felt a curiosity about that flush. "Well, want to get rid of him?" Thorpe hooked his thumbs in his vest armholes and confronted VB. No answer. "What do you want for him?" The young fellow started. "What?" he said in surprise. "I was thinking. I didn't catch your question." The fact was, he had heard, but had distrusted the sense. The idea of men offering money for the Captain had never occurred to him. "What do you want for him?" VB smiled. "What do I want for him?" he repeated. "I want--feed and water for the rest of his life; shelter when he needs it; the will to treat him as he should be treated. And I guess that's about all." The other again removed his cigar, and his jaw dropped. A cow-puncher talking so! He could not believe it; and the idea so confused him that he blundered right on with the bargaining. "Five hundred? Seven-fifty? No? Well, how much?" VB smiled again, just an indulgent smile prompted by the knowledge that he possessed a thing beyond the power of even this man's wealth. "The Captain is not for sale," he said. "Not to-day--or ever. That's final." There was more talk, but all the kindly bluffness, all the desire instinctive in Bob Thorpe to give the other man an even break in the bargain, fell flat. This stranger, this thirty-five-dollar-a-month ranch hand, shed his offers as a tin roof sheds rain and with a self-possession characterized by unmistakable assurance. "Tell Jed I was over," the big man said as they gave up their errand and turned to go. "And"--as he set a foot on the running board of his car--"any time you're our way drop in." "Yes, do!" added the girl, and her father could not check the impulse which made him turn halfway as though to shut her off. CHAPTER XIII VB Fights Jed returned that evening, worn by a hard day's riding. He was silent. VB, too, was quiet and they spoke little until the housework was finished and Jed had drawn off his boots preparatory to turning in. Then VB said: "Bob Thorpe was over to-day." "So?" "Uh-huh; wanted to buy the Captain." After a pause Jed commented: "That's natural." "Wanted me to give you the good word." The old man walked through the doorway into the little bunk room and VB heard him flop into the crude bed. A short interval of silence. "Jed," called VB, "ever hear where his daughter went to school?" A long yawn. Then: "Yep--don't remember." Another pause. "She was over, too." "Oh-ho-o-o!" The boy felt himself flushing, and then sat bolt upright, wondering soberly and seriously why it should be so--without reason. Young VB slept restlessly that night. He tossed and dreamed, waking frequently under a sense of nervous tension, then falling back to half-slumber once more. Thorpe came, and his daughter, offering fabulous sums for the Captain, which were stubbornly refused. Then, shouting at the top of her voice, the girl cried: "But I will give you kisses for him! Surely that is enough!" And VB came back to himself, sitting up in bed and wadding the blankets in his hands. He blinked in the darkness and herded his scattered senses with difficulty. Then the hands left off twisting the covers and went slowly to his throat. For the thirst was on him and in the morning he rose in the grip of the same stifling desire, and his quavering hands spilled things as he ate. Jed noticed, but made no comment. When the meal was finished he said: "S'pose I could get you to crawl up on the Captain an' take a shoot up Curley Gulch with an eye out for that black mare an' her yearlin'?" VB was glad to be alone with his horse, and as he walked to the corral, his bridle over his arm, he felt as though, much as Jed could help him, he could never bring the inspiration which the black beast offered. He opened the gate and let it swing wide. The Captain came across to him with soft nickerings, deserting the alfalfa he was munching. He thrust his muzzle into the crook of VB's elbow, and the arm tightened on it desperately, while the other hand went up to twine fingers in the luxurious mane. "Oh, Captain!" he muttered, putting his face close to the animal's cheek. "You know what it is to fight for yourself! You know--but where you found love and help when you lost that fight, I'd find--just blackness--without even a candle--" The stallion moved closer, shoving with his head until he forced VB out of the corral. Then with his teasing lips he sought the bridle. "You seem to understand!" the man cried, his tired eyes lighting. "You seem to know what I need!" Five minutes later he was rushing through the early morning air up the gulch, the Captain bearing him along with that free, firm, faultless stride that had swept him over those mountains for so many long, unmolested years. Throughout the forenoon they rode hard. VB looked for the mare and colt, but the search did not command much of his attention. "Why can't I turn all this longing into something useful?" he asked the horse. "Your lust for freedom has come to this end; why can't my impulses to be a wild beast be driven into another path?" And the Captain made answer by bending his superb head and lipping VB's chap-clad knee. The quest was fruitless, and an hour before noon VB turned back toward the ranch, making a short cut across the hills. In one of the gulches the Captain nickered softly and increased his trotting. VB let him go, unconscious of his brisker movement, for the calling in his throat had risen to a clamor. The horse stopped and lowered his head, drinking from a hole into which crystal water seeped. The man dropped off and flopped on his stomach, thrusting his face into the pool close to the nose of the greedily drinking stallion. He took the water in great gulps. It was cold, as cold as spring water can be, yet it was as nothing against the fire within him. The Captain, raising his head quickly, caught his breath with a grunt, dragging the air deep into his great lungs and exhaling slowly, loudly, as he gazed off down the gulch; then he chewed briskly on the bit and thrust his nose again into the spring. VB's arm stole up and dropped over the horse's head. "Oh, boy, you know what one kind of thirst is," he said in a whisper. "But there's another kind that this stuff won't quench! The thirst that comes from being in blackness--" They went on, dropped off a point, and made for the flat little buildings of the ranch. As he approached, VB saw three saddled horses standing before the house, none of which was Jed's property. Nothing strange in that, however, for one man's home is another's shelter in that country, whether the owner be on the ground or not, and to VB the thought of visitors brought relief. Contact with others might joggle him from his mood. He left the Captain, saddled, at the corral gate, bridle reins down, and he knew that the horse would not budge so much as a step until told to do so. Then he swung over toward the house, heels scuffing the hard dirt, spurs jingling. At the threshold he walked squarely into the man Rhues. The recognition was a distinct shock. He stepped backward a pace--recoiled rather, for the movement was as from a thing he detested. Into his mind crowded every detail of his former encounters with this fellow; in the Anchor bunk house and across the road from the saloon in Ranger. They came back vividly--the expression of faces, lights and shadows, even odors, and the calling in him for the help that throttles became agonizing. Rhues misconstrued his emotion. His judgment was warped by the spirit of the bully, and he thought this man feared him. He remembered that defiant interchange of questions, and the laugh that went to VB on their first meeting. He nursed the rankling memory. He had told it about that Avery's tenderfoot was afraid to take a drink--speaking greater truth than he was aware--but his motive had been to discredit VB in the eyes of the countrymen, for he belonged to that ilk who see in debauchery the mark of manhood. Coming now upon the man he had chosen to persecute, and reading fear in VB's eyes, Rhues was made crudely happy. "You don't appear to be overglad to see us," he drawled. VB glanced into the room. A Mexican sat on the table, smoking and swinging his legs; a white man he remembered having seen in Ranger stood behind Rhues. Jed was nowhere about. He looked back at the snaky leer in those half-opened green eyes, and a rage went boiling into his brain. The unmistakable challenge which came from this bully was of the sort that strips from men civilization's veneer. "You've guessed it," he said calmly. "I don't know why I should be glad to see you. These others"--he motioned--"are strangers to me." Then he stepped past Rhues into the room. The man grinned at him as he tossed his hat to a chair and unbuckled the leather cuffs. "But that makes no difference," he went on. "Jed isn't here. It's meal time, and if you men want to eat I'll build a big enough dinner." Rhues laughed, and the mockery in his tone was of the kind that makes the biggest of men forget they can be above insult. "We didn't come here to eat," he said. "We come up to see a horse we heerd about--th' Captain. We heerd Jed caught him." VB started. The thought of Rhues inspecting the stallion, commenting on him, admiring him, was as repulsive to Young VB as would be the thought to a lover of a vile human commenting vulgarly on the sacred body of the woman of women. The Mexican strolled out of the house as VB, turning to the stove, tried to ignore the explanation of their presence. He walked on toward the ponies. A dozen steps from the house he stopped, and called: _"Por Dios, hombre!"_ Rhues and the other followed him, and VB saw them stand together, staring in amazement at the Captain. Then they moved toward the great horse, talking to one another and laughing. VB followed, with a feeling of indignation. The trio advanced, quickening their pace. "Hold on!" he cried in sudden alarm. "Don't go too near; he's dangerous!" Already the Captain had flattened his ears, and as VB ran out he could see the nose wrinkling, the lips drawing back. "What's got into you?" demanded Rhues, turning, while the Mexican laughed jeeringly. "I guess if you can ride him a _man_ can git up clost without gittin' chawed up! Remember, young kid, we've been workin' with hosses sence you was suckin' yer thumb." The others laughed again, but VB gave no heed. He was seeing red again; reason had gone--either reason or the coating of conventions. "Well, if you won't stand away from him because of danger, you'll do it because I say so!" he muttered. "O-ho, an' that's it!" laughed Rhues, walking on. VB passed him and approached the Captain and took his bridle. "Be still, boy," he murmured. "Stand where you are." He stroked the nose, and the wrinkles left it. Rhues laughed again harshly. "Well, that's a fine kind o' buggy horse!" he jeered. "Let a tenderfoot come up an' steal all th' man-eatin' fire outen him!" He laughed again and the others joined. The Mexican said something in Spanish. "Yah," assented Rhues. "I thought we was comin' to see a _hoss_--th' kind o' nag this feller pertended to be. But now--look at him! He's just a low-down ----" VB sprang toward him. "You--" he breathed, "you--you hound! Why, you aren't fit to come into sight of this horse. You--you apologize to that horse!" he demanded, and even through his molten rage the words sounded unutterably silly. Yet he went on, fists clenched, carried beyond reason or balance by the instinctive hate for this man and love for the black animal behind him. Rhues laughed again. "Who says so, besides you, you ----. Why, you ain't no more man'n that hoss is hoss!" He saw then that he had reckoned poorly. The greenhorn, the boy who cowered at the thought of a man's dissipation, had disappeared, and in his stead stood a quivering young animal, poising for a pounce. Being a bully, Rhues was a coward. So when VB sprang, and he knew conflict was unavoidable, his right hand whipped back. The fingers closed on the handle of his automatic as VB made the first step. They made their hold secure as the Easterner's arm drew back. They yanked at the gun as that fist shot out. It was a good blow, a clean blow, a full blow right on the point of the chin, and, quickly as it had been delivered, the right was back in an instinctive guard and the left had rapped out hard on the snarling mouth. Rhues went backward and down, unbalanced by the first shock, crushed by the second; and the third, a repeated jab of the left, caught him behind the ear and stretched him helpless in the dust. His fingers relaxed their hold on the gun that he had not been quick enough to use, so lightning-like was the attack from this individual he had dubbed a "kid." VB stepped over the prostrate form, put his toe under the revolver, and flipped it a dozen yards away. Then Jed Avery pulled up his horse in a shower of dust, and VB, his rage choking down words, turned to lead the Captain into the corral. The animal nosed him fiercely and pulled back to look at Rhues, who, under the crude ministrations of his two companions, had taken on a semblance of life. A moment later VB returned from the inclosure, bearing his riding equipment. He said to Jed: "This man insulted the Captain. I had to whip him." Then he walked to the wagon shed, dropped his saddle in its shelter, and came back. Rhues sat up and, as VB approached, got to his feet. He lurched forward as if to rush his enemy, but the Mexican caught him and held him back. VB stood, hands on hips, and glared at him. He said: "No, I wouldn't come again if I were you. I don't want to have to smash you again. I'd enjoy it in a way, but when a man is knocked out he's whipped--in my country--judged by the standards we set there. "You're a coward, Rhues--a dirty, sneaking, low-down coward! Every gun-man is a coward. It's no way to settle disputes--gun fighting." He glared at the fellow before him, who swore under his breath but who could not summon the courage to strike. "You're a coward, and I hope I've impressed that on you," VB went on, "and you'll take a coward's advantage. Hereafter I'm going to carry a gun. You won't fight in my way because you're not a man, so I'll have to be prepared for you in your way. I just want to let you know that I understand your breed! That's all. "Don't start anything, because I'll fight in two ways hereafter--in my way and in yours. And that goes for you other two. If you run with this--this _thing_, it marks you. I know what would have happened if Jed hadn't come up. You'd have killed me! That's the sort you are. Remember--all three of you--I'm not afraid, but it's a case of fighting fire with fire. I'll be ready." Rhues stood, as though waiting for more. When VB did not go on he said, just above a whisper: "I'll get you--yet!" And VB answered, "Then I guess we all understand one another." When the three had ridden away Jed shoved his Colt tight into its holster again and looked at the young chap with foreboding. "There'll be trouble, VB; they're bad," he said. "He's a coward. The story'll go round an' he'll try to get you harder 'n ever. If he don't, those others will--will try, I mean. Matson and Julio are every bit as bad as Rhues, but they ain't quite got his fool nerve. "They're a thievin' bunch, though it ain't never been proved. Nobody trusts 'em; most men let 'em alone an' wait fer 'em to show their hand. They've been cute; they've been suspected, but they ain't never got out on a limb. They've got a lot to cover up, no doubt. But they've got a grudge now. An' when cowards carry grudges--look out!" "If a man like Rhues were all I had to fear, I should never worry," VB muttered, weak again after the excitement. "He's bad--but there are worse things--that you can't have the satisfaction of knocking down." And his conspiring nostrils smelled whisky in that untainted air. CHAPTER XIV The Schoolhouse Dance Young VB held a twofold interest for the men of Clear River. First, the story of his fight with the Captain spread over the land, percolating to the farthest camps. Men laughed at first. The absurdity of it! Then, their surprise giving way to their appreciation of his attainment, their commendation for the young Easterner soared to superlatively profane heights. When he met those who had been strangers before it was to be scrutinized and questioned and frankly, honestly admired. Now came another reason for discussing him about bunk-house stoves. He had thrashed Rhues! Great as had been the credit accorded VB for the capture of the stallion, just so great was men's delight caused by the outcome of that other encounter. They remembered, then, how Rhues had told of the greenhorn who was afraid to take a drink; how he had made it a purpose to spread stories of ridicule, doing his best to pervert the community's natural desire to let the affairs of others alone. And this recollection of Rhues's bullying was an added reason for their saying: "Good! I'm glad to hear it. Too bad th' kid didn't beat him to death!" Though his meetings with other men were few and scattered, VB was coming to be liked. It mattered little to others why he was in the country, from where he came, or who he had been. He had accomplished two worthy things among them, and respect was accorded him across vast distances. Dozens of these men had seen him only once, and scores never, yet they reckoned him of their number--a man to be taken seriously, worthy of their kindly attention, of their interest, and of their respect. Bob Thorpe helped to establish VB in the mountains. He thought much about his interview with the young chap, and told to a half-dozen men the story which, coming from him, had weight. His daughter did not abandon her idea of owning the Captain. Bob told her repeatedly that it was useless to argue with a man who spoke as did Jed's rider; but the girl chose to disagree with him. "I think that if you'd flatter him enough--if we both would--that he would listen. Don't you?" she asked. Bob Thorpe shook his head. "No," he answered. "You can't convince me of that. You don't know men, and I do. I've seen one or two like him before--who love a thing of that sort above money; and, I've found you can't do a thing with 'em--ding 'em!" The girl cried: "Why, don't feel that way about it! I think it's perfectly fine--to love an animal so much that money won't buy him!" "Sure it is," answered her father. "That's what makes me out of patience with them. They're--they're better men than most of us, and--well, they make a fellow feel rather small at times." Then he went away, and Gail puzzled over his concluding remark. A week to a day after her first visit she drove again to Jed's ranch. "I came over to see the Captain," she told the old man gayly. "Well, th' Captain ain't here now," he answered, beaming on her; "but VB'll be back with him before noon." She looked for what seemed to be an unnecessarily long time at her watch, and then asked: "Is that his name?" "What--th' Captain?" "No--VB." Jed laughed silently at her. "Yep--to be sure an' that's his name--all th' name he's got." "Well, I wish Mr. VB would hurry back with the Captain," she said. But that easy flush was again in her cheeks, and the turn she gave the conversation was, as they say in certain circles, poor footwork. Within an hour the Captain bore his rider home. Gail stayed for dinner and ate with the two men. It was a strange meal for VB. Not in months had he eaten at the same table with a woman; not in years had he broken bread with a woman such as this, and realization of the fact carried him back beyond those darkest days. He remembered suddenly and quite irrelevantly that he once had wondered if this daughter of Bob Thorpe's was to be a connecting link with the old life. That had been when he first learned that the big cattleman had a daughter, and that she was living in his East. Now as he sat before neglected food and watched and listened, feasting his starved spirit on her, noting her genuine vivacity, her enthusiasm, the quick come and go of color in her fine skin, he knew that she was a link, but not with the past that he had feared. She took him back beyond that, into his earlier boyhood, that period of adolescence when, to a clean-minded boy, all things are good and unstained. She was attractive in all the ways that women can be attractive, and at the same time she was more than a desirable individual; she seemed to stand for classes, for modes of living and thinking, that Young VB had put behind him--put behind first by his wasting, now by distance. But as the meal progressed a fresh wonder crept up in his mind. Was all that really so very far away? Was not the distance just that between them and the big ranch house under the cotton woods beyond the hills? And was the result of his wasting quite irreparable? Was he not rebuilding what he had torn down? He felt himself thrilling and longing suddenly for fresher, newer experiences as the talk ran on between the others. The conversation was wholly of the country, and VB was surprised to discover that this girl could talk intelligently and argue effectively with Jed over local stock conditions when she looked for all the world like any of the hundreds he could pick out on Fifth Avenue at five o'clock of any fine afternoon. He corrected himself hastily. She was _not_ like those others, either. She possessed all their physical endowments, all and more, for her eye was clearer, her carriage better, she was possessed of a color that was no sham; and a finer body. Put her beside them in their own environment, and they would seem stale by comparison; bring those others here, and their bald artificiality would be pathetic. The boy wanted her to know those things, yet thought of telling her never came to his consciousness. Subjectively he was humble before her. The interest between the two young people was not centered completely in VB. Each time he lowered his gaze to his plate he was conscious of those frank, intelligent blue eyes on him, studying, prying, wondering, a laugh ever deep within them. Now and then the girl addressed a remark to him, but for the most part she spoke directly to Jed; however, she was studying the boy every instant, quietly, carefully, missing no detail, and by the time the meal neared its end the laughter had left her eyes and they betrayed a frank curiosity. When the meal was finished the girl asked VB to take her to the corral. She made the request lightly, but it smote something in the man a terrific blow, stirring old memories, fresh desires, and he was strangely glad that he could do something for her. As they walked from the cabin to the inclosure he was flushed, embarrassed, awkward. He could not talk to her, could scarcely keep his body from swinging from side to side with schoolboy shyness. The stallion did not fidget at sight of the girl as he had done on the approach of other strangers. He snorted and backed away, keeping his eyes on her and his ears up with curiosity, coming to a halt against the far side of the corral and switching his fine tail down over the shapely hocks as though to make these people understand that in spite of his seeming harmlessness he might yet show the viciousness that lurked down in his big heart. "I think he'll come to like you," said VB, looking from his horse to the girl. "I don't see how he could help it--to like women, understand," he added hastily when she turned a wide-eyed gaze on him. "He doesn't like strange men, but see--he's interested in you; and it's curiosity, not anger. I--I don't blame him--for being interested," he ventured, and hated himself for the flush that swept up from his neck. They both laughed, and Gail said: "So this country hasn't taken the flattery out of you?" "Why, it's been years--years since I said a thing like that to a girl of your sort," VB answered soberly. An awkward pause followed. "Dare I touch him?" the girl finally asked. "No, I wouldn't to-day," VB advised. "Just let him look at you now. Some other time we'll see if--That is, if you'll ever come to see us--to see the Captain again." "I should like to come to see the Captain very much, and as often as is proper," she said with mocking demureness. And she did come again; and again and yet again. Always she took pains to begin with inquiries about the horse. When she did this in Jed Avery's presence it was with a peculiar avoidance of his gaze, that might have been from embarrassment; when she asked Young VB those questions it was with a queer little teasing smile. A half-dozen times she found the boy alone at the ranch, and the realization that on such occasions she stayed longer than she did when Jed was about gave him a new thrill of delight. At first there was an awkward reserve between them, but after the earlier visits this broke down and their talk became interspersed with personal references, with small, inconsequential confidences that, intrinsically worthless, meant much to them. Yet there was never a word of the life both had lived far over the other side of those snowcaps to the eastward. Somehow the girl felt intuitively that it had not all been pleasant for the man there, and VB maintained a stubborn reticence. He could have told her much of her own life back in the East, of the things she liked, of the events and conditions that were irksome, because he knew the environment in which she had lived and he felt that he knew the girl herself. He would not touch that topic, however, for it would lead straight to _his_ life; and all that he wanted for his thoughts now were Jed and the hills and the Captain and--this girl. They composed a comfortable world of which he wanted to be a part. Gail found herself feeling strangely at home with this young fellow. She experienced a mingled feeling compounded of her friendship for the finished youths she had known during school days and that which she felt for the men of her mountains, who were, she knew, as rugged, as genuine, as the hills themselves. To her Young VB rang true from the ground up, and he bore the finish that can come only from contact with many men. That is a rare combination. It came about that after a time the Captain let Gail touch him, allowed her to walk about him and caress his sleek body. Always, when she was near, he stood as at attention, dignified and self-conscious, and from time to time his eyes would seek the face of his master, as though for reassurance. Once after the girl had gone VB took the Captain's face between his hands and, looking into the big black eyes, muttered almost fiercely: "She's as much of the real stuff as you are, old boy! Do you think, Captain, that I can ever match up with you two?" Before a month had gone by the girl could lead the Captain about, could play with him almost as familiarly as VB did; but always the horse submitted as if uninterested, went through this formality of making friends as though it were a duty that bored him. Once Dick Worth, the deputy from Sand Creek, and his wife rode up the gulch to see the black stallion. While the Captain would not allow the man near him, he suffered the woman to tweak his nose and slap his cheeks and pull his ears; then it was that Jed and VB knew that the animal understood the difference between sexes and that the chivalry which so became him had been cultivated by his intimacy with Gail Thorpe. After that, of course, there was no plausible excuse for Gail's repeated visits. However, she continued coming. VB was always reserved up to a certain point before her, never yielding beyond it in spite of the strength of the subtle tactics she employed to draw him out. A sense of uncertainty of himself held him aloof. Within him was a traditional respect for women. He idealized them, and then set for men a standard which they must attain before meeting women as equals. But this girl, while satisfying his ideal, would not remain aloof. She forced herself into VB's presence, forced herself, and yet with a delicacy that could not be misunderstood. She came regularly, her visits lengthened, and one sunny afternoon as they stood watching the Captain roll she looked up sharply at the man beside her. "Why do you keep me at this?" "This? What? I don't get your meaning." "At coming over here? Why don't you come to see me? I-- Of course, I haven't any fine horse to show you, but--" Her voice trailed off, with a hint of wounded pride in the tone. The man faced her, stunning surprise in his face. "You--you don't think I fail to value this friendship of ours?" he demanded, rallying. "You--Why, what can I say to you? It has meant so much to me--just seeing you; it's been one of the finest things of this fine country. But I thought--I thought it was because of this,"--with a gesture toward the Captain, who stood shaking the dust from his hair with mighty effort. "I thought all along you were interested in the horse; not that you cared about knowing me--" "Did you really think that?" she broke in. VB flushed, then laughed, with an abrupt change of mood. "Well, it _began_ that way," he pleaded weakly. "And you'd let it end that way." "Oh, no; you don't understand, Miss Thorpe," serious again. "I--I can't explain, and you don't understand now. But I've felt somehow as though it would be presuming too much if I came to see you." She looked at him calculatingly a long moment as he twirled his hat and kicked at a pebble with his boot. "I think it would be presuming too much if you let me do all the traveling, since you admit that a friendship does exist," she said lightly. "Then the only gallant thing for me to do is to call on you." "I think so. I'm glad you recognize the fact." "When shall it be?" "Any time. If I'm not home, stay until I get back. Daddy likes you. You'll love my mother." The vague "any time" occurred three days later. Young VB made a special trip over the hills to the S Bar S. The girl was stretched in a hammock, reading, when he rode up, and at the sound of his horse she scrambled to her feet, flushed, and evidently disconcerted. "I'd given you up!" she cried. "In three days?" taking the hand she offered. "Well--most boys in the East would have come the next morning--if they were really interested." "This is Colorado," he reminded her. He sat crosslegged on the ground at her feet, and they talked of the book she had been reading. It was a novel of music and a musician and a rare achievement, she said. He questioned her about the story, and their talk drifted to music, on which they both could converse well. "You don't know what it means--to sit here and talk of these things with you," he said hungrily. "Well, I should like to know," she said, leaning forward over her knees. For two long hours they talked as they never had talked before; of personal tastes, of kindred enthusiasms, of books and plays and music and people. They went into the ranch house, and Gail played for him--on the only grand piano in that section of the state. They came out, and she saddled her pony to ride part way back through the hills with him. "_Adios,_ my friend," she called after him, as he swung away from her. "It's your turn to call now," he shouted back to her, and when the ridge took him from sight he leaned low to the Captain's ear and repeated gently,--"my friend!" So the barrier of reserve was broken. VB did not dare think into the future in any connection--least of all in relation to this new and growing friendship; yet he wanted to make their understanding more complete though he would scarcely admit that fact even to himself. A week had not passed when Gail Thorpe drove the automobile up to the VB gate. "I didn't come to see the Captain this time," she announced to them both. "I came to pay a party call to Mr. VB, and to include Mr. Avery. Because when a girl out here receives a visit from a man it's of party proportions!" As she was leaving, she asked, "Why don't you come down to the dance Friday night?" "A big event?" "Surely!" She laughed merrily. "It's the first one since spring, and everybody'll be there. Mr. Avery will surely come. Won't you, too, Mr. VB?" He evaded her, but when she had turned the automobile about and sped down the road, homeward bound, he let down the bars for youth's romanticism and knew that he would dance with her if it meant walking every one of the twenty-two miles to the schoolhouse. For the first time in years VB felt a thrill at the anticipation of a social function, and with it a guilty little thought kept buzzing in the depths of his mind. The thought was: Is her hair as fragrant as it is glorious in color and texture? Jed and VB made the ride after supper, over frozen paths, for autumn had aged and the tang of winter was in the air. Miles away they could see the glow of the bonfire that had been built before the little stone schoolhouse; and VB was not sorry that Jed wanted to ride the last stages of the trip at a faster pace. Clear River had turned out, to the last man and woman--and to the last child, too! The schoolhouse was no longer a seat of learning; it was a festal bower. The desks had been taken up and placed along the four walls, seats outward, tops forming a ledge against the calcimined stones, making a splendid place for those youngest children who had turned out! Yes, a dozen babies slumbered there in the confusion, wrapped in many thicknesses of blankets. Three lamps with polished reflectors were placed on window ledges, and the yellow glare filled the room with just sufficient brilliance to soften lines in faces and wrinkles in gowns that clung to bodies in unexpected places. The fourth window ledge was reserved for the music--a phonograph with a morning-glory horn, a green morning-glory horn that would have baffled a botanist. The stove blushed as if for its plainness in the center of the room, and about it, with a great scraping of feet and profound efforts to be always gentlemanly and at ease, circled the men, guiding their partners. VB stood in the doorway and watched. He coughed slightly from the dust that rose and mantled everything with a dulling blanket--everything, I said, but the eyes must be excepted. They flashed with as warm a brilliance as they ever do where there is music and dancing and laughter. The music stopped. Women scurried to their seats; some lifted the edges of blankets and peered with concerned eyes at the little sleepers lying there, then whirled about and opened their arms to some new gallant; for so brief was the interval between dances. "Well, are you never going to see me?" VB started at the sound of Gail's voice so close to him. He bowed and smiled at her. "I was interested," he said in excuse. "Getting my bearings." She did not reply, but the expectancy in her face forced his invitation, and they joined the swirl about the stove. "I can't dance in these riding boots," he confided with an embarrassed laugh. "Never thought about it until now." "Oh, yes, you can! You dance much better than most men. Don't stop, please!" He knew that no woman who danced with Gail's lightness could find pleasure in the stumbling, stilted accompaniment of his handicapped feet; and the conviction sent a fresh thrill through him. He was glad she wanted him to keep on! She had played upon the man down in him and touched upon vanity, one of those weak spots in us. She wanted him near. His arm, spite of his caution, tightened a trifle and he suddenly knew that her _hair_ was as fragrant as it should be--a heavy, rich odor that went well with its other wealth! For an instant he was a bit giddy, but as the music came to a stop he recovered himself and walked silently beside Gail to a seat. After that he danced with the wife of a cattleman, and answered absently her stammered advances at communication while he watched the floating figure of Gail Thorpe as it followed the bungling lead of her father's foreman. The end of the intermission found him with her again. As they whirled away his movements became a little quicker, his tongue a little looser. It had been a long time since he had felt so gay. He learned of the other women, Gail telling him about them as they danced, and through the thrill that her warm breath aroused he found himself delighting in the individuality of her expression, the stamping of a characteristic in his mind by a queer little word or twisted phrase. He discovered, too, that she possessed a penetrating insight into the latent realities of life. The red-handed, blunt, strong women about him, who could ride with their husbands and brothers, who could face hardships, who knew grim elementals, became new beings under the interpretation of this sunny-haired girl; took on a charm tinged with pathos that brought up within VB a sympathy that those struggles in himself had all but buried. And the knowledge that Gail appreciated those raw realities made him look down at her lingeringly, a trifle wonderingly. She was of that other life--the life of refinements--in so many ways, yet she had escaped its host of artificialities. She had lifted herself above the people among whom she was reared; but her touch, her sympathies, her warm humanness remained unalloyed! She was real. And then, when he was immersed in this appreciation of her, she turned the talk suddenly to him. He was but slightly responsive. He put her off, evaded, but he laughed; his cold reluctance to let her know him had ceased to be so stern, and her determination to get behind his silence rose. As they stood in the doorway in a midst of repartee she burst on him: "Mr. VB, why do you go about with that awful name? It's almost as bad as being branded." He sobered so quickly that it frightened her. "Maybe I am branded," he said slowly, and her agile understanding caught the significance of his tone. "Perhaps I'm branded and can't use another. Who knows?" He smiled at her, but from sobered eyes. Confused by his evident seriousness, she made one more attempt, and laughed: "Well, if you won't tell me who you are, won't you please tell me what you are?" The door swung open then, and on the heels of her question came voices from without. One voice rose high above the rest, and they heard: "Aw, come on; le's have jus' one more little drag at th' bottle!" VB looked at Gail a bit wildly. Those words meant that out there whisky was waiting for him, and at its mention that searing thing sprang alive in his throat! "What am I?" he repeated dully, trying to rally himself. "What am I?" Unknowingly his fingers gripped her arm. "Who knows? I don't!" And he flung out of the place, wanting but one thing--to be with the Captain, to feel the stallion's nose in his arms, to stand close to the body which housed a spirit that knew no defeat. As he strode past the bonfire a man's face leered at him from the far side. The man was Rhues. CHAPTER XV Murder The incident at the schoolhouse was not overlooked. Gail Thorpe was not the only one who heard and saw and understood; others connected the mention of drink with VB's sudden departure. The comment went around in whispers at the dance, to augment and amplify those other stories which had arisen back in the Anchor bunk house and which had been told by Rhues of the meeting in Ranger. "Young VB is afraid to take a drink," declared a youth to a group about the fire where they discussed the incident. He laughed lightly and Dick Worth looked sharply at the boy. "Mebby he is," he commented, reprimand in his tone, "an' mebby it'd be a good thing for some o' you kids if you was afraid. Don't laugh at him! We know he's pretty much man--'cause he's done real things since comin' in here a rank greenhorn. Don't laugh! You ought to help, instead o' that." And the young fellow, taking the rebuke, admitted: "I guess you're right. Maybe the booze has put a crimp in him." So VB gave the community one more cause for watching him. Quick to perceive, ever taking into consideration his achievements which spoke of will and courage, Clear River gave him silent sympathy, and promptly put the matter out of open discussion. It was no business of theirs so long as VB kept it to himself. Yet they watched, knowing a fight was being waged and guessing at the outcome, the older and wiser ones hoping while they guessed. When Bob Thorpe announced to his daughter that he was going to Jed Avery's ranch and would like to have her drive him over through the first feathery dusting of snow, a strain of unpleasant thinking which had endured for three days was broken for the girl. In fact, her relief was so evident that the cattleman stared hard at his daughter. "You're mighty enthusiastic about that place, seems to me," he remarked. "Why shouldn't I be?" she asked. "There's where they keep the finest horse in this country!" "Is that all?" he asked, a bit grimly. She looked at him and laughed. Then, coming close, she patted one of the weathered cheeks. "He's awfully nice, daddy--and so mysterious!" The giggle she forced somehow reassured him. He did not know it was forced. They arrived at Jed's ranch as Kelly, the horse buyer, was preparing to depart after long weeks in the country. His bunch was in the lower pasture and two saddle horses waited at the gate. Thorpe and his daughter found Jed, VB, and Kelly in the cabin. The horse buyer was just putting bills back into his money belt, and Jed still fingered the roll that he had taken for his horses. "Aren't you afraid to pack all that around, Kelly?" Thorpe asked. "No--nobody holds people up any more," he laughed. "There's only an even six hundred there, anyhow--and a fifty-dollar bill issued by the Confederate States of America, which I carry for luck. My father was a raider with Morgan," he explained, "and I was fifteen years old before I knew 'damn Yank' was two words!" VB was preparing to go with the buyer, to ride the first two days at least to help him handle the bunch. They expected to make it well out of Ranger the second day, and after that Kelly would pick up another helper. Gail followed VB when he went outside. "I'm going away, too," she said. "So?" "Yes; mother and I will leave for California day after to-morrow, for the winter." "That will be fine!" "Will I be missed?" He shrank from this personal talk. He remembered painfully their last meeting. He was acutely conscious of how it had ended, and knew that the incident of his abrupt departure must have set her wondering. "Yes," he answered, meeting her answer truthfully, "I shall miss you. I like you." Such a thing from him was indeed a jolt, and Gail stooped to pick up a wisp of hay to cover her confusion. "But I'm sorry," he said, "I must be going." She looked up in surprise. The horse buyer still talked and the discussion bade fair to go on for a long time. "You're not starting?" she asked. "Oh, no. Not for half an hour, anyhow. But you see, the Captain found a pup-hole yesterday and wrenched his leg a little. Not much, but I don't want him to work when anything's wrong. So I'm leaving him behind and I must look after him. Will you excuse me? Good-by!" She was so slow in extending her hand that he was forced to reach down for it. It was limp within his, and she merely mumbled a response to his hasty farewell. Gail watched him swing off toward the corral, saw him enter through the gate and put his face against the stallion's neck. She strolled toward the car, feet heavy. "He wouldn't even ask me to go--go with him. He cares more about--that horse--than--" She clenched her fists and whispered: "I hate you! I hate you!" Then mounting to the seat and tucking the robe about her ankles, she blew her nose, wiped her eyes, and in a voice strained high said: "No, I don't, either." VB and Kelly took their bunch down the gulch at a spanking trot. Most of the stock was fairly gentle and they had little difficulty. They planned to stop at a deserted cabin a few miles north of Ranger where a passable remnant of fenced pasture still remained. They reached the place at dark and made a hasty meal, after which VB rolled in, but his companion roped a fresh horse and made on to Ranger for a few hours' diversion. It was nearly dawn when Kelly returned with a droll account of the night's poker, and although VB was for going on early, wanting to be rid of the task, the other insisted on sleeping. "I don't want to get too far, anyhow," he said. "Those waddies like to rimmed me last night. Got all I had except what's in old Betsy, the belt. I'm goin' back to-night and get their scalp!" It was noon before they reached Ranger and swung to the east. "Oh, I'll be back to-night and get you fellows!" Kelly called to a man who waved to him from the saloon. VB held his gaze in the opposite direction. He knew that even the sight of the place might raise the devil in him again. A man emerged from one of the three isolated shacks down on the river bank. It was Rhues. The two rode slowly, for the buyer was in no mood for fast travel, and for a long time Rhues stood there following them with his eyes. At dusk the horsemen turned the bunch into a corral and prepared to spend the night with beds spread in the ruin of a cabin near the inclosure. Before the bed-horses had been relieved of their burdens a cowboy rode along who was known to Kelly, and arrangements were made for him to take VB's place on the morrow. "Well, then, all you want me to do is to stay here to-night to see that things don't go wrong. Is that it?" VB asked. "Yep-- Oh, I don't know," with a yawn. "I guess I won't sit in that game to-night. I'll get some sleep. Mebby if I did go back I'd only have to dig up part of my bank here." He patted his waist. "You can go on home if you want to." VB was glad to be released, for he could easily reach the ranch that night. He left Kelly talking with the cowboy, making their plans for the next day, and struck across the country for Jed's ranch. Left alone, the horse buyer munched a cold meal. Then, shivering, he crept into his thick bed and slept. An hour passed--two--three. A horse dropped slowly off a point near the corral. A moment later two more followed. One rider dismounted and walked away after a low, hoarse whisper; another pushed his horse into the highway and stood still, listening; the third held the pony that had been left riderless. A figure, worming its way close to the ground, crawled up on the sleeping horse buyer. It moved silently, a yard at a time; then stopped, raised its head as though to listen; on again, ominously, so much a part of the earth it covered that it might have been just the ridge raised by a giant mole burrowing along under the surface. It approached to within three yards of the sleeping man; to within six feet; three; two. Then it rose to its knees slowly, cautiously, silently, and put out a hand gently, lightly feeling the outlines of the blankets. A shoot of orange scorched the darkness--and another, so close together that the flame was almost continuous. The blankets heaved, trembled, settled. The man on his knees hovered a long moment, revolver ready, listening intently. Not a sound--even the horses seemed to be straining their ears for another break in the night. The man reached out a hand and drew the blankets away from the figure beneath, thrusting his face close. The starlight filtered in and he drew a long, quivering breath--not in hate or horror, but in surprise. He got to his feet and listened again. Then he moved into the open, over the way he had come. After a dozen quick, stealthy paces he stopped and turned back. He unbuttoned the jumper about the figure under the blankets, unbuttoned the shirt, felt quickly about the waist, fumbled a moment, and jerked out a long, limp object. Again he strode catlike into the open, and as he went he tucked the money belt into his shirt-front. VB rode straight to the ranch. He made a quick ride and arrived before ten. "Mighty glad Kelly got that man," he told Jed. "I'm like a fish out of water away from the Captain." At dusk the next day a horseman rode up the gulch to Jed's outfit. The old man stood in the doorway, watching him approach. "Hello, Dick!" he called, recognizing the deputy from Sand Creek. "How's things, Jed?" "Better'n fine." Worth left his horse and entered the cabin. "VB around?" he asked. "Uh-huh; out in th' corral foolin' with th' Captain." Dick dropped to a chair and pushed his hat back. He looked on the other a moment, then asked: "What time did VB get home last night?" Jed showed evident surprise, but answered: "Between half-past nine an' ten." "Notice his horse?" "Saw him this mornin'. Why?" "Was it a hard ride th' boy made?" "No--sure not. I rode th' pony down to th' lower pasture myself this afternoon." Worth drew a deep breath and smiled as though relieved. "Bein' 'n officer is mighty onpleasant sometimes," he confessed. "I knew it wasn't no use to ask them questions, but I had to do it--'cause I'm a deputy." With mouth set, Jed waited for the explanation he knew must come. "Kelly was killed while he slept last night." Horror was the first natural impulse for a man to experience on the knowledge of such a tragedy, but horror did not come to Jed Avery then or for many minutes. He put out a hand slowly and felt for the table as though dizzy. Then, in a half tone, "You don't mean you suspected VB? Dick--_Dick!_" The sheriff's face became troubled. "Jed, didn't I tell you I knew it wasn't no use to ask them questions?" he said reassuringly. "I'd 'a' gambled my outfit on th' boy, 'cause I know what he is. When you tell me he got here by ten an' it wasn't a hard ride, I know they's no use even thinkin' about it. But th' fact is-- "You see, Jed, everybody in th' country has got to know what's up with VB. They know he's fightin' back th' booze! That gang o' skunks down at Ranger--Rhues an' his outfit--started out to rub it into VB, but everybody knew they was tellin' lies. An' everybody's thought lots of him fer th' fight he's made." He got to his feet and walked slowly about the room. "But th' truth is, Jed--an' you know it--when a man's been hittin' th' booze, an' we ain't sure he's beat it out, we're always lookin' fer him to slip. Nobody down at Ranger has thought one word about VB in this, only that mebby he could tell who'd been round there. "But, bein' 'n officer, I had th' sneakin', dirty idee I ought to ask them questions about VB. That's all there is to it, Jed. That's all! I'm deputy; VB's been a boozer. "But I tell you, Jed Avery, it sure's a relief to know it's all right." The warmth of sincerity was in his tone and his assurances had been of the best, but Jed slumped limply into a chair and rested his head on his hands. "It's a rotten world, Dick--a rotten, rotten world!" he said. "I know you're all right; I know you mean what you say; but ain't it a shame that when a man's down our first thought is to kick him? Always expect him to fall again once he gets up! Ain't it rotten?" And his love for Young VB, stirred anew by this sense of the injustice of things, welled into his throat, driving back more words. Dick Worth was a man of golden integrity; Jed knew well that no suspicion would be cast on VB. But the knowledge that serious-minded, clear-thinking men like the deputy would always remember, in a time like this, that those who had once run wild might fall into the old ways at any hour, stung him like a lash. VB opened the door. "Hello, Dick!" he greeted cheerily. "Want me?" Worth laughed and Jed started. "No; I come up to get a little help from you if I can, though." "Help?" "Kelly was shot dead in his bed last night." For a moment VB stared at him. "Who?" "That's what we don't know. That's what I came up here for--to see if you could help us." And Jed, face averted, drew a foot quickly across the boards of the floor. "One of Hank Redden's boys was with him--th' one who took your place--until dark. Little after eight old Hank heard two shots, but didn't think nothin' of it. Kelly was shot twice. That must 'a' been th' time." VB put down his hat, his eyes bright with excitement. "He'd planned to go back to Ranger," he said. "But, after being up most of the night before, he was too tired. He told them at Ranger he'd be back. And if I'd been there they'd have got me," he ended. "Unless they was lookin' for Kelly especial," said Dick. "They took his money belt." "Mebby," muttered Jed,--"mebby they made a mistake." CHAPTER XVI The Candle Burns Time went on, and the country dropped back from the singing pitch of excitement to which the killing of the horse buyer raised it. Men agreed that some one of that country had fired the shots into that blanket, but it is not a safe thing to suspect too openly. Dick Worth worked continually, but his efforts were without result. A reward of two hundred and fifty dollars for the slayer, dead or alive, disclosed nothing. After the evidence had been sifted, and each man had asked his quota of questions and passed judgment on the veracity of the myriad stories, Dick said to himself: "We'll settle down now and see who leaves the country." Jed and VB went about the winter's work in a leisurely way. For days after the visit of Worth the old man was quieter than usual. The realization of how the world looked on this young fellow he had come to love had been driven in upon him. There could be no mistaking it; and as he reasoned the situation out, he recognized the attitude of men as the only logical thing to expect. With his quietness came a new tenderness, a deeper devotion. The two sat, one night, listening to the drawing of the stove and the whip of the wind as it sucked down the gulch. The candle burned steadily in its bottle. Jed watched it a long time, and, still gazing at the steady flame, he said, as though unconscious that thoughts found vocal expression: "Th' candle's burnin' bright, VB." The other looked slowly around at it and smiled. "Yes, Jed; it surely burns bright." At the instant an unusually vicious gust of wind rattled the windows and a vagrant draft caught the flame of the taper, bending it low, dulling its orange. "But yet sometimes," the younger man went on, "something comes along--something that makes it flicker--that takes some of the assurance from it." Jed had started in his chair as the flame bowed before the draft. "But it-- You ain't been flickerin' lately, have you?" he asked, with a look in the old eyes that was beseeching. Young VB rose and commenced to walk about thumbs hooked in his belt. "I don't know, Jed," he said. "That's the whole of it: I don't know. Sometimes I'm glad I don't; but other times I wish--_wish_ that whatever is coming would come. I seem to be gaining; I can think of drink now without going crazy. Now and then it gets hold of me; but moving around and getting busy stifles it. Still, I know it's there. That's what counts. I know I've had the habit, been down and out, and there's no telling which way it's going to turn. If I could ever be sure of myself; if I could ever come right up against it, where I needed a drink, where I wanted it--then, if I could refuse, I'd be sure." He quickened his stride. "Seems to me you're worryin' needless," Jed argued. "Don't you see, VB, this is th' worst night we've had; th' worst wind. An' yet it ain't blowed th' candle out! It bends low an' gets smoky, to be sure. But it always keeps on shinin'!" "But when it bends low and gets smoky its resistance is lower," VB said. "It wouldn't take much at such a time to blow it out and let the darkness come in. You never can tell, Jed; you never can tell." Ten minutes later he added: "Especially when you're afraid of yourself and daren't hunt out a test." Another time they talked of the man that he had been before he came to Colt. They were riding the hills, the Captain snuggling close to the pinto pony Jed rode. The sun poured its light down on the white land. Far away, over on the divide, they could see huge spirals of snow picked up by the wind and carried along countless miles, finally to be blasted into veils of silver dust that melted away into distance. An eagle flapped majestically to a perch on a scrub cedar across the gulch; a dozen deer left off their browsing, watched the approach of the riders a moment, and then bounded easily away. The sharp air set their blood running high, and it was good to live. "Ain't this a good place, VB?" Jed asked, turning his eyes away from a snow-capped crag that thrust into the heavens fifty miles to the east. VB slapped the Captain's neck gladly. "I never saw a finer, Jed!" he cried. "If those people back in New York could only get the _feel_ of this country! You bet if they once did, it would empty that dinky little island." "You never want to go back?" the older man ventured. VB did not answer for a long time. When he did he said: "Some day I shall go back, Jed, but not to stay. I will not go back, either, until I've come to be as good and as strong a man as the Captain is a good and strong horse. That's something to set up as a goal, isn't it? But I mean every word. When I left the city I was--nothing. When I go back I want to be everything that a man should be--as this old fellow is everything that a horse should be." He leaned forward and pulled the Captain's ears fondly, while the stallion champed the bit and lifted his forefeet high in play. VB straightened then, and looked dreamily ahead. "I hope that time will come before a man there gets to the end of things. He was hard with me, my father, Jed--mighty hard. But I know he was right. Perhaps I'm not doing all I could for his comfort, perhaps I'm making a bad gamble, but when I go back I want to be as I believe every man can be--at some time in his life." He turned his eyes on the little, huddled figure that rode at his side. "Then, when I've seen New York once more, with all its artificiality and dishonest motives and its unrealities--from the painted faces of its women to its very reasons for living and doing--I'll come back here, Jed; back to the Captain and to the hills. "I've seen the other! Oh, I've seen it, not from the ground up, but from the ground down! I've gone to the very subcellars of rottenness--and there's nothing to attract. But here there's a bigness, a freedom, an incentive to be real that you won't find in places where men huddle together and lie and cheat and scheme!" They returned to the ranch in late afternoon and found that a passing cowboy had left mail for them--papers and circulars--and a picture postal card. VB had picked up the bundle of mail first, and for a long time he gazed at the gaudy colorings of that card. Palm trees, faultlessly kept lawns, a huge, rambling building set back from the road that formed a foreground, and a glimpse of a superblue Pacific in the distance. He held it in his fingers and took in every detail. Then, with a queer little feeling about his middle, he turned it over. A small hand--he remembered just how firm the fingers were that held the pen--had written: +--------------------------+ | Mr. VB | | Ranger, Colorado | +--------------------------+ And across the correspondence section of the card was inscribed this: Give my very best regards to the Captain and to Mr. Avery. Home early in April. He read the message again and again, looking curiously at the way she had formed the letters. Then he muttered: "Why didn't she send it to Jed--or to the Captain?" When Jed came into the cabin VB asked him, as though it were a matter of great concern: "Where's that calendar we had around here?" That night the young fellow lay awake long hours. The thirst had come again. Not so ravishing as it used to be, not inspiring all the old terror, but still it was there, and as it tugged at his throat and teased from every fiber of his being, he thought of Gail Thorpe--and tossed uneasily. "Why?" he asked himself. "Why is it that the thirst calls so loudly when I think of that girl?" He could not answer, and suddenly the query seemed so portentous that he sat up in bed, prying the darkness with his eyes, as though to find a solution of the enigma there. And his wandering mind, circling and doubling and shooting out in crazy directions, settled back on the Captain, and with it the hurt of his jumping nerves became dulled. He closed his eyes, picturing the great stallion as he had first seen him, standing there on a little rim-rock protecting his band of mares, watching with regal scorn the approach of his adversary. "And his spirit didn't break," VB muttered. "It's all there, just as sound as it ever was--but it's standing for different things. It's no longer defiance--it's love." When March was well on its way Jed and VB drove to Ranger for more supplies. The Captain had been turned into the lower pasture, and followed them as far as he could. When stopped by the fence he stood looking after them inquiringly, and when they topped a little swell in the road, ready to drop out of sight, a long-drawn neighing came from him. "Poor Captain!" muttered VB. "It's like going away from a home--to leave him." "You're foolish!" snorted Jed. Later he said sharply: "No, you ain't, either!" When they reached Ranger three cowboys were shooting at a tin can out on the flat, and before entering the store they stopped to watch. A man came out of the saloon and walked swiftly toward the buildings along the road. As he approached both recognized Rhues. "Better come in," said Jed, moving toward the door. "Wait!" With apparent carelessness VB lounged against a post that supported the wooden awning. Rhues slowed his pace a trifle as he saw who the men were, and VB could see his mouth draw into an expression of nasty hate as he passed close and entered the blacksmith shop. No further sign of recognition had passed between them. When the trading was finished and they walked back toward the corral Jed remarked uneasily: "I don't feel right--havin' you around Rhues, VB. He's bound to try to get you some time. I know his breed. He'll never forget th' beatin' you give him, an' th' first time he sees an openin' he'll try for you. Men like him lives just to settle one big grudge--nothin' else counts." VB raised a hand to his side and gripped the forty-five that was slung in a shoulder holster under his shirt. "I know it, Jed. I hate to pack this gun--makes me feel like a yellow dog or a Broadway cow-puncher--I don't know which. But I know he means business. I don't want to let him think I'd step an inch out of his way, though; that's why I didn't go into the store." He lowered his voice and went on: "Jed, I wouldn't say a word that would send the worst man in the world into trouble with the law unless I was absolutely certain. I've never mentioned it even to you--but I think when Kelly was killed the man who did that shooting believed he was getting me." Jed spat lingeringly. "VB, I've thought so, too," he said. They reached the ranch the next afternoon, greeted by a shrilling from the Captain that endured from the time they came in sight until VB was beside him. "Captain," the boy whispered, rubbing the velvety nose, "making them respect you is worth having a gunman on my trail--it is." CHAPTER XVII Great Moments They were a long way from camp, and night impended. "We won't go back," Jed decided. "We'll go on over to th' S Bar S an' put up for th' night." VB said nothing, but of a sudden his heart commenced to hammer away so lustily that the pulse in the back of his neck felt like blows from metal. It was beyond the middle of April, and he knew that Gail must have returned from the coast; for days he had been wondering when he would see her again, had been itching to ask questions of every chance passer who might know of her return. Yet that unaccountable diffidence had kept him from mentioning it even to Jed. Now, though, that he was to go for himself, that he was to see her-- He gripped the Captain fiercely with his knees. He told himself, in an attempt to be sane, that this discomfiture was merely because he had been out of the sight of women so long. They rode into the Thorpe ranch after dark. Lights shone from the windows, and Jed, knowing the place, declared that they were eating. "Hello, Bob!" he cried when Thorpe himself threw the door open. "Keep a couple of stoppers to-night?" "Well, Jed, you're a rough-looking old rascal; but I s'pose we'll have to take you in. Who else--that young animal-tamer, VB?" "Right!" laughed Jed. VB, peering into the lighted room, saw a figure jump up from the table and hurry toward the door. As it came between him and the light it seemed to be crowned with a halo, a radiant, shimmering, golden aura. Then her voice called in welcome: "Hello, Mr. Avery!" Before Jed could make answer she had gone on, as though ignoring him. "Hello, Mr. VB! Aren't you coming in to shake hands?" VB wanted to laugh, like a boy with a new gun; his spirits bubbled up into his throat and twisted into laughter any words that might have formed, but he managed to answer: "I'll feed the Captain--then I'll be in." Without a word she turned back. Long ago--years ago, it seemed--he had drawn away from her to go to the Captain; then it was the love of the horse that took him. Now, however, it was nothing but confusion that drove him away. Not that he held the Captain less dear, but he wanted to put off that meeting with Gail, to delay until he could overcome that silly disorganization of his powers of self-control. Out in the corral he flung his arms about the black's head and laughed happily into the soft neck. "VB, you're a fool--a silly fool!" he whispered. But if it was so, if being a fool made him that happy, he never wanted to regain mental balance. It was a big evening for VB, perhaps the biggest of his life. Bob Thorpe and his family ate with the men. Democracy unalloyed was in his soul. He mingled with them not through condescension, but through desire, and his family maintained the same bearing. Not a cow-puncher in the country but who respected Mrs. Thorpe and Gail and would welcome an opportunity to fight for them. The men had finished their meal before VB and Jed entered. Mrs. Thorpe made excuses and went out, leaving the four alone. While Jed talked to her father, Gail, elbows on the table, chatted with VB, and Young VB could only stare at his plate and snatch a glance at her occasionally and wonder why it was that she so disturbed him. Later Bob took Jed into his office, and when Gail and VB were left alone the constraint between them became even more painful. Try as he would, the man could not bring his scattered wits together for coherent speech. Just being beside that girl after her long absence was intoxicating, benumbing his mind, stifling in him all thought and action, creating a thralldom which was at once agony and peace. An intuitive sensing of this helplessness had made him delay seeing her that evening; now that he was before her he never wanted to leave; he wanted only to sit and listen to her voice and watch the alert expressiveness of her face--a mute, humble worshiper. And this attitude of his forced a reaction on the girl. At first she talked vivaciously, starting each new subject with an enthusiasm that seemed bound to draw him out, but when he remained dumb and helpless in spite of her best efforts to keep the conversation going, her flow of words lagged. Long, wordless intervals followed, and a flush came into the girl's cheeks, and she too found herself woefully self-conscious. She sought for the refuge of diversion. "Since you won't talk to me, Mr. VB," she said with an embarrassed laugh, "you are going to force me to play for you." "It isn't that I won't--I _can't_," he stammered. "And please play." He sat back in his chair, relieved, and watched the fine sway of her body as she made the big full-toned instrument give up its soul. Music, that--not the tunes that most girls of his acquaintance had played for him; a St. Saens arrangement, a MacDowell sketch, a bit of Nevin, running from one theme into another, easily, naturally, grace everywhere, from the phrasing to the movements of her firm little shoulders. And VB found his self-possession returning, found that he was thinking evenly, sanely, under the quieting influence of this music. Then Gail paused, sitting silent before the keyboard, as though to herald a coming climax. She leaned closer over the instrument and struck into the somber strains of a composition of such grim power and beauty that it seemed to create for itself an oddly receptive attitude in the man, sensitizing his emotional nature to a point where its finest shades were brought out in detail. It went on and on through its various phases to the end, and on the heavy final chord the girl's hands dropped into her lap. For a moment she sat still bent toward the keyboard before turning to him. When she did face about her flush was gone. She was again mistress of the situation and said: "Well, are you ever going to tell me about yourself?" VB's brows were drawn, and his eyes closed, but before he opened them to look at her a peculiar smile came over his face. "That man Chopin, and his five-flat prelude--" he said, and stirred with a helpless little gesture of one hand as though no words could convey the appreciation he felt. "I wonder if you like that as well as I do?" she asked. He sat forward in his chair and looked hard at her. The constraint was wholly gone; he was seriously intent, thinking clearing, steadily now. "I used to hear it many times," he said slowly, "and each time I've heard it, it has meant more to me. There's something about it, deep down, covered up by all those big tones, that I never could understand--until now. I guess," he faltered, "I guess I've never realized how much a man has to suffer before he can do a big thing like that. Something about this,"--with a gesture of his one hand,--"this house and these hills, and what I've been through out here, and the way you play, helps me to understand what an accomplishment like that must have cost." She looked at him out of the blue eyes that had become so grave, and said: "I guess we all have to suffer to do big things; but did you ever think how much we have to suffer to appreciate big things?" And she went on talking in this strain with a low, even voice, talking for hours, it seemed, while VB listened and wondered at her breadth of view, her sympathy and understanding. She was no longer a little, sunny-haired girl, a bit of pretty down floating along through life. Before, he had looked on her as such; true, he had known her as sympathetic, balanced, with a keen appreciation of values. But her look, her tone, her insight into somber, grim truths came out with emphasis in the atmosphere created by that music, and to Young VB, Gail Thorpe had become a woman. A silence came, and they sat through it with that ease which comes only to those who are in harmony. No constraint now, no flushed faces, no awkward meeting of eyes. The new understanding which had come made even silence eloquent and satisfying. Then the talk commenced, slowly at first, gradually quickening. It was of many things--of her winter, of her days in the East, of her friends. And through it Gail took the lead, talking as few women had ever talked to him before; talking of personalities, yet deviating from them to deduce a principle here, apply a maxim there, and always showing her humanness by building the points about individuals and the circumstances which surround them. "Don't you ever get lonely here?" he asked abruptly, thinking that she must have moments of discontent in these mountains and with these people. "No. Why should I?" "Well, you've been used to things of a different sort. It seems to be a little rough for a girl--like you." "And why shouldn't a nicer community be too fine for a girl like me?" she countered. "I'm of this country, you know. It's mine." "I hadn't thought of that. You're different from these people, and yet," he went on, "you're not like most women outside, either. You've seemed to combine the best of the two extremes. You--" He looked up to see her gazing at him with a light of triumph in her face. VB never knew, but it was that hour for which she had waited months, ever since the time when she declared to her father, with a welling admiration for the spirit he must have, that he who broke the Captain was a _man_. Here he was before her, talking personalities, analyzing her! Four months before he would not even linger to say good-by! Surely the spell of her womanhood was on him. "Oh!" she cried, bringing her hands together. "So you've been thinking about me--what sort of a girl I am, have you?" Her eyes were aflame with the light of conquest. Then she said soberly: "Well, it's nice to have people taking you seriously, anyhow." "That's all any of us want," he answered her; "to be taken seriously, and to be worthy of commanding such an attitude from the people about us. Sometimes we don't realize it until we've thrown away our best chances and then--well, maybe it's too late." On the words he felt a sudden misgiving, a sudden waning of faith. And, bringing confusion to his ears, was the low voice of this girl-woman saying: "I understand, VB, I understand. And it's never too late to mend!" Her hand lay in her lap, and almost unconsciously he reached out for it. It came to meet his, frankly, quickly, and his frame was racked by a great, dry sob which came from the depths of his soul. "Oh, do you understand, Gail?" he whispered doubtfully. "Can you--without knowing?" He had her hands in both his and strained forward, his face close to hers. The small, firm fingers clutched his hardened ones almost desperately and the blue eyes, so wide now, looking at him so earnestly, were filmed with tears. "I think I've understood all along," she said, keeping her voice even at the cost of great effort. "I don't know it all--the detail, I mean. I don't need to. I know you've been fighting, VB, nobly, bravely. I know--" He rose to his feet and drew her up with him, pulling her close to him, closer and closer. One arm slipped down over her shoulders, uncertainly, almost timidly. His face bent toward hers, slowly, tenderly, and she lifted her lips to meet it. It was the great moment of his life. Words were out of place; they would have been puerile, disturbing sounds, a mockery instead of an agency to convey an idea of the strength of his emotions. He could feel her breath on his cheek, and for an instant he hung above her, delaying the kiss, trembling with the tremendous passion within him. And then he backed away from her--awkwardly, threatening to fall, a limp hand raised toward the girl as though to warn her off. "Oh, Gail, forgive me!" he moaned. "Not yet! Great God, Gail, I'm not worthy!" His hoarse voice mounted and he stood backed against the far wall, fists clenched and stiff arms upraised. She took a faltering step toward him. "Don't!" she begged. "You are--you--" But he was gone into the night, banging the door behind him, while the girl leaned against her piano and let the tears come. He was not worthy! He loved; she knew he loved; she had come to meet that great binding, enveloping emotion willingly, frank with the joy of it, as became her fine nature. Then he had run from her, and for her own sake! All the ordeals he had been through in those last months were as brief, passing showers compared with the tempest that raged in him as he rode through the night; and it continued through the hours of light and of darkness for many days. Young VB was a man who feared his own love, and beyond that there can be no greater horror. He sought solace in the Captain, in driving himself toward the high mark he had set out to attain, but the ideal exemplified in the noble animal seemed more unattainable than ever and he wondered at times if the victory he sought were not humanly impossible. The knowledge that only by conquering himself could he keep his love for Gail Thorpe unsullied never left him, and beside it a companion haunter stalked through and through his consciousness--the fact that they had declared themselves to each other. He was carrying not alone the responsibility of reclaiming his own life; he must also answer for the happiness of a woman! In those days came intervals when he wondered if this thing were really love. Might it not be something else--a passing hysteria, a reaction from the inner battle? But he knew it was a love stronger than his will, stronger than his great tempter, stronger than the prompting to think of the future when he saw the Thorpe automobile coming up the road that spring day on the first trip the girl had made to the ranch that year. And under the immense truth of the realization he became bodily weak. Doubt of his strength, too, became more real, more insistent than it had ever been; its hateful power mingled with the thirst, and his heart was rent. What if that love should prove stronger than this discretion which he had retained at such fearful cost, and drag him to her with the stigma he still bore and wreck her! Gail saw the constraint in him the instant she left the car, and though their handclasp was firm and long and understanding, it sobered her smile. She tried to start him talking on many things as they sat alone in the log house, but it was useless. He did not respond. So, turning to the subject that had always roused him, that she knew to be so close to his heart, she asked for the Captain. "In the corral," said VB, almost listlessly. "We'll go out." So they went together and looked through the gate at the great animal. The Captain stepped close and stretched his nose for Gail to rub, pushing gently against her hand in response. "Oh, you noble thing!" she whispered to him. "When you die, is all that strength of yours to be wasted? Can't it be given to some one else?" She looked full on VB, then down at the ground, and said: "You've never told me how you broke the Captain. No one in the country knows. They know that he almost killed you; that you fought him a whole week. But no one knows how. Won't--won't you tell me? I want to know, because it was a real achievement--and _yours_." He met her gaze when it turned upward, and for many heartbeats they stood so, looking at each other. Then VB's eyes wavered and he moved a step, leaning on the bars and staring moodily at the stallion. "It hurts to think about it," he said. "I don't like to remember. That is why I have never told any one. It hurt him and it hurt me." She waited through the silence that followed for him to go on. "I've worked and rubbed it and curried it, and nursed the hair to grow over the place. It looks just like a cinch mark now--like the mark of service. No one would ever notice. But it isn't a mark of labor. _I_ marked the Captain--I had to do it--had to make him understand me. It laid his side open, and all the nursing, all the care I could give wouldn't make up for it. It's there. The Captain knows it; so do I." She followed his gaze to the little rough spot far down on the sleek side. "All wild things have to be broken," she said. "None of them ever become tame of their own volition. And in the breaking a mark is invariably left. The memory hurts, but the mark means nothing of itself, once it is healed. Don't you realize that? "We all bear marks. The marks of our environment, the marks of our friends, the marks of those we--we love. Some of them hurt for a time, but in the end it is all good. Don't you believe that? We see those who are very dear to us suffer, and it marks us; sometimes just loving leaves its mark. But--those are the greatest things in the world. They're sacred. "The marks on a woman who goes through fire for a man, say; the marks of a--a mother. They hurt, but in the end they make the bond tighter, more holy." She waited. Then asked again: "Don't you believe that?" After a long pause VB answered in a peculiarly bitter voice: "I wish I knew what I believe--if I do believe!" CHAPTER XVIII The Lie VB's eyes burned after Gail as she drove away. He followed the car in its flight until it disappeared over the hump in the road; then continued staring in that direction with eyes that did not see--that merely burned like his throat. Jed came up the gulch with a load of wood, and VB still stood by the gate. "I never can get used to these here city ways," he grumbled, "no more'n can these ponies." VB noticed casually that a tug had been broken and was patched with rope. "Runaway?" he asked, scarcely conscious of putting the question. "Oh, Bob Thorpe's girl come drivin' her automobile along fit to ram straight through kingdom come, an' don't turn out till she gets so close I thought we was done for; to be sure, I did. Peter, here, took a jump an' busted a tug." He looked keenly at VB. "Funny!" he remarked. "She didn't see me, I know. An' she looked as if she'd been cryin'!" He could not know the added torture those words carried to the heart of the young fellow battling there silently, covering up his agony, trying to appear at ease. For the thirst had returned with manifold force, augmenting those other agonies which racked him. All former ordeals were forgotten before the fury of this assault. By the need of stimulant he was subjected to every fiendish whim of singing nerves; from knowing that in him was a love which must be killed to save a woman from sacrifice arose a torment that reached into his very vitals. The glands of his mouth stopped functioning, and it seemed as though only one thing would take the cursed dryness from his tongue and lips. His fingers would not be still; they kept plucking and reaching out for that hidden chord which would draw him back to himself, or on down into the depths--somehow, he did not care which. Anything to be out of that killing uncertainty! As he had gained in strength during those months, so it now seemed had the thirst grown. It battered down his spirit, whipped it to a pulp, and dragged it through the sloughs of doubt and despair. His will--did he have a will? He did not know; nor did he seem to care. It had come--the slipping backward. He had battled well, but now he could feel himself going, little by little, weakening, fighting outwardly but at heart knowing the futility of it all. And going because of Gail Thorpe! "I can't put this mark on her!" he moaned against the Captain's neck. "She said it--that even those we love must bear the mark. And she said it was all good. She was wrong, wrong! Such a thing can't be good! "Suppose I did keep above it, was sure of myself for a time in a sham way, wouldn't it only be running the risk of a greater disaster? Wouldn't it surely come some time? Wouldn't it, if-- "And then it would kill her, too!" He hammered the Captain's shoulder with his clenched fist and the great stallion snuggled his cheek closer to the man, trying to understand, trying to comfort. Then would come moments when his will rallied and Young VB fought with the ferocity of a jungle cat, walking back and forth across the corral, talking to the Captain, condemning his weaker self, gesticulating, promising. At those times he doubted whether it was so much the actual thirst that tore him as it was wondering if he could be worthy of her. Then the old desire would come again, in an engulfing wave, and his fighting would become empty words. Jed, who had ridden up the gulch to look after a gap in the fence, returned at dusk. As he watched VB feed the Captain he saw in the gloom the straining of the boy's face; heard him talk to the stallion piteously; and the old man's lips framed silent words. "If it's that girl," he declared, shaking his fist at the skies--"if it's that girl, she ought to be--ought to be spanked. An' if it's th' wantin' of whisky, God pity th' boy!" Supper was a curious affair. VB tried to help in the preparation but spoiled everything he touched, so far removed was his mind from the work of his hands. Jed ate alone. VB sat down, but could not touch the food offered. He gulped coffee so steaming hot that Jed cried aloud a warning. "Burned?" scoffed VB. "Burned by that stuff? Jed, you don't know what burning is!" He got to his feet and paced the floor, one hand pressed against his throat. The boy sat down twice again and drank from the cup the old man kept filled, but his lips rebelled at food; his hands would not carry it from the plate. Once Jed rose and tried to restrain the pacing. "VB, boy," he implored, "set down an' take it easy. Please do! It's been bad before, you know, but it's always turned out good in th' end. It will this time--same as always. Just--" "Don't, Jed." He spoke weakly, averting his white face and pushing the old man away gently with trembling hands. "You don't understand; you don't understand!" For the first time he was beyond comfort from the little old man who had showed him the lighted way, who had encouraged and comforted and held faith in him. After a while a calm fell on VB and he stopped his walking, helped with the work, and then sat, still and white, in his chair. Jed watched him narrowly and comfort came to the old soul, for he believed the boy had won another fight over the old foe; was so sure of it that he whistled as he prepared for the night. The candle burned on, low against the neck of the bottle, but still bright and steady. VB watched it, fascinated, thought tagging thought through his mind. Then a tremor shot through his body. "Jed," he said in a voice that was strained but even, "let's play a little pitch, won't you?" It was his last hope, the last attempt to divert the attack on his will and bolster his waning forces. His nerves jumped and cringed and quivered, but outwardly he was calm, his face drawn to mask the torture. Jed, aroused, rubbed his sleepy eyes and lighted his pipe. He put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and took down the greasy, cornerless deck of cards to shuffle them slowly, with method, as though it were a rite. VB sat motionless and a little limp in his chair, too far from the table for comfortable playing. Jed peered at him over his glasses. "You might get th' coffee beans," he said, with a great yawn. When the other did not answer he said again: "You might get th' coffee beans, VB. Sleepy?" The young chap arose then to follow the suggestion, but ignored the query. He went to the cupboard and brought back a handful of the beans, the cowman's poker chips. His hand was waiting for him. "Good deal?" Jed asked. VB shook his head. "Not better than a couple." "O-ho, I'm better off!" and Jed slammed down the ace of hearts. VB leaned low and played the four-spot, almost viciously, gritting his teeth to force his mind into the game. It rebelled, told him the uselessness of such things, the hopelessness before him, tried to play on the aridness of his throat. But for the moment his will was strong and he followed the game as though gambling for a life. Suddenly the thought surged through him that he was gambling for a life--his _own_ life, and possibly for a woman's life! Jed made his points, and again, on his own bid, he swept up the coffee counters. Then he took off his glasses and laid them aside with another yawn. VB wanted to cry aloud to him to keep on playing; he wanted to let Jed Avery know all that the simple, foolish little game of cards meant to him. But somehow his waning faith had taken with it the power to confide. Jed made four inexcusable blunders in playing that hand, and each time his muttered apologies became shorter. When the hand was over and he had won a point he did not notice that the boy failed to give him the counter. VB dealt, picked up his cards, and waited for the bid. But Jed's chin was on his breast, one hand lay loosely over the scattered cards before him; the other hung at his side limply. His breath came and went regularly. Sleep had stolen in on VB's final stand! Oh, if Jed Avery had only known! If his kindly old heart had only read VB better, divining the difference between calm and peace! For a long time VB looked at the old man, his breath gradually quickening, the flame in his eyes growing sharper, more keen, as the consuming fire in him ate away the last barriers of resistance. Once his gaze went to the candle, burning so low against the bottle, yet so brightly, its molten wax running down and adding to the incrustment. He stared wanly at the bright little beacon and shook his head, terror wiping out the vestiges of a smile. Action! That was what he wanted! Action! He must move or lose his mind and babble and scream! He must move and move rapidly--as rapidly as the rush of those thoughts through his inflamed mind. He trembled in every limb as he sat there, realizing the need for bodily activity. And yet, guilefully, craftily, softly, that voice down within him told that action could be of only one sort, could take him only in one direction. It whined and wheedled and gave him a cowardly assurance, made him lie in his own thoughts; made him cautious in his sneaking determination, for he knew any question Jed might ask would bring frenzy. VB rose, slowly, carefully, so that there might be no creaking of the boots or scraping of chair legs. He picked up his hat, his muffler, his jumper, and moved stealthily toward the door, opened it inch by inch, and shut it behind him quickly, silently, cutting off the draft of night air--for such a thing might be as disastrous as a cry aloud. The moon rode above the ridge and the air had lost its winter's edge. It was mild, but with the tang of mountain nights. It was quiet below, but as he stood in the open, pulling on his jumper, he heard the stirring of wind on the points above. It was a soughing, the sort of wind that makes stock uneasy; and VB caught that disquieting vibration. He stepped out from the cabin and a soft calling from the corral reached him. "Coming, Captain, coming," he answered. And with a guilty glance behind him he felt for the gun nestling against his side. His jaw-muscles tightened as he assured himself it was fastened there securely. The Captain was waiting at the gate. VB let it swing open, then turned and walked toward the saddle rack. The horse followed closely, ears up as though in wonder at this procedure. "It's all right, Captain," VB whispered as he threw on the saddle blanket. As he drew the cinch tight he muttered: "Or else all wrong!" Action, action! his body begged. He must have it; nothing else would suffice! He wanted to fly along, skimming the tops of those ghost bushes, ripping through the night, feeling the ripple of wind on that throat, the cooling currents of air against those hammering temples. And VB knew it was a lie! A rank, deliberate, hypocritical lie! He knew what that action meant, he knew in what direction it would take him. He knew; he knew! "Oh, Captain!" he sobbed, drawing the bridled head against his chest. "You know what it is to fight! You know what it is to yield! But the yielding didn't break you, boy! It couldn't. You were too big, too great to be broken; they could only bend and--" With a breath of nervous rage he was in the saddle. The Captain's feet rattled on the hard ground with impatience. An instant VB hesitated, gathering the reins, separating them from the strands of thick mane. Then, leaning low, uttering a throaty wail, he gave the Captain his head and into the veiled night they bolted. The cattle were coming on him, and he was powerless to move! They were bunched, running shoulder to shoulder, and his bed was in their path! Jed tried to raise his arms and could barely move them; his legs rebelled. The stampede was roaring at him! Oh, the rumble of those hoofs, those sharp, cloven, blind, merciless hoofs, that would mangle and tear and trample! Jed Avery awoke with a start. He was on his feet in the middle of the floor before consciousness came, gasping quickly at the horror of his dream, his excited heart racing! But it was no stampede. Running hoofs, but no stampede! He stumbled to the door and flung it open. His old eyes caught the flash of a lean, dark object as it raced across the dooryard straight at the gate, never pausing, never hesitating, and taking the bars with a sturdy leap that identified the horse instantly. "VB!" He called the name shrilly into the night, but his cry was drowned to the rider's ears, for the Captain's hoofs had caught ground again and were spurning it viciously as he clawed for the speed, the action, that was to satisfy the outraged nerves of his master! That lie! It was not the action that would satisfy. The flight was only an accessory, an agency that would transport VB to the scene of the renunciation of all that for which he had battled through those long months. For a long moment Jed stood in the doorway as he had poised at first, stiff, rigid. The sounds of the rushing horse diminuendoed quickly and became only a murmur in the night. Jed Avery's figure lost its tensity, went slack, and he leaned limply against the door frame. "He's gone!" he moaned. "He's gone! It's broke in on him--Oh, VB, I'm afraid it has! No good takes you south at this time, after th' spell you've had!" He slammed the door shut and turned back into the room. Unsteady feet took him to his chair, and he settled into it heavily, leaning against the table, his eyes registering the sight of no objects. "He was fightin' harder'n ever," he whispered dryly, "an' I set here sleepin'. To be sure, I wasn't on hand when VB needed me most!" The ending of his self-accusation was almost a sob, and his head dropped forward. He sat like that for an hour. The fire in the stove went out, and the cool of night penetrated the log walls of the cabin. He gazed unblinkingly at the floor; now and then his lips formed soundless words. The candle, burning low, fed the flame too fiercely with the last bit of itself. The neck of the bottle was a globule of molten wax in which the short wick swam. The flame had become larger, but it was dead and the smoke rose thickly from its heavy edges. The grease seemed to be disturbed. It quivered, steadied, then settled. The flame slipped down the neck of the bottle and was snuffed out by the confines of the thing. Jed Avery drew a long, quivering breath, a breath of horror. He turned his face toward the place where the light had been, hoping that his sight had failed. Then he reached out and found the bottle. His hard fingers ran over it, felt the empty neck, paused, and drew away as though it were an infectious thing. The old man sagged forward to the table, his face in his arms. CHAPTER XIX Through the Night On into the night went the Captain, bearing VB. Over the gate the bridle-rein drew against his neck and the big beast swung to the right, following the road southward, on down the gulch, on toward Ranger--a fierceness in his rider's heart that was suicidal. All the bitterness VB had endured, from the stinging torrent his father turned upon him back in New York to the flat realization that to let himself love Gail Thorpe might bring him into worse hells, surged up into his throat and mingled with the craving there. It seeped through into his mind, perverted his thoughts, stamped down the optimism that had held him up, shattered what remnants of faith still remained. "Faster, Captain!" he cried. "Faster!" And the stallion responded, scudding through the blue moonlight with a speed that seemed beyond the power of flesh to attain. He shook his fine head and stretched out the long nose as though the very act of thrusting it farther would give more impetus to his thundering hoofs. VB sat erect in the saddle, a fierce delight aroused by the speed running through his veins like fire--and, reaching to his throat, adding to the scorching. He swung his right hand rhythmically, keeping time to the steady roll of the stallion's feet. The wind tore at him, vibrating his hat brim, whipping the long muffler out from his neck, and he shook his head against it. He was free at last! Free after those months of doubt, of foolish fighting! He was answering the call that came from the depths of his true self--that hidden self--the call of flesh that needs aid! He cared not for the morrow, for the stretching future. His one thought was on the now--on the rankling, eating, festering moment that needed only one thing to be wiped out forever. And always, in the back of his mind, was the picture of Gail Thorpe as she had turned from him that afternoon. It loomed large and larger as he tore on to the south through the solitude, ripping his way through the cool murk. "I won't put my mark on her!" he cried, and whipped the Captain's flanks with his heavy hat, the thought setting his heart flaming. "I won't!" he cried. And again, "I won't!" He was riding down into his particular depths so to stultify himself that it would be impossible to risk that woman's happiness against the chance that some time, some day, he would go down, loving her, making her know he loved her, but fighting without gain. That, surely, is one sort of love, faulty though the engendering spirit may be. The whipping with the hat sent the horse on to still greater endeavor. A slight weariness commenced to show in the ducking of his head with every stride, but he did not slacken his pace. His ears were still set stiffly forward, flipping back, one after the other, for word from his rider; the spurn of his feet was still sharp and clear and unfaltering; the spirit in that rippling, dripping body still ran high. And closing his eyes, drinking the night air through his mouth in great gulps, VB let the animal carry him on and on,--yet backward, back into the face of all that fighting he had summoned, doubling on his own tracks, slipping so easily down the way he had blazed upward with awful sacrifice and hardship. An hour--two--nine--eleven--the Captain might have been running so a week, and VB would not have known. His mind was not on time, not on his horse. He had ceased to think beyond the recognition of a craving, a craving that he did not fight but encouraged, nursed, teased--for it was going to be satisfied! The stallion's pace began to slacken. He wearied. The bellows lungs, the heart of steel, the legs of tireless sinew began to feel the strain of that long run. The run waned to a gallop, and the gallop to a trot. There his breathing becoming easier, he blew loudly from his nostrils as though to distend them farther and make way for the air he must have. VB realized this dully but his heeding of that devilish inner call had taken him so far from his more tender self, from his instinctive desire to love and understand, that he did not follow out his comprehension. "Go it, boy!" he muttered. "It's all I'll ask of you--just this one run." And the Captain, dropping an ear back for the word, leaned to the task, resuming the steady, space-eating gallop mile after mile. All the way into Ranger they held that pace. In the last mile the stallion stumbled twice, but after both breaks in his stride ran on more swiftly for many yards, as though to make up to his master for the jolting the half falls gave him. He was a bit unsteady on those feet as he took the turn and dropped down the low bank into the river. They forded it in a shimmer of silver as the horse's legs threw out the black water to be frozen and burnished by the light of the moon. The stallion toiled up the far bank at a lagging trot, and on the flat VB pulled the panting animal down to a walk. Oh, VB, it was not too late then, had you only realized it! Your ideal was still there, more exemplary than ever before, but you could not recognize it through those eyes which saw only the red of a wrecking passion! You had drained to the last ounce of reserve the strength of that spirit you had so emulated, which had been as a shining light, an unfaltering candle in the darkness. It was stripped bare before you as that splendid animal gulped between breaths. Could you have but seen! Could something only have _made_ you see! But it was not to be. VB had forgotten the Captain. In the face of his wretched weakening the stallion became merely a conveyance, a convenience, a means for stifling the neurotic excitement within him. He forgot that this thing he rode represented his only achievement--an achievement such as few men ever boast. He guided the stallion to a half-wrecked log house south of the road, dismounted, and stood a moment before the shack, his glittering eyes on the squares of light yonder under the rising hill. He heard a faint tinkling from the place, and a voice raised in laughter. As he watched, a mounted man passed between him and the yellow glare. In a moment he saw the man enter the saloon door. "Come, boy," he muttered, moving cautiously through the opening into the place. "You'll be warm in here. You'll cool off slowly." Then, in a burst of hysterical passion, he threw his arms about the stallion's head and drew it to him fiercely. "Oh, I won't be gone long, Captain!" he promised. "Not long--just a little while. It's not the worst, Captain! I'm not weakening!" Drunk with the indulgence of his nervous weakness, he lied glibly, knowing he lied, without object--just to lie, to pervert life. And as the Captain's quick, hot breath penetrated his garments, VB drew the head still tighter. "You're all I've got, Captain," he muttered, now in a trembling calm. "You'll wait. I know that. I know what you will do better than I know anything else in the world--better than I know what--what _I'll_ do! Wait for me, boy--wait right here!" His voice broke on the last word as he stumbled through the door and set off toward the building against the hill. He did not hear the Captain turn, walk as far as the door of the shack, and peer after him anxiously. Nor did he see the figure of a man halted in the road, watching him go across the flat, chaps flapping, brushing through the sage noisily. VB halted in the path of light, swaying the merest trifle from side to side as he pulled his chap belt in another hole and tried to still the twitching of his hands, the weakening of his knees. The tinkling he had heard became clear. He could see now. A Mexican squatted on his spurs, back against the wall, and twanged a fandango on a battered guitar. His hat was far back over his head, cigarette glowing in the corner of his mouth, gay blue muffler loose on his shoulders. He hummed to the music, his voice rising now and then to float out into the night above the other sounds from the one room. The bar of rough boards, top covered with red oilcloth, stretched along one side. Black bottles flashed their high lights from a shelf behind it, above which hung an array of antlers. The bartender, broad Stetson shading his face, talked loudly, his hands wide apart on the bar and bearing much of his weight. Now and then he dropped his head to spit between his forearms. Three men in chaps lounged before the bar, talking. One, the tallest, talked with his head flung back and gestures that were a trifle too loose. The shortest looked into his face with a ceaseless, senseless smile, and giggled whenever the voice rose high or the gestures became unusually wild. The third, elbows on the oilcloth, head on his fists, neither joined in nor appeared to heed the conversation. Back in the room stood two tables, both covered with green cloth. One was unused; the other accommodated four men. Each of the quartet wore a hat drawn low over his face; each held cards. They seldom spoke; when they did, their voices were low. VB saw only their lips move. Their motions were like the words--few and abrupt. When chips were counted it was with expertness; when they were shoved to the center of the table it was with finality. Near them, tilted against the wall in a wire-trussed chair, sat a sleeping man, hat on the floor. Two swinging oil lamps lighted the smoke-fogged air of the place, and their glow seemed to be diffused by it, idealizing everything, softening it-- Everything except the high lights from the bottles on the shelf. Those were stabs of searing brightness; they hurt VB's eyeballs. His gaze traveled back to the Mexican. The melody had drifted from the fandango into a swinging waltz song popular in the cities four years before. He whistled the air through his teeth. The cigarette was still between his lips. The face brought vague recollections to VB. Then he remembered that this was Julio, the Mexican who ran with Rhues. He belonged to Rhues, they had told him, body and soul. Thought of Rhues sent VB's right hand to his left side, up under the arm. He squeezed the gun that nestled there. Of a sudden, nausea came to the man who looked in. It was not caused by fear of Rhues--of the possibility of an encounter. The poignant fumes that came from the open door stirred it, and the sickness was that of a man who sees his great prize melt away. For the moment VB wanted to rebel. He tore his eyes from those glittering bottles; tried to stop his breathing that treacherous nostrils might not inhale those odors. But it was useless--his feet would not carry him away. He knew he must move, move soon, and though he now cried out in his heart against it he knew which way his feet would carry him. He half turned his body and looked back toward the shack where the Captain waited, and a tightening came in his throat to mingle with the rapaciousness there. "Just a little while, Captain," he whispered, feeling childishly that the horse would hear the words and understand. "Just a little while--I'm just--just going to take a little hand in the card game." And as the Mexican finished his waltz with a rip of the thumb clear across the six strings of his instrument, Young VB put a foot on the threshold of the saloon and slowly drew himself to his full height in the doorway. Framed by darkness he stood there, thumbs in his belt, mouth in a grim line, hat down to hide the pallor of his cheeks, the torment in his eyes; his shoulders were braced back in resolution, but his knees, inside his generous chaps, trembled. CHAPTER XX The Last Stand Even the vibrating guitar strings seemed to be stilled suddenly. For VB, an abrupt hush crushed down on the scene. He felt the eyes as, pair after pair, they followed those of the Mexican and gazed at him; even the man slumbering in his chair awoke, raised his head, and stared at him sleepily. He stood in the doorway, leaning lightly against the logs, returning each gaze in turn. "Hello, VB!" one of the trio before the bar said. "Hello, Tom!" answered the newcomer--and stepped into the room. Then what hush had fallen--real or imaginary--lifted and the talk went on, the game progressed. Perhaps the talk was not fully sincere, possibly the thoughts of the speakers were not always on their words, for every man in the place stole glances at the tall young fellow as he moved slowly about the room. They had known for months the fight that was going on up there on Jed Avery's ranch. They knew that the man who had mastered the Captain and set his name forever in the green annals of the country had been fighting to command himself against the attacks of the stuff they peddled here in the saloon at Ranger. They knew how he had fought off temptation, avoided contact with whisky--and now, late at night, he had walked slowly into the heart of the magnet that had exerted such an influence on him. So they watched VB as he moved about. The sharp lights from those black bottles! Like snakes' eyes, they commanded his--and, when this power had been exerted, they seemed to stab the brain that directed sight at them. In the first few steps across the rough floor VB answered their call to look a half dozen times, and after each turning of his gaze jerked his eyes away in pain. He did not turn toward the bar--rather, kept close to the wall, passing so near the squatting Mexican that the flap of his chaps brushed the other's knees. The Greaser picked at the strings of his instrument aimlessly, striking unrelated chords, tinkling on a single string; then came a few bars from the fandango. His head was tilted to one side and a glittering eye followed the slow-moving figure of Young VB. By the time the newcomer was halfway toward the poker table the Mexican got to his feet, sliding his back slowly up the wall until he reached a standing position. Then, for the first time taking his eyes from VB, he stepped lightly toward the door. After a final tinkling chord had fallen he disappeared, guitar slung under one arm, walking slowly away from the lighted place. But when he was beyond sight of those within, he ran. VB went on, past the just-awakened man in his chair, close to the poker table. The players looked up again, first one, with a word of recognition; then two spoke at once, and after he had raked in the pot the fourth nodded with a welcoming grunt. The young fellow leaned a shoulder against the log wall and watched the game. That is, he looked at it. But continually his fevered memory retained a vision of those glares from the bottles. His mind again played crazy tricks, as it always did when the thirst clamored loudly. The rattle of the chips sounded like ice in glasses, and he turned his head quickly toward the bar, following the imaginary sound. The four men there were just drinking. He followed their movements with wild eyes. The bartender lifted his glass to the level of his forehead in salute, then drained its contents slowly, steadily, every movement from the lifting to the setting down of the empty glass smooth, deliberate--even polished--the movements of a professedly artful drinker. The silent man offered no good word--merely lifted the glass and drank, tipping his head but slightly, emptying the glass with an uneven twisting of the wrist, something like an exaggerated tremble. The short man tossed his drink off by elevating the glass quickly to his lips and throwing his head back with a jerk to empty it into his mouth. The tall man, who talked loudly and motioned much, waved his drink through the air to emphasize a declaration, and with an uncertain swoop directed it to his lips. He leaned backward from the hips to drink, and the movement made him reel and grasp the bar for support. As he had followed the movements of those men, so VB followed the course of the stuff they drank down their throats; in imagination, down his throat, until it hit upon and glossed over that spot which wailed for soothing! Oh, how he wanted it! Still, all those months of battling had not been without result. The rigid fight he had made carried him on, even in face of his resolve to yield, and he delayed, put it off just a moment--lying to himself! He turned back to the game. "Sit in, VB?" one of the players asked. "Don't mind." He dragged another chair to the table, unbuttoned and cast off his jumper, gave the hat another low tug, and tossed a yellow-backed twenty to the table. The chips were shoved toward him. "Jacks or better," the dealer said, and shot the cards about the board. VB won a pot. He bet eagerly on the next and lost. Then he won again. The game interested him for the moment. "Oh, just one more li'l' drink!" cried the garrulous cowboy at the bar. VB had passed the opening, went in later, drew three cards, failed to help his tens, and hiked the bet! Called, he dropped the hand; and the winner, showing aces up, stared at the boy who had bet against openers on lone tens. He noticed that VB's hands trembled, and he wondered. He could not feel VB's throat. Nor could he hear the careless plea of the sotted rider for just one more drink ringing in VB's burning brain. A big pot was played and the winner, made happy, said: "Well, I'll buy a drink." The bartender, hearing, came to the table. "What'll it be?" he asked. "Whisky," said the man on VB's right, and the word went around the circle. Then a moment's pause, while the cards fluttered out. "VB?" There it was, reaching out for him, holding out its tentacles that ceased to appear as such and became soft, inviting arms. It was that for which he had ridden through the night; it was that against which he had fought month after month until, this night, he realized that a fight was useless; it was the one solace left him, for indirectly it had brought into his life the glorious thing--and wiped it out again. So why hold off? Why refuse? But those months of fighting! He could not overcome that impetus which his subjective self had received from the struggle. Consciously he wanted the stuff--oh, how he wanted it! But deep in him _something_-- "Not now--thanks," he managed to mutter, and clasped his cards tightly. The bartender turned away, rubbing his chin with one finger, as though perplexed. VB dealt, and with lightning agility. He even broke in on the silence of the playing with senseless chatter when the drinks were brought. He held his cards high that he might not see the glasses, and was glad that the men did not drink at once. Nor did they drink for many moments. The opener was raised twice; few cards were drawn. A check passed one man, the next bet, the next raised, and VB, the deal, came in. The opener raised again and the bartender, seeing, stepped across to watch. The drowsy lounger, sensing the drift of the game, rose to look on. VB dropped out. He held threes, but felt that they had no place in that game. The betting went on and on, up and up, three men bent on raising, the fourth following, intent on having a look, anyhow. VB threw his cards down and dropped his hands loosely on the table. The back of his right hand touched a cold object. He looked down quickly. It was resting against a whisky glass. "And ten more," a player said. "Ten--and another ten." More chips rattled into the pile. His hand stole back and hot fingers reached out to touch with sensitive tips that cool surface. His nostrils worked to catch the scent of the stuff. His hand was around the glass. "I'm staying." "You are--for five more." VB's fingers tightened about the thing, squeezed it in the palm of his hand. It had felt cool at first; now it was like fire. The muscles of that arm strove to lift it. His inner mind struggled, declared against the intention, weakened, yielded, and-- "Well, I'm through. Fight it out." The man at VB's right dropped his cards in disgust and with a quick movement reached for his drink. His nervous, hot hand closed on VB's and their surprised glances met. "Excuse me," muttered VB. "Sure!" said the other, surly over his lost stake, and gulped down the whisky. Two of the players went broke in that pot. The fourth had a scant remnant of his original stack left, and VB was loser. The two who had failed shoved back their hats and yawned, almost simultaneously. "How about it?" asked the winner, stacking his chips. "I'm satisfied," said the man at VB's right. "And VB?" "Here, too!" The boy sat back in his chair with a long-drawn breath after shoving his chips across to be cashed. He pushed his hat back for the first time, and a man across the table stared hard as he saw the harried face. The others were busy, cashing in. "Just get in, VB?" some one asked. He heard the question through a tumult. His muscles had already contracted in the first movement of rising; his will already directed his feet across the room to the bar to answer the call of those searching bottle eyes. Inwardly he raged at himself for holding off so long, for wasting those months, for letting that other new thing come into his life only to be torn away again; when it all meant mere delay, a drawing out of suffering! Only half consciously he framed the answer: "Yes, I rode down to-night." "Goin' on out?" "What?" he asked, forcing his mind to give heed to the other. "Goin' on out, or goin' to hang around a while?" "I don't know." The boy got to his feet, and the reply was given with rare bitterness. "I don't know," he said again, voice mounting. "I may go out--and I may not. I may hang around a while, and it mayn't take long. I'm here to finish something I started a long time ago, something that I've been putting off. I'm going to put a stop to a lying, hypocritical existence. I'm--" He broke off thickly and moved away from the table. No imagination created a hush this time. On his words the counting of chips ceased. They looked at him, seeing utter desperation, and not understanding. A face outside that had been pressed close to a window was lowered, darkness hiding the glitter of green eyes and the leering smile of triumph. A figure slunk along carefully to the corner of the building and joined two others. It was his chance! Rhues was out to get his man this moonlight night, and there was now no danger. Young VB was no longer afraid to take a drink. He would give up his fight, give up his hard-wrung freedom, and when drunken men go down, shot in a quarrel, there is always cause. He had him now! VB lurched across the room toward the bar. In mid-floor he paused, turned, and faced those at the poker table. "Don't mistake me," he said with a grin. "Don't think I'm talking against any man in the country. It's myself, boys--just _me_. I'm the liar, the hypocrite. I've tried to lie myself into being what I never can be. I've come out here among you to go by the name of the outfit I ride for. You don't know me, don't even know my name, say nothing of my own rotten self. Well, you're going to know me as I am." He swung around to face the bar. The bartender pulled nervously on his mustache. "What'll it be, VB?" he asked, surprised knowledge sending the professional question to his lips. "The first thing you come to," the boy muttered, and grasped the bar for support. CHAPTER XXI Guns Crash Out in the shadow of the building three men huddled close together, talking in whispers--Rhues, Matson, and the Mexican. Rhues had watched the progress of the poker game, waiting the chance he had tried to seek out ever since that day up at Avery's when he had been beaten down by the flailing fists of that tall young tenderfoot. He had seen VB start for the bar; he knew the hour had struck. "We've got him!" he whispered. "He won't get away this time. They won't be no mistakes." "S-s-s-s!" the Greaser warned. "Aw, nobody'll ever know," Rhues scoffed in an undertone. "They'll never know that unless you spill. An' if you do--it'll mean three of us to th' gallows, unless--we're lynched first!" Silence a moment, and they heard VB's voice raised. Then Rhues whispered his quick plans. "Take it easy," he warned in conclusion. "Don't start nothin'. Let him git drunk; then he'll do th' startin' an' it'll be easy." Inside a bottle was thumped on the bar, a glass beside it. Feverishly VB reached for both, lifting the glass with uncertain hand, tilting the bottle from the bar, not trusting his quaking muscles to raise it. The neck touched the glass with a dull clink; the mouth of the bottle gurgled greedily as the first of the liquor ran out--for all the world as if it had waited these months for that chuckle of triumph. And then that romanticism of youth came to the surface of his seething thoughts again. It would be the closing of a chapter, that drink. It was for her sake he would lift it to his lips. He wanted to bid her a last, bitter farewell. She was over there, far across the hills, sleeping and dreaming--with her golden hair--over there in the northeast. He laughed harshly, set the bottle back on the bar, and turned his face in her direction. Those who watched from the other end of the room saw him turn his head unsteadily; saw the sudden tenseness which spread through his frame, stiffening those faltering knees. He turned slowly toward the door and thrust his face forward as though to study and make certain that he saw rightly. Like a rush of fire the realization swept through him. A man stood there in the moonlight, and the sheen from the heavens was caught on the dull barrel of a gun in his hand. VB was covered, and he knew by whom! The man who had fought less than half a dozen times in his life, and then with bare fists, was the object of a trained gun hand. He could almost see the glitter of the green eyes that were staring at him. Instinct should have told him to spring to one side; a leap right or left would have carried him out of range, but instinct had been warped by all those months of struggle. He was on the brink, at the point of losing his balance; but the battling spirit within him still throbbed, though his frenzy, his lack of faith, had nearly killed it. Now the thing came alive pulsing, bare! An instant before he had not cared what happened. Now he did, and the end was not the only thing in view; the means counted with Young VB. He did not jump for shelter. He roared his rage as he prepared to stand and fight. The others understood before his hand reached his shirt front. The bartender dropped behind the fixture and the others in the room sprang behind the barrels and stove. By the time VB's hand had clasped the neck of his shirt he stood alone. When the vicious yank he gave the garment ripped it open from throat halfway to waist the first belch of fire came from that gun out there. The bottle on the bar exploded, fine bits of glass shooting to the far corners of the room. "Come on--you--yellow--" VB's fingers found the butt of his Colt, closed and yanked. It came from the holster, poised, muzzle upward, his thumb over the hammer. Possibly he stood thus a tenth part of a second, but while he waited for his eyes to focus well a generation seemed to parade past. He was hunted down by a crawling piece of vermin! A parallel sprang to his mind. While Rhues sought his body did not another viper seek his soul? Was-- Then he made out the figure--crouched low. The forty-five came down, and the room resounded with its roar. He stood there, a greenhorn who had never handled a weapon in his life until the last year, giving battle to a gun fighter whose name was a synonym! Out of the moonlight came another flash, and before VB could answer the hunched figure had leaped from the area framed by the doorway. "You won't stand!" the boy cried, and strode across the room. "Don't be a fool! VB!" The bartender's warning might as well have been unheard. Straight for the open door went the boy, gun raised, coughing from the powder smoke. But the mustached man, though panderer by profession, revolted at unfairness; perhaps it was through the boy's ignorance, but he knew VB walked only to become a target. Twice his gun roared from behind the bar and the two swinging lamps became scattered, tinkling fragments. VB seemed not to heed, not to notice that he was in darkness. He reached the door, put his left hand against the casing, and looked out. With lights behind he would have been riddled on the instant. But, looking from blackness to moonlight, he was invisible for the moment--but only for a moment. The stream of yellow stabbed at him again and Young VB, as though under the blow of a sledge, spun round and was flattened against the wall. His left breast seemed to be in flames. He reached for it, fired aimlessly with the other hand in the direction of his hidden foe, and let the gun clatter to the floor. He wondered if it were death--that darkness. He felt the fanning of the wind, heard, dimly, its uneasy soughing. It was very dark. A movement and its consequent grip of pain brought him back. He saw then that a heavy cloud, wind driven, had blotted out the moon. In a frenzy he came alert! He was wounded! He had dropped his gun and they were waiting for him out there, somewhere; waiting to finish him! He could feel the smearing of blood across his chest as his clothing held it in. His legs commenced to tremble, from true physical weakness this time. And the Captain was waiting! That thought wiped out every other; he was possessed with it. He might be dying, but if he could only get to the Captain; if he could only feel that silken nose against his cheek! Nothing would matter then. If he could get up, if he could mount, the Captain would take care of him. He could outrun those bullets--the Captain. He would take him home, away from this inferno. "I'm coming, Captain!" he muttered brokenly. "You're waiting! Oh, I know where to find you. I'm coming, boy, coming!" He stepped down from the doorway and reeled, a hand against his wounded breast. It seemed as though it required an eternity to regain his balance. Then he lurched forward a step. Oh, they were merciless! They opened on him from behind--when he had no weapon, when his life was gushing away under his shirt! Those shots never came from one gun alone. More than one man fired on him! His salvation then was flight. He ran, staggering, stumbling. He plunged forward on his face and heard a bullet scream over him. "Oh, Captain!" he moaned. "Can't you come and get me? Can't you?" He snarled his determination to rally those senses that tried to roam off into vagaries. He got to his hands and knees and crawled, inch by inch. He heard another shot, but it went wild. He got to his feet and reeled on. They thought they'd done for him when he fell! He heard himself laughing crazily at the joke. "Oh, you'll laugh, too--Captain!" he growled. "It's a joke--you'll--if I can only get to--you!" His numb, lagging legs seemed to make conscious efforts to hold him back. His head became as heavy as his feet and rolled about on his neck, now straight forward, now swinging from side to side. His arms flopped as no arm ever should flop. And he heard the blood bubbling under his vest. Perhaps he would never get there! Perhaps he was done for! "Oh, no--I can't quit before--I get to--you, Captain!" he muttered as he fell again. "You're waiting--where I told you to wait! I've got to--get--there!" Of only one thing in this borderland between consciousness and insensibility was he certain--the Captain was waiting. The Captain was waiting! If he could get that far-- It was the climax of all things. To reach his horse; to touch him; to put his arms about those ankles as he fell and hold them close; to answer trust with trust. For through all this the Captain had waited! The shack where he had left the horse swam before his eyes. He heard the breath making sounds in his throat as he crawled on toward it, counting each hand-breadth traveled an achievement. He tried to call out to the horse, but the words clogged and he could not make his voice carry. "Just a moment, boy!" he whispered. "Only--a moment longer--then you won't have--to wait!" He was conscious again that his pursuers fired from behind. It was moonlight once more, and they could see him as he reeled on toward the shack. He sprawled again as his foot met a stone, and the guns ceased to crash. But VB did not think on this more than that instant. He found no comfort in the cessation of firing. For him, only one attainable object remained in life. He wanted to be with the thing of which he was certain, away from all else--to know a faith was justified; to sense once again stability! His hand struck rough wood. He strained his eyes to make out the tumble-down structure rising above him. "Captain!" he called, forcing his voice up from a whisper. "Come--boy, I'm--ready--to go--home!" Clinging to the logs, he raised himself to his feet and swayed in through the door. "Captain," he muttered, closing his eyes almost contentedly and waiting. "Captain?" He started forward in alarm, a concern mounting through his torture and dimming his sensibilities. "Captain--are you--here?" He stumbled forward, arms outstretched in the darkness, feeling about the space. He ran into a wall; turned, met another. "Captain!" he cried, his voice mounting to a ranting cry. The Captain was gone! Reason for keeping on slipped from VB's mind. He needed air, so his reflexes carried him through the doorway again, out of the place where he had left the stallion, out of the place where his trust had been betrayed. He stumbled, recovered his balance, plunged on out into the moonlight, into the brush, sobbing heavily. His knees failed. He crashed down, face plowing into cool soil. "Captain"! he moaned. "Oh, boy--I didn't think--_you_ would--fail-- No wonder--I couldn't keep--going--" He did not hear the running feet, did not know they rolled him over, Rhues with his gun upraised. "I got him, th' ----" he muttered. "Then let's get out--_pronto_!" Twenty minutes later a man with a lantern stepped out of the shack in which the Captain had stood. Two others were with him. "Yes, he left his horse there, all right," the man with the light muttered. "He got to him an' got away. Nobody else could lead that horse off. He couldn't 'a' been hard hit or he couldn't 'a' got up." CHAPTER XXII Tables Turn; and Turn Again A young chap from the East who was in Clear River County because of his lungs named her Delilah when she was only a little girl--Delilah Gomez. She cooked now for the Double Six Ranch, the buildings of which clustered within a stone's throw of the Ranger post office. And that night as she sat looking from her window she thought, as she did much of the time, about the smiling Julio with his guitar--the handsome fellow who lived with Señor Rhues and did no work, but wore such fine chaps and kerchiefs! She sighed, then started to her feet as she saw him come through the gate and up the path, and hastened to open the door for him. Julio took off his hat. "It is late," he said, flashing his teeth. "I come to ask you to do something for me, Delilah." "What is it--now--so late?" she asked breathlessly. "In the old house across the road"--he pointed--"is a horse. It is the horse of a friend. A friend, also, of Señor Rhues. He is now in the saloon. He is drunk. Will you take the horse away? To the place of Señor Rhues? And put him in the barn? And be sure to fasten the door so he will not get out?" Delilah was puzzled a moment. "But why," she asked, "why so late?" Julio bowed profoundly again. "We go--Señor Rhues, Señor Matson, and I, Julio, to take our friend away from the saloon. We are busy. Senor Rhues offers this." He pressed a dollar into her palm. And for the dollar and a flash of Julio's teeth, Delilah went forth upon her commission. The three men watched her go. "That devil'd tear a man to pieces," Rhues muttered. "Any woman can handle him, though. Git him locked up, an' th' ---- tenderfoot can't make it away! He'll have to stay an' take what's comin'!" The girl led the Captain down the road, past the Double Six Ranch, on to the cramped little barn behind the cabin where lived Rhues and his two companions. It was not an easy task. The Captain did not want to go. He kept stopping and looking back. But the girl talked to him kindly and stroked his nose and--VB himself had taught him to respect women. This woman talked softly and petted him much, for she remembered the great horse she had seen ridden by the tall young fellow. Besides, the dollar was still in her hand. She led him into the cramped little barn, left him standing and came out, closing the doors behind her. Then she set out for home, clasping the dollar and thinking of Julio's smile. The first shot attracted her. The second alarmed, and those that followed terrified the girl. She ran from the road and hovered in the shadow of a huge bowlder, watching fearfully, uttering little moans of fright. She heard everything. Some men ran past her in the direction of Rhues's cabin, and she thought one of them must be Julio. But she was too frightened to stir, to try to determine; too frightened to do anything but make for her own home. The girl moved stealthily through the night, facing the moon that swung low, unclouded again, making all radiant. She wanted to run for home, where she could hide under blankets, but caution and fear held her to a walk. She did not cry out when she stumbled over the body; merely cowered, holding both hands over her lips. For a long time she stood by it, looking down, not daring to stoop, not daring to go away. Then the hand that sprawled on the dirt raised itself fell back; the lips parted, a moan escaped, and the head rolled from one side to the other. The fear of dead things that had been on her passed. She saw only a human being who was hurt. She dropped to her knees and took the head in her lap. "Oh, _por Dios_! It is the _señor_ who rode the horse!" she muttered, and looked quickly over her shoulder at the Rhues cabin. "They left him; they thought he was dead," she went on aloud. "They should know; he should be with them. They were going for him when the shooting began!" She looked closer into VB's face and he moaned again. His eyes opened. The girl asked a sharp question in Spanish. "Is the _señor_ much hurt?" she repeated in the language he understood. "Oh, Captain!" he moaned. "Why? Why did you--quit?" She lifted him up then and he struggled sluggishly to help himself. Once he muttered: "Oh, Gail! It hurts so!" She strained to the limits of her lithe strength until she had him on his feet. Then she drew one of his arms about her neck, bracing herself to support his lagging weight. "Come," she said comfortingly. "We will go--to them." No light showed from the Rhues cabin, but the girl was sure the men were there, or would come soon. Loyal to Julio for the dollar and the memory of his graciousness, she worked with the heart of a good Samaritan, guiding the unconscious steps of the muttering man toward the little dark blot of houses. It was a floundering progress. Twice in the first few rods the man went down and she was sorely put to get him on his feet again. But the moving about seemed to bring back his strength, and gradually he became better able to help himself. They crossed the road and passed through the gap in the fence by the cabin. VB kept muttering wildly, calling the girl Gail, calling for the Captain in a plaintive voice. "There they are now! See the light?" she whispered. "It is not much. They have covered the window. Yes." "What?" VB asked, drawing a hand across his eyes. She repeated her assertion that the men were in the cabin and he halted, refusing drunkenly to go on. "No," he said, shaking his head. "I'm unarmed--they--" But she tugged at him and forced him to go beside her. They progressed slowly, painfully, quietly. There was no sound, except VB's hard breathing, for they trod in dust. They approached the house and the girl put out a hand to help her along with the burden. A thin streak of light came from a window. It seemed to slash deeply into the staggering man, bringing him back to himself. Then a sound, the low, worried nickering of a horse! The Mexican girl felt the arm about her neck tighten and tremble. "The Captain!" VB muttered, looking about wildly. He opened his lips to cry out to the horse as the events of the night poured back into his consciousness, to cry his questioning and his sorrow, to put into words the mourning for a faith, but that cry never came from his throat. The nickering of the stallion and the flood of memory had brought him to a clear understanding of the situation; a sudden glare of light from the abruptly uncovered window before which he and the girl stood provoked an alertness which was abnormally keen, that played with the subjective rather than the more cumbersome objective. He stooped with the quickness of a drop and scuttled into the shadows, cautious, the first law of man athrob. The man who had brushed away the blanket that had screened the window burst into irritated talk. VB recognized him as Matson. Back in the shadows of the room he saw the Mexican standing. A table was close to the window, so close that in crowding behind it Matson had torn down the blanket that had done service as a curtain. A lamp burned on the table, its wick so high that smoke streamed upward through the cracked chimney. And close beside the lamp, eyes glittering, cruel cunning in every line, the flush of anger smearing it, was the face of Rhues! VB, crouching there, saw then that Matson's finger was leveled at Rhues. "It ain't good money!" That was the declaration Matson had made as the blanket slipped down and disclosed the scene. He repeated it, and his voice rose to a snarl. Delilah started to rise but VB jerked her back with a vehemence that shot a new fear through the girl, that made her breathe quickly and loudly. For the first time he turned and looked at the girl, not to discover who this might be that had brought him to the nest of those who sought his life, but to threaten. "You stay here," he whispered sharply. "If you make a sound, I'll--you'll never forget it!" His face was close to hers and he wagged his head to emphasize the warning. Where she had expected to find a friend the Mexican girl realized that she had encountered a foe. Where she had, from the fullness of her heart and for a dollar and the admiration of Julio, sought to help, she knew now that she had wronged. His intensity filled her with this knowledge and sent her shrinking against the wall of the cabin, a hand half raised to her cheek, trembling, wanting to whimper for mercy. "Keep still!" he warned again, and, stretching one hand toward her as though to do sentry duty, ready to throttle any sound, to stay any flight, to bolster his commands, he crept closer to the window. "Why ain't it good?" Rhues was asking in a voice that carried no great conviction, as though he merely stalled for time. VB saw him stretch a bill close to the lamp and Matson lean low beside him. The light fell on the piece of currency, not six feet from VB's fever-bright eyes. He saw that they were inspecting a fifty-dollar bill issued by the Confederate States of America! And Rhues said grudgingly: "Well, if that ain't good, they's only six hunderd 'n all!" Up came the buried memories, struggling through all the welded events in the furnace consciousness of the man who pressed his face so close to the window's crinkly glass. His eyes sought aimlessly for some object that might suggest a solution for the slipping thought he tried to grasp. They found it--found it in a rumpled, coiled contrivance of leather that lay beside the lamp. It was a money belt. The money belt that Kelly, the horse buyer, had worn! Six hundred dollars! And a Confederate States fifty-dollar bill! They were quarreling over the spoils of that chill murder! VB swayed unsteadily as he felt a rage swell in him, a rage that nullified caution. He turned his eyes back to the Mexican girl cringing just out of his reach and moved the extended hand up and down slowly to keep his warning fresh upon her. He wanted time to think, just a moment to determine what action would be most advisable. His heart raced unevenly and he thought the hot edges of his wound were blistering. "That's two hundred apiece, then," Rhues said, and straightened. VB saw that the hand which had dropped the worthless piece of paper held a roll of yellow-backed bills. "Two hundred we all git," he growled. "You git it, Julio gits it, I git it--an' I'm th' party what done th' work!" VB stooped and grasped Delilah roughly by the arm. He held a finger to his lips as he dragged the shaking girl out to where she could see. "Watch!" he commanded, close in her ear. "Watch Rhues--and the others!" Rhues counted slowly, wetting his thumb with hasty movements and dropping bills from the roll to the table top. "Both you"--he looked up to indicate Matson and Julio--"gits 's much 's me, an' I done th' work!" "An' if we're snagged, we stand as good a chanct o' gettin' away as you," Matson remarked, and laughed shortly. Rhues looked up again and narrowed the red lids over his eyes. "You said it!" he snarled. "That's why it's good to keep yer mouths shut! That's why you got to dig out--with me. "If I'm snagged--remember, they's plenty o' stories I could tell about you two--an' I will, too, if I'm snagged 'cause o' you!" He worked his shoulders in awkward gesture. "An' that's why we want our share," Matson growled back. "An' want it quick! We watched th' road; you done th' killin'. We thought it was jus' to settle things with that ----, but it wasn't. It was profitable." He ended with another short laugh. "Well, I said I'd git him, didn't I? An' I did, didn't I? An' if th' first time went wrong it was--profitable, wasn't it?" "Yes, but queek, queeker!" the Mexican broke in. "They might come--now!" "Well, quit snivelin'!" snapped Rhues. "It didn't go as we planned. I had to shoot 'fore I wanted to. But I got him, didn't I?" Julio reached for the pile of bills Rhues shoved toward him; Matson took his; Rhues pocketed the rest. And outside, VB relaxed his hold on the girl's wrist, raising both hands upward and out, fingers stiff and claw-like. Kelly, good-natured, careless, likable, trusting Kelly, had gone out to pay toll to this man's viciousness; had gone because he, VB, would not submit to Rhues's bullying! And now they laughed, and called it a profitable mistake! All his civilized, law-abiding nature rose in its might. All that spirit which demands an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, which makes for statutes and courts and the driving of nations into fixed paths, lifted VB above any caution that the circumstances could have engendered. His whole nature cried out for the justice he had been trained to respect; his single remaining impulse was to make this man Rhues suffer for the act of which there was such ample evidence. He struggled to find a way toward retribution, for in a moment it might be too late. He had no thought beyond the instant, no idea but to possess himself of something more, to make the case stronger for society. He had seen, he had heard, he had the girl beside him, but he wanted more evidence. Matson moved away from the window and as he did so the sash sagged inward. It was a hinged casing! His hands numb from excitement, VB forced his arms against it, shoving stoutly. The force of his effort precipitated his head and shoulders into the room! He had a flash of the three men as they whirled and poised, with oaths, but his mind did not linger on them. His fingers clutched the money belt, drew it to him, and as Rhues dropped a hand to his hip VB staggered backward out of the window, stuffing the money belt inside his shirt, in against the hot wound, and stared about him. For an instant, silence, as Rhues stood, gun drawn, shoulders forward, gazing at the empty window. Then upon them came a shrill, quavering, anxious cry--the call of the Captain. CHAPTER XXIII Life, the Trophy To VB, at the sound of the stallion's neighing, came the realization of his position--weaponless in the midst of men who, now of all times, would shoot to kill! His righteous abhorrence of the murder Rhues had done and in which the others had been conspirators did not lessen. He did not falter in his determination for vengeance; but his thirst for it did not detract one whit from his realization of the situation's difficulties. Seconds were precious. Just a lone instant he poised, looking quickly about, and to his ears came again the cry of the horse, plaintive, worried, appealing. "Captain!" he cried, and started to run. "Captain! You didn't fail! They _brought_ you!" His voice lifted to a shout as he rounded the corner of the house, and the Captain answered. With the horse located, VB stumbled across the short intervening space, one hand to his breast doing the double duty of attempting to still the searing of that wound and hold fast to the money belt. He flung himself at the door of the low little stable, jerked the fastening apart, and, backing in, saw men run from the house, heard them curse sharply, and saw them turn and look, each with his shooting hand raised. VB drew the door shut after him, trembling, thinking swiftly. The Captain nosed him and nickered relief, stepping about in his agitation as though he knew the desperate nature of the corner into which they had been driven. "We've got to get out, boy," VB cried, running his numb hands over the animal's face in caress. "We're up against it, but there's a way out!" It was good to be back. It was good to feel that thick, firm neck again, to have the warm breath of the vital beast on his cheek, to sense his dominating presence--for it did dominate, even in that strained circumstance, and in the stress VB found half hysterical joy and voiced it: "You didn't quit, Captain!" he cried as he felt the cinch hastily. "You didn't quit. They--that woman! She brought you here!" He flung his arms about the stallion's head in a quick, nervous embrace at the cost of a mighty cutting pain across his chest. Then the cautious voice of Rhues, outside and close up to the door, talking lowly and swiftly: "Julio, saddle th' buckskin! Quick! I'll hold him here till we're ready! Then I'll shoot th' ---- down in his tracks! We got to ride, anyhow--nothin' 'll make no difference now!" Raising his voice, Rhues taunted: "Pray, you ----! Yer goin' to cash!" VB pressed his face to a crack and saw Rhues in the moonlight, close up to the door. He also saw another man, Julio, leading a horse from the corral on the run. Two other animals, saddled, stood near. He was cornered, helpless, in their hands--hard hands, that knew no mercy. But he did not give up. His mind worked nimbly, skipping from possibility to possibility, looking, searching for a way out. He reeled to the black horse and felt the animal's breath against the back of his neck. "We're up against it, boy," he whispered. And the voice of Rhues again: "They'll find him to-morrow--with th' belt!" He broke off suddenly, as though the words had set in his mind a new idea. VB did not hear; would not have heeded had his senses registered the words, because an odd apathy had come over him, dulling the pain of his wound, deadening the realization of his danger. He sighed deeply and shook himself and tried to rally, but though a part of him insisted that he gather his faculties and force them to alertness, another tired, lethargic self overbore the warning. Half consciously he pulled the stirrup toward him, put up his foot with an unreal effort, and laboriously drew himself to the saddle. There, he leaned forward on his arms, which were crossed on the Captain's neck, oblivious to all that transpired. But the great stallion was not insensible to the situation. He could not know the danger, but he did know that he had been led into a strange place, shut there and left virtually a prisoner; that his master had burst in upon him atremble with communicable excitement; that strange voices were raised close to him; that men had been running to and fro; that the sounds of struggling horses were coming from out there; that some man was standing on the other side of the door, closer than most men had ever stood to him. He breathed loudly; then stilled that breath to listen, his head moving with frequent, short jerks as he saw objects move past the cracks in the building. He switched his tail about his hindquarters sharply, and backed a step. Another voice called softly to Rhues, and Rhues answered: "Dah! When I rolled him over his holster flopped out of his shirt, empty. He dropped it in th' s'loon. If he'd had a gun he'd done fer us 'n there, wouldn't he?" Then his voice was raised in a sharp command: "Help him, Julio! Hang on to his ear an' he'll stand. _Pronto!_" Sounds of men grunting, of a horse striving to break from them; a sharp cry. These things--and emanating from a scene taking place outside the Captain's sight! He half wheeled and scrubbed the back wall of the stable with his hip, blowing loudly in fright. He stamped a forefoot impatiently; followed that by a brisk, nervous pawing. He tossed his head and chewed his bit briskly; then shook his head and blew loudly again. He shied violently as a man ran past the door, wheeled, crashed into the wall again and, crouching, quivered violently. VB moaned with pain. When the horse under him had shied the boy had pushed himself erect in the saddle and the effort tore at the wound in his chest. The pain roused him, and as the Captain again wheeled, frantic to find a way out of this pen, VB's heels clapped inward to retain his seat, the spurs drove home, and with a whimper the horse reared to his hind legs, lunged forward, and the front hoofs, shooting out, crashed squarely against the closed door! Under the force of the blow the door swept outward, screaming on its rusty hinges. A third of the way open it struck resistance, quivered, seemed to hesitate, then continued on its arc. A surprised, muffled shout, the sound of a body striking ground, a shot, its stream of fire spitting toward the night sky. Then the vicious smiting of hoofs as the Captain, bearing his witless rider, swung in a short circle and made for the river. Rhues, caught and knocked flat by the bursting open of the door, was perhaps a half-dozen seconds in getting to his feet. He came up shooting, a stream of leaden missiles shrieking aimlessly off into space. Julio and Matson, busy with the refractory buckskin, heard the crash and creak of the swinging door, heard the shout, heard the shot; they turned to see the black stallion sweep from the little building and swirl past them, ears back, teeth gleaming, and bearing to the north. Still clinging to the buckskin's head, the Mexican drew his gun; Matson, utterly bewildered, fearful of impending consequences, gave the cinch a final tug, but before Julio could fire the water of the river was thrown in radiant spray as the Captain floundered into midstream with VB low on his neck. Then Rhues was on them, putting into choking words the vileness of his heart. He did not explain beyond: "Th' ---- horse! Th' door got me!" He seized the cheek strap of the buckskin's bridle and swung up, while the others watched the horse running out into the moonlit river. The pony reared and pivoted on his hind legs. "Git on yer hosses!" Rhues screeched, yanking at the bit. "He can't git away, with his hoss run down once to-night! An' if we let him--we swing!" Goaded by that terror they obeyed, hanging spurs in their horses' flanks before they found stirrups, and the trio whirled down to the water. "He's goin' home!" Rhues cried above the splashing. "That's our way out; we'll git him as we go 'long! We'll ride him down; he ain't got a gun! An' they'll find him out yonder with th' money belt on him! We--" He broke short with a laugh. "We could claim th' reward! Two fifty, dead 'r alive!" Matson snarled something. Then, as their horses struggled up the far bank of the stream, completed it: "---- with th' reward! What we want's a get-away!" "We're on our way now," growled Rhues, and lashed his pony viciously with the ends of his bridle reins. Knee to knee they raced, the ponies stretching their heads far out in efforts to cover that light ribbon of road which clove the cloudlike sage brush and ate up the distance between their position and that scudding blur ahead. Each had his gun drawn and held high in the right hand ready for use; each, with eyes only for that before them, with minds only for speed--and quick speculation on what might happen should they fail. The creak of leather, the sharp batter of hoofs, the rattle of pebbles as they were thrown out against the rocks, the excited breathing of horses: A race, with human life the trophy! And VB, looking back, saw. With set teeth he leaned still lower over the Captain's neck in spite of the raging the posture set up in his torn breast. No will of his had directed the stallion in that flight northward. His unexpected dash through the barn door, the quick recognition of the point they had scored, the sharp pang which came when VB realized the fact that the horse's, break for home had cut him off from help that might have remained in Ranger, left the wounded man in a swirl of confused impressions. Behind all the jumble was the big urge to reach that place which had been the only true haven of his experience. He felt a glimmer of solace when he sensed that he was going home which quite neutralized the terror that the glance at those oncoming riders provoked. The comfort inculcated by the idea grew into clear thinking; from there on into the status of an obsession. He was going home! He was on the way, with that mighty beast under him! He raised more of his weight to the stirrups and laid a reassuring hand on the snapping shoulder of his horse. And on his trail rode the merciless three, their eyes following the bending course of the road, hat-brims now blown back against the crowns, now down over their eyes in the rush through the night. Rhues rode a quarter of a length ahead of the others, and his automatic was raised higher than were their gun-hands. Now and then one of the trio spoke sharply to his horse and grunted as he raked with a spur, but for the greater part of the time they did not lift their voices above the thunder of the race. They knew what must happen; they held their own, and waited! "Go, boy, go!" whispered VB. "We'll run their legs off; they'll never get in range!" The Captain held an attentive ear backward a moment, then shot it forward, watching the road, holding his rolling, space-eating stride. VB turned his head and again looked back. They were still there! No nearer--but he had not shaken them off. Two, perhaps three, miles had been covered and they hung by him, just within sight, just beyond that point where they might fire with an even chance of certainty. He pressed his arm against his burning breast, crowding the treasured money belt tighter against the wound. Somehow, it seemed to dull the torment, and for minutes he held the pressure constant, still lifted to supreme heights of endeavor and ability to withstand suffering by the rage that had welled up from his depths as he stood back in the shadow of the cabin and had the suspicion of how and why Kelly had met death become certainty. Another mile, and he turned to look back again. They still hung there, making a blur in the moonlight, fanciful, half floating, but he knew they were real, knew that they hammered their way through the night with lust for his life! "Captain!" he cried, apprehension rising. "Go it, boy; go it!" He pressed a spur lightly against his side and felt the great beast quiver between strides. The pace quickened a trifle, but VB saw that the ears were no longer held steadily to the fore, that the head ducked with each leap forward as he had never seen it duck before. And as the thought with its killing remorse thundered into his intelligence, VB sat erect in the saddle with a gasp and a movement which staggered the running animal that bore him. The Captain's strength had been drained! For twenty strides VB sat there, inert, a dead weight, while grief came into his throat, into his vision, deadening his mind. In all that melodrama which began when he stared through the saloon door and saw Rhues standing in the moonlight, gun ready, the reason for his presence in Ranger, the history of the earlier night, had been obliterated for the time being. Now, as he felt the beast under him labor, heard his heavy breathing, saw the froth on his lips, it all came back to Young VB. "Oh, Captain!" he wailed, leaning forward again, eyes burning, throat choking. And for a long time he rode as though unable to do else but hold his position over the fork of the saddle. He was stunned, beaten down by poignant remorse. The Captain had made the long ride from Jed's to Ranger at a killing pace. VB remembered acutely now that the stallion had staggered as he emerged from Clear River and came into view of the saloon lights. And he had been there how long? An hour of poker, perhaps; an hour more at the outside. Two hours for the horse to regain the strength that had been taken from him in that cruel ride--a ride taken to satisfy the viciousness which made VB a man uncertain of himself! The Captain had been wasted! He had gone, as had VB's heart and mind, to be a sacrifice for hideous gods! In an hour of weakness he had been offered, had been given gladly, and without thought of his value! For had not VB gloried in that ride to Ranger? Had it not been the end of all things for him? An end for which he was thankful? Had it not been all conscious, witting, planned? It had--and it had not been worth the candle! The boy moaned aloud and wound his fingers in the flapping mane. "Captain!" he cried. "It was all wrong--all false! I threw you away an hour ago, and now--you're _life_ to me! Oh, boy, will you forgive? Can you?" No fear of death tapped the wells of his grief. There was only sorrow for his wasting of that great animal, that splendid spirit, that clean strength! After a moment he sobbed: "You can't do anything else but go on, boy! You're that sort! You'll go, then I'll go; anyhow, it will be together!" And the great beast, blowing froth from his lips, struggled on, while from behind came the sounds of other running horses--perhaps a trifle nearer. CHAPTER XXIV Victory The road writhed on through the sage brush sixteen miles from Ranger before it branched. Then to the right ran the S Bar S route, while straight on it headed into Jed's ranch, and the left-hand course, shooting away from the others behind a long, rocky point, followed Sand Creek up to the cluster of buildings which marked the domicile of Dick Worth. It was more than halfway. The Captain, now trotting heavily, now breaking once more into a floundering gallop, passed the first fork, that leading toward Worth's. With a gulp of relief VB saw that the moon hung low in the west--so low that the road home would be in the shadow of the point, which seemed to come down purposely to split the highway. He might then find refuge in darkness somewhere. He must have refuge! At the tenth mile he had suspected, now he knew, that it would be impossible to stand off his pursuers clear to the ranch, and there were no habitations between him and Jed's. "They haven't gained on you, boy!" he cried as he made out the distinct outlines of the point. "They're right where they were at the start! No other horse in the world could have done it; not even you should be asked to do it--but--but--" He choked back the sob that fought to come. He knew he must concentrate his last energy, now. If he came through there would be time to think of his crime against the Captain! But now-- Futures depend on lives. His life dangled in the balance, and he wanted it, as men can want life only when they feel it slipping. Back there three men raked the streaming sides of their ponies with vicious spurs. "He can't make it!" Rhues swore. "Th' black's quittin' now! If he gits away, what chance we got? We got to git him! It'll give us th' last chance!" "We're killin' our horses," growled Matson. And Julio, a length behind, flogged his pinto mercilessly. No craving for VB's life prompted Rhues now. He must go on for the sake of his own safety. He and those other two had all to gain and nothing to lose. If they could drop the man ahead it would be possible to skirt the ranches, catch fresh horses, and make on toward Wyoming. But let VB gain shelter with Jed or any one else, and a posse would be on their trail before they could be beyond reach. No, there could be no turning back! They had made their bet; now they must back it with the whole stack. And before them--that blot in the moonlight--a wounded, suffering man cried aloud to the horse that moved so heavily under him. "Make it to the point, Captain!" he begged. "Just there! It'll be dark! Only a little faster, boy!" The stallion grunted under the stress of his effort, moving for the moment with less uncertainty, with a jot more speed. They crawled up to the point and followed the bend of the road as it led into the dimness of the gulch. Across the way, far to the right, moonlight fell on the cliffs, but where the road hung close to the rise at the left all was in shadow. To VB, entering the murk was like plunging from the heat of glaring day to the cool of a forest. The men behind him would be forced to come twice as close before they could make firing effective. Then, when he reached the ranch-- He threw out an arm in a gesture of utter hopelessness. Reach the ranch? He laughed aloud, mocking his own guilelessness. He had come only a little more than half the distance now, and Captain could scarcely be held at a trot. Three miles, possibly five, he might last, and then his rider would have to face his pursuers with empty hands. His was the very epitome of despair. A weaker man would have quit then, would have let the stallion flounder to his finish, would have waited submissively for Rhues to come and shoot him down. But VB possessed the strength of his desperation. Rhues might get him now, as he had tried to get him twice before, but he would get him by fighting. Not wholly for himself did the boy think, but for the likable, friendly Kelly, who had died there in his blankets without warning. If he could rid men of the menace which Rhues represented he would have done service, and the life of those last months had implanted within him the will to be of use--though, a few hours back, he might have thought it all a delusion. So VB was alert with the acute alertness of mind which is given to humans when forced to fight to preserve life--when everything, the buried subconscious impulses, the forgotten, tucked-away memories, are in the fore, crying to help. Abandoning hope of reaching Jed's, he turned all his physical force, even, into the mental effort to seek a way out; fought his way to clarified thought, fought his way into logic. He could not go on much longer; there was no such thing as turning back, for he could hear them, nearer now! He could hear the click of pebbles as his pursuers' horses sent them scattering, and a pebble click will not travel far. Ahead--weakening muscles; behind--guns ready; to the right--moonlight; to the left-- The bridle rein drew across the Captain's lathered neck. The big beast swung to the left, out of the road, crashed through the brush, and lunged against the rise of rocks. The horse seemed to sense the fact that this was the one remaining chance, the last possibility left in their bag of tricks. He picked his way up among the ragged bowlders and spiked brush with a quickness of movement that told of the breaking through into those reservoirs of strength which are held in man and beast until a last hope is found. VB went suddenly faint. The loss of blood, the pain, the stress of nervous thought, the knowing that his full hand was on the table, caused him to reel dizzily in the saddle. He made no pretense of guiding the Captain. He merely sagged forward and felt the horse lunge and plunge and climb with him, heard the rasping breath that seemed to come from a torn throat. Below and behind, the trailers swept from moonlight into shadow, horses wallowing as though that hard road were in deep mud, so great was the race that the stallion, spent though he might be, had given them. Rhues was ahead, revolver held higher than before, Matson's pony at his flank and Julio a dozen lengths behind. Bridle reins, knotted, hung loosely on their horses' necks; the three left hands rose and fell and quirts swished viciously through the night air. "We got to close in!" Rhues cried. "We'll have him 'n a mile!" And he called down on the heads of the horses awful imprecations for their weakness. On into the darkness they stormed, Julio trailing. And when Rhues had passed by fifty yards the point where the Captain had turned to take the steep climb the Mexican opened his throat in a cry, half of fright, half of exultation. The Captain, almost at the end of his climb, leaping from rise to rise, had missed his footing. The soft earth slid as he jumped for a ledge of rock, and the front feet, coming down on the smooth surface in frantic clawing to prevent a fall, sent fire streaming from their shoes. In the darkness Julio had seen the orange sparks. At his cry the others set their ponies back on haunches and, following the Mexican, who now led, cursing VB and their weakening mounts, they commenced the climb. VB knew. The flash from the stallion's feet had roused him; he heard the shout; he knew what must follow. He gave no heed to the bullet which bored the air above him as he was silhouetted for the instant against moonlit space before he commenced the drop to the road leading up Sand Creek. Where now? With a sigh which ended in a quick choking, as though he were through, ready to give up this ghost of a chance, ready to quit struggling on, the Captain dropped from the last little rim and turned into the road. Not on ahead--into that void where they could ride him down. Not back toward Ranger, for it was impossibly far. Where then? What was there? Sand Creek! And up Sand Creek was Dick Worth's! VB caught his breath in a sob. It was the one goal open to him, though the odds were crushing. He pressed the money belt tightly. Dick Worth was the man who should have that--Dick Worth, deputy sheriff! He lifted his voice and cried aloud the name of the deputy. To the north once more the Captain headed, and with no word from VB took up the floundering way again. The boy looked behind and saw the others commence the drop down the moonlit point--saw one of the blurs slump quickly and heard a man scream. Then he leaned low on the stallion and talked to the horse as he would talk to a child who could pilot him to safety. Behind him, along the road, came the blot again, now, however, smaller. VB did not know that it was Julio who had fallen, but he knew with a fierce delight that the Captain, running on his bare spirit, had killed off one of the pursuers! The boy grew hysterical. He chattered to the stallion, knowing nothing of the words he uttered. At times his lips moved but uttered no sound. Continually his hands sought his breast. He knew from the dampness that crept down his side, on down into the trouser leg, that the wound still bled, that his life was running out through the gash. Through the clamoring of his heart a familiar ache came into his throat, and the boy lifted his voice into the night with a rant of rage, of self-denunciation. "Oh, Captain! You were the price!" he moaned. But still he wanted--just one drink! Not to satisfy that craving now, but to keep him alive, a legitimate use for stimulant. The stallion ceased pretense of galloping. Now and then he even dropped from his uncertain trotting to a walk. VB, watching behind, could just make out those other travelers in the light of the low-hanging moon which seemed to balance on the ragged horizon and linger for sight of the finish of this grim drama worked out in the lonely stretches. As the horse stumbled more and more frequently under him VB knew that those who pressed him were coming closer. Then a flash of flame and a bullet spattered itself against a rock ahead and to the right. "They're closer, Captain!" he muttered grimly. "The game's going against us--against you. I'm too much of a burden--too much weight." His mind seized upon the aimless words. The suddenness of his shifting in the saddle made the stallion stagger, for VB's whole weight went into the right stirrup. He drew the other up with fiendish tinges shooting through his breast and tore at the cinch. It came loose. The saddle turned. VB flung his arms about the Captain's neck and kicked it from under him. "Fifty pounds gone!" he muttered triumphantly, and the horse tossed his head, quickening the trot, trying once again the heavy gallop. VB could hear the horse breathing through his mouth. He looked down and saw that the long tongue flopped from the lips with every movement of the fine head. Tears came to his eyes as he caressed the Captain's withers frantically. "Can I do more, boy?" he asked in a strained voice. "Can I do more?" It was as though he pleaded with a dying human. "Yes, I can do more!" he cried a moment later in answer to his own question. "You've given your whole to me; now I'll give you back your freedom, make you as free as you were the day I took you. I'll strip you, boy!" He reached far out along the neck, drawing his weight up on the withers, and loosed the head-stall. The bridle fell into the road and the Captain ran naked! And, as though to show his gratitude, the horse shook his head groggily and reeled on in his crazy progress. A half mile farther on the Captain fell. VB went down heavily and mounted the waiting horse again in a daze--from which he was roused by the fresh gushing on his breast. Another shot from behind--then two close together. Dawn was coming. He looked around vaguely. The moon was slipping away. Perhaps yet it would be in at the finish. The shimmering light of new day was taking from objects their ghostly quality; making them real. The men behind could see VB--and they were firing! The boy said no word to the Captain. He merely clamped his knees tighter and leaned lower on his neck. He had ceased to think, ceased to struggle. His trust, his life, was in the shaking legs of the animal he rode, whose sweat soaked through his clothing to mingle with the blood there. The stallion breathed in great moaning sobs, as though his heart were bursting, as though his lungs were raw and bleeding. He reeled from side to side crazily. Now and then he ran out of the road and floundered blindly back. His head hung low, almost to his knees, and swung from side to side with each step, and at intervals he raised it as though it were a great weight, to gasp--and to sob! From behind, bullets. Rhues and Matson fired grimly. They had ceased to lash their ponies, for it was useless. The beasts were beyond giving better service in return for punishment. Their sides dripped blood, but they were beyond suffering. Handicapped as he had been, the Captain had held them off, almost stride for stride. Better light now, but their shooting could not hope to find a mark except through chance. They cursed in glad snarls as they saw the stallion reel, sink to his knees; then snarled again as they saw him recover and go on at his drunken trot. Before VB's eyes floated a blotch of color. It was golden, a diffused light that comforted him; that, for some incomprehensible reason, was soothing to the senses. It eased the wound, too, and put new strength in his heart so that he could feel the warm blood seeping slowly into his numb arms and hands and fingers. He smiled foolishly and hugged the Captain's neck as the horse reeled along. Oh, it was a glorious color! He remembered the day he had seen a little patch of it scudding along the roadway in the sunshine. Why, it had seemed like concentrated sunshine itself. "Gail," he murmured. "It was you--I didn't want to put--that mark--on you!" The nature of that color became clear to him and he roused himself. It was a light--a light in a window--the window of a ranch house--Dick Worth's ranch house! Bullets had ceased to zip and sing and spatter. He did not turn to see what had become of his pursuers, for he was capable of only one thought at a time. "Dick Worth! Dick Worth!" he screamed. Then he looked behind. Away to the left he saw two riders pushing through the dawn, détouring. And he laughed, almost gayly. Another blotch of light, a bigger one, showed in the young day. It was an opened door, and a deep chest gave forth an answer to his cry. Dick Worth stepped from the threshold of his home and ran to the gate to see better this crazy figure which lurched toward him. It was a man on foot, hatless, his face gray like the sky above, hair tousled, eyes glowing red. He stumbled to the fence and leaned there for support, holding something forward, something limp and bloodstained. "Dick--it's Kelly's money belt--Rhues--he killed him-- He shot me--he's got the money--on him--he's swinging off west--two of 'em-- Their horses are--all in-- He--he shot Kelly because--I wouldn't take--a drink--he--and I need--a--drink--" He slumped down against the fence. After an uncertain age VB swam back from that mental vacuity to reality. He saw, first, that the Captain was beside him, standing there breathing loudly, eyes closed, sobbing low at every heave of his lungs. A quavering moan made its way to the boy's throat and he moved over, reaching out groping arms for the stallion's lowered head. "Captain!" he moaned. "Oh, boy--it was our last ride--I can never--ask you to carry me--again." He hugged the face closer to his. Then he heard a man's voice saying: "Here, VB, take this--it'll brace you up!" He turned his face slowly, for the strength that remained was far from certain. His wound was on fire, every nerve of his body laid bare. His will to do began and ended with wanting to hold that horse's head close. He was as a child, stripped of every effect that the experiences of his life could have had. He was weak, broken, unwittingly searching for a way back to strength. He turned his head halfway and beheld the man stooping beside him who held in his hands a bottle, uncorked, and from it came a strong odor. The boy dilated his nostrils and drew great breaths laden with the fumes of the stuff. A new life came into his eyes. They shone, they sparkled. Activity came to those bare nerves, and they raised their demands. He opened his mouth and let the odor he inhaled play across that place in his throat. The smell went on out through his arteries, through his veins, along the nerves to the ends of his being, to the core of his soul! He was down, down in the depths, his very ego crying for the stimulant, for something to help it come back. He coaxed along that yearning, let it rise to its fullest. Then he raised his eyes to meet the concerned gaze of the other man. And the man saw in those eyes a look that made him sway back, that made him open his lips in surprise. "To hell with that stuff!" the boy screamed. "To hell with it! To hell--_to hell!_ It belongs there! It--it killed the Captain!" Tears came with the sobs, and strength to the arms that held the stallion's head; strength that surged through his entire body, stilling those nerves, throttling the crying of his throat. For VB had gone down to his test, his real ordeal, and had found himself not wanting. CHAPTER XXV "The Light!" Jed Avery sat alone. It was night, a moonlight night in Colorado, the whole world bathed in a cold radiance that conduces to dreams and fantasies. But as he sat alone Jed's mind wove no light reveries. Far from it, indeed. He was sodden in spirit, weakened in nerve. He rested his body on the edge of a chair seat and leaned far forward, elbows on his knees. His fingers twined continually, and on occasion one fist hammered the palm of the other hand. "You old fool!" he whispered. "You old fool! Now, if he's gone--" For twenty-four hours he had not dared frame the words. He lifted his eyes to the window, and against the moonlight stood a bottle, its outlines distorted by incrustings of tallow. No candle was in its neck. There was only the bottle. After a time the old man got up and paced the floor, three steps each way from the splotch of moonlight that came through the window. He had been walking that way for a night and a day--and now it was another night. While it was daylight he had walked outside, eyes ever on the road, hoping, fearing. And no one had come! Now, as the night wore on and the boy did not return, Jed's condition bordered on distraction. His pacing became faster and more fast. He lengthened the limits of his walk to those of the room, and finally in desperation jerked open the door to walk outside. But he did not leave the threshold. Two figures, a man and a horse, coming up the road held him as though robbed of the will to move. He stood and stared, breathing irregularly. The man, who walked ahead, made his way slowly toward the gate. He was followed by the horse, followed as a dog might follow, for not so much as a strap was on the animal. The man's movements were painful, those of the horse deliberate. Jed knew both those figures too well to be mistaken, even though his sight dimmed. He wanted to cry out, but dared not. One question alone crowded to get past his teeth. The answer would mean supremest joy or sorrow. Fear of the latter held him mute. The man unfastened the gate and let it swing open. "Come, boy," he said gently, and the big animal stepped inside. With the same slow movements again, the man closed the bars. Jed stood silent. A coyote high on the hills lifted his voice in a thin yapping, and the sound made Old VB shiver. The boy came slowly toward the house. He saw Jed, but gave no sign, nor did the old man move. He stood there, eyes on the other in a misted stare, and VB stopped before him, putting a hand against the wall for support. Then came the question, popping its way through unwilling, tight lips: "Shall I light th' candle, Young VB?" His voice was shrill, strained, vibrant with anxiety. But VB did not answer--merely lifted a hand to his hot head. "VB, when you left last night th' candle dropped down into th' bottle an' went out. I didn't dare light a new one to-night--" His voice broke, and he paused a moment. "I didn't dare light it until I knowed. I've been settin' in th' dark here, thinkin' things--tryin' not to think dark things." One hand went halfway to his mouth in fear as he waited for the other to answer. VB put a hand on Jed's shoulder, and the old man clamped his cold fingers over it desperately. "Yes, Jed--light it," he said huskily. Then he raised his head and looked at the old man with a half smile. "Light it, Jed. Let it burn on and on, just for the sake of being bright. But we--we don't need it any more. Not for the old reason, Jed." The cold hand twitched as it gripped the hot one. "Not for the old reason, Jed," VB continued. "There's a bigger, better, truer light burning now. It won't slip into the bottle; it can't be blown out. It didn't waver when the true crisis came. It'll always burn; it won't slip down into the bottle. It's--it's the real thing." He staggered forward, and Jed caught him, sobbing like a woman, a happy woman. They had the whole story over then by the light of a fresh candle. When Jed started forward with a cry at the recital of the shooting VB pushed him off. "It's only a flesh wound; it don't matter--much. Mrs. Worth dressed it, and I'm all right. It's the Captain I want to tell about--the Captain, Jed!" And he told it all, in short, choking sentences, stripping his soul naked for the little rancher. He did not spare himself, not one lone lash. He ended, crushed and bleeding before the eyes of his friend. After a pause he straightened back in his chair, the new fire in his eyes, the fire the man at Worth's had seen when he offered drink. "But I've got to make it up to the Captain now," he said with a wild little laugh. "I've got to go on. He gave me the chance. He took me into blackness, into the test I needed, and brought me back to light. I've got to be a man, Jed--a man--" And throughout the night Jed Avery tended the wound and watched and muttered--with joy in his heart. Morning came, with quieted nerves for VB. He lay in the bunk, weak, immobile. Jed came in from tending the horses. "He didn't bleed, did he, VB?" "No." "It ain't what you thought, sonny. It ain't bad. Give him a rest an' he'll be better'n ever. Why, he's out there now, head up, whisperin' for you! You can't break a spirit like his unless you tear his vitals out!" VB smiled, and the smile swelled to a laugh. "Oh, Jed, it makes me so happy! But it won't be as it was. I can never let him carry me again." The old man turned on the boy a puzzled look. "What you goin' to do with him, VB--turn him loose again?" "Not that, Jed; he wouldn't be happy. He'll never carry me again, but perhaps--perhaps he could carry a light rider--a girl--a woman." And from Jed: "Oh-o-o-o!" An interval of silence. "That is," muttered VB, "if she'll take him, and--" "Would you want him away from you?" the old man insisted. "Oh, I hope it won't be that, Jed! I hope not--but I want her to-- You understand. Jed? You understand?" The other nodded his head, a look of grave tenderness in the old eyes. "Then--then, Jed, I'm all right. I can get along alone. Would you mind riding over and--asking her if she'd come-- "You see, Jed, I know now. I didn't before--I'm sure it's worth the candle--and there'll be no more darkness; no lasting night for her if--" Jed walked slowly out into the other room and picked up his spurs. VB heard him strap them on, heard his boots stamp across the floor and stop. "I'd go, VB, but it ain't necessary." The boy raised his head, and to his ears came the bellow of a high-powered motor, the sound growing more distinct with each passing second. "Lord, how that woman's drivin'!" Jed cried. "Lordy!" And he ran from the house. The bellow of the motor rose to a sound like batteries of Gatlings in action; then came the wail of brakes. With a pulsing thrill VB heard her voice upraised--with such a thrill that he did not catch the dread in her tone as she questioned Jed. She came to him swiftly, eyes dimmed with tears, without words, and knelt by his bunk, hands clasped about his head. For many minutes they were so, VB gripping her fine, firm forearms. Then she raised her face high. "And you wouldn't let me help?" she asked querulously. He looked at her long and soberly, and took both her hands in his. "It was the one place you couldn't help," he muttered. "It was that sort--my love, I mean. I had to know; had to know that I wouldn't put a hateful mark on you by loving. I had to know that. Don't you see?" She moved closer and came between him and the sunshine that poured through the open door. The glorious light was caught by her hair and thrown, it seemed, to the veriest corners of the dingy little room. "The light!" he cried. She settled against him, her lips on his, and clung so. From outside came the shrilling call of the Captain. VB crushed her closer. CHAPTER XXVI To the Victor Up the flagged walk to the house of chill, white stone overlooking the North River went a messenger, and through the imposing front portal he handed a letter, hidden away in a sheaf of others. A modest-appearing letter; indeed, perhaps something less than modest; possibly humble, for its corners were crumpled and its edges frayed. Yet, of all the packages handed him, Daniel Lenox, alone at his breakfast, singled it out for the earliest attention. And what he read was this: Dear Father: In my last letter--written ten years ago, it seems--I promised to tell you my whereabouts when I had achieved certain ends. I now write to tell you that I am at the Thorpe Ranch, one hundred and thirty miles northwest of Colt, Colorado, the nearest railroad point. I can inform you of this now because I have won my fight against the thing which would have stripped me of my manhood. And I want to make clear the point that it was you, father, who showed me the way, who made me realize to what depths I had gone. I am very humble, for I know the powers that rule men. When I left New York there was little in me to interest you, but I am making bold enough to tell you of the greatest thing in my life. I have won the love of a good woman. We are to be married here the twentieth, and some day I will want to bring her East with me. I hope you will want to see her. Your son, Danny. While the hand of the big clock made a quarter circle the man sat inert in his chair; limp, weak in body, spirit, and mind, whipped by the bitterest lashes that human mind can conjure. Then he raised his chin from his breast and rested his head against the back of the chair, while his hands hung loose at his sides. His lips moved. "Hope--you will want to see her," he repeated in a whisper. A pause, and again words: "He wouldn't even ask me--wouldn't dream I wanted to--be there!" An old man, you would have said, old and broken. The snap, the precision that had been his outstanding characteristic, was gone. But not for long. The change came before the whispering had well died; the lines of purpose, of decision, returned to his face, his arms ceased to hang limp, the look in the eyes--none the less warm--became definite, focused. Suddenly Daniel Lenox sat erect and raised the letter to the light once more. "The twentieth!" he muttered. "And this is--" Another train fumed at the distances, left cities behind, and crawled on across prairies to mountain ranges. As it progressed, dispatchers, one after another, sat farther forward in their chairs and the alert keenness of their expression grew a trifle sharper. For the Lenox Special, New York to Colt, Colorado, invited disaster with every mile of its frantic rush across country. Freights, passenger trains, even the widely advertised limiteds, edged off the tracks to let it shriek on unhampered. In the swaying private car sat the man who had caused all this disarray of otherwise neat schedules. At regular, short intervals his hand traveled to watch-pocket and his blue eyes scrutinized the dial of his timepiece as though to detect a lie in the sharp, frank characters. In the other hand, much of the time, were held sheets of limp paper. They had been folded and smoothed out again so many times and, though he was an old man and one who thought mostly in figures, fondled so much, that the ink on them was all but obliterated in places. He read and reread what was written there as the train tore over the miles, and as he read the great warmth came back to his eyes. With it, at times, a fear came. When fear was there, he tugged at his watch again. Up grades, through cañons, the special roared its way. At every stop telegrams zitted ahead, and hours before the train was due an automobile waited by the depot platform at Colt. Daniel Lenox heeded not the enthusiastic train-men who held watches and calculated the broken record as brakes screamed down and the race by rail ended. Bag in hand, he strode across the cinder platform and entered the waiting automobile, without a single glance for the group that looked at him wonderingly. "You know the way to the Thorpe Ranch?" he asked the driver of the car. "Like a book!" "Can you drive all night?" "I can." "Good! We must be there as early to-morrow as possible." And ten minutes before noon the next day the heavy-eyed driver threw out his clutch and slowed the car to a stop before the S Bar S ranch house. Saddled horses were there, a score of them standing with bridle reins down. Sounds of lifted voices came from the house, quickly lulled as an exclamation turned attention on the arrival. From the ample door came a figure--tall and lean, well poised, shoulders square, feet firm on the ground. Pale, true, but surely returning strength was evidenced in his very bearing. VB's lips moved. His father, halfway to him, stopped. "Dad!" "Am I on time?" queried the older man. "_Dad!_" With a cry the boy was up on him, grasping both hands in his. "I didn't--dare hope you'd want--Dad, it makes me so--" The other looked almost fiercely into the boy's face, clinging to the hands that clutched his, shaking them tremblingly now and then. The penetrating blue eyes searched out every line in the boy's countenance, and the look in them grew to be such as VB had never seen before. "Did you think I'd stay back there in New York and let you do all this alone? Did you think I wouldn't come on, in time if I could, and tell you how ashamed I am to have ever doubted you, my own blood, how mean a thing was that which I thought was faith?" His gaze went from VB to Gail, coming toward him clad all in simple white, flushing slightly as she extended her hand. He turned to her, took the hand, and looked deep into her big eyes. He tried to speak, but words would not come and he shook his head to drive back the choking emotion. "Bless you!" he finally muttered. "Bless you both. You're a man--Danny. And you--" His voice failed again and he could only remain mute, stroking the girl's hand. Then Jed came up and greeted the newcomer silently, a bit grimly, as though he had just forgiven him something. "Come over here, you three," said VB, and led them over to where two horses stood together. One was the bay the boy had ridden that afternoon he charged down the ridge to make the great stallion his, and beside him, towering, head up, alert, regally self-conscious, stood the Captain. The bay bore VB's saddle. On the Captain's back perched one of smaller tree, silver mounted and hand tooled, with stirrups that were much too short for a man. They looked the great horse over silently, moving about him slowly, and Danny pointed out his fine physical qualities to his father. A rattling of wheels attracted them and they looked up to see a team of free-stepping horses swing toward them, drawing a light buckboard. The vehicle stopped and from it stepped a man in the clothing of a clergyman. "He's here, VB," Jed muttered. "To be sure, an' he's got his rope down, too. Th' iron's hot; th' corral gate's open and he's goin' to head you in. 'T ain't often you see such a pair of high-strung critters goin' in so plumb docile, Mister Lenox!" And from the corner of his eye he saw the man beside him wipe his hand across his cheek, as though to brush something away. The Captain pawed the ground sharply. Then he lifted his head high, drew a great breath, and peered steadily off toward the distant ridges, eagerly, confidently, as though he knew that much waited--out yonder. 
36503	----	A MAN'S HEARTH * * * * * [Illustration: ELSIE FELT THE GLANCE PASS ACROSS HER AND REST ON ANTHONY _Page 223_] * * * * * A MAN'S HEARTH BY ELEANOR M. INGRAM AUTHOR OF "FROM THE CAB BEHIND," "THE UNAFRAID," ETC. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR BY EDMUND FREDERICK [Illustration] PHILADELPHIA & LONDON J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1915 COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1915 PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. TONY ADRIANCE----"MILLIONS, YOU KNOW!" 9 II. HIS NEIGHBOR'S WIFE 27 III. THE GIRL OUTSIDE 45 IV. THE WOMAN WHO GRASPED 55 V. THE LITTLE RED HOUSE 77 VI. THE WOMAN WHO GAVE 96 VII. THE DARING ADVENTURE 109 VIII. ANDY OF THE MOTOR-TRUCKS 110 IX. THE LUCK IN THE HOUSE 144 X. MRS. MASTERSON TAKES TEA 155 XI. THE GLOWING HEARTH 173 XII. THE UPPER TRAIL 184 XIII. WHAT TONY BUILT 203 XIV. THE CABARET DANCER 215 XV. THE OTHER MAN'S ROAD 229 XVI. THE GUITAR OF ALENYA OF THE SEA 243 XVII. RUSSIAN MIKE AND MAÎTRE RAOUL GALVEZ 261 XVIII. THE CHALLENGE 271 XIX. THE ADRIANCES 283 XX. THE CORNERSTONE 308 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Elsie felt the Glance pass across Her and Rest on Anthony _Frontispiece_ There Would Have Been no more Bedtime Romps for Masterson and His Son 71 The Winter was Hard and Long, but Never Dull to Them 173 A MAN'S HEARTH CHAPTER I TONY ADRIANCE--"MILLIONS, YOU KNOW!" The man who had taken shelter in the stone pavilion hesitated before taking a place on the curved bench before him. He had the air of awaiting some sign of welcome or dismissal from the seat's occupant; receiving none, he sat down and turned his gaze toward the broad Drive, where people were scattering before the sudden flurry of rain. It suggested spring rather than autumn, this shower that had swept out of a wind-blown cloud and was already passing. After a moment he drew a cigar-case from his pocket, then paused. Obviously, he was not familiar with the etiquette of the public parks, with their freedom and lack of formalities. He was beside a woman--a girl. He had no wish to be inconsiderate, yet, to speak--in suspicious, sardonic New York--that was to invite misconstruction, or a flirtation. Still---- "May I smoke?" he suddenly and brusquely shot his question. The girl turned towards him. Her eyes were as gray as the rain; heavily shadowed by their lashes, their expression had a misted aloofness suggesting thoughts hastily recalled from remote distances. He realized that he might have come, smoked, and gone without drawing her notice any more than a blowing leaf. She was not a beauty, but he liked the clearing frankness of the glance with which she judged him, and judged aright. He liked it, too, that she did not smile, and that her steadfast regard showed neither invitation nor hostility. "Thank you," she answered. "Please do." The form of her reply seemed to him peculiarly gracious and unexpected, as if she gave with both hands instead of doling out the merely necessary. He never had known a woman who gave; they always took, in his experience. Unconsciously he lifted his hat in acknowledgment of the tone rather than the permission. That was all, of course. She returned to her study of river and sky, while he drew out his cigar. But afterward he looked at her, unobtrusively. She was dressed altogether in black, but not the black of mourning, he judged. The costume, plain but not shabby, conventional without being up-to-date, touched him with a vague sense of familiarity, yet escaped recognition. It should have told him something of her, but it did not, except that she had not much money for frocks. He was only slightly interested; he might not have glanced her way again if he had not been struck by her rapt absorption in the sunset panorama before them. She had gone back to that place of thought from which his speech had called her; withdrawn from all around her as one who goes into a secret room and closes a door against the world. And she looked happy, or at least serenely at peace with her dreams. The man sighed with envious impatience, striving to follow her gaze and share the enchantment. The enchantment was not for him. The brief storm had left tumbled masses of purple cloud hanging in the deep-rose tinted sky, in airy mockery and imitation of the purplish wall of the Palisades standing knee-deep in the rosy waters of the Hudson. Along the crest of the great rock walls lights blossomed like flowers through the violet mist, at the walls' base half-seen buildings flashed with lighted windows. He saw that it was all very pretty, but he had seen it so a hundred times without especial emotion. His cigar was finished, yet the girl had not once moved. Abruptly, as before, he spoke to her, as he moved to leave. "What are you looking at?" he demanded. "Oh, I'm not trying to be impertinent--I would like to know what you see worth while? You have not moved for half an hour. I wish you could show me something worth that." Again she turned and considered him with grave attention. His tired young face bore the scrutiny; she answered him. "I am seeing all the things I have not got." "Over there?" She yielded his lack of imagination. "Well, yes; over there. Don't you know it is always Faeryland--the place over there?" "It is only Jersey--?" She corrected him. "The place out of reach. The place between which and ourselves flows a river, or rises a cliff. One can imagine anything to be there. See that grim, unreal castle, there in the shadows, its windows all gleaming with light from within. Well, it is a factory where they make soap-powder, but from here I can see Fair Rosamond leaning from its arched windows, if I choose, or armored and plumed knights riding into its gates." "Oh!" Disappointment made the exclamation listless. "Story-making, you were? I am afraid I can't see that way, thank you; I haven't the head for it." For the first time she smiled, with a warm lighting of her rain-gray eyes and a Madonna-like protectiveness of expression. He felt as distinct an impression as if she had laid her hand on his arm with an actual touch of sympathy. "But I do not see that way, either," she explained. "That was an illustration. I mean that one can make pictures there of all the _real_ things that are not real for one's self; at least, not yet real. It is a game to play, I suppose, while one waits." "I do not understand." She made a gesture of resignation, and was mute. He comprehended that confidence would go no farther. "Thank you," he accepted the rebuke. "It was good of you to put up with my curiosity and--not to misunderstand my speaking." "Oh, no! I hate to misunderstand, ever; it is so stupid." Although he had risen, he did not go at once. The evening colors faded, first from river, then from sky. With autumn's suddenness, dusk swept down. Playing children, groups of young people and promenaders passed by the little pavilion in a gay current; automobiles multiplied with the homing hour of the city. New York thought of dining, simply or superbly, as might be. The silent tête-à-tête in the pavilion was broken by the softest sound in the world--a baby's drowsy, gurgling chuckle of awakening. Instantly the girl in black started from revery, and then the man first noticed that a white-and-gold baby carriage stood at her end of the curved seat. Astonished, incredulous, he saw her throw back miniature coverlets of frost-white eiderdown and bend over the little face, pink as a hollyhock, nestled there. For the first time in his life he witnessed the pretty byplay of the nursery--dropped kisses, the answering pats of chubby, useless hands, love-words and replying baby speech, inarticulate, adorable. The scene struck deeply into inner places of thought he had never known lay at the back of consciousness. He never had thought very profoundly, until the last few weeks. And even yet he was struggling, turning in a mental circle of doubt, rather than thinking. The girl and the child flung open a door through which he glimpsed strange vistas, startling in their forbidden possibilities. He stood watching, dumb, until she turned to him. Her face was kindled and laughing; she looked infinitely candid and good. But--she looked maid, not mother. Somehow he felt that. "You are married?" he questioned, almost roughly. "I did not suppose---- You are married, then?" Into her expression swept scorn for his dulness, compassion for his ignorance, fused by the flaring fire of some intense feeling far beyond his ken. "Married? No. Or I would not be here!" "Why? Where would you be?" The baby was standing upright in its coach. The girl passed an arm about the tottering form to steady the fat little feet, and retorted on her questioner. "Where? Home, of course, making ready for my man! If I lived there,"--with a gesture toward the tall, luxurious apartment houses on the Drive, behind them, "I would be choosing my prettiest frock and coiling my hair the way he liked best. If I lived there, across the river in one of those little houses, I would be making the house bright with lamps; wearing my whitest apron and making the supper hot--very hot, for there is frost in the air and he would be cold and tired and hungry. And I would have his chair ready and draw the curtains because he was inside and no one else mattered." She paused, drawing a deep breath. "That is where I would be," she concluded, as one patiently lessoning a dull pupil, and reseated the baby in its coach in obvious preparation for departure. The man had stood quite still, dazed. But when she turned away, with a bend of her dark little head by way of farewell, he roused himself and overtook her in a stride. "Thank you," he said, "I mean for letting me know anyone could feel like that. I suppose a great many people do, only I have not met that kind? No, never mind answering; how should you know? But, thank you. May I--if I see you again--may I speak to you?" She surveyed him gravely, as if with clairvoyant ability to read a history from his face, a face open-browed and planned for strength, by its square outlines, but that somehow only succeeded in being pleasant and passively agreeable. It was the face of a man who never had been brought against conflict or any need for stern decision, whose true character was a sword never yet drawn from the sheath. And now, he was in trouble; so much lay plain to see. He was in bitter trouble and, she guessed, alone with the trouble. He stood in mute acceptance of her scrutiny, recognizing her right, since he had asked so much. Before she spoke, he knew her answer, seeing it foreshadowed in the gray eyes. "If you wish to very much. But--not too soon again." She stepped from the curb, allowing no reply, but without apparent haste, pushing the carriage in which the baby chuckled and twisted to peep back at her. He watched her thread her way through the rushing lines of pleasure traffic; saw her reach the other side and disappear behind a knoll clothed with turf and evergreens that rose between them. The woman from whose presence he had come to this chance encounter once had told him that any human being looked absurd propelling a baby-coach. He recalled that statement now, and did not find it true. It was such a sane thing to do, so natural and good. At least, it seemed so when this girl did it. He envied the man, whoever he might be, who did, or would love her; envied him the clean simplicity she would make of life and the absence of hateful complications. People were glancing curiously at his motionless figure; he aroused himself and walked on. He had chosen his own way of living, he angrily told himself; there was no excuse for whining if he did not like the place where free-will had led him. Yet--had he? Or had he, instead, been trapped? The doubt was ugly. He walked faster to escape it, but it ran at his heels like one of those sinister demon-animals of medieval legend. Across the blackening river electric signs were flashing into view; gigantic affairs insolently shouldering themselves into the unwilling attention, as indeed they were designed to do by Jersey's desire for the greater city's patronage. Looking toward one of these, the man read it with a sullen distaste: "Adriance's Paper." That simple announcement marked an industry, even a monopoly, great enough to have been subjected more than once to the futile investigations of an uneasy government. The family name was sufficiently unusual, the family fortune sufficiently well known to have been bracketted together for him wherever he had gone. In school, in college, and later, always he had found a courier whisper running officiously before him, "Young Adriance--paper, you know. Millions!" And always it had led him into trouble; at twenty-six he was just commencing to realize that fact. The trouble never had been very serious until now. He never had committed anything his mother's church would have called a mortal sin. Even yet he stood only on the verge of commission. But he could not draw back; he was like a man being inexorably pushed into a dark place. The house toward which he turned did not arrest the eye by any ostentatious display. In fact, it was remarkable only for being one of the very few houses on lower Riverside Drive which possessed lawns and verandas. Set in a small town, or a suburb, the gray stone villa would have been merely "very handsome." Here, it gained the value of an exotic. To Anthony Adriance, junior, as he climbed the steps that night, it seemed to stare arrogantly from its score of blinking windows at the glittering sign on the opposite shore. Cause and effect, they duly acknowledge each other. The man paused to glance at them both, then let his gaze fall to the avenue below the terraced lawn. That way the black-gowned girl had gone. Probably she had turned across into the city; her dress was hardly that of a resident of the neighborhood. The man who took his hat and coat deferentially breathed a message. Mr. Adriance was in the library and desired to know if his son was dining at home. "Yes," was the prompt, even eager reply. "Certainly, if he wishes it. Or--never mind; I will go in, myself." The inquiry was unusual. It was not Mr. Adriance's habit to question his son's movements. One might have said they did not interest him. He and "Tony" were very good acquaintances and lived quite without friction. He was too busy, too self-centred and ultra-modern to desire any warmer relation. Affection was a sentimentality never mentioned in that household; a mutilated household, for Mrs. Adriance had died twenty years before Tony's majority. But it was not curiosity, rather an odd, faintly flickering hope that lighted the younger man's eyes as he entered the room and returned his father's nod of greeting. The two were not unlike, at a first glance; definitely good features: eyes so dark that they were frequently mistaken for black instead of blue, upright figures that made the most of their moderate height,--these they had in common. The great difference between them was in expression; the difference between untempered and tempered metal. No one would ever have nicknamed the elder Anthony "Tony." "I shall be glad to dine with you," the younger Anthony opened, at once. "I'll go change, and be back. Were you going to try the new Trot tonight--I think you said so?" "No. I had an hour this afternoon," Mr. Adriance stated, picking up a pen from the table and turning it in his fingers. He had a habit of playing with small articles at times--to distract his listener's attention rather than his own, said those who knew him well. Neither to his son nor to himself did it occur as incongruous that he should discuss a lesson in dancing with the matter-of-fact decision that made his speech cold and sharp as the crackle of a step on a frost-bound road. "It is not so difficult as the tango, though more fatiguing. Where had you intended to dine, tonight? At the Mastersons'?" Tony Adriance colored a slow, painful red that burned over face and neck like a flame scar. "Fred asked me," he made difficult work of the reply. "I couldn't get out of it very well, but I am glad of an excuse to stay away. It is early enough to 'phone." Mr. Adriance turned the pen around. "If Masterson was to be there, you might safely have gone," he pronounced. "If----" "Exactly. Dining with Mrs. Masterson will no longer do. Am I speaking to a full-grown man or a boy? If Mrs. Masterson chooses to get a divorce, and you afterward marry her, very good. It is done; divorce is accepted among us. But there must be no gossip concerning the lady." "There is no cause for any," retorted the other, but the defense lacked fire. He looked suddenly haggard, and the shamed red scorched still deeper. "She--isn't that kind." "No. She is very clever." He laid down the pen and took up a book. "I was cautioning you. Will you hurry your dressing a little? I have an early engagement down-town this evening." The dry retort was not resented. The younger man did not retreat, although way was shown to him. Since the subject had been dragged into the open ground of speech, he had more to say, with whatever reluctance. "You don't seem to consider Fred," he finally said. "Why should I?" Mr. Adriance looked up perfunctorily. "Masterson is nothing to me. You have not considered him." "I have! At least, I tried to stop this--after I understood. I never meant----" There was a pause, during which Mr. Adriance turned a page. The sentence was not completed, but Tony Adriance lingered as if in expectation of some reply to it; an expectation half eager, half defiant. No reply was made; finally it became evident there was to be none. "I thought you might object." He forced a laugh with the avowal, but his eyes denied the lightness. "Parents do in books and plays, you know. I thought you might tell me---- Oh, well, to pull out of this and bring home a woman of my own instead of some other man's woman. It isn't very pretty!" Mr. Adriance looked up with a certain curiosity. "You have a sentimental streak, Tony? I never suspected it. Why should I object to an affair so suitable? You have been following Mrs. Masterson about for a year; she is altogether charming and will make a good hostess here--a great lack in our household. I admire her myself, more than any débutante I ever saw. I am very well satisfied. Suppose you had brought home some milkmaid romance, a wife to stumble over the rugs and defer to the servants? No, no; manage this properly, that is all my advice. Meanwhile, do you know it is after seven o'clock? Unless you hurry----" "Oh, I'll hurry," was the dry promise. "And I am much obliged for the advice. But I fancy a good many of us may defer to the milkmaids, after we are dead." He swung the door shut with unnecessary force, as he went out. While he climbed the broad, darkly-lustrous stairs, he was aware that his father was turning another page of the book; and as a pendant to that picture had a mental glimpse of Lucille Masterson, lovely, perfect in every line of costume and tint of color, waiting for a man who was not her husband. What would the girl in black think of that, he wondered? Yet Lucille was altogether beyond reproach. She had every right to contemplate a divorce, in view of Fred Masterson's undoubted wildness and extravagance. If only she had not discussed it with him, Tony Adriance, he thought impatiently. If only she had announced her intention to her husband and the world, instead of broaching it secretly to the admirer she had chosen for her second husband! It was horrible to meet Masterson with this knowledge thrust like a stone blocking the way of intercourse. Certainly she lacked delicacy. Of course he must go on gracefully. It was very like climbing these stairs; one step taken implied taking the next. But he wished that he had not met the girl in the pavilion. CHAPTER II HIS NEIGHBOR'S WIFE During the next few days, Tony Adriance several times saw the girl in black. But he did not venture to approach or speak to her. It was too soon; moreover, he was not altogether certain that he wished to be with her. She was too disturbing, too concrete an evidence of other possibilities in life than those he had been taught. He remembered the story of the Grecian lake that was only muddy when stirred. Probably those who lived within view of its waters seldom "disturbed Comarina." Nevertheless, he always regarded the girl with a keen interest he could not have explained even to himself. He would glimpse her from his automobile in passing, or observe her from the opposite sidewalk as he went in or out of his father's house. She always had the child with her, and always wore the same frock. Usually, she was to be found in the white stone pavilion, established on the curved stone bench with a bit of sewing or a book. He never had imagined so quietly monotonous a life as hers seemed to be. It was at the end of the first week after their meeting that Adriance, riding slowly along the bridle-path through the park, saw an itinerant vendor of toy balloons and pinwheels wander into the pavilion where girl and baby were ensconced. The sunlight glittered bravely on the gaudy colors of fluted paper wheels, the plump striped sides of bobbing globes, and the sleepy, brown face of the Syrian pedler who mutely presented his wares. The girl lifted her smiling eyes to meet the man's questioning glance, and shook her head with a pretty gesture that somehow implied admiration and a gay friendliness which made her refusal more gracious than another's purchase. The pedler smiled, also, and lingered to hoist the straps supporting his tray into a new position upon his bent, velveteen-clad shoulders, before moving on his way. The baby had not been consulted. But his attention had been none the less enchained. Those pink and yellow things set spinning by the fresh morning breeze, those red balloons tugging at their cords like unwilling captives hungry for the clear upper spaces of blue--to see all this radiance departing was too much! He spread wide both chubby arms and plunged in pursuit. "Holly!" the girl cried, arresting his flight from the coach. "Why, Holly?" Holly hurled himself into magnificent rage. Halted by the outburst, the Syrian turned back with an air of experienced victory. "_Now_ you buy?" he interrogated. The girl shook her head, struggling to appease the young insurrectionist. "No, no. Please go away, and he will forget." The man took a step away. The baby's screams redoubled; he stamped with small, fat feet and brandished small, fat fists. "You buy?" the pedler blandly insisted. "No!" the girl panted. "Please do go. I cannot; I have no money with me. Holly, dear----!" Adriance had found a boy to hold his horse, and came up in time to overhear the last statement. He halted the Syrian with a gesture. "I have," he made his presence known to the combatants. "Won't you let me gratify a fellowman? Here, bring those things nearer. Which shall it be, young chap--or both?" The girl turned to him with candid relief warming her surprise. "Oh!" she exclaimed her recognition. "You are very good. I am afraid, really afraid it will have to be both. _Oh_----!" Holly had deliberately lunged forward and clutched a double handful of the alluring wares. By the time calm was re-established and the amused Adriance had paid, it seemed altogether natural that he should take his place on the seat beside the girl; as natural as the pedler's placid departure. Holly lay back on his cushions in vast content, two balloons floating from their tethers at the foot of his coach and a pinwheel clasped in his hand. "I should like to say that he is not often like this," remarked the girl, gathering together her scattered sewing, "But he likes having his own way as much as Maît' Raoul Galvez; and everyone knows what _he_ raised." "I don't," Adriance confessed. He noticed for the first time a softening of her words, not enough to be called an accent, far less a lisp, but yet a trick of speech, unfamiliar to him. "What did he raise?" "Satan," she gravely told him. "Maît' Raoul knew more about voodooism and black magic than any white man ever should. It is said he vowed that he would have the devil up in person to play cards with him, or never be content on earth or under it. And he did, although he knew well enough Satan never gambles except for souls." "Who won?" "Satan did. Yet he lost again, for Maît' Raoul tricked him in the contract so cleverly that it did not bind and the soul was free. There is a great split rock near Galvez Bayou where they say the demon stamped in his rage so fiercely the stone burst." "Then Maître Raoul escaped Hades, after all?" "Oh, no! He went there, but merely as a point of honor. He was a gambler, but he always paid his losses." Adriance laughed, yet winced a little, too. A baffled, helpless bitterness darkened across his expression, as it had done on the evening of their first meeting. He looked down at the pavement as if in fear of accidentally encountering his companion's clear glance. "I never read that story," he acknowledged. "Thank you." "I fancy it never was written," she returned. "There is a song about it; a sleepy, creepy song which should never be sung between midnight and dawn." He watched her draw the thread in and out, for a space. She was embroidering an intricate monogram in the centre of a square of fine linen, working with nice exactitude and daintiness. "What is it?" he wondered, finally. Her glance traced the direction of his. "A net for goldfish," she replied. It was not until long afterward he understood she had told him that she sold her work. The river glittered, breaking into creamy furrows of foam under the ploughing traffic. The sunshine was warm and sank through Adriance with a lulling sense of physical pleasure and tranquil laziness. How bright and clean a world he seemed to view, seated here! He felt a pang of longing, keen as pain, when he thought that he might have had such content as this as an abiding state, instead of a brief respite. How had he come to shut himself away from peace, all unaware? How was it that he never had valued the colorless blessing, until it was lost? After a while he fell to envying Maître Raoul, who had gone to the devil honorably. A long sigh from Holly, slumbering amid his trophies, awoke Adriance to realization that his companion possessed the gift of being silent gracefully. He had not spoken to her for quite half an hour, yet she appeared neither bored nor offended, but as if she had been engaged in following out some pleasant theme of meditation. A sparrow tilted and preened itself on the rail, not a yard from her bent, dark head. Over at the curbstone, the boy who guarded Adriance's horse had slipped the bridle over one arm and was playing marbles with two cheerful comrades who made calculated allowances for his handicap, based on his coming reward from the rider. "I am afraid I am very dull," Adriance presently offered vague apology. "Are you?" "I mean, I am not entertaining." She lifted her eyes from her sewing to regard him with delicate raillery. "No. If you had been the entertaining sort of person, I could never have let you talk to me," she said. "But I think you had better go, please, now. Two imported nursemaids in bat-wing cloaks have been glowering at us for some time as it is. Holly and I shall be grateful to you a thousand years for this morning's rescue." He rose reluctantly, with a feeling of being ejected from the only serene spot on earth. "Thank you for letting me stay," he answered. "You are very kind. I----" His lowered glance had encountered her little feet, demurely crossed under the edge of her sober skirt. They were very small, serious shoes indeed; not a touch of the day's capricious fancy in decoration relieved them. But what struck to the man's heart was their brave blackness, the blackness of polish that could not quite conceal that they had been mended. Of course, he at once looked away, but the impression remained. "I hope Holly will not imitate Maît' Raoul any more," he finished lamely. The girl frankly turned to watch him ride away. Her natural interest seemed to the man more modest than any pose of indifference. But it seemed that she was appointed by Chance to make Tony Adriance dissatisfied and restive. It was altogether absurd, but the fanciful legend she had told him taunted and hunted his sullen thoughts. He took it with him to his home, when he changed into suitable attire to keep a luncheon engagement with Mrs. Masterson. It still accompanied him when he entered the great apartment house where the Mastersons lived. He had not wanted to act as Lucille Masterson's escort on this occasion. His attendance had been skilfully compelled. But now he hated the duty so much that he was dangerously near rebellion. He hesitated on the threshold of the building, half inclined not to enter; to go, instead, to a telephone and excuse himself for desertion on some pretext. It was too late. Already the door was held open for him by a footman whose discreetly familiar smile Adriance saw, and resented. He winced again when the elevator boy stopped at the Mastersons' floor without being told, implying the impossibility of Mr. Adriance's call being intended for any other household. He never had noticed these things before; now, he felt himself disgracefully exposed before these black men. He was altogether in a mood of bitter exasperation, when he was ushered into Mrs. Masterson's little drawing-room. He recognized this condition with a vague sense of surprise at himself underlying the dominant emotion. All his life he had been singularly even-tempered. Now he combated a wish to say ugly, caustic things to the woman who had brought him here. He did not want to see her. Yet she was very pleasant to see. Indeed, both the scene and his hostess were charming, as they met his view. Mrs. Masterson was standing before a long mirror, surveying herself, so that Adriance saw her twice; once in fact, and once as a reflection. Sunlight filled the room, which was furnished and draped in a curious shade of deep blue with a shimmering richness of color, so that the lady's gray-clad figure stood out in clear and precise detail. But Mrs. Masterson could bear that strong light, and knew it. Without turning, she smiled into the mirror toward the man whose image she saw there. "How do you like the last Viennese fancy, Tony?" she composedly greeted him. Her voice was not one of her good points. It was naturally too high-pitched and harsh, and although by careful training she had accustomed herself to speak with a suppressed evenness of tone that smothered the defect to most ears, there resulted a lack of expression or modulation perilously near monotony. Adriance listened now, with a fresh sense of irritation, to the fault he only had observed recently. Before answering, he surveyed critically the decided lines of the costume offered for his approval; its audacious little waistcoat of cerise-and-black checked velvet, the diminutive hat that seemed to have alighted like a butterfly on the shining yellow hair brushed smoothly back from Mrs. Masterson's pink ears, and the high-buttoned gray boots with a silk tassel pendant at each ankle. Those exquisite and costly boots taunted him with their sharp contrast to those he had studied an hour before; they spurred him on to rudeness as if actual rowels were affixed to their little French heels. "The skirt is too extreme," he stated perversely. "They are going to be so; this is quite a bit in advance," she returned. "Do you like it?" "Not so well! It makes a woman look like a child; except for her face." Lucille Masterson's tact was often at fault from her lack of humor. Instead of retorting with laughter or silence, she opposed offence to his wilfulness. "Thank you," she answered freezingly. "I seem to have aged rather suddenly." "You know well enough how handsome you are," he said, a trifle ashamed. "Of course I did not mean what you imply. But, after all, we are not children, Lucille, either of us. We are a man and a woman who are going----" "Well?" "To gather a rather nasty apple!" He forced a smile to temper the statement. She slowly turned around and regarded him. "What do you mean?" she demanded, lifting her narrow, arched eyebrows. "My _costume trottoir_, and apples----? Aren't you considerably confused, Tony?" "Can't we at least face what we are doing?" he countered. "If we are able to do a thing, we ought to be able to look at it, surely. We can put through this thing, and our friends will think none the less of us; they are that kind. But they are not all the people on earth, you know. What the maid who brushes your gown or the man who opens the door for me says of us downstairs may come nearer the general opinion. Perhaps we would better have considered that. For I am afraid the majority of the white man's world cannot be altogether wrong." There was a quality in his voice that alarmed her. He had flung himself into a chair beside her desk, and sat nervously moving back and forth the trinkets nearest his hand. She stood quite still, studying him before committing herself by a reply. This was a Tony Adriance strange to her. "It seems very cowardly, to me, to be afraid of what people will say," she slowly answered. "And I will not have you speak to me as if I were a wicked woman, Tony. You know that I am not. You know I have borne with Fred's neglect and extravagance much longer than other women would." He flushed dark-red at the taunt of cowardice, but he spoke doggedly, tenacious of his purpose. "You could not give Fred another chance? You remember, he and I were friends, once. He has played too much with the stock market. Well, I might get my father to help him there; we might fix it so that he won sometimes, instead of lost. You do not know how hard it is for me to come into Fred's house this way." A flash of blended anger and fear crossed Mrs. Masterson's large, light-colored eyes. "Is it?" she doubted, cuttingly. "You have been coming here for a whole year, Tony." She had found the one retort he could not answer. Adriance opened his lips, then closed them with a grim recognition of defeat. Who would believe he had come here innocently? How could he tell this beautiful and sophisticated woman that he had been vaguely, romantically charmed by her without ever dreaming of any issue to the affair or of letting her suspect his mild sentimentality? How could he hope she would credit the tale, if he did tell her? She had been watching his changing expression; herself paled by a very genuine dread. Now, suddenly she was beside him, her hands on his shoulders. "Don't you love me any more, Tony? You come in here to-day and rage at me----! Have you taught me for months to need you and count on you for all the future, only to leave me, now? Oh, I believed _you_ were strong and true!" A caress from her was so rare an event, so unfamiliar a concession, that her mere nearness fired Adriance. Her fragrant face was close to his; he looked into her eyes, like jewels under water, suffused by her terror of losing him. His kiss was her victory. Instantly she was away from him; half across the room and sending furtive glances toward the curtained doorways, even toward the windows five stories above the street. The guilt implied in the action made it to Adriance as if a hand had struck the kiss from his lips. "We must be careful," she cautioned. "Suppose someone were coming in? You didn't mean all that, Tony? You love me as much as ever?" Adriance moved toward her. "I won't answer that in Masterson's house," he said, his voice shaken. "Lucille, you have got to do now what I asked you to do weeks ago: you must leave here at once and marry me as soon as it can be done. Since we have begun this thing, we must carry it through as decently as possible. And it is not decent for you to stay here or for me to come here. If you come with me now, to-day, I will put you with someone who can act as chaperon until the divorce is obtained; one of my aunts, perhaps. If you do this, and help me to keep what honestly is left, I give you my word that I never will fail you as long as I live, come what may." She drew back from his vehemence. Assured of herself and him, now, she permitted a frown to tangle her fair brow in half-amused rebuke. "My dear boy, what a dramatic tirade! Of course I will come to you the first moment possible--but, to-day? And just now you were deprecating gossip! You must let me arrange this affair. I am not ready to leave Fred, yet. Do you not understand? I must wait until he makes another one of his scenes; I must have a fresh reason for going, not a past one already tacitly overlooked." "You will not come?" She turned from his darkened face to the mirror. "You really are very selfish, Tony. Pray think a little of me instead of yourself. But I will try to do as you wish; next month, perhaps. I could go to Florida for the winter." Adriance sat down again beside the desk and took a cigarette from a small lacquered tray that stood there. He was beaten, but he was not submissive. He bent his head to the yoke with a bitter, sick reluctance. Yet he understood that it was too late to draw out. Lucille loved him; whether intentionally or not, he had won her. No, he must finish what he had begun. The cigarette was perfumed, and nauseated him. He dropped it into an ash-receiver, but it had given him a moment to steady himself. After all, Masterson did neglect his wife. If he could not keep his own, why should Tony Adriance turn altruist and try to do it for him? At least, Lucille might be happy. Mrs. Masterson had touched her hat into place, surveying her vivid reflection. She was wise enough to take her triumph casually. "Shall we go?" she questioned. "Nan Madison hates late arrivals, you know. Do make your man throw away that cravat you are wearing, Tony. Gray is not your color. It makes you look too pale; too much----" "Like Maître Raoul Galvez?" he dryly supplied, rising. "Who was he?" "A man who raised the Devil. I am quite ready if you wish to go." CHAPTER III THE GIRL OUTSIDE Tony Adriance slipped into the habit of pausing for a few words with the girl in black whenever circumstances set them opposite each other. And that was quite often, since his home was so near the pavilion she had adopted as her place of repose. He rather avoided his friends, during the days following his futile rebellion against Lucille Masterson's will, yet he was lonely and eager to escape thought. He could talk to the girl, he admitted to himself, because she did not know him. They met with a casual frankness, the girl and he, like two men who find each other congenial, yet whose lives lie far apart. Their brief conversations were intimate without being inquisitively personal. She had a trick of saying things that lingered in the memory; at least, in his memory. Not that she was especially brilliant; her charm was her earnestness, at once vivid and tranquil, and the odd glamor of enchantment she threw over plain commonsense, making it no longer plain, but alluring as folly. But she continued to wear the shabby little boots, with their optimistic bravery of blacking. They really were respectable boots, aging, not aged. The fault lay with Adriance, not them; he was too much accustomed to women "whose sandals delighted his eyes." If her feet had been less childishly small, they might have preoccupied him less. As it was, they preoccupied him more and more. There is no accepted way of offering a pair of shoes to a feminine acquaintance. Nevertheless, in the third week of his friendship with the girl, Adriance bought a pair of pumps for her. He had seen them in a glass case set out before a shop and stopped to gaze, astonished. They were so unmistakably hers; the size, the rounded lines, the very arch and tilt were right! They were of shining black, with Spanish heels and glinting buckles. He took them home with him, but of course he dared not give them to her. He had an idea that he might essay the venture on the last occasion of their meeting; if she punished him with banishment, then, it would not matter. For he meant to leave New York when Lucille went to Florida. He would spend the necessary interval between the divorce and his marriage, in Canada, alone. Meanwhile, there was the girl. It was on the last day of October that he found her knitting instead of embroidering; a web of gay scarlet across her knees. "A new suit for Holly's big Teddybear," she explained, as he sat down opposite to her. "Christmas is coming, you know. I like to have all ready in advance. Don't you think the color should become a brown-plush bear?" "It is not depressing." "It is the color of holly. And depression is not a sensation to cultivate, is it?" She paused to gaze across the river, already shadowed by approaching evening. "I believe in fighting it off with both hands; driving a spear right through the ugly thing and holding it up like Sir Sintram with that wriggly monster in the old picture." "You would be a good one to be in trouble with," he said abruptly. She disentangled his meaning from the extremely vague speech, and nodded serious assent. "Yes, perhaps. I'm used to making the most of things." "The best of them," he corrected. "Of course! The most best--why should anyone make more worst?" They laughed together. But directly the restless unhappiness flowed back into his eyes. "They do, though!" he exclaimed. "Then they are wrong, all wrong," she said decidedly. "They should set themselves right the moment they find it out." "But if they can't?" he urged, with a personal heat and protest. "Things aren't so simple as all that. Suppose they can't set one thing straight without knocking over a lot of others? You _cannot_ go cutting and slashing through like that!" "Oh, yes; you can," she contradicted, sitting very upright, her gray eyes fired. "You must; anyone must. It is cowardly to let things, crooked things, grow and grow. And one could not knock down anything worth while that easily. Good things are strong." He shook his head. But she had stirred him so that he sat silent for a while, then rather suddenly rose to take his leave. "You never told me your name," he remarked, looking down at her. He noticed again how supple and deft her fingers were, and their capable swiftness at the work. "No. Why?" she replied simply. "I don't know," he accepted the rebuke. "I--beg your pardon." "Oh, certainly. Holly is trying to shake hands before you go." Of course he and the baby had become friends. He carefully yielded his forefinger to the clutching hands, but he did not smile as usual. "Look here," he spoke out brusquely. "Just as an illustration that things are not as easily kept straight as you seem to think--I know a man who somehow got to following one woman around. I don't think he knows quite how. Of course, he admired her immensely, and liked her. Well, I suppose he felt more than that! But he never even imagined making love to her, because she was married. You see, he was a fool. One day when he called, she told him that she was going to get a divorce from her husband. She has the right. And the man found she expected to marry him, afterward; she thought he had meant that all along. What could he do? What can he do?" The baby gurgled merrily, dropping the forefinger and yawning. The girl laid down her work to tuck a coverlet about her charge. "I do not know," she admitted, her voice low. Adriance drew a quick breath. "That isn't all of it. The husband is the man's friend. Why, they used to sleep together, eat together----! And he doesn't know. Don't you see, the man has to fail either the husband or wife? How can you straighten that?" She looked up, to meet the unconscious self-betrayal of his defiant, unhappy eyes. "I am very sorry for him," she answered gravely. And, after a moment. "She must be very clever." He started away from the suggestion with sharp resentment. Clever--that was his father's term for Lucille Masterson; and it was hateful to him. He would not analyze why he felt that repugnance to hearing Lucille called clever. He refused to consider what that implied, what ugly depths of doubt were stirred in him to make him wince in anger and humiliation. Suddenly he bitterly regretted having told the story to this girl, even under the concealed identity. "No doubt," he made a coldly vague rejoinder. "I dare say the matter will work itself out well enough. It is getting late; I think I must go." It was altogether too abrupt, and he knew it. But he could do no better. He knew the girl's eyes followed him away, and he walked with careful ease and nonchalance. Out of her sight, he walked more slowly. Already the autumn twilight was settling down like a delicate gray veil. At the foot of the Palisades, opposite, a familiar point of light sprang into view among the myriad lights there; a point that ran like fire through tow, up, across, around until the glittering words shone complete: "Adriance's Paper." The name was reflected in the dark water. Down there, it swayed weakly and its legend was broken by the river's ripples. "You shine, up there, but I govern here," the Hudson flung its scorn back to the man-made arrogance. He was like that reflection, Tony Adriance thought, with a fancy caught from the girl's trick of imagery; he was the mere reflection of his father's successes, shifting, worthless, inseparable from the gold-colored reality above, dancing and broken on the current of a woman's will. He himself was--nothing. He winced under the self-applied lash. It was knotted with truth; he, personally, never had counted. Even Lucille never had said she loved him; she simply had taken his devotion for granted, and used it. Would she have promised herself to him if he had been a poor man? Would she ever have contemplated divorce from Masterson, with all his faults, if Tony Adriance had not brought himself and his gilded possibilities across her path? The questions were ugly, and sent the blood into his face. He stopped walking and stood by the stone wall edging the sidewalk, facing the river. He always had resented being merely his father's heir, in a vague, unanalyzed way. Now resentment threatened to flame into rebellion. Rebellion against what? His father, who left him absolute freedom from any restraint? Lucille, whom he was at perfect liberty never to see again, if he chose to deny her assumption? He was very completely trapped by circumstance, since the trap was open and yet he could not leave it. The delicate dot on the _i_ of irony was that he had loved Lucille, yet he knew he must be miserable with her all their lives. He thought of her even now with a certain longing, yet he would always distrust her and detest himself. His fingers gripped the stone edge; he felt a passionate envy of men who were strong enough to do insane, desperate things, to tear their own way ruthlessly through the clinging web of other people's ways. He fancied the girl in black to be such a person; if she considered herself right in any course, she would take it. But after a while he turned away and began to walk home. He had to dress, for he was dining with the Mastersons. It had been insisted upon, to make amends for the night he had stayed away to dine with his father. Lucille was not yet ready for any audible whisper to suggest divorce to the world or her husband. Tony must come and go as usual for a few weeks more. She had chosen to forget his appeal, after quelling his mutiny. Mrs. Masterson was not a generous victor. CHAPTER IV THE WOMAN WHO GRASPED The Mastersons' apartment had, like many such apartments, a charming little foyer. It was lighted by a jade-green lamp, swung in bronze chains delicately green from the tinting of time; and the notes of bronze and dull jade were carried through all the furnishings, through leather and tapestry and even a great, dragon-clasped Chinese vase. But those greenish lights were not always becoming to visitors. When Tony Adriance entered the foyer that evening they were so unbecoming to him that the maid privately decided he was ill. Her master not infrequently came home with that worn look about the eyes and mouth. She wondered if Mr. Adriance gambled. None of the other guests had arrived. Indeed, it was not yet time. The clink of glass and bustle of servants in the dining-room alone told of the coming event in hospitality. Hospitality? Tony Adriance stood still, arrested in his movement toward the drawing-room; the sick distaste of all the last weeks finally culminated in paralysis before the prospect of the farce he was expected to play out, with his unconscious host as spectator. "I--am not ready," he found himself temporizing with the maid. His glance fell upon a desk and prompted him. "I have forgotten an important letter; I will write it before I go in. Don't wait; I know my way." She obeyed him. Of course he had nothing to write, but he fumbled for a sheet of paper and picked up a pen. He was awake at last to the enormity of his presence here as a guest; before he had glimpsed it, now he saw it, stripped naked. He could not go on. There was no reason why the conviction should have come to him at this moment, but it did so. As he sat there, that knowledge rose slowly to full stature before his vision like an actual figure reared in the path he had been following. It was no longer a question of Lucille's desires or his own; he could not do this thing. He was not accustomed to intricate windings of thought, or to self-analysis. He hardly understood, as yet, what was aroused in him, or why. But he knew that he must act; that his time of passive drifting was ended. Once Lucille had reproached him with cowardice. To-day, the girl in the pavilion had innocently brought the charge again. And the girl was right; it was cowardly to let a wrong grow and grow. Masterson's friend in Masterson's house! Adriance dropped the pen his clenching fingers had bent, and stood up. The maid had gone back to that centre of approaching activities, the kitchen. Alone, Adriance went down the corridor to the drawing-room. Mrs. Masterson was alone there, moving some introduced chairs into less conspicuous situations. The alien chairs were covered in rose-color and marred the clouded-blue effect of the room. She pushed them about with a vicious force, as though she hated the inanimate offenders; her expression was sullen and fretful. That expression altered too quickly, when she saw Adriance standing on the threshold. He caught the skilful change that transformed it into winning plaintiveness. "You, Tony?" she greeted him, advancing to give him her hand. "I am so glad it was no one else. _You_ know how I must contrive and make the best of what little I have. How I loathe this cramped place, and bringing chairs from bed-chambers to have enough, and all pinching----!" She glanced about her with a flare of contempt, her smooth scarlet lip lifting in a sneer. Adriance slowly looked over the room, not very large, perhaps, yet scarcely cramped; made lovely by opalescent lamps and fragrant by the perfume of roses set in high, slender vases of rock-crystal. All one wall was smothered in the silken warmth of a Chinese rug, against whose blue was lifted the creamy whiteness of an ivory elephant quaintly carved and poised on its pedestal. Even to his eyes nothing here warranted discontent. "I thought this very pretty," he dissented. "I thought Masterson had done things very well, here." "Well enough, for a nook in a house; not for the house," she retorted. "I hate living in apartments. I always have wanted stairs; wide, shining stairs down which I would pass to cross broad rooms!" She drew a thirsty breath. In the gleaming gown which left uncovered as much of her beauty as an indulgent fashion allowed, her large light eyes avid, her yellow head thrown slightly forward as she looked up at the man, she was a vivid and unconscious embodiment of greed. Not the pitiful greed of necessity, but the greed which, having much, covets more. As if he shared her mind, Adriance knew that she pictured herself descending the stairs in his father's house gowned and jewelled as Mrs. Tony Adriance could be and Lucille Masterson could not. He was not aware of the change in his own face until he saw its reflection in the sudden alarm and question clouding hers. He answered her expression, then, compelling his voice to hold its low evenness of speech with the inborn distaste of well-bred modern man for betrayed emotion. "That is it," he interpreted. "That is why you would marry me and leave Masterson. You want more than he can give you. If he had as much to give as I have, it would not matter what he did. You would bear with him. Perhaps you have been bearing with me." "Tony!" she stammered. "It is quite true. I have been a solemn fool. I have been nerving myself to lay down my self-respect without flinching, because I believed that I had led you to count upon me; and all the while you were counting upon what I owned." She gathered her forces together after the surprise. "Rather severe, Tony, because I dislike expensive tenement life!" she commented, with careful irony. Turning aside, she laid her lace scarf across a table, gaining a respite from his gaze. "Have I ever pretended not to care for beautiful, luxurious things? And does that argue that I care for nothing else? I think you should apologize--and pay more heed to your digestion." He paused an instant, steadying himself. As usual, she had contrived to make him feel in the wrong and ashamed. "I do apologize," he said, less certainly. "I did not come in here to say all that, Lucille. But I did come to say what reaches the same end. We cannot finish this thing we have begun. We could not stand it. Think whatever you may of me as a coward, I am not going on." "Indeed, I think you have gone far enough," she calmly returned. "Suppose we sit down and be civilized. Will you smoke before dinner?" He shook his head, baffled in spite of himself by her elusiveness, but also angered to resolution. And he knew that he had seen her truly a moment since; the loveliness that had glamoured his sight for a year could not hide from memory that glimpse of her mind. "I am not staying to dinner, thanks," he refused. "And I am not playing. Our matter looked bad enough as it was, but you showed me a worse thing, just now. It was bad enough to take my friend's wife for love; I can't and won't take her by means of my father's money." She wheeled about, swiftly and hotly aflame, and they stared at each other as strangers. "You have forgotten that we are engaged," she said stingingly. "Or doesn't your conscience heed a broken word?" "Perhaps it is heeding the tactfulness of being engaged to one man while you are married to another," he struck back, goaded to a brutality foreign to his nature. The faint chime of touching glasses checked them on the brink of a breach that would have made reconciliation impossible. Mrs. Masterson dropped into a chair, snatching up a fan to shade her flushed face. Adriance stood stiffly, where he was, wisely making no attempt at artificial nonchalance. The servant who entered saw only composure in his immobility. Mrs. Masterson eagerly lifted the offered cocktail to her lips, as if anger had parched them. Adriance took a glass from the tray presented to him, but at once set it aside upon the table; now that he realized, he felt that the hospitality of this house was not for him. But the brief interlude helped both of them. When the servant had gone, Adriance spoke with restored calmness. "You see, even now the situation has warped us all awry. If it were not so, I should like to buy things for you, I suppose. I can imagine----" He broke the sentence; quite suddenly he had remembered the little buckled shoes bought for the girl in the pavilion. He had looked interestedly at other things in the shop, while he waited for his parcel. It would have given him delight to purchase certain elaborate stockings and absurd lace-frilled handkerchiefs. "I can imagine that I should," he finished lamely. "Lucille, you will come to agree with me, I hope. But even if you do not, I cannot go on." She rose and came up to him with a swift movement that brought both her hands against his shoulders before he grasped her intention. Her warm face was directly beneath his own. "Is there someone else, Tony?" she demanded. "Some girl? Of course it would be a young girl who inspired all this; 'pure as water'--and as tasteless! Is that it?" She might have struck him with less effect. Tony Adriance went absolutely numb with disgusted wrath. What preposterous thing did she imply? The shining gray eyes of the girl in the pavilion looked at him across the alert, probing gaze of Lucille Masterson; looked at him with beautiful candor, with indignation. He felt outraged, as if the young girl herself had been made present in this nasty scene. And without cause! He had no thought of loving that sober little figure; he was sick of love. "I am sorry you cannot credit me with one disinterested motive," he said coldly. "As it happens, you are wrong. There is no one except you. I am going away because you are neither unmarried nor a widow, since you force me to repeat all this. If you were either----" "You would stay?" she whispered. He looked down at her, and as always before her magic his strength grew weak. He lifted her hands from his shoulders, before replying. "Yes," he conceded, his voice changed. "But it is over, Lucille. Tell Masterson I have gone abroad; to stay." As he moved toward the door, Mrs. Masterson turned to the table and caught up his untouched glass. Fear and chagrin were swept from her face; it still glowed from her late rage, but her eyes were lighted with confidence and ironic relief. "To your safe voyage and pleasant return!" she exclaimed lightly, facing him across the room. "For you will come back, Tony. The spasm will pass; and leave you lonely. I can wait, then. Good-night." She laughed outright at the consternation in his glance, as he paused. But he turned and went out, leaving her leaning across the arm of one of the discordant rose-colored chairs, watching him. Back in the foyer, Adriance stopped to recover a conventional composure of bearing before going out. He recalled that he must pass inspection by the elevator boy and footman; must meet their wonder, no less obvious because dumb, at his departure before the dinner. The heavy blankness of his waiting was broken by the gayest sound in the world. The gurgling laughter of a happy child rippled through the silence like a brook, cascading down in a cadence of chuckles. As if to confirm the recognition to which Adriance started, a girl's clear laugh joined the baby merriment. Opposite him, light showed in a thin line through a curtained doorway. Without the slightest remembrance of proprieties or conventions, he sprang that way and swung the door open. He was on the threshold of a nursery; a room pink as the inside of a rosebud, gay with all the adorable paraphernalia babyhood demands, fragrant with violet-powder and warm as a nest. At the foot of a shining little bed, clutching the brass rail for support while executing a stamping dance, was the lord of the domain; his silk-fine, frankly red hair rumpled into glinting ringlets about his moist, rosy face, his blue eyes crinkled shut by mirth. The girl knelt opposite, steadying the chubby figure and serenely indifferent to the small, mischievous fingers that had loosened her dark hair from its braids. Without her hat, she was younger, even more wholesome and good than he had thought. She looked as fresh and candid as the damp, open-lipped kisses the baby lavished upon her. Perhaps the intruder moved, perhaps she felt his gaze, for as he watched the girl broke up the picture. She rose abruptly, turned, and saw him standing there. At first her startled face told only of surprise; indeed his mere presence there gave her no reason to feel more. But in his dismay and bewilderment and complete obsession Tony Adriance betrayed himself. "I didn't know," he stammered, grasping blindly at justification and apology. "I didn't know who Holly was--or that you lived here. I am sorry; I should not have spoken----" He stopped short. He had forgotten the fiction of a third person with which he had masked his confidence in the park; forgotten that the girl knew neither his name nor his purpose in this house. Quite without necessity he had enlightened her. For the girl was swift of perception. Perhaps his expression alone would have told her the truth, if he had been silent. Mechanically she had put one arm around the baby, now she drew it closer, as if in protection. Her rain-gray eyes grieved, reproached, rebuked him. Possessed of Lucille Masterson's plans, holding her son, she faced him in judgment. Of course he had known Lucille had a child, somewhat as he knew his father owned the factory behind the electric sign. He never had seen either of them, except distantly; they meant nothing actual to him. But now, there seemed nothing in the world so important. The girl had not spoken, yet she had abruptly brought him face to face with new things. "You know, I would have taken him, too," he tried to answer all she left unsaid, hating himself for the unsteady humility he could not keep from his voice. "I always meant to. I meant to do everything for the boy. I could--I am Anthony Adriance." She spoke, then, her smooth voice all roughened. "You can buy him everything? You cannot buy him his father. And nothing will make up for that." "But----" She struck down the weak protest. "I _know_. I have a good father. And Holly," the infinite compassion of her glance embraced the baby, "he has not even a real mother to do her half. It is not right; you cannot make it right." "But I have! I am going----!" He faltered. How was he to explain to her the scene that had just been enacted? Was it decent to Lucille? "I've done my best," he stammered. "I told you; you know I've not liked this." The exclamation blended defiance and appeal; it was almost a cry wrested from him. His position had been hard enough before the introduction of this new element. The girl understood, for the anger died from her eyes like a blown-out flame. "There must be a way," she said quite gently. "There is always a right way, if one can only find it. I think you had better not stay here, now. Mr. Masterson always comes at this time; it is even late for him." The warning had been delayed too long. Almost with the last word, a man's step sounded in the foyer, the curtains rustled apart and the door swung. "What, Tony in a nursery!" exclaimed the master of the house, with an oddly tired gayety. He came forward and gave his hand to Adriance, his amused scrutiny wholly cordial. If he wondered how the other man came here, he was both too indifferent and too well-bred to betray the fact. "You have caught me; here is the only place I am behind the times," he added. "Hello, son!" Adriance was spared the necessity of replying. The baby, who had stood staring round-eyed at the visitor, exploded into a very madness of chuckles and shouts, twisting out of the girl's hold and plunging toward the newcomer with fat arms insistently spread. With an apologetic, half-diffident glance at his guest, Masterson caught and swung Holly into the game of romps demanded. It was a good game, evidently the result of practice. The pink room rang with treble shrieks of glee; and Masterson laughed, too, occasionally interjecting phrases of caution or comment. "Jove, what a punch! How's that for muscle, Tony? Easy, son! How do _you_ like your wig pulled? Steady, now." [Illustration: THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO MORE BEDTIME ROMPS FOR MASTERSON AND HIS SON] The two in the background looked on. Adriance's throat was contracting; he was suffocating with a terrible sense of barely having escaped a shameful action. He understood the girl even better now. Only, if he loathed himself so much, yet knew that at least he had ended the wrong, how much more must her clear sight find him despicable in her ignorance of his tardy amendment! He dared not look at her. He tried to remember Lucille Masterson's regretfully murmured plaints of Fred's carelessness with money, his "wildness" and neglect of her. But he could only think heavily that if Mrs. Masterson had obtained a divorce, the custody of the child would surely have been awarded to her, the irreproachable wife. There would have been no more bedtime romps for Fred Masterson and his son. How much alike the two looked! He had forgotten how very auburn Fred's hair was, and how boyish his eyes were when he laughed. With a final toss and shout the dishevelled, panting baby was replaced in the bed, one cheek poppy-red from a rough masculine caress. A little shame-faced over the sentimentality, Masterson turned to his guest. "All over!" he affected lightness. "Come have a Martini before dinner, Tony." "No, thanks. I couldn't." Adriance pulled himself together with a sharp effort. "I heard your kiddie laughing, and just looked in here. I ought to apologize; I have not yet met this lady----" Masterson regarded him curiously. "Miss Elsie Murray, Mr. Adriance," he obeyed the implied request. "Miss Murray is good enough to be Holly's guardian, since no one of his family has time for that--or inclination." She was a nurse. The simple fact came home to Adriance for the first time. The severe black dress, the little white cuffs and collar that made it a uniform, her constant attendance upon the baby--all the obvious evidence had been overshadowed for him by her face and bearing, the personality out of all accord with the position in which she was. There was no change in her face. He comprehended that she never had imagined him ignorant of her relation to Holly. Through all his whirling confusion of thought, Adriance contrived to hold outward composure and acknowledge the introduction as he would that to any gentlewoman. The quaint word seemed to suit her. She met him with a poise at least equal to his own. But it was he who offered his hand, heedless of Masterson's observation. It seemed to him that he never had desired anything in his life so desperately, with such passionate eagerness as he desired to be justified before this girl. He wanted her to know the very thing he could not honorably tell anyone: that he had broken with Lucille Masterson of his own free will. His eyes sought hers, unconsciously beseeching her grace of comprehension; indeed, he had a confused idea that she would comprehend that his offered handclasp was ventured only because he was not going to do the wrong they both hated. Perhaps she did understand. At least, she gave him her hand, for the first time in their acquaintance. He grasped it with a brightening of his drawn face, leaning toward her. "Thank you!" he said. "I congratulate Holly; you will teach him in time about Maître Raoul Galvez." That speech took her by surprise; for an instant she did not withdraw her hand, her direct gaze meeting his. He saw her gray eyes cloud and clear, and cloud again; abruptly her dark lashes cloaked them from him. "Yes," she murmured. "Yes." Masterson was staring at the two, his lips parted by cynical interest. But no one perceived the second observer. Mrs. Masterson had come to the doorway while Masterson was playing with the baby and still stood there, narrowed, incredulous eyes appraising the amazing tableau offered by her nursemaid and Tony Adriance. She herself had followed Adriance for a last word, unaware of her husband's return home. And she had found this group, in her nursery. When the others moved, she drew back. The curtains noiselessly fell shut. The two men came into the foyer almost immediately, but the bronze lamp lighted an empty room. Masterson asked no questions of his guest as they paused outside the nursery, but Adriance had recollected himself enough to shelter the girl from embarrassment. "I stopped one day to speak to your boy in the park," he remarked casually. "Miss Murray was telling him an odd fairy tale that struck my fancy; Creole, I should think." Masterson dropped his hand on the other's shoulder with an intimacy long unused between them, ignoring the explanation. "We never seem to get together, any more, except at some society nonsense," he regretted. "We used to be pretty close, Tony. Remember that night in the Maine camp after the canoe had upset, when there was only one blanket left and we tossed up for it? I don't remember who won, but I know we both slept under it----as much as we could get under." He laughed reminiscently. "Well, it's a far cry from there to here! Shall we go in to Lucille?" "Thank you, but I have made my excuses to Mrs. Masterson," Adriance answered steadily. "I had a telegram----! I am off for the rest of the year; perhaps longer. I am going to South America." "Your father's business? I remember you once spoke of some such thing. I wish I were going with you." He sighed with impatient fatigue, and the two stood for a silent moment. Masterson aroused himself to hold out his slender, nervous hand. "Well, good luck go with you, Tony. It usually does, though! 'To him who hath----.'" CHAPTER V. THE LITTLE RED HOUSE The next day it stormed. A biting north wind hunted across river and city; a wind that carried the first ice-particles of the approaching winter. There were no children on the Drive or in the park, except a few sturdy urchins neither of the age nor class attended by nurses. No one uncompelled cared to face the grim, gray, scowling day whose breath was freezing. In the Adriances' breakfast-room, an effort had been made to offset the outside cheerlessness by aid of lamps glowing under gold-colored shades. But only an optimist could have deluded vision into accepting the artificial sunshine as satisfactory. Tony Adriance was even irritated by the feeble sham, and snapped out the lamp nearest to him as he took his seat. The action was trifling, but Mr. Adriance, seated on the opposite side of the round table, glanced keenly at his son and read an interpretation of it. He believed that Tony wished to shadow the pale exhaustion of his face. In this he was wrong; Tony Adriance was quite past thoughts of his appearance. Not having looked in a mirror, he was not even aware of the traces left by the last night. He did not at all appreciate the significance with which his father presently inquired, courteously concerned: "You are not well, this morning?" "Quite well, thank you," Tony replied; he glanced up from his plate somewhat surprised at the question. Mr. Adriance met the glance with sincere curiosity. His first hazard failing, he sought for a second. Indeed, he knew very well that Tony had none of the habits which lead to uncomfortable mornings, although to a casual regard his present bearing suggested a white night. Fortunately, he had not perceived the innuendo within the older man's question and was not offended. Mr. Adriance detested being in the wrong. Tony was too listless to pursue the subject at all. After vainly waiting a moment for his father to explain the inquiry, he proceeded with the business of breakfasting more or less indifferently. He was conjecturing as to his own ability to set forth his trouble for the calm inspection of the gentleman across the table. He had come down-stairs with that intention, born of the night's bitter experience of solitude in unhappiness. Now he felt that the project was impossible. His father and he were not on terms of sufficient intimacy. He suffered an access of discouragement and weariness. His only idea had failed, yet something must be decided, some course followed. "You dined at the Mastersons', last night, I believe?" Mr. Adriance had found his second hazard. Unconsciously his voice sharpened; it would be intolerable if Tony and Masterson had made some clumsy scene between them. Occasionally Mr. Adriance wondered what so clever a woman as Lucille Masterson had seen in either of the two. "No," Tony denied. "No? I had understood----?" "I dined down-town." That was the first deliberate lie the younger man had told the older in all their life together. But Tony confronted an utter impossibility; he could not confess that he had sat until midnight in a park pavilion, with no more thought of life's common-sense routine than a sentimental boy. Nevertheless, his voice sounded unconvincing to his own ears, and humiliation swept over him like a wave of heat. The desire to get away from everyone and everything familiar made it difficult for him not to spring up and leave the room and the unfinished breakfast. But Mr. Adriance was convinced and appeased. In his relief, he felt a really kind desire to relieve Tony from his evident depression. "You appear to have something on your mind," he observed. "If it is anything I might remove, pray call upon me, Tony." "Financially?" queried his son, drily. "Certainly, if you wish. You are not in the least extravagant. In fact, you are a charming contradiction of a great many popular conceptions concerning those not forcibly employed." "Thank you. But I wish you would employ me, sir, if not forcibly. I want to go away for a time; not just--for amusement. Can you not send me somewhere to take charge of your interests instead of a hired agent? I could learn to help you, perhaps." The last expression was unfortunate. Mr. Adriance's brow contracted and the cordiality left his gaze. "I am not yet superannuated," he signified. "When I am in need of help, I will ask it, Tony. Naturally I intend training you to take charge of your own affairs after my death. You will find that quite enough to occupy you, some day. I am sorry if you are unable to amuse yourself, already. Next year, if you like, we will take up the matter of your business education. This year, I shall be too busy. You are young and I am not old." His glance turned toward a mirror set in a buffet opposite. The face reflected was clear in outline, firm to the verge of hardness; the eyes full and alert, the carefully brushed hair so abundant that its grayness gave dignity without the effect of age. Self-appreciation touched Mr. Adriance's lip with a smile, as he gazed, smoothing away his slight annoyance. His son, tracing that glance, felt a movement of kindred admiration and a renewed sense of his own personal inadequacy. Tony Adriance had accomplished nothing, yet he was already tired. How would he look when he was thirty years older? Hardly like that, he feared. Nor would Fred Masterson! Whose was the fault, and what the remedy? Mr. Adriance, returning to his coffee, surprised the other's observation of him, and shrugged an unembarrassed acceptance of the verdict. "We have plenty of time, you see," he remarked. "Moreover, you are hardly ready for abstract affairs. You are not sufficiently settled. After you are married that will come. I myself married young. Marriage makes private life sufficiently monotonous not to interfere with the conduct of outside matters of importance." "Does it?" speculated Tony, doubtingly. "It should. Monotony is closer to content than is agitation, would you not say?" "Doesn't that depend on the kind of monotony?" "Surely. That is why each man should choose his own wife." "I see. If I ever choose a wife, I shall remember the advice." This time Mr. Adriance was astonished. He did not miss the significance of the remark, or the alteration in Tony since the previous day, when he had last seen him. It was not possible to be explicit in a matter so delicate, especially with servants present; but his curiosity was not to be denied. "You have not--reached that point? I had fancied----" "I have no such engagement at present," was the steady reply. Mr. Adriance pushed away his finger bowl and allowed his cigar to be lighted by the deferential automaton behind his chair. "I am sorry," he said. His son did not misunderstand him; in fact, he understood more clearly than perhaps did the older man himself. Mr. Adriance had chosen the hostess he wanted for his house, or rather, he had been enchanted by Tony's supposed choice. Lucille Masterson filled his ideal of his son's wife. Her loveliness would be a point of pride; her social experience would make her competent for the position; moreover, she was too clever not to have courted and won the genuine liking of Tony's father long ago. Fred Masterson was hardly considered, except as an obstacle readily removed, when the proper time came. And now, Tony himself was overturning all the pleasant family life that Mr. Adriance had planned. He knew that his father never willingly relinquished a perfected plan; rarely, indeed, was he turned aside from a purpose on which his mind was fixed. "Perhaps you will reconsider that statement later," Mr. Adriance presently suggested. "I think not, in the sense you mean," he made slow reply. Mr. Adriance raised himself abruptly. "I hope so," he said, with a touch of sharpness; "I hope you are not going to grow irresolute and changeable, Tony. I detest weakness of character. Perhaps you had better take a trip somewhere and get yourself in tone." "Perhaps," Tony agreed; his voice was not yielding, but sullen and desperate. Indeed, he was as near illness as a man may be without physical injury or disease. After his father had left the breakfast-room he sat for a long time in utter mental incapacity to undertake any line of effort. Finally he arose, oppressed with a sense of suffocation in the rich, sombre atmosphere; of imprisonment and helplessness. He wanted air and solitude, the solitude he had come to the breakfast-room to escape, and he could think of no place where he could be so well assured of both as in his motor-car. In his abstraction he walked bareheaded and without an overcoat across the frozen stretch of lawn between the house and the garage. He was quite indifferent to the weather; his chauffeur put him into furs and passed him his gloves and cap as a matter of course, or he might have fared forth poorly equipped to meet the wind and storm. He swung his machine from the cement incline into the street and turned across Broadway. He did not wish to pass Elsie Murray ensconced in the park pavilion with Holly Masterson at her knees; yet his thoughts were so swayed by her that when he reached One Hundred and Thirtieth Street he turned west again and took the ferry across the Hudson. He had no better reason for doing so than the tranquillity and content she seemed to draw from contemplating the opposite shore. He sped up Fort Lee hill with a crowd of other cars, turned west and north to escape their companionship and all the landmarks he knew. He avoided the main highway and chose mere cross and hill roads and lanes. Always he had before him the vivid, pretty face of Lucille, the tired young face of Masterson and the gray eyes of Elsie Murray. A nurse-maid! The girl who had told him the legend of Raoul Galvez, the girl by whose standard he had come to measure himself and his companions and who had fixed the sluggish attention of his conscience upon the mischief being wrought by his yielding good nature--that girl was Lucille's nurse-maid. That amazement of the night before remained with him, coloring all other emotions. He had come out to arrange his thoughts, but the hours passed and they remained in chaotic condition. Near noon he was running through a narrow woodland track when a bend in the road suddenly revealed his way blockaded by an enormous wagon that stood before him. It was a moving van; its canvas sides distended by bulky furniture and household fittings, its rear doors tied open to allow a huge old-fashioned cupboard to stand between. Adriance brought his machine to an abrupt halt. "Clear the way there," he impatiently shouted to the invisible driver; "what is the matter--broken down?" The answer came, not from the concealed front of the van, but from the bank bordering on the side of the road. "All right; but ain't it a shame that you blew in at dinner-time!" The reply was unexpected; Adriance looked towards the complainant's voice. In the shelter of a big boulder that gave some protection from the wind, three men were seated, each with a leather lunch-box on his knee. Two of them wore the striped aprons of moving-men; the third evidently was the spokesman and the driver. All three held various portions of food and stared down at the intruder in the attitude in which his advance had arrested them. "It ain't as if we could just turn out," the driver pursued, not resentfully but with an impersonal disgust. He put the apple in his hand back into his lunch-box and stood up. "We've got to go on a mile before there's room for you to pass. Come on, boys." "No," Adriance aroused himself from self-absorption to forbid the upheaval. "I am in no hurry; finish your lunch, and I will wait." The three on the bank stared harder. "You're a sport," complimented the driver; "but it ain't more than five minutes after twelve." "What has that to do with it? Oh, I see; you mean that you rest until one?" "You're on." "Well, I said that I was not in a hurry," he accepted the delay he had not contemplated. "Take your rest and I will smoke." The three men regarded each other, then the driver slowly sat down. The munching horses were blanketed against the cold, but the men appeared careless of temperature. They obviously were constrained by the presence of the man in the automobile, however. "This road ain't much used," the driver ventured presently. "We're taking this load to a farmhouse up here a ways. That's why we thought we could stop traffic without being noticed." His round, bright eyes asked a question that Adriance answered with doubtful truthfulness. "I lost my way." "Oh!" The driver paused, then suddenly slid down the bank. "Ain't we the hogs," he observed deprecatingly, coming up to the side of the car and offering his lunch-box. "Won't you eat?" The tired, dark-blue eyes of Tony Adriance met the cheerful, light-blue eyes of the other man. The two men were about the same age, and one of them was desperately lonely and sick of his own thoughts. They both smiled involuntarily. "Thanks, I will," said Adriance; and took a thick, rye bread sandwich from the box presented. The driver sat down on the running-board of the automobile and there ensued a well-employed silence. The sandwich was excellent. Adriance had eaten little breakfast; yet, left to himself, he would hardly have thought of food in his bitter preoccupation; but it did him good. The ham smeared with cheap mustard had a zest of its own, a little brutal, perhaps, but effective. It was a generously designed sandwich, too, not a frail wafer. He ate it all, even the acrid crust. "'Nother?" invited the host. "No, thanks; but that one tasted good." Adriance drew out his cigar-case. "Won't you all have a smoke with me, now?" The cigars were passed and lighted. Before returning the case, the driver frankly inspected the fine leather toy with the tiny monogram in one corner. "That's all right," he approved, returning it to its owner. "I was afraid you'd pull out a little gold box of cigarettes." "Why?" amused. "Oh, I don't know, my luck, I guess." "You don't like them?" "Me? I got a pipe three years old that holds _some_ tobacco--that for me. But this cigar is all right. Ever try a pipe?" "Yes." The driver leaned back comfortably against the spare tire strapped beside the car, gazing up at the gray, cold sky. "A pipe, my feet on the kitchen stove, the kids and the missus--me for that, nights." Adriance looked at him with startled scrutiny. Almost he could have imagined that Elsie Murray had come to the man's side and prompted him. What, was it then real and usual, that homely content she once had painted so vividly? Did most men have such homes? "You're married?" he vaguely asked. "Sure, these five years; we got two kids." The boyish driver chuckled and shook his head reminiscently. "Darn little tykes! What they ain't up to I don't know. Dragged a big bull pup in off the street last week, they did, and scared the missus into fits. Pete--he's four--had it by the collar bold as brass, and it ugly enough to scare you. Say, I'm trying one of those schemes for training kids on him; exercising him, you know. You ought to see the muscles he's got already, arms and legs hard as nails. Think it will work all right?" Adriance looked down into the eager face. "Yes, I do," he said slowly. "You cannot be more than twenty-five or six----?" "Twenty-five is right." "You must have worked pretty hard?" "Ever since I was fourteen," was the cheerful assent. He pulled out a watch of the dollar variety and looked at it. "One o'clock it is! We'll get along again, boys. Yes, I've been busy. But the missus and I are saving up. Some day I'm going to have a trucking business of my own; there's good money in it. Well, we're sure obliged to you for waiting for us." The other two men were coming down the bank. Adriance drew off his glove and held out his hand to his acquaintance. "I am glad I met you. Good luck!" "Same to you!" He pulled off his mitten to give the clasp. "Are you going to the ferry?" "I--I--? Yes." "Well, turn off when you get to the next road. It's a poor one, but it's a short cut to the Palisades road." The horses were unblanketed and the bags which had held their luncheon removed. The men climbed into their places, and presently Adriance's lusty machine was rebelliously crawling on behind the moving-van. At the end of a mile they came to the side road, and parted with cheerful shouts of farewell. It was impossible to measure the good that interlude of healthy companionship had done to Tony Adriance. It had swept aside vapors, cleared his mind to normality, invigorated him like a pungent tonic. Yet it had laid a reproach upon him. He contrasted himself with that boyish husband and father; yes, contrasted Mr. Adriance, senior, with that driver who was anxiously training his son's body by his own efforts after the day's work. He could not recollect his father ever playing with him or seriously advising him. Even Fred Masterson was doing better. The road debouched abruptly upon the main highway. A passing automobile momentarily delayed Adriance, and looking idly across the way, he perceived a house. After the other car had passed and the way was open, he sat quite still in his machine, gazing. There was nothing about the house before him to catch the eye except a certain air of quaint sturdiness that had survived desertion. It was rather a cottage than a house, bearing a sign "For Sale," and unoccupied. It was a red-painted cottage, built in that absurd Gothic fashion once favored by some insane builders. Its ridiculous roof and windows were highly peaked; its high, narrow porch had a pointed top like a caricature of the entrance to _Notre Dame de Paris_. It stood quite back from the road with an air of abandonment; but it was unconquerably cheerful, even against the gray sky. It was a house that wanted to be cosy. Suddenly Adriance realized that he was very tired. He was not ready to go home; he even thought with abhorrence of going there. Yet he was weary of guiding his machine along the highway. He left his seat and walked up the wood path--two planks in width--leading to the cottage. The windows gaped, uncurtained; he looked in, then deliberately seated himself upon the step and lapsed into heavy revery. There were few passers-by on such a day. Those who were compelled to the road lingered in the cold to look curiously at the automobile standing by the gutter and at the young man who sat on the old wooden step. It was four o'clock when Tony Adriance rose and went back to his automobile. He did not turn down to the ferry, but looked again at the signboard on the house; then turned his machine about and drove to an address which was seven miles inland. CHAPTER VI THE WOMAN WHO GAVE Tony Adriance had not really heeded the weather until he found his way to the stone pavilion on Riverside Drive at dusk that evening. Cold and wind had recorded slight impression on his preoccupied mind and his healthy body. Indeed, his feeling was that of a man passing through a fever, rather than one chilled. And he was hot with a savage sense of victory, for he brought decision back with him. He knew, at last, what he meant to do. He was brought to heed the weather by his need of seeing the girl who was Holly's nurse. He stood for a while in the pavilion, after realizing the absurdity of expecting to find her, and considered. He was accustomed to having his own way; hardly likely to abandon it when his necessity loomed urgent. His distrust of himself was deep, if unconfessed; he dared not wait until the next day. Besides, the storm might continue. After a brief pause of bafflement, he walked up to Broadway, found a stationer's shop and a messenger, and dispatched a note to Miss Elsie Murray. He looked curiously at the name, after it was written; it seemed so soft, even childish, matched with that steadfastness of hers to which he held as to the one stable thing in his knowledge. Would she come? The doubt bore him company on his way back to the pavilion. Could she free herself from duties to come, if she wished? He did not know, but he was obstinately resolved to see her that night. He was indeed like a man in a fever; one idea consumed him. A quarter of an hour passed; a half hour. Dusk, their hour of adventure fixed by chance, had almost darkened to night when Adriance saw the small figure for which he watched step from the curb. She hurried, almost ran across the broad avenue, the wind wrapping her garments around her. "Thank you," the man greeted her, his gratitude very earnest. The girl brushed aside his speech with a gesture. She was breathing rapidly; amid all the shadows her face showed white and small. "Of course I came," she said. "It was not easy--to come. I cannot stay long. But I knew you would not have sent unless it was important." "No," he affirmed, and paused. "I wonder why you are there? I mean, why are you somebody's nurse, to be ordered about when you could do so much better things? Of course, I can see how different you are!" He stopped, with a sense of alarmed clumsiness. Because she was weary, the girl sat down on the cold stone bench before answering. "You are quite wrong," she said quietly. "I cannot do clever things at all. I do not mean that I am stupid, exactly, but that I cannot do anything so especially well as to make people pay me for it. Neither can my father. I think he is the best man in the world, and my mother the dearest woman, but they cannot make money. He is a professor of romance and history, at a small college in Louisiana. There are a good many of us--I have four younger sisters--so I came North to support myself." "But----" "Not as a nurse, of course. I came with an old lady whose son we knew at the college. She asked me to be her private secretary. But after a few months she died. I could not go back to be a burden. After I had tried to find other things to do, and failed, I came to take care of Holly. Why are we talking about me? There was something important, you said?" "I--yes," Adriance said. He could read so much more than she told. Afterward he was ashamed to remember that he neither felt nor expressed any pity for her disappointed hopes. His whole attention was fixed on her steady courage; the fighting spirit that he had divined in her and toward which his indecision reached weak hands groping in the dark for support. The girl shrank behind the stone column nearest her as a blast of freezing wind rushed past. "Well?" she spurred his hesitation. She was successful. He moved nearer her to be heard; the fever of the last twenty-four hours thickened and hurried his speech. "I'm not going to tell you about Mrs. Masterson," he told her. "In the first place, you would not listen, and in the second place, I have nothing to say. But you must know that last evening she broke her engagement with me. I mean, before I saw you in the nursery. I was free, then." "She dismissed you?" He had deliberately thought out the falsehood that protected Lucille Masterson at his own expense. But it was harder than he had anticipated to play this weak rôle before Elsie Murray. "Yes," he forced the difficult acknowledgment. "You need not have told me that," her slow reply crossed the darkness to him. "I know it is not true. And I know what is true. It does not matter how I--learned. But we may as well speak honestly." He could have cried out in his great relief. Instead, he seized the offered privilege of speech. "I will, then! You know what I have done to Fred Masterson. I brought the glamour of money, of what I could buy, into his household and made his wife awake to discontent and ambition. I didn't know what mischief I was working, until too late. I did not understand some of it until last night. Now, what? Suppose I go away? Where can I go? Abroad, or on a hunting trip? While I was gone she would get the divorce, when I came back she and the rest would push me into the marriage. My own father is pushing me. Everyone pities her and thinks the thing is suitable. You don't know me! I like her, and I'm easily pushed. I tell you I never did anything but drift, until last night. I am afraid of myself, yet." "Then, why have you sent for me?" she asked, after a silence. There was as much sullenness as resolution in the unconscious gesture with which he folded his arms. "Because I mean to stop this thing. Because I am going to take my own way for the rest of the journey instead of being pushed and pulled. I quit, to-night." "How? What do you mean?" "I am leaving the position where I am not strong enough to stand firm. And because I know myself, I am fixing it so I cannot go back. You"--he stumbled over the word--"you are not much better off than I, so far as getting what you want out of life is concerned. Do you want--will you try the venture with me? I think, I'm sure I could keep my half of a home. You once said you would like to be a poor man's wife----" The last word died away as if its boldness hushed him with a sense of what he asked so readily. The girl rose to her feet, swaying slightly in the strong wind; her fingers gripped the stone railing behind her while she strove to see his face through the dark. A street lamp sent a faint grayness into the pavilion, but he stood in shadows. "You--are asking--me----?" He laughed shortly to cover his own embarrassment. "To marry a man who isn't much more than a chauffeur out of work! Driving a car is my only way of earning money, just now. Of course, if we go away together we will have to live on what I can bring in. It's not very dazzling, but neither is being a nurse." Comprehension slowly came to her. "You would do this so you never could go back," she whispered, half to herself. "To be cut off from everyone, because of me!" "Not that!" he offered quick apology. "Why, you are above me by every count I can make! No, it is because I can't stand alone. And, of course--if I were married----" "Mrs. Masterson would give her husband another chance," she finished. He could not see her expression, but he felt her bitterness, and that he was losing. "Don't be offended," he appealed. "I thought we could be good friends--why, if I did not respect and--and admire you, would I be asking to spend my life with you? I know I am not offering you much, but it's my best." "You do not love me." He bent his head to the assertion; for it was an assertion, not a question. After the dazzling companionship of Lucille Masterson, love was scarcely an emotion he could associate with the grave, quiet little figure of Elsie Murray. He was surprised and embarrassed anew, and showed it. "I am not very sentimental, I'm afraid. Couldn't we start with friendship? I'll try to make a good comrade for everyday." The delay was long, so long that he anticipated the refusal and felt his heart sink with a sense of loss and apprehension. All his plans, he suddenly realized, were founded upon a strength drawn from her. He felt the tremor of his structure of resolution, with that support withdrawn. Unreasonable bitterness surged over him. Even she would not have him, penniless. She was shivering. He noticed that, when she spoke. "You wish us to understand each other?" she said, her voice quite steady. "Very well. Remember, then, I never knew who you were until last night. You were just a man who seemed lonely, as I was just a woman alone. Remember that I am human, too, and imagine things, and how monotonous it is to be a nurse and do the same things every day. I thought you talked to me and came so often because you were commencing to like me. Once you bought violets from a man on the corner, then threw them away before you crossed to me. I knew you meant them for me, but feared I would not like you to give them to me. I liked you better for throwing them away than for buying them. I was--foolish. And I cannot marry you, because you do not love me, while I--might you." With the last low word, she passed him and went from the pavilion, not in running flight, but with the swift, certain step of finality. Adriance was left standing, struck out of articulate thought. The astounding blow had fallen among his accumulated ideas and scattered them like dust. She loved him. Slowly stupefaction gave place to hot shame for the insult of his proposal to her. He had been coarse, selfish beyond belief and wrapped in egotism. He had asked her to be his wife with the grace of one engaging a housemaid. And he might have had the unbelievable! A slow-rising excitement mounted through him; a tingling, vivifying interest in the future he had faced with such sullen indifference. She was gone from sight. Adriance was not rapid of thought, or readjustment. But he knew where to look for her, now. He sprang from the pavilion and ran, throwing his weight against the wind's blustering opposition. The physical effort, in that stinging air, sent his blood racing with tonic exhilaration. He felt dulness and morbidity dropping away from him; zest of life taking their place. The girl was crossing a dark little strip of park that lay before the house where the Mastersons lived, when he overtook her. "Elsie Murray!" he panted. "Elsie Murray!" His voice had changed, and his accent. He spoke to her possessively; he no longer depended, he directed. Instantly sensitive to the difference, the girl stopped. "Are you running away from me, Elsie Murray?" His hand closed lightly on her arm, he stood over her with the advantage of his superior height, and she heard him draw the cold air deeply into his lungs. "I did not tell you the truth, back there. I meant to, but I did not know it myself. I want what you might give, and I want to give as much to you. Why, do you know what started me toward ending all this bad business, what has given me the will to keep on? It was what you said, the first night I saw you, about a woman waiting for her husband, with the lamps lit, and all. I can't say what I mean--I'm clumsy! But, will you come keep the lamp for me?" She tried to speak, but to his dismay and her own, instead covered her face; not weeping, but fiercely struggling not to weep. "No," she flung refusal at him. "No! No!" As her firmness lessened, his gained. She looked pitiful and helpless, she, his tower of strength. Suddenly, protectingly, he caught her from the assault of a violent swirl of the gale; caught and held her against him, in the curve of his arm. "If you may love me, and I want you, we have enough to start with," he gently insisted. "I promise you I'll do my part. Will you try it with me?" She remained still. But the long pause, the contact between them, joined with the change in the man and helped him. "Will you marry me to-night?" he pressed. She drew away from him with a flare of her natural resolution. "No! Not to-night, if you could!" "To-morrow, then?" "Go home," she bade him. "Go home; think of everything--of what you have and what you would leave, of all you want and must miss. _Think._ And if, to-morrow----" "Yes?" "If you are sure, come back. I----may try it." He knew better than to force her further. "To-morrow, then, I will meet you at noon, in the pavilion," he yielded, quietly, in spite of his leaping excitement. "And there is something else. Once I bought these, for you. Of course I dared not give them to you, afterward. But I did not throw them away, and I brought them in my pocket to-night. Perhaps you will wear them to-morrow, when we go away." The storm swooped down again. This time he did not hold her from the gust, and she flitted with it into the darkness. But she took the little package he had pressed into her hands; she had at last the little pair of buckled shoes. CHAPTER VII THE DARING ADVENTURE They were married at two o'clock the next day. The wedding was in church, at Elsie Murray's desire. With a certain defiance expressive of his attitude toward all the world, Adriance, after obtaining their license, took her to the rector of that costly and fashion-approved cathedral which the Adriances graced with their membership and occasional attendance. Of course the two were met with astonishment, but there was a decision in the young man's speech and bearing that forbade interference. The clergyman did not find the familiar, easy, good-natured Tony Adriance in the man who curtly silenced delicate allusion to the wedding's unexpectedness and the surprising absence of Mr. Adriance, senior. "I am over age, and so is Miss Murray," was the brief statement, whose finality ended comment. "Will you be good enough not to delay us; we are leaving town?" There were no more objections. Of course the bride was not recognized as Mrs. Masterson's nurse; she simply was an unknown girl. And she did not in any way suggest that Mr. Adriance was marrying out of his world. Adriance himself entirely approved of her in this new rôle. He liked her dark-blue suit with its relieving white at throat and wrists, and her small hat with a modest white quill at just the right angle. And she wore the shining, Spanish-heeled, small shoes of his choosing. He noticed how large her gray eyes were, when she lifted them to his, large, and clear as pure water is clear under a still, gray sky. But her heavy lashes threw shadows across them, as he had once seen lines of shadow lie across a little lake in Maine on an autumn day. He wondered if she was happy, or frightened. He could not tell what she was thinking or feeling. So they were married before the imposing altar of cream-hued marble, and the conventional notice went to the newspapers: Adriance-Murray. Elsie Galvez Murray to Anthony Adriance, Jr., by the Rev. Dr. Van Huyden, at St. Dunstan's Cathedral. It was very simply done, for so daring an adventure. When they stood outside, in the sparkling autumn sunshine, Elsie Adriance asked her first question. "Where are we going?" she wondered, in her soft, blurred speech that now Adriance recognized as of the South. Her middle name had caught his attention also. There once had been a governor of Louisiana called Galvez; New Orleans has a street named for him. But he was not thinking of ancestry now. He looked doubtfully at his companion. In spite of his repressed bearing, he was suffering a terrible excitement and a tearing conflict of will and desire. He was acutely conscious of the finality of what had been done; and one part of him wished it undone. He thought of his father and Lucille as a man in a fever thinks; glimpsing them in a confusion of remembered pictures, conceiving their future attitude with the exaggeration of his unreasoning sense of guilt and belated regret. He felt himself in bonds, and the instinct of escape gripped and shook him. But he kept himself in hand. "Where do you wish to go?" he temporized, withholding his own wish. It became him to consider her first, now and hereafter. She shook her head. "I follow you," she reminded him, quite simply and gravely. "Where would--it be easiest for you? You spoke of going out of town; perhaps that would be best. I think, it seems to me, that we should start as we mean to go on." "Yes!" he exclaimed eagerly. She had offered him his inmost desire; in his gratitude he caught her hand, stammering in the rush of words released. "Yes. If you will go, I have a house--our house. Let me tell you. Yesterday, after meeting you at Masterson's the night before, I was at the limit. I had to keep out of doors and keep moving, or go to pieces. I kept seeing Fred, and Holly. Well, I took a long drive; across the river, I went, perhaps because you were always looking over there as if it were some kind of a fairyland. And on the way back, on the road along the Palisades, I saw the house. It was--I stopped and went in. It looked like a place you had made a picture of. I can't explain what I mean, but I sat down there and thought things out. You won't be angry? I bought it. Not that I was so sure of you! You see, if you refused to take me, I knew I had money enough to buy fifty like it for a whim. And if you would come, it was the house." There was no anger in her glance, only a heartening comprehension and cordial willingness. "Let us go there," she agreed. "I should like that best of all." Reanimated, he put her into the waiting taxicab, gave the chauffeur his directions, and closed the door upon their first wedded solitude. "But this is one of the things we must not do," she told him, bringing the relief of humor to the situation. "We must not take taxis and let them wait for us with a price on the head of each moment. It is more than extravagant; it is reckless." He laughed out, surprised. "So it is. I am afraid you will have a lot to teach me." "Yes," she assumed the burden. "Yes." They rode down to the ferry, and the taxicab rolled on board the broad, unsavory-smelling boat. When the craft started, the vibration of the engine sent a throbbing sense of departure through Adriance such as he never had felt in starting a European voyage. This time he could not return. He was humbly grateful for Elsie's silence, which permitted his own. On the Jersey side their cab slowly moved through the dark ferry house, then plunged out into a sun-drenched world and swung blithely up to the long Edgewater hill. They left the river shipping behind, presently. The sunlight glittered through the woods that still clothe the long, rampart-like stretches along the summit of the great cliffs; a forest of jewels like the subterranean woods of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, only instead of silver and diamonds these trees displayed the red of cornelian and brown of topaz all set in copper and bronze. The storm of the night before had littered the ground with the spoils of Lady Autumn's jewel-box; the air was spicily sweet and very clear. The village on the first slope of the hills had been dingy and poor. Here above, on the heights winding up the river, there were few houses, with long spaces between. Elsie leaned at the window, her wide eyes embracing all. Adriance leaned back, seeing nothing. The taxicab finally stopped, nevertheless, at his signal, before a little red cottage set far back from the road. "Here?" the chauffeur queried, with incredulous scorn. "Here," Adriance affirmed, swinging out their two suit-cases and his wife. He laughed a little at the man's face. "How much?" The toll pointed Elsie's warning. She made a grimace at her pupil. His spirits mounting again, Adriance answered the rebuke by catching her hand to lead her up the absurd, staggering Gothic porch in miniature. "I'll come back for the baggage," he promised. "Come look, first." "Is there anything inside?" "Oh, yes. I----" he looked askance at her. "I bought things, at a shop in Fort Lee, early this morning. I suppose they're all wrong." She met his diffidence with a smile so warm, so enchanting in its sweet, maternal raillery and indulgence that his heart melted within him. And then, as he fumbled with the key, she took from her hand-bag a book and a small glass bottle, and gave them to him. "What----?" he marvelled. "Don't you know?" she wondered at him. "'Where was you done raised, man?' Don't you know there is no luck in the house unless the first things carried into it are the Bible and the salt?" He did not know, but he found the superstition of a singular charm. "Give me the salt, then, and you take the other," he divided the ceremony. "No," she denied quietly. "You should carry the Book, because you will make the laws. I will take the salt, because I shall keep the hearth." So they went in, he oddly sobered by the dignity she laid upon him. There were only two rooms on the ground floor. The one into which they stepped was large and square, with a floor of brick faded to a mellow Tuscan red, and walls of soft brown plaster. A brick fireplace was built against the north side; the furnishings comprehended two arm-chairs, a round Sheraton table and china closet, a tall wooden clock, and four rag rugs in red and white. In one corner, modestly retired, a plain deal table supported an oil cook-stove, with an air of decent humility and shrinking from observation. The open door beyond revealed a bed-chamber, also rag-rugged, furnished with a noble meagreness, but displaying a four-posted bed of carved and time-darkened ash. Elsie took a long, full look, then regarded her husband with widening eyes. "Anthony, _where_ did you buy them? And what did you pay for them?" No one within his memory had ever called Adriance by his unabbreviated name. It came to him as part of this new life where he was full-grown man and master. And he welcomed the frank comradeship with which she used it, without a sentimental affectation of shyness. "At a little place with a sign 'Antiques'," he confessed. "I had passed it in the car. I thought they might do as well as new things, since we have got to economize. I never bought any furniture before; if they won't do----" "They are perfect." The mirth in her eyes deepened. "But you had better let me help you, next time we shop economically. Hadn't we better build a fire, first, to drive away the chill? Oh, and is there anything to eat?" "In the cupboard over there; everything the grocer could think of," he said meekly. "I'll go get anything else you say. First, though, I'll run down to the gate and bring in our suit-cases." "Do," she approved. "I want an apron. Do you know, you never asked me if I could cook." "Can you?" "Wait and see. What woman thought of the oil-stove?" "The antiquarian's wife. She said the fireplace was more bother than it was use and suggested stuffing it with paper to keep the draughts out." "Well, we will stuff it with fire," she declared. They built the fire; or rather, Adriance built it, aided by the girl's tactful advice. When the flames were roaring and leaping, she sent him to the nearest shop where lamps could be purchased, the trifling question of light having been overlooked. When he hurried back from the village, the need of light was becoming imminent. Dusky twilight came early here under the edge of the hills. Climbing the steep road, Anthony Adriance looked across the violet-tinted river toward the chain of lights marking the street where Tony Adriance had lived and idled. Already he knew himself removed, altered; he was interested in keeping on with this thing. Of course, he must keep on, he had set a barrier blocking retreat; he had taken a wife. He opened the brown door of the shabby little cottage, and stopped. The fire on the hearth had settled to a warm, rosy steadiness, filling the room with its glow and starting velvet shadows that tapestried the simple place with an airy brocade of shifting patterns. In the centre of the room stood the round table, robed in white and gay with the antique shop's ware of blue-and-white Wedgewood. The perfume of coffee and fragrance of good food floated on the warm air. The fire snapped at intervals as if from jovial excess of spirits, and a tea-kettle was bubbling with the furious enthusiasm of all true tea-kettles. It was the room of his fancy, the unattainable home that Elsie had pictured on the first evening he had spoken to her out of his sick heart. Elsie herself stood beside the hearth. Elsie? He never had seen her like this. But then, he scarcely had seen her at all except in the severe black of a nurse's livery. She had merely taken off her jacket, now, although he did not realize the fact. Her soft white blouse rolled away from a round, full throat pure in color and smoothness as cream. She was no sylph-slim beauty, but a deep-bosomed, young girl-woman, fashioned with that rich fulness of curve and outline that artists once loved, but which Fashion now disapproves. Her mouth, too, curved in generous, womanly softness; neither a thin line nor a round rosebud. Her dark hair rippled of itself around her forehead and was lustrous in the firelight. His entrance caught her off guard. He surprised herself in her eyes, before she masked feeling in gayety. And he saw a wistful, frightened girl whose trembling excitement matched his own. The latching of the door behind him ended the brief instant of revelation. At once she turned to him the cordial comrade's face he knew. "Dinner is served," she announced merrily. "At least, it is waiting in the oven. We have hot biscuits, scrambled eggs, a fifty-eighth variety of baked beans, and strawberry jam. There is no meat, because you only shopped at a grocery, sir. Do you really adore canned oysters, Anthony?" "I never tasted one," he slowly replied, putting down the packages he had brought, without taking his gaze from her. "Well, you bought six tins of them," she shrugged. He made no pretense of replying, this time, moving across the room toward her. He was remembering that she was a bride, who by her confession loved him, and that he had given her nothing except the gold ring compelled by custom; not a caress, not a flower, even, to speak of tenderness and reassurance. He was astounded at himself, appalled by his degree of selfish absorption. All day she had given him of her understanding, her warm companionship, her gracious tact and heartening cheerfulness, exacting nothing--and he had taken. Oh, yes, he had taken! Troubled by his silence, her color mounting in a vivid sweep, the girl tried to turn aside from his approach. "We must have a little cat," she essayed diversion. "I hope you like kittens? Purrs should go with crackling logs. Not an Angora or a Persian; just a pussy." Her voice died away. Very quietly and firmly Adriance had taken her into his arms. "I've made a bad beginning," he made grave avowal. "I am learning how much I need to learn. And I don't deserve my luck in having you to teach me." She rested quietly in his arms, as if conceding his right, but she did not look at him. She was very supple and soft to hold, he found. There breathed from her a fresh, faint fragrance like the clean scent of just-gathered daffodils, but no perfume that he recognized. She was individual even in little things. He wondered what she was thinking. The uneven rise and fall of her breast timed curiously with the pulse of his heart, as she leaned there, and the fact affected him unreasonably. He did not want her to move; warmth and content were flowing into him. Content, yet---- Suddenly, he knew; a man confronted with a blaze of light after long groping. "Elsie!" he cried, his voice sounding through the room his great amazement. "Elsie! Elsie!" She looked at him then, putting her two little hands on his breast and forcing herself back against his arm that she might read his face. But he would not have it so, compelling her submission to the marvel that had mastered him. What the church had essayed to do was done, now. Anthony Adriance had taken a wife. "I love you," he repeated, inarticulate still with wonder, his lips against her cheek. "Why didn't you tell me? I love you." He never forgot that she met him generously, with no mean reminder of his tardiness. She took his surrender, and set no price on her own. Her lips were fresh as a cup lifted to his thirst for good and simple things; he thought her kiss was to the touch what her eyes were to the gaze, and tried clumsily to tell her so. When they finally remembered the delayed supper, that meal was in need of repairs. And because now Adriance would not suffer the width of the room between himself and his wife, he insisted in aiding her in the process, thereby delaying matters still further. Nine o'clock had been struck by the clock in the corner when they sat down to table, lighted by the new lamp. It had a garnet shade, that lamp, upon which its purchaser received the compliments of Mrs. Adriance. She delivered an impromptu lecture on the subject, as the light glowed into full radiance and illumined her, seated behind it. "Red, sir, is the color of life. It was the color of the alchemist's fabled rose, looked for in their mystic cauldrons, because if the ruddy image formed on the surface of the brew, the bubbling liquid was indeed the true elixir of youth and immortality. Red is the color of dawn, of sunset, of a fireside; of bright blood, poured splendidly for a good cause or daintily glimpsed in a girl's blush. Red are a cardinal's robes, a Chinese bride's gown, a Spanish bride's flowers. To be kept in a red-draped chamber, in Queen Elizabeth's time, was believed to cure beauty of the smallpox without a scar. Lastly, red is the color of the heart." "'Lord, keep our heart's-blood red,'" paraphrased Adriance soberly. "I am not clever like you, but I know red is the color of your own jewels." "Mine?" He caught her hands across the table. "Have you forgotten what stones were likened to the value of a good woman? Elsie, Elsie, when I can, I will give you--not diamonds or pearls, but rubies. Rubies, for to-night." Neither of the two was given to continued sentimentality of speech. But the deep happiness, the shining wonder that still dazzled them found expression in plans for this new future; mere suggestions for the comfort of the house or the pleasure of their leisure together. She mentioned a much-discussed book, and he promised to read it aloud to her. "I've always wanted to read aloud, but I never found anyone who would listen," he told her, over the strawberry jam and coffee. "You can't escape, so----! You can embroider, and listen." "Embroider!" She heaped scorn on the word. "Let me inform you, sir, that there will be dish-towels to hem, and napkins. Do you know we have only one tablecloth, and that has a frightful border, with fringe? Blue fringe? And there are no curtains at the windows. Embroider? I shall _sew_, and listen." "Well, so long as you listen!" He lighted a cigar and leaned back luxuriously. "What little hands you have!" She spread them out on the table and seriously contemplated them. "Most Southerners have. Didn't you ever notice it, even with the men? Down in Louisiana most of us have some French or Spanish blood. But mine have not been do-nothing hands, and I think they show it a little bit." He stopped her, with a sudden distasteful memory of certain wax-white, wax-smooth and useless hands that almost had laid hold on his life. "I hope that mine may soon show something. To-morrow I will try to become a wage-earner, and start a pay envelope to bring you." "So soon?" "Right away. Am I one of the idle rich? The fact is, our grocer tells me chauffeurs are badly needed at a certain factory near the foot of the hill. I think I should rather drive a motor truck than pilot a private car, open doors and touch my cap." She nodded agreement. "Yes, of course. What factory is it, Anthony?" He regarded her with a whimsical humor. "Well, to be exact, it is not a factory unfamiliar to us. It is one whose sign you often have viewed from the aristocratic side of the Hudson, and it is the property of Mr. Anthony Adriance, senior." "Oh!" startled. "Is, is that--safe?" "Why not?" he wondered. "We haven't broken any laws, have we? The worst he could do, if he wanted to do something melodramatic, would be to fire me. But he will not. In the first place, why should he? In the second, he knows a trifle more about the natives of Patagonia than he knows about the men who drive his trucks. I don't believe he has been in this factory for ten years. New York is his end. And I'm giving him a square deal; he will have a very valuable chauffeur, Mrs. Adriance--one who can drive a racing-machine, if required!" She disclosed two dimples he had not previously observed. But her eyes hid from the challenge of his and she rose hastily to clear away the dishes. "Let them stand," he commanded, man-like. There she was firm in rebellion, however. Finally they compromised on his assisting her. "We must have a dog, too," he decided, when all was neat once more. He glanced about the fire-bright room with a proprietary air. "One that will not eat your kitten." "With a nice watch-doggy bark?" "With anything you want!" He turned abruptly and drew her to him. "Elsie, suppose I had missed you? What a poor fool I've been! Last night---- Why don't you take it out of me? Why don't you make me pay as I deserve?" She smiled with the delicately-mocking indulgence he was learning to know and anticipate; it sat upon her youth with so quaint a wisdom. "Perhaps I am, or will." "I believe now that I loved you from the first day. I know that I kept thinking about you and considering everything from the point of view I fancied you would take. You"--with sudden anxiety--"you do not regret coming with me, Elsie? What were you thinking of, just now, when your eyes darkened? You looked----" "Of Holly," she answered simply. "I hope his new nurse will play with him, and cuddle him." "The baby?" Her fidelity touched him with a warm sense of promise for his own future. "Yes, I have taken you from him. But, we left him his father." The allusion brought a constraint. The words spoken, Adriance flushed like a woman and turned his ashamed eyes away from the girl. "You did not take me from Holly," Elsie hurriedly corrected. "Mrs. Masterson discharged me, night before last. I was to go to-day, anyhow." "You? Why?" She hesitated. "She came to the nursery door while you were speaking to me of telling Holly the story of Maît' Raoul Galvez. You know, Holly is too much a baby to hear stories, so she understood that you meant--other things. And it seems that once you had spoken to her of that story. She--made connections. She accused me of--of flirting with her guests; of being--an improper person." "Elsie!" "It is all over. It does not matter, now. But that was how I knew she did not send you away. Of course she said nothing to tell me; she is too clever. But, you see I knew so much already; and when I saw she was jealous even of your speaking to me----!" The silence continued long. Both were thinking of Lucille Masterson. As if she feared the man's thoughts, Elsie shrank away from her husband's clasp, the movement unnoticed by him. Her clear eyes clouded with doubt, a creeping chill extinguished their glow. Adriance spoke first, breaking at once the pause and the barrier. "Once they must have been like this--like us. She would have left Fred, left him down and out, for a new man; and she his wife!" Disgust was in his voice, wondering contempt. He pressed his own wife hard against his side. But Elsie dragged her arms from the hold that bound them, and impulsively clasped them about his neck in her first offered caress. "You were thinking _that_?" she cried, fiercely glad in her triumph. "Anthony, you were thinking that?" He stooped his head to meet her glance; standing together, they looked into each other's eyes. CHAPTER VIII ANDY OF THE MOTOR-TRUCKS. The man behind the wicket leaned forward to survey the man outside. The gate-keeper at the main entrance to Adriance's was the prey of a double vanity that kept his attention alert: he was vain of his own position, and of his ability to judge the positions of other men. This was his seventeenth year in the cage of ornamental iron-work, and he had brought his hobby into it with his first day there. He delighted in difficult subjects, now, who baffled a casual inspection. It was, therefore, with an air of bored certainty that he classified this morning visitor at a glance, and settled back on his high stool. "Office door to the right, sir," he directed, briefly, but respectfully. "Boy there will take in your card, sir." "I understand chauffeurs are wanted here," said the visitor, his composed gaze dwelling on a poster to that effect affixed to the nearest wall. The gate-keeper stared. "I guess so----?" "Is the office the place where I should apply for such work?" "Trucking department; turn left, down basement, Mr. Ransome," vouchsafed the chagrined concierge, severely wounded in his self-esteem. So blatant a mistake had not offended his pride in years. He turned in his seat and craned his thin neck to watch the stranger swing blithely away in the direction indicated. "Chauffeur!" he muttered. "Walks as if Adriance's was his private garage an' he was buildin' himself a better one around the corner! Hope Ransome throws him out!" But Ransome of the motor-trucks was in urgent need of men and disposed to be more tolerant. Moreover, his sensitive vanity had taken no hurt that morning. But he looked rather closely at the applicant, nevertheless. "Used to chauffing private cars, aren't you?" he shrewdly questioned. "Yes," admitted Adriance. "I thought so! Where was your last place?" "I drove for Mr. Adriance, junior," was the grave response. The man whistled. "You did, eh? Why did he fire you?" "He left New York for the winter, without taking his machines along." "Did he give you a reference?" "I can bring one to-morrow, or I can go get it now, if you want me to start work at once. I haven't it with me." "Why not?" "I forgot it would be needed." This was unusual, and produced a pause. Ransome studied his man, and liked what he saw. "Married?" he shot the next routine question. "Yes." "Anything against you on the police records? Accidents? Overspeeding?" "Nothing." "I can see you don't drink. You know Jersey?" "Not so well as New York, but well enough to pick up the rest as I go along." "Well, it's irregular, but we're short-handed. Give me your license number so I can verify that. Bring your reference to-morrow, and if it is all right---- I'll take you on to-day, on trial. Wait; I'll give you your card." The inquisition was safely past. Adriance smiled to himself as he watched the superintendent fill out the card that grudgingly permitted him to earn his first wage. He was intoxicated, almost bewildered by his own lightheartedness. His body was still tired and beaten after the miserable conflict from which his mind had resiliently leaped erect to stand rejoicing in the sunlight. To-day he could have overcome a hundred ill chances, where one had yoked him yesterday. "Name?" came the crisp demand from the man writing. "Anthony Adriance." "What!" The superintendent's head came up abruptly. "Why--what connection----?" "Poor relation," classified Adriance coolly. He had anticipated this, but he could not have endured the furtive discomfort and risk of a false name. "All rich men have them, I suppose." His indifference was excellently done. The superintendent nodded acquiescence. "I suppose so; must have been queer, though! What did young Adriance call you? Did he know?" "Oh, yes. 'Andy' is a noncommittal nickname." "All right; here is your card." Mr. Ransome watched the new employee cross the floor, with a meditative consideration of the uselessness of the shadow of the purple without its comfortable substance; but he was not especially surprised after the first moment. Few wealthy men trouble themselves about the distant branches of their families, and babies are frequently named after them by hopeful kinsmen. At the other end of the subterranean chamber where trucks rolled in and out, piloted by weather-beaten chauffeurs and loaded with heavy packages and bales by perspiring porters, a little man in a derby hat and shirt sleeves was in command. With him the matter passed still more easily for the stranger. "What's your name?" he shrilled in a peculiarly flat treble voice, across the uproar of thudding weight, rolling wheels and panting machinery. "Andy? Well, take out number thirty-five. Mike, Mike! Where is that--that Russian? Here, Mike, you are to go with number thirty-five. Bring your truck in for its load and get your directions from the boss there, Andy. Report when you get back." A huge figure lounged across the electric-lighted space toward Adriance; a pair of mild brown eyes gazed down at him from under a shock of red hair. "I guess you're new," pronounced the heavy accent of Russian Mike; "I guess I show you?" "I wish you would," Adriance cordially accepted the patronizing kindness. He found time to marvel at the readiness of his own smile since last night, and at the response it evoked from these strangers. "I don't know where to find thirty-five yet, or who is the boss." "I know," announced Mike, grandly comprehensive; "you ride with me, Andy; I'll learn you." So Andy of the trucks began his education. A motor-truck is not a high-priced pleasure car. Nor is the trucking department of a large factory professional in its courtesy. Tony Adriance learned a great many things in breathless sequence. And he never had been quite so much interested by anything in his life--except his newly-made wife. The men were not gentle, but they were merry. They shouted gaily back and forth at each other with a humor of their own. When Tony stalled his unfamiliar motor there was much unpolished witticism at his expense; but also a neighbor jumped down to crank the machine for him, and another sprang up to the seat beside the new man and gave him a score of valuable hints in a dozen terse sentences. When he finally drove up the incline into the street, he found that Russian Mike appeared to have a complete map of the Jersey City river front engraved on his otherwise blank intelligence and proved as willingly efficient a guide on the streets as in the factory. If the difficulties were more numerous than the novice had anticipated and the work harder, these things were more than offset by the unexpected comradeship he encountered. All day, amid the steady press of events, the thought of his wife lay warm at the core of his heart. His love was matched only by his deep wonder at the thing which had befallen him. The exultation of successful escape was strong upon him; escape from loathsome bonds, from complicated problems his innately simple mind detested, above all, from the guidance of other people. He and Elsie were alone as no distance around the world could have made them. He had come to a place in life where he was not a boy to be governed, but master in his own right. A heat of pride had burned his face when he had answered "Yes" to the superintendent's question: "Married?" Decidedly he meant to stay in the home and the factory of his first adventure, if possible. On his first trip he made an excuse to stop at a stationer's, where he wrote for himself a recommendation signed by Anthony Adriance, Junior. The ruse amused him; he found himself childishly ready to be amused. When he brought the truck in from the last journey of the day he presented this letter to Mr. Ransome, who read and returned it with a nod of content. "All right; to-morrow at seven," he said briefly. He ached in every unaccustomed muscle bent to toil when he strode up the hill at dusk, his day's work over. But he was no more affected by that than a boy on his first day of camping--it was part of the sport. Because he was learning unselfishness he felt more anxiety as to how Elsie had got through the day. Housework in the rather primitive cottage was a different thing from caring for Holly Masterson in his luxurious pink-and-gold nursery. Would he find her discouraged, tired--perhaps cross? He smiled audacious confidence in his ability to caress her into good humor, but he wondered rather uneasily whether his wages would support a maid should Elsie demand one as necessary. He was utterly unused to the practical apportionment of money. There were new curtains draped across the lighted windows of the little red house. As he turned up the ridiculous plank walk he saw a very diminutive kitten seated on the window-sill inside washing its face. And then he heard a fresh, smooth voice singing the drollest little air he ever had heard in his musical experience--a minor grotesquerie distinctive as the flavor of _bouillabaisse orléanais_. He opened the door and his wife laughed at him across the bright room, flushed with fire heat, dainty in her lavender frock and white ruffled apron, arrested with a steaming tureen uplifted in her little hands. Perhaps she had doubted how he would come home from that first day of work. For just a moment they drank full reassurance from each other's eyes; then Adriance was across the room. "Put it down or I'll spill it!" "Sir, this is a soup extraordinary! Would you overturn your supper?" "Yes, for this," said Adriance, and kissed her soft mouth. "Anthony, can one be _too_ happy and affront the fates?" "No." "We can go on and on, and nothing will happen!" "Please God!" said Tony Adriance with perfect reverence. "It is not a wonderful adventure now; it is just life?" "Of course. I say--I wish that van-driver could see me now--the one I told you about last night." "The butcher gave me the kitten, Anthony." "Of course he did; any man would give you all he had. What were you singing when I came in?" "How should I know? I know a thousand bits of song and a thousand stories, and they march in and out of my head. Our dinner is spoiling, Mr. Adriance." "I love you!" "I dislike you!" she mocked him. There was no one in New York who would have quite recognized either Anthony or Elsie Adriance in these two children at play together. "Next Saturday evening I want you to take me shopping, please," she told him when they were seated at supper. "Enchanted; but why Saturday?" "Because you will have your wages then, naturally. We need more dishes, and a casserole, and a ribbon for the kitten, and--thousands of things." "Shall I have wealth enough?" "Plenty; we are going to the 5-10-20 cent store." "I thought those were the prices of melodrama on the East Side." "Wait. You may find the event even tragic, if I want too many seductive articles," she cautioned him. "But let us not talk of mere things--aren't you going to tell me about your day?" "I am. But it was a day like any other workingman's, I suppose; nothing happened." "Did you want anything to happen? I imagined----" "All I want," said Tony Adriance fervently, "is to be left alone, with you." CHAPTER IX THE LUCK IN THE HOUSE. Nothing did happen. None of the traditionary usual experiences overtook the two in the little red house, as November ran out and December stormed in like a lusty viking from northern seas, attended by tremendous winds and early snow. In the first place, the marriage of Anthony Adriance, Junior, somehow escaped the sensational journals, as a pleasing theme. There were no headlines announcing: "Son of a millionaire weds a nursemaid." No reporters discovered the house on the Palisades, to photograph its diminutive Gothic front for Sunday specials. Adriance had written a letter of explanation, so far as explanation might be, to his father. That was on the morning of his marriage, and as he had given no address, naturally he had received no answer. There were no reproaches and no pursuit. Nor was Tony Adriance gnawed by vain regrets. According to every rule of romance and reason, he should have suffered from at least brief seasons of repining; at least have been twinged by memories of things foregone, yet desired. But he felt nothing of the kind. Masculine independence was aroused in him, and held reign in riotous good spirits. With a boy's triumphant bravado he faced down cold and hard work, delighting in the victory. He rose early and built Elsie's fires before permitting her to rise, while she sat up protesting in the four-posted bed as he bullied and loved and mastered her. He walked two miles to and from work morning and evening, and drove his big motor-truck eight hours a day. Moreover, he gained weight on the régime, and the springing step of a man in training. He never had suspected it, but his whole body had craved outdoors and employment of its forces; Nature had built him for work, not idleness. The atmosphere in which he had been reared was, by a trick of temperament, foreign to him. "I'm plain vulgarian," he laughed to his wife one morning as he started to work. "I would rather drive one of my father's trucks and come home to your pork-chops, than I would to dawdle around his house and dine with a strong man standing behind my chair to save me the fatigue of putting sugar in my own coffee. Are you going to have some of those jolly little apple-fritters with butter and cinnamon on them for supper to-night?" She made a tantalizing face at him. It was two days before Christmas, and so cold that her lips and cheeks were stung poppy-bright as she stood in the doorway. "Of course not; now I know that you want them. We will have cold meat. What are you going to give me for my stocking, Anthony?" "A cold-meat fork," he countered promptly. "How did you know I meant to give you anything?" "I didn't," she calmly told him. "But I am going to give you something, so I thought it only kind to remind you." He swung himself easily over the railing and smothered her in an embrace made bear-like by his shaggy coat. "The chauffeur's peerless bride shall not weep," he soothed her. "For ten days her ruby stomacher has been ordered by her devoted husband. Now let your Romeo depart, or his pay will get docked next Saturday." She lingered in his arms an instant, her shining dark hair pressed against the rough darkness of his cheap fur coat. "Anthony, don't they ever notice your name, down there? Didn't they ever ask about it?" "Surely! The first day I went in, the superintendent asked if I were related to Mr. Adriance. I told him yes, a poor relation. True, isn't it? He was satisfied, anyhow. They call me Andy, down there." "Andy!" she essayed experimentally. "Andy! It goes pretty well." They laughed together, then he gently pushed her toward the door. "Go in," he bade, with his commanding manner; the manner Elsie had taught him. "You will take a royal cold out here, and then what should I do for my meals? I have to eat if I am to labor; besides, I like my food. What did you call those cakes we had this morning?" "'_Belle cala, tout chaud!_'" she intoned the soft street-cry of old New Orleans' breakfast hours, her voice catching the quaint, enticing inflections of those dark-skinned vendors who once loitered their sunny rounds freighted with fragrant baskets. "Some day I will show you what I call a city, sir; if you'll take me?" "I'll take you anywhere, but I'll not let you go as far as the next corner. Now, go in-doors, and good-bye." She obeyed him so far as to draw back into the warm doorway. There, sheltered, she stayed to watch him swinging down the hill through the gray winter morning. It was nearly seven o'clock, but the sun had not yet warmed or gilded the atmosphere. Bleakness reigned, except in the hearts of the man and woman. They had been married two months. Elsie Adriance slowly closed the door and turned to the uncleared breakfast table. But presently she left the dishes she had begun to assemble, and walked to one of the rear windows. There she leaned, gazing where Anthony never gazed: toward the gray-and-white stateliness of New York, across the ice-dotted river. She contemplated the city, not with defiance or challenge, but with the steady-eyed gravity, of one measuring an enemy. Two months, and the victory was still with her! Yet, she warned herself, surely some day New York would call. She never quite could forget that. She herself was not unlike a city preparing for defence, feverishly grasping at every stone to build her ramparts. How she envied Lucille Masterson her beauty, the elder Adriance his wealth, since those possessions might have bound Anthony closer to her! She recalled Mrs. Masterson's exquisite costumes, colored like flowers and as delightful to the touch; the costly perfumes that made all her belongings fragrant; the studied coquetry that kept her like Cleopatra, never customary or stale. To oppose all this, Anthony's wife had only--her hearth. For she never would keep her husband against his will; Elsie Adriance never would claim as a right what she had held as a gift. The kitten, a black-and-white midget suggestive of a Coles-Phillips drawing, rubbed insistently against the girl's foot. She picked up the living toy and nestled its furry warmth beneath her chin, as she turned in quest of milk. She thrust forebodings from her mind with resolute will. It was too soon to think of these things; Anthony loved her, Anthony was content. She had no conception of how fervently glad Anthony was to be rid of harassing thoughts and complications, or how gratefully the luxury of peace enfolded him and dwarfed the mere physical luxuries of idleness and lavish expenditure. Nor, being a woman, did she sufficiently value his pride in the possessions he had bought with his own labor. Tony Adriance never had noticed the table service in his father's house; he had been known to overturn a whole tray of translucent coffee-cups set in lace-fine silver work, without a second glance at the destruction. But he knew every one of the cheap, heavy dishes he and Elsie had added to their equipment on Saturday evening shopping orgies at a five-and-ten-cent store. Knew, and admired them! When Elsie would call from her "kitchen corner;" "Bring me the Niagara platter, honey," he could locate that ceramic atrocity at a glance. And when he let fall the Whistler bread-plate--it had a nocturnal, black-lined landscape effect in its centre--he was truly grieved. Indeed, it was he who selected their china, Elsie's taste being inclined toward a simplicity he refused as monotonous. He never had realized the pleasure of purchasing until he went shopping with his wife, chose with her, overruled her or indulged her in some fancy, then drew out his newly-received wage and paid, magnificent. He could not have explained his emotions to Elsie. But his candid delight in those expeditions came to her memory, as she poured the kitten's milk into a saucer enamelled with blue forget-me-nots. She lifted her head and again glanced toward the distant city; but this time she smiled with certain triumph. He was her husband; better still, he was as eagerly her playmate as any lonely boy who first finds a chum. She knew Lucille Masterson did not possess the art of comradeship among her talents; it was an art too unselfish. "When he begins to tire of just playing this way," she half-unconsciously addressed the kitten, "we will find something else. There will always be something for us to think of, together. It will come when it is needed. Perhaps----" Arrested, her breath failed speech. It was as if her own words had thrown open a door before which she faltered, her eyes sun-dazzled, yet glimpsing a wide horizon. Soothed by her silent neighborhood, the kitten finished lapping its milk and went to sleep against her skirt. But the girl stood still for a long time, steadying her heart, which seemed to her to be filling like a cup held under a clear fountain. Later in the day a boy brought wreaths and sprays of holly to the door. Elsie bought recklessly, so Adriance came home that night to a house Yule-gay with scarlet and green, spicy with the cinnamon fragrance of the apple-fritters, and holding a mistress who showed him a Christmas face of merry content. "I could not wait two days," she explained to him. "We'll begin now and work up to it gradually." But after all, Christmas morning came as a surprise, and achieved a final defeat of doubts and forebodings that drove them out of sight for many a day. For, kissing his wife awake at dawn, Anthony made his gift first, forestalling hers. "You never had an engagement ring," he reminded her. "I'll have to make a tremendous record as a husband to live down my blunders as a fiancé! Here, let me put it on for you. What clever dimples you've got in your fingers! I noticed them our first night here, remember?" She frankly cried in her great surprise and passionate joy in his thought of her. It really was a spectacular ring, and glittered bravely in the early light; an oval of dark-red stones like a shield set above her wedding ring. "They're only garnets," he stilled her protest of extravagance. "But they are the color of rubies; and the promise of them. Don't--please don't! Come, what have you got for me? Give it up." The diversion succeeded. Laughing before her eyes were dry, she answered: "He is in the wood-box. I had to keep him in the house where it was warm, and I was so afraid you would hear him and spoil the surprise. But he was as good as possible; he never said one word. Open the lid, dear." "He?" echoed her husband. "Him?" The wood-box yielded him; a small, jovial, bandy-legged puppy. "He is _almost_ a Boston bull," Elsie explained conscientiously. "If he had been quite one, I couldn't have afforded to buy him. But he is a love. Anthony, he is the watch-dog, you know." Finding both faces within reach, as he hung over Anthony's arm, the puppy licked them with fond impartiality. CHAPTER X MRS. MASTERSON TAKES TEA It was the day after Christmas that Adriance was sent over to New York with his motor-truck, for the first time since he had become that massive vehicle's pilot. His destination was in Brooklyn, so that he had the entire city to cross, and lights were commencing to twinkle here and there through the gray of the short winter afternoon when he turned homeward. The experience had not been without a novel interest. Holiday traffic crowded the streets; traffic officers, tired and chilled by a biting east wind, were not patient. Adriance chose Fifth Avenue for his route up-town with the naturalness of long custom, without reflecting upon the greater freedom of travel he would have found on one of the dingy streets usually followed by such vehicles as his. However, the difficulties exhilarated him. Andy of the truck could not but wonder how the policeman who roughly ordered him away from the entrance of the Park might have phrased that request if he had known that the intruder was Tony Adriance, "paper, you know!" Perhaps, because of this wonder, his cheerful grin drew a sour smile from the officer. "Don't you know you've not got a limousine there? You from the woods?" came the not ill-natured sarcasm. "Worse than that: from Jersey," Adriance shot back. "All right; I'm sorry." "Plain streets for yours; round the circle," was the direction, which also implied a release. "Thanks," Adriance called acknowledgment, as he obeyed. The bulky figure beside the chauffeur stirred. "You got a nerve," commented the man, his slow, heavy voice tinged with admiration. "I seen guys pulled fer less, Andy." Adriance laughed. He and his big assistant were very good friends, after weeks of sharing the truck's seat. The chauffeur appeared a stripling by comparison with the man lounging beside him, huge arms folded across thick chest. "Mike," as he was known to his fellow-workers, was a Russian peasant. His upbringing in a Hoboken slum had fixed his patriotism and language, but had left his physique that of his inheritance. His reddish-yellow head was set on a massive neck whose base his open shirt showed to be covered with a red growth of hair extending down over his chest. His large features and mild, slow-moving eyes, his heavy, placid manner of speech were absurdly alien to the colloquial language that he spoke. Adriance knew his helper had been an employee of the factory for ten years, but he did not know that Mike was always assigned to a new chauffeur until the stranger proved himself trustworthy. Mike was dull, but he was stolidly honest. Valuable boxes or packages were not reported "lost" from trucks under his care. Adriance had no idea of the truth that "Russian Mike" actually had determined the permanence of his position in his father's great mill. "If I cannot go through the Park, I'll go back to the avenue," Adriance declared, when the turning had been negotiated. "I want gayety, Michael; boulevard gayety! Four o'clock on Fifth Avenue--shall a poor workingman be deprived of the sight? It is true that we are too far uptown, but the principle is the same. You agree with me?" "It ain't nothin' to me," averred the magnificent guardian, shifting to a new position with an indolent movement that swelled the muscles under his flannel shirt until the fabric strained. His glance at his companion was mildly indulgent. "Of course not. But it will be, next time; that is, if you do not die of pneumonia after taking this drive with your coat wide open. Appreciation will grow on you. What do you think of that girl in gray, in the limousine? Pretty? I used to go to school with her, Michael; dancing school." The Slavic brown eyes became humorous. "Fact," Adriance met the incredulity. "And now she doesn't recognize me; and neither of us cares." The uplifted hand of another traffic officer halted the long lines of vehicles. Three deep from the curb on either side, so that the street was solidly filled, automobiles, carriages, green and yellow busses and ornate delivery-cars stopped in a close, orderly mass. Adriance's truck was next to the sidewalk, in obedience to the rule for slow-moving vehicles. As his laughing voice answered Mike, his tone raised to carry across the roar of sound about them, a woman who had emerged from one of the shops stopped abruptly. Her glance quested along the rows, to rest upon Adriance with eager attention. A moment later, the man started at the sound of his own name, spoken beside him. "How do you do, Tony. And aren't you--rather out of place?" Momentarily dumb, he looked down into the large, cool eyes of Lucille Masterson. She did not smile, but faced his regard with a composure that made his embarrassment a fault. Against the white fur of her stole was fastened a knot of pink-and-white sweet peas; beside them her face showed as softly tinted, and artificially posed, as the flowers. Beside the wheel of the huge truck, she appeared smaller and more fragile than Adriance remembered her. Without the slightest cause he felt himself a culprit surprised by her. He had all the sensations of a deserter confronted with the heartlessly abandoned. "Aren't you going to speak to me?" she queried, when he remained voiceless. "I have missed you, Tony." He hastily aroused himself. "Of course! I mean--you are very kind. I--we have been out of town." Feeling the utter idiocy into which he was stumbling, he checked himself. The current of traffic was flowing on once more, leaving his machine stranded against the curb; made fast, as it were, by the white-gloved hand Mrs. Masterson had laid upon the wheel. Without heeding his incoherence, she looked at a tiny watch on her wrist, half-hidden by her wide, furred sleeve. With her movement a drift of fragrance was set afloat on the thick, city air. "I want you to take me to tea," she announced, with her accustomed imperativeness. "I have things to say to you. Let your man take your car home." In spite of his exasperation, Adriance laughed. He was aware of the staring admiration which held the big man beside him intent upon the beautiful woman; he had heard the greedy intake of breath with which the other absorbed the perfume shaken from her daintiness, and could guess the effect of _Essence Enivrante_ upon untutored nostrils. But for all that, he could not imagine Russian Mike obeying the order proposed. "You see, he isn't my man," he excused himself from compliance. "Thank you very much, but it is not possible." "Then let him wait for you. Really, Tony, I think you owe me a little courtesy." Adriance flushed before the rebuke. He never had seen Lucille Masterson since that rough farewell of their final quarrel. He had left her, to marry another woman inside of the next thirty-six hours. He always had been at his weakest with Mrs. Masterson; he slipped now into his old mistake of temporizing. "I am not dressed for a tea-room," he deprecated. "Otherwise, I should be delighted." Her eyes glinted. Grasping the slight concession, she leaned toward Adriance's assistant with her brilliant, arrogant smile. "You will watch the car for Mr. Adriance, just a few moments, will you not?" she appealed. "I have something of importance to say to him. I should be much obliged." The white-gloved hand slipped forward and left a bank note in the hairy fist. Dazed, Mike vaguely jerked his cap in salute, still staring at the woman. Neither money nor beauty might have lured him to an actual breach of duty, but this was the last trip of the day and the truck was empty. It could not matter if the return were delayed half an hour; a belated ferryboat might lose so much time. Moreover, he was not only willing, but anxious, to do Andy a favor, and the bill in his clutch assured a glorious Saturday night. "Sure," he mumbled, with a grin of shyness like a colossal child's. "Come, Tony," directed Mrs. Masterson. Because he saw nothing else to do, Tony reluctantly swung himself down to the pavement beside her. "I can only stay for a word," he essayed revolt. "It is hardly worth while to go anywhere. We should have to go find some place where these clothes would pass and where no one knew us." "On the contrary! We must go where you are so well-known that your dress does not matter," she contradicted him. "The Elizabeth Tea-room is just here, and we used to go there often." He could think of no objection to the proposal. Presently he found himself following his captor into the pretty, yellow-and-white tea-room. As the Elizabeth affected an English atmosphere and had not adopted the _thé dansant_, the place was not overfull. The quaintly-gowned waitress greeted them with a murmur of recognition and led the way to a table without a glance at the chauffeur's attire. Mrs. Masterson ordered something; an order which Adriance seconded without having heard it. He was recovering his poise, and marvelling at himself for coming here no less than at Lucille for bringing him. What could they have to say to each other, now? The scented warmth of the room brought to his realization the cold in which he had left Mike to wait, and he was nipped by remorse. It was a consequence of his education among people who never considered that narrowness of convention which they designated as middle-class, that Adriance had no sense of disloyalty either to Elsie or Fred Masterson in being here. On the contrary, the knowledge of his marriage would have enabled him to welcome frankly either of the two had they chanced to enter and find him. It was as if his assured position chaperoned the situation. But, truly masculine, since he no longer loved Lucille Masterson he detested being with her. He resented the acute discomfort he felt in her presence. She was drawing off her gloves with a slowness that irritated him as an affectation; he thought the artificial perfection of her hands hideous as a waxwork. They were not really a good shape, nor small, but merely blanched very white and manicured to a glistening illusion. And he saw with disgust that she wore a ring he once had given her because she made it plain to him that the costly gift was expected. He knew she had lied to her husband as to the giver; "Tony" had been startled and half-awakened from his hazy content by that discovery at the time. Now he looked at the bulky pearl set around with diamonds and recalled the modest garnets he had given Elsie. "I am sorry, but I haven't long to stay," he said. "You spoke of something important to discuss." "Did I?" "Certainly!" She studied him with open curiosity. "You want to go back to that wagon with the gorilla of a man?" "Yes." "Are you still very much married, Tony?" she questioned maliciously. His eyes blazed, then chilled. Her lack of finesse had led her to a final mistake. "You forget that my wife is an unfashionable woman. I am still happily married," he retorted. "How--romantic!" "Very." "Still, two months, or is it three? Even Fred and I lasted that long. You will not mind my saying that you are a bit fickle, Tony. What will you do when you grow bored? Or do you believe that you never will? Elsie must have resources that I never suspected. Does she tell you the story of--Monsieur Raoul, was it?" "She has others more pleasant. With Mrs. Adriance boredom is not possible," he controlled his anger to state. But he felt himself clumsy and inadequate. The quaint little waitress was beside him, and proceeded to her duty of service with exasperating slowness and precision. She was a pretty girl, in a butter-cup-yellow frock and ruffled white cap and apron. Adriance became conscious of his work-darkened hands, of a collar that showed a day's accumulated dust, and other signs that differentiated him from the usual idle and dainty patrons of this place. "You _are_ a bit seedy," corroborated Mrs. Masterson, watching him with furtive acuteness. She permitted herself an ironic smile. "Do you not think it time you went home, and changed?" He divined an innuendo, a _double entendre_ in the speech that he did not comprehend, yet which enraged him. He wondered if she had brought him here for the purpose of forcing this contrast between his present life and his past, and so tainting him with discontent or even regret of his marriage. If so, she had failed. He merely visited his humiliation on her, and found her beauty spoiled by her spitefulness. "I shall be home in an hour," he said. "And of course I am anxious to be there, so you will forgive my reminding you of whatever we have to discuss." "Oh, of course." She paused until their attendant fluttered away through a swinging door. "You are quite cured of me, aren't you, Tony? Don't trouble about denying politely, please. But it is lucky no one really knew about us--I suppose you have not told?" "Mrs. Masterson!" She hushed the protest, laughing across the spray of sweet-peas she had lifted against her smooth red lips. "Very well, very well! But promise you never will. Promise, Tony." "It is not necessary," he replied stiffly. "But if you think it so, I give you my word." "Never to tell that I thought of marrying you, whatever may happen?" "Yes." She dropped the sweet-peas and sat in silence for a space, her gaze dwelling on him. Neither of the two made any pretense of pouring the tea cooling in the diminutive pots between them, or of tasting the miniature sandwiches and cakes. Months later, Adriance was to learn something of Lucille Masterson's thoughts during that interval. He himself thought of Russian Mike waiting in the motor-truck, and that he would be so late home that Elsie might be worried. He had wanted to stop at a shop to buy a toy bull-dog collar for his Christmas puppy, but now that must be postponed. He was amazed and infinitely angry at himself for yielding so easily to Lucille's whim to bring him here. Unconsciously he looked toward her with open impatience in his glance. She responded at once, with a shrug. "Go, by all means. Pray go, Tony. Am I keeping you? I am not the kind of woman who mourns, you know. Just remember that our episode is not only closed, but locked, when we meet again. Good-bye." "And the important communication that I was to hear?" "I have forgotten what I wanted to say. Good-bye, Tony." Puzzled and angry, he rose, leaving on the table twice the amount of the check, at which he had not looked. Mrs. Masterson nodded an acknowledgment of his grim salute. Her eyes had a look of triumph, and as the girl in yellow ushered him out, Adriance saw the other turn with appetite to the sandwiches and tea. The east wind had grown stronger and its current was thick with whirling particles of snow. Darkness had come with the storm, turning dusk into night. Adriance shivered and buttoned his cheap fur coat as he hurried across the wet, shining pavement. Mike aroused himself with a grunt when the chauffeur swung up into the seat beside him. "Swell dame, Andy!" he commented, staring with heavy curiosity at the man pushing throttle and spark. "I guess maybe you're a swell, too, like a movie show I seen once?" Adriance stepped down again, to go forward and crank the motor. He began to glimpse the possible complications if Mike recounted this adventure among his mates. He wondered, also, if Lucille had noticed the name on the truck. Altogether, he was in a vicious enough mood to lie, and he did so. "No," he asserted flatly, when he had regained his seat. "Don't be an idiot, Mike. I--used to be employed by that lady." "Drive her automobile?" "Yes." The explanation was accepted as satisfactory. An intimate acquaintance with the etiquette of intercourse between mistress and chauffeur was not one of the examiner's accomplishments. But the incident appealed to Mike as romantic, and for him romance flowed from one source only. "She looks like one of them actresses from the movies," he averred, folding his huge arms comfortably across his breast. "I guess she is, maybe? I seen queens like her, there." "It is a good way to see them, if they are like her," observed Adriance ruefully. He laughed in spite of vexation. "Better stick to the movie girls, Michael; it's safer! Now stop talking to me; if this brute of a truck swerves an inch in this slush, some pretty car is going to feel as if an elephant had stepped on it." But the ill luck of that day was over. They made a fast trip up-town and just caught a ferry-boat on the point of leaving. After all, they were not to be noticeably late. And since there would be no need of explanation, it occurred to Adriance that he might not recount to Elsie the tale of his discomfiture. He was keenly ashamed of the poor rôle Lucille Masterson had made him play. She had whistled him to heel, and he had come with the meekness of the well-trained. She had amused herself with him as long as she chose, then dismissed him, humiliated and helpless. He did not want Elsie to picture her husband in that situation, nor to find him still unable to say no to Mrs. Masterson. By the time he had walked up the long hill through a beating snow-storm, he was thoroughly chilled and self-disgusted, desirous only of shelter and peace. Both met him, when he pushed open the door of his house and stepped into the warm, bright room. When the door closed behind him, he definitely shut outside the image of Lucille Masterson. With a little rush Elsie came to meet him, lifting her warm and rosy face for his kiss. The puppy scrambled across the floor, uttering staccato yelps of salute. "I've named our house," the girl announced gleefully. "You know, we have named everything else. Don't you like Alaric Cottage?" "I like the inside of it to-night, all right. But why Alaric?" "Because it is so early-Gothic, of course. You must appreciate our front porch, Anthony. Oh, you _are_ wet and cold! Hurry and change your things--I have them all laid out--and I will feed you, sir." So the matter passed for that time, and was forgotten. CHAPTER XI THE GLOWING HEARTH Christened Noel, in honor of the day of his arrival, the puppy thrived and grew toward young doghood in a household atmosphere of serene content. From Christmas to Easter the days flowed by in an untroubled current of time. Day after day, Anthony and Elsie Adriance grew into closer and fuller companionship. The winter was a hard and long one, but never dull to them. They found so much to do. In return for his reading to her, Elsie sometimes put out the lamp and in the flickering firelight told him quaint, grotesque legends of Creole and negro lore. Her soft accents fell naturally into pâtois; she was a born mimic, and interspersed fragments of plaintive songs, old as the tragedy of slavery or the romance of a pre-Napoleonic France. Her voice could be drowsy as sunshine on a still lagoon, or instinct with life as the ring of a marching regiment's tread. She taught him to play chess, too, with a wonderful set of jade-and-ivory men produced from among her few belongings. "Do you know these must be mighty valuable?" Adriance exclaimed, the first time he saw them. "I know they are mighty old," she mocked his seriousness. "And I wouldn't sell them, so the rest doesn't matter." "Tell me about them." "There is nothing very definite to tell." She regarded him askance from the corner of a laughing eye. "Can you bear the shock of hearing that one of your wife's ancestors was suspected of having secret relations with the notorious LaFitte?" "Who was he?" "LaFitte was a pirate and freebooter, sir, who had a stronghold below New Orleans, where the mouth of the Mississippi widens into the Gulf. Many a ship paid toll to him, many curious prizes fell into his greedy hands; and it was whispered that some of these strange, foreign things mysteriously appeared in the house of Martin Galvez. Negroes were heard to tell, with breath hushed and eyes rolling, of a swift-sailing sloop, black of hull and rigged in black canvas, lines, and all. It slipped up the river at midnight and down again before dawn, past all defences, they said--and its point of landing was Colonel Galvez's wharf, ten miles above the city. No one ever knew more than a rumor that ran untraced like the black sloop. But it was said the ivory-and-jade chessmen had travelled by that craft, as had great-great-grandmother's string of pink pearls which are painted around her neck in her portrait. Loud and often her husband laughed at the tales, inviting all who chose to watch his wharf between sunset and sunrise, any night. The chessmen, he declared, were presented to him by a prince of Cairo, whose enemies had betrayed him into the hands of a slave-trader. The Egyptian noble's dark skin and ignorance of Western speech had made him a helpless victim; he faced the final degradation of the lash when Colonel Galvez saw and rescued him. His gratitude sent the pretty playthings. As for the pink pearls, they came from Vienna, by lawful purchase. At least, so the worthy Colonel was fond of relating, with a convincing detail, over his incomparable French wines and Havana cigars." "But, what was truth? Which, I mean?" he questioned. She shut her eyes in droll disclaimer. "How should I know? The pink pearls disappeared before Josephine Galvez married Fairfax Murray, sixty years ago. The chessmen are dumb. But I know of many an old toy from overseas, around our house still. Nothing of great value! We are as poor as ecclesiastical mice; the family wealth long ago fled down the wind on the black sails of ill-luck. Yes, the Murrays usually held poor hands at cards. Will you move first, or shall I?" "You," he invited. He looked at her with curiosity. "Why didn't you tell me before that you were a princess in disguise? I never knew you had an ancestor on record, and here you have a procession of them. You're a funny girl." If you don't like me, Why do you, why do you, _Why_ do you stay around? She sang the very modern verse to him with a mockery altogether tantalizing; and he upset all the chessboard in answering her properly. Little by little he learned a great deal about her home; which, he discovered, had once been the veritable home of the punctilious Maît' Raoul Galvez of surprising memory. He made acquaintance with her parents and her sisters, as Elsie brought before him a living simulacra of each one with her magician-like arts of description and mimicry. There were five sisters, it appeared: Lee, Roberta, Virginia, Clotilda and Nicolette. "Mother named the first three of us and Daddy the last three," she explained. "Wasn't he right polite to wait so long? Mother is a rebel Confederate up to this minute, while Daddy altogether indorses the North and is a professional delver in romantic history." "'Elsie' is not historical," he objected, much diverted. "Oh, my truly name is Elcise; I come before Clotilda and Nicolette. But my grandfather insisted upon calling me Elsie as long as he lived, so in deference to him the first intention was abandoned. Poor Daddy lost one of his turns, after all. It happened very well, though! Elsie is more practical, and I am the most practical member of the whole family circle." "Really?" "Why, certainly! Lee married a dramatic poet, who is also the editor of a newspaper," she retorted upon his incredulity. "And one who lets his two vocations interfere with one another! Roberta has been engaged to an army officer these five years. He is stationed in the Philippines, where she is to join him and live in some jungle with him whenever he is sufficiently promoted to marry. Virginia is a beauty, who has the entire college full of young men vibrating around our house; and she declares that she is going into a convent when she is twenty-five. Clotilda and Nicolette are twin babies of eleven years. They still have plenty of time to do anything, you see. We were all perfectly happy as we were, but it became really necessary for someone to relieve Daddy, if only by supporting herself and leaving more for the others. So I began, and went as private secretary and companion with the old lady of whom I have told you. Wasn't that practical? Of course, Lee's husband supports her, usually. "But the spring that I came away, Daddy had urged him to resign from the newspaper and come home for six months in order to write a poetic drama over which they both were enthusiastic. No one expects it to make much money, but, as Daddy said, we have always had enough for dignified simplicity, and it should be our duty as well as our glory to help Lee's husband to fame." "Elsie's husband means to support her all the time." "Oh, I told you Elsie was practical. She married sensibly." "Should you call it that?" doubtingly. "Her husband is quite kind to her, you know." "Well, he is still in love. When that wears off as she grows tired of feeding him, and ill-tempered----?" They laughed at one another across the hearth. But presently Adriance became serious. "Elsie, I think that I should write to your father. One does not snatch a man's daughter in this barefaced fashion, without so much as a word to him, in civilized lands. Why haven't I thought of that before? And I should like to be welcomed into your family, or at least tolerated there. Do you suppose we might visit them, some day when our finances permit? Or perhaps some of my sisters-in-law might come to see us? George, what a time we could have given those girls with some of the money that I had, and haven't!" His wife leaned toward him, her gray eyes quite wet with her earnestness. "Anthony, there is nothing in the world that would make me so happy as for you to write home and tell them that I belong to you. I have so _hoped_ you would think of it!" "Why didn't you tell me to do so, long ago?" he asked reproachfully. "Now, how could I tell you a thing like that?" "Why not?" he wondered, densely. She made an expressive gesture with her little hands, resigning the hopeless task of explanation. "Never mind. But I shall be so glad! You see, they do not know that I am married at all. I have not dared tell them, because they have such stately, quaint ideas that they would be profoundly offended if you did not write yourself. They would consider it a great slight to me. So I have just waited." He gazed at her in utter marvel at such patience. "Never do it again," he requested. "Please remember that you have deigned to wed a poor, dull animal who needs your constant guidance. Even yet, I have failed to grasp the delicate point of your not setting me to work at this weeks ago. But bring the writing things and sit beside me as expert critic; we will attend to this before we sleep." They did so; and were drawn still closer together by the fulfillment of that act of courtesy and consideration which they unwittingly had neglected so long. The warm, gay intimacy of their life together sank deeper into the fibre of both, as the days went by. They found a comradeship of minds as well as hearts, never failing in novelty and delight to the man. "I never before had an intimate friend," he said, one morning, with a wondering realization of the fact. "I knew so many people that I never guessed it, Elsie, but I've been lonely all my life. I can't see how I could be any happier than I am now." They had just risen from the breakfast-table. Across it Elsie met her husband's eyes; her own infinitely wise, splendidly happy as his, yet touched with that delicate raillery which caressed and laughed at him. "Oh, yes!" she dissented. "Yes, Anthony." Puzzled, he searched her meaning in her shining gaze. "I could be happier?" "Yes. _We_ could be." "But----?" She came around the table and told him the answer, putting her hands into his. She did not speak shyly, but proudly, with frank courage and comradeship. An hour later, when Adriance went down the long hill to his day's work, he carried himself with a dignity new as the blended exaltation and dread that paled his face. Once he stopped in the snapping March wind to bare his head and draw a full, deep breath, looking up at the bright-blue sky where tufts of white cloud sailed. Although the season was so far advanced, new-fallen snow overlay road and hills, so that Adriance seemed to himself as standing between two surfaces of pure, glinting brightness. His thoughts were only now becoming articulate, yet a sense of final change had settled through him. His manhood had come to full dignity. Now he knew what he had done when he snatched Elsie Murray out of her cross-current of life and took her for himself. He had found love like a jewel on the road; content had reared a shelter for his inexperience. Now, he stood as protector and shelter as long as he should live for the weaker ones who were his. And with responsibility, ambition sprang fully grown to life and challenged him. Was his wife to rank as a chauffeur's wife, and nothing more? Was their child to be reared in that place, and he to give the two nothing better? Anthony Adriance passed his glance, with his father's cold accuracy of appraisal, over the great factory lying far down at the foot of the cliffs, where he himself was awaited to drive a truck. Presently he went on, down the road. But he went differently. CHAPTER XII THE UPPER TRAIL Adriance had not spent half a year in the mill, even in the limited capacity of chauffeur, without observing many things. He had come to recognize flaws in that smooth-running mechanism of which he was a part. Might he not find in this fact an opportunity? He saw much that he himself, given authority, might do to promote efficiency. He did not delude himself with the idea that he could go into any factory as an efficiency expert; he did see that here he might fairly earn and ask for a salary that would give Elsie more luxuries than she had even known in her own home and more than he himself had learned to desire. After all, there had been no quarrel between his father and himself. When the young man had chosen a course that he knew to be disagreeable to the older, he simply had withdrawn from their life together as a matter of courtesy and self-respect. Since he no longer gave what was expected of Tony Adriance, he could not take Tony's privileges; now however, knowledge of Elsie had changed the situation. His father had only to meet his wife, Anthony felt assured, for his marriage to explain itself. Even if Mr. Adriance were disappointed by the simplicity of his son's choice and ambitions, even if he preferred the brilliant Mrs. Masterson to the serene young gentlewoman as a daughter-in-law, why should there be rancor between the two men? For the first time it occurred to Adriance that his father might be lonely and welcome a reconciliation. They never had been intimate, but they had been companions, or at least pleasant acquaintances. The house on the Drive had not contained only servants, as now it must--servants who were merely servants, too, not the faithful, devoted, tactful servitors of romance, but the average modern hireling. The house-keeper engaged and dismissed them and was herself a shadowy automaton, who appeared only to receive special orders and render monthly accounts. For any atmosphere of home created in the house, the Adriances might as well have been established in a hotel. Anthony wondered if even Elsie could leaven that dense mass of formality, or if her art was too delicate, too subtle a combination of heart and mind and personality to affect such conditions. He could not be certain. He could well imagine her, daintily gowned and demurely self-possessed, as mistress of that household; but he could not imagine the household itself as altered very much or made less stupidly ponderous by her presence. He had not thought of this before, but now he could not think his pleasure would be quite the same if they sat together in state in that drawing-room he knew so well, while she told him the tales he had learned to delight in. It could not be quite the same as a hearth of their own, and his pipe, burning with a coarse, outrageous energy, expressed in volumes of smoke, while Elsie leaned forward, little hands animated, gray eyes sparkling, and mimicked or drolled or sang as the mood swayed them or the tale demanded. He knew that he himself could never read aloud with enthusiasm and verve if Mr. Adriance listened with amused criticism. No, Anthony realized with some astonishment that he did not want to take his wife home. Nevertheless, the thing must be done. It was a duty. He could not selfishly continue in the way he liked so well. He must consider Elsie and the third who was to join their circle. He must pick up for them what he had thrown aside for himself. But he refused to go back to his father like a defeated incompetent to plead for his inheritance. His pride recoiled from the certainty that his father would so regard his return; there must be a middle course. At the great gate to the factory yard he paused to survey again the enormous buildings with their teeming life. In more than one sense this was his workshop. There was more than the usual hubbub and confusion in the shipping-room when he went down the stone incline to that vast subterranean apartment. The little wizened man in horn-rimmed spectacles, who vibrated around his long platform, checking rolls and bales and boxes as they were loaded into the trucks, had already the appearance of wearied distraction. His thin hair was flattened by perspiration across his knobby forehead, although it was not yet eight o'clock and freezing draughts of air swept the place as the doors swung unceasingly open and shut. Groups of grinning chauffeurs and porters loitered in corners or behind pillars, eying with enjoyment or indifference, as the case might be, the little man's bustling energy and anxiety. This condition had already lasted two days, like a veritable festival of confusion. Adriance had watched it with the utter indifference of his mates, merely attending to the duties assigned him and leaving Mr. Cook to solve his own perplexities; but this morning he hesitated beside the fiery, streaming little man. The little man caught sight of his not unsympathetic face and hailed him, calling through the tumult of cars, rattling hand-trucks, pushed by blue-shirted porters, and the complex din of the place. "Here, Andy--you know New York, how long should I allow this man to go to the Valparaiso dock, unload and get back? Three hours?" "Two," responded Adriance, mounting the long platform beside his chief. "Can't be done," the chauffeur of the waiting truck sullenly contradicted. "Why not?" "You ain't allowing for the ferry running across here only every half hour, nor for the traffic over on the other side." The tone was insolent, and Adriance answered sharply, unconsciously speaking as Tony rather than as Andy: "You don't know your business when you propose going that way. Go down the Jersey side here where the way is open, and take the down-town ferry, that runs every ten minutes. And come back by the same route." "Who are you----" the chauffeur began, but was curtly checked by Mr. Cook: "Do as you're told, Pedersen, and if I catch you at more tricks like that you're fired. You've got two hours. Next! Herman, get your truck loaded and take the same route and time; do you hear?" "Yes, sir; but----" "Get out, and the two of you come in together." "Excuse me, Mr. Cook;" said Adriance, his glance taking appraisal of the second truck; "Herman has a cargo of heavy stuff, he can hardly get it unloaded in as short a time as Pedersen." The little man turned on him wrathfully. "Can't? Can't? They've got to get back for second trips." "Then give him two extra helpers." Mr. Cook stared at him through his spectacles, then turned and shouted the order. When he turned back he dried his forehead and relieved himself by a burst of confidence. "There's a lot of stuff to go to South America by the boat sailing at three o'clock. A rush order, and just when we are rushed with other deliveries; and Ransome is home sick. _I_ never send out the trucks; _I_ don't know when they should come in or how they should go. I've got all my own work checking over every shipment that goes out, too. It's too much, it can't be done. The chauffeurs are playing me, I know they are. Look at the stuff left over that ought to have been got out yesterday, not moved yet! They tell me lies about the motors breaking down; I know they are lies; why should half the trucks in the place break down just when Ransome is away? But I can't prove it." "Why not put a mechanic in a light machine to go out to any truck that breaks down, and then give orders that any man whose truck stops is to 'phone in here at once?" suggested Adriance. This time Mr. Cook regarded him steadily for a full minute. Seizing the advantage of the other man's attention, Adriance struck again: "Would you like me to take Mr. Ransome's place for the day? I know both cities pretty well and I know your men. One of the other men can take out my truck; Russian Mike, for instance." "He can't drive." "I beg your pardon, he drives very well; I taught him myself this winter." The little man jerked a telephone receiver from the wall beside him. "Mr. Goodwin! Cook, sir. I've got a man here to fill Ransome's place for the present; one of our chauffeurs, sir. Oh, yes! Andy--I forget his last name. He's all right, yes. I've got to have help; can't handle the men, Mr. Goodwin. All right; thank you, sir." He whirled about to Andy. In the brief moments of their talk the congestion had thickened appallingly, and Mr. Cook looked at the disorder aghast. "Go over to Ransome's box," he snapped; "you're appointed; and I wish you luck! Fire them if they kick, and, you may count on it, I'll back you up." Ransome's box was on a small pier run out upon the main floor, in such a situation that every vehicle leaving or entering must pass it and report. It was railed around and contained a desk, a telephone and a chair. Adriance slipped off his overcoat and cap as he walked out on the little elevation and took his place. The men lounging about the rooms straightened themselves and stared up at this new arrival. A little improvement in calmness came over the horde at the mere sight of a figure in the post of authority. The invalided Ransome was missed no more. Opportunity had visited Adriance on the day when he was inspired to seize it and attuned to accord with it. He and his fellow chauffeurs had been very good friends, but only as their work for the same employer brought them together. None of them had been so intimate with him as to feel his present position a slight upon themselves. Indeed, they were a good-natured, hard-working set, whose heckling of Mr. Cook had been as much mischief as any desire to take a mean advantage of the present situation. There was an authority in Adriance himself of which he was quite conscious, a personal force that grew with exercise. He stood on his elevation, sending out man after man with clear, reasonable orders, noting the distance, the time of departure and the time allowed for the errand of each. He acquainted each man with the new rule concerning machines broken down or temporarily disabled, wisely giving this as an order of Mr. Cook's. When Russian Mike came by with Andy's truck, the big man smiled up at the man on the pier. "I ain't going to bust her," he assured him; "I guess I'm a pretty good driver?" "Of course you are," laughed Adriance, leaning down to give him his slip and a hand-clasp by way of encouragement. "You're all right, Michael; take care of yourself and remember what I told you about going slow." "Sure!" A smile widened the broad lips. "Say, I guess it's a pretty good thing we wasn't being checked up this way when we met that actor lady, yes?" "Never mind her." Adriance's color rose a trifle. "I am not holding any one down to too close time, either; but this is a rush morning. Go along now." And Michael placidly went. The room began to clear before the efforts of the excitable, nervous Mr. Cook at one end and the quiet management of the young man at the other extremity of the place. This was far more exacting work than driving one of those motor-trucks he dispatched in such imperious fashion, Adriance soon discovered. For he did not merely hand each driver a slip stating his destination, as was the custom of Ransome. Under that system Adriance knew from his own observation that hours a day were wasted by the men. Only if a chauffeur outrageously over-staid the reasonable time for his journey did he receive a sarcastic rebuke, which was sufficiently answered by the allegation of engine trouble. The new method was received with astonishment and some scowls, but without revolt. Instead of each truck sent out failing to return until the noon hour, two, and even three trips were completed during the morning. There were some complaints, of course. Adriance cut them off in their incipience. He was enjoying himself in spite of the strain. In the middle of the morning, when the trucks first sent out began to come in again, Cook left his post for a few moments. Adriance did not see him leave, nor did he note that two other men returned with his temporary colleague and remained standing for some time in the shadow of the pillared arcade around the wall, watching the proceedings on the floor. During a lull in the coming and going, when Adriance was sorting his piles of slips, one of these men walked out to his raised enclosure. "Good morning," the stranger opened. "Good morning," Adriance absently replied; turning his head and perceiving his visitor to be a frail little old gentleman, he offered him the solitary chair. Of course he knew that his visitor must be connected with the factory, if only from the air of tranquil assurance with which he settled his _pince-nez_ and surveyed the younger man. "How do you keep all those apart?" he questioned, motioning toward the slips. "Put them in order on a file as the men go out, then turn the heap over. The first one out should be the first one in," explained Adriance, smiling. "Of course, I have to keep together those who have approximately the same distance to cover. It is a very rough and ready method, I know; but it was devised under the stress of the moment. A row of boxes with a compartment for each truck numbered to correspond would be one better way that occurs to me; but, of course, I am merely a temporary interloper." "My name is Goodwin; Mr. Cook did not tell me yours----?" The manager of the factory and his father's associate! It was the purest chance that Tony and he never had met at the Adriance house. But Mr. Goodwin belonged to an older generation than the senior Adriance, his home was in Englewood and he rarely came to New York unless upon business--the great city was distasteful to him. Something of this Adriance recollected after his first dismay, and drew such reassurance from it as he might, as he answered: "My name is Adriance, Mr. Goodwin." "Adriance?" "Yes, sir. It is not so odd; I am a distant connection of the New York family, I believe." He had a cloudy recollection of a witty Frenchman who alluded to an estranged member of his family as his "distant brother." "I see, I see; after all, even somewhat unusual names are constantly repeated." Mr. Goodwin scrutinized the other in the glare of artificial light that rather confused vision. "But, excuse me, you hardly speak like a chauffeur." "Does not that depend on the chauffeur?" Adriance parried pleasantly. "I hope not to remain one all my life, anyhow." "Ah--certainly. Mr. Cook asked me to come down and observe the improvement in the conditions here this morning. I am pleased, much pleased. I should have regulated the system in this department before; but these modern innovations press upon me rather fast. I looked forward to retiring, I do indeed," he coughed impatiently and glanced vaguely over the great room. "However, that is not the point. I should like you to keep this position, Adriance; at least until Mr. Ransome recovers. I hear he is threatened with pneumonia." "I should be glad to do so, Mr. Goodwin." "We might use him in the office to better advantage. Well, we will try your system first. Write an order for any filing cabinets or apparatus you deem necessary. Give it to Mr. Cook and I will see personally that all is supplied. This is a critical moment on which may depend a considerable trade with South America. Cook tells me that more goods have been moved this morning than in any entire day recently. We had thought of buying more trucks." "I think that is not required, sir; I wish you would try my way for a week before doing so, at least. It is only a question of using to the full extent the materials on hand. I fancy new troubles grow up with new institutions, and an outsider may more easily see the remedy." "Yes? Young blood in the business, you think? Perhaps, perhaps." Two trucks roared into the place and up to Adriance's post. When he had finished with them and sent them on to Cook's end of the room, he turned back to Mr. Goodwin; but that gentleman, satisfied as to the improved conditions, was already stepping into the elevator to return to his own offices above. "Seventy-three, the old top is," remarked Cook, running over to pass his fellow-worker a mass of memoranda. "Keen as ever, but not up-to-date, that is all. Here--these to the dock, these to the Erie yards; this straight to the decorator on Fifth Avenue, who is waiting for it--it's a special design landscape-paper for a club grill-room on Long Island. Rush the one to the steamer--Long Island and Buffalo can wait." "You were mighty good to help me that way," said Adriance. He took the slip, regarding the little man with a glance in which many thoughts met. He smiled at one of these, and his face became warmly kind for an instant and rather startled Cook. "You helped me out of a scrape by volunteering this morning," Cook answered, a trifle abruptly. "I only asked him to come see how things were going. You are to keep on here?" "Yes, for the present." "Glad of it! Ever do this kind of work before?" "Handling trucks?" "No; handling men." Adriance considered. "Only on a yacht, I think." A group of four trucks came in. Outside a whistle began to blow; others joined the clamor and a gong clanged heavily through the intermittent shudder of the machinery-crowded building. Twelve o'clock! Cook hurried away to his own men, who had fallen idle with the surprising promptness of the true workmen; and the examination was ended. Adriance foresaw that it would recommence, but he was indifferent. He cared very little how soon his father discovered him, now that he had resolved to seek his father as soon as he saw his way a little more clearly. He was profoundly gratified and excited by this morning's success. It gave him self-confidence, and it enabled him to ask a share in the factory's management with something more tangible to offer his father than the mere assertion that he saw improvements to be made. He actually had accomplished something. He would save many thousands of dollars by utilizing the machines on hand instead of purchasing more of the costly motor-trucks, with their expenses of upkeep, additional chauffeurs, and inevitable deterioration from use. He walked out into the cold, fresh air to glimpse the sunshine and cool his hot flush of satisfaction. He thought of Elsie with a passion of tenderness and triumph. He resolved that he would not tell her of his plans until they were better assured. He must begin to shelter her from excitement or possible disappointment. No, he would not speak of the reconciliation he hoped to effect with his father; not yet. But of course he would tell her of his new position in the factory, and they would exult over it together. Adriance decided he would wait until their dinner was over and cleared away, then he would draw her down beside him in the firelight and astonish her. There was a little lunch cart across the way, much frequented by chauffeurs, car-conductors and ferry-men. He went there for his lunch, as he usually did when noon found him near the factory. It seemed to him that there was already a little difference in the way the fellow-workers whom he found there treated him. Already they seemed to feel that he was moving away from them--had taken the upper trail, as it were. Indeed, he felt a change in himself not to be denied. It was not arrogance, merely the assurance of a man who sees a definite path before him and follows it to his own end; he had ceased to live from day to day. But he was quite sure that he would never forget this day. If he had a son he would tell him about this when he reached manhood. And he would be his son's guide to this satisfaction of work accomplished, lest he miss it altogether, as Tony himself so nearly had done. There were to be no worthless Adriances. CHAPTER XIII WHAT TONY BUILT By a caprice of chance, it was that day Masterson came; almost at the hour when Adriance, tired and exultant, was rearing a structure of good dreams as he ate his cheap food at the counter of the lunch-cart under the shadow of the huge electric sign bearing his name. Morning had arrived at noon, when Elsie was called to her front door by a clang of the bell; one of those small gongs favored years ago, that snap with a pulled handle. Down at the end of the straight path she heard laughter and the high-pitched voices of women above the soft roll of an automobile's motor. Surprised, she opened the door. Before her, on the high, absurd little porch, a man in motoring furs stood and steadied himself by grasping the snow-powdered railing. Confronted by a woman, he lifted his cap, and a sunbeam piercing the old roof gleamed across his close-clipped auburn curls. "I was told at the little shop that a chauffeur lived here," he explained, pleasantly enough. The glare of the sun on snow dazzled his first vision. "Our compressed air system is out of order, and my man forgot to put in a hand-pump. I----" His voice trailed away into silence. He had seen her face. "Elsie?" he doubted. "Elsie?" She smiled at him with her serene composure, although deep color swept over her face with the startled movement of her blood. "Mrs. Adriance," she corrected. "Will you not come in? I am sorry Mr. Adriance is not at home." He crossed the threshold mechanically, his gaze not leaving her. "I did not believe it," he exclaimed, under his breath. "I thought Lucille--lied." "Mr. Masterson!" He shook his head in deprecation of offense, continuing his scrutiny of her. He had the appearance of a man fevered by drink or illness; his eyes were bright behind a surface glaze, his face was haggard, yet flushed. His features, always of a fineness almost suggesting effeminacy, had sharpened to an extreme delicacy that promised little for health or endurance. "They told me a chauffeur lived here," he said, presently. "Anthony is a chauffeur," she answered, compassion for the change in him making her voice very gentle. "But I am afraid we have no automobile tools to lend. All such things are kept at the factory or in the machine he drives." He swept aside the subject of automobiles with an impatient movement of his hand, and slowly turned to look over the room. It had gathered much of comfort during those last months, that room; and something more. Scarlet-flowered curtains hung at the windows, echoing the vivid note of scarlet salvia in bloom on the sills. A shelf of books had been put up; beneath, a small table held the jade-and-ivory chessmen drawn up in battle array on their field. As always, the fire glowed, and on the hearth the cat stretched drowsily. Cheer dwelt in the place, the atmosphere of comradeship and assured love; and the pulse of it all was the girl who stood, tranquil of regard, rich in life and beautiful with health, princess in her own domain. At her Masterson looked longest, his handsome, bitter mouth oddly twisted out of shape. "You're different," he pronounced, finally. "I am very happy." "Happy? Here? You married a millionaire's son to live here?" "I married to live with my husband," she proudly corrected him. Again he looked around, and suddenly laughed out with an over-loud lack of control that in a woman would have been called hysterical. "Tony Adriance's house!" he cried, striking his gloved hands together. "Tony--idle Tony, easy Tony, Tony of teas and tangos--Tony has built this! Why----," he bent toward her. "You have been matching work with God, Elsie Adriance; you have made a man!" She drew back, aghast at the bold irreverence. He laughed again at her expression. "You think I meant that wrongly? I did not. I know well enough the way Tony is going, and the way I am. That is if he sticks to this! Are you never afraid he will not! Never afraid he will drift back to the easier ways?" "No," she affirmed. A shining radiance lighted her confident eyes. She carried beneath her heart that which made Anthony and her forever one. Fear was done with; it no longer, wolf-like, hunted down her happiness. "No? Do you think he will be content to be a chauffeur on a honeymoon all his life? I'm going to do something decent, Elsie; I'm going to help you clinch Tony Adriance. No, don't protest. I'm going to force my help on you both, wanted or not. Why, you can't keep him out of New York forever! Send him there to-night, to me, and I'll finish what you have begun." Amazed and dismayed, she retreated from his urgency. "Excuse me," she began a stiff refusal. He cut her short with impatience. "Then I'll leave a message for him. Don't look like that; I only want him to meet me in a public restaurant. Can't you trust me?" "You do not understand." "I understand more than you do," he retorted bluntly. "But if I am wrong, no harm will be done. I want to see him, anyhow. Are you afraid of me?" "No." "Well, then----?" He pulled off his gloves and took a card and fountain pen from his pocket. Elsie watched him helplessly as he wrote, chilled in spite of herself by a return of the old dread. What, was she not able to hold Anthony certainly, even now? She tried to look around her, fortifying her spirit with all the prosaic evidences of their united life. After all, Masterson knew "Tony"; he knew nothing of the man Anthony was. She was able to meet her visitor's glance with her usual calm, when he put the message he had written into her hand. "Tell him to come," he pressed. "Have you forgotten he and I were friends? And I'll always be grateful to you for loving Holly. Did you know I had lost Holly?" She paled, the baby face rising before her. "Lost him! Not----?" "Dead? No. I'm the one who is dead, to borrow a bit of slang." His laugh was bitter as quassia; he turned his head toward the sound of the automobile horn that summoned him. "A dead one!" he repeated. "I have to go, Mrs. Adriance. But send Tony over, to-night." The door closed on the last word. Elsie heard the high, rather strident voices of the women calling salute and impatience; then Masterson's reply set in a key of strained merriment. The motor roared under the chauffeur's hand. They were departing; evidently a means of inflating the tire had been found. The peace of Elsie's day had departed with them. The alteration in Masterson frightened her; the strangeness of his manner and of his invitation filled her with anxiety. Something was wrong; something she could not guess or understand. Why should he have spoken so of Holly? Why, too, did he want Anthony this night? Was Mrs. Masterson to be one of the party at the restaurant? That idea came later. The mere possibility of such an event fixed Elsie's decision; she would not send Anthony to the meeting desired. She would let Masterson's accidental visit pass unnoticed. But when evening came, and with it Adriance, ruddy with the March wind, boyishly hungry and gay; when he took his wife in his arms and kissed her with the deep tenderness that the morning had added to their first love, Elsie knew better. Better any misfortune than the barrier of deceit between them. And she remembered in time that it was not for her to deprive him of his right of decision and free-will. She waited until supper was eaten and the blue-and-white dishes shining in their rack again beside the ten-cent-shop china. "Shall we go on with our book?" Adriance proposed, when his pipe was lit. Now that the moment had come, it pleased him to dally with the surprise he held for her, to prolong his secret content. He stretched luxuriously in his arm-chair. "Lord, it's good to get home! Funny I never cared much about books until we took to reading aloud, isn't it? Come over and settle down. I think we'll turn in early to-night, if you don't mind, girl. I want to do some extra work, to-morrow." She came to him rather slowly. "Mr. Masterson was here to-day," she said reluctantly. "He came by chance, to borrow something for his automobile. I think it was a tire-pump. Of course he was surprised to find me. And he left this for you." Astonished, he took the card, pulling her down beside him; and they read the message together. It was very brief, yet somehow carried a force of compulsion. Masterson urged his friend to go that night to the ball-room of a certain restaurant known to every New Yorker, and there wait until he, Masterson, joined him. There was a pause after the reading. Adriance stared at the card with the knitted brow of perplexity, while Elsie watched his face in tense suspense. "It would be too late, now, anyway," she murmured, tentatively. "It is eight o'clock." Adriance aroused himself and laughed. "Oh, innocence! That ball-room does not open until eleven, fair outlander. But you had better get ready, for we have a quite respectable distance to go. Here vanishes our quiet evening!" "We? You would take me?" He regarded her curiously. "Did you suppose I would go without you? We will have to go, because Fred means this; I know him well enough to tell. I'm afraid he is in some kind of trouble." Elsie shut her eyes for a moment, mastering her passionate relief. She opened them to a new thought. "Anthony, I haven't any clothes, for such a place." "Neither have I," he calmly dismissed the matter. "We will go in street costume. It doesn't matter, since we do not want to dance. By the way, can you dance?" "Certainly." "The new dances?" "Some of them," a dimple disturbed her smooth cheek. "Not the very new one." "Well, I'll teach you. But you will only dance with me," he stated with finality. Absurdly happy in the jealous prohibition, she went to make ready. Elsie Murray had possessed one dress that Elsie Adriance never had worn. It was a year old, one brought from her distant home, but so simply made that its fashion would still pass. It was an afternoon, not evening gown; a clinging, black sheath of chiffon and net, covering her arms, but leaving bare the creamy pillar of her throat. The cloudy darkness echoed the dark softness of her hair and threw into relief her clear, health-tinted beauty of complexion. When she wore it into the room where her husband waited, he greeted her with a whistle of surprise and pleasure. "Some lady!" he approved. "What did you mean--no clothes? Have I seen that before?" "No. Do you like me this way?" He put his hands on her shoulders, looking down into her eyes. "Of course. But don't you know it doesn't matter what you wear or have?" he asked. "We have got away beyond that, you and I." They walked to the ferry; two miles through the cold darkness. But they found the journey a pleasure, not a hardship. Elsie had taught Anthony her art of extracting amusement from each experience. On the ferryboat, they had sole possession of the deck. "Mollycoddles," Elsie called the passengers who huddled into the cabins. The wind painted her cheeks and lips scarlet, as she leaned over the rail to hear the crunch of drift ice under the boat's sides. The two evoked quite a sense of arctic voyage, between them. Anthony gravely insisted he had seen a polar bear on one tossing floe. They were happy enough to relish nonsense; and more excited by the coming meeting and place of meeting than either would have admitted. CHAPTER XIV THE CABARET DANCER It was eleven o'clock when they entered the revolving door of the restaurant appointed, and faced a group of lounging attendants in the lobby; cynical-eyed servitors, all. Tony Adriance was recognized by these with a vivifying promptness; at once he was surrounded, addressed by name, had officious service pressed upon him. It was strange to the girl to see him so familiar in this place where she never had been; strange, and a little disquieting. But her grave poise was undisturbed. She left her simple hat and coat with a maid, aware of their unsuitability for the place and hour. They did not enter the crowded room to their right, where an orchestra was overwhelming all other and lesser din with a crashing one-step. Instead, Anthony turned up a shining marble stair with a plush-cushioned balustrade and too much gilding. Elsie viewed herself beside him in mirrors set in the wall at regular intervals. The stairs ended at an arcaded hall, beyond which lay a long, brilliant room, comfortably filled with people at supper. Filled, that is, according to its arrangement: the entire central space of gleaming, ice-smooth floor was empty, the tables were ranged around the four walls. The guests here wore evening dress, for the most part, so that the room glowed with color, delicate, vivid or glaring, as the taste of the owner dictated. Here there was comparative quiet; the voices and laughter were lower in pitch than down-stairs. "Is Mr. Masterson here?" Anthony questioned the head waiter, who hastened to meet the arriving couple. "Not yet, Mr. Adriance," the man answered deferentially. "At twelve, he comes. May I show you a table, sir?" "Yes. Not too near the music--Mrs. Adriance and I want to hear each other speak." "Certainly, sir. The drum _will_ be loud, sir; but the dancers like it." Elsie caught the man's side glance of respectful curiosity and interest directed toward herself, and understood why Anthony deliberately had fixed her identity as his wife. Pride warmed her, and love of his consideration for her; suddenly she was able to enjoy the scene around her. She felt no self-consciousness, even when the elaborately gowned and coifed women glanced over her appraisingly as she passed by their tables. She looked back at them, serenely sure of herself. She was not at all aware that many of the men stared at her with startled admiration of a visitor alien to this atmosphere. Adriance saw well enough, however. Elsie had an innocent dignity of carriage that, joined with her gravely candid gaze, was not a little imposing. Moreover her pure, bright color and clear eyes were disconcertingly natural beside the artificial beauties. Pride of possession tingled agreeably through him; he had not thought of this or expected the emotion. When the two were seated opposite one another, the regard they exchanged was of glowing content. Adriance ordered supper with the interest of appetite and with a fine knowledge of her tastes and his own. Then, at ease, they smiled at each other. The extravagance of the feast was of no moment. The utter simplicity of their daily life made Anthony's salary more than sufficient; they already possessed the resource of a bank account. So far, there had been no music, except faint echoes from the room below. Now a tinkle of strings sounded delicately, swelling from a single note into a full, minor waltz melody. Turning, Elsie saw the musicians. They were negroes; not a band or an orchestra, merely a pianist, two men with mandolins and as many with banjoes, and one who handled with amazing dexterity a whole set of sound producers; a drum, cymbals, bells, a gong, even an automobile horn. From one to another instrument, as the character of the piece demanded, this performer's hands and feet flew with accuracy and ludicrous speed. But the music was more than good, it was unique, inspired; it snared the feet and the senses. All round sounded the scraping of chairs pushed back, as men and women rose to answer the call. In one short moment the place changed from a restaurant to a ball-room. It was such a ball-room as Elsie Adriance never had glimpsed in either her Louisiana or restricted New York experiences. The women were costumed in the extreme fashions of a year when all fashion was extreme. As the dancers swayed past in the graceful, hesitating steps of the last new waltz, there were revelations;--of low-cut draperies, of skirts transparent to the knees, with ribbon-laced slippers jewelled at heel and buckle glancing through the thin veil of tinted chiffon or lace. The scene had an Oriental frankness without being blatant or coarse. At the tables there was much drinking of wine and liqueurs, but as yet no apparent intoxication. Some of the women who were not dancing smoked cigarettes as they chatted with their companions; not a few of these had white hair and were obviously matrons, respected and self-respecting. "What do you think of it?" Adriance inquired, after watching his wife with mischief in his eyes. "I don't know," she slowly confessed. "You know, I am an outlander. But I am not so stupid as to misunderstand too badly. These people are--all right?" "Yes; most of them. This is the after-theatre crowd. Some are from the stage, some from the audience. That lady in green chiffon who looks as if she had forgotten to put on most of her clothes is the wife of one of my father's business associates. Did you see her husband bow to us as we came in? The little black-eyed girl in the black velvet walking-suit, at the next table, is La Tanagra, who does classic dances in a yard of pink veil. She is a very nice girl, too. Of course, some of them----" He shrugged. The music stopped. Through a press of laughing, flushed people returning to their tables, a waiter wound a difficult passage with the first course of the supper Adriance had ordered. Guests entered the room in a thin, constant stream, as the hour advanced. But there was no sign of Masterson. Elsie wondered what he would say on finding her with Anthony. Would he be angry, indifferent, disconcerted? Perhaps he would not come alone. A sharp, imperious clang of cymbals rang out abruptly, hushing the murmur of voices and laughter. Elsie started from her abstraction, and saw all eyes turned toward the centre of the room. "Demonstration dance," smiled Adriance. "Now you'll see something!" A short, dark man and a woman in yellow gauze through which showed her bare, dimpled knees, stood alone on the floor. At a second clang of cymbals they floated with the music into a strange, half-Spanish, half-savage dance; a dance vigorously, even crudely alive and swift as a flight. The woman was not beautiful, but she was incredibly graceful. Her small, arched, flashing feet in their gilded slippers recalled a half-forgotten line to Elsie. "'And her sandals delighted his eyes----'" she quoted aloud. "Do you remember that, Anthony?" But Adriance was laughing at her. "Infant!" he mocked. "Wait until you've seen it as often as I have, and then you will not let your supper grow cold. There, it's over!" It was. The dance ended with the dancers in each other's arms, glances knit, lips almost touching. The applause was courteous. The audience, like Adriance, was too sophisticated to be readily excited. It really preferred to do its own dancing. The preference was gratified during the next half hour. One-step, fox-trot and a Lulu Fado followed in smooth succession. The room was very full, now. One or two parties began to show too much exhilaration. "I wish Fred would come," Adriance remarked, with a restive glance at the noisiest group. "I don't want you to be here much after midnight. I wonder----" He was interrupted by a second crash of brazen cymbals that struck down the chatter and movement of the crowd. With the harsh, resonant clang, and continuing after it had ceased, came the soft chime of a clock striking twelve. This time a more decided interest greeted the announcement. In fact, a distinct thrill ran through the room. Men and women abandoned forks and glasses, turning eagerly toward the entrance. A marked hush continued in the place. "Some celebrity," Adriance interpreted, impatiently. "Confound Masterson's whims--why couldn't he have seen me at home? Now he can't get in until this is over." The music had commenced--a tripping languorous ballet suite from a famous opera. Into the large, square arch of the doorway a girl drifted and stood. She was a sullen, magnificent creature, as she faced the audience. Her full, red mouth was straight-lipped, returning no smile to the welcoming applause. It was not possible to imagine a dimple breaking the firm curve of her rouged cheek. Elsie thought she never had seen a woman so indisputably handsome, or so utterly lacking in feminine allure. Heaps of satin-black hair framed her face and were held by jewelled bandeaux; her corsage was dangerously low, retained in place by narrow strings of brilliants over her strong, smooth, white shoulders. Her skirts were those of the conventional ballet: billows of spangled rose-colored tulle. As she began to dance, her eyes, very large and dark behind their darkened lashes, swept the spectators with a sombre alertness. Elsie felt the glance pass across her and rest on Anthony. Yes, rest there, for an instant of fixed attention! But Adriance showed no change of expression to his wife's questioning regard; he watched the dancer with a placid interest, without evincing any sign of recognition. It was a curious dance, as singularly stripped of womanly allure as the girl's beauty. Yet it was graceful and clever. She bent and swayed through the measures, circling the room with a studied coquetry cold as indifference; posing now and then with a rose she lifted to touch lips or cheek. The audience looked on with a sustained tension of interest that the performance did not seem to warrant. Elsie noticed that the men laughed or evinced faint embarrassment if the dancer leaned toward them, but the women clapped enthusiastically and sent smiling glances. What was it that these people knew, but which she and Anthony did not? There was something---- Just opposite the Adriances the dancer had slipped in executing an intricate and difficult step. She staggered, catching herself, but not before she had reeled heavily against Elsie's chair. "Pardon!" she panted, her voice low. "The floor is too polished!" For a moment her eyes looked full into Elsie's, and they were not dark, but a very bright blue. The brush of her naked arm and shoulder left a streak of white powder on the other's sleeve; a heavy fragrance of heliotrope shook from her garments. Before Adriance could rise she was gone. "Confounded clumsiness!" he exclaimed, with suppressed anger. "Did she hurt you, Elsie?" "No. Oh, no! Anthony, I know her--I knew her eyes." He stared at his wife. "You know her!" "I recognized her eyes. I do not know who she is, I cannot think; yet I know her. She knew me, too; I saw it in her face. And I believe she knows you." "Elsie!" "She looked---- Wait; she is finishing!" The music was indeed rising to a finale. The dancer glided to the central arch through which she had entered, poised on the verge of taking flight, then raised both hands to her head. The black wig came off with the sweeping gesture. The dancer was a man, whose short-clipped auburn hair tumbled in boyish disorder about his powdered forehead. But there was no look of boyhood in his face, as he turned it toward Adriance's table; the familiar, reckless face of Fred Masterson. The room was in an uproar of laughter and applause. But the dancer disappeared without acknowledging or pausing to enjoy his success; indeed, as if escaping from it. When Elsie ventured to look at her husband, he had one hand across his eyes. He dropped it at once, but avoided her gaze as if the humiliation were his own. "Finish your coffee," he bade, his voice roughened by a dry hoarseness. "I want to get out of this--to get home." "We have not spoken to Mr. Masterson," she hesitatingly reminded him. "He asked us to meet him." "I suppose I have seen what he wanted me to see." The waiter was beside them again, checking her answer. It seemed to Elsie that the man eyed Anthony with a furtive and malicious comprehension. Had he ever seen Tony Adriance with Mrs. Masterson, she wondered? Did he imagine--she thrust away the thought. "After all, dear, aren't we prejudiced?" she essayed, unconvinced and unconvincing reason. "Isn't it really as if he were an actor?" "No, it isn't! You know it's not. It isn't what he does that these people applaud; they applaud because he does it. He succeeds by making a show of himself, his name, his position. The grotesqueness of his being here succeeds, not his work. Well--are you ready?" "Yes," she answered, submissive to his mood. He paid the check, and they passed out. Elsie recovered her hat and coat from the maid, in the dressing-room below. She was too preoccupied to notice the attendant's inquisitive scrutiny, or the frank stare of a fair-haired girl who was making up her complexion with elaborate care before one of the mirrors. It would not have occurred to her, if she had, that word had passed down the staff of servants that the quiet girl in black was Mrs. Tony Adriance. But without knowing her own plain attire had the reflected lustre of cloth-of-gold, she was too feminine not to embrace with a glance of faintly wistful admiration the furs, velvets and shining satins of the wraps left in this place by the other women. No preoccupation could quite ignore that array. There was one coat of gray velvet that matched her own eyes, lined with poppy-hued silk that matched her lips. A trifle dismayed by her own frivolity, she hastened out from the place of temptation. Anthony was waiting for her. CHAPTER XV THE OTHER MAN'S ROAD The damp cold of a March night closed chillingly around the two, as they passed through the revolving door into the street. The restaurant did not face on Broadway, the street of a million lights; for a moment they seemed to have stepped into darkness, after the dazzle of light just left. Adriance turned away from the vociferous proffers of taxicabs, with an economy prompted by Elsie's guiding hand rather than his own prudence. Indeed, his great amazement and vicarious shame for Masterson left him with slight attention for ordinary matters. But they were not allowed to reach the subway, and return as they had come. As they neared the station entrance, a limousine rolled up to the curb and halted across their path. The car's occupant threw open the door before the chauffeur could do so, and leaned out. "Come in," commanded, rather than invited Masterson's voice. "You didn't wait for me, so I had a chase to catch you. Put Mrs. Adriance in, Tony, and tell the man where you want to go. The ferry, is it? All right; tell him so." He spoke with an abrupt impatience and strain that excused much by its account of his sick nerves. Adriance complied without objection. Before she quite realized the situation, Elsie found herself seated beside him, opposite Masterson in the warmed interior of the car. The air of the limousine was not only warm, but perfumed. Without analyzing their reason, it struck both the Adriances as peculiarly shocking that this should be so. Elsie identified the white heliotrope scent worn by the dancer. The globe set in the ceiling was not lighted, but the street lamps shone in, showing the thinness of Masterson's flushed face and its haggardness, accentuated by smudges of make-up imperfectly removed. Elsie felt a quivering embarrassment for him, and a desperate hopelessness of finding anything possible to say. She divined that Anthony was experiencing the same feelings, but intensified. The car rolled smoothly around Columbus Circle and settled into a steady pace up Broadway. The rush of after-theatre traffic was long since over, the streets comparatively clear. Masterson spoke first, with a defiance that attempted to be light. "Well, haven't you any compliments for me? I've been told I do it pretty well. That's the only thing I learned at college of any use to me!" "How did you come----?" Adriance began, brusquely. "I mean--what sent you there, to that? Why, Fred----?" "I thought it was you, Tony, until to-day," was the dry retort. "I've thought so ever since I found out who was financing the case. Until this morning, I believed Lucille lied when she told me you were married. I suppose I should apologize to you; consider it done, if you like." "Don't!" Adriance begged. His hand closed sharply over his wife's. "We have been married since last November," she gravely came to his aid. "I am sure Mrs. Masterson told you only the truth in that. Indeed, the announcement was published in the newspapers! Since then, we have been living where you saw me this morning; on a honeymoon quite out of the world." "I don't read more of any newspaper than the first pages," Masterson returned. "I see you two do not read even so much, or you would hardly have been taken by surprise, to-night. Shocked, were you, Tony? I suppose I would have been, myself, once. Now----" "Now----?" Adriance prompted, after waiting. Masterson faced his friend with a sudden blaze in his hollow eyes. "Now, I am through with being shocked at myself, through with thinking of myself or sparing myself and other people. Can't you see, can't you guess for whom alone I would do this--or anything else? Have you forgotten Holly? I may not have a wife, but I have a son. And I will not have my son reared as I was, married as I was, and ruined as I am. I am going to have money, if I fish it out of the gutter, to take him away to some clean, far-off place. There I shall rear him myself, understand! He shall never know this Fred Masterson. Roughing it outdoors will put me in fit condition long before he is old enough to criticise. He's got a fine little body, Tony! I'll have him as hard and straight as a pine tree. I'll teach him to work. What will I care for the squalls of this corner of the world, when I have done that? Since Lucille divorced me, I've stripped my mind of a good deal of hampering romance." He was interrupted by the exclamation of both his listeners. "Divorced you?" Adriance echoed, stifled by the pressure of warring emotions. "Divorced you, after all?" "You don't mean to say you didn't know?" He studied the two faces with incredulous astonishment; then, convinced by their patent honesty, shrugged derision of himself. "Conceited lot, all of us! We think if our tea-cups drop, the crash is heard around the world. Yes, I have been a single man for three months. You have been away for six, remember. But it went through very quietly. Lucille is strong for propriety and conventions. She even," his face darkened with an angry flood of bitterness startling as a self-betrayal, "she even is willing to pay pretty highly for them. Holly----" The sentence remained unfinished. Elsie's memory returned to that morning, when Masterson told her that he had lost Holly. She glimpsed his meaning now. The automobile had long since left behind the flash and glitter of theatrical Broadway. When the gliding silence of the progress was suddenly broken by a blast of the car's electric horn sounding warning to some late pedestrian, the three within started as if at an unnatural happening. "It went through quietly," Masterson sullenly picked up the broken thread, "because she bargained with me. She said that if I made no defence, she would let me take Holly. Well, I kept my word; I stayed away from the whole business and didn't even get a lawyer--like a fool. I don't even know what they said about me. I didn't care, since she wanted it. And then she asked the court for the custody of Holly; and got him. It was only for the boy's good, she says; I was not fit to have charge of him." "Oh!" Elsie gasped. Masterson lighted a cigarette with an attempt at unconcern. He had a singular difficulty in bringing the burning match in contact with the end of the little paper tube--a lack of coordination between the nerves and muscles that held a sinister meaning for one able to interpret the signs. "Thanks," he acknowledged the unworded sympathy. "Maybe you know I was fit, then; or, at least, would have been fit if I had had him. Not having him, I went to--I beg your pardon, Mrs. Adriance." "Fred----" Adriance essayed. The other man hushed him with a gesture. "I know what you are going to say, Tony. Don't! My wife, my _late_ wife and I have managed this business. Keep out of what doesn't concern you. Here, I'll give her due to her, too! If I had not been weak, all this would never have happened. But if she had played the game, it would never have happened, either. Well, I lose. But Holly shall not pay for the game he had no share in. I am telling you two what I have told no one else. When I have enough money, I shall buy Holly from his mother and take him to Oregon. Lucille always needs money. Phillips is out there, Tony. Do you remember my Cousin Phil? Well, I started him out there ten years ago; sold my first automobile to help him out of a bad scrape. He says there is room for me; work that will support any man who doesn't want too much. They raise square miles of fruit. I only wish it was the other side of the world!" The limousine swung to the left, jarring across a network of car tracks. They were turning down to the ferry. Elsie nestled her hand into her husband's, divining his pain. "Nice machine, this," Masterson observed, casually. "One thing, I'm not making a gutter exit! You wouldn't believe what they pay me for my bit of college theatrical work. I did it at first on a bet, after a supper party I gave to celebrate my freedom. I think it must annoy Lucille considerably. It suits me; and there isn't any other way I could earn so quickly what I need. Here we are." The automobile had stopped, and the chauffeur threw open the door. "The ferry-boat is just coming across, sir," he stated. "Very well," his employer dismissed him. "Mrs. Adriance, you had better stay in here until the boat docks; it is cold, to-night. Tony and I will go buy the tickets." "You might say Elsie, still," she answered gently. "You know we were always good friends." "You are good to say so now," he returned. "Thank you." The two men did not buy the tickets; instead, they walked side by side across the rough, cobblestone square in front of the ferry-house. Adriance was pale, but steadily set of face and determination to have done, here and now with all deceit. "Fred, I've got to clear things between us," he forced the distasteful speech. "Before I met my wife, I did see a great deal of Mrs. Masterson. You spoke a while ago of believing me responsible for her wanting a divorce. Once I might have done such a thing, I do not know. But, I did not. I went away, in order that I should not." The other nodded, almost equally embarrassed by the difficult avowal. "That's all right, Tony. I understand. But don't blame me too much for my mistake. Do you know who paid all the expenses of the case, whose influence kept it out of the newspapers as much as possible--in short, who managed the whole campaign? Except about Holly; that was a woman's trick! Do you know?" "Why, no. How should I?" The boat was in the slip; across the clank of unwinding chains, the fall of gangways and tread of men and horses, Masterson's reply came: "Your father." The amazing statement stunned Adriance beyond the possibility of reply. No outcry, no denial of complicity could have been so convincing as the utter stupefaction of the regard he fixed upon his friend. What had the senior Adriance to do with this affair? What had he to do with Lucille Masterson? "It is true," Masterson answered his doubt. "Now you know why I did not believe you were married, until I met your wife, this morning. And," he hesitated, "that is why, when I did understand, I brought you to see me, to-night. I could not say so before Mrs. Adriance, but evidently your father is not pleased with your marriage, since you're living like a laborer, across the river. Make no mistake, Tony; your father never in his life did anything without reason. If he got Lucille her divorce, why, he knows you admired her, once. And he always liked her, himself. Suppose he figured that if she were free, you might wish to become so? Why not? We all know couples where both parties have been divorced and married several times, and no one says a word against them." The recoil that shook Adriance was strong as physical sickness. Like a woman, he was glad of the darkness. Divorce between Elsie and himself? He could have laughed at the coarse absurdity of the idea, if it had not been for his disgust and desire to get away from the subject. "We shall miss the boat," he said curtly. "Thank you, Fred, but that is all nonsense. The truth of the matter is that you are sick--and no wonder! Come, man, pull yourself up and you'll get past all this. Why, you are only twenty-eight; start over again here! Drop everything and come home with Elsie and me for a while. You saw how we live; it isn't much, perhaps, but you would get back your health. And we can force Mrs. Masterson to let you have Holly part of the time, at least." "I saw the way you live," Masterson repeated. "Yes. And you see the way I live. I'm no preacher, but measure them up and choose if ever you feel discontented, Tony. As for taking me home, neither of us could stand it. I drink all day to keep myself merry enough to stand that restaurant, and take morphine at night to keep myself asleep. No, we will not talk about it. I must put this through in my own way, and then leave this part of the earth. I can drop all this at once when I am ready. I am no weakling physically." The two wanted back to the car. Just before they reached it, Masterson closed the discussion. "Think over what I've told you. You can't love your wife any more than I did Lucille." He shivered in the damp air, drawing his fur-lined coat closer about him. "I couldn't keep her, though I tried hard, at first. Wish you better luck." It was three o'clock in the morning when Adriance slipped his key into the clumsy old lock of his house-door, while Elsie perched herself on the railing of the porch. Within they heard his dog barking boisterous welcome. "Up to work at seven," he commented, as the clock struck simultaneously with the opening of the door. But there was no complaint in his tone. He threw his arm around Elsie and drew her across the threshold with a deep breath of relief. "Let me light the lamp," she offered. "I'll light it." He held her closer. "Wait a moment; the hearth gives glow enough. I have been thinking--if it should be a boy, I would like to call our son after that jolly old ancestor of yours: the black-sloop man, Martin Galvez." "Not Anthony?" "No." The brevity of the answer silenced her. She gave her consent more delicately than in words. But still Adriance did not move toward the lamp, or release his companion. "Elsie, you are happy, aren't you?" "More than happy, dear." "If ever you are not, if you want anything you have not got, tell me. You know I am not going to keep you in this poor place always, or let you work for me; I am working towards better things for you, now. I have not told you, yet--I was promoted to a new position to-day. I have work inside the factory, and some individuality. I am no longer just one of a troup of chauffeurs. And, of course, this is only a beginning. It is all for you, everything, will you remember? If ever--I'm often stupid and, well, a man!--if ever you find me lacking, you will tell me, won't you?" She clasped her hands over the hand that held her. This ending to the day of doubt and anxiety closed her round with a hush of deep content. She wanted to cry out her love and happiness and gratitude for his tenderness, to exalt him above herself. But with a new wisdom, she did not. Where he had placed her, she stood. "Yes," she assented. "Yes." CHAPTER XVI THE GUITAR OF ALENYA OF THE SEA That one day, in a mood of fierce impatience, had seized upon Anthony Adriance and hurried him through a range of feeling and experience such as Time usually brings in leisurely sequence, spaced apart. From Elsie's confidence in the morning, with its moving love and pride and awe he in nowise was afraid to name holy, he had gone to the spectacle of his friend's degradation in the tawdry restaurant. And as a completion, he had been confronted with the new and ugly vision of a father he could not honor. He always had respected his father very sincerely, and felt more affection for him than either of them ever had realized. He had admired the success of the elder Adriance, and secretly regretted that he was not allowed to work with him or share it except by spending its proceeds. His hope of a reconciliation had not been all mercenary. Now all that was thrown down, an image overturned and shattered. He saw only a selfish, narrow-minded man, scheming to divorce a pretty woman from her husband in order that she might be free to come between his son and the unwelcome wife he had taken. For of course Elsie was judged by the servant's position she had held; there was no one to tell of her gentle birth and breeding. Anthony had understood this, and had looked forward with eager anticipation to enlightening his father, some day when his other plans were quite ready. He had meant that day to be soon; now he knew that it would never come in the way he had fancied. And the loss of an ideal hurt. Masterson had told him the truth; there was no escaping the logical inference to be drawn from it. Anthony wasted no energy in trying, instead addressing himself still more closely to the work in hand. He worked harder than ever, at the mill, but the buoyant enthusiasm was gone. Now he dreaded the possibility that Mr. Goodwin might speak to Mr. Adriance of the young man who bore his name and who was making such changes in the shipping department. For Anthony did not content himself with regulating the trucking system. He had inherited his father's ability, although the unused tool had lain undiscovered. His attention aroused, he found other slack lines, and indicated how to tighten them to taut efficiency. Mr. Goodwin visited the underground room more than once, observed and approved. Cook, won by the new man's tact that never slighted or criticised injuriously his former chief and present associate, aided him with warm co-operation. Anthony found his salary increased. When Ransome returned, after his illness, he was given a new position, upstairs. The evenings in the little red house were no longer entirely devoted to play, after that night spent abroad. Adriance took to keeping a book of records, in the form of cryptic notes and columns of figures. "Chauffeur's accounts," he called them, when Elsie questioned; and she laughed acceptance of the evasion, forbearing to tease him with curiosity. Long before, there had arrived the replies to the letters of announcement he and Elsie had written to her parents, and Adriance had been touched home by the serious, graciously cordial welcome extended to the unknown son-in-law. He had promised himself, and Elsie, that some time a visit to Louisiana should be paid. Since that, she had described the neighborhood, the countryside and people, with her knack of vivid word-sketching, until all lay as clearly before him as a place seen. Now he recalled this with a new consideration. "Do you remember the old house and plantation that you once told me about?" he asked her, one Sunday morning. "The deserted place, that had been for sale so long. Do you suppose it is still for sale?" "It was, the last time Virginia wrote," she replied, regarding him questioningly. "She spoke of a picnic held under the old trees." "If I--well, was crowded out of here, would you be content to try life down there? I remembered yesterday that I own some rather valuable stuff left me by my mother; nothing very much, just jewelry she had as a girl. I do not like the idea of selling it, but if I am forced into a corner, it would buy such a place for us. I have some ideas I would like to try out." Elsie set down the salad-bowl with which she was busied; her rain-gray eyes grave, she considered her husband. "Of what are you thinking, Anthony?" Adriance looked away. Even to her, he could not bring himself to speak of his lost confidence in his father or to say whom he now feared as an enemy. Mr. Adriance could not divide Anthony and his wife without their consent, but he could make it bitterly hard for them to live together. Anthony had known of men who had incurred his father's enmity, and the memory was not reassuring. Before his interview with Masterson, he would have ridiculed the idea of such a situation between his father and himself; now, he was uncertain. "Put on your hat and coat," he evaded the question. "Come for a walk; I want to show you something." "And our dinner?" she demurred. "Never mind it. We will eat scrambled eggs." Laughing, she complied. "What am I going to see, Anthony?" "A house," briefly. The walk took them quite away from the neighborhood of such small cottages as their own. In fact, the house before which Anthony finally halted was standing so much away from any others as scarcely to be called in a neighborhood, at all. It stood out on a little spur of the Palisades, delightfully nestled in a bit of woodland and lawns of its own. "There!" he indicated it. "Pretty?" Elsie looked, with a satisfying seriousness. The house was so new that the builder's self-advertisement still jostled the sign offering for sale: "this modern residence, all improvements." "I love it," she pronounced. "Those white cement houses are adorable; it looks as if it were made of cream-candy. What deep porches, like caves of white coral; and how deliciously the light gleams in those cunning, stained-glass windows! I suppose they are set up the stairs? It is a nice size, too; large enough to be quite luxurious, but not so large as to be appalling. How did you happen to notice it, dear?" "I took this road for a short cut, one day. Look what a view you have up here. One must see twenty miles up and down the river, and over half New York. But it is open to inspection; let us go in." "As if we were considering buying it," she fell in with the sport. "Yes, and we will be very critical indeed; find flaws and finally reject it. Really, Anthony, it does not at all compare with our present residence." "You'll do," he approved, drawing her up the broad, lazily-low steps. It really was an enchanting house; a house that developed unexpected charms to the pair who wandered through its empty, echoing rooms and halls. It indulged in nooks, and inconsequential little balconies; it displayed a most inviting window-seat halfway up the stairs that could only have been designed for lovers. "But none have been there, yet," Elsie observed, lingering on the stairs to contemplate this last allurement. "Just think, Anthony, that it is a mere débutante of a house with its ball-book all unfilled. No one has sat before its hearth, or nestled in its window-seat, or opened its door to let in love or give out charity. It is an Undine house whose soul has not yet entered its cool whiteness. Oh, I hope the people who buy it are both fair and good, and respect its innocence!" "Coral caves and Undines--your sentiment is all deep-sea, to-day," he teased her. "Elsie, doesn't all this make you want something?" "Yes," she promptly returned looking over her shoulder at him as she descended. "I want something that I saw in the Antique Shop, yesterday. Will you buy it for me?" "That depends. What is it?" "A guitar. A guitar that might have been made to go with our ivory and jade chessmen, for some heavy-lidded slave-girl to touch while her master and his favored guest moved the pieces on the board. It is _El Aud_ of Arabia; all opalescent inlay of mother-of-pearl, pegs and frets marked with dull color. I am quite sure it belonged to some Eastern princess; perhaps Zaraya the Fair or Alenya of the Sea. It will sing of court-yards in Fez where fountains splash all the hot, still days, of midnight, in the Alhambra gardens, and the nightingales of lost Zahara. And the antiquarian person will sell it for five dollars!" Adriance threw back his head and laughed, beguiled from serious thoughts. "What a peroration! We will buy the thing on our way home, Sunday or no Sunday. That is, if you can play it for me, and if it will come West enough for the sleepy, creepy song about Maître Raoul Galvez that should never be sung between midnight and dawn? I have never heard that one, yet." "You shall," she promised. "And also the song with which Alenya of the Sea charmed the king from his sadness." "Tell me first who Alenya was." "To-night----" "No, now." Lightly, but with determination he drew her across the threshold of the room that opened beside them. Opposite its rawly new, rose-tiled fireplace he pushed a tool-chest, forgotten by some careless workman, and spread over it his own coat, making a fairly comfortable seat. "Sit here," he bade. "You're tired, anyhow; and I have a fancy to see you here." Surprised, but yielding to his whim with that cordial readiness he loved in her, Elsie obeyed. Adriance established himself opposite, on the comparatively clean tiles of the hearth. "Shoot," he commanded, lazily and colloquially imperious. "Your sultan listens." She made a mutinous face at him and slowly removed her hat, laying it beside her upon the chest. Her gaze dwelt meditatively upon the broad ray of sunlight that streamed across from the nearest window and glittered between them like a golden sword. Watching, Adriance saw her gray eyes grow reminiscent. "Very well, I will try to tell the story as my father once told it to me. But whether he drew it from those strange histories in which he is so learned, or whether he drew it from his own fancy, I do not know. For he is more poet than professor, and more antiquarian than either--and more dear than you can know until you meet him, Anthony. Now imagine yourself in our neglected old garden, and listen. "Long, long ago, before the beauty of Cava brought the Moors across Gibraltar into Spain, there lived in the East a king named Selim the Sorrowful. The name was his alone. His kingdom was as rich as vast; his people were content; it seemed that all the country laughed except its ruler. Upon him lay a vague, sinister spell, and had so lain from the hour of his birth. "For always he grieved for a thing unknown, a want undefined and unsatisfied. Royalty was his, and youth, and absolute power, yet, because of this great longing of his he moved like a beggar through his splendor and knew hunger of the heart by night and day. Wise men and temples were questioned in vain, rich gifts vainly sent to distant oracles; none could tell the king's desire, or cure it. And his dark, wistful face came to be accepted by his people as a thing usual and royal. "One day, when the king walked alone in his garden by the sea, a strange mist crept over the land and water, silvery, opalescent, wonderful. He stood, watching. Suddenly a gigantic wave loomed through the haze and swept curling and hissing shoreward to his very feet, where it broke with a great sound. When the glittering foam and spray fell away again, a girl was standing on the sands before him; a girl clad in the floating gray of the mist, girdled and crowned with soft, dim pearls. Her lustrous eyes were green as the heart of the ocean, and when the king gazed into them his sorrow shrank and fled. "'Who are you, desire of mine?' asked Selim. "'Alenya of the Sea,' she answered him, and her voice was the lap of waves on a summer night. "Then the king took her in his arms and bore her to his palace." "And she cured him?" "Better! She satisfied him. Never was a change more marvellous; in all the kingdom there was no man so happy as Selim the king. Day and night, night and day, he lingered by the sea-maiden. Riotous prosperity came to the land, the fields yielded double crops; it seemed that the king's smile was a very sunshine of the South. "But by-and-by superstitious dread fell upon the people, and the jealous priests fostered it. Strange, strange and weirdly sweet was the music that drifted from Alenya's apartments. There came a day when the country demanded that Selim put away the evil enchantress, or die. One month they gave him for the choice." "The men of the East were poor lovers," commented Adriance. "He banished the sea-princess?" "Not at all! He chose death, and a month with Alenya." "Well, if he lived one month exactly as he willed, he had something." "Very true, cynical person. But never was such month as his, when the lonely man still possessed his love and the wearied king had found an excitement. Intensity is the leap of a flame, and cannot endure. When the end of the four weeks came--" she paused, her dark little head tilted back, her regard inviting his hazard. "They died?" "Alenya sang to the king for the last time. There is no record of that lost music; it is so sad that if it were written the paper would dissolve in tears. When it ceased the king slept, and Alenya flitted back to the sea and mist, alone. Later came the people and awakened Selim with their rejoicing, but he stared in cold amazement at the pageant of their returning loyalty. He had forgotten all." "Forgotten?" "Yes, for Alenya's last song had swept her image from his mind. From his mind, not his heart; he was again Selim the Sorrowful, yearning for the desire he did not know. "Often, often he wandered along the shore, suffering, uncomprehending. It is written that his reign was long, and wise. But on the night he died his attendants found the print of a small, wet hand on the pillow where rested the king's white head." After a moment Adriance rose. "So he could not keep his own, when he had it!" he said. "Thank you, Madame Scheherazade. Now come outside and I'll tell you why I wanted you to sit at that hearth, for luck." Laughing, she followed him, carrying her hat in her hand. "Why, Anthony?" "Because I want this place for our home," he answered. She uttered a faint exclamation, genuinely dismayed. "Want it? Why it must be worth ten thousand dollars, Anthony! See, it even has a little garage. And one would need servants; a maid-of-all-work, at least." "Yes. I am working for all that. A while ago I thought I was certain of it. Now, I am afraid not. But you are not going to live the way we are now for much longer. Either I shall win my game, and bring you here, or we will go South and try a new venture." Amazed and hushed, she met his steady, resolute gaze. She had not glimpsed this purpose of his in all their intimate life together. "Do you--care to tell me about it?" she wondered. "And, you know I am quite, quite happy as we are; as I must be happy with you always, win or lose, my dearest dear." The place was quite deserted; he kissed her, before the blank windows of the house that never had been lived in. "I know," he said. "As I must be with you, and am! But I will wait to tell you the rest, until I can tell it all." She accepted the frank reticence. They walked home more quietly than they had come, each busied with thought. But Adriance did not forget to stop at the antique shop for the guitar. The proprietor lived in the rear of the shabby frame building and willingly admitted his two customers, after examining them beneath a raised corner of the sun-bleached green curtain. "The guitar?" he echoed Adriance's request. "For madame? But certainly!" He produced the instrument from the window with deferential alacrity. He was a thin, bright-eyed French Jew; quite ugly and quite old enough in appearance to justify Elsie's assertion that he was the Wandering Jew and this the very shop of Hawthorne's tale. She smiled at him with a mischievous recollection of this, as she pulled off her gloves to finger the rusty strings. "It is a good guitar," she approved. "And gay, with all this mother-of-pearl inlay and the little colored stones set in the pegs! But these wire strings must come off, Anthony. They are too loud and too harsh." "It is so, madame," the old man nodded entire agreement, before Adriance could speak. "The guitar was used on the stage, where loudness----!" He shrugged. "Never would you guess, madame, who brought that instrument in to me last week." "No?" Elsie wondered, politely interested. "It was that enormous Russian who formerly rode beside your husband in the motor wagon, madame. He has not a head, that Michael, but he has a heart. About the cinés he is mad--the moving pictures, I would say. Well then, into the poor boarding-house where he lives came an actress. She was out of work, or she would not have been there, _bien sur_! The guitar was hers. Michael brought it here to sell for her. I believe she is sick. Because she is of the stage, he is a slave to her." "He is in love?" "He, madame? It has not even occurred to him. He would not presume." "Poor idealist!" said Adriance. "We will take the theatrical guitar, but wrap it up so I can get home without someone tossing me a penny." He laughed as he spoke, and had forgotten the guitar's story before they reached Alaric Cottage. But Elsie neither laughed nor forgot. That evening, as she sat across the hearth from Anthony, evoking music gay or weird for his enchantment, she thought much of the girl who had last played her decorative instrument. "Is it my guitar, truly, Anthony?" she questioned, at last. "It certainly isn't mine," he retorted teasingly. She made a grimace at him. But she also made a resolve. CHAPTER XVII RUSSIAN MIKE AND MAÎTRE RAOUL GALVEZ Russian Mike lived in a settlement perhaps a mile back from the river road. He usually passed the Adriances' house each morning, a few moments earlier than the lighter-footed Anthony set forth, whose swinging stride carried him two steps to the big man's one. Elsie had long since made acquaintance with her husband's assistant. During the bitter weather she frequently had called him from the snow-piled road to warm his slow blood with a cup of her vivifying Creole coffee. The Monday morning following the purchase of the guitar, she knew just when to run down the path and find the bulky, lounging figure passing her gate. At the sight of the girl in her lilac-hued frock, a drift of white-wool scarf wound about her shoulders, her dark little head shining almost bronze in the bright morning light, Mike came to a halt and awkwardly jerked at his coarse cap. It had flaps that fastened down under his chin, so that he was embarrassed equally by the difficulty of removing his headgear and the _inconvenance_ of remaining covered. But Elsie's smile was a sunshine of the heart that melted such chills of doubt, as she came up to him. "Good-morning, Michael. Thank you for bringing back my kitty-puss, Saturday night. She _will_ run away, somehow." "It ain't nothing, ma'am," he deprecated, confused, yet gratified. "It was very kind. Michael," she considerately lowered her eyes to her breeze-blown scarf, "yesterday Mr. Adriance bought a guitar for me, from the antique shop. We heard where it came from--how you brought it. Will you tell the lady who owned it that I should be sorry to keep a thing she might miss? Tell her, please, that I hope she will soon grow well, and when she is ready I shall be happy to return the guitar to her. We will just play that she lent it to me for a while." His rough face and massive neck slowly reddened to match his fiery hair. "You, you----" he stammered, inarticulate. His mittened fist wrung the nearest fence paling. "I ain't----! Thank you, lady." Mischief curled Elsie's lips like poppy petals, as she contemplated the discomfited giant. "Is she very pretty, Michael?" "No, ma'am," was the unexpected avowal. "Not 'less she's dolled up for actin'. She's nice, just. I guess many ain't like the swell one Andy used to work for: dolled up any time." "Andy? Mr. Adriance? He never worked----" "For an actress; yes, ma'am," finished Mike, calmly assertive. "He treated her to tea, the day after Christmas, when we was sent over to New York. Ain't you seen her? Swell blonde, with awful big sort of light eyes an' nice clothes on?" He leaned against the frail old fence, shutting his eyes reminiscently. "She had on some kind of perfumery----! Since I seen her, nobody else ain't very good-lookin'." "He treated her to tea?" Elsie faintly repeated. She did not intend an espial upon Anthony; the question was born of pain and bewilderment. "She ast him to. They went to a eatin' place an' I watched the truck. Tony, _she_ called him." Mike ponderously straightened himself and prepared to depart. "I guess I'll get to work, ma'am." Elsie nodded, and turning, crept back. Adriance had appeared on the threshold of the cottage, his dog leaping about him in the daily disappointed, daily renewed hope of accompanying the worshipful master. He was whistling and fumbling in his pockets for a match, as he stood. But he was struck dumb and motionless by the change in the pale girl who turned from the gate. She seemed almost groping her way up the path. "Elsie!" he called, springing down the steps. "Why, Elsie?" To his utter dismay, she crumpled into his extended arms, her eyes shut. He gathered her to him and swept her into the house, himself sick with absolute panic. Illness was so new to them; he did even know of a doctor nearer than the stately and important family physician in New York. He felt the world rock beneath his feet; his world, which held only his wife. Trembling, he laid her on their bed and knelt beside it, her head still on his arm. "Elsie!" he choked, his eyes searching her face. "Girl!" Perhaps it was the misery in his voice, perhaps the anguish of love with which he clasped her, but she moved in his arms. "Yes," she whispered. "I--I shall be well, in a moment." "You're not dying? Not in pain? What can I do?" "No, no. Wait a little. Put me down; I must think." He obeyed, settling her among the pillows with infinite tenderness. He dared not kiss her lest he disturb recovery, but he carefully drew the pins from her hair and smoothed out the thick, soft ripples. He had a vague recollection of reading somewhere that a woman's locks should be unbound when she swooned. It was in a novel, of course; still, it might be true. And there was one panacea that he knew! Elsie did not open her eyes, but she heard him rise and hurry into the other room. The giddiness had left her now, and she could think. Of course she had recognized Mike's portrait of Lucille Masterson. She had seen the other woman, lovely, imperious in assured beauty; almost had breathed the rich odor of her _Essence Enivrante_--which was not French at all, but distilled in an upper room on Forty-second street where individual perfumes were composed for those who could pay well. Anthony had gone to her, the day after Christmas. The day after that Christmas! Lying there, Elsie recalled how she and Anthony had gone together to church in Yuletide mood and knelt hand in hand in the bare little pew as simply as children: "because they had found each other." And then their first Christmas dinner in their holly-decked house, when the puppy had sat in rolypoly unsteadiness on Anthony's knee, regaled with food that should have slain him, while she laughed and remonstrated and abetted the crime. The day after all that, the day after he had given her the garnet love-ring, Anthony had gone to Mrs. Masterson? Her reason cried out against the absurdity. Yet, he had gone. The clink of china hurriedly moved in the next room had ceased. Adriance came to the bedside, leaning over to slip his arm carefully under the pillow and raise the girl's head. In his other hand he held a cup of hot tea, the only medicine he knew. All his wife's heart melted toward him in his helpless helpfulness. Suddenly she remembered that he had come back to her from that meeting. He had seen the invincible Lucille, yet had returned to glorious content with his wife. The ordeal she long had foreseen and dreaded was over. She opened her eyes and looked up at him quietly. He looked like a man who had been ill, and his gaze devoured her, enfolded her. "What was it?" he asked unsteadily. "What is it?" "Anthony, why did you not tell me that you met Mrs. Masterson?" she put her quiet question. "Why did you leave me to hear it from Michael?" Startled, he still continued to look down into her eyes with no confusion in his own. "I suppose I should have told you," he frankly admitted. "But it wasn't of any importance, and I--well, I cut such a poor figure that I dodged exhibiting it to you. The woman caught me on the Avenue and fairly bullied me into a tea-room, with my collar wilted and oily hands. I think she did it out of pure malice, too, for she had nothing to say, after all. But--surely _that_ did not make you ill, Elsie?" "You never thought that I might mind your going?" "Why?" he asked simply. "What is it to us? You don't, do you?" She put up her hands and clasped them behind his head. "Set down the tea," she laughed, tears in her mockery, "or we will spill it between us. Did you think me an inhuman angel, dear darling? No, I don't mind; but I did." "Like that?" amazed. "So much?" "You keep remembering who Maît' Raoul Galvez raised," she warned, her lips against his. "I'm mighty jealous, man!" "But I love you," he stammered clumsily. "That woman--she looked like a vixen! Poor Fred!" Their first misunderstanding was passed, and left no shadow. By and by they drank the cold tea together, and Elsie persuaded her nurse to go to the factory as usual. "I was not sick, just full of badness," she conscientiously explained. "Although it might not have happened if I had been altogether just the same as usual, Anthony." They talked over the affair at more leisure, that evening. But they could find no reason for Lucille Masterson's insistence upon that brief interview with Anthony. Why had she forced him to attend her? He could honestly assure Elsie that Mrs. Masterson had made no attempt to win him back to his former allegiance; rather, she had taunted and antagonized him. As a caprice, they finally classified and dismissed the episode. What they did not dismiss from their thoughts was the conversation they had held in the new white house, the day they had bought the guitar. They did not speak of Anthony's ambitions, but Elsie came to speak often and with freer enthusiasm of her native Louisiana. Her husband saw through the innocent ruse with keener penetration than she recognized, and so far it failed. He understood that she was cunningly preparing to make easy for him their way of retreat, in case he lost his fight; preparing to convince him that was the way she most desired to go. He loved her the better; and was the more obstinately determined to force his own way. CHAPTER XVIII THE CHALLENGE Each day found Anthony less willing to leave the place he had chosen. He did not want to abandon the work commenced in the factory; he had attained an active personal interest in his progress there. He was well aware that he would soon know more about some possibilities of the mill than did Mr. Goodwin himself. His father never had concerned himself at all with such matters. Mr. Adriance was the converging-point of the many lines forming a widespread net of affairs in which this factory was but one strand. He did not even find time to notice Mr. Goodwin's advancing years and the desire for retirement the old man was too proud to voice. But the strand whose smallness was disdained by the greater Adriance might well prove able to support the lesser. An accident still further determined his wish to remain. One day Mr. Goodwin came down to the lower room; occupied the chair in Adriance's enclosure for a quarter-hour and watched the proceedings. These occasional visits had done much to establish firmly "Andy's" authority, yielding as they did the manager's sanction to the new order of things. But this time Mr. Goodwin had something to say to the young man whom he and Cook had grown to regard as a fortunate discovery of their own. "Andy," he began, using the nickname as Adriance himself had suggested on observing the positive reluctance with which the old gentleman handled familiarly the revered name of the factory's owner; "Andy, to-morrow there will be a meeting at the office of Mr. Adriance in New York City; I shall be present." He cleared his throat a trifle importantly. "I shall have pleasure in mentioning the excellent, the really excellent, work you have done here. I shall mention you personally." Anthony carefully put down the papers he held and stood still, trouble darkening across his face. He saw what was coming, and he saw no way to stop it. He did not want his father to learn of his presence here from an outsider, or at a public meeting. He wanted to tell Mr. Adriance his own story, with their kinship to help him. He wanted to explain Elsie to the man who was championing Mrs. Masterson; he wanted to tell him of the new Adriance to come. He hardly thought it possible that his father would deny him the simple opportunity he asked, or try to force the monstrous wrong of a separation between man and wife, if he understood. But if the bare fact that Tony was secretly in his employ were flung before him, Mr. Adriance was quite capable of regarding this as an added defiance and even mockery of himself. Mr. Goodwin's speech flowed placidly on: "Your abilities are really exceptional, exceptional; I am sure that they will be suitably appreciated. You are doing much better work than Ransome. I shall advise that I be allowed to create a new position for you at a new salary. I should like you to supervise the entire shipping department on this floor, not merely the trucking." "You are very good," Adriance murmured; "I am not quite ready perhaps for that. By the time the next meeting is held----" "I have said that you were competent," Mr. Goodwin reminded him with some stiffness. "I am accustomed to judge such matters, pray recollect. I am quite sure Mr. Adriance will feel pleasure that a connection of his, even a distant connection, should thus distinguish himself from the ordinary employee." "No! That is--I should wish----" Adriance caught himself stumbling, and colored before the astonished eyes of the other. "I mean to say, family influence cannot help me in that way. Can you place the matter before Mr. Adriance without using my name?" The older man chilled in severe amazement. Very slowly he took off his _pince-nez_ with fingers a trifle uncertain. "Certainly not," he said, rigidly. "Why should I do so remarkable a thing?" That challenge was not easily answered. The silence persisted unpleasantly. Through the breach it made trickled a thin stream of doubt, which rapidly grew to a full current of suspicion. Still Adriance could find nothing to reply, and the situation became more than embarrassing. Mr. Goodwin at last arose. "I regret that I made this proposition," he said. "Of course it was not in my calculations that you had anything to conceal, especially from Mr. Adriance. We will of course drop the matter for the present." "You mean that I may continue here as I am?" "I hope so. You will comprehend that it becomes my duty to set this matter before Mr. Adriance. It is not right that I should employ in his name a man who fears to have his presence here known to his employer. I will bid you good-morning." This condition was worse than the first. Recognizing himself as cornered, Adriance cast a hurried glance around him, found no one within ear-shot of his little enclosure, and took a step toward the man about to leave him. "Wait! Mr. Goodwin, I am Tony Adriance." The little old gentleman stared at him blankly. "My father does not know that I am here, no one knows except my wife. Will you not sit down again and listen to me?" Still Mr. Goodwin stared at him, dumb. Smiling in spite of his vexation and anxiety, the young man quietly fronted the scrutiny. He was quite aware that in his working clothes, his hands evidencing his winter of manual labor, his face dark with the tan of months of wind and sun, he hardly looked the part he claimed; that is, if Mr. Goodwin knew anything of the former Tony Adriance. But he kept the candid honesty of his eyes open to the other's reading, and waited. Perhaps if those rather unusual blue-black eyes he and his father had in common had confronted Mr. Goodwin in the brightness of daylight, he might before this have been identified. At any rate, they convinced now, even in the deceptive light. "There is a resemblance," murmured Mr. Goodwin. "To my father? Yes, I think so; I have been told so." "But--why----?" One of the usual interruptions called Adriance away before he could reply. The old gentleman sat dazed, watching him. When the vehicle had passed on, Adriance turned back to the other man. "I married without consulting my father, last autumn," he said quietly. "Will you dine with me to-night, Mr. Goodwin, at my own house up the hill, and let me explain to you what I am doing and why I am doing it? If you have any doubt of my identity, you may easily fix it by asking my father when you see him to-day whether his son is at home or not." Mr. Goodwin found his voice with some difficulty. "No, I would prefer to understand before I see Mr. Adriance. Come up to my private office now; Cook can manage here for an hour without you. I am astounded, even bewildered, Andy--Mr. Adriance----" "Try 'Tony'," suggested the other with his sudden smile. So while the indignant Cook struggled with double duties, Adriance and Mr. Goodwin sat opposite one another in the latter's private office, and held long converse. With the exception of the Masterson side of the affair, Adriance told the story without reserve. He hoped to win Mr. Goodwin's temporary silence, but he actually won more than he had imagined possible. Mr. Goodwin was excited and interested as he had not been for years. When Adriance concluded, the other was quite the most agitated of the two. "You will not tell my father to-day of my presence here, you will give me time to do so myself?" "I will do better," said Mr. Goodwin, much moved, "I will help you--I adopt you, as it were. Mr. Adriance----" "Tony." "Tony, I will train you to succeed me here. I wish much to retire, as I have told you. My wife and I--we have no children--have long planned to travel; we have even selected the places we would visit and the routes we would prefer to take. It has been, I might say, our dream for years; but Mr. Adriance would not listen to my desire to leave. He declares there is no one he could trust in my place." Pride colored the thin old face. "His esteem flatters me; but now I will give him a successor whom he can trust. It is very suitable that you should have this position. I will say nothing to him, as you wish; but do you enter my office here and study the management of this concern with me. I will myself take charge of that." Astonished in his turn, and deeply touched, Adriance took the offered hand. "Of course you know I can find no words of sufficient gratitude, Mr. Goodwin. If you will indeed be so good you shall not find me lacking so far as my abilities reach." "They have reached quite far already," said his senior, drily. What had appeared a calamity had become strange good fortune. Mr. Goodwin readily satisfied any doubt he might have felt of Tony's identity. Next morning when he would have gone to his usual place, a clerk stopped him and took him to Mr. Goodwin's private office, where a desk awaited him. "Of course it is all my name, or rather my father's," Adriance said to Elsie that night. "There are a score of cleverer men than I already there who will continue, I suppose, plodding on as they are. Cook is one of them. But I am not altruistic enough to throw away the luck I have been born into, I am afraid. I shall take all Goodwin will give me, and if my father refuses to keep me there, at least the training will make me more fitted to earn our living in some other place." "Man, you have not enough vanity to nourish you properly," Elsie gravely told him. Mr. Goodwin proved a harder taskmaster than Cook or Ransome. He entered upon the education of Tony Adriance with an enthusiastic zest tempered with a conscientious severity that made him exacting and meticulous in detail. Adriance was fond enough of the outdoors to miss the motor-truck at times--there were even hours when he thought wistfully of Russian Mike; but he learned rapidly under the forced cultivation. Now he saw how superficial had been the knowledge of the factory on which he had prided himself in the shipping room, and how absurdly inadequate to the management of the great place he would have been had his father put it in his hands. But under Mr. Goodwin he was becoming in actuality what he once had fancied himself to be. Incidentally the teacher and the student grew cordially attached to one another; and as this attachment was obvious, as the new man was known in every department where he was sent to gather experience as "Mr. Adriance," and as Mr. Goodwin called him "Tony," his identity was soon no secret in the factory. But the senior Adriance never came in personal contact with any member of the force except Mr. Goodwin, so this was a matter of indifference. Adriance continued to be entered on the books as a chauffeur, and received the corresponding salary. The genuine chauffeurs whose comrade Andy had been looked curiously after him and whispered among themselves when, he chanced to pass, although his greetings to them were the same as always. Cook dropped the use of "Andy," and said "sir" if the young man spoke to him suddenly. Mr. Goodwin advised his pupil to let such things pass without comment. Either Anthony's position would be assured and demand such deference, or he would leave the factory altogether; in either case protest would only be hypocritical or useless. The time when Anthony should go to his father with an account of the affair, was indefinitely postponed. The more accomplished first, the better. Secretly, both he and Goodwin had come to dread the possibility that Mr. Adriance would refuse to continue Anthony in his position, either through resentment or lack of faith in Tony's ability. Sometimes Anthony felt a sharp misgiving that perhaps the very preparation that fitted him for the place he so much desired, would deprive him of it. It was more than possible that Mr. Adriance would keenly resent what was being done without his knowledge. In a sense Anthony was fortifying himself in his father's own territory in order to resist the older man's will in regard to Mrs. Masterson. Anthony never learned to think without vicarious shame and pain of the treachery his father had planned against Elsie. He could not reconcile that idea with anything their years together had shown him of his father. But he worked on and thrust from his mind what he could not remedy. CHAPTER XIX THE ADRIANCES The weeks ran quietly on, bringing spring as the only visitor to the little red house. Masterson had been invited to come, but he never availed himself of the invitation. The Adriances did not speak of him, by tacit agreement feigning to forget the only painful evening they had spent since their marriage. The event that fell like an exploding shell into the tranquil household, shattering its accustomed life as truly as if by material destruction, came quite without warning. It chose one of the first evenings of April, when a delicate, pastel-tinted sunset was concluding the day as gracefully as the _envoi_ of a poem. Elsie was making ready for her husband, much as she once had described to him a wife's employment at this hour, and so all unconsciously had cleansed the temple of his heart, thrusting down the false idols to make a place for herself. The table stood arrayed, she herself was daintily fresh in attire and mood; the little house waited, expectant, for the man's return. The soft flattery of love lapped Adriance around whenever he crossed this threshold; life had taught him a new luxury in this bare school-room. Elsie was singing, as she went about her pleasant tasks with the deft surety and swiftness so pretty to watch; singing a lilting, inconsequent Creole _chanson_, velvet-smooth as the sprays of gray pussy-willow she presently began to arrange in a squat, earthen jar. She was happy with a deep, abiding, steadfast content, and a faith that admitted no fear. She was listening, through all her occupations. The crackle of Anthony's quick, eager step on the old gravel walk would have brought her at once to the door. But the sound of an automobile halting before the gate passed unnoticed; many cars travelled this road, day and night. So, as before, Masterson came unheralded into his friend's house. Only, this time he found the door open and entered without knocking. When his shadow darkened across the room, Elsie turned and saw her visitor. Rather, her visitors. Masterson carried in the curve of his arm a diminutive figure clad in white corduroy from tasselled cap to small leggings. The child's dimpled, ruddy-bright cheek was pressed against the man's worn and sallow young face, the shining baby-gaze looked out from beside the fever-dulled eyes of the other. A chubby arm tightly embraced Masterson's neck. "Holly!" Elsie cried, the willow-buds slipping through her fingers. "Why--how----? Oh, how he has grown! Holly, baby, don't you remember Elsie? He does, truly does--please let me have him!" Masterson willingly relinquished his charge, putting Holly into the eager arms held out, and stood watching the ensuing scene of pretty nonsense and affection. He did not speak or offer interruption. When Elsie finally looked toward him again, recovering recollection and curiosity, baby and woman were equally rose-hued and radiant. "But--how did it happen?" she wondered. "Did--was the agreement kept, after all? Is Holly to stay with you, now?" The man met her gaze with a strange blending of defiance and entreaty. Now she perceived his condition of terrible excitement and that his dumbness had not been the apathy she fancied. He was on the verge of a breakdown, perhaps irreparable to mental health. Her question was answered by her own quick perception before he spoke. "I have stolen him. No! I did _not_ steal him; I took my own. It was in the park--he was with a nurse, and she struck him. She didn't know me. I had stopped to get a sight of him. Well, that is all Lucille will ever give him: nurses! She never wanted him, or had time to trouble about him. She doesn't like children. He stumbled, fell down, and the woman slapped him--more than once." She looked at him with a sense of helpless inability either to aid or condemn. Every conscious fibre in her championed his cause, except her reason. How could this sick man hope to keep Holly against the world? "You----?" she temporized. "I've told you what I did; I took him away from her. 'Tell Mrs. Masterson that Holly has gone with his father,' I said. That was all. I carried him to my car and drove straight here. You will keep him for me? You and Tony? I have got to go; to get back and make my last fight." Elsie gently set down the baby. She saw what Masterson in his dazed and selfish absorption overlooked: that she and Anthony were to be drawn into a conflict surely evil for them. Mrs. Masterson must resent this, and call on the law to undo the kidnapping. She herself and Anthony would be dragged from their happy obscurity, their long honeymoon ended. More menacing still, Anthony's position in his father's factory would be discovered and exploited by the newspapers, with the probable result that Mr. Adriance would end that situation by dismissing the impromptu employee. But she never even thought of sending Masterson away. The baby hands that grasped her dress grasped deeper at her heart. Also, this man in need was Anthony's friend and one to whom he owed atonement for a wrong contemplated, if not committed. "Of course we will keep him," she promised, kindly and naturally. "But you must stay, too. You are not well and must rest for a while--it is absurd to speak of fighting when you can scarcely stand. Sit there, in that arm-chair. Presently Anthony will come home, then we will have supper and talk of all this." The serene good-sense calmed and cooled his fever. Sighing, he relaxed his tenseness of attitude. "I must go," he repeated, but without resolution. For answer she drew forward the chair. He sank into it and lay rather than sat among its cushions, passive before her firmness. Elsie moved about the matter at hand with her unfailing practicality. She took off Holly's wraps and improvised a high-chair by means of a dictionary and a pillow. To an accompaniment of gay chatter she made ready her small guest's evening meal, tied a napkin under the fat chin and superintended the business of supping. Hunger and sleep were contending before the bread and milk and soft-boiled egg were finished. Afterward, Elsie carried a very drowsy little boy into her room and made him a nest in her antique-shop four-posted bed. Masterson looked on, mutely attentive to every movement of the two as if some dramatic interest lay in the simple actions. When Elsie returned from the sleeping baby, he abruptly spoke: "You know, I only mean you to keep him for to-night, not always. I will come back for him. You know all I planned for him and myself. This has hurried me, but I have money enough. Earned money. Did I tell you Mr. Adriance, Tony's father, has offered me a considerable sum to stop 'making a mountebank' of myself at the restaurant? No? He has. I fancy her former husband's occupation grates on Lucille." He laughed, moving his head on the cushions of the high-backed chair. "Well, I refused." "Of course!" "You knew I would? Then you grant me more grace than she did." "She? You said Mr. Adriance offered----" He glanced keenly at her face, then turned his own face aside that it might not guide her groping thought. "I must go," he said, again. But he did not move, nor did Elsie. The pause was broken by Anthony's whistle, the signal which always advised his wife of his return. But to-night it was not the blithe hail of custom. The clear notes were shaken, curtly eloquent of some anger or distress. Acutely sensitive to every change or mood of his, Elsie caught both messages, the intentional and the one sent unaware. Dropping upon the table a box of matches she had taken up, she ran to the door. It opened before she reached it. Anthony, his face dark with repressed anger, his movements stiff with the constraint he forced upon them, appeared outlined against the soft, clear dusk of April twilight. He looked behind him, and, holding open the door of his house formally ushered in a guest. "My wife, sir," he briefly introduced to his father the girl who drew back, amazed, before their entrance. Mr. Adriance showed no less evidence of inward storm than his son. But he stopped and saluted his daughter-in-law with precise courtesy. "Mrs. Adriance," he acknowledged the presentation, his voice better controlled than the younger man's. "Light the lamp, Elsie," her husband requested, dragging off the clumsy chauffeur's gloves he had worn home. "It seems that we are under suspicion of child-stealing. My father has done us the honor of looking us up, to accuse me of conniving at the kidnapping of Mrs. Masterson's boy. I have not yet gathered exactly what interest I am supposed to have in the lady or her affairs, or whether I am presumed to be engaged in a bandit enterprise for ransom. But I understand that there is a detective outside, who probably wishes to search the house." Elsie made no move to obey the command. In the indeterminate light Masterson's presence had been unnoticed, shadowed as he was by the deep chair in which he sat. She was not afraid, or bewildered so far as to conceive keeping him concealed, but she was not yet ready to act. "My son is inexact, as usual," Mr. Adriance gave her space, aiding her unaware by his irritation. "Mr. Masterson is known to have crossed the Edgewater ferry with the child, and we know of no friends he would seek in this place except Tony and you. His brain is hardly strong enough, now, to plan any extended moves. Surely it needs no explanation that we wish to rescue a two-year-old child from the hands of a drug-crazed incompetent?" Elsie laid her hand over the match-box, wondering that the other two did not hear, as she did, the very audible breathing of the man in the arm-chair. "He is hardly that," she deprecated. "But, if you find him, what will you do?" "To him? Nothing. We want the child. If he persists in annoying the lady who was his wife, however, he must be put in a sanitarium." "Elsie, why do you not say that we know nothing of all this?" Anthony demanded, harsh in his strong impatience. "Why do you feed suspicion by arguing? I don't say that I would not shelter Holly Masterson, if he were here--in fact, I should! But I do say that he is not here, sir, and I expect my word to be taken. Elsie----" His wife put out her hand in a quieting gesture. "Now I will light the lamp," she stated, in her full, calm voice. Oddly checked, the two angry men stood watching her. The flame-touched wick burned slowly, at first, the light rising gradually to its full power; the circle of radiance crept out and up, warmed by the crimson shade through which it passed. It crept like a bright tide, shining on the figure of the woman who stood behind the table, rising over the noble swell of her bosom, submerging the curved hollow of her throat where a small ebony cross lay against a surface of ivory, flooding at last her face set in generous resolution and glinting in her gray, serenely fearless eyes. She looked, and was mistress of the place and situation; perhaps because of all those present she alone was not thinking of herself. "You see," she broke the pause, "there was much excuse. It is always wiser and kinder to listen to the excuse for actions; I think usually there is one. Mr. Masterson loves his little son very dearly, and that they have been separated is terrible to him. But he was patient, he did not interfere until to-day; he saw Holly struck and roughly treated by the nurse. He could not bear that, and just look on. No one could! So Mr. Masterson, obeying his first impulse, snatched up the baby, and he did bring him here. It was only a little while ago, Anthony; a very little while." Before either Adriance could speak, the third man lifted himself out of the shadows into the light. He was laughing slightly, all his reckless, too-feminine beauty somehow restored as he faced them. "Here is your drug-crazed incompetent, Mr. Adriance," he mocked. "Have you succeeded so well in training your own son that you want to undertake bringing up mine?" The insult changed the atmosphere to that of crude war. Elsie drew back, recognizing this field was not for her. Mr. Adriance considered his antagonist with a deliberation cold and very dangerous. "I think a comparison between my son and yourself is hardly one you can afford to challenge," he said bitingly. "Now, no," Masterson admitted. He laughed again. "But a year ago--who was the best citizen, then? Fred Masterson, with all his shortcomings, or Tony Adriance, dangling after Masterson's wife? Hold on, Tony! I'm not saying this for you; you quit the nasty game as soon as you saw where it was leading. I'm only explaining to your father, here, that the difference between you and me is chiefly--our wives. Of course we ought not to lean on our women; we ought to be strong and independent. But I was not born that way, and neither were you. Lucille wanted me down, and I am down; Mrs. Adriance wanted you up, and you're standing up. Be honest, and out with the truth to yourself, if you never speak it, Tony. As for your father, if our guardians had started us differently, it might not have been this way with us. I don't know, but that is the chance I am giving Holly. He shall not have to pick up his education on the road. I have brought him here, and here he stays with Mrs. Adriance until I take him away with me. She has given me her promise." "You forget that the court has given the child to its mother," Mr. Adriance reminded him, before Anthony could reply. "And let me tell you I have nothing except contempt for a man who foists off his responsibilities upon a woman's shoulders." "Neither have I," retorted Masterson. "Did you imagine I had any vanity left, or that my self-respect still breathed? You are dull, Mr. Adriance! But all that is aside from the case. Holly stays here, unless Anthony turns him out, and then he goes with me, not with his mother. Do you think I fail to understand why she wants him, and you want her to have him? It is because he is a social vindication; her possession of him brands me as the one found lacking in our partnership. Well, he is not to be so sacrificed." "May I ask how you intend to enforce this?" "You may, and I will tell you." He looked return in full measure of the older man's irony and determination. "I can enforce it because you care about the public at large, and I do not; because it would make a beautiful sob story: how Holly's reprobate father rescued him from neglect and ill-treatment, taking him away from a brutal nurse in the Park; and how Mr. Adriance, _the_ Mr. Adriance, pursued and recaptured the child. The newspapers would be interested in learning that Mr. Adriance had managed the whole Masterson divorce case; with his usual tact and success. They might wonder why he had done it. I have wondered, myself, you know. That is, I might have wondered, if I had not known how much you once approved of Mrs. Masterson as a possible daughter-in-law, before Tony disappointed you by marrying to please himself. You have the reputation of never admitting a defeat; and, after all, two divorces are as right as one! I beg your pardon, Mrs. Adriance." Elsie uttered a faint cry, abruptly confronted with the hideous thing Masterson had shown her husband on the night that had changed Anthony from her playfellow to her defender and fightingman. "Fred!" Anthony exclaimed indignant rebuke, springing to the girl's side. She caught his arm fiercely, as it clasped her. Suddenly she was one with the men in mood, burning with defiance and alert to make war for her own. And Anthony was her own, as she was his. Pressing close to her husband she held him. Arrayed together, the three who had youth stood against the man who had everything else. But Mr. Adriance had reddened through his fine, gray, slightly withered skin like any schoolboy. His dark eyes lightened and hardened to an unforgiving grimness of wrath that dwarfed the younger men's passion and made it puerile. "You will restrain yourself in speaking of the lady who had the misfortune to marry you," he signified, with a clipped precision of speech more menacing than any threat. "Since yesterday she has been my wife." Of all the possibilities, this most obvious one never had occurred to any of the three who heard the announcement. The effect held the group dumb. All thought had to be readjusted, all recent experience focussed to this new range of vision. In the long pause, Anthony's dog yawned with the ridiculous sigh and snap of happy puppyhood; ticking clock and singing kettle seemed to fill the room with a swell of commonplace, domestic sound derisive of all complicated life. After all, men were simple, and involved evil usually a chimera. Plots and counterplots resolved into a most natural happening; thrown into companionship with Lucille Masterson by Anthony's flight, Mr. Adriance had fallen in love. Probably at first he had aided her through sympathy, as Anthony himself had done. There was no mystery in the rest. The reckless challenge and false gayety died out of Masterson's face, leaving it dull and bleak as a stage when the play is over and the artificial light and color extinguished. Quite suddenly he looked haggard and appallingly ill. Circles darkened beneath his eyes as if dashed in by the blue crayon of an artist. He was conquered; with his fancied right to resentment and contempt he also lost all animation. The fire was quenched, apparently forever. "I apologize, of course," he said, his lifeless ease a poor effort at his former manner. "Certainly I would have been--well, less frank, if I had understood. Pray convey my congratulations to Mrs. Adriance. No doubt you will be happy, since you can buy everything she wants. But neither you nor she can care to keep Holly Masterson in your house. I want him. After all, I am his father, you know, and entitled to some direction of his future. No? Come, I'll bargain with you! Leave him here, and I will do what I refused to do for money: I will quit public dancing and drop out of sight." The unexpected offer allured. The wrath in the eyes of Mr. Adriance did not lessen, but speculation crept into his regard. His abhorrence of scandal urged him to grasp at this escape from having his wife's name constantly linked with the escapades of her first husband. There could be no question of Masterson's genius for spectacular trouble-making. Moreover, Holly would still be with the Adriances, so that dignity was assured. He did not believe that Masterson really intended to burden himself with the child. Lucille Masterson had formed his opinion of the other man; he credited him with no intention good or stable. "Of course I must consult Mrs. Adriance," he answered stiffly. "But I have no doubt that she will meet your wishes in the matter, since Tony is now the child's step-brother. That is, if my son and his wife are willing to undertake the charge you thrust upon them?" He turned toward the two, as he concluded. For the first time, the Adriance senior and junior, really looked at each other as man at man. For "Tony" no longer existed; in his place was someone the elder did not yet know. Indeed, he and Tony had been merely pleasant acquaintances; he and this new man were strangers. "Why, yes," Anthony replied to the indirect question. He had regained his composure as the others had lost theirs. His cool steadiness and poise contrasted strongly with the strained tension of his guests; he spoke for both himself and Elsie with the assured masterfulness she had nursed to life in him during these many months. "We will take charge of Holly until his father claims him, unless it is going to be too difficult for me to take care of my own family. As you may see, sir, we are not rich." "Is that my affair?" "It has not been. But it is going to be." "As a question of money----" Anthony checked the sentence with a gesture. Gently freeing himself from Elsie's clasp upon his arm, he drew from a pocket of his rough coat that notebook which had absorbed so many of his leisure hours. "Let us say a question of business," he suggested. "Six months ago I entered your employ as a chauffeur. You will find my record has no marks against it. I did not think at that time of drawing any advantage from the fact that the mill belonged to you; I worked exactly as I must have done for any stranger. I was not late or absent, I accomplished rather more each day than the average chauffeur in the place. Cook and Ransome can tell you whether I gave them satisfaction. I only speak of this, sir, because I should like you to understand that I was in earnest. It was not until months had passed at this work that I began to think of changing my position. One day Ransome fell sick. I asked for his place to try out a better system of checking the shipping that had occurred to me. I was given this at first tentatively, then permanently. In fact, the system worked so successfully that--Mr. Goodwin came to see me." He hesitated. "I wish you would ask Mr. Goodwin to tell you himself something of what has happened." "Very well." The laconic assent was somehow disconcerting. "I had to tell him who I was," Anthony resumed, with less certainty, "I had meant to find out what your attitude would be, before that happened, but I had no choice. He was good enough to take me into his office and offer to teach me the management of your factory. Now----" "Now, since it is a matter of business," said Mr. Adriance, dryly, "what do you want?" "I want a stranger's chance, and your pull," was the prompt return; Anthony's smile flashed across seriousness. "That is, I want your influence to give me Mr. Goodwin's position as manager, and after that I am willing to stand on the basis of my business value to you. Goodwin is old and anxious to retire. If I hold his place for a year and fail to earn his salary, then discharge me and I'll not complain. I know this end of your business as you do not, sir. You are brilliant, a genius of big affairs; I have discovered in myself a capacity for meticulous attention to detail. Will you take this little book home with you? It contains a collection of notes and figures for which you would gladly pay an outsider. Mr. Goodwin and I have found the plant is enormously wasteful; every department contributes its quota of mismanagement, except the office under his own eye. I want a chance to do this work, to buy a house I like up on the hill, here, and put my delicate Southern wife in a setting suitable for her. Will you let me earn all this?" "I am not aware that it has been my custom to interfere with you," retorted Mr. Adriance. He eyed his son with icy disfavor. "Between you and Mr. Masterson it appears to be established that I am the typical oppressor of fiction and melodrama. Kindly look at the other side of the shield. Last autumn you chose to marry and leave my house. You did both, without paying me the trifling courtesy of announcing your intentions. I knew of no quarrel between us. The rudeness appeared to me quite without warrant. Nevertheless, I tied all the loose ends you had left behind. I kept your marriage from furnishing a sensation to the journals. The lady who is now my wife helped me in convincing our friends that your wedding was in no way unusual or unexpected, if a little sudden, and that you had met the young lady from Louisiana at her house. In short, I smothered curiosity, a task with which you had not concerned yourself. You choose to enter this place as a truck driver. You did not ask if that were pleasant to me. It was not, but I made no objection. Oh, yes; of course I have known what you were doing! Why should I not know? Now, you meet me with the air of a man hampered and pursued. Why?" "I was wrong," admitted Anthony, simply. He had flushed hotly before the rebuke, but his eyes met his father's frankly and with a relief that gladly found himself at fault rather than the other. "I did not understand. I am sorry." They shook hands. A constraint between them was not to be avoided. The marriage of the older man had thrust them apart. Unforgiveable things had been said of Lucille Adriance; things that had the biting permanence of truth. "I will arrange for Goodwin's retirement," Mr. Adriance remarked. "You will take his place, and this winter's work may pass as your whim to study the business from the bottom. I spent an hour discussing your affairs with him, on my way here, to-night. I had called on him to ascertain your exact address. He has agreed to remain as your adviser and assistant for a month or two, until you have quite found yourself. And of course I will be at your service. That is enough for this evening; I have already stayed here too long. Come to my office to-morrow." When he turned toward the door, Elsie was awaiting him. A moment before she had slipped away from the two men. "This is the first time you have been in Anthony's house," she said, her soft speech very winning. "You aren't going without taking our hospitality?" She held a little round tray on which stood a cup and plate. The action was gracious and graceful, quaintly alien as her own legends. Mr. Adriance gazed at her, then bowed ceremoniously, lifted the coffee and drank. "I think I had forgotten to congratulate Tony," he regretted. "Allow me to do so, most warmly." Anthony closed the door behind his guest; presently the sound of a starting motor ruffled the calm hush of the spring evening. "I want my supper," Anthony announced, practically. "I shall not have any more of your cooking, Elsie. What are you going to do with your idle time--learn to play bridge?" She ran into his arms. CHAPTER XX THE CORNERSTONE When they looked for Fred Masterson, he was not there. Elsie remembered, then, that he had gone into Holly's room while Anthony and his father were intent on each other. On the bed where the baby was asleep they found an envelope upon which was scrawled a message. "I'm off for the present," Anthony read. "I'll drop in to-morrow or next day, when Holly is awake. Thank Mrs. Adriance for me. I'm going to be old-fashioned, Tony--God bless you both." "He never will come, I know it!" Elsie exclaimed, her heavy lashes wet. "Can't we do something? Can't we go after him?" "I will go after him," her husband agreed. "But not to-night." He crumpled the envelope and flung it aside. "Fred Masterson is not going under without a fight. If doctors, sanitariums, his love for Holly and our help can set him on his feet again, he shall be cured and do all he dreams of doing. To-morrow I will find him." "Not to-night?" "Not to-night. Elsie, don't you understand? He loved his wife. If I lost you so--if you married someone else----" She put her small fingers across his lips, stilling the sacrilege. "No! Do not let our little house even hear you say it!" "Nor any house of ours! To-morrow I will buy the house we looked at together, and you shall have an orgy of shopping to furnish it. Oh, yes, you shall, and I'll help you. Have lots of dark red things and brown leather in that front room where you told me about Alenya of the Sea. And--do nurseries have to be pink?" "Of course not, foolish one. We might make ours sunshine-color, like the satiny inside of a buttercup or a drop of honey in a daffodil. Anthony----" "Yes?" The rain-gray eyes laughed up at him, demure and daring. "Please, I want a cloak all gorgeous without and furry within; a shimmery, glittery, useless brocaded cloak like those in the cloak-room of that restaurant. I--I just want it!" "How do you know?" he wondered at her. "How do you always know the gracious way to delight me most? What a time we are going to have, girl! I'm going to drag Cook out of his rut and start him up the ladder, for one thing. If he hadn't given me a chance, and then brought Mr. Goodwin down to see how I handled it, who can tell how much I might have missed? I shall bring him here for you to see, before we move, too. You won't mind?" "Try it and see." "And we will spend my first vacation in Louisiana! Can't we take a trunkful of junk to each girl--including your mother? Let's bribe a publisher to bring out the poetic drama, if it's ever finished. Ah, be ready to come to Tiffany's next week. I'm going to buy you a ruby as big as the diamond advertisements on the backs of the magazines." "Anthony!" "Two of them!" "Dear," she hesitated, "are we going to have so much money? I do not quite see----" Her husband looked at her, and laughed. "You haven't learned to understand your father-in-law. I have not mastered that study, myself, but I know some branches. He is not a half-way man. He will expect Tony and Mrs. Tony to proceed precisely as Tony used to do. And we will offend and disgust him with our small-mindedness if we do not take this for granted. When I remember the things I allowed Fred to make me believe of him! Elsie, I always could have earned our living somehow; I think the best news to-night was that my father is as fine as I grew up to believe him. By George, I never told him----" "What, dear?" "Don't you know?" * * * * * They had almost finished their delayed supper, an hour later, when Adriance set down his cup with an exclamation and stared across the table at his wife. "I have just thought of something! Now I understand what Lucille Masterson wanted of me, that day, in the tea-room. She made me give my word never to tell anyone that she had been willing to marry me. I was angry enough that she should suppose such a promise necessary. But now I can see the reason: she feared I might tell my father enough of that affair to prevent his falling in love with her. You do not know him, Elsie. If he had suspected her attachment to him was greed, and that she had been willing to marry either Adriance for the Adriance possessions, he would have suffered nothing to bring them together, nothing whatever. I suppose she told him she never thought of me except as a pleasant young fool. Think of us!" He pushed back his chair and took an angry turn across the room. "Fred, and I, and my father--all puppets for her to move about!" [Illustration: THE WINTER WAS HARD AND LONG, BUT NEVER DULL TO THEM] "Holly has Mrs. Masterson, and I have you," Elsie demurred, her mouth curling into a smile as her glance followed him. "And I do not believe she has your father, Anthony; I think he has her. You know--excuse me, dear--both you and Fred Masterson were too young and inexperienced. And your father heard, in spite of himself, Mr. Masterson's story, this evening. I'm going to borrow a sentence from Mike: 'She's got her a boss.' Let the mills grind; we know what grain we put in! Anthony, did you notice that I gave your father coffee in the Vesuvius cup? If he noticed its five-cent atrocity, he will ostracize me; and you know who bought it." "It is a good cup!" He dropped into his chair again and leaned across the table to catch her hands in his. "Elsie, we will never sell this house, or change anything in it, will we? We can come back to it, often, for just a day. It was the beginning place, however far we go." "Yes. Oh, yes! Anthony, our hearthstone is our cornerstone; on it we're going to build, build splendidly, eternally----" Her voice faltered before the vision. Silent, the two looked into each other's eyes, seeing a happiness strongly secured, closing them around like folded wings. FINIS * * * * * J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY'S New and Forthcoming Books Peg Along By GEORGE L. WALTON, M.D. 12mo. Cloth, $1.00 net. Dr. Walton's slogan, "Why Worry," swept the country. His little book of that title did an infinite amount of good. "Peg Along" is the 1915 slogan. Hundreds of thousands of fussers, fretters, semi- and would-be invalids, and all other halters by the wayside should be reached by Dr. Walton's stirring encouragement to "peg along." 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13532	----	KINDRED OF THE DUST by PETER B. KYNE Author of _Cappy Ricks_, _The Valley of the Giants_, _Webster--Man's Man_, etc. Illustrated by Dean Cornwell 1920 TO IRENE MY DEAR, TYRANNICAL, PRACTICAL LITTLE FOSTER-SISTER WITHOUT WHOSE AID AND COMFORT, HOOTS, CHEERS AND UNAUTHORIZED STRIKES, THE QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF MY ALLEGED LITERARY OUTPUT WOULD BE APPRECIABLY DIMINISHED, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED THE ILLUSTRATIONS Hector McKaye was bred of an acquisitive race She stole to the old square piano and sang for him Donald bowed his head, "I can't give her up, father" "I'm a man without a home and you've just _got_ to take me in, Nan" I In the living-room of The Dreamerie, his home on Tyee Head, Hector McKaye, owner of the Tyee Lumber Company and familiarly known as "The Laird," was wont to sit in his hours of leisure, smoking and building castles in Spain--for his son Donald. Here he planned the acquisition of more timber and the installation of an electric-light plant to furnish light, heat, and power to his own town of Port Agnew; ever and anon he would gaze through the plate-glass windows out to sea and watch for his ships to come home. Whenever The Laird put his dreams behind him, he always looked seaward. In the course of time, his home-bound skippers, sighting the white house on the headland and knowing that The Laird was apt to be up there watching, formed the habit of doing something that pleased their owner mightily. When the northwest trades held steady and true, and while the tide was still at the flood, they would scorn the services of the tug that went out to meet them and come ramping into the bight, all their white sails set and the glory of the sun upon them; as they swept past, far below The Laird, they would dip his house-flag--a burgee, scarlet-edged, with a fir tree embroidered in green on a field of white--the symbol to the world that here was a McKaye ship. And when the house-flag fluttered half-way to the deck and climbed again to the masthead, the soul of Hector McKaye would thrill. "Guid lads! My bonny brave lads!" he would murmur aloud, with just a touch of his parents' accent, and press a button which discharged an ancient brass cannon mounted at the edge of the cliff. Whenever he saw one of his ships in the offing--and he could identify his ships as far as he could see them--he ordered the gardener to load this cannon. Presently the masters began to dip the house-flag when outward bound, and discovered that, whether The Laird sat at his desk in the mill office or watched from the cliff, they drew an answering salute. This was their hail and farewell. One morning, the barkentine Hathor, towing out for Delagoa Bay, dipped her house-flag, and the watch at their stations bent their gaze upon the house on the cliff. Long they waited but no answering salute greeted the acknowledgment of their affectionate and willing service. The mate's glance met the master's. "The old laird must be unwell, sir," he opined. But the master shook his head. "He was to have had dinner aboard with us last night, but early in the afternoon he sent over word that he'd like to be excused. He's sick at heart, poor man! Daney tells me he's heard the town gossip about young Donald." "The lad's a gentleman, sir," the mate defended. "He'll not disgrace his people." "He's young--and youth must be served. Man, I was young myself once--and Nan of the Sawdust Pile is not a woman a young man would look at once and go his way." * * * * * In the southwestern corner of the state of Washington, nestled in the Bight of Tyee and straddling the Skookum River, lies the little sawmill town of Port Agnew. It is a community somewhat difficult to locate, for the Bight of Tyee is not of sufficient importance as a harbor to have won consideration by the cartographers of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and Port Agnew is not quite forty years old. Consequently, it appears only on the very latest state maps and in the smallest possible type. When Hector McKaye first gazed upon the bight, the transcontinental lines had not yet begun to consider the thrusting of their tentacles into southwestern Washington, and, with the exception of those regions where good harbors had partially solved the problem of transportation, timber in Washington was very cheap. Consequently, since Hector McKaye was one of those hardy men who never hesitate to take that which no man denies them, he reached forth and acquired timber. A strip of land a quarter of a mile wide and fronting the beach was barren of commercial timber. As grazing-land, Hector McKaye was enabled to file on a full section of this, and, with its acquisition, he owned the key to the outlet. While "proving up" his claim, he operated a general store for trading with the Indians and trappers, and at this he prospered. From time to time he purchased timber-claims from the trappers as fast as they "proved up," paying for these stumpage-prices varying from twenty-five to fifty cents per thousand. On his frequent trips to the outer world, McKaye extolled the opportunities for acquiring good timber-claims down on the Skookum; he advertised them in letters and in discreet interviews with the editors of little newspapers in the sawmill towns on Puget Sound and Grays Harhor; he let it be known that an honest fellow could secure credit for a winter's provisions from him, and pay for it with pelts in the spring. The influx of homesteaders increased--single men, for the most part, and poor--men who labored six months of the year elsewhere and lived the remaining six months in rude log huts on their claims down on the Skookum. And when the requirements of the homestead laws had been complied with and a patent to their quarter-section obtained from the Land Office in Washington, the homesteaders were ready to sell and move on to other and greener pastures. So they sold to the only possible purchaser, Hector McKaye, and departed, quite satisfied with a profit which they flattered themselves had been the result of their own prudence and foresight. Thus, in the course of ten years, Hector McKaye' acquired ten thousand acres of splendid Douglas fir and white cedar. But he had not been successful in acquiring claims along the south bank of the Skookum. For some mysterious reason, he soon found claims on the north bank cheaper and easier to secure, albeit the timber showed no variance in quantity or quality. Discreet investigations brought to light the fact that he had a competitor--one Martin Darrow, who dwelt in St. Paul, Minnesota. To St. Paul, therefore, journeyed Hector McKaye, and sought an audience with Martin Darrow. "I'm McKaye, from the Skookum River, Washington," he announced, without preamble. "I've been expecting you, Mr. McKaye," Darrow replied. "Got a proposition to submit?" "Naturally, or I wouldn't have come to St. Paul. I notice you have a weakness for the timber on the south bank of the Skookum. You've opposed me there half a dozen times and won. I have also observed that I have a free hand with claims north of the river. That's fair--and there's timber enough for two. Hereafter, I'll keep to my own side of the river." "I see we're going to come to an understanding, Mr. McKaye. What will you give me to stick to my side of the river?" "An outlet through the bight for your product when you commence manufacturing. I control the lower half-mile of the river and the only available mill-sites. I'll give you a mill-site if you'll pay half the expense of digging a new channel for the Skookum, and changing its course so it will emerge into the still, deep water under the lee of Tyee Head." "We'll do business," said Martin Darrow--and they did, although it was many years after Hector McKaye had incorporated the Tyee Lumber Company and founded his town of Port Agnew before Darrow began operations. True to his promise, McKaye deeded him a mill-and town-site, and he founded a settlement on the eastern edge of Port Agnew, but quite distinct from it, and called it Darrow, after himself. It was not a community that Hector McKaye approved of, for it was squalid and unsanitary, and its untidy, unpainted shacks of rough lumber harbored southern European labor, of which Hector McKaye would have none. In Darrow, also, there were three groggeries and a gambling-house, with the usual concomitant of women whose profession is the oldest and the saddest in the world. Following his discovery of the Bight of Tyee, a quarter of a century passed. A man may prosper much in twenty-five years, and Hector McKaye, albeit American born, was bred of an acquisitive race. When his Gethsemane came upon him, he was rated the richest lumberman in the state of Washington; his twenty-thousand board-feet capacity per day sawmill had grown to five hundred thousand, his ten thousand acres to a hundred thousand. Two thousand persons looked to him and his enterprise for their bread and butter; he owned a fleet of half a dozen steam-schooners and sixteen big wind-jammers; he owned a town which he had called Port Agnew, and he had married and been blessed with children. And because his ambition no longer demanded it, he was no longer a miser. [Illustration: HECTOR MCKAYE WAS BRED OF AN ACQUISITIVE RACE.] In a word, he was a happy man, and in affectionate pride and as a tribute to his might, his name and an occasional forget-me-not of speech which clung to his tongue, heritage of his Scotch forebears, his people called him "The Laird of Tyee." Singularly enough, his character fitted this cognomen rather well. Reserved, proud, independent, and sensitive, thinking straight and talking straight, a man of brusque yet tender sentiment which was wont to manifest itself unexpectedly, it had been said of him that in a company of a hundred of his mental, physical, and financial peers, he would have stood forth preeminently and distinctively, like a lone tree on a hill. Although The Laird loved his town of Port Agnew, because he had created it, he had not, nevertheless, resided in it for some years prior to the period at which this chronicle begins. At the very apex of the headland that shelters the Bight of Tyee, in a cuplike depression several acres in extent, on the northern side and ideally situated two hundred feet below the crest, thus permitting the howling southeasters to blow over it, Hector McKaye, in the fulness of time, had built for himself a not very large two-story house of white stone native to the locality. This house, in the center of beautiful and well-kept grounds, was designed in the shape of a letter T, with the combination living-room and library forming the entire leg of the T and enclosed on all three sides by heavy plate-glass French windows. Thus, The Laird was enabled to command a view of the bight, with Port Agnew nestled far below; of the silver strip that is the Skookum River flowing down to the sea through the logged-over lands, now checker-boarded into little green farms; of the rolling back country with its dark-green mantle of fir and white cedar, fading in the distance to dark blue and black; of the yellow sandstone bluffs of the coast-line to the north, and the turquoise of the Pacific out to the horizon. This room Hector McKaye enjoyed best of all things in life, with the exception of his family; of his family, his son Donald was nearest and dearest to him. This boy he loved with a fierce and hungry love, intensified, doubtless, because to the young Laird of Tyee, McKaye was still the greatest hero in the world. To his wife, The Laird was no longer a hero, although in the old days of the upward climb, when he had fiercely claimed her and supported her by the sweat of his brow, he had been something akin to a god. As for Elizabeth and Jane, his daughters, it must be recorded that both these young women had long since ceased to regard their father as anything except an unfailing source of revenue--an old dear who clung to Port Agnew, homely speech, and homely ways, hooting good-naturedly at the pretensions of their set, and, with characteristic Gaelic stubbornness, insisting upon living and enjoying the kind of life that appealed to him with peculiar force as the only kind worth living. Indeed, in more than one humble home in Port Agnew, it had been said that the two McKaye girls were secretly ashamed of their father. This because frequently, in a light and debonair manner, Elizabeth and Jane apologized for their father and exhibited toward him an indulgent attitude, as is frequently the case with overeducated and supercultured young ladies who cannot recall a time when their slightest wish has not been gratified and cannot forget that the good fairy who gratified it once worked hard with his hands, spoke the language and acquired the habits of his comrades in the battle for existence. Of course, Elizabeth and Jane would have resented this analysis of their mental attitude toward their father. Be that as it may, however, the fact remained that both girls were perfunctory in their expressions of affection for their father, but wildly extravagant in them where their mother was concerned. Hector McKaye liked it so. He was a man who never thought about himself, and he had discovered that if he gave his wife and daughters everything they desired, he was not apt to be nagged. Only on one occasion had Hector McKaye declared himself master in his own house, and, at the risk of appearing paradoxical, this was before the house had been built. One day, while they still occupied their first home (in Port Agnew), a house with a mansard roof, two towers, jig-saw and scroll-work galore, and the usual cast-iron mastiffs and deer on the front lawn, The Laird had come gleefully home from a trip to Seattle and proudly exhibited the plans for a new house. Ensued examination and discussion by his wife and the young ladies. Alas! The Laird's dream of a home did not correspond with that of his wife, although, as a matter of fact, the lady had no ideas on the subject beyond an insistence that the house should be "worthy of their station," and erected in a fashionable suburb of Seattle. Elizabeth and Jane aided and abetted her in clamoring for a Seattle home, although both were quick to note the advantages of a picturesque country home on the cliffs above the bight. They urged their father to build his house, but condemned his plans. They desired a house some three times larger than the blue-prints called for. Hector McKaye said nothing. The women chattered and argued among themselves until, Elizabeth and Jane having vanquished their mother, all three moved briskly to the attack upon The Laird. When they had talked themselves out and awaited a reply, he gave it with the simple directness of his nature. It was evident that he had given his answer thought. "I can never live in Seattle until I retire, and I cannot retire until Donald takes my place in the business. That means that Donald must live here. Consequently, I shall spend half of my time with you and the girls in Seattle, mother, and the other half with Donald here. When we built our first home, you had your way--and I've lived in this architectural horror ever since. This time, I'm going to have my own way--and you've lived with me long enough to know that when I declare for a will of my own, I'll not be denied. Well I realize you and the girls have outgrown Port Agnew. There's naught here to interest you, and I would not have woman o' mine unhappy. So plan your house in Seattle, and I'll build it and spare no expense. As for this house on the headland, you have no interest in it. Donald's approved the plans, and him only will I defer to. 'Twill be his house some day--his and his wife's, when he gets one. And there will be no more talk of it, my dears. I'll not take it kindly of ye to interfere." II At a period in his upward climb to fortune, when as yet Hector McKaye had not fulfilled his dream of a factory for the manufacture of his waste and short-length stock into sash, door, blinds, moldings, and so forth, he had been wont to use about fifty per cent. of this material for fuel to maintain steam in the mill boilers, while the remainder passed out over the waste-conveyor to the slab pile, where it was burned. The sawdust, however, remained to be disposed of, and since it was not possible to burn this in the slab fire for the reason that the wet sawdust blanketed the flames and resulted in a profusion of smoke that blew back upon the mill to the annoyance of the employees, for many years The Laird had caused this accumulated sawdust to be hauled to the edge of the bight on the north side of the town, and there dumped in a low, marshy spot which formerly had bred millions of mosquitoes. Subsequently, in the process of grading the streets of Port Agnew and excavating cellars, waste dirt had been dumped with the sawdust, and, occasionally, when high winter tides swept over the spot, sand, small stones, sea-shells, and kelp were added to the mixture. And as if this were not sufficient, the citizens of Port Agnew contributed from time to time old barrels and bottles, yard-sweepings, tin cans, and superannuated stoves and kitchen utensils. Slowly this dump crept out on the beach, and in order to prevent the continuous attrition of the surf upon the outer edge of it from befouling the white-sand bathing-beach farther up the Bight of Tyee, The Laird had driven a double row of fir piling parallel with and beyond the line of breakers. This piling, driven as close together as possible and reenforced with two-inch planking between, formed a bulkhead with the flanks curving in to the beach, thus insuring practically a water-tight pen some two acres in extent; and, with the passage of years, this became about two-thirds filled with the waste from the town. Had The Laird ever decided to lay claim to the Sawdust Pile, there would have been none in Port Agnew to contest his title; since he did not claim it, the Sawdust Pile became a sort of No Man's Land. After The Laird erected his factory and began to salvage his waste, the slab fire went out forever for lack of fuel, and the modicum of waste from the mill and factory, together with the sawdust, was utilized for fuel in an electric-light plant that furnished light, heat, and power to the town. Consequently, sawdust no longer mercifully covered the trash on the Sawdust Pile as fast as this trash arrived, and, one day, Hector McKaye, observing this, decided that it was an unsightly spot and not quite worthy of his town of Port Agnew. So he constructed a barge somewhat upon the principle of a patent dump-wagon, moored it to the river-bank, created a garbage monopoly in Port Agnew, and sold it for five thousand dollars to a pair of ambitious Italians. With the proceeds of this garbage deal, The Laird built a very pretty little public library. Having organized his new garbage system (the garbage was to be towed twenty miles to sea and there dumped), The Laird forbade further dumping on the Sawdust Pile. When the necessity for more dredger-work developed, in order to keep the deep channel of the Skookum from filling, he had the pipes from the dredger run out to the Sawdust Pile and covered the unsightly spot with six feet of rich river-silt up to the level of the piling. "And now," said Hector McKaye to Andrew Daney, his general manager, "when that settles, we'll run a light track out here and use the Sawdust Pile for a drying-yard." The silt settled and dried, and almost immediately thereafter a squatter took possession of the Sawdust Pile. Across the neck of the little promontory, and in line with extreme high-water mark on each side, he erected a driftwood fence; he had a canvas, driftwood, and corrugated-iron shanty well under way when Hector McKaye appeared on the scene and bade him a pleasant good-morning. The squatter turned from his labor and bent upon his visitor an appraising glance. His scrutiny appearing to satisfy him as to the identity of the latter, he straightened suddenly and touched his forelock in a queer little salute that left one in doubt whether he was a former member of the United States navy or the British mercantile marine. He was a threadbare little man, possibly sixty years old, with a russet, kindly countenance and mild blue eyes; apart from his salute, there was about him an intangible hint of the sea. He was being assisted in his labors by a ragamuffin girl of perhaps thirteen years. "Thinking of settling in Port Agnew?" The Laird inquired. "Why, yes, sir. I thought this might make a good safe anchorage for Nan and me. My name is Caleb Brent. You're Mr. McKaye, aren't you?" The Laird nodded. "I had an idea, when I filled this spot in and built that bulkhead, Mr. Brent, that some day this would make a safe anchorage for some of my lumber. I planned a drying-yard here. What's that you're building, Brent? A hen-house?" Caleb Brent flushed. "Why, no, sir. I'm making shift to build a home here for Nan and me." "Is this little one Nan?" The ragamuffin girl, her head slightly to one side, had been regarding Hector McKaye with alert curiosity mingled with furtive apprehension. As he glanced at her now, she remembered her manners and dropped him a courtesy--an electric, half-defiant jerk that reminded The Laird of a similar greeting customarily extended by squinch-owls. Nan was not particularly clean, and her one-piece dress, of heavy blue navy-uniform cloth was old and worn and spotted. Over this dress she wore a boy's coarse red-worsted sweater with white-pearl buttons. The skin of her thin neck was fine and creamy; the calves, of her bare brown legs were shapely, her feet small, her ankles dainty. With the quick eye of the student of character, this man, proud of his own ancient lineage for all his humble beginning, noted that her hands, though brown and uncared-for, were small and dimpled, with long, delicate fingers. She had sea-blue eyes like Caleb Brent's, and, like his, they were sad and wistful; a frowsy wilderness of golden hair, very fine and held in confinement at the nape of her neck by the simple expedient of a piece of twine, showed all too plainly the lack of a mother's care. The Laird returned Nan's courtesy with a patronizing inclination of his head. "Your granddaughter, I presume?" he addressed Caleb Brent. "No; my daughter, sir. I was forty when I married, and Nan came ten years later. She's thirteen now, and her mother's been dead ten years." Hector McKaye had an idea that the departed mother was probably just as well, if not better, off, free of the battle for existence which appeared to confront this futile old man and his elf of a daughter. He glanced at the embryo shack under construction and, comparing it with his own beautiful home on Tyee Head, he turned toward the bight. A short distance off the bulkhead, he observed a staunch forty-foot motor-cruiser at anchor. She would have been the better for a coat of paint; undeniably she was of a piece with Caleb Brent and Nan, for, like them, The Laird had never seen her before. "Yours?" he queried. "Yes, sir." "You arrived in her, then?" "I did, sir. Nan and I came down from Bremerton in her, sir." The Laird owned many ships, and he noted the slurring of the "sir" as only an old sailor can slur it. And there was a naval base at Bremerton. "You're an old sailor, aren't you, Brent?" he pursued. "Yes, sir. I was retired a chief petty officer, sir. Thirty years' continuous service, sir--and I was in the mercantile marine at sixteen. I've served my time as a shipwright. Am--am I intruding here, sir?" The Laird smiled, and followed the smile with a brief chuckle. "Well--yes and no. I haven't any title to this land you've elected to occupy, although I created it. You see, I'm sort of lord of creation around here. My people call me 'The Laird of Tyee,' and nobody but a stranger would have had the courage to squat on the Sawdust Pile without consulting me. What's your idea about it, Brent?" "I'll go if you want me to, sir." "I mean what's your idea if you stay? What do you expect to do for a living?" "You will observe, sir, that I have fenced off only that portion of the dump beyond high-water mark. That takes in about half of it--about an acre and a half. Well, I thought I'd keep some chickens and raise some garden truck. This silt will grow anything. And I have my launch, and can do some towing, maybe, or take fishing parties out. I might supply the town with fish. I understand you import your fish from Seattle--and with the sea right here at your door." "I see. And you have your three-quarters pay as a retired chief petty officer?" "Yes, sir." "Anything in bank? I do not ask these personal questions, Brent, out of mere idle curiosity. This is my town, you know, and there is no poverty in it. I'm rather proud of that, so I--" "I understand, sir. That's why I came to Port Agnew. I saw your son yesterday, and he said I could stay." "Oh! Well, that's all right, then. If Donald told you to stay, stay you shall. Did he give you the Sawdust Pile?" "Yes, sir; he did!" "Well, I had other plans for it, Brent; but since you're here, I'll offer no objection." Nan now piped up. "We haven't any money in bank, Mr. Laird, but we have some saved up." "Indeed! That's encouraging. Where do you keep it?" "In the brown teapot in the galley. We've got a hundred and ten dollars." "Well, my little lady, I think you might do well to take your hundred and ten dollars out of the brown teapot in the galley and deposit it in the Port Agnew bank. Suppose that motor-cruiser should spring a leak and sink?" Nan smiled and shook her golden head in negation. They had beaten round Cape Flattery in that boat, and she had confidence in it. "Would you know my boy if you should see him again, Nan?" The Laird demanded suddenly. "Oh, yes, indeed, sir! He's such a nice boy." "I think, Nan, that if you asked him, he might help your father build this house." "I'll see him this afternoon when he comes out of high school," Nan declared. "You might call on Andrew Daney, my general manager," The Laird continued, turning to Caleb Brent, "and make a dicker with him for hauling our garbage-scow out to sea and dumping it. I observe that your motor-boat is fitted with towing-bitts. We dump twice a week. And you may have a monopoly on fresh fish if you desire it. We have no fishermen here, because I do not care for Greeks and Sicilians in Port Agnew. And they're about the only fishermen on this coast." "Thank you, Mr. McKaye." "Mind you don't abuse your monopoly. If you do, I'll take it away from you." "You are very kind, sir. And I can have the Sawdust Pile, sir?" "Yes; since Donald gave it to you. However, I wish you'd tear down that patchwork fence and replace it with a decent job the instant you can afford it." "Ah, just wait," old Brent promised. "I know how to make things neat and pretty and keep them shipshape. You just keep your eye on the Sawdust Pile, sir." The old wind-bitten face flushed with pride; the faded sea-blue eyes shone with joyous anticipation. "I've observed your pride in your town, sir, and before I get through, I'll have a prettier place than the best of them." A few days later, The Laird looked across the Bight of Tyee from his home on Tyee Head, and through his marine glasses studied the Sawdust Pile. He chuckled as he observed that the ramshackle shanty had disappeared almost as soon as it had been started and in its place a small cottage was being erected. There was a pile of lumber in the yard--bright lumber, fresh from the saws--and old Caleb Brent and the motherless Nan were being assisted by two carpenters on the Tyee Lumber Company's pay-roll. When Donald came home from school that night, The Laird asked him about the inhabitants of the Sawdust Pile with relation to the lumber and the two carpenters. "Oh, I made a trade with Mr. Brent and Nan. I'm to furnish the lumber and furniture for the house, and those two carpenters weren't very busy, so Mr. Daney told me I could have them to help out. In return, Mr. Brent is going to build me a sloop and teach me how to sail it." The Laird nodded. "When his little home is completed, Donald," he suggested presently, "you might take old Brent and his girl over to our old house in town and let them have what furniture they require. See if you cannot manage to saw off some of your mother's antiques on them," added whimsically. "By the way, what kind of shanty is old Brent going to build?" "A square house with five rooms and a cupola fitted up like a pilot-house. There's to be a flagpole on the cupola, and Nan says they'll have colors every night and morning. That means that you hoist the flag in the morning and salute it, and when you haul it down at night, you salute it again. They do that up at the Bremerton navy-yard." "That's rather a nice, sentimental idea," Hector McKaye replied. "I rather like old Brent and his girl for that. We Americans are too prone to take our flag and what it stands for rather lightly." "Nan wants me to have colors up here, too," Donald continued. "Then she can see our flag, and we can see theirs across the bight." "All right," The Laird answered heartily, for he was always profoundly interested in anything that interested his boy. "I'll have the woods boss get out a nice young cedar with, say, a twelve-inch butt, and we'll make it into a flagpole." "If we're going to do the job navy-fashion, we ought to fire a sunrise and sunset gun," Donald suggested with all the enthusiasm of his sixteen years. "Well, I think we can afford that, too, Donald." Thus it came about that the little brass cannon was installed on its concrete base on the cliff. And when the flagpole had been erected, old Caleb Brent came up one day, built a little mound of smooth, sea-washed cobblestones round the base, and whitewashed them. Evidently he was a prideful little man, and liked to see things done in a seamanlike manner. And presently it became a habit with The Laird to watch night and morning, for the little pin-prick of color to flutter forth from the house on the Sawdust Pile, and if his own colors did not break forth on the instant and the little cannon boom from the cliff, he was annoyed and demanded an explanation. III Hector McKaye and his close-mouthed general manager, Andrew Daney, were the only persons who knew the extent of The Laird's fortune. Even their knowledge was approximate, however, for The Laird disliked to delude himself, and carried on his books at their cost-price properties which had appreciated tremendously in value since their purchase. The knowledge of his wealth brought to McKaye a goodly measure of happiness--not because he was of Scottish ancestry and had inherited a love for his baubees, but because he was descended from a fierce, proud Scottish clan and wealth spelled independence to him and his. The Laird would have filled his cup of happiness to overflowing had he married a less mediocre woman or had he raised his daughters as he had his son. The girls' upbringing had been left entirely in their mother's hands. Not so with young Donald, however--wherefore it was a byword in Port Agnew that Donald was his father's son, a veritable chip of the old block. By some uncanny alchemy, hard cash appears to soften the heads and relax the muscles of rich men's sons--at least, such had been old Hector's observation, and on the instant that he first gazed upon the face of his son, there had been born in him a mighty resolve that, come what might, he would not have it said of him that he had made a fool of his boy. And throughout the glad years of his fatherhood, with the stern piety of his race and his faith, he had knelt night and morning beside his bed and prayed his God to help him not to make a fool of Donald--to keep Donald from making a fool of himself. When Donald entered Princeton, his father decided upon an experiment. He had raised his boy right, and trained him for the race of life, and now The Laird felt that, like a thoroughbred horse, his son faced the barrier. Would he make the run, or would he, in the parlance of the sporting world, "dog it?" Would his four years at a great American university make of him a better man, or would he degenerate into a snob and a drone? With characteristic courage, The Laird decided to give him ample opportunity to become either, for, as old Hector remarked to Andrew Daney: "If the lad's the McKaye I think he is, nothing can harm him. On the other hand, if I'm mistaken, I want to know it in time, for my money and my Port Agnew Lumber Company is a trust, and if he can't handle it, I'll leave it to the men who can--who've helped me create it--and Donald shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Tools," he added, "belong to the men that can use them." When Donald started East for college, old Hector accompanied him as far as Seattle. On the way up, there was some man-talk between them. In his youth, old Hector had not been an angel, which is to state that he had been a lumberjack. He knew men and the passions that beset them--particularly when they are young and lusty--and he was far from being a prude. He expected his son to raise a certain amount of wild oats; nay, he desired it, for full well he knew that when the fires of youth are quenched, they are liable to flare disgracefully in middle life or old age. "Never pig it, my son," was his final admonition. "Raise hell if you must, but if you love your old father, be a gentleman about it. You've sprung from a clan o' men, not mollycoddles." "Hence the expression: 'When Hector was a pup,'" Donald replied laughingly. "Well, I'll do my best, father--only, if I stub my toe, you mustn't be too hard on me. Remember, please, that I'm only half Scotch." At parting, The Laird handed his son a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. "This is the first year's allowance, Donald," he informed the boy gravely. "It should not require more than a hundred thousand dollars to educate a son of mine, and you must finish in four years. I would not care to think you dull or lazy." "Do you wish an accounting, father?" The Laird shook his head. "Keeping books was ever a sorry trade, my son. I'll read the accounting in your eye when you come back to Port Agnew." "Oh!" said young Donald. At the end of four years, Donald graduated, an honor-man in all his studies, and in the lobby of the gymnasium, where the athletic heroes of Princeton leave their record to posterity, Hector McKaye read his son's name, for, of course, he was there for commencement. Then they spent a week together in New York, following which old Hector announced that one week of New York was about all he could stand. The tall timber was calling for him. "Hoot, mon!" Donald protested gaily. He was a perfect mimic of Sir Harry Lauder at his broadest. "Y'eve nae had a bit holiday in all yer life. Wha' spier ye, Hector McKaye, to a trip aroond the worl', wi' a wee visit tae the auld clan in the Hielands?" "Will you come with me, son?" The Laird inquired eagerly. "Certainly not! You shall come with me. This is to be my party." "Can you stand the pressure? I'm liable to prove an expensive traveling companion." "Well, there's something radically wrong with both of us if we can't get by on two hundred thousand dollars, dad." The Laird started, and then his Scotch sense of humor--and, for all the famed wit of the Irish, no humor on earth is so unctuous as that of the Scotch--commenced to bubble up. He suspected a joke on himself and was prepared to meet it. "Will you demand an accounting, my son?" Donald shook his head. "Keeping books was ever a sorry trade, father, I'll read the accounting in your eye when you get back to Port Agnew." "You braw big scoundrel! You've been up to something. Tell it me, man, or I'll die wi' the suspense of it." "Well," Donald replied, "I lived on twenty-five hundred a year in college and led a happy life. I had a heap of fun, and nothing went by me so fast that I didn't at least get a tail-feather. My college education, therefore, cost me ten thousand dollars, and I managed to squeeze a roadster automobile into that, also. With the remaining ninety thousand, I took a flier in thirty-nine hundred acres of red cedar up the Wiskah River. I paid for it on the instalment plan --yearly payments secured by first mortgage at six per cent., and----" "Who cruised it for you?" The Laird almost shouted. "I'll trust no cruiser but my own David McGregor." "I realized that, so I engaged Dave for the job. You will recall that he and I took a two months' camping-trip after my first year in Princeton. It cruised eighty thousand feet to the acre, and I paid two dollars and a half per thousand for it. Of course, we didn't succeed in cruising half of it, but we rode through the remainder, and it all averaged up very nicely. And I saw a former cruise of it made by a disinterested cruiser----" The Laird had been doing mental arithmetic. "It cost you seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars--and you've paid ninety thousand, principal and interest, on account. Why, you didn't have the customary ten per cent, of the purchase-price as an initial payment!" "The owner was anxious to sell. Besides, he knew I was your son, and I suppose he concluded that, after getting ninety thousand dollars out of me at the end of three years, you'd have to come to my rescue when the balance fell due--in a lump. If you didn't, of course he could foreclose." "I'll save you, my son. It was a good deal--a splendid deal!" "You do not have to, dad. I've sold it--at a profit of an even two hundred thousand dollars!" "Lad, why did you do it? Why didn't you take me into your confidence? That cedar is worth three and a half. In a few years, 'twill be worth five." "I realized that, father, but--a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush--and I'm a proud sort of devil. I didn't want to run to you for help on my first deal, even though I knew you'd come to my rescue and ask no questions. You've always told me to beware of asking favors, you know. Moreover, I had a very friendly feeling toward the man I sold my red cedar to; I hated to stick him too deeply." "You were entitled to your profit, Donald. 'Twas business. You should have taken it. Ah, lad, if you only knew the terrible four years I've paid for yon red-cedar!" "You mean the suspense of not knowing how I was spending my allowance?" The Laird nodded. "Curiosity killed a cat, my son, and I'm not as young as I used to be." "I had thought you'd have read the accounting in my eye. Take another look, Hector McKaye." And Donald thrust his smiling countenance close to his father's. "I see naught in your eye but deviltry and jokes." "None are so blind as they that will not see. If you see a joke, dad, it's on you." Old Hector blinked, then suddenly he sprang at his son, grasped him by the shoulders, and backed him against the wall. "Did you sell me that red cedar?" he demanded incredulously. "Aye, mon; through an agent," Donald burred Scottishly. "A' did nae ha' the heart tae stick my faither sae deep for a bit skulin'. A'm a prood man, Hector McKaye; a'll nae take a grrand eeducashun at sic a price. 'Tis nae Christian." "Ah, my bonny bairn!" old Hector murmured happily, and drew his fine son to his heart. "What a grand joke to play on your puir old father! Och, mon, was there ever a lad like mine?" "I knew you'd buy that timber for an investment if I offered it cheap enough," Donald explained. "Besides, I owed you a poke. You wanted to be certain you hadn't reared a jackass instead of a man, so you gave me a hundred thousand dollars and stood by to see what I'd do with it--didn't you, old Scotty?" Hector nodded a trifle guiltily. "Andrew Daney wrote me you swore by all your Highland clan that the man who sold you that red cedar was ripe for the fool-killer." "Tush, tush!" The Laird protested. "You're getting personal now. I dislike to appear inquisitive, but might I ask what you've done with your two hundred thousand profit?" "Well, you see, dad, I would have felt a trifle guilty had I kept it, so I blew it all in on good, conservative United States bonds, registered them in your name, and sent them to Daney to hide in your vault at Port Agnew." "Ah, well, red cedar or bonds, 'twill all come back to you some day, sonny. The real profit's in the fun--" "And the knowledge that I'm not a fool--eh, father?" Father love supernal gleamed in The Laird's fine gray eyes. "Were you a fool, my son, and all that I have in the world would cure you if thrown into the Bight of Tyee, I'd gladly throw it and take up my life where I began it--with pike-pole and peavy, double-bitted ax, and cross-cut saw. However, since you're not a fool, I intend to continue to enjoy my son. We'll go around the world together." Thus did the experiment end. At least, Donald thought so. But when he left the hotel a few minutes later to book two passages to Europe, The Laird of Tyee suddenly remembered that thanks were due his Presbyterian God. So he slid to his old knees beside his bed and murmured: "Lord, I thank thee! For the sake of thine own martyred Son, set angels to guard him and lead him in the path of manly honor that comes at last to thy kingdom. Amen." Then he wired Andrew Daney a long telegram of instructions and a stiff raise in salary. "The boy has a head like a tar-bucket," he concluded. "Everything I ever put into it has stuck. We are going to frolic round the world together, and we will be home when we get back." IV Donald was twenty-four and The Laird fifty-eight when the pair returned from their frolic round the world--Donald to take up this father's labors, The Laird to lay them aside and retire to The Dreamerie and the books he had accumulated against this happy afterglow of a busy and fruitful life. Donald's mother and sisters were at The Dreamerie the night the father and son arrived. Of late years, they had spent less and less of their time there. The Laird had never protested, for he could not blame them for wearying of a little backwoods sawmill town like Port Agnew. With his ability to think calmly, clearly, and unselfishly, he had long since realized that eventually his girls must marry; now Elizabeth was twenty-six and Jane twenty-eight, and Mrs. McKaye was beginning to be greatly concerned for their future. Since The Laird had built The Dreamerie in opposition to their wishes, they had spent less than six months in each year at Port Agnew. And these visits had been scattered throughout the year. They had traveled much, and, when not traveling, they lived in the Seattle house and were rather busy socially. Despite his devotion to his business, however, The Laird found time to spend at least one week in each month with them in Seattle, in addition to the frequent business trips which took him there. That night of his home-coming was the happiest The Laird had ever known, for it marked the culmination of his lifetime of labor and dreams. Long after his wife and the girls had retired, he and Donald sat in the comfortable living-room, smoking and discussing plans for the future, until presently, these matters having been discussed fully, there fell a silence between them, to be broken presently by The Laird. "I'm wondering, Donald, if you haven't met some bonny lass you'd like to bring home to Port Agnew. You realize, of course, that there's room on Tyee Head for another Dreamerie, although I built this one for you--and her." "There'll be no other house on Tyee Head, father," Donald answered, "unless you care to build one for mother and the girls. The wife that I'll bring home to Port Agnew will not object to my father in my house." He smiled and added, "You're not at all hard to get along with, you know." The Laird's eyes glistened. "Have you found her yet, my son?" Donald shook his head in negation. "Then look for her," old Hector ordered. "I have no doubt that, when you find her, she'll be worthy of you. I'm at an age now when a man looks no longer into the future but dwells in the past, and it's hard for me to think of you, big man that you are, as anything save a wee laddie trotting at my side. Now, if I had a grandson--" When, presently, Donald bade him good-night, Hector McKaye turned off the lights and sat in the dark, gazing down across the moonlit Bight of Tyee to the sparks that flew upward from the stacks of his sawmill in Port Agnew, for they were running a night shift. And, as he gazed, he thrilled, with a fierce pride and a joy that was almost pain, in the knowledge that he had reared a merchant prince for this, his principality of Tyee. V Hector McKaye had always leaned toward the notion that he could run Port Agnew better than a mayor and a town council, in addition to deriving some fun out of it; consequently, Port Agnew had never been incorporated. And this was an issue it was not deemed wise to press, for The Tyee Lumber Company owned every house and lot in town, and Hector McKaye owned every share of stock in the Tyee Lumber Company. If he was a sort of feudal baron, he was a gentle and kindly one; large building-plots, pretty little bungalows, cheap rentals, and no taxation constituted a social condition that few desired to change. As these few developed and The Laird discovered them, their positions in his employ, were forfeited, their rents raised, or their leases canceled, and presently Port Agnew knew them no more. He paid fair wages, worked his men nine hours, and employed none but naturalized Americans, with a noticeable predilection for those of Scotch nativity or ancestry. Strikes or lockouts were unknown in Port Agnew--likewise saloons. Unlike most sawmill towns of that period, Port Agnew had no street in which children were forbidden to play or which mothers taught their daughters to avoid. Once an I.W.W. organizer came to town, and upon being ordered out and refusing to go, The Laird, then past fifty, had ducked him in the Skookum until he changed his mind. The Tyee Lumber Company owned and operated the local telephone company, the butcher shop, the general store, the hotel, a motion-picture theater, a town hall, the bank, and the electric-light-and-power plant, and with the profits from these enterprises, Port Agnew had paved streets, sidewalks lined with handsome electroliers, and a sewer system. It was an admirable little sawmill town, and if the expenses of maintaining it exceeded the income, The Laird met the deficit and assumed all the worry, for he wanted his people to be happy and prosperous beyond all others. It pleased Hector McKaye to make an occasion of his abdication and Donald's accession to the presidency of the Tyee Lumber Company. The Dreamerie was not sufficiently large for his purpose, however, for he planned to entertain all of his subjects at a dinner and make formal announcement of the change. So he gave a barbecue in a grove of maples on the edge of the town. His people received in silence the little speech he made them, for they were loath to lose The Laird. They knew him, while Donald they had not known for five years, and there were many who feared that the East might have changed him. Consequently, when his father called him up to the little platform from which he spoke, they received the young laird in silence also. "Folks--my own home folks," Donald began, "to-day I formally take up the task that was ordained for me at birth. I am going to be very happy doing for you and for myself. I shall never be the man my father is; but if you will take me to your hearts and trust me as you have trusted him, I'll never go back on you, for I expect to live and to die in Port Agnew, and, while I live, I want to be happy with you. I would have you say of me, when I am gone, that I was the worthy son of a worthy sire." He paused and looked out over the eager, upturned faces of the men, women, and children whose destinies he held in the hollow of his hand. "My dear friends, there aren't going to be any changes," he finished, and stepped down off the platform. From the heart of the crowd a lumberjack cried, "Ya-hoo-o-o-o-o!" as only a lusty lumberjack can cry it. "He's a chip of the old block!" cried another, and there were cheers and some tears and a general rush forward to greet the new master, to shake his hand, and pledge allegiance to him. When the reception was over, old Hector took charge of the homely games and athletic contests, and the day's delights culminated in a log-burling contest in the Skookum, in which the young laird participated. When, eventually, he fell in the river and was counted out, old Hector donned his son's calked boots and, with a whoop such as he had not emitted in forty years, entered the lists against the young fellows. In the old days in the Michigan woods, when burling was considered a magnificent art of the lumberjack, he had been a champion, and for five minutes he spun his log until the water foamed, crossing and recrossing the river and winning the contest unanimously. From the bank, Mrs. McKaye and his daughters watched him with well-bred amusement and secret disapproval. They could never forget, as he could, that he was The Laird of Tyee; they preferred more dignity in the head of the house. The McKaye family drove home along the cliff road at sunset. Young Donald paused on the terrace before entering the house, and, stirred by some half-forgotten memory, he glanced across the bight to the little white house far below on the Sawdust Pile. The flag was floating from the cupola, but even as he looked, it came fluttering down. Donald turned toward the McKaye flag. It was still floating. "The old order changeth," he soliloquized, and hauled it down, at the same time shouting to his father within the house: "Hey, dad; fire the sunset gun!" The Laird pressed the button and the cannon boomed. "We've neglected that little ceremony since you've been away," he remarked, as Donald entered the room. "'Other times, other customs,' I dare say." He hurried up-stairs to dress for dinner (a formality which he disliked, but which appeared to please his wife and daughters), and Donald took his father's binoculars and went out on the terrace. It had occurred to him that he had not seen old Caleb Brent and Nan at the barbecue, and he wondered why. Through the glasses, he could make out the figure of a woman in the cupola window, and she was watching him through a long marine telescope. "There's my old friend Nan, grown to womanhood," Donald soliloquized, and waved his arm at her. Through the glasses, he saw her wave back at him. VI The morning after the barbecue, Donald McKaye reported at eight o'clock to his father's faithful old general manager, Andrew Daney. Daney had grown gray in his father's service, and it was no part of Donald's plans to assign him to a back seat. "Well, Mr. Daney," he inquired affably, "what are your plans for the new hired man?" Old Daney looked up quizzically. "You do the planning here, Don," he replied. "You heard me say yesterday that there would be no changes, Mr. Daney. Of course, I haven't grown up in Port Agnew without learning something of my heritage, but, in view of the fact that I still have considerable to learn, suppose you indicate just where I ought to start." Daney was pleased at a deference he had not anticipated. "Start in the woods," he replied. "That's where your daddy started. Felling timber and handling it is rather a fine art, Don. I'd wrestle logs for a month and follow them down the Skookum to the log boom. Then I'd put in six months in the mill and six more in the factory, following it with three months on the dock, tallying, and three months of a hand-shaking tour out among the trade. After that, you may sit in at your father's desk, and I'll gradually break you in to his job." "That's a grand idea, and I'll act on it," Donald declared. "Well, it's too late to act on it to-day, Don. The up-river launch to the logging-camp left at seven o'clock. However, I have a job for you. We really need the Sawdust Pile for an extension of our drying-yard. Our present yard lies right under the lee of that ridge of which Tyee Head is an extension, and it's practically noon before the sun gets a fair chance at it. The Sawdust Pile gets the sun all day long, and the winds have an uninterrupted sweep across it. We can dry our cedar decking there in half the time it requires now." "But the Sawdust Pile is--" "A rat's nest, Don. There are a number of other shacks there now--some Greek fishermen, a negro, and a couple of women from the overflow of Tyee. It ought to be cleaned out." "I noticed those shacks last night, Mr. Daney, and I agree with you that they should go. But I haven't the heart to run old Caleb Brent off the Sawdust Pile. I gave it to him, you know." "Well, let Brent stay there. He's too old and crippled with rheumatism to attend to his truck-garden any more; so if you leave him the space for his house and a chicken-yard, he'll be satisfied. In fact, I have discussed the proposition with him, and he is agreeable." "Why did dad permit those other people to crowd him, Mr. Daney?" "While your father was in Europe with you, they horned in, claimed a squatter's right, and stood pat. Old Brent was defenseless, and while the boys from the mill would have cleaned them out if I had given the word, the Greeks and the negro were defiant, and it meant bloodshed. So I have permitted the matter to rest until your father's return." Donald reached for his hat. "Caleb Brent's squatter-right to that Sawdust Pile is going to be upheld," he declared. "I'll clean that colony out before sunset, or they'll clean me." "I'd proceed cautiously if I were you, Don. They have a host of friends up in Darrow, and we mustn't precipitate a feud." "I'm going over now and serve notice on them to vacate immediately." He grinned at old Daney. "A negro, a handful of Greeks, and those unfortunate women can't bluff the boss of Port Agnew, Mr. Daney." "They tell me there's a blind pig down there, also." "It will not be there after to-day," Donald answered lightly, and departed for the Sawdust Pile. As he came up to the gate in the neat fence Caleb Brent had built across the Sawdust Pile nine years before, a baby boy, of perhaps three years of age, rose out of the weeds in which he had been playing and regarded the visitor expectantly. "Hello, bub!" the young laird of Tyee greeted the child. "Hello!" came the piping answer. "Are you my daddy?" "Why, no, Snickelfritz." He ran his fingers through the tot's golden hair. "Don't you know your own daddy?" "I haven't any daddy," the child drawled. "No? Well, that's unfortunate." Donald stooped and lifted the tike to his shoulder, marveling the while that such a cherub could be the product of any of the denizens of the Sawdust Pile. At once, the boy's arms went round his neck and a velvet cheek was laid close to his. "You're an affectionate little snooks, aren't you?" Donald commented. "Do you live here?" "Yes, sir." "Somebody's been teaching you manners. Whose little boy are you?" "Muvver's." "And who might mother be?" "Nan Brent." "Yo-ho! So you're Nan Brent's boy! What's your name?" "Donald Brent." "No; that isn't it, son. Brent is your mother's name. Tell me your father's name." "Ain't got no farver." "Well then, run along to your mother." He kissed the child and set him down just as a young woman came down the sadly neglected shell walk from Caleb Brent's little white house. Donald opened the gate and advanced to meet her. "I'm sure you must be Nan," he said, "although I can't be certain. I haven't seen Nan in six years." She extended her hand "Yes; I'm Nan," she replied, "and you're Donald McKaye. You're a man now, but somehow you haven't changed greatly." "It's fine to meet you again, Nan." He shook her hand enthusiastically. She smiled a little sadly. "I saw you at colors last night, Donald. When your flag came down and the gun was fired, I knew you'd remembered." "Were you glad?" he demanded, and immediately wondered why he had asked such a childish question. "Yes, I was, Donald. It has been a long time since--since--the gun has been fired--for me. So long since we were children, Donald." "You weren't at the barbecue yesterday. I missed you and Caleb. You two are very old friends of mine, Nan. Was it quite loyal of you to stay home?" "You're the only person that missed us, Donald," she answered, with just the suspicion of a tremor in her sweet voice. "But, then, we are accustomed to being left out of things." He made no effort to formulate an answer to this. Truth does not require an answer. Yet he was sensible of a distinct feeling of sympathy for her, and, manlike, he decided to change the topic of conversation. "You have neighbors on the Sawdust Pile, Nan." "Yes. They came when The Laird was in Europe." "They would never have dared it had he been in Port Agnew. I'm surprised that Andrew Daney permitted it. I had thought of him as a man of courage, but, strange to say, these people outgamed him." "They didn't outgame him, Donald. He just didn't care. I--I--fancy he concluded they would make agreeable neighbors--for me." "I'm sorry, Nan. However, I'm the new laird of Tyee, and I've come down to stage an eviction. I didn't know of this state of affairs until this morning." She smiled a little wistfully and bitterly. "I had flattered myself, Donald, you had called to visit your old friends instead. When you waved at me last night, I--oh, you can't realize how happy it made me to know that _you_ had noticed me--that you really were big enough to be the big man of Port Agnew. And I thought perhaps you would come because of that." He smiled tolerantly upon her. "Something has occurred to make you bitter, Nan. You're not like the girl I used to know before I went away to school. If it will help to restore me to your previous good opinion, however, please believe that when I waved at you last night, simultaneously I made up my mind to make an early visit to the Sawdust Pile. The discovery that these cattle have intruded upon you and your old father, because you were unable to defend yourselves and no one in Port Agnew would defend you, merely hastened my visit. I couldn't in decency come any earlier; could I, Nan? It's just half after eight. And if you're going to keep me standing at the gate, as if I were a sewing-machine agent instead of a very old friend, I _may_ conclude to take offense and regret that I called." "Oh, I'm sorry! Please forgive me, Donald. I'm so much alone--so very lonely--I suppose I grow suspicious of people and their motives." "Say no more about it, Nan. May I come in, then, to greet Caleb and your husband?" "Father is in the house. I'll call him out, Donald. As for my husband--" She hesitated, glanced out across the bight, and then resolutely faced him. "You cannot have heard all of the town gossip, then?" "I hadn't even heard of your marriage. The first I knew of it was when his little nibs here hailed me, and asked me if I was his father. Then he informed me he was your boy. He's a lovely child, Nan, and I have been the recipient of some of his extremely moist kisses." She realized that he was too courteous to ask whether her husband was dead or if there had been a divorce. "I'm rather glad you haven't heard, Donald," she replied evenly. "I much prefer to tell you myself; then you will understand why I cannot invite you into our house, and why you must not be seen talking to me here at the gate. I am not married. I have never been married. My baby's name is--Brent, and I call him Donald, after the only male human being that has ever been truly kind to my father and me." "Ah," said Donald quietly, "so that's why he misses his father and appears to want one so very much." She gazed forlornly out to sea and answered with a brief nod. Seemingly she had long since ceased to be tragic over her pitiful tragedy. "Well," he replied philosophically, "life is quite filled with a number of things, and some of them make for great unhappiness." He stooped and lifted the baby in his great arms. "You're named after me, sonny; so I think I'll try to fill the gap and make you happy. Do you mind, Nan, if I try my hand at foster-fathering? I like children. This little man starts life under a handicap, but I'll see to it that he gets his chance in life--far from Port Agnew, if you desire." She closed her eyes in sudden pain and did not answer. "And whatever your opinion on the matter may be, Nan," he went on, "even had I known yesterday of your sorrow, I should have called to-day just the same." "You call it my 'sorrow!'" she burst forth passionately. "Others call it my trouble--my sin--my disgrace." "And what does Caleb call it, Nan?" "He doesn't call it, Donald. It hasn't appeared to make any difference with him. I'm still--his little girl." "Well, I cannot regard you as anything but a little girl--the same little girl that used to help Caleb and me sail the sloop. I don't wish to know anything about your sorrow, or your trouble, or your disgrace, or your sin, or whatever folks may choose to call it. I just want you to know that I know that you're a good woman, and when the spirit moves me--which will be frequently, now that I have this young man to look after--I shall converse with you at your front gate and visit you and your decent old father in this little house, and be damned to those that decry it. I am the young laird of Tyee. My father raised me to be a gentleman, and, by the gods, I'll be one! Now, Nan, take the boy and go in the house, because I see a rascally negro in the doorway of that shack yonder, and I have a matter to discuss with him. Is that white woman his consort?" Nan nodded again. She could not trust herself to speak, for her heart was full to overflowing. "Come here--you!" Donald called to the negro. The fellow slouched forth defiantly. He was a giant mulatto, and his freckled face wore an evil and contemptuous grin. "I'm Donald McKaye," Donald informed him. "I'm the new laird of Tyee. I want you and that woman to pack up and leave." "How soon, boss?" "Immediately." Anticipating a refusal, Donald stepped closer to the mulatto and looked him sternly in the eye. "We-ll, is dat so?" the yellow rascal drawled. "So youh-all's de new la'rd, eh? Well, ah'm de king o' de Sawdust Pile, an' mah house is mah castle. Git dat, Mistah La'rd?" Donald turned toward Nan. "I'm going to have trouble here, Nan. Please go in the house." "Proceed," she replied simply. "I have a most unwomanly and unladylike desire to see that beast manhandled." Donald turned, in time to go under a sizzling right-hand blow from the mulatto and come up with a right uppercut to the ugly, freckled face and a left rip to the mulatto's midriff. The fellow grunted, and a spasm of pain crossed his countenance. "You yellow dog!" Donald muttered, and flattened his nose far flatter than his mammy had ever wiped it. The enemy promptly backed away and covered; a hearty thump in the solar plexus made him uncover, and under a rain of blows on the chin and jaw, he sprawled unconscious on the ground. Donald left him lying there and stepped to the door of the shack. The frightened drab within spat curses at him. "Pack and go!" he ordered. "Within the hour, I'm going to purge the Sawdust Pile with fire; if you stay in the house, you'll burn with it." She was ready in ten minutes. Three more of her kind occupying an adjacent shack begged to be allowed time in which to load their personal possessions in an express-wagon. The four Greeks were just about to set out for a day's fishing, but, having witnessed the defeat of the mulatto bully, the fever of the hegira seized them also. They loaded their effects in the fishing-launch, and chugged away up river to Darrow, crying curses upon the young laird of Tyee and promising reprisal. Donald waited until the last of the refugees had departed before setting fire to the shacks. Then he stood by old Caleb Brent's house, a circle of filled buckets around him, and watched in case the wind should suddenly shift and shower sparks upon the roof. In half an hour the Sawdust Pile had reverted to its old status and a throng of curious townspeople who, attracted by the flames and smoke, had clustered outside Caleb Brent's gate to watch Donald at work, finally despaired of particulars and scattered when they saw Donald and Nan Brent enter the house. Caleb Brent, looking twenty years older than when Donald had seen him last, sat in an easy chair by the window, gazing with lack-luster eyes out across the bight. He was hopelessly crippled with rheumatism, and his sea-blue eyes still held the same lost-dog wistfulness. "Hello, Caleb!" Donald greeted him cordially. "I've just cleaned up the Sawdust Pile for you. You're back in undisputed possession again." He shook hands with old Caleb and sat down in a chair which Nan drew up for him. "It's good of you to call, Mr. Donald," the old man piped. "But isn't that just like him, Nan?" he demanded. "Many's the day--aye, and the night, too, for of late the nights have been bad here--we've thought of you, sir, and wished you were back in Port Agnew. We knew what would happen to those scoundrels when Mr. Donald got around to it." And he laughed the asthmatic, contented chuckle of the aged as Nan related briefly the story of Donald's recent activities. Their conversation which followed was mostly of a reminiscent character--recollections of boat-races in the bight, fishing excursions off the coast, clambakes, hew boats, a dog which Donald had given Nan when he left for prep school and which had since died of old age. And all the while Nan Brent's child stood by Donald's knee, gazing up at him adoringly. During a lull in the conversation, he created some slight embarrassment by reiterating his belief that this strange man must be his father, and appealed to his mother for verification of his suspicions. Poor child! His baby mind had but lately grasped the fact that for him there was something missing in the scheme of life, and, to silence his persistent questioning, Nan had told him that some day his father would come to see them; whereupon, with the calm faith of innocence, he had posted himself at the front gate, to be in position to receive this beloved missing one when the latter should appear. Donald skilfully diverted the child's mind from this all-consuming topic by sliding the boy down to his foot and permitting him to swing gently there. Presently Nan excused herself, for the purpose of looking after the embers of Donald's recent raid. The instant the door closed behind her, old Caleb Brent looked across at his visitor. "You've heard--of course, Mr. Donald?" he queried, with a slight inclination of his head toward the door through which his daughter had disappeared. "Yes, Caleb. Misfortune comes in various guises." "I would I could die," the pitiful old fellow whispered. "I will, soon, but, oh, what will my poor darling do then, Mr. Donald? After we first came here, I was that prosperous, sir, you wouldn't believe it. I gave Nan a good schooling, piano lessons, and fine dresses. We lived well, and yet we put by a thousand dollars in six years. But that's gone now, what with the expenses when the baby came, and my sickness that's prevented me from working. Thank God, sir, I have my three-quarter pay. It isn't much, but we're rent-free, and fuel costs us nothing, what with driftwood and the waste from Darrow that comes down the river. Nan has a bit of a kitchen-garden and a few chickens--so we make out. But when I die, my navy-pay stops." He paused, too profoundly moved by consideration of the destitution that would face Nan and her nameless boy to voice the situation in words. But he looked up at Donald McKaye, and the latter saw again that wistful look in his sea-blue eyes--the dumb pleading of a kind old lost dog. He thought of the thirty-eight-foot sloop old Caleb had built him--a thing of beauty and wondrously seaworthy; or the sense of obligation which had caused old Brent to make of the task a labor of love; of the long, lazy, happy days when, with Caleb and Nan for his crew, he had raced out of the bight twenty miles to sea and back again, for the sheer delight of driving his lee rail under until Nan cried out in apprehension. Poor, sweet, sad Nan Brent! Donald had known her through so many years of gentleness and innocence--and she had come to this! He was consumed with pity for her. She had fallen, but--there were depths to which destitution and desperation might still drive her, just as there were heights to which she might climb again if some half-man would but give her a helping hand. "Do you know the man, Caleb?" he demanded suddenly. "No, I do not. I have never seen him. Nan wrote me when they were married, and told me his name, of course." "Then there _was_ a marriage, Caleb?" "So Nan wrote me." "Ah! Has Nan a marriage certificate?" "I have never seen it. Seems their marriage wasn't legal. The name he gave wasn't his own; he was a bigamist." "Then Nan knows his real name." "Yes; when she learned that, she came home." "But why didn't she prosecute him, Caleb? She owed that to herself and the child--- to her good name and" "She had her reasons, lad." "But you should have prosecuted the scoundrel, Caleb." "I had no money for lawyers. I knew I was going to need it all for Nan and her child. And I thought her reasons sufficient, Donald. She said it would all come out right in the end. Maybe it will." "Do you mean she knowingly accepted the inevitable disgrace when she might have--have--" He wanted to add, "proved herself virtuous," but, somehow, the words would not come. They didn't appear to him to be quite fair to Nan. The old man nodded. "Of course we haven't told this to anybody else," he hastened to add. "'Twould have been useless. They'd have thought it a lie." "Yes, Caleb--a particularly clumsy and stupid lie." Caleb Brent looked up suddenly and searched, with an alert and wistful glance, the face of the young laird of Tyee. "But you do not think so, do you?" he pleaded. "Certainly not, Caleb, If Nan told you that, then she told you the truth." "Thank you, lad." "Poor old Caleb," Donald soliloquized, "you find it hard to believe it yourself, don't you? And it does sound fishy!" "I don't believe it's Nan's fault," Donald found himself saying next. "She was always a good girl, and I can't look at her now and conceive her as anything but virtuous and womanly. I'll always be a good friend of hers, Caleb. I'll stand back of her and see that she gets a square deal--she and her son. When you're gone, she can leave Port Agnew for some city where she isn't known, and as 'Mrs. Brent' she can engage in some self-supporting business. It always struck me that Nan had a voice." "She has, Mr. Donald. They had grand opera in Seattle, and I sent her up there to hear it and having a singing teacher hear her sing 'Alice, Where Art Thou.' He said she'd be earning a thousand dollars a night in five years, Mr. Donald, if somebody in New York could train her. That was the time," he concluded, "that she met _him!_ He was rich and, I suppose, full of fine graces; he promised her a career if she'd marry him, and so he dazzled the child--she was only eighteen--and she went to San Francisco with him. She says there was some sort of marriage, but he gave her no such gift as I gave her mother--a marriage certificate. She wrote me she was happy, and asked me to forgive her the lack of confidence in not advising with me--and of course I forgave her, Mr. Donald. But in three months he left her, and one night the door yonder opened and Nan come in and put her arms round my neck and held me tight, with never a tear--so I knew she'd cried her fill long since and was in trouble." He paused several seconds, then added, "Her mother was an admiral's daughter--and she married me!" He appeared to suggest this latter as a complete explanation of woman's frailty. "The world is small, but it is sufficiently large to hide a girl from the Sawdust Pile of Port Agnew. Of course, Nan cannot leave you now, but when you leave her, Caleb, I'll finance her for her career. Please do not worry about it." "I'm like Nan, sir," he murmured. "I'm beyond tears, or I'd weep, Mr. Donald. God will reward you, sir. I can't begin to thank you." "I'm glad of that. By the way, who is towing the garbage-barge to sea nowadays?" "I don't know, sir. Mr. Daney hired somebody else and his boat when I had to quit because of my sciatica." "Hereafter, we'll use your boat, Caleb, and engage a man to operate it. The rental will be ten dollars per trip, two trips a week, eighty dollars a month. Cheap enough; so don't think it's charity. Here's the first month's rental in advance. I'm going to run along now, Caleb, but I'll look in from time to time, and if you should need me in the interim, send for me." He kissed little Don Brent, who set up a prodigious shriek at the prospect of desertion and brought his mother fluttering into the room. He watched her soothe the youngster and then asked: "Nan, where do you keep the arnica now? I cut my knuckles on that yellow rascal." She raised a sadly smiling face to his. "Where would the arnica be--if we had any, Donald?" she demanded. "Where it used to be, I suppose. Up on that shelf, inside the basement of that funny old half-portion grandfather's clock and just out of reach of the pendulum." "You do remember, don't you? But it's all gone so many years ago, Donald. We haven't had a boy around to visit us since you left Port Agnew, you know. I'll put some tincture of iodine on your knuckles, however." "Do, please, Nan." A little later, he said: "Do you remember, Nan, the day I stuck my finger into the cage of old Mrs. Biddle's South American parrot to coddle the brute and he all but chewed it off?" She nodded. "And you came straight here to have it attended to, instead of going to a doctor." "You wept when you saw my mangled digit. Remember, Nan? Strange how that scene persists in my memory! You were so sweetly sympathetic I was quite ashamed of myself." "That's because you always were the sweetest boy in the world and I was only the garbage-man's daughter," she whispered. "There's a ridiculous song about the garbage-man's daughter. I heard it once, in vaudeville--in San Francisco." "If I come over some evening soon, will you sing for me, Nan?" "I never sing any more, Don." "Nobody but you can ever sing 'Carry Me Back to Old Virginy' for me." "Then I shall sing it, Don." "Thank you, Nan." She completed the anointing of his battle-scarred knuckles with iodine, and, for a moment, she held his hand, examining critically an old ragged white scar on the index-finger of his right hand. And quite suddenly, to his profound amazement, she bent her head and swiftly implanted upon that old scar a kiss so light, so humble, so benignant, so pregnant of adoration and gratitude that he stood before her confused and inquiring. "Such a strong, useful big hand!" she whispered. "It has been raised in defense of the sanctity of my home--and until you came there was 'none so poor to do me reverence.'" He looked at her with sudden, new interest. Her action had almost startled him. As their eyes held each other, he was aware, with a force that was almost a shock, that Nan Brent was a most unusual woman. She was beautiful; yet her physical beauty formed the least part of her attractiveness, perfect as that beauty was. Instinctively, Donald visualized her as a woman with brains, character, nobility of soul; there was that in her eyes, in the honesty and understanding with which they looked into his, that compelled him, in that instant, to accept without reservation and for all time the lame and halting explanation of her predicament he had recently heard from her father's lips. He longed to tell her so. Instead, he flushed boyishly and said, quite impersonally: "Yes; you're beautiful as women go, but that's not the right word to express you. Physically, you might be very homely, but if you were still Nan Brent you would be sweet and compelling. You remind me of a Catholic chapel; there's always one little light within that never goes out, you know. So that makes you more than beautiful. Shall I say--glorious?" She smiled at him with her wistful, sea-blue eyes--a smile tender, maternal, all-comprehending. She knew he was not seeking to flatter her, that the wiles, the Artifices, the pretty speeches of the polished man of the world were quite beyond him. "Still the same old primitive pal," she murmured softly; "still thinking straight, talking straight, acting straight, and--dare I say it, Donald?--seeing straight. I repeat, you always were the sweetest boy in the world--and there is still so much of the little boy about you." Her hand fluttered up and rested lightly on his arm. "I'll not forget this day, my dear friend." It was characteristic of him that, having said that which was uppermost in his mind, he should remember his manners and thank her for dressing his knuckles. Then he extended his hand in farewell. "When you come again, Donald," she pleaded, as he took her hand, "will you please bring me some books? They're all that can keep me sane--and I do not go to the public library any more. I have to run the gantlet of so many curious eyes." "How long is it since you have been away from the Sawdust Pile?" "Since before my baby came." He was silent a minute, pondering this. Since old Caleb had become house-ridden, then, she had been, without books. He nodded assent to her request. "If I do not say very much, you will understand, nevertheless, how grateful I am," she continued. "To-day, the sun has shone. Whatever your thoughts may have been, Donald, you controlled your face and you were decent enough not to say, 'Poor Nan.'" He had no answer to that. He was conscious only of standing helpless in the midst of a terrible tragedy. His heart ached with pity for her, and just for old sake's sake, for a tender sentiment for lost youth and lost happiness of the old comradely days when she had been Cinderella and he the prince, he wished that he might take her in a fraternal embrace and let her cry out on his breast the agony that gnawed at her heart like a worm in an apple. But it was against his code to indicate to her by word or action that she was less worthy than other women and hence to be pitied, for it seemed to him that her burden was already sufficient. "Let me know if those people return to annoy you, Nan," was all he said. Then they shook hands very formally, and the young laird of Tyee returned to the mill-office to report to Andrew Daney that the Sawdust Pile had been cleaned out, but that, for the present at least, they would get along with the old drying-yard. Somehow, the day came to an end, and he went home with tumult in his soul. VII An unerring knowledge of men in general and of his own son in particular indicated to Hector McKaye, upon the instant that the latter appeared at the family dinner-table, that his son's first day in command had had a sobering effect upon that young man. He had gone forth that morning whistling, his eyes alert with interest and anticipation; and a feeling of profound contentment had come to The Laird as he watched Donald climb into his automobile and go briskly down the cliff highway to Port Agnew. Here was no unwilling exile, shackled by his father's dollars to a backwoods town and condemned to labor for the term of his natural life. Gladly, eagerly, it seemed to Hector McKaye, his son was assuming his heritage, casting aside, without one longing backward glance, a brighter, busier, and more delightful world. Although his son's new arena of action was beautiful and The Laird loved it with a passionate love, he was sufficiently imaginative to realize that, in Port Agnew, Donald might not be as happy as had been his father. Old Hector was sufficiently unselfish to have harbored no resentment had this been so. It had been his one anxiety that Donald might take his place in the business as a matter of duty to himself rather than as a duty to his father, and because he had found his lifework and was approaching it with joy, for The Laird was philosopher enough to know that labor without joy is as dead-sea fruit. Indeed, before the first day of his retirement had passed, he had begun to suspect that joy without labor was apt to be something less than he had anticipated. The Laird observed in his son's eyes, as the latter took his place at table, a look that had not been there when Donald left for the mill that morning. His usually pleasant, "Evening, folks!" was perfunctory to-night; he replied briefly to the remarks addressed to him by his mother and sisters; the old man noted not less than thrice a slight pause with the spoon half-way to his mouth, as if his son considered some problem more important than soup. Mrs. McKaye and the girls chattered on, oblivious of these slight evidences of mental perturbation, but as The Laird carved the roast (he delighted in carving and serving his family, and was old-fashioned enough to insist upon his right, to the distress of the girls, who preferred to have the roast carved in the kitchen and served by the Japanese butler), he kept a contemplative eye upon his son, and presently saw Donald heave a slight sigh. "Here's a titbit you always liked, son!" he cried cheerfully, and deftly skewered from the leg of lamb the crisp and tender tail. "Confound you, Donald; I used to eat these fat, juicy little lamb's tails while you were at college, but I suppose, now, I'll have to surrender that prerogative along with the others." In an effort to be cheerful and distract his son's thoughts, he attempted this homely badinage. "I'll give you another little tale in return, dad," Donald replied, endeavoring to meet his father's cheerful manner. "While we were away, a colony of riffraff from Darrow jumped old Caleb Brent's Sawdust Pile, and Daney was weak enough to let them get away with it. I'm somewhat surprised. Daney knew your wishes in the matter; if he had forgotten them, he might have remembered mine, and if he had forgotten both, it would have been the decent thing to have thrown them out on his own responsibility." So that was what lay at the bottom of his son's perturbation! The Laird was relieved. "Andrew's a good man, but he always needed a leader, Donald," he replied. "If he didn't lack initiative, he would have been his own man long ago. I hope you did not chide him for it, lad." "No; I did not. He's old enough to be my father, and, besides, he's been in the Tyee Lumber Company longer than I. I did itch to give him a rawhiding, though." "I saw smoke and excitement down at the Sawdust Pile this morning, Donald. I dare say you rectified Andrew's negligence." "I did. The Sawdust Pile is as clean as a hound's tooth." Jane looked up from her plate. "I hope you sent that shameless Brent girl away, too," she announced, with the calm attitude of one whose own virtue is above reproach. Donald glared at her. "Of course I did not!" he retorted. "How thoroughly unkind and uncharitable of you, Jane, to hope I would be guilty of such a cruel and unmanly action!" The Laird waved his carving-knife. "Hear, hear!" he chuckled. "Spoken like a man, my son. Jane, my dear, if I were you, I wouldn't press this matter further. It's a delicate subject." "I'm sure I do not see why Jane should not be free to express her opinion, Hector." Mrs. McKaye felt impelled to fly to the defense of her daughter. "You know as well as we do, Hector, that the Brent girl is quite outside the pale of respectable society." "We shall never agree on what constitutes 'respectable society,' Nellie," The Laird answered whimsically. "There are a few in that Seattle set of yours I find it hard to include in that category." "Oh, they're quite respectable, father," Donald protested. "Indeed they are, Donald! Hector, you amaze me," Mrs. McKaye chided. "They have too much money to be anything else," Donald added, and winked at his father. "Tush, tush, lad!" the old man murmured. "We shall get nowhere with such arguments. The world has been at that line of conversation for two thousand years, and the issue's still in doubt. Nellie, will you have a piece of the well-done?" "You and your father are never done joining forces against me," Mrs. McKaye protested, and in her voice was the well-known note that presaged tears should she be opposed further. The Laird, all too familiar with this truly feminine type of tyranny, indicated to his son, by a lightning wink, that he desired the conversation diverted into other channels, whereupon Donald favored his mother with a disarming smile. "I'm going to make a real start to-morrow morning, mother," he announced brightly. "I'm going up in the woods and be a lumberjack for a month. Going to grow warts on my hands and chew tobacco and develop into a brawny roughneck." "Is that quite necessary?" Elizabeth queried, with a slight elevation of her eyebrows. "I understood you were going to manage the business." "I am--after I've learned it thoroughly, Lizzie." "Don't call me 'Lizzie,'" she warned him irritably. "Very well, Elizabeth." "In simple justice to those people from Darrow that you evicted from the Sawdust Pile, Don, you should finish your work before you go. If they were not fit to inhabit the Sawdust Pile, then neither is Nan Brent. You've got to play fair." Jane had returned to the attack. "Look here, Jane," her brother answered seriously: "I wish you'd forget Nan Brent. She's an old and very dear friend of mine, and I do not like to hear my friends slandered." "Oh, indeed!" Jane considered this humorous, and indulged herself in a cynical laugh. "Friend of his?" Elizabeth, who was regarded in her set as a wit, a reputation acquired by reason of the fact that she possessed a certain knack for adapting slang humorously (for there was no originality to her alleged wit), now bent her head and looked at her brother incredulously. "My word! That's a rich dish." "Why, Donald dear," his mother cried reproachfully, "surely you are jesting!" "Not at all. Nan Brent isn't a bad girl, even if she is the mother of a child born out of wedlock. She stays at home and minds her own business, and lets others mind theirs." "Donald's going to be tragic. See if he isn't," Elizabeth declared. "Come now, old dear; if Nan Brent isn't a bad woman, just what is your idea of what constitutes badness in a woman? It would be interesting to know your point of view." "Nan Brent was young, unsophisticated, poor, and trusting when she met this fellow, whoever he may be. He wooed her, and she loved him--or thought she did, which amounts to the same thing until one discovers the difference between thinking and feeling. At first, she thought she was married to him. Later, she discovered she was not--and then it was too late." "It wouldn't have been too late with some--er--good people," The Laird remarked meaningly. "In other words," Donald went on, "Nan Brent found herself out on the end of a limb, and then the world proceeded to saw off the limb. It is true that she is the mother of an illegitimate child, but if that child was not--at least in so far as its mother _is_ concerned--conceived in sin, I say it isn't illegitimate, and that its mother is not a bad woman." "Granted--if it's true; but how do you know it to be true?" Jane demanded. She had a feeling that she was about to get the better of her brother in this argument. "I do not _know_ it to be true, Jane." "_Voilà!"_ "But--I believe it to be true, Jane." "Why?" "Because Nan told her father it was true, and old Caleb told me when I was at his house this morning. So I believe it. And I knew Nan Brent when she was a young girl, and she was sweet and lovely and virtuous. I talked with her this morning, and found no reason to change my previous estimate of her. I could only feel for her a profound pity." "'Pity is akin to love,'" Elizabeth quoted gaily. "Mother, keep an eye on your little son. He'll be going in for settlement-work in Port Agnew first thing we know." "Hush, Elizabeth!" her mother cried sharply. She was highly scandalized at such levity. The Laird salted and peppered his food and said nothing. "Your attitude is very manly and sweet, dear," Mrs. McKaye continued, turning to her son, for her woman's intuition warned her that, if the discussion waxed warmer, The Laird would take a hand in it, and her side would go down to inglorious defeat, their arguments flattened by the weight of Scriptural quotations. She had a feeling that old Hector was preparing to remind them of Mary Magdalen and the scene in the temple. "I would much rather hear you speak a good word for that unfortunate girl than have you condemn her." "A moment ago," her son reminded her, with some asperity, for he was sorely provoked, "you were demanding the right of free speech for Jane, in order that she might condemn her. Mother, I fear me you're not quite consistent." "We will not discuss it further, dearie. It is not a matter of such importance that we should differ to the point of becoming acrimonious. Besides, it's a queer topic for dinner-table conversation." "So say we all of us," Elizabeth struck in laconically. "Dad, will you please help me to some of the well-done?" "Subjects," old Hector struck in, "which, twenty years ago, only the family doctor was supposed to be familiar with or permitted to discuss are now being agitated in women's clubs, books, newspapers, and the public schools. You can't smother sin or the facts of life unless they occur separately. In the case of Nan Brent they have developed coincidently; so we find it hard to regard her as normal and human." "Do you condone her offense, Hector?" Mrs. McKaye demanded incredulously. "I am a firm believer in the sacredness of marriage, I cannot conceive of a civilization worth while without it," The Laird declared earnestly. "Nevertheless, while I know naught of Nan Brent's case, except that which is founded on hearsay evidence, I can condone her offense because I can understand it. She might have developed into a far worse girl than it appears from Donald's account she is. At least, Nellie, she bore her child and cherishes it, and, under the rules of society as we play it, that required a kind of courage in which a great many girls are deficient. Give her credit for that." "Apparently she has been frank," Elizabeth answered him coolly. "On the other hand, father McKaye, her so-called courage may have been ignorance or apathy or cowardice or indifference. It all depends on her point of view." "I disagree with mother that it is not a matter of importance," Donald persisted. "It is a matter of supreme importance to me that my mother and sisters should not feel more charity toward an unfortunate member of their sex; and I happen to know that it is a matter of terrible importance to Nan Brent that in Port Agnew people regard her as unclean and look at her askance. And because that vacillating old Daney didn't have the courage to fly in the face of Port Agnew's rotten public opinion, he subjected Nan Brent and her helpless old father to the daily and nightly association of depraved people. If _he_ should dare to say one word against" "Oh, it wasn't because Andrew was afraid of public opinion, lad," Hector McKaye interrupted him dryly. "Have you no power o'deduction? Twas his guid wife that stayed his hand, and well I know it." "I dare say, dad," Donald laughed. "Yes; I suppose I'll have to forgive him." "She'll be up to-morrow, my dear, to discuss the matter with you," The Laird continued, turning to his wife. "I know her well. Beware of expressing an opinion to her." And he bent upon all the women of his household a smoldering glance. Apparently, by mutual consent, the subject was dropped forthwith. Donald's silence throughout the remainder of the meal was portentous, however, and Mrs. McKaye and her daughters were relieved when, the meal finished at last, they could retire with good grace and leave father and son to their cigars. "Doesn't it beat hell?" Donald burst forth suddenly, apropos of nothing. "It does, laddie." "I wonder why?" The Laird was in a philosophical mood. He weighed his answer carefully. "Because people prefer to have their thoughts manufactured for them; because fanatics and hypocrites have twisted the heart out of the Christian religion in the grand scramble for priority in the 'Who's Holier than Who' handicap; because people who earnestly believe that God knows their inmost thoughts cannot refrain from being human and trying to put one over on Him." He smoked in silence for a minute, his calm glance on the ceiling. "Now that you are what you are, my son," he resumed reflectively, "you'll begin to know men and women. They who never bothered to seek your favor before will fight for it now--they do the same thing with God Almighty, seeking to win his favor by outdoing him in the condemnation of sin. A woman's virtue, lad, is her main barricade against the world; in the matter of that, women are a close corporation. Man, how they do stand together! Their virtue's the shell that protects them, and when one of them leaves her shell or loses it, the others assess her out of the close corporation, for she's a minority stockholder." "Mother and the girls are up to their eyebrows in the work of an organization in Seattle designed to salvage female delinquents," Donald complained. "I can't understand their attitude." Old Hector hooted. "They don't do the salvaging. Not a bit of it! That unpleasant work is left to others, and the virtuous and respectable merely pay for it. Ken ye not, boy, 'twas ever the habit of people of means to patronize and coddle the lowly. If they couldn't do that, where would be the fun of being rich? Look in the Seattle papers. Who gets the advertising out of a charity ball if it isn't the rich? They organize it and they put it over, with the public paying for a look at them, and they attending the ball on complimentary tickets, although I will admit that when the bills are paid and the last shred of social triumph has been torn from the affair, the Bide-a-Wee Home for Unmarried Mothers can have what's left--and be damned to them." Donald laughed quietly. "Scotty, you're developing into an iconoclast. If your fellow plutocrats should hear you ranting in that vein, they'd call you a socialist." "Oh, I'm not saying there aren't a heap of exceptions. Many's the woman with a heart big enough to mother the world, although, when all's said and done; 'tis the poor that are kind to the poor, the unfortunate that can appreciate and forgive misfortune. I'm glad you stood by old Brent and his girl," he added approvingly. "I intend to accord her the treatment which a gentleman always accords the finest lady in the land, dad." "Or the lowest, my son. I've noticed that kind are not altogether unpopular with our finest gentlemen. Donald, I used to pray to God that I wouldn't raise a fool. I feel that he's answered my prayers, but if you should ever turn hypocrite, I'll start praying again." VIII Donald left the following morning in the automobile for the logging-camps up-river, and because of his unfamiliarity with their present location, his father's chauffeur drove him up. He was to be gone all week, but planned to return Saturday afternoon to spend Sunday with his family. As the car wound up the narrow river road, Donald found himself thinking of Nan Brent and her tragedy. Since his visit to the Sawdust Pile the day before, two pictures of her had persisted in his memory, every detail of both standing forth distinctly. In the first, she was a shabby, barelegged girl of thirteen, standing in the cockpit of his sloop, holding the little vessel on its course while he and old Caleb took a reef in the mainsail. The wilderness of gold that was her uncared-for hair blew behind her like a sunny burgee; her sea-blue eyes were fixed on the mainsail, out of which she adroitly spilled the wind at the proper moment, in order that Donald and her father might haul the reef-points home and make them fast. In his mind's eye, he could see the pulse beating in her throat as they prepared to come about, for on such occasions she always became excited; he saw again the sweet curve of her lips and her uplifted chin; he heard again her shrill voice crying, "Ready, about!" and saw the spokes spin as she threw the helm over and crouched from the swinging boom, although it cleared her pretty head by at least three feet. He listened again to her elfin laugh as she let the sloop fall off sufficiently to take the lip of a comber over the starboard counter and force Donald and her father to seek shelter from the spray in the lee of the mainsail, from which sanctuary, with more laughter, she presently routed them by causing the spray to come in over the port counter. The other picture was the pose in which he had seen her the morning previous at the Sawdust Pile, when, to hide her emotion, she had half turned from him and gazed so forlornly out across the Bight of Tyee. It had struck him then, with peculiar force, that Nan Brent never again would laugh that joyous elfin laugh of other days. He had seen the pulse beating in her creamy neck again--a neck fuller, rounder, glorious with the beauty of fully developed womanhood. And the riot of golden hair was subdued, with the exception of little wayward wisps that whipped her white temples. Her eyes, somewhat darker now, like the sea near the horizon after the sun has set but while the glory of the day still lingers, were bright with unshed tears. The sweet curves of her mouth were drawn in pain. The northwest trade-wind blowing across the bight had whipped her gingham dress round her, revealing the soft curves of a body, the beauty of which motherhood had intensified rather than diminished. Thus she had stood, the outcast of Port Agnew, and beside her the little badge of her shame, demanding the father he had never known and would never see. The young laird of Tyee wondered what sort of man could have done this thing--this monumental wickedness. His great fists were clenched as there welled within him a black rage at the scoundrel who had so wantonly wrecked that little home on the Sawdust Pile. He wondered, with the arrogance of his years, assuming unconsciously the right of special privilege, if Nan would ever reveal to him the identity of the villain. Perhaps, some day, in a burst of confidence, she might. Even if she did tell him, what could he do? To induce the recreant lover to marry her openly and legally would, he knew, be the world's way of "righting the wrong" and giving the baby a name, but the mischief had been done too long, and could never be undone unless, indeed, a marriage certificate, with proper dating, could be flaunted in the face of an iconoclastic and brutal world. Even then, there would remain that astute and highly virtuous few who would never cease to impart in whispers the information that, no matter what others might think, _they_ had their doubts. He was roused from his bitter cogitations by the chauffeur speaking. "This is Darrow, Mr. Donald. I don't believe you've seen it, have you? Darrow put in his mill and town while you were away." Donald looked over the motley collection of shacks as the automobile rolled down the single unpaved street. "Filthy hole," he muttered. "Hello! There's one of my late friends from the Sawdust Pile." A woman, standing in the open door of a shanty on the outskirts of the town had made a wry face and thrust out her tongue at him. He lifted his hat gravely, whereat she screamed a curse upon him. An instant later, an empty beer-bottle dropped with a crash in the tonneau, and Donald, turning, beheld in the door of a Darrow groggery one of the Greek fishermen He had dispossessed. "Stop the car!" Donald commanded. "I think that man wants to discuss a matter with me." "Sorry, sir, but I don't think it's wise to obey you just now," his father's chauffeur answered, and trod on the accelerator. "They call that place the 'Bucket of Blood,' and you'll need something more than your fists if you expect to enter there and come out under your own power." "Very well. Some other time, perhaps." "You don't appear to be popular in Darrow, Mr. Donald." "Those people left the Sawdust Pile yesterday--in a hurry," Donald explained. "Naturally, they're still resentful." "They were making quite a little money down there, I believe. Folks do say business was good, and when you take money from that kind of cattle you make a worth-while enemy. If I were you, sir, I'd watch my step in dark alleys, and I'd carry a gun." "When I have to carry a gun to protect myself from vermin like that mulatto and those shifty little Greeks, I'll be a few years older than I am now, Henry. However, I suppose I'd be foolish to neglect your warning to mind my step." He spent a busy week in the woods, and it was his humor to spend it entirely felling trees. The tough, experienced old choppers welcomed him with keen interest and played freeze-out each night in the bunk-houses to see which one should draw him for a partner next day; for the choppers worked in pairs, likewise the cross-cut men. Their bucolic sense of humor impelled the choppers to speed up when they found themselves paired with the new boss, for it would have been a feather in the cap of the man who could make him quit or send him home at nightfall "with his tail dragging," as the woods boss expressed it. Donald sported a wondrous set of blisters at the close of that first day, but after supper he opened them, covered them with adhesive tape, and went back to work next morning as if nothing had happened. During those five days, he learned considerable of the art of dropping a tree exactly where he desired it, and bringing it to earth without breakage. He rode down to Port Agnew with the woods crew on the last log-train Saturday night, walked into the mill office, and cashed in his time-slip for five days' work as a chopper. He had earned two dollars a day and his board and lodging. His father, who had driven into town to meet him, came to the window and watched him humorously. "So that's the way you elect to work it, eh?" he queried. "I told Daney to pay you my salary when I quit." "I like to feel that I'm earning my stipend," Donald replied, "so it pleases me to draw the wages of the job I'm working at. When I'm thoroughly acquainted with all the jobs in the Tyee Lumber Company, or at least have a good working knowledge of them, I think I'll be a better boss." The Laird took his son's big brown hands in his and looked at the palms. "I rather think I like it so," he answered. "A man whose hands have never bled or whose back has never ached is a poor man to judge a labor dispute. 'Twould improve you if you were a married man and had to live on that for a week, less twenty-five cents for your hospital dues. The choppers pay a dollar a month toward the hospital, and that covers medical attendance for them and their families." Donald laughed and flipped a quarter over to the cashier, then turned and handed ten dollars to a wiry little chopper standing in line. "I was feeling so good this morning I bet Sandy my week's pay I could fell a tree quicker than he and with less breakage. He won in a walk," he explained to The Laird. "Come with me," his father ordered, and led him into the office. From the huge safe he selected a ledger, scanned the index, and opened it at a certain account headed, "Sandy dough." To Sandy's credit each month, extending over a period of fifteen years, appeared a credit of thirty dollars. "That's what it's costing me to have discovered Sandy," his father informed him; "but since I had served an apprenticeship as a chopper, the time required to discover Sandy was less than half an hour, I watched him one day when he didn't know who I was--so I figured him for a man and a half and raised him a dollar a day. He doesn't know it, however. If he did, he'd brag about it, and I'd have to pay as much to men half as good. When he's chopped for us twenty years, fire him and give him that. He's earned it. Thus endeth the first lesson, my son. Now come home to dinner." After dinner, Donald returned to town to buy himself some working-clothes at the general store. His purchases completed, he sought the juvenile department. "I want some kid's clothing," he announced. "To fit a child of three. Rompers, socks, shoes--the complete outfit. Charge them to my account and send them over to Nan Brent at the Sawdust Pile. I'll give you a note to enclose with them." Notwithstanding the fact that she was an employe of the Tyee Lumber Company, the girl who waited on him stared at him frankly. He noticed this and bent upon her a calm glance that brought a guilty flush to her cheek. Quickly she averted her eyes, but, nevertheless she had a feeling that the young laird of Tyee was still appraising her, and, unable to withstand the fascination peculiar to such a situation, she looked at him again to verify her suspicions--and it was even so. In great confusion she turned to her stock, and Donald, satisfied that he had squelched her completely, went into the manager's office, wrote, and sealed the following note to Nan Brent: Saturday night. FRIEND NAN: Here are some duds for the young fellow. You gave me the right to look after him, you know; at least, you didn't decline it. At any rate, I think you will not mind accepting them from me. I sent to Seattle for some books I thought you might like. They have probably arrived by parcel-post. Sent you a box of candy, also, although I have forgotten the kind you used to prefer. Been up in the logging-camp all week, chopping, and I ache all over. Expect to be hard and not quite so weary by next week-end, and will call over for Sunday dinner. Sincerely, DONALD McKAYE He spent Sunday at The Dreamerie, and at four o'clock Sunday afternoon boarded the up train and returned to the logging-camp. Mrs. Andrew Daney, seated in Sunday-afternoon peace upon her front veranda, looked up from the columns of the _Churchman_ as the long string of logging-trucks wound round the base of the little knoll upon which the general manager's home stood; but even at a distance of two blocks, she recognized the young laird of Tyee in the cab with the engineer. "Dear, dear!" this good soul murmured. "And such a nice young man, too! I should think he'd have more consideration for his family, if not for himself." "Who's that?" Mr. Daney demanded, emerging from behind the Seattle _Post-Intelligencer_. "Donald McKaye." "What about him?" Mr. Daney demanded, with slight emphasis on the pronoun. "Oh, nothing; only--" "Only what?" "People say he's unduly interested in Nan Brent." "If he is, that's his business. Don't let what people say trouble you, Mrs. Daney." "Well, can I help it if people will talk?" "Yes--when they talk to you." "How do you know they've been talking to me, Andrew?" she demanded foolishly. "Because you know what they say." Andrew Daney rose from the wicker deck-chair in which he had been lounging and leveled his index-finger at the partner of his joys and sorrows. "You forget Donald McKaye and that Brent girl," he ordered. "It's none of your business. All Don has to say to me is, 'Mr. Daney, your job is vacant'--and, by Judas Priest, it'll be vacant. Remember that, my dear." "Nonsense, dear. The Laird wouldn't permit it--after all these years." "If it comes to a test of strength, I'll lose, and don't you forget it. Old sake's sake is all that saved me from a run-in with Donald before he had been in command fifteen minutes. I refer to that Sawdust Pile episode. You dissuaded me from doing my duty in that matter, Mary, and my laxity was not pleasing to Donald. I don't blame him a whit." "Did he say anything?" she demanded, a trifle alarmed. "No; but he looked it." "How did he look, Andrew?" "He looked," her husband replied, "like the Blue Bonnets coming over the border--that's what he looked like. Then he went down to the Sawdust Pile like a raging demon, cleaned it out in two twos, and put it to the torch. You be careful what you say to people, Mary. Get that boy started once, and he'll hark back to his paternal ancestors; and if The Laird has ever told you the history of that old claymore that hangs on the wall in The Dreamerie, you know that the favorite outdoor sports of the McKaye tribe were fighting and foot-racing--with the other fellow in front." "The Laird is mild enough," she defended. "Yes, he is. But when he was young, he could, and frequently did, whip twice his weight in bear-cats. Old as he is to-day, he's as sound as a man of forty; he wouldn't budge an inch for man or devil." Mrs. Daney carefully folded the _Churchman_, laid it aside, and placed her spectacles with it. "Andrew, I know it's terrible of me to breathe such a thing, but--did it ever occur to you that--perhaps--the father of Nan Brent's child might be--" "Donald?" he exploded incredulously. She nodded, and about her nod there was something of that calm self-confidence of an attorney who is winning his case and desires to impress that fact upon the jury. "By God, woman," cried Daney, "you have the most infernal ideas--" "Andrew! Remember it's the Sabbath!" "It's a wonder my language doesn't shrivel this paper. Now then, where in hades do you get this crazy notion?" Daney was thoroughly angry. She gazed up at him in vague apprehension. Had she gone too far? Suddenly he relaxed. "No; don't tell me," he growled. "I'll not be a gossip. God forgive me, I was about to befoul the very salt I eat. I'll not be disloyal." "But, Andrew dear, don't you know I wouldn't dare breathe it to anyone but you?" "I don't know how much you'd dare. At any rate, I'll excuse you from breathing it to me, for I'm not interested. I know it isn't true." "Then, Andrew, it is your duty to tell me why you know it isn't true, in order that I may set at rest certain rumors--" "You--mind--your--own--business, Mary!" he cried furiously, punctuating each word with a vigorous tap of his finger on the arm of her chair. "The McKayes meet their responsibilities as eagerly as they do their enemies. If that child were young Donald's, he'd have married the Brent girl, and if he had demurred about it, The Laird would have ordered him to." "Thank you for that vote of confidence in the McKaye family, Andrew," said a quiet voice. "I think you have the situation sized up just right." Andrew Daney whirled; his wife glanced up, startled, then half rose and settled back in her chair again, for her legs absolutely refused to support her. Standing at the foot of the three steps that led off the veranda was Hector McKaye! "I drove Donald down from The Dreamerie to catch the up train, and thought I'd drop over and visit with you a bit," he explained. "I didn't intend to eavesdrop, and I didn't--very much; but since I couldn't help overhearing such a pertinent bit of conversation, I'll come up and we'll get to the bottom of it. Keep your seat, Mrs. Daney." The advice was unnecessary. The poor soul could not have left it. The Laird perched himself on the veranda railing, handed the dumfounded Daney a cigar, and helped himself to one. "Well, proceed," The Laird commanded. His words apparently were addressed to both, but his glance was fixed on Mrs. Daney--and now she understood full well her husband's description of the McKaye look. "I had finished what I had to say, Mr. McKaye," Andrew Daney found courage to say. "So I noted, Andrew, and right well and forcibly you said it. I'm grateful to you. I make no mistake, I think, if your statement wasn't in reply to some idle tale told your good wife and repeated by her to you--in confidence, of course, as between man and wife." "If you'll excuse me, Mr. McKaye, I--I'd rather not--discuss it!" Mary Daney cried breathlessly. "I would I did not deem it a duty to discuss it myself, Mary. But you must realize that when the tongue of scandal touches my son, it becomes a personal matter with me, and I must look well for a weapon to combat it. You'll tell me now, Mary, what they've been saying about Donald and Caleb Brent's daughter." "Andrew will tell you," she almost whispered, and made as if to go. But The Laird's fierce eyes deterred her; she quailed and sat down again. "Andrew cannot tell me, because Andrew doesn't know," The Laird rebuked her kindly. "I heard him tell you not to tell him, that he wasn't a gossip, and wouldn't befoul the salt he ate by being disloyal, or words to that effect. Is it possible, Mary Daney, that you prefer me to think you are not inspired by similar sentiments? Don't cry, Mary--compose yourself." "Idleness is the mother of mischief, and since the children have grown up and left home, Mary hasn't enough to keep her busy," Daney explained. "So, womanlike and without giving sober thought to the matter, she's been listening to the idle chattering of other idle women. Now then, my dear," he continued, turning to his wife, "that suspicion you just voiced didn't grow in your head. Somebody put it there--and God knows it found fertile soil. Out with it now, wife! Who've you been gossiping with?" "I'll name no names," the unhappy woman sobbed; "but somebody told me that somebody else was down at the Sawdust Pile the day Donald burned those shacks, and after be burned them he spent an hour in the Brent cottage, and when he came out he had the baby in his arms. When he left, the child made a great to-do and called him, 'daddy.'" The Laird smiled. "Well, Mary, what would you expect the boy to do? Beat the child? To my knowledge, he's been robbing the candy department of my general store for years, and the tots of Port Agnew have been the beneficiaries of his vandalism. He was born with a love of children. And would you convict him on the prattle of an innocent child in arms?" "Certainly not, Mr. McKaye. I understand. Well then, on Saturday night he sent over a complete outfit of clothing for the child, with a note in the bundle--" "Hm-m-m." "And then somebody remembered that the child's name is Donald." "How old is that child, Mrs. Daney?" She considered. "As I recall it, he'll be three years old in October." "Since, you're a married woman, Mrs. Daney," The Laird began, with old-fashioned deprecation for the blunt language he was about to employ, "you'll admit that the child wasn't found behind one of old Brent's cabbages. This is the year 1916." But Mrs. Daney anticipated him. "They've figured it out," she interrupted, "and Donald was home from college for the holidays in 1912." "So he was," The Laird replied complacently. "I'd forgotten. So that alibi goes by the board. What else now? Does the child resemble my son?" "Nobody knows. Nan Brent doesn't receive visitors, and she hasn't been up-town since the child was born." "Is that all, Mary?" "All I have heard so far." Old Hector was tempted to tell her that, in his opinion, she had heard altogether too much, but his regard for her husband caused him to refrain. "It's little enough, and yet it's a great deal," he answered. "You'll be kind enough, Mary, not to carry word of this idle gossip to The Dreamerie, I should regret that very much." She flushed with the knowledge that, although he forgave her, still he distrusted her and considered a warning necessary. However, she nodded vigorous acceptance of his desire, and immediately he changed the topic. While, for him, the quiet pleasure he had anticipated in the visit had not materialized and he longed to leave at once, for Daney's sake he remained for tea. When he departed, Mrs. Daney ran to her room and found surcease from her distress in tears, while her husband sat out on the veranda smoking one of The Laird's fine cigars, his embarrassment considerably alleviated by the knowledge that his imprudent wife had received a lesson that should last for the remainder of her life. About eight o'clock, his wife called him to the telephone. The Laird was on the wire. "In the matter of the indiscreet young lady in the store, Andrew," he ordered, "do not dismiss her or reprimand her. The least said in such cases is soonest mended." "Very well, sir." "Good-night, Andrew." "Good-night, sir." "Poor man!" Daney sighed, as he hung up. "He's thought of nothing else since he heard about it; it's a canker in his heart. I wish I dared indicate to Donald the fact that he's being talked about--and watched--by the idle and curious, in order that he may bear himself accordingly. He'd probably misunderstand my motives however." IX During the week, Mary Daney refrained from broaching the subject of that uncomfortable Sunday afternoon, wherefore her husband realized she was thinking considerably about it and, as a result, was not altogether happy. Had he suspected, however, the trend her thoughts were taking, he would have been greatly perturbed. Momentous thoughts rarely racked Mrs. Daney's placid and somewhat bovine brain, but once she became possessed with the notion that Nan Brent was the only human being possessed of undoubted power to create or suppress a scandal which some queer feminine intuition warned her impended, the more firmly did she become convinced that it was her Christian duty to call upon Nan Brent and strive to present the situation in a common-sense light to that erring young Woman. Having at length attained to this resolution, a subtle peace settled over Mrs. Daney, the result, doubtless, of a consciousness of virtue regained, since she was about to right a wrong to which she had so thoughtlessly been a party. Her decision had almost been reached when her husband, coming home for luncheon at noon on Saturday, voiced the apprehension which had harassed him during the week. "Donald will be home from the woods to-night," he announced, in troubled tones. "I do hope he'll not permit that big heart of his to lead him into further kindnesses that will be misunderstood by certain people in case they hear of them. I have never known a man so proud and fond of a son as The Laird is of Donald." "Nonsense!" his wife replied complacently. "The Laird has forgotten all about it." "Perhaps. Nevertheless, he will watch his son, and if, by any chance, the boy should visit the Sawdust Pile--" "Then it will be time enough to worry about him, Andrew. In the meantime, it's none of our business, dear. Eat your luncheon and don't think about it." He relapsed into moody silence. When he had departed for the mill office, however, his wife's decision had been reached. Within the hour she was on her way to the Sawdust Pile, but as she approached Caleb Brent's garden gate, she observed, with a feeling of gratification, that, after all, it was not going to be necessary for her to be seen entering the house or leaving it. Far up the strand she saw a woman and a little child sauntering. Nan Brent looked up at the sound of footsteps crunching the shingle, identified Mrs. Daney at a glance, and turned her head instantly, at the same time walking slowly away at right angles, in order to obviate a meeting. To her surprise, Mrs. Daney also changed her course, and Nan, observing this out of the corner of her eye, dropped her apronful of driftwood and turned to face her visitor. "Good afternoon, Miss Brent. May I speak to you for a few minutes?" "Certainly, Mrs. Daney." Mrs. Daney nodded condescendingly and sat down on the white sand. "Be seated, Miss Brent, if you please." "Well, perhaps if we sit down, we will be less readily recognized at a distance." Nan replied smilingly, and was instantly convinced that she had read her visitor's mind aright, for Mrs. Daney flushed slightly. "Suppose," the girl suggested gently, "that you preface what you have to say by calling me 'Nan.' You knew me well enough to call me that in an earlier and happier day, Mrs. Daney." "Thank you, Nan. I shall accept your invitation and dispense with formality." She hesitated for a beginning, and Nan, observing her slight embarrassment, was gracious enough to aid her by saying: "I dare say your visit has something to do with the unenviable social position in which I find myself in Port Agnew, Mrs. Daney, for I cannot imagine any other possible interest in me to account for it. So you may be quite frank. I'm sure nothing save a profound sense of duty brought you here, and I am prepared to listen." This was a degree of graciousness the lady had not anticipated, and it put her at her ease immediately. "I've called to talk to you about Donald McKaye," she began abruptly. "At the solicitation of whom?" "Nobody." Mrs. Daney sighed. "It was just an idea of mine." "Ah--I think I prefer it that way. Proceed, Mrs. Daney." "Young Mr. McKaye is unduly interested in you, Nan--at least, that is the impression of a number of people in Port Agnew." "I object to the use of the adverb 'unduly' in connection with Mr. Donald's interest in my father and me. But no matter. Since Port Agnew has no interest in me, pray why, Mrs. Daney, should I have the slightest interest in the impressions of these people you refer to and whose volunteer representative you appear to be?" "There! I knew you would be offended!" Mrs. Daney cried, with a deprecatory shrug. "I'm sure I find this a most difficult matter to discuss, and I assure you, I do not desire to appear offensive." "Well, you are; but I can stand it, and whether I resent it or not cannot be a matter of much import to you or the others. And I'll try not to be disagreeable. Just why did you come to see me, Mrs. Daney?" "I might as well speak plainly, Miss Brent. Donald McKaye's action in ridding the Sawdust Pile of your neighbors has occasioned comment. It appears that this was his first official act after assuming his father's place in the business. Then he visited you and your father for an hour, and your child, whom it appears you have named Donald, called him 'daddy.' Then, last Saturday night, Mr. McKaye sent over some clothing for the boy--" "Whereupon the amateur detectives took up the trail," Nan interrupted bitterly. "And you heard of it immediately." "His father heard of it also," Mrs. Daney continued. "It worries him." "It should not. He should have more faith in his son, Mrs. Daney." "He is a father, my dear, very proud of his son, very devoted to him, and fearfully ambitious for Donald's future." "And you fear that I may detract from the radiance of that future? Is that it?" "In plain English," the worthy lady replied brutally, "it is." "I see your point of view very readily, Mrs. Daney. Your apprehensions are ridiculous--almost pathetic, Don McKaye's great sympathy is alone responsible for his hardihood in noticing me, and he is so much too big for Port Agnew that it is no wonder his motives are misunderstood. However, I am sorry his father is worried. We have a very great respect for The Laird; indeed, we owe him a debt of gratitude, and there is nothing my father or I would not do to preserve his peace of mind." "The talk will die out, of course, unless something should occur to revive it, Miss Brent--I mean, Nan. But it would be just like Donald McKaye to start a revival of this gossip. He doesn't care a farthing for what people think or say, and he is too young to realize that one _must_ pay _some_ attention to public opinion. You realize that, of course." "I ought to, Mrs. Daney. I think I have had some experience of public opinion," Nan replied sadly. "Then, should Donald McKaye's impulsive sympathy lead him to--er--" "You mean that I am to discourage him in the event--" "Precisely, Miss Brent. For his father's sake." "Not to mention your husband's position. Precisely, Mrs. Daney." Mary Daney's heart fluttered. "I have trusted to your honor, Nan--although I didn't say so in the beginning--not to mention my visit or this interview to a living soul." "My 'honor!'" Nan's low, bitter laugh raked the Daney nerves like a rasp. "I think, Mrs. Daney, that I may be depended upon to follow my own inclinations in this matter. I suspect you have been doing some talking yourself and may have gone too far, with the result that you are hastening now, by every means in your power, to undo whatever harm, real or fancied, has grown out of your lack of charity." "Nan, I beg of you--" "Don't! You have no right to beg anything of me. I am not unintelligent and neither am I degraded. I think I possess a far keener conception of my duty than do you or those whom you have elected to represent; hence I regard this visit as an unwarranted impertinence. One word from me to Donald McKaye--" Terror smote the Samaritan. She clasped her hands; her lips were pale and trembling. "Oh, my dear, my dear," she pleaded, "you wouldn't breathe a word to him, would you? Promise me you'll say nothing. How could I face my husband if--if--" She began to weep. "I shall promise nothing," Nan replied sternly. "But I only came for his father's sake, you cruel girl!" "Perhaps his father's case is safer in my hands than in yours, Mrs. Daney, and safest of all in those of his son." The outcast of Port Agnew rose, filled her apron with the driftwood she had gathered, and called to her child. As the little fellow approached, Mrs. Daney so far forgot her perturbation as to look at him keenly and decide, eventually, that he bore not the faintest resemblance to Donald McKaye. "I'm sure, Nan, you will not be heartless enough to tell Donald McKaye of my visit to you," she pleaded, as the girl started down the beach. "You have all the assurance of respectability, dear Mrs. Daney," Nan answered carelessly. "You shall not leave me until you promise to be silent!" Mary Daney cried hysterically, and rose to follow her. "I think you had better go, Mrs. Daney. I am quite familiar with the figure of The Laird since his retirement; he walks round the bight with his dogs every afternoon for exercise, and, if I am not greatly mistaken, that is he coming down the beach." Mrs. Daney cast a terrified glance in the direction indicated. A few hundred yards up the beach she recognized The Laird, striding briskly along, swinging his stick, and with his two English setters romping beside him. With a final despairing "Please Nan; please do not be cruel!" she fled, Nan Brent smiling mischievously after her stout retreating form. "I have condemned you to the horrors of uncertainty," the girl soliloquized. "How very, very stupid you are, Mrs. Daney, to warn me to protect him! As if I wouldn't lay down my life to uphold his honor! Nevertheless, you dear old bungling busybody, you are absolutely right, although I suspect no altruistic reason carried you forth on this uncomfortable errand." Nan had heretofore, out of the bitterness of her life, formed the opinion that brickbats were for the lowly, such as she, and bouquets solely for the great, such as Donald McKaye. Now, for the first time, she realized that human society is organized in three strata--high, mediocre, and low, and that when a mediocrity has climbed to the seats of the mighty, his fellows strive to drag him back, down to their own ignoble level--or lower. To Nan, child of poverty, sorrow, and solitude, the world had always appeared more or less incomprehensible, but this afternoon, as she retraced her slow steps to the Sawdust Pile, the old dull pain of existence had become more complicated and acute with the knowledge that the first ray of sunlight that had entered her life in three years was about to be withdrawn; and at the thought, tears, which seemed to well from her heart rather than from her eyes, coursed down her cheeks and a sob broke through her clenched lips. Her progress homeward, what with the heavy bundle of driftwood, in her apron impeding her stride, coupled with the necessity for frequent pauses to permit her child to catch up with her, was necessarily slow--so slow, in fact, that presently she heard quick footsteps behind her and, turning, beheld Hector McKaye. He smiled, lifted his hat, and greeted her pleasantly. "Good-afternoon, Miss Nan. That is a heavy burden of driftwood you carry, my dear. Here--let me relieve you of it. I've retired, you know, and the necessity for finding something to do--Bless my soul, the girl's crying!" He paused, hat in hand, and gazed at her with frank concern. She met his look bravely. "Thank you, Mr. McKaye. Please do not bother about it." "Oh, but I shall bother," he answered. "Remove your apron, girl, and I'll tie the wood up in it and carry it home for you." Despite her distress, she smiled. "You're such an old-fashioned gentleman," she replied. "So very much like your son--I mean, your son is so very much like you." "That's better. I think I enjoy the compliment more when you put it that way," he answered. "Do not stand there holding the wood, my girl. Drop it." She obeyed and employed her right hand, thus freed, in wiping the telltale tears from her sweet face. "I have been lax in neighborly solicitude," The Laird continued. "I must send you over a supply of wood from the box factory. We have more waste than we can use in the furnaces. Is this your little man, Nan? Sturdy little chap, isn't he? Come here, bub, and let me heft you." He swung the child from the sands, and while pretending to consider carefully the infant's weight, he searched the cherubic countenance with a swift, appraising glance. "Healthy little rascal," he continued, and swung the child high in the air two or three times, smiling paternally as the latter screamed with delight. "How do you like that, eh?" he demanded, as he set the boy down on the sand again. "Dood!" the child replied, and gazing up at The Laird yearningly. "Are you my daddy?" But The Laird elected to disregard the pathetic query and busied himself gathering up the bundle of driftwood, nor did he permit his glance to rest upon Nan Brent's flushed and troubled face. Tucking the bundle under one arm and taking Nan's child on the other, he whistled to his dogs and set out for the Sawdust Pile, leaving the girl to follow behind him. He preceded her through the gate, tossed the driftwood on a small pile in the yard, and turned to hand her the apron. "You are not altogether happy, poor girl!" he said kindly. "I'm very sorry. I want the people in my town to be happy." "I shall grow accustomed to it, Mr. McKaye," Nan answered. "To-day, I am merely a little more depressed than usual. Thank you so much for carrying the wood. You are more than kind." His calm, inscrutable gray glance roved over her, noting her beauty and her sweetness, and the soul of him was troubled. "Is it something you could confide in an old man?" he queried gently. "You are much neglected, and I--I understand the thoughts that must come to you sometimes. Perhaps you would be happier elsewhere than in Port Agnew." "Perhaps," she replied dully. "If you could procure work--some profession to keep your mind off your troubles--I have some property in Tacoma--suburban lots with cottages on them." The Laird grew confused and embarrassed because of the thought that was in the back of his mind, and was expressing himself jerkily and in disconnected sentences. "I do not mean--I do not offer charity, for I take it you have had enough insults--well, you and your father could occupy one of those cottages at whatever you think you could afford to pay, and I would be happy to advance you any funds you might need until you--could--that is, of course, you must get on your feet again, and you must have help--" He waved his hand. "All this oppresses me." The remembrance of Mrs. Daney's interview with her prompted the girl to flash back at him. "'Oppresses,' Mr. McKaye? Since when?" He gazed upon her in frank admiration for her audacity and perspicacity. "Yes," he admitted slowly; "I dare say I deserve that. Yet, mingled with that ulterior motive you have so unerringly discerned, there is a genuine, if belated, desire to be decently human. I think you realize that also." "I should be stupid and ungrateful did I not, Mr. McKaye. I am sorry I spoke just now as I did, but I could not bear--" "To permit me to lay the flattering unction to my soul that I had gotten away with something, eh?" he laughed, much more at his ease, now that he realized how frank and yet how tactful she could be. "It wasn't quite worthy of you--not because I might resent it, for I am nobody, but because you should have more faith in yourself and be above the possibility of disturbance at the hands--or rather, the tongues--of people who speak in whispers." She came close to him suddenly and laid her hand lightly on his forearm, for she was speaking with profound earnestness. "I am your debtor, Mr. McKaye, for that speech you found it so hard to make just now, and for past kindnesses from you and your son. I cannot accept your offer. I would like to, did my pride permit, and were it not for the fact that such happiness as is left to my father can only be found by the Bight of Tyee. So, while he lives I shall not desert him. As for your apprehensions"--she smiled tolerantly and whimsically--"though flattering to me, they are quite unnecessary, and I beg you rid your mind of them. I am--that which I am; yet I am more than I appear to be to some and I shall not wantonly or wilfully hurt you--or yours." The Laird of Tyee took in both of his the slim hand that rested so lightly on his sleeve--that dainty left hand with the long, delicate fingers and no wedding ring. "My dear child," he murmured, "I feel more than I dare express. Good-by and may God bless you and be good to you, for I fear the world will not." He bowed with old-fashioned courtesy over her hand and departed; yet such was his knowledge of life that now his soul was more deeply troubled than it had been since his unintentional eavesdropping on his manager's garrulous wife. "What a woman!" he reflected. "Brains, imagination, dignity, womanly pride, courage, beauty and--yes; I agree with Donald. Neither maid, wife nor widow is she--yet she is not, never has been, and never will be a woman without virtue. Ah, Donald, my son, she's a bonny lass! For all her fall, she's not a common woman and my son is not a common man--I wonder--Oh, 'tis lies, lies, lies, and she's heard them and knows they're lies. Ah, my son, my son, with the hot blood of youth in you--you've a man's head and heart and a will of your own--Aye, she's sweet--that she is--I wonder!" X At the front of Caleb Brent's little house there was a bench upon which the old man was wont to sit on sunny days--usually in the morning, before the brisk, cool nor'west trade-wind commenced to blow. Following Hector McKaye's departure, Nan sought this bench until she had sufficiently mastered her emotions to conceal from her father evidence of a distress more pronounced than usual; as she sat there, she revolved the situation in her mind, scanning every aspect of it, weighing carefully every possibility. In common with the majority of human kind, Nan considered herself entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and now, at a period when, in the ordinary course of events, all three of these necessary concomitants of successful existence (for, to her, life meant something more than mere living) should have been hers in bounteous measure, despite the handicap under which she had been born, she faced a future so barren that sometimes the distant boom of the breakers on Tyee Head called to her to desert her hopeless fight and in the blue depths out yonder find haven from the tempests of her soul. In an elder day, when the Sawdust Pile had been Port Agnew's garbage-dump, folks who clipped their rose bushes and thinned out their marigold plants had been accustomed to seeing these slips take root again and bloom on the Sawdust Pile for a brief period after their ash-cans had been emptied there; and, though she did not know it, Nan Brent bore pitiful resemblance to these outcast flowers. Here, on the reclaimed Sawdust Pile, she had bloomed from girlhood into lovely womanhood--a sweet forget-me-not in the Garden of Life, she had been transplanted into Eden until Fate, the grim gardener, had cast her out, to take root again on the Sawdust Pile and ultimately to wither and die. It is terrible for the great of soul, the ambitious, the imaginative, when circumstances condemn them to life amid dull, uninteresting, drab, and sometimes sordid surroundings. Born to love and be loved, Nan Brent's soul beat against her environment even as a wild bird, captured and loosed in a room, beats against the window-pane. From the moment she had felt within her the vague stirrings of womanhood, she had been wont to gaze upon the blue-back hills to the east, to the horizon out west, wondering what mysteries lay beyond, and yearning to encounter them. Perhaps it was the sea-faring instinct, the _Wanderlust_ of her forebears; perhaps it was a keener appreciation of the mediocrity of Port Agnew than others in the little town possessed, a realization that she had more to give to life than life had to give to her. Perhaps it had been merely the restlessness that is the twin of a rare heritage--the music of the spheres--for with such had Nan been born. It is hard to harken for the reedy music of Pan and hear only the whine of a sawmill or the boom of the surf. Of her mother, Nan had seen but little. Her recollections of her mother were few and vague; of her mother's people, she knew nothing save the fact that they dwelt in a world quite free of Brents, and that her mother had committed a distinctly social _faux pas_ in marrying Caleb Brent she guessed long before Caleb Brent, in his brave simplicity, had imparted that fact to her. An admiral's daughter, descendant of an old and wealthy Revolutionary family, the males of which had deemed any calling other than the honorable profession of arms as beneath the blood and traditions of the family, Nan's mother had been the pet of Portsmouth until, inexplicably, Caleb Brent, a chief petty officer on her father's flag-ship, upon whom the hero's medal had just been bestowed, had found favor in her eyes. The ways of love, as all the philosophers of the ages are agreed, are beyond definition or understanding; even in his own case, Caleb Brent was not equal to the task of understanding how their love had grown, burgeoned into an engagement, and ripened into marriage. He only knew that, from a meek and well-disciplined petty officer, he had suddenly developed the courage of a Sir Galahad, and, while under the influence of a strange spell, had respectfully defied the admiral, who had foolishly assumed that, even if his daughter would not obey him, his junior in the service would. Then had come the baby girl, Nan, the divorce--pressed by the mother's family--and the mother's death. If his wife had discerned in him the nobility that was so apparent to his daughter--Poor old hero! But Nan always checked her meditations at this point. They didn't seem quite fair to her mother. Seated on the bench this afternoon, Nan reviewed her life from her sixth year, the year in which her father had claimed her. Until her eighteenth year, she had not been unhappy, for, following their arrival in Port Agnew, her father had prospered to a degree which permitted his daughter the enjoyment of the ordinary opportunities of ordinary people. If she had not known extravagance in the matter of dress, neither had she known penury; when her feminine instinct impelled her to brighten and beautify the little home on the Sawdust Pile from time to time, she had found that possible. She had been graduated with honors from the local high school, and, being a book-lover of catholic taste and wide range, she was, perhaps, more solidly educated than the majority of girls who have had opportunities for so-called higher education. With the broad democracy of sawmill towns, she had not, in the days gone by, been excluded from the social life of the town, such as it was, and she had had her beaus, such as they were. Sometimes she wondered how the choir in the Presbyterian church had progressed since she, once the mezzo-soprano soloist, had resigned to sing lullabys to a nameless child, if Andrew Daney still walked on the tips of his shoes when he passed the collection-plate, and if the mortgage on the church had ever been paid. She rose wearily and entered the little house. Old Caleb sat at the dining-room table playing solitaire. He looked up as she entered, swept the cards into a heap and extended his old arm to encircle her waist as she sat on the broad arm of his chair. She drew his gray head down on her breast. "Dadkins," she said presently, "Donald McKaye isn't coming to dinner to-morrow after all." "Oh, that's too bad, Nan! Has he written you? What's happened?" "No; he hasn't written me, and nothing's happened. I have decided to send him word not to come." [Illustration: SHE STOLE TO THE OLD SQUARE PIANO AND SANG FOR HIM.] "Aren't you feeling well, my dear?" "It isn't that, popsy-wops. He's the new laird of Tyee now, and he must be careful of the company he keeps." Old Caleb growled in his throat. "Much he cares what people think." "I know it. And much I care what people think, for I've grown accustomed to their thoughts. But I do care what his father thinks, for, of course, he has plans for Donald's future, and if Donald, out of the kindness of his heart, should become a frequent visitor here, The Laird would hear of it sooner or later--sooner, perhaps, for it would never occur to Donald to conceal it--and then the poor laird would be worried. And we don't owe The Laird that, father Brent!" "No; we do not." The old face was troubled. "I met Mrs. Daney on the beach, and it was she who gave me the intimation that The Laird had heard some cruel gossip that was disturbing him." "I'm sorry. Well, use your own judgment, daughter." "I'm sure Donald will understand," she assured him. "And he will not think the less of us for doing it." She got up and went to the peculiar and wholly impractical little desk which Mrs. McKaye had picked up in Italy and which Donald, calm in the knowledge that his mother would never use it or miss it, had given her to help furnish the house when first they had come to the Sawdust Pile. On a leaf torn from a tablet, she wrote: THE SAWDUST PILE, Saturday Afternoon. DEAR DONALD: I had planned to reserve my thanks for the books and the candy until you called for dinner to-morrow. Now, I have decided that it will be better for you not to come to dinner to-morrow, although this decision has not been made without father and me being sensible of a keen feeling of disappointment. We had planned to sacrifice an old hen that has outlived her margin of profit, hoping that, with the admixture of a pinch of saleratus, she would prove tender enough to tempt the appetite of a lumberjack, but, upon sober second thought, it seems the part of wisdom to let her live. We honor and respect you, Donald. You are so very dear to us that we wish to cherish always your good opinion of us; we want everybody in Port Agnew to think of you as we do. People will misunderstand and misconstrue your loyalty to the old friends of your boyhood if you dare admit your friendship. Indeed, some have already done so. I thank you for the books and the candy, but with all my heart I am grateful to you for a gift infinitely more precious but which is too valuable for me to accept. I shall have to treasure it at a distance. Sometimes, at colors, you might wave to Your old friend, NAN BRENT. Her letter completed, she sealed it in a plain white envelop, after which she changed into her best dress and shoes and departed up-town. Straight to the mill office of the Tyee Lumber Company she went, her appearance outside the railing in the general office being the signal for many a curious and speculative glance from the girls and young men at work therein. One of the former, with whom Nan had attended high school, came over to the railing and, without extending a greeting, either of word or smile, asked, in businesslike tones, "Whom do you wish to see?" In direct contrast with this cool salutation, Nan inclined her head graciously and smilingly said: "Why, how do you do, Hetty? I wonder if I might be permitted a minute of Mr. Daney's time." "I'll see," Hetty replied, secretly furious in the knowledge that she had been serenely rebuked, and immediately disappeared in the general manager's office. A moment later, she emerged. "Mr. Daney will see you, Miss Brent," she announced. "First door to your right. Go right in." "Thank you very much, Hetty." Andrew Daney, seated at a desk, stood up as she entered. "How do you do, Nan?" he greeted her, with masculine cordiality, and set out a chair. "Please be seated and tell me what I can do to oblige you." A swift scrutiny of the private office convinced her that they were alone; so she advanced to the desk and laid upon it the letter she had addressed to Donald McKaye. "I would be grateful, Mr. Daney, if you would see that Mr. Donald McKaye receives this letter when he comes in from the woods to-night," she replied. Daney was frankly amazed. "Bless my soul," he blurted, "why do you entrust me with it? Would it not have been far simpler to have mailed it?" "Not at all, Mr. Daney. In the first place, the necessity for writing it only developed an hour ago, and in order to be quite certain Mr. McKaye would receive it this evening, I would have had to place a special-delivery stamp upon it. I did not have a special-delivery stamp; so, in order to get one, I would have had to go to the post-office and buy it. And the instant I did that, the girl on duty at the stamp-window would have gone to the mail-chute to get the letter and read the address. So I concluded it would be far more simple and safe to entrust my letter to you. Moreover," she added, "I save ten cents." "I am very greatly obliged to you, Nan," Daney answered soberly. "You did exactly right," Had she conferred upon him a distinct personal favor, his expression of obligation could not have been more sincere. He took a large envelop of the Tyee Lumber Company, wrote Donald's name upon it, enclosed Nan's letter in this large envelop, and sealed it with a mighty blow of his fist. "Now then," he declared, "what people do not know will not trouble them. After you go, I'll place this envelop in Don's mail-box in the outer office. I think we understand each other," he added shrewdly. "I think we do, Mr. Daney." "Splendid fellow, young Donald! Thundering fine boy!" "I agree with you, Mr. Daney. If Donald has a fault, it is his excessive democracy and loyalty to his friends. Thank you so much, Mr. Daney. Good-afternoon." "Not at all--not at all! All this is quite confidential, of course, otherwise you would not be here." He bowed her to the door, opened it for her, and bowed again as she passed him. When she had gone, he summoned the young lady whom Nan had addressed as "Hetty." "Miss Fairchaild," he said, "'phone the local sales-office and tell them to deliver a load of fire-wood to the Brent house at the Sawdust Pile." Two minutes later, the entire office force knew that Nan Brent had called to order a load of fire-wood, and once more the world sagged into the doldrums. XI At six o'clock Donald came in from the logging-camp. Daney made it his business to be in the entry of the outer office when his superior took his mail from his box, and, watching narrowly, thought he observed a frown on the young laird's face as he read Nan Brent's letter. Immediately he took refuge in his private office, to which he was followed almost immediately by Donald. "That's your handwriting, Mr. Daney," he said, thrusting the large envelop under Daney's nose. "Another letter in a smaller envelop was enclosed by you in this large one. You knew, of course, who wrote it." "Miss Brent brought it personally." Donald started slightly. He was amazed. "I take it," he continued, after a slight pause, "that it was entirely your idea to conceal from the office force the fact that Miss Brent had written me this letter." "It was, Don." "I am at a loss to know why you took such a precaution." Donald's eyes met Daney's in frank suspicion; the latter thought that he detected some slight anger in the younger man's bearing. "I can enlighten you, Don. Miss Brent was at some pains to conceal the fact that she had written you a letter; she brought it to me to be handed to you, rather than run the risk of discovery by dropping it in the post-office for special delivery. Some of the girls in our office went to school with Nan Brent and might recognize her handwriting if they saw the envelop. I saw Hetty Fairchaild looking over your letters rather interestedly the other day, when she was sorting the mail and putting it in the boxes." "The entire procedure appears to me to be peculiar and wholly unnecessary. However, I'm obliged to you, Mr. Daney, for acceding so thoroughly to Nan's apparent wishes." He frowned as he tore the envelop into shreds and dropped them in Dahey's waste-basket. "I'm afraid some young women around this plant are going to lose their jobs unless they learn to restrain their curiosity and their tongues," he added. "I thought I was still general manager," Daney reminded him gently, "Hiring and firing have always been my peculiar prerogatives." "Forgive me, Mr. Daney. They shall continue to be." The young Laird grinned at the rebuke; Daney smiled back at him, and the somewhat charged atmosphere cleared instantly. "By the way, Donald, your father is in town. He's going up to Seattle to-night on the seven-ten train. Your mother and the girls left earlier in the week. He's dining at the hotel and wishes you to join him there. He figured that, by the time you could reach The Dreamerie, shave, bathe, and dress, it would be too late to have dinner with him there and still allow him time to catch his train." "How does idleness sit on my parent, Mr. Daney?" "Not very well, I fear. He shoots and fishes and takes long walks with the dogs; he was out twice in your sloop this week. I think he and your mother and the girls plan a trip to Honolulu shortly." "Good!" Donald yawned and stretched his big body, "I've lost eight pounds on this chopping-job," he declared, "and I thought I hadn't an ounce of fat on me. Zounds, I'm sore! But I'm to have an easy job next week. I'm to patrol the skid-roads with a grease-can. That woods boss is certainly running me ragged." "Well, your innings will come later," Daney smiled. At the mill office, Donald washed, and then strolled over to the hotel to meet his father. Old Hector grinned as Donald, in woolen shirt, mackinaw, corduroy trousers, and half-boots came into the little lobby, for in his son he saw a replica of himself thirty years agone. "Hello, dad!" Donald greeted him. "Hello, yourself!" The father, in great good humor, joined his son, and they proceeded to dine, chaffing each other good-naturedly the while, and occasionally exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors at adjoining tables. The Laird was in excellent spirits, a condition which his interview that afternoon with Nan Brent had tended to bring about; during the period that had elapsed between his subsequent doubts and his meeting with his son, he had finally decided that the entire matter was a mare's nest and had dismissed it from his mind. After dinner, they walked down to the railroad station together, Donald carrying his father's bag. While The Laird was at the ticket-window purchasing his transportation, his son walked over to a baggage-truck to rest the bag upon it. As the bag landed with a thud, a man who had been seated on the truck with his back toward Donald glanced over his shoulder in a leisurely way, and, in that glance, the latter recognized one of the Greeks he had evicted from the Sawdust Pile--the same man who had thrown a beer-bottle at him the day he motored through Darrow. "What are you doing in Port Agnew?" Donald demanded. To his query, the fellow replied profanely that this was none of his interrogator's affair. "Well, it is some of my affair," the new boss of Tyee replied. "I have a crow to pluck with you, anyhow, and I'm going to pluck it now." He grasped the Greek by his collar and jerked him backward until the man lay flat on his back across the baggage-truck; then, with his horny left hand, Donald slapped the sullen face vigorously, jerked the fellow to his feet, faced him in the direction of Darrow, and, with a vigorous kick, started him on his way. "That's for throwing beer-bottles!" he called after the man. "And hereafter you keep out of Port Agnew. Your kind are not welcome here." The Greek departed into the night cursing, while The Laird, still at the ticket-window, glanced interestedly from his son to the Greek and then back to Donald. "What's the idea, son?" he demanded. "A recent dweller on the Sawdust Pile," his son replied easily. "He declared war on me, so, naturally, he comes into my territory at his own risk. That scum from Darrow must keep out of our town, dad, and force is the only argument they can understand. Daney gave them a free hand and spoiled them, but I'm going to teach them who's boss around here now. Besides, I owe that fellow a poke. He insulted Nan Brent. There would have been a bill for repairs on the scoundrel if I had caught him the day I drove his gang off the Sawdust Pile." "Well, I approve of your sentiments, Donald, but, nevertheless, it's a poor practise for a gentleman to fight with a mucker, although," he added whimsically, "when I was your age I always enjoyed a go with such fellows. That man you just roughed is George Chirakes, and he's a bad one. Knifed three of his countrymen in a drunken riot in Darrow last fall, but got out of it on a plea of self-defense. Keep your eye on the brute. He may try to play even, although there's no real courage in his kind. They're born bushwhackers," The Laird glanced at his watch and saw that it still lacked eight minutes of train-time. "Wait for me a minute," he told his son. "I want to telephone Daney on a little matter I overlooked this afternoon." He entered the telephone-booth in the station and called up Andrew Daney. "McKaye speaking," he announced. "I've just discovered Donald has an enemy--that Greek, Chirakes, from Darrow. Did Dirty Dan come in from the woods to-night?" "I believe he did. He usually comes in at week-ends." "Look him up immediately, and tell him to keep an eye on Donald, and not to let him out of his sight until the boy boards the logging-train to-morrow night to go back to the woods. Same thing next week-end, and when Donald completes his tour of duty in the woods, transfer Dan from the logging-camp and give him a job in the mill, so he can watch over the boy when he's abroad nights. He is not, of course, to let my son know he is under surveillance." "I will attend to the matter immediately," Daney promised, and The Laird, much relieved, hung up and rejoined his son. "Take care of yourself--and watch that Greek, boy," he cautioned, as he swung aboard the train. Donald stood looking after the train until the tail-lights had disappeared round a curve. XII Daney readily discovered in a pool-hall the man he sought. "Dirty Dan" O'Leary was a chopper in the McKaye employ, and had earned his sobriquet, not because he was less cleanly than the average lumberjack but because he was what his kind described as a "dirty" fighter. That is to say, when his belligerent disposition led him into battle, which it frequently did, Mr. O'Leary's instinct was to win, quickly and decisively, and without consideration of the niceties of combat, for a primitive person was Dirty Dan. Fast as a panther, he was as equally proficient in the use of all his extremities, and, if hard pressed, would use his teeth. He was a stringy, big-boned man of six feet, and much too tall for his weight, wherefore belligerent strangers were sometimes led to the erroneous conclusion that Mr. O'Leary would not be hard to upset. In short, he was a wild, bad Irishman who had gotten immovably fixed in his head an idea that old Hector McKaye was a "gr-rand gintleman," and a gr-rand gintleman was one of the three things that Dirty Dan would fight for, the other two being his personal safety and the love of battle. Daney drew Dirty Dan out of the pool-hall and explained the situation to him. The knowledge that The Laird had, in his extremity, placed reliance on him moved Dirty Dan to the highest pitch of enthusiasm and loyalty. He pursed his lips, winked one of his piggy eyes craftily, and, without wasting time in words of assurance, set forth in search of the man he was to follow and protect. Presently he saw Donald entering the butcher shop; so he stationed himself across the street and watched the young laird of Tyee purchase a fowl and walk out with it under his arm. Keeping his man dimly in view through the gloom, Dirty Dan, from the opposite side of the street, followed on velvet feet to the outskirts of the town, where Donald turned and took a path through some vacant lots, arriving at last at the Sawdust Pile. Dirty Dan heard him open and close the gate to Caleb Brent's garden. "Oh, ho, the young divil!" Dirty Dan murmured, and immediately left the path, padding softly out into the grass in order that, when the door of Caleb Brent's house should be opened, the light from within might not shine forth and betray him. After traversing a dozen steps, he lay down in the grass and set himself patiently to await the reappearance of his quarry. In response to several clearly audible knocks, the front door failed to open, and Dirty Dan heard Don walk round the house to the back door. "The young divil!" he reiterated to himself. "Faith, whin the cat's away the mice'll play, an' divil a worrd o' lie in that! Begorra, I'm thinkin' the ould gintleman'd be scandalized could he know where his darlin' bhoy is this minute--here, wait a minute Daniel, ye gossoon. Maybe, 'tis for this I've been sint to watch the lad an' not for to protect him. If it is, faith 'tis a job I'm not wishful for, shpyin' on me own boss." He pondered the matter. Then: "Well, sorra wan o' me knows. What if the young fella do be in love wit' her an' his father have wind of it! Eh? What thin, Daniel? A scandal, that's what, an', be the toe-nails o' Moses, nayther The Laird nor his son can afford that. I'll take note o' what happens, but, be the same token, 'tis not to Misther Daney I'll make me report, but to the ould man himself. Sh--what's that?" His ear being close to the ground, Dirty Dan had caught the sound of slow, cautious footsteps advancing along the little path. He flattened himself in the grass and listened, the while he hoped fervently that those who walked the path (for he knew now there were more than one) would not leave it as he had done and at the same point. Should they inadvertently tread upon him, Dirty Dan felt that the honor of the McKaye family and the maintenance of the secret of his present employment would demand instant and furious battle--on suspicion. The unknown pedestrians paused in the path. "Ah done tol' you-all Ah'm right," Dirty Dan heard one of them say. "Ha!" thought Dirty Dan. "A dirrty black naygur! I can tell be the v'ice of him." One of his companions grunted, and another said, in accents which the astute Mr. O'Leary correctly judged to be those of a foreigner of some sort: "All right. W'en he's come out, we jumpa right here. Wha's matter, eh?" "Suits me," the negro replied. "Let's set down, an' fo' de Lawd's sake, keep quite 'twell he come." Dirty Dan heard them move off to the other side of the path and sit down in the grass. "So 'tis that big buck yeller naygur from Darrow an' two o' the Greeks," he mused. "An' God knows I never did like fightin' in the dark. They'll knife me as sure as pussy is a cat." Decidedly, the prospect did not appeal to Dirty Dan. However, he had his orders to protect The Laird's son; he had his own peculiar notions of honor, and in his wild Irish heart there was not one drop of craven blood. So presently, with the stealth of an animal, he crawled soundlessly away until he judged it would be safe for him to stand up and walk, which he did with infinite caution. He reached the gate, passed like a wraith through it, and round to the side of Caleb Brent's home, in momentary dread of discovery by a dog. He breathed a sigh of relief when, the outcry failing to materialize, he decided the Brents were too poor to maintain a dog; whereupon he filled his pipe, lighted it, leaned up against the house, and, for the space of an hour, stood entranced, for from Caleb Brent's poor shanty there floated the voice of an angel, singing to the notes of a piano. "Glory be!" murmured the amazed Daniel. "Sure, if that's what the young fella hears whin he calls, divil a bit do I blame him. Oh, the shweet v'ice of her--an' singin' 'The Low-backed Car'!" Despite the wicked work ahead of him, Dirty Dan was glad of the ill fortune which had sent him hither. He had in full measure the Gael's love of music, and when, at length, the singing ceased and reluctantly he made up his mind that the concert was over, he was thrilled to a point of exaltation. "Begorra, I didn't expect to be piped into battle," he reflected humorously--and sought the Brent wood-pile, in which he poked until his hard hands closed over a hard, sound, round piece of wood about three feet long. He tested it across his knee, swung it over his head, and decided it would do. "Now thin, for the surprise party," he reflected grimly, and walked boldly to the gate, which he opened and closed with sufficient vigor to advertise his coming, even if his calked boots on the hard path had not already heralded his advance. However, Dirty Dan desired to make certain; so he pursed his lips and whistled softly the opening bars of "The Low-backed Car" in the hope that the lilting notes would still further serve to inculcate in the lurking enemy the impression that he was a lover returning well content from his tryst. As he sauntered along, he held his bludgeon in readiness while his keen eyes searched--and presently he made out the cronching figures. "The naygur first--to hold me, whilst the Greeks slip a dirk in me," he decided shrewdly. He heard the scuttering rush start, and, with the shock of combat, his carefully prearranged plan of battle quite fled his mercurial mind. He met the charge with a joyous screech, forgot that he had a club, and kicked viciously out with his right foot. His heavy logger's boots connected with something soft and yielding, which instinct told Mr. O'Leary was an abdomen; instinct, coupled with experience, informed him further that no man could assimilate that mighty kick in the abdomen and yet remain perpendicular, whereupon. Dirty Dan leaped high in the air and came down with both terrible calked boots on something which gave slightly under him and moaned. On the instant, he received a light blow in the breast and knew he had been stabbed. He remembered his club now; as he backed away swiftly, he swung it, and, from the impact, concluded he had struck a neck or shoulder. That was the luck of night-fighting; so, with a bitter curse, Dirty Dan swung again, in the pious hope of connecting with a skull; he scored a clean miss and was, by the tremendous force of his swing, turned completely round. Before he could recover his balance, a hand grasped his ankle and he came down heavily on his face; instantly, his assailant's knees were pressed into his back. With a mighty heave he sought to free himself, at the same time flinging both long legs upward, after the fashion of one who strives to kick himself in the small of the back; whereupon a knife drove deep into his instep, and he realized he had not acted a split second too soon to save himself from a murderous thrust in the kidneys--a Greek's favorite blow. In battle, Dirty Dan's advantage lay always in his amazing speed and the terrible fury of his attack during the first five minutes. Even as he threw up his feet, he drew back, an elbow and crashed it into his enemy's ribs; like a flash, his arm straightened, and his sinewy hand closed over the wrist of an arm that struggled in vain to strike downward. Holding that wrist securely, Dirty Dan heaved upward, got his left elbow under his body, and rested a few moments; another mighty heave, and he tossed off the Greek, and, whirling with the speed of a pin-wheel, was on top of his man. He had momentarily released his hold on the Greek's wrist, however, and he had to fight for another hold now--in the dark. Presently he captured it, twisted the arm in the terrible hammer-lock, and broke it; then, while the Greek lay writhing in agony, Mr. O'Leary leaped to his feet and commenced to play with his awful boots a devil's tattoo on that portion of his enemy's superstructure so frequently alluded to in pugilistic circles as "the slats." After five or six kicks, however, he paused, due to a difficulty in breathing; so he struck a match and surveyed the stricken field. The big mulatto and two Greeks, lay unconscious before him; in the nickering light of the match, two blood-stained dirks gleamed in the grass, so, with a minute attention to detail, Dirty Dan possessed himself of these weapons, picked up his club, and, reasoning shrewdly that Donald McKaye's enemies had had enough combat for a few weeks at least, the dauntless fellow dragged the fallen clear of the path, in order that his youthful master might not stumble over them on his way home, and then disappeared into the night. Half an hour later, smeared with dust and blood, he crawled up the steps of the Tyee Lumber Company's hospital on his hands and knees and rapped feebly on the front door. The night nurse came out and looked him over. "I'm Dirty Dan O'Leary," he wheezed; "I've been fightin' agin." The nurse called the doctor and two orderlies, and they carried him into the operating-room. "I'm not the man I used to be," Dirty Dan whispered, "but glory be, ye should see the other fellers." He opened his hand, and two blood-stained clasp-knives rolled out; he winked knowingly, and indulged in humorous reminiscences of the combat while he was being examined. "You're cut to strings and ribbons, Dan," the doctor informed him, "and they've stuck you in the left lung. You've lost a lot of blood. We may pull you through, but I doubt it." "Very well," the demon replied composedly. "Telephone Judge Alton to come and get his dying statement," the doctor ordered the nurse, but Dirty Dan raised a deprecating hand. "'Twas a private, personal matther," he declared. "'Twas settled satisfacthory. I'll not die, an' I'll talk to no man but Misther Daney. Sew me up an' plug me lung, an' be quick about it, Docthor." When Andrew Daney came, summoned by telephone, Dirty Dan ordered all others from the room, and Daney saw that the door was closed tightly after them. Then he bent over Dirty Dan. "Where's Donald?" he demanded. "That's neither here nor there, sir," Mr. O'Leary replied evasively. "He's safe, an' never knew they were afther him. T'ree o' thim, sir, the naygur and two Greeks. I kidded thim into thinkin' I was Misther McKaye; 'tis all over now, an' ye can find out what two Greeks it was by those knives I took for evidence. I cannot identify thim, but go up to Darrow in the mornin' an' look for a spreckled mulatter, wan Greek wit' a broken right arm, an' another wit' a broken neck, but until I die, do nothin'. If I get well, tell them to quit Darrow for good agin' the day I come out o' the hospital. Good-night to you, sir, an' thank ye for callin'." From the hospital, Andrew Daney, avoiding the lighted main street, hastened to the Sawdust Pile. A light still burned in Caleb Brent's cottage; so Daney stood aloof in the vacant lot and waited. About ten o'clock, the front door opened, and, framed in the light of the doorway, the general manager saw Donald McKaye, and beside him Nan Brent. "Until to-morrow at five, Donald, since you will persist in being obstinate," he heard Nan say, as they reached the gate and paused there. "Good-night, dear." Andrew Daney waited no longer, but turned and fled into the darkness. XIII Having done that which her conscience dictated, Nan Brent returned to her home a prey to many conflicting emotions, chief of which were a quiet sense of exaltation in the belief that she had played fair by both old Hector and his son, and a sense of depression in the knowledge that she would not see Donald McKaye again. As a boy, she had liked him tremendously; as a man, she knew she liked him even better. She was quite certain she had never met a man who was quite fit to breathe the same air with Donald McKaye; already she had magnified his virtues until, to her, he was rapidly assuming the aspect of an archangel--a feeling which bordered perilously on adoration. But deep down in her woman's heart she was afraid, fearing for her own weakness. The past had brought her sufficient anguish--she dared not risk a future filled with unsatisfied yearning that comes of a great love suppressed or denied. She felt better about it as she walked homeward; it seemed that she had regained, in a measure, some peace of mind, and as she prepared dinner for her father and her child, she was almost cheerful. A warm glow of self-complacency enveloped her. Later, when old Caleb and the boy had retired and she sat before the little wood fire alone with her thoughts, this feeling of self-conscious rectitude slowly left her, and into its place crept a sense of desolation inspired by one thought that obtruded upon her insistently, no matter how desperately she drove her mind to consider other things. She was not to see him again--no, never any more. Those fearless, fiery gray eyes that were all abeam with tenderness and complete understanding that day he left her at the gate; those features that no one would ever term handsome, yet withal so rugged, so strong, so pregnant of character, so peculiarly winning when lighted by the infrequent smile--she was never to gaze upon them again. It did not seem quite fair that, for all that the world had denied her, it should withhold from her this inconsequent delight. This was carrying misfortune too far; it was terrible--unbearable almost-- A wave of self-pity, the most acute misery of a tortured soul, surged over her; she laid her fair head on her arms outspread upon the table, and gave herself up to wild sobbing. In her desolation, she called aloud, piteously, for that mother she had hardly known, as if she would fain summon that understanding spirit and in her arms seek the comfort that none other in this world could give her. So thoroughly did she abandon herself to this first--and final--paroxysm of despair that she failed to hear a tentative rap upon the front door and, shortly, the tread of rough-shod feet on the board walk round the house. Her first intimation that some one had arrived to comfort her came in the shape of a hard hand that thrust itself gently under her chin and lifted her face from her arms. Through the mist of her tears she saw only the vague outlines of a man clad in heavy woolen shirt and mackinaw, such as her father frequently wore. "Oh, father, father!" she cried softly, and laid her head on his breast, while her arms went round his neck. "I'm so terribly unhappy! I can't bear it--I can't! Just--because he chose to be--kind to us--those gossips--as if anybody could help being fond of him--" She was held tight in his arms. "Not your father, Nan." Donald murmured in a low voice. She drew away from him with a sharp little cry of amazement and chagrin, but his great arms closed round her and drew her close again. "Poor dear," he told her, "you were calling for your mother. You wanted a breast to weep upon, didn't you? Well, mine is here for you." "Oh, sweetheart, you mustn't!" she cried passionately, her lips unconsciously framing the unspoken cry of her heart as she strove to escape from him. "Ah, but I shall!" he answered. "You've called me 'sweetheart,' and that gives me the right." And he kissed her hot cheek and laughed the light, contented little laugh of the conqueror, nor could all her frantic pleadings and struggling prevail upon him to let her go. In the end, she did the obvious, the human thing. She clasped him tightly round the neck, and, forgetting everything in the consuming wonder of the fact that this man loved her with a profound and holy love, she weakly gave herself up to his caresses, satisfying her heart-hunger for a few blessed, wonderful moments before hardening herself to the terrible task of impressing upon him the hopelessness of it all and sending him upon his way. By degrees, she cried herself dry-eyed and leaned against him, striving to collect her dazed thoughts. And then he spoke. "I know what you're going to say, dear. From a worldly point of view, you are quite right. Seemingly, without volition on our part, we have evolved a distressing, an impossible situation--" "Oh, I'm so glad that you understand!" she gasped. "And yet," he continued soberly, "love such as ours is not a light thing to be passed lightly by. To me, Nan Brent, you are sacred; to you, I yearn to be all things that--the--other man was not. I didn't realize until I entered unannounced and found you so desolate that I loved you. For two weeks you have been constantly in my thoughts, and I know now that, after all, you were my boyhood sweetheart." "I know you were mine," she agreed brokenly. "But that's just a little tender memory now, even if we said nothing about it then. We are children no longer, Donald dear; we must be strong and not surrender to our selfish love." "I do not regard it as selfish," he retorted soberly. "It seems most perfectly natural and inevitable. Why, Nan, I didn't even pay you the preliminary compliment of telling you I loved you or asking you if you reciprocated my affection. It appeared to me I didn't have to; that it was a sort of mutual understanding--for here we are. It seems it just was to be--like the law of gravitation." She smiled up at him, despite her mental pain. "I'm not so certain, dear," she answered, "that I'm not wicked enough to rejoice. It will make our renunciation all the easier--for me. I have known great sorrow, but to-night, for a little while, I have surrendered myself to great happiness, and nothing--nothing--can ever rob me of the last shred of that. You are my man, Donald. The knowledge that you love me is going to draw much of the sting out of existence. I know I cannot possess you, but I can resign myself to that and not be embittered." "Well," he answered dully, "I can give you up--because I have to; but I shall never be resigned about it, and I fear I may be embittered. Is there no hope, Nan?" "A faint one--some day, perhaps, if I outlive another." "I'll wait for that day, Nan. Meanwhile, I shall ask no questions. I love you enough to accept your love on faith, for, by God, you're a good woman!" Her eyes shown with a wonderful radiance as she drew his face down to hers and kissed him on the lips. "It's sweet of you to say that; I could love you for that alone, were there nothing else, Donald. But tell me, dear, did you receive my letter?" "Yes--and ignored it. That's why I'm here." "That was a risk you should not have taken." He looked thoughtfully at the multicolored flame of the driftwood fire. "Well, you see, Nan, it didn't occur to me that I was taking a risk; a confession of love was the last thing I would have thought would happen." "Then why did you disregard that letter that cost me such an effort to write?" "Well," he replied slowly, "I guess it's because I'm the captain of my soul--or try to be, at any rate. I didn't think it quite fair that you should be shunned; it occurred to me that I wouldn't be playing a manly part to permit the idle mewing of the Port Agnew tabbies to frighten me away. I didn't intend to fall in love with you--Oh, drat my reasons! I'm here because I'm here. And in the matter of that old hen--" He paused and favored her with a quizzical smile. "Yes?" "I brought a substitute hen with me--all ready for the pot, and if I can't come to dinner to-morrow, I'm going to face a very lonely Sunday." "You ridiculous boy! Of course you may come, although it must be the final visit. You realize that we owe it to ourselves not to make our burden heavier than it's going to be." He nodded. "'Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we may be dead,'" he quoted. "Let's sit down and talk it over. I haven't sat in front of a driftwood fire since I was a boy. Queer how the salt in the wood colors the flames, isn't it?" It occurred to her for a fleeting moment that they two were driftwood, and that the salt of their tears would color their lives as the years consumed them. But she banished from her mind all thought of everything save the present. With a contented little sigh she seated herself beside him; her hand stole into his and, soothed and sustained by the comforting touch, each of the other, gradually the first terror of their predicament faded; ere long, Donald reminded her of her promise, and she stole to the old square piano and sang for him while, without, Dirty Dan O'Leary crouched in the darkness and thrilled at the rippling melody. At ten o'clock, when Donald left the Sawdust Pile, he and Nan had arrived at a firm determination to follow separate paths, nor seek to level the barrier that circumstance had raised between them. "Some day--perhaps," he whispered, as he held her to his heart in the dark-it the garden gate. "While I live, I shall love you. Good-by, old sweetheart!" XIV True to his promise, Daniel P. O'Leary declined to die that night. "Confound your belligerent soul!" the doctor growled at dawn. "I believe you're too mean to die." "We'll make it a finish fight," whispered Daniel. "I'll go you," the doctor answered, and sent for digitalis and salt solution. There was one other soul in Port Agnew who did not sleep that night, either. Andrew Daney's soul, shaken by what was to him a cosmic cataclysm, caused that good man to rise at five o'clock and go down to the hospital for another look at Dirty Dan. To his anxious queries the doctor shook a dubious head, but the indomitable O'Leary smiled wanly. "Go on wit' ye!" he wheezed faintly. "I'll win be a hair-line decision." At seven o'clock, when the telegraph-station opened, Andrew Daney was waiting at the door. He entered and sent a telegram to The Laird. Return immediately. In the late afternoon, Hector McKaye returned to Port Agnew and at once sought Daney, who related to him exactly what had occurred. The shadow of profound worry settled over The Laird's face. "Dan refuses to disclose anything regarding Donald's movements," Daney continued, "where he followed the boy or where the fight took place. I only know that Donald was not present; Dan, fortunately, overheard the plot, inculcated, by some means, the idea in those scoundrels' heads that he was Donald, and took the fight off the boy's hands. He claimed he fought a winning fight, and he is right. The mulatto died in Darrow this morning. One of the Greeks has a smashed shoulder, and the other a broken arm and four broken ribs. How they ever got home to Darrow is a mystery." "The third Greek must have waited near the river-mouth with a boat, Andrew. Have you any idea where Donald spent the evening?" "Yes, sir; but he's free, white, and twenty-one, and he's my superior. I prefer not to discuss his movements." "Andrew, I command you to." "I refuse to be commanded, sir." "That's all I wanted to know. He visited the Brents, and you know it." He saw by the flush on Daney's old face that he had hit the mark. "Well, I'm obliged to you, Andrew. You've done your full duty; so we'll not discuss the matter further. The situation will develop in time, and, meanwhile, I'll not spy on my boy. I wonder if that Darrow gang will talk." "I imagine not, sir--that is, if Dirty Dan keeps his own counsel. They will fear prosecution if Dan dies; so they will be silent awaiting the outcome of his injuries. If he lives, they will still remain silent, awaiting his next move. Dan will probably admit having been jumped in the dark by three unknown men and that he defended himself vigorously; he can fail to identify the Greeks, and the Greeks cannot do less than fail to identify Dirty Dan, who can plead self-defense if the coroner's jury delves too deeply into the mulatto's death. I imagine they will not. At any rate, it's up to Dan whether Donald figures in the case or not, and Dan will die before he'll betray the confidence." "That's comforting," The Laird replied. "Will you be good enough to drive me home to The Dreamerie, Andrew?" At The Dreamerie, old Hector discovered that his son had left the house early in the afternoon, saying he would not be home for dinner. So The Laird sat him down and smoked and gazed out across the Bight of Tyee until sunset, when, a vague curiosity possessing him, he looked down to the Sawdust Pile and observed that the flag still flew from the cupola. The night shadows gathered, but still the flag did not come down; and presently round The Laird's grim mouth a little prescient smile appeared, with something of pain in it. "Dining out at Brent's," he soliloquized, "and they're so taken up with each other they've forgotten the flag. I do not remember that the Brent girl ever forgot it before. She loves him." XV Following his parting with Nan Brent on Saturday night, Donald McKaye went directly to the mill office, in front of which his car was parked, entered the car, and drove home to The Dreamerie, quite oblivious of the fact that he was not the only man in Port Agnew who had spent an interesting and exciting evening. So thoroughly mixed were his emotions that he was not quite certain whether he was profoundly happy or incurably wretched. When he gave way to rejoicing in his new-found love, straightway he was assailed by a realization of the barriers to his happiness--a truly masculine recognition of the terrible bar sinister to Nan's perfect wifehood induced a veritable shriveling of his soul, a mental agony all the more intense because it was the first unhappiness he had ever experienced. His distress was born of the knowledge that between the Sawdust Pile and The Dreamerie there stretched a gulf as wide and deep as the Bight of Tyee. He was bred of that puritanical stock which demands that the mate for a male of its blood must be of original purity, regardless of the attitude of leniency on the part of that male for lapses from virtue in one of his own sex. This creed, Donald had accepted as naturally, as inevitably as he had accepted belief in the communion of saints and the resurrection of the dead. His father's daughter-in-law, like Cæsar's wife, would have to be above suspicion; while Donald believed Nan Brent to be virtuous, or, at least, an unconscious, unwilling, and unpremeditating sinner, non-virtuous by circumstance instead of by her own deliberate act, he was too hard-headed not to realize that never, by the grace of God, would she be above suspicion. Too well he realized that his parents and his sisters, for whom he entertained all the affection of a good son and brother, would, unhampered by sex-appeal and controlled wholly by tradition, fail utterly to take the same charitable view, even though he was honest enough with himself to realize that perhaps his own belief in the matter was largely the result of the wish being father to the thought. Curiously enough, he dismissed, quite casually, consideration of the opinions his mother and sisters, their friends and his, the men and women of Port Agnew might entertain on the subject. His apprehensions centered almost entirely upon his father. His affection for his father he had always taken for granted. It was not an emotion to exclaim over. Now that he realized, for the first time, his potential power to hurt his father, to bow that gray head in grief and shame and humiliation, he was vouchsafed a clearer, all-comprehending vision of that father's love, of his goodness, his manliness, his honor, his gentleness, and his fierce, high pride; to Donald simultaneously came the knowledge of his own exalted love for the old man. He knew him as no other human being knew him or ever would know him; whence he knew old Hector's code--that a clean man may not mate with an unclean woman without losing caste. He and Nan had discussed the situation but briefly; for they were young, and the glory of that first perfect hour could not be marred by a minute consideration of, misery in prospect. To-night, they had been content to forget the world and be happy with each other, apparently with the mutual understanding that they occupied an untenable position, one that soon must be evacuated. Yes; he was the young laird of Tyee, the heir to a principality, and it would be too great a strain on mere human beings to expect his little world to approve of its highest mating with its lowest. Prate as we may of democracy, we must admit, if we are to be honest with ourselves, that this sad old world is a snobocracy. The very fact that man is prone to regard himself as superior to his brother is the leaven in the load of civilization; without that quality, whether we elect to classify it as self-conceit or self-esteem, man would be without ambition and our civilization barren of achievement. The instinct for the upward climb--the desire to reach the heights--is too insistent to be disregarded. If all men are born equal, as the framers of our Constitution so solemnly declared, that is because the brains of all infants, of whatsoever degree, are at birth incapable of thought. The democracy of any people, therefore, must be predicated upon their kindness and charity--human characteristics which blossom or wither according to the intensity of the battle for existence. In our day and generation, therefore, democracy is too high-priced for promiscuous dissemination; wherefore, as in an elder day, we turn from the teaching of the Man of Galilee and cling to tradition. Tradition was the stone in the road to Donald McKaye's happiness, and his strength was not equal to the task of rolling it away. Despair enveloped him. Every fiber of his being, every tender, gallant instinct drew him toward this wonder-girl that the world had thrust aside as unworthy. His warm, sympathetic heart ached for her; he knew she needed him as women like her must ever need the kind of man he wanted to be, the kind he had always striven to be. Had he been egotist enough to set a value upon himself, he would have told himself she was worthy of him; yet a damnable set of damnable man-made circumstances over which he had no control hedged them about and kept them apart. It was terrible, so he reflected, to know that, even if Nan should live the life of a saint from the hour of her child's birth until the hour of her death, a half-century hence, yet would she fail to atone for her single lapse while there still lived one who knew--and remembered. He, Donald McKaye, might live down a natural son, but Nan Brent could not. The contemplation of this social phenomenon struck him with peculiar force, for he had not hitherto considered the amazing inequalities of a double standard of morals. For the first time in his life, he could understand the abject deference that must be shown to public opinion. He, who considered himself, and not without reason, a gentleman, must defer to the inchoate, unreasoning, unrelenting, and barbaric point of view of men and women who hadn't sense enough to pound sand in a rat-hole or breeding enough to display a reasonable amount of skill in the manipulation of a knife and fork. Public opinion! Bah! Deference to a fetish, a shibboleth, to the ancient, unwritten law that one must not do that which hypocrites condemn and cowards fear to do, unless, indeed, one can "get away with it." Ah, yes! The eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not be discovered." It had smashed Nan Brent, who had violated it, desolated her, ruined her--she who had but followed the instinct that God Almighty had given her at birth--the instinct of sex, the natural yearning of a trustful, loving heart for love, motherhood, and masculine protection from a brutal world. More. Not satisfied with smashing her, public opinion insisted that she should remain in a perennial state of smash. It was abominable! Nan had told him she had never been married, and a sense of delicacy had indicated to him that this was a subject upon which he must not appear to be curious. To question her for the details would have been repugnant to his nicely balanced sense of the fitness of things. Nevertheless, he reflected, if her love had been illicit, was it more illicit than that of the woman who enters into a loveless marriage, induced to such action by a sordid consideration of worldly goods and gear? Was her sin in bearing a child out of wedlock more terrible than that of the married woman who shudders at the responsibilities of motherhood, or evades the travail of love's fulfilment by snuffing out little lives in embryo? He thought not. He recalled an evening in New York when he had watched a policeman following a drab of the streets who sought to evade him and ply her sorry trade in the vicinity of Herald Square; he remembered how that same policeman had abandoned the chase to touch his cap respectfully and open her limousine door for the heroine (God save the mark!) of a scandalous divorce. "Damn it!" he murmured. "It's a rotten, cruel world, and I don't understand it. I'm all mixed up." And he went to bed, where, his bodily weariness overcoming his mental depression, he slept. He was man enough to scorn public opinion, but human enough to fear it. XVI The heir of the Tyee mills and forests was not of a religious turn of mind for all his strict training in Christian doctrine, although perhaps it would be more to the point to state that he was inclined to be unorthodox. Nevertheless, out of respect to the faith of his fathers, he rose that Sunday morning and decided to go to church. Not that he anticipated any spiritual benefit would accrue to him by virtue of his pilgrimage down to Port Agnew; in his heart of hearts he regarded the pastor as an old woman, a man afraid of the world, and without any knowledge of it, so to speak. But old Hector was a pillar of the church; his family had always accompanied him thither on Sundays, and a sense of duty indicated to Donald that, as the future head of the clan, he should not alter its customs. By a strange coincidence, the Reverend Mr. Tingley chose as the text for his sermon the eighth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John from the first to the eleventh verses, inclusive. Donald, instantly alert, straightened in the pew, and prepared to listen with interest to the Reverend Mr. Tingley's opinion of the wisdom of Jesus Christ in so casually disposing of the case of the woman taken in adultery. "Dearly beloved," the pastor began, carefully placing an index-finger between the leaves of his Bible to mark the passage he had just read, "the title of my sermon this Sunday shall be: 'The First Stone. Let him who is without sin cast it.'" "Banal, hypocritical ass!" Donald soliloquized. "She was the mezzo-soprano soloist in your choir four years, and you haven't tried to help her since she came back to the Sawdust Pile." It was a good sermon, as sermons go. In fact, the Reverend Mr. Tingley, warming to his theme, quite outdid himself on the subject of charity as practised by his Redeemer, and, as a result, was the recipient of numberless congratulatory handshakes later at the church door. Donald agreed that it was an unusually good sermon--in theory; but since he knew it would collapse in practise, he avoided Mr. Tingley after service. On the steps of the church he was accosted by Andrew Daney and the latter's wife, who greeted him effusively. Unfortunately for Mrs. Daney, Nan, in one of those bursts of confidence that must ever exist between lovers, had informed Donald the night previous of the motherly soul's interest in his affairs; wherefore he returned Mrs. Daney's warm greeting with such chilly courtesy that she was at no loss to guess the reason for it and was instantly plunged into a slough of terror and despair. She retained sufficient wit, however, to draw her husband away, thus preventing him from walking with Donald. "I want to tell him about Dirty Dan," Daney protested, in a low voice. "As the boss, he ought to be told promptly of any injury to an employe." "Never mind Dirty Dan," she retorted. "He'll hear of it soon enough. Let us congratulate Mr. Tingley on his sermon." Donald, having turned his back on them almost rudely, strode down the street to his car and motored back to The Dreamerie. He spent the remainder of the morning force-breaking a setter puppy to retrieve; at one o'clock, he ate a cold luncheon, and immediately thereafter drove down to Port Agnew and brazenly parked his car in front of Caleb Brent's gate. He entered without the formality of knocking, and Nan met him in the tiny entrance-hall. "I couldn't wait until dinner-time," he explained. "Nobody home at The Dreamerie--" He took her face in his calloused hands, drew her to him. "You're sweet in that calico gown," he informed her, waiving a preliminary word of greeting. "I love you," he added softly, and kissed her. She clung to him. "You should not have come here in broad daylight," she protested. "Oh, you big, foolish, impulsive dear! Don't you realize I want to protect you from the tongue of scandal? If you persist in forgetting who you are, does it follow that I should pursue a similar course?" He ignored her argument. "I'll help you get dinner, old blue-eyes," he suggested. "Let me shuck some corn or shell some peas or string some beans--any job where I can sit and look at you and talk to you." "It will please me if you'll visit a little while with father Caleb," she suggested. "He's out on the sun-porch. He's far from well this morning. Do cheer him up, Donald dear." Old Caleb hailed him with a pleasure that was almost childish. During the two weeks that had elapsed since Donald had seen him last, he had failed markedly. "Well, how does the old sailor feel this morning?" Donald queried casually, seating himself opposite the old man. "Poorly, Mr. Donald; poorly." He turned, satisfied himself that Nan was busy in the kitchen, and then leaned toward his visitor. "I've got my sailing-orders," he whispered confidentially. The man who had won a Congressional medal of honor, without clearly knowing why or how, had not changed with the years. He advanced this statement as a simple exposition of fact. "Think so, Caleb?" Donald answered soberly. "I know it." "If you have no desire to live, Caleb, of course nature will yield to your desires. Remember that and buck up. You may have your sailing-orders, but you can keep the bar breaking indefinitely to prevent you from crossing out." "I've done that for a year past. I do not wish to die and leave her, for my three-quarter pay stops then. But I suffer from angina pectoris. It's the worry, Mr. Donald," he added. "Worry as to the future of Nan and the child?" "Aye, lad." "Well, Caleb, your worries are unnecessary. I feel it my duty to tell you that I love Nan; she loves me, and we have told each other so. She shall not suffer when you are gone. She has indicated to me that, some day, this--this mess may be cleared up; and when that happens, I shall marry Nan." "So Nan told me this morning. I was wondering if you'd speak to me about it, and I'm glad you have done so--promptly. You--you--honor us, Mr. Donald; you do, indeed. You're the one man in the world I can trust her with, whether as good friend or husband--only, her hushand you'll never be." "I see breakers ahead," Donald admitted. He had no desire to dissemble with this straightforward old father. "We're poor folk and plain, but--please God!--we're decent and we know our place, Mr. Donald. If your big heart tells you to dishonor yourself in the eyes of your world and your people--mark you, lad, I do not admit that an alliance with my girl could ever dishonor you in your own eyes--Nan will not be weak enough to permit it." "I have argued all that out with myself," Donald confessed miserably, "without having arrived at a conclusion. I have made up my mind to wait patiently and see what the future may bring forth." "It may be a long wait." "It will be worth while. And when you have sailed, I'll finance her to leave Port Agnew and develop her glorious voice." "You haven't the right, Mr. Donald. My girl has some pride." "I'll gamble a sizable sum on her artistic future. The matter will be arranged on a business basis. I shall lend her the money, and she shall pay me back with interest." "Nan has a woman's pride. The obligation would remain always, even though the money should be repaid." "I think we'll manage to adjust that," Donald countered confidently. "Ah, well," the old fellow answered; "we've always been your debtors. And it's a debt that grows." He loaded his pipe and was silent, for, after the fashion of the aged, he dared assume that his youthful auditor would understand just how the Brents regarded him. "Well, my heart's lighter for our talk, lad," he declared presently. "If you don't mind, I'll have a little nap." Donald, grateful for the dismissal, returned to the kitchen, where Nan was preparing the vegetables. Her child at once clamored for recognition, and, almost before he knew it, Donald had the tyke in his lap and was saying, "Once upon a time there was a king and he had three sons----" "He isn't interested in kings and princes, dear," Nan interrupted. "Tell him the story of the bad little rabbit." "But I don't know it, Nan." "Then you'll fail as a daddy to my boy. I'm surprised. If Don were your own flesh and blood, you would know intuitively that there is always a bad little rabbit and a good little rabbit. They dwell in a hollow tree with mother Rabbit and father Rabbit." "Thanks for the hint. I shall not fail in this job of dadding. Well then, bub, once upon a time there was a certain Mr. Johnny Rabbit who married a very beautiful lady rabbit whose name was Miss Molly Cottontail. After they were married and had gone to keep house under a lumber-pile, Mr. Hezekiah Coon came along and offered to rent them some beautifully furnished apartments in the burned-out stump of a hemlock tree. The rent was to be one nice ear of sweet corn every month--" The tale continued, with eager queries from the interested listener--queries which merely stimulated the young laird of Tyee to wilder and more whimsical flights of fancy, to the unfolding of adventures more and more thrilling and unbelievable until, at last, the recital began to take on the character of an Arabian Nights' tale that threatened to involve the entire animal kingdom, and only ceased when, with a wealth of mournful detail, Donald described the tragic death and funeral of the gallant young Johnny Rabbit, his fatherless audience suddenly burst into tears and howled lugubriously; whereupon Donald was hard put to it to bring Johnny Rabbit back to life mysteriously but satisfactorily, and send him scampering home to the hollow hemlock tree, there to dwell happily ever after. His tale completed, Donald happened to glance toward Nan. She was regarding him with shining eyes. "Donald," she declared, "it's a tremendous pity you haven't a boy of your own. You're just naturally intended for fatherhood." He grinned. "My father has been hinting rather broadly that a grandson would be the very last thing on earth to make him angry. He desires to see the name and the breed and the business in a fair way of perpetuation before he passes on." "That is the way of all flesh, Donald." "I wish it were not his way. My inability to comply with his desires isn't going to render dad or me any happier." "Dear old boy, what a frightful predicament you're in!" she murmured sympathetically. "I wish I could be quite certain you aren't really in love with me, Donald." "Life would be far rosier for all concerned if I were quite certain I was mistaking an old and exalted friendship for true love. But I'm not. You're the one woman in the world for me, and if I cannot have you, I'll have none other--Hello! Weeping has made this young fellow heavy-lidded, or else my fiction has bored him, for he's nodding." "It's time for his afternoon nap, Donald." She removed the sleepy tot from his arms and carried him away to his crib. When she returned, she resumed her task of preparing dinner. "Nan," Donald queried suddenly, "have I the right to ask you the name of the man who fathered that child?" "Yes," she answered soberly; "you have. I wish, however, that you would not ask me. I should have to decline to answer you." "Well, then, I'll not ask. Nevertheless, it would interest me mightily to know why you protect him." "I am not at all desirous of protecting him, Donald. I am merely striving to protect his legal wife. His marriage to me was bigamous; he undertook the task of leading a dual married life, and, when I discovered it, I left him." "But are you certain he married you?" "We went through a marriage ceremony which, at the time, I regarded as quite genuine. Of course, since it wasn't legal, it leaves me in the status of an unmarried woman." "So I understood from your father. Where did this ceremony take place?" "In San Francisco." She came over, sat down beside him, and took one of his hard, big hands in both of hers. "I'm going to tell you as much as I dare," she informed him soberly. "You have a right to know, and you're too nice to ask questions. So I'll not leave you to the agonies of doubt and curiosity. You see, honey dear, father Brent wanted me to have vocal and piano lessons, and to do that I had to go to Seattle once a week, and the railroad-fare, in addition to the cost of the lessons, was prohibitive until your father was good enough to secure me a position in the railroad-agent's office in Port Agnew. Of course, after I became an employe of the railroad company, I could travel on a pass, so I used to go up to Seattle every Saturday, leaving here on the morning train. Your father arranged matters in some way so that I worked but five days a week." "Naturally. Dad's a pretty heavy shipper over the line." "I would receive my lessons late Saturday afternoons, stay overnight with a friend of mine, and return to Port Agnew on Sunday. _He_ used to board the train at--well, the name of the station doesn't matter--every Saturday, and one day we got acquainted, quite by accident as it were. Our train ran through an open switch and collided with the rear end of a freight; there was considerable excitement, and everybody spoke to everybody else, and after that it didn't appear that we were strangers. The next Saturday, when he boarded the train, he sat down in the same seat with me and asked permission to introduce himself. He was very nice, and his manners were beautiful; he didn't act in the least like a man who desired to 'make a mash.' Finally, one day, he asked me to have dinner with him in Seattle, and I accepted. I think that was because I'd never been in a fashionable restaurant in all my life. After dinner, he escorted me to the studio, and on Sunday morning we took the same train home again. He was such good company and such a jolly, worldly fellow--so thoughtful and deferential! Can't you realize, Donald, how he must have appealed to a little country goose like me? "Well, finally, daddy Brent learned that Signor Moretti, a tenor who had retired from grand opera, had opened a studio in San Francisco. We both wanted Moretti to pass on my voice, but we couldn't afford the expense of a journey to San Francisco for two, so daddy sent me alone. I wrote--that man about our plans, and told him the name of the steamer I was sailing on. Your father gave me a passage on one of his steam-schooners, and when we got to the dock in San Francisco--" "_He_ was there, eh? Came down by train and beat the steamer in." Donald nodded his comprehension. "What did Moretti say about your voice?" "The usual thing. My Seattle teacher had almost ruined my voice, he declared, but, for all that, he was very enthusiastic and promised me a career within five years if I would place myself unreservedly in his hands. Of course, we couldn't afford such an expensive career, and the realization that I had to forego even the special inducements Signor Moretti was generous enough to make me quite broke my heart. When I told _him_ about it--we were engaged by that time--he suggested that we get married immediately, in order that I might reside with him in San Francisco and study under Moretti. So we motored out into the country one day and were married at San José. He asked me to keep our marriage secret on account of some clause in his father's will, but I insisted upon my right to tell daddy Brent. Poor old dear! My marriage was such a shock to him; but he agreed with me that it was all for the best--" "Well, I was quite happy for three months. My husband's business interests necessitated very frequent trips North--" "What business was he in, Nan?" "That is immaterial," she evaded him. "Presently, Signer Moretti contracted a severe cold and closed his studio for a month. My husband--I suppose I must call him that to identify him when I refer to him--had just gone North on one of his frequent trips, and since he always kept me generously supplied with money, I decided suddenly to take advantage of Moretti's absence to run up to Port Agnew and visit my father. "In Seattle, as I alighted from the train, I saw my husband in the station with another woman. I recognized her. She was a friend of mine--a very dear, kind, thoughtful friend of several years' standing--the only woman friend I had in the world. I loved her dearly; you will understand when I tell you that she had frequently gone out of her way to be kind to me. It struck me as strange that he had never admitted knowing her, although frequently he had heard me speak of her. While I stood pondering the situation, he took her in his arms and kissed her good-by and boarded the train without seeing me. I slipped out of the station without having been seen by either of them; but while I was waiting for a taxicab, my friend came out of the station, saw me, and rushed up to greet me. It developed, in the course of our conversation following the usual commonplaces of greeting, that she had been down to the station to see her husband off on the train for San Francisco." Donald whistled softly. "How did you manage to get away with it, Nan?" he demanded incredulously. "All my life I have been used to doing without things," she replied simply. "I suppose that helped a little. The shock was not so abrupt that I lost my presence of mind; you see, I had had a few minutes to adjust myself after seeing him kiss her in the station--and just then the taxicab came up and I escaped. Then I came home to the Sawdust Pile. I wrote him, of course, and sent the letter by registered mail, in order to make certain he would receive it. He did, but he did not answer. There was no reason why he should, for he was quite safe. I had assured him there was no necessity for worry on my account." "Of all the crazy, fool things for you to do!" Donald cried sharply. "Why under the canopy did you deem it necessary to sacrifice yourself for him? Surely you did not love him--" "I'm afraid I never loved him," she interrupted. "I--I thought I did, although, if he hadn't been away so frequently after our marriage, I would have learned to love him dearly, I think." "Just human nature," Donald suggested. "Something akin to what trapshooters and golfers call a mental hazard." "Of course he married me under an assumed name, Donald." "Did you ever see a marriage certificate?" "Oh, yes; I had to sign it in the presence of the minister." Donald was relieved. "Then, you great goose of a girl, you can clear your record any time you desire. The minister forwarded the marriage certificate to the state capital, and it is registered there with the State Board of Health. After registration, it was returned to the minister whose signature appeared on the certificate as the officiating clergyman. The minister undoubtedly returned the certificate to your husband." "I never saw it again." "What if you did not? You can procure a certified copy from the record in the county-clerk's office or from the records of the State Board of Health. Marriage records, old dear, are fairly well protected in our day and generation." "I wrote to the State Board of Health at Sacramento. There is no record of my marriage there." "That's strange. Why didn't you write the county clerk, of the county in which the license was issued?" She smiled at him. "I did. I had to, you know. My honor was at stake. The license was issued in Santa Clara County." "Well, it will be a simple matter to comb the list of ministers until we find the one that tied the knot. A certified copy of the marriage license, with a sworn affidavit by the officiating clergyman--" "The officiating clergyman is dead. A private detective agency in San Francisco discovered that for us." "But couldn't you cover your tracks, Nan? Under the circumstances, a lie--any kind of deceit to save your good name--would have been pardonable." "I couldn't help being smirched. Remember, my father was the only person in Port Agnew who knew I had been married; he heeded my request and kept the secret. Suddenly I returned home with a tale of marriage in anticipation of my ability to prove it. In that I failed. Presently my baby was born. People wondered who my husband was, and where he kept himself; some of the extremely curious had the hardihood to come here and question me. Was my husband dead? Of course not. Had I fibbed and told them he was, they would have asked when and where and the nature of the disease that carried him off. Was I divorced? Again I was confronted with the necessity for telling the truth, because a lie could be proved. Then the minister, to quiet certain rumors that had reached him--he wanted me to sing in the choir again, and there was an uproar when he suggested it--wrote to the California State Board of Health. When he received a reply to his letter, he visited me to talk it over, but I wasn't confiding in Mr. Tingley that day. He said I might hope for salvation if I confessed my wickedness and besought forgiveness from God. He offered to pray for me and with me. He meant well--poor, silly dear!--but he was so terribly incredulous that presently I told him I didn't blame him a bit and suggested that I be permitted to paddle my own canoe, as it were. Thanked him for calling, but told him he needn't call again. He departed in great distress." "I hold no brief for the Reverend Tingley, Nan; but I'll be shot if your story will hold water in a world that's fairly well acquainted with the frailty of humankind. Of course I believe you--and, for some fool reason, I'm not ashamed of my own intelligence in so believing. I have accepted you on faith. What sets my reason tottering on its throne is the fact that you insist upon protecting this scoundrel." "I insist upon protecting his wife. I love her. She has been kind to me. She's the only friend of my own sex that I have ever known. She's tubercular, and will not live many years. She has two children--and she adores her scamp of a husband. If I cannot convict that man of bigamy, would it not be foolish of me to try? And why should I inflict upon her, who has shown me kindness and love, a brimming measure of humiliation and sorrow and disgrace? I can bear my burden a year or two longer, I think; then, when she is gone, I can consider my vindication." She patted his hand to emphasize her unity of purpose. "That's the way I've figured it all out--the whole, crazy-quilt pattern, and if you have a better scheme, and one that isn't founded on human selfishness, I'm here to listen to it." A long silence fell between them. "Well, dear heart?" she demanded finally. "I wasn't thinking of _that_," he replied slowly. "I was just trying to estimate how much more I love you this minute than I did five minutes ago." He drew her golden head down on his shoulder and held her to him a long time without speaking. It was Nan who broke the spell by saying: "When the time comes for my vindication, I shall ask you to attend to it for me, dear. You're my man--and I think it's a man's task." His great fingers opened and closed in a clutching movement. He nodded. XVII When Donald returned to The Dreamerie about eleven o'clock, he was agreeably surprised to find his father in the living-room. "Hello, dad!" he greeted The Laird cheerfully. "Glad to see you. When did you get back?" "Came down on the morning train, Donald." They were shaking hands now. The Laird motioned him to a chair, and asked abruptly. "Where have you been all day, son?" "Well, I represented the clan at church this morning, and, after luncheon here, I went down to visit the Brents at the Sawdust Pile. Stayed for dinner. Old Caleb's in rather bad shape mentally and physically, and I tried to cheer him up. Nan sang for me--quite like old times." "I saw Nan Brent on the beach the other day. Quite a remarkable young woman. Attractive, I should say," the old man answered craftily. "It's a pity, dad. She's every inch a woman. Hard on a girl with brains and character to find herself in such a sorry tangle." The Laird's heavy heart was somewhat lightened by the frankness and lack of suspicion with which his son had met his blunt query as to where he had been spending his time. For the space of a minute, he appeared to be devoting his thoughts to a consideration of Donald's last remark; presently he sighed, faced his son, and took the plunge. "Have you heard anything about a fight down near the Sawdust Pile last night, my son?" he demanded. His son's eyes opened with interest and astonishment. "No; I did not, dad. And I was there until nearly ten o'clock." "Yes; I was aware of that, and of your visit there to-day and this evening. Thank God, you're frank with me! That yellow scoundrel and two Greeks followed you there to do for you. After you roughed the Greek at the railroad station, it occurred to me that you had an enemy and might hold him cheaply; so, just before I boarded the train, I telephoned Daney to tell Dirty Dan to shadow you and guard you. So well did he follow orders that he lies in the company hospital now at the point of death. As near as I can make out the affair, Dirty Dan inculcated in those bushwhackers the idea that he was the man they were after; he went to meet them and took the fight off your hands." "Good old Dirty Dan! I'll wager a stiff sum he did a thorough job." The young laird of Tyee rose and ruffled his father's gray head affectionately. "Thoughtful, canny old fox!" he continued. "I swear I'm all puffed up with conceit when I consider the kind of father I selected for myself." "Those scoundrels would have killed you," old Hector reminded him, with just a trace of emotion in his voice. "And if they'd done that, sonny, your old father'd never held up his head again. There are two things I could not stand up under--your death and"--he sighed, as if what he was about to say hurt him cruelly--"the wrong kind of a daughter-in-law." "We will not fence with each other," his son answered soberly. "There has never been a lack of confidence between us, and I shall not withhold anything from you. You are referring to Nan, are you not?'" "I am, my son." "Well?" "I am not a cat, and it hurts me to be an old dog, but--I saw Nan Brent recently, and we had a bit of talk together. She's a bonny lass, Donald, and I'm thinking 'twould be better for your peace of mind--and the peace of mind of all of us--if you saw less of her." "You think, then, father, that I'm playing with fire." "You're sitting on an open barrel of gunpowder with a lighted torch in your hand." Donald returned to his chair and faced his father. "Let us suppose," he suggested, "that the present unhappy situation in which Nan finds herself did not exist. Would you still prefer that I limit my visits to, say, Christmas and Easter?" The Laird scratched the back of his head in perplexity. "I'm inclined to think I wouldn't," he replied. "I'd consider your best interests always. If you married a fine girl from Chicago or New York, she might not be content to dwell with you in Port Agnew." "Then Nan's poverty--the lowliness of her social position, even in Port Agnew, would not constitute a serious bar?" "I was as poor as Job's turkey once myself--and your mother's people were poorer. But we came of good blood." "Well, Nan's mother was a gentlewoman; her grandfather was an admiral; her great-grandfather a commodore, her great-great-granduncle a Revolutionary colonel, and her grandmother an F.F.V. Old Caleb's ancestors always followed the sea. His father and his grandfather were sturdy old Yankee shipmasters. He holds the Congressional medal of honor for conspicuous gallantry in action over and above the call of duty. The Brent blood may not be good enough for some, but it's a kind that's good enough for me!" "All that is quite beside the question, Donald. The fact remains that Nan Brent loves you." "May I inquire on what grounds you base that statement, dad?" "On Saturday night, when you held her in your arms at parting, she kissed you." Donald was startled, and his features gave indubitable indication of the fact. His father's cool gray eyes were bent upon him kindly but unflinchingly. "Of course," he continued, in even tones, "you would not have accepted that caress were you not head over heels in love with the girl. You are not low enough to seek her favor for another reason." "Yes; I love her," Donald maintained manfully. "I have loved her for years--since I was a boy of sixteen,--only, I didn't realize it until my return to Port Agnew. I can't very well help loving Nan, can I, dad?" To his amazement, his father smiled at him sympathetically. "No; I do not see how you could very well help yourself, son," he replied. "She's an extraordinary young woman. After my brief and accidental interview with her recently, I made up my mind that there would be something radically wrong with you if you didn't fall in love with her." His son grinned back at him. "Proceed, old lumberjack!" he begged. "Your candor is soothing to my bruised spirit." "No; you cannot help loving her, I suppose. Since you admit being in love with her, the fact admits of no argument. It has happened, and I do not condemn you for it. Both of you have merely demonstrated in the natural, human way that you are natural human beings. And I'm grateful to Nan for loving you. I think I should have resented her not doing so, for it would demonstrate her total lack of taste and appreciation of my son. She informed me, in so many words, that she wouldn't marry you." "Nan has the capacity, somewhat rare in a woman, of keeping her own counsel. That is news to me, dad. However, if you had waited about two minutes, I would have informed you that I do not intend to marry Nan--" He paused for an infinitesimal space and added, "yet." The Laird elevated his eyebrows. "'Yet?'" he repeated. Donald flushed a little as he reiterated his statement with an emphatic nod. "Why that reservation, my son?" "Because, some day, Nan may be in position to prove herself that which I know her to be--a virtuous woman--and when that time comes, I'll marry her in spite of hell and high water." Old Hector sighed. He was quite familiar with the fact that, while the records of the county clerk of Santa Clara County, California, indicated that a marriage license had been issued on a certain date to a certain man and one Nan Brent, of Port Agnew, Washington, there was no official record of a marriage between the two. The Reverend Mr. Tingley's wife had sorrowfully imparted that information to Mrs. McKaye, who had, in turn, informed old Hector, who had received the news with casual interest, little dreaming that he would ever have cause to remember it in later years. And The Laird was an old man, worldly-wise and of mature judgment. His soul wore the scars of human perfidy, and, because he could understand the weakness of the flesh, he had little confidence in its strength. Consequently, he dismissed now, with a wave of his hand, consideration of the possibility that Nan Brent would ever make a fitting mate for his son. "It's nice of you to believe that, Donald. I would not destroy your faith in human nature, for human nature will destroy your faith in time, as it has destroyed mine. I'm afraid I'm a sort of doubting Thomas. I must see in order to believe; I must thrust my finger into the wound. I wonder if you realize that, even if this poor girl should, at some future time, be enabled to demonstrate her innocence of illicit love, she has been hopelessly smeared and will never, never, be quite able to clean herself." "It matters not if _I_ know she's a good woman. That is all sufficient. To hell with what the world thinks! I'm going to take my happiness where I find it." "It may be a long wait, my son." "I will be patient, sir." "And, in the meantime, I shall be a doddering old man, without a grandson to sweeten the afternoon of my life, without a hope for seeing perpetuated all those things that I have considered worth while because I created them. Ah, Donald, lad, I'm afraid you're going to be cruel to your old father!" "I have suffered with the thought that I might appear to be, dad. I have considered every phase of the situation; I was certain of the attitude you would take, and I feel no resentment because you have taken it. Neither Nan nor I had contemplated the condition which confronts us. It happened--like that," and Donald snapped his fingers. "Now the knowledge of what we mean to each other makes the obstacles all the more heart-breaking. I have tried to wish, for your sake, that I hadn't spoken--that I had controlled myself, but, for some unfathomable reason, I cannot seem to work up a very healthy contrition. And I think, dad, this is going to cause me more suffering than it will you." A faint smile flitted across old Hector's stern face. Youth! Youth! It always thinks it knows! "This affair is beyond consideration by the McKayes, Donald. It is utterly impossible! You must cease calling on the girl." "Why, father?" "To give you my real reason would lead to endless argument in which you would oppose me with more or less sophistry that would be difficult to combat. In the end, we might lose our tempers. Let us say, therefore, that you must cease calling on the lass because I desire it." "I'll never admit that I'm ashamed of her, for I am not!" his son burst forth passionately. "But people are watching you now--talking about you. Man, do ye not ken you're your father's son?" A faint note of passion had crept into The Laird's tones; under the stress of it, his faint Scotch brogue increased perceptibly. He had tried gentle argument, and he knew he had failed; in his desperation, he decided to invoke his authority as the head of his clan. "I forbid you!" he cried firmly, and slapped the huge leather arm of his chair. "I charge you, by the blood that's in you, not to bring disgrace upon my house!" A slight mistiness which Donald, with swelling heart, had noted in his father's eyes a few moments before was now gone. They flashed like naked claymores in the glance that Andrew Daney once had so aptly described to his wife. For the space of ten seconds, father and son looked into each other's soul and therein each read the other's answer. There could be no surrender. "You have bred a man, sir, not a mollycoddle," said the young laird quietly. "I think we understand each other." He rose, drew the old man out of his chair, and threw a great arm across the latter's shoulders. "Good-night, sir," he murmured humbly, and squeezed the old shoulders a little. The Laird bowed his head but did not answer. He dared not trust himself to do so. Thus Donald left him, standing in the middle of the room, with bowed head a trifle to one side, as if old Hector listened for advice from some unseen presence. The Laird of Tyee had thought he had long since plumbed the heights and depths of the joys and sorrows of fatherhood. The tears came presently. A streak of moonlight filtered into the room as the moon sank in the sea and augmented the silver in a head that rested on two clasped hands, while Hector McKaye, kneeling beside his chair, prayed to his stern Presbyterian God once more to save his son from the folly of his love. XVIII It had been Donald McKaye's intention to go up to the logging-camp on the first log-train leaving for the woods at seven o'clock on Monday morning, but the news of Dirty Dan's plight caused him to change his plans. Strangely enough, his interview with his father, instead of causing him the keenest mental distress, had been productive of a peculiar sense of peace. The frank, sympathetic, and temperate manner in which the old laird had discussed his affair had conduced to produce this feeling. He passed a restful night, as his father observed when the pair met at the breakfast-table. "Well, how do you feel this morning, son?" the old man queried kindly. "Considerably better than I did before our talk last night, sir," Donald answered. "I haven't, slept," old Hector continued calmly, "although I expect to have a little nap during the day. Just about daylight a comforting thought stole over me." "I'm glad to hear it, dad." "I've decided to repose faith in Nan, having none at all in you. If she truly loves you, she'll die before she'll hurt you." "Perhaps it may be a comfort to you to know that she has so expressed herself to me." "Bless her poor heart for that! However, she told me practically the same thing." He scooped his eggs into the egg-cup and salted and peppered them before he spoke again. Then: "We'll not discuss this matter further. All I ask is that you'll confine your visits to the Sawdust Pile to the dark of the moon; I trust to your natural desire to promote my peace of mind to see to it that no word of your--affair reaches your mother and sisters. They'll not handle you with the tact you've had from me." "I can well believe that, sir. Thank you. I shall exercise the utmost deference to your desires consistent with an unfaltering adherence to my own code." There it was again--more respectful defiance! Had he not, during the long, distressing hours of the night, wisely decided to leave his son's case in the hands of God and Nan Brent, The Laird would have flown into a passion at that. He compromised by saying nothing, and the meal was finished in silence. After breakfast, Donald went down to the hospital to visit Dirty Dan. O'Leary was still alive, but very close to death; he had lost so much blood that he was in a state of coma. "He's only alive because he's a fighter, Mr. McKaye," the doctor informed Donald. "If I can induce some good healthy man to consent to a transfusion of blood, I think it would buck Dan up considerably." "I'm your man," Donald informed him. It had occurred to him that Dirty Dan had given his blood for the House of McKaye; therefore, the least he could do was to make a partial payment on the debt. The doctor, knowing nothing of the reason for Dirty Dan's predicament, was properly amazed. "You--the boss--desire to do this?" he replied. "We can get one of this wild rascal's comrades--" "That wild rascal is my comrade, doctor. I'm more or less fond of Dan." He had removed his coat and was already rolling up his sleeve. "I'm half Gael," he continued smilingly, "and, you know, we must not adulterate Dirty Dan's blood any more than is absolutely necessary. Consider the complications that might ensue if you gave Dan an infusion of blood from a healthy Italian. The very first fight he engaged in after leaving this hospital, he'd use a knife instead of nature's weapons. Get busy!" But the doctor would take no liberties with the life-blood of the heir of Tyee until he had telephoned to The Laird. "My son is the captain of his own soul," old Hector answered promptly. "You just see that you do your job well; don't hurt the boy or weaken him too greatly." An hour after the operation, father and son sat beside Dirty Dan's bed. Presently, the ivory-tinted eyelids flickered slightly, whereat old Hector winked sagely at his son. Then Dirty Dan's whiskered upper lip twisted humorously, and he whispered audibly: "Ye young divil! Oh-ho, ye young vagabond! Faith, if The Laird knew what ye're up to this night, he'd--break yer--back--in two halves!" Hector McKaye glanced apprehensively about, but the nurse had left the room. He bent over Dirty Dan. "Shut up!" he commanded. "Don't tell everything you know!" O'Leary promptly opened his eyes and gazed upon The Laird in profound puzzlement. [Illustration: DONALD BOWED HIS HEAD. "I CAN'T GIVE HER UP, FATHER."] "Wild horrses couldn't dhrag it out o' me," he protested. "Ask me no questions an' I'll tell ye no lies." He subsided into unconsciousness again. The doctor entered and felt of his pulse. "On the up-grade," he announced. "He'll do." "Dan will obey the voice of authority, even in his delirium," The Laird whispered to his son, when they found themselves alone with the patient once more. "I'll stay here until he wakes up rational, and silence him if, in the mean time, he babbles. Run along home, lad." At noon, Dirty Dan awoke with the light of reason and belligerency in his eyes, whereupon The Laird questioned him, and developed a stubborn reticence which comforted the former to such a degree that he decided to follow his son home to The Dreamerie. XIX A week elapsed before Hector McKaye would permit his son to return to his duties. By that time, the slight wound in the latter's arm where the vein had been opened had practically healed. Dirty Dan continued to improve, passed the danger-mark, and began the upward climb to his old vigor and pugnacity. Port Agnew, stirred to discussion over the affray, forgot it within three days, and on the following Monday morning Donald returned to the woods. The Laird of Tyee carried his worries to the Lord in prayer, and Nan Brent frequently forgot her plight and sang with something of the joy of other days. A month passed. During that month, Donald had visited the Sawdust Pile once and had written Nan thrice. Also, Mrs. Andrew Daney, hard beset because of her second experience with the "Blue Bonnet" glance of a McKaye, had decided to remove herself from the occasions of gossip and be in a position to claim an alibi in the event of developments. So she abandoned Daney to the mercies of a Japanese cook and departed for Whatcom to visit a married daughter. From Whatcom, she wrote her husband that she was enjoying her visit so much she hadn't the slightest idea when she would return, and, for good and sufficient reasons, Daney did not urge her to change her mind. Presently, Mrs. McKaye and her daughters returned to Port Agnew. His wife's letters to The Laird had failed to elicit any satisfactory reason for his continued stay at home, and inasmuch as all three ladies were deferring the trip to Honolulu on his account, they had come to a mutual agreement to get to close quarters and force a decision. Mrs. McKaye had been inside The Dreamerie somewhat less than five minutes before her instinct as a woman, coupled with her knowledge as a wife, informed her that her spouse was troubled in his soul. Always tactless, she charged him with it, and when he denied it, she was certain of it. So she pressed him further, and was informed that he had a business deal on; when she interrogated him as to the nature of it (something she had not done in years), he looked at her and smoked contemplatively. Immediately she changed the subject of conversation, but made a mental resolve to keep her eyes and her ears open. The Fates decreed that she should not have long to wait. Donald came home from the logging-camp the following Saturday night, and the family, having finished dinner, were seated in the living-room. The Laird was smoking and staring moodily out to sea, Donald was reading, Jane was at the piano softly playing ragtime, and Mrs. McKaye and Elizabeth were knitting socks for suffering Armenians when the telephone-bell rang. Jane immediately left the piano and went out into the entrance-hall to answer it, the servants having gone down to Port Agnew to a motion-picture show. A moment later, she returned to the living-room, leaving the door to the entrance-hall open. "You're wanted on the telephone, Don!" she cried gaily. "Such a sweet voice, too!" Mrs. McKaye and Elizabeth looked up from their knitting. They were not accustomed to having Donald called to the telephone by young ladies. Donald laid his magazine aside and strode to the telephone; The Laird faced about in his chair, and a harried look crept into his eyes. "Close the door to the entrance-hall, Jane," he commanded. "Oh, dear me, no!" his spoiled daughter protested. "It would be too great a strain on our feminine curiosity not to eavesdrop on Don's little romance." "Close it!" The Laird repeated. He was too late. Through the open door, Donald's voice reached them: "Oh, you poor girl! I'm so sorry, Nan dear. I'll be over immediately." His voice dropped several octaves, but the words came to the listeners none the less distinctly. "Be brave, sweetheart." Mrs. McKaye glanced at her husband in time to see him avert his face; she noted how he clutched the arm of his chair. To quote a homely phrase, the cat was out of the bag at last. Donald's face wore a troubled expression as he reentered the living-room. His mother spoke first. "Donald! _My_ son!" she murmured tragically. "Hum-m--!" The Laird grunted. The storm had broken at last, and, following the trend of human nature, he was conscious of sudden relief. Jane was the first to recover her customary aplomb. "Don dear," she cooed throatily, "are we mistaken in our assumption that the person with whom you have just talked is Nan Brent?" "Your penetration does you credit, Jane. It was." "And did our ears deceive us or did we really hear you call her 'dear' and 'sweetheart'?" "It is quite possible," Donald answered. He crossed the room and paused beside his father. "Caleb Brent blinked out a few minutes ago, dad. It was quite sudden. Heart-trouble. Nan's all alone down there, and of course she needs help. I'm going. I'll leave to you the job of explaining the situation to mother and the girls. Good-night, pop; I think you understand." Mrs. McKaye was too stunned, too horrified, to find refuge in tears. "How dare that woman ring you up?" she demanded haughtily. "The hussy!" "Why, mother dear, she has to have help," her son suggested reproachfully. "But why from you, of all men? I forbid you to go!" his mother quavered. "You must have more respect for us. Why, what will people say?" "To hell with what people say! They'll say it, anyhow," roared old Hector. Away down in his proud old heart he felt a few cheers rising for his son's manly action, albeit the necessity for that action was wringing his soul. "'Tis no time for idle spierin'. Away with you, lad! Comfort the puir lass. 'Tis no harm to play a man's part. Hear me," he growled; "I'll nae have my soncy lad abused." "Dad's gone back to the Hielands. 'Nough said." Elizabeth had recovered her customary jolly poise. Wise enough, through long experience, to realize that when her father failed to throttle that vocal heritage from his forebears, war impended, she gathered up her knitting and fled to her room. Jane ran to her mother's side, drew the good lady's head down on her shoulder, and faced her brother. "Shame! Shame!" she cried sharply. "You ungrateful boy! How could you hurt dear mother so!" This being the cue for her mother to burst into violent weeping, forthwith the poor soul followed up the cue. Donald, sore beset, longed to take her in his arms and kiss away her tears, but something warned him that such action would merely serve to accentuate the domestic tempest, so, with a despairing glance at old Hector, he left the room. "Pretty kettle o' fish you've left me to bring to a boil!" the old man cried after him. "O Lord! O Lord! Grant me the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, and the cunning of Judas Iscariot! God help my mildewed soul!" XX The instant the front door closed behind her son, Mrs. McKaye recovered her composure. Had the reason been more trifling, she would have wept longer, but, in view of its gravity, her common sense (she possessed some, when it pleased her to use it) bade her be up and doing. Also, she was smitten with remorse. She told herself she was partly to blame for this scourge that had come upon the family; she had neglected her son and his indulgent father. She, who knew so well the peculiar twists of her husband's mental and moral make-up, should not be surprised if he cast a tolerant eye upon his son's philanderings; seemingly the boy had always been able to twist his father round his finger, so to speak. She sat up, dabbed her eyes, kissed Jane lovingly as who should say, "Well, thank God, here is one child I can rely upon," and turned upon the culprit. Her opening sentence was at once a summons and an invitation. "Well, Hector?" "It happened while you were away--while we were both away, Nellie. I was gone less than forty-eight hours--and he had compromised himself." "You don't mean--really compromised himself!" Jane cried sharply, thus bringing upon her The Laird's attention. He appeared to transfix her with his index finger. "To bed with you, young lady!" he ordered. "Your mother and I will discuss this matter without any of your pert suggestions or exclamations. I'm far from pleased with you, Jane. I told you to shut that door, and you disobeyed me. For that, you shall suffer due penance. Six months in Port Agnew, my dear, to teach you obedience and humility. Go!" Jane departed, sniffling, and this stern evidence of The Laird's temper was not lost upon his wife. She decided to be tactful, which, in her case, meant proceeding slowly, speaking carefully, and listening well. Old Hector heaved himself out of his great chair, came and sat down on the divan with his wife, and put his arm round her. "Dear old Nellie!" he whispered, and kissed her. For the moment, they were lovers of thirty-odd years agone; their children forgotten, they were sufficient unto themselves. "I know just how you feel, Nellie. I have done my best to spare you--I have not connived or condoned. And I'll say this for our son: He's been open and above-board with her and with me. He's young, and in a moment of that passion that comes to young men--aye, and young women, too, for you and I have known it--he told her what was in his heart, even while his head warned him to keep quiet. It seems to me sometimes that 'tis something that was to be." "Oh, Hector, it mustn't be! It cannot be!" "I'm hoping it will not be, Nellie. I'll do my best to stop it." "But, Hector, why did you support him a moment ago?" He flapped a hand to indicate a knowledge of his own incomprehensible conduct. "She'd called for him, Nellie. Poor bairn, her heart went out to the one she knew would help her, and, by God, Nellie, I felt for her! You're a woman, Nellie. Think--if one of your own daughters was wishful for a kind word and a helping hand from an honorable gentleman and some fool father forbade it. Nellie wife, my heart and my head are sore tangled, sore tangled--" His voice broke. He was shaken with emotion. He had stood much and he had stood it alone; while it had never occurred to him to think so, he had been facing life pretty much alone for a decade. It would have eased his surcharged spirit could he have shed a few manly tears, if his wife had taken his leonine old head on her shoulder and lavished upon him the caresses his hungry heart yearned for. Unfortunately, she was that type of wife whose first and only thought is for her children. She was aware only that he was in a softened mood, so she said, "Don't you think you've been a little hard on poor Jane, Hector dear?" "No, I do not. She's cruel, selfish, and uncharitable." "But you'll forgive her this once, won't you, dear?" He considered. "Well, if she doesn't heckle Donald--" he began, but she stopped further proviso with a grateful kiss, and immediately followed Jane up-stairs to break the good news to her. She and Jane then joined Elizabeth in the latter's room, and the trio immediately held what their graceless relative would have termed "a lodge of sorrow." Upon motion of Jane, seconded by Elizabeth, it was unanimously resolved that the honor of the family must be upheld. At all cost. They laid out a plan of campaign. XXI Upon his arrival in Port Agnew, Donald called upon one Sam Carew. In his youth, Mr. Carew had served his time as an undertaker's assistant, but in Port Agnew his shingle proclaimed him to his world as a "mortician." Owing to the low death-rate in that salubrious section, however, Mr. Carew added to his labors those of a carpenter, and when outside jobs of carpentering were scarce, he manufactured a few plain and fancy coffins. Donald routed Sam Carew out of bed with the news of Caleb Brent's death and ordered him down to the Sawdust Pile in his capacity of mortician; then he hastened there himself in advance of Mr. Carew. Nan was in the tiny living-room, her head pillowed on the table, when Donald entered, and when she had sobbed herself dry-eyed in his arms, they went in to look at old Caleb. He had passed peacefully away an hour after retiring for the night; Nan had straightened his limbs and folded the gnarled hands over the still heart; in the great democracy of death, his sad old face had settled into peaceful lines such as had been present in the days when Nan was a child and she and her father had been happy building a home on the Sawdust Pile. As Donald looked at him and reflected on the tremendous epics of a career that the world regarded as commonplace, when he recalled the sloop old Caleb had built for him with so much pride and pleaure, the long-forgotten fishing trips and races in the bight, the wondrous tales the old sailor had poured into his boyish ears, together with the affection and profound respect, as for a superior being, which the old man had always held for him, the young laird of Tyee mingled a tear or two with those of the orphaned Nan. "I've told Sam Carew to come for him," he informed Nan, when they had returned to the living-room. "I shall attend to all of the funeral arrangements. Funeral the day after to-morrow, say in the morning. Are there any relatives to notify?" "None that would be interested, Donald." "Do you wish a religious service?" "Certainly not by the Reverend Tingley." "Then I'll get somebody else. Anything else? Money, clothes?" She glanced at him with all the sweetness and tenderness of her great love lambent in her wistful sea-blue eyes. "What a poor thing is pride in the face of circumstances," she replied drearily. "I haven't sufficient strength of character to send you away. I ought to, for your own sake, but since you're the only one that cares, I suppose you'll have to pay the price. You might lend me a hundred dollars, dear. Perhaps some-day I'll repay it." He laid the money in her hand and retained the hand in his; thus they sat gazing into the blue flames of the driftwood fire--she hopelessly, he with masculine helplessness. Neither spoke, for each was busy with personal problems. The arrival of Mr. Carew interrupted their sad thoughts. When he had departed with the harvest of his grim profession, the thought that had been uppermost in Donald's mind found expression. "It's going to be mighty hard on you living here alone." "It's going to be hard on me wherever I live--alone," she replied resignedly. "Wish I could get some woman to come and live with you until we can adjust your affairs, Nan. Tingley's wife's a good sort. Perhaps--" She shook her head. "I prefer my own company--when I cannot have yours." A wave of bitterness, of humiliation swept over him in the knowledge that he could not ask one of his own sisters to help her. Truly he dwelt in an unlovely world. He glanced at Nan again, and suddenly there came over him a great yearning to share her lot, even at the price of sharing her shame. He was not ashamed of her, and she knew it; yet both were fearful of revealing that fact to their fellow mortals. The conviction stole over Donald McKaye that he was not being true to himself, that he was not a man of honor in the fullest sense or a gentleman in the broadest meaning of the word. And that, to the heir of a principality, was a dangerous thought. He then took tender leave of the girl and walked all the way home. His father had not retired when he reached The Dreamerie, and the sight of that stern yet kindly and wholly understandable person moved him to sit down beside The Laird on the divan and take the old man's hand in his childishly. "Dad, I'm in hell's own hole!" he blurted. "I'm so unhappy!" "Yes, son; I know you are. And it breaks me all up to think that, for the first time in my life, I can't help you. All the money in the world will not buy the medicine that'll cure you." "I have to go through that, too, I suppose," his son complained, and jerked his head toward the stairs, where, as a matter of fact, his sister Jane crouched at the time, striving to eavesdrop. "I had a notion, as I walked home, that I'd refuse to permit them to discuss my business with me." "This particular business of yours is, unfortunately, something which they believe to be their business, also. God help me, I agree with them!" "Well, they had better be mighty careful how they speak of Nan Brent," Donald returned darkly. "This is something I have to fight out alone. By the way, are you going to old Caleb's funeral, dad?" "Certainly. I have always attended the funerals of my neighbors, and I liked and respected Caleb Brent. Always reminded me of a lost dog. But he had a man's pride. I'll say that for him." "Thank you, father. Ten o'clock, the day after to-morrow, from the little chapel. There isn't going to be a preacher present, so I'd be obliged if you'd offer a prayer and read the burial service. That old man and I were pals, and I want a real human being to preside at his obsequies." The Laird whistled softly. He was on the point of asking to be excused, but reflected that Donald was bound to attend the funeral and that his father's presence would tend to detract from the personal side of the unprecedented spectacle and render it more of a matter of family condescension in so far as Port Agnew was concerned. "Very well, lad," he replied; "I'm forced to deny you so much 'twould be small of me not to grant you a wee favor now and then. I'll do my best. And you might send a nurse from the company hospital to stay with Nan for a week or two." "Good old file!" his son murmured gratefully, and, bidding his father good-night, climbed the stairs to his room. Hearing his footsteps ascending, Jane emerged from the rear of the landing; simultaneously, his mother and Elizabeth appeared at the door of the latter's room. He had the feeling of a captured missionary running the gantlet of a forest of spears _en route_ to a grill over a bed of coals. "Donald dear," Elizabeth called throatily, "come here." "Donald dear is going to bed," he retorted savagely. "'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' Good-night!" "But you _must_ discuss this matter with us!" Jane clamored. "How can you expect us to rest until we have your word of honor that you--" The Laird had appeared at the foot of the stairs, having followed his son in anticipation of an interview which he had forbidden. "Six months, Janey," he called up; "and there'll be no appeal from that decision. Nellie! Elizabeth! Poor Jane will be lonesome in Port Agnew, and I'm not wishful to be too hard on her. You'll keep her company." There was a sound of closing doors, and silence settled over The Dreamerie, that little white home that The Laird of Tyee had built and dedicated to peace and love. For he was the master here. XXII Caleb Brent's funeral was the apotheosis of simplicity. Perhaps a score of the old sailor's friends and neighbors attended, and there were, perhaps, half a dozen women--motherly old souls who had known Nan intimately in the days when she associated with their daughters and who felt in the presence of death a curious unbending of a curious and indefinable hostility. Sam Carew, arrayed in the conventional habiliments of his profession, stood against the wall and closed his eyes piously when Hector McKaye, standing beside old Caleb, spoke briefly and kindly of the departed and with a rough eloquence that stirred none present--not even Nan, who, up to that moment, entirely ignorant of The Laird's intention, could only gaze at him, amazed and incredulous--more than it stirred The Laird himself. The sonorous and beautiful lines of the burial service took on an added beauty and dignity as he read them, for The Laird believed! And when he had finished reading the service, he looked up, and his kind gaze lay gently on Nan Brent as he said: "My friends, we will say a wee bit prayer for Caleb wi' all the earnestness of our hearts. O Lorrd, now that yon sailor has towed out on his last long cruise, we pray thee to gie him a guid pilot--aye, an archangel, for he was ever an honest man and brave--to guide him to thy mansion. Forgie him his trespasses and in thy great mercy grant comfort to this poor bairn he leaves behind. And thine shall be the honor and the glory, forever and ever. Amen!" None present, except Donald, realized the earnestness of that prayer, for, as always under the stress of deep emotion, The Laird had grown Scotchy. Mrs. Tingley, a kindly little soul who had felt it her Christian duty to be present, moved over to the little organ, and Nan, conspicuous in a four-year-old tailored suit and a black sailor-hat, rose calmly from her seat and stood beside the minister's wife. For a moment, her glance strayed over the little audience. Then she sang--not a hymn, but just a little song her father had always liked--the haunting, dignified melody that has been set to Stevenson's "Requiem." Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: _Here he lies where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter, home from the hill_. The Laird, watching her narrowly, realized the effort it was costing her; yet her glorious voice did not break or quiver once. "You wonderful, wonderful woman!" he thought, moved to a high pitch of admiration for her independence and her flagrant flaunting of tradition, "What a wife for my boy--what a mother for my grandson--if you hadn't spoiled it all!" She rode to the cemetery in The Laird's car with The Laird, Donald, and Mrs. Tingley. Leaning on Donald's arm, she watched them hide old Caleb beneath the flowers from the gardens of The Dreamerie; then The Laird read the service at the grave and they returned to the Sawdust Pile, where Nan's child (he had been left at home in charge of a nurse from the Tyee Lumber Company's hospital) experienced more or less difficulty deciding whether Donald or The Laird was his father. The Laird now considered his duty to Caleb Brent accomplished. He remained at the Sawdust Pile a period barely sufficient for Nan to express her sense of obligation. "In a month, my dear girl," he whispered, as he took her hand, "you'll have had time to adjust yourself and decide on the future. Then we'll have a little talk." She smiled bravely up at him through misty eyes and shook her head. She read his thoughts far better than he knew. Father and son repaired to the private office at the mill, and The Laird seated himself in his old swivel chair. "Now then, lad," he demanded, "have I been a good sport?" "You have, indeed, father! I'm grateful to you." "You needn't be. I wouldn't have missed that funeral for considerable. That girl can sing like an angel, and, man, the courage of her! 'Twas sweet of her, singing to old Caleb like that, but I much mistake if she won't be talked about for it. 'Twill be said she's heartless." He handed his son a cigar and snipped the end off one for himself. "We'll be needing the Sawdust Pile now for a drying-yard," he announced complacently. "You mean----" "I mean, my son, that you're dreaming of the impossible, and that it's time for you to wake up. I want no row about it. I can't bear to hear your mother and sisters carrying on longer. I'll never get over thinking what a pity it is that girl is damaged goods. She must not be wife to son of mine." The young laird of Tyee bowed his head. "I can't give her up, father," he murmured. "By God, I can't!" "There can be no happiness without honor, and you'll not be the first to make our name a jest in the mouths of Port Agnew. You will write her and tell her of my decision; if you do not wish to, then I shall do it for you. Trust her to understand and not hold it against you. And it is my wish that you should not see her again. She must be cared for, but when that time comes, I shall attend to it; you know me well enough to realize I'll do that well." He laid his hand tenderly on the young man's shoulder. "This is your first love, my son. Time and hard work will help you forget--and I'll wait for my grandson." "And if I should not agree to this--what?" "Obey me for a month--and then ask me that question if you will. I'm--I'm a bit unprepared for an answer on such short notice." Donald bowed his head. "Very well, sir. I'll think it over for a month--on one condition." "Thank you, my son," said The Laird of Tyee. "And what is the condition?" "Let mother and the girls go to Seattle or Honolulu or Shanghai or some other seaport--anywhere, provided they're not at The Dreamerie when I return to Port Agnew. I'm going to spend that damnable month in the woods, week-ends and all, and wrestle with this problem." Old Hector smiled a small smile. "I'm an old ass," he declared. "Have it your own way, only--by the gods, I ought to teach them sense. I've spoiled them, and I ought to unspoil them. They drive me crazy, much as I love them." * * * * * The Laird went home that afternoon lighter of heart than he had been for a month. He told himself that his firm stand with Donald had rather staggered that young man, and that a month of reflection, far from the disturbing influence of Nan Brent's magnetic presence, would induce Donald to adopt a sensible course. XXIII Since that night when Mr. Daney, standing aloof in the dark vacant lot close to the Sawdust Pile, had seen Donald McKaye, in the light cast through the open door of Caleb Brent's cottage, take Nan Brent in his arms and kiss her, since he had heard Nan Brent's voice apply to the young laird of Port Agnew a term so endearing as to constitute a verbal caress, his practical and unromantic soul had been in a turmoil of apprehension. It seemed to him that in old Hector he noted signs of deep mental perturbation. Also, he told himself, he detected more shades than lights in Donald's usually pleasant features; so, knowing full well that which he knew and which neither The Laird nor Donald suspected him of knowing, to wit: that a declaration of love had been made between Nan Brent and the heir to the Tyee millions, Mr. Daney came to the conclusion, one evening about a week after old Caleb's funeral, that something had to be done--and done quickly--to avert the scandal which impended. To his way of reasoning, however, it appeared that nothing along this line was possible of accomplishment while Nan Brent remained in Port Agnew; so Mr. Daney brought to play all of his considerable intelligence upon the problem of inducing her to leave. Now, to render Port Agnew untenable for Nan, thus forcing her to retreat, was a task which Mr. Daney dismissed not only as unworthy of him but also as impossible. As a director of the Bank of Port Agnew, he had little difficulty in ascertaining that Caleb Brent's savings-account had been exhausted; also, he realized that the chartering of Caleb's motor-boat, Brutus, to tow the municipal garbage-barge to sea and return, had merely been Donald's excuse to be kind to the Brents without hurting their gentle pride. To cancel the charter of the Brutus now would force Nan to leave Port Agnew in order to support herself, for Daney could see to it that no one in Port Agnew employed her, even had anyone in Port Agnew dared run such risk. Also, the Tyee Lumber Company might bluff her out of possession of the Sawdust Pile. However, Donald would have to be reckoned with in either case, and Mr. Daney was not anxious to have the weight of his young master's anger fall on his guilty head. He saw, therefore, that some indirect means must be employed. Now, Mr. Daney wisely held, in contradiction to any number of people not quite so hard-headed as he, that absence does _not_ tend to make the heart grow fonder--particularly if sufficient hard work and worry can be supplied to prevent either party to the separation thinking too long or too intensely of the absentee. Within a decent period following Nan's hoped-for departure from Port Agnew, Mr. Daney planned to impress upon The Laird the desirability of a trip to the Orient, while he, Daney, upon the orders of a nerve-specialist, took a long sea voyage. Immediately the entire burden of seeing that the Tyee Lumber Company functioned smoothly and profitably would fall upon Donald's young and somewhat inexperienced shoulders. In the meantime, what with The Laird's money and the employment of a third party or parties, it would be no trick at all to induce Nan Brent to move so far from Port Agnew that Donald could not, in justice to his business interests, desert those interests in order to pay his court to her. "Dog my cats!" Mr. Daney murmured, at the end of a long period of perplexity. "I have to force the girl out of Port Agnew, and I can never do so while that motor-boat continues to pay her eighty dollars a month. She cannot exist on eighty dollars a month elsewhere, but she can manage very nicely on it here. And yet, even with that confounded charter canceled, we're stuck with the girl. She cannot leave Port Agnew without sufficient funds to carry her through for a while, and she'd die before she'd accept the gift of a penny from anybody in Port Agnew, particularly the McKayes. Even a loan from The Laird would be construed as a roundabout way of buying her off." Mr. Daney pondered his problem until he was almost tempted to butt his poor head against the office wall, goat-fashion, in an attempt to stimulate some new ideas worth while. Nevertheless, one night he wakened from a sound sleep and found himself sitting up in bed, the possessor of a plan so flawless that, in sheer amazement, he announced aloud that he would be--jiggered. Some cunning little emissary of the devil must have crept in through his ear while he slept and planted the brilliant idea in Mr. Daney's brain. Eventually, Mr. Daney lay down again. But he could not go to sleep; so he turned on the electric bedside-lamp and looked at his watch. It was midnight and at midnight no living creature, save possibly an adventurous or amorous cat, moved in Port Agnew; so Mr. Daney dressed, crept down-stairs on velvet feet, in order not to disturb the hired girl, and stepped forth into the night. Ten minutes later, he was down at the municipal garbage-barge, moored to the bulkhead of piles along the bank of the Skookum. He ventured to strike a match. The gunwale of the barge was slightly below the level of the bulkhead; so Mr. Daney realized that the tide had turned and was at the ebb--otherwise, the gunwale would have been on a level with the bulkheads. He stepped down on the barge, made his way aft to the Brutus, moored astern, and boarded the little vessel. He struck another match and looked into the cabin to make certain that no member of the barge-crew slept there. Finding no one, he went into the engine-room and opened the sea-cock. Then he lifted up a floor-board, looked into the bilge, saw that the water therein was rising, and murmured, "Bully--by heck!" He clambered hastily back aboard the barge, cast off the mooring-lines of the Brutus, and with a boat-book gave her a shove which carried her out into the middle of the river. She went bobbing away gently on the ebb-tide, bound for the deep water out in the Bight of Tyee where, when she settled, she would be hidden forever and not be a menace to navigation. Mr. Daney watched her until she disappeared in the dim starlight before returning to his home and so, like Mr. Pepys, to bed, where he had the first real sleep in weeks. He realized this in the morning and marveled at it, for he had always regarded himself as a man of tender conscience and absolutely incapable of committing a maritime crime. Nevertheless, he whistled and wore a red carnation in his lapel as he departed for the mill office. XXIV Following the interview with his father, subsequent to Caleb Brent's funeral, Donald McKaye realized full well that his love-affair, hitherto indefinite as to outcome, had crystallized into a definite issue. For him, there could be no evasion or equivocation; he had to choose, promptly and for all time, between his family and Nan Brent--between respectability, honor, wealth, and approbation on one hand, and pity, contempt, censure, and poverty on the other. Confronting this _impasse_, he was too racked with torment to face his people that night and run the gantlet of his mother's sad, reproachful glances, his father's silence, so eloquent of mental distress, and the studied scorn, amazement, and contempt in the very attitudes of his selfish and convention-bound sisters. So he ate his dinner at the hotel in Port Agnew, and after dinner his bruised heart took command of his feet and marched him to the Sawdust Pile. The nurse he had sent down from the Tyee Lumber Company's hospital to keep Nan company until after the funeral had returned to the hospital, and Nan, with her boy asleep in her lap, was seated in a low rocker before the driftwood fire when Donald entered, unannounced save for his old-time triple tap at the door. At first glance, it was evident to him that the brave reserve which Nan had maintained at the funeral had given way to abundant tears when she found herself alone at home, screened from the gaze of the curious. He knelt and took both outcasts in his great strong arms, and for a long time held them in a silence more eloquent than words. "Well, my dear," she said presently, "aren't you going to tell me all about it?" That was the woman of it. She knew. "I'm terribly unhappy," he replied. "Dad and I had a definite show-down after the funeral. His order--not request--is that I shall not call here again." "Your father is thinking with his head; so he thinks clearly. You, poor dear, are thinking with your heart controlling your head. Of course you'll obey your father. You cannot consider doing anything else." "I'm not going to give you up," he asserted doggedly. "Yes; you are going to give me up, dear heart," she replied evenly. "Because I'm going to give you up, and you're much too fine to make it hard for me to do that." "I'll not risk your contempt for my weakness. It _would_ be a weakness--a contemptible trick--if I should desert you now." "Your family has a greater claim on you, Donald. You were born to a certain destiny--to be a leader of men, to develop your little world, and make of it a happier place for men and women to dwell in. So, dear love, you're just going to buck up and be spunky and take up your big life-task and perform it like the gentleman you are." "But what is to become of you?" he demanded, in desperation. "I do not know. It is a problem I am not going to consider very seriously for at least a month. Of course I shall leave Port Agnew, but before I do, I shall have to make some clothes for baby and myself." "I told my father I would give him a definite answer regarding you in a month, Nan. I'm going up in the woods and battle this thing out by myself." "Please go home and give him a definite answer to-night. You have not the right to make him suffer so," she pleaded. "I'm not prepared to-night to abandon you, Nan. I must have some time to get inured to the prospect." "Did you come over to-night to tell me good-by before going back to the woods, Donald?" He nodded, and deliberately she kissed him with great tenderness. "Then--good-by, sweetheart," she whispered. "In our case, the least said is soonest mended. And please do not write to me. Keep me out of your thoughts for a month, and perhaps I'll stay out." "No hope," he answered, with a lugubrious smile. "However, I'll be as good as I can. And I'll not write. But--when I return from that month of exile, do not be surprised if I appear to claim you for good or for evil, for better or for worse." She kissed him again--hurriedly--and pressed him gently from her, as if his persistence gave her cause for apprehension. "Dear old booby!" she murmured. "Run along home now, won't you, please?" So he went, wondering why he had come, and the following morning, still wrapped in a mental fog, he departed for the logging-camp, but not until his sister Jane had had her long-deferred inning. While he was in the garage at The Dreamerie, warming up his car, Jane appeared and begged him to have some respect for the family, even though, apparently, he had none for himself. Concluding a long and bitter tirade, she referred to Nan as "that abandoned girl." Poor Jane! Hardly had she uttered the words before her father appeared in the door of the garage. "One year, Janey," he announced composedly. "And I'd be pleased to see the photograph o' the human being that'll make me revoke that sentence. I'm fair weary having my work spoiled by women's tongues." "I'll give you my photograph, old pepper-pot," Donald suggested. "I have great influence with you have I not?" The Laird looked up at him with a fond grin. "Well?" he parried. "You will remit the sentence to one washing of the mouth with soap and water to cleanse it of those horrid words you just listened to." "That's not a bad idea," the stern old man answered. "Janey, you may have your choice, since Donald has interceded for you." But Jane maintained a freezing silence and swept out of the garage with a mien that proclaimed her belief that her brother and father were too vulgar and plebeian for her. "I'm having the deil's own time managing my family," old Hector complained, "but I'll have obedience and kindness and justice in my household, or know the reason why. Aye--and a bit of charity," he added grimly. He stood beside the automobile and held up his hand up for his son's. "And you'll be gone a month, lad?" he queried. Donald nodded. "Too painful--this coming home week-ends," he explained. "And Nan has requested that I see no more of her. You have a stanch ally in her, dad. She's for you all the way." Relief showed in his father's troubled face. "I'm glad to know that," he replied. "You're the one that's bringing me worry and breaking down her good resolutions and common sense." He leaned a little closer, first having satisfied himself, by a quick, backward glance, that none of the women of the family was eavesdropping, and whispered: "I'm trying to figure out a nice way to be kind to her and give her a good start in life without insulting her. If you should have a clear thought on the subject, I'd like your advice, son. 'Twould hurt me to have her think I was trying to buy her off." "As I view the situation, all three of us have to figure our own angles for ourselves. However, if a happy thought should dawn on me, I'll write you. Think it over a few weeks, and then do whatever seems best." So they parted. XXV A few days subsequent to Andrew Daney's secret scuttling of the motor-boat Brutus, Nan Brent was amazed to receive a visit from him. "Good-morning, Nan," he saluted her. "I have bad news for you." "What, pray?" she managed to articulate. She wondered if Donald had been injured up in the woods. "Your motor-boat's gone." This was, indeed, bad news. Trouble showed in Nan's face. "Gone where?" she faltered. "Nobody knows. It disappeared from the garbage-barge, alongside of which it was moored. I've had men searching for it two days, but we've given it up as lost. Was the Brutus, by any chance, insured against theft?" "Certainly not." "Well, the Tyee Lumber Company used reasonable care to conserve your property, and while there's a question whether the company's responsible for the loss of the boat if it's been stolen, even while under charter to us, nevertheless, you will be reimbursed for the value of the boat. Your father had it up for sale last year. Do you recall the price he was asking?" "He was asking considerably less than he really believed the Brutus to be worth," Nan replied honestly. "He would have sold for fifteen hundred dollars, but the Brutus was worth at least twenty-five hundred. Values shrink, you know, when one requires ready cash. And I do not agree with you that no responsibility attaches to the Tyee Lumber Company, although, under the circumstances, it appears there is no necessity for argument." "We'll pay twenty-five hundred rather than descend to argument," Daney replied crisply, "although personally I am of the opinion that two thousand would be ample." He coughed a propitiatory cough and looked round the Sawdust Pile appraisingly. "May I inquire, my girl," he asked presently, "what are your plans for the future?" "Certainly, Mr. Daney. I have none." "It would be a favor to the Tyee Lumber Company if you had, and that they contemplated removal to some other house. The Laird had planned originally to use the Sawdust Pile for a drying-yard"--he smiled faintly--"but abandoned the idea rather than interfere with your father's comfort. Of course, The Laird hasn't any more title to the Sawdust Pile than you have--not as much, in fact, for I do believe you could make a squatter's right stick in any court. Just at present, however, we have greater need of the Sawdust Pile than ever. We're getting out quite a lot of airplane spruce for the British government, and since there's no doubt we'll be into the war ourselves one of these days, we'll have to furnish additional spruce for our own government. Spruce has to be air-dried, you know, to obtain the best results, and--well, we really need the Sawdust Pile. What will you take to abandon, it and leave us in undisputed possession?" "Nothing, Mr. Daney." "Nothing?" "Precisely--nothing. We have always occupied it on The Laird's sufferance, so I do not think, Mr. Daney," she explained, with a faint smile, "that I shall turn pirate and ingrate now. If you will be good enough to bring me over twenty-five hundred dollars in cash to-day, I will give you a clearance for the loss of the Brutus and abandon the Sawdust Pile to you within the next three or four days." His plan had worked so successfully that Daney was, for the moment, rendered incapable of speech. "Will you be leaving Port Agnew?" he sputtered presently. "Or can I arrange to let you have a small house at a modest rental--" She dissipated this verbal camouflage with a disdainful motion of her upflung hand. "Thank you. I shall leave Port Agnew--forever. The loss of the Brutus makes my escape possible," she added ironically. "May I suggest that you give no intimation of your intention to surrender this property?" he suggested eagerly. "If word of your plan to abandon got abroad, it might create an opportunity for some person to jump the Sawdust Pile and defy us to dispossess him." Mr. Daney sought, by this subterfuge, to simulate an interest in the physical possession of the Sawdust Pile which he was far from feeling. He congratulated himself, however, that, all in all, he had carried off his mission wonderfully well, and departed with a promise to bring over the money himself that very afternoon. Indeed, so delighted was he that it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from unburdening to The Laird, when the latter dropped in at the mill office that afternoon, the news that before the week should be out Nan Brent would be but a memory in Port Agnew. Later, he wondered how far from Port Agnew she would settle for a new start in life and whether she would leave a forwarding address. He resolved to ask her, and he did, when he reappeared at the Sawdust Pile that afternoon with the money to reimburse Nan for the loss of the Brutus. "I haven't decided where I shall go, Mr. Daney," Nan informed him truthfully, "except that I shall betake myself some distance from the Pacific Coast--some place where the opportunities for meeting people who know me are nebulous, to say the least. And I shall leave no forwarding address. When I leave Port Agnew"--she looked Mr. Daney squarely in the eyes as she said this--"I shall see to it that no man, woman, or child in Port Agnew--not even Don McKaye or The Laird, who have been most kind to me--shall know where I have gone." "I'm sorry matters have so shaped themselves in your life, poor girl, that you're feeling bitter," Mr. Daney replied, with genuine sympathy, notwithstanding the fact that he would have been distressed and puzzled had her bitterness been less genuine. In the realization that it _was_ genuine, he had a wild impulse to leap in the air and crack his ankles together for very joy. "Will I be seeing you again, Nan, before you leave?" "Not unless the spirit moves you, Mr. Daney," she answered dryly. She had no dislike for Andrew Daney, but, since he was the husband of Mrs. Daney and under that person's dominion, she distrusted him. "Well then, I'll bid you good-by now, Nan," he announced. "I hope your lot will fall in pleasanter places than Port Agnew. Good-by, my dear girl, and good luck to you--always." "Good-by, Mr. Daney," she replied. "Thank you for bringing the money over." XXVI By an apparent inconsistency in the natural order of human affairs, it seems that women are called upon far oftener than men to make the hardest sacrifices; also, the call finds them far more willing, if the sacrifice is demanded of them by love. Until Andrew Daney had appeared at the Sawdust Pile with the suddenness of a genie (and a singularly benevolent genie at that), Nan had spent many days wondering what fate the future held in store for her. With all the ardor of a prisoner, she had yearned to leave her jail, although she realized that freedom for her meant economic ruin. On the Sawdust Pile, she could exist on the income from the charter of the Brutus, for she had no rent to pay and no fuel to buy; her proximity to the sea, her little garden and a few chickens still further solved her economic problems. Away from the Sawdust Pile, however, life meant parting with her baby. She would have to place him in some sort of public institution if she would be free to earn a living for them both, and she was not aware that she possessed any adaptability for any particular labor which would enable her to earn one hundred dollars a month, the minimum sum upon which she could, by the strictest economy, manage to exist and support her child. Too well she realized the difficulty which an inexperienced woman has in securing employment in an office or store at a wage which, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, may be termed lucrative, and, lacking funds wherewith to tide her over until she should acquire experience, or even until she should be fortunate enough to secure any kind of work, inevitable starvation faced her. Her sole asset was her voice; she had a vague hope that if she could ever acquire sufficient money to go to New York and buy herself just sufficient clothing to look well dressed and financially independent, she might induce some vaudeville impresario to permit her to spend fifteen minutes twice or four times daily, singing old-fashioned songs to the proletariat at something better than a living wage. She had an idea for a turn to be entitled, "Songs of the 'Sixties." The arrival of Andrew Daney with twenty-five hundred dollars might have been likened to an eleventh-hour reprieve for a condemned murderer. Twenty-five hundred dollars! Why, she and Don could live two years on that! She was free--at last! The knowledge exalted her--in the reaction from a week of contemplating a drab, barren future, she gave no thought to the extreme unlikelihood of anyone's daring to steal a forty-foot motor-boat on a coast where harbors are so few and far between as they are on the Pacific. Had old Caleb been alive, he would have informed her that such action was analogous to the theft of a hot stove, and that no business man possessed of a grain of common sense would have hastened to reimburse her for the loss after an inconsequential search of only two days. Had she been more worldly wise, she would have known that business men do not part with twenty-five hundred dollars that readily--otherwise, they would not be business men and would not be possessed of twenty-five hundred dollars. Nan only realized that, in handing her a roll of bank-notes with a rubber band round them, Andrew Daney had figuratively given her the key to her prison, against the bars of which her soul had beaten for three long years. Now, it is doubtful whether any woman ever loved a man without feeling fully assured that she, more than any other person, was better equipped to decide exactly what was best for that man. Her woman's intuition told Nan that Donald McKaye was not to be depended upon to conserve the honor of the McKaye family by refraining from considering an alliance with her. Also, knowing full well the passionate yearnings of her own heart and the weakness of her economic position, she shrank from submitting herself to the task of repelling his advances. Where he was concerned, she feared her own weakness--she, who had endured the brutality of the world, could not endure that the world's brutality should be visited upon him because of his love for her. Strong of will, self-reliant, a born fighter, and as stiff-necked as his father, his yearning to possess her, coupled with his instinct for fair play, might and probably would lead him to tell the world to go hang, that he would think for himself and take his happiness where he found it. By all means, this must be prevented. Nan felt that she could not permit him to risk making a sorry mess of a life of promise. Consumed with such thoughts as these, it was obvious that Nan should pursue but one course--that is, leave Port Agnew unannounced and endeavor to hide herself where Donald McKaye would never find her. In this high resolve, once taken, she did not falter; she even declined to risk rousing the suspicions of the townspeople by appearing at the general store to purchase badly needed articles of clothing for herself and her child. She resolved to leave Port Agnew in the best clothes she had, merely pausing a few days in her flight--at Vancouver, perhaps--to shop, and then continuing on to New York. On the morning of her departure, the butcher's boy, calling for an order, agreed, for fifty cents, to transport her one small trunk on his cart to the station. The little white house which she and her father had built with so much pride and delight, she left furnished as it was and in perfect order. As she stood at the front door and looked back for the last time, the ticking of the clock in the tiny dining-and-living room answered her mute, "Good-by, little house; good-by," and, though her heart was full enough, she kept back the tears until she saw the flag flying bravely at the cupola. "Oh, my love, my love!" she sobbed. "I mustn't leave it flying there, flaunting my desertion in your dear eyes." Blinded by her tears, she groped her way back to the house, hauled down the flag, furled it, and laid it away in a bureau drawer. And this time, when she left the house, she did not look back. * * * * * At the station, she purchased a ticket for Seattle and checked her trunk at the baggage-room counter. As she turned from the counter and started for the waiting-room, she caught the interested eyes of old Hector McKaye bent upon her. He lifted his hat and walked over to her. "I happened to be looking down at the Sawdust Pile when you hauled your flag down this morning," he explained, in a low voice. "So I knew you were going away. That's why I'm here." To this extraordinary speech, the girl merely replied with an inquiring look. "I wonder if you will permit me to be as kind to you as I can," he continued. "I know it sounds a bit blunt and vulgar to offer you money, but when one needs money--" "I have sufficient for my present needs," she replied. "Mr. Daney has paid me for the loss of my motor-boat, you know. You are very kind; but I think I shall have no need to impose further on your generosity. I think the twenty-five hundred dollars will last me nicely until I have made a new start in life." "Ah!" The Laird breathed softly, "Twenty-five hundred dollars. Yes, yes! So he did; so he did! And are you leaving Port Agnew indefinitely, Nan?" "Forever," she replied. "We have robbed you of the ground for a drying-yard for nearly ten years, but this morning the Sawdust Pile is yours." "Bless my soul!" The Laird ejaculated. "Why, we are not at all in distress for more drying-space." "Mr. Daney intimated that you were. He asked me how much I would take to abandon my squatter's right, but I declined to charge you a single cent." She smiled up at him a ghost of her sweet, old-time whimsical smile. "It was the first opportunity I had to be magnanimous to the McKaye family, and I hastened to take advantage of it. I merely turned the key in the lock and departed." "Daney has been a trifle too zealous for the Tyee interests, I fear," he replied gently. "And where do you plan to live?" "That," she retorted, still smilingly, "is a secret. It may interest you, Mr. McKaye, to know that I am not even leaving a forwarding address for my mail. You see, I never receive any letters of an important nature." He was silent a moment, digesting this. Then, "And does my son share a confidence which I am denied?" "He does not, Mr. McKaye. This is my second opportunity to do the decent thing toward the McKaye family--so I am doing it. I plan to make rather a thorough job of it, too. You--you'll be very kind and patient with him, will you not? He's going to feel rather badly, you know, but, then, I never encouraged him. It's all his fault, I think--I tried to play fair--and it was so hard." Her voice sunk to a mere whisper. "I've always loved Donald, Mr. McKaye. Most people do; so I have not regarded it as sinful on my part." "You are abandoning him of your own free will--" "Certainly. I have to. Surely you must realize that?" "Yes, I do. I have felt that he would never abandon you." He opened and closed his big hands nervously, and was plainly a trifle distrait. "So--so this is your idea of playing the game, is it?" he demanded presently. She nodded. "Well," he replied helplessly, "I would to God I dared be as good a sport as you are, Nan Brent! Hear me, now, lass. Think of the thing in life you want to do and the place where you want to do it--" She interrupted him. "No, no, Mr. McKaye; there can be no talk of money between us. I cannot and will not take your son--for his sake, and for my own sake I cannot and will not accept of your kindness. Somehow, some place, I'm going to paddle my own canoe." "Guid lass; guid lass," he whispered huskily. "Remember, then, if your canoe upsets and spills you, a wire to me will right you, and no questions asked. Good-by, my dear, and good luck to you!" He pressed her hand, lifted his hat, and walked briskly away in the direction of The Tyee Lumber Company's office, quite oblivious of the fact that his interview with Nan Brent had been observed by a person to whom the gods had given at birth a more than average propensity of intrigue, romance, and general cussedness--Mr. Daniel J. O'Leary, of whom more anon. From the station, Hector McKaye hurried over to the mill office and entered Andrew Daney's room. "Andrew," he began, "you've been doing things. What became of old Caleb Brent's motor-boat?" "I opened the sea-cock, cast it off, and let it drift out into the bight on the ebb-tide one night recently." "Why?" "In order that I might have a logical and reasonable excuse to furnish Nan Brent with sufficient funds to leave this town and make a new start elsewhere. I have charged the twenty-five hundred to your personal account on the company books." "You also indulged in some extraordinary statements regarding our pressing need for the Sawdust Pile as a drying-yard." "We can use it, sir," Daney replied. "I felt justified in indicating to the girl that her room was desired to her company. Your son," he added deliberately, "was treading on soft ground, and I took the license of an old friend and, I hope, a faithful servant, to rid him of temptation." "I shall never be done with feeling grateful to you, Andrew. The girl is leaving on the train that's just pulling out, and--the incident is closed. My son is young. He will get over it. Thank you, Andrew, dear friend, until you're better paid--as you will be some day soon." "I'll have need of your friendship if Donald ever discovers my part in this deal. He'll fire me out o' hand." "If he does, I'll hire you back." "Hell will pop when he finds the bird has flown, sir." "Let it pop! That kind of popping is music in my ears. Hark, Andrew lad! There's the train whistling for Darrow's Crossing. From there on the trail is lost--lost--_lost_, I tell you! O Lord, God of Hosts, I thank Thee for Thy great mercy!" And, quite suddenly, old Hector sat down and began to weep. XXVII Nan Brent's departure from the Sawdust Pile was known to so few in Port Agnew that it was fully ten days before the news became general; even then it excited no more than momentary comment, and a week later when Donald McKaye returned to town, somewhat sooner than he had anticipated, Port Agnew had almost forgotten that Nan Brent had ever lived and loved and sinned in its virtuous midst. Even the small gossip about her and the young laird had subsided, condemned by all, including the most thoughtless, as a gross injustice to their favorite son, and consequently dismissed as the unworthy tattling of unworthy, suspicious old women. Life in the busy little sawmill town had again sagged into the doldrums. For several days, a feeling of lassitude had been stealing over Donald. At first he thought it was mental depression, but when, later, he developed nausea, lack of appetite, and pains in his head, back, and extremities, it occurred to him that he wasn't feeling well physically and that The Dreamerie was to be preferred to his rough pine shanty in the woods, even though in the latter he had sanctuary from the female members of his family. He came in unexpectedly on the last log-train on Saturday night; tired, with throbbing head and trembling legs, he crawled off the caboose at the log dump and made his way weakly up to the mill office. It was deserted when he got there at half-past six, but in his mail-box he found something which he had promised himself would be there, despite certain well-remembered assurances to the contrary. It was a letter from Nan. He tore the envelop eagerly and read: Donald dear, I love you. That is why I am leaving you. We shall not meet again, I think. If we should, it will doubtless be years hence, and by that time we shall both have resigned ourselves to this present very necessary sacrifice. Good-by, poor dear. Always your sweetheart, NAN. He read and reread the letter several times. It was undated. Presently, with an effort, he recovered the envelop from the waste-basket and examined the postmark. The letter had been mailed from Seattle, but the post-date was blurred. With the letter clutched in his hand, he bent forward and pillowed his hot face in his arms, outspread upon his father's old desk. He wanted to weep--to sob aloud in a childish effort to unburden his heart, scourged now with the first real sorrow of his existence. His throat contracted; something in his breast appeared to have congealed, yet for upward of an hour he neither moved nor gave forth a sound. At last, under the inspiration of a great hope that came apparently without any mental effort or any desire for hope, so thoroughly crushed was he, the black, touseled head came slowly up. His face, usually ruddy beneath the dark, suntanned skin but now white and haggard, showed a fleeting little smile, as if he grinned at his own weakness and lack of faith; he rose unsteadily and clumped out of the office-building. Gone! Nan gone--like that! No, no! He would not believe it. She might have intended to go--she might have wanted to go--she might even have started to go--but she had turned back! She loved him; she was his. During those long days and nights up in the woods, he had fought the issue with himself and made up his mind that Nan Brent was the one woman in the world for him, that there could never, by God's grace, be any other, and that he would have her, come what might and be the price what it would. Rather than the fortune for which his father had toiled and sacrificed, Donald preferred Nan's love; rather than a life of ease and freedom from worry, he looked forward with a fierce joy to laboring with his hands for a pittance, provided he might have the privilege of sharing it with her. And The Dreamerie, the house his father had built with such great, passionate human hopes and tender yearnings, the young laird of Port Agnew could abandon without a pang for that little white house on the Sawdust Pile. Round steak and potatoes, fried by the woman destined to him for his perfect mate, would taste better to him than the choicest viands served by light stepping servitors in his father's house. What, after all, was there worth while in the world for him if he was to be robbed of his youth and his love? For him, the bare husks of life held no allurement; he was one of that virile, human type that rejects the doctrine of sacrifice, denial, and self-repression in this life for the greater glory of God and man's promise of a reward in another life, of which we wot but little and that little not scientifically authenticated. He wanted the great, all-compelling, omnipotent Present, with its gifts that he could clutch in his fierce hands or draw to his hungry heart. To hell with the future. He reflected that misers permit their thoughts to dwell upon it and die rich and despised, leaving to the apostles of the Present the enjoyment of the fruits of a foolish sacrifice. "She came back. I know she did," he mumbled, as he groped his way through the dark of the drying-yard. "I'm sick. I must see her and tell her to wait until I'm well. The damned dirty world can do what it jolly well pleases to me, but I'll protect her from it. I will--by God!" He emerged into the open fields beyond which lay the Sawdust Pile, snuggled down on the beach. The Brent cottage was visible in the dim starlight, and he observed that there was no light in the window; nevertheless, his high faith did not falter. He pressed on, although each step was the product of an effort, mental and physical. His legs were heavy and dragged, as if he wore upon, his logger's boots the thick, leaden soles of a deep-sea diver. At the gate, he leaned and rested for a few minutes, then entered the deserted yard and rapped at the front door; but his summons bringing no response, he staggered round to the back door and repeated it. He waited half a minute and then banged furiously with his fist upon the door-panel. Still receiving no response, he seized the knob and shook the door until the little house appeared to rattle from cellar to cupola. "Nan! Nan! Where are you?" he called. "It is I--Donald. Answer me, Nan. I know you haven't gone away. You wouldn't! Please answer me, Nan!" But the only sound he heard was the labored pumping of his own heart and the swish of the wavelets against the timbered buttress of the Sawdust Pile. The conviction slowly came to his torpid brain that he was seeking admittance to a deserted house, and he leaned against the door and fought for control of himself. Presently, like a stricken animal, he went slowly and uncertainly away in the direction whence he had come. * * * * * Andrew Daney had put out the cat and wound the clock and was about to ascend to his chamber (now, alas, reoccupied by Mrs. Daney, upon whom the news of Nan's departure had descended like a gentle rainfall over a hitherto arid district) when he heard slow footsteps on his front veranda. Upon going to the door and peering out, he was amazed to see Donald McKaye standing just outside. "Well, bless my soul!" Daney declared. "So it's you Donald. Come in, lad; come in." Donald shook his head. "No, I've only come to stay a minute, Mr. Daney. Thank you, sir. I--I notice you're running a light track from the drying-yard down to the Sawdust Pile. Stumbled over it in the dark a few minutes ago, and I--" He essayed a ghastly smile, for he desired to remove the sting from the gentle rebuke he purposed giving the general manger--"couldn't seem to remember having ordered that track--or--suggesting that it be laid." "Quite so, Donald; quite so," Daney answered. "I did it on my own initiative. Nan Brent has abandoned the Sawdust Pile--moved away from Port Agnew, you know; so I decided to extend the drying-yard, and squat on the Sawdust Pile before some undesirable took possession." "Hm-m-m! I see. Well, suppose Nan takes a notion to return to Port Agnew, Mr. Daney. She'll find our drying-yard something of a nuisance, will she not?" "Oh, but she's not coming back," Daney assured him, with all the confidence of one free from the slightest doubt on the subject. "She might. I could see rather dimly into the kitchen and it appears Miss Brent left her little home furnished." "Yes, she did, Donald. I believe she just turned the key in the lock and went away." "Know where she went, Mr. Daney?" "No. She didn't even leave a forwarding address for her mail." The young laird of Tyee lurched up to Mr. Daney and laid a heavy hand on the older man's shoulder. "How do you know that?" he demanded, and there was a growl in his voice. "Has Mrs. Daney been asking the postmaster?" Mr. Daney saw that, for some inexplicable reason, he was in for a bad five minutes or more. His youthful superior's face was white and beaded with perspiration. Daney had a suspicion that Donald had had a drink or two. "There has been no gossip, Donald," he answered crisply. "Get that notion out of your head. I would protect you from gossip, for I think I know my duty to the McKayes. I learned that lesson a long time ago," he added, with spirit. "You haven't answered my question, Mr. Daney," Donald persisted. "I shall. I know, because she told me herself." Mr. Daney had not intended that Donald should ever discover that he had had an interview with Nan Brent, but his veracity had, for the moment, appeared to him to be questioned by his superior, and he was too truthful, too thoroughly honest to attempt now to protect his reputation for truth-telling by uttering a small fib, albeit he squirmed inwardly at the terrible necessity for such integrity. "Ah! Then Nan called upon you again?" Mr. Daney sighed. "No, I called upon her." "With reference to what?" "To settle with her for the loss of the Brutus." "When did you lose the Brutus." Mr. Daney pulled at his ear, gazed at the porch light, rubbed his Adam's apple, and gave the exact date. "What happened to the Brutus?" "She just disappeared, Donald. She was tied up alongside the barge--" The heavy hand on Mr. Daney's shoulder tightened a little. Donald was merely holding fast to the general manager in order to stay on his feet, but Mr. Daney credited him with being the victim of rising anger. "When did Nan leave Port Agnew, Mr. Daney?" "Let me see, Donald." Mr. Daney tugged at his beard. "Why, she left two weeks ago yesterday. Yes; she left on the nineteenth." "When did you settle with her for the loss of the Brutus?" "On the sixteenth," Daney answered glibly. "How much?" "Twenty-five hundred dollars. It was more than the Brutus was worth, but I disliked to appear niggardly in the matter, Donald. I knew you and your father would approve whatever sum I settled for--and the loss of the little boat provided a nice opportunity for generosity without hurting the girl's pride." "Yes--thank you, Mr. Daney. That was kind and thoughtful of you." Donald spoke the words slowly, as if he searched his brain carefully for each word and then had to coax his tongue into speaking it. "You settled, then, two days after the boat disappeared. Fast work. Nobody up here would steal the boat. Too much distance between ports--run short of gasoline, you know, on her limited tank capacity--and if anybody had purchased cased gasoline around here to load on deck, you'd know of it. Hard to conceal or disguise a forty-foot boat, too." His fingers closed like steel nippers over Mr. Daney's shoulder. "Where did you hide the boat, Mr. Daney? Answer me. I'll not be trifled with." "I scuttled her--if you must have the truth." "I knew you wouldn't lie to me. On whose orders, Mr. Daney? My father's?" "No, sir; it was my own idea." Daney's face was white with mental and physical distress and red with confusion, by turns. His shoulder was numb. "Why?" "I figured that if the girl had some money to make a new start elsewhere, she'd leave Port Agnew, which would be best for all concerned." "Why, Andrew Daney, you old hero! Cost you something to confess that, didn't it? Well--I guessed you or my father had induced her to go, so I concluded to start the investigation with you," He passed his hand over his white dripping brow before resuming what he had to say. "The Tyee Lumber Company isn't equipped to carry on its pay-roll Mr. Donald McKaye and the man who interferes in his personal affair, even though actuated by a kindly interest. You rip up that track you're laying and leave Nan's home alone. Then you clean up your desk and hand me your resignation. I'm sick--and your damned interference hurts. Sorry; but you must go. Understand? Nan's coming back--understand? Coming back--devilish hot night--for this time of year, isn't it? Man, I'm burning up." It came to Mr. Daney that the young laird was acting in a most peculiar manner. Also, he was talking that way. Consequently, and what with the distress of being dismissed from the McKaye service in such cavalier fashion, the general manager decided to twist out from under that terrible grasp on his shoulder. Instantly, Donald released from this support, swayed and clutched gropingly for Mr. Daney's person. "Dizzy," he panted. "Head's on strike. Mr. Daney, where the devil are you? Don't run away from me. You damned old muddler, if I get my hands on you I'll pick you apart--yes, I will--to see--what makes you go. You did it, Yes, you did--even if you're too stupidly honest--to lie about it. Glad of that, though, Mr. Daney. Hate liars and interfering duffers. Ah--the cold-blooded calculation of it--took advantage of her poverty. She's gone--nobody knows--May God damn your soul to the deepest hell--Where are you? I'll kill you--no, no; forgive me, sir--Yes, you've been faithful, and you're an old employe--I wish you a very pleasant good-evening, sir." He stepped gingerly down the three wide stairs, pitched forward, and measured his length in a bed of pansies. Mr. Daney came down, struck a match, and looked at his white face. Donald was apparently unconscious; so Mr. Daney knelt, placed his inquisitive nose close to the partly open lips, and sniffed. Then he swore his chiefest oath. "Hell's hells and panther-tracks! He isn't drunk. He's sick." Fifteen minutes later, the young Laird of Port Agnew reposed in the best room of his own hospital, and Andrew Daney was risking his life motoring at top speed up the cliff road to The Dreamerie with bad news for old Hector. Mrs. McKaye and the girls had retired but The Laird was reading in the living-room when Daney entered unannounced. Old Hector looked up at his general manager from under his white, shaggy brow. "Ye, Andrew," he saluted the latter gently, "I see by your face it's not welcome news you bring. Out with it, man." So Andrew came "out with it," omitting no detail, and at the conclusion of his recital, the old man wagged his head to emphasize his comprehension. "My son is not a dull man by any means," he said presently. "He knows what he knows--a man sure of himself always--and oh, Andrew man, because of the brain of him and the sweet soul of him, it breaks my heart to give pain to him. And what does the doctor say?" "From a cursory examination he suspects typhoid fever." "Ah, that's bad, bad, Andrew." "The boy has the strength of a Hercules, sir. He'll beat through, never fear." "Well, he'll not die to-night, at any rate," old Hector answered, "and I can do no good puttering round the hospital to-night. Neither would I alarm his mother and the girls. Send for the best medical brains in the country, Andrew, and don't quibble at the cost. Pay them what they ask. 'Twill be cheap enough if they save him. Good-night, Andrew, and thank you kindly." He stood up and laid his hand affectionately upon the shoulder of his faithful servant and walked with him thus to the door. "My good Andrew," he murmured, and propelled the general manager gently outside, "there's no need to worry over the dismissal. When the lad's well, he'll rescind his order, so, in the meantime, do not leave us." "But--if he shouldn't rescind it?" Daney pleaded anxiously. Although he was comfortably fixed with this world's goods and had long since ceased to work for monetary reward, the Tyee Lumber Company was, nevertheless, part of his life, and to be dismissed from its service was akin to having some very necessary part of him amputated. "Tush, man; tush! Don't be building a mare's nest," old Hector answered and closed the door upon him. For The Laird was losing control of himself and he could not bear that any human eye should gaze upon his weakness. XXVIII The morning following Donald's admittance to the hospital, the company doctor confirmed his original diagnosis that the patient was suffering from an attack of typhoid fever. The disease had evidently been two weeks incubating, for the woods boss reported that his superior had complained of being "under the weather" for ten days before yielding to the former's repeated advice to go down to Port Agnew and have the doctor look him over. As a result of Donald's stubborn refusal to acknowledge his illness, the disease had reached a fair stage of development by the time he received medical attention. He was not delirious when The Laird and Mrs. McKaye reached the hospital that morning, however, they were permitted to see him for but a few minutes only. "Has he a fighting chance?" old Hector demanded bluntly of the doctor. It seemed to him that his son's face already wore the look of one doomed to dissolution at an early date. "Yes, he has, Mr. McKaye," the doctor replied gravely; "provided he'll fight. You will understand that in typhoid fever the mortality rate is rather high--as high as thirty per cent. However, in the case of Donald, who is a husky athlete, I should place the odds at about ten to one that he'll survive an attack of even more than moderate severity. That is," he added, "under the most favorable conditions." "Well, what's wrong with the conditions in this case?" The Laird demanded crisply. "You can have anything you want--if you're shy on material to work with, and I've sent for the best physician in the state to come here and consult with you." "The hospital conditions are perfect, Mr. McKaye. What I mean is this: It is a well recognized principle of medical practice that a patient combating a disease of extreme severity and high mortality is sustained quite as much by his courage and a passionate desire to get well--in a word, by his morale--as he is by his capacity for physical resistance. Your son is, I think, slightly depressed mentally. That is the sole reason I see to warrant apprehension." "Oh--so that's all, eh?" The Laird was relieved. "Then don't worry about him. He'll put up a battle--never fear. Why, he never quit in all his life. However, in case he might need a bit of encouragement from his old daddy from time to time, you'll have a room made ready for me. I'll stay here till he's out of danger." That was a terrible week on old Hector. The nurse, discovering that his presence appeared to excite her patient, forbade him the room; so he spent his days and part of his nights prowling up and down the corridor, with occasional visits to the mill office and The Dreamerie, there to draw such comfort from Daney and his family as he might. While his temperature remained below a hundred and four, Donald would lie in a semi-comatose condition, but the instant the thermometer crept beyond that point he would commence to mutter incoherently. Suddenly, he would announce, so loudly The Laird could hear every word, that he contemplated the complete and immediate destruction of Andrew Daney and would demand that the culprit be brought before him. Sometimes he assumed that Daney was present, and the not unusual phenomenon attendant upon delirium occurred. When in good health Donald never swore; neither would he tolerate rough language in his presence from an employe; nevertheless, in his delirium he managed, at least once daily, to heap upon the unfortunate Daney a generous helping of invective of a quality that would have made a mule-skinner blush. Sometimes Mr. Daney was unfortunate enough to drop in at the hospital in time to hear this stream of anathema sounding through the corridor; upon such occasions he would go into The Laird's room and he and old Hector would eye each other grimly but say never a word. Having demolished Mr. Daney with a verbal broadside, Donald would appear to consider his enemy dead and direct his remarks to Nan Brent. He would reproach her tenderly for leaving Port Agnew without informing him of her intention; he assured her he loved her, and that unless she returned life would not be worth living. Sometimes he would call upon old dead Caleb to reason with her in his behalf. About that time he would be emerging from a Brand bath and, with the decline of his temperature, his mutterings and complaints gradually grew incoherent again and he would sleep. Thus two weeks passed. Donald showed no sign of the improvement which should ordinarily be looked for in the third week, and it was apparent to the doctors and nurses who attended him that the young Laird was not making a fight to get well--that his tremendous physical resistance was gradually being undermined. His day-nurse it was who had the courage, womanlike, to bring the matter to an issue. "He's madly in love with that Nan girl he's always raving about," she declared. "From all I can gather from his disconnected sentences, she has left Port Agnew forever, and he doesn't know where she is. Now, I've seen men--little, weak men--recover from a worse attack of typhoid than this big fellow has, and he ought to be on the up-grade now, if ever--yet he's headed down-hill. About next week he's going to start to coast, unless Nan Brent shows up to take him by the hand and lead him back up-hill. I believe she could do it--if she would." "I believe she could, also," the doctor agreed. "Perhaps you've noticed that, although his family have listened to him rave about her, they have never given the slightest indication that they know what he is raving about. The girl's tabu, apparently." "The Laird appears to be a human being. Have you spoken to him about this--Nan girl?" "I tried to--once. He looked at me--and I didn't try any more. The fact is," the doctor added, lowering his voice, "I have a notion that old Hector, through Daney, gave the girl money to leave the country." "If he knew what an important personage she is at this minute, he'd give her more money to come back--if only just long enough to save his son. Have you spoken to Mr. Daney?" "No; but I think I had better. He has a great deal of influence with The Laird, and since I have no doubt they were in this conspiracy together, Daney may venture to discuss with the old man the advisability of bringing the girl back to Port Agnew." "If she doesn't appear on the scene within ten days--" "I agree with you. Guess I'll look up Mr. Daney." He did. Daney was at his desk in the mill office when the doctor entered and, without the least circumlocution, apprised him of the desperate state to which Donald was reduced. "I tell you, Mr. Daney," he declared, and pounded Daney's desk to emphasize his statement, "everything that medical science can do for that boy has been done, but he's slipping out from under us. Our last hope lies in Nan Brent. If she can be induced to come to his bedside, hold his hand, and call him pet names when he's rational, he'll buck up and win out. There are no dangerous physical complications to combat now. They are entirely mental." While the physician was speaking, Andrew Daney's face had gradually been taking on the general color-tones of a ripe old Edam cheese. His chin slowly sagged on his breast; his lips parted in horror and amazement until, finally, his mouth hung open slackly, foolishly; presently, two enormous tears gathered in the corners of his eyes and cascaded slowly across his cheeks into his whiskers. He gripped the arms of his chair. "O God, forgive me!" he moaned. "The Laird doesn't know where she is, and neither do I. I induced her to go away, and she's lost somewhere in the world. To find her now would be like searching a haystack for a needle." "But you might telegraph a space-ad to every leading newspaper in the country. The Laird can afford to spend a million to find her--if she can be found in a hurry. Why, even a telegram from her would help to buck him up." But Andrew Daney could only sway in his chair and quiver with his profound distress. "The scandal!" he kept murmuring, "the damned scandal! I'll have to go to Seattle to send the telegrams. The local office would leak. And even if we found her and induced her to come back to save him, she'd--she'd have to go away again--and if she wouldn't--if he wouldn't permit her--why, don't you see how impossible a situation has developed? Man, can Donald McKaye wed Nan Brent of the Sawdust Pile?" "My interest in the case is neither sentimental nor ethical. It is entirely professional. It appears to me that in trying to save this young fellow from the girl, you've signed his death warrant; now it is up to you to save him from himself, and you're worrying because it may be necessary later to save the girl from him or him from the girl. Well, I've stated the facts to you, and I tried to state them to The Laird. Do as you think best. If the boy dies, of course, I'll swear that he was doomed, anyhow, due to perforation of the intestines." "Yes, yes!" Daney gasped. "Let The Laird off as lightly as you can." "Oh, I'll lie cheerfully. By the way, who is this girl? I haven't been in Port Agnew long enough to have acquired all the gossip. Is she impossible?" "She's had a child born out of wedlock." "Oh, then she's not a wanton?" "I'm quite sure she is not." "Well, I'll be damned! So that's all that's wrong with her, eh?" Like the majority of his profession, this physician looked up such a _contretemps_ with a kindly and indulgent eye. In all probability, most of us would if we but knew as many of the secrets of men as do our doctors and lawyers. Long after the doctor had left him alone with his terrible problem, Mr. Daney continued to sit in his chair, legs and arms asprawl, chin on breast. From time to time, he cried audibly: "O Lord! O my God! What have I done? What shall I do? How shall I do it? O Lord!" He was quite too incoherent for organized prayer; nevertheless his agonized cry to Omnipotence was, indeed, a supplication to which the Lord must have inclined favorably, for, in the midst of his desolation and bewilderment, the door opened and Dirty Dan O'Leary presented himself. XXIX Thanks to the constitution of a Nubian lion, Dirty Dan's wounds and contusions had healed very rapidly and after he got out of hospital, he spent ten days in recuperating his sadly depleted strength. His days he spent in the sunny lee of a lumber pile in the drying-yard, where, in defiance of the published ordinance, he smoked plug tobacco and perused the _Gaelic American_. Now, Mr. O'Leary, as has been stated earlier in this chronicle, was bad black Irish. Since the advent of Oliver Cromwell into Ireland, the males of every generation of the particular tribe of O'Leary to which Dirty Dan belonged had actively or passively supported the battles of Ould Ireland against the hereditary enemy across the Channel, and Dirty Dan had suckled this holy hatred at his mother's breast; wherefore he regarded it in the light of his Christian duty to keep that hate alive by subscribing to the _Gaelic American_ and believing all he read therein anent the woes of the Emerald Isle. Mr. O'Leary was also a member of an Irish-American revolutionary society, and was therefore aware that presently his kind of Irish were to rise, cast off their shackles (and, with the help o' God and the German kaiser) proclaim the Irish Republic. For several months past, Daniel's dreams had dwelt mostly with bayonet-practice. Ordinary bayonets, however, were not for him. He dreamed his trusty steel was as long as a cross-cut saw, and nightly he skewered British soldiers on it after the fashion of kidneys and bacon _en brochette_. For two months he had been saving his money toward a passage home to Ireland and the purchase of a rifle and two thousand rounds of ammunition--soft-nose bullets preferred--with the pious intention of starting with "th' bhoys" at the very beginning and going through with them to the bloody and triumphant finish. Unfortunately for Dirty Dan, his battle in defense of Donald McKaye had delayed his sortie to the fields of martyrdom. On the morning that Nan Brent left Port Agnew, however, fortune had again smiled upon The O'Leary. Meeting Judge Moore, who occupied two local offices--justice of the peace and coroner--upon the street, that functionary had informed Dan that the public generally, and he and the town marshal in particular, traced an analogy between the death of the mulatto in Darrow and Mr. O'Leary's recent sojourn in the Tyee Lumber Company's hospital, and thereupon, verbally subpoenaed him to appear before a coroner's jury the following day at ten o'clock A.M., then and there to tell what he knew about said homicide. Dirty Dan received this summons with outward nonchalance but tremendous secret apprehensions, and immediately fled for advice to no less a person than Andrew Daney. However, the Fates ordained that Andrew Daney should be spared the trouble of advising Dirty Dan, for as the latter came shuffling down the hall toward Daney's office door, The Laird emerged from his old office and accosted his henchman. "Well, Dan!" he greeted the convalescent, "how do you find yourself these days?" "Poorly, sir, poorly," Dirty Dan declared. "Twas only yisterd'y I had to take the other side av the shtreet to av'id a swamper from Darrow, sir." The Laird smiled. "Well, Dan, I think it's about time I did something to make you feel better. I owe you considerable for that night's work, so here's a thousand dollars for you, my boy. Go down to southern California or Florida for a month or two, and when you're back in your old form, report for duty. I have an idea Mr. Donald intends to make you foreman of the loading-sheds and the drying-yard when you're ready for duty." "God bless ye, me lord, an' may the heavens be your bed!" murmured the astounded lumberjack, as The Laird produced his wallet and counted into Dan's grimy quivering paw ten crisp hundred-dollar bills. "Oh, t'ank you, sor; t'ank you a t'ousand times, sor. An' ye'll promise me, won't ye, to sind for me firrst-off if ye should be wan tin' some blackguard kilt?" "I assure you, Dan, you are my sole official killer," laughed The Laird, and shook the O'Leary's hand with great heartiness. "Better take my advice about a good rest, Dan." "Sor, I'll be afther havin' the vacation o' me life." "Good-by, then, and good luck to you, Dan!" "Good-by, an' God bless ye, sor!" Five minutes later, Daniel J. O'Leary was in the general store fitting on what he termed a "Sunday suit." Also, he bought himself two white shirts of the "b'iled" variety, a red necktie, a brown Derby hat, and a pair of shoes, all too narrow to accommodate comfortably his care-free toes. Next, he repaired to the barber-shop, where he had a hair-cut and a shave. His ragged red mustache, ordinarily of the soup-strainer pattern, he had trimmed, waxed, and turned up at each end; the barber put much pomade on his hair and combed it in a Mazeppa, with the result that when! Daniel J. O'Leary appeared at the railroad station the following morning, and purchased a ticket for New York City, Hector McKaye, loitering in front of the station on the lookout for Nan Brent, looked at and through Mr. O'Leary without recognizing him from Adam's off ox. It is, perhaps, superfluous to remark that Dirty Dan was about to embark upon an enterprise designed to make his dreams come true. He was headed for Ireland and close grips with the hated redcoats as fast as train and steamer could bear him. Now, Mr. O'Leary had never seen Nan Brent, although he had heard her discussed in one or two bunk-houses about the time her child had been born. Also, he was a lumberjack, and since lumberjacks never speak to the "main push" unless first spoken to, he did not regard it as all necessary to bring himself to Hector McKaye's notice when his alert intelligence informed him that The Laird had failed to recognize him in his going-away habiliments. Further, he could see with half an eye that The Laird was waiting for somebody, and when that somebody appeared on the scene, the imp of suspicion in Dirty Dan's character whispered: "Begorra, is the father up to some shenanigans like the son? Who's this girrl? I dunno. A young widder, belike, seem' she has a youngster wit' her." He saw Nan and The Laird enter into earnest conversation, and his curiosity mastering him, he ventured to inquire of a roustabout who was loading baggage on a truck who the young lady might be. Upon receiving the desired information, he, with difficulty repressed a whistle of amazement and understanding; instantly his active imagination was at work. The girl was leaving Port Agnew. That was evident. Also, The Laird must have known of this, for he had reached the station before the girl and waited for her. Therefore, he must have had something to do with inducing her to depart. Mr. O'Leary concluded that it was quite within the realm of possibility that The Laird had made it well worth her while to refrain from wrecking the honor of his house, and he watched narrowly to observe whether or not money passed between them. One thing puzzled Dirty Dan extremely. That was the perfectly frank, friendly manner in which his employer and this outcast woman greeted each other, the earnestness with which they conversed, and the effect of the woman's low-spoken words upon the color of Hector McKaye's face. When The Laird took his leave, the lumberjack noted the increased respect--the emotion, even--with which he parted from her. The lumberjack heard him say, "Good-by, my dear, and good luck to you wherever you go"; so it was obvious Nan Brent was not coming back to Port Agnew. Knowing what he knew, Mr. O'Leary decided that, upon the whole, here was good riddance to the McKaye family of rubbish that might prove embarrassing if permitted to remain dumped on the Sawdust Pile. "Poor gurrl," he reflected as he followed Nan aboard the train. "She have a sweet face, that she have, God forgive her! An be th' Rock av Cashel, she have a v'ice like an angel from heaven." He sat down in a seat behind her and across the aisle, and all the way to Seattle he stared at the back of her neck or the beautiful rounded profile of her cheek. From time to time, he wondered how much Hector McKaye had paid her to disappear out of his son's life, and how that son would feel, and what he would say to his father when he discovered his light o' love had flown the cage. The following morning Mr. O'Leary boarded a tourist-sleeper on the Canadian Pacific, and, to his profound amazement, discovered that Nan Brent and her child occupied a section in the same car. "Begorra, she couldn't have shtuck the ould man very deep at that, or 'tis in a standard shleeper an' not a tourist she'd be riding," he reflected. "What the divil's up here at all, at all, I dunno." Dirty Dan saw her enter a taxicab at the Grand Central Station in New York. "I wonder if the young Caddyheck himself'll meet her here," Mr. O'Leary reflected, alive with sudden suspicion, and springing into the taxicab that drew in at the stand the instant the taxi bearing Nan and her child pulled out, he directed the driver to follow the car ahead, and in due course found himself before the entrance to a hotel in lower Broadway--one of that fast disappearing number of fifth-class hotels which were first-class thirty years ago. Dirty Dan hovered in the offing until Nan had registered and gone up to her room. Immediately he registered also, and, while doing so, observed that Nan had signed her real name and given her address as Port Agnew, Washington. With unexpected nicety, Dirty Dan decided not to embarrass her by registering from Port Agnew also, so he gave his address as Seattle. For two days, he forgot the woes of Ireland and sat round the stuffy lobby, awaiting Nan Brent's next move. When he saw her at the cashier's window paying out, he concealed himself behind a newspaper, and watched her covertly as the clerk gave instructions to the head porter regarding the disposition of her baggage. The instant she left the hotel, accompanied by her child, Dirty Dan approached the porter and said with an insinuating smile: "I'd give a dollar to know the address the young lady wit' the baby bhoy give you f'r the delivery av her trunk." The porter reached for the dollar and handed Dirty Dan a shipping tag containing the address. Mr. O'Leary laboriously wrote the address in a filthy little memorandum-book, and that afternoon made a point of looking up Nan's new habitation. He discovered it to be an old brownstone front in lower Madison Avenue, and a blue-and-gold sign over the area fence indicated to Mr. O'Leary that, from an abode of ancient New York aristocracy, the place had degenerated into a respectable boarding-house. "'Tis true," Dirty Dan murmured. "She's given the young fella the go-by. Hurro! An' I'm bettin' I'm the only lad in the wide, wide wurrld that knows where she's gone. Faith, but wouldn't Misther Donald pay handsomely for the information in me little book." Having, as he judged, followed the mystery to its logical conclusion, Mr. O'Leary was sensible of a sudden waning of his abnormal curiosity in Nan Brent's affairs. He acknowledged to himself that he had spent time and money on a matter that was absolutely none of his business, but excused himself upon the ground that if he hadn't investigated the matter thoroughly, his failure to do so might annoy him in the future. If, for no other reason than the desirability of being on the inside track of this little romance of a rich man's son, his action was to be commended. People have no business disappearing without leaving a trace or saying good-by to those that love them. Dirty Dan hadn't the least idea of selling his information to Donald McKaye, but something in his peculiar mental make-up caused him to cherish a secret for its own sake; he had a true Irishman's passion for being "in the know," and now that he was in it, he was tremendously satisfied with himself and dismissed the entire matter from his mind. Old Ireland and her woes were again paramount, so Mr. O'Leary presented himself before the proper authorities and applied for a passport to visit Ireland. Now, while Daniel J. did not know it, one of the first questions the applicant for a passport is required to answer is his reason for desiring to make the journey, and during the Great War, as everybody of mature years will recall, civilians were not permitted to subject themselves to the dangers of a ruthless submarine war without good and sufficient reason. Mr. O'Leary had a reason--to his way of thinking, the noblest reason in all the world; consequently he was proud of it and not at all inclined to conceal it. "I'm goin' over there," he declared, with profane emphasis, "to kill all the damned English I can before they kill me." His interlocutor gravely wrote this reply down in Mr. O'Leary's exact language and proceeded to the other questions. When the application was completed, Dirty Dan certified to the correctness of it, and was then smilingly informed that he had better go back where he came from, because his application for a passport was denied. Consumed with fury, the patriot thereupon aired his opinion of the Government of the United States, with particular reference to its representative then present, and in the pious hope of drowning his sorrows, went forth and proceeded to get drunk. When drunk, Mr. O'Leary always insisted, in the early stages of his delirium, on singing Hibernian ballads descriptive of the unflinching courage, pure patriotism and heroic sacrifices of the late Owen Roe O'Neill and O'Donnell Abu. Later in the evening he would howl like a timber-wolf and throw glasses, and toward morning he always fought it out on the floor with some enemy. Of course, in the sawmill towns of the great Northwest, where folks knew Mr. O'Leary and others of his ilk, it was the custom to dodge the glasses and continue to discuss the price of logs. Toward Dirty Dan, however, New York turned a singularly cold shoulder. The instant he threw a glass, the barkeeper tapped him with a "billy"; then a policeman took him in tow, and the following morning, Dirty Dan, sick, sore, and repentant was explaining to a police judge that he was from Port Agnew, Washington, and really hadn't meant any harm. He was, therefore, fined five dollars and ordered to depart forthwith for Port Agnew, Washington, which he did, arriving there absolutely penniless and as hungry as a cougar in midwinter. He fled over to the mill kitchen, tossed about five dollars worth of ham and eggs and hot biscuit into his empty being, and began to take stock of life. Naturally, the first thing he recalled in mind was The Laird's remark that Donald planned to make him foreman of the loading-sheds and drying-yards; so he wasted no time in presenting himself before Donald's office door. To his repeated knocking there was no reply, so he sought Mr. Daney. "Hello, Dan! You back?" Daney greeted him. "Glad to see you. Looking for Mr. Donald?" "Yes, sor; thank you, sor." "Mr. Donald is ill in the company's hospital. We're afraid, Dan, that he isn't going to pull through." "Glory be!" Mr. O'Leary gasped, horrified on two counts. First, because he revered his young boss, and, second, because the latter's death might nullify his opportunity to become foreman of the loading-sheds and drying-yard. "Sure, what's happened to the poor bhoy?" Before Daney could answer, a terrible suspicion shot through the agile and imaginative O'Leary brain. In common with several million of his countrymen, he always voiced the first thought that popped into his head; so he lowered that member, likewise his voice, peered cunningly into Andrew Daney's haggard face, and whispered: "Don't tell me he tried to commit suicide, what wit' his poor broken heart an' all!" It was Andrew Daney's turn to peer suspiciously at Dirty Dan. For a few seconds, they faced each other like a pair of belligerent game-cocks. Then said Daney: "How do you know his heart was broken?" Dirty Dan didn't know. The thought hadn't even occurred to him until ten seconds before; yet, from the solemnity of Daney's face and manner, he knew instantly that once more his feet were about to tread the trails of romance, and the knowledge imbued him with a deep sense of importance. He winked knowingly. "Beggin' yer pardon, Misther Daney an' not m'anin' the least offinse in life, but--I know a lot about that young man--yis, an' the young leddy, too--that divil a sowl on earth knows or is goin' to find out." He tried a shot in the dark. "That was a clever bit o' wurrk gettin' her out o' Port Agnew--" Andrew Daney's hands closed about Dirty Dan's collar, and he was jerked violently into the latter's office, while Daney closed and locked the door behind them. The general manager was white and trembling. "You damned, cunning mick, you!" he cried, in a low voice. "I believe you're right. You do know a lot about this affair--" "Well, if I do, I haven't talked about it," Dirty Dan reminded him with asperity. "You knew the girl had left Port Agnew and why, do you not?" Daney demanded. "Of course I do. She left to plaze The Laird an' get rid o' the young fella. Whether Th' Laird paid her to go or not, I don't know, but I'll say this: 'If he gave her anythin' at all, 'twas damned little.'" "He didn't give her a red cent," Daney protested. "I believe you, sor," Mr. O'Leary assured him, as solemn as a Supreme Court justice. "I judged so be the way she traveled an' the hotel she shtopped at." Daney made another dive at the returned prodigal, but Mr. O'Leary evaded him. "Where did she travel, and what hotel did she put up at?" the general manager demanded. "She traveled to the same places an' put up at the same hotels that I did," Dirty Dan replied evasively, for his natural love for intrigue bade him hoard his secret to the last. Daney sat down and said very quietly: "Dan, do you know where Nan Brent may be found?" "Where she _may_ be found? Faith, I can tell you where she can be found--but I'll not." "Why not?" "Because 'tis her secret, an' why should I share it wit' you, m'anin' no disrespect, sor, at that?" "Your sentiments do you honor, Dan--a heap more honor than I ever thought you possessed. If Mr. Donald's life should happen to be the price of your silence, however, you'd tell me, wouldn't you?" "I would. The young gintlemin's blood runs in my veins, sor." "Thank you, Dan. Give me her address." "Number one eighty-five Madison Avenue, Noo Yorrk City," Dirty Dan replied promptly. "More I do not know. Am I on the pay-roll agin?" "You bet! I'll pick out a good job for you as soon as I find time to think about it." "Could I have a dollar or two in advance--" the wanderer began, as Daney hastened toward the door. "Certainly." The door slammed, and Dirty Dan could hear the general manager shouting in the general office. "Dirty Dan is back. Give him some money." Mr. O'Leary sighed contentedly. "Oh-ho, 'tis the great life we live," he murmured, and hastened outside to present himself at the cashier's window, while Andrew Daney continued on to the Tyee Lumber Company's hospital, tiptoed down the corridor to the room where the young Laird of Port Agnew lay dying, and rapped lightly on the door. A nurse came out and closed the door after her. "Well?" Daney demanded. "No change. His temperature fell two degrees during the night and he slept a little, but the fever is up again this morning, and he's raving again. Any news at your end?" "Yes. I have the girl's address. She's in New York. Is his father inside?" "Yes." "Ask him to step into the reception room for a few minutes, please." The Laird appeared promptly in response to this message, and the two men walked slowly down the hall to the reception-room. Daney closed the door and resolutely faced The Laird. "The doctors and the nurses tell me things, sir, they're afraid to tell you," he began. "Ordinarily, the boy should be able to fight this thing through successfully, for he has a splendid body and a lot of resistance, but the fact of the matter is, he isn't trying. He doesn't want to get well." The Laird's face went white. "They believe this?" he cried sharply. "They do. His subconscious mind clings to the memory of his loss. He keeps calling for her in his delirium, doesn't he? Now that he is assured she has dropped out of his life forever, he doesn't give a snap whether school keeps or not--and the doctors cannot cure him. If the girl were here--well, she might. Her very presence would bring about a strong mental and physical reaction--" He paused a moment. Then, "I know where she can be found." The Laird raised his haggard face and though his stern gray eyes were dull with agony, yet Daney saw in them the light of an unfaltering resolution. "I have left my son's honor and his life in the hands of God Almighty. I have made my bed and I'll lie in it," he panted. "But if the boy should die--" "Rather that than--than--" "But you're not going to take a chance on his pulling through, in the face of the advice of the doctors that only the girl's presence can stimulate him to a desire to live. I tell you, Hector McKaye, man, he's dying because he is not interested in living." "God's will be done, Andrew. If I asked her to come back and save my lad, I'd have to surrender him to her, and I would be derelict in my duty as a father if I permitted that. Better that he should pass out now than know the horror of a living death through all the years to come. God knows best. It is up to Him. Let there be no talk of this thing again, Andrew." Abruptly he quitted the room and returned to his vigil by the side of the son who was at once the light and the shadow of his existence. The nurse came stealthily to the reception-room entrance and looked in inquiringly. Daney shook his head, so she came into the room and pointed at him a singularly commanding index-finger. "If that old man is permitted to have his stubborn way, Donald McKaye will die," she declared. "So will old Hector. He'll be dead of a broken heart within the year." "He's sacrificing his son to his Scotch pride. Now, his mother is far more bitter against the girl than The Laird is; in her distress she accuses the Brent girl of destroying her son. Nevertheless, Mrs. McKaye's pride and resentment are not so intense that she will sacrifice her son to them." "Then give her this address," Daney suggested weakly, and handed it over. "I'm caught between the upper and nether millstone, and I don't care what happens to me. Damn the women, say I. Damn them! Damn them! They're the ones that do all the talking, set up a cruel moral code, and make a broad-minded, generous man follow it." "Thanks for the compliment," the nurse retorted blithely. "If I had time, I'd discuss the matter with you to your disadvantage, but, fortunately, I have other fish to fry. My job is to keep Donald McKaye alive for the next five or six days until Nan Brent can get here. She'll come. I know she will. She'd lie down in the street and die for him. I know it. I spent two days with her when her father was dead, and let me tell you something, Mr. Daney: 'She's too good for them. There! I feel better now.'" "What a remarkable woman!" Mr. Daney reflected, as he walked back to the mill office. "What a truly remarkable woman!" Then he remembered the complications that were about to ensue, and to the wonderment of several citizens of Port Agnew, he paused in front of the post-office, threw both arms aloft in an agitated flourish, and cried audibly: "Hell's bells and panther-tracks! I'd give a ripe peach to be in hell or some other seaport. O Lordy, Lordy, Lordy! And all the calves got loose!" XXX As a wife, it is probable that Nellie McKaye had not been an altogether unqualified success. She lacked tact, understanding and sympathy where her husband was concerned; she was one of that numerous type of wife who loses a great deal of interest in her husband after their first child is born. The Laird's wife was normally intelligent, peacefully inclined, extremely good-looking both as to face and figure, despite her years, and always abnormally concerned over what the most inconsequential people in the world might think of her and hers. She had a passion for being socially "correct." Flights of imagination were rarely hers; on the few occasions when they were, her thoughts had to do with an advantageous marriage for Jane and Elizabeth, who, it must be confessed, had not had very good luck holding on to the few eligible young bachelors who had seemed, for a brief period, to regard them with serious intent. The poor soul was worried about the girls, as well she might be, since the strides of time were rapidly bearing both into the sere-and-yellow-leaf period of life. For her son, she had earnest, passionate mother love, but since, like all mothers, she was obsessed with the delusion that every girl in the world, eligible and ineligible, was busy angling for her darling, she had left his matrimonial future largely to his father. Frequently her conscience smote her for her neglect of old Hector, but she smoothed it by promising herself to devote more time to him, more study to his masculine needs for wifely devotion, as soon as Elizabeth and Jane should be settled. Her son's acute illness and the possibility that he might not survive it had brought her closer to The Laird than these twain had been in twenty years; the blow that had all but crushed him had not even staggered her, for she told herself that, during this crisis she must keep her feet and her head. A wave of pity for her husband and a tinge of shame for her years of neglect of him revived more than a modicum of the old honeymoon tenderness, and, to her mild amazement, she discovered that she was still, in old Hector's eyes, young and beautiful; her breast, her lips, still had power to soothe and comfort. In those trying days she was The Laird's greatest asset. With maternal stubbornness, she resolutely refused to entertain the thought that her son might die. She could understand the possibility of some other woman's son dying, but not hers! she, who knew him so well (or thought she did, which amounts to the same thing), met with gentle tolerance and contempt the portentous nods and anxious glances of doctors and trained nurses. 'Fraid-cats--every last one of them! She told old Hector so and, to a considerable extent, succeeded in making him believe it. After The Laird's interview with Andrew Daney he came home that night to The Dreamerie, and, to please Nellie, he pretended to partake of some dinner. Also, during the course of the meal he suddenly decided to relate to his wife and daughters as much as he knew of the course of the affair between Donald and Nan Brent; he repeated his conversation with Nan on the two occasions he had spoken with her, and gave them to understand that his efforts to induce Donald to "be sensible" had not been successful. Finally, his distress making him more communicative, he related the cunning stratagem by which Daney had made it possible for Donald to be separated from the source of temptation. Elizabeth was the first to comment on his extraordinary revelations when he appeared to have finished his recital. "The girl has a great deal more character than I supposed," she opined in her soft, throaty contralto. "She played the game in an absolutely ripping manner!" Jane declared enthusiastically. "I had no idea she was possessed of so much force. Really, I should love to be kind to her, if that were at all possible now." The Laird smiled but without animus. "You had ample opportunity once, Janey," he reminded her. "But then, of course, unlike Donald and myself, you had no opportunity for realizing what a fine, wholesome lass she is." He lowered his gaze and rolled a bread-crumb nervously between thumb and forefinger. "They tell me at the hospital, Nellie," he began again presently, "that her absence is killing our boy--that he'll die if she doesn't come back. They've been whispering to Daney, and this afternoon he mentioned the matter to me." Three pairs of eyes bent upon him; gazes of mingled curiosity and distress. "Have you heard aught of such talk from the doctors and nurses," he continued, addressing them collectively. "I have," said Mrs. McKaye meekly, and the two girls nodded. "I think it's all poppycock," Jane added. "It isn't all poppycock, my dear," old Hector rebuked her. He rolled another bread-crumb. "Andrew has her address," he resumed after a long silence. "She's in New York. He asked me to wire her to come immediately, or else permit him to wire her in my name. I refused. I told Daney that our boy's case was in the hands of God Almighty." "Oh, Hector!" Mrs. McKaye had spoken. There was gentle reproach and protest in her voice, but she camouflaged it immediately by adding: "You poor dear, to be called upon to make such a decision." "His decision was absolutely right," Elizabeth declared. "I'd almost prefer to see my brother decently dead than the laughing-stock of the town, married to a woman that no respectable person would dare receive in her home." Old Hector looked up in time to see Jane nod approval of her sister's sentiments, and Mrs. McKaye, by her silence, appeared also to agree with them. The Laird reached forth and laid his great hand over hers. "Poor Nellie!" he murmured affectionately. "'Tis hard to stand between our love and duty, is it not, lass? By God, sweetheart, I had to do it. I couldn't stand to see him wedded wie a lass that any man or woman could throw mud at." His voice shook with the intensity of his emotion; his flashing glance swept the board in pitiful defiance. "I have a right to protect my honor and the honor of my house!" he cried sharply. "Is not Jesus Christ the embodiment of honor? How can He blame me if I trust in His power and discretion. I've prayed to Him--ach, man, how I've prayed to Him--to keep my son from makin' a fule o' himself--" "Now, there you go again, Hector, dear," his wife soothed. She rose from her place at the table, came round to him, put her arms around his great neck, and laid her cheek against his. "An open confession is good for the soul, they say, Hector. I'm glad you've taken us into your confidence, because it permits us to share with you an equal burden of this heart-breaking decision. But you mustn't feel badly, father. Haven't I told you our boy isn't going to die?" "Do you really think so, Nellie?" he pleaded childishly, and for the hundredth time. "Silly old Hector! I know so." And this time there was in her voice such a new note of confidence and in her eyes such a gleam of triumph that she actually did succeed in comforting him. "Ah, well, God's will be done," he said piously, and attacked his dinner again, while Mrs. McKaye slipped out of the room and up-stairs on some pretext. Once in her bedroom, she seized the extension telephone and called up Andrew Daney. "Andrew," she said softly but distinctly, "this is Nellie McKaye speaking. Hector and I have been discussing the advisability of sending for the Brent girl." "I--I was goin' to take the matter up with you, Mrs. McKaye. I had a talk with your husband this afternoon, but he was a bit wild--" "He isn't so wild now, Andrew. He's talked it over with the girls and me. It's a terrible alternative, Andrew, but it simply means our boy's life for the gratification of our own selfish family pride--" "Exactly! Exactly! And though I understand just how you feel, Mrs. McKaye, after all, now, it's only a nine days' wonder, and you can't keep people from talking anyhow, unless you gag the brutes. The boy has been raving, and some of the hospital attendants have talked, and the gossip is all over town again. So why not send for her? She doesn't have to marry him just because her presence will revive his sinking morale--" "Certainly not. My idea, exactly, Andrew. Well, Andrew, suppose you telegraph her--" "No, no, no! I'll telephone her. Remember, we have a transcontinental telephone service nowadays. She might not realize the vital necessity for speed; she might question her right to come if I tried to cover the situation in a telegram. But, catch her on the 'phone, Mrs. McKaye, and you can talk to her and convince her." "Oh, that's perfectly splendid! Place the call for me immediately, Andrew, please. And--Andrew, don't mention to Hector what I've done. He wants to do it, poor man, but he simply cannot bring himself to the point of action." "Don't I know it?" Daney's voice rose triumphant. "The blessed old duffer!" he added. "I'll put in a call for New York immediately. We ought to get it through in an hour or two." XXXI It was Mr. Daney's task to place the call for Nan Brent in New York City and while he did not relish the assignment, nevertheless he was far from shrinking from it. While the citizens of Port Agnew had been aware for more than two years that transcontinental telephoning was possible, they knew also that three minutes of conversation for twenty-five dollars tended to render silence more or less golden. As yet, therefore, no one in Port Agnew had essayed the great adventure; wherefore, Mr. Daney knew that when he did his conversation would be listened to eagerly by every telephone operator in the local office and a more or less garbled report of same circulated through the town before morning unless he took pains to prevent it. This he resolved to do, for the Tyee Lumber Company owned the local telephone company and it was quite generally understood in Port Agnew that Mr. Daney was high, low, and jack and the game, to use a sporting expression. He stood by the telephone a moment after hanging up the receiver, and tugged at his beard reflectively. "No," he murmured presently, "I haven't time to motor up-country forty or fifty miles and place the call in some town where we are not known. It just isn't going to be possible to smother this miserable affair; sooner or later the lid is going to fly off, so I might as well be game and let the tail go with the hide. Oh, damn it, damn it! If I didn't feel fully responsible for this dreadful state of affairs, I would most certainly stand from under!" He turned from the 'phone and beheld Mrs. Daney, alert of countenance and fairly pop-eyed with excitement. She grasped her husband by the arm. "You have a private line from the mill office to The Dreamerie," she reminded him. "Have the call run in on your office telephone, then call Mrs. McKaye, and switch her in. We can listen on the office extensions." Upon his spouse Mr. Daney bent a look of profound contempt. "When I consider the loyalty, the love, the forebearance, and Christian charity that have been necessary to restrain me from tearing asunder that which God, in a careless moment, joined together, Mary, I'm inclined to regard myself as four-fifths superman and the other fifth pure angel," he declared coldly. "This is something you're not in on, woman, and I hope the strain of your curiosity will make you sick for a week." He seized his hat and fled, leaving his wife to shed bitter, scalding tears at his cruel words. Poor thing! She prided herself upon being the possessor of a superior brand of virtue and was always quick to take refuge in tears when any one decried that virtue; indeed, she never felt quite so virtuous as when she clothed herself, so to speak, in an atmosphere of patient resignation to insult and misunderstanding. People who delude themselves into the belief that they can camouflage their own nastiness and weaknesses from discovery by intelligent persons are the bane of existence, and in his better half poor Daney had a heavy cross to bear. He left the house wishing he might dare to bawl aloud with anguish at the knowledge that he was yoked for life to a woman of whom he was secretly ashamed; he wished he might dare to get fearfully intoxicated and remain in that condition for a long time. In his youth, he had been shy and retiring, always envying the favor which the ladies appeared to extend to the daring devils of his acquaintance; consequently, his prenuptial existence had not been marked by any memorable amourous experiences, for where other young men sowed wild oats Mr. Daney planted a sweet forget-me-not. As a married man, he was a model of respectability--sacrosanct, almost. His idea of worldly happiness consisted in knowing that he was a solid, trustworthy business man, of undoubted years and discretion, whom no human being could blackmail. Now, as he fled from the odor of respectability he yearned to wallow in deviltry, to permit his soul, so long cramped in virtue, to expand in wickedness. On his way down-town he met young Bert Darrow, son of the man after whom the adjacent lumber-town had been christened. Mr. Darrow had recently been indicted under the Mann law for a jolly little interstate romance. But yesterday, Mr. Daney had regarded Bert Darrow as a wastrel and had gone a block out of his way to avoid the scapegrace; to-night, however, Bert appealed to him as a man of courage, a devil of a fellow with spirit, a lover of life in its infinite moods and tenses, a lad with a fine contempt for public opinion and established morals. Morals? Bah, what were they! In France, Bert Darrow would have earned for himself a wink and a shrug, as though to say: "Ah, these young fellows! One must watch out for the rascals!" In the United States, he was a potential felon. "Evening, Bert," Mr. Daney saluted him pleasantly, and paused long enough to shake the latter's hand. "I saw your ad in the Seattle _P.I._ this morning. You young dog! Hope you crawl out of that mess all right." "_C'est la guerre_," Bert murmured nonchalantly. "Thanks, awfully." Mr. Daney felt better after that brief interview. He had clasped hands with sin and felt now like a human being. He went directly to the local telephone office and placed his New York call with the chief operator, after which he sat in the manager's office and smoked until ten o'clock, when New York reported "Ready!" "You young ladies," said Mr. Daney, addressing the two young women on duty, "may take a walk around the block. Port Agnew will not require any service for the next twenty minutes." They assimilated his hint, and when he was alone with the chief operator Mr. Daney ordered her to switch the New York call on to Mrs. McKaye at The Dreamerie. Followed ten minutes of "Ready, Chicago." "All right, New York. Put your party on the line!"--a lot of persistent buzzing and sudden silence. Then: "Hello, Port Agnew." Mr. Daney, listening on the extension in the office of the manager, recognized the voice instantly as Nan Brent's. "Go on, Mrs. McKaye," he ordered. "That's the Brent girl calling Port Agnew." "Hello, Miss Brent. This is Donald McKaye's mother speaking. Can you hear me distinctly?" "Yes, Mrs. McKaye, quite distinctly." "Donald is ill with typhoid fever. We are afraid he is not going to get well, Miss Brent. The doctors say that is because he does not want to live. Do you understand why this should be?" "Yes; I think I understand perfectly." "Will you come back to Port Agnew and help save him? We all think you can do it, Miss Brent. The doctors say you are the only one that can save him." There was a moment of hesitation. "His family desires this, then?" "Would I telephone across the continent if we did not?" "I'll come, Mrs. McKaye--for his sake and yours. I suppose you understand why I left Port Agnew. If not, I will tell you. It was for his sake and that of his family." "Thank you. I am aware of that, Miss Brent. Ah--of course you will be amply reimbursed for your time and trouble, Miss Brent. When he is well--when all danger of a relapse has passed--I think you realize, Miss Brent, all of the impossible aspects of this unfortunate affair which render it necessary to reduce matters strictly to a business basis." "Quite, dear Mrs. McKaye. I shall return to Port Agnew--on business--starting to-morrow morning. If I arrive in time, I shall do my best to save your son, although to do so I shall probably have to promise not to leave him again. Of course, I realize that you do not expect me to keep that promise." "Oh, I'm so sorry, my dear girl, that I cannot say 'No' to that. But then, since you realized, in the first place, how impossible" "Good-night. I must pack my trunk." "Just a minute, my girl," Andrew Daney interrupted. "Daney speaking. When you get to Chicago, call up the C.M. St. P. station. I'll have a special train waiting there for you." "Thank you, Mr. Daney. I'm sorry you cannot charter an airplane for me from New York to Chicago. Good-night, and tell Donald for me whatever you please." "Send him a telegram," Daney pleaded. "Good-by." He turned to the chief operator and looked her squarely in the eyes. "The Laird likes discreet young women," he announced meaningly, "and rewards discretion. If you're not the highest paid chief operator in the state of Washington from this on, I'm a mighty poor guesser." The girl smiled at him, and suddenly, for the first time in all his humdrum existence, Romance gripped Mr. Daney. He was riotously happy--and courageous! He thrust a finger under the girl's chin and tilted it in a most familiar manner, at the same time pinching it with his thumb. "Young woman," he cautioned her, "don't you ever be prim and smug! And don't you ever marry any man until you're perfectly wild to do it; then, were he the devil himself, follow your own natural impulses." He let go her chin and shook his forefinger between her eyes. "I'd rather be happy than virtuous," the amazing man continued. "The calm placidity that comes of a love of virtue and the possession of it makes me sick! Such people are dull and stupid. They play hide-and-seek with themselves, I tell you. Suspicious little souls peering out of windows and shocked to death at everything they see or hear--condemn everything they do not understand. Damn it, girl, give me the virtue that's had to fight like the devil to stay on its feet--the kind that's been scratched and has had the corners knocked off in contact with the world and still believes that God made man to his own image and likeness. I tell you, the Lord knew what he was about when he invented the devil. If he hadn't, we'd all be so nasty-nice nobody could trust the other fellow further'n you can throw a bear up-hill by the tail. I tell you, young woman, sin is a great institution. Why, just think of all the fun we have in life--we good people--forgiving our neighbor his trespasses as he does not forgive us for trespassing against him." And with this remarkable statement, Mr. Daney betook himself to his home. Mrs. Daney, a trifle red and watery about the eyes and nose, sat up in bed and demanded to be informed what had kept him down-town so late. "Would you sleep any better if you knew?" he demanded. She said she would not. "Then, woman, resign yourself to the soft embrace of Bacchus, the god of sleep," he replied, mixed metaphorically. "As for me, my dear, I'm all talked out!" XXXII Donald, trembling on the brink of Beyond, not from his disease but from the exhaustion incident to it, was conscious when his father entered the room and sat down beside his bed. "Well, lad," he greeted the boy with an assumption of heartiness he was far from feeling, "and have you no good news for your old father this morning. Tell me you're feeling better, lad." "Read the telegram," Donald whispered, and old Hector, seeing a telegram lying on the bed, picked it up. It was dated from New York that morning, and the Laird read: Due Port Agnew Friday morning. Remember the last line in the fairy-tale. Love and kisses from your SWEETHEART. "God bless my soul!" The Laird almost shouted. "Who the devil is 'Sweetheart'?" "Only--have one--Scotty. Sorry--for you--but do you--happen to know--last line--fairy-tale? Tell you. 'And so--they--were married--and lived--happy--ever--after.'" Fell a long silence. Then, from The Laird: "And you're going to wait for--her, my son?" "Certainly. Foolish die--now. I'll try--to wait. Try hard." He was still trying when Nan Brent stepped off the special train at Port Agnew on Friday morning. She was heavily veiled, and because of the distinctly metropolitan cut of her garments, none recognized her. With her child trotting at her side, she walked swiftly to the company hospital, and the nurse, who had been watching for her, met her at the door. The girl raised a white, haggard face, and her sad blue eyes asked the question. The nurse nodded, led her down the hall, pointed to the door of Donald's room, and then picked up Nan's child and carried him off to the hospital kitchen for a cookie. The outcast of Port Agnew entered. Hector McKaye sat by the bed, gazing upon his son, who lay with closed eyes, so still and white and emaciated that a sudden fear rose in Nan's mind. Had she arrived too late? The Laird turned and gazed at her an instant with dull eyes, then sprang to meet her. "Well, lass," he demanded, and there was a belligerent and resentful note in his voice, "is this playing the game?" She nodded, her blurred eyes fixed upon his son, and old Hector's face softened with a tenderness almost paternal. "Then," he whispered, "you didn't mean that--about the last line of the fairy-tale?" Her head moved in negation, but she did not look at him. She had eyes only for the wreck of the man she loved. "I heard you needed me--to save him, Mr. McKaye. So I'm here--to save him, if I can--for you--nothing more." He bowed to her, deeply, humbly, as if she were in truth the grandest lady in the land, then left the room hurriedly. Nan approached the bed and leaned over Donald, gazing at him for several minutes, for he was not as yet aware of her presence. Suddenly she commenced to sing softly the song he loved: "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny," and her hand stole into his. The little grin that crept over his bearded face was ghastly; after the first bar, she bent and laid her cool cheek against his. "Well, old shipmate," she murmured in his ear, "I'm back." "'God's in--his heaven,'" he whispered. "'All's right--with the--world.'" XXXIII From the company hospital, The Laird went straight to his general manager's office. Entering, he strode to Daney's desk and transfixed that harassed individual with an accusing finger. "Andrew, this is your work, is it not?" Mr. Daney's heart skipped a beat, but he remembered this was Friday morning. So he decided not to be foolish and spar for time by asking The Laird what work he referred to. Also, having read somewhere that, in battle, the offensive frequently wins--the defensive never--he glared defiantly at The Laird and growled. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" His demeanor appeared to say: "This is my work, and I'm proud of it." To Daney's profound amazement, The Laird smiled benignantly and thrust out his hand, which Mr. Daney shook gingerly, as one might a can of nitroglycerin. "I thank you more than you will ever realize, Andrew, for taking this matter out of my hands. I left the decision up to the Almighty and evidently he inspired you to disobey me and save the day--without compromising me." "Pooh! That's the easiest thing I do." Mr. Daney's courage had returned with a rush. "For heaven's sake, don't talk about it, sir. I placed a call for the girl on the telephone--at your expense. Yes, sir; I talked with her clear across the continent, and before she even started from New York, it was understood that she is to jilt Donald the minute the doctors pronounce him strong enough to stand jilting." "She told me, practically, the same thing. Oh, Andrew, Andrew, my boy, this is bully work! Bully! Bully!" Mr. Daney replied to this encomium with a deprecatory shrug and hoped The Laird would never ask _him who had made the bargain_. Thus far, he flattered himself, he had not strayed from the straight and narrow path of strict veracity, and he hoped he would not have to. To obviate this, he decided to get rid of The Laird immediately; so he affected embarrassment; fussed with the pile of mail on his desk, and growled: "All right, boss. If you're satisfied, I am. I haven't been able to sleep very well since I started mixing in your family affairs, and without sleep a man cannot hold up his job. I've got a lot of work to do, and I cannot have any idle, interfering fellows stampeding round my office; so I suggest that you run up to The Dreamerie to break the good news to your poor wife and the girls, and let me get something done." "All right, Andrew; I'll go in a minute. Er--ah--you're certain, Andrew, the girl understands quite thoroughly that I haven't had a thing to do with bringing her back to Port Agnew?" The Laird smote the desk resolutely; he desired to be absolutely certain of his ground. Mr. Daney looked up with a slight frown. "I'll answer your question with another. Have you seen and talked with Nan Brent this morning?" "Yes. I did--the minute she entered Donald's room." "And you demanded a show-down then and there?" Parenthetically it may be stated that Mr. Daney's intimate knowledge of The Laird's character prompted this question. He was certain of an affirmative reply. "I did." "And her answer was satisfactory?" "Absolutely!" "So I judged from the fact that you shook hands with me upon entering my office. I had expected nothing more nor less than instant dismissal.... Well, since you desire the girl's testimony confirmed, I repeat that she came out here on the distinct understanding that Donald's family had not receded from its original position. This is a business trip, pure and simple, in so far as the McKaye family is concerned, although I grant you there is a heap of sentiment on Nan's part--at least sufficient to persuade her to do anything for the boy's sake. She places his welfare above her own." The Laird nodded. "The girl is capable of doing the most unexpected things, Andrew. I really think she'll play the game. When she told me what her intentions were, I believe she stated the absolute truth." "Well, let us hope she doesn't change them, sir. Remember, she has no more intention of marrying him this morning than she had when she fled from Port Agnew. I was certain of that when listening to her on the telephone the other night. However, sir, I want to go on record, here and now, as disclaiming responsibility for anything that may occur hereafter. I am not the seventh son of a seventh son, and neither was I born with a caul. Hence, I do not pretend to foretell future events with any degree of exactitude. I simply guarantee you, sir, that the girl realizes that you have had nothing whatsoever, directly or indirectly, to do with the request for her return. Also, I give you my word of honor that I have not made her a single promise--directly or indirectly." "Well, I am relieved. I dreaded the thought that I might be compromised--indirectly, for, as you well know, Andrew, I have a repugnance to asking favors from anybody to whom I am not prepared to grant them. My son is my chief happiness. Now, if I were to ask her to save my happiness, while at the same time reserving the right to deny the girl hers--well, thank God, I'm saved that embarrassment! Thanks to you, you fox!" he added. "Bless my wicked heart! I'm glad you've gone and that I'm out of it so easy," the general manager soliloquized, as the door closed behind The Laird. He reached for the telephone and called Mrs. McKaye at The Dreamerie. "Your husband is on his way home, Mrs. McKaye," he advised her. "The girl is here, The Laird has met her and talked with her and is quite happy over the situation. However, I want to warn you that you will avoid unpleasantness by keeping from him the fact that you asked the Brent girl to come back to Port Agnew. He thinks I did that, and I have not seen fit, for reasons of my own, to deny it." "Why, I asked you not to tell him, Andrew," she replied, surprised that he should forget it. "I know. But you had planned to tell him yourself if, after the girl had arrived, you discovered he was secretly pleased that she had come." "Yes; that is true. However, since you say Hector is quite pleased with the situation, why should I not tell him, Andrew?" "I have a suspicion the news will trouble him. He is quite willing to accept of the girl's services, as it were, but not at the behest of any member of his family. Better hear what he has to say on the subject before you commit yourself, Mrs. McKaye." "Oh, I think I can be depended upon to manage Hector," she replied confidently, and hung up, for already through the window she could see The Laird's car taking the grade up Tyee Head. He arrived a few minutes later and entered smilingly, rubbing his hands as indicative of his entire satisfaction with the universe as constituted that morning. "My dears, I have wonderful news for you!" he announced. Elizabeth, warned by her mother of the impending announcement, and already in the latter's confidence regarding the long-distance conversation with Nan Brent, interrupted him. She was a born actress. "Oh, do tell us quickly, daddy dear," she gushed, and flew to throw her arms round his neck. Over his shoulder she winked at Jane and her mother and grimaced knowingly. "Donald's going to pull through. The doctors feel certain he'll take in the slack on his life-line, now that the Brent girl has suddenly turned up. In fact, the lad has been holding his own since he received a telegram from her some days back. I didn't tell you about that, my dears, not being desirous of worrying you; and since it was no doings of mine, I saw it could not be helped, and we'd have to make the best of it." "Oh, daddy! How could you? That's perfectly dreadful news!" the artful Elizabeth cried, while her mother raised her eyes resignedly upward and clasped her hands so tightly that they trembled. The Laird thought his wife sought comfort from above; had he known that she had just delivered a sincere vote of thanks, he would not have hugged her to his heart, as he forthwith proceeded to do. "Now, now, Nellie, my dear," he soothed her, "it's all for the best. Don't cross your bridges before you come to them. Wait till I tell you everything. That fox, Daney, had the common sense to call the girl on the telephone and explain the situation; he induced her to come out here and tease that soft-hearted moonstruck son of ours back to life. And when Donald's strong enough to stand alone--by Jupiter, that's exactly how he's going to stand!--We're not the slightest bit compromised, my dears. The McKaye family is absolutely in the clear. The girl has done this solely for Donald's sake." "Hector McKaye," Jane declared, "you've really got to do something very handsome for Andrew Daney." "Yes, indeed," Elizabeth cooed. "Dear, capable, faithful Andrew!" Mrs. McKaye sighed. "Ah, he's a canny lad, is Andrew," old Hector declared happily. "He took smart care not to compromise me, for well he knows my code. When I rejected his suggestion that I send for the lass, Andrew knew why without asking foolish questions. Well, he realized that if I should ask her to come and save my son, I would not be unfair enough to tell her later that she was not a fit wife for that son. As a matter o' manly principle, I would have had to withdraw my opposition, and Donald could wed her if he liked and with my blessing, for all the bitter cost. I did not build The Dreamerie with the thought that Donald would bring a wife like this Brent lass home to live in it, but--God be thanked!--the puir bairn loves him too well to ruin him--" He broke off, wiping his eyes, moist now with the pressure of his emotions, and while he was wiping them, Mrs. McKaye and her daughters exchanged frightened glances. Elizabeth's penchant for ill-timed humor disappeared; she stood, alert and awed, biting her lip. Jane's eyebrows went up in quick warning to her mother, who paled and flushed alternately. The latter understood now why Andrew Daney had taken the precaution to warn her against the danger of conjugal confidences in the matter of Nan Brent; devoutly she wished she had had the common sense to have left those delicate negotiations entirely in the hands of dear, capable, faithful Andrew, for, delicate as they had been, she realized now, when it was too late, that in all probability Mr. Daney, although a mere man, would have concluded them without compromising the McKaye family. Surely he would have had the good taste to assure Nan that he was acting entirely upon his own initiative. On the instant, Mrs. McKaye hated the unfortunate general manager. She told herself that, had he been possessed of the brains of a chipmunk, he would have pointed out to her the danger of her course; that he had not done so was proof that the craven had feared to compromise himself. He had made a cat's-paw of her, that's what he had done! He had taken advantage of a momentary lack of caution--the result of her impetuous mother love. Ah, what a blockhead the man was, not to have warned her of the diplomatic dangers she was risking! At that moment, placid Nellie McKaye could have shrieked with fury; it would have been a relief to her if she could have stuck her hatpin in that monumental chucklehead, Daney. Like so many of her sex, the good lady's code of sportsmanship was a curious one, to say the least. It had not been prudence but an instinctive desire to protect her son that had moved her to be careful when begging Nan to return to Port Agnew, to indicate that this request predicated no retirement from the resolute stand which the family had taken against the latter's alliance with Donald. In a hazy, indefinite way, she had realized the importance of nullifying any tendency on her part to compromise herself or her family by the mere act of telephoning to Nan, and with the unintentional brutality of a not very intelligent, tactless woman she had taken this means of protection. Curiously enough, it had not occurred to her until this moment that she had done something shameful and cruel and stupid and unwomanly. She shriveled mentally in the contemplation of it. Not until her husband had so unexpectedly revealed to her a hitherto hidden facet of his character--his masculine code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--did she realize how dreadfully she had blundered. She realized now that, without having given the slightest thought to the commission of an act unworthy of her womanhood, she had acted because, to her, the end appeared to justify the means; never given to self-analysis, she had merely followed the imperative call of her mother love to the point where nothing mattered save results. She looked up tearfully at The Laird. For thirty-odd years she had lived with this strange soul; yet she had not known until now how fierce was his desire for independence, how dear to him was his passion for self-respect. Even now, she found it difficult to understand why, even if he had been able to subdue his pride to the point of asking Nan Brent to preserve life in that which was dearer to him than his own life, his passion for always giving value received should preclude bargaining with the girl. It was plain to her, therefore, that her husband could never love their son as his mother loved him, else, in a matter of life or death, he would not have paused to consider the effect on himself of any action that might safeguard his son's existence. She knew what he had thought when Daney first proposed the matter to him. That sort of thing wasn't "playing the game." Poor, troubled soul! She did not know that he was capable of playing any game to the finish, even though every point scored against him should burn like a branding-iron. The Laird, noting her great distress, held her fondly in his arms and soothed her; manlike, he assumed that she wept because her heart was overflowing with joy. For half an hour he chatted with her; then, with a light step and a cheerful "Good-by, Nellie, wife," he entered his automobile and drove back to town. His departure was the signal for Jane and Elizabeth to rally to their mother's side and inaugurate a plan of defense. "Well, mother dear," Elizabeth opined calmly, "it appears that you've spilled the beans." "What a funny old popsy-wops it is, to be sure!" Jane chirped. "It's fine to be such a grand old sport, but so dreadfully inconvenient! Beth, can you imagine what father McKaye would say if he only knew?" "I wouldn't mind the things he'd say. The things he'd do would be apt to linger longest in our memories." "Oh, my dears, what shall I do?" poor Mrs. McKaye quavered. "Stand pat, should necessity ever arise, and put the buck up to Mr. Daney," the slangy Elizabeth suggested promptly. "He has warned you not to confess to father, hasn't he? Now, why did he do this? Answer. Because he realized that if dad should learn that you telephoned this odious creature from the Sawdust Pile, the head of our clan would consider himself compromised--bound by the action of a member of his clan, as it were. Then we'll have a wedding and after the wedding we'll all be thrown out of The Dreamerie to make room for Master Don and his consort. So, it appears to me, since Mr. Daney has warned you not to tell, mother dear, that he cannot afford to tell on you himself--no, not even to save his own skin." "You do not understand, Elizabeth," Mrs. McKaye sobbed. "It isn't because that stupid Andrew cares a snap of his finger for us; it's because he's devoted to Hector and doesn't want him worried or made unhappy." And in this observation, it is more than probable that the lady spoke more truly than she realized. "Oh, well, if that's the case, it's all as clear as mud!" Jane cried triumphantly. "If the worst should ever come to the worst, Mr. Daney will lie like a gentleman and--why, he has already done so, silly! Of course he has, and it's rather gallant of him to do it, I think." "He's an imbecile, and why Hector has employed him all these years--why he trusts him so implicitly, I'm sure I am at a loss to comprehend." Mrs. McKaye complained waspishly. "Dear, capable, faithful Andrew!" Elizabeth mimicked her mother's speech earlier in the day. "Cheer up, ma! Cherries are ripe." She snapped her fingers, swayed her lithe body, and undulated gracefully to the piano, where she brought both hands down on the keys with a crash, and played ragtime with feverish fury for five minutes. Then, her impish nature asserting itself, she literally smashed out the opening bars of the Wedding March from Lohengrin, and shouted with glee when her mother, a finger in each ear, fled from the room. XXXIV Mr. Daney worked through a stack of mail with his stenographer, dismissed her, and, in the privacy of his sanctum, lighted his pipe and proceeded to mend his fences. In the discretion of the chief operator at the telephone exchange, he had great confidence; in that of Mrs. McKaye, none at all. He believed that the risk of having the secret leak out through Nan herself was a negligible one, and, of course (provided he did not talk in his sleep) the reason for Nan's return was absolutely safe with him. Indeed, the very fact that The Laird had demanded and received an explanation from the girl would indicate to Nan that Mrs. McKaye had acted on her own initiative; hence, Nan would, in all probability, refrain from disclosing this fact to The Laird in any future conversations. Reasoning further, Daney concluded there would be no future conversations. The Laird, following his usual custom of refraining from discussing a subject already settled to his satisfaction, could be depended upon to avoid a discussion of any kind with Nan Brent in future, for such discussions would not be to his interest, and he was singularly adept in guarding that interest. His cogitations were interrupted by a telephone-call from Mrs. McKaye. The good soul's first gust of resentment having passed, she desired to thank him for his timely warning and to assure him that, on the subject of that transcontinental telephone-conversation she and her daughters could be depended upon to remain as silent as the Sphinx. This information relieved Mr. Daney greatly. "After all," he confided to the cuspidor, "it is up to the girl whether we fish or cut bait. But then, what man in his senses can trust a woman to stay put. Females are always making high dives into shoal water, and those tactless McKaye women are going to smear everything up yet. You wait and see." The longer Mr. Daney considered this situation, the more convinced did he become that mischief was brewing. Did not periods of seraphic calm always precede a tornado? In the impending social explosion, a few hard missiles would most certainly come his way, and in a sudden agony of apprehension and shame because he had told The Laird a half-truth, he sprang to his feet, resolved to seek old Hector, inform him that Mrs. McKaye had compromised the family, and thus enable him to meet the issue like a gentleman. But this decision was succeeded by the reflection that perhaps this action would merely serve to precipitate a situation that might not be evolved in the ordinary course of affairs. Furthermore, he could not afford to betray Mrs. McKaye on the mere suspicion that, sooner or later, she would betray herself, for this would savor of too much anxiety to save his own skin at her expense. "I'm a singularly unhappy old duffer," he groaned and kicked his inoffending waste-basket across the office. "The females! The mischief-making, bungling, thoughtless, crazy females! There are millions of wonderful, angelic women in this terrible world, but what I want to know is: Where the Sam Hill do they hide themselves?" XXXV Nan did not remain at the hospital more than fifteen minutes. She was ill at ease there; it was no comfort to her to gaze upon the pallid, wasted face of the man she loved when she realized that, by her presence here, she was constituting herself a party to a heart-breaking swindle, and must deny herself the joy of gazing upon that same beloved countenance when, later, it should be glowing with health and youth and high hopes. He was too weak to speak more than a few words to her. The faintest imaginable pressure of his hand answered the pressure of hers. It appeared to be a tremendous effort for him to open his eyes and look up at her. When, however, he had satisfied his swimming senses that she was really there in the flesh, he murmured: "You'll not--run away--again? Promise?" "I promise, dear. The next time I leave Port Agnew, I'll say good-by." "You must not--leave--again. Promise?" She knew his life might be the reward of a kindly lie; so she told it, bravely and without hesitation. Was she not there for that purpose? "Good--news! If I get--well, will you--marry me, Nan?" She choked up then; nevertheless, she nodded. "More good--news! Wait for me--Sawdust Pile--sweetheart." She interpreted this as a dismissal, and gratefully made her exit. From the hospital office she telephoned orders to the butcher, the baker, the grocer, and the milkman, forcibly separated little Don from the nurse, and walked down through Port Agnew to the Sawdust Pile. The old-fashioned garden welcomed her with its fragrance; her cat, which she had been unable to give away and had not the heart to destroy at the time of her departure, came to the little white gate to meet her and rubbed against her, purring contentedly--apparently none the worse for a month of vagabondage and richer by a litter of kittens that blinked at Nan from under the kitchen stoop. From across the Bight of Tyee, the morning breeze brought her the grateful odor of the sea, while the white sea-gulls, prinking themselves on the pile-butts at the outer edge of the Sawdust Pile, raised raucous cries at her approach and hopped toward her in anticipation of the scraps she had been wont to toss them. She resurrected the key from its hiding-place under the eaves, and her hot tears fell so fast that it was with difficulty she could insert it in the door. Poor derelict on the sea of life, she had gone out with the ebb and had been swept back on the flood, to bob around for a little while in the cross-currents of human destinies before going out again with the ebb. The air in the little house was hot and fetid; so she threw open the doors and windows. Dust had accumulated everywhere and, with a certain detachment, she noted, even in her distress, that she had gone away without closing the great square piano. She ran her fingers over the dusty keys and brought forth a few, sonorous chords; then she observed that the little, ancient, half-portion grandfather's clock had died of inanition; so she made a mental note to listen for the twelve-o'clock whistle on the Tyee mill and set the clock by it. The spigot over the kitchen sink was leaking a little, and it occurred to her, in the same curious detached way, that it needed a new gasket. She sighed. Once more, in this silent little house so fraught with happy memories, the old burden of existence was bearing upon her--the feeling that she was in jail. For a month she had been free--free to walk the streets, to look in shop windows, to seek a livelihood and talk to other human beings without that terrible feeling that, no matter how pleasant they might appear to be, their eyes were secretly appraising her--that they were _thinking_. And now to be forced to abandon that freedom-- "Oh, well! It can't last forever," she soliloquized, and, blinking away her tears, she proceeded to change into a house dress and put her little home in order. Presently, the local expressman arrived with her baggage and was followed by sundry youths bearing sundry provisions; at twelve-thirty, when she and young Don sat down to the luncheon she had prepared, her flight to New York and return appeared singularly unreal, like the memory of a dream. She visited the hospital next day, choosing an hour when Port Agnew was at its evening meal and too preoccupied with that important detail to note her coming and going. She returned to her home under cover of darkness. At the hospital, she had received a favorable report of the patient's progress. His physicians were distinctly encouraged. Nan looked in on her lover for a minute, and then hurried away on the plea that her baby was locked in at the Sawdust Pile, in the absence of some one to care for him; she had the usual maternal presentiment that he was playing with matches. As she was going out she met The Laird and Mrs. McKaye coming in. Old Hector lifted his hat and said quite heartily: "How do you do, my dear girl. The news this evening is most encouraging--thanks to you, I'm told--so we are permitted to see Donald for five minutes. Nellie, my dear, you remember little Nan Brent, do you not?" Mrs. McKaye's handsome mouth contracted in a small, automatic smile that did not extend to her eyes. She acknowledged Nan's "Good-evening, Mrs. McKaye," with a brief nod, and again favored the girl with another property smile, between the coming and going of which her teeth flashed with the swiftness of the opening and closing of a camera shutter. "We are _so_ grateful to you, Miss Brent," she murmured. And then, womanlike, her alert brown eyes, starting their appraisal at Nan's shoes, roved swiftly and calmly upward, noting every item of her dress, every soft seductive curve of her healthy young body. Her glance came to a rest on the girl's face, and for the space of several seconds they looked at each other frankly while old Hector was saying: "Aye, grateful indeed, Nan. We shall never be out of your debt. There are times when a kindness and a sacrifice are all the more welcome because unexpected, and we had no right to expect this of you. God bless you, my dear, and remember--I am always your friend." "Yes, indeed," his wife murmured, in a voice that, lacking his enthusiasm, conveyed to Nan the information that The Laird spoke for himself. She tugged gently at her husband's arm; again the automatic smile; with a cool: "Good-night, Miss Brent. Thank you again--_so_ much," she propelled The Laird toward the hospital entrance. He obeyed promptly, glad to escape a situation that was painful to him, for he had realized that which his wife did not credit him with having sufficiently acute perception to realize--to-wit, that his wife's camouflage was somewhat frayed and poorly manufactured. _She had not played the game with him_. It would have cost her nothing to have been as kindly and sincere as he had been toward this unfortunate girl; nevertheless, while he had sensed her deficiency, his wife had carried the affair off so well that he could not advance a sound argument to convince her of it. So he merely remarked dryly as the hospital door closed behind them: "Nellie, I'm going to propound a conundrum for you. Why did your greeting of the Brent girl remind me of that Louis Quinze tapestry for which you paid sixty thousand francs the last time you were abroad?" "I loathe conundrums, Hector," she replied coldly. "I do not care to guess the answer." "The answer is: Not quite genuine," he retorted mildly, and said no more about it. After that visit, Nan went no more to the hospital. She had met Donald's mother for the first time in four years and had been greeted as "Miss Brent," although in an elder day when, as a child, Donald had brought her to The Dreamerie to visit his mother and sisters, and later when she had sung in the local Presbyterian choir, Mrs. McKaye and her daughters had been wont to greet her as "Nan." The girl did not relish the prospect of facing again that camera-shutter smile and she shrank with the utmost distress from a chance meeting at the hospital with Elizabeth or Jane McKaye. As for The Laird, while she never felt ill at ease in his presence, still she preferred to meet him as infrequently as possible. As a result of this decision, she wrote Andrew Daney, and after explaining to him what she intended doing and why, asked him if he would not send some trustworthy person to her every evening with a report of Donald's progress. Accordingly, Dirty Dan O'Leary, hat in hand and greatly embarrassed, presented himself at the Sawdust Pile the following evening under cover of darkness, and handed her a note from Daney. Donald's condition was continuing to improve. For his services, Mr. O'Leary was duly thanked and given a bouquet from Nan's old-fashioned garden for presentation to the invalid. Tucked away in the heart of it was a tiny envelop that enclosed a message of love and cheer. Dirty Dan was thrilled to think that he had been selected as the intermediary in this secret romance. Clasping the bouquet in his grimy left hand, he bowed low and placed his equally grimy right in the region of his umbilicus. "Me hearrt's wit' ye, agra," he declared. "Sure 'tis to the divil an' back agin I'd be the proud man to go, if 'twould be a favor to ye, Miss Brint." "I know you would, Dan," she agreed, tactfully setting the wild rascal at his ease when addressing him by his Christian name. "I know what you did for Mr. Donald that night. I think you're very, very wonderful. I haven't had an opportunity heretofore to tell you how grateful I am to you for saving him." Here was a mystery! Mr. O'Leary in his Sunday clothes bound for Ireland resembled Dirty Dan O'Leary in the raiment of a lumberjack, his wild hair no longer controlled by judicious applications of pomade and his mustache now--alas--returned to its original state of neglect, as a butterfly resembles a caterpillar. Without pausing to consider this, Dirty Dan, taking the license of a more or less privileged character, queried impudently: "An' are ye glad they sint for ye to come back?" She decided that Mr. O'Leary was inclined to be familiar; so she merely looked at him and her cool glance chilled him. "Becuz if ye are," he continued, embarrassed, "ye have me to thank for it. 'Tis meself that knows a thing or two wit'out bein' told. Have ye not been surprised that they knew so well where to find ye whin they wanted ye?" She stared at him in frank amazement. "Yes, I have been tremendously interested in learning the secret of their marvelous perspicacity." "I supplied Misther Daney wit' your address, allanah." "How did you know it? Did The Laird--" "He did not. I did it all be mesel'. Ah, 'tis the romantic divil I am, Miss Brint. Sure I got a notion ye were runnin' away an' says I to meself, says I: 'I don't like this idjee at all, at all. These mysterious disappearances are always leadin' to throuble.' Sure, what if somebody should die an' lave ye a fortun'? What good would it be to ye if nobody could find ye? An' in back o' that agin," he assured her cunningly, "I realized what a popular laddy buck I'd be wit' Misther Donald if I knew what he didn't know but was wishful o' knowin'?" "But how did you procure my address in New York?" she demanded. "Now, I'm a wise man, but if I towld ye that, ye'd be as wise as I am. An' since 'twould break me heart to think anybody in Port Agnew could be as wise as mesel', ye'll have to excuse me from blatherin' all I know." "Oh, but you must tell me, Dan. There are reasons why I should know, and you wouldn't refuse to set my mind at ease, would you?" Dirty Dan grinned and played his ace. "If ye'll sing 'The Low-backed Car' an' 'She Moved Through the Fair' I'll tell ye," he promised. "Sure I listened to ye the night o' the battle, an' so close to death was I, sure I fought 'twas an angel from glory singing'. Troth, I did." She sat down, laughing, at the antiquated piano, and sang him the songs he loved; then, because she owed him a great debt she sang for him "Kathleen Mavourneen," "Pretty Molly Brannigan," "The Harp That Once Thro' Tara's Halls," and "Killarney." Dan stood just outside the kitchen door, not presuming to enter, and when the last song was finished, he had tears in his piggy little eyes; so he fled with the posies, nor tarried to thank her and wish her a pleasant good-night. Neither did he keep his promise by telling her how he came to know her New York address. "Let me hear anny blackguard mintion that one's name wit' a lack o' respect," Mr. O'Leary breathed, as he crossed the vacant lots, "an' I'll break the back o' him in two halves! Whirro-o-o! Sure I'd make a mummy out o' him!" XXXVI A month passed, and to the Sawdust Pile one evening, instead of Dirty Dan, there came another messenger. It was Mr. Daney. To Nan's invitation to enter and be seated, he gave ready acceptance; once seated, however, he showed indubitable evidence of uneasiness, and that he was the bearer of news of more than ordinary interest was apparent by the nervous manner in which he twirled his hat and scattered over her clean floor a quantity of sawdust which had accumulated under the rim during his peregrinations round the mill that day. "Well, Nan, he went home to The Dreamerie this afternoon," the general manager began presently. "Got up and dressed himself unaided, and insisted on walking out to the car without assistance. He's back on a solid diet now, and the way he's filling up the chinks in his superstructure is a sight to marvel at. I expect he'll be back on the job within a month." "That is wonderful news, Mr. Daney." "Of course," Daney continued, "his hair is falling out, and he'll soon be as bald as a Chihuahua dog. But--it'll grow in again. Yes, indeed. It'll grow in." "Oh dear! I do hope it will grow out," she bantered, in an effort to put him at his ease. "What a pity if his illness should leave poor Don with a head like a thistle--with all the fuzzy-wuzzy inside." He laughed. "I'm glad to find you in such good spirits, Nan, because I've called to talk business. And, for some reason or other, I do not relish my job." "Then, suppose I dismiss you from this particular job, Mr. Daney. Suppose I decline to discuss business." "Oh, but business is something that has to be discussed sooner or later," he asured her, on the authority of one whose life had been dedicated to that exacting duty. "I suppose you've kept track of your expenses since you left New York. That, of course, will include the outlay for your living-expenses while here, and in order to make doubly certain that we are on the safe side, I am instructed to double this total to cover the additional expenses of your return to New York. And if you will set a value upon your lost time from the day you left New York until your return, both days inclusive, I will include that in the check also." "Suppose I should charge you one thousand dollars a day for my lost time," she suggested curiously. "I should pay it without the slightest quibble. The Laird would be delighted to get off so cheaply. He feels himself obligated to you for returning to Port Agnew--" "Did The Laird send you here to adjust these financial details with me, Mr. Daney?" "He did not. The matter is entirely in my hands. Certainly, in all justice, you should be reimbursed for the expenses of a journey voluntarily incurred for the McKaye benefit." "Did he say so?" "No. But I know him so well that I have little difficulty in anticipating his desires. I am acting under Mrs. McKaye's promise to you over the telephone to reimburse you." "I am glad to know that, Mr. Daney. I have a very high regard for Donald's father, and I should not care to convict him of an attempt to settle with me on a cash basis for declining to marry his son. I wish you would inform The Laird, Mr. Daney, that what I did was done because it pleased me to do it for his sake and Donald's. They have been at some pains, throughout the years, to be kind to the Brents, but, unfortunately for the Brents, opportunities for reciprocity have always been lacking until the night Mrs. McKaye telephoned me in New York. I cannot afford the gratification of very many desires--even very simple ones, Mr. Daney--but this happens to be one of the rare occasions when I can. To quote Sir Anthony Gloster, 'Thank God I can pay for my fancies!' The Laird doesn't owe me a dollar, and I beg you, Mr. Daney, not to distress me by offering it." "But, my dear girl, it has cost you at least five hundred dollars--" "What a marvelous sunset we had this evening, Mr. Daney. Did you observe it? My father always maintained that those curious clouds predicated sou'west squalls." "I didn't come here, girl, to talk about sunsets. You're foolish if you do not accept--" The outcast of Port Agnew turned upon Mr. Daney a pair of sea-blue eyes that flashed dangerously. "I think I have paid my debt to the McKayes," she declared, and in her calm voice there was a sibilant little note of passion. "Indeed, I have a slight credit-balance due me, and though Mrs. McKaye and her daughters cannot bring themselves to the point of acknowledging this indebtedness, I must insist upon collecting it. In view of the justice of my claim, however, I cannot stultify my womanhood by permitting the McKaye women to think they can dismiss the obligation by writing a check. I am not an abandoned woman, Mr. Daney. I have sensibilities and, strange to relate, I, too, have pride--more than the McKayes I think sometimes. It is possible to insult me, to hurt me, and cause me to suffer cruelty, and I tell you, Mr. Daney, I would rather lie down and die by the roadside than accept one penny of McKaye money." Mr. Daney stared at her, visibly distressed. "Why, what's happened?" he blurted. She ignored him. "I repeat that The Laird owes me nothing--not even his thanks. I met him one night with Mrs. McKaye on the hospital steps, and he tendered me his meed of gratitude like the splendid gentleman he is." "Oh, I see!" A great light had suddenly dawned on Mr. Daney. "The Laird led trumps, but Nellie McKaye revoked and played a little deuce?" "Well, Mr. Daney, it seemed to me she fumbled the ball, to employ a sporting metaphor. She bowed to me--like this--and smiled at me--like that!" Her cool, patronizing nod and the sudden contraction and relaxation of Nan's facial muscles brought a wry smile to old Daney's stolid countenance. "Even if I felt that I could afford to or was forced to accept reimbursement for my expenses and lost time," Nan resumed, "her action precluded it. Can't you realize that, Mr. Daney? And Jane and Elizabeth went her one--no, two--better. I'm going to tell you about it. I went up-town the other day to send a telegram, and in the telegraph-office I met Donald's sisters. I knew they would not care to have me speak to them in public, so, when the telegrapher wasn't looking at me and intuition told me that Elizabeth and Jane were, I glanced up and favored them with a very small but very polite smile of recognition." "And then," quoted Mr. Daney, reaching into his ragbag of a mind and bringing up a remnant of Shakespeare, "'there came a frost--a killing frost!'" "Two hundred and forty-five degrees below zero, and not even a stick of kindling in the wood-box," she assured him humorously. "They looked at me, through me, over me, beyond me--" "And never batted an eye?" "Not even the flicker of an eyelash." His canine loyalty bade Mr. Daney defend The Laird's ewe lambs. "Well, maybe they didn't recognize you," he protested. "A good deal of water has run under a number of bridges since the McKaye girls saw you last." "In that event, Mr. Daney, I charge that their manners would have been extremely bad. I know town dogs that smile at me when I smile at them. However, much as I would like to assure you that they didn't know me, I must insist, Mr. Daney, that they did." "Well, now, how do you know, Nan?" "A little devil took possession of me, Mr. Daney, and inspired me to smoke them out. I walked up and held out my hand to Jane. 'How do you do, Jane,' I said. 'I'm Nan Brent. Have you forgotten me?'" Mr. Daney raised both arms toward the ceiling. "'Oh, God! cried the woodcock,--and away he flew!' What did the chit say?" "She said, 'Why, not at all,' and turned her back on me. I then proffered Elizabeth a similar greeting and said, 'Surely, Elizabeth, _you_ haven't forgotten me!' Elizabeth is really funny. She replied: 'So sorry! I've always been absent-minded!' She looked at me steadily with such a cool mirth in her eyes--she has nice eyes, too--and I must have had mirth in mine, also, because I remember that at precisely that minute I thought up a perfectly wonderful joke on Elizabeth and Jane and their mother. Of course, the poor Laird will not see the point of the joke, but then he's the innocent bystander, and innocent bystanders are always, getting hurt." "Ah, do not hurt him!" Daney pleaded anxiously. "He's a good, kind, manly gentleman. Spare him! Spare him, my dear!" "Oh, I wouldn't hurt him, Mr. Daney, if I did not know I had the power to heal his hurts." Suddenly she commenced to laugh, albeit there was in her laugh a quality which almost caused Mr. Daney to imagine that he had hackles on his back and that they were rising. He much preferred the note of anger of a few minutes previous; with a rush all of his old apprehensions returned, and he rasped out at her irritably: "Well, well! What's this joke, anyhow? Tell me and perhaps I may laugh, too." "Oh, no, Mr. Daney, you'd never laugh at this one. You'd weep." "Try me." "Very well. You will recall, Mr. Daney, that when Mrs. McKaye rang me up in New York, she was careful, even while asking me to return, to let me know my place?" "Yes, yes. I was listening on the line. I heard her, and I thought she was a bit raw. But no matter. Proceed." "Well, since she asked me to return to Port Agnew, I'm wondering who is going to ask me to go away again?" "I'll be shot if I will! Ha! Ha! Ha!" And Mr. Daney threw back his head and laughed the most enjoyable laugh he had known since the night an itinerant hypnotist, entertaining the citizens of Port Agnew, had requested any adventurous gentleman in the audience who thought he couldn't be hypnotized, to walk up and prove it. Dirty Dan O'Leary had volunteered, had been mesmerized after a struggle, and, upon being told that he was Dick Whittington's cat, had proceeded to cut some feline capers that would have tickled the sensibilities of a totem-pole. Mr. Daney's honest cachinnations now were so infectious that Nan commenced to laugh with him--heartily, but no longer with that strident little note of resentment, and cumulatively, as Mr. Daney's mirth mounted until the honest fellow's tears cascaded across his ruddy cheeks. "Egad, Nan," he declared presently, "but you have a rare sense of humor! Yes, do it. Do it! Make 'em all come down--right here to the Sawdust Pile! Make 'em remember you--all three of 'em--make 'em say please! Yes, sir! 'Please Nan, forgive me for forgetting. Please Nan, forgive me for smiling like the head of an old fiddle. Please, Nan, get out of Port Agnew, so we can sleep nights. Please, Nan, be careful not to say "Good-by." Please, Nan, knock out a couple of your front teeth and wear a black wig and a sunbonnet, so nobody'll recognize you when you leave, follow you, and learn your address.'" He paused to wipe his eyes. "Why, dog my cats, girl, you've got 'em where the hair is short; so make 'em toe the scratch!" "Well, of course," Nan reminded him, "they are not likely to toe the scratch unless they receive a hint that toeing scratches is going to be fashionable in our best Port Agnew circles this winter." Mr. Daney arched his wild eyebrows, pursed his lips, popped his eyes, and looked at Nan over the rims of his spectacles. "Very well, my dear girl, I'll be the goat. A lesson in humility will not be wasted on certain parties. But suppose they object? Suppose they buck and pitch and sidestep and bawl and carry on? What then?" "Why," Nan replied innocently, regarding him in friendly fashion with those wistful blue eyes, "you might hint that I'm liable to go to The Laird and tell him I regard him as a very poor sport, indeed, to expect me to give up his son, in view of the fact that his son's mother sent for me to save that son's life. Do you know, dear Mr. Daney, I suspect that if The Laird knew his wife had compromised him so, he would be a singularly wild Scot!" "Onward, Christian soldier, marching as to war!" cried Mr. Daney, and, seizing his hat from the table, he fled into the night. XXXVII Upon reaching his home, Mr. Daney telephoned to Mrs. McKaye. "It is important," he informed her, "that you, Miss Jane and Miss Elizabeth come down to my office to-morrow for a conference. I would come up to The Dreamerie to see you, but Donald is home now, and his father will be with him; so I would prefer to see you down-town. I have some news of interest for you." The hint of news of interest was sufficient to secure from Mrs. McKaye a promise to call at his office with the girls at ten o'clock the following morning. "What is this interesting news, Andrew?" Mrs. Daney asked, with well-simulated disinterestedness. She was knitting for the French War-Relief Committee a pair of those prodigious socks with which well-meaning souls all over these United States have inspired many a poor little devil of a _poilu_ with the thought that the French must be regarded by us as a Brobdingnagian race. "We're arranging a big blowout, unknown to The Laird and Donald, to celebrate the boy's return to health. I'm planning to shut down the mill and the logging-camps for three days," he replied glibly. Of late he was finding it much easier to lie to her than to tell the truth, and he had observed with satisfaction that Mrs. Daney's bovine brain assimilated either with equal avidity. "How perfectly lovely!" she cooed, and dropped a stitch which later would be heard from on the march, in the shape of a blister on a Gallic heel. "You're so thoughtful and kind, Andrew! Sometimes I wonder if the McKayes really appreciate your worth." "Well, we'll see," he answered enigmatically and went off to bed. It was with a feeling of alert interest that he awaited in his office, the following morning, the arrival of the ladies from The Dreamerie. They arrived half an hour late, very well content with themselves and the world in general, and filling Mr. Daney's office with the perfume of their presence. They appeared to be in such good fettle, indeed, that Mr. Daney took a secret savage delight in dissipating their nonchalance. "Well, ladies," he began, "I decided yesterday that it was getting along toward the season of the year when my thoughts stray as usual toward the Sawdust Pile as a drying-yard. So I went down to see if Nan Brent had abandoned it again--and sure enough, she hadn't." He paused exasperatingly, after the fashion of an orator who realizes that he has awakened in his audience an alert and respectful interest. "Fine kettle of fish brewing down there," he resumed darkly, and paused again, glanced at the ceiling critically as if searching for leaks, smacked his lips and murmured confidentially a single word: "Snag!" "'Snag!'" In chorus. "Snag! In some unaccountable manner, it appears that you three ladies have aroused in Nan Brent a spirit of antagonism--" "Nonsense!" "The idea!" "Fiddlesticks!" "I state the condition as I found it. I happen to know that the girl possesses sufficient means to permit her to live at the Sawdust Pile for a year at least." "But isn't she going away?" Mrs. McKaye's voice rose sharply. "Is she going to break her bargain?" "Oh, I think not, Mrs. McKaye. She merely complained to me that somebody begged her to come back to Port Agnew; so she's waiting for somebody to come down to the Sawdust Pile and beg her to go away again. She's inclined to be capricious about it, too. One person isn't enough. She wants three people to call, and she insists that they be--ah--ladies!" "Good gracious, Andrew, you don't mean it?" "I am delivering a message, Mrs. McKaye." "She must be spoofing you," Jane declared. "Well, she laughed a good deal about it, Miss Jane, and confided to me that a bit of lurking devil in your sister's eyes the day you both met her in the telegraph office gave her the inspiration for this joke. She believes that she who laughs last laughs best." Mrs. McKaye was consumed with virtuous indignation. "The shameless hussy! Does she imagine for a moment that I will submit to blackmail, that my daughters or myself could afford to be seen calling upon her at the Sawdust Pile?" "She wants to force us to recognize her, mother." Jane, recalling that day in the telegraph-office, sat staring at Daney with flashing eyes. She was biting the finger of her glove. "Nothing doing," Elizabeth drawled smilingly. Mr. Daney nodded his comprehension. "In that event, ladies," he countered, with malignant joy in his suppressed soul, "I am requested to remind you that The Laird will be informed by Miss Brent that she considers him a very short sport, indeed, if he insists upon regarding her as unworthy of his son, in view of the fact that his son's mother considered her a person of such importance that she used the transcontinental telephone in order to induce--" "Yes, yes; I know what you're going to say. Do you really think she would go as far as that, Andrew?" Mrs. McKaye was very pale. "Beware the anger of a woman scorned," he quoted. "In the event that she should, Mr. Daney, we should have no other alternative but to deny it." Elizabeth was speaking. She still wore her impish glacial smile. "As a usual thing, we are opposed to fibbing on the high moral ground that it is not a lady's pastime, but in view of the perfectly appalling results that would follow our failure to fib in this particular case, I'm afraid we'll have to join hands, Mr. Daney, and prove Nan Brent a liar. Naturally, we count on your help. As a result of his conversation with you, father believes you did the telephoning." "I told him half the truth, but no lie. I have never lied to him, Miss Elizabeth, and I never shall. When Hector McKaye asks me for the truth, he'll get it." In Mr. Daney's voice there was a growl that spoke of slow, quiet fury at the realization that this cool young woman should presume to dictate to him. "I think you'll change your mind, Mr. Daney. You'll not refuse the hurdle when you come to it. As for this wanton Brent girl, tell her that we will think her proposition over and that she may look for a call from us. We do not care how long she looks, do we mother?" And she laughed her gay, impish laugh. "In the meantime, Mr. Daney, we will do our best to spare ourselves and you the ignominy of that fib. The doctors will order Donald away for a complete rest for six months, and dad will go with him. When they're gone that Brent house on the Sawdust Pile is going to catch fire--accidently, mysteriously. The man who scuttled the Brent's motor-boat surely will not scruple at such a simple matter as burning the Brent shanty. Come, mother. Jane, for goodness' sake, do buck up! Good-by, dear Mr. Daney." He stared at her admiringly. In Elizabeth, he discerned, for the first time, more than a modicum of her father's resolute personality; he saw clearly that she dominated her mother and Jane and, like The Laird, would carry her objective, once she decided upon it, regardless of consequences. "Good-morning, ladies. I shall repeat your message--verbatim, Miss Elizabeth," he assured the departing trio. And that night he did so. "They neglected to inform you how much time they would require to think it over, did they not?" Nan interrogated mildly. "And they didn't tell you approximately when I should look for their visit?" "No," he admitted. "Oh, I knew they wouldn't submit," Nan flung back at him. "They despise me--impersonally, at first and before it seemed that I might dim the family pride; personally, when it was apparent that I could dim it if I desired. Well, I'm tired of being looked at and sneered at, and I haven't money enough left to face New York again. I had dreamed of the kind of living I might earn, and when the opportunity to earn it was already in my grasp, I abandoned it to come back to Port Agnew. I had intended to play fair with them, although I had to lie to Donald to do that, but--they hurt something inside of me--something deep that hadn't been hurt before--and--and now--" [Illustration: "I'M A MAN WITHOUT A HOME AND YOU'VE _GOT_ TO TAKE ME IN, NAN."] "Now _what_!" Mr. Daney cried in anguished tones. "If Donald McKaye comes down to the Sawdust Pile and asks me to marry him, I'm going to do it. I have a right to happiness; I'm--I'm tired--sacrificing--Nobody cares--no appreciation--Nan of the Sawdust Pile will be--mistress of The Dreamerie--and when they--enter house of mine--they shall be--humbler than I. They shall--" As Mr. Daney fled from the house, he looked back through the little hall and saw Nan Brent seated at her tiny living-room table, her golden head pillowed in her arms outspread upon the table, her body shaken with great, passionate sobs. Mr. Daney's heart was constricted. He hadn't felt like that since the Aurora Stock Company had played "East Lynne" in the Port Agnew Opera House. XXXVIII At the Sawdust Pile the monotony of Nan Brent's life remained unbroken; she was marking time, waiting for something to turn up. Since the last visit of the McKaye ambassador she had not altered her determination to exist independent of financial aid from the McKaye women or their father,--for according to her code, the acceptance of remuneration for what she had done would be debasing. Nan had made this decision even while realizing that in waiving Mr. Daney's proffer of reimbursement she was rendering impossible a return to New York with her child. The expenses of their journey and the maintenance of their brief residence there; the outlay for clothing for both and the purchase of an additional wardrobe necessitated when, with unbelievable good luck she had succeeded in securing twenty weeks time over a high-class vaudeville circuit for her "Songs of the 'Sixties," had, together with the cost of transportation back to Port Agnew, so depleted her resources that, with the few hundred dollars remaining, her courage was not equal to the problem which unemployment in New York would present; for with the receipt of Mrs. McKaye's message, Nan had written the booking agent explaining that she had been called West on a matter which could not be evaded and expressed a hope that at a later date the "time" might be open to her. Following her return to the Sawdust Pile she had received a brief communication stating that there would be no opening for her until the following year. The abandonment of her contract and the subsequent loss of commissions to the agent had seriously peeved that person. The receipt of this news, while a severe disappointment, had not caused her to flinch, for she had, in a measure, anticipated it and with the calmness of desperation already commenced giving thought to the problem of her future existence. In the end she had comforted herself with the thought that good cooks were exceedingly scarce--so scarce, in fact, that even a cook with impedimenta in the shape of a small son might be reasonably certain of prompt and well-paid employment. Picturing herself as a kitchen mechanic brought a wry smile to her sweet face, but--it was honorable employment and she preferred it to being a waitress or an underfed and underpaid saleswoman in a department store. For she could cook wonderfully well and she knew it; she believed she could dignify a kitchen and she preferred it to cadging from the McKayes the means to enable her to withstand the economic siege incident to procuring a livelihood more dignified and remunerative. Thus she had planned up to the day of her unexpected meeting with Jane and Elizabeth McKaye in the Port Agnew telegraph office. On that day, something had happened--something that had constituted a distinct event in Nan Brent's existence and with which the well-bred insolence of the McKaye girls had nothing to do. Indirectly old Caleb Brent had been responsible, for by the mere act of dying, his three-guarter pay as a retired sailor had automatically terminated, and Nan had written the Navy Department notifying it accordingly. Now, the death of a retired member of the Army or Navy, no matter what his grade may be, constitutes news for the service journals, and the fact that old Caleb had been a medal of honor man appeared, to the editor of one of these journals, to entitle the dead sailor to three hundred words of posthumous publicity. Subsequently, these three hundred words came under the eye of a retired admiral of the United States Navy, who thereby became aware that he had an orphaned grand-daughter residing in Port Agnew, Washington. As a man grows old he grows kindlier; those things which, at middle age, appear so necessary to an unruffled existence, frequently undergo such a metamorphosis, due to the corroding effects of time, that at eighty one has either forgotten them or regards them as something to be secretly ashamed of. Thus it was with Nan's grandfather. His pride and dignity were as austere as ever, but his withered heart yearned for the love and companionship of one of his own blood; now that Caleb Brent was dead, the ancient martinet forgot the offense which this simple sailor had committed against the pride of a long line of distinguished gentlemen, members of the honorable profession of arms. He thought it over for a month, and then wrote the only child of his dead daughter, asking her to come to him, hinting broadly that his days in the land were nearly numbered and that, in the matter of worldly goods he was not exactly a pauper. Having posted this letter the old admiral waited patiently for an answer, and when this answer was not forthcoming within the time he had set, he had telegraphed the postmaster of Port Agnew, requesting information as to her address. This telegram the postmaster had promptly sent over to Nan and it was for the purpose of replying to it that she had gone to the telegraph office on the day when Fate decreed that Jane and Elizabeth McKaye should also be there. After her return to the Sawdust Pile that day Nan's thoughts frequently adverted to the Biblical line: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Certainly, in her case, He appeared to be working at cross purposes. At a time when she had resigned herself to domestic labor in order to avoid starvation, her aristocratic, arrogant, prideful grandfather had seen fit to forgive her dead father and offer her shelter from the buffets of the world; yet, even while striving, apparently to be kind, she knew that the reason underlying his invitation was plain, old-fashioned heart-hunger, a tender conscience and a generous admixture of human selfishness. She smiled bitterly at his blunt hint of a monetary reward following his demise; it occurred to her that the stubborn old admiral was striving to buy that which he might have had for a different asking. She read the admiral's letter for the twentieth time--and from the thick white page her glance went to her child. Would he be welcome in that stern old sea dog's home? Would his great-grandfather forget the bar sinister of little Don's birth and would her own misfortune be viewed by him with the tenderness and perfect understanding accorded her by old Caleb? She did not think so; and with the remembrance of her dead father, the flames of revolt leaped in her heart. He had been loyal to her and she would be loyal to him. No, no! She was not yet prepared to come fawning to the feet of that fierce old man who had robbed her father of his happiness. What right had he to expect forgiveness, _sans_ the asking, _sans_ an acknowledgment of his heartlessness? With a bitter smile she wrote him a long letter, relating in detail the incident of her marriage, the birth of her child, her standing in Port Agnew society and her belief that all of this rendered acceptance of his invitation impossible, if she were to act with deference to his point of view and still remain loyal to the memory of her dead father. For these reasons she declined, thanked him for his kindness and remained his very sincerely. When she had posted this letter she felt better, and immediately took up the case of the McKayes. Until that moment she had not considered seriously the possibility of a marriage with the young Laird of Port Agnew as a means of humiliating these women who had humiliated her. The thought had occurred to her in the telegraph office and at the moment had held for her a certain delightful fascination; prior to that meeting her resolution not to permit Donald McKaye to share her uncertain fortunes had been as adamant. But long and bitter reflection upon the problem thrust upon her by her grandfather had imbued her with a clearer, deeper realization of the futility of striving to please everybody in this curious world, of the cruelty of those who seek to adjust to their point of view that of another fully capable of adjusting his own; of the appalling lack of appreciation with which her piteous sacrifice would meet from the very persons who shrank from the ignominy incident to non-sacrifice oft the part of her whom they held in open contempt! Donald McKaye was not unintelligent. He was a man, grown, with all a man's passions, with all the caution to be expected in one of his class. If he still loved her sufficiently, following a period of mature deliberation and fierce opposition from his people, to offer her honorable marriage, would she not be a fool to cast away such a priceless gift? How few men know love so strong, so tender, so unselfish, that they do not shrink from sharing with the object of their love, the odium which society has always set upon the woman taken in adultery. In rejecting his proffered sacrifice, she had told herself that she acted thus in order to preserve his happiness, although at the expense of her own. By so doing Nan realized that she had taken a lofty, a noble stand; nevertheless, who was she that she should presume to decide just wherein lay the preservation of his happiness? In her grandfather's letter before her she had ample evidence of the miscarriage of such pompous assumptions. There is a latent force in the weakest of women, an amazing capacity for rebellion in the meekest and a regret for lost virtue even in the most abandoned. Nan was neither weak, meek, nor abandoned; wherefore, to be accorded toleration, polite contumely and resentment where profound gratitude and admiration were her due, had aroused in her a smouldering resentment which had burned like a handful of oil-soaked waste tossed into a corner. At first a mild heat; then a dull red glow of spontaneous combustion progresses--and presently flame and smoke. It is probable that mere man, who never has been able to comprehend the intensity of feeling of which a woman is capable, is not equal to the problem of realizing the effect of solitude, misunderstanding and despair upon the mind of a woman of more than ordinary sensibilities and imagination. The seed of doubt, planted in such soil, burgeons rapidly, and when, upon the very day that Mr. Daney had made his last call at the Sawdust Pile, Nan, spurred to her decision by developments of which none but she was aware, had blazed forth in open rebellion and given the Tyee Lumber Company's general manager the fright of his prosaic existence. XXXIX After leaving the Sawdust Pile, Mr. Daney walked twice around the Bight of Tyee before arriving at a definite decision as to his future conduct in this intrigue, participation in which had been thrust upon him by his own loyalty to his employer and the idiocy of three hare-brained women. Time and again as lie paced the lonely strand, Mr. Daney made audible reference to the bells of the nether regions and the presence of panther tracks! This was his most terrible oath and was never employed except under exceptional circumstances. At length Mr. Daney arrived at a decision. He would have nothing further to do with this horrible love affair. In the role of Dan Cupid's murderer he was apparently a Tumble Tom; for three months he had felt as if he trod thin ice--and now he had fallen through! "I'll carry no more of their messages," he declared aloud. "I'll tell them so and wash my hands of the entire matter. If there is to be any asking of favors from that girl the McKaye women can do it." It was after midnight when he returned to his home and his wife was sitting up to receive an explanation of his nocturnal prowlings. However, the look of desperation with which he met her accusing glance frightened her into silence, albeit she had a quiet little crying spell next morning when she discovered on the floor of Mr. Daney's room quite a quantity of sand which had worked into his shoes during his agitated spring around Tyee Beach. She was quite certain he had indulged in a moonlight stroll on the seashore with a younger and prettier woman, so she resolved to follow him when next he fared forth and catch the traitor red-handed. To her surprise, Mr. Daney went out no more o' nights. He had kept his word given to himself, and on the morning succeeding his extraordinary interview with Nan he had again summoned the ladies of the McKaye family to his office for a conference. However, the capable Elizabeth was the only one of the trio to present herself, for this young woman--and not without reason--regarded herself as Mr. Daney's mental superior; she was confident of her ability to retain his loyalty should he display a tendency to betray them. "Well, dear Mr. Daney," she murmured in her melted-butter voice, "what new bugaboo have you developed for us?" "You do not have to bother calling upon the Brent girl, Miss Elizabeth. She says now that if Donald asks her to marry him she'll accept. She has an idea she'll be mistress of The Dreamerie." Elizabeth arched her eyebrows. "What else?" she queried amiably. "That's all--from Nan Brent. I have a small defi to make on my own account, however, Miss Elizabeth. From this minute on I wash my hands of the private affairs of the McKaye family. My job is managing your father's financial affairs. Believe me, the next move in this comedy-drama is a wedding--if Donald asks her in all seriousness to marry him--that is, if he insists on it. He may insist and then again he may not, but if he should, I shall not attempt to stop him. He's free, white and twenty-one; he's my boss and I hope I know my place. Personally, I'm willing to wager considerable that he'll marry her, but whether he does or not--I'm through." Elizabeth McKaye sighed. "That means we must work fast, Mr. Daney. Donald will be feeling strong: enough within two weeks to call on her; he may even motor down to the Sawdust Pile within ten days. Mother has already broached the subject of taking him away to southern California or Florida for a long rest; Dad has seconded the motion with great enthusiasm--and that stubborn Donald has told them frankly that he isn't going away for a rest." "Gosh!" Mr. Daney gasped. "That makes it a little binding, eh?" She met his clear glance thoughtfully and said: "If her house should burn down--accidentally--to-day or to-night, when she and her baby aren't in it, she'll have to leave Port Agnew. There isn't a house in town where she could find shelter, and you could see to it that all the rooms in the hotel are taken." "You forget, my dear," he replied with a small smile. "I have no further interest in this affair and moreover, I'm not turning firebug--not this year." "You refuse to help us?" "Absolutely. What is to be will be, and I, for one, have decided not to poke my finger into the cogs of destiny." "Well--thanks awfully for what you've already done, Mr. Daney." Again she smiled her bright, impish smile. "Good-morning." "Good-morning, Miss Elizabeth." As she left the office, Mr. Daney noted her débutante slouch and gritted his teeth. "Wonder if they'll call on Nan now, or make a combined attack on the boy and try bluff and threats and tears," he soliloquized. As a matter of fact they tried the latter. The storm broke after luncheon one day when Donald declared he felt strong enough to go down to Port Agnew, and, in the presence of the entire family, ordered the butler to tell his father's chauffeur to bring the closed car around to the door. Immediately, the astute Elizabeth precipitated matters by asking her brother sharply if his projected visit to Port Agnew predicated also a visit to the Sawdust Pile. "Why, yes, Elizabeth," he answered calmly. The Laird scowled at her, but she ignored the scowl; so old Hector flashed a warning glance to Jane and her mother--a glance that said quite plainly: "Let there be no upbraiding of my son." "Do you think it is quite--ah, delicate of you, Donald, to call upon any young lady at her apartments in the absence of a proper chaperon, even if the lady herself appears to have singularly free and easy views on the propriety of receiving you thus?" He saw that she was bound to force the issue and was rather relieved than otherwise. With a mental promise to himself to keep his temper at all hazards he replied: "Well, Elizabeth, I'll admit the situation is a trifle awkward, but what cannot be cured must be endured. You see, I want to have a talk with Nan Brent and I cannot do so unless I call upon her at the Sawdust Pile. It is impossible for us to meet on neutral ground, I fear. However, if you will write her a nice friendly little note and invite her up here to visit me, the question of a chaperon will be solved and I will postpone my visit until she gets here." "Don't be a fool," she retorted bitterly. "As for Nan's free and easy views on the subjects, who in Port Agnew, may I ask, expects her to act differently? Why, therefore, since she is fully convinced that I possess a few of the outward appearances of a gentleman, should she fear to receive me in her home? To conform to the social standards of those who decry her virtue? Elizabeth, you expect too much, I fear." "Hear, hear," cried The Laird. He realized that Elizabeth was not to be denied, so he thought best to assume a jocular attitude during the discussion. "Father," his eldest daughter reminded him. "It is your duty to forbid Donald doing anything which is certain to bring his family into disrepute and make it the target for the tongue of scandal." "Oh, leave him alone, you pestiferous woman," old Hector cried sharply. "Had it not been for the girl he would not be living this minute, so the least he can do is to express his compliments to her. Also, since this disagreeable topic has again been aired, let me remind you that the lass isn't going to marry Donald. She came out here, Donald," he continued, turning to his son, "with the distinct understanding that her job was to humor you back to health, and for that you owe her your thanks and I'm willing you should call on her and express them. Don't flattter yourself that she'll marry you, my boy. I've had a talk with her--since you must know it, sooner or later--and she promised me she wouldn't." The young Laird's face paled a little but he maintained his composure. "I greatly fear you misunderstood her, father," he replied gently. "She promised me she'd marry me. You see," he added looking the old man resolutely in the face, "I think she's virtuous, so I'm going to marry her." His father smiled sadly. "Poor lad. God knows I'm sorry for you, but--well, go see her and let's have the issue settled once for all. For God's sake, lad, grant me peace of mind. End it to-day, one way or the other." "Ah, yes, you're brave," Elizabeth flung at her father. "You're so certain that girl will keep her promise, aren't you? Well, I happen to have been informed, on very good authority, that she intends to betray you. She had made the statement that she'll marry Donald if he asks her--again." "The girl doesn't impress me as one who would lie, Elizabeth. Who told you this?" "Andrew Daney." "Bear with me a moment, son, till I call Andrew on the telephone," the Laird requested, and went into the telephone booth under the stairs in the reception hall. When he emerged a few minutes later his face was pale and haggard. "Well? What did I tell you?" Elizabeth's voice was triumphant. Her father ignored her. Placing himself squarely before his son, he bent forward slightly and thrust his aggressive face close to Donald's. "I command you to respect the honor of my house," he cried furiously. "For the last time, Donald McKaye, ha' done wie this woman, or--" and his great arm was outflung in a swooping gesture that denoted all too forcibly the terrible sentence he shrank from speaking. "Are you offering me an alternative?" Donald's voice was low and very calm, but his brown eyes were blazing with suppressed rage. "The Dreamerie or--" and he swung and pointed to the Brent cottage far below them on the Sawdust Pile. "Aye," his father cried in a hard cracked voice. "Aye!" Donald looked over at his mother with the helplessness of a child who has fallen and hurt himself. "And you, mother? What do you say to this?" She thought she would faint. "You--you must obey your father," she quavered. Until her son should marry Nan Brent she could not force herself to the belief that he could possibly commit such an incredible offense. "The opinions of you and Jane," Donald continued, turning to each sister in turn, "do not interest me particularly, but while the polls are open you might as well vote. If I marry Nan Brent are you each prepared to forget that I am your brother?" Elizabeth nodded calmly. She had gone too far now to develop weakness when an assumption of invincible strength might yet win the day. "I couldn't receive such a peculiar sister-in-law," Jane murmured, evidently close to tears. "Surely, you would not expect us to take such a woman to our hearts, Donald dear?" "I did not build The Dreamerie for yon lass," The Laird burst forth passionately. His son stood with bowed head. "Have you, mother, or you, my sisters, been down to the Sawdust Pile to thank Nan for inspiring me--no matter how--with a desire to live? I think you realize that until she came I was too unhappy--too disgusted with life--to care whether I got well or not? Have you absolved yourselves of an obligation which must be perfectly evident to perfect ladies?" "We have not." Elizabeth's calm voice answered him. "What the girl did was entirely of her own volition. She did it for your sake, and since it is apparent that she plans to collect the reward of her disinterested effort we have considered that a formal expression of thanks would be superfluous." "I see. I see. Well, perhaps you're right. I shall not quarrel with your point of view. And you're all quite certain you will never recede from your attitude of hostility toward Nan--under no circumstances, to recognize her as my wife and extend to her the hospitality of The Dreamerie?" He challenged his father with a look and the old man slowly nodded an affirmative. His mother thought Donald was about to yield to their opposition and nodded likewise. "I have already answered that question," Jane murmured tragically, and Elizabeth again reminded him that it was not necessary for him to make a fool of himself. "Well, I'm glad this affair has been ironed out--at last," Donald assured them. "I had cherished the hope that when you knew Nan better--" He choked up for a moment, then laid his hands on his father's shoulders. "Well, sir," he gulped, "I'm going down to the Sawdust Pile and thank Nan for saving my life. Not," he added bitterly, "that I anticipate enjoying that life to the fullest for some years to come. If I did not believe that time will solve the problem--" The Laird's heart leaped. "Tush, tush, boy. Run along and don't do anything foolish." He slapped Donald heartily across the back while the decisive sweep of that same hand an instant later informed the women of his household that it would be unnecessary to discuss this painful matter further. "I understand just how you feel, dad. I hold no resentment," Donald assured him, and dragged The Laird close to him in a filial embrace. He crossed the room and kissed his mother, who clung to him a moment, tearfully; seeing him so submissive, Jane and Elizabeth each came up and claimed the right to embrace him with sisterly affection. The butler entered to announce that the car was waiting at the front door. Old Hector helped his son into a great coat and Mrs. McKaye wound a reefer around his neck and tucked the ends inside the coat. Then The Laird helped him into the car; as it rolled slowly down the cliff road, Old Hector snorted with relief. "By Judas," he declared, "I never dreamed the boy would accept such an ultimatum." "Well, the way to find out is to try," Elizabeth suggested. "Sorry to have been forced to disregard that optical S.O.S. of yours, Dad, but I realized that we had to strike now or never." "Whew-w-w!" The Laird whistled again. XL With the license of long familiarity, Donald knocked at the front door of the Brent cottage to announce his arrival; then, without awaiting permission to enter, he opened the door and met Nan in the tiny hall hurrying to admit him. "You--Donald!" she reproved him. "What are you doing here? You shouldn't be out." "That's why I came in," he retorted drily and kissed her. "And I'm here because I couldn't stand The Dreamerie another instant. I wanted my mother and sisters to call on you and thank you for having been so nice to me during my illness, but the idea wasn't received, very enthusiastically. So, for the sheer sake of doing the decent thing I've called myself. It might please you," he added, "to know that my father thought I should." "He is always tactful and kind," she agreed. She led him to her father's old easy chair in the living room. "As Dirty Dan O'Leary once remarked in my presence," he began, "it is a long lane that hasn't got a saloon at the end of it. I will first light a cigarette, if I may, and make myself comfortable, before putting you on the witness stand and subjecting you to a severe cross-examination. Seat yourself on that little hassock before me and in such a position that I can look squarely into your face and note flush of guilt when you fib to me." She obeyed, with some slight inward trepidation, and sat looking up at him demurely. "Nan," he began, "did anybody ever suggest to you that the sporty thing for you to do would be to run away and hide where I could never find you?" She shook her head. "Did anybody ever suggest to you that the sporty thing for you to do would be to return to Port Agnew from your involuntary exile and inspire me with some enthusiasm for life?" His keen perception did not fail to interpret the slight flush of embarrassment that suffused Nan's face. "I object to that question, your honor," she replied with cleverly simulated gaiety, "on the ground that to do so would necessitate the violation of a confidence." "The objection is sustained by the court. Did my father or Andrew Daney, acting for him, ever offer you any sum of money as a bribe for disappearing out of my life?" "No. Your father offered to be very, very kind to me the morning I was leaving. We met at the railroad station and his offer was made _after_ I informed him that I was leaving Port Agnew forever--and why. So I know he made the offer just because he wanted to be kind--because he is kind." "Neither he nor Daney communicated with you in anyway following your departure from Port Agnew?" "They did not." "Before leaving New York or immediately after your return to Port Agnew, did you enter into verbal agreement with any member of my family or their representative to nurse me back to health and then jilt me?" "I did not. The morning I appeared at the hospital your father, remembering my statement to him the morning I fled from Port Agnew, suspected that I had had a change of heart. He said to me: 'So this is your idea of playing the game, is it?' I assured him then that I had not returned to Port Agnew with the intention of marrying you, but merely to stiffen your morale, as it were. He seemed quite satisfied with my explanation, which I gave him in absolute good faith." "Did he ever question you as to how you ascertained I was ill?" "No. While I cannot explain my impression, I gathered at the time that he knew." "He credited Andrew Daney with that philanthropic job, Nan. He does not know that my mother communicated with you." "Neither do you, Donald. I have not told you she did." "I am not such a stupid fellow as to believe you would ever tell me anything that might hurt me, Nan. One does not relish the information that one's mother has not exhibited the sort of delicacy one expects of one's mother," he added bluntly. "It is not nice of you to say that, Donald. How do you know that Mr. Daney did not send for me?" He smiled tolerantly. "Before Daney would dare do that he would consult with my father, and if my father had consented to it he would never have left to Daney the task of requesting such a tremendous favor of you for his account. If Daney ever consulted my father as to the advisability of such a course, my father refused to consider it." "What makes you think so, old smarty?" "Well, I know my father's code. He had no hesitancy in permitting you to know that you were not welcome as a prospective daughter-in-law, although he was not so rude as to tell you why. He left that to your imagination. Now, for my father to ask a favor of anybody is very unusual. He has a motto that a favor accepted is a debt incurred, and he dislikes those perennial debts. My father is a trader, my dear. If he had, directly or indirectly, been responsible for your return to Port Agnew for the purpose of saving his son's life, he would not be--well, he just wouldn't do it," he explained with some embarrassment. "He couldn't do it. He would say to you, 'My son is dying because he finds life uninteresting without you. If you return, your presence will stimulate in him a renewed interest in life and he will, in all probability, survive. If you are good enough to save my son from death you are good enough to share his life, and although this wedding is about going to kill me, nevertheless we will pull it off and make believe we like it.'" "Nonsense," she retorted. "Knowing how my father would act under such circumstances, I was dumfounded when he informed me this afternoon that you had agreed to perform under false pretenses. He was quite certain you would proceed to jilt me, now that I am strong enough to stand it. He said you had promised him you would." "I did not promise him. I merely told him truthfully what my firm intention was at the time he demanded to be informed as to the nature of my intentions. I reserved my woman's right to change my mind." "Oh!" "Had I made your father a definite promise I would have kept it. If I were a party to such a contract with your father, Donald dear, all of your pleading to induce me to break it would be in vain." "A contract without a consideration is void in law," he reminded her. "Dad just figured he could bank on your love for me. He did you the honor to think it was so strong and wonderful that death would be a delirious delight to you in preference to spoiling my career by marrying me--well--Elizabeth disillusioned him!" Nan's eyebrows lifted perceptibly. "She informed my father in my presence," Donald continued, "that you had had a change of heart; that you were now resolved to accept me should I again ask you to marry me. It appears you had told Andrew Daney this--in cold blood as it were. So Dad went to the telephone and verified this report by Daney; then we had a grand show-down and I was definitely given my choice of habitation--The Dreamerie or the Sawdust Pile. Father, Mother, Elizabeth and Jane; jointly and severally assured me that they would never receive you, so Nan, dear, it appears that I will have to pay rather a heavy price for the privilege of marrying you--" "I have never told you I would marry you," she cried sharply. "Yes, you did. That day in the hospital." "That was a very necessary fib and you should not hold it against me. It was a promise absolutely not made in good faith." "But did you tell Daney that you would accept me if I should ask you again to marry me?" She was visibly agitated but answered him truthfully. "Yes, I did." "You said it in anger?" "Yes." Very softly. "Daney had come to you with an offer of monetary reward for your invaluable services to the McKaye family, had he not? And since what you did was not done for profit, you were properly infuriated and couldn't resist giving Daney the scare of his life? That was the way of it, was it not?" Nan nodded and some tears that trembled on her long lashes were flicked off by the vigor of the nod; some of them fell on the big gaunt hands that held hers. "I suppose you haven't sufficient money with which to return to New York?" he continued. Again she nodded an affirmative. "Just what are your plans, dear?" "I suppose I'll have to go somewhere and try to procure a position as a cook lady." "An admirable decision," he declared enthusiastically. "I'll give you a job cooking for me, provided you'll agree to marry me and permit me to live in your house. I'm a man without a home and you've just _got_ to take me in, Nan. I have no other place to lay my weary head." She looked at him and through the blur of her tears she saw him smiling down at her, calmly, benignantly and with that little touch of whimsicality that was always in evidence and which even his heavy heart could not now subdue. "You've--you've--chosen the Sawdust Pile?" she cried incredulously. "How else would a man of spirit choose, old shipmate?" "But you're not marrying me to save me from poverty, Donald? You must be certain you aren't mistaking for love the sympathy which rises so naturally in that big heart of yours. If it's only a great pity--if it's only the protective instinct--" "Hush! It's all of that and then some. I'm a man grown beyond the puppy-love stage, my dear--and the McKayes are not an impulsive race. We count the costs carefully and take careful note of the potential profits. And while I could grant my people the right to make hash of my happiness I must, for some inexplicable reason, deny them the privilege of doing it with yours. I think I can make you happy, Nan; not so happy, perhaps, that the shadow of your sorrow will not fall across your life occasionally, but so much happier than you are at present that the experiment seems worth trying, even at the expense of sacrificing the worldly pride of my people." "Are you entertaining a strong hope that after you marry me, dear, your people will forgive you, make the best of what they consider a bad bargain and acknowledge me after a fashion? Do you think they will let bygones be bygones and take me to their hearts--for your sake?" "I entertain no such silly illusion. Under no circumstances will they ever acknowledge you after a fashion, for the very sufficient reason that the opportunity to be martyrs will never be accorded my mother and sisters by yours truly, Donald McKaye, late Laird apparent of Port Agnew. Bless, your sweet soul, Nan, I have some pride, you know. I wouldn't permit them to tolerate you. I prefer open warfare every time." "Have you broken with your people, dear?" "Yes, but they do not know it yet. I didn't have the heart to raise a scene, so I merely gave the old pater a hug, kissed mother and the girls and came away. I'm not going back." "You will--if I refuse to marry you?" "I do not anticipate such a refusal. However, it Hoes not enter into the matter at all in so far as my decision to quit The Dreamerie is concerned. I'm through! Listen, Nan. I could win my father to you--win him wholeheartedly and without reservation--if I should inform him that my mother asked you to come back to Port Agnew. My mother and the girls have not told him of this and I suspect they have encouraged his assumption that Andrew Daney took matters in his own hands. Father has not cared to inquire into the matter, anyhow, because he is secretly grateful to Daney (as he thinks) for disobeying him. Mother and the girls are forcing Daney to protect them; they are using his loyalty to the family as a club to keep him in line. With that club they forced him to come to you with a proposition that must have been repugnant to him, if for no other reason than that he knew my father would not countenance it. When you told him you would marry me if I should ask you again, to whom did Daney report? To Elizabeth, of course--the brains of the opposition. That proves to me that my father had nothing to do with it--why the story is as easily understood from deduction as if I had heard the details from their lips. But I cannot use my mother's peace of mind as a club to beat dad into line; I cannot tell him something that will almost make him hate mother and my sisters; I would not force him to do that which he does not desire to do because it is the kindly, sensible and humane course. So I shall sit tight and say nothing--and by the way, I love you more than ever for keeping this affair from me. So few women are true blue sports, I'm afraid." "You must be very, very angry and hurt, Donald?" "I am. So angry and hurt that I desire to be happy within the shortest possible period of elapsed time. Now, old girl, look right into my eyes, because I'm going to propose to you for the last time. My worldly assets consist of about a hundred dollars in cash and a six dollar wedding ring which I bought as I came through Port Agnew. With these wordly goods and all the love and honor and respect a man can possibly have for a woman, I desire to endow you. Answer me quickly. Yes or no?" "Yes," she whispered. "You chatterbox! When?" "At your pleasure." "That's trading talk. We'll be married this afternoon." He stretched out his long arms for her and as she slid off the low hassock and knelt beside his chair, he gathered her hungrily to him and held her there for a long time before he spoke again. When he did it was to say, with an air of wonder that was almost childlike: "I never knew it was possible for a man to be so utterly wretched and so tremendously happy and all within the same hour. I love you so much it hurts." He released her and glanced at his watch. "It is now two o'clock, Nan. If we leave here by three we can reach the county seat by five o'clock, procure a license and be married by six. By half past seven we will have finished our wedding supper and by about ten o'clock we shall be back at the Sawdust Pile. Put a clean pair of rompers on the young fellow and let's go! From this day forward we live, like the Sinn Fein. 'For ourselves alone.'" While Nan was preparing for that hurried ceremony, Donald strolled about the little yard, looking over the neglected garden and marking for future attention various matters such as a broken hinge on the gate, some palings off the fence and the crying necessity for paint on the little white house, for he was striving mightily to shut out all thought of his past life and concentrate on matters that had to do with the future. Presently he wandered out on the bulkhead. The great white gulls which spent their leisure hours gravely contemplating the Bight of Tyee from the decaying piling, rose lazily at his approach and with hoarse cries of resentment flapped out to sea; his dull glance followed them and rested on a familiar sight. Through the Bight of Tyee his father's barkentine Kohala was coming home from Honolulu, ramping in before a twenty mile breeze with every shred of canvas drawing. She was heeled over to starboard a little and there was a pretty little bone in her teeth; the colors streamed from her mizzen rigging while from her foretruck the house-flag flew. Idly Donald watched her until she was abreast and below The Dreamerie and her house-flag dipped in salute to the master watching from the cliff; instantly the young Laird of Tyee saw a woolly puff of smoke break from the terrace below the house and several seconds later the dull boom of the signal gun. His heart was constricted. "Ah, never for me!" he murmured, "never for me--until he tells them to look toward the Sawdust Pile for the master!" He strode out to the gate where his father's chauffeur waited with the limousine. "Take the car home," he ordered, "and as you pass through town stop in at the Central Garage and tell them to send a closed car over to me here." The chauffeur looked at him with surprise but obeyed at once. By the time the hired car had arrived Nan and her child were ready, and just before locking the house Nan, realizing that they would not return to the Sawdust Pile until long after nightfall, hauled in the flag that floated over the little cupola; and for the second time, old Hector, watching up on the cliff, viewed this infallible portent of an event out of the ordinary. His hand trembled as he held his marine glasses to his blurred eyes and focussed on The Sawdust Pile, in time to see his son enter the limousine with Nan Brent and her child--and even at that distance he could see that the car in which they were departing from the Sawdust Pile was not the one in which Donald had left The Dreamerie. From that fact alone The Laird deduced that his son had made his choice; and because Donald was his father's son, imbued with the same fierce high pride and love of independence, he declined to be under obligation to his people even for the service of an automobile upon his wedding day. The Laird stood watching the car until it was out of sight; then he sighed very deeply, entered the house and rang for the butler. "Tell Mrs. McKaye and the young ladies that I would thank them to come here at once," he ordered calmly. They came precipitately, vaguely apprehensive. "My dears," he said in an unnaturally subdued voice, "Donald has just left the Sawdust Pile with the Brent lass to be married. He has made his bed and it is my wish that he shall lie in it." "Oh, Hector!" Mrs. McKaye had spoken quaveringly. "Oh, Hector, dear, do not be hard on him!" He raised his great arm as if to silence further argument. "He has brought disgrace upon my house. He is no longer son of mine and we are discussing him for the last time. Hear me, now. There will be no further mention of Donald in my presence and I forbid you, Nellie, you, Elizabeth and you, Jane, to have aught to do wie him, directly or indirectly." Mrs. McKaye sat down abruptly and commenced to weep and wail her woe aloud, while Jane sought vainly to comfort her. Elizabeth bore the news with extreme fortitude; with unexpected tact she took her father by the arm and steered him outside and along the terrace walk where the agonized sobs and moans of her mother could not be heard--for what Elizabeth feared in that first great moment of remorse was a torrent of self-accusation from her mother. If, as her father had stated, Donald was en route to be married, then the mischief was done and no good could come out of a confession to The Laird of the manner in which the family honor had been compromised, not by Donald, but by his mother, aided and abetted by his sisters! The Laird, now quite dumb with distress, walked in silence with his eldest daughter, vaguely conscious of the comfort of her company and sympathy in his hour of trial. When Elizabeth could catch Jane's attention through the window she cautiously placed her finger on her lip and frowned a warning. Jane nodded her comprehension and promptly bore her mother off to bed where she gave the poor soul some salutary advice and left her to the meager comfort of solitude and smelling salts. * * * * * Just before he retired that night, The Laird saw a light shine suddenly forth from the Sawdust Pile. So he knew his son had selected a home for his bride, and rage and bitterness mingled with his grief and mangled pride to such an extent that he called upon God to take him out of a world that had crumbled about his hoary head. He shook his fist at the little light that blinked so far below him and Mrs. McKaye, who had crept down stairs with a half-formed notion of confessing to The Laird in the hope of mitigating her son's offense--of, mother-like, taking upon her shoulders an equal burden of the blame--caught a glimpse of old Hector's face, and her courage failed her. Thoroughly frightened she returned noiselessly to her room and wept, dry-eyed, for the fountain of her tears had long since been exhausted. Meanwhile, down at the Sawdust Pile, Nan was putting her drowsy son to bed; in the little living-room her husband had lighted the driftwood fire and had drawn the old divan up to the blue flames. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, outlining plans for their future, when Nan, having put her child to bed, came and sat down beside him. He glanced at her with troubled eyes and grinned a trifle foolishly. "Happy?" he queried. She nodded. "In a limited fashion only, dear heart. I'm thinking how wonderfully courageous you have been to marry me and how tremendously grateful I shall always be for your love and faith." She captured his right hand and fondled it for a moment in both of hers, smiling a little thoughtfully the while as if at some dear little secret. "Port Agnew will think I married you for money," she resumed presently; "your mother and sisters will think I married you to spite them and your father will think I married you because you insisted and because I was storm-tossed and had to find a haven from the world. But the real reason is that I love you and know that some day I am going to see more happiness in your eyes than I can see to-night." Again, in that impulsive way she had, she bent and kissed his hand. "Dear King Cophetua," she murmured, "your beggar maid will never be done with adoring you." She looked up at him with a sweet and lovely wistfulness shining in her sea-blue eyes. "And the sweetest thing about it, you angelic simpleton," she added, "is that you will never, never, never know why." XLI The first hint of the tremendous events impending came to Mr. Daney through the medium of no less an informant than his wife. Upon returning from the mill office on the evening of Donald McKaye's marriage, Mr. Daney was met at his front door by Mrs. Daney who cried triumphantly: "Well, what did I tell you about Donald McKaye?" Mr. Daney twitched inwardly, but answered composedly. "Not one-tenth of one per cent, of what I have discovered without your valuable assistance my dear." She wrinkled the end of her nose disdainfully. "He's gone motoring with Nan Brent in a hired car, and they took the baby with them. They passed through town about half past two this afternoon and they haven't returned yet." "How do you know all this?" he demanded coolly. "I saw them as they passed by on the road below; I recognized that rent limousine of the Central Garage with Ben Nicholson driving it, and a few moments ago I telephoned the Central Garage and asked for Ben. He hasn't returned yet--and it's been dark for half an hour." "Hum-m-m! What do you suspect, my dear?" "The worst," she replied dramatically. "What a wonderful fall day this has been," he remarked blandly as he hung up his hat. She turned upon him a glance of fury; he met it with one so calm and impersonal that the good lady quite lost control of herself. "Why do you withhold your confidence from me?" she cried sharply. "Because you wouldn't respect it, my dear; also, because I'm paid to keep the McKaye secrets and you're not." "Is he going to marry her, Andrew? Answer me," she demanded. "Unfortunately for you, Mrs. Daney, the young gentleman hasn't taken me into his confidence. Neither has the young lady. Of course I entertain an opinion, on the subject, but since I am not given to discussing the intimate personal affairs of other people, you'll excuse my reticence on this subject, I'm sure. I repeat that this has been a wonderful fall day." She burst into tears of futile rage and went to her room. Mr. Daney partook of his dinner in solitary state and immediately after dinner strolled down town and loitered around the entrance to the Central Garage until he saw Ben Nicholson drive in about ten o'clock. "Hello, Ben," he hailed the driver as Ben descended from his seat. "I hear you've been pulling off a wedding." Ben Nicholson lowered his voice and spoke out the corner of his mouth. "What do you know about the young Laird, eh, Mr. Daney? Say I could 'a' cried to see him throwin' himself away on that Jane." Mr. Daney shrugged. "Oh, well, boys will be boys," he declared. "The bigger they are the harder they fall. Of course, Ben, you understand I'm not in position to say anything, one way or the other," he added parenthetically, and Ben Nicholson nodded comprehension. Thereupon Mr. Daney sauntered over to the cigar stand in the hotel, loaded his cigar case and went down to his office, where he sat until midnight, smoking and thinking. The sole result of his cogitations, however, he summed up in a remark he directed at the cuspidor just before he went home: "Well, there's blood on the moon and hell will pop in the morning." For the small part he had played in bringing Nan Brent back to Port Agnew, the general manager fully expected to be dismissed from the McKaye service within thirty seconds after old Hector should reach the mill office; hence with the heroism born of twelve hours of preparation he was at his desk at eight o'clock next morning. At nine o'clock The Laird came in and Mr. Daney saw by his face instantly that old Hector knew. The general manager rose at his desk and bowed with great dignity. "Moritori salutamus, sir," he announced gravely. "What the devil are you talking about, Daney?" The Laird demanded irritably. "That's what the gladiators used to say to the Roman populace. It means, I believe, 'We who are about to die, salute you.' Here is my resignation, Mr. McKaye." "Don't be an ass, Andrew," The Laird commanded and threw the proffered resignation into the waste basket. "Why should you resign?" "To spare the trouble of discharging me, sir." "What for?" "Bringing the Brent girl back to Port Agnew. If I hadn't gotten her address from Dirty Dan I would never have suggested to--" "Enough. We will not discuss what might have been, Andrew. The boy has married her, and since the blow has fallen nothing that preceded it is of the slightest importance. What I have called to say to you is this: Donald McKaye is no longer connected with the Tyee Lumber Company." "Oh, come, come, sir," Daney pleaded. "The mischief is done. You'll have to forgive the boy and make the best of a bad business. What can't be cured must be endured, you know." "Not necessarily. And you might spare me your platitude, Andrew," The Laird replied savagely. "I'm done with the lad forever, for son of mine he is no longer. Andrew, do you remember the time he bought that red cedar stumpage up on the Wiskah and unloaded it on me at a profit of two hundred thousand dollars?" Mr. Daney nodded. "And you, in turn, sold it at a profit of fifty thousand," he reminded the irate old man. "Donald did not retain that profit he made at my expense. 'Twas just a joke with him. He put the money into bonds and sent them to you with instructions to place them in my vault for my account." Mr. Daney nodded and The Laird resumed. "Take those bonds to the Sawdust Pile, together with a check for all the interest collected on the coupons since they came into my possession, and tell him from me that I'll take it kindly of him to leave Port Agnew and make a start for himself elsewhere as quickly as he can. He owes it to his family not to affront it by his presence in Port Agnew, giving ground for gossip and scandal and piling needless sorrow upon us. And when the Sawdust Pile is again vacant you will remove the Brent house and put in the drying yard you've planned this many a year." "Very well, sir. It's not a task to my liking, but--" His pause was eloquent. "Have my old desk put in order for me. I'm back in the harness and back to stay, and at that I'm not so certain it isn't the best thing for me, under the present circumstances. I dare say," he added, with a sudden change of tone, "the news is all over Port Agnew this morning." Mr. Daney nodded. "You will procure Donald's resignation as President and have him endorse the stock I gave him in order to qualify as a director of the company. We'll hold a directors' meeting this afternoon and I'll step back into the presidency." "Very well, sir." "You will cause a notice to be prepared for my signature, to be spread on the bulletin board in each department, to the effect that Donald McKaye is no longer connected in any way with the Tyee Lumber Company." "Damn it, man," Daney roared wrathfully, "have you no pride? Why wash your dirty linen in public?" "You are forgetting yourself, my good Andrew. If you do not wish to obey my orders I shall have little difficulty inducing your assistant to carry out my wishes, I'm thinking." The Laird's voice was calm enough; apparently he had himself under perfect control, but--the Blue-Bonnets-coming-over-the-Border look was in his fierce gray eyes; under his bushy iron-gray brows they burned like campfires in twin caverns at night. His arms, bowed belligerently, hung tense at his side, his great hands opened and closed, a little to the fore; he licked his lips and in the brief silence that followed ere Mr. Daney got up and started fumbling with the combination to the great vault in the corner, old Hector's breath came in short snorts. He turned and, still in the same attitude, watched Daney while the latter twirled and fumbled and twirled. Poor man! He knew The Laird's baleful glance was boring into his back and for the life of him he could not remember the combination he had used for thirty years. Suddenly he abandoned all pretense and turned savagely on The Laird. "Get out of my office," he yelled. "I work for you, Hector McKaye, but I give you value received and in this office I'm king and be damned to you." His voice rose to a shrill, childish treble that presaged tears of rage. "You'll be sorry for this, you hard-hearted man. Please God I'll live to see the day your dirty Scotch pride will be humbled and you'll go to that wonderful boy and his wife and plead for forgiveness. Why, you poor, pitiful, pusillanimous old pachyderm, if the boy has dishonored you he has honored himself. He's a gallant young gentleman, that's what he is. He has more guts than a bear. He's _married_ the girl, damn you--and that's more than you would have done at his age. Ah, don't talk to me! We were young together and I know the game you played forty years ago with the girl at the Rat Portage--yes, you--you with your youth and your hot passions--turning your big proud back on your peculiar personal god to wallow in sin and enjoy it." "But I--I was a single man then," The Laird sputtered, almost inarticulate with fury and astonishment. "He was a single man yesterday but he's a married man to-day. And she loves him. She adores him. You can see it in her eyes when his name is mentioned. And she had no _reason_ to behave herself, had she? She has behaved herself for three long years, but did she win anybody's approbation for doing it? I'm telling you a masterful man like him might have had her without the wedding ring, for love's sake, if he'd cared to play a waiting game and stack the cards on her. After all, she's human." Suddenly he commenced to weep with fury, the tears cascading into his whiskers making him look singularly ridiculous in comparison with the expression on his face, which was anything but grievous. "Marriage! Marriage!" he croaked. "I know what it is. I married a fat-head--and so did my wife. We've never known romance; never had anything but a quiet, well-ordered existence. I've dwelt in repression; never got out of life a single one of those thrills that comes of doing something daring and original and nasty. Never had an adventure; never had a woman look at me like I was a god; married at twenty and never knew the Grand Passion." He threw up his arms. "Oh-h-h, God-d-d! If I could only be young again I'd be a devil! Praise be, I know one man with guts enough to tell 'em all to go to hell." With a peculiar little moving cry he started for the door. "Andrew," The Laird cried anxiously. "Where are you going?" "None of your infernal business," the rebel shrilled, "but if you must know, I'm going down to the Sawdust Pile to kiss the bride and shake a man's hand and wish him well. After I've done that I'll deliver your message. Mark me, he'll never take those bonds." "Of course he will, you old fool. They belong to him." "But he refused to make a profit at the expense of his own father. He gave them to you and he's not an Indian giver." "Andrew, I have never known you to act in such a peculiar manner. Are you crazy? Of course he'll take them. He'll have to take them in order to get out of Port Agnew. I doubt if he has a dollar in the world." Mr. Daney beat his chest gorilla fashion. "He doesn't need a dollar. Boy and man, I've loved that--ahem! son of yours. Why, he always _did_ have guts. Keep your filthy money. The boy's credit is good with me. I'm no pauper, even I if do work for you. I work for fun. Understand. Or do you, Hector McKaye?" "If you dare to loan my son as much as a thin dime I'll fire you out of hand." Mr. Daney jeered. "How?" he demanded very distinctly, and yet with a queer, unusual blending of the sentence with a single word, as if the very force of his breath had telescoped every syllable, "would you like to stand off in that corner there and take a long runnin' jump at yourself, proud father?" "Out of this office! You're fired." Mr. Daney dashed the tears from his whiskers and blew his nose. Then he pulled himself together with dignity and bowed so low he lost his center of gravity and teetered a little on his toes before recovering his balance. "Fired is GOOD," he declared. "Where do you get that stuff, eh? My dear old Furiosity, ain't my resignation in the waste-basket? Good-by, good luck and may the good Lord give you the sense God gives geese. I'm a better man than you are, Gunga Din." The door banged open. Then it banged shut and The Laird was alone. The incident was closed. The impossible had come to pass. For the strain had been too great, and at nine o'clock on a working day morning, steady, reliable, dependable, automatic Andrew Daney having imbibed Dutch courage in lieu of Nature's own brand, was, for the first time in his life, jingled to an extent comparable to that of a boiled owl. Mr. Daney's assistant thrust his head in the door, to disturb The Laird's cogitations. "The knee-bolters went out at the shingle mill this morning, sir," he announced. "They want a six and a half hour day and a fifty per cent. increase in wages, with a whole holiday on Saturday. There's a big Russian red down there exhorting them." "Send Dirty Dan to me. Quick!" A telephonic summons to the loading shed brought Daniel P. O'Leary on the run. "Come with me, Dan," The Laird commanded, and started for the shingle mill. On the way down he stopped at the warehouse and selected a new double-bitted ax which he handed to Dirty Dan. Mr. O'Leary received the weapon in silence and trotted along at The Laird's heels like a faithful dog, until, upon arrival at the shingle mill the astute Hibernian took in the situation at a glance. "Sure, 'tis no compliment you've paid me, sor, thinkin' I'll be afther needin' an ax to take that fella's measure," he protested. "Your job is to keep those other animals off me while _I_ take his measure," The Laird corrected him. Without an instant's hesitation Dirty Dan swung his ax and charged the crowd. "Gower that, ye vagabones," he screeched. As he passed the Russian he seized the latter by the collar, swung him and threw him bodily toward old Hector, who received him greedily and drew him to his heart. The terrible O'Leary then stood over the battling pair, his ax poised, the while he hurled insult and anathema at the knee-bolters. A very large percentage of knee-bolters and shingle weavers are members of the I.W.W. and knowing this, Mr. O'Leary begged in dulcet tones, to be informed why in this and that nobody seemed willing to lift a hand to rescue the Little Comrade. He appeared to be keenly disappointed because nobody tried, albeit other axes were quite plentiful thereabouts. Presently The Laird got up and dusted the splinters and sawdust from his clothing; the Red, battered terribly, lay weltering in his blood. "I feel better now," said The Laird. "This is just what I needed this morning to bring me out of myself. Help yourself, Dan," and he made a dive at the nearest striker, who fled, followed by his fellow-strikers, all hotly pursued by The Laird and the demon Daniel. The Laird returned, puffing slightly, to his office and once more sat in at his own desk. As he remarked to Dirty Dan, he felt better now. All his resentment against Daney had fled but his resolution to pursue his contemplated course with reference to his son and the latter's wife had become firmer than ever. In some ways The Laird was a terrible old man. XLII Nan was not at all surprised when, upon responding to a peremptory knock at her front door she discovered Andrew Daney standing without. The general manager, after his stormy interview with The Laird had spent two hours in the sunny lee of a lumber pile, waiting for the alcoholic fogs to lift from his brain, for he had had sense enough left to realize that all was not well with him; he desired to have his tongue in order when he should meet the bride and groom. "Good morning, Mr. Daney," Nan greeted him. "Do come in." "Good morning, Mrs. McKaye. Thank you. I shall with pleasure." He followed her down the little hallway to the living room where Donald sat with his great thin legs stretched out toward the fire. "Don't rise, boy, don't rise," Mr. Daney protested. "I merely called to kiss the bride and shake your hand, my boy. The visit is entirely friendly and unofficial." "Mr. Daney, you're a dear," Nan cried, and presented her fair cheek for the tribute he claimed. "Shake hands with a rebel, boy," Mr. Daney cried heartily to Donald. "God bless you and may you always be happier than you are this minute." Donald wrung the Daney digits with a heartiness he would not have thought possible a month before. "I've quarreled with your father, Donald," he announced, seating himself. "Over you--and you," he added, nodding brightly at both young people. "He thinks he's fired me." He paused, glanced around, coughed a couple of times and came out with it. "Well, what are you going to do now to put tobacco in your old tobacco box, Donald?" Donald smiled sadly. "Oh, Nan still has a few dollars left from that motor-boat swindle you perpetrated, Mr. Daney. She'll take care of me for a couple of weeks until I'm myself again; then, if my father still proves recalcitrant and declines to have me connected with the Tyee Lumber Company, I'll manage to make a living for Nan and the boy somewhere else." Briefly Mr. Daney outlined The Laird's expressed course of action with regard to his son. "He means it," Donald assured the general manager. "He never bluffs. He gave me plenty of warning and his decision has not been arrived at in a hurry. He's through with me." "I fear he is, my boy. Er-ah-ahem! Harumph-h-h! Do you remember those bonds you sent me from New York once--the proceeds of your deal in that Wiskah river cedar?" "Yes." "Your father desires that you accept the entire two hundred thousand dollars worth and accrued interest." "Why?" "Well, I suppose he thinks they'll come in handy when you leave Port Agnew." "Well, I'm not going to leave Port Agnew, Andrew." "Your father instructed me to say to you that he would take it kindly of you to do so--for obvious reasons." "I appreciate his point of view, but since he has kicked me out he has no claim on my sympathies--at least not to the extent of forcing his point of view and causing me to abandon my own. Please say to my father that since I cannot have his forgiveness I do not want his bonds or his money. Tell him also, please, that I'm not going to leave Port Agnew, because that would predicate a sense of guilt on my part and lend some support to the popular assumption that my wife is not a virtuous woman. I could not possibly oblige my father on this point because to do so would be a violent discourtesy to my wife. I am not ashamed of her, you know." Mr. Daney gnawed his thumb nail furiously. "'The wicked flee when no man pursueth'," he quoted. "However, Mr. Donald, you know as well as I do that if your father should forbid it, a dicky bird couldn't make a living in this town." "There are no such restrictions in Darrow, Mr. Daney. The superintendent up there will give me a job on the river." Mr. Daney could not forbear an expression of horror. "Hector McKaye's son a river hog!" he cried incredulously. "Well, Donald McKaye's father was a river hog, wasn't he?" "Oh, but times have changed since Hector was a pup, my boy. Why, this is dreadful." "No, Mr. Daney. Merely unusual." "Well, Donald, I think your father will raise the ante considerably in order to avoid that added disgrace and force you to listen to reason." "If he does, sir, please spare yourself the trouble of bearing his message. Neither Nan nor I is for sale, sir." "I told him you'd decline the bonds. However, Mr. Donald, there is no reason in life why you shouldn't get money from me whenever you want it. Thanks to your father I'm worth more than a hundred thousand myself, although you'd never guess it. Your credit is A-1 with me." "I shall be your debtor for life because of that speech, Mr. Daney. Any news from my mother and the girls?" "None." "Well, I'll stand by for results," Donald assured him gravely. "Do not expect any." "I don't." Mr. Daney fidgeted and finally said he guessed he'd better be trotting along, and Donald and Nan, realizing it would be no kindness to him to be polite and assure him there was no need of hurry, permitted him to depart forthwith. "I think, sweetheart," Donald announced with a pained little smile, as he returned from seeing Mr. Daney to the front gate, "that it wouldn't be a half bad idea for you to sit in at that old piano and play and sing for me. I think I'd like something light and lilting. What's that Kipling thing that's been set to music?" So we went strolling, Down by the rolling, down by the rolling sea. You may keep your croak for other folk But you can't frighten me! He lighted a cigarette and stretched himself out on the old divan. She watched him blowing smoke rings at the ceiling--and there was no music in her soul. In the afternoon the McKaye limousine drew up at the front gate and Nan's heart fluttered violently in contemplation of a visit from her husband's mother and sisters. She need not have worried, however. The interior of the car was unoccupied save for Donald's clothing and personal effects which some thoughtful person at The Dreamerie had sent down to him. He hazarded a guess that the cool and practical Elizabeth had realized his needs. XLIII Returning to the mill office, Mr. Daney sat at his desk and started to look over the mail. The Laird heard his desk buzzer sounding frequently and rightly conjecturing that his general manager was back on the job, he came into the latter's office and glared at him. "I thought I fired you?" he growled. "I know. You thought you did," the rebel replied complacently. "I see by your knuckles you've been fighting. Hope it did you good." "It did. Are you going to leave this office?" "No, sir." "I didn't think you would. Well, well! Out with it." Mr. Daney drew a deal of pleasure from that invitation. "The boy directs me to inform you, sir, that he will not accept the bonds nor any monies you may desire to give him. He says he doesn't need them because he isn't going to leave Port Agnew." "Nonsense, Andrew. He cannot remain in this town. He hasn't the courage to face his little world after marrying that girl. And he has to make a living for her." "We shall see that which we shall see," Mr. Daney replied enigmatically. "I wonder if it is possible he is trying to outgame me," old Hector mused aloud. "Andrew, go back and tell him that if he will go to California to live I will deed him that Lassen county sugar and white pine and build him the finest mill in the state." "The terms are quite impossible," Daney retorted and explained why. "He shall get out of Port Agnew," The Laird threatened. "He shall get out or starve." "You are forgetting something, sir." "Forgetting what?" "That I have more than a hundred thousand dollars in bonds right in that vault and that I have not as yet developed paralysis of the right hand. The boy shall not starve and neither shall he crawl, like a beaten dog currying favor with the one that has struck him." "I am the one who has been struck--and he has wounded me sorely," The Laird cried, his voice cracked with anger. "The mischief is done. What's the use of crying over spilled milk? You're going to forgive the boy sooner or later, so do it now and be graceful about it." "I'll never forgive him, Andrew." Mr. Daney walled his eyes toward the ceiling. "Thank God," he murmured piously, "I'm pure. Hereafter, every time Reverend Mr. Tingley says the Lord's prayer I'm going to cough out loud in church at the line: 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.' You'll hear that cough and remember, Hector McKaye." A deeper shadow of distress settled over The Laird's stern features. "You're uncommon mean to me this bitter day, Andrew," he complained wearily. "I take it as most unkind of you to thwart my wishes like this." "I'm for true love!" Mr. Daney declared firmly. "Ah come, come now! Don't be a stiff-necked old dodo. Forgive the boy." "In time I may forgive him, Andrew. I'm not sure of myself where he is concerned, but we canna receive the girl. 'Tis not in reason that we should." "I believe I'll cough twice," Daney murmured musingly. And the following day being Sunday, he did! He sat two rows behind the McKaye family pew but across the aisle, and in a cold fury The Laird turned to squelch him with a look. What he saw in the Daney pew, however, chilled his fury and threw him into a veritable panic of embarrassment. For to the right of the incomprehensible general manager sat the young ex-laird of Port Agnew; at Daney's left the old Laird beheld his new daughter-in-law, while further down the pew as far as she could retreat, Mrs. Daney, with face aflame, sat rigid, her bovine countenance upraised and her somewhat vacuous glance fixed unblinkingly at a point some forty feet over Mr. Tingley's pious head. Donald intercepted the old man's amazed and troubled glance, and smiled at his father with his eyes--an affectionate overture that was not lost on The Laird ere he jerked his head and eyes once more to the front. Mrs. McKaye and her two daughters were as yet unaware of the horror that impended. But not for long. When the congregation stood to sing the final hymn, Nan's wondrous mezzo-soprano rose clear and sweet over the indifferent-toned notes of every other woman present; to the most dull it would have been obvious that there was a trained singer present, and Mrs. McKaye and her daughters each cast a covert glance in the direction of the voice. However, since every other woman in the church was gazing at Nan, nobody observed the effect of her presence upon the senior branch of the McKaye family, for which small blessing the family in question was duly grateful. At the conclusion of the service old Hector remained in his pew until the majority of the congregation had filed out; then, assuring himself by a quick glance, that his son and the latter's wife had preceded him, he followed with Mrs. McKaye and the girls. From the church steps he observed Donald and Nan walking home, while Mr. Daney and his outraged spouse followed some twenty feet behind them. Quickly The Laird and his family entered the waiting limousine; it was the first occasion that anybody could remember when he had not lingered to shake hands with Mr. Tingley and, perchance, congratulate him on the excellence of his sermon. They were half way up the cliff road before anybody spoke. Then, with a long preliminary sigh, The Laird voiced the thought that obsessed them all. "That damned mutton-head, Daney. I'd run him out of the Tyee employ if it would do a bit of good. I cannot run him out of town or out of church." "The imbecile!" Elizabeth raged. Jane was dumb with shame and rage and Mrs. McKaye was sniffling a little. Presently she said: "How dare he bring her right into church with him," she cried brokenly. "Right before everybody. Oh, dear, oh dear, is my son totally lacking in a sense of decency? This is terrible, terrible." "I shall not risk such another awful Sunday morning," Elizabeth announced. "Nor I," Jane cried with equal fervor. "We shall have to leave Port Agnew now," Mrs, McKaye sobbed. Old Hector patted her hand. "Yes, I think you'll have to, Nellie. Unfortunately, I cannot go with you. Daney doesn't appear to be quite sane of late and with Donald out of the business I'm chained to a desk for the remainder of my life. I fear, however," he added savagely, "I do not intend to let that woman run me out of my own church. Not by a damned sight!" The instant they entered the house, rightly conjecturing that the Daneys had also reached their home, Mrs. McKaye went to the telephone and proceeded to inform Mr. Daney of the opinion which the McKaye family, jointly and severally, entertained for his idea of comedy. Daney listened respectfully to all she had to say touching his sanity, his intelligence, his sense of decency, and his loyalty to Hector and when, stung because he made no defense, she asked: "Have you no explanation to make us for your extraordinary behavior?" he replied: "I am an usher of our church, Mrs. McKaye. When Donald and his wife entered the church the only vacant seats in it were in my pew; the only person in the church who would not have felt a sense of outrage at having your daughter-in-law seated with his or her family, was my self-sacrificing self. I could not be discourteous to Donald and I'm quite certain his wife has as much right in our church as you have. So I shooed them both up to my pew, to the great distress of Mrs. Daney." "You should be ashamed of yourself, Andrew. You should!" "I'm not ashamed of myself, Mrs. McKaye. I've been a pussy-foot all my life. I had to do something I knew would detract from my popularity, but since I had to do it I decided to do it promptly and as if I enjoyed it. Surely you would not have commended me had I met the young couple at the door and said to them: 'Get out of this church. It is not for such as you. However, if you insist upon staying, you'll have to stand up or else sit down on the floor. Nobody here wants to sit with you. They're afraid, too, they'll offend the Chief Pooh-bah of this town'." "You could have pretended you did not see them." "My dear Mrs. McKaye," Daney retorted in even tones, "do you wish me to inform your husband of a certain long distance telephone conversation? If so--" She hung up without waiting to say good-by, and the following day she left for Seattle, accompanied by her daughters. Throughout the week The Laird forbore mentioning his son's name to Mr. Daney; indeed, he refrained from addressing the latter at all unless absolutely necessary to speak to him directly--wherefore Daney knew himself to be blacklisted. On the following Sunday The Laird sat alone in the family pew and Mr. Daney did not cough during the recital of the Lord's prayer, so old Hector managed to conquer a tremendous yearning to glance around for the reason. Also, as on the previous Sunday, he was in no hurry to leave his pew at the conclusion of the service, yet, to his profound irritation, when he did leave it and start down the central aisle of the church, he looked squarely into the faces of Donald and Nan as they emerged from the Daney pew. Mrs. Daney was conspicuous by her absence. Nan's baby boy had fallen asleep during the service and Donald was carrying the cherub. Old Hector's face went white; he gulped when his son spoke to him. "Hello, Dad. You looked lonely all by yourself in that big pew. Suppose we come up and sit with you next Sunday?" Old Hector paused and bent upon his son and Nan a terrible look. "Never speak to me again so long as you live," he replied in a low voice, and passed out of the church. Donald gazed after his broad erect figure and shook his head dolefully, as Mr. Daney fell into step beside him. "I told you so," he whispered. "Isn't it awful to be Scotch?" Nan inquired. "It is awful--on the Scotch," her husband assured her. "The dear old fraud gulped like a broken-hearted boy when I spoke to him. He'd rather be wrong than president." As they were walking home to the Sawdust Pile, Nan captured one of her husband's great fingers and swung it childishly. "I wish you didn't insist upon our going to church, sweetheart," she complained. "We're spoiling your father's Christianity." "Can't help it," he replied doggedly. "We're going to be thoroughbreds about this, no matter how much it hurts." She sighed. "And you're only half Scotch, Donald." XLIV By noon of the following day, Port Agnew was astounded by news brought by the crew of one of the light draft launches used to tow log rafts down the river. Donald McKaye was working for Darrow. He was their raftsman; he had been seen out on the log boom, pike pole in hand, shoving logs in to the endless chain elevator that drew them up to the seas. As might be imagined, Mrs. Daney was among the first to glean this information, and to her husband she repeated it at luncheon with every evidence of pleasure. "Tut, tut, woman," he replied carelessly, "this is no news to me. He told me yesterday after service that he had the job." The familiar wrinkle appeared for an instant on the end of her nose before she continued: "I wonder what The Laird thinks of that, Andrew?" "So do I," he parried skilfully. "Does he know it?" "There isn't a soul in Port Agnew with sufficient courage to tell him." "Why do you not tell him?" "None of my business. Besides, I do not hanker to see people squirm with suffering." She wrinkled her nose once more and was silent. As Mr. Daney had declared, there was none in Port Agnew possessed of sufficient hardihood to inform the Laird of his son's lowly status and it was three weeks before he discovered it for himself. He had gone up the river to one of his logging camps and the humor had seized him to make the trip in a fast little motor-boat he had given Donald at Christmas many years' before. He was busy adjusting the carburetor, after months of disuse, as he passed the Darrow log boom in the morning, so he failed to see his big son leaping across the logs, balancing himself skilfully with the pike pole. It was rather late when he started home and in the knowledge that darkness might find him well up the river he hurried. Now, from the Bight of Tyee to a point some five miles above Darrow, the Skookum flows in almost a straight line; the few bends are wide and gradual, and when The Laird came to this home-stretch he urged the boat to its maximum speed of twenty-eight miles per hour. Many a time in happier days he had raced down this long stretch with Donald at the helm, and he knew the river thoroughly; as he sped along he steered mechanically, his mind occupied in a consideration of the dishonor that had come upon his clan. The sun had already set as he came roaring down a wide deep stretch near Darrow's mill; in his preoccupation he forgot that his competitor's log boom stretched across the river fully two-thirds of its width; that he should throttle down, swerve well to starboard and avoid the field of stored logs. The deep shadows cast by the sucker growth and old snags along the bank blended with the dark surface of the log boom and prevented him from observing that he was headed for the heart of it; the first intimation he had of his danger came to him in a warning shout from the left bank--a shout that rose above the roar of the exhaust. "Jump! Overboard! Quickly! The log boom!" Old Hector awoke from his bitter reverie. He, who had once been a river hog, had no need to be told of the danger incident to abrupt precipitation into the heart of that log boom, particularly when it would presently be gently agitated by the long high "bone" the racing boat carried in her teeth. When logs weighing twenty tons come gently together--even when they barely rub against each other, nothing living caught between them may survive. The unknown who warned him was right. He must jump overboard and take his chance in the river, for it was too late now to slow down and put his motor in reverse. In the impending crash that was only a matter of seconds, The Laird would undoubtedly catapult from the stern sheets into the water--and if he should drift in under the logs, knew the river would eventually give up his body somewhere out in the Bight of Tyee. On the other hand, should he be thrown out on the boom he would stand an equal chance of being seriously injured by the impact or crushed to death when his helpless body should fall between the logs. In any event the boat would be telescoped down to the cockpit and sink at the edge of the log field. He was wearing a heavy overcoat, for it was late in the fall, and he had no time to remove it; not even time to stand up and dive clear. So he merely hurled his big body against the starboard gunwale and toppled overboard--and thirty feet further on the boat struck with a crash that echoed up and down the river, telescoped and drove under the log boom. It was not in right when old Hector rose puffing to the surface and bellowed for help before starting to swim for the log boom. The voice answered him instantly: "Coming! Hold On!" Handicapped as he was with his overcoat, old Hector found it a prodigious task to reach the boom; as he clung to the boom-stick he could make out the figure of a man with a pike pole coming toward him in long leaps across the logs. And then old Hector noticed something else. He had swum to the outer edge of the log boom and grasped the light boom-stick, dozens of which, chained end to end, formed the floating enclosure in which the log supply was stored. The moment he rested his weight on this boom-stick, however, one end of it submerged suddenly--wherefore The Laird knew that the impact of the motor-boat had broken a link of the boom and that this broken end was now sweeping outward and downward, with the current releasing the millions of feet of stored logs. Within a few minutes, provided he should keep afloat, he would be in the midst of these tremendous Juggernauts, for, clinging to the end of the broken boom he was gradually describing a circle on the outside of the log field, swinging from beyond the middle of the river in to the left-hand bank; presently, when the boom should have drifted its maximum distance he would be hung up stationary in deep water while the released logs bore down upon him with the current and gently shoulder him into eternity. He clawed his way along the submerging boom-stick to its other end, where it was linked with its neighbor, and the combined buoyancy of both boom-sticks was sufficient to float him. "Careful," he called to the man leaping over the log-field toward him. "The boom is broken! Careful, I tell you! The logs are moving out--they're slipping apart. Be careful." Even as he spoke, The Laird realized that the approaching rescuer would not heed him. He _had_ to make speed out to the edge of the moving logs; if he was to rescue the man clinging to the boom-sticks he must take a chance on those long leaps through the dusk; he _must_ reach The Laird before too much open water developed between the moving logs. Only a trained river man could have won to him in such a brief space of time; only an athlete could have made the last flying leap across six feet of dark water to a four-foot log that was bearing gently down, butt first, on the figure clinging to the boom-stick. His caulks bit far up the side of the log and the force of his impact started it rolling; yet even as he clawed his way to the top of the log and got it under control the iron head of his long pike pole drove into the boom-stick and fended The Laird out of harm's way; before the log the man rode could slip by, the iron had been released and the link of chain between the two boom-sticks had been snagged with the pike hook, and both men drifted side by side. "Safe--o," his rescuer warned Old Hector quietly. "Hang on. I'll keep the logs away from you and when the field floats by I'll get you ashore. We're drifting gradually in toward the bank below the mill." The Laird was too chilled, too exhausted and too lacking in breath to do more than gasp a brief word of thanks. It seemed a long, long time that he clung there, and it was quite dark when his rescuer spoke again. "I think the last log has floated out of the booming ground. I'll swim ashore with you now, as soon as I can shuck my boots and mackinaw." A few minutes later he cried reassuringly, "All set, old-timer," and slid into the water beside The Laird. "Relax yourself and do not struggle." His hands came up around old Hector's jaws from the rear. "Let go," he commanded, and the hard tow commenced. It was all footwork and their progress was very slow, but eventually they won through. As soon as he could stand erect in the mud the rescuer unceremoniously seized The Laird by the nape and dragged him high and dry up the bank. "Now, then," he gasped, "I guess you can take care of yourself. Better go over to the mill and warm yourself in the furnace room. I've got to hurry away to 'phone the Tyee people to swing a dozen spare links of their log boom across the river and stop those runaways before they escape into the Bight and go to sea on the ebb." He was gone on the instant, clambering up the bank through the bushes that grew to the water's edge; old Hector could hear his breath coming in great gasps as he ran. "Must know that chap, whoever he is," The Laird soliloquized. "Think he's worked for me some time or other. His voice sounds mighty familiar. Well--I'll look him up in the morning." He climbed after his rescuer and stumbled away through the murk toward Darrow's mill. Arrived here he found the fireman banking the fires in the furnace room and while he warmed himself one of them summoned Bert Darrow from the mill office. "Bert," The Laird explained, "I'd be obliged if you'd run me home in more or less of a hurry in your closed car. I've been in the drink," and he related the tale of his recent adventures. "Your raftsman saved my life," he concluded. "Who is he? It was so dark before he got to me I couldn't see his face distinctly, but I think he's a young fellow who used to work for me. I know because his voice sounds so very familiar." "He's a new hand, I believe. Lives in Port Agnew. I believe your man Daney can tell you his name," Darrow replied evasively. "I'll ask Daney. The man was gone before I could recover enough breath to thank him for my life. Sorry to have messed up your boom, Bert, but we'll stop the runaways at my boom and I'll have them towed back in the morning. And I'll have a man put in a new boom-stick and connect it up again." Bert Darrow set him down at the Tyee Lumber Company's office, and wet and chilled as he was, The Laird went at once to Mr. Daney's office. The latter was just leaving it for the day when The Laird appeared. "Andrew," the latter began briskly. "I drove that fast motor-boat at full speed into Darrow's boom on my way down river this evening; I've had a ducking and only for Darrow's raftsman you'd be closing down the mill to-morrow out of respect to my memory. Bert Darrow says their raftsman used to work for us; he's a new man with them and Bert says you know who he is." "I think I know the man," Mr. Daney replied thoughtfully. "He's been with them about three weeks; resigned our employ a couple of weeks before that. I was sorry to lose him. He's a good man." "I grant it, Andrew. He's the fastest, coolest hand that ever balanced a pike pole or rode a log. We cannot afford to let men like that fellow get away from us for the sake of a little extra pay. Get him back on the pay-roll, Andrew, and don't be small with him. I'll remember him handsomely at Christmas, and see that I do not forget this, Andrew. What is his name?" "Let me think." Mr. Daney bent his head, tipped back his hat and massaged his brow before replying. "I think that when he worked for the Tyee Lumber Company he was known as Donald McKaye." He looked up. The old Laird's face was ashen. "Thank you, Andrew," he managed to murmur presently. "Perhaps you'd better let Darrow keep him for a while. G--g--good-night!" Outside, his chauffeur waited with his car. "Home--and be quick about it," he mumbled and crawled into the tonneau slowly and weakly. As the car rolled briskly up the high cliff road to The Dreamerie, the old man looked far below him to the little light that twinkled on the Sawdust Pile. "She'll have his dinner cooked for him now and be waiting and watching for him," he thought. XLV Hector McKaye suffered that winter. He dwelt in Gethsemane, for he had incurred to his outcast son the greatest debt that one man can incur to another, and he could not publicly acknowledge the debt or hope to repay it in kind. By the time spring came his heart hunger was almost beyond control; there were times when, even against his will, he contemplated a reconciliation with Donald based on an acceptance of the latter's wife but with certain reservations. The Laird never quite got around to defining the reservation but in a vague way he felt that they should exist and that eventually Donald would come to a realization of the fact and help him define them. Each Sunday during that period of wretchedness he saw his boy and Nan at church, although they no longer sat with Mr. Daney. From Reverend Tingley The Laird learned that Donald now had a pew of his own, and he wondered why. He knew his son had never been remotely religious and eventually he decided that, in his son's place, though he were the devil himself, he would do exactly as Donald had done. Damn a dog that carried a low head and a dead tail! It was the sign of the mongrel strain--curs always crept under the barn when beaten! One Sunday in the latter part of May he observed that Nan came to church alone. He wondered if Donald was at home ill and a vague apprehension stabbed him; he longed to drop into step beside Nan as she left the church and ask her, but, of course, that was unthinkable. Nevertheless he wished he knew and that afternoon he spent the entire time on the terrace at The Dreamerie, searching the Sawdust Pile with his marine glasses, in the hope of seeing Donald moving about the little garden. But he did not see him, and that night his sleep was more troubled than usual. On the following Sunday Nan was not accompanied by her husband either. The Laird decided, therefore, that Donald could not be very ill, otherwise Nan would not have left him home alone. This thought comforted him somewhat. During the week he thought frequently of telephoning up to Darrow and asking if they still had the same raftsman on the pay-roll, but his pride forbade this. So he drove up the river road one day and stopped his car among the trees on the bank of the river from the Darrow log boom. A tall, lively young fellow was leaping nimbly about on the logs, but so active was he that even at two hundred yards The Laird could not be certain this man was his son. He returned to Port Agnew more troubled and distressed than ever. Mrs. McKaye and the girls had made three flying visits down to Port Agnew during the winter and The Laird had spent his week-ends in Seattle twice; otherwise, save for the servants, he was quite alone at The Dreamerie and this did not add to his happiness. Gradually the continued and inexplicable absence of Donald at Sunday service became an obsession with him; he could think of nothing else in his spare moments and even at times when it was imperative he should give all of his attention to important business matters, this eternal, damnable query continued to confront him. It went to bed with him and got up with him and under its steady relentless attrition he began to lose the look of robust health that set him off so well among men of his own age. His eyes took on a worried, restless gleam; he was irritable and in the mornings he frequently wore to the office the haggard appearance that speaks so accusingly of a sleepless night. He lost his appetite and in consequence he lost weight. Andrew Daney was greatly concerned about him, and one day, apropos of nothing, he demanded a bill of particulars. "Oh, I daresay I'm getting old, Andrew," The Laird replied evasively. "Worrying about the boy?" It was a straight shot and old Hector was too inexpressibly weary to attempt to dodge it. He nodded sadly. "Well, let us hope he'll come through all right, sir." "Is he ill? What's wrong with him, Andrew? Man, I've been eating my heart out for months, wondering what it is, but you know the fix I'm in. I don't like to ask and not a soul in Port Agnew will discuss him with me." "Why, there's nothing wrong with him that I'm aware of, sir. I spoke to Nan after services last Sunday and she read me a portion of his last letter. He was quite well at that time." "W-wh-where is he, Andrew?" "Somewhere in France. He's not allowed to tell." "France? Good God, Andrew, not _France_!" "Why not, may I ask? Of course he's in France. He enlisted as a private shortly after war was declared. Dirty Dan quit his job and went with him. They went over with the Fifth Marines. Do you mean to tell me this is news to you?" he added, frankly amazed. "I do," old Hector mumbled brokenly. "Oh, Andrew man, this is terrible, terrible. I canna stand it, man." He sat down and covered his face with his trembling old hands. "Why can't you? You wouldn't want him to sit at home and be a slacker, would you? And you wouldn't have a son of yours wait until the draft board took him by the ear and showed him his duty, would you?" "If he's killed I'll nae get over it." The Laird commenced to weep childishly. "Well, better men or at least men as fine, are paying that price for citizenship, Hector McKaye." "But his wife, man? He was married. 'Twas not expected of him--" "I believe his wife is more or less proud of him, sir. Her people have always followed the flag in some capacity." "But how does she exist? Andrew Daney, if you're giving her the money--" "If I am you have no right to ask impertinent questions about it. But I'm not." "I never knew it, I never knew it," the old man complained bitterly. "Nobody tells me anything about my own son. I'm alone; I sit in the darkness, stifling with money--oh, Andrew, Andrew, I didn't say good-by to him! I let him go in sorrow and in anger." "You may have time to cure all that. Go down to the Sawdust Pile, take the girl to your heart like a good father should and then cable the boy. That will square things beautifully." Even in his great distress the stubborn old head was shaken emphatically. The Laird of Port Agnew was not yet ready to surrender. Spring lengthened into summer and summer into fall. Quail piped in the logged-over lands and wild ducks whistled down through the timber and rested on the muddy bosom of the Skookum, but for the first time in forty years The Laird's setters remained in their kennels and his fowling pieces in their leather cases. To him the wonderful red and gold of the great Northern woods had lost the old allurement and he no longer thrilled when a ship of his fleet, homeward bound, dipped her house-flag far below him. He was slowly disintegrating. Of late he had observed that Nan no longer came to church, so he assumed she had found the task of facing her world bravely one somewhat beyond her strength. A few months before, this realization would have proved a source of savage satisfaction to him, but time and suffering were working queer changes in his point of view. Now, although he told himself it served her right, he was sensible of a small feeling of sympathy for her and a large feeling of resentment against the conditions that had brought her into conflict with the world. "I daresay," Andrew Daney remarked to him about Christmas time, "you haven't forgotten your resolve to do something handsome for that raftsman of Darrow's who saved your life last January. You told me to remind you of him at Christmas." "I have not forgotten the incident," old Hector answered savagely. "I think it might be a nice thing to do if you would send word to Nan, by me, that it will please you if she will consent to have your grandchild born in the company hospital. Otherwise, I imagine she will go to a Seattle hospital, and with doctors and nurses away to the war there's a chance she may not get the best of care." "Do as you see fit," The Laird answered. He longed to evade the issue--he realized that Daney was crowding him always, setting traps for him, driving him relentlessly toward a reconciliation that was abhorrent to him. "I have no objection. She cannot afford the expense of a Seattle hospital, I daresay, and I do not desire to oppress her." The following day Mr. Daney reported that Nan had declined with thanks his permission to enter the Tyee Lumber Company's hospital. As a soldier's wife she would be cared for without expense in the Base Hospital at Camp Lewis, less than a day's journey distant. The Laird actually quivered when Daney broke this news to him. He was hurt--terribly hurt--but he dared not admit it. In January he learned through Mr. Daney that he was a grandfather to a nine-pound boy and that Nan planned to call the baby Caleb, after her father. For the first time in his life then, The Laird felt a pang of jealousy. While the child could never, by any possibility, be aught to him, nevertheless he felt that in the case of a male child a certain polite deference toward the infant's paternal ancestors was always commendable. At any rate, Caleb was Yankee and hateful. "I am the twelfth of my line to be named Hector," he said presently--and Andrew Daney with difficulty repressed a roar of maniac laughter. Instead he said soberly. "The child's playing in hard luck as matters stand; it would be adding insult to injury to call him Hector McKaye, Thirteenth. Isn't that why you named your son Donald?" The Laird pretended not to hear this. Having been fired on from ambush, as it were, he immediately started discussing an order for some ship timbers for the Emergency Fleet Corporation. When he retired to his own office, however, he locked the door and wept with sympathy for his son, so far away and in the shadow of death upon the occasion of the birth of his first son. XLVI Spring came. Overhead the wild geese flew in long wedges, honking, into the North, and The Laird remembered how Donald, as a boy, used to shoot at them with a rifle as they passed over The Dreamerie. Their honking wakened echoes in his heart. With the winter's supply of logs now gone, logging operations commenced in the woods with renewed vigor, the river teemed with rafts, the shouts of the rivermen echoing from bank to bank. Both Tyee and Darrow were getting out spruce for the government and ship timbers for the wooden shipyards along San Francisco Bay. Business had never been so brisk, and with the addition of the war duties that came to every community leader, The Laird found some surcease from his heart-hunger. Mrs. McKaye and the girls had returned to The Dreamerie, now that Donald's marriage had ceased to interest anybody but themselves, so old Hector was not so lonely. But--the flag was flying again at the Sawdust Pile, each day of toil for The Laird was never complete without an eager search of the casualty lists published in the Seattle papers. Spring lengthened into summer. The Marine casualties at Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry appalled The Laird; he read that twenty survivors of a charge that started two hundred and fifty strong across the wheat field at Bouresches had taken Bouresches and held it against three hundred of the enemy--led by Sergeant Daniel J. O'Leary, of Port Agnew, Washington! Good old Dirty Dan! At last he was finding a legitimate outlet for his talents! He would get the Distinguished Service Cross for that! The Laird wondered what Donald would receive. It would be terrible should Dirty Dan return with the Cross and Donald McKaye without it. In September, Donald appeared in the Casualty List as slightly wounded. Also, he was a first lieutenant now. The Laird breathed easier, for his son would be out of it for a few months, no doubt. It was a severe punishment, however, not to be able to discuss his gallant son with anybody. At home his dignity and a firm adherence to his previous announcement that his son's name should never be mentioned in his presence, forbade a discussion with Mrs. McKaye and the girls; and when he weakly sparred for an opportunity with Andrew Daney, that stupid creature declined to rise to the bait, or even admit that he knew of Donald's commission. When told of it, he expressed neither surprise nor approval. In November, the great influenza epidemic came to Port Agnew and took heavy toll. It brought to The Laird a newer, a more formidable depression. What if Donald's son should catch it and die, and Donald be deprived of the sight of his first-born? What if Nan should succumb to an attack of it while her husband was in France? In that event would Donald forgive and forget and come home to The Dreamerie? Somehow, old Hector had his doubts. For a long time now, he had felt a great urge to see Donald's son. He had a curiosity to discover whether the child favored the McKayes or the Brents. If it favored the McKayes--well, perhaps he might make some provision for its future in his will, and in order to prove himself a good sport he would leave an equal sum to Nan's illegitimate child, which Donald had formally adopted a few days after his marriage to Nan. Why make fish of one and fowl of the other? he thought. They were both McKayes now, in the sight of the law, and for aught he knew to the contrary they were full brothers! The child became an obsession with him. He longed to weigh it and compare its weight with that of Donald's at the same age--he had the ancient record in an old memorandum book at the office. He speculated on whether it had blue eyes or brown, whether it was a blond or a brunette. He wondered if Daney had seen it and wondering, at length he asked. Yes, Mr. Daney had seen the youngster several times, but beyond that statement he would not go and The Laird's dignity forbade too direct a probe. He longed to throttle Mr. Daney, who he now regarded as the most unsympathetic, prosaic, dull-witted old ass imaginable. He wanted to see that child! The desire to do so never left him during his waking hours and he dreamed of the child at night. So in the end he yielded and went down to the Sawdust Pile, under cover of darkness, his intention being to sneak up to the little house and endeavor to catch a glimpse of the child through the window. He was enraged to discover, however, that Nan maintained a belligerent Airedale that refused, like all good Airedales, to waste his time and dignity in useless barking. He growled--once, and The Laird knew he meant it, so he got out of that yard in a hurry. He was in a fine rage as he walked back to the mill office and got into his car. Curse the dog! Was he to be deprived of a glimpse of his grandson by an insensate brute of a dog? He'd be damned if he was! He'd shoot the animal first--no, that would never do. Nan would come out and he would be discovered. Moreover, what right had he to shoot anybody's dog until it attacked him? The thing to do would be to put some strychnine on a piece of meat--no, no, that would never do. The person who would poison a dog--any kind of a dog-- It was a good dog. The animal certainly was acting within its legal rights. Yes, he knew now where Nan had gotten it. The dog had belonged to First Sergeant Daniel J. O'Leary of the Fifth Marines; he had doubtless given it to Nan to keep for him when he went to the war; The Laird knew Dan thought a great deal of that dog. His name was Jerry and he had aided Dirty Dan in more than one bar-room battle. Jerry, like his master, like the master of the woman he protected, was a Devil-dog, and one simply cannot kill a soldier's dog for doing a soldier's duty. Should Jerry charge there would be no stopping him until he was killed, so The Laird saw very clearly that there was but one course open to him. If he marched through that gate and straight to the door, as if he meant business, as if he had a moral and legal right to be there on business, Jerry would understand and permit him to pass. But if he snooped in, like a thief in the night, and peered in at a window-- "I wish I had a suit of Fifteenth Century armour," he thought. "Then Jerry, you could chew on my leg and be damned to you. You're a silent dog and I could have a good look while you were wrecking your teeth." He went back to the Sawdust Pile at dusk the next evening, hoping Jerry would be absent upon some unlawful private business, but when he approached the gate slowly and noiselessly Jerry spoke up softly from within and practically said: "Get out or take the consequences." The following night, however, The Laird was prepared for Jerry. He did not halt at the dog's preliminary warning but advanced and rattled the gate a little. Immediately Jerry came to the gate and stood just inside growling in his throat, so The Laird thrust an atomizer through the palings and deluged Jerry's hairy countenance with a fine cloud of spirits of ammonia. He had once tried that trick on a savage bulldog in which he desired to inculcate some respect for his person, and had succeeded beyond his most sanguine expectations. Therefore, since desperate circumstances always require desperate measures, the memory of that ancient victory had moved him to attempt a similar embarrassment of the dog Jerry. But Jerry was a devil-dog. He had been raised and trained by Dirty Dan O'Leary and in company with that interesting anthropoid he had been through many stormy passages. Long before, he had learned that the offensive frequently wins--the defensive never. It is probable that he wept as he sniffed the awful stuff, but if he did they were tears of rage. Jerry's first move was to stand on his head and cover his face with his paws. Then he did several back flips and wailed aloud in his misery and woe, his yelps of distress quite filling the empyrean. But only for the space of a few seconds. Recovering his customary aplomb he made a flying leap for the top of the gate, his yelps now succeeded by ambitious growls--and in self-defense The Laird was forced to spray him again as he clung momentarily on top of the palings. With a sob Jerry dropped back and buried his nose in the dust, while The Laird beat a hurried retreat into the darkness, for he had lost all confidence in his efforts to inculcate in Jerry an humble and contrite spirit. He could hear rapid footsteps inside the little house; then the door opened and in the light that streamed from within he was indistinctly visible to Nan as she stood in the doorway. "Jerry!" he heard her call. "Good dog! What's the matter? After him, Jerry. Go get him, Jerry!" She ran to the gate and opened it for the dog, who darted through, but paused again to run his afflicted nose in the dust and roll a couple of times. Apparently he felt that there was no great hurry; his quarry could not escape him. It is probable, also, that he was more or less confused and not quite certain which direction the enemy had taken, for Jerry's sense of smell was temporarily suspended and his eyes blinded by tears; certain his language was not at all what it should have been. The Laird ran blindly, apprehensively, but for a very short distance. Suddenly he bumped into something quite solid, which closed around him viciously. "Halt, damn you," a commanding voice cried. Despite his years, Hector McKaye was no weakling, and in the knowledge that he could not afford to be captured and discovered, seemingly he slipped forty years from his shoulders. Once more he was a lumberjack, the top dog of his district--and he proceeded to fight like one. His old arms rained punches on the midriff of the man who held him and he knew they stung cruelly, for at every punch the man grunted and strove to clinch him tighter and smother the next blow. "Let go me or I'll kill you," The Laird panted. "Man dinna drive me to it." He ceased his rain of blows, grasped his adversary and tried to wrestle him down. He succeeded, but the man would not stay down. He wriggled out with amazing ease and had old Hector with his shoulders touching before The Laird's heaving chest and two terrible thumbs closed down on each of The Laird's eyes, with four powerful fingers clasping his face like talons. "Quit, or I'll squeeze your eyeballs out," a voice warned him. The Laird's hand beat the ground beside him. He had surrendered to a master of his style of fighting. With something of the air of an expert, his conqueror ran a quick hand over him, seeking for weapons, and finding none, he grasped The Laird by the collar and jerked him to his feet. "Now, then, my hearty, I'll have a look at you," he said. "You'll explain why you're skulking around here and abusing that dog!" The Laird quivered as he found himself being dragged toward the stream of light, in the center of which Nan Brent stood silhouetted. He could not afford this and he was not yet defeated. "A thousand dollars if you let me go now," he panted. "I have the money in my pocket. Ask yon lass if I've done aught wrong." His captor paused and seemed to consider this. "Make it ten thousand and I'll consider it," he whispered. "Leave it on the mail box just outside the Tyee Lumber Company's office at midnight to-morrow night." "I'll do it--so help me God," The Laird promised frantically. His son's voice spoke in his ear. "Dad! You low-down, worthless lovable old fraud!" "My son! My son!" Old Hector's glad cry ended in a sob. "Oh, my sonny boy, my bonny lad! I canna stand it. I canna! Forgie me, lad, forgie me--and ask her to forgie me!" His old arms were around his son's neck and he was crying on Donald's shoulder, unashamed. "I was trying for a look at the bairn," he cried brokenly, "and 'twas a privilege God would nae gie me seeing that I came like a sneak and not like an honest man. The damned dog--he knew! Och, Donald, say ye forgie ye're auld faither. Say it, lad. Ma heart's breakin'." "Why, bless your bare-shanked old Scotch soul, of course I forgive you. I never held any grudge, you know. I simply stood pat until you could see things through my eyes." "Is that you, Donald?" Nan called. "Aye, aye, sweetheart. Dad's here. He wants to know if you regard him as a particularly terrible old man. I think he's afraid you will refuse to let him look at Laird Hector, Thirteenth." "Man, man," the old man urged, quite shocked at this casual greeting of a returned hero to his wife, "go to her, lad. She'll not relish favoritism." "Oh, this isn't our first meeting, Dad. I got home yesterday. I have thirty days leave. They sent me home as an instructor in small arms practice and gave me a boost in rank. I was just up town for a beefsteak and I've lost the beefsteak battling with you." The Laird wiped his eyes and got control of himself. Presently he said: "Keep that blessed dog off me," and started resolutely for the front gate. Without a moment's hesitation he folded Nan in his arms and kissed her. "Poor bairn," he whispered. "I've been cruel to you. Forgie me, daughter, if so be you can find it in your heart to be that generous. God knows, lass, I'll try to be worthy of you." "Am I worthy of him?" she whispered, womanlike. "Far more than his father is," he admitted humbly. "Damn the world and damn the people in it. You're a good girl, Nan. You always were a good girl--" "But suppose she wasn't--always?" Donald queried gently. "Is that going to make any difference--to you?" "I don't care what she was before you married her. I haven't thought about that for a long time the way I used to think about it. I built The Dreamerie for you and the girl you'd marry and I--I accept her unconditionally, my son, and thank God she has the charity to accept an old Pharisee like me for a father-in-law." Donald slipped his arm around Nan's waist, and started with her toward the door. "Tag along, father," he suggested, "and Nan will show you a prize grandson." At the door, Nan paused. "Do you think, father McKaye," she queried, "that the remainder of the family will think as you do?" "I fear not," he replied sadly. "But then, you haven't married the family. They'll accept you or keep out of Port Agnew; at any rate they'll never bother you, my dear. I think," he added grimly, "that I may find a way to make them treat you with civility at least." "He's a pretty good old sport after all, isn't he, Nan?" her husband suggested. "I'll tell the world he is," she answered archly, employing the A.E.F. slang she had already learned from Donald. She linked her arm in old Hector's and steered him down the hall to the living-room. "Your grandson is in there," she said, and opening the door she gently propelled him into the room. XLVII Nan was right. His grandson was there, but strange to relate he was seated, as naked as Venus (save for a diaper) on his grandmother's lap. Hector McKaye paused and glared at his wife. "Damn it, Nellie," he roared, "what the devil do you mean by this?" "I'm tired of being an old fool, Hector," she replied meekly, and held the baby up for his inspection. "It's time you were," he growled. "Come here, you young rascal till I heft you. By the gods of war, he's a McKaye!" He hugged the squirming youngster to his heart and continued to glare at his wife as if she were a hardened criminal. "Why didn't you tell me you felt yourself slipping?" he demanded. "Out with it, Nellie." "There will be no post-mortems," Nan interdicted. "Mother McKaye and Elizabeth and Jane and I patched up our difficulties when Donald came home yesterday. How we did it or what transpired before we did it, doesn't matter, you dear old snooper." "What? Elizabeth and Jane? Unconditional surrender?" She nodded smilingly and The Laird admitted his entire willingness to be--jiggered. Finally, having inspected his grandson, he turned for an equally minute inspection of his soldier son under the lamplight. "Three service stripes and one wound stripe," he murmured. "And you're not crippled, boy dear?" "Do I fight like one? Hector, man, those punches of yours would have destroyed a battalion of cripples. Oh, you old false-alarm! Honestly, Dad, you're the most awful dub imaginable. And trying to bribe me into permitting you to escape--what the deuce have you been monkeying with? You reek of ammonia--here, go away from my son. You're poison." The Laird ignored him. "What's that ribbon?" he demanded. "Distinguished Service Cross." "You must have bought it in a pawnshop. And that thing?" "Croix de Guerre." "And that red one?" "Legion d'Honneur." A pause. "What did Dirty Dan get, son?" "The one thing in the world he thought he despised. The Congressional Medal of Honor for valor in saving the life of a British colonel, who, by the way, happens to be an Orangeman. When he discovered it he wanted to bayonet the colonel and I won the Croix de Guerre for stopping him." "Oh, cease your nonsense, Donald," his wife urged, "and tell your father and mother something. I think they are entitled to the news now." "Yes, Nan, I think they are. Listen, folks. Now that you've all been nice enough to be human beings and accept my wife at her face value, I have a surprise for you. On the day when Nan married the father of my adopted son, he waited until the officiating minister had signed the marriage license and attested that he had performed the ceremony; then while the minister's attention was on something else, he took possession of the license and put it in his overcoat pocket. Later he and Nan drove to a restaurant for luncheon and the overcoat with the license in the pocket was stolen, from the automobile. The thief pawned the coat later and the pawnbroker discovered the license in the pocket after the thief had departed. The following day the fellow was arrested in the act of stealing another overcoat; the pawnbroker read of the arrest and remembered he had loaned five dollars on an overcoat to a man who gave the same name this thief gave to the police. So the pawnbroker--" "I am not interested, my son. I require no proofs." "Thank you for that, father. But you're entitled to them and you're going to get them. The pawnbroker found on the inside lining of the inner breast pocket of the overcoat the tag which all tailors sew there when, they make the garment. This tag bore the name of the owner of the overcoat, his address and the date of delivery of the overcoat." "Now, the pawnbroker noticed that the man who owned the overcoat was not the person named in the marriage license. Also he noticed that the marriage license was attested by a minister but that it had not been recorded by the state board of health, as required by law--and the pawnbroker was aware that marriage licenses are not permitted, by law, to come into the possession of the contracting parties until the fact that they have been legally married has been duly recorded on the evidence of the marriage--which is, of course, the marriage license." "Why didn't the idiot send the license back to the minister who had performed the ceremony?" The Laird demanded. "Then this tangle would never have occurred." "He says he thought of that, but he was suspicious. It was barely possible that the officiating clergyman had connived at the theft of the license from his desk, so the pawnbroker, who doubtless possesses the instincts of an amateur detective, resolved to get the license into the hands of Nan Brent direct. Before doing so, however, he wrote to the man named in the license and sent his letter to the address therein given. In the course of time that letter was returned by the post-office department with the notation that the location of the addressee was unknown. The pawnbroker then wrote to the man whose name appeared on the tailor's tag in the overcoat, and promptly received a reply. Yes, an overcoat had been stolen from his automobile on a certain date. He described the overcoat and stated that the marriage license of a friend of his might be found in the breast pocket, provided the thief had not removed it. If the license was there he would thank the pawnbroker to forward it to him. He enclosed a check to redeem the overcoat and pay the cost of forwarding it to him by parcel post, insured. The pawnbroker had that check photographed before cashing it and he forwarded the overcoat but retained the marriage license, for he was more than ever convinced that things were not as they should have been. "His next move was to write Miss Nan Brent, at Port Agnew, Washington, informing her of the circumstances and advising her that he had her marriage certificate. This letter reached Port Agnew at the time Nan was living in San Francisco, and her father received it. He merely scratched out Port Agnew, Washington, and substituted for that address: 'Care of---- using Nan's married name, Altamont Apartments, San Francisco.' "By the time that letter reached San Francisco Nan had left that address, but since she planned a brief absence only, she left no forwarding address for her mail. That was the time she came north to visit her father and in Seattle she discovered that her supposed husband was already married. I have told you, father, and you have doubtless told mother, Nan's reasons for refusing to disclose this man's identity at that time. "Of course Nan did not return to San Francisco, but evidently her husband did and at their apartment he found this letter addressed to Nan. He opened it, and immediately set out for San José to call upon the pawnbroker and gain possession of the marriage license. Unknown to him, however, his lines were all tangled and the pawnbroker told him frankly he was a fraud and declined to give him the license. Finally the pawnbroker tried a bluff and declared that if the man did not get out of his place of business he would have him arrested as a bigamist--and the fellow fled. "A month or two later the pawnbroker was in San Francisco so he called at the Altamont Apartments to deliver the license in person, only to discover that the person he sought had departed and that her address was unknown. So he wrote Nan again, using her married name and addressed her at Port Agnew, Washington. You will remember, of course, that at this time Nan's marriage was not known to Port Agnew, she had kept it secret. Naturally the postmaster here did not know anybody by that name, and in due course, when the letter remained unclaimed he did not bother to advertise it but returned it to the sender." "It doesn't seem possible," Mrs. McKaye declared, quite pop-eyed with excitement. "It was possible enough," her son continued drily. "Well, the bewildered pawnbroker thrust the license away in his desk, and awaited the next move of the man in the case. But he never moved, and after a while the pawnbroker forgot he had the license. And the minister was dead. One day, in cleaning out his desk he came across the accumulated papers in the case and it occurred to him to write the state board of health and explain the situation. Promptly he received a letter from the board informing him that inquiries had been made at the board of health office for a certified copy of the license, by Miss Nan Brent, of Port Agnew, Washington, and that the board had been unable to furnish such a certified copy. Immediately our obliging and intelligent pawnbroker, whose name, by the way, is Abraham Goldman, bundled up the marriage license, together with the carbon copy of the pawn ticket he had given the thief; a press clipping from the San José _Mercury_ recounting the story of the capture of the thief; carbon copies of all his correspondence in the case, the original of all letters received, the photograph of the check--everything, in fact, to prove a most conclusive case through the medium of a well-ordered and amazing chain of optical and circumstantial evidence. This evidence he sent to Miss Brent, Port Agnew, Washington, and she received it about a week before I married her. Consequently, she was in position to prove to the most captious critic that she was a woman of undoubted virtue, the innocent victim of a scoundrel who had inveigled her into a bigamous marriage. Of course, in view of the fact that the man she went through a legal marriage ceremony with already had a wife living, Nan's marriage to him was illegal--how do you express it? Ipso facto or per se? In the eyes of the law she had never been married; the man in the case was legally debarred from contracting another marriage. The worst that could possibly be said of Nan was that she played in mighty hard luck." "In the name of heaven, why did you not tell me this the day you married her?" The Laird demanded wrathfully. "I didn't know it the day I married her. She was curious enough to want to see how game I was. She wanted to be certain I truly loved her, I think--and in view of her former experience I do not blame her for it. It pleased you a whole lot, didn't it, honey?" he added, turning to Nan, "when I married you on faith?" "But why didn't you tell us after you had discovered it, Donald?" Mrs. McKaye interrupted. "That was not kind of you, my son." "Well," he answered soberly, "in the case of you and the girls I didn't think you deserved it. I kept hoping you and the girls would confess to Dad that you telephoned Nan to come back to Port Agnew that time I was sick with typhoid--" "Eh? What's that?" The Laird sat up bristling. Mrs. McKaye flushed scarlet and seemed on the verge of tears. Donald went to her and took her in his arms. "Awfully sorry to have to peach on you, old dear," he continued. "Do not think Nan told on you, Mother. She didn't. I figured it all out by myself. However, as I started to remark, I expected you would confess and that your confession would start a family riot, in the midst of it I knew father would rise up and declare himself. I give you my word, Dad, that for two weeks before I went to work up at Darrow I watched and waited all day long for you to come down here and tell Nan it was a bet and that we'd play it as it lay." Old Hector gritted his teeth and waged his head sorrowfully. "Nellie," he warned his trembling wife, "this is what comes of a lack of confidence between man and wife." She flared up at that. "Hush, you hypocrite. At least I haven't snooped around here trying to poison dogs and kill people when I was discovered playing Peeping Tom. A pretty figure you've cut throughout this entire affair. Didn't I beg you not to be hard on our poor boy?" "Yes, you had better lay low, Father," Donald warned him. "You've been married long enough to know that if you start anything with a woman she'll put it all over you. We will, therefore, forget Mother's error and concentrate on you. Remember the night I dragged you ashore at Darrow's log boom? Well, permit me to tell you that you're a pretty heavy tow and long before my feet struck bottom I figured on two Widows McKaye. If I'd had to swim twenty feet further I would have lost out. Really, I thought you'd come through after that." "I would if you'd waited a bit," old Hector protested miserably. "You ought to know I never do things in a hurry." "Well, I do, Dad, but all the same I grew weary waiting for you. Then I made up my mind I'd never tell you about Nan until you and Mother and the girls had completely reversed yourselves and taken Nan for the woman she is and not the woman you once thought she was." "Well, you've won, haven't you?" The Laird's voice was very husky. "Yes, I have; and it's a sweet victory, I assure you." "Then shut up. Shut up, I tell you." "All right! I'm through--forever." The Laird bent his beetling brows upon Nan. "And you?" he demanded. "Have you finished?" She came to him and laid her soft cheek against his. "You funny old man," she whispered. "Did you ever hear that I had begun?" "Well, nae, I have not--now that you mention it. And, by the way, my dear! Referring to my grandson's half-brother?" "Yes." "I understand he's a McKaye." "Yes, Donald has legally adopted him." "Well, then, I'll accept him as an adopted grandson, my dear. I think there'll be money enough for everybody. But about this scalawag of a man that fathered him. I'll have to know who he is. We have a suit of zebra clothing waiting for him, my dear." "No, you haven't, Father McKaye. My boy's father is never going to be a convict. That man has other children, too." "I'm going to have a glass frame made and in it I'm going to arrange photographic reproductions of all the documents in Nan's case," Donald stated. "The history of the case will all be there, then, with the exception, of course, of the name of the man. In deference to Nan's desires I will omit that. Then I'll have that case screwed into the wall of the post-office lobby where all Port Agnew can see and understand--" "Nellie," The Laird interrupted, "please stop fiddling with that baby and dress him. Daughter, get my other grandson ready, and you, Donald, run over to the mill office. My car is standing there. Bring it here and we'll all go home to The Dreamerie--yes, and tell Daney to come up and help me empty a bottle to--to--to my additional family. He'll bring his wife, of course, but then we must endure the bitter with the sweet. Good old file, Daney. None better." Donald put on his cap and departed. As the front gate closed behind him Hector McKaye sprang up and hurried out of the house after him. "Hey, there, son," he called into the darkness, "What was that you said about a glass case?" Donald returned and repeated the statement of his plan. "And you're going to the trouble of explaining to this sorry world," the old man cried sharply. "Man, the longest day she lives there'll be brutes that will say 'twas old man McKaye's money that framed an alibi for her.' Son, no man or woman was ever so pure that some hypocrite didn't tread 'em under foot like dust and regard them as such. Lad, your wife will always be dust to some folks, but--we're kindred to her--so what do we care? We understand. Do not explain to the damned Pharisees. They wouldn't understand. Hang that thing in the post-office lobby and some superior person will quote Shakespeare, and say: 'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.'" "Then you would advise me to tell the world to go to--" "Exactly, sonny, exactly." 
54880	----	Letters _from a_ Son _to_ His Self-Made Father _By_ CHARLES EUSTACE MERRIMAN BEING _the_ REPLIES _to_ LETTERS _from a_ SELF-MADE MERCHANT _to his_ SON _Illustrations by_ FRED KULZ _London: G. P. Putnam's Sons_ _Boston: Robinson, Luce Company_ _1904_ [Illustration: _The Girl the son Married._] Copyright, 1903 by HENRY G. PAGANI. Entered at STATIONERS HALL. _All Rights Reserved._ _TO_ Mark Twain _A READY-MADE WIT_ _ILLUSTRATIONS._ _"The Son" in College._ _His College Girl._ _"The Son" as a Travelling Salesman._ _His Society Girl._ _"The Son" as Manager of His Father's Pork-packing Establishment._ _The Girl He Marries._ LETTER No. I. _Pierrepont Graham, a newly fledged Freshman at Harvard, writes his father, John, in Chicago, how he and the University are getting along together._ CAMBRIDGE, Oct. 10, 189-- _Dear Father_: I know you will accuse me of lack of the business promptness which is the red label on your brand of success, but I really couldn't answer your letter before. I have been trying to reconcile your maxims of life with the real thing, and I had to get busy and keep so. Reconciliation has not yet come, leastwise not so as you would notice it. I'm glad Ma got back safe to the stock-yards, for when she left Cambridge that morning she didn't quite feel as if she would. I thought she had too large a roll to be travelling around the country with, and convinced her that she ought to leave all but $8 and her return ticket with me. Its a great thing to have a good mother. I have already taken quite a course in art, fitting up my new flat; the fellows go in quite strong for art here, and it really is one of the most expensive courses in the curriculum, for although the photographers make special rates to the students, models come high. You will be glad to hear that I shook the room in College Hall that Ma picked out for me, and by extraordinary luck secured a small apartment of five rooms and bath in one of the big dormitories. The dingy hole in "College" was so horribly noisy that I found it impossible to do my best work. The building was fairly infested with "pluggers," whose grinding made day and night hideous. Here I can work in peace and get a raft of culture from my art studies and other beautiful surroundings. I have had the bill for fitting up forwarded to you. Please settle within thirty days, or I shall be terribly disturbed in my course. Tell Ma not to worry about my over-studying. I have too much inherited common sense for that. It's a wise pig that knows when he is being crammed for John Graham's lightning sausage developer; I've heard the squeal. As for under-study--well, as Kip says, that's another floor to the building. I fail to find education as "good and plenty" at Harvard as you seem to think it. Some of it may be good, but it certainly isn't plenty, and it isn't passed around with the term bills. There's a fellow in our dormitory--one of the "pluggers" who escaped from College Hall--who is hot after education, and they say he has to dig for it. I haven't dug yet, although I had a spade given me last night. Unfortunately, what I needed just then was a club. You will be pleased to hear that I have already added several extra elective courses to my studies. I am especially interested in the topography course, in which we are making a careful study of Boston streets. I am glad to say that I am making rapid strides in the same. For this no text-books are required, but the experimental apparatus is quite expensive. On our last tour of inspection we all required lanterns. I paid $10 and costs for mine, and it stood me $5 more to square things with the driver of the herdic for a window broken while making a particularly interesting experiment. I feel that I am learning rapidly. I know the value of money as never before. Money talks here quite as much as in Chicago; not so loudly, perhaps, but faster. As you have always advised me to be sociable, I find it pretty lively work keeping up my share in the pecuniary conversation, especially as in all our little gatherings there are always several fellows whose money doesn't talk even in signs. Taking it by and large, as you say so often, Harvard seems all right, although the fellows say the term hasn't really opened, as there's nothing doing yet in the legitimate drama in the Boston theatres. They have a queer custom of colloquial abbreviation here--they call it "leg. drama," or "leg. show." Curious, isn't it? If you value my peace of mind, dear father, don't write any more educated pig stories to me. Such anecdotes strike me as verging close on personalities. In fact, the whole pig question just now hits me in a tender spot. Even the pen I am using makes me shudder. I hate to look a gift hog in the mouth, but I wish you had made your money in coal or patent medicine, or anything that wasn't porcine. Fact is, I've got a nickname out of your business, and it'll stick so that even your boss hogman, Milligan, couldn't scald it off. You see, I board at Memorial Hall with about 1199 other hungry wretches, and let me tell you that your yarns about old Lem Hostitter and his skin-bruised hams wouldn't go for a cent here. Memorial is the limit for bad grub, and thereby hangs a curly tail. The other day at dinner, things were so rotten that an indignation meeting was held on the spot, and a committee of investigation was appointed to go to the kitchen and see what kind of vile stuff was being shovelled at us. There must have been a rough-house in the culinary cellar, for we heard a tremendous racket in which the crash of crockery and the banging of tin predominated. Pretty soon the committee came back bringing a dozen or so of cans, waving them about and yelling like Indians. When they got near enough for me to see, I shuddered, for on every blessed can of them was your label, father--that old red steer pawing the ground as if he smelt something bad. Just one table away from me the gang stopped, and a fat senior they call "Hippo" Smith rapped for order. Even the girls in the gallery quit gabbling. "Gentlemen," yelled the senior, "your committee begs leave to report that it has discovered the abominable truck that has been ruining our palates and torturing our vitals. It's these cans of trichinated pork, unclassable sausages and mildewed beef that have made life a saturnalia of dyspepsia for us, and every one of 'em bears the label 'Graham & Company, Chicago.'" Then you ought to have heard the roaring. "Down with Graham & Co.!" "Let's go to Chicago and lynch Graham." "Confounded old skinflint!" the fellows shouted. I turned pale and thought what a narrow escape I was having. Just then up got little "Bud" Hoover, old Doc's grandson, whom you have always held up to me as a model of truth-telling you know. Bud's a sophomore, and thinks he's a bigger man than old Eliot. "Here's Graham's son," he piped in his rat-tail-file voice that you could hear over all the rumpus, and pointing right at me, "Ask him about it." There was nothing for it for me but to get up and defend the family honor. As I was about to speak I saw another fellow running in from the kitchen with a big ham, yellow covered and bearing a big red label,--your label. I had a great inspiration. I felt that ham would prove our salvation. "Gentlemen, I _am_ the son of John Graham," I said haughtily, "and glad of it, for he has got more dough than this whole blamed college is worth; and, to show that you're all wrong, I'm going to quote something that he wrote me last week. Just you listen: "'If you'll probe into a thing which looks sweet and sound on the skin to see if you can't fetch up a sour smell from around the bone, you'll be all right.'" That hit 'em in great shape, and "Hippo" Smith took a big carver and slashed the ham into shoe-strings in about thirty seconds. Then he lifted the bone to his nose and let out a yell that sent all the girls upstairs flying. The other fellows sniffed and bellowed with him. The next thing I knew the bone landed violently on my neck and the air was full of tin cans, four of which met splendid interference from my head. When I came to I could hear four hundred voices shouting "Piggy, piggy, oowee, oowee oowee," at me, and I knew I had passed through a baptism of rapid fire. They were the "roast beef and blood-gravy boys" you mentioned in your letter, for sure. The surgeon's bill is $75, which I know you will pay cheerfully for my gallant defense of the house. But I wish you'd put up better stuff. Your label is a dandy, but couldn't you economize in lithographs and buy better pigs? By the way, the fellows have nicknamed you the "Ham-fat Philosopher." The letter did it. But don't feel hurt; I've already almost got used to being called "Piggy" myself. I am appreciating more and more the golden truths of your cold storage precepts. As you say "Right and wrong don't need to be labelled for a boy with a good conscience." Good consciences must be scarce around here, for on the other side of Harvard Bridge they label wrong with red lights, and I've failed to find a fellow yet who is color blind. In my pursuit of knowledge I have made the acquaintance of quite a number of the police force. They seem to me to be an undiscerning lot. For instance, I heard one of them say the other day that Harvard turned out fools. This isn't true, for, to my certain knowledge, there are quite a number of fools who have been in the University several years. I am unable to write at any further length this evening, as I must attend a lecture in Course XIII. on Banks and Banking, by Professor Pharo. Your affectionate son, PIERREPONT GRAHAM. P.S. I am trying hard to be a good scholar, and am really learning a thing or two. But I respect your anxiety that I should also be "a good, clean man," and almost every Sunday morning I wake up in a Turkish bath. LETTER No. II. _Pierrepont's University progress along rather unique lines is duly chronicled for the paternal information, and some rather thrilling experiences are noted._ CAMBRIDGE, May 7, 189-- _Dear Dad_: I am sincerely sorry my last expense account has made you round-shouldered. I should think you pay your cashier well enough to let him take the burden of this sort of thing. Better try it when next month's bills come in, for I should hate to have a hump-backed father. You haven't the worst end of this expense account business, by any means. If it makes you round-shouldered to look it over, as you say, you can just gamble a future in the short ribs of your dutiful son that it made me cross-eyed to put it together. You see there are so many items that a Philistine--that's what Professor Wendell calls men who haven't been to Harvard--couldn't be expected to understand. I was afraid that $150 for incidental expenses in the Ethnological course wouldn't be quite clear to you. It may be necessary to tell you that Ethnology is the study of races, and the text-books are very costly and hard to procure. But the fellows are very fond of the course; it is so full of human interest that it is a real pastime for them. In fact, they sportively call it "playing the races," to the great delight of dear old Professor Bookmaker, our instructor. Your suggestion that I appear to be trying to buy Cambridge proves you are not posted on conditions here. I am, and I may say _en passant_, the conditions are also posted on me--the Dean sees to that. I wouldn't buy Cambridge if it were for sale. I never had any taste for antiques. There are purchasable things in Boston far more attractive; if you will come on I'll be glad to let you look 'em over. I like Cambridge well enough daytimes, but the most interesting thing in it is the electric car that runs to Boston. I realize that my expenses grow heavier each month, but money not only has wings, but swims like a duck, and the fashionable fluid to float it is costly. I'm really beginning to believe that a man who can read, write and speak seven or eight languages may be an utter failure unless he's able to say "No" in at least one of them. The problem of how to get rich has not yet been reached in the Higher Mathematics course and so it's not worrying me, as you seem to think. But of course I don't want to cast reflections on the solvency of the house of Graham & Co., so I try to keep my end up. It's expensive, for there are fellows here who've got bigger fools than I have for--but this wasn't what I started to say. All men may be born equal, but they get over it a good sight easier than they do the measles; and while some of the fellows have to study in cold rooms, others have money to burn. Poverty may not be a crime, but it's a grave misdemeanor in Cambridge. I am grieved, my dear father, to have you say that you haven't noticed any signs of my taking honors here at Cambridge. You cannot have read the society columns of the Boston papers, or you would have seen that I have already a degree from the Cotillion Society, as being a proficient student of the German; am entitled to the letters B.A.A. after my name--a privilege granted by a learned Boston organization after very severe tests, and have been extended the freedom of Boston Common by the aldermen of the city. If these things don't justify the inking up of a few pink slips, you can souse my knuckles. It grieves me to have you fail to appreciate what I've accomplished. I am trying to do your credit,--what a foolish little slip; rub the "r" from "your" and you'll see my meaning. Another thing that proves my high standing in college is the fact that I've been admitted to the D.K.E., playfully known here as the "Dicky," a very exclusive and high-toned literary and debating society, specially patronized by the Faculty. The initiation ceremonies are very curious, and I really believe you would laugh to see some of the innocent little pranks the new men cut up. They are sent around town and over into Boston dressed in quaint garb and instructed to ask roguish questions of any they meet. This is to give them self-possession in debate and calmness in facing the battles of life. It would meet with your hearty approval, I am sure. For my little trial I was compelled to wear a yellow Mother Hubbard, with a belt of empty Graham & Co. tin cans fastened around my waist and a double rope of your sausages hanging from my neck. A silk hat completed the rig. Thus accoutred I was told to promenade up and down Tremont street over in Boston, a swell walk opposite the Common, and bark like a dog. Every five minutes I had to buttonhole some one and shout "Buy Graham & Co.'s pork products and you'll never use any others." Well, the long and short of it is that I became a marked man on the gay boulevard. Small boys tendered me a free escort and made insulting remarks, which I endured cheerfully for the cause. It vexed me a bit, though, to find that one of the persons I advised as to our meats was Miss Vane of Chicago. She looked unutterable things and murmured something to her escort at which he smiled pityingly. If you hear that I drink, you will know exactly how the rumor started, and discredit it accordingly. Finally the crowd around me became so dense that street traffic was blocked, and I was taken in charge by a policeman for disorderly conduct. In another minute I was arrested by a meat inspector for exposing adulterated foods for sale. Between the two of them it was a simple little cot that night and a frugal breakfast next morning for Pierrepont. I was discharged on the disorderly conduct count, but fined $100 and costs on the bad meat item. The judge ordered all the windows opened when it came into court. Father, it's up to Graham & Co. to make good the deficit in my month's allowance. As a philosopher, you will see the point, I am sure. Perhaps a little bonus for mental suffering will suggest itself to you. I simply mention this in a general way to let you know how your pork products are regarded in the east, where the health laws are stricter than in Chicago. I would advise you to play harder for the Klondike trade and cut Boston off your drummers' maps. This is a bit of "thinking for the house" that I'm not charging anything for. It's sense, though, and you can coin it into dollars if you see fit. Dear old father, always planning for my comfort and pecuniary welfare! You wrote that when I have had my last handshake with John the Orangeman, I am to enter the Graham packing plant to lick postage stamps as a mailing clerk at $8 a week. Honestly, dad, I don't feel worthy of so much. Make me an office boy at three per and let me grow up with the business. And I can't lick a postage stamp--really, I can't. Professor Plexus, our instructor in calisthenics, told me so the other day. He is a coarse and brutal man and I think I shall cut his elective out next semester. But of course I shall accept your offer, although I should prefer a partnership, no matter how silent; for I shall be glad to be on hand in case anything should happen to you. Despite the law of averages you never can tell, you know. As you say, there's plenty of room at the top. But that's where I'd like to start. I'd take all the chances of falling down the elevator well. Even if one starts at the bottom, he's not safe. The elevator may fall on him. You say that Adam invented all the different ways in which a young man can make a fool of himself. If he did--which, with all due respect to you, pater, I doubt--it's a wonder to me that Beelzebub didn't quit his job in Adam's favor. I have no doubt it pays to be good, but you know better than I do that it often takes a long time to get a business well established. Misdeeds may be sure to find you out, but if they do they'll call again. I've devoted a good deal of thought to your maxims, which I realize to be sensible if homely, but, after all, if people practiced what other people preached, the preachers would have to take on a new line of goods. At all events I won't allow myself to worry. The man who's long on pessimism is usually short on liver pills. Misanthropy is only an aristocratic trade-mark for biliousness. I don't do things just because the other fellows do, as you suggest, but for the sake of the family name I must observe the proprieties. Even in this I do not go to such extremes as the Afro-American gentleman who sells hot corn and "hot dogs" in Harvard Square in their respective seasons. His wife died a few weeks ago and he found it pretty hard to get a living and crap stakes without a laundress in the family. So he married a stout wench about ten days ago. Last Sunday, says our janitor, who tells the story, his new wife asked him to go to church with her. "Go to church wid you, chile," he cried; "Bress de Lord, be'ent you got no moh sense ob de propri'ties dan to think dat I'd go to church wid annuder woman so soon after de death ob my wife?" It is nearly midnight and I must close, for at twelve the art class meets at Soldiers Field to go and paint the John Harvard statue. Your affectionate son, PIERREPONT GRAHAM. P.S. I wired you to-day for $50. I couldn't explain by telegraph, but the fact is it cost me that sum to keep your name out of the police court records. LETTER No. III. _Pierrepont, about to forsake Harvard, supplies his father with some reasons for agreeing with him that a post-graduate course is not advisable._ CAMBRIDGE, June 4, 189-- _My Dear Father_: No, you certainly need not get out a meat ax to elaborate your arguments against my taking a post-graduate course. What you have already said makes me feel as if a ham had fallen on me from the top of Pillsbury's grain elevator. There I go again with my similes derived from trade! It's exasperating how home associations will cling to a fellow even after four years of college life! But it's worse when these stock-yard phrases bulge out in polite conversation. It's a case of head-on collision with your pride, when you are doing your very neatest to impress some sugar-cured beauty that you are the flower of the flock, to make a break like a Texas steer. The social circle was pretending to tell ages the other night. When it came my next, a pert little run-about, in a cherry waist and a pair of French shoes that must have come down to her from the original Cinderella, spoke up. "And you, Mr. Graham, how old are you?" "I was established in 187--" I said, with one of my fervid I'll-meet-you-in-the-conservatory-after-the-next-dance glances. But I never added the odd figure. Everybody laughed. Fortunately they thought I intended a joke. I'll bet you a new hat--if you are still sporting your old friend you need one--that you couldn't say "born." I caught the "established" from you. I trust my education will do all that you hope for my advancement in business. I've read somewhere--perhaps in one of your meaty letters--that "good schooling is good capital." It may be, but the chances for investment are pretty poor hereabouts. Money is certainly more generally current. It may be the root of all evil, but I've noticed that it is a root that some very good people plant in the sunniest corner of their intellectual garden and keep well watered. While it may not be true that every man has his price, I note that many of those who do are ready to cut rates and give long time with discounts. With your customary capacity for banging the spike on its topknot, you diagnose my future correctly. I admit that I'm "not going to be a poet or a professor." Even the Lampoon rejects my verses--though I am bound to say that if I wrote such hogwash as your street-car ad-smith grinds out, I would never dare criticise Alfred Austin again--while as for the professorial calling, there is nothing I could possibly teach except anatomy. We have had a splendid course in that at the various Boston amphitheatres, and the fellows say I'm way up on the subject. But I hardly think it serious enough for a life calling, so, as you so pleasantly intimate, I believe I will accept your offer to join fortunes with the packing-house. I think I know enough of Latin to decline pig--and I always do when it's our label--but circumstances of a strictly pecuniary nature make it advisable for me to close with you at once. Better an eight-dollar job and six o'clock dinner than a post-graduate course and free lunch. While I'm not prepared to admit that my soul soars to the azure at the thought of being a pork packer, perhaps it is just as well. When I was a boy my ambition oscillated between keeping a candy store and being a hero. Now candy makes my teeth ache and I've seen two or three heroes. I spent some time thinking what I had better do about meeting your desire that I desert literature for liver, but your last letter soldered my aspirations into a pretty small can. My chum doesn't like pork or relish my imminent intimate connection with it. Every day for a month he's asked me whether I had decided. To-day I answered him with a story that Deacon Skinner used to tell about a young minister he once knew. He was parson of a small country church that paid a pretty skimpy salary, mostly in vegetables his flock could not eat themselves. There was precious little marrying and everybody that died seemed to be on the funeral free list. Altogether it was a case of labouring in a vineyard that had gone to seed, and the young preacher was more often full of inspiration than of roast turkey and fixin's. But an empty stomach made a clear head and the eloquence of his sermons would have given Demosthenes a hard run for first money. You can't always hide away talent so that it can't be dug up, and one Sunday the outlook committee from a fashionable church came down to D-- and listened to the minister. His text that day happened to be one of those which permit of much oratory without enough orthodoxy to set the soul into convulsions. The sermon made a hit with a regular Harvard "H" and in a day or two the pastorate of the Wabash avenue church, whose steeple is nearer heaven than the majority of the congregation are likely to get, was offered to the young man, who told the committee that he must weigh the matter carefully. The news spread through the village instantly, as it always does--for any country town has Marconi beat to a custard on wireless telegraphy--and on the afternoon of the day on which the call to the new field of labor came, the young minister's parishioners inaugurated a special pilgrimage to find out the prospects. The first arrival was a woman. (Strange, isn't it, that for all a woman takes so long to dress, she can always give a man a killing handicap and beat him from scratch to the scene of a scandal or a bargain sale?) She was ushered into the parlor by the clergyman's little girl. No one else seemed to be visible. The Mother Eve in her wouldn't let the visitor wait long, so she put the little girl in the quiz box. "I've heerd tell, Cicely, that your pa's been asked to go to a big church up to the city." "Yes'm," answered Cicely, discreetly. "Well, child, tell me, hev you heerd him say if he's a-goin'?" "No, mam, I haven't." "Nor your mother neither?" "No, mam." "Waal, my dear, you must know somethin' abaout it. Dew you think he's a-goin' to leave us?" The child squirmed about uneasily and twisted her fingers. "Speak right out naow, that's a good girl. Be he a-goin' to go or stay?" urged the inquisitor. "I don't know, mam, really. Papa's in his study praying for Divine guidance." "Where's your mother?" "Upstairs packing the trunks." I simply mention this in a general way, father, and would note in addition that in the absence of mother the janitor has helped me do my packing. I decided it was best to agree with you, for I realize that it never pays a man to act like a fool; there are too many doing it as a regular business. While I should have liked a post-graduate course, with an elective or two from Radcliffe, I realize that the difference between firmness and obstinacy is that the first is the exercise of will power and the second of won't power. Give me a little vacation in Europe and I'll come home and let you can me as devilled ham if you want to. I don't want to brag about myself, but I'll bet you'll be surprised in me. We've all been cured of bragging by a New Yorker in my class who spends all his spare time proving why Gotham should be the only real splash on the map. To hear him, you'd think the good Lord moved the sun up and down simply to accommodate New York's business hours. A fellow from Dublin who's here studying home rule took him down the other day. Gotham was boasting of New York's high buildings when Dublin spoke up. "Hoigh buildings, is it? Begorra, we've buildings in Dublin so tall that we have to put hinges on the four upper stories." "What in the world is that for?" asked Gotham. "To let the sun by so it can reach New York, av coorse." By the way, you say that some men learn all they know from Life. If you refer to the New York publication, you must have met some very gloomy and dyspeptic individuals of late. I'm not of that sort, nor, on the other hand, am I bound up in books, although, if I do say it, I have the finest set of the Decameron in college, and am considered quite an authority on the poetry of Rabelais. While on the subject of literature, I ought to state that the extra $100 in this month's expense account is for initiation fee and dues in the new Reading Club that a lot of us seniors have organized. We have for our motto Lord Bacon's great phrase "Reading maketh a full man," and it is wonderful to see how accurately the old philosopher hits our case. Owing to lack of accommodations here, we usually meet in some Boston hotel where we are safe from interruption. You would laugh to see how hot some of the fellows get arguing fine points. The other night I become so exercised myself discussing Schenck's "Theory of Straights" that I walked plumb into a pier glass, thinking I was up against another chap. I think the hotel man stuck us on the damages, but the Club chipped in and paid like little men. Despite such occasional drawbacks, the club meetings are very popular. In fact, we have full houses every time we get together. [Illustration: _The Son in College._] Yes, that being elected president of my class was a good thing, for at last I can get my name on programmes and things without any reference to pigs tacked to it. But I don't know as it proves any overwhelming popularity on my part, for it was a dull season and I just slid in. Of course I would have liked to be marshal, but as I hadn't made any home runs and you wouldn't let me kick goals through your check-book, I was put on the mourners' bench so far as that ambition went. I am glad to be able to write you the cheerful news that I shall graduate; up to last week there seemed to be considerable doubt about it in certain high quarters not far removed from Prexy's mansion. But I went over to see one of the influential overseers, a Boston Brahmin with moss on his front steps, and plead with him. I was finally obliged to promise him that you would leave Harvard $100,000 by your will if he would see that I graduated. Of course it's a pretty stiff price, but as you won't have to pay it you ought not to mind. Besides, dad, think of the pleasure to Ma and the girls to have one real Commencement in their lives. It's cheap all round. Your affectionate son, PIERREPONT. P.S. If my dream comes out and I get a diploma, I'll bring it home. It may be useful to you as a by-product. It's sheepskin, you know. LETTER No. IV. _From the Waldorf-Astoria, Pierrepont gives his father some inside information as to life and manners in New York and cites some experiences._ WALDORF-ASTORIA, June 30, 189-- _My Dear Father_: I used to think you had a strong sense of fun, but I am beginning to fear that long connection with such essentially un-humorous animals as hogs condemned to the guillotine, has dulled it. I say this because it is evident that you didn't take my little joke about wanting to go to Europe in the spirit I intended. The idea of suggesting to you, dear old practical pig-sticker that you are, that Europe was in it for a minute with a pork-packing house as a means of culture seemed so irresistibly comic to me that I thought you would roar with laughter also, and perhaps put another dollar on that eight per I am going to receive so soon. I can catch echoes of your roar even here, but I get no suggestion of cachinnation. Really, the laugh is on me for attempting such a feeble joke. When I get fairly into the pork emporium, I shall confine my witty sallies to Milligan. On the whole, and seriously, I'm glad you drew a red line through my scheme of letting the Old World see what a pork-packer's only looks like after his bristles have been scraped through college. Since I've been at the Waldorf-Astoria I've seen so many misguided results of a few days in London that I never want to cross the duck pond. Montie Searles, who graduated when I was a soph, was a tip-topper at Cambridge, but he unfortunately got the ocean fever. I met him in the palm room last night and the way he "deah boy"-ed me and worked his monocle overtime was pitiful. He's just got back and took the fastest steamer, for fear his British dialect would wear off before he got a chance to air it on Broadway. If I should borrow his clothes and come home in 'em you'd swap 'em for a straight-jacket. They are so English that boys play tag with him in the streets waiting to see the H's drop, and so loud that every time he goes out of the hotel an auto gets frightened and runs away. After I left him last night I had to sing myself to sleep with "Hail Columbia." Familiarity breeds contempt; no man is a hero to his own valet, and I'm afraid no son is taken seriously by his own father. For instance, you draw a pretty strong inference that I've never earned a dollar which is hardly fair. I have earned considerable at times as a dealer in illustrated cards, and have picked up a tenner here and there by successfully predicting the results of various official speed tests. These things require hard labor and mental application. But the pay is sometimes uncertain, and on the whole I think your plan for me is better. I told Searles about the packing-house job, and he pooh-poohed the idea. "Ma deah boy," he cried, "why don't you be independent? Try writing for money, old chap. That's what you were always doing in college." I'll bet he read that joke in Punch. This is the greatest hotel in the world for one thing--in it you can meet a more varied assortment of people than under any one roof on earth. Billionaires jog elbows with impecunious upstarts who saunter about the hotel corridors in evening clothes, and live on some cross street in hall-rooms way up under the eaves. There is one young fellow who haunts the hotel and looks like a swell, who is said to be only a few dress shirts shy of being a pauper. But he actually believes he's the real thing, and the story goes that to keep up his self-deception he goes home every afternoon, sits on his trunk and toots a horn, after cleaning his trousers with gasoline, and thinks he's been automobiling. It's a long shot that you can't tell anything about a man in New York until you find out his business. He may look like a tramp and have curvature of the spine from carrying around certified checks, or he may seem the real thing in lords and only have a third interest in an ash collecting industry. I had an illustration last Sunday of how impossible it is to judge a man's motives until you know his business. I went to church--fact, I assure you. I saw a new style hat and followed its wearer into the sacred edifice, as I wanted to fix its details in my mind to tell mother. She--I mean it--was very pretty. On second thought I guess you'd better not mention this to mother. In the course of his sermon the minister--one of those preachers who seem to think it necessary to shout out an occasional sentence to keep his congregation awake--declared in stentorian tones, "Wonders will never cease." A fat, bald-headed man in front of me nodded and murmured audibly, "Thank Heaven!" I wondered and asked the sexton who he was. It appears that he runs a dime museum on Sixth avenue. Here's a straight tip for Sis. If she must marry a title let it be an American one, a Coal or Ice Baron. Counts and earls are thicker than sand fleas here and about as useless and annoying. Speaking of straight tips, I've got a sure one on the horses sewed into the lining of my vest: If you want to go to the races without losing money don't take any money with you. The subject of money reminds me that your old Kansas friend, "Uncle" Seth Slocum was in town a day or two ago. With all due respect to him and his, you must admit that with his particularly flourishing facial lawn he looks more like a hayseed than a wheat king. At all events the head clerk tipped off a house detective to keep an eye on him. They don't want any one robbed in the hotel--by outsiders. Seth hadn't been in town an hour, most of which he spent in telling me how he once got you into a corner on July wheat, when he remembered that he had an appointment down town and started out for the L. I went with him as far as the door, and as I stood there waiting for a cab, I saw a burly, flashily dressed man step up and grab Seth by the hand. "How do you do, my dear Mr. Haymaker. How are all the folks at the Corners?" he cried. Uncle Seth looked at him a moment and said, "Haven't you made a mistake?" "In the name, perhaps, in the face, no," said the big chap, suavely. "Can it be possible that you are--" Seth took hold of the fellow's lapel and drew him closer to him. "No, my name's not Haymaker nor am I from the Corners. Come closer. I've heerd tell a lot about those bunker men and I don't want any one to know my name, except you; you're such a likely chap." The burly man laughed and inclined his head. Then, in a stage whisper that could be heard a block, Uncle Seth said, solemnly, "Sh, don't breathe it. I'm Sherlock Holmes, disguised as the real thing in gold-brick targets, but don't give me away." Uncle Seth nearly started a riot one day at luncheon. It had been very hot in the morning, but the wind changed and the temperature went down rapidly. Seth saw me at a table in the palm room and came over. "Well, Ponty," he shouted, in that grain-elevator voice of his, "quite a tumble, wasn't it? Dropped 15 points in half an hour." You ought to have seen 'em. It seemed as if every one in the room jumped to his feet in wild excitement. You see they thought he was talking stocks instead of thermometer. By the way, Uncle Seth is infringing on your territory. He's going in for philosophy and gave me a little advice. "If you ever want to build up a big trade, Ponty," he said, "mix up a little soft soap with your business life. Flattery counts. There's a man here in New York who's made his pile as a barber because it is his invariable rule to ask every bald-headed man that he shaves if he'll have a shampoo." I gather from your statement that my allowance dies a violent death on July 15, that you are very anxious to see me on or about that date. You will. I have no desire to walk to Chicago, and my general mode of life trends toward Pullmans rather than freight cars. _Ad interim_, as we used to say in our debating societies, I think I shall run down to one of those jaw-twisting lakes in Maine to get some of New York soaked out of my system before dropping in on you. Billy Poindexter, a classmate of mine, has a camp there, and he writes me that hornpouts are biting like sixty, and mosquitoes like seventy. But I don't mind that, for I believe a little blood-letting will do me good after my stay here. I like New York, even if it is a bit commonplace and straight-laced compared with Chicago. They are great on Sunday observance in this town, and I find I am gathering a little of the same spirit myself. For instance, at an auditorium called the Haymarket, there is always a devotional service very early on Sunday mornings. I attended yesterday, and was much attracted by the ceremonies and the music. You would be surprised to see the number of ladies who are willing to be absent from their comfortable homes at such an inconvenient hour. Say what you will, father, New York is a hospitable place. Although an utter stranger, I was invited the other night to the house of Mr. Canfield, a very wealthy gentleman who lives in great style. Mr. Canfield is well known as a philosopher who devotes a great deal of his time to the working out of the laws of chance and sequence. Beautiful experiments are made at his home every evening before a number of invited guests, among whom are some of the most prominent men in the city. It seems that it is the custom to have the youngest and least known guest contribute largely for the evening's entertainment, so naturally I went pretty deep into my available funds. I think I have just about enough to settle my hotel bill and buy my transportation to Lake Moose-something-or-other. It will be quite necessary that I hear from you at that point, and to the point, if you don't want me to become a lumberman or a Maine guide. By the way, I've been observant and I've discovered something, though you'll doubtless not credit it. I see at last how so many dunderheads marry pretty girls. Two of them--pretty girls, not dunderheads--were talking at the next table to me the other day. "So she's going to marry Dick Rogers, is she?" said one. "Poor thing! He's awfully flat." "Well," replied her companion, "he's got a steam yacht, an auto, a string of saddle horses and his own golf links." "Ah, I see," murmured her companion, "a flat with all the modern improvements." Not bad for a New York girl, is it? Your affectionate son, P. P.S. I met Colonel Blough the other evening and he invited me to sit in at a poker game. Of course I refused. He was surprised, said he supposed it ran in the family, and related the details of a little business transaction he and some other gentlemen had with you when you were last in New York. I hope mother is well. I am very anxious to see her. I think you'd be in line for repute as a philanthropist if you would send me a check for a hundred. LETTER No. V. _Pierrepont goes fishing and writes his father some of his experiences, not all of which, however, seem directly identified with the piscatorial art._ LAKE MOOSE, ETC., ME., July 11, 189-- _Dear Dad_: Here I am in a little hut by the water, writing on the bottom of a canned meat box--not our label, for I gave Billy a bit of wholesome advice as to packing foods, which he accepted on the ground that mine was expert testimony--a tallow candle flickering at my side, and the hoarse booming of bullfrogs outside furnishing an obligato to my thoughts. One particular bullfrog who resides here can make more noise than any Texas steer that ever struck Chicago. It isn't always the biggest animal that can make the loudest rumpus, as I sometimes fear you think. I simply mention this in passing that you may see that all the Graham philosophy isn't on one side of the house. As a spot for rest this place has even Harvard skinned to death. It is so quiet here--when the frogs are out of action--that you can hear the march of time. Besides Billy Poindexter and our guide, Pete Sanderson, I don't believe there's another human being within a hundred miles. It's a great change from the Waldorf-Astoria, where you couldn't walk into the bar without getting another man's breath. The commissary department is different, too. The canned goods Billy bought are as bad as yours, dad, upon my soul, while as for fish, there's nothing come to the surface yet but hornpouts, and they'll do for just about once. We have fried salt pork for a change and Pete makes biscuits that would make excellent adjuncts to deep sea fishing tackle. Altogether, this is great preparation for the packing-house, for I shall be so hungry by July 15 that I'll do anything to get a square meal. By the way, you haven't said anything on the subject of board--whether I could live at home on a complimentary meal ticket or be landed in a boarding-house and made to pay. I am going to write to Ma on this subject, for I think she is a good deal stronger on the fatted calf business than you. I think you would like to meet Pete Sanderson, for he's a veteran of the Civil War with a pension for complete disability, which he was awarded a little while ago. There isn't anything the matter with Pete except a few little scars, which he came by in a curious manner. It seems that he was examined by the pension board down at Bangor a few weeks back for complete paralysis. His home doctor swore that Pete couldn't move nor feel, and two strapping sons brought him to the office in their arms. The other doctors punched and pounded him nearly to a jelly, but Pete never yipped. As a last resort they jabbed him with pins in a dozen different places, yet he didn't budge. Complete paralysis, they declared, but they didn't know that Pete had been stuffed so full of opium that he couldn't see nor feel, either. But he says he helped just as hard to save the nation as any one else, and ought to be recognized. At any rate his case is quite as worthy as that of the man who visited a Washington pension agency and sought government aid on the ground that he had contracted gout from high living, due to his profits on army contracts. Pete is a great hand to spring stories of the war on us, and some of them are pretty good. One he tells about the chaplain of the ---- Mass., when that regiment was lying on the Rappahannock or Chickahominy, or some other river during the summer of '62. It seems that the chaplain was acting as postmaster for the men, and had been much bothered by requests for the mail, which had got tangled up with the Rebs somewhere. One hot afternoon he allowed to himself that he'd like a good snooze free from interruption, so he affixed to the front of his tent a placard that read thus: CHAPLAIN DOESN'T KNOW WHEN THE MAIL WILL ARRIVE. This worked like a charm, and the reverend soldier had a fine sleep and came out several hours later, greatly refreshed in body and mind. He was just a bit surprised to find a row of grinning privates sitting outside his canvas residence, their eyes fixed on his warning in so noticeable a fashion that he himself turned to look at it. There, to his horror, mixed with amusement--for he was a very human sort of chaplain--he found that some wag had got at his card so that it now read: CHAPLAIN DOESN'T KNOW WHEN THE MAIL WILL ARRIVE, AND DOESN'T GIVE A DAMN. I merely mention this anecdote as evidence that a man cannot always be judged by what appear to be his deeds, as you seem to think, and that the devil often gives him a side wallop when he's engaged in perfectly innocent recreation. Thanks to your kind little remembrance I shall be able to be officially introduced to Milligan on the 15th. I note that, through your customary forethought, the check is just sufficient to land me in Chicago with eleven cents in my pocket, provided I practice strict economy _en route_. Permit me to compliment you on being the most skillful promoter of labor any son ever had. I have racked my brain in vain to think what I could have said in the letter of the Fourth of July to arouse your encomiums. Your assertion that it "said more to the number of words" than any letter you ever received from me suggests that it was brief. As it was written on the Fourth, a day that, as a good American, I always celebrate, its brevity may be accounted for. The same explanation, however, will scarcely answer for the condensed power of expression you note. By the way, Poindexter isn't going to marry old Conway's widow, spite her millions. I quizzed him about it and he finally put me wise. "Yes, I could have married her," he said. "In fact, we agreed, but I squirmed out of it. The truth is I proposed by mail--I didn't have the nerve to do it face to face--and she accepted me on a postal card. Her evident economy was a bit too much for me." I've done a lot of thinking (this word is not written very plainly, but it _is thinking_ and nothing else) since I have been in the woods. Billy says I only think I'm thinking, but he's a cynic. There's been little to do but think. The hunting is worse than the fishing and the only thing I've bagged is my trousers. The sum total of my thoughts seems to be a few resolutions. Although I know resolutions are not ripe till Jan. 1, I've had time to make them here and I'll have plenty of chance to get accustomed to them before I write them down in the Russia leather diary that I know you will be glad to include among my Christmas gifts. My resolutions may not be original, they may not even be good ones, but such as they are I am going to write them out for you, for you have often told me that it was every man's duty to himself to set himself a goal and mark out the course by which to reach it. For this and a perfect wealth of other advice I can never thank you enough. Perhaps, however, the knowledge that I am really taking life seriously, as shown by my resolutions, will be some recompense to you for the midnight oil you have burned in the coinage of succinct sayings and meaty metaphors. (I flatter myself that is pretty well expressed, although my English professor would object, as he often did, to my employment of trade terms as illustrations and similes.) The stain on this sheet of paper is due to Poindexter, who shied a slice of fat pork at my head while I was writing. That was yesterday and he absolutely refused to let me finish my letter. He said a man who couldn't find anything better to do in the woods than write was several unpleasant sounding things. As he emphasized his remarks by war-whoops, Comanche dances and the beating together of tin plates, I was forced to forsake my literary pursuits till this morning. Billy is asleep. He absolutely refused to rise without a pick-me-up and, as our canoe was upset last night, we lost all our camp utensils, including that indispensable adjunct to camp life, the pick-me-up. Billy is up and insists that we must go to the nearest settlement for a new camp kit. He misses the splendid assortment of pick-me-ups with which we started out and swears he won't know north from south till he gets one. The resolutions will have to wait till we return. July 13. We did not get back till to-day. We found a fine collection of camp necessities at the settlement and what we selected proved such a heavy burden that we were unable to start on the return trip till this morning. Billy is asleep again. I never knew he was such a heavy sleeper. It must be the bracing air of the woods. In Cambridge he had the reputation of never sleeping. I have re-read the resolutions and I think it best not to send them to you until I am out of the woods. Surveyed in the light of this particular morning they seem to need as many amendments as the Constitution of the United States. Just a word of warning not to be surprised when I show up for work in hunting costume. I was compelled to leave all my other clothes in New York for safe keeping. Storage rates are very high there; the tickets call for a payment of $150. I shall call at the Waldorf on my way through the city and shall get any letters--with enclosures--that may be there. Your hopeful son, P. P.S. Do you think that when a man finds he is catching two fish on one hook every time he hauls in his line it is time for him to stop using bait? Billy assures me that it is. LETTER No. VI. _The seat at his father's mailing desk does not appear especially comfortable to the Junior Graham, if we may judge by the tone of his correspondence._ CHICAGO, Aug. 30, 189-- _My Dear Father_: Permit me to say, most respectfully of course, that you are overdoing the emotional business as to my mistake in mailing a note of invitation to the theatre to Jim Donnelly in place of a letter denying his claim of shortage on hams, and denouncing him as a double-distilled prevaricator for venturing the same. As a matter of fact, it was a great stroke, and I've ordered the cashier in your name to put a two-dollar ell on my financial structure. Donnelly came in to-day and gave us a thousand-dollar order for short ribs; said he was devilish glad to find a bit of humanity and sentiment in the house of Graham, and that if you had more blood and less lard in your veins, Chicago would be a better place to live in. He's fond of the old burgh, at that, for he licked a Boston drummer last week for claiming that the Boston Symphony Orchestra was better than Theodore Thomas'. You see Jim has just become engaged and my little break struck him in a tender spot. I note with pain, dear dad, that you make a great hullabaloo over my robbing you of your time by writing that note. Theoretically you may be right, but practically your kick is so small that a respectable jack-rabbit would be ashamed of it. Let's see; I work--theoretically--from 8 to 6, one hour out for lunch. Under your munificent system of payment I get about 15 cents an hour, or a quarter of a cent a minute. It took me two minutes to write the note. Ergo, I owe you half a cent, whereas you owe me the profit on the thousand-dollar order of short ribs, which Donnelly says must be something immense. Let's square up on that basis. But even had results been worse, absent-mindedness is a fault, not a crime. Literature is full of well-authenticated instances of that perversity of wit which makes one do the wrong thing instead of the much easier right one. The poet Cowper's feat of boiling his watch while he timed it by an egg is really a very commonplace illustration of the vagaries of the human mind. It was surpassed by Dean Stanley and Dr. Jowett, who were both extremely absent-minded and very fond of tea. One morning they breakfasted together and in their chat each of them drank seven or eight cups of tea. As the session broke up, Dr. Jowett happened to glance at the table. "Good gracious!" he exclaimed, "I forgot to put in the tea." Neither had noticed it. Even this, I think, is excelled by the case of a remarkably absent-minded man in the western part of Massachusetts, whose freaks of memory made him the sport of the country for miles around. He once went for days without sleeping because he was very busy in his library and didn't leave it, so did not see his bed as a reminder. He capped the climax, however, when he came home one night and hanged himself to the bed-post by his suspenders. As he was wealthy and cheerful, with much to live for, it is generally believed that he mistook himself for his own pants. At all events absent-mindedness, like bad penmanship, is a sign of genius, and, as a loving father, you should be glad that I have one of the symptoms. I must frankly admit that the addressing of envelopes is not the most fascinating of pursuits. If I must write in order to earn my salary from the house, I should much prefer to do it across the bottom of checks. I would then feel that the business was more dependent upon me and also that it might mean more to me. It has got so that the sight of a U. S. stamp after business hours gives me a bilious attack. Let me at least fill out the checks if I don't sign 'em. Then I'll be better able to imagine that I'm the real thing around here, even if my salary's attenuation continues to eat a big hole in my sainted mother's pin money. The next best thing to owning an auto, you know, is to wear an auto coat. Of course Milligan made a noisy, braying, Hibernian ass of himself when he came around to take your cussing of him out on me. He swore and danced and waved his arms, and got still madder when I asked him what he was Donnybrooking around in Chicago for. He didn't seem to like it a bit when I told him that one little finger of the girl I wrote to, was worth a thousand times as much as himself and the hogs he associated with, put together. He allowed that I was an impudent young jackass and the dead copy of my father; went on to say that if he hadn't started the firm and kept his weather-eye on it ever since, you would have been in the bankruptcy court or jail years ago. When I got mad and told him that I'd have him bounced, he said you didn't dare to fire him because he knew the secret of--but really I don't think it safe to entrust it to paper. Milligan is a dirty beast who belongs to the Shy-of-Water tribe and smokes a horror of a clay pipe. To think that I, who have mingled with gentlemen for the past four years, should be compelled to breathe his air is too much. I won't work under a man who habitually insults my honored father. If you haven't pride enough to rebel, I have. He is vulgar enough to call you the "ould man," and I am morally certain he is a pretty liberal toucher of that private stock you keep in your inner office. For heaven's sake, throw him out and purify the place. Jim Donnelly seems to have taken quite a shine to me, and last night he invited me to his club for dinner. This was a great relief for yours truly, for between you and me, Ma has got pretty stingy with the table since you left, and is trying to use up a box of our products she found down cellar. (By the way, I notice from a slip Milligan gave me to file to-day, that you crossed off all the Graham foods the steward of your private car had picked out for your trip--wise old dad!) So Jim's invite was like an early cocktail to Col. R. E. Morse. After dinner we hied ourselves to a vaudeville show, which I simply mention in a business way. I see you've an "ad" on the drop curtain at the Hyperion, and if you won't kill the poet who wrote those verses, I must. Such awful rot as: "We corrall the choicest hogs, Stab 'em, scald 'em, flay 'em; Then you get the superfine Sausage made by Graham," may appeal to you as A1 inspiration, but trust an humble member of your family when he says that you simply nauseate the public by such tomfool stuff. You're rich enough to hire Howells if you like, so there's no excuse for this. Wish I was with you on the car instead of being compelled to hear Milligan blart about "our house" like an Irish Silas Wegg. They say around the office that the car is bully well stocked with things and things, and they even hint that you have been taking to it pretty regular of late to change climates with Ma. I don't encourage such idle talk. I've worried a lot since you went away. The business seems to have got on my nerves. Of course I realize that all I have to do is to lick stamps and try to look as if I enjoyed it, but as the family heir I can't help worrying about the firm. Several matters have come to my attention, in the way of business, that make me fearful that perhaps you made a mistake in going away without leaving one of the family at the helm here. The Celtic gentleman who signs himself "Supt." and whom the boys call "Soup," does not take kindly to my advice. When I told him yesterday that I feared that a carload of lard that was shipped to Indiana was not first chop and would be returned, he looked me over curiously for a minute and said: "Don't let that worry ye, me bye; the toime to fret is when they sind it back." And then, in a very loud voice, so that everybody in the office could hear, he told me a story. "Your anticipation av trouble reminds me," he said, "av an ould maid up in York state twinty years ago. She was so plaguey homely that if she'd been the lasht woman on earth the lasht man wud a jumped off it whin he met her. Arethusa Prudence Smylie--I've niver forgot the name, how cud I?--was as full av imagination as a Welsh rarebit is av nightmare, and ye niver cud tell phwat her nixt break wud be. She was sittin' in the kitchen one winter's day, radin' po'try and toastin' her fate in the open oven door, while her good ould slob av a mother was rollin' out pie crust, whin all av a suddint she burst out cryin'. This startled her mother so that she dropped her rollin' pin and rushed to her daughter's side. She thought she'd had a warnin' or cramps or somethin'. It was a long toime before she cud squeeze a worrd out edgewise bechune the wapes. "'Phwat is the matter?' she cried, agin and agin. Finally, wid the tears a streamin' down her chakes an' the sobs wrestlin wid her breath, Arethusa tuk her mother into her confidence. 'I was sittin' here, radin',' she said, 'whin the po'try suggisted somethin' to me an' thin I got to thinkin',' and here her gab trolley was trun off by sobs. "'Thinkin' of phwat, darlint?' cried her mother. "'Oh, mother, I was thinkin', as I sot here wid my feet in the open oven door, that if I should get married and a little baby should come and--and--' Agin she stopped to put on brakes wid her handkerchief, and thin wint on rapidly, 'I was thinkin' how terrible it would be if I should git married and should leave the baby here in the kitchin' and go out and--and it should crawl into the oven an' you should shut it up wid the pies and--and--boo-hoo, hoo!'" The point of this yarn appeared clear enough to the boys in the office, for they laughed like hyenas and looked at me as if I were the latest thing in tailor-mades. Strange how everybody knows when to laugh when the boss makes a joke! This morning one of the boys had the nerve to call me Arethusa. When I got through with him, in the vacant lot back of the hog pens, he couldn't have said "Arethusa" to save his life. You will commend this, I know, for the dignity of the family name must be upheld. I found long ago that in order to maintain the respect of the world it is sometimes necessary to give it a few drop kicks. I am disappointed in Milligan. Until recently I thought he really felt an interest in me. For instance, a day or two ago he expressed surprise that you had not established me in the real estate business, and said that it struck him that I was better suited for it than for the coarse details of pork-packing. After that I went round like a pouter pigeon. But I have since learned that he followed his remark about the real estate business with a side speech to one of the clerks: "He certainly knows more about the real estate business than he is likely to ever learn of this. He _can_ tell the difference between a house and lot." Milligan is so full of jokes that it's safe betting that if he had the shaking up I'd like to give him he'd shed comic operas, end-men's gags and "side-walk conversation" enough to keep the show business running for years to come. Do you wonder that I have written you several letters demanding his resignation or acceptance of my own? You will not receive any of those letters, however, for home, although humble, is a place of shelter. I must say, though, that Milligan's _penchant_ for presenting the naked truth without even the traditional fig leaf is annoying. Your chafing son, PIERREPONT. P.S. I have just learned that Milligan is at home, sick. I wish him well, of course, but if he should find a change of climate necessary I will gladly hunt up the timetables for him. LETTER No. VII. _Pierrepont writes of "independent work for the house" and its results; of the methods of "guide-books-to-success" philosophers, and of divers other topics._ CHICAGO, Sept. 10, 189-- _Dear Father_: What a clever, indulgent, far-seeing old boy you are, to be sure. Your ultimatum that I must continue to be subject to Milligan sounds harsh at first reading, but I see your motive. You think by keeping me under him for a while I shall work like a fiend to get promotion, and thus escape his Celtic cussedness. I shall. No greater incentive to rise was ever offered a poor young man. In fact, you couldn't keep me down with Mike if you gave me ten thousand a year. My lacerated feelings are worth much more than that. Ma is a pretty good Samaritan these days. I told her that Milligan was my _bête noir_, and she said it was a mean shame for a grandson of her father to have to affiliate with such an animal. Her sympathy cost her ten, but I feel that it was worth that to have her wellsprings of emotion tapped once more. I see the logic of what you said in your last. True it is that if it isn't a Milligan over us, it's some one else--I won't say worse, for that would be lying. I have Mike, Mike has you, you have Ma, and Ma has Mrs. Grundy. We are all travelling over the ocean of life in the same boat, but I'm hanged if I wouldn't prefer to be in the first cabin drinking champagne, than down in the stoke-hole sweating like a galley slave. I am sincerely glad you are coming home. The old adage about the mice playing when the cat's away is away off. Since you've been gone, except for the half day that your Brian Boru-descended super was sick, I've not even had time enough in office hours to devote an occasional few moments' thought to how I will improve methods here when you elect to add "retired" to your recital of personal facts for the city directory. The way Milligan keeps me jumping would have pinned all the Mott Haven medals on me, had his system of training been adopted in Harvard athletics. I've lost seven pounds in three weeks, and if this thing keeps on I'll be so far under weight that I'll be sent out to pasture or to the boneyard. I used to think Milligan a well-balanced man, but I was wrong,--no man whose lungs are so out of proportion to his brains can be. I'm getting used to being bossed, but I shall never be broke to being roared at in the fashion of the Bull of Bashan. I don't object to being told that it is necessary to have a state as a component part of the superscription on a letter,--but is it essential to the business code that the people in East Saginaw should have full particulars of my dereliction shouted at them? Milligan takes especial delight in introducing me to all the visitors who inspect the works, but never by any chance does he tell who I am. Not a bit of it. "This is our new mailing clerk: he is just from Harvard," is the neat way he puts it. And then they look me over and say, "Harvard? Oh, indeed!" and the look passed out with it--you'd think I was a new line of prize pig. I've come to believe that I'm under suspicion here in Chicago; and I've locked up all my college pins and insignia in a closet down cellar, and couldn't be roped into confession of my _alma mater_ with a lariat. Education is evidently not a thing to brag of in Chicago. I can't quite get on to what it is, but Milligan is up to some game. He's very chummy with the visitors and insists upon showing them about himself. An English lord who was here the other day, chatted with him for fully half an hour in your private office. Think of it--in your private office. I shall have it deodorized before you return. As usual, Milligan boasted and, as the door was open, we all heard. Something was said of the Irish land bill, and this opened the throttle of the super's conversation. "It's no more than roight to do somethin' for Ireland. Who won the Boer War for ye? Kitchener, Lord Roberts,--both Irish." "Really, you don't tell me?" drawled his lordship. "And were all our great fighters Irishmen? Was--was Wellington?" "Certainly," said Milligan. "And Nelson?" "Shure. All great fightin' min were Irish." "How about Alexander?" asked the Englishman. "Celtic, for shure." "So? And say now, how about--well, Balaam?" lisped the peer. "Irish," cried Milligan, "Irish to the backbone. But--an' I asks ye to note this, your lordship--but the ass was English." I hate Milligan, but I love a joke, and I joined in the laugh that went up. Then I heard his lordship pipe up, "How delightful, don't yer know, that your clarks are so merry. I do wonder what they are laughing at." Just then he toddled out and surveyed us through his monocle. As Milligan joined him he turned to him and said: "So Balaam was Irish, too, Mr. Milligan? But I really didn't know the ass was a native animal in my country." Milligan certainly possesses self-control. He was as grave as a government inspector opening a Graham tin can as he replied, "Those laugh best who laugh last, your lordship." By the way, there was a little excitement in the packing house yesterday which you may hear of in some other way. I'll tell you the straight facts. I happened to be over in the refining house during the noon hour, to get some butterine for a sandwich, when a fellow with some sort of monkey togs blew in and acted in a very suspicious manner. He nosed around into the vats, poked a queer glass machine plumb through a keg of butterine, broke open some tins and raised particular Ned in the olive oil department When he started to put some stuff in his pockets, I remembered your oft-repeated injunctions to occasionally do some independent work for the house--to get out of the ruts, as it were--and I came an old-time Soldier's Field tackle on his jiglets which resulted in his complete disappearance from the interior of the plant, and a compound fracture of the left shoulder-blade where he landed on the cobblestones of the yard. He cursed me as he was being carried away on a stretcher, and said the concern would hear from him to its sorrow. I understand he's a government inspector, but I rely on your little way of settling such things. However, I think it would be just as well that you cut your expedition in two and get around here by the time the plot thickens. If you don't care to go home so much sooner than you intended, you can live in the private car right here in the railroad yard, and I won't let Ma know. You would enjoy the surroundings immensely. Think of being lulled to sleep by the squealing of your own hogs and awakened in the morning by the music of Texas steers that are going into Graham cans. Billy Poindexter is here for a day or two on a little trip from New York. He cut up horribly when I told him I couldn't get out to air myself all day long. But I pointed out to him that I was in training to carry Graham & Co. around on my shoulders one of these days, and he admitted that it looked like a good game to follow. I showed him one or two of your letters, and he said they were too clever for a pork-packer and too greasy for a philosopher. Asked if you weren't over-doing the "Beyond-the-Alps-lies-Italy" business a trifle, and allowed that too much watering has killed many a promising plant. However, I don't believe water will be the death of me. Billy says my occupation would drive him to drink, but I guess he isn't on to my salary or else doesn't know the price of cabs out here. Besides, he doesn't need driving. Billy has developed quite a philosophical streak lately. I guess the girl he really wanted for better or worse decided it a long shot for worse and scratched Billy in the running. I taxed him with it. "Young man," said he--he's only fourteen months older than I, but how he does swell up over it--"Young man, the pursuit of a girl is like running after a street car and missing it. You're never quite sure that it was the right car, after all." That's all I could coax out of him, but I guess he got the stuffed glove all right. The other night, after we had spent several hours in the Palmer House examining some very curiously shaped glasses and some quaintly embossed steins, Billy became pathetically confidential and imparted a secret to me. "Piggy, my boy," he said, "I once cherished rainbow visions of being a great man some day, but I've given it up. After all, the only sure guarantee that you _are_ a great man is to have a five-cent cigar named after you and see them sold at the drug stores at seven for a quarter." The thought affected him so that he tried to conceal his emotion by hiding his face behind one of a couple of glasses that were just then submitted to our inspection. If Billy only could set his mind on any thing he'd be sure to make a success at it; but the only thing he has ever tried to do is to help spend his governor's money, and he is certainly the entire ping-pong at that. He is of a companionable nature, however, and is not averse to assistance in his pecuniary labors. I help him all I can, and, to square things up a bit, I invited him to be my guest at the house during his stay here. He doesn't eat much, so the family exchequer will not be lowered materially. He never has any appetite for breakfast. Mother has cottoned to him as if he were an orphan. She likes me to be with him for his good example, for she knows that he doesn't drink, he's always so thirsty in the morning. The other night at dinner Billy was very loquacious. He had been playing billiards all the afternoon, and there is something connected with the game that always loosens his tongue. Somebody mentioned success, and that started William, for he always spells it with a big "S." "Success is much easier to talk about than to discover," he said. "The man of affairs who undertakes to point out the path to it to a young man anxious to tread it, is like the average man of whom you ask directions in a large city, and who says, 'Well, but it's hard to tell a stranger. You'd better go up this street till you come to the City Hall, then take the first street to the right and the second to the left and--and then ask some one else.'" "I've noticed," said Billy, without a pause in his eloquence, "that the prominent men who write magazine and newspaper articles on 'How to Succeed,' always tell their yearning readers to save part of each dollar they receive, but never tell them how to get the dollar. Fact is, if they knew where the dollar was they'd go get it themselves. And they never tell how they themselves succeeded. That would be betraying a business secret. 'Work, work hard,' they say, 'do more than you're paid for doing, and you will soon be appreciated by your employer. Do two dollars' worth of work for one dollar and you'll soon be getting three dollars.'" Here Billy leaned over the table and spoke more impressively than I thought he was able to. "Search the career of one of these self-advisory boards for the community," he said, "and you'll find that these men succeeded by hiring men to do two dollars' worth of work for one dollar and then getting themselves incorporated and selling the work for $5." When Billy got through, Ma smiled across to me and said, "How much Mr. Poindexter talks like your father!" Your hopeful son, P. P.S.--We are going to a masquerade ball to-night at the De Porques. Old De P. offers a prize of $100 for the most hideous make-up. I'm going as Milligan. LETTER No. VIII. _His governor's visit to Hot Springs, a contretemps with a British Lord, together with experiences with a few physicians, inspire Pierrepont's pen._ CHICAGO, JAN. 23, 189-- _Dear Pa_: There's no doubt that the Hot Springs are great for a good many ailments, and I'm glad you are improving. Professor Plexus, our old instructor in calisthenics at Harvard, used to take the trip to Arkansas with John L. Sullivan, twice a year, and they both said the treatment was fine. I don't think Sullivan had rheumatism, but your case may not be the same as his, and the scalding process will probably do you more good than it does a regular Graham hog. The boys around the office laugh considerably when they mention you and the Hot Springs, which makes me rather warm under the collar, for I can't stand having a father of mine misapprehended. I know you for what you are, but they know you for what they think you are, and provisional knowledge, you know, goes a long ways in the provision business. Speaking of the Hot Springs reminds me of a story Professor Plexus used to tell about the Arkansas boiling vats. According to him, there used to be a morgue connected with the establishment, for the use of those who were unlucky enough to succumb to the treatment. An old Irishman was the general factotum of the place, and it happened that he was afflicted with a bronchial disturbance that was the envy of every cougher who visited the spot. Meeting him one day in the abode of the departed, one of the doctors remarked to him, on hearing a particularly sepulchral wheeze: "Pat, I wouldn't have your cough for five hundred dollars." "Is thot so, sorr?" retorted the son of Erin. "Well," pointing with his thumb to the inner room where the departed patients lay on slabs covered with sheets, "they's a felly in there who wud give five t'ousand uf _he_ cud hav ut." I simply mention this little incident in passing to show that all of us prefer the ills we have to those we know not of. I would rather be a mailing clerk at eight per than a free man working freight trains for transportation and relying on hand-outs for sustenance in place of Ma's frugal, but certain _table d'hôte_. I sincerely trust, sir, that your trip to the Springs will do you the anticipated good. Billy Poindexter says--(by the way, I guess you didn't know he was back from the Klondike. Not exactly that, either, for he didn't reach the Klondike. The nearest he got to it was on the map he bought while he was here. He went no farther than San Francisco. His only object in starting for the Yukon, he says, was to see if he couldn't pick up a good thing or two, and as he found them in 'Frisco he stayed there.) He was much concerned about you when I told him you had gone to the Springs. "Too bad for your governor," he said. "He must suffer terribly with them." "With them?" I asked. "With what?" "Why, boils, of course. What would he go to the Hot Springs for, if not for boils?" It cost me five minutes' time in a very busy evening to find out that he had made a very bad joke, a paranomasia as we called it in college; in other words, a pun or play upon words. I've advised Billy to publish a chart of this joke. If he does I'll send you one. He says I'm as dense as that English lord who visited the works while you were away last fall. Apropos, we met him--the lord--the other night. We were having a bite to eat at a rathskeller after the theatre when "his ludship" wandered in. He was built up regardless, with an Inverness coat with grey plaids, that looked like a country-bred rag carpet. It was the real thing, of course, and I made up my mind to save the four dollars that have been added to my stipend until I could get one like it. I decided, however, that I shall not make my possession of it public until he has left the country. I should really hate to be mistaken for him. I even prefer to be known as connected with your business. Strange to say, when "his ludship" reached our table, he halted uncertainly as he saw me, and then stepped forward. "You'll--aw--pawdon me, doncherknow, but--aw--is not this--aw--young Mr.--aw--Graham?" I pleaded guilty, with a mental plea for mercy, and the next thing I knew his dukelets had made his monocle a part of the set-up of our table. I was very much embarrassed, for I didn't know how to introduce him to Billy. But his earlship quickly backed me out of that corner by calling Billy by name. "Yaas, old chap," he was saying, "I met you--aw--at the Ring Club, doncherknow." Billy didn't know, because his sight is often very bad, especially at the Ring Club. So the Marquis gave his memory a push. "I'm Fitz-Herbert," he said. This gave us the route, for his picture has several times filled up space between breakfast food ads. in the newspapers. Not that he ever seems to do anything; he's always being done for, as the guest of this, that and the other. He was desperately civil, wouldn't have us "Lord Percying" him, he said. So it was plain Percy after that and "plain Percy" he surely is. A homelier man I've never seen outside the comic weeklies. It would be great if you could hire him, dad, to scare the steers into the killing pens. He likes American ways, he told us, between orders to the waiter. The way he did keep Garcon bringing things was a caution, and he ate and drank them, too. But he is bright and sees a point oftener than most Britishers. Some things he said made it seem almost impossible that he could be other than a Yankee. Billy was very hard to keep in order. About midnight he usually feels patriotic and he said some things that would have riled his lordship if I hadn't tipped him the wink not to mind. Billy waved the "Star Spangled Banner" at every opportunity and if the British Isles could have heard and believed him they'd have sunk in sheer chagrin. He bragged so loudly of Uncle Sam and "the greatest nation on earth," that the night clerk woke up and came down to see how many police reserves were needed to quell the riot. Lord Percy stood it like a weathered sport, but finally, when Billy was too busy for a minute to talk, he smiled over to me and said, "America's a great country, Mr. Poindexter, but--aw--you must admit, doncherknow, that London is ahead of New York--aw--in one thing." Billy was right on his feet to deny everything. "Ahead of New York!" he cried, with a scornful laugh, "In what, pray?" "Why, my deah boy, you must know that it's nine o'clock in London when it's only four in New York." This seemed to daze Billy, and while he was recovering Lord Percy excused himself to speak to some friends at the other end of the café. He hadn't come back when the place closed and his pile of checks was credited to Poindexter's account by the obsequious head waiter. I've since seen by the newspapers that Lord Percy's engagement to Millicent Wheatleigh is announced. As she's got more money than any girl should be allowed to spend all alone, I presume Lord Percy will be less thoughtless about café checks after the wedding march. As you already know, I'm no longer a stamp-licker at the old figure, but a billing clerk at twelve per. I take it that they wanted to get rid of me in my earlier situation, and passed me along toward the ownership of the house with a right good will. Whatever the motive, I appreciate the fact, for the extra four bones will enable me to get my boots blacked occasionally, and justify my acquiring better cigars than the kind that used to drive my friends away. As you say, if I am good enough to warrant my boss pushing me upward I ought to satisfy you that I am a rising young man in the splendid enterprise of murdering hogs. I am really learning a good deal of the business, for I can now tell a ham-fat from a legitimate actor, and heaven knows we have few enough of the latter in Chicago. Billy Poindexter says that in the east they speak of "trying it on the hog," when they produce a new play in this town, and that if the animal squeals and shows signs of displeasure, they know the thing will be a great success in New York. But to return to business. I am glad you are so worked up about my rapid rise in Graham & Co. To be sure, an ordinary bill poster around town can earn more than twelve dollars a week, but his future is generally limited to three-sheet bills and a pail of slush, while I am ticketed to a considerable share in the assets of Graham & Co. Of course, we all know that this starting away down and rising by merit is considerable of a bluff, for I am your heir-at-law, and could very likely break your will if you should become cantankerous in your final testament. Of course you understand that I am not threatening you at all, but there are certain physiological facts in my position which cannot very well be overlooked. You didn't consult me when I became Pierrepont Graham, nor did I ask you to go into the pork-packing business. Since each enterprise was a success in a way, we ought to make mutual concessions. [Illustration: _The Son's College Girl._] I think I ought to tell you that Ma is getting uneasy about you. She even goes so far as to say that she takes no stock in the Hot Springs business, but thinks you are in St. Louis, having a deuce of a time. I can't see why she should be so suspicious. When I showed her the postmark on your letter, she sniffed and said it was easy enough to get some one to mail it from the Arkansas boiling-out place. She threatens to start for St. Louis in a day or two if you don't show up, which might be a pretty good thing, for I could telegraph you as soon as she left, and you could be at home when she returned, and give her the grand laugh. It's a wise wife who doesn't know her own husband, after all. I am getting into the social swim with both hands and feet, spite of our business. Made a great hit at the De Porque's the other night. The girls are getting up a new dancing association and wanted me to name it--because I was a Harvard man. I told them to call it the St. Vitus Club, and you ought to have seen their faces. I regret to learn that you are in the hands of a specialist. I had one of that brand of doctors when I had the grippe at Cambridge. I grew worse suddenly one night, and as my chum couldn't reach the regular physician by 'phone he called in another. He had not been in the room three minutes when doctor No. 1 drew alongside. They were painfully cordial and had what they called a consultation. My chum said it was a fight. At all events they decided that a specialist be called. I was feeling better by that time and began to take notice. From what I saw then and have since learned from others similarly afflicted I gather that a specialist always wears gloves and a beard and speaks with great deliberation and gravity. After feeling my pulse with excessive care, he turned to each of the medical men in turn and inquired what they had done and recommended. To each statement he muttered, "Very good," or "That is well," although the two regulars had failed to agree on any point. The other two doctors went away, with lingering glances, as if they hated to give me up. Then the specialist came out strong. "This young man," he said slowly and impressively, "has the grippe. You will continue his medicines regularly to-night--mark me, regularly. I will prescribe for him in the morning--in the morning." Then he walked out. When he called in the morning I had done the same thing--walked out. I felt a moral certainty that if he got after me I should eventually have to be carried out. The bunco business is not confined to gentlemen with beetle brows, big moustaches and checked trousers. But doctors have their troubles--the conscientious ones. Doc Mildmay--my chum Frank's brother, you know--once had an experience with a chronic invalid--one of the kind that change their doctor and their disease every two weeks--that was an eye-opener. A nervous, choleric old man sent for him. He was chock full of symptoms and his conversation sounded like a patent medicine folder. He wound up thusly: "When I go upstairs or up a hill I find difficulty in breathing and often get a stitch in the side. These conditions, doctor, denote a threatening affection of the heart." Mildmay, finding the old fellow fat and thick-necked, decided he was a too liberal feeder, so, with a desire to set his fears at rest, he said: "I trust not. These are by no means necessary symptoms of heart trouble." Here the old man switched in, glaring at Mildmay. "I am sorry, sir," he said fiercely, "to note such lack of discretion. How can you presume to differ with me as to the significance of my symptoms? You, a young physician, and I an old and--well, I may say, a seasoned, experienced invalid." Doc needed a fee badly enough, but just then needed the air more and got out. Ma might send her love if I asked her, but I guess you'd better trim ship for the home anchorage. Dutifully, PIERREPONT. P.S. I've just learned that Lord Percy Fitz-Herbert's engagement to Millicent Wheatleigh has been broken off. It seems she refused to marry him because of his family. It was a wife and three children in Maine, which is the nearest he's known to have ever been to London. LETTER No. IX. _Pierrepont gives his Pa a line on the up-to-date methods of courtship, relates an episode of calf-love and has a fling at matrimonial adages._ CHICAGO, Feb. 10, 189-- _Dear Father_: I realize that you mean well by me and I accept your advice on courtship, love and marriage, and all that rot, in the spirit in which it is given. But really, my dear pater, you are hopelessly in arrears in your information on those subjects. Of course you know a lot about marriage. I cannot dispute that; it is too obvious; but in matters of courtship detail you are back in the stagecoach age, hopelessly old style. Nowadays, if a fellow is "spoons" on a girl he makes it public in quite different fashion than when you "sparked Ma"--as you rather vulgarly, as it seems to me, express it. Methods have changed since your salad days, when courtship consisted of escorting the same girl home from singing school three weeks running and then going in the cherished "best suit" to "keep company" with her one or two evenings a week. The modern swain has an entirely different system, although I grant you that he makes an ass of himself quite as much as his predecessors. There is no more sitting in the back parlor with the gas low. All reputable back parlors are electrically illuminated and the situation is therefore changed. I do not say, however, that lamps are not sometimes provided by thoughtful parents of large families of daughters of marriageable age. The average young man, however, would regard the presence of a lamp in such circumstances as a danger signal, and run on to the first siding. No eligible young man likes to feel that he is walking into a specially set matrimonial trap. As you may judge from the florist's bill brought to your attention, Cupid, nowadays, is very partial to flowers. In your day a straw ride once or twice a winter, a few glasses of lemonade or plates of ice-cream, and church sociables and picnics were about the only obligations attendant upon making a girl think herself your particular one. To-day hot-house roses and violets, boxes of chocolate, appreciated only when expensively trade-marked, matinee tickets, auto rides, dainty luncheons with chaperons on the side--but I could fill two pages in enumeration of the little, but expensive attentions which the up-to-date city girl demands. And all these things may mean much or little. Because a fellow runs up a florist's bill is no sign that his next purchase will be an engagement ring. Lots of fellows with lots of money buy lots of things for lots of nice girls and no questions asked. You certainly don't want your only son and heir to be a rank outsider. As a matter of fact, the joke is on you in regard to that bill of $52 for roses sent to Mabel Dashkam and charged up to me. To be sure, I don't quite see how the thing reached you at the Springs. Pollen & Stalk ought to be called down good and plenty for chasing you around the country with a thing they should have known you took no interest in. It reflects on me, and I'll see that such a gross insult isn't repeated. But about the joke. I didn't send the roses to Mabel Dashkam at all. Since dallying with hogs I seem to have acquired an improved taste in girls, and her face doesn't warm me in the least. The fact is that little Bud Hoover, who is just at present in town, living a life of mysterious ease, has conceived the idea that he could stand being Job Dashkam's son-in-law. He thinks there is a gold mine in the old man's backyard, evidently; he isn't at all afraid that Job will ever borrow money of him--and he's right there. Well, it came around to Mabel's birthday, and Bud, who'd been doing the grand social at the house for some time, saw that it was up to him to celebrate the occasion with a "trifling nosegay," as he put it. He nailed me for the wherewithal, urging that I was in duty bound to help a struggling young man to a position. When I couldn't quite focus my approval on that proposition, he declared that I owed the service to him because his grandfather had saved my father's soul. That was a clincher, and I let him get the roses and charge 'em to me. As you say, most young fellows who explode fifty-two for flowers at one blast will wish they had the money for provisions some time or other. Not so with Bud, however; he never can be poorer than he is now, and he calculates to eat on Job for the rest of his natural life. There's a good deal of his grandfather in Bud. You needn't worry about my acquaintance with Mabel. She's bully good sort and always ready for a good time in good company. But just because a fellow is civil to her doesn't jump her to the conclusion that he sits up nights trying to fit her name into metre. That's what I like about her. A fellow can invite her to go golfing without any danger of her knocking the ball into the first grove she sights that looks suitable for a proposal. The girls are not as dead crazy to marry as they were when you were young; I have proof positive of this. Even mother admits that it is true. Your matrimonial adages and observations please me quite considerably, dear father. It's a long time since you had your little fling with Cupid, and the world has moved a bit since then, but at the same time you strike twelve pretty often. You warn me against marrying a poor girl who's been raised like a rich one; I can think of but one thing worse, and that's marrying a rich girl who's been raised like a poor one. And what you say about picking out a good-looking wife is eminently sane, if not always practicable. I'm bound to observe, however, that if you'd put your theory into practice when you married, I'd probably be a good bit handsomer than I am. As for Mabel, she wouldn't marry me if I could move the whole Graham plant into her father's backyard on the wedding morning. Her father's curbstone brokerage in wheat may not be as high-class or as remunerative as trying out hog fat, but it's certainly less malodorous. Besides, Mabel has aspirations. Although I am not in her confidence, she is known as committed to the theory that love in a cottage--or its municipal equivalent, a flat--is an obsolete form of existence. The legitimate inference is that the eligible men who are several times millionaires in their own right had better wear smoked glasses when they get up against Mabel. Marriage, to date, does not appeal to me strongly. I hope to trot quite a number of speedy miles alone before I have to slow down under a double hitch. Naturally, considering the fact that I am your son and in view of your business, I have not escaped a few attacks of "calf love." I suppose it is as inevitable as the measles. The worse case I ever had was when, in my first year at Cambridge, I made desperate love to the accompanist who banged the piano for the Glee Club rehearsals. She was a widow with a small child who always accompanied her, and her desolateness appeared to touch a hidden, sympathetic chord in my nature. Whatever the cause, I was dippy for fair. I fairly bombarded her with music, and the kid must have thought me an edition _de luxe_ of Santa Claus. It's only fair to say that she seemed to try to avoid me, but I was not to be turned aside. I insisted on seeing her to her door after rehearsals, and then stood under her window for hours, like a cross between a hitching post and a jackass. She was courteous, almost maternal, in her attitude towards me. The boys said she was thirty-five, but I scorned them. What was age to love, which is eternity. Sometimes she smiled at me and I bounded up into the seventh heaven, although I often wondered if she was only too well-bred not to laugh outright. (Her father and husband had both been connected with Harvard.) She was pretty; I have no doubt of that, even now; but her hair was flaming red. I called it Titian then, but love is color-blind with all the rest. The "fatal day" came in about six weeks. I proposed in the front hall of her boarding-house and she took me into the parlor and closed the door. That would have been the overture to a breach-of-promise suit or a Dakota divorce purchased by my loving papa, if she had been some women, but she wasn't. She thanked me for the honor--I have since realized that she was not afraid of a white lie--and then she began to try to argue me out of it. She referred to the disparity in our ages, to her widowhood and my youth, to the difference in our stations, etc. Of course I pooh-poohed it all and vowed everlasting devotion. I dimly recollect that I made some mention of the Charles River. After I had delivered a passionate oration that would have given a long-time discount to Demosthenes and Romeo rolled into one, she looked at me searchingly a moment and then rose and said: "Very well, I will marry you--on one condition." What were conditions to me? I--you know, just the usual. I wanted to name the day then and there, and the next day at that, but she insisted upon the condition. "I will go to my room," she said, "and put the condition in writing, that there may never be any doubt in the future." When she returned she placed in my hand a sealed envelope and exacted a pledge that I would not open it until I reached my room. "If, when you know the condition," she said at parting, "you are still determined on marriage, you will find me in till noon to-morrow." I ran all the way to the dormitory, and when I reached my rooms I was so nervous that it took me five minutes to unlock the door and five more to light a match. Then I sat down at my study table,--for the first time in some weeks--tore open the envelope, spread out the single sheet of paper it contained, and read: "The condition upon which I will entertain an offer of marriage from you is this: I am, unfortunately, unduly sensitive about the color of my hair. Will you dye yours the same red to keep me in countenance?" I scarcely imagine she waited till noon the next day,--that is, if she had anything to do. She probably explained to the kid that Santa Claus had died suddenly. I didn't recover my self-respect nor my common sense for a week. When I did I sent her a box of flowers and enclosed a note in which I said that ever afterwards I should regard red hair as the accompaniment of strong common sense. As for now, there is scarcely any danger, as you suggest, of a girl marrying me for your money--that is, if she has seen you. You look as if you were a goodly representative of a line of ancestors dating back to the original Methusalah. Natural demise is evidently afar off, and really there is nothing about you to suggest that you are likely to blow out the gas in the next hotel you stop at. As for love, I've none of the symptoms. There isn't a girl in Chicago who can boast that I've let her beat me at golf. Almost all girls are all right to meet occasionally, but when you're picking one to sit opposite you at breakfast every morning you want to be sure you will get one who will not take away your appetite. It's safer, I believe, to select a wife for what she is not rather than for what she is. Al Packard--you know him--with his father on the Board of Trade--married his wife, Sophie Trent, because she was a brilliant conversationalist. Now he has applied for a divorce for the same reason. A man and his wife should be one, of course, but the question often is, which one? It is rather trying to the male disposition to have the wife the one and the husband the cipher on the other side of the plus sign. That you may feel more confidence in me, I will make a confession. I _was_ a bit smitten last fall. I won't tell the girl's name. She had really done nothing to encourage me. I called one afternoon and her little sister received me and said, "Sister's out." "Tell her I called, Susie, will you?" "I did," she smiled back. That ended my pool-selling on that race. You don't say anything about your condition at the Vattery, nor when you are coming home. You needn't hurry, necessarily, for Ma's disquiet about your whereabouts has quite disappeared. It seems that old Wheatleigh, who bobbed up at the house the other night, must have divined her suspicions, for he remarked casually that he'd just seen you at the Hot Springs and that you were looking out of sight. The odd part of it was that he hadn't been anywhere near Arkansas. It's curious how a woman will believe all men but her own husband. I think I must be making a hit at this billing business, for I hear a rumor about the place that I'm to be sent out collecting. I sincerely hope you'll use what influence you've got to prevent this, for I can't even collect my thoughts in this porkery, much less gather in accounts due it outside. I'm afraid I've got too much conscience to face debtors to Graham & Co. Your heartwhole son, P. P.S.--Talking about women suggests that I tell you that old Mrs. De Lancey Cartwright is evidently heartbroken over her husband's loss, although he's been dead six months. Her mourning is so deep that her hair has turned black again. LETTER No. X. _First experiences "on the road" inspire little confidence on the part of Pierrepont either in himself, the Graham goods, or country hotels._ FOSTERVILLE, IND., March 4, 189-- _My Dear Father_: Although I have not succeeded to date in getting far enough from Chicago to escape the odors of your refinery and have yet to ascertain how a man looks when he gives an order, I feel that I am going to like being a drummer. There is a certain independence about it which pleases me. While I, of course, shall labor early and late in the interests of the house, there is a great deal in not having a time-keeper staring you in the face every morning. The call left at the hotel office is sufficient reminder to me of the flight of time, especially after I have sat up till 4 A.M. trying to make things come my way. I may not, as you hint, be cut out by the Lord for a drummer. In fact, I don't believe I was, for from what I have seen of the species I am of the belief that the Lord does not number its manufacture among His responsibilities. At all events it is sufficient for me to know that you, the head of the house, have selected me as one. Let me reassure you on one point. I may have looked chesty and important when I started from Chicago the other morning, but my experience as a drummer for Graham & Co. has so completely knocked the self-esteem out of me that I don't believe my hat will ever cock on one side again. It's all right enough to sit in the office and talk about the big business you have built, but just get out into the world and stack up against the fact that you've got to sell our stuff to suspicious buyers or lose your job, and you'll find yourself a first-class understudy for Moses in short order. The first two days out I felt so proud of the house that I added "Graham & Co." to my name on the hotel register. But I dropped that little flourish just as soon as I saw that it got me the worst room on the key-rack and the toughest steak in the dining-room. What on earth have we been doing to people for the last thirty years that makes them all down on us? I see that I'm going to have no trouble in making the concern known; in fact, if I may venture to say so, it seems to be too well known. For some reasons I regret leaving the house. Business may go on well enough in my absence, but it's a mighty poor fiddler who thinks the orchestra plays as loud as it did before he breaks a string. I thank you for your hints as to methods in soliciting trade, but I also appreciate the truth that, after all, the man on the spot must give the decision. So far, I see no reason for your belief that a fund of anecdote is not necessary to the commercial traveller. (I may say in passing that I much prefer this phrase to drummer, although I am prepared to admit that after I sell a bill of goods I may be ready to accept any title.) Jokes may not be profitable as the main stock in trade, but they are certainly essential as a side line. So far, I have been utterly unable to get up early enough in the morning to reach a customer before he has fallen into the clutches of one or more of my competitors, and when I arrive they are usually so hilarious over funny stories that business--especially serious business, like the buying of our products--is the thing farthest from their thoughts. Because a man who wanted to sell you a dog once indulged in flippant, but you must admit, clever repartee about your needing such things in your business, you must not draw the inference that the sense of humor has entirely departed from storekeepers. Of course the joke must not be on the prospective customer, as was that of the dog fancier in your case. I found that out to my sorrow the other day. I had almost persuaded a country grocer to try a couple of pails of lard and a ham--not munificent, but a beginning--when I tipped the fat into the fire by being over keen to take a joke. A small boy came running in with a wad of paper, apparently containing money, clutched in one fist and a card in the other hand. "How much is ten pounds of sugar at 5½ cents a pound?" he asked. "Fifty-five cents," said the grocer. "And a quarter of a pound of 60-cent tea?" "Fifteen cents--to your mother"--smiled the grocer. "And a half peck of potatoes at 28 cents a peck?" asked the boy. "Fourteen," said the grocer. "And four cans of tomatoes at 12½ cents each," said the boy, consulting his list. "Just fifty cents," said the grocer. "And six pounds of rice at 3½ cents?" "Twenty-one cents. Is that all?" asked the grocer, as the boy put his card in his pocket. "Yes," said the boy; "what does it all cost?" The grocer figured with a bit of charcoal on a bag and said: "A dollar fifty-five. Will you take the package?" "Nope," said the boy, edging towards the door. "I'm on my way to school." "Very well, I'll send it right up," said the grocer, urbanely. "Wouldn't if I were you," said the boy. "Ma aint at home. She don't want the stuff, anyhow. That was only my 'rithmetic lesson." As the lad vanished I laughed and said "bon voyage" to my prospective order. The worst of it is, the boys say that this story dates back to Joe Miller's great-grandfather. But it taught me that it is sometimes wise to be deaf, dumb and blind to the point of a joke. Unfortunately, I am short on the joke market, and to date have been unable to meet the keen competition I encounter in this line. Job Withers, a big-faced, big-voiced chap, who travels for Soper & Co., spins yarns with the speed, ease and penetrating quality of a well greased circular saw. When he goes into a store he looks about, comments on any changes or improvements that may have occurred since his last visit, asks the proprietor about his dog, if he has one, and about his wife, if he has not, sits on a barrel and says: "Did I ever tell you--?" At that there is a great shuffling of feet and all the store loungers sit up and take notice. Then he launches into a story and follows it with another and another. Then, when the boss is wiping away the tears that come with the laughter, Job pulls out an order blank and, with a look about the store, says: "I see you're almost all out of--" and he writes off a list of things. Before the echoes of the laughter have ceased the order is rolling along towards "the House" in the custody of a two-cent stamp. If there is one thing needed more than nerve in this business it is hypnotism; and in the practical part of this science Job Withers has Mesmer and Professor Carpenter backed clear over the divide. It's no trick to sell a man anything he wants, but unfortunately no one ever wants anything. The Job Witherses see to that by their delicate attentions in keeping everybody stocked up. A man'll never get the V. H. C. from "the House" till he learns how to sell goods that his customer doesn't want, and I tell you, pater, a good swift game of talk--the right kind--is what gives the shelves and refrigerators of country stores indigestion. If you pursued a different policy I do not wonder that when you tried travelling you had, as you hint, to run the last quarter in record time in order to anticipate a request for your resignation. But I have a suspicion that you have not dealt squarely by me. I will be frank and tell you why. In view of the paucity of my supply of stories--and nothing, I assure you, but extremity would have induced me to do it--I overhauled your letters the other day and weeded out the best of your anecdotes and tried them on some of my intended customers. It immediately became clear to me why you do not believe in story-telling as an adjunct to trade. You must have been less philosophical during your brief stay on the road than you are now, otherwise you would have realized that the failure of your crop of anecdotes to yield a harvest does not prove the futility of planting a different class of seed. The well-known facts concerning _our_ hams do not demonstrate that there are no good hams in the market. One thing is sure. I shall send "the House" an order before the week is out, even if I have to eat the stuff myself. It really can't be worse than the food I get at some of the hotels. The hotel in the town before this was a wonder. I asked for a napkin and the table girl said they used to have them, but the boarders took so many with them that it was too expensive. I guess they ate them in preference to the food. I told the girl I'd have a piece of steak and an egg. She returned, cheerful but empty-handed. "I am sorry, sir," she lisped, "but cook says the last piece of steak has been used for a hinge on the landlord's daughter's trunk. She is to be married to-day," she added, with a smile evidently intended to be engaging. But I didn't care to be engaged, at least not to her. "Well, bring an egg and some toast," I said, amiably. "Sorry, sir," chirped up Bright Eyes, "but cook's just beaten up the egg. She says you can have your share of it in the meringue pudding at dinner." "What _have_ you got, then?" I demanded with some acrimony. "Hot lamb, cold lamb, roast lamb, and minced lamb," she gurgled. I subsequently ascertained that they sheared the lamb a few days before and that the poor innocent caught cold and died. If they were as strict in their menu in these country hotels as they are in their rules, it would be all right. No hotel is complete without a long list of "Don'ts for Guests," plastered on the inside of the door. Here are a few that appealed to me with especial force: "Please do not tip the waiters or the porter." (As the waiters did nothing for me and the porter weighed 285 pounds I conformed to this rule.) "In event of fire an alarm will be sounded on the gongs if the night clerk is awake. The fire-escapes are in the office safe. In case of fire you can have one after you have paid your bill." It is hard to get a decent night's rest in these hostelries. If it isn't one thing it's another. Last Saturday I was so tired that I felt I wouldn't care if I jumped Sunday right out of the calendar. Sunday morning I was sleeping beautifully when there was a rap on the door. "Been't you a goin' to git up?" came a squeaky voice. "What time is it?" I asked. "Half past seven," was the reply. "Get up? No, go away," I shouted. "Breakfast comes in half an hour," said the squeak. "Don't want any breakfast," I thundered back. "All right, the other boarders do." "What in blazes is that to me?" I snarled. "We want your sheets for tablecloths." Do not worry. I shall not write long letters to "the House." They will be as short as my expense account will permit. Your hungry but hopeful son, P. P.S. On the dead, now, did my recital of my hotel experiences make you laugh? They are not quite genuine. How do you think they would go as a part of my sample line of stories for the trade? LETTER No. XI. _Pierrepont meets with some curious experience "on the road;" attends a "badger fight," and relates some of his adventures in country hotels._ HARROD'S CREEK, IND., April 16, 189-- _Dear Dad_: There's no use in telling me that I've got to dream hog if I want to get a raise--for that's what all this rumpus on the road amounts to, after all. There's no need, I say, to enforce the lesson, for I have porcine nightmares every time I go to bed out in this uncivilized country. And I _do_ wake up with determination--the determination to do something to get back to dear old Chicago, if I have to do the Weary Waggles act over the pike. When I think that I used to disparage our city in comparison with Boston, I feel very humble indeed. In comparison with the villages I've struck since I've been the _avant courier_ of Graham & Co., Chicago is a paradise which no sensible man ought to depreciate. Milligan used to tell about a purgatory to which wandering souls have to go for a bit of scrubbing up to fit them for the good things of heaven. Of course he referred to experience on the road. You complain because my selling cost in this sort of life just balances the profit I turn in to the house, but I think it should be a source of great satisfaction that you've got a son who can so rise superior to circumstances as to pay his way with the Graham incubus hitched to his shoulders. It's worth something to make an Ananias of yourself a dozen times a day, with bad dreams thrown in at the end of it. A liar is popular only when his cause hits the popular taste, and I've yet to find a town where our bluff is worth more than twenty-five cents in the pot. Of course life isn't all a vale of tears, even during the quest for orders. There was a rift of sunlight yesterday at Simkinsville Four Corners, where I assisted at the annual Spring dog-and-badger fight. This function is gotten up with such a regard for the proprieties that even a college man has to give it his approval. I happened to arrive in town on the day of the festivity, and just naturally wanted to see it. A big crowd gathered in an open space back of the town hall, and all other interests were neglected for the time being. Even the Presbyterian minister was on hand to see that the thing was carried out in a fair and square manner, and I felt that with such spiritual backing the fight ought to be a good go. There was a good-sized box in the centre of the ring, under which some one told me was a badger of exceptional fierceness. About ten feet away was a bull terrier who looked like the veteran of a hundred fields. He was kept in leash by a muscular negro, and the way he strained at his chain convinced me that badger was his particular meat and that he ate a good many pounds a day. At the time I arrived on the scene there seemed to be a difference of opinion as to who should pull the string of the box and liberate the badger. Finally the row grew so intense that an election was proposed, and nominations for the exalted office were made. But every one who was mentioned seemed to have some out about him. He had bet heavily on either the dog or the badger, and such a thing as pulling the string with impartiality was thought to be out of the question. Meantime the odds were being chalked up on a big blackboard amid the excited roars of the crowd, and it began to look as if there wouldn't be any dog-and-badger fight at all. Just at this point somebody suggested me as the proper string-puller, on the ground that I was a stranger and not biased either way. "Besides," he urged, "as a college athlete he is an expert on sport." Then the whole crowd yelled "Graham, Graham," and I felt that I ought to respond to the confidence imposed in me. So I made a little speech in which I said I was highly honored by the nomination and would accept the duty with the firm determination to do unswerving justice to all. I took the string as the bulldog was making frantic endeavors to get at the box, and turned my head away so as to give a pull that should be absolutely fair. Then the umpire began to count, amid the breathless silence of the crowd. At the word "three" I gave a tremendous yank at the box, and--well, the result wasn't exactly conducive to the dignity of yours truly, for there, where I had uncovered what was supposed to be a fierce badger, stood a full-fledged cuspidor. I don't know which looked the sickest, the dog or I, but he had the advantage of being able to sneak off into the crowd, while I had to stand and take the wild cheers of the populace like a true hero of the Graham stock. It cost me considerable to wipe out the disgrace in drink for the gathering, but it simply had to be done if I am to sell any goods in this vicinity. And as what I am out for is orders with a capital O, it follows that I've got to have the capital necessary to get 'em. You understand, of course, and will approve my next expense account with a glad hand. In this town I am staying at the Eagle Hotel,--a hostelry that would probably carry you back to your boyhood days. It's the kind where one roller-towel does duty for every one in the washroom, and a big square trough filled with sawdust is the general office cuspidor. There's no table in my room, of course, so I'm writing this on the slanting pine board they call the writing desk, listening to the shouts of the natives and the stories of mine host, Major Jaggins. The major is a slab-sided, lantern-jawed individual, who got his title all right in the war, as his two cork legs prove. He's a very tall man, and when I ventured to remark on his unusual height the crowd roared and voted that I was elected to "buy." All strangers buy on this particular proposition, I was told. It seems that Major Jaggins was a regular sawed-off before the war, and he felt his lack of height keenly, especially as he had a soaring mind and had to answer to the name of "Stumpy." But his time came. At the battle of Cold Harbor he had both legs taken off by a shell. When he came to he gave a yell of delight that paralyzed the nurses and nearly scared the rest of the hospital to death. He was simply thinking of what he was going to do on the leg matter, and he realized that he wasn't going to be "Stumpy" Jaggins any more. After he was cured he just gave his order to the cork leg people to make him two of the longest pins he could stand up on. Consequently he now walks the earth a trifle shakily, to be sure, but way above the general run of mankind, and that's what he likes. He swore he'd been short long enough. I simply mention the case of Major Jaggins as a reminder that nature doesn't know everything, and that art sometimes has the last word. Even if I'm not cut out by an obliging providence to be the proprietor of a big packing house--and your letters sometimes have a pessimistic ring that implies your belief that I am not--a good deal can be done by kindness and a judicious expenditure of money. Which leads me quite naturally to remark that your ideas of a travelling man's expenses are evidently founded on your early knowledge of pack-peddling. Then again, these country yokels have to be conciliated, and, although whiskey is cheap, they have blamed long throats. This hotel belies its name, for they say eagles don't feed on carrion. But it's no use kicking at the table, for Major Jaggins simply stivers out to the pantry and brings back a lot of Graham cans which he places at your plate with an injured air. I suppose he has the same gag for the drummers of all the different houses, but it's effective, just the same. Apropos of hotels, I have discovered a curious fact: the farther you go the worse they get, and even if you strike a good one occasionally it only increases your sorrow, for comparison augments the future misery. It's no use to try to pick your hotel. No matter which one you select in a town, you'll be sorry you didn't go to the other. And if you make a change and go to the other you're dead certain to regret that you didn't know when you were well off and stay where you were. It's no use to complain. I've tried it. Night before last I slept in a room that was apparently a gymnasium for rats. About two o'clock, when they began to use the pit of my stomach for a spring-board, I went down to the office and pried the clerk out from behind the cigar counter. "See here," I said, "I can't sleep, there's so much noise." "Sorry, sir, but I can't help it," he replied, flicking a dust atom from the register. "This is a hotel. The Sanit_o_rium is on the next street. Ever try powders?" "What on?" I queried, not to be outdone, "the rats?" "Rats? I do hope ye haven't got them. The last man that--" "No, I haven't got 'em, but the room has. They're all over the place." "Rats, eh?" and the clerk gave the register a twirl. "Let's see, you're in 51--dollar room. Couldn't expect buffaloes at that price, could ye?" I stayed in the office the rest of the night and in the morning the clerk pointed me out to his chief. "That gent," he said, "has insomniay." "That won't do, young man," said the landlord, with a withering look. "We can't have such things in this house. It's a family hotel." I tried making inquiries, but it's no good. Every man in town will swear that some particular hotel is "the best this side the Mississippi." Foolishly enough, I tried to quiz the clerk of one house, while I was registering. I wound up a few queries about the table with the conundrum, "Are your eggs fresh?" He knew the answer. "Fresh?" he drawled, looking straight at me. Then he rang a bell, and cried, "Front!" The one bell-boy appeared from somewhere, eating what was once an apple. "Gent to hund'erd an' thirteen," said the clerk. "An', boy, stop at the dining-hall on your way back and tell the head waiter that this gentleman is to have his eggs laid on his toast by the hens direct." That was the end of my attempts at previous investigating. Now if I cannot eat the food, I content myself with chewing the cud of bitter reflection. But I'd barter my immortal soul for a square meal at mother's round table. The time I've put in at the different grocery stores to-day has served as a regular eye-opener to me as to the game I'm up against. Apparently nobody in this whole country except the patrons of the Eagle eat any packed provisions at all, and our special brand seems to be a dead one on all the shelves. I couldn't give the stuff away, much less sell it. I did place one order for a hundred pails of lard, but I learned to-night that the fellow is going into insolvency in a day or two, so I guess you'd better not send the stuff. Taking it by and large, I have discovered that a thorough course in hypnotism would be the best equipment for a successful salesman of our particular kind of goods. For instance, if I could look old Sol Blifkins of the Harrod's Creek Bazaar and Emporium in the eye, and make him believe that folks were just clamoring for frankfurts instead of rum in these parts, and compel him to see a blank space where our aged cans are still lumbering his shelves, I fancy the thing would be a cinch. One of our fellows at Harvard, the son of an Episcopal bishop, wrote me a while ago that his father had decided upon his taking orders, and that it was a blamed hard proposition; I don't know what his special line is, but if it can match this gunning for pork buyers he has my sincere sympathy. I keep running across Job Withers. I think he's detailed by his house to watch me. He arrived at the City Hotel this morning just as I was leaving it to go on a still hunt for a ham sandwich. He greeted me cheerily. "Ah! been stopping at the City? Good hotel. Fine table." "Is it?" I said calmly. "Yes, indeed; best this side of Indianapolis." Thank heaven, I'm going the other way. I didn't tell him that. What I did say was: "You say this is a good hotel and a good table?" He nodded. "Well," I went on, "let me tell you a story." That staggered him, for I saw he realized that if I'd reached the story stage I was due for business. "There was once a little boy," I proceeded, "who was sitting on the walk under a green apple tree, doubled up with cramps and howling like a pocket edition fiend. A bespectacled lady of severe cast of countenance, stopped and asked him his trouble. 'Them,' said the boy, pointing to the tree, 'and I've an orful pain.' "'Pain!' said the lady, 'don't you know there's no such thing? You only think so. Have faith and you'll have no pain.' "'Gee!' said the boy, 'that's all right. You may think there's no pain, but,' rubbing his stomach dolefully, 'I've positive inside information.' And so have I about this hotel," I said to Withers as I left him. Confidentially, I think Withers' label reads "N. G." My one object in life is to put him off the reservation. From now on watch Your hustling son, PIERREPONT. P.S. Please ask the cashier to forward an immediate check for enclosed voucher--a bill presented by the landlord of the Eagle Hotel. The "medical services" were for typhoid fever, contracted by his family. It appears that your drummer who came here last fall emptied part of the contents of his sample case in a vacant lot back of the hotel. [Illustration: _Pierrepont Graham as a Travelling Salesman._] LETTER No. XII. _Pierrepont puts one of the paternal theories into execution with unfortunate results and recites some drummer's yarns with philosophical addenda._ MUDDY FORK, IND., April 21, 189-- _Dear Father_: The tone of your last letter isn't altogether pleasing to me, nor does it reflect credit on yourself. You hint that because I am patient under this life of hardship and abuse, spent in trying to convince people that what they know about Graham & Co's. stuff is all wrong--you hint, I say, that I am a mule. If that is so, your knowledge of natural history ought to show you that you are not patting yourself on the back to any great extent; you are my father, you know. You remind me of what Johnny Doolittle, who used to live next door to us, once said to his father when the old man remonstrated at his lack of table manners. "Johnny, you are a perfect pig!" shouted old Doolittle. "Well, pa," replied Johnny, as innocent as could be, "ain't a pig a hog's little boy?" I mention Johnny merely to remind you that the sort of reviling I have been getting of late out here in this God-forsaken country; on duty for the house, has its recoil and you're the fellow who's getting hit. It's worse than old Elder Hoover's famous gun that Uncle Ephraim used to tell me about. According to him, there was a big rabbit hunt one day, and the Elder was persuaded to join. Some of the backsliders had rigged up a gun for his special use, loaded with a double charge of powder and shot and rammed tighter than glue. At last Doc drew a bead on a big jack and let go. When the roar had ceased and the smoke lifted, the Elder was seen on his back, pawing the air with hands and feet and shouting for help. "Did the gun kick, Elder?" asked one of the bad hunters. "Kick," roared the good man, "it nearly kicked me into hell, for if I hadn't been so stunned I'd have taken the name of the Lord in vain, as sure as I'm a miserable sinner." Now if you want me to kick, dear father, I can do a job that would make a Missouri mule look like a grasshopper. I'm shod with good hard facts which you know as much about as I do. If decency doesn't suit you, I'll give you an exhibition of bag-punching that will make your head swim. I now beg leave to report on the result of one of your pieces of advice as to ways and means in selling. A little while back, you remember, you said that I was pretty sure to run into a buyer who would bring me a pail of lard which he would say was made by a competitor, and ask what I thought of such stuff. Then, when I had condemned it by and large, you allowed he would tell me it was our own lard and the store would have the grand cachinnation on me. What I ought to say, you observed, was, that I didn't think So-and-So could produce such good stuff. That would clinch an order, sure enough--still according to you. Well, I ran into the identical thing at Higginbotham Bros., in this town. Just as I was nailing an order for 200 pails with Lige Higginbotham, his brother Nat blew in with some lard that he said was made by Skinner & Co., our big rivals, and asked me what I thought of that for a bucket of slush. I had presence of mind enough to remember what you had said, and I told him that it was a blamed sight better lard than I thought Skinner & Co. were capable of putting out. Then I waited for the laugh at Nat's expense, but there wasn't any. It was very, very quiet, a stillness relieved only by the working of Lige's jaws on his quid. "Well," said he, after a pause that I knew was deadly, "if you, a competitor, say it's good lard, why, gosh dang it, it _must_ be all right. And seein' that Skinner's always treated us white, I guess I'll telegraph that order for 200 pails instead of givin' it to you." You see the lard _was_ Skinner's, as I saw a minute afterwards by the cover on the pail. This little incident gives me serious doubts whether you can safely regard all men as liars. There happens to be quite a jolly crowd of drummers of various persuasions at this hotel just at present, and last night we had a little _seance_ in the smoking-room for mutual inspiration and advancement. The talk naturally got rather shoppy at last, and the fellows began bragging of the business they did. A drummer for grindstones said that he thought he'd average up about six sales a day, and a fellow in whiskey allowed that he would make at least ten. Then a Hebrew, who travelled with neckties, declared that he could take in about a dozen orders, and so it went. I modestly admitted that I was handicapped, and that two sales per diem were about all I could attain to under the circumstances. Of course that's more than I do make, but, as you say, you've got to impress the world with the fact that you're some pumpkins or you won't get assessed at even cucumbers. They'd all got through their little yarns, except one thin-faced, quiet chap who sat in a corner and didn't have much to say. Finally the Hebrew pounced on him, thinking he'd have some fun at his expense. "You hafn't told us vat you do, mein frent," he said to the quiet fellow. "Eferypody must speak in this exberience meeting. How many sales do you make?" The man looked up with a sort of weary expression on his face and replied: "Well, if I make one sale a year, I think I'm doing pretty well." "Von sale a year!" exclaimed the descendant of Aaron, with a pitying smile. "Von sale a _year_! Vy, vot do you travel for?" "Suspension bridges," replied the quiet man, and we all regarded our cigar ashes in silence. After a while we suspended the Hebrew from the association for not making good at the bar. One of the crowd is a Boston fellow who is out selling encyclopedias. He has the usual Hub classicism, aided and abetted by a desire to ask conundrums. He hit everybody good and hard, and then landed on me. "Why are you so different from Circe?" he asked. Of course I gave it up. Does anybody ever guess conundrums they don't know? "Because Circe turned men into hogs, while you are trying to turn hogs into men," he replied, and I started for bed then and there. Always on the hog, always! When will it end? This town is full and boiling over with drummers. I never saw so many in one day in my life. There is more shop talk going on here to-night than occurs in a week in all the Siegel-Cooper stores. I verily believe that there are ten men here to try and sell something, for every man there is to buy. Somehow or other the town has assumed the proportions of a junction, or a drummers' fair. The townspeople, they say, are much excited over it, and the village constable is at the town hall swearing in two deputies. As Job Withers has made himself very conspicuous during the day, I think the reason for the reign of terror is evident. Job, by the way, had a bit of the conceit taken out of him at the depot this evening. Several of us were down there to inquire about trains, etc. As no train would stop for nearly an hour, none of the station hands were about. Withers took the fact as a text and delivered a short, but exceedingly ornate, sermon to the crossing flagman on the moribund condition of the town. He fairly tore its reputation to shreds. Finally, with one finger laying down the law in the palm of his other hand, Job fired this at the defenceless old flagman: "I tell you, sir, this town needs more life and energy. Something needs to come along and shake things up." Just then the Inter-state Express dashed by at sixty miles an hour, and "something" came along. It was a heavy mail bag tossed from Uncle Sam's car, and it took poor Job plumb in the centre of gravity. Over he went, like an Arabian acrobat. When we picked him out of the ditch he looked like what's left after a Kansas cyclone. But he was game. "Boys, this time the laugh's on me," he cried. "The evening's artificial irrigation will be charged to my house." I hate to do it, but I must. When Job tries to cut me out of a trade with his stories, I'll make him the hero of one of mine. Then I guess I'll coax a little business by his fat sides. Speaking of trains, reminds me of the laugh some of the boys had on Sol Lichinstein the other day. He was to take the 3.30 out of Michigan City, and about quarter of three his great bulk--he is very corpulent--was seen dashing down the street at furious pace. A half hour later two or three other drummers, who had proceeded leisurely to the station, found him still out of breath. "What made you run so, Sol?" asked one of them. "Hang it all!" he answered, "the clock in front of the jeweler's store in the hotel block was wrong. It said 3.20." "The clock on the post, Sol?" asked one of the party. "Yes; confound it!" "Well, Sol, that clock's said 3.20 every time I've been here for four years. The hands are painted on." When the story was told to a party of us, one man spoke up after the laugh and said: "Well, it's not surprising. Lichinstein is always chock full of business." I met him to-day for the first time and found this statement is true. He _is_ chock full of business--liquor business is his line. Apropos of business, I may state that I think you must find some cause to congratulate yourself on the gains I am making. As you say, new methods _are_ better than old and I am beginning to believe I have discovered a few of them. It has taken me some time, for it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks and, although I'm not so old, still I'm somewhat removed from the young pup you once called me. Still, an old dog can learn new tricks--by himself. Old Gabe Short, of Harrod's Creek, says the only reason you cannot teach an old dog new tricks is because he has got on to the game and refuses to learn 'em, knowing that he will be called up to perform for company. Old Gabe knows, for he has heaps of opportunity for observation. He hasn't done any work for over thirty years. The story goes that he was such a coward at the outbreak of the Rebellion that he said, that rather than go to war he'd stay at home and lick stamps. And he did it, too. After all the men went to war he got the postmastership. Gabe has a fat old water spaniel who is too lazy to do anything but eat and chase fleas. The latter task is usually performed in half-hearted fashion. One day--but I'll try to tell it as old Gabe does. "One day an out-of-town dog was friendly with Neb and after he left there seemed to be a heap o' worry on my dog's mind. He just couldn't keep still. It was scratch here and nibble there. Fleas never seemed to stir him up like that afore and I made up my mind that the strange cur had imported a new brand of the critters. Finally the old fellow was so bad that I gave him a dose of flea powder. Seems like it druv the varmints all into his tail, fur he chased it fur hours, as he hadn't done since he was a purp. I was busy and anyway I'd used all the powder I had. He's so fat he couldn't catch that tail and it was funny an' a bit pitiful, too, the way he went after it. "Finally, just as he seemed driven to desperation, he stopped short. He stood and looked around at that tail. Then he slowly backed up against the counter till his tail laid alongside. Then he pushed hard and grabbed. When he got through chewing that tail if there was a flea left it was mincemeat." I merely mention this in passing to illustrate that experience is a pretty good teacher, and that it must be your own experience--no one's else will do. Your counsels and rules of life are very enlightening and all that, but they are really of little value compared with the hard knocks of actual experience. You may explain to a boy till you're black in the face that fire is a dangerous element to monkey with, but it takes a few burnt fingers to instill real dread of a cannon-cracker. You are giving me the experience and I have no doubt that it's the best thing that could happen to me. But really, father, you may overdo it. Your anxiety for my future may make my present unduly uncomfortable. In this connection I am reminded of a story told by the pastor of Tremont Temple in Boston, Dr. George C. Lorimer, in a lecture that I attended. He didn't vouch for the truth of the story, but thought it enforced a moral. "A nestful of linnets," he said, "were in a field in India. Their mother had flown away and left them. They were cold and hungry and flapped their wings and cried. An enormous elephant chanced to note their plight. 'Poor little things,' said the elephant. 'No mother, no one to keep you warm and nestle you. My mother's heart aches for you. I will nestle you and keep you warm.' And the elephant, in pure goodness of heart, sat down upon the nest of poor little linnets." It may not be out of order to mention that you quite frequently sit upon Your loving son, PIERREPONT. P.S. Just a suggestion. A leading grocer here says, that if the labels on our canned goods did not display the name "Graham" so prominently, he thinks he could sell some of them. LETTER No. XIII. _A farmhouse, a farmer's daughter and bucolic pleasures and pastimes give Pierrepont a respite from commercial activities, but not from the study of pig._ DOOLITTLE MILLS, IND., May 25, 189-- _Dear Father_: I take it that you are now enough of a philosopher to suppress any surprise you may feel to see a letter dated at this outpost of civilization. I admit that it's somewhat off the beaten track for the distribution of lard and pork products, but I got here legitimately enough, as you shall learn. The people hereabouts raise their own hogs, and I believe it would interest you to see the real article. Their lard is so attractive in appearance that I mistook it for vanilla ice cream when shown some last night, not stopping to think that your simon-pure farmer never uses his cream for such frivolous purposes. However, their stuff showed me that the nearer you get to nature and the farther from the stock-yards, the more respectable an animal is the pig. But to the adventure that brought me here. I left for the southern part of the state yesterday morning on the Gatling Gun Express, and all went well until we struck a cow at about noon, a few miles from where I have pitched the Graham headquarters. The cow is now beef, all right, but the locomotive is also scrap-iron. The track was blocked for keeps at the lonely crossing where the horror occurred, and there seemed to be no escape from a dreary wait for the wrecking train. But I investigated, and soon discovered an ancient farmer with a horse whose meridian of life had long since passed, jogging along toward somewhere--anywhere, away from the slough of despond in which the cow had deposited us. I grabbed my samples--which, by the way, are of no earthly use in this section of the world--and begged for transportation. I got it for twenty-five cents and a cigar whose antecedents I fain would forget, and started for the interior. It was an interesting locality where we brought up. Doolittle's Mills are apparently so named because there's so little doing in them that the building which gives the place its name looks like a church where all the citizens are atheists. Once a year, in the time of the early spring freshets, they saw a few boards for exercise. But just now the farmers have the call, and the call is usually the tin-horn summons to dinner, which is the only sound that awakes any interest in the people. Just now they are putting in potatoes, corn, and beans, and the only fertilizer they use are cuss words and hard cider, which go well enough together at the start, but don't hitch worth a cent at harvest time. My rustic benefactor was christened Martin Van Buren Philpot, but long use has shrunk his cognomen considerably, and he is now known as "Vebe." He has a big quiverful of children, the thirteenth of whom arrived about three weeks ago. "Vebe" has named him Theodore Roosevelt, and is still waiting for the silver mug. Says he's afraid the thirteen part of it will queer the kid's chances. You would like Mrs. Philpot, I think. She is full of homely philosophy and has a face to match. Her cooking, though, might be improved by a course of training under Oscar of the Waldorf. I don't just remember the sort of biscuits Ma used to produce, but if they were anything like Mrs. Philpot's I can account for your dyspepsia. The little Philpots are sportive creatures who insist on showing me the pigs about a dozen times a day. I believe I unwarily dropped a hint as to my occupation when I arrived, and they seem to think I want to see pork all the time. They call me the hog man, but they are such innocent kids that I can't show any resentment. This afternoon they took me out to the pasture to view a sit-still's nest. Said the mother bird was on the eggs and wouldn't fly, even when handled. Just before we reached the place two of them ran ahead, and Johnny Philpot clapped his straw hat on the ground and signalled me to hurry. "She's here, all right, mister," said Johnny, quivering with excitement. "Now you jest stoop down, and when I lift my hat, you grab the bird." Slowly the brim of yellow straw rose, and with lightning-like celerity I dashed my hand through the opening. Then there was a sharp click and a wild whoop from myself as a steel trap closed its jaws on my fingers and held on like death. You never saw such delighted children in your life. They danced around me all the while I was trying to get the confounded thing off my hand, and said I "swore orful." I guess I did. After awhile Johnny helped me, and allowed I was real funny. He'll never know how near he came to a violent death in his happy childhood. The way these simple people combine business and pleasure would be a revelation to the packing house. I saw a good example of this peculiarity at a barn-raising that "Vebe" Philpot arranged for this morning. It showed, too, that the countryman was the original socialist. About forty farmers gathered at the place in vehicles that would simply make the Lake Front howl. Every man then visited the toolhouse, where a tin wash-boiler filled with what they call here "horse's neck," a savage compound of whiskey and hard cider, occupied the place of honor. They tell me that "horse's neck" and barn-raisings are one and inseparable in these parts, and that any attempt to preach temperance at such occasions would lead to rioting. I'll do old Philpot the justice to say that his wash-boiler was the real thing, and erred a bit on the side of hard liquor, if anything. Having gotten themselves in first-class trim, the barn-raisers proceeded to business. The way they do the work is this: Two uprights lying on the ground are fastened top and bottom by crossbeams and a long rope is hitched to each end. About fifteen men attach their persons to each rope, and the other ten jam big crowbars against the bottom beam to prevent its slipping. Then somebody yells "hist her!" and the crowd on the ropes tug like bulls and that part of the frame goes slowly up. They prop this up lightly to prevent its falling, and proceed to get the other end perpendicular in the same fashion. Then up go the sides to be cleated to the end, and the thing is done. But it wasn't quite done this morning, for just as the second side was being fastened in place by my genial host, who had been boosted up on the corner to do the job, one of the props broke, and the whole blamed frame, including "Vebe," came to the ground in a grand crash. "Vebe" wasn't hurt very much physically, but his spirits were greatly damaged. Father, you may think you can juggle expletives pretty well, you may believe that Milligan can swear good and plenty; but neither of you ever dreamed of such a Niagara of blue-streaked and sulphur-fumed cuss words as came from that irate farmer. The rest of the crowd lit out, after a farewell visit to the wash-boiler, for, as one weazened old veteran told me confidentially, "When 'Vebe' war in tarntrums it war no use treatin' him like a civilized critter." To that mishap of the morning I attribute the rather doleful ending of something that occurred this evening. It seems that old Philpot's son Ike got married a day or two ago, and, after the poetic custom of the country, the neighbors determined to give him a serenade. To-night was the chosen time. I guess it was a surprise, all right, for when the awful pandemonium of tin horns, cow-bells, rattles, cracked cornets and whistles broke upon the peaceful air like a blast from a madhouse, old "Vebe" made a dash for his double-barrelled shotgun and let go twice into the crowd. "Dern fresh fools," he growled, as he cleaned his smoking gun. "Guess that'll season 'em all right." I was horrified and asked him if he wasn't afraid he had killed somebody. "Kill nuthin'," he snorted. "That thar was good honest rock salt. It'll melt inside their blasted pelts and sting like all possessed, but that's all. Don't you worry about any of 'em dyin', they're too consarned tough." Of course Ike and his new wife appeared on the scene as soon as the rumpus began, and the young husband bitterly upbraided his dad, until I thought I should have to serve as referee in a good bout then and there. Ike said that the old man had ruined his credit in the town forever; that he never could hold his head up again. He appealed to me, and asked why fathers always wanted to make jackasses of themselves where their sons were concerned. I couldn't tell him, of course. Finally the household quieted down, but the upshot of it is that Ike is going to quit to-morrow and get out a handbill, saying that his father was drunk when the unfortunate affair occurred, and inviting the town to serenade him again in his new home. You see it's almost a religious point with young couples in this section of the world that their banns be blessed with the most outrageous racket man can devise. They actually feel sort of shame-faced otherwise. Speaking of banns naturally leads me to remark, that however shy on personal beauty Mrs. Philpot may be, she has a daughter of the A1 pure leaf brand. Her name is Verbena, and she can certainly give points to her namesake in the matter of sweetness. Naturally, she was somewhat upset after the stirring experiences of this evening, and I felt it my duty to restore her equanimity, especially as I was a guest in the house. We sat for quite a while in the best parlor and Verbena grew somewhat confidential. She said she had a beau over at Bumstead Four Corners, but that as a sparker he was about as useful as a pig of lead. Asked me if I didn't think that city men had more real romance and made better husbands. At this point I slowly withdrew my hand from her pretty one, for there was something in the suggestion that looked ominous. I think I might have kissed Verbena good-night had not old Philpot appeared on the scene. I am almost inclined to believe that he had some notion as to what I meditated and that he was simply a little ahead of time. For, before coming to my room to write, I strolled out for a smoke and met one of Philpot's neighbors, a garrulous old fellow. "Verbena's a likely gal," was the way he opened on me. I admitted it. "Engaged yit?" was his astounding query. Quietly but firmly, I denied the soft impeachment. "So-ho" he said, "Vebe's a-gettin' slow." Curiosity got the better of me and in a half hour's talk I wormed considerable information out of my companion. It seems that the three oldest girls married recently and that their husbands were travelling men who, for some occult reason, had penetrated into this country. In two cases there was an elopement, said my informant. "What did the father do?" I asked, thinking of old Philpot's shotgun. "Do?" echoed the old farmer, "waal, he helped the hired man to sot the ladder under Dahlia's window, and when Lobelia skipped with her feller, 'Vebe' routed the hired man out o' bed at two in the morning to hitch up the best hoss, so's he could foller the elopers with the girl's trunk. I tell yer, it's tough tripe to have so many darters in this country." I've made up my mind that Verbena's flier than she looks and that she and her old man have an understanding. To-morrow I leave this sylvan retreat and start once more on the pursuit of the man who wants pig. I believe this little outing has given me new nerve, and that you will soon get Orders, More Orders and Big Orders, the only trinity you seem to think has any holiness in it. I wonder how Verbena will take my departure. Your dutiful son, PIERREPONT. P.S. I've been thinking over old Philpot's rock salt shooting, and it suggests a great idea. "Why not kill hogs with volleys of the stuff, thus obviating the necessity of salting 'em?" Do I get a raise for this invention? P. LETTER No. XIV. _A companionable deputy sheriff, a hospitable townsman, and "the best-natured wife on earth" inspires Pierrepont's pen to the narration of lively incidents._ JASPER, IND., July 21, 189-- _My Dear Father_: I am surprised that my broker should have given you the particulars of my little flyer in short ribs--I mean ribs short--and in future I shall patronize another broker. The few hundreds I made in that deal I had relied upon to dispose of a little bill I owe in Chicago. When it started it wasn't quite so much like the national debt as it is now; but the fact is, I have been carting a deputy sheriff round the country for three weeks, paying for his time and board. Now you want me to return the check, endorsed to the treasurer of some orphanage. If you saw that deputy sheriff you wouldn't have the heart. If I sent you back the check it was lost in the mail and we'll forget it. I've been so busy arranging to sell carloads of our stuff that I really haven't been able to write before, but when I got rid of that deputy a great load was removed from my mind. It's a tough thing to go in to try and sell a hard proposition a bill of goods--this _is_ a euphemism in our case--and know that the eye of the law is glued upon the show-window, lest you escape by the back door. If I'm to keep up my present spurt in the market you'll have to raise the limit. Thirty a week might do for a drummer when you started business, but for a commercial traveller of to-day it's only tip money. I'm making good now, and if I'm not worth more than thirty I'm useless to you. I may mention in passing that I've had an offer from Soper & Co. to jump over to them. They don't know I'm your son. They know that I'm the same fellow who was at your mailing desk a while back, and probably cannot imagine that you would treat your only the way I was treated. You will agree with me that business is business and I can learn it quite as well selling car lots for Soper as for any one else. A word to the wise--and to the cashier--is sufficient. Don't worry about my becoming a victim to gambling on margin. Your tip on the market--that you will fire me if I keep it up--is valuable. I will see to it that you hear no more of my trading. I should not have taken this particular flyer had it not been for the fact that you wrote the last sheet of one of your recent letters on the back of a typewritten note from Gamble & Chance, in which they advised you that they had placed your order to sell ribs short. I just made up my mind that what was good enough for pop must be real velvet for sonny. You know you have always urged me to follow your example. I am quite certain that, now you are in possession of the full facts, you will revise your idea about that check. At all events, as I have hinted, that particular check is so full of bank teller's stamps that its own father would scarcely know it. I never did take much stock in trading "on 'change." It's a form of gambling where interest is sacrificed by the fact that you do not see the ball rolled or the cards dealt. Even when you see the play you may be up against a brace game, so what can you expect when two or three big dealers, like my revered parent, get together and mark the cards for a big game? Anyway, I'd rather bet any day on something straight. If a man gambles on whether the sun will shine or not on certain days he may be unlucky enough to lose every trip, but he will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that no thimble rigging in somebody's back office introduced the clouds. Finance, as I understand it, is the art of making the other fellow's dollar work for the financier; but this requires a sort of hypnotism that I do not yet possess. I may grow to it; indeed, now that I find myself able to sell the goods manufactured by our house, I am almost afraid to look a mirror in the face lest I discover that I am possessed of the evil eye. The "marts of trade," as the poet puts it, strike me as queer places. The interior of a stock or produce exchange is certainly an understudy for bedlam, if my imagination is correct. "Give you 86 for C.P. & N.," shouts one. "No," comes the reply, "want 86 and an eighth." "All right." "Sold." "I'll take 500." And nobody takes a thing, for the man who sells it hasn't got it and the man who buys don't want it. No wonder the poor lambs lose their fleece and their heads. Nevertheless, that short-rib check was a life-saver. I was actually so poor that I had to descend to living in lodgings for three days. Think of it, the heir of Graham & Co. in lodgings! What would "the street" say of that? But I have found that the Graham credit is all covered with N.G.'s at the hotels and I scarcely cared to come home with a deputy sheriff among my excess baggage. So I went into lodgings in an "over Sunday" town. It gave me a lesson on the danger of officiousness that I'm not likely to forget, but, although for a few minutes I could see the danger lights of a sound thrashing dead ahead, it ended pleasantly. Lodgings were hard to find, but the cigar store man finally recommended me to a place. The woman who answered my ring was willing to let me--and the sheriff--a room, but before we arranged terms she took me one side and made an explanation. Her husband, she said, was apt to stay out very late at night in convivial company and I might be disturbed by his noise when he came home. I assured her that, as a patron of hotels, I was quite used to this sort of thing, and forthwith negotiated for the use of her front parlor. About two o'clock in the morning we were awakened by the sound of bacchanalian revelry outside the window. I looked out and saw a man on the grassplot in front of the house. He was just able to move--and howl--and his frantic struggles to get on his feet were funnier than Milligan's attempts to put on superior airs. "Ah, the inebriate husband!" I said to the sheriff, who agreed with me that it would be a good scheme to get him off the lawn and into the house. So we slipped on enough clothing to cover the law and the major part of our persons and went out. The serenader was light weight and we carried him up the steps without difficulty. He stopped singing long enough to roar: "Whas-yer-doin'--lemme go--lemme go, I tell yer." "Come to bed," I said, soothingly. "Done wan ter go ter bed--never go t' bed Sat'day night," he hiccoughed. "This not (hic) my bed." We bore him into the front hall, and laid him down to get a fresh hold for the journey upstairs. He was happy again and started a new song. Just then a light appeared at the top of the stairs, and I saw the landlady's face peering over the balustrade. In my most courteous manner I asked: "Shall we bring him upstairs, madam?" "Who?" she asked. "Your husband." She did not reply, but another voice did. "I am her husband, sir," and another head, with a jolly face and a big moustache, appeared beside the landlady's. We dumped our operatic load across the street and I hid my shamed head in the pillows, making a sacred vow that for ever more I shall keep very busy attending to my own affairs. This led to a very pleasant Sunday for me--and the sheriff--however. The landlady's husband could take a joke--especially when it was on me, and at breakfast we became very good friends. He invited me to his club and we--and the legal limb--spent the afternoon there. His face grew bigger and jollier each hour, and finally he became very confidential. Referring to his own peccadilloes, he made the statement that he had the best-natured wife in the world. I had no reason to controvert this, but he seemed to think that I doubted it, and went on to accumulate testimony. "We've never had a quarrel yet, though we've been married sixteen years," he declared. "I'll bet that no matter what I might do when I go home, she'd smile through it all." This didn't interest me, but my legal guardian seemed curious. He even went so far as to doubt our friend. It wasn't long before they had patched up some sort of a wager between them. The husband was to go home to supper, appear intoxicated, raise a row, break dishes and otherwise generally make an ass of himself. If his wife kept her temper it was on the sheriff, and _vice versa_. Bill--his name was William Jenks--started off ahead. We were to follow at a distance and observe results from the yard. Bill began to totter and sway as he neared the house, and presently Mrs. J. ran out of the front gate to meet him. She picked up his hat from the ground, brushed it and put it on, and then kissed him. Then she guided his uncertain legs into the house. When we reached the window which looked into the parlor we saw Bill sitting on the floor, howling incoherencies at his wife, who was trying to help him pull off his shoes. When they were off he commanded: "Put 'em on the mantelpiece," and she did it. Then he got up and staggered across the room and fell, just before he reached a sofa. "What did yer pull sofa 'way for?" he howled. "Oh, William, forgive me. I didn't know. I'm so awkward. Did you hurt yourself?" And she tried to help him up. But he wouldn't get up, and continued to abuse her like a pickpocket. Finally she induced him to go into the dining-room and sit down at the supper table. As a prelude he shied a teacup past her head and against the wall. Then he pulled away the tablecloth and with it the dishes, and sat down on the floor amid the ruins. What did that wonder of a woman do but plump down on the floor in front of him and say, with a smile as of gratified pleasure, "Why, William, isn't this nice? We haven't eaten on the floor since we were married. So like the old picnic days!" Then she tried to rearrange the broken crockery and rescue the supper. It was too much for me, and I guess Bill thought he had gone far enough, for he began to smile and abandoned his assumed inebriety. "Mary, my dear," he said, "I brought home a couple of friends to supper. They're outside and--" "Brought home friends to supper," cried his wife, jumping to her feet, "brought them home to supper, did you, without notice to me, when you knew it was Sally's afternoon out? I'll teach you," and she set both hands in his hair and shook him. "I've stood your freaks for sixteen years and been patient and loving, but this is more than human nature is capable of. Friends? No warning? What would they think of me?" Our entrance relieved the tragedy, but Jenks was terror-stricken. The surprise was too much for him. For the first time he realized that even the most docile of women have reservations and that every worm has some turning point. He finally explained the joke and it was received with his wife's smiles. He was desperately anxious to square himself and then and there presented her with twenty dollars, to which the sheriff added the ten-dollar bill which he insisted he had lost on the wager. I saw Jenks the following evening. "You'll never guess," he said, "what that woman did with the thirty?" I acknowledged my incapacity to cope with the subject. "Bought me a smoking-jacket, a meerschaum pipe and three boxes of Havanas. And, my boy," he added, "I've quit drinking. She's so good that I'm going to see all I can of her in my lifetime, for we'll keep house separately in the next world." I guess he's right, for they'll certainly feel called upon to build a special alcove in heaven when she reaches there. Your snappy observation that the poorest men on earth are the relations of millionaires strikes me in a very sensitive spot. I realize its truth, and I can assure you that if something is not done speedily to decrease the discrepancy between my income and my outgo, there will be a sensational story for the newspapers, with cuts--cuts of you and me, with possibly a picture of the hog plant thrown in for decorative purposes. If you think this would be a good ad., I'll play the cards as they lay. If not, please see to it that my expense accounts are accepted more in the spirit in which they are made. My ex-guardian, the sheriff, has given me many pointers on how to escape the debt trap--it was after I settled his particular claim--but I don't think you'd care to have me get a reputation as a shirker of obligations. Sometimes, though, the escapes from the clutches of the law are very amusing. The sheriff tells of a good one that happened recently in Indianapolis. It seems that a young spendthrift was arrested for debt on the very day he was to be married to a wealthy widow. Knowledge of his plight would put an end to his expectations in this direction, and he was at his wits' ends as the two officers escorted him along the street. In front of the City Hall a carriage was standing and as they approached the mayor of the city entered it and conversed for a moment through the window with a friend. Mr. Spendthrift had an inspiration and said to the officers: "You know that gentleman who got into that carriage?" "Yes," said one of them, "It's Mayor B----." "Well, he's my uncle, and if I ask him he'll see me out of this thing. You'll take his guarantee, of course." The deputies thought it would be satisfactory and when they reached the carriage the men hung back. The young man took off his hat and put his head into the carriage window just as it was about to start. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayor," he said, "but there are two men with me who have influence in the seventh ward. They say they'll be glad to work for you at the election next week if you'll give them any encouragement." "Very well," said the mayor, "bring them here." The spendthrift beckoned to the deputies and they approached. The mayor looked them over and said: "Come around to my office at 5 o'clock this afternoon and I'll fix up this matter." Then he drove off and the spendthrift borrowed half a dollar of one of the deputies, went and got shaved and then married. I simply mention this to illustrate to what extremities an appetite for truffles and mushrooms may lead a young man whose pocket money prescribes cheese sandwiches and spinach. For the honor of the name I must not be permitted to be set down as deficient in credit. This really _must_ appeal to you. As you say, a man must not overwork a dollar, and the thirty of them I am now receiving per week get fatigued to a standstill within twenty-four hours after I make their acquaintance. Yours in trust, P. P.S. I would respectfully suggest that you do not show this letter to mother. The story of Bill Jenk's wife might not appeal to her. [Illustration: _The Son's Society Girl._] LETTER No. XV. _The oddities and humors of railroad travels appeal so strongly to Pierrepont that he writes his father of them, as well as of a breach-of-promise suit._ FALL LAKE, Mich., Sept. 7, 189-- _Dear Father_: Replying to your last budget of aphorism and advice, I must say that it pains me somewhat to find my own father skeptical as to the history of the fish I caught at Spring Lake. The only lies I have ever told thus far have been on the road for Graham & Co., and I'm not going to begin any outside prevaricating on such trivial articles as fish. By the way, why do they use the term "fish stories" as a generic description for falsehoods? If the world only knew its business, "pork yarns" would be the synonym henceforth and forevermore. But a truce to the finny tribe! I note with joy that the wisdom of the "House" has decreed that I am to be assistant manager of the lard department on my return. Now, to be honest, there's nothing very fascinating about tried-out pig fat, but the prospects of staying in good old Chicago right along atone for anything. We college men at first condemn our city because it seems the right and proper thing to do, after Boston; but let me tell you that a few months on the road will knock all that nonsense out of a fellow for good, and he's willing to swear that old "Chi" is the nearest copy of the New Jerusalem that's yet been invented. Allow me to congratulate you on your good taste, my dear father, in gilding the lard pail with the fifty per you mention. I haven't sold so very many goods, but I like to see that you recognize good intentions. I have always believed that the Graham products could be made to sell better if certain imperfections could be eliminated, and these I have tried to point out to you, from time to time. It speaks well for your good sense that you haven't got offended at my blunt speech. Of course I can't help feeling elated, also, at my rapid rise in the business. It isn't every young man who can climb from eight dollars a week to fifty in about a year; it only goes to prove my pet theory that to the son of the "old man" all things are possible. I'm coming back to town with the firm determination to make the manager of the lard department look like three battered dimes. As you say, it's my business to do my work so well that I can run the department without him, and I'm going to bring that about pretty deuced quick, because I need his job. I rely on your shrewd sense of economy to fire him the moment he becomes superfluous. Your observation to the effect that a man who can't take orders can't give them, may be true enough in the pork-packing business, but did you ever watch a Pullman car conductor? The only person I can conceive of giving him orders is the porter, and I presume there's sufficient _esprit de corps_ to lead the subordinate functionary to at least make a pretence of deference due, and take out all his bossing on the passengers. As you must be aware from the way I've been eating my way through mileage books, I've made some long jumps lately. It was necessary, for as soon as I gladdened your paternal heart by becoming the "car lot man" you once expressed some doubt of my ever being, I saw at once that I had no business in towns where a car load of anybody's lard--to say nothing of ours--would last so long as to become eventually a public nuisance. My long railroad trips have broadened my point of view of life materially, and have incidentally given me no little amusement. I tell you, father, outside of your letters there's no place where human nature can be studied so well as on a railroad train; whether it is the nervous strain of travel, or the clickety-click of the wheels, or the rapid motion, a man on a train comes pretty near acting out his real nature. It's pretty hard to be a hero to a "Limited" conductor. Thanks to the methods of American railroading, democracy is at its zenith on the cars. True, we have gradations, but the people who ride second-class are seldom appealing, while the parlor car is really very little of a barrier against the touching elbows of the most diverse elements of society. For a collection of all sorts, commend me to the parlor coach of an express. You are quite as likely to be bled in a game of freeze-out in the smoker next to the buffet, as you are in a less expensive portion of the train. There was a very merry crowd of travelling men on the "Gilt-Edge" Express the other afternoon when I came through. It was a hot day and very few of the boys took the parlor, preferring the greater freedom from constraint of the ordinary smoker. If this had not been the case, perhaps the incident which I am to relate--merely as a warning to you, for I know you take the "Gilt-Edged" occasionally--might not have occurred. The train stops at the Junction, you know, about ten minutes, and the majority of the boys got down to stretch their legs on the platform and get a bit of air, for even Indiana air is better than no air at all. As I strolled along, smoking, my attention was attracted by a young woman who was pacing slowly up and down the extreme end of the platform. As I am not especially observant of the fair sex, the fact that I noticed her at all is proof that she was considerably out of the ordinary in the feminine line. In fact, she was ripe fruit from the very top layer. She had a music roll under her arm, and a tailor-made gown that, fitting perfectly, showed that not quite all the modern Venuses have been corralled for the "showgirl" department of musical comedy. It was little wonder, then, that one of the band of travelling men should have disentangled himself from his fellows and extended his promenade up into the reservation affected by the Beauty, for closer inspection subsequently proved that she was entitled to the name and to the initial capital I've employed. The two paced up and down, as people will, and passed each other several times. It chanced that just as this passing was about to occur again, the music roll fell to the platform. A raised hat, a returned music roll, a smile, a murmured "thank you," were the preludes to a more extended conversation. I noted that at the fall of the music roll a slight laugh arose from several of the older fellows, but I paid no attention to it at the time, being otherwise engaged. When the train started the young woman was helped into the parlor car by her new acquaintance, and provided with a seat which, as he put it, he had secured for his sister, who, at the last moment, had postponed her journey. He was rather young, this travelling man, so his trepidation is explained. It was scarcely necessary, as I have since learned, for him to sneak out and surreptitiously pay for both seats. It was surprising how this little incident affected the railroad business. Almost all the drummer clan moved up into the parlor coach. I imagined at the time that they envied their associate his prize and wished at least to share his very evident satisfaction by witnessing it. The young man was most gallant, and everything that the train boy offered, from the latest novel to chocolates and smelling salts, was left in the young woman's custody. Never have I seen a train boy who made as many trips in a given time. The dining car had been put on at the Junction--the train, you know, gets in just between hay and grass on the meal question--and the porter's announcement had scarcely left his lips before the couple were at the table. Most of the boys went, too, and watched with evident delight the exquisite taste and lavish appetite with which the young woman selected from the _à la carte_ menu. I was one of the few who saw the check after it was all over, and its duplicate would practically annihilate half a week's salary for me. It was over quite soon, for, just as the pair had begun to sip their cordial, the train whistled and slowed down. I thought there must have been an accident, for the train is an express with no stops indicated between the Junction and the terminus. But the young woman was better posted, for she interrupted the flow of conversation and _liqueur_, by gathering up the beneficences heaped upon her, for sundry considerations, by the train boy. The young man expostulated, but she nodded her head and said something in a low tone. Just then the conductor of the regular train came into the dining car. "Oh, there you are, Bessie! I thought I'd find you here. Hurry now! Remember, you nearly got a fall yesterday by being slow." The car was rosy with grinning faces by this time, but the red flush on the young man's cheeks was certainly the most conspicuous feature. But I am pleased to say that he kept a stiff upper lip and assisted the young woman off the train. When he returned it was on the run--in the gathering up of the books, boxes and magazines, the young woman had forgotten her music roll. He had to throw it at her as the train rolled ahead. There was no hope for him; he had to go back into the dining car, for the check had not been paid. As he opened the door he met the porter and hurled one question at him. "Why in thunder did the train stop here?" "Stops ebry day, sir," answered the grinning son of Ham. "Dere's a bridge ahead an' we has to slow down, an' as Miss Bessie's de engineer's daughter, he makes it a full stop so she kin ride home on the Express." It was really pitiful what the young man was forced to endure as he walked back to his table. It is but simple justice to him to say that he stood his ground bravely, doubled the denomination of his check for the benefit of his guyers, and tried to drop vague hints as to future carriage rides. It was of no avail, however, for every man jack of them, except himself, knew that Bessie was an established institution on the "Gilt Edge," and that it was accounted a pretty dull trip when she failed to add to the revenue of the dining car. Of course she is doing a certain sort of good in the world, on her daily trip from her music lesson, in taking some of the conceit out of fresh young men, but I really think it would be quite as well for her if she rode on the engine with her father. The balance of that run was devoted to stories of somewhat similar experiences. Job Withers--he is sure to be around when anything happens--told one on himself which sounded a bit apochryphal, but is nevertheless worth repeating, as illustrating how easy it is to simplify a situation by speaking the right word at the right time. As Job tells it, he draws a verbal picture of a very pretty girl in a crowded car and confesses to having honored her with glances more admiring than strictly decorous. "She was a beauty, boys, and no mistake, and I envied the old lady who sat with her. When the old lady left the train I sauntered out upon the platform and stayed there till the train slowed down for the next stop. Then I wandered in again and, stopping beside the young Hebe, I inquired in my most dulcet tones, 'Is this seat engaged, miss?' "She looked up straight into my face, and her baby-blue eyes seemed to be making a bill of lading of me. Then she spoke up in a sweet, clear, distinct voice, that must have been heard in every part of the car. 'No,' she said, 'this seat isn't engaged, but I am, and _he_ is just getting aboard the train.' "And he was, six feet seven of him, with hands like friend Piggy's hams. I tell you, boys," concluded Job, "I felt about as cheap as the man who raised a warranted watch-dog from a pup, taught him to fetch and carry things, and, when burglars broke into the house, discovered their presence without his dog's assistance, and found that the faithful brute was doing credit to his training by trotting about after the burglars with their lantern in his mouth." I got quite a shock to-day by the receipt of a letter, forwarded from Chicago, from one Silas Pettingill, attorney at Doolittle's Mills, Ind., informing me that Miss Verbena Philpot had decided to sue for breach of promise in the sum of $10,000. The only way in which this calamity could be staved off, according to Mr. Pettingill, was by my going to Doolittle's Mills and making "other arrangements," which I firmly decline to do. Verbena is all right on her native heath, but I fear that transplanting her to Chicago wouldn't be healthful for her or me. Talk about your simple, confiding farmers and all that sort of rubbish! I believe that if old "Vebe" Philpot should come to Chicago and walk up and down State street a couple of times, he would have the biggest bunco artist in town skinned to his last nickel before sundown. As it is, however, the thing looks rather ugly, and I don't know but I had better be absent from home for a year or so. Why couldn't I be made manager of your London branch instead of monkeying with the lard department? Your threatened son, P. P.S. In some roundabout way you may hear of the train escapade with the engineer's daughter. The boys on the road are no respecters of persons and are likely to make most any one the hero of a story. Should some hint connecting me with the affair reach you, it will be only necessary to recall that you heard the story first from me. LETTER No. XVI. _The Game of Golf, a most peculiar banquet, a social lion's fall and his escape from threatening legal meshes, inspire Pierrepont's pen._ CHICAGO, Sept. 20, 189-- _Dear Father_: Your little joke about being almost well and about broke at Carlsbad strikes me as about the limit in sarcastic humor. It's always so easy for millionaires to talk about being broke, that they're about the only ones who do it. It's the same with clothes, you know. If I dressed like Russell Sage, you wouldn't have me in the lard department ten minutes. On the whole, I guess you'll get back somehow, even if you have to draw on London for a thousand or two. I don't mind telling you that I'm doing great work in my new position. I don't know whether the manager of the lard section could do without me or not, but I'm dead sure I could do without him, for a more pompous ass never yet brayed in an office. He told me to-day that I ought to be very thankful for the accident of birth, and I countered on him by telling him he ought to be devilish glad my father was a good-natured man. I think that when you get home, we'll revolutionize this department. I can already see that there is great waste going on here; the amount of hog fat they are putting into the lard is simply scandalous. While I think about it, I want to ask you if you can't find a good place for my old college friend, Courtland Warrington. Court is a perfect gentleman, and would be an ornament to the packing house, if you could only manage to keep him out of Milligan's way. I think that wild Irishman would kill him if he ever caught sight of his stockings. Of course Courtland ought to have something that wouldn't grate on his refined tastes and dignified style. Pasting labels on cans might do, but I don't think sorting livers would appeal to him. Anyway, I rely on you to fix up something nice and genteel for Court; he is very unfortunate in having an unsuccessful father. I'll tell the Beef House people to look up the export cattle business, as you request, and tell it to 'em good and hard. If there's anything I like to do it's to give orders to fellows that are not under me; I believe this shows that I have the making of a successful business man concealed within me. I'd like to know, however, what this General Principle is you speak of as being in my department; up to now I never thought there was any principle in it. Don't worry that I am to become a golf maniac, dear dad. My first day on the links was my last, and the article you saw in that Chicago paper about my appearance as a putter was very misleading. The fact is that I had gotten half around the promenade when I unfortunately allowed my brassy-niblick, or something of that sort, to come into contact with my caddy's head, and the game ended at the moment he was carried away on a stretcher. The caddy's father, a bullet-headed Dutchman, who was utterly unamenable to reason, had me arrested for assault and battery, and it made terrible inroads into my surplus to get him to withdraw the charge and to square the police reporters. No golf for Pierrepont, so you may calm your perturbed spirit. If I want highballs, I know where I can connect with 'em, and the place isn't a thousand miles from the packing house, either. Curiously, they have a concoction there known as a "Graham Fertilizer." I tried one, and I must say that the man who could drink two must have a stomach of brass. Speaking of the stomach reminds me of a banquet. I can't imagine how it happened, but when the news leaked out that you had gone to Europe, so soon after calling me in from the road, the impression gained currency in some quarters that I had been placed in charge at the "House." You will appreciate that it's a pretty leathery sort of a proposition to have to go around denying a report that your own father has done the square thing by you, and explaining that you are in reality only first assistant manager of the lard department, and that a salt-pickled Celt named Milligan is still so far above me that I get a crick in the neck looking up at his exaltedness. So I decided that the best thing I could do was not to deny the rumor and to accept all the honors likely to be thrust upon me. This may be obtaining distinction under false pretences, but it's less embarrassing than confessing that one's father is so thoroughly under the domination of a man who eats, drinks, sleeps and thinks pig, as to ignore the claims of blood and heredity. What could I do, for instance, when a number of friends proposed to give a banquet in my honor? If I had refused they would have said that I was a hog myself, besides being in the business; for people who get up banquets for other people are really only seeking an excuse to give themselves a good time. How could I disappoint them? Anyway, the banquet came off on the appointed date. It was really an elaborate affair, the sixty guests sitting at tables fairly buried in flowers. It was doubtless thought to be a delicate compliment to the guest of the evening--meaning your only--that a few feet down the table at whose head I sat, and facing towards me, stood the life-sized figure of a hog, done in white roses and with a pail of our lard in its mouth; but I submit that there _are_ better appetizers than a reminder of the source of our prosperity. I accepted the situation and swallowed the pig--metaphorically, of course--with all the grace I could assume. The menu card at my plate was an elegant affair, evidently handwork, and was different in design from those of the others, although I was kept too busy in conversation with my neighbors to read it. The service of the dinner was perfect, the well-trained waiters moving noiselessly to and fro and depositing the various courses without a word. A special attendant had evidently been assigned to me and I appreciated the distinction. The food that he served me, however, was, to say the least, peculiar. The soup tasted queer--like medicine; the oysters were replaced by curious tasting lumps served on shells, while the fish course was fishy enough in smell, but tasteless. I had eaten practically nothing, and when the _entrees_ brought me only a spoonful of something that looked surprisingly like hash, I looked around at the other fellows. I saw twinkling eyes, some of which fell upon the plates in front of their owners. A glance at the plates of my nearest neighbors showed that they were being served with quite different food from that which reached me. I began to smell something familiar, and surreptitiously glanced at my menu. The first thing that struck my eye was this line in gilt letters at the bottom: "This dinner prepared from recipes in Graham's celebrated booklet, '100 Dainty Dishes from a Can.'" You should hear the roar that went up, as the crowd saw that I was no longer shut out of their executive session. I could do no less than order up a case of wine (which you, of course, will pay for and charge to advertising account), and after that they let me have something to eat. It's a terrible thing to have one's father's business chickens come home to roost so frequently. I did not recover from this affair for two days, which will explain the absence from the office, of which I have no doubt Milligan has duly informed you. I have had a hearty laugh over your story of Hank Smith and his attempt to butt into Boston society with money, a brass band and fireworks. Hank made the great mistake of thinking that noise would go very far on Beacon street. And this just naturally reminds me of Baron Bonski, a self-made social lion, who had Boston's upper-tendom on tiptoe about the time I was a freshman in college. Bonski's method was the very antithesis of Hank's, and it worked as long as he chose to have it. The Baron floated gently into Boston one spring day, armed with letters of introduction to a few of the _literati_ from men of prominence in Europe. He straightway attended various "afternoons" of poets, artists and Bohemian philosophers. He was a little chap with a sad, pale face, dark and soulful eyes, a voice as mellow as new cider, and a gift of gab unceasing as the flow of the tides. He hinted at tragic love affairs and allowed it to get around that he had been expelled from Russia for revolutionary work. He was modest and retiring, and the more he retired at the literary functions the more people tumbled over themselves to dig him out. He made a distinct hit without doing anything in particular, except to look pensive and sow a crop of romantic rumors. The Baron quickly got next the residence problem in Boston. He hired a room in a side street, just far enough off Beacon street to be cheap, and just near enough to catch the sacred aroma of that classic thoroughfare. He filled up his place with Oriental toggery, and kept it lighted dimly and religiously with queer Eastern lanterns. A mysterious odor always hung over the apartment. Here the Baron began to receive the swells at five o'clock teas, over which he presided with a huge samovar. The thing was so new, so captivating, so full of charm, that half the society women in town, including Mrs. "Bob" Tiller, the leading lady of the whole bunch, used to drop in quite informally. They do say that the Baron became pretty well acquainted with the interiors, not to speak of boudoirs, of a good many of the great houses in town, and that his living expenses were pretty small during his first year in Boston. But in an evil hour Baron Bonski fell. He decided that he wanted more money, and he could conceive no better way of getting it than by writing novels. He found a publisher easily enough, and then he used his knowledge of society people for his books. He paraded the foibles of his friends under thin disguises, and even trotted out Mrs. "Bob" as one of his leading characters. The novels were pretty poor stuff, on the whole, but they got everybody hot, and the Baron's social star went down behind the horizon with a thud. Then his creditors began to worry him, his later books failed, ugly stories about his fraudulent title got around, and finally a brother novelist lampooned _him_. At last the town, which had warmed toward him at first, got too hot to hold him, and he resigned in favor of the next impostor. I simply mention the Baron's case to show you that you can get into Boston society all right by knowing just how to do it, but that you've got to stick to your original _rôle_ if you want to stay there. You will be gratified to learn that the little difficulty with Verbena Philpot and her pa is at an end. Although, when I asked your advice on how to meet the absurd charge, you politely informed me that it was my breach-of-promise suit, I know you will be glad not to find this particular Verbena blooming beneath your roof-tree. When you refused to aid me with your vast experience, I went to see George Damon, who graduated from Harvard Law in my sophomore year. I told him the facts and he looked so solemn that I made up my mind that all was over, and I tried to decide between Canada and South America as a place of residence. He never even laughed when I told him that old man Philpot had the reputation of bribing the drivers of rural conveyances to lose a tire off a wheel when they were driving by his place with an eligible stranger as passenger. "You won't marry the girl?" he asked. With as much courtesy to Verbena as I could at the time command, I replied in the negative. "How much can you give to settle the thing?" came next. I said almost any sum, but it would have to be in expectancy, for you had definitely declared yourself against any appropriation to take up mortgages for indigent farmers with beguiling daughters. "But you must get out of this without publicity," he said. "You'd be the laughing stock of the town." I admitted it sadly and he said he would do what he could. He began by writing letters, but Papa Philpot was evidently too old a bird to be caught by legal chaff. It was settle up, or marry and settle down, and that settled it. Finally, Damon told me that there was only one chance for me. He would go down to Doolittle's Mills and see the old man in person and try and argue him out of it. I was deeply grateful that he should make it such a personal matter, but he said it wasn't much, he needed a vacation anyway. Well, he went about three weeks ago and I accompanied him to the railroad station in a great state of nervousness. Three days later I received a letter from him stating that, although he had not sounded the old man yet, he had some hopes. Two other letters reached me within the next week, but no definite result had been attained. Then I heard no more and for the last fortnight I have dreamt of bridal wreaths that changed into halters and wedding-cake with iron bars embedded in the frosting. Yesterday I received this telegram: "NIAGARA FALLS, Sept 19. I am on my wedding tour. Verbena sends kind regards. George Damon." I am much relieved, but my mind will not be at complete rest till I find out whether Damon is a modern martyr or just plain damn fool. Your freed son, Pierrepont. P.S. I wonder if Damon--but there are some things in life before which even the most riotous imagination falters. LETTER No. XVII. _A boomerang wager, a story of Illinois justice, and a futile attempt at small economy, furnish the inspiration for Pierrepont's correspondence._ CHICAGO, Oct. 21, 189-- _Dear Father_: The enclosed clippings will doubtless prove even more explanatory to you than to me. I regret to learn from them and others--for all the newspapers had it--that you are being squeezed by being short on November lard. Couldn't you substitute some of the September variety that we have been unable to sell? It is naturally surprising to learn that you have become so involved, when I recall the wealth of good advice you have given me to avoid this sort of thing. I realize that you have the justification of a long line of precedent in not practicing what you preach, but do you think it wise to jeopardize the future of the "House" by being mixed up in deals of this sort, especially when you are not at home to look after them? Of course, had you placed the matter in my charge, the conditions to-day would be quite different. The gambling mania--and what is dealing in futures of grain or pork but gambling?--is certainly a terrible disease to encourage. No one who begins knows where he will leave off. Of course I do not presume to comment on your conduct; these remarks are purely impersonal; but I must admit that I am glad you did not include Monte Carlo in your European itinerary. The late John T. Raymond, the actor, used to say that he'd gambled away several acres of business blocks. Not that he ever owned any, but he might have done so had he not gambled. For he lost, as every man who gambles does in the long run, I am told. He would bet on anything, from the time of day to the complexion of the next person to turn a corner. His infirmity was well known in the theatrical profession and sometimes advantage was taken of it to lay pre-arranged wagers in which Raymond must get the worst of it. A veteran actor whom I met the other evening tells of an incident of this sort. It occurred here in Chicago years ago, when Raymond was playing "Mulberry Sellers" at McVickers. One afternoon he came into the hotel office and sat down to chat with some friends. As he crossed one leg over the other, a particularly striking pattern of fancy sock was exposed to view. Some one commented on the brilliant colors and Raymond held up his foot and looked at it admiringly. "Isn't it great?" he said. "I found that in Wanamaker's in Philadelphia. I guess they had the only line, for I've never seen a duplicate of the pattern." "Come now, Mr. Raymond," spoke up a young actor. "They don't have all the good things in Philadelphia. Chicago has anything that any city has." "Most things, young man," laughed Raymond, "but not a stocking like this," and he surveyed it again critically. "No sir-ee, there's not another stocking like it in Chicago, I'll bet." "What will you bet?" asked the young man quickly, with a laugh. "Oh, anything," answered Raymond. "Cigars for the crowd?" "Certainly, and the best in the house," agreed the actor. "You bet, Mr. Raymond, that there's not another stocking in Chicago like that one?" "Yes." "Well, what's the matter with the one on your other foot?" cried the young man, triumphantly, while a roar of laughter went up from the bystanders. "Well," drawled Raymond, "strangely enough, young man, you have propounded a conundrum for which I've been unable to find an answer. What _is_ the matter with the stocking on my other foot? This is the way it came back from the laundry." He pulled up his trouser leg and exhibited a faded stocking that looked as if it had been exposed to some powerful bleach. "This certainly isn't like the other one. Now if there _is_ one in Chicago I'd like to have it, for I never did care for a fancy-matched span." The young man had no zest for further search. His own joke, the inspiration of the moment, had turned upon him and the arrival of the cigars he knew to be the best antidote for the general laughter and jests of which he was the victim. This instance of circumstances and a laundry conspiring to defeat a practical joker may not have a dyed-in-the-wool moral, but it has a philosophical ring and I have often noted that your wise saws and modern instances often sound better than they look when dissected. _Par example_, I fail to see the application to me of your sententious observation that some men do a day's work and then spend six days admiring it. From your knowledge of me, as expressed in your letters, you cannot believe me guilty of the day's work. As for self-admiration, the glass which you are constantly holding before me is no flatterer, and conceit has been thumped out of me with the unremitting persistency of a pile-driver. After the perusal of one of your letters, I always feel so small that if I looked as I felt I'd be valuable as a midget. [Illustration: _The Son as Manager of his Father's Pork-packing Establishment._] As you say, there is room at the top, but not much elsewhere. That's just exactly how I feel about the pork-packing business. In order to expedite my progress I, day before yesterday, informed the manager of the lard department that either he or I would have to quit the employ of Graham & Co. In case he decided that I had better go, I warned him that it was my intention to take the first European steamer to lay certain facts before you. I knew that it would be no use for me to appeal to Milligan, for it is a bed-rock principle of that dignitary's life that I am always wrong. The next day the manager of the lard department was not on hand. Milligan asked for him and I said, "I am the manager." "Umph!" he grunted. (Did you ever notice how exceedingly porcine is Milligan's grunt?) "Where's Welch?" "I discharged him yesterday," I replied. "You--_you_ discharge him? It's impossible. You have no right," blustered your Hibernian auxiliary. "Haven't I the right?" I answered. "Well, perhaps not." Then I told him one of my stock stories, a true tale of Illinois in the early days. A newly appointed Justice of the Peace had as his first case a charge of horse stealing. The accused man's guilt was palpable enough and there were grounds for belief that a recent epidemic of this sort of thieving was to be attributed to him. At all events the J. P. decided that it was no case for half way measures and that he would try it himself without wasting time getting together a jury. In about fifteen minutes he found the prisoner guilty and ordered the constable to get the nearest available rope and hang the condemned directly. The horse thief had a friend within hearing, who, when he saw how things were going, went in hot haste after the only lawyer the settlement boasted. The lawyer, inspired by a liberal retainer, galloped up in hot haste and sought the Justice of the Peace. "Your honor," he exclaimed at the close of a fervent plea, "you have no jurisdiction or power to condemn the prisoner to death. You can only hold him for a higher court. You cannot hang him." "Wa-al," said the justice, aiming a quid of tobacco at the window, "you seem to know a lot about the law an' I'm obleeged to you. But as to hanging this man, if you'll look out that thar window p'raps you'll change your mind as to whether I kin do it or not." And he pointed calmly to a most potent argument, a body swinging from the end of a limb of a neighboring tree. "I may not have the right," I added to Milligan, "to fire Welch, but, by George, I had the power, for he's gone." The fact is--I didn't tell Milligan, for I wouldn't give him the satisfaction--I happened to learn that Welch was giving the "House" the double cross. For half a dozen years he's been running a sort of illicit still for lard and been selling it on the quiet to our customers. As our business has grown rapidly and as his sales were but a flea bite, it was not noticed until I probed his secret. If it hadn't been for my affection for exercise about a green table I shouldn't have spoilt Welch's sport. Old Si Higginbotham came to town last week and I met him one evening when he was pretty well steam-heated. He insisted on trying to tear up the cloth with a cue and, for the trade's sake, I gave him his head. The more games we played--with lubricants--the mellower he became, and before I could get him to bed he had wept the color completely out of the shoulder of my coat. Incidentally he blurted out about Mr. Welch's neat side line, and after I had verified the facts I taxed him with it. As I do not want to interfere too much in the business during your absence, I have appointed no successor to my former place as assistant manager of the lard department, but am holding down both salaries. There is really no need of an assistant. The only duty of the manager is to boss the assistant and you ought to hear me order myself around. I'm not particularly enraptured with the job, and if you think I deserve further promotion please cable (at my expense). You will be pleased, I know, to learn that a week ago Thursday I quit smoking. It may sound strange to you when I say that I did it simply and solely because I was argued into it. I met Fred Pennypacker--paying teller in the Michigan National, you know--and offered him a cigar, which he declined, with the information that he had not smoked for five years. "Heart trouble?" I asked. "No," he replied, "marriage." "Oh, wife objected?" "Not at all," he answered. "Mrs. Pennypacker likes the odor of a good cigar. The fact is, Graham, after little Ernest came"--his boy--"I made up my mind to begin a special bank account for him by denying myself something. So I determined that it should be smoking, which did me no real good and cost a lot, for I cared only for the best cigars. I found it was costing me on an average over a dollar a day for tobacco. So ever since I have placed $30 a month to the young man's credit in the savings bank. In five years, with compound interest and a little extra change, it has amounted to nearly $2,000. When he is twenty-one it will be the nucleus of a fortune. Try it, Graham, it's much better than smoking." I suggested that I had no son to make it an object. "Well, you may have," was the reply, "and even if you don't you may be glad some day you've got the money." I fancy that perhaps he was thinking of the rumors that have placed you in a particularly splintery corner on November lard. But I thought of what he said several times and the next day, after trying in vain to smoke a cigar that I found in your desk, I decided to relegate smoking to the list of my banished small vices. That was a week ago last Thursday. Last Friday, day before yesterday, I met Pennypacker in the Palmer House café. "Hello, Fred," I said, "I want to tell you something. I've followed your advice." "Advice? What advice?" he asked. "Why, to quit smoking and save the money." "Did I tell you that?" he asked nervously, as he fumbled in his breast-pocket. "Certainly. You told me about little Ernest and--why, what are you doing?" He had pulled a case from his pocket and was biting off a cigar. "I thought you--" "Didn't smoke, eh? Well, I didn't till yesterday, when that blasted savings bank suspended." I resumed smoking Friday. In fact, Pennypacker and I had a regular smoke-talk. I've decided that if ever I save money it will not be by small personal economies. I've made up my mind that, as a general rule, economy is only a species of self-deception. The man who walks two or three miles to save car-fare gets the exercise as a bonus, but what sense is there in using postal cards to save postage and then sending telegrams to hurry up the answer? There was a fellow in college whose mania was to save shoestrings. He thought they ought to wear as long as the shoes and sooner than indulge in the lavish expenditure of a nickel for a new pair, he'd cover his feet all over with knots and blacken up twine with ink. Yet when this chap wanted a cuspidor, nothing but an $18 majolica affair would satisfy him. The man who makes his money by slow savings seldom knows when he's got enough, and even if he finds out he never knows how to let down the bars so that he can enjoy it. Habit is a stern taskmaster and I have no wish to degenerate into a miser. There is, of course, a mean between a spendthrift and a miser, but the difficulty is in determining where it is located. If I seem prolix on this subject it is because I find that my $50 salary and that of the late Manager Welch combined, seem to go no farther than did the eight per with which I started my tumultuous business career. If a man has one dollar a week clear he is seldom likely to have very expensive tastes, but give him a few hundred a year more than demanded for the absolute necessities of life and he forthwith becomes a plutocrat in his longings. This may be back-handed philosophy, but it's pretty straight goods so far as the majority of the rising generation are concerned. But I am infringing, dear father, on your chosen prerogative. Let me change the subject. Why is it that life on the road as a drummer seems to mark a man for life? Every time I meet a commercial traveller in a hotel he invariably fires at me, "What line are you in?" I have changed my tailor three times and have repeatedly altered my style of dress, but still they seem to recognize me as one of them. Can I never shake off the ear-marks of the road? I am thinking seriously of taking a course with a professor of deportment, for perhaps it is my manner. I am more inclined to think it due to daily association with Milligan. The drummer's stock query, "What line are you in?" is natural enough, but it gets to be a bore after a time. Job Withers tells a story that illustrates how it may annoy some people. It also illustrates how smart Job Withers is, which Job's stories usually do. One day, in the train, he says, he sat beside a rather striking-looking man who, he afterward learned, is a professor in Chicago University. Job tried to start up conversation, but with little encouragement. "Fine day," he ventured. "Well, yes," said the stranger. "Pretty good crops." "Fair." "Think we'll have a shower?" "Don't know." Job didn't give up, but all his questions begot monosyllables. Somewhat nettled, he said at last, "What line are you in?" "Brains," said the professor, laconically. "Umph!" said Job, "lucky, isn't it, that you don't have to carry any samples?" I'm glad your gout is better, father, it will not pain you so much when I try to--but I know you hate slang. Your rising son, P. P.S. Milligan talks a good deal about me around the office. He said this afternoon he expected that some day I'd discharge him. Thus do coming events cast their shadows before. LETTER No. XVIII. _How an Elder's conscience was amused at a church fair, the folly of telling a wife the truth, are among Pierrepont's topics._ CHICAGO, Nov. 2, 189-- _Dear Father_: I am sending this letter to you, special delivery, care of the New York branch, that you may feel that you are welcomed home. Although you have been abroad but a few weeks, I know that you will be glad to set foot on American soil once more. I wish I could be on hand to meet you and help sing "The Star Spangled," but I want to stay here and keep an eye on Milligan. In my absence he would be very likely to try and queer my record. It's a great pleasure to find from your last that you don't give a rag for the bulls on pork, because when I heard that they were going to have your heart's blood and make you squeal louder than any hog you ever assassinated, it just naturally made me feel a bit uneasy. I don't want to see the Graham money go flying on flyers, and ever since you showed me the error of my ways in dabbling in the Open Board, I thought that you, too, must have reformed. However, if you have got the bulls by their tails and can twist 'em till the critters bellow again, I'll forgive your little lapse from righteousness. But, somehow, I can't help thinking of old Elder Blivins, of the little New Hampshire town where we used to go summers before you got very rich. You remember the Elder,--a tall, thin man, with a conscience as highly developed as dyspepsia. Well, one Sunday he preached a mighty powerful sermon on gambling, and the way he did sock it at the sinners made my young blood run cold. There happened to be several summer visitors in his congregation that day, among 'em Colonel Porter, a big stock-broker of Boston, but that only inflamed the Elder all the more. He declared that the stock market was run by the devil in person, and that every man who took part in those hideous games of chance was predestinedly and teetotally damned. It was a scorcher, and the deacons congratulated him so heartily after the service that he naturally looked for a fifty-dollar raise in his salary, which was just then running more to potatoes than his needs seem to warrant. Colonel Porter looked a little hot under the frying, but he didn't make a fool of himself by going out. About the middle of the week the church had a Grand Fair and Sale for the purpose of raising funds to mend the chimney. There were candy tables, flower tables, and knit-goods tables; kissing booths, lemonade stands, cider stands, and coffee stands. But the crowds were always around the grab-bag and the place where tickets were sold for the "grand drawing" of a piece of Rogers statuary, representing two old codgers at a heartbreaking game of checkers. Colonel Porter was on hand as chipper as a lark, spending money like a hero and earning the blessings of all the ladies. He kept away from the grab-bag until he saw Elder Blivins standing by, and then he sailed up. He allowed that he wanted the gold ring that was said to be in the bag, and he paid his money and took a draw. He got a birchbark napkin ring tied with a yellow ribbon. "Pshaw, Elder," said the colonel, looking old Blivins right in the eye, "this is a hideous game of chance." The Elder blinked a moment, as if he were trying to think of something, but he never yipped. "Come on, Elder," said the colonel heartily. "I want that Rogers group the worst way. One of the old bucks looks just like my grandfather used to when grandmother wigged him. I'm willing to gamble good and hard for that group. I'll take--" "Put up your filthy lucre, sir!" shouted the Elder. "The devil don't run this church, and there isn't going to be any drawing." So saying, he knocked off one of the heads of the Rogers group with his cane, kicked the grab-bag down the cellar door, ordered the crowd to vamoose, put out the lamps, and locked up the vestry. Then he disappeared from public view until the following Sunday, when he preached his memorable discourse on the text, "Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." And they do say that Colonel Porter put a century-run dollar bill into the contribution box that day to make up for the loss the fair sustained through his little joke on the parson. I simply mention this story of the Elder as an example of how a man's conscience for other folks may be extraordinarily active, while that section reserved for himself may be sound asleep. And some graceless individual generally holds the alarm clock. In commenting on the Elder's sudden change of heart, Colonel Porter admitted that he was pretty hard on the old chap. "But if he was ever to reform it was time he began," he said. "Some people seem to think that it's never too late to reform or"--softly--"or to become a lawyer." This meant a story, for the colonel never chuckled except when he felt anecdotal. "Speaking of lawyers," mused the colonel, "there's a man in Boston who's done more things, it seems to me, than any one I ever knew. He has run stores of all sorts, has been a real estate agent, a promoter, a journalist, a fiddler in an orchestra, and tuba in a band. A few years ago he opened a fish market in the winter, sold it out two days before Lent and went into the cultivation of strawberries. He couldn't be content long enough to make a success of anything. He didn't stick at anything long enough to even lose money at it, to say nothing of making it. One day I met him near the Court House, hurrying along with an earnest, wrapt look in his eyes. I knew at once that he had a new call of duty, for he always began like a steam engine. "'Hulloa, Caldwell," I said, 'what you up to?' "'Got to hurry to court,' he answered. "'What's up,' I asked, 'not in trouble, I hope?' "'No, indeed,' he said. 'But perhaps you haven't heard. I'm in new business.' "'Indeed!' I said, with as great a show of interest as I could command in a man whom I never met without learning of a change of calling. 'What now?' "'Oh, I'm an expert,' he said, proudly. "My face must have expressed interrogation, for he hastened to explain. 'An expert for legal cases, you know.' "'In what line?' I ventured. "'Oh, anything,' he replied. In view of his record I was free to admit mentally that his experience was no better in any one thing than in any of the others. A month or so later I was riding in an open car with a friend of Caldwell's, when we passed that chameleon. He had a blue bag under his arm and looked happy. "'There's Caldwell,' I remarked. 'Wonder how he is doing as an expert witness?' "'Oh, he gave that up several weeks ago,' retorted my companion. 'His court attendance gave him a new inspiration. He's studying law now.' "'Studying law!' I cried, in amazement. 'Studying law at 65? The idiot!' "'I don't know about that,' said my friend. 'He may not be such a fool as he looks. I was surprised when he told me that he was going to try the bar examination next spring, and expressed it. He smiled significantly and said he guessed he'd get through all right. 'You see,' he said, 'my wife's word is law, and she's been laying it down to me for thirty years.'" "Hence," said the colonel, "it's never too late for some men to reform--to desert or to take to the bar." I'm sure I have no desire to be a humming bird in life, to flit from flower to flower; but I shall not be sorry if some day a stentorian call comes to me to forsake the pork industry. I am not much of a farmer, but I'm cock sure you can't make cider out of dried apples, and as far as taste for the business of selling pig is concerned, I'm threaded on a string from the rafters. I really think it's time that the family name was taken out of trade. Where would the "four hundred" be if the Astors and Vanderbilts and the rest of the aristocracy had stuck to the business that made them rich? It's actually indecent for the wealthy to parade the source of their prosperity to the populace. May I venture a suggestion? Why not capitalize the Graham plant? You can do this at a figure about four times its worth, sell almost half of the stock, keep the rest and own the plant after all is done. If this isn't kicking the gizzard out of the old proverb that you can't eat your cake and have it too, I'm a Dutchman. Besides, when you are an incorporated company, or in a merger, you're respectable. The grease don't come off dividend checks. Then if, as a clincher, you give away some of your surplus to educational institutions, you've headed your family along the highway which leads to seeing your name in another part of the newspapers than the court calendar. You certainly owe something to your descendants, for upon them depends the future of your own reputation. The original money grabber of a great family may have dug clams and robbed widows and orphans, but his memory swells into gigantic proportions when his multi-millionaire great-grandchildren know that he is so generally forgotten as to be talked about with impunity. You may not take kindly to this, but mother has social aspirations. She will probably never get any farther, personally, than an extremely pink tea, but she would be encouraged if she had some hope of being pointed to in her portrait as the grandmother of people to whom trade will be only a despised heirloom, to be stored in the garret with the haircloth sofa. I presume that you are to stay at the Waldorf-Astoria while you linger in New York. Let me, as a dutiful son, give you a tip as to your bearing in that hostelry. Don't let on that you are a pork packer from Chicago, if you value the contents of your pocketbook. They'll skin you, dress you and salt you while you wait, if they find out your profession. And don't tell the clerk that you're the father of Pierrepont Graham who stopped at his hotel for awhile, a little over a year ago. I believe there's still a little something due for extras from that visit of mine, and I am considerate enough not to want to get you into any muss about that robber baron bill. You are somewhat of a stranger in New York, and I want to caution you against travelling around town exposing your massive gold chain with the hog watch-charm you affect. Somehow a sucker is viewed by the amount of yellow metal he displays on his vest, and I don't want to hear that you have been treated to knock-out drops or tapped on the cranium with a sandbag, just because you look like a guy with an inflated wallet. All I ask of you is, that you get back safe to Chicago to straighten out the business. Since I have assumed control of the lard department there have been two strikes and one lock-out in our branch of the business, and I don't know whether to close down the department altogether or to raise everybody's wages and make it up on the quality of the lard. Even Ma is beginning to kick, for she says she has a life interest in the business and she can't see why your rheumatism should be allowed to cut her dividends in two. I read her your excellent advice as to the sin of worrying, but it had no effect on her. She says that any woman who has a gallivanting husband and a fool son has the right to worry, and that she will keep right at it until you drive up to the door, when she will give you a welcome home that you will remember. Perhaps you had better come in by the back entrance and let her discover you in bed suffering the tortures of the damned, as they say in novels. Nothing disarms a woman like a man keeled over by disease. In any event, don't tell her the truth about your European trip and its little enjoyments. If you do, you may have something like the experience of Henry Bagshot. As you, I have reason to believe, know, Bagshot is an habitual poker player--one of the kind who'd rather sit up all night saying, "that's good," than make fifty thousand by a _coup_ on the Exchange. In twenty-seven years of married life, it seems he has concealed from Mrs. B. his feverish anxiety to draw one card for the middle, and has always had some good excuse for his late sessions. But about a month ago he had a bad attack with his heart and the doctor who pulled him through warned him that life was not eternal in his case any more than with the rest of us. It gave Bagshot a creepy feeling to see the "Gates Ajar," and for a couple of weeks, when his fingers itched for the chips, he let it go at scratching. When he fell there was a terrible thud and it was 4 A.M. when he crawled into the family mansion. Mrs. B. was sitting up. She had feared the worst. A compunction of conscience, due to the graveyard suggestion of his medical advisor, struck Bagshot when the lady of his choice propounded the usual conundrum and he weakened. His carefully prepared explanation stuck in his throat and he blurted out: "Very sorry, my dear, but the fact is I got into a game of poker at the club and--and I won eighty-five. Here they are, buy yourself something." And he dropped the greenbacks into Mrs. B's lap. Then there _was_ a scene. She didn't believe him and could not be induced to do so. "Henry Bagshot," she cried, "in twenty-seven years you've never stayed away from home to play poker. It was not cards, but some awful hussy!" and she had hysterics till daylight and it cost Bagshot $2,500 for a new brougham and a span of horses before he could get away to breakfast. Whatever happens, no husband should tell the truth to his wife. Either she'd not believe him or the shock would kill her. Your cautious son, PIERREPONT. P.S. I wrote George Damon congratulations on his marriage to Verbena Philpot, the girl, you remember, whose father insisted that I should be his son-in law. The letter evidently followed him to Europe where the happy couple appear to have gone, for the other day I received this cablegram: "Letter received. Congratulations belong to you." LETTER No. XIX. _Pierrepont tells the governor "what's what" about Helen Heath and cites an example of matrimonial felicity secured by peculiar methods pursued by the husband._ CHICAGO, Nov. 7, 189-- _Dear Father_: You want to know who's Helen Heath and what's what about her. Well, sir, I can tell you right off the reel that she's the dearest girl on earth, and that she has promised to be my life antidote against the hog trade. She's the daughter of old General Heath, who hasn't a red cent to his name, and she hasn't a prospect in the world other than that of being your daughter-in-law, which is about as near to a settled fact as anything this side of heaven. That's who she is and that's what's what. But _what_ she is, I can't begin to tell you, and I don't believe you'd care to read it if I did. I find that a year and a half in Graham & Co. has sadly dulled my once radiant and classic vocabulary, and that the things I want to say about Helen keep getting tainted with the aroma of the trying-out vats and the smell of gloomy, gray sausages. It's no use, father, love and pork packing never did go together and never will. And you probably know without my telling you one article of food that will never appear on my Helen's table. But of course you do not need any rhapsody from me, for you know Helen already, and you admit that she's a peach, which is a pretty extreme thing for a man of your strength of mind to do. You say she treated you like a father on the voyage home. She had her cue, and I'm glad to find that our little game worked. Of course I wrote to London, where she has been staying for a month or two, giving her a tip on the steamer you were to take. I knew that if I broached the subject of Helen to you in the regular, orthodox way, you would fly into a tantrum and swear that no son of yours should ever marry the daughter of a penniless old lush like the general, no matter how sweet and worthy she herself might be. So I told Helen to get next you in a casual way, sparing no sugar in the process. From what you say, I should think she had used molasses instead, and if a man could reasonably be jealous of his own father, you'd certainly be the Cassio of our little play. Your observation that love in a flat with fifty a week isn't very bad, is interesting and no doubt true, but it's open to correction. Suppose we amend it by substituting the words "seventy-five" for "fifty," and then pass it without a dissenting vote. And the house gives notice that the governor need not object, because we shall certainly pass the bill over his head if he does. Of course, as you say, a wife doubles a man's expenses, but she doesn't begin to increase them as a "best girl" does. I think that's why a good many men marry young, especially those with a provident streak in them. They want to get to saving money as soon as possible; flowers and candy and books and theatres and carriages and suppers are pretty apt to average more than rent, frugal board and modest clothes. Of course, my wife is going to look decent, but there are a few things around which I am going to draw a good strong line. I shall lay down the proposition that a woman's hat ought not to cost more than four times what I pay for mine, which lasts a good deal longer. However, I believe Helen has a knack toward millinery which it will be well to encourage. If you tell your wife she's artistic, she'll work her fingers off to prove it to you. I have some very decided ideas on the conduct of the matrimonial partnership, and I propose to see that they are carried into effect. I do not mean to be a martinet, but I've kept my eyes open at home and abroad--especially at home--and I think I can say without egotism that I know a thing or two about married life. There is always an easy way for a man to be master in his own house. Although Dame Nature has not given me the same physical handicap as Homer Aristotle Eaton, the stockbroker, I fancy there is a good tip in his methods of home rule. Eaton, as you know, is a very little man, and, by one of the freaks of Cupid, he is married to a particularly fine specimen of the genus Amazon. Indeed, when they go out driving together, their outfit looks like one of those newspaper puzzle pictures: "find the missing man," you know. But although Mrs. E. is a masterful sort of woman, whose look would seem enough to annihilate the remaining sixteenth of their domestic unit, it is common knowledge that Homer Aristotle Eaton is the boss of his family ward. I used to think that this might be awe of the portentous name with which his parents cursed him, but his junior partner, Giles Corey, let the Angora out of the suit case the other night at a heart party--one of those affairs where hearts are the souvenirs and the play is to get as few of them as possible. "Yes," said Giles, in a pause for refreshments, "Eaton's high card in _his_ deck. He's pretty fussy and wants things his own way. And he's had them so for his eleven years of married life." "With that queenly woman!" cried one of the party. "She could annihilate him with a look," said another. "Ah, that's just it," was Giles' reply. "He don't give her a chance. You see, fellows, it's this way. The first time, years ago, that there was a difference between them, Eaton dropped the subject and came down town. Two or three hours later he called Mrs. E. on the 'phone. He was in the booth fully three-quarters of an hour and when he came out his face was as red as a boiled lobster. But, as I happen to know, he won his point. It was about inviting a certain man and his wife to dinner. Mrs. Eaton objected because they were not in her set. Eaton wanted them because the man was nibbling at his bait in a big deal. They went to the dinner." As there were several married men in the gathering, Corey was bombarded with questions as to his partner's secret. At last he said: "Well, I'll tell you, if you'll never quote me as your authority." As you, father, can be depended upon for secrecy, I am not violating confidence. "You see," said Corey, "Homer has a big bass voice and he could argue the Sphynx out of the sand or a New Yorker out of his conceit. The combination of voice and argument is irresistible--through the telephone--and Mrs. Eaton always wilts when he's held the line for a few minutes. Meek as Moses at home, he's a tyrant over his private wire. I honestly think that he has Mrs. E. hypnotized and that the sound of his ring puts her in a receptive mood. Homer confessed as much to me one day when he said, 'Giles, my boy, the puny little man with a bass voice finds his best friend in the telephone.'" Although I am not in the light-weight class, and favor in voice Jean rather than Edouard de Reszke, I think I can see a valuable suggestion in the Homer-Aristotle-Eaton method. An argument conducted from a distance certainly cannot end in woman's last resource and most potent argument--tears. I trust you will not fancy that I anticipate any domestic infelicity. I am only following your rule of being well prepared for all emergencies. I certainly intend to be a kind, loving, and--within my rights--pliable husband. Helen is a sweet-natured girl, but I don't expect her to be all sugar-cane and molasses. She'll scarcely equal in complacence the wife of a few very unhappy years, who, when her friends advised her to leave the husband who neglected and abused her, stood up in his defence and insisted that he was far kinder than they thought. "Why," she said, "it was only a few months ago that he celebrated the anniversary of our marriage--our wooden wedding." This was too much for her sister, who had spent several weeks with her at the time, to stand. "Wooden wedding, indeed!" she cried; "the only wooden wedding you had was when your brute of a husband came home and knocked you down with a chair!" It is surprising what a different thing the world becomes when a fellow is in love. I don't want to be a silly ass just because the prettiest, dearest girl on the footstool said "yes" instead of the "no" I really deserved, but I must tell somebody how happy I am. If I had money enough and was a sort of czar at whom people couldn't laugh without arrest for _lese majeste_, I'd have all the church bells rung, fire salutes on the lake front and send up balloons with Helen's name on 'em in twenty-seven foot letters. Until I met Helen Heath I thought I should never marry; in fact, I considered myself immune. But I hadn't seen her three times before she had me under her thumb, and the minute a girl has a fellow there, he, strangely enough, wants her hand. And I'm to have it and her heart with it, and she--well, she's to have me and the fifty per that you dole out to me. Occasionally I have the blues, declare that I'm not fit for her and feel as I felt on the road when I finally buncoed some confiding grocer to order a bill of our goods. I'm in a pretty tough dilemma, anyway, and unless you help me out I'll have difficulty in keeping my footing. When a fellow's head over heels in love and up to his ears in debt, it's certainly time for somebody to throw him a life-preserver. You, my dear father, can knock the cork jackets off all the coastguards in the service in this particular branch of the life-saving business, by just getting your fountain pen busy over a check-book. And how you would be repaid! We--and ours--would bless you far down the thundering ages. Think it over and cut your Boston visit short. I'm afraid for you in the Hub, anyway. You are very likely to get into trouble. Do you know, for instance, that it is believed by the best Boston families that capital punishment is a very light penalty for committing a solecism? Pray be careful. I do not wish to inherit through a tragedy. You will find me more serious than I used to be. Perhaps this is due in part to my realization of the responsibility that I am about to assume in the way of a father-in-law. General Heath is very friendly--indeed, I may say that we are on a very intimate understanding. I have already grown to know him so well that I am usually able to anticipate his wishes--that is, when I have the price. I confess it _is_ hard work to affect an interest in the story of the only battle in which he appears to have participated, on hearing it for the fourteenth time. But every rose has its thorn, and Helen Heath has the General. I have a friend or two at Washington, and, as you have several more, perhaps between us we shall be able to prove to him that republics are not always ungrateful. I think a South American or Pacific Island consulate would express the nation's gratitude with agreeable significance. When I put a plain gold ring under the diamond that I gave Helen--and which, I regret to say, is not yet paid for--I do not propose to marry her distinguished but slightly disheveled pater. The constant recital of that battle story might not destroy domestic felicity, but it would certainly give it an unsettled feeling. You might send him on the road if the government proves unmindful of its debt to him. He is fond of travelling, and he could scarcely sell less goods than I did. Of course, I'm glad you think Helen pretty and nice, but now that you know my intentions I shall rely upon your sense of good taste and the fitness of things to moderate your raptures. I agree with you that there is nothing in the theory that two can live cheaper than one. I wouldn't have one--that is, _the_ one--live on what I have been receiving since I accepted a position with your house. I intend that my wife shall feel that she is the real thing. While there are many signs to prove that Helen is not extravagant--thanks to the General, she's had no practice--she must not be pointed out on the street as your daughter-in-law and comments made in this vein: "How can that rich John Graham let her dress like that or live so!" You will not allow that, I know, for, with all your abstruse theories about economy and self-help, you'll appreciate that it is due to you to see to it that your only daughter is a credit to you. It would be a pretty bad advertisement for the business to have a dowdy daughter-in-law living in a dowdy neighborhood, now wouldn't it? And if we must be identified with the pork industry, there should be compensation. But we can discuss these things better when we are face to face. Your enamoured son, Pierrepont. P.S. I'm so happy and at peace with all the world that if I thought it would please him I'd invite Milligan to be my best man. LETTER No. XX. _Pierrepont's philosophy on matrimony is somewhat colored by the fact that he is a Benedict and it is evident that henceforth he will be too busy to write letters._ CHICAGO, Nov. 13, 189-- _Dear Father_: The seventy-five dollars a week that you promised me in yours of the 11th inst., are already mine, for there isn't any Helen Heath now. There _is_ a Mrs. Pierrepont Graham, whose first name is Helen, and I guess you'll find her pretty nearly the same young woman who took you into camp so neatly on the voyage to New York. She reached Chicago five days ago, and her glowing reports about your subjugation, backed up by your promise to raise me to seventy-five on the day I married Helen Heath, decided us to plunge into the sea of matrimony before we stopped to find whether the water was cold or not. It wasn't, as it happened; but that's another affair. Our wedding was a quiet affair, and would have pleased you by its utter lack of ostentation. We took a carriage at Helen's house and drove to the home of old Dr. Ramage, the superannuated Methodist parson, who is glad to eke out his stipend by marrying and no questions asked. Somehow General Heath got wind of what was going forward, and he sent out a line of scouts to reconnoitre our movements. One of his men intersected our line at Clark street, and an orderly was immediately despatched on a street-car to the general with the news in cipher. The gallant old commander mounted a hansom and proceeded on the double-quick to our temporary camp--otherwise the parlor of Dr. Ramage. He moved on us in good order, and charged our intrenchments just as the doctor was asking Helen if she would love, cherish and obey. He was in high good spirits--in fact, I should say that good spirits were high in him by the change in the atmosphere after he arrived--and he insisted that the ceremony be begun all over again, so that he shouldn't lose a single syllable. I am glad to find that the old boy is highly pleased by my alliance with his noble family. He cracked a joke to the effect that his side of the house had the blood and ours the pork, and that the combination would be irresistible; but I was too much absorbed in my own happiness just then to feel hurt. He wanted to know when you were coming home, as he had a very important business scheme to propose to you. If I were you I'd let him have ten or fifteen thousand for the sake of Helen, who is a dear girl, and takes after her mother. The going home to Ma was something of a trial, and if Helen hadn't been a mighty sensible girl, she'd have declined to stay in the house a single night. Ma cut up badly because there had been no bridesmaids nor wedding-cake, and when I quoted your endorsement of a speedy marriage, she said you were an old fool, who, if you had stopped to think, would probably never have got married yourself. I couldn't just see where she complimented herself very much by that, but I didn't try to show her the errors of her logic just then. I just bucked up and gave her a tremendous steer about the romance that must be in her nature, although perhaps long dormant from the force of circumstances. This veiled allusion to you mollified Ma a good deal, and pretty soon she calmed down completely and asked us to come in and stay as long as we liked. We made a very merry little party after all. Ma sent out to a caterer's for a good spread and produced some champagne in some mysterious manner--I'd no idea there was any in the house. Pretty soon the General turned up and Ma was wonderfully cordial. She even brought him a bottle of your 1830 Private Stock, and the way stock went down would have tickled the bears on 'Change half to death. The General was good enough to say, before we escorted him to his chamber, that your taste in such things was impeccable--that was his very word, "impeccable, sir." I can't refrain from telling you that he made a deep impression on Ma, and I think if I were you I wouldn't linger in Boston too long. Do you know that your last letter, so full of philosophy as applied to matrimony, has set me to wondering what has made you such an expert on wives. You talk of nagging women, and sulky women, and violent women, quite as if by the book. Where your vast experience in such matters has come from I can't quite make out. At any rate I want it distinctly understood that it mustn't be taken as reflecting on Ma. Ma is now ace high with Mr. and Mrs. Pierrepont Graham, having proven herself a true thoroughbred. She has cleaned the house entirely of Graham food products, sending them all to the Home for Half Orphans, has hired a decent cook in place of your Scandinavian horror, and allows that she likes the smell of cigars in the drawing-room. From this on, my vote is for Ma, no matter what office she may run for. I may mention in passing that Ma said a rather curious thing the other day, which you may be able to explain. I had made some foolish remark about getting a divorce because of something Helen had said, and Ma reproved me for it. I laughed and said to Helen, "Mother never could take a joke." This evidently displeased Ma, for she replied, "You seem to have forgotten, Pierrepont, that I married your father." Women are queer creatures, anyhow. You are everlastingly right, father, in what you say about the undesirability of having them in places of business. I took Helen to the packing house to-day, intending to show her through the establishment. But one glance at the luckless hogs "travelling into dry salt at the rate of one a minute," as you once so poetically expressed it, drove all idea of further investigation out of her pretty head. She said she'd take for granted all the wonderful facts of sausage and lard, and proposed lunch at the Palmer House instead. So you see, my little experiment took some valuable time out of the house. Helen goes further than either of us in this distaste for women in business and says she doesn't think we ought to have girl typewriters. That was after she caught sight of mine, who isn't the worst ever, as you know. But, so far, I am pleased to state, the honeymoon has not waned an atom. We are keeping pretty close to the house, for what a shock it would be to society if they knew we had been married without hustling off on a wedding tour. The bridal trip business has always struck me as nonsensical. The way people act after the minister gives the word, you would think that they hated the place where they determined upon the irrevocable step. After you get home and certain matters are adjusted, I think I would like to go to Europe. You see, Helen has been there and no man likes to be at a disadvantage with his wife. You may feel more friendly towards this foreign tour when I tell you that since Helen forsook her native Heath she has become very confidential with me and has told me some of the particulars of her first meeting with you. I just naturally am pleased with the details, for it is extremely gratifying to a man to feel that his father corroborates his good taste in the selection of the girl of his choice. It is certainly most creditable to the largeness of your paternal heart that you should have paid her so much attention in the first few days out of Liverpool. It was a great courtesy for you to arrange her tray for her on deck and to relieve her of the necessity of feeing the stewards. Equally kind was your aid in adjusting her wrap on the windy afternoon that you sat alone with her in the lee of the smokestack. But it was unfortunate, was it not, that your forgetfulness in not withdrawing your arm from the back of her steamer chair was called to your attention by Helen's chance remark that she was acquainted with me? Mother has never been abroad, so I have not told her of your gallantry to your fellow-passenger. She might not understand steamer conventions. Helen, perhaps, might mention the matter to her casually. If we go abroad, as I suggest to you, I will take special pains to destroy her entire recollection of the trip with you. Oh, by the way, it occurs to me to tell you that Cy Willoughby--the widower, not his brother Seth--has disinherited his son Arthur, because he married a typewriter. It was not because of the _mésalliance_, but it was because it was the _father's_ typewriter that Arthur married. Possibly, when I think of Helen, I should have more than the dictates of filial affection as a reason for gratitude that Ma did not succumb a year ago last winter to pneumonia and the six doctors you insisted on having. As you so succinctly express it, Helen is not getting any the best of it in marrying me. Her pater may not be very much of a financial proposition, and more of a bottle than a battle-scarred warrior, but he can talk about his great-grandfather, and that's more than you care to do, I fancy. Blood may not amount to much, except in racehorses, but when you balance things up, by and large, neither of the two families need to take off their hats to the other. I'm glad Helen has a family whose pictures she's not afraid to show, for it sort of evens things up for our money. (I note that I have omitted the "y" before "our," but you will understand that it belongs there.) I gather from your last letter that your curiosity is aroused as to how I proposed. I did it in person. It happened at a dance. I told Helen the other day that she really paved the way for my proposal, but I saw by the look on her face that it would not be safe to pursue the subject, so I turned it off with a jest. You will judge. When it came time to dance the cotillion she said she was tired, and that, anyway, she knew a better step than any that would be danced. So we went out into the hallway and she showed me the step, which was on the stairs, and we sat there till the cotillion was over. When we returned to the ballroom she had me guessing as to where I would get the engagement ring, for though love is blind, it's not stone-blind--not if the stone is a diamond. As for what I said, well, I wouldn't repeat it, even if I remembered it. I guess I must have talked a lot of rot. I referred to it once in a casual way and Helen burst out laughing. I recall that she didn't laugh at the time. She probably realized that laughter is apt to scare away fish. I am very happy, for I have discovered that your daughter-in-law is not perfect, and that makes the inequality between us seem a trifle less. She cried yesterday, and said I was unkind, and all because when we were planning the house that I have decided you shall build for us, I suggested that she lay out the clothes-closets and have the architect draw his plans around them. It is evident that repartee is not always appreciated in the family circle. I was interrupted yesterday by a call to settle a dispute between Helen and Ma, as to whether it is good form for a young married woman to invite lady friends who are strangers to her husband to call informally before they have been introduced to him. What could I do? I looked wise and said it was a grave point. I said I would consult the society editor of the _Ladies' Home Journal_ and went out, ostensibly to send a wire to Bok. When I returned I found my wife in tears--second crop. She had read the concluding pages of this letter--justified her conduct by the observation that there should be no secrets between husband and wife. She takes exceptions to what I have written you about my proposal. I am finishing this letter down town. I am now going to 'phone Helen to see if I can come home to dinner. Your Benedict son, Pierrepont. P.S. You need not consider it necessary to continue your advisory letters to me. I can see that I will receive all the advice I need from Mrs. Pierrepont. 
11614	----	THE SECOND GENERATION BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS AUTHOR OF "THE COST," "THE PLUM TREE," "THE SOCIAL SECRETARY," "THE DELUGE," ETC. 1906 CONTENTS CHAPTER I.--"PUT YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER!" II.--OF SOMEBODIES AND NOBODIES III.--MRS. WHITNEY INTERVENES IV.--THE SHATTERED COLOSSUS V.--THE WILL VI.--MRS. WHITNEY NEGOTIATES VII.--JILTED VIII.--A FRIEND IN NEED IX.--THE LONG FAREWELL X.--"THROUGH LOVE FOR MY CHILDREN" XI.--"SO SENSITIVE" XII.--ARTHUR FALLS AMONG LAWYERS XIII.--BUT IS RESCUED XIV.--SIMEON XV.--EARLY ADVENTURES OF A 'PRENTICE XVI.--A CAST-OFF SLIPPER XVII.--POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE XVIII.--LOVE, THE BLUNDERER XIX.--MADELENE XX.--LORRY'S ROMANCE XXI.--HIRAM'S SON XXII.--VILLA D'ORSAY XXIII.--A STROLL IN A BYPATH XXIV.--DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES XXV.--MAN AND GENTLEMAN XXVI.--CHARLES WHITNEY'S HEIRS XXVII.--THE DOOR AJAR XXVIII.--THE DEAD THAT LIVE THE SECOND GENERATION CHAPTER I "PUT YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER!" In six minutes the noon whistle would blow. But the workmen--the seven hundred in the Ranger-Whitney flour mills, the two hundred and fifty in the Ranger-Whitney cooperage adjoining--were, every man and boy of them, as hard at it as if the dinner rest were hours away. On the threshold of the long room where several scores of filled barrels were being headed and stamped there suddenly appeared a huge figure, tall and broad and solid, clad in a working suit originally gray but now white with the flour dust that saturated the air, and coated walls and windows both within and without. At once each of the ninety-seven men and boys was aware of that presence and unconsciously showed it by putting on extra "steam." With swinging step the big figure crossed the packing room. The gray-white face held straight ahead, but the keen blue eyes paused upon each worker and each task. And every "hand" in those two great factories knew how all-seeing that glance was--critical, but just; exacting, but encouraging. All-seeing, in this instance, did not mean merely fault-seeing. Hiram Ranger, manufacturing partner and controlling owner of the Ranger-Whitney Company of St. Christopher and Chicago, went on into the cooperage, leaving energy behind him, rousing it before him. Many times, each working day, between seven in the morning and six at night, he made the tour of those two establishments. A miller by inheritance and training, he had learned the cooper's trade like any journeyman, when he decided that the company should manufacture its own barrels. He was not a rich man who was a manufacturer; he was a manufacturer who was incidentally rich--one who made of his business a vocation. He had no theories on the dignity of labor; he simply exemplified it, and would have been amazed, and amused or angered according to his mood, had it been suggested to him that useful labor is not as necessary and continuous a part of life as breathing. He did not speculate and talk about ideals; he lived them, incessantly and unconsciously. The talker of ideals and the liver of ideals get echo and response, each after his kind--the talker, in the empty noise of applause; the liver, in the silent spread of the area of achievement. A moment after Hiram roused the packing room of the flour mill with the master's eye, he was in the cooperage, the center of a group round one of the hooping machines. It had got out of gear, and the workman had bungled in shutting off power; the result was chaos that threatened to stop the whole department for the rest of the day. Ranger brushed away the wrangling tinkerers and examined the machine. After grasping the problem in all its details, he threw himself flat upon his face, crawled under the machine, and called for a light. A moment later his voice issued again, in a call for a hammer. Several minutes of sharp hammering; then the mass of iron began to heave. It rose at the upward pressure of Ranger's powerful arms and legs, shoulders and back; it crashed over on its side; he stood up and, without pause or outward sign of his exertion of enormous strength, set about adjusting the gearing to action, with the broken machinery cut out. "And he past sixty!" muttered one workman to another, as a murmur of applause ran round the admiring circle. Clearly Hiram Ranger was master there not by reason of money but because he was first in brain and in brawn; not because he could hire but because he could direct and do. In the front rank of the ring of on-looking workmen stood a young man, tall as himself and like him in the outline of his strong features, especially like him in the fine curve of the prominent nose. But in dress and manner this young man was the opposite of the master workman now facing him in the dust and sweat of toil. He wore a fashionable suit of light gray tweed, a water-woven Panama with a wine-colored ribbon, a wine-colored scarf; several inches of wine-colored socks showed below his high-rolled, carefully creased trousers. There was a seal ring on the little finger of the left of a pair of large hands strong with the symmetrical strength which is got only at "polite" or useless exercise. Resting lightly between his lips was a big, expensive-looking Egyptian cigarette; the mingled odor of that and a delicate cologne scented the air. With a breeziness which a careful observer of the niceties of manner might have recognized as a disguise of nervousness, the young man advanced, extending his right hand. "Hello, father!" said he, "I came to bring you home to lunch." The master workman did not take the offered hand. After a quick glance of pride and pleasure which no father could have denied so manly and handsome a son, he eyed the young man with a look that bit into every one of his fashionable details. Presently he lifted his arm and pointed. The son followed the direction of that long, strong, useful-looking forefinger, until his gaze rested upon a sign: "No Smoking"--big, black letters on a white background. "Beg pardon," he stammered, flushing and throwing away the cigarette. The father went to the smoking butt and set his foot upon it. The son's face became crimson; he had flung the cigarette among the shavings which littered the floor. "The scientists say a fire can't be lighted from burning tobacco," he said, with a vigorous effort to repair the rent in his surface of easy assurance. The old man--if that adjective can be justly applied to one who had such strength and energy as his--made no reply. He strode toward the door, the son following, acute to the grins and winks the workmen were exchanging behind his back. The father opened the shut street door of the cooperage, and, when the son came up, pointed to the big, white letters: "No Admittance. Apply at the Office." "How did you get in here?" he asked. "I called in at the window and ordered one of the men to open the door," explained the son. "Ordered." The father merely repeated the word. "Requested, then," said the son, feeling that he was displaying praiseworthy patience with "the governor's" eccentricities. "Which workman?" The son indicated a man who was taking a dinner pail from under a bench at the nearest window. The father called to him: "Jerry!" Jerry came quickly. "Why did you let this young--young _gentleman_ in among us?" "I saw it was Mr. Arthur," began Jerry. "Then you saw it was not anyone who has any business here. Who gave you authority to suspend the rules of this factory?" "Don't, father!" protested Arthur. "You certainly can't blame him. He knew I'd make trouble if he didn't obey." "He knew nothing of the sort," replied Hiram Ranger. "I haven't been dealing with men for fifty years--However, next time you'll know what to do, Jerry." "He warned me it was against the rules," interjected Arthur. A triumphant smile gleamed in the father's eyes at this vindication of the discipline of the mills. "Then he knew he was doing wrong. He must be fined. You can pay the fine, young _gentleman_--if you wish." "Certainly," murmured Arthur. "And now, let's go to lunch." "To dinner," corrected the father; "your mother and I have dinner in the middle of the day, not lunch." "To dinner, then. Anything you please, pa, only let's go." When they were at the office and the father was about to enter the inner room to change his clothes, he wheeled and said: "Why ain't you at Harvard, passing your examinations?" Arthur's hands contracted and his eyes shifted; in a tone to which repression gave a seeming lightness, he announced: "The exams, are over. I've been plucked." The slang was new to Hiram Ranger, but he understood. In important matters his fixed habit was never to speak until he had thought well; without a word he turned and, with a heaviness that was new in his movements, went into the dressing room. The young man drew a cautious but profound breath of relief--the confession he had been dreading was over; his father knew the worst. "If the governor only knew the world better," he said to himself, "he'd know that at every college the best fellows always skate along the edge of the thin ice. But he doesn't, and so he thinks he's disgraced." He lit another cigarette by way of consolation and clarification. When the father reappeared, dressed for the street, he was apparently unconscious of the cigarette. They walked home in silence--a striking-looking pair, with their great similar forms and their handsome similar faces, typical impersonations of the first generation that is sowing in labor, and the second generation that is reaping in idleness. "Oh!" exclaimed Arthur, as they entered the Ranger place and began to ascend the stone walk through the lawns sloping down from the big, substantial-looking, creeper-clad house. "I stopped at Cleveland half a day, on the way West, and brought Adelaide along." He said this with elaborate carelessness; in fact, he had begged her to come that she might once more take her familiar and highly successful part of buffer between him and his father's displeasure. The father's head lifted, and the cloud over his face also. "How is she?" he asked. "Bang up!" answered Arthur. "She's the sort of a sister a man's proud of--looks and style, and the gait of a thoroughbred." He interrupted himself with a laugh. "There she is, now!" he exclaimed. This was caused by the appearance, in the open front doors, of a strange creature with a bright pink ribbon arranged as a sort of cockade around and above its left ear--a brown, hairy, unclean-looking thing that gazed with human inquisitiveness at the approaching figures. As the elder Ranger drew down his eyebrows the creature gave a squeak of alarm and, dropping from a sitting position to all fours, wheeled and shambled swiftly along the wide hall, walking human fashion with its hind feet, dog fashion with its fore feet or arms. At first sight of this apparition Ranger halted. He stared with an expression so astounded that Arthur laughed outright. "What was that?" he now demanded. "Simeon," replied Arthur. "Del has taken on a monk. It's the latest fad." "Oh!" ejaculated Ranger. "Simeon." "She named it after grandfather--and there _is_ a--" Arthur stopped short. He remembered that "Simeon" was his father's father; perhaps his father might not see the joke. "That is," he explained, "she was looking for a name, and I thought of 'simian,' naturally, and that, of course, suggested 'Simeon'--and--" "That'll do," said Hiram, in a tone of ominous calm which his family knew was the signal that a subject must be dropped. Now there was a quick _froufrou_ of skirts, and from the sitting room to the left darted a handsome, fair girl of nineteen, beautifully dressed in a gray summer silk with simple but effectively placed bands of pink embroidery on blouse and skirt. As she bounded down the steps and into her father's arms her flying skirts revealed a pair of long, narrow feet in stylish gray shoes and gray silk stockings exactly matching the rest of her costume. "Daddy! Daddy!" she cried. His arms were trembling as they clasped her--were trembling with the emotion that surged into her eyes in the more obvious but less significant form of tears. "Glad to see you, Delia," was all he said. She put her slim white forefinger on his lips. He smiled. "Oh! I forgot. You're Adelaide, of course, since you've grown up." "Why call me out of my name?" she demanded, gayly. "You should have christened me Delia if you had wanted me named that." "I'll try to remember, next time," he said, meekly. His gray eyes were dancing and twinkling like sunbeams pouring from breaches in a spent storm-cloud; there was an eloquence of pleasure far beyond laughter's in the rare, infrequent eye smiles from his sober, strong face. Now there was a squeaking and chattering behind them. Adelaide whirled free of her father's arms and caught up the monkey. "Put out your hand, sir," said she, and she kissed him. Her father shuddered, so awful was the contrast between the wizened, dirty-brown face and her roselike skin and fresh fairness. "Put out your hand and bow, sir," she went on. "This is Mr. Hiram Ranger, Mr. Simeon. Mr. Simeon, Mr. Ranger; Mr. Ranger, Mr. Simeon." Hiram, wondering at his own weakness, awkwardly took the paw so uncannily like a mummied hand. "What did you do this for, Adelaide?" said he, in a tone of mild remonstrance where he had intended to be firm. "He's so fascinating, I couldn't resist. He's so wonderfully human--" "That's it," said her father; "so--so--" "Loathsomely human," interjected Arthur. "Loathsome," said the father. "That impression soon wears off," assured Adelaide, "and he's just like a human being as company. I'd be bored to death if I didn't have him. He gives me an occupation." At this the cloud settled on Ranger's face again--a cloud of sadness. An occupation! Simeon hid his face in Adelaide's shoulder and began to whimper. She patted him softly. "How can you be so cruel?" she reproached her father. "He has feelings almost like a human being." Ranger winced. Had the daughter not been so busy consoling her unhappy pet, the father's expression might have suggested to her that there was, not distant from her, a being who had feelings, not almost, but quite human, and who might afford an occupation for an occupation-hunting young woman which might make love and care for a monkey superfluous. But he said nothing. He noted that the monkey's ribbon exactly matched the embroidery on Adelaide's dress. "If he were a dog or a cat, you wouldn't mind," she went on. True enough! Clearly, he was unreasonable with her. "Do you want me to send him away?" "I'll get used to him, I reckon," replied Hiram, adding, with a faint gleam of sarcasm, "I've got used to a great many things these last few years." They went silently into the house, Adelaide and Arthur feeling that their father had quite unreasonably put a damper upon their spirits--a feeling which he himself had. He felt that he was right, and he was puzzled to find himself, even in his own mind, in the wrong. "He's hopelessly old-fashioned!" murmured Arthur to his sister. "Yes, but _such_ a dear," murmured Adelaide. "No wonder _you_ say that!" was his retort. "You wind him round your finger." In the sitting room--the "back parlor"--Mrs. Ranger descended upon them from the direction of the kitchen. Ellen was dressed for work; her old gingham, for all its neatness, was in as sharp contrast to her daughter's garb of the lady of leisure as were Hiram's mill clothes to his son's "London latest." "It's almost half-past twelve," she said. "Dinner's been ready more than half an hour. Mary's furious, and it's hard enough to keep servants in this town since the canning factories started." Adelaide and Arthur laughed; Hiram smiled. They were all thoroughly familiar with that canning-factory theme. It constituted the chief feature of the servant problem in Saint X, as everybody called St. Christopher; and the servant problem there, as everywhere else, was the chief feature of domestic economy. As Mrs. Ranger's mind was concentrated upon her household, the canning factories were under fire from her early and late, in season and out of season. "And she's got to wait on the table, too," continued Ellen, too interested in reviewing her troubles to mind the amusement of the rest of the family. "Why, where's the new girl Jarvis brought you?" asked Hiram. "She came from way back in the country, and, when she set the table, she fixed five places. 'There's only four of us, Barbara,' said I. 'Yes, Mrs. Ranger,' says she, 'four and me.' 'But how're you going to wait on the table and sit with us?' says I, very kindly, for I step mighty soft with those people. 'Oh, I don't mind bouncin' up and down,' says she; 'I can chew as I walk round.' When I explained, she up and left in a huff. 'I'm as good as you are, Mrs. Ranger, I'd have you know,' she said, as she was going, just to set Mary afire; 'my father's an independent farmer, and I don't have to live out. I just thought I'd like to visit in town, and I'd heard your folks well spoke of. I'll get a place in the canning factory!' I wasn't sorry to have her go. You ought to have seen the way she set the table!" "We'll have to get servants from the East," said Arthur. "They know their place a little better there. We can get some English that have just come over. They're the best--thoroughly respectful." He did not see the glance his father shot at him from under his heavy eyebrows. But Adelaide did--she was expecting it. "Don't talk like a cad, Artie!" she said. "You know you don't think that way." "Oh, of course, I don't admire that spirit--or lack of it," he replied. "But--what are you going to do? It's the flunkies or the Barbaras and Marys--or doing our own work." To Hiram Ranger that seemed unanswerable, and his resentment against his son for expressing ideas for which he had utter contempt seemed unreasonable. Again reason put him in the wrong, though instinct was insisting that he was in the right. "It's a pity people aren't contented in 'the station to which God has called them,' as the English prayer book says," continued Arthur, not catching sensitive Adelaide's warning frown. "If your mother and I had been content," said Hiram, "you and Delia would be looking for places in the canning factory." The remark was doubly startling--for the repressed energy of its sarcasm, and because, as a rule, Hiram never joined in the discussions in the family circle. They were at the table, all except Mrs. Ranger. She had disappeared in the direction of the kitchen and presently reappeared bearing a soup tureen, which she set down before her husband. "I don't dare ask Mary to wait on the table," said she. "If I did, she's just in the humor to up and light out, too; and your mother's got no hankering for hanging over a hot stove in this weather." She transferred the pile of soup plates from the sideboard and seated herself. Her husband poured the soup, and the plates were passed from hand to hand until all were served. "If the Sandyses could see us now, Del," said Arthur. "Or the Whitneys," suggested Adelaide, and both laughed as people laugh when they think the joke, or the best part of it, is a secret between themselves. Nothing more was said until the soup was finished and Mrs. Ranger rose and began to remove the dishes. Adelaide, gazing at the table, her thoughts far away, became uneasy, stirred, looked up; she saw that the cause of her uneasiness was the eyes of her father fixed steadily upon her in a look which she could not immediately interpret. When he saw that he had her attention, he glanced significantly toward her mother, waiting upon them. "If the Sandyses or the Whitneys could see us _now_!" he said. She reddened, pushed back her chair, and sprang up. "Oh, I never thought!" she exclaimed. "Sit down, mother, and let _me_ do that. You and father have got us into awful bad ways, always indulging us and waiting on us." "You let me alone," replied her mother. "I'm used to it. I did my own work for fifteen years after we were married, and I'd have been doing it yet if your father hadn't just gone out and got a girl and brought her in and set her to work. No; sit down, Del. You don't know anything about work. I didn't bring you up to be a household drudge." But Del was on her way to the kitchen, whence she presently reappeared with a platter and a vegetable dish. Down the front of her skirt was a streak of grease. "There!" exclaimed Mrs. Ranger, coloring high with exasperation, "your dress is spoiled! I don't believe I can take it out of that kind of goods without leaving a spot. Hiram, I do wish you wouldn't meddle with the children! It seems to me you've got enough to do to 'tend your own affairs at the mill." This was unanswerable, or so it seemed to her husband. Once more he felt in the wrong, when he knew that, somehow, he was in the right. But Adelaide was laughing and going forward gracefully with her duties as waitress. "It's nothing," she said; "the stain will come out; and, if it doesn't, there's no harm done. The dress is an old thing. I've worn it until everybody's sick of the sight of it." Mrs. Ranger now took her turn at looking disapproval. She exclaimed: "Why, the dress is as good as new; much too good to travel in. You ought to have worn a linen duster over it on the train." At this even Hiram showed keen amusement, and Mrs. Ranger herself joined in the laugh. "Well, it was a good, sensible fashion, anyhow," said she. Instead of hurrying through dinner to get back to his work with the one o'clock whistle, Hiram Ranger lingered on, much to the astonishment of his family. When the faint sound of the whistles of the distant factories was borne to them through the open windows, Mrs. Ranger cried, "You'll be late, father." "I'm in no hurry to-day," said Ranger, rousing from the seeming abstraction in which he passed most of his time with his assembled family. After dinner he seated himself on the front porch. Adelaide came up behind and put her arm round his neck. "You're not feeling well, daddy?" "Not extra," he answered. "But it's nothing to bother about. I thought I'd rest a few minutes." He patted her in shy expression of gratitude for her little attention. It is not strange that Del overvalued the merit of these trivial attentions of hers when they were valued thus high by her father, who longed for proofs of affection and, because of his shyness and silence, got few. "Hey, Del! Hurry up! Get into your hat and dust-coat!" was now heard, in Arthur's voice, from the drive to the left of the lawns. Hiram's glance shifted to the direction of the sound. Arthur was perched high in a dogcart to which were attached two horses, one before the other. Adelaide did not like to leave her father with that expression on his face, but after a brief hesitation she went into the house. Hiram advanced slowly across the lawn toward the tandem. When he had inspected it in detail, at close range, he said: "Where'd you get it, young gentleman?" Again there was stress on the "gentleman." "Oh, I've had it at Harvard several months," he replied carelessly. "I shipped it on. I sold the horses--got a smashing good price for 'em. Yours ain't used to tandem, but I guess I can manage 'em." "That style of hitching's new to these parts," continued Hiram. Arthur felt the queerness of his father's tone. "Two, side by side, or two, one in front of the other--where's the difference?" True, reflected Hiram. He was wrong again--yet again unconvinced. Certainly the handsome son, so smartly gotten up, seated in this smart trap, did look attractive--but somehow not as he would have had _his_ son look. Adelaide came; he helped her to the lower seat. As he watched them dash away, as fine-looking a pair of young people as ever gladdened a father's eye, this father's heart lifted with pride--but sank again. Everything _seemed_ all right; why, then, did everything _feel_ all wrong? "I'm not well to-day," he muttered. He returned to the porch, walking heavily. In body and in mind he felt listless. There seemed to be something or some one inside him--a newcomer--aloof from all that he had regarded as himself--aloof from his family, from his work, from his own personality--an outsider, studying the whole perplexedly and gloomily. As he was leaving the gate a truck entered the drive. It was loaded with trunks--his son's and his daughter's baggage on the way from the station. Hiram paused and counted the boxes--five huge trunks--Adelaide's beyond doubt; four smaller ones, six of steamer size and thereabouts--profuse and elegant Arthur's profuse and elegant array of canvas and leather. This mass of superfluity seemed to add itself to his burden. He recalled what his wife had once said when he hesitated over some new extravagance of the children's: "What'd we toil and save for, unless to give them a better time than we had? What's the use of our having money if they can't enjoy it?" A "better time," "enjoy"--they sounded all right, but were they _really_ all right? Was this really a "better time"?--really enjoyment? Were his and his wife's life all wrong, except as they had contributed to this new life of thoughtless spending and useless activity and vanity and splurge? Instead of going toward the factories, he turned east and presently out of Jefferson Street into Elm. He paused at a two-story brick house painted brown, with a small but brilliant and tasteful garden in front and down either side. To the right of the door was an unobtrusive black-and-gold sign bearing the words "Ferdinand Schulze, M.D." He rang, was admitted by a pretty, plump, Saxon-blond young woman--the doctor's younger daughter and housekeeper. She looked freshly clean and wholesome--and so useful! Hiram's eyes rested upon her approvingly; and often afterwards his thoughts returned to her, lingering upon her and his own daughter in that sort of vague comparisons which we would not entertain were we aware of them. Dr. Schulze was the most distinguished--indeed, the only distinguished--physician in Saint X. He was a short, stout, grizzled, spectacled man, with a nose like a scarlet button and a mouth like a buttonhole; in speech he was abrupt, and, on the slightest pretext or no pretext at all, sharp; he hid a warm sympathy for human nature, especially for its weaknesses, behind an uncompromising candor which he regarded as the duty of the man of science toward a vain and deluded race that knew little and learned reluctantly. A man is either better or worse than the manner he chooses for purposes of conciliating or defying the world. Dr. Schulze was better, as much better as his mind was superior to his body. He and his motherless daughters were "not in it" socially. Saint X was not quite certain whether it shunned them or they it. His services were sought only in extremities, partly because he would lie to his patients neither when he knew what ailed them nor when he did not, and partly because he was a militant infidel. He lost no opportunity to attack religion in all its forms; and his two daughters let no opportunity escape to show that they stood with their father, whom they adored, and who had brought them up with his heart. It was Dr. Schulze's furious unbelief, investing him with a certain suggestion of Satan-got intelligence, that attracted Saint X to him in serious illnesses--somewhat as the Christian princes of mediaeval Europe tolerated and believed in the Jew physicians. Saint X was only just reaching the stage at which it could listen to "higher criticism" without dread lest the talk should be interrupted by a bolt from "special Providence"; the fact that Schulze lived on, believing and talking as he did, could be explained only as miraculous and mysterious forbearance in which Satan must somehow have direct part. "I didn't expect to see _you_ for many a year yet," said Schulze, as Hiram, standing, faced him sitting at his desk. The master workman grew still more pallid as he heard the thought that weighted him in secret thus put into words. "I have never had a doctor before in my life," said he. "My prescription has been, when you feel badly stop eating and work harder." "Starve and sweat--none better," said Schulze. "Well, why do you come here to-day?" "This morning I lifted a rather heavy weight. I've felt a kind of tiredness ever since, and a pain in the lower part of my back--pretty bad. I can't understand it." "But I can--that's my business. Take off your clothes and stretch yourself on this chair. Call me when you're ready." Schulze withdrew into what smelled like a laboratory. Hiram could hear him rattling glass against glass and metal, could smell the fumes of uncorked bottles of acids. When he called, Schulze reappeared, disposed instruments and tubes upon a table. "I never ask my patients questions," he said, as he began to examine Hiram's chest. "I lay 'em out here and go over 'em inch by inch. I find all the weak spots, both those that are crying out and those worse ones that don't. I never ask a man what's the matter; I tell him. And my patients, and all the fools in this town, think I'm in league with the devil. A doctor who finds out what's the matter with a man Providence is trying to lay in the grave--what can it be but the devil?" He had reached his subject; as he worked he talked it--religion, its folly, its silliness, its cruelty, its ignorance, its viciousness. Hiram listened without hearing; he was absorbed in observing the diagnosis. He knew nothing of medicine, but he did know good workmanship. As the physician worked, his admiration and confidence grew. He began to feel better--not physically better, but that mental relief which a courageous man feels when the peril he is facing is stripped of the mystery that made it a terror. After perhaps three quarters of an hour, Schulze withdrew to the laboratory, saying: "That's all. You may dress." Hiram dressed, seated himself. By chance he was opposite a huge image from the Orient, a hideous, twisted thing with a countenance of sardonic sagacity. As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances to the physician himself. When Schulze reappeared and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion--the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's--his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the superstitions of Saint X. "There!" said Schulze, looking up. "That's the best I can do for you." "What's the matter with me?" "You wouldn't know if I told you." "Is it serious?" "In this world everything is serious--and nothing." "Will I die?" Schulze slowly surveyed all Hiram's outward signs of majesty that had been denied his own majestic intellect, noted the tremendous figure, the shoulders, the forehead, the massive brow and nose and chin--an _ensemble_ of unabused power, the handiwork of Nature at her best, a creation worth while, worth preserving intact and immortal. "Yes," he answered, with satiric bitterness; "you will have to die, and rot, just like the rest of us." "Tell me!" Hiram commanded. "Will I die soon?" Schulze reflected, rubbing his red-button nose with his stubby fingers. When he spoke, his voice had a sad gentleness. "You can bear hearing it. You have the right to know." He leaned back, paused, said in a low tone: "Put your house in order, Mr. Ranger." Hiram's steadfast gray eyes met bravely the eyes of the man who had just read him his death warrant. A long pause; then Hiram said "Thank you," in his quiet, calm way. He took the prescriptions, went out into the street. It looked strange to him; he felt like a stranger in that town where he had spent half a century--felt like a temporary tenant of that vast, strong body of his which until now had seemed himself. And he--or was it the stranger within him?--kept repeating: "Put your house in order. Put your house in order." CHAPTER II OF SOMEBODIES AND NOBODIES At the second turning Arthur rounded the tandem out of Jefferson Street into Willow with a skill that delighted both him and his sister. "But why go that way?" said she. "Why not through Monroe street? I'm sure the horses would behave." "Better not risk it," replied Arthur, showing that he, too, had had, but had rejected, the temptation to parade the crowded part of town. "Even if the horses didn't act up, the people might, they're such jays." Adelaide's estimate of what she and her brother had acquired in the East was as high as was his, and she had the same unflattering opinion of those who lacked it. But it ruffled her to hear him call the home folks jays--just as it would have ruffled him had she been the one to make the slighting remark. "If you invite people's opinion," said she, "you've no right to sneer at them because they don't say what you wanted." "But _I_'m not driving for show if _you_ are," he retorted, with a testiness that was confession. "Don't be silly," was her answer. "You know you wouldn't take all this trouble on a desert island." "Of course not," he admitted, "but I don't care for the opinion of any but those capable of appreciating." "And those capable of appreciating are only those who approve," teased Adelaide. "Why drive tandem among these 'jays?'" "To keep my hand in," replied he; and his adroit escape restored his good humor. "I wish I were as free from vanity as you are, Arthur, dear," said she. "You're just as fond of making a sensation as I am," replied he. "And, my eye, Del! but you _do_ know how." This with an admiring glance at her most becoming hat with its great, gracefully draped _chiffon_ veil, and at her dazzling white dust-coat with its deep blue facings that matched her eyes. She laughed. "Just wait till you see my new dresses--and hats." "Another shock for your poor father." "Shock of joy." "Yes," assented Arthur, rather glumly; "he'll take anything off you. But when I--" "It's no compliment to me," she cut in, the prompter to admit the truth because it would make him feel better. "He thinks I'm 'only a woman,' fit for nothing but to look pretty as long as I'm a girl, and then to devote myself to a husband and children, without any life or even ideas of my own." "Mother always seems cheerful enough," said Arthur. His content with the changed conditions which the prosperity and easy-going generosity of the elder generation were making for the younger generation ended at his own sex. The new woman--idle and frivolous, ignorant of all useful things, fit only for the show side of life and caring only for it, discontented with everybody but her own selfish self--Arthur had a reputation among his friends for his gloomy view of the American woman and for his courage in expressing it. "You are _so_ narrow-minded, Artie!" his sister exclaimed impatiently. "Mother was brought up very differently from the way she and father have brought me up--" "Have let you bring yourself up." "No matter; I _am_ different." "But what would you do? What can a woman do?" "I don't know," she admitted. "But I _do_ know I hate a humdrum life." There was the glint of the Ranger will in her eyes as she added: "Furthermore, I shan't stand for it." He looked at her enviously. "You'll be free in another year," he said. "You and Ross Whitney will marry, and you'll have a big house in Chicago and can do what you please and go where you please." "Not if Ross should turn out to be the sort of man you are." He laughed. "I can see Ross--or any man--trying to manage _you_! You've got too much of father in you." "But I'll be dependent until--" Adelaide paused, then added a satisfactorily vague, "for a long time. Father won't give me anything. How furious he'd be at the very suggestion of dowry. Parents out here don't appreciate that conditions have changed and that it's necessary nowadays for a woman to be independent of her husband." Arthur compressed his lips, to help him refrain from comment. But he felt so strongly on the subject that he couldn't let her remarks pass unchallenged. "I don't know about that, Del," he said. "It depends on the woman. Personally, I'd hate to be married to a woman I couldn't control if necessary." "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," cried Del, indignant. "Is _that_ your idea of control--to make a woman mercenary and hypocritical? You'd better change your way of thinking if you don't want Janet to be very unhappy, and yourself, too." "That sounds well," he retorted, "but you know better. Take our case, for instance. Is it altogether love and affection that make us so cautious about offending father?" "Speak for yourself," said Adelaide. "_I'm_ not cautious." "Do try to argue fair, even if you are a woman. You're as cautious in your way as I am in mine." Adelaide felt that he was offended, and justly. "I didn't mean quite what I said, Artie. You _are_ cautious, in a way, and sometimes. But often you're reckless. I'm frightened every once in a while by it, and I'm haunted by the dread that there'll be a collision between father and you. You're so much alike, and you understand each other less and less, all the time." After a silence Arthur said, thoughtfully: "I think I understand him. There are two distinct persons inside of me. There's the one that was made by inheritance and by my surroundings as a boy--the one that's like him, the one that enables me to understand him. Then, there's this other that's been made since--in the East, and going round among people that either never knew the sort of life we had as children or have grown away from it. The problem is how to reconcile those two persons so that they'll stop wrangling and shaming each other. That's _my_ problem, I mean. Father's problem--He doesn't know he has one. I must do as he wishes or I'll not be at all, so far as he is concerned." Another and longer silence; then Adelaide, after an uneasy, affectionate look at his serious profile, said: "I'm often ashamed of myself, Artie--about father; I don't _think_ I'm a hypocrite, for I do love him dearly. Who could help it, when he is so indulgent and when even in his anger he's kind? But you--Oh, Artie, even though you are less, much less, uncandid with him than I am, still isn't it more--more--less manly in you? After all, I'm a woman and helpless; and, if I seriously offend him, what would become of me? But you're a man. The world was made for men; they can make their own way. And it seems unworthy of you to be afraid to be yourself before _any_body. And I'm sure it's demoralizing." She spoke so sincerely that he could not have resented it, even had her words raised a far feebler echo within him. "I don't honestly believe, Del, that my caution with father is from fear of his shutting down on me, any more than yours is," he replied. "I know he cares for me. And often I don't let him see me as I am simply because it'd hurt him if he knew how differently I think and feel about a lot of things." "But are you right?--or is he?" Arthur did not answer immediately. He had forgotten his horses; they were jogging along, heads down and "form" gone. "What do _you_ think?" he finally asked. "I--I can't quite make up my mind." "Do you think I ought to drudge and slave, as he has? Do you think I ought to spend my life in making money, in dealing in flour? Isn't there something better than that?" "I don't think it's what a man deals in; I think it's _how_ he deals. And I don't believe there's any sort of man finer and better than father, Arthur." "That's true," he assented warmly. "I used to envy the boys at college--some of them--because their fathers and mothers had so much culture and knowledge of the world. But when I came to know their parents better--and them, too--I saw how really ignorant and vulgar--yes, vulgar--they were, under their veneer of talk and manner which they thought was everything. 'They may be fit to stand before kings' I said to myself, 'but my father _is_ a king--and of a sort they ain't fit to stand before.'" The color was high in Del's cheeks and her eyes were brilliant. "You'll come out all right, Artie," said she. "I don't know just how, but you'll _do_ something, and do it well." "I'd much rather do nothing--well," said he lightly, as if not sure whether he was in earnest or not. "It's so much nicer to dream than to do." He looked at her with good-humored satire. "And you--what's the matter with your practising some of the things you preach? Why don't you marry--say, Dory Hargrave, instead of Ross?" She made a failure of a stout attempt to meet his eyes and to smile easily. "Because I don't love Dory Hargrave," she said. "But you wouldn't let yourself if you could--would you, now?" "It's a poor love that lags for let," she replied. "Besides, why talk about me? I'm 'only a woman.' I haven't any career, or any chance to make one." "But you might help some man," he teased. "Then you'd like me to marry Dory--if I could?" "I'm just showing you how vain your theorizing is," was his not altogether frank reply. "You urge me to despise money when you yourself--" "That isn't fair, Arthur. If I didn't care for Ross I shouldn't think of marrying him, and you know it." "He's so like father!" mocked Arthur. "No, but he's so like _you_," she retorted. "You know he was your ideal for years. It was your praising him that--that first made me glad to do as father and mother wished. You know father approves of him." Arthur grinned, and Del colored. "A lot father knows about Ross as he really is," said he. "Oh, he's clever about what he lets father see. However, you do admit there's some other ideal of man than successful workingman." "Of course!" said Adelaide. "I'm not so silly and narrow as you try to make out. Only, I prefer a combination of the two. And I think Ross is that, and I hope and believe he'll be more so--afterwards." Adelaide's tone was so judicial that Arthur thought it discreet not to discuss his friend and future brother-in-law further. "He isn't good enough for Del," he said to himself. "But, then, who is? And he'll help her to the sort of setting she's best fitted for. What side they'll put on, once they get going! She'll set a new pace--and it'll be a grand one." At the top of the last curve in the steep road up from Deer Creek the horses halted of themselves to rest; Arthur and his sister gazed out upon the vast, dreamy vision--miles on miles of winding river shimmering through its veil of silver mist, stately hills draped in gauziest blue. It was such uplifting vistas that inspired the human imagination, in the days of its youth, to breathe a soul into the universe and make it a living thing, palpitant with love and hope; it was an outlook that would have moved the narrowest, the smallest, to think in the wide and the large. Wherever the hills were not based close to the water's edge or rose less abruptly, there were cultivated fields; and in each field, far or near, men were at work. These broad-hatted, blue-shirted toilers in the ardent sun determined the turn of Adelaide's thoughts. "It doesn't seem right, does it," said she, "that so many--almost everybody--should have to work so hard just to get enough to eat and to wear and a place to sleep, when there's so much of everything in the world--and when a few like us don't have to work at all and have much more than they need, simply because one happened to be born in such or such conditions. I suppose it's got to be so, but it certainly looks unjust--and silly." "I'm not sure the workers haven't the best of it," replied Arthur. "They have the dinner; we have only the dessert; and I guess one gets tired of only desserts, no matter how great the variety." "It's a stupid world in lots of ways, isn't it?" "Not so stupid as it used to be, when everybody said and thought it was as good as possible," replied he. "You see, it's the people in the world that make it stupid. For instance, do you suppose you and I, or anybody, would care for idling about and doing all sorts of things our better judgment tells us are inane, if it weren't that most of our fellow-beings are stupid enough to admire and envy that sort of thing, and that we are stupid enough to want to be admired and envied by stupid people?" "Did you notice the Sandys's English butler?" asked Adelaide. "_Did_ I? I'll bet he keeps every one in the Sandys family up to the mark." "That's it," continued Adelaide. "He's a poor creature, dumb and ignorant. He knows only one thing--snobbishness. Yet every one of us was in terror of his opinion. No doubt kings feel the same way about the people around them. Always what's expected of us--and by whom? Why, by people who have little sense and less knowledge. They run the world, don't they?" "As Dory Hargrave says," said her brother, "the only scheme for making things better that's worth talking about is raising the standards of the masses because their standards are ours. We'll be fools and unjust as long as they'll let us. And they'll let us as long as they're ignorant." By inheritance Arthur and Adelaide had excellent minds, shrewd and with that cast of humor which makes for justice of judgment by mocking at the solemn frauds of interest and prejudice. But, as is often the case with the children of the rich and the well-to-do, there had been no necessity for either to use intellect; their parents and hirelings of various degrees, paid with their father's generously given money, had done their thinking for them. The whole of animate creation is as lazy as it dares be, and man is no exception. Thus, the Ranger children, like all other normal children of luxury, rarely made what would have been, for their fallow minds, the arduous exertion of real thinking. When their minds were not on pastimes or personalities they were either rattling round in their heads or exchanging the ideas, real and reputed, that happened to be drifting about, at the moment, in their "set." Those ideas they and their friends received, and stored up or passed on with never a thought as to whether they were true or false, much as they used coins or notes they took in and paid out. Arthur and Adelaide soon wearied of their groping about in the mystery of human society--how little direct interest it had for them then! They drove on; the vision which had stimulated them to think vanished; they took up again those personalities about friends, acquaintances and social life that are to thinking somewhat as massage is to exercise--all the motions of real activity, but none of its spirit. They stopped for two calls and tea on the fashionable Bluffs. When they reached home, content with tandem, drive, themselves, their friends, and life in general, they found Hiram Ranger returned from work, though it was only half-past five, and stretched on the sofa in the sitting room, with his eyes shut. At this unprecedented spectacle of inactivity they looked at each other in vague alarm; they were stealing away, when he called: "I'm not asleep." His expression made Adelaide impulsively kneel beside him and gaze anxiously into his face. He smiled, roused himself to a sitting posture, well concealing the effort the exertion cost him. "Your father's getting old," he said, hiding his tragedy of aching body and aching heart and impending doom in a hypocrisy of cheerfulness that would have passed muster even had he not been above suspicion. "I'm not up to the mark of the last generation. Your grandfather was fifty when I was born, and he didn't die till I was fifty." His face shadowed; Adelaide, glancing round for the cause, saw Simeon, half-sitting, half-standing in the doorway, humble apology on his weazened, whiskered face. He looked so like her memory-picture of her grandfather that she burst out laughing. "Don't be hard on the poor old gentleman, father," she cried. "How can you resist that appeal? Tell him to come in and make himself at home." As her father did not answer, she glanced at him. He had not heard her; he was staring straight ahead with an expression of fathomless melancholy. The smile faded from her face, from her heart, as the light fades before the oncoming shadow of night. Presently he was absent-mindedly but tenderly stroking her hair, as if he were thinking of her so intensely that he had become unconscious of her physical presence. The apparition of Simeon had set him to gathering in gloomy assembly a vast number of circumstances about his two children; each circumstance was so trivial in itself that by itself it seemed foolishly inconsequential; yet, in the mass, they bore upon his heart, upon his conscience, so heavily that his very shoulders stooped with the weight. "Put your house in order," the newcomer within him was solemnly warning; and Hiram was puzzling over his meaning, was dreading what that meaning might presently reveal itself to be. "Put my house in order?" muttered Hiram, an inquiring echo of that voice within. "What did you say, father?" asked Adelaide, timidly laying her hand on his arm. Though she knew he was simple, she felt the vastness in him that was awe-inspiring--just as a mountain or an ocean, a mere aggregation of simple matter, is in the total majestic and incomprehensible. Beside him, the complex little individualities among her acquaintances seemed like the acrostics of a children's puzzle column. "Leave me with your brother awhile," he said. She glanced quickly, furtively at Arthur and admired his self-possession--for she knew his heart must be heavier than her own. She rose from her knees, laid her hand lingeringly, appealingly upon her father's broad shoulder, then slowly left the room. Simeon, forgotten, looked up at her and scratched his head; he turned in behind her, caught the edge of her skirt and bore it like a queen's page. The son watched the father, whose powerful features were set in an expression that seemed stern only because his eyes were hid, gazing steadily at the floor. It was the father who broke the silence. "What do you calculate to do--now?" "Tutor this summer and have another go at those exams in September. I'll have no trouble in rejoining my class. I sailed just a little too close to the wind--that's all." "What does that mean?" inquired the father. College was a mystery to him, a deeply respected mystery. He had been the youngest of four sons. Their mother's dream was the dream of all the mothers of those pioneer and frontier days--to send her sons to college. Each son in turn had, with her assistance, tried to get together the sum--so small, yet so hugely large--necessary to make the start. But fate, now as sickness, now as crop failure, now as flood, and again as war, had been too strong for them. Hiram had come nearest, and his defeat had broken his mother's heart and almost broken his own. It was therefore with a sense of prying into hallowed mysteries that he began to investigate his son's college career. "Well, you know," Arthur proceeded to explain; "there are five grades--A, B, C, D, and E. I aimed for C, but several things came up--interfered--and I--just missed D." "Is C the highest?" Arthur smiled faintly. "Well--not in one sense. It's what's called the gentleman's grade. All the fellows that are the right sort are in it--or in D." "And what did _you_ get?" "I got E. That means I have to try again." Hiram began to understand. So _this_ was the hallowed mystery of higher education. He was sitting motionless, his elbows on his knees, his big chest and shoulders inclined forward, his gaze fixed upon a wreath of red roses in the pattern of the moquette carpet--that carpet upon which Adelaide, backed by Arthur, had waged vain war as the worst of the many, to cultured nerves, trying exhibitions of "primitive taste" in Ellen's best rooms. When Hiram spoke his lips barely opened and his voice had no expression. His next question was: "What does A mean?" "The A men are those that keep their noses in their books. They're a narrow set--have no ideas--think the book side is the only side of a college education." "Then you don't go to college to learn what's in the books?" "Oh, of course, the books are part of it. But the real thing is association--the friendships one makes, the knowledge of human nature and of--of life." "What does that mean?" Arthur had been answering Hiram's questions in a flurry, though he had been glib enough. He had had no fear that his father would appreciate that he was getting half-truths, or, rather, truths prepared skillfully for paternal consumption; his flurry had come from a sense that he was himself not doing quite the manly, the courageous thing. Now, however, something in the tone of the last question, or, perhaps, some element that was lacking, roused in him a suspicion of depth in his simple unworldly father; and swift upon this awakening came a realization that he was floundering in that depth--and in grave danger of submersion. He shifted nervously when his father, without looking up and without putting any expression into his voice, repeated: "What do you mean by associations--and life--and--all that?" "I can't explain exactly," replied Arthur. "It would take a long time." "I haven't asked you to be brief." "I can't put it into words." "Why not?" "You would misunderstand." "Why?" Arthur made no reply. "Then you can't tell me what you go to college for?" Again the young man looked perplexedly at his father. There was no anger in that tone--no emotion of any kind. But what was the meaning of the _look_, the look of a sorrow that was tragic? "I know you think I've disgraced you, father, and myself," said Arthur. "But it isn't so--really, it isn't. No one, not even the faculty, thinks the less of me. This sort of thing often occurs in our set." "Your 'set'?" "Among the fellows I travel with. They're the nicest men in Harvard. They're in all the best clubs--and lead in supporting the athletics and--and--their fathers are among the richest, the most distinguished men in the country. There are only about twenty or thirty of us, and we make the pace for the whole show--the whole university, I mean. Everybody admires and envies us--wants to be in our set. Even the grinds look up to us, and imitate us as far as they can. We give the tone to the university!" "What is 'the tone'?" Again Arthur shifted uneasily. "It's hard to explain that sort of thing. It's a sort of--of manner. It's knowing how to do the--the right sort of thing." "What is the right sort of thing?" "I can't put it into words. It's what makes you look at one man and say, 'He's a gentleman'; and look at another and see that he isn't." "What is a 'gentleman'--at Harvard?" "Just what it is anywhere." "What is it anywhere?" Again Arthur was silent. "Then there are only twenty or thirty gentlemen at Harvard? And the catalogue says there are three thousand or more students." "Oh--of course," began Arthur. But he stopped short. How could he make his father, ignorant of "the world" and dominated by primitive ideas, understand the Harvard ideal? So subtle and evanescent, so much a matter of the most delicate shadings was this ideal that he himself often found the distinction quite hazy between it and that which looked disquietingly like "tommy rot." "And these gentlemen--these here friends of yours--your 'set,' as you call 'em--what are they aiming for?" Arthur did not answer. It would be hopeless to try to make Hiram Ranger understand, still less tolerate, an ideal of life that was elegant leisure, the patronage of literature and art, music, the drama, the turf, and the pursuit of culture and polite extravagance, wholly aloof from the frenzied and vulgar jostling of the market place. With a mighty heave of the shoulders which, if it had found outward relief, would have been a sigh, Hiram Ranger advanced to the hard part of the first task which the mandate, "Put your house in order," had set for him. He took from the inside pocket of his coat a small bundle of papers, the records of Arthur's college expenses. The idea of accounts with his children had been abhorrent to him. The absolute necessity of business method had forced him to make some records, and these he had expected to destroy without anyone but himself knowing of their existence. But in the new circumstances he felt he must not let his own false shame push the young man still farther from the right course. Arthur watched him open each paper in the bundle slowly, spread it out and, to put off the hateful moment for speech, pretend to peruse it deliberately before laying it on his knee; and, dim though the boy's conception of his father was, he did not misjudge the feelings behind that painful reluctance. Hiram held the last paper in a hand that trembled. He coughed, made several attempts to speak, finally began: "Your first year at Harvard, you spent seventeen hundred dollars. Your second year, you spent fifty-three hundred. Last year--Are all your bills in?" "There are a few--" murmured Arthur. "How much?" He flushed hotly. "Don't you know?" With this question his father lifted his eyes without lifting his shaggy eyebrows. "About four or five thousand--in all--including the tailors and other tradespeople." A pink spot appeared in the left cheek of the old man--very bright against the gray-white of his skin. Somehow, he did not like that word "tradespeople," though it seemed harmless enough. "This last year, the total was," said he, still monotonously, "ninety-eight hundred odd--if the bills I haven't got yet ain't more than five thousand." "A dozen men spend several times that much," protested Arthur. "What for?" inquired Hiram. "Not for dissipation, father," replied the young man, eagerly. "Dissipation is considered bad form in our set." "What do you mean by dissipation?" "Drinking--and--all that sort of thing," Arthur replied. "It's considered ungentlemanly, nowadays--drinking to excess, I mean." "What do you spend the money for?" "For good quarters and pictures, and patronizing the sports, and club dues, and entertainments, and things to drive in--for living as a man should." "You've spent a thousand, three hundred dollars for tutoring since you've been there." "Everybody has to do tutoring--more or less." "What did you do with the money you made?" "What money, father?" "The money you made tutoring. You said everybody had to do tutoring. I suppose you did your share." Arthur did not smile at this "ignorance of the world"; he grew red, and stammered: "Oh, I meant everybody in our set employs tutors." "Then who does the tutoring? Who're the nobodies that tutor the everybodies?" Arthur grew cold, then hot. He was cornered, therefore roused. He stood, leaned against the table, faced his father defiantly. "I see what you're driving at, father," he said. "You feel I've wasted time and money at college, because I haven't lived like a dog and grubbed in books day in and day out, and filled my head with musty stuff; because I've tried to get what I believe to be the broadest knowledge and experience; because I've associated with the best men, the fellows that come from the good families. You accept the bluff the faculty puts up of pretending the A fellows are really the A fellows, when, in fact, everybody there and all the graduates and everyone everywhere who knows the world knows that the fellows in our set are the ones the university is proud of--the fellows with manners and appearance and--" "The gentlemen," interjected the father, who had not changed either his position or his expression. "Yes--the gentlemen!" exclaimed Arthur. "There are other ideals of life besides buying and selling." "And working?" suggested Hiram. "Yes--and what you call working," retorted Arthur, angry through and through. "You sent me East to college to get the education of a man in my position." "What is your position?" inquired Hiram--simply an inquiry. "Your son," replied the young man; "trying to make the best use of the opportunities you've worked so hard to get for me. I'm not you, father. You'd despise me if I didn't have a character, an individuality, of my own. Yet, because I can't see life as you see it, you are angry with me." For answer Hiram only heaved his great shoulders in another suppressed sigh. He _knew_ profoundly that he was right, yet his son's plausibilities--they could only be plausibilities--put him clearly in the wrong. "We'll see," he said; "we'll see. You're wrong in thinking I'm angry, boy." He was looking at his son now, and his eyes made his son's passion vanish. He got up and went to the young man and laid his hand on his shoulder in a gesture of affection that moved the son the more profoundly because it was unprecedented. "If there's been any wrong done," said the old man--and he looked very, very old now--"I've done it. I'm to blame--not you." A moment after Hiram left the room, Adelaide hurried in. A glance at her brother reassured her. They stood at the window watching their father as he walked up and down the garden, his hands behind his back, his shoulders stooped, his powerful head bent. "Was he very angry?" asked Del. "He wasn't angry at all," her brother replied. "I'd much rather he had been." Then, after a pause, he added: "I thought the trouble between us was that, while I understood him, he didn't understand me. Now I know that he has understood me but that I don't understand him"--and, after a pause--"or myself." CHAPTER III MRS. WHITNEY INTERVENES As Hiram had always been silent and seemingly abstracted, no one but Ellen noted the radical change in him. She had brought up her children in the old-fashioned way--her thoughts, and usually her eyes, upon them all day, and one ear open all night. When she no longer had them to guard, she turned all this energy of solicitude to her husband; thus the passionate love of her youth was having a healthy, beautiful old age. The years of circumventing the easily roused restiveness of her spirited boy and girl had taught her craft; without seeming to be watching Hiram, no detail of his appearance or actions escaped her. "There's mighty little your pa don't see," had been one of her stock observations to the children from their earliest days. "And you needn't flatter yourselves he don't care because he don't speak." Now she noted that from under his heavy brows his eyes were looking stealthily out, more minutely observant than ever before, and that what he saw either added to his sadness or took a color of sadness from his mood. She guessed that the actions of Adelaide and Arthur, so utterly different from the actions of the children of her and Hiram's young days--except those regarded by all worth-while people as "trifling and trashy"--had something to do with Hiram's gloom. She decided that Arthur's failure and his lightness of manner in face of it were the chief trouble--this until Hiram's shoulders began to stoop and hollows to appear in his cheeks and under his ears, and a waxlike pallor to overspread his face. Then she knew that he was not well physically; and, being a practical woman, she dismissed the mental causes of the change. "People talk a lot about their mental troubles," she said to herself, "but it's usually three-fourths stomach and liver." As Hiram and illness, real illness, could not be associated in her mind, she gave the matter no importance until she heard him sigh heavily one night, after they had been in bed several hours. "What is it, father?" she asked. There was no answer, but a return to an imitation of the regular breathing of a sleeper. "Hiram," she insisted, "what is it?" "Nothing, Ellen, nothing," he answered; "I must have ate something that don't sit quite right." "You didn't take no supper at all," said she. This reminded him how useless it was to try to deceive her. "I ain't been feeling well of late," he confessed, "but it'll soon be over." He did not see the double meaning of his words until he had uttered them; he stirred uneasily in his dread that she would suspect. "I went to the doctor." "What did he say?--though I don't know why I should ask what such a fool as Milbury said about anything." "I got some medicine," replied he, evading telling her what doctor. Instantly she sat up in bed. "I haven't seen you take no drugs!" she exclaimed. Drugs were her especial abhorrence. She let no one in the family take any until she had passed upon them. "I didn't want to make a fuss," he explained. "Where is it?" she demanded, on the edge of the bed now, ready to rise. "I'll show it to you in the morning, mother. Lie down and go to sleep. I've been awake long enough." "Where is it?" she repeated, and he heard her moving across the room toward the gas fixture. "In my vest pocket. It's a box of pills. You can't tell nothin' about it." She lit the gas and went to his waistcoat, hanging where it always hung at night--on a hook beside the closet door. He watched her fumble through the pockets, watched her take her spectacles from the corner of the mantel and put them on, the bridge well down toward the end of her nose. A not at all romantic figure she made, standing beside the sputtering gas jet, her spectacles balanced on her nose, her thin neck and forearms exposed, and her old face studying the lid of the pill box held in her toil- and age-worn hands. The box dropped from her fingers and rolled along the floor. He saw an awful look slowly creep over her features as the terrible thought crept over her mind. As she began to turn her face toward him, with a motion of the head like that of a machine on unoiled bearings, he closed his eyes; but he felt her looking at him. "Dr. Schulze!" she said, an almost soundless breathing of the name that always meant the last resort in mortal illness. He was trying to think of lies to tell her, but he could think of nothing. The sense of light upon his eyelids ceased. He presently felt her slowly getting into bed. A pall-like silence; then upon his cheek, in long discontinued caress, a hand whose touch was as light and soft as the fall of a rose leaf--the hand of love that toil and age cannot make harsh, and her fingers were wet with her tears. Thus they lay in the darkness and silence, facing together the tragedy of the eternal separation. "What did he say, dearest?" she asked. She had not used that word to him since the first baby came and they began to call each other "father" and "mother." All these years the children had been between them, and each had held the other important chiefly as related to them. Now it was as in their youth--just he and she, so close that only death could come between them. "It's a long way off," said Hiram. He would not set ringing in her ears that knell which was clanging to him its solemn, incessant, menacing "Put your house in order!" "Tell me what he said," she urged gently. "He couldn't make out exactly. The medicine'll patch me up." She did not insist--why fret him to confess what she knew the instant she read "Schulze" on the box? After an hour she heard him breathing as only a sleeper can breathe; but she watched on until morning. When they were dressing, each looked at the other furtively from time to time, a great tenderness in his eyes, and in hers the anguish of a dread that might not be spoken. On the day after Mrs. Whitney's arrival for the summer, she descended in state from the hills to call upon the Rangers. When the front bell rang Mrs. Ranger was in the kitchen--and was dressed for the kitchen. As the "girl" still had not been replaced she answered the door herself. In a gingham wrapper, with her glasses thrust up into her gray hair, she was facing a footman in livery. "Are Mrs. Ranger and Miss Ranger at home?" asked he, mistaking her for a servant and eying her dishevelment with an expression which was not lost on her. She smiled with heartiest good nature. "Yes, I'm here--I'm Mrs. Ranger," said she; and she looked beyond him to the victoria in which sat Mrs. Whitney. "How d'ye do, Matilda?" she called. "Come right in. As usual when the canneries are running, I'm my own upstairs girl. I reckon your young man here thinks I ought to discharge her and get one that's tidier." "Your young man here" was stiffly touching the brim of his top hat and saying: "Beg parding, ma'am." "Oh, that's all right," replied Mrs. Ranger; "I am what I look to be!" Behind her now appeared Adelaide, her cheeks burning in mortification she was ashamed of feeling and still more ashamed of being unable to conceal. "Go and put on something else, mother," she urged in an undertone; "I'll look after Mrs. Whitney till you come down." "Ain't got time," replied her mother, conscious of what was in her daughter's mind and a little contemptuous and a little resentful of it. "I guess Tilly Whitney will understand. If she don't, why, I guess we can bear up under it." Mrs. Whitney had left her carriage and was advancing up the steps. She was a year older than Ellen Ranger; but so skillfully was she got together that, had she confessed to forty or even thirty-eight, one who didn't know would have accepted her statement as too cautious by hardly more than a year or so. The indisputably artificial detail in her elegant appearance was her hair; its tinting, which had to be made stronger year by year as the gray grew more resolute, was reaching the stage of hard, rough-looking red. "Another year or two," thought Adelaide, "and it'll make her face older than she really is. Even now she's getting a tough look." Matilda kissed Mrs. Ranger and Adelaide affectedly on both cheeks. "I'm so glad to find you in!" said she. "And you, poor dear"--this to Mrs. Ranger--"are in agony over the servant question." She glanced behind her to make sure the carriage had driven away. "I don't know what we're coming to. I can't keep a man longer than six months. Servants don't appreciate a good home and good wages. As soon as a man makes acquaintances here he becomes independent and leaves. If something isn't done, the better class of people will have to move out of the country." "Or go back to doing their own work," said Mrs. Ranger. Mrs. Whitney smiled vaguely--a smile which said, "I'm too polite to answer that remark as it deserves." "Why didn't you bring Jenny along?" inquired Mrs. Ranger, when they were in the "front parlor," the two older women seated, Adelaide moving restlessly about. "Janet and Ross haven't come yet," answered Mrs. Whitney. "They'll be on next week, but only for a little while. They both like it better in the East. All their friends are there and there's so much more to do." Mrs. Whitney sighed; before her rose the fascination of all there was to "do" in the East--the pleasures she was denying herself. "I don't see why you don't live in New York," said Mrs. Ranger. "You're always talking about it." "Oh, I can't leave Charles!" was Mrs. Whitney's answer. "Or, rather he'd not hear of my doing it. But I think he'll let us take an apartment at Sherry's next winter--for the season, just--unless Janet and I go abroad." Mrs. Ranger had not been listening. She now started up. "If you'll excuse me, Mattie, I must see what that cook's about. I'm afraid to let her out of my sight for five minutes for fear she'll up and leave." "What a time your poor mother has!" said Mrs. Whitney, when she and Adelaide were alone. Del had recovered from her attack of what she had been denouncing to herself as snobbishness. For all the gingham wrapper and spectacles anchored in the hair and general air of hard work and no "culture," she was thinking, as she looked at Mrs. Whitney's artificiality and listened to those affected accents, that she was glad her mother was Ellen Ranger and not Matilda Whitney. "But mother doesn't believe she has a hard time," she answered, "and everything depends on what one believes oneself; don't you think so? I often envy her. She's always busy and interested. And she's so useful, such a happiness-maker." "I often feel that way, too," responded Mrs. Whitney, in her most profusely ornate "_grande dame_" manner. "I get _so_ bored with leading an artificial life. I often wish fate had been more kind to me. I was reading, the other day, that the Queen of England said she had the tastes of a dairy maid. Wasn't that charming? Many of us whom fate has condemned to the routine of high station feel the same way." It was by such deliverances that Mrs. Whitney posed, not without success, as an intellectual woman who despised the frivolities of a fashionable existence--this in face of the obvious fact that she led a fashionable existence, or, rather, it led her, from the moment her _masseuse_ awakened her in the morning until her maid undressed her at night. But, although Adelaide was far too young, too inexperienced to know that judgment must always be formed from actions, never from words, she was not, in this instance, deceived. "It takes more courage than most of us have," said she, "to do what we'd like instead of what vanity suggests." Mrs. Whitney did not understand this beyond getting from it a vague sense that she had somehow been thrust at. "You must be careful of that skin of yours, Adele," she thrust back. "I've been looking at it. You can't have been home long, yet the exposure to the sun is beginning to show. You have one of those difficult, thin skins, and one's skin is more than half one's beauty. You ought never to go out without a veil. The last thing Ross said to me was, 'Do tell Adelaide to keep her color down.' You know he admires the patrician style." Adelaide could not conceal the effect of the shot. Her skin was a great trial to her, it burned so easily; and she hated wrapping herself in under broad brims and thick veils when the feeling of bareheadedness was so delightful. "At any rate," said she sweetly, "it's easier to keep color down than to keep it up." Mrs. Whitney pretended not to hear. She was now at the window which gave on the garden by way of a small balcony. "There's your father!" she exclaimed; "let's go to him." There, indeed, was Hiram, pacing the walk along the end of the garden with a ponderousness in the movements of his big form that bespoke age and effort. It irritated Mrs. Whitney to look at him, as it had irritated her to look at Ellen; very painful were the reminders of the ravages of time from these people of about her own age, these whom she as a child had known as children. Crow's-feet and breaking contour and thin hair in those we have known only as grown people, do not affect us; but the same signs in lifelong acquaintances make it impossible to ignore Decay holding up the mirror to us and pointing to aging mouth and throat, as he wags his hideous head and says, "Soon--_you_, too!" Hiram saw Matilda and his daughter the instant they appeared on the balcony, but he gave no hint of it until they were in the path of his monotonous march. He was nerving himself for Mrs. Whitney as one nerves himself in a dentist's chair for the descent of the grinder upon a sensitive tooth. Usually she got no further than her first sentence before irritating him. To-day the very sight of her filled him with seemingly causeless anger. There was a time when he, watching Matilda improve away from her beginnings as the ignorant and awkward daughter of the keeper of a small hotel, had approved of her and had wished that Ellen would give more time to the matter of looks. But latterly he had come to the conclusion that a woman has to choose between improving her exterior and improving her interior, and that it is impossible or all but impossible for her to do both; he therefore found in Ellen's very indifference to exteriors another reason why she seemed to him so splendidly the opposite of Charles's wife. "You certainly look the same as ever, Hiram," Matilda said, advancing with extended, beautifully gloved hand. The expression of his eyes as he turned them upon her gave her a shock, but she forced the smile back into her face and went on, "Ross says you always make him think of a tower on top of a high hill, one that has always stood there and always will." The gray shadow over Hiram's face grew grayer. "But you ought to rest," Mrs. Whitney went on. "You and Charles both ought to rest. It's ridiculous, the way American men act. Now, Charles has never taken a real vacation. When he does go away he has a secretary with him and works all day. But at least he gets change of scene, while you--you rarely miss a day at the mills." "I haven't missed a whole day in forty-three years," replied Hiram, "except the day I got married, and I never expect to. I'll drop in the harness. I'd be lost without it." "Don't you think that's a narrow view of life?" asked Mrs. Whitney. "Don't you think we ought all to take time to cultivate our higher natures?" "What do you mean by higher natures?" Mrs. Whitney scented sarcasm and insult. To interrogate a glittering generality is to slur its projector; she wished her hearers to be dazzled, not moved to the impertinence of cross-examination. "I think you understand me," she said loftily. "I don't," replied Hiram. "I'm only a cooper and miller. I haven't had the advantages of a higher education"--this last with a steady look toward his son, approaching from the direction of the stables. The young man was in a riding suit that was too correct at every point for good taste, except in a college youth, and would have made upon anyone who had been born, or initiated into, the real mysteries of "good form" an impression similar to that of Mrs. Whitney's costume and accent and manner. There was the note of the fashion plate, the evidence of pains, of correctness not instinctive but studied--the marks our new-sprung obstreperous aristocracy has made familiar to us all. It would have struck upon a sense of humor like a trivial twitter from the oboe trickling through a lull in the swell of brasses and strings; but Hiram Ranger had no sense of humor in that direction, had only his instinct for the right and the wrong. The falseness, the absence of the quality called "the real thing," made him bitter and sad. And, when his son joined them and walked up and down with them, he listened with heavier droop of face and form to the affected chatter of the young "man of the world" and the old "_grande dame_" of Chicago society. They talked the language and the affairs of a world he had never explored and had no wish to explore; its code and conduct, his training, his reason and his instinct all joined in condemning as dishonorable shirking of a man's and woman's part in a universe so ordered that, to keep alive in it, everyone must either work or steal. But his boy was delighted with the conversation, with Mrs. Whitney, and, finally, with himself. A long, hard ride had scattered his depression of many weeks into a mere haze over the natural sunshine of youth and health; this haze now vanished. When Mrs. Whitney referred to Harvard, he said lightly, "You know I was plucked." "Ross told me," said she, in an amused tone; "but you'll get back all right next fall." "I don't know that I care to go," said Arthur. "I've been thinking it over. I believe I've got about all the good a university can do a man. It seems to me a year or so abroad--traveling about, seeing the world--would be the best thing for me. I'm going to talk it over with father--as soon as he gets through being out of humor with me." Hiram did not look at his son, who glanced a little uneasily at him as he unfolded this new scheme for perfecting his education as "man of the world." "Surely your father's not _angry_" cried Mrs. Whitney, in a tone intended to make Hiram ashamed of taking so narrow, so rural, a view of his son's fashionable mischance. "No," replied Hiram, and his voice sounded curt. He added, in an undertone: "I wish I were." "You're wrong there, Hiram," said Mrs. Whitney, catching the words not intended for her, and misunderstanding them. "It's not a case for severity." Arthur smiled, and the look he gave his father was a bright indication of the soundness of his heart. Severity! The idea was absurd in connection with the most generous and indulgent of fathers. "You don't get his meaning, Mrs. Whitney," said he. "I, too, wish he were angry. I'm afraid I've made him sad. You know he's got old-fashioned views of many things, and he can't believe I've not really disgraced him and myself." "Do _you_ believe it?" inquired Hiram, with a look at him as sudden and sharp as the ray of a search light. "I _know_ it, father," replied Arthur earnestly. "Am I not right, Mrs. Whitney?" "Don't be such an old fogy, Hiram," said Mrs. Whitney. "You ought to be thankful you've got a son like Arthur, who makes a splendid impression everywhere. He's the only western man that's got into exclusive societies at Harvard in years simply on his own merits, and he's a great favorite in Boston and in New York." "My children need no one to defend them to me," said Hiram, in what might be called his quiet tone--the tone he had never in his life used without drying up utterly the discussion that had provoked it. Many people had noted the curious effect of that tone and had resolved to defy it at the next opportunity, "just to see what the consequences would be." But when the opportunity had come, their courage had always withered. "You can't expect me to be like you, father. You wouldn't, want it," said Arthur, after the pause. "I must be myself, must develop my own individuality." Ranger stopped and that stopped the others. Without looking at his son, he said slowly: "I ain't disputing that, boy. It ain't the question." There was tremendousness in his restrained energy and intensity as he went on: "What I'm thinking about is whether I ought to keep on _helping_ you to 'develop' yourself, as you call it. That's what won't let me rest." And he abruptly walked away. Mrs. Whitney and Arthur stared after him. "I don't think he's quite well, Artie," she said reassuringly. "Don't worry. He'll come round all right. But you ought to be a little more diplomatic." Arthur was silent. Diplomacy meant deceit, and he hadn't yet reached the stage of polite and comfortable compromise where deceit figures merely as an amiable convenience for promoting smoothness in human intercourse. But he believed that his father would "come round all right," as Mrs. Whitney had so comfortingly said. How could it be otherwise when he had done nothing discreditable, but, on the contrary, had been developing himself in a way that reflected the highest credit upon his family, as it marched up toward the lofty goal of "cultured" ambition, toward high and secure social station. Mrs. Whitney, however, did not believe her own statement. In large part her reputation of being a "good, kind sort," like many such reputations, rested on her habit of cheering on those who were going the wrong way and were disturbed by some suspicion of the truth. She had known Hiram Ranger long, had had many a trying experience of his character, gentle as a trade wind--and as steady and unchangeable. Also, beneath her surface of desperate striving after the things which common sense denounces, or affects to denounce, as foolishness, there was a shrewd, practical person. "He means some kind of mischief," she thought--an unreasoned, instinctive conclusion, and, therefore, all-powerful with a woman. That evening she wrote her daughter not to cut short her visit to get to Saint X. "Wait until Ross is ready. Then you can join him at Chicago and let him bring you." Just about the hour she was setting down this first result of her instinct's warning against the danger signal she had seen in Hiram Ranger's manner, he was delivering a bombshell. He had led in the family prayers as usual and had just laid the Bible on the center-table in the back parlor after they rose from their knees. With his hands resting on the cover of the huge volume he looked at his son. There was a sacrificial expression in his eyes. "I have decided to withdraw Arthur's allowance," he said, and his voice sounded hollow and distant, as unfamiliar to his own ears as to theirs. "He must earn his own living. If he wants a place at the mills, there's one waiting for him. If he'd rather work at something else, I'll do what I can to get him a job." Silence; and Hiram left the room. Adelaide was first to recover sufficiently to speak. "O mother," cried she, "you're not going to allow this!" To Adelaide's and Arthur's consternation, Ellen replied quietly: "It ain't no use to talk to him. I ain't lived all these years with your father without finding out when he means what he says." "It's so unjust!" exclaimed Adelaide. There came into Ellen's face a look she had never seen there before. It made her say: "O mother, I didn't mean that; only, it does seem hard." Mrs. Ranger thought so, too; but she would have died rather than have made the thought treason by uttering it. She followed her husband upstairs, saying: "You and Arthur can close up, and put out the lights." Adelaide, almost in tears over her brother's catastrophe, was thrilled with admiration of his silent, courageous bearing. "What are you going to do, Artie?" This incautious question drew his inward ferment boiling to the surface. "He has me down and I've got to take his medicine," said the young man, teeth together and eyes dark with fury. This she did not admire. Her first indignation abated, as she sat on there thinking it out. "Maybe father is nearer right than we know," she said to herself finally. "After all, Arthur will merely be doing as father does. There's _something_ wrong with him, and with me, too, or we shouldn't think that so terrible." But to Arthur she said nothing. Encourage him in his present mood she must not; and to try to dissuade him would simply goad him on. CHAPTER IV THE SHATTERED COLOSSUS That night there was sleep under Hiram Ranger's roof for Mary the cook only. Of the four wakeful ones the most unhappy was Hiram himself, the precipitator of it all. Arthur had the consolation of his conviction that his calamity was unjust; Adelaide and her mother, of their conviction that in the end it could not but be well with Arthur. For Hiram there was no consolation. He reviewed and re-reviewed the facts, and each time he reached again his original conclusion; the one course in repairing the mistakes of the boy's bringing up was a sharp rightabout. "Don't waste no time gettin' off the wrong road, once you're sure it's wrong," had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced to do right in the wrong way--to hide himself from them behind a manner of cold and silent finality, and, so, to prevent them from forming an alliance and a junction of forces with the traitor softness within him. Besides, gentle, roundabout, gradual measures would require time--delay; and he must "put his house in order" forthwith. Thus, even the consolation that he was at least doing right was denied him. As he lay there he could see himself harshly forcing the bitter medicine upon his son, the cure for a disease for which he was himself responsible; he could see his son's look and could not deny its justice. "I reckon he hates me," thought Hiram, pouring vitriol into his own wounds, "and I reckon he's got good cause to." But there was in the old miller a Covenanter fiber tough as ironwood. The idea of yielding did not enter his head. He accepted his sufferings as part of his punishment for past indulgence and weakness; he would endure, and go forward. His wife understood him by a kind of intuition which, like most of our insight into the true natures of those close about us, was a gradual permeation from the one to the other rather than clear, deliberate reasoning. But the next morning her sore and anxious mother's heart misread the gloom of his strong face into sternness toward her only son. "When did you allow to put the boy to work, father?" she finally said, and her tone unintentionally made Hiram feel more than ever as if he had sentenced "the boy" to hard labor in the degradation and disgrace of a chain gang. As he waited some time for self-control before answering, she thought her inquiry had deepened his resentment. "Not that I don't think you're right, maybe," she hastened to add, "though"--this wistfully, in a feminine and maternal subtlety of laying the first lines for sapping and mining his position--"I often think about our life, all work and no play, and wonder if we oughtn't to give the children the chance we never had." "No good never came of idleness," said Hiram, uncompromisingly, "and to be busy about foolishness is still worse. Work or rot--that's life." "That's so; that's so," she conceded. And she was sincere; for that was her real belief, and what she had hinted was a mere unthinking repetition of the shallow, comfortable philosophy of most people--those "go easys" and "do nothings" and "get nowheres" wherewith Saint X and the surrounding country were burdened. "Still," she went on, aloud, "Arthur hasn't got any bad habits, like most of the young men round here with more money than's good for them." "Drink ain't the only bad habit," replied Hiram. "It ain't the worst, though it looks the worst. The boy's got brains. It ain't right to allow him to choke 'em up with nonsense." Ellen's expression was assent. "Tell him to come down to the mill next Monday," said Hiram, after another silence, "and tell him to get some clothes that won't look ridiculous." He paused, then added; "A man that ain't ready to do anything, no matter what so long as it's useful and honest, is good for nothing." The night had bred in Arthur brave and bold resolves. He would not tamely submit; he would cast his father off, would go forth and speedily carve a brilliant career. He would show his father that, even if the training of a gentleman develops tastes above the coarseness of commerce, it also develops the mental superiority that makes fleeing chaff of the obstacles to fame and wealth. He did not go far into details; but, as his essays at Harvard had been praised, he thought of giving literature's road to distinction the preference over the several others that must be smooth before him. Daylight put these imaginings into silly countenance, and he felt silly for having lingered in their company, even in the dark. As he dressed he had much less than his wonted content with himself. He did not take the same satisfaction in his clothes, as evidence of his good taste, or in his admired variations of the fashion of wearing the hair and tying the scarf. Midway in the process of arranging his hair he put down his military brushes; leaning against the dressing table, he fixed his mind upon the first serious thoughts he had ever had in his whole irresponsible, sheltered life. "Well," he said, half-aloud, "there _is_ something wrong! If there isn't, why do I feel as if my spine had collapsed?" After a long pause, he added: "And it has! All that held it steady was father's hand." The whole lofty and beautiful structure of self-complacence upon which he had lounged, preening his feathers and receiving social triumphs and the adulation of his "less fortunate fellows" as the due of his own personal superiority, suddenly slipped from under him. With a rueful smile at his plight, he said: "The governor has called me down." Then, resentfully, and with a return of his mood of dignity outraged and pride trampled upon: "But he had no right to put me up there--or let me climb up there." Once a wrong becomes "vested," it is a "vested right," sacred, taboo. Arthur felt that his father was committing a crime against him. When he saw Adelaide and his mother their anxious looks made him furious. So! They knew how helpless he was; they were pitying him. _Pitying_ him! Pitying _him_! He just tasted his coffee; with scowling brow he hastened to the stables for his saddle horse and rode away alone. "Wait a few minutes and I'll come with you," called Adelaide from the porch as he galloped by. He pretended not to hear. When clear of the town he "took it out" on his horse, using whip and spur until it gripped the bit and ran away. He fought savagely with it; at a turn in the road it slipped and fell, all but carrying him under. He was in such a frenzy that if he had had a pistol he would have shot it. The chemical action of his crisis precipitated in a black mass all the poison his nature had been absorbing in those selfish, supercilious years. So long as that poison was held in suspense it was imperceptible to himself as well as to others. But now, there it was, unmistakably a poison. At the sight his anger vanished. "I'm a beast!" he ejaculated, astonished. "And here I've been imagining I was a fairly decent sort of fellow. What the devil have I been up to, to make me like this?" He walked along the road, leading his horse by the bridle slipped over his arm. He resumed his reverie of the earlier morning, and began a little less dimly to see his situation from the new viewpoint. "I deserve what I'm getting," he said to himself. Then, at a twinge from the resentment that had gone too deep to be ejected in an instant, he added: "But that doesn't excuse _him_." His father was to blame for the whole ugly business--for his plight within and without. Still, fixing the blame was obviously unimportant beside the problem of the way out. And for that problem he, in saner mood, began to feel that the right solution was to do something and so become in his own person a somebody, instead of being mere son of a somebody. "I haven't got this shock a minute too soon," he reflected. "I must take myself in hand. I--" "Why, it's you, Arthur, isn't it?" startled him. He looked up, saw Mrs. Whitney coming toward him. She was in a winter walking suit, though the day was warm. She was engaged in the pursuit that was the chief reason for her three months' retirement to the bluffs overlooking Saint X--the preservation of her figure. She hated exercise, being by nature as lazy, luxurious, and self-indulgent physically as she was alert and industrious mentally. From October to July she ate and drank about what she pleased, never set foot upon the ground if she could help it, and held her tendency to hips in check by daily massage. From July to October she walked two or three hours a day, heavily dressed, and had a woman especially to attend to her hair and complexion, in addition to the _masseuse_ toiling to keep her cheeks and throat firm for the fight against wrinkles and loss of contour. Arthur frowned at the interruption, then smoothed his features into a cordial smile; and at once that ugly mass of precipitated poison began to redistribute itself and hide itself from him. "You've had a fall, haven't you?" He flushed. She, judging with the supersensitive vanity of all her self-conscious "set," thought the flush was at the implied criticism of his skill; but he was far too good a rider to care about his misadventure, and it was her unconscious double meaning that stung him. She turned; they walked together. After a brief debate as to the time for confessing his "fall," which, at best, could remain a secret no longer than Monday, he chose the present. "Father's begun to cut up rough," said he, and his manner was excellent. "He's taken away my allowance, and I'm to go to work at the mill." He was yielding to the insidious influence of her presence, was dropping rapidly back toward the attitude as well as the accent of "our set." At his frank disclosure Mrs. Whitney congratulated herself on her shrewdness so heartily that she betrayed it in her face; but Arthur did not see. "I suppose your mother can do nothing with him." This was spoken in a tone of conviction. She always felt that, if she had had Hiram to deal with, she would have been fully as successful with him as she thought she had been with Charles Whitney. She did not appreciate the fundamental difference in the characters of the two men. Both were iron of will; but there was in Whitney--and not in Hiram--a selfishness that took the form of absolute indifference to anything and everything which did not directly concern himself--his business or his physical comfort. Thus his wife had had her way in all matters of the social career, and he would have forced upon her the whole responsibility for the children if she had not spared him the necessity by assuming it. He cheerfully paid the bills, no matter what they were, because he thought his money's power to buy him immunity from family annoyances one of its chief values. She, and everyone else, thought she ruled him; in fact, she not only did not rule him, but had not even influence with him in the smallest trifle of the matters he regarded as important. The last time he had looked carefully at her--many, many years before--he had thought her beautiful; he assumed thenceforth that she was still beautiful, and was therefore proud of her. In like manner he had made up his mind favorably to his children. As the bills grew heavier and heavier, from year to year, with the wife and two children assiduously expanding them, he paid none the less cheerfully. "There is some satisfaction in paying up for them," reflected he. "At least a man can feel that he's getting his money's worth." And he contrasted his luck with the bad luck of so many men who had to "pay up" for "homely frumps, that look worse the more they spend." But Arthur was replying to Mrs. Whitney's remark with a bitter "Nobody can do anything with father; he's narrow and obstinate. If you argue with him, he's silent. He cares for nothing but his business." Arthur did not hesitate to speak thus frankly to Mrs. Whitney. She seemed a member of the family, like a sister of his mother or father who had lived with them always; also he accepted her at the valuation she and all her friends set upon her--he, like herself and them, thought her generous and unselfish because she was lavish with sympathetic words and with alms--the familiar means by which the heartless cheat themselves into a reputation for heart. She always left the objects of her benevolence the poorer for her ministrations, though they did not realize it. She adopted as the guiding principle of her life the cynical philosophy--"Give people what they want, never what they need." By sympathizing effusively with those in trouble, she encouraged them in low-spiritedness; by lavishing alms, she weakened struggling poverty into pauperism. But she took away and left behind enthusiasm for her own moral superiority and humanity. Also she deceived herself and others with such fluid outpourings of fine phrases about "higher life" and "spiritual thinking" as so exasperated Hiram Ranger. Now, instead of showing Arthur what her substratum of shrewd sense enabled her to see, she ministered soothingly unto his vanity. His father was altogether wrong, tyrannical, cruel; he himself was altogether right, a victim of his father's ignorance of the world. "I decided not to submit," said Arthur, as if the decision were one which had come to him the instant his father had shown the teeth and claws of tyranny, instead of being an impulse of just that moment, inspired by Mrs. Whitney's encouragement to the weakest and worst in his nature. "I shouldn't be too hasty about that," she cautioned. "He is old and sick. You ought to be more than considerate. And, also, you should be careful not to make him do anything that would cut you out of your rights." It was the first time the thought of his "rights"--of the share of his father's estate that would be his when his father was no more--had definitely entered his head. That he would some day be a rich man he had accepted just as he accepted the other conditions of his environment--all to which he was born and in which consisted his title to be regarded as of the "upper classes," like his associates at Harvard. Thinking now on the insinuated proposition that his father might disinherit him, he promptly rejected it. "No danger of his doing that," he assured her, with the utmost confidence. "Father is an honest man, and he wouldn't think of anything so dishonest, so dishonorable." This view of a child's rights in the estate of its parents amused Mrs. Whitney. She knew how quickly she would herself cut off a child of hers who was obstinately disobedient, and, while she felt that it would be an outrage for Hiram Ranger to cut off his son for making what she regarded as the beginning of the highest career, the career of "gentleman," still she could not dispute his right to do so. "Your father may not see your rights in the same light that you do, Arthur," said she mildly. "If I were you, I'd be careful." Arthur reflected. "I don't think it's possible," said he, "but I guess you're right. I must not forget that I've got others to think of besides myself." This patently meant Janet; Mrs. Whitney held her discreet tongue. "It will do no harm to go to the office," she presently continued. "You ought to get some knowledge of business, anyhow. You will be a man of property some day, and you will need to know enough about business to be able to supervise the managers of your estate. You know, I had Janet take a course at a business college, last winter, and Ross is in with his father and will be active for several years." * * * * * Thus it came about that on Monday morning at nine Arthur sauntered into the offices of the mills. He was in much such a tumult of anger, curiosity, stubbornness, and nervousness as agitates a child on its first appearance at school; but in his struggle not to show his feelings he exaggerated his pose into a seeming of bored indifference. The door of his father's private room was open; there sat Hiram, absorbed in dictating to a stenographer. When his son appeared in the doorway, he apparently did not realize it, though in fact the agitation the young man was concealing under that unfortunate manner was calmness itself in comparison with the state of mind behind Hiram's mask of somber stolidity. "He's trying to humiliate me to the depths," thought the son, as he stood and waited, not daring either to advance or to retreat. How could he know that his father was shrinking as a criminal from the branding iron, that every nerve in that huge, powerful, seemingly impassive body was in torture from this ordeal of accepting the hatred of his son in order that he might do what he considered to be his duty? At length the young man said: "I'm here, father." "Be seated--just a minute," said the father, turning his face toward his boy but unable to look even in that direction. The letter was finished, and the stenographer gathered up her notes and withdrew. Hiram sat nerving himself, his distress accentuating the stern strength of his features. Presently he said: "I see you haven't come dressed for work." "Oh, I think these clothes will do for the office," said Arthur, with apparent carelessness. "But this business isn't run from the office," replied Hiram, with a gentle smile that to the young man looked like the sneer of a tyrant. "It's run from the mill. It prospers--it always has prospered--because I work with the men. I know what they ought to do and what they are doing. We all work together here. There ain't a Sunday clothes job about the place." Arthur's fingers were trembling as he pulled at his small mustache. What did this tyrant expect of him? He had assumed that a place was to be made for him in the office, a dignified place. There he would master the business, would gather such knowledge as might be necessary successfully to direct it, and would bestow that knowledge in the humble, out-of-the-way corner of his mind befitting matters of that kind. And here was his father, believing that the same coarse and toilsome methods which had been necessary for himself were necessary for a trained and cultured understanding! "What do you want me to do?" asked Arthur. Hiram drew a breath of relief. The boy was going to show good sense and willingness after all. "I guess you'd better learn barrel-making first," said he. He rose. "I'll take you to the foreman of the cooperage, and to-morrow you can go to work in the stave department. The first thing is to learn to make a first-class barrel." Arthur slowly rose to follow. He was weak with helpless rage. If his father had taken him into the office and had invited him to help in directing the intellectual part of that great enterprise, the part that in a way was not without appeal to the imagination, he felt that he might gradually have accustomed himself to it; but to be put into the mindless routine of the workingman, to be set about menial tasks which a mere muscular machine could perform better than he--what waste, what degradation, what insult! He followed his father to the cooperage, the uproar of its machinery jarring fiercely upon him, but not so fiercely as did the common-looking men slaving in torn and patched and stained clothing. He did not look at the foreman as his father was introducing them and ignored his proffered hand. "Begin him at the bottom, Patrick," explained Hiram, "and show him no favors. We must give him a good education." "That's right, Mr. Ranger," said Patrick, eying his new pupil dubiously. He was not skilled in analysis of manner and character, so Arthur's superciliousness missed him entirely and he was attributing the cold and vacant stare to stupidity. "A regular damn dude," he was saying to himself. "As soon as the old man's gone, some fellow with brains'll do him out of the business. If the old man's wise, he'll buy him an annuity, something safe and sure. Why do so many rich people have sons like that? If I had one of his breed I'd shake his brains up with a stave." Arthur mechanically followed his father back to the office. At the door Hiram, eager to be rid of him, said: "I reckon that's about all we can do to-day. You'd better go to Black and Peters's and get you some clothes. Then you can show up at the cooperage at seven to-morrow morning, ready to put in a good day's work." He laid his hand on his son's shoulder, and that gesture and the accompanying look, such as a surgeon might give his own child upon whom he was performing a cruelly painful operation, must have caused some part of what he felt to penetrate to the young man; for, instead of bursting out at his father, he said appealingly: "Would it be a very great disappointment to you if I were to go into--into some--some other line?" "What line?" asked Hiram. "I haven't settled--definitely. But I'm sure I'm not fitted for this." He checked himself from going on to explain that he thought it would mean a waste of all the refinements and elegancies he had been at so much pains to acquire. "Who's to look after the business when I'm gone?" asked Hiram. "Most of what we've got is invested here. Who's to look after your mother's and sister's interests, not to speak of your own?" "I'd be willing to devote enough time to it to learn the management," said Arthur, "but I don't care to know all the details." It was proof of Hiram's great love for the boy that he had no impulse of anger at this display of what seemed to him the most priggish ignorance. "There's only one way to learn," said he quietly. "That's the way I've marked out for you. Don't forget--we start up at seven. You can breakfast with me at a quarter past six, and we'll come down together." As Arthur walked homeward he pictured himself in jumper and overalls on his way from work of an evening--meeting the Whitneys--meeting Janet Whitney! Like all Americans, who become inoculated with "grand ideas," he had the super-sensitiveness to appearances that makes foreigners call us the most snobbishly conventional people on earth. What would it avail to be in character _the_ refined person in the community and in position _the_ admired person, if he spent his days at menial toil and wore the livery of labor? He knew Janet Whitney would blush as she bowed to him, and that she wouldn't bow to him unless she were compelled to do so because she had not seen him in time to escape; and he felt that she would be justified. The whole business seemed to him a hideous dream, a sardonic practical joke upon him. Surely, surely, he would presently wake from this nightmare to find himself once more an unimperiled gentleman. In the back parlor at home he found Adelaide about to set out for the Whitneys. As she expected to walk with Mrs. Whitney for an hour before lunch she was in walking costume--hat, dress, gloves, shoes, stockings, sunshade, all the simplest, most expensive-looking, most unpractical-looking white. From hat to heels she was the embodiment of luxurious, "ladylike" idleness, the kind that not only is idle itself, but also, being beautiful, attractive, and compelling, is the cause of idleness in others. She breathed upon Arthur the delicious perfume of the elegant life from which he was being thrust by the coarse hand of his father--and Arthur felt as if he were already in sweaty overalls. "Well?" she asked. "He's going to make a common workman of me," said Arthur, sullen, mentally contrasting his lot with hers. "And he's got me on the hip. I don't dare treat him as he deserves. If I did, he's got just devil enough in him to cheat me out of my share of the property. A sweet revenge he could take on me in his will." Adelaide drew back--was rudely thrust back by the barrier between her and her brother which had sprung up as if by magic. Across it she studied him with a pain in her heart that showed in her face. "O Arthur, how can you think such a thing!" she exclaimed. "Isn't it so?" he demanded. "He has a right to do what he pleases with his own." Then she softened this by adding, "But he'd never do anything unjust." "It isn't his own," retorted her brother. "It belongs to us all." "We didn't make it," she insisted. "We haven't any right to it, except to what he gives us." "Then you think we're living on his charity?" "No--not just that," she answered hesitatingly. "I've never thought it out--never have thought about it at all." "He brought us into the world," Arthur pursued. "He has accustomed us to a certain station--to a certain way of living. It's his duty in honesty and in honor to do everything in his power to keep us there." Del admitted to herself that this was plausible, but she somehow felt that it was not true. "It seems to me that if parents bring their children up to be the right sort--useful and decent and a credit," said she, "they've done the biggest part of their duty. The money isn't so important, is it? At least, it oughtn't to be." Arthur looked at her with angry suspicion. "Suppose he made a will giving it all to you, Del," he said, affecting the manner of impartial, disinterested argument, "what would _you_ do?" "Share with you, of course," she answered, hurt that he should raise the question at a time when raising it seemed an accusation of her, or at least a doubt of her. He laughed satirically. "That's what you think now," said he. "But, when the time came, you'd be married to Ross Whitney, and he'd show you how just father's judgment of me was, how wicked it would be to break his last solemn wish and will, and how unfit I was to take care of money. And you'd see it; and the will would stand. Oh, you'd see it! I know human nature. If it was a small estate--in those cases brothers and sisters always act generously--no, not always. Some of 'em, lots of 'em, quarrel and fight over a few pieces of furniture and crockery. But in a case of a big estate, who ever heard of the one that was favored giving up his advantage unless he was afraid of a scandal, or his lawyers advised him he might as well play the generous, because he'd surely lose the suit?" "Of course, Arthur, I can't be sure what I'd do," she replied gently; "but I hope I'd not be made altogether contemptible by inheriting a little money." "But it wouldn't seem contemptible," he retorted. "It'd be legal and sensible, and it'd seem just. You'd only be obeying a dead father's last wishes and guarding the interests of your husband and your children. They come before brothers." "But not before self-respect," she said very quietly. She put her arm around his neck and pressed her cheek against his. "Arthur--dear--dear--" she murmured, "please don't talk or think about this any more. It--it--hurts." And there were hot tears in her eyes, and at her heart a sense of sickness and of fright; for his presentation of the other side of the case made her afraid of what she might do, or be tempted to do, in the circumstances he pictured. She knew she wouldn't--at least, not so long as she remained the person she then was. But how long would that be? How many years of association with her new sort of friends--with the sort Ross had long been--with the sort she was becoming more and more like--how many, or, rather, how few years would it take to complete the process of making her over into a person who would do precisely what Arthur had pictured? Arthur had said a great deal more than he intended--more, even, than he believed true. For a moment he felt ashamed of himself; then he reminded himself that he wasn't really to blame; that, but for his father's harshness toward him, he would never have had such sinister thoughts about him or Adelaide. Thus his apology took the form of an outburst against Hiram. "Father has brought out the worst there is in me!" he exclaimed. "He is goading me on to--" He looked up; Hiram was in the doorway. He sprang to his feet. "Yes, I mean it!" he cried, his brain confused, his blood on fire. "I don't care what you do. Cut me off! Make me go to work like any common laborer! Crush out all the decency there is in me!" The figure of the huge old man was like a storm-scarred statue. The tragedy of his countenance filled his son and daughter with awe and terror. Then, slowly, like a statue falling, he stiffly tilted forward, crashed at full length face downward on the floor. He lay as he had fallen, breathing heavily, hoarsely. And they, each tightly holding the other's hand like two little children, stood pale and shuddering, unable to move toward the stricken colossus. CHAPTER V THE WILL When Hiram had so far improved that his period of isolation was obviously within a few days of its end, Adelaide suggested to Arthur, somewhat timidly, "Don't you think you ought to go to work at the mills?" He frowned. It was bad enough to have the inward instinct to this, and to fight it down anew each day as a temptation to weakness and cowardice. That the traitor should get an ally in his sister--it was intolerable. The frown deepened into a scowl. But Del had been doing real thinking since she saw her father stricken down, and she was beginning clearly to see his point of view as to Arthur. That angry frown was discouraging, but she felt too strongly to be quite daunted. "It might help father toward getting well," she urged, "and make _such_ a difference--in _every_ way." "No more hypocrisy. I was right; he was wrong," replied her brother. He had questioned Dr. Schulze anxiously about his father's seizure; and Schulze, who had taken a strong fancy to him and had wished to put him at ease, declared that the attack must have begun at the mills, and would probably have brought Hiram down before he could have reached home, had he not been so powerful of body and of will. And Arthur, easily reassured where he must be assured if he was to have peace of mind, now believed that his outburst had had no part whatever in causing his father's stroke. So he was all for firm stand against slavery. "If I yield an inch now," he went on to Adelaide, "he'll never stop until he has made me his slave. He has lorded it over those workingmen so long that the least opposition puts him in a frenzy." Adelaide gave over, for the time, the combat against a stubbornness which was an inheritance from his father. "I've only made him more set by what I've said," thought she. "Now, he has committed himself. I ought not to have been so tactless." Long after Hiram got back in part the power of speech, he spoke only when directly addressed, and then after a wait in which he seemed to have cast about for the fewest possible words. After a full week of this emphasized reticence, he said, "Where is Arthur?" Arthur had kept away because--so he told himself and believed--while he was not in the least responsible for his father's illness, still seeing him and being thus reminded of their difference could not but have a bad effect. That particular day, as luck would have it, he for the first time since his father was stricken had left the grounds. "He's out driving," said his mother. "In the tandem?" asked Hiram. "Yes," replied Ellen, knowing nothing of the last development of the strained relations between her husband and her "boy." "Then he hasn't gone to work?" "He's stayed close to the house ever since you were taken sick, Hiram," said she, with gentle reproach. "He's been helping me nurse you." Hiram did not need to inquire how little that meant. He knew that, when anyone Ellen Ranger loved was ill, she would permit no help in the nursing, neither by day nor by night. He relapsed into his brooding over the problem which was his sad companion each conscious moment, now that the warning "Put your house in order" had been so sternly emphasized. The day Dr. Schulze let them bring him down to the first floor, Mrs. Hastings--"Mrs. Fred," to distinguish her from "Mrs. Val"--happened to call. Mrs. Ranger did not like her for two reasons--first, she had married her favorite cousin, Alfred Hastings, and had been the "ruination" of him; second, she had a way of running on and on to everyone and anyone about the most intimate family affairs, and close-mouthed Ellen Ranger thought this the quintessence of indiscretion and vulgarity. But Hiram liked her, was amused by her always interesting and at times witty thrusts at the various members of her family, including herself. So, Mrs. Ranger, clutching at anything that might lighten the gloom thick and black upon him, let her in and left them alone together. With so much to do, she took advantage of every moment which she could conscientiously spend out of his presence. At sight of Henrietta, Hiram's face brightened; and well it might. In old-fashioned Saint X it was the custom for a married woman to "settle down" as soon as she returned from her honeymoon--to abandon all thoughts, pretensions, efforts toward an attractive exterior, and to become a "settled" woman, "settled" meaning purified of the last grain of the vanity of trying to please the eye or ear of the male. And conversation with any man, other than her husband--and even with him, if a woman were soundly virtuous, through and through--must be as clean shorn of allurement as a Quaker meetinghouse. Mrs. Fred had defied this ancient and sacred tradition of the "settled" woman. She had kept her looks; she frankly delighted in the admiration of men. And the fact that the most captious old maid in Saint X could not find a flaw in her character as a faithful wife, aggravated the offending. For, did not her devotion to her husband make dangerous her example of frivolity retained and flaunted, as a pure private life in an infidel made his heresies plausible and insidious? At "almost" forty, Mrs. Hastings looked "about" thirty and acted as if she were a girl or a widow. Each group of gods seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it. Saint X's set of gods of conventionality doubtless seems ridiculous to those who knock the dust before some other set; but Saint X cannot be blamed for having a sober face before its own altars, and reserving its jeers and pitying smiles for deities of conventionality in high dread and awe elsewhere. And if Mrs. Fred had not been "one of the Fuller heirs," Saint X would have made her feel its displeasure, instead of merely gossiping and threatening. "I'm going the round of the invalids to-day," began Henrietta, after she had got through the formula of sick-room conversation. "I've just come from old John Skeffington. I found all the family in the depths. He fooled 'em again last night." Hiram smiled. All Saint X knew what it meant for old Skeffington to "fool 'em again." He had been dying for three years. At the first news that he was seized of a mortal illness his near relations, who had been driven from him by his temper and his parsimony, gathered under his roof from far and near, each group hoping to induce him to make a will in its favor. He lingered on, and so did they--watching each other, trying to outdo each other in complaisance to the humors of the old miser. And he got a new grip on life through his pleasure in tyrannizing over them and in putting them to great expense in keeping up his house. He favored first one group, then another, taking fagots from fires of hope burning too high to rekindle fires about to expire. "How is he?" asked Hiram. "_They_ say he can't last till fall," replied Henrietta; "but he'll last another winter, maybe ten. He's having more and more fun all the time. He has made them bring an anvil and hammer to his bedside, and whenever he happens to be sleeping badly--and that's pretty often--he bangs on the anvil until the last one of his relations has got up and come in; then, maybe he'll set 'em all to work mending his fishing tackle--right in the dead of night." "Are they all there still?" asked Hiram. "The Thomases, the Wilsons, the Frisbies, and the two Cantwell old maids?" "Everyone--except Miss Frisbie. She's gone back home to Rushville, but she's sending her sister on to take her place to-morrow. I saw Dory Hargrave in the street a while ago. You know his mother was a first cousin of old John's. I told him he ought not to let strangers get the old man's money, that he ought to shy _his_ castor into the ring." "And what did Dory say?" asked Hiram. "He came back at me good and hard," said Mrs. Fred, with a good-humored laugh. "He said there'd been enough people in Saint X ruined by inheritances and by expecting inheritances. You know the creek that flows through the graveyard has just been stopped from seeping into the reservoir. Well, Dory spoke of that and said there was, and always had been, flowing from every graveyard a stream far more poisonous than any graveyard creek, yet nobody talked of stopping it." The big man, sitting with eyes downcast, began to rub his hands, one over the other--a certain sign that he was thinking intently. "There's a good deal of truth in what he said," she went on. "Look at our family, for instance. We've been living on an allowance from Grandfather Fuller in Chicago for forty years. None of us has ever done a stroke of work; we've simply been waiting for him to die and divide up his millions. Look at us! Bill and Tom drunkards, Dick a loafer without even the energy to be a drunkard; Ed dead because he was too lazy to keep alive. Alice and I married nice fellows; but as soon as they got into our family they began to loaf and wait. We've been waiting in decent, or I should say, indecent, poverty for forty years, and we're still waiting. We're a lot of paupers. We're on a level with the Wilmots." "Yes--there are the Wilmots, too," said Hiram absently. "That's another form of the same disease," Henrietta went on. "Did you know General Wilmot?" "He was a fine man," said Hiram, "one of the founders of this town, and he made a fortune out of it. He got overbearing, and what he thought was proud, toward the end of his life. But he had a good heart and worked for all he had--honest work." "And he brought his family up to be real down-East gentlemen and ladies," resumed Henrietta. "And look at 'em. They lost the money, because they were too gentlemanly and too ladylike to work to hold on to it. And there they live in the big house, half-starved. Why, really, Mr. Ranger, they don't have enough to eat. And they dress in clothes that have been in the family for a generation. They make their underclothes out of old bed linen. And the grass on their front lawns is three feet high, and the moss and weeds cover and pry up the bricks of their walks. They're too 'proud' to work and too poor to hire. How much have they borrowed from you?" "I don't know," said Hiram. "Not much." "I know better--and you oughtn't to have lent them a cent. Yesterday old Wilmot was hawking two of his grandfather's watches about. And all the Wilmots have got brains, just as our family has. Nothing wrong with either of us, but that stream Dory Hargrave was talking about." "There's John Dumont," mused Ranger. "Yes--_he_ is an exception. But what's he doing with what his father left him? I don't let them throw dust in my eyes with his philanthropy as they call it. The plain truth is he's a gambler and a thief, and he uses what his father left him to be gambler and thief on the big scale, and so keep out of the penitentiary--'finance,' they call it. If he'd been poor, he'd have been in jail long ago--no, he wouldn't--he'd have done differently. It was the money that started him wrong." "A great deal of good can be done with money," said Hiram. "Can it?" demanded Mrs. Fred. "It don't look that way to me. I'm full of this, for I was hauling my Alfred over the coals this very morning"--she laughed--"for being what I've made him, for doing what I'd do in his place--for being like my father and my brothers. It seems to me, precious little of the alleged good that's done with wealth is really good; and what little isn't downright bad hides the truth from people. Talk about the good money does! What does it amount to--the good that's good, and the good that's rotten bad? What does it all amount to beside the good that having to work does? People that have to work hard are usually honest and have sympathy and affection and try to amount to something. And if they are bad, why at least they can't hurt anybody but themselves very much, where a John Dumont or a Skeffington can injure hundreds--thousands. Take your own case, Mr. Ranger. Your money has never done you any good. It was your hard work. All your money has ever done has been--Do you think your boy and girl will be as good a man and woman, as useful and creditable to the community, as you and Cousin Ellen?" Hiram said nothing; he continued to slide his great, strong, useful-looking hands one over the other. "A fortune makes a man stumble along if he's in the right road, makes him race along if he's in the wrong road," concluded Henrietta. "You must have been talking a great deal to young Hargrave lately," said Hiram shrewdly. She blushed. "That's true," she admitted, with a laugh. "But I'm not altogether parroting what he said. I do my own thinking." She rose. "I'm afraid I haven't cheered you up much." "I'm glad you came," replied Hiram earnestly; then, with an admiring look, "It's a pity some of the men of your family haven't got your energy." She laughed. "They have," said she. "Every one of us is a first-rate talker--and that's all the energy I've got--energy to wag my tongue. Still--You didn't know I'd gone into business?" "Business?" "That is, I'm backing Stella Wilmot in opening a little shop--to sell millinery." "A Wilmot at work!" exclaimed Hiram. "A Wilmot at work," affirmed Henrietta. "She's more like her great grandfather; you know how a bad trait will skip several generations and then show again. The Wilmots have been cultivating the commonness of work out of their blood for three generations, but it has burst in again. She made a declaration of independence last week. She told the family she was tired of being a pauper and beggar. And when I heard she wanted to do something I offered to go in with her in a business. She's got a lot of taste in trimming hats. She certainly has had experience enough." "She always looks well," said Hiram. "And you'd wonder at it, if you were a woman and knew what she's had to work on. So I took four hundred dollars grandfather sent me as a birthday present, and we're going to open up in a small way. She's to put her name out--my family won't let me put mine out, too. 'Wilmot & Hastings' would sound well, don't you think? But it's got to be 'Wilmot & Co.' We've hired a store--No. 263 Monroe Street. We have our opening in August." "Do you need any--" began Hiram. "No, thank you," she cut in, with a laugh. "This is a close corporation. No stock for sale. We want to hold on to every cent of the profits." "Well," said Hiram, "if you ever do need to borrow, you know where to come." "Where the whole town comes when it's hard up," said Henrietta; and she astonished the old man by giving him a shy, darting kiss on the brow. "Now, don't you tell your wife!" she exclaimed, laughing and blushing furiously and making for the door. When Adelaide, sent by her mother, came to sit with him, he said: "Draw the blinds, child, and leave me alone. I want to rest." She obeyed him. At intervals of half an hour she opened the door softly, looked in at him, thought he was asleep, and went softly away. But he had never been further from sleep in his life. Henrietta Hastings's harum-scarum gossiping and philosophizing happened to be just what his troubled mind needed to precipitate its clouds into a solid mass that could be clearly seen and carefully examined. Heretofore he had accepted the conventional explanations of all the ultimate problems, had regarded philosophers as time wasters, own brothers to the debaters who whittled on dry-goods boxes at the sidewalk's edge in summer and about the stoves in the rear of stores in winter, settling all affairs save their own. But now, sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, half of his mind. Even as Henrietta was talking, he began to see what seemed to him the hidden meaning in the mysterious "Put your house in order" that would give him no rest. But he was not the man to make an important decision in haste, was the last man in the world to inflict discomfort, much less pain, upon anyone, unless the command to do it came unmistakably in the one voice he dared not disobey. Day after day he brooded; night after night he fought to escape. But, slowly, inexorably, his iron inheritance from Covenanter on one side and Puritan on the other asserted itself. Heartsick, and all but crying out in anguish, he advanced toward the stern task which he could no longer deny or doubt that the Most High God had set for him. He sent for Dory Hargrave's father. Mark Hargrave was president of the Tecumseh Agricultural and Classical University, to give it its full legal entitlements. It consisted in a faculty of six, including Dr. Hargrave, and in two meager and modest, almost mean "halls," and two hundred acres of land. There were at that time just under four hundred students, all but about fifty working their way through. So poor was the college that it was kept going only by efforts, the success of which seemed miraculous interventions of Providence. They were so regarded by Dr. Hargrave, and the stubbornest infidel must have conceded that he was not unjustified. As Hargrave, tall and spare, his strong features illumined by life-long unselfish service to his fellow-men, came into Hiram Ranger's presence, Hiram shrank and grew gray as his hair. Hargrave might have been the officer come to lead him forth to execution. "If you had not sent for me, Mr. Ranger," he began, after the greetings, "I should have come of my own accord within a day or two. Latterly God has been strongly moving me to lay before you the claims of my boys--of the college." This was to Hiram direct confirmation of his own convictions. He tried to force his lips to say so, but they would not move. "You and Mrs. Ranger," Hargrave went on, "have had a long life, full of the consciousness of useful work well done. Your industry, your fitness for the just use of God's treasure, has been demonstrated, and He has made you stewards of much of it. And now approaches the final test, the greatest test, of your fitness to do His work. In His name, my old friend, what are you going to do with His treasure?" Hiram Ranger's face lighted up. The peace that was entering his soul lay upon the tragedy of his mental and physical suffering soft and serene and sweet as moonlight beautifying a ruin. "That's why I sent for you, Mark," he said. "Hiram, are you going to leave your wealth so that it may continue to do good in the world? Or, are you going to leave it so that it may tempt your children to vanity and selfishness, to lives of idleness and folly, to bring up their children to be even less useful to mankind than they, even more out of sympathy with the ideals which God has implanted? All of those ideals are attainable only through shoulder-to-shoulder work such as you have done all your life." "God help me!" muttered Hiram. The sweat was beading his forehead and his hands were clasped and wrenching each at the other, typical of the two forces contending in final battle within him. "God help me!" "Have you ever looked about you in this town and thought of the meaning of its steady decay, moral and physical? God prospered the hard-working men who founded it; but, instead of appreciating His blessings, they regarded the wealth He gave them as their own; and they left it to their children. And see how their sin is being visited upon the third and fourth generations! Industry has been slowly paralyzing. The young people, whose wealth gave them the best opportunities, are leading idle lives, are full of vanity of class and caste, are steeped in the sins that ever follow in the wake of idleness--the sins of selfishness and indulgence. Instead of being workers, leading in the march upward, instead of taking the position for which their superior opportunities should have fitted them, they set an example of idleness and indolence. They despise their ancestry of toil which should be their pride. They pride themselves upon the parasitism which is their shame. And they set before the young an example of contempt for work, of looking on it as a curse and a disgrace." "I have been thinking of these things lately," said Hiram. "It is the curse of the world, this inherited wealth," cried Hargrave. "Because of it humanity moves in circles instead of forward. The ground gained by the toiling generations, is lost by the inheriting generations. And this accursed inheritance tempts men ever to long for and hope for that which they have not earned. God gave man a trial of the plan of living in idleness upon that which he had not earned, and man fell. Then God established the other plan, and through it man has been rising--but rising slowly and with many a backward slip, because he has tried to thwart the Divine plan with the system of inheritance. Fortunately, the great mass of mankind has had nothing to leave to heirs, has had no hope of inheritances. Thus, new leaders have ever been developed in place of those destroyed by inherited prosperity. But, unfortunately, the law of inheritance has been able to do its devil's work upon the best element in every human society, upon those who had the most efficient and exemplary parents, and so had the best opportunity to develop into men and women of the highest efficiency. No wonder progress is slow, when the leaders of each generation have to be developed from the bottom all over again, and when the ideal of useful work is obscured by the false ideal of living without work. Waiting for dead men's shoes! Dead men's shoes instead of shoes of one's own." "Dead men's shoes," muttered Hiram. "The curse of unearned wealth," went on his friend. "Your life, Hiram, leaves to your children the injunction to work, to labor cheerfully and equally, honestly and helpfully, with their brothers and sisters; but your wealth--If you leave it to them, will it not give that injunction the lie, will it not invite them to violate that injunction?" "I have been watching my children, my boy, especially," said Hiram. "I don't know about all this that you've been saying. It's a big subject; but I do know about this boy of mine. I wish I'd 'a' taken your advice, Mark, and put him in your school. But his mother was set on the East--on Harvard." Tears were in his eyes at this. He remembered how she, knowing nothing of college, but feeling it was her duty to have her children educated properly, a duty she must not put upon others, had sent for the catalogues of all the famous colleges in the country. He could see her poring over the catalogues, balancing one offering of educational advantage against another, finally deciding for Harvard, the greatest of them all. He could hear her saying: "It'll cost a great deal, Hiram. As near as I can reckon it out it'll cost about a thousand dollars a year--twelve hundred if we want to be v-e-r-y liberal, so the catalogue says. But Harvard's the biggest, and has the most teachers and scholars, and takes in all the branches. And we ought to give our Arthur the best." And now--By what bitter experience had he learned that the college is not in the catalogue, is a thing apart, unrelated and immeasurably different! His eyes were hot with anger as he thought how the boy's mother, honest, conscientious Ellen, had been betrayed. "Look here, Mark," he blazed out, "if I leave money to your college I want to see that it can't ever be like them eastern institutions of learning." He made a gesture of disgust. "Learning!" "If you leave us anything, Hiram, leave it so that any young man who gets its advantages must work for them." "That's it!" exclaimed Hiram. "That's what I want. Can you draw me up that kind of plan? No boy, no matter what he has at home, can come to that there college without working his way through, without learning to work, me to provide the chance to earn the living." "I have just such a plan," said Hargrave, drawing a paper from his pocket. "I've had it ready for years waiting for just such an opportunity." "Read it," said Hiram, sinking deep in his big chair and closing his eyes and beginning to rub his forehead with his great hand. And Hargrave read, forgetting his surroundings, forgetting everything in his enthusiasm for this dream of his life--a university, in fact as well as in name, which would attract the ambitious children of rich and well-to-do and poor, would teach them how to live honestly and nobly, would give them not only useful knowledge to work with but also the light to work by. "You see, Hiram, I think a child ought to begin to be a man as soon as he begins to live--a man, standing on his own feet, in his own shoes, with the courage that comes from knowing how to do well something which the world needs." He looked at Hiram for the first time in nearly half an hour. He was alarmed by the haggard, ghastly gray of that majestic face; and his thought was not for his plan probably about to be thwarted by the man's premature death, but of his own selfishness in wearying and imperiling him by importunity at such a time. "But we'll talk of this again," he said sadly, putting the paper in his pocket and rising for instant departure. "Give me the paper," said Hiram, putting out his trembling hand, but not lifting his heavy, blue-black lids. Mark gave it to him hesitatingly. "You'd better put it off till you're stronger, Hiram." "I'll see," said Hiram. "Good morning, Mark." * * * * * Judge Torrey was the next to get Ranger's summons; it came toward mid-afternoon of that same day. Like Hargrave, Torrey had been his life-long friend. "Torrey," he said, "I want you to examine this plan"--and he held up the paper Hargrave had left--"and, if it is not legal, put it into legal shape, and incorporate it into my will. I feel I ain't got much time." With a far-away, listening look--"I must put my house in order--in order. Draw up a will and bring it to me before five o'clock. I want you to write it yourself--trust no one--no one!" His eyes were bright, his cheeks bluish, and he spoke in a thick, excited voice that broke and shrilled toward the end of each sentence. "I can't do it to-day. Too much haste--" "To-day!" commanded Hiram. "I won't rest till it's done!" "Of course, I can--" "Read the paper now, and give me your opinion." Torrey put on his glasses, opened the paper. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "I remember this. It's in my partner's handwriting. Hargrave had Watson draw it up about five years ago. We were very careful in preparing it. It is legal." "Very well," continued Hiram. "Now I'll give you the points of my will." Torrey took notebook and pencil from his pocket. "First," began Hiram, as if he were reciting something he had learned by heart, "to my wife, Ellen, this house and everything in it, and the grounds and all the horses and carriages and that kind of thing." "Yes," said Torrey, looking up from his note making. "Second, to my wife an income of seven thousand a year for life--that is what it cost her and me to live last year, and the children--except the extras. Seven thousand for life--but only for life." "Yes," said Torrey, his glance at Hiram now uneasy and expectant. "Third, to my daughter, Adelaide, two thousand a year for her life--to be divided among her daughters equally, if she have any; if not, to revert to my estate at her death." "Yes," said Torrey. "Fourth, to my son, five thousand dollars in cash." A long pause, Torrey looking at his old friend and client as if he thought one or the other of them bereft of his senses. At last, he said, "Yes, Hiram." "Fifth, to my brothers, Jacob and Ezra, four hundred dollars each," continued Hiram, in his same voice of repeating by rote, "and to my sister Prudence, five thousand dollars--so fixed that her husband can't touch it." "Yes," said Torrey. "Sixth, the rest of my estate to be made into a trust, with Charles Whitney and Mark Hargrave and Hampden Scarborough trustees, with power to select their successors. The trust to be administered for the benefit of Tecumseh University under the plan you have there." Torrey half-rose from his chair, his usually calm features reflecting his inner contention of grief, alarm, and protest. But there was in Hiram's face that which made him sink back without having spoken. "Seventh," continued Hiram, "the mills and the cooperage to be continued as now, and not to be sold for at least fifteen years. If my son Arthur wishes to have employment in them, he is to have it at the proper wages for the work he does. If at the end of fifteen years he wishes to buy them, he to have the right to buy, that is, my controlling interest in them, provided he can make a cash payment of ten per cent of the then value; and, if he can do that, he is to have ten years in which to complete the payment--or longer, if the trustees think it wise." A long pause; Hiram seemed slowly to relax and collapse like a man stretched on the rack, who ceases to suffer either because the torture is ended or because his nerves mercifully refuse to register any more pain. "That is all," he said wearily. Torrey wiped his glasses, put them on, wiped them again, hung them on the hook attached to the lapel of his waistcoat, put them on, studied the paper, then said hesitatingly: "As one of your oldest friends, Hiram, and in view of the surprising nature of the--the--" "I do not wish to discuss it," interrupted Hiram, with that gruff finality of manner which he always used to hide his softness, and which deceived everyone, often even his wife. "Come back at five o'clock with two witnesses." Torrey rose, his body shifting with his shifting mind as he cast about for an excuse for lingering. "Very well, Hiram," he finally said. As he shook hands, he blurted out huskily, "The boy's a fine young fellow, Hi. It don't seem right to disgrace him by cutting him off this way." Hiram winced. "Wait a minute," he said. He had been overlooking the public--how the town would gossip and insinuate. "Put in this, Torrey," he resumed after reflecting. And deliberately, with long pauses to construct the phrases, he dictated: "I make this disposal of my estate through my love for my children, and because I have firm belief in the soundness of their character and in their capacity to do and to be. I feel they will be better off without the wealth which would tempt my son to relax his efforts to make a useful man of himself and would cause my daughter to be sought for her fortune instead of for herself." "That may quiet gossip against your children," said Torrey, when he had taken down Hiram's slowly enunciated words, "but it does not change the extraordinary character of the will." "John," said Hiram, "can you think of a single instance in which inherited wealth has been a benefit, a single case where a man has become more of a man than he would if he hadn't had it?" Hiram waited long. Torrey finally said: "That may be, but--" But what? Torrey did not know, and so came to a full stop. "I've been trying for weeks to think of one," continued Hiram, "and whenever I thought I'd found one, I'd see, on looking at all the facts, that it only _seemed_ to be so. And I recalled nearly a hundred instances right here in Saint X where big inheritances or little had been ruinous." "I have never thought on this aspect of the matter before," said Torrey. "But to bring children up in the expectation of wealth, and then to leave them practically nothing, looks to me like--like cheating them." "It does, John," Hiram answered. "I've pushed my boy and my girl far along the broad way that leads to destruction. I must take the consequences. But God won't let me divide the punishment for my sins with them. I see my duty clear. I must do it. Bring the will at five o'clock." Hiram's eyes were closed; his voice sounded to Torrey as if it were the utterance of a mind far, far away--as far away as that other world which had seemed vividly real to Hiram all his life; it seemed real and near to Torrey, looking into his old friend's face. "The power that's guiding him," Torrey said to himself, "is one I daren't dispute with." And he went away with noiseless step and with head reverently bent. CHAPTER VI MRS. WHITNEY NEGOTIATES The Rangers' neighbors saw the visits of Hargrave and Torrey. Immediately a rumor of a bequest to Tecumseh was racing through the town and up the Bluffs and through the fashionable suburb. It arrived at Point Helen, the seat of the Whitneys, within an hour after Torrey left Ranger. It had accumulated confirmatory detail by that time--the bequest was large; was very large; was half his fortune--and the rest of the estate was to go to the college should Arthur and Adelaide die childless. Mrs. Whitney lost no time. At half-past four she was seated in the same chair in which Hargrave and Torrey had sat. It was not difficult to bring up the subject of the two marriages, which were doubly to unite the houses and fortunes of Ranger and Whitney--the marriages of Arthur and Janet, of Ross and Adelaide. "And, of course," said Mrs. Whitney, "we all want the young people started right. I don't believe children ought to feel dependent on their parents. It seems to me that puts filial and parental love on a very low plane. Don't you think so?" "Yes," said Hiram. "The young people ought to feel that their financial position is secure. And, as you and Ellen and Charles and I have lived for our children, have toiled to raise them above the sordid cares and anxieties of life, we ought to complete our work now and make them--happy." Hiram did not speak, though she gave him ample time. "So," pursued Mrs. Whitney, "I thought I wouldn't put off any longer talking about what Charles and I have had in mind some months. Ross and Janet will soon be here, and I know all four of the children are anxious to have the engagements formally completed." "Completed?" said Hiram. "Yes," reaffirmed Matilda. "Of course they can't be completed until we parents have done our share. You and Ellen want to know that Arthur and Adelaide won't be at the mercy of any reverse in business Charles might have--or of any caprice which might influence him in making his will. And Charles and I want to feel the same way as to our Ross and Janet." "Yes," said Hiram. "I see." A smile of stern irony roused his features from their repose into an expressiveness that made Mrs. Whitney exceedingly uncomfortable--but the more resolute. "Charles is willing to be liberal both in immediate settlement and in binding himself in the matter of his will," she went on. "He often says, 'I don't want my children to be impatient for me to die. I want to make 'em feel they're getting, if anything, more because I'm alive.'" A long pause, then Hiram said: "That's one way of looking at it." "That's _your_ way," said Matilda, as if the matter were settled. And she smiled her softest and sweetest. But Hiram saw only the glitter in her cold brown eyes, a glitter as hard as the sheen of her henna-stained hair. "No," said he emphatically, "that's _not_ my way. That's the broad and easy way that leads to destruction. Ellen and I," he went on, his excitement showing only in his lapses into dialect, "we hain't worked all our lives so that our children'll be shiftless idlers, settin' 'round, polishin' their fingernails, and thinkin' up foolishness and breedin' fools." Matilda had always known that Hiram and Ellen were hopelessly vulgar; but she had thought they cherished a secret admiration for the "higher things" beyond their reach, and were resolved that their son should be a gentleman and their daughter a lady. She found in Hiram's energetic bitterness nothing to cause her to change her view. "He simply wants to hold on to his property to the last, and play the tyrant," she said to herself. "All people of property naturally feel that way." And she held steadily to her programme. "Well, Hiram," she proceeded tranquilly, "if those marriages are to take place, Charles and I will expect you to meet us halfway." "If Ross and my Delia and Arthur and your Jane are fond of each other, let 'em marry as you and Charles, as Ellen and I married. I ain't buyin' your son, nor sellin' my daughter. That's my last word, Tillie." On impulse, he pressed the electric button in the wall behind him. When the new upstairs girl came, he said: "Tell the children I want to see 'em." Arthur and Adelaide presently came, flushed with the exercise of the tennis the girl had interrupted. "Mrs. Whitney, here," said Hiram, "tells me her children won't marry without settlements, as it's called. And I've been tellin' her that my son and daughter ain't buyin' and sellin'." Mrs. Whitney hid her fury. "Your father has a quaint way of expressing himself," she said, laughing elegantly. "I've simply been trying to persuade him to do as much toward securing the future of you two as Mr. Whitney is willing to do. Don't be absurd, Hiram. You know better than to talk that way." Hiram looked steadily at her. "You've been travelin' about, 'Tilda," he said, "gettin' together a lot of newfangled notions. Ellen and I and our children stick to the old way." And he looked at Arthur, then at Adelaide. Their faces gave him a twinge at the heart. "Speak up!" he said. "Do you or do you not stick to the old way?" "I can't talk about it, father," was Adelaide's evasive answer, her face scarlet and her eyes down. "And you, sir?" said Hiram to his son. "You'll have to excuse me, sir," replied Arthur coldly. Hiram winced before Mrs. Whitney's triumphant glance. He leaned forward and, looking at his daughter, said: "Del, would you marry a man who wouldn't take you unless you brought him a fortune?" "No, father," Adelaide answered. She was meeting his gaze now. "But, at the same time, I'd rather not be dependent on my husband." "Do you think your mother is dependent on me?" "That's different," said Adelaide, after a pause. "How?" asked Hiram. Adelaide did not answer, could not answer. To answer honestly would be to confess that which had been troubling her greatly of late--the feeling that there was something profoundly unsatisfactory in the relations between Ross and herself; that what he was giving her was different not only in degree but even in kind from what she wanted, or ought to want, from what she was trying to give him, or thought she ought to try to give him. "And you, Arthur?" asked Hiram in the same solemn, appealing tone. "I should not ask Janet to marry me unless I was sure I could support her in the manner to which she is accustomed," said Arthur. "I certainly shouldn't wish to be dependent upon her." "Then, your notion of marrying is that people get married for a living, for luxury. I suppose you'd expect her to leave you if you lost your money?" "That's different," said Arthur, restraining the impulse to reason with his illogical father whose antiquated sentimentalism was as unfitted to the new conditions of American life as were his ideas about work. "You see, Hiram," said Mrs. Whitney, good-humoredly, "your children outvote you." The master workman brought his fist down on the arm of his chair--not a gesture of violence, but of dignity and power. "I don't stand for the notion that marriage is living in luxury and lolling in carriages and showing off before strangers. I told you what my last word was, Matilda." Mrs. Whitney debated with herself full half a minute before she spoke. In a tone that betrayed her all but departed hope of changing him, she said: "It is a great shock to me to have you even pretend to be so heartless--to talk of breaking these young people's hearts--just for a notion." "It's better to break their hearts before marriage," replied Hiram, "than to let them break their lives, and their hearts, too, on such marriages. The girl that wants my son only if he has money to enable her to make a fool of herself, ain't fit to be a wife--and a mother. As for Del and Ross--The man that looks at what a woman _has_ will never look at what she _is_--and my daughter's well rid of him." A painful silence, then Mrs. Whitney rose. "If I hadn't suspected, Hiram, that you intended to cheat your children out of their rights in order to get a reputation as a philanthropist, I'd not have brought this matter up at this time. I see my instincts didn't mislead me. But I don't give up hope. I've known you too many years, Hiram Ranger, not to know that your heart is in the right place. And, after you think it over, you will give up this wicked--yes, wicked--plan old Doctor Hargrave has taken advantage of your sickness to wheedle you into." Hiram, his face and hands like yellow wax, made no answer. Arthur and Adelaide followed Mrs. Whitney from the room. "Thank you, Mrs. Whitney," said Arthur, gratefully, when they were out of his father's hearing. "I don't know what has come over him of late. He has gone back to his childhood and under the spell of the ideas that seemed, and no doubt were, right then. I believe you have set him to thinking. He's the best father in the world when he is well and can see things clearly." Mrs. Whitney was not so sanguine, but she concealed it. She appreciated what was troubling Hiram. While she encouraged her own son, her Ross, to be a "gentleman," she had enough of the American left to see the flaws in that new ideal of hers--when looking at another woman's son. And the superciliousness which delighted her in Ross, irritated her in Arthur; for, in him, it seemed a sneering reflection upon the humble and toilsome beginnings of Charles and herself. She believed--not without reason--that, under Ross's glossy veneer of gentleman, there was a shrewd and calculating nature; it, she thought, would not permit the gentleman to make mess of those matters, which, coarse and sordid though they were, still must be looked after sharply if the gentleman was to be kept going. But she was, not unnaturally, completely taken in by Arthur's similar game, the more easily as Arthur put into it an intensity of energy which Ross had not. She therefore thought Arthur as unpractical as he so fashionably professed, thought he accepted without reservation "our set's" pretenses of aristocracy for appearance's sake. "Of course, your father'll come round," she said, friendly but not cordial. "All that's necessary is that you and Adelaide use a little tact." And she was in her victoria and away, a very grand-looking lady, indeed, with two in spick and span summer livery on the box, with her exquisite white and gold sunshade, a huge sapphire in the end of the handle, a string of diamonds worth a small fortune round her neck, a gold bag, studded with diamonds, in her lap, and her superb figure clad in a close-fitting white cloth dress. In the gates she swept past Torrey and his two clerks accompanying him as witnesses. She understood; her face was anything but an index to her thoughts as she bowed and smiled graciously in response to the old judge's salutation. * * * * * Torrey read the will to Hiram slowly, pausing after each paragraph for sign of approval or criticism. But Hiram gave no more indication of his thought, by word or expression or motion, than if he had been a seated statue. The reading came to an end, but neither man spoke. The choir of birds, assembled in the great trees round the house, flooded the room with their evening melody. At last, Hiram said: "Please move that table in front of me." Torrey put the table before him, laid the will upon it ready for the signing. Hiram took a pen; Torrey went to the door and brought in the two clerks waiting in the hall. The three men stood watching while Hiram's eyes slowly read each word of the will. He dipped the pen and, with a hand that trembled in spite of all his obvious efforts to steady it, wrote his name on the line to which Torrey silently pointed. The clerks signed as witnesses. "Thank you," said Hiram. "You had better take it with you, judge." "Very well," said Torrey, tears in his eyes, a quaver in his voice. A few seconds and Hiram was alone staring down at the surface of the table, where he could still see and read the will. His conscience told him he had "put his house in order"; but he felt as if he had set fire to it with his family locked within, and was watching it and them burn to ashes, was hearing their death cries and their curses upon him. * * * * * The two young people, chilled by Mrs. Whitney's manner, flawless though it was, apparently, had watched with sinking hearts the disappearance of her glittering chariot and her glistening steeds. Then they had gone into the garden before Torrey and the clerks arrived. And they sat there thinking each his own kind of melancholy thoughts. "What did she mean by that remark about Doctor Hargrave?" asked Arthur, after some minutes of this heavy silence. "I don't know," said Adelaide. "We must get mother to go at father," Arthur continued. Adelaide made no answer. Arthur looked at her irritably. "What are you thinking about, Del?" he demanded. "I don't like Mrs. Whitney. Do you?" "Oh, she's a good enough imitation of the real thing," said Arthur. "You can't expect a lady in the first generation." Adelaide's color slowly mounted. "You don't mean that," said she. He frowned and retorted angrily: "There's a great deal of truth that we don't like. Why do you always get mad at me for saying what we both think?" "I admit it's foolish and wrong of me," said she; "but I can't help it. And if I get half-angry with you, I get wholly angry with myself for being contemptible enough to think those things. Don't you get angry at yourself for thinking them?" Arthur laughed mirthlessly--an admission. "We and father can't both be right," she pursued. "I suppose we're both partly right and partly wrong--that's usually the way it is. But I can't make up my mind just where he begins to be wrong." "Why not admit he's right through and through, and be done with it?" cried Arthur impatiently. "Why not tell him so, and square yourself with him?" Adelaide, too hurt to venture speech, turned away. She lingered a while in the library; on her way down the hall to ascend to her own room she looked in at her father. There he sat so still that but for the regular rise and fall of his chest she would have thought him dead. "He's asleep," she murmured, the tears standing in her eyes and raining in her heart. Her mother she could judge impartially; her mother's disregard of the changes which had come to assume so much importance in her own and Arthur's lives often made her wince. But the same disregard in a man did not offend her; it had the reverse effect. It seemed to her, to the woman in her, the fitting roughness of the colossal statue. "That's a _man_!" she now said to herself proudly, as she gazed at him. His eyes opened and fixed upon her in a look so agonized, that she leaned, faint, against the door jamb. "What is it, father?" she gasped. He did not answer--did not move--sat rigidly on, with that expression unchanging, as if it had been fixed there by the sculptor who had made the statue. She tried to go to him, but at the very thought she was overwhelmed by such fear as she had not had since she, a child, lay in her little bed in the dark, too terrified by the phantoms that beset her to cry out or to move. "Father! What is it?" she repeated, then wheeled and fled along the hall crying: "Mother! Mother!" Ellen came hurrying down the stairs. "It's father!" cried Adelaide. Together they went into the back parlor. He was still motionless, with that same frozen yet fiery expression. They went to him, tried to lift him. Ellen dropped the lifeless arm, turned to her daughter. And Adelaide saw into her mother's inmost heart, saw the tragic lift of one of those tremendous emotions, which, by their very coming into a human soul, give it the majesty and the mystery of the divine. "Telephone for Dr. Schulze," she commanded; then, as Adelaide sped, she said tenderly to her husband: "Where is the pain? What can I do?" But he did not answer. And if he could have answered, what could she have done? The pain was in his heart, was the burning agony of remorse for having done that which he still believed to be right, that which he now thought he would give his soul's salvation for the chance to undo. For, as the paralysis began to lock his body fast in its vise, the awful thought had for the first time come to him: "When my children know what I have done they will _hate_ me! They will hate me all their lives." Dr. Schulze examined him. "Somewhat sooner than I expected," he muttered. "How long will it last?" said Ellen. "Some time--several weeks--months--perhaps." He would let her learn gradually that the paralysis would not relax its grip until it had borne him into the eternal prison and had handed him over to the jailer who makes no deliveries. CHAPTER VII JILTED Mrs. Ranger consented to a third girl, to do the additional heavy work; but a nurse--no! What had Hiram a wife for, and a daughter, and a son, if not to take care of him? What kind of heartlessness was this, to talk of permitting a stranger to do the most sacred offices of love? And only by being on the watch early and late did Adelaide and Arthur prevent her doing everything for him herself. "Everybody, nowadays, has trained nurses in these cases," said Dr. Schulze. "I don't think you ought to object to the expense." But the crafty taunt left her as indifferent as did the argument from what "everybody does." "I don't make rules for others," replied she. "I only say that nobody shall touch Hiram but us of his own blood. I won't hear to it, and the children won't hear to it. They're glad to have the chance to do a little something for him that has done everything for them." The children thus had no opportunity to say whether they would "hear to it" or not. But Arthur privately suggested to Adelaide that she ought to try to persuade her mother. "It will make her ill, all this extra work," said he. "Not so quickly as having some one about interfering with her," replied Adelaide. "Then, too, it _looks_ so bad--so stingy and--and--old-fashioned," he persisted. "Not from mother's point of view," said Adelaide quietly. Arthur flushed. "Always putting me in the wrong," he sneered. Then, instantly ashamed of this injustice, he went on in a different tone, "I suppose this sort of thing appeals to the romantic strain in you." "And in mother," said Del. Whereupon they both smiled. Romantic was about the last word anyone would think of in connection with frankly practical Ellen Ranger. She would have died without hesitation, or lived in torment, for those she loved; but she would have done it in the finest, most matter-of-fact way in the world, and without a gleam of self-conscious heroics, whether of boasting or of martyr-meekness or of any other device for signaling attention to oneself. Indeed, it would not have occurred to her that she was doing anything out of the ordinary. Nor, for that matter, would she have been; for, in this world the unheroic are, more often than not, heroes, and the heroic usually most unheroic. We pass heroism by to toss our silly caps at heroics. "There are some things, Artie, our education has been taking out of us," continued Del, "that I don't believe we're the better for losing. I've been thinking of those things a good deal lately, and I've come to the conclusion that there really is a rotten streak in what we've been getting there in the East--you at Harvard, I at Mrs. Spenser's Select School for Young Ladies. There are ways in which mother and father are better educated than we." "It does irritate me," admitted Arthur, "to find myself caring so much about the _looks_ of things." "Especially," said Adelaide, "when the people whose opinion we are afraid of are so contemptibly selfish and snobbish." "Still mother and father are narrow-minded," insisted her brother. "Isn't everybody, about people who don't think as they do?" "I've not the remotest objection to their having their own views," said Arthur loftily, "so long as they don't try to enforce those views on me." "But do they? Haven't we been let do about as we please?" Arthur shrugged his shoulders. The discussion had led up to property again--to whether or not his father had the right to do as he pleased with his own. And upon that discussion he did not wish to reenter. He had not a doubt of the justice of his own views; but, somehow, to state them made him seem sordid and mercenary, even to himself. Being really concerned for his mother's health, as well as about "looks," he strongly urged the doctor to issue orders on the subject of a nurse. "If you demand it, mother'll yield," he said. "But I shan't, young man," replied Schulze curtly and with a conclusive squeezing together of his homely features. "Your mother is right. She gives your father what money can't buy and skill can't replace, what has often raised the as-good-as-dead. Some day, maybe, you'll find out what that is. You think you know now, but you don't." And there the matter rested. The large room adjoining Hiram and Ellen's bedroom was made over into a sitting room. The first morning on which he could be taken from his bed and partially dressed, Mrs. Ranger called in both the children to assist her. The three tried to conceal their feelings as they, not without physical difficulty, lifted that helpless form to the invalid's chair which Ellen wheeled close to the bedside. She herself wheeled him into the adjoining room, to the window, with strands of ivy waving in and out in the gentle breeze, with the sun bright and the birds singing, and all the world warm and vivid and gay. Hiram's cheeks were wet with tears; they saw some tremendous emotion surging up in him. He looked at Arthur, at Adelaide, back to Arthur. Evidently he was trying to say something--something which he felt must be said. His right arm trembled, made several convulsive twitches, finally succeeded in lifting his right hand the few inches to the arm of the chair. "What is it, father?" said Ellen. "Yes--yes--yes," burst from him in thick, straining utterances. "Yes--yes--yes." Mrs. Ranger wiped her eyes. "He is silent for hours," she said; "then he seems to want to say something. But when he speaks, it's only as just now. He says 'Yes--yes--yes' over and over again until his strength gives out." The bursting of the blood vessels in his brain had torn out the nerve connection between the seat of power of speech and the vocal organs. He could think clearly, could put his thoughts into the necessary words; but when his will sent what he wished to say along his nerves toward the vocal organs, it encountered that gap, and could not cross it. What did he wish to say? What was the message that could not get through, though he was putting his whole soul into it? At first he would begin again the struggle to speak, as soon as he had recovered from the last effort and failure; then the idea came to him that if he would hoard strength, he might gather enough to force a passage for the words--for he did not realize that the connection was broken, and broken forever. So, he would wait, at first for several hours, later for several days; and, when he thought himself strong enough or could no longer refrain, he would try to burst the bonds which seemed to be holding him. With his children, or his wife and children, watching him with agonized faces, he would make a struggle so violent, so resolute, that even that dead body was galvanized into a ghastly distortion of tortured life. Always in vain; always the same collapse of despair and exhaustion; the chasm between thought and speech could not be bridged. They brought everything they could think of his possibly wanting; they brought to his room everyone with whom he had ever had any sort of more than casual relations--Torrey, among scores of others. But he viewed each object and each person with the same awful despairing look, his immobile lips giving muffled passage to that eternal "Yes! Yes! Yes!" And at last they decided they were mistaken, that it was no particular thing he wanted, but only the natural fierce desire to break through those prison walls, invisible, translucent, intangible, worse than death. * * * * * Sorrow and anxiety and care pressed so heavily and so unceasingly upon that household for several weeks that there was no time for, no thought of, anything but Hiram. Finally, however, the law of routine mercifully reasserted itself; their lives, in habit and in thought, readjusted, conformed to the new conditions, as human lives will, however chaotic has been the havoc that demolished the old routine. Then Adelaide took from her writing desk Ross's letters, which she had glanced at rather than read as they came; when she finished the rereading, or reading, she was not only as unsatisfied as when she began, but puzzled, to boot--and puzzled that she was puzzled. She read them again--it did not take long, for they were brief; even the first letter after he heard of her father's illness filled only the four sides of one sheet, and was written large and loose. "He has sent short letters," said she, "because he did not want to trouble me with long ones at this time." But, though this excuse was as plausible as most of those we invent to assist us to believe what we want to believe, it did not quite banish a certain hollow, hungry feeling, a sense of distaste for such food as the letters did provide. She was not experienced enough to know that the expression of the countenance of a letter is telltale beyond the expression of the countenance of its writer; that the face may be controlled to lie, but never yet were satisfying and fully deceptive lies told upon paper. Without being conscious of the action of the sly, subconscious instinct which prompted it, she began to revolve her friend, Theresa Howland, whose house party Ross was honoring with such an extraordinarily long lingering. "I hope Theresa is seeing that he has a good time," she said. "I suppose he thinks as he says--that he'd only be in the way here. That's a man's view! It's selfish, but who isn't selfish?" Thus, without her being in the least aware of the process, her mind was preparing her for what was about to happen. It is a poor mind, or poorly served by its subconscious half, that is taken wholly by surprise by any blow. There are always forewarnings; and while the surface mind habitually refuses to note them, though they be clear as sunset silhouettes, the subconscious mind is not so stupid--so blind under the sweet spells of that arch-enchanter, vanity. At last Ross came, but without sending Adelaide word. His telegram to his mother gave just time for a trap to meet him at the station. As he was ascending the broad, stone approaches of the main entrance to the house at Point Helen, she appeared in the doorway, her face really beautiful with mother-pride. For Janet she cared as it is the duty of parent to care for child; Ross she loved. It was not mere maternal imagination that made her so proud of him; he was a distinguished and attractive figure of the kind that dominates the crowds at football games, polo and tennis matches, summer resort dances, and all those events which gather together the youth of our prosperous classes. Of the medium height, with a strong look about the shoulders, with sufficiently, though not aggressively, positive features and a clear skin, with gray-green eyes, good teeth, and a pleasing expression, he had an excellent natural basis on which to build himself into a particularly engaging and plausible type of fashionable gentleman. He was in traveling tweeds of pronounced plaid which, however, he carried off without vulgarity. His trousers were rolled high, after the fashion of the day, to show dark red socks of the same color as his tie and of a shade harmonious to the stripe in the pattern of shirt and suit and to the stones in his cuff links. He looked clean, with the cleanness of a tree after the measureless drenching of a storm; he had a careless, easy air, which completely concealed his assiduous and self-complacent self-consciousness. He embraced his mother with enthusiasm. "How well you look!" he exclaimed; then, with a glance round, "How well _everything_ looks!" His mother held tightly to his arm as they went into the house; she seemed elder sister rather than mother, and he delighted her by telling her so--omitting the qualifying adjective before the sister. "But you're not a bit glad to see me," he went on. "I believe you don't want me to come." "I'm just a little cross with you for not answering my letters," replied she. "How is Del?" he asked, and for an instant he looked embarrassed and curiously ashamed of himself. "Adelaide is very well," was her reply in a constrained voice. "I couldn't stay away any longer," said he. "It was tiresome up at Windrift." He saw her disappointment, and a smile flitted over his face which returned and remained when she said: "I thought you were finding Theresa Howland interesting." "Oh, you did?" was his smiling reply. "And why?" "Then you have come because you were bored?" she said, evading. "And to see you and Adelaide. I must telephone her right away." It seemed to be secretly amusing him to note how downcast she was by this enthusiasm for Adelaide. "I shouldn't be too eager," counseled she. "A man ought never to show eagerness with a woman. Let the women make the advances, Ross. They'll do it fast enough--when they find that they must." "Not the young ones," said Ross. "Especially not those that have choice of many men." "But no woman has choice of many men," replied she. "She wants the best, and when _you're_ in her horizon, you're the best, always." Ross, being in the privacy of his own family, gave himself the pleasure of showing that he rather thought so himself. But he said: "Nonsense. If I listened to your partiality, I'd be making a fearful ass of myself most of the time." "Well--don't let Adelaide see that you're eager," persisted his mother subtly. "She's very good-looking and knows it and I'm afraid she's getting an exaggerated notion of her own value. She feels _so_ certain of you." "Of course she does," said Ross, and his mother saw that he was unmoved by her adroit thrust at his vanity. "It isn't in human nature to value what one feels sure of." "But she _is_ sure of me," said Ross, and while he spoke with emphasis, neither his tone nor his look was quite sincere. "We're engaged, you know." "A boy and girl affair. But nothing really settled." "I've given my word and so has she." Mrs. Whitney had difficulty in not looking as disapproving as she felt. A high sense of honor had been part of her wordy training of her children; but she had relied--she hoped, not in vain--upon their common sense to teach them to reconcile and adjust honor to the exigencies of practical life. "That's right, dear," said she. "A man or a woman can't be too honorable. Still, I should not wish you to make her and yourself unhappy. And I know both of you would be unhappy if, by marrying, you were to spoil each other's careers. And your father would not be able to allow or to leave you enough to maintain an establishment such as I've set my heart on seeing you have. Mr. Ranger has been acting very strange of late--almost insane, I'd say." Her tone became constrained as if she were trying to convey more than she dared put into words. "I feel even surer than when I wrote you, that he's leaving a large part of his fortune to Tecumseh College." And she related--with judicious omissions and embroideries--her last talk with Hiram, and the events that centered about it. Ross retained the impassive expression he had been cultivating ever since he read in English "high life" novels descriptions of the bearing of men of the "_haut monde_." "That's of no consequence," was his comment, in a tone of indifference. "I'm not marrying Del for her money." "Don't throw yourself away, Ross," said she, much disquieted. "I feel sure you've been brought up too sensibly to do anything reckless. At least, be careful how you commit yourself until you are sure. In our station people have to think of a great many things before they think of anything so uncertain and so more or less fanciful as love. Rest assured, Adelaide is thinking of those things. Don't be less wise than she." He changed the subject, and would not go back to it; and after a few minutes he telephoned Adelaide, ordered a cart, and set out to take her for a drive. Mrs. Whitney watched him depart with a heavy heart and so piteous a face that Ross was moved almost to the point of confiding in her what he was pretending not to admit to himself. "Ross is sensible beyond his years," she said to herself sadly, "but youth is _so_ romantic. It never can see beyond the marriage ceremony." Adelaide, with as much haste as was compatible with the demands of so important an occasion, was getting into a suitable costume. Suddenly she laid aside the hat she had selected from among several that were what the Fifth Avenue milliners call the "_dernier cri_." "No, I'll not go!" she exclaimed. Ever since her father was stricken she had stayed near him. Ellen had his comfort and the household to look after, and besides was not good at initiating conversation and carrying it on alone; Arthur's tongue was paralyzed in his father's presence by his being unable for an instant to forget there what had occurred between them. So Del had borne practically the whole burden of filling the dreary, dragging hours for him--who could not speak, could not even show whether he understood or not. He had never been easy to talk to; now, when she could not tell but that what she said jarred upon a sick and inflamed soul, aggravating his torture by reminding him of things he longed to know yet could not inquire about, tantalizing him with suggestions--She dared not let her thoughts go far in that direction; it would soon have been impossible to send him any message beyond despairing looks. Sometimes she kissed him. She knew he was separated from her as by a heavy, grated prison door, and was unable to feel the electric thrill of touch; yet she thought he must get some joy out of the sight of the dumb show of caress. Again, she would give up trying to look cheerful, and would weep--and let him see her weep, having an instinct that he understood what a relief tears were to her, and that she let him see them to make him feel her loving sympathy. Again, she would be so wrought upon by the steady agony of those fixed eyes that she would leave him abruptly to hide herself and shudder, tearless, at the utter misery and hopelessness of it all. She wondered at her mother's calm until she noticed, after a few weeks, how the face was withering with that shriveling which comes from within when a living thing is dying at the core. She read the Bible to him, selecting consolatory passage with the aid of a concordance, in the evenings after he had been lifted into bed for the night. She was filled with protest as she read; for it seemed to her that this good man, her best of fathers, thus savagely and causelessly stricken, was proof before her eyes that the sentences executed against men were not divine, but the devilish emanations of brute chance. "There may be a devil," she said to herself, frightened at her own blasphemy, "but there certainly is no God." Again, the Bible's promises, so confident, so lofty, so marvelously responsive to the longings and cravings of every kind of desolation and woe, had a soothing effect upon her; and they helped to put her in the frame of mind to find for conversation--or, rather, for her monologues to him--subjects which her instinct told her would be welcome visitors in that prison. She talked to him of how he was loved, of how noble his influence had been in their lives. She analyzed him to himself, saying things she would never have dared say had there been the slightest chance of so much response as the flutter of an eyelid. And as, so it seemed to her, the sympathetic relations and understanding between them grew, she became franker, talked of her aspirations--new-born aspirations in harmony with his life and belief. And, explaining herself for his benefit and bringing to light her inmost being to show to him, she saw it herself. And when she one day said to him, "Your illness has made a better woman of me, father, dear father," she felt it with all her heart. It was from this atmosphere, and enveloped in it, that she went out to greet Ross; and, as she went, she was surprised at her own calmness before the prospect of seeing him again, after six months' separation--the longest in their lives. His expression was scrupulously correct--joy at seeing her shadowed by sympathy for her calamity. When they were safely alone, he took her hand and was about to kiss her. Her beauty was of the kind that is different from, and beyond, memory's best photograph. She never looked exactly the same twice; that morning she seemed to him far more tempting than he had been thinking, with his head for so many weeks full of worldly ideas. He was thrilled anew, and his resolve hesitated before the fine pallor of her face, the slim lines of her figure, and the glimpses of her smooth white skin through the openwork in the yoke and sleeves of her blouse. But, instead of responding she drew back, just a little. He instantly suspected her of being in the state of mind into which he had been trying to get himself. He dropped her hand. A trifling incident, but a trifle is enough to cut the communications between two human beings; it often accomplishes what the rudest shocks would not. They went to the far, secluded end of the garden, he asking and she answering questions about her father. "What is it, Del?" he said abruptly, at length. "You act strained toward me." He did not say this until she had been oppressed almost into silence by the height and the thickness of the barrier between them. "I guess it's because I've been shut in with father," she suggested. "I've seen no one to talk to, except the family and the doctor, for weeks." And she tried to fix her mind on how handsome and attractive he was. As a rebuke to her heart's obstinate lukewarmness she forced herself to lay her hand in his. He held it loosely. Her making this slight overture was enough to restore his sense of superiority; his resolve grew less unsteady. "It's the first time," he went on, "that we've really had the chance to judge how we actually feel toward each other--that's what's the matter." His face--he was not looking at her--took on an expression of sad reproach. "Del, I don't believe you--care. You've found it out, and don't want to hurt my feelings by telling me." And he believed what he was saying. It might have been--well, not quite right, for him to chill toward her and contemplate breaking the engagement, but that she should have been doing the same thing--his vanity was erect to the last feather. "It's most kind of you to think so considerately of me," he said satirically. She took her hand away. "And you?" she replied coldly. "Are your feelings changed?" "I--oh, you know I love you," was his answer in a deliberately careless tone. She laughed with an attempt at raillery. "You've been too long up at Windrift--you've been seeing too much of Theresa Howland," said she, merely for something to say; for Theresa was neither clever nor pretty, and Del hadn't it in her to suspect him of being mercenary. He looked coldly at her. "I have never interfered with your many attentions from other men," said he stiffly. "On the contrary, I have encouraged you to enjoy yourself, and I thought you left me free in the same way." The tears came to her eyes; and he saw, and proceeded to value still less highly that which was obviously so securely his. "Whatever is the matter with you, Ross, this morning?" she cried. "Or is it I? Am I--" "It certainly is not I," he interrupted icily. "I see you again after six months, and I find you changed completely." A glance from her stopped him. "Oh!" she exclaimed, with a dangerous smile. "You are out of humor this morning and are seeking a quarrel." "That would be impossible," he retorted. "_I_ never quarrel. Evidently you have forgotten all about me." Her pride would not let her refuse the challenge, convert in his words, frank in his eyes. "Possibly," mocked she, forcing herself to look amusedly at him. "I don't bother much about people I don't see." "You take a light view of our engagement," was his instant move. "I should take a still lighter view," retorted she, "if I thought the way you're acting was a fair specimen of your real self." This from Adelaide, who had always theretofore shared in his almost reverent respect for himself. Adelaide _judging_ him, criticising _him_! All Ross's male instinct for unquestioning approval from the female was astir. "You wish to break our engagement?" he inquired, with a glance of cold anger that stiffened her pride and suppressed her impulse to try to gain time. "You're free," said she, and her manner so piqued him, that to nerve himself to persist he had to think hard on the magnificence of Windrift and the many Howland millions and the rumored Ranger will. She, in a series of jerks and pauses, took off the ring; with an expression and a gesture that gave no further hint of how she had valued it, both for its own beauty and for what it represented, she handed it to him. "If that's all," she went on, "I'll go back to father." To perfect her pretense, she should have risen, shaken hands cheerfully with him, and sent him carelessly away. She knew it; but she could not. He was not the man to fail to note that she made no move to rise, or to fail to read the slightly strained expression in her eyes and about the corners of her mouth. That betrayal lost Adelaide a triumph; for, seeing her again, feeling her beauty and her charm in all his senses, reminded of her superiority in brains and in taste to the women from whom he might choose, he was making a losing fight for the worldly wise course. "Anyhow, I must tame her a bit," he reflected, now that he was sure she would be his, should he find on further consideration that he wanted her rather than Theresa's fortune. He accordingly took his hat, drew himself up, bowed coldly. "Good morning," he said. And he was off, down the drive--to the lower end where the stableboy was guarding his trap--he was seated--he was driving away--he was gone--_gone_! She did not move until he was no longer in sight. Then she rushed into the house, darted up to her room, locked herself in and gave way. It was the first serious quarrel she had ever had with him; it was so little like a quarrel, so ominously like a--No; absurd! It could not be a finality. She rejected that instantly, so confident had beauty and position as a prospective heiress made her as to her powers over any man she chose to try to fascinate, so secure was she in the belief that Ross loved her and would not give her up in any circumstances. She went over their interview, recalled his every sentence and look--this with surprising coolness for a young woman as deeply in love as she fancied herself. And her anger rose against him--a curious kind of anger, to spring and flourish in a loving heart. "He has been flattered by Theresa until he has entirely lost his point of view," she decided. "I'll give him a lesson when he comes trying to make it up." * * * * * He drove the part of his homeward way that was through streets with his wonted attention to "smartness." True "man of the world," he never for many consecutive minutes had himself out of his mind--how he was conducting himself, what people thought of him, what impression he had made or was making or was about to make. He estimated everybody and everything instinctively and solely from the standpoint of advantage to himself. Such people, if they have the intelligence to hide themselves under a pleasing surface, and the wisdom to plan, and the energy to execute, always get just about what they want; for intelligence and energy are invincible weapons, whether the end be worthy or not. As soon, however, as he was in the road up to the Bluffs, deserted at that hour, his body relaxed, his arms and hands dropped from the correct angle for driving, the reins lay loose upon the horse's back, and he gave himself to dejection. He had thought--at Windrift--that, once he was free from the engagement which was no longer to his interest, he would feel buoyant, elated. Instead, he was mentally even more downcast a figure than his relaxed attitude and gloomy face made him physically. His mother's and his "set's" training had trimmed generous instincts close to the roots, and, also, such ideals as were not purely for material matters, especially for ostentation. But, being still a young man, those roots not only were alive, but also had an under-the-soil vigor; they even occasionally sent to the surface sprouts--that withered in the uncongenial air of his surroundings and came to nothing. Just now these sprouts were springing in the form of self-reproaches. Remembering with what thoughts he had gone to Adelaide, he felt wholly responsible for the broken engagement, felt that he had done a contemptible thing, had done it in a contemptible way; and he was almost despising himself, looking about the while for self-excuses. The longer he looked the worse off he was; for the more clearly he saw that he was what he called, and thought, in love with this fresh young beauty, so swiftly and alluringly developing. It exasperated him with the intensity of selfishness's avarice that he could not have both Theresa Howland's fortune and Adelaide. It seemed to him that he had a right to both. Not in the coldly selfish only is the fact of desire in itself the basis of right. By the time he reached home, he was angry through and through, and bent upon finding some one to be angry with. He threw the reins to a groom and, savagely sullen of face, went slowly up the terrace-like steps. His mother, on the watch for his return, came to meet him. "How is Mr. Ranger this morning?" she asked. "Just the same," he answered curtly. "And--Del?" No answer. They went into the library; he lit a cigarette and seated himself at the writing table. She watched him anxiously but had far too keen insight to speak and give him the excuse to explode. Not until she turned to leave the room did he break his surly silence to say: "I might as well tell you. I'm engaged to Theresa Howland." "O Ross, I'm _so_ glad!" she exclaimed, lighting up with pride and pleasure. Then, warned by his expression, she restrained herself. "I have felt certain for a long time that you would not throw yourself away on Adelaide. She is a nice girl--pretty, sweet, and all that. But women differ from each other only in unimportant details. A man ought to see to it that by marrying he strengthens his influence and position in the world and provides for the standing of his children. And I think Theresa has far more steadiness; and, besides, she has been about the world--she was presented at court last spring a year ago, wasn't she? She is _such_ a lady. It will be so satisfactory to have her as the head of your establishment--probably Mr. Howland will give her Windrift. And her cousin--that Mr. Fanning she married--is connected with all the best families in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. They are at the top of our aristocracy." This recital was not to inform, but to inspire--to remind him what a wise and brilliant move he had made in the game of life. And it had precisely the effect she intended. Had she not herself created and fostered in him the nature that would welcome such stuff as a bat welcomes night? "I'm going back to Windrift to-morrow," he said, still sullen, but with the note of the quarrel-seeker gone from his voice. "When do you wish me to write to her?" "Whenever you like," he said. The defiance in his tone was for Adelaide. "The engagement is to be announced as soon as I get back." Mrs. Whitney was called away, and Ross tried to write to Theresa. But the words wouldn't come. He wandered restlessly about the room, ordered the electric, went to the Country Club. After an hour of bitterness, he called up his mother. "You needn't send that note we were talking about just yet," he said. "But I've already sent it," his mother answered. In fact, the note was just then lying on the table at her elbow. "What were you in such a devil of a hurry for?" he stormed--an unnecessary question, for he knew his mother was the sort of person that loses no time in settling an important matter beyond possibility of change. "I'm sorry, Ross," she replied soothingly. "I thought I might as well send it, as you had told me everything was settled." "Oh--all right--no matter." He could break with Theresa whenever he wished. Perhaps he would not wish to break with her; perhaps, after a few days he would find that his feeling for Adelaide was in reality no stronger than he had thought it at Windrift, when Theresa was tempting him with her huge fortune. There was plenty of time before it would be necessary to make final choice. Nevertheless, he did not leave Saint X, but hung round, sour and morose, hoping for some sign from "tamed" Adelaide. * * * * * As soon as Theresa got Mrs. Whitney's note, she wrote to Adelaide. "I've promised not to tell," her letter began, "but I never count any promise of that kind as including _you_, dear, sweet Adelaide--" Adelaide smiled as she read this; Theresa's passion for intimate confession had been the joke of the school. "Besides," Adelaide read on, "I think you'll be especially interested as Ross tells me there was some sort of a boy-and-girl flirtation between you and him. I don't see how you could get over it. Now--you've guessed. Yes--we're engaged, and will probably be married up here in the fall--Windrift is simply divine then, you know. And I want you to be my 'best man.' The others'll be Edna and Clarice and Leila and Annette and perhaps Jessie and Anita. We're to live in Chicago--father will give us a house, I'm sure. And you must come to visit us--" It is hardly fair to eavesdrop upon a young woman in such an hour as this of Adelaide's. Only those might do so who are willing freely to concede to others that same right to be human which they themselves exercise, whether they will or no, when things happen that smash the veneer of "gentleman" or "lady" like an eggshell under a plowboy's heel, and penetrate to and roil that unlovely human nature which is in us all. Criticism is supercilious, even when it is just; so, without criticism, the fact is recorded that Adelaide paced the floor and literally raved in her fury at this double-distilled, double treachery. The sense that she had lost the man she believed she loved was drowned in the oceanic flood of infuriated vanity. She raged now against Ross and now against Theresa "She's marrying him just because she's full of envy, and can't bear to see anybody else have anything," she fumed. "Theresa couldn't love anybody but herself. And he--he's marrying her for her money. She isn't good to look at; to be in the house with her is to find out how mean and small and vain she is. It serves me right for being snob enough to have such a friend. If she hadn't been immensely rich and surrounded by such beautiful things I'd never have had anything to do with her. She's buying him; he's selling himself. How vile!" But the reasons why they were betraying her did not change or mitigate the fact of betrayal; and that fact showed itself to proud, confident Adelaide Ranger in the form of the proposition that she had been jilted, and that all the world, all her world, would soon know it. Jilted! She--Adelaide Ranger--the all-conqueror--flung aside, flouted, jilted. She went back to that last word; it seemed to concentrate all the insult and treason and shame that were heaped upon her. And she never once thought of the wound to her heart; the fierce fire of vanity seemed to have cauterized it--if there was a wound. What could she do to hide her disgrace from her mocking, sneering friends? For, hide it she must--must--_must_! And she had not a moment to lose. A little thought, and she went to the telephone and called up her brother at the Country Club. When she heard his voice, in fear and fright, demanding what she wanted, she said: "Will you bring Dory Hargrave to dinner to-night? And, of course, don't let him know I wanted you to." "Is _that_ all!" exclaimed Arthur in a tone of enormous relief, which she was too absorbed in her calamity to be conscious of. "You will, won't you? Really, Arthur, it's _very_ important; and don't say a _word_ of my having telephoned--not to _anybody_." "All right! I'll bring him." A pause, then. "Father's just the same?" "Yes," she answered, in sudden confusion and shame. CHAPTER VIII A FRIEND IN NEED In the turmoil of his own affairs Arthur forgot his promise almost while he was making it. Fortunately, as he was driving home, the sight of Dr. Hargrave, marching absent-mindedly along near the post office, brought it to his mind again. With an impatient exclamation--for he prided himself upon fidelity to his given word, in small matters as well as in larger--he turned the horse about. He liked Dory Hargrave, and in a way admired him; Dory was easily expert at many of the sports at which Arthur had had to toil before he was able to make even a passable showing. But Dory, somehow, made him uncomfortable. They had no point of view in common; Dory regarded as incidental and trivial the things which seemed of the highest importance to Arthur. Dory had his way to make in the world; Arthur had been spared that discomfort and disadvantage. Yet Dory persisted in pretending to regard Arthur as in precisely the same position as himself; once he had even carried the pretense to the impertinence of affecting to sympathize with Arthur for being so sorely handicapped. On that occasion Arthur had great difficulty in restraining plain speech. He would not have been thus tactful and gentlemanly had he not realized that Dory meant the best in the world, and was wholly unconscious that envy was his real reason for taking on such a preposterous pose. "Poor chap!" Arthur had reflected. "One shouldn't blame him for snatching at any consolation, however flimsy." In those days Arthur often, in generous mood, admitted--to himself--that fortune had been shamefully partial in elevating him, without any effort on his part, but merely by the accident of birth, far above the overwhelming majority of young men. He felt doubly generous--in having such broad views and in not aggravating the misfortunes of the less lucky by expressing them. Dr. Hargrave and his son--his only child--and his dead wife's sister, Martha Skeffington, lived in a quaint old brick house in University Avenue. A double row of ancient elms shaded the long walk straight up from the gate. On the front door was a huge bronze knocker which Arthur lifted and dropped several times without getting response. "Probably the girl's in the kitchen; and old Miss Skeffington is so deaf she couldn't hear," he thought. He had known the persons and the habits of that household from earliest boyhood. He followed the path round the house and thus came in sight of a small outbuilding at the far corner of the yard, on the edge of the bank overlooking and almost overhanging the river--Dory's "workshop." Its door was open and Arthur could see the whole of the interior. Dory and a young woman were standing by a bench at the window, were bending over something in which they seemed to be absorbed. Not until Arthur stepped upon the doorsill did they lift their heads. "Hello, Artie!" cried Dory, coming forward with extended hand. Arthur was taking off his hat and bowing to the young woman. "Hello, Theo," said he. "How d'ye do, Estelle?" Miss Wilmot shook hands with him, a shade constrainedly. "How are you, Arthur?" she said. It was in his mouth to ask why she hadn't been to see Adelaide. He checked himself just in time. She and Adelaide were great friends as youngsters at the public school, but the friendship cooled into acquaintance as Adelaide developed fashionable ideas and tastes. Also, Estelle had been almost a recluse since she was seventeen. The rest of the Wilmots went into Saint X's newly developed but flourishing fashionable society. They had no money to give return entertainments or even to pay their share of the joint, dances and card parties Arthur decided to sheer off. "I came to ask you to the house for sup--dinner to-night," said he. "It's lonely--just mother and Del and me. Come and cheer us up. Come along with me now." Dory looked confused. "I'm afraid I can't," he all but stammered. "Of course, I can't blame you for not caring about coming." This a politeness, for Arthur regarded his invitation as an honor. "Oh, you didn't understand me," protested Dory. "I was thinking of something entirely different." A pause during which he seemed to be reflecting. "I'll be glad to come," he finally said. "You needn't bother to dress," continued Arthur. Dory laughed--a frank, hearty laugh that showed the perfect white teeth in his wide, humorous-looking mouth. "Dress!" said he. "My other suit is, if anything, less presentable than this; and they're all I've got, except the frock--and I'm miserable in that." Arthur felt like apologizing for having thus unwittingly brought out young Hargrave's poverty. "You look all right," said he. "Thanks," said Dory dryly, his eyes laughing at Arthur. And, as a matter of fact, though Arthur had not been sincere, Dory did look "all right." It would have been hard for any drapery not to have set well on that strong, lithe figure. And his face--especially the eyes--was so compelling that he would have had to be most elaborately overdressed to distract attention from what he was to what he wore. On the way to the Rangers, he let Arthur do the talking; and if Arthur had been noticing he would have realized that Dory was not listening, but was busy with his own thoughts. Also Arthur would have noticed that, as they came round from the stables to the steps at the end of the front veranda, and as Dory caught sight of Adelaide, half-reclining in the hammock and playing with Simeon, his eyes looked as if he had been suddenly brought from the darkness into the light. "Here's Dory Hargrave, Del," cried Arthur, and went on into the house, leaving them facing each other. "So glad you've come," said Adelaide, her tone and manner at their friendliest. But as she faced his penetrating eyes, her composure became less assured. He looked straight at her until her eyes dropped--this while they were shaking hands. He continued to look, she feeling it and growing more and more uncomfortable. "Why did you send for me?" he asked. She would have liked to deny or to evade; but neither was possible. Now that he was before her she recalled his habit of compelling her always to be truthful not only with him but--what was far worse--also with herself. "Did Arthur tell you I asked him to bring you?" she said, to gain time. "No," was his reply. "But, as soon as he asked me, I knew." It irritated her that this young man who was not at all a "man of the world" should be able so easily to fathom her. She had yet to learn that "man of the world" means man of a very small and insignificant world, while Dory Hargrave had been born a citizen of the big world, the real world--one who understands human beings, because his sympathies are broad as human nature itself, and his eyes clear of the scales of pretense. He was an illustration of the shallowness of the talk about the loneliness of great souls. It is the great souls that alone are not alone. They understand better than the self-conscious, posing mass of mankind the weakness and the pettiness of human nature; but they also appreciate its other side. And in the pettiest creature, they still see the greatness that is in every human being, in every living thing for that matter, its majesty of mystery and of potentiality--mystery of its living mechanism, potentiality of its position as a source of ever-ascending forms of life. From the protoplasmal cell descends the genius; from the loins of the sodden toiler chained to the soil springs the mother of genius or genius itself. And where little people were bored and isolated, Dory Hargrave could without effort pass the barriers to any human heart, could enter in and sit at its inmost hearth, a welcome guest. He never intruded; he never misunderstood; he never caused the slightest uneasiness lest he should go away to sneer or to despise. Even old John Skeffington was confidential with him, and would have been friendly had not Dory avoided him. Adelaide soon fell under the spell of this genius of his for inspiring confidence. She had not fully disclosed her plans to herself; she hesitated at letting herself see what her fury against Theresa and Ross had goaded her on to resolve. So she had no difficulty in persuading herself that she had probably sent for Dory chiefly to consult with him. "There's something I want to talk over with you," said she; "but wait till after din--supper. Have you and Artie been playing tennis?" "No, he found me at home. Estelle Wilmot and I were playing with a microscope." "Estelle--she has treated me shamefully," said Adelaide. "I haven't seen her for more than a year--except just a glimpse as I was driving down Monroe Street one day. How beautiful she has become! But, then, she always was pretty. And neither her father nor her mother, nor any of the rest of the family is especially good-looking. She doesn't in the least resemble them." "There probably was a time when her father and mother really loved," said Dory. "I've often thought that when one sees a beautiful man or woman, one is seeing the monument to some moment of supreme, perfect happiness. There are hours when even the meanest creatures see the islands of enchantment floating in the opal sea." Adelaide was gazing dreamily into the sunset. It was some time before she came back, dropped from the impersonal to the personal, which is the normal attitude of most young people and of all the self-absorbed. Simeon, who had been inspecting Dory from the far upper end of the hammock, now descended to the floor of the veranda, and slowly advanced toward him. Dory put out his hand. "How are you, cousin?" he said, gravely shaking Simeon's extended paw. Simeon chattered delightedly and sprang into Dory's lap to nestle comfortably there. "I always thought you would fall in love with Estelle, some day," Adelaide was saying. Dory looked at Simeon with an ironical smile. "Why does she say those things to me?" he asked. Simeon looked at Adelaide with a puzzled frown that said, "Why, indeed?" "You and Estelle are exactly suited to each other," explained she. "Exactly unsuited," replied he. "I have nothing that she needs; she has nothing that I need. And love is an exchange of needs. Now, I have hurt your vanity." "Why do you say that?" demanded Adelaide. "You'd like to feel that your lover came to you empty-handed, asking everything, humbly protesting that he had nothing to give. And you know that I--" He smiled soberly. "Sometimes I think you have really nothing I need or want, that I care for you because you so much need what I can give. You poor pauper, with the delusion that you are rich!" "You are frank," said she, smiling, but not liking it. "And why shouldn't I be? I've given up hope of your ever seeing the situation as it is. I've nothing to lose with you. Besides, I shouldn't want you on any false terms. One has only to glance about him to shrink from the horrors of marriage based on delusions and lies. So, I can afford to be frank." She gave him a puzzled look. She had known him all her life; they had played together almost every day until she was seventeen and went East, to school, with Janet Whitney. It was while she was at home on her first long vacation that she had flirted with him, had trapped him into an avowal of love; and then, having made sure of the truth which her vanity of conquest and the fascination of his free and frank manliness for her, though she denied it to herself, had led her on to discover beyond doubt, she became conscience-stricken. And she confessed to him that she loved Ross Whitney and was engaged to him; and he had taken the disclosure so calmly that she almost thought he, like herself, had been simply flirting. And yet--She dimly understood his creed of making the best of the inevitable, and of the ridiculousness of taking oneself too seriously. "He probably has his own peculiar way of caring for a woman," she was now reflecting, "just as he has his own peculiar way in every other respect." Arthur came, and their mother; and not until long after supper, when her father had been got to bed, did she have the chance to continue the conversation. As soon as she appeared on the veranda, where Dory and Arthur were smoking, Arthur sauntered away. She was alone with Dory; but she felt that she had nothing to say to him. The surge of fury against Ross and Theresa had subsided; also, now that she had seen Theodore Hargrave again, she realized that he was not the sort of man one tries to use for the purpose she had on impulse formed, nor she the sort of woman who, in the deliberateness of the second thought, carries into effect an impulse to such a purpose. When they had sat there in the moonlight several minutes in silence, she said: "I find I haven't anything especial to say to you, after all." A wait, then from him: "I'm sorry. I had hoped--" He halted. "Hoped--what?" "Hoped it was off with you and Whitney." "Has some one been saying it was?" she asked sharply. "No. I thought I felt it when I first saw you." "Oh!" she said, enormously relieved. A pause, then constrainedly, "Your guess was right." "And was that why you sent for me?" The assent of silence. "You thought perhaps you might--care for--me?" It seemed almost true, with him looking so earnestly and hopefully at her, and in the moonlight--moonlight that can soften even falsehood until true and false seem gently to merge. She hesitated to say No. "I don't know just what I thought," she replied. But her tone jarred on the young man whose nerves were as sensitive as a thermostat. "You mean, when you saw me again, you felt you really didn't care," he said, drawing back so that she could not see his face. "No," she replied, earnestly and honestly. "Not that." And then she flung out the truth. "Ross has engaged himself to Theresa Howland, a girl with a huge big fortune. And I--I--" "You needn't say it," he interrupted, feeling how it was distressing her to confess. "I understand." "I wasn't altogether--wicked," she pleaded. "I didn't think of you wholly because I thought you cared for me. I thought of you chiefly because I feel more at home with you than with anyone else. It has always seemed to me that you see me exactly as I am, with all the pretenses and meannesses--yet not unkindly, either. And, while you've made me angry sometimes, when you have refused to be taken in by my best tricks, still it was as one gets angry with--with oneself. It simply wouldn't last. And, as you see, I tell you anything and everything." "You thought you'd engage yourself to me--and see how it worked out?" "I'm afraid I did." A pause. She knew what he was going to say next, and waited for him to say it. At last it came. "Well, now that there's no deception, why shouldn't you?" "Somehow, I don't seem to mind--about Ross, so much. It--it was while I was in with father this evening. You haven't seen him since he became so ill, but you will understand why he is a rebuke to all mean thoughts. I suppose I'll be squirming again to-morrow, but to-night I feel--" "That Ross has done you a great service. That you've lost nothing but a dangerous illusion; that you have been honorable with him, and all the wrong and the shame are upon him. You must feel it, for it is true." Adelaide sighed. "I wish I were strong enough to feel it with my friends jeering at me, as I can feel it now, Dory." He moved nearer the hammock in which she was sitting. "Del," he said, "shall we become engaged, with the condition that we'll not marry unless we both wish to, when the time comes?" "But you're doing this only to help me--to help me in a weakness I ought to be ashamed of." "Not altogether," he replied. "You on your part give me a chance to win you. You will look at me differently--and there's a great deal in that, a very great deal, Del." She smiled--laughed. "I see what you mean." But he looked gravely at her. "You promise to do your best to care? An engagement is a very solemn thing, Del. You promise?" She put out her hand. "Yes," she answered. And, after a moment, in tones he would have known meant opportunity had he been less in love with her, less modest about his own powers where she was concerned, she went on: "The night you told me you loved me I did not sleep. What you said--what I saw when you opened your heart to me--oh, Dory, I believed then, and I believe now, that the reason I have not loved you is because I am not worthy of you. And I'm afraid I never can--for just that reason." He laughed and kissed her hand. "If _that's_ all that stands in the way," said he, "you'll love me to distraction." Her spirits went soaring as she realized that she had gained honorably all she had been tempted to gain by artifice. "But you said a while ago," she reminded him mischievously, "that you didn't need me." "So I did," said he, "but the fox shouldn't be taken too literally as he talks about the grapes that are out of reach." Suddenly she was longing for him to take her in his arms and compel her to feel, and to yield to, his strength and his love. But he, realizing that he was in danger of losing his self-control, released her hand and drew away--to burn aloof, when he might have set her on fire. Ross Whitney found his cousin, Ernest Belden, in the Chicago express next morning. When they were well on their way, Belden said: "I'm really sorry it's all off between you and Adelaide, Ross." Ross was silent, struggling against curiosity. Finally curiosity won. "How did you know, Ernest?" he asked. "On the way to the station I met Dory Hargrave looking like a sunrise. I asked him what was up--you know, he and I are like brothers. And he said: 'I've induced Adelaide Ranger to promise to marry me.' 'Why, I never knew _you_ cared about her in that way,' said I. And he said: 'There's lots of things in this world you don't know, Ernest, a lot of _important_ things, and this is one of 'em. I've never cared about anybody else.'" Belden had been thinking that the engagement between Ross and Adelaide was dissolved by mutual consent. A glance at Ross and he changed his mind; for, Ross was so amazed at Adelaide's thus challenging him--it could be nothing more than an audacious challenge--that he showed it. "I beg your pardon, old man," Belden said impulsively. "I didn't appreciate that I was making a prying brute of myself." Ross decided that a "gentleman" would be silent under the suspicion of having been jilted, and that therefore _he_ must be silent--on that subject. "Not at all," said he. "I suppose you haven't heard yet that I'm engaged to Miss Howland, of Chicago." "Ah--Really--I congratulate you," said Belden. And Ross, seeing that his cousin understood precisely what he had intended he should, felt meaner than ever. CHAPTER IX THE LONG FAREWELL Not until Adelaide told Arthur and saw the expression that succeeded his first blank stare of incredulity did she realize what the world, her "world," would think of her engagement to Theodore Hargrave. It was illuminative of her real character and of her real mind as to Ross, and as to Dory also, that, instead of being crushed by her brother's look of downright horror, she straightway ejected the snobbish suggestions with which her vanity had been taunting her, and called her heart, as well as her pride, to the defense of Dory. "You're joking," said Arthur, when he was able to articulate; "and a mighty poor joke it is. Dory! Why, Del, it's ridiculous. And in place of Ross Whitney!" "Be careful what you say, Artie," she warned in a quiet, ominous tone, with that in her eyes which should in prudence have halted him. "I am engaged to Dory, remember." "Nonsense!" cried Arthur. "Why, he hasn't a cent, except his beggarly salary as professor at that little jay college. And even if he should amount to something some day, he'll never have anything or any standing in society. I thought you had pride, Del. Just wait till I see him! I'll let him know what I think of his impudence. Of course, I don't blame him. Naturally, he wants to get up in the world. But _you_--" Arthur's laugh was a sneer--"And I thought you were _proud_!" From Del's eyes blazed that fury which we reserve for those we love when they exasperate us. "Shame on you, Arthur Ranger!" she exclaimed. "Shame on you! See what a snob you have become. Except that he's poor, Dory Hargrave has the advantage of any man we know. He's got more in his head any minute than you or your kind in your whole lives. And he is honorable and a gentleman--a _real_ gentleman, not a pretender. You aren't big enough to understand him; but, at least, you know that if it weren't for your prospects from father, you wouldn't be in the same class with him. _He_ is somebody in himself. But you--and--and your kind--what do _you_ amount to, in yourselves?" Arthur lowered at her. "So this is what you've been leading up to, with all the queer talk you've been giving me on and off, ever since we came home." That remark seemed to Adelaide for an instant to throw a flood of light in amazing revelation upon her own innermost self. "I believe it is!" she exclaimed, as if dazed. Then the light seemed to go, seemed to have been only imaginary. It is not until we are much older than Del then was, that we learn how our acts often reveal us to ourselves. "So you're in love with Dory," scoffed Arthur. "You're a wonder--you are! To go about the world and get education and manners and culture, and then to come back to Saint X and take up with a jay--a fellow that's never been anywhere." "Physically, he hasn't traveled much," said Del, her temper curiously and suddenly restored. "But mentally, Artie, dear, he's been distances and to places and in society that your poor brain would ache just at hearing about." "You've lost your senses!" "No, dear," replied Del sweetly; "on the contrary, I've put myself in the way of finding them." "You needn't 'bluff' with me," he retorted. He eyed her suspiciously. "There's some mystery in this." Del showed that the chance shot had landed; but, instantly recovering herself, she said: "It may interest you to know that a while ago, when I told you I was engaged to him, I felt a little uneasy. You see, I've had a long course at the same school that has made such a gentleman of you. But, as the result of your talk and the thoughts it suggested, I haven't a doubt left. I'd marry Dory Hargrave now, if everybody in the world opposed me. Yes, the more opposition, the prouder I'll be to be his wife!" "What's the matter, children?" came in their mother's voice. "What are you quarreling about?" Mrs. Ranger was hurrying through the room on her way to the kitchen; she was too used to heated discussions between them to be disturbed. "What do you think of this, mother?" almost shouted Arthur. "Del here says she's engaged to Dory Hargrave!" Mrs. Ranger stopped short. "Gracious!" she ejaculated. She felt for her "specs," drew them down from her hair, and hastily adjusted them for a good look, first at Arthur, then at Del. She looked long at Del, who was proudly erect and was at her most beautiful best, eyes glittering and cheeks aglow. "Have you and Ross had a falling out, Del?" she asked. "No, mother," replied Adelaide; "but we--we've broken our engagement, and--What Artie says is true." No one spoke for a full minute, though the air seemed to buzz with the thinking and feeling. Then, Mrs. Ranger: "Your father mustn't hear of this." "Leave me alone with mother, Artie," commanded Adelaide. Arthur went, pausing in the doorway to say: "I'm sorry to have hurt you, Del. But I meant every word, only not in anger or meanness. I know you won't do it when you've thought it over." When Arthur had had time to get far enough away, Adelaide said: "Mother, I want you to hear the whole truth--or as much of it as I know myself. Ross came and broke off our engagement so that he could marry Theresa Howland. And I've engaged myself to Dory--partly to cover it, but not altogether, I hope. Not principally, I believe. I'm sick and ashamed of the kind of things I've been so crazy about these last few years. Before this happened, before Ross came, being with father and thinking over everything had made me see with different eyes. And I--I want to try to be--what a woman ought to be." Ellen Ranger slowly rolled her front hair under her fingers. At length she said: "Well--I ain't sorry you've broke off with Ross. I've been noticing the Whitneys and their goings on for some time. I saw they'd got clean out of _my_ class, and--I'm glad my daughter hasn't. There's a common streak in those Whitneys. I never did like Ross, though I never would have said anything, as you seemed to want him, and your father had always been set on it, and thought so high of him. He laid himself out to make your pa think he was a fine character and full of business--and I ain't denying that he's smart, mighty smart--too smart to suit me." A long reflective pause, then: "But--Dory--Well, my advice is to think it over before you jump clear in. Of course, you'll have enough for both, but I'd rather see you taking up with some man that's got a good business. Teachin' 's worse than preachin' as a business. Still, there's plenty of time to think about that. You're only engaged." "Teachin' 's worse than preachin'"--Adelaide's new, or, rather, revived democracy was an aspiration rather than an actuality, was--as to the part above the soil, at least--a not very vigorous looking forced growth through sordid necessity. In this respect it was like many, perhaps most, human aspirations--and, like them, it was far more likely to wither than to flourish. "Teachin' 's worse than preachin'"--Del began to slip dismally down from the height to which Arthur's tactless outburst had blown her. Down, and down, and down, like a punctured balloon--gently, but steadily, dishearteningly. She was ashamed of herself, as ashamed as any reader of these chronicles is for her--any reader with one standard for judging other people and another for judging himself. To the credit of her character must be set down her shame at her snobbishness. The snobbishness itself should not be set down to her discredit, but should be charged up to that class feeling, as old as property, and fostered and developed by almost every familiar fact in our daily environment. "I shouldn't be surprised but your father'd be glad, if he knew," her mother was saying. "But it's no use to risk telling him. A shock might--might make him worse." She started up. "I must go to him. I came to send you, while I was looking after Mary and the dinner, and I clean forgot." She hurried away. Adelaide sat thinking, more and more forlorn, though not a whit less determined. "I ought to admire him more than I did Ross, and I ought to want to marry him--and I _will_!" The birds had stopped singing in the noonday heat. The breeze had died down. Outdoors, in the house, there was not a sound. She felt as if she must not, could not breathe. The silence, like a stealthy hand, lifted her from her chair, drew her tiptoeing and breathless toward the room in which her father was sitting. She paused at its threshold, looked. There was Hiram, in his chair by the window, bolt upright, eyes open and gazing into the infinite. Beside that statue of the peace eternal knelt Ellen, a worn, wan, shrunken figure, the hands clasped, the eyes closed, the lips moving. "Mother! Mother!" cried Del. Her mother did not hear. She was moaning, "I believe, Lord, I believe! Help Thou my unbelief!" CHAPTER X "THROUGH LOVE FOR MY CHILDREN" On the day after the funeral, Mrs. Ranger and the two children and young Hargrave were in the back parlor, waiting for Judge Torrey to come and read the will. The well-meant intrusions, the services, the burial--all those barbarous customs that stretch on the rack those who really love the dead whom society compels them publicly to mourn--had left cruel marks on Adelaide and on Arthur; but their mother seemed unchanged. She was talking incessantly now, addressing herself to Dory, since he alone was able to heed her. Her talk was an almost incoherent stream, as if she neither knew nor cared what she was saying so long as she could keep that stream going--the stream whose sound at least made the voice in her heart, the voice of desolation, less clear and terrible, though not less insistent. There was the beat of a man's footsteps on the side veranda. Mrs. Ranger started up, listened, sat again. "Oh," she said, in the strangest tone, and with a hysterical little laugh, "I thought it was your father coming home to dinner!" Then from her throat issued a stifled cry like nothing but a cry borne up to the surface from a deep torture-chamber. And she was talking on again--with Adelaide sobbing and Arthur fighting back the tears. Hargrave went to the door and admitted the old lawyer. He had a little speech which he always made on such occasions; but to-day, with the knowledge of the astounding contents of that will on his mind, his lips refused to utter it. He simply bowed, seated himself, and opened the document. The old-fashioned legal phrases soon were steadying him as the harness steadies an uneasy horse; and he was monotonously and sonorously rolling off paragraph after paragraph. Except the judge, young Hargrave was the only one there who clearly understood what those wordy provisions meant. As the reading progressed Dory's face flushed a deep red which slowly faded, leaving him gray and haggard. His father's beloved project! _His_ father's! To carry out his father's project, Arthur and Adelaide, the woman he loved and her brother, were to lose their inheritance. He could not lift his eyes. He felt that they were all looking at him, were hurling reproaches and denunciations. Presently Judge Torrey read: "I make this disposal of my estate through my love for my children and because I have firm belief in the soundness of their character, and in their capacity to do and to be. I feel they will be better off without the wealth which would tempt my son to relax his efforts to make a useful man of himself and would cause my daughter to be sought for her fortune instead of for herself." At the words "without the wealth," Arthur shifted sharply in his chair, and both he and Adelaide looked at Judge Torrey in puzzled wonder. The judge read on, read the names of signer and witnesses, then laid the will down and stared gloomily at it. Mrs. Ranger said: "And now, judge, can you tell us in plain words just what it means?" With many a pause and stammer the old lawyer made it clear: the house and its contents and appurtenances, and seven thousand a year to the widow for life; two thousand a year to Adelaide; five thousand in cash to Arthur and the chance to earn the mill and factory; the rest, practically the whole estate, to Tecumseh University. "Any further questions?" he asked, breaking the silence that followed his explanation. No one spoke. Still without looking at anyone, he put away his glasses? "Then I guess I'll be going. It won't be necessary to do anything further for a day or two." And, with face like that of criminal slinking from scene of crime, he got himself to the door by a series of embarrassed bows and shuffling steps. Outside, he wiped the streaming sweat from his forehead. "It wasn't my fault," he muttered, as if some one were accusing him. Then, a little further from the house, "I ain't sure Hiram hasn't done right. But, God help me, I couldn't never save _my_ children at such a price." He was clear of the grounds before Adelaide, the first to move, cast a furtive glance at her brother. Her own disaster was swallowed up for her in the thought of how he had been struck down. But she could read nothing in his face. He was simply gazing straight ahead, and looking _so_ like his father at his most unfathomable. As soon as he had fully realized what the will meant, his nerves had stopped feeling and his brain had stopped thinking. Adelaide next noted Dory, and grew cold from head to foot. All in a rush it came over her how much she had relied upon her prospective inheritance, how little upon herself. What would Dory think of her _now_? And Ross--what a triumph for him, what a narrow escape! Had he suspected? Had others in the town known that of which they of the family were in complete ignorance? Oh, the horror of the descent--the horror of the rude snatching away of the golden aureole! "Father, father, how could you do it? How could you hurt us so?" she muttered. Then, up before her rose his face with that frightful look in the eyes. "But how doing it made _him_ suffer!" she thought. And the memory of those hours on hours she had spent with him, buried alive, flooded over her. "Doing it killed him!" she said to herself. She felt cruel fingers grinding into her arm. With a sharp cry she sprang up. Her brother was facing her, his features ablaze with all the evil passions in his untrained and unrestrained nature. "_You knew_!" he hissed. "You traitor! You knew he was doing this. You honeyfugled him. And you and Hargrave get it all!" Adelaide shrank as she would not have shrunk under a lash. "O Arthur! Arthur!" she cried, clasping her hands and stretching them toward him. "You admit it, do you?" he shouted, seizing her by the shoulders like a madman. "Yes, your guilty face admits it. But I'll undo your work. I'll break the will. Such an outrage as that, such a robbery, won't stand in court for a minute." Dory had risen, was moving to fling the brother from the sister; but Mrs. Ranger was before him. Starting up from the stupor into which Judge Torrey's explanation had thrown her, she thrust herself between her children. "Arthur!" she said, and her voice was quiet and solemn. "Your father is dead." She drew herself up, and facing her son in her widow's black, seemed taller than he. "If I had needed any proof that he was right about what he did with his own," she went on, "I'd have found it in your face and in what you just said to your sister. Go to the glass there, boy! Look at your face and remember your words!" Young Hargrave left the room, went to the garden where they could see him from the windows and call him if they wished. Arthur hung his head before his mother's gaze. "It isn't _his_ will," he muttered. "Father in his right mind would never have made such a will." "He never would have made such a will if his children had been in their right mind," replied his mother sternly; and sternness they had never before seen in those features or heard in that voice. "I know now what he was broodin' over for weeks. Yes--" and her voice, which rose shrill, was the shriek of the tempest within her--"and I know now what made him break so sudden. I noticed you both driftin' off into foolishness, ashamed of the ways of your parents, ashamed of your parents, too. But I didn't give no attention to it, because I thought it was the silliness of children and that you'd outgrow it. But _he_ always did have a good head on him, and he saw that you were ridin' loose-rein to ruin--to be like them Whitneys. Your pa not in his right mind? I see _God_ in that will." She paused, but only for breath to resume: "And you, Arthur Ranger, what was in your head when you came here to-day? Grief and love and willingness to carry out your dead father's last wishes? No! You came thinking of how you were to benefit by his death. Don't deny! I saw your face when you found you weren't going to get your father's money." "Mother!" exclaimed Arthur. She waved him down imperiously; and he was afraid before her, before her outraged love for her outraged dead. "Take care how you stamp on my Hiram's grave, Arthur Ranger!" "He didn't mean it--you know he didn't," pleaded Adelaide. At that moment she could not think of this woman as her mother, but only as the wife, the widow. But Ellen's instinct told her that her son, though silent, was still in traitorous rebellion against her idol. And she kept on at him: "With Hiram hardly out of the house, you've forgot all he did for you, all he left you--his good name, his good example. You think only of his money. I've heard you say children owe nothing to their parents, that parents owe everything to the children. Well, that's so. But it don't mean what you think. It don't mean that parents ought to _ruin_ their children. And your pa didn't spare himself to do his duty by you--not even though it killed him. Yes, it killed him! You'd better go away and fall on your knees and ask God to forgive you for having shortened your father's life. And I tell you, Arthur Ranger, till you change your heart, you're no son of mine." "Mother! Mother!" cried Arthur, rushing from the room. Mrs. Ranger looked vacantly at the place where he had been, dropped into a chair and burst into a storm of tears. "Call him back, mother," entreated Del. "No! no!" sobbed Ellen Ranger. "He spoke agin' my dead! I'll not forgive him till his heart changes." Adelaide knelt beside her mother and tried to put her arms around her. But her mother shrank away. "Don't touch me!" she cried; "leave me alone. God forgive me for having bore children that trample on their father's grave. I'll put you both out of the house--" and she started up and her voice rose to a shriek. "Yes--I'll put you both out! Your foolishness has ate into you like a cancer, till you're both rotten. Go to the Whitneys. Go among the lepers where you belong. You ain't fit for decent people." She pushed Adelaide aside, and with uncertain steps went into the hall and up toward her own room. CHAPTER XI "SO SENSITIVE" Adelaide was about to go in search of her brother when he came hunting her. A good example perhaps excepted, there is no power for good equal to a bad example. Arthur's outburst before his mother and her, and in what seemed the very presence of the dead, had been almost as potent in turning Adelaide from bitterness as the influence her father's personality, her father's character had got over her in his last illness. And now the very sight of her brother's face, freely expressing his thoughts, since Ellen was not there to shame him, gave double force to the feelings her mother's denunciations had roused in her. "We've got to fight it, Del," Arthur said, flinging himself down on the grass at her feet. "I'll see Torrey to-morrow morning." Adelaide was silent. He looked fiercely at her. "You're going to help me, aren't you?" "I must have time to think," she replied, bent on not provoking him to greater fury. He raised himself to a sitting posture. "What has that Hargrave fellow been saying to you?" he cried. "You'll have to break off with him. His father--the old scoundrel!--got at father and took advantage of his illness and his religious superstition. I know just how it was done. We'll bring it all out." Adelaide did not answer. "What did Dory say to you?" repeated Arthur. "He went as soon as I came out from mother," she replied. She thought it best not to tell him that Dory had stopped long enough to urge her to go to her brother, and to make and keep peace with him, no matter what he might say to anger her. "Don't you think," she continued, "that you ought to see Janet and talk with her?" Artie sank back and stared somberly at the ground. "When is she coming?" asked his sister. "I don't know," he answered surlily. "Not at all, perhaps. The Whitneys won't especially care about having any of us in the family now." He looked furtively at Adelaide, as if he hoped she would protest that he was mistaken, would show him that Janet would be unchanged. "Mrs. Whitney won't," said Adelaide. "But Janet--she's different, I think. She seems to be high-minded, and I believe she loves you." Arthur looked relieved, though Adelaide was too honest to have been able to make her tone as emphatic as her words. Yes, Janet was indeed high-minded, he said to himself; did indeed love him. Her high-mindedness and the angel purity of her love had often made him uneasy, not to say uncomfortable. He hated to be at the trouble of pretenses; but Janet, living on a far higher plane than he, had simply compelled it. To let her see his human weaknesses, to let her suspect that he was not as high-minded as she told him he was, to strip from himself the saintly robes and the diadem with which she had adorned him--well, he would put it off until after marriage, he had always told himself, and perhaps by that time he would feel a little less like a sinner profaning a sanctuary when he kissed her. He had from time to time found in himself a sinful longing that she were just a little less of an angel, just a little more of a fellow sinner--not too much, of course, for a man wants a pure wife, a pure mother for his children. But, while the attitudes of worship and of saintliness were cramped, often severely so, still on the whole Arthur had thought he was content with Janet just as she was. "Why don't you go to Chicago and see her?" suggested Adelaide. "You ought to talk with her before anyone else has a chance. I wouldn't put _anything_ past her mother." "That's a good idea!" exclaimed Arthur, his face clearing before the prospect of action. "I'll take the night train. Yes, I must be the one to tell her." Adelaide had a sense of relief. Arthur would see Janet; Janet would pour balm upon his wounds, would lift him up to a higher, more generous view. Then, whatever he might do would be done in the right spirit, with respect for the memory of their father, with consideration for their mother. "You had better not see mother again until you come back," she suggested. His face shadowed and shame came into it that was from the real Arthur Ranger, the son of Hiram and Ellen. "I wish I hadn't burst out as I did, Del," he said. "I forgot everything in my own wrongs. I want to try to make it all right with mother. I can't believe that I said what I remember I did say before her who'd be glad to die for us." "Everything'll be all right when you come back, Artie," she assured him. As they passed the outbuilding where the garden tools were kept they both glanced in. There stood the tools their father had always used in pottering about the garden, above them his old slouch and old straw hats. Arthur's lip quivered; Adelaide caught her breath in a sob. "O Artie," she cried brokenly, "He's gone--gone--gone for ever." And Artie sat on the little bench just within the door and drew Del down beside him, and, each tightly in the other's arms, they cried like the children that they were, like the children that we all are in face of the great tragedy. A handsome and touching figure was Arthur Ranger as he left his cab and slowly ascended the lawn and the steps of the Whitney palace in the Lake Drive at eleven the next morning. His mourning garments were most becoming to him, contrasting with the fairness of his hair, the blue of his eyes, and the pallor of his skin. He looked big and strong and sad, and scrupulously fashionable, and very young. The Whitneys were leading in Chicago in building broad and ever broader the barriers, not between rich and poor, but between the very, very rich and all the rest of the world. Mrs. Whitney had made a painstaking and reverent study of upper-class life in England and on the Continent, and was endeavoring to use her education for the instruction of her associates, and for the instilling of a proper awe into the multitude. To enter her door was at once to get the impression that one was receiving a high privilege. One would have been as greatly shocked as was Mrs. Whitney herself, could one have overheard "Charley" saying to her, as he occasionally did, with a grin which he strove to make as "common" as he knew how, "Really, Tillie, if you don't let up a little on this putting on dog, I'll have to take to sneaking in by the back way. The butler's a sight more of a gent than I am, and the housekeeper can give you points on being a real, head-on-a-pole-over-the-shoulder lady." A low fellow at heart was Charley Whitney, like so many of his similarly placed compatriots, though he strove as hard as do they, almost as hard as his wife, to conceal the deficiencies due to early training in vulgarly democratic ways of living and thinking. Arthur, ushered by the excruciatingly fashionable butler into the smallest of the series of reception _salons_, fell straightway into the most melancholy spirits. He felt the black, icy shadow of the beginnings of doubt as to his right to admittance on terms of equality, now that his titles to nobility had been torn from him and destroyed. He felt that he was in grave danger of being soon mingled in the minds of his fashionable friends and their servants with the vulgar herd, the respectable but "impossible" middle classes. Indeed, he was not sure that he didn't really belong among them. The sound of Janet's subdued, most elegant rustle, drove out of his mind everything but an awful dread of what she would say and think and feel when he had disclosed to her the hideous truth. She came sweeping in, her eyes full of unshed tears, her manner a model of refined grief, sympathetic, soothing. She was tall and slim, a perfect figure of the long, lithe type; her face was small and fine and dreamy; her hair of an unusual straw color, golden, yet pale, too, like the latest autumn leaves in the wan sun of November; her eyes were hazel, in strange and thrilling contrast to her hair. To behold her was to behold all that man finds most fascinating in woman, but so illumined by the soul within that to look on it with man's eye for charms feminine seemed somewhat like casting sensuous glances upon beauty enmarbled in a temple's fane. Janet was human, but the human that points the way to sexless heaven. "_Dear_ Artie!" she said gently. "_Dear_ Artie!" And she took both his hands and, as she looked at him, her tears fell. Arthur, in his new humility of poverty, felt honored indeed that any loss of his could cause her matchless soul thus to droop upon its dazzling outer walls the somber, showery insignia of grief. "But," she went on, "you have him still with you--his splendid, rugged character, the memory of all he did for you." Arthur was silent. They were seated now, side by side, and he was, somewhat timidly, holding one of her hands. "He was so simple and so honest--such a _man_!" she continued. "Does it hurt you, dear, for me to talk about him?" "No--no," he stammered, "I came to you--to--to--talk about him." Then, desperately, seizing her other hand and holding both tightly, "Janet, would it make any difference with you if I--if I--no--What am I saying? Janet, I release you from our engagement. I--I--have no prospects," he rushed on. "Father--They got round him and wheedled him into leaving everything to the college--to Tecumseh. I have nothing--I must give you up. I can't ask you to wait--and--" He could not go on. He longed for the throbbing, human touch that beauty of hers could make so thrilling. But she slowly drew away her hands. Her expression made him say: "What is it, Janet? What have I said that hurt you?" "Did you come," she asked, in a strange, distant voice, "because you thought your not having money would make a difference with me?" "No," he protested, in wild alarm. "It was only that I feel I--" "You feel that there could be a question of money between us?" she interrupted. "Not between _us_, Janet," he said eagerly; "but there is your--your mother." "I beg you," she replied coldly, "not to speak of mamma in that way to me, even if you have such unjust thoughts of her." Arthur looked at her uncertainly. He had an instinct, deep down, that there was something wrong--something in her that he was not fathoming. But in face of that cloud-dwelling beauty, he could only turn and look within himself. "I beg your pardon, dear," he said. "You know so little of the practical side of life. You live so apart from it, so high above it, that I was afraid I'd be doing wrong by you if I did not put that side of it before you, too. But in the bottom of my heart I knew you would stand by me." She remained cold. "I don't know whether I'm glad or sorry, Arthur, that you let me see into your real self. I've often had doubts about our understanding each other, about our two natures being in that perfect harmony which makes the true marriage. But I've shut out those doubts as disloyal to you. Now, you've forced me to see they were only too true!" "What do you mean, Janet? Of course, I'm not good enough for you--no one is, for that matter; but I love you, and--Do you care for me, Janet?" "Yes," she replied mournfully. "But I must conquer it. O Arthur, Arthur!" Her voice was tremulous now, and her strange hazel eyes streamed sorrowful reproach. "How could you think sordidly of what was sacred and holy to me, of what I thought was holy to us both? You couldn't, if you had been the man I imagined you were." "Don't blame a fellow for every loose word he utters when he's all upset, Janet," he pleaded. "Put yourself in my place. Suppose you found you hadn't anything at all--found it out suddenly, when all along you had been thinking you'd never have to bother about money? Suppose you--But you must know how the world, how all our friends, look on that sort of thing. And suppose you loved--just as I love you. Wouldn't you go to her and hope she'd brace you up and make you feel that she really loved you and--all that? Wouldn't you, Janet?" She looked sadly at him. "You don't understand," she said, her rosebud mouth drooping pathetically. "You can't realize how you shook--how you _shattered_--my faith in you." He caught her by the arms roughly. "Look here, Janet Whitney. Do you love me or don't you? Do you intend to throw me over, now that I have lost my money, or do you intend to be all you've pretended to be?" The sadness in her sweet face deepened. "Let me go, Arthur," she said quietly. "You don't understand. You never will." "Yes or no?" he demanded, shaking her. Then suddenly changing to tenderness, with all his longing for sympathy in his eyes and in his voice, "Janet--dear--yes or no?" She looked away. "Don't persist, Arthur," she said, "or you will make me think it is only my money that makes you, that made you, pretend to--to care for me." He drew back sharply. "Janet!" he exclaimed. "Of course, I don't think so," she continued, after a constrained silence. "But I can't find any other reason for your talking and acting as you have this morning." He tried to see from her point of view. "Maybe it's true," he said, "that other things than our love have had too much to do with it, with both of us, in the past. But I love you for yourself alone, now, Janet. And, you haven't a fortune of your own, but only expectations--and they're not always realized, and in your case can't be for many a year. So we don't start so unevenly. Give yourself to me, Janet. Show that you believe in me, and I know I shall not disappoint you." Very manly his manner was as he said this, and brave and convincing was the show of his latent, undeveloped powers in his features and voice. She hesitated, then lowered her head, and, in a sad, gentle voice, said, "I don't trust you, Arthur. You've cut away the foundation of love. It would be fine and beautiful for us to start empty-handed and build up together, if we were in sympathy and harmony. But, doubting you--I can't." Again he looked at her uneasily, suspicious, without knowing why or what. But one thing was clear--to plead further with her would be self-degradation. "I have been tactless," he said to her. "Probably, if I were less in earnest, I should get on better. But, perhaps you will judge me more fairly when you think it over. I'll say only one thing more. I can't give up hope. It's about all I've got left--hope of you--belief in you. I must cling to that. I'll go now, Janet." She said nothing, simply looked unutterable melancholy, and let her hand lie listlessly in his until he dropped it. He looked back at her when he reached the door. She seemed so sad that he was about to return to her side. She sighed heavily, gazed at him, and said, "Good-by, Arthur." After that he had no alternative. He went. "I must wait until she is calm," he said to himself. "She is so delicately strung." As he was driving toward the hotel, his gloom in his face, he did not see Mrs. Whitney dash past and give him an anxious searching glance, and sink back in her carriage reassured somewhat. She had heard that he was on the Chicago express--had heard it from her _masseuse_, who came each morning before she was up. She had leaped to the telephone, had ordered a special train, and had got herself into it and off for her Chicago home by half-past eight. "That sentimental girl, full of high ideals--what mayn't she do!" she was muttering, almost beside herself with anxiety. "No doubt he'll try and induce her to run away with him." And the rushing train seemed to creep and crawl. She burst into the house like a dignified whirlwind. "Where's Miss Janet?" she demanded of the butler. "Still in the blue _salon_, ma'am, I think," he replied. "Mr. Arthur Ranger just left a few moments ago." Clearing her surface of all traces of agitation, Mrs. Whitney went into the presence of her daughter. "Mamma!" cried Janet, starting up. "Has anything happened?" "Nothing, nothing, dear," replied her mother, kissing her tenderly. "I was afraid my letter might have miscarried. And, when I heard that Arthur had slipped away to Chicago, I came myself. I've brought you up so purely and innocently that I became alarmed lest he might lead you into some rash sentimentality. As I said in my letter, if Arthur had grown up into a strong, manly character, I should have been eager to trust my daughter to him. But my doubts about him were confirmed by the will. And--he is simply a fortune-hunter now." Janet had hidden her face in her handkerchief. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed. "You wrong him, mother." "You haven't encouraged him, Janet!" cried Mrs. Whitney. "After what I've been writing you?" "The loss of his money hasn't made any difference about him with me," said Janet, her pure, sweet face lighting up with the expression that made her mother half-ashamed of her own worldliness. "Of course not! Of course not, Janet," said she. "No child of mine could be mercenary without being utterly false to my teachings." Janet's expression was respectful, yet not confirmatory. She had often protested inwardly against the sordid views of life which her mother unconsciously held and veiled with scant decency in the family circle in her unguarded moments. But she had fought against the contamination, and proudly felt that her battle for the "higher plane" was successful. Her mother returned, somewhat awkwardly, to the main point. "I hope you didn't encourage him, Janet." "I don't wish to talk of it, mother," was Janet's reply. "I have not been well, and all this has upset me." Mrs. Whitney was gnawing her palms with her nails and her lip with her teeth. She could scarcely restrain herself from seizing her daughter and shaking the truth, whatever it was, out of her. But prudence and respect for her daughter's delicate soul restrained her. "You have made it doubly hard for me," Janet went on. "Your writing me to stay away because there was doubt about Arthur's material future--oh, mother, how could that make any difference? If I had not been feeling so done, and if father hadn't been looking to me to keep him company, I'd surely have gone. For I hate to have my motive misunderstood." "He has worked on her soft-heartedness and inexperience," thought Mrs. Whitney, in a panic. "And when Arthur came to-day," the girl continued, "I was ready to fly to him." She looked tragic. "And even when he repulsed me--" "_Repulsed_ you!" exclaimed Mrs. Whitney. She laughed disagreeably. "He's subtler than I thought." "Even when he repulsed me," pursued Janet, "with his sordid way of looking at everything, still I tried to cling to him, to shut my eyes." Mrs. Whitney vented an audible sigh of relief. "Then you didn't let him deceive you!" "He shattered my last illusion," said Janet, in a mournful voice. "Mother, I simply _couldn't_ believe in him, in the purity of his love. I had to give him up." Mrs. Whitney put her arms round her daughter and kissed her soothingly again and again. "Don't grieve, dear," she said. "Think how much better it is that you should have found him out now than when it was too late." And Janet shuddered. * * * * * Ross dropped in at the house in the Lake Drive the next morning on his way East from the Howlands. As soon as he was alone with his mother, he asked, "How about Janet and Arthur?" Mrs. Whitney put on her exalted expression. "I'm glad you said nothing before Janet," said she. "The child is so sensitive, and Arthur has given her a terrible shock. Men are so coarse; they do not appreciate the delicateness of a refined woman. In this case, however, it was most fortunate. She was able to see into his true nature." "Then she's broken it off? That's good." "Be careful what you say to her," his mother hastened to warn him. "You might upset her mind again. She's so afraid of being misunderstood." "She needn't be," replied Ross dryly. And when he looked in on Janet in her sitting room to say good-by, he began with a satirical, "Congratulations, Jenny." Jenny looked at him with wondering eyes. She was drooping like a sunless flower and was reading poetry out of a beautifully bound volume. "What is it, Ross?" she asked. "On shaking Artie so smoothly. Trust you to do the right thing at the right time, and in the right way. You're a beauty, Jen, and no mistake," laughed Ross. "I never saw your like. You really must marry a title--Madame la Duchesse! And nobody's on to you but me. You aren't even on to yourself!" Janet drew up haughtily and swept into her bedroom, closing the door with _almost_ coarse emphasis. CHAPTER XII ARTHUR FALLS AMONG LAWYERS Arthur ended his far from orderly retreat at the Auditorium, and in the sitting room of his suite there set about re-forming his lines, with some vague idea of making another attack later in the day--one less timid and blundering. "I'd better not have gone near her," said he disgustedly. "How could a man win when he feels beaten before he begins?" He was not now hazed by Janet's beauty and her voice like bells in evening quiet, and her mystic ideas. Youth, rarely wise in action, is often wise in thought; and Arthur, having a reasoning apparatus that worked uncommonly well when he set it in motion and did not interfere with it, was soon seeing his situation as a whole much as it was--ugly, mocking, hopeless. "Maybe Janet knows the real reason why she's acting this way, maybe she don't," thought he, with the disposition of the inexperienced to give the benefit of even imaginary doubt. "No matter; the fact is, it's all up between us." This finality, unexpectedly staring at him, gave him a shock. "Why," he muttered, "she really has thrown me over! All her talk was a blind--a trick." And, further exhibiting his youth in holding the individual responsible for the system of which the individual is merely a victim, usually a pitiable victim, he went to the opposite extreme and fell to denouncing her--cold-hearted and mercenary like her mother, a coward as well as a hypocrite--for, if she had had any of the bravery of self-respect, wouldn't she have been frank with him? He reviewed her in the flooding new light upon her character, this light that revealed her as mercilessly as flash of night-watchman's lantern on guilty, shrinking form. "She--Why, she always _was_ a fakir!" he exclaimed, stupefied by the revelation of his own lack of discernment, he who had prided himself on his acuteness, especially as to women. "From childhood up, she has always made herself comfortable, no matter who was put out; she has gotten whatever she wanted, always pretending to be unselfish, always making it look as if the other person were in the wrong." There he started up in the rate of the hoodwinked, at the recollection of an incident of the previous summer--how she had been most gracious to a young French nobleman, in America in search of a wife; how anybody but "spiritual" Janet would have been accused of outrageous flirting--no, not accused, but convicted. He recalled a vague story which he had set down to envious gossip--a story that the Frenchman had departed on learning that Charles Whitney had not yet reached the stage of fashionable education at which the American father appreciates titles and begins to listen without losing his temper when the subject of settlements is broached. He remembered now that Janet had been low-spirited for some time after the Frenchman took himself and title and eloquent eyes and "soulful, stimulating conversation" to another market. "What a damn fool I've been!" Arthur all but shouted at his own image in a mirror which by chance was opposite him. A glance, and his eyes shifted; somehow, it gave him no pleasure, but the reverse, to see that handsome face and well-set-up, well-dressed figure. "She was marrying me for money," he went on, when he had once more seated himself, legs crossed and cigarette going reflectively. The idea seemed new to him--that people with money could marry for money, just as a capitalist goes only where he hopes to increase his capital. But on examining it more closely, he was surprised to find that it was not new at all. "What am I so virtuous about?" said he. "Wasn't _I_ after money, too? If our circumstances were reversed, what would _I_ be doing?" He could find but one honest answer. "No doubt I'd be trying to get out of it, and if I didn't, it'd be because I couldn't see or make a way." To his abnormally sensitized nerves the whole business began to exude a distinct, nauseating odor. "Rotten--that's the God's truth," thought he. "Father was right!" But there he drew back; he must be careful not to let anger sweep him into conceding too much. "No--life's got to be lived as the world dictates," he hastened to add. "I see now why father did it, but he went too far. He forgot my rights. The money is mine. And, by God, I'll get it!" And again he started up; and again he was caught and put out of countenance by his own image in the mirror. He turned away, shamefaced, but sullenly resolute. Base? He couldn't deny it. But he was desperate; also, he had been too long accustomed to grabbing things to which his conscience told him he had doubtful right or none. "It's mine. I've been cheated out of it. I'll get it. Besides--" His mind suddenly cleared of the shadow of shame--"I owe it to mother and Del to make the fight. They've been cheated, too. Because they're too soft-hearted and too reverent of father's memory, is that any reason, any excuse, for my shirking my duty by them? If father were here to speak, I know he'd approve." Before him rose the frightful look in his father's eyes in the earlier stage of that second and last illness. "_That's_ what the look meant!" he cried, now completely justified. "He recovered his reason. He wanted to undo the mischief that old sneak Hargrave had drawn him into!" The case was complete: His father had been insane when he made the will, had repented afterward, but had been unable to unmake it; his only son Arthur Ranger, now head of the family, owed it to the family's future and to its two helpless and oversentimental women to right the wrong. A complete case, a clear case, a solemn mandate. Interest and duty were synonymous--as always to ingenious minds. He lost no time in setting about this newly discovered high task of love and justice. Within twenty minutes he was closeted with Dawson of the great law firm, Mitchell, Dawson, Vance & Bischoffsheimer, who had had the best seats on all the fattest stranded carcasses of the Middle West for a decade--that is, ever since Bischoffsheimer joined the firm and taught its intellects how on a vast scale to transubstantiate technically legal knowledge into technically legal wealth. Dawson--lean and keen, tough and brown of skin, and so carelessly dressed that he looked as if he slept in his clothes--listened with the sympathetic, unwandering attention which men give only him who comes telling where and how they can make money. The young man ended his story, all in a glow of enthusiasm for his exalted motives and of satisfaction with his eloquence in presenting them; then came the shrewd and thorough cross-examination which, he believed, strengthened every point he had made. "On your showing," was Dawson's cautious verdict, "you seem to have a case. But you must not forget that judges and juries have a deep prejudice against breaking wills. They're usually fathers themselves, and guard the will as the parent's strongest weapon in keeping the children in order after they're too old for the strap or the bed slat, as the case may be. Undue influence or mental infirmity must be mighty clearly proven. Even then the court may decide to let the will stand, on general principles. Your mother and sister, of course, join you?" "I--I hope so," hesitated Arthur. "I'm not sure." More self-possessedly: "You know how it is with women--with _ladies_--how they shrink from notoriety." "No, I can't say I do," said Dawson dryly. "Ladies need money even more than women do, and so they'll usually go the limit, and beyond, to get it. However, assuming that for some reason or other, your mother and sister won't help, at least they won't oppose?" "My sister is engaged to the son of Dr. Hargrave," said Arthur uneasily. "That's good--excellent!" exclaimed Dawson, rubbing his gaunt, beard-discolored jaw vigorously. "But--he--Theodore Hargrave is a sentimental, unpractical chap." "So are we all--but not in money matters." "He's an exception, I'm afraid," said Arthur. "Really--I think it's almost certain he'll try to influence her to take sides against me. And my mother was very bitter when I spoke of contest. But, as I've shown you, my case is quite apart from what they may or may not do." "Um--um," grunted Dawson. He threw himself back in his chair; to aid him in thinking, he twisted the only remaining crown-lock of his gray-black hair, and slowly drew his thin lips from his big sallow teeth, and as slowly returned them to place. "Obviously," he said at length, "the doctor is the crucial witness. We must see to it that"--a significant grin--"that the other side does not attach him. We must anticipate them by attaching him to us. I'll see what can be done--legitimately, you understand. Perhaps you may have to engage additional counsel--some such firm as, say, Humperdink & Grafter. Often, in cases nowadays, there is detail work of an important character that lawyers of our standing couldn't think of undertaking. But, of course, we work in harmony with such other counsel as our client sees fit to engage." "Certainly; I understand," said Arthur, with a knowing, "man-of-the-world" nod. His cause being good and its triumph necessary, he must not be squeamish about any alliances it might be necessary to make as a means to that triumph, where the world was so wicked. "Then, you undertake the case." "We will look into it," Dawson corrected. "You appreciate that the litigation will be somewhat expensive?" Arthur reddened. No, he hadn't thought of that! Whenever he had wanted anything, he had ordered it, and had let the bill go to his father; whenever he had wanted money, he had sent to his father for it, and had got it. Dawson's question made the reality of his position--moneyless, resourceless, friendless--burst over him like a waterspout. Dawson saw and understood; but it was not his cue to lessen that sense of helplessness. At last Arthur sufficiently shook off his stupor to say: "Unless I win the contest, I shan't have any resources beyond the five thousand I get under the will, and a thousand or so I have in bank at Saint X--and what little I could realize from my personal odds and ends. Isn't there some way the thing could be arranged?" "There is the method of getting a lawyer to take a case on contingent fee," said Dawson. "That is, the lawyer gets a certain per cent of what he wins, and nothing if he loses. But _we_ don't make such arrangements. They are regarded as almost unprofessional; I couldn't honestly recommend any lawyer who would. But, let me see--um--urn--" Dawson was reflecting again, with an ostentation which might have roused the suspicions of a less guileless person than Arthur Ranger at twenty-five. "You could, perhaps, give us a retainer of say, a thousand in cash?" "Yes," said Arthur, relieved. He thought he saw light ahead. "Then we could take your note for say, five thousand--due in eighteen months. You could renew it, if your victory was by any chance delayed beyond that time." "Your victory" was not very adroit, but it was adroit enough to bedazzle Arthur. "Certainly," said he gratefully. Dawson shut his long, wild-looking teeth and gently drew back his dry, beard-discolored lips, while his keen eyes glinted behind his spectacles. The fly had a leg in the web! Business being thus got into a smooth way, Dawson and Arthur became great friends. Nothing that Dawson said was a specific statement of belief in the ultimate success of the suit; but his every look and tone implied confidence. Arthur went away with face radiant and spirit erect. He felt that he was a man of affairs, a man of consequence, he had lawyers, and a big suit pending; and soon he would be rich. He thought of Janet, and audibly sneered. "I'll make the Whitneys sick of their treachery!" said he. Back had come his sense of strength and superiority; and once more he was "gracious" with servants and with such others of the "peasantry" as happened into or near his homeward path. Toward three o'clock that afternoon, as he was being whirled toward Saint X in the Eastern Express, his lawyer was in the offices of Ramsay & Vanorden, a rival firm of wreckers and pirate outfitters on the third floor of the same building. When Dawson had despatched his immediate business with Vanorden, he lingered to say: "Well, I reckon we'll soon be lined up on opposite sides in another big suit." Confidences between the two firms were frequent and natural--not only because Vanorden and Dawson were intimate friends and of the greatest assistance each to the other socially and politically; not only because Ramsay and Bischoffsheimer had married sisters; but also, and chiefly, because big lawyers like to have big lawyers opposed to them in a big suit. For several reasons; for instance, ingenuity on each side prolongs the litigation and makes it intricate, and therefore highly expensive, and so multiplies the extent of the banquet. "How so?" inquired Vanorden, put on the alert by the significant intonation of his friend. "The whole Ranger-Whitney business is coming into court. Ranger, you know, passed over the other day. He cut his family off with almost nothing--gave his money to Tecumseh College. The son's engaged us to attack the will." "Where do _we_ come in?" asked Vanorden. Dawson laughed and winked. "I guess your client, old Charley Whitney, won't miss the chance to intervene in the suit and annex the whole business, in the scrimmage." Vanorden nodded. "Oh, I see," said he. "I see! Yes, we'll take a hand--sure!" "There won't be much in it for us," continued Dawson. "The boy's got nothing, and between you and me, Len, the chances are against him. But you fellows and whoever gets the job of defending the college's rights--" Dawson opened his arms and made a humorous, huge, in-sweeping gesture. "And," he added, "Whitney's one of the trustees under the will. See?" "Thanks, old man." Vanorden was laughing like a shrewd and mischievous but through-and-through good-natured boy. The two brilliant young leaders of the Illinois bar shook hands warmly. And so it came about that Charles Whitney was soon indorsing a plan to cause, and to profit by, sly confusion--the plan of his able lawyers. They had for years steered his hardy craft, now under the flag of peaceful commerce and now under the black banner of the buccaneer. The best of pilots, they had enabled him to clear many a shoal of bankruptcy, many a reef of indictment. They served well, for he paid well. CHAPTER XIII BUT IS RESCUED By the time he reached Saint X our young "man of affairs" believed his conscience soundly converted to his adventure; and, as he drove toward the house, a final survey of his defenses and justifications satisfied him that they were impregnable. Nevertheless, as he descended from the station hack and entered the grounds of the place that in his heart of heart was all that the word "home" can contain, he felt strangely like a traitor and a sneak. He kept his manner of composed seriousness, but he reasoned in vain against those qualms of shame and panic. At the open front door he dared not lift his eyes lest he should be overwhelmed by the sight of that colossal figure, with a look in its face that would force him to see the truth about his thoughts and his acts. The house seemed deserted; on the veranda that opened out from the back parlor he found Dory Hargrave, reading. He no longer felt bitter toward Dory. Thinking over the whole of the Ranger-Whitney relations and the sudden double break in them, he had begun to believe that perhaps Adelaide had had the good luck to make an extremely clever stroke when she shifted from Ross Whitney to Hargrave. Anyhow, Dory was a fine fellow, both in looks and in brains, with surprisingly good, yes, really amazing air and manner--considering his opportunities; he'd be an ornament to any family as soon as he had money enough properly to equip himself--which would be very soon, now that the great Dawson was about to open fire on the will and demolish it. "Howdy," he accordingly said, with only a shade less than his old friendliness, and that due to embarrassment, and not at all to ill feeling. "Where's mother--and Del?" "Your sister has taken your mother for a drive," replied Hargrave. "Smoke?" said Arthur, extending his gold cigarette case, open. Dory preferred his own brand of cigarettes; but, feeling that he ought to meet any advance of Arthur's, he took one of the big, powerful Egyptians with "A.K." on it in blue monogram. They smoked in silence a moment or so, Arthur considering whether to practise on Dory the story of his proposed contest, to enable him to tell it in better form to his mother and sister. "I've been to Chicago to see about contesting the will," he began, deciding for the rehearsal. "I supposed so," said Hargrave. "Of course, for mother's and Del's sake I simply have to do it," he went on, much encouraged. "Anyone who knew father knows he must have been out of his mind when he made that will." "I see your point of view," said Dory, embarrassed. Then, with an effort he met Arthur's eyes, but met them fearlessly. "You misunderstood me. I think a contest is a mistake." Arthur flamed. "Naturally you defend your father," he sneered. "Let us leave my father out of this," said Dory. His manner made it impossible for Arthur to persist. For Dory was one of those who have the look of "peace with honor" that keeps to bounds even the man crazed by anger. "You can't deny I have a legal right to make the contest," pursued Arthur. "Undoubtedly." "And a moral right, too," said Arthur, somewhat defiantly. "Yes," assented Dory. The tone of the "yes"--or was it Arthur's own self-respect--made him suspect Dory of thinking that a man might have the clearest legal and moral right and still not be able to get his honor's consent. "But why discuss the matter, Arthur? You couldn't be changed by anything I'd say." "We will discuss it!" exclaimed Arthur furiously. "I see what your plan is. You know I'm bound to win; so you'll try to influence Del and mother against me, and get the credit for taking high ground, and at the same time get the benefit of the breaking of the will. When the will's broken, mother'll have her third; you think you can stir up a quarrel between her and me, and she'll leave all of her third to Del and you." Arthur had started up threateningly. There showed at his eyes and mouth the ugliest of those alien passions which his associations had thrust into him, and which had been master ever since the reading of the will. The signs were all for storm; but Dory sat impassive. He looked steadily at Arthur until Arthur could no longer withstand, but had to drop his eyes. Then he said: "I want you to think over what you have just said to me, Artie--especially your calculations on the death of your mother." Arthur dropped back into his chair. "Honestly, Artie, honestly," Dory went on, with the friendliest earnestness, "isn't there something wrong about anything that causes the man you are by nature to think and feel and talk that way, when his father is not a week dead?" Arthur forced a sneer, but without looking at Dory. "Do you remember the day of the funeral?" Dory went on. "It had been announced in the papers that the burial would be private. As we drove out of the front gates there, I looked round--you remember it was raining. There were uncovered farm wagons blocking the streets up and down. There were thousands of people standing in the rain with bared heads. And I saw tears thick as the rain drops streaming down faces of those who had known your father as boy and man, who had learned to know he was all that a human being should be." Arthur turned away to hide his features from Dory. "_That_ was your father, Artie. What if _he_ could have heard you a few minutes ago?" "I don't need to have anyone praise my father to me," said Arthur, trying to mask his feelings behind anger. "And what you say is no reason why I should let mother and Del and myself be cheated out of what he wanted us to have." Dory left it to Arthur's better self to discuss that point with him. "I know you'll do what is right," said he sincerely. "You are more like your father than you suspect as yet, Artie. I should have said nothing to you if you hadn't forced your confidence on me. What I've said is only what you'd say to me, were I in your place and you in mine--what you'll think yourself a month from now. What lawyer advised you to undertake the contest?" "Dawson of Mitchell, Dawson, Vance & Bischoffsheimer. As good lawyers as there are in the country." "I ought to tell you," said Dory, after brief hesitation, "that Judge Torrey calls them a quartette of unscrupulous scoundrels--says they're regarded as successful only because success has sunk to mean supremacy in cheating and double-dealing. Would you mind telling me what terms they gave you--about fee and expenses?" "A thousand down, and a note for five thousand," replied Arthur, compelled to speech by the misgivings Dory was raising within him in spite of himself. "That is, as the first installment, they take about all the money in sight. Does that look as if they believed in the contest?" At this Arthur remembered and understood Dawson's remark, apparently casual, but really crucial, about the necessity of attaching Dr. Schulze. Without Schulze, he had no case; and Dawson had told him so! What kind of a self-hypnotized fool was he, not to hear the plainest warnings? And without waiting to see Schulze, he had handed over his money! "I know you think I am not unprejudiced about this will," Dory went on. "But I ask you to have a talk with Judge Torrey. While he made the will, it was at your father's command, and he didn't and doesn't approve it. He knows all the circumstances. Before you go any further, wouldn't it be well to see him? You know there isn't an abler lawyer, and you also know he's honest. If there's any way of breaking the will, he'll tell you about it." Hiram Ranger's son now had the look of his real self emerging from the subsiding fumes of his debauch of folly and fury. "Thank you, Hargrave," he said. "You are right." "Go straight off," advised Dory. "Go before you've said anything to your mother about what you intend to do. And please let me say one thing more. Suppose you do finally decide to make this contest. It means a year, two years, three years, perhaps five or six, perhaps ten or more, of suspense, of degrading litigation, with the best of you shriveling, with your abilities to do for yourself paralyzed. If you finally lose--you'll owe those Chicago sharks an enormous sum of money, and you'll be embittered and blighted for life. If you win, they and their pals will have most of the estate; you will have little but the barren victory; and you will have lost your mother. For, Arthur, if you try to prove that your father was insane, and cut off his family in insane anger, you know it will kill her." A long silence; then Arthur moved toward the steps leading down to the drive. "I'll think it over," he said, in a tone very different from any he had used before. Dory watched him depart with an expression of friendship and admiration. "He's going to Judge Torrey," he said to himself. "Scratch that veneer of his, and you find his mother and father." The old judge received Arthur like a son, listened sympathetically as the young man gave him in detail the interview with Dawson. Even as Arthur recalled and related, he himself saw Dawson's duplicity; for, that past master of craft had blundered into the commonest error of craft of all degrees--he had underestimated the intelligence of the man he was trying to cozen. He, rough in dress and manners and regarding "dudishness" as unfailing proof of weak-mindedness, had set down the fashionable Arthur, with his Harvard accent and his ignorance of affairs, as an unmitigated ass. He had overlooked the excellent natural mind which false education and foolish associations had tricked out in the motley, bells and bauble of "culture"; and so, he had taken no pains to cozen artistically. Also, as he thought greediness the strongest and hardiest passion in all human beings, because it was so in himself, he had not the slightest fear that anyone or anything could deflect his client from pursuing the fortune which dangled, or seemed to dangle, tantalizingly near. Arthur, recalling the whole interview, was accurate where he had been visionary, intelligent where he had been dazed. He saw it all, before he was half done; he did not need Torrey's ejaculated summary: "The swindling scoundrel!" to confirm him. "You signed the note?" said the judge. "Yes," replied Arthur. He laughed with the frankness of self-derision that augurs so well for a man's teachableness. "He must have guessed," continued the judge, "that a contest is useless." At that last word Arthur changed expression, changed color--or, rather, lost all color. "Useless?" he repeated, so overwhelmed that he clean forgot pride of appearances and let his feelings have full play in his face. Useless! A contest useless. Then-- "I did have some hopes," interrupted Judge Torrey's deliberate, judicial tones, "but I had to give them up after I talked with Schulze and President Hargrave. Your father may have been somewhat precipitate, Arthur, but he was sane when he made that will. He believed his wealth would be a curse to his children. And--I ain't at all sure he wasn't right. As I look round this town, this whole country, and see how the second generation of the rich is rotten with the money-cancer, I feel that your grand, wise father had one of the visions that come only to those who are about to leave the world and have their eyes cleared of the dust of the combat, and their minds cooled of its passions." Here the old man leaned forward and laid his hand on the knee of the white, haggard youth. "Arthur," he went on, "your father's mind may have been befogged by his affections in the years when he was letting his children do as they pleased, do like most children of the rich. And his mind may have been befogged by his affections again, _after_ he made that will and went down into the Dark Valley. But, I tell you, boy, he was sane _when_ he made that will. He was saner than most men have the strength of mind to be on the best day of their whole lives." Arthur was sitting with elbows on the desk; his face stared out, somber and gaunt, from between his hands. "How much he favors his father," thought the old judge. "What a pity it don't go any deeper than looks." But the effect of the resemblance was sufficient to make it impossible for him to offer any empty phrases of cheer and consolation. After a long time the hopeless, dazed expression slowly faded from the young man's face; in its place came a calm, inscrutable look. The irresponsible boy was dead; the man had been born--in rancorous bitterness, but in strength and decision. It was the man who said, as he rose to depart, "I'll write Dawson that I've decided to abandon the contest." "Ask him to return the note," advised Torrey. "But," he added, "I doubt if he will." "He won't," said Arthur. "And I'll not ask him. Anyhow, a few dollars would be of no use to me. I'd only prolong the agony of getting down to where I've got to go." "Five thousand dollars is right smart of money," protested the judge. "On second thought, I guess you'd better let me negotiate with him." The old man's eyes were sparkling with satisfaction in the phrases that were forming in his mind for the first letter to Dawson. "Thank you," said Arthur. But it was evident that he was not interested. "I must put the past behind me," he went on presently. "I mustn't think of it." "After all," suggested Torrey, "you're not as bad off as more than ninety-nine per cent of the young men. You're just where they are--on bed rock. And you've got the advantage of your education." Arthur smiled satirically. "The tools I learned to use at college," said he, "aren't the tools for the Crusoe Island I've been cast away on." "Well, I reckon a college don't ruin a young chap with the right stuff in him, even if it don't do him any great sight of good." He looked uneasily at Arthur, then began: "If you'd like to study law"--as if he feared the offer would be accepted, should he make it outright. "No; thank you, I've another plan," replied Arthur, though "plan" would have seemed to Judge Torrey a pretentious name for the hazy possibilities that were beginning to gather in the remote corners of his mind. "I supposed you wouldn't care for the law," said Torrey, relieved that his faint hint of a possible offer had not got him into trouble. He liked Arthur, but estimated him by his accent and his dress, and so thought him probably handicapped out of the running by those years of training for a career of polite uselessness. "That East!" he said to himself, looking pityingly at the big, stalwart youth in the elaborate fopperies of fashionable mourning. "That _damned_ East! We send it most of our money and our best young men; and what do we get from it in return? Why, sneers and snob-ideas." However, he tried to change his expression to one less discouraging; but his face could not wholly conceal his forebodings. "It's lucky for the boy," he reflected, "that Hiram left him a good home as long as his mother's alive. After she's gone--and the five thousand, if I get it back--I suppose he'll drop down and down, and end by clerking it somewhere." With a survey of Arthur's fashionable attire, "I should say he might do fairly well in a gent's furnishing store in one of those damn cities." The old man was not unfeeling--far from it; he had simply been educated by long years of experience out of any disposition to exaggerate the unimportant in the facts of life. "He'll be better off and more useful as a clerk than he would be as a pattern of damnfoolishness and snobbishness. So, Hiram was right anyway I look at it, and no matter how it comes out. But--it did take courage to make that will!" "Well, good day, judge," Arthur was saying, to end both their reveries. "I must," he laughed curtly, "'get a move on.'" "Good day, and God bless you, boy," said the old man, with a hearty earnestness that, for the moment, made Arthur's eyes less hard. "Take your time, settling on what to do. Don't be in a hurry." "On the contrary," said Arthur. "I'm going to make up my mind at once. Nothing stales so quickly as a good resolution." CHAPTER XIV SIMEON A crisis does not create character, but is simply its test. The young man who entered the gates of No. 64 Jefferson Street at five that afternoon was in all respects he who left them at a quarter before four, though he seemed very different to himself. He went direct to his own room and did not descend until the supper bell sounded--that funny little old jangling bell he and Del had striven to have abolished in the interests of fashionable progress, until they learned that in many of the best English houses it is a custom as sacredly part of the ghostly British Constitution as the bathless bath of the basin, as the jokeless joke of the pun, as the entertainment that entertains not, as the ruler that rules not and the freedom that frees not. When he appeared in the dining-room door, his mother and Del were already seated. His mother, her white face a shade whiter, said: "I expect you'd better sit--there." She neither pointed nor looked, but they understood that she meant Hiram's place. It was her formal announcement of her forgiveness and of her recognition of the new head of the family. With that in his face that gave Adelaide a sense of the ending of a tension within her, he seated himself where his father had always sat. It was a silent supper, each one absorbed in thoughts which could not have been uttered, no one able to find any subject that would not make overwhelming the awful sense of the one that was not there and never again would be. Mrs. Ranger spoke once. "How did you find Janet?" she said to Arthur. His face grew red, with gray underneath. After a pause he answered: "Very well." Another pause, then: "Our engagement is broken off." Mrs. Ranger winced and shrank. She knew how her question and the effort of that answer must have hurt the boy; but she did not make matters worse with words. Indeed, she would have been unable to say anything, for sympathy would have been hypocritical, and hypocrisy was with her impossible. She thought Arthur loved Janet; she realized, too, the savage wound to his pride in losing her just at this time. But she had never liked her, and now felt justified in that secret and, so she had often reproached herself, unreasonable dislike; and she proceeded to hate her, the first time she had ever hated anybody--to hate her as a mother can hate one who has made her child suffer. After supper, Mrs. Ranger plunged into the household duties that were saving her from insanity. Adelaide and Arthur went to the side veranda. When Arthur had lighted a cigarette, he looked at it with a grim smile--it was astonishing how much stronger and manlier his face was, all in a few hours. "I'm on my last thousand of these," said he. "After them, no more cigarettes." "Oh, it isn't so bad as all that!" said Adelaide. "We're still comfortable, and long before you could feel any change, you'll be making plenty of money." "I'm going to work--next Monday--at the mills." Adelaide caught her breath, beamed on him. "I knew you would!" she exclaimed. "I knew you were brave." "Brave!" He laughed disagreeably. "Like the fellow that faces the fight because a bayonet's pricking his back. I can't go away somewhere and get a job, for there's nothing I can do. I've got to stay right here. I've got to stare this town out of countenance. I've got to get it used to the idea of me as a common workingman with overalls and a dinner pail." She saw beneath his attempt to make light of the situation a deep and cruel humiliation. He was looking forward to the keenest torture to which a man trained in vanity to false ideals can be subjected; and the thing itself, so Adelaide was thinking, would be more cruel than his writhing anticipation of it. "Still," she insisted to him, "you are brave. You might have borrowed of mother and gone off to make one failure after another in gentlemanly attempts. You might have"--she was going to say, "tried to make a rich marriage," but stopped herself in time. "Oh, I forgot," she said, instead, "there's the five thousand dollars. Why not spend it in studying law--or something?" "I've lost my five thousand," he replied. "I paid it for a lesson that was cheap at the price." Then, thoughtfully, "I've dropped out of the class 'gentleman' for good and all." "Or into it," suggested she. He disregarded this; he knew it was an insincerity--one of the many he and Del were now trying to make themselves believe against the almost hopeless handicap of the unbelief they had acquired as part of their "Eastern culture." He went on: "There's one redeeming feature of the--the situation." "Only one?" "And that for you," he said. "At least, _you've_ got a small income." "But I haven't," she replied. "Dory made me turn it over to mother." Arthur stared. "Dory!" "Yes," she answered, with a nod and a smile. It would have given Dory a surprise, a vastly different notion as to what she thought of him, had he seen her unawares just then. "_Made_ you?" "Made," she repeated. "And you did it?" "I've promised I will." "Why?" "I don't just know," was her slow reply. "Because he was afraid it might make bad blood between you and me?" "That was one of the reasons he urged," she admitted. "But he thought, too, it would be bad for him and me." A long silence. Then Arthur: "Del, I almost think you're not making such a mistake as I feared, in marrying him." "So do I--sometimes," was his sister's, to him, astonishing answer, in an absent, speculative tone. Arthur withheld the question that was on his lips. He looked curiously at the small graceful head, barely visible in the deepening twilight. "She's a strange one," he reflected. "I don't understand her--and I doubt if she understands herself." And that last was very near to the truth. Everyone has a reason for everything he does; but it by no means follows that he always knows that reason, or even could extricate it from the tangle of motives, real and reputed, behind any given act. This self-ignorance is less common among men than among women, with their deliberate training to self-consciousness and to duplicity; it is most common among those--men as well as women--who think about themselves chiefly. And Adelaide, having little to think about when all her thinking was hired out, had of necessity thought chiefly about herself. "You guessed that Janet has thrown me over?" Arthur said, to open the way for relieving his mind. Adelaide made a gallant effort, and her desire to console him conquered her vanity. "Just as Ross threw me over," she replied, with a successful imitation of indifference. Instead of being astonished at the news, Arthur was astonished at his not having guessed it. His first sensation was the very human one of pleasure--the feeling that he had companionship in humiliation. He moved closer to her. Then came an instinct, perhaps true, perhaps false, that she was suffering, that Ross had wounded her cruelly, that she was not so calm as her slim, erect figure seemed in the deep dusk. He burst out in quiet, intense fury: "Del, I'll make those two wish to God they hadn't!" "You can't do it, Artie," she replied. "The only power on earth that can do them up is themselves." She paused to vent the laugh that was as natural in the circumstances as it was unpleasant to hear. "And I think they'll do it," she went on, "without any effort on your part--or mine." "You do not hate them as I do," said he. "I'm afraid I'm not a good hater," she answered. "I admit I've got a sore spot where he--struck me. But as far as he's concerned, I honestly believe I'm already feeling a little bit obliged to him." "Naturally," said he in a tone that solicited confidences. "Haven't you got what you really wanted?" But his sister made no reply. "Look here, Del," he said after waiting in vain, "if you don't want to marry, there's no reason why you should. You'll soon see I'm not as good-for-nothing as some people imagine." "What makes you think I don't want to marry?" asked Adelaide, her face completely hid by the darkness, her voice betraying nothing. "Why, what you've been saying--or, rather, what you've _not_ been saying." A very long silence, then out of the darkness came Adelaide's voice, even, but puzzling. "Well, Artie, I've made up my mind to marry. I've got to _do_ something, and Dory'll give me something to do. If I sat about waiting, waiting, and thinking, thinking, I should do--something desperate. I've got to get away from myself. I've got to forget myself. I've got to get a new self." "Just as I have," said Arthur. Presently he sat on the arm of her chair and reached out for her hand which was seeking his. When Hiram was first stricken, Adelaide's Simeon had installed himself as attendant-in-chief. The others took turns at nursing; Simeon was on duty every hour of every twenty-four. He lost all interest in Adelaide, in everything except the sick man. Most of the time he sat quietly, gazing at the huge, helpless object of his admiration as if fascinated. Whenever Hiram deigned to look at him, he chattered softly, timidly approached, retreated, went through all his tricks, watching the while for some sign of approval. The first week or so, Hiram simply tolerated the pathetic remembrancer to human humility because he did not wish to chagrin his daughter. But it is not in nature to resist a suit so meek, so persistent, and so unasking as Simeon's. Soon Hiram liked to have his adorer on his knee, on the arm of his chair, on the table beside him; occasionally he moved his unsteady hand slowly to Simeon's head to give it a pat. And in the long night hours of wakefulness there came to be a soothing companionship in the sound of Simeon's gentle breathing in the little bed at the head of his bed; for Simeon would sleep nowhere else. The shy races of mankind, those that hide their affections and rarely give them expression, are fondest of domestic animals, because to them they can show themselves without fear of being laughed at or repulsed. But it happened that Hiram had never formed a friendship with a dog. In his sickness and loneliness, he was soon accepting and returning Simeon's fondness in kind. And at the time when a man must re-value everything in life and put a proper estimate upon it, this unselfish, incessant, wholly disinterested love of poor Simeon's gave him keen pleasure and content. After the stroke that entombed him, some subtle instinct seemed to guide Simeon when to sit and sympathize at a distance, when to approach and give a gentle caress, with tears running from his eyes. But the death Simeon did not understand at all. Those who came to make the last arrangements excited him to fury. Adelaide had to lock him in her dressing room until the funeral was over. When she released him, he flew to the room where he had been accustomed to sit with his great and good friend. No Hiram! He ran from room to room, chattering wildly, made the tour of gardens and outbuildings, returned to the room in which his quest had started. He seemed dumb with despair. He had always looked ludicrously old and shriveled; his appearance now became tragic. He would start up from hours of trancelike motionlessness, would make a tour of house and grounds; scrambling and shambling from place to place; chattering at doors he could not open, then pausing to listen; racing to the front fence and leaping to its top to crane up and down the street; always back in the old room in a few minutes, to resume his watch and wait. He would let no one but Adelaide touch him, and he merely endured her; good and loving though she seemed to be, he felt that she was somehow responsible for the mysterious vanishing of his god while she had him shut away. Sometimes in the dead of night, Adelaide or Arthur or Mrs. Ranger, waking, would hear him hurrying softly, like a ghost, along the halls or up and down the stairs. They, with the crowding interests that compel the mind, no matter how fiercely the bereaved heart may fight against intrusion, would forget for an hour now and then the cause of the black shadow over them and all the house and all the world; and as the weeks passed their grief softened and their memories of the dead man began to give them that consoling illusion of his real presence. But not Simeon; he could think only that his friend had been there and was gone. At last the truth in some form must have come to him. For he gave up the search and the hope, and lay down to die. Food he would not touch; he neither moved nor made a sound. When Adelaide took him up, he lifted dim tragic eyes to her for an instant, then sank back as if asleep. One morning, they found him in Hiram's great arm chair, huddled in its depths, his head upon his knees, his hairy hands stiff against his cheeks. They buried him in the clump of lilac bushes of which Hiram had been especially fond. Stronger than any other one influence for good upon Adelaide and Arthur at that critical time, was this object lesson Simeon gave--Simeon with his single-hearted sorrow and single-minded love. CHAPTER XV EARLY ADVENTURES OF A 'PRENTICE Arthur, about to issue forth at a quarter to seven on Monday morning to begin work as a cooper's apprentice, felt as if he would find all Saint X lined up to watch him make the journey in working clothes. He had a bold front as he descended the lawn toward the gates; but at the risk of opening him to those with no sympathy for weaknesses other than their own, and for their own only in themselves, it must be set down that he seemed to himself to be shaking and skulking. He set his teeth together, gave himself a final savage cut with the lash of "What a damned coward I am!" and closed the gate behind him and was in the street--a workingman. He did not realize it, but he had shown his mettle; for, no man with any real cowardice anywhere in him would have passed through that gate and faced a world that loves to sneer. From the other big houses of that prosperous neighborhood were coming, also in working clothes, the fathers, and occasionally the sons, of families he was accustomed to regard as "all right--for Saint X." At the corner of Cherry Lane, old Bolingbroke, many times a millionaire thanks to a thriving woolen factory, came up behind him and cried out, "_Well_, young man! _This_ is something like." In his enthusiasm he put his arm through Arthur's. "As soon as I read your father's will, I made one myself," he continued as they hurried along at Bolingbroke's always furious speed. "I always did have my boys at work; I send 'em down half an hour before me every morning. But it occurred to me they might bury their enthusiasm in the cemetery along with me." He gave his crackling, snapping laugh that was strange and even startling in itself, but seemed the natural expression of his snapping eyes and tight-curling, wiry whiskers and hair. "So I fixed up my will. No pack of worthless heirs to make a mockery of my life and teachings after I'm gone. No, sir-ee!" Arthur was more at ease. "Appearances" were no longer against him--distinctly the reverse. He wondered that his vanity could have made him overlook the fact that what he was about to do was as much the regular order in prosperous Saint X, throughout the West for that matter, as posing as a European gentleman was the regular order of the "upper classes" of New York and Boston--and that even there the European gentleman was a recent and rather rare importation. And Bolingbroke's hearty admiration, undeserved though Arthur felt it to be, put what he thought was nerve into him and stimulated what he then regarded as pride. "After all, I'm not really a common workman," reflected he. "It's like mother helping Mary." And he felt still better when, passing the little millinery shop of "Wilmot & Company" arm in arm with the great woolen manufacturer, he saw Estelle Wilmot--sweeping out. Estelle would have looked like a storybook princess about royal business, had she been down on her knees scrubbing a sidewalk. He was glad she didn't happen to see him, but he was gladder that he had seen her. Clearly, toil was beginning to take on the appearance of "good form." He thought pretty well of himself all that day. Howells treated him like the proprietor's son; Pat Waugh, foreman of the cooperage, put "Mr. Arthur" or "Mr. Ranger" into every sentence; the workingmen addressed him as "sir," and seemed to appreciate his talking as affably with them as if he were unaware of the precipice of caste which stretched from him down to them. He was in a pleasant frame of mind as he went home and bathed and dressed for dinner. And, while he knew he had really been in the way at the cooperage and had earned nothing, yet--his ease about his social status permitting--he felt a sense of self-respect which was of an entirely new kind, and had the taste of the fresh air of a keen, clear winter day. This, however, could not last. The estate was settled up; the fiction that he was of the proprietorship slowly yielded to the reality; the men, not only those over him but also those on whose level he was supposed to be, began to judge him as a man. "The boys say," growled Waugh to Howells, "that he acts like one of them damn spying dude sons proprietors sometimes puts in among the men to learn how to work 'em harder for less. He don't seem to catch on that he's got to get his money out of his own hands." "Touch him up a bit," said Howells, who had worshiped Hiram Ranger and in a measure understood what had been in his mind when he dedicated his son to a life of labor. "If it becomes absolutely necessary I'll talk to him. But maybe you can do the trick." Waugh, who had the useful man's disdain of deliberately useless men and the rough man's way of feeling it and showing it, was not slow to act on Howells's license. That very day he found Arthur unconsciously and even patronizingly shirking the tending of a planer so that his teacher, Bud Rollins, had to do double work. Waugh watched this until it had "riled" him sufficiently to loosen his temper and his language. "Hi, there, Ranger!" he shouted. "What the hell! You've been here goin' on six months now, and you're more in the way than you was the first day." Arthur flushed, flashed, clenched his fists; but the planer was between him and Waugh, and that gave Waugh's tremendous shoulders and fists a chance to produce a subduing visual impression. A man, even a young man, who is nervous on the subject of his dignity, will, no matter how brave and physically competent, shrink from avoidable encounter that means doubtful battle. And dignity was a grave matter with young Ranger in those days. "Don't hoist your dander up at me," said Waugh. "Get it up agin' yourself. Bud, next time he soldiers on you, send him to me." "All right, sir," replied Bud, with a soothing grin. And when Waugh was gone, he said to Arthur, "Don't mind him. Just keep pegging along, and you'll learn all right." Bud's was the tone a teacher uses to encourage a defective child. It stung Arthur more fiercely than had Waugh's. It flashed on him that the men--well, they certainly hadn't been looking up to him as he had been fondly imagining. He went at his work resolutely, but blunderingly; he spoiled a plank and all but clogged the machine. His temper got clean away from him, and he shook with a rage hard to restrain from venting itself against the inanimate objects whose possessing devils he could hear jeering at him through the roar of the machinery. "Steady! Steady!" warned good-natured Rollins. "You'll drop a hand under that knife." The words had just reached Arthur when he gave a sharp cry. With a cut as clean as the edge that made it, off came the little finger of his left hand, and he was staring at it as it lay upon the bed of the planer, twitching, seeming to breathe as its blood pulsed out, while the blood spurted from his maimed hand. In an instant Lorry Tague had the machine still. "A bucket of clean water," he yelled to the man at the next planer. He grabbed dazed Arthur's hand, and pressed hard with his powerful thumb and forefinger upon the edges of the wound. "A doctor!" he shouted at the men crowding round. Arthur did not realize what had happened until he found himself forced to his knees, his hand submerged in the ice-cold water, Lorry still holding shut the severed veins and arteries. "Another bucket of water, you, Bill," cried Lorry. When it came he had Bill Johnstone throw the severed finger into it. Bud Rollins, who had jumped through the window into the street in a dash for a physician, saw Doctor Schulze's buggy just turning out of High Street. He gave chase, had Schulze beside Arthur within two minutes. More water, both hot and cold, was brought, and a cleared work bench; with swift, sure fingers the doctor cleaned the stump, cleaned the severed finger, joined and sewed them, bandaged the hand. "Now, I'll take you home," he said. "I guess you've distinguished yourself enough for the day." Arthur followed him, silent and meek as a humbled dog. As they were driving along Schulze misread a mournful look which Arthur cast at his bandaged hand. "It's nothing--nothing at all," he said gruffly. "In a week or less you could be back at work." The accompanying sardonic grin said plain as print, "But this dainty dandy is done with work." Weak and done though Arthur was, some blood came into his pale face and he bit his lip with anger. Schulze saw these signs. "Several men are _killed_ every year in those works--and not through their carelessness, either," he went on in a milder, friendlier tone. "And forty or fifty are maimed--not like that little pin scratch of yours, my dear Mr. Ranger, but hands lost, legs lost--accidents that make cripples for life. That means tragedy--not the wolf at the door, but with his snout right in the platter." "I've seen that," said Arthur. "But I never thought much about it--until now." "Naturally," commented Schulze, with sarcasm. Then he added philosophically, "And it's just as well not to bother about it. Mankind found this world a hell, and is trying to make it over into a heaven. And a hell it still is, even more of a hell than at first, and it'll be still more of a hell--for these machines and these slave-driving capitalists with their luxury-crazy families are worse than wars and aristocrats. They make the men work, and the women and the children--make 'em all work as the Pharaohs never sweated the wretches they set at building the pyramids. The nearer the structure gets toward completion, the worse the driving and the madder the haste. Some day the world'll be worth living in--probably just about the time it's going to drop into the sun. Meanwhile, it's a hell of a place. We're a race of slaves, toiling for the benefit of the race of gods that'll some day be born into a habitable world and live happily ever afterwards. Science will give them happiness--and immortality, if they lose the taste for the adventure into the Beyond." Arthur's brain heard clearly enough to remember afterwards; but Schulze's voice seemed to be coming through a thick wall. When they reached the Ranger house, Schulze had to lift him from the buggy and support his weight and guide his staggering steps. Out ran Mrs. Ranger, with _the_ terror in her eyes. "Don't lose your head, ma'am," said Schulze. "It's only a cut finger. The young fool forgot he was steering a machine, and had a sharp but slight reminder." Schulze was heavily down on the "interesting-invalid" habit. He held that the world's supply of sympathy was so small that there wasn't enough to provide encouragement for those working hard and well; that those who fell into the traps of illness set in folly by themselves should get, at most, toleration in the misfortunes in which others were compelled to share. "The world discourages strength and encourages weakness," he used to declaim. "That injustice and cruelty must be reversed!" "Doctor Schulze is right," Arthur was saying to his mother, with an attempt at a smile. But he was glad of the softness and ease of the big divan in the back parlor, of the sense of hovering and protecting love he got from his mother's and Adelaide's anxious faces. Sorer than the really trifling wound was the deep cut into his vanity. How his fellow-workmen were pitying him!--a poor blockhead of a bungler who had thus brought to a pitiful climax his failure to learn a simple trade. And how the whole town would talk and laugh! "Hiram Ranger, he begat a fool!" Schulze, with proper equipment, redressed and rebandaged the wound, and left, after cautioning the young man not to move the sick arm. "You'll be all right to strum the guitar and sport a diamond ring in a fortnight at the outside," said he. At the door he lectured Adelaide: "For God's sake, Miss Ranger, don't let his mother coddle him. He's got the makings of a man like his father--not as big, perhaps, but still a lot of a man. Give him a chance! Give him a chance! If this had happened in a football game or a fox-hunt, nobody would have thought anything of it. But just because it was done at useful work, you've got yourself all fixed to make a fearful to-do." How absurdly does practice limp along, far behind firm-striding theory! Schulze came twice that day, looked in twice the next day, and fussed like a disturbed setting-hen when his patient forestalled the next day's visit by appearing at his office for treatment. "I want to see if I can't heal that cut without a scar," was his explanation--but it was a mere excuse. When Arthur called on the fifth day, Schulze's elder daughter, Madelene, opened the door. "Will you please tell the doctor," said he, "that the workman who cut his finger at the cooperage wishes to see him?" Madelene's dark gray eyes twinkled. She was a tall and, so he thought, rather severe-looking young woman; her jet black hair was simply, yet not without a suspicion of coquetry, drawn back over her ears from a central part--or what would have been a part had her hair been less thick. She was studying medicine under her father. It was the first time he had seen her, it so happened, since she was in knee dresses at public school. As he looked he thought: "A splendid advertisement for the old man's business." Just why she seemed so much healthier than even the healthiest, he found it hard to understand. She was neither robust nor radiant. Perhaps it was the singular clearness of her dead-white skin and of the whites of her eyes; again it might have been the deep crimson of her lips and of the inside of her mouth--a wide mouth with two perfect rows of small, strong teeth of the kind that go with intense vitality. "Just wait here," said she, in a businesslike tone, as she indicated the reception room. "You don't remember me?" said Arthur, to detain her. "No, I don't _remember_ you," replied Madelene. "But I know who you are." "Who I _was_," thought Arthur, his fall never far from the foreground of his mind. "You used to be very serious, and always perfect in your lessons," he continued aloud, "and--most superior." Madelene laughed. "I was a silly little prig," said she. Then, not without a subtle hint of sarcasm, "But I suppose we all go through that period--some of us in childhood, others further along." Arthur smiled, with embarrassment. So he had the reputation of being a prig. Madelene was in the doorway. "Father will be free--presently," said she. "He has another patient with him. If you don't care to wait, perhaps I can look after the cut. Father said it was a trifle." Arthur slipped his arm out of the sling. "In here," said Madelene, opening the door of a small room to the left of her father's consultation room. Arthur entered. "This is your office?" he asked, looking round curiously, admiringly. It certainly was an interesting room, as the habitat of an interesting personality is bound to be. "Yes," she replied. "Sit here, please." Arthur seated himself in the chair by the window and rested his arm on the table. He thought he had never seen fingers so long as hers, or so graceful. Evidently she had inherited from her father that sure, firm touch which is perhaps the highest talent of the surgeon. "It seems such an--an--such a _hard_ profession for a woman," said he, to induce those fascinating lips of hers to move. "It isn't soft," she replied. "But then father hasn't brought us up soft." This was discouraging, but Arthur tried again. "You like it?" "I love it," said she, and now her eyes were a delight. "It makes me hate to go to bed at night, and eager to get up in the morning. And that means really living, doesn't it?" "A man like me must seem to you a petty sort of creature." "Oh, I haven't any professional haughtiness," was her laughing reply. "One kind of work seems to me just as good as another. It's the spirit of the workman that makes the only differences." "That's it," said Arthur, with a humility which he thought genuine and which was perhaps not wholly false. "I don't seem to be able to give my heart to my work." "I fancy you'll give it _attention_ hereafter," suggested Madelene. She had dressed the almost healed finger and was dexterously rebandaging it. She was necessarily very near to him, and from her skin there seemed to issue a perfumed energy that stimulated his nerves. Their eyes met. Both smiled and flushed. "That wasn't very kind--that remark," said he. "What's all this?" broke in the sharp voice of the doctor. Arthur started guiltily, but Madelene, without lifting her eyes from her task, answered: "Mr. Ranger didn't want to be kept waiting." "She's trying to steal my practice away from me!" cried Schulze. He looked utterly unlike his daughter at first glance, but on closer inspection there was an intimate resemblance, like that between the nut and its rough, needle-armored shell. "Well, I guess she hasn't botched it." This in a pleased voice, after an admiring inspection of the workmanlike bandage. "Come again to-morrow, young man." Arthur bowed to Madelene and somehow got out into the street. He was astonished at himself and at the world. He had gone drearily into that office out of a dreary world; he had issued forth light of heart and delighted with the fresh, smiling, interesting look of the shaded streets and the green hedges and lawns and flower beds. "A fine old town," he said to himself. "Nice, friendly people--and the really right sort. As soon as I'm done with the rough stretch I've got just ahead of me, I'm going to like it. Let me see--one of those girls was named Walpurga and one was named--Madelene--this one, I'm sure--Yes!" And he could hear the teacher calling the roll, could hear the alto voice from the serious face answer to "Madelene Schulze," could hear the light voice from the face that was always ready to burst into smiles answer to "Walpurga Schulze." But though it was quite unnecessary he, with a quite unnecessary show of carelessness, asked Del which was which. "The black one is Madelene," replied she, and her ability to speak in such an indifferent tone of such an important person surprised him. "The blonde is Walpurga. I used to detest Madelene. She always treated me as if I hadn't any sense." "Well, you can't blame her for that, Del," said Arthur. "You've been a great deal of a fool in your day--before you blossomed out. Do you remember the time Dory called you down for learning things to show off, and how furious you got?" Adelaide looked suddenly warm, though she laughed too. "Why did you ask about Dr. Schulze's daughters?" she asked. "I saw one of them this morning--a beauty, a tip-topper. And no nonsense about her. As she's 'black,' I suppose her name is Madelene." "Oh, I remember now!" exclaimed Adelaide. "Madelene is going to be a doctor. They say she's got nerves of iron--can cut and slash like her father." Arthur was furious, just why he didn't know. No doubt what Del said was true, but there were ways and ways of saying things. "I suppose there is some sneering at her," said he, "among the girls who couldn't do anything if they tried. It seems to me, if there is any profession a woman could follow without losing her womanliness, it is that of doctor. Every woman ought to be a doctor, whether she ever tries to make a living out of it or not." Adelaide was not a little astonished by this outburst. "You'll be coming round to Dory's views of women, if you aren't careful," said she. "There's a lot of sense in what Dory says about a lot of things," replied Arthur. Del sheered off. "How did the doctor say your hand is?" "Oh--all right," said Arthur. "I'm going to work on Monday." "Did he say you could?" "No, but I'm tired of doing nothing. I've got to 'get busy' if I'm to pull out of this mess." His look, his tone made his words sound revolutionary. And, in fact, his mood was revolutionary. He was puzzled at his own change of attitude. His sky had cleared of black clouds; the air was no longer heavy and oppressive. He wanted to work; he felt that by working he could accomplish something, could deserve and win the approval of people who were worthwhile--people like Madelene Schulze, for instance. Next day he lurked round the corner below the doctor's house until he saw him drive away; then he went up and rang the bell. This time it was the "blonde" that answered--small and sweet, pink and white, with tawny hair. This was disconcerting. "I couldn't get here earlier," he explained. "I saw the doctor just driving away. But, as these bandages feel uncomfortable, I thought perhaps his daughter--your sister, is she not?--might--might fix them." Walpurga looked doubtful. "I think she's busy," she said. "I don't like to disturb her." Just then Madelene crossed the hall. Her masses of black hair were rolled into a huge knot on top of her head; she was wearing a white work slip and her arms were bare to the elbows--the finest arms he had ever seen, Arthur thought. She seemed in a hurry and her face was flushed--she would have looked no differently if she had heard his voice and had come forth to prevent his getting away without having seen him. "Meg!" called her sister. "Can you--" Madelene apparently saw her sister and Arthur for the first time. "Good morning, Mr. Ranger. You've come too late. Father's out." Arthur repeated his doleful tale, convincingly now, for his hand did feel queer--as what hand would not, remembering such a touch as Madelene's, and longing to experience it again? "Certainly," said Madelene. "I'll do the best I can. Come in." And once more he was in her office, with her bending over him. And presently her hair came unrolled, came showering down on his arm, on his face; and he shook like a leaf and felt as if he were going to faint, into such an ecstasy did the soft rain of these tresses throw him. As for Madelene, she was almost hysterical in her confusion. She darted from the room. When she returned she seemed calm, but that was because she did not lift those tell-tale gray eyes. Neither spoke as she finished her work. If Arthur had opened his lips it would have been to say words which he thought she would resent, and he repent. Not until his last chance had almost ebbed did he get himself sufficiently in hand to speak. "It wasn't true--what I said," he began. "I waited until your father was gone. Then I came--to see you. As you probably know, I'm only a workman, hardly even that, at the cooperage, but--I want to come to see you. May I?" She hesitated. "I know the people in this town have a very poor opinion of me," he went on, "and I deserve it, no doubt. You see, the bottom dropped out of my life not long ago, and I haven't found myself yet. But you did more for me in ten minutes the other day than everything and everybody, including myself, have been able to do since my father died." "I don't remember that I said anything," she murmured. "I didn't say that what you said helped me. I said what you _did_--and looked. And--I'd like to come." "We never have any callers," she explained. "You see, father's--our--views--People don't understand us. And, too, we've found ourselves very congenial and sufficient unto one another. So--I--I--don't know what to say." He looked so cast down that she hastened on: "Yes--come whenever you like. We're always at home. But we work all day." "So do I," said Arthur. "Thank you. I'll come--some evening next week." Suddenly he felt peculiarly at ease with her, as if he had always known her, as if she and he understood each other perfectly. "I'm afraid you'll find me stupid," he went on. "I don't know much about any of the things you're interested in." "Perhaps I'm interested in more things than you imagine," said she. "My sister says I'm a fraud--that I really have a frivolous mind and that my serious look is a hollow pretense." And so they talked on, not getting better acquainted but enjoying the realization of how extremely well acquainted they were. When he was gone, Madelene found that her father had been in for some time. "Didn't he ask for me?" she said to Walpurga. "Yes," answered Walpurga. "And I told him you were flirting with Arthur Ranger." Madelene colored violently. "I never heard that word in this house before," she said stiffly. "Nor I," replied Walpurga, the pink and white. "And I think it's high time--with you nearly twenty-two and me nearly twenty." At dinner her father said: "Well, Lena, so you've got a beau at last. I'd given up hope." "For Heaven's sake don't scare him away, father!" cried Walpurga. "A pretty poor excuse," pursued the doctor. "I doubt if Arthur Ranger can make enough to pay his own board in a River Street lodging house." "It took courage--real courage--to go to work as he did," replied Madelene, her color high. "Yes," admitted her father, "_if_ he sticks to it." "He will stick to it," affirmed Madelene. "I think so," assented her father, dropping his teasing pretense and coming out frankly for Arthur. "When a man shows that he has the courage to cross the Rubicon, there's no need to worry about whether he'll go on or turn back." "You mustn't let him know he's the only beau you've ever had, Meg," cautioned her sister. "And why not?" demanded Madelene. "If I ever did care especially for a man, I'd not care for him because other women had. And I shouldn't want a man to be so weak and vain as to feel that way about me." It was a temptation to that aloof and isolated, yet anything but lonely or lonesome, household to discuss this new and strange phenomenon--the intrusion of an outsider, and he a young man. But the earnestness in Madelene's voice made her father and her sister feel that to tease her further would be impertinent. Arthur had said he would not call until the next week because then he would be at work again. He went once more to Dr. Schulze's, but was careful to go in office hours. He did not see Madelene--though she, behind the white sash curtains of her own office, saw him come, watched him go until he was out of sight far down the street. On Monday he went to work, really to work. No more shame; no more shirking or shrinking; no more lingering on the irrevocable. He squarely faced the future, and, with his will like his father's, set dogged and unconquerable energy to battering at the obstacles before him. "All a man needs," said he to himself, at the end of the first day of real work, "is a purpose. He never knows where he's at until he gets one. And once he gets it, he can't rest till he has accomplished it." What was his purpose? He didn't know--beyond a feeling that he must lift himself from his present position of being an object of pity to all Saint X and the sort of man that hasn't the right to ask any woman to be his wife. CHAPTER XVI A CAST-OFF SLIPPER A large sum would soon be available; so the carrying out of the plans to extend, or, rather, to construct Tecumseh, must be begun. The trustees commissioned young Hargrave to go abroad at once in search of educational and architectural ideas, and to get apparatus that would make the laboratories the best in America. Chemistry and its most closely related sciences were to be the foundation of the new university, as they are at the foundation of life. "We'll model our school, not upon what the ignorant wise of the Middle Ages thought ought to be life, but upon life itself," said Dr. Hargrave. "We'll build not from the clouds down, but from the ground up." He knew in the broad outline what was wanted for the Tecumseh of his dream; but he felt that he was too old, perhaps too rusted in old-fashioned ways and ideas, himself to realize the dream; so he put the whole practical task upon Dory, whom he had trained from infancy to just that end. When it was settled that Dory was to go, would be away a year at the least, perhaps two years, he explained to Adelaide. "They expect me to leave within a fortnight," he ended. And she knew what was in his mind--what he was hoping she would say. It so happened that, in the months since their engagement, an immense amount of work had been thrust upon Dory. Part of it was a study of the great American universities, and that meant long absences from home. All of it was of the kind that must be done at once or not at all--and Work is the one mistress who, if she be enamored enough of a man to resolve to have him and no other, can compel him, whether he be enamored of her or not. However, for the beginning of the artificial relation between this engaged couple, the chief cause was not his work but his attitude toward her, his not unnatural but highly unwise regard for the peculiar circumstances in which they had become engaged. Respect for the real feelings of others is all very well, if not carried too far; but respect for the purely imaginary feelings of others simply encourages them to plunge deeper into the fogs and bogs of folly. There was excuse for Dory's withholding from his love affair the strong and firm hand he laid upon all his other affairs; but it cannot be denied that he deserved what he got, or, rather, that he failed to deserve what he did not get. And the irony of it was that his unselfishness was chiefly to blame; for a selfish man would have gone straight at Del and, with Dory's advantages, would have captured her forthwith. As it was, she drifted aimlessly through day after day, keeping close at home, interested in nothing. She answered briefly or not at all the letters from her old friends, and she noted with a certain blunted bitterness how their importunities fainted and died away, as the news of the change in her fortunes got round. If she had been seeing them face to face every day, or if she had been persistent and tenacious, they would have extricated themselves less abruptly; for not the least important among the sacred "appearances" of conventionality is the "appearance" of good-heartedness; it is the graceful cloak for that icy selfishness which is as inevitable among the sheltered and pampered as sympathy and helpfulness are among those naked to the joys and sorrows of real life. Adelaide was far from her friends, and she deliberately gave them every opportunity to abandon and to forget her without qualms or fears of "appearing" mean and snobbish. There were two girls from whom she rather hoped for signs of real friendship. She had sought them in the first place because they were "of the right sort," but she had come to like them for themselves and she believed they liked her for herself. And so they did; but their time was filled with the relentless routine of the fashionable life, and they had not a moment to spare for their own personal lives; besides, Adelaide wouldn't have "fitted in" comfortably. The men of their set would be shy of her now; the women would regard her as a waste of time. Her beauty and her cleverness might have saved her, had she been of one of those "good families" whom fashionables the world over recognize, regardless of their wealth or poverty, because recognition of them gives an elegant plausibility to the pretense that Mammon is not the supreme god in the Olympus of aristocracy. But--who were the Rangers? They might be "all right" in Saint X, but where was Saint X? Certainly, not on any map in the geography of fashion. So Adelaide, sore but too lethargic to suffer, drifted drearily along, feeling that if Dory Hargrave were not under the influence of that brilliant, vanished past of hers, even he would abandon her as had the rest, or, at least, wouldn't care for her. Not that she doubted his sincerity in the ideals he professed; but people deceived themselves so completely. There was her own case; had she for an instant suspected how flimsily based was her own idea of herself and of her place in the world?--the "world" meaning, of course, "the set." As is the rule in "sets," her self-esteem's sole foundation had been what she had, or, rather, what the family had, and now that that was gone, she held what was left cheap indeed--and held herself the cheaper that she could feel thus. At the outset, Arthur, after the familiar male fashion, was apparently the weaker of the two. But when the test came, when the time for courageous words was succeeded by the time for deeds, the shrinking from action that, since the nation grew rich, has become part of the education of the women of the classes which shelter and coddle their women, caused Adelaide to seem feeble indeed beside her brother. Also--and this should never be forgotten in judging such a woman--Arthur had the advantage of the man's compulsion to act, while Adelaide had the disadvantage of being under no material necessity to act--and what necessity but the material is there? Dory--his love misleading his passion, as it usually does when it has much influence before marriage--reasoned that, in the interest of the Adelaide that was to be, after they were married, and in his own interest with her as well, the wise course for him to pursue was to wait until time and the compulsion of new circumstances should drive away her mood, should give her mind and her real character a chance to assert themselves. In the commission to go abroad, he saw the external force for which he had been waiting and hoping. And it seemed to him most timely--for Ross's wedding invitations were out. "Two weeks," said Adelaide absently. "You will sail in two weeks." Then in two weeks she could be out of it all, could be far away in new surroundings, among new ideas, among strangers. She could make the new start; she could submerge, drown her old self in the new interests. "Will you come?" he said, when he could endure the suspense no longer. "Won't you come?" She temporized. "I'm afraid I couldn't--oughtn't to leave--mother and Arthur just now." He smiled sadly. She might need her mother and her brother; but in the mood in which she had been for the last few months, they certainly did not need her. "Adelaide," said he, with that firmness which he knew so well how to combine with gentleness, without weakening it, "our whole future depends on this. If our lives are to grow together, we must begin. This is _our_ opportunity." She knew that Dory was not a man she could play fast and loose with, even had she been so disposed. Clearly, she must decide whether she intended to marry him, to make his life hers and her life his. She looked helplessly round. What but him was there to build on? Without him--She broke the long silence with, "That is true. We must begin." Then, after a pause during which she tried to think and found she couldn't, "Make up my mind for me." "Let us be married day after to-morrow," said he. "We can leave for New York on the one o'clock train and sail on Thursday." "You had it planned!" "I had several plans," he answered. "That's the best one." What should she do? Impulsively--why, she did not know--she gave Dory her answer: "Yes, that _is_ the best plan. I must begin--at once." And she started up, in a fever to be doing. Dory, dazed by his unexpected, complete victory, went immediately, lest he should say or do something that would break or weaken the current of her aroused energy. He went without as much as touching her hand. Certainly, if ever man tempted fate to snatch from him the woman he loved, Dory did then; and at that time Del must, indeed, have been strongly drawn to him, or she would have been unable to persist. The problem of the trousseau was almost as simple for her as for him. She had been extravagant and luxurious, had accumulated really unmanageable quantities of clothing of all kinds, far, far more than any woman without a maid could take care of. The fact that she had not had a maid was in part responsible for this superfluity. She had neither the time nor the patience for making or for directing the thousand exasperating little repairs that are necessary if a woman with a small wardrobe is always to look well. So, whenever repairs were necessary, she bought instead; and as she always kept herself fresh and perfect to the smallest detail she had to buy profusely. As soon as a dress or a hat or a blouse or a parasol, a pair of boots, slippers, stockings, or any of the costly, flimsy, all but unlaunderable underwear she affected, became not quite perfect, she put it aside against that vague day when she should have leisure or inclination for superintending a seamstress. Within two hours of her decision she had a seamstress in the house, and they and her mother were at work. There was no necessity to bother about new dresses. She would soon be putting off black, and she could get in Paris what she would then need. In the whirlwind of those thirty-six hours, she had not a moment to think of anything but the material side of the wedding--the preparations for the journey and for the long absence. She was half an hour late in getting down to the front parlor for the ceremony, and she looked so tired from toil and lack of sleep that Dory in his anxiety about her was all but unconscious that they were going through the supposedly solemn marriage rite. Looking back on it afterwards, they could remember little about it--perhaps even less than can the average couple, under our social system which makes a wedding a social function, not a personal rite. They had once in jesting earnest agreed that they would have the word "obey" left out of the vows; but they forgot this, and neither was conscious of repeating "obey" after the preacher. Adelaide was thinking of her trunks, was trying to recall the things she felt she must have neglected in the rush; Dory was worrying over her paleness and the heavy circles under her eyes, was fretting about the train--Del's tardiness had not been in the calculations. Even the preacher, infected by the atmosphere of haste, ran over the sentences, hardly waiting for the responses. Adelaide's mother was hearing the trunks going down to the van, and was impatient to be where she could superintend--there was a very important small trunk, full of underclothes, which she was sure they were overlooking. Arthur was gloomily abstracted, was in fierce combat with the bitter and melancholy thoughts which arose from the contrast he could not but make--this simple wedding, with Dory Hargrave as her groom, when in other circumstances there would have been such pomp and grandeur. He and Mary the cook and Ellen the upstairs girl and old Miss Skeffington, generalissimo of the Hargrave household, were the only persons present keenly conscious that there was in progress a wedding, a supposedly irrevocable union of a man and woman for life and for death and for posterity. Even old Dr. Hargrave was thinking of what Dory was to do on the other side, was mentally going over the elaborate scheme for his son's guidance which he had drawn up and committed to paper. Judge Torrey, the only outsider, was putting into form the speech he intended to make at the wedding breakfast. But there was no wedding breakfast--at least, none for bride and groom. The instant the ceremony was over, Mary the cook whispered to Mrs. Ranger: "Mike says they've just got time to miss the train." "Good gracious!" cried Mrs. Ranger. And she darted out to halt the van and count the trunks. Then she rushed in and was at Adelaide's arm. "Hurry, child!" she exclaimed. "Here is my present for you." And she thrust into her hand a small black leather case, the cover of a letter of credit. Seeing that Del was too dazed to realize what was going on, she snatched it away and put it into the traveling case which Mary was carrying. Amid much shaking hands and kissing and nervous crying, amid flooding commonplaces and hysterical repetitions of "Good-by! Good luck!" the young people were got off. There was no time for Mary to bring the rice from the kitchen table, but Ellen had sequestered one of Adelaide's old dancing slippers under the front stair. She contrived to get it out and into action, and to land it full in Adelaide's lap by a lucky carom against the upright of the coach window. Adelaide looked down at it vaguely. It was one of a pair of slippers she had got for the biggest and most fashionable ball she had ever attended. She remembered it all--the gorgeousness of the rooms, the flowers, the dresses, the favors, her own ecstasy in being where it was supposed to be so difficult to get; how her happiness had been marred in the early part of the evening by Ross's attendance on Helen Galloway in whose honor the ball was given; how he made her happy again by staying beside her the whole latter part of the evening, he and more young men than any other girl had. And here was the slipper, with its handsome buckle torn off, stained, out of shape from having been so long cast aside. Where did it come from? How did it get here? Why had this ghost suddenly appeared to her? On the opposite seat, beside her traveling case, fashionable, obviously expensive, with her initials in gold, was a bag marked "T.H."--of an unfashionable appearance, obviously inexpensive, painfully new. She could not take her fascinated eyes from it; and the hammering of her blood upon her brain, as the carriage flew toward the station, seemed to be a voice monotonously repeating, "Married--married--" She shuddered. "My fate is settled for life," she said to herself. "I am _married_!" She dared not look at her husband--Husband! In that moment of cruel memory, of ghastly chopfallen vanity, it was all she could do not visibly to shrink from him. She forgot that he was her best friend, her friend from babyhood almost, Theodore Hargrave. She felt only that he was her husband, her jailer, the representative of all that divided her forever from the life of luxury and show which had so permeated her young blood with its sweet, lingering poison. She descended from the carriage, passed the crowd of gaping, grinning loungers, and entered the train, with cheeks burning and eyes downcast, an ideal bride in appearance of shy and refined modesty. And none who saw her delicate, aristocratic beauty of face and figure and dress could have attributed to her the angry, ugly, snobbish thoughts, like a black core hidden deep in the heart of a bewitching flower. As he sat opposite her in the compartment, she was exaggerating into glaring faults the many little signs of indifference to fashion in his dress. She had never especially noted before, but now she was noting as a shuddering exhibition of "commonness," that he wore detachable cuffs--and upon this detail her distraught mind fixed as typical. She could not take her eyes off his wrists; every time he moved his arms so that she could see the wristband within his cuff, she felt as if a piece of sandpaper were scraping her skin. He laid his hand on her two gloved hands, folded loosely in her lap. Every muscle, every nerve of her body grew tense; she only just fought down the impulse to snatch her hands away and shriek at him. She sat rigid, her teeth set, her eyes closed, until her real self got some control over the monstrous, crazy creature raving within her. Then she said: "Please don't--touch me--just now. I've been on such a strain--and I'm almost breaking down." He drew his hand away. "I ought to have understood," he said. "Would you like to be left alone for a while?" Without waiting for her answer, he left the compartment to her. She locked the door and let herself loose. When she had had her cry "out," she felt calm; but oh, so utterly depressed. "This is only a mood," she said to herself. "I don't really feel that way toward him. Still--I've made a miserable mistake. I ought not to have married him. I must hide it. I mustn't make him suffer for what's altogether my own fault. I must make the best of it." When he came back, she proceeded to put her programme into action. All the afternoon he strove with her sweet gentleness and exaggerated consideration for him; he tried to make her see that there was no necessity for this elaborate pose and pretense. But she was too absorbed in her part to heed him. In the evening, soon after they returned to the compartment from the dining car, he rose. "I am going out to smoke," he said. "I'll tell the porter to make up your berth. You must be very tired. I have taken another--out in the car--so that you will not be disturbed." She grew white, and a timid, terrified look came into her eyes. He touched her shoulder--gently. "Don't--please!" he said quietly. "In all the years we've known each other, have you ever seen anything in me to make you feel--like--that?" Her head drooped still lower, and her face became crimson. "Adelaide, look at me!" She lifted her eyes until they met his uncertainly. He put out his hand. "We are friends, aren't we?" She instantly laid her hand in his. "Friends," he repeated. "Let us hold fast to that--and let the rest take care of itself." "I'm ashamed of myself," said she. And in her swift revulsion of feeling there was again opportunity for him. But he was not in the mood to see it. "You certainly ought to be," replied he, with his frank smile that was so full of the suggestions of health and sanity and good humor. "You'll never get a martyr's crown at _my_ expense." At New York he rearranged their steamer accommodations. It was no longer diffidence and misplaced consideration that moved him permanently to establish the most difficult of barriers between them; it was pride now, for in her first stormy, moments in the train he had seen farther into her thoughts than he dared let himself realize. CHAPTER XVII POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE The day after the wedding, as Arthur was going home from work, he saw Ross on the lofty seat of a dogcart, driving toward him along lower Monroe Street. His anger instantly flamed and flared; he crushed an oath between his teeth and glanced about for some way to avoid the humiliating meeting. But there was no cross street between him and the on-coming cart. Pride, or vanity, came to his support, as soon as he was convinced that escape was impossible. With an air that was too near to defiance to create the intended impression of indifference, he swung along and, just as the cart was passing, glanced at his high-enthroned former friend. Ross had not seen him until their eyes met. He drew his horse in so sharply that it reared and pawed in amazement and indignation at the bit's coarse insult to thoroughbred instincts for courteous treatment. He knew Arthur was at work in the factory; but he did not expect to see him in workman's dress, with a dinner pail in his hand. And from his height, he, clad in the carefully careless, ostentatiously unostentatious garments of the "perfect gentleman," gazed speechless at the spectacle. Arthur reddened violently. Not all the daily contrasts thrust upon him in those months at the cooperage had so brought home to his soul the differences of caste. And there came to him for the first time that hatred of inequalities which, repulsive though it is in theory, is yet the true nerver of the strong right arm of progress. It is as characteristic of the homely, human countenance of Democracy as the supercilious smirk is of the homely, inhuman countenance of caste. Arthur did not want to get up where Ross was seated in such elegant state; he wanted to tear Ross, all the Rosses down. "The damn fool!" he fumed. "He goes lounging about, wasting the money _we_ make. It's all wrong. And if we weren't a herd of tame asses, we wouldn't permit it." And now he began to feel that he was the superior of this showy idler, that his own garments and dinner pail and used hands were the titles to a nobility which could justly look down upon those who filched from the treasury of the toiler the means to buzz and flit and glitter in dronelike ease. "As for these Whitneys," he thought, "mother's right about them." Then he called out in a tone of good-natured contempt, which his stature and his powerful frame and strong, handsome face made effective: "Hello, Ross! When did _you_ come to town?" "This morning," replied Ross. "I heard you were working, but I had no idea it was--I've just been to your house, looking for you, and was on the way to the factory. Father told me to see that you get a suitable position. I'm going to Howells and arrange it. You know, father's been in the East and very busy." "Don't bother," said Arthur, and there was no pretense in his air of ease. "I've got just what I want. I am carrying out father's plan, and I'm far enough into it to see that he was right." In unbelieving silence Ross looked down at his former equal with condescending sympathy; how well Arthur knew that look! And he remembered that he had once, so short a time before, regarded it as kindly, and the thoughts behind it as generous! "I like my job," he continued. "It gives me a sense of doing something useful--of getting valuable education. Already I've had a thousand damn-fool ideas knocked out of my head." "I suppose it _is_ interesting," said Ross, with gracious encouragement. "The associations must be rather trying." "They _were_ rather trying," replied Arthur with a smile. "Trying to the other men, until I got my bearings and lost the silliest of the silly ideas put in my head by college and that sort of thing. But, now that I realize I'm an apprentice and not a gentleman deigning to associate with the common herd, I think I'm less despicable--and less ridiculous. Still, I'm finding it hard to get it through my head that practically everything I learned is false and must be unlearned." "Don't let your bitterness over the injustice to you swing you too far the other way, Artie," said Ross with a faint smile in his eyes and a suspicious, irritating friendliness in his voice. "You'll soon work out of that class and back where you belong." Arthur was both angry and amused. No doubt Ross was right as to the origin of this new breadth of his; but a wrong motive may start a man right just as readily as a right motive may start him wrong. Arthur would have admitted frankly his first feelings about his changed position, would have admitted that those feelings still lingered, still seemed to influence him, as grown people often catch themselves thinking in terms of beliefs impressed on them in childhood, but exploded and abandoned at the very threshold of youth. But he knew, also, that his present beliefs and resolves and aspirations were sincere, were sane, were final--the expression of the mind and heart that were really himself. Of what use, however, to argue with Ross? "I could no more convince him," thought Arthur, "than I could myself have been convinced less than a year ago." Besides, of what importance were Ross's beliefs about him or about his views? So he said to him, and his tone and manner were now convincing: "Well, we'll see. However, as long as I'm a workman, I'll stand with my class--just as you stand with your class. And while you are pretending to be generous to us, we'll pretend to be contemptuous of you. You'll think we are living off of your money; we'll think you are living off of our work. You'll say we're earning less than half what we get; we'll say you're stealing more than half what you get. It may amuse you to hear that I am one of the organizers of the trades union that's starting. I'm on the committee on wages. So some day you and I are likely to meet." "I don't know much about those things," said Ross politely. "I can see that you're right to ingratiate yourself with those working chaps. It will stand you in good stead when you get on top and have to manage them." Arthur laughed, and so did Ross. They eyed each the other with covert hostility. "Poor creature!" thought Ross. And "Pup!" thought Arthur. "How could I have wanted Del to marry _him_?" He wished to pass on, but was detained by some suggestion in Ross's manner that he had not yet discharged his mind of its real burden. "I was glad to see your mother so well," said Ross. "I wish she were," replied Arthur. "She seemed to be better while the excitement about Del's wedding was on; but as soon as Del and Dory went, she dropped back again. I think the only thing that keeps her from--from joining father is the feeling that, if she were to go, the family income would stop. I feel sure we'd not have her, if father had left us well provided for, as they call it." "That is true," said Ross, the decent side of his nature now full to the fore. "I can't tell you what a sense of loss I had when your father died. Artie, he was a splendid gentleman. And there is a quality in your mother that makes me feel very humble indeed before her." Arthur passed, though he noted, the unconscious superciliousness in this tribute; he felt that it was a genuine tribute, that, for all its discoloration in its passage through the tainted outer part of Ross's nature, it had come from the unspoiled, untainted, deepest part. Fortunately for us all, the gold in human nature remains gold, whatever its alloys from base contacts; and it is worth the mining, though there be but a grain of it to the ton of dross. As Ross spoke Arthur warmed to him. "You must come to see us," he said cordially. Ross became embarrassed, so embarrassed that all his ability to command his feelings went for nothing. "Thank you," said he hurriedly, "but I'm here only for a few hours. I go away to-night. I came about a matter that--that--I want to get back as soon as possible." Arthur was mystified by the complete transformation of the self-complacent, superior Ross of a few minutes before. He now noted that Ross was looking almost ill, his eyes sunken, the lids red at the edges, as if from loss of sleep. Under Arthur's scrutiny his embarrassment increased to panic. He nervously shifted the reins, made the horse restless, shook hands with Arthur, reined in, tried to speak, said only, "I must be off--my horse is getting nervous," and was gone. Arthur looked after him. "That's the sort of chap I was on the way to being when father pulled me up," he reflected. "I wonder if I'll ever get sense enough not to have a sneaking envy of him--and regret?" If he could have looked in upon Ross's mind, he might have been abruptly thrust far along the toilsome road toward his goal. In this world, roses and thorns have a startling, preposterous way of suddenly exchanging natures so that what was thorn becomes fairest rose, and what was rose becomes most poisonous of thorns. Ross had just fallen an amazed and incredulous victim to this alchemy. Though somewhat uncomfortable and downright unhappy at times, he had been, on the whole, well pleased with himself and his prospects until he heard that Adelaide was actually about to marry Dory. His content collapsed with the foundation on which it was built--the feeling that Adelaide was for no other man, that if at any time he should change his mind he would find her waiting to welcome him gratefully. He took train for Saint X, telling himself that after he got there he could decide what to do. In fact, when he had heard that the wedding was about to be, it was over and Adelaide and Dory were off for New York and Europe; but he did not find this out until he reached Saint X. The man who gave him that final and overwhelming news noticed no change in his face, though looking for signs of emotion; nor did Ross leave him until he had confirmed the impression of a heart at ease. Far along the path between the Country Club and Point Helen he struck into the woods and, with only the birds and the squirrels as witnesses, gave way to his feelings. Now, now that she was irrevocably gone, he knew. He had made a hideous mistake; he had been led on by his vanity, led on and on until the trap was closed and sprung; and it was too late. He sat there on a fallen tree with his head aching as if about to explode, with eyes, dry and burning and a great horror of heart-hunger sitting before him and staring at him. In their sufferings from defeated desire the selfish expiate their sins. He had forgotten his engagement to Theresa Howland, the wedding only two weeks away. It suddenly burst in upon his despair like a shout of derisive laughter. "I'll _not_ marry her!" he cried aloud. "I _can't_ do it!" But even as he spoke he knew that he could, and would, and must. He had been a miserable excuse for a lover to Theresa; but Theresa had never had love. All the men who had approached her with "intentions" had been fighting hard against their own contempt of themselves for seeking a wife for the sake of her money, and their efforts at love-making had been tame and lame; but Theresa, knowing no better, simply thought men not up to the expectations falsely raised by the romances and the songs. She believed _she_ could not but get as good a quality of love as there was going; and Ross, with his delightful, aristocratic indifference, was perfectly satisfactory. Theresa had that thrice-armored self-complacence which nature so often relentingly gives, to more than supply the lack of the charms withheld. She thought she was fascinating beyond any woman of her acquaintance, indeed, of her time. She spent hours in admiring herself, in studying out poses for her head and body and arms, especially her arms, which she regarded as nature's last word on that kind of beauty--a not wholly fanciful notion, as they were not bad, if a bit too short between elbow and wrist, and rather fat at the shoulders. She always thought and, on several occasions in bursts of confidence, had imparted to girl friends that "no man who has once cared for me can ever care for another woman." Several of her confidantes had precisely the same modest opinion of their own powers; but they laughed at Theresa--behind her back. Ross knew how vain she was. To break with her, he would have to tell her flatly that he would not marry her. "I'd be doing her no injury," thought he. "Her vanity would root out some explanation which would satisfy her that, whatever might be the cause, it wasn't lack of love for her on my part." But--To break off was unthinkable. The invitations out; the arrangements for the wedding all made; quantities of presents arrived--"I've got to go through with it. I've got to marry her," said Ross. "But God help me, how I shall hate her!" And, stripped clean of the glamour of her wealth, she rose before him--her nose that was red and queer in the mornings; her little personal habits that got on the nerves, especially a covert self-infatuated smile that flitted over her face at any compliment, however obviously perfunctory; her way of talking about every trivial thing she did--and what did she do that was not trivial?--as if some diarist ought to take it down for the delight of ages to come. As Ross looked at the new-created realistic image of her, he was amazed. "Why, I've always disliked her!" he cried. "I've been lying to myself. I am too low for words," he groaned. "Was there ever such a sneaking cur?" Yes, many a one, full as unconscious of his own qualities as he himself had been until that moment; nor could he find consolation in the fact that he had company, plenty of company, and it of the world's most "gentlemanly" and most "ladylike." The young man who left that wood, the young man whom Arthur saw that day, had in his heart a consciousness, an ache, of lonely poverty that dress and dogcarts and social position could do little--something, but little--to ease. * * * * * He stopped at Chicago and sent word to Windrift that he was ill--not seriously ill, but in such a state that he thought it best to take care of himself, with the wedding so near. Theresa was just as well pleased to have him away, as it gave her absolute freedom to plan and to superintend her triumph. For the wedding was to be her individual and exclusive triumph, with even Ross as part of the background--the most conspicuous part, but still simply background for her personal splendor. Old Howland--called Bill until his early career as a pedlar and keeper of a Cheap Jack bazaar was forgotten and who, after the great fire, which wiped out so many pasts and purified and pedigreed Chicago's present aristocracy, called himself William G. Howland, merchant prince, had, in his ideal character for a wealth-chaser, one weakness--a doting fondness for his daughter. When she came into the world, the doctors told him his wife would have no more children; thereafter his manner was always insulting, and usually his tone and words, whenever and of whatever he spoke to her. Women were made by the Almighty solely to bear children to men; his woman had been made to bear him a son. Now that she would never have a son, she was of no use, and it galled him that he could find no plausibly respectable excuse for casting her off, as he cast off worn-out servants in his business. But as the years passed and he saw the various varieties of thorns into which the sons of so many of his fellow-princes developed, he became reconciled to Theresa--_not_ to his wife. That unfortunate woman, the daughter of a drunkard and partially deranged by illness and by grief over her husband's brutality toward her, became--or rather, was made by her insistent doctor--what would have been called a drunkard, had she not been the wife of a prince. Her "dipsomania" took an unaggressive form, as she was by nature gentle and sweet; she simply used to shut herself in and drink until she would cry herself into a timid, suppressed hysteria. So secret was she that Theresa never knew the truth about these "spells." Howland did not like Ross; but when Theresa told him she was going to marry him she had only to cry a little and sit in the old man's lap and tease. "Very well, then," said her father, "you can have him. But he's a gambler, like his father. They call it finance, but changing the name of a thing only changes the smell of it, not the thing itself. I'm going to tie my money up so that he can't get at it." "I want you to, papa," replied Theresa, giving him a kiss and a great hug for emphasis. "I don't want anybody to be able to touch _my_ property." For the wedding, Howland gave Theresa a free hand. "I'll pay the bills, no matter what they are," said he. "Give yourself a good time." And Theresa, who had been brought up to be selfish, and was prudent about her impulses only where she suspected them of being generous, proceeded to arrange for herself the wedding that is still talked about in Chicago "society" and throughout the Middle West. A dressmaker from the Rue de la Paix came over with models and samples, and carried back a huge order and a plaster reproduction of Theresa's figure, and elaborate notes on the color of her skin, hair, eyes, and her preferences in shapes of hats. A jeweler, also of the Rue de la Paix, came with jewels--nearly a million dollars' worth--for her to make selections. Her boots and shoes and slippers she got from Rowney, in Fifth Avenue, who, as everybody knows, makes nothing for less than thirty-five dollars, and can put a hundred dollars worth of price, if not of value, into a pair of evening slippers. Theresa was proud of her feet; they were short and plump, and had those abrupt, towering insteps that are regarded by the people who have them as unfailing indications of haughty lineage, just as the people who have flat feet dwell fondly upon the flat feet of the Wittlesbachs, kings in Bavaria. She was not easy to please in the matter of casements for those feet; also, as she was very short in stature, she had to get three and a half extra inches of height out of her heels; and to make that sort of heel so that it can even be hobbled upon is not easy or cheap. Once Theresa, fretting about her red-ended nose and muddy skin, had gone to a specialist. "Let me see your foot," said he; and when he saw the heel, he exclaimed: "Cut that tight, high-heeled thing out or you'll never get a decent skin, and your eyes will trouble you by the time you are thirty." But Theresa, before adopting such drastic measures, went to a beauty doctor. He assured her that she could be cured without the sacrifice of the heel, and that the weakness of her eyes would disappear a year or so after marriage. And he was soon going into ecstasies over her improvement, over the radiance of her beauty. She saw with his eyes and ceased to bother about nose or skin--they were the least beautiful of her beauties, but--"One can't expect to be absolutely perfect. Besides, the absolutely perfect kind of beauty might be monotonous." The two weeks before the wedding were the happiest of her life. All day long, each day, vans were thundering up to the rear doors of Windrift, each van loaded to bursting with new and magnificent, if not beautiful costliness. The house was full of the employees of florists, dressmakers, decorators, each one striving to outdo the other in servility. Theresa was like an autocratic sovereign, queening it over these menials and fancying herself adored. They showed _so_ plainly that they were awed by her and were in ecstasies of admiration over her taste. And, as the grounds and the house were transformed, Theresa's exaltation grew until she went about fairly dizzy with delight in herself. The bridesmaids and ushers came. They were wealth-worshipers all, and their homage lifted Theresa still higher. They marched and swept about in her train, lording it over the menials and feeling that they were not a whit behind the grand ladies and gentlemen of the French courts of the eighteenth century. They had read the memoirs of that idyllic period diligently, had read with minds only for the flimsy glitter which hid the vulgarity and silliness and shame as a gorgeous robe hastily donned by a dirty chambermaid might conceal from a casual glance the sardonic and repulsive contrast. The wedding day approached all too swiftly for Theresa and her court. True, that would be the magnificent climax; but they knew it would also dissipate the spell--after the wedding, life in twentieth century America again. "If only it don't rain!" said Harry Legendre. "It won't," replied Theresa with conviction--and her look of command toward the heavens made the courtiers exchange winks and smiles behind her back. They were courtiers to wealth, not to Theresa, just as their European prototypes are awed before a "king's most excellent Majesty," not before his swollen body and shrunken brain. And it did not rain. Ross arrived in the red sunset of the wedding eve, Tom Glenning, his best man, coming with him. They were put, with the ushers, in rooms at the pavilion where were the squash courts and winter tennis courts and the swimming baths. Theresa and Ross stood on the front porch alone in the moonlight, looking out over the enchantment-like scene into which the florists and decorators had transformed the terraces and gardens. She was a little alarmed by his white face and sunken eyes; but she accepted his reassurances without question--she would have disbelieved anything which did not fit in with her plans. And now, as they gazed out upon that beauty under the soft shimmer of the moonlight, her heart suddenly expanded in tenderness. "I am _so_ happy," she murmured, slipping an arm through his. Her act called for a return pressure. He gave it, much as a woman's salutation would have made him unconsciously move to lift his hat. "While Adele was dressing me for dinner--" she began. At that name, he moved so that her arm dropped from his; but she did not connect her maid with her former bosom friend. "I got to thinking about those who are not so well off as we," she went on; "about the poor. And so, I've asked papa to give all his employees and the servants nice presents, and I've sent five thousand dollars to be divided among the churches in the town, down there--for the poor. Do you think I did wrong? I'm always afraid of encouraging those kind of people to expect too much of us." She had asked that he might echo the eulogies she had been bestowing upon herself. But he disappointed her. "Oh, I guess it was well enough," he replied. "I must go down to the pavilion. I'm fagged, and you must be, too." The suggestion that he might not be looking his best on the morrow was enough to change the current of her thoughts. "Yes, _do_, dear!" she urged. "And don't let Tom and Harry and the rest keep you up." They did not even see him. He sat in the shed at the end of the boat-landing, staring out over the lake until the moon set. Then he went to the pavilion. It was all dark; he stole in, and to bed, but not to sleep. Before his closed but seeing eyes floated a vision of two women--Adelaide as he had last seen her, Theresa as she looked in the mornings, as she had looked that afternoon. He was haggard next day. But it was becoming to him, gave the finishing touch to his customary bored, distinguished air; and he was dressed in a way that made every man there envy him. As Theresa, on insignificant-looking little Bill Howland's arm, advanced to meet him at the altar erected under a canopy of silk and flowers in the bower of lilies and roses into which the big drawing-room had been transformed, she thrilled with pride. _There_ was a man one could look at with delight, as one said, "My husband!" It was a perfect day--perfect weather, everything going forward without hitch, everybody looking his and her best, and "Mama" providentially compelled by one of her "spells" to keep to her room. Those absences of hers were so frequent and so much the matter of course that no one gave them a second thought. Theresa had studied up the customs at fashionable English and French weddings, and had combined the most aristocratic features of both. Perhaps the most successful feature was when she and Ross, dressed for the going away, walked, she leaning upon his arm, across the lawns to the silk marquee where the wedding breakfast was served. Before them, walking backward, were a dozen little girls from the village school, all in white, strewing roses from beribboned baskets, and singing, "Behold! The bride in beauty comes!" "Well, I'm glad it's all over," said Theresa as she settled back in a chair in the private car that was to take them to Wilderness Lodge, in northern Wisconsin for the honeymoon. "So am I," Ross disappointed her by saying. "I've felt like a damn fool ever since I began to face that gaping gang." "But you must admit it was beautiful," objected Theresa pouting. Ross shut his teeth together to keep back a rude reply. He was understanding how men can be brutal to women. To look at her was to have an all but uncontrollable impulse to rise up and in a series of noisy and profane explosions reveal to her the truth that was poisoning him. After a while, a sound from her direction made him glance at her. She was sobbing. He did not then know that, to her, tears were simply the means to getting what she wanted; so his heart softened. While she was thinking that she was looking particularly well and femininely attractive, he was pitying her as a forlorn creature, who could never inspire love and ought to be treated with consideration, much as one tries to hide by an effusive show of courtesy the repulsion deformity inspires. "Don't cry, Theresa," he said gently, trying to make up his mind to touch her. But he groaned to himself, "I can't! I must wait until I can't see her." And he ordered the porter to bring him whisky and soda. "Won't you join me?" he said. "You know, I never touch anything to drink," she replied. "Papa and Dr. Massey both made me promise not to." Ross's hand, reaching out for the bottle of whisky, drew slowly back. He averted his face that she might not see. He knew about her mother--and knew Theresa did not. It had never entered his head that the weakness of the mother might be transmitted to the daughter. Now--Just before they left, Dr. Massey had taken him aside and, in a manner that would have impressed him instantly but for his mood, had said: "Mr. Whitney, I want you never to forget that Theresa must not be depressed. You must take the greatest care of her. We must talk about it again--when you return." And _this_ was what he meant! He almost leaped to his feet at Theresa's softly interrupting voice, "Are you ill, dear?" "A little--the strain--I'll be all right--" And leaving the whisky untouched, he went into his own compartment. As he was closing the door, he gave a gasp of dismay. "She might begin now!" he muttered. He rang for the porter. "Bring that bottle," he said. Then, as an afterthought of "appearances," "And the soda and a glass." "I can get you another, sir," said the porter. "No--that one," ordered Ross. Behind the returning porter came Theresa. "Can't I do something for you, dear? Rub your head, or fix the pillows?" Ross did not look at her. "Do, please--fix the pillows," he said. "Then if I can sleep a little, I'll be all right, and will soon rejoin you." "Can't I fix your drink for you?" she asked, putting her hand on the bottle. Ross restrained an impulse to snatch it away from her. "Thanks, no--dear," he answered. "I've decided to swear off--with you. Is it a go?" She laughed. "Silly!" she murmured, bending and kissing him. "If you wish." "That settles it," said Ross, with a forced, pained smile. "We'll neither of us touch it. I was getting into the habit of taking too much--not really too much--but--Oh, you understand." "That's the way father feels about it," said Theresa, laughing. "We never drink at home--except mother when she has a spell, and has to be kept up on brandy." Ross threw his arm up to hide his face. "Let me sleep, do," he said gently. CHAPTER XVIII LOVE, THE BLUNDERER As Dory had several months' work before him at Paris, he and Del took a furnished apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, high up, attractive within, before its balconied windows the stately trees, the fountains, the bright flower beds, the thronged playgrounds of the Tuileries. But they were not long left to themselves; in their second week, the _concierge's_ little girl late one afternoon brought Janet's card up to Adelaide. As Janet entered, Del regretted having yielded to impulse and admitted her. For, the granddaughter of "blue-jeans Jones," the tavern keeper, was looking the elegant and idle aristocrat from the tip of the tall, graceful plume in her most Parisian of hats to the buckles of shoes which matched her dress, parasol, and jewels. A lovely Janet, a marvelous Janet; a toilette it must have taken her two hours to make, and spiritual hazel eyes that forbade the idea of her giving so much as a moment's thought to any material thing, even to dress. Adelaide had spent with the dressmakers a good part of the letter of credit her mother slipped into her traveling bag at the parting; she herself was in a negligee which had as much style as Janet's costume and, in addition, individual taste, whereof Janet had but little; and besides, while her beauty had the same American delicateness, as of the finest, least florid Sèvres or Dresden, it also had a look of durability which Janet's beauty lacked--for Janet's beauty depended upon those fragilities, coloring and contour. Adelaide was not notably vain, had a clear sense of her defects, tended to exaggerate them, rather than her many and decisive good points. It was not Janet's appearance that unsettled Del; she brought into the room the atmosphere Del had breathed during all those important years of girlhood, and had not yet lost her fondness for. It depressed her at once about herself to note how this vision of the life that had been but would never be again affected her. "You are sad, dear," said Janet, as she kissed her on both cheeks with a diffusing of perfume that gave her a sense of a bouquet of priceless exotics waving before her face. "You are sad, dear," she repeated, with that air of tenderest sympathy which can be the safest cover for subtle malice. Adelaide shrank. "I'm so glad I've come when I may be able to do some good." Adelaide winced. "How cozy these rooms are--" At "cozy" Adelaide shuddered. No one ever used, except apologetically, that word, which is the desperate last resort of compliment. "And what a beautiful view from the windows--so much better than ours at the pompous old Bristol, looking out on that bare square!" Adelaide laughed. Not by chance, she knew, did Miss Janet, with her softly sheathed but swift and sharp cat claws, drag in the delicate hint that while Adelaide was "cozy" in an unaristocratic _maison meublée_, she herself was ensconced in the haunts of royalty; and it suddenly came back to Del how essentially cheap was "aristocracy." "But I mustn't look at those adorable gardens," continued Janet. "They fill me with longing for the country, for the pure, simple things. I am so sick of the life mamma and I lead. And you are married to dear Dory--how romantic! And I hear that Arthur is to marry Margaret Schultz--or whatever her name was--that splendid creature! She was a _dear_ friend of the trained nurse I had last spring, and what the nurse told me about her made me positively love her. Such character! And getting ready to lead _such_ a useful life." This without the least suggestion of struggle with a difficult subject. "Arthur is a noble fellow, too. If we had been in spiritual accord, I'd have loved to go and lead his life with him." Adelaide was in high good humor now--Janet was too preposterous to be taken seriously. "What do you want me to do for you, Jen?" said she. "Why, nothing!" exclaimed Janet, looking a little wonder and much reproach. Del laughed. "Now, really, Jen," said she. "You know you never in the world went to all the trouble of getting my address, and then left royalty at the Bristol for a _maison meublée_, four flights up and no elevator, just to _see_ me!" "I had thought of something I was sure would give you pleasure," said Janet, injured. "What do you want me to do for you?" repeated Adelaide, with smiling persistence. "Mamma and I have an invitation to spend a week at Besançon--you know, it's the splendid old chateau Louis Treize used to love to visit. It's still the seat of the Saint Berthè family, and the present Marquis, a _dear_ friend of ours, is such a wonderful, fine old nobleman--so simple and gracious and full of epigrams. He really ought to wear lace and ruffles and a beautiful peruke. At any rate, as I was saying, he has asked us down. But mamma has to go to England to see papa before he sails, and I thought you'd love to visit the chateau--you and Dory. It's so poetic--and historic, too." "Your mother is going away and you'll be unable to make this visit unless you get a chaperon, and you want me to chaperon you," said Adelaide, who was not minded to be put in the attitude of being the recipient of a favor from this particular young woman at this particular time, when in truth she was being asked to confer a favor. "Adversity" had already sharpened her wits to the extent of making her alert to the selfishness disguised as generosity which the prosperous love to shower upon their little brothers and sisters of the poor. She knew at once that Janet must have been desperately off for a chaperon to come to her. A look of irritation marred Janet's spiritual countenance for an instant. But she never permitted anything whatsoever to stand between her and what she wished. She masked herself and said sweetly: "Won't you go, dear? I know you'll enjoy it--you and Dory. And it would be a great favor to me. I don't see how I can go unless you consent. You know, I mayn't go with just anyone." Adelaide's first impulse was to refuse; but she did not. She put off decision by saying, "I'll ask Dory to-night, and let you know in the morning. Will that do?" "Perfectly," said Janet, rising to go. "I'll count on you, for I know Dory will want to see the chateau and get a glimpse of life in the old aristocracy. It will be _so_ educational." Dory felt the change in Del the instant he entered their little _salon_--felt that during the day some new element had intruded into their friendly life together, to interrupt, to unsettle, and to cloud the brightening vistas ahead. At the mention of Janet he began to understand. He saw it all when she said with a show of indifference that deceived only herself, "Wouldn't you like to go down to Besançon?" "Not I," replied he coldly. "Europe is full of that kind of places. You can't glance outdoors without seeing a house or a ruin where the sweat and blood of peasants were squandered." "Janet thought you'd be interested in it as history," persisted Adelaide, beginning to feel irritated. "That's amusing," said Dory. "You might have told her that scandal isn't history, that history never was made in such places. As for the people who live there now, they're certainly not worth while--the same pretentious ignoramuses that used to live there, except they no longer have fangs." "You ought not to be so prejudiced," said Adelaide, who in those days often found common sense irritating. She had the all but universal habit of setting down to "prejudice" such views as are out of accord with the set of views held by one's business or professional or social associates. Her irritation confirmed Dory's suspicions. "I spoke only for myself," said he. "Of course, you'll accept Janet's invitation. She included me only as a matter of form." "I couldn't, without you." "Why not?" "Well--wouldn't, then." "But I urge you to go--want you to go! I can't possibly leave Paris, not for a day--at present." "I shan't go without you," said Adelaide, trying hard to make her tone firm and final. Dory leaned across the table toward her--they were in the garden of a cafe in the Latin Quarter. "If you don't go, Del," said he, "you'll make me feel that I am restraining you in a way far meaner than a direct request not to go. You want to go. I want you to go. There is _no_ reason why you shouldn't." Adelaide smiled shamefacedly. "You honestly want to get rid of me?" "Honestly. I'd feel like a jailer, if you didn't go." "What'll you do in the evenings?" "Work later, dine later, go to bed and get up earlier." "Work--always work," she said. She sighed, not wholly insincerely. "I wish I weren't so idle and aimless. If I were the woman I ought to be--" "None of that--none of that!" he cried, in mock sternness. "I ought to be interested in your work." "Why, I thought you were!" he exclaimed, in smiling astonishment. "Oh, of course, in a way--in an 'entertainment' sort of way. I like to hear you talk about it--who wouldn't? But I don't give the kind of interest I should--the interest that thinks and suggests and stimulates." "Don't be too sure of that," said Dory. "The 'helpful' sort of people are usually a nuisance." But she knew the truth, though passion might still be veiling it from him. Life, before her father's will forced an abrupt change, had been to her a showman, submitting his exhibits for her gracious approval, shifting them as soon as she looked as if she were about to be bored; and the change had come before she had lived long enough to exhaust and weary of the few things he has for the well-paying passive spectator, but not before she had formed the habit of making only the passive spectator's slight mental exertion. "Dory is so generous," she thought, with the not acutely painful kind of remorse we lay upon the penitential altar for our own shortcomings, "that he doesn't realize how I'm shirking and letting him do all the pulling." And to him she said, "If you could have seen into my mind while Janet was here, you'd give me up as hopeless." Dory laughed. "I had a glimpse of it just now--when you didn't like it because I couldn't see my way clear to taking certain people so seriously as you think they deserve." "But you _are_ prejudiced on that subject," she maintained. "And ever shall be," admitted he, so good-humoredly that she could not but respond. "It's impossible for me to forget that every luxurious idler means scores who have to work long hours for almost nothing in order that he may be of no use to the world or to himself." "You'd have the whole race on a dead level," said Adelaide. "Of material prosperity--yes," replied Dory. "A high dead level. I'd abolish the coarse, brutal contrasts between waste and want. Then there'd be a chance for the really interesting contrasts--the infinite varieties of thought and taste and character and individuality." "I see," said Adelaide, as if struck by a new idea. "You'd have the contrasts, differences among flowers, not merely between flower and weed. You'd abolish the weeds." "Root and stalk," answered Dory, admiring her way of putting it. "My objection to these aristocratic ideals is that they are so vulgar--and so dishonest. Is that prejudice?" "No--oh, no!" replied Del sincerely. "Now, it seems to me, I don't care to go with Janet." "Not to oblige me--very particularly? I want you to go. I want you to see for yourself, Del." She laughed. "Then I'll go--but only because you ask it." * * * * * That was indeed an elegant company at Besançon--elegant in dress, elegant in graceful carelessness of manners, elegant in graceful sinuosities of cleverly turned phrases. But after the passing of the first and second days' sensations, Hiram and Ellen Ranger's daughter began to have somewhat the same feeling she remembered having as a little girl, when she went to both the afternoon and the evening performances of the circus. These people, going through always the same tricks in the same old narrow ring of class ideas, lost much of their charm after a few repetitions of their undoubtedly clever and attractive performance; she even began to see how they would become drearily monotonous. "No wonder they look bored," she thought. "They are." What enormous importance they attached to trifles! What ludicrous tenacity in exploded delusions! And what self-complacent claiming of remote, powerful ancestors who had founded their families, when those ancestors would have disclaimed them as puny nonentities. Their ideas were wholly provided for them, precisely as were their clothes and every artistic thing that gave them "background." They would have made as absurd a failure of trying to evolve the one as the other. Yet they posed--and were widely accepted--as the superiors of those who made their clothes and furniture and of those who made their ideas. And she had thought Dory partly insincere, partly prejudiced when he had laughed at them. Why, he had only shown the plainest kind of American good sense. As for snobbishness, was not the silly-child American brand of it less ridiculous than this unblushing and unconcealed self-reverence, without any physical, mental or material justification whatsoever? They hadn't good manners even, because--as Dory had once said--no one could have really good manners who believed, and acted upon the belief, that he was the superior of most of the members of his own family--the human race. "I suppose I could compress myself back into being satisfied with this sort of people and things," she thought, as she looked round the ballroom from which pose and self-consciousness and rigid conventionality had banished spontaneous gayety. "I suppose I could even again come to fancying this the only life. But I certainly don't care for it now." But, although Adelaide was thus using her eyes and her mind--her own eyes and her own mind--in observing what was going on around her, she did not disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts. Common sense--absolute common sense--always sounds incongruous in a conventional atmosphere. In its milder forms it produces the effect of wit; in stronger doses it is a violent irritant; in large quantity, it causes those to whom it is administered to regard the person administering it as insane. Perhaps Adelaide might have talked more or less frankly to Janet had Janet not been so obviously in the highest of her own kind of heavens. She was raised to this pinnacle by the devoted attentions of the Viscount Brunais, eldest son of Saint Berthè and the most agreeable and adaptable of men, if the smallest and homeliest. Adelaide spoke of his intelligence to Janet, when they were alone before dinner on the fourth day, and Janet at once responded. "And such a soul!" she exclaimed. "He inherits all the splendid, noble traditions of their old, _old_ family. You see in his face that he is descended from generations of refinement and--and--freedom from contact with vulgarizing work, don't you?" "That hadn't struck me," said Adelaide amiably. "But he's a well-meaning, good-hearted little man, and, of course, he feels as at home in the surroundings he's had all his life as a bird on a bough. Who doesn't?" "But when you know him better, when you know him as I know him--" Janet's expression disclosed the secret. "But won't you be lonely--away off here--among--foreign people?" said Adelaide. "Oh, I should _love_ it here!" exclaimed Janet. "It seems to me I--he and I--must have lived in this very chateau in a former existence. We have talked about it, and he agrees with me. We are _so_ harmonious." "You've really made up your mind to--to marry him?" Adelaide had almost said "to buy him"; she had a sense that it was her duty to disregard Janet's pretenses, and "buy" was so exactly the word to use with these people to whom money was the paramount consideration, the thought behind every other thought, the feeling behind every other feeling, the mainspring of their lives, the mainstay of all the fictions of their aristocracy. "That depends on father," replied Janet. "Mother has gone to talk to him about it." "I'm sure your father won't stand between you and happiness," said Adelaide. "But he doesn't understand these aristocratic people," replied she. "Of course, if it depended upon Aristide and me, we should be married without consulting anybody. But he can't legally marry without his father's consent, and his father naturally wants proper settlements. It's a cruel law, don't you think?" Adelaide thought not; she thought it, on the contrary, an admirable device to "save the face" of a mercenary lover posing as a sentimentalist and money-spurner. But she merely said, "I think it's most characteristic, most aristocratic." She knew Janet, how shrewd she was, how thoroughly she understood the "coarse side of life." She added, "And your father'll come round." "I wish I could believe it," sighed Janet. "The Saint Berthès have an exaggerated notion of papa's wealth. Besides, they need a good deal. They were robbed horribly by those dreadful revolutionists. They used to own all this part of the country. All these people round here with their little farms were once the peasants of Aristide's ancestors. Now--even this chateau has a mortgage on it. I couldn't keep back the tears, while Aristide was telling me." Adelaide thought of Charles Whitney listening to that same recital, and almost laughed. "Well, I feel sure it will turn out all right," she said. "Your mother'll see to that. And I believe you'll be very, very happy." Theatricals in private life was Janet's passion--why should she not be happy? Frenchmen were famous for their politeness and consideration to their wives; Aristide would never let her see or feel that she bored him, that her reverence for the things he was too intelligent and modern not to despise appealed to him only through his sense of humor. Janet would push her shrewd, soulful way into social leadership, would bring her children up to be more aristocratic than the children of the oldest aristocrats. Adelaide smiled as she pictured it all--smiled, yet sighed. She was not under Janet's fixed and unshakable delusions. She saw that high-sounding titles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the mass of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide's grand-aunt was part of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering. But that other self of hers, so reluctant to be laughed or frowned down and out by the self that was Hiram Ranger's daughter, still forced her to share in the ancient, ignorant allegiance to "appearances." She did not appreciate how bored she was, how impatient to be back with Dory, the never monotonous, the always interesting, until she discovered that Janet, with her usual subtlety, had arranged for them to stay another week, had made it impossible for her to refuse without seeming to be disobliging and even downright rude. They were to have returned to Paris on a Monday. On Sunday she wrote Dory to telegraph for her on Tuesday. "I'd hate to be looking forward to that life of dull foolery," thought she, as the mossy bastions of Besançon drifted from her horizon--she was journeying up alone, Janet staying on with one of the Saint Berthè women as chaperone. "It is foolery and it is dull. I don't see how grown-up people endure it, unless they've never known any better. Yet I seem unable to content myself with the life father stands for--and Dory." She appreciated the meaning of the legend of the creature with the two bodies and the two wills, each always opposed to the other, with the result that all motion was in a dazing circle in which neither wished to go. "Still," she concluded, "I _am_ learning"--which was the truth; indeed, she was learning with astonishing rapidity for a girl who had had such an insidiously wrong start and was getting but slight encouragement. Dory, of course, was helping her, but not as he might. Instead of bringing to bear that most powerful of influences, the influence of passionate love, he held to his stupid compact with his supersensitive self--the compact that he would never intrude his longings upon her. He constantly reminded himself how often woman gives through a sense of duty or through fear of alienating or wounding one she respects and likes; and, so he saw in each impulse to enter Eden boldly a temptation to him to trespass, a temptation to her to mask her real feelings and suffer it. The mystery in which respectable womanhood is kept veiled from the male, has bred in him an awe of the female that she does not fully realize or altogether approve--though she is not slow to advantage herself of it. In the smaller cities and towns of the West, this awe of respectable womanhood exists in a degree difficult for the sophisticated to believe possible, unless they have had experience of it. Dory had never had that familiarity with women which breeds knowledge of their absolute and unmysterious humanness. Thus, not only did he not have the key which enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand. Poor Dory, indeed--but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart, sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike. "Men would dare much more, if they knew what women think," says George Sand. It is also true that the men who dare most, who win most, are those who do not stop to bother about what the women think. Thought does not yet govern the world, but appetite and action--bold appetite and the courage of it. CHAPTER XIX MADELENE To give himself, journeyman cooper, the feeling of ease and equality, Arthur dressed, with long-discontinued attention to detail, from his extensive wardrobe which the eighteen months since its last accessions had not impaired or antiquated. And, in the twilight of an early September evening, he went forth to settle the matter that had become the most momentous. There is in dress a something independent of material and cut and even of the individuality of the wearer; there is a spirit of caste. If the lady dons her maid's dress, some subtle essence of the menial permeates her, even to her blood, her mind, and heart. The maid, in madame's dress, putting on "airs," is merely giving an outlet to that which has entered into her from her clothes. Thus, Arthur assumed again with his "_grande toilette_" the feeling of the caste from which he had been ejected. Madelene, come herself to open the door for him, was in a summer dress of no pretentions to style other than that which her figure, with its large, free, splendid lines, gave whatever she happened to wear. His nerves, his blood, responded to her beauty, as always; her hair, her features, the grace of the movements of that strong, slender, supple form, gave him the sense of her kinship with freedom and force and fire and all things keen and bright. But stealthily and subtly it came to him, in this mood superinduced by his raiment, that in marrying her he was, after all, making sacrifices--she was ascending socially, he descending, condescending. The feeling was far too vague to be at all conscious; it is, however, just those hazy, stealthy feelings that exert the most potent influence upon us. When the strong are conquered is it not always by feeble forces from the dark and from behind? "You have had good news," said Madelene, when they were in the dim daylight on the creeper-screened back porch. For such was her generous interpretation of his expression of self-confidence and self-satisfaction. "Not yet," he replied, looking away reflectively. "But I hope for it." There wasn't any mistaking the meaning of that tone; she knew what was coming. She folded her hands in her lap, and there softly entered and pervaded her a quiet, enormous content that made her seem the crown of the quiet beauty of that evening sky whose ocean of purple-tinted crystal stretched away toward the shores of the infinite. "Madelene," he began in a self-conscious voice, "you know what my position is, and what I get, and my prospects. But you know what I was, too; and so, I feel I've the right to ask you to marry me--to wait until I get back to the place from which I had to come down." The light was fading from the sky, from her eyes, from her heart. A moment before he had been there, so near her, so at one with her; now he was far away, and this voice she heard wasn't his at all. And his words--She felt alone in the dark and the cold, the victim of a cheat upon her deepest feelings. "I was bitter against my father at first," he went on. "But since I have come to know you I have forgiven him. I am grateful to him. If it hadn't been for what he did I might never have learned to appreciate you, to--" "Don't--_please_!" she said in the tone that is from an aching heart. "Don't say any more." Arthur was astounded. He looked at her for the first time since he began; instantly fear was shaking his self-confidence at its foundations. "Madelene!" he exclaimed. "I know that you love me!" She hid her face in her hands--the sight of them, long and narrow and strong, filled him with the longing to seize them, to feel the throb of their life thrill from them into him, troop through and through him like victory-bringing legions into a besieged city. But her broken voice stopped him. "And I thought you loved me," she said. "You know I do!" he cried. She was silent. "What is it, Madelene?" he implored. "What has come between us? Does your father object because I am--am not well enough off?" She dropped her hands from before her face and looked at him. The first time he saw her he had thought she was severe; ever since he had wondered how he could have imagined severity into a countenance so gentle and sweet. Now he knew that his first impression was not imaginary; for she had again the expression with which she had faced the hostile world of Saint X until he, his love, came into her life. "It is I that must ask you what has changed you, Arthur," she said, more in sadness than in bitterness, though in both. "I don't seem to know you this evening." Arthur lost the last remnant of his self-consciousness. He saw he was about to lose, if indeed he had not already lost, that which had come to mean life to him--the happiness from this woman's beauty, the strength from her character, the sympathy from her mind and heart. It was in terror that he asked: "Why, Madelene? What is it? What have I done?" And in dread he studied her firm, regular profile, a graceful strength that was Greek, and so wonderfully completed by her hair, blue black and thick and wavy about the temple and ear and the nape of the neck. The girl did not answer immediately; he thought she was refusing to hear, yet he could find no words with which to try to stem the current of those ominous thoughts. At last she said: "You talk about the position you have 'come down from' and the position you are going back to--and that you are grateful to your father for having brought you down where you were humble enough to find me." "Madelene!" "Wait!" she commanded. "You wish to know what is the matter with me. Let me tell you. We didn't receive you here because you are a cooper or because you had been rich. I never thought about your position or your prospects. A woman--at least a woman like me--doesn't love a man for his position, doesn't love him for his prospects. I've been taking you at just what you were--or seemed to be. And you--you haven't come, asking me to marry you. You treat me like one of those silly women in what they call 'society' here in Saint X. You ask me to wait until you can support me fashionably--I who am not fashionable--and who will always support myself. What you talked isn't what I call love, Arthur. I don't want to hear any more about it--or, we might not be able to be even friends." She paused; but Arthur could not reply. To deny was impossible, and he had no wish to attempt to make excuses. She had shown him to himself, and he could only echo her just scorn. "As for waiting," she went on, "I am sure, from what you say, that if you ever got back in the lofty place of a parasite living idly and foolishly on what you abstracted from the labor of others, you'd forget me--just as your rich friends have forgotten you." She laughed bitterly. "O Arthur, Arthur, what a fraud you are! Here, I've been admiring your fine talk about your being a laborer, about what you'd do if you ever got the power. And it was all simply envy and jealousy and trying to make yourself believe you weren't so low down in the social scale as you thought you were. You're too fine a gentleman for Madelene Schulze, Arthur. Wait till you get back your lost paradise; then take a wife who gives her heart only where her vanity permits. You don't want _me_, and I--don't want you!" Her voice broke there. With a cry that might have been her name or just an inarticulate call from his heart to hers, he caught her in his arms, and she was sobbing against his shoulder. "You can't mean it, Madelene," he murmured, holding her tight and kissing her cheek, her hair, her ear. "You don't mean it." "Oh, yes, I do," she sobbed. "But--I love you, too." "Then everything else will straighten out of itself. Help me, Madelene. Help me to be what we both wish me to be--what I can't help being, with you by my side." When a vanity of superiority rests on what used to be, it dies much harder than when it rests upon what is. But Arthur's self-infatuation, based though it was on the "used-to-be," then and there crumbled and vanished forever. Love cleared his sight in an instant, where reason would have striven in vain against the stubborn prejudices of snobbism. Madelene's instinct had searched out the false ring in his voice and manner; it was again instinct that assured her all was now well. And she straightway, and without hesitation from coquetry or doubt, gave herself frankly to the happiness of the love that knows it is returned in kind and in degree. "Yes, everything else will come right," she said. "For you _are_ strong, Arthur." "I shall be," was his reply, as he held her closer. "Do I not love a woman who believes in me?" "And who believes because she knows." She drew away to look at him. "You _are_ like your father!" she exclaimed. "Oh, my dear, my love, how rich he made you--and me!" * * * * * At breakfast, the next morning, he broke the news to his mother. Instead of returning his serene and delighted look she kept her eyes on her plate and was ominously silent. "When you are well acquainted with her, mother, you'll love her," he said. He knew what she was thinking--Dr. Schulze's "unorthodox" views, to put it gently; the notorious fact that his daughters did not frown on them; the family's absolute lack of standing from the point of view of reputable Saint X. "Well," said his mother finally, and without looking at her big, handsome son, "I suppose you're set on it." "Set--that's precisely the word," replied Arthur. "We're only waiting for your consent and her father's." "_I_ ain't got anything to do with it," said she, with a pathetic attempt at a smile. "Nor the old doctor, either, judging by the look of the young lady's eyes and chin. I never thought you'd take to a strong-minded woman." "You wouldn't have her _weak_-minded, would you, mother?" "There's something between." "Yes," said he. "There's the woman whose mind is weak when it ought to be strong, and strong when it ought to be weak. I decided for one like you, mother dear--one that would cure me of foolishness and keep me cured." "A female doctor!" Arthur laughed. "And she's going to practice, mother. We shouldn't have enough to live on with only what I'd make--or am likely to make anyway soon." Mrs. Ranger lifted her drooping head in sudden panic. "Why, you'll live _here_, won't you?" "Of course," replied Arthur, though, as a matter of fact, he hadn't thought where they would live. He hastened to add, "Only we've got to pay board." "I guess we won't quarrel about that," said the old woman, so immensely relieved that she was almost resigned to the prospect of a Schulze, a strong-minded Schulze and a practicing female doctor, as a daughter-in-law. "Madelene is coming up to see you this morning," continued Arthur. "I know you'll make her--welcome." This wistfully, for he was now awake to the prejudices his mother must be fighting. "I'll have the horses hitched up, and go and see her," said Ellen, promptly. "She's a good girl. Nobody could ever say a word against her character, and that's the main thing." She began to contrast Madelene and Janet, and the situation brightened. At least, she was getting a daughter-in-law whom she could feel at ease with, and for whom she could have respect, possibly even liking of a certain reserved kind. "I suggested that you'd come," Arthur was replying. "But Madelene said she'd prefer to come to you. She thinks it's her place, whether it's etiquette or not. We're not going to go in for etiquette--Madelene and I." Mrs. Ranger looked amused. This from the young man who had for years been "picking" at her because she was unconventional! "People will misunderstand you, mother," had been his oft-repeated polite phrase. She couldn't resist a mild revenge. "People'll misunderstand, if she comes. They'll think she's running after me." Like all renegades, the renegades from the religion of conventionality are happiest when they are showing their contempt for that before which they once knelt. "Let 'em think," retorted Arthur cheerfully. "I'll telephone her it's all right," he said, as he rose from the table, "and she'll be up here about eleven." And exactly at eleven she came, not a bit self-conscious or confused. Mrs. Ranger looked up at her--she was more than a head the taller--and found a pair of eyes she thought finest of all for their honesty looking down into hers. "I reckon we've got--to kiss," said she, with a nervous laugh. "I reckon so," said Madelene, kissing her, and then, after a glance and an irresistible smile, kissing her again. "You were awfully put out when Arthur told you, weren't you?" "Well, you know, the saying is 'A bad beginning makes a good ending,'" said Ellen. "Since there was only Arthur left to me, I hadn't been calculating on a daughter-in-law to come and take him away." Madelene felt what lay behind that timid, subtle statement of the case. Her face shadowed. She had been picturing a life, a home, with just Arthur and herself; here was a far different prospect opening up. But Mrs. Ranger was waiting, expectant; she must be answered. "I couldn't take him away from you," Madelene said. "I'd only lose him myself if I tried." Tears came into Ellen's eyes and her hands clasped in her lap to steady their trembling. "I know how it is," she said. "I'm an old woman, and"--with an appeal for contradiction that went straight to Madelene's heart--"I'm afraid I'd be in the way?" "In the way!" cried Madelene. "Why, you're the only one that can teach me how to take care of him. He says you've always taken care of him, and I suppose he's too old now to learn how to look after himself." "You wouldn't mind coming here to live?" asked Ellen humbly. She hardly dared speak out thus plainly; but she felt that never again would there be such a good chance of success. It was full a minute before Madelene could trust her voice to make reply, not because she hesitated to commit herself, but because she was moved to the depths of her tender heart by this her first experience of about the most tragic of the everyday tragedies in human life--a lone old woman pleading with a young one for a little corner to sit in and wait for death. "I wish it weren't quite such a grand house," she said at last with a look at the old woman--how old she seemed just then!--a look that was like light. "We're too poor to have the right to make any such start. But, if you'd let me--if you're sure you wouldn't think me an intruder--I'd be glad to come." "Then that's settled," said Mrs. Ranger, with a deep sigh of relief. But her head and her hands were still trembling from the nervous shock of the suspense, the danger that she would be left childless and alone. "We'll get along once you're used to the idea of having me about. I know my place. I never was a great hand at meddling. You'll hardly know I'm around." Again Madelene had the choke in her throat, the ache at the heart. "But you wouldn't throw the care of this house on my hands!" she exclaimed in well-pretended dismay. "Oh, no, you've simply got to look after things! Why, I was even counting on your helping me with my practice." Ellen Ranger thrilled with a delight such as she had not had in many a year--the matchless delight of a new interest. Her mother had been famous throughout those regions in the pioneer days for skill at "yarbs" and at nursing, and had taught her a great deal. But she had had small chance to practice, she and her husband and her children being all and always so healthy. All those years she had had to content herself with thinking and talking of hypothetical cases and with commenting, usually rather severely, upon the conduct of every case in the town of which she heard. Now, in her old age, just as she was feeling that she had no longer an excuse for being alive, here, into her very house, was coming a career for her, and it the career of which she had always dreamed! She forgot about the marriage and its problems, and plunged at once into an exposition of her views of medicine--her hostility to the allopaths, with their huge, fierce doses of dreadful poisons that had ruined most of the teeth and stomachs in the town; her disdain of the homeopaths, with their petty pills and their silly notion that the hair of the dog would cure its bite. She was all for the medicine of nature and common sense; and Madelene, able honestly to assent, rose in her esteem by leaps and bounds. Before the end of that conversation Mrs. Ranger was convinced that she had always believed the doctors should be women. "Who understands a woman but a woman? Who understands a child but a woman? And what's a man when he's sick but a child?" She was impatient for the marriage. And when Madelene asked if she'd object to having a small doctor's sign somewhere on the front fence, she looked astounded at the question. "We must do better than that," she said. "I'll have you an office--just two or three rooms--built down by the street so as to save people coming clear up here. That'd lose you many a customer." "Yes, it might lose us a good many," said Madelene, and you'd never have thought the "us" deliberate. That capped the climax. Mrs. Ranger was her new daughter's thenceforth. And Madelene went away, if possible happier than when she and Arthur had straightened it all out between themselves the night before. Had she not lifted that fine old woman up from the grave upon which she was wearily lying, waiting for death? Had she not made her happy by giving her something to live for? Something to live for! "She looked years younger immediately," thought Madelene. "That's the secret of happiness--something to live for, something real and useful." "I never thought you'd find anybody good enough for you," said Mrs. Ranger to her son that evening. "But you have. She's got a heart and a head both--and most of the women nowadays ain't got much of either." And it was that night as Ellen was saying her prayers, that she asked God to forgive her the sin of secret protest she had let live deep in a dark corner of her heart--reproach of Hiram for having cut off their son. "It was for the best," she said. "I see it now." CHAPTER XX LORRY'S ROMANCE When Charles Whitney heard Arthur was about to be married, he offered him a place on the office staff of the Ranger-Whitney Company at fifteen hundred a year. "It is less than you deserve on your record," he wrote, "but there is no vacancy just now, and you shall go up rapidly. I take this opportunity to say that I regard your father's will as the finest act of the finest man I ever knew, and that your conduct, since he left us, is a vindication of his wisdom. America has gone stark mad on the subject of money. The day is not far distant when it has got to decide whether property shall rule work or work shall rule property. Your father was a courageous pioneer. All right-thinking men honor him." This, a fortnight after his return from Europe, from marrying Janet to Aristide, Viscount Brunais. He had yielded to his secret snobbishness--Matilda thought it was her diplomacy--and had given Janet a dowry so extravagant that when old Saint Berthè heard the figures, he took advantage of the fact that only the family lawyer was present to permit a gleam of nature to show through his mask of elegant indifference to the "coarse side of life." Whitney had the American good sense to despise his wife, his daughter, and himself for the transaction. For years furious had been his protestations to his family, to his acquaintances, and to himself against "society," and especially against the incursions of that "worm-eaten titled crowd from the other side." So often had he repeated those protests that certain phrases had become fixedly part of his conversation, to make the most noise when he was violently agitated, as do the dead leaves of a long-withered but still firmly attached bough. Thus he was regarded in Chicago as an American of the old type; but being human, his strength had not been strong enough to resist the taint in the atmosphere he had breathed ever since he began to be very rich and to keep the company of the pretentious. His originally sound constitution had been gradually undermined, just as "doing like everybody else"--that is, everybody in his set of pirates disguised under merchant flag and with a few deceptive bales of goods piled on deck--had undermined his originally sound business honor. Arthur answered, thanking him for the offered position, but declining it. "What you say about my work," he wrote, "encourages me to ask a favor. I wish to be transferred from one mechanical department to another until I have made the round. Then, perhaps, I may venture to ask you to renew your offer." Whitney showed this to Ross. "Now, _there's_ the sort of son I'd be proud of!" he exclaimed. Ross lifted his eyebrows. "Really!" said he. "Why?" "Because he's a _man_," retorted his father, with obvious intent of satirical contrast. "Because within a year or two he'll know the business from end to end--as his father did--as I do." "And what good will that do him?" inquired Ross, with fine irony. "You know it isn't in the manufacturing end that the money's made nowadays. We can hire hundreds of good men to manufacture for us. I should say he'd be wiser were he trying to get a _practical_ education." "Practical!" "Precisely. Studying how to stab competitors in the back and establish monopoly. As a manager, he may some day rise to ten or fifteen thousand a year--unless managers' salaries go down, as it's likely they will. As a financier, he might rise to--to _our_ class." Whitney grunted, the frown of his brows and the smile on his sardonic mouth contradicting each other. He could not but be pleased by the shrewdness of his son's criticism of his own half-sincere, half-hypocritical tribute to virtues that were on the wane; but at the same time he did not like such frank expression of cynical truth from a son of his. Also, he at the bottom still had some of the squeamishness that was born into him and trained into him in early youth; he did not like to be forced squarely to face the fact that real business had been relegated to the less able or less honest, while the big rewards of riches and respect were for the sly and stealthy. Enforcing what Ross had said, there came into his mind the reflection that he himself had just bribed through the Legislature, for a comparatively trifling sum, a law that would swell his fortune and income within the next five years more than would a lifetime of devotion to business. He would have been irritated far more deeply had he known that Arthur was as well aware of the change from the old order as was Ross, and that deliberately and on principle he was refusing to adapt himself to the new order, the new conditions of "success." When Arthur's manliness first asserted itself, there was perhaps as much of vanity as of pride in his acceptance of the consequences of Hiram's will. But to an intelligent man any environment, except one of inaction or futile action, soon becomes interesting; the coming of Madelene was all that was needed to raise his interest to enthusiasm. He soon understood his fellow-workers as few of them understood themselves. Every human group, of whatever size or kind, is apt to think its characteristics peculiar to itself, when in fact they are as universal as human nature, and the modifications due to the group's environment are insignificant matters of mere surface. Nationality, trade, class no more affect the oneness of mankind than do the ocean's surface variations of color or weather affect its unchangeable chemistry. Waugh, who had risen from the ranks, Howells, who had begun as shipping clerk, despised those above whom they had risen, regarded as the peculiar weaknesses of the working classes such universal failings as prejudice, short-sightedness, and shirking. They lost no opportunity to show their lack of sympathy with the class from which they had sprung and to which they still belonged in reality, their devotion to the class plutocratic to which they aspired. Arthur, in losing the narrowness of the class from which he had been ejected, lost all class narrowness. The graduates from the top have the best chance to graduate into the wide, wide world of human brotherhood. By an artificial process--by compulsion, vanity, reason, love--he became what Madelene was by nature. She was one of those rare human beings born with a just and clear sense of proportion. It was thus impossible for her to exaggerate into importance the trivial differences of mental stature. She saw that they were no greater than the differences of men's physical stature, if men be compared with mountains or any other just measure of the vast scale on which the universe is constructed. And so it came naturally to her to appreciate that the vital differences among men are matters of character and usefulness, just as among things they are matters of beauty and use. Arthur's close friend was now Laurent Tague, a young cooper--huge, deep-chested, tawny, slow of body and swift of mind. They had been friends as boys at school. When Arthur came home from Exeter from his first long vacation, their friendship had been renewed after a fashion, then had ended abruptly in a quarrel and a pitched battle, from which neither had emerged victor, both leaving the battle ground exhausted and anguished by a humiliating sense of defeat. From that time Laurent had been a "damned mucker" to Arthur, Arthur a "stuck-up smart Alec" to Laurent. The renewal of the friendship dated from the accident to Arthur's hand; it rapidly developed as he lost the sense of patronizing Laurent, and as Laurent for his part lost the suspicion that Arthur was secretly patronizing him. Then Arthur discovered that Lorry had, several years before, sent for a catalogue of the University of Michigan, had selected a course leading to the B.S. degree, had bought the necessary text-books, had studied as men work only at that which they love for its own sake and not for any advantage to be got from it. His father, a captain of volunteers in the Civil War, was killed in the Wilderness; his mother was a washerwoman. His father's father--Jean Montague, the first blacksmith of Saint X--had shortened the family name. In those early, nakedly practical days, long names and difficult names, such as naturally develop among peoples of leisure, were ruthlessly taken to the chopping block by a people among whom a man's name was nothing in itself, was simply a convenience for designating him. Everybody called Jean Montague "Jim Tague," and pronounced the Tague in one syllable; when he finally acquiesced in the sensible, popular decision, from which he could not well appeal, his very children were unaware that they were Montagues. Arthur told Lorry of his engagement to Madelene an hour after he told his mother--he and Lorry were heading a barrel as they talked. This supreme proof of friendship moved Laurent to give proof of appreciation. That evening he and Arthur took a walk to the top of Reservoir Hill, to see the sun set and the moon rise. It was under the softening and expanding influence of the big, yellow moon upon the hills and valleys and ghostly river that Laurent told his secret--a secret that in the mere telling, and still more in itself, was to have a profound influence upon the persons of this narrative. "When I was at school," he began, "you may remember I used to carry the washing to and fro for mother." "Yes," said Arthur. He remembered how he liked to slip away from home and help Lorry with the big baskets. "Well, one of the places I used to go to was old Preston Wilmot's; they had a little money left in those days and used to hire mother now and then." "So the Wilmots owe her, too," said Arthur, with a laugh. The universal indebtedness of the most aristocratic family in Saint X was the town joke. Lorry smiled. "Yes, but she don't know it," he replied. "I used to do all her collecting for her. When the Wilmots quit paying, I paid for 'em--out of money I made at odd jobs. I paid for 'em for over two years. Then, one evening--Estelle Wilmot"--Lorry paused before this name, lingered on it, paused after it--"said to me--she waylaid me at the back gate--I always had to go in and out by the alley way--no wash by the front gate for them! Anyhow, she stopped me and said--all red and nervous--'You mustn't come for the wash any more.' "'Why not?' says I. 'Is the family complaining?' "'No,' says she, 'but we owe you for two years.' "'What makes you think that?' said I, astonished and pretty badly scared for the minute. "'I've kept account,' she said. And she was fiery red. 'I keep a list of all we owe, so as to have it when we're able to pay.'" "What a woman she is!" exclaimed Arthur. "I suppose she's putting by out of the profits of that little millinery store of hers to pay off the family debts. I hear she's doing well." "A smashing business," replied Lorry, in a tone that made Arthur glance quickly at him. "But, as I was saying, I being a young fool and frightened out of my wits, said to her: 'You don't owe mother a cent, Miss Estelle. It's all been settled--except a few weeks lately. I'm collectin', and I ought to know.' "I ain't much of a hand at lying, and she saw straight through me. I guess what was going on in her head helped her, for she looked as if she was about to faint. 'It's mighty little for me to do, to get to see you,' I went on. 'It's my only chance. Your people would never let me in at the front gate. And seeing you is the only thing I care about.' Then I set down the washbasket and, being desperate, took courage and looked straight at her. 'And,' said I, 'I've noticed that for the last year you always make a point of being on hand to give me the wash.'" Somehow a lump came in Arthur's throat just then. He gave his Hercules-like friend a tremendous clap on the knee. "Good for you, Lorry!" he cried. "_That_ was the talk!" "It was," replied Lorry. "Well, she got red again, where she had been white as a dogwood blossom, and she hung her head. 'You don't deny it, do you?' said I. She didn't make any answer. 'It wasn't altogether to ask me how I was getting on with my college course, was it, Miss Estelle?' And she said 'No' so low that I had to guess at it." Lorry suspended his story. He and Arthur sat looking at the moon. Finally Arthur asked, rather huskily, "Is that the end, Lorry?" Lorry's keen, indolent face lit up with an absent and tender smile. "That was the end of the beginning," replied he. Arthur thrilled and resisted a feminine instinct to put his arm round his friend. "I don't know which of you is the luckier," he said. Lorry laughed. "You're always envying me my good disposition," he went on. "Now, I've given away the secret of it. Who isn't happy when he's got what he wants--heaven without the bother of dying first? I drop into her store two evenings a week to see her. I can't stay long or people would talk. Then I see her now and again--other places. We have to be careful--mighty careful." "You must have been," said Arthur. "I never heard a hint of this; and if anyone suspected, the whole town would be talking." "I guess the fact that she's a Wilmot has helped us. Who'd ever suspect a Wilmot of such a thing?" "Why not?" said Arthur. "She couldn't do better." Lorry looked amused. "What'd you have said a few months ago, Ranger?" "But _my_ father was a workingman." "That was a long time ago," Lorry reminded him. "That was when America used to be American. Anyhow, she and I don't care, except about the mother. You know the old lady isn't strong, especially the last year or so. It wouldn't exactly improve her health to know there was anything between her daughter and a washerwoman's son, a plain workingman at that. We--Estelle and I--don't want to be responsible for any harm to her. So--we're waiting." "But there's the old gentleman, and Arden--_and_ Verbena!" Lorry's cheerfulness was not ruffled by this marshaling of the full and formidable Wilmot array. "It'd be a pleasure to Estelle to give _them_ a shock, especially Verbena. Did you ever see Verbena's hands?" "I don't think so," replied Arthur; "but, of course, I've heard of them." "Did you know she wouldn't even take hold of a knob to open a door, for fear of stretching them?" "She _is_ a lady, sure." "Well, Estelle's not, thank God!" exclaimed Lorry. "She says one of her grandmothers was the daughter of a fellow who kept a kind of pawn shop, and that she's a case of atavism." "But, Lorry," said Arthur, letting his train of thought come to the surface, "this ought to rouse your ambition. You could get anywhere you liked. To win her, I should think you'd exert yourself at the factory as you did at home when you were going through Ann Arbor." "To win her--perhaps I would," replied Lorry. "But, you see, I've won her. I'm satisfied with my position. I make enough for us two to live on as well as any sensible person'd care to live. I've got four thousand dollars put by, and I'm insured for ten thousand, and mother's got twelve thousand at interest that she saved out of the washing. I like to _live_. They made me assistant foreman once, but I was no good at it. I couldn't 'speed' the men. It seemed to me they got a small enough part of what they earned, no matter how little they worked. Did you ever think, it takes one of us only about a day to make enough barrels to pay his week's wages, and that he has to donate the other five days' work for the privilege of being allowed to live? If I rose I'd be living off those five days of stolen labor. Somehow I don't fancy doing it. So I do my ten hours a day, and have evenings and Sundays for the things I like." "Doesn't Estelle try to spur you on?" "She used to, but she soon came round to my point of view. She saw what I meant, and she hasn't, any more than I, the fancy for stealing time from being somebody, to use it in making fools think and say you're somebody, when you ain't." "It'd be a queer world if everybody were like you." "It'd be a queer world if everybody were like any particular person," retorted Lorry. Arthur's mind continually returned to this story, to revolve it, to find some new suggestion as to what was stupid or savage or silly in the present social system, as to what would be the social system of to-morrow, which is to to-day's as to-day's is to yesterday's; for Lorry and Dr. Schulze and Madelene and his own awakened mind had lifted him out of the silly current notion that mankind is never going to grow any more, but will wear its present suit of social clothes forever, will always creep and totter and lisp, will never learn to walk and to talk. He was in the habit of passing Estelle's shop twice each day--early in the morning, when she was opening, again when the day's business was over; and he had often fancied he could see in her evening expression how the tide of trade had gone. Now, he thought he could tell whether it was to be one of Lorry's evenings or not. He understood why she had so eagerly taken up Henrietta Hastings's suggestion, made probably with no idea that anything would come of it--Henrietta was full of schemes, evolved not for action, but simply to pass the time and to cause talk in the town. Estelle's shop became to him vastly different from a mere place for buying and selling; and presently he was looking on the other side, the human side, of all the shops and businesses and material activities, great and small. Just as a knowledge of botany makes every step taken in the country an advance through thronging miracles, so his new knowledge was transforming surroundings he had thought commonplace into a garden of wonders. "How poor and tedious the life I marked out for myself at college was," he was presently thinking, "in comparison with this life of realities!" He saw that Lorry, instead of being without ambitions, was inspired by the highest ambitions. "A good son, a good lover, a good workman," thought Arthur. "What more can a man be, or aspire to be?" Before his mind's eyes there was, clear as light, vivid as life, the master workman--his father. And for the first time Arthur welcomed that vision, felt that he could look into Hiram's grave, kind eyes without flinching and without the slightest inward reservation of blame or reproach. It was some time before the bearing of the case of Lorry and Estelle upon the case of Arthur and Madelene occurred to him. Once he saw this he could think of nothing else. He got Lorry's permission to tell Madelene; and when she had the whole story he said, "You see its message to us?" And Madelene's softly shining eyes showed that she did, even before her lips had the chance to say, "We certainly have no respectable excuse for waiting." "As soon as mother gets the office done," suggested Arthur. * * * * * On the morning after the wedding, at a quarter before seven, Arthur and Madelene came down the drive together to the new little house by the gate. And very handsome and well matched they seemed as they stood before her office and gazed at the sign: "Madelene Ranger, M.D." She unlocked and opened the door; he followed her in. When, a moment later, he reappeared and went swinging down the street to his work, his expression would have made you like him--and envy him. And at the window watching him was Madelene. There were tears in her fine eyes, and her bosom was heaving in a storm of emotion. She was saying, "It almost seems wicked to feel as happy as I do." CHAPTER XXI HIRAM'S SON In Hiram Ranger's last year the Ranger-Whitney Company made half a million; the first year under the trustees there was a small deficit. Charles Whitney was most apologetic to his fellow trustees who had given him full control because he owned just under half the stock and was the business man of the three. "I've relied wholly on Howells," explained he. "I knew Ranger had the highest opinion of his ability, but evidently he's one of those chaps who are good only as lieutenants. However, there's no excuse for me--none. During the coming year I'll try to make up for my negligence. I'll give the business my personal attention." But at the end of the second year the books showed that, while the company had never done so much business, there was a loss of half a million; another such year and the surplus would be exhausted. At the trustees' meeting, of the three faces staring gloomily at these ruinous figures the gloomiest was Charles Whitney's. "There can be only one explanation," said he. "The shifting of the centers of production is making it increasingly difficult to manufacture here at a profit." "Perhaps the railways are discriminating against us," suggested Scarborough. Whitney smiled slightly. "That's your reform politics," said he. "You fellows never seek the natural causes for things; you at once accuse the financiers." Scarborough smiled back at him. "But haven't there been instances of rings in control of railways using their power for plants they were interested in and against competing plants?" "Possibly--to a limited extent," conceded Whitney. "But I hold to the old-fashioned idea. My dear sir, this is a land of opportunity--" "Still, Whitney," interrupted Dr. Hargrave, "there _may_ be something in what Senator Scarborough says." "Undoubtedly," Whitney hastened to answer. "I only hope there is. Then our problem will be simple. I'll set my lawyers to work at once. If that is the cause"--he struck the table resolutely with his clenched fist--"the scoundrels shall be brought to book!" His eyes shifted as he lifted them to find Scarborough looking at him. "You have inside connections with the Chicago railway crowd, have you not, Mr. Whitney?" he inquired. "I think I have," said Whitney, with easy candor. "That's why I feel confident your suggestion has no foundation--beyond your suspicion of all men engaged in large enterprises. It's a wonder you don't suspect me. Indeed, you probably will." He spoke laughingly. Scarborough's answer was a grave smile. "My personal loss may save me from you," Whitney went on. "I hesitate to speak of it, but, as you can see, it is large--almost as large as the university's." "Yes," said Scarborough absently, though his gaze was still fixed on Whitney. "You think you can do nothing?" "Indeed I do not!" exclaimed Whitney. "I shall begin with the assumption that you are right. And if you are, I'll have those scoundrels in court within a month." "And then?" The young senator's expression and tone were calm, but Whitney seemed to find covert hostility in them. "Then--justice!" he replied angrily. Dr. Hargrave beamed benevolent confidence. "Justice!" he echoed. "Thank God for our courts!" "But _when_?" said Scarborough. As there was no answer, he went on: "In five--ten--fifteen--perhaps twenty years. The lawyers are in no hurry--a brief case means a small fee. The judges--they've got their places for life, so there's no reason why they should muss their silk gowns in undignified haste. Besides--It seems to me I've heard somewhere the phrase 'railway judges.'" Dr. Hargrave looked gentle but strong disapproval. "You are too pessimistic, Hampden," said he. "The senator should not let the wounds from his political fights gangrene," suggested Whitney, with good-humored raillery. "Have you nothing but the court remedy to offer?" asked Scarborough, a slight smile on his handsome face, so deceptively youthful. "That's quite enough," answered Whitney. "In my own affairs I've never appealed to the courts in vain." "I can believe it," said Scarborough, and Whitney looked as if he had scented sarcasm, though Scarborough was correctly colorless. "But, if you should be unable to discover any grounds for a case against the railways?" "Then all we can do is to work harder than ever along the old lines--cut down expenses, readjust wages, stop waste." Whitney sneered politely. "But no doubt you have some other plan to propose." Scarborough continued to look at him with the same faint smile. "I've nothing to suggest--to-day," said he. "The court proceedings will do no harm--you see, Mr. Whitney, I can't get my wicked suspicion of your friends out of my mind. But we must also try something less--less leisurely than courts. I'll think it over." Whitney laughed rather uncomfortably; and when they adjourned he lingered with Dr. Hargrave. "We must not let ourselves be carried away by our young friend's suspicions," said he to his old friend. "Scarborough is a fine fellow. But he lacks your experience and my knowledge of practical business. And he has been made something of a crank by combating the opposition his extreme views have aroused among conservative people." "You are mistaken, Whitney," replied the doctor. "Hampden's views are sound. He is misrepresented by the highly placed rascals he has exposed and dislodged. But in these business matters we rely upon you." He linked his arm affectionately in that of the powerful and successful "captain of industry" whom he had known from boyhood. "I know how devoted you are to Tecumseh, and how ably you manage practical affairs; and I have not for a moment lost confidence that you will bring us safely through." Whitney's face was interesting. There was a certain hangdog look in it, but there was also a suggestion--very covert--of cynical amusement, as of a good player's jeer at a blunder by his opponent. His tone, however, was melancholy, tinged with just resentment, as he said: "Scarborough forgets how my own personal interest is involved. I don't like to lose two hundred and odd thousand a year." "Scarborough meant nothing, I'm sure," said Hargrave soothingly. "He knows we are all single hearted for the university." "I don't like to be distrusted," persisted Whitney sadly. Then brightening: "But you and I understand each other, doctor. And we will carry the business through. Every man who tries to do anything in this world must expect to be misunderstood." "You are mistaken about Scarborough, I know you are," said Hargrave earnestly. Whitney listened to Hargrave, finally professed to be reassured; but, before he left, a strong doubt of Scarborough's judgment had been implanted by him in the mind of the old doctor. That was easy enough; for, while Hargrave was too acute a man to give his trust impulsively, he gave without reserve when he did give--and he believed in Charles Whitney. The ability absolutely to trust where trust is necessary is as essential to effective character as is the ability to withhold trust until its wisdom has been justified; and exceptions only confirm a rule. Scarborough, feeling that he had been neglecting his trusteeship, now devoted himself to the Ranger-Whitney Company. He had long consultations with Howells, and studied the daily and weekly balance sheets which Howells sent him. In the second month after the annual meeting he cabled Dory to come home. The entire foundation upon which Dory was building seemed to be going; Saint X was, therefore, the place for him, not Europe. "And there you have all I have been able to find out," concluded Scarborough, when he had given Dory the last of the facts and figures. "What do you make of it?" "There's something wrong--something rotten," replied Dory. "But where?" inquired Scarborough, who had taken care not to speak or hint his vague doubts of Whitney. "Everything _looks_ all right, except the totals on the balance sheets." "We must talk this over with some one who knows more about the business than either of us." Then he added, as if the idea had just come to him, "Why not call in Arthur--Arthur Ranger?" Scarborough looked receptive, but not enthusiastic. "He has been studying this business in the most practical way ever since his father died," urged Dory. "It can't do any harm to consult with him. We don't want to call in outside experts if we can help it." "If we did we'd have to let Mr. Whitney select them," said Scarborough. And he drew Dory out upon the subject of Arthur and got such complete and intelligent answers that he presently had a wholly new and true idea of the young man whose boyish follies Saint X had not yet forgotten. "Yes, let's give Arthur a chance," he finally said. Accordingly, they laid the case in its entirety before Arthur, and he took home with him the mass of reports which Scarborough had gathered. Night after night he and Madelene worked at the problem; for both knew that its solution would be his opportunity, _their_ opportunity. It was Madelene who discovered the truth--not by searching the figures, not by any process of surface reasoning, but by that instinct for motive which woman has developed through her ages of dealing with and in motives only. "They must get a new management," said she; "one that Charles Whitney has no control over." "Why?" "Because he's wrecking the business to get hold of it. He wants the whole thing, and he couldn't resist the chance the inexperience and confidence of the other two gave him." "I see no indication of it," objected Arthur, to draw her out. "On the contrary, wherever he directly controls there's a good showing." "That's it!" exclaimed Madelene, feeling that she now had her feet on the firm ground of reason on which alone stupid men will discuss practical affairs. Arthur had lived with Madelene long enough to learn that her mind was indeed as clear as her eyes, that when she looked at anything she saw it as it was, and saw all of it. Like any man who has the right material in him, he needed only the object lesson of her quick dexterity at stripping a problem of its shell of nonessentials. He had become what the ineffective call a pessimist. He had learned the primer lesson of large success--that one must build upon the hard, pessimistic facts of human nature's instability and fate's fondness for mischief, not upon the optimistic clouds of belief that everybody is good and faithful and friendly disposed and everything will "come out all right somehow." The instant Madelene suggested Whitney as the cause, Arthur's judgment echoed approval; but, to get her whole mind as one gives it only in combating opposition, he continued to object. "But suppose," said he, "Whitney insists on selecting the new management? As he's the only one competent, how can they refuse?" "We must find a way round that," replied Madelene. "It's perfectly plain, isn't it, that there's only one course--an absolutely new management. And how can Mr. Whitney object? If he's not guilty he won't object, because he'll be eager to try the obvious remedy. If he's guilty he won't object--he'll be afraid of being suspected." "Dory suggested--" began Arthur, and stopped. "That you be put in as manager?" "How did _you_ know _that_?" "It's the sensible thing. It's the only thing," answered his wife. "And Dory has the genius of good sense. You ought to go to Scarborough and ask for the place. Take Dory with you." "That's good advice," said Arthur, heartily. Madelene laughed. "When a man praises a woman's advice, it means she has told him to do what he had made up his mind to do anyhow." * * * * * Next day Scarborough called a meeting of the trustees. Down from Chicago came Whitney--at the greatest personal inconvenience, so he showed his colleagues, but eager to do anything for Tecumseh. Scarborough gave a clear and appalling account of how the Ranger-Whitney Company's prosperity was slipping into the abyss like a caving sand bank, on all sides, apparently under pressure of forces beyond human control. "In view of the facts," said he, in conclusion, "our sole hope is in putting ourselves to one side and giving an entirely new management an entirely free hand." Whitney had listened to Scarborough's speech with the funereal countenance befitting so melancholy a recital. As Scarborough finished and sank back in his chair, he said, with energy and heartiness, "I agree with you, senator. The lawyers tell me there are as yet no signs of a case against the railways. Besides, the trouble seems to be, as I feared, deeper than this possible rebating. Jenkins--one of my best men--I sent him down to help Howells out--he's clearly an utter failure--utter! And I am getting old. The new conditions of business life call for young men with open minds." "No, no!" protested Dr. Hargrave. "I will not consent to any change that takes your hand off the lever, my friend. These are stormy times in our industrial world, and we need the wise, experienced pilot." Scarborough had feared this; but he and Dory, forced to choose between taking him into their confidence and boldly challenging the man in whom he believed implicitly, had chosen the far safer course. "While Mr. Whitney must appreciate your eulogy, doctor," said he, suave yet with a certain iciness, "I think he will insist upon the trial of the only plan that offers. In our plight we must not shrink from desperate remedies--even a remedy as desperate as eliminating the one man who understands the business from end to end." This last with slight emphasis and a steady look at Whitney. Whitney reddened. "We need not waste words," said he, in his bluff, sharp voice. "The senator and I are in accord, and we are the majority." "At least, Mr. Whitney," said the doctor, "you must suggest the new man. You know the business world. We don't." A long pause; then from Whitney: "Why not try young Ranger?" Scarborough looked at him in frank amazement. By what process of infernal telepathy had he found out? Or was there some deep reason why Arthur would be the best possible man for his purpose, if his purpose was indeed malign? Was Arthur his tool? Or was Arthur subtly making tools of both Whitney and himself? Dr. Hargrave was dumfounded. When he recovered himself sufficiently to speak, it was to say, "Why, he's a mere boy, Whitney--not yet thirty. He has had no experience!" "Inexperience seems to be what we need," replied Whitney, eyes twinkling sneeringly at Scarborough. "We have tried experience, and it is a disastrous failure." Scarborough was still reflecting. "True," pursued Whitney, "the young man would also have the motive of self-interest to keep him from making a success." "How is that?" inquired Scarborough. "Under the will," Whitney reminded him, "he can buy back the property at its market value. Obviously, the less the property is worth, the better for him." Scarborough was staggered. Was Arthur crafty as well as able? With the human conscience ever eager to prove that what is personally advantageous is also right, how easy for a man in his circumstances to convince himself that any course would be justifiable in upsetting the "injustice" of Hiram Ranger's will. "However," continued Whitney, "I've no doubt he's as honest as his father--and I couldn't say more than that. The only question is whether we can risk giving him the chance to show what there is in him." Dr. Hargrave was looking dazedly from one of his colleagues to the other, as if he thought his mind were playing him a trick. "It is impossible--preposterous!" he exclaimed. "A man has to make a beginning," said Whitney. "How can he show what there is in him unless he gets a chance? It seems to me, doctor, we owe it to Hiram to do this for the boy. We can keep an eye and a hand on him. What do you think, senator?" Scarborough had won at every stage of his career, not merely because he had convictions and the courage of them, but chiefly because he had the courage to carry through the plans he laid in trying to make his convictions effective. He had come there, fixed that Arthur was the man for the place; why throw up his hand because Whitney was playing into it? Nothing had occurred to change his opinion of Arthur. "Let us try Arthur Ranger," he now said. "But let us give him a free hand." He was watching Whitney's face; he saw it change expression--a slight frown. "I advise against the free hand," said Whitney. "I _protest_ against it!" cried Dr. Hargrave. "I protest against even considering this inexperienced boy for such a responsibility." Scarborough addressed himself to Whitney. "If we do not give our new manager, whoever he may be, a free hand, and if he should fail, how shall we know whether the fault is his or--yours?" At the direct "yours" Scarborough thought Whitney winced; but his reply was bland and frank enough. He turned to Dr. Hargrave. "The senator is right," said he. "I shall vote with him." "Then it is settled," said Scarborough. "Ranger is to have absolute charge." Dr. Hargrave was now showing every sign of his great age; the anguish of imminent despair was in his deep-set eyes and in his broken, trembling voice as he cried: "Gentlemen, this is madness! Charles, I implore you, do not take such precipitate action in so vital a matter! Let us talk it over--think it over. The life of the university is at stake!" It was evident that the finality in the tones and in the faces of his colleagues had daunted him; but with a tremendous effort he put down the weakness of age and turned fiercely upon Whitney to shame him from indorsing Scarborough's suicidal policy. But Whitney, with intent of brutality, took out his watch. "I have just time to catch my train," said he, indifferently; "I can only use my best judgment, doctor. Sorry to have to disagree with you, but Senator Scarborough has convinced me." And having thus placed upon Scarborough the entire responsibility for the event of the experiment, he shook hands with his colleagues and hurried out to his waiting carriage. Dr. Hargrave dropped into a chair and stared into vacancy. In all those long, long years of incessant struggle against heartbreaking obstacles he had never lost courage or faith. But this blow at the very life of the university and from its friends! He could not even lift himself enough to look to his God; it seemed to him that God had gone on a far journey. Scarborough, watching him, was profoundly moved. "If at the end of three months you wish Ranger to resign," said he, "I shall see to it that he does resign. Believe me, doctor, I have not taken this course without considering all the possibilities, so far as I could foresee them." The old president, impressed by his peculiar tone, looked up quickly. "There is something in this that I don't understand," said he, searching Scarborough's face. Scarborough was tempted to explain. But the consequences, should he fail to convince Hargrave, compelled him to withhold. "I hope, indeed I feel sure, you will be astonished in our young friend," said he, instead. "I have been talking with him a good deal lately, and I am struck by the strong resemblance to his father. It is more than mere physical likeness." With a sternness he could have shown only where principle was at stake, the old man said: "But I must not conceal from you, senator, that I have the gravest doubts and fears. You have alienated the university's best friend--rich, powerful, able, and, until you exasperated him, devoted to its interests. I regard you as having--unintentionally, and no doubt for good motives--betrayed the solemn trust Hiram Ranger reposed in you." He was standing at his full height, with his piercing eyes fixed upon his young colleague's. All the color left Scarborough's face. "Betrayed is a strong word," he said. "A strong word, senator," answered Dr. Hargrave, "and used deliberately. I wish you good day, sir." Hargrave was one of those few men who are respected without any reservation, and whose respect is, therefore, not given up without a sense of heavy loss. But to explain would be to risk rousing in him an even deeper anger--anger on account of his friend Whitney; so, without another word, Scarborough bowed and went. "Either he will be apologizing to me at the end of three months," said he to himself, "or I shall be apologizing to Whitney and shall owe Tecumseh a large sum of money." * * * * * Both Madelene and Arthur had that instinct for comfort and luxury which is an even larger factor in advancement than either energy or intelligence. The idea that clothing means something more than warmth, food something more than fodder, a house something more than shelter, is the beginning of progress; the measure of a civilized man or woman is the measure of his or her passion for and understanding of the art of living. Madelene, by that right instinct which was perhaps the finest part of her sane and strong character, knew what comfort really means, knew the difference between luxury and the showy vulgarity of tawdriness or expensiveness; and she rapidly corrected, or, rather, restored, Arthur's good taste, which had been vitiated by his associations with fashionable people, whose standards are necessarily always poor. She was devoted to her profession as a science; but she did not neglect the vital material considerations. She had too much self-respect to become careless about her complexion or figure, about dress or personal habits, even if she had not had such shrewd insight into what makes a husband remain a lover, a wife a mistress. She had none of those self-complacent delusions which lure vain women on in slothfulness until Love vacates his neglected temple. And in large part, no doubt, Arthur's appearance--none of the stains and patches of the usual workingman, and this though he worked hard at manual labor and in a shop--was due to her influence of example; he, living with such a woman, would have been ashamed not to keep "up to the mark." Also her influence over old Mrs. Ranger became absolute; and swiftly yet imperceptibly the house, which had so distressed Adelaide, was transformed, not into the exhibit of fashionable ostentation which had once been Adelaide's and Arthur's ideal, but into a house of comfort and beauty, with colors harmonizing, the look of newness gone from the "best rooms," and finally the "best rooms" themselves abolished. And Ellen thought herself chiefly responsible for the change. "I'm gradually getting things just about as I want 'em," said she. "It does take a long time to do anything in this world!" Also she believed, and a boundless delight it was to her, that she was the cause of Madelene's professional success. Everyone talked of the way Madelene was getting on, and wondered at her luck. "She deserves it, though," said they, "for she can all but raise the dead." In fact, the secret was simple enough. She had been taught by her father to despise drugs and to compel dieting and exercise. She had the tact which he lacked; she made the allowances for human nature's ignorance and superstition which he refused to make; she lessened the hardship of taking her common-sense prescriptions by veiling them in medical hocus-pocus--a compromise of the disagreeable truth which her father had always inveighed against as both immoral and unwholesome. Within six months after her marriage she was earning as much as her husband; and her fame was spreading so rapidly that not only women but also men, and men with a contempt for the "inferior mentality of the female," were coming to her from all sides. "You'll soon have a huge income," said Arthur. "Why, you'll be rich, you are so grasping." "Indeed I am," replied she. "The way to teach people to strive for high wages and to learn thrift is to make them pay full value for what they get. I don't propose to encourage dishonesty or idleness. Besides, we'll need the money." Arthur had none of that mean envy which can endure the prosperity of strangers only; he would not even have been able to be jealous of his wife's getting on better than did he. But, if he had been so disposed, he would have found it hard to indulge such feelings because of Madelene. She had put their married life on the right basis. She made him feel, with a certainty which no morbid imagining could have shaken, that she loved and respected him for qualities which could not be measured by any of the world's standards of success. He knew that in her eyes he was already an arrived success, that she was absolutely indifferent whether others ever recognized it or not. Only those who realize how powerful is the influence of intimate association will appreciate what an effect living with Madelene had upon Arthur's character--in withering the ugly in it, in developing its quality, and in directing its strength. When Scarborough gave Arthur his "chance," Madelene took it as the matter of course. "I'm sorry it has come so soon," said she, "and in just this way. But it couldn't have been delayed long. With so much to be done and so few able or willing to do it, the world can't wait long enough for a man really to ripen. It's lucky that you inherit from your father so many important things that most men have to spend their lives in learning." "Do you think so?" said he, brightening; for, with the "chance" secure, he was now much depressed by the difficulties which he had been resurveying from the inside point of view. "You understand how to manage men," she replied, "and you understand business." "But, unfortunately, this isn't business." He was right. The problem of business is, in its two main factors, perfectly simple--to make a wanted article, and to put it where those who want it can buy. But this was not Arthur Ranger's problem, nor is it the problem of most business men in our time. Between maker and customer, nowadays, lie the brigands who control the railways--that is, the highways; and they with equal facility use or defy the law, according to their needs. When Arthur went a-buying grain or stave timber, he and those with whom he was trading had to placate the brigands before they could trade; when he went a-selling flour, he had to fight his way to the markets through the brigands. It was the battle which causes more than ninety out of every hundred in independent business to fail--and of the remaining ten, how many succeed only because they either escaped the notice of the brigands or compromised with them? "I wish you luck," said Jenkins, when, at the end of two weeks of his tutelage, Arthur told him he would try it alone. Arthur laughed. "No, you don't, Jenkins," replied he, with good-humored bluntness. "But I'm going to have it, all the same." Discriminating prices and freight rates against his grain, discriminating freight rates against his flour; the courts either powerless to aid him or under the rule of bandits; and, on the top of all, a strike within two weeks after Jenkins left--such was the situation. Arthur thought it hopeless; but he did not lose courage nor his front of serenity, even when alone with Madelene. Each was careful not to tempt the malice of fate by concealments; each was careful also not to annoy the other with unnecessary disagreeable recitals. If he could have seen where good advice could possibly help him, he would have laid all his troubles before her; but it seemed to him that to ask her advice would be as if she were to ask him to tell her how to put life into a corpse. He imagined that she was deceived by his silence about the details of his affairs because she gave no sign, did not even ask questions beyond generalities. She, however, was always watching his handsome face with its fascinating evidences of power inwardly developing; and, as it was her habit to get valuable information as to what was going on inside her fellow-beings from a close study of surface appearances, the growing gauntness of his features, the coming out of the lines of sternness, did not escape her, made her heart throb with pride even as it ached with sympathy and anxiety. At last she decided for speech. He was sitting in their dressing room, smoking his last cigarette as he watched her braid her wonderful hair for the night. She, observing him in the glass, saw that he was looking at her with that yearning for sympathy which is always at its strongest in a man in the mood that was his at sight of those waves and showers of soft black hair on the pallid whiteness of her shoulders. Before he realized what she was about she was in his lap, her arms round his neck, his face pillowed against her cheek and her hair. "What is it, little boy?" she murmured, with that mingling of the mistress and the mother which every woman who ever loved feels for and, at certain times, shows the man she loves. He laughed. "Business--business," said he. "But let's not talk about it. The important thing is that I have _you_. The rest is--smoke!" And he blew out a great cloud of it and threw the cigarette through the open window. "Tell me," she said; "I've been waiting for you to speak, and I can't wait any longer." "I couldn't--just now. It doesn't at all fit in with my thoughts." And he kissed her. She moved to rise. "Then I'll go back to the dressing table. Perhaps you'll be able to tell me with the width of the room between us." He drew her head against his again. "Very well--if I must, I will. But you know all about it. For some mysterious reason, somebody--you say it's Whitney, and probably it is--won't let me buy grain or anything else as cheaply as others buy it. And for the same mysterious reason, somebody, probably Whitney again, won't let me get to market without paying a heavier toll than our competitors pay. And now for some mysterious reason somebody, probably Whitney again, has sent labor organizers from Chicago among the men and has induced them to make impossible demands and to walk out without warning." "And you think there's nothing to do but walk out, too," said Madelene. "Or wait until I'm put out." His tone made those words mean that his desperate situation had roused his combativeness, that he would not give up. Her blood beat faster and her eyes shone. "You'll win," she said, with the quiet confidence which strengthens when it comes from a person whose judgment one has tested and found good. And he believed in her as absolutely as she believed in him. "I've been tempted to resign," he went on. "If I don't everybody'll say I'm a failure when the crash comes. But--Madelene, there's something in me that simply won't let me quit." "There is," replied she; "it's your father." "Anyhow, _you_ are the only public opinion for me." "You'll win," repeated Madelene. "I've been thinking over that whole business. If I were you, Arthur"--she was sitting up so that she could look at him and make her words more impressive--"I'd dismiss strike and freight rates and the mill, and I'd put my whole mind on Whitney. There's a weak spot somewhere in his armor. There always is in a scoundrel's." Arthur reflected. Presently he drew her head down against his; it seemed to her that she could feel his brain at work, and soon she knew from the change in the clasp of his arms about her that that keen, quick mind of his was serving him well. "What a joy it is to a woman," she thought, "to know that she can trust the man she loves--trust him absolutely, always, and in every way." And she fell asleep after awhile, lulled by the rhythmic beat of his pulse, so steady, so strong, giving her such a restful sense of security. She did not awaken until he was gently laying her in the bed. "You have found it?" said she, reading the news in the altered expression of his face. "I hope so," replied he. She saw that he did not wish to discuss. So she said, "I knew you would," and went contentedly back into sleep again. * * * * * Next day he carefully read the company's articles of incorporation to make sure that they contained no obstacle to his plan. Then he went to Scarborough, and together they went to Judge Torrey. Three days later there was a special meeting of the board of directors; the president, Charles Whitney, was unable to attend, but his Monday morning mail contained this extract from the minutes: "Mr. Ranger offered a resolution that an assessment of two thousand dollars be at once laid upon each share of the capital stock, the proceeds to be expended by the superintendent in betterments. Seconded by Mr. Scarborough. Unanimously passed." Whitney reread this very carefully. He laid the letter down and stared at it. Two thousand dollars a share meant that he, owner of four hundred and eighty-seven shares, would have to pay in cash nine hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars. He ordered his private car attached to the noon express, and at five o'clock he was in Scarborough's library. "What is the meaning of this assessment?" he demanded, as Scarborough entered. "Mr. Ranger explained the situation to us," replied Scarborough. "He showed us we had to choose between ruin and a complete reorganization with big improvements and extensions." "Lunacy, sheer lunacy!" cried Whitney. "A meeting of the board must be called and the resolution rescinded." Scarborough simply looked at him, a smile in his eyes. "I never heard of such an outrage! You ask me to pay an assessment of nearly a million dollars on stock that is worthless." "And," replied Scarborough, "at the end of the year we expect to levy another assessment of a thousand a share." Whitney had been tramping stormily up and down the room. As Scarborough uttered those last words he halted. He eyed his tranquil fellow-trustee, then seated himself, and said, with not a trace of his recent fury: "You must know, Scarborough, the mills have no future. I hadn't the heart to say so before Dr. Hargrave. But I supposed you were reading the signs right. The plain truth is, this is no longer a good location for the flour industry." Scarborough waited before replying; when he did speak his tones were deliberate and suggestive of strong emotion well under control. "True," said he, "not just at present. But Judge Beverwick, your friend and silent partner who sits on the federal bench in this district, is at the point of death. I shall see to it that his successor is a man with a less intense prejudice against justice. Thus we may be able to convince some of your friends in control of the railways that Saint X is as good a place for mills as any in the country." Whitney grunted. His face was inscrutable. He paced the length of the room twice; he stood at the window gazing out at the arbors, at the bees buzzing contentedly, at the flies darting across the sifting sunbeams. "Beautiful place, this," said he at last; "very homelike. No wonder you're a happy man." A pause. "As to the other matter, I'll see. No doubt I can stop this through the courts, if you push me to it." "Not without giving us a chance to explain," replied Scarborough; "and the higher courts may agree with us that we ought to defend the university's rights against your railway friends and your 'labor' men whom you sent down here to cause the strike." "Rubbish!" said Whitney; and he laughed. "Rubbish!" he repeated. "It's not a matter either for argument or for anger." He took his hat, made a slight ironic bow, and was gone. He spent the next morning with Arthur, discussing the main phases of the business, with little said by either about the vast new project. They lunched together in the car, which was on a siding before the offices, ready to join the early afternoon express. Arthur was on his guard against Whitney, but he could not resist the charm of the financier's manner and conversation. Like all men of force, Whitney had great magnetism, and his conversation was frank to apparent indiscretion, a most plausible presentation of the cynical philosophy of practical life as it is lived by men of bold and generous nature. "That assessment scheme was yours, wasn't it?" he said, when he and Arthur had got on terms of intimacy. "The first suggestion came from me," admitted Arthur. "A great stroke," said Whitney. "You will arrive, young man. I thought it was your doing, because it reminded me of your father. I never knew a more direct man than he, yet he was without an equal at flanking movements. What a pity his mind went before he died! My first impulse was to admire his will. But, now that I've come to know you, I see that if he had lived to get acquainted with you he'd have made a very; different disposition of the family property. As it is, it's bound to go to pieces. No board ever managed anything successfully. It's always a man--one man. In this case it ought to be you. But the time will come--soon, probably--when your view will conflict with that of the majority of the board. Then out you'll go; and your years of intelligent labor will be destroyed." It was plain in Arthur's face that this common-sense statement of the case produced instant and strong effect. He merely said: "Well, one must take that risk." "Not necessarily," replied Whitney; he was talking in the most careless, impersonal way. "A man of your sort, with the strength and the ability you inherit, and with the power that they give you to play an important part in the world, doesn't let things drift to ruin. I intend, ultimately, to give my share of the Ranger-Whitney Company to Tecumseh--I'm telling you this in confidence." Arthur glanced quickly at the great financier, suspicion and wonder in his eyes. "But I want it to be a value when I give it," continued Whitney; "not the worse than worthless paper it threatens to become. Scarborough and Dr. Hargrave are splendid men. No one honors them more highly than I do. But they are not business men. And who will be their successors? Probably men even less practical." Arthur, keen-witted but young, acute but youthfully ready to attribute the generous motive rather than the sinister, felt that he was getting a new light on Whitney's character. Perhaps Whitney wasn't so unworthy, after all. Perhaps, in trying to wreck the business and so get hold of it, he had been carrying out a really noble purpose, in the unscrupulous way characteristic of the leaders of the world of commerce and finance. To Whitney he said: "I haven't given any thought to these matters." With a good-natured laugh of raillery: "You have kept me too busy." Whitney smiled--an admission that yet did not commit him. "When you've lived a while longer, Arthur," said he, "you'll not be so swift and harsh in your judgments of men who have to lay the far-sighted plans and have to deal with mankind as it is, not as it ought to be. However, by that time the Ranger-Whitney Company will be wiped out. It's a pity. If only there were some way of getting the control definitely in your hands--where your father would have put it if he had lived. It's a shame to permit his life work and his plans for the university to be demolished. In your place I'd not permit it." Arthur slowly flushed. Without looking at Whitney, he said: "I don't see how I could prevent it." Whitney studied his flushed face, his lowered eyes, reflected carefully on the longing note in the voice in which he had made that statement, a note that changed it to a question. "Control could be got only by ownership," explained he. "If I were sure you were working with a definite, practical purpose really to secure the future of the company, I'd go heartily into your assessment plan. In fact, I'd--" Whitney was feeling his way. The change in Arthur's expression, the sudden tightening of the lips, warned him that he was about to go too far, that he had sowed as much seed as it was wise to sow at that time. He dropped the subject abruptly, saying: "But I've got to go up to the bank before train time. I'm glad we've had this little talk. Something of value may grow out of it. Think it over, and if any new ideas come to you run up to Chicago and see me." Arthur did indeed think it over, every moment of that afternoon; and before going home he took a long walk alone. He saw that Charles Whitney had proposed a secret partnership, in which he was to play Whitney's game and, in exchange, was to get control of the Ranger-Whitney Company. And what Whitney had said about the folly of board managements, about the insecurity of his own position, was undeniably true; and the sacrifice of the "smaller morality" for the "larger good" would be merely doing what the biographies of the world's men of achievement revealed them as doing again and again. Further, once in control, once free to put into action the plans for a truly vast concern, of which he had so often dreamed, he could give Tecumseh a far larger income than it had ever hoped to have through his father's gift, and also could himself be rich and powerful. To the men who have operated with success and worldly acclaim under the code of the "larger good," the men who have aggrandized themselves at the expense of personal honor and the rights of others and the progress of the race, the first, the crucial temptation to sacrifice "smaller morality" and "short-sighted scruples" has always come in some such form as it here presented itself to Arthur Ranger. The Napoleons begin as defenders of rational freedom against the insane license of the mob; the Rockefellers begin as cheapeners of a necessity of life to the straitened millions of their fellow-beings. If Arthur had been weak, he would have put aside the temptation through fear of the consequences of failure. If he had been ignorant, he would have put it aside through superstition. Being neither weak nor ignorant, and having a human passion for wealth and power and a willingness to get them if he could do it without sacrifice of self-respect, he sat calmly down with the temptation and listened to it and debated with it. He was silent all through dinner; and after dinner, when he and Madelene were in their sitting room upstairs, she reading, he sat with his eyes upon her, and continued to think. All at once he gave a curious laugh, went to the writing table and wrote a few moments. Then he brought the letter to her. "Read that," said he, standing behind her, his hands on her shoulders and an expression in his face that made his resemblance to Hiram startling. She read: "MY DEAR MR. WHITNEY: I've been 'thinking it over' as you suggested. I've decided to plug along in the old way, between the old landmarks. Let me add that, if you should offer to give your stock to Tecumseh now, I'd have to do my utmost to persuade the trustees not to take it until the company was once more secure. You see, I feel it is absolutely necessary that you have a large pecuniary interest in the success of our plans." When Madelene had read she turned in the chair until she was looking up at him. "Well?" she inquired. "What does it mean?" He told her. "And," he concluded, "I wish I could be a great man, but I can't. There's something small in me that won't permit it. No doubt Franklin was right when he said life was a tunnel and one had to stoop, and even occasionally to crawl, in order to get through it successfully. Now--if I hadn't married you--" "Always blaming me," she said, tenderly. "But even if you hadn't married me, I suspect that sooner or later you'd have decided for being a large man in a valley rather than a very small imitation man on a mountain." Then, after a moment's thought, and with sudden radiance: "But a man as big as you are wouldn't be let stay in the valley, no matter how hard he tried." He laughed. "I've no objection to the mountain top," said he. "But I see that, if I get there, it'll have to be in my own way. Let's go out and mail the letter." And they went down the drive together to the post box, and, strolling back, sat under the trees in the moonlight until nearly midnight, feeling as if they had only just begun life together--and had begun it right. * * * * * When Charles Whitney had read the letter he tore it up, saying half-aloud and contemptuously, "I was afraid there was too big a streak of fool in him." Then, with a shrug: "What's the use of wasting time on that little game--especially as I'd probably have left the university the whole business in my will." He wrote Scarborough, proposing that they delay the assessment until he had a chance to look further into the railway situation. "I begin to understand the troubles down there, now that I've taken time to think them over. I feel I can guarantee that no assessment will be necessary." And when the railways had mysteriously and abruptly ceased to misbehave, and the strike had suddenly fizzled out, he offered his stock to the university as a gift. "I shall see to it," he wrote, "that the company is not molested again, but is helped in every way." Arthur was for holding off, but Scarborough said, "No. He will keep his word." And Scarborough was right in regarding the matter as settled and acceptance of the splendid gift as safe. Whitney had his own code of honesty, of honor. It was not square dealing, but doing exactly what he specifically engaged to do. He would have stolen anything he could--anything he regarded as worth his while. On the other hand, he would have sacrificed nearly all, if not all, his fortune, to live up to the letter of his given word. This, though no court would have enforced the agreement he had made, though there was no written record of it, no witness other than himself, the other party, and the Almighty--for Charles Whitney believed in an Almighty God and an old-fashioned hell and a Day of Judgment. He conducted his religious bookkeeping precisely as he conducted his business bookkeeping, and was confident that he could escape hell as he had escaped the penitentiary. CHAPTER XXII VILLA D'ORSAY Adelaide did not reach home until the troubles with and through Charles Whitney were settled, and Arthur and Dory were deep in carrying out the plans to make the mills and factories part of the university and not merely its property. When Scarborough's urgent cable came, Dory found that all the steamers were full. Adelaide could go with him only by taking a berth in a room with three women in the bottom of the ship. "Impossible accommodations," thought he, "for so luxurious a person and so poor a sailor"; and he did not tell her that this berth could be had. "You'll have to wait a week or so," said he. "As you can't well stay on here alone, why not accept Mrs. Whitney's invitation to join her?" Adelaide disliked Mrs. Whitney, but there seemed to be no alternative. Mrs. Whitney was at Paris, on the way to America after the wedding and a severe cure at Aix and an aftercure in Switzerland. She had come for the finishing touches of rejuvenation--to get her hair redone and to go through her biennial agony of having Auguste, beauty specialist to the royalty, nobility and fashion, and demimonde, of three continents, burn off her outer skin that nature might replace it with one new and fresh and unwrinkled. She was heavily veiled as she and Adelaide traveled down to Cherbourg to the steamer. As soon as she got aboard she retired to her room and remained hidden there during the voyage, seen only by her maid, her face covered day and night with Auguste's marvelous skin-coaxing mask. Adelaide did not see her again until the morning of the last day, when she appeared on deck dressed beautifully and youthfully for the shore, her skin as fair and smooth as a girl's, and looking like an elder sister of Adelaide's--at a distance. She paused in New York; Adelaide hastened to Saint X, though she was looking forward uneasily to her arrival because she feared she would have to live at the old Hargrave house in University Avenue. Miss Skeffington ruled there, and she knew Miss Skeffington--one of those old-fashioned old maids whose rigid ideas of morality extend to the ordering of personal habits in minutest detail. Under her military sway everyone had to rise for breakfast at seven sharp, had to dine exactly at noon, sup when the clock struck the half hour after five. Ingress and egress for members of the family was by the side door only, the front door being reserved for company. For company also was the parlor, and for company the front stairs with their brilliant carpet, new, though laid for the first time nearly a quarter of a century before; for company also was the best room in the house, which ought to have been attractive, but was a little damp from being shut up so much, and was the cause of many a cold to guests. "I simply can't stand it to live by the striking of clocks!" thought Adelaide. "I must do something! But what?" Her uneasiness proved unnecessary, however. Dory disappointed his aunt, of a new and interestingly difficult spirit to subdue, by taking rooms at the Hendricks Hotel until they should find a place of their own. Mrs. Ranger asked them to live with her; but Adelaide shrank from putting herself in a position where her mother and Arthur could, and her sister-in-law undoubtedly would, "know too much about our private affairs." Mrs. Ranger did not insist. She would not admit it to herself, but, while she worshiped Del and thought her even more beautiful than she was, and just about perfection in every way, still Madelene was more satisfactory for daily companionship. Also, Ellen doubted whether two such positive natures as Madelene's and Adelaide's would be harmonious under the same roof. "What's more," she reflected, "there may be a baby--babies." Within a fortnight of Del's return, and before she and Dory had got quite used to each other again, she fixed on an abode. "Mrs. Dorsey was here this afternoon," said she, with enthusiasm which, to Dory's acute perceptions, seemed slightly exaggerated, in fact, forced, "and offered us her house for a year, just to have somebody in it whom she could trust to look after things. You know she's taking her daughter abroad to finish. It was too good a chance to let pass; so I accepted at once." Dory turned away abruptly. With slow deliberation he took a cigarette from his case, lighted it, watched the smoke drift out at the open window. She was observing him, though she seemed not to be. And his expression made her just a little afraid. Unlike most men who lead purely intellectual lives, he had not the slightest suggestion of sexlessness; on the contrary, he seemed as strong, as positive physically, as the look of his forehead and eyes showed him to be mentally. And now that he had learned to dress with greater care, out of deference to her, she could find nothing about him to help her in protecting herself by criticising him. "Do you think, Del," said he, "that we'll be able to live in that big place on eighteen hundred a year?" It wasn't as easy for him thus to remind her of their limited means as it theoretically should have been. Del was distinctly an expensive-looking luxury. That dress of hers, pale green, with hat and everything to match or in harmony, was a "simple thing," but the best dressmaker in the Rue de la Paix had spent a great deal of his costly time in producing that effect of simplicity. Throughout, she had the cleanness, the freshness, the freedom from affectations which Dory had learned could be got only by large expenditure. Nor would he have had her any different. He wanted just the settings she chose for her fair, fine beauty. The only change he would have asked would have been in the expression of those violet eyes of hers when they looked at him. "You wish I hadn't done it!" she exclaimed. And if he had not glanced away so quickly he would have seen that she was ready to retreat. "Well, it's not exactly the start I'd been thinking of," replied he, reluctantly but tentatively. It is not in human nature to refuse to press an offered advantage. Said Del: "Can't we close up most of the house--use only five or six rooms on the ground floor? And Mrs. Dorsey's gardener and his helpers will be there. All we have to do is to see that they've not neglected the grounds." She was once more all belief and enthusiasm. "It seemed to me, taking that place was most economical, and so comfortable. Really, Dory, I didn't accept without thinking." Dory was debating with himself: To take that house--it was one of those trifles that are anything but trifles--like the slight but crucial motion at the crossroads in choosing the road to the left instead of the road to the right. Not to take the house--Del would feel humiliated, reasoned he, would think him unreasonably small, would chafe under the restraint their limited means put upon them, whereas, if he left the question of living on their income entirely to her good sense, she would not care about the deprivations, would regard them as self-imposed. "Of course, if you don't like it, Dory," she now said, "I suppose Mrs. Dorsey will let me off. But I'm sure you'd be delighted, once we got settled. The house is so attractive--at least, I think I can make it attractive by packing away her showy stuff and rearranging the furniture. And the grounds--Dory, I don't see how you can object!" Dory gave a shrug and a smile. "Well, go ahead. We'll scramble through somehow." He shook his head at her in good-humored warning. "Only, please don't forget what's coming at the end of your brief year of grandeur." Adelaide checked the reply that was all but out. She hastily reflected that it might not be wise to let him know, just then, that Mrs. Dorsey had said they could have the house for two years, probably for three, perhaps for five. Instead, she said, "It isn't the expense, after all, that disturbs you, is it?" He smiled confession. "No." "I know it's snobbish of me to long for finery so much that I'm even willing to live in another person's and show off in it," she sighed. "But--I'm learning gradually." He colored. Unconsciously she had put into her tone--and this not for the first time, by any means--a suggestion that there wasn't the slightest danger of his wearying of waiting, that she could safely take her time in getting round to sensible ideas and to falling in love with him. His eyes had the look of the veiled amusement that deliberately shows through, as he said, "That's good. I'll try to be patient." It was her turn to color. But, elbowing instinctive resentment, came uneasiness. His love seemed to her of the sort that flowers in the romances--the love that endures all, asks nothing, lives forever upon its own unfed fire. As is so often the case with women whose charms move men to extravagance of speech and emotion, it was a great satisfaction to her, to her vanity, to feel that she had inspired this wonderful immortal flame; obviously, to feed such a flame by giving love for love would reduce it to the commonplace. All women start with these exaggerated notions of the value of being loved; few of them ever realize and rouse themselves, or are aroused, from their vanity to the truth that the value is all the other way. Adelaide was only the natural woman in blindly fancying that Dory was the one to be commiserated, in not seeing that she herself was a greater loser than he, that to return his love would not be a concession but an acquisition. Most men are content to love, to compel women to receive their love; they prefer the passive, the receptive attitude in the woman, and are even bored by being actively loved in return; for love is exacting, and the male is impatient of exaction. Adelaide did not understand just this broad but subtle difference between Dory and "most men"--that he would feel that he was violating her were he to sweep her away in the arms of his impetuous released passion, as he knew he could. He felt that such a yielding was, after all, like the inert obedience of the leaf to the storm wind--that what he could compel, what women call love, would be as utterly without substance as an image in a mirror, indeed, would be a mere passive reflection of his own love--all most men want, but worthless to him. Could it be that Dory's love had become--no, not less, but less ardent? She saw that he was deep in thought--about her, she assumed, with an unconscious vanity which would have excited the mockery of many who have more vanity than had she, and perhaps with less excuse. In fact, he was not thinking of her; having the ability to turn his mind completely where he willed--the quality of all strong men, and the one that often makes the weak-willed think them hard--he was revolving the vast and inspiring plans Arthur and he had just got into practical form--plans for new factories and mills such as a university, professing to be in the forefront of progress need not be ashamed to own or to offer to its students as workshops. All that science has bestowed in the way of making labor and its surroundings clean and comfortable, healthful and attractive, was to be provided; all that the ignorance and the shortsighted greediness of employers, bent only on immediate profits and keeping their philanthropy for the smug penuriousness and degrading stupidity of charity, deny to their own self-respect and to justice for their brothers in their power. Arthur and he had wrought it all out, had discovered as a crowning vindication that the result would be profitable in dollars, that their sane and shrewd utopianism would produce larger dividends than the sordid and slovenly methods of their competitors. "It is always so. Science is always economical as well as enlightened and humane," Dory was thinking when Adelaide's voice broke into his reverie. "You are right, Dory," said she. "And I shall give up the house. I'll go to see Mrs. Dorsey now." "The house?--What--Oh, yes--well--no--What made you change?" She did not know the real reason--that, studying his face, the curve and set of his head, the strength of the personality which she was too apt to take for granted most of the time because he was simple and free from pretense, she had been reminded that he was not a man to be trifled with, that she would better bestir herself and give more thought and attention to what was going on in that superbly shaped head of his--about her, about her and him. "Oh, I don't just know," replied she, quite honestly. "It seems to me now that there'll be too much fuss and care and--sham. And I intend to interest myself in _your_ work. You've hardly spoken of it since I got back." "There's been so little time--" "You mean," she interrupted, "I've been so busy unpacking my silly dresses and hats and making and receiving silly calls." "Now you're in one of your penitential moods," laughed Dory. "And to-morrow you'll wish you hadn't changed about the house. No--that's settled. We'll take it, and see what the consequences are." Adelaide brightened. His tone was his old self, and she did want that house so intensely! "I can be useful to Dory there; I can do so much on the social side of the university life. He doesn't appreciate the value of those things in advancing a career. He thinks a career is made by work only. But I'll show him! I'll make his house the center of the university!" Mrs. Dorsey had "Villa d'Orsay" carved on the stone pillars of her great wrought-iron gates, to remind the populace that, while her late father-in-law, "Buck" Dorsey, was the plainest of butchers and meat packers, his ancestry was of the proudest. With the rise of its "upper class" Saint X had gone in diligently for genealogy, had developed reverence for "tradition" and "blood," had established a Society of Family Histories, a chapter of the Colonial Dames, another of Daughters of the Revolution, and was in a fair way to rival the seaboard cities in devotion to the imported follies and frauds of "family." Dory at first indulged his sense of humor upon their Dorsey or d'Orsay finery. It seemed to him they must choose between making a joke of it and having it make a joke of them. But he desisted when he saw that it grated on Del for him to speak of her and himself as "caretakers for the rich." And presently his disposition to levity died of itself. It sobered and disheartened and, yes, disgusted him as he was forced to admit to himself the reality of her delight in receiving people in the great drawing room, of her content in the vacuous, time-wasting habits, of her sense of superiority through having at her command a troop of servants--Mrs. Dorsey's servants! He himself disliked servants about, hated to abet a fellow-being in looking on himself or herself as an inferior; and he regarded as one of the basest, as well as subtlest poisons of snobbishness, the habit of telling others to do for one the menial, personal things which can be done with dignity only by oneself. Once, in Paris--after Besançon--Janet spoke of some of her aristocratic acquaintances on the other side as "acting as if they had always been used to everything; so different from even the best people at home." Dory remembered how Adelaide promptly took her up, gave instance after instance in proof that European aristocrats were in fact as vulgar in their satisfaction in servility as were the newest of the newly aristocratic at home, but simply had a different way of showing it. "A more vulgar way," she said, Janet unable to refute her. "Yes, far more vulgar, Jen, because deliberately concealed; just as vanity that swells in secret is far worse than frank, childish conceit." And now--These vanities of hers, sprung from the old roots which in Paris she had been eager to kill and he was hoping were about dead, sprung in vigor and spreading in weedy exuberance! He often looked at her in sad wonder when she was unconscious of it. "What _is_ the matter?" he would repeat. "She is farther away than in Paris, where the temptation to this sort of nonsense was at least plausible." And he grew silent with her and shut himself in alone during the evening hours which he could not spend at the university. She knew why, knew also that he was right, ceased to bore herself and irritate him with attempts to make the Villa d'Orsay the social center of the university. But she continued to waste her days in the inane pastimes of Saint X's fashionable world, though ashamed of herself and disgusted with her mode of life. For snobbishness is essentially a provincial vice, due full as much to narrowness as to ignorance; and, thus, it is most potent in the small "set" in the small town. In the city even the narrowest are compelled to at least an occasional glimpse of wider horizons; but in the small town only the vigilant and resolute ever get so much as a momentary point of view. She told herself, in angry attempt at self-excuse, that he ought to take her in hand, ought to snatch her away from that which she had not the courage to give up of herself. Yet she knew she would hate him should he try to do it. She assumed that was the reason he didn't; and it was part of the reason, but a lesser part than his unacknowledged, furtive fear of what he might discover as to his own feelings toward her, were there just then a casting up and balancing of their confused accounts with each other. Both were relieved, as at a crisis postponed, when it became necessary for him to go abroad again immediately. "I don't see how _you_ can leave," said he, thus intentionally sparing her a painful effort in saying what at once came into the mind of each. "We could cable Mrs. Dorsey," she suggested lamely. She was at the Louis Quinze desk in the Louis Quinze sitting room, and her old gold negligee matched in charmingly, and the whole setting brought out the sheen, faintly golden, over her clear skin, the peculiarly fresh and intense shade of her violet eyes, the suggestion of gold in her thick hair, with its wan, autumnal coloring, such as one sees in a field of dead ripe grain. She was doing her monthly accounts, and the showing was not pleasant. She was a good housekeeper, a surprisingly good manager; but she did too much entertaining for their income. Dory was too much occupied with the picture she made as she sat there to reply immediately. "I doubt," he finally replied, "if she could arrange by cable for some one else whom she would trust with her treasures. No, I guess you'll have to stay." "I _wish_ I hadn't taken this place!" she exclaimed. It was the first confession of what her real, her sane and intelligent self had been proclaiming loudly since the first flush of interest and pleasure in her "borrowed plumage" had receded. "Why _do_ you let me make a fool of myself?" "No use going into that," replied he, on guard not to take too seriously this belated penitence. He was used to Del's fits of remorse, so used to them that he thought them less valuable than they really were, or might have been had he understood her better--or, not bothered about trying to understand her. "I shan't be away long, I imagine," he went on, "and I'll have to rush round from England to France, to Germany, to Austria, to Switzerland. All that would be exhausting for you, and only a little of the time pleasant." His words sounded to her like a tolling over the grave of that former friendship and comradeship of theirs. "I really believe you'll be glad to get away alone," cried she, lips smiling raillery, eyes full of tears. "Do you think so?" said Dory, as if tossing back her jest. But both knew the truth, and each knew that the other knew it. He was as glad to escape from those surroundings as she to be relieved of a presence which edged on her other-self to scoff and rail and sneer at her. It had become bitterness to him to enter the gates of the Villa d'Orsay. His nerves were so wrought up that to look about the magnificent but too palace-like, too hotel-like rooms was to struggle with a longing to run amuck and pause not until he had reduced the splendor to smithereens. And in that injustice of chronic self-excuse which characterizes all human beings who do not live by intelligently formed and intelligently executed plan, she was now trying to soothe herself with blaming him for her low spirits; in fact, they were wholly the result of her consciously unworthy mode of life, and of an incessant internal warfare, exhausting and depressing. Also, the day would surely come when he would ask how she was contriving to keep up such imposing appearances on their eighteen hundred a year; and then she would have to choose between directly deceiving him and telling him that she had broken--no, not broken, that was too harsh--rather, had not yet fulfilled the promise to give up the income her father left her. After a constrained silence, "I really don't need anyone to stop here with me," she said to him, as if she had been thinking of it and not of the situation between them, "but I'll get Stella Wilmot and her brother." "Arden?" said Dory, doubtfully. "I know he's all right in some ways, and he has stopped drinking since he got the place at the bank. But--" "If we show we have confidence in him," replied Adelaide, "I think it will help him." "Very well," said Dory. "Besides, it isn't easy to find people of the sort you'd be willing to have, who can leave home and come here." Adelaide colored as she smiled. "Perhaps that _was_ my reason, rather than helping him," she said. Dory flushed. "Oh, I didn't mean to insinuate that!" he protested, and checked himself from saying more. In their mood each would search the other's every word for a hidden thrust, and would find it. The constraint between them, which thus definitely entered the stage of deep cleavage where there had never been a joining, persisted until the parting. Since the wedding he had kissed her but once--on her arrival from Europe. Then, there was much bustle of greeting from others, and neither had had chance to be self-conscious. When they were at the station for his departure, it so happened that no one had come with them. As the porter warned them that the train was about to move, they shook hands and hesitated, blushing and conscious of themselves and of spectators, "Good-by," stammered Dory, with a dash at her cheek. "Good-by," she murmured, making her effort at the same instant. The result was a confusion of features and hat brims that threw them into a panic, then into laughter, and so made the second attempt easy and successful. It was a real meeting of the lips. His arm went round her, her hand pressed tenderly on his shoulder, and he felt a trembling in her form, saw a sudden gleam of light leap into and from her eyes. And all in that flash the secret of his mistake in managing his love affair burst upon him. "Good-by, Dory--dear," she was murmuring, a note in her voice like the shy answer of a hermit thrush to the call of her mate. "All aboard!" shouted the conductor, and the wheels began to move. "Good-by--good-by," he stammered, his blood surging through his head. It came into her mind to say, "I care for you more than I knew." But his friend the conductor was thrusting him up the steps of the car. "I wish I had said it," thought she, watching the train disappear round the curve. "I'll write it." But she did not. When the time came to write, that idea somehow would not fit in with the other things she was setting down. "I think I do care for him--as a friend," she decided. "If he had only compelled me to find out the state of my own mind! What a strange man! I don't see how he can love me, for he knows me as I am. Perhaps he really doesn't; sometimes I think he couldn't care for a woman as a woman wants to be cared for." Then as his face as she had last seen it rose before her, and her lips once more tingled, "Oh, yes, he _does_ care! And without his love how wretched I'd be! What a greedy I am--wanting his love and taking it, and giving nothing in return." That last more than half-sincere, though she, like not a few of her sisters in the "Woman's Paradise," otherwise known as the United States of America, had been spoiled into greatly exaggerating the value of her graciously condescending to let herself be loved. And she was lonely without him. If he could have come back at the end of a week or a month, he would have been received with an ardor that would have melted every real obstacle between them. Also, it would have dissipated the far more obstructive imaginary obstacles from their infection with the latter-day vice of psychologizing about matters which lie in the realm of physiology, not of psychology. But he did not come; and absence, like bereavement, has its climax, after which the thing that was begins to be as if it had not been. He was gone; and that impetuous parting caress of his had roused in her an impulse that would never again sleep, would pace its cage restlessly, eager for the chance to burst forth. And he had roused it when he would not be there to make its imperious clamor personal to himself. As Estelle was at her shop all day, and not a few of the evenings, Del began to see much of Henrietta Hastings. Grandfather Fuller was now dead and forgotten in the mausoleum into which he had put one-fifth of his fortune, to the great discontent of the heirs. Henrietta's income had expanded from four thousand a year to twenty; and she spent her days in thinking of and talking of the careers to which she could help her husband if he would only shake off the lethargy which seized him the year after his marriage to a Fuller heiress. But Hastings would not; he was happy in his books and in his local repute for knowing everything there was to be known. Month by month he grew fatter and lazier and slower of speech. Henrietta pretended to be irritated against him, and the town had the habit of saying that "If Hastings had some of his wife's 'get up' he wouldn't be making her unhappy but would be winning a big name for himself." In fact, had Hastings tried to bestir himself at something definite in the way of action, Henrietta would have been really disturbed instead of simply pretending to be. She had a good mind, a keen wit that had become bitter with unlicensed indulgence; but she was as indolent and purposeless as her husband. All her energy went in talk about doing something, and every day she had a new scheme, with yesterday's forgotten or disdained. Adelaide pretended to herself to regard Henrietta as an energetic and stimulating person, though she knew that Henrietta's energy, like her own, like that of most women of the sheltered, servant-attended class, was a mere blowing off of steam by an active but valveless engine of a mind. But this pretense enabled her to justify herself for long mornings and afternoons at the Country Club with Henrietta. They talked of activity, of accomplishing this and that and the other; they read fitfully at serious books; they planned novels and plays; they separated each day with a comfortable feeling that they had been usefully employed. And each did learn much from the other; but, as each confirmed the other in the habitual mental vices of the women, and of an increasing number of the men, of our quite comfortable classes, the net result of their intercourse was pitifully poor, the poorer for their fond delusions that they were improving themselves. They laughed at the "culture craze" which, raging westward, had seized upon all the women of Saint X with incomes, or with husbands or fathers to support them in idleness--the craze for thinking, reading, and talking cloudily or muddily on cloudy or muddy subjects. Henrietta and Adelaide jeered; yet they were themselves the victims of another, and, if possible, more poisonous, bacillus of the same sluggard family. One morning Adelaide, in graceful ease in her favorite nook in the small northwest portico of the club house, was reading a most imposingly bound and illustrated work on Italian architecture written by a smatterer for smatterers. She did a great deal of reading in this direction because it was also the direction of her talent, and so she could make herself think she was getting ready to join in Dory's work when he returned. She heard footsteps just round the corner, and looked up. She and Ross Whitney were face to face. There was no chance for evasion. He, with heightened color, lifted his hat; she, with a nonchalance that made her proud of herself, smiled and stretched out her hand. "Hello, Ross," said she, languidly friendly. "When did _you_ come to town?" And she congratulated herself that her hair had gone up so well that morning and that her dress was one of her most becoming--from Paris, from Paquin--a year old, it is true, but later than the latest in Saint X and fashionable even for Sherry's at lunch time. Ross, the expert, got himself together and made cover without any seeming of scramble; but his not quite easy eyes betrayed him to her. "About two hours ago," replied he. "Is Theresa with you?" She gazed tranquilly at him as she fired this center shot. She admired the coolness with which he received it. "No; she's up at her father's place--on the lake shore," he answered. He, too, was looking particularly well, fresh yet experienced, and in dress a model, with his serge of a strange, beautiful shade of blue, his red tie and socks, and his ruby-set cuff-links. "Mr. Howland is ill, and she's nursing him. I'm taking a few days off--came down to try to sell father's place for him." "You're going to sell Point Helen?" said Adelaide, politely regretful. "Then I suppose we shan't see your people here any more. Your mother'll no doubt spend most of her time abroad, now that Janet is married there." Ross did not answer immediately. He was looking into the distance, his expression melancholy. His abstraction gave Adelaide a chance to verify the impression she had got from a swift but femininely penetrating first glance. Yes, he did look older; no, not exactly older--sad, rather. Evidently he was unhappy, distinctly unhappy. And as handsome and as tasteful as ever--the band of his straw hat, the flower in his buttonhole, his tie, his socks--all in harmony; no ostentation, just the unerring, quiet taste of a gentleman. What a satisfactory person to look at! To be sure, his character--However, character has nothing to do with the eye-pleasures, and they are undeniably agreeable. Then there were his manners, and his mind--such a man of the world! Of course he wasn't for one instant to be compared with Dory--who was? Still, it was a pity that Dory had a prejudice against showing all that he really was, a pity he had to be known to be appreciated--that is, appreciated by the "right sort" of people. Of course, the observant few could see him in his face, which was certainly distinguished--yes, far more distinguished than Ross's, if not so regularly handsome. "I've been looking over the old place," Ross was saying, "and I've decided to ask father to keep it. Theresa doesn't like it here; but I do, and I can't bring myself to cut the last cords. As I wandered over the place I found myself getting so sad and sentimental that I hurried away to escape a fit of the blues." "We're accustomed to that sort of talk," said Adelaide with a mocking smile in her delightful eyes. "People who used to live here and come back on business occasionally always tell us how much more beautiful Saint X is than any other place on earth. But they take the first train for Chicago or Cincinnati or anywhere at all." "So you find it dull here?" "I?" Adelaide shrugged her charming shoulders slightly. "Not so very. My life is here--the people, the things I'm used to. I've a sense of peace that I don't have anywhere else." She gazed dreamily away. "And peace is the greatest asset." "The greatest asset," repeated Ross absently. "You are to be envied." "_I_ think so," assented she, a curious undertone of defiance in her voice. She had a paniclike impulse to begin to talk of Dory; but, though she cast about diligently, she could find no way of introducing him that would not have seemed awkward--pointed and provincially prudish. "What are you reading?" he asked presently. She turned the book so that he could see the title. His eyes wandered from it to linger on her slender white fingers--on the one where a plain band of gold shone eloquently. It fascinated and angered him; and she saw it, and was delighted. Her voice had a note of triumph in it as she said, putting the book on the table beside her, "Foolish, isn't it, to be reading how to build beautiful houses"--she was going to say, "when one will probably never build any house at all." She bethought her that this might sound like a sigh over Dory's poverty and over the might-have-been. So she ended, "when the weather is so deliciously lazy." "I know the chap who wrote it," said Ross, "Clever--really unusual talent. But the fashionable women took him up, made him a toady and a snob, like the rest of the men of their set. How that sort of thing eats out manhood and womanhood!" Just what Dory often said! "My husband says," she answered, "that whenever the world has got a fair start toward becoming civilized, along have come wealth and luxury to smother and kill. It's very interesting to read history from that standpoint, instead of taking the usual view--that luxury produces the arts and graces." "Dory is a remarkable man," said Ross with enthusiasm. "He's amazingly modest; but there are some men so big that they can't hide, no matter how hard they try. He's one of them." Adelaide was in a glow, so happy did this sincere and just tribute make her, so relieved did she feel. She was talking to one of Dory's friends and admirers, not with an old sweetheart of hers about whom her heart, perhaps, might be--well, a little sore, and from whom radiated a respectful, and therefore subtle, suggestion that the past was very much the present for him. She hastened to expand upon Dory, upon his work; and, as she talked of the university, she found she had a pride in it, and an interest, and a knowledge, too, which astonished her. And Ross listened, made appreciative comments. And so, on and on. When Henrietta came they were laughing and talking like the best of old friends; and at Ross's invitation the three lunched at the club and spent the afternoon together. "I think marriage has improved Ross," said Henrietta, as she and Adelaide were driving home together after tea--tea with Ross. "Theresa is a very sweet woman," said Adelaide dutifully. "Oh, I don't mean that--any more than you do," replied Henrietta. "I mean marriage has chastened him--the only way it ever improves anybody." "No doubt he and Theresa are happy together," said Adelaide, clinging to her pretense with a persistence that might have given her interesting and valuable light upon herself had she noted it. "Happy?" Henrietta Hastings laughed. "Only stupid people are happy, my dear. Theresa may be happy, but not Ross. He's far too intelligent. And Theresa isn't capable of giving him even those moments of happiness that repay the intelligent for their routine of the other sort of thing." "Marriage doesn't mean much in a man's life," said Adelaide. "He has his business or profession. He is married only part of each day, and that the least important part to him." "Yes," replied Henrietta, "marriage is for a man simply a peg in his shoe--in place or, as with Ross Whitney, out of place. One look at his face was enough to show me that he was limping and aching and groaning." Adelaide found this pleasantry amusing far beyond its merits. "You can't tell," said she. "Theresa doesn't seem the same to him that she does to--to us." "Worse," replied Henrietta, "worse. It's fortunate they're rich. If the better class of people hadn't the money that enables them to put buffers round themselves, wife-beating wouldn't be confined to the slums. Think of life in one of two small rooms with a Theresa Howland!" Adelaide had fallen, as far as could one of her generous and tolerant disposition, into Henrietta's most infectious habit of girding at everyone humorously--the favorite pastime of the idle who are profoundly discontented with themselves. By the time Mrs. Hastings left her at the lofty imported gates of Villa d'Orsay, they had done the subject of Theresa full justice, and Adelaide entered the house with that sense of self-contempt which cannot but come to any decent person after meting out untempered justice to a fellow-mortal. This did not last, however; the pleasure in the realization that Ross did not care for Theresa and did care for herself was too keen. As the feminine test of feminine success is the impression a woman makes upon men, Adelaide would have been neither human nor woman had she not been pleased with Ross's discreet and sincerely respectful, and by no means deliberate or designing disclosure. It was not the proof of her power to charm the male that had made her indignant at herself. "How weak we women are!" she said to herself, trying to assume a penitence she could not make herself feel. "We really ought to be locked away in harems. No doubt Dory trusts me absolutely--that's because other women are no temptation to him--that is, I suppose they aren't. If he were different, he'd be afraid I had his weakness--we all think everybody has at least a touch of our infirmities. Of course I can be trusted; I've sense enough not to have my head turned by what may have been a mere clever attempt to smooth over the past." Then she remembered Ross's look at her hand, at her wedding ring, and Henrietta's confirmation of her own diagnosis. "But why should _that_ interest _me_," she thought, impatient with herself for lingering where her ideal of self-respect forbade. "I don't love Ross Whitney. He pleases me, as he pleases any woman he wishes to make an agreeable impression upon. And, naturally, I like to know that he really did care for me and is ashamed and repentant of the baseness that made him act as he did. But beyond that, I care nothing about him--nothing. I may not care for Dory exactly as I should; but at least knowing him has made it impossible for me to go back to the Ross sort of man." That seemed clear and satisfactory. But, strangely, her mind jumped to the somewhat unexpected conclusion, "And I'll not see him again." She wrote Dory that night a long, long letter, the nearest to a love letter she had ever written him. She brought Ross in quite casually; yet--What is the mystery of the telltale penumbra round the written word? Why was it that Dory, in far-away Vienna, with the memory of her strong and of the Villa d'Orsay dim, reading the letter for the first time, thought it the best he had ever got from her; and the next morning, reading it again, could think of nothing but Ross, and what Adelaide had really thought about him deep down in that dark well of the heart where we rarely let even our own eyes look intently? CHAPTER XXIII A STROLL IN A BYPATH Ross had intended to dine at the club; but Mrs. Hastings's trap was hardly clear of the grounds when he, to be free to think uninterruptedly, set out through the woods for Point Helen. Even had he had interests more absorbing than pastimes, display, and money-making by the "brace" game of "high finance" with its small risks of losing and smaller risks of being caught, even if he had been married to a less positive and incessant irritant than Theresa was to him, he would still not have forgotten Adelaide. Forgetfulness comes with the finished episode, never with the unfinished. In the circumstances, there could be but one effect from seeing her again. His regrets blazed up into fierce remorse, became the reckless raging of a passion to which obstacles and difficulties are as fuel to fire. Theresa, once the matter of husband-getting was safely settled, had no restraint of prudence upon her self-complacence. She "let herself go" completely, with results upon her character, her mind, and her personal appearance that were depressing enough to the casual beholder, but appalling to those who were in her intimacy of the home. Ross watched her deteriorate in gloomy and unreproving silence. She got herself together sufficiently for as good public appearance as a person of her wealth and position needed to make, he reasoned; what did it matter how she looked and talked at home where, after all, the only person she could hope to please was herself? He held aloof, drawn from his aloofness occasionally by her whim to indulge herself in what she regarded as proofs of his love. Her pouting, her whimpering, her abject but meaningless self-depreciation, her tears, were potent, not for the flattering reason she assigned, but because he, out of pity for her and self-reproach, and dread of her developing her mother's weakness, would lash himself into the small show of tenderness sufficient to satisfy her. And now, steeped in the gall of as bitter a draught as experience forces folly to drink anew each day to the dregs--the realization that, though the man marries the money only, he lives with the wife only--Ross had met Adelaide again. "I'll go to Chicago in the morning," was his conclusion. "I'll do the honorable thing"--he sneered at himself--"since trying the other would only result in her laughing at me and in my being still more miserable." But when morning came he was critical of the clothes his valet offered him, spent an hour in getting himself groomed for public appearance, then appeared at the Country Club for breakfast instead of driving to the station. And after breakfast, he put off his departure "until to-morrow or next day," and went to see Mr. and Mrs. Hastings. And what more natural then than that Henrietta should take him to the Villa d'Orsay "to show you how charmingly Del has installed herself." "And perhaps," said Henrietta, "she and Arden Wilmot will go for a drive. He has quit the bank because they objected to his resting two hours in the middle of the day." What more natural than that Adelaide should alter her resolution under the compulsion of circumstance, should spend the entire morning in the gardens, she with Ross, Henrietta with Arden? Finally, to avoid strain upon her simple domestic arrangements in that period of retrenchment, what more natural than falling in with Ross's proposal of lunch at Indian Mound? And who ever came back in a hurry from Indian Mound, with its quaint vast earthworks, its ugly, incredibly ancient potteries and flint instruments that could be uncovered anywhere with the point of a cane or parasol; its superb panorama, bounded by the far blue hills where, in days that were ancient when history began, fires were lighted by sentinels to signal the enemy's approach to a people whose very dust, whose very name has perished? It was six o'clock before they began the return drive; at seven they were passing the Country Club, and, of course, they dined there and joined in the little informal dance afterwards; and later, supper and cooling drinks in a corner of the veranda, with the moon streaming upon them and the enchanted breath of the forest enchaining the senses. What a day! How obligingly all unpleasant thoughts fled! How high and bright rose the mountains all round the horizon of the present, shutting out yesterday and to-morrow! "This has been _the_ happy day of my life," said Ross as they lingered behind the other two on the way to the last 'bus for the town. "The happiest"--in a lower tone--"thus far." And Del was sparkling assent, encouragement even; and her eyes were gleaming defiantly at the only-too-plainly-to-be-read faces of the few hilltop people still left at the club house. "Surely a woman has the right to enjoy herself innocently in the twentieth century," she was saying to herself. "Dory wouldn't want me to sit moping alone. I am young; I'll have enough of that after I'm old--one is old so much longer than young." And she looked up at Ross, and very handsome he was in that soft moonlight, his high-blazing passion glorifying his features. "I, too, have been happy," she said to him. Then, with a vain effort to seem and to believe herself at ease, "I wish Dory could have been along." But Ross was not abashed by the exorcism of that name; her bringing it in was too strained, would have been amusing if passion were not devoid of the sense of humor. "She _does_ care for me!" he was thinking dizzily. "And I can't live without her--and _won't_!" His mother had been writing him her discoveries that his father, in wretched health and goaded by physical torment to furious play at the green tables of "high finance," was losing steadily, swiftly, heavily. But Ross read her letters as indifferently as he read Theresa's appeals to him to come to Windrift. It took a telegram--"Matters much worse than I thought. You must be here to talk with him before he begins business to-morrow"--to shock him into the realization that he had been imperiling the future he was dreaming of and planning--his and Del's future. On the way to the train he stopped at the Villa d'Orsay, saw her and Henrietta at the far end of Mrs. Dorsey's famed white-and-gold garden. Henrietta was in the pavilion reading. A few yards away Adelaide, head bent and blue sunshade slowly turning as it rested on her shoulder, was strolling round the great flower-rimmed, lily-strewn outer basin of Mrs. Dorsey's famed fountain, the school of crimson fish, like a streak of fire in the water, following her. When she saw him coming toward them in traveling suit, instead of the white serge he always wore on such days as was that, she knew he was going away--a fortunate forewarning, for she thus had time to force a less telltale expression before he announced the reason for his call. "But," he added, "I'll be back in a few days--a very few." "Oh!" was all Del said; but her tone of relief, her sudden brightening, were more significant than any words could have been. Henrietta now joined them. "You take the afternoon express?" said she. Ross could not conceal how severe a test of his civility this interruption was. "Yes," said he. "My trap is in front of the house." There he colored before Henrietta's expression, a mingling of amusement, indignation, and contempt, a caustic comment upon his disregard of the effect of such indiscretion upon a Saint X young married woman's reputation. "Then," said she, looking straight and significantly at him, "you'll be able to drop me at my house on the way." "Certainly," was his prompt assent. When Saint X's morality police should see him leaving the grounds with her, they would be silenced as to this particular occurrence at least. After a few minutes of awkward commonplaces, he and Henrietta went up the lawns, leaving Del there. At the last point from which the end of the garden could be seen, he dropped behind, turned, saw her in exactly the same position, the fountain and the water lilies before her, the center and climax of those stretches of white-and-gold blossoms. The sunshade rested lightly upon her shoulder, and its azure concave made a harmonious background for her small, graceful head with the airily plumed hat set so becomingly upon those waves of dead-gold hair. He waved to her; but she made no sign of having seen. When Henrietta returned, Adelaide had resumed her reverie and her slow march round the fountain. Henrietta watched with a quizzical expression for some time before saying: "If I hadn't discouraged him, I believe he'd have blurted it all out to me--all he came to say to you." Del was still absent-minded as she answered: "It's too absurd. People are so censorious, so low-minded." "They are," rejoined Mrs. Hastings. "And, I'm sorry to say, as a rule they're right." The curve of Del's delicate eyebrows and of her lips straightened. "All the trouble comes through our having nothing to do," pursued Henrietta, disregarding those signs that her "meddling" was unwelcome. "The idle women! We ought to be busy at something useful--you and I and the rest of 'em. Then we'd not be tempted to kill time doing things that cause gossip, and may cause scandal." Seeing that Adelaide was about to make some curt retort, she added: "Now, don't pretend, Del. You know, yourself, that they're always getting into mischief and getting the men into mischief." "Don't you ever feel, Henrietta, that we're simply straws in the strong wind?" "Fate sometimes does force mischief on men and women," was Henrietta's retort, "and it ceases to be mischief--becomes something else, I'm not sure just what. But usually fate has nothing to do with the matter. It's we ourselves that course for mischief, like a dog for rabbits." Del, in sudden disdain of evasion, faced her with, "Well, Henrietta, what of it?" Mrs. Hastings elevated and lowered her shoulders. "Simply that you're seeing too much of Ross--too much for his good, if not for your own." Del's sunshade was revolving impatiently. "It's as plain as black on white," continued Mrs. Hastings, "that he's madly in love with you--in love as only an experienced man can be with an experienced and developed woman." "Well, what of it?" Del's tone was hostile, defiant. "You can't abruptly stop seeing him. Everyone'd say you and he were meeting secretly." "Really!" "But you can be careful how you treat him. You can show him, and everybody, that there's nothing in it. You must--" Henrietta hesitated, dared; "you must be just friendly, as you are with Arden and the rest of the men." Hiram's daughter was scarlet. Full a minute, and a very full minute, of silence. Then Adelaide said coldly: "Thank you. And now that you've freed your mind I hope you'll keep it free for your own affairs." "Ouch!" cried Henrietta, making a wry face. And she devoted the rest of the afternoon to what she realized, at the parting, was the vain task of mollifying Del. She knew that thenceforth she and Adelaide would drift apart; and she was sorry, for she liked her--liked to talk with her, liked to go about with her. Adelaide's beauty attracted the men, and a male audience was essential to Henrietta's happiness; she found the conversation of women--the women she felt socially at ease with--tedious, and their rather problematic power of appreciation limited to what came from men. As she grew older, and less and less pleasing to the eye, the men showed more and more clearly how they had deceived themselves in thinking it was her brains that had made them like her. As Henrietta, with mournful cynicism, put it: "Men the world over care little about women beyond their physical charm. To realize it, look at us American women, who can do nothing toward furthering men's ambitions. We've only our physical charms to offer; we fall when we lose them. And so our old women and our homely women, except those that work or that have big houses and social power, have no life of their own, live on sufferance, alone or the slaves of their daughters or of some pretty young woman to whom they attach themselves." The days dragged for Adelaide. "I'm afraid he'll write," said she--meaning that she hoped he would. Indeed, she felt that he had written, but had destroyed the letters. And she was right; almost all the time he could spare from his efforts to save his father from a sick but obstinately active man's bad judgment was given to writing to her--formal letters which he tore up as too formal, passionate letters which he destroyed as unwarranted and unwise, when he had not yet, face to face, in words, told her his love and drawn from her what he believed was in her heart. The days dragged; she kept away from Henrietta, from all "our set," lest they should read in her dejected countenance the truth, and more. CHAPTER XXIV DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES Madelene's anteroom was full of poor people. They flocked to her, though she did not pauperize them by giving her services free. She had got the reputation of miraculous cures, the theory in the tenements being that her father had swindled his satanic "familiar" by teaching his daughter without price what he had had to pay for with his immortal soul. Adelaide refused the chair a sick-looking young artisan awkwardly pressed upon her. Leaning against the window seat, she tried to interest herself in her fellow-invalids. But she had not then the secret which unlocks the mystery of faces; she was still in the darkness in which most of us proudly strut away our lives, deriding as dreamers or cranks those who are in the light and see. With almost all of us the innate sympathies of race, which give even wolves and vultures the sense of fraternal companionship in the storm and stress of the struggle for existence, are deep overlaid with various kinds of that egotistic ignorance called class feeling. Adelaide felt sorry for "the poor," but she had yet to learn that she was of them, as poor in other and more important ways as they in money and drawing-room manners. Surfaces and the things of the surface obscured or distorted all the realities for her, as for most of us; and the fact that her intelligence laughed at and scorned her perverted instincts was of as little help to her as it is to most of us. When Madelene was free she said to her sister-in-law, in mock seriousness, "Well, and what can I do for _you_!" as if she were another patient. Adelaide's eyes shifted. Clearly Madelene's keen, pretense-scattering gaze was not one to invite to inspect a matter which might not look at all well stripped of its envelopes of phrase and haze. She wished she had not come; indeed, she had been half-wishing it during the whole three-quarters of an hour of watching and thinking on Madelene's wonderful life, so crowded with interest, with achievement, with all that Hiram Ranger's daughter called, and believed, "the real thing." "Nothing, nothing at all," replied she to Madelene's question. "I just dropped in to annoy you with my idle self--or, maybe, to please you. You know we're taught at church that a large part of the joy of the saved comes from watching the misery of the damned." But Madelene had the instinct of the physician born. "She has something on her mind and wants me to help her," she thought. Aloud she said: "I feel idle, myself. We'll sit about for an hour, and you'll stay to dinner with Arthur and me--we have it here to-day, as your mother is going out. Afterwards I must do my round." A silence, with Adelaide wondering where Ross was and just when he would return. Then Madelene went on: "I've been trying to persuade your mother to give up the house, change it into a hospital." The impudence of it! _Their_ house, _their_ home; and this newcomer into the family--a newcomer from nowhere--trying to get it away from them! "Mother said something about it," said Adelaide frostily. "But she didn't say _you_ had been at her. I think she ought to be left alone in her old age." "The main thing is to keep her interested in life, don't you think?" suggested Madelene, noting how Adelaide was holding herself in check, but disregarding it. "Your mother's a plain, natural person and never has felt at home in that big house. Indeed, I don't think any human being ever does feel at home in a big house. There was a time when they fitted in with the order of things; but now they've become silly, it seems to me, except for public purposes. When we all get sensible and go in for being somebody instead of for showing off, we'll live in convenient, comfortable, really tasteful and individual houses and have big buildings only for general use." "I'm afraid the world will never grow up into your ideals, Madelene," said Del with restrained irony. "At least not in our day." "I'm in no hurry," replied Madelene good-naturedly. "The most satisfactory thing about common sense is that one can act on it without waiting for others to get round to it. But we weren't talking of those who would rather be ignorantly envied than intelligently happy. We were talking of your mother." "Mother was content with her mode of life until you put these 'advanced' ideas into her head." "'Advanced' is hardly the word," said Madelene. "They used to be her ideas--always have been, underneath. If it weren't that she is afraid of hurting your feelings, she'd not hesitate an instant. She'd take the small house across the way and give herself the happiness of helping with the hospital she'd install in the big house. You know she always had a passion for waiting on people. Here's her chance to gratify it to good purpose. Why should she let the fact that she has money enough not to have to work stand between her and happy usefulness?" "What does Arthur think?" asked Del. Her resentment was subsiding in spite of her determined efforts to keep it glowing; Madelene knew the secret of manner that enables one to be habitually right without giving others the sense of being put irritatingly in the wrong. "But," smiling, "I needn't inquire. Of course he assents to whatever _you_ say." "You know Arthur better than that," replied Madelene, with no trace of resentment. She had realized from the beginning of the conversation that Del's nerves were on edge; her color, alternately rising and fading, and her eyes, now sparkling now dull, could only mean fever from a tempest of secret emotion. "He and I usually agree simply because we see things in about the same light." "You furnish the light," teased Adelaide. "That was in part so at first," admitted her sister-in-law. "Arthur had got many foolish notions in his head through accepting thoughtlessly the ideas of the people he traveled with. But, once he let his good sense get the upper hand--He helps me now far more than I help him." "Has he consented to let them give him a salary yet?" asked Adelaide, not because she was interested, but because she desperately felt that the conversation must be kept alive. Perhaps Ross was even now on his way to Saint X. "He still gets what he fixed on at first--ten dollars a week more than the foreman." "Honestly, Madelene," said Adelaide, in a flush and flash of irritation, "don't you think that's absurd? With the responsibility of the whole business on his shoulders, you know he ought to have more than a common workman." "In the first place you must not forget that everyone is paid very high wages at the university works now." "And he's the cause of that--of the mills doing so well," said Del. She could see Ross entering the gates--at the house--inquiring--What was she talking to Madelene about? Yes, about Arthur and the mills. "Even the men that criticise him--Arthur, I mean--most severely for 'sowing discontent in the working class,' as they call it," she went on, "concede that he has wonderful business ability. So he ought to have a huge salary." "No doubt he earns it," replied Madelene. "But the difficulty is that he can't take it without it's coming from the other workmen. You see, money is coined sweat. All its value comes from somebody's labor. He deserves to be rewarded for happening to have a better brain than most men, and for using it better. But there's no fund for rewarding the clever for being cleverer than most of their fellow-beings, any more than there's a fund to reward the handsome for being above the average in looks. So he has to choose between robbing his fellow-workmen, who are in his power, and going without riches. He prefers going without." "That's very noble of you both, I'm sure," said Adelaide absently. The Chicago express would be getting in at four o'clock--about five hours. Absurd! The morning papers said Mr. Whitney had had a relapse. "Very noble," she repeated absently. "But I doubt if anybody will appreciate it." Madelene smiled cheerfully. "That doesn't worry Arthur or me," said she, with her unaffected simplicity. "We're not looking for appreciation. We're looking for a good time." Del, startled, began to listen to Madelene. A good time--"And it so happens," came in Madelene's sweet, honest voice, "that we're unable to have it, unless we feel that we aren't getting it by making some one else have a not-so-good time or a very bad time indeed. You've heard of Arthur's latest scheme?" "Some one told me he was playing smash at the mills, encouraging the workmen to idleness and all that sort of thing," said Del. Somehow she felt less feverish, seemed compelled to attention by Madelene's voice and eyes. "But I didn't hear or understand just how." "He's going to establish a seven-hours' working day; and, if possible, cut it down to six." Madelene's eyes were sparkling. Del watched her longingly, enviously. How interested she was in these useful things. How fine it must be to be interested where one could give one's whole heart without concealment--or shame! "And," Madelene was saying, "the university is to change its schedules so that all its practical courses will be at hours when men working in the factory can take them. It's simply another development of his and Dory's idea that a factory belonging to a university ought to set a decent example--ought not to compel its men to work longer than is necessary for them to earn at honest wages a good living for themselves and their families." "So that they can sit round the saloons longer," suggested Adelaide, and then she colored and dropped her eyes; she was repeating Ross's comment on this sort of "concession to the working classes." She had thought it particularly acute when he made it. Now-- "No doubt most of them will spend their time foolishly at first," Madelene conceded. "Working people have had to work so hard for others--twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, just to be allowed to live--that they've had really no free time at all; so they've had no chance to learn how to spend free time sensibly. But they'll learn, those of them that have capacity for improvement. Those that haven't will soon drop out." "The factories can't make money on such a plan as that," said Adelaide, again repeating a remark of Ross's, but deliberately, because she believed it could be answered, wished to hear it answered. "No, not dividends," replied Madelene. "But dividends are to be abolished in that department of the university, just as they are in the other departments. And the money the university needs is to come from tuition fees. Everyone is to pay for what he gets. Some one has to pay for it; why not the person who gets the benefit? Especially when the university's farms and workshops and factories give every student, man and woman, a chance to earn a good living. I tell you Adelaide, the time is coming when every kind of school except kindergarten will be self-supporting. And then you'll see a human race that is really fine, really capable, has a real standard of self-respect." As Madelene talked, her face lighted up and all her latent magnetism was radiating. Adelaide, for no reason that was clear to her, yielded to a surge of impulse and, half-laughing, half in tears, suddenly kissed Madelene. "No wonder Arthur is mad about you, stark mad," she cried. Madelene was for a moment surprised out of that perfect self-unconsciousness which is probably the rarest of human qualities, and which was her greatest charm to those who knew her well. She blushed furiously and angrily. Her and Arthur's love was to her most sacred, absolutely between themselves. When any outsider could observe them, even her sister Walpurga, she seemed so much the comrade and fellow-worker in her attitude toward him that people thought and spoke of their married life as "charming, but cold." Alone with him, she showed that which was for him alone--a passion whose strength had made him strong, as the great waves give their might to the swimmer who does not shrink from adventuring them. Adelaide's impulsive remark, had violated her profoundest modesty; and in the shock she showed it. "I beg your pardon!" exclaimed Adelaide, though she did not realize wherein she had offended. Love was an unexplored, an unsuspected mystery to her then--the more a mystery because she thought she knew from having read about it and discussed it and reasoned about it. "Oh, I understand," said Madelene, contrite for her betraying expression. "Only--some day--when you really fall in love--you'll know why I was startled." Adelaide shrank within herself. "Even Madelene," thought she, "who has not a glance for other people's affairs, knows how it is between Dory and me." It was Madelene's turn to be repentant and apologetic. "I didn't mean quite that," she stammered. "Of course I know you care for Dory--" The tears came to Del's eyes and the high color to her cheeks. "You needn't make excuses," she cried. "It's the truth. I don't care--in _that_ way." A silence; then Madelene, gently: "Was this what you came to tell me?" Adelaide nodded slowly. "Yes, though I didn't know it." "Why tell _me_?" "Because I think I care for another man." Adelaide was not looking away. On the contrary, as she spoke, saying the words in an even, reflective tone, she returned her sister-in-law's gaze fully, frankly. "And I don't know what to do. It's very complicated--doubly complicated." "The one you were first engaged to?" "Yes," said Del. "Isn't it pitiful in me?" And there was real self-contempt in her voice and in her expression. "I assumed that I despised him because he was selfish and calculating, and _such_ a snob! Now I find I don't mind his selfishness, and that I, too, am a snob." She smiled drearily. "I suppose you feel the proper degree of contempt and aversion." "We are all snobs," answered Madelene tranquilly. "It's one of the deepest dyes of the dirt we came from, the hardest to wash out." "Besides," pursued Adelaide, "he and I have both learned by experience--which has come too late; it always does." "Not at all," said Madelene briskly. "Experience is never too late. It's always invaluably useful in some way, no matter when it comes." Adelaide was annoyed by Madelene's lack of emotion. She had thought her sister-in-law would be stirred by a recital so romantic, so dark with the menace of tragedy. Instead, the doctor was acting as if she were dealing with mere measles. Adelaide, unconsciously, of course--we are never conscious of the strong admixture of vanity in our "great" emotions--was piqued into explaining. "We can never be anything to each other. There's Dory; then there's Theresa. And I'd suffer anything rather than bring shame and pain on others." Madelene smiled--somehow not irritatingly--an appeal to Del's sense of proportion. "Suffer," repeated she. "That's a good strong word for a woman to use who has health and youth and beauty, and material comfort--and a mind capable of an infinite variety of interests." Adelaide's tragic look was slipping from her. "Don't take too gloomy a view," continued the physician. "Disease and death and one other thing are the only really serious ills. In this case of yours everything will come round quite smooth, if you don't get hysterical and if Ross Whitney is really in earnest and not"--Madelene's tone grew even more deliberate--"not merely getting up a theatrical romance along the lines of the 'high-life' novels you idle people set such store by." She saw, in Del's wincing, that the shot had landed. "No," she went on, "your case is one of the commonplaces of life among those people--and they're in all classes--who look for emotions and not for opportunities to be useful." Del smiled, and Madelene hailed the returning sense of humor as an encouraging sign. "The one difficult factor is Theresa," said Madelene, pushing on with the prescription. "She--I judge from what I've heard--she's what's commonly called a 'poor excuse for a woman.' We all know that type. You may be sure her vanity would soon find ways of consoling her. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred where one holds on after the other has let go the reason is vanity, wounded vanity--where it isn't the material consideration that explains why there are so many abandoned wives and so few abandoned husbands. Theresa doesn't really care for her husband; love that isn't mutual isn't love. So she'd come up smiling for a second husband." "She's certainly vain," said Del. "Losing him would all but kill her." "Not if it's done tactfully," replied Madelene. "Ross'll no doubt be glad to sacrifice his own vanity and so arrange matters that she'll be able to say and feel that she got rid of him, not he of her. Of course that means a large sacrifice of his vanity--and of yours, too. But neither of you will mind that." Adelaide looked uncomfortable; Madelene took advantage of her abstraction to smile at the confession hinted in that look. "As for Dory--" At that name Del colored and hung her head. "As for Dory," repeated Madelene, not losing the chance to emphasize the effect, "he's no doubt fond of you. But no matter what he--or you--may imagine, his fondness cannot be deeper than that of a man for a woman between whom and him there isn't the perfect love that makes one of two." "I don't understand his caring for me," cried Del. "I can't believe he does." This in the hope of being contradicted. But Madelene simply said: "Perhaps he'd not feel toward you as he seems to think he does if he hadn't known you before you went East and got fond of the sort of thing that attracts you in Ross Whitney. Anyhow, Dory's the kind of man to be less unhappy over losing you than over keeping you when you didn't want to stay. You may be like his eyes to him, but you know if that sort of man loses his sight he puts seeing out of the calculation and goes on just the same. Dory Hargrave is a _man_; and a real man is bigger than any love affair, however big." Del was trying to hide the deep and smarting wound to her vanity. "You are right, Madelene," said she. "Dory _is_ cold." "But I didn't say that," replied Madelene. "Most of us prefer people like those flabby sea creatures that are tossed aimlessly about by the waves and have no permanent shape or real purposes and desires, but take whatever their feeble tentacles can hold without effort." Del winced, and it was the highest tribute to Dr. Madelene's skill that the patient did not hate her and refuse further surgery. "We're used to that sort," continued she. "So when a really alive, vigorous, pushing, and resisting personality comes in contact with us, we say, 'How hard! How unfeeling!' The truth, of course, is that Ross is more like the flabby things--his environment dominates him, while Dory dominates his environment. But you like the Ross sort, and you're right to suit yourself. To suit yourself is the only way to avoid making a complete failure of life. Wait till Dory comes home. Then talk it out with him. Then--free yourself and marry Ross, who will have freed himself. It's quite simple. People are broad-minded about divorce nowadays. It never causes serious scandal, except among those who'd like to do the same, but don't dare." It certainly was easy, and ought to have been attractive. Yet Del was not attracted. "One can't deal with love in such a cold, calculating fashion," thought she, by way of bolstering up her weakening confidence in the reality and depth of those sensations which had seemed so thrillingly romantic an hour before. "I've given you the impression that Ross and I have some--some understanding," said she. "But we haven't. For all I know, he may not care for me as I care for him." "He probably doesn't," was Madelene's douche-like reply. "You attract him physically--which includes his feeling that you'd show off better than Theresa before the world for which he cares so much. But, after all, that's much the way you care for him, isn't it?" Adelaide's bosom was swelling and falling agitatedly. Her eyes flashed; her reserve vanished. "I'm sure he'd love me!" cried she. "He'd give me what my whole soul, my whole body cry out for. Madelene, you don't understand! I am so starved, so out in the cold! I want to go in where it's warm--and--human!" The truth, the deep-down truth, was out at last; Adelaide had wrenched it from herself. "And Dory will not give you that?" said Madelene, all gentleness and sympathy, and treading softly on this dangerous, delicate ground. "He gives me nothing!" exclaimed Adelaide bitterly. "He is waiting for me to learn to love him. He ought to know that a woman has to be taught to love--at least the sort of woman I am. He treats me as if I were his equal, when he ought to see that I'm not; that I'm like a child, and have to be shown what's good for me, and _made_ to take it." "Then, perhaps, after all," said Madelene slowly, "you do care for Dory." "Of course I care for him; how could anyone help it? But he won't let me--he won't let me!" She was on the verge of hysteria, and her loss of self-control was aggravated by the feeling that she was making a weak, silly exhibition of herself. "If you do care for Dory, and Dory cares for you, and you don't care for Ross--" began Madelene. "But I do care for Ross, too! Oh, I must be bad--bad! Could a nice woman care for two men at the same time?" "I'd have said not," was Madelene's answer. "But now I see that she could--and I see why." "Dory means something to me that Ross does not. Ross means something that Dory does not. I want it all--all that both of them represent. I can't give up Dory; I can't give up Ross. You don't understand, Madelene, because you've had the good luck to get it all from Arthur." After a silence, Madelene said: "Well, Del, what are you going to do?" "Nothing." "That's sensible!" approved Madelene. "If Ross really loves you, then, whether he can have you or not, he'll free himself from Theresa. He simply couldn't go on with her. And if you really care for him, then, when Dory comes home he'll free you." "That ought to be so," said Adelaide, not seeing the full meaning of Madelene's last words. "But it isn't. Neither Ross nor I is strong enough. We're just ordinary people, the sort that most everybody is and that most everybody despises when they see them or read about them as they really are. No, he and I will each do the conventional thing. We'll go our separate ways "--contemptuously--"the _easiest_ ways. And we'll regard ourselves as martyrs to duty--that's how they put it in the novels, isn't it?" "At least," said Madelene, with a calmness she was far from feeling, "both you and Ross have had your lesson in the consequence of doing things in a hurry." "That's the only way people brought up as we've been ever do anything. If we don't act on impulse, we don't act at all; we drift on." "Drifting is action, the most decisive kind of action." Madelene was again thinking what would surely happen the instant Dory found how matters stood; but she deemed it tactful to keep this thought to herself. Just then she was called to the telephone. When she came back she found Adelaide restored to her usual appearance--the fashionable, light-hearted, beautiful woman, mistress of herself, and seeming as secure against emotional violence from within as against discourtesy from without. But she showed how deep was the impression of Madelene's common-sense analysis of her romance by saying: "A while ago you said there were only three serious ills, disease and death, but you didn't name the third. What is it?" "Dishonor," said Madelene, with a long, steady look at her. Adelaide paled slightly, but met her sister-in-law's level gaze. "Yes," was all she said. A silence; then Madelene: "Your problem, Del, is simple; is no problem at all, so far as Dory or Ross's wife is concerned; or the whole outside world, for that matter. It's purely personal; it's altogether the problem of bringing pain and shame on yourself. The others'll get over it; but can you?" Del made no reply. A moment later Arthur came; after dinner she left before he did, and so was not alone with Madelene again. Reviewing her amazing confessions to her sister-in-law, she was both sorry and not sorry. Her mind was undoubtedly relieved, but at the price of showing to another her naked soul, and that other a woman--true, an unusual woman, by profession a confessor, but still a woman. Thenceforth some one other than herself would know her as she really was--not at all the nice, delicate lady with instincts as fine as those of the heroines of novels, who, even at their most realistic, are pictured as fully and grandly dressed of soul in the solitude of bedroom as in crowded drawing-room. "I don't care!" concluded Adelaide. "If she, or anyone, thinks the worse of me for being a human being, it will show either hypocrisy or ignorance of human nature." CHAPTER XXV MAN AND GENTLEMAN A few evenings later, Del, in a less strained, less despondent frame of mind, coming home from supper at her mother's, found Estelle Wilmot on the front veranda talking with Lorry Tague. She had seen this same sight perhaps half-a-dozen times since Estelle and Arden had come to stop with her at the Villa d'Orsay. On this particular evening his manner toward Estelle was no different from what it had been the other times; yet, as Del approached them, she felt the electric atmosphere which so often envelops two who love each other, and betrays their secret carefully guarded behind formal manner and indifferent look and tone. She wondered that she had been blind to what was now obvious. "Well, Arthur has at last compelled you to go to work," said she smilingly to the big cooper with the waving tawny hair and the keen, kind gray eyes. Then, to show her respect for the secret, she said to Estelle, "Perhaps he hasn't told you that he was made superintendent of the cooperage to-day?" Estelle blushed a little, her eyes dancing. "He was just telling me," replied she. "I understand why you yielded," continued Adelaide to Lorry. "Arthur has been showing me the plans for the new factories. Gardens all round, big windows, high ceilings, everything done by electricity, no smoke or soot, a big swimming pool for winter or summer, a big restaurant, dressing rooms--everything! Who'd have believed that work could be carried on in such surroundings?" "It's about time, isn't it," said Lorry, in his slow, musical voice, "that idleness was deprived of its monopoly of comforts and luxuries?" "How sensible that is!" said Del admiringly. "Yet nobody thinks of it." "Why," Lorry went on, "the day'll come when they'll look back on the way we work nowadays, as we do on the time when a lot of men never went out to work except in chains and with keepers armed with lashes. The fellows that call Dory and Arthur crazy dreamers don't realize what ignorant savages they themselves are." "They have no imagination," said Estelle. "No imagination," echoed Lorry. "That's the secret of the stupidity and the horror of change, and of the notion that the way a thing's done to-day is the way it'll always be done." "I'm afraid Arthur is going to get himself into even deeper trouble when these new plans are announced," said Del. Arthur's revolution had already inflamed the other manufacturers at Saint X against him. Huge incomes were necessary to the support of their extravagant families and to the increase of the fortunes they were piling up "to save their children from fear of want"--as if that same "fear of want" were not the only known spur to the natural lethargy of the human animal! They explained to their workmen that the university industries were not business enterprises at all, and therefore must not be confused and compared with enterprises that were "practical"; but the workmen fixed tenaciously upon the central fact that the university's men worked at mechanical labor fewer hours each day by four to seven, and even eight, got higher wages, got more out of life in every way. Nor was there any of the restraint and degradation of the "model town." The workers could live and act as they pleased; it was by the power of an intelligent public opinion that Arthur was inducing his fellows and their families to build for themselves attractive homes, to live in tasteful comfort, to acquire sane habits of eating, drinking, and personal appearance. And no one was more amazed than himself at the swiftness with which the overwhelming majority responded to the opportunity. Small wonder that the other manufacturers, who at best never went beyond the crafty, inexpensive schemes of benevolent charity, were roaring against the university as a "hotbed of anarchy." At Adelaide's suggestion of the outburst that would follow the new and still more "inflammatory" revolution, Lorry shrugged his shoulders and laughed easily. "Nobody need worry for that brother of yours, Mrs. Hargrave," said he. "There may be some factories for sale cheap before many years. If so, the university can buy them in and increase its usefulness. Dory and Arthur are going to have a university that will be up to the name before they get through--one for all ages and kinds, and both sexes, and for everybody all his life long and in all his relations." "It's a beautiful dream," said Del. She was remembering how Dory used to enlarge upon it in Paris until his eloquence made her feel that she loved him at the same time that it also gave her a chilling sense of his being far from her, too big and impersonal for so intimate and personal a thing as the love she craved. "A beautiful dream," she repeated with a sigh. "That's the joy of life," said Estelle, "isn't it? To have beautiful dreams, and to help make them come true." "And this one is actually coming true," said Lorry. "Wait a few years, only a few, and you'll see the discoveries of science make everything so cheap that vulgar, vain people will give up vulgarity and vanity in despair. A good many of the once aristocratic vulgarities have been cheapened into absurdity already. The rest will follow." "Only a few years?" said Del, laughing, yet more than half-convinced. "Use your imagination, Mrs. Hargrave," replied Lorry, in his large, good-humored way. "Don't be afraid to be sensible just because most people look on common sense as insanity. A hundred things that used to be luxuries for the king alone are now so cheap that the day-laborer has them--all in less than two lifetimes of real science! To-morrow or next day some one will discover, say, the secret of easily and cheaply interchanging the so-called elements. Bang! the whole structure of swagger and envy will collapse!" They all laughed, and Del went into the house. "Estelle--no woman, no matter who--could hope to get a better husband than Lorry," she was thinking. "And, now that he's superintendent, there's no reason why they shouldn't marry. What a fine thing, what an American thing, that a man with no chance at all in the start should be able to develop himself so that a girl like Estelle could--yes, and should--be proud of his love and proud to love him." She recalled how Lorry at the high school was about the most amusing of the boys, with the best natural manner, and far and away the best dancer; how he used to be invited everywhere, until excitement about fashion and "family" reached Saint X; how he was then gradually dropped until he, realizing what was the matter, haughtily "cut" all his former friends and associates. "We've certainly been racing downhill these last few years. Where the Wilmots used to be about the only silly people in town, there are scores of families now with noses in the air and eyes looking eagerly about for chances to snub. But, on the other hand, there's the university, and Arthur--and Dory." She dismissed Lorry and Estelle and Saint X's fashionable strivings and, in the library, sat down to compose a letter to Dory--no easy task in those days, when there were seething in her mind and heart so much that she longed to tell him but ought not, so much that she ought to tell but could not. Lorry had acted as if he were about to depart, while Adelaide was there; he resumed his seat on the steps at Estelle's feet as soon as she disappeared. "I suppose I ought to go," said he, with a humorous glance up at her face with its regular features and steadfast eyes. She ran her slim fingers through his hair, let the tips of them linger an instant on his lips before she took her hand away. "I couldn't let you go just yet," said she slowly, absently. "This is the climax of the day. In this great, silent, dim light all my dreams--all our dreams--seem to become realities and to be trooping down from the sky to make us happy." A pause, then he: "I can see them now." But soon he moved to rise. "It frightens me to be as happy as I am this evening. I must go, dear. We're getting bolder and bolder. First thing you know, your brother will be suspecting--and that means your mother." "I don't seem to care any more," replied the girl. "Mother is really in much better health, and has got pretty well prepared to expect almost anything from me. She has become resigned to me as a 'working person.' Then, too, I'm thoroughly inoculated with the habit of doing as I please. I guess that's from being independent and having my own money. What a good thing money is!" "So long as it means independence," suggested Lorry; "but not after it means dependence." But Estelle was thinking of their future. The delay, the seemingly endless delay, made her even more impatient than it made him, as is always the case where the woman is really in love. In the man love holds the impetuosity of passion in leash; in the woman it rouses the deeper, the more enduring force of the maternal instinct--not merely the unconscious or, at most, half-conscious longing for the children that are to be, but the desire to do for the man--to look after his health, his physical comfort, to watch over and protect him; for, to the woman in love, the man seems in those humble ways less strong than she--a helpless creature, dependent on her. "It's going to be much harder to wait," said she, "now that you are superintendent and I have bought out Mrs. Hastings's share of my business." They both laughed, but Lorry said: "It's no joke. A little too much money has made fools of as wise people as we are--many and many's the time." "Not as wise a person as you are, and as you'll always make me be, or seem to be," replied Estelle. Lorry pressed his big hand over hers for an instant. "Now that I've left off real work," said he, "I'll soon be able to take your hand without giving you a rough reminder of the difference between us." He held out his hands, palms upward. They were certainly not soft and smooth, but they more than made up in look of use and strength what they lacked in smoothness. She put her small hands one on either side of his, and they both thrilled with the keen pleasure the touch of edge of hand against edge of hand gave them. In the ends of her fingers were the marks of her needlework. He bent and kissed those slightly roughened finger ends passionately. "I love those marks!" he exclaimed. "They make me feel that we belong to each other." "I'd be sorry to see _your_ hands different," said she, her eyes shining upon his. "There are many things you don't understand about me--for instance, that it's just those marks of work that make you so dear to me. A woman may begin by liking a man because he's her ideal in certain ways, but once she really cares, she loves whatever is part of him." In addition to the reasons she had given for feeling "bolder" about her "plebeian" lover, there was another that was the strongest of all. A few months before, a cousin of her father's had died in Boston, where he was the preacher of a most exclusive and fashionable church. He had endeared himself to his congregation by preaching one Easter Sunday a sermon called "The Badge of Birth." In it he proceeded to show from the Scriptures themselves how baseless was the common theory that Jesus was of lowly origin. "The common people heard Him gladly," cried the Rev. Eliot Wilmot, "because they instinctively felt His superiority of birth, felt the dominance of His lineage. In His veins flowed the blood of the royal house of Israel, the blood of the first anointed kings of Almighty God." And from this interesting premise the Reverend Wilmot deduced the divine intent that the "best blood" should have superior rights--leadership, respect, deference. So dear was he to his flock that they made him rich in this world's goods as well as in love and honor. The Wilmots of Saint X had had lively expectations from his estate. They thought that one holding the views eloquently set forth in "The Badge of Birth" must dedicate his fortune to restoring the dignity and splendor of the main branch of the Wilmot family. But, like all their dreams, this came to naught. His fortune went to a theological seminary to endow scholarships and fellowships for decayed gentlemen's sons; he remembered only Verbena Wilmot. On his one visit to the crumbling, weed-choked seat of the head of the house, he had seen Verbena's wonderful hands, so precious and so useless that had she possessed rings and deigned to wear them she would not have permitted the fingers of the one hand to put them on the fingers of the other. The legacy was five thousand dollars, at four per cent., an income of two hundred dollars a year. Verbena invested the first quarterly installment in a long-dreamed-of marble reproduction of her right hand which, after years of thinking daily about the matter, she had decided was a shade more perfect than the left. If one dim eye makes a man king among blind men--to translate to the vernacular Verbena's elegant reasoning--an income, however trifling, if it have no taint of toil, no stench of sweat upon it, makes its possessor entitled to royal consideration in a family of paupers and dead beats, degraded by harboring a breadwinner of an Estelle. No sudden recipient of a dazzling, drenching shower of wealth was ever more exalted than was Verbena, once in possession of "_my_ legacy." Until the Rev. Eliot Wilmot's posthumous blessing descended upon her, the Wilmots lived together in comparative peace and loving kindness. They were all, except for their mania of genealogy, good-humored, extremely well-mannered people, courteous as much by nature as by deliberate intent. But, with the coming of the blessing, peace and friendliness in that family were at an end. Old Preston Wilmot and Arden railed unceasingly against the "traitor" Eliot; Verbena defended him. Their mother and Estelle were drawn into the battle from time to time, Estelle always against her will. Before Verbena had been a woman of property three months, she was hating her father and brother for their sneers and insults, Arden had gone back to drinking, and the old gentleman was in a savage and most ungentlemanly humor from morning until night. Estelle, the "black sheep" ever since she began to support them by engaging in trade, drew aloof now, was at home as little as she could contrive, often ate a cold supper in the back of her shop. She said nothing to Lorry of the family shame; she simply drew nearer to him. And out of this changed situation came, unconsciously to herself, a deep contempt for her father and her brother, a sense that she was indeed as alien as the Wilmots so often alleged, in scorn of her and her shop; Verbena's income went to buy adornments for herself, dresses that would give the hands a fitting background; Estelle's earnings went to her mother, who distributed them, the old gentleman and Arden ignoring whence and how the money came. As Estelle and Lorry lingered on the porch of the Villa d'Orsay that August evening, alone in the universe under that vast, faintly luminous, late-twilight sky, Arden Wilmot came up the lawn. Neither Lorry nor Estelle saw or heard him until his voice, rough with drink and passion, savagely stung them with, "What the hell does _this_ mean?" Lorry dropped Estelle's hand and stood up, Estelle behind him, a restraining hand on his shoulder. Both were white to the lips; their sky, the moment before so clear and still, was now black and thunderous with a frightful storm. Estelle saw that her brother was far from sober; and the sight of his sister caressed by Lorry Tague would have maddened him even had he not touched liquor. She darted between the two men. "Don't be a goose, Arden," she panted, with a hysterical attempt to laugh. "That fellow was touching you!" stormed Arden. "You miserable disgrace!" And he lifted his hand threateningly to her. Lorry put his arm round her and drew her back, himself advancing. "You must be careful how you act toward the woman who is to be my wife, Mr. Wilmot," he said, afire in all his blood of the man who has the right to demand of the whole world the justice he gives it. Arden Wilmot stared dumfounded, first at Lorry, then at Estelle. In the pause, Adelaide, drawn from the library by the sound of Arden's fury, reached the front doorway, saw the three, instantly knew the whole cause of this sudden, harsh commotion. With a twitch that was like the shaking off of a detaining grasp, with a roar like a mortally wounded beast's, Arden recovered the use of limbs and voice. "You infernal lump of dirt!" he yelled. Adelaide saw his arm swing backward, then forward, and up--saw something bright in his hand. A flash--"O God, God!" she moaned. But she could not turn her eyes away or close them. Lorry stood straight as a young sycamore for an instant, turned toward Estelle. "Good-by--my love!" he said softly, and fell, face downward, with his hands clasping the edge of her dress. And Estelle-- She made no sound. Like a ghost, she knelt and took Lorry's head in her lap; with one hand against each of his cheeks she turned his head. "Lorry! Lorry!" she murmured in a heartbreaking voice that carried far through the stillness. Arden put the revolver back in his pocket, seized her by the shoulder. "Come away from that!" he ordered roughly, and half-lifted her to her feet. With a cry so awful that Adelaide swayed and almost swooned at hearing it, Estelle wrenched herself free, flung herself on her lover's body, buried her fingers in his hair, covered his dead face with kisses, bathed her lips in the blood that welled from his heart. Shouts and heavy, quick tramping from many directions--the tempest of murder was drawing people to its center as a cyclone sucks in leaves. Fright in Arden Wilmot's face, revealed to Adelaide in the light streaming from the big drawing-room windows. A group--a crowd--a multitude--pouring upon the lawns from every direction--swirling round Arden as he stood over the prostrate intermingled forms of his sister and her dead lover. Then Adelaide, clinging to the door frame to steady herself, heard Arden say in a loud blustering voice: "I found this fellow insulting my sister, and I treated him as a Wilmot always treats an insult." And as the words reached her, they fired her. All her weakness, all her sense of helplessness fled. Out of the circle came a man bearing unconscious Estelle, blood upon her face, upon her bosom, blood dripping from her hands. "Where shall I take her?" asked the man of Adelaide. "A doctor's been sent for." "Into the hall--on the sofa--at the end--and watch by her," said Del, in quick, jerking tones. Her eyes were ablaze, her breath came in gusts. Without waiting to see where he went with his burden, she rushed down the broad steps and through the crowd, pushing them this way and that. She faced Arden Wilmot--not a lady, but a woman, a flaming torch of outraged human feeling. "You lie!" she cried, and he seemed to wither before her. "You lie about him and about her! You, with the very clothes you're dressed in, the very liquor you're drunk with, the very pistol that shot him down, paid for by _her_ earnings! He never offended you--not by look or word. You murdered him--I saw--heard. You murdered the man she was to marry, the man she loved--murdered him because she loved him. Look at him!" The crowd widened its circle before the sweep of her arm. Lorry's blood-stained body came into view. His face, beautiful and, in its pale calm, stronger than life, was open to the paling sky. "There lies a man," she sobbed, and her tears were of the kind that make the fires of passion burn the fiercer. "A man any woman with a woman's heart would have been proud to be loved by. And you--you've murdered him!" "Take care, Mrs. Hargrave," a voice whispered in her ear. "They'll lynch him." "And why not?" she cried out. "Why should such a creature live?" A hundred men were reaching for Arden, and from the crowd rose that hoarse, low, hideous sound which is the first deep bay of the unleashed blood-madness. "No, no!" she begged in horror, and waved them back. "Adelaide!" gasped Arden, wrenching himself free and crouching at her feet and clinging to her skirts. "Save me! I only did my duty as a gentleman." She looked down at him in unpitying scorn, then out at the crowd. "Hear that!" she cried, with a wild, terrible laugh. "A gentleman! Yes, that's true--a gentleman. Saving your sister from the coarse contamination of an honest man!" Then to the men who were dragging at him: "No, I say--_no_! Let him alone! Don't touch the creature! He'll only foul your hands." And she pushed them back. "Let him live. What worse fate could he have than to be pointed at every day of a long life as the worthless drunken thing who murdered a man, and then tried to save himself by defaming his victim and his own sister?" Under cover of her barrier of command, the constable led Arden into the house, past where his sister lay in a swoon, and by the back way got him to jail. The crowd, fascinated by her beauty, which the tempest of passion had transfigured into terrible and compelling majesty, was completely under her control. She stayed on, facing that throng of men, many of whom she knew by name, until Lorry's body was taken away. She was about to go into the house, as the crowd began quietly to disperse, when there arose a murmur that made her turn quickly toward the doors. There was Estelle, all disheveled and bloodstained. Her face was like death; her movements were like one walking in a deep sleep as she descended to the lawn and came toward them. "Where is he? Where is he?" she wailed, pushing this way and that through the crowd, her hands outstretched, her long fair hair streaming like a bridal veil. Her feet slipped on the wet grass--where it was wet with his blood. She staggered, swayed uncertainly, fell with her arms outstretched as if the earth were he she sought. She lay there moaning--the cry of her tortured nerves alone, for her mind was unconscious. Adelaide and Madelene, who had just come, bent to lift her. But their strength failed them and they sank to their knees in terror; for, from the silent crowd there burst a shriek: "Kill him, kill him!" And all in an instant the grounds were emptied of those thousands; and to the two women came an ever fainter but not less awful roar as the mob swept on uptown toward the jail. Madelene was first to recover. "Let us carry her in," she said. And when the limp form was once more on the big sofa and the eyelids were trembling to unclose, she ripped open the right sleeve and thrust in the needle that gives oblivion. Adelaide went to the window and listened. Before her in the moonlight was the place where that tempest of hate and murder had burst and raged. Once more her heart hardened in the pitiless fury of outraged mercy. A moan from Estelle stung her, and she leaned forward the better to catch the music of the mob's distant shriek. Silence for full five minutes; then a sound like that which bursts from the throats of the bloodhounds as they bury their fangs in their quarry. She gave a faint scream, covered her face. "Oh, spare him! Spare him!" she cried. And she sank to the floor in a faint, for she knew that Arden Wilmot was dead. * * * * * Adelaide took Estelle's store until Estelle came back to it, her surface calm like the smooth river that hides in its tortured bosom the deep-plunged rapids below the falls. The day after Estelle's return Adelaide began to study architecture at the university; soon she was made an instructor, with the dean delighted and not a little mystified by her energy and enthusiasm. Yet the matter was simple and natural: she had emerged from her baptism of blood and fire--a woman; at last she had learned what in life is not worth while; she was ready to learn what it has to offer that is worth while--the sole source of the joys that have no reaction, of the content that is founded upon the rock. CHAPTER XXVI CHARLES WHITNEY'S HEIRS Eight specialists, including Romney, of New York and Saltonstal, of Chicago, had given Charles Whitney their verdicts on why he was weak and lethargic. In essential details these diagnoses differed as widely as opinions always differ where no one knows, or can know, and so everyone is free to please his own fancy in choosing a cloak for his ignorance. Some of the doctors declared kidneys sound but liver suspicious; others exonerated liver but condemned one or both kidneys; others viewed kidneys and liver with equal pessimism; still others put those organs aside and shook their heads and unlimbered their Latin at spleen and pancreas. In one respect, however, the eight narrowed to two groups. "Let's figure it out trial-balance fashion," said Whitney to his private secretary, Vagen. "Five, including two-thousand-dollar Romney, say I 'may go soon.' Three, including our one-thousand-dollar neighbor, Saltonstal, say I am 'in no immediate danger.' But what the Romneys mean by 'soon,' and what the Saltonstals mean by 'immediate,' none of the eight says." "But they all say that 'with proper care'--" began Vagen, with the faith of the little in the pretentious. "So they do! So they do!" interrupted Whitney, whom life had taught not to measure wisdom by profession of it, nor yet by repute for it. And he went on in a drowsy drawl, significantly different from his wonted rather explosive method of speech: "But does any of 'em say what 'proper care' is? Each gives his opinion. Eight opinions, each different and each cautioning me against the kind of 'care' prescribed by the other seven. And I paid six thousand dollars!" A cynical smile played round his thin-lipped, sensual, selfish mouth. "Sixty-three hundred," corrected Vagen. He never missed this sort of chance to impress his master with his passion for accuracy. "Sixty-three, then. I'd better have given you the money to blow in on your fliers on wheat and pork." At this Vagen looked much depressed. It was his first intimation that his chief knew about his private life. "I hope, sir, nobody has been poisoning your mind against me," said he. "I court the fullest investigation. I have been honest--" "Of course, of course," replied Whitney. "There never was a man as timid as you are that wasn't honest. What a shallow world it is! How often envy and cowardice pass for virtue!" "I often say, sir," replied Vagen, with intent to soothe and flatter, "there ain't one man in ten million that wouldn't have done the things you've done if they'd had the brains and the nerve." "And pray what are the 'things I've done'?" inquired Whitney. But the flame of irritation was so feeble that it died down before his words were out. "I'm going down to Saint X to see old Schulze," he drawled on. "Schulze knows more than any of 'em--and ain't afraid to say when he don't know." A slow, somewhat sardonic smile. "That's why he's unknown. What can a wise man, who insists on showing that he's wise, expect in a world of damn fools?" A long silence during which the uncomfortable Vagen had the consolation of seeing in that haggard, baggy, pasty-white face that his master's thoughts were serving him much worse than mere discomfort. Then Whitney spoke again: "Yes, I'm going to Saint X. I'm going home to--" He did not finish; he could not speak the word of finality. Vagen saw the look in his pale, blue-green eyes, saw that the great financier knew he would never again fling his terrible nets broadcast for vast hauls of golden fish, knew his days were numbered and that the number was small. But, instead of this making him feel sympathetic and equal toward his master, thus unmasked as mere galvanized clay, it filled him with greater awe; for, to the Vagens, Death seems to wear a special costume and walk with grander step to summon the rich and the high. "Yes, I'll go--this very afternoon," said Whitney more loudly, turning his face toward the door through which came a faint feminine rustling--the _froufrou_ of the finest, softest silk and finest, softest linen. He looked attentively at his wife as she crossed the threshold--looked with eyes that saw mercilessly but indifferently, the eyes of those who are out of the game of life, out for good and all, and so care nothing about it. He noted in her figure--in its solidity, its settledness--the signs of age the beauty doctors were still almost successful in keeping out of that masklike face which was their creation rather than nature's; he noted the rough-looking red of that hair whose thinness was not altogether concealed despite the elaborate care with which it was arranged to give the impression of careless abundance. He noted her hands; his eyes did not linger there, for the hands had the wrinkles and hollows and age marks which but for art would have been in the face, and they gave him a feeling--he could not have defined it, but it made him shudder. His eyes rested again upon her face, with an expression of pity that was slightly satirical. This struggle of hers seemed so petty and silly to him now; how could any human being think any other fact important when the Great Fact hung from birth threateningly over all? "You feel worse to-day, dear?" said she, in the tones that sound carefully attuned to create an impression of sympathy. Hers had now become the mechanically saccharine voice which sardonic time ultimately fastens upon the professionally sympathetic to make them known and mocked of all, even of the vainest seekers after sympathy. "On the contrary, I feel better," he drawled, eyes half-shut. "No pain at all. But--horribly weak, as if I were going to faint in a minute or two--and I don't give a damn for anything." There was a personal fling in that last word, an insinuation that he knew her state of mind toward him, and reciprocated. "Well, to-morrow Janet and her baby will be here," said Mrs. Whitney, and her soothing tones seemed to stimulate him by irritation. "Then we'll all go down to Saint X together, if you still wish it." "Don't take that tone with me, I tell you!" he said with some energy in his drawl. "_Don't_ talk to me as if you were hanging over my deathbed lying to me about my going to live!" And he closed his eyes, and his breath made his parted, languid lips flutter. "Mr. Vagen," said Matilda, in her tone of sweet graciousness, "may I trouble you to go and--" "Go to the devil, Vagen," said Charles, starting up again that slow stream of fainting words and sentences. "Anywhere to get you out of the room so you won't fill the flapping ears of your friends with gossip about Whitney and his wife. Though why she should send you out I can't understand. If you and the servants don't hear what's going on, you make up and tattle worse than what really happens." Mrs. Whitney gave Vagen a look of sweet resignation and Vagen responded with an expression which said: "I understand. He is very ill. He is not responsible. I admire your ladylike patience." As Whitney's eyes were closed he missed this byplay. "Here, Vagen--before you go," he drawled, waving a weary hand toward the table at his elbow. "Here's a check for ten thousand. You don't deserve it, for you've used your position to try to get rich on the sly. But inasmuch as I was 'on to' you, and dropped hints that made you lose, I've no hard feelings. Then, too, you did no worse than any other would have done in your place. A man's as good, and as bad, as he has the chance to be. So take it. I've not made my will yet, and as I may not be able to, I give you the money now. You'll find the check in this top drawer, and some other checks for the people near me. I suppose they'll expect something--I've got 'em into the habit of it. Take 'em and run along and send 'em off right away." Vagen muttered inarticulate thanks. In fact, the check was making small impression on him, or the revelation that his chief had eyes as keen for what was going on under his nose as for the great movements in the big field. He could think only of that terrifying weakness, that significant garrulousness. When Vagen was out of the way, Charles repeated: "I'm going this afternoon." His listless eyes were gazing vacantly at the carved rosewood ceiling. His hands--the hands of a corpse--looked horribly like sheathed, crumpled claws in the gold silk cuffs of his dark-blue dressing gown. His nose, protruding from his sunken cheeks, seemed not like a huge beak, but indeed a beak. "But Janet--" began Mrs. Whitney, thinking as she spoke that he surely would "not be spared to us much longer." "Janet can follow--or stay here--or--I don't care what she does," droned Whitney. "Do you suppose I'm thinking about anybody but myself now? Would you, if you were in my fix. I should say," he amended cynically, "_will_ you, when you're in my fix?" "Charles!" exclaimed Matilda. Whitney's smile checked her. "I'm not a fool," he rambled on. "Do you suppose I haven't seen what was going on? Do you suppose I don't know all of you wish I was out of it? Yes, out of it. And you needn't bother to put on that shocked look; it doesn't fool me. I used to say: 'I'll be generous with my family and give 'em more than they'd have if I was gone.' 'No children waiting round eager for me to pass off,' said I, 'so that they can divide up my fortune.' I've said that often and often. And I've acted on it. And I've raised up two as pampered, selfish children as ever lived. And now--The last seven months I've been losing money hand over fist. Everything I've gone into has turned out bad. I'm down to about half what I had a year ago--maybe less than half. And you and Ross--and no doubt that marchioness ex-daughter of mine--all know it. And you're afraid if I live on, I'll lose more, maybe everything. Do you deny it?" Matilda was unable to speak. She had known he was less rich; but half!--"maybe less!" The cuirass of steel, whalebone, kid, and linen which molded her body to a fashionable figure seemed to be closing in on her heart and lungs with a stifling clutch. "No, you don't deny it. You couldn't," Whitney drawled on. "And so my 'indulgent father' damned foolishness ends just where I might have known it'd end. We've brought up the children to love money and show off, instead of to love us and character and self-respect--God forgive me!" The room was profoundly silent: Charles thinking drowsily, yet vividly, too, of his life; Matilda burning in anguish over the lost half, or more, of the fortune--and Charles had always been secretive about his wealth, so she didn't know how much the fortune was a year ago and couldn't judge whether much or little was left! Enough to uphold her social position? Or only enough to keep her barely clear of the "middle class"? Soon Whitney's voice broke in upon her torments. "I've been thinking a great deal, this last week, about Hiram Ranger." Matilda, startled, gave him a wild look. "Charles!" she exclaimed. "Exactly," said Whitney, a gleam of enjoyment in his dull eyes. In fact, ever since Hiram's death his colossal figure had often dominated the thoughts of Charles and Matilda Whitney. The will had set Charles to observing, to _seeing_; it had set Matilda to speculating on the possibilities of her own husband's stealthy relentlessness. At these definite, dreadful words of his, her vague alarms burst into a deafening chorus, jangling and clanging in her very ears. "Arthur Ranger," continued Whitney, languid and absent, "has got out of the beaten track of business--" "Yes; look at Hiram's children!" urged Matilda. "Everybody that is anybody is down on Arthur. See what his wife has brought him to, with her crazy, upsetting ideas! They tell me a good many of the best people in Saint X hardly speak to him. Yes, Charles, _look_ at Hiram's doings." "Thanks to Hiram--what he inherited from Hiram and what Hiram had the good sense not to let him inherit--he has become a somebody. He's doing things, and the fact that they aren't just the kind of things I like doesn't make me fool enough to underestimate them or him. Success is the test, and in his line he's a success." "If it hadn't been for his wife he'd not have done much," said Matilda sourly. "You've lived long enough, I'd think, to have learned not to say such shallow things," drawled he. "Of course, he has learned from her--don't everybody have to learn somewhere? Where a man learns is nothing; the important thing is his capacity to learn. If a man's got the capacity to learn, he'll learn, he'll become somebody. If he hasn't, then no man nor no woman can teach him. No, my dear, you may be sure that anybody who amounts to anything has got it in himself. And Arthur Ranger is a credit to any father. He's becoming famous--the papers are full of what he's accomplishing. And he's respected, honest, able, with a wife that loves him. Would he have been anybody if his father had left him the money that would have compelled him to be a fool? As for the girl, she's got a showy streak in her--she's your regular American woman of nowadays--the kind of daughter your sort of mother and my sort of damn-fool father breed up. But Del's mother wasn't like you, Mattie, and she hadn't a fool father like me, so she's married to a young fellow that's already doing big things, in his line--and a good line his is, a better line than trimming dollars and donkeys. Our Jenny--Jane that used to be--We've sold her to a Frenchman, and she's sold herself to the devil. Hiram's daughter--God forgive us, Matilda, for what we've done to Janet." All this, including that last devout appeal, in the manner of a spectator of a scene at which he is taking a last, indifferent, backward glance as he is leaving. His wife's brain was too busy making plans and tearing them up to follow his monotonous garrulity except in a general way. He waited in vain for her to defend her daughter and herself. "As for Ross," he went on, "he's keen and quick enough. He's got together quite a fortune of his own--and he'll hold on to it and get more. It's easy enough to make money if you've got money--and ain't too finicky about the look and the smell of the dollars before you gulp 'em down. Your Ross has a good strong stomach that way--as good as his father's--and mother's. But--He ain't exactly the man I used to picture as I was wheeling him up and down the street in his baby carriage in Saint X." That vulgar reminiscence seemed to be the signal for which Matilda was waiting. "Charles Whitney," she said, "you and I have brought up our children to take their proper place in our aristocracy of wealth and birth and breeding. And I know you're not going to undo what we've done, and done well." "That's your 'bossy' tone, Mattie," he drawled, his desire to talk getting a fresh excuse for indulging itself. "I guess this is a good time to let you into a secret. You've thought you ran me ever since we were engaged. That delusion of yours nearly lost you the chance to lead these thirty years of wedded bliss with me. If you hadn't happened to make me jealous and afraid the one man I used to envy in those days would get you--I laughed the other day when he was appointed postmaster at Indianapolis--However, I did marry you, and did let you imagine you wore the pants. It seemed to amuse you, and it certainly amused me--though not in the same way. Now I want you to look back and think hard. You can't remember a single time that what you bossed me to do was ever done. I was always fond of playing tricks and pulling secret wires, and I did a lot of it in making you think you were bossing me when you were really being bossed." It was all Mrs. Whitney could do to keep her mind on how sick he was, and how imperative it was not to get him out of humor. "I never meant to try to influence you, Charles," she said, "except as anyone tries to help those about one. And certainly you've been the one that has put us all in our present position. That's why it distressed me for you even to talk of undoing your work." Whitney smiled satirically, mysteriously. "I'll do what I think best," was all he replied. And presently he added, "though I don't feel like doing anything. It seems to me I don't care what happens, or whether I live--or--don't. I'll go to Saint X. I'm just about strong enough to stand the trip--and have Schulze come out to Point Helen this evening." "Why not save your strength and have him come here?" urged Matilda. "He wouldn't," replied her husband. "Last time I saw him he looked me over and said: 'Champagne. If you don't stop it you won't live. Don't come here again unless you cut out that poison.' But I never could resist champagne. So I told myself he was an old crank, and found a great doctor I could hire to agree with me. No use to send for Schulze to come all this distance. I might even have to go to his office if I was at Saint X. He won't go to see anybody who's able to move about. 'As they want _me_, let 'em come _to_ me, just as I'd go to them if I wanted them,' he says. 'The air they get on the way is part of the cure.' Besides, he and I had a quarrel. He was talking his nonsense against religion, and I said something, and he implied I wasn't as straight in business as I should be--quoted something about 'He that hasteth to be rich shall not be innocent,' and one thing led to another, and finally he said, with that ugly jeer of his: 'You pious bandits are lucky to have a forgiving God to go to. Now we poor devils have only our self-respect, and _it_ never forgives anything.'" Whitney laughed, reflected, laughed again. "Yes, I must see Schulze. Maybe--Anyhow, I'm going to Saint X--going home, or as near home as anything my money has left me." He drowsed off. She sat watching him--the great beak, the bulging forehead, the thin, cruel lips; and everywhere in the garden of artificial flowers which formed the surface of her nature, hiding its reality even from herself, there appeared the poisonous snakes of hateful thoughts to shoot their fangs and hiss at him. She shrank and shuddered; yet--"It's altogether his own fault that I feel this way toward him as he lies dying," she said to herself, resorting to human nature's unfailing, universally sought comforter in all trying circumstances--self-excuse. "He always was cold and hard. He has become a monster. And even in his best days he wasn't worthy to have such a woman as I am. And now he is thinking of cheating me--and will do it--unless God prevents him." He drowsed on, more asleep than awake, not even rousing when they put him to bed. He did not go to Saint X that day. But he did go later--went to lie in state in the corridor of the splendid hall he had given Tecumseh; to be gaped at by thousands who could not see that they were viewing a few pounds of molded clay, so busy were their imaginations with the vast fortune it was supposed he left; to be preached over, the sermon by Dr. Hargrave, who believed in him--and so, in estimating the man as distinguished from what the system he lived under had made of him, perhaps came nearer the truth than those who talked only of the facts of his public career--his piracy, his bushwhacking, his gambling with the marked cards and loaded dice of "high finance"; to be buried in the old Cedar Grove Cemetery, with an imposing monument presently over him, before it fresh flowers every day for a year--the Marchioness of St. Berthè contracted with a florist to attend to that. * * * * * Four days after the funeral Janet sent a servant down to Adelaide and to Mrs. Ranger with notes begging them to come to Point Helen for lunch. "We are lonely and _so_ dreary," she wrote Adelaide. "We want you--need you." Only one answer was possible, and at half-past twelve they set out in Mrs. Ranger's carriage. As they drove away from the Villa d'Orsay Mrs. Ranger said: "When does Mrs. Dorsey allow to come home?" "Not for two years more," replied Del. Ellen's expression suggested that she was debating whether or not to speak some thought which she feared Del might regard as meddlesome. "When you finally do have to get out," she said presently, "it'll be like giving up your own home, won't it?" "No," said Del. "I hate the place!" A pause, then: "I wrote Mrs. Dorsey yesterday that we wouldn't stay but three months longer--not in any circumstances." The old woman's face brightened. "I'm mighty glad of that," she said heartily. "Then, you'll have a home of your own at last." "Not exactly," was Del's reply, in a curious tone. "The fact is, I'm going to live with Dr. Hargrave." Ellen showed her astonishment. "And old Martha Skeffington!" "She's not so difficult, once you get to know her," replied Del. "I find that everything depends on the point of view you take in looking at people. I've been getting better acquainted with Dory's aunt the last few weeks. I think she has begun to like me. We'll get along." "Don't you think you'd better wait till Dory gets back?" "No," said Adelaide firmly, a look in her eyes which made her mother say to herself: "There's the Ranger in her." They drove in silence awhile; then Del, with an effort which brought a bright color to her cheeks, began: "I want to tell you, mother, that I went to Judge Torrey this morning, and made over to you the income father left me." "Whatever did you do _that_ for?" cried Ellen, turning in the seat to stare at her daughter through her glasses. "I promised Dory I would. I've spent some of the money--about fifteen hundred dollars--You see, the house was more expensive than I thought. But everything's paid up now." "I don't need it, and don't want it," said Ellen. "And I won't take it!" "I promised Dory I would--before we were married. He thinks I've done it. I've let him think so. And--lately--I've been having a sort of house cleaning--straightening things up--and I straightened that up, too." Ellen Ranger understood. A long pause, during which she looked lovingly at her daughter's beautiful face. At last she said: "No, there don't seem to be no other way out of it." Then, anxiously, "You ain't written Dory what you've done?" "No," replied Del. "Not yet." "Not never!" exclaimed her mother. "That's one of the things a body mustn't ever tell anyone. You did wrong; you've done right--and it's all settled and over. He'd probably understand if you told him. But he'd never quite trust you the same again--that's human nature." "But _you'd_ trust me," objected Del. "I'm older'n Dory," replied her mother; "and, besides, I ain't your husband. There's no end of husbands and wives that get into hot water through telling, where it don't do any earthly good and makes the other one uneasy and unhappy." Adelaide reflected. "It _is_ better not to tell him," she concluded. Ellen was relieved. "That's common sense," said she. "And you can't use too much common sense in marriage. The woman's got to have it, for the men never do where women are concerned." She reflected a few minutes, then, after a keen glance at her daughter and away, she said with an appearance of impersonality that evidenced diplomatic skill of no mean order: "And there's this habit the women are getting nowadays of always peeping into their heads and hearts to see what's going on. How can they expect the cake to bake right if they're first at the fire door, then at the oven door, openin' and shuttin' 'em, peepin' and pokin' and tastin'--that's what _I'd_ like to know." Adelaide looked at her mother's apparently unconscious face in surprise and admiration. "What a sensible, wonderful woman you are, Ellen Ranger!" she exclaimed, giving her mother the sisterly name she always gave her when she felt a particular delight in the bond between them. And half to herself, yet so that her mother heard, she added: "And what a fool your daughter has been!" "Nobody's born wise," said Ellen, "and mighty few takes the trouble to learn." At Point Helen the mourning livery of the lodge keeper and of the hall servants prepared Ellen and her daughter for the correct and elegant habiliments of woe in which Matilda and her son and daughter were garbed. If Whitney had died before he began to lose his fortune, and while his family were in a good humor with him because of his careless generosity, or, rather, indifference to extravagance, he would have been mourned as sincerely as it is possible for human beings to mourn one by whose death they are to profit enormously in title to the material possessions they have been trained to esteem above all else in the world. As it was, those last few months of anxiety--Mrs. Whitney worrying lest her luxury and social leadership should be passing, Ross exasperated by the daily struggle to dissuade his father from fatuous enterprises--had changed Whitney's death from a grief to a relief. However, "appearances" constrained Ross to a decent show of sorrow, compelled Mrs. Whitney to a still stronger exhibit. Janet, who in far-away France had not been touched by the financial anxieties, felt a genuine grief that gave her an admirable stimulus to her efflorescent oversoul. She had "prepared for the worst," had brought from Paris a marvelous mourning wardrobe--dresses and hats and jewelry that set off her delicate loveliness as it had never been set off before. She made of herself an embodiment, an apotheosis, rather, of poetic woe--and so, roused to emulation her mother's passion for pose. Ross had refused to gratify them even to the extent of taking a spectator's part in their refined theatricals. The coming of Mrs. Ranger and Adelaide gave them an audience other than servile; they proceeded to strive to rise to the opportunity. The result of this struggle between mother and daughter was a spectacle so painful that even Ellen, determined to see only sincerity, found it impossible not to suspect a grief that could find so much and such language in which to vent itself. She fancied she appreciated why Ross eyed his mother and sister with unconcealed hostility and spoke almost harshly when they compelled him to break his silence. Adelaide hardly gave the two women a thought. She was surprised to find that she was looking at Ross and thinking of him quite calmly and most critically. His face seemed to her trivial, with a selfishness that more than suggested meanness, the eyes looking out from a mind which habitually entertained ideas not worth a real man's while. What was the matter with him--"or with me?" What is he thinking about? Why is he looking so mean and petty? Why had he no longer the least physical attraction for her? Why did her intense emotions of a few brief weeks ago seem as vague as an unimportant occurrence of many years ago? What had broken the spell? She could not answer her own puzzled questions; she simply knew that it was so, that any idea that she did, or ever could, love Ross Whitney was gone, and gone forever. "It's so," she thought. "What's the difference why? Shall I never learn to let the stove doors alone?" As soon as lunch was over Matilda took Ellen to her boudoir and Ross went away, leaving Janet and Adelaide to walk up and down the shaded west terrace with its vast outlook upon the sinuous river and the hills. To draw Janet from the painful theatricals, she took advantage of a casual question about the lynching, and went into the details of that red evening as she had not with anyone. It was now almost two months into the past; but all Saint X was still feverish from it, and she herself had only begun again to have unhaunted and unbroken sleep. While she was relating Janet forgot herself; but when the story was told--all of it except Adelaide's own part; that she entirely omitted--Janet went back to her personal point of view. "A beautiful love story!" she exclaimed. "And right here in prosaic Saint X!" "Is it Saint X that is prosaic," said Adelaide, "or is it we, in failing to see the truth about familiar things?" "Perhaps," replied Janet, in the tone that means "not at all." To her a thrill of emotion or a throb of pain felt by a titled person differed from the same sensation in an untitled person as a bar of supernal or infernal music differs from the whistling of a farm boy on his way to gather the eggs; if the title was royal--Janet wept when an empress died of a cancer and talked of her "heroism" for weeks. "Of course," she went on musingly, to Adelaide, "it was very beautiful for Lorry and Estelle to love each other. Still, I can't help feeling that--At least, I can understand Arden Wilmot's rage. After all, Estelle stepped out of her class; didn't she, Del?" "Yes," said Del, not recognizing the remark as one she herself might have made not many months before. "Both she and Lorry stepped out of their classes, and into the class where there is no class, but only just men and women, hearts and hands and brains." She checked herself just in time to refrain from adding, "the class our fathers and mothers belonged in." Janet did not inquire into the mystery of this. "And Estelle has gone to live with poor Lorry's mother!" said she. "How noble and touching! Such beautiful self-sacrifice!" "Why self-sacrifice?" asked Del, irritated. "She couldn't possibly go home, could she? And she is fond of Lorry's mother." "Yes, of course. No doubt she's a dear, lovely old woman. But--a washerwoman, and constant, daily contact--and not as lady and servant, but on what must be, after all, a sort of equality--" Janet finished her sentence with a ladylike look. Adelaide burned with the resentment of the new convert. "A woman who brought into the world and brought up such a son as Lorry was," said she, "needn't yield to anybody." Then the silliness of arguing such a matter with Madame la Marquise de Saint Berthè came over her. "You and I don't look at life from the same standpoint, Janet," she added, smiling. "You see, you're a lady, and I'm not--any more." "Oh, yes, you are," Janet, the devoid of the sense of humor, hastened to assure her earnestly. "You know we in France don't feel as they do in America, that one gets or loses caste when one gets or loses money. Besides, Dory is in a profession that is quite aristocratic, and those lectures he delivered at Göttingen are really talked about everywhere on the other side." But Adelaide refused to be consoled. "No, I'm not a lady--not what you'd call a lady, even as a Frenchwoman." "Oh, but _I_'m a good American!" Janet protested, suddenly prudent and rushing into the pretenses our transplanted and acclimatized sisters are careful to make when talking with us of the land whence comes their sole claim to foreign aristocratic consideration--their income. "I'm really quite famous for my Americanism. I've done a great deal toward establishing our ambassador at Paris in the best society. Coming from a republic and to a republic that isn't recognized by our set in France, he was having a hard time, though he and his wife are all right at home. Now that there are more gentlemen in authority at Washington, our diplomats are of a much better class than they used to be. Everyone over there says so. Of course, you--that is we, are gradually becoming civilized and building up an aristocracy." "Yes, I suppose so," said Adelaide, feeling that she must change the subject or show her exasperation, yet unable to find any subject which Janet would not adorn with refined and cultured views. "Isn't Ross, there, looking for you?" He had just rushed from the house, his face, his manner violently agitated. As he saw Adelaide looking at him, he folded and put in his pocket a letter which seemed to be the cause of his agitation. When the two young women came to where he was standing, he joined them and walked up and down with them, his sister, between him and Del, doing all the talking. Out of the corner of her eye Del saw that his gaze was bent savagely upon the ground and that his struggle for self-control was still on. At the first opportunity she said: "I must get mother. We'll have to be going." "Oh, no, not yet," urged Janet, sincerity strong in her affected accents. Del felt that the sister, for some reason, as strongly wished not to be left alone with the brother as the brother wished to be left alone with the sister. In confirmation of this, Janet went on to say: "Anyhow, Ross will tell your mother." Ross scowled at his sister, made a hesitating, reluctant movement toward the steps; just then Matilda and Ellen appeared. Adelaide saw that her mother had succeeded in getting through Matilda's crust of sham and in touch with her heart. At sight of her son Mrs. Whitney's softened countenance changed--hardened, Adelaide thought--and she said to him eagerly: "Any news, any letters?" "This," answered Ross explosively. He jerked the letter from his pocket, gave it to his mother. "You'll excuse me--Ellen--Adelaide," said Matilda, as she unfolded the paper with ringers that trembled. "This is very important." Silence, as she read, her eager glance leaping along the lines. Her expression became terrible; she burst out in a voice that was both anger and despair: "No will! He wasn't just trying to torment me when he said he hadn't made one. No will! Nothing but the draft of a scheme to leave everything to Tecumseh--there's your Hiram's work, Ellen!" Adelaide's gentle pressure on her mother's arm was unnecessary; it was too evident that Matilda, beside herself, could not be held responsible for anything she said. There was no pretense, no "oversoul" in her emotion now. She was as different from the Matilda of the luncheon table as the swollen and guttered face of woe in real life is different from the graceful tragedy of the stage. "No will; what of it?" said Ellen gently. "It won't make the least difference. There's just you and the children." Adelaide, with clearer knowledge of certain dark phases of human nature and of the Whitney family, hastily interposed. "Yes, we must go," said she. "Good-by, Mrs. Whitney," and she put out her hand. Mrs. Whitney neither saw nor heard. "Ellen!" she cried, her voice like her wild and haggard face. "What do you think of such a daughter as mine here? Her father--" Janet, with eyes that dilated and contracted strangely, interrupted with a sweet, deprecating, "Good-by, Adelaide dear. As I told you, I am leaving to-night--" There Ross laid his hand heavily on Janet's shoulder. "You are going to stay, young lady," he said between his teeth, "and hear what your mother has to say about you." His voice made Adelaide shudder, even before she saw the black hate his eyes were hurling at his sister. "Yes, we want you, Ellen, and you, Del, to know her as she is," Mrs. Whitney now raged on. "When she married, her father gave her a dowry, bought that title for her--paid as much as his whole fortune now amounts to. He did it solely because I begged him to. She knows the fight I had to win him over. And now that he's gone, without making a will, she says she'll have her _legal_ rights! Her _legal_ rights! She'll take _one-third_ of what he left. She'll rob her brother and her mother!" Janet was plainly reminding herself that she must not forget that she was a lady and a marchioness. In a manner in which quiet dignity was mingled with a delicate soul's shrinking from such brawling vulgarity as this that was being forced upon her, she said, looking at Adelaide: "Papa never intended that my dowry should be taken out of my share. It was a present." She looked calmly at her mother. "Just like your jewels, mamma." She turned her clear, luminous eyes upon Ross. "Just like the opportunities he gave you to get your independent fortune." Mrs. Whitney, trembling so that she could scarcely articulate, retorted: "At the time he said, and I told you, it was to come out of your share. And how you thanked me and kissed me and--" She stretched toward Ellen her shaking old woman's hands, made repellent by the contrasting splendor of magnificent black pearl rings. "O Ellen, Ellen!" she quavered. "I think my heart will burst!" "You did _say_ he said so," replied Janet softly, "but _he_ never told _me_." "You--you--" stuttered Ross, flinging out his arms at her in a paroxysm of fury. "I refuse to discuss this any further," said Janet, drawing herself up in the full majesty of her black-robed figure and turning her long shapely back on Ross. "Mrs. Ranger, I'm sure you and Del realize that mother and Ross are terribly upset, and not--" "They'll realize that you are a cheat, a vulture in the guise of woman!" cried Mrs. Whitney. "Ellen, tell her what she is!" Mrs. Ranger, her eyes down and her face expressing her agonized embarrassment, contrived to say: "You mustn't bring me in, Mattie. Adelaide and I must go." "No, you _shall_ hear!" shrieked Mrs. Whitney, barring the way. "All the world shall hear how this treacherous, ingrate daughter of mine--oh, the sting of that!--how she purposes to steal, yes, steal four times as much of her father's estate as Ross or I get. Four times as much! I can't believe the law allows it! But whether it does or not, Janet Whitney, _God_ won't allow it! God will hear my cry, my curse on you." "My conscience is clear," said Janet, and her gaze, spiritual, exalted, patient, showed that she spoke the truth, that her mother's looks and words left her quite unscathed. Ross vented a vicious, jeering laugh. His mother, overcome with the sense of helplessness, collapsed from rage to grief and tears. She turned to Mrs. Ranger. "Your Hiram was right," she wailed, "and my Charles said so just before he went. Look at my daughter, Ellen. Look at my son--for he, too, is robbing me. He has his own fortune that his dead father made for him; yet he, too, talks about his legal rights. He demands his full third!" Adelaide did not look at Ross; yet she was seeing him inside and out, the inside through the outside. "My heartless children!" sobbed Matilda. "I can't believe that they are the same I brought into the world and watched over and saw that they had everything. God forgive them--and me. Your Hiram was right. Money has done it. Money has made monsters of them. And I--oh, how I am punished!" All this time Ellen and Adelaide had been gradually retreating, the Whitneys following them. When Mrs. Whitney at last opened wide the casket of her woe and revealed Ross there, too, he wheeled on Adelaide with a protesting, appealing look. He was confident that he was in the right, that his case was different from Janet's; confident also that Adelaide would feel that in defending his rights he was also defending hers that were to be. But before Del there had risen the scene after the reading of her own father's will. She recalled her rebellious thoughts, saw again Arthur's fine face distorted by evil passions, heard again her mother's terrible, just words: "Don't trample on your father's grave, Arthur Ranger! I'll put you both out of the house! Go to the Whitneys, where you belong!" And then she saw Arthur as he now was, and herself the wife of Dory Hargrave. And she for the first time realized, as we realize things only when they have become an accepted and unshakable basic part of our lives, what her father had done, what her father was. Hiram had won his daughter. "We are going now," said Ellen, coming from the stupor of shame and horror into which this volcanic disgorging of the secret minds and hearts of the Whitneys had plunged her. And the expression she fixed first upon Janet, then upon Ross, then upon Matilda, killed any disposition they might have had to try to detain her. As she and Adelaide went toward her carriage, Ross followed. Walking beside Adelaide, he began to protest in a low tone and with passionate appeal against the verdict he could not but read in her face. "It isn't fair, it isn't just!" he pleaded. "Adelaide, hear me! Don't misjudge me. You know what your--your good opinion means to me." She took her mother's arm, and so drew farther away from him. "Forgive me," he begged. "Janet put me out of my mind. It drove me mad to have her rob--_us_." At that "us" Adelaide fixed her gaze on his for an instant. And what he saw in her eyes silenced him--silenced him on one subject forever. He left for Chicago without seeing either his sister or his mother again. His impulse was to renounce to his mother his share of his father's estate. But one does not act hastily upon an impulse to give up nearly a million dollars. On reflection he decided against such expensive and futile generosity. If it would gain him Adelaide--then, yes. But when it would gain him nothing but the applause of people who in the same circumstances would not have had even the impulse to forego a million--"Mother's proper share will give her as much of an income as a woman needs at her age and alone," reasoned he. "Besides, she may marry again. And I must not forget that but for her Janet would never have got that dowry. She brought this upon herself. Her folly has cost me dearly enough. If I go away to live abroad or in New York--anywhere to be free of the Howlands--why I'll need all I've got properly to establish myself." Janet and her baby left on a later train for the East. Before going she tried to see her mother. Her mother had wronged her in thought, had slandered her in word; but Janet forgave her and nobly wished her to have the consolation of knowing it. Mrs. Whitney, however, prevented the execution of this exalted purpose by refusing to answer the gentle persistent knocking and gentle appealing calls of "Mother, mother dear!" at her locked boudoir door. CHAPTER XXVII THE DOOR AJAR Judge Torrey succeeded Whitney as chairman of the overseers of Tecumseh and in the vacant trusteeship of the Ranger bequest. Soon Dr. Hargrave, insisting that he was too old for the labors of the presidency of such a huge and varied institution as the university had become, was made honorary president, and his son, still in Europe, was elected chairman of the faculty. Toward the middle of a fine afternoon in early September Dr. Hargrave and his daughter-in-law drove to the railway station in the ancient and roomy phaeton which was to Saint X as much part of his personality as the aureole of glistening white hair that framed his majestic head, or as the great plaid shawl that had draped his big shoulders with their student stoop every winter day since anyone could remember. Despite his long exposure to the temptation to sink into the emasculate life of unapplied intellect, mere talker and writer, and to adopt that life's flabby ideals, he had remained the man of ideas, the man of action. His learning was all but universal, yet he had the rugged, direct vigor of the man of affairs. His was not the knowledge that enfeebles, but the knowledge that empowers. As his son, the new executive of the university--with the figure of a Greek athlete, with positive character, will as well as intellect, stamped upon his young face--appeared in the crowd, the onlookers had the sense that a "somebody" had arrived. Dory's always was the air an active mind never fails to give; as Judge Torrey once said: "You've only got to look at him to see he's the kind that does things, not the kind that tells how they used to be done or how they oughtn't to be done." Now there was in his face and bearing the subtly but surely distinguishing quality that comes only with the strength a man gets when his fellows acknowledge his leadership, when he has seen the creations of his brain materialize in work accomplished. Every successful man has this look, and shows it according to his nature--the arrogant arrogantly; the well-balanced with tranquil unconsciousness. As he moved toward his father and Adelaide, her heart swelled with pride in him, with pride in her share in him. Ever since the sending of the cablegram to recall him, she had been wondering what she would feel at sight of him. Now she forgot all about her once-beloved self-analysis. She was simply proud of him, enormously proud; other men seemed trivial beside this personage. Also she was a little afraid; for, as their eyes met, it seemed to her that his look of recognition and greeting was not so ardent as she was accustomed to associate with his features when turned toward her. But before she could be daunted by her misgiving it vanished; for he impetuously caught her in his arms and, utterly forgetting the onlookers, kissed her until every nerve in her body was tingling in the sweeping flame of that passion which his parting caress had stirred to vague but troublesome restlessness. And she, too, forgot the crowd, and shyly, proudly gave as well as received; so there began to vibrate between them the spark that clears brains and hearts of the fogs and vapors and keeps them clear. And it was not a problem in psychology that was revealed to those admiring and envying spectators in the brilliant September sunshine, but a man and a woman in love in the way that has been "the way of a man with a maid" from the beginning; in love, and each looking worthy of the other's love--he handsome in his blue serge, she beautiful in a light-brown fall dress with pale-gold facings, and the fluffy, feathery boa close round her fair young face. Civilization has changed methods, but not essentials; it is still not what goes on in the minds of a man and woman that counts, but what goes on in their hearts and nerves. The old doctor did not in the least mind the momentary neglect of himself. He had always assumed that his son and Del loved each other, there being every reason why they should and no reason why they shouldn't; he saw only the natural and the expected in this outburst which astonished and somewhat embarrassed them with the partial return of the self-consciousness that had been their curse. He beamed on them from eyes undimmed by half a century of toil, as bright under his shaggy white brows as the first spring flowers among the snows. As soon as he had Dory's hand and his apparent attention, he said: "I hope you've been getting your address ready on the train, as I suggested in my telegram." "I've got it in my bag," replied Dory. In the phaeton Del sat between them and drove. Dory forgot the honors he had come home to receive; he had eyes and thoughts only for her, was impatient to be alone with her, to reassure himself of the meaning of the blushes that tinted her smooth white skin and the shy glances that stole toward him from the violet eyes under those long lashes of hers. Dr. Hargrave resumed the subject that was to him paramount. "You see, Theodore, your steamer's being nearly two days late brings you home just a day before the installation. You'll be delivering, your address at eleven to-morrow morning." "So I shall," said Dory absently. "You say it's ready. Hadn't you better let me get it type-written for you?" Dory opened the bag at his feet, gave his father a roll of paper. "Please look it over, and make any changes you like." Dr. Hargrave began the reading then and there. He had not finished the first paragraph when Dory interrupted with, "Why, Del, you're passing our turning." Del grew crimson. The doctor, without looking up or taking his mind off the address, said: "Adelaide gave up Mrs. Dorsey's house several weeks ago. You are living with us." Dory glanced at her quickly and away. She said nothing. "He'll understand," thought she--and she was right. Only those who have had experience of the older generation out West would have suspected the pride, the affection, the delight hiding behind Martha Skeffington's prim and formal welcome, or that it was not indifference but the unfailing instinct of a tender heart that made her say, after a very few minutes: "Adelaide, don't you think Dory'd like to look at the rooms?" Del led the way, Dory several feet behind her--deliberately, lest he should take that long, slender form of hers in his arms that he might again feel her bosom swelling and fluttering against him, and her fine, thick, luminous hair caressing his temple and his cheek. Miss Skeffington had given them the three large rooms on the second floor--the two Dory used to have and one more for Del. As he followed Del into the sitting room he saw that there had been changes, but he could not note them. She was not looking at him; she seemed to be in a dream, or walking with the slow deliberate steps one takes in an unfamiliar and perilous path. "That is still your bedroom," said she, indicating one of the doors. "A stationary stand has been put in. Perhaps you'd like to freshen up a bit." "A stationary stand," he repeated, as if somewhat dazed before this practical detail. "Yes--I think so." She hesitated, went into her room, not quite closing the door behind her. He stared at it with a baffled look. "And," he was thinking, "I imagined I had trained myself to indifference." An object near the window caught his eye--a table at which he could work standing. He recalled that he had seen its like in a big furniture display at Paris when they were there together, and that he had said he would get one for himself some day. This hint that there might be more than mere matter in those surroundings set his eyes to roving. That revolving bookcase by the desk, the circular kind he had always wanted, and in it the books he liked to have at hand--Montaigne and Don Quixote, Shakespeare and Shelley and Swinburne, the Encyclopedia, the statistical yearbooks; on top, his favorites among the magazines. And the desk itself--a huge spread of cleared surface--an enormous blotting pad, an ink well that was indeed a well--all just what he had so often longed for as he sat cramped at little desks where an attempt to work meant overflow and chaos of books and papers. And that big inlaid box--it was full of his favorite cigarettes; and the drop-light, and the green shade for the eyes, and the row of pencils sharpened as he liked them-- He knocked at her door. "Won't you come out here a moment?" cried he, putting it in that form because he had never adventured her intimate threshold. No answer, though the door was ajar and she must have heard. "Please come out here," he repeated. A pause; then, in her voice, shy but resolute, the single word, "Come!" CHAPTER XXVIII THE DEAD THAT LIVE On the green oval within and opposite the entrance to the main campus of the great university there is the colossal statue of a master workman. The sculptor has done well. He does not merely show you the physical man--the mass, the strength, of bone and sinew and muscle; he reveals the man within--the big, courageous soul. Strangers often think this statue a personation of the force which in a few brief generations has erected from a wilderness our vast and splendid America. And it is that; but to Arthur and Adelaide, standing before it in a June twilight, long after the events above chronicled, it is their father--Hiram. "How alive he seems," says his daughter. And his son answers: "How alive he _is_!" 
10932	----	Proofreading Team. OVER THE PASS BY FREDERICK PALMER AUTHOR OF THE VAGABOND, DANBURY RODD, ETC. 1912 CONTENTS PART I--AN EASY TRAVELLER CHAPTER I YOUTH IN SPURS II DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO III JACK RIDES IN COMPANY IV HE CARRIES THE MAIL V A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN VI OBLIVION IS NOT EASY VII WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S VIII ACCORDING TO CODE IX THE DEVIL IS OUT X MARY EXPLAINS XI SEÑOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES XII MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE XIII A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES XIV "HOW FAST YOU SEW!" XV WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS XVI A CHANGE OF MIND XVII THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND XVIII ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES XIX LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES XX A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR XXI "GOOD-BY, LITTLE RIVERS!" XXII "LUCK, JACK, LUCK!" PART II--HE FINDS HIMSELF XXIII LABELLED AND SHIPPED XXIV IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS XXV "BUT WITH YOU, YES, SIR!" XXVII BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY XXVIII JACK GETS A RAISE XXIX A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL XXX WITH THE PHANTOMS XXXI PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT XXXII A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY XXXIII PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT XXXIV "JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU--" PART III--HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN LIFE XXXV BACK TO LITTLE RIVERS XXXVI AROUND THE WATER-HOLE XXXVII THE END OF THE WEAVING XXXVIII THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS PART I AN EASY TRAVELLER I YOUTH IN SPURS Here time was as nothing; here sunset and sunrise were as incidents of an uncalendared, everlasting day; here chaotic grandeur was that of the earth's crust when it cooled after the last convulsive movement of genesis. In all the region about the Galeria Pass the silence of the dry Arizona air seemed luminous and eternal. Whoever climbed to the crotch of that V, cut jagged against the sky for distances yet unreckoned by tourist folders, might have the reward of pitching the tents of his imagination at the gateway of the clouds. Early on a certain afternoon he would have noted to the eastward a speck far out on a vast basin of sand which was enclosed by a rim of tumbling mountains. Continued observation at long range would have shown the speck to be moving almost imperceptibly, with what seemed the impertinence of infinitesimal life in that dead world; and, eventually, it would have taken the form of a man astride a pony. The man was young, fantastically young if you were to judge by his garb, a flamboyant expression of the romantic cowboy style which might have served as a sensational exhibit in a shop-window. In place of the conventional blue wool shirt was one of dark blue silk. The _chaparejos_, or "chaps," were of the softest leather, with the fringe at the seams generously long; and the silver spurs at the boot-heels were chased in antique pattern and ridiculously large. Instead of the conventional handkerchief at the neck was a dark red string tie; while the straight-brimmed cowpuncher hat, out of keeping with the general effect of newness and laundered freshness, had that tint which only exposure to many dewfalls and many blazing mid-days will produce in light-colored felt. There was vagrancy in the smile of his singularly sensitive mouth and vagrancy in the relaxed way that he rode. From the fondness with which his gaze swept the naked peaks they might have been cities _en fête_ calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed snatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt, which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer joy of living. Lapsing into silence, his face went ruminative and then sad. With a sudden indrawing of breath he freed himself from his reverie, and bending over from his saddle patted a buckskin neck in affectionate tattoo. Tawny ears turned backward in appreciative fellowship, but without any break in a plodding dog-trot. Though the rider's aspect might say with the desert that time was nothing, the pony's expressed a logical purpose. Thus the speed of their machine-like progress was entirely regulated by the prospect of a measure of oats at the journey's end. When they came to the foot-hills and the rider dismounted and led the way, with a following muzzle at times poking the small of his back, up the tortuous path, rounding pinnacles and skimming the edge of abysses, his leg muscles answered with the readiness of familiarity with climbing. At the top he saw why the pass had received its name of Galeria from the Spanish. A great isosceles of precipitous walls formed a long, natural gallery, which the heaving of the earth's crust had rent and time had eroded. It lay near the present boundary line of two civilizations: in the neutral zone of desert expanses, where the Saxon pioneer, with his lips closed on English _s's_, had paused in his progress southward; and the _conquistadore_, with tongue caressing Castilian vowels, had paused in his progress northward. At the other side the traveller beheld a basin which was a thousand feet higher than the one behind him. It approached the pass at a gentler slope. It must be cooler than the other, its ozone a little rarer. A sea of quivering and singing light in the afternoon glow, it was lost in the horizon. Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by the roofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the end of the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom in sterile expanses. There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visible symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outer edge of the oasis. "This beats any valley I've seen yet," and the traveller spoke with the confidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys. He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous vista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present it in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visual intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoism of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the sound of voices, a man's and a woman's, broke on his ear. The man's was strident, disagreeable, persistent. Its timbre was such as he had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons. The woman's was quiet and resisting, its quality of youth peculiarly emphasized by its restrained emotion. Now the easy traveller took stock of his immediate surroundings, which had interested him only as a foothold and vantage-point for the panorama that he had been breathing in. Here, of all conceivable places, he was in danger of becoming eavesdropper to a conversation which was evidently very personal. Rounding the escarpment at his elbow he saw, on a shelf of decaying granite, two waiting ponies. One had a Mexican saddle of the cowboy type. The other had an Eastern side-saddle, which struck him as exotic in a land where women mostly ride astride. And what woman, whatever style of riding she chose, should care to come to this pass? Judging by the direction from which the voices came, the speakers were hidden by still another turn in the defile. A few more steps brought eye as well as ear back to the living world with the sight of a girl seated on a bowlder. He could see nothing of her face except the cheek, which was brown, and the tip of a chin, which he guessed was oval, and her hair, which was dark under her hatbrim and shimmering with gold where it was kissed by the rays of the sun. An impression as swift as a flash of light could not exclude inevitable curiosity as to the full face; a curiosity emphasized by the poised erectness of her slender figure. The man was bending over her in a familiar way. He was thirty, perhaps, in the prime of physical vigor, square-jawed, cocksure, a six-shooter slung at his hip. Though she was not giving way before him, her attitude, in its steadiness, reflected distress in a bowstrung tremulousness. Suddenly, at something he said which the easy traveller could not quite understand, she sprang up aflame, her hand flying back against the rock wall behind her for support. Then the man spoke so loud that he was distinctly audible. "When you get mad like that you're prettier'n ever," he said. It was a peculiar situation. It seemed incredible, melodramatic, unreal, in sight of the crawling freight train far out on the levels. "Aren't you overplaying your part, sir?" the easy traveller asked. The man's hand flew to his six-shooter, while the girl looked around in swift and eager impulse to the interrupting voice. Its owner, the color scheme of his attire emphasized by the glare of the low sun, expressed in his pose and the inquiring flicker of a smile purely the element of the casual. Far from making any movement toward his own six-shooter, he seemed oblivious of any such necessity. With the first glimpse of her face, when he saw the violet flame of her anger go ruddy with surprise and relief, then fluid and sparkling as a culminating change of emotion, he felt cheap for having asked himself the question--which now seemed so superficial--whether she were good-looking or not. She was, undoubtedly, yes, undoubtedly good-looking in a way of her own. "What business is it of yours?" demanded the man, evidently under the impression that he was due to say something, while his fingers still rested on his holster. "None at all, unless she says so," the deliverer answered. "Is it?" he asked her. After her first glance at him she had lowered her lashes. Now she raised them, sending a direct message beside which her first glance had been dumb indifference. He was seeing into the depths of her eyes in the consciousness of a privilege rarely bestowed. They gave wing to a thousand inquiries. He had the thrill of an explorer who is about to enter on a voyage of discovery. Then the veil was drawn before his ship had even put out from port. It was a veil woven with fine threads of appreciative and conventional gratitude. "It is!" she said decisively. "I'll be going," said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixed partly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed down to normal. "As you please," answered that easy traveller. "I had no mind to exert any positive directions over your movements." His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an open challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made his protagonist appear a negligible quantity. "There's some things I don't do when women are around," the persecutor returned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silence prevailed. The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him. He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuously as he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to draw rein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easy traveller in from head to foot. "Huh! You near-silk dude!" he said chokingly, in his rancor which had grown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion. "If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk," the easy traveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement. "We'll meet again!" came the more definite and articulate defiance. "Perhaps. Who can tell? Arizona, though a large place, has so few people that it is humanly very small." Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body on the palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle. He was rigid, his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to a fine point of determination. "When we do meet, you better draw! I give you warning!" he called. There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten a single muscle. But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile. "Whew!" He drew the exclamation out into a whistle. "Whistle--whistle while you can! You won't have many more chances! Draw, you tenderfoot! But it won't do any good--I'll get you!" With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceeded on his way. "Whew!" The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything but apologetic. It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delight of the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places. From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of embarrassment that left her speechless. "Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, but your anthropology as you find it!" His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and his absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete. "Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said. "But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick to fall in with his cue. "The swooning age outlasted him--lasted, indeed, into the era of hoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone." "They do give medals," she added. "For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carry around in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!" Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other in understanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play the classic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young man finding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world, five or six miles from a settlement--well, it was a fact. Over the bump of their self-introduction, free of the serious impression of her experience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struck her with sudden alarm. "I fear I have made you a dangerous enemy," she said. "Pete Leddy is the prize ruffian of our community of Little Rivers." "I thought that this would be an interesting valley," he returned, in bland appreciation of her contribution of information about the habits of the specimen. II DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO She faced a situation irritating and vitalizing, and inevitably, under its growing perplexity, her observation of his appearance and characteristics had been acute with feminine intuition, which is so frequently right, that we forget that it may not always be. She imagined him with a certain amiable aimlessness turning his pony to one side so as not to knock down a danger sign, while he rode straight over a precipice. What would have happened if Leddy had really drawn? she asked herself. Probably her deliverer would have regarded the muzzle of Leddy's gun in studious vacancy before a bullet sent him to kingdom come. All speculation aside, her problem was how to rescue her rescuer. She felt almost motherly on his account, he was so blissfully oblivious to realities. And she felt, too, that under the circumstances, she ought to be formal. "Now, Mister--" she began; and the Mister sounded odd and stilted in her ears in relation to him. "Jack is my name," he said simply. "Mine is Mary," she volunteered, giving him as much as he had given and no more. "Now, sir," she went on, in peremptory earnestness, "this is serious." "It _was_," he answered. "At least, unpleasant." "It is, _now_. Pete Leddy meant what he said when he said that he would draw." "He ought to, from his repeated emphasis," answered Jack, in agreeable affirmation. "He has six notches on his gun-handle--six men that he has killed!" Mary went on. "Whew!" said Jack. "And he isn't more than thirty! He seems a hard worker who keeps right on the job." She pressed her lips together to control her amusement, before she asked categorically, with the precision of a school-mistress: "Do you know how to shoot?" He was surprised. He seemed to be wondering if she were not making sport of him. "Why should I carry a six-shooter if I did not?" he asked. This convinced her that his revolver was a part of his play cowboy costume. He had come out of the East thinking that desperado etiquette of the Bad Lands was _opéra bouffe_. "Leddy is a dead shot. He will give you no chance!" she insisted. "I should think not," Jack mused. "No, naturally not; otherwise there might have been no sixth notch. The third or the fourth, even the second object of his favor might have blasted his fair young career as a wood-carver. Has he set any limit to his ambition? Is he going to make it an even hundred and then retire?" "I don't know!" she gasped. "I must ask," he added, thoughtfully. Was he out of his head? Certainly his eye was not insane. Its bluish-gray was twinkling enjoyably into hers. "You exasperated him with that whistle. It was a deadly insult to his desperado pride. You are marked--don't you see, marked?" she persisted. "And I brought it on! I am responsible!" He shook his head in a denial so unmoved by her appeal that she was sure he would send Job into an apoplectic frenzy. "Pardon me, but you're contradicting your own statement. You just said it was the whistle," he corrected her. "It's the whistle that gives me Check Number Seven. You haven't the least bit of responsibility. The whistle gets it all, just as you said." This was too much. Confuting her with her own words! Quibbling with his own danger in order to make her an accomplice of murder! She lost her temper completely. That fact alone could account for the audacity of her next remark. "I wonder if you really know enough to come in out of the rain!" she stormed. "That's the blessing of living in Arizona," he returned. "It is such a dry climate." She caught herself laughing; and this only made her the more intense a second later, on a different tack. Now she would plead. "Please--please promise me that you will not go to Little Rivers to-night. Promise that you will turn back over the pass!" "You put me between the devil and the dragon. What you ask is impossible. I'll tell you why," he went on, confidentially. "You know this is the land of fossil dinosaurs." "I had a brute on my hands," she thought; "now I have the Mad Hatter and the March Hare in collaboration!" "There is a big dinosaur come to life on the other side," he proceeded. "I just got through the pass in time. I could feel his breath on my back--a hot, gun-powdery breath! It was awful, simply awful and horrible, too. And just as I had resigned myself to be his entrée, by great luck his big middle got wedged in the bottom of the V, and his scales scraped like the plates of a ship against a stone pier!" To her disgust she was laughing again. "If I went back now out of fear of Pete Leddy," he continued, "that dinosaur would know that I was such insignificant prey he would not even take the trouble to knock me down with a forepaw. He would swallow me alive and running! Think of that slimy slide down the red upholstery of his gullet, not to mention the misery of a total loss of my dignity and self-respect!" He had spoken it all as if he believed it true. He made it seem almost true. "I like nonsense as much as anybody," she began, "and I do not forget that you did me a great kindness." "Which any stranger, any third person coming at the right moment might have done," he interrupted. "Sir Walter's age has passed." "Yes, but Pete Leddy belongs still farther back. We may laugh at his ruffianly bravado, but no one may laugh at a forty-four calibre bullet! Think what you are going to make me pay for your kindness! I must pay with memory of the sound of a shot and the fall of a body there in the streets of Little Rivers--a nightmare for life! Oh, I beg of you, though it is fun for you to be killed, consider me! Don't go down into that valley! I beg of you, go back over the pass!" There was no acting, no suspicion of a gesture. She stood quite still, while all the power of her eyes reflected the misery which she pictured for herself. The low pitch of her voice sounded its depths with that restraint which makes for the most poignant intensity. As she reached her climax he had come out of his languid pose. He was erect and rigid. She saw him as some person other than the one to whom she had begun her appeal. He was still smiling, but his smile was of a different sort. Instead of being the significant thing about him in expression of his casualness, it seemed the softening compensation for his stubbornness. "I'd like to, but it is hardly in human nature for me to do that. I can't!" And he asked if he might bring up her pony. "Yes," she consented. She thought that the faint bow of courtesy with which he had accompanied the announcement of his decision he would have given, in common politeness, to anyone who pointed at the danger sign before he rode over the precipice. "May I ride down with you, or shall I go ahead?" he inquired, after he had assisted her to mount. "With me!" she answered, quickly. "You are safe while you are with me." The decisive turn to her mobile lips and the faint wrinkles of a frown, coming and going in various heraldry, formed a vividly sentient and versatile expression of emotions while she watched his silhouette against the sky as he turned to get his own pony. "Come, P.D.--come along!" he called. In answer to his voice an equine face, peculiarly reflective of trail wisdom, bony and large, particularly over the eyes, slowly turned toward its master. P.D. was considering. "Come along! The trail, P.D.!" And P.D. came, but with democratic independence, taking his time to get into motion. "He is never fast," Jack explained, "but once he has the motor going, he keeps at it all day. So I call him P.D. without the Q., as he is never quick." "Pretty Damn, you mean!" she exclaimed, with a certain spontaneous pride of understanding. Then she flushed in confusion. "Oh, thank you! It was so human of you to translate it out loud! It isn't profane. Look at him now. Don't you think it is a good name for him?" Jack asked, seriously. "I do!" She was laughing again, oblivious of the impending tragedy. III JACK RIDES IN COMPANY Let not the Grundy woman raise an eyebrow of deprecation at the informal introduction of Jack and Mary, or we shall refute her with her own precepts, which make the steps to a throne the steps of the social pyramid. If she wishes a sponsor, we name an impeccable majesty of the very oldest dynasty of all, which is entirely without scandal. We remind her of the ancient rule that people who meet at court, vouched for by royal favor, need no introduction. These two had met under the roof of the Eternal Painter. His palette is somewhere in the upper ether and his head in the interplanetary spaces. His heavy eyebrows twinkle with star-dust. Dodging occasional flying meteors, which harass him as flies harass a landscapist out of doors on a hot day, he is ever active, this mighty artist of the changing desert sky. So fickle his moods, so versatile his genius, so quick to creation his fancy, that he never knows what his next composition will be till the second that it is begun. No earthly rival need be jealous of him. He will never clog the galleries. He always paints on the same canvas, scraping off one picture to make room for another. And you do not mind the loss of the old. You live for the new. His Majesty has no artistic memory. He is as young as he was the day that he flung out his first tentative lunette after chaos. He is the patron saint of all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the abandoned preoccupation of his own brushwork. His lieges, who seek oblivion in the desert, need not worry about the water that will never run over the millwheel again, or dwell in prophecy on floods to come. The omnipotence of the moment transports and soothes them. "Time is nothing!" says the Eternal Painter. "If you feel important, remember that man's hectic bustling makes but worm-work on the planet. Live and breathe joyfully and magnificently! Do not strain your eyes over embroidery! Come to my open gallery! And how do you like the way I set those silver clouds a-tumbling? Do you know anything better under the dome of any church or capitol? Shall I bank them? Line them with purple? It is done! But no! Let us wipe it all out, change the tint of our background, and start afresh!" With his eleven hundred million billionth sunset, or thereabouts, His Majesty held a man and a woman who had met on the roof of the world in thrall. He was lurid at the outset, dipping his camel's hair in at the round furnace door sinking toward the hills, whose red vortex shot tongues of flame into canyons and crevasses and drove out their lurking shadows with the fire of its inquisition. The foliage of Little Rivers became a grove of quivering leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross. "I love it all--all the desert!" said Mary Ewold. "And I, too!" "I have for six years." "I for five." The sentences had struck clearly as answering chimes, impersonally, in their preoccupied gazing. "It gave me life!" he added. "And it gave me life!" Then they looked at each other in mutual surprise and understanding; each in wonder that the other had ever been anything but radiant of out-of-doors health. That fleck on the lungs which brought a doctor's orders had long ago been healed by the physician of the ozone they were breathing. "And you remained," he said. "And you, also," she answered. Their own silence seemed to become a thing apart from the silence of the infinite. It was as if both recognized a common thought that even the Eternal Painter could not compel oblivion of the past to which they did not return; of the faith of cities to which they had been bred. But it is one of the Eternal Painter's rules that no one of his subjects should ask another of his subjects why he stays on the desert. Jack was the first to speak, and his voice returned to the casual key. "Usually I watch the sunset while we make camp," he said. "I am very late to-night--late beyond all habit; and sunset and sunrise do make one a creature of habit out here. Firio and my little train will grow impatient waiting for me." "You mean the Indian and the burro with the silver bells that came over the pass some time before you?" Of course they belonged to him, she was thinking, even as she made the inquiry. This play cowboy, with his absurdly enormous silver spurs, would naturally put bells on his burro. "Yes, I sent Firio with Wrath of God and Jag Ear on ahead and told him to wait at the foot of the descent. Wrath of God will worry--he is of a worrying nature. I must be going." In view of the dinosaur nonsense she was already prepared for a variety of inventional talk from him. As they started down from the pass in single file, she leading, the sun sank behind the hills, leaving the Eternal Painter, unhindered by a furnace glare in the centre of the canvas, to paint with a thousand brushes in the radiant tints of the afterglow. "You don't like that one, O art critics!" we hear him saying. "Well, here is another before you have adjusted your _pince-nez,_ and I will brush it away before you have emitted your first Ah! I do not criticise. I paint--I paint for the love of it. I paint with the pigments of the firmament and the imagination of the universe." The two did not talk of that sky which held their averted glances, while knowing hoofs that bore their weight kept the path. For how can you talk of the desert sky except in the banality of exclamations? It is _lèse majesté_ to the Eternal Painter to attempt description. At times she looked back and their eyes met in understanding, as true subjects of His Majesty, and then they looked skyward to see what changes the Master's witchery had wrought. In supreme intoxication of the senses, breathing that dry air which was like cool wine coming in long sips to the palate, they rode down the winding trail, till, after a surpassing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night. It was dusk. Shadows returned to the crevasses. Free of the magic of the sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself. It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy. She was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of blood; and there, behind her, rode this smiling stranger, proceeding so genially and carelessly to the fate which she had provided for him. With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony. The Indian sprang up, grinning: his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat. "I must introduce you all around," Jack told Mary. She observed in his manner something new!--a positive enthusiasm for his three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their loyalty and character. "Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle," Jack said. "Sancho was fat and unresourceful; even stupid. Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit! Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!" Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish blood in the primitive southern strain. "And Firio rides Wrath of God," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?--always miserable, whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature. There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the cheerful humor of Jag Ear." "It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," she observed, "and how he earned his name." Every time a burro gets into the corn, an Indian master cuts off a bit of long, furry ear as a lesson. Before Jag Ear passed into kindlier hands he had been clipped closer than a Boston terrier. Only a single upstanding fragment remained in token of a graded education which had availed him nothing. "There's no curtailing Jag Ear's curiosity," said Jack. "To him, everything is worth trying. That is why he is a born traveller. He has been with me from Colorado to Chihuahua, on all my wanderings back and forth." While he spoke, Firio mounted Wrath of God and, with Jag Ear's bells jingling, the supply division set out on the road. Jack and Mary followed, this time riding side by side, pony nose to pony nose, in an intimacy of association impossible in the narrow mountain trail. It was an intimacy signalized by silence. There was an end to the mighty transports of the heights; the wells of whimsicality had dried up. The weight of the silence seemed balancing on a brittle thread. All the afternoon's events aligned themselves in a colossal satire. In the half light Jack became a gaunt and lonely figure that ought to be confined in some Utopian kindergarten. Mary could feel her temples beating with the fear of what was waiting for him in Little Rivers, now a dark mass on the levels, just dark, without color or any attraction except the mystery that goes with the shroud of night. She knew how he would laugh at her fears; for she guessed that he was unafraid of anything in the world which, however, was no protection from Pete Leddy's six-shooter. "I--I have a right to know--won't you tell me how you are going to defend yourself against Pete Leddy?" she demanded, in a sudden outburst. "I hadn't thought of that. Certainly, I shall leave it to Pete himself to open hostilities. I hadn't thought of it because I have been too busy thinking out how I was going to break a piece of news to Firio. I have been an awful coward about it, putting it off and putting it off. I had planned to do it on my birthday two weeks ago, and then he gave me these big silver spurs--spent a whole month's wages on them, think of that! I bought this cowboy regalia to go with them. You can't imagine how that pleased him. It certainly was great fun." Mary could only shake her head hopelessly. "Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God and old P.D. here--we've sort of grown used to one another's foolishness. Now I can't put it off any longer, and I'd about as soon be murdered as tell him that I am going East in the morning." "You mean you are going to leave here for good?" She mistrusted her own hearing. She was dazzled by this sudden burst of light through the clouds. "Yes, by the first train. This is my last desert ride." Why had he not said so at first? It would not only have saved her from worry, but from the humiliation of pleading with a stranger. Doubtless he had enjoyed teasing her. But no matter. The affair need not last much longer, now. She told herself that, if necessary, she would mount guard over him for the remaining twelve hours of his stay. Once he was aboard the Pullman he would be out of danger; her responsibility would be over and the whole affair would become a bizarre memory; an incident closed. "Back to New York," he said, as one who enters a fog without a compass. "Back to fight pleosaurs, dinosaurs, and all kinds of monsters," he added, with a cheeriness which rang with the first false note she had heard from him. "I don't care," he concluded, and broke into a Spanish air, whose beat ran with the trickling hoof-beats of the ponies in the sand. "That is it!" she thought. "That explains. He just does not care about anything." Ahead, the lamps were beginning to twinkle in the little settlement which had sent such a contrast in citizenship as Mary Ewold and Pete Leddy out to the pass. They were approaching a single, isolated building, from the door of which came a spray of light and the sound of men's voices. "That is Bill Lang's place," Mary explained. "He keeps a store, with a bar in the rear. He also has the post-office, thanks to his political influence, and this is where I have to stop for the mail when I return from the pass." She had not spoken with any sense of a hint which it was inevitable he should accept. "Let me get it for you;" and before she had time to protest, he had dismounted, drawing rein at the edge of the wooden steps. She rode past where his pony was standing. When he entered the door, his tallness and lean ease of posture silhouetted in the light, she could look in on the group of idling male gossips. "Don't!" It was a half cry from her, hardly audible in an intensity which she knew was futile in the surge of her torturing self-incrimination. Why had she not thought that it would be here that Pete Leddy was bound to wait for anyone coming in by the trail from Galeria? The loungers suddenly dropped to the cover of boxes and barrels, as a flicker of steel shot upward, and behind the gleaming rim of a revolver muzzle held rigid was a brown hand and Leddy's hard, unyielding face. What matter if the easy traveller could shoot? He was caught like a man coming out of an alley. He had no chance to draw in turn. In the click of a second-hand the thing would be over. Mary's eyes involuntarily closed, to avoid seeing the flash from the revolver. She listened for the report; for the fall of a body which should express the horror she had visualized for the hundredth time. A century seemed to pass and there was no sound except the beat of her heart, which ran in a cataract throb to her temples; no sound except that and what seemed to be soft, regular steps on the bare floor of the store. "Coward!" she told herself, with the agony of her suspense breaking. "He saved you from inexpressible humiliation and you are afraid even to look!" She opened her eyes, prepared for the worst. Had she gone out of her head? Could she no longer trust her own eyesight? What she saw was inconceivable. The startled faces of the loungers were rising from behind the boxes and barrels. Pete Leddy's gun had dropped to his side and his would-be victim had a hand on Pete's shoulder. Jack was talking apparently in a kindly and reasoning tone, but she could not make out his words. One man alone evidently had not taken cover. It was Jim Galway, a rancher, who had been standing at the mail counter. To judge by his expression, what Jack was saying had his approval. With a nod to Leddy and then a nod to the others, as if in amicable conclusion of the affair, Jack wheeled around to the counter, disclosing Leddy's face wry with insupportable chagrin. His revolver was still in his hand. In the swift impulse of one at bay who finds himself released, he brought it up. There was murder, murder from behind, in the catlike quickness of his movement; but Jim Galway was equally quick. He threw his whole weight toward Leddy in a catapult leap, as he grasped Leddy's wrist and bore it down. Jack faced about in alert readiness. Seeing that Galway had the situation pat, he put up his hand in a kind of questioning, puzzled remonstrance; but Mary noticed that he was very erect. He spoke and Galway spoke in answer. Evidently he was asking that Leddy be released. To this Galway consented at length, but without drawing back until he had seen Leddy's gun safe in the holster. Then Leddy raised himself challengingly on tiptoes to Jack, who turned to Galway in the manner of one extending an invitation. On his part, Leddy turned to Ropey Smith, another of Little Rivers' ruffians. After this, Leddy went through the door at the rear; the loungers resumed their seats on the cracker barrels and gazed at one another with dropped jaws, while Bill Lang proceeded with his business as postmaster. IV HE CARRIES THE MAIL When the suspense was over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning sense of her surroundings came with the sound of a voice, the same careless, pleasant voice which she had heard at Galeria asking Pete Leddy if he were not overplaying his part. "You were right," said the voice. "It was the whistle that made him so angry." Indistinctly she associated a slowly-shaping figure with the voice and realized that she had been away in the unknown for a second. Yes, it was all very well to talk about Sir Walter being out of fashion, but she had been near to fainting, and in none of the affectation of the hoop-skirt age, either. Had she done any foolish thing in expression of a weakness that she had never known before? Had she extended her hand for support? Had he caught her as she wobbled in the saddle? No. She was relieved to see that he was not near enough for that. "By no stretch of ethics can you charge yourself with further responsibility or fears," he continued. "Pete and I understand each other perfectly, now." But in his jocularity ran something which was plain, if unspoken. It was that he would put an end to a disagreeable subject. His first words to her had provided a bridge--and burned it--from the bank of the disagreeable to the bank of agreeable. Her own desire, with full mastery of her faculties coming swiftly, fell in with his. She wanted to blot out that horror and scotch a sudden uprising of curiosity as to the exact nature of the gamble in death through which he had passed. It was enough that he was alive. The blurry figure became distinct, smiling with inquiry in a glance from her to the stack of papers, magazines, and pamphlets which crowded his circling arms. He seemed to have emptied the post-office. There had not been any Pete Leddy; there had been no display of six-shooters. He had gone in after the mail. Here he was ready to deliver it by the bushel, while he waited for orders. She had to laugh at his predicament as he lowered his chin to steady a book on the top of the pile. "Oh, I meant to tell you that you were not to bring the second-class matter!" she told him. "We always send a servant with a basket for that. You see what comes of having a father who is not only omnivorous, but has a herbivorous capacity." He saw that the book had a row of Italian stamps across the wrapper. Unless that popular magazine stopped slipping, both the book and a heavy German pamphlet would go. He took two hasty steps toward her, in mock distress of appeal. "I'll allow salvage if you act promptly!" he said. She lifted the tottering apex just in time to prevent its fall. "I'll take the book," she said. "Father has been waiting months for it. We can separate the letters and leave the rest in the store to be sent for." "The railroad station is on the other side of the town, isn't it?" he asked. "Yes." "I shall camp nearby, so it will be no trouble to leave my burden at your door as I pass." "He does have the gift of oiling the wheels in either, big or little moments," she thought, as she realized how simple and considerate had been his course from the first. He was a stranger going on his way, stopping, however, to do her or any other traveller a favor _en route_. "Firio, we're ready to hear Jag Ear's bells!" he called. "_Sí_!" answered Firio. All the while the Indian had kept in the shadow, away from the spray of light from the store lamp, unaware of the rapid drama that had passed among the boxes and barrels. He had observed nothing unusual in the young lady, whose outward manifestation of what she had, witnessed was the closing of her eyes. It was out of the question that Jack should mount a horse when both arms were crowded with their burden. He walked beside Mary's stirrup leather in the attitude of that attendant on royalty who bears a crown on a cushion. "Little Rivers is a new town, isn't it?" he asked. "Yes, the Town Wonderful," she answered. "Father founded it." She spoke with an affection which ran as deep into the soil as young roots after water. If on the pass she had seemed a part of the desert, of great, lonely distances and a far-flung carpet of dreams, here she seemed to belong to books and gardens. "I wish I had time to look over the Town Wonderful in the morning, but my train goes very early, I believe." After his years of aimless travelling, to which he had so readily confessed, he had tied himself to a definite hour on a railroad schedule as something commanding and inviolable. Such inconsistency did not surprise her. Had she not already learned to expect inconsistencies from him? "Oh, it is all simple and primitive, but it means a lot to us," she said. "What one's home and people mean to him is pretty well all of one's own human drama," he returned, seriously. The peace of evening was in the air and the lights along the single street were a gentle and persistent protest of human life against the mighty stretch of the enveloping mantle of night. From the cottages of the ranchers came the sound of voices. The twang of a guitar quivering starward made medley with Jag Ear's bells. Here, for a little distance, the trail, in its long reach on the desert, had taken on the dignity of the urban name of street. On either side, fronting the cottages, ran the slow waters of two irrigation ditches, gleaming where lamp-rays penetrated the darkness. The date of each rancher's settlement was fairly indicated by the size of the quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade. Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its architecture. At a cement bridge over the ditch, leading to a broad veranda under the soft illumination of a big, wrought-iron lantern, Mary drew rein. "This is home," she said; "and--and thank you!" He could not see her face, which was in the shadow turned toward him, as he looked into the light of the lantern from the other side of her pony. "And--thank you!" It was as if she had been on the point of saying something else and could not get the form of any sentence except these two words. Was there anything further to say except "Thank you"? Anything but to repeat "Thank you"? There he stood, this stranger so correctly introduced by the Eternal Painter, with his burden, waiting instructions in this moment of awkward diffidence. He looked at her and at the porch and at his bundle of mail in a quizzical appeal. Then she realized that, in a peculiar lapse of abstraction, she had forgotten about his encumberment. Before she could speak there was a sonorous hail from the house; a hail in keeping with the generous bulk of its owner, who had come through the door. He was well past middle-age, with a thatch of gray hair half covering his high forehead. In one hand he held the book that he had been reading, and in the other a pair of big tortoise-shell glasses. "Mary, you are late--and what have we here?" He was beaming at Jack as he came across the bridge and he broke into hearty laughter as he viewed Jack's preoccupation with the second-class matter. "At last! At last we have rural free delivery in Little Rivers! We are the coming town! And your uniform, sir"--Jasper Ewold took in the cowboy outfit with a sweeping glance which warmed with the picturesque effect--"it's a great improvement on the regulation; fit for free delivery in Little Rivers, where nobody studies to be unconventional in any vanity of mistaking that for originality, but nobody need be conventional." He took some of the cargo in his own hands. With the hearty breeze of his personality he fairly blew Jack onto the porch, where magazines and pamphlets were dropped indiscriminately in a pile on a rattan settee. "You certainly have enough reading matter," said Jack. "And I must be getting on to camp." For he had no invitation to stay from Mary and the conventional fact that he had to recognize is that a postman's call is not a social call. As he turned to go he faced her coming across the bridge. An Indian servant, who seemed to have materialized out of the night, had taken charge of her pony. "To camp! Never!" said Jasper Ewold. "Sir Knight, slip your lance in the ring of the castle walls--but having no lance and this being no castle, well, Sir Knight in _chaparejos_--that is to say, Sir Chaps--let me inform you"--here Jasper Ewold threw back his shoulders and tossed his mane of hair, his voice sinking to a serious basso profundo--"yes, inform you, sir, that there is one convention, a local rule, that no stranger crosses this threshold at dinner-time without staying to dinner." There was a resonance in his tone, a liveliness to his expression, that was infectious. "But Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God wait for me," Jack said, entering with real enjoyment into the grandiose style. "High sounding company, sir! Let me see them!" demanded Jasper Ewold. Jack pointed to his cavalcade waiting in the half shadows, where the lamp-rays grew thin. Wrath of God's bony face was pointed lugubriously toward the door; Jag Ear was wiggling his fragment of ear. "And Moses on the mountain-top says that you stay!" declared Jasper Ewold. Jack looked at Mary. She had not spoken yet and he waited on her word. "Please do!" she said. "Father wants someone to talk to." "Yes, Sir Chaps, I shall talk; otherwise, why was man given a tongue in his head and ideas?" Refusal was out of the question. Accordingly, Firio was sent on to make camp alone. "Now, Sir Chaps, now, Mr.--" began Jasper Ewold, pausing blankly. "Why, Mary, you have not given me his city directory name!" "Mr.--" and Mary blushed. She could only pass the, blame back to the Eternal Painter's oversight in their introduction. "Jack Wingfield!" said Jack, on his own account. "Jack Wingfield!" repeated Jasper Ewold, tasting the name. A flicker of surprise followed by a flicker of drawn intensity ran over his features, and he studied Jack in a long glance, which he masked just in time to save it from being a stare. Jack was conscious of the scrutiny. He flushed slightly and waited for some word to explain it; but none came. Jasper Ewold's Olympian geniality returned in a spontaneous flood. "Come inside, Jack Wingfield," he said. "Come inside, Sir Chaps--for that is how I shall call you." The very drum-beat of hospitality was in his voice. It was a wonderful voice, deep and warm and musical; not to be forgotten. V A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN When a man comes to the door book in hand and you have the testimony of the versatility and breadth of his reading in half a bushel of mail for him, you expect to find his surroundings in keeping. But in Jasper Ewold's living-room Jack found nothing of the kind. Heavy, natural beams supported the ceiling. On the gray cement walls were four German photographs of famous marbles. The Venus de Milo looked across to the David of Michael Angelo; the Flying Victory across to Rodin's Thinker. In the centre was a massive Florentine table, its broad top bare except for a big ivory tusk paper-knife free from any mounting of silver. On the shelf underneath were portfolios of the reproductions of paintings. An effect which at first was one of quiet spaciousness became impressive and compelling. Its simplicity was without any of the artificiality that sometimes accompanies an effort to escape over-ornamentation. No one could be in the room without thinking through his eyes and with his imagination. Wherever he sat he would look up to a masterpiece as the sole object of contemplation. "This is my room. Here, Mary lets me have my way," said Jasper Ewold. "And it is not expensive." "The Japanese idea of concentration," said Jack. Jasper Ewold, who had been watching the effect of the room on Jack, as he watched it on every new-comer, showed his surprise and pleasure that this young man in cowboy regalia understood some things besides camps and trails; and this very fact made him answer in the vigorous and enjoyed combatancy of the born controversialist. "Japanese? No!" he declared. "The little men with their storks and vases have merely discovered to us in decoration a principle which was Greek in a more majestic world than theirs. It was the true instinct of the classic motherhood of our art before collectors mistook their residences for warehouses." "And the books?" Jack asked, boyishly. "Where are they? Yes, what do you do with all the second-class matter?" The question was bait to Jasper Ewold. It gave him an opportunity for discourse. "When I read I want nothing but a paper-cutter close at hand--a good, big paper-cutter, whose own weight carries it through the leaves. And I want to be alone with that book. If I am too lazy to go to the library for another, then it is not worth reading. When I get head-achy with print and look up, I don't want to stare at the backs of more books. I want something to rest and fill the eye. I--" "Father," Mary admonished him, "I fear this is going to be long. Why not continue after Mr. Wingfield has washed off the dust of travel and we are at table?" "Mary is merely jealous. She wants to hurry you to the dining-room, which was designed to her taste," answered her father, with an affectation of grand indignation. "The dust of travel here is clean desert dust--but I admit that it is gritty. Come with me, Sir Chaps!" He bade Jack precede him through a door diagonally opposite the one by which he had entered from the veranda. On the other side Jack found himself surrounded by walls of books, which formed a parallelogram around a great deal table littered with magazines and papers. Here, indeed, the printed word might riot as it pleased in the joyous variety and chaos of that truly omnivorous reader of herbivorous capacity. Out of the library Jack passed into Jasper Ewold's bedroom. It was small, with a soldier's cot of exaggerated size that must have been built for his amplitude of person, and it was bare of ornament except for an old ivory crucifix. "There's a pitcher and basin, if you incline to a limited operation for outward convention," said Jasper Ewold; "and through that door you will find a shower, if you are for frank, unlimited submersion of the altogether." "Have I time for the altogether?" Jack asked. "When youth has not in this house, it marks a retrocession toward barbarism for Little Rivers which I refuse to contemplate. Take your shower, Sir Chaps, and"--a smile went weaving over the hills and valleys of Jasper Ewold's face--"and, mind, you take off those grand boots or they will get full of water! You will find me in the library when you are through;" and, shaking with subterranean enjoyment of his own joke, he closed the door. Cool water from the bowels of the mountains fell on a figure as slender as that of the great Michael's David pictured in the living-room; a figure whose muscles ran rippling with leanness and suppleness, without the bunching over-development of the athlete. He bubbled in shivery delight with the first frigid sting of the downpour; he laughed in ecstasy as he pulled the valve wide open, inviting a Niagara. While he was still glowing with the rough intimacy of the towel, he viewed the trappings thrown over the chair and his revolver holster on the bureau in a sense of detachment, as if in the surroundings of civilization some voice of civilization made him wish for flannels in which to dine. Then there came a rap at the door, and an Indian appeared with an envelope addressed in feminine handwriting. On the corner of the page within was a palm-tree--a crest to which anybody who dwelt on the desert might be entitled; and Jack read: "DEAR MR. WINGFIELD: "Please don't tell father about that horrible business on the pass. It will worry him unnecessarily and might interfere with my afternoon rides, which are everything to me. There is not the slightest danger in the future. After this I shall always go armed. "Sincerely yours, "MARY EWOLD." The shower had put him in such lively humor that his answer was born in a flash from memory of her own catechising of him on Galeria. "First, I must ask if you know how to shoot," he scribbled beneath her signature. The Indian seemed hardly out of the doorway before he was back with a reply: "I do, or I would not go armed," it said. She had capped his satire with satire whose prick was, somehow, delicious. He regarded the sweep of her handwriting with a lingering interest, studying the swift nervous strokes before he sent the note back with still another postscript: "Of course I had never meant to tell anybody," he wrote. "It is not a thing to think of in that way." This, he thought, must be the end of the correspondence; but he was wrong. The peripatetic go-between reappeared, and under Jack's last communication was written, "Thank you!" He could hardly write "Welcome!" in return. It was strictly a case of nothing more to say by either duelist. In an impulse he slipped the sheet, with its palm symbolic of desert mystery and oasis luxuriance, into his pocket. "Here I am in the midst of the shucks and biting into the meat of the kernel," said Jasper Ewold, as Jack entered the library to find him standing in the midst of wrappings which he had dropped on the floor; "yes, biting into very rich meat." He held up the book which was evidently the one that had balanced uncertainly on the pile which Jack had brought from the post-office. "Professor Giuccamini's researches! It is as interesting as a novel. But come! You are hungry!" Book in hand, and without removing his tortoise-shell spectacles, he passed out into the garden at the rear. There a cloth was laid under a pavilion. "In a country where it never rains," said the host, "where it is eternal spring, walls to a house are conventions on which to stack books and hang pictures. Mary has chosen nature for her decorative effect--cheaper, even, than mine. In the distance is Galeria; in the foreground, what was desert six years ago." The overhead lamp deepened to purple the magenta of the bougainvillea vines running up the pillars of the pavilion; made the adjacent rows of peony blossoms a pure, radiant white; while beyond, in the shadows, was a broad path between rows of young palms. Mary appeared around a hedge which hid the open-air kitchen. The girl of the gray riding-habit was transformed into a girl in white. Jack saw her as a domestic being. He guessed that she had seen that the table was set right; that she had had a look-in at the cooking; that the hands whose boast it was that they could shoot, had picked the jonquils in the slender bronze vase on the table. "Father, there you are again, bringing a book to the dining-room against the rules," she warned him; "against all your preachments about reading at meals!" "That's so, Mary," said Jasper Ewold, absently, regarding the book as if some wicked genius had placed it in his hand quite unbeknown to him. "But, Mary, it is Professor Giuccamini at last! Giuccamini that I have waited for so long! I beg your pardon, Sir Chaps! When I have somebody to talk to I stand doubly accused. Books at dinner! I descend into dotage!" In disgust he started toward the house with the book. But in the very doorway he paused and, reopening the book, turned three or four pages with ravenous interest. "Giuccamini and I agree!" he shouted. "He says there is no doubt that Burlamacchi and Pico were correct. Cosmo de' Medici did call Savonarola to his death-bed, and I am glad of it. I like good stories to turn out true! But here I have a listener--a live listener, and I ramble on about dead tyrants and martyrs. I apologize--I apologize!" and he disappeared in the library. "Father does not let me leave books in the living-room, which is his. Why should he bring them to the dining-room, which is mine?" Mary explained. "There must be law in every household," Jack agreed. "Yes, somebody fresh to talk to, at, around, and through!" called Jasper Ewold, as he reappeared. "Yes, and over your head; otherwise I shall not be flattered by my own conversation." "He glories in being an intellectual snob," Mary said. "Please pretend at times not to understand him." "Thank you, Mary. You are the corrective that keeps my paternal superiority in balance," answered her father, with a comprehending wave of his hand indicating his sense of humor at the same time as playful insistence on his role as forensic master of the universe. How he did talk! He was a mill to which all intellectual grist was welcome. Over its wheel the water ran now singing, again with the roar of a cataract. He changed theme with the relish of one who rambles at will, and the emotion of every opinion was written on the big expanse of his features and enforced with gestures. He talked of George Washington, of Andrea del Sarto, of melon-growing, trimming pepper-trees, the Divina Commedia, fighting rose-bugs, of Schopenhauer and of Florence--a great deal about Florence, a city that seemed to hang in his mind as a sort of Renaissance background for everything else, even for melon-growing. "You are getting over my head!" Jack warned him at times, politely. "That is the trouble," said Jasper Ewold. "Consider the hardship of being the one wise man in the world! I find it lonely, inconvenient, stupefying. Why, I can't even convince Jim Galway that I know more about dry farming than he!" Jack listened raptly, his face glowing. Once, when he looked in his host's direction suddenly, after speaking to Mary, he found that he was the object of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch. In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then, the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his wordy feints and thrusts. "Christian civilization began in the Tuscan valley," the philosopher proceeded, harking back to the book which had arrived by the evening's mail. "Florence was a devil--Florence was divine. They raised geniuses and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a Florence pension is all this"--with a wave of his hand to the garden and the stars--"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which brought us here after--after we had found that we had not as much money as we thought we had and an old fellow who had been an idling student, mostly living abroad all his life, felt the cramp of the material facts of board-and-clothes money. It made Mary well. It made me know the fulness of wisdom of the bee and the ant, and it brought me back to the spirit of America--the spirit of youth and accomplishment. Instead of dreaming of past cities, I set out to make a city like a true American. Here we came to camp in our first travelled delight of desert spaces for her sake; and here we brought what was left of the fortune and started a settlement." The spectator-philosopher attitude of audience to the world's stage passed. He became the builder and the rancher, enthusiastically dwelling on the growth of orchards and gardens in expert fondness. As Jack listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll. Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil. Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they brought to his brow. "The honey of our prosperity brings us something besides the bees. It brings those who would share the honey without work," said he. "It brings the Bill Lang hive and Pete Leddy." At the mention of the name, Jack's and Mary's glances met. "You have promised not to tell," hers was saying. "I will not," his was answering. But clearly he had grasped the fact that Little Rivers was getting out of its patron's hands, and every honest man in that community wanted to be rid of Pete Leddy. "I should think your old friend, Cosmo de' Medici, would have found a way," Jack suggested. "Cosmo is for talk," said Mary. "At heart father is a Quaker." "Some are for lynching," said Jasper Ewold, thoughtfully. "Begin to promote order with disorder and where will you end?" he inquired, belligerently. "This is not the Middle Ages. This is the Little Rivers of peace." Then, after a quotation from Cardinal Newman, which seemed pretty far-fetched to deal with desert ruffians, he was away again, setting out fruit trees and fighting the scale. "And our Date Tree Wonderful!" he continued. "This year we get our first fruit, unless the book is wrong. You cannot realize what this first-born of promise means to Little Rivers. Under the magic of water it completes the cycle of desert fecundity, from Scotch oats and Irish potatoes to the Arab's bread. Bananas I do not include. Never where the banana grows has there been art or literature, a good priesthood, unimpassioned law-makers, honest bankers, or a noble knighthood. It is just a little too warm. Here we can build a civilization which neither roasts us in summer nor freezes us in winter." There was a fluid magnetism in the rush of Jasper Ewold's junketing verbiage which carried the listener on the bosom of a pleasant stream. Jack was suddenly reminded that it must be very late and he had far overstayed the retiring hour of the desert, where the Eternal Painter commands early rising. "Going--going so soon!" protested Jasper Ewold. "So late!" Jack smiled back. To prove that it was, he called attention to the fact, when they passed through the living-room to the veranda, that not a light remained in any ranch-house. "I have not started my talk yet," said Jasper. "But next time you come I will really make a beginning--and you shall see the Date Tree Wonderful." "I go by the morning train," Jack returned. "So! so!" mused Jasper. "So! so!" he objected, but not gloomily. "I get a good listener only to lose him!" But Jack was hardly conscious of the philosopher's words. In that interval he had still another glimpse of Mary's eyes without the veil and saw deeper than he had before; saw vast solitudes, inviting yet offering no invitation, where bright streams seemed to flash and sing under the sunlight and then disappear in a desert. That was her farewell to the easy traveller who had stopped to do her a favor on the trail. And he seemed to ask nothing more in that spellbound second; nor did he after the veil had fallen, and he acquitted himself of some spoken form of thanks for an evening of happiness. "A pleasant journey!" Mary said. "Luck, Sir Chaps, luck!" called Jasper Ewold. Jack's easy stride, as he passed out into the night, confirmed the last glimpse of his smiling, whimsical "I don't care" attitude, which never minded the danger sign on the precipice's edge. "He does not really want to go back to New York," Mary remarked, and was surprised to find that she had spoken her thought aloud. "I hardly agree with that opinion," said her father absently, his thoughts far afield from the fetter of his words. "But of one thing I am sure, John Wingfield! A smile and a square chin!" VI OBLIVION IS NOT EASY "A smile and a square chin!" Mary repeated, as they went back into the living-room. "Yes, hasn't he both, this Wingfield?" asked her father. "This Wingfield"--on the finish of the sentence there was a halting, appreciable accent. He moved toward the table with the listlessness of some enormous automaton of a man to whom every step of existence was a step in a treadmill. There was a heavy sadness about his features which rarely came, and always startled her when it did come with a fear that they had so set in gloom that they would never change. He raised his hand to the wick screw of the lamp, waiting for her to pass through the room before turning off the flame which bathed him in its rays, giving him the effect of a Rodinesque incarnation of memory. Any melancholy that beset him was her own enemy, to be fought and cajoled. Mary slipped to his side, dropping her head on his shoulder and patting his cheek. But this magic which had so frequently rallied him brought only a transient, hazy smile and in its company what seemed a random thought. "And you and he came down the pass together? Yes, yes!" he said. His tone had the vagueness of one drawing in from the sea a net that seemed to have no end. Had Jack Wingfield been more than a symbol? Had he brought something more than an expression of culture, manner, and ease of a past which nothing could dim? Had he suggested some personal relation to that past which her father preferred to keep unexplained? These questions crowded into her mind speculatively. They were seeking a form of conveyance when she realized that she had been adrift with imaginings. He was getting older. She must expect his preoccupation and his absent-mindedness to become more exacting. "Yes, yes!" His voice had risen to its customary sonority; his eyes were twinkling; all the hard lines had become benignant wrinkles of Olympian charm. "Yes, yes! You and this funny tourist! What a desert it is! I wonder--now, I wonder if he will go aboard the Pullman in that stage costume. But come, come, Mary! It's bedtime for all pastoral workers and subjects of the Eternal Painter. Off you go, or we shall be playing blind-man's-buff in the dark!" He was chuckling as he turned down the wick. "His enormous spurs, and Jag Ear and Wrath of God!" he said. Her fancy ran dancing rejoicingly with his mood. "Don't forget the name of his pony!" she called merrily from the stairs. "It's P.D." "P.D.!" said her father, with the disappointment of one tempted by a good morsel which he finds tasteless. "There he seems to have descended to alphabetic commonplace. No imagery in that!" "He is a slow, reliable pony," put in Mary, "without the Q." "Pretty Damn, without the Quick! Oh, I know slang!" Jasper Ewold burst into laughter. It was still echoing through the house when she entered her room. As it died away it seemed to sound hollow and veiled, when the texture of sunny, transparent solidity in his laugh was its most pronounced characteristic. Probably this, too, was imagination, Mary thought. It had been an overwrought day, whose events had made inconsiderable things supreme over logic. She always slept well; she would sleep easily to-night, because it was so late. But she found herself staring blankly into the darkness and her thoughts ranging in a shuttle play of incoherency from the moment that Leddy had approached her on the pass till a stranger, whom she never expected to see again, walked away into the night. What folly! What folly to keep awake over an incident of desert life! But was it folly? What sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been anything but a great event! Naturally, quiet, desert nerves must still be quivering after the strain. Inevitably, they would not calm instantly, particularly as she had taken coffee for supper. She was wroth about the coffee, though she had taken less than usual that evening. She heard the clock strike one; she heard it strike two, and three. And he, on his part--this Sir Chaps who had come so abruptly into her life and evidently set old passions afire in her father's mind--of course he was sleeping! That was the exasperating phlegm of him. He would sleep on horseback, riding toward the edge of a precipice! "A smile and a square chin--and dreamy vagueness," she kept repeating. The details of the scene in the store recurred with a vividness which counting a flock of sheep as they went over a stile or any other trick for outwitting insomnia could not drive from her mind. Then Pete Leddy's final look of defiance and Jack Wingfield's attitude in answer rose out of the pantomime in merciless clearness. All the indecisiveness of the interchange of guesses and rehearsed impressions was gone. She got a message, abruptly and convincingly. This incident of the pass was not closed. An ultimatum had been exchanged. Death lay between these two men. Jack had accepted the issue. The clock struck four and five. Before it struck again daylight would have come; and before night came again, what? To lie still in the torment of this new experience of wakefulness with its peculiar, half-recognized forebodings, had become unbearable. She rose and dressed and went down stairs softly, candle in hand, aware only that every agitated fibre of her being was whipping her to action which should give some muscular relief from the strain of her overwrought faculties. She would go into the garden and walk there, waiting for sunrise. But at the edge of the path she was arrested by a shadow coming from the servants' sleeping-quarters. It was Ignacio, the little Indian who cared for her horse, ran errands, and fought garden bugs for her--Ignacio, the note-bearer. "Señorita! señorita!" he exclaimed, and his voice, vibrant with something stronger than surprise, had a certain knowing quality, as if he understood more than he dared to utter. "Señorita, you rise early!" "Sometimes one likes to look at the morning stars," she remarked. But there were no stars; only a pale moon, as Ignacio could see for himself. "Señorita, that young man who was here and Pete Leddy--do you know, señorita?" "The young man who came down from the pass with me, you mean?" she asked, inwardly shamed at her simulation of casual curiosity. "Yes, he and Leddy--bad blood between them'" said Ignacio. "You no know, señorita? They fight at daybreak." The pantomime in the store, Jack's form disappearing with its easy step into the night, analyzed in the light of this news became the natural climax of a series of events all under the spell of fatality. "Come, Ignacio!" she said. "We must hurry!" And she started around the house toward the street. VII WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S While Jack had been playing the pioneer of rural free delivery in Little Rivers, Pete Leddy, in the rear of Bill Lang's store, was refusing all stimulants, but indulging in an unusually large cud of tobacco. "Liquor ain't no help in drawing a bead," he explained to the loungers who followed him through the door after Jack had gone. If Pete did not want to drink it was not discreet to press him, considering the mood he was in. The others took liberal doses, which seemed only to heighten the detail of the drama which they had witnessed. To Mary it had been all pantomime; to them it was dynamic with language. It was something beyond any previous contemplation of possibility in their cosmos. The store had been enjoying an average evening. All present were expressing their undaunted faith in the invincibility of James J. Jeffries, when a smiling stranger appeared in the doorway. He was dressed like a regular cowboy dude. His like might have appeared on the stage, but had never been known to get off a Pullman in Arizona. And the instant he appeared, up flashed Pete Leddy's revolver. The gang had often discussed when and how Pete would get his seventh victim, and here they were about to be witnesses of the deed. Instinct taught them the proper conduct on such occasions. The tenderfoot was as good as dead; but, being a tenderfoot and naturally a bad shot and prone to excitement, he might draw and fire wild. They ducked with the avidity of woodchucks into their holes--all except Jim Galway, who remained leaning against the counter. "I gin ye warning!" they heard Pete say, and closed their eyes involuntarily--all except Jim Galway--with their last impression the tenderfoot's ingenuous smile and the gleam on Pete's gun-barrel. They waited for the report, as Mary had, and then they heard steps and looked up to see that dude tenderfoot, still smiling, going straight toward the muzzle pointed at his head, his hands at his side in no attempt to draw. The thing was incredible and supernatural. "Pete is letting him come close first," they thought. But there, unbelievable as it was, Pete was lowering his revolver and the tenderfoot's hand was on his shoulder in a friendly, explanatory position. Pete seemed in a trance, without will-power over his trigger finger, and Pete was the last man in the world that you would expect to lose his nerve. Jim Galway being the one calm observer, whose vision had not been disturbed by precipitancy in taking cover, let us have his version. "He just walked over to Pete--that's all I can say--walked over to him, simple and calm, like he was going to ask for a match. All I could think of and see was his smile right into that muzzle and the glint in his eyes, which were looking into Pete's. Someway you couldn't shoot into that smile and that glint, which was sort of saying, 'Go ahead! I'm leaving it to you and I don't care!'--just as if a flash of powder was all the same to him as a flash of lightning." The desert had given Jack life; and it would seem as if what the desert had given, it might take away. He was not going to humble himself by throwing up his arms or standing still for execution. He was on his way into the store and he continued on his way. If something stopped him, then he would not have to take the train East in the morning. "Now if you want to kill me, Pete Leddy," the astonished group heard this stranger say, "why, I'm not going to deny you the chance. But I don't want you to do it just out of impulse, and I know that is not your own reasoned way. You certainly would want sporting rules to prevail and that I should have an equal chance of killing you. So we will go outside, stand off any number of paces you say, let our gun-barrels hang down even with the seams of our trousers, and wait for somebody to say 'one, two, three--fire!'" Not once had that peculiar smile faded from Jack's lips or the glint in his eyes diverted from its probe of Leddy's eyes. His voice went well with the smile and with an undercurrent of high voltage which seemed the audible corollary of the glint. Every man knew that, despite his gay adornment, he was not bluffing. He had made his proposition in deadly earnest and was ready to carry it out. Pete Leddy shuffled and bit the ends of his moustache, and his face was drawn and white and his shoulder burning under the easy grip of Jack's hand. From the bore of the unremitting glance that had confounded him he shifted his gaze sheepishly. "Oh, h--l!" he said, and the tone, in its disgust and its attempt to laugh off the incident, gave the simplicity of an exclamation from his limited vocabulary its character. "Oh, h--l! I was just trying you out as a tenderfoot--a little joke!" At this, all the crowd laughed in an explosive breath of relief. The inflection of the laugh made Pete go red and look challengingly from face to face, with the result that all became piously sober. "Then it is all right? I meant in no way to wound your feelings or even your susceptibilities," said Jack; and, accepting the incident as closed, he turned to the counter and asked for the Ewold mail. Free from that smile and the glint of the eyes, Pete came to in a torrent of reaction. He, with six notches on his gun-handle, had been trifled with by a grinning tenderfoot. Rage mounted red to his brow. No man who had humiliated him should live. He would have shot Jack in the back if it had not been for Jim Galway, lean as a lath, lantern-jawed, with deep-set blue eyes, his bearing different from that of the other loungers. Jim had not joined in the laugh over Pete's explanation; he had remained impassive through the whole scene; but the readiness with which he knocked Leddy's revolver down showed that this immovability had let nothing escape his quiet observation. When Jack looked around and understood what had passed, his face was without the smile. It was set and his body had stiffened free of the counter. "I'll take the gun away from him. It's high time somebody did," said Galway. "I think you had better, if that is the only way that he knows how to fight," said Jack. "I have wondered how he got the six. Presumably he murdered them." "To their faces, as I'll get you!" Leddy answered. "I'll play your way now, one, two, three--fire!" Galway, convinced that this stranger did not know how to shoot, turned to Jack: "It's not worth your being a target for a dead shot," he said. "In the morning, yes," answered Jack; and he was smiling again in a way that swept the audience with uncanniness. "But to-night I am engaged. Make it early to-morrow, as I have to take the first train East." "Well, are you going to let me go?" Leddy asked Jim, while he looked in appeal to the loungers, who were his men. "Yes, by all means," Jack told Galway. "And as I shall want a man with me, may I rely on you? Four of us will be enough, with a fifth to give the word." "Ropey Smith can go with me," said Leddy. It scarcely occurred to them to give the name of duel to this meeting, which Jack held was the only fair way when one felt that he must have satisfaction from an adversary in the form of death. An _arroyo_ a mile from town was chosen and the time dawn, for a meeting which was to reverse the ethics of that boasted fair-play in which the man who first gets a bead is the hero. "It seems a mediaeval day for me," Jack said, when the details were concluded. "Good-night, gentlemen," he added, after Bill Lang, with fingers that bungled from agitation, had filled his arms with second-class matter. Jim Galway resumed his position, leaning against the counter watchfully as the gang filed out to the rear to wet up, and in his right hand, which was in his pocket, nestled an automatic pistol. "I'd shot Pete Leddy dead--'twas the first real fair chance within the law--so help me, God! I would," he thought, "if there had been time to spare, and save that queer tenderfoot's life. And me a second in a regular duel! Well, I'll be--but it ain't no regular duel. One of 'em is going to drop--that is, the tenderfoot is. I don't just know how to line him up. He beats me!" VIII ACCORDING TO CODE It was the supreme moment of night before dawn. A violet mist shrouded everything. The clamminess of the dew touched Mary's forehead and her hand brushed the moisture-laden hedge as she left the Ewold yard. She remembered that Jack had said that he would camp near the station, so there was no doubt in which direction she should go. Hastening along the silent street, it was easy for her to imagine that she and Ignacio were the only sentient beings, abroad in a world that had stopped breathing. Softly, impalpably, with both the graciousness of a host and the determinedness of an intruder who will not be gainsaid, the first rays of morning light filtered into the mist. The violet went pink. From pale pink it turned to rose-pink; to the light of life which was as yet as still as the light of the moon. The occasional giant cactus in the open beyond the village outskirts ceased to be spectral. For the first time Mary Ewold was in the presence of the wonder of daybreak on the desert without watching for the harbinger of gold in the V of the pass, with its revelation of a dome of blue where unfathomable space had been. For the first time daybreak interested her only in broadening and defining her vision of her immediate surroundings. When the permeating softness suddenly yielded to full transparency, spreading from the fanfare of the rising sun come bolt above the range, and the mist rose, she left the road at sight of two ponies and a burro in a group, their heads together in drooping fellowship. She knew them at once for P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear. Nearby rose a thin spiral of smoke and back of it was a huddled figure, Firio, preparing the morning meal. Animals and servant were as motionless as the cactus. Evidently they did not hear her footsteps. They formed a picture of nightly oblivion, unconscious that day had come. Firio's face was hidden by his big Mexican hat; he did not look up even when she was near. She noted the two blanket-rolls where the two comrades of the trail had slept. She saw that both were empty and knew that Jack had already gone. "Where is Mr. Wingfield?" she demanded, breathlessly. Firio was not startled. To be startled was hardly in his Indian nature. The hat tipped upward and under the brim-edge his black eyes gleamed, as the sandy soil all around him gleamed in the dew. He shrugged his shoulders when he recognized the lady speaking as the one who had delayed him at the foot of the pass the previous afternoon. Thanks to her, he had been left alone without his master the whole evening. "He go to stretch his legs," answered Firio. Apparently, Sir Chaps had been disinclined to disturb the routine of camp by telling Firio anything about the duel. "Where did he go? In which direction?" Mary persisted. Firio moved the coffee-pot closer to the fire. This seemed to require the concentration of all his faculties, including that of speech. He was a fit servant for one who took duels so casually. "Where? Where?" she repeated. "Where? Have you no tongue?" snapped Ignacio. Firio gazed all around as if looking for Jack; then nodded in the direction of rising ground which broke at the edge of a depression about fifty yards away. Her impatience had made the delay of a minute seem hours, while the brilliance of the light had now become that of broad day. She forgot all constraint. She ran, and as she ran she listened for a shot as if it were something inevitable, past due. And then she uttered a muffled cry of relief, as the scene in a depression which had been the bed of an ancient river flashed before her with theatric completeness. In the bottom of it were five men, two moving and three stationary. Jim Galway and Ropey Smith were walking side by side, keeping a measured step as they paced off a certain distance, while Bill Lang and Pete Leddy and Jack stood by. Leddy and Lang were watching the process inflexibly. Jack was in the costume which had flushed her curiosity so vividly on the pass and he appeared the same amused, disinterested and wondering traveller who had then come upon strange doings. She stopped, her temples throbbing giddily, her breaths coming in gasps; stopped to gain mastery of herself before she decided what she would do next. On the opposite bank of the _arroyo_ was a line of heads, like those of infantry above a parapet, and she comprehended that, in the same way that news of a cock-fight travels, the gallery gods of Little Rivers had received a tip of a sporting event so phenomenal that it changed the sluggards among them into early risers. They were making themselves comfortable lying flat on their stomachs and exposing as little as possible of their precious bodies to the danger of that tenderfoot firing wild. It was a great show, of which they would miss no detail; and all had their interest whetted by some possible new complication of the plot when they saw the tall, familiar figure of Jasper Ewold's daughter standing against the skyline. She felt the greedy inquiry of their eyes; she guessed their thoughts. This new element of the situation swept her with a realization of the punishment she must suffer for that chance meeting on Galeria and then with resentful anger, which transformed Jack Wingfield's indifference to callous bravado. Must she face that battery of leers from the town ruffians while she implored a stranger, who had been nothing to her yesterday and would be nothing tomorrow, to run away from a combat which was a creation of his own stubbornness? She was in revolt against herself, against him, and against the whole miserable business. If she proceeded, public opinion would involve her in a sentimental interest in a stranger. She must live with the story forever, while to an idle traveller it was only an adventure at a way-station on his journey. She had but to withdraw in feigned surprise from the sight of a scene which she had come upon unawares and she would be free of any association with it. For all Little Rivers knew that she was given to random walks and rides. No one would be surprised that she was abroad at this early hour. It would be ascribed to the nonsense which afflicted the Ewolds, father and daughter, about sunrises. Yes, she had been in a nightmare. With the light of day she was seeing clearly. Had she not warned him about Leddy? Had not she done her part? Should she submit herself to fruitless humiliation? Go to him in as much distress as if his existence were her care? If he would not listen to her yesterday, why should she expect him to listen to her now? She would return to her garden. Its picture of content and isolation called her away from the stare of the faces on the other bank. She turned on her heel abruptly, took two or three spasmodic steps and stopped suddenly, confronted with another picture--one of imagination--that of Jack Wingfield lying dead. The recollection of a voice, the voice that had stopped the approach of Leddy's passion-inflamed face to her own on the pass, sounded in her ears. She faced around, drawn by something that will and reason could not overcome, to see that Jim Galway and Ropey Smith had finished their task of pacing off the distance. The two combatants were starting for their stations, their long shadows in the slant of the morning sunlight travelling over the sand like pursuing spectres. Leddy went with the quick, firm step which bespoke the keenness of his desire; Jack more slowly, at a natural gait. His station was so near her that she could reach him with a dozen steps. And he was whistling--the only sound in a silence which seemed to stretch as far as the desert--whistling gaily in apparent unconsciousness that the whole affair was anything but play. The effect of this was benumbing. It made her muscles go limp. She sank down for very want of strength to keep erect; and Ignacio, hardly observed, keeping close to her dropped at her side. "Ignacio, tell the young man, the one who was our guest last evening, that I wish to see him!" she gasped. With flickering, shrewd eyes Ignacio had watched her distress. He craved the word that should call him to service and was off with a bound. His rushing, agitated figure was precipitated into a scene hard set as men on a chess-board in deadly serenity. Leddy and Jack, were already facing each other. "Señor! Señor!" Ignacio shouted, as he ran. "Señor Don't Care of the Big Spurs--wait!" The message which he had to give was his mistress's and, therefore, nobody else's business. He rose on tiptoes to whisper it into Jack's ear. Jack listened, with head bent to catch the words. He looked over to Mary for an instant of intent silence and then raised his empty left hand in signal. "Sorry, but I must ask for a little delay!" he called to Leddy. His tone was wonderful in its politeness and he bowed considerately to his adversary. "I thought it was all bluff!" Leddy answered. "You'll get it, though--you'll get it in the old way if you haven't the nerve to take it in yours!" "Really, I am stubbornly fond of my way," Jack said. "I shall be only a minute. That will give you time to steady your nerves," he added, in the encouraging, reassuring strain of a coach to a man going to the bat. He was coming toward Mary with his easy, languid gait, radiant of casual inquiry. The time of his steps seemed to be reckoned in succeeding hammer-beats in her brain. He was coming and she had to find reasons to keep him from going back; because if it had not been for her he would be quite safe. Oh, if she could only be free of that idea of obligation to him! All the pain, the confusion, the embarrassment was on her side. His very manner of approach, in keeping with the whole story of his conduct toward her, showed him incapable of such feelings. She had another reaction. She devoutly wished that she had not sent for him. Had not his own perversity taken his fate out of her hands? If he preferred to die, why should it be her concern? Should she volunteer herself as a rescuer of fools? The gleaming sand of the _arroyo_ rose in a dazzling mist before her eyes, obscuring him, clothing him with the unreality of a dream; and then, in physical reality, he emerged. He was so near as she rose spasmodically that she could have laid her hand on his shoulder. His hat under his arm, he stood smiling in the bland, questioning interest of a spectator happening along the path, even as he had in her first glimpse of him on the pass. "I don't care! Go on! Go on!" she was going to say. "You have made sport of me! You make sport of everything! Life itself is a joke to you!" The tempest of the words was in her eyes, if it did not reach her tongue's end. It was halted by the look of hurt surprise, of real pain, which appeared on his face. Was it possible, after all, that he could feel? The thought brought forth the passionate cry of her mission after that sleepless night. "I beg of you--I implore you--don't!" Had anyone told her yesterday that she would have been begging any man in melodramatic supplication for anything, she would have thought of herself as mad. Wasn't she mad? Wasn't he mad? Yet she broke into passionate appeal. "It is horrible--unspeakable! I cannot bear it!" A flood of color swept his cheeks and with it came a peculiar, feminine, almost awkward, gentleness. His air was that of wordless humility. He seemed more than ever an uncomprehending, sure prey for Leddy. "Don't you realize what death is?" she asked. The question, so earnest and searching, had the contrary effect on him. It changed him back to his careless self. He laughed in the way of one who deprecates another's illusion or passing fancy. This added to her conviction that he did not realize, that he was incapable of realizing, his position. "Do you think I am about to die?" he asked softly. "With Pete Leddy firing at you twenty yards away--yes! And you pose--you pose! If you were human you would be serious!" "Pose?" He repeated the word. It startled him, mystified him. "The clothes I bought to please Firio, you mean?" he inquired, his face lighting. "No, about death. It is horrible--horrible! Death for which I am responsible!" "Why, have you forgotten that we settled all that?" he asked. "It was not you. It was the habit I had formed of whistling in the loneliness of the desert. I am sorry, now, that I did not stick to singing, even at the expense of a sore throat." Now he called to Leddy, and his voice, high-pitched and powerful, seemed to travel in the luminous air as on resilient, invisible wires. "Leddy, wasn't it the way I whistled to you the first time we met that made you want satisfaction? You remember"--and he broke into a whistle. His tone was different from that to Leddy on the pass; the whistle was different. It was shrill and mocking. "Yes, the whistle!" yelled Leddy. "No man can whistle to me like that and live!" Jack laughed as if he appreciated all the possibilities of humor inherent in the picture of the bloodthirsty Leddy, the waiting seconds and the gallery. He turned to Mary with a gesture of his outstretched hands: "There, you see! I brought it on myself." "You are brutal! You are without feeling--you are ridiculous--you--" she stormed, chokingly. And in face of this he became reasoning, philosophical. "Yes, I admit that it is all ridiculous, even to farce, this little _comédie humaine_. But we must remember that beside the age of the desert none of us last long. Ridiculous, yes; but if I will whistle, why, then, I must play out the game I've started." He was looking straight into her eyes, and there was that in his gaze which came as a surprise and with something of the effect of a blade out of a scabbard. It chilled her. It fastened her inactive to the earth with a helplessness that was uncanny. It mixed the element of fear for him with the element of fear of him. "Remember I am of age--and I don't mind," he added, with the faintest glint of satire in his reassurance. He was walking away, with a wave of his hand to Leddy; he was going over the precipice's edge after thanking the danger sign. He did not hasten, nor did he loiter. The precipice resolved itself into an incident of a journey of the same order as an ankle-deep stream trickling across a highway. IX THE DEVIL IS OUT She had done her best and she had failed. What reason was there for her to remain? Should she endure witnessing in reality the horror which she had pictured so vividly in imagination? A flash of fire! The fall of a careening figure to the earth! Leddy's grin of satisfaction! The rejoicing of his clan of spectators over the exploit, while youth which sang airs to the beat of a pony's hoofs and knew the worship of the Eternal Painter lay dead! What reason to remain except to punish herself! She would go. But something banished reason. She was held in the leash of suspense, staring with clearness of vision in one second; staring into a mist the next; while the coming and going of Ignacio's breaths between his teeth was the only sound in her ears. "Señor Don't Care of the Big Spurs will win!" he whispered. "He will?" she repeated, like one marvelling, in the tautness of every nerve and muscle, that she had the power of speech. She peered into Ignacio's face. Its Indian impassivity was gone. His lips were twitching; his eyes were burning points between half-closed lids. "Why?" she asked. "How?" "I know. I watch him. I have seen a mountain lion asleep in a tree. His paw is like velvet. He smiles. There seems no fight in him. I know. There is a devil, a big devil, in Señor Don't Care. It sleeps so much it very terrible when it awakes. And Pete Leddy--he is all the time awake; all the time too ready. Something in him will make his arm shake when the moment to shoot comes and something in Señor Don't Care--his devil--will make his arm steady." Could Ignacio be right? Did Jack really know how to shoot? Was he confident of the outcome? Were his smiles the mask of a conviction that he was to kill and not to be killed? After all, had his attitude toward her been merely acting? Had she undergone this humiliation as the fish on the line of the mischievous play of one who had stopped over a train in order to do murder? No! If he were capable of such guile he knew that Leddy could shoot well and that twenty yards was a deadly range for a good shot. He was taking a chance and the devil in him was laughing at the chance, while it laughed at her for thinking that he was an innocent going to slaughter in expression of a capricious sense of chivalry. "He will win--he will win if Leddy plays fair!" Ignacio repeated. Now she was telling herself that it was solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see Señor Don't Care survive; solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see him go aboard the train safe. After that, she could forget ever having owed this trifler the feeling of gratitude for a favor done. Literally, he must live in order to be a dead and unremembered incident of her existence. And Jack was back at his station, with the bright sunlight heightening the colors of his play cowboy attire, his weight on the ball of his right foot thrown well ahead of the other, his head up, but the whole effect languid, even deferential. He seemed about to take off his hat to the joyous sky of a fair day in May. His shadow expressed the same feeling as his pose, that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon. Leddy had the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is associated with the spread of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded individualism. If Jack's bearing was amateurish, then Pete's was professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had an unrelieved hardness of outline. Both drew their guns from their holsters and lowered them till the barrels lay even with the trousers seams. They awaited the word to fire which Bill Lang, who stood at an angle equidistant from the two men, was to give. "Wait!" Jack called, in a tone which indicated that something had recurred to him. Then a half laugh from him fell on the brilliant, shining, hard silence with something of the sound of a pebble slipping over glare ice. "Leddy, it has just occurred to me that we are both foolish--honestly, we are!" he said. "The idea when Arizona is so sparsely settled of our starting out to depopulate it in such a premeditated manner on such a beautiful morning, and all because I was such an inept whistler! Why, if I had realized what a perfectly bad whistler I was I would never have whistled again. If my whistle hurt your feelings I am sorry, and I--" "No, you don't!" yelled Leddy. "I've waited long enough! It's fight, you--" "Oh, all right! You are so emphatic," Jack answered. His voice was still pleasant, but shot with something metallic. The very shadow of him seemed to stiffen with the stiffening of his muscles. "Ready!" called Bill Lang. The ruling passion that had carved six notches on his gun-handle overwhelmed Pete Leddy. At least, let us give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this and not calculation was responsible for his action. Before the word for preparation was free of Lang's lips, and without waiting for the word to fire, his revolver came up in a swift quarter-circle. He was sure of his aim at that range with a ready draw. Again and again he had thus hit his target in practice and six times he had winged his man by such agile promptness. With the flash from the muzzle all the members of the gallery rose on hands and knees. They were as sure that there was to be a seventh notch as of their identity. There was no question in their minds but Pete had played a smart trick. They had known from the first that he would win. And the proof of it was in the sudden, uncontrollable movement of the adversary. Jack whirled half round. He was falling. But even as he fell he was still facing his adversary. He plunged forward unsteadily and came to rest on his left elbow. A trickle of blood showed on the chap of his left leg, which had tightened as his knee twisted under him. Leddy's rage had been so hot that for once his trigger finger had been too quick. He had aimed too low. But he was sure that he had done for his man and he looked triumphantly toward the gallery gods whose hero he was. They had now risen to their feet. In answer to their congratulations he waved his left hand, palm out, in salutation. His gun-hand had dropped back to his trousers seam. Even as it dropped, Jack's revolver had risen, his own gun-hand steadied in the palm of his left hand, which had an elbow in the sand for a rest. Victor and spectators, in their preoccupation with the relief and elation of a drama finished, had their first warning of what was to come in a voice that did not seem like the voice of the tenderfoot as they had heard it, but of another man. And Leddy was looking at a black hole in a rim of steel which, though twenty yards away, seemed hot against his forehead, while he turned cold. "Now, Pete Leddy, do not move a muscle!" Jack told him. "Pete Leddy, you did not play my way. I still have a shot due, and I am going to kill you!" Jack's face seemed never to have worn a smile. It was all chin, and thin, tightly-pressed lips, and solid, straight nose, bronze and unyielding. "And I am going to kill you!" This was surely the devil of Ignacio's imagery speaking in him--a cold, passionless, gray-eyed devil. Though they had never seen him shoot, everybody felt now that he could shoot with deadly accuracy and that there was no play cowboy in his present mood. He had the bead of death on Leddy and he would fire with the first flicker of resistance. His call seemed to have sunk the feet of everyone beneath the sand to bed-rock and riveted them there. Lang and the two seconds were as motionless as statues. Mary recalled Leddy's leer at her on the pass, with its intent of something more horrible than murder. Savagery rose in her heart. It was right that he should be killed. He deserved his fate. But no sooner was the savagery born--born, she felt, of the very hypnosis of that carved face--than she cast it out shudderingly in the realization that she had wished the death of a fellow human being! She looked away from Jack; and then it occurred to her that he must be bleeding. He was again a companion of the trail, his strength ebbing away. Her impulse was retarded by no fear of the gallery now. It brought her to her feet. "But first drop your revolver!" she heard Jack call, as she ran. She saw it fall from Leddy's trembling hand, as a dead leaf goes free of a breeze-shaken limb. All the fight was out of him. The courage of six notches was not the courage to accept in stoicism the penalty of foul play. And that black rim was burning his forehead. "Galway, you have a gun?" Jack asked. "Yes," Galway answered, mechanically. His presence of mind, which had been so sure in the store, was somewhat shaken. He had seen men killed, but never in such deliberate fashion. "Take it out'" There was a quality in the command like frosty madness, which one instinctively obeyed. The half-prostrate figure of the tenderfoot seemed to dominate everything--men, earth, and air. Mary had a glimpse of Galway drawing an automatic pistol from his pocket when she dropped at Jack's side. She knew that Jack had not heard or seen her approach. All his will was flowing out along a pistol's sight, even as his blood was flowing out on the sand in a broadening circle of red. It was well that she had come. Her fingers were splashed as she felt for the artery, which she closed by leaning her whole weight on the thumb. Ignacio had followed her and immediately after him came Firio, who had been startled in his breakfast preparations by the sound of a shot and had set out to investigate its cause. He was as changed as his master; a twitching, fierce being, glaring at her and at the wound and then prolongedly and watchfully at Pete Leddy. "Can you shoot to kill?" Jack asked Galway, in a piercing summons. "Yes," drawled Galway. "Then up with your gun--quick! There! A bead on Ropey Smith!" Galway had the bead before Ropey could protest. "Give Ropey ten seconds to drop his gun or we will care for him at the same time as Pete'" Jack concluded. Ropey did not wait the ten seconds. He was over-prompt for the same reasons of temperament that made Pete Leddy prefer his own way of fighting. "I take it that we can count on the neutrality of our spectators. They cannot be interested in the success of either side," Jack observed, with dry humor, but still methodically. "All they ask is a spectacle." "Yes, you bet!" came a voice from the gallery, undisguisedly eager to concur. "Now, Pete and Ropey," Jack began, and broke off. There was a poignant silence that waited on the processes of his mind. Not only was there no sound, but to Mary there seemed no movement anywhere in the world, except the pulse of the artery trying to drive its flood past the barrier of her thumb. Jack kept his bead unremittingly on Pete. It was Firio who broke the silence. "Kill him! He is bad! He hates you!" said Firio. "_Sí, sí_! If you do not kill him now, you must some time," said Ignacio. Mary felt that even if Jack heard them he would not let their advice influence him. On the bank before she had hastened to him a strange and awful visitor in her heart had wished for Leddy's death. Now she wished for him to go away unharmed. She wished it in the name of her own responsibility for all that had happened. Yet her tongue had no urging word to offer. She waited in a supernatural and dreadful curiosity on Jack's decision. It was as if he were to answer one more question in explanation of the mystery of his nature. Could he deliberately shoot down an unarmed man? Was he that hard? "I am thinking just how to deal with you, Pete and Ropey," Jack proceeded. "As I understand it, you have not been very useful citizens of Little Rivers. You can live under one condition--that you leave town and never return armed. Half a minute to decide!" "I'll go!" said Pete. "I'll go!" said Ropey. "And keep your words?" "Yes!" they assented. But neither moved. The fact that Jack had not yet lowered his revolver made them cautious. They were obviously over-anxious to play safe to the last. "Then go!" called Jack. Pete and Ropey slouched away, leaving behind Ropey's gun, which was unimportant as it had only one notch, and Pete's precious companion of many campaigns with its six notches, lying on the sand. "And, gentlemen," Jack called to the spectators, "our little entertainment is over now. I am afraid that you will be late for breakfast." Apparently it came as a real inspiration to all at once that they might be, for they began to withdraw with a celerity that was amazingly spontaneous. Their heads disappeared below the skyline and only the actors were left. Pete and Ropey--Bill Lang following--walked away along the bed of the _arroyo_, instead of going over the bank. Pete paused when he was out of range. The old threat was again in his pose. "I'm not through with you, yet!" he called. "Why, I hope you are!" Jack answered. He let his revolver fall with a convulsion of weakness. Mary wondered if he were going to faint. She wondered if she herself were not going to faint, in a giddy second, while the red spot on the sand shaped itself in revolving grotesquery. But the consciousness that she must not lift her weight from the artery was a centering idea to keep her faculties in some sort of equilibrium. He was looking around at her, she knew. Now she must see his face after this transformation in him which had made her fears of his competency silly imaginings; after she had linked her name with his in an overwhelming village sensation. She was stricken by unanalyzable emotions and by a horror of her nearness to him, her contact with his very blood, and his power. She was conscious of a glimpse of his turning profile, still transfixed with the cool purpose of action. Then they were gazing full at each other, eyes into eyes, directly, questioningly. He was smiling as he had on the pass; as he had when he stood with his arms full of mail waiting for the signal to deposit his load. His devil had slipped back into his inner being. He spoke first, and in the voice that went with his vaguest mood; the voice in which he had described his escape from the dinosaur whose scales had become wedged in the defile at the critical moment. "You have a strong thumb and it must be tired, as well as all bluggy," he said, falling into a childhood symbol for taking the whole affair in play. Could he be the same man who had said, "I am going to kill you!" so relentlessly? He had eased the situation with the ready gift he had for easing situations; but, at the same time, he had made those unanalyzable emotions more complex, though they were swept into the background for the moment. He glanced down at his leg with comprehending surprise. "Now, certainly, you are free of all responsibility," he added. "You kept the strength in me to escape the fate you feared. Jim Galway will make a tourniquet and relieve you." The first available thing for tightening the tourniquet was the barrel of Pete Leddy's gun and the first suggestion for material came from her. It was the sash of her gown, which Galway knotted with his strong, sunburned fingers. When she could lift her numbed thumb from its task and rose to her feet she had a feeling of relief, as if she were free of magnetic bonds and uncanny personal proximity. The incident was closed--surely closed. She was breathing a prayer of thanks when a remark from Galway to Jack brought back her apprehension. "I guess you will have to postpone catching to-day's train," he said. Certainly, Jack must remain until his wound had healed and his strength had returned. And where would he go? He could not camp out on the desert. As Jasper Ewold had the most commodious bungalow it seemed natural that any wounded stranger should be taken there. The idea chilled her as an insupportable intrusion. Jack hesitated a moment. He was evidently considering whether he could not still keep to his programme. "Yes, Jim, I'm afraid I shall have to ask you for a cot for a few days," he said, finally. Again he had the right thought at the right moment. Had he surmised what was passing in her mind? "Seeing that you've got Pete Leddy out of town, I should say that you were fairly entitled to a whole bed," Jim drawled. "These two Indians here can make a hustle to get some kind of a litter." Now she could go. That was her one crying thought: She could go! And again he came to her rescue with his smiling considerateness. "You have missed your breakfast, I'll warrant," he said to her. "Please don't wait. You were so brave and cool about it all, and--I--" A faint tide of color rose to his cheeks, which had been pale from loss of blood. For once he seemed unable to find a word. Mary denied him any assistance in his embarrassment. "Yes," she answered, almost bluntly. Then she added an excuse: "And you should have a doctor at once. I will send him." She did not look at Jack again, but hastened away. When she was over the bank of the _arroyo_ out of sight she put her fingers to her temples in strong pressure. That pulse made her think of another, which had been under her thumb, and she withdrew her fingers quickly. "It is the sun! I have no hat," she said to herself, "and I didn't sleep well." X MARY EXPLAINS Dr. Patterson was still asleep when Mary rapped at his door. Having aroused him to action by calling out that a stranger had been wounded in the _arroyo_, she did not pause to offer any further details. With her eyes level and dull, she walked rapidly along the main street where nobody was yet abroad, her one thought to reach her room uninterrupted. As she approached the house she saw her father standing on the porch, his face beaming with the joy of a serenely-lived moment as he had his morning look at the Eternal Painter's first display for the day. She had crossed the bridge before he became conscious of her presence. "Mary! You are up first! Out so early when you went to bed so late!" he greeted her. "I did not sleep well," she explained. "What, Mary, you not sleep well!" All the preoccupation with the heavens went from his eyes, which swept her from head to foot. "Mary! Your hand is covered with blood! There is blood on your dress' What does this mean?" She looked down and for the first time saw dark red spots on her skirt. The sight sent a shiver through her, which she mastered before she spoke. "Oh, nothing--or a good deal, if you put it in another way. A real sensation for Little Rivers!" she said. "But you are not telling!" "It is such a remarkable story, father, it ought not to be spoiled by giving away its plot," she said, with assumed lightness. "I don't feel equal to doing full justice to it until after I've had my bath. I will tell you at breakfast. That's a reason for your waiting for me." And she hastened past him into the house. "Was it--was it something to do with this Wingfield?" he called excitedly after her. "Yes, about the fellow of the enormous spurs--Señor Don't Care, as Ignacio calls him," she answered from the stair. Some note underneath her nonchalance seemed to disturb, even to distress him. He entered the house and started through the living-room on his way to the library. But he paused as if in answer to a call from one of the four photographs on the wall, Michael Angelo's young David, in the supple ease of grace. The David which Michael made from an imperfect piece of marble! The David which sculptors say is ill-proportioned! The David into which, however, the master breathed the thing we call genius, in the bloom of his own youth finding its power, even as David found his against Goliath. This David has come out of the unknown, over the hills, with the dew of morning freshness on his brow. He is unconscious of self; of everything except that he is unafraid. If all other aspirants have failed in downing the old champion, why, he will try. Now, Jasper Ewold frowned at David as if he were getting no answer to a series of questions. "I must make a change. You have been up a long time, David," he thought; for he had many of these photographs which he kept in a special store-room subject to his pleasure in hanging. "Yes, I will have a Madonna--two Madonnas, perhaps, and a Velasquez and a Rembrandt next time." In the library he set to reading Professor Giuccamini; but he found himself disagreeing with the professor. "I want your facts which you have dug out of the archives," he said, speaking to the book as if it were alive. "I don't want your opinions. Confound it!" he threw Giuccamini on the table. "I'll make my own opinions! Nothing else to do out here on the desert. Time enough to change them as often as I want, too." He went into the garden--the garden which, next to Mary, was the most intimate thing in his affections. Usually, every new leaf that had burst forth over night set itself in the gelatine of his mind like so many letterpress changes on a printed page to a proof-reader. This time, however, a new palm leaf, a new spray of bougainvillea blossoms, a bud on the latest rose setting which he had from Los Angeles, said "Good morning," without any response from him. He paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed moodily, and his shoulders drawn together in a way that made him seem older and more portly. With each turn he looked sharply, impatiently, toward the door of the house. Never had Mary so felt the charm of her room as on this morning; never had it seemed so set apart from the world and so personal. It was the breadth of the ell and the size of her father's library and bedroom combined. The windows could hardly be called windows in a Northern sense, for there was no glass. It was unnecessary to seal up the source of light and air in a dry climate, where a blanket at night supplied all the extra warmth one's body ever required. The blinds swung inward and the shades softened the light and added to the privacy which the screen of the growing young trees and creeping vines were fast supplying. Here she could be more utterly alone than on the summit of the pass itself. She paused in the doorway, surveying familiar objects in the enjoyed triumph of complete seclusion. While she waited for the water to run into the bowl, she looked fixedly at the stains of a fluid which had been so warm in its touch. It was only blood, she told herself. It would wash off, and she held her hands in the water and saw the spread of the dye through the bowl in a moment of preoccupation. Then she scrubbed as vigorously as if she were bent on removing the skin itself. After she had held up her dripping fingers in satisfied inspection, the spots on her gown caught her eye. For a moment they, too, held her staring attention; then she slipped out of the gown precipitately. With this, her determined haste was at an end. She was about to enjoy the feminine luxury of time. The combing of her hair became a delightful and leisurely function in the silky feel of the strands in her fingers and the refreshing pull at the roots. The flow of the bath water made the music of pleasurable anticipation, and immersion set the very spirit of physical life leaping and tingling in her veins. And all the while she was thinking of how to fashion a narrative. When she started down-stairs she was not only refreshed but remade. She was going to breakfast at the usual hour, after the usual processes of ushering herself from the night's rest into the day's activities. There had been no stealthy trip out to the _arroyo_; no duel; no wound; no Señor Don't Care. She had only a story which involved all these elements, a most preposterous story, to tell. "Now you shall hear all about it!" she called to her father as soon as she saw him; "the strangest, most absurd, most amusing affair"--she piled up the adjectives--"that has ever occurred in Little Rivers!" She began at once, even before she poured his coffee, her voice a trifle high-pitched with her simulation of humor. And she was exactly veracious, avoiding details, yet missing nothing that gave the facts a pleasant trail. She told of the meeting with Leddy on the pass and of the arrival of the gorgeous traveller; of Jack's whistle; of Pete's challenge. Jasper Ewold listened with stoical attentiveness. He did not laugh, even when Jack's vagaries were mentioned. "Why didn't you tell me last night?" was his first question. "To be honest, I was afraid that it would worry you. I was afraid that you would not permit me to go to the pass alone again. But you will?" She slipped her hand across the table and laid her fingers appealingly on the broad back of his heavily tanned hand, from which the veins rose in bronze welts. "And he was nice about it in his ridiculous, big-spurs fashion. He said that it was all due to the whistle." "Go on! Go on! There must be more!" her father insisted impatiently. She gave him the pantomime of the store, not as a bit of tragedy--she was careful about that--but as something witnessed by an impersonal spectator and narrator of stories. "He walked right toward a muzzle, this Wingfield?" Jasper asked, his brows contracting. "Why, yes. I told you at the start it was all most preposterous," she answered. "And he was not afraid of death--this Wingfield!" Jasper repeated. He was looking away from her. The contraction of his brows had become a scowl of mystification. "Why do you always speak of him as 'this Wingfield,'" she demanded, "as if the town were full of Wingfields and he was a particular one?" He looked around quickly, his features working in a kind of confusion. Then he smiled. "I was thinking of the whistle," he explained. "Well, we'll call him this Sir Chaps, this Señor Don't Care, or whatever you please. As for his walking into the gun, there is nothing remarkable in that. You draw on a man. You expect him to throw up his hands or reach for his gun. He does nothing but smile right along the level of the sight into your eyes. It was disturbing to Pete's sense of etiquette on such occasions. It threw him off. There are similar instances in history. A soldier once put a musket at Bonaparte's head. Some of Caesar's legionaries once pressed their swords at his breast. Such old hands in human psychology had the presence of mind to smile. And the history of the West is full of examples which have not been recorded. Go on, Mary!" "Ignacio says he has a devil in him," she added. "That little Indian has a lot of primitive race wisdom. Probably he is right," her father said soberly. "It explains what followed," she proceeded. She was emphatic about the reason for her part. She went out to the _arroyo_ on behalf of her responsibility for a human life. "But why did you not rouse me? Why did you go alone?" he asked. "I didn't think--there wasn't time--I was upset and hurried." She proceeded in a forced monotone which seemed to allow her hardly a single full breath. "And I am going to kill you!" she repeated, shuddering, at the close of the narrative. "When he said that did his face change completely? Did it seem like the face of another man? Yes, did it seem as if there were one face that could charm and another that could kill?" Jasper's words came slowly and with a drawn exactness. They formed the inquiry of one who expected corroboration of an impression. "Yes." "You felt it--you felt it very definitely, Mary?" "Yes." She was living over the moment of Jack's transformation from silk to steel. The scene in the _arroyo_ became burning clear. Under the strain of the suppression of her own excitement, concentrated in her purpose to make all the realism of the duel an absurdity, she did not watch keenly for the signs of expression by which she usually knew what was passing in her father's mind. But she was not too preoccupied to see that he was relieved over her assent that there was a devil in Jack Wingfield, which struck her as a puzzle in keeping with all that morning's experience. It added to the inward demoralization which had suddenly dammed her power of speech. "Ignacio saw it, too, so I was interested," Jasper added quickly, in a more natural tone, settling back into his chair. His agitation had passed. So that was it. Her father's dominant, fine old egoism was rejoicing in another proof of his excellence as a judge of character. "Finis! The story is told!" he continued softly. All told! And it had been a success. Mary caught her breath in a gay, high-pitched exclamation of realization that she had not to go on with explanations. "Our singular cavalier is safe!" she said. "My debt is paid. I need not worry any further lest someone who did me a favor should suffer for it!" "True! true!" Jasper's outburst of laughter when he had paused in turning down the wick of the lamp the previous evening had been as a forced blast from the brasses. Anyone with strong lungs may laugh majestically; but it takes depth of feeling and years rich with experience to express the gratification that now possessed him. He stretched his hands across the table to her and the laugh that came then came as a cataract of spontaneity. "Exactly, Mary! The duel provided the way to pay a debt," he said. "Why, it is you who have done our Big Spurs a favor! He has a wound to show to his friends in the East! I am proud that you could take it all so coolly and reasonably." She improved her opportunity while he held her hands. "I will go armed next time, and I do know how to shoot, so you won't worry"--she put it that way, rather than openly ask his consent--"if I ride out to the pass?" "Mary, I have every reason to believe that you know how to take care of yourself," he answered. And that very afternoon she rode out to Galeria, starting a little earlier than usual, returning a little later than usual, in jubilant mood. "Everything is the same!" she had repeated a dozen times on the road. "Everything is the same!" she told herself before she fell asleep; and her sleep was long and sweet, in nature's gratitude for rest after a storm. The sunlight breaking through the interstices of the foliage of a poplar, sensitive to a slight breeze, came between the lattices in trembling patchwork on the bed, flickering over her face and losing itself in the strands of her hair. "Everything is the same!" she said, when her faculties were cleared of drowsiness. For the second time she gave intimate, precious thanks for a simple thing that had never occurred to her as a blessing before: for the seclusion and silence of her room, free from all invasion except of her own thoughts. The quicker flow of blood that came with awaking, the expanding thrill of physical strength and buoyancy of life renewed, brought with it the moral courage which morning often brings to flout the compromises of the confusion of the evening's weariness. The inspiriting, cool air of night electrified by the sun cleared her vision. She saw all the pictures on the slate of yesterday and their message plainly, as something that could not be erased by any Buddhistic ritual of reiterated phrase. "No, everything is not the same, not even the ride--not yet!" she admitted. "But time will make it so--time and a sense of humor, which I hope I have." XI SEÑOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES Jack lounged in an armchair in the Galway sitting-room with his bandaged leg bolstered on a stool after Dr. Patterson had fished a bit of lead out of the wound. Tribute overflowed from the table to the chairs and from the chairs to the floor; pineapples, their knobby jackets all yellow from ripening in the field, with the full succulency of root-fed and sun-drawn flavor; monstrous navel oranges, leaden with the weight of juice, richer than cloth of gold and velvet soft; and every fruit of the fertile soil and benignant climate; and jellies, pies, and custards. But these were only the edibles. There were flowers in equal abundance. They banked the windows. "It's Jasper Ewold's idea to bring gifts when you call," explained Jim Galway. "Jasper is always sowing ideas and lots of them have sprung up and flourished." Jack had not been in Little Rivers twenty-four hours, and he had played a part in its criminal annals and become subject to all the embarrassment of favors of a royal bride or a prima donna who is about to sail. In a bower, amazed, he was meeting the world of Little Rivers and its wife. Men of all ages; men with foreign accent; men born and bred as farmers; men to whom the effect of indoor occupation clung; men still weak, but with red corpuscles singing a song of returning health in their arteries--strapping, vigorous men, all with hands hardened by manual labor and in their eyes the far distances of the desert, in contrast to the sparkle of oasis intimacy. Women with the accent of college classrooms; women who made plural nouns the running mates of singular verbs; women who were novices in housework; women drilled in drudgery from childhood--all expanding, all dwelling in a democracy that had begun its life afresh in a new land, and all with the wonder of gardens where there had been only sagebrush in their beings. There was something at odds with Jack's experience of desert towns in the picture of a bronzed rancher, his arms loaded with roses, saying, in boyish diffidence: "Mister, you fit him fair and you sure fixed him good. Just a few roses--they're so thick over to our place that they're getting a pest. Thought mebbe they'd be nice for you to look at while you was tied up to a chair nursing Pete's soovenir!" One visitor whose bulk filled the doorway, the expansion of his smile spreading over a bounteous rotundity of cheek, impressed himself as a personality who had the distinction in avoirdupois that Jim Galway had in leanness. In his hand he had five or six peonies as large as saucers. "Every complete community has a fat man, seh!" he announced, with a certain ample bashfulness in keeping with his general amplitude and a musical Southern accent. "If it wants to feel perfectly comfortable it has!" said Jack, by way of welcome. "Well, I'm the fat man of Little Rivers, name being Bob Worther!" said he, grinning as he came across the room with an amazingly quick, easy step. "No rivals?" inquired Jack. "No, seh! I staked out the first claim and I've an eye out for any new-comers over the two hundred mark. I warn them off! Jasper Ewold is up to two hundred, but he doesn't count. Why, you ought to have seen me, seh, before I came to this valley!" "A living skeleton?" "No, seh! Back in Alabama I had reached a point where I broke so many chairs and was getting so nervous from sudden falls in the midst of conversation, when I made a lively gesture that I didn't dare sit down away from home except at church, where they had pews. I weighed three hundred and fifty!" "And now?" "I acknowledge two hundred and forty, including my legs, which are very powerful, having worked off that extra hundred. I've got the boss job for making a fat man spider-waisted--inspector of ditches and dams. Any other man would have to use a horse, but I hoof it, and that's economy all around. And being big I grow big things. Violets wouldn't be much more in my line than drawnwork. I've got this whole town beat on peonies and pumpkins. Being as it's a fat man's pleasure to cheer people up, I dropped in to bring you a few peonies and to say that, considering the few well-selected words you spoke to Pete Leddy on this town's behalf, I'm prepared to vote for you for anything from coroner to president, seh!" Later, after Bob had gone, a small girl brought a spray of gladiolus, their slender stems down to her toe-tips and the opening blossoms half hiding her face. Jack insisted on having them laid across his knee She was not a fairy out of a play, as he knew by her conversation. "Mister, did you yell when you was hit?" she asked. Jack considered thoughtfully. It would not do to be vagarious under such a shrewd examination; he must be exact. "No, I don't think I did. I was too busy." "I'll bet you wanted to, if you hadn't been so busy. Did it hurt much?" "Not so very much." "Maybe that was why you didn't yell. Mother says that all you can see is a little black spot--except you can't see it for the bandages. Is that the way yours is?" "I believe so. In fact, I'll tell you a secret: That's the fashion in wounds." "Mother will be glad to know she's right. She sets a lot by her opinion, does mother. Say, do you like plums?" Jack already had a peck of plums, but another peck would not add much to the redundancy as far as he was concerned. "I'll bring you some. We've got the biggest plums in Little Rivers--oh, so big! Bigger'n Mr. Ewold's! I'll bring some right away." She paused, however, in the doorway. "Don't you tell anybody I said they were bigger'n Mr. Ewold's," she went on. "It might hurt his feelings. He's what they call the o-rig-i-nal set-tler, and we always agree that he grows the biggest of everything, because--why, because he's got such a big laugh and such a big smile. Mother says sour-faced people oughtn't to have a face any bigger'n a crab apple; but Mr. Ewold's face couldn't be too big if it was as big as all outdoors! Good-by. I reckon you won't be s'prised to hear that I'm the dreadful talker of our family." "Wait!" Jack called. "You haven't told me your name." "Belvedere Smith. Father says it ain't a name for living things. But mother is dreadfully set in her ideas of names, and she doesn't like it because people call me Belvy; but they just naturally will." "Belvedere, did you ever hear of the three little blue mice"--Jack was leaning toward her with an air of fascinating mystery--"that thought they could hide in the white clover from the white cat that had two black stripes on her back?" There was a pellmell dash across the room and her face, with wide-open eyes dancing in curiosity, was pressed close to his: "Why did the cat have two black stripes? Why? why?" "Just what I was going to tell," said the pacifier of desperadoes. "They were off on a tremendous adventure, with anthills for mountains and clover-stems for the tree-trunks of forests in the path. Tragedy seemed due for the mice, when a bee dropped off a thistle blossom for a remarkable reason--none other than that a hummingbird cuffed him in the ear with his wing--and the bee, looking for revenge with his stinger on the first vulnerable spot, stung the cat right in the Achilles tendon of his paw, just as that paw was about to descend with murderous purpose. The cat ran away crying, with both black stripes ridges of fur sticking up straight, while the rest of the fur lay nice and smooth; and the mice giggled so that their ears nearly wiggled off their heads. So all ended happily." "He does beat all!" thought Mrs. Galway, who had overheard part of the nonsense from the doorway. "Wouldn't it make Pete Leddy mad if he could hear the man who took his gun away getting off fairy stuff like that!" Mrs. Galway had brought in a cake of her own baking. She was slightly jealous of the neighbors' pastry as entering into her own particular field of excellence. Jack saw that the supply of cake in the Galway pantry must be as limitless as the pigments on the Eternal Painter's palette. "The doctor said that I was to have a light diet," he expostulated; "and I am stuffed to the brim." "I'll make you some floating island," said Mrs. Galway, refusing to strike her colors. "That isn't filling and passes the time," Jack admitted. "Jim says if you had to Fletcherize on floating island you would starve to death and your teeth would get so used to missing a step on the stairs that they would never be able to deal with real victuals at all." "Mrs. Galway," Jack observed sagely, dropping his head on the back of the chair, "I see that it has occurred to you and Jim that it is an excellent world and full of excellent nonsense. I am ready to eat both fluffy isles and the yellow sea in which they float. I am ready to keep on getting hungry with my efforts, even though you make it continents and oceans!" From his window he had a view, over the dark, polished green of Jim's orange trees, of the range, brown and gray and bare, holding steady shadows of its own and host to the shadows of journeying clouds, with the pass set in the centre as a cleft in a forbidding barrier. In the yard Wrath of God, Jag Ear, and P.D. were tethered. Deep content illumined the faces of P.D. and Jag Ear; but Wrath of God was as sorrowful as ever. A cheerful Wrath of God would have excited fears for his health. "Yet, maybe he is enjoying his rest more than the others," Jack told Firio, who kept appearing at the window on some excuse or other. "Perhaps he takes his happiness internally. Perhaps the external signs are only the last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces of internal joy." "_Sí, sí_!" said Firio. "Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agree with any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are an ideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may in turn have my say." "_Sí_," said Firio. He leaned on the windowsill, his black eyes shining with ingenuous and flattering appeal: "I will broil you a quail on a spit," he whispered. "It's better than stove cooking." "Don't talk of that!" Jack exclaimed, almost sharply. The suggestion brought a swift change to sadness over his face and drew a veil of vagueness over his eyes. "No, Firio, and I'll tell you why: the odor of a quail broiled on a spit belongs at the end of a day's journey, when you camp in sight of no habitation. You should sit on a dusty blanket-roll; you should eat by the light of the embers or a guttering candle. No, Firio, we'll wait till some other day. And it's not exactly courtesy to our hostess to bring in provender from the outside." The trail had apparently taught Firio all the moods of his master. He knew when it was unwise to persist. "_Sí_!" he whispered, and withdrew. Jack looked at Galeria and then back quickly, as if resisting its call. He smiled half wryly and readjusted his position in the chair. Over the hedge he could see the heads and shoulders of passers-by. Jim Galway had come into the room, when Jasper Ewold's broad back and great head hove in sight with something of the steady majesty of progress of a full-rigged ship. "The Doge!" Jack exclaimed, brightening. Jim was taken unawares. Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropical fruit not yet introduced into Arizona? "Not the Doge of Venice--hardly, when Mr. Ewold's love runs to Florence! The Doge of Little Rivers!" "Why, the Doge--of course!" Jim was "on" now and grinning. "I didn't think of my history at first. That's a good one for Jasper Ewold!" "O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!" said Jack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper's abundance filled the doorway. "But it is all the more compliment to me that you should walk." "Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage! persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it." "And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promise that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part in the duel. His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed. He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer its charm on the previous evening. "She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pass this afternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pass till the minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the great kindness you did her." "Not a kindness--an inevitable interruption by any passer-by," Jack put in. "Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl's self-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had turned out fortunately." "Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing in every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too much on going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only men ought to witness--so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable impression." "Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs at it all, now!" "Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke into laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously. Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy traveller's life as in Mary's. "Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "You may have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that you had planned to take the train this morning." "When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a few days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a week Dr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should have missed." "I am glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad that your wound is so slight--glad that you need not be shut up long when you are due elsewhere." What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "The Three Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so well that a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and, more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to his cadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with a bandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail. "Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the 'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad Boy,' Heine---but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb, that will do. Do you think they could travel together?" "All printed things can, if you choose. I'll include Lamb." "And any Daudet lying loose," Jack added. "And Omar?" "I carry Omar in my head, thank you, O Doge!" "Sir Chaps of the enormous spurs, you have a broad taste for one who rides over the pass of Galeria after five years in Arizona," said the Doge as he rose. He was covertly surveying that soft, winning, dreamy profile which had turned so hard when the devil that was within came to the surface. "I was fed on books and galleries in my boyhood," Jack said; but with a reticence that indicated that this was all he cared to tell about his past. XII MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE Every resident except the cronies of Pete Leddy considered it a duty, once a day at least, to look over the Galway hedge and ask how Señor Don't Care was doing. That is, everyone with a single exception, which was Mary. Jack had never seen her even pass the house. It was as if his very existence had dropped out of her ken. The town remarked the anomaly. "You have not been in lately," Mrs. Galway reminded her. "My flowers have required a lot of attention; also, I have been riding out to the pass a good deal," she answered, and changed the subject to geraniums, for the very good reason that she had just been weeding her geranium bed. Mrs. Galway looked at her strangely and Mary caught the glance. She guessed what Mrs. Galway was thinking: that she had been a little inconsiderate of a man who had been wounded in her service. "Probably it is time I bore tribute, too," she said to herself. That afternoon she took down a glass of jelly from the pantry shelves and set forth in the line of duty, frowning and rehearsing a presentation speech as she went. With every step toward the Galway cottage she was increasingly confused and exasperated with herself for even thinking of a speech. As she drew near she heard a treble chorus of "ohs!" and "ahs!" and saw Jack on the porch surrounded by children. "It's dinosaur foolishness again!" she thought, pungently. He was in the full fettle of nonsense, his head a little to one side and lowered, while he looked through his eyebrows at his hearers, measuring the effect of his words. She thought of that face when he called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and felt the pulse of inquiry beat over all that lay in this man's repertory between the two moods. "Then, counting each one in his big, deep, bass voice, like this," he was saying, "that funny little dwarf kept dropping oranges out of the tree on the big giant, who could not wiggle and was squeaking in protest in his little, old woman's voice. Every orange hit him right on the bridge of his nose, and he was saying: 'You know I never could bear yellow! It fusses me so.'" "He doesn't need any jelly! I am going on!" Mary thought. Then Jack saw a slim, pliant form hastening by and a brown profile under hair bare of a hat, with eyes straight ahead. Mary might have been a unit of marching infantry. The story stopped abruptly. "Yes--and--and--go on!" cried the children. Jack held up his hand for silence. "How do you do?" he called, and she caught in his tone and in her first glimpse of his face a certain mischievousness, as if he, who missed no points for idle enjoyment of any situation, had a satisfaction in taking her by surprise with his greeting. This put her on her mettle with the quickness of a summons to fence. She was as nonchalant as he. "And you are doing well, I learn," she answered. "Oh, come in and hear it, Miss Ewold! It's the best one yet!" cried Belvedere Smith. "And--and--" "And--and--" began the chorus. Mary went to the hedge. She dropped the glass of jelly on the thick carpet of the privet. "I have just brought my gift. I'll leave it here. Belvy will bring it when the story is over. I am glad you are recovering so rapidly." "And--and--" insisted the chorus. "You oughtn't to miss this story. It's a regular Jim dandy!" Belvedere shouted. "Yes, won't you come in?" Jack begged in serious urgency. "I pride myself that it is almost intellectual toward the close." "I have no doubt," she said, looking fairly at him from under her hand, which she held up to shade her face, so he saw only the snap of her eyes in the shadow. "But I am in a hurry." And he was looking at a shoulder and a quarter profile as she turned away. "Did you make the jelly yourself?" he called. "Yes, I am not afraid of the truth--I did!" she answered with a backward glance and not stopping. "Oh, bully!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, in which she detected a strain of what she classified as impudence. "But all the time the giant was fumbling in his pocket for his green handkerchief. You know the dwarf did not like green. It fussed him just as much as yellow fussed the giant. But it was a narrow pocket, so narrow that he could only get his big thumb in, and very deep. So, you see--" and she heard the tale proceeding as she walked on to the end of the street, where she turned around and came back across the desert and through the garden. On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze or an ivory statuette. 1. In his favor: Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color, his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and, mostly, by his latent savagery--which she would hardly have been willing to apply to Ignacio's worshipful attachment to herself. 2. Against him: Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of children and savages; everything in logic. He would not stand analysis at all. He was without definite character. He was posing, affected, pleased with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity. "I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and that is the last I shall hear of it," she concluded. Not so. Mrs. Galway came that evening, a bearer of messages. "He says it is the most wonderful jelly that ever was," said Mrs. Galway. "He ate half the glass for dinner and is saving the rest for breakfast--I'm using his own words and you know what a killing way he has of putting things--saving it for breakfast so that he will have something to live through the night for and in the morning the joy of it will not be all a memory. He wants to know if you have any more of the same kind." "Yes, a dozen glasses," Mary returned. "Tell him we are glad of the opportunity of finishing last year's stock, and I send it provided he eats half a glass with every meal." "I don't know what his answer will be to that," said Mrs. Galway, contracting her brow studiously at Mary. "But he would have one quick. He always has. He's so poetic and all that, we're planning to go to the station to see him off and pelt him with flowers; and Dr. Patterson is going to fashion a white cat out of white carnations, with deep red ones for the black stripes, for the children to present." "Hurrah!" exclaimed Mary blithely, and went for the jelly. She was spared further bulletins on the state of health of the wounded until her father returned from his daily call the next morning. She was in the living-room and she knew by his step on the porch, vigorous yet light, that he was uplifted by good news or by the anticipation of the exploitation of some new idea--a pleasure second only to that of the idea's birth. Such was his elation that he broke one of his own rules by tossing some of the books loaned to Jack onto the broad top of the table of the living-room, which was sacred to the isolation of the ivory paper-knife. "He has named the date!" shouted the Doge. "He goes by to-morrow's train! It will be a gala affair, almost an historical moment in the early history of this community. I am to make a speech presenting him with the freedom of the whole world. Between us we have hit on a proper modern symbol of the gift. He slips me his Pullman ticket and I formally offer it to him as the key to the hospitality of the seven seas, the two hemispheres, and the teeming cities that lie beyond the range. It will be great fun, with plenty of persiflage. And, Mary, they suggest that you write some verses--ridiculous verses, in keeping with the whole nonsensical business." "You mean that I am to stand on the platform and read poetry dedicated to him?" she demanded. "Poetry, Mary? You grow ambitious. Not poetry--foolish doggerel. Or someone will read it for you." He had not failed to watch the play of her expression. She had received all his nonsense, announced in his best style of simulated forensic grandeur, with a certain unchanging serenity which was unamused: which was, indeed, barely interested. "And someone else shall write it, for I don't think of any verses," she said, with a slight shrug of the shoulder. "Besides, I shall not be there." "Not be there! People will remark your absence!" "Will they?" she asked, thoughtfully, as if that had not occurred to her. "No, they will be too occupied with the persiflage. I am going to ride out to the pass in the morning very early--before daybreak." "But"--he was positively frolicsome as he caught her hands and waved them back and forth, while he rocked his shoulders--"when you are stubborn, Mary, have your way. I will make your excuses. And I to work now. It is the hour of the hoe," as he called all hours except those of darkness and the hot midday. For Jasper Ewold was no idler in the affairs of his ranch or of the town. Few city men were so busy. His everlasting talk was incidental, like the babbling of a brook which, however, keeps steadily flowing on; and the stored scholarship of his mind was supplemented by long evenings with no other relaxation but reading. Now as he went down the path he broke into song; and when the Doge sang it was something awful, excusable only by the sheer happiness that brought on the attack. Mary had important sewing, which this morning she chose to do in her room rather than in her favorite spot in the garden. She closed the shutters on the sunny side and sat down by the window nearest the garden, peculiarly sensible of the soft light and cool spaciousness of an inner world. The occasional buzz of a bee, the flutter of the leaves of the poplar, might have been the voice of the outer world in Southern Spain or Southern Italy, or anywhere else where the air is balmy. And to-morrow! Out to Galeria in the fervor of a pilgrim to some shrine, with the easy movement of her pony and the rigid lines of the pass gradually drawing nearer and the sky ever distant! She would be mistress of her thoughts in all the silent glamour of morning on the desert. She would hear the train stop at the station, its heavy effort as it pulled out, and watch it winding over the flashing steel threads in a clamor of stridency and harshness, which grew fainter and fainter. And she would smile as it disappeared around a bend in the range. She would smile at him, at the incident, just as carelessly as he had smiled when he told of the dinosaur. XIII A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES The sun became benign in its afternoon slant. Little Rivers was beginning to move after its siesta, with the stretching of muscles that would grow more vigorous as evening approached and freshened life came into the air with the sprinkle of sunset brilliance. To Jack the hour palpably brought a reminder of the misery of the moment when a thing long postponed must at last be performed. The softness of speculative fancy faded from his face. His lips tightened in a way that seemed to bring his chin into prominence in mastery of his being. As he called Firio, his voice unusually high-pitched, he did not look out at P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear. Firio came with the eagerness of one who is restless for action. He leaned on the windowsill, his elbows spread, his chin cupped in his hands, his Indian blankness of countenance enlivened by the glow of his eyes, as jewels enliven dull brown velvet. "Firio, I have something to tell you." "_Sí_!" There was a laboring of Jack's throat muscles, and then he forced out the truth in a few words. "Firio," he said, "this is my trail end. I am going back to New York to-morrow." "_Sí_!" answered Firio, without a tremor of emotion; but his eyes glowed confidently, fixedly, into Jack's. "There will be money for you, and--" "_Sí_!" said Firio mechanically, as if repeating the lines of a lesson. Was this Indian boy prepared for the news? Or did he not care? Was he simply clay that served without feeling? The thought made Jack wince. He paused, and the dark eyes, as in a spell, kept staring into his. "And you get P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear and, yes, the big spurs and the chaps, too, to keep to remember me by." Firio did not answer. "You are not pleased? You--" "_Sí_! I will keep them for you. You will want them; you will come back to all this;" and suddenly Firio was galvanized into the life of a single gesture. He swept his arm toward the sky, indicating infinite distance. "No, I shall never come back! I can't!" Jack said; and his face had set hard, as if it were a wall about to be driven at a wall. "I must go and I must stay." "_Sí_!" said Firio, resuming his impassiveness, and slipped around the corner of the house. "He does care!" Jack cried with a smile, which, however, was not the smile of gardens, of running brooks, and of song. "I am glad--glad!" He picked up his crutches and went out to the three steeds of trail memory: "And _you_ care--_you_ care!" he repeated to them. He drew a lugubrious grimace in mockery at Wrath of God. He tickled the sliver of the donkey's ear, whereat Jag Ear wiggled the sliver in blissful unconsciousness that he had lost any of the ornamental equipment of his tribe. "You are like most of us; we don't see our deformities, Jag Ear," Jack told him. "And if others were also blind to them, why, we should all be good-looking!" His arm slipped around P.D.'s neck and he ran a finger up and down P.D.'s nose with a tickling caress. "You old plodder!" he said. "You know a lot. It's good to have the love of any living thing that has been near me as long as you have." This preposterous being was preposterously sentimental over a pair of ponies and an earless donkey. When Mrs. Galway, who had watched him from the window, came out on the porch she saw that he was on his way through the gate in the hedge to the street. "Look here! Did the doctor say you might?" she called. "No, my leg says it!" Jack answered, gaily. "Just a little walk! Back soon." It was his first enterprise in locomotion outside the limits of Jim Galway's yard since he had been wounded. He turned blissful traveller again. Having come to know the faces of the citizens, now he was to look into the faces of their habitations. The broad main street, with its rows of trees, narrowed with perspective until it became a gray spot of desert sand. Under the trees leisurely flowed those arteries of ranch and garden-life, the irrigation ditches. Continuity of line in the hedge-fences was evidently a municipal requirement; but over the hedges individualism expressed itself freely, yet with a harmony which had been set by public fashion. The houses were of cement in simple design. They had no architectural message except that of a background for ornamentation by the genius of the soil's productivity. They waited on vines to cover their sides and trees to cast shade across their doorways. One need not remain long to know the old families in this community, where the criterion of local aristocracy was the size of your plums or the number of crops of alfalfa you could grow in a year. Already Jack felt at home. It was as if he were friends with a whole world, lacking the social distinctions which only begin when someone acquires sufficient worldly possessions to give exclusive, formal dinners. He knew every passer-by well enough to address him or her by the Christian name. Women called to him from porches with a dozen invitations to visit gardens. "Just a saunter, just a try-out before I take the train. Not going far," he always answered; yet there was something in his bearing that suggested a definite mission. "We hate to lose you!" called Mrs. Smith. "I hate to be lost!" Jack called back; "but that is just my natural luck." "I suppose you've got your work cut out for you back East, same's everybody else, somewhere or other, 'less they're millionaires, who all stay in the city and try to run from microbes in their automobiles." "Yes, I have work--lots of it," said Jack, ruefully. He shifted his weight on the crutches, paused and looked at the sky. The Eternal Painter was dipping his brush lightly and sweeping soft, silvery films, as a kind of glorified finger-exercise, over an intangible blue. "Why care? Why care?" His Majesty was asking. "Why not leave all the problems of earthly existence to your lungs? Why not lie back and look on at things and breathe my air? That is enough to keep your whole being in tune with the Infinite." It was his afternoon mood. At sunset he would have another. Then he would be crying out against the folly of wasting one precious moment in the eons, because that moment could never return to be lived over. Jack kept on until he recognized the cement bridge where he had stopped when he came from the post-office with Mary. Left bare of its surroundings, the first habitation in Little Rivers, with the ell which had been added later, would have appeared a barracks. But Jasper Ewold had the oldest trees and the most luxuriant hedge and vines as the reward of his pioneerdom. When Jack crossed the bridge and stood in the opening of the hedge there was no one on the porch in the inviting shade of the prodigal bougainvillea vines. So he hitched his way up the steps. Feeling that it was a formal occasion, he searched for the door-bell. There was none. He rapped on the casing and waited, while he looked at the cool, quiet interior, with the portrait of David facing him from the wall. "David, you seem to be the only one at home," he remarked, for there had been no answer to his raps; "and you are too busy getting a bead on Goliath to answer the immaterial questions of a wayfarer." Accepting the freedom of the Little Rivers custom on such occasions, he followed the path to the rear. His head knocked off the dead petals of a rambler rose blossom, scattering them at his feet. Rounding the corner of the house, he saw the arbor where he had dined the night of his arrival, and beyond this an old-fashioned flower garden separated by a path from a garden of roses. There was a sound of activity from the kitchen behind a trellis screen, but he did not call out for guidance. He would trust to finding his own way. When he came to the broad path, its stretch lay under a crochet-work of shadows from the ragged leaves of two rows of palms which ran to the edge of an orange grove, and the centre of this path was in a straight line with the bottom of the V of Galeria. Jasper Ewold had laid out his little domain according to a set plan before the water was first let go in laughing triumph over the parched earth, and this plan, as one might see on every hand, was expressive of the training of older civilizations in landscape gardening, which ages of men striving for harmonious forms of beauty in green and growing things had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a bougainvillea vine its sonnet. Between the palms to the right and left Jack had glimpses of a vegetable garden; of rows of berry bushes; of a grove of young fig-trees; of rows of the sword-bundles of pineapple tops. Everything except the old-fashioned flower-bed, with its border of mignonette, and the generous beds of roses and other flowers of the bountiful sisterhood of petals of artificial cultivation, spoke of utility which must make the ground pay as well as please. Jack took each step as if he were apprehensive of disturbing the quiet Midway of the avenue of palms ran a cross avenue, and at the meeting-point was a circle, which evidently waited till the oranges and the olives should pay for a statue and surrounding benches. Over the breadth of the cross avenue lay the glossy canopy of the outstretched branches of umbrella-trees. A table of roughly planed boards painted green and green rattan chairs were in keeping with the restful effect, while the world without was aglare with light. Here Mary had brought her sewing for the afternoon. She was working so intently that she had not heard his approach. He had paused just as his line of vision came flush with the trunks of the umbrella-trees. For the first time he saw his companion in adventure in repose, her head bent, leaving clear the line of her neck from the roots of her hair to the collar, and the soft light bringing out the delicate brown of her skin. There seemed no movement anywhere in the world at the moment, except the flash of her needle in and out. XIV "HOW FAST YOU SEW!" And she had not seen him! He was touched with a sense of guilt for having looked so long; for not having at once called to her; and rather than give her the shock of calling now, he moved toward her, the scuff of his limp, pendent foot attracting her attention. Her start at the sound was followed, when she saw him, with amazement and a flush and a movement as if she would rise. But she controlled the movement, if not the flush, and fell back into her chair, picking up her sewing, which had dropped on the table. It was like him, she might well think, to come unexpectedly, without invitation or announcement. She was alert, ready to take the offensive as the best means of defence, and wishing, in devout futility, that he had stayed away. He was smiling happily at everything in cosmos and at her as a part of it. "Good afternoon!" "Good afternoon!" "That last lot of jelly was better than the first," he said softly. "Was it? You must favor vintage jelly!" "I came to call--my p.p.c. call--and to see your garden," he added. "Is there any particular feature that interests you?" she asked. "The date-trees? The aviary? The nursery?" "No," he answered, "not just yet. It is very cool here under the umbrella-trees, isn't it? I have walked all the way from the Galways and I'll rest a while, if I may." He was no longer the play cavalier in overornamented _chaparejos_ and cart-wheel spurs, but a lame fellow in overalls, who was hitching toward her on crutches, his cowpuncher hat held by the brim and flopping with every step. But he wore the silk shirt and the string tie, and somehow he made even the overalls seem "dressy." "Pray sit down," she said politely. Standing his crutches against the table, he accepted the invitation. She resumed her sewing, eyes on the needle, lips pressed into a straight line and head bending low. He might have been a stranger on a bench in a public park for all the attention she was paying to him. She realized that she was rude and took satisfaction in it as the only way of expressing her determination not to reopen a closed incident. "It's wonderful--wonderful!" he observed, in a voice of contemplative awe. "What is?" she asked. "Why, how fast you sew!" "Yes?" she said, as automatically as she stitched. "Your wound is quite all right? No danger of infection?" "I don't blame you!" he burst out. His tone had turned sad and urgent. She looked up quickly, with the flare of a frown. His remark had brought her out of her pose and she became vivid and real. "Blame me!" she demanded, sharply, as one who flies to arms. But she met a new phase--neither banter, nor fancy, nor unvarying coolness in the face of fire. He was all contrition and apology. Must she be the audience to some fresh exhibition of his versatility? "I do not blame you for feeling the way that you do," he said. "How do you know how I feel?" she asked; and as far as he could see into her eyes there was nothing but the flash of sword-points. "I don't. I only know how I think you feel--how you might well feel," he answered delicately. "After Pete let his gun drop in the store I should not have named terms for an encounter. I should have turned to the law for protection for the few hours that I had to remain in town." "But to you that would have been avoiding battle!" she exclaimed. "Which may take courage," he rejoined. "What I did was selfish. It was bravado, with no thought of your position." "It is late to worry about that now. What does it matter? I did not want anyone killed on my account, and no one was," she insisted. "Besides, you should not be blue," this with a ripple of satire; "it is not quite all bravado to face Pete Leddy's gun at twenty yards." "And it is not courage. Courage is a force of will driving you into danger for some high purpose. I want you to realize that I am not such a barbarian that I do not know that I could have kept you out of it all if I had had proper self-control. Though probably, on the impulse, I would do the fool thing over again! Yes, that's the worst of it!" "There is a devil in him!" Ignacio's words were sounding in her ears. To how many men had he said, "I am going to kill you?" What other quarrels had he known in his wanderings from Colorado to Chihuahua? "If you really want my opinion, I am glad, so far as I am concerned, that you did fight," she said lightly. "Aren't you a hero? Isn't the town free of Leddy? And you take the train in the morning!" "Yes." The monosyllable was drawn out rather faintly. For the first time since they had met on the pass she felt she was mistress of the situation. This time she had not to plead with him in fear for his life. She could regard him without any sense of obligation, this invader of her garden retreat who had to put in one more afternoon in a dull desert town before he was away to that outside world which she might know only through books and memory. She rose exultantly, disregarding any formality that she would owe to the average guest; for an average guest he was not. Her attitude meant that she was having the last word; that she was showing her mettle. He did not rise. He was staring into the sunlight, as if it were darkness alive with flitting spectres which baffled identification. "Yes, back--back to armies of Leddys!" he said slowly. But this she saw as still another pose. It did not make her pause in gathering up her sewing. She was convinced that there was nothing more for her to say, except to give their parting an appearance of ease and unconcern. "Is it work you mean? You are not used to that, I take it?" she inquired a little sarcastically. "Yes, call it work," he answered, looking away from the spectres and back to her. "And you have never done any work!" she added. "Not much," he admitted, with his old, airy carelessness. He was smiling at the spectres now, as he had at the dinosaur. "As there is nothing particular about the garden that I can show you--" she was moving away. "No, I will be walking back to the house," he said after she had taken a few steps. "Will you wait on my slow pace?" He reached for his crutches, lifted himself to his feet and swung to her side. She who wished that the interview were over saw that it must be prolonged. Then suddenly she realized the weakness as well as the brusqueness of her attitude. She had been about to fly from him as from something that she feared. It was not necessary. It was foolish, even cowardly. "I thought perhaps you preferred to be alone, you seemed so abstracted," she said, lamely; and then, as they came out into the sunlight in the circle, she began talking of the garden as she would to any visitor; of its beginnings, its growth, and its future, when her father's plans should have been fulfilled. "And in all these years you have never been back East?" he asked. "No. We are always planning a trip, but the money which we save for it goes into more plantings." They had been moving slowly toward the house, but now he stopped and his glance swept the sky and rested on Galeria. "It is the best valley of all! I knew it as soon as I saw it from the pass!" and the rapture of the scene was sounding in every syllable like chimes out of the distance. She knew that he was far away from the garden, and delaying, still delaying. If she spoke she felt that he would not hear what she said. If she went on it seemed certain that she would leave him standing there like a statue. "And there is more land here to make gardens like this?" he asked slowly, absorbed. "Yes, with water and labor and time." Though his face was in the full light of the sun, it seemed at times in shadow; then it glowed, as if between two passions. For an instant it was grim, the chin coming forward, the brows contracting; then it was transformed with something that was as a complete surrender to the transport of irresistible temptation. He looked down at her quickly and she saw him in the mood of story-telling to the children, suffused with the radiance of a decision. "I prefer the Leddys of Little Rivers to the Leddys of New York," he said. "I am not going to-morrow! I am going to have land and a home under the aegis of the Eternal Painter and in sight of Galeria, and worship at the shrine of fecund peace. Will you and the Doge help me?" he asked with an enthusiasm that was infectious. "May I go to his school of agriculture, horticulture, and floriculture?" Dumfounded, she bent her head and stared at the ground to hide her astonishment. "You want citizens, industrious young citizens, don't you?" he persisted. "Yes, yes!" she said hastily and confusedly. "Do you know a good piece of land?" he continued. "Yes, several parcels," she answered, recovering her poise and smiling in mockery. "Come on!" he cried. He was taking long, jumping steps on his crutches as they went up the path. "You will take me to look at the land, won't you, please--now? I want to get acquainted with my future estate. I mean to beat the Smiths at plums, Jim Galway at alfalfa, even rival Bob Worther at pumpkins and peonies. And you will help me lay out the flower garden, won't you? You see, I shall have to call in the experts in every line to start with, before I begin to improve on them and make them all jealous. I may find a kind of plum that will grow on alfalfa stalks," he hazarded. "What a horticultural sensation!" "And a spineless cactus called the Leddy!" His eyes were laughing into hers and hers irresistibly laughed back. She guessed that he was only joking. He had acted so well in the latest rôle that she had actually believed in his sincerity for a moment. He meant to take the train, of course, but his resourceful capriciousness had supplied him with a less awkward exit from the garden than she had provided. He would yet have the last word if she did not watch out--a last mischievous word at her expense. "First, you will have to plow the ground, in the broiling hot sun," she said tauntingly, when they had passed around to the porch. She was starting into the house with nervous, precipitate triumph. The last word was hers, after all. "But you are going to show me the land now!" His tone was so serious and so hurt that she paused. "And"--with the seriousness electrified by a glance that sought for mutual understanding--"and we are to forget about that duel and the whole hero-desperado business. I am a prospective settler who just arrived this afternoon. I came direct to headquarters to inquire about property. The Doge not being at home, won't you show me around?" Again he had said the right thing at the right time, with a delightful impersonality precluding sentiment. "I couldn't be unaccommodating," she admitted. "It is against all Little Rivers ethics." "I feel like a butterfly about to come out of his miserable chrysalis! Haven't you a walking-stick? I am going to shed the crutches!" She became femininely solicitous at once. "Are you sure you ought? Did the doctor say you might? Is the wound healed?" "There isn't any wound!" he answered. "That is one of the things which we are to forget." She brought a stick and he laid the crutches on the porch. He favored the lame leg, yet he kept up a clipping pace, talking the while as fast as the Doge himself as they passed through one of the side streets out onto the cactus-spotted, baking, cracked levels. "This is it!" she said finally. "This is all that father and I had to begin with." "Enough!" he answered, and held out his hands, palms open. "With callouses I will win luxuriance!" She showed him the irrigation ditch from which he should draw his water; she told him of the first steps; She painted all the difficulties in the darkest colors, without once lessening the glow of his optimism. He was so overwhelmingly, boyishly happy that she had to be happy with him in making believe that he was about to be a real rancher. But he should not have the sport all on his side. He must not think that she accepted this latest departure of his imagination incarnated by his Thespian gift in anything but his own spirit. "You plowing! You spraying trees for the scale! You digging up weeds! You stacking alfalfa! You settling down in one place as a unit of co-ordinate industry! You earning bread by the sweat of your brow! You with callouses!" Thus she laughed at him. Very seriously he held out his hands and ran a finger around a palm and across the finger-joints: "That is where I shall get them," he said. "But not on the thumb. I believe you get them on the thumb only by playing golf." He asked about carpenters and laborers; he chose the site for his house; he plotted the walks and orchards. She could not refuse her advice. Who can about the planning of new houses and gardens? He had everything quite settled except the land grant from the Doge when they started back; while the sun, with the swift passage of time in such fascinating diversion, had swung low in its ellipse. When they reached the main street the Doge was on the porch passing his opinion on the Eternal Painter's evening work. "Some very remarkable purples to-night, I admit, Your Majesty, without any intention of giving you too good an opinion of yourself; but otherwise, you are not up to your mark. There must have been a downpour in the rainy world on the other side of the Sierras that moistened your pigments. Next thing we know you will be turning water-colorist!" he was saying, when he heard Jack's voice. "Here's a new settler!" Jack called. "I am going to stay in Little Rivers and win all the prizes." "You are joking!" gasped the Doge. "Not joking," said Jack. "I want to close the bargain to-night." "You bring color and adventure--yes! I did not expect the honor--the town will be delighted! I am overwhelmed! Will you plow with Pete Leddy's gun drawn by Wrath of God, sir, and harrow with your spurs drawn by Jag Ear? Shall you make a specialty of olives? Do you dare to aspire as high as dates?" The Doge's speech had begun incoherently, but steadied into rallying humor at the close. "I haven't seen the date-tree yet," said Jack. "Not until I have can I judge whether or not I shall dare to rival the lord of the manor in his own specialty. And there are business details which I must settle with you, O Doge of this city of slender canals!" "O youth, will you tarry with peace between wars?" answered the Doge, in quick response to the spirit of nonsense as a basis for their new relations. "Come, and I will show you our noblest product of peace, the Date-Tree Wonderful!" he said, leading the way to the garden, while Mary hurried rather precipitately into the house. Jasper Ewold was at his best, a glowing husbandman, when he pointed aloft to the clusters of fruit pendent from the crotches of the stiff branches, enclosed in cloth bags to keep them free of insects. "Do you see strange lettering on the cloth?" he asked. "Yes, it looks like Arabic." "So it is! Among other futile diversions in a past incarnation I studied Arabic a little, and I still have my lexicon. Perhaps my construction might not please the grammarians of classic Bagdad, but the sentiment is there safe enough in the language of the mother romance world of the date: 'All hail, first-born of our Western desert fecundity!' It is calling out to the pass and the range from the wastes where the sagebrush has had its own way since the great stir that there was in the world at genesis." "With the unlimited authority I have in bestowing titles," said Jack, "I have a mind to make you an Emir. But it's a pity that you haven't a camel squatting under your date-tree and placidly chewing his cud." "A tempting thought!" declared the Doge unctuously. "Bob Worther could ride him on the tours of inspection. I think the jounce would be almost as good a flesh-reducer as pedestrianism." "There you go! You would have the camel wearing bells, with reins of red leather and a purple saddle-cloth hung with spangles, and Bob--our excellent Bob--in a turban! Persiflage, sir! A very demoralization of the faculties with cataracts of verbiage, sir!" declared the Doge as he started back to the house. "Little Rivers is a practical town," he proceeded seriously. "We indulge in nonsense only after sunset and when a stranger appears riding a horse with a profane name. Yes, a practical town; and I am surprised at your disloyalty to your own burro by mentioning camels." "It rests with you, I believe, to let me have the land and also the water," said Jack. "We grow businesslike!" returned the Doge with a change of manner. "Very!" declared Jack. "The requirement is that you become a member of the water users' association and pay your quota of taxes per acre foot; and the price you pay for your land also goes to the association. But I decide on the eligibility of the applicant." They were in front of the house by this time, and again the Doge gave Jack that sharp, quick, knowing glance of scrutiny through his heavy, tufted eyebrows, before he proceeded: "The concession for the use of the river for irrigation is mine, administered by the water users' association as if it were theirs, under the condition that no one who has not my approval can have membership. That is, it is practically mine, owing to my arrangement with old Mr. Lefferts, who lives upstream. He is an eccentric, a hermit. He came here many years ago to get as far away from civilization as he could, I judge. That gives him an underlying right. Originally he had two partners, squaw men. Both are dead. He had made no improvements beyond drawing enough water for a garden and for his horse and cow. When I came to make a bargain with him he named an annual sum which should keep him for the rest of his life; and thus he waived his rights. First, Jim Galway, then other settlers drifted in. I formed the water users' association. All taxes and sums for the sale of land go into keeping the dam and ditches in condition." "You take nothing for yourself!" "A great deal. The working out of an idea--an idea in moulding a little community in my old age in a fashion that pleases me; while my own property, of course, increases in value. At my death the rights go to the community. But no Utopia; Sir Chaps! Just hard-working, cheerful men and women in a safe refuge!" "And I am young!" exclaimed Jack, with a hopeful smile. "I have good health. I mean to work. I try to be cheerful. Am I eligible?" "Sir Chaps, you--you have done us a great favor. Everybody likes you. Sir Chaps"--the Doge hesitated for an instant, with a baffling, unspoken inquiry in his eyes--"Sir Chaps, I like your companionship and your mastery of persiflage. Jim Galway, who is secretary of the association, will look after details of the permit and Bob Worther will turn the water on your land, and the whole town will assist you with advice! Luck, Sir Chaps, in your new vocation!" That evening, while the Doge took down the David and set a fragment from the frieze of the Parthenon in its place, Little Rivers talked of the delightful news that it was not to lose its strange story-teller and duelist. Little Rivers was puzzled. Not once had Jack intimated a thought of staying. By his own account, so far as he had given any, his wound had merely delayed his departure to New York, where he had pressing business. He had his reservation on the Pullman made for the morning express; he had paid a farewell call at the Ewolds, and apparently then had changed his mind and his career. These were the only clues to work on, except the one suggested by Mrs. Galway, who was the wise woman of the community, while Mrs. Smith was the propagandist. "I guess he likes the way Mary Ewold snubs him!" said Mrs. Galway. But there was one person in town who was not surprised at Jack's decision. When Jack sang out as he entered the Galway yard on returning from the Doge's, "We stay, Firio, we stay!" Firio said: "_Sí_, Señor Jack!" with no change of expression except a brighter gleam than usual in his velvety eyes. XV WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS Perhaps we may best describe this as a chapter of Incidents; or, to use a simile, a broad, eddying bend in a river on a plateau, with cataracts and canyons awaiting it on its route to the sea. Or, discarding the simile and speaking in literal terms, in a search for a theme on which to hang the incidents, we revert to Mary's raillery at the announcement of an easy traveller that he was going to turn sober rancher. "You plowing! You blistering your hands! You earning your bread by the sweat of your brow!" But there he was in blue overalls, sinking his spade deep for settings, digging ditches and driving furrows through the virgin soil, while the masons and carpenters built his ranch house. "They are straight furrows, too!" Jack declared. "Passably so!" answered Mary. "And look at the blisters!" he continued, exhibiting his puffy palms. "You seem to think blisters a remarkable human phenomenon, a sensational novelty to a laboring population!" "Now, would you advise pricking?" he asked, with deference to her judgment. "It is so critical in your case that you ought to consult a doctor rather than take lay advice." "Jim Galway says that the thorough way, I mulched my soil before putting in my first crop of alfalfa is a model for all future settlers," he ventured. She remarked that Jim was always encouraging to new-comers, and remarked this in a way that implied that some new-comers possibly needed hazing. "And I am up at dawn and hard at it for six hours before midday." "Yes, it is wonderful!" she admitted, with a mock show of being overwhelmingly impressed. "Nobody in the world ever worked ten hours a day before!" "I'm doing more than any man that I pay two-fifty. I do perspire, and if you don't call that earning your bread with the sweat of your brow, why this is an astoundingly illogical world!" "There is a great difference between sporadic display and that continuity which is the final proof of efficiency," she corrected him. "Long, involved sentences often indicate the loss of an argument!" declared Jack. "There isn't any argument!" said Mary with superior disinterestedness. By common inspiration they had established a truce of nonsense. She still called him Jack; he still called her Mary. It was the only point of tacit admission that they had ever met before he asked her to show a prospective settler a parcel of land. Their new relations were as the house of cards of fellowship: cards of glass, iridescent and brittle, mocking the idea that there could be oblivion of the scene in Lang's store, the crack of Leddy's pistol in the _arroyo_, or the pulse of Jack's artery under her thumb! She was sure that he could forget these experiences, even if she could not. That was his character, as she saw it, free of clinging roots of yesterday's events, living some new part every day. In the house of cards she set up a barrier, which he saw as a veil over her eyes. Not once had he a glimpse of their depths. There was only the surface gleam of sunbeams and sometimes of rapier-points, merry but significant. She frequently rode out to the pass and occasionally, when his day's work was done, he would ride to the foot of the range to meet her, and as they came back he often sang, but never whistled. Indeed, he had ceased to whistle altogether. Perhaps he regarded the omission as an insurance against duels. Aside from nonsense they had common interests in cultural and daily life, from the Eternal Painter's brushwork to how to dress a salad. She did extend her approval for the generous space which he was allowing for flower-beds, and advised him in the practical construction of his kitchen; while the Doge decorated the living-room with Delia Robbias, which, however, never arrived at the express office. He was a neighbor always at home in the Ewold house. The Doge revelled in their disputations, yet never was really intimate or affectionate as he was with Jim Galway, who knew not the Pitti, the Prado, nor the Louvre, and could not understand the intoning of Dante in the original as Jack could, thanks to his having been brought up in libraries and galleries. The town, which was not supposed to ask about pasts, could not help puzzling about his. What was the story of this teller of stories? The secluded little community was in a poor way to find out, even if the conscientious feeling about a custom had not been a restraint that kept wonder free from inquiring hints. They took him for what he was in all their personal relations; that was the delightful way of Little Rivers, which inner curiosity might not alloy. His broader experience of that world over the pass which stretched around the globe and back to the other range-wall of the valley, seemed only to make him fall more easily into the simple ways of the fellow-ranchers of the Doge's selection, who were genuine, hall-marked people, whatever the origin from which the individual sprang. He knew the fatigue of productive labor as something far sweeter than the fatigue that comes from mere exercise, and the neophyte's enthusiasm was his. "I'm sitting at the outer edge of the circle," he told Jim Galway. "But when my first crop is harvested I shall be on the inside--a real rancher!" "You've already got one foot over the circle," said Jim. "And with my first crop of dates I'll be in the holy of holies of pastoral bliss!" "Yes, I should say so!" Jim responded, but in a way that indicated surprise at the thought of Jack's remaining in Little Rivers long enough for such a consummation. When his alfalfa covered the earth with a green carpet Jack was under a spell of something more than the never-ending marvel of dry seeds springing into succulent abundance without the waving of any magic wand. "I made it out of the desert!" he cried. "It laughs in triumph at the bare stretches around it, waiting on water!" "That is it," said Jim; "waiting on water!" "The promise of what might come!" "It will come! Some day, Jack, you and I will ride up into the river canyon and I will show you a place where you can see the blue sky between precipitous walls two hundred feet high. The abyss is so narrow you can throw a stone across it." "What lies beyond?" asked Jack, his eyes lighting vividly. "A great basin which was the bed of an ancient lake before the water wore its way through." "A dam between those walls--and you have another lake!" "Yes, and the spring freshets from the northern water-shed all held in a reservoir--none going to waste! And, Jack, as population spreads the dam must come." "Why, the Doge has a kingdom!" "Yes, that's the best of it, the rights being in his hands. He shares up with everybody and we get it when he dies. That's why we are ready to accept the Doge's sentiments as kind of gospel. If ornamental hedges waste water and bring bugs and are contrary to practical ranching ideas, why--well, why not? It's our Little Rivers to enjoy as we please. We aren't growing so fast, but we're growing in a clean, beautiful way, as Jasper Ewold says. What if that river was owned by one man! What if we had to pay the price he set for what takes the place of rain, as they do in some places in California? We're going to say who shall build that dam!" "Think of it! Think of it!" Jack half whispered, his imagination in play. "Plot after plot being added to this little oasis until it extends from range to range, one sea of green! Many little towns, with Little Rivers the mother town, spreading its ideas! Yes, think of being in at the making of a new world, seeing visions develop into reality as, stone by stone, an edifice rises! I--I--" Jack paused, a cloud sweeping over his features, his eyes seeming to stare at a wall. His body alone seemed in Little Rivers, his mind on the other side of the pass. He was in one of those moods of abstraction that ever made his fellow-ranchers feel that he would not be with them permanently. Indeed, he had whole days when his smile had a sad turn; when, though he spoke pleasantly, the inspiration of talk was not in him and when Belvy Smith could not rouse any action in the cat with two black stripes down its back. But many Little Riversites, including the Doge, had their sad days, when they looked away at the pass oftener than usual, as if seeing a life-story framed in the V. His came usually, as Mrs. Smith observed, when he had a letter from the East. And it was then that he would pretend to cough to Firio. These mock coughing spells were one of the few manifestations that made the impassive Firio laugh. "Now you know I am not well, don't you, Firio?" he would ask, waggishly, the very thought seeming to take him out of the doldrums. "I could never live out of this climate. Why, even now I have a cough, kuh-er!" Firio had turned a stove cook. He accepted the humiliation in a spirit of loyalty. But often he would go out among the sagebrush and return with a feathery tribute, which he would broil on a spit in a fire made in the yard. Always when Jack rode out to meet Mary at the foot of the range, Firio would follow; and always he had his rifle. For it was part of Jack's seeming inconsistency, emphasizing his inscrutability, that he would never wear his revolver. It hung beside Pete's on the wall of the living-room as a second relic. Far from being a quarrel-maker, he was peaceful to the point of Quakerish predilection. "Nobody ever hears anything of Leddy," said Jim; "but he will never forget or forgive, and one day he will show up unexpectedly." "Not armed!" said Jack. "Do you think he will keep his word?" "I know he will. I asked him and he said he would." "You're very simple, Jack. But mind, he can keep his word and still use a gun outside the town!" "So he might!" admitted Jack, laughing in a way that indicated that the subject was distasteful to him; for he would never talk of the duel. Now we come to that little affair of Pedro Nogales. Pedro was a half-breed, whose God among men was Pete Leddy no less than Jack was Firio's and the Doge was Ignacio's. In his shanty back of Bill Lang's the Mexicans and Indians lost their remaining wages in gambling after he had filled them with _mescal_. It happened that Gonzalez, head man of the laborers under Bob Worther, who had saved quite a sum, came away penniless after taking but one drink. Every ounce of Bob's avoirdupois was in a rage. "It's time we cleaned out Pedro's place, seh!" he told Jack; "and you and Jim Galway have got to help me do it!" "I don't like to get into a row," said Jack very soberly. "Then I'll undertake the job alone," Bob retorted. "That will be a good deal worse, for when I get going I lose my temper and I tell you, seh, I've got a lot to lose! And, Jack, are you going to stand by and see robbery done by the meanest, most worthless greaser in the valley--and a good Indian the victim?" "Yes, Jack," said Jim, "you've got such a formidable reputation since your set-to with Leddy that the Indians think you are a regular master of magic. You're just the one to make Pedro come to terms." "A formidable reputation without firing a shot!" admitted Jack quizzically, and consented. "You'll surely want your gun this time!" Bob warned him. "No," said Jack. "But--" "I have hung up my gun!" Jack said decisively. "We'll try to handle this peacefully. Come on!" "Well, we've got our guns, anyway!" Jim put in. It was mid-afternoon, a slack hour for Pedro's kind of trade, and the shanty was empty of customers when the impromptu vigilance committee entered. Pedro himself was half dozing in the faro dealer's chair. His small, ferret eyes flashed a spark at the visitors as he rose, but he was politeness itself. "Señores! It is great honor! Be seated, señores!" he said with eloquent deference. The very sight of him set all the ounces in Bob quivering in an outburst: "No chairs for us! You fork over Gonzalez's money that you tricked out of him!" "I take Gonzalez's money! I? Señores?" "It's a hundred and twenty dollars that he earned honestly, and the quicker you lay your hands on it the better for you!" Bob roared back. Pedro was quite impassive. "Señores, if Gonzalez need money--señores, I honest man! Señores, sit down! We talk!" Pedro dropped back into his chair and his hand, with cat-like quickness, shot under the faro table. Jack had come through the door after Jim and Bob. He was standing a little behind them, and while they had been watching Pedro's face he had watched Pedro's movements. "Pedro, take your hand out from under the table and without your gun!" said Jack; and Jim Galway caught a thrill in Jack's voice that he had heard in the _arroyo_. Pedro looked into Señor Don't Care's eyes and saw a bead, though they were not looking along the glint of a revolver barrel. "_Sí_, señor!" said Pedro, settling back in the chair with palms out in intimation of his pacific intentions. "Now, Pedro, you have Gonzalez's money, haven't you?" Jack went on, in the reasoning fashion that he had adopted to Leddy in the store. "And you aren't going to make yourself or Bob trouble. You are going to give it back!" "_Sí_, señor!" said Pedro wincing. While he was producing the money and counting it, his furtive glance kept watch of Jack. Then, as the committee turned to go, he suddenly exclaimed with angry surprise and disillusion: "You got no gun!" While Jim and Bob waited for Jack to precede them out of the door Jim had time to note Pedro's baleful, piercing look at Jack's back. "Just as I told you, Jack--and I reckon you saved a big row. You just put a scare into that hellion with a word, like you had a thousand devils in you!" said Jim. "It's all over!" Jack answered, looking more hurt than pleased over the congratulations. "Very fortunately over." "But," Jim observed, tensely, "Pedro is not only Leddy's bitter partisan and ready to do his bidding, Pedro's a bit loco, besides--the kind that hesitates at nothing when he gets a grudge. You've got to look out for him." "Oh, no!" said Jack, in the full swing of a Señor Don't Care mood. Jim and Bob began to entertain the feelings of Mary on the pass, when she thought of Jack as walking over precipices regardless of danger signs. After all, did he really know how to shoot? If he would not look after himself, it was their duty to look after him. Jim suggested that the rule which Jack had made for Leddy should have universal application. No one whosoever should wear arms in Little Rivers without a permit. The new ordinance had the Doge's approval; and Jim and Bob, both of whom had permits, kept watch that it was enforced, particularly in the case of Pedro Nogales. Meanwhile, Jack kept the ten-hour-a-day law. His alfalfa was growing with prolific rapidity, but Firio had the air of one who waits between journeys. "Never the trail again?" he asked temptingly, one day. "Never the trail again!" Jack declared firmly. "_Sí, sí, sí_--the trail again!" "You think so? Then why do you ask?" "To make a question," answered Firio. "The big sadness will be too strong. It will make you move--_sí_!" "The big sadness!" Jack exclaimed. He seized Firio by the shoulders and looked narrowly at him, and Firio met the gaze with soft, puzzling lights in his eyes. "Ho! ho! A big sadness! How do you know?" he laughed. "I learn on the trail when I watch you look at the stars. And Señorita Ewold, she know; but she think the big sadness a devil. She--" and he paused. "She--yes?" Jack asked. "She--" Firio started again. Jack suddenly raised his hands from Firio's shoulders in a gesture of interruption. It was not exactly Firio's place to hazard opinions about Mary Ewold. "Never mind!" he said, rather sharply. But Firio proceeded fixedly to finish what he had to say. "She has a big sadness, which makes her ride to the pass. She rides out so she can ride back smiling." "Firio, don't mistake your imagination for divination!" Jack warned him. As Firio did not understand the meaning of this he said nothing. Probably he would have said nothing even if he had understood. "I'll show you the nature of the big sadness and that the devil is a joy devil when we harvest our first crop of alfalfa," Jack concluded. "Then I shall make a holiday! Then I shall be a real rancher and something is going to happen!" "The trail!" exclaimed Firio, and the soft light in his eyes flashed. "_Sí_! The trail and the big spurs and the revolver in the holster!" "No!" But Firio said "_Sí_"! with the supreme confidence of one who holds that belief in fulfilment will make any wish come true. XVI A CHANGE OF MIND It was Sunday afternoon; or, to date it by an epochal event, the day after Jack's alfalfa crop had fallen before the mower. Mary was seated on the bench under the avenue of umbrella-trees reading a thin edition of Marcus Aurelius bound in flexible leather. Of late she had developed a fondness for the more austere philosophers. Jack, whose mood was entirely to the sonneteers, came softly singing down the avenue of palms and presented himself before her in a romping spirit of interruption. "O expert in floriculture!" he said, "the humble pupil acting as a Committee of One has failed utterly to agree with himself as to the form of his new flowerbed. There must be a Committee of Two. Will you come?" "Good! I am weary of Marcus. I can't help thinking that he too far antedates the Bordeaux mixture!" she answered, springing to her feet with positive enthusiasm. He rarely met positive enthusiasm in her and everything in him called for it at the moment. He found it so inspiring that the problem of the bed was settled easily by his consent to all her suggestions--a too-ready consent, she told herself. "After all, it is your flower garden," she reminded him. "No, every flower garden in Little Rivers is yours!" he declared. The way he said this made her frown. She saw him taking a step on the other side of that barrier over which she mounted guard. "Never make your hyperboles felonious!" she warned him. "Besides, if you are going to be a real Little Riversite you should have opinions of your own." "I haven't any to-day--none except victory!" and he held out his palms, exhibiting their yellowish plates. "Look! Even corns on the joints!" "Yes, they look quite real," she admitted, censoriously. "Haven't I made good? Do you remember how you stood here on the very site of my house and lectured me? I would not work! I would not--" "You have worked a little--a little!" she said grudgingly, and showed him as much of the wondrous sparkle in her eyes as he could see out of the corners between the lashes. She never allowed him to look into her eyes if she apprehended any attempt to cross the barrier. But she could see well enough out of the corners to know that his glances had a kind of hungry joy and a promise of some new demonstration in his attitude toward her. She must watch that barrier very shrewdly. "Look at my hedge!" he went on. "It is knee-high already, and my umbrella-trees cast enough shade for anybody, if he will wrap himself around the trunk. But such things are ornamental. I have a more practical appeal. Come on!" His elation was insistent, superior to any prickling gibes of banter, as they walked on the mealy earth between rows of young orange settings, and the sweet odor of drying alfalfa came to their nostrils, borne by a vagrant breeze. He swept his hand toward the field in a gesture of pride, his shoulders thrown back in a deep breath of exultation. "The callouses win!" And he exhibited them again. But she refused even to glance at them this time. "You seem to think callouses phenomenal. Most people in Little Rivers accept them as they do the noses on their faces." "They certainly are phenomenal on me. So is my first crop! My first crop! I'll be up at dawn to stack it--and then I'm no longer a neophyte. I am an initiate! I'm a real rancher! A holiday is due! I celebrate!" He was rhapsodic and he was serious, too. She was provokingly flippant as an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the little flexible leather volume. "How celebrate?" she inquired. "By walking through the town with a wisp of alfalfa in one hand and exhibiting the callouses on the other? or will you be drawn on a float by Jag Ear--a float labeled, 'The Idler Enjoying His Own Reform?' We'll all turn out and cheer." "Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste. No! I shall celebrate by a terrific spree--a ride to the pass!" He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock masses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses. She felt that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever folly he was about to suggest. "A ride to the pass and a view of the sunset from the very top!" he cried. He looked down at her quickly, and all the force of the call he had transformed into a sunny, personal appeal, which made her avert her glance. "My day in the country--my holiday, if you will go with me! Will you, and gaze out over that spot of green in the glare of the desert, knowing that a little of it is mine?" "Your orange-trees are too young. It's so far away they will hardly show," she ventured, surveying the distance to the pass judicially. "Will you?" "Why, to me a ride to the pass is not a thing to be planned a day beforehand," she said deliberately, still studiously observing Galeria. "It is a matter of momentary inspiration. Make it a set engagement and it is but a plodding journey. I can best tell in the morning," she concluded. "And, by the way, I see you haven't yet tried grafting plums on the alfalfa stalks." "No. I have learned better. It is not consistent. You see, you mow alfalfa and you pick plums." This return to drollery, in keeping with the prescribed order of their relations, made her look up in candid amusement over the barrier which for a moment he had been endangering. "Honestly, Jack, you do improve," she said, with mock encouragement. "You seem to have mastered a number of the simple truths of age-old agricultural experience." "But will you? Will you ride to the pass?" He had the question launched fairly into her eyes. She could not escape it. He saw one bright flash, whether of real anger or simply vexation at his reversion to the theme he could not tell, and her lashes dropped; she ran the leaf edges of the austere Marcus back and forth in her fingers, thip-thip-thip. That was the only sound for some seconds, very long seconds. "As I've already tried to make clear to you, it's such a businesslike thing to ride to the pass unless you have the inspiration," she remarked thoughtfully to Marcus. "Perhaps I shall get the inspiration on the way back to the house;" which was a signal that she was going. "And, by the way, Jack, to return to the object of my coming, if you have ideas of your own about flowers incorporate them; that is the way to develop your floricultural talent." She turned away, but he followed. He was at her side and proceeding with her, his head bent toward her, boyishly, eagerly. "You see, I have never been out to the pass," he remarked urgently. "What! You--" she started in surprise and checked herself. "Didn't I come by train?" he asked reprovingly. "No!" she answered. Her eyes were level with the road, her voice was a little unnatural. "No! You came over the pass, Jack." It was the first time in the months of his citizenship of Little Rivers that she had ever hinted anything but belief in the fiction that they had first met when he asked her to show him a parcel of land. She seemed to be calling a truth out of the past and grappling with it, while her lips tightened and she drew in her chin. "Then I did come over the pass," he agreed; and after a pause added: "But there was no Pete Leddy." "Yes, oh, yes--there was a Pete Leddy!" "But he will not be there this time!" And now his voice, in a transport that seemed to touch the cloud heights, was neither like the voice of the easy traveller on the pass, nor the voice of his sharp call to Leddy to disarm, nor the voice of the storyteller. It had a new note, a note startling to her. "We shall be on the pass without Leddy and smiling over Leddy and thanking him for his unwitting service in making me stop in Little Rivers," he concluded. "Yes, he did that," she admitted stoically, as if it were some oppressive fact for which she could offer no thanks. "I want to see our ponies with their bridles hanging loose! I want the great silence! I want company, with imagination speaking from the sky and reality speaking from the patch of green out on the sea of gray! Will you?" Their steps ran rhythmically together. His look was eager in anticipation, while she kept on running the leaves of the austere Marcus through her fingers. Her lips were half open, as if about to speak, but were without words; the thin, delicate nostrils trembled. "Will you? Will you, because I kept the faith of callouses? Will you go forth and dream for a day? We'll tell fairy stories! We'll get a pole and prod the dinosaur through the narrow part of the pass and hear him roar his awfullest. Will you?" Her fingers paused in the pages as if they had found a helpful passage. The chin tilted upward resolutely and he had a full view of her eyes, dancing with challenging lights. She was augustly, gloriously mischievous. "Will you go in costume? Will you wear your spurs and the chaps and the silk shirt?" The question said that it was not a time to be serious. It sprinkled the crest of the barrier with gleaming slivers of glass, which might give zest to words spoken across it, but would be most sharp to the touch. "I will wear my spurs around my wrists, if you say, tie roses in the fringe of my chaps, bind my hat with a big red silk bandanna, and put streamers on P.D.'s bits!" "That is too enticing for refusal," she answered, playfully. "I particularly want to hear the dinosaur roar." They had come to the opening of the Ewold hedge, and they paused to consider arrangements. There was no one in sight on the street except Jim Galway, who was approaching at some distance. "Shall we start in the morning and have luncheon at the foot of the range?" suggested Jack. She favored an early afternoon start; he argued for his point of view, and in their preoccupation with the passage of arms they did not notice Pedro Nogales slipping along beside the hedge with soft steps, his hand under his jacket. A gleam out of the bosom of Pedro's jacket, a cry from Mary, and a knife flashed upward and drove toward Jack's neck. Jack had seemed oblivious of his surroundings, his gaze centered on Mary. Yet he was able to duck backward so that the blade only slit open his shirt as Pedro, with the misdirected force of his blow, lunged past its object. Mary saw that face which had been laughing into hers, which had been so close to hers in its persistent smile of persuasion, struck white and rigid and a glint like that of the blade itself in the eyes. In a breath Jack had become another being of incarnate, unthinking physical power and swiftness. One hand seized Pedro's wrist, the other his upper arm, and Mary heard the metallic click of the knife as it struck the earth and the sickening sound of the bone of Pedro's forearm cracking. She saw Pedro's eyes bursting from their sockets in pain and fear; she saw Jack's still profile of unyielding will and the set muscles of his neck and the knitting muscles of his forearm driving Pedro over against the hedge, as if bent on breaking the Mexican's back in two, and she waited in frozen apprehension to hear another bone crack, even expecting Pedro's death cry. "The devil is out of Señor Don't Care!" It was the voice of Ignacio, who had come around the house in time to witness the scene. "What fearful strength! You will kill him!" It was the voice of the Doge, from the porch. "Yes, please stop!" Mary pleaded. Suddenly, at the sound of her cry, Jack released his hold. The strong column of his neck became apparently too weak to hold the weight of his head. Inert, he fell against the hedge for support, his hands hanging limp at his side, while he stared dazedly into space. It seemed then that Pedro might have picked up the knife and carried out his plan of murder without defence by the victim. "Yes, yes, yes!" Jack repeated. Pedro had not moved from the hollow in the hedge which the impress of his body had made. He was trembling, his lips had fallen away from his teeth, and he watched Jack in stricken horror, a beaten creature waiting on some judgment from which there was no appeal. "We'll tell fairy stories"--Jack's soft tones of persuasion repeated themselves in Mary's ears in contrast to the effect of what she had just witnessed. Her hand slipped along the crest of the hedge, as if to steady herself. "I'll change my mind about going to the pass, Jack," she said. "Yes, Mary," he answered in a faint tone. He looked around to see her back as she turned away from him; then, with an effort, he stepped free of the hedge. "Come, we will go to the doctor!" he said to the Mexican. He touched Pedro's shoulder softly and softly ran his hand down the sleeve in which the arm hung limp. Pedro had not moved; he still leaned against the hedge inanimate as a mannikin. "Come! Your legs are not broken! You can walk!" said Jim Galway, who had come up in a hurry when he saw what was happening. "Pedro, you will learn not to play with the devil in Señor Don't Care!" whispered Ignacio, while Mary had disappeared in the house and the Doge stood watching. Jack had stroked Pedro's head while the bone was being set. He had arranged for Pedro's care. And now he was in his own yard with Jag Ear and the ponies, rubbing their muzzles alternately in silent impartiality, his head bowed reflectively as Firio came around the corner of the house. At first he half stared at Firio, then he surveyed the steeds of his long journeyings in questioning uncertainty, and then looked back at Firio, smiling wanly. "Firio," he said, "I feel that I am a pretty big coward. Firio, I am full up--full to overflowing. My mind is stuffed with cobwebs. I--I must think things out. I must have the solitudes." "The trail!" prescribed Doctor Firio. After Jack had given his ranch in charge to Galway, he rode away in the dusk, not by the main street, but straight across the levels toward the pass. XVII THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND Jasper Ewold was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer express them with the simple directness of our ancestors. He kept a diary with what he called a perfect regularity of intermittency. A week might pass without his writing a single word, and again he might indulge freely for a dozen nights running. He wrote as much or as little as he pleased. He wrote when he had something to tell and when he was in the mood to tell it. "It is facing yourself in your own ink," he said. "It is confessing that you are an egoist and providing an antidote for your egoism. Firstly, you will never be bored by your own past if you can appreciate your errors and inconsistencies. Secondly, you will never be tempted to bore others with your past as long as you wish to pose as a wise man." He must have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to form a powerful current. On the evening that Jack took to the trail again, Jasper Ewold had a number of thick notebooks out of the box in the library which he always kept locked, and placed them on the living-room table beside his easy chair, in which he settled himself. Mary was sewing while he pored over his life in review as written by his own hand. Her knowledge of the secrets of that chronicle from wandering student days to desert exile was limited to glimpses of the close lines of fine-written pages across the breadth of the circle of the lamp's reflection. He surrounded his diary with a line of mystery which she never attempted to cross. On occasions he would read to her certain portions which struck his recollection happily; but these were invariably limited to his impressions of some city or some work of art that he was seeing for the first time in the geniality of the unadulterated joy of living in what she guessed was the period of youth before she was born; and never did they throw any light on his story except that of his views as a traveller and a personality. But he did not break out into a single quotation to-night. It seemed as if he were following the thread of some reference from year to year; for he ran his fingers through the leaves of certain parts hastily and became studiously intense at other parts as he gloomily pondered over them. Neither she nor her father had mentioned Jack since the scene by the hedge. This was entirely in keeping with custom. It seemed a matter of instinct with both that they never talked to each other of him. Yet she was conscious that he had been in her father's mind all through the evening meal, and she was equally certain that her father realized that he was in her mind. It was late when the Doge finished his reading, and he finished it with the page of the last book, where the fine handwriting stopped at the edge of the blank white space of the future. An old desire, ever strong with Mary, which she had never quite had the temerity to express, had become impelling under the influence of her father's unusually long and silent preoccupation. "Am I never to have a glimpse of that treasure? Am I never, never to read your diary?" she asked. The Doge drew his tufted eyebrows together in utter astonishment. "What! What, Mary! Why, Mary, I might preach a lesson on the folly of feminine curiosity. Do you think I would ask to see your diary?" "But I don't keep one." "Hoo-hoo-hoo!" The Doge was blowing out his lips in an ado of deprecatory nonsense. "Don't keep one? Have you lost your memory?" "I had it a minute ago--yes," after an instant's playful consideration, "I am sure that I have it now." "Then, everybody with a memory certainly keeps a diary. Would you want me to read all the foolish things you had ever thought? Do you think I would want to?" "No," she answered. "There you are, then!" declared the Doge victoriously, as he rose, slipping a rubber band with a forbidding snap over the last book. "And this is all stupid personal stuff--but mine own!" There was an unconscious sigh of weariness as he took up the thumbed leather volumes. He was haggard. "Mine own" had given him no pleasure that evening. All the years of his life seemed to rest heavily upon him for a silent moment. Mary feared that she had hurt him by her request. "You have read so much you will scarcely do any writing to-night," she ventured. "Yes, I will add a few more lines--the spirit is in me--a few more days to the long record," he said, absently, then, after a pause, suddenly, with a kind of suppressed force vibrating in his voice: "Well, our Sir Chaps has gone." "As unceremoniously as he came," she answered. "It was terrible the way he broke Nogales's wrist!" remarked the Doge narrowly. "Terrible!" she assented as she folded her work, her head bent. "Gone, and doubtless for good!" he continued, still watching her sharply. "Very likely!" she answered carelessly without looking up. "His vagarious playtime for this section is over." "Just it! Just it!" the Doge exclaimed happily. "And if Leddy overtakes him now, it's his own affair!" "Yes, yes! He and his Wrath of God and Jag Ear are away to other worlds!" "And other Leddys!" "No doubt! No doubt!" concluded the Doge, in high good humor, all the vexation of his diary seemingly forgotten as he left the room. But, as the Doge and Mary were to find, they were alone among Little Riversites in thinking that the breaking of Pedro Nogales's wrist was horrible. Jim Galway, who had witnessed the affair, took a radically contrary view, which everyone else not of the Leddy partisanship readily accepted. Despite the frequency of Jack's visits to the Ewold garden and all the happy exchange of pleasantries with his hosts, the community could not escape the thought of a certain latent hostility toward Jack on the part of the Doge, the more noticeable because it was so out of keeping with his nature. "Doge, sometimes I think you are almost prejudiced against Jack Wingfield because he didn't let Leddy have his way," said Jim, with an outright frankness that was unprecedented in speaking to Jasper Ewold. "You're such a regular old Quaker!" "But that little Mexican panting in abject fear against the hedge!" persisted the Doge. "A nice, peaceful little Mexican with a knife, sneaking up to plant it in Jack's neck!" "But Jack is so powerful! And his look! I was so near I could see it well as he towered over Nogales!" "Yes, no mistaking the look. I saw it in the _arroyo_. It made me think of what the look of one of those old sea-fighters might have been like when they lashed alongside and boarded the enemy." "And the crack of the bone!" continued the Doge. "Would you have a man turn cherub when he has escaped having his jugular slashed by a margin of two or three inches? Would you have him say, 'Please, naughty boy, give me your knife? You mustn't play with such things!'" "No! That's hyperbole!" the Doge returned with a lame attempt at a laugh. "Mebbe it is, whatever hyperbole is," said Jim; "but if so, hyperbole is a darned poor means of self-defence. Yes, the trouble is you are against Jack Wingfield!" "Yes, I am!" said the Doge suddenly, as if inward anger had got the better of him. "And the rest of us are for him!" Jim declared sturdily. "Naturally! naturally!" said the Doge, passing his hand over his brow. "Yes, youth and color and bravery!" He shook his head moodily, as if Jim's statement brought up some vital, unpleasant, but inevitable fact to his mind. "It's beyond me how anybody can help liking him!" concluded Galway stubbornly. "I like him--yes, I do like him! I cannot help it!" the Doge admitted rather grudgingly as he turned away. "So we weren't so far apart, after all!" Galway hastened to call after the Doge in apology for his testiness. "We like him for what he has been to us and will always be to us. That's the only criterion of character in Little Rivers according to your own code, isn't it, Jasper Ewold?" "Exactly!" answered the Doge over his shoulder. The community entered into a committee of the whole on Jack Wingfield. With every citizen contributing a quota of personal experience, his story was rehearsed from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure. Argument fluctuated on the question of whether or not he would ever return, with now the noes and now the ayes having it. On this point Jim had the only first-hand evidence. "He said to let things grow until he showed up or I heard from him," said Jim. "Not what I would call enlightening," said Bob Worther. "That was his way of expressing it; but to do him justice, he showed what a good rancher he was by his attention to the details that had to be cared for," Jim added. "He's like the spirit of the winds, I guess," put in Mrs. Galway. "Something comes a-calling him or a-driving him, I don't know which. Indeed, I'm not altogether certain that it isn't a case of Mary Ewold this time!" "Yes," agreed Jim. "The fighting look went out of his face when she spoke, and when he saw how horrified she was, why, I never saw such a change come over a man! It was just like a piece of steel wilting." However, the children, who had no part in the august discussions of the committee of the whole, were certain that their story-teller would come back. Their ideas about Jack were based on a simple, self-convincing faith of the same order as Firio's. Lonely as they were, they were hardly more lonely than their elders, who were supposed to have the philosophy of adults. No Jack singing out "Hello!" on the main street! No Jack looking up from work to ask boyishly: "Am I learning? Oh, I'll be the boss rancher yet!" No Jack springing all sorts of conceits, not of broad humor, but the kind that sort of set a "twinkling in your insides," as Bob Worther expressed it! No Jack inspiring a feeling deeper than twinkles on his sad days! He had been an improvement in town life that became indispensable once it was absent. Little Rivers was fairly homesick for him. "How did we ever get along without him before he came, anyway?" Bob Worther demanded. Then another new-comer, as distinctive from the average settler as Jack was, diverted talk into another channel, without, however, reconciling the people to their loss. XVIII ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES If the history of Little Rivers were to be written in chapter headings the first would be, "Jasper Ewold Founded the Town"; the second, "Jack Wingfield Arrived"; and the third, "John Prather Arrived." While Jack came in chaps and spurs, bearing an argosy of fancy, Prather came by rail, carrying a suitcase in a conventional and businesslike fashion. Bill Deering, as the representative of a spring wagon that did the local omnibus and express business, was on the platform of the station when the 11:15 rolled in, and sang out, in a burst of joy, as the stranger, a man in the early twenties, stepped off the Pullman: "What's this, Jack? Back by train--and in store clothes? Well, of all--" and saw his mistake when the stranger's full face was turned toward him. "Yes, I am sometimes called Jack," said the stranger pleasantly. "Now, where have we met before? Perhaps in Goldfield? No matter. It is time we got acquainted. My name is Prather, and yours?" As he surveyed the man before him, Bill was as fussed as the giant of the fairy story had been by a display of yellow. He was uncertain whether he was giving his own baptismal name or somebody's else. "By Jing! No, I don't know you, but you sure are the dead spit of a fellow I do know!" said Bill. "Well, he has done me the favor of introducing me to you, anyway," said Prather, who had a remarkably ingratiating smile. "I would like a place to stop while I take a look around. Is there a hotel?" "Rooms over the store and grub at Mrs. Smith's--none better!" "That will do." As they rode into town more than one passer-by called out a ringing "Hello, Jack!" or, "Back, eh, Jack? Hurrah for you!" and then uttered an exclamation of disillusion when Prather turned his head. "The others see it, too," said Bill. "They seem to. Who is this double of mine?" "Jack Wingfield." "Jack Wingfield? It seems that our first names are the same, too. He lives here, I take it." "Yes. But he's away now." "Well, when he comes back"--with a pause of slight irritation--"there will be no difficulty in telling us apart." He put his finger to a triangular patch of mole on his cheek. His irritation passed and a sense of appreciative amusement at the distinction took its place. "Now, where shall I find Jasper Ewold?" he asked, as Bill drew up before the Smiths. A few minutes later the Doge, busy among his orange-trees, hearing a step, looked up with a signal of recognition which changed to blank inquiry when the cheek with the mole was turned toward him. "Upon my word, sir, I--I thought that you were--" he began. "Mr. Wingfield! Yes, everybody in town seems to think so at first glance, so I am quite used to the comparison by this time," Prather put in, easily. "It is very interesting to meet the founder of a town, and I have come to you to find out about conditions here." Prather did not appear as if he had ever done manual labor. He was too young to have turned from ill health or failure in the city to the refuge of the land. Indeed, his quiet gray suit of good material indicated unostentatious prosperity. Evidently he was well-bred and evidently he was not an agent for a new style of seeding harrow or weed killer. "You think of settling?" asked the Doge. "Yes. From all I have heard of Little Rivers, it's a community where I should feel at home." "Then, sir, we will talk of it at luncheon; it is knocking-off time for the morning. Yes, I'll talk as much as you please. Come on, Mr. Prather!" They started along the avenue of palms, the Doge still studying the face at his side. "Pardon me for staring at you, but the resemblance to Jack Wingfield at first sight is most striking," he added. "Has he travelled much in the West?" asked Prather. "Yes, much--leading an aimless life." "Then he must be the one that I was taken for in Salt Lake City one day. The man who called out to me saw his mistake, just as you did, when he saw my full face;" and again Prather made a gesture of understanding amusement to the mole. "When you consider what confusion there must be in the workrooms, with the storks flapping and screeching like newsboys outside the delivery room," mused the Doge, "and when you consider the multitudinous population of the earth, it's surprising that the good Lord is able to furnish such a variety of faces as he does. But they do say that every one of us has a few doubles. In the case of famous public men they get their pictures in the papers." "Yes, very few of us but have been mistaken for a friend by a stranger passing in the street!" Prather suggested. "Only to have the stranger see his mistake at a second glance; and on second glance you do not look very much like Jack Wingfield," the Doge concluded. "Just a coincidence in physiognomy!" And Prather was very frank about his past. "I have led rather a hard life," he said. "Though I was well brought up my father left mother and me quite penniless. I had to fend for myself at the age of sixteen. A friend gave me an opportunity to go to Goldfield at the outbreak of the excitement there. The rough experience of a mining-camp was not exactly to my taste, but it meant a livelihood. My real interest has always been in irrigation farming. I would rather grow a good crop than mine for gold. Well, I saved a little money at Goldfield--saved it to buy land. But land is not the only consideration. The surroundings, the people with whom you have to live count for a great deal when you mean to settle permanently." "Excellent!" declared the Doge. "A good citizen in full fellowship with your neighbors! Exactly what we want in Little Rivers." Prather had a complexion of that velvety whiteness that never tans. His eyes were calm, yet attractive, with a peculiar insinuating charm when he talked that made it seem easy and natural to respond to his wishes. In listening he had an ingratiating manner that was flattering to the speaker. "A practical man!" the Doge said to Mary that evening. "The kind we need here. He and I had a grand afternoon of it together. Every one of his questions about soils and cultivation was to the point." "Not one argument?" she asked. "No, Mary; no time for argument." "You do like people to agree with you, after all!" she hazarded. For she did not like Prather. "Pooh! Not a matter of agreement! No persiflage! No altitudinous conversation of the kind that grows no crops. Prather wants to learn, and he's got good, clean ideas, with a trained and accurate mind--the best possible combination. I hope he will stay for the very reason that he is not the kind that takes up a plot of land for life on an impulse, which usually results in turning on the water and getting discouraged because nature will not do the rest. But he is very favorably impressed. He said that after Goldfield Little Rivers was like Paradise--practical Paradise. Good phrase, practical Paradise!" In two or three days the new-comer knew everyone in town; but though he addressed the men by their first names they always addressed him as "Mr. Prather." In another respect besides his features he was like Jack: he was much given to smiling. "The difference between his smile and Jack's," said Mrs. Galway, who was at one with Mary in not liking him, "is that his is sort of a drawing-in kind of smile and Jack's sort of radiates." The children developed no interest in him. It was evident that he could not tell stories, except with an effort. In his goings and comings, ever asking pleasant questions and passing compliments, he was usually accompanied by the Doge, and his attitude toward the old man was the admiring deference of disciple for master. "I am sorry I don't understand that," he would say when the Doge fell into a scholastic allusion to explain a point. "I was hard at work when lots of my friends were in college." "Learning may be ruination," responded the Doge, "though it wouldn't have been in your case. It's the man that counts. See what you have made of yourself!" "Ah, yes, but I feel that I have missed something. When I am settled here I shall be able to make up for lost time, with your help, sir." "Every pigeonhole in my mind will be open at your call!" said the Doge, glowing at the prospect. The favor that Prather found in the eyes of Jasper Ewold partly accounted for what favor he found in Little Rivers' eyes. "Prather has certainly made a hit with the Doge!" quoth Bob Worther. "As the Doge gets older I reckon he will like compliments better than persiflage. But Jack could pay a compliment, too--only he never used the ladle." It was Bob, as inspector of ditches and dams, who provided a horse for Prather to inspect the source of the water supply. In keeping with a characteristic thoroughness, Prather wanted to go up the river into the canyon. He made himself a very enjoyable companion on the way, drawing out all of Bob's best stories. When they stopped in sight of the streak of blue sky through the breach in the mighty wall that had once imprisoned the ancient lake, he was silent for some time, while he surveyed this grandeur of the heights with smiling contemplation, at intervals rubbing the palms of his hands together in a manner habitual with him when he was particularly pleased. "I guess the same idea has struck you that strikes everybody at sight of that, seh!" said Bob. "Yes, a dam might be practical," Prather answered. "But it would take a lot of capital--a lot of capital!" On the way back they stopped before a dilapidated shanty near the foothills. In the midst of a littered yard old man Lefferts, half dozing, occupied a broken chair. "Since the Doge came old man Lefferts has had to do no work at all. A Mexican looks after him. But it hasn't made him any happier," Bob explained as they approached. "Howdy yourself?" growled Lefferts in answer to Bob's greeting. "He seems to be a character!" whispered Prather to Bob, as he smiled at the prospect. "To confess the truth, I am a little saddle sore and tired. I didn't get much riding in Goldfield. I think I'll stop and rest and get acquainted." "You won't get much satisfaction but growls." "That will be all the more fun for me," rejoined Prather. "But don't let me keep you." "No. I must be going on. I've got some things to look after before nightfall," said Bob, while Prather, in a humor proof against any hermit cantankerousness, rode into the yard. When he returned after dark he said, laughingly, that he had enjoyed himself, though the conversation was all on one side. The next morning he decided to take up the plot of land adjoining Jack's. "But I shall not be able to begin work for a few weeks," he said. "I must go to Goldfield to settle up my affairs before I begin my new career." "If Jack ever comes back I wonder what he will say to his new neighbor!" Little Rivers wondered. XIX LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES To Mary Ewold the pass was a dividing line between two appeals. The Little Rivers side, with the green patch of oasis in the distance, had a message of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided for her. Under its spell she saw herself content to live within garden walls forever in the land that had given her life, grateful for the trickles of intelligence that came by mail from the outside world. The other side aroused a mighty restlessness. Therefore, she rarely made that short journey which spread another panorama of space before her. But this was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a tumult of any kind as a relief from her depression; and she went on through the V as soon as she reached the summit. Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the passage of time, of the dream cities of the Eternal Painter, she was staring far away where the narrowing gray line between the mountain rims met the sky. She was seeing beyond the horizon. She was seeing cities of memory and reality. A great yearning was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap of the heights which seemed without end was a symbol that separated her from her desire. She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms and villages; in a shop selecting gowns; viewing from a high window the human stream of Fifth Avenue; taking passage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongues long ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of great audiences before a curtain rose; glimpsing the Mediterranean from a car window; feeling herself a unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of many streets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world. "It is hard to do it all in imagination!" she said to herself. "Even imagination needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way of encouragement." An hour on the far side of the pass played the emotional part for her of a storm of tears for many another woman. She rejoiced in being utterly alone; rejoiced in the grandeur of the very wastes around her as mounting guard over the freedom of her thoughts. There was no living speck on the trail, which she knew lay across the expanse of parched earth to the edge of the blue dome; there was not even a bird in the air. Undisturbed, she might think anything, pray for anything; she might feed the flame of revolt till the fuel of many weeks' accumulation had burned itself out and left her calm in the wisdom and understanding that reconciled her to her portion and freshened to return through Galeria to the quiet routine of her daily existence. Her mind paused in its travels from capital to capital and she was conscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened. There was no sound. The spacious stillness was soothing to her nerves; a specific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes, trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize the Infinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed at first a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in the fellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with a readjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched the point where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade. Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, and after that a sage baggage burro with clipped ears, a solemn-faced pony, and an Indian. Jack was watching his steps in the uneven path, and not until the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the level with her did he look up. She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her hand on the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep of the lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face in shadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiant readiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel--its ease, mystery, unattachedness--which had spanned the distances between her and the horizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitched exclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture she made, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting on her first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought a look of horror into her eyes. "Hello, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a spark electrifying him with all his old, happy manner. He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sun which turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born as an inspiration from her greeting, with radiance. "Hello to you, Mary, guarding the pass to Little Rivers!" he said exultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been in a hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to me this morning." She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have had time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomed any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of their meeting. She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they were alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that they seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background. "You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a conviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated you are not to be able to recall the time and place!" "Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must have thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you remember him the last time you went through the pass." "Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after all, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur. But"--he did not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and proceeded as if she had not spoken--"it has never been out of my mind that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the question that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen each other before?" "Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to "this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the night before the duel, his reticence and animadversions. "I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kind of contest between us as to which should be the first to say 'Tag!'" She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of her eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity. "I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things do come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and I met! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!" "Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed to rouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lips apart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley. "And _we_ met--_you_ and _I_!" "We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was in earnest. "Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been about a year younger. Do you remember it at all?" "No!" She was silent, concentrated, groping. "No, no!" she repeated. "Five is very immature compared to six!" "Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited my emulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such bushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fast to his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path with him to see my mother--I can see just how you looked holding so fast to that thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't you remember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened." "No!" "Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet of the villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to his turn." "Yes--yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mists of fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonder of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the fascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to come up on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You said it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet." "And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't I frightened for fear you would tumble off!" "But I remember that you helped me down very nicely--and--and that is all I do remember. What then?" She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the current of this past association? "Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his big thumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and I had gone to Switzerland--we were always on the move." The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl they had met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under an Arizona sky. Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic touch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past; they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canvasses and enjoying Raphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the Eternal Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could not really have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him the power of divination; for if he had it he might not be so young of heart. Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing an entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the hour. To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure. "Do you see where that shelf breaks abruptly?" he asked. "It must be the side of a canyon. Have you ever looked down?" "I started to once." "I should not like to go over the pass again without seeing if this is really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authority on canyons." "It will be dark before we reach Little Rivers!" she protested. "Ten minutes--only a step!" and he was appealing in his boyish fashion to have his way. "Nonsense! Besides, I do not care for canyons." "You still fear, then, to look down from walls? You--" And this decided her. On another occasion she had gone to the precipice edge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; he should not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely of the imagination. The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab of granite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, a thrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately. Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition, while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling into the chasm! "Don't!" she gasped, and blindly tugged at his arm to draw him back. As he looked around in surprise and inquiry, she withdrew her hand in a reaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it out with fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regarded her for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, while the still light of confidence was in his eyes, he locked his arm in hers. Before she could protest or resist he had drawn her to his side. "It is just as safe as looking off the roof of a porch on to a flower garden," he said. And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite and settled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph of mind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked down into that gulf of shadows--looked down for a thousand feet, where the narrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness. From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with no movement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wrist distinctly. He had her fast, a pawn of one of his impulses. A shiver of revolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shown weakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to prove that she was not. "Thank you. My little tremor of horror has passed," she told him. "I can stand without help, now." He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashing her independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and triumphantly back at him. "You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me. It is tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the barrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddy turn--probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of the desert." He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she looked back into the abyss. "I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness; "courage to master my revulsion against shadows." "Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answered uncomprehendingly. Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly persistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had in a desert basin beside a water-course. "The little pine has courage--the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How green it is--greener than they!" "But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make controversy. "Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!" "In a crowd and waiting for the axe!" "And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there was nothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of the stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward of a look and a word of praise!" "But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, "the big pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnish the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!" "The little pine makes no pretensions. It has done more. It has given us something without which houses are empty: It has given us a thought!" "True!" he exclaimed soberly, yielding. And now all the lively signals of the impulse of action played on his face. "For your glance and your word of praise it shall pay you tribute!" he cried. "I am going down to bring you one of its clusters of spines." "But, Jack, it is a dangerous climb--it is late! No! no!" "No climb at all. It is easy if I work my way around by that ledge yonder. I see stepping-places all the way." How like him! While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinking how to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty. Already he had started despite her protest. "I don't want to rob the little pine!" she called, testily. "I'll bring a needle, then!" "Even every needle is precious!" "I'll bring a dead one, then!" There was no combatting him, she knew, when he was headstrong; and when he was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way. He was laughing now as he took off his spurs and tossed them aside. "No climbing in these cart-wheels, and I shall have to roll up my chaps!" She went back to the precipice edge to prove to him, to prove to herself, that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone at her side, and found that she could. She had mastered her weakness. It was as if a new force had been born in her. She felt its stiffening in every fibre as she saw him pass around the ledge and start down toward the little pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mount them with an invulnerable guard. How would he get past that steep shoulder? The worst obstacle confronted him at the very beginning of the descent. He was hugging a rock face, feeling his way, with nothing but a few inches of a projecting seam between him and the darkness far below. His foot slipped, his body turned half around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt when waiting for the sound of Leddy's shot in Bill Lang's store. She saw his outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. But they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his way out on a shelf. He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at him. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to be subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beaming up at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her face return in a hot flood. It brought with it anger in place of fear. "I don't want it! I don't want it!" she cried down. "And I want to get it for you! I want to get it for you--for you!" His voice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of passionate declaration. So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had the power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There is nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like to pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to go on doing things for you forever!" There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to her now that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his, the iridescent house of glass had fallen about them in a confused, dazzling shower of wreckage. He had found an opening. He had broken through the barrier. Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside the pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and, with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of her wishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her--this garland of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at her feet from the lists. "No, no, no!" she said, half aloud. She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he would be crunching the glass of the house under that confident tread; in the ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken in the barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. His pulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, his artery-beat in the _arroyo_, was hammering in her temples, hammering out a decision which, when it came, brought her to her feet. Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the Eternal Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of rich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. It enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she went, she hurried toward the other side of Galeria. When Jack Wingfield came up over the ledge, a pine tassel in his hand, his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphant intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio was there to welcome him. "Señorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very late, she said." Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in abstraction. "I understand!" he said, half to himself; and then aloud: "Firio, we will not go into town to-night. We will camp on the other side by the river." "_Sí_! I shot enough quail this afternoon for dinner." But Jack did not have much appetite, and after dinner he did not amuse Firio with inventions of his fancy. He lay long awake, his head on his clasped hands, looking at the stars. XX A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR A faint aureole of light crept up back of the pass. "Dawn at last!" Jack breathed, in relief. "Firio! Firio! Up with you!" "Oh-yuh!" yawned Firio. "_Sí, sí_!" he said, rising numbly to his feet and rubbing his eyes with his fists, while he tried to comprehend an astonishing reversal of custom. Usually he awakened his camp-mate; but this morning his camp-mate had awakened him. A half shadow in the semi-darkness, Jack was already throwing the saddle over P.D.'s back. "We will get away at once," he said. Firio knew that something strange had come over Señor Jack after he had met Señorita Ewold on the pass, and now he was convinced that this thing had been working in Señor Jack's mind all night. "Coffee before we start?" he inquired ingratiatingly. "Coffee at the ranch," Jack answered. In their expeditious preparations for departure he hummed no snatches of song as a paean of stretching muscles and the expansion of his being with the full tide of the conscious life of day; and this, too, was contrary to custom. Before it was fairly light they were on the road, with Jack urging P.D. forward at a trot. The silence was soft with the shimmer of dawn; all glistening and still the roofs and trees of Little Rivers took form. The moist sweetness of its gardens perfumed the fresh morning air in greeting to the easy traveller, while the makers of gardens were yet asleep. It was the same hour that Mary had hurried forth after her wakeful night to stop the duel in the _arroyo_. As Jack approached the Ewold home he had a glimpse of something white, a woman's gown he thought, that disappeared behind the vines. He concluded that Mary must have risen early to watch the sunrise, and drew rein opposite the porch; but through the lace-work of the vines he saw that it was empty. Yet he was positive that he had seen her and that she must have seen him coming. She was missing the very glorious moment which she had risen to see. A rim of molten gold was showing in the defile and all the summits of the range were topped with flowing fire. "Mary!" he called. There was no answer. Had he been mistaken? Had mental suggestion played him a trick? Had his eyes personified a wish when they saw a figure on the steps? "Mary!" he called again, and his voice was loud enough for her to have heard if she were awake and near. Still there was no answer. The pass had now become a flaming vortex which bathed him in its far-spreading radiance. But he had lost interest in sunrises. A last backward, hungry glance over his shoulder as he started gave him a glimpse through the open door of the living-room, and he saw Mary leaning against the table looking down at her hands, which were half clasped in her lap, as if she were waiting for him to get out of the way. Thus he understood that he had ended their comradeship when he had broken through the barrier on the previous afternoon, and the only thing that could bring it back was the birth of a feeling in her greater than comradeship. His shoulders fell together, the reins loosened, while P.D., masterless if not riderless, proceeded homeward. "Hello, Jack!" It was the greeting of Bob Worther, the inspector of ditches, who was the only man abroad at that hour. Jack looked up with an effort to be genial and found Bob closely studying his features in a stare. "What's the matter, Bob?" he asked. "Has my complexion turned green over night or my nose slipped around to my ear?" "I was trying to make out if you do look like him!" Bob declared. "Like whom? What the deuce is the mystery?" "What--why, of course you're the most interested party and the only Little Riversite that don't know about it, seh!" After all, there was some compensation for early rising. Bob expanded with the privilege of being the first to break the news. "If you'd come yesterday you'd have seen him. He went by the noon train," he said, and proceeded with the story of Prather. Jack had never heard of the man before and was obviously uninterested. He did not seem to care if a dozen doubles came to town. "Oh, yes, there's another thing concerning you," Bob continued. "I was so interested in telling you about Prather that I near forgot it. A swell-looking fellow--says he's a doctor and he's got New York written all over him--came in yesterday particularly to see you." Though it was a saying in Little Rivers that nobody ever found Jack at a loss, he started perceptibly now. His fingers worked nervously on the reins and he bit his lips in irritation. "He was asking a lot of questions about you," Bob added. By this time Jack had summoned back his smile. He did not seem to mind if a dozen doctors came to town at the same time as a dozen doubles. "Did you tell him that I had a cough--kuh-er?" he asked, casually. "Why, no! I said you could thrash your weight in wildcats and he says, 'Well, he'll have to, yet!' and then shut up as if he'd overspoke himself--and I judge that he ain't the kind that does that often. But say, Jack," Bob demanded, in the alarm of local partisanship which apprehends that it may unwittingly have served an outside interest, "did you want us to dope it out that you were an invalid? We ain't been getting you in wrong, I hope?" "Not a bit!" answered Jack with a reassuring slap on Bob's shoulder. "Was his name Bennington?" "Yes, that's it." "Well," said Jack thoughtfully and with a return of his annoyance, "he will find me at home when he calls." And P.D. knew that the reins were still held in listless hands as he turned down the side street toward the new ranch. Firio was feeling like an astrologer who had lost faith in his crystal ball. An interrogation had taken the place of his confident "_Sí, sí_" of desert understanding of the mind of his patron. Jack had broken camp with the precipitancy of one who was eager to be quit of the trail and back at the ranch; yet he gave his young trees only a passing glance before entering the house. He had not wanted coffee on the road, yet coffee served with the crisp odor of bacon accompanying its aroma, after his bath and return to ranch clothes, found no appetite. He was as a man whose mind cannot hold fast to anything that he is doing. Firio, restless, worried, his eyes flicking covert glances, was frequently in and out of the living-room on one excuse or another. "What work to-day?" he asked, as he cleared away the breakfast dishes. "What has Señor Jack planned for us to do?" "The work to-day? The work to-day?" Jack repeated absently. "First the mail." He nodded toward a pile on the table. "And I shall make ready to stay a long time?" Firio insinuated softly. "No!" Jack answered to space. The pyramid of mail might have been a week's batch for the Doge himself. At the bottom were a number of books and above them magazines which Jack had subscribed for when he found that they were not on the Doge's list. There was only one letter as a first-class postage symbol of the exile's intimacy with the outside world, and out of this tumbled a check and a blank receipt to be filled in. He tore off the wrappers of the magazines as a means of some sort of physical occupation and rolled them into balls, which he cast at the waste-basket; but neither the contents of the magazines nor those of the newspapers seemed to interest him. His aspect was that of one waiting in a lobby to keep an appointment. When he heard steps on the porch he sang out cheerily, "Come in!" but, contrary to the habit of Little Rivers hospitality, he did not hasten to meet his caller, and any keenness of anticipation which he may have felt was well masked. There entered a man of middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fashion for negligee business suits for that spring. To the simple interior of a western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as a thing ineradicably bred into his being. It was evident, too, that he had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow physicians, or the members of the patient's family. But this time that was lacking. The young man leaning against the table was not visibly impressed. "Hello, doctor!" said Jack, as unconcernedly as he would have passed the time of day with Jim Galway in the street. "Hello, Jack!" said the doctor. Jack went just half-way across the room to shake hands. Then he dropped back to his easy position, with the table as a rest, after he had set a chair for the visitor. "How do you like Little Rivers?" Jack asked. "I have been here only thirty-six hours," answered the doctor, avoiding a direct answer. He was pulling off his silk summer gloves, making the operation a trifle elaborate, one which seemed to require much attention. "I came pretty near mistaking another man for you, but his mole patch saved me. I didn't think you could have grown one out here. Wonderfully like you! Have you met him?" He glanced up as he asked this question, which seemed the first to occur to him as a warming-up topic of conversation before he came to the business in hand. "No. I have just heard of him," Jack answered. The doctor smiled at his gloves, which he now folded and put in his pocket. Don't the lecturers to young medical students say, "Divert your patient's mind to some topic other than himself as you get your first impression"? Now Dr. Bennington drew forward in his chair, rested the tips of the long fingers of a soft, capable hand on the edge of the table, and looked up to Jack in professional candor, sweeping him with the knowing eye of the modern confessor of the secrets of all manner of mankind. With the other hand he drew a stethoscope from his side coat-pocket. "Well, Jack, you can guess what brought me all the way from New York--just five minutes' work!" and he gave the symbol of examination a flourish in emphasis. "I don't think I have forgotten the etiquette of the patient on such occasions," Jack returned. "It is an easy function in this Arizona climate." He drew his shirt up from a compact loin and lean middle, revealing the arch of his deep chest, the flesh of which was healthy pink under neck and face plated with Indian tan. The doctor's eyes lighted with the bliss of a critic used to searching for flaws at sight of a masterpiece. While he conducted the initial plottings with the rubber cup which carried sounds to one of the most expensive senses of hearing in America, Jack was gazing out of the window, as if his mind were far away across the cactus-spotted levels. "Breathe deep!" commanded the doctor. Jack's nostrils quivered with the indrawing of a great gust of air and his diaphragm swelled until his ribs were like taut bowstrings. "And you were the pasty-faced weakling that left my office five years ago--and you, you husky giant, have brought me two thousand miles to see if you were really convalescent!" "I hope the trip will do you good!" said Jack, sweetly. "But it is great news that I take back, great news!" said the doctor, as he put the stethoscope in his pocket. "Yes?" returned Jack, slipping his head through his shirt. "You don't find even a speck?" "Not a speck! No sign of the lesion! There is no reason why you should not have gone home long ago." "No?" Jack was fastening his string tie and doing this with something of the urban nicety with which the doctor had folded his gloves. That tie was one of the few inheritances from complex civilization which still had Jack's favor. "What have you found to do all these years?" Jack was surprised at the question. "I have just wandered about and read and thought," he explained. "Without developing any sense of responsibility?" demanded the doctor in exasperation. "I have tried to be good to my horses, and of late I have taken to ranching. There is a lot of responsibility in that and care, too. Take the scale, for instance!" "A confounded little ranch out in this God-forsaken place, that a Swede immigrant might run!" "No, the Swedes aren't particularly good at irrigation, though better than the Dutch. You see, the Hollanders are used to having so much water that--" Jack was leaning idly against the table again. The fashionable practitioner, accustomed to having his words accepted at their cost price in gold, broke in hotly: "It is past all understanding! You, the heir to twenty millions!" "Is it twenty now?" Jack asked softly and sadly. "Nearer thirty, probably! And shirking your duty! Shirking and for what--for what?" Jack faced around. The doctor, meeting a calm eye that was quizzically challenging, paused abruptly, feeling that in some way he had been caught at a professional disadvantage in his outburst of emotion. "Don't you like Little Rivers?" asked Jack. "I should be bored to death!" the doctor admitted, honestly. "Well, you see this air never healed a lesion for you! You never uttered a prayer to it for strength with every breath! And, doctor," Jack hesitated, while his lips were half open, showing his even teeth slightly apart in the manner of a break in a story to the children where he expected them to be very attentive to what was coming, "you can take a piece of tissue and analyze it, yes, a piece of brain tissue and find all the blood-vessels, but not what a man was thinking, can you? Until you can take a precipitate of his thoughts--the very thoughts he is unconscious of himself--and put them under a microscope, why, there must be a lot of guesswork about the source of all unconventional human actions." Jack laughed over his invasion of psychology; and when he laughed in a certain way the impulse to join him was strong, as Mary first found on the pass. So the doctor laughed, partly in relief, perhaps, that this uncertain element which he was finding in Jack had not yet proved explosive. "That would make a capital excuse for a student flunking in examinations!" he said. "It might be a worthy one--not that I say it ought to pass him." "Now, Jack," the doctor began afresh, the reassuring force of his personality again in play. He took a step and raised his hands as if he would put them on Jack's shoulders. One could imagine him driving hypochondria out of many a patient's mind by thus making his own vigorous optimism flow down from his fingertips, while he looked into the patient's eye. But his hands remained in the air, though Jack had been only smiling at him. This was not the way to handle this patient, something told his trained, sensitive instinct in time, and he let his hands fall in semblance of a gesture of protest, gave a shrug and came directly to the point very genuinely. "Well, Jack--your father!" "Yes." And Jack's face was still and blank, while shadows played over it in a war among themselves. "He did not even tell me you were coming," he added. "Perhaps he feared that it would give you time to develop a cough or you would start overland to Chihuahua so I should miss you. Jack, he needs you! All that fortune waits for you!" "Now that I am strong, yes! He did not come out to see me even during the first year when I had not the health to go to him, nor did he think to come with you." "He--he is a very busy man!" explained the doctor, in ready championship. And yet he looked away from Jack, and when he looked back it was with an appeal to conscience rather than to filial affection. "Is it right to remain, however much you like this desert life? Have you any excuse?" "Yes, an overwhelming one!" exclaimed Jack in a voice that was high-pitched and determined, while his eyes burned and no trace of humor remained on lips that were as firm as the outline of his chin. "Yes, one that thrills me from head to foot with the steady ardor of the soldier who makes a siege!" "I--I--you are beyond me! Then you will stay? You are not coming home?" "Yes," Jack answered, in another mood, but one equally rigid. "I am coming at once. That was all settled last night under the stars. I have found the courage!" "The courage to go to twenty millions!" gasped the doctor. "But--good! You will go! That is enough! Why shouldn't we take the same train back?" he went on enthusiastically. "I shall be coming through here in less than a week. You see, I am so near California that I simply had to steal a few days with my sister, who can't come East on account of her health. I have been so tied down to practice that I have not seen her for fifteen years. That will give you time to arrange your affairs. How about it?" "It would be delightful, but--" Jack was hesitating. "No, I will refuse. You see, I rode horseback when I entered this valley for the first time and I should like to ride out in the way I came. Just sentiment!" "Jack!" exclaimed the doctor. He was casting about how to express his suspicion when something electric checked him--a current that began in Jack's measured glance. Jack was not mentioning that his word was being questioned, but something still and effective that came from far away out on the untrod desert was in the room. It fell on the nerves of the ambassador from the court of complex civilization like a sudden hush on a city's traffic. Jack broke the silence by asking, in a tone of lively hospitality: "You will join me at luncheon?" "I should like to," answered the doctor, "but I can catch a train on the other trunk line that will give me a few more hours with my sister. And what shall I wire your father? Have you any suggestion?" "Why, that he will be able to judge for himself in a few days how near cured I am." "You will wire him the date of your arrival?" "Yes." "Jack," said the doctor at the door, "that remark of yours about the analysis of brain tissue and of thought put a truth very happily. Come and see me and let me know how you get on. Good-by!" He took his departure thoughtfully, rather than with a sense of triumph over the success of a two-thousand-mile mission in the name of twenty millions. XXI "GOOD-BY, LITTLE RIVERS!" It was the thing thrilling him with the ardor of a soldier preparing for a siege that sent Jack to the Ewolds' later in the morning. He had come determined to finish the speech that he had called up to Mary from the canyon. As he crossed the cement bridge, Ignacio appeared on the path and took his position there obdurately, instead of standing to one side with a nod, as usual, to let the caller pass. "Señorita Ewold is not at home!" he announced, before Jack had spoken. "Not even in the garden?" "No, señor." "But she will be back soon?" "I do not think so." Ignacio's face was as blank as a wall, but knowingly, authoritatively blank. His brown eyes glistened with cold assurance. He seemed to have become the interpreter of a message in keeping with Mary's flight from the pass and her withdrawal from the porch when she had seen Jack approaching. Here was a new barrier which did not permit even banter across the crest. She must know that he was going, for the news of his approaching departure had already spread through the town. She had chosen not to see him again, even for a farewell. For a little time he stood in thought, while Ignacio remained steadfast on the path, watchful, perhaps, for the devil in Señor Don't Care to appear. Suddenly Jack's features glowed with action; he took a step as if he would sweep by Ignacio on into the garden. But the impulse instantly passed. He stopped, his face drawn as it had been when he fell limp against the hedge stricken by the horror of his seeming brutality to Pedro Nogales, and turned away into the street with a mask of smiles for the greetings and regrets of the friends whom he met. Worth twenty millions or twenty cents, he was still Jack to Little Rivers; still the knight who had come over the range to vanquish Pete Leddy; still a fellow-rancher in the full freemasonry of calloused hands; still the joyous teller of stories. The thought of losing him set tendrils in the ranchers' hearts twitching in sympathy with tendrils in his own, which he found rooted very deep now that he must tear them out. That afternoon at the appointed hour for his departure every man, woman, and child had assembled at the end of the main street, where it broke into the desert trail. The principal found an excuse for dismissing school an hour earlier than usual. That is, everyone was present except Mary. The Doge came, if a little late, to fulfil his function as chosen spokesman for all in bidding Jack Godspeed on his journey. "Señor Don't Care, you are a part of the history of Little Rivers!" he said, airily. "You have brought us something which we lacked in our singularly peaceful beginning. Without romance, sir, no community is complete. I have found you a felicitous disputant whom I shall miss; for you leave me to provide the arguments on both sides of a subject on the same evening. Our people have found you a neighbor of infinite resources of humor and cheer. We wish you a pleasant trail. We wish you warm sunshine when the weather is chill and shade when the weather is hot, and that you shall ever travel with a singing heart, while old age never overtakes the fancy of youth." Every one of the familiar faces grouped around the fine, cultured old face of the Doge expressed the thoughts to which he had given form. "May your arguments be as thick as fireflies, O Doge!" Jack answered, "everyone bearing a torch to illumine the outer darkness of ignorance! May every happy thought I have for Little Rivers spring up in a date-tree wonderful! Then, before the year is out, you will have a forest of date-trees stretching from foothills to foothills, across the whole valley." "And one more about the giant with the little voice and the dwarf with the big voice and the cat with the stripes down her back!" cried Belvy Smith, spokeswoman for the children. "Are they just going on forever having adventures and us never knowing about them?" "No. I have been holding back the last story," Jack said. "Both the giant and the dwarf were getting old, as you all know, and they were pretty badly battered up from their continual warfare. Why, the scar which the giant got on his forehead in their last battle was so big that if the dwarf had had it there would have been no top left to his head. After the cat had lost that precious black tip to her tail she became more and more thoughtful. She made up her mind to retire and reform and have a permanent home. And you know what a gift she had for planning out things and how clever she was about getting her own way. Now she sat in a hedge corner thinking and thinking and looking at the stubby end of her tail, and suddenly she cried, 'Eureka!' And what do you think she did? She went to a paint shop and had her left ear painted yellow and her right ear painted green. So, now you can see her any day sunning herself on the steps of the cottage where the giant and the dwarf live in peace. Whenever they have an inclination to quarrel she jumps between them and wiggles the yellow ear at the giant and the green ear at the dwarf, which fusses them both so that they promise to be good and rush off to get her a saucer of milk." "A green ear and a yellow ear! What a funny looking cat she must be!" exclaimed Belvy. "So she says to herself between purrs," concluded Jack. "But she is a philosopher and knows that she would look still funnier if she had lost her ears as Jag Ear has. Good-by, children! Good-by, everybody! Good-by, Little Rivers!" Jack gave P.D. a signal and the crowd broke into a cheer, which was punctuated by the music of Jag Ear's bells as his burrohood got in motion. The Doge, who had brought his horse, mounted. "I will ride a little distance with you," he said. He appeared like a man who had a great deal on his mind and yet was at a loss for words. There was the unprecedented situation of silence between the two exponents of persiflage in Little Rivers. "I--" he began, and paused as if the subject were too big for him and it were better not to begin at all. Then he drew rein. "Luck, Jack!" he said, simply, and there was something like pity in his tone. "And Mary--you will say good-by to her and thank her!" said Jack. "I think you may meet her," answered the Doge. "She went away early taking her luncheon, before she knew that you were going." So Ignacio had been acting on his own authority! The thrill of the news singing in Jack's veins was too overwhelming for him to notice the challenge and apprehension in the Doge's glance. The Doge saw the glow of a thousand happy, eager thoughts in Jack's face. He hesitated again on the brink of speech, before, with a toss of his leonine head as if he were veritably leaving fate's affairs to fate, he turned to go; and Jack mechanically touched P.D.'s rein, while he gazed toward the pass. P.D. had not gone many steps when Jack heard the same sonorous call that had greeted him that first night when he stopped before the door of the Ewolds; the call of a great, infectious fellowship between men: "Luck, Sir Chaps! I defy you to wear your spurs up the Avenue! Give my love to that new Campanile in Babylon, the Metropolitan tower! Get it in the mist! Get it under the sun! Kiss your hand to golden Diana, huntress of Manhattan's winds! Say ahoy to old Farragut! And on gray days have a look for me at the new Sorollas in the Museum! Luck, Sir Chaps!" "Good crops and a generous mail, O Doge!" Jack rode fast, in the gladness of a hope this side of the pass and in the face of shadows on the other side which he did not attempt to define. To Firio he seemed to have grown taller and older. XXII "LUCK, JACK, LUCK!" Apprehensively he watched the end of the ribbon running under P.D.'s hoofs for the sight of a horsewoman breaking free of the foothills. The momentary fear which rode with him was that Mary might be returning earlier than usual. If they met on the road--why, the road was without imagination and, in keeping with her new attitude toward him, she might pass him by with a nod. But at the top of the pass imagination would be supreme. There they had first met; there they had found their first thought in common in the ozone which had meant life to them both. He did not look up at the sky changes. As he climbed the winding path worn by moccasined feet before the Persians marched to Thermopylae, his mind was too occupied making pictures of its own in glowing anticipation to have any interest in outside pictures. This path was narrow. Here, at least, she must pause; and she must listen. Every turn which showed another empty stretch ahead sent his spirits soaring. Then he saw a pony with an empty side-saddle on the shelf. A few steps more and he saw Mary. She was seated with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took, she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the intimacy of her thoughts. And more enveloping than the light was the silence which held her in a spell as still as the rocks themselves, waiting on time's dispensation where time was nothing. Yet the soft movement of her bosom with her even breaths triumphed in a life supreme and palpitant over all that dead world. Thus he drank her in before the crunch of a stone under his heel warned her of his presence and set her breaths going and coming in quick gusts as she wheeled around, half rising and then dropping back to a position as still as before, with a trace of new dignity in her grace, while her starkness of inquiry gradually changed to stoicism. "Mary, I came upon you very suddenly," he said. "Yes"--a bare, echoing monosyllable. He stepped to one side to let Firio and his little cavalcade pass. All the while she continued to look at him through the screen of her half-closed lashes in a way that set her repose and charm apart as something precious and cold and baffling. Now he realized that he had made a breach in the barrier of their old relations only to find himself in a garden whose flowers fell to ashes at his touch. He saw the light that enveloped her as an armor far less vulnerable than any wall, and the splendor of her was growing in his eyes. Jag Ear's bells with their warm and merry notes became a faint tinkle that was lost in the depths of the defile. The two were alone on the spot where the Eternal Painter had introduced them so simply as Jack and Mary, and where he, as the easy traveller, had listened to her plead for his own life. It was his turn to plead. She was not to be won by fighting Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her visor as a passer-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from passers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up the canyon wall with his pine-tree branch. "I have learned now to look over any kind of a precipice without getting dizzy," she announced, quietly. He was not the Jack who had come over the ledge in the energy of his passion yesterday to find her gone. He had turned gentle and was smiling with craved permission for a respite from her evident severity as he dropped to a half-lying posture near her. Overhead, the Eternal Painter was throwing in the smoky purple of a false thunderhead, sweeping it away with the promise of a downpour, rolling in piles of silver clouds and drawing them out into filmy fingers melting into a luminous blue. "One can never tire of this," he said, tentatively. "To me it is all!" she answered, in an absorption with the scene that made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her. "And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy eddies?" he asked. "Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human. I--" The unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or which it was purposeless to express. Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells floating away into space. If a precipitate were taken from her forehead, in keeping with Jack's suggestion to Dr. Bennington, it would have been mercury, which is so tangible to the eye and intangible to the touch. Press it and it breaks into little globules, only to be shaken together in a coherent whole. If there is joy or pain in the breaking, either one must be glittering and immeasurable. "But Little Rivers is best," she added after a time, speaking not to him, but devoutly to the oasis of green. In the crystal air Little Rivers seemed so near that one could touch the roofs of the houses with the fingertips of an extended arm, and yet so diminutive in the spacious bosom of the plateau that it might be set in the palm of the hand. Jack was as one afraid of his own power of speech. A misplaced word might send her away as oblivious of him as a globule of mercury rolling free from the grasp. Here was a Mary unfathomed of all his hazards of study, undreamed of in all his flights of fancy. "It is my last view," he began. "I have said all my good-bys in town. I am going." Covertly, fearfully, he watched the effect of the news. At least now she would look around at him. He would no longer have to talk to a profile and to the golden mist of the horizon about the greatest thing of his life. But there was no sign of surprise; not even an inclination of her head. "Yes," she told the horizon; and after a little silence added: "The time has come to play another part?" She asked the question of the horizon, without any trace of the old banter over the wall. She asked it in confirmation of a commonplace. "I know that you have always thought of me as playing a part. But I am not my own master. I must go. I--" "Back to your millions!" She finished the sentence for him. "Then you--you knew! You knew!" But his exclamation of astonishment did not move her to a glance in his direction or even a tremor. "Yes," she went on. "Father told me about your millions last night. He has known from the first who you were." "And he told no one else in Little Rivers? He never mentioned it to me or even to you before!" "Why should he when you did not mention it yourself? His omission was natural delicacy, in keeping with your own attitude. Isn't it part of the custom of Little Rivers that pasts melt into the desert? There is no standard except the conduct of the present!" And all this speech was in a monotone of quiet explanation. "He did not even tell you until last night! Until after our meeting on the other side of the pass! It is strange! strange!" he repeated in the insistence of wonder. He saw the lashes part a little, then quiver and close as she lifted her gaze from the horizon rim to the vortex of the sun. Then she smiled wearily. "He likes a joke," she said. "Probably he enjoyed his knowledge of your secret and wanted to see if I would guess the truth before you were through playing your part." "But the part was not a part!" he said, with the emphasis of fire creeping along a fuse. "It was real. I do not want to leave Little Rivers!" "Not in your present enthusiasm," she returned with a warning inflection of literalness, when he would have welcomed satire, anger, or any reprisal of words as something live and warm; something on which his mind could lay definite hold. In her impersonal calm she was subjecting him to an exquisite torture. He was a man flayed past all endurance, flayed by a love that fed on the revelation of a mystery in her being superbly in control. The riot of all the colors of the sky spoke from his eyes as he sprang to his feet. He became as intense as in the supreme moment in the _arroyo_; as reckless as when he walked across the store toward a gun-muzzle. Only hers were this time the set, still features. His were lighted with all the strength of him and all the faith of him. "A part!" he cried. "Yes, a part--a sovereign and true part which I shall ever play! I was going that day we first met, going before the legate of the millions came to me. Why did I stay? Because I could not go when I saw that you wanted to turn me out of the garden!" His quivering words were spoken to a profile of bronze, over which flickered a smile as she answered with a prompting and disinterested analysis. "You said it was to make callouses on your hands. But that must have been persiflage. The truth is that you imagined a challenger. You wanted to win a victory!" she answered. "It was for you that I calloused my hands!" "Time will make them soft!" She was half teasing now, but teasing through the visor, not over the wall. "And if I sought victory I saw that I was being beaten while I made a profession of you, not of gardening! Yes, of you! I could confess it to all the world and its ridicule!" "Jack, you are dramatic!" If she would only once look at him! If he could only speak into her eyes! If her breaths did not come and go so regularly! "Why did I take to the trail after Pedro Nogales struck at me with his knife? Because I saw the look on your face when you saw that I had broken his arm. I had not meant to break his arm--yet I know that I might have done worse but for you! I did not mean to kill Leddy--yet there was something in me which might have killed him but for you!" "I am glad to have prevented murder!" she answered almost harshly. A shadow of horror, as if in recollection of the scene in the _arroyo_ and beside the hedge, passed over her face. "Yes, I understand! I understand!" he said. "And you must hear why this terrible impulse rose in me." "I know." "You know? You know?" he repeated. "About the millions," she corrected herself, hastily. "Go on, Jack, if you wish!" Urgency crept into her tone, the urgency of wishing to have done with a scene which she was bearing with the fortitude of tightened nerves. "It was the millions that sent me out here with a message, when I did not much care about anything, and their message was: 'We do not want to see you again if you are to be forever a weakling. Get strong, for our power is to the strong! Get strong, or do not come back!'" "Yes?" For the first time since he had begun his story she looked fairly at him. It was as if the armor had melted with sympathy and pity and she, in the pride of the poverty of Little Rivers, was armed with a Samaritan kindliness. For a second only he saw her thus, before she looked away to the horizon and he saw that she was again in armor. "And I craved strength! It was my one way to make good. I rode the solitudes, following the seasons, getting strength. I rejoiced in the tan of my arm and the movement of my own muscles. I learned to love the feel of a rifle-stock against my shoulder, the touch of the trigger to my finger's end. I would shoot at the cactus in the moonlight--oh, that is difficult, shooting by moonlight!--and I gloried in my increasing accuracy--I, the weakling of libraries and galleries and sunny verandas of tourist resorts! Afraid at first of a precipice's edge, I came to enjoy looking over into abysses and in spending a whole day climbing down into their depths, while Firio waited in camp. And at times I would cry out: 'Millions, I am strong! I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of anything!' In the days when I knew I could never be acceptable as their master I knew I was in no danger of ever having to face them. When I had grown strong, less than ever did I want to face them. I know not why, but I saw shadows; I looked into another kind of depths--mental depths--which held a message that I feared. So I procrastinated, staying on in the air which had given me red blood. But that was cowardly, and that day I came over the pass I was making my last ride in the kingdom of irresponsibility. I was going home! "When you asked me not to face Leddy I simply had to refuse. I had just as soon as not that Leddy would shoot at me, because I wanted to see if he would. Yes, I was strong. I had conquered. And if Leddy hit me, why, I did not have to go back to battle with the shadows--the obsession of shadows which had grown in my mind as my strength grew. When I was smiling in Leddy's muzzle, as they say I did, I was just smiling exultantly at the millions that had called me a weakling, and saying, like some boaster, 'Could you do this, millions?' I--I--well, Mary, I--I have told you what I never was quite able to tell myself before." "Thank you, Jack!" she answered, and all the particles of sunlight that bathed her seemed to reflect her quiet gladness as something detached, permeating, and transcendent. "When Leddy challenged me I wanted to fight," he went on. "I wanted to see how cool I, the weakling whom the millions scorned, could be in battle. After Leddy's shot in the _arroyo_ I found that strength had discovered something else in me--something that had lain dormant in boyhood and had not awakened to any consciousness of itself in the five years on the desert--something of which all my boyhood training made me no less afraid than of the shadows, born of the blood, born of the very strength I had won. It seemed to run counter to books and gardens and peace itself--a lawless, devil-like creature! Yes, I gloried in the fact that I could kill Leddy. It was an intoxication to hold a steady bead on him. And you saw and felt that in me--yes, I tell you everything as a man must when he comes to a woman offering himself, his all, with his angels, his devils, and his dreams!" He paused trembling, as before a judge. She turned quickly, with a sudden, winsome vivacity, the glow of a great satisfaction in her eyes and smiling a comradeship which made her old attitude over the wall a thing of dross and yet far more intimate. Her hand went out to meet his. "Jack, we have had good times together," she said. "We were never mawkish; we were just good citizens of Little Rivers, weren't we? And, Jack, every mortal of us is partly what he is born and the rest is what he can do to bend inheritance to his will. But we can never quite transform our inheritance and if we stifle it, some day it will break loose. The first thing is to face what seems born in us, and you have made a good beginning." She gave his hands a nervous, earnest clasp and withdrew hers as she rose. So they stood facing each other, she in the panoply of good will, he with his heart on his sleeve. The swiftly changing pictures of the Eternal Painter in his evening orgy seemed to fill the air with the music of a symphony in its last measures, and her very breaths and smiles to be keeping time with its irresistible movement toward the finale. "I must be starting back, Jack," she said. "And, Mary, I must learn how to master the millions. Oh, I have not the courage of the little dwarf pine in the canyon! Mary, Mary, I calloused my hands for you! I want to master the millions for you! I would give you the freedom of Little Rivers and all the cities of the world!" "No, Jack! This is my side of the pass. I shall be very happy here." "Then I will stay in Little Rivers! I will leave the millions to the shadows! I will stay on ranch-making, fortune-making. Mary, I love you! I love you!" There was no staying the flame of his feeling. He seized her hands; he drew her to him. But her hands were cold; they were shivering. "Jack! No, no! It is not in the blood!" she cried in the face of some mocking phantom, her calmness gone and her words rocking with the tumult of emotion. "In the blood, Mary? What do you mean? What do you know that I don't know? Do you know those shadows that I cannot understand better than I?" he pleaded; and he was thinking of the Doge's look of pity and challenge and of the meeting long ago in Florence as the hazy filaments of a mystery. "No, I should not have said that. What do I know? Little--nothing that will help! I know what is in me, as I know what is in you. I am afraid of myself--afraid of you!" "Mary, I will fight all the shadows!" He drew her close to him resistlessly in his might. "Jack, you will not use your strength against me! Jack!" He saw her eyes in a mist of pain and reproach as he released her. And now she threw back her head; she was smiling in the philosophy of garden nonsense as she cried: "Good-by, Jack! Luck against the dinosaur! Don't press him too hard when he is turning a sharp corner. Remember he has a long reach with his old paleozoic tail. Luck!" with a laugh through her tears; a laugh with tremulous cheer in it and yet with the ring of a key in the lock of a gate. Unsteadily he bent over and taking her hands in his pressed his lips to them. "Yes, luck!" he repeated, and half staggering turned toward the defile. "Luck!" she called after him when he was out of sight. "Luck!" she called to the silence of the pass. Three days with the trail and the Eternal Painter mocking him, when the singing of Spanish verses that go click with the beat of horse-hoofs in the sand sounded hollow as the refrain of vain memories, and from the steps of a Pullman he had a final glimpse of Firio's mournful face, with its dark eyes shining in the light of the station lamp. Firio had in his hand a paper, a sort of will and testament given him at the last minute, which made him master in fee simple of the ranch where he had been servant, with the provision that the Doge of Little Rivers might store his overflow of books there forever. PART II HE FINDS HIMSELF XXIII LABELLED AND SHIPPED Behold Jack clad in the habiliments of conventional civilization taken from the stock of ready-made suitings in an El Paso store! They were of the Moscowitz and Guggenheim type, the very latest and nattiest, as advertised in popular prints. The dealer said that no gentleman could be well dressed without them. He wanted to complete the transformation with a cream-colored Fedora or a brown derby. "I'll wait on the thirty-third degree a little longer," said Jack, fondling the flat-brimmed cowpuncher model of affectionate predilection. Swinging on a hook on the sleeper with the sway of the train, its company was soothing to him all the way across the continent. The time was March, that season of the northern year when winter growing stale has a gritty, sticky taste and the relief of spring seems yet far away. After the desert air the steam heat was stifling and nauseating. Jack's head was a barrel about to burst its hoops; his skin drying like a mummy's; his muscles in a starchy misery from lack of exercise. He felt boxed up, an express package labelled and shipped. When he crawled into his berth at night it was with a sense of giving himself up to asphyxiation at the whim of strange gods. If you have ever come back to town after six months in the woods, six months far from the hysteria of tittering electric bells, the brassy honk-honk of automobiles, the clang of surface cars and the screech of their wheels on the rails, multiply your period of absence by ten, add a certain amount of desert temperament, and you will vaguely understand how the red corpuscles were raising rebellion in Jack's artery walls on the morning of his journey's end. From the ferryboat on the dull-green bosom of the river he first renewed his memory of the spectral and forbidding abysses and pinnacles of New York. Here time is everything; here man has done his mightiest in contriving masses to imitate the architectural chaos of genesis. A mantle of chill, smoky mist formed the dome of heaven, in which a pale, suffused, yellowish spot alone bespoke the existence of a sun in the universe. In keeping with his promise to Dr. Bennington he had wired to his father, naming his train; and in a few minutes Wingfield, Sr. and Wingfield, Jr. would meet for the first time in five years. Jack was conscious of a faster beating of his heart and a feeling of awesome expectancy as the crowd debouched from the ferryboat. At the exit to the street a big limousine was waiting. The gilt initials on the door left no doubt for whom it had been sent. But there was no one to meet him, no one after his long absence except a chauffeur and a footman, who glanced at Jack sharply. After the exchange of a corroborative nod between them the footman advanced. "If you please, Mr. Wingfield," he said, taking Jack's suit case. "What would Jim Galway think of me now!" thought Jack. He put his head inside the car cautiously. "Another box!" he thought, this time aloud. "You have the check for it, sir?" asked the footman, thinking that Jack was using the English of the mother island for trunk. "No. That's all my baggage." In the tapering, cut-glass vase between the two front window-panels of the "box" was a rose--a symbol of the luxury of the twenty millions, evidently put there regularly every morning by direction of their master. Its freshness and color appealed to Jack. He took it out and pressed it to his nostrils. "Just needs the morning sun and the dew to be perfect," he said to the amazed attendants; "and I will walk if you will take the suit case to the house." He kept the rose, which he twirled in his fingers as he sauntered across town, now pausing at curb corners to glance back in thoughtful survey, now looking aloft at the peaks of Broadway which lay beyond the foothills of the river-front avenues. "All to me what the desert is to other folks!" he mused; "desert, without any cacti or mesquite! All the trails cross one another in a maze. A boxed-up desert--boxes and boxes piled on top of one another! Everybody in harness and attached by an invisible, unbreakable, inelastic leash to a box, whither he bears his honey or goes to nurse his broken wings!--so it seems to me and very headachy!" At Madison Square he was at the base of the range itself; and halting on the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Avenue he was a statue as aloof as the statue of Farragut from his surroundings. Salt sea spray ever whispers in the atmosphere around the old sailor. How St. Gaudens created it and keeps it there in the heart of New York is his secret. Possibly the sculptor put some of his soul into it as young Michael Angelo did into his young David. It is a great thing to put some of your soul into a thing, whether it is driving a nail or moulding a piece of clay into life. There are men who pause before the old Admiral and see the cutwater of men-of-war's bows and hear the singing of the signal halyards as they rise with the command to close in. Perhaps the Eternal Painter had put a little of his soul into the heart of Jack; for some busy marchers of the Avenue trail as they glanced at him saw the free desert and heard hoof-beats in the sand. Others seeing a tanned Westerner kissing his hand to Diana of Madison Square Garden probably thought him mad. Next, performing another sentimental errand for the Doge of Little Rivers, his gaze rose along the column of the Metropolitan tower. Its heights were half shrouded in mist, through which glowed the gold of the lantern. "Oh, bully! bully!" he thought. "The only sun in sight a manufactured one, shining on top of a manufactured mountain! It is a big business building a mountain; only, when God Almighty scattered so many ready-made ones about, why take the trouble?" he concluded. "Or so it seems to me," he added, sadly, in due appreciation of the utterly reactionary mood of a man who has been boxed up for a week. Now he turned toward a quarter which he had, thus far, kept out of the compass of observation. He looked up the jagged range of Broadway where, over a terra-cotta pile, floated a crimson flag with "John Wingfield" in big, white letters. "My mountain! My box! My millions!" he breathed half audibly. How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness of ambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him, he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on all the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out under the long glass awning. "A whole block now! Yes, the doctor was right. It must be thirty instead of twenty millions!" he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line, window-checkered mass of the twelve stories. "And I do wish we had a tower! If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the range now and then and breathe deep, it would help." When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreage of counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers under the glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble of shrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of the pneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like some devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the store seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper. So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by the elevator, he would gradually scale the heights. Ascending stairway after stairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in his own wonderland. When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more to the offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare with expectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; the very Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martial attention. "The boss!" he heard one of the model girls say. Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds of the way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit and neutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of his principality. The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriad electric needles that pricked sharply, without exhilaration. "The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day," said the model girl to a customer; "and what he don't see don't count!" "Not much older; not much changed!" thought Jack; and his realization of the disinterestedness of his observation tipped the needles with acid. In the sharpness of the master's button-counting survey there was swift finality; and his impressions completed, analyzed, docketed for reference, he ran on up the flight with light step, still rubbing the palms of his hands in the unctuously well-contained and appreciative sense of his power. To Jack he was a fascinating, grand, distant figure, this of his own father, yet mortally near. If the model girl had had the same keenness of observation for what is borne in the face as for what is worn on the back, she could not have failed to note the strong family resemblance between the young man standing near her and the man who had paused on the stairway. This glimpse of his father's mastery of every detail of that organization which he had built, this glimpse of cool, self-centered authority, only reminded Jack of his own ignorance and flightiness in view of all that would be expected of him. He knew less than one of the cash girls about how to run the store. A duel with Leddy was a simple matter beside this battle he had to wage. He mounted the last flight of stairs into an area of glass-paneled doors, behind which the creative business of the great concern was conducted. Out of one marked "Private," closing it softly and stepping softly, came a round-shouldered, stooping man of middle age, with the apprehensive and palliating manner of a long-service private secretary who has many things to remember and many persons to appease with explanations. It was evident that Peter Mortimer had just come from The Presence. At sight of Jack he drew back in a surprise that broke into a beaming delight which played over his tired and wrinkled features in ecstasy. "Jack! Jack! You did it! You did it!" he cried. "Peter!" Jack seized the secretary's hands and swung them back and forth. "You've got a grip of iron! And tanned--my, how you're tanned! You did it, Jack, you did it! It hardly seems credible, when I think of the last time I saw you." It was then that the secretary had seen a Jack with his eyes moist; a Jack pasty-faced, hollow-cheeked; and, in what was a revolutionary outburst for a unit in the offices, Peter Mortimer had put his arm around the boy in a cry for the success of the Odyssey for health which the heir was about to begin. And Mortimer's words were sweet, while the words of the farewell from the other side of the glass-paneled door marked "Private" were acrid with the disappointed hopes of the speaker. "You have always been a weakling, Jack, and I have had little to say about your rearing. Go out to the desert and stay--stay till you are strong!" declared the voice of strength, as if glad to be freed of the sight of weakness in its own image. "Father did not come to meet me?" Jack observed questioningly now to Mortimer. "He was very busy--he did not feel certain about the nature of your telegram--he--" and Mortimer's impulses withdrew into the shell of the professional private secretary. "I wired that he should see for himself if I were well. So he shall!" said Jack, turning toward the door. "Yes--that will be all right--yes, there is no one with him!" Mortimer, in the very instinct of long practice, was about to go in to announce the visitor, but paused. As Jack entered, whatever else may have been in his eyes, there was no moisture. XXIV IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS John Wingfield, Sr. sat at a mahogany table without a single drawer, in the centre of a large room with bare, green-tinted walls. His oculist had said that green was the best color for the eyes. Beside the green blotting-pad in front of him was a pile of papers. These would either be disposed of in the course of the day or, if any waited on the morrow's decision, would be taken away by Peter Mortimer overnight. When he rose to go home it was always with a clear desk; a habit, a belief of his singularly well-ordered mind in the mastery of the teeming detail that throbbed under the thin soles of his soft kid shoes. On the other side of the pad was the telephone, and beyond it the supreme implements of his will, a row of pearl-topped push-buttons. The story of John Wingfield, Sr.'s rise and career, as the lieutenants of the offices and the battalions of the shopping floors knew it, was not the story, perhaps, as Dr. Bennington or Peter Mortimer knew it; but, then, doctors and private secretaries are supposed to hold their secrets. There was little out of the commonplace in the world's accepted version. You may hear its like from the moneyed host at his dinner table in New York or as he shows you over the acres of his country estate, enthusing with a personal narrative of conquest which is to him unique. John Wingfield, Sr. makes history for us in the type of woman whom he married and the type of son she bore him. He was the son of a New England country clergyman, to whom working his way through college in order to practise a profession made no appeal. Birth and boyhood in poverty had taught him, from want of money, the power of money. He sought the centre of the market-place. At sixteen he was a clerk, marked by his industry not less than by his engaging manners, on six dollars a week in the little store that was the site of his present triumph. Of course he became a partner and then owner. It was his frequent remark, when he turned reminiscent, that if he could only get as good clerks as he was in his day he would soon have a monopoly of supplying New York and its environs with all it ate and wore and needed to furnish its houses; which raises the point that possibly such an equality of high standards in efficiency might make all clerks employers. The steady flame of his egoism was fanned with his Successes. Without real intimates or friends, he had an effective magnetism in making others do his bidding. It had hardly occurred to him that his discovery of the principle of never doing anything yourself that you can win others to do for you and never failing, when you have a minute to spare, to do a thing yourself when you can do it better than any assistant, was already a practice with leaders in trade and industry before the Pharaohs. Life had been to him a ladder which he ascended without any glances to right or left or at the rung that he had left behind. The adaptable processes of his mind kept pace with his rise. He made himself at home in each higher stratum of atmosphere. His marriage, delayed until he was forty and already a man of power, was still another upward step. Alice Jamison brought him capital and position. The world was puzzled why she should have accepted him; but this stroke of success he now considered as the vital error of a career which, otherwise, had been flawlessly planned. Yet he could flatter his egoism with the thought that it was less a fault of judgment than of the uncertainty of feminine temperament, which could not be measured by logic. New York saw little of Mrs. Wingfield after Jack's birth. Her friends knew her as a creature all life and light before her marriage; they realized that the life and light had passed out of her soon after the boy came; and thenceforth they saw and heard little of her. She had given herself up to the insistent possessorship and company of her son. Those who met her when travelling reported how frail she was and how constrained. Jack was fourteen when his mother died. He was brought home and sent to school in America; and two-years later Dr. Bennington announced that the slender youngster, who had been so completely estranged from the affairs of the store, must matriculate in the ozone of high altitudes instead of in college, if his life were to be saved. Whether Jack were riding over the _mesas_ of Arizona or playing in a villa garden in Florence, John Wingfield, Sr.'s outlook on life was the same. It was the obsession of self in his affairs. After the eclipse of his egoism the deluge. The very thought that anyone should succeed him was a shock reminding him of growing age in the midst of the full possession of his faculties, while he felt no diminution of his ambition. "I am getting better," came the occasional message from that stranger son. And the father kept on playing the tune of accruing millions on the push-buttons. His decision to send Dr. Bennington to Arizona came suddenly, just after he had turned sixty-three. He had had an attack of grip at the same time that his attention had been acutely called to the demoralization of another great business institution whose head had died without issue, leaving his affairs in the hands of trustees. Two days of confinement in his room with a high pulse had brought reflection and the development of atavism. What if the institution built as a monument to himself should also pass! What if the name of Wingfield, his name, should no longer float twelve stories high over his building! He foresaw the promise of companionship of a restless and ghastly apparition in the future. But he recovered rapidly from his illness and his mental processes were as keen and prehensile as ever. Checking off one against the other, with customary shrewdness, he had a number of doctors go over him, and all agreed that he was good for twenty years yet. Twenty years! Why, Jack would be middle-aged by that time! Twenty years was the difference between forty-three and sixty-three. Since he was forty-three he had quintupled his fortune. He would at least double it again. He was not old; he was young; he was an exceptional man who had taken good care of himself. The threescore and ten heresy could not apply to him. Bennington's telegram irritated him with its lack of precision. Fifteen hundred dollars and expenses to send an expert to Arizona and in return this unbusinesslike report: "You will see Jack for yourself. He is coming." In the full enjoyment of health, observing every nice rule for longevity, his slumber sweet, his appetite good, John Wingfield, Sr. had less interest in John Wingfield, Jr. than he had when his bones were aching with the grip. Jack's telegram from Chicago announcing the train by which he would arrive aroused an old resentment, which dated far back to Jack's childhood and to a frail woman who had been proof against her husband's will. Did this home-coming mean a son who could learn the business; a strong, shrewd, cool-headed son? A son who could be such an adjutant as only one who is of your own flesh and blood can be in the full pursuit of the same family interest as yourself? If Jack were well, would not Bennington have said so? Would he not have emphasized it? This was human nature as John Wingfield, Sr. knew it; human nature which never missed a chance to ingratiate itself by announcing success in the service of a man of power. The spirit of his farewell message to Jack, which said that strength might return but bade weakness to remain away, and the injured pride of seeing a presentment of wounded egoism in the features of a sickly boy, which had kept him from going to Arizona, were again dominant. Yet that morning he had a pressing sense of distraction. Even Mortimer noticed it as something unusual and amazing. He kept reverting to Jack's history between flashes of apprehension and he was angry with himself over his inability to concentrate his mind. Concentration was his god. He could turn from lace-buyer to floor-walker with the quickness of the swing of an electric switch. Concentrate and he was oblivious to everything but the subject in hand. He was in one of the moments of apprehension, half staring at the buttons on the desk rather than at the papers, when he heard the door open without warning and looked up to see a lean, sturdy height filling the doorway and the light from the window full on a bronzed and serene face. More than ever was Jack like David come over the hills in his incarnation of sleeping energy. Instead of a sling he carried the rose. Into the abode of the nicely governed rules of longevity came the atmosphere of some invasive spirit that would make the stake of life the foam on the crest of a charge in a splendid moment; the spirit of Señor Don't Care pausing inquiringly, almost apologetically, as some soldier in dusty khaki might if he had marched into a study unawares. Jack was waiting, waiting and smiling, for his father to speak. In a swift survey, his features transfixed at first with astonishment, then glowing with pride, the father half rose from his chair, as if in an impulse to embrace the prodigal. But he paused. He felt that something under his control was getting out of his control. He felt that he had been tricked. The boy must have been well for a long time. Yes! But he was well! That was the vital point. He was well, and magnificent in his vigor. The father made another movement; and still Jack was waiting, inquiring yet not advancing. And John Wingfield, Sr. wished that he had gone to the station; he wished that he had paid a visit to Arizona. This thought working in his mind supplied Jack's attitude with an aspect which made the father hesitate and then drop back into his chair, confused and uncertain for the first time in his own office. "Well, Jack, you--you surely do look cured!" he said awkwardly. "You see, I--I was a little surprised to see you at the office. I sent the limousine for you, thinking you would want to go straight to the house and wash off the dust of travel. Didn't you connect?" "Yes, thank you, father--and when you didn't meet me--" "I--I was very busy. I meant to, but something interrupted--I--" The father stopped, confounded by his own hesitation. "Of course," said Jack. He spoke deferentially, understandingly. "I know how busy you always are." Yet the tone was such to John Wingfield, Sr.'s ears that he eyed Jack cautiously, sharply, in the expectancy that almost any kind of undisciplined force might break loose from this muscular giant whom he was trying to reconcile with the Jack whom he had last seen. "I thought I'd stretch my legs, so I came over to the store to see how it had grown," said Jack. "I don't interrupt--for a moment?" He sat down on the chair opposite his father's and laid his faded cowpuncher hat and the rose on the desk. They looked odd in the company of the pushbuttons and the pile of papers in that neutral-toned room which was chilling in its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr. could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had shown affection on Jack's entrance. He had a desire to grip the brown hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering the rose stem; but the lateness of the demonstration, its futility in making up for his previous neglect, and some subtle influence radiating from Jack's person, restrained him. It was apparent that Jack might sit on in silence indefinitely; in a desert silence. "Well, Jack, I hear you had a ranch," said the father, with a faint effort at jocularity. "Yes, and a great crop of alfalfa," answered Jack, happily. "And it seems that all the time you were away you have never used your allowance, so it has just been piling up for you." "I didn't need it. I had quite sufficient from the income of my mother's estate." "Yes--your mother--I had forgotten!" "Naturally, I preferred to use that, when I was of so little service to you unless I got strong, as you said," Jack said, very quietly. Now came another silence, the silence of luminous, unsounded depths concealing that in the mind which has never been spoken or even taken form. Jack's garden of words had dried up, as his ranch would dry up for want of water. He rose to go, groping for something that should express proper contrition for wasted years, but it refused to come. He picked up the rose and the hat, while the father regarded him with stony wonder which said: "Are you mine, or are you not? What is the nature of this new strength? On what will it turn?" For Jack's features had set with a strange firmness and his eyes, looking into his father's, had a steady light. It seemed as if he might stalk out of the office forever, and nothing could stop him. But suddenly he flashed his smile; he had looked about searching for a talisman and found it in the rose, which set his garden of words abloom again. "This room is so bare it must be lonely for you," he said. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to cheer it up a bit? To have this rose in a vase on your table where you could see it, instead of riding about in an empty automobile box?" "Why, there is a whole cold storage booth full of them down on the first floor!" said the father. "Yes, I saw them in their icy prison under the electric light bulbs. The beads of water on them were like tears of longing to get out for the joy of their swan song under a woman's smiles or beside a sick bed," said Jack, in the glow of real enthusiasm. "Good line for the ad writer!" his father exclaimed, instinctively. "You always did have fanciful ideas, Jack." "Yes, I suppose I have!" he said, with some surprise and very thoughtfully. "I suppose that I was born with them and never weeded them out." "No doubt!" and the father frowned. Surveying the broad shoulders before him, he was thinking how nothing but aimlessness and fantasies and everything out of harmony with the career to come had been encouraged in the son. But he saw soberness coming into Jack's eyes and with it the pressure of a certain resoluteness of purpose. And now Jack spoke again, a trifle sadly, as if guessing his father's thoughts. "It will be a case of weeding for me in the future, won't it?" he asked wanly, as he rose. "I am full of foolish ideas that are just bound to run away with me." "Jack! Jack!" John Wingfield, Sr. put his hands out to the shoulders of his son and gripped them strongly, and for a second let his own weight half rest on that sturdy column which he sensed under the grip. His pale face, the paleness of the type that never tans, flushed. "Jack, come!" he said. He permitted himself something like real dramatic feeling as he signalled his son to follow him out of the office and led the way to a corner of one of the balconies where, under the light from the glass roof of the great central court, he could see down the tiers of floors to the jewelry counter which sparkled at the bottom of the well. "Look! look!" he exclaimed, rubbing his palms together with a peculiar crisp sound. "All selling my goods! All built from the little store where I began as a clerk!" "It's--it's immense!" gasped Jack; and he felt a dizziness and confusion in gazing at this kind of an abyss. "And it's only beginning! It's to go on growing and growing! You see why I wanted you to be strong, Jack; why it would not do to be weak if you had all this responsibility." This was a form of apology for his farewell to Jack, but the message was the same: He had not wanted a son who should be of his life and heart and ever his in faults and illnesses. This was the recognizable one of the shadows between them now recalled. He had wanted a fresh physical machine into which he could blow the breath of his own masterful being and instil the cunning of his experience. He saw in this straight, clean-limbed youth at his side the hope of Jack's babyhood fulfilled, in the projection of his own ego as a living thing after he himself was gone. "And it is to go on growing and growing, in my name and your name--John Wingfield!" Jack was swallowing spasmodically; he moistened his lips; he grasped the balcony railing so tight that his knuckles were white knobs on the bronze back of his hand. The father in his enthusiasm hardly noticed this. "What couldn't I have done," he added, "if I had had all this to begin with! All that you will have to begin with!" Jack managed a smile, rather thin and wavering. "Yes, I am going to try my best." "All I ask! You have me for a teacher and I know one or two little things!" said the father, fairly grinning in the transmission of his joke. "Now, you must be short on clothes," he added; "so you can get something ready-made downstairs while you have some making at Thompson's." "Don't you buy your clothes, your best clothes, I mean, in your own store?" Jack asked. It was his first question in getting acquainted with his future property. "No. We cater to a little bigger class of trade--one of the many twists of the business," was the answer. "And now we'll meet at dinner, shall we, and have a good long talk," he concluded, closing the interview and turning to the door, his mind snapping back to the matter he was about to take up when he had been interrupted with more eagerness than ever, now that his egoism thrilled with a still greater purpose. "I--I left my hat on your desk," Jack explained, as he followed his father into the office. "Well, you don't want to be carrying packages about," said John Wingfield, Sr. "That is hardly the fashion in New York, though John Wingfield's son can make it so if he wants to. I'll have that flat-brimmed western one sent up to the house and you can fit out with another when you go downstairs for clothes. That is, I suppose you will want to keep this as a memento, eh?" and he held out the cowpuncher, sweeping it with a sardonic glance. "No," Jack answered decisively, out of the impulse that came with the sight of the veteran companion that had shielded him from the sun on the trail. It was good to have any kind of an impulse after his giddiness on the balcony at sight of all the phantasmagoria of detail that he must master. If he were to be equal to this future there must be an end of temptation. He must shake himself free of the last clinging bit of chrysalis of the old life. His amazed father saw the child of the desert, where convention is made by your fancy and the supply of water in your canteen, go to the window and raise the sash. Leaning out, he let the hat drop into Broadway, with his eyes just over the line of the ledge while he watched it fall, dipping and gliding, to the feet of a messenger boy, who picked it up, waved it gleefully aloft before putting it over his cap, and with mock strides of grandeur went his way. "That gave him a lot of pleasure--and a remarkably quick system for delivering goods, wasn't it?" said Jack, cheerfully. "Yes, I should say so!" assented his father, returning to his seat. "Dinner at seven!" he called before the door closed; and as his finger sought one of the push-buttons it rested for a moment on the metal edge of the socket, his head bowed, while an indefinable emotion, mixed of prophecy and recollection, must have fluttered through the routine channels of his vigorous mind. XXV "BUT WITH YOU, 'YES, SIR'" As Jack came out of the office, Mortimer appeared from an adjoining room in furtive, mouselike curiosity. "Not much damage done!" said Jack, in happy relief from the ordeal. "I am without a hat, but I have the rose." He held it up before Mortimer's worn, kindly face that had been so genuine in welcome. "Yes, I must have kept it to decorate you, Peter!" Ineffectually, in timorous confusion, the old secretary protested while Jack fastened it in his buttonhole. "And you are going to help me, aren't you, Peter?" Jack went on, seriously. "You are going to hold up a finger of warning when I get off the course. I am to be practical, matter-of-fact; there's to be an end to all fantastic ideas." An end to all fantastic ideas! But it was hardly according to the gospel of the matter-of-fact to take Burleigh, the fitter, out to luncheon. Jack might excuse himself on the ground that he had not yet begun his apprenticeship and had several hours of freedom before his first lesson at dinner. This ecstasy of a recess, perhaps, made him lay aside the derby, which the clerk said was very becoming, and choose a softer head-covering with a bit of feather in the band, which the clerk, with positive enthusiasm, said was still more becoming. At all events, it was easy on his temples, while the derby was stiff and binding and conducive to a certain depression of spirits. Burleigh, the fitter, was almost as old as Mortimer. He rose to the exceptional situation, his eyes lighting as he surveyed the form to be clothed with a professional gratification unsurpassed by that of Dr. Bennington in plotting Jack's chest with a stethoscope. "Yes, sir, we will have that dinner-jacket ready to-night, sir, depend upon it--and couldn't I show you something in cheviots?" Jack broke another precedent. A Wingfield, he decided to patronize the Wingfield store, because he saw how supremely happy every order made Burleigh. "You can do it as well as Thompson's?" he asked. "With you, yes, sir--though Thompson is a great expert on round shoulders. But with you, yes, sir!" When the business of measuring was over, while Burleigh peered triumphant over the pile of cloths from which the masterpieces were to be fashioned, Jack said that he had a ripping appetite and he did not see why he and Burleigh should not appease their hunger in company. Burleigh gasped; then he grinned in abandoned delight and slipped off his shiny coat and little tailor's apron that bristled with pins. They went to a restaurant of reputation, which Jack said was in keeping with the occasion when a man changed his habits from Arizona simplicity to urban multiplicity of courses. And what did Burleigh like? Burleigh admitted that if he were a plutocrat he would have caviar at least once a day; and caviar appeared in a little glass cup set in the midst of cracked ice, flanked by crisp toast. After caviar came other things to Burleigh's taste. He was having such an awesomely grand feast that he was tongue-tied; but Jack could never eat in silence until he had forgotten how to tell stories. So he told Burleigh stories of the trail and of life in Little Rivers in a way that reflected the desert sunshine in Burleigh's eyes. Burleigh thought that he would like to live in Little Rivers. Almost anyone might after hearing Jack's description, in the joy of its call to himself. "Now, if you would trust me," said Burleigh, when they left the restaurant, "I should like to send out for some cloths not in stock for a couple of suits. And couldn't I make you up three or four fancy waistcoats, with a little color in them--the right color to go with the cloth? You can carry a little color--decidedly, yes." "Yes, I rather like color," said Jack, succumbing to temptation, though he felt that the heir to great responsibilities ought to dress in the most neutral of tones. "And I should like to select the ties to go with the suits and a few shirts, just to carry out my scheme--a kind of professional triumph for me, you see. May I?" "Go ahead!" said Jack. "And you can depend on your evening suit to be up in time. But I am going to rush a little broader braid on those ready-made trousers--you can carry that, too," Burleigh concluded. When they parted Jack turned into Fifth Avenue. Before he had gone a block the bulky eminence of a Fifth Avenue stage awakened his imagination. How could anybody think of confinement in a taxicab when he might ride in the elephant's howdah of that top platform, enjoying mortal superiority over surrounding humanity? Jack hung the howdah with silken streamers and set a mahout's turban on the head of the man on the seat in front of him, while the glistening semi-oval tops of the limousines floating in the mist of the rising grade from Madison Square to Forty-second Street, swarmed and halted in a kind of blind, cramped _pas de quatre_ from cross street to cross street, amid the breaking surge of pedestrians. "Such a throbbing of machine motion," he thought, "that I don't see how anybody can have an emotion of his own without bumping into somebody else's." It was a scene of another age and world to him, puzzling, overpowering, dismal, mocking him with a sense of loneliness that he had never felt on the desert. Could he ever catch up with this procession which had all the time been moving on in the five years of his absence? Could he learn to talk and think in the regulated manner of the traffic rules of convention? The few chums of his brief home school-days were long away from the fellowship of academies; they had settled in their grooves, with established intimacies. If he found his own flock he could claim admission to the fold only with the golden key of his millions, rather than by the password of kindred understanding. The tripping, finely-clad women, human flower of all the maelstrom of urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as a proof of the overmastering desire that possessed him whenever she was in his mind. And the Doge! He was the wisest man in the world. With a nod of well-considered and easy generosity Jack presented him with the new Public Library. And then all the people on the sidewalks vanished and the buildings melted away into sunswept levels, and the Avenue was a trail down which Mary came on her pony in the resplendent sufficiency of his dreams. "Great heavens!" he warned himself. "And I am to take my first lesson in running the business this evening! What perfect lunacy comes from mistaking the top of a Fifth Avenue stage for a howdah!" XXVI THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY How thankful he was that the old brick corner mansion in Madison Avenue, with age alone to recommend its architecture of the seventies--let it stand for what it was--had not been replaced by one of stone freshly polished each year! The butler who opened the door was new and stiffer than the one of the old days; but he saw that the broad hall, with the stairs running across the rear in their second flight, was little more changed than the exterior. Five years since he had left that hall! He was in the thrall of anticipation incident to seeing old associations with the eyes of manhood. The butler made to take his hat, but Jack, oblivious of the attention, went on to the doorway of the drawing-room, his look centering on a portrait that faced the door. In this place of honor he saw a Gainsborough. He uttered a note of pained surprise. "There used to be another portrait here. Where is it?" he demanded. The butler, who had heard that the son of the house was an invalid, had not recovered from his astonishment at the appearance of health of the returned prodigal. "Upstairs, sir," he answered. "When Mr. Wingfield got this prize last year, sir--" Though the butler had spoken hardly a dozen words, he became conscious of something atmospheric that made him stop in the confusion of one who finds that he has been garrulous with an explanation that does not explain. "Please take this upstairs and bring back the other," said Jack. "Yes, sir. You will be going to your room, sir, and while--" The butler had a feeling of a troublesome future between two masters. "Now, please!" said Jack, settling into a chair to wait. The Gainsborough countess, with her sweeping plumes, her rich, fleshy, soft tones, her charming affectation, which gave you, after the art interest, no more human interest in her than in a draped model, was carried upstairs and back came the picture that it had displaced. The frame still bore at the bottom the title "Portrait of a Lady," under which it had been exhibited at the Salon many years ago. It was by a young artist, young then, named Sargent. He had the courage of his method, this youngster, no less than Hals, who also worked his wonders with little paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed the canvas. A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark, looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility. "I give! I give! I give!" was her message. For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait, set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears. It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey; believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her. After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that he had never suspected. He was mutely asking her help, asking the support of her frail, feminine courage for his masculine courage in the battle before him; and little tremors of nervous determination were running through him, when he heard his father's footstep and became conscious of his father's presence in the doorway. There was a moment, not of hesitation but of completing a thought, before he looked up and rose to his feet. In that moment, John Wingfield, Sr. had his own shock over the change in the room. The muscles of his face twitched in irritation, as if his wife's very frailty were baffling invulnerability. Straightening his features into a mask, his eyes still spoke his emotion in a kind of stare of resentment at the picture. Then he saw his son's shoulders rising above his own and looked into his son's eyes to see them smiling. Long isolated by his power from clashes of will under the roof of his store or his house, the father had a sense of the rippling flash of steel blades. A word might start a havoc of whirling, burning sentences, confusing and stifling as a desert sandstorm; or it might bring a single killing flash out of gathering clouds. Thus the two were facing each other in a silence oppressive to both, which neither knew how to break, when relief came in the butler's announcement of dinner. Indeed, by such small, objective interruptions do dynamic inner impulses hang that this little thing may have suppressed the lightnings. The father was the first to speak. He hoped that a first day in New York had brought Jack a good appetite; certainly, he could see that the store had given him a wonderful fit for a rush order. XXVII BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY There were to be no stories of Little Rivers at dinner; no questions asked about desert life. This chapter of Jack's career was a past rung of the ladder to John Wingfield, Sr. who was ever looking up to the rungs above. The magnetism and charm with which he won men to his service now turned to the immediate problem of his son, whom he was to refashion according to his ideas. "Are you ready to settle down?" he asked, half fearful lest that scene in the drawing-room might have wrought a change of purpose. In answer he was seeing another Jack; a Jack relaxed, amiable, even amenable. "If you have the patience," said Jack. "You know, father, I haven't a cash-register mind. I'm starting out on a new trail and I am likely to go lame at times. But I mean to be game." He looked very frankly and earnestly into his father's eyes. "Wild oats sown! My boy, after all!" thought the father. "Respected his mother! Well, didn't I respect mine? Of course--and let him! It is good principles. It is right. He has health; that is better than schooling." In place of the shock of the son's will against his, he was feeling it as a force which might yet act in unison with his. He expanded with the pride of the fortune-builder. He told how a city within a city is created and run; of tentacles of investment and enterprise stretching beyond the store in illimitable ambition; how the ball of success, once it was set rolling, gathered bulk of its own momentum and ever needed closer watching to keep it clear of obstacles. "And I am to stand on top like a gymnast on a sphere or be rolled under," thought Jack. "And I'll have cloth of gold breeches and a balancing pole tipped with jewels; but--but--" "A good listener, and that is a lot!" thought the father, happily. Jack had interrupted neither with questions nor vagaries. He was gravely attentive, marveling over this story of a man's labor and triumph. "And the way to learn the business is not from talks by me," said his father, finally. "You cannot begin at the top." "No! no!" said Jack, aghast. "The top would be quite too insecure, too dizzy to start with." "Right!" the father exclaimed, decidedly. "You must learn each department of itself, and then how it works in with the others. It will be drudgery, but it is best--right at the bottom!" "Yes, father, where there is no danger of a fall." "You will be put on an apprentice salary of ten dollars a week." "And I'll try to earn it." "Of course, you understand that the ten is a charge against the store. That's business. But as for a private allowance, you are John Wingfield's son and--" "I think I have enough of my own for the present," Jack put in. "As you wish. But if you need more, say the word. And you shall name the department where you are to begin. Did you get any idea of which you'd choose from looking the store over to-day?" "That's very considerate of you!" Jack answered. He was relieved and pleased and made his choice quickly, though he mentioned it half timidly as if he feared that it might be ridiculous, so uncertain was he about the rules of apprenticeship. "You see I have been used to the open air and I'd like a little time in which to acclimatize myself in New York. Now, all those big wagons that bring the goods in and the little wagons that take them out--there is an out-of-door aspect to the delivery service. Is that an important branch to learn?" "Very--getting the goods to the customer--very!" "Then I'll start with that and sort of a roving commission to look over the other departments." "Good! We will consider it settled. And, Jack, every man's labor that you can save and retain efficiency--that is the trick! Organization and ideas, that's what makes the employer and so makes success. Why, Jack, if you could cut down the working costs in the delivery department or improve the service at the present cost, why--" John Wingfield, Sr. rubbed the palms of his hands together delightedly. Everything was going finely--so far. He added that proviso of _so far_ instinctively. "Besides, Jack," he went on, changing to another subject that was equally vital to his ego, "this name of Wingfield is something to work for. I was the son of a poor New England clergyman, but there is family back of it; good blood, good blood! I was not the first John Wingfield and you shall not be the last!" He rose from the table, bidding the servant to bring the coffee to the drawing-room. With the same light, quick step that he ascended the flights in the store, he led the way downstairs, his face alive with the dramatic anticipation that it had worn when he took Jack out of the office to look down from the balcony of the court. "Ah, we have something besides the store, Jack!" he was saying, in the very exultation of the pride of possession, as he went to the opposite side of the mantel from the mother's portrait and turned on the reflector over a picture. Jack saw a buccaneer under the brush of the gold and the shadows of Spain; a robust, ready figure on fighting edge, who seemed to say, "After you, sir; and, then, pardon me, but it's your finish, sir!" "It's a Velasquez!" Jack exclaimed. "And you knew that at a glance!" said his father. "Why, yes!" "Not many Velasquezes in America," said the father, thinking, incidentally, that his son would not have to pay the dealers a heavy toll for an art education, while he revelled in a surprise that he was evidently holding back. "Or many better Velasquezes than this, anywhere," added Jack. "What mastery! What a gift from heaven that was vouchsafed to a human being to paint like that!" He was in a spell, held no less by the painter's art than by the subject. "Absolutely a certified Velasquez, bought from the estate of Count Galting," continued his father. "I paid a cool two hundred and fifty thousand for it. And that isn't all, Jack, that isn't all that you are going to drudge for as an apprentice in the delivery department. I know what I am talking about. I wasn't fooled by any of the genealogists who manufacture ancestors. I had it all looked up by four experts, checking one off against another." "Yes," answered Jack, absently. He had hardly heard his father's words. In fervent scrutiny he was leaning forward, his weight on the ball of the foot, the attitude of the man in the picture. "And who do you think he is--who?" pursued John Wingfield, Sr. "A man who fought face to face with the enemy; a man whom men followed! Velasquez caught all that!" answered Jack. "That old fellow was a great man in his day--a great Englishman--and his name was John Wingfield! He was your ancestor and mine!" After a quick breath of awakening comprehension Jack took a step nearer the portrait, all his faculties in the throe of beaming inquiry of Señor Don't Care and desert freedom, in the self-same, alert readiness of pose as the figure he was facing. "They say I resemble him!" The father repeated that phrase which he had used in benignant satisfaction to many a guest, but now seeing with greedy eyes a likeness between his son and the ancestor deeper than mere resemblance of feature, he added: "But you--you, Jack, you're the dead spit of him!" "Yes," said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were too engrossed to be interested. To the buccaneer's "After you, sir; and, then, your finish, sir!" he seemed to be saying, in the fully-lived spirit of imagination: "A good epitaph, sir! I'll see that it is written on your tombstone!" The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge that he was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbard of the canvas and another from Jack's side. "If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have built himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great institution, just as I am." "Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack, hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation, while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been a cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would never have been a camp-follower." "At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!" "It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final, mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!" There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her hurt cry had come echoing to his ears. "Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back, painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I exhibited him in the store!" "You--you--" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited him in the store!" he said. "Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise him as my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact got around, Jack." While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face and whose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easy fatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of the first John Wingfield. At length, Jack passed over to the other side of the mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother; and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone and in its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch the Eternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not in features, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiar sensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind than was the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer. "Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swear and could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or live a lie. And I guess something else--how supremely gentle he could be before a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargent brought out a soul!" John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on the mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white on the dark wood. Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force in his son, he hastened to change the subject. "I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack." "Yes, from her;" which was hardly changing the subject. "As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to know everything there was to know about the old fellow," said the father. "So I set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English and Spanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material. Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp." "You have that!" cried Jack. "You have the framework from which you can build the whole story of him--the story of how he fought and how Velasquez came to paint him? Oh, I want to read it!" With an unexplored land between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, in the transport of wanderlust that had sent him away over the sand from Little Rivers. _Sí, sí_, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars! If Señor Don't Care's desert journeys were over--and he had no thought but that they were--there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trails in the ancestor's company. Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of his men; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain of twenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answer to the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said: "It is glorious for one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition even of Your Majesty's chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanish ambassador," which won Elizabeth's reversal of the Admiralty's decision; with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court of Spain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with him when the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his time while his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer's joy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away to his studio. More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighter was gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than of statesmen or courtiers. He had married the daughter of a great merchant, a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, according to the gossips of the time. Rumor had it that he had taken her for the wherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit. To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came back laden with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wife had died at the birth of a son. He promised himself to settle down for good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling reaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And his son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of five generations, the poor clergyman was descended. Thus ran the tale in its completeness. The end of the ancestor's career had been in keeping with its character and course. He had been spared the slow decay of faculties in armchair reminiscence. He had gone down in his ship without striking his colors, fighting the Spaniards one to three. When Jack closed the cover on the last page tenderly and in enraptured understanding, it was past midnight. The spaciousness of the sea under clouds of battle smoke had melted into the spaciousness of the desert under the Eternal Painter's canopy. Then four walls of a bedroom in Madison Avenue materialized, shutting out the horizon; a carpet in place of sand formed the floor; and in place of a blanket roll was a canopied bed upon which a servant had laid out a suit of pajamas. In the impulse of a desire to look into the face of the first John Wingfield in the light of all he now knew, Jack went downstairs, and in the silence of the house drank in the portrait again. "You splendid old devil, you!" he breathed, understandingly. "How should you like to start out delivering goods with me in the morning?" XXVIII JACK GETS A RAISE The next morning Jack went down town with his father in the limousine. About an hour later, after he had been introduced to the head of the delivery division, he was on his way up town beside a driver of one of the wagons on the Harlem route. He was in the uniform of the Wingfield light cavalry, having obtained a cap with embroidered initials on the front. The driver was like to burst from inward mirth, and Jack was regarding the prospect with veritable juvenile zest. At dinner that evening John Wingfield, Jr. narrated his experiences of the day to John Wingfield, Sr. with the simplicity and verisimilitude that always make for both realism and true comedy. "But, Jack, you took me too literally! It is hardly in keeping with your position! You--" "Why, I thought that the only way to know the whole business was to play every part. Didn't you ever deliver packages in person in your early days?" "I can't say that I did!" the father admitted wryly. "Then it seems to me that you missed one of the most entertaining and instructive features," Jack continued. "You cannot imagine the majestic feminine disdain with which you may be informed that a five-cent bar of soap should be delivered at the back door instead of the front door. The most indignant example was a red-haired woman who was doing her own work in a flat. She fairly blazed. She wanted to know if I didn't know what dumb-waiters were for." "And what did you say?" the father asked wearily; for the ninth John Wingfield had a limited sense of humor. "Oh, I try, however irritating the circumstances, to be most courtly, for the honor of the store," said Jack. "I told her that I was very sorry and I would speak to you in person about the mistake." "You mean that you admitted who you were?" "Oh, no! The red-haired woman laughed and took the package in at the front door," Jack responded. Anybody in Little Rivers would have understood just how he looked and smiled and why it was that the red-haired woman laughed. "Jack--now, really, Jack, this is not quite dignified!" expostulated the father. "What do you think your ancestor would say to it?" "I suspect that he would have made an even more ingratiating bow to the lady than I could," said Jack, thoughtfully. "They had the grand manner better developed in his day than in ours." In the ensuing weeks John Wingfield, Sr. dwelt in a kind of infernal wonder about his son. He was cheered when some friend of his world who had met Jack in the garb of his caste, as fitted by Burleigh, would say: "Fine, strapping son you have there, Wingfield!" He was abashed and dumfounded when Jack announced that he had taken Mamie Devore, who sold culinary utensils in the basement, out to luncheon with her "steady company," Joe Mathewson, driver of one of the warehouse trucks. "They were a little awed at first," Jack explained, "but they soon became natural. I don't know anything pleasanter than making people feel perfectly natural, do you? You see, Joe and Mamie are very real, father, and most businesslike; an ambitious, upstanding pair. They're going to have two thousand dollars saved before they marry. "'I don't believe that a woman ought to work out after she's married,' was the way Joe put it. And Mamie, with her eyes fairly devouring him, snapped back: 'No, she'd have enough to do looking after you, you big old bluff!' "Mamie is a wiry little thing and Joe is a heavyweight, with a hand almost as big as a baseball mit. That's partly why their practical romance is so fascinating. Why, it's wonderful the stories that are playing themselves out in that big store, father! Well, you see Joe is on a stint--two thousand before he gets Mamie. He had been making money on the side nights in boxing bouts. But Mamie stopped the fighting. She said she was not going to have a husband with the tip of his nose driven up between his eyes like a bull-dog's. And what do you imagine they are going to do with the two thousand? Buy a farm! Isn't that corking!" John Wingfield, Sr. shrugged his shoulders, but did not express his feelings with any remark. It seemed to him that Jack must have been born without a sense of proportion. With the breaking of spring, when gardens were beginning to sprout, Jack broadened his study to the trails of Westchester, Long Island, and New Jersey, coursed by the big automobile vans of the suburban delivery. To the people of the store, whose streets he traversed at will in unremitting wonder over its varied activities, he had brought something of the same sensation that he had to an Arizona town. He came to know the employees by name, even as he had his neighbors in Little Rivers. He nodded to the clerks as he passed down an aisle. They watched for his coming and brightened with his approach and met his smile with their smiles. In their idle moments he would stop and talk of the desert. Although he was learning to like the store as a community of human beings its business was as the works of a watch, when all he knew was how to tell the time by the face. But he tried hard to learn; tried until his head was dizzy with a whirl of dissociated facts, which he knew ought to be associated, and under the call of his utter restlessness would disappear altogether for two or three days. "Relieving the pressure! It's a safety-valve so I shan't blow up," he explained to his father, sadly. "Take your time," said John Wingfield, Sr., having in mind a recent talk with Dr. Bennington. Jack listened faithfully to his father's clear-cut lessons. He asked questions which only made his father sigh; for they had little to do with the economy of working costs. All his suggestions were extravagant; they would contribute to the joy of the employees, but not to profit. And other questions made his father frown in devising answers which were in the nature of explanations. Born of his rambling and humanly observant relations with every department, they led into the very heart of things in that mighty organization. There were times when it was hard for him to control his indignation. There were trails leading to the room with the glass-paneled door marked "Private" which he half feared to pursue. Thus, between father and son remained that indefinable chasm of thought and habit which filial duty or politeness could not bridge. No stories of the desert were ever told at home, though it was so easy to tell them to Burleigh or Mathewson, those contrasts in a pale fitter of clothes and a herculean rustler of dry-goods boxes. But echoes of the tales came to the father through his assistants. He had the feeling of some stranger spirit in his own likeness moving there in the streets of his city under the talisman of a consanguinity that was nominal. One day he put an inquiry to the general manager concretely, though in a way to avoid the appearance of asking another's opinion about his own son. "He has your gift of winning men to him. There is no denying his popularity with the force," said the general manager, who was a diplomat. The same question was put to Peter Mortimer. "We all love him. I think a lot of people in the store would march out to the desert after him," said Mortimer, with real rejoicing in his candor and courage. Indeed, of late he had been developing cheer as well as courage, imbibing both, perhaps, from the roses in the vase on his employer's desk. Jack had ordered a fresh bunch put there every day; and when employees were sick packages of grapes and bunches of flowers came to them, in Little Rivers fashion, with J.W. on the card, as if they had come from the head of the firm himself. "Maybe Jack will soften the old man a little," ran a whisper from basement to roof. For the battalions called him "Jack," rather than "Mr. Wingfield," just as Little Rivers had. "The boy's good nature isn't making him too familiar with the employees?" was a second question which the father had asked both the general manager and Mortimer. "No. That is the surprising thing--the gift of being friendly without being familiar," answered the manager. "He's got a kind of self-respect that induces respect in others," said Peter. John Wingfield, Sr. was the proprietor of the store, but the human world of the store began to feel a kind of proprietorship in Jack, while its guardian interest in helping him in his mistakes was common enough to be a conspiracy. And the callouses were gone from his hands. There was no longer a dividing line between tan and white on his forehead. No outward symbol of the desert clung to his person except the moments of the far vision of distances in his eyes. Superficially, on the Avenue he would have been taken for one of his caste. But tossing a cowpuncher hat out of a window into Broadway was easier than tossing a thing out of mind. He sat up nights to write to Mary. Letter after letter he poured out as a diary of his experiences in his new world, letters breathing a pupil's hope of learning and all that pupil's sorry vagaries. No answer ever came, not even to the most appealing ones about his most adventurous conflicts with the dinosaur. He felt the chagrin of the army of unpublished novelists who lay their hearts bare on the stone slab of the dissectors in a publisher's office. He might as well have thrown all he wrote into the waste-basket so far as any result was concerned; yet he kept on writing as if it were his glorious duty to report to her as his superior. But he found a more responsive correspondent in Jim Galway; and this was the letter he received: "DEAR JACK: "The whole valley is not yet sprouting with dates as you said it would from your thinking of us. Maybe we didn't use the right seed. Your ranch is still called Jack's ranch, and Firio is doing his best and about the best I ever knew in an Indian. But as you always said, Indians are mostly human, like the rest of us, barring a sort of born twist in their intellect for which they aren't responsible. You see, Jack, a lot of your sayings still live with us, though you are gone. "Well, Firio keeps your P.D. exercised and won't let anybody but himself ride him. He says you will need him. For you can't budge the stubborn little cuss. He declares you're coming back. When we tell him you're worth twenty millions and he's plumb full of primitive foolishness and general ignorance of the outside world, he says, '_Sí_, he will come back!' like some heathen oracle that's strong on repetition and weak on vocabulary. "Of course you know about the new addition to our citizenship, John Prather, that double of yours that you didn't happen to meet. And I might mention that by this time, after we've seen so much of him, we agree with the Doge that he doesn't look a bit like you. Well, he's making a fine ranch across the road from you, but hiring all his work done, which ain't exactly according to Little Rivers custom, as you will remember. The Doge sets a lot by him, though I can't see how there's much in common between them. This fellow's not full of all that kind of scholastic persiflage that you are, Jack. He's so all-fired practical his joints would crack if he wasn't so oily; and he's up to old man Lefferts' pretty often. "He goes to Phoenix a good deal. When I was there the other day I heard he was circulating around among the politicians in his quiet way, and I saw him and Pete Leddy hobnobbing together. I didn't like that. But when I told the Doge of it he said he guessed there wasn't much real hobnobbing. The Doge is certainly strong for Prather. Another thing I heard was that, after all, old man Lefferts' two partners aren't dead, and Prather's been hunting them up. "Come to think of it, I didn't tell you that Pete Leddy and some of the gang have been back in town. Of course we have every confidence in the Doge, he's been so fair to this community. Still, some of us can't help having our private suspicions, considering what a lot we have at stake. And four or five of us was talking the other night, when suddenly we all agreed how you'd shine in any trouble, and if there was going to be any--not that there is--we wished you were here. "Well, Jack, the pass hasn't changed and the sunsets are just as grand as ever and the air just as free. The pass won't have changed and the sunsets will be doing business at the old stand when the antiquaries are digging up the remote civilization of Little Rivers and putting it in a high scale because they ran across a pot of Mrs. Galway's jam in the ruins--the same hifalutin compliment being your own when you were nursing your wound, as you will remember. "Here's wishing you luck from the whole town, way out here in nowhere. "As ever yours, "James R. Galway. "P.S. Belvy Smith wants to know if you won't write just one story. I told her you were too busy for such nonsense now. But she refuses to believe it. She says being busy doesn't matter to you. She says the stories just pop out. So I transmit her request. J.R.G." "P.D. waiting!" breathed Jack. "No changing Firio! He is like the pass. I wonder how Wrath of God and Jag Ear are!" He wrote a story for Belvy. He wrote to Firio in resolute assertion that he would never require the services of P.D. again, when he knew that Firio, despite the protests, would still keep P.D. fit for the trail. He wrote to Jim Galway how immersed he was in his new career, but that he might come for a while--for a little while, with emphasis--if ever Jim wired that he was needed. "That was a good holiday--a regular week-end debauch away from the shop!" he thought, when the letters were finished. Soon after this came an event which, for the first time, gave John Wingfield, Sr. a revelation of the side of his son that had won Little Rivers and the interest of the rank and file of the store. Among Jack's many suggestions, in his aim to carry out his father's talk about the creative business sense the first night they were together, had been one for a suburban clubbing delivery system. It had been dismissed as fantastic, but Jack had asked that it be given a trial and his father had consented. Its basis was a certain confidence in human nature. Jack and his father had dined together the evening after the master of the push-buttons had gone through the final reports of the experiment. "Well, Jack, I am going to raise your salary to a hundred a week," the father announced. "On the ground that if you pay me more I might make myself worth more?" Jack asked respectfully. "No, as a matter of business. Whenever any man makes two dollars for the store, he gets one dollar and I keep the other. That is the basis of my success--others earning money for me. Your club scheme is a go. As the accountant works it out, it has brought a profit of two hundred a week." "Then I have done something worth while, really?" Jack asked, eagerly, but half sceptical of such good fortune. "Yes. You have created a value. You have used your powers of observation and your brain. That's the thing that makes a few men employers while the multitude remains employees." "Father! Then I am not quite hopeless?" "Hopeless! My son hopeless! No, no! I didn't expect you to learn the business in a week, or a month, or even a year. Time! time!" Nor did John Wingfield, Sr. wish his son to develop too rapidly. Now that he was so sure of beating threescore and ten, while retaining the full possession of his faculties, if he followed the rules of longevity, he would not have welcomed a son who could spring into the saddle at once. He wanted to ride alone. He who had never shared his power with anyone! He who had never admitted anyone into even a few shares of company partnership in his concern! Time! time! The boy would never fall heir to undivided responsibility before he was forty. John Wingfield, Sr. was pleased with himself; pleased over a good sign; and he could not deny that he was pleased at the sudden change in Jack. For he saw Jack's eyes sparkling into his own; sparkling with comradeship and spontaneous gratification. Was the boy to be his in thought and purpose, after all? Yes, of course; yes, inevitably, with the approach of maturity. Gradually the flightiness of his upbringing would wear off down to the steel, the hard-tempered, paternal steel. "You can scarcely realize what a fight it has been for me until you know the life I led out in Arizona, getting strong for you and the store," Jack began. "Strong for me! For the store! Yes, Jack!" There was an emphasis on the subjective personal pronoun--for _him_; for the store! The father's face beamed a serene delight. This Jack accepted as the expression of sympathy and understanding which he had craved. It was to him an inspiration of fellowship that set the well of his inner being in overflow and the force of his personality, which the father had felt uncannily before the mother's picture, became something persuasive in its radiance rather than something held in leash as a threatening and volcanic element. Now he could talk as freely and happily of the desert to his father as to Burleigh and Mathewson. He told of the long rides; of Firio and Wrath of God. He made the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells heard in the silence of the dining-room as it was heard in the silences of the trail. He mentioned how he was afraid to come back after he was strong. "Afraid?" queried his father. "Yes. But I was coming--coming when, at the top of the pass, I saw Little Rivers for the first time." He sketched his meeting with Mary Ewold; the story of the town and the story of Jasper Ewold as he knew it, now glancing at his father, now seeming to see nothing except visualization of the pictures of his story. The father, looking at the table-cloth, at times playing with his coffee-spoon, made no comment. "And that first night I saw that Jasper Ewold had met me somewhere before. But--" he went on after going back to the incident of the villa in his childhood--"that hardly explained. How could he remember the face of a grown man from the face of a boy? Jasper Ewold! Do you recall ever having met him? He must have known my mother. Perhaps he knew you, though why he should not have told me I don't know." "Yes, yes--Jasper Ewold," said the father. "I knew him in his younger days. His was an old family up in Burbridge, the New England town where I came from. Too much college, too much travel, as I remember, characterized Jasper Ewold. No settled point of view; and I judge from what you say that he must have run through his patrimony. One of the ups and downs of the world, Jack. And he never mentioned that he had met me?" "No." "Probably a part of that desert notion of freemasonry in keeping pasts a secret. But why did you stay on after you had recovered from your wound?" he asked penetratingly, though he was looking again at the bottom of his coffee-cup. "For a reason that comes to a man but once in his life!" Jack answered. Had the father looked up--it was a habit of his in listening to any report to lower his eyes, his face a mask--he might have seen Jack's face in the supremacy of emotion, as it was when he had called up to Mary from the canyon and when he had pleaded with her on the pass. But John Wingfield, Sr. could not mistake the message of a voice vibrating with all the force of a being let free living over the scene. With the shadows settling over his eyes, Jack came to her answer and to the finality of her cry: "It's not in the blood!" The only sound was a slight tinkle of a spoon against the coffee-cup. Looking at his father he saw a nervous flutter in his cheeks, his lips hard set, his brow drawn down; and the rigidity of the profile was such that Jack was struck by the shiver of a thought that it must have been like his own as others said it was when he had gripped Pedro Nogales's arm. But this passed quickly, leaving, however, in its trail an expression of shock and displeasure. "So it was the girl, that kept you--you were in love!" John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed, tensely. "Yes, I was--I am! You have it, father, the unchangeable all of it! I face a wall of mystery. 'It's not in the blood!' she said, as if it were some bar sinister. What could she have meant?" In the fever of baffled intensity crying for light and help, he was sharing the secret that had beset him relentlessly and giving his father the supreme confidence of his heart. Leaning across the table he grasped his father's hand, which lay still and unresponsive and singularly cold for a second. Then John Wingfield, Sr. raised his other hand and patted the back of Jack's hesitantly, as if uncertain how to deal with this latest situation that had developed out of his son's old life. Finally he looked up good-temperedly, deprecatingly. "Well, well, Jack, I almost forgot that you are young. It's quite a bad case!" he said. "But what did she mean? Can you guess? I have thought of it so much that it has meant a thousand wild things!" Jack persisted desperately. "Come! come!" the father rallied him. "Time, time!" He gripped the hand that was gripping his and swung it free of the table with a kindly shake. All the effective charm of his personality which he never wasted, the charm that could develop out of the mask to gain an end when the period of listening was over, was in play. "She excited the opposition of the strength in you," he said. "You ask what did she mean? It is hard to tell what a woman means, but I judge that she meant that it was not in her blood to marry a fellow who went about fighting duels and breaking arms. She would like a more peaceful sort; and, yes, anything that came into her mind leaped out and you were mystified by her strange exclamation!" "Perhaps. I suppose that may be it. It was just myself, just my devil!" Jack assented limply. "Time! time! All this will pass." Jack could not answer that commonplace with one of his own, that it would not pass; he could only return the pressure when his father, rising and coming around the table, slipped his arm about the son in a demonstration of affection which was like opening the gate to a new epoch in their relations. "And you would have killed Leddy! You could have broken that Mexican in two! I should like to have seen that! So would the ancestor!" said the father, giving Jack a hug. "Yes, but, father, that was the horror of it!" "Not the power to do it--no! I mean, Jack, that in this world it is well to be strong." "And you think that I am no longer a weakling?" Jack asked strangely; "that I carried out your instructions when you sent me away?" "Oh, Jack, you remember my farewell remark? It was made in irritation and suffering. That hurt me. It hurt my pride and all that my work stands for. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. But if it was a whip, why, then, it served a purpose, as I wanted it to." "Yes, it was a whip!" said Jack, mechanically. "Then all ends well--all quits! And, Jack," he swung Jack, who was unresisting but unresponsive, around facing him, "if you ever have any doubts or any questions to ask bring them to me, won't you?" "Yes." "And, Jack, a hundred a week to-morrow! You're all right, Jack!" And he gave Jack a slap on the back as they left the dining-room. XXIX A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed the streets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made a far different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist of the day of Jack's arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was all blazing gold; Diana's scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandon of her _honi soit qui mal y pense_ chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragut grew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won; General Sherman in his over-brightness, guided by his guardian lady, still gallantly pursued the tone of time in the direction of the old City Hall and Trinity; and the marble façade of the new library seemed no less at home than under an Agean sky. An ecstasy, blinding eyes to blemishes, set critical faculties to rejoicing over perfections. They graciously overlooked the blotch of red brick hiding the body of St. Patrick's on the way up town in gratitude for twin spires against the sky. Enveloping radiance gilded the sharp lines of skyscrapers and swept away the shadows in the chasms between them. It pointed the bows of busy tugs with sprays of diamonds falling on the molten surface of rivers and bays. It called up paeans of childish trebles from tenement alleys; slipped into the sickrooms of private houses, delaying the advent of crape on the door; and played across the rows of beds in the public wards of hospitals in the primal democracy of the gift of ozone to the earth. The milky glass roof of the central court of the Wingfield store acted as a screen to the omnipotent visitor, but he set unfiltered patches of delight in the aisles and on the counters near the walls. Mamie Devore and Burleigh and Peter Mortimer and many other clerks and employees asked if this were like a desert day and Jack said that it was. He longed to be free of all roofs and feel the geniality of the hearth-fire of the planetary system penetrating through his coat, his skin, his flesh, into his very being. Why not close the store and make a holiday for everybody? he asked himself; only to be amazed, on second thought, at such a preposterous suggestion from a hundred-dollar-a-week author of created profits in the business. He was almost on the point of acting on another impulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country in a touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hunger overtook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the same demoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filial relations springing from the night when he had told his desert story over the coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange of confidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked more restlessness. At least, he would fare forth for a while on the broad asphalt trail that begins under the arch of the little park and runs to the entrance of the great park. Even as the desert has its spell of overawing stillness in an uninhabited land, so this trail had its spell of congested human movement in the heart of habitations. A broad, luminous blade lay across the west side of the street and left the other in shade; and all the world that loved sunshine and had no errands on the east side kept to the west side. There was a communism of inspiration abroad. It was a conqueror's triumph just to be alive and feel the pulse-beat of the throng. The very over-developed sensitiveness of city nerves became something to be thankful for in providing the capacity for keener enjoyment as compensation for the capacity for keener pain. Womankind was in spring plumage. The mere consciousness of the value of light to their costumes, no less than the elixir in their nostrils, gave vivacity to their features. As usual, Jack was seeing them only to see Mary. The creation of no _couturier_ could bear rivalry with the garb in which his imagination clothed her. He found himself suddenly engrossed in a particular exhibit of fashion's parade a little distance ahead and going in the same direction as himself, a young woman in a simplicity of gown to which her carriage gave the final touch of art. Her steps had a long-limbed freedom and lightness, with which his own steps ran in a rhythm to the music of some past association. The thrall of a likeness, which more and more possessed him, made him hasten to draw near for a more satisfying glimpse. The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and then there could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relation of the long lashes to the brow. It was the profile whose imprint had become indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock on Galeria. The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from Mary Ewold on the pass became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of May sunshine at seeing and speaking to her again. "Mary! Mary!" he cried. "My, but you've become a grand swell!" he breathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her. "Jack!" There was a nervous twitching of her lips. He saw her eyes at first in a blaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hiding their depths, of the slivers of glass on the old barrier. His smile and hers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trail had met on the Avenue trail. There had not been any Leddy; there had not been any scene on the pass. They were back to the conditions of the protocol he had established when they started out from the porch of the Ewold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land. "And you also have become a grand swell!" she said. "Did you expect that I should be in a gray riding-habit? Certainly I didn't expect to see you in chaps and spurs." It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managed it well. And there they were walking together, noted by passers-by for their youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves. "How long have you been here?" Jack asked. "Two weeks," she answered. Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her! What a maze New York was! What a desert waste of two weeks! "Yes. Our decision to come was rather abrupt," she explained. "A sudden call to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that he could not resist. And how happily he has entered into the spirit of the city again! It has made him young." "And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!" Jack put in, teasingly. "Terrible! Sackcloth and ashes!" "I see you are wearing the sackcloth." She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once in guilt and appreciation. "Another whim of father's." "The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!" "Not a scapegoat--a partisan! He insisted on going to one of the best places. Could I resist? I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared." "The veritable curiosity of a Japanese woman getting her first foreign gown!" "Thank you! That is another excuse." "And it certainly looks very well," Jack declared. "Do you think so?" Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being pleased. "After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine gown?"--and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. "But," she added, severely, "I have only two--just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole orange crop!" Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving, deliver them at her door! "Having succumbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to the orange crop," Mary said; "and yes, because I like beautiful gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I like the desert." And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she had stubbornly refused! The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind, from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after deliberate, critical appraisement, would surely become her, she asked boldly if it were better than the one she wore. "I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of becoming you!" "Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!" she answered, unruffled. He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a jeweler's window. "To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?" she inquired. When they passed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she found a further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddy fancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoat and, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with a momentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger. "Why be on the Avenue and not buy?" he queried, enthusing with a new idea. Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of Jim's personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children, a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude swept the breadth of the Avenue. "Shall we lunch--yes, and in the Best Swell Place?" he asked, as if it were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally. "Yes, the Best Swell Place--let's! Who isn't entitled to the Best Swell Place occasionally?" After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from the broad range of a bill of fare. A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the barrier for an impetuous leap across. "I wrote you stacks of letters," he said, "and you never sent me one little line; not even 'Yours received and contents noted!'" In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of the dining-room in somebody else's party nodding to him as to an acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring. "A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to the author!" He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony. Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure of it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation had risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of better conduct. They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people passing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he threatened an invasion. While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of news. How high were Jack's hedges? How were the Doge's date-trees? How was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of the swiftly-passing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve. "I was to meet father at a bookstore at three," she said, finally, as she rose. "Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery," said Jack. "He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books--still more books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keep on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze of finance?" "I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at least, Peter Mortimer!" They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word and she would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily she might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will! "But I must say howdy do to the Doge!" he urged. "I should like to see him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannot miss that!" "It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him. A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack paused at the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an old octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of withdrawals. "No, sir! No more, you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuous ambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as high as the Roman Pantheon!" The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from danger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of that clerk. "I'll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs of the popular novels fresh from the press!" he said. Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stock still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glance hovered back and forth between Jack's face and Mary's, and then met Jack's look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks of New York. "Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days! The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is only the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular in their day--Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And not one Velasquez"--evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings after his shock at seeing Jack--"no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! I go home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up! Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homer and our exile Whistler, who annexed Japan, and our Sargent, born in Florence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, my broad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter's umbrella, to that tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the Grand Canyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise." The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath. He was ready to yield the floor to Jack. "I kissed my hand to Diana for you!" said Jack. "And what do you think? The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and small fluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note." "Did you open that note?" asked the Doge in haughty suspicion. "Naturally." "Wasn't it marked personal for me?"--this in fine simulation of indignation. "Without address!" "I am chagrined and surprised at Diana," said the Doge ruefully. "It's the effect of city association. As a matter of course, she ought to have given it to Mercury, or at least to one of the Centaurs, considering all the horseshows that have been held under her skipping toes! Well, what did she say? Being a woman of action she was brief. What did she say?" "It was in the nature of a general personal complaint. Her costume is in need of repair; it is flaking disgracefully. She said that if you had not forsaken your love of the plastic for love of the graphic arts you would long ago have stolen a little gold off the Eternal Painter's palette, just to clothe her decently for the sake of her own self-respect--the town having set her so high that its sense of propriety was quite safe." "I stand convicted of neglect," said the Doge, coming down to the floor of the store. "I will shoot her a bundle of gold leaf from the top of the pass on a ray of evening sunshine." There, he gave Jack a pat on the shoulder; a hasty, playful, almost affectionate demonstration, and broke off with a shout of: "Persiflage, sir, persiflage!" "It is manna to me!" declared Jack, in the fulness and sweetness of the sensation of the atmosphere of Little Rivers reproduced in New York. "And not a Velasquez in the Metropolitan!" mused the Doge, bustling along the aisle hurriedly. "Well, Mary, we have errands to do. There is no time to spare." They were at the door, Jack in wistful insistence, hungry for their companionship, and the Doge and Mary in common hesitancy for a phrase before parting from him. He was ahead of the phrase. "But there is a Velasquez, one of the greatest of Velasquezes, just a few steps from here! It would take only a minute to see it." "A Velasquez a few steps from here!" cried the Doge. "Where? Be exact, before I let my hopes rise too high." "The subject is an ancestor of mine. My father has it." Jack had looked in the direction of the Wingfield house on the Madison Avenue corner as he spoke, and the Doge had followed his glance. The eagerness passed from the Doge's face, but not its intensity. That was transmuted into something staring and hard. "A very great Velasquez!" Jack repeated. "My _amour propre_!" the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in the form of words come unwittingly from his lips. He tried to retrieve his exclamation in an effort at the forensic: "The _amour propre_ of any American is hurt by the thought that he must go to a private gallery to see a Velasquez in the greatest city of the land!" But it was a lame explanation. Clearly, some old antipathy had been aroused in Jasper Ewold; and it made him hesitate to enter the big red brick house on the corner. "And we have a wonderful Sargent, too, a Sargent of my mother!" Jack proceeded. "Yes, yes!" said the Doge, and eagerness returned; a strange, moving eagerness that seemed to come from the same depths as the exclamation that had arrested his acceptance of the invitation at the outset. It held the monosyllables like drops of water trembling before they fell. "I should like you to see them both," said Jack. "Yes," said the Doge, the word an echo rather than consent. "There is no one at home at this hour; you will have all the time you can spare for the pictures." In the ascendency of his ardor to retain the joy of their company and in the perplexity of mystery injected afresh into his relations with Mary, Jack was hardly conscious that his urging was only another way of saying that his father was absent. And Mary had not thrown her influence either for or against going. She was watching her father, curiously and penetratingly, as if trying to understand the source of the emotion that he was seeking to control. "Why, in that case," exclaimed the Doge, "why, you see," he went on to explain, "we desert folk, though we are used to galleries, are a little diffident about meeting people who live in big mansions. I mean, people who have not had the desert training that you have had, Sir Chaps. If it is only a matter of looking at a picture without any social responsibilities, and that picture a Velasquez, why, we must take the time, mustn't we, Mary?" "Yes," Mary assented. With Mary on one side of him and Jack on the other, the Doge was walking heavily and slowly. "At what period of Velasquez's career?" he asked, vacantly. "When he was young and the subject was middle-aged, a Northerner, with fair hair and lean muscles under a skin bronzed by the tropics, and the unquenchable fire of youth in his eyes." "That ought to be a good Velasquez," said the Doge. At the bottom step of the flight up to the entrance to the house he hesitated. He appeared to be very old and very tired. His face had gone quite pale. The lids hung heavily over his eyes. Jack dropped back in alarm to assist him; but his color quickly returned and the old challenge was in his glance as it met Jack's. "Now for your Velasquez!" he exclaimed, with calm vigor. Once in the hall, Jack stood to one side of the door of the drawing-room to let the Doge enter first. As the old man crossed the threshold his hands were clasped behind him; his shoulders had fallen together, not in weariness now, but in a kind of dazed, studious expectancy; and he faced the "Portrait of a Lady." "This is the Sargent," he said slowly, his lips barely opening in mechanical and absent comment. "A good Sargent!" He was as still as the picture in his bowed and earnest gaze into her eyes, except for an occasional nervous movement of the fingers. All the surroundings seemed to melt into a neutral background for the two; there was nothing else in the room but the scholar in his age and the "Portrait of a Lady" in her youth. Jack saw the Doge's face, its many lines expressive as through a mist of time, its hills and valleys in the sun and the shadow of emotions as variable as the mother's in life, speaking personal resentment and wrong, admiration and tenderness, grievous inquiry and philosophy, while the only answer was the radiant, "I give! I give!" Finally, the Doge tightened the clasp of his hands, with a quiver of his frame, as he turned toward Jack. "Yes, a really great Sargent--a Sargent of supreme inspiration!" he said. "Now for your Velasquez!" Before the portrait of the first John Wingfield, Jasper Ewold's head and shoulders recovered their sturdiness of outline and his features lighted with the veritable touch of the brush of genius itself. He was the connoisseur who understands, whose joy of possession is in the very tingling depths of born instinct, rich with training and ripened by time. It was superior to any bought title of ownership. In the presence of a supreme standard, every shade of discriminative criticism and appraisal became threads woven into a fabric of rapture. "Mary," he said, his voice having the mellowness of age in its deep appreciation, "Mary, wherever you saw this--skied or put in a corner among a thousand other pictures, in a warehouse, a Quaker meetinghouse, anywhere, whatever its surroundings--should you feel its compelling power? Should you pause, incapable of analysis, in a spell of tribute?" "Yes, I don't think I am quite so insensible as not to realize the greatness of this portrait, or that of the Sargent, either," she answered. "Good! I am glad, Mary, very glad. You do me credit!" Now he turned from the artist to the subject. He divined the kind of man the first John Wingfield was; divined it almost as written in the chronicle which Jack kept in his room in hallowed fraternity. Only he bore hard on the unremitting, callous, impulsive aggressiveness of a fierce past age, with its survival of the fittest swordsmen and buccaneers, which had no heroes for him except the painters, poets, and thinkers it gave to posterity. "Fire-eating old devil! And the best thing he ever did, the best luck he ever had, was attracting the attention of a young artist. It's immortality just to be painted by Velasquez; the only immortality many a famous man of the time will ever know!" He looked away from the picture to Jack's face keenly and back at the picture and back at Jack and back at the picture once more. "Yes, yes!" he mused, corroboratively; and Jack realized that at the same time Mary had been making the same comparison. "Very like!" she said, with that impersonal exactness which to him was always the most exasperating of her phases. Then the Doge returned to the Sargent. He was standing nearer the picture, but in the same position as before, while Jack and Mary waited silently on his pleasure; and all three were as motionless as the furniture, had it not been for the nervous twitching of the Doge's fingers. He seemed unconscious of the passing of time; a man in a maze of absorption with his thoughts. Jack was strangely affected. His brain was marking time at the double-quick of fruitless energy. He felt the atmosphere of the room surcharged with the hostility of the unknown. He was gathering a multitude of impressions which only contributed more chaos to chaos. His sensibilities abnormally alive to every sound, he heard the outside door opened with a latch-key; he heard steps in the hall, and saw his father's figure in the doorway of the drawing-room. John Wingfield, Sr. appeared with a smile that was gone in a flash. His face went stark and gray as stone under a frown from the Doge to Jack; and with an exclamation of the half-articulate "Oh!" of confusion, he withdrew. Jack looked around to see the Doge half turned in the direction of the door, gripping the back of a chair to steady himself, while Mary was regarding this sudden change in him in answer to the stricken change in the intruder with some of Jack's own paralysis of wonder. The Doge was the first to speak. He fairly rocked the chair as he jerked his hand free of its support, while he shook with a palsy which was not that of fear, for there was raging color in his cheeks. The physical power of his great figure was revealed. For the first time Jack was able to think of him as capable of towering militancy. His anger gradually yielded to the pressure of will and the situation. At length he said faintly, with a kind of abyssmal courtesy: "Thank you, Sir Chaps! Now I shall not go back to the desert without having seen a Velasquez. Thank you! And we must be going." Jack had an impulse, worthy of the tempestuous buccaneer of the picture, to call to his father to come down; and then to bar the front door until his burning questions were heard. The still light in Mary's eyes would have checked him, if not his own proper second thought and the fear of precipitating an ungovernable crisis. There had been shadows, real shadows, he was thinking wildly; they were not born of desert imaginings; and out of the quandary of his anguish came only the desire not to part from the Doge and Mary in this fashion! No, not until in some way equilibrium of mind was restored. Though he knew that they did not expect or want his company, he went out into the street with them. He would go as far as their hotel, he remarked, in the bravery of simulated ease. The three were walking in the same relative positions that they had before, with the Doge's bulk hiding Mary from Jack's sight. The Doge set a rapid pace, as if under the impetus of a desire to escape from the neighborhood of the Wingfield house. "Well, Sir Chaps," he said, after a while, "it will be a long time before the provincials come to New York again. Why, in this New York you can spend a patrimony in two weeks"--this with an affected amusement at his own extravagance--"and I've pretty nearly done it. So we fly from temptation. Yes, Mary, we will take the morning train." "The morning train!" Mary exclaimed; and her surprise left no doubt that her father's decision was new to her. Was it due to an exchange of glances between a stark face and a face crimson with indignation which Jack had already connected with the working out of his own destiny? "Yes, that is better than spending our orange crop again!" she hastened to add, with reassuring humor. "I'm fairly homesick for our oasis." "We've had our fill of the big city," said the Doge, feelingly, "and we are away to our little city of peace where we turned our pasts under with the first furrows in the virgin soil." Then silence. The truce of nonsense was dead. Persiflage was dead. Jack was as a mute stranger keeping at their side unasked, while the only glimpse he had of Mary was the edge of her hat and her fingertips on her father's sleeve. Silence, which he felt was as hard for them as for him, lasted until they were at the entrance to the quiet little hotel on a cross-town street where the Ewolds were staying; and having the first glimpse of Mary's eyes since they had started, he found nothing fathomable in them except unmistakable relief that the walk was over. "Thank you for showing me the Velasquez," said the Doge. "Thank you, Jack," Mary added. Both spoke in a manner that signaled to him the end of all things, but an end which he could not accept. "I--I--oh, there are a thousand questions I--" he broke out, desperately. The muscles of his face tightened. Unconsciously he had leaned forward toward the Doge in his intensity, and his attitude had become that of the Wingfield of the portrait. A lower note of command ran through the misery of his tone. Jasper Ewold stared at him in a second of scrutiny, at once burningly analytic and reflective. Then he flushed as he had at sight of the figure in the drawing-room doorway. His look plainly said: "How much longer do you mean to harass me?" as if Jack's features were now no less the image of a hard and bitter memory than those of John Wingfield, Sr. Jack drew back hurt and dumb, in face of this anger turned on himself. At length, the Doge mustered his rallying smile, which was that of a man who carries into his declining years a burden of disappointments which he fears may, in his bad moments, get the better of his personal system of philosophy. "Come, Mary!" he said, drawing his arm through hers. He became, in an evident effort, a grand, old-fashioned gentleman, making a bow of farewell. "Come, Mary, it's an early train and we have our packing yet to do." This time it was, indeed, dismissal; such a dismissal with polite urgency as a venerable cabinet minister might give an importunate caller who is slow to go. He and Mary started into the hotel. But he halted in the doorway to say over his shoulder, with something of his old-time cheer, which had the same element of pity as his leave-taking on the trail outside of Little Rivers: "Luck, Sir Chaps!" "Luck!" Mary called in the same strained tone that she had called to Jack when he went over the pass on his way to New York, the tone that was like the click of a key in the lock of a gate. XXX WITH THE PHANTOMS As Jack left the hotel entrance he was walking in the treadmill mechanics of a prisoner pacing a cell, without note of his surroundings, except of dim, moving figures with which he must avoid collision. The phantoms of his boyhood, bulky and stiflingly near, had a monstrous reality, yet the ghostly intangibility that mocked his sword-thrusts of tortured inquiry. At length his distraction centered on the fact that he and his father were to dine alone that evening. They dined alone regularly every Wednesday, when Jack made a report of his progress and received a lesson in business. It was at the last council of this kind that John Wingfield, Sr. had bidden his son to bring all questions and doubts to him. Now Jack hailed the weekly function as having all the promise of relief of a surgeon's knife. Fully and candidly he would unburden himself of every question beating in his brain and every doubt assailing his spirit. By the time that he was mounting the steps of the house his growing impatience could no longer bear even the delay of waiting on dinner. When he entered the hall he was the driven creature of an impelling desire that must be satisfied immediately. "Will you ask my father if he will see me at once?" he said to the butler. "Mr. Wingfield left word that he had to go into the country for the night," answered the butler. "I am sorry, sir," he added confusedly, in view of the blank disappointment with which the information was received. In dreary state Jack dined by himself in the big dining-room, leaving the food almost untouched. At intervals he was roused to a sense of his presence at table by the servant's question if he should bring another course. Without waiting for the last one, he went downstairs to the drawing-room, and standing near the "Portrait of a Lady," again poured out his questions, receiving the old answer of "I give! I give!" which meant, he knew, that she had given all of herself to him. Saying after saying of hers raced through his mind without throwing light on the mystery, which had the uncanniness of a conspiracy against him. And after his mother, Mary had influenced him more than any other person. She had brought life to the seeds which his mother had planted in his nature. That new life could not die, but without her it could not flourish. Her cry of "It's not in the blood!" again came echoing to his ears. What had she meant? The question sent him to the Ewolds' hotel; it sent this note up to her room: "MARY: "In behalf of old desert comradeship, if I were in trouble wouldn't you help me all you could? If I were in darkness and you could give me light, would you refuse? Won't you see me for a few moments, if I promise to keep to my side of the barrier which you have raised between us? I will wait here in the lobby a long time, hoping that you will. "JACK." "All the light I have to give. I also am in darkness," came the answer in a nervous, impulsive hand across a sheet of paper; and soon Mary herself appeared from the elevator, not in the fashion of the Avenue, but in simple gray coat and skirt, such as she wore at home. She greeted him in a startled, half-fearful manner, as if her presence were due to the impulsion of duty rather than choice. "Shall we walk?" she asked, turning toward the door in the welcome of movement as a steadying influence in her evident emotion. There they were in the old rhythm of step of Little Rivers companionship on a cross-town street. He saw that the costly hat that he had selected for her in the display of a shop-window after all was not the equal of the plain model with a fetching turn to the brim and a single militant feather, which she wore that evening. The light feather boa around her neck on account of the cool night air seemed particularly becoming. He was near, very near, her, so near that their elbows touched; but the nearness was like that of a picture out of a frame which has come to life and may step back into cold canvas at any moment. Oh, it was hard, in the might of his love for her, not to forget everything else and cry out another declaration, as he had from the canyon! But her face was very still. She was waiting for him to begin, while her fingers were playing nervously with the tip of her boa. "I must be frank, very frank," he said. "Yes, Jack, or why speak at all?" "From the night of my arrival in Little Rivers, when the Doge at once recognized who I was without telling me, I saw that, under his politeness and his kindness, he was hostile to my presence in Little Rivers." "Yes, I think that in a way he was," she answered. "I was conscious that something out of the past was between him and me, and that it included you in a subtle influence that nothing could change. And this afternoon, while you were at the house and my father came to the drawing-room door, I could not help noticing how the Doge was overcome. You noticed it, too?" "Yes, I never saw my father in such anger before. It seemed to me that he could have struck down that man in the doorway!" There was a perceptible shudder, but she did not look up, her glance remaining level with the flags. "And on the pass you said, 'It's not in the blood!'" he continued. "Yes, almost in terror you said it, as if it spelled an impassable gulf between us. Why? why? Mary, haven't I a right to know?" As he broke off passionately with this appeal, which was as the focus of all the fears that had tormented him, they were immediately under the light of a street lamp. She turned her head toward him resolutely, in the mustering of her forces for an ordeal. Her face was pale, but there was an effort at the old smile of comradeship. "Yes, as I said, the little light that I have is yours, Jack," she began. "But there is not much. It is, perhaps, more what I feel than what I know that has influenced me. All that my father has ever said about you and your father and your relations to us was the night after I returned from the pass ahead of you, when you had descended into the canyon to frighten me with the risk you were taking." "I did not mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followed an impulse." "Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Father and I have been so much together--indeed, we have never been apart--that there is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There is something akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. I think that he understood what had taken place between us on the pass; that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It was then that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you and your father--you still wish to hear?" "Yes!" "And you will listen in silence?" "Yes!" "I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I am giving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, my feelings." "No, I will not argue." Their tones were so low that a passer-by would have hardly been conscious that they were talking; but had the passer-by caught the pitch he might have hazarded many guesses, every one serious. "Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the image of your father--a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and the chin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro Nogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the pass and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said, victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant and inextinguishable in your veins." "I--" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue. "Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in the sheer joy of the exercise of your strength. This had been your father's story in everything, even in his marriage." She paused. "There is nothing more? No further light on his old relations with my father and mother?" he asked. "Only a single exclamation, 'It's not in the blood for you to believe in Jack Wingfield, Mary!' And after that he turned silent and moody. I pressed him for reasons. He answered that he had told me enough. I had to live my own life; the rest I must decide for myself. I knew that I was hurting him sorely. I was striking home into that past about which he would never speak, though I know it still causes him many days of suffering." "But on the desert there is no past!" Jack exclaimed. "Yes, there is, Jack. There is your own heart. On the desert your past is not shared with others. But to-night, after I received your note, I did try, for the second time in my life, to share father's. I told him your request; I spoke of the scene in your drawing-room; I asked him what it meant. He answered that you must learn from one nearer you than he was, and that he never wanted to think of that scene again." It was she who had chosen the direction at the street corners. They were returning now toward the hotel. The fingers which had been playing with the boa had crumpled the end of it into a ball, which they were gripping so tightly that the knuckles were little white spots set in a blood-red background. She was suffering, but determined to leave nothing unsaid. "Jack, when I said 'It's not in the blood' I was more than repeating my father's words. They expressed a truth for me. I meant not only rebellion against what was in you, but against the thing that was in me. Why, Jack, I do not even remember my own mother! I have only heard father speak of her sadly when I was much younger. Of late years he has not mentioned her. He and the desert and the garden are all I have and all I know; and probably, yes--probably I'm a strange sort of being. But what I am, I am; and to that I will be true. Father went to the desert to save my life; and broken-hearted, old, he is greater to me than the sum of any worldly success. And, Jack, you forget--riding over the pass so grandly with your impulses, as if to want a thing is to get it--you--but we have had good times together; and, as I said, you belong on one side of the pass and I on the other. This and much else, which one cannot see or define, is between us. From the day you came, some forbidding influence seemed at work in my father's life and mine; and when you had gone another man, with your features and your smile, came to Little Rivers; one that I understand even less than you!" Jack recalled the references to the new rancher by Bob Worther on the day of his departure for the East and, later, in Jim Galway's letter. But he did not speak. Something more compelling than his promise was keeping him silent: her own apprehension, with its story of phantoms of her own. "And yesterday I saw your father's face," she went on, "as it appeared in the doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with fear, and how like yours it was--but more like John Prather's. And the high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns became real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth, free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in the blood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could be in you!" To the end, under the dominance of her will, she had not faltered; and with the end she looked up with a faint smile of stoicism and an invincible flame in her eyes. Anything that he might be able to say would be as flashing a blade in and out of a blaze. She had become superior to the resources of barrier or armor, confident of a self whose richness he realized anew. He saw and felt the tempered fineness of her as something that would mind neither siege nor prayer. "I am not afraid," she said, "and I know that you are not. It is all right!" Then she added, with a desperate coolness, but still clasping the boa rigidly: "The hotel is only a block away, and to-morrow you will be back in the store and I shall soon be on my side of the pass." This was her right word for a situation when his temples were throbbing, harking back, with time's reversal of conditions, to a situation after the duel in the _arroyo_ was over and he had used the right word when her temples were throbbing and her hands splashed. If retribution were her object, she had repaid in nerve-twitch of torture for nerve-twitch of torture. The picture that had been alive and out of its frame was back on cold canvas. Even the girl he had known across the barrier, even the girl in armor, seemed more kindly. But one can talk, even to a picture in a frame; at least, Jack could, with wistful persistence. "You don't mind if I tell you again--if I speak my one continuous thought aloud again?" he asked. "Mary, I love you! I love you in such a way that I"--with a faint bravery of humor as he saw danger signals--"I would build mud-houses all day for you to knock to pieces!" "Foolish business, Jack!" she answered. "Or drag a plow." "Very hard work!" "Or set out to tunnel a mountain single-handed, with hammer and chisel." "I think you would find it dreadfully monotonous at the end of the first week." He had spoken his extravagances without winning a glance from her. She had answered with a precision that was more trying than silence. "_I_ shouldn't find it so if you were in the neighborhood to welcome me when I knocked off for the day," he declared. "You see, I can't help it. I can't help what is in me, just as surely as the breath of life is in me." "Jack!" she flashed back, with arresting sharpness, but without looking around, while her step quickened perceptibly, "suppose I say that I am sorry and I, too, cannot help it; that I, too, have temperament, as well as you;" her tone was almost harsh; "that even you cannot have everything you command; that for you to want a thing does not mean that I want it; that I cannot help the fact that I do not--" With a quick interruption he stayed the end of the sentence, as if it were a descending blade. "Don't say that!" he implored. "It is too much like taking a vow that might make you fearfully stubborn in order to live up to it. Perhaps the thing will come some day. It's wonderful how such a thing does come. You see, I speak from experience," he went on, in wan insistence, with the entrance to the hotel in sight. "Why, it is there before you realize it, like the morning sunshine in a room while you are yet asleep. And you open your eyes and there is the joyous wonder, settling itself all through you and making itself at home forever. You know for the first time that you are alive. You know for the first time that you were born into this world merely because one other person was born into it." "Very well said," she conceded, in hasty approval, without vouchsafing him a glance. "I begin to think you get more inspiration for compliments on this side of the pass than on the other,"--and they were at the hotel door. Precipitately she hastened through it, as if with her last display of strength after the exhaustion of that walk. XXXI PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT When he returned to the house, Jack found a letter that had come in the late mail from Jim Galway: "First off, that story you sent for Belvy," Jim wrote. "We've heard it read and reread, and the more it's worn with reading the fresher it gets in our minds. As I size up the effect on the population, we folks in the forties and fifties got more fun out of it than anybody except the folks in the seventies and the five-to-twelve-year-olds. Some of the thirteen and fourteen-year-olds were inclined to think at first that it wasn't quite grown up enough for them, until they saw what fashionable literature it was becoming. Then their dignified maturity limbered up a little. Jack, it certainly did us a world of good. It seemed as if you were back home again." "Back home again!" Jack repeated, joyously; and then shook his head at himself in solemn warning. "And those of us that don't take our meat without salt sort of needed cheering up," Jim went on. "Only a few days after I wrote you, the Doge and Mary suddenly started for New York. Maybe he has looked you up." (The "maybe" followed an "of course," which had been scratched through.) "And maybe if he has you know more about what is going on here than we do. We practically don't know anything; but I've sure got a feeling of that uncertainty in the atmosphere that I used to have before a cyclone when I lived in Kansas. This Prather, that so many thought at first looked like you, has also gone to New York. "He left only two days ago. Maybe you will run across him. I don't know, but it seems to me he's gone to get the powder for some kind of a blow-up here. Jack, you know what would happen if we lost our water rights and you know what I wrote you in my last letter. Leddy and Ropey Smith are hanging around all the time, and since the Doge went a whole lot of fellows that don't belong to the honey-bee class have been turning up and putting up their tents out on the outskirts, like they expected something to happen. If things get worse and I've got something to go on and we need you, I'm going to telegraph just as I said I would; because, Jack, though you're worth a lot of millions, someway we feel you're one of us. "Very truly yours for Little Rivers, "JAMES R. GALWAY. "P.S.--Belvy said to put in P.S. because P.S.'s are always the most important part of a letter. She wants to know if you won't write another story." "I will!" said Jack. "I will, immediately!" He made it a long story. He took a deal of pains with it in the very relief of something to do when sleep was impossible and he must count the moments in wretched impatience until his interview with the one person who could answer his questions. As he went down town in the morning the very freshness of the air inspired him with the hope that he should come out of his father's office with every phantom reduced to a figment of imagination springing from the abnormality of his life-story; with a message that should allay Mary's fears and soften her harshness toward him; with the certainty that the next time he and his father sat together at dinner it would be in a permanent understanding, craved of affection. Mary might come to New York; the Doge might spend his declining years in leisurely patronage of bookshops and galleries; and he would learn how to run the business, though his head split, as became a simple, normal son. These eddying thoughts on the surface of his mind, however, could not free him of a consciousness of a deep, unsounded current that seemed to be the irresistible, moving power of Mary's future, the store's, his fathers, Jasper Ewold's and his own. With it he was going into a gorge, over a cataract, or out into pleasant valleys, he knew not which. He knew nothing except that there was no stopping the flood of the current which had its source in streams already flowing before he was born. When the last question had been asked his future would be clear. Relief was ahead, and after relief would come the end of introspection and the beginning of his real career. But another question was waiting for him in the store. It was walking the streets of his father's city in the freedom of a spectator who comes to observe and not to buy. Crossing the first floor as he came to the court, Jack saw, with sudden distinctness among the many faces coming and going, a profile which, in its first association, developed on his vision as that of his own when he shaved in front of the ear in the morning. He had only a glimpse before it was turned away and its owner, a young man in a quiet gray suit, started up the stairs. Jack studied the young man's back half amusedly to see if this, too, were like his own, and laughed at himself because he was sure that he would not know his own back if it were preceding him in a promenade up the Avenue. In peculiar suspense he was hoping that the young man would pause and look around, as his father always did and shoppers often did, in a survey of the busy, moving picture of the whole floor. But the young man went on to the top of the flight. There he proceeded along the railing of the court. His profile was again in view under a strong light, and Jack realized that his first recognition of a resemblance was the recognition of an indisputable fact. "Have I a double out West and another in New York?" he thought. "It gives a man a kind of secondhand feeling!" Then he recalled Jim's letter saying that John Prather had gone to New York. Was this John Prather? He had no doubt that it was when the object of his scrutiny, with full face in view, stopped and leaned over the balcony just above the diamond counter. There was a mole patch on the cheek such as Jack remembered that the accounts of John Prather had mentioned. "I am as much fussed as the giant was at the sight of yellow!" Jack mused. But for the mole patch the features were his own, as he knew them, though no one not given to more frequent personal councils with mirrors than Señor Don't Care of desert trails knows quite the lights and shadows of his own countenance, which give it its character even more than does its form. John Prather was regarding the jewelry display, where the diamonds were scintillating under the light from the milk glass roof, with a smile of amused contemplation. His expression was unpleasant to Jack. It had a quality of satire and of covetousness as its owner leaned farther over the rail and rubbed the palms of his hands together as gleefully as if the diamonds were about to fly into his pockets by enchantment. All the time Jack had stood motionless in fixed and amazed observation. He wondered that his stare had not drawn the other's attention. But John Prather seemed too preoccupied with the dazzle of wealth to be susceptible to any telepathic influence. "Great heavens! I am gaping at him as if he were climbing hand over hand up the face of a sky-scraper!" Jack thought. It was time something happened. Why should he get so wrought up over the fact that another man looked like him? "I'll get acquainted!" he declared, shaking himself free of his antipathy. "We are both from Little Rivers and that's a ready excuse for introducing myself." As he started across the floor toward the stairs, Prather straightened from his leaning posture. For an instant his glance seemed to rest on Jack. Indeed, eye met eye for a flash; and then Prather moved away. His decision to go might easily have been the electric result of Jack's own decision to join him. Jack ran up the stairs. At the head of the flight he saw, at half the distance across the floor, Prather's back entering an elevator on the down trip. He hurried forward, his desire to meet and speak with the man whose influence Jim Galway and Mary feared now overwhelming. "Hello!" Jack sang out; and this to Prather's face after he had turned around in the elevator. In the second while the elevator man was swinging to the door, Jack and Prather were fairly looking at each other. Prather had seen that Jack wanted to speak to him, even if he had not heard the call. His answer was a smile of mixed recognition and satire. He made a gesture of appreciative understanding of the distinction in their likeness by touching the mole on his cheek with his finger, which was Jack's last glimpse of him before he was shot down into the lower regions of the store. "He did it neatly!" Jack gasped, with a sense of defeat and chagrin. "And it is plain that he does not care to get acquainted. Perhaps he takes it for granted that I am not friendly and foresaw that I would ask him a lot of questions about Little Rivers that he would not care to answer." At all events, the only way to accept the situation was lightly, his reason insisted. "Having heard about the likeness, possibly he came to the store to have a look at me, and after seeing me felt that he had been libeled!" But his feelings refused to follow his reason in an amused view. "I do not like John Prather!" he concluded, as he took the next elevator to the top floor. "Yes, I liked Pete Leddy better at our first meeting. I had rather a man would swear at me than smile in that fashion. It is much more simple." The incident had had such a besetting and disagreeable effect that Jack would have found it difficult to rid his mind of it if he had not had a more centering and pressing object in prospect in the citadel of the push-buttons behind the glass marked "Private." John Wingfield, Sr. looked up from his desk in covert watchfulness to detect his son's mood, and he was conscious of a quality of manner that recalled the returning exile's entry into the same room upon his arrival from the West. "Well, Jack," the father said, with marked cheeriness, "I hear you have been taking a holiday. It's all right, and you will find motoring beats pony riding." "In some ways," Jack answered; and then he came a step nearer, his hand resting on the edge of the desk, as he looked into his father's eyes with glowing candor. John Wingfield, Sr.'s eyes shifted to the pushbuttons and later to a paper on the desk, with which his fingers played gently. He realized instantly that something unusual was on Jack's mind. "Father," Jack went on, "I want a long talk quite alone with you. When it is over I feel that we shall both know each other better; we can work together in a fuller understanding." "Yes, Jack," answered the father, cautiously feeling his way with a swift upward glance, which fell again to the paper. "Well, what is it now? Come on!" "There are a lot of questions I want to ask--family questions." "Family questions?" The fingers paused in playing with the paper for an instant and went on playing again. The soft hands were as white as the paper. "Family questions, eh? Well, there isn't much to our family except you and I and that old ancestor--and a long talk, you say?" "Yes. I thought that probably this would be a good time; you could give me an hour now. It might not take that long." Jack's voice was even and engaging and respectful. But it seemed to fill the room with many echoing whispers. "I have a very busy day before me," the father said, still without looking up. He was talking to a little pad at one corner of the green blotter which had a list of his appointments. "Your questions are not so imperative that they cannot wait?" "Then shall it be at dinner?" Jack asked. "At dinner? No. I have an engagement for dinner." "Shall you be home early? Shall I wait up for you?" Jack persisted. "Yes, that's it! Say at nine. I'll make a point of it--in the library at nine!" John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand slipped away from the papers and patted the back of Jack's hand. "And come on with your questions. I will answer every one that I can." He was looking up at Jack now, smilingly and attractively in his frankness. "Every one that I can, from the first John Wingfield right down to the present!" But the hand that lay on Jack's was cold and its movement nervous and spasmodic. "Thank you, father. I knew you would. I haven't forgotten your wish that I should bring all my doubts and questions to you," said Jack, happily. And in an impulse which had the devoutness of a rising hope he took that cold, soft hand in both of his and gave it a shake; and the feel of the son's grip, firm and warm, remained with John Wingfield, Sr. while he stared at the door through which Jack had passed out. When he had pulled himself together he asked Mortimer to connect him with Dr. Bennington. "Doctor, I want a little talk with you to-night before nine," he said. "Could you dine with me--not at the house--say at the club? Yes--excellent--and make it at seven. Yes. Good-by!" XXXII A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY A library atmosphere was missing from the Wingfield library, with its heavy panelling and rows of red and blue morocco backs. Rather the suggestion was of a bastion of privacy, where a man of action might make his plans or take counsel at leisure amid rich and mellow surroundings. Here, John Wingfield, Sr. had gained points through post-prandial geniality which he could never have won in the presence of the battery of push-buttons; here, his most successful conceptions had come to him; here, he had known the greatest moments of his life. He was right in saying that he loved his library; but he hardly loved it for its books. When he returned to the house shortly before nine from his session with Dr. Bennington, it was with the knowledge that another great moment was in prospect. He took a few turns up and down the room before he rang for the butler to tell Jack that he had come in. Then he placed a chair near the desk, where its occupant would sit facing him. After he sat down he moved the desk lamp, which was the only light in the room, so that its rays fell on the back of the chair and left his own face in shadow--a precaution which he had taken on many other occasions in adroitness of stage management. He drew from the humidor drawer of his desk a box of the long cigars with blunt ends which need no encircling gilt band in praise of their quality. As Jack entered, the father welcomed him with a warm, paternal smile. And be it remembered that John Wingfield, Sr. could smile most pleasantly, and he knew the value of his smile. Jack answered the smile with one of his own, a little wan, a little subdued, yet enlivening under the glow of his father's evident happiness at seeing him. The father, who had transgressed the rules of longevity by taking a second cigar after dinner, now pushed the box across the desk to his son. Jack said that he would "roll one"; he did not care to smoke much. He produced a small package of flake tobacco and a packet of rice paper and with a deftness that was like sleight of hand made a cigarette without spilling a single flake. He had not always chosen the "makings" in place of private stock Havanas, but it seemed to suit his mood to-night. "That is one of the things you learned in the West," the father observed affably, to break the ice. "I can do them with one hand," Jack answered. "But you are likely to have an overflow--which is all right when you have the whole desert for the litter. Besides, in a library it would have the effect of gallery play, I fear." He was seated in a way that revealed all the supple lines of his figure. However relaxed his attitude before his father, it was always suggestive of latent strength, appealing at once to paternal pride and paternal uncertainty as to what course the strength would take. His face under the light of the lamp was boyish and singularly without trace of guile. The father struck a match and held it to light his son's cigarette; another habit of his which he had found flattering to men who were brought into the library for conference. Jack took a puff slowly and, after a time, another puff, and then dropped the cigarette on the ash receiver as much as to say that he had smoked enough. Something told John Wingfield, Sr. that this was to be a long interview and in no way hurried, as he saw the smile dying on the son's lips and misery coming into the son's eyes. "These last two days have been pretty poignant for me," Jack began, in a simple, outright fashion; "and only half an hour ago I got this. It was hard to resist taking the first train West." He drew a telegram from his pocket and handed it to his father. "We want you and though we don't suppose you can come, we simply had to let you know. "JAMES R. GALWAY." "It is Greek to me," said the father. "From your Little Rivers friends, I judge." "Yes. I suppose that we may as well begin with it, as it drove everything else out of my mind for the moment." John Wingfield, Sr. swung around in his chair, with his face in the shadow. His attitude was that of a companionable listener who is prepared for any kind of news. "As you will, Jack," he said. "Everything that pertains to you is my interest. Go ahead in your own way." "It concerns John Prather. I don't know that I have ever told you about him in my talks of Little Rivers." "John Prather?" The father reflectively sounded the name, the while he studied the spiral of smoke rising from his cigar. "No, I don't think you have mentioned him." It was Jack's purpose to take his father entirely into his confidence; to reveal his own mind so that there should be nothing of its perplexities which his father did not understand. He might not choose a logical sequence of thought or event, but in the end nothing should be left untold. Indeed, he had not studied how to begin his inquiries. That he had left to take care of itself. His chief solicitude was to keep his mind open and free of bitterness whatever transpired, and it was evident that he was under a great strain. He told of the coming of John Prather to Little Rivers while he was absent; of the mention of the likeness by his fellow-ranchers; and of the fears entertained by Jim Galway and Mary. When he came to the scene in the store that afternoon it was given in a transparent fulness of detail; while all his changing emotions, from his first glimpse of Prather's profile to the effort to speak with him and the ultimatum of Prather's satirical gesture, were reflected in his features. He was the story-teller, putting his gift to an unpleasant task in illumination of sober fact and not the uses of imagination; and his audience was his father's cheek and ear in the shadow. "Extraordinary!" John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed when Jack had finished, glancing around with a shrug. "Naturally, you were irritated. I like to think that only two men have the Wingfield features--the features of the ancestor--yes, only two: you and I!" "It was more than irritation; it was something profound and disturbing, almost revolting!" Jack exclaimed, under the disagreeable spell of his vivid recollection of the incident. "The resemblance to you was so striking, father, especially in the profile!" Jack was leaning forward, the better to see his father's profile, dim in the half light. "Yes, recognizable instantly--the nose and the lines about the mouth! You have never met anyone who has seen this man? You have never heard of him?" he asked, almost morbidly. John Wingfield, Sr. broke into a laugh, which was deprecatory and metallic. He looked fairly into Jack's eyes with a kind of inquiring amazement at the boy's overwrought intensity. "Why, no, Jack," he said, reassuringly. "If I had I shouldn't have forgotten it, you may be sure. And, well, Jack, there is no use of being sensitive about it, though I understand your indignation--especially after he flaunted the fact of the resemblance in such a manner and refused to meet you. From what I have heard about that fight with Leddy--Dr. Bennington told me--I can appreciate why he did not care to meet you." He laughed, more genially this time, in the survey of his son's broad shoulders. "I fear there is something of the old ancestor's devil in you when you get going!" he added. So his father had seen this, too--what Mary had seen--this thing born in him with the coming of his strength! "Yes, I suppose there is," he admitted, ruefully. "Yes, I have reason to know that there is." His face went moody. Any malice toward John Prather passed. He was penitent for a feeling against a stranger that seemed akin to the dormant instinct that had made him glory in holding a bead on Pete Leddy. "And I am glad of it!" said John Wingfield, Sr., with a flash of stronger emotion than he had yet shown in the interview. "I am not. It makes me almost afraid of myself," Jack answered. "Oh, I don't mean firing six-shooters--hardly! I mean backbone," he hastened to add, almost ingratiatingly. "It is a thing to control, Jack, not to worry about." "Yes, to control!" said Jack, dismally. He was hearing Ignacio's cry of "The devil is out of Señor Don't Care!" and seeing for the thousandth time Mary's horrified face as he pressed Pedro Nogales against the hedge. Now poise was all on the side of the father, who glanced away from Jack at the glint of the library cases in the semi-darkness in satisfaction. But only a moment did the son's absent mood last. He leaned forward quivering, free from his spell of reflection, and his words came pelting like hail. He was at grip with the phantoms and nothing should loosen his hold till the truth was out. "Father, I could not fail to see the look on your face and the look on Jasper Ewold's when you found him in the drawing-room!" At the sudden reversal of his son's attitude, John Wingfield, Sr. had drawn back into the shadow, as, if in defensive instinct before the force that was beating in Jack's voice. "Yes, I was startled; yes, very startled! But, go on! Speak everything that you have in mind; for it is evident that you have much to say. Go on!" he repeated more calmly, and turned his face farther into the shadow, while he inclined his head toward Jack as if to hear better. One leg had drawn up under him and was pressing against the chair. Jack waited a moment to gather his thoughts. When he spoke his passion was gone. "We have always been as strangers, father," he began. "I have no recollection of you in childhood until that day you came as a stranger to the house at Versailles. I was seven, then. My mother was away, as you will recall. I remember that you did not kiss me or show any affection. You did not even say who you were. You looked me over, and I was very frail. I saw that I did not please you; and I did not like you. In my childish perversity I would speak only French to you, which you did not understand. When my mother came home, do you remember her look? I do. She went white as chalk and trembled. I was frightened with the thought that she was going to die. It was a little while before she spoke and when she did speak she was like stone. She asked you what you wanted, as if you were an intruder. You said: 'I have been looking at the boy!' Your expression told me again that you were not pleased with me. Without another word you departed. I can still hear your steps on the walk as you went away; they were so very firm." "Yes, Jack, I can never forget." The tone was that of a man racked. "What else?" he asked. "Go on, Jack!" "You know the life my mother and I led, study and play together. And that was the only time you saw me until I was fourteen. I was mortally in awe of you then and in awe of you the day I went West with your message to get strong. But I got strong; yes, strong, father!" "Yes, Jack," said the father. "Yes, Jack, leave nothing unsaid--nothing!" Now Jack swept back to the villa garden in Florence, the day of the Doge's call; and from there to the Doge's glance of recognition that first night in Little Rivers; then to the scene in front of the bookstore, when the Doge hesitated about going to see the Velasquez. He pictured the Doge's absorption over the mother's portrait; he repeated Mary's story on the previous evening. All the while the profile, so dimly outlined in the outer darkness beyond the lamp's circle of light, to which he had been speaking, had not stirred. The father's cigar had gone out. It lay idly in his fingers, which rested on the arm of the chair, above a tiny pile of ashes on the rug. But there was no other sign of emotion, except his half affirmative interjections, with a confessional's encouragement to empty the mind of its every affliction. "Why were my mother and myself always in exile? What was this barrier between you and her? Why was it that I never saw you? Why this bitterness of Jasper Ewold against you? Why should that bitterness be turned against me? I want to know, father, so that we can start afresh and right. I no longer want to be in the dark, with its mystery, but in the light, where I can grapple with the truth!" There was no rancor, no crashing of sentences; only high tension in the finality of an inquiry in which hope and fear rose together. "Yes, Jack!" exclaimed John Wingfield, Sr., after a silence in which he seemed to be passing all that Jack had said in review. "I am glad you have told me this; that you have come to the one to whom you should come in trouble. You have made it possible for me to speak of something that I never found a way to speak about, myself. For, Jack, you truly have been a stranger to me and I to you, thanks to the chain of influences which you have mentioned." Very slowly John Wingfield, Sr. had turned in his chair. Distress was rising in his tone as he leaned toward Jack. His face under the rim of light of the lamp had a new charm, which was not that of the indulgent or flattering or winning smile, or the masterful set of his chin on an object. He seemed pallid and old, struggling against a phantom himself; almost pitiful, this man of strength, while his eyes looked into Jack's with limpid candor. "Jack, I will tell you all I can," he said. "I want to. It is duty. It is relief. But first, will you tell me what your mother told you? What her reasons were? I have a right to know that, haven't I, in my effort to make my side clear?" He spoke in direct, intimate appeal. Jack's lips were trembling and his whole nature was throbbing in a new-found sympathy. For the first time he saw his father as a man of sensitive feeling, capable of deep suffering. And he was to have the truth, all the truth, in kindness and affection. "After you had left the house at Versailles," said Jack, "she took me in her arms and said that you were my father. 'Did you like him?' she asked; and I said no, realizing nothing but the childish impression of the interview. At that she was wildly, almost hysterically, triumphant. I was glad to have made her so happy. 'You are mine alone! You have only me!' she declared over and over again. 'And you must never ask me any questions, for that is best.' She never mentioned you afterward; and in all my life, until I was fourteen, I was never away from her." Again the palm of John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand ran back and forth over his knee and the foot that was against the chair leg beat a nervous tattoo; while he drew a longer breath than usual, which might have been either of surprise or relief. His face fell back behind the rim of the lamp's rays, but he did not turn it away as he had when Jack was talking. "You know only the Jasper Ewold who has been mellowed by time," he began. "His scholarship was a bond of companionship for you in the isolation of a small community. I know him as boy and young man. He was very precocious. At the age of eight, as I remember, he could read his Caesar. You will appreciate what that meant in a New England town--that he was somewhat spoiled by admiration. And, naturally, his character and mine were very different, thanks to the difference in our situations; for the Ewolds had a good deal of money in those days. I was the type of boy who was ready to work at any kind of odd job in order to get dimes and quarters for my little bank. "Well, it is quite absurd to go back to that as the beginning of Jasper Ewold's feelings toward me; but one day young Wingfield felt that young Ewold was patronizing him. We had a turn at fisticuffs which resulted in my favor. Jasper was a proud boy, and he never quite forgave me. In fact, he was not used to being crossed. Learning was easy for him; he was good-looking; he had an attractive manner, and it seemed only his right that all doors should open when he knocked. Soon after our battle he went away to school. Not until we were well past thirty did our paths cross again. He was something of a painter, but he really had had no set purpose in life except the pleasures of his intellectual diversions. I will not say that he was wild, but at least he had lived in the abundant freedom of his opportunities. He fell in love at the same time that I did with Alice Jamison. You have seen your mother's picture, but that gives you little idea of her beauty in girlhood." "I have always thought her beautiful!" Jack exclaimed spontaneously. "Yes. I am glad. She always was beautiful to me; but I like best to think of her before she turned against me. I like to think of her as she was in the days of our courtship. Fortune favored me instead of Jasper Ewold. I can well understand the blow it was to him, that she should take the storekeeper, the man without learning, the man without family, as people supposed then, when he thought that she belonged entirely to his world. But his enmity thereafter I can only explain by his wounded pride; by a mortal defeat for one used to having his way, for one who had never known discipline. Your mother and I were very happy for a time. I thought that she loved me and had chosen me because I was a man of purpose, while Jasper Ewold was not." John Wingfield, Sr. spoke deliberately, measuring his thought before he put it into words, as if he were trying to set himself apart as one figure in a drama while he aimed to do exact justice to the others. "It was soon after you were born that your mother's attitude changed. She was, as you know, supersensitive, and whatever her grievances were she kept them to herself. My immersion in my affairs was such that I could not be as attentive to her as I ought to have been. Sometimes I thought that the advertisement with our name in big letters in every morning paper might be offensive to her; again, that she missed in me the education I had had to forfeit in youth, and that my affection could hardly take its place. I know that Jasper Ewold saw her occasionally, and in his impulse I know that he said things about me that were untrue. But that I pass over. In his place I, too, might have been bitter. "The best explanation I can find of your mother's change toward me is one that belongs in the domain of psychology and pathology. She suffered a great deal at your birth and she never regained her former strength. When she rose from her bed it was with a shadow over her mind. I saw that she was unhappy and nervous in my presence. Indeed, I had at times to face the awful sensation of feeling that I was actually repugnant to her. She was especially irritable if I kissed or fondled you. She dropped all her friends; she never made calls; she refused to see callers. I consulted specialists and all the satisfaction I had was that she was of a peculiarly high-strung nature and that in certain phases of melancholia, where there is no complete mental and physical breakdown, the patient turns on the one whom she would hold nearest and dearest if she were normal. The child that had taken her strength became the virtual passion of her worship, which she would share with no one. "When she proposed to go to Europe for a rest, taking you with her, I welcomed the idea. I rejoiced in the hope that the doctors held out that she would come back well, and I ventured to believe in a happy future, with you as our common object of love and care. But she never returned, as you know; and she only wrote me once, a wild sort of letter about what a beautiful boy you were and that she had you and I had the store and I was never to send her any more remittances. "I made a number of trips to Europe. I could not go frequently, because in those days, Jack, I was a heavy borrower of money in the expansion of my business, and only one who has built up a great business can understand how, in the earlier and more uncertain period of our banking credits, the absence of personal attention in any sudden crisis might throw you on the rocks. Naturally, when I went I wrote to Alice that I was coming; but I always found that she had gone and left no address for forwarding mail from the Crédit Lyonnais. Once when I went without writing she eluded me, and the second time I found that she had a cottage at Versailles. That, as you know, was the only occasion when I ever saw you or her until I came to bring you home after her sudden death." "Yes," Jack whispered starkly. "That day I had left her as well as usual and came home to find her lying still and white on a couch, her book fallen out of her hand onto the floor and--" the words choked in his throat. "And the stranger, your father, who came for you seemed very hard and forbidding to you!" "Yes," Jack managed to say. "But, Jack, when my steps sounded so firm the day I left you at Versailles it was the firmness of force of will fighting to accept the inevitable. For I had seen your face. It was like mine, and yet I had to give you up! I had to give you up knowing that I might not see you again; knowing that this tragic, incomprehensible fatality had set you against me; knowing that any further efforts to see you meant only pain for Alice and for me. Whatever happiness she knew came from you, and that she should have. And remember, Jack, that out of all this tragedy I, too, had my point of view. I had my moments of reproach against fate; my moments of bitterness and anger; my moments when I set all my mind with, volcanic energy into my affairs in order to forget my misfortune. I had to build for the sake of building. Perhaps that hardened me. "When you came home I saw that you were mine in blood but not mine in heart. All your training had been foreign, all of estrangement from the business and the ways of the home-country; which you could not help, I could not help, nothing now could help. But, after all, I had been building for you; that was my new solace. I wanted you to be equal to what was coming to you, and that change meant discipline. To be frank with you, as you have been with me, you were sickly, hectic, dreamy; and when word came that you must go to the desert if your life were to be saved--well, Jack, I had to put affection aside and consider this blow for what it was, and think not of kind words but of what was best for you and your future. I knew that my duty to you and your duty to yourself was to see you become strong, and for your sake you must not return until you were strong. "Now, as for the scene in the drawing-room the other day: I could not forget what Jasper Ewold had said of me. That was one thing. Another was that I had detected his influence over you; an influence against the purpose and steadiness that I was trying to inculcate in you; and suddenly coming upon him in my own house, in view of his enmity and the way in which he had spoken about me, I was naturally startled and indignant and withdrew to avoid a scene. That is all, Jack. I have answered your questions to the best of my knowledge. If others occur to you I will try my best to answer them, too;" and the father seemed ready to submit every recess of his mind to the son's inquisition. "You have answered everything," said Jack; "everything--fairly, considerately, generously." There was a flash of triumph in the father's eyes. Slowly he rose and stood with his finger-ends caressing the blotting-pad. Jack rose at the same time, his movement automatic, instinctively in sympathy with his father's. His head was bowed under stress of the emotion, incapable of translation into language, which transfixed him. It had all been made clear, this thing that no one could help. His feeling toward his mother could never change; but penetrating to the depths in which it had been held sacred was a new feeling. The pain that had brought him into the world had brought misery to the authors of his being. There was no phantom except the breath of life in his nostrils which they had given him. Watchfully, respecting the son's silence, the father's lips tightened, his chin went out slightly and his brows drew together in a way that indicated that he did not consider the battle over. At length, Jack's head came up and his face had the strength of a youthful replica of the ancestor's, radiant in gratitude, and in his eyes for the first time, in looking into his father's, were trust and affection. There was no word, no other demonstration except the steady, liquid look that spoke the birth of a great, understanding comradeship. The father fed his hunger for possession, which had been irresistibly growing in him for the last two months, on that look. He saw his son's strength as something that had at last become malleable; and this was the moment when the metal was at white heat, ready for knowing turns with the pincers and knowing blows of the hammer. The message from Jim Galway was still on the table where the father had laid it after reading. Now he pressed his fingers on it so hard that the nails became a row of red spots. "And the telegram, Jack?" he asked. Jack stared at the yellow slip of paper as the symbol of problems that reappeared with burning acuteness in his mind. It smiled at him in the satire of John Prather triumphing in Little Rivers. It visualized pictures of lean ranchers who had brought him flowers in the days of his convalescence; of children gathered around him on the steps of his bungalow; of all the friendly faces brimming good-will into his own on the day of his departure; of a patch of green in desert loneliness, with a summons to arms to defend its arteries of life. "They want me to help--I half promised!" he said. "Yes. And just how can you help?" asked his father, gently. "Why, that is not quite clear yet. But a stranger, they made me one of themselves. They say that they need me. And, father, that thrilled me. It thrilled the idler to find that there was some place where he could be of service; that there was some one definite thing that others thought he could do well!" The father proceeded cautiously, reasonably, with his questions, as one who seeks for light for its own sake. Jack's answers were luminously frank. For there was always to be truth between them in their new fellowship, unfettered by hopes or vagaries. "You could help with your knowledge of law? With political influence? Help these men seasoned by experience in land disputes in that region?" "No!" "And would Jasper Ewold, whom I understand is the head and founder of the community, want you to come? Has he asked you?" the father continued, drawing in the web of logic. "On the contrary, he would not want me." "And Miss Ewold? Would she want you?" There Jack hesitated. When he spoke, however, it was to admit the fact that was stabbing him. "No, she would not. She has dismissed me. But--but I half promised," he added, his features setting firmly as they had after Leddy had fired at him. "It seems like duty, unavoidable." The metal was cooling, losing its malleability, and the father proceeded to thrust it back into the furnace. "Then, I take it that your value to Little Rivers is your cool hand with a gun," he said, "and the summons is to uncertainties which may lead to something worse than a duel. You are asked to come because you can fight. Do you want to go for that? To go to let the devil, as you call it, out of you?" Now the metal was soft with the heat of the shame of the moment when Jack had called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and of the moment when he saw Pedro Nogales's limp, broken arm and ghastly face. "No, no!" Jack gasped. "I want no fight! I never want to draw a bead on a man again! I never want to have a revolver in my hand again!" He was shuddering, half leaning against the desk for support. His father waited in observant comprehension. Convulsively, Jack straightened with desperation and all the impassioned pleading to Mary on the pass was in his eyes. "But the thing that I cannot help--the transcendent thing, not of logic, not of Little Rivers' difficulties--how am I to give that up?" he cried. "Miss Ewold, you mean?" "Yes!" "Jack, I know! I understand! Who should understand if not I?" The father drew Jack's hand into his own, and the fluid force of his desire for mastery was flowing out from his finger-ends into the son's fibres, which were receptively sensitive to the caress. "I know what it is when the woman you love dismisses you! You have her to think of as well as yourself. Your own wish may not be lord. You may not win that which will not be won"--how well he knew that!--"either by protest, by persistence, or by labor. You are dealing with the tender and intangible; with feminine temperament, Jack. And, Jack, it is wise for you, isn't it, to bear in mind that your life has not been normal? With the switch from desert to city life homesickness has crept over you. From to-night things will not be so strange, will they? But if you wish a change, go to Europe--yes, go, though I cannot bear to think of losing you the very moment that we have come to know each other; when the past is clear and amends are at hand. "And, Jack, if your mother were here with us and were herself, would she want you to go back to take up a rifle instead of your work at my side? I do not pretend to understand Jasper Ewold's or Mary Ewold's thoughts. She has preferred to make another generation's ill-feeling her own in a thing that concerns her life alone. She has seen enough of you to know her mind. For, from all I hear, you have not been a faint-hearted lover. Is it fair to her to follow her back to the desert? Is it the courage of self-denial, of control of impulse on your part? Would your mother want you to persist in a veritable conquest by force of your will, whose strength you hardly realize, against Mary Ewold's sensibilities? And if you broke down her will, if you won, would there be happiness for you and for her? Jack, wait! If she cares for you, if there is any germ of love for you in her, it will grow of itself. You cannot force it into blossom. Come, Jack, am I not right?" Jack's hands lay cold and limp in his father's; so limp that it seemed only a case of leading, now. Yet there was always the uncertain in the boy; the uncertain hovering under that face of ashes that the father was so keenly watching; a face so clearly revealing the throes of a struggle that sent cold little shivers into his father's warm grasp. Jack's eyes were looking into the distance through a mist. He dropped the lids as if he wanted darkness in which to think. When he raised them it was to look in his father's eyes firmly. There was a half sob, as if this sentimentalist, this Señor Don't Care, had wrung determination from a precipice edge, even as Mary Ewold had. He gripped his father's hands strongly and lifted them on a level with his breast. "You have been very fine, father! I want you to be patient and go on helping me. The trail is a rough one, but straight, now. I--I'm too brimming full to talk!" And blindly he left the library. When the door closed, John Wingfield, Sr. seized the telegram, rolled it up with a glad, fierce energy and threw it into the waste-basket. His head went up; his eyes became points of sharp flame; his lips parted in a smile of relief and triumph and came together in a straight line before he sank down in his chair in a collapse of exhaustion. After a while he had the decanter brought in; he gulped a glass of brandy, lighted another cigar, and, swinging around, fell back at ease, his mind a blank except for one glowing thought: "He will not go! He will give up the girl! He is to be all mine!" It is said that the best actors never go on the stage. They play real parts in private life, making their own lines as they watch the other players. One of this company, surveying the glint of his bookcases, was satisfied with the greatest effort of his life in his library. XXXIII PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT It did not occur to Jack to question a word of the narrative that had reduced a dismal enigma to luminous, connected facts. With the swift processes of reason and the promptness of decision of which he was capable on occasion, he had made up his mind as to his future even as he ascended the stairs to his room. The poignancy of his father's appeal had struck to the bed-rock of his affection and his conscience, revealing duty not as a thing that you set for yourself, but which circumstances set for you. Never before had he realized how hopelessly he had been a dreamer. Firio, P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear became the fantastic memory of another incarnation. His devil should never again rejoice in having his finger on a trigger or send him off an easy traveller in search of gorgeous sunrises. His devil should be transformed into a backbone of unremitting apprenticeship in loving service for the father who had built for him in love. Though his head split, he would master every detail of the business. And when Jack stepped into the Rubicon he did not splash around or look back. He went right over to the new country on the other bank. But there were certain persons whom he must inform of the crossing. First, he wrote a telegram to Jim Galway: "Sorry, but overwhelming duty here will not permit. Luck and my prayers with you." Then to Firio a letter, which did not come quite so easily: "You see by now that you are mistaken, Firio. I am not coming back. Make the most of the ranch--your ranch--that you can." The brevity, he told himself, was in keeping with Firio's own style. Besides, anything more at length would have opened up an avenue of recollections which properly belonged to oblivion. And Mary? Yes, he would write to her, too. He would cut the last strand with the West. That was best. That was the part of his new courage of self-denial stripping itself of every trammeling association of sentiment. Other men had given up the women of their choice; and he could never be the man of this woman's choice. Somehow, his father's talk had made him realize an inevitable outcome which had better be met and mastered in present fortitude, rather than after prolonged years of fruitless hope centering two thousand miles away. He started a dozen letters to Mary, meaning each to be a fitting _envoi_ to their comradeship and a song of good wishes. Each one he wrote in the haste of having the task quickly over, only to throw away what he had written when he read it. The touch that he wanted would not come. He was simply flashing out a few of a thousand disconnected thoughts that ran away incoherently with his pen. But wasn't any letter, any communication of any kind, superfluous? Wasn't it the folly of weak and stupid stubbornness? She had spoken her final word in their relations at the hotel door. There was no Little Rivers; there was no Mary; there was nothing but the store. To enforce this fiat he had only to send the wire to Jim and post the letter to Firio. This he would do himself. A stroll would give him fresh air. It was just what he needed after all he had been through that evening; and he would see the streets not with any memory of the old restlessness when he and his father were strangers, but kindly, as the symbol of the future. His room was on the second floor. As he left it, he heard the door-bell ring, its electric titter very clear in the silence of the house. No doubt it meant a telegram for his father. At the turn of the stairs on the first floor he saw the back of the butler before the open door. Evidently it was not a matter of a telegram, but of some late caller. Jack paused in the darkness of the landing, partly to avoid the bother of having to meet anyone and partly arrested by the manner of the butler, who seemed to be startled and in doubt about admitting a stranger at that hour. Indistinctly, Jack could hear the caller's voice. The tone was familiar in a peculiar quality, which he tried to associate with a voice that he had heard frequently. The butler, apparently satisfied with the caller's appearance, or, at least, with his own ability to take care of a single intruder, stepped back, with a word to come in. Then, out of the obscurity of the vestibule, appeared the pale face of John Prather. Jack withdrew farther into the shadows instinctively, as if he had seen a ghost; as if, indeed, he were in fear of ghosts. "I will take your card to Mr. Wingfield," said the butler. Prather made a perfunctory movement as if for a card-case, but apparently changed his mind under the prompting suggestion that it was superfluous. "My name is John Prather," he announced. "Mr. Wingfield knows who I am and I am quite sure that he will see me." While the butler, after rapping cautiously, went into the library with the message, John Prather stood half smiling to himself as he looked around the hall. The effect seemed to please him in a contemplative fashion, for he rubbed the palms of his hands together, as he had in his survey of the diamond counters. He was serenity itself as John Wingfield, Sr. burst out of the library, his face hard-set. "I thought you were going this evening!" he exclaimed. "By what right do you come here?" He placed himself directly in front of Prather, thus hiding Prather's figure, but not his face, which Jack could see was not in the least disturbed by the other's temper. "Oh, no! The early morning train has the connections I want for Arizona," he answered casually, as if he were far from being in any hurry. "I was taking a walk, and happening to turn into Madison Avenue I found myself in front of the house. It occurred to me what a lot I had heard about that ancestor, and seeing a light in the library, and considering how late it was, I thought I might have a glimpse of him without inconveniencing any other member of the family. Do you mind?" He put the question with an inflection that was at once engaging and confident. "Mind!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr. "I am sure you do not!" Prather returned. Now a certain deference and a certain pungency of satire ran together in his tone, the mixture being nicely and pleasurably controlled. "Is it in there, in the drawing-room?" "And then what else? Where do you mean to end? I thought that--" "Nothing else," Prather interrupted reassuringly. "Everything is settled, of course. This is sort of a farewell privilege." "Yes, in there!" snapped John Wingfield, Sr. "It's the picture on the other side of the mantel. I will wait here--and be quick, quick, I tell you! I want you out of this house! I've done enough! I--" "Thanks! It is very good-natured of you!" John Prather passed leisurely into the drawing-room and John Wingfield, Sr. stood guard by the door, his hand gripping the heavy portieres for support, while his gaze was steadily fixed at a point in the turn of the stairs just below where Jack was obscured in the shadow. His face was drawn and ashen against the deep red of the hangings, and torment and fear and defiance, now one and then the other, were in ascendency over the features which Jack had always associated with composed and unchanging mastery until he had seen them illumined with affection only an hour before. And the father had said that he had never met or heard of John Prather! The father had said so quietly, decidedly, without hesitation! This one thought kept repeating itself to Jack's stunned brain as he leaned against the wall limp from a blow that admits of no aggressive return. "The ancestor certainly must have been a snappy member of society in his time! It has been delightful to have a look at him," said John Prather, as he came out of the drawing-room. He paused as he spoke. He was still smiling. The mole on his cheek was toward the stairway; and it seemed to heighten the satire of his smile. The faces of the young man and the old man were close together and they were standing in much the same attitude, giving an effect of likeness in more than physiognomy. That note of John Prather's voice that had sounded so familiar to Jack was a note in the father's voice when he was particularly suave. "This is the end--that is the understanding--the end?" demanded John Wingfield, Sr. "Oh, quite!" John Prather answered easily, moving toward the door. He did not offer his hand, nor did John Wingfield, Sr. offer to take it. But as he went out he said, his smile broadening: "I hope that Jack makes a success with the store, though he never could run it as well as I could. Good-by!" "Good-by!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr. He wheeled around distractedly and stood still, his head bowed, his fingers working nervously before his hands parted in a shrugging, outspread gesture of relief; then, his head rising, his body stiffening, once more his arbitrary self, he started up the stairs with the firm yet elastic step with which he mounted the flights of the store. If Jack remained where he was they would meet. What purpose in questions now? The answer to all might be as false as to one. He was no more in a mood to trust himself with a word to his father than he had been to trust himself with a word to John Prather. He dropped back into the darkness of the dining-room and sank into a chair. When a bedroom door upstairs had closed softly he was sequestered in silence with his thoughts. His own father had lied to him! Lied blandly! Lied with eyes limpid with appeal! And the supreme commandment on which his mother had ever insisted was truth. The least infraction of it she would not forgive; it was the only thing for which she had ever punished him. He recalled the one occasion when she had seemed harsh and merciless, as she said: "A lie fouls the mouth of the one who utters it, Jack. A lie may torture and kill. It may ruin a life. It is the weapon of the coward--and never be a coward, Jack, never be afraid!" At the New England preparatory school which he had attended after he came home, a lie was the abomination on which the discipline of student comradeship laid a scourge. Out on the desert, where the trails run straight and the battle of life is waged straight against thirst and fatigue and distance, men spoke straight. And nothing had been explained, after all! The phantom was back, definite of form and smiling in irony. For it had a face, now, the face of John Prather! How was he connected with the story of the mother? the father? the Doge? Then, like a shaft of light across memory, came the recollection of a thing that had been so negligible to Jack at the time. It was Dr. Bennington's first question in Jack's living-room; a question so carelessly put and so dissociated from the object of his visit! Jack remembered Dr. Bennington's curious glance through his eyebrows as he asked him if he had met John Prather. And Dr. Bennington had brought Jack into the world! He knew the family history! The Jack that now rose from the chair was a Jack of action, driven by the scourge of John Prather's smile into obsession with the one idea which was crying: "I will know! I will know!" Downstairs in the hall he learned over the telephone that Dr. Bennington had just gone out on a call. It would be possible to see him yet to-night! An hour later, as the doctor entered his reception-room he was startled by a pacing figure in the throes of impatience, who turned on him without formality in an outburst: "Dr. Bennington, you asked me in Little Rivers if I had ever met John Prather. I have met him! Who is he? What is he to me?" The doctor's suavity was thrown off its balance, but he did not lose his presence of mind. He was too old a hand at his profession, too capable, for that. "I refuse to answer!" he said quickly and decisively. "Then you do know!" Jack took a step toward the doctor. His weight was on the ball of his foot; his eyes had the fire of a command that was not to be resisted. "Heavens! How like the ancestor!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily. "Then you do know! Who is he? What is he to me?" It seemed as if the ceiling were about to crack. The doctor looked away to avoid the bore of Jack's unrelenting scrutiny. He took a turn up and down, rapidly, nervously, his fingers pressed in against the palms and the muscles of his forearms moving in the way of one who is trying to hold himself in control by an outward expression of force against inward rebellion. "I dined with your father to-night!" he exclaimed. "I counseled him to tell you the truth! I said that if he did not want to tell it for its own sake, as policy it was the only thing to you! I--I--" he stopped, facing Jack with a sort of grisly defiance. "Jack, a doctor is a confessor of men! He keeps their secrets! Good-night!" And he strode through the office door, which he closed behind him sharply, in reminder that the interview was at an end. As Jack went down the steps into the night, the face of John Prather, with a satirical turn to the lips, was preceding him. Now he walked madly up and down and back and forth across town to the river fronts, with panting energy of stride, as he fastened the leash of will on quivering nerves. When dawn came it was the dawn of the desert calling to a brain that had fought its way to a lucid purpose. It started him to the store in the fervor of a grateful mission, while a familiar greeting kept repeating itself in his ears on the way: "You won't forget, Jack, about giving me a chance to come along if you ever go out West again, will you?" The question was one in answer to a promise; a reminder from certain employees into whom he had fused his own spirit of enthusiasm about dry wastes yielding abundance. "But you must work very hard," he had told them. "Not until you have callouses on your hands can you succeed or really know how to enjoy a desert sunrise or sunset. After that, you will be able to stand erect and look destiny in the face." "No February slush!" Burleigh, the fitter, had said. "No depending on one man to hold your job!" "Your own boss! You own some land and you just naturally get what you earn!" according to Joe Mathewson. "And from what I can make out," observed one of the automobile van drivers whom Jack had accompanied on the suburban rounds, "it requires about as much brains as running an automobile to be what you'd call a first-class, a number one desert Rube, Jack!" "Yes," Jack told him. "The process that makes the earth fruitful is not less complicated than a motor, simply because it is one of the earliest inventions. You mix in nature's carbureter light and moisture with the chemical elements of the soil." "I'm on!" the chauffeur rejoined. "If a man works with a plow instead of a screwdriver, it doesn't follow that his mind is as vacant as a cow that stands stockstill in the middle of the road to show you that you can't fool her into thinking that radiators are good to eat." In explaining the labor and pains of orange-growing, which ended only with the careful picking and packing, Jack would talk as earnestly as his father would about the tedious detail which went into the purchase and sale of the articles in any department of the store. He might not be able to choose the best expert for the ribbon counter, but he had a certain confidence that he could tell the man or the woman who would make good in Little Rivers. No manager was more thorough in his observation of clerks for promotion than Jack in observing would-be ranchers. He had given his promise to one after another of a test list of disciples; and at times he had been surprised to find how serious both he and the disciples were over a matter that existed entirely on the hypothesis that he was not going to stay permanently in New York. This morning he was at the store for the last time, arriving even before the delivery division, to circulate the news that he was returning to Little Rivers. Trouble was brewing out there, he explained, but they could depend on him. He would make a place for them and send word when he was ready; and all whom he had marked as faithful were eager to go. Thus he had builded unwittingly for another future of responsibilities when he had paused in the midst of the store's responsibilities to tell stories of how a desert ranch is run. But one disciple did not even want to wait on the message. It was Peter Mortimer, whom Jack caught on his way to the elevator at eight, his usual hour, to make sure of having the letters opened and systematically arranged when his employer should appear. "So you are going, Jack! And--and, Jack, you know?" asked Peter significantly. "Yes, Peter. And I see that you know." "I do, but my word is given not to tell." Through that night's march Jack had guessed enough. He had guessed his fill of chill misery, which now took the place of the hunger of inquiry. The full truth was speeding out to the desert. It was with John Prather. "Then I will not press you, Peter," he said. "But, Peter, just one question, if you care to answer; was it--was it this thing that drove my mother into exile?" "Yes, Jack." Then a moment's silence, with Peter's eyes full of sympathy and Jack's dull with pain. "And, Jack," Peter went on, "well, I've been so long at it that suddenly, now you're going, I feel choked up, as if I were about to overflow with anarchy. Jack, I'm going to give notice that I will retire as soon as there is somebody to take my place. I want to rest and not have to keep trying to remember if I have forgotten anything. I've saved up a little money and whatever happens out there, why, there'll be some place I can buy where I can grow roses and salads, as you say, if nothing more profitable, won't there?" "Yes, Peter. I know other fertile valleys besides that of Little Rivers, though none that is its equal. I shall have a garden in one of them and you shall have a garden next to mine." "Then I feel fixed comfortable for life!" said Peter, with a perfectly wonderful smile enlivening the wrinkles of his old face, which made Jack think once more that life was worth living. Later in the morning, after he had bought tickets for Little Rivers, Jack returned to the house. When he stood devoutly before the portrait, whose "I give! I give!" he now understood in new depths, he thought: "I know that you would not want to remain here another hour. You would want to go with me." And before the portrait on the other side of the mantel he thought, challengingly and affectionately: "And you? You were an old devil, no doubt, but you would not lie! No, you would not lie to the Admiralty or to Elizabeth even to save your head! Yes, you would want to go with me, too!" Tenderly he assisted the butler to pack the portraits, which were put in a cab. When Jack departed in their company, this note lay on the desk in the library, awaiting John Wingfield, Sr.'s return that evening: "Father: "The wire to Jim Galway which I enclose tells its own story. It was written after our talk. When I was going out to send it I saw John Prather and you in the hall. You said that you knew nothing of him. I overheard what passed between you and him. So I am going back to Little Rivers. The only hope for me now is out there. "I am taking the portrait of my mother, because it is mine. I am taking the portrait of the ancestor, because I cannot help it any more than he could help taking a Spanish galleon. That is all I ask or ever could accept in the way of an inheritance. "Jack." XXXIV "JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU--" John Wingfield, Sr. had often made the boast that he never worried; that he never took his business to bed with him. When his head touched the pillow there was oblivion until he awoke refreshed to greet the problems left over from yesterday. Such a mind must be a reliably co-ordinated piece of machinery, with a pendulum in place of a heart. It is overawing to average mortals who have not the temerity to say "Nonsense!" to great egos. Yet the best adjusted clocks may have a lapse in a powerful magnetic storm, and in an earthquake they might even be tipped off the shelf, with their metal parts rendered quite as helpless by the fall as those of a human organism subject to the constitutional weaknesses of the flesh. It was also John Wingfield, Sr.'s boast to himself that he had never been beaten, which average mortals with the temerity to say "Nonsense!"--that most equilibratory of words--might have diagnosed as a bad case of self-esteem finding a way to forget the resented incidental reverses of success. Yet, even average mortals noted when John Wingfield, Sr. arrived late at the store the morning after Jack's departure for the West that he had not slept well. His haggardness suggested that for once the pushbutton to the switch of oblivion had failed him. The smile of satisfied power was lacking. In the words of the elevator boy, impersonal observer and swinger of doors, "I never seen the old man like that before!" But the upward flight through the streets of his city, if it did not bring back the smile, brought back the old pride of ownership and domination. He still had a kingdom; he was still king. Resentment rose against the cause of the miserable twelve hours which had thrown the machinery of his being out of order. He passed the word to himself that he should sleep to-night and that from this moment, henceforth things would be the same as they had been before Jack came home. Yes, there was just one reality for him. It was enthroned in his office. This morning was to be like any other business morning; like thousands of mornings to come in the many years of activity that stretched ahead of him. "A little late," he said, explaining his tardiness to his secretary; a superfluity of words in which he would not ordinarily have indulged. "I had some things to attend to on the outside." With customary quiet attentiveness, Mortimer went through the mail with his employer, who was frequently reassuring himself that his mind was as clear, his answers as sure, and his interest as concentrated as usual. This task finished, Mortimer, with his bundle of letters and notes in hand, instead of going out of the room when he had passed around the desk, turned and faced the man whom he had served for thirty years. "Mr. Wingfield--" "Well, Peter?" John Wingfield, Sr. looked up sharply, struck by Mortimer's tone, which seemed to come from another man. In Mortimer's eye was a placid, confident light and his stoop was less marked. "Mr. Wingfield, I am getting on in years, now," he said, "and I have concluded to retire as soon as you have someone for my place; the sooner, sir, the more agreeable to me." "What! What put this idea into your head?" John Wingfield, Sr. snapped. Often of late he had thought that it was time he got a younger man in Peter's place. But he did not like the initiative to come from Peter; not on this particular morning. "Why, just the notion that I should like to rest. Yes, rest and play a little, and grow roses and salads," said the old secretary, respectfully. "Roses and salads! What in--where are you going to grow them?" There was something so serene about Peter that his highly imperious, poised employer found it impertinent, not to say maddening. Peter had a look of the freedom of desert distances in his eyes already. A lieutenant was actually radiating happiness in that neutral-toned sanctum of power, particularly this morning. "I am going out to Little Rivers, or to some place that Jack finds for me, where I am to have a garden and work--or maybe I better call it potter around--out of doors in January and February, just like it was June." Peter spoke very genially, as if he were trying to win a disciple on his own account. "With Jack! Oh!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr. He struck his closed fist into the palm of his hand in his favorite gesture of anger, the antithesis of the crisp rubbing of the palms, which he so rarely used of late years. Rage was contrary to the rules of longevity, exciting the heart and exerting pressure on the artery walls. "Yes, sir," answered Peter, pleasantly. "Well--yes--well, Jack has decided to go back!" Then there rose strongly in John Wingfield, Sr.'s mind a suspicion that had been faintly signaled to his keen observation of everything that went on in the store. "Are any other employees going?" he demanded. "Yes, sir, I think there are; not immediately, but as soon as he finds a place for them." "How many?" "I don't think it is any secret. About fifty, sir." "Name some of them!" "Joe Mathewson, that big fellow who drives a warehouse truck, and Burleigh;" and Peter went on with those of the test proof list whom he knew. Every one of them had high standing. Every one represented a value. While at first John Wingfield, Sr. had decided savagely that Mortimer should remain at his pleasure, now his sense of outraged egoism took an opposite turn. He could get on without Mortimer; he could get on if every employee in the store walked out. There were more where they came from in a city of five millions population; and no one in the world knew so well as he how to train them. "Very good, Peter!" he said rigidly, as if he were making a declaration of war. "Fix up your papers and leave as soon as you please. I will have one of the clerks take your place." "Thank you. That is very kind, Mr. Wingfield!" Mortimer returned, so politely, even exultantly, that his aspect seemed treasonable. John Wingfield, Sr. tried to concentrate his attention on some long and important letters that had been left on his desk for further consideration; but his mind refused to stick to the lines of typewriting. "This one is a little complicated," he thought, "I will lay it aside." He tried the second and the third letters, with no better results. A tanned face and a pair of broad shoulders kept appearing between him and the paper. Again he was thinking of Jack, as he had all night, to the exclusion of everything else. Unquestionably, this son had a lot of magnetic force in him; he had command of men. Why, he had won fifty of the best employees out of sheer sentiment to follow him out to the desert, when they had no idea what they were in for! His gaze fell and rested for some time on the bunch of roses on his desk. Every morning there had been a fresh bunch, in keeping with the custom that Jack had established. The father had become so used to their presence that he was unconscious of it. For all the pleasure he got out of them, they might as well have been in the cornucopia vase in the limousine. His hand went out spasmodically toward the roses, as if he would crush them; crush this symbol of the thing drawn from the mother that had invaded the calm autocracy of his existence. The velvety richness of the petals leaning toward him above the drooping grace of their stems made him pause in realization of the absurdity of his anger. A feeling to which he had been a stranger swept over him. It was like a breaking instinct of dependableness; and then he called up Dr. Bennington. "Well, he has gone!" he told the doctor, desperately. "You did not tell him the truth!" came the answer; and he noted that the doctor's voice was without its usual suavity. It was as matter-of-fact to the man of millions as if it had been advising an operation in a dispensary case. "No, not exactly," John Wingfield, Sr. confessed. "I told you what his nature was; how it had drawn on the temperament of his mother. I told you that with candor, with a decently human humility appealing to his affections, everything was possible. And remember, he is strong, stronger than you, John Wingfield! There's a process of fate in him! John Wingfield, you--" The sentence ended abruptly, as if the doctor had dropped the receiver on the hooks with a crash. Phantoms were closing in around John Wingfield, Sr.... His memory ranged back over the days of ardent youth, in the full tide of growing success, when to want a thing, human or material, meant to have it.... And in his time he had told a good many lies. The right lie, big and daring, at the right moment had won more than one victory. With John Prather out of the way, he had decided on an outright falsehood to his son. Why had he not compromised with Dr. Bennington's advice and tried part falsehood and part contrition? But no matter, no matter. He would go on; he was made of steel. Again the tanned face and broad shoulders stood between him and the page. Jack was strong; yes, strong; and he was worth having. All the old desire of possession reappeared, in company with his hatred of defeat. He was thinking of the bare spot on the wall in the drawing-room in place of the Velasquez. There would be an end of his saying: "The boy is the spit of the ancestor and just as good a fighter, too; only his abilities are turned into other channels more in keeping with the spirit of the age!" An end of: "Fine son you have there!" from men at the club who had given him only a passing nod in the old days. For he was not displeased that the boy was liked, where he himself was not. The men whom he admired were those who had faced him with "No!" across the library desk; who had got the better of him, even if he did not admit it to himself. And the strength of his son, baffling to his cosmos, had won his admiration. No, he would not lose Jack's strength without an effort; he wanted it for his own. Perhaps something else, too, there in the loneliness of the office in the face of that bunch of roses was pulling him: the thrill that he had felt when he saw the moisture in Jack's eyes and felt the warmth of his grasp before Jack left the library. And Jack and John Prather were speeding West to the same destination! They would meet! What then? There was no use of trying to work in an office on Broadway when the forces which he had brought into being over twenty years ago were in danger of being unloosed out on the desert, with Jack riding free and the fingers of the ancestor-devil on the reins. John Wingfield, Sr. called in the general manager. "You are in charge until I return," he said; and a few hours later he was in a private car, bound for Little Rivers. PART III HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN LIFE XXXV BACK TO LITTLE RIVERS As with the gentle touch of a familiar hand, the ozone of high altitudes gradually and sweetly awakened Jack. The engine was puffing on an upgrade; the car creaked and leaned in taking a curve. Raising the shade of his berth he looked out on spectral ranges that seemed marching and tumbling through dim distances. With pillows doubled under his head he lay back, filling sight and mind with the indistinctness and spacious mystery of the desert at night; recalling his thoughts with his last view of it over two months ago in the morning hours after leaving El Paso and seeing his future with it now, where then he had seen his future with the store. "Think of old Burleigh raising oranges! I am sure that the trees will be well trimmed," he whispered. "Think of Mamie Devore in the thick of the great jelly competition, while the weight of Joe Mathewson's shoulders starts a spade into the soil as if it were going right to the centre of the earth. Why, Joe is likely to get us into international difficulties by poking the ribs of a Chinese ancestor! Yes--if we don't lose our Little Rivers; and we must not lose it!" The silvery face of the moon grew fainter with the coming of a ruddier light; the shadows of the mountains were being etched definitely on the plateaus that stretched out like vast floors under the developing glow of sunrise; and the full splendor of day had come, with its majestic spread of vision. "When Joe sees that he will feel so strong he will want to get out and carry the Pullman," Jack thought. "But Mamie will not let him for fear that he will overdo!" How slow the train seemed to travel! It was a snail compared to Jack's eagerness to arrive. He was inclined to think that P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear were faster than through expresses. He kept inquiring of the conductor if they were on time, and the conductor kept repeating that they were. How near that flash of steel at a bend around a tongue of chaotic rock, stretching out into the desert sea, with its command to man to tunnel or accept a winding path for his iron horse! How long in coming to it in that rare air, with its deceit of distances! Landmark after landmark of peak or bold ridge took the angle of some recollected view of his five years' wanderings. It was already noon when he saw Galeria from the far end of the long basin that he had crossed, with the V as the compass of his bearings, on the ride that brought him to the top to meet Mary and Pete Leddy. Then the V was lost while the train wound around the range that formed one side of the basin's rim. The blaze of midday had passed before it entered the reaches of the best valley yet in the judgment of a connoisseur in valleys; and under the Eternal Painter's canopy a spot of green quivered in the heat-rays of the horizon. His Majesty was in a dreamy mood. He was playing in delicate variations, tranquil and enchanting, of effects in gold and silver, now gossamery thin, now thick and rich. "What is this thing crawling along on two silken threads and so afraid of the hills?" he was asking, sleepily. "Eh? No! Bring the easel to me, if you want a painting. I am not going to rise from my easy couch. There! Fix that cushion so! I am a leisurely, lordly aristocrat. Palette? No, I will just shake my soft beard of fine mist back and forth across the sky, a spectrum for the sunrays. So! so! I see that this worm is a railroad train. Let it curl up in the shadow of a gorge and take a nap. I will wake it up by and by when I seize my brush and start a riot in the heavens that will make its rows of window-glass eyes stare." "I am on this train and in a hurry!" Jack objected. "Do I hear the faint echo of a human ego down there on the earth?" demanded the Eternal Painter. "Who are you? One of the art critics?" "One of Your Majesty's loving subjects, who has been away in a foreign kingdom and returns to your allegiance," Jack answered. "So be it. I shall know if what you say is true when I gaze into your eyes at sunset." "I am bringing you a Velasquez!" Jack added. "Good! Put him where he can have a view out of the window of his first teacher at work in the studio of the universe." The train crept on toward the hour of the Eternal Painter's riot and toward Little Rivers, while the patch of green was softly, impalpably growing, growing, until the crisscross breaks of the streets developed and Jack could identify the Doge's and other bungalows. He was on the platform of the car before the brakes ground on the wheels, leaning out to see a crowd at the station, which a minute later became a prospect of familiar, kindly, beaming faces. There was a roar of "Hello, Jack!" in the heavy voices of men and the treble of children. Then he did not see the faces at all for a second; he saw only mist. "Not tanned, Jack, but you'll brown up soon!" "Gosh! But we've been lonesome without you!" "Cure any case of sore eyes on record!" Jack was too full of the glory of this unaffected welcome in answer to his telegram that he was coming to find words at first; but as he fairly dropped off the steps into the arms of Jim Galway and Dr. Patterson he shouted in a shaking voice: "Hello, everybody! Hello, Little Rivers!" He noted, while all were trying to grasp his hands at once, that the men had their six-shooters. A half-dozen were struggling to get his suit case. Not one of his friends was missing except the Doge and Mary. "Let the patient have a little air!" protested Dr. Patterson, as some started in to shake hands a second time. "Fellow-citizens, if there's anything in the direct primary I feel sure of the nomination!" said Jack drily. "You're already elected!" shouted Bob Worther. Around at the other side of the station Jack found Firio waiting his turn in patient isolation, with P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear. "_Sí! sí_!" called Firio triumphantly to all the sceptics who had told him that Jack would not return. Jack took the little Indian by the shoulders and rocked him back and forth in delight, while Firio's eyes were burning coals of jubilation. "You knew!" Jack exclaimed. "You were right! I have come back!" "_Sí, sí_! I know!" repeated Firio. "No stopping him from bringing the whole cavalcade to the station, either," said Jim Galway. "And he wouldn't join the rest of us out in front of the station. He was going to be his own reception committee and hold an overflow meeting all by himself!" There was no disguising the fact that the equine trio of veterans remembered Jack. With P.D. and Jag Ear the demonstration was unrestrained; but however exultant Wrath of God might be in secret, he was of no mind to compromise his reputation for lugubriousness by any public display of emotional weakness. "Wrath of God, I believe you were a cross-eyed Cromwellian soldier in your previous incarnation!" said Jack; "and as it is hard for a horse to be crosseyed, you could not retain the characteristic. Think of that! Wouldn't a cross-eyed Cromwellian soldier strike fear to the heart of any loyalist? And Jag Ear, you're getting fat!" "I keep his hoofs hard. When he fat he eat less on trail!" explained Firio, becoming almost voluble. "All ready for trail!" he hinted. "Not now, Firio," said Jack. "And, Firio, there's a package at the station, a big, flat case. It came by express on the same train with me--the most precious package in the world. See that it is taken to the house." "Sí! You ride?" asked Firio, offering P.D.'s reins. "No, we'll all walk." The procession had started toward the town when Jack felt something soft poking him in the small of the back and looked around to find that the cause was P.D.'s muzzle. Wrath of God and Jag Ear might go with Firio, but P.D. proposed to follow Jack. "And after I have ridden you thousands of miles and you've heard all my songs over and over! Well, well, P.D., you are a subtle flatterer! Come along!" Then he turned to Jim Galway: "Has John Prather arrived?" "Yes, last night." "He is here now?" Jack put in quickly. "No; he pulled out at dawn on his way to Agua Fria." "Oh!" Jack was plainly disappointed. "He has the grant for the water rights?" "Yes," said Jim, "though he hasn't made the fact public. He does everything in his smooth, quiet fashion, with a long head, and I suppose he hasn't things just right yet to spring his surprise. But there is no disputing the fact--he has us!" One man henceforth was in control of the water. His power over the desert community would be equivalent to control of the rains in a humid locality. "You see," Jim continued, "old man Lefferts' partners had really never sold out to him; so his transfer to the Doge wasn't legal. He turned his papers over to Prather, giving Prather full power to act for him in securing the partners' surrender of their claims and straighten out everything with the Territory and get a bonafide concession. That is as I understand it, for the whole business has been done in an underhand way. Prather represented to the Doge that he was acting entirely in the interests of the community and his only charge would be the costs. The Doge quite believed in Prather's single-mindedness and public spirit. Well, with the use of money and all the influences he could command, including the kind that Pete Leddy exercises, he got the concession and in his name. It was very smart work. I suppose it was due to the crafty way he could direct the Doge to do his wishes that the Doge happened to be off the scene at the critical stage of the negotiations. When he went to New York all that remained was for him to obtain the capital for his scheme. Lefferts and his partners had the underlying rights and the Doge the later rights, thanks to his improvements, and Prather has them both. Well, Leddy and his crowd have been taking up plots right and left; that's their share in the exploitation. They're here, waiting for the announcement to be made and--well, the water users' association is still in charge; but it won't be when Prather says the word." "And you have no plans?" Jack asked. "None." "And the Doge?" "None. What can the old man do? Though nobody exactly blames him, a good many aren't of a mind to consult him at all. The crisis has passed beyond him. Three or four men, good men, too, were inclined to have it out with John Prather; but that would have precipitated a general fight with Leddy's gang. The conservatives got the hot-heads to wait till you came. You see, the trouble with every suggestion is that pretty much everybody is against it except the fellow who made it. The more we have talked, the more we have drifted back to you. It's a case of all we've got in the world and standing together, and we are ready to get behind you and take orders, Jack." "Yes, ready to fight at the drop of the hat, seh, or to sit still on our doorsteps with our tongues in our cheeks and doing the wives' mending, as you say!" declared Bob Worther. "It's right up to you!" "You are all of the same opinion?" asked Jack. They were, with one voice, which was not vociferous. For theirs was that significantly quiet mood of an American crowd when easy-going good nature turns to steel. Their partisanship in pioneerdom had not been with six-shooters, but with the ethics of the Doge; and such men when aroused do not precede action with threats. "All right!" said Jack. There was a rustle and an exchange of satisfied glances and a chorus of approval like an indrawing of breath. "First, I will see the Doge," Jack added; "and then I shall go to the house." Galway, Dr. Patterson, Worther, and three or four others went on with him toward the Ewold bungalow. They were halted on the way by Pete Leddy, Ropey Smith, and a dozen followers, who appeared from a side street and stopped across Jack's path, every one of them with a certain slouching aggressiveness and staring hard at him. Pete and Ropey still kept faith with their pledge to Jack in the _arroyo_. They were without guns, but their companions were armed in defiance of the local ordinance which had been established for Jack's protection. "Howdy do, Leddy?" said Jack, as amiably as if there had never been anything but the pleasantest of relations between them. "Getting polite, eh! Where's your pretty whistle?" Leddy answered. "I put it in storage in New York," Jack said laughing; then, with a sudden change to seriousness: "Leddy, is it true that you and John Prather have got the water rights to this town?" "None of your d----d business!" Leddy rapped out. "The only business I've got with you has been waiting for some time, and you can have it your way out in the _arroyo_ where we had it before, right now!" "As I said, Pete, I put the whistle in storage and I have already apologized for the way I used it," returned Jack. "I can't accommodate you in the _arroyo_ again. I have other things to attend to." "Then the first time you get outside the limits of this town you will have to play my way--a man's way!" "I hope not, Pete!" "Naturally you hope so, for you know I will get you, you--" "Careful!" Jack interrupted. "You'd better leave that out until we are both armed. Or, if you will not, why, we both have weapons that nature gave us. Do you prefer that way?" and Jack's weight had shifted to the ball of his foot. Plainly this was not to Pete's taste. "I don't want to bruise you. I mean to make a clean hole through you!" he answered. "That is both courteous and merciful; and you are very insistent, Leddy," Jack returned, and walked on. "Just as sweet as honey, just as cool as ice, and just as sunny as June!" whispered Bob Worther to the man next him. Again Jack was before the opening in the Ewold hedge, with its glimpse of the spacious living-room. The big ivory paper-cutter lay in its accustomed place on the broad top of the Florentine table. In line with it on the wall was a photograph of Abbey's mural in the Pennsylvania capitol and through the open window a photograph of a Puvis de Chavannes was visible. Evidently the Doge had already hung some of the reproductions of masterpieces which he had brought from New York. But no one was on the porch or in the living-room; the house was silent. As Jack started across the cement bridge he was halted by a laugh from his companions. He found that P.D. was taking no risks of losing his master again; he was going right on into the Doge's, too. Jim took charge of him, receiving in return a glance from the pony that positively reeked of malice. Again Jack was on his way around the Doge's bungalow on the journey he had made so many times in the growing ardor of the love that had mastered his senses. The quiet of the garden seemed a part of the pervasive stillness that stretched away to the pass from the broad path of the palms under the blazonry of the sun. As he proceeded he heard the crunching of gravel under a heavy tread. The Doge was pacing back and forth in the cross path, fighting despair with the forced vigor of his steps, while Mary was seated watching him. As the Doge wheeled to face Jack at the sound of his approach, it was not in surprise, but rather in preparedness for the expected appearance of another character in a drama. This was also Mary's attitude. They had heard of his coming and they received his call with a trace of fatalistic curiosity. The Doge suddenly dropped on a bench, as if overcome by the weariness and depression of spirits that he had been defying; but there was something unyielding and indomitable in Mary's aspect. "Well, Sir Chaps, welcome!" said the Doge. "We still have a seat in the shade for you. Will you sit down?" But Jack remained standing, as if what he had to say would be soon said. "I have come back and come for good," he began. "Yes, I have come back to take all the blue ribbons at ranching," he added, with a touch of garden nonsense that came like a second thought to soften the abruptness of his announcement. "For good! For good! You!" The Doge stared at Jack in incomprehension. "Yes, my future is out here, now." "You give up the store--the millions--your inheritance!" cried the Doge, still amazed and sceptical as he sounded the preposterousness of this idea to worldly credulity. "Quite!" There was no mistaking the firmness of the word. "To make your fortune, your life, out here?" The Doge's voice was throbbing with the wonder of the thing. "Yes!" "Why? Why? I feel that I have a right to ask why!" demanded the Doge, in all the majesty of the moment when he faced John Wingfield, Sr. in the drawing-room. "Because of a lie and what it concealed. Because of reasons that may not be so vague to you as they are to me." "A lie! Yes, a lie that came home!" the Doge repeated, while he passed his hand back and forth over his eyes. The hand was trembling. Indeed, his whole body was trembling, while he sought for self-control and to collect his thoughts for what he had to say to that still figure awaiting his words. When he looked up it was with an expression wholly new to Jack. Its candor was not that of transparent mental processes in serene philosophy or forensic display, but that of a man who was about to lay bare things of the past which he had kept secret. "Sir Chaps, I am going to give you my story, however weak and blameworthy it makes me appear," he said. "Sir Chaps, you saw me in anger in the Wingfield drawing-room, further baffling you with a mystery which must have begun for you the night that you came to Little Rivers when we exchanged a look in which I saw that you knew that I recognized you. I tried to talk as if you were a welcome stranger, when I was holding in my rancor. There was no other face in the world that I would not rather have seen in this community than yours! "How glad I was to hear that you were leaving by the morning train! How I counted the days of your convalescence after you were wounded! How glad I was at the news that you were to go as soon as you were well! With what a revelry of suggestion I planned to speed your parting! How demoralized I was when you announced that you were going to stay! How amazed at your seriousness about ranching--but how distrustful! Yet what joy in your companionship! At times I wanted to get my arms around you and hug you as a scarred old grizzly bear would hug a cub. And, first and last, your success with everybody here! Your cool hand in the duel! That iron in your will which would triumph at any cost when you broke Nogales's arm! For some reason you had chosen to stop, in the play period of youth, on the way to the inheritance to overcome some obstacle that it pleased you to overcome and to amuse yourself a while in Little Rivers--you with your steadiness in a fight and your airy, smiling confidence in yourself!" "I--I did not know that I was like that!" said Jack, in hurt, groping surprise. "Was I truly?" The Doge nodded. "As I saw you," he said. Jack looked at Mary, frankly and calmly. "Was I truly?" he asked her. "As I saw you!" she repeated, as an impersonal, honest witness. "Then I must have been!" he said, with conviction. "But I hope that I shall not be in the future." And he smiled at Mary wistfully. But her gaze was bent on the ground. "And you want it all--all the story from me?" the Doge asked, hesitating. "All!" Jack answered. "It strikes hard at your father." "The truth must strike where it will, now!" "Then, your face, so like your father's, stood for the wreck of two lives to me, and for recollections in my own career that tinged my view of you, Jack. You were one newcomer to Little Rivers to whom I could not wholly apply the desert rule of oblivion to the past and judgment of every man solely by his conduct in this community. No! It was out of the question that I could ever look at you without thinking who you were. "You know, of course, that your father and I spent our boyhood in Burbridge. Once I found that he had told me an untruth and we had our difference out, as boys will; and, as I was in the right, he confessed the lie before I let him up. That defeat was a hurt to his egoism that he could not forget. He was that way, John Wingfield, in his egoism. It was like flint, and his ambition and energy were without bounds. I remember he would say when teased that some day he should have more money than all the town together, and when he had money no one would dare to tease him. He had a remarkable gift of ingratiation with anyone who could be of service to him. My uncle, who was the head of the family, was fond of him; he saw the possibilities of success in this smart youngster in a New England village. It was the Ewold money that gave John Wingfield his start. With it he bought the store in which he began as a clerk. He lost a good part of the Ewold fortune later in one of his enterprises that did not turn out well. But all this is trifling beside what is to come. "He went on to his great commercial career. I, poor fool, was an egoist, too. I tried to paint. I had taste, but no talent. In outbursts of despair my critical discrimination consigned my own work to the rubbish heap. I tried to write books, only to find that all I had was a head stuffed with learning, mixed with the philosophy that is death to the concentrated application that means positive accomplishment. But I could not create. I was by nature only a drinker at the fountain; only a student, the pitiful student who could read his Caesar at eight, learn a language without half trying, but with no ability to make my knowledge of service; with no masterful purpose of my own--a failure!" "No one is a failure who spreads kindliness and culture as he goes through life," Jack interrupted, earnestly; "who gives of himself unstintedly as you have; who teaches people to bring a tribute of flowers to a convalescent! Why, to found a town and make the desert bloom--that is better than to add another book to the weight of library shelves or to get a picture on the line!" "Thank you, Jack!" said the Doge, with a flash of his happy manner of old, while there was the play of fleeting sunshine over the hills and valleys of his features. "I won't call it persiflage. I am too selfish, too greedy of a little cheer to call it persiflage. I like the illusion you suggest." He was silent for a while, and when he spoke again it was with the tragic simplicity of one near his climax. "Your father and I loved the same girl---your mother. It seemed that in every sympathy of mind and heart she and I were meant to travel the long highway together. But your father won her with his gift for ingratiation with the object of his desire, which amounts to a kind of genius. He won her with a lie and put me in a position that seemed to prove that the lie was truth. She accepted him in reaction; in an impulse of heart-break that followed what she believed to be a revelation of my true character as something far worse than that of idler. I married the woman whom he had made the object of his well-managed calumny. My wife knew where my heart was and why I had married her. It is from her that Mary gets her dark hair and the brown of her cheeks which make her appear so at home on the desert. Soon after Mary's birth she chose to live apart from me--but I will not speak further of her. She is long ago dead. I knew that your mother had left your father. I saw her a few times in Europe. But she never gave the reason for the separation. She would talk nothing of the past, and with the years heavy on our shoulders and the memory of what we had been to each other hovering close, words came with difficulty and every one was painful. Her whole life was bound up in you, as mine was in Mary. It was you that kept her from being a bitter cynic; you that kept her alive. "Some of the Ewold money that John Wingfield lost was mine. You see how he kept on winning; how all the threads of his weaving closed in around me. I came to the desert to give Mary life with the fragments of my fortune; and here I hope that, as you say, I have done something worthier than live the life of a wandering, leisurely student who had lapsed into the observer for want of the capacity by nature or training to do anything else. "But sometimes I did long for the centres of civilization; to touch elbows with their activities; to feel the flow of the current of humanity in great streets. Not that I wanted to give up Little Rivers, but I wanted to go forth to fill the mind with argosies which I could enjoy here at my leisure. And Mary was young. The longing that she concealed must be far more powerful than mine. I saw the supreme selfishness of shutting her up on the desert, without any glimpse of the outer world. I sensed the call that sent her on her lonely rides to the pass. I feared that your coming had increased her restlessness. "But I wander! That is my fault, as you know, Sir Chaps. Well, we come to the end of the weaving; to the finality of John Wingfield's victory. Little Rivers was getting out of hand. I could plan a ranch, but I had not a business head. I had neither the gift nor the experience to deal with lawyers and land-grabbers. I knew that with the increase of population and development our position was exciting the cupidity of those who find quicker profit in annexing what others have built than in building on their own account. I knew that we ought to have a great dam; that there was water to irrigate ten times the present irrigated area. "Then came John Prather. I saw in him the judgment, energy, and ability for organization of a real man of affairs. He was young, self-made, engaging and convincing of manner. He liked our life and ideals in Little Rivers; he wanted to share our future. In his resemblance to you I saw nothing but a coincidence that I passed over lightly. He knew how to handle the difficult situation that arose with the reappearance of old man Lefferts' partners. He would get the water rights legalized beyond dispute and turn them over to the water users' association; he would bring in capital for the dam; the value of our property would be enhanced; Little Rivers would become a city in her own right, while I was growing old delectably in the pride of founder. So he pictured it and so I dreamed. I was so sure of the future that I dared the expense of a trip to New York. "And always to me, when I looked at you and when I thought of you, you were the son of John Wingfield; you incarnated the inheritance of his strength. But when, from the drawing-room, I saw your father, whom I had not seen for fifteen years, then--well, the thing came to me in a burning second, the while I glimpsed his face before he saw mine. He was smiling as if pleased with himself and his power; he was rubbing the palms of his hands together; and I saw that it was John Prather who was like John Wingfield in manner, pose, and feature. You were like the fighting man, your ancestor, and your airy confidence was his. And I, witless and unperceiving, had been won by the same methods of ingratiation with which John Wingfield had won the assistance of the Ewold fortune for the first step of his career; with which he had won Alice Jamison and kept me unaware of his plan while he was lying to her. "Finally, let us say, in all charity, that your father is what he is because of what is born in him and for the same reason that the snowball gathers size as it rolls; and I am what I am for the same reason that the wind scatter the sands of the desert--a man full of books and tangent inconsequence of ideas, without sense; a simpleton who knows a painting but does not know men; a garrulous, philosophizing, blind, old simpleton, whose pompous incompetency has betrayed a trust! Through me, men and women came here to settle and make a home! Through me they lose--to my shame!" The Doge buried his face in his hands and drew a deep breath more pitiful than a sob, which, as it went free of the lungs, seemed to leave an empty ruin of what had once been a splendid edifice. He was in striking contrast to Mary, who, throughout the story fondly regarding him, had remained as straight as a young pine. Now, with her rigidity suddenly become so pliant that it was a fluid thing mixed of indignation, fearlessness, and compelling sympathy, she sprang to his side. She knew the touchstone to her father's emotion. He did not want his cheek patted in that moment of agony. He wanted a stimulant; some justification for living. "There is no shame in believing in those who speak fairly! There is honor, the honor of faith in mankind!" she cried penetratingly. "There is no shame in being the victim of lies!" "No! No shame!" the Doge cried, rising unsteadily to his feet under the whip. "And we are not afraid for the future!" she continued. "And the other men and women in Little Rivers are not afraid for the future!" "No, not afraid under this sun, in this air. Afraid!" An unconquerable flame had come into his eyes in answer to that in Mary's. "The others have asked me to act for them, and I think I may yet save our rights," said Jack. "Will you also trust me?" "Will I trust you, Jack? Trust you who gave up your inheritance?" exclaimed the Doge. "I would trust you on a mission to the stars or to lead a regiment; and the wish of the others is mine." Jack had turned to go, but he looked back at Mary. "And you, Mary? I have your good wishes?" He could not resist that question; and though it was clear that nothing could stay him--as clear as it had been in the _arroyo_ that he would keep his word and face Leddy--he was hanging on her word and he was seeing her eyes moist, with a bright fire like that of sunshine on still water. She was swaying slightly as a young pine might in a wind. Her eyes darkened as with fear, then her cheeks went crimson with the stir of her blood; and suddenly, her eyes were sparkling in their moisture like water when it ripples under sunshine. "Yes, Jack," she said quietly, with the tense eagerness of a good cause that sends a man away to the wars. "That is everything!" he answered. So it was! Everything that he could ask now, with his story and hers so fresh in mind! He started up the path, but stopped at the turn to look back and wave his hand to the two figures in a confident gesture. "Luck with you, Sir Chaps!" called the Doge, with all the far-carrying force of his oldtime sonorousness. "Luck! luck!" Mary called, on her part; and her voice had a flute note that seemed to go singing on its own ether waves through the tender green foliage, through all the gardens of Little Rivers, and even away to the pass. "Mary! Mary!" he answered, with a ring of cheeriness. "Luck for me will always come at your command!" A moment later Galway and the others saw him smiling with a hope that ran as high as his purpose, as he passed through the gateway of the hedge. "It will all be right!" he told them. With P.D. keeping his muzzle close to the middle of Jack's back, the party started toward his house, which took them almost the length of the main street. "Prather went by the range trail, of course?" Jack asked Galway. "No, straight out across the desert," said Galway. "Straight out across the desert!" exclaimed Jack, mystified. For one had a choice of two routes to Agua Fria, which was well over the border in Mexico. Not a drop of water was to be had on the way across the trackless plateau, but halfway on the range trail was a camping-place, Las Cascadas, where a spring which spouted in a tiny cascade welcomed the traveller. Under irrigation, most of the land for the whole stretch between the two towns would be fertile. There was said to be a big underground run at Agua Fria that could be pumped at little expense. "All I can make out of Prather's taking a straight line, which really is slower, as you know, on account of the heavy sand in places, is to look over the soil," said Galway. "He may be preparing to get a concession in Mexico at the same time as on this side, so as to secure control of the whole valley. It means railroads, factories, new towns, millions--but you and I have talked all this before in our dreams." "Who was with him?" Jack asked. "Pedro Nogales. He seems to have taken quite a fancy to Pedro and Pedro is acting as guide. Leddy recommended him, I suppose." "No one else?" "No." "Good!" said Jack. As they turned into the side street where the front of Jack's bungalow was visible, Jim Galway observed that they had seen nothing of Leddy or any of his followers. "Maybe he's gone to join Prather," said Bob Worther. But Jack paid no attention to the remark. He was preoccupied with the first sight of his ranch in over two months. "It will be all right!" he called out to the crowd in his yard; for the others who had met him at the station were waiting for him there. "Bob, those umbrella-trees could shade a thin, short man now, even if he didn't hug the trunk! Firio has done well, hasn't he?" he concluded, after he had walked through the garden and surveyed the fields and orchards in fond comparison as to progress. "The best I ever knew an Indian to do!" said Jim Galway. "And everything kept right on growing while I was away! That's the joy of planting things. They are growing for somebody, if not for you!" Inside the house he found Firio, with the help of some of the ranchers, taking the pictures out of their cases. Firio surveyed the buccaneer for some time, squinting his eyes and finally opening them saucer-wide in approval. "You!" he said to Jack. And of the Sargent, after equally deliberate observation, he said: "A lady!" That seemed about all there was to say and expressed the thought of the onlookers. "And, Firio, now it's the trail!" said Jack. "_Sí, sí_!" said Firio, ever so softly. "We take rifles?" "Yes. Food for a week and two-days' water." It pleased Jack to hang the portraits while Firio was putting on Jag Ear's pack; and he made it a ceremony in which his silence was uninterrupted by the comments of the ranchers. They stood in wondering awe before John Wingfield, Knight, hung where he could watch the Eternal Painter at his sunset displays and looking at the "Portrait of a Lady" across the breadth of the living-room, whose neutral tones made a perfect setting for their dominant genius. "I believe they are at home," said Jack, with a fond look from one to the other, when Firio came to say that everything was ready. "Señor Jack," whispered Firio insinuatingly, "for the trail you wear the grand, glad trail clothes and the big spurs. I keep them shiny--the big spurs!" He was speaking with the authority of an expert in trail fashions, who would consider Jack in very bad form if he refused. "Why, yes, Firio, yes; it is so long since we have been on the trail!" And he went into the bedroom to make the change. "I've never seen him quite so dumb quiet!" said Worther. Jack certainly had been quiet, ominously quiet and self-contained. When he came out of the bedroom he was without the jaunty freedom of manner that Little Rivers always associated with his full regalia. In place of the dreamy distances in his eyes on such occasions were a sad preoccupation and determination. When they went outside to Firio and the waiting ponies, the Eternal Painter was in his evening orgy of splendor. But even Jack did not look up at the sky this time as he walked along in silence with his fellow-citizens to the point where the farthest furrow of his ranch had been drawn across the virgin desert. His foot was already in the stirrup when Jim Galway spoke the thought of all: "Jack, there's only two of you, and if it happened that you met Leddy--" "It is Prather that I want to see," Jack answered. "But Leddy's whole gang! We don't know what your plans are, but if there's going to be a mix-up, why, we've got to be with you!" "No!" said Jack, decidedly. "Remember, Jim, you were to trust me. This is a mission that requires only two; it is between Prather and me. We are going to get acquainted for the first time." Already Firio, riding Wrath of God, had started, and the bells of Jag Ear were jingling, while the rifles, their bores so clean from Firio's care, danced with the gleams of sunset in their movement with the burro's jogging trot. Jack sprang into the saddle, his face lighting as the foot came home in the stirrup. "It will be all right!" he called back. P.D. in the freshness of his long holiday, feeling a familiar pressure of a leg, hastened to overtake his companions; and the group of Little Riversites watched a chubby horseman and a tall, gaunt horseman, bathed in gold, riding away on a hazy sea of gold, with Jag Ear's bells growing fainter and fainter, until the moving specks were lost in the darkness. XXXVI AROUND THE WATER-HOLE Easy traveller had turned speedy traveller, on a schedule. Never had he and Firio ridden so fast as in pursuit of John Prather, who had eight hours' start of them on a two-days' journey. Jag Ear had to trot all the time to keep up. Ounce by ounce he was drawing on his sinking fund of fat in a constitutional crisis. "I keep his hoofs good. I keep his wind good. All right!" said Firio. It was after midnight before the steady jingle of Jag Ear's orchestra had any intermission. An hour for food and rest and the little party was off again in the delicious cool of the night, toward a curtain pricked with stars which seemed to be drawn down over the edge of the world. "What sort of horses had Prather and Nogales?" Jack asked. He must reach the water-hole as soon as Prather; for it was not unlikely that Prather might have fresh mounts waiting there to take him on to the nearest railroad station in Mexico. "Look good, but bad. Nogales no know horses!" Firio answered. "And they rode in the heat of the day!" said Jack, confidently. "_Sí_! And we ride P.D. and Wrath of God!" There were no sign-posts on this highway of desert space except the many-armed giant cacti, in their furrowed armor set with clusters of needles, like tawny auroras gleaming faintly; no trail on the hard earth under foot, mottled with bunches of sagebrush and sprays of low-lying cacti, all as still as the figures of an inlaid flooring in the violet sheen, with an occasional quick, irregular, shadowy movement when a frightened lizard or a gopher beat a precipitate retreat from the invading thud of hoofs in this sanctuary of dust-dry life. And the course of the hoofs was set midway between the looming masses of the mountain walls of the valley. Firio listened for songs from Señor Jack; he waited for stories from Señor Jack; but none came. He, the untalkative one of the pair, the living embodiment of a silent and happy companionship back and forth from Colorado to Chihuahua, liked to hear talk. Without it he was lonesome. If, by the criterion of a school examination, he never understood more than half of what Jack said, yet, in the measure of spirit, he understood everything. Now Jack was going mile after mile with nothing except occasional urging words to P.D. His close-cut hair well brushed back from his forehead revealed the sweep of his brow, lengthening his profile and adding to the effect of his leanness. The moonlight on his face, which had lost its tan, gave him an aspect of subdued and patient serenity in keeping with the surroundings. You would have said that he could ride on forever without tiring, and that he could go over a precipice now without even seeing any danger sign. He had never been like this in all Firio's memory. The silence became unsupportable for once to Indian taciturnity. If Jack would not talk Firio would. Yes, he would ask a question, just to hear the sound of a voice. "We go to fight?" "No, Firio." "Not to fight Prather?" "No." "To fight Leddy?" "I hope not." "Why we go? Why so--why so--" he had not the language to express the strange, brooding inquiry of his mind. "I go to save Little Rivers." "_Sí_!" said Firio, but as if this did not answer his question. "I go to get the end of a story, Firio--my story!" continued Jack. "I have travelled long for the story and now I shall have it all from John Prather." "_Sí, sí_!" said Firio, as if all the knowledge in the world had flashed into his head quicker than the hand of legerdemain could run the leaves of a pack of cards through its fingers. "And then?" At last Firio had won a smile from the untanned face which could not be the same to him until it was tanned. "Then I shall plant seeds and keep the ground around them soft and the weeds out of it; and I shall wear my heart on my sleeve and lay a siege--a siege in the open, without parallels or mines! A siege in the open!" Firio did not understand much about parallels or mines or, for that matter, about sieges; but he could see the smile fading from Jack's lips and could comprehend that the future of which Jack was speaking was very far from another prospect, which was immediate and vivid in his mind. "But you must fight Leddy! _Sí, sí_! You must fight Leddy first!" "Then I must, I suppose," said Jack, absently. "All things in their turn and time." "_Sí_!" answered Firio. All things in their turn and time! This desert truth was bred in him through his ancestry, no less than in the Eternal Painter himself. Again the silence of the morning darkness, with all the stars twinkling more faintly and some slipping from their places in the curtain into the deeper recesses of the broad band of night on the surface of the rolling ball. The plodding hoofs kept up their regular beat of the march of their little world of action in the presence of the Infinite; plodding, plodding on into the dawn which sent the last of the stars in flight, while the curtain melted away before blue distances swimming with light. Still bareheaded, Jack looked into the face of the sun which heaved above an irregular roof of rocks. It blazed into the range on the other side of the valley. It slaked its thirst with the slight fall of dew as a great, red tongue would lick up crumbs. Sun and sky, cactus and sagebrush, rock and dry earth and sand, that was all. Nowhere in that stretch of basin that seemed without end was there a sign of any other horseman or of human life. But at length, as they rode, their eyes saw what only eyes used to desert reaches could see, that the speck in the distance was not a cactus or even two or three cacti in line, but something alive and moving. Perceptibly they were gaining on it, while it developed into two riders and a pack animal in single file. Now Jack and Firio were coming into a region of more stunted vegetation, and soon the two figures emerged into a stretch of gray carpet on which they were as clearly silhouetted as a white sail on a green sea. "Very thick sand there--five or six miles of it. It make this the long way," said Firio. "They call it the apron of hell to fools who ride at noon." "And beyond that how many miles to the water-hole?" "Five or six." But Firio knew a way around where the going was good. It made a difference of two or three miles in distance against them, but two or three times that in their favor in time and the strength taken out of their ponies. "How long will Prather be in getting through the sand?" Jack asked. Firio squinted at the objects of their pursuit for a while, as if he wanted to be exact. "Almost as many hours as miles," he said. Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins. A single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into the steel-blue of the sky. The savage, merciless hours of the desert day approached; the hours of reckoning for unknowing and unprepared travellers. Jag Ear's bells had a faint plaintiveness at intervals and again their jingling was rapid and hysterical, as he tried to make up the distance lost through a lapse in effort. He had ceased altogether to wiggle the sliver of ear--the baton with which he conducted his orchestra--because this was clearly a waste of energy. P.D.'s steps still retained their dogged persistence, but their regular beat was slower, like that of a clock that needs winding. His head hung low. Wrath of God was no more and no less melancholy than when he was rusticating in Jack's yard. It seemed as if his sad visage, so reliably and grandly sad, might still be marching on toward the indeterminate line of the horizon when his legs were worn off his body. "Firio, you brown son of the sun," said Jack, with a sudden display of his old-time trail imagery, "you prolix, garrulous Firio, you knew! You had the great equine trio ready, and look at the miles they have done since sunset to prove it! You, P.D., favorite trooper of our household cavalry! You, Wrath of God, don't be afraid to make an inward smile, for your face will never tell on you! You, Jag Ear, beat a tattoo with the fragment of the gothic glory of burrohood, for we rest, to go on all the faster when the heat of the day is past!" While Prather and Nogales were riding over hell's apron, their pursuers had saddles off hot, moist backs, over which knowing hands were run to find no sores. After they had eaten, P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear stood in drooping relaxation which would make the most of every moment of respite. Jack and Firio, with a blanket fastened to the rifles as standards, made a patch of shade in which they lay down. "Have a nap, Firio," said Jack. "I will wake you when it is time to start." "And you--you no sleep?" asked Firio. "I could not sleep to-day," Jack answered. "I don't feel as if I could sleep until I've seen Prather and heard his story--my story--Firio!" And he lay with eyes half closed, staring at the steel blue overhead. It was well after midday when they mounted for the remainder of the journey. The Eternal Painter was shaking out the silvery cloud-mist of his beard across a background that had a softer, kindlier, deeper blue. The shadows of the ponies and their riders and Jag Ear and his pack no longer lay under their bellies heavily, but were stretched out to one side by the angle of the sun, in cheerful, jogging fraternity. Prather and Nogales had again become only a speck. "Do you think that they are out of the sand?" asked Jack. "Very near," Firio answered. "Their ponies had a whole night's rest--we must not forget that," said Jack; "and they must be in a hurry, for certainly Nogales had sense enough to rest over noon." "_Quien sabe_!" answered Firio. "But we catch them--_sí, sí_!" Leading the way, Firio turned toward the eastern range until he came to a narrow tongue of shale almost as hard to the hoofs as asphalt, that ran like a shoal across that sea of sand. Rest had given the great equine trio renewed life. P.D., reduced in rank to second place, could not think of allowing more than a foot between his muzzle and the tail of Wrath of God, who was bound to make up the time he had lost in pursuit of the horizon. Another hypothesis of Jack's as to the cause of Wrath of God's melancholy was that solemn Covenanter's inability to get any nearer to the edge of the earth. Once he could poke his nose through the blue curtain and see what was on the other side, the satisfaction of his eternal curiosity might have made him a rollicking comedian. As for Jag Ear, his baton was once more conducting his orchestra in spirited tempo. He, who was nearest of all three in heart to Firio, might well have been saying to himself: "I knew! I knew we were not going through the sand! Firio and I knew!" So rapidly were they gaining that, when past the sand and they turned back westward, it was only a question of half an hour or so to come up with Prather and Nogales. Nogales had been riding ahead; but now Prather, after gazing over his shoulder for some time at his pursuers, took the lead. He was urging his horse as if he would avoid being overtaken. Evidently Nogales did not share that desire, for he let Prather go on alone. But Prather's horse was too tired after its effort in the sand and he halted and waited until Nogales, at a slow walk, closed up the gap between them, when they proceeded at their old, weary gait. As Jack and Firio came within hailing distance, both Prather and Nogales glanced at them sharply; but no word was spoken on either side. The absence of any call between these isolated voyagers of the desert sea was strangely unlike the average desert meeting. Prather and Nogales did not look back again, not even when Jack and Firio were very near. A neigh by P.D., a break into a trot by him and Wrath of God, and Firio was saying to Nogales: "You went right through the sand!" "_Sí_!" answered Pedro, with a grin. Still Prather did not so much as turn his head to get a glimpse of Jack, nor did he offer any sign of knowledge of Jack's presence when Jack reined alongside him so close that their stirrup leathers were brushing. Prather was gazing at the desert exactly in front of him, the reins hanging loose, almost out of hand. His horse was about spent, if not on the point of foundering. Jack was so near the mole on the cheek of the peculiar paleness that never tans that by half extending his arm he might have touched it. After all, it was only a raised patch of blue, a blemish removable by the slightest surgical operation which its owner must have preferred to retain. Firio and Nogales, also riding side by side, were also silent. There was no sound except Jag Ear's bells, now sunk to a faint tinkle in keeping with the slow progress of Prather's beaten horse. Looking at Prather's hands, Jack was thinking of another pair of hands amazingly like them. In the uncanniness of its proximity he was imagining how the profile would look without the birthmark, and he found himself grateful for the silence, which spoke so powerfully to him, in the time that it provided for bringing his faculties under control. "How do you do?" he said at last, pleasantly. Probably the silence had been equally welcome to Prather in charting his own course in the now unavoidable interview. He looked around slowly, and he was smiling with a trace of the satire that Jack had seen in the elevator, but smiling watchfully in a way that covers the apprehension of a keen glance. And he saw features that were calm and eyes that were still as the sky. "How do you do?" he answered; and paused as one who is about to slip a point of steel home into a scabbard. "How do you do, brother?" he added, as if uttering a shibboleth that could protect him from any physical violence. "Brother! Brother! Yes!" repeated Jack, with dry lips. This shaping of conviction into fact so nakedly, so coolly, made all the desert and the sky swim before him in kaleidoscopic patches of blue and gray, shot with zigzag flashes. He half reeled in the saddle; his hands gripped the pommel to hold himself in place. It was as if a long strain of nervous tension had come to an end with a crack. Prather's smile took a turn of deeper satisfaction. It was like John Wingfield, Sr.'s after Jack had left the library. "This is the first time we have ever met to speak," said Prather, easily. "Yes!" assented Jack, the gray settling back into desert and the blue into sky and the zigzag flashes becoming only the brilliance of late afternoon sunshine. "Certainly it is time that we got acquainted, brother," said Prather. "It is!" agreed Jack. "It is time that I knew your story!" "Which you have hardly heard from your--I mean, our father!" The pause between the "your" and the "our" was made with an appreciative significance. "Well, you see, I was the brother who had the mole on his cheek!" "Yes--pitifully yes!" said Jack, with a kind of horror at the expression of this face in his father's likeness, no less than at the words. "Why, no! I've often thought of _you_ rather pitifully!" said Prather. "You well might!" Jack answered, feelingly. "We may well share a common pity for each other." There was no sign that John Prather subscribed to the sentiment except in a certain quizzical turn of his lips, as he looked away. "Yes, the story has been kept from me. I have come for it!" said Jack. "That is raking out the skeletons. But why not rake out our skeletons together, you and I?" said Prather. It was clear that he enjoyed the prospect as an opportunity for retributive enlightenment. "To begin with, I have the rights of primogeniture in my favor," he said. "I was born a day before you were, in the same city of New York. My mother's name was not down in the telephone list as Mrs. Wingfield, however--I look at it all philosophically, you understand--and it was just that which made the difference between you and me, outside of the difference of our natures. But I am proud of my birth on both sides, in my own way. My mother was won without marriage and she was true to father. A woman of real ability, my mother! She was well suited to be John Wingfield's wife; better, I think, in the practical world of materialism than your mother. By a peculiar coincidence, unknown to father, my mother called in Dr. Bennington. So you and I have a further bond, in that the same doctor brought us into the world." "And my mother must have known this!" Jack exclaimed, in racking horror. At last the cause of her exile was clear in all its grisly monstrousness; the source of the pain in her eyes in the portrait had been traced home. Again he saw her white and trembling when she returned to the house in Versailles to find a visitor there; and now he realized the fulness of her relief when the frail boy said that he did not like his father. Her travels had spoken the restlessness of flight in search of oblivion to the very fact of his paternity. The "I give! I give!" of the portrait was the giving of the infinity of her fine, sensitive being to him to make him all hers. His feeling which had held him on the desert when he should have gone home, that feeling of literal revulsion toward his inheritance, was a thing born in him which had grown under her caresses and her training. She had been living solely for him to that last moment when the book dropped out of her hand; and the incarnation of that which had killed her was riding beside him now in the flesh. He felt a weaving of his muscles, a tightening of his nerves, as if waiting on the spark of will, and all the strength that he had built in the name of the store was madly tempted. But no! John Prather was not to blame, any more than himself. He would listen to John Prather, as justice listens to evidence, and endure his stare to the end. "Yes, your mother knew," continued Prather. "My mother made a point of having her know. That was part of my mother's own bitterness. That was her teaching to me from the first. She had no illusions. She knew the advantages and the disadvantages of her position. She was and is one of the few persons in the world of whom my father is a little afraid." "Then she still lives?" asked Jack sharply. "Yes, she is in California," Prather returned. "She often referred to the mole on my cheek as the symbol of my handicap in the world of convention. 'But for the mole, Jack, you would have the store,' she often said. It delighted her that I had my father's face. As I grew older the resemblance became more marked. I could see that I pleased my father with my practical ideas of life, which I developed when quite young. He saw to it that my mother and I lived well and that I went to a good school. From my books I drew the same lesson as from my peculiar inheritance; the lesson that my mother was always inculcating. 'A bank account,' she would repeat, 'will erase even a mole patch on the cheek. It is the supreme power that will carry you anywhere, Jack. You must make money!' "When father came to see her he would talk with a candor with which I am sure he never talked to your mother. He would tell of his successes, revealing the strategy and system by which they were won, finding her both understanding and sympathetic. I became a little blade that delighted to get sharp against his big blade by asking him questions. He did not want me about the store, and this was one of the things in which my mother humored him. She knew just when to humor and just when to threaten the play of the strong card which she always held. "All the while her ambition was laying its plans. It was that I should have the Wingfield store one day, myself. Out of school hours I would range the other department stores. You see, I had not only inherited my father's face more strikingly than you had, but also his talents. I spent the summer vacations of my fourteenth and fifteenth years in a store. I won the attention of my superiors and promise of promotion. I foresaw the day when I should so prove my ability that father would take me into his own store, and then, gradually, I would make my place, secure, while you were idling about Europe. And in those days you were frail and I was vigorous. "There was no mistaking that father's sense of convention was the one thing that stood between him and my desire. He feared the world's opinion if the truth became known, and deep down in heart he could never get over the pride of having married into your mother's family. You had very good blood on the maternal side, as they say, while my mother had begun in the cloak department and was self-made, like father. Again, I was so truly his son in every instinct that he may have been a little jealous of me. Father does not like to think that any other man was ever quite as great as he is. I confess that is the way I feel, too. That is what life is, after all--it is yourself. Yes, I saw the store as mine--surely mine, with time!" Prather's reins lay across the pommel of the saddle drawn taut by the drooping head of his horse, which was barely dragging one foot after another. He gave Jack a glance of flashing resentment and then, in his first impulse of real emotion, made a fist of one hand and drove it angrily into the palm of the other before continuing. "Then father went to Europe to bring you home. He had decided for the son of convention, the son of blood! Though self-made, he was for family as against talent. Besides, it was a victory for him. At last you were his. After your return there was a scene between mother and him, a cool, bitter argument. He defied her to play her last card. He said that you knew the truth and that she could at best only make a row. And he wanted us out of New York; the place for me was a new country. He would make us a handsome allowance. So my mother agreed to his terms and we went to the Pacific coast. There I was to enter one of the colleges. My mother wanted me to have a college education, you see. The last meeting between father and me was very interesting, blade playing on blade. He really hated to let me go, for by this time he knew how hopeless you were. He embraced me and said that I would get on, anyway. I told him that the only trouble was that while I was the real son, I had a mole on my cheek. "The West was best. There we could claim the favor of convention, Mrs. Prather and her son. I matriculated at Stanford, but I saw nothing in it for me. It was all dream stuff. Greek and Latin don't help in building a fortune. They handicap you with the loss of time it takes to learn them, at least; and I meant to be worth a million before I was thirty. Now I know that I shall be worth two or three or four millions at thirty, if all goes as I plan. So I cut college and broke for Goldfield. I ran a store and was a secret partner in a saloon that paid better than the store. I was in the game morning, noon, and night; it beat marching to class to recite Horace and fiddle with the binomial theorem, as it must for every man who counts for something in the world." Throughout, Prather's tone, except for the one moment of anger, had been that of an even recital of facts by one who does not allow himself to consider anything but facts in the judgment of his position. At times he gave Jack covert glances out of the tail of his eye and saw Jack's face white and drawn and his head lowered. Now Prather became the victim--so he would have put it, no doubt--of another outburst of feeling. "But it was not like having the store!" he said. "No, my heart was in the store; and that morning when you saw me looking down from the gallery I was permitting myself to dream. I was thinking of what had come to you, the fairy prince of good fortune, who had no talent for your inheritance, and of what I might have done with it. I was thinking how I could win men to work for me"--and there he was smiling with the father's charm--"and of the millions to come if I could begin to build on the foundation that father had laid. I saw branches in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia--a great chain of stores all co-ordinated under my directing hand--I the master!" He rubbed the palms of his hands together as he had over the scintillation of the jewelry counters. Though Jack had not looked around, his ear recognized that crisp sound of exultant power. "Yes," Jack murmured thoughtfully, as if inviting Prather to go on with anything further he might have to say. "All mine--mine!" Prather concluded, in a sort of hypnosis with his own picture. Jack still stared at the earth, his profile limned in gold and the side of his face toward Prather in shadow. They were nearing the clump of cotton-woods around the water-hole at the base of a tongue of the range which ran out into the desert, and Firio rode up to whisper in Spanish: "Señor Jack, see there! Horsemen!" Jack raised his head with a returning sense of his surroundings to see some mounted men, eight in all he counted, riding along the range trail a half mile nearer the water-hole than themselves. Their horses had the gait of exhaustion after a long, hard ride. "You know who it is?" Firio whispered. "Yes," Jack answered. "They had the better trail and have outridden us. All right, Firio!" "Leddy--Pete Leddy and some of his men!" exclaimed Prather, shading his eyes to watch the file of figures now passing under the cotton-woods. It seemed to relieve him. "I suppose he came on my account," he added, nodding to Nogales. "Yes," said Nogales, with a grin. He always either grinned or his face had a half savage impassiveness. "I wonder if Leddy thought I was in danger," and Prather gave Jack a knowing glance of satisfaction. "We shall all camp together," he added, smiling. Jack did not answer for a moment. He was intent on the cotton-woods. Leddy and his companions appeared on the other side, the figures of riders and horses bathed in the sunset glow. Then they disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them up. "They are going on! They are not going to stop!" said Prather apprehensively. "There is a basin beyond the water-hole and the seepage makes a little pasture," Jack explained. "You will see them back in a moment." "Oh, yes!" said Prather, with a thrill in his voice; and again the palms of his hands were making that refrain of delight. "But I have told my story," he resumed. "Now may I ask you a question? Why have you come back?" Jack looked around frankly and dispassionately. "To save Little Rivers from you! I understand that you have secured the water rights." "Well, then, I have!" declared Prather, confidently, "and I mean to have the rights for the whole valley!" and he struck his fist into his palm. "You see," he went on, with another flash of satire, "it is not exactly fair that you should have the store and Little Rivers, too. I had heard of the possibilities here from my friend Leddy, who was also at Goldfield. A useful man in his place! He got his sixth notch there. When I came and looked around and saw that here was the opportunity I wanted, I wired father that in any fair division of territory everything west of the Mississippi belonged to me"--he was showing some bravado in his sense of security now, when he saw that Leddy and his men were returning through the cotton-woods to the water-hole--"and I should like to have you out of my way. I told him you were the picture of health, even if you didn't have anything in your head, and if you were ever going to learn the business it was time that you began. But father is always careful. Naturally he wanted to check off my report with another's; for he didn't want you back if you were ill. So he sent Dr. Bennington out to get professional confirmation of my statement." "And you told Jasper Ewold that you wanted the rights only to turn them over to the water users' association and then bring in capital to build a dam, with everybody sharing alike in the prosperity that was to come." "Yes, and Jasper Ewold was so simple! Well, what I told him was strategy--strategy of which I think father would approve. When you have a big object in view the end must justify the means. Look at the situation! Two hundred thousand acres of land waiting on water to be the most fertile in the world! Why, when I rode up the valley the first time and saw what could be done, I was amazed to think that such an opportunity should be lying around loose. Little Rivers was so out of the way that other promoters had overlooked it, and everybody had sort of taken it for granted that Jasper Ewold and his water users' association really had legal possession. It was my chance. I thought big. That dam should be mine. I had the money I had made in Goldfield, but it was not enough for my purpose. "Where should I turn for outside capital that would not demand a majority interest in the project? I concluded that it was time father did something for me in return for giving up the store. Besides this call of justice I had another influence with him. I was sure that when he told my mother that you knew the truth he was making a statement that suited his purpose. I was sure that you knew nothing of my story and that father did not want you to know it. I was ready to tell if he did not meet my demands. "Well, you know how he can talk when he wants to gain a point. I fancy that I talked as well as father when I showed him how that dam would pay for itself in five years in tolls and twenty per cent on the capital after that; when I showed him how a population ten times that of his store would have to take their water from me; when I showed him all the side issues of profit from town sites and the increase of values of the big holdings which Leddy's men would take up for me. You ought to have seen his eyes glow. He could not withstand his pride in me. 'You have the gift, the one gift!' he said. I told him yes, it was in the blood; and I struck while the iron was hot. I got an outright sum from him; and he could not resist a chance to share all that profit when capital was to be had in New York for three or four per cent. He went in as silent partner, as I was in the saloon at Goldfield; as a partner with a minority interest." John Prather paused to laugh to himself over his victory, while the movement of palm on palm was rapid and prolonged. "Our arrangement amounted to the commercial division of territory for the family, which I had suggested," he went on with appreciative irony. "You and he were to have the east side of the Mississippi and I was to have the west, and you were never to know my story. Publicly, father and I were strangers and quits, and we came to this agreement in the room of a down-town hotel. "The day before I started West I simply had to have a look through the store--the store that I loved and that I had to lose. Yes, the store is far more to my taste than this rough western life. Naturally, as my existence was to be kept a secret from you, when you followed me to the elevator and tried to get acquainted I couldn't have it." "But as the elevator descended you pointed to the mole," said Jack. "Did I? I suppose that was an involuntary, instinctive pleasantry. The previous evening father and I had had a farewell visit together. We went into the country." "The night after the scene in the drawing-room!" Jack thought. "I knew that father was worried because he had to make an effort to show that he was not. Usually he can cover his worries perfectly. He said that he might have a fight in order to keep you and that he very much wanted you to stay. But he did not succeed," concluded Prather, fist driving into palm. "You came on the express after me." "Because, fortunately, you went to the house to have a look at the ancestor!" "Yes," said Prather. "But I did not see you." "However, I saw you from the landing and overheard what passed between you and father!" "No matter!" cried Prather harshly. "I am prepared for you!" He looked toward the water-hole significantly. "And the concession is mine! The dam will be mine!" "The dam could be built and all the valley might bloom without so much power passing into the hands of one man," said Jack. P.D. scenting the pasturage and feeling the pangs of thirst was starting forward at a smarter pace; but Jack held him back to the snail's crawl of Prather's pony. "Who would do it? Jasper Ewold? Jim Galway?" Prather demanded. "What these men need is a leader. They don't realize what I am doing for them. Do they think I want to put in ten years out here for nothing? For every dollar that they make for me they are going to make one for themselves. That's the rule of prosperity. I am not robbing them. I am taking only my fair share in return for creative business genius. The fellows in Little Rivers who sulk and don't get on will have only themselves to thank." "But they lose their independence," Jack was arguing quietly, as if he would thrash out the subject. "There are other things than money in this world." "There's nothing much money won't do!" said Prather. "It will not give one self-respect or courage or moral fibre; it will not bring the gift of poetry, music, or painting; or turn a lie into truth; or bring back virtue to a woman who has been defiled; or make the courage to face death calmly." "It will do all I want!" Prather answered. "Father not having been true to his agreement by keeping you in New York, why should I keep his secret? He breaks faith; I break faith. It seems to me as if there were no escaping the penalty of my birth. I no sooner arrive than I find the whole town knows of your return; and not only that, but a wire comes from father saying that we had better not meet until he comes." "Until he comes! Yes, go on!" "Well, as you say, you are here to save Little Rivers and that meant an interview with me, and--well," again the palms in their crisp movement, "before I started out I told Pete Leddy that if you came after me I should look to him for protection, and it seems he is on time." "Yes," said Jack, without looking at Prather. All the while he had kept watch on the water-hole, and he received Prather's announcement stoically as a confirmation of his suspicions. "So, if you will take my advice, brother, the best thing for you to do is to ride back before we reach the water-hole, unless you prefer Leddy's company. This time he will fight you in his way." "My horse is tired and there is neither water nor feed for him except there." Jack stated this quietly and stubbornly, as he nodded toward the cotton-woods. Then he looked around to Prather. Suddenly Prather found himself looking at a face that seemed to have only the form of that face by the side of which he had been riding. It was as if another man had taken Jack's place in the saddle. The ancestor was rising in Jack. Prather saw an electric spark in Jack's eyes, the spark of the high voltage that made his muscles weave and a flutter come in his cheeks. "No, I am not going back until I have recovered the rights that you have taken from Little Rivers!" he said. Prather in sudden confusion realized that he had let his feelings go too soon. They were not yet at the water-hole, and he was within easy reach of that hand working on the reins in a way that promised an outburst. "You think of physical violence against me--your own flesh and blood!" he said defensively. He saw Jack shudder in reaction and knew that he was safe for the moment. When Jack looked away at the water-hole Prather's fingers slipped to his own six-shooter and rested there, twitching nervously; and in the rear Firio was watching both him and Nogales shrewdly. From any outward sign now, Jack might have been starting on another journey with quiet eagerness; a journey that might end at a precipice a few yards ahead or at the other side of the world. Of this alone you could be sure from the resoluteness of his features, that he was going straight on; while Firio, in the telepathy of desert companionship, understood that he was missing no developing detail within the narrow range of vision in front of P.D.'s nose. Trusting all to Jack, Firio was on wires, ready for a spring in any direction. They were coming to the edge of a depression of an old watercourse that wound around past the cotton-woods to the ridge itself and included the basin where Leddy and his followers had tethered their horses. But this part of it was dry sand. The standing figures around the water-hole had sunk down. Jack could see them as lumps in a row. A blade of flame from the setting sun fell on them, revealing the glint of rifle barrels. "Firio! Quick--down! P.D., down!" Jack called, dismounting with a leap; and as though in answer to his warning came the singing of bullets about their ears. P.D. had been trained to sink on all fours at a word and he and Jack together dropped into the cover of the _arroyo_, below the desert line. When he looked around Firio was at his side, still holding the reins of Wrath of God. But Wrath of God's sturdy, plodding nature had little facility in learning tricks. A tiny stream of blood was flowing down his forehead and he lay still. At last, all in loyal service, he had reached the horizon. His bony, homely, good old face seemed singularly peaceful, as if satisfied with the reward at his journey's end. Jag Ear was standing beside P.D. and Prather's burro next to him, both unharmed. Nogales's horse had also been killed, but its rider was safe. Prather was crawling down the side of the _arroyo_ on his belly, digging his hands into the dirt, his face white and contorted and his eyes shifting back and forth in ghastly incomprehension. His horse followed him and sank down in final surrender to exhaustion. By common impulse, Jack and Firio seized the rifles from Jag Ear's pack, while Nogales, a spectator, squatted beside Prather. "What--what does it mean?" Prather gasped, spasmodically. "I--I--was it Leddy that fired on us?" "Yes," said Jack over his shoulder, as he and Firio started up the bank of the _arroyo_ facing the water-hole. "No doubt of it." "It was you they wanted--not me--not me! I--I--" "I don't know. At all events, I do not mean they shall rush us!" Jack answered, as he and Firio hugged the slope with their rifles resting on top and only their heads showing above it. "No! It couldn't be that they recognized me. They will let me by! They expect me!" "Yes, you belong on their side!" Jack called back. "I will send out a flag of truce!" said Prather, brightening with the thought. "You, Nogales, take my handkerchief and go and explain to Leddy!" Nogales seemed agreeable to the suggestion. Indeed, he was very expeditious in starting. While Jack never took his eye off the sight of his barrel, Nogales walked across the gleaming interval between the two parties waving Prather's handkerchief. Leddy rose on his knee watchfully, rifle in hand, while he spoke with Nogales. Then Nogales started back with his head thrown up jubilantly, but stopped when he was within calling distance and sang out, truculently: "Leddy get you both! He get everything!" He turned on his heel and soon was another lump around the water-hole. "That makes nine, Firio!" said Jack. He smiled in relief to be rid of Nogales; smiled in happy confidence, as if he were truly the ancestor's child. "_Sí_!" answered Firio, as if he had just as soon there were a regiment against them. He was happy beyond words. He patted his rifle barrel; he spread out his big red bandanna beside his elbow and on it nicely arranged a couple of extra charges of cartridges. Prather remained flat on the bottom of the _arroyo_, overwhelmed. It was some time before he could speak. "I--I don't understand! It isn't possible!" he said finally. "Everything is possible with Leddy. It seems that there can be peace between him and me in this valley in only one way," Jack answered. "But me! I suppose he found out that I--" Prather stopped without finishing the sentence. "What am I to do?" he asked Jack in livid appeal. "Why, it is three against nine, if you choose!" Jack answered. "You have a rifle, and it is for your life." "My life!" Prather gasped, another wave of fear submerging him. "Yes. We have no horses with which to make our escape and we should be winged as soon as we exposed ourselves. Leddy means that we shall die of thirst, or die fighting." Through all this dialogue Jack had been speaking to the head that lay between his eye and a target. As Prather reached up a trembling hand to take his rifle from the back of his burro one of the lumps around the water-hole rose, possibly to change position. When it became the silhouette of a kneeling man, Jack fired and the figure plunged forward like an automaton that had had its back broken. "Eight!" whispered Firio. "Duck!" Jack told him; for a response instantly came in a volley that kicked up the dust around their heads. But Jack's rifle lay in limp hands. "Eight!" he repeated, dazedly. "And I shot to kill--to kill!" His face blanched with horror at the thing that he had done. It seemed as if the strength had been struck out of him. He appeared ready to let destiny overtake him rather than fire again. Then as in a flash, the ancestor in him reappeared and in his features was written that very process of fate which Dr. Bennington had said was in him. Again his hand was firm on the barrel and his eye riveted on the sight, as he drew himself up until he lay even with the bank of the _arroyo_. The volley from the cotton-woods had swept over Prather's head at the instant that he had taken hold of his rifle. It dropped from his grasp. He burrowed in the sand under the pressure of that near and sinister rush of singing breaths. "I can't! I can't!" he said helplessly. He was leaden flesh, without the power to move. At his words Jack glanced back to see a dropped jaw and glassy, staring eyes. "You are suffering!" exclaimed Jack. "Are you hit?" "No!" Prather managed to say, and reached out for his rifle in clumsy desperation, as if he were feeling for it in the dark. "Take your time!" said Jack encouragingly, as one would to a victim of stage fright. "There isn't any danger for the moment, while advantage of position is with us--the sun over our shoulders and in their faces." The lumps around the water-hole grew smaller. Evidently, as a result of the lesson, they were creeping backward on their stomachs to a less exposed position. Two had quite disappeared, or else the brilliant play of light had melted them into the golden carpet of reflected sunshine on which they rested. Directly, Jack saw two figures creeping over the rim of the pasturage basin. "So, that's it!" he said to Firio. Firio nodded his understanding of Leddy's plan to take them in flank under cover of the _arroyo_. "We shall have to respond in kind!" said Jack. He left his hat where his head had been and began crawling along the side of the _arroyo_, but paused to call to Prather, who, now that no bullets were flying, was trying the mechanism of his rifle with a somewhat steadier hand: "Prather, if you could manage to get up there beside Firio and join him in pouring out a magazine full at the right moment, it would help! If not, put your hat up there beside mine. You can do that without exposing yourself." Jack's tone was that of one who urges a tired man to take a few more steps, or an invalid without any appetite to try another sup of broth. It had no hint of irony. "No matter," said Firio. "Leddy know he can't fight. Leddy know there is only two of us!" His tone was without satire, but its sting was sharper than satire; that of an Indian shrug over a negligible quantity. It started Prather on all fours laboriously toward him. "I am going to the turn in the _arroyo_ that commands the next turn," Jack explained. "When I whistle you empty your magazines. Keep your heads down and fire fast, no matter if not accurately, so as to disturb their aim at me!" "_Sí_!" said Firio. "I know!" No one could deny that he was having a very good time making war in the company of Señor Jack. "Yes, Mister Prather," he added, when, after toiling painfully on his belly for the few feet he had to go, Prather lay with his stark face near Firio's; a face strangely like that of John Wingfield, Sr. when he saw Jasper Ewold from the drawing-room doorway. "For your life, Mister Prather! _Sí_! Up a little more! Chin high as mine, so! Eye on sight, so!" Prather obeyed in an abyssmal sort of shame which, for the time being, conquered his fear, though not his palsy; for his rifle barrel trembled on its rest. Meanwhile, Jack had crept to the bend in the _arroyo_. He was listening. It would not do to show his head as a warning of his presence. Faintly he heard men moving in the sand, moving slowly and cautiously. At the moment he chose as the right one, with rifle cocked and finger on trigger, he gave his signal. Then he sprang to the top of the bank, fully exposed to the marksmen at the water-hole. For no half measure would do. He must have a full view of the bottom of the next bend. There he saw two crawling figures. He fired twice and dropped down with three or four stinging whispers in his ears and a second volley overhead as he was under cover. Again he sprang up over the bank in the temptation to see the result of his aim. One of the would-be flankers lay prostrate and still, face downward. The other was disappearing beyond the second bend. "Seven, now!" he thought miserably, in comprehension of the whole business as ridicule in human savagery. "They won't trouble us again immediately. They will wait on darkness and thirst," he concluded; and called, as he turned back, to Firio: "It worked like a charm, O son of the sun! They could not fire at all straight with your bullets flying about their heads, disturbing their--" His speech ended at sight of Prather, half rolling, half tumbling down the slope, his hands over his face, while he uttered a prolonged moan. "Bullet hit a rock under sand!" said Firio, as Jack hastened to assist Prather, who had come to a halt at the very bottom of the _arroyo_ and lay gasping on his side. Jack took hold of Prather's wrists to draw his hands away from the wound. "My God! Out here, like a rat in a trap!" Prather groaned. "When I have all life before me! In sight of millions and power--a rat in a trap out on this damnable desert, as if I were of no more account than a rancher!" "Let me see!" said Jack; for Prather was holding his hands tight against his face, as if he feared that all the blood in his body would pour out if he removed them. "Let me see! Maybe it is not so bad!" Prather let his hands drop and the right one which was over the cheek with the mole was splashed red between the fingers. On the cheek was a raw spot, from which ran a slight trickle. The mole had gone. A splinter of rock, or perhaps a bullet, with its jacket split, ricocheting sidewise, had torn it clean from the flesh. "Not at all dangerous!" said Jack. "No?" exclaimed Prather, in utter relief. "It will heal in a fortnight!" A small medicine case was among the regular supplies that were always packed on that omnibus of a burro, Jag Ear. While Jack was bandaging the wound, Firio, who kept watch, had no news to report. "Nothing matters! They will get us, anyway!" Prather moaned. The shock of being hit had quite finished any pretence at concealing his mortal fear of the outcome. "Oh, I wouldn't say that! We already have them down to seven!" said Jack encouragingly, as he made a pillow of a blanket and bade Prather rest his head on it. But he knew well that they were a seven who had learned wisdom from the fate of their comrades. From Nogales, Leddy must have heard of the loss of two horses. At best, but one of the beleaguered three had any means of escape. Leddy could well afford to curb his impatience as he camped comfortably by the water-hole, while his own horses grazed. The sun was still above the western ridge in the effulgence of its adieu for the day. Jack was on his knee, with the broad, level glare full on him, looking at Prather, who was in the shadow; and his reflections were mixed with that pity which one feels toward another who is lame or blind or suffers for the want of any sense or faculty that is born to the average human being. For a man of true courage rarely sees a coward as anything but a man ailing; he is grateful for nature's kindness to himself. And the spark of John Wingfield, Knight, skipping generations before it settled on a descendant, had not chosen John Prather for its favor. The ancestor was all Jack's. Prather, in his agony of mind, had moments of wondering envy as he watched Jack's changing expression. He could see that Jack, in entire detachment from his problem of fighting Leddy, was thinking soberly in the silence of the desert, unconscious in his absorption of the presence of any other human being. Suddenly his eyes opened wide in the luminousness of a happy discovery; his lips turned a smile of supreme satisfaction, and his face seemed to be giving back the light of the sun. "It's all right!" he said. "Yes, everything is going to be all right!" "How?" asked Prather wistfully, feeling the infection of the confident ring of Jack's tone. "There is one horse left," said Jack. "He is in better condition than Leddy imagines. When darkness comes you can get away with him and by morning he will have brought you to water at Las Cascadas, halfway on the range trail. Then you will be quite safe." "Yes! Yes!" Prather half rose, his breath coming fast, his eyes ravenous. "And in return you will give Little Rivers back its water rights! Is that a bargain?" Jack asked. "Give up my concession and all it means to me! Give it up absolutely--its millions!" objected Prather, in an uncontrollable impulse of greed. "King Richard III, you remember," Jack declared, with a trace of his old humor breaking out over the new aspect of the situation, "said he would give his kingdom for a horse. He could not get the horse and he lost both his kingdom and his life. If he had been able to make the trade he might have saved his life and perhaps--who knows?--have won another kingdom." "I will save my life!" Prather concluded; but under his breath he added bitterly: "And you get both the store and Little Rivers!" in the prehensile instinct which gains one thing only to covet another. "You have the papers for the concession with you?" Jack asked. "I--I--" "Yes!" interposed Jack firmly. "Yes!" Prather admitted. "And you have pencil and paper to make some sort of transfer that will be the first legal step in undoing what you have done?" "Yes." While Prather was occupied with this, Jack found pencil and paper on his own account and by the light of the sun's last rays and in the happiness of one who has brought a story to a good end, he wrote to his father: "John Prather will tell you how he and I met out on the desert before you came and of the long talk we had. "You wanted a son who would go on building on the great foundation you had laid. You have one. He said that you wanted to give him the store. The reason why you might not give it to him no longer exists. The mole is gone. Of course there will be a scar where the mole was. I, too, shall have to carry a scar. But the means is in your power to go far toward erasing his, for his mother, Mrs. Prather, is still living. "So everything is clear. Everything is coming out right. John Prather and I change places, as nature intended that we should. You need have no apprehensions on my account. Though I had not a cent in the world I could make my living out here--a very sweet thought, this, to me, with its promise of something real and practical and worth while, at which I can make good. I know that you are going to keep the bargain that Prather and I have made; and think of me as over the pass and very happy as I write this, in the confidence that at last all accounts have been balanced and we can both turn to a fresh page in the ledger. JACK." When Jack, after he had received the transfer, gave the letter to Prather to read, Prather was transfixed with incredulity. "You mean this?" he gasped blankly, as his surprise became articulate. "Yes. You have quite the better of King Richard--you gain both the kingdom and the horse." "The store, yes, the store--mine! Mine--the store!" said Prather, in a slow, passionate monotone, his fingers trembling with the very triumph of possession as he thrust the letter into his pocket. "The store, yes, the store!" he repeated, amazement mixed with exultation. "But--" his keen, practical mind was recovering its balance; he was on guard again. Between him and the realization of his inheritance lay the shadow of the fear of the miles in the night. "But--there is no trick?" he hazarded in suspicion. "No!" Jack spoke in such a way that it removed the last doubt for Prather, who kneaded his palms together in a kind of frenzy, oblivious of all except the moneyed prospect of the kingdom craved that had become a kingdom won. "How long before I start?" he asked. "As soon as the first darkness settles and before the moon rises." "I shall need some food," Prather went on ingratiatingly. "And they say wounds bring on fever. Have you any water to drink on the way?" "We will fix you up the best we can. I will divide what water remains between you and P.D. He shall have his share now and you can drink yours later." The sun had set. The afterglow was fading, and in a few minutes, when the light was quite out of the heavens, Jack announced that it was time for Prather to start. "How shall I know the direction?" Prather asked. "Trust P.D. He will find it," said Jack. He held the stirrup for Prather to mount with the relief of freeing himself at last from the clinging touch of the phantoms. "You are perfectly safe. In two days you will be mounting the steps of a Pullman on your way to New York." "And you? What--what are you going to do?" Prather inquired hectically, with a momentary qualm of shame. "Why, if Firio and I are to have water to make coffee for breakfast we must take the water-hole!" Jack answered, as if this were a thing of minor importance beside seeing Prather safely on his way. "Be sure not to overwater P.D. after the night's ride, and don't overdo him on the final stretch, and turn him over to Galway when you arrive. Home, P.D.! Home!" he concluded, striking that good soldier with the flat of his hand on the buttocks. And P.D. trotted away into the night. Jack listened to the hoof-beats on the soft earth dying away and then crept up beside Firio on the bank and gazed into the black wall in the direction of the cotton-woods. A slight glow in the basin, which must be Leddy's camp-fire, was the only sign of life in the neighborhood. The silence was profound. He had not spoken a word to Firio. With one problem forever solved, he was absorbed in another. "Leddy drinks, eats, waits!" whispered Firio. "If we try to go they hunt us down!" "Yes," said Jack. "And we not go, eh? We stay? We fight?" "For water, Firio, yes! Two against seven!" "_Sí_!" Firio had no illusions about the situation. "_Sí_!" he repeated stoically. "And, Firio--" Jack's hand slipped with a quick, gripping caress onto Firio's shoulder. An inspiration had come to the mind of action, just as a line comes to a poet in a flash; as one must have come to the ancestor many times after he had gone into a tight place trusting to his wits and his blade to bring him out. "And, Firio, we are going to change our base, as the army men say--and change it before the moon rises. Jag Ear, we shall have to leave you behind," he added, when they had dropped back to the burro's side. "Just make yourself comfortable. Leddy surely wouldn't think of killing so valuable a member of the non-combatant class. We will come for you, by and by. It will be all right!" He gave the sliver of ear an affectionate corkscrew twist before he and Firio, taking all their ammunition, crawled along the bottom of the _arroyo_ and up the ridge where they settled down comfortably behind a ledge commanding the water-hole at easy range. "It's lucky we learned to shoot in the moonlight!" Jack whispered. "_Sí"!_ Firio answered, in perfect understanding. XXXVII THE END OF THE WEAVING For over a week a private car had stood on a siding at Little Rivers. Every morning a porter polished the brasswork of the platform in heraldry of the luxury within. Occasionally a young man with a plaster over a wound on his cheek would walk up and down the road-bed on the far side of the car. Indeed, he had worn a path there. He never went into town, and any glances that he may have cast in that direction spoke his desire to be forever free of its sight. Not a train passed that he did not wish himself aboard and away. But as heir-apparent he had no thought of endangering his new kingdom by going before his father went. He meant to keep very close to the throne. He had become clingingly, determinedly filial. At times the gleam of the brasswork would exercise the same hypnosis over his senses as the scintillation of the jewelry counters of the store, and he would rub his hands crisply together. John Wingfield, Sr. spent little time in the car. Morning and afternoon and evening he would go over to Dr. Patterson's with the question: "How is he?" which all Little Rivers was asking. The rules of longevity were in oblivion and the routine channels of a mind, so used to teeming detail, had become abysses as dark and void as the canyons of the range. On the day of his arrival in Little Rivers he found a town peopled mostly by women and children. All of the men who could bear arms and get a horse had departed, and with them Mary. Thereby hangs a story all to the honor of little Ignacio. After Jack had ridden away with his insistent refusal of assistance, apprehension among the group that watched him disappear in the gathering darkness was allayed by reports of men who had been at the store, where they found the Leddyites hanging about as usual. True, no one had seen either Pete or Ropey Smith, but Lang said that they were upstairs playing poker, a favorite relaxation from the strain of their intellectual life. But Ignacio learned from another Indian in Lang's service that Pete and seven of his best shots had started for Agua Fria about the same time as Jack, while the rest of the gang that had been left behind were making it their business to cover the leader's absence. Distrusting Ignacio, they locked him in a closet off the bar. In the early hours of the morning he succeeded in escaping with his news, which he carried first to Mary. She was not asleep when he rapped at her door. It had been a night of wakefulness for her, recalling the night after her meeting with Jack on the pass before the duel in the _arroyo_. "I for Señor Don't Care, now! I for every devil in him! And they go to kill him!" was the incoherent way in which he began his announcement. In an hour the alarm had travelled from house to house. While the gang slept at Lang's or in their tents, a solemn cavalcade set forth quietly into the night, with rifles slung over their shoulders or lying across the pommels of their saddles, bound to rescue Jack Wingfield. They had protested against Mary's going with all the old, familiar arguments that occur to the male at thought of a woman in physical danger. "It is the least that any of us can do," she declared. "But of what service will you be?" Dr. Patterson asked. "No one can say yet," she replied. "And no one shall stop me!" She was driven by the same impulse that had sent her across the _arroyo_ in face of the ruffians on the bank to Jack's side after he was wounded. "My pony can keep up with the best of yours," she added. Leddy had eight hours' start on a two-days' journey. It was not in horse-flesh to gain much on his fast and hardened ponies. There was little chance that Jack could hold out against such odds as he must face, even if he had escaped an ambush. So they rode in desperation and in silence, each too certain of what was in the minds of the others to make pretence of a hope that was not in the heart. Their only stop for rest was at Las Cascadas in the hot hours of midday. Darkness had fallen when they overtook a solitary horseman coming from Agua Fria. John Prather drew rein well to one side of the trail. He had a moment, as they approached, in which to think out his explanation of his position. "It's Prather, and riding P.D.!" Galway announced. "Where is Jack Wingfield?" came the merciless question as in one voice from all. "You are his friends! You have come to rescue him!" Prather cried. He seemed overcome by his relief. At all events, the wildness of his exclamation in face of the force barring the trail was without affectation. "There is time? There is hope?" "Yes! yes!" gasped Prather, as the men began to surround him. "Why are you here? Why on his horse?" "Leddy turned on me, too! I was fighting at Wingfield's side! We got two of them before dark! Then I was wounded and couldn't see to shoot. And I came for help. And you will be in time! He's in a good position!" "I think you are lying!" said Galway. "He couldn't help it!" said Bob Worther. "How--how would I have his horse if he weren't willing?" protested Prather, frantically. "By stealing it, in keeping with your character!" "Yes! On general principles we ought to--" "I have a piece of rope!" called a voice from the rear. "There isn't any tree. But we can drop him over the wall of a chasm!" Spectral figures with set faces appallingly grim in the thin moonlight pressed close to Prather. "My God! No!" he pleaded, throatily. "We fought together, I tell you! We drew lots to see which one should take the risk of riding through danger to save the other!" "Lying again!" "Here's the rope! All we've got to do is to slip a noose over his head!" "It's a clean piece of rope, isn't it?" said the Doge, in his mellow voice. "I don't think it's worth while soiling a clean piece of rope. Come! Taking his life is no way to save Jack's. Come, we are losing time!" "Right, Doge!" said the man with the rope. "But it is some satisfaction to give him a scare." "And take care of P.D.!" called another. "Yes, if you founder Jack's pony you'll hear from us a-plenty!" This was their adieu to John Prather, who was left to pursue his way in safety to his kingdom, while they rode on, following a hard path at the base of the range. Those with the best horses took the lead, while the heavier men, including the Doge, whose weight was telling on their mounts, fell to the rear. Mary was at the head, between Dr. Patterson and Jim Galway. The stars flickered out; the moon grew pale, and for a while the horsemen rode into a wall of blackness, conscious of progress only by the sound of hoof-beats which they were relentlessly urging forward. Then dawn flashed up over the chaos of rocks, pursuing night with the sweep of its broadening, translucent wings across the valley to the other range. The tops of the cotton-woods rose out of the sparkling sea, floating free of any visible support of trunks, and the rescuers saw that they were near the end of their journey. There was a faint sound of a shot; then of another shot and another. After that, the radiant, baffling silence of daybreak on uninhabited wastes, when the very active glory of the spreading, intensifying light ought, one feels, to bring paeans of orchestral splendor. It set desperation in the hearts of the riders, which was communicated to weary ponies driven to a last effort of speed. And still no more shots. The silence spoke the end of some tragedy with the first streaks from the rising sun clearing a target to a waiting marksman's eye. Around the cotton-woods was no sign of human movement; nothing but inanimate, dark spots which developed into prostrate human forms, in pantomimic expression of the story of that night's work done in the moonlight and finished with the first flush of morning. Two of the outstretched figures were lying head to head a few yards apart on either side of the water-hole. The one on the side toward the ridge was recognized as Jack, still as death. Another a short distance behind him, at the sound of hoof-beats looked up with face blanched despite its dark skin, the parched lips stretched over the teeth; but in Firio's eyes there was still fire, as he whispered, "All right!" before he sank back unconscious. A wound in his shoulder had been bandaged, but the wrist of his gun hand lay beside a fresh red spot on the earth. Jack had a bullet hole in the upper left arm plugged with a bit of cotton; and a deep furrow across the temple, which was bleeding. His rigid fingers were still gripping his six-shooter. He lay partly on his side, facing Leddy, who had rolled over on his back dead. Mary and Dr. Patterson dropped from their horses simultaneously. The doctor pressed his hand over Jack's heart, to find it still beating. "Jack!" they whispered. "Jack!" they called aloud. He roused slightly, lifting his weary eyelids and gazing at them as if they were uncertain shadows who wanted some kind of an explanation from him which he had not the strength to give. "We must drink--blaze away, Leddy," he murmured. "I'm coming down after the stars go out--close--close as you like--we must drink!" "No vital hit!" said the doctor; while Mary bringing water assisted him to bathe the wounds before he dressed them. "No, not from a bullet!" he added, after the dressing was finished and he had one hand on Jack's hot brow and the other on his pulse. Then he attended to Firio, who was talking incoherently: "Take water-hole--boil coffee in the morning--quail for dinner, Señor Jack--_sí, sí_!" When they had moved Jack and Firio into the shadow of the cotton-woods and forced water down their throats, Firio revived enough to recognize those around him and to cry out an inquiry about Jack; but Jack himself continued in a stupor, apparently unconscious of his surroundings and scarcely alive except for breathing. Yet, when litters of blankets and rifles tied together had been fashioned and attached to the pack-saddles of tandem burros, as he was lifted into place for the return he seemed to understand that he was starting on a journey; for he said, disjointedly: "Don't forget Wrath of God--and Jag Ear is thirsty--and bury Wrath of God fittingly--give him an epitaph! He was gloomy, but it was a good gloom, a kind of kingly gloom, and he liked the prospect when at last he stuck his head through the blue blanket of the horizon." Those of the party who remained behind for the last duty to the dead counted its most solemn moment, perhaps, the one that gave Wrath of God the honorable due of a soldier who had fallen face to the enemy. Bob Worther wrote the epitaph with a pencil on a bit of wood: "Here lies the gloomiest pony that ever was. The gloomier he was the better he went and the better Jack Wingfield liked him;" which was Bob's way of interpreting Jack's instructions. Then Worther and his detail rode as fast as they might to overtake the slow-marching group in trail of the litters with the question that all Little Rivers had been asking ever since, "How is he?" A ghastly, painfully tedious journey this homeward one, made mostly in the night, with the men going thirsty in the final stretches in order that wet bandages might be kept on Jack's feverish head; while Dr. Patterson was frequently thrusting his little thermometer between Jack's hot, cracking lips. "If he were free of this jouncing! It is a terrible strain on him, but the only thing is to go on!" the doctor kept repeating. But when Jack lay white and still in his bedroom and Firio was rapidly convalescing, the fever refused to abate. It seemed bound to burn out the life that remained after the hemorrhage from his wounds had ceased. Men found it hard to work in the fields while they waited on the crisis. John Wingfield, Sr. sat for hours under Dr. Patterson's umbrella-tree in moody absorption. He talked to all who would talk to him. Always he was asking about the duel in the _arroyo_ which was fought in Jack's way. He could not hear enough of it; and later he almost attached himself to the one eye-witness of the final duel, which had been fought in Leddy's way. When Firio was well enough to walk out he was to be found in a long chair on Jack's porch, ever raising a warning finger for silence to anyone who approached and looking out across the yard to Jag Ear, who was winning back the fat he had lost in a constitutional crisis, and P.D., who, after bearing himself first and last in a manner characteristic of a pony who was P.D. but never Q., seemed already none the worse for the hardships he had endured. The master of twenty millions would sit on the steps, while Firio occupied the chair and regarded him much as if he were a blank wall. But at times Firio would humor the persistent inquirer with a few abbreviated sentences. It was out of such fragments as this that John Wingfield, Sr. had to piece the story of the fight for the water-hole. "Señor Jack and Mister Prather, they no look alike," said Firio one day, evidently bound to make an end of the father's company. "Anybody say that got bad eyes. Mister Prather"--and Firio smiled peculiarly--"I call him the mole! He burrow in the sand, so! His hand tremble, so! He act like a man believe himself the only god in the world when he in no danger, but when he get in danger he act like he afraid he got to meet some other god!" "But Jack? Now, after Prather had gone?" persisted the father greedily. "We glad the mole go. It sort of hurt inside to think a man like him. He make you wonder what for he born." John Wingfield, Sr. half rose in a sudden movement, as if he were about to go, but remained in response to another emotion that was stronger than the impulse. "And Jack? He kept his head! He figured out his chances coolly! Now, that trick he played by going up on the ridge under cover of darkness?" "No trick!" said Firio resentfully, in instinctive defence. "That the place to fight! Señor Jack he see it." "And all through the night you kept firing?" "_Sí,_ after moon very bright and over our shoulders in their faces! _Sí_, at the little lumps that lie so still. When they move quick like they stung, we know we hit!" "Ah, that was it! You hit! You hit! And the other fellows couldn't. You had the light with you--everything! Jack had seen to that! He used his head! He--he was strong, strong!" Quite unconsciously, John Wingfield, Sr. rubbed his palms together. "When you pleased you always rub your hands same as Mister Prather," observed Firio. "Oh! Do I? I--" John Wingfield, Sr. clasped his fingers together tightly. "Yes, and the finish of the fight--how was that?" "Sometimes, when there no firing, Señor Jack and Leddy call out to each other. Leddy he swear hard, like he fight. Señor Jack he sing back his answers cheerful, like he fight. Toward morning we both wounded and only Leddy and one other man alive on his side. When a cloud slip over the moon and the big darkness before morning come, we creep down from the ridge and with first light we bang-bang quick--and I no remember any more." "Forced the fighting--forced it right at the end!" cried John Wingfield, Sr. in the flush of a great pride. "The aggressive, that is it--that is the way to win, always!" "But Señor Jack no fight just to win!" said Firio. "He no want to fight. In the big darkness, before we crawl down to the water-hole, he call out to Leddy to make quits. He almost beg Leddy. But Leddy, he say: 'I never quit and I get you!' 'Sorry,' says Señor Jack, with the devil out again, 'sorry--and we'll see!' No, Señor Jack no like to fight till you make him fight and the devil is out. He fight for water; he fight for peace. He no want just to win and kill, but--but--" bringing his story to an end, Firio looked hard at the father, his velvety eyes shot with a comprehending gleam as he shrugged his shoulders--"but you no understand, you and the mole!" John Wingfield, Sr. shifted his gaze hurriedly from the little Indian. His face went ashen and it was working convulsively as he assisted himself to rise by gripping the veranda post. "Why do you think that?" he asked. "I know!" said Firio. His lips closed firmly. That was all he had to say. John Wingfield, Sr. turned away with the unsteady step of a man who is afraid of slipping or stumbling, though the path was hard and even. Out in the street he met the cold nods of the people of a town where his son had a dominion founded on something that was lacking in his own. And one of those who nodded to him ever so politely was a new citizen, who had once been a unit of his own city within a city. Peter Mortimer had arrived in Little Rivers only two days after his late employer. Peter had been like some old tree that everybody thinks has seen its last winter. But now he waited only on the good word from the sick-room for the sap of renewed youth to rise in his veins and his shriveled branches to break into leaf at the call of spring. And the good word did come thrilling through the community. The physical crisis had passed. The fever was burning itself out. But a mental crisis developed, and with it a new cause for apprehension. Even after Jack's temperature was normal and he should have been well on the road to convalescence, there was a veil over his eyes which would not allow him to recognize anybody. When he spoke it was in delirium, living over some incident of the past or of sheer imagination. Now he was the ancestor, fitting out his ship: "No, you can't come! A man who is a malingerer on the London docks would be a malingerer on the Spanish Main. I don't want bullies and boasters. Let them stay at home to pick quarrels in the alleys and cheer the Lord Mayor's procession!" Now his frigate was under full sail, sighting the enemy: "Suppose they have two guns to our one! That makes it about even! We'll get the windward side, as we have before! Who cares about their guns once we start to board!" Another time he was on the trail: "I'll grow so strong, so strong that he can never call me a weakling again! He will be proud of me. That is my only way to make good." Then he was apprenticed to the millions: "All this detail makes me feel as if my brains were a tangled spool of thread. But I will master it--I will!" Again, he was happily telling stories to the children; or tragically pleading with Leddy that there had been slaughter enough around the water-hole; or serenely planning the future which he foresaw for himself when the phantoms were laid: "I may not know how to run the store, but I do seem to fit in here. We can find the capital! We will build the dam ourselves!" His body grew stronger, with little appreciable change otherwise. For an instant he would seem to know the person who was speaking to him; then he was away on the winds of delirium. "His mind is too strong for him not to come out of this all right. It is only a question of time, isn't it?" insisted the father. "There was a far greater capacity in him for suffering in that hellish fight than there was in Pete Leddy," said Dr. Patterson. "He had sensitiveness to impressions which was born in him, at the same time that a will of steel was born in him--the sensitiveness of the mother, perhaps, and the will of the ancestor. His life hung by a thread when we found him and his nerves had been twisted and tortured by the ordeal of that night. And that isn't all. There was more than fighting. Something that preceded the fight was even harder on him. I knew from his look when he set out for Agua Fria that he was under a terrible strain; a strain worse than that of a few hours' battle--the kind that had been weighing day after day on the will that grimly sustained its weight. And that wound in the head was very close, very, and it came at the moment when he collapsed in reaction after that last telling shot. Something snapped then. There was a fracture of the kind that only nature can set. Will he come out of this delirium, you ask? I don't know. Much depends upon whether that strain is over for good or if it is still pressing on his mind. When he rises from his bed he may be himself or he may ride away madly into the face of the sun. I don't know. Nobody on earth can know." "Yes, yes!" said John Wingfield, Sr. slowly. In Jack's wildest moments it was Mary's voice that had the most telling effect. However low she spoke he seemed always to recognize the tone and would greet it with a smile and frequently break into verses and scraps of remembered conversations of his boyhood exile in villa gardens. One morning, when she and Dr. Patterson had entered the room together, Jack called out miserably: "Just killing, killing, killing! What will Mary say to me, now?" He raised his hands, fingers spread, and stared at them with a ghastly look. She sprang to the bedside and seized them fast in hers, and bending very close to him, as if she would impart conviction with every quivering particle of her being, she said: "She thinks you splendid! She is glad, glad! It is just what she wanted you to do. She wished every bullet that you fired luck--luck for your sake, to speed it straight to the mark!" He seemed to understand what she was saying, as one understands that shade is cool after the broiling torment of the sun. "Luck will always come at your command, Mary!" he whispered, repeating his last words when he left the Ewold garden to go to the wars. "And she wants you to rest--just rest--and not worry!" This had the effect of a soothing draught. Smilingly he fell back on the pillow and slept. "You put some spirit into that!" said the doctor, after he and Mary had tiptoed out of the room; "a little of the spirit in keeping with a dark-eyed girl who lives in the land of the Eternal Painter." "All I had!" answered Mary, with simple earnestness. At noon Jack was still sleeping. He slept on through the last hours of the day. "The first long stretch he has had," ran the bulletin, from tongue to tongue, "and real sleep, too--the kind that counts!" In the late afternoon, when the coolness and the shadows of evening were creeping in at the doors and windows, the doctor, Peter Mortimer, the father, and Firio were on the veranda, while Mrs. Galway was on watch by the bedside. "He's waking!" she came out to whisper. The doctor hastened past her into the sick-room. As he entered, Jack looked up with a bright, puzzled light in his eyes. "Just what does this mean?" he asked. "Just how does it happen that I am here? I thought that I--" "We brought you in some days ago," the doctor explained. "And since you took the water-hole your mind has been enjoying a little vacation, while we moved your body about as we pleased." "I took the water-hole, then! And Firio? Firio? He--" "He is just waiting outside to congratulate you on the re-establishment of the old cordial relations between mind and body," the doctor returned; and slipped out to call Firio and to announce: "He is right as rain, right as rain!" news that Mrs. Galway set forth immediately to herald through the community. As for Firio, he strode into Jack's presence with the air of conqueror, sage, and prophet in one. "Is it really you, Firio? Come here, so that I can feel of you and make sure, you son of the sun!" Jack put out his thin, white hand to Firio, and the velvet of Firio's eyes was very soft, indeed. "Did you know when they brought you in?" Jack asked. "When burro stumble I feel ouch and see desert and then I drift away up to sky again," answered Firio. "All right now, eh? Pretty soon you so strong I have to broil five--six--seven quail a day and still you hungry!" The doctor who had been looking on from the doorway felt a vigorous touch on the arm and turned to hear John Wingfield, Sr. asking him to make way. With a grimace approaching a scowl he drew back free of Jack's sight and held up his hand in protest. "You had better not excite him!" he whispered. "But I am his father!" said John Wingfield, Sr. with something of his old, masterful manner in a moment of irritation, as he pushed by the doctor. He paused rather abruptly when his eyes met Jack's. A faint flush, appearing in Jack's cheeks, only emphasized his wanness and the whiteness of his neck and chin and forehead. "Well, Jack, right as rain, they say! I knew you would come out all right! It was in the blood that--" and the rest of John Wingfield, Sr.'s speech fell away into inarticulateness. It was a weak, emaciated son, this son whom he saw in contrast to the one who had entered his office unannounced one morning; and yet the father now felt that same indefinable radiation of calm strength closing his throat that he had felt then. Jack was looking steadily in his father's direction, but through him as through a thin shadow and into the distance. He smiled, but very faintly and very meaningly. "Father, you will keep the bargain I have made," he said, as if this were a thing admitting of no dispute. "It is fair to the other one, isn't it? Yes, we have found the truth at last, haven't we? And the truth makes it all clear for him and for you and for me." "You mean--it is all over--you stay out here for good--you--" said John Wingfield, Sr. gropingly. Then another figure appeared in the doorway and Jack's eyes returned from the distances to rest on it fondly. In response to an impulse that he could not control, Peter Mortimer was peering timidly into the sick-room. "Why, Peter!" exclaimed Jack, happily. "Come farther in, so I can see more of you than the tip of your nose." After a glance of inquiry at the doctor, which received an affirmative nod, Peter ventured another step. "So it's salads and roses, is it, Peter?" Jack continued. "Well, I think you may telegraph any time, now, that the others can come as soon as they are ready and their places are filled." Thus John Wingfield, Sr. had his answer; thus the processes of fate that Dr. Bennington had said were in the younger man had worked out their end. Under the spur of a sudden, powerful resolution, the father withdrew. In the living-room he met Jasper Ewold. The two men paused, facing each other. They were alone with the frank, daring features from Velasquez's brush and with the "I give! I give!" of the Sargent, both reflecting the afterglow of sunset; while the features of the living--John Wingfield, Sr.'s, in stony anger, and Jasper Ewold's, serene in philosophy--told their story without the touch of a painter's genius. "You have stolen my son, Jasper Ewold!" declared John Wingfield, Sr. with the bitterness of one whose personal edict excluded defeat from his lexicon, only to find it writ broad across the page. "I suppose you think you have won, damn you, Jasper Ewold!" The Doge flushed. He seemed on the point of an outburst. Then he looked significantly from the portrait of the ancestor to the portrait of the mother. "He was never yours to lose!" was the answer, without passion. John Wingfield, Sr. recoiled, avoiding a glance at the walls where the pictures hung. The Doge stepped to one side to leave the way clear. John Wingfield, Sr. went out unsteadily, with head bowed. But he had not gone far before his head went up with a jerk and he struck fist into palm decisively. Rigidly, ignoring everyone he passed and looking straight ahead, he walked rapidly toward the station, as if every step meant welcome freedom, from the earth that it touched. His private car was attached to the evening express, and while it started homeward with the king and the determinedly filial heir-apparent to the citadel of the push-buttons, through all the gardens of Little Rivers ran the joyous news that Jack was "right as rain." It was a thing to start a continual exchange of visits and to keep the lights burning in the houses unusually late. But all was dark and silent out at Bill Lang's store. After their return from Agua Fria, the rescuing party, Jim Galway leading, had attended to another matter. The remnants of Pete Leddy's gang, far from offering any resistance, explained that they had business elsewhere which admitted of no delay. There was peace in the valley of Little Rivers. Its phantoms had been laid at the same time as Jack's. XXXVIII THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS "Persiflage! Persiflage!" cried the Doge. He and Jack were in the full tilt of controversy, Jack pressing an advantage as they came around the corner of the Ewold house. It was like the old times and better than the old times. For now there was understanding where then there had been mystery. The stream of their comradeship ran smoothly in an open country, with no unsounded depths. "But I notice that you always say persiflage just as I am getting the better of the argument!" Jack whipped back. "Has it taken you all this time to find that out? For what purpose is the word in the English vocabulary? But I'll take the other side, which is the easy one, next time, and then we'll see! Boom! boom!" The Doge pursed out his lips in mock terrorization of his opponent. "You are pretty near yourself again, young sir," he added, as he paused at the opening in the hedge. "Yes, strength has been fairly flooding back the last two or three days. I can feel it travelling in my veins and making the tissues expand. It is glorious to be alive, O Doge!" "Now, do you want me to take the other side on that question so you can have another unearned victory? I refuse to humor the invalid any longer and I agree. The proposition that it is glorious to live on such an afternoon as this is carried unanimously. But I will never agree that you can grow dates the equal of mine." "Not until my first crop is ripe; then there will be no dispute!" "That is real persiflage!" the Doge called after Jack. Jack had made his first visit to the Doge's garden since he had left it to meet Prather and Leddy rather brief when he found that Mary was not at home. She had ridden out to the pass. Her trips to the pass had been so frequent of late that he had seen little of her during his convalescence. Yet he had eaten her jelly exclusively. He had eaten it with his bread, his porridge, his dessert, and with the quail that Firio had broiled. He had even intimated his willingness to mix it with his soup. She advised him to stir it into his coffee, instead. When he was seated in the long chair on the porch and she called to ask how he was, they had kept to the domain of nonsense, with never a reference to sombre memories; but she was a little constrained, a little shy, and he never gave her cause to raise the barrier, even if she had been of the mind in face of a possible recurrence of former provocations while he was weak and easily tired. It was enough for him to hear her talk; enough to look out restfully toward the gray masses of the range; enough to know that the desert had brought him oblivion to the past; enough to see his future as clear as the V of Galeria against the sky, sharing the life of the same community with her. And what else? He was almost in fear of the very question that was never out of his mind. She might wish him luck in the wars, but he knew her too well to have any illusions that this meant the giving of the great thing she had to give, unless in the full spontaneity of spirit. This afternoon, with the flood of returning strength, the question suddenly became commanding in a fresh-born suspense. As he walked back to the house he met Belvy Smith and some of the children. Of course they asked for a story, and he continued one about a battered knight and his Heart's Desire, which he had begun some days previously. "He wasn't a particularly handsome knight or particularly good--inclined to mischief, I think, when he forgot himself--but he was mightily in earnest. He didn't know how to take no. Say 'No!' to him and push him off the mountain top and there he was, starting for the peak again! And he was not so foolish as he might seem. When he reached the top he was happy just to get a smile from his Heart's Desire before he was tossed back again. His fingers were worn clear down to the first joint and his feet off up to the knees, so he could not hold on to the seams of canyons as well as before. He would have been a ridiculous spectacle if he weren't so pitiful. And that wasn't the worst of it. He was pretty well shot to pieces by the brigands whom he had met on his travels. With every ascent there was less of him to climb, you see. In fact, he was being worn down so fast that pretty soon there wouldn't be much left of him except his wishbone. That was indestructible. He would always wish. And after the hardest climb of all, here he is very near the top again, and--" "And--and--" "I'll have to finish this story later," said Jack, sending the youngsters on their way, while he went his own to call to Firio, as he entered the yard: "Son of the sun, I feel so strong that I am going for a ride!" "You wear the big spurs and the grand chaps?" Firio asked. Jack hesitated thoughtfully. "No, just plain togs," he answered. "I think we will hang up that circus costume as a souvenir. We are past that stage of our career. My devil is dead." It was Firio's turn to be thoughtful. "_Sí_! We had enough fight! We get old and sober! _Sí_, I know! We settle down. I am going to begin to shave!" he concluded, stroking the black down on his boyish lip. With the town behind him and the sinking sun over his shoulder, the battered knight rode toward the foothills and on up the winding path, oblivious of the Eternal Painter's magic and conscious only that every step brought him nearer his Heart's Desire. Here was the rock where she was seated when he had first seen her. What ages had passed since then! And there, around the escarpment, he saw her pony on the shelf! Dropping P.D.'s reins, he hurried on impetuously. With the final turn he found Mary seated on the rock where she had been the day that he had come to say farewell before he went to battle with the millions. Now as then, she was gazing far out over that sea of singing, quivering light, and the crunch of his footsteps awakened her from her revery. But how differently she looked around! Her breaths were coming in a happy storm, her face crimsoning, her nostrils playing in trembling dilation. In her eyes he saw open gates and a long vista of a fair highway in a glorious land; and the splendor of her was something near and yielding. He sank down beside her. Her hands stole into his; her head dropped on his shoulder; and he felt a warm and palpitating union with the very breath of her life. "What do I see!" cried the Eternal Painter. "Two human beings who have climbed up as near heaven as they could and seem as happy as if they had reached it!" "We have reached it!" Jack called back. "And we like it, you hoary-bearded, Olympian impersonality!" Thus they watched the sun go down, gilding the foliage of their Little Rivers, seeing their future in the fulness and richness of the life of their choice, which should spread the oasis the length of that valley, and knowing that any excursions to the world over the pass would only sink their roots deeper in the soil of the valley that had given them life. "Jack, oh, Jack! How I did fight against the thing that was born in me that morning in the _arroyo_! I was in fear of it and of myself. In fear of it I ran from you that day you climbed down to the pine. But I shan't run again--not so far but that I can be sure you can catch me. Jack, oh, Jack! And this is the hand that saved you from Leddy--the right hand! I think I shall always like it better than the left hand! And, Jack, there is a little touch of gray on the temples"--Mary was running her fingers very, very gently over the wound--"which I like. But we shall be so happy that it will be centuries before the rest of your hair is gray! Jack, oh, Jack!" 
38171	----	Imprudence By F.E. Mills Young Published by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, London. This edition dated 1920. Imprudence, by F.E. Mills Young. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ IMPRUDENCE, BY F.E. MILLS YOUNG. CHAPTER ONE. "Now came still evening on." The fading light, warm and faintly glowing from the last rays of the May sun, lay with a lingering mellowness upon the fields, upon the light green of leafing trees, upon a white froth of late blackthorn blossoming in the hedges, upon the straggling township nestling in the hollow, and upon the tall red-brick chimneys dominating Wortheton--dominating the souls sheltering beneath the clustering roofs--dominating and subjugating brain and mind and body by the might of their crushing omnipotence, by the strength of wealth and industry and established order--gaunt chimneys, rising out of the green mist of the trees, grotesque, symbolic landmarks--index fingers witnessing in obelisk-like ugliness to the power and importance of successful commercial enterprise, to the dignity of capital and the drab necessity of labour, to, in short, the disproportionate values in most existing things. In the evening light, between the lengthening shadows flung by the hedges along the dusty road that leads to Wortheton, a girl walked listlessly, a girl whose youth was marred by a look of world-weary wisdom, as much at variance with the young face as the tall brick chimneys with the harmonious beauty of the landscape. But for that look, and the sullen expression in the brown eyes, the girl would have been beautiful, as the scene was beautiful, and the soft primrose light upon the uplands; but the buoyant elasticity, the hope, and the freshness of youth, these were lacking; there remained only the pitiful fact that in years the girl was in the springtime of life and in experience more matured. As she walked, her sullen gaze shifted furtively from the township below to the fair open country, growing momentarily dimmer and greyer as the light in the sky paled. A gap in the hedge revealed a narrow path between giant elms, and a cool shadowed coppice where the bracken fronds rose stiff and closely curled, and dark ivy twined thickly about the tree trunks. The girl turned aside into the coppice and, with the fugitive instinct of hiding from the light, penetrated its shaded depths, and paused and leaned her arms against the gnarled trunk of a sheltering beech tree, and rested her head upon her arms in dry-eyed tragic sorrow. In a fork of the leafy branches overhead a bird had its nest, sitting in brooding satisfaction upon its delicate speckled eggs. The intrusion startled it from slumber: the round eyes betrayed a suspicious uneasiness, and the soft warm body nestled closer over the eggs it protected. Quaint thing of feathers and bright-eyed watchfulness and maternal instinct, with no sense of anything beyond the supreme importance of hatching those little speckled eggs--drawing its unconscious comparison by the pride of elemental right to the disproportion in values in this as in other matters, happy in its prospective motherhood, peering timorously through the green tracery sheltering it, home at the unhappy prospective human mothers with resentful eyes lifted curiously to observe its brooding content. So still the girl remained, gazing upward into the deepening shadows that the little feathered mother lost her fear; the sharp anxiety faded from the round bright eyes, which never relaxed their unwavering vigilance even when the shadows, gathering closer, enveloped the still figure of the girl and wrapped her about with a hazy indistinctness that made her one with the landscape, a thing of indefinite outline and colouring, breathing, sentient nature in harmony with inanimate nature, immovable and silent as the tree against which she leaned. So night settled silently over Wortheton, and a wanderer stole home in its kindly shade. CHAPTER TWO. In the big ugly morning-room at Court Heatherleigh six people sat engaged with different degrees of interest on six ugly pieces of coarse material which were being fashioned into serviceable garments for the poor. The poor were an institution in Wortheton and so was charity: both, like the big chimneys dominating the town, were things of usage; all were in a sense interdependent, and had their headquarters at Court Heatherleigh, which was the big house and belonged to the owner of the big chimneys--the owner of most things in Wortheton, from the ugly brick cottages in which his employees dwelt to, one might say, the employees themselves. The Trades Unions had not penetrated the select privacy of Wortheton as yet. If occasionally a voice was uplifted in discontent and hinted at these things, it was speedily silenced; and life flowed on tranquilly as it had before the grumbler raised his foolish protest; and his place knew him no more. But each whisper was as a small stone flung in a mill stream; and stones follow the law of aggregation till eventually they dam the stream. The six busy workers in Court Heatherleigh morning-room were the six daughters of Mr Graynor, and their ages ranged from somewhere about fifty to eighteen. Besides the daughters, two sons had swelled the family. The younger of these had married indiscreetly, and died indiscreetly with his wife somewhere abroad, bequeathing an indiscreet son to his father because he had nothing else to leave behind him, having departed from the family tradition that the end and aim of life is to acquire wealth. He had acquired nothing beyond a wife and son; but he had loved both these, and been beloved in turn, so that, according to his views, he had prospered well: according to his brother William's views, he had been a fool. William carried on the family traditions, and would eventually succeed his father as owner of the big chimneys, the family mansion, and the guardianship of his numerous sisters. He was not married. No one expected him to marry; he did not expect it of himself. No woman worthy of William's attention had ever adventured across his path. Of the sisters, Miss Agatha Graynor, who was the eldest of the family by several years, took the lead in all things, social and domestic, and ruled the household with a despotism that not even old Mr Graynor had been known to question; though his wives--he had married twice--had never been permitted such absolute authority. In his youth he had been as despotic as Agatha; but he was an old man now, and weary; and his daughter overawed him. The one being to whom he clung was his young daughter. Prudence, the only child of his second wife; and after Prudence, his scapegrace grandson, Bobby, then at college, held possibly the strongest place in his tired affections. They were two very human young people, Prudence and Bobby, with a contempt for the Graynor traditions, and lacking the Graynor pride and self-complacency, and all the other creditable characteristics of an old, influential, commercial stock that had owned the greater part of Wortheton for generations, and had come to regard themselves by reason of local homage as personages of high importance in the land. Prudence made one of the working party from a matter of compulsion; charity of that nature bored her, and she hated sewing. Since leaving school, where her happiest years had been spent, Miss Agatha had imposed many irksome duties as a corrective for idleness: a healthy youthful desire for pleasure and recreation affronted her; if she had experienced such desires in her own youth she had forgotten them: possibly she had not experienced them; people are born deficient in various respects and in different degrees. Miss Agatha had always been Good: her young half-sister was lacking in piety, and suffered from warm human impulses which not infrequently led her into trouble and subsequent disgrace. Also Prudence was pretty; the other five Miss Graynors were plain. The pretty, bored little face bending over the plain sewing showed mutinous in the sunlit brightness of the quiet room; the small fingers were hot, and the needle was sticky and refused to pass through the coarse material: it bent alarmingly, and, in response to a savage little thrust from a determined steel thimble, snapped audibly in the silence. Miss Agatha looked up with quick rebuke. "Not again, Prudence? That is the second needle this morning." She hunted in her basket for a fresh needle, and passed it down the line to the rebellious worker in displeased silence. Prudence's blue eyes snapped dangerously, but she made no spoken comment. She threaded the new needle languidly, and then sat with it in her idle hands and stared through the open French window to the inviting stretch of green lawn, dotted with brilliant flower beds, which made tennis, or any other game, thereon impossible, which was the reason, Bobby was wont to assert, why his aunt insisted on their remaining. Bobby and Prudence would have made a clean sweep of the bedding-out borders if they had been allowed their will. Miss Agatha, looking up and observing this idleness, was on the point of remonstrating when the door opened opportunely to admit a visitor, and Prudence's delinquencies were forgotten in the business of welcoming the arrival. "My dear Mrs North!" Miss Agatha exclaimed, surprised, and rose hastily and shook hands with the vicar's wife, who, warm and a little flushed, greeted her effusively, and nodded affably to the train of nondescript sisters, who all rose and remained standing until the new-comer was seated, when they reseated themselves--all save Prudence; she edged a little nearer to the open window, prepared for escape at the first favourable moment. "Such an astonishing thing has happened," Mrs North was saying breathlessly to the monotonous accompaniment of the diligently-plied needles. "That girl, Bessie Clapp, has come back. I saw her myself in her mother's house." Miss Agatha's thin cheek became instantly pink. She turned in her seat and regarded her sisters with grave solicitude in her eyes. "Priscilla, Alice, Mary, Matilda, _and_ Prudence, leave the room," she said. Four needles were promptly thrust into the unfinished work, and the four sisters, who were echoes of Miss Agatha, and the youngest of whom was thirty, rose obediently and followed slowly Prudence's more alert retreat. When they had passed beyond sight of the window Miss Agatha turned apologetically to her friend. "Of course," she explained earnestly, "I couldn't discuss that subject in front of the girls." Mrs North, realising the delicacy of the position, generously acquiesced. "It was a little indiscreet of me," she allowed. "But I was never so astounded in my life. And the girl's mother actually defends her. She talks about `her own flesh and blood.' ... As though that makes any difference! I knew you would be shocked. It's such a scandal in the place. And to come back... where every one knows!" "She can't stay," said Miss Agatha decidedly; and her thin lips compressed themselves tightly, locking themselves upon the sentence as it passed them. She pushed the work on the table aside and looked fixedly at the vicar's wife. "We can't tolerate such a scandal in Wortheton. We have to think of the people at the Works. That kind of thing... it... We must set our faces against it." "Of course," Mrs North agreed doubtfully. "That's why I came to you." Every one came to Miss Agatha when an unpleasant situation had to be faced: she faced it so resolutely, with the inflexibility of justice untempered with mercy. Sin was sin. There were no intermediate shades between black and white. Sin had to be uprooted. The moral prestige of Wortheton demanded that all which was "not nice" must be eliminated from its community. And in a dingy room in a dingy little house in a dingier side street, a girl with a beautiful face was thinking in her passionate discontent how good it was to be a bird--a small feathered thing in a nest among the branches of a fine old tree--anything rather than a human being. CHAPTER THREE. Prudence leaned with her arms on the sill of her bedroom window, looking out on the night-shadowed garden and the white line of the road beyond its shrub-hidden walls. This was the best hour in the twenty-four--the hour when she could be alone; for the bedroom, which once had been a nursery, was all her own. The other Miss Graynors, with the exception of Agatha, shared rooms; but the little half-sister who had occupied the nursery alone for so many years was permitted to regard this haven as still hers: no one sought to dispossess her, though the room was large and had a south aspect, while Miss Agatha's room faced north. But Miss Agatha was not averse from a northern aspect; and the room had the advantage of commanding a view of the servants' quarters, so that she was enabled to watch the coming in and, which was still more important, the going forth of these dependants, whose seemly conduct she made her particular care. Many people besides the poet have discovered that the pleasantest place in the house is leaning out of the window. Prudence knew that. From early spring to late autumn, and occasionally on fine frosty nights, she leaned from her window and thought, and felt, and dreamed dreams of romance and beauty, and of a life that was fuller than the life of Wortheton, a life beyond the seclusion of the walled garden, beyond the white winding road, the tall chimneys, and the dull succession of busy dreary days--days which commenced with morning prayers at seven-thirty, followed by breakfast at eight, by work, by an hour's walk before lunch, a little district visiting, the receiving and returning of calls, tea at five, a dull formal dinner at seven, and family prayers at half-past eight. Then nine o'clock and merciful release, and that good hour, sometimes longer, when she was supposed to be in bed and which she spent leaning out of the window, dreaming her girlish dreams. We all know those dreams of youth, though some of us forget them. They are just dreams, nothing more; but none of life's realities are half as good as those inspiring idle fancies which illumine the drabbest lives in the imaginative days of youth. The dreams of youth are worth all the philosophy, all the wisdom of the ages; and when they arise, as Prudence's arose, out of a spirit of dissatisfaction with existing things, they do not necessarily add to the dissatisfaction, but catch one away from realities in a flight of golden thought. To-night, however, Prudence's mind was not concerned so much with personal matters as with the story of the girl of whose return she had heard that morning, the girl who was not good, and who was to be banished from Wortheton for fear that her example might contaminate others. Prudence wondered whether Wortheton were more susceptible to contamination than most places; otherwise the sending forth of the black sheep, who after all belonged to Wortheton, were to inflict an injustice on some equally respectable town. Black sheep cannot be banished to the nether world; they have to reside somewhere. The details of the girl's case were known to Prudence. All the secrecy and silence of Miss Agatha's careful guardianship availed little against an inquiring and sympathetic mind and somewhat unusual powers of observation. Prudence at eighteen was not ignorant. To attempt to keep an intelligent person ignorant is to attempt the impossible. Miss Agatha did not shrink from impossible effort: furthermore she confused the terms ignorance and innocence, and in her furtive avoidances contrived to throw a suggestion of indelicacy upon the most simple of elemental things. Many well-meaning persons bring disrepute in this way on things which should be sacred, and utterly confuse the mind in matters of morality with the disastrous result that, bewildered and impatient, the individual not infrequently breaks away from conventional caution and adopts a line of indifference in regard to decent restraints. Life cannot be run on lines of suppression any more successfully than on the broader gauge of a too liberal tolerance. Restraint has to be practised; and it is the right of the individual to be taught to recognise the necessity for this with the encouragement of the practice. Miss Agatha's narrow creed proclaimed that the girl had sinned, and must therefore be thrust forth; Prudence, in her impulsive youth, felt this decree to be ungenerous, and, had she dared, would have championed the sinner's cause before all Wortheton. She did not fear Wortheton, but she was afraid of Agatha--Agatha, who, at the time of Prudence's birth, was older than Prudence's mother, and who had domineered over her mother and herself until the former's death, which sad event occurred when Prudence was five years old. She remembered her mother only dimly, but she hated Miss Agatha on her mother's account as she would not have hated her on her own. The mop of golden curls which, with the wide blue eyes, lent to Prudence's face a guileless and childlike expression, covered a shrewd little brain. It was no strain on the owner's intelligence to discern that Agatha was jealous of her, had been jealous of her mother before her, on account of their father's preference; and it occasioned her much inward satisfaction to reflect that not even Agatha had the power to lessen his love for her: she was the child of his old age and the light of his eyes. "I've half a mind," she said to herself, and rested her dimpled chin on her hands and stared into the shadowy distance, "to tell him about Bessie. If I asked him to interfere and let her remain, he--might." She did not feel very positive on that head; Mr Graynor was after all a male edition of Agatha. Nevertheless, she would at least make her appeal. "I wonder..." she mused, and thought awhile. "I suppose she was very much in love," was the outcome of these reflections. "I wonder what it feels like to be very much in love." Prudence's world had not brought any of these experiences into her life. She never met any men, save her father's friends and William's, none of whom were calculated to awaken sentiment in the breast of a girl of eighteen. The youngest of these was a man of forty, a nice kind old thing, who brought her chocolates, and pulled her curls before she put her hair up. Since the hair had gone up he had ceased to pull it, and he did not bring her chocolates so often; his kindliness had become more formal; but she liked him rather better on that account; the teasing had sometimes annoyed her. Like most girls, Prudence allowed her mind at times to dwell on the subject of love and marriage. The older girls at school had discussed these subjects freely: one of them had professed an undying passion for the drawing-master, who was married, and had asseverated before an admiring audience in the playing-field that she would cheerfully ignore the wife and run away with him if he asked her. He had not asked her. He had indeed been entirely unaware of her devotion, and had regarded her as a rather dull pupil. Prudence had considered her silly. Also she held a belief that emotional excitement was not love. She was not very clear in her thoughts what the term love expressed exactly; but she believed that when it did come love would be a big thing. She did not consider it in relation with marriage: marriage was a contract, often a convenience. She would have been glad herself to marry, merely to escape from Agatha and Wortheton. When a girl was married she could at least fashion her own life. And Prudence loved children. She envied Bessie Clapp her coming motherhood more than she pitied her on account of the social ostracism entailed thereby. Prudence's ideas on morality, never having been wisely directed, inclined to exalt the beauty of motherhood and to ignore the baser aspect of crude and illicit passions selfishly indulged. It is not the maternal woman who brings children into the world with a selfish disregard for the shame of their nameless birth. While Prudence leaned from her window and thought of love and motherhood, she became abruptly and amazedly aware of a figure in the road beyond the high wall--a man's figure, tall and straight in the moonlight--walking with a purposeful air down the hill towards the town. The man glanced up at the lighted window in which the girlish form was brightly framed, and broke off abruptly in the middle of a bar he was whistling softly, paused for the fraction of a second, and then went swinging on down the hill. He was a stranger; Prudence recognised that; there were no young men, except the factory employees and the tradesmen, in Wortheton. "I wonder," she murmured to herself, and leaned further out to look after the vanishing figure, "what it feels like to be in love..." A sudden sense of chill touched her. The moon vanished behind a cloud, and a little cold breeze sprang up and played on her bare neck and arms. The garden showed dark with the white light withdrawn, dark and deserted. A shadowed loneliness had fallen on the spirit of the night. CHAPTER FOUR. "I want," Prudence said in her soft appealing voice, "the sum of fifty pounds." Mr Graynor looked not unnaturally amazed. Prudence's wants had never assumed such extravagant proportions before: it puzzled him to understand what she could possibly require to necessitate the demand for so large a sum, and, because he had only a few hours earlier refused to listen to another outrageous request of hers and told her a little harshly that there were matters with which she should not concern herself, he hoped, despite a general reluctance to part with money, that this further demand was one he could treat more generously. He put a large shaky hand on her curls and tilted her head back and smiled into the wide blue eyes. "Fifty pounds, eh?" he said. "That's a big sum, Prue." "You'll let me have it?" she asked, and clasped her hands round his arm. "That depends," he answered, "on what you want it for." "I'd rather not tell that," she said slowly. Mr Graynor removed his hand. Secrecy savoured of a want of candour; he could not allow that. "I can't give you a cheque without knowing what you purpose spending the money on," he said firmly. "It's a big sum for a little girl--even for finery. You mustn't develop extravagance." Prudence braced herself and faced him a little defiantly. "It's not for me," she said. "I don't need anything. But you are sending the Clapps away, and they've nowhere to go and no money. That isn't just; it's--wicked." His face hardened while he listened to this sweeping indictment, and he turned away from her with an air of sharp annoyance. "You are extremely foolish, Prudence," he said. "Leave these matters which you are not able to understand to your elders. I forbid you to mention this subject again." Prudence was defeated but not subdued. She accepted the defeat, but she had her retort ready. "Very well," she said, as she moved towards the door. "Then I'll just pray hard night and morning that God will befriend Bessie Clapp. When you see me kneeling I hope you will remember." Then she was gone; and the old man, staring with his dim eyes at the closed door, reflected uncomfortably that Prudence was growing strangely annoying. She was, as he also recognised, growing extraordinarily like her mother. Of course, he told himself, unconsciously self-deceiving, he had always intended to see that these people were sufficiently provided for. It was not necessary for his youngest daughter to point out his duty to him. So Prudence was not really defeated; though she was denied the satisfaction of knowing of her victory. Mr Graynor's subsequent generosity amazed the recipients no more than it amazed his eldest daughter and William, both of whom entirely disapproved of a munificence they deemed unnecessary and an encouragement in wrong-doing. But old Mr Graynor, furtively watching Prudence's golden head bowed over her clasped hands during the evening prayers, bowed in almost aggressive supplication, knew that he could not view it thus night and morning with a deaf ear turned to her appeal for succour for the friendless. The good-night kiss he gave her was, had she but known it, an answer to her prayer. Prudence retired to her room that night in a state of antagonism towards every one. She knew herself to be in disgrace. Agatha treated her with chill disapproval, and William ignored her. It was William's invariable rule to show his displeasure by treating the object thereof as though she did not exist. Prudence had been ignored before: she did not resent this; it amused her. William, when he attempted to be dignified, was altogether ridiculous. He maintained the dignified role throughout the next day, and laboured under the delusion that his pompous disregard was impressing his young sister with a proper sense of the enormity of her indiscretion; a belief which suffered a rude awakening at luncheon, when Prudence threw off her ill-humour and emerged from the large silences in which she had enwrapped herself to participate in the unenlivening talk carried on fragmentally by the various members of the family. She had watched brother William, who was a big man and corpulent of build, as she had watched him for many years, with an amazed dumb criticism in her look, unfasten with big deliberate fingers the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat and the top button of his trousers on sitting down to lunch for his greater convenience and the more thorough enjoyment of his food. He performed this office regularly, with the formal solemnity of an important rite. Prudence had come to regard it as William's grace before meals. She sometimes wondered what ran through the serious minds of the portly whiskered butler and the elderly parlourmaid, who ministered to the family needs under his direction, daily privileged to witness this public tribute of respect to the good things of life. Perhaps they regarded these manifestations of epicurean nicety, as Agatha regarded them, as becoming in William as a man and the prospective head of the house of Graynor. It was an inconsistency in Agatha's prudish nature to consider that men might do things which could not be tolerated in the other sex, and that whatever William did must of necessity be seemly. In Prudence's opinion, William's table manners were gluttonous and disgusting. "A man called on me at the works this morning," William observed, addressing his father, who latterly stayed much at home and left the control and worry of business largely to his son. "He had a letter of introduction from Morgan. I asked him to call at the house this afternoon in time for tea. His name's Steele." "You should have asked him to dine," Mr Graynor said. "Time enough for that after you have seen him," William returned, and for some reason, which he would have been at a loss to explain, his gaze travelled in Prudence's direction and rested for the space of a second on her listening, eager face. "I've seen him," Prudence said. "He's quite young." William raised his eyebrows; Miss Agatha's head came round with a jerk; several other heads jerked round likewise, and every one looked at Prudence. "I saw him from my window," Prudence explained, unabashed by the general interest, "striding down the hill. His back looked nice." William sought to ignore the interruption and the interrupter, and addressed himself exclusively to his father. But it was useless. Prudence, having broken her silence, refused to be excluded from the conversation, and expressed the flippant desire to see the face belonging to the nice-looking back. Had it been possible to banish her young sister to her bedroom, Agatha would have done so; but Prudence lately had shown a growing tendency to break away from control, and she was wise enough not to put a further strain on the weakening strands of her already frayed authority. Therefore Prudence was in the drawing-room when the stranger called-- indeed, she was the only person present so far as he was concerned. He paid her far more attention than Miss Agatha deemed necessary or in good taste. The manners of youth, as each generation which has left youth behind unfailingly recognises, are sadly deteriorating. As for Prudence, she admired the front view as greatly as she had admired the back. Mr Philip Steele was eminently well-favoured. Prudence considered him handsome. She had met so few men that anyone who escaped middle-age and stoutness appeared to her in the guise of masculine perfection, provided only that his face was strong. Steele's face matched with his name, sharp, clear-cut, firm of jaw. And he was clean-shaven. William wore a beard. Hair on a man's face was patriarchal. Tea was brought in by the butler and deposited on a table in front of Miss Agatha; and the young man, seizing the opportunity when his hostess' attention was thus engaged, demanded of Prudence in a confidential undertone: "I say, wasn't it you I saw leaning from a window two nights ago?" "Yes." Prudence looked at him with a frank laugh in her blue eyes. "I saw you pass. It must have been gorgeous, walking down there in the moonlight." "It was pleasant," he said without enthusiasm, and added with a return smile: "I was thinking how jolly it must be up there where you were, looking out on the quiet fragrance of the night." And then they both laughed happily, though there was manifestly nothing to laugh at. Miss Agatha, disapproving of this mutual enjoyment, called Prudence away to make the tea; whereupon the young man followed her to the tea-table and hovered over it, wishful to be of use. "One teaspoonful for each person and one for the teapot," Miss Agatha directed precisely; and the visitor wondered with resentment why on earth the old girl didn't make the brew herself. "I hope you'll like our tea," she said, when, having handed round the various cups, Steele returned to the table for his own. "We give eighteenpence a pound for it. We drink it for an example." She did not explain why, nor for whom, the example was deemed necessary. Steele sipped his tea, and tried not to looked amazed, and assured her that it was jolly good. Then he wandered back to Prudence's side, openly curious as to her relationship in regard to the others. "I say," he murmured--"don't think me rude--but where do you come in?" Prudence scrutinised him for a perplexed moment, at a loss for his meaning; whereupon he suggested with a smile: "Niece, perhaps?" "Oh!" The gay little laugh, which so irritated Miss Agatha's ears, broke from her lips once more. "I see. No. I'm Mr Graynor's youngest daughter... by his second marriage," she added, with just a hint of malice in her voice. The young man grasped the position. "I'm getting hold of it," he said, a sympathetic light in his eyes. "The thing puzzled me. I couldn't place you. You don't seem to fit in." Then he said with a kind of inspiration, as though the idea had suddenly presented itself to him: "You don't fit in, you know. Your place rightly is leaning out of a window. That's how I shall always picture you." It was an extraordinary talk, and altogether delightful. Prudence enjoyed his visit tremendously. But when he left, Miss Agatha reproved her sharply for pushing herself forward and monopolising the visitor. "He monopolised me," Prudence contended. "I retired into corners, and he followed." "You made yourself conspicuous," Miss Agatha said, "and behaved altogether in a forward and unseemly manner." Prudence had occasion later to regret this success in which she had triumphed at the time; Mr Philip Steele had not succeeded in winning general favour, and so never received the invitation to dine. He did not possess sufficient nerve to present himself at the house uninvited, or he would have called again for the pleasure of meeting Prudence. He did meet her, but the encounter was accidental. It was all the more enjoyable on that account. They met where there were neither walls nor interruptions, where they could talk without reserve and laugh unrestrainedly, with only the mating birds to hear them, and the soft wind to catch up and echo their mirth in the tall trees overhead--a joyous meeting, with the springtime harmony about them, and the springtime gladness in their hearts and eyes. CHAPTER FIVE. "By Jove!" exclaimed Steele, when he vaulted a stile and came upon her, picking primroses from the hedge. "This is a piece of luck!" Prudence looked up from her occupation. The sunlight was in her surprised blue eyes, in her hair; it shone on her white dress, and on the pale wilting flowers in her hand. The effect of her was dazzling--a white shining thing of milk and roses against the soft greens of the bank. He had sprung upon her unawares, and it took her a little while to recover from her astonishment. And yet she had been thinking of him--thinking how agreeable it would be if the event which was now realised could only befall. She had been guilty of loitering, of watching the field-path furtively, and wishing she knew which direction he took when he walked abroad. And now he stood before her, gay, and unmistakably pleased, with a laugh in his grey eyes which expressed his satisfaction. He had been thinking about her as she had been thinking of him, and wishing that he had made better use of his time that afternoon, and discovered her favourite haunts. It was all right now; they had found one another. That was good, because on the morrow he was going away. "You'd never guess how hard I've been wishing I might happen upon you this morning," he said as they shook hands. "It looks as though wishing had brought its reward. I'm rather a believer in telepathy. Something of what has been in my mind must unconsciously have transmitted itself to yours. Have you given me any thought, I wonder? I've given you so many," he added, observing her blush. "I was thinking of you at the moment you appeared," Prudence answered with audacious candour. "You see, William mentioned at breakfast that you were leaving to-morrow. I wondered why you came? So few people come here--except commercial travellers." "There are one or two at the hotel," he said, laughing. "Save that they possess enormous appetites, I haven't observed them particularly. The landlady informed me that they are very exclusive. I came on the firm's business--Morgan Bros. We're woollen too, you know." "Yes I know. Mr Morgan stays with us sometimes." She regarded him with renewed interest. It was a little disappointing to discover that he followed the same occupation as William; she had placed him in her thoughts amid more romantic surroundings. The factory, despite its financial magnificence, struck her as rather sordid. He became aware of the criticism in her eyes and smiled in some amusement. "I'm just a paid man," he volunteered. "Nothing very gorgeous about my position." "But that's an advantage," she said, and smiled in sympathy. "At least, you can leave." "True. I never thought of it like that. My principal concern has been to evade leaving; it has loomed so very imminent at times. I say, let's sit on this stile in the shade of that jolly elm and talk. You're not in a hurry, are you?" "No," answered Prudence, who knew that she ought to be at home sewing in the morning-room, knew also that she had not the smallest intention of going back now. "I'm not in any hurry. It's--pleasant here." "Yes, isn't it? I don't think I have ever seen prettier country than this. You were gathering primroses?" "Just a few late ones." She held the bunch up and surveyed their drooping beauty. "It's almost a pity; they looked so sweet in the hedge." "They look sweeter where they are," he said quite sincerely, though obviously without sufficient reason for the comparison; the primroses were so unmistakably dying. "Put one in my button-hole, will you? It will recall a pleasant morning." She complied without hesitation, laughing when the task was accomplished because the flower drooped its head. "A bit shy," he commented. "It is going to raise its face and smile at me when I put it in water, later." "Will you really do that?" she asked. "Why, of course. You don't suppose I would allow a gift of yours to fade into a memory?" "But it will fade," she insisted, "in spite of your efforts. All these pleasant things fade so swiftly." He turned more directly towards her and looked into her eyes. She had taken off her hat, and sat with her shoulders against the tree and looked steadily back at him. "Yes," he admitted; "that's uncomfortably true. But something remains." "Something?" Her eyes questioned him, wide childlike eyes with a hint of womanhood lurking in their blue depths. He drew a little nearer to her. "Something," he repeated--"subtle, intangible--an emotion, a memory... Call it what you will... Some recurring brightness which is to the human soul what the sunlight is to the earth--a thousand harmonies spring from the one source. My primrose will fade, but for me it can't die; nor will the kind hand that gathered it and placed it where it is be forgotten either. There are things one doesn't forget." "I suppose there are," acquiesced Prudence, her thoughts by some odd twist reverting to William's table manners. "Sometimes one would like to forget." "I shouldn't," he averred--"not this, at least." She roused herself with a laugh. "I was thinking of other things--I don't know why--horrid things. Are you one of a large family?" "No," he answered, surprised. "I'm an only son--and rather a bad investment. Why?" "There are eight of us," said Prudence--"counting Bobby." "Who is Bobby?" "He's a dear," she answered, as though that explained Bobby. "He's at college: when he leaves he will have to go into the factory; and he hates it so. But there isn't any help for it. He is the only Graynor to carry on." "I don't think his case calls for sympathy exactly," he remarked dryly, with a contemplative eye on the tall red chimneys, an eye that travelled slowly over the wide spring-clad countryside and came back to her face and rested there in quiet enjoyment. "You don't know," she returned seriously, "how the kind of life we lead here stifles an imaginative person." "You find it dull?" he said. "I suppose it may be. Most country towns are dull." "The country isn't to blame," she explained; "it's the routine of dull business, dull duties, dull pleasures, and duller people. You've no idea... How should you know? Virtue, as practised in Wortheton, is a quality without smiles, and enjoyment is sinful. Instead of idling happily here I ought to be at home sewing garments for the poor, like the others are doing. I shall be reproved for flaying truant... and I don't care." She laughed joyously. Steele, ignoring the larger part of her communications, leaned towards her, intent on bringing her back to a particular phrase that stuck in his memory. "Are you happy sitting here--with me?" he asked. "I'm always happy," Prudence replied calmly, "when I've some one to talk to who isn't Wortheton." "Oh!" he said, a little damped. "So that's it? Well, I'm happy sitting here talking with some one who is Wortheton." "I'm not up to sample," she said, amused. "If you want local colour, call at the Vicarage--or take William as a specimen. Wortheton is earnest in woof." She looked so pretty and so impish as she drew her invidious comparisons that Steele was unable to suppress a smile of sympathy. Her criticism of her brother was wanting in loyalty; but he could find in his heart no blame for her: he did not like William, possibly because William had so pointedly refrained from extending further hospitality to him. The young man had counted on an extension, and was disappointed. "You'll shake the dust off your feet some day," he hazarded, and thought how agreeable it would be to assist in the escape. Visions of scorching across country in a motor with her beside him floated pleasantly through his brain. "Some day," she returned a little vaguely, and looked pensively into the distance. "Yes, I'll do that... But it's so difficult to find a way." "Time will solve that difficulty, I expect," he said. She glanced towards him brightly, a look of expectant eagerness shining in her eyes. He felt that when the opportunity offered she would not be slow in seizing it, and was unreasonably angry at the thought of his own uncertain prospects, which offered not the faintest hope of his ever being able to hire, much less own, the necessary car in which to scorch across country with anyone. "You say such nice, encouraging things," she observed. "I hope time won't be long in solving the difficulty. It would be horrid to be forced to live here until I am middle-aged." "I'm afraid you will be disappointed when you get out into the world," he said. "Life is pretty much the same elsewhere as here, I take it. It is what we make it--largely." "It is what other people make it for us--largely," she mimicked him. "I could have quite a good time if I was allowed to. When Bobby is home we do contrive a little fun, but it generally ends in disaster. They sent him back to school a week before term commenced once. Agatha managed that. It is always Bobby who reaps the blame; I am punished vicariously." "I call that vindictive," Steele said. "We called it that--and other things." She smiled reminiscently. "It's odd how these little things stick in the memory. I never sew without recalling that exasperating week when I broke needles maliciously six days in succession. I break them occasionally now--in memoriam." He laughed aloud. "I don't fancy Miss Graynor gets it all her own way," he said. Prudence swung her hat by the brim and gazed up at a patch of blue sky between the trees. A little frown puckered her brow. She had ceased to think of Agatha; her mind was intent on the man beside her, the man who was merely a new acquaintance and yet seemed already a tried and sympathetic friend. She liked him. She wished he were staying longer in Wortheton. She wished William had invited him to spend his last evening at Court Heatherleigh. Strictly speaking, courtesy demanded it; but William was not always courteous. She held a well-founded belief that William sought to punish her by this omission; and it pleased her to reflect that she was in a sense getting even with him through the present informal meeting. She promised herself the satisfaction of relating her morning's experience at lunch for his and Agatha's delectation. They so entirely disapproved of such harmless pleasures. "If you've really nothing to do," she said, "let us go for a stroll in the woods. It's lovely there; and we can talk... I feel like a recluse enjoying an unexpected holiday: I want to make the most of it. And I love to talk." "So do I--with some people," he returned in his level, pleasant voice, and lent her a hand to assist her down from the stile. "It's as well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb, don't you think? Why not enlarge on the idea? I know a shop where we can procure quite edible pasties. If you are agreeable, I could fetch provisions, and we can picnic in the woods." "But that's a capital idea," said Prudence, with a careless disregard for developments, which further evidenced the emancipation Miss Agatha already foresaw. "There'll be such a row," she said cheerfully, as they walked across the fields side by side. "It was just such another excursion that Bobby was sent back to school for." "For a little thing like that!" He laughed. "Well, they can't send me back to school anyhow, and I have a comfortable feeling in my mind that you'll be able to keep your end up. Miss Graynor would be wise to recognise that her day is done. I'll return with you and take my share of the censuring. With luck I might be asked to stay to tea." This audacity amused them both. There was gladness in the spring day, the gladness of irresponsible youth, the gladness of life in its promise with the hope of its fruition unfulfilled and undaunted. The two gay young hearts, in their mutual pleasure in one another, were in tune with the brightness of the May morning; and the two gay young voices rang out in clear enjoyment and awoke the echoes in the shady woods. CHAPTER SIX. It detracted somewhat from Prudence's enjoyment when, having lunched delightfully off viands which would have met with less favour eaten off a plate from an ordinary dining-table, having subsequently strolled about the woods, engaged in botanical and other research, it abruptly occurred to her that it was time to return home. The thought of going home was less pleasant with the prospect so imminent. Picnicking in the woods with a comparative stranger was, she felt now, a sufficiently unusual proceeding to make explanation difficult. Neither Agatha nor her father would view the matter in the light in which she saw it-- simply as a pleasant excursion breaking the monotony of dull days. The necessity to account for her absence at all annoyed her. "The drawback to stolen pleasure," she announced, regarding the young man with serious eyes in which a shade of anxiety was faintly reflected, "lies in the aftermath of nettles; while not dangerous, they sting." "By Jove! yes," he agreed. "The little matter of going back has been sitting on my mind for the last ten minutes. The thing loses its humour when no longer in the background. I'm really horribly afraid of Miss Graynor." "You need not come," said Prudence generously. "Oh! I'm not so mean a coward as to back out," he said. "It's up to me to see it through with you. After all, the excursion was at my suggestion. And it was worth being stung for by all the nettles that ever grew. Besides, I want my tea." "You'll be lucky if you get it," she returned. "Come now!" he urged. "Let us take a charitable view, and decide that they will dispense generous hospitality. Upon my soul, I don't see why they shouldn't be charmed to receive us. The Prodigal, you know, got an amazing reception." "Yes," she laughed. "I think possibly we'll get an amazing reception too. Please, if you don't mind, I would rather you took that dead flower out of your coat." "They would never suspect you of putting it there," he protested, with a feeling of strong reluctance to do what she proposed. But Prudence insisted. She knew that when William's eye fell on that withered memento her guilty conscience would give him the clue to its history. "In any case," she added diplomatically, "it adds a look of untidiness." And so the primrose never had the opportunity of lifting its head in water. Before discarding it, Steele was seized with the idea of placing it between the leaves in his pocket-book; but after a glance at the pretty, serious face of his companion he decided against this and left the dead flower lying in the bracken at their feet. "The first brush against the nettles," he remarked, and smiled at her regretfully. "I'm braced now. That first sting hurt more than any other can." The further stings proved embarrassing rather than hurtful. When Steele entered the drawing-room at Court Heatherleigh with Prudence he was made uncomfortably aware of the surprised gaze of five pairs of curious feminine eyes all focussed upon himself, and, advancing under this raking fire, felt his amiable smile of greeting fade before Miss Agatha's blank stare of cold inquiry; her reluctantly extended hand, its chill response to his clasp, reduced him to a state of abject humility. He found himself stammering an apologetic explanation of his presence. "I just looked in to say good-bye," he began awkwardly. "I had the good luck to meet Miss Graynor this morning--" "I presume you mean that you encountered my sister, Prudence?" Miss Graynor interrupted him frigidly. He flushed, and felt savage with himself for being betrayed into the weakness. "I met Miss Prudence--yes, and persuaded her to show me the woods. You have some very beautiful scenery about here; it seemed a pity to miss the best of it, and this was my last opportunity. I made the most of it," he added with a touch of audacity which Miss Agatha inwardly resented. "We've had a delightful time," Prudence interposed defiantly, and turned as her father entered the room and forestalled his reproaches with a light kiss on his unresponsive lips. "I've been picnicking in the woods, daddy," she said brightly. "And now we've come back--for tea." She made this announcement in the tone of a person who does not intend to be denied. Miss Agatha remarked tartly that it was not the hour for tea, and Mr Graynor, ignoring the hospitable suggestion, reproved her for her long absence. "You caused me considerable anxiety," he said. Prudence expressed her contrition. Steele added his apologies, although in his heart he felt there was nothing in the adventure to apologise for. "I am afraid the fault was mine," he said. "The suggestion originated with me. I was thoughtless enough to overlook the fact that you might be worried." "The thoughtlessness was on my daughter's side," Mr Graynor answered. "She is fully aware that her absence from luncheon would cause anxiety. She should have invited you to return with her instead." Prudence flashed a surprised smile at him. To have done what he proposed was the last thing she would have dared to do. Had she given the invitation she would have been reproved quite as severely for taking the liberty as for absenting herself without permission. The privilege of independent action involving promiscuous hospitality was vested solely in Agatha and William. Matters appeared to have reached a deadlock. Steele had nothing to say! Prudence had nothing to say! Miss Agatha had no desire to help the situation by bridging the silence; and Mr Graynor had nothing further to add to his reproof. He seated himself. Since Miss Agatha remained standing Steele had no option but to do the same: he felt increasingly awkward, and wished he had taken advantage of Prudence's permission and remained out of it. "Sit down, sit down," exclaimed Mr Graynor suddenly, with an accession of ill-humour as he became aware of the general strain. "Why is every one standing?" His intervention scarcely relieved matters. Steele said he thought he must be going, and murmured something about an early start on the morrow; he had merely called to make his adieux. Miss Agatha's prompt acceptance of this explanation for the brevity of his visit was not flattering; but Mr Graynor, awakening tardily to a sense of the lack of cordiality, protested against his leaving so hurriedly. "William will be in presently," he said. "You had better wait and see him. And we'll have tea. I see no object in deferring tea, Agatha, until a given hour." "Prudence," Agatha commanded, "ring the bell, please." Steele attempted to forestall the girl; their hands touched as each reached out to press the button. "Oh, Lord!" he murmured under his breath, and caught her eye and smiled dryly. "It will require something more efficacious than dock leaves to counteract these nettles." She drew back without replying, but her face was charged with meaning, and he detected the hidden laughter in her eyes. It was well for her, he decided, that she could find anything to laugh at in the dismal situation; for himself he would gladly have escaped and sacrificed the tea; a whisky and soda would have suited him better at the moment. The tea, when it came, caused little unbending, but it provided a legitimate excuse for moving from Miss Agatha's side, and it gave him an opportunity for a few minutes' talk with Prudence, a disjointed, embarrassed talk under the close observation of the rest. Steele was conscious of those watchful eyes, of the listening hang in the conversation when he approached the girl. Prudence also was conscious of this silent manifestation of vigilant criticism on the part of her family; but she had reached a stage of recklessness which moved her to openly disregard the condemnation in Agatha's eyes when Steele, having handed the cake to her, remained beside her for a few minutes, and held her in conversation. "I have been reconsidering what you said in the wood," he observed, "about the influence of others in regard to the enjoyment of life. You were entirely right." "Given the opportunity, I knew I could prove my case," she answered with the same amount of caution in her tones as he had used. "But you mustn't talk to me now, please; I'm in disgrace." "So am I," he replied. "I wonder if you will be looking out of a window to-night?" "I expect so." "I prowl about most nights," he said, and scrutinised her face intently to observe the effect of his words. "I know. I've seen you." "It is regrettable," he remarked, "that the upper story of a private house is usually inaccessible. Won't you have another piece of cake? No! Miss Matilda, may I fetch you some tea?" The maidenly breasts of the four Miss Graynors, who were pale reflections of their eldest sister, were pleasantly stirred by Steele's punctilious courtesy. They were envious of their young half-sister, whose temerity had led her into the indiscretion of spending an entire morning in the society of a member of the opposite sex. It does not follow that a life which has known no romance is innocent of romantic aspirations. Miss Matilda, spare and prim and slightly grey, experienced a vague sense of loss and of resentment against her single state when she met Steele's smiling, youthful eyes, and reflected that no man's glance had ever rested upon herself with that look of pleased interest which she observed in Steele's face whenever it was turned in Prudence's direction. Prudence, of course, was pretty and young. Miss Matilda's girlhood lay behind her, but it had known none of the delights that her virgin heart longed for in the secret chamber which she seldom unlocked even for her own inspection. The emotions that lay concealed there were unbecoming in a modest woman whose function it was to be pious and dutiful in the acceptance of her lot. It was possibly due to these hidden emotions that Steele found Miss Matilda's society less depressing than her sister's, and he clung to it tenaciously until the entrance of brother William assigned him as by right to the position of audience to the ponderous conversation of this man of limited intelligence and no humour. William would have failed to understand that a man, even when young, would rather talk with a woman than be talked to by himself. The manner in which his sisters effaced themselves in his presence was a tribute to, as well as a recognition of, his masculine superiority. It was the want of a proper appreciation on his youngest sister's part in this respect that so frequently made it necessary for him to assert his dignity before her. He was angry with her now, and he passed her with his face averted, righteous indignation in his frown and in the set of his shoulders. Steele felt that it would be a pleasure to kick him; but when he detected the mischievous wickedness in Prudence's eyes, William's dignity became a matter for amusement rather than annoyance; the man was so obviously an ass. "The weather," William observed, as he took his tea, waited on by two of his sisters despite Steele's efforts to relieve them, "shows signs of breaking. The barometer has fallen." "The country needs rain," Miss Agatha remarked in tones of satisfaction. And for the next few minutes the advantages of a good downpour and the benefit therefrom to the garden as well as to the farmers, was discussed in detail: the watering of the borders, it transpired, fully occupied the gardener's time each evening as a result of the dry spell. Bored beyond measure, Steele took an abrupt leave, and declining William's invitation to take a stroll round the grounds in his company, seized his hat and fled. "She'll never stick it," he reflected, as he banged the gate and hurried away down the road like a man pursued. "She can't. She'll do a bunk, one day. I would in her place." And Prudence, defenceless in the drawing-room, meeting the brunt of William's anger, and the reproaches of the others, determined in her rebellious soul that if release did not come in some legitimate form before she was twenty-one, she would on acquiring that age obtain it for herself. CHAPTER SEVEN. The moonlight fell softly on Prudence's bright hair, touching the curls lovingly with a wan brilliance that, paling their shining gold, added a purer sheen to replace the beauty stolen by the night. Its light was reflected in the blue depths of her eyes, eyes which took on the misty darkness of the night sky so that the moonbeams felt at home therein and lingered there confidingly. She leaned far out of the window, and the fragrance of some early gloire de Dijon roses was wafted towards her on the night breeze. A scent besides that of the roses stole up to her out of the shadows--the scent of cigarette smoke, too close under her window to suggest that the smoker was beyond the wall that shut off the garden from the road. Prudence had watched the smoker enter the garden; she watched him now throw away his cigarette among the flowers in one of the borders as he advanced, and she heard his voice speaking softly to her out of the gloom. "Can't you come down?" he asked. "Not unless you have come provided with a rope ladder," she replied as softly. "By Jove! I never thought of that. But you aren't locked in?" "Not in the sense you mean. But locked doors would be trifles compared with the opposition I should encounter if I attempted to join you. I'd love to come out; but it's impossible." "Is there any likelihood of our being overheard?" he asked with caution. Prudence laughed quietly. "Every likelihood," she answered. "I don't think I mind." Steele stood under cover of the wall of the house. There were no lights in the windows on that side; he had observed that on former occasions; the library, where Mr Graynor sat every evening with William, faced the other way. "Then I'm going to run the risk and stay and talk with you," he said. There was a strange intimacy in the situation that appealed to Prudence. The adventure of the morning was as nothing compared with this stolen interview. The insufficient light of the moon, and the distance which divided them, added a touch of romance which she found pleasantly exciting. To gaze down upon his upturned face and the uncertain outline of his form below stirred her imagination; and the necessity for caution, occasioning them to lower their voices to whispers, gave to the utterance of the most trivial speech the flavour of intimate things. She leaned down nearer to him. "It's rather like Romeo and Juliet, isn't it?" she said. "That ended rottenly," he replied, and laughed. "So will this probably. What made you venture inside?" "Isn't the reason obvious?" he returned. "I thought I had prepared you for my visit at tea. It wasn't possible for us to say good-bye like that. I'm sorry I got you into that mess." "You didn't," Prudence assured him gently. "I knew how it would be. I'm not regretting--anything. Stinging nettles cease to hurt when the rash subsides. William is furious. We don't speak." "That must be rather a relief for you." She dimpled suddenly. "He doesn't think so. When I apologise I am to be taken into favour again. So, if he keeps to that, it is likely to be many years before we interchange remarks." "What an egregious ass he is," Steele commented. "Never mind that now. We don't want to discuss him. I came to-night to beg a favour. Will you write to me sometimes? ... and may I write? I don't want to lose touch altogether." "I can't promise that," she said, and fingered a rosebud below her window, snapping its stem in nervous preoccupation. "All our letters go into a box at the post office and are sorted before we receive them. They would not allow me to correspond with you." "Could we not arrange a little deception," he suggested, "by means of which you could collect your own letters from the post office?" But this idea did not commend itself to Prudence. She might be a rebel, but she was honest, as courageous people usually are; anything in the nature of deceit repelled her. "I should not care to do that," she said. Her answer pleased Steele, although it defeated his purpose. He had hoped to follow up this pleasant friendship begun under such unusual and difficult conditions. It was the quality of conspiracy and quick intimacy which made the acquaintance so extraordinarily attractive to him. He was more than half in love with her already; and it galled him to reflect that with his present uncertain prospects he was no match for this daughter of a wealthy man. He could not have afforded to marry had other conditions proved favourable, which they did not: Mr Graynor would scarcely have welcomed a son-in-law with a salary of under two hundred a year. "I am afraid that settles it," he said in tones compounded of a mixture of emotions. "I wonder if ever I'll have the good luck to meet you again?" This remark pulled Prudence up sharply. She had never considered the question of his going out of her life; the suggestion thus forced on her unwilling attention hurt. Abruptly the knowledge came to her that she did not wish to lose his friendship. She had not considered the matter of his going away seriously: she had taken it for granted that the business that had brought him to Wortheton would bring him again; no doubt had crossed her mind as to a further meeting--now that the doubt was implanted a vague distress seized her, bringing with it a sense of desolation. She realised that when he was gone she would miss him, would feel doubly lonely by comparison with this bright break in the monotony of her life. "You'll come again?" she said quickly. "It's possible," he answered, "but not in the least likely. It was just a chance that brought me this time. The firm sends a more important man as a rule. If I come again you will soon know of it. I shall make my first appearance under your window. In the meanwhile you will quite possibly have forgotten my existence." "Amid the distractions of Wortheton!" Prudence retorted. "That's very probable, isn't it?" He laughed. "I won't hear a word against Wortheton if it keeps your memory green," he returned. "It fossilises memory," she answered. "Every little event that has ever befallen is stamped on my mind in indelible colours--drab colours for the unpleasant event, and brighter tints for the pleasant in comparison with their different degrees of agreeableness." "And this event?" he questioned. "These stolen moments? In what colour is this event painted?" "I'll tell you that when we meet again--perhaps," she answered. "Oh please!" he persisted. "I want to know now." Prudence laughed softly. He detected a slight nervousness in her mirth, a quality of shyness that gratified his eager curiosity, conveying as it did that the girl was not insensible of his influence and his unspoken homage. "You see," she said, and blushed warmly in the darkness as she leaned down towards him, "it is all a confusion of splashes of moonlight and brighter splashes of sunshine. There aren't any colours on the canvas at all." "I'm contented with that," he said... "a luminous impression! Your fancy pleases me. My fancy in connexion with you will picture always a rose-bowered window set in a grey stone wall--just a frame for you, with your moonlit hair and eyes like beautiful stars. Always I shall see you like that--inaccessible, while I stand below and gaze upward." This extravagance led to further admissions. He managed very clearly to convey to his silent listener that his feeling for her was of quite an unusual quality, that he cared immensely, that he had no intention of letting her drop out of his life. He wanted to see more of her and was fully determined to do so. He made her realise that unless she disclaimed a reciprocal liking he intended taking her silence for acquiescence. He spoke so rapidly, and with so much concentrated passion in his lowered tones, that Prudence only vaguely comprehended all that his eager words attempted to convey. She was apprehensive of discovery, and, rendered doubly nervous by this clandestine love-making and the fear of interruption, could find no words in which to reply. She wanted time to think: the whole situation flurried her; and her heart was beating with a rapidity that made articulation difficult. "Oh!" she said... "Oh! I didn't know... I didn't understand..." "Well, you understand now," he answered. "Prudence, give me one word-- one kind word to carry away with me... dear!" There followed a pause, during which her face showed dimly above him, with eyes shadowed darkly in the wan light. She leaned towards him. "Ssh! Good-bye--dear!" she called back softly. And the next thing he realised, even as her words floated faintly down to his eager ears, was that he was standing alone in the darkness, gazing up at the place where she had stood and from whence she had vanished with startling and unaccountable suddenness. Later Steele walked back to the quaint little hotel where he was staying, confused by the hurried sweetness of her farewell as she withdrew from her position at the window with a caution that suggested unseen interruption. He had stepped forward with noiseless haste to secure a rose which fell from her window, and carrying it with him, made his way silently out of the garden. He was never certain whether the falling of the rose had been accidental, or whether Prudence had dropped it for him as a token and a reminder; but because her hand had gathered it, he lifted it in the moonlight and touched its cool fragrance reverently with his lips. The act made him consciously her lover. The rose became a symbol--a bond between him and her. Just so long as he kept it he knew that her influence would dominate his life, and his memory of her retain its warm and vital quality, so that she would remain a beautiful inspiration amid the sordid worries of uncongenial things. CHAPTER EIGHT. "I heard you," Miss Matilda said in tones of immense reserve to her youngest sister on the following morning when they met on the landing at the top of the stairs, "talking from your window last night." Prudence blushed brightly. "Then it was you who came to my door?" "Yes." Miss Matilda kept her maidenly gaze lowered to the carpet. Her expression was guilty, so that one might have supposed that she, and not the defiant young woman whom she accosted in this unexpected way, had engaged in clandestine whisperings overnight. "I was afraid Mary might wake. You were a little imprudent, I think." Prudence laughed. The gently spoken reproof sounded like a play on her name. "You are a dear," she said, and felt more kindly towards this sister whom she so little understood. Had Miss Matilda proved less pliant to Miss Graynor's moulding she might have developed into an ordinary human being; but she had gone down under Miss Agatha's training, had imbibed the family traditions until she became saturated with the Graynor ideals and lost her own individuality. In her heart she sympathised with her sister's indiscretions; but her mind condemned this conduct as unseemly and unbecoming in a girl of refinement. She went downstairs in advance of Prudence, and throughout the reading of the morning prayers her pink distressed face witnessed to its owner's shame in being a partner to this flagrant deception. She was shielding her sister against her conscience: no accessory to a criminal offence could have felt more wickedly implicated. And Prudence did not care. She was so utterly reckless that she had not bargained even with Miss Matilda for her silence. It had not occurred to Prudence that anyone could be mean enough to inform against her. With the finish of breakfast Miss Agatha commanded her presence in the morning-room, and provided her with sufficient work to occupy her fully until the lunch hour; and Prudence sat near the open window with her sewing in her lap and looked out on the garden with faintly smiling eyes, recalling the overnight interview while she watched the gardener a few yards off trimming a border of wallflowers which since the previous day had been trampled upon inexplicably. "It must have been a dog from outside, Simmonds," Miss Agatha remarked from her position at the window. Simmonds, stooping over the despoiled border, presented an uncompromising back to her view. He grunted something, of which the only word that Miss Agatha caught was "tramps." "In that case," she said with decision, "it is a matter for the police." The smile in Prudence's eyes deepened, and Miss Matilda's downbent face took on a brighter shade of pink. There is no end to the embarrassment which follows upon duplicity. Luncheon brought William and a further sense of enormity. William appeared somewhat obviously not to see his youngest sister; she had become, since answering him with unpardonable rudeness in the drawing-room yesterday, amazingly invisible to him. That he was aware of her presence was manifest by the care with which he avoided looking in her direction, and by the calculated offensiveness of his speech in referring to the absent Steele. "I am glad to say that bounder Steele left by train this morning," he announced with unpleasant emphasis, as soon as the usual attention to his buttons, which allowed for a more expansive ease, left him free to indulge in the amenities of the table. "I hope Morgan won't send a man like that again." "Edward Morgan usually comes himself," Mr Graynor observed. "But for a touch of bronchitis he would have come. He is subject to chest trouble." "Well, of course," said Prudence, with the sisterly intention of annoying William who was senior to Mr Morgan, "he is getting old." Edward Morgan was the man who, with heavy playfulness, had pulled her curls in the days of her childhood. Despite the fact that she rather liked him, she looked upon him as almost elderly; he had seemed to her elderly at thirty. "Don't be absurd," interposed Miss Agatha sharply. "Mr Morgan is in the prime of life." Although he would have enjoyed the business of squashing her, William, in his determination to ignore Prudence's existence, was compelled to let the remark pass unchallenged. He addressed himself pointedly to his father on matters appertaining to the works, while the five Miss Graynors interchanged commonplaces, and Prudence was left to the satisfying of a healthy young appetite, and her own reflections, which, judging from her expression of pleasant abstraction, were more entertaining than the scrappy conversation to which she paid no attention. At the finish of the meal Miss Agatha created a diversion by requesting William to call at the police station to report that tramps had been loitering on the premises and had made havoc of the flowers in the borders. William required to be shown the borders, which he inspected with an air of pompous vexation, describing the damage as scandalous and an outrage, to the secret amusement of his youngest sister, who observed him critically from the French window of the drawing-room, which looked upon the borders in question. William was aware of her presence and of the smiling impertinence of her glance. It may have been the sight of her standing there in her scornful indifferent youth that accounted for the connecting thought which caused him to lift his eyes with swift suspicion to the window above the despoiled bed. Prudence, intercepting the upward glance, felt her cheeks suddenly aglow. For the first time since their disagreement he looked her fully in the face; then, with a change of expression that was a studied insult, he looked away. "I don't think it is the work of a tramp," he said. "But I will inform the police. If anyone is caught loafing about the premises I'll run him in." And Prudence, gazing upon the outraged dignity of his retreating back, laughed with considerable enjoyment. "If only he could see how ridiculous he looks!" she mused, and stepped out upon the path, and gathered a wallflower head, which with an air of bravado she pinned in the front of her dress. She regretted that she could not write to Steele and inform him of the havoc he had wrought and the distress this caused the family. She wrote instead to Bobby, describing in detail the whole surprising event of Steele's visit and its result; and Bobby, whose letters she was permitted to receive uncensored, commented briefly upon the episode and added that he would jolly well like to punch the fellow's head. Bobby's incipient jealousy was always taking fire when anyone loomed on Prudence's horizon with a prominence which threatened to eclipse his own popularity; and this matter of Steele, it occurred to him while reading Prudence's frankly worded enthusiasms, was more serious than anything that had transpired hitherto in the youthful experiences of his aunt. There was just sufficient Graynor blood in his veins to excite resentment in him at the thought of Prudence hanging out of the window to talk with any fellow in the night; but he was wise enough not to put that on paper. His want of sympathy, however, disappointed Prudence. For the first time in her life she caught herself wondering whether there was a latent possibility for Bobby of development upon his uncle's lines. But she put this idea aside as absurd; Bobby was the son of his father, and his father had flung off the family yoke early, and gone away and married a penniless girl of no family, and never repented. That was what Prudence admired most in him, that he had never solicited the forgiveness which was not voluntarily extended. That was how she would act in similar circumstances. When in due course Bobby came home for the summer vacation, Prudence made a strange discovery; she could not, she found, discuss Steele with him. It had been easy to write, with the excitement of the experience fresh in her memory, of the pleasure of Steele's visit and the stresses that ensued; but in the interval she had thought much about Steele, and missed him increasingly; and now she found it not only difficult but impossible to speak of him without constraint and a certain shyness foreign to her nature and oddly disconcerting. When Bobby referred to the fellow she had written to him about, she disposed of the matter briefly. "Oh, that!" she said. "That's ancient history. Lots of duller things have happened since and put that in the background." "The new curate!" suggested Bobby, grinning. "The chap who is fluttering the dovecots on account of his being unmarried. You devoted several letters to him, I remember. What's he like?" "He's a little man in a big coat and a big hat," she answered. "What can be seen of him is quite nice, but it isn't much. There must be a brain of sorts under the hat, but it's little too. His chief idiosyncrasy is that he fancies himself all brain. Mrs North is trying to marry her daughter to him." "And he prefers you," commented Bobby... "naturally." Prudence smiled wickedly. "He says it is the duty of a curate with only his stipend to depend upon to marry a woman of independent means. I think myself he will marry Matilda. He would like to belong to the family; the factory attracts him." "Money-grubbing little worm!" said Bobby, who was barely a year younger than Prudence and presumed on that account to set aside her more responsible relationship. "I wish he would marry Aunt Agatha. That would be something of a lark." "Poor little man!" said Prudence. "He's not so impossible as all that. And he is horribly afraid of her. She makes him stammer." Bobby laughed outright. "We're all horribly afraid of her. That's the funny part of it. And yet, you know, if one turned round and cheeked her she'd crumple up. I'll do it one day." Prudence regarded him with increased respect. "I hope I'll be there," was all she said. CHAPTER NINE. Bobby made the acquaintance of the curate very soon after that talk. They met for the first time at the vicarage garden party, which, according to an invariable rule, was held on Mrs North's birthday. This enabled the vicar's wife to display her birthday gifts, exciting by their numerical strength rather than their quality envy in the breasts of those guests less favoured in the matter of tokens of esteem on the important day which by right of precedent we appropriate to ourselves, and causing embarrassment to the more neglectful of her visitors by this reminder of a custom ignored. She made little self-depreciatory remarks in displaying these absurd articles, which wore in most instances an appearance of having come from some bazaar stall and a dejected air of expectation that eventually they would return thither by reason of their uselessness, and be sold and resold at extortionate prices for charitable ends. When one tired of viewing the gifts one wandered about the garden and admired the flowers, and a few of the younger people played tennis. The vicar hovered on the outskirts and smiled with remote affability upon every one. He discussed eighteenth century art with anyone who would listen to him. He claimed to be an authority on eighteenth century art, and possessed a few pictures which he had dug out of second-hand dealers' shops and bought for a trifle on account of their doubtful authenticity. He led the way triumphantly to his study where these treasures were hung, and discoursed learnedly on Humphreys, and other artists of that period, while he showed his canvasses to a listless, uninterested, and uninformed audience, who had seen most of them before. One crude portrait, that resembled a bad imitation of the Hamilton, he pronounced to be a Romney. No one believed him. It is doubtful whether he believed it himself; the dealer who had sold it to him had lied without conviction. But the possession of even a questionable Romney afforded him a sense of artistic importance. His collection was, he asserted, very valuable. He had insured it for a figure which would have tempted many people to the mean crime of arson: there were moments, when the vicar was harassed and the Easter offering had proved disappointing, when he gazed upon this comfortable asset lining his walls and decided that if Providence saw fit to raze his dwelling to the ground he would bear his loss with Christian fortitude and take a holiday abroad on the proceeds. Bobby, as one of the younger guests, enjoying also the doubtful privilege of being one of the two bachelors of the party--the other being the curate--was spared a review of the pictures and carried off to the tennis court by Mable North and several middle-aged spinsters, who cheated themselves into the deception that because romance had not been met in their youth, youth lay before instead of behind them, and saw in every unattached male a suppliant for their favour or an object for their womanly sympathy. Why country parishes beget these women remains an unsolved problem, but that they do beget them is very certain--women who cherish sickly sentimentality beyond the time for its decent interment and who look down on their sturdier sisters of a busier atmosphere as unsexed for putting the impossible aside and seeking a justification for their existence in an independence apart from these things. Bobby played several sets of tennis with various partners of doubtful efficiency, opposed to the curate with a similar inadequate support who beseeched him plaintively to take her balls whenever they pitched a yard from her racket. And then the two young men insisted upon a rest, and sat on a bench a little apart from the feminine element and took stock of one another. Prudence and a dispirited-looking woman of uncertain age played a set against Mable North and the Sunday-school lady superintendent, who was stout and forty and of a practical turn of mind. She rather preferred playing in a feminine foursome. The curate had eyes only for Prudence. It is doubtful whether he knew who else was on the court. "Your cousin is so graceful," he remarked to Bobby in an undertone. And Bobby, interrupted in the business of observing the curate's infatuated glances, brought himself up sharply and allowed his surprised gaze to follow his companion's. "My--Oh! my aunt. Yes, she's ripping, isn't she?" "The relationship seems so absurd," the curate said, with his eyes on Bobby's long legs. "I always confuse it." "Yes," Bobby agreed. "I might as well be a grandfather as she my aunt. There's not a year's difference between us." He offered his cigarette case to the curate, who declined the invitation to smoke. "It is such a mistake to drug the brain," he said. "It's so difficult," Bobby returned cheerfully, "to know whether one has a brain to drug." "Oh! I don't think anyone can have any doubt about that," the curate returned seriously. "No," Bobby agreed. "It is generally the other people who entertain doubts." He lighted himself a cigarette and slipped the case into his pocket. "Prudence smokes--like a furnace," he added--"whenever she gets the chance." Smokes! and surreptitiously! The curate was horrified. "You are joking surely?" he said. "Not much of a joke, when I have to supply the fags." Bobby looked amused. "We have to be mighty close about it. _I_ am not allowed to smoke in the Presence." So he designated Miss Agatha. "But we moon about the garden at night and enjoy ourselves." "Well played!" cried the curate enthusiastically, and ignored Bobby's confidence in his warm admiration for Prudence's spirited return. "That was very neatly placed indeed," he said. "Prudence is a very deceptive player. She always scores through trickery," Bobby observed, and watched the effect of this remark on his disapproving listener. "Nothing very brilliant about her play, you may note; but she wins all the time." "She is so very graceful," the curate said again, as though this quality was accounted a virtue in his estimation, as probably it was. "He's an awful ass, Prue," Bobby confided to her later. "And I've spoilt your matrimonial chances by telling him you smoke." Whereupon Prudence laughed sceptically. "As though I couldn't counteract that by allowing him to convert me from the evil practice," she said. "I think you are an abandoned little wretch," Bobby said, and dismissed the subject. It was so very evident that the curate as a rival for Prudence's favour was a negligible quantity. "Pretty tame, these old tabby meetings," Bobby remarked presently. "Why don't they do something in this benighted hole?" "That's what I am always wondering. I am looking to you to come home and wake the place up." "Paint it red?" he suggested, grinning. "Paint it any colour, save the drab hues which at present disfigure it. There isn't any earthly reason why people should remain satisfied to be so dull. What are you going to do when you come home to settle?" "Well, the first thing I shall do will be to marry--in order to get away from the Court," he replied with decision. "I refuse to be aunt-pecked any longer than necessity demands." "Does that include me?" Prudence inquired with irony. "You! Oh Lord!" He threw back his head and laughed. "You can come along and share my emancipation." "Thank you." Prudence's small chin was elevated, her lip curled disdainfully. "I shall contrive my own emancipation," she said. "How?" he asked, suddenly interested. "By marriage also," she answered, and laughed and broke from his detaining hand and fled indoors. Bobby looked after her in perplexity. "By Jove! I had forgotten that chap," he reflected, and recalled her earlier confidences with suddenly awakened suspicion and a mind not a little disturbed. He had been joking. Possibly Prudence had been joking also. But Wortheton without her would be a drear hole, he decided; and Wortheton and the factory were his ultimate and inevitable lot. And yet he did not wish her to remain unmarried. His five spinster aunts and the unmarried women he had met that afternoon, hovering hungrily about the little curate, sickened him. Prudence had no place in that gallery. She was altogether too fine and too clever to be wasted in the narrow seclusion of this life which she led with such evident distaste. Of course she would marry and go away. That was the chief point; she would go away. It didn't after all seem to matter who the fellow was, so long as he was a decent sort of chap and could provide for her an appreciate her qualities of beauty and intellect. If he didn't appreciate her--so Bobby philosophised--it would be a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire; but whoever it was got into the flames, the young man felt comfortably assured it would not be Prudence. She would contrive her emancipation more thoroughly than that. "I wish I had asked her more about that fellow," he mused. But he recognised that the time for asking questions was past. CHAPTER TEN. "I've been thinking," Bobby remarked one evening to Prudence, when they strolled up the road together in the dusk, "about our talk the other afternoon; and I've come to the conclusion that it's not the fault of the place, it's our own fault, that we find life dull. One place is much like another. Either we want too much, or else we are dull in ourselves and can't get the enjoyment out of life that is there for our taking. That's what I make of it anyhow." Prudence considered this. "Possibly I want too much--I think I do," she said after a while. "And so do you. We are the children of our age, Bobby; we've learnt to think for ourselves; when one begins to think one ceases to accept things unquestioningly. I'm alive to my finger tips. I want to enjoy. I am not satisfied merely to exist; a worm does that. I want to experience life to the full. Don't you?" "I suppose I do," Bobby agreed--"when you put it that way." Prudence was triumphant. "There you are, you see. It's just the way a thing is put. For the moment you almost convinced me that the discontent lay in myself, and now I convince you that there is substantial ground for discontent. No one should remain quiet under dissatisfying conditions; we should each strive for individual liberty. Youth is the time in which to do things, and youth passes quickly. When we are old we cease to strive because the spirit of adventure leaves us; but the hunger for the things which we have missed remains. And that makes us bitter." "How do you know?" demanded Bobby, with a cynical smile for her youth. "Know!" she repeated, and faced him, her eyes alight and scornful. "One has only to look around and note the disappointed, dull, sour people one meets; people who have had their chance and missed it, because they reasoned as you do; people who have not possessed courage or initiative, but in whose blood the desire for enjoyment has worked as surely as it works in ours. Do you suppose Agatha has never wanted to marry and manage a man and a home of her own? Do you suppose Matilda doesn't hunger for children, and Mary for a lover? Didn't daddy desire love? He married twice, and the second time at least was not merely a matter of expediency. I'm colder perhaps, harder anyway. I don't want anything but just to get away from Wortheton and live my own life independently, and order my days as I please." Bobby stared at her open-mouthed, bereft in his astonishment of the power of speech. Prudence suddenly laughed. "You old thing!" she cried. "I've properly scandalised you. Why do you set my thoughts working along these lines? You are just a boy." "Oh, shut it!" he ejaculated. "You aren't much older." "A girl is a lot older than a boy," she said. "She apprehends life more fully; your sex, until you are a responsible age, is just out for fun. But there's a time limit to one's capacity for enjoyment. In a few years I shall settle down to the routine, whatever it is that offers; and if I haven't had my good time, I'll just be a discontented dull reflection of the others. I know. And I'm going to guard against that." "But how?" he persisted. "What do you mean to do?" "I haven't thought that out," Prudence answered after a moment for reflection. "I don't know that I should confide in you if I had." He smiled at that, and stopped and lighted himself a cigarette. "I don't care what you do," he said, and added cheerfully: "I only hope you will have a good time. You know you're awfully pretty, Prue, and-- and interesting, and all that." "Am I?" Prudence laughed again, and there was a note of satisfaction in her mirth. "I thank Providence that I am pretty; it makes things easier. But if I were plain I should still insist on my good time. It doesn't necessarily include the homage of man. That's a side issue. It is sometimes a means to an end, but the end is the thing which matters. I want my own individual life." "I don't want any own individual life like that," Bobby confessed in thoughtful seriousness. "I want a home of my own, of course, and--a wife, and all those jolly things." "At seventeen?" she scoffed. And then he confided to her that he had met the divinity he hoped to marry at the home of a school chum. She was nearly as old as he was, and she was quite prepared to marry him as soon as circumstances permitted. She was a ripping good sort and very high spirited. "You had better invite her to stay at Wortheton before the ceremony," Prudence advised him. "If that doesn't put her off, you'll be sure of her genuine affection anyway." "I'm sure of that now," he returned confidently. "You've made good use of your time," was all she said. His words, the ring in his young voice, called up a mental picture of a strong clear-cut face looking up at her in the uncertain light of a moonlit night in May. She felt that somehow Bobby had outdistanced her. "Here we are," she exclaimed abruptly, "you and I, mooning, as we've mooned for years whenever the vacation came round. When we were children we mooned along and talked of splendid things--the things we meant to do, the positions we could create for ourselves in a world that was open and defenceless to our attacks; and now we moon sentimentally and talk of love instead." "But that's splendid too," he affirmed with young enthusiasm. "Is it? ... I wonder. I think perhaps it's just a little disappointing also... moonshine, like the rest." "Rot!" said Bobby elegantly. "Something's changed you, Prue--or some one... Which?" "The curate perhaps," Prudence returned flippantly. "Marriage with him would not be moonshine exactly, but it would be a trifle dull--just the distractions which the parish offered, and on Sundays his sermons to listen to." "There would be stimulation in the way of jealousy," Bobby suggested helpfully. "Think of all those women who work braces for him and lounge slippers. You'd have to compete, you know." "They cease all that when the curates marry," Prudence returned with disgust. "If they only kept it up there would be some excitement offering; but they don't." She turned and began to retrace her steps. "Goodness knows how we got on this topic! Your brain is love-sick, Bobby, and you're infecting me. If my memory serves me, there have been three ideal girls in your life already--and one of them was Mabel North." "Oh! that," said Bobby, colouring, "was all rot. This is the real thing." "It's always the real thing till the newer attraction comes along. You needn't resent that; it's true not only in your case. We are unstable as the waters which start from infinitesimal raindrops and run down in flood to the sea." Bobby chuckled. "Your image doesn't apply aptly to every one," he said. "One can't think of Uncle William in connexion with all that broiling strife." "Oh!" Prudence made a gesture which conveyed fairly adequately her contempt for the person referred to. "Some raindrops form into puddles, and the puddles cheat themselves into believing that they are the sea, and ridicule the idea of any expansion beyond their own muddy limits. William's is a complete little destiny in itself. And he never suspects the mud at the bottom because he never stirs it up." "How can you be sure of that?" Bobby inquired. "You are taking it too much for granted that the old boy's life is lived on the surface. He takes his annual holiday." "Well!" said Prudence, and turned her head and surveyed his grinning countenance with mixed emotions. "That's the most evil suggestion I've heard from you. I'm not fond of brother William, but I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself." He only laughed. "There's a bit of the old Adam in him as well as in the rest of us, I imagine," he said, and drew her hand within his arm affectionately. Thus, walking closely, they pursued their way along the dim country road which their childish feet had trodden and made familiar in its every aspect; which knew too the steadier tramp of their adolescent youth, and which in the near future was to know but seldom the lighter tread of the girl, whose feet stirred the unconscious dust that in the years ahead would lie undisturbed by her passing, when, in the pursuance of her destiny, the confined vista of her childhood, with its sense of security and dulness, should have become an elusive memory of drab and peaceful things. CHAPTER ELEVEN. With Bobby's return to college, life for Prudence reverted to the old dreary routine of ceaseless exasperating duties and increasingly curtailed liberty. She had a strong suspicion that the sisterly supervision which she was conscious was being exercised was carried out at brother William's suggestion. Although there was no one, with the exception of the curate, to tempt her to indiscreet behaviour it was very obvious that she was not trusted to venture abroad without one of her sisters to chaperon her. Prudence found this irksome at first, and set herself, sometimes successfully, to evade their united vigilance; but after one or two apparently accidental encounters with the curate, who appeared astonishingly in the most unexpected places and joined her on her stolen walks, she accepted the new development with a meekness which agreeably surprised her family, and discomfited the curate. It was the curate's quietly resolved manner, his air of exaggerated conspiracy, that drove Prudence to this unusual submissiveness. She knew quite well that the little man was making up his mind to propose to her, and she did not wish to give him the opportunity. Her decision was taken abruptly, after meeting him one day on the high road along which she was walking briskly with her back to the tall chimneys and her face to the wind and the little village which lay half-way between Wortheton and the junction town which connected it with the busier world from which it held aloof. The curate was cycling from the opposite direction. He was due to attend a meeting within the half-hour and had barely time to arrive at the appointed place; but when he came face to face with Prudence he alighted nimbly from his machine, and, pulling off a heather mixture glove, extended an eager hand. For a moment she allowed him to hold hers in his grip, and found herself wondering while she faced him which of his admirers had knitted the gloves for him. Then she withdrew her hand and remarked, for the lack of something more interesting to say, that the wind was boisterous. "Yes," he said; "you have it against you. Why not face about? It's a great help at one's back." This suggestion Prudence considered artful without being brilliant. She had no desire for his company on the return journey. "I love to feel it in my face," she said. "And since you prefer it behind it is well we are travelling in opposite directions." But the curate was not to be disposed of so easily. He turned his cycle and fell into step beside her. Prudence was taller than he; he was obliged to look up from under the wide brim of his hat when regarding her, a reversal of the usual order which occasioned him secret vexation. "One so seldom gets a chance of seeing you alone," he said. "I suppose it is because you are so much younger that your sisters make so much of you. They care for you tremendously. It is beautiful to observe their devotion." This view of her family's watchful mistrust as a manifest sign of their devotion was new to Prudence and afforded her amusement. She wondered whether he was altogether sincere in what he said, or if he were indulging in unsuspected satire. "I find it a little trying sometimes to be the family pet," she returned demurely. "The position is rather like that of the cat of the house which gets called indoors when it would prefer to remain in the garden. I wonder myself at times why the cat obeys the summons." He experienced a little difficulty in following her train of thought. "It's thinking of the milk, I suppose," he suggested, whereat Prudence laughed. "I dare say that explains it--economic dependence explains many uncomfortable things. I haven't much sympathy with the domesticated cat," she added. "She should ignore the call, and remain in the garden and eat birds." "Surely," he said, a little pained, "you wouldn't wish it to do that? It's so cruel." "So is eating mutton," she answered flippantly; "but we all do it." He digested this for a moment, found no adequate answer, and turned the conversation. "I was thinking of you as I rode," he said, in tones into which he threw an inflection of tenderness which she could not fail to detect. "I scarcely dared to expect so much happiness as to meet you like this. You are a tremendous walker. Do you realise how far you are from home?" He still hoped to induce her to turn and walk back with him. He would be late for his meeting in any case. He was too mentally flurried to decide how he should explain the defection: he was not very ready at invention; but the sight of Prudence's fair indifferent face drove him to the verge of recklessness; no consideration at the moment was strong enough to tear him from her side. "The farther the better," Prudence answered. "I am walking into the sunset." She turned her face to the westering sun and the warm glow in the sky that lit its declining glory. "When I turn about I see only the chimneys; they blot out everything for me." "But one can't see them from this distance," he insisted, and paused and looked back to verify his statement. Prudence smiled faintly. "I can," she said. "I see them even in my dreams." "I think myself they look rather fine," he said. "The red bricks against the trees are arresting." "Yes," she agreed, and smiled at him more directly. He felt that he had struck a happy note and was unnecessarily elated. "All great industries appeal to me," he continued as they walked on again. "I'm tremendously interested in the factory--and in the workpeople. They are so human and yet simple. I enjoy working among them. And Mr Graynor is so generous. The workpeople think very highly of him. I have been very happy in my labours since coming here." Prudence, missing the guile in this, looked at him in astonishment. "Really!" she said. "You are easily pleased." "You think so?" He drew a little nearer to her; his disengaged hand, hanging at his side, brushed lightly against hers. "I don't think that myself. But you see I have met much kindness here, and--forgive my saying so--it is such a happiness in itself to know you. I doubt whether you understand what a priceless pleasure that is to me." "It is very flattering of you to say so," Prudence broke in hastily, and not so much turned the conversation as jerked it into an impersonal channel. "Look at that gorgeous splash of red on those clouds. Isn't it just as though they were catching fire?" "Yes," he said in a flattened voice, feeling the rebuff; "it's very fine." "Isn't it? And that warm light on the trees... You can see it spreading along the branches. They're all aglow. If it could only last!" "`The light of the whole world dies when day is done,'" quoted the curate sentimentally, and gazed in rapt admiration upon her face which was all aglow too, but owed nothing of its colour to the sunset. "You look like one inspired," he added. "I wish I could sketch you as I see you now." Prudence made an impatient movement. "I don't believe you care a bit for beautiful scenery," she said. "I do," he assured her eagerly. "I admire everything beautiful. I... Never mind the sunset now. I'm thinking of you. I can't think of anything else. I want to--" "Oh!" she interrupted, with a note of sharp relief in her voice, and turned an embarrassed face in the direction of a solitary pedestrian, who appeared opportunely round a bend in the road, and slowly advanced, bearing a bundle in her arms, which at first the girl failed to recognise for an infant, wrapped in an old shawl. "There's some one I want to speak to," she said, and blessed Bessie Clapp for her timely appearance--"some one I know." "I'll wait," he said, still resolute though considerably ruffled at the interruption. Prudence regarded him frowningly. "No," she insisted, "you mustn't wait. I want to see her alone. I shall walk back with her." "That isn't altogether kind," he said--"to dismiss me. But I may see you another time?" He held out his hand and waited. If he expected a direct answer to his tentative suggestion, he was disappointed. Prudence shook hands hurriedly, murmured a breathless good-bye, and left him to mount his cycle and ride in unclerical mood to his neglected meeting, where he accounted for his unpunctuality by confessing to a puncture which he omitted to explain was caused by a thorn which he had painstakingly placed in the road and ridden over when a quarter of a mile from the town. Which proves what an amount of trouble a conscientious person will take in the insincere evasion of a direct lie. Prudence meanwhile advanced to meet the girl in the road. As the distance between them decreased she discovered that what the other carried in her arms was not an inanimate bundle, as she had supposed, but a little child. Instantly her interest quickened. The unexpected appearance of Bessie Clapp had seemed to her merely opportune at a moment when any diversion would have been welcome, but the sight of Bessie with a baby in her arms--presumably her own baby--caught her attention away from her immediate concerns and brought the other's affairs into greater prominence. She had always believed that this girl had been hardly dealt by, and no one had ever considered it worth while to enlighten her. Prudence's sense of justice was in arms, and her liking for Bessie, whom she had known from childhood, awoke anew at sight of the beautiful tragic face with its look of passionate antagonism. She halted in the girl's path and accosted her with disarming friendliness. "I'm so glad to meet you," she said. "I thought you had left this neighbourhood altogether." "There are some as would like to make me leave," said Bessie Clapp, her dark unsmiling gaze on the fair tranquillity of the younger, happier face. "I've been badgered enough. We'm living in the little village down over the hill." "Just five miles away! And I never knew." Prudence bent suddenly over the bundle in her arms. "Is this your child?" she asked. "Yes; he's mine." There was proprietorship but no pride in the admission. It was Prudence's hand which pulled the covering away from the tiny face. "Oh!" she said, and half drew back, and then bent again compassionately over the ugly little mottled piece of humanity in the beautiful young mother's arms. "I've never seen so young a baby before. What do you call him?" "He isn't christened," the sullen voice responded. "I've no patience with those silly customs." "But," began Prudence, and looked perplexed, "he'll have to have a name of his own some time." "We call 'im William," the young mother volunteered. "There's no need for cold water splashing over that. If 'e don't like 'is name later on, 'e can change it." Prudence, steering away from the subject, replaced the shawl over the little face and impulsively held out her arms. "Let me carry him," she said. "I'd love to; and you are tired. Where were you taking him?" "To the farm yonder, among the trees. I get milk for 'im there. 'E's been weaned these three weeks." The exchange from the girl-mother's arms to the younger arms extended eagerly to receive their burden was effected silently. Prudence walked on proudly, bearing her unaccustomed charge with a sense of new responsibility suddenly acquired. She loved the feel of the little warm body against her heart; the nestling pressure of this soft helpless thing, which lay so confidingly within the shelter of her arms, roused in her the strong protective maternal instinct which is every woman's heritage. In her pity for its puny helplessness she forgot the sense of shock which the first glimpse of the repellently ugly wrinkled face had occasioned her, forgot the circumstances of its unfortunate birth, and the more recent revelation that it had not been received into the Church, was not in any sense of the term a Christian; she realised only that she held in her arms that most wonderful of all things, a new generation; and felt in her heart the warm glow of protective love for this weak little morsel of humanity, born into an unwelcoming world--a love child who was denied love. The unfair conditions of the child's birth awoke her utmost compassion. She felt resentful against its unknown father, against the injustice of the world's judgment, which throws discredit on maternity rather than on illicit love. The greatest crime of this unwedded mother, Prudence recognised, lay in the fact that she had brought a child into the world. "He must be a great comfort to you," she said gently. "A baby makes up for a lot." Bessie Clapp laughed harshly. "Ban't many as think like you," she said. "They wouldn't agree with you at Court Heatherleigh." And Prudence, thinking of Agatha, and Matilda's pink shocked face, of brother William's austere principles, and her father's cold disapproval at the mere mention of Bessie's name, could not contradict this. They would have been scandalised, and she knew it, could they have seen her walking with this outcast, and carrying the outcast's baby in her strong young arms. CHAPTER TWELVE. The meeting with Bessie Clapp set Prudence's mind working in new directions. She realised, with an immense pity and a growing wonder for the complexities of human emotions, that this girl, whose motherhood had come to her in circumstances which the world surrounds with contumely and disgrace, had no love for the child of her unlawful passion. She had allowed Prudence to discover that. But for the fear of consequent punishment, she had admitted with bitterness that she would do away with the baby. She confessed too to a hatred of its father. Prudence wondered whether this unnatural dislike for her own offspring resulted from the shame with which its birth had covered her, or was the inevitable consequence of the revulsion of feeling which had swept from her heart every kindly emotion which must have drawn her once towards the man she now professed aversion for. The man who had injured her had a lot to answer for. If ever it lay in her power to hurt him in return it was fairly certain that she would not hesitate to use her opportunity. The silence which she maintained in regard to his name was no guarantee of a wish to shield him; it suggested rather a caution which awaited its hour to strike. The meeting left Prudence with a feeling of depression. It did not decrease her pity, but it lessened her liking for the girl to discover her attitude of bitter resentment against the helpless mite she had brought into the world. And it set her thinking about marriage in a new light. Was it possible to cease to love a man one had loved once passionately? And could a woman grow to hate the children of a loveless marriage? If these matters were beyond the control of human will power, it seemed that it might be so. Here was an example of it anyway, though it might be a bad example. Until that talk with Bessie Clapp it had never occurred to Prudence that a woman could dislike her own child. It was one of the inexplicable problems of life. Prudence reached home to discover that she was late. Miss Agatha met her in the hall, already dressed for the evening meal, which was the most important function of the day, and at which no one was expected to put in a tardy appearance. Miss Agatha glanced from the warning face of the great clock at the foot of the staircase to the sweet flushed face of her young sister, and from thence to her dust-soiled shoes. "Where have you been?" she demanded. "Don't you see the time?" "I'll hurry," Prudence answered. "It won't take me three minutes to change. I've been for a tramp." "You have a deceitful habit," Miss Agatha admonished her, "of slipping away from the house without informing anyone. If you were less selfish it might occur to you that your sisters would like to accompany you occasionally. I can't understand why you prefer to walk alone." "I shall be late," Prudence said, with her foot on the stair, "if I stay to go into that now." And with a rebellious face she ran upstairs, leaving Miss Agatha, aghast and indignant, looking up from the foot of the staircase after her vanishing figure. Prudence was getting altogether out of hand. "She tramps the country," William affirmed on learning the trouble, "like a factory girl. I won't have my sister making herself so noticeable--mooning about the lanes and hanging over stiles. It--it isn't respectable." "I wish," Miss Agatha said, meanly shifting responsibility, "that you would put your foot down. If you were firm she might possibly respect your wishes. I can do nothing with her." "M'm!" William coughed gently, and assumed an expression which he hoped conveyed the air of inflexibility he deemed suited to the responsible position thus conferred on him. "I'll see to it," he said; and felt relieved when the gong sounded in advance of Prudence's entry, and so deferred the moment for exercising his authority. He was less confident than Agatha that firmness on his part would produce the result desired. He had in mind the occasion when he had insisted upon an apology before the resumption of fraternal relations with his young sister. He had maintained a dignified silence until the thing threatened to become ridiculous, and still the apology had not been forthcoming: he had been forced to capitulate; and the memory of that defeat rankled. But the lesson had been salutary in so far that it discouraged him from straining his authority to a point whence it aggravated to open revolt. Defiance was a quality which defeated William's statesmanship. Prudence came running down the stairs as the rest of the family crossed the hall on the way to the dining-room. "You ran it pretty close, Prue," her father said, as she took the last couple of stairs at a jump and landed laughing beside him. He patted the little hand she slipped within his arm. "You are precisely two minutes late," Miss Agatha observed. "I think you might have made a greater effort to be punctual." "I might, of course, have slid down the banisters," Prudence retorted. "Tut, tut!" Mr Graynor patted the small hand again in gentle reproof. "You are tomboy enough without scandalising us to that extent." Save that he held his head a little higher on passing behind her to his seat at table, William disregarded her presence, a sign by which Prudence recognised that she was once again in disgrace. It occasioned her therefore something of a shock when William approached her later during the evening and requested a few minutes of her time. He had something of importance, he announced, which he wished to say. This request in its unexpectedness deprived her for the moment of breath. She was attracted by his speech and puzzled. She found herself wondering amazedly what kind of confidence William intended to repose in her. William found her silence embarrassing; he had expected her to give him a cue. He cleared his throat, nervously fingering the arrangement of his tie. Prudence began to feel sympathetic. She believed he was about to confess to some romantic attachment, although there was not, so far as she knew, any woman of their acquaintance likely to inspire sentiment in him. If William were in love, that might account for his preoccupation during dinner. "Please give me your whole attention," he said, which was a superfluous remark even for a commencement; it was so obvious that he was receiving what he asked for. "It is a little difficult for me, a little--ahem!-- embarrassing to say what I wish to say in view of your inexperience." This confirmed Prudence's suspicion. She smiled at him encouragingly. "Oh! I expect I'll understand," she said kindly. "It's nice of you to tell me, anyhow." He was taken aback, and he showed it. He had never known Prudence so amenable before; her attitude discountenanced him slightly. "I am glad you take so sensible a tone," he returned; "it makes my task easier. I do not wish to find fault; your conduct is indiscreet rather than blameworthy. You ought to realise that it is not seemly for a young girl in your position to tear about the country as you do. I am not sure that in a factory town it is altogether safe. In any case it gets you talked about. It distresses your sisters; it distresses me. It lays you open to misapprehension. Why should you wander about the roads alone?" "Oh! Is that all?" Prudence's smile had changed in quality; kindliness made way for irony. "How do you know I do wander alone?" William reddened angrily. "I should be sorry to insult you by supposing the contrary," he replied with restrained annoyance. "No one in this house credits you with being other than thoughtless. Your behaviour shows a great want of consideration for your family." "It wasn't until to-day that I realised you were all so devoted to me," Prudence returned with suspicious meekness. "I have yet to get accustomed to that idea. So much family affection is embarrassing." "If you are going to adopt that outrageous tone," William observed with a resumption of dignity, "I have nothing further to say." "Don't worry about that," Prudence reassured him. "You haven't left much unsaid. You have filled my mind with a lot of new ideas that make it feel like a rubbish heap. If the roads are not safe for a girl to walk along, it is time some one saw to it that they were made so. As for being talked about, no one with a decent mind would make matter for talk where there was none. Are you quite sure, William, that your own mind doesn't need a little tidying up? Your workpeople at least are your responsibility. If you have any dubious characters among them, turn them away--as you turned away Bessie Clapp." William's face was crimson. He rose and stood looking down at her with the look of a man who feels himself deeply insulted. "You forget yourself," he said. "How dare you mention that woman's name to me?" "I have held that woman's child in my arms to-day," she answered quietly. "I think perhaps that gives me the courage." He bent swiftly and caught her by the shoulder. "So that's how you spend your time?" he said, staring into her steady eyes. He emitted an ugly laugh and pushed her roughly from him. "A decent-minded girl would shrink from such contact." She smiled coldly. "It is only the decent mind that does not fear these things," she answered, and turned away from the look in his eyes, which was not good to see. It was by a great effort at control that he refrained from striking her. He spluttered for words. Confronted with her cool disdain, anger overcame him. He felt himself at an immense disadvantage. "You are impossible!" was all he could find to say. Prudence, thinking over the scene later, while leaning from her window with the night wind cooling her heated face, wondered what was wrong with herself that this spirit of antagonism should flame forth at the slightest provocation. Why could she not endure William, and suffer his little homilies with patience? Why should Agatha's constant fault-finding irritate her to the verge of desperation? If she were possessed of a vein of humour, she told herself, these things would merely afford amusement. But they did not amuse. They were slowly souring a naturally sweet disposition. Big tears welled in the blue eyes, hung for a space on her lashes, and fell like silver dew upon the rose-leaves beneath the sill--hot tears that sprang from the well of discontent which had its source in a vain longing for unattainable things. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. The troubles of youth are none the less real because to riper age they appear trivial in the retrospect. In the constant fret against the irksome restrictions of her life Prudence's sunny nature fought under unequal conditions, with the result that the sun suffered many an eclipse. In one of these depressed moods she wrote to Bobby to the effect that she felt unequal to holding out until he came home for good, and that if matters did not improve the desperation of the situation would drive her to elope with the curate. "The sole consideration which deters me," she added, "is that Jones is such an impossible name." "What's in a name?" Bobby wrote back airily. "You're safe, old girl, if you jib at a little thing like that." The curate, failing to meet Prudence alone and wearying of being fenced with, took a mean advantage of her at the annual Sunday-school treat, and secluding her in a corner of the playing-field with her class of infants, set the infants running races and came rather abruptly to his point. "I love to watch you with little children," he remarked with disconcerting suddenness. "You have such a wonderful sympathy with them." "I like children," she answered guardedly; and tried to gather the babies about her; but the curate was throwing sweets for them, and they preferred scrambling for these to clinging to teacher's hands. There is a time for everything. "So do I," he said, attentively scrutinising her averted face, and admiring the fine colour in her cheeks which a new quality in his voice had brought there. "Children in the home make home beautiful." He swept the field with his glance, and decided that his chance was short-lived and might not come again. He plunged desperately. "I want to marry," he said, hurriedly, and threw a further quantity of sweets to the children and turned more directly towards her. "I have been waiting so long for an opportunity of saying this to you that you will forgive me if I seem a little abrupt and choose my time inopportunely. I never see you alone now. You cannot have failed to observe how deeply in love I am. You are so sweet and gentle that I feel you will be kind. I want a little encouragement." He paused expectantly. "I may go on?" he asked, when she took no advantage of his hesitation. "You will give me a little hope?" Prudence turned her face and met his eyes fully. There was no possibility of mistaking his meaning. "No, please don't," she said. "I don't want you to say any more. I hoped you would see it wasn't any use. I'm sorry." The curate although a vain man, had never felt very confident of winning her. He wanted her quite urgently; but he was not so deeply in love with Prudence as he was with himself, and the certainty of defeat wounded his pride more than it wounded his feelings. He had no intention of giving her the satisfaction of being in a position to say that she had refused him. He dissembled meanly, congratulating himself on the clever ambiguity with which he had worded his proposal. "I am sorry you have formed that opinion," he said, trying to keep the chagrin he felt from betraying itself in his voice. "You are so much with her that I believed you would enjoy her entire confidence, and I was vain enough to expect a little encouragement. But I am not going to accept your opinion as final. I shall make my appeal to her. Perhaps I ought to have done so in the first instance; but a man feels naturally diffident at these times." The play of expression on Prudence's face while she listened to his stilted sentences was remarkable. He would have been very obtuse if he believed that he succeeded in deceiving her. It was very evident that she apprehended him very clearly. A little smile hovered about her mouth when she replied to him. "If it is Matilda you allude to," she said, with an ambiguity equal to his own, "I wish you all the success you deserve." He raised his hat gravely and left her, carrying the bag of sweets with him, to the manifest disgust of the staring infants; and Prudence, watching his hurrying little figure making its purposeful way through the different groups in search of his unconscious quarry, laughed quietly and without malice, despite his ungenerous effort to humiliate her. "Now I shall have a new enemy in my brother-in-law," she reflected. "He is marrying the chimneys. But Matilda will be too grateful to him to resent that." Matilda was grateful. She was sufficiently overcome with the honour thus conferred on her to satisfy even Mr Jones' colossal vanity. Mr Jones accepted his triumph with becoming condescension; to describe his air as elated would be misleading. His manner towards his affianced wife, who was several years his senior, and had never been handsome, was benevolently patronising. His courtship was business-like, and free from those affectations of silly sentiment so unsuited to his calling. If Miss Matilda regretted the lack of lover-like attentions, she concealed her disappointment, clinging insistently to the belief that everything that Ernest did was right and dignified. It would have been unbecoming in a clergyman to be demonstrative. "I used to think," she confessed to Prudence in a moment of rare confidence, "that it was you he admired. You remember how he used to persist in accompanying us on our walks, and how he talked principally with you? All the while he was thinking of me. He told me so. Isn't it wonderful?" "He has the sense," Prudence answered, and kissed the flushed face kindly, "to realise that you will make the best wife in the world for a clergyman." And she thought of Bobby's epithet, "money-grubbing little worm," and decided that it aptly fitted Ernest. Bobby chaffed her about the curate, affecting to believe she had suffered a disappointment. Prudence did not confide in him the tale of the curate's duplicity; loyalty to Matilda kept her silent on that subject. But her wrathful disgust was roused on the day of Matilda's wedding, when Mr Jones, claiming the privilege of a brother, caught her unprepared in the hall and kissed her unsuspecting lips. "If you ever take such a liberty with me again," she said, white and angry, "I will make you the laughing-stock of Wortheton." He assumed an air of dignity while conscious of looking ridiculous. Her words, her tone in uttering them, lashed him into a rage of hatred that cured him finally of any tender thought he had cherished in regard to her. He spoke of her later to his wife as ill-mannered and ungentle of temper, a description which, while holding it to be ungenerous, occasioned Matilda considerable comfort. She had felt uneasily jealous of Prudence at times, even during the days of her brief engagement. Mr Jones had shown such predilection for the society of the younger sister that Matilda, like Leah, was made to realise the humiliating position of the substitute. Her faith in his uprightness did not allow of disbelief; besides which his ill-natured criticism of her young sister carried conviction; his tone expressed cordial dislike. "Fuller acquaintance with her reveals her more objectionable qualities," he said. "I believed her to be a nice, simple girl, but she is certainly not that." "Prudence is very warm-hearted," Matilda said weakly in defence of the absent. "But father spoils her a little." "He makes a fool of her," was the bridegroom's unclerical retort. Thus Matilda left the home of her childhood, seated beside her husband in the carriage which was to take them to the junction, and to the back of which Bobby, with a sense of the eternal unfitness of things, had tied one of Matilda's discarded shoes. Not even the thought of the comfortable dowry which went with the gentle Matilda had the power to lighten Mr Jones' lowering countenance during the long drive to the station, and Mr Graynor had behaved with quite surprising generosity in the matter of settlements. The hard ring in Prudence's voice, when she had threatened to make a laughing-stock of him, the expression of disgust on her white face, hit his pride hard. And he dared not offend her further from the wholly unnecessary fear that she would put her threat into execution. He knew that he had paid her marked attention, and that Wortheton was aware of his preference. If she chose to spread tales about him they would not lack credence. His frown deepened when he felt his wife's gloved hand timidly feeling for his; then he roused himself with an effort and responded to the gentle pressure of her fingers. "It's nervous work getting married," he said, with an uneasy laugh. "The fuss and the crowd... every one staring. Phew!" Matilda sympathised with him; she had felt nervous also. "I'm glad it's over--oh! so very glad--and happy, dear." "Blithering ass, isn't he?" was Bobby's cheerful comment, when, turning from watching the vanishing carriage, he found Prudence beside him, looking unusually tall and womanly in her bridesmaid's dress of soft blue, with a hat with cornflowers in it shading her face. "Come along, and drink to their connubial bliss in another bumper of champagne." He filled her glass for her and one for himself. "Cheer up," he cried, and raising his glass, grinned at her over the brim. "There are more Joneses than one in the sea. You needn't sport the willow so openly. It's indecent. Here's to their health, wealth, and happiness! It will be wealth for him, anyway--cute little beast!" Prudence became aware of her father surveying them from the doorway with a tired smile on his bored and worried face. He had slipped away from his guests, who lingered aimlessly on the lawn, and followed them indoors. She persuaded him to take a seat beside her and drink a glass of his own very excellent champagne. "It's jolly good stuff. You did them awfully well, sir," said Bobby enthusiastically approving. "We've given Wortheton something to think about. It'll be Prue's turn next." "There's plenty of time for Prudence," Mr Graynor said--"plenty of time." He found himself looking at her in her unfamiliar dress, surprised, as Bobby had been, by the womanliness he realised for the first time. It disconcerted him. "Weddings are a nuisance; they upset the household," he said. "I wish all these people would go." "They are like the wasps," said Bobby; "they'll hang about so long as the grub's there. I'll go out and clear them off." He left the room by the window. Mr Graynor looked after him, and meeting Prudence's eye, exchanged a smile with her. "The assurance of youth!" he remarked. "You and I, we've had enough of them, Prue." He regarded her again more attentively. "That blue dress is very becoming to you, my dear." Prudence flushed warmly. His appreciation recalled to her mind the light of admiration in the curate's eyes, his quick hungry swoop towards her, the eager furtiveness of his kiss--the first time that a man's lips had touched hers, other than the members of her family. But he belonged to the family in a sense--a wretched little hanger-on, catching at the overflow from the Graynor pockets. "If it is becoming, I don't believe you like it very well," she said. "It makes you look old--perhaps that's why," he answered, and thought with regret of the little girl who had given place to this tall and gracious young woman. CHAPTER FOURTEEN. Matilda's departure from the family circle made strangely little difference. She had made no particular place for herself in the home which she had occupied for thirty years, had established no claim on any member of her family. If anyone missed her, it was Prudence: Matilda had been the most amiable of her elder sisters; but she had never been in any sense of the word a companion. The first Mrs Graynor's family, with the exception of the younger son, were none of them companionable; they were self-contained and reserved, and lacking in those qualities of individuality and initiative which make for the breaking away from tradition and the following a line of one's own. Matilda was naturally submissive. She had submitted uncomplainingly to Agatha's rule all her life; and she left one submission for another, and, in accordance with the dictates of the marriage service, which Prudence considered degrading and Matilda thought beautiful, became subject willingly to the dominating and not particularly chivalrous authority of her husband. Had Mr Jones succeeded in winning the sister whom he had coveted, he would have found this comfortable arrangement of relationship reversed. There was no aptitude for submission in Prudence. On one point after Matilda's marriage Prudence was firm: she refused to be chaperoned on her walks by one of the remaining sisters. Matilda's presence she had suffered as a protection against the curate's advances; since these advances were no longer to be dreaded, she refused to be shadowed in future, and in order to escape from the annoyance took to cycling, a form of exercise which none of the elder Miss Greynors would attempt. Her cycling took her far afield, and brought many new pleasures into her life. Miss Agatha tried to veto the idea; but Prudence, backed by her father's permission, and in possession of a fine new machine which he bought for her, defied opposition and rode forth whenever the weather permitted in quest of new experiences. Sometimes she met with adventures, and got into unexpected and informal conversations with strangers encountered surprisingly in little outlying villages where she dismounted to rest and quench her thirst. Cycling in its early stages is very thirsty work. She never mentioned those experiences at home; not that she was naturally secretive, but she held a strong conviction that such harmless amusement would meet with disapproval; and life had taught her that it is wisest to avoid unpleasantness. And once she met with an accident. That had to be admitted because it could not by any means be suppressed. It was a silly sort of accident, which an experienced rider might have averted; and it left her injured in temper as much as physically hurt. The bicycle suffered the greater damage. She was free-wheeling down hill with a broad open road ahead and nothing more formidable to pass than a leisurely farm cart, crawling up the steep incline, accompanied by an amiable sheep-dog which, until the cycle came abreast with it, was ambling comfortably within the shade at the back of the cart. Apparently the sight of the girl on the cycle excited it. It rushed forward unexpectedly and, barking vociferously, got in front of her wheel. Prudence swerved violently in order to avoid it, overbalanced herself, and, before she quite realised what was happening, found herself in the road inextricably mixed up with her crumpled machine. The dog, its feet planted deeply in the white dust, barked in enjoyment of this new kind of game. The farmer pulled up his horse, and looked down upon their grouping with an expression of stolid amiability. "'E won't 'urt 'ee," he called out reassuringly, and whistled to the dog, which, disregarding its owner, continued to bark gleefully at the debris. Prudence lifted a face pale with indignation to the speaker. "'E won't 'urt 'ee," he repeated, and in case she needed further reassurance, added comfortably: "'E's done it afore. 'E's that friendly. But you needn't be afraid; 'e won't hurt." "Afraid!" she ejaculated, and sat up and looked around for her hat. "He's done all the mischief he can. Get down, please, and wheel my machine as far as the cottage. I'll have to rest." It dawning upon the man for the first time that the lady was annoyed with him, he proceeded to obey her instructions, curiously little resentful of her anger. While Prudence painfully regained her feet he righted the disabled cycle, and, after a glance at his horse to assure himself of his intention to stand, half-wheeled half-carried the machine to a cottage at the bottom of the hill, and propped it against the wall of the house. "'E's that friendly," he reiterated, gently admonishing the dog which accompanied them delightedly. "'E always runs up to folk like that. 'E's done it afore. But 'e wouldn't 'urt anyone. It's just friendliness." Prudence found nothing to say. She was already ashamed of her heat; but the man's amiable indifference exasperated her. This was due, not to any want of consideration, but to rustic obtuseness. He was urgently anxious to reassure her in regard to the dog; ladies were scared as a rule of dogs; he was also desirous of returning to his cart, the horse having views of its own about standing. He knocked on the cottage door, quite unnecessarily; two girls, who had witnessed the accident, having already appeared in the entrance. One of them was laughing immoderately, as though she considered the affair a huge joke, enacted for her special amusement; the other, and older girl, favoured her with a reproving look. "Young lady's met with a accident," the man explained. "The dog done it; 'e's that friendly. She wants to rest a bit." He left it at that, and hurried back to his cart. The elder girl invited the stranger to come inside, and the younger, following them, stood in the doorway, laughing. Prudence showed her annoyance. "It wasn't so funny as you seem to think," she said, surveying her from a chair in indignant surprise. "I know," the girl replied, her laughter trailing off into spasmodic giggles. "I don't know what makes me keep laughing. But it was funny seeing you in the road, an' the bicycle an' all. It made me fair screech. I'm glad you're not hurt." "You'd like a glass of water, I expect?" said the older girl; and the younger, as if desirous of atoning for her misplaced merriment, hurried away to fetch it. "I don't know how I shall get home," said Prudence, who was more concerned with this difficulty than with her bruises, although these were more considerable than she had thought at first. She had wrenched her ankle badly. "I'm ten miles from Wortheton, and my machine is twisted hopelessly--even if I could ride it, which at present I don't feel equal to doing. Could I get a conveyance near here?" "No," answered the girl. "There's nothing but that cart that's gone on. I don't know what you'll do." They were not very helpful people, and there was no other house within sight. Prudence began to fear that she would be hung up there for the night. She wondered whether for a consideration the girl who had laughed so immoderately would walk to the nearest village and secure some sort of conveyance. She regretted that she had not commandeered the cart of the man whose dog was responsible for the mishap, but events had been too hurried to allow her time to realise the difficulties of getting home in her damaged condition. She appealed to the girl, who still stood surveying her with a wide grin of amusement, and who seemed by no means eager to undertake the mission. She looked out along the dusty road and up the steep hill, down which Prudence had sped to her undoing, and hesitated; then she picked up a hat which was lying on a chair and remarked that she would go up the road a bit and see if anyone were about. Prudence sat on in the room, waiting in the company of the sister, with a blank feeling of hopelessness for the next event. This when it befell was so altogether unexpected that at the moment when she first caught sight of a motor, with the girl who had set forth on her reluctant search seated in the back, she almost discredited her senses. But the motor came to a stop in the roadway before the house, and the other girl, springing up and going to the window, remarked explanatorily over her shoulder: "It's Major Stotford in his car. That's a rare bit of luck for you. I suppose Lizzie stopped him. She's got a cheek. He's lord of the manor over to Liscombe. It's all his property about here." Lizzie burst in in great excitement. "It's all right," she cried; "the Major'll drive you. Only you must be quick; he hates to be kept waiting." She ran out again, and stood in the road staring admiringly at the rather heavy, handsome man who remained at the steering wheel, and only looked round when Prudence, walking with an unmistakable limp, emerged from the house, with the other girl behind her, and approached the car. With his first casual glance at her the look of indifference gave immediate place to an expression of very real interest. What he had expected he hardly knew, certainly not what he saw. He raised his cap, and with an alertness he had not yet displayed, left the wheel and opening the door of the car stepped into the road. "I don't know how to thank you," said Prudence. "It's most awfully kind of you to come to the assistance of a stranger. I fear it will trespass on your time. I live at Wortheton; that's ten miles from here." "Wortheton!" he said, and smiled charmingly. "My time is not so valuable that so heavy a call upon it need worry you. I'll sprint you home under the half-hour." He held the door for her and helped her up. Lizzie had occupied the back seat, but plainly he preferred to have Prudence beside him. "Is that your cycle?" he asked. "You _have_ had a spill." "Yes. It will need to visit the doctor before I can ride it again," she said, and turned a look of regret on the damaged machine. "So will you, by the look of things," he remarked, and scrutinised her more closely. Prudence leaned down to take her farewell of, and recompense the sisters, who, sober enough now, watched the proceedings with interest. "I'll send out for the cycle to-morrow," she said. But Major Stotford saw no necessity for leaving the cycle behind. "It will go in the back all right. We might as well take it along," he said, and lifted it into the car. Lizzie, considerably more obliging than heretofore, lent a hand. When he had settled the machine he took his seat beside Prudence. "Anyone we pass will conclude that I've run you down, and that I'm taking home the pieces," he said, smiling at her with curious intimacy, as the car took the long hill, and the girl leaned back white and weary against the cushions. He drew a flask from his pocket and handed it to her. "Don't look so horrified. If you could see the colour of your face you would realise as surely as I do that this is what you need. Take a good pull at it and you'll feel better." "I begin to believe that the lamp on my bicycle must once have belonged to Aladdin," Prudence said with a quiet little laugh of enjoyment. "I rubbed it to some purpose in the dust of the road. Whatever I require appears." Major Stotford laughed with her. The thought in his mind, which he was careful not to express in words, was that she carried the magic within her. He leaned forward and altered the pace of the car, which had been running at top speed. CHAPTER FIFTEEN. "And now," Major Stotford remarked, as he turned in at the gates of Court Heatherleigh and drove slowly along the smooth gravelled path which led to the house, "for explanations. Beastly things, explanations, eh? Can't see the necessity for them myself." He scrutinised the white face which, even in its pallor, and despite the worried expression which he observed settled upon it as they drew near her home, looked extraordinarily fresh and sweet. He had enjoyed the ten mile drive exceedingly. Had he not believed that his companion was enduring more discomfort than she would allow, he could have wished that the distance had been greater. He was a man who appreciated feminine society, and he had derived considerable pleasure as the result of an act of careless good-nature from which he had not anticipated enjoyment. It had been a new and agreeable experience. He determined that he would see her again. The slight service he had been able to render her gave him that much right at least, he decided. The door was flung wide, and the butler came down the steps with concern written large on his discreet features. He opened the door of the car. Major Stotford alighted, shouldered the man authoritatively out of the way, and assisted Prudence to the ground. She leaned on his arm heavily, and he saw her blue eyes darken with a look of pain. "I'm sorry; my ankle hurts." She turned from him to the waiting servant; but Major Stotford, anticipating her request, lifted her in his arms and carried her easily up the steps and into the hall. The butler, following quickly, got ahead of this intrusive stranger whose proceedings he did not altogether approve of, and threw open the drawing-room door. Major Stotford entered with his burden, and after one swift comprehensive glance which took in the fact that the room was untenanted, and located the sofa at the same moment, carried Prudence to it and laid her gently down among its cushions. He stood over her inquiringly, anxiety in his look and the hint of a smile in his eyes. "Come now! We're all right, eh?" he said, and felt in his pocket for his flask, thought better of it and withdrew his hand again empty. Prudence made an effort to sit up and laughed nervously. "It's so stupid," she said, "A little thing like that! It's nothing really." She was immensely relieved that no one save Graves had witnessed their arrival. It would have alarmed her father, and scandalised Agatha, to have seen her carried in like a baby. Major Stotford's helpfulness had been in excess of what was necessary, she felt; with the aid of a strong arm she could have accomplished the journey herself. "I've given you a lot of trouble. You've been awfully kind to me," she said. Before he could reply, Mr Graynor entered, concerned and fussy, followed by Agatha, who wore an expression of protest, and suggested frigid disapproval in the very rustle of her skirts. "I always knew how it would end," she exclaimed. "This doesn't in the least surprise me." "Oh! it isn't the end," Major Stotford put in with a twinkling of amusement. "These little annoyances happen at the beginning. I don't think there are any bones broken." Mr Graynor bent anxiously over Prudence and laid a hand on her hair. "You've had an accident. Are you much hurt?" he asked. "It's nothing really," she said, ashamed at the general fuss in front of a stranger. "I had a spill--a silly little spill which jarred my ankle. Major Stotford very kindly motored me home." Mr Graynor glanced swiftly at the person referred to. His anxiety partially relieved, he found time to give attention to the man who had not only brought his daughter home, but was, he imagined, responsible for the accident. Major Stotford, taking advantage of the pause, set about correcting this impression, which he had foreseen as likely to follow his share in the proceedings. "I was fortunately near the spot," he said. "Miss Graynor rode over a dog in the roadway, and unluckily it was not the dog which got hurt. It seldom is on these occasions. I brought home the wreckage." "I am sure I am very much obliged to you," Mr Graynor said, but with such a lack of graciousness in his manner as to cause Prudence surprise and distress. Major Stotford's helpfulness had been more valuable than he realised. She glanced at her new acquaintance with a quick bright flush. "I know I am. If it had not been for Major Stotford's kindness I should have been stranded for the night with no possibility of communicating with you at a wretched wayside cottage ten miles away. I've trespassed enormously on his time, and given quite a lot of trouble. But I enjoyed the ride." He laughed pleasantly. "I enjoyed it too. And you make too much of my services. They were nothing. I trust the foot will soon be well, and that the injuries are as light as you would so bravely have us believe." He addressed himself to Mr Graynor. "If you like I'll leave word at the doctor's on my way back. You'll want to call him in, I expect." "Thank you, there is no need to trouble you further," Mr Graynor returned stiffly. "I can send." "I have already sent," Miss Agatha interposed; and Major Stotford turned to look in her direction, as if recalling the presence of one he had temporarily forgotten. "Then that's finished," he said; "and it only remains to unload the car." He spoke with a certain cold hostility in his voice which did not escape Prudence's ear. It hurt her. She could have wept with vexation at her father's want of gratitude and courtesy to this man who had proved so good a friend to her in her need: she felt that she wanted to apologise to him for the rudeness of her family. Then she became aware of her father speaking again in the same politely distant tones as before, thanking the other man coldly for the trouble he had been put to, and assuring him that the bicycle had been removed by the servants. "You should not have burdened yourself with that too," he added. "You place me under a heavy obligation to you which will leave me always indebted." "My dear sir," Major Stotford interrupted, "you are in no sense under an obligation to me; please disabuse your mind of that idea." He cut short further expressions of gratitude by advancing to the sofa and shaking hands with Prudence, who, as if desirous of atoning for the general lack of warmth, gave him both her hands on a simple girlish impulse. He took and held them with no show of surprise. "Thank you so much," she said, a soft appeal in eyes and voice which he was quick to note. "I just want to say how much I enjoyed the drive and your kind care of me. I'm very grateful to you." "You are setting such a premium on ordinary courtesy that I begin to believe it must be a rare quality in these parts," he said jestingly, with what sounded to Prudence a faintly sarcastic humour. He had assuredly not been given particular evidence of the quality beneath that roof. "But if you insist on regarding my small service so graciously I do not feel inclined to quarrel with you on that score. I can only repeat that I am glad I happened to be on the spot. Good-bye. Take care of the ankle. It will tax your patience, I expect." Mr Graynor accompanied him into the hall, and invited him into the library for refreshment, which he declined. Prudence listened to their voices outside, listened to the motor drive away, and turned with a face pale with indignation, when her father re-entered the room, and reproached him with having displayed so little gratitude to a man who had acted with such ready kindliness towards her. "I felt ashamed," she said. "You were barely civil." "You forget yourself, Prudence," Agatha said. "Father was quite civil. There was no need to gush--you did that." "And if I did," Prudence cried, exasperated, "you two forced me into doing so." Mr Graynor had crossed to the window, where he remained with his back towards the room, paying little heed to their wrangling. "I wish it had not been Major Stotford who rendered you the service," he said presently, and faced about and approached the sofa with an expression of worried annoyance on his face. "I am sorry this has happened." "Why?" Prudence sat up straighter and punched the cushions viciously. "Why?" she repeated aggressively. "Because--" "Do you think it necessary to explain these matters to a child?" Agatha interrupted tartly. Prudence laughed angrily. "I'm not a child," she said. "You can't keep my mind for ever on a leading string." "I think you are unnecessarily excited," Mr Graynor said in displeased tones. "I doubt whether that is good for you in your present condition." "Being thwarted is not good for me in my present condition," Prudence retorted, but with greater calmness. "You aren't being fair to me. Why should it be a matter for regret to you that Major Stotford should do me a service? He hadn't much choice. No man, who wasn't a brute, could have acted otherwise in the circumstances." "No," Mr Graynor admitted. "It was simply unfortunate. Major Stotford is a man whom I do not care to have in my house, whom I would not choose as an associate for my daughters. He has an evil reputation." "Evil!" Prudence sounded a note of incredulity. "In what sense?" she asked. "There is no need to soil your ears with his history," Mr Graynor replied. "His wife divorced him two years ago. I understood he was abroad." "Oh!" said Prudence, and felt oddly chilled by this revelation. She had liked the man, had hoped that the acquaintance so informally begun would develop pleasantly on ordinary lines, a hope which she realised very certainly could never be fulfilled. Further intercourse would be forbidden her. Though had the road been open to a pursuance of the acquaintance Prudence herself would no longer have wished to follow it up. The colour had gone out of the pleasure and left a neutral-toned picture in its stead, a picture of life in its least lovely aspect, with the sordid streak of self-indulgence trailing its disfiguring smudges across the canvas. Was nothing that was pleasant altogether fine? In this complex meandering of human destinies was this mean streak, which spoilt the fine grain of the wood, discoverable in each separate individual? Prudence lay back against the cushions feeling utterly weary and unable to cope with the rush of swift emotions which flooded her mind. Reaction followed upon the period of excitement. She was conscious only of the pain in her foot. No one had thought of removing her shoe. She had loosened it in the car; but the foot had swollen and felt too big for its covering. She made an effort now to remove the shoe, whereupon Agatha, capable but unsympathetic, came to her assistance. "You ought to have done that before," she complained petulantly, and to her own surprise, as well as to her sister's, broke down and cried weakly. CHAPTER SIXTEEN. Though not serious, Prudence's injuries confined her to the house for some time. It proved an irksome time for the members of her family as well as for herself. She was not patient, and it exasperated her to be compelled to lie on the sofa, unequal to rising from it and running away when her sisters, from a sense of duty, installed themselves near her couch with the sociable intention of keeping her company. They insisted on her occupying herself with some sewing as a relief to the tedium of enforced inaction. Prudence hated sewing, and made a demand for books; whereupon her sisters in turn read aloud to her the works of Miss Nouchette Carey, which were familiar to Prudence from childhood, and bored her exceedingly. She wanted something more stimulating; something which did not depict Wortheton ideals and sentiment. But the more modern writers were banned as unwholesome, and the poets were discredited on account of an erotic tendency to idealise passion and adorn sensuousness with an exalted language better suited to more spiritual qualities. Or so Miss Agatha thought. "The merit of a book," she affirmed, "depends upon whether it stands the test of being read aloud without causing embarrassment to the reader and to the audience." "Books never embarrass me," Prudence said, "but occasionally they bore me. I don't care to read about people who lead the stodgy kind of life we lead." "Life is not stodgy," Agatha reproved her. "And it is the same everywhere." "God forbid!" ejaculated Prudence, and thereby brought a storm of horrified reproach upon her head. On occasions Matilda arrived and spent an afternoon or morning with her, such an altered Matilda that she appeared to Prudence in the guise of a stranger. Matilda had emerged since her marriage, and from being a mild reflection of her eldest sister, reflected now Mr Jones quite brightly and unconsciously. She echoed him in a feminine note, and quoted him with unintentional inaccuracy, but with sufficient likeness to recall the original with unpleasant vividness to Prudence's mind. Usually Mr Jones was too busy to accompany her. "The vicar leaves so much to him," Mrs Jones explained. "Ernest hopes to move from Wortheton shortly." "I understood that he was greatly attached to his work here," Prudence said. "He likes the factory and the people." "He has hopes of a living," Matilda confided, lowering her voice. "Oh, a living! That's another matter. You'll be quite important." Matilda looked a little doubtful. "It's a very poor living," she confessed, "even if he succeeds in obtaining it. No clergyman without private means could accept it." "I see." Prudence did see, very clearly. She smiled suddenly. "How grateful he must feel to you," she added. Matilda resented this very much in the manner Prudence decided in which Mr Jones would have resented it. "That matters only in regard to this particular living," she said. "Ernest would succeed in any case; he is so clever." Prudence's accident, with the unfortunate complication which had effected Major Stotford's entry upon the scene, was used by Agatha, backed by brother William, as a sufficient reason against future cycling. Agatha went to an immense amount of trouble in her efforts to gain her father's veto against Prudence riding again. She persuaded him to get rid of the bicycle as the surest means of avoiding fresh misadventures; and rendered him so nervous with her gloomy forebodings that he did consent to part with the bicycle; but he reserved his veto against riding until he saw how Prudence viewed a possible prohibition. He could not deny her pleasure merely because the idea of her riding made him nervous. Bobby had met with accidents when he first cycled; but it never had been suggested that Bobby should give up riding from a fear he might break his neck. The damaged cycle was disposed of; William saw to that. Agatha undertook to inform her sister; she also sought to prevail with her to give up the exercise. She enlarged upon her father's anxiety, so injurious in the case of a man of his years, and pointed out to Prudence that duty demanded this sacrifice of her pleasure to his anxious love. Prudence heard her out in silence, a stony silence which betrayed nothing of the rage that burned within her breast. With the finish of the oration her chin tilted aggressively. "This is your doing," she said. "It is father's wish," Agatha replied. "The bicycle was sold by his orders." "Oh!" Prudence exclaimed, with a gesture of impatience. "I know. What's the good of talking? I am sick of all this pretence of anxiety. You hate me to have any enjoyment. You never rest--you never have rested, from seeking to make my life colourless and dull. You are satisfied only when you keep me sewing, or working in the parish. Well, I won't sew any more--for fear I prick my fingers, and I won't work in the parish either from a nervous dread of having my morals contaminated. If I can't do the things I like, I won't do the things I don't like either." Miss Agatha's anger, if more controlled, was every whit as great as Prudence's. She gazed down upon her sister where she lay upon the sofa with eyes of cold dislike. Always they had been antagonistic. She had resented her father's second marriage bitterly, and had disliked his young wife: the earlier resentment, and the dislike for Prudence's mother, influenced her largely in her antagonism towards the child of the marriage, the child who was dearer to their father than any of his other children, and who was so unlike the rest. But she had, according to her own view, conscientiously done her duty by her young sister: the accusation of jealous injustice stung her; she felt that she had not merited that. "You are wicked and ungrateful," she said. "You display a great want of control, and an unchristian spirit. I hope that later, when you have given yourself time to reflect, you will regret what you have said. I confess I don't understand you." "No," Prudence rejoined. "You never have understood me. I don't suppose you ever will." "You are not," Miss Agatha answered shortly, "so complex as you imagine." Having nothing further to say, and feeling irritated by the laugh with which her rebuke was received, she closed the interview by leaving the room. But the matter was not ended. Prudence had no intention of allowing it to rest there. She meant to have it out with her father. He had given the bicycle to her; he had no right to dispose of it without consulting her. The business of having it out with him in private was not easy of accomplishment; she seldom saw him alone, and pride restrained her from broaching the subject before the others. Matters were complicated by the arrival of Mr Edward Morgan, who, to Prudence's secret disappointment, came himself on his firm's business instead of sending a subordinate. Prudence had very vividly in her memory that former occasion when Steele visited Wortheton. She recalled their different meetings, few in number but strangely pleasant and familiar; recalled too the stolen interview with Steele under her window. She longed to speak of him to Mr Morgan; but self-consciousness tied her tongue and made mention of his name too difficult. She waited in the hope that Mr Morgan would allude to the young man's visit. But Mr Morgan was not accommodating. He had as a matter of fact almost forgotten Steele's existence, had entirely forgotten that visit of Steele's to Wortheton over a year ago. Steele had left Morgan Bros, shortly afterwards and gone abroad: that, so far as Edward Morgan's interest in him was concerned, was the finish. It became plain to Prudence, and to the members of Prudence's family, as the days passed and Mr Morgan showed no haste to depart, that he was becoming more than ordinarily interested in herself. He had known her for years. As a child she had delighted him; as a girl he had found her amusing; but the woman in her came as a startling revelation, and carried this middle-aged and rather serious-minded business man out of his immense abstractions and his rather cumbersome habit of reserve. He became surprisingly alert and attentive to Prudence's whims. He was quick to lend a hand when she left her sofa; and he sat beside the sofa in the evenings, and played chess with her, and taught her card games. William's amiable efforts to draw him into conversation with himself, or to entice him into the library, met with no encouragement. "It's dull for your sister, not being able to get about," he explained. "We've got to amuse her." He did amuse her; and he earned her gratitude at the same time. It was a new and agreeable experience to be considered first and consulted deferentially and made to feel oneself of some importance. He bought her chocolates and books, books such as Miss Agatha did not approve of, and which Prudence read with avidity. She shared her chocolates, but she kept the books to herself. "If you only knew what pleasure you give me," she said, on receiving a volume. And Mr Morgan, looking pleased, answered quietly: "That's what I want to give you--pleasure." The next day he gave her another book. "I don't read novels myself," he explained. "But I demand the best, and place myself unreservedly in the bookseller's hands. Generally they know what is worth reading." Prudence confided in him her trouble over the cycling veto, anticipating sympathy, and was disappointed in him because he sided with the family in their objection to her riding. He did not approve of cycling for ladies, he said. That struck her as a very antiquated prejudice. Cycling for women was so general until motoring became more popular. "If father would give me a car," she said, "I should prefer it." "Better have a pony carriage," he advised, "if you intend driving it yourself. Safer and pleasanter, really." "How stodgy!" she said, and laughed. "That's much too slow." It was regrettable, she reflected, that he was so elderly; and she wondered what he had been like as a young man, and why he had never married. The answer to that question was that, until he met her as a woman, he had never known love. He knew it now. And he recognised it for the one passion of his life--a disturbing passion on account of the disparity in their ages. This disparity he recognised as a barrier, but a barrier which might be overcome. It is a barrier which many people surmount and not always unsuccessfully. None the less the undertaking is attended with risks, and the risks are worthy of consideration. The ideal marriage is based on equality in essential things. Contemporaneous ideas and sentiments lend themselves most readily to sympathy. Without sympathy and understanding a perfect relationship cannot exist. The individual of forty who fails to recognise this fact deserves no compassion when he strikes the rocks ahead. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. Edward Morgan came into Prudence's life again at a time when the dulness and restriction of her home were peculiarly galling, when her spirit was in fierce revolt against the petty tyranny of Agatha's rule, supported by William's influence and strengthened by their animosity towards her, which seemed to her daily to increase and to make anything like amicable relations impossible. Before this powerful bond of opposition Mr Graynor, old and incapable of sustained effort, gave way against his volition, slowly but surely deputing his authority in domestic affairs as he had deputed his business authority to his son, and retiring more and more within himself, content, if not harassed with a knowledge of unpleasantness to leave to his family the arrangement of their affairs. That in this way he treated his young daughter unfairly did not occur to him. He had no idea that Prudence was unhappy. Yet, had he reflected he must have recognised that it was a powerful combination arrayed against her, a combination which he himself felt unequal to opposing. But he belonged to a past generation. When the autumn leaves cling to the tree beyond their time they hang sear and useless before the push of the new verdure: and he had hung on till it seemed that the seasons had forgotten him and time refused to detach him from the bough. He was a little weary of hanging there overlooked and forgotten while another generation ripened to decay. He saw his children entering upon their autumn, and almost forgot the time when they, like Prudence, were in the springtime of life. When one reaches the winter of life one realises life's sadness; for the hope of spring, and the contentment of summer belong to the days that are numbered. One lives necessarily in the present and looks back upon the past; the future belongs solely to youth. In Edward Morgan's love for Prudence was repeated his own middle-aged romance. His married life with his young wife had been too brief to prove its unsuitability. He only remembered that that short time had been a happy time for him. And he liked Morgan; he would be satisfied to accept him for a son-in-law. Prudence was young for him, he recognised that; but, he argued, middle-aged men frequently married young girls, and such marriages were not always unsuccessful. The middle-aged suitor seldom pauses to reflect that if a younger man appeared upon the scene his matured experience would stand him in no good stead; a girl does not often marry a man many years her senior from any happier reason than that nothing better offers. To a girl a man of forty appears elderly. This is natural. Age, like everything else, is relative in either sex. Prudence was flattered by Mr Morgan's attentions and grateful for his consideration. She did not love him. She had a very clear idea what type of man could inspire love in her. It was an entirely different type from Mr Morgan. But marriage with Mr Morgan opened a way of escape from uncongenial surroundings. If she missed this opening it was very possible that an opportunity might not occur again. She made up her mind, as Steele had known she would do, to seize it when the moment offered. She made one final attempt, however, to gain news of Steele. One day when she was alone with Mr Morgan she summoned all her courage and inquired after Steele. Mr Morgan showed surprise at her question, and paused a moment for reflection before he was able clearly to recall the facts about the man to whom she referred. It seemed to be a matter of astonishment to him that she should be acquainted with Steele. Steele had left Morgan Bros, a year ago, he told her. He had gone abroad, to Africa, he believed. He revealed an uncertainty as to his movements and a lack of interest in them which exasperated Prudence. "So many young men emigrate to the Colonies nowadays," he said. "New countries attract them. They don't settle down in England." "There are better openings in new countries, I suppose," she said in a dispirited voice, which she strove to render indifferent. "A man with enterprise ought to get ahead in the Colonies." "A man with enterprise possibly might get ahead," Mr Morgan allowed; "a man with capital assuredly would." "Don't brains reckon as capital in new countries?" she asked. "Brains are an asset in every country," he answered; "but credit at one's bank is the surest passport to success anywhere. So far as I remember, Steele was unfortunate. He did not leave us under any cloud; but there was a default in his department, and he had to make good. I imagine he emigrated with only the necessary means for landing." "Oh!" said Prudence, and regarded Mr Morgan, who was reputed to be a millionaire, with a diminution of respect. He could better have afforded to lose the money. To have allowed a man who, while responsible, was not culpable in the matter of the deficit to make good was ungenerous. "I wish you had not told me that." He looked astonished. "You could have borne the loss," she said. "Business cannot be run on quixotic lines," he answered. "Besides, every man of honour accepts his responsibilities." He was quite right; she knew that; all he said was perfectly just. But a woman seldom reasons on lines of strict justice. She would have liked Edward Morgan better had he been generous rather than just. Instead she went to bed feeling angry with him and compassionate towards Steele. Why, she wondered, had she forbidden Steele to write? And why had he obeyed her so implicitly? He might in any case have sent her a line of farewell before sailing. She would not have cared had the whole family seen it if only she had received that small assurance that he remembered. Perhaps he did not remember. Perhaps when he left Wortheton he had put her out of his thoughts. There was no reason why he should continue to bear her in mind when circumstances had taken him out of her life and separated them so widely. There were fresh interests now, new scenes, to engage and distract his attention. The Wortheton episode had played an unimportant part in his life. Such episodes, she knew, were frequent in most men's lives, and stood for no more than they were, pleasant interludes breaking the monotony of everyday things. Then her thoughts strayed reminiscently to that stolen interview under her window; and she recalled things Steele had said to her and the manner of their utterance; and it seemed to her by the light of those half-forgotten memories that he had acted disloyally in going out of her life so completely. He _had_ betrayed an interest in her. And he had stirred up a corresponding interest in her breast. He had no right to do that and then to pass on and forget. Two days later Edward Morgan returned to Derbyshire. It had been his intention to propose to Prudence before returning. He had had an interview with Mr Graynor, and had ascertained that his suit was viewed favourably by her father; but Prudence herself was a little difficult during those last two days; and Mr Morgan did not feel sufficiently confident of success with her to put his happiness to the test. Her variable moods disconcerted him. It did not occur to him to seek an explanation of her decreased kindliness in anything that had passed between them; and so he failed to trace his fall in her esteem to the information he had given her in regard to Steele. That unfortunate relation had opened up a wider gulf than he would have believed possible, as a more generous account would, while raising him in her esteem, have decreased the influence of the absent Steele. Now the balance weighed in Steele's favour; and Mr Morgan was made uncomfortably conscious of a lack of response to his tenderness from the girl he hoped to marry. On the evening before he left he had an interview with her alone. It was a matter for amusement with Prudence to note the frequency of these private audiences. Hitherto the family had relegated her to the background; now, with an amazing discernment for matters calling for their united supervision, they withdrew from the drawing-room, melting away with such tactful unobtrusiveness that Mr Morgan firmly believed in those numerous domestic obligations which engaged so much of their time, and very willingly submitted to be entertained by the sister whose accident incapacitated her from taking an active share in their doings. On the whole he was well satisfied; and he approved of the doctor's prescription of rest as the only cure for the damaged ankle. "I'll send you some more literature when I get back," he said, sitting facing her in the dusk, with what remained of the daylight falling on his broad strong face. "I expect the sofa will see a good deal of you for a week or so longer. The trouble of these matters is the disproportionately long time they take to mend. On the next occasion when I visit Wortheton I shall hope to see you walking about with the best." "I should hope so," Prudence said, and laughed. "Oh! I don't mean to absent myself for a specially long period," he said, and looked at her with the light of a steady purpose in his eyes. "I'm wanting you to say that you will be glad to see me again. I should have liked to have heard you express some regret at my going now." He paused, but Prudence, who was nervously playing with a flower which he had brought in from the garden for her, did not immediately reply. She was not sure what might follow an expression of regret from her. She did not feel regret; and she had a very definite desire in her mind to avert a direct proposal. "I shall be very pleased to see you when you come again," she said at last. Mr Morgan smiled faintly. "I suppose I shall have to rest content with that," he said. He put out a hand and laid it over her hand--the hand which held the flower. "Do I seem old to you?" he asked. Prudence looked up at him with wide surprised eyes. He was looking back at her with a steady kindly smile that made her nervous. "Not so _very_ old," she answered; and felt her cheeks flaming as she saw the quick colour stain his face. He sighed. "A little fatherly, eh?" he said, the smile returning. And he wondered whether she would ever learn to her distress how cruelly youth can hurt. "Well, I'm not young. I'm forty-two. I want you to accustom yourself to that knowledge before I come again. When I come again I shall have another lesson to teach you." He spoke lightly; and with the lessening of his earnestness and the removal of his hand, both of which Prudence had found embarrassing, she felt relieved and was able to smile back at him with something of the old frankness. "If you teach then as kindly as you have to-day," she said, "I shall prove a dull pupil if I do not learn it readily." "You give me hope," he said. He scrutinised her for a moment very closely, made as though he would speak, surprised a startled apprehension in her eyes which nearly resembled fear, and thought better of it. He got up rather suddenly and walked to the fireplace and stood staring unseeingly into the empty grate. "I'll be patient," he said. "Perhaps you will have prepared your mind a little to receive that lesson by the time I return." CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. It was the wisest thing which Edward Morgan could have done to go away and leave what he had it in his mind to say unsaid. Prudence missed him after he left, missed his kindly attentions, the quick thought for her comfort which forestalled her wishes, his pleasant companionship. He was a man who, if somewhat earnest, perhaps because of this earnestness, talked well on most subjects. He was neither brilliant nor very ready of speech. The quality Prudence liked best in him was his habit of treating her as an equal; he did not pursue the tactic of talking down to her. The latter was one of William's unamiable eccentricities, and it annoyed Prudence the more because William at his wisest was never so profound as to be beyond the comprehension of the most ordinary intelligence. In Mr Morgan's presence William's attitude towards her changed considerably; following Mr Morgan's departure the increased deference of his manner moderated slightly since no definite proposal had resulted. William suspected that his sister's chances were not so secure as he had believed. She was foolish enough, he decided, to lose this excellent opportunity of making a brilliant marriage. William was not so anxious to see his sister married as he was desirous of forming an alliance with the house of Morgan Bros. If she brought the matter off she would win his approbation and his unbounded respect. Something of what he felt on this head he managed to convey to her in an indirect manner which he considered tactful. He felt that his approval would have considerable weight with her. "Morgan appears to have enjoyed his visit," he remarked to her; "he was sorry to go. He is an uncommonly good fellow. I like him." "He's a kind old thing," said Prudence with a gleam of mischief in her eyes. "Old! Nonsense!" William squared his heavy shoulders and regarded himself complacently in the overmantel. "He's a younger man than I." "Well, yes." Prudence surveyed William's grey hairs with uncomplimentary attentiveness, surveyed his corpulent figure, and smiled. "He's forty-two. I have his own word for that." "A man isn't old at forty-two," he said. "He looks old though." "When a man has passed his first youth," William observed sententiously, "he is--ahem!--more interesting, more reliable. He knows what he wants. I confess that Morgan inspires in me both confidence and liking. One can respect a man who has proved his worth." "He has proved an aptitude for making money," Prudence allowed. "Isn't that proof of worth?" "It suggests sound business acumen." "With industry and perseverance," he insisted. "Generosity is finer than these qualities." She was thinking of the unfortunate confidence relating to Steele. "You at least have not found him lacking in that quality," he said, surprised. "He has showered gifts on you." "He has been very generous to me," she admitted, and laughed with a ring of scorn in the mirth. "There is small merit in being generous when it pleases one to be so." He stared at her in amazement. "I think you are strangely wanting in gratitude," he said. "Few people with the very sufficient grounds which you have for recognising a man's generosity would display so grudging an acknowledgment. Morgan was most appreciative in his praise of you. He revealed a very deep--regard for you." William surveyed his half-sister with the doubtful scrutiny of a man who failed to discover what it was in her which attracted other men: beyond her looks he could discern no particular charm; and her looks were not in his opinion remarkable. "I have heard more impassioned avowals," she returned. "From whom?" he demanded instantly. "Perhaps I have only imagined them,--or," and she patted the cover of one of Mr Morgan's gifts and laughed, "met with them in books." "There is a lot of pernicious trash written," observed William. "It puts ideas in girls' heads." "You wouldn't wish even a girl's head empty of ideas, would you?" "I would wish it empty of nonsense," he answered sharply. "A woman should be satisfied to look after her home, and--all that." This being non-committal and liberal of interpretation, Prudence let it pass unchallenged. She was so familiar with William's ideas about woman and her place in the scheme of things, and appreciated his opinion so little that she was satisfied to leave him to the undisputed enjoyment of his views. It was William's own misfortune that he could never emerge from the rut into which he had floundered. He had long ago persuaded himself into the belief that his rut was the open road. Feeling that he had said sufficient to add the weight of his approval to the balance in favour of Mr Morgan, William left his sister to digest his words; and subsequently informed his father that he entertained small doubt that if Edward Morgan did Prudence the honour of asking her to be his wife she would accept him. He believed she would appreciate the compliment of such an offer. Prudence herself was less confident. She was indeed so undecided that the respite allowed her came as a relief. It gave her time for consideration of the matter. She did not love Edward Morgan; but he held open the door of freedom, and she feared that if she missed this opportunity of passing through, it might never open for her again. There followed a period of waiting and uncertainty and general boredom, during which the ankle grew well and she was able to leave the sofa and walk in the garden. It was then that the loss of her cycle became once more a source of acute annoyance. "You had no right to sell it, daddy," she complained; "it was mine. You'll have to buy me a new one." "I hoped you wouldn't care to ride any more, Prue," he returned evasively. "It isn't safe. You may break your neck next time." "I may, of course. I stand a greater chance of doing so if you won't buy me a machine, because I shall hire; and hired cycles aren't reliable. Of course I shall ride again. Your advice is as preposterous as telling a child who has learnt to walk that it must revert to sedentary habits. It wouldn't, you know, however nice a child it might be." She drew him towards her by the lapels of his coat and kissed him on either cheek. "You'll get me a new cycle, daddy?--just like the last?" Mr Graynor yielded. When Prudence coaxed, looking at him with that light in her blue eyes, she recalled her mother so vividly to his mind that he could not resist her. It were easier to vex Agatha than to disappoint Prue. CHAPTER NINETEEN. Summer was on the wane and autumn was busy early colouring the leaves. Edward Morgan had intended returning to Wortheton before the finish of the warm weather; but many things prevented him from carrying out his wish; and the weeks went by without any sign from him, save the regular arrival of the monthly parcel of books, which Prudence as regularly acknowledged, writing a frank girlish letter of thanks, which took longer to compose than the subject matter warranted. The difficulty of writing those letters increased with each repetition of the performance. He never wrote to her. He did not even address the parcels; they came direct from the bookseller. Had he sent a few friendly lines with his gifts it would have made the task of acknowledgment easier. Each time that he received one of these brief inconsequent epistles Mr Morgan opened it eagerly and hastily read it in the always vain hope of finding the wish expressed therein that he would fulfil his promise to revisit Wortheton. But Prudence made no mention of this matter. And he locked the letters away in a private drawer and waited in patient hopefulness for the next. The next letter invariably roused similar emotions and brought further disappointment on perusal. Mr Morgan proved of his own experience that being in love is not a happy condition of mind. On the whole Prudence enjoyed the possession of an undeclared suitor: it gave her a sense of importance, a sense too of future security. She could regard with indifference the acid rigour of Agatha's authority and brother William's pompous displeasure. William had been extremely annoyed by the arrival of the new bicycle, and had made unpleasant observations about Prudence's roaming habits and her propensity for making casual and undesirable acquaintances. It was very evident that William considered that his sister rode abroad in quest of these adventures. His insinuations exasperated her, but they did not shake her determination to ride when and where she pleased. It was soon after the arrival of the new cycle, when she was enjoying her first long rides after the accident, that she met again the man whose kindness to her lingered pleasantly in her memory, despite the shock of disillusion which had eclipsed much of the brightness of the recollection. The encounter sprung upon her unaware. She had neither expected nor wished to meet Major Stotford again. But when he overtook her in his car, and stopped the car a few yards ahead of her and waited for her to come up with it, there was no doubt in Prudence's mind as to what she ought to do. She ceased peddling and alighted. Major Stotford, who was alone, opened the door of the car and stepped into the road beside her. "A piece of good luck!" he said, shaking hands. "I've often wondered about you. There is no need to ask if you have quite recovered. So they let you ride again?" "They didn't want to; it was a fight," Prudence said, and laughed. "Yes!" he said, smiling too. "I imagined you would have difficulty. I'm glad you won. They didn't tell you, I suppose, that I called to inquire a few days after our adventure?" "No; they didn't tell me," she replied, and flushed slightly. "It was very kind of you. I didn't know." "I thought possibly it might not get to your knowledge," he said coolly, and surveyed her flushed face with keen appreciation. "I was not allowed to see you, but was privileged to interview your brother instead. I have never approved of substitutes, and discovered on that occasion no good reason for reconsidering my prejudice. I'm delighted to meet you again anyhow." His frankness embarrassed Prudence; but she recalled his kindness and the service he had done her, and felt further vexation with her family. "I'm glad too," she said, playing nervously with the little bell on her handle-bar. He took hold of the handle-bar also and became immensely interested in the machine. "It's a new one, isn't it?" he said. "Surely the other wasn't past repairing?" "I don't know. They got rid of it." "I see." His eyes twinkled. "And you compelled them to make good. They have done it quite handsomely. Your persuasive powers must be considerably greater than mine." "I threatened to hire," said Prudence, and immediately realised on hearing him laugh that this admission was disloyal to the family. She lifted her eyes with a flash of pride in them to his smiling face. "Father is always generous," she said. "He wouldn't trust the old cycle again, though the spill was entirely my fault. I'm cautious in regard to dogs now." "Yes," he agreed, the smile deepening. "Caution is a quality which the wise cultivate. Possibly had I not considerably neglected it I should have been more successful--socially. But these things are so dull." He took his hand off the handle-bar and straightened himself and looked down at her with a quick resolve in his face. "We managed to find room for the old cycle," he said. "I don't see why there need be any difficulty in stowing this away. What do you say? Will you drive with me?" For the fraction of a second Prudence hesitated. She did not want to drive with him. She knew that if she agreed she could not speak of it at home: there was something a little shameful in doing what must of necessity be done secretly. But the memory of that former occasion on which she had been glad enough to make use of his car was in her mind, and made a refusal to accept the present invitation appear pointedly ungracious. "You would rather not?" he said reproachfully. Prudence made up her mind on the instant. "Thank you, I should like it. But couldn't we leave the bicycle somewhere and pick it up on our return?" "We could," he said. "That's not a bad idea. There's an inn a quarter of a mile along the road. I'll drive on so that you shan't be smothered in dust, and you follow; then we'll house the bicycle and go for a joy ride." He re-entered the car and drove off; while Prudence, waiting for the cloud of dust which he raised to subside, stood beside her machine, dismayed at the realisation of what she had consented to do, and considering whether it would not be wiser to head her cycle in the opposite direction and ride home. But reflection showed her the impossibility of acting in so ungracious a manner. She should have declined his invitation in the first instance; to evade the engagement now was unthinkable. When she arrived at the inn it was to discover that Major Stotford had made the necessary arrangements; it only remained for her to relinquish her cycle to the man who stood ready to take it, and climb to her seat in the car. Despite a determination to enjoy herself and banish disquieting thoughts, Prudence was conscious of feeling not entirely at her ease with her companion. She could not have explained this sense of mistrust. There was nothing in Major Stotford's manner to arouse it; she decided that possibly it resulted from what she had learned in regard to his private life. That ugly story coloured all her thoughts of him, and revealed him in an unfavourable light. She had not met this type of man before. Nevertheless he interested her. He talked well. And he was so manifestly enjoying himself and showed such eagerness to please her that Prudence made an effort to shake off her uneasiness and share his pleasure in the excursion. But when he stopped at a little village some miles further on and took her into a place where they catered for tourists, the old disquieting feeling came back intensified; and she knew that she was not enjoying herself, that she shrank from appearing in public with a man whose acquaintance she had been forbidden. There was no longer any doubt in her mind that she had acted indiscreetly. "I would rather go on," she said. "I don't want tea, and I mustn't be late." "We shan't be here many minutes," he replied. "And you must have something. Rushing through the air gives me an appetite. I'll get you back in good time, if I have to exceed the speed limit. We've been doing that already." He carried his point and led her within. They were shown into a little room where a table was laid for tea. There was no one else in the room, though from across the passage voices were audible and the sound of clinking china in proof that other travellers were taking refreshment. Major Stotford looked about him critically, flung his gloves on a chair, and advised Prudence to sit down and rest. "I'll go and order something to eat," he said. Prudence, who was standing near the window, looking out on a regiment of tall hollyhocks and a group of flaming dahlias blooming in the little garden, made no response; and he left the room, closing the door behind him. With the closing of the door she faced about, feeling extraordinarily like a person trapped. It was absurd of course; but her heart beat with uncomfortable rapidity, and excitement flushed her face and lent a brightness to her eyes. She moved about the room restlessly examining the gaudy prints on the walls and the hideous design of the Brussels carpet; but was unable to fix her attention on anything, and wandered back to the window again. There was a flavour of wrong-doing in this adventure which troubled her. The fear of being found out loomed with ugly insistence in the foreground of her ideas. She wished he had been satisfied simply to drive with her. This unforeseen development with its intimate suggestion of confidential relations vexed her. Intuition told her that in the circumstances he should have refrained from taking this step. Then the door opened again to admit him. He came in, confident and smiling, and joined her where she stood at the window. CHAPTER TWENTY. Prudence poured out the tea while Major Stotford sat with his back to the light, attentively observant of her actions, causing her considerable confusion by the intensity of his regard, and by the fact that he had fallen upon a quite unusual silence and seemed content simply to sit and watch her. "We must hurry," she said, handing him a cup. "If I cause them anxiety at home through being late they will make such a fuss about my cycling in future." "Oh, Lord!" he murmured. "What a nuisance a family can become. I wish you were an orphan." He stirred his tea slowly, and smiled at her. "You are living up to your name. Do you know, when I first heard it, I thought it strangely unsuited." "I suppose you think me imprudent?" she said, without looking at him. "No; not that," he hastened to assure her. "But Prudence is such a Puritanic appellation. It suggests a nun. I'm not sure on the whole that I don't prefer Imprudence. It's purely a matter of taste." "Never mind my name," she said, and looked vexed. "You are not the first to discover its unsuitability. Will you have another cup of tea?" "I haven't started on my first cup yet," he answered, and lifted it to his lips to conceal his amusement. "You _are_ in a hurry. See here!" He placed a gun-metal watch on the table beside his plate. "We'll give it ten minutes. If you attempt to finish under you will ruin your digestion. I would, if permitted a choice, allow half an hour for tea and another half-hour for digestion; but since that doesn't fit in with your wishes, I sacrifice mine. Try this plum cake; it's rather good. The woman who runs this place was formerly a servant of mine, and her plum cakes are excellent." He cut the cake into generous slices. Prudence took a slice and pronounced it as good as he had promised. Although she had declared that she was not hungry, with the food before her she discovered a very healthy appetite. Her spirits began to revive. After all, it was rather jolly having tea in this quaint place, with the autumn sunshine streaming in through the little window and falling brightly across the tea-table, till the honey in its glass pot shone like liquid amber, and the dahlias, which Major Stotford had removed from the centre of the table because they obstructed his view, were ruby red against the snowy cloth. The sunlight fell too upon the man's dark hair and showed it thinning on the top and about the temples. Prudence noted these things with interest. She wondered what his age was, and decided that he was older than he appeared. She began to feel more at ease with him. He ate surprising quantities of cake in the limited time at his disposal, and dispatched several cups of tea. At the expiration of the ten minutes he returned the watch to his pocket and rose briskly. "Time's up," he said, coming round to her seat and standing over her with his hand on the back of her chair. "I think I deserve thanks for my self-sacrifice, don't you?" Prudence would have risen too, but it was impossible to do so without coming into collision with him. She wished he would not stand so close. "I can't see where the self-sacrifice comes in," she replied. "You made an excellent tea." He laughed and leant over her chair, so that their faces were on a level. The expression in his eyes startled her. She jerked back her chair quickly and stood up, but immediately his hand slipped to her arm and held her. "Do you know," he said, "I think you are a little afraid of me." "Let me go--please!" She was thoroughly alarmed now. The old uneasiness gripped her. She experienced again the sensation of being trapped. And his eyes frightened her. They held hers with strangely compelling force, and there was a look in them such as she had never seen in a man's eyes before--such as she had never imagined human eyes could express. "I wish you--wouldn't look at me--like that." The grip on her arm tightened. He drew her close to him, and his other hand came to rest on her shoulder, slipped round her shoulders and held her. "Look into my eyes," he said. "Don't be frightened. There is nothing to be frightened about." "Oh, please!" said Prudence, near to tears. "Let me go." "In a minute," he returned softly. "I've something to say first. You shy child, what are you afraid of? I've a great affection for you. You are the dearest, sweetest little girl I have met for many a long year. I want to be friends--now and for ever. And I'm going to seal the compact right here." Swiftly with the words his clasp of her became vicelike. It was useless for Prudence to struggle against him. Her resistance served only to strengthen his resolve. He crushed her to him, set his lips to hers, and kissed her--kissed her with a passion that was as a flame which burned into her soul. Then he released her; and she fell back with a gasp of anger, her face white, her eyes ablaze with rage and mortification. She leaned with her clenched hand upon the tablecloth, panting and inarticulate. He turned to give her time to recover, picked his cap up from a chair, and faced round again deliberately. "I couldn't help it," he said; "you were so sweet. I've been wanting to do that all the time. Don't look so tragic. I won't offend again." "How dare you?" she breathed; and with difficulty he forced back the smile that threatened to break over his features. That was exactly what he had expected her to say, what he had known she would say, as soon as she found any voice to speak with. "I don't know," he said. "Upon my soul, I don't know how it happened. I'm sorry--to have annoyed you. I'm not sorry about anything else. I had to kiss you." "I want," Prudence said, with a faint sob in her voice, "to go home." "You aren't angry with me?" he said, and became suddenly humble. "You aren't going to punish me? I'm really ashamed of my roughness. Forgive me. Say you forgive me. I will not offend again. Please..." "I will never willingly speak to you again," Prudence said. "If I had any means at all of getting back without you I wouldn't drive with you now. Please don't say any more. Let us start at once." "You are as hard as a piece of flint," he said, "for all your sweetness. I didn't think you could be so unkind. Come then!" He opened the door for her and followed her into the passage. From across the passage the sound of merry voices broke upon their ears. Major Stotford glanced in the direction from whence the sounds came, and then glanced curiously at Prudence. She walked on, very erect and quiet, with a white chilled face, and a hurt look in her eyes, seeming to notice nothing. Once during the drive back he broke the silence which up to that moment had endured between them since they had taken their seats in the car. He had been driving at top speed; but they were nearing the inn where they had left the bicycle, and he slowed the car down and turned his face towards his quiet companion. "Prudence," he said, "you aren't for keeping it up, are you? I've apologised. I'm really awfully sorry. Let bygones be bygones, won't you? I wish I hadn't made such an ass of myself. You surprised and delighted me. I didn't think you'd take it like that." "Major Stotford," Prudence returned with her face averted, "I have never given you permission to use my name." He reddened angrily, turned his attention to the steering and made no response. Nothing further passed between them. He let the car out, taking, with a recklessness that at another time would have made the girl nervous, the sharp curves of the winding road. Had they met any traffic along the road his driving would have caused an accident, as it was he nearly ran down a cyclist whom they overtook, and who saved himself and his machine by riding into the hedge. Prudence's heart stood still on perceiving the cyclist. She had taken one swift look at him as they rushed past, had met his eyes fully, eyes in which indignation yielded to amazement and a most unflattering criticism as they rested upon her face, which from white flamed swiftly to a shamed distressed crimson in the moment of mutual recognition. The Rev Ernest Jones extricated himself and his bicycle from the hedge and pursued the racing car. Why he pursued it he could not have explained; he had certainly no hope of overtaking it, and he had no idea that the car would come to a standstill shortly after passing him. He discovered it half a mile further on at the bottom of the hill, with Major Stotford standing beside it, and Prudence in the road, holding her bicycle which the man at the inn had brought out for her. These proceedings were nothing short of astounding. Mr Jones felt they needed explaining. He put on a fresh spurt, and in a cloud of dust rode almost into Prudence, and alighted. Major Stotford uttered an exclamation of disgust and started to beat the dust from his clothes, while Prudence silently regarded her brother-in-law, and he in turn surveyed the general grouping with manifest disfavour in his curious eyes. "You are riding home," he said to Prudence, not in the manner of a question, but simply stating a fact. "I will accompany you--when you are ready." "I am ready now," she answered, and led her bicycle into the middle of the road. Major Stotford, still beating the dust from his clothes, did not look round. Mr Jones held his bicycle ready; he had no intention of mounting until he had seen Prudence in the saddle. Instantly with the placing of her foot on the pedal, Major Stotford swung round and approached her. He held out his hand to her. "Just for appearances," he said in an undertone. "You must... It's too silly... parting like that--before him." She shook hands gravely. He put his hand to his cap and stepped back. "Good-bye," he called after her. "Sorry you couldn't come for a longer spin. I'm off to-morrow." He paid no attention to Mr Jones, who was already in pursuit of Prudence, and ringing his bell fussily; he turned his back on him and went into the inn for the purpose of washing some of the curate's dust from his throat, reflecting while he did so that, had Prudence been more reasonable, she would have avoided the parson. Despite the fact that he felt annoyed with her, he regretted the complication of the meeting which he foresaw would create new difficulties for her. "He'll tell of course," he mused. "He's the sneaking sort of little cad who feels it his special mission in life to use the lash where he can. Well, she ran into it, poor little Imprudence!" CHAPTER TWENTY ONE. Mr Jones was spared the necessity of describing the conditions under which he had met Prudence by Prudence's own frank confession immediately on her arrival at the house. She was either too proud to appeal to Mr Jones' generosity, or she did not credit him with the possession of this quality. He had quite expected an appeal from her, urging him to secrecy in the matter, and was a little uncertain as to the attitude he should adopt. But he was fully determined to improve the occasion with spiritual advice and a little brotherly reproof; also he intended that she should thoroughly appreciate his magnanimity in shielding her from the consequences of her very indiscreet behaviour. And she spoilt his pleasing role by refusing to give him the cue. This annoyed him, and showed him plainly that his first duty was to his father-in-law, who had every right to be informed of his daughter's indiscretions. He followed Prudence into the drawing-room, the sense of responsibility sitting heavily upon him, and was received by Mr Graynor and by his sisters-in-law with marked cordiality. "You should have arrived earlier," Agatha said. "The tea is cold. Where is Matilda?" "I didn't come from home," he answered. "I've just cycled in from Hatchett. I've had tea, thanks." And then Prudence's bombshell was delivered. "So have I," she said. "I met Major Stotford, and we had tea at a Cyclists' Rest." "You _did what_?" On any other occasion the scandalised horror in Agatha's voice would have roused Prudence to a defiant retort; but the afternoon's experience had subdued her spirit; she felt too crushed and miserable to resent her sister's amazed anger, or to heed the exchange of significant glances between the others. She was dimly aware that her father rose and approached her, but the pained displeasure of his look left her unmoved. It did not seem to her to matter particularly what happened, or what they thought of her; she was past caring about such things. "I thought I had given you quite clearly to understand that I did not wish you to pursue the acquaintance with Major Stotford," Mr Graynor said. Prudence's eyes fell. "I believed I could trust you," he added reproachfully; "and you don't even respect my wishes." "I will in future," she answered with unusual meekness. "It seemed ungracious to refuse after his kindness." "More particularly when it was against your own inclination," broke in Agatha. Mr Graynor raised a protesting hand. "Not now," he said. "We will speak of this later." And with a word of apology to Mr Jones, he left the room. Prudence followed him into the hall. "Daddy, I'm sorry," she said, and caught at his sleeve; but, for the first time within her memory, he repulsed her. "I don't want to hear any more," he said. "You have annoyed me exceedingly." He went on, leaving Prudence to realise the enormity of her conduct, and the hopelessness of expecting forgiveness in this quarter. She had offended him deeply. She ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom and sought relief from tears. The exasperating part of the affair lay in the wholly unnecessary attitude of inflexible veto adopted by her family. Prudence was not likely to repeat her mistake. Experience teaches its own lessons, and her experience had been sufficiently humiliating without any additional disgrace. She bore for a time with this state of affairs: when the general hostility became insupportable she set her mind to work to discover a remedy. As a result of this mental activity, Mr Edward Morgan received one morning the letter for which he had so long and so patiently waited. Mr Morgan read the letter in the privacy of his office, smiled, re-read it, examined it from all angles, and promptly proceeded to answer it, a light of satisfaction illumining his features as he wrote. And yet there was in the briefly worded note not much that a man could have twisted into any meaning conveying particular encouragement; nevertheless, the invitation for which he had waited had come at last; that sufficed for Mr Morgan. "It is so dull," Prudence had written. "When are you coming to pay your promised visit?" His answer read: "My dear Miss Prudence,-- "I was delighted to get your letter. It would be selfish on my part to say that I am rejoiced to know you feel dull; but at least I cannot express sincere regret since the admission is followed by what I have been hoping for ever since we parted--your permission to visit you again. I am coming immediately. I was only waiting for just this dear little letter. "Yours very truly,-- "Edward Morgan." "Oh!" exclaimed Prudence when she read this letter, and bit her lip in vexation, her face aflame at the thought that she had taken the irrevocable step, and brought very close the moment for the great decision of her life. She knew that he would ask her to marry him, that he would take her consent for granted; and, although in sending the letter she had decided upon taking this step, now that the thing was upon her she felt reluctant and afraid. "You've done it now," she told herself, for the purpose of stiffening her resolution. "You ought to have realised your doubts sooner. It is impossible to draw back." Impossible to draw back! The finality of the phrase gripped her imagination with the startled sensation of a lost cause. She had burnt her boats. The prospect ahead was not entirely lacking in fascination; but she wished none the less that some kind of raft might discover itself on which she could retreat conveniently if the alternative proved very distasteful. The thought of being kissed by Mr Morgan, as Major Stotford had kissed her, the idea of giving any man the right to so kiss her, filled her with sick apprehension. The whole process of love-making thrilled her with disgust. She leaned from her window and looked out upon the glistening darkness of the wet November night, and her thoughts became detached from present complexities, and attuned themselves to memories that were becoming old. They were nearly two years old, but they wore the stark vividness of very recent things. She allowed her fancy to riot unchecked around these bitter-sweet memories of a romance which had started from slumber only to fall back again into sleep, a sleep no longer sound and reposeful but disturbed by haunting dreams, dreams that were elusive and disconnected, and which belonged to the might-have-been. There was no shrinking from these dreams; they floated before her mind arrayed in the gracious beauty of simple and sincere emotions. The thought of love, of passion even, in this connection, had no qualm of revulsion in it. To be held in strong arms a willing captive, to be kissed by lips to which her own responded, that was a different matter. There would be no sense of shame in that, only a great wonder and a vast content. "Dreams! dreams!" Prudence murmured, and listened to the falling of the rain without--wet darkness everywhere, the dismal darkness of a winter world sodden with the sky's incessant weeping. She clenched her hands upon the wet sill, and felt the rain drops on her hair. "He is out there in the sunshine," she thought; "and I'm here in the dark and the rain alone. It is easy to forget when the sun shines always." Abruptly she drew back and closed the window and turned up the lights in the room. "I wish he wasn't coming quite so soon," she said, crouching down by the dying fire, a shivering, shrinking figure, with rain-wet hair, and eyes which were wet also, but not with rain. The memories were shut out with the rain-washed night. She was back in the present again, with the disturbing reflection that the morrow, the last day of sad November, would see the arrival of Edward Morgan and the end of her girlish dreams. CHAPTER TWENTY TWO. Mr Edward Morgan arrived on the following afternoon. Prudence watched him from the window disentangling himself from the carriage rugs, and fussing with the muffler which he wore wound carefully about his throat. The wind was in the north-east, and he was subject to bronchitis. Swathed in wraps he did not cut a romantic figure: he looked what he was, a prosperous, middle-aged man who valued his health and refrained from taking liberties with it. Prudence told herself that he was wise to be cautious, at the same time she wished that he was of an age at which such caution was unnecessary. He mounted the steps, and was welcomed in the hall by Mr Graynor and taken to the library for purposes of refreshment stronger than tea after his cold and tedious journey. Later, he made his appearance in the drawing-room, divested of his outdoor wear and improved on that account. A subtle blending of whisky and cigar smoke emanated from his person, of which Prudence was critically aware as she shook hands and replied to his inquiries as to her health. He was in immense spirits, as became a successful lover; also he was a little shy and nervously anxious to please. He talked about his journey and discussed politics and business and the weather; and Prudence listened, taking no part in the conversation, and feeling grateful to him for refraining from addressing her directly. He was, while intensely alive to her presence, seemingly unmindful of it. He credited her, not without reason, with sharing his shyness; and was anxious to give her time to get used to him and feel her way back to their former easy relations. Miss Agatha received the greater part of his attention, and in return pressed the hot scones on him hospitably. He refused these on the plea that they gave him indigestion; but he accepted cake, and a cup of the eighteenpenny tea, which he pronounced excellent. "Mrs Morgan is well, I hope?" Miss Agatha inquired conversationally, filling in one of those abrupt, unaccountable, and disconcerting pauses in the talk, which flowed with even dulness between the hitches. "Thank you, yes. My mother enjoys excellent health. Henry's wife has been laid up; they had to operate for appendicitis. She's about again now. Henry and the boys are flourishing." There followed polite expressions of regret for Mrs Henry Morgan's indisposition, broken into by the arrival of William, whose greeting of Mr Morgan overflowed with cordiality. "Been looking to see you in these parts for months," he said. "Beastly weather for travelling; the wind is cutting. Are those hot scones, Prudence?" William was so accustomed to being waited upon by the different members of his family that it never occurred to him to attend to his own needs. He did not observe the flush of annoyance that overspread Prudence's face, nor the reluctance with which she rose to fetch the scones in question; Mr Morgan observed it, however, and was before her in reaching the fireplace where the scones lay on a hot plate inside the fender. He stooped for the plate; and the stiffness of his movements, while apparent to Prudence, passed uncriticised on this occasion. William protested loudly. "Oh, come!" he said. "You shouldn't do that. I can't allow a visitor to wait on me. One of the girls will do it." Mr Morgan disregarded the remonstrance, refusing to relinquish the dish of scones. "My mother brought me up to wait upon her," he said, smiling. "It comes natural to me." Prudence felt pleased; but she had no faith in the lesson proving beneficial to William; he would assuredly miss the point. "Well, you're a younger man than I," said William jocularly. "I shouldn't show such energy after a long journey." Which speech, delivered for Prudence's benefit, William considered particularly tactful. He had in mind his sister's reflections on Mr Morgan's age. But Mr Morgan was not helpful. "I'm forty-three to-day," he acknowledged, with, in William's opinion, quite unnecessary candour. "I decided on this date for making the journey from sentimental reasons; it occurred to me as an altogether agreeable way of celebrating the occasion." He did not look in Prudence's direction while he spoke, for which consideration she was obliged to him: she felt the eyes of the rest focussed upon herself, and guessed what was in their thoughts in connection with these confidences. It did not in the least surprise her to hear William playfully observe that they would have to contrive something special in the way of entertainment to mark the event and make this birthday a memorable one. He looked meaningly at Prudence, and slyly at Mr Morgan, and remarked that birthdays conferred peculiar privileges and gave a right to indulgence. But Mr Morgan repudiated this. "At my age one doesn't insist on those prerogatives," he said. "The only advantage I take of the day is to give myself pleasure. I have done that." From which Prudence gathered to her relief that he did not intend to press his suit that day. Nor did he. He rather skilfully evaded the _tete-a-tetes_ with her, which every member of the household seemed in conspiracy to bring about. He was giving her time to commit to heart the lesson which he had told her he wanted her to learn. It was a lesson which she could not master with him for teacher; but she came to feel a very warm friendship for him, which in lieu of anything better seemed not insufficient to begin with. Mr Morgan had been at Court Heatherleigh a week before he broached the question of marriage with her; and Prudence, lulled into a sense of security by his avoidance of the subject, doubted whether he intended to propose to her, and was divided between a state of mortification and relief. The proposal when it came startled her the more by reason of this adaptation of Mr Morgan from the role he had been cast for to the less romantic role of friend. It found her immensely unprepared, as the delayed falling of anything long expected is apt to do when launched suddenly and with irrelevant haste. She was altogether unaware of what was in his mind at the moment when he sprung the thing upon her. They were playing billiards together after dinner, with Mary acting as marker and making a third in the conversation that confined itself almost exclusively to the game. Prudence, in the interest of making a brake, did not observe when Mary left the room; she became aware of her absence for the first time on looking round to call the score. Mr Morgan marked for her. When he approached the table, instead of playing, he laid his cue on the cloth and took Prudence's hand. "Come and sit down," he said, drawing her to the settee. "We'll finish the game presently." Prudence relinquished her cue to him and sat down. He put the cue away in the rack and seated himself beside her. "I've been a long time coming to my point," he said, coming to it rather abruptly now that he was once started; "but I think you must have understood my reason for delay. I did not want to hurry you. You know why I came down... Prudence, will you marry me?" Prudence gave a little sigh, and sat perfectly still, staring with amazed eyes at the neglected balls on the green cloth. Oddly, the thought which struck her at the moment was that it was unnecessary to break off in the middle of a game to ask her that. There was no need to make opportunities; they were thrust at him. "Let me think," she said. "Give me time. You--startled me." "But you knew that I meant to ask you that question?" He took her hand again and pressed it gently. "When you sent that letter, wasn't it intended for permission to speak? I interpreted it that way." "I--don't--know." She was still for a moment; then she turned to him and looked him uncertainly in the eyes. "I was very miserable when I wrote that letter. Yes; I suppose that was what I meant--then." She broke off, and her gaze wandered away and came to rest again on the balls. "It's silly of me," she said, speaking very low. "I feel a little afraid." "Just shyness," he said reassuringly, stroking the hand which lay limply in his. "I am old for you; but you will find me the more gentle, possibly the more understanding, on that account. My darling, I love you very dearly. You are so young--you don't know yet what love is. I did not know either until recently. I come to it rather late. But my feeling for you is very deep. Prudence, my dear, I want you. I love you. If you give yourself to me I will do everything in my power to make your life happy. Will you marry me, dear?" It seemed to Prudence that there was only one possible answer. She had understood when she invited him to come down the significance of what she did. She had no right to encourage him to hope and then fail in her part. He was too good a man to play with. She kept her face averted while she answered him, staring fixedly at the shining balls, lying where her last stroke had left them placed conveniently, she realised with grim appreciation of her mistake, for him to score off. "I want to be quite frank with you," she said, her breathing fast through sheer nervousness, an earnest expression on her face, which he thought very modest and gentle. "I don't love you, Mr Morgan,--not in that way--not, I mean, as you love me. I've thought--I should like to marry you. I think that still--only I'm afraid sometimes,--afraid that you'll find me disappointing." He placed his arm very gently round her shoulders and held her so without attempting any warmer caress. He smiled into her troubled eyes. "There is only one thing that could possibly disappoint me," he said, "and that is if I fail to make you happy. Trust me, and all will be well." And so Prudence secured her passage through the door which it seemed he alone could open for her into those wider spaces where she imagined freedom was to be found. But emerging with Edward Morgan at her side, it gradually became clear to her that she was doubly fettered. In blindly groping for her freedom she had given herself to a new and more complete bondage. She would leave the old tyranny behind her, only to pass to another condition of fresh and more pressing obligations. The certainty of these things came to her with the realisation of her distaste for her new responsibility. CHAPTER TWENTY THREE. Prudence insisted upon a long engagement. That was the first hitch in the amicable relations between her and her fiance. Mr Morgan could see no reason why they should not marry immediately. He had less time than she to waste, and he was impatient of delay. But Prudence remained firm. She held out for a six months' engagement; and Mr Graynor from purely selfish reasons ranged himself on her side. He was glad that her choice had fallen so wisely on this trusty friend of long standing. He could hand her over to the care of Edward Morgan with no anxiety for her future well-being; but he did not want to part with her too soon. When she was married the opportunities for seeing her would be few, and he dreaded the separation. "Six months is not so very long," he told the exasperated Mr Morgan. "And Prudence is only twenty." "If I were twenty," Mr Morgan retorted, "I might see the matter in that light. Unfortunately I am not that age. But I shall have to exercise patience, I suppose." He bought his fiancee a magnificent half hoop of diamonds, and slipped it on her fingers, where it looked, Prudence considered, oddly out of place. It was altogether too valuable for constant wear. She did not tell him so for fear of hurting his feelings; but she wished that he would buy her less extravagant gifts. Whenever he gave her anything it was of the costliest description that he could procure. It seemed to give him peculiar satisfaction to surround her with expensive things. And he was amazingly kind and considerate for her unexpressed wishes. Prudence never knew how much it cost him in self-restraint in those early days of their engagement to keep under the ardour of his love for her, and school his passionate desire to take her in his arms and kiss madly her cool unresponding lips. He was wise, this mature lover. He knew that he had to foster her kindly affection for him; that he would need to tend and cherish it a long time before he could look to see it blossom into love. But he did not despair. He believed that she would give him eventually a full and willing response. The engagement brought unforeseen consequences in the form of affectionate and intimate letters from the different members of Mr Morgan's family. All these people were unknown to Prudence; yet they wrote to her as though the prospective relationship admitted them to terms of confidential familiarity. Old Mrs Morgan wrote approving her son's choice, and congratulating Prudence on having won so excellent a husband. She was glad, she added, that Prudence was young; she liked young people about her. She looked forward to having Prudence on a visit, when she would instruct her in regard to Edward's likes and dislikes, the care of his health, and other matters of similar importance. Mrs Henry Morgan's letter was gushing and insincere in tone. As a matter of fact Mr Morgan's sister-in-law was not very pleased to hear of his engagement. She had come to regard him as a confirmed bachelor, and her two sons, for whom she was very ambitious as quite certain of inheriting their uncle's immense wealth. She had mapped out a brilliant future for them in which Morgan Bros, played no part; and she considered it indelicate on Edward's side to upset her plans by marrying--at his time of life. "You are a brave little person," ran one passage in her letter; "a man past forty is not adaptable. But I'll give you all sorts of wrinkles how to manage him. And of course his mother will live with you. She and I don't get on." "Of course his mother won't live with us," Prudence told herself. But she learned later that Mrs Henry's statement was correct. Old Mrs Morgan had managed Edward's house always, and would continue to do so. "You will love her," he assured Prudence; "and most certainly she will love you." An invitation to spend Christmas in Derbyshire followed; but Prudence, panic-stricken at the thought of meeting these people, insisted on spending her last Christmas at home; and it was finally settled that the visit should be deferred till the spring, when Mr Morgan promised himself the pleasure of fetching her to spend a fortnight with his mother, and of bringing her home again at the finish of the visit. There was little likelihood of seeing much of her in the interval; but she promised to write to him regularly once a week, setting aside his tentative suggestion that a daily correspondence would be welcome by frankly admitting that she would find nothing to say. He was disappointed. The ink on his own pen would not have dried from a dearth of ideas. At forty-three a man's passion is no whit less ardent than that of a boy of twenty; but the man knows how to practise restraint. It was this knowledge which helped Edward Morgan over the difficulties of his courtship with a girl whose heart he had yet to win, and to whom passion was an unknown quantity. Prudence was rather sexless in those days. The realities of love and marriage were mysteries to her. Marriage meant no more than the solution of a problem that had occupied her attention on and off for years. She saw no other way of obtaining her emancipation. And he was very unexacting in his devotion, and patient and kind. The kindly attentions of Mr Morgan, the cessation of general hostilities, and the patronising approval of brother William, effected a wonderful clearance in the domestic atmosphere. Prudence was once more in favour, and the indiscretions of the past were tacitly overlooked. She discovered also that by virtue of her engagement she had achieved a new importance in Wortheton social life. People called to offer their congratulations; and the vicar talked affably of the imitative tendency of marriage, seeming to ascribe Prudence's good fortune to the example set by her sister. He informed Mr Morgan rather unnecessarily that he was rich in this world's goods. Amid the general rejoicings Bobby alone stood aloof, critical and disapproving and altogether unimpressed with the splendour of the match. "You don't need to marry money," he wrote. "There's more than enough of the beastly commodity in the family as it is. And Morgan! ... Of course he's all right in himself, and a good fellow; but he's more than double your age. Imagine what you would say if I wanted to marry a woman old enough to be my mother! Break it off, Prue. I'll be home shortly, and I'll stand by you." Prudence shed a few surreptitious tears over this letter, though it moved her to mirth as well; it was so characteristic of the writer. But, save for glimpses during the holidays, Bobby had no idea of the flatness of life at Court Heatherleigh, its repression, its sneaking pose--there was no other term for it--of pious superiority which crushed the spirit and the natural honesty of those upon whom its influence was exerted. She was not marrying Mr Morgan for his wealth; she was not marrying him for love. Her reasons, when she came to analyse them, occurred to her singularly inadequate. She felt very doubtful as to the wisdom of the step she had taken. The idea of a triangular household, with a mother-in-law in supreme command, seemed to her rather like a repetition of the unsatisfactory home conditions. She felt that Edward Morgan owed it to her to set up a separate establishment, and even ventured to suggest this rearrangement to him. He heard her in pained surprise. "My mother will not intrude on us," he said. "Morningside has been her home always. I could not agree to her living elsewhere." "Couldn't _we_ live elsewhere?" Prudence insisted. "I should like a house of my own." "You don't understand," he said, with his hands on her shoulders, and his grave eyes looking tenderly down upon her. "Home for my mother is where I am." He stooped and kissed her as a sort of act of forgiveness for the want of consideration she had shown. CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR. On the morning that Edward Morgan left Wortheton it was arranged that Prudence should drive with him to the junction and see the train off. It was never clear to Prudence with whom the idea originated; it certainly did not emanate from her own brain. She was even a little embarrassed at the thought of the four-mile drive with her heavily coated and bemuffled fiance, and the prospective ordeal of standing by the door of his compartment during those exasperating, interminable minutes before the starting of the train. She came downstairs into the hall dressed for the drive in a navy costume which accentuated the girlish slenderness of her figure to discover Mr Morgan winding his many wraps about him, and talking cheerfully with her father and sisters, who were gathered together to see him off. He paused in the business of buttoning his coat to inquire anxiously if she were sufficiently warmly clad for the day, which was bright and cold, with a touch of December frost in the air. She replied carelessly that she did not feel cold; and Mr Graynor, with his arm about her shoulders, remarked thoughtlessly: "Young blood, Morgan, defies the weather." "I think Prudence should wear a fur about her throat," Agatha said. "It would look more suitable." Mary was despatched forthwith to fetch the unwanted addition, which, when it appeared, Mr Morgan insisted on placing round her shoulders. Prudence took her seat in the carriage, feeling oppressed with the warmth of the sable and the confined heated atmosphere of the artificially warmed brougham, with its windows carefully closed against the cold clear air. She dragged at the fur impatiently. "I must take it off," she said. "I feel stifled." "All right," he acquiesced, and passed his arm round her waist in a clumsy caress. "I'll keep you warm. Comfy, eh?" She smiled at him a little nervously. "You are just a mountain of clothes," she said. During the long drive Mr Morgan kept his arm about her, and held her so closely that Prudence felt suffocated. She proposed letting down the window part way; but Mr Morgan showed such alarm at the idea that she did not persist. "You don't understand the risk," he said. "This winter travelling... It's how people contract pneumonia, risking chills through open windows. You don't know how to take care of yourself. It's time I took a hand at it. I'm going to take great care of you, little girl,--all my life. Open windows!--no! This open-air craze is the cause of most of the ills of life." Prudence laughed. "I understood it was the cure for them," she replied. "I live in the open air--and sleep in it." "Sleep in it!" he ejaculated in horrified accents. "Well, not actually that," she said; "but with the bedroom window wide-- always." He stared at her. He had never supposed that any one, save those undergoing the outrageous experiment of the new-fangled open-air cure, which he considered stark madness, slept with open windows in the winter. His own windows were always carefully secured and heavily curtained. Occasionally, during the very warm summer months, he allowed an inch at the top to remain open for purposes of ventilation. "You will grow wiser as you grow older," he said, and determined that on that point anyhow he would have his own way. It was a relief to Prudence when they arrived at the station. She walked on to the platform, declining to accompany Mr Morgan to the booking-office while he procured his ticket. She wanted to fill her lungs with fresh air before the further ordeal of final leave-taking; and she wanted for a few minutes to be rid of his kindly presence, and the necessity of responding to his lover-like advances. It was all so dull and irksome; there was only one word which occurred to her as applicable to the situation, and that was stodgy. The stodginess of it was getting on her nerves. When finally the big over-coated figure emerged upon the platform and came towards her Prudence felt a touch of compunction because she could not return the smiling gladness of his look with eyes which expressed a like pleasure at his approach; her own gaze was critical and entirely matter-of-fact. His train was in. She opened the door of an empty compartment and stood beside it. He joined her, waited until the porter had placed his luggage on the rack, and dismissed him handsomely; then he motioned Prudence to get into the compartment, and followed her quickly and closed the door upon themselves. "We've just time," he said, "for a last good-bye." And took her in his arms. She had never felt so embarrassed in his presence before, perhaps because he had never before assumed so lover-like and determined an attitude. He tilted back her face and kissed her lips, and continued to hold and kiss her in this extravagant manner, despite the fact that people passed the carriage at intervals and stared in as they passed. Mr Morgan was indifferent to this manifest curiosity in his doings, and his broad figure blocked the middle window and screened Prudence from intrusive eyes. "Oh!" she said, and attempted to withdraw from his embrace. "The train will be starting immediately. I had better get out." "Shy little girl!" he returned, and laughed joyously. "You've never been very free with your kisses, Prudence; and it will be a long time before I see you again. All right! You shall get out now. One good kiss before I let you go." He fairly hugged her. Prudence gave him a cool hasty peck on the cheek, slipped from his hold, and was out on the platform as soon as he opened the door. He closed the door and fastened it and leaned from the window to talk to her, holding her hand until the guard's flag waved the signal for her release. "Good-bye, my darling," he called to her. Prudence stood back and waved her hand to him, waved it gaily with a glad sense of relief. The last she saw of him as the train began to move out of the station was his grave face regarding her mournfully as he pulled up the window before settling down in his corner. Prudence hurried out to the waiting carriage with her thoughts in a whirl. This business of being engaged was an altogether perplexing affair. She had not expected things to be like this somehow. She did not know quite what she had expected; but she had never imagined that the stolid Edward Morgan could assume the role of lover and confidently look for a similar response from her; she had believed he would maintain the more dignified attitude of a warm and affectionate friendliness throughout their engagement; and she felt vexed and cheated because he had disappointed her in this belief. "It's absurd," she told herself, with her hot face turned to the sharp crisp air which came through the open window, "for him to imagine I am going to let him make love to me when I only want him to be nice and kind always." But she began dimly to apprehend that the absurdity was likely to go on. Bobby came home for the Christmas holidays and talked to her seriously of the mistake she was making. He did not look forward to the prospect of coming home finally to find Prudence gone; and the next term at school was his last. "Beastly rotten it will be here without you," he remarked. "You might have waited, Prue, a little longer. You don't love old Morgan, do you?" That was a poser for Prudence. "I'm fond of him," she answered guardedly. "He's kind, and generous. When I am married I shall be able to do as I like." "Rot!" he retorted. "It will mean simply exchanging one dulness for another. Then you'll vary the dullness by falling in love with some one else, and there'll be a scandal. I know you. You'll never settle down to a stick-in-the-mud existence with old Morgan. And serve him jolly well right for being such an ass." Prudence regarded him with newly awakened interest, her expression slightly aggrieved. "I had no idea you held such a low opinion of me," she said. He laughed. "That's human nature, old girl. If you intend to remain faithful to old Morgan you'll not have to look at another man, because when the right man comes along you'll know it; all the wedding rings in the world won't keep you blind to facts. You chuck the silly old geyser," he counselled in the inelegant phraseology he affected, "before you tie your life into a hopeless knot." She shook her head. "It's not so easy," she said. "They'd be down on you, of course. But I'd stand by you. We'd worry through." "I didn't mean that." She attempted explanations. "He's so good and kind. You don't understand. I'd feel the meanest thing on the face of the earth if I hurt him deliberately like that. And there isn't any need. I _want_ to marry him." "There's no accounting for tastes, of course," he said rudely, and flung out of the room in a mood of deep disgust. The whole business of Prudence's engagement was profoundly exasperating to him. It obtruded itself at unexpected moments with an insistence that was to his way of thinking indecent. It interfered with his arrangements. So many hours of her time were given to letter writing that the size of the weekly epistle was ever a matter of suspicious amazement to him. He had no means of knowing how long those bald sentences which Prudence sprawled largely with a generous marginal space over the sheet of notepaper took in their composition. He suspected that she wrote reams to the fellow and posted them on the sly. The regular arrival of Mr Morgan's weekly effusion was a further irritation. This was handed usually to Prudence across the breakfast table with ponderous playfulness on brother William's part, and a show of sly surreptitiousness, that drew general attention to the transit from his pocket to her reluctant hand. The sorting of the letters was accompanied by such facetious subtleties as "Do we behold a billet doux?" or the murmured misquotation: "He sent a letter to his love." And the bulky envelope would be passed to her to the accompaniment of appreciative giggles from his sisters, and received by Prudence with as unconcerned an air as the trying circumstances made possible, and left by her lying unopened on the table exposed to the general gaze while she finished her meal. She carried her letter away with her and read it in the privacy of her room. "I can't think how you stand it," Bobby said once, when they were alone together. "If Uncle William made such fatuous remarks to me I'd hit him." "I won't give him the satisfaction of seeing how he annoys me," she answered. "William would vulgarise the most sacred thing." "You aren't for calling this luke-warm affair sacred, I hope?" Bobby asked with fine sarcasm. Whereupon she smiled suddenly and pulled his scornful young face down to hers and kissed it. "It's one way out," she explained; and he was silent in face of the reasonableness of her reply. CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE. Christmas came and brought with it Edward Morgan's gift to his fiancee, a rope of pearls, so beautiful and costly that Prudence, on taking the shining thing from its bed of velvet, and holding it in her hands, was moved with a sense of remorse at the inadequacy of the return she was making this man, who showered gifts upon her in token of his love. She did not want his presents; they were an embarrassment and a distress. The thought of wearing the pearls, as in the letter which accompanied them he requested her to do, on Christmas night, was distasteful to her on account of the continuous flow of witticism she would be forced to meet from William, who already had revealed a new inventiveness on presenting the registered package to her, and had manifested open curiosity as to its contents, which she had failed to gratify. And she dreaded the cold criticism of Bobby's appraising eye. Bobby would possibly refrain from verbal comment, but his face would express the more. She locked the pearls away and decided that she would show them to no one; she would ignore the request that came with them. In any case they were too valuable to wear at a quiet dinner at home, at which the only guests would be Matilda and her husband, who, still in uncertainty as to his living, waited on in Wortheton in hopeful expectation. To wear the pearls in Ernest's presence, and suffer William's sly pleasantries unmoved, was more than she felt equal to. Ernest, through the medium of his wife, had expressed amazement at her engagement, which he attributed to worldly considerations. "She is incapable of appreciating the seriousness of marriage," he had told Matilda. "Her mind is light and inclines to frivolity, and material advantages." That his own inclination had been towards a comfortable income, was a point he was apt to overlook. Prudence found some difficulty in writing a sufficiently appreciative acknowledgment of her lover's gift. She hated the necessity for expressing a pleasure which she did not feel. "Your present is much too beautiful," she wrote. "I don't know how to thank you. I am overpowered. You give such wonderful things..." She added nothing about locking the pearls away, but left it to his imagination to picture her, as he had said he would do, shining in all her girlish beauty with his pearls about her throat. She determined to take them with her to Morningside when she went in April. If he wished to see her wearing pearls, she would gratify him then. The visit to Morningside hung over her like a nightmare. She was not allowed to forget it; Mr Morgan continually referred to it in his letters. He was having the whole place re-decorated for her; and he wrote consulting her preference in the matter of wall-papers, and her taste in tapestries. The furnishing of the house was Victorian; and he feared she might consider it a little heavy and inartistic. He wanted her to express her wishes in regard to furniture and other matters. But Prudence, taking alarm at the thought of this responsibility, flung the onus of everything on to him, and insisted that the furniture which had sufficed hitherto would assuredly serve for her needs. She did not want anything changed. This proved disappointing to him. He would have liked her to show a greater interest in the home which was to be hers. Her indifference chilled his enthusiasm in the plans he was making for her pleasure; and the arrangements were left more and more in the entirely capable hands of the decorator. "We can alter things later," he told himself. "And Prudence can buy any new stuff she wants." The agreeable prospect of shopping with her compensated for the earlier disappointment. It would be so much pleasanter to choose things together. When she first beheld Morningside Prudence thought it the ugliest house she had ever been in; but later, when better acquainted with its solid splendour, she decided that it had possibilities, and was really a nice house made to look ugly. There was a dingy serviceable effect about everything. She arrived on a fine evening in April, soft and balmy, following a day of intermittent showers and blazing sunshine. Mr Morgan accompanied her. He had spent the week-end at Wortheton, and made the journey back with her, as had been arranged. His manner during the journey was kindly and attentive. He displayed great consideration for her comfort, and, because she enjoyed fresh air, lowered one window a couple of inches and buttoned his coat from fear of the draught. The absence of lover-like attentions, which he had sufficient perception to see disturbed her, reassured Prudence, and placed their relations on an easier footing. When she arrived at his home and was conducted to the drawing-room to be received by his mother, she was conscious of a new feeling in regard to him; he inspired her with a sense of support. She turned to him instinctively as to some one reliable and familiar; and was grateful to him when he slipped his hand within her arm and kept it there while they advanced together down the long room to where old Mrs Morgan, stout and severe of feature, sat in a big chair, quietly observant of her, scrutinising her in the close disconcerting way peculiar to short-sighted people. "This is the daughter I promised you, mother," Edward Morgan said. Mrs Morgan rose slowly and confronted them. She took the girl's outstretched hand. "What a child!" she said, and bent forward and kissed Prudence on the cheek. She was, nor did she hide it altogether successfully, a little disappointed. Edward had prepared her for a young daughter-in-law, but she had not expected to see any one quite so youthful in appearance. Comparing them as they stood side by side, the disparity in age struck her unpleasantly. "My dear," she said, "I had not realised you were so young." "I don't think I realised it myself," Prudence returned, feeling her courage oozing away before the hard scrutiny of those critical eyes, "until to-day. I've an unfledged feeling since leaving home. But I'm twenty." Twenty! And the man who proposed to make her his wife might, had circumstances so ordained it, have been her father. "She'll grow up, mother," Mr Morgan observed, and pressed the girl's arm reassuringly. "I must try to equalise matters by growing younger myself." But the old lady was not encouraging. "You won't succeed, Edward. It's like planting a bulb the wrong way in the soil; it grows against nature downwards, curves about, and works its way to the surface, crooked. Prudence will have to grow to you; you can't go backwards." He reddened and laughed a little constrainedly. "I feel as young as I did at twenty," he said. "Prudence will help to rejuvenate me. I refuse to be discouraged." He crossed to the tea-table, poured the girl out a cup of tea, and brought it to her. "We've had a tiring journey," he said. "I expect you'll be glad to go to your room and rest. There's a family gathering to-night--in your honour." He smiled down into the startled upraised eyes, and added: "Just my brother and his wife. You'll find Mrs Henry amusing. She's very eager to meet you." "Rose always gushes over new acquaintances," Mrs Morgan interposed. "She is making plans for Prudence's entertainment, although I told her that Prudence was coming for the purpose of making our acquaintance, and might prefer to avoid festivities. I think she might have waited to consult her wishes." "Oh!" cried Prudence, with a ring of pleasurable excitement in her tones. "But that's awfully kind of her." "You see," Mr Morgan said, enjoying the sight of her pleasure, and feeling grateful to his sister-in-law for her forethought, "the idea is not amiss. We are out for amusement and agreeable to anything that offers. Rose's plan is excellent." "Rose is glad of any excuse for gaiety," Mrs Morgan said. "It is ridiculous for a woman of her age, with two big boys, to amuse herself in the undignified manner in which she does. There is to be a dance next week. She says it will introduce Prudence to the neighbourhood. In reality it is an excuse for indulging in a form of exercise which she has outgrown." "Do you enjoy dancing, Prudence?" Mr Morgan asked. Her sparkling eyes answered him. "Oh! yes," she murmured eagerly, and was conscious from the expression on Mrs Morgan's face, of giving offence. "I've never been to a dance-- a real dance in my life," she added. "Too much thought is given to amusement nowadays," Mrs Morgan observed. "When I was a girl we seldom went to evening parties. Late hours rob young people of their freshness, and these modern dances are very vulgar. Edward dislikes dancing." "Oh! once in a way I can put up with that sort of thing," he interposed quickly. "If Prudence enjoys it, I expect I shall get some pleasure out of the evening." Prudence gave him a grateful look, and, in reward for his consideration, remarked: "It's fortunate that I brought my pearls. It's such a splendid opportunity for wearing them. You didn't prepare me for these festivities." "Upon my word," he returned, laughing, "I never gave it a thought." He became aware of his mother's silence, her tight-lipped disapproval, and turned the subject diplomatically. "There's a busy time ahead for you. We've quite a lot of things calling for your attention. And my mother is looking forward to showing you over the house, and letting you into the inner mysteries. She is quite a wonderful housewife." "Prudence is probably not domesticated," Mrs Morgan said. "Girls show no interest in their homes nowadays. Things are left to servants." "I've never had much chance," Prudence explained apologetically. "You see, I am the youngest of six daughters. But I'd like to learn." Mr Morgan considered her gentle submissiveness very sweet. He was surprised at his mother's lack of response to this softly-voiced desire; for himself, he felt a strong temptation to kiss the pretty timid face of the speaker, but his natural shyness restrained him from obeying this impulse. "Six woman are too many in one household," Mrs Morgan vouchsafed. "Some of you ought to have married." "One of us has," Prudence answered. "And another is going to," Mr Morgan put in, with a tentative smile at his fiancee. She laughed softly. "It suggests the rhyme of the ten little nigger boys," she said. "Six women in one house; one of them married, and then there were five." Later, when Prudence had gone upstairs to her room, Mrs Morgan voiced her opinion of her to her son in a single expressive phrase. "I am afraid, Edward, that your choice has fallen on a rather frivolous girl." CHAPTER TWENTY SIX. Alone in the spacious bedroom allotted to her, Prudence spent the rest time allowed her before dinner in the indulgence of her favourite occupation, leaning from the window, lost in a maze of thought. It struck her very forcibly with not the slightest intimation of doubt that six women in a household were less assertively too many than two women-- two women with conflicting interests and equal authority. She determined that she would not consent to live with a mother-in-law. It was very plain to her that in the event of Mrs Morgan sharing their home, the combined wills of mother and son would force her inevitably to regulate her life on the lines which habit and tradition inclined them naturally to follow. She did not aspire to excel as a housewife; nor did she wish to avoid late hours and unwholesome excitement, and develop a horror of draughts and a cautious regard for her digestion. Mr Morgan was obliged to live simply. His diet consisted mainly, it seemed to Prudence, of boiled mutton and milk puddings. Mrs Morgan had impressed these important details on her in the drawing-room while she drank her tea. Any departure from this rigorous self-denial was followed by tribulation. And invariably he drank a glass of hot water the last thing before retiring. Old Mrs Morgan partook of hot water also. She proposed that Prudence should adopt this excellent custom. "It is so good for every one," she had explained to Prudence's immense embarrassment. "It flushes the kidneys." Recalling this amazing statement in the solitude of her room, Prudence was moved to quiet mirth. "A kidney bath," she reflected with a flash of malicious humour at Mrs Morgan's expense, "before bedtime. Excellent practice! I must certainly introduce Bobby to the beverage. We'll call it K.B. I suppose I'm expected to dine off boiled mutton every night, and wash it down with K.B. What a prospect! I wonder whether his mother suspects that when he is away from home Edward strengthens his nightly tonic with whisky." Prudence lingered at the open window until the first gong, booming through the house, roused her from her meditations to the disquieting realisation that she must dress and go down and face a resumption of these surprisingly intimate confidences. Mrs Morgan had given her to understand that she was to be fully informed in everything relating to Edward's well-being and comfort. The first duty of a wife, indeed the duty which embraced all others, consisted in having always in mind a regard for her husband's wishes and care for his health and happiness. "I fail to see where I come in," Prudence thought. "Presumably my wishes don't count." Mr Morgan was waiting for her alone in the drawing-room when she descended. He came forward quickly at sight of her and took her in his arms and kissed her gently. "I want to thank you," he said, "while I have the opportunity, for your sweetness and patience. My mother has coddled me so long; she loves doing it; and I let her because--well, because she is my mother. But don't be alarmed into believing I am the faddist she would make me appear. You will find, when we are married, it is I who will do the thinking for both. Don't worry your pretty head with trying to absorb these ideas. They amuse her; we need not distress ourselves about them." Prudence looked up at him with a smile in her wide blue eyes. "Have I really to see to the airing of your flannels before you change?" she asked. He laughed with her. "There is an airing cupboard. I don't think you need bother. But I believe she does." "You really are a reassuring person," she said, and held up her face to him to be kissed. "You are crumpling your shirt, Edward," Mrs Morgan said, entering the room at the moment, a commanding figure in black silk and fine old lace, with a critical eye on their grouping and an absence of sympathy in her look. Prudence moved away quickly with the feeling that she had been rebuked. The Henry Morgans arrived exactly five minutes in advance of dinner, and were received with restrained cordiality, and duly presented to Prudence. Mrs Henry, a bright little woman in the middle thirties, with a gay audacity of manner and a ready infectious laugh, took Prudence by the shoulders and kissed her effusively. Then she held her off at arm's length and scrutinised her closely. "It is absurd," she remarked, her amused eyes on the girl's blushing face; "you'll take precedence of me. You're the senior partner, you know. We really ought to change husbands." "Prudence is better suited to a serious-minded husband than you are, Rose, in everything but years," old Mrs Morgan retorted. Mrs Henry did not appear to resent this remark. She and her mother-in-law never met without an interchange of polite hostilities. "Now you know where to place me," she said to Prudence. "I'm the little lump of leaven amid the dough of Morgan responsibility. You and I have got to be friends. I've been blessing Edward ever since he broke the amazing news for introducing something youthful into the firm. We didn't expect it of him." The gong broke in on these indiscretions with its booming summons to the dining-room. Prudence went in with her fiance, and faced Henry Morgan and his wife at table. Henry was a younger edition of his brother, and not much more animated. It occurred to Prudence that Mrs Henry struck a bright note of contrast amid the semitones of the Morgan household. Mrs Henry could on occasions make herself peculiarly offensive to her mother-in-law; but it suited her to cultivate Prudence's acquaintance, and so she exercised for that evening a certain tact in fencing with Mrs Morgan that gave no substantial ground for disagreement. She contrived none the less to reveal Edward's mother to his fiancee in an altogether unfavourable light. "Mother is such an autocrat," she remarked once laughingly. "I suppose that is due to the fact that she has never had a daughter." "If I had had a daughter," Mrs Morgan replied, "I would have brought her up to respect authority." "You'll be able to practise on Prudence," Mrs Henry suggested pleasantly, giving the old lady, who was more shrewd than she suspected, an insight into her game. She was trying to prejudice Prudence against her. Mrs Morgan said nothing; but she determined to counterstroke that move. With the laudable desire of getting on to easier ground, Edward Morgan spoke of the coming dance and Prudence's anticipatory pleasure. Mrs Henry discussed it happily. "I love dancing," she confessed to Prudence. "And of course I knew you would. It's one way of giving you a glimpse of the aborigines. They are a dull lot on the whole. And I'm afraid we'll be short of dancing men. I shall have to import a few. I'm glad you approve of the idea; mother, of course, doesn't." "You could scarcely expect dancing to appeal to me at my time of life," Mrs Morgan observed, her short-sighted eyes scrutinising her daughter-in-law's face with unflattering attentiveness. "I confess to surprise that it should still attract you so strongly. But for Prudence it is a different matter. At her age dancing is quite suitable. Since Edward is willing to accompany her, I am sure she will enjoy it." She smiled agreeably at Prudence. "I shall enjoy hearing all about it afterwards." Mrs Henry had not calculated on this neat turning of her weapon of offence, and was temporarily at a disadvantage. But she recovered from her surprise with astonishing quickness. "She will be able to tell you of her many conquests," she said. "It will amuse you to hear of her triumphs." "I pay Prudence the compliment of believing her to be neither silly nor vain," Mrs Morgan returned. "If she made conquests she would not boast of them." "I'm unfortunate," Mrs Henry remarked plaintively. "I am always saying the wrong thing." She glanced at Prudence with a swift upward lift of her eyelid, and added: "I shall have to borrow a leaf from your book of deportment. You don't look as good as they would have me believe; but," and she turned her eyes to where Edward Morgan sat beside his fiancee, and let them rest contemplatively on his solid figure, "I suppose you really are seriously inclined." CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN. During the days which followed Prudence strove continually to overcome her prejudices and adapt herself to Mrs Morgan's ways. She tried, too, to blind herself to what she now realised for an unalterable fact, that her engagement was a mistake. She did not love Edward Morgan. She did not like his mother, nor his home, nor the life they led. Mrs Henry's humorously sarcastic criticisms of the Morningside establishment did not annoy her. She was often amused by them, and allowed Mrs Henry to see it. Afterwards, removed from Mrs Henry's influence, her conscience rebuked her for disloyalty. She liked Mrs Henry on account of her brightness, and spent more time with her than old Mrs Morgan approved of. Mrs Henry kept open house for her bachelor friends, of whom she had a number, and she took a malicious pleasure in getting Prudence to help in the business of entertaining. "You'll meet these men at my dance," she said. "I want you to know them first; it makes it so much more agreeable." Prudence thought so too. She failed to understand old Mrs Morgan's objection. It was absurd to suppose that she must avoid all other male society on account of her engagement. These brief lapses into an almost Bohemian gaiety under Mrs Henry's chaperonage, made the Morningside household more noticeably dull. The evenings were particularly dreary. Mrs Morgan insisted upon playing patience after dinner, three-handed to include Prudence, and necessitating the use of three packs of cards which made for confusion in dealing. Prudence was dense in learning the game, and would have preferred to sit out, but was not allowed to; it was imperative that she should share in the amusement. It did not amuse her; and the concentration necessary in following the play made conversation impossible. "Edward and I play every night," Mrs Morgan explained. "When he is absent I play a single-handed patience. But that isn't so interesting. Now when he has to leave home you will be able to play with me. That will cheer us during his absences, and will be nicer for me." Prudence began to feel very much as a fish must when caught in a net. The desire to escape was imperative; but the net tightened hourly; there appeared no weak places in it. And Edward Morgan himself was so amazingly kind, and equally amazingly obtuse. He appeared entirely unaware of the vain longing for escape which dominated Prudence's mind, and made her increasingly restless because of that gradual closing of the net which made retreat day by day more seemingly impossible. Old Mrs Morgan gave a dinner party for the purpose of introducing Prudence formally as her son's betrothed wife to his and her immediate friends. Prudence was obliged to stand beside her with Edward and receive these guests as they arrived, and listen to their congratulations and utter little stereotyped phrases in acknowledgment of their good wishes. There was no way out of the muddle that she could see. She had sealed and ratified her engagement by this visit to her fiance's home. The dinner party produced a curious state of reaction. Apathetic resignation to the inevitable followed upon this amazingly dull ceremony. She must go through with what she had undertaken and make the best of the bargain. The hope of keeping a separate establishment from Mrs Morgan was as forlorn as the hope of escape had been. Neither mother nor son, she knew, would suffer the arrangement. They would wear down her opposition with the firm kindliness with which those in authority overrule the undisciplined complainings of youth. None the less, she felt that the imposition of a mother-in-law was unfair. Had Mr Morgan raised this condition at the time of his proposal she would not have agreed to it. The night of Mrs Henry's dance was to witness another reaction. Prudence's mood varied so continually during the brief visit to Mr Morgan's home that it might be said to shift like the compass with each fresh breath of criticism that greeted the intelligence of her engagement. She was painfully sensitive on the subject. She had looked forward to this dance, the success of which in regard to partners was secured in advance, with much pleasure. It was a new experience for her. She dressed that evening with unusual care, and was conscious on surveying the finished result in the glass of looking her best. When she went downstairs old Mrs Morgan's dim eyes noticed only that she appeared extraordinarily young and immature; there was a suggestion of the ingenue in the fresh girlish prettiness, emphasised by her white dress and the childlike expression in the wide blue eyes. At sight of her, flushed and happy, and wearing his pearls about her throat, Edward Morgan was moved to an infinitely tender admiration. The thought of the appraising eyes of other men resting upon her, of her being held in familiar closeness by the partners who would claim the privilege of dancing with her, gave him a queer stab of jealousy. He would have preferred that she should dance only with himself. "You look like a bride," he said, and bent over her and kissed her lips. Both speech and manner disconcerted Prudence. Her glance fell, and the flush in her cheeks deepened. "I'm glad you think I look nice," she said. He put her into the motor, and sat beside her, a silent abstracted figure, enveloped in a heavy fur-lined coat. Concern for the thinness of her attire and fear of draughts occupied him during the brief drive. Prudence was relieved when they reached the house and she was free from his fussy guardianship. He was waiting for her when she emerged from the cloak-room, and he tucked her hand under his arm with an air of conscious proprietorship and led her through an admiring group of men to where the hostess stood with her husband receiving their guests. "How sweet you look. Prudence!" Mrs Henry said. "How do? Awfully glad to see you," murmured Mr Henry, repeating his formula parrotwise to each arrival. Edward Morgan passed gravely on into the ball-room with his fiancee. He felt nervous and out of his element. Functions of this description always bored him; he possessed no small talk, and dancing seemed to him a foolish pastime. Nevertheless he claimed two dances from Prudence, whose programme filled rapidly; and, having danced the first dance with her, retired to the outskirts, and leaned against the doorpost, watching the moving scene with eyes that looked with jealous insistence for Prudence's figure among the gay throng of dancers. Mrs Henry, who found time among her distractions to observe him, drew her husband's attention to the lounging figure, with the whispered injunction: "For goodness' sake take him into the card-room! He is making himself ridiculous." But Mr Morgan refused to be beguiled into the card-room. He maintained a determined stand near the door; and Prudence, whenever she left the room with her partner in search of rest at the finish of a dance, was conscious of his hungry watchfulness and the look of grave dissatisfaction in his eyes. She wished that he would not watch her; it was embarrassing. "He doesn't look much like the hero of the evening," one unconscious partner remarked to her as he steered her carefully through the press of people. "I wonder which is the lucky lady?--Some one with her eyes wide to the main chance, I imagine. I've been amusing myself with trying to pick her out. She is not conspicuous through attentiveness to him, anyhow. Do you know her?" "Yes," Prudence admitted, with face aflame. "Oh, I say! Point her out to me, will you? I am a new-comer, and out of the know." "No; I don't think I will." "That's the reproof courteous," he returned, slightly nettled. "You consider my remarks in bad taste." "I think them indiscreet," she answered. "You wouldn't feel very happy for instance if I laid claim to the honour." It never occurred to him to treat this speech seriously. He laughed as though it were a huge joke. "I'm not such a fool as I look," he said. "It was because I knew it was safe that I spoke so unguardedly to you." Later on in the evening he had cause to remember his indiscretion and to regret it. He noticed her with Edward Morgan, and observed with amazement the intimacy of the terms that held between them. It flashed into his mind with disconcerting conviction that what he had believed to be a joke was no jest after all. He had seen Mr Morgan speak to no one else, dance with no other partner. He pushed his inquiries further, and learned to his ever-increasing discomfiture that it was to Mr Morgan's fiancee he had made his unguarded remarks. CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT. That night Prudence asked Edward Morgan for her release. The dance to which she had looked forward so gladly, and which she had not enjoyed, had galvanised her into a fixed determination to secure her freedom while yet there was time. The thought of marriage with a man so much older than herself, with whom she had nothing in common, whose every wish opposed itself in gentle opposition to her own, had become a nightmare to her. Young eyes had looked into her eyes that night with a wondering question in them that had hurt her. The hunger for young companionship gripped her. Her memory echoed the careless inconsequent chatter, the joyous laughter of irresponsible youth. One laugh in particular, an amused incredulous laugh, rang in her ears like a reproach. Why had she committed this folly? She must draw back before it was too late. With manifest nervousness Prudence made her faltering appeal for release from her engagement during the homeward drive. Mr Morgan was amazed. He keenly resented her lack of consideration for himself in wishing to withdraw her promise after the publicity given to their engagement. She shrank back from the cold anger in his eyes and the hardness of his voice when he answered her. "You are overwrought," he said. "You don't know what you are saying. What have I done, that you should wish to break off your engagement? I have striven to please you, to make you happy. Do you realise that in less than two months we are to be married? You would make me ridiculous. People will laugh. It will be scandalous." His voice gathered anger as he considered the amusement that would arise at his expense when it became known that the young bride he had chosen had jilted him--jilted the wealthy Edward Morgan almost on the eve of the wedding. "It is absurd!" he added. "You don't realise what you ask." "Oh, please!" she cried, and turned a white frightened face towards him. "Don't be angry with me. I'm so sorry. I ought never to have become engaged to you. I don't love you." He sounded a note of impatience. "You raised that point at the time when I proposed," he said. "I thought we had settled that. Love will come with marriage. I have enough for both." "Don't you see that that only makes it worse?" she said in a voice that shook with nervousness. "I can never love you. I know that now. I've tried. Oh! please be generous and forgive me. I am so sorry for causing you pain. I'm so sorry." She broke down, and sat huddled in a corner of the motor, and sobbed. Mr Morgan sank back in his corner and stared out at the darkened street. Never in his life had he felt so annoyed and upset. At the back of his mind lurked the uncomfortable conviction that he had been a fool, that his world would call him a fool, an old fool for falling in love with a pretty face. He wished he had never seen Prudence, wished that he had never asked her to become his wife. Since he had asked her and she had accepted him, he had no intention of acceding now to her absurd request for release. She was placing him in a most invidious position. She seemed to have no appreciation of what was right and due to him. It would be necessary to make her see that he had to be considered in this as well as herself. He thought of his mother, of the annoyance this would cause her. He determined to ask her to intercede with the girl in his behalf. It was impossible that she should retract from her promise at the eleventh hour. He sat in a heavy silence, his imagination busy with the awkwardness of this disastrous crisis in his hitherto pleasant life, until the motor turned in at his own gates and stopped in front of the house. He got out, and, leaving Prudence to follow, walked up to the door which he opened with his latchkey. He waited for her in the warm, dimly-lit hall, and closed the door after her and bolted it. He lit a bedroom candle for her with some attempt to atone for his late discourtesy, and asked: "Would you like anything before you go upstairs?" "No, thank you." She took the candlestick from him with a shaking hand and turned towards the stairs. "Good-night," he said. The emotion in his voice moved her to yet deeper distress. It was the first time she had parted from him without the good-night kiss. She looked back at him where he stood, muffled in his greatcoat, a big ungainly figure, which nevertheless seemed shrunken, possibly on account of the loss of that air of successful assurance which hitherto had characterised the man. "Good-night," she answered softly. "I am so sorry that I have hurt you." Then, carrying her candle, she went swiftly up the stairs. Neither Prudence nor Edward Morgan secured any sleep that night. While Mr Morgan tossed restlessly on his bed, fretting and worrying over this blow which she had dealt him, Prudence lay very still and wide-eyed in the darkness, wondering dismally what the new day would bring forth, and how she would face old Mrs Morgan's anger, and the pained displeasure in Edward's eyes. It was obvious to Prudence when she descended on the following morning, heavy-eyed and with nerves strung to high tension, that Mr Morgan had already confided in his mother the fact that she wished to end her engagement. The old lady was upset and deeply affronted. Her agitation betrayed itself in the trembling of her hands as she poured out the coffee from the big silver urn. Nothing was said on the subject uppermost in their thoughts until the finish of the meal, but a sense of something impending hung in the air, making ordinary conversation impossible. When he had finished his breakfast Mr Morgan rose and went out, closing the door behind him. Mrs Morgan followed his exit with her short-sighted gaze; then she sat back in her chair and gave her attention to Prudence. She did not speak immediately; she was busy collecting her ideas, trying to subdue her bitter resentment against this girl who deliberately planned to wreck her son's happiness. A betrayal of anger would, she realised, only make the estrangement more complete. "I want to talk to you," she said presently, breaking the silence which was becoming increasingly awkward. Prudence looked up, and sat crumbling the bread beside her plate nervously, and waited. "Edward has told me what happened last night," Mrs Morgan added with fresh signs of agitation in her voice. "He is very distressed and worried. This means more to him than you realise. It is not as if he were a young man, and could face a disappointment and get over it. You cannot seriously intend to break off your engagement--now--when everything is arranged? It would be monstrous." She paused, and looked with pathetic eagerness to Prudence for her answer. The girl choked. She felt the tears rising to her eyes and hastily winked them away. What could she say? What was there to say in face of her determination not to marry a man with whom marriage seemed to her now intolerable? It amazed her to think that ever she could have contemplated such a step. "I don't know how to answer you," she faltered. "It's so hateful to keep hurting people. I know I've hurt Edward. I know you are thinking badly of me--you must be. And I can't alter it. I can't please you. I ought never to have accepted Edward. I don't love him. How can I marry some one I don't love?" The tears fell now unchecked; she made no attempt to staunch them. But old Mrs Morgan took no heed of this display of emotion; no amount of tears could atone for such heartless conduct. She set herself to the task of overruling the girl's decision. "I agree with you that you ought not to have engaged yourself to my son," she said; "but, since you are engaged to him and every one knows of the engagement, it would be most dishonourable for you to end it now. Your father will say the same. You cannot do it, Prudence." "But I must," Prudence insisted. "No." The old lady became more emphatic. "It is unthinkable. You can't do it. I don't consider, myself, that you will make Edward a suitable wife; but he still wishes it; your family wish it. You cannot draw back." Prudence pushed back her chair and stood up. "I'll go home," she said. "I'll go to-day--now. I don't think that Edward has a right to expect me to many him against my will. I'll go home." She gripped the back of her chair hard, and met Mrs Morgan's unfriendly eyes with no sign of yielding in her look. "I know you are angry with me," she added. "They'll be angry at home. I can't help that. I deserve it. But to do as you wish wouldn't help matters. It would be another mistake. I couldn't make him happy." "You will never make any one happy," Mrs Morgan said, "because you are utterly selfish." CHAPTER TWENTY NINE. Prudence was not allowed to return home that day as she wished to do. Old Mrs Morgan insisted upon writing first to Mr Graynor to prepare him for his daughter's unexpected return, and to explain the reason for her travelling before the original date and alone. In the circumstances it was impossible that Mr Morgan should accompany her. Prudence dreaded the sending of this letter. She feared as the result of its dispatch that some member of her family would arrive to take her home like a child who is in disgrace. She retired to her room and spent the greater part of the day in tears till her face was disfigured and her eyelids swollen with weeping, so that Mrs Henry, when she called during the afternoon, could not fail to detect these signs of distress. Old Mrs Morgan was too upset to receive any one; and Prudence entertained the mystified visitor alone, and in response to repeated probings, explained the situation to her in jerky incomplete sentences which conveyed nothing very clearly, save the fact that she wished to end her engagement and that the Morgans would not agree to this on account of what people would say. Mrs Henry's primary emotion, when this point became clear, revealed itself in a vindictive gratification in her mother-in-law's discomfiture. Apart from that she kept an open mind on the subject. She liked Prudence. She would have preferred that Edward should not upset her own arrangements by taking to himself a wife, but, since he was inclined that way, she thoroughly approved his choice, and had become reconciled to the thought of his marriage. She scarcely knew whether to feel relieved or disappointed at this unexpected turn of affairs. But she was frankly amused. The picture of old Mrs Morgan, amazed and angry, fussing in irreconcilable distress over what people would say, filled her with indescribable satisfaction. "They can't make you marry against your will," she said reassuringly. Prudence was not so sanguine. Persistent opposition of the kind enforced in her family bore one with the irresistible force of a flood in the most unlikely directions. To brave this opposition from a distance was a very different affair from facing it daily and being crushed beneath its influence. She had had experience enough of this sort in the past. "It wouldn't be so intolerable," she said, "if Edward and I could five alone. I want a home of my own. I should hate to have my household ordered according to Mrs Morgan's ideas of what a home should be. Imagine not being mistress in one's own house!" "I can't imagine anything of the kind," Mrs Henry said, and became animated with a new and brilliant inspiration. "Make your consent to marrying him conditional on his keeping a separate establishment," she suggested. "Turn the old woman out--or make him take another house. That's how I should act in your place." The audacity of this proposal robbed it largely of its effect. Prudence rejected it without consideration. "They would never agree to that," she said. "Then Edward has no right to hold you to your engagement. You didn't undertake to marry his mother." Mrs Henry felt particularly pleased with her Solomon-like solution of the difficulty. She urged Prudence to give it her attention. "You have the whole situation in your hands, if you like to be firm," she said. It was a shabby card. Prudence felt, to hold in reserve for the winning of the game. Nevertheless, if it was a shabby card, it was a very strong one: it threw the responsibility of decision on Mr Morgan's shoulders. "Don't let them bully you, you poor child!" Mrs Henry added, and passed a friendly arm around Prudence's waist. "Be firm, and show some spirit, and you'll win through." She took Prudence out motoring, to change the current of her thoughts, as she expressed it. "It won't help matters if you are ill on our hands," she said. William arrived at Morningside as a result of Mrs Morgan's letter, a pompously irate and blustering William, whose anger roused Prudence to a show of defiance, but otherwise left her unmoved. "This is a nice thing to have happened," he observed, his cold eyes resting with unsympathetic criticism on her white face, with the eyes ringed from sleeplessness and recent distress. "You have disgraced the family. No Graynor, whatever his faults, has acted dishonourably before. Your conduct is scandalous. Here have I been obliged to leave my business and start off at a moment's notice on your account. You show no consideration for any one." "You might have spared yourself the journey, so far as my pleasure is concerned," Prudence retorted. He insisted upon her returning with him by the first available train, an arrangement which suited Prudence, whose one desire was to get away from Morningside under any condition. Edward Morgan's sense of injury, which he made very manifest, and his mother's silent anger, were difficult to face. She had not seen Edward alone since the night of the dance; but he sought an interview with her before she left the house to which he had brought her in the proud belief that she would one day live there with him as his wife. He came to her in the drawing-room where she waited dressed ready for departure, with an air of perplexed and hurt inquiry in his look. He refused to believe in the unalterable quality of her decision. The whole thing was utterly incomprehensible to him. "Don't move," he said gravely, as Prudence started up nervously at his entrance with a hurried demand to know whether the motor and William were ready. "I couldn't let you leave without a further effort to arrive at some sort of an understanding. The motor will not be round for a few minutes. There is plenty of time. Won't you sit down?" She reseated herself, and looked away from his reproachful eyes, painfully conscious of the changing colour in her cheeks. It troubled her to see him look so sad and stern. He drew a chair forward and sat down near her. His proximity, the ordeal of remaining there alone with him, was peculiarly distressing to her. "I am not going to accept your present decision as final," he said, after a pause given to reflection. "You haven't allowed yourself opportunity for thought. I regard this unaccountable change in your feelings as the result of some emotional phase which will eventually pass. No; don't interrupt me," for she had looked up as if about to speak. "I would rather that you took time to think about this matter first. I have a right to that much consideration at least. It is not fair to me that you should rely upon your impulses in so grave an issue. Treat me justly, Prudence. Go home and weigh the question carefully, and then let me hear from you again. My love for you remains unaltered in essence, though I confess to a feeling of disappointment at your want of appreciation. Take time, my dear. Give yourself at least a month for reflection. I have not released you from your engagement; I cannot do that. But if at the end of the month you still feel you do not wish to marry me, write to me frankly, and I promise you you will not find me unreasonable." "Thank you," Prudence said with her face averted. "You are very kind." Mr Morgan, who was finding a pathetic satisfaction in the role of sorrowful mentor, took her listless hand in his, and assumed a friendlier tone. He was beginning to believe his own assertion that her present mood was merely a phase that would pass and leave her in a normal frame of mind once more. He pressed his point. "You haven't answered me," he said gently. "You will do as I ask?" "I'll think it over," she agreed. "And I'll write. But--I wish you didn't care so much." Conversation hung after that. Mr Morgan had made his appeal; he had nothing further to add, and Prudence found nothing to say. It came as a relief to both when the door opened abruptly, and William thrust his head inside and demanded how much longer his sister intended keeping him waiting. She rose and offered Mr Morgan her hand. He pressed it warmly, and followed her from the room, and saw her into the waiting motor. He still wore an air of chastened sorrow, but there was a gleam in his eyes suggestive of hope; and he turned away from watching the departure of the motor and went into the house with a lessening of the heavy gravity of his expression and a look of greater assurance than he had worn since the rupture. He refused to accept defeat. When she left his house Prudence had on her finger the engagement ring which he had given her. She had offered to return this; but in answer he had taken her hand and replaced it and told her to keep it where it was. It was not until after she reached home that she remembered it and took it off and locked it away from her sight. The return home was a miserable affair. Her conduct in breaking off her engagement was viewed on all sides as a dishonourable act. No one had any sympathy with the reasons she alleged for this amazing decision. Mr Graynor refused with an obstinacy that baffled her to discuss the subject. He would not hear of her breaking her word to his valued and trusted friend. It seemed to him disgraceful that she should contemplate such a step. To jilt a man like Edward Morgan appeared to him an unpardonable offence. Prudence crept away early to bed and cried her heart out in the solitude of her room. CHAPTER THIRTY. An intolerable fortnight went by. Prudence bore with the displeasure of the family, which manifested itself in a gloomy reserve in her presence, with such cheerfulness as she could command. The influence of Agatha and brother William pervaded the household and fenced her about in a withering isolation. She had ample opportunity for the reflection which Mr Morgan had so earnestly entreated her to give to the matter of her engagement; but this subject least engrossed her attention. The alternative of marriage with Mr Morgan in order to escape from the dreary home life was less attractive than it had seemed. It held out no promise of freedom. Old Mrs Morgan's rule was as arbitrary as Agatha's. There still remained to her the move in the game which Mrs Henry had suggested so readily; but Prudence felt reluctant to win that way. From Bobby's letters Prudence derived her sole source of comfort. These came fairly frequently, and urged upon her the necessity for keeping her end up. Bobby approved of the rupture which disturbed the peace of two households, and promised his active support in the near future, and in the present his very sincere sympathy. "You've done the right thing at last, old girl," he wrote. "It would have been better had you done it before; but it's no use wailing about that. Don't let them bully you into retracing your step." Advice that was easier to give than to follow, in view of the general displeasure. There were moments when Prudence felt that if something did not speedily relieve the tension she would be unable to hold out against the combined pressure of her family's disapproval and her father's sorrowful anger. The latter hit her hard. She had not known what it was to be really estranged from him before. "I wish you would try to understand," she pleaded with him once. "I can't bear it when you never speak. I want to talk to you about-- things. I want to make you understand my point of view. You can't really think it right I should marry a man I do not care for." "I do not think it right that you should jilt an honourable man like Edward Morgan," he said. "But if I don't love him?" she insisted. "You married for love." "Yes," he answered. "And there was as great a difference between the ages of your mother and me as between you and the man you have promised to marry. But your mother was happy with me." "Because she loved you," Prudence replied. "Yes," he allowed, and shifted uneasily in his chair and shaded his eyes with his hand. "I think your mother's sense of duty would have kept her to her promise in any case," he added quietly. "There is a code of honour. Prudence, which we, who would keep our own respect and the respect of others, must uphold. In urging the plea for your own happiness you are opposing a selfish consideration against the happiness of a good and just man. You have to think of him as well as of yourself--of his happiness and your honour. I beg you not to jilt him in this heartless manner. It is not right, Prudence. I must continue to set my face against it." That was the last time she attempted to plead her cause with him. He was past being able to appreciate her point of view. The only member of the family who sympathised with Prudence, and who in unobtrusive fashion sought to show a kindly understanding and to invite her confidence, was Matilda. Marriage had not lessened Matilda's love for romance, though there was little that was romantic in her own life. Ernest was sternly opposed to sentiment; and his wife, beautifully submissive to his prejudices, restrained her sentimental yearning in his presence, and in his absence fed her emotional mind on erotic literature and dreams. He was absent from Wortheton at the time of Prudence's amazing return. The expected living had fallen vacant, and he had gone in advance of his wife to prepare the new home for her reception. That she might like a voice in the furnishing and decoration of the dilapidated vicarage which her money was to restore did not seem to have occurred to him. He felt indeed quite generous and important while spending her money lavishly, according to his own idea of what was needful and agreeable for their mutual comfort. The enlargement and improvement of his study gave him much pleasurable thought. Matilda, as well as Prudence, felt relieved that he was away. The breaking of Prudence's engagement would have afforded him many opportunities for making unfavourable comments on his sister-in-law's character. Matilda on this subject held views opposed to the rest. The engagement had always been a matter for wonderment to her. Her mind strayed continually back to the days of Steele's visit, and harped with reflective persistence on the more vivid events of that time. She pictured his strong, good-looking face, and the admiration in his eyes when they had rested upon Prudence. She recalled the night when he had entered the garden and talked stealthily with her young sister under her window. She felt puzzled to understand how, after knowing Philip Steele, Prudence could have engaged herself to marry any one else. Matilda would have lived solitary, wedded to the memory of romance, rather than shut romance out of her life. "You should not many a man you don't love," she said once. "You are young enough to wait." "I have waited two years," Prudence answered drearily. "Wait a little longer. You don't want to marry Edward Morgan?" "I don't want to; but it looks as if I should be driven to marry him against my will." Matilda found nothing to say to that. She had never possessed any will of her own as opposed to the family. The month for reflection drew to a close, and Prudence had arrived at no settled resolve as to what she purposed doing; she could not determine what to write to Mr Morgan. She had promised him that she would write, but she found nothing to say. The relations between herself and her family became more strained. William made unnecessary references to the Graynor Honour at frequent intervals. The word of a Graynor, he remarked, was regarded as equal to his bond--in the past; and left it to be generally inferred that it remained for Prudence to break that admirable record. Old Mr Graynor took little notice of her. He was not actively unkind; but she had disappointed him keenly, and he allowed her to feel the weight of his displeasure. Goaded beyond measure, her thoughts reverted at times to the dull tranquillity of the Morningside establishment, and the relief to be gained from Mrs Henry's bright companionship, the memory of which brought a sense of comfort to her weary brain. If it were not for old Mrs Morgan... She sat down one day to write to Mr Morgan. She took her engagement ring from the locked drawer and packed it in its case and directed it to him. All of which was entirely simple. But the writing of the letter was a different matter. It was very difficult to set down on paper what she wanted to say. Ultimately the letter was written but the finished production did not please her; the sentences looked bald and brutal and ungracious. It was one thing to resolve to refuse to marry a man unless he sent his old mother out of the home, it was another and altogether detestable matter to put that statement on to paper. She could not do it. Either she must marry the man unconditionally, or end the engagement finally. It was impossible to make any such stipulation. So the letter was never sent. Prudence eventually destroyed it; and still in a state of desperate indecision, entered upon a further period for reflection. The re-opening of the subject devolved upon Mr Morgan. After the lapse of six weeks a letter arrived, reminding her of her promise to write to him, urging his love upon her, and hoping that she had reconsidered her decision. It was a restrained and kindly letter, with not one sentence in the whole of it into which she could read a hint at reproach. Quite at the finish he wrote: "My mother sends her love, and wishes me to say that, as possibly you would be happier keeping house alone, she will find a home for herself near ours." A flush came into Prudence's face while she read these words. She smiled ruefully, and laid the letter aside, and sat quite still, looking out at the sunlight with a shadow of doubt like a passing cloud darkening the blue of her eyes. "That knocks down all my defences," she mused, and moved suddenly and found her handkerchief and buried her face in it. "I'm a fool to cry," she reflected. "It doesn't alter anything really... But I wish she hadn't sent that message." Thus ended Prudence's fight for freedom. She gave in weakly, without further struggle; her resolves borne down by the relentless opposition of the family, by Mr Morgan's quite courteous persistence, and by his mother's unexpected concession. She no longer had any substantial reason to urge against the marriage. The reason which she had put forward repeatedly, that she did not love the man she was being forced to marry, was treated as frivolous and generally disregarded. There appeared no way of escape. Marriage, which once had seemed to her to offer freedom from the dull restrictions of her home life, was nothing more than a shuffling of the same pack of cards. She would change her place in the game, that was all; leave one control for another. Perhaps that was life--woman's life, anyway. But she had dreamed once of fine things, big things, in a world that was fair and lovely and tolerant--the land of promise of every young imaginative mind. CHAPTER THIRTY ONE. Having yielded on the most important point. Prudence conceded every other. She no longer seemed to possess any will, or, if the will were there, she had no heart to express her wishes. The family arranged everything without consulting her; and the marriage, which was hurried forward to fit in as nearly as possible with the date previously fixed upon, was the biggest and most important function of its kind that Wortheton had ever seen. The young bride alone showed no interest in the proceedings, and wore her white satin and orange wreath with a look of weary protest in her pretty eyes, and an air of shrinking timidity which Mr Morgan considered very beautiful. Bobby's disgust at the whole affair was openly manifest. It would have been more seemly, he told her with scorn, had she married the curate. "There's no accounting for tastes," he said, with an odd lack of sympathy in his manner. "Morgan is a refined edition of Uncle William. When you are indulging in your hot water kidney cures and boiled mutton and respectability, don't forget that you asked for these blessings." "Oh, Bobby!" she protested. "Well, I told you not to give in. You should have taken a firm stand." "When you have lived at home a little while you will discover how simple that advice is to follow," she said, and left him to digest this remark at his leisure. She felt too flattened to argue with him. But on the day of the actual ceremony Bobby proved helpful and encouraging. He hovered about her watchfully, and was always at hand to fend off the bores, as he expressed it. "It might be worse, old girl," he said. "When you are fed up with things, send for me, and we'll manage some sort of a stunt together." There was no pretence between him and Prudence that the latter's marriage was a subject for rejoicing: they were too intimately acquainted with each other's thoughts to attempt a pose. "Lord! won't it be dull," he said, "without you." The Rev Ernest assisted in marrying his sister-in-law; and Matilda in a dove-coloured dress, a little regretful, and still puzzled by the turn of events, followed the service tearfully, and compared Mr Morgan's matured thick-set figure with Steele's well-set-up, muscular youthfulness, to the former's disadvantage, and tried to solace her misgivings with the reflection that doubtless everything was ordered for the best in this admirably regulated universe. Then the ring was placed on Prudence's finger; and the married couple repaired to the vestry, where Prudence signed the register which witnessed to the sacrifice of her girlhood and all her dreams of romance and freedom and the great flight into the unknown, which was to have revealed such wonderful possibilities of a golden life, complete and satisfying, and bright with gratified desires. The shackles were riveted and her wings clipped for all time. Marriage is one of two things, a realisation of life, or a compromise. Prudence had effected a compromise, with her eyes opened wide to what she had lost. "That's finished," Edward Morgan said in satisfied tones, and kissed his wife heartily. Every one showed an eagerness to kiss the bride. Even William raised her veil and laid a benedictory kiss upon her brow; but it was Bobby alone who felt her lips respond to his in warm affection; to the rest she remained a composed, unsmiling young woman, far too composed for a bride, Matilda thought. She never shed a tear. Matilda had shed several--emotional drops of pure happiness. She recalled her sentimental mood of tremulous joy with agreeable satisfaction. Love must express itself in such tender ways; it is never coldly and gravely self-contained, as in Prudence's case. "I hope you will be very happy, dear," Matilda said mournfully. "It is a blessed thing to be married." At which the bride's stony features relaxed into a quiet smile; she had often heard Ernest make use of the same expression, though never in relation to his connubial bliss. Old Mrs Morgan, and Mr and Mrs Henry attended the wedding; and Bobby and Mrs Henry exerted themselves to make the affair go off brightly. Mrs Henry was a sport, Bobby opined. He had an idea that under her auspices Prudence might have quite a good time, the nightly K.B. and the mother-in-law notwithstanding. Mrs Henry confessed to him her surprise at Prudence's sudden capitulation. "I never supposed she would give in," she said. "It wasn't her fault entirely," Bobby returned. "The family made it so beastly uncomfortable for her. Now you see us in bulk you ought to be equal to grasping the situation. You see us at our amiable best; we aren't often so agreeable. But even at our best we are a trifle heavy." "You are the lightest heavyweight I have ever encountered," she replied, laughing. "Oh! I don't count. I'm a sort of changeling." He brought his face suddenly close to hers. "I say," he said confidentially, "look after Prue a bit, and help her to a spree occasionally. It's been dull enough for her at home. She ought to have a fling now and again." Mrs Henry looked into his earnest eyes reflectively for a moment, and smiled. "That will be all right," she said. "I've been a rebel always. We'll contrive between us to make things hum. You shall come along some day and see." "I can't understand a man wishing to marry a girl who has shown that she isn't keen," he remarked. Mrs Henry betrayed amusement. "The average man's vanity prevents him from realising her lack of eagerness," she returned cynically. "He attributes her reluctance to shyness or ignorance or any other incomprehensible feminine quality, seldom to non-appreciation of himself. It is just as well, perhaps; it makes things pleasanter. But don't you think at this stage it would be advisable to admit the keenness?" "Well, perhaps," he allowed, and smiled in response to the laugh in her eyes. "Life is all a game of make-believe, after all. Look round, and behold! Every one affecting affability, and trying to appear as though this were a joyful occasion. There is as much real joy in a funeral. Uncle William is genuinely pleased anyhow. He has always feared that Prue would get Benjamin's share of the spoil. There is more than a touch of the miser in the Graynor blood." William meanwhile was conversing amiably with the bride, who, wearied with congratulations, had drawn a little apart from the press of guests, and stood in the opening of the French window where the sunlight fell on the sheen of white satin and brightened the gold of her hair. From where she stood she could survey the wallflowers growing in the borders near the path. The sight of them brought back vividly the memory of the night when they had suffered sadly from the tread of despoiling feet. She answered William absently. "I am proud of you," he said unexpectedly, and placed a heavy hand upon her arm. "The Graynor honour is safe in your keeping." She looked at him curiously. William was fond of talking of the Graynor honour as though it were a quality peculiarly and finely personal. She wondered what he had ever done to make it so manifestly his. He spoke as a man might speak, but never does, who spends his life in defence of this particular virtue. "I've renounced the Graynor," she replied with a little twist of her lips. "I'm not keeping anything appertaining to the name. As for honour, we guard it best, perhaps, when we are least concerned about it--it's a natural instinct, not an hereditary quality." "It has always been an attribute of our family," he observed pompously. "Like the chimneys," she remarked--"which spoil the landscape for other people." She felt irritated, irritated with his sententiousness, his inflated pride. She wished he would not thrust his unwanted company upon her. His condescending air of being kind and brotherly exasperated her. He had rushed her into this marriage, he and Agatha; and she was resentful and bitter on this account. It was a matter of immense regret to her at that moment that she had yielded to the force of circumstances and become the reluctant bride of a man who was altogether too good to be treated in this fashion. Their married life could never be entirely happy: he would demand of her what she could never give. The consciousness of his claim upon her galled already. When she saw him coming towards her, where she stood with William in the aperture of the window, advancing heavily with his smiling gaze upon her white-clad figure, she experienced a difficulty in meeting his eyes. Something akin to fear gripped her heart and held her silent, white-lipped and unsmiling, as he approached. She felt a wild desire to escape--out through the open window, beyond the walls into the road--to run away into the wide open country and hide. He little guessed at the storm that shook that quiet figure which remained so still and unresponsive when he halted beside it, with some jesting remark about her having slipped away from him. She gathered from his words that she had done an unprecedented thing in deserting his side. That was her place--at his side--always. He conducted her to the dining-room, where a huge wedding cake adorned the centre of the long table, a mountain of ornamental white sugar and silver decorations, which it was required she should cut, while her husband stood by, glad and proud, wishful to be helpful, enjoying these absurd customs, and listening to and responding to the toasts with heartfelt appreciation. Would all this insincere merrymaking never end? Old Mr Graynor put out a hand and felt for hers under the tablecloth, and pressed her fingers tenderly. His action, in its simple appeal, melted the ice that was closing about Prudence's heart. She turned to him swiftly, silently, and smiled into his understanding eyes with eyes as dim as his. The new antagonism broke down; he was again the one human being whom she greatly loved. And he was feeling every whit as lonely and sad at heart as herself. How stupid and unnecessary it all seemed, and yet how inevitable! There followed the change into her travelling-dress, and the bustle of departure amid hurried farewells; and then Prudence entered the motor-- the fine new car which Edward had bought for her, and in which they would make the journey to London, _en route_ for the Continent, where the honeymoon was to be spent. He had thought of everything that would conduce to her pleasure and comfort; and had sacrificed many an old-fashioned prejudice in planning a honeymoon that would appeal to her more youthful ideas of enjoyment. He did not care about travelling himself, and he hated foreign places and people. But he enjoyed giving her pleasure. When the car turned out of the gates and whirled down the white road, he took her in his arms and crushed her to him and rained ardent kisses on her unresponsive lips. "My darling!" he murmured. "My own darling! How good it is to be alone with you at last!" Thus Prudence left her girlhood behind her and started upon her married life. CHAPTER THIRTY TWO. One sorry satisfaction attends on circumstance which admit no prospect of great happiness or pleasurable development, disappointment and disillusion are alike avoided. During five dull years of married life Prudence passed from one stage to another of repugnance, remorse, and hostility, till she reached the final stage of apathetic resignation to the conditions of her life. The years, and Prudence's lack of any response, had considerably altered Edward Morgan's feelings towards her. The ardour of his passion had cooled, and a polite indifference mainly characterised his mental attitude in regard to his girl-wife. He remained proud of her, proud of her youth and of her beauty; but they were in no sense companions, or even faintly interested in each other's concerns. They went their separate ways within the first two years of the ill-assorted union. During the first year they quarrelled frequently. Mr Morgan, unaccustomed to opposition, found himself so constantly opposed to his young wife in small things that his temper suffered considerably. Their first serious difference was in the matter of open windows. Mr Morgan was unaccustomed to sleeping with his window open to the treacherous ills of the night air; Prudence was unaccustomed to sleep with them closed. She could not, she averred, sleep at all in an insufficiently ventilated room; she couldn't breathe without air. It transpired that Mr Morgan's respiratory organs worked better in a confined atmosphere. He ought to have belonged to the toad, or other hybernating species, Prudence reflected, but forbore to frame her reflections in speech. They spent some hours one cold night in the unprofitable exercise of jumping in and out of bed, alternately opening and shutting the window; until Prudence, recognising the absence of dignity in these proceedings, feigned slumber; and awoke in the morning with a headache, and the fixed resolve to have a separate sleeping apartment. Quarrels were frequent after that decision, which she adhered to firmly; until finally they arrived at that state of mutual indifference to which most unsuitably married people attain in time, when they are not sufficiently spirited to part, or are deterred by other considerations from taking this step. No children came to bless the union. The little hands which might have drawn them together, the little feet which alone could have bridged the distances, were destined never to gladden their hearts. It was a great grief to Prudence that she had no child. Had a little child been born to her it would have eased her heart hunger and filled her lonely life and satisfied her. It might possibly have reconciled her to her marriage. The mother instinct was strong in her. She desired a child with passionate intensity, and she was denied this greatest wish of her life. She resented this. It widened the gulf between herself and her husband, and fed her discontent from the perennial springs of regret which occasionally submerge the barren woman's soul in bitter waters. She wished to adopt a child; but Edward Morgan objected to the introduction into his quiet home of a child who was not his; and she let the matter drop. It would have caused dissension had she persisted. Edward was seconded in his objection by old Mrs Morgan, who continued to live with them, her promise of a separate establishment having ended in a temporary absence from Morningside, to which she returned on a visit to her daughter-in-law, which prolonged itself indefinitely until her presence in the home was tacitly accepted as a matter of course. Had she adopted a child, there would have been, Prudence foresaw, considerable disagreement in regard to its upbringing; she and the Morgans held such opposite views on subjects of hygiene and education and general discipline. Mrs Henry was Prudence's sole refuge from unutterable boredom. The worldly-minded little woman proved a staunch ally. But her influence did not tend towards reconciling Prudence to her lot. Mrs Henry cordially detested her husband's people, and enjoyed nothing better than inciting her sister-in-law to rebellion. "They would flatten you out, if you allowed them to," she declared, "until you felt like nothing in the world so much as a tired worm. They tried it on with me." Prudence fell into the habit of seeking Mrs Henry's society whenever life at home proved more than usually trying; and Mrs Henry, whose house enjoyed the reputation of being a sort of free hotel, encouraged her visits, recognising in her pretty sister-in-law's presence an additional attraction to her successful parties. The intimacy between the two women was a source of continual annoyance to Mrs Morgan; but Edward, who liked his brother's wife and trusted his own wife implicitly, saw no reason for objecting to the friendship. Possibly he was wise enough to recognise that any objection to this harmless pleasure would be futile. The affair of the windows had left a lasting impression on his mind. The beginning of the sixth year of her married life, when Prudence, at the age of twenty-five, outwardly very little altered since the day she married, had become resigned, if not reconciled, to a life in which she foresaw no possibility of change, witnessed the outbreak of war--the war which sprung so suddenly upon the world, and which was destined to change so many lives. Lives which were fitted into grooves so deeply that it seemed they had rusted there and could never be dislodged, were flung out of their ruts like lava spit from the mouth of a volcano by this greatest upheaval which the world had known. To Morgan Bros, as to Mr Graynor, the great disaster brought added prosperity. The works were engaged in the manufacture of khaki, which Bobby, afire with enthusiasm, and eager for release from a life that was irksome and uninspiring, donned speedily, to William's manifest satisfaction, and his grandfather's pride and grief. That was the beginning of the changes in Prudence's life. Apart from her anxiety on Bobby's account, and the natural gravity which the appalling immensity of the disaster occasioned, Prudence in the early days witnessed only the lighter side of war. Mrs Henry, destined before those tragic five years ran their terrible course to lose both her young sons, worked hard in the early days--indeed, she worked unflaggingly to the end, and bravely strove to hide her sorrow from the world--to give the men she knew, and many who were strangers to her until the wearing of the uniform made them participators in her hospitality, the best of times while they remained in England. Dances and entertainments of every description were organised on a princely scale for the benefit of the men who were out to defend the honour of the Empire. Old Mrs Morgan looked upon all this festivity disapprovingly, and remonstrated with her, urging the unseemliness of feting in such frivolous fashion men who were about to face death, and many of whom would be called inevitably before long to meet their God. But Mrs Henry treated these remonstrances with smiling indifference. "The heroes of Waterloo left a ball-room to defeat their enemies," she argued. "I expect the poor dears fought better and died happier by reason of those few bright hours. The boys like being amused, and they love flirting with the girls. Whatever does it matter? If one has to die one might as well have a good time first. It is the moment, after all, which counts. We have only the present to think for; there may be no to-morrow." Which view of things did not tend to soothe her mother-in-law, who had arrived at an age which avoids reflecting on the uncertainty of the future. "Rose has no spiritual outlook," she observed one evening, over the nightly glass of hot water which she sipped with an enjoyment a toper might evince while imbibing his grog. "Her attitude towards the Hereafter is frankly pagan. She will perhaps be brought some day through suffering to recognise the vanity of this world, and the importance of the Future Life. No one can escape responsibility for his acts." "Quite possibly Rose's record will be finer than the records of many people who lead seemingly exemplary lives," returned Prudence, to whom her mother-in-law's narrow views were particularly irritating. "`How strange it will be,' as Lewis Hind says, `if, when we awake from the dream of death, we find that we are judged only by the good we have done.' That would cause a considerable readjustment of the balance." "People who lead good lives do good by example," Mrs Morgan insisted; "those who spend their days in a feverish round of pleasure exert an evil influence." "The warm impulses which make for kindly human acts and brighten life for others have for me greater virtue than any prayer," came the quick retort, which scandalised Edward Morgan as well as his mother, and provoked him into joining in the discussion. "I don't like to hear any disparagement of prayer," he said quietly. "Your training in a pious home should have taught you at least respect for such things. I say nothing against pleasure, except where it clashes with duty. In the lives of upright people duty ranks above everything." "I've heard so much about the paramount importance of duty that I am a little weary of it. It seems good to turn instead to the more genial side of human nature. I think Rose's practical idea of a God-speed to the men by sending them off smiling is just splendid. They all kissed her in sheer gratitude when they left her house the other night." "I hope," Edward Morgan said stiffly, "that you don't allow them to take those liberties with you?" Prudence laughed suddenly. "I'd just love it, if they did," she said. "But I am too near their own age for them to attempt it. I've, promised to write to quite a number of them though. That includes parcels. They will all be glad of gifts from home. They are so young and jolly and full of life--just like Bobby." Her eyes were a little wistful. She stood up, a graceful girlish figure in blue velvet, with the light falling softly on the gold of her hair. Edward Morgan's gaze followed her movements, as she walked to the fireplace and stood leaning with her arm on the mantelshelf, looking down on the hearth. This free and frequent mixing with young life of the male sex disturbed him. He was jealous. It seemed to him that this new stream of sturdy youthful masculinity flowed between them, and set them still further apart. If his love for Prudence had diminished, his sense of proprietorship had not abated in the least. His pride of ownership was in arms against this incursion of new interests, new friendships, in which he had no share. "Rose is giving another dance to-morrow night, isn't she?" he said. "I think I'll go with you and look on for a bit." She lifted her head and glanced towards him, surprised, and not particularly overwhelmed with gladness at the prospect of his company. Her reception of his proposal was not exactly flattering. "You! You will be--bored. It's just a romp." "Henry will be there, I suppose?" "Oh, Henry! He likes that sort of thing. He romps too." "Henry was always a fool," Mrs Morgan put in acidly. "He would not have married Rose if he had possessed ordinary common sense. It will be as well for you to go, Edward; it may lend a little dignity to the occasion." Prudence laughed. "Oh! there's plenty of dignity--of a joyous nature," she said. "We don't rag." She crossed to old Mrs Morgan's side and laid a hand on the back of her chair, feeling remorseful, as she so often felt when she had been provoked into a show of ungraciousness. "You come too," she said softly,--"just for an hour, and look on. You'd love it; and they would love to see you there. It's you, and others like you, that every mother's son of them is out to fight for. Come and show them you appreciate their sacrifice." "I can better show my appreciation," Mrs Morgan answered, "by praying for them on my knees every night and morning of my life." She handed her empty tumbler to her daughter-in-law, and stood up. "It is time I went to bed," she said. "I find these talks very upsetting." "I'm sorry," Prudence said, and suffered the distant good-night kiss, which was the customary parting between them, regardless of any feeling of antagonism that lay behind the caress. CHAPTER THIRTY THREE. Having announced his intention of accompanying his wife to the dance which Mrs Henry was giving, Edward Morgan, despite a growing disinclination for spending an evening in this way, adhered to his purpose in much the same spirit in which a man will keep an appointment he has made with his dentist, not compulsorily, nor because he wants to, but because he has no definite reason to urge against keeping the engagement. It was a matter of indifference to Prudence whether he went or not. His presence would not add to the general hilarity; and he would probably want her to leave early; apart from that, it would be good for him to look on at the harmless fun with which youth took its fill of enjoyment in the presence of tragedy. There was something fine and inspiriting in the gay manner in which these young people enjoyed themselves with the dark cloud of war overshadowing their lives. Prudence's thoughts dwelt upon these things as she entered Mrs Henry's house with her husband, and left him at the foot of the stairs and went up to take off her wrap. They were everywhere, these khaki-clad figures; the sound of their voices, of their gay laughter, filled the rooms and passages. She talked to them, when she descended, and met their admiring glances with the quiet self-possession which characterised her always, talked easily and pleasantly with men whom she had never met before, to whom she had not been introduced. The uniform was an introduction; and she was there to help them to have a good time. Mrs Henry demanded that of her. But this lapse from the conventions struck Edward Morgan unfavourably. He perceived disrespect in the eager push of these unknown young men to secure a dance with his wife. And she gave her dances readily to any one who solicited the favour, a sweet and gracious-looking figure in a dress of white and gold, with a wreath of gold leaves in her hair. "Don't tell me your name," he heard one laughing voice exclaim, as its owner scribbled something on his card. "I've written it down as Queen of Hearts. That's what you are--to me for to-night. I want to think of you as just that." Mr Morgan, restraining a desire to interfere, turned abruptly and moved away. He did not at all approve of this sort of thing. The licence permitted by the times struck him as very objectionable. He took up a position near the door, where he could command a view of the dancing and be out of the way. He did not like the modern dances; they were awkward, and lacked the dignity of the dances familiar to his youth. "Come and open the ball with me," Mrs Henry said graciously, pausing beside him while the band played the opening bars of a two-step. "I'm sorry," he said stiffly; "but these rag-time airs are unfamiliar to me." "We can waltz to this," she said good-naturedly. "You waltz divinely. Come on, old dear!" She put her hand on his arm, and he found himself to his amazement dancing with his sister-in-law and enjoying it. He had not danced for years, not since the night when he danced in that same room with his fiancee, who, at the finish of the evening, had asked him to release her from her engagement. The memory of that humiliating experience was with him when, at the finish of the dance, he found his way back to the quiet corner near the doorway, from whence he watched Prudence come and go with her different partners, always animated and gay and tireless in her enjoyment. What, he wondered, would his life have been like, and hers, had he not turned a deaf ear to her request? He hated to see her enjoying herself thus independently of him; and he was powerless to interfere. She would have accused him justly of jealousy of her youth. He was jealous of her youth; he was still more jealous of the youth of the men who surrounded her. A late arrival, entering unobtrusively while the dancing was in full swing, seeing Mr Morgan standing disconsolately in the doorway, came to a halt beside him, and noting the heavy boredom of his look, was moved to address him, though he had no particular liking for the man he accosted, and was not sure how his advances would be received. "Something of a crush inside, sir," he observed. "There doesn't appear to be any room for me." Mr Morgan turned his head and surveyed the speaker. A light of surprised recognition flashed into his sombre eyes, and, after a slight show of hesitation, he held out his hand. "Steele!" he exclaimed. "The last man I expected to see. Where do you spring from?" Steele laughed quietly. "The war brought me back," he said. "I arrived two days ago, and of course came home. Mrs Henry met me yesterday outside the bank--and so I'm here. She told me she was short of men. The shortage isn't apparent." He stared into the densely packed room and smiled. "One can't imagine Mrs Henry short of anything. It looks ripping." "Beastly crush!" Edward Morgan muttered. "I hate this sort of thing." The smile in the young man's eyes deepened, but the rest of his face was grave. He was wondering why Mr Morgan put himself to the inconvenience of attending an entertainment against his inclination. "It doesn't look as though my chance of securing partners was rosy," he remarked. "I'm horribly late." He had not made any great effort to get there earlier. He had felt no particular interest in the dance to which he had been so urgently and unceremoniously bidden. But he deplored his lateness sincerely when, as the music slowed down before finally ceasing, he caught an amazingly unexpected vision of soft white and gold, with cheeks flushed like a wild rose, and with wide blue eyes opened to their fullest as they encountered his eager gaze. Prudence's eyes looked into his; and the lights and the music and the crowd melted magically away. She was back in the past, with the scent of _gloire de Dijon_ roses filling the air, and one voice only breaking across immeasurable distance, and falling on her ears like a note, lost and now recalled, the dear familiar sound of a voice to which her heart responded and which flooded the universe with the music of the spring. Whether Prudence broke away from her legitimate partner, or whether it was Steele who effected the change, she never afterwards remembered. She was conscious at the moment only of the eager welcome in his eyes, the surprised satisfaction of his voice speaking her name, the glad assurance with which he took her hand and placed it on his arm and steered her with dexterous swiftness through the crowd about the doorway, leaving Mr Morgan staring after them in stupefied amazement, and her late partner frowning with annoyance at the slight which bereft him of the most sought after partner of the evening. It all happened so quickly. Before she had recovered fully from the first surprise of the encounter, she found herself alone with Steele in a little room off the hall, that was all in confusion with an overflow of furniture from the rooms which had been cleared. He drew her inside and closed the door and stood looking down at her with a laugh in his grey eyes. CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR. "What luck!" he ejaculated. "Whoever would have thought of finding you here? This saves me a journey." "I thought you were abroad," she said, her face irradiating happiness. "It's just a dream, I can't believe you are real." He stooped over her, and laid his hands on her shoulders and held her, looking into her upturned face. "I thought myself at first _you_ were a dream," he said--"a vision which the longing in my heart had conjured up. And then your voice--the touch of your hand..." He bent lower and kissed her lips. "That is no dream," he murmured, and drew back, smiling at her. "How good it is to be with you again! All the way home on the ship I've had you in my thoughts. For that matter, I've had you in my thoughts right along ever since I went away. I came home, I think, just to see you." "I thought you had forgotten," she said, and turned aside her face to hide the regret in her eyes. "I waited to hear from you. I waited, and waited. And then--I thought surely you must have forgotten." "You might have known I couldn't forget," he said. "You told me not to write. I did write several times, but I didn't send the letters for fear they might get you into trouble at home. But all that doesn't count now. I've come back." There was a ring of triumph in his voice, a joyous inflection that seemed not only to invite, but to confidently expect, a sympathetic response. Prudence, who in the first flush of her gladness at being with him again, had forgotten everything else for the moment, gave herself up to the pleasure of this unexpected encounter: her marriage, everything outside the immediate present, every one save themselves, was blotted out like patterns on the sand which the incoming tide obliterates. She was as a person whose mind swings abruptly backward, with every event which has befallen in the interval wiped from her memory for the time. "You've come back!" she repeated, and smiled happily. "I'm so glad. Why did you go abroad?" "Because there didn't seem much chance of getting on here," he replied. "I couldn't afford to waste the years. You see, I wanted to make a home. Well, I've done that." "Oh! but that's splendid!" she cried, her eyes shining with excitement. "You've got on quickly." He laughed with her, and seated himself on the arm of her chair and laid a hand upon one of hers. "I've been lucky," he said. He lifted his hand to her neck and slipped his arm around her shoulders. It did not seem to occur to him that she might resent or feel surprised at this familiarity. They were in love with one another; he took that for granted; he was so certain about it that it did not appear necessary even to raise that point. "So now, you see," he added, "I can afford to marry." She looked at him with a quick darkening of her blue eyes, a sudden gravity chasing the smiling happiness from her face. She knew quite well whom he wished to marry. And she loved him. She had no doubt about that at all. She loved the feel of his nearness, the clasp of his arm about her: the touch of his lips had caused her a thrill of happiness, deeper and sweeter than any emotion she had felt or imagined. He wanted her; she wanted him; and she was not free to go to him. "Yes," she said, with, to him, unaccountable nervousness. "Yes. That's wonderful. It's great news. Tell me more--something about your life out there. Where was it you went? South Africa! Funny! I didn't even know where you were. You'll go back, I suppose, after the war?" "Yes, I'll go back. I don't think I'd care to live in England again. It's jolly out there--always summer. You'd like it. Say you'll like it--the jolly warmth and the brightness. The scenery knocks spots out of Wortheton. Do you remember that day in the woods, Prudence?--and the primroses we gathered and threw away? I've often thought of that day, when I've been lonely and wanting you, and comparing the blue of your eyes with the blue of the African sky. Dear, waking and dreaming, I have pictured you continually--leaning out of a window with the roses beneath the sill." He bent lower over her and clasped her closely, smiling at the reluctance, which he realised, and attributed to shyness; it was not because she did not love him that she shrank from his embrace. "Little girl," he said, "dear little girl, I didn't come over only to fight for the old country, I came for the purpose of fetching you and taking you out with me, if I am spared. You'll go with me, Prudence--as my wife? You know how I love you." "Oh!" she said. And suddenly she was clinging to him sobbing, with her face hidden against his sleeve. "I can't. I can't." He was surprised, but manifestly unconvinced. He supposed it was family opposition she feared, and he set himself to the business of sweeping this difficulty aside. "We're up against a lot, of course," he said, and smoothed her hair with his ungloved hand. "Who cares? If I go back to Africa I'm going to take you with me, if all the blooming family rolls up to prevent me. You trust me? You love me, Prudence dear?" Prudence lifted her head, and sat back, looking at him with drenched, dismayed blue eyes. The realisation that she must tell him of her marriage, that she ought to have told him sooner, came to her with startling abruptness. A distressful certainty that she was about to give pain to this man whom she loved better than any one in all the world gripped her tormentingly. She felt ashamed at the confession which she must make. Horror of her marriage seized her. She wanted to hide her eyes from the tenderness in his. "You don't understand," she said, and clenched her hands on the chair arm, her face strained and weary and her eyes full of a humiliated appeal. "It's not the family. Their attitude wouldn't matter. If I had only known! I thought you had forgotten, and I was so unhappy at home." Her head drooped suddenly; she hid her eyes from his gaze. "I can't tell you," she faltered. "I can't tell you." He seized her hands almost roughly and held them in a grip which hurt. His face, set and stern and paler than her own, seemed suddenly to have aged. His voice was hoarse. "You aren't going to tell me that you are married?" he said. "For God's sake, don't tell me that!" Prudence did not answer, did not raise her head; she dared not meet his eyes. He loosened her hands abruptly and stood up. "Some one's got before me," he said in odd constrained tones. "Is that it?" He turned deliberately away, and remained rigid and outwardly composed, staring at a hideous old print on the wall, without consciously seeing what he looked at. Prudence stood up also, and approached him, a white-robed quiet figure, in the stillness of the dimly-lit room. She put one hand to her throat and nervously fingered the pearls which Edward Morgan had given her. "Yes, I'm married," she said, "to Mr Morgan." "That man!" He turned on her angrily. "He's old enough to be your father." "My mother married a man much older than herself," she answered quietly. "They were very happy." He emitted a short hard laugh. "So that's the end of my hopes," he said. "Fool that I was! I thought you cared for me." She moved nearer to him, and something of her forced control left her in that moment of intense emotion. She laid a hand swiftly on his arm; and he read the despair and the longing in her saddened eyes. "You know I cared," she said. "You know I care still. I didn't understand. I thought you had forgotten. I was not sure how much you really meant. You went away; and life was very difficult. I had to get away from it all--I had to. You had gone. I believed that I should never see you again. If I'd known you remembered, I would have borne with things; I would have waited all my life, if necessary, until you came back to me. And now you've come--and it's too late. It's too late." He looked down at her long and steadily, with a hint of something in his eyes which she did not understand, which she instinctively feared. She put a hand before her eyes to shut out that look in his; and he seized the hand and dragged it aside and compelled her to meet his gaze. "Look here," he said quickly. "We've got to meet and talk this matter out. We can't talk here. They'll miss you presently, and search for you." They had missed her already. Mr Morgan was even then on his way to discover their retreat. He approached the door while Steele spoke. Steele continued speaking rapidly and with vehement insistence. "It's not going to end like this, you know. It can't. Now that I know you love me, I'm not reckoning anything else. Nothing else counts. I'll win you, if I have to break every law under the sun. You are mine. I'll have you, whoever stands in my way. Yours is no better than a forced marriage. You belong to me. You belonged to me first. I went abroad to make a home for you. I've done that. Now I've come back to fight for you--in a double sense. If I come through this war, you go back with me. I won't go without you. Think it over. I'll see you somehow, and learn your decision later. We'll bolt. Don't be frightened. It's a bit of a muddle, but it will all come right." At which moment the door opened, and Mr Morgan, ruffled and large and important, with an air of refusing to see what was altogether painfully obvious, advanced with an exaggeration of dignity and offered Prudence his arm. "Your partner is looking for you," he said. "You have overstayed the interval." Prudence placed her hand on his sleeve, and, with her face averted from Steele, walked silently out of the room. CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE. The Edward Morgans left the dance early, at whose suggestion Prudence never remembered. She was quite willing to go home. The misery of meeting again Philip Steele after the lapse of years, of discovering that she loved him--that he loved her, had remained true to her memory always, was more than she could bear. The image of Steele filled her mind and so dominated her thoughts that she could not fix her attention on anything else. She did not see him again. He left quietly soon after Edward Morgan led his wife away--disappearing as he had come, unobtrusively, without meeting his hostess, feeling unequal to facing her, and fearful of risking a further encounter with the girl whose memory he had cherished faithfully since the night he had stood under her window and caught a rose which she dropped down to him for a token at parting. The rose was in his possession still, and it was no more faded with the years, he reflected with bitterness, than his memory was in her fickle affections. He felt angry with her, and in his anger he judged her harshly. He had thought of her so much, had imagined her pleasure at their meeting, had taken for granted that she would wait for him, confident of his return and of his love. And he came back to find her married--gone from her old place at the window, the setting in which he had pictured her during those five lonely years of work. He had sworn to take her back with him, sworn to have her in defiance of every law. He recalled the boast with a smile of grim irony. There was a suggestion of melodrama about it which struck him now as absurd. What, he wondered, had she thought of the boast--of him? She had remained so still and silent, with her half-averted face and an air of drooping sadness in her quiet pose. She loved him. In spite of his bitter resentment at her marriage, at her want of faith, deep down in his inner consciousness there remained the calm assurance that her heart was his, would remain his, no matter what the years brought forth. The Morgans exchanged scarcely a word during the drive home. But when they reached the house Mr Morgan followed his wife into the drawing-room with the air of a man who intends having things out. It was not the time for explanations. He would have displayed greater wisdom had he deferred the discussion to a more fitting occasion. Prudence's nerves were all jarred. She had reached a stage of misery which rendered her desperate, and her husband's manner, conveying his sense of outraged pride and conscious authority, provoked her to a show of bitterness, which in calmer moments she deplored. "That's the finish of all this dancing and merrymaking," he said rudely, and poured himself out a glass of water, which old Mrs Morgan's thought for their comfort had provided in chill readiness on a side table. "I have always felt that this frivolity was out of keeping with the seriousness of the times. Perhaps you will give me some explanation of your extraordinary behaviour. What is Steele to you? I saw there was something between you when you met. It was not difficult to see. Your manner attracted general attention. I won't have my wife make herself conspicuous with any man. Steele!" He voiced the name with an oath, and banged down his glass so that the water spilled over on the polished table. Prudence watched him stonily, but without surprise, while he sopped up the water with his handkerchief. It was so characteristic of him to be careful in small matters even in a moment of great emotional strain. "I am tired," she said, making the only appeal that presented itself to her mind whereby to avoid the discussion. "I would rather not talk about these things now." "Tired!" he ejaculated angrily. "You won't have to complain of that in future. I will see that you take more rest. And you _must_ talk of these things. I have every right to insist upon an explanation." "Very well," she said, in quiet tones that should have warned him to desist. "But I think you are unwise. Mr Steele, when he met me to-night, had no idea that I was married; and, in the surprise of seeing him again, I suppose I betrayed my gladness. I did not mean to do that. It was all so unexpected." "But what is he to you?" Edward Morgan demanded. "Good God! can't you answer a plain question? What has there been between you and Steele in the past?" Prudence turned away from him to conceal the quivering of her lips, but her voice was steady when she answered despite the wild beating of her heart. "I loved him," she said simply, "and he loved me. There was that between us. But he went away, and I thought--he had forgotten." A long silence fell between them, a heavy silence. In all his life Edward Morgan had never received such a blow to his pride as this. She had dealt him a blow before when she sought to break their engagement; but that was trifling as compared with this--this brazen confession of love for another man. She had never loved him--her husband. She had been in love with another man all these years. "And yet you married me!" he said in a hard voice, snapping the silence abruptly. Had she not been goaded past endurance, Prudence, would not have said what she did say; she was ashamed of it later. But his manner and his clumsy insistence irritated her into retorting. "At least I tried to evade doing you that injury," she said. His face became purple with anger. Nothing she could have planned to say could have enraged him more than that cutting reminder at such a time of her reluctance to become his wife. "You did," he shouted, and smote the table beside which he stood so violently that the glasses on it jingled and the water was spilled again. This time he allowed it to remain; he appeared not to see it in his outburst of noisy passion. "But you weren't honest with me even then. You concealed this thing from me deliberately. You deceived me. I believed you were a simple-hearted girl whose love I could win with kindness. And I was kind to you. I have tried to be kind always-- though God knows! I received small return. Do you suppose I would have married you had you told me that you loved another man? I could feel some respect for you had you persisted in your refusal; I feel none for you now. It was an evil day for me when you married me." "It was the one big mistake of my life," she answered, and turned and faced him fully, with blue eyes aflame with anger, her head lifted proudly, almost aggressively, her face expressing cold dislike. She had never loved Edward Morgan, but she had not until then actively disliked him. His blustering anger, and his ill-considered taunts repelled her. "If you care to have a separation I am quite agreeable. I think we shall be happier apart." "I don't doubt you would like that," he said brutally. "To be free to gallivant in your frivolous way at my expense, and under the protection of my name! I prefer to exercise full control over my wife. You are my wife, remember. Nothing's going to alter that. And since you bear my name I will see that you respect it. There's going to be no scandal in this family. Separation! So that's what you are after! Good God! I would sooner see you lying dead in your coffin than that you should disgrace the name of Morgan by dragging it into the courts." She smiled coldly. His arrogant rhetoric recalled annoyingly William's pride in the Graynor Honour. They both seemed to fear these things were in jeopardy through her. The tissue-paper wrappings in which they preserved these qualities appeared to her as consistent as they were inadequate. There was a hollow ring in all this noisy talk. Respect was to her a personal attribute, which revealed itself daily in the commonplace round of homely things. She was not in the least concerned as to its chance of safe keeping in her possession. "I'll go to bed," she said. "It isn't very profitable to stay here wrangling at this hour of night. And to-morrow I will go home. I want to get away. I am weary of everything." "_This_ is your home," he said sharply. Prudence looked at him strangely. "This has never been home to me," she replied. "It is your home. It is more your mother's home than mine. I have not even authority to order the meals, or direct the household." "That's your own fault," he returned curtly. "You evinced no interest in these matters." "Largely, it is my own fault," she agreed, with surprising meekness. "I am responsible for the arrangement of my life, and I have done it very badly." She was perilously near to weeping. She felt that if she did not escape immediately she would break down in front of him, and that was the last thing she desired to happen. But he would not let her go at once. He detained her while he put further questions to her relative to Steele. Had she made any arrangement to meet him again? That was a suspicion which had jerked itself into his mind and would not be dislodged. He was jealous of the man. It was jealousy which had lashed him to his mood of unreasonable anger; it was jealousy which prompted him to ask this question of her, though in his heart he did not believe her capable of that. "What do you take me for?" she demanded fiercely, and shook off his detaining hand as if it stung her. "I am going away in order to avoid meeting him. Oh! let me go. I can't stand any more to-night. If you had been wise you would have kept silent and let me bury this thing in the most secret place of my heart. There are things one ought not to speak of." "I have a right to your full confidence," he said. "Ah!" she cried, and brushed a tear away. "If you only knew how much you lose in insisting on your rights!" With which she left him to his reflections, and went quickly from the room. CHAPTER THIRTY SIX. It was strange that in this bitter crisis of her life the old home, from which she had longed so impatiently to escape in the days of her impulsive girlhood, should seem to Prudence a refuge from the distresses which now overwhelmed her. She wanted to return to her childhood's home, to her father, to the bedroom with its window facing south and the roses lifting their heads to the sunlight below the sill. These familiar pleasant things in their quiet beauty appealed to her irresistibly. There was a suggestion of peace in the homely picture, of escape from misunderstanding and worry and the near danger of a presence which she feared to face. Edward Morgan raised no objection to her going. Relations between himself and his wife were so strained since his unusual outburst of passion that he was relieved to be spared the awkwardness of daily intercourse for a time. A brief separation might more readily effect a reconciliation between them than the present hostile conditions of life together promised. His attitude of cold courtesy towards her, her silent aloofness, threatened to widen the distances irrevocably; and Mr Morgan had no desire for an open breach. It was his intention to patch up the quarrel. Prudence had not arrived at this stage. Her thought was solely for the present. She realised the urgent need to get away, to escape from Morningside, and from her husband and this life which had grown so painful to her. The return to her old home stuck in her memory by reason of the sense of change here as elsewhere. The influence of the times had its grip on Wortheton, on Court Heatherleigh and its inmates. William, whose manner was oddly unwelcoming towards his sister, was much occupied at the works, and troubled with labour discontent, and the threatened invasion of the Trades Union. Some of his workpeople had struck for increased wages. The increase had been granted after considerable delay; but the strikers had been compelled to apologise before they were allowed to resume their places. That was the beginning of the end of William's autocracy. Higher wages were given elsewhere, and the workpeople spoke sullenly among themselves of going in quest of better pay and fairer treatment. The Wortheton factories were fated to come into line with the rest. At Court Heatherleigh the family had decreased in numbers, the younger Miss Graynor being absent on war work. And Agatha had developed the knitting habit, and was never to be seen without a ball of wool and needles in her hands. Even during meals she occupied herself with knitting between the courses. The irreproachable butler was somewhere in France behind the lines, and his place had not been filled; the eminently respectable, severe-looking parlourmaid carried on unaided for the present. Eventually the war engulfed her also; and she drifted from Wortheton to a munition factory with the settled purpose of bringing the war to a close. Prudence observed these changes with wonderment. Somehow she had not supposed that a war even could alter the course of life in Wortheton-- that lichenous spot, which seemed to have detached itself from the general progress and fallen into contented slumber for all time. But the booming of the guns had effectually disturbed its repose. The booming of those guns in France penetrated everywhere and found their echo in every heart. Old Mr Graynor alone stood apart from these things. He was too old and feeble to feel a great interest in anything beyond the personal aspect of the great upheaval. He was concerned at his daughters leaving home, and was anxious for Bobby's safety; but the war between the nations, which he was fated never to see ended, was too amazing and too vast to hold his attention. The discussions in the home circle provided all the information he gleaned of the progress of events. He was glad of Prudence's company. She, as well as himself, stood outside the general activity, and conveyed by her presence something of the atmosphere of the past. He accepted her reappearance in the home without question. He was growing forgetful and, save when Edward Morgan's name was mentioned, did not appear to remember his existence. The changes which had taken the others away had brought Prudence home; that was how he saw things; and he liked to have her there. "I'm getting old, Prue," he told her. "I've taken to falling asleep in my chair, and my memory plays me tricks. It is good to have you back. They are all so busy; the old man gets overlooked and forgotten. You'll stay with me?" "Yes," Prudence answered, responding to the wistful tone in his shaky voice; "as long as you want me." He was the only person in all the world, she reflected, who really had need of her. His dependence on her comforted her greatly. They were both of them lonely souls, whom the rush of events left stranded beyond reach of the changing tides. It was early spring, and the depression of those first months of war brooded like a dark cloud over everything. The garden, which in former years had blazed with bloom, seemed to have taken on an air of mourning with the rest. Only a solitary bulb here and there, left in the soil from a past season, lifted its defiant head among the empty borders. The Court was short-handed; and Agatha had deemed it unfitting to waste time and money over the planting of unnecessary flowers. But below Prudence's window the _gloire de Dijon_ roses were opening slowly, bringing their golden promise of warmer days to come. In the evenings, when her father had retired early as his custom was of late, Prudence would stand at her old place and lean upon the sill and look out over the shadowy stillness upon the white riband of road beyond the walls. And her thoughts would travel back to the days when she had leaned there as a girl and watched a man go striding down the hill, whistling as he walked. She had dreamed of love in those days, and of romance: but these things too had passed her by and gone down the road of life, following the man's destiny out of her sight. When one has voluntarily accepted the lesser gift it is vain to hunger after what might have been. There are two philosophies in life, and they both lead to definite points, and each has its followers: the one is to accept one's lot, whatever it may be, and bear it courageously; the other is to cast off responsibility and take what offers agreeably as the opportunity presents itself. The individual can resolve for himself alone which is the better course. Temptation assails people differently. The prudent nature is not necessarily always the higher; but discretion is a wise virtue, and restraint is a proof of strength. Not until the night of her unexpected meeting with Steele had Prudence's fortitude been really tried. She had felt it to be unequal to battle, and had not stayed to test its strength. Safety for her lay in flight. Yet had she paused to reflect she might have realised that by her flight she betrayed her weakness to the man who had avowed in passionate terms his determination to meet and have speech with her again. Prudence had sought only to avoid a further meeting; but while she stood at her window a few nights after her return to Court Heatherleigh a sudden conviction seized her that Steele would make inquiries, would discover her movements, might even follow her. He had been in earnest when he had said: "We've got to meet and talk this matter out... It's not going to end like this. Now that I know you love me nothing else counts." Nothing else counts! ... So many things counted; so many conflicting interests stood between her and this reckless reasoning. It was not in his right, nor in hers, to set aside every consideration that baulked his desire. Prudence rested her elbows on the sill and sunk her chin in her hands and remained still, lost in thought. It was late. The big clock in the hall had chimed the hour of midnight; but still she lingered there-- lingered in the windy moonlight, which the dark clouds, hurrying athwart the sky, intermittently obscured. A fever of pain and unrest fired her blood, and sent the warm colour to her cheeks where it burned, two brilliant spots of crimson, that defied the cooling breath of the wind. A sense of something impending held her breathless. All that day she had felt an influence at work, an intangible something which oppressed and oddly disquieted her; the prescience of some unexpected event armed her against surprise. She stood at the window as one who watches and waits for the event to befall. She did not know what she expected, what she waited for in the silent room, that room in which she had lived through so many emotions, none more disturbing than those which swayed her now. She felt that something was about to happen. The suggestion of a presence near her was so real that she could not rest. She had no thought of going to bed. Something in the night called to her imperatively and kept her at her post. Suddenly while she leaned there her attention was caught by a sound below her window, a sound which brought with it a rush of memories which were a part of the past. Some one moved swiftly out from the shadows of the bushes and stood under her window and called to her softly by name. The quiet authority of that voice set her pulses beating rapidly, till the thudding of her heart sounded loudly in her ears. For a long moment she remained motionless, looking down through the shadowy moonlight upon a man's upturned face, a strong determined face with purposeful eyes raised to meet her shrinking gaze. Prudence half drew back, and put a hand over her breast with a quick involuntary movement; at the same moment the man below drew himself a foot or so nearer to her by grasping at the trellis against which the rose-bush was trained. "If you don't come down, I will come up to you," Steele said. "Oh! wait," she cried. She remained for awhile irresolute; then, as if in answer to an impatient movement from below, she said quietly: "Please be cautious. I will join you in a minute." And the next moment the light of the moon was eclipsed and the stars paled to insignificance--or so it seemed to Steele--as her form vanished from above him, and he was alone in the windy darkness with the clouds trailing drearily across the face of the moon. CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN. Prudence slipped a cloak over her evening dress and softly unlatched her bedroom door and stepped out on to the landing. There was no show of hesitation in her movements now. She was doing an unwise thing; she realised that perfectly; but something outside her volition urged her on to the course she was taking. She wanted to see Philip Steele, to talk with him once more--for the last time--talk with him uninterruptedly with no fear of being seen or overheard, with the certainty of being alone together, unsuspected, and with no explanations to be demanded by any one concerning their doings. The freedom of the thought was like a breath of fresh air in her lungs. But there was need for caution too. She stood still for a second or so on the landing, and listened with rapidly beating heart to the sounds which disturbed the silence of the sleeping house. Every one had gone to bed hours before; the lights were all extinguished; but the moonlight shone at intervals brightly through the big windows, and illumined the staircase and the hall below. Prudence grasped the bannister and began the descent. Carefully though she trod, the stairs creaked ominously as they never seemed to creak in the daylight. And the great clock in the hall swung its heavy pendulum noisily backwards and forwards. The familiar sound struck unfamiliarly on her excited fancy; it seemed to her that the old clock was ticking a warning, that it sought to rouse the house. Stealthily she crossed the hall towards the drawing-room; the windows were easier to unfasten than the barred and chained front door. To reach the drawing-room it was necessary to pass the library; in doing so a sound from within the room caught her attention, causing her heart to momentarily stop its beating. Some one was moving about, treading with heavy cautiousness over the carpet. She took a hurried run, heedless, in her fear of being discovered there, whether her footsteps were audible or not, and gaining the drawing-room door, slipped inside the room, and remained still, watchful and alert. The figure of a man emerged from the library, hesitated, and then approached the hat-rack in the hall. Prudence watched the man while he divested himself of his cap and overcoat and shoes before going quietly upstairs, shoes in hand, to his room. She stood amazed and surveyed these doings through the narrow opening of the partially closed door. Intuition assured her that these mysterious proceedings were not connected in any way with herself. Whatever it was that had taken William abroad it could have no association with her concerns. William had shown as furtively anxious a desire to avoid detection as she had; he wore the air of a person engaged in nefarious practices. The hall was not sufficiently light to reveal the expression of worried annoyance on his face; she recognised only the familiar outline of his form, and noted the secretiveness of his movements, and the care with which, in his stockinged feet, he had crept upstairs. Abruptly some words of Bobby's, uttered half jestingly years ago, recurred in an illuminating flash across her mind: "You are taking it too much for granted that the old boy's life is lived on the surface." Perhaps after all William had a life apart from the factory and the home, a life which he did not choose to reveal before the world. It was strangely disconcerting to discover a person whom one had believed hitherto to have walked always circumspectly through life, stealing furtively about the house in the middle of the night like a burglar in search of plunder. In the surprise of this amazing development in the night's proceedings, Prudence lost sight of her own fears and became wonderfully clear-headed and reliant. The responsibility of her present action weighed less heavily with her. She unfastened the window quietly, and without haste, and stepped out on to the gravelled path. Immediately Steele was beside her. It seemed to her little short of miraculous that William should be abroad and have failed to discover his presence. Steele, as a matter of fact, was alive to William's nocturnal prowling, and had concealed himself from sight among the shrubs. He came forward now quickly and with caution, took Prudence's hand, and led her from the garden. "Some one's about," he said. "William," she whispered back. "We only missed coming face to face in the hall by the fraction of a second." "I know." He gripped her hand tightly. "When I saw him pass round the corner of the house I made sure you'd run into him. What's he doing, anyway?" "I don't know. He was so anxious to avoid detection that it was easy to evade him." She laughed nervously. "I wonder what would have happened if I had run into him?" They passed through the gate side by side and came out on the moonlit road. Steele drew his companion into the shadow of the wall and caught her in his arms and kissed her. "Oh, Prudence!" he said, and held her, scrutinising the shadowy outline of her face, with the dear eyes, misty and starlike, gazing sadly back into his. She made a feeble effort to extricate herself from his embrace. "I don't think we ought," she said, and found herself suddenly crying, with her face pressed against his shoulder. It was altogether wrong. She knew quite well that she ought not to be there alone with him in the night. She had not allowed for his following her to Wortheton. The shock of seeing him again unnerved her. Steele soothed her and kissed the tears away. Then he started to walk again, keeping his arm about her. "We can't talk here," he said. "I've a lot of things to say to you. We'll cut across the fields and sit on that jolly stile where I discovered you picking primroses--was it really seven years ago? Seven years! My God! Prudence, what a fool I was to believe you would wait for me till that time." "I didn't know..." she faltered. "Never mind," he said quickly. "We won't speak of it. We'll wipe the years out. You are here--with me. The other is just a dream. It was yesterday that we picked primroses together, and spent the morning mooning in the woods. You were so sweet, dear. I just loved you. I so longed to kiss you that day. What a fool I was not to kiss you. I remember so well how the sunlight played on your hair. I watched it, and loved it--and you. Oh, my dear!" "Don't!" Prudence urged him. "I can't bear it. And I ought not to listen. You mustn't say these things to me--now." "But I must," he said. And added: "Now! Why not now? It's my time. As though it matters--anything. I'm not going to consider anything but just my need of you. You are mine, by every right under the sun." "No," she protested. "No! I can't let you say these things. I ought not to have come out with you. Don't make me regret coming." He was silent for a while after that; and she heard him breathing in hard deep breaths as he walked close by her side. Many emotions stirred him; passion and desire and resentment strove furiously within him, making speech difficult, and defeating his effort after control. The sense of loss, of defeat, weighed bitterly with him. He wanted her so, wanted her with an intensity that resembled hunger--wanted her urgently, savagely, with a crude, primitive, human want that was for setting aside every consideration, every civilised law and code; that was for taking the law into his own hands and making her see eye to eye with himself. And she would not see things as he wished her to. She was difficult. She was altogether too civilised. He turned to her abruptly, and snapped the silence sharply by hurling an unexpected question at her. "Why did you come out?" he asked. "What did you expect?" "I don't know," she answered, and drew a little away from him. "I think I wanted to talk to you just once more before--we parted." "Oh!" he said, with a short laugh. "So that was it? If that was your only reason you shouldn't have come. I'm not intending to part--like that anyhow. I wanted to talk to you on quite another subject. You were stolen from me. I'm for stealing you back. I haven't any scruples--of that kind Mine was the greater injury. I love you. You love me. You can't deny that, Prudence." Prudence made no attempt to deny it. She faced him fully in the moonlight with her steady eyes lifted to his in saddened appeal. He realised the quiet strength of her nature with a sense of impotent anger in feeling it opposed to his will. There was going to be a fight in any case and the issue appeared uncertain. "Whether we love one another or not," she said, "we have to bear in mind that I am married." She was indeed more conscious of the fact at the moment than of any other. She felt the necessity of impressing it upon him. But Steele needed no reminding. The rage in his heart leapt up at her words like a flame fed by some combustible fluid. He seized her roughly in his arms and rained hot kisses upon her mouth. "But you don't love him?" he breathed. "You don't love him?" He stared at her as she pushed his face back, and laughed harshly. "God! Do you suppose I'm not bearing it in mind?--every moment since I learned the truth from your lips? It's like murder in my heart, that knowledge. I'd like to kill him. I could have struck him in the face that night when he came in and found us together, and took you away. And he knows... He knows that only the legal tie binds you to him. I saw the knowledge in his eyes. He doesn't trust you. If he knew that you were out here, walking with me in the night, he would believe the worst. He's that type of man. Nothing you could say would convince him otherwise. They are made like that, those narrow, strictly conventional people. They daren't trust their own emotions; they never allow them full play. And they don't trust any one else. They judge others by their own feeble standards. They aren't human--it's sawdust, not blood, in their veins." He helped her over the first stile and led her along the field-path and so on to the next gate. Prudence was rather silent and worried and somewhat dispirited. She left him to do the talking, and walked on like a woman only half awake, to whom everything appears hazy and a little unreal. And he unfolded his views to her on life, and love, and happiness, and the right of the individual to independent action. "It's not as though this business of marriage were a natural institution," he argued; "it's purely artificial. When a man and a woman are honestly in love they don't bother with that aspect of the relationship. They just want one another. Marriage is merely a result attendant on the natural impulse. I came home with the idea of marrying you, and I find you no longer free. That fact maddens me; its fills me with despair. But it doesn't alter the initial fact that I want you. That desire is no less keen than before I heard of your marriage. Prudence, dearest, be true to yourself. You love me. Come with me-- now. I came down here for that purpose--to take you away with me." He pulled her down on the stile beside him and put his arm about her and held her close to him. She did not repulse him. She felt strangely little angry at what he said. She was too greatly moved to experience the lesser emotions which a sense of outraged virtue might have called forth at another time. She had hurt this man badly; and she felt too sorry for him to resent in indignant terms the proposal which he made. He wanted her, wanted her urgently; and they loved one another. Why had she allowed the years to separate them so irrevocably? "You don't answer," he said, and brought his face nearer to here and looked her in the eyes. "You don't answer me." His voice shook with hardly repressed passion; his whole form shook. She felt the shoulder which pressed against her shoulder tremble, and the hand which gripped hers trembled also, and was burning to the touch. "You don't answer," he said again hoarsely. "My dear," she said, "what is there to say?" And broke down again and wept. CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT. There was a great deal which she might have said, Steele thought, as he held her sobbing in his arms, and tried to convince her that happiness for both of them lay in following the path along which he sought to direct her steps. He wanted her so; and they loved one another--two all-sufficient reasons, as he saw matters, for throwing such deterrent considerations as honour and duty to the winds. They owed a duty to themselves as well as to others, he argued; and a loveless marriage was dishonouring. She ought not to submit to the spoiling of both their lives from motives of no higher consideration than fear of the world's censure. "What does it matter to us what any one thinks?" he asked. "This ruling of one's life by the world's opinion is ridiculous. Here we are, you and I, in love with one another, wanting one another. Life is very sweet and precious while one loves. Prudence, but it isn't worth more than a sigh when one is denied love. I want to make you mine before I leave for France. We'll have our time together. Then, when I come back, I will take you with me--to a new country where no one knows anything about us. Dear, we shall be so happy." "You may never come back," Prudence said, and sat up and started to dry her tears. "What would become of me then?" "I may not, of course." He stared at her with his hot eager eyes, careless in that hour of passionate longing about the consequences involved. He knew that for himself there was only one certainty--the present. He lived in the present; it was useless to look ahead. "Aren't you ready to risk something? I'd rather leave you my widow than not have you," he declared. "I can't go away feeling that you belong to some one else. Prudence, I'm mad with jealousy. I'm jealous of that man's claim on you. I'm beside myself. I don't know what I'm saying. I know only one thing--I want you. I'm just hungry for you. I can't rest." "Oh, hush!" she said. "But you've got to hear," he insisted. "You've got to know. I've been like this since you told me your news. I lie awake at nights, thinking, thinking, till it seems as if I were going mad. I think of you always. I'm wanting you always. For years I've thought of you as mine. I meant from the beginning to win you. Life's just a nightmare for me while I know you belong to some one else. You made a mistake. Set it right, dear--as far as you can. Give yourself to me. Say you will--now." He seized her again in his arms and held her and set his lips to hers. Frightened as well as distressed. Prudence struggled against him, pushed his face gently away. She felt the quick beating of his heart against her breast while he held her close, and she knew that her own heart was beating as rapidly; the pulses in her throat were going like tiny hammers. The ardour of his kisses excited her. All the natural impulses of youth, repressed so long, leapt up to answer his passion and flamed into warmth beneath his touch. He stirred her, tempted her. She had never experienced passionate love before, but she knew it now; it burned her lips and set her blood on fire. She was a woman alight with love for the first time in her life. Her eyes glowed softly, and behind their glow, dried up as it were by that flame of love, the mist of sorrow's unshed rain welled slowly and dimmed her sight of him. "You can't refuse me," he pleaded. "My darling, you can't send me out of your life." "Oh, don't!" she sobbed, and clung to the gate, half swooning, and rested her face on her arm. "You've no right to say these things to me; it's wicked of me to listen. I ought not to have come out. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say to you. It's all so difficult." He refused to admit the difficulty. "If you had an ounce of pluck," he said--"if you cared, you would know what to do all right. I am asking you for one thing; it's yes or no. Prudence." He gripped her shoulder and pulled her forcibly round till she faced him again. "Look here!" he cried hoarsely. "Listen to me for a moment. This may be the last time I shall see you--it will be the last time, if you refuse what I ask. If I didn't know that you love me I wouldn't worry you. I shouldn't want you if you did not want me. But you do. I don't care a damn about your marriage. If you'll trust me, and come to me, you shall never regret it. Oh! my little love!--my sweetheart! Don't refuse what I ask. It means everything to me. Say you will, dear?" "Oh, don't!" she entreated him again, and shrank back from the passion in his eyes. But his arms were about her; they held her tightly. "Are you afraid?" he said, his face grim and set. "I'm dangerous to you to-night, and you know it. Here we are alone in the night together. What is to prevent me from taking what I want? Why should I consider your scruples--or anything? I am going out to that inferno... Why shouldn't I seize my good hour before I go? What's to prevent me? What's to prevent me from kissing you now?" He leaned over her and rained kisses on her mouth, kisses that seared her lips, that almost stifled her. He was giving rein to his passion. A quality both wild and lawless sprang to life in him and overrode his better nature for the time. Disappointed hope and baulked desire drove him to a frenzy of excess which in saner moments he would not have believed himself capable of. He would have been horrified at this complete loss of control had he been able to appreciate it. But a spirit of recklessness held him before which his commonsense melted like snow consumed by the fires which passion lit in his breast. It occurred to him while he held her, crushed and trembling, in his arms and kissed her madly, that he was a fool to attempt to reason with her. A girl nursed in the washy traditions of her class, as Prudence was, should not be hampered with the responsibility of choice: he ought to decide for her--ought to take full responsibility for the step he was urging her to accede to. It wasn't fair to burden her conscience with a sense of willing concession. That was where he had made the mistake. He was asking too much of her. "Little love," he whispered against her lips, "don't be afraid. There is nothing to fear in love; and I love you better than life. You are going with me to-night. No, don't speak! You are nervous and unstrung. You don't know what you want. Leave this to me. I've got a car waiting in the village. We'll travel up to town in it; and later, when I am drafted across the water, you'll go to France as my wife, and live there until I can be with you again." He drew back his head to look at her, and his face softened to a wonderful tenderness; there were tears in his eyes. After a barely perceptible pause, he resumed more quietly: "Prudence, I've thought of this hour day and night since I saw your dear face light up at sight of me, and your dear eyes smile their welcome into mine. You are mine by every natural law; and I'm going to take you. Scruples! We have no use for such folly. They didn't scruple to marry you to a man too old for you. He had no scruple against taking you without love. They've themselves to thank for this. What does it matter? It's our own lives we have to think for. Leave everything to me. Don't worry. I'll manage things. I am taking you away with me to-night... Life's going to be just splendid, dear. We'll be together. Oh, Prudence, it will be great--wonderful! My dear! ... Oh, my dearest!" Very tenderly he kissed her lips again. Prudence suddenly disengaged herself from his arms and slipped to her feet and stood facing him, the moonlight splashed on her hair and face, and on the slender bare arms, which she lifted on an impulse, bringing the hands to rest on his shoulders. "We can't, dear," she said. "We can't. It isn't that I'm afraid; it isn't that I don't love you--better than any one in all the world. It's just because I love you so well, I think, that I can't have the beauty of it spoiled. That sort of thing brings regret--always." "You don't dare," he said in sullen tones. "You are thinking of what people will say." "No; it isn't that. I don't wish to pose as good--I've never been good. But clean and decent living appeals to me. I'm cold, perhaps--even a little hard; it isn't so difficult for me to practise restraint--when I try--hard. I'm loving you with all my heart, dear; but I don't want to do what you ask. If I agreed, I should hate myself, my life, everything, when the glamour faded and I had time to reflect. I know myself so well. I would rather go on with my dull loveless life than go away with you and lose my self-respect." "You don't love me," he said. "You couldn't talk like that if you were in love. It's unnatural. I'd risk damnation for you." She leaned a little nearer to him, and a new quality came into her voice; her face was solemn and tender. "There's something else I'm thinking of besides these things," she said. "I can't bear that you should go to face death--to meet death, perhaps--with this sin upon your soul. I don't like to think that men can talk so lightly of sinning in such grave and terrible times." He made an impatient sound that was like a cry of protest, and moved restlessly under her hands. "Oh, hang it all! One doesn't want to be thinking all the time about that." "When death stands so close as it stands to nearly every one of us these days; when one reads of nothing else," she added quietly; "it makes one think. It alters all one's view of life. I used to feel that my own life mattered tremendously; that I had to make the most of every opportunity which might add to my enjoyment. Now I see things differently. I don't hold a lesser belief in the importance of life, quite the reverse; but the personal point of view is altogether unimportant. Satisfaction comes from living worthily. I have never done that. I have been always selfish and inconsiderate for others. I believe that to-night you have taught me self-knowledge. Teach me also to be strong." Her voice fell into silence, but she did not remove her hands from his shoulders. And he remained for a few seconds motionless, looking at her without speaking. The appeal in her eyes and in her voice was irresistible; it was as an appeal to his manhood from some one pathetically weak and conscious of her weakness; and the better side of his nature responded to it. But it cost him more than she could ever know to relinquish his dreams at her bidding. He put his hands over hers and stood up. And so they remained for a while close together, looking into each other's eyes. "You are everything to me," he said at last, breaking the silence unexpectedly. "I've thought of you so much--thought of you always as belonging to me. It doesn't seem possible to rid myself of that idea. I've no interest in life outside it." "I know," she said. "I know. It is not going to be easy for me either." They came upon another pause. "At least you have a cause to fight for," she said presently. He shook his head. "All that doesn't count, somehow. But I shall be glad to go now. I shall never come back. Prudence." "Ah, don't!" she cried, with a sob in her voice. "Don't say that. I shall pray for your safety every day of my life." "Pray rather for a swift and merciful bullet," he said. Then, seeing the pain in her eyes, he took her face between his hands and kissed it. "Don't cry, little love. There are worse things to face than the long sleep. Alive or dead, you will live in my heart always. Keep my place green in your memory, dear." She dropped her face on his breast and sobbed her heart out in the shelter of his arms. CHAPTER THIRTY NINE. More credit is given to heroism which arises from physical courage than is accorded usually to moral bravery. Yet the standard of physical courage, however loudly acclaimed, ranks no higher. To win a victory over one's self demands greater strength of purpose than is required for the defeat of an ordinary foe. To obey a sense of right from motives other than discretion necessitates courage of a superior order. And it is through this courage, this quiet self-denial, that the world is kept a little better, a little sweeter, than would be possible if each individual set-out with the poor determination to gratify his every desire. Prudence had won a victory; but she did not feel triumphant; there was no conscious elation in her heart. If the night air struck fresher and purer by reason of this restraint, it also struck very chill. Its cold breath enveloped her. She was weary and sad at heart. Steele, too, was silent and dispirited. He parted from her in the road outside the gate, parted in almost apathetic calmness, and turned and walked quickly away down the hill. He did not once look back to where Prudence waited at the gate and watched him with sad eyes, tearless now, until the night enfolded him and hid him from her view. Then she let herself into the house and went wearily up to bed. That was the beginning and the end of her romance. All the fine thinking in the world could not reduce the feeling of irreparable loss which she experienced in the knowledge that he had passed out of her life for ever. She had sent him away; and all her happiness went with him, all her love. If for a moment she regretted the triumph of virtue, it was but a transitory regret; but she did regret, passionately, that life had come between her and the realisation of love. She believed that she could never feel happy any more. She also believed that she could not return to her husband. The thought of living again beneath his roof was hateful to her. Then merciful sleep overtook her, and the darkness closed down upon the misery of her thoughts. The morning brought no relief. Heavy-eyed and languid, Prudence went downstairs, to find that she was late for prayers. She was aware of William's gaze, as she slipped quietly into the room and took her seat, fixed upon her with a curious, it seemed to her, even a suspicious scrutiny. He paused in the reading and waited with a sort of aggressive patience until she was seated. Then he continued in his sonorous voice reading the lesson for the day. Upon the finish of prayers breakfast followed, after which Mr Graynor repaired to the library with Prudence who since her return read the papers to him because of his failing sight. William prepared to start out on the day's business. From the library Prudence could hear him calling loudly for his boots, and demanding of the servant who brought them why they were not in their accustomed place. It transpired that he had omitted to put them outside his bedroom door on the previous night and thereby caused delay in the cleaning of them. He muttered something in response, and hastily proceeded to draw them on. The servant meanwhile went to the front door in answer to an imperative ring. Commotion followed upon the opening of the door. Mr Graynor looked round at these unexpected interruptions and signed to Prudence to cease reading. She sat with the newspaper open in her hands and listened to the sound of angry voices without. Some one had entered and was talking loudly and defiantly to William in the hall. William was doing his utmost to eject the intruder and to talk her down at the same time--two impossible feats. The noise of their voices raised in fierce altercation drew nearer; and, attracted by the disturbance, Agatha made her appearance from the morning-room and stood, pink and trembling with indignation, looking upon the scene in incredulous amazement. "What is that--creature doing here?" she asked of her brother. He seemed to find some difficulty in answering her, and, evading her eyes, glared furiously at the defiant young woman, who, holding a child by the hand, maintained her stand with an air of assurance which refused to be cowed by his lowering scowl. "You tell 'er what I want," she said. "I don't mind." "Go away," he shouted. "Do you hear? Go away!" "It isn't difficult to 'ear you," she retorted sharply. "I want a word with you, William Graynor; and I'm not going away until I've 'ad it." "Turn her out," Miss Agatha exclaimed, shocked and affronted. "How dare she speak to you like that?" "Why don't you tell 'er," the insolent voice insisted, "what I've come for, and why I speak as I do? Seems as if you was afraid of 'er." She looked round suddenly, and caught sight of Mr Graynor, standing with the library door open, surveying the scene. She shrank back, quailing before the cold anger of his look. But he had recognised her, and spoke now in a voice of sharp command. "Come in here, girl," he said; and to his son he added fiercely: "William, bring that woman inside, and shut the door." From force of habit, perhaps too because he recognised that there was no possible chance of evading explanations, William obeyed the order. He allowed Bessie Clapp to precede him, and following her into the room, shut the door sharply behind him, and stood with his back against it in an attitude of gloomy anger. Once he looked at Prudence, seated opposite their father with the newspaper in her lap, regarding the woman and child with pitiful understanding eyes. He would have liked to suggest the advisability of her retiring; but his natural effrontery had deserted him, and he remained silent. Bessie Clapp also looked at Prudence. The sight of the quiet figure, the light of friendly interest in the blue eyes, proved heartening: the hardness melted from her own face. Standing a few steps inside the door against which William leaned, superb in her magnificent beauty, with the child clinging nervously to her hand, she confronted Mr Graynor, who, reseating himself, remained staring at her fixedly across the writing-table upon which he rested his shaking hand. The stillness of their various poses, for with the closing of the door each had maintained a rigid immovability, was fraught with significance. There was no need for a verbal explanation of the presence of the woman with her child in that house. Mr Graynor knew, Prudence knew, as surely as William and the girl, what brought her there. Nevertheless Mr Graynor, leaning heavily upon the table, with his cold eyes upon the girl's frightened face, demanded the reason of her noisy intrusion. "I told her not to come," William interposed sullenly. "I dared her to come here annoying you." Mr Graynor silenced him with a gesture, never once removing his gaze from the nervous, but still defiant, face. His question had been addressed to the girl, and he waited for her to answer him. She drew the child closer to her, and looked into the cold unsympathetic face of her questioner, and answered with a sort of sulky shame: "I've brought William Graynor's son 'ome." William made a move, taking a quick step towards her as though he would have silenced her with force; but no one looked in his direction; and he shrank back to his former position by the door. "You make a serious charge," Mr Graynor said, speaking harshly. "It will go hard with you if you cannot prove your words." "I can prove them all right," she answered sulkily. "I do not believe you," Mr Graynor said. "This sort of thing has been tried often enough. It is an audacious lie. I say it is a lie. Give me your proof." Bessie Clapp smiled faintly. Her manner was growing more assured; the nervousness which the unexpected sight of him had caused her, was less apparent now. "You can't 'ave looked at the boy," she said, and bent down and removed the cap from the child's head and turned his face towards the man who questioned the truth of her statement. Mr Graynor had given only a cursory glance at the child; he looked now more closely, and, staring with dim eyes fierce with passionate anger into the small face, beheld as in the days of his own youth the features of his elder son faithfully reproduced. There could be no dispute as to the likeness. A sickening sense of the truth of the woman's claim, which before he had not so much doubted as refused to admit, held him dumb. He put his hand before his eyes to shut out the sight of the child's face; and the little fellow, thoroughly frightened now, began to whimper. His mother held him and hushed his cries. "You see," she said, watching Mr Graynor curiously, fascinated and somewhat awed by his evident emotion; "that's my proof. One 'as only to look at 'im to see who's 'is father." A groan escaped Mr Graynor's lips. He took his hand from before his eyes, and pushed aside some papers on the table, and rested his arms on it as before. "How dare you bring him here?" he asked in low shaking tones. "Why do you bring him--now--after all this time? You want money, I suppose?" Bessie Clapp turned a resentful gaze from him to William, who, furtively watching her, remained with his shoulders hunched dejectedly, scowling malevolently at her, and at the child whose claim upon him she sought to establish. "'E knows why I came," she said, indicating William with a brief nod. "I gave 'im 'is chance; but 'e wouldn't 'elp me. I asked 'im to take the child off my 'ands, and 'e refused. 'E thought the work'ouse good enough for 'is son. But the work'ouse don't 'elp these cases; and anyway I wouldn't care for 'im to go there. And I can't keep 'im no longer I'm going to be married. My man's joined up, and I'll draw the separation allowance. But 'e don't want _'is_ child." Again she gave a nod indicating William, and then brought her gaze back to Mr Graynor's face. The sight of the pained humiliation of his look caused a softening in her voice and manner. She had not wanted to distress him; she was not vindictive. She only required that the father of her child should make provision for it. He was wealthy enough to do so. "I am sorry to 'ave 'ad to come," she said. "I didn't mean no 'arm. If 'e 'adn't treated me mean, I wouldn't 'a come. But I've got a chance now to start fair. I want to place the child somewheres. Plenty would take 'im if I could get the money guaranteed. But _'e_," with another nod at William, "won't do nothing. That's why I came. I warned 'im all right." The red of William's face deepened to purple. He looked at the woman as if he would have killed her had he dared; but he did not move, did not utter a word even in his own defence. His animus against this girl, who had been his mistress, arose from the fact that she had broken with him. Had the initiative been his he might have acted differently. He hated her while he listened to her scornful denunciation of himself, and the sordid story of his meanness which she mercilessly unfolded. Not a word of what she uttered but had the ring of truth in it, and not a word in the miserable recital reflected any credit upon himself. He shifted his feet uneasily, and turned his furtive eyes from the spectacle of her standing there in her dark and tragic beauty, with the boy clinging timidly to her skirt, hiding his tear-stained face in her dress in fear of the old man who sat and glared at him and spoke to his mother in harsh angry tones. They frightened him, these strange people. He wanted to go away from the big house, and this fierce old man, and the red-faced man, whom he knew slightly but did not like. The red-faced man so often made his mother cry. But the mother took no heed of the small hands tugging at her dress; her thoughts were intent on other matters than the child's distress. Mr Graynor, his face transformed with anger, turned to his son, and, in a voice broken with emotion, with shame for that son's dishonourable conduct and most despicable meanness, bade him speak. "You stand there and say nothing to these charges," he cried. "Why don't you speak? Have you nothing to say in answer to what this woman alleges?" "What is there to say?" William returned. "No doubt the child is mine. But I don't flatter myself that I have been more favoured than others. She is a loose woman; and she is lucky enough to have forced a claim on me." "You lie, William Graynor," she said fiercely. "And you know that you lie. From the time you pursued me, when I worked in the factory, a girl of sixteen, to the moment when I met the man I am going to marry, I never looked at another man. You are a mean liar, that's what you are." Mr Graynor, ignoring the speaker and still looking towards his son, struck the table violently with his hand in an access of indignant anger. "You admit the paternity of this child, and, instead of sharing the responsibility, meanly try to shift it, and impugn the morality of a woman whose immorality you brought about! How dare you utter these things in my hearing?" "I've paid her," William excused himself, and fingered his collar nervously as though it were too tight. "I kept her so long as--" He broke off abruptly; and added in a savage voice: "She's had money enough from me." "I'm not complaining of what's past," the girl interposed. "If you 'adn't stopped the payments I shouldn't be 'ere now. I can't afford to keep the child. 'E's as much yours as mine." "There," Prudence broke in to the general astonishment, for she had remained so quiet until now that they had almost forgotten her presence, "you are mistaken. The law protects the man in these cases." "Then the law's rotten bad," said Bessie Clapp bitterly. Whether the sudden recollection of his daughter's presence decided Mr Graynor to bring the interview to a close, or if he felt unequal to further discussion is uncertain, but at this point he waved the girl to silence, and unlocking a drawer in the table, took out his cheque book and wrote a cheque and tore it out and passed it across the table to her. "I will see that my son makes suitable provision for the child," he said quaveringly. Bessie Clapp took the cheque and stood with it in her hand, looking at him out of her dark, sombre eyes. "I'm sorry I come," she said falteringly. "I'm going right away from 'ere. You won't see me no more." Then suddenly Prudence rose. She left her place by the fire, and crossing to where the other girl stood beside the table, she bent over the child and took the little fellow by the hand and drew him to her. "I am a childless woman," she said, in a sweet voice full of sympathy, "and I love children. Give him to me." CHAPTER FORTY. A bomb falling in their midst could scarcely have caused a greater sensation than was produced by Prudence's request. The effect of her speech and of her action was electrical. Only the child remained unmoved; and he, reassured doubtless by the quiet composure of her bearing amid the general tension, which he realised without understanding it, and the sweet gentleness of her voice, ceased his plaintive whimpering and stared at her with round eyes filled with wonderment, and forgot his fear. Bessie Clapp stared also, a solemn light in her dark eyes, and with a face grown tender and womanly, with all the hardness gone from its look. But William Graynor, flushed with anger, strode forward to intervene; and the old man, looking with disfavour upon the grouping, uttered: "No, no!" in tones of sharp protest, and put out a hand and touched Prudence's sleeve. "The child will be all right," he said. "Leave this to me." She turned to him with a wistful smile. "He's nobody's bairn," she said. "Nobody wants him--except me." "Your husband wouldn't like it," he remonstrated. "You have to consider him. Take the child away," he added, addressing Bessie Clapp. "I will communicate with you later." Prudence gave the boy into his mother's charge and walked with them to the door. "If I can arrange it, are you willing to give him up to me entirely?" she asked. "Yes, miss," Bessie answered in awed tones; and added, almost in a whisper: "It 'ud be a fine thing for 'im, any'ow." "'E's good," she said, with the door open and her hand upon it. "'E ban't like 'is father; 'e ban't mean." Prudence returned to confront her father and brother, both of them disturbed, though in different degrees, by her unlooked for interference. Mr Graynor regretted having allowed her to be present at the interview, while William resented deeply the fact that his double life should have been revealed to the young sister whom he had systematically snubbed and preached to all the years she had lived in the home. The knowledge that she wished to adopt his bastard son was insupportable. "Let me beg, sir," he said, crimson and spluttering for words, "that you won't permit this. It's indecent. It's--unthinkable. I can't agree to it." "It has nothing," Prudence answered quietly, "to do with you." Mr Graynor fixed his dim angry eyes on his son's face, the passion which he had kept under until now blazing up like a conflagration fanned by a sudden draught. He had never felt so humiliated and ashamed in all the years of his long life. For generations they had lived in Wortheton, honourable men and women, with an unsullied record which it remained for the present generation to smirch. It hurt him in his most vulnerable spot, his pride, that this base and sordid sin should be laid to his son's charge. "You despicable hypocrite!" he shouted. "How dare you question the right of any one to undertake a responsibility you are not man enough to shoulder? Had I known before of this low intrigue I would have compelled you to marry the mother of your child. Fortunately for her, she has found a better fate. As for the child--" He broke off abruptly, and turned in his seat and sat looking into the fire. "Prudence and I will settle that matter," he added more quietly. "Leave it to us." Without uttering another word, William went heavily out of the room. Prudence approached the old man, who sat, a shrunken dejected figure, before the hearth, and kneeling on the carpet beside him, put her arms about him lovingly, and remained so in silence, while he looked steadily into the fire, thinking back--hearing again in imagination her indignant young voice speaking out of the past: "I will pray hard night and morning that God will befriend Bessie Clapp." He put a hand upon her hair and smoothed it caressingly. "This is a blow, Prue," he said. "It hits me hard." He roused himself after a while and sat straighter in his chair and looked at her inquiringly. "What makes you think you would like to have the child?" he asked. "Because I have no little one of my own," she answered. "And this little child's life promises to be a sad one. He has a claim on our consideration; the same blood runs in his veins." "That is what makes your proposition impossible, as I see it," he said. "Edward would not wish it. Think of the disgrace, my dear. One likes to hide these things." "That's where I don't see with you," she replied gently. "In my opinion it is in refusing to accept our responsibilities that we merit disgrace. I've learned that quite lately. Let me try to explain." She clung closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder and was silent for a space, plunged in thought. The old man continued his occupation of stroking the bright hair, and was silent too, wondering what it was that needed explanation. "You never asked me," Prudence said presently, "what it was that brought me home so unexpectedly." "I was so glad," he replied, "to see you. It never occurred to me to ask the reason of your coming. It's sufficient for me that you are here." "Dear!" she said, and pressed his hand fondly. "I'm always glad to come. I'm sorry that ever I went away. I came home because of a quarrel with Edward. I left him in anger. I had thoughts of leaving him altogether. You see, dear, I too have behaved badly. I meant to shirk my responsibilities because they had grown irksome. Don't grieve, daddy; that's all past. I've come to see that life can't be twisted to suit each person's needs. We should make a hopeless tangle of it if we followed that principle. There's one simple course for the straight and decent liver--to accept life as it is and make the best of it. I mean to write to Edward to-day and ask him to come down and fetch me. Then I will tell him about the child. If he consents to my adopting him, I shall take him back with me." "You will make Edward's consent a condition to your reconciliation?" Mr Graynor asked. "Oh, no!" Prudence looked swiftly into his face. "I am hoping that he will give it as a concession." She twined her arms about the old man's neck and drew his cheek to hers and pressed hers against it. "I'm just hungry for a little child," she said. "I long to hear little footsteps about the house, to know the clinging feel of little hands. I'm just a sackful of motherhood tied down and repressed. I feel that I can't go on like this much longer." "I wish you had a dozen babies of your own," he said wistfully. "My dear!" She was laughing now, though the tears shone behind the laughter. "Half that number would serve." "I still don't like the idea of you adopting this child," Mr Graynor said after a pause. "He comes of bad stock, Prue." "Not bad stock," she contradicted. "I've known his mother all my life. She made a mistake. That was largely due to environment: many girls in her position would have done the same. And William... we won't judge William. We don't know--everything, do we? I am a great believer in training. I know the faults I have to watch for. I shall teach my child to be honest and generous and self-controlled." He smiled at her a little sadly. Youth is so hopeful and so sanguine. But experience had proved to him that there is something which strikes deeper than training, something which no training can overcome--the nature which lies at the root of every human being. CHAPTER FORTY ONE. Edward Morgan came in immediate response to his wife's letter. It was highly inconvenient with the press of business at the mills for him to leave; but he spent the night in travelling in order to save a day, and arrived at Wortheton, cold and stiff, in the early hours of the morning, risking chills and all the evils he was wont to avoid in his alacrity to respond to his wife's unexpected summons. It had come to him in a flash of unusual perceptivity that if he did not seize this moment which her softened mood generously offered for effecting a reconciliation, another opportunity might not present itself. Despite a certain narrowness of outlook, there was no smallness in Mr Morgan's nature. Because he read in Prudence's letter a sign of relenting, an earnest wish to close their differences, it did not occur to him to take a dignified stand and leave her to make all the advances, extending his forgiveness only when fully assured of her penitence. Such unequal methods, he realised quite clearly, never effected anything beyond a compromise. And he was very anxious for a complete understanding between himself and his young wife. Complete understanding and complete trust. Without these no married life could be congenial. His own marriage had fallen far short of his expectations. He knew that he had not won Prudence's love. Since the night of their quarrel, when she had confessed to loving Steele, the hope which he had fostered patiently through the disappointing years, that he might yet win it, had died utterly. But, oddly, that night with its ugly memories, its noisy wrangling and bitter recrimination, had revealed with a certainty beyond question that his own love for her, which he had believed was faded to insignificance, was still very much alive. He wanted her very earnestly. He missed her, missed her bright presence about the house, her youthful prettiness, her coming and going in her independent search for pleasure outside his home. She had brought a glimpse of the unexpected, the delightful irrelevance of pleasant trivial things, into the prosaic setting of everyday life which had caught him away insensibly from the dulness and the worries of his stupendous business undertakings, and brightened his home, very much, he often thought, as the swift appearance of the sun would brighten the prospect on a grey day. He had not realised, until she left him, how much he appreciated these things. It was some return anyway, if not the most adequate he could have desired, for the love he felt for her. He had made no particular concession, had not even attempted to adapt himself to her view of life. He had demanded a great deal of her and given little in return. These thoughts floated through his mind as he drove up the hill to the house. He was seeing their case altogether differently from the days when he had taken his young wife home and quarrelled with her seriously over such unimportant matters as ventilation and the direction of household affairs. He was, he realised now, directly responsible for the beginning of the breach which had widened yearly and ended in an open rupture. It remained for him to make amends for those earlier mistakes which had broken up the peace of his home. He had led too self-centred a life. In future he would evince greater interest in his wife's doings, show more sympathy with her aims. After all, a wife needs something more from her husband than board and lodging; she has a right to his confidence and companionship. He had never attempted to make a companion of her. He had treated her always as a child, a child to be spoilt and petted, until she refused the petting. Lately he had treated her with greater indifference, but still as a child, an unreasonable child towards whom kindness was misdirected. It was not surprising that the woman in her had rebelled. It came as an agreeable surprise to Mr Morgan when he reached Court Heatherleigh in the grey dawn, weary and cold after his long journey, to be met on the doorstep by Prudence, who was the only member of the household awake at that hour. Their meeting was somewhat constrained. He had not expected to see her and was at a loss for words. They faced one another a little self-consciously in the big empty hall; and then Edward Morgan bent down and kissed his wife, with an air of uncertainty as to how his caress would be received. Prudence flushed warmly, and, to cover her embarrassment, became actively helpful in disentangling him from his numerous wrappings. "I didn't expect to see any one at this hour," he said, and struggled out of his heavy coat and hung it on a peg. Then he turned to her with quick unexpectedness. "Thank you for the kindly thought, dear. It is good to find a welcome awaiting one at the end of a journey." "You shouldn't have travelled by the night train," she said. "You know you hate it." "It saved time," he explained. Arrangements had been made for an early breakfast for the traveller. Prudence led him into the breakfast-room, and poured out the hot coffee which she had made. They did not talk much. Each was conscious of the strain of this meeting; and the remarks which passed between them were impersonal and confined to the business of the moment. On finishing his meal Mr Morgan expressed a desire to go to bed; he thought he could sleep for a couple of hours. Prudence accompanied him upstairs, and parted from him outside his bedroom door with a smile that was friendlier and more ready than any she had given him of late. He was puzzled. He could not understand her. It was as though they had gone back to the days of the courtship, when he had been diffident and awkward and had found her shy and a little difficult, but kind always. The wife who had left him in anger, who for years, it seemed to him on looking back upon the past, had felt entirely indifferent towards him, ceased to be a vivid memory with him; her place in his thoughts was blotted out by the sunshine of Prudence's smile. He did not understand what had worked this change in her, but he realised that in some subtle way she was changed. She had grown suddenly older, more self-contained and womanly. She was as a person who, after walking aimlessly for a long while, strikes the right road unexpectedly, and proceeds more surely, with a definite purpose in view. Still puzzling over these things, he got into bed and soon forgot his perplexities and fatigue in sleep. While Edward Morgan slept heavily, and the rest of the household slumbered on undisturbed by the early arrival, Prudence remained at her bedroom window, wakeful and deep in thought, looking out upon the new day, upon the garden drenched with the heavy dews and saddened looking in its mantle of unrelieved green. There were weeds upon the paths, which formerly had been weedless. It occurred to her that the disorder was significant of the disorder in their own lives. They had been careless of what they should have tended carefully, and had allowed things to fall into neglect. There was a good deal of weeding to be accomplished on her own account. She had let the disorder accumulate until it threatened to choke all the pleasant places in her mind and leave her just a discontented woman with no object in life, no mental outlook. Many lives as they unfold reveal a less agreeable vista than anticipation has led one to expect. The philosophic mind makes the best of these disappointments, and sets to work to discover hidden beauties in the less alluring prospect ahead; it is the shallower mind which is dismayed by adverse conditions. The road upon which Prudence had set her feet was not the road of her inclination; it was none the less the road she must travel. To follow it finely was the desire of her heart, as she leaned from the window and thought sadly of the love she had let pass out of her life, and of the responsibilities she had undertaken, and so far neglected entirely. She had endeavoured to shape life to her purpose, and instead life was shaping her to certain definite ends. Prudence leaned her chin on her hand and looked down upon the white riband of road beyond the walls. Love had appeared to her along that road, and love had parted from her there and gone on down the road out of her life. There were two sad hearts more in the world, that was all. But the road of life, like the road beyond the walls, remained to be trodden. One had to go on. It is better to travel with a brave confidence than to cherish vain regrets. Prudence and her husband met and had their talk out in the library after breakfast. It was not so difficult a talk as she had imagined it would be. Mr Morgan was as eager to make concessions as Prudence. He had been doing a good deal of private thinking on his own account; and he saw very clearly that his young wife had never received fair treatment. He was anxious to make amends. His insistence on taking the greater share of the blame left her with curiously little to urge. She scrutinised him, faintly amused. It occurred to her that this generous closing of differences resembled the impulsive overtures of two children who had quarrelled needlessly and were bent on making it up. On one point he was very decided: he refused to open up the cause of their quarrel. All that was past. He wanted to start afresh from that moment; he was not going to look back. "I've been a fool, Prudence," he said. "A man is apt to forget the value of even his dearest treasure, simply, I suppose, because of the assurance given by possession; but when he is in danger of losing it he discovers his need. My dear, I have been very unhappy." He was seated beside her on the sofa, and he moved as he finished speaking and put a hand upon hers, which rested on the seat beside her. She twisted her hand round and clasped his warmly. "Perhaps it was rather a good thing that I came away," she said, after a moment's pause. "I was growing nervy. A woman with nerves is difficult to live with. I have been thinking, and finding out things. It is astonishing what a lot I've learned about myself just lately. I want to do better." "It's been my fault," he insisted. "I never made sufficient allowance for your youth, dear. We'll try again--make a fresh start. We'll talk things out together and not bottle up grievances. We have never talked freely enough to one another." "No," she said. "I'm rather glad," he said presently, "that things came to a head. It has opened up the way to a better understanding. You are the sort of woman a man learns to rely upon. You're honest. When I recall the things I said to you that night I am ashamed of myself." "Never mind that now," she said quickly. "I don't want to think of that. We agreed not to talk of that." She got up suddenly and stood in front of him, looking down at him with softened, smiling eyes. "I want to ask a favour," she said, "and I feel that that isn't quite honest just at the moment. It's like taking advantage of our talk. That's so like a woman, isn't it?" He sprang up from his seat and took her by the shoulders and kissed her. "It's the most generous response you could make," he said--"to ask a favour. It's a proof of your trust anyhow." "It's something very big," she said, with her earnest eyes lifted to his face. "If you are altogether against it I'll not insist." "Tell me what it is," he said, manifestly surprised by the seriousness of her manner, and entirely unsuspecting the nature of the request. A faint increase of colour stole into her cheeks, but she kept her gaze lifted to his. "I have discovered a little child," she explained softly, "whom nobody wants; and I want to mother him. I want to take him home with me." "You've always wanted that," he said, and waited for further enlightenment. Briefly she confided to his scandalised ears the story of William's illegitimate son, observing him closely while she unfolded the sordid tale in simple direct language, making no appeal to sentiment, merely relating the bald facts and leaving these to work their own effect. She was not in the least surprised that he was too shocked on hearing the story to feel any sympathy for the child in his deserted condition. That side of the picture left him unmoved. "You couldn't bring that child home," he said, with more than a touch of firmness. "A child like that! ... In our home! My dear, how could you wish such a thing in view of his parentage?" "It is on account of his parentage I wish it," Prudence answered quietly. "He is a Graynor, Edward. I want to give him a chance--a chance to grow up honest and decent living, a chance to become a better man than his father." "You talk as though the child were your responsibility," he complained. "It's nothing to do with us." "Not directly, no," she said. "Nor indirectly," he insisted. "There isn't the faintest reason why you should assume responsibility." "There is every reason," she urged. "He is a child launched evilly into a world which shows little sympathy for these children. His life will be a hard one with no good nor kindly influences surrounding it. There are numberless cases like this--little children brought into the world shamefully, and left to drift. It is not surprising that they grow up to become bad citizens; it would be surprising if they didn't. I want to give one of these small citizens his chance. The knowledge that he is closely akin to me makes me more earnest in this wish. We are childless people, Edward; we could do this without injuring any one. Are you very set against it?" She paused, and gazed inquiringly into his grave face, while he looked back at her for a long minute in silence, looked into the blue eyes, raised to his with a frank trustfulness he had never beheld in them before; and he knew that he could not refuse her her wish, however distasteful the idea of introducing this child into his home might be. Still gazing steadily into her quiet eyes, he said: "You wish to give this child his chance? I don't like the idea, but I have no doubt it is none the less right because it is objectionable to me. I withdraw my opposition. Give him his chance, Prudence. And in return let me ask a favour of you." "What is that?" she said. He did not take his eyes from hers. He remained standing before her, observing her with such a yearning wistfulness in his face that her heart went out to him in pity because she had no love to offer in return for the love he still bore for her. "What is the favour, dear?" she asked. "Give me also a chance," he said hoarsely, and held out his hands to her, and waited. Prudence put her hands into his, and the tears were in her eyes. 
47739	----	produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library, Original from University of California.) THE WYNDHAM GIRLS [Illustration: "TOM HAD CAMPED OUT, AND HE INSISTED ON COOKING THE STEAK."] THE WYNDHAM GIRLS BY MARION AMES TAGGART WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. M. RELYEA NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1902 Copyright, 1901, 1902, by THE CENTURY CO. _Published October, 1902_ THE DEVINNE PRESS TO CAROLYN WELLS CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I "POOR HUMPTY DUMPTY!" 3 II FRIENDS, COUNSELORS, AND PLANS 22 III WAYS AND MEANS 40 IV MAKING THE BEST OF IT 59 V PHYLLIS AND BARBARA ENTER THE LISTS 75 VI MARK TAPLEY'S KIND OF DAYS 91 VII TAKING ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES 107 VIII THE TURN OF THE LANE 122 IX HOME-KEEPING HEARTS 140 X DISCOVERIES 157 XI LOYAL PHYLLIS 172 XII THE SQUARE BECOMES A TRIANGLE 190 XIII THE STRAY UNIT 207 XIV THE LITTLE BLIND GOD OPENS HIS EYES 224 XV WREATHING HOLLY AND TWINING BAY 242 XVI SPOKES FROM THE HUB 258 XVII THE LADY OF THE SCALES 271 XVIII UNDER THE HARVEST MOON 289 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE "TOM HAD CAMPED OUT, AND HE INSISTED ON COOKING THE STEAK" _Frontispiece_ THE WYNDHAM GIRLS 7 "A YOUNG MAN DASHED DOWN THE STEPS INTO THE RUINS" 51 AUNT HENRIETTA 81 THE EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF PEACE 125 "'LOOK OUT, TRUCHI-KI; YOU'LL FALL!' PHYLLIS SAID" 145 "'I KNEW THAT IF I WAS AWFULLY ILL MISS BAB WOULD BE NICE TO YOU,' MURMURED MARGERY" 237 A BEARER OF GOOD TIDINGS 279 THE WYNDHAM GIRLS CHAPTER I "POOR HUMPTY DUMPTY!" "No pink for me, please; I want that beautiful shimmering green, made up over shining white silk. It will make my glossy brown eyes and hair look like a ripe chestnut among its green leaves." "Oh, Bab, such a glistening sentence! 'Shimmering green,' 'shining white,' 'glossy hair'--you didn't mean glossy eyes, I hope! Besides, chestnuts don't show among green leaves; they stay in their burs till they drop off the tree." "Now, Phyllis, what is the use of spoiling a poetical metaphor--figure--what do you call it? Which do you like best? Have you made up your mind, Jessamy?" "I want all white; probably this mousseline de soie." "I'm rather inclined to the pearl, yet the violet is lovely." "You both 'know your effects,' as that conceited little novelist said last night," cried Barbara. "Jessamy's a dream in white, and Phyl looks too sweet for mortal uses in anything demure." The soft May wind from the distant river blew the lace curtains gently to and fro, and lifted the squares of delicate fabrics scattered over the couch on which the three young girls were sitting. Jessamy, the elder of the two Wyndham sisters, was at eighteen very beautiful, with dainty elegance of motion, refinement of speech, almost stately grace, unusual to her age and generation. Barbara, a year younger, was her opposite. Life, energy, fun were declared in every quick turn of her head and hands; small in figure, with sparkling dark eyes, and a saucy tilt of nose and chin, she could hardly have contrasted more sharply with her tall, gray-eyed, delicately tinted sister, and with what Bab herself called "Jessamy's Undine ways." The third girl, Phyllis, was twin in age to Jessamy, but unlike either of the others in appearance and temperament. She was in reality their cousin, the one child of their father's only brother, but, as she had been brought up with them since her fourth year, Jessamy and Barbara knew no lesser kinship to her than to each other. At first glance Phyllis was not pretty; to those who had known her for even a brief time she was beautiful. Sweetness, unselfishness, content shone out from her dark-blue eyes, with the large pupils and long, dark lashes. Her lips rested together with the suggestion of a smile in their corners, and the clear pallor of her complexion was shaded by her masses of dark-brown hair, which warmed into red tints under the sunlight. Across the room from her daughters and niece, enjoying the girls' happiness as she always did, sat Mrs. Wyndham, rocking slowly. She was a fragile woman, still clad in the mourning she had worn for her husband for seven years,--a sweet and gentle creature, who, one felt at once, had been properly placed by Providence in luxury, and fortunately shielded from hardship; for the Wyndhams were wealthy. The morning-room in the great house on Murray Hill showed evidence of being the spot where the family gathered informally for rest and recreation; it made no attempt at special beauty, still it was full of countless little objects which declared the long custom of all its inmates of purchasing whatever struck their fancy, regardless of its cost or subsequent usefulness. The three young girls, differing in many ways, were alike in bearing the stamp of having spent their short lives among luxurious surroundings, shielded from the cradle against the sharp buffets of common experience. Even the samples fluttering under their fingers and the touch of the spring wind bore the name of a French artist on Fifth Avenue whose skill only the highly favored could command, and the consultation under way was for the selection for each young girl of gowns fit for a princess's wearing, yet intended for the use of maidens not yet "out," in the hops at the hotel at Bar Harbor in the coming summer. "Madrina, do you care which we choose?" asked Bab, jumping up in a shower of samples which flew in all directions at her sudden movement, and running over to hug her pale mother. Jessamy said Bab was "subject to irruptions of affection." "Not in the least; the samples are all bewilderingly pretty. I only ask to have a voice in selecting the style of the gown. Madame Alouette and I sometimes differ as to what is suitable," replied Mrs. Wyndham, when she had caught her breath. "Do you remember the elaborate lace she used on Jessamy's dimity last year, auntie?" laughed Phyllis, on her knees collecting the samples Bab had scattered. Jessamy rose slowly, gently putting together the bits of soap-bubble-tinted gauzes on her knee; her fingers stroked them reluctantly, as if unwilling to part from them. "I am afraid I am dreadfully vain," she said, "though I hope I am only artistic. I am not sure whether I love exquisite things for their own sake or because I want them for myself, but these lovely fabrics go to my very heart. I hate cheapness to an extent that I am ashamed of, and I certainly always have an instinct for the most expensive articles in the shops, though I never think of the price." "I am sure it is because you're artistic, Amy," said Phyllis, coming up flushed from under an arm-chair. "You do like fine things for yourself, but it's just as you want only good pictures in your room. You crave beauty, and you're born royal in taste. If we were all beggared, Bab and I could get on; for while I love beauty too, it's not with your love for it. Besides, I could be happy in a tenement if we were together, and Bab would revel in a sunbonnet and driving the cows home. But you're a princess, and you can't be anything else: _noblesse oblige_, you know, means, in your case, 'obliged to be noble.'" [Illustration: THE WYNDHAM GIRLS.] "You're a bad Phyl, whose object in life is to ruin people by making them perfectly self-satisfied," said Jessamy. "I only hope some of the excuses you find for me are true. I'm as luxurious in nature as a cat. I know that. Come to the window; I want to see this old rose in the sunlight." Bab stopped swinging her feet, and slipped from the arm of her mother's chair, where she had been perching, to follow them. "Don't you abuse cats, nor my sister Jessamy, miss," she said, putting her arm around slender Jessamy and peering over her shoulder at the sample of old-rose silk, while she rubbed Jessamy's arm with her chin like an affectionate dog. "They're two as nice things as I know. Madrina, I see Mr. Hurd coming across the street; he's headed this way." "Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Wyndham, almost fretfully; "I suppose he is coming to talk business again. He has been tormenting me all winter to withdraw my money from the corporation; you know, he thinks it isn't secure. I am sure I cannot see why--do you, Jessamy and Phyllis? You are as good business women as I am. Don't leave me when he comes to-day; I should like to have you hear his arguments. Young as you are, you can understand quite as well as I do. He says I ought to sell my stock, or enough to secure us against misfortune, but I cannot get as high interest elsewhere, and it is safe." "He--you said Mr. Hurd thinks it isn't safe, didn't you, mama?" asked Jessamy, turning from the window. "But that is ridiculous! Your poor father's partner is at the helm, and your father always said he was both clever and unimpeachable; he trusted him like himself," said Mrs. Wyndham. "It is all because they won't show the books lately--as though I wanted to see the books, or minded if Mr. Hurd did not, as long as Mr. Abbott is managing! I cannot see why Mr. Hurd is so nervous; he has talked hours to me since last fall, and yet I don't see. I will not put our stock on the market--in the market--what is the right word?--and shake public confidence, flood the market--inflate it--oh, I cannot remember terms! And Mr. Abbott wrote me, and came especially to see me in March to say that would be the effect of my offering my bonds or stock now. I understand him much better than Mr. Hurd; he is more patient, and won't leave his point until I have mastered it. He said industrial stock was different from--from--the other kind. He said one must not bear the market on one's own stock, but must bull it. That means, in their queer terms, not depress it, but force things upward, which is, of course, what one would want to do with one's own values. You stay in the room to-day, children, and see if you understand. Mr. Hurd insists I am risking beggaring you, and that distresses me unspeakably." "Don't mind Mr. Hurd, Madrina; he's an anxious attorney, that's all," said Barbara, with an air of lucidity. "But one has to heed one's attorney, daughter," said her mother, half smiling. "Only I can't turn my back on my dear husband's business, which he brought to such splendid success, and sell out Wyndham Iron Company stock as if we weren't Wyndhams, but outsiders." "Mr. Hurd, ma'am," said Violet, the black maid, extending a card in one hand, while the other twisted her apron-string nervously; she had caught alarm from a glance at the visitor's face. "Bring him here, Violet. Mr. Hurd will pardon feminine confusion," Mrs. Wyndham added, rising and pointing to the samples on the couch with her extended hand, for the lawyer had followed the maid without delay. "We are pluming, or more properly donning, our feathers for flight, Mr. Hurd." "Yes, yes," said the little man, shaking hands, without looking at Mrs. Wyndham. "Good morning, Miss Jessamy; good morning, Phyllis; how do you do, little Barbara? May I interrupt your--Gracious powers! dear madam, I mean I _must_ interrupt your plans, Mrs. Wyndham." Jessamy and Phyllis clutched each other with sudden pallor; the little lawyer's voice shook with emotion. Bab flushed and ran to her mother, putting her arms around her frail figure as though to place herself as a bulwark between her and ill. "You will not interrupt anything more important than the selection of dancing-gowns for the children," said Mrs. Wyndham, with her soft dignity, though she turned a little paler. "Is there any special reason for your visit--kind visit always--Mr. Hurd? And may the girls hear what you have to say, since their interests are at stake?" "Special reason, madam? Special, indeed! God help me, I don't know how to say what I have to say, but I prefer the young ladies to hear it. You remember, I have urged their presence at our previous conferences, but you considered them too young to be troubled--Poor chicks!" he added suddenly. "Evidently you feel that you have something unpleasant to tell me, Mr. Hurd; but I feel sure you exaggerate; you know, you are always more timid and pessimistic than I," said Mrs. Wyndham, dropping into the nearest chair and trying to smile. "Good heavens, Mrs. Wyndham! It isn't a matter for self-gratulation. If I could have made you listen to me six--even two--months ago, I should not be here to-day, the bearer of such dreadful news," burst out the lawyer, impatiently. "Wouldn't it be better, Mr. Hurd, to tell us quickly? You frighten us with hints," said Jessamy, in her silvery, even voice; but the poor child's lips were white. Mr. Hurd glanced at Jessamy. "Yes," he said; "but it is not easy. I heard the definite news last night in Wall Street; rumors had been afloat for days. I wanted to give you one more night of untroubled sleep. It will be in the papers this evening." "What will, Mr. Hurd?" burst out Barbara, impatiently. "The failure of the Wyndham Iron Company." There was dead silence in the room, broken only by the low-toned little French clock striking ten times. "The company--failed?" whispered Mrs. Wyndham, trying to find her voice. "What does that mean, Mr. Hurd?" asked Phyllis. "It means that your mother's bonds and stocks are valueless; and as she holds everything in her own right and has kept all that your father left in the business, it means that your inheritance has been wiped out of existence," said the lawyer, not discriminating between the daughters and the niece in his excitement. "How can it be--total ruin?" asked poor Mrs. Wyndham. "Henry gone but seven years, and such a splendid success as he left the company! How can it have failed? I don't believe it!" she cried, starting to her feet with sudden strength. "Dear Mrs. Wyndham, it is too certain," said her husband's old friend and attorney, gently. "When they refused to open up the books for inspection, and you would not authorize me to take steps to compel them to do so, I knew this would come." "Mr. Abbott--" began Mrs. Wyndham. "Mr. Abbott is an outrageous villain," interrupted Mr. Hurd, passionately. "I have lain awake all night cursing him, or I could not mention him before you without swearing. He has got control of the corporation by holding the majority of stock, and he has run the thing on a speculative basis instead of a solid business one. At the same time, justice to his business capacity compels me to add that he has kept himself clear of possible failure, using the stockholders' funds and not his own for his operations, so that though you and others are ruined, he is safe. I shall never be able to make you understand the case more fully; but that is the sum of it, and he's a consummate rogue." "But Henry trusted him--" essayed Mrs. Wyndham once more. "Henry Wyndham was an honest man, and a good friend. He is not the first who has been deceived in his estimate of a man. That is all to be said on that score," said the little lawyer, grimly. "I never knew any one who was ruined, outside of books," said Jessamy, trying to smile. "What does it mean? Going to live in an East-side tenement, and working in a sweat-shop?" "Nonsense, Jessamy!" said her mother, sharply, drying her tears, which had been softly falling, while Bab burst into wailing at the picture. "Nonsense! I shall sell some stock, and I am sure that we shall get on very well--perhaps economizing somewhat." "Dear madam, you no more grasp the situation than you saw it coming," said Mr. Hurd, struggling between annoyance and pity. "Your preferred stock might bring five cents, and the common stock three, but I doubt it; their value is wiped out. Practically, you have no stock. Still, I hope the situation will not be as grave as Miss Jessamy pictures. You will have an income greater than enough to give you comfort, though by comparison you will be poor. You cannot stay in this house, for it alone, and its contents, must furnish your income. But it will rent or sell at a figure to insure you six to eight thousand a year; and if you sell your pictures and some of the furniture you will have a very respectable principal to live upon. Bad as it is, your case might be far worse." "Do you mean that this house will be the sole--actually the sole--source of income left me?" gasped Mrs. Wyndham, with more agitation than she had yet shown. Mr. Hurd nodded. The poor lady uttered a sharp cry and fell back, sobbing wildly. "Then I have nothing--nothing!" she screamed. "My darlings are beggared!" Phyllis rang for wine, and Mr. Hurd leaped to his feet with apprehension of the truth. "What do you mean, Mrs. Wyndham?" he demanded. Mrs. Wyndham rested her head on Phyllis's arm and drank the wine she held to her lips. "Last March," she began feebly, "Mr. Abbott came to me and explained--or seemed to explain--matters to me. At that time he told me he had bought iron for the works as a speculation, expecting it to appreciate in value. Instead it fell, and the business was temporarily embarrassed in consequence. He asked me to let him negotiate a loan with this house as security." Mr. Hurd, who had been pacing the floor furiously, stopped short, with a fervent imprecation. Halting before the feeble creature who had been so duped, he thrust his hands deep into his pockets and gazed down on her. "And you did it?" he growled. Mrs. Wyndham bowed her head lower. "It was a mere formality, he said. The business needed but to be tided over its present embarrassment, which the ready money thus raised would do, and then the loan would be paid and the house stand as free as before. So I gave it as security." "Just heaven! Why didn't Henry leave everything in trust for you in the hands of a decent man!" cried Mr. Hurd, furiously. "To trick a woman, and such a guileless woman as you, like that! The miserable, currish scamp! Why didn't you mention this to me, madam?" "Because Mr. Abbott begged me not to; he said none but ourselves, partners in the concern, stockholders of the corporation, should know of it, or it might make the stock panicky--I am sure he said panicky," murmured the wretched woman. "Then I am afraid Miss Jessamy's picture is not so overdrawn," groaned the lawyer. "You will have no principal except what the personal property, the furniture and the pictures will bring." "And I have ruined my children--my dear, blessed, pretty girls, for whom I would gladly die, and whose father was so happy to feel that he had secured them from the hard side of life! He knew in his youth what privation meant--my dear, good Henry. Oh, I can't bear it! I won't have it so! It isn't true!" And Mrs. Wyndham went off into hysterical cries, which ended all possibility of further discussion. Jessamy ran to call Violet to help her mother to her room; Bab lay on the floor, a collapsed heap of misery, sobbing in terror of her mother's agony and the affliction, dimly understood, which had fallen on them in the midst of the dainty fabrics and happy plans. But Phyllis, trembling and white, yet calm, laid her cold hands on her aunt and gently forced her into quiet. She lifted her eyes, no longer blue, but jet black, with their dilated pupils blazing with righteous wrath, to Mr. Hurd's face. "Is there no law to make that villain give up what he stole?" she demanded fiercely. The lawyer looked at her with the good fighter's quick recognition of the same quality in another. "I'll try mighty hard to find it, Phyllis," he said. "The trouble is that a consummate rogue knows how to cover his tracks. He has undoubtedly put everything out of his hands. But we'll make him show when it was done; and if he has taken such steps this winter past, we can force him to disgorge. There is one comfort: I'll make New York a confoundedly unpleasant place for him to try to do business in." Kind Violet, with her black face gray from sympathy and fright, came back with Jessamy, and put her strong arms around her mistress's fragile body, lifting her like a baby. "Come right along, you po' little lamb lady," she said. "Miss Jes'my telephone for doctoh, an' I'm goin' make you quiet an' comf'able in bed. Don' you cry 'notheh teah; Vi'let ain't goin' let nothin' come neah you." Utterly exhausted in mind and body, Mrs. Wyndham found comfort in the soft voice and loving arms. She drooped her head on the pink gingham shoulder of the tall girl, and let herself be carried away to her chamber as if she had been a child. Jessamy turned to Mr. Hurd. "You will not mind if we received the news rather badly," she said. "We shall all do our parts when we have learned them. It--it--came rather suddenly, you see." Evidently Jessamy was going to be the princess her cousin called her, and meet misfortune proudly. "You dear child," said the lawyer, his eyes softening and dimming as he looked in the pretty face, blanched white, and noted the lines holding the soft lips grimly set to keep them from quivering. "You are little heroines--you and Phyllis. Don't try to be too brave; it is better to cry, and then wipe away the tears to see what is to be done after the shipwreck." "There is only one thing I want to ask you now, Mr. Hurd; then, perhaps, we would better not talk any more to-day: What are we likely to have to live on if we sell our things?" asked Jessamy. "You know it is guesswork; no one can more than approximate the result of sales," answered Mr. Hurd. "Your father knew good pictures, and there are many of considerable value here, but summer is no time to offer them. I should say you were likely to have returns of about thirty thousand dollars, which, if I invest it at six per cent., will give you nearly two thousand a year. Now, good-by, my dears, for this morning. Try not to grieve; no one knows what is best for him in this curious world, and the day may come when you will be grateful for this change of fortune. People are usually better and stronger for trying their mettle as well as their muscle. God bless you." Jessamy did not attempt to answer. Mr. Hurd laid his hand gently on each head, and went away. Left to themselves, Jessamy and Phyllis looked at each other and around the pretty room, with the couch still strewn with the samples for their dancing-gowns; the books, pictures, ornaments they had bought scattered everywhere. With a sudden rush of memory, they saw themselves little children, playing about their kind father--for he had been father to them both--in that very room, and with equal clearness saw the years before them in which this beautiful home had no being, but, instead, privations more awful to their imaginations because they had no clue to their actual meaning. The necessity for self-restraint being removed, with a common impulse Jessamy and Phyllis turned, and, throwing their arms around each other, burst into passionate weeping--the despairing weeping of youth which has not yet learned that nothing on earth is final. Bab stirred uneasily and sat up on the floor, wiping her own eyes and trying to smile. "Don't cry like that, girls; please don't," she said. "It doesn't matter so much about me, because I always go off one way or the other, but I can't stand it if you are wretched." She gathered herself up, and went slowly over to the others. "We're young and beautiful," she said, "and we have some few brains; we'll make another fortune for ourselves. I think, perhaps, I'll marry an oil man with millions. Smile--for mercy's sake smile--Jess and Phyl!" But Jessamy and Phyllis, who had controlled themselves while Bab sobbed, could not raise their heads. Bab was mercurial--always, as she herself put it, "going off" to extremes. She had cried her first terror away, and now the necessity of her nature to look on the bright side and find something funny in all situations began to assert itself. "I think likely two thousand a year will be a lot when we get used to it, though it costs that to clothe us all now, I suppose. I expect to learn to manage so well that we can adopt twins on the money we have left over. I shall go to get points from Ruth Wells; I always thought she was splendid, and longed to know her; she understands how to make every quarter a half-dollar. Now, girls, we're going to be like the people in the story-books, and learn who are our true friends--don't you know how misfortune always tests them? Look up--smile! 'Rise, Sally, rise; dry your weeping eyes!'" "Don't, Bab," murmured Jessamy, faintly. "You haven't an idea of what has really happened." But she raised her head, and attempted to check her tears as she spoke. Bab saw it with secret triumph; she was actually talking herself into something like cheerfulness. "Don't I! I have quite as much experience as you, miss, anyway. Still, I'm willing to confess I'd rather not be poor," she added, with the air of making a generous concession. "But I feel sure we'll be happy yet, because I, for one, have got to be. But it is rather hard to get thrown off your high wall when you've sat on it all your life. Poor Humpty Dumpty! I never properly felt for him before." And Bab was rewarded for her nonsense by a tearful smile from Jessamy and Phyllis. CHAPTER II FRIENDS, COUNSELORS, AND PLANS The evening turned cool and damp, with the unreliability of May. Mrs. Wyndham was too ill to rise; the doctor had given her sedatives, and she slept in utter exhaustion. Jessamy, Phyllis, and Barbara dined lightly alone; no one had any desire for food, although the cook sent up the dishes dearest to each young palate, hoping to tempt her young ladies to forget sorrow enough to eat. But this very kindness on the part of Sally below stairs, combined with Violet's positively tragic efforts to be cheerful while she served them, brought sobs into the three throats, and defeated the end of their good will. After dinner the three girls carried their burdens to Jessamy's room, where an acceptable wood fire was burning. The great house was amply large enough to afford a room for each of the young Wyndhams to occupy unshared. Phyllis's and Bab's were on the third floor, connected by dressing-rooms; Jessamy's was next her mother's, over the dining-room, on the second. Each room expressed, as rooms always do, the character of its occupant. Phyllis's was cheery, yet beautiful, with simple elegance and plenty of space. Her pictures were good, but not all the very highest art; "literary pictures," those which told a story, were not lacking, and many of the photographs, abounding everywhere, were portraits of literary people. The room was lined with low bookcases, and books crowded the tables and the desk. Barbara's room was an anomaly. Bright Eastern colors gave the general effect of a field of poppies on entering. Pictures of animals, casts of Barye's splendid beasts abounded, with Luca della Robbia's happy cherubs, and a copy of Dürer's portrait of Stephan Paumgärtner, and Rembrandt's "Lesson in Anatomy" to prove how many-sided little Bab was thus far in her development. A small upright piano, with a guitar and mandolin lying on its top, between busts of Paderewski and Beethoven, testified truly that she was the most musical girl of the three. Jessamy's room was all soft greens and moss browns as to color. Her pictures were chosen for beauty alone, and that of the highest sort. Copies of Botticelli's "Triumph of Spring," his lovely Madonna in the National Gallery, some of Holbein's glorious portraits, two Corots, Carpaccio's "Dream of St. Ursula," Donatello casts, as well as antiques, demonstrated at a glance that the eye of an artist had chosen them to rest upon. But, revealing the corresponding side of Jessamy's nature, were softest down cushions heaped on a divan, dainty toilet accessories in ivory and gold, carved chairs of slumbrous depths, flowers in delicate green Venetian glasses, and, above all, volumes of poems, with Thomas à Kempis and the "Celestial City" on the stand nearest the bed; for Jessamy loved perfect beauty, and turned naturally to its highest ideals and expression. Into this half-studio, half-chamber, and wholly beautiful room the three girls crept after dinner, drawing their chairs close to the fire and speaking softly, not to disturb Mrs. Wyndham in the next room. "The only thing for us to do is to find out what we can live on, and then make our plans. If we haven't quite enough money, we must earn it in some way," said Jessamy, with her most mature and responsible air. "I think the very first thing of all is to find out what that income will be, and Mr. Hurd says we can't know positively until after the sale," said practical Phyllis. "And the next and most awful thing is to find out what we can do. I doubt if we know anything thoroughly enough to earn money by it." "Do? Why, we'll do anything!" cried Bab. "Jessamy draws and paints beautifully, you are all kinds of a genius, and I--oh, there are lots of things I could do if I tried. Some girls make ever so much money; I'm sure we sha'n't have any trouble when we are once started." "We have some talents between us, but I am afraid they're trained only well enough for the admiration of ourselves and our friends; when it comes to getting something more solid than flattery for our cleverness--well, I'm afraid! I can't help seeing that Jessamy's work, though it is talented, is amateurish. Bab plays, and burns things with her pokers, to our delight; but she can't play like a person who has been grinding at music in earnest six or eight hours a day. And as to me, when I write a story you think it is great, but I see it lacks something. It may be correct English and a good idea, but it is not worth money because of the thing that isn't in it; and I suspect that quality is the mark of training and experience," said Phyllis, sadly. "I don't see why you try to discourage us, Phyl," said Bab, in an aggrieved tone. "I think we ought to bolster each other up." "And I think we ought to face facts, and that as soon as we can," said Phyllis, firmly. "We've lived so far in a dream. I've been thinking hard all the afternoon, and I've realized how cruel such cases as ours are. There was auntie, left with great wealth and no more business knowledge than a baby. And here are we, three girls with brains enough to be useful and enough money to have had a practical training in some direction, no more ready to meet emergencies than so many kittens. We couldn't compete with tenement-house girls, with all our advantages and their drawbacks." "Phyllis is right," said Jessamy, with conviction. "Still, we must compete if we must." "She is not right; I'm sure we can make lots of money with no special training," said Bab, indignantly. "Good gracious! There's 'our inheritance'! We never once thought of it!" Six years before, an aunt of Mr. Wyndham, dying on her New Hampshire farm, had left each of her grand-nieces five thousand dollars. They had rather laughed at it, and never alluded to it save as "their inheritance"; yet now, recalled suddenly by Bab, it shone across their path like a ray of sunshine. Taken from the bank where it lay and reinvested at higher interest, it would materially help them in an hour when a thousand dollars had assumed new proportions. "Mercy, yes! I quite forgot it," cried Jessamy, her face brightening. "At six per cent., what would that be a year?" This was too great a mental problem for these would-be business women, whose arithmetic was that of most pupils of fashionable schools for girls. Bab sprang up for pencil and paper. "Nine hundred dollars!" she announced triumphantly. "That is quite an addition to our fortune, isn't it?" "I suppose there isn't much good in making plans," said Jessamy. "We've got to trust Mr. Hurd to guide us. If we are no use, as Phyllis believes--and probably is right in believing--we had better live quite poorly for a while, and fit ourselves to do something well. I don't want to rush into any kind of half-good employment, if by self-denial, perhaps even hardship, at first, we might amount to something in the end." "Hail Minerva!" cried Phyllis. "You'll be as thoroughbred a working girl, if you must, as you were fine lady; and that's what I love you for, Jasmine blossom." "My poor, unfortunate children, are you sitting here in the dark?" said a voice. "Violet told me I should find you up-stairs. I saw that dreadful item in 'The Evening Post,' Is it true?" "How do you do, Aunt Henrietta?" said Jessamy, rising, while Bab barely stifled a groan. "About the failure? Yes, I am afraid it is quite true." Mrs. Hewlett was Mr. Wyndham's aunt; he had been her favorite nephew because he was her namesake. Her nieces did not love their great-aunt; she had a strong tendency to speak her opinions, if they were unpleasant to the hearer; sincerity and a profound conviction that she was infallible in judgment being Mrs. Henrietta Hewlett's most marked characteristics. Jessamy, Phyllis, and Barbara recognized in her coming an added hardship at the end of their hard day. "I always knew it would end this way," said Aunt Henrietta, dropping into an easy-chair and letting her cloak slip to the floor while she untied her bonnet strings. "Your mother has no business ability whatever. Poor Henry!" "Mama did not make the iron company fail, aunt; and papa can't need pity now as much as she does," said Bab, losing her temper instantly, as she always did on encountering "the drum-major," as she irreverently called her great-aunt. "How are you left?" demanded Aunt Henrietta, ignoring Bab, to Jessamy's profound gratitude. "We shall have only what the contents of this house will bring, besides the five thousand apiece left us by Aunt Amelia," said Jessamy. Aunt Henrietta held up both hands in genuine horror. "My poor sister had no notion that her little legacy would be your all,--for of course you can't get anything for second-hand furniture. So you are actually beggared! Well, it is even worse than I expected." "Not quite beggars, aunt," said Phyllis. "We expect to have two thousand a year. And if you foresaw Mr. Abbott's dishonesty, you are the only one who mistrusted him. Uncle Henry believed in him as firmly as in himself. Of course, if you read the papers, you know no one is to blame for anything, unless for trusting Mr. Abbott." "Two thousand for such a family as you!" ejaculated Aunt Henrietta, characteristically passing over the less disagreeable points in Phyllis's remarks. "It is practically beggary. You have been brought up in the most extravagant way--never taught the value of money. Your mother has spoiled you from the cradle. I suppose you will run through what little ready money you have, and then expect to be helped by your friends." "Really, Aunt Henrietta, I cannot see why you assume us entirely to lack common sense, principles, and pride," said Jessamy, struggling hard to keep her voice steady. "We have already determined to make our income suffice us, investing our little capital." "H'm! Two thousand suffice! You're exactly like your mother--absolutely unpractical. If poor Henry--" began Mrs. Hewlett. "Now, Aunt Henrietta, just drop mama, if you please," said Barbara, hotly. "She is the dearest mother in the world, and papa loved her with all his heart. I don't see what good there can be in trying to blame some one for this trouble; but if any one were to blame, it was dear papa himself, and not mama, for he left her all his wealth and all his trust in Mr. Abbott, and never taught her the least thing about business. Mama never said nor did an unkind thing in all her gentle life, and I won't have her abused. And, in spite of what you say now, you were always very proud of her lovely face and manners, and glad enough to point out your niece, Mrs. Henry Wyndham. And you've boasted about all of us while we were rich, and now you talk as if this trouble was the punishment of our sins, especially mama's. And I won't have you mention her--dear, crushed mama--lying in there heartbroken for our sakes!" Bab's cheeks had been getting redder and her voice higher through this speech, until at this point she burst into tempestuous tears. "Hoity-toity, miss! Don't be impertinent," said the old lady. "You'll be dependent on your friends' charity in six months, and you will be wise not to offend them." "I won't! I'll beg from door to door or be a cashgirl at Macy's first," sobbed Bab. "Besides, I'm not impertinent; I'm only firm." The idea of Bab firm on the verge of hysterics made Phyllis and Jessamy smile faintly. "Don't say any more, Bab; you know it's no use," whispered Phyllis, stroking the hot cheek, while Jessamy said: "You must not mind Bab, aunt. We are all somewhat overwrought, but I agree with her that, if you please, we will leave our mother out of the discussion." "I don't mind that flighty child; she never had a particle of stability, and has not been taught self-control or respect," said Aunt Henrietta, with what in a less dignified person would have been a sniff. "What kind of work are you going to take up? For of course it is ridiculous to talk of living on two thousand a year, and you must earn your living." "We have not decided anything yet, aunt; we've had only a few hours to get used to being poor," replied Phyllis. "Well, I've been considering your case, and I don't believe there is anything you can do decently; your education has been the thistle-down veneer girls get, nowadays," said their aunt, disregarding the fact that she would have been still less prepared to meet misfortune than her nieces at their age. "Veneer!" echoed Jessamy. "I hope not, though I don't know what thistle-down veneer is. I wouldn't mind being honest white pine, but I should despise the best veneer." "As far as I can see, you would do well to go out as a nurse girl. There are many who would be glad to get a young woman of refinement, and you would be treated nicely in a good place," said Aunt Henrietta. Bab gasped. Phyllis cried: "A nurse girl! Jessamy!" But Jessamy turned white to her lips. "Will you allow me to sit on your steps and sun my young charge, if I take care to keep my aprons clean?" she asked slowly, her voice low and ominously steady. "Don't be a fool, Jessamy, and have high-flown notions. Any work is honorable, and you are not trained to skilled labor," said her aunt. "All labor is certainly honorable, aunt," said Phyllis, seeing that Jessamy dared not speak again. "But there are degrees in its attractiveness. It would be short-sighted wisdom to put a talented creature like our princess to doing what the humblest emigrant can perform, wasting all her opportunities. I am afraid I cannot understand how you could consent to pushing any of us down, instead of helping us up." "We shall not need help," said Jessamy, her head up like a young racer. "I hope to manage quite well alone. Will you excuse us from more of this sort of talk, aunt? We have had a hard day, and are tired." Mrs. Hewlett rose; her eldest niece always overawed her, in spite of her determination not to mind what she to herself called "Jessamy's affected airs." "I felt sure I should not find you chastened by misfortune," she said. "You should take your downfall in a more Christian spirit. I trust you will heed me in one point, at least. Sell your best clothes and ornaments. It will be most unbecoming if, in your altered circumstances, you dress in articles bought for Henry Wyndham's daughters. People will make the most unkind comments if you do." Barbara had recovered by this time. "Aren't we still Henry Wyndham's daughters, aunt?" she asked guilelessly. "I didn't realize parentage as well as inheritance was vested in the business. What a calamity that it failed! As to unkind remarks, no mere acquaintances will make them; all but our relatives will understand that we could afford fine things when we had them, and that failure naturally did not destroy them. I give you fair warning, I mean to look my best, whatever the rest do, else I may be defeated in my plan to get back to luxury by a brilliant marriage." "Bab, how could you?" said Jessamy, reproachfully, as their aunt disappeared. "She will take that for solemn truth and despise you. There's no use in making her worse than she is." "I couldn't, Lady Jessamy; nature is perfect in her works. And I'll tell you one thing for your edification: If I did mean it, and did succeed in marrying for money, so far from despising me, she would be proud of me, and talk to every one about 'my charming niece, Barbara,'" said Bab, venomously. "Oh, don't, Bab!" cried Phyllis, distressed. "We've been poor only one day, and here are you growing bitter! That's the worst of this sort of misfortune, I feel sure in advance. It shows people in such a horrid light that the victims get cynical and nasty. Do let us keep sweet and wholesome through it all, for if we're that, and have each other, nothing else matters seriously." "You dear little saint Phyllis!" cried Bab. "My bitterness so far is shallow, so don't worry. You're better than bicarbonate of soda to sweeten what Sally calls 'a sour risin'.'" An hour later Violet brought up a note that came opportunely to counteract the disagreeable effect of Mrs. Hewlett's visit. It was from an old friend of their mother, and ran thus: "MY DEAREST LITTLE GIRLS: I am not going to bother poor Emily to-night, but I cannot sleep unless I write you. I read that horrible item in 'The Sun' about the Wyndham Iron Company, and I am wretched. Maybe it will be less bad than it now seems--I pray it may! But I want you to realize that my house, my love, are entirely yours. You are all coming to spend the summer with me at Mount Desert--there is plenty of room in my house--so that is settled. And in the fall we shall see. If there is to be a sale, I shall attend to it myself, with Mr. Hurd's help, for I am a good business woman. And don't make too heroic resolves just now. If you must earn your living, some of us will see that it is done in ways in which your sweetness, cleverness, and delicacy will not be wasted. But I should try very hard not to be pushed out into a world unfit for women to fight in. And don't forget how much is left, how much you are blessed in yourselves--I know you do remember it--and be sure you are going to be perfectly happy again. Dear little girls, I'm crying as I write, but that is because I love you so much, and am so sorry. We won't let you do anything too bitter, and I know how splendidly you are meeting trouble, because I know your dear, good mother, and how truly well you have been taught. Tell my old friend I am coming to her in the morning--to refuse me if she likes, but I hope to comfort her. Good night, my poor little chickens, out in your first storm. There is sunshine ahead, but I wish that I could gather you all under my wings. "Your old, loving friend, "MARY VAN ALYN." The girls cried on one another's shoulders after they had read this warm message, full of loving comprehension of their needs and natures; but they were tears which did them good and sent them to bed refreshed and comforted. In the morning Bab started off early to see Ruth Wells, as she had planned. Ruth was a brisk little creature of the same age as Bab, who had been the Wyndhams' schoolmate for a short time, but who had met with misfortune too, and had left school and dropped almost entirely out of their lives; only Bab had kept up a desultory friendship with her. Ruth lived with her mother in a little flat--apartment is too dignified a word--not far from Morningside Heights. She was skilful with her needle, as at any work of her hands, and earned, by embroidering for two wholesale houses, enough to supplement sufficiently an income hardly large enough to pay their low rent. Bab had always wondered to find her so blithe and happy; to-day she came determined to solve, if possible, the secret of her content. As she pressed the electric button under the speaking-tube over which the name "Wells" shone on a narrow strip of brass, the latch of the front door clicked, and, pushing it open, Barbara mounted the three flights of stairs and rang the bell by the door at their head. Ruth herself answered the summons, and uttered an exclamation of pleasure on seeing Bab. "Oh, Babbie, dear, it does affect you, doesn't it?" she cried at once. "I saw an account of the Wyndham Iron Works failure in this morning's 'Times.'" "It affects us so much, Ruth, that I came up here the first thing to get your advice; you have had experience in coming down in the world. And I want to say just here," Barbara added, with heightened color, "that I wish I had been here oftener, and that Phyl and Jessamy had been with me. We never realized how lonely you must have been at first." And Bab looked around the little parlor with new interest. "Oh, I was so much younger than we are now when our troubles came that it was easier to bear," said Ruth, brightly. "Besides, I never had nearly as much as you to lose. And as to coming to see me, you have always been a good friend, Bab. We lived too far apart in every sense to meet often. When one is poor one cannot be intimate with those who are living luxuriously; it is so stupid for those who have fallen from past glories to expect old friendships kept up, and call old acquaintances snobs when they are not. It is impossible for extremes to meet often or agreeably, for one doesn't care to know the very wealthy; they are not half as interesting as those whose faculties have been sharpened--they don't know facts, and it is not their fault that they don't. Even you, Babbie, have not understood words in the sense I did when we have talked lately, and I saw it. Then a busy person hasn't time for people who don't know what _must_ means. It is far nicer to have friends who are busy too, and don't waste precious time. But goodness! You see, I talk just as fast as ever; and maybe you are not going to be poor, after all! Is the loss as heavy as the papers had it?" While Ruth had talked she had gotten off Bab's outer garments, and now seated herself at her embroidery frame, while Bab drew a chair in front of it and shook her head. "Quite as bad; worse, in fact," she said, and proceeded to tell Ruth the whole story. "Now, what I want to know, Ruth, is whether four persons can possibly live on two thousand a year--supposing we have that--until we can learn to be useful?" she said in conclusion. "Of course they can," said Ruth, with cheerful decision; she did not seem to think the case very bad. Taking a pencil and paper from the window-sill at her side, she began to reckon. "Do you think you could take a little flat and do your own work?" she asked. "Mercy, no!" cried Bab, in horror. "Why, we'd starve! We can't do anything; we must board." "That's a pity, for cheap boarding is unwholesome, vulgar, and generally horrid," said Ruth. "However, if you must, you must; but I'm sure you'll be taught better. Mama and I began that way, but we were soon cured. You can get two rooms, and pay--let's see--two in a room--say seven dollars each--twenty-eight dollars a week. Twenty-eight times fifty-two--fourteen hundred and fifty-six dollars a year. That leaves you five hundred for washing, clothes, possible doctor's bill, and so on." "Can we board for seven dollars apiece?" asked Bab, rather awed by Ruth's businesslike methods. "You can; it will be pretty horrid, but, honestly, I wouldn't spend more till you increase your income. Your mother isn't well, and you will need extra dainties for her, no matter where you board nor what you pay. Mama and I ran too close to our margin once, and then she got ill. It taught me a lesson I did not forget," said Ruth. "You have been very kind and interested, Ruth; and you have helped me a lot in more than advice," said Bab, rising to go. "I shouldn't mind being poor if I could be like you." "Well, I believe I have a talent for poverty; it has its good side," laughed Ruth. "And I'll tell you one thing, Babbie. Real troubles keep one from imagining affliction, and that is no small gain. I am happy because I am busy, and my mind is too full of my responsibilities and cares to let me worry over shadows; I haven't time to consider how I feel, even; and sometimes, when I suspect I might be a tiny bit ill if I thought about it, I go to work and drive it away. You don't know what a good thing it is for girls to have lots that must be done. Come see our flat," added brave Ruth, leading the way into a bedroom off the parlor. "This is mama's room; next it is mine. Then, here is the bath-room--you see, it is quite large--for a flat! And isn't this a nice little dining-room? Sunny too! And here is the kitchen. Mama, this is Barbara Wyndham." Mrs. Wells was bending over a double boiler set on the gas-range; she was plainly dressed in black, shielded by a large apron. She lifted a sweet, well-bred face to smile at Bab, and held out a delicate, daintily formed hand to greet her, with no apology for her employment. "The maid's room is our store-room, for we do our own work, with a woman coming in to wash and iron and sweep. Now, isn't this a nice flat? And we pay only twenty-eight dollars a month for it!" cried Ruth, triumphantly. Bab looked at the rooms, as they were shown to her, with newly perceptive eyes. Everything was of the plainest, yet so refined and dainty it could but be pretty. She began to suspect there were many things in life to learn which would not be unpleasant knowledge. She wondered, coming from the spacious rooms of her home, how Ruth and her mother managed to move about without seriously damaging their anatomy; the chambers, with the furniture in them, looked hardly larger than a good-sized napkin. But Ruth was so proud of it all, so unconscious of any defects in her home, that Bab could only envy her, though the tiny box of a place did look rather meager in her eyes, and Ruth worked hard all day to maintain it. "Thank you again, Ruth," she said, as her friend hugged her at the head of the stairs, letting the pity which she had not dared express show in the warmth of the embrace and the tears in her eyes as she kissed her. "I'm coming often, please, for advice and courage. You have already shown me that I need not fear. I suspect our first additional revenue will come from the sale of my book, 'How to be Happy Though Ruined,' illustrated by Ruth Wells." CHAPTER III WAYS AND MEANS Events moved swiftly for the Wyndhams, impelled by the force of necessity. The trust company that had made the loan to Mr. Abbott which had been secured by Mrs. Wyndham's house, learning of the failure of the corporation and that it was unable to meet its indebtedness, fell back on its security, and seized the house so unfortunately pledged to it. Although Mrs. Wyndham was prepared for this inevitable result of her fatal confidence in Mr. Abbott, it came upon her like a bewildering blow that her house was hers no longer. This, and the fact that the expense of running such an immense establishment would make ruinous inroads on her slender principal in a few weeks, determined her upon hastening her movements and quitting as soon as possible the home she loved, taking up an existence which seemed to her, as she tried to picture it, a horrible nightmare in which she must die if she did not waken. It was no more difficult for her true friends to mislead Mrs. Wyndham kindly in business matters than it had been for her false friend to defraud her. Mr. Hurd and Mrs. Van Alyn combined to take advantage of her ignorance of affairs, to her profit. It was a bad time of year for a sale, as Mr. Hurd had said; but it was of paramount importance that the painful severing of old ties should be made quickly, not only because it was necessary to begin to receive an income immediately, but in order to avoid the torture of keeping the Wyndhams' troubles an open wound. To all those whom she hoped the news might interest, Mrs. Van Alyn sent notices that the pictures were to be sold. Collectors and dealers came not only from the city, but from Boston and Philadelphia, for Mr. Wyndham had been well known for the value of his art treasures. Offers were made for the pictures as they hung on the walls, as well as for the marbles and bronzes; on the whole, the prices were fair, considering that it was a forced sale, with no time margin to allow the owners opportunity to do better. At least this method saved the commission on an auction sale, which had to be added to net profits in estimating them. The horses brought an excellent price; they were young, perfectly matched, and spirited, yet gentle. Parting from them was perhaps the hardest pang Barbara had to endure. Castor and Pollux were really her friends--as, indeed, any animal she came in contact with was sure to be. But she derived a grain of comfort from the promise, which she went personally to obtain from their new owner, that even if they began to break down he would never allow them to be sold into hardship--a promise which, it is to be hoped, was kept for the sake of the girl who had tried to protect the creatures she loved. Mrs. Van Alyn persuaded Mrs. Wyndham to come to her for the final two weeks of her nominal ownership of the house. It would be less painful, she thought, if the poor lady could pass its threshold for the last time, shutting the door on everything as she had loved it, rather than remain during the dismantling, to see profane hands ruthlessly dragging from their places the mementos of her happy marriage and the childhood of her daughters. Accordingly, one warm, sunny morning, Mrs. Van Alyn's rotund horses drew up at the door, and Mrs. Wyndham, looking very frail and newly widowed under her long veil, came slowly down the stairs, leaning on Jessamy's arm. She had made a painful pilgrimage to each room, pausing at certain spots, laying her hand lingeringly on the furniture, and kneeling long before the great brown-leather chair which had been her husband's, her face hidden on its glossy seat, which was wet with her tears when she raised her head. At each door she stopped, rested her cheek a moment against the casement, and kissed the dark wood as lovingly as a Jew would kiss the _mazuzah_ on the casement; for this had been her home, a sacred temple, and the law of love was written on its door-posts. It was a long and weary task to get the poor creature to the end of her stations of sorrow, and the three girls, as well as she, were white and faint when they reached the hall. But finally Mrs. Wyndham came forth on the door-step, and for the last time the heavy mahogany door swung close, shutting out its mistress forever. Jessamy drove with her mother to the kind friend who waited her with loving welcome, but Phyllis and Bab sobbed long and tempestuously on the stairs after Mrs. Wyndham had gone, and black Violet and blacker Sally, with Irish Ellen, the laundress, on the basement stairs, sobbed with them. That afternoon the work of stripping the house was begun. The pictures were boxed for their various owners, vans were coming and going, taking the furniture to auction-rooms, and all was melancholy confusion. Mrs. Van Alyn and Phyllis took charge of the painful work. Mrs. Van Alyn quietly set aside some of the dearer mementos of past happiness not too valuable to be kept out of the sale, to be sent to a store-room she had taken for the purpose. Nothing splendid was retained; only the pictures in the girls' rooms, their own special pet chairs, desks, tables, Bab's piano, and Mr. Wyndham's library chair. Mrs. Van Alyn foresaw and tried to provide for the day when, in one way or another, some of the Wyndhams would again have a home in which this flotsam and jetsam from their early shipwreck would be welcome. Not even Phyllis knew that their kind friend was doing this, though she unconsciously furnished the information which guided Mrs. Van Alyn in making her selections. It took but a week to undo the work of twenty years. Mr. Wyndham had bought this house on his marriage, and his family had known no other home; yet by the Saturday following the Monday on which Mrs. Wyndham had gone away from it, it was barren of everything except a bonnet and shawl hanging on a hook behind the kitchen door, the property of the woman who had come in to sweep out the empty rooms. Jessamy, Phyllis, and Barbara roamed through the house as their mother had done, like her, bidding it farewell in every corner, listening, half frightened, to the echo of their footsteps on the bare floors. Their power to feel had been spent in the preceding days of their painful tasks; utterly weary in body and mind, they closed the door of their dismantled home behind them, and passed down the steps into their new existence. It had been agreed at first among the Wyndhams that they would not accept Mrs. Van Alyn's invitation to Mount Desert for the summer; but Mrs. Wyndham was so ill with utter prostration of nerves and strength, and the girls themselves so unfit to encounter any further trials, that the question decided itself otherwise. They gladly availed themselves of another kindness from the devoted friend who was an antidote against heavy doses of the poisonous bitterness of finding there were many the warmth of whose affection was much tempered by change of fortune. The summer at Mount Desert sent the Wyndhams back to New York fortified in mind and body to meet their fate. Phyllis especially was much cheered by the fact that she had made a friend in Maine in the person of an old lady from Boston, who had been quite charmed by her, of whom she always spoke as "the dear little girl," and to whom she promised a position as reader and companion to herself at any time that fortune failed Phyllis in New York or that her family could spare her. The sale of the Wyndhams' effects--silver, glass, jewelry, as well as pictures, marbles, furniture, and horses--had brought but a trifle over twenty thousand dollars. Fortunately Mrs. Wyndham disapproved of bills, so there was but little outstanding indebtedness to discharge before investing the remnant of their fortune. But even at six per cent. it could not yield more than half of the sum they had calculated on having, and the once lightly valued legacy to the girls from their unknown great-aunt Amelia was required to bring their little capital up to the point of returning them two thousand a year. The first step to be made by these novices in the ungentle art of living was to find a boarding-place. This undertaking was assumed by Jessamy and Phyllis, aided by Ruth Wells, who knew better than they did what to seek and what to avoid. The limitations of their purse defined the boundaries of their search; only places where low prices obtained were open to the Wyndhams--a fact in itself difficult to master at first; and the poor little pilgrims up Poverty Hill shrank from the mere exterior of some of the houses, the advertisements of which they had cut out and pasted on a sheet of paper, making a "vertebrate" like Mrs. March's in Howells's story. At last they summoned courage to ring the bell of an old-fashioned, high-stoop house in a quiet down-town street. "What a queer smell, Ruth!" murmured Phyllis, sniffing the air critically and speaking low, because the sight and sound of some one moving about, opening and shutting drawers in the back parlor, were distinctly visible and audible through the plain places in the pattern of the ground-glass panels of the folding doors. "Boarding-house!" said Ruth, laconically. "It's the regular odor; ghosts of Christmases--past Christmas dinners, I mean--Fourth of July, and no particular days besides." At this moment the doors slid back, revealing a folding-bed, let down and unmade, and a gaunt figure in a worn black silk skirt and lavender waist stood confessed. "We are looking for board for four ladies--a widow with two daughters and a niece," said Ruth, making herself spokeswoman. "You take boarders, I believe? We saw your advertisement in yesterday's 'Herald.'" "We receive a few guests," replied the gaunt person, correctively. "We prefer gentlemen." "Yes; we knew that on general principles," said Ruth, easily; "but these are ladies. What rooms have you?" "A hall bedroom on the second and two square rooms on the third," returned the gaunt one. "Will you look at them?" "If you please," said Jessamy, and they were conducted up the dingy stairs to the third floor. The floors were covered alike with red Brussels carpet; the wall-papers--gray with gilt figures in one, brown with red roses in the other--were alike tarnished and stained. A marble-topped bureau of black walnut, a bedstead, and three chairs, with one rocker, all of the same expressionless wood, furnished each room. "We could never put up with this, Ruth; don't delay here," whispered Jessamy, but Ruth shook her head. "What do you ask for these rooms?" she inquired. "Twenty dollars a week for each, two in a room," replied the gaunt person. "Thank you; they would not answer," said Jessamy. "Why, I should die here, or go mad of odors and ugliness," she added for Phyllis's private ear. "We might consider thirty-five a week, as it is one family," suggested the gaunt person at the door. "No, thanks," said Phyllis. "Only fancy! Seven dollars more than we mean to pay, and for what? Are all boarding-houses like this, Ruth?" "Not in detail; similar in genus. I tell you, you would be far better off in your own little flat, cooking your own little meals on your own little gas-range, in your own little spider. However, don't lose heart at the first one; there are degrees of badness," laughed Ruth. The second attempt was made further up town, in a street among the Thirties. The parlor into which the girls were ushered was more cheerful here than in the first case, but was furnished in a style that jarred on the nerves through the eyes, just as grating slate-pencils jar them through the ears. A portly person, with a much jetted front, sailed into the room, smiling affably. "We take a few guests," she said in reply to the inquiry for board, precisely as the gaunt person down town had replied, adding, like her, that she "preferred gentlemen." "I have the back parlor on this floor and a hall bedroom on the third vacant just now, though we rarely have a vacancy," she said graciously. "You might manage with a folding-bed in the large room and the hall bedroom." "And your prices?" asked Phyllis. "Still, it doesn't matter; we must have two square rooms near each other." "I should charge eighteen dollars for two in the back parlor, and I would let the hall bedroom to two for fourteen--my table board is six dollars apiece without a room," said she of the jets. "No; we shall pay only fourteen for each of the rooms we are looking for," said Jessamy, whose courage was rising. "Oh, I couldn't consider it," said the landlady, sternly. "Still, there are two lovely rooms on the top floor you might have for that. The furnace does not go up there, so they would be heated by a stove. You wouldn't mind looking after your own fires?" "I should mind my mother going up so many flights; still, we will look at the rooms," said Jessamy. The long climb to the top of the house brought them to two rooms together, though not connected; sunny, rather cheerful, and, though plainly furnished, not so ugly as the first ones. "We are not willing to go up so high, but we will let you know if we consider them further," said Jessamy. "I should require references as to respectability," said the landlady, firmly. "I am glad to hear it; so should I," said Jessamy, and departed, cutting short a list of distinguished people who had once boarded there. Three days of weary search brought forth no better results. The main difference in the places the discouraged girls visited was that in one house the stairs went up on the right side of the hall, in another on the left; that in one the furniture of the rooms was black walnut, in another oak--when it was maple or mahogany it was beyond the Wyndhams' limit of price. These days taught the three girls--for Barbara had joined the others--more of life than their entire years so far had shown them, and the fruit of this tree of knowledge was bitter indeed. They were unable to find anything within their means better than the upper rooms in the West Thirty ---- Street house, and decided to risk the four flights--five including the basement--and the dubious prospect of the care of their own fires. Having decided, they proceeded to make the best of what each felt in her heart to be a very bad bargain, with the courage each possessed in different forms. There were two days intervening between that on which the new boarding-place was engaged and the day on which it was to be "infested," as Bab called taking possession. That young person assumed the task of beautifying their unattractive quarters, nor would she permit any of the others to see her improvements, but hammered her thumbs and strained her unaccustomed arms putting up curtains, shelves, casts, and photographs unassisted, in order to "usher her family into a bower of bliss" when it moved in. On the afternoon before this event, Barbara came along Thirty ---- Street from Sixth Avenue. Her arms were full of flower-pots--two filled them--and a boy came behind with a basket containing six more. Bab had not been able to resist the temptation to invest in plants to fill her mother's sunny window and make the room a little more cheerful. She hurried down the street, and paused at the foot of the steps long enough to let her listless attendant squire catch up with her. She had no hand to give her skirts, but she sprang up the steps, regardless of the danger of tripping. At the same instant the front door opened and a cocker spaniel rushed out, barking wildly and throwing himself downward with that apparent utter disregard of whether head or tail went first, and of anything which might be in his path, characteristic of a young and blissful little dog. [Illustration: "A YOUNG MAN DASHED DOWN THE STEPS INTO THE RUINS."] He flung himself down, and Barbara stepped aside; her balance was uncertain, and her skirts unmanageable by reason of her laden arms. She tripped, fell, and flower-pots, dog, and girl rolled crashing and scattering dirt in all directions into the boy and basket two steps lower, ending in a tangle on the sidewalk. From the doorway a horrified voice cried: "Good heavens! Nixie!" and a young man dashed down the steps into the ruins. "Are you hurt?" he cried anxiously, as he fished Barbara out of the wreck. Nixie had already slunk out from under, and was wagging his tail deprecatingly, with glances of mingled shame and amazement at his master. "I think I am," said Barbara, raising her head and trying to speak cheerfully. The young man replaced her hat--it had fallen over her eyes--and revealed a woebegone little face. Earth plastered the saucy chin, one cheek was cut, and blood trickled from the bridge of the poor little tilted nose, making a paste wherever the loam from the flower-pots had spattered, and this was nearly everywhere. Barbara's hair was coming down, her hat was shapeless, and her eyes tearful from the smarting wounds. "By Jove, you're a wreck! It's a shame!" cried the young man. "I'll whip Nixie." "You'll do nothing of the sort!" said Barbara, with spirit. "How did he know I was coming up--coming up like a flower--at that moment? You might as well whip me. Nobody is to blame, and I'll be all right when I've washed and sewed and plastered, and done a few other things." "Well, you're plucky," said the youth, admiringly. "I'm a doctor in embryo--full fledged next June. I'll take you in and fix you up. Do you--you don't live here?" "We shall to-morrow; I'm a new boarder," said Barbara. "Oh, I hope my plants aren't broken! Can they be re-potted? We've become poor, and I ought not to have bought them. Why on earth doesn't that boy get up? Is he killed?" she demanded, realizing that her companion in misery was still lying, with his head in the basket, under a debris of flower-pots. "It's why _in_ earth, rather," laughed the medical student. "Here, you boy, are you alive? You're buried all right! Get up." The listless boy gathered himself slowly together. "Well, I'll be darned!" he said. "You'll have to be," cried the doctor, sitting down to laugh, and pointing to the rent across the shoulders of the inert one's jacket. "What ailed that dog? Did he have a fit?" drawled the boy, scowling at Nixie, who slunk behind Barbara self-consciously. "He wasn't a dog; he was a cat-apult," gasped the doctor. "Oh, please help me into the house," cried Barbara, half laughing, half crying. Several people had paused to gaze, grinning sympathetically at the scene. "I beg your pardon! What an idiot to keep you standing here!" cried the medical student, jumping up. "Here, hustle these plants into your basket," he added to the boy. "They're not broken; we can fix them up all right. Where's my key?--there you are! Walk in. Get into the house, Nixie, you crazy pup; you've lost your walk. Leave those plants in the hall, boy, and rush back to your employer and tell him you want as many pots as you had at first, and a bag of dirt, and hurry back with it. Now, Mrs. Black--Mrs. Black, where are you?" "Here," said the landlady, emerging from the rear. "Why, Miss Wyndham, what has happened?" "Introduce us, please; we met on the steps," said Barbara's new acquaintance. "Miss Wyndham--Doctor Leighton," said the bewildered Mrs. Black, automatically. "Happy to have the honor, Miss Wyndham. There was a mix-up on the steps, Mrs. Black; there's some of it there yet. Let me have some warm water and a sponge, please. Miss Wyndham, take off your hat and have your face washed," said the unabashed boy. "Not by you," said Barbara. "Precisely. I'm almost a doctor, and I'm going to see that no dirt is left in your wounds to scar you. Don't be foolish, Miss Wyndham; it's not exactly a ceremonious occasion." Barbara submitted with no further demur, and soon her face was adorned with strips of court-plaster laid on in a plaid pattern. "Shall I be scarred?" she asked, surveying the crisscross lines on the bridge of her nose. "Not a bit," said Doctor Leighton, cheerfully. "Mrs. Black might give you a cup of tea to brace you up." "Yes," said Mrs. Black, without enthusiasm. "No, thanks; I hate tea, and I'll be all right. There's the boy back with the new pots," said Barbara. "Let me help you get the plants in, and I'll settle with the boy, because it's all Nixie's fault," said the young doctor. "Not a word! Get to work, Miss Wyndham." He placed papers on the floor in the rear hall, apparently oblivious to Mrs. Black's icy disapproval, which inexperienced Barbara found oppressive. "My father and your father were friends," said the young fellow, packing the earth around a begonia. "I knew you were coming here to board, and I know about the hard blow you've had. It's a shame, and it's all the fault of that scoundrel Abbott." "Oh, how nice that your father knew papa! That is almost like being friends ourselves," said Barbara, simply. "Yes, it's dreadful for mama to be poor, and for Jessamy. Phyl and I are not going to mind it so much." "Is Phil your brother?" "No; Phyllis it is; she's my cousin, only she's just as much my sister as Jessamy, for she has always lived with us. I'm a year younger than she and Jessamy. Jessamy's perfectly beautiful and princessfied, and Phyllis is the most unselfish blessing in the world. I'm only Barbara." "And I'm only Tom; I'm not a doctor yet. It's awfully jolly you're coming here. Mrs. Black gone? Yes. There isn't any one in the house I care to know; the young people are not my sort. I hope you'll forgive Nixie and me enough to speak to us once in a while," said Tom, getting up and dusting his knees. "Oh, we shall want to talk to you; Nixie is such a nice dog," laughed Barbara. "Only Nixie? Well, love my dog, love--oh, it's the other way about! Never mind, though; we can improve old saws. Where are your rooms?" "First floor from the Milky Way," laughed Bab. "We hate to have mama climb so far, but we couldn't afford better rooms." Tom Leighton looked down on the swollen, patched little face with brotherly kindness; respect and pity were in his voice as he said gently: "You will make any room bright and homelike. I see why you took your tumble down the steps so well. You are brave in falling, Miss Barbara." Barbara stooped suddenly to pat Nixie, hiding her wounded face in his glossy curls. "I'm not always brave," she said huskily. "I am ashamed to think so much about my beautiful room and home. I feel so little and lost in this boarding-house." "Poor little woman!" said Tom Leighton. "Try to feel you have one friend in it. I have two sisters, and it was lonely for me when I left home. Good-by; we shall meet to-morrow." They shook hands, feeling like old friends; and Nixie sat up to shake hands too, though the dignity of his farewell was much damaged by a surreptitious lick of his quick red tongue on Bab's chin. Tom departed, whistling, to give Nixie the walk the accident had postponed; he found himself seeing, all down the street, a tilted little nose adorned with court-plaster, and brown eyes, wistful like Nixie's. "She's plucky and simple and frank; just the girl to be a fellow's good chum," he thought. "What luck they're coming to the Blackboard!"--Tom's name for his residence. Bab finished her tasks, and went home with glowing accounts of the little dog who had undone her and the jolly boy who had patched her up. "There are two nice things in our new home," she said; "and I believe we'll be happy, in spite of fate." CHAPTER IV MAKING THE BEST OF IT "I don't know where to put another thing," said Mrs. Wyndham, pushing aside a hat-box to sit beside it on the rocker, and casting a despairing glance from the shallow closet, already full, to the floor, covered with the heterogeneous contents of two trunks, in the midst of which Barbara was sitting. It had been decided that Bab, as the liveliest member of the family, should share her mother's room; and a compact was drawn up solemnly pledging Barbara to keep a sharp lookout for symptoms of "blues" in her mother, and, if necessary, take as vigorous measures against them as the immortal Jerry Cruncher used to prevent his wife "flopping." The Wyndhams had taken possession of their new quarters but two hours earlier, and forceful measures against slight despondency were not considered yet in order. A scream from the next room prevented Bab replying to her mother, and Nixie bounded through the open door, triumphantly worrying a slipper. He recognized Barbara, and dropped his prize to bestow several rapid kisses on the nose he had been the means of damaging before Bab, from her disadvantage-point on the floor, could stop him. Tom Leighton appeared immediately behind his dog, calling Nixie with no result, for Bab had her arms around the wriggling black bit of enthusiasm, hugging him hard and begging his master to let him stay. "Mama, this is the doctor who repaired me so nicely. Doctor Leighton--my mother," said Barbara. "Please don't think me intrusive, Mrs. Wyndham," said Tom, stepping forward to take the delicate hand extended to him. "I am the son of John Leighton, a friend of your husband, and I wanted to ask if I could be of use in getting you in order. I'm a jack-of-all-trades, and have been boarding long enough to have learned dodges." "I remember your father," said Mrs. Wyndham, cordially. "It is very pleasant to find a friend among strangers. I don't see what you can do, unless you can build a closet. This tiny cubby Bab and I must share is already overflowing, yet just look!" And Mrs. Wyndham made a comprehensive gesture toward the littered floor. "I suppose we've too many clothes, but we don't dare give away one thing, because we may never be able to get any more, and we're going to buy patent patterns and make over this stock until we're old and gray. I expect that to be soon, however, if I have to sew," said Bab, scrambling to her feet and tossing up Nixie's purloined slipper for him to catch. "A dog broke and entered--entered any way--and stole Jessamy's slipper--oh, I beg pardon!" said Phyllis, stopping short in the doorway at the unexpected apparition of Tom. "My niece, Miss Phyllis Wyndham--and my elder daughter Jessamy, Doctor Leighton," added Mrs. Wyndham, as Jessamy followed Phyllis. "I came to ask if you had any idea of what Jessamy and I could do with our things, auntie," said Phyllis. "We haven't begun to make an impression on the room, yet the closet and drawers are full." "Bab and I are in the same plight; how do people get on in such narrow space?" sighed Mrs. Wyndham. "You'll have to have a wigwam," said Tom. "A wigwam! That would have no closet at all; besides, where could we build it in New York?" laughed Phyllis. "In that corner; I'll make it," said Tom. "It's a corner shelf, with hooks in the under side and a curtain around it. It's the only kind of closet I have, for my room is a hall bedroom. You can keep things dust won't hurt in there. Then you want a divan--a woven-wire cot-bed, with the legs cut off, fastened by hinges to a box made to fit it. We could upholster it between us. It would be larger than the ready-made divans, and hold more; you'll be surprised to see what it holds. Then, if one of you were ill, it would be useful as a couch." "There spoke the doctor," said Jessamy. "A couch is always useful. I suppose we shall have to have a trunk in each room besides," she added ruefully. "If you could bring yourself to part with that table, you could set the trunk--the flat-topped one--in the window, and I could case it in with white pine; we'd cover it all over with felt, and it wouldn't be a very bad-looking book-stand," said Tom. "Well, you are a genius!" cried Bab, in open admiration. Phyllis sang softly under her breath, to the tune of "St. Patrick's Day in the Morning": "All hail to the doctor who seems to be able To mend up a nose, or to make up a table! We gladly would cheer him, but that it seems risky, For cheers in a boarding-house may be too frisky." "Well, I never!" laughed Tom. "Say, was that--of course it had to be--improvised?" "Oh, Phyl is a genius," said Jessamy, proudly. "One of these days her name will be in all the magazines, and at last in the encyclopedia." "And maybe in oblivion," added Phyl. "What time do you--do we dine, Doctor Leighton?" "At six; I suppose you want to get ready. It is your first appearance in a boarding-house dining-room; you must make a strong impression." "Yes, and only look at my court-plaster! Nixie, your first impression was too strong," groaned Bab. "You mustn't let Nixie bother you; he'll try to be friendly," warned Tom. "Let him, and his master, too," said Mrs. Wyndham, heartily. "You will both cheer us, and I appreciate your kindness very fully." "Not a bit kindness, ma'am," said Tom, promptly. "I tell you, you don't know how forlorn a boy is alone in a boarding-house. It does me good to get a home breath again." "We'll help each other if we can," said Mrs. Wyndham, gently. "You can't be more than a year or so older than my girls, and a nice boy will be a welcome addition to storm-tossed lassies' lives." "Not to mention Nixie; _dogs_ are so dear," said Bab, with a slight, naughty emphasis on "dogs." Tom and Nixie departed, followed by praise from all the Wyndhams. Fifteen minutes later a gong sounded through the house, and Mrs. Wyndham and the girls made their long descent into the basement. Two tables ran the full length of the dining-room, at the first of which the newcomers took their places. A severe old lady, presented to them as Mrs. Hardy, sat at its head, beside Mrs. Wyndham. She demanded--and so received--more attention than any one else in the house; her favorite theme was her past splendors and the dignity of her acquaintances. Opposite Mrs. Wyndham sat a big, kindly-looking man, who said he was "just in" from a Western trip, thus revealing himself a traveling salesman. He was pathetically fond of his two overgrown, ill-mannered children, and deprecating toward his peevish wife, who, with the elegance brought from her early apprenticeship to a milliner, assumed superiority to her less pretentious husband, thus keeping him in wholesome abeyance and general readiness to endow her with ornaments. Three over-dressed, painfully vivacious girls in a row completed the line opposite the Wyndhams, with a big man at the other end of the table, who combated with a sort of fury every proposition made by any one else. Beside him sat a widow who was a bookkeeper in a department store, and who looked utterly worn out and anemic. Two school-teachers, middle-aged and drab of complexion, with the aggressive air of women who had from girlhood fought the world to maintain a foothold in it, filled in the line between the wilted widow and Jessamy. The girls were too young to realize all that these melancholy types stood for, but their poor mother felt, with utter heartsickness, that this was the fate of those whom poverty made homeless and forced to struggle for existence. The second table was filled with men of varying degrees of youth, solitary and unattached, some of whom lived under the roof, but the majority came in from outside for meals only, thus belonging to the class designated as "table boarders." This table almost to a man stared at Mrs. Wyndham and her three charges, especially at Jessamy. Tom Leighton sat there, and Phyllis, who was quickest of the three to seize a situation, saw him flush with annoyance, and guessed that they, and particularly Jessamy's beauty, were the subject of impertinent comment. Bab was half amused and wholly excited by the new experience; there was something she liked in rubbing elbows with such a singular world. But the sense of humor of all the others failed them, and they ate but lightly, pecking from the individual vegetable-dishes, which resembled birds' bath-tubs, with not much more appetite than the birds themselves would have had. Jessamy heard a loud whisper asking for "a knockdown to the beauty" as she smiled and bowed to Tom Leighton in leaving the room, and Phyllis was stopped by the three resplendent maidens, who introduced themselves as May Daly, Fanny Harmon, and Daisy Heimberger. "You just come?" they asked--it seemed to Phyllis they all talked at once. "Say, ain't your sister handsome? My, I think she's simply great! Too bad the other one got cut so; must be her who fell up the steps yest'day when the young doc was goin' out. Mis' Black was tellin' us last night. Funny way to meet! Do you know any of the other young gentlemen? They're awful nice, but I s'pose we won't have any chance now you've come!" This with a giggle that showed doubt of her own prediction. "They take us girls to the theater real often Sat'day nights--not doc, though; do you know him?" "Mrs. Wyndham's husband and his father were friends," said Phyllis, prudently. It was the first time in her short life it had occurred to her to explain her actions. "Well, come see us; we've got a room with two beds on the third floor." And Phyllis noticed, as they nodded good night, that each wore two buttons bearing photographs of the other two members of their trio. "Very likely they are nice in their way--poor things!" she thought; "and share comforts and sorrows--but, oh, dear!" And she followed her family sadly up the stairs. Their own rooms looked very peaceful and refined to the Wyndhams when they got back to them, and Phyllis and Barbara felt comforted when the door was closed behind them; but Jessamy sank into a chair in blank despondency, and her mother could not smile at Bab's wildest sallies. "First aid to the injured!" cried a cheery voice, and Ruth Wells burst into the gloom--"like an arc-light," Barbara said, jumping up to hug her rapturously. "No, don't; I've tacks and a hammer here," said Ruth, struggling free. "I knew you had no closets, or none worth calling one, so I came to show you how to make a charity." "A what?" asked Jessamy. "A charity; it covers a multitude of things, you see," laughed Ruth. "You take a board--we can get one down-stairs, probably--saw it off to the right length, and put it in a corner. Then you drive hooks--" "In the under side--we know," interrupted Phyllis. "Only Doctor Leighton says it is a wigwam." "Mama, let me call that boy; we'll have a bee--a be-autiful time, too," cried Bab, springing up. "I wonder if I could get him." And she looked wistfully out of the door. By a strange chance, Tom's door happened to be open. "Do you want me?" he called, seeing the eager little face he had patched up so carefully. "Yes. Ruth Wells has come, and we're going to make a wigwam, only she calls it a charity, because, she says, it covers a multitude of things," said Bab. "Nixie too; come, Nix." "I don't know who Ruth Wells is, but we shall be glad to come," responded Tom, with alacrity. In five minutes the little room was ringing with fun. The "charitable wigwam"--Phyllis's compromise on the name--could not be made for lack of boards, but the young people managed to cover up the dismal impressions of their first experience of the bleak side of life, and that was making a real charity, as Jessamy pointed out in bidding Ruth good night. The wigwam was made in the end, the divan too, and the Wyndhams began to learn to adjust themselves to the new conditions. Tom had become almost one of themselves, and Nixie a necessity and no longer a luxury, as Bab noted. Tom was such a bright, honest, boyish young creature that no greater piece of good fortune could well have befallen the girls in their new trouble than his friendship--a fact their mother recognized gratefully. As to Tom himself, the motherly kindness of Mrs. Wyndham and the sweet, frank companionship of the girls were a boon to the young fellow, who had loved his own mother and sisters well. Bab and he were the best comrades, but he admired beautiful Jessamy, and was not less proud of her than the girls were; and Phyllis he regarded from the first with affectionate reverence, as the embodiment of perfect maidenhood. Winter was coming on, and for the first time in their lives the Wyndhams tried to make old answer for new in the matter of garments. "Not a penny must be spent this season," declared Jessamy, sternly. "A year hence we may earn new clothes." All the summer garments had been laid away in the new divan. "Never throw away a winter thing in the spring, nor a summer thing in the fall," advised Ruth, that little woman wise in ways and means. "You can't tell how anything looks out of its season, nor what you may want. Set up a scrap-box, and tuck everything into it; it's ten to one you'll be grateful for the very thing you thought least hopeful. Many a time I've all but hugged an old faded ribbon because its one bright part was just the right shade and length to line a collar." The scrap-box was therefore established, and easily filled from a stock not yet depleted. Jessamy's artistic talents developed in the direction of hats. Ruth taught her to take the long wrists of light suede gloves which were past wearing, and stretch them over a frame for the foundation of especially pretty hats. Jessamy made three hats, one for each of them, with crowns of old glove wrists and velvet puffs around the brims; and in the new scrap-box she found quills and ribbons and flowers to trim them, so that all three were different, yet each "a James Dandy," according to Tom Leighton's authoritative verdict. Dressmaking was a more serious matter, but the three Wyndhams essayed it with the courage of ignorance. Ruth brought down mysterious brown tissue-paper patterns--"perforated to confuse the innocent," Bab said--and announced that she had come for a dress parade. Her friends were still too unversed in being poor to realize that when she came to them Ruth was sacrificing her own good for theirs, since her time meant money, and little Ruth's pockets jingled only when she spent long days at her needle. "Get out all your last year's glories," commanded Ruth, perched on the footboard of Jessamy's and Phyllis's bed. "That's a pretty dark-blue cloth suit; whose is that?" "Phyllis's; it was nice, but she tried it on the other day, and it's too full in the skirt," said Jessamy. "I don't believe I'd dare touch anything so tailor-made; if we rip it we shall never be able to give it the same finish. I'll tell you, Phyllis; we can take out the gathers and lay a box-pleat in the back; that will make it look flatter and more in the present style," cried Ruth, with sudden illumination. "Now isn't it true that there's good blown to some one on all winds? If you didn't have stoves in your rooms, you wouldn't have any place to heat irons; and don't I know the impossibility of getting a flatiron from the lower regions when one is boarding?" "Infernal regions do you mean, when you say 'lower'?" inquired Tom, from the doorway. "Go away! This is a feminine occasion; no boys allowed," cried Ruth. "Mysteries of Isis?" suggested Tom. "I only want a buttonhole sewed up; wouldn't the goddess allow that?" "Yes," said Phyllis, holding out her hand for the collar Tom was waving appealingly. "It is rather in the line of the service about to begin in this temple. We are going into dressmaking." "You'll succeed; you can do anything," said Tom, watching Phyllis's fingers as she twitched the thread in a scientific manner to draw the gaping buttonhole together. "Those laundry people apparently dry collars by hanging them upon crowbars thrust through the buttonholes. Couldn't I help with your dressmaking? I know there are bones in waists, and maybe I could set them." The four girls groaned. "Such a pale, feeble little jokelet!" sighed Bab. "Take it to the hospital to be measured for crutches." "Here's your collar. Run away and play with the other little boys; we're busy. By and by, if you're good, we may let you take out bastings," said Phyllis. "Jupiter! That sounds familiar," sighed Tom. "My mother used to say just that when I was seven. Much obliged for the collar. When you want me for the bastings sing out, and I'll pardon your impertinence in consideration of service rendered." And Tom disappeared. "Phyl will do very well with the blue, then," said Ruth, resuming practicalities. "What are your prospects, Other Two?" "I had this gray, and I loved it," said Jessamy, smoothing a chinchilla-trimmed jacket fondly. "I think it isn't hurt at all, and I shouldn't dare touch it." "There's a spot on the back where you leaned up against something greasy, but French chalk will make it all right," said Ruth, issuing her mandates from her perch like a mounted general at the head of an army. "Mine was brown, with mink," said Barbara, sadly; "but I spilled something, sometime--I don't know what or when--on the front of the skirt, and I don't see what you can do with it; I haven't a smidge of the goods." "A what?" murmured Ruth, absent-mindedly, wrinkling her brow over the problem. "Tailor-made or not, we shall have to rip that skirt and put in a breadth of something else; and it will never look right--No, I have it!" she cried, interrupting herself and sliding to her feet with a triumphant little shout. "Eureka, Miss Archimedes! What is it?" asked Phyllis. "Braid!" cried Ruth. "We'll get narrowest silk soutache--Jessamy shall draw a design--and you shall braid the entire front breadth of your skirt, Bab, resolving with each stitch to be neater in the future." "I never saw such cleverness!" cried Jessamy, admiringly, while Bab made a wry face over the prospect. "And now for house wear," said Ruth. "Here are some pretty light silks; the skirts are good, but the waists are worn out." "I thought, perhaps, we could make fancy waists of the skirts to wear with our cloth gowns," said Phyllis, doubtfully, turning over a heap of light colors. "Could? Why, of course we can. Let's rip them now," said Ruth, whipping out her own little scissors with alacrity. The four pairs of hands made quick work of the ripping, and Ruth cut out three waists by the tissue-paper patterns she had brought, pinned and basted them together, and left her friends to carry out her instructions. Phyllis proved most adept at the new art; Jessamy succeeded fairly, but Bab had a dreadful time with her waist. Seams puckered and drew askew because of her reckless way of sewing them up in various widths, yet she felt aggrieved when the waist proved one-sided on trying on. And as to sleeves, Bab's would not go in with anything approaching civility and decorum. The poor child ripped, basted, tried on, ripped again, refusing all help in her proud determination to be independent, till her cheeks were purple, and she threw the waist down in despair and cried forlornly. Tom surprised her in this tempest, and laughed at her until she longed to flay him. Then, sincerely repentant for having aggravated her woes, he humbly begged her pardon, and took her out for a walk with Nixie to cool her cheeks and calm her ruffled nerves. When she returned, Phyllis had taken it upon herself to disregard her wishes, and had basted in the refractory sleeves for her, which, like everything else, had yielded to Phyllis's charm and gone meekly into place. From this point Bab's path was smooth before her, and the last of the three waists, the first attempt of the girls at practical work, was brought to a triumphant finish. There was real pleasure in using their wits in these things, the girls found; there was truly a bright side to poverty. But the ugly side remained--the jealousy of the three girls who were their opposites at table, as well as literally, and who disliked the Wyndhams for their difference in accent, manners, birth, for their unlikeness to themselves, for which neither side was to blame nor to praise. And Mrs. Wyndham was ailing, fretting her heart out over the present situation and her poor girls' future. And--hardest of all to bear--the landlady made them feel that she considered the rate of their board insufficient to remunerate her for the immense, though to them imperceptible, generosity with which she served them. But the most serious aspect of the anxieties closing in around the Wyndhams was that, in spite of all their prudence, money slipped away, laundry bills took on alarming proportions, and they had never dreamed how fast five-cent car fares could swell into as many dollars. Although they had taken care to make their expenditures come well within their income, they saw that there was not going to be enough to meet an emergency should it arise, and Jessamy and Phyllis talked till midnight many a night discussing how they could put their young shoulders to the wheel and join the great army of wage-earners. CHAPTER V PHYLLIS AND BARBARA ENTER THE LISTS Aunt Henrietta always stayed until November in her cottage near Marblehead. She said that she never enjoyed the ocean until she was alone with it, and Jessamy suggested afterward that it was a trifle hard on the ocean--a severe remark for Jessamy, whose genuinely high standards of good breeding forbade unkind comment on others--even on Aunt Henrietta, though she was trying. Immediately on her return to town, Mrs. Hewlett came to look up "her fallen kindred," as Barbara said. That young lady went down to the parlor to conduct her great-aunt to her mother. "It would make a lovely title for a Sunday-school book, wouldn't it?" she said, turning from the glass, where she had been inspecting the last faint trace of the mishap to her nose. "'Little Barbara's Upward Leading,' or 'Toward the Skies,' or 'Helped Upward,' or 'Mounting Heavenward,' or even simply 'Uplifted.'" "Barbara, I am ashamed of you!" said her mother, as severely as she could, while trying not to laugh. "Now, Bab, do be nice," pleaded Jessamy. "Nice! I'd like to know what could be nicer than to plan moral little titles like those?" said Bab, in an injured tone. "But don't worry; I'll be a sweet morsel when I get down there." "You look thinner," said Aunt Henrietta, when Barbara had delicately touched the unresponsive cheek offered her to kiss. "I _am_ thinner, aunt; we're none of us waxing fleshy. Black Sally's marketing and cooking seemed rather more comforting than our present fare," said Bab. "H'm! Where under heavens are your rooms?" asked Mrs. Hewlett. "Just there, Aunt Henrietta. Right under heavens--on the top floor," laughed Barbara. "Do you mean to say you have taken your delicate mother up all those flights?" demanded her great-aunt. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves." "What could we do, aunt?" asked Barbara, meekly, though her cheeks grew very red. "We were not able to make any boarding-house keeper give us better rooms at our price for mama's sake." "Do? You ought to be earning money--three great healthy girls--and Phyllis only a niece-in-law of your mother's into the bargain! I came to talk to you about this," said Mrs. Hewlett. "Please wait till we get up-stairs; I fancy there are always ears about here," said Bab, and led the way to their own quarters. "'Excelsior!' is our motto, aunt," she said, pausing at the head of the second flight, and finding malicious pleasure in her relative's labored breathing. "Well, Emily, the consequences of your imprudence are severe. I am sorry to find you thus; you don't look well," was Aunt Henrietta's greeting to Mrs. Wyndham. "Now, I want to get down to business without delay," she added, removing her splendid furs. "I suppose you are using your principal?" "On the contrary, our living, such as it is, comes well within the limits of our income," replied Mrs. Wyndham. "Really!" exclaimed Mrs. Hewlett, disappointed of the chance to find fault on that score, but swiftly rallying to another point of attack. "Then it is because you are living so wretchedly in order to keep these girls fine ladies. You always spoiled them, Emily; but your weakness really should have some limit. It is outrageous for you to be compelled to climb all these stairs, that a slender income may support four people. These girls should be a source of income, not a drain upon you; you can't be poor and be fine ladies at the same time." "We hope that we can be, aunt," said Jessamy; "but you are quite mistaken if you think we wish to spare ourselves at mother's expense." Only Mrs. Wyndham's hand holding Bab's wrist tight kept that small torpedo from exploding. "This question has been discussed among us, aunt, especially lately," said Mrs. Wyndham, quietly, though her voice trembled. "Jessamy has clearly determined her course; she has talent, and we all think can do good book illustrations. She is going to fit herself for her work, and we hope will be successful. From the first Jessamy has declared that she should prepare herself to do something well, and devote herself to one vocation." "Jessamy has sense," said Aunt Henrietta, surveying the girl with something like approbation. "She is so pretty that she will undoubtedly marry before she follows any business long. I only hope that she will remember your necessities, and marry well." "If by 'well' you mean a good man, whom she loves, I hope so too, Aunt Henrietta," said Mrs. Wyndham, with heightened color. "Bitter as our recent trouble has been, it would be unbearable if I thought it would lead one of my girls to sell herself, forgetful of self-respect, goodness, and true womanliness. Thank heaven, I believe there is no danger of what I should feel was a great crime." "Sentimentality! You never were practical, Emily," said Aunt Henrietta, impatiently, but too intent on her object to quarrel. "Now, how about Phyllis and Barbara!" "I agree with Aunt Henrietta that I, at least, ought to be earning money," said Phyllis. "Not you any more than me, Phyl," cried Barbara, with more warmth than correctness. "Well, I cut out an advertisement from the morning paper for one of you to answer," said Aunt Henrietta, producing a clipping. "I want to help you get started. Barbara, you might try this; it would probably be easy employment, and you are too flighty for most things." "Thanks, aunt," said Bab, with double intent, and read aloud: "'Wanted: A young lady correspondence clerk in gentleman's office. Good salary to right person. Address X. Y. Z. Trumpet, Downtown Office.'" "That sounds rather nice," commented Barbara, spearing the slip to the pin-cushion with a hat-pin. "I will answer it, Aunt Henrietta." "If you write now, I'll post it when I go out," suggested Mrs. Hewlett. "Afraid to trust me? I always do what I say I will, but I would as lief write now as any time," said Bab, and seated herself at the table. "How is this?" she asked later, and read: "'The inclosed advertisement from "The Trumpet" noted. The undersigned applicant for the situation would say that she is seventeen years old. This note is a specimen of her handwriting; and for character, ability, personal qualities, etc., she can furnish best city references. An interview requested. Address,' etc. Will that do? I'm not so sure about the reference for ability, but I hope some one would guarantee my honesty." "Mercy, Bab! where did you learn such business-like forms?" cried Jessamy. "Oh, but fancy my little Bab--my baby--going down to business every day! There is no doubt that it is a misfortune for women to be forced to compete with men; I never could let little Babbie do it," cried poor Mrs. Wyndham. "I promise not to compete, Madrina; the men shall go on as if nothing--as if I, at any rate--had never happened. It can't do any harm to send in my application," said Bab. "There is just where your foolish pride comes in, Emily," said Aunt Henrietta, sternly. "Your daughters are no better than other people's daughters; and every one knows that if a girl behaves herself no harm can befall her under any circumstances." "It is not pride," said Mrs. Wyndham, stung to self-defense. "Nor do I fear harm, exactly. Unwomenly women are a misfortune to themselves and all the community, and it is impossible to knock about the world without losing something of that dear and delicate loveliness which, at best, is fast going out of fashion. If it can be avoided, I think no girl should be placed in the thick of the fight, striding through the world in fierce competition with men." "If it can be avoided--precisely; but it cannot be avoided," said Aunt Henrietta, calmly; "for none of your relatives can afford to help you, Emily." "Help? When did I ever dream of wanting or being willing to accept help, aunt?" cried Mrs. Wyndham, hysterically. "But if I prefer to practise stern self-denial to keep my girls sheltered until such time as they can help me in more feminine ways than you propose--or would let them follow if they were your own, I feel sure--is that wrong?" [Illustration: AUNT HENRIETTA.] "Not wrong," said Aunt Henrietta, with exasperating soothing in her voice, and entire conviction of being right, "but utterly foolish and impractical. Now, I have a proposition for Phyllis. A friend--an acquaintance of mine--desires a nursery governess. She has three charming children, and will pay a girl twenty-five dollars a month to teach them the simple things children between six and three years of age learn, take them out--in short, be, as I said, nursery governess; you know what those duties are as well as I do. There is no exposure to the world in that position, so you ought to like it, Emily." "Could I go and come every day, aunt?" asked Phyllis, while Mrs. Wyndham twisted her handkerchief nervously. This was bringing poverty home to her; she clung strongly, poor lady, to the hope of sheltering her little brood, and no amount of privation at home seemed to her like thrusting the burden on them, as did their going out into the world to earn their living. "She would want you to," said Aunt Henrietta, rising, well pleased at finding her grand-nieces so amenable to reason--"amenable to reason" meaning, to her mind, as to most others, readiness to accept her opinion. "I wrote this introductory line on the back of my visiting-card. You will find Mrs. Haines at that number on East Forty ---- Street, just beyond Fifth Avenue. You will do well to apply at once, for there will be many after the situation." "You won't mind if Phyllis mentions that she is your niece, in case she does decide to apply?" inquired Jessamy, with meaning hidden under a gentle manner. But the satire was quite lost on Aunt Henrietta. "Not at all; you are only my grand-nieces, and my social position is beyond being affected by trifles," she said, in self-gratulatory tones. Then she went away, leaving a perturbed roomful behind her. "Now, let me tell you, my dearest auntie-mother, that I think I'll try the nursery governess," said Phyllis. "Twenty-five dollars a month will nearly pay my board, and I'd be happier to feel I were helping. It won't be the end of my career, I hope, but it will answer for a beginning. I honestly think our beloved metallic great-aunt is right--that we ought to be bettering matters, rather than settle down satisfied to such a life as this. Jessamy and I have reached that conclusion lately." Mrs. Wyndham was crying softly. "To think that if I had heeded Mr. Hurd we should still have enough," she moaned. "If--if! Mama, what is the use of 'ifs' now?" cried Barbara. "You did what you thought right, and we can't bear to have you reproach yourself. My letter has gone, and we will try to enter the lists to fight for you like true knights--pity we're girls, for it spoils my fine simile." "I think not, Babbie baby; a knightly spirit is quite as often in a girl's breast as in a boy's," said her mother, kissing her. "The worst of it is that I feel so mean and selfish to let you all help, while I stay at home," said Jessamy. "But I honestly believe I can do more and help better by waiting and following my natural bent. You won't think me shirking? When even little Bab is answering advertisements, I feel horribly indolent and self-seeking." "'Even little Bab'--who is anything but even--is only a year younger than you, miss," said Bab; while Phyllis put her arms around Jessamy and kissed her as she said: "No one could ever suspect you of not playing fair, my crystal cousin." Phyllis went forth in her dark-blue gown the next day to "secure the young ideas which in the end she would probably want to shoot," Bab said. Mrs. Haines was at home, and came down immediately. Phyllis presented her card of introduction, and stated her errand. "It seems absurd to inquire into the qualifications of a Miss Wyndham to teach children as young as mine are--but do you understand kindergarten methods?" Mrs. Haines asked affably. "I am sorry, but I do not," said Phyllis. "No; you would hardly have studied them, not having foreseen the necessity of teaching. The books can give you suggestions, and you can easily pick up those charming song-games. You sing?" "A little; enough for that," said Phyllis. "And speak French?" "As well as English," said Phyllis, glad to answer one inquiry affirmatively. "Oh, then I should be glad if you would speak it with the children," exclaimed Mrs. Haines. "Fancy having a daughter of Mr. Henry Wyndham for one's nursery governess! What a land of reverses America is! Frankly, I made up my mind to take you the moment you came." The vulgarity of this remark struck Phyllis dumb for a moment. Never in her life had she felt that the money standard existed. In her home she had been surrounded by luxury, but never before had she imagined that any one could estimate a person by what he had, or desire to know those who had wealth, merely for that reason. In a flash, the vision of a world of shams, snobbishness, insincerity, spread before her, calling forth the fierce revolt, the sickening repulsion, proper and natural to her youth and better teaching. "I am not Mr. Henry Wyndham's daughter," she said; "I am his brother's daughter, but I have lived with my uncle since I was almost a baby, and neither of my cousins feels any difference between me and her own sister." "Oh, but there _is_ a difference; your uncle and aunt must have felt it, if the children did not, or if they were too kind to let you see it. They were very nice to look after you. Are you the only one who is going to work, now that the money is gone? Why did not one of the others come?" asked Mrs. Haines, with evident disappointment, wrinkling her pretty, if rather common, face fretfully. "Miss Wyndham and Miss Barbara Wyndham have other plans," said Phyllis, haughtily. Then, realizing that she was actually the applicant for a position, and that this tone would never do, she added, with the intention of influencing the shallow creature before her, though she despised herself for appealing to such motives: "I doubt very much if the world knows which is niece and which are daughters. We have always been to every one merely 'the Wyndham girls,' with no distinction to outsiders any more than among ourselves." "How lovely! Of course it makes no real difference; you must come to me, just the same," said Mrs. Haines, brightening. "Would you like to see the children and the nursery? All mothers _think_ their babies sweetest, but I _know_ that mine are." And she led the way up-stairs. Poor Phyllis! Her heart melted somewhat toward her future employer at this remark, but when she reached the nursery even her innocence could hardly help discovering that this too was a pose. No mother-light leaped into Mrs. Haines's eyes at the sight of the three little creatures playing there, nor did the children spring to meet her, as the three little Wyndhams had always sprung at the sight of their mother--mother to them all equally, in spite of Mrs. Haines's doubt. Phyllis loved children, and her quick perception of the lack in the lives of these filled her with pity. She stooped down to them, and ran her fingers through the curls of the second child, a girl of four, and drew the baby, another girl of three, toward her. The eldest, a pale boy of six, gazed at her steadily. "Who are you?" then he said. "This is Miss Wyndham, and she is coming to teach you and play with you every day," said his mother. "Oh, wouldn't it be better for them to call me Miss Phyllis? It sounds less distant, and I want them to love me. You will love me, won't you?" said Phyllis. "Don't touch my hair; you'll spoil it!" said the elder girl; but the baby laughed and cuddled closer, and the boy said gravely: "I think I shall, because you've got such a lamp behind your eyes." "Decidedly, one of my charges is going to prove interesting," thought Phyllis; but she only said: "Won't you tell me your name, and your sisters'?" "Mine is Lionel Ferdinand Haines. What would you do if the boys up in the park called you 'Nellie' Because you wore curls? My mother won't cut them off." "Then I should laugh at the boys for trying to tease me when I didn't care what they said; and I should try to like curls because my mother liked them," said Phyllis. "And the girls' names?" "The big one is Muriel Dorothy Haines, and the littlest one is Gladys Gertrude Haines," said Master Lionel, and was about to propound another question when his mother interrupted him to say that she must take Phyllis away, because she had an engagement. "Shall I consider the matter settled, Miss Wyndham, and that you are coming?" she asked. "Yes, please," said Phyllis. "And at twenty-five dollars a month? Mrs. Hewlett mentioned the wages, I suppose?" "Yes--please," said Phyllis again, forcing the last word, as she kissed the baby. Lionel extended his hand to be shaken, but Muriel said "Good-by" crossly, refusing to be touched. "I am engaged, girls," said Phyllis, coming into the room with very red cheeks on her return, and maintaining silence as to the discouraging aspects of her new employment. Phyllis began her labors on the following Monday. Barbara, who had heard nothing further from her application for the correspondence clerkship, now turned to Mr. Hurd for help, and the little lawyer obtained for her the position of cashier with a friend of his own, where the young girl would at least be secure from many of the drawbacks to a business career which her mother dreaded for her. But, to Bab's unspeakable mortification, she found that she was incompetent to fill the position. She made change slowly, often wrongly, and at night her columns would not add up right, no matter how often she went over them nor how carefully she counted her fingers. At the end of a week she came home crestfallen, having been kindly dismissed, to be comforted and petted by her mother and the girls. Accomplishments she had, but practical knowledge, especially arithmetic, she lacked. Phyllis had been right, in the first place, when she said they were not able to compete with their inferiors in doing the serious work of the world. After this experience, Mr. Hurd placed Barbara in an office to address envelops. This she did well, for her fingers and brain were quick; but she was far from an expert, and her salary was but three dollars and a half a week. Fortunately, the office was within walking distance for her, so that car fare did not have to be deducted from this magnificent result of six days' labor. Jessamy was working hard at her drawing. Phyllis said little of her daily experiences, from which her family concluded that they were not wholly pleasant. A single ray of hope shone out of the gloom for Phyllis. A little story she had written was accepted by one of the large syndicates and paid for--fifteen dollars. The money was not much, though it was more than half of what she was paid monthly by Mrs. Haines; but the glory and the hope it shed on the future were invaluable. On the whole, Phyllis and Barbara found their entrance into the lists not easy, and the blows of the tourney hard, but they kept on with a courage fine to see. They all felt that in some way their skies would brighten when Mrs. Van Alyn returned; she was their "Lady from Philadelphia," and would be sure to find a way through their difficulties. But Mrs. Van Alyn had gone to England till February, and in the meantime the Wyndhams struggled on to the best of their ability. CHAPTER VI MARK TAPLEY'S KIND OF DAYS Phyllis was finding her occupation trying. The children had not been accustomed to obedience, and Muriel proved intractable; Phyllis could neither win her affection nor subdue her by sternness. Lionel minded her because he loved her; in a week's time the boy had become her doglike adorer, and Phyllis loved him with pitying tenderness. The baby was like a little garden patch with the sun shining upon it through the tree branches, in alternate sunshine and shadow, and her obedience was patchy, too; no child more properly deserved the insignia of "a little curl right in the middle of her forehead." But she was only the baby; no one could take very seriously the misdemeanors of a mite of three, and Gladys was a dear mite when she was not the other sort. It was hard to assume the charge of three children for six hours a day; hard to bring them, and herself as well, into the discipline of stated hours and tasks; not easy to take them out to walk, and feel perfectly independent and indifferent to the possibility of meeting old acquaintances when thus employed. But the hardest thing about her new life to Phyllis was the insight it gave her into a manner of living which shocked and tortured her, for Phyllis was a conscientious girl, and the first actual contact with the worldly side of the world is bitter to such as she. Mrs. Haines did not love her children. Sometimes, when they were beautifully dressed, she flattered them and devoured them with kisses; but more frequently she repulsed them, scolded them petulantly and unjustly, and answered their questions with a fretful "Don't bother me! I don't know; ask Miss Wyndham." Sometimes she would say in their hearing that she detested children; that they all ought to be fastened up in the barrel Holmes suggested and fed through the bunghole; and that she would give anything if she were free to have a good time like other young women. And Phyllis could see Lionel's lips quiver and then set hard at these speeches, and she knew the little lad understood that though he had a mother, he had not her love, but was a burden to her. It made her sick at heart; less experienced than her tiny charges, she had never for a moment dreamed that a woman who had children could do less than love them beyond all the world, holding no pleasure, no admiration, worth a thought while her babies' little arms clung to her. But Mrs. Haines boasted the flattery she received. Evidently husband, as well as children, was nothing to her beside her idea of pleasure; and honest Phyllis went home daily, heavy in mind and foot, weary with loathing more than with work. Tom saw that she was looking blue and ill, and he made it his business to come home her way and meet her, and try to cheer her into forgetfulness of the annoyances of which he was ignorant; for Phyllis could not reconcile it with her standard of honor to talk to any one of what she saw in the home to which she had been admitted. Yet she longed to ask some one if all the world, but her own narrow one, was like this new one; Jessamy and Bab knew no better than she, and her aunt was too ill to be troubled. Mrs. Haines soon discovered the handsome young fellow who came to meet her governess, and rallied Phyllis on what she called "her conquest." "I hear you have an admirer, my dear," she said. Phyllis flushed scarlet with indignation. "Tom is a dear boy, like a brother to all of us," she said. "There isn't the least silly thing about him; we are only girls, and we don't want nor think of flirtations." Mrs. Haines laughed with contemptuous good nature. "Would it be silly in him to admire you?" she asked. "As to the rest of it, girls you may be, but children you are not; I was no older than you when I married, and am only seven years older than you are now." "My aunt has taught us that love and marriage are so sacred and solemn that we must never think nor speak of them lightly, and, above all things, never spoil our lives and hearts by flirting," said Phyllis, trying to speak without excitement. "Very good teaching; very poor practice, my dear," laughed Mrs. Haines. "Do you want to be three little gray nuns? But I hoped this 'Tom' of yours might prove something more serious than a flirtation--that is, if he has any money; your business is to marry well, under your present circumstances; don't go in for romance." "I never think of marrying, Mrs. Haines; I am much too young and girlish. But I would rather die than marry just for money," said Phyllis. "See here, Miss Wyndham; I was a poor girl too," said Mrs. Haines. "I had just about enough money for gloves and hats, but not for gowns and shoes. My husband is fourteen years older than I; do you think I cared for him? Not a bit, but I married him at nineteen, and now I have a fine house, carriage, everything I want, and more beaux to say I'm pretty than most girls of my age. Don't you think I was sensible?" In spite of herself, Phyllis shuddered; she thought of Mr. Haines's solitary breakfasts, frequent dinners at the club, the unloved children, and realized how blessed she had been in her bringing up. "There are better things than money, Mrs. Haines," she said, almost pitying the little creature before her, hardly, as she said, older than herself, yet so frankly pagan and sordid. "I would rather work till I died working than--" She stopped, frightened at her own boldness. Mrs. Haines looked at her, understanding what she did not say. "There will always be these two kinds of people," she said, and Phyllis wondered, not quite comprehending. Phyllis met Tom with a sensation of relief, as well as pleasure; he looked so manly, so reliable. "It's no use, Tom," she said. "I've been trying not to tell you, but I must. Is it I or the world that's out of joint?" "On general principles, I can assure you that it's not you, Phyllis; you're all right. But, if I might, I should like to have something more explicit," said Tom, looking very kindly down on the flushed, earnest face. Phyllis began at the beginning, and poured forth to Tom all the matters that had distressed her in the Haines household, ending with the conversation of the afternoon, suppressing his part in the theme. "Well, what do you want me to tell you, Phyllis?" asked Tom. "Surely you don't have to question whether you or a heartless, flirting, worldly woman is right? Or whether any woman worth the name will sell herself for an establishment and clothes?" "No, not that; right is right, and wrong is wrong--" began Phyllis. "Always," broke in Tom. "Yes, I know; but what makes me downright sick is the fear that dear auntie has kept us shut away from a world that is full of this sort of thing--that all the world is like this," cried Phyllis. "Are we different from the rest of the world? These last months have frightened me." "Not much wonder," said Tom, heartily. "Poor little soul! Now, look here, Phyllis; you're not different from all the world, but you're different from lots of it. The best never gets run out, but it runs low often. You've been given the highest standards in all things, and they can never be common. It is much easier to be bad than good for people who start crooked; you started straight, you and Jessamy and Bab. All you've got to do is to be yourself and not worry. Keep your own ideas, and steer by them, and let the rest go. Do you suppose I don't see heaps and piles of things I hate? More than you ever will, because a fellow runs up against the world as no girl does. I'd like to be able to tell you I see none but sweet, modest, true girls; but, honest, I see fewer of them than the other kind. Girls make me sick, though I feel mean to say it; they wouldn't if I didn't think they are so much better than we are when they are nice. You see, Phyllis, girls don't understand that the whole world is in their hands; we're all what women, young and old, make us. Now, you and I had good mothers and sisters. When I went away my oldest sister--she's past thirty--talked to me. 'Shut your eyes to the bold girls, Tom,' she said, 'and make no woman friend you would not introduce to your sisters. Keep your ideals, and be sure there will always be sweet, wholesome girls to save the world.' So I have been shutting my eyes to the strong-minded sisterhood, and the giddy ones too; and just when I needed you, because I was getting too lonely, the Wyndhams turned up, thank heaven! So you'll find it, Phyl; it's a queer, crooked old world, but there are straight folk in it. Keep your ideals, miss, as my sister told me, and 'gang your ways,' And don't take it so hard that there is wrong and injustice in the world. That's being morbid. You'll get used to it; it's only your first plunge that costs; the world's like the ocean in that. And there's heaps of good lying around, mixed up with bad too, sometimes, and that's what no young person sees at first. You know I am ever so much older than you because I've had my eyes opened longer. Don't you get to thinking it's a bad world; it's a good one. The Lord saw that, and said so, when it was first made. Thus endeth my first lesson. I never talked so much in my life at a stretch. Come into this drug-store for hot coffee; you look fagged." "You're such a comfort, Tom," said Phyllis. "I feel much better. There was no use in talking to Jessamy or Bab, because we all know no more nor less than one another, but I wanted straightening out. And auntie looks so ill of late, don't you think so?" Tom looked very serious. "I think she is ill, Phyllis," he said. "There is nothing the matter with her, except one of the worst things: she is exhausted, worn out with fret and trouble. She doesn't get enough nourishment; she needs nursing." "Oh, I see it, Tom," cried Phyllis, as they left the soda-fountain. "What can I do?" "Take care of yourself, for one thing; you don't look right, either," said Tom. "I feel dragging--that's the only word I know for it," said Phyllis. "And Lionel is pale and languid. I wonder if the child and I are both getting ready to be ill." "Poor little beggar, I hope he isn't," said Tom; "but that would be nothing to your coming down. I'm going to fix you up some quinine and calisaya; I am not pleased with you of late, Miss Phyllis." Four days later Phyllis trailed her weary way homeward. The end of her first month of servitude had come; the twenty-five dollars she had thus earned lay in her pocket-book in four new bills. Her head ached, her knees felt strangely unreliable, her spine seemed to be some one else's, so burning and painful it felt in its present place, and her eyes played her tricks by showing her objects in false positions and sizes and occasionally flaring up and darkening completely for a dreadful few seconds. Jessamy met her at the door with an anxious face. "Mama has given out wholly, Phyl," she said. "She is in bed and frightens me, she looks so weak, and her heart beats unevenly and feebly." "That's bad," said Phyllis, so indifferently that Jessamy stared in amazement, then saw with utter sinking of her heart that Phyllis looked desperately ill herself; if Phyllis, the rock they all leaned on, gave out now, what should she do? "What is the matter, Phyl?" she cried, putting her arm around her cousin. "I have no idea. My head aches unbearably, and it seems to be a headache that reaches to the soles of my feet," answered Phyllis, miserably. "What does Tom say about auntie?" "He thinks it is just complete giving out, as though that weren't bad enough! And he made me send for Doctor Jerome; he says he wouldn't dare take the responsibility of our resting on his opinion, so the doctor is to come soon, I hope." said Jessamy. "Yes, that's right. I have twenty-five dollars in my purse; that will pay for several visits, won't it?" asked Phyllis, uncertainly; she dropped her hat on the floor beside her and pushed the hair back from her temples as she spoke, resting both elbows on her knees. "I shall have only the little girls, I am afraid, for a time; Lionel is ill." "What ails him?" demanded Jessamy, her breath shortening; suppose it were something dreadful, and Phyllis had caught the infection! "The doctor thought it might be typhoid; it was too soon to tell, he said," replied Phyllis. "Typhoid! Is that contagious?" demanded Jessamy. "I don't know. Don't be afraid, Jessamy; I am too full of pain for anything else to get in; I couldn't catch it," said Phyllis, with no intention to be humorous. Jessamy waited to hear no more. Running across to Tom's room, she knocked impatiently. "Oh, Tom, dear Tom, do come into my room," she cried. "Phyllis has come home so ill I am more frightened about her than about mama now." They found Phyllis exactly as Jessamy had left her. Tom felt her pulse; her hands were burning, the pulses galloping. "She must lie down and wait till the doctor comes," said Tom, looking grave. "I'll give her something sedative that can't do any harm, but I'd rather not do anything more. Doctor Jerome ought to prescribe. Help her into bed, Jessamy, and don't look so hopeless, dear girl; all's not lost save honor, even though that's a good deal to have left. Phyllis is very likely going to have grip--the real thing, not a cold under that name--and though that is bad to go through, it does not need such a tragic face to meet it." But Jessamy would not smile. "The Haines boy has a fever; the doctor thinks it may be typhoid; is that contagious?" For the life of him, Tom could not repress a slight start; then he bethought himself, and answered cheerfully: "Not a bit--only infectious. Get Phyllis quiet in bed, and try not to borrow trouble." But as he crossed the hall he shook his head like an old practitioner. "Not contagious--only infectious, is true; but Phyl has been in the same atmosphere as the boy, and may have contracted it under the same conditions," he said, rubbing Nixie's head absent-mindedly, as the little dog poked it into his hand. "I don't like it, Nixie, old man; I confess I don't like it." Doctor Jerome came to find two patients instead of one. His verdict as to Mrs. Wyndham corroborated Tom's; she needed nursing, constant nourishing, utter rest, and cheer. And, to make sure of the latter prescription, there was Phyllis! On her case the doctor said it was much too early to pronounce; typhoid was misleading in its first symptoms, sometimes; but--yes, it might be typhoid. He would do all he could to break it up, but Phyllis was decidedly ill. Jessamy must have a nurse, even though Barbara gave up her employment to help her; they were both too inexperienced, not strong enough to undertake cases in which everything depended on the nursing. Phyllis did not resist the doctor's verdict that she should give herself up to being ill, though Jessamy fully expected to have hard work persuading her. She lay quite passive, her dark lashes sweeping her crimsoned cheeks, and only lifted her eyes to say, "Tell Mrs. Haines," and then sank into unnatural slumber again. Barbara came home into the trouble very tired and discouraged over her own uselessness; she who had felt so confident that she could do anything had thus far been able to earn but three dollars and a half for many hours' labor; in the old days she had spent that in a week at Huyler's. Jessamy and she had a consultation, at which Tom assisted, as to their possibilities. By their prudence in living within their income the Wyndhams had nearly four hundred dollars a year more than their actual living expenses cost them. But this income came in quarterly; a trained nurse would cost them twenty-five dollars a week, besides her board, yet Tom and Doctor Jerome said it was of the utmost importance to have the best of nurses. "I have an inspiration!" cried Tom. "There's a fine woman I know of, disengaged now; she has nursed in our family, and she's all right. If Doctor Jerome approves, I'll see if I can get her, and I am nearly certain she would come for me for fifteen dollars a week." "Then I must see Mrs. Black as to her terms; and how about the arrangement of the rooms?" asked Jessamy. "The two patients must be separate; that goes without saying," said Tom. "You and Bab will use my room, and the nurse will take her share of rest where it suits her." "And where will you sleep, you dear, generous boy?" cried Jessamy. "I have a friend I can bunk with till you are through with the room," said Tom. "It won't trouble me a bit, so don't call me names, princess." Jessamy interviewed their landlady, and had a tempestuous time. Mrs. Black refused at first to allow her house to be turned into a hospital; then she demanded an exorbitant sum for the nurse's board, although the room was not to be included. At last, when Jessamy, calling up the spirit which usually lay dormant under her quiet manner, threatened removing both her charges to a hospital and leaving the house at once, Mrs. Black compromised, with a mental reservation to get even in the end, as the girls suspected from her subsequent behavior. It would have been wiser to have taken Mrs. Wyndham and Phyllis to a good hospital, where a private room would have been no heavier drain on their purse than the present arrangement, and the accommodations better; but Jessamy was so shocked at the proposition that Doctor Jerome waived the point, and the nursing began at home. Tom's good woman came; she was the kindest soul in the world, and no less competent than kind. Barbara gave up her envelops to help Jessamy. With two patients she was needed, and even then there were hardly hands enough to render the service required. Tom ran in and out at all hours of the day and night; Jessamy felt that if she lived ninety-nine years she never could repay him for his help and cheer, though she devoted her life to trying to do so. Mrs. Wyndham lay in that wearying state of feebleness peculiar to exhausted nerves; there was no actual danger, unless it were the danger of continued prostration. But Phyllis grew more ill; twice a day the old doctor came to watch her progress. The typhoid symptoms did not develop positively, but she burned with a low fever, and no one could foretell the end. Out of the five hundred dollars coming to the Wyndhams quarterly from their total income, there was an excess over necessary expenditures amounting to something like ninety dollars. This was all the capital Jessamy had in hand to meet the present emergency; and underlying all her other anxieties was the dreadful fear that she should be obliged to borrow of Aunt Henrietta to tide herself through the double illness which had come upon them. For her mother required all sorts of expensive food preparations, and Jessamy realized that her little fund would not take them further on the hard road than three weeks' distance, when out of it she had to pay a nurse, and that nurse's board. Christmas was coming--the Christmas they had dreaded, at best, to meet in a boarding-house, the first since they had become homeless; but now what a Christmas it was! Barbara, sitting, as she did every moment that the nurse would intrust Phyllis to her, close by her cousin's bed, thought, with quietly falling tears, of what Phyllis had always said, that nothing mattered while they had one another. What if they were not always to have one another? What if Phyllis herself--dear, unselfish, sweet Phyllis--was to be the one to go away, leaving forever a void which no one could fill? For Phyllis had become delirious, and raved ceaselessly of the horrible faces grinning and mowing around her bed; of the recent troubles, begging pitifully to be taken home and laid in her own big, pretty room where her head would not ache so. And she did not know Barbara nor Jessamy, but confounded them with Mrs. Haines, and implored them by turns to love the children, for Lionel was ill, and his head was aching inside of hers, which made him and "poor Phyllis" both worse, and they might die, and then his mother would never forgive herself. She always spoke of herself as "poor Phyllis," apparently with some dim idea that she was unlike herself--another personality--and invariably ended every burst of delirium with the same appeal for mercy, and to be taken home again. Barbara had never seen delirium; these ravings nearly broke her heart, and took every particle of hope out of her. In vain Doctor Jerome and Tom, whom she trusted even more, told her it was nothing unusual. Bab, the light-hearted, refused to fulfil her title, but sat stonily, looking forward to Phyllis's death. Jessamy, more equable, kept up a little courage; but she too was utterly inexperienced, and it was very hard for her to hope for Phyllis's recovery. And so Christmas eve dawned grimly enough upon the two poor girls, and on them alone, for Mrs. Wyndham was too weak to give more than a sick woman's passing thought to the day, and to Phyllis there was neither day nor night. Doctor Jerome came that morning, and looked more anxious than ever. "Your mother is doing fairly," he said; "but this little girl does not mend. Nurse, if you will get your scissors, I think this heavy hair must come off." "Oh, don't--please don't cut off Phyllis's beautiful hair," cried Bab, while Jessamy clasped her hands, mutely making the same appeal. "Nonsense, Bab; it will relieve her more than you can imagine," said Tom, sharply, who had followed the doctor into the room. "It would all fall, anyway, after such an illness. It is better for the hair; but if it weren't, it would still require doing. Pray, be sensible." The nurse brought the scissors, and with a few strokes the long, warm, dark masses of hair lay on the quilt. "That's better," said the doctor, as Phyllis moved her head as though at once conscious of relief. He left a few additional directions for the nurse, and went away. Phyllis's hair lay on a paper on the table; the sunlight, resting on it, brought out its rich reddish tint. Tom lifted a tress tenderly. "Poor, sweet Phyllis," he said. Jessamy turned away to the window, without a word. What a Christmas eve, indeed! CHAPTER VII TAKING ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES Christmas morning dawned clear and cold, with a few errant snowflakes drifting on the wind as if to show New York that the great Northwest had not forgotten her, but had only delayed its Christmas box of winter weather for a little while. It is hard wholly to escape the universal joy in the Christmas air; and, in spite of anxiety, Jessamy and Barbara felt more hopeful than they had the night before. Then little crumbs of comfort floated their way in the morning, as the snowflakes were floating without. Beautiful flowers came to Mrs. Wyndham from Mr. Hurd and other friends, and the expressman had left some packages for the girls late the preceding night, which the chambermaid with the chronically dust-branded forehead brought up the first thing in the morning. Relations had been strained between the three Wyndham girls and the less fortunate trio who sat opposite them at table; Jessamy, Phyllis, and Bab, finding their overtures of peace misunderstood and rejected, had given up making them. But this morning the Christmas spirit seemed reflected in the softer looks under the towering pompadours across from them, and, hearing May Daly say that she was "dreadful sorry they hadn't any flowers for the dance that evenin'," Jessamy ventured to suggest that her mother had received lovely roses, which she would be glad to share with her neighbors if they would accept them. "You're real kind," said Daisy Heimberger, flushing with pleasure. "If you've got so many you'll have enough for your ma and we, they'd be about 's nice a Christmas card as you could give us." "We'll accept them with pleasure, and be much obliged," added May Daly, who, the Wyndhams had learned, was more ambitious than either of her friends. "We was sayin' this mornin' that it must be a sorrowful kind of Christmas to you, and we'd like to show we thought of you if we knew how, or you wouldn't be mad," added Fanny Harmon. "That was lovely," said Jessamy, heartily, flushing in her turn, and wondering that she felt so glad of a kind word from one of these girls. "We have had a good many more merry Christmases, but we won't mind if only my mother and cousin get well--" She stopped abruptly. "Don't you fret," said Daisy Heimberger, coming around to pat dignified Jessamy kindly on the shoulder. "I wish you was goin' to the dance to-night like us; but your turn'll come, sure, an' most likely your ma and sister'll be all right in a day or two." "Thank you," said Jessamy, gratefully, while Bab added: "We're very glad you are going to have a nice time, if we can't; but we shall be happier if we can add to your pleasure with the flowers. We'll send them down, and if you wrap them in wet newspapers and lay them outside on your window-sill in the shade they won't open, but will be just right to wear to-night. We have lots, so don't be afraid to take what we send." "All right; we'll do something for you if ever we can," said May Daly. "So long, and I hope you'll have something nice happen to you to-day." This little incident made both Jessamy and Bab feel that the sun shone brighter; it is such a pleasant thing to feel one can add even a trifle to some one's happiness, and every one's good wishes and liking are worth having. Then the postman came and brought Christmas greetings for the girls from several of their old friends, and a letter from Mrs. Van Alyn, with an ivy-leaf from Stratford-on-Avon for Phyllis, a photograph of Botticelli's beautiful little picture of the "Nativity" in the National Gallery for Jessamy, and for Bab an oak-leaf from the sleepy old English town whence the first ancestor of the Wyndhams had sailed away to America two hundred years before. But, best and most wonderful of all, he brought a note from Aunt Henrietta, which Jessamy read aloud to Bab after they got up-stairs. "'My dear nieces,'" it ran, "'I am concerned to hear that your mother and Phyllis are ill, though it would be more becoming if you had acquainted me with the fact directly, rather than leave me to learn it circuitously through Mrs. Haines. I trust Phyllis is not going to have typhoid, like the Haines child. Also that your mother will try to overcome her natural weakness. It is a pity she has none of the Wyndham endurance.'" "Yet dear papa died, not Madrina," interrupted Bab. "'I should have been to see you,'" continued Jessamy, "'but that I myself have been suffering. I have had a severe attack of bronchitis, and the doctor thought I should not escape appendicitis--'" "Mercy! They're not much alike, except in having that horrible long-i sound!" exclaimed Bab, who grew what Tom called "Babbish" the moment pressure on her spirits was relaxed. "Do be still, Babbie," cried Jessamy, and read on: "'Escape appendicitis, but the symptoms were caused, as you may conjecture, by acute indigestion. When I am able to be out, I shall go to see you. In the meantime, I send you each a small Christmas remembrance, which may be useful to you in your present circumstances. Your affectionate aunt, Henrietta Hewlett.'" The small Christmas remembrance was a check for twenty-five dollars for each member of the family. Jessamy snatched them up greedily. No one knew how she had dreaded applying to Aunt Henrietta for a loan, and now Aunt Henrietta herself had precluded the necessity. A hundred dollars! It would carry them more than two weeks beyond the New Year, when their interest came in; and perhaps before this windfall was used up they might be able to dispense with the nurse. It is difficult to be hopeful about anything with money anxieties to corrode one's heart, and for the first time Jessamy and Bab looked down on their two dear patients with courage, and pressed each other's waists with their encircling arms, feeling very grateful for the relief Christmas had brought them, and something very like love for Aunt Henrietta, who, in spite of ways all her own, had done a really beautiful thing. Mrs. Black rose to the requirements of the festival, and gave "her guests" an unwonted feast. Mrs. Wyndham took little bits of the delicate meat around the turkey wishbone with more relish than she had shown for anything since her breaking down. After dinner Ruth Wells came down, her basket on her arm, like a happy combination of Little Red Riding Hood and Little Mabel, whose "willing mind" could not have been as ready to serve others as kindly Ruth's. Out of her basket she produced a veil-case for Jessamy, a handkerchief-case for Bab, a glove-case for Phyllis, all embroidered in tiny Dresden flowers and wreaths on white linen, not in her spare moments--for Ruth had no spare moments--but in the moments she had pilfered from her work for her friends. And for the sick ones were clear jellies and a mold of blanc-mange, with bits of holly stuck blithely in the top. "Oh, Ruth, how could you make all these, and how did you get them down here?" cried Jessamy. "That comes of having one's flat, and not boarding," laughed Ruth. "At least, as far as the making goes. As to getting them down, a little more or less, once you have a basket, doesn't matter. Your mother looks ever so much brighter." "Yes; she ate with a little appetite to-day. But Phyllis doesn't seem to change. And, oh, Ruth! They have cut off her hair!" said Bab. "Well," said Ruth, stoutly, "what of it? You speak as though it were her head. I suppose it won't be like the raveled-yarn hair on the knit doll I had when I was a little tot; I cut that once when he was going to a party, and was dreadfully grieved that it never grew again. Phyllis's will, I suspect." "Come and see her," said Jessamy. Ruth followed. She really was a wonderfully comforting girl. Not a shadow of regret could Jessamy and Bab, watching her closely, detect as she looked on poor shorn Phyllis, lying quietly just then, the delirium past. Instead, Ruth said cheerily: "It will probably grow out in little soft curls all over her head, and how pretty she will look!" And, as if to reward Ruth for her goodness, Phyllis opened her eyes, smiled faintly, and said: "I'm lazy, Ruth." It was the first sign of recognition she had given since she became unconscious, and Jessamy and Bab clutched each other with speechless joy. To be sure, Phyllis said no more, but dropped away again into that mysterious space wherein the sick seem to exist, and Tom was gone home to keep the holidays with his family, so they could not fly, as they longed to do, to ask some one just how good a symptom this might be. But the nurse told them that though it might mean little, it was encouraging; and Jessamy and Bab resolved to take it at its highest valuation--to get all the joy they could out of a Christmas which was not too bright at best. Bab went out with Ruth for a breath of air, and they walked up town, passing one or two elevated-road stations which Ruth might have used, but that she preferred keeping Bab company. They came to a little church; its doors were ajar, and Bab proposed entering. "I think I feel like church," she said, and Ruth understood that tired Babbie craved support and help. So she did not suggest that she was due at home, but went in willingly. A strong odor of spruce and pine filled the air, together with a kind of close sweetness, the lingering reminder of incense used in the morning service. "It must be a Catholic church," whispered Ruth. "What do you suppose that is on the side where everybody is kneeling?" The girls followed two women who had preceded them up the aisle, and came to a curious scene at the altar-rails. On the right side a small grotto of firs had been made, with rocks represented by unmistakable painted canvas. At the back of the grotto were little figures, dressed in bright colors, mounted on camels, coming in procession down the rocks toward the foreground. And in that foreground were far larger figures, some shepherds with lambs on their shoulders, an ox and an ass, a man leaning on a staff, a young woman dressed in blue, with a white veil floating backward, all adoring a tiny infant, lying, with little hands clasped, on straw in the middle of the group. "It must represent Bethlehem, and the birth of Christ," whispered Barbara. "Isn't it queer? And do see those funny little Wise Men on the camels, and the big tinsel star," returned Ruth. "Don't, Ruth," said Bab. She saw that the representation was childish, far from artistic, and yet that it had another kind of beauty. For old women and men were kneeling around it at prayer, with rapt faces or wet cheeks, evidently carried back to the first Christmas; and little children came and went hand in hand, kneeling a brief time before this quaint reminder of Bethlehem, then going decorously away. Sometimes, as the girls watched, funny round tots, in faded hoods or with tattered caps in hand, would rise from kneeling on the altar-step, so high to them that their shabby shoes stuck straight out in the air, and make a bobbing curtsy of farewell with the best of intentions, but with their backs frequently turned toward the Bethlehem where their serious faces should have been. It was droll, but it was touching. Barbara was endowed by nature with the simplicity and love which enabled her to see beyond the ugly colors, the tinsel, the inartistic figures, and grasp the love and faith they were meant to awaken. It was a simple representation, for simple people, and Barbara saw for what it stood. She knelt in a pew, watching the strange scene, and feeling as though some magic had transported her far from New York to a distant European village; but as she watched and wondered, wordlessly her heart prayed too among these imploring visitors to the manger. "Mama, Phyllis; mama, Phyllis," she thought, but the thought was a prayer, every pulse and heart-beat crying out for those she loved. At last they left the dark church, lighted only by the reflector behind the star and a light above the altar. "Did you ever see anything like it?" said Ruth, who had been less touched by the scene than Barbara. "No; it is so foreign and queer, but I think I see what it means," said Bab, slowly. "Only fancy there being such quaint things among us! If we went to Europe, and saw what we have seen on Christmas, we should write long letters home, and probably you would think it pretty in Italy, Ruth." "Well, I don't see how it could be pretty, but I suppose it has a kind of beauty, too. I am glad we went in. I'll take the train here, Bab, for I'm late already. Keep up heart; everything is coming right for you, and Phyllis is better, or she wouldn't have known me." "Thank you, Ruthy; you're so heartening. I wish mama could take you for a tonic. I'm sure I don't know any other equal to you," said Bab. And she went her way alone, quickening her steps, for it was growing dusk, and feeling comforted by the quiet quarter of an hour in the little dim church, where she had poured her heart out silently and it had come back to her refreshed. The last seven days of the year slipped by with alternations of hope and fear for Phyllis filling Jessamy and Barbara's moments,--for Phyllis, because the question of whether she was to throw off the fever or settle down to long typhoid was determining, and Mrs. Wyndham's condition involved no present danger. On the whole, hope predominated; the times in which Phyllis had lucid moments grew more frequent and longer. Doctor Jerome looked more cheerful each day. But finally, as if she knew that the time of good resolutions and amendment had come, on the closing night of the year Phyllis threw off the last trace of her fever and lay weak and white, but smiling and conscious, to greet the New Year's dawn. Tom and Nixie came back just in time to hear the good news and rejoice with the grateful girls, bringing cheer with them; altogether, Jessamy felt that night, when she lay down to sleep, that her troubles were nearly over, and she saw light ahead. She had yet to learn that the long days of convalescence held trials greater than those she had borne, though the haunting fear that had hung over her during Phyllis's danger was relieved. In the first place, the January days fulfilled the old prophecy of increased cold, with longer hours of light; and the little stoves, to which she and Bab offered up holocausts of knuckles and finger-tips, tried them almost past endurance. "It really isn't the stove which bothers us," said Bab, falling back on her heels as she knelt before it, and raising a discouraged and smutty face to Jessamy. "The stove is like the rest of us--it would work better if it could get something to consume." That was true; it took constant battling to keep coal on hand to replenish the fire. Mrs. Black was not interested in fuel, or, more correctly, she was interested in it to keep the supply low, and the result was that the swift-drawing cylinder stoves were precariously near being fireless half the time. The matter of getting food for their convalescents kept Jessamy and Barbara's nerves quivering. Even when they sacrificed their own dinners, and toiled upstairs again with clumsy trays, hoping to get a warm chop, bowl of soup, or slice of beef to their mother or Phyllis, who was pathetically hungry and begged for plenty to eat, they failed in their object, though they went hungry themselves to attain it. They bought chops and gave them to Mrs. Black to be cooked, bribing the cook to do them nicely; but the meat that had looked so succulent and juicy when it was cut, reappeared dry and blackened, with congealing fat around the edges of the plate, or else was so rare that Phyllis's hungry eyes filled with tears at the sight of it. They bought beef and glass jars, and tried extracting the juice in cold water and salt, as Mrs. Wells taught them to do; and they got a broiling-fork and cooked chops over the coals in their stoves till the irascible old man below them and Mrs. Hardy, who disapproved of the Wyndhams' friendship for Tom, complained to the landlady of the odor of broiling. Jessamy began to have a little line between her eyes, and her sweet voice grew almost sharp from nervous strain, while Bab, though she really struggled hard to "be good," as she said, found her naturally quick temper roused beyond her ability to curb it in the effort to obtain justice, if not kindness, for her dear patients, whose recovery depended on proper care. For a month the two poor little heroines struggled on in a daily round of petty annoyances that were not petty when one considered what they involved. "We're getting awful, Jessamy," said Bab, tearfully, one night. "We're getting sharp-tempered, nervous, hard, and where shall we end?" "Come in here, girls," called Phyllis's voice, still tremulous, from the next room. "Bring Tom." Tom and Nixie had resumed their old quarters since the nurse had gone, and they both came as readily as they always did when Jessamy and Barbara called them. "I heard what you said, Babbie," said Phyllis, motioning Tom to the seat of honor, and making Nixie welcome by her side in the big chair. "I heard you say you were getting horrid, and I've been seeing what a hard time you were having, and I want to tell you what we're going to do." "It sounds rather solemn, Phyl," said Jessamy, "summoning us to a conclave like this. If we're going to do anything bad, don't tell us to-night." Phyllis laughed. "Hand me that book, Bab, please," she said, and Bab wonderingly gave her a volume she had been reading that afternoon. Phyllis produced from it a sheet of paper covered with figures. "What we're going to do," she said, "or what I am going to do, is go to housekeeping." There was a shout of laughter from her auditors, after a moment of surprised silence. "You look like housekeeping just now," said Bab. "I look less like boarding," said Phyllis, stoutly. "Ruth Wells is perfectly right; we should be far better off in a little home of our own--'be it ever so humble.' It takes strong--no, I mean tough people to get on without home comforts. You and Jessamy are getting utterly worn out, as nervous and fretted as you can be, and if you put half the strength it takes to live this way into healthy housework you would have everything you need and not be tired, still less cross." "Phyllis is right!" exclaimed Tom. "It's a miserable way to live." "Of course I'm right," said Phyllis; "only this isn't living. Now, I've been figuring," and she held up her sheet of paper. "It costs us fourteen hundred and fifty-six dollars a year to board as we are boarding now. Our washing is about three dollars a week--that is a hundred and fifty-six dollars a year--and that makes sixteen hundred and twelve dollars. Then, I don't know what you are spending besides for all these nourishing things auntie and I are having." "I do," said Jessamy, with a half-humorous, half-genuine sigh. "I am sure you do, and that it is awful," said Phyllis. "Well, now, listen; we are going to take a flat, wherever we can find it, and the best for the money, at forty dollars a month. We are going to have a woman come in two days in the week, to wash, iron, and sweep, at a dollar and a quarter a day, and that is a hundred and thirty dollars a year. And we are going to cook on gas, and spend about six dollars a month for our gas--Ruth said so--and that is seventy-two dollars more. And we're going to live plainly, but have nice, wholesome things to eat, and all we want, for six hundred a year--Ruth told me that too, and she knows--and that makes a total of thirteen hundred dollars, allowing a little margin. That's three hundred dollars less than we spend now; and who wouldn't rather live in her own dear little home, with all scratchy, maddening things and people shut out?" Phyllis stopped, breathless, and the others had listened in so much the same condition that it was a moment before any one spoke. Then Bab leaped to her feet and ran over to hug Phyllis in rapture. "You dear, quiet, splendid old Phyllistine!" she cried. "It's just blissfully lovely. To think of you being the one to do it, when you're still so weak and forlorn!" "Ask me to tea, have me up to help, and let me catch the crumbs from your table," said Tom. "Phyllis, you're a trump, and you've saved the day!" "Crumbs from the table!" cried Jessamy, catching her breath. "That's just it. It is a dream, Phyl; but how in the wide world can we do it? There won't be any crumbs from the table, nor anything to eat; we don't know anything, any of us; I'm not sure mama understands cooking." "Auntie can direct a cook; I've heard her do it," said Phyllis. "And as to anything to eat, we'll learn a few necessary things, and do them every day if we have to. But I'm not afraid, with a good cook-book and Ruth to ask. It's better than this at the worst, and we shall save money, too. As to that, if we failed we could have one servant and still spend no more than we do now. You and Bab go out to look for flats to-morrow. You'll see I am right." Phyllis's last remark settled the question; if they could afford to keep a servant in case they were forced to it, there could be no risk in the attempt. Indeed, Barbara would not admit that there was risk in any case. Tom was unselfishly enthusiastic over the scheme, though he said he dared not think of his loneliness if they left the "Blackboard." But Bab hospitably gave him the freedom of the new apartment, and before they separated for the night the place was rented, furnished, and they had moved in. And, best of all, Tom had promised Phyllis a kitten. CHAPTER VIII THE TURN OF THE LANE Jessamy and Barbara were ready for their expedition in search of peace by nine o'clock the next morning. Phyllis had solemnly promised to prepare for herself and her aunt alternate cups of beef-tea and malted milk for every two hours of their absence, a task to which she protested she was quite equal, especially as she would be sustained by the remembrance of the errand on which they were bound. If they were detained over lunch-hour, the willing but overworked maid was engaged to serve them, a provision for possibilities suggested by Phyllis, who realized that Harlem was a long distance away and flat-seeking consuming of time. "Phyllis is rather like the centurion in the gospel: she tells one to go, and she goeth, and another to do this, and she doeth it. That isn't irreverent, because the centurion was only a Roman soldier, not even a prophet," said Bab, as she and Jessamy toiled up the elevated-road steps at Thirty-third Street. "I wonder what it is about Phyl that we all yield to?" "She is very decided, with all her quiet manner, for one thing," said Jessamy; "and we have learned that she is generally right, and pulls us out of difficulties for another. Wait till I get up, Bab; I think I've two tickets." "What does it matter? Keep them; we shall need them when we've moved up town," said Bab, airily, as she dashed ahead and deposited ten cents at the ticket-seller's window. They had a list of apartments to rent, cut from the paper, and they decided, after consulting it, to make One Hundred and Fourth Street what Bab called "their distributing-point," whence they would scatter themselves impartially over the neighborhood. It is not wholly an attractive section of the city; Jessamy and Bab felt their ardor somewhat dampened after they had rung several janitors' bells, in uniformly small vestibules decorated with stencil-work on the ceilings and walls, and with little brass speaking-tubes, and electric bells, and, in many cases, with several small children munching cookies and staring, round-eyed, at the strangers. The apartments they were shown were not what they had dreamed of the previous night. They were tiny, with chambers "just about large enough to iron a pocket handkerchief on the floor," said Jessamy, forlornly. But Barbara said, "Where there's scope there's hope, and New York is large," and kept on cheerfully. At last they discovered a house further up, but still below the bend of the elevated road, around which, the girls felt sure, they would never be able to persuade their mother to travel. It looked very neatly kept; the janitor's wife, a ruddy German, showed them the rooms, up two flights, with no elevator, it was true, but the stairs were not steep ones. There were seven rooms in the little place, not large, but not as small as the others they had seen; the outlook was on a quiet street, the chambers were not all dark and aired from a well, and the upper entrance to Central Park was but two blocks away. The rent of the apartment, they were told, was forty-five dollars a month; but, since it was February, the janitor thought it could be had for forty. Jessamy and Barbara were unversed in the ways of landlords, and did not know that this was a method frequently resorted to in trying to enhance the attractiveness of unrented property; it had its desired effect in their case, and they quite trembled lest some one else should secure their bargain before they had time to report it to their mother. "We will go to see the landlord," said Jessamy, making a note of his address, and hoping she did not seem too eager. They got home, tired but triumphant, to be greeted by two faces so much brighter than the ones they had left that they were amazed, until Mrs. Wyndham and Phyllis told them in a breath that Mrs. Van Alyn had come home, and had been to see them. [Illustration: THE EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF PEACE.] "And, oh, girls!" cried Phyllis, giving them each a rapturous squeeze. "I got her in this room all alone and told her our plan, and where you had gone, and she thought it the wisest move we could make. And--and--oh, Jess--oh, Bab, I'm half crazy! She's had some of our dearest things stored away for us, and we never knew it! Uncle's big chair, Bab's piano, our desks, tables--oh, I don't know what they are--and photographs and casts out of our own dear, lovely old rooms; and now they will be all ready for this little home!" Bab turned white, then took a header into the pillows to smother the cry of joy which she could not keep back, but which her mother must not hear, while Jessamy, who had silently mourned her lost treasures as neither of the others had, dropped into the rocking-chair, crying for joy. Mrs. Van Alyn had advised the girls to settle the matter without consulting their mother. She was so weak, so dead to all interest around her, that her friend thought it would be better to take her into the little apartment when it was ready to receive her, without giving her a chance to worry over the difficulties in their path--difficulties which, in her condition, would impress her more than the advantages of the plan. Jessamy took Mrs. Van Alyn to see their discovery, and she approved; that made it somewhat better if matters went wrong later, for Jessamy did not like to assume all responsibility for such a radical change of which her mother was to be ignorant. So the flat was taken, and then arose the question of "Only necessities, dear girls, at first, if you are guided by my advice," said Mrs. Van Alyn; "but buy good things, and select wisely. The articles I have saved for you out of your old home are rather of the nature of luxuries, so you will have almost as much as your little nest will hold of pretty things, which is fortunate." The new apartment was repapered from front to back, and the girls had the pleasure of selecting the colors. A soft gray-green in the parlor, a rich red, olive, and brown tapestry in the dining-room, light, cheery papers in the darker bedrooms were their choice, and entirely changed the effect given by the ugly papers which had preceded them. The floors were stained in the parlor and dining-room, and for the floors of the little chambers Jessamy bought tasteful denims, which were not only pretty, but would save labor in sweeping. The three-feet-wide hall running through the apartment was stained also, and black goatskin rugs bought to lay at intervals; they were real of their kind, and Jessamy abhorred imitations. The parlor had a pretty Wilton rug to cover it, and the dining-room likewise. Curtains were not among the first necessities, though the girls thought longingly of their softening effect against the woodwork, which was not of the best quality. However, there must be many things left for time to supply; the outlay for dining-room and chamber furniture was all their first quarter's income could spare. Ruth was called into consultation for the kitchen; she and Barbara had a delightful morning in a hardware shop, buying bright tins and fascinating japanned boxes, and all the other homely articles--homely in the English sense, for they looked beautiful to the homesick girls--which go to furnish the most important room in the house. Jessamy, Phyllis, and Bab were wild with delight during these last days; they hardly knew how to get through them, so impatient were they for the day to come when they should take possession of their kingdom. Tom was not less excited than they. Not a day passed without his bringing home some wonderful contribution to the coöperative housekeeping, in which he claimed his full share of coöperation. And at last, on the day before the Wyndhams were to move up town, Mrs. Van Alyn carried Tom off with her to the apartment, forbidding the girls entrance to their own precincts, and with his help set in place the priceless treasures of old association which her kindness had kept for them from a past more splendid, but which the present promised to equal in happiness. And so the great day came. Mrs. Wyndham had been told only two days before of the home awaiting her, and received the news with rather more apprehension than pleasure. Aunt Henrietta had been to see them, and had scolded the girls roundly for their madness, prophesying utter failure and expense far beyond their calculations, and telling them that it was quite evident they meant to kill their poor mother, putting a burden upon her she was so unequal to bearing, for of course it was ridiculous to consider them, inexperienced, spoiled children, as either housekeepers or cooks. But though there was a little time after this interview that Jessamy especially, having been the one who was inclined to doubt, felt her ardor somewhat dampened, it passed quickly, for Tom came, bringing in a patent washboard which did everything but iron the clothes laid in a tub in which it stood; and in the nonsense talked over it, and the lecture Tom gave on its merits, Aunt Henrietta was forgotten. Phyllis had given up her position with Mrs. Haines. They hoped to save as much as she had earned there under the new arrangements, and her services were needed at home to do this. "Besides, you couldn't possibly be a nursery governess, Phyllis Wyndham," said Bab. "Won't it be blissful if we can earn money by saving it, and by making a home for ourselves into the bargain?" Mrs. Van Alyn sent her carriage once more for her old friend's service. Mrs. Black "assembled," Tom said, to see them off; this time it was Phyllis who accompanied her aunt, and the two invalids were furnished with refreshments for the drive, and the coachman was ordered to take them up through the park at an easy pace. And so, in the carriage which had borne her away from her first home, poor Mrs. Wyndham, full of the recollection, too ill and too sad to share the girls' enthusiasm, rode away to her new one. The trunks and all Tom's mad contributions to the apartment had gone away early, and as soon as the door had closed on their mother and Phyllis, Jessamy and Barbara tore up the long flights to get their hats and jackets and hasten after them. Bab seized Jessamy around the waist and waltzed her all over both empty rooms, singing at the top of her voice. The chambermaid pushed her reddish bang out of her eyes to see better, and grinned sympathetically; she liked the Wyndhams, who had been considerate of her, and she would have been glad to escape bondage herself. "Oh, Nellie, here is our parting gift to you," said Jessamy. "We're much obliged to you for what you have done for us since we came here." "Sure, 'twa'n't anything to thank me for, miss, thanks to you; an' it's sorry I am to see you goin'," said Nellie, wiping her forehead with her apron, for she knew from long experience that it was dusty without looking to see. "Don't say it, Nellie, don't say it," cried Bab, wriggling into her jacket, both arms at a time. "I'm so glad I think I shall die before I get home--home, Nellie, home! Only think of that--_home_, and we have been boarding here since September! Come on, Jess! Don't stop for gloves; put them on in the train! Got everything? Oh, hurry! We must be there to look after Madrina and Phyl, and I'm wild to see what Mrs. Van Alyn and that boy did up there yesterday. Don't stop for gloves; I'm going crazy." "You're crazy now," said Jessamy, but she tucked her gloves into her coat pocket, and her voice shook, and her cheeks were crimson. "Come, then. Good-by, Nellie; I hope you will be well and happy. Good-by, old room; we might have left you sorrowful instead of rejoicing, and I thank you for that." Barbara was already half way down-stairs; Jessamy ran after her, and they reached the front door breathless, to find Mrs. Black and Mrs. Hardy waiting to say farewell. "I wish you luck," said Mrs. Black, with an air that seemed to imply it was a hopeless desire for any one mad enough to leave her sheltering roof. "You'll find housekeeping very different from having no cares and being free to enjoy yourself. I hope you may be happy, and your ma won't break down under the strain; she can't stand much." "Good-by, Miss Wyndham and Miss Barbara," said Mrs. Hardy. "I thought, maybe, the young medical student might board with you. I hope you won't forget to send us cards to your wedding, my dear. I think you make a mistake to leave here, but I hope you know best." "Did you ever dream of such a horrible old woman?" said Bab, walking indignantly down the street to Sixth Avenue. But these last shafts from the quiver which had pricked them so often in the past months could not annoy Jessamy and Barbara long, because they were the last; were they not going home, home, and is not home a word to conjure evils away? The ride seemed endless to the two girls, feverish with impatience; the train dragged around the curve at Fifty-third Street, and loitered as it had never done before at each station. But at last--at last the tedious journey ended, and once they had turned east out of crowded Columbus Avenue, Jessamy and Bab fairly ran down the street where their apartment waited them. They let themselves into the house with their own latch-key; the janitor's wife was cleaning brasses, and said good morning pleasantly, but with no notion of what a great event was happening before her Swabian eyes. How could she have, poor soul, since people move in and out of apartments every day, and few of them are young exiles, hungry for a home, come to take possession of their Land of Promise? Jessamy's heart beat so she could hardly get up the stairs, but Bab honorably waited for her, and would not put the key in the lock--not the general, common lock of the outer door, solemn as that ceremony had been, but the sacred, blessed lock of their own private-hall door. She threw the door open, clutched Jessamy's hand, who returned the pressure with interest, and together they entered their home. How beautiful, peaceful, homelike everything looked! There stood Bab's piano, Jessamy's desk, and the pictures they had loved welcomed them from the walls like living things. They ran from room to room, calling to each other, sobbing and laughing and kissing the inanimate things like crazy girls. Phyllis's desk stood in her room, and the little rocking-chair Bab loved best held out its arms to her beside her bed. In the dining-room they found silver they had thought never to see again, and dishes which, empty or full, they knew would be equal to food to their mother. They made their excited way back to the parlor finally, and Jessamy dropped exhausted in the window, which was mysteriously draped with white lace, though they had made up their minds to self-denial in the matter of curtains. Her eyes rested on her father's chair, and her lips trembled with joy and gratitude. "Oh, God bless that dear, dear Mrs. Van Alyn!" she said, though she usually found such expression impossible. Barbara opened the piano, and laid her hands on the keys. She struck two or three chords of "Home, Sweet Home," and then laid her head down on the pretty case to cry the happiest tears she had ever shed. It was fortunate that Jessamy and Barbara had more than half an hour to await the arrival of the invalids, for neither Phyllis nor their mother was strong enough to encounter them while their excitement was at its height. When they arrived the girls had calmed down enough to open the door quietly and say, with only a little tremor in each voice: "Welcome home, mama and Phyllis!" Phyllis looked white after her drive, but the color rushed from her throat to her short hair at the sight that met her eyes. She did not attempt to go further than the parlor sofa, where Bab led her, and let her cousin take off her wraps without an effort to help herself. She lay still in a trance of delight, looking from one dear picture to another, letting the soothing green tone of the room sink into her brain and rest her as if a quiet hand had been laid upon her nerves. Mrs. Wyndham got no further than her husband's chair. She sank into it, laid her tired head against its cool leather, and burst into quiet tears. But even the girls, inexperienced as they were, recognized that they were tears which would restore her, that they stood for the breaking up of the apathy which had been the worst phase of their mother's illness, over which Doctor Jerome had looked gravest. And they felt certain that they had done well in taking matters into their own hands, and giving the frail little mother a home once more. Bab, getting to herself again, saw that the taking possession must be keyed lower, and that they must get into the commonplace as quickly as possible if they wanted their mother and Phyllis to feel no ill effect of the drive. "We shall now proceed, Miss Wyndham and I, to prove to you that we can build a fire and cook," she said. "We are going into our kitchen, and shall turn on our gas, which is the way we always build a fire, and light it with a safety match, and we shall take our new saucepan and heat for both of you ladies a fresh glass of milk. You will perceive, without my mentioning it, that everything we propose to do is new and up-to-date. You shall be served within fifteen minutes, Mrs. Wyndham, ma'am, with crisp, fresh crackers, hot milk, and a thimbleful of brandy, then you and your niece will be mildly but firmly compelled to lie down on your beds until luncheon." A program which was carried out to the letter. Oh, the joy of preparing that luncheon, when for the first time Jessamy deposited the carefully measured tea--measured by the old rule of a teaspoonful to each cup and one for the pot--into the fat little Japanese teapot, and the unutterable bliss of peeping in afterward, with an air of experience, to see if it had "drawn" sufficiently! And the happiness of broiling the chops on the broiler of the gas-range, new and lovely to behold, if it was black! And the greater happiness of making cocoa for the invalids in the alluring agate saucepan, brought forth from the under part of the kitchen closet, to be useful for the first time in its gray, satin-finish life! Bab was delirious, cut a slice of bread, and flew off to turn the chops; cut two more slices, and ran away to hug her mother. She set the cold water running, and Jessamy just stopped her afterward from filling the water-pitcher from the hot-water faucet. She set the table in a whirl, darting here and there with rapturous squeals at the discovery of some treasure she had not yet seen; on the whole, did all a mad child could do to prove that Aunt Henrietta was right, and that she was "flighty" and unreliable. Jessamy took her happiness in another way. She went about with an uplifted look on her lovely face, touched everything with a kind of reverence, brooding over the teacups and lifting the butter-jar as if they were little babies. She forgot nothing, left nothing undone, and when she went in to say, with an assumption of what she intended for a commonplace manner, though her voice would quiver: "Lunch is ready, mama; come, Phyllis," she called them to a meal perfect, so far as it went, thanks to her and in spite of Bab's temporary insanity. Tom and Ruth came to that first dinner. Tom had camped out, and insisted on cooking the steak. Ruth showed the girls how to boil potatoes so that they would neither crumble to bits nor emerge water-soaked from the hot water. Ruth also taught them to prepare the canned peas so that the flavor of the tin would be taken from them; and more than this they did not attempt, beyond cutting oranges into flower shapes for dessert, and making black coffee, which the girls had supposed a simple accomplishment until Ruth explained to them the many ways in which they could spoil it. Nixie had a brilliant red bow, which he despised, on his collar for the occasion, and was fed in turn by every one till he could eat no more and retired to the front of the radiator to meditate on the advantages of housekeeping. Mrs. Wyndham made an effort, and took her place at the head of her table to please the girls, and really showed such an improved appetite that Jessamy and Barbara forgot theirs in the joy of watching her. And Phyllis did her duty by the tender steak as only fever and half a year of "Blackboard" steaks could make her. Jessamy and Bab made a dinner chiefly of rapture; it was all so wonderful, so blissful, that they did not crave ordinary food, but beamed on their family in satisfaction that was as nourishing--for once--as steak. Tom donned one of the new plaid gingham aprons provided for the young housekeepers and helped with the dishes. It was only a game, new and fascinating, this first time to wash even the greasy broiler; but Ruth had shown them the charm of ammonia and a patent preparation of potash, and even dainty Jessamy faced the prospect of future pans fearlessly. "Now, I've one more contribution to this mansion," said Tom. "I wanted to show it to you when I came, but I feared for my dinner. Your mother has it in the parlor. It's for you, Phyllis." "Is it--" began Phyllis, but Tom interrupted her. "Don't guess; come and see, all of you." Phyllis fairly jumped from the rocking-chair, where she had been installed in range of the kitchen door to watch the dish-washing, and ran, as if she had never been ill, into the parlor. There sat her aunt, and in her lap, curled up like a powder-puff, the tiniest, whitest kitten ever seen. Phyllis had it in her hands and cuddled in her neck in a moment. "Oh, Tom, it's lovely! Oh, if you only knew how I've been wanting a kitten! How did you get such a white one?" she cried rapturously. "I've had it engaged for you for ten days; we've been waiting for it to learn to eat; it's only a month old," said Tom, looking very happy at Phyllis's pleasure. "His mother is a white lady of most honorable reputation and perfect manners; they say all her kittens are models in every way. Hope he'll do you credit." "He shall be called Truce," cried Phyllis; "because he's all white and we're at peace." "Truce is not peace; however, it's a jolly name," said Tom. "I called him Antiseptic Cotton, but I don't mind if you change the name. He looks precisely like the little packages of cotton we use in the hospital." "Horrid!" said Bab, decidedly. "Truce is pretty. I think you might let some one else see just the tip of his tail, Phyl. We like kittens, too." "He adds the very last touch to the hominess of everything," said Phyllis, generously handing the kitten over to Bab. "Bless you, Tom, for getting him!" CHAPTER IX HOME-KEEPING HEARTS The Wyndhams had been "out of Egypt," as Phyllis called it, a month. Tom painted a highly decorative sign bearing the word "Canaan," in gold letters on a red ground, to be placed over the front door, because the Wyndhams were not only out of Egypt, but entered into the Land of Promise. Although it was not quite possible to hang the inscription in the front hall, Phyllis would not discard it, but placed it between the dining-room windows. The flat was the land of promise to them all, and each realized it in her own way. Mrs. Wyndham was almost entirely well; her improvement had been rapid from the first, and she was far happier than she had been since the fatal day when Mr. Hurd had come to tell her of her loss, almost a year ago. Phyllis was completely recovered; she was so happy there was no possibility of being less than well. Her hair was growing out in soft rings of curls, as Ruth had prophesied it would, and she had never been half as pretty in her life as now, with present joy and hope for the future shining in her beautiful eyes. For Phyllis was dreaming and working; when household duties were done she spent certain hours of each day over her desk, and it was hard for her not to share Jessamy and Barbara's sincere conviction that her little stories were one day to see the light. In the meantime, Phyllis had gravitated naturally into the position of chief cook in the scheme of domestic economy; she loved a kitchen, she took kindly to all that belonged to it, and her delight was to feed those she loved. "Phyllis is a real lady, there's no doubt of that," said Bab. "It is her nature to give bread to her dependents, and the term describes her in its dictionary meaning." With little white Truce on her shoulder, his favorite throne, Phyllis went about her tasks, singing from morning till night, happier than she had ever before been in all her short life. Jessamy had found her proper place as the beautifier; she set every room in order daily, gave the touch only she could give to the table, planned, and went to market, and was no less happy than Phyllis. Barbara--what was her share? It would be hard to say, but she permeated the little home with her sunny lightheartedness, and never shirked any duty that came her way. "I'm general utility man and clown," she said herself, and, with proper modification of the latter word, perhaps that described her position. She was growing older, Jessamy thought, watching her; there was a new note of womanliness in her jesting sometimes. But little Barbara was eighteen; her birthday was the first festival celebrated in the new home. The plan was working triumphantly; the girls were so afraid of the failure prophesied for them that they did not dare spend what they could honestly afford, and the first month's bills were under the estimate; yet they were flourishing, and needed for comfort and health no more than they had. There were bad days, when everything went cross-ways from the beginning to the end of the day, as there will be in all households, even the best regulated. But when such days came the girls treated them politely, and pretended not to notice that they were crooked, as Phyllis suggested doing, and so they came less often than to people who dwelt on their deficiencies. Jessamy and Bab were making beds one morning as usual, and Phyllis was out in the kitchen clearing away the breakfast things. Truce was on her shoulder; he was growing fast, but did not seem to think that was any reason why he should alter his custom. He was the most loving of small catkins, with golden eyes, and a preternaturally long, slender tail; he wore a scarlet ribbon to set off his pink-lined ears and pink nose, and the snowy coat his devoted mistress kept spotless by the simple method of sponging with soap and water. Truce never objected to anything Phyllis chose to do to him; indeed, he had "reversed hydrophobia," Bab said, for water had such an irresistible fascination for him that anything containing it was in danger from his meddlesome little white paws, from the biggest water-pitcher to the most dainty vase. Phyllis was singing, as usual. The two girls in the room near by heard her chanting, to a tune of her own: "Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest; Home-keeping hearts are happiest, For those that wander they know not where Are full of trouble and full of care; To stay at home is best." Then she apparently tired of Longfellow, for there were a few moments of silence and chatter to the kitten alternately. Suddenly she began singing to a swinging, not particularly tuneful tune, like those the little children use for the games they play in the street. This time it was a funny little song of her own: "Homy and happy, cheery and bright, New tins to left of me, new tins to right, A little white kitten to pet and to cuddle, And purr back my peace when I get in a muddle; A getting-well mother, three girls, and a cat-- My joys are so many they're crowding the flat! Look out, Truchi-ki; you'll fall!" And Jessamy and Bab heard a saucepan cover drop, and guessed that Phyllis had put up her hand to steady Truce on her shoulder. "Copyrighted, Phyl?" called Bab; but Phyllis, on her knees looking at her cake in the oven, did not hear her, and Jessamy put her hand over her sister's lips. "Let her alone, Bab. Listen! She may improvise more," she said. "Now she's beginning to sweep, and that usually inspires her." Phyllis's broom flew, and Jessamy and Bab waited developments. Evidently Truce had dismounted, and was ready for the frolic sweeping always meant to him, for they heard Phyllis laugh, and cry: "Look out, Truchi-ki! How do you expect me to sweep if you hold my broom? I'll spank you, kitten; you've never had one tiny, least spanking in all your life." Phyllis always talked nonsense to Truce, whose name had developed through an Italian pronunciation of Truce, Truchi, into the Japanese-sounding Truchi-ki, which Phyllis said meant, "Trucie, ki-tten," but which Jessamy more correctly defined as meaning nonsensical affection. Luckily for them, however, all the Wyndhams loved nonsense. To prove it, Phyllis began to sing once more, a long jumble of nonsense in one rhyme: "Trouble found me where I sat, But I didn't care for that, Only learned my lesson pat. Then I took a heavy bat, And I hit old Trouble--spat! And I gave him tit for tat. Last, I drowned him in a vat. Now I've learned to make a hat, Wash a dish and sweep a mat, And I think I'm getting fat In this blessed little flat, With my snowy Trucie-cat-- I'm so very, very happy that I don't know where I'm at!" [Illustration: "'LOOK OUT, TRUCHI-KI; YOU'LL FALL!' PHYLLIS SAID."] This was too much for the audience; two peals of laughter rang out from the bedroom, echoed by Mrs. Wyndham from the hall. "Going crazy, Phyl?" gasped Bab. "I don't know, I'm sure, and I don't see that it matters," returned Phyllis. "I'm brushing up our own kitchen, and everything I've sung is true; I'd like to know what consequence a little more or less sanity is under these circumstances? Oh, dear peoplekins, do you think we shall ever get used to this niceness? You needn't laugh at my inspirations; they are real hymns of praise, in spirit, even if they sound crazy." "I am the one to sing hymns of praise, dear little Phyllis," said Mrs. Wyndham, fondly. "No one was ever so blessed with three happy, contented, true-hearted props in misfortune as I have been." "I'll tell you a secret, mama," said Jessamy, emerging from under Phyllis's desk, where she had been picking up scraps of torn paper. "I suspect it isn't misfortune. I have a deep-seated suspicion that it is just good luck that has come to us, and that if we had stayed rich we should have missed getting into the heart of things and the real fun of living." "Now be honest, Jessamy," said Bab. "I have entire confidence in Phyllis and myself sincerely enjoying makeshifts, but I have a horrid doubt that you may be making the best of it. Don't you wish you could go about, and have all the pretty things you love, and do no housework, but merely be lovely all day and every day?" Jessamy paused, her color heightened; she was too honest to answer equivocally. "Sometimes," she said slowly, "I remember that though we are rather simple girls, and like to stay girlish just as long as we can, still we are a little past nineteen, Phyl and I, and Babbie is eighteen, and I'd like to have just a little more girlish fun, because we can't be young long. The pretty things I don't miss much, because I have them, if I may be allowed a bull. So far we have had as nice things to wear as we used to have, because our old stock is not used up. And as to our flat, it is simple, but it has the right look, and beauty is not a matter of cost. I am very happy, and I am truly contented; your 'horrid doubt,' Bab, need not come again. I think this year has done more for us than we know, and I am honestly satisfied. But I do hope that we may be able to help ourselves; if only my illustrating turns out well, I ask nothing more--nothing better of fate." "Why did you change that _more_ into _better_, Jessamy?" asked Phyllis. "Oh, because!" said Jessamy, smiling. "I'm not like you and Bab; I can't help looking ahead and wondering." Barbara looked at her pretty face in Phyllis's glass, and the color mounted to her dark hair. She turned hastily to see if the others were watching her; Jessamy saw, and noted again that Babbie, like the white kitten, was growing up fast. "Oh!" cried Bab, laughing a little self-consciously. "As to wondering, I wonder, wonder, all the time. It is rather like 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,' isn't it? When you're a three-feet snip you wonder what the little star is, and when you're a five-feet snippier you wonder less what is up above the world so high than what is down on your own level, headed toward you. I suppose even the most contented girls have to dream and get restless, don't they, Madrina--don't they, Trucie-pet?" And she swung Truce to her shoulder, where he kissed her ear as she danced around, singing, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," in waltz time. Her mother watched her, and sighed. She too saw that Bab was changing, and, mother-like, hated to have her baby less a child. Tom--and Nixie, as a matter of course--were due at the apartment that afternoon. The big divan which had been constructed at his suggestion in the boarding days, was promoted to the rank of dining-room couch, and in this honorable position required a new cover. Tom claimed the right, as his part of coöperation, to help in all tasks needing masculine strength of hands; and both for his sake and their own the Wyndhams gladly admitted him to a share in The Experiment, as they called their housekeeping, which they thought of in capitals. Tom was a little late, but he and Nixie appeared at last. The little dog and Truce were perfectly good friends, though Nixie had the lowest opinion of cats in general, and it is likely Truce held dogs in slight esteem, but his life in an apartment, secluded from the vulgar world, did not expose him to their acquaintance. The dining-room was a medley of all the contents of the divan, ready emptied for operations, and Tom lost no time in getting to work in the three hours of light remaining. "Pull the stuff out straight, and let me mark where it is to be cut," said Tom to his three assistants. Mrs. Wyndham sat in the arm-chair to watch the performance and offer advice. The new cover was a beautiful dark red, with the colors of the tapestry paper on the wall suggested and emphasized in the pattern. "Make a notch here, Bab," ordered Tom, "and cut it off straight across. Then, Jessamy, you and Phyllis can take the piece that comes off and be sewing the pillow-covers, if you like." "Yes, my lord," said Phyllis, rescuing her cushion full of needles from Truce, who was beside himself with delight at so much going on. Tom stretched the tapestry over the top of the couch, and held it with a few tacks while he made sure the figure ran straight. Then he sat down on the floor and began tacking the covering on across the front. "I've something to decide," he said, as well as he could with his mouth full of tacks. "I want advice." "If we can give it, my dear, you shall have it," said Mrs. Wyndham. "You know I am to graduate this summer--" Tom began. "I advise you to do that, if that is what you have to decide," said Bab, saucily. "Barbara, my dear, pray let Tom speak," said her mother. "Yes, Miss Impudence, I intend to," said Tom. "But it is the question of the next step I must decide. I think I never told you--please give me the scissors, Jessamy--but I have an uncle, my father's only brother, who had a son my age, and who was left a widower with the boy when we were both about eight years old. My cousin died; it was a dreadful blow to his father, whose whole life was wrapped up in his child. My uncle has a considerable fortune, and he said, when poor Ralph died, I was to be his heir. He has sent me to college, and now he says that if I want to be a specialist, he'll send me to Germany to study in some of those famous schools and under their first-class scientists as long as I please. And I don't know what to tell him." "Is it a question of being a specialist or a general practitioner?" asked Mrs. Wyndham. "You ought not to consult us; we aren't competent to advise. Besides, isn't it chiefly a matter of vocation?" "Yes, ma'am, it is a question of taking up general or special practice; and, no, ma'am, it is not a matter of vocation; it is a matter of expediency. I could never be anything but a physician; I never for a moment wanted to do anything but practise medicine, but I don't care which branch of it I practise," said Tom. "Specialists, if they succeed, are likely to make more money." "But you say you are to inherit your uncle's fortune." "Surely you wouldn't look at your profession merely from the money point of view?" said Jessamy and Barbara, speaking together and with the unworldliness of all good young girls. "But if you went to Germany you would be gone ever so long," said Phyllis, slowly. "How can you expect us to offer you unselfish advice, when we should miss you so?" Tom flushed with pleasure. "Then you would miss me?" he said. "That is the point that makes me hesitate; it seems to me I could hardly make the sacrifice." "I don't think we ought to say one word to keep Tom from the course that is best for him, Phyllis," said Mrs. Wyndham. "You ought to ask some of your medical professors at college, and do what they suggest." "I think he ought to consider what gives him most opportunity to do good," said Jessamy, "if he is not obliged to depend wholly on his profession for a living." "And a general practice surely does that," said Barbara. "Oh, I don't know; a doctor never lacks chances to help suffering in mind and body," said Tom. "It is a hard problem. Do you want this puffed or drawn tight over this edge?" "The easier way, whichever that may be," said Mrs. Wyndham, smiling. "Either is pretty." For a while Tom tacked industriously, calling upon the girls occasionally for a stitch taken in strong shoe thread. At last the divan was covered, and the four pairs of young hands packed it again with the numerous bundles and bags of precious remnants taken from it. Mrs. Wyndham went to her room, and Phyllis stood absent-mindedly gazing down on their neighbors' back yards, while Truce, from her shoulder, watched a cat on the fence with mild curiosity. Jessamy and Barbara put the pillows in place, and gave the last touches to their loops and ruffles. Tom walked over to Phyllis, and stood beside her. "What do you say about me going to Germany, Phyllis? I would rather have your opinion than any one's, and you have not spoken." His tone was lower than usual, but rather as if the subject were serious than to exclude the other two. Phyllis looked up at him, frankly smiling. "Mine?" she said. "Why, Tom, if I thought you would heed it I wouldn't dare give it, for I don't know anything about what is best, as you know quite well." "But on general principles?" insisted Tom. "On general principles, and if you really don't care which you do, then I think 'home-keeping hearts are happiest.' That little song has been haunting me all day," said Phyllis. "I hate to think of you so far away, alone, and for so long." "You would rather I did not go? You would rather have me here, in New York, and near you?" asked Tom, eagerly. Phyllis laughed, and pushed her hair, getting to an inconvenient length, back from her eyes to see him better. "Why, Tom!" she said. "What a foolish question! Don't you know I would? Aren't you one of ourselves, and shouldn't we all be crippled if you left us? Unless it is much better for you, I should feel dreadfully to think of losing you for three or four years." "Then I stay," said Tom, decidedly. "For general practice I can get all the training I need in our own hospitals, and I shall stay. You've settled it, Phyllis." Tom repaired to the bath-room to get the black from the curled hair, tacks, and hammer off his hands, and the girls went out to get dinner. Phyllis sang her own little rhyme of the morning as she peeled potatoes and dipped the cutlets in eggs and crumbs, but Jessamy was thoughtful, and, unlike herself, did queer things setting the table. Bab was silent; her cheeks were red, and her manner jerky. Once she ordered Nixie out from under her feet sharply, and then sat down on the floor to hug him and beg the pardon he lavishly accorded. At dinner Bab and Tom nearly fell out over nothing more likely than a difference of opinion as to a political candidate, though it turned out in the end that the man Bab denounced so fiercely was not the one of whom she thought she was speaking. Tom went home early, and Mrs. Wyndham asked Phyllis to read to her and let the other two girls attend to the dishes. Every one seemed a trifle disturbed in mind except Phyllis, who was as happy and calm as--Phyllis Wyndham, and that means a very clear and peaceful calmness. Barbara washed the dishes and Jessamy wiped them in silence, each busy with her own thoughts. At last, when Barbara was putting the butter in the lower part of the refrigerator, and Jessamy was hanging her wet dish-towels on the line to dry, Jessamy said: "Bab, do tell me; did it occur to you this afternoon that Tom cared more for Phyllis's wishes in the matter of his going to Germany than for ours?" "Yes," said Barbara, shortly. "Have you thought he was beginning to like--care for Phyllis; I mean differently from the way he likes us--the old brotherly way?" said Jessamy. "Yes," said Barbara again, her head still in the refrigerator. "Lately? When did you begin to think so?" insisted Jessamy. "Yes, lately; the last three or four times, perhaps," said Bab, not very lucidly. "Phyl doesn't notice it, if it is so," remarked Jessamy, thoughtfully. "She is as unconscious as the new moon." There was no remark from Bab in reply to this, but the cover of the earthen jar she was putting away was set in place with rather unnecessary violence. "Well," said Jessamy, turning from the last refractory towel, into which she had forced a pin with difficulty, because she had not wrung the water out thoroughly, "well, maybe it is not so at all; we mustn't get sentimental, contrary to our habit, and imagine things; but I really couldn't help thinking Tom was beginning to care for Phyllis. He's a dear boy, just as splendid and true as he can be; and if it were so, and she grew to care about him, it would be lovely, wouldn't it?" Bab withdrew from the refrigerator and stood up. Her cheeks were very red, but that might have been from long stooping. "Lovely!" she said. "I don't see anything lovely about it! I think it is all horrid, horrid--likings, and changes, and growing up, and everything! For goodness sake, why can't we stay children forever?" She spoke with such violence and excitement in her voice that Jessamy stared in amazement as she dashed through the dining-room to her own little room. "Poor Babbie! I didn't know she cared," thought Jessamy, turning down the gas and setting the milk-bottles on the dumb-waiter. "She does love to be a little girl; and how nice it would be if we all could be little girls for years and years!" CHAPTER X DISCOVERIES There were hints of spring in the air. The willows near the northern entrance to Central Park had a filmy, yellow-green effect in the distance, as if the coming leaves were foreshadowed in a mist of sap. The robins were full of importance, bustling over their spring arrangements, and the strawberry venders were adding their discordant voices to the necessary city sounds, yet adding, too, to the general cheerfulness with the scarlet-laden trays balanced on their heads. The Wyndhams had prepared for a pleasant day. Ruth had come to spend it with them, and hem the ruffles of her new white dimity. Jessamy, Phyllis, and Barbara had sewing, and the new machine which they had added to their belongings stood ready, with its top invitingly laid back, in Phyllis's room, where the strongest and longest light came. "If we had nothing to do but practise a little music, get through a little shopping, make and receive a few calls, we should miss all this sort of pleasantness," said Jessamy, touching up a bow on a hat she was trimming, and holding it off to look at it with one eye shut in true artistic manner. "Half the best things of life are not to be met on the highways; it's the byways which are loveliest, figuratively and literally," said Ruth, contentedly. "That sounds like a poem condensed into prose," remarked Bab. "Are you going to drop into poetry?" Ruth laughed. "All happy people must be more or less poetical, I fancy," she said. "I wonder if Silas Wegg meant more than he knew when he talked about dropping into poetry in the light of a friend? If you're friendly toward life and people, then you get happy, then poetical; it's a clear sequence in my mind, only I haven't expressed it clearly." "Not very, Ruth, and that's undeniable," laughed Phyllis. "I am perfectly certain Mr. Wegg meant nothing so complex. However, your idea is all right; I know from experience one becomes a poet under pressure of happiness." "_One_ does; the rest don't," said Jessamy. "Phyllis sings yards of rhymes when she's jolly, but Bab and I remain prose copies." "Won't you show me that story you wrote, and Jessamy's illustrations?" said Ruth. "I'll solemnly--and safely--promise not to go home and reproduce either." Phyllis arose and took from her desk several sheets of foolscap, covered with painstaking writing. She also produced several squares of Bristol board, and gave it all into Ruth's hands. "You won't appreciate the drawings unless you read the story," she said. "We think Jessamy has come out in an entirely new vein, and never has done anything to compare with this." Ruth looked at the drawings with surprise and admiration growing greater every moment. "Why," she cried at last, "I should think she had come out and surpassed herself! Why, Jessamy, they're exquisite! Dainty, graceful, but strong, and--I can't say what I mean--original is a stupid word, yet I can't get hold of a better." "Individual, Mrs. Van Alyn says, and she knows," said Barbara. "The story is good, too." "I can't tell what has happened to me," said Jessamy, looking very glad. "But it is as though I had been groping my way with my eyes half-shut, and suddenly I saw, and felt as well as saw, just where I belonged and what I meant to express. I did those illustrations fast, and I really do not think I drew one line with uncertainty. It is the strangest thing, but I feel as though I had discovered myself, and could do what I wanted to do. Even when I am not at work I feel the same certainty of power. It is the most glorious feeling! It isn't one bit conceit, but I can't lose the impression of being equal to anything." "Well, I don't know much about artistic matters, either writing or drawing, but I suppose that means just what you say: you've discovered yourself, and if you have, you're bound to succeed," said Ruth. "What are you going to do with the story and pictures? Have you sent it anywhere?" "Not yet--" began Jessamy, but Bab interrupted her. "She must take it herself, and show it to one of the magazine editors, we think," she said. "They say it is just as well to send things--better, perhaps, since editors are such busy men," said Ruth. "But whatever you do, get it seen soon." "We are going to collaborate, and grow tremendously rich and famous," laughed Phyllis, putting the work back in the desk. "There's our bell; oh, dear, I hope no one has come just when we are beginning such a lovely day!" "It is Mrs. Van Alyn, girls, and she is coming in there," called Bab, from the hall. "I have come to be disagreeable and spoil all your plans," said Mrs. Van Alyn, kissing Phyllis and Jessamy. "Don't get up, dears; the end of the bed is all I want, for I mean to hurry off, and take Jessamy with me." And she pushed one side the scattered breadths of an organdie Jessamy was cutting. "Oh, don't sit on Trucie!" cried Bab. "He's somewhere there asleep, after bothering our lives out." "Dear me!" cried Mrs. Van Alyn, jumping up hastily. "Why, Barbara, you scamp, why did you frighten me so? The kitten is rolled up in the pillow-sham!" "Did you say you wanted me to go out with you, Mrs. Van Alyn?" asked Jessamy. "Yes. Where is your mother?" asked their friend. "Mama went to market to-day, and said she should sit in the park awhile; she hasn't come in," answered Jessamy. "Then I can speak in ordinary tones; the worst of these dear little apartments is that the rooms are so close together there is no chance for secrets," laughed Mrs. Van Alyn. "I would rather your mother should not know my errand, for very likely it amounts to nothing, and I don't want to set her dreaming. There is a young lawyer of my acquaintance--the son of very nice people I met in the Berkshires--who had a desk in one of Mr. Abbott's offices a year and a half ago--the winter before the trouble. He thinks it is possible that he may be able to help Mr. Hurd prove that Mr. Abbott put his property out of his hands too late for it to have been legal, or at least that a part of it was disposed of too late. He has seen Mr. Hurd, and he sent Mr. Robert Lane--the young lawyer--to me, asking me to let him meet your mother. But I prefer to save her possible disappointment, as I said, so I am going to carry Jessamy off to lunch with me, and Mr. Lane will call at half-past two to see her. You know enough of the matter to satisfy him, don't you, Jessamy?" "I know more than I did at the time it happened," said Jessamy, "for then I knew nothing; I have tried to learn all about it from mama since. Of course, I will go, dear Mrs. Van Alyn; you are always so good to us!" "Nonsense, my dear! There is not much goodness in stealing one of you for a few hours; you are such busy bees nowadays I can hardly get a peep at you. Make haste, or as much as you can consistently with looking your prettiest. Old Peter is driving up and down, and I am dreadfully afraid of him; he looks unutterable things if I use the horses more than he approves. Show me all your pretty things while Jessamy is dressing, Phyllida and Babette. Little Miss Ruth Wells, you are the quickest needlewoman I ever saw. I wish you girls could keep me here all day, instead of the exigencies of the law driving Jessamy and me away. There are never bright spots like this room in my house." And Mrs. Van Alyn's sweet face clouded; her three little girls, who would have been just the age of the three Wyndhams, had slept in Greenwood for more than ten years, taken from her in one dreadful week by diphtheria. "Ready, Jessamy sweet?" she asked, as Jessamy came back, looking lovely in her gray gown, with the blush roses nestling against her hair under the soft brim of her hat. "Come, then; good-by, Phyllida, Babette, little Ruth, who manages to glean so much that is worth having. Jessamy shall come back safely, but late; tell your mother only that I carried her off to spend the day." "Wouldn't it be nice if we could get some of our money back?" said Barbara, tickling Truce's nose with the end of his long tail, when she had come back from seeing Mrs. Van Alyn and Jessamy safely off. "Nice! It would be just fine," cried Ruth. "Though that doesn't seem quite consistent with what we were saying as Mrs. Van Alyn came in." "It is a good thing we have learned all we know now," said Phyllis, thoughtfully. "We can never forget it, and be the sort of girls we should have been if we had never seen the seamy side. Still, that doesn't make it inconsistent to be glad to have enough not to feel uncertain of how we are coming out. If we all had wealth--even great wealth--again, which we probably shall never have, we should use it better than we would have before we learned our lesson; we cannot forget some things gained in this year." "_You_ probably will not," said Ruth, smiling to herself, as if she knew something that amused her in that connection. Phyllis and Bab looked up, the former wonderingly, the latter with a sharp look; her tone was a trifle sharp also as she asked: "What, for instance?" "Making croquettes," laughed Ruth, with a teasing look. "I suspect some of you have gained more than you realize." "Why this Guy Fawkes--only an amiable Guy Fawkes--manner, Ruth?" asked Phyllis. "One would think there were something funny about it, and we were talking quite seriously. Bab and I are out of the joke; what is it?" "You have gained a kitten, haven't you?" hinted Ruth. Barbara flushed quickly, but Phyllis smiled frankly, and said: "Yes, and a perfect one too, and we have gained the friendship of Nixie and Nixie's master, and I suppose Tom is more than even Truce; at any rate, I owe Truce to him. All that is not mysteriously funny, though; what is amusing you?" "Phyllis owns the kitten; that is her personal gain." "Yes; so far, maybe, Phyllis has rather the heaviest score to her credit of all the family. The matter with me, Phyl, is that I am aching to tell you girls something, and I don't know whether I ought to or not. It wasn't told me; I found it out, and yet it is a secret, and perhaps you won't thank me for telling," said Ruth. "Does it concern us, and what has happened to us in the past year?" asked Phyllis, mystified. "Secrets are likely to make mischief; I am sure this is one that will upset things. Yet you might as well tell now, for we shall guess it; it is the kind that is likely to come out anyway, isn't it?" asked Bab, in a manner most unlike herself. It was Ruth's turn to look surprised. "You must have some idea of what it is," she said. "I could guess," said Barbara, briefly. "Well, I do not think this is fair," said Phyllis. "I seem to be the only one in the dark. Tell the secret, Ruth, unless you really can't." "Well, then--oh, I feel mean telling you, but girls can't keep secrets anyway, and this is such a lovely one! What did you do with your hair when it was cut off?" said Ruth, speaking very fast at the last. "I? I didn't do anything with it; how could I, when I was so ill?" asked Phyllis. "If you mean what was done with it, I believe each of the family kept a lock and burned the rest." "All of it?" asked Ruth, knowingly. "What do you mean, Ruth; what are you getting at?" inquired Phyllis, impatiently. "Tom came to see me the other night," said Ruth. "He wanted to show me something one of his sisters had written him, and he pulled a lot of papers out of his pocket, hunting for the letter. A great many fell on the floor, and though we thought he had gathered them all up, I spied a narrow one, quite worn in the folds, under the sofa some half an hour later. I picked it up, and was going to hand it to him when a long lock of hair slipped out. Then I didn't dare let him know I had seen it, so I made an excuse to get out of the room and popped it into his overcoat pocket. But before I did so I saw what was written on the outside of the paper, and the paper was worn and had been folded small, and the ends were wrinkled as if it had been in a bag; I believe he had worn it around his neck, Phyllis. And on the paper was written: 'Christmas Eve, 1901. "Nay, but you who do not love her, is she not pure gold"'--Browning, you know! And the initials 'P.'--" "Stop, stop, Ruth!" cried Phyllis, her hands over her ears, her face crimson. "What is the use of stopping her at one letter? You have heard the whole story," said Bab. Phyllis's face was full of a strange light; shame, regret, joy, shyness--all were there; but, above all, wonder. "You ought not to have told me; I ought not to have listened," she said. "But even if--if it were mine--" "It was," interrupted Ruth, with decision. "Well, if it was, what of it? Surely there is nothing strange in carrying a friend's hair, and especially when you thought she was dying," stammered Phyllis. "You haven't been dying all this time, miss; and what about the Browning line?" suggested Ruth. "Perhaps boys are like girls, after all, and like to play at being sentimental," said Phyllis. "It is mean of us to spy on Tom; I suppose boys like to dream. Do you remember, Bab, that funny little peanut Italian boy we used to watch for when we were about eleven, and how we used to wear a peanut for a badge to show how we all three admired him? Weren't we funny little monkeys?" "I have some recollection of the peanut Italian," said Bab, "though I am not sure we could find that quarter of Italy on the map. It strikes me some of us are rather funny monkeys still." "Trying to change the subject, Phyl?" teased Ruth. "Did you think sensible Tom would be your first--" "You must not, Ruth; I won't let you!" cried Phyllis, in sincere distress. "Please don't talk about it; please never jest about it. I would give the world not to have heard of it. It doesn't mean one thing; Tom is fond of us all, quite fond enough to carry all our hair in his pocket--" "That _is_ a proof of affection," said Bab, laughing. "All our hair! Dear me! Still, I agree with Phyllis; we ought all be spanked for our impertinence; let's change the subject. If we get silly and sentimental, we sha'n't be able to stand ourselves. I hate sentiment, and I hate a fool, like Mr. F.'s aunt in 'Little Dorrit'! What a dear old lady she was; so sensible! Don't tell Jessamy this trash. Ruth Wells, I dare you to try a griddle-cake race with me at luncheon. We'll make the yellow bowl full, and I dare you to race me eating them." "Why, Barbara Wyndham, do you want to kill yourself? You know they always hurt you!" said Phyllis, horrified. "And a race eating! Ruth, don't do it!" "Why should I want to kill myself just when we're all so happy, and everything is going beautifully?" cried Bab. "Come on, Ruth!" And she gathered up her skirts and danced toward the kitchen, singing cakewalk music, and swinging her body in the real plantation manner. Ruth, always ready for anything, followed her, while Phyllis went to let in her aunt, who rang at that moment. Then she continued her way, and stood leaning her hot cheeks against the glass of the parlor window. Tom! Her hair! She had not believed a word she had said of it being only boyish sentiment. Was she glad or sorry? She did not know; it spoiled all the old, unconscious friendliness, but then it was beautiful to feel that dear Tom cared for her all alone, and for herself, not as "one of the Wyndham girls." Whether she was fonder of him than she had guessed she could not tell in this first confused pleasure and regret; all she knew was that she could not let any one speak of it; it was something to keep all to herself and dream over, while she was pretending to Babbie and Ruth that she had forgotten all about it. Whether she was glad or sorry, it was a lovely thing to have happen to a girl, and she hardly knew herself for little Phyllis in the new light it shed around her. She caught up Truce, and laid his purring little throat against her cheek; Truce was very fond of her, and he was part of Tom's kindness. Phyllis went back to the kitchen, where she found Ruth in a gale of laughter and Bab as full of pranks as a monkey. She mimicked old black Sally, then scolded herself, impersonating Aunt Henrietta, till Phyllis had to sit down and gasp for breath, and Ruth was so weak from laughing that she could not stir the cake-batter. All lunch-time Bab talked a stream of nonsense that made her mother shake her head between peals of laughter, and warn her that such high spirits usually preceded the other extreme with her mercurial little self. But Bab was irrepressible, and both Ruth and Phyllis begged for mercy, till Bab seated herself at her piano and played dance music and made them dance till they could no longer stand. "Now, who says three girls can't have a jolly time, with nothing but themselves to make it jolly?" demanded Barbara. "Phyllis, when Ruth goes home, you are to go with her; you haven't been out to-day." "Is that a hint?" asked Ruth. "You needn't send me home, Mistress Barbara, because I was going anyway. I promised mother to get home early, so that she could go out. Will you come with me, Phyllis?" "No; Babbie and I are going to sew longer," replied Phyllis. "Babbie and you are going to do nothing of the sort. You must take your airing, and I shall rest; I am sure I have earned it," said Bab, decidedly. Accordingly, Phyllis left the house with Ruth, but she was not in the mood for walking all the way home with her friend. She went but part way, then returned, and let herself in with her key half an hour later. The house was very still, and Phyllis, moving softly, saw that her aunt was asleep in her own room. Passing on down the narrow hall, she came to Bab's door, and stopped short at what she saw. There lay Barbara, flat on her face, which was buried in the pillow. Stifled moans came from the slender figure, which was shaking with sobs so violent that Phyllis's heart stood still with terror; the first thought that crossed her mind was that something awful had happened to Jessamy, or that her aunt was not sleeping, but had died, and Bab knew it. "For heaven's sake, Bab, what is it; tell me," she whispered, laying her hand on the heaving shoulder. Barbara started as though she had been shot. "You here?" she gasped. "Where did you come from?" "What has happened? Is it Jessamy?" whispered Phyllis. "Nothing has happened; do let me alone! I--I have a headache," said poor Bab. "Nothing happened?" repeated Phyllis, sitting down on the edge of the bed, and gathering her cousin into her arms. "Dear, darling Babbie, are you ill? Aren't you happy?" "Happy!" echoed Bab, scornfully; then she seemed to recall herself, and said quickly: "It's just as Madrina said: I was too gay, that's all; this is the reaction." "Bab, that is not true; you were gay because you were trying to hide something," said Phyllis, slowly. "What is wrong with you, dearie? Tell Phyllis; you know she will help you." "What do you care?" asked Bab, bitterly, putting down her head on the pillow and withdrawing from Phyllis's arms. "You have everything a girl could ask; what do you care about me?" "Why, Bab, how unjust you are! As though I could be happy if you weren't! And what have I that you have not--" Phyllis stopped suddenly. An idea crossed her mind that made her breath come in a swift sob. Oh, surely that was not it; Bab was a child--"Are you really in pain, Babbie? Are you ill? Let me send word to Tom; he will help you; he would do anything for you, you know," she said, with sudden cunning. "Anything you asked him too," said Bab. "I have known about Tom for some time, Phyllis. That was not news to me to-day. Of course, I don't want his help, nor any medicine. And I wish you would let me alone, Phyllis; I don't want you to touch me, or bother with me. I have a headache; you said those cakes would hurt me. Can't I have a headache or be blue without being bothered? You all think I never have a sober moment because I generally am cutting capers. I'll caper again, never fear. But, honestly, I don't want to see you now, Phyllis. I hope I'm not rude, but you're driving me mad. Do go! I hoped you were out of the house for an hour or so. Flats are horrid! A body can't cry a minute in one. Go, go, _go_, Phyllis; only go." Barbara was getting hysterical, and Phyllis rose without another word. Her own face was full of pain as she turned away, and her eyes looked big with dismayed surprise. She turned back and kissed Barbara. "You'll be better if you take a nap," she said. It cut her like a knife that Bab shrank from her lips. Phyllis went to her own room, and sat down in her little rocking-chair without taking off her hat. Here was trouble indeed, and childhood's peaceful days looked very sweet and distant. CHAPTER XI LOYAL PHYLLIS Phyllis sat looking, with unseeing eyes, out upon the small courtyard below her window for more than an hour. All day her brain had been full of sweet, indefinite girlish dreams from which Bab's grief had aroused her into most definitely unpleasant waking. She was a sensible little body, and she knew that she was not yet fond enough of Tom to make it tragic that she must find measures to break off his increasing affection for her; nor was she conceited enough to believe that it would be fatal to Tom's happiness for all time to drive him from her. It was as though a vision of vague and beautiful possibilities had arisen before her, from which she must turn away her eyes; it was not that she was rejecting a present good, but that which might grow into a very precious gift in the future. She shrank from the idea of a lover yet, feeling too young and too content in her girlhood to tolerate losing it, but Tom was a dear, good, splendid boy, and by and by, possibly, when she was older and ready to be a woman--then who could tell? Perhaps she would grow fonder of him--so fond that-- And at that point Phyllis had shyly stopped, even in her thoughts; but it had been delicious to dream, thus vaguely, all day since Ruth had told the mischievous secret. Now Phyllis felt, without a moment's doubt, that she must dream no more. If Bab already cared so much that Tom's preference for her cousin could cost her such bitter tears, their source but ill concealed, then Phyllis knew that her duty was to turn away from rose-colored visions and try to bring about Bab's happiness. She had a sorrowful feeling that when she had closed the front door behind her, and walked in upon weeping Babbie, she had shut it upon her first careless youth, and was beginning to grow up and face a grown-up girl's puzzles. For in stories sometimes two friends were rivals, and all sorts of catastrophes came from the situation, and one or both of the heroines had a hard lot to bear. Well, she and Bab were never to be rivals, that was certain; how absurd it all was, and how sensible Tom would laugh if he could know her thoughts! But, after all, it was not absurd, but the beginning of what might prove a real sorrow if some one did not prevent it; and no one but she herself could remedy the matter, if it could be done at all. Yes, she felt sure it could be done, and that there was only one way to do it. If that way involved sacrifice for herself, that did not make it less her duty. She would rather die than stand in the way of Barbara's good, much rather die than be the one to deprive either of her adopted sisters of anything essential to her happiness; for they were dearer and more to be considered that they were not her own sisters, but the children of the uncle and aunt to whom she owed so much. Phyllis thought and thought, and it seemed to her the only thing that she could do was to drop out of the little home which was dearer to her, if possible, than to either of the others, and go away for a while, until Tom should have grown sensible enough to see how much nicer Bab really was than she. When that happy day had come she would come back; she hoped it would not be long coming, for her heart sickened within her at the thought of herself alone from home. There was that dear old lady in Boston; she would write her, and ask her if the place as companion she had promised her whenever she claimed it were still open to her, and if it were she would pack her trunk and slip out, and the blessed "square of Wyndhams," as they called the happy four constituting their family, would be a four no longer. Above all, Mrs. Wyndham must not guess the true reason of her going, for she would never consent to Phyllis going away for Barbara's sake. Jessamy? Yes, she would tell Jessamy, for she must have an assistant in furthering her plans, both in getting away and in seeing that Barbara was helped toward the happiness she might miss if let alone; for Phyllis had heard that girls in love sometimes did such dreadful things that they drove off the blessing they craved. She had known such cases, she thought, then remembered that her experience was confined to the book-shelves, and that the only case in point she had encountered was Hetty Lambert's, in "The Virginians." Phyllis had reached this stage of her meditations, and had wiped away some quiet tears which would come as she planned giving up everything she loved, even for a time, when the bell rang, and she rose to let in Jessamy, radiant, lovely, at the end of a very happy day. "Bab has a headache, and auntie is lying down," said Phyllis. "Is there any news, Jessamy?" "Mr. Lane thinks the prospect is good of our recovering something," said Jessamy, going into Phyllis's room to take off her hat. "He is the nicest person! Beautiful manners, and decidedly good-looking--well bred, you know," Jessamy added, as if she could say no more, as indeed she could not, being the sort of girl she was. "I had a lovely day; Mrs. Van Alyn is perfect. Why have you your hat on? Have you been out, or are you going? It is nearly dinner-time. When did Ruth go?" "Ruth went rather early; I forgot my hat. I walked with her a little way, and have been sitting here, thinking, ever since," said Phyllis, taking out her hat-pins and tossing her hat on the bed with a gesture as though flowers and their getting tumbled were beneath her interest. "Anything wrong, Phyl? You've been crying!" said Jessamy, turning from the glass with a sharp look at her cousin. "What ails Bab? She never has headaches." "There's nothing very wrong, Jessamy; nothing we can't set right," said Phyllis. "It is a story too long to tell you now, but I'm going to tell you as soon as we can get off somewhere together. It is a solemn secret, mind, and you're not to tell a soul--not even auntie. Don't appear to see anything queer about Bab to-night, and to-morrow come with me into the park and we'll talk it out." "Then it is about Bab?" said Jessamy, looking puzzled. "Bab, of all people! She was all right when I went away; I don't see how I can wait until to-morrow to hear the secret, Phyllis. It can't be very trifling, when you show no interest in getting our money back." "It is just a horrid little snarl, Amy, but nothing worse; you and I will unravel it. Hush! I hear auntie, and Bab is moving about in her room. Let's put the kettle on; there's nothing like the kitchen for troubled minds! Don't you dare look thoughtful this evening, nor try to guess what I've on my mind by studying me, or Bab will see. I am going to tell you as soon as I can. Better change your dress, Jessamy; I'll whisk on my apron, and get the water boiling," Phyllis added in a louder tone, as her aunt came down the hall. In spite of Phyllis's warning, Jessamy found her eyes wandering from her face to Bab's all through dinner. One she saw was clouded, discontented, very unlike its usually bright self; the other, grave, but patient and sweet: neither helped her to a solution of the mystery in the air. There was no possibility of waiting for the morrow to hear Phyllis's story. Curiosity made it more than easy for Jessamy to keep awake until her mother and Bab were asleep, and, creeping to Phyllis's door, she soon satisfied herself that her cousin was as wakeful as she was. "Get on your wrapper and come into the kitchen, Phyl; I'm wild to hear what you have to tell me," she said through a crack in the door. Phyllis opened it at once. "I'll come," she said. "Don't make a sound." Jessamy went down the hall in the dark, and Phyllis followed her in a few moments, wrapped in her eiderdown wrapper, soundless knit slippers on her feet, and Truce in her arms, for the kitten was her bedfellow, and was so spoiled that he would have cried and aroused the household if he had wakened to find himself alone. "Now," said Jessamy, carefully and noiselessly closing the door behind Phyllis, and taking the straight chair, having pulled the rocker forward for her cousin, "now, tell me." Phyllis seated herself, tucking her feet up on the round of the chair and pulling her wrapper down around them, for the floor was cold. Truce immediately took up the post under the tubs which he always assumed to look for the mice which never came. "Well, Jessamy," Phyllis began, "it is not the sort of news you expect, no matter what you have guessed it to be. Babbie has fallen in love with Tom." "Bab?" exclaimed Jessamy, so loudly that Phyllis had to warn her to be careful. "But that is impossible! Why, Tom is beginning to care for you." "How did you know that?" demanded Phyllis, sitting up straight. "Bab said, too, she had thought so for some time. I never dreamed such a thing until Ruth told us something to-day. It is all horrid, Jessamy, and I wish we were back to our doll days." "What did Ruth tell you? What makes you fancy such nonsense about Bab?" asked Jessamy; but, as she spoke, the memory of Bab's curt manner when she had spoken of Tom's caring for Phyllis came back to her with a pang of foreboding. Phyllis recounted, without interruption from Jessamy, the secret that Ruth had discovered, and Bab's subsequent behavior. Then, without waiting for comment from Jessamy, she said: "There's only one thing for me to do, Jessamy; I'm going to slip out and leave Tom to love the right girl, if he loves a Wyndham at all. I'm going to write to Boston to Mrs. Dean, and ask if she will take me, as she said she would. I shall stay there until the trouble blows over, and you will get a maid to do the work, which would be too much for you without me; we could afford it as it is, so we certainly can when I am earning money." Jessamy rose and put her arms around Phyllis, kneeling at her side. "My dear, good, unselfish Phyllis," she said, "if you won't let me tell mama--and I think it is right not to, because it would worry her dreadfully to think there was no way of keeping pain from one or the other of her girls--you force me to act as I know she would if she were told. Bab is not the only one to be considered; you have just as much right to be happy as she. And there is Tom. It is you, not Bab, he has turned to; is it just to give him no thought? And are you sure you don't care a little bit for him, dear?" "I have tried to be very honest, Jessamy," said Phyllis, slowly. "I like Tom; I believe I could do more than like him by and by. Wait! But I don't love him; I never thought of loving any one until to-day. I liked to think of it--I'll confess that--but before the thought had a chance to do any harm I found out about Babbie; wasn't it lucky, Jessamy? As to Tom, it is only a boyish fancy, and he will get so much the better bargain in getting Bab that there is no reason to be sorry for him." "Neither mama nor I would admit that, though Babbie is a splendid, true, loving girl," said Jessamy. "But there never was but one Phyllis, and you must know that if Bab is my own sister, you have always been even dearer to me than she. I won't have you sacrifice yourself, Phyllis, not for any, or all of us, so you may make up your mind this moment that I will not help your plan out till I have thought a long time. And how do you suppose we shall bear letting you go?" "And how do you suppose I shall bear going?" retorted Phyllis. "Even Trucie is dear, and I can't bear to leave him. But it is the only way to bring things straight. As to sacrificing myself, if I were to be happy at Bab's expense, I couldn't be happy--to make a fine bull. But don't let us get sentimental and exaggerate the case, Jessamy. I am just running away from a possibility; I might have something beautiful in the end, if there were no reason why I should not have it; but again I might never find it beautiful. In the meantime here is Babbie, really unhappy, jealous of me, wanting positively what I might possibly have wanted, but never could want now. Do you realize how dreadful it was to have Bab, our own Bab, shrink away from me when I kissed her, and to feel that she was actually jealous of me? Why, I wouldn't have such a thing as that between our love, breaking up the fondest affection three girls ever felt for one another, for all the splendid boys in the world! So help me away, Jessamy; help me get auntie's consent, and help me keep up heart to leave home for the first time in my life; for, honestly, I am a coward at the thought of it. And, after I am gone, help Barbara be happy." "Do you ever think, my darling old Loyalty," said Jessamy, with a hug, "that you may be throwing away a very precious thing--for I feel sure you could care for Tom, and he is not a man to be met with every day--throwing it away all for nothing? That you may wean him from you without turning him to Bab, and that Bab herself may be passing through a mere girlish fancy?" Phyllis was silent a moment, then she said slowly: "I never once thought of that, but I mustn't think of it now. I must do what is right, and hope for the best. I don't think Babbie is the sort to take silly, trifling little fancies, and you don't think so, either. Tom must care for her, since he is goose enough not to care for you, because he will never find any one to compare with you two. But if he didn't love Bab at last, at least she would not think I had robbed her, and I wouldn't have that thought to torture me, and we'd still have one another; and I always did say, having that, nothing else mattered." Jessamy drew the pretty head, with its soft rings of hair, down on her shoulder, and kissed Phyllis with a tenderness that was almost motherly. "You are the best, the truest girl that ever lived, Phyllis, and I respect you even more than I love you. Bab ought to be thankful on her knees for such generous love as yours, if she never gets any other kind. You shall go, dear; I won't say one word against it, and I'll help you all I can. If mama could know this she would be quite overcome with your devotion to Bab. I only hope Bab will be worthy of your love and truth." "I'd do just as much for you, Jessamy," said Phyllis, looking up slyly through the tears she was shedding on her cousin's blue jacket. "Don't you imply I don't appreciate your love, miss," said Jessamy. "Go to bed, Phylkins; you are cold. And go to sleep; perhaps you have imagined more than the truth, and you won't go away, after all. To think of your giving up a lover to Bab! It's rather romantic and interesting, isn't it? This is the horrid penalty of being nineteen." "Oh, dear me, yes; that's what I have been thinking all the afternoon. I wish we were nine, don't you?" said Phyllis, fervently. Jessamy hesitated. "There is something rather nice about growing up, though," she said meditatively. "To be quite honest, Phyl, I think it would be pleasant having lovers and admiration and all that, provided we did not all fancy the same youth." "Have you been tasting that pleasure, Jessamy Wyndham?" demanded Phyllis, grown sharp in the experience of the past hours. "Was Mr. Lane quick to recognize our princess's charms?" "Don't be a goose, Phyllis; he was very polite, of course," said Jessamy. "If we don't take care, we shall be as bad as the girls we always have despised, who see a possible admirer in every young man they meet. Go to bed, dearie, and go to sleep. It's a perfect shame Bab's notions have to shadow your blessed, unselfish little face--when you were going your ways so unconsciously and harmlessly, too! It isn't her fault, but I really believe I should enjoy shaking Babbie a little, especially if you go away." "Poor, dear little Babbie! You don't know how bitterly she was crying when I found her," said Phyllis, unrolling herself from the folds of her wrapper. "It certainly isn't her fault, and I shall be happy if she is. Come, Truchi-ki; bedtime, and past it, my golden-eyed kitten! No mouselets here, so there's no use watching; they know too much to come where kittens watch. It's rather nice to be a little white catkin, and purr at a touch, isn't it, Jessamy?" she added, as she swung Truce to her shoulder, where he immediately cuddled down to purr. "We used to be little white, purring things too, not long ago; it is such a pity not to stay so! Until the trouble came we never knew a care; and now, just when we are getting so cozy, the baby has to fall in love! Isn't it horrid? Good night; you're such a comfort, Amy-princess, with your common sense and your partial judgments of me! I wonder if this kitchen was ever the refuge of any other girl tenants in sentimental troubles?" "Good night, loyal Phyllis; I can never love you nor thank you enough for Bab, who is not likely to realize fully what you have done. I'm not partial to you; I can't do you justice, but at least I know it," said Jessamy, taking Phyllis and the kitten into a comprehensive embrace and kissing her with her heart on her lips. Tired out with their long talk, and chilled in the night air, Jessamy and Phyllis soon fell asleep, and forgot the troubles hanging over them in the dreamless rest of their years. Phyllis wrote her letter to Mrs. Dean, and posted it without a word to any one save Jessamy. There was no use in getting her aunt's permission to go to Boston until she had found out whether the opportunity of going were still open to her. It was difficult to wait the answer, keep the secret, and behave in the old way, as in the days when there were no secrets and, above all, no consciousness of changes that were far from pleasant in what Barbara had called "the squareness of the square." But though it was not an easy task, Jessamy and Phyllis accomplished it fairly well, and, fortunately, it did not require doing long. Mrs. Dean replied very quickly to Phyllis's note, with unmistakable pleasure bidding her welcome at the earliest possible time she could set out. Mrs. Wyndham could not be brought to listen to the plan when it was first broached to her; there was not the slightest need, she said, of Phyllis's leaving home; indeed it was unwise for her to go until she and Jessamy had first tested their hope of working together for the magazines, for which Jessamy especially seemed suddenly so well prepared. But Phyllis begged very hard to be allowed to try her wings, pleading restlessness and a longing to see more of the world; especially, she reminded her aunt, because no one could hope to write well who lived in one narrow routine. Jessamy seconded her plea, and said they should work together quite as effectually with Phyllis in Boston, for she would send her stories home for Jessamy to illustrate, and nothing would be lost by separation. Mrs. Wyndham was a little hurt at first by Phyllis's insistence, and then not a little suspicious; it was so improbable that a restless desire to roam should come suddenly upon home-loving Phyllis in the midst of her supreme content in their new housekeeping. Though she did not suspect that Barbara had any connection with the plan, she did surmise that Phyllis was running away from an unwelcome lover, and so gave her consent reluctantly at last. Bab herself took the news with dumb amazement at first, then evidently with an irreconcilable mixture of emotions. It was past comprehending that Phyllis did not care for Tom, and yet this sudden change of spirit, following Ruth's disclosure, left no other solution. Bab did not believe that any one suspected what it was costing her to think that even Phyllis was first in Tom's esteem; she hoped that no one saw that Phyllis's going away was a relief to her, and she hated herself that it should be so. So it was settled that Phyllis was to go out into the world to try her fortunes. She and Jessamy hunted up Violet, their former waitress, and discovered, as they had expected, that for the sake of coming back to the Wyndhams she would gladly undertake to do "gen'l house-woak, dough she mos' in gen'lly didn't cah 'bout it." Getting Violet back simplified the domestic problem, and there were no more obstacles in Phyllis's path of duty, except its general thorniness, and this she tried to keep to herself. Tom had been in and out as usual during these days when Jessamy and Phyllis were plotting against him, but of course was not told of Phyllis's plans till they were complete. Phyllis was in the park late one afternoon, when all her arrangements had been settled, and even the day of her departure fixed upon as the coming Monday. Only three days at home left her, she was thinking sadly; but if she must go, delay could make it no easier, and, as she looked up, she saw Tom coming toward her. It was difficult to talk to Tom now, with her guilty consciousness of so many complex feelings connected with him, but Phyllis managed to smile with almost her old frankness, and say at once: "Oh, Tom, I'm glad to see you and tell you myself my great news; I'm going away." "Away! Where? For how long?" asked Tom, his face falling. "To Boston, and 'it may be for years and it may be forever.' I'm going to be independent, and live a little solitary life of my own," laughed Phyllis, with affected gaiety. "Phyllis!" exclaimed Tom, in such a shocked, grieved tone that Phyllis hastily rattled on: "It may be spring fever, but I think it will last longer than spring. I am not going to be tied down to pots and pans all my life." "That does not sound like you," said Tom. "How do you think the others--how do you think I shall get on without you?" "The others have one another; you have them. Frankly, Tom, I am so much occupied in my own affairs I can't consider any one," said Phyllis. "Why do you want to misrepresent yourself so?" demanded Tom, indignantly. "I have known you long enough to know what a good friend you are, and how much better--" "I am not a very good friend; Jessamy and Bab--Bab especially--are much more devoted to friends than I am," said Phyllis, who was new to this sort of thing, and rather overdid trying to drive Tom from her. "I hope that isn't rude, Tom, when you've been so good to me, but you've the truest Wyndhams left." "Are you going to write me?" asked Tom, swallowing as well as he could this awkward implication that, after all, Phyllis had very little interest in him. "You won't be offended if I don't, will you? That is, not to you personally; you will hear the letters I write home, and I shall want messages from you, but I mean to work very hard, and there are three people at home to write--and Ruth and Mrs. Van Alyn--and I must do my duty by Aunt Henrietta, I suppose, so you won't think it strange if I satisfy myself with messages to you. You know I shall think of you," added Phyllis, breaking down a little as she saw Tom's hurt and puzzled face; it was rather hard to put him so far below all these others. "I cannot think anything later half as strange as this sudden announcement that you are going away, and your snubbing me," said Tom. "I have no right to complain of what you choose to do, but it is not easy to understand you, Phyllis; you were never like this before, and I hoped you knew how much more than either of the other girls--" "I am not snubbing you, Tom," said Phyllis, hastily. "I should be sorry to lose your regard, but the whole truth--that is--you see--why, my family and my hopes of doing something good in work--that's all I care about. Don't you understand, Tom?" "I think I do," said poor Tom, rather huskily. "You aren't very good at making believe, and there's no kind of use in trying to make me think less well of you. You don't want me to tell you how I feel about your going away, but it is hard--" He stopped, and stooped to pat Nixie. Tom was only a big boy after all, and he was dangerously near tears. "Dear Tom, you make me feel a selfish brute, but indeed I like you, and I wish we could all be together as before, and yet that I could do what I want to do; but as that can't be, I must choose what I care most for, so don't think much about me, since I am having my own way," said Phyllis, holding to her purpose, though her own eyes were dim. "And to prove how much I trust you, I am going to put dear Babbie in your hands. She isn't quite well lately, though she is so brave and tries so hard to make us all happy that she doesn't talk about herself. Won't you take care of her for me, study her as a doctor, and cheer her up as a friend? Babbie is the most loving, faithful soul in the world; I am afraid she will miss me dreadfully. If you can get her all right again, I'll be your friend fast enough; you'll have no occasion to complain of me." "I'll look after her," said Tom, "though I don't think there is anything wrong with her. She shall not be lonely if I can help it. By Jove, Phyllis, I wish you weren't quite so wrapped up in your family!" "But I am; in comparison, there is no one in the world for me. Here we are at home; are you not coming up?" said Phyllis. "Not to-night. I'll be in to-morrow," said Tom, wringing the hand she extended. "Good luck, Phyllis, and I'm just as much your friend, if you don't feel interested in me." And Phyllis, having succeeded in her efforts, toiled painfully up-stairs, with the regret of her success. CHAPTER XII THE SQUARE BECOMES A TRIANGLE Mrs. Wyndham, Jessamy, and Barbara, with Tom as escort, returned heavy-heartedly from the Warren Street pier, where they had been seeing off Phyllis at the beginning of her first venture into the world. The big _Puritan_, with her colors flying and her band playing, steamed out into the river looking bright and festive, but to those from whom she was bearing one fourth of themselves she seemed a kind of monster. Violet opened the door to them when they reached home, and Truce arched his back into a furry croquet-wicket in his pleasure on seeing them once more; but Jessamy's tears sprang to her eyes again, remembering that the kitten's dear mistress was sailing away; if Phyllis had gone to Darkest Africa, it could hardly have been more dismally tragic than the short journey to Boston seemed to the two girls who loved her. "We are a square no more," said Bab, drearily, as they seated themselves at the dinner-table. "Still we are four," suggested Mrs. Wyndham, with a kindly smile for Tom, toward whom Barbara's manner was distinctly forbidding. "Oh, I can't take Phyllis's place," said Tom, cheerily; "but I should say you were still as square as ever, since she is bound to be here, no matter where else she is. That sounds slightly occult," he added, laughing. "What I mean is--" "You mean her heart's in the Highlands wherever she roams," said Barbara. "But that is worse for us all; it makes her homesick, and we miss her just the same. No, we are no longer a square; we are a triangle, and I feel as though we were not even a triangle standing on one of its sides--or whatever you call them--but a triangle standing up on one of its points, and very wobbly." "We will hope it will not be long before we are squared again," said her mother. "We must not take Phyllis's flight too seriously; we are so unused to separations we cannot realize how trifling this little trip would be to less spoiled people. We shall have a telegram in the morning and such nice letters every day from our dear little girl that perhaps we shall never be willing to let her come home again." "I don't believe Horace Walpole and Madame Sévigné, melted down and poured out on the tip of Phyl's pen, could bring us to that state of mind," said Jessamy, giving Truce an extra fine bit of lamb for his mistress's sake. The telegram announcing Phyllis's safe arrival came before luncheon the next morning, and the following day brought her first letter. "Dearest Auntie, Girls, and Truchi-ki," it began: "Behold me of an arrival--you see, I am inclined to French forms. I had the nicest kind of a journey--so nice that I should be delighted to repeat it to-night--with the steamer's bow headed the other way!" "Dear old Phyl; telegraph her to do it!" cried Barbara. "But I am here to stay, and not so homesick as you might think I would be. Mrs. Dean is a dear, and Boston reserve may be as icy as the comic newspapers say, but when it makes up its mind to thaw it really is as warming as port wine, with much of the same rich, dignified quality. Mrs. Dean treats me with what I should call respectful affection, and that is the kind of treatment that makes a snip of a girl, away from home for the first time, feel self-reliant; it puts her on her mettle to be as womanly, contented, and generally pretty-behaved as she is expected to be. Mrs. Dean evidently intends to watch over me, and make me happy if she can, and the least I can do under such goodness is to be happy. She is going to save my self-respect by letting me feel she did not take me for charity, but that she really wanted me for service. My duties are to read to her, attend to her correspondence, and bear her company from her breakfast, at half-past eight, till luncheon, at one. After luncheon she drives for an hour, when I accompany her, after which drive she lies down, and I am free till the seven o'clock dinner. In the evening I sit with her, reading or playing backgammon or cribbage, until nine, except those evenings when her nephews and nieces call, or, as she says with a significant twinkle, when she feels minded to go to a concert or play, as she will sometimes, now that she has a youthful companion to enjoy frivolity as much as she does. "She is interested in my account of my little hopes, and says I must continue writing while with her, and she will see to it that I have time to do so for hours in the splendid great library. Oh, dear folkses, do you suppose our library at Fortieth Street will be as glorious as this beautiful Greek temple here? Of course, I maintain to Mrs. Dean that it is to be surpassed by the New York library when it is done, but in my heart of hearts I wonder if ours can equal the Boston one. "I have not seen much more of the city than the library; not that from the inside. The coachman brought me through Copley Square this morning when I arrived, and this afternoon I went down among the shops with Mrs. Dean. The shops look rather serious after our beauties; indeed, though Boston is handsomer than New York--that is, Commonwealth Avenue and around it, where Mrs. Dean lives, is fine--it is not cheerful and bright like our own queer, big jumble of a city, but looks as though it wore gray, and wore it on principle. We went down in the subway, and I felt dreadfully mortified not to have a hand-bag. Every woman, young and old, except myself, carried a little cloth bag, most of them shaped like school satchels held together by their leather handles. I felt as though I were out without some necessary article of clothing, not a hat or anything that might ever be superfluous, but something as dreadful to want as the waist of my dress, for instance. I certainly must get a bag, if I want to be respectable--I wonder if Boston policemen arrest girls who go out without bags, if they are alone? Mrs. Dean had one, so that may have saved me. Dearest, darlingest family, I hope you miss me--not too much, but a little. And I hope Violet will keep the kitchen and all my dear tins in apple-pie order; tell her I said so. And don't let Trucie miss me, yet don't let him forget me. And I am glad I came away, yet I would give anything to drop down among you as I shall drop this letter into the box. Altogether, I am a bundle of contradictions, you see; but I am doing as well as one could expect me to, and am going to be busy and contented. Write me, one of you, every day; for I love you more than you know, and it is a wee bit hard to be a wandering, prodigal daughter. Especially to such a home body as your spoiled, but loving Phyllis." "She is homesick, but she doesn't mean to let herself find it out," said Jessamy. "Dear little Phyllis! It won't hurt her to test herself under new conditions, but I hope she will feel that she can come back to us soon," said Mrs. Wyndham. "Now, your note, Jessamy? From Mrs. Van Alyn, isn't it?" "I think so," said Jessamy, examining the envelop, with that peculiar carefulness every one bestows on the outside of a letter, instead of opening it and looking at the signature. "Yes, it is, and she wants Bab and me to plunge into society; just listen!" she added, when she finally had opened the note and glanced at its contents. "'MY DEAR JESSAMY: We are going to have an entertainment, in aid of the Baby's Hospital, that promises to be quite charming. It is to be a Masque of Shakspere. The Mr. Lane whom you met at my house has written or constructed for us a Masque on the lines of those used in the Elizabethan period, in which many of Shakspere's characters, culled from all the plays, are introduced. He has used the Shaksperian text as far as possible, connecting it with original matter to bring out the very simple plot--it is practically but a meeting between all the dear characters whom we know, but who have hitherto never known one another. I beg you to help in this merrymaking, you and Barbara, and implore your mother to allow you to do so. First of all, I need you; secondly, you have been too long recluses from your old acquaintances, from whom mere change of circumstances should not wholly debar you. Jessamy is to be _Miranda_, for good and sufficient reasons, and Babbie will be, if she will, _Beatrice_. She is not quite large enough to realize exactly one's conception of "dear Lady Disdain," but she is admirably adapted for her otherwise, having by nature much of that young woman's ready wit and her loving heart, imperfectly concealed by the saucy tongue. I have asked your Doctor Tom to be _Benedick_--an added reason for our _Beatrice_ to be a success, if my observations the last few times that I have seen Bab with him and marked her snubbing of him are correct. It will be a delightful frolic, for we all love play-acting, and it will be a remarkably pretty affair if it goes well. So don't refuse me, dear Jessamy and Barbara, and tell your mother I say that it is as wrong to hide her daughters in a Harlem flat as to hide her light under a bushel. Say yes at once, and oblige your friend, MARY VAN ALYN.'" "It sounds beautiful, doesn't it, mama?" said Jessamy. "Do you think it would be wise for us to begin to nibble at forbidden fruit? You know we can't afford the time nor money to be gay very often." Barbara's cheeks had been rosy red since Jessamy had read the allusion to Tom, which showed that her desire to treat him indifferently had overshot the mark. "It might be rather stupid," she said. "We don't know who will be with us." "Mrs. Van Alyn will not ask any but acceptable young people, and it seems to me we can hardly refuse anything she suggests for you," said Mrs. Wyndham. "She has been your best friend all your lives--heavenly kind since the trouble came. You will enjoy it, and she is right to draw you into something bright and youthful. I certainly consent, and urge you to take part in the masque. Write your acceptance before you go out." "I'm only too delighted, if you think it won't upset us, mama," said Jessamy, with a beaming face, as she opened her desk. "I should love to try to act a little, and Mrs. Van Alyn has given us the dearest parts! Bab will be a splendid _Beatrice_, though she is small." The note of acceptance was despatched, and from that moment the little home was a whirl of excitement. Fortunately, Violet had the talent of her race for cooking, else the Wyndham family might have died of starvation, for neither Jessamy nor Barbara could get her mind down to practical things. Rehearsals began at once. The masque proved to be very clever and pretty, the plot a dream, in which most of the best-beloved people in Shakspere's plays met, talked, told the story of their lives subsequent to the ending of the play in which they had moved, straightened out tangles, showed that sorrowful events were all a mistake and had never happened, and ended at the last in a beautiful old English dance, which faded away into a background of shadow, in which finally all were lost to sight and were understood to have gone back into the 1623 folio whence they had emerged. The return of Jessamy and Barbara to the set which had been theirs was hailed by most of their friends with pleasure. Many of them had called on the Wyndhams when misfortune first befell them, but finding them boarding, with no satisfactory place in which to receive their friends, and meeting them no more in the houses and places of amusement they frequented, had ceased making efforts to hunt them up. Many of the girls came out during the winter spent by the Wyndhams at the "Blackboard," and the life of a débutante leaves little time for extra pursuits, even the pursuit of former acquaintances, so the Wyndhams had been suffered to drop out of mind rather through indifference and pressure of interests than from unkindness. One girl there was--Grace Hammond--who hailed their reappearance with anything but rapture. Grace Hammond's father was an old friend of Mrs. Van Alyn and of her brothers, who had made the fatal mistake of marrying an entirely worldly woman, with a thoroughly vulgar love of mere wealth, and Grace, unfortunately, had inherited her mother's nature, not her father's--a nature carefully fostered by that mother's training. Mr. Hammond's fortune had been swallowed up in a Wall Street venture; he had not been able to get beyond a sufficient income in his efforts to make another, efforts seriously hampered by his wife's extravagance. It was the intention of both Grace and her mother that Mrs. Van Alyn's beautiful house, wealth, social standing, and exquisite breeding should be Grace's backing in her presentation to the world, counting on the claim of old friendship for Grace's father. Under these circumstances, the advent of the Wyndhams was especially provoking, the more so that Grace could not compete with Barbara for prettiness, wit, and charm, while Jessamy was an avowed beauty. It would not do to betray the envy and bitterness she felt, so Grace did what people of her type generally do--smiled sweetly in public and bided her time to oust or mortify those whom she chose to consider her rivals. Jessamy and Barbara were not long in discovering that Grace hated them, but Mrs. Van Alyn was blissfully unconscious that one of the young people she loved to have about her was consumed with jealous spitefulness. The great night came at last; it was the middle of May, and warm. Mrs. Van Alyn's long parlors, where first the play was to have been given, were found inadequate to the guests who applied for tickets, and a small theater, closed for the season, had been secured without cost, as the masque was given for charity; only the lighting and similar expenses were incurred in its use. The prospect of appearing, as Bab said, "really on the boards, and not on carpet politely called the boards," was tremendously exciting. It seemed to change the whole affair, solemnizing it into something little short of professional. All the actors had to have hasty training in speaking and walking on a real stage, given at the last moment by a real actor and actress, who had taken up the masque with enthusiasm, and had done all in their power to perfect the young Shaksperians. Jessamy and Barbara were wild with excitement. If it had not been for their mother, Phyllis's home bulletins would have been meager and delirious during these thrilling weeks, but Mrs. Wyndham kept "the stray unit of their four times one are four," as she called Phyllis, informed of the progress of the housekeeping and the revels. Jessamy and Barbara set out dinnerless on the night of their "first appearance on any stage," as Jessamy reminded her mother it was, appetite lost in excitement. She and Bab shared their dressing-room--what a delicious feeling of importance it gave them to know it was a dressing-room used by a real actress during the season! Jessamy's _Miranda_ costume was most beautiful; perhaps none of the others quite equaled it in poetic beauty, though most of the other costumes were more splendid. It was sea-green and white, hung with pearls and shells and narrow ribbon made to represent seaweed. A gauzy veil, white and filmy as sea-foam, floated from her beautiful hair, which hung, half loose, half confined with pearls, about her shoulders. Little Barbara looked her best in white and gold, with devices for increasing her height, and her hair piled high on her saucy head, held tilted scornfully as became both her actual self and _Beatrice_. Grace Hammond was _Viola_, not in doublets, but in a short skirt, with sword at side and a rakish cap set boyishly on her dark hair. _Ophelia_--come to life, as the lines explained, for she had not been drowned, but had revived when they laid her in the grave--and _Juliet_ and _Desdemona_, both happily resuscitated after the curtain had fallen on the play, and now come forth to prove it to those who loved and mourned them, _Hermione_, _Rosalind_, _Cordelia_, _Portia_, _Katherine_ the Shrew, and _Katherine_ the Queen, _Queen Constance_, _Titania_, _Hero_, and a few of the lesser known of Shakspere's lovable women, shyly opened their dressing-room doors one by one, and went to the wings to join _Ferdinand_, _Benedick_, _Romeo_, _Bassanio_, _Othello_, _Hamlet_, _Laertes_, _Orlando_, and all the other gallants in velvets, satins, laces, and ribbons, with _Malvolio_, gartered and bedizened, to lead the opening march. The masque was but half an hour late in beginning, a wonderful feat of promptness for an amateur charitable entertainment. The curtain rose upon the pretty setting and a picturesque grouping of all the characters, which, immediately after the applause greeting it had begun to die away, broke up into a march to display the individual beauty concealed in the whole. Then the masque proper began. There was, naturally, considerable difference in the talents of the actors, but their training had been good, and none was conspicuously bad. Grace Hammond acted with real ability, although she did not understand the character of _Viola_, construing her by her boyish costume rather after the spirit of _Katherine_. Jessamy's _Miranda_ was the admiration of all beholders--sweet, innocent, alluring--all that a sea princess should be--while Bab charmed the most fastidious with her _Beatrice_, burred like a chestnut exteriorly, but womanly sweet and true of heart within. Murmurs from the wings, plaudits from the audience, showed Grace that the Wyndhams, and more especially Barbara, whom she disliked more than Jessamy, were carrying off the honors of the evening, and her petty soul was filled with rage and bitterness. There came a moment when Barbara had her most effective bit of acting. It was _Ophelia's_ entrance, and _Beatrice_ was to rush to her with a glad cry at seeing her return from the grave. Grace, as _Viola_, stood directly in the center. Barbara, from the left of the stage, saw _Ophelia_ crossing from the right, and sprang forward. Grace made a motion as if to free herself from something interfering with her skirt, short though it was, and stepped slightly forward, as she did so contriving to extend the point of her sword toward the swift feet of _Beatrice_. Barbara did not see--indeed, there was no time to see--the malicious act. She bounded forward, and fell headlong, face downward, on the stage. Mr. Lane, in the wings, directing and watching his play with all the nervousness of a young author, said something vigorous and excusable under the circumstances, turning whiter than he was before at the sight of the accident. "The miserable girl!" he muttered. "She has spoiled the play!" Tom, as _Benedick_, was not far off; standing near Grace, he saw plainly the entire action. With great presence of mind, he leaped to Barbara's assistance. Stooping, he raised her, helped her free her feet from her entangling skirt, and whispered: "Are you hurt, Bab? For goodness sake, pull yourself together and go on!" Barbara was shaken by the force of her fall, and mortified almost beyond bearing. Tom's voice steadied her a little, and she managed to whisper: "Not seriously, Tom; but what shall I do?" "Don't let that beast of a girl down you," he whispered back. "Say something in reply to me." Then, aloud, he said, laughing: "'Tis the first time, dear Lady Disdain, I have caught you tripping. That I should live to see the day that proud _Beatrice_ throws herself at my feet! But, faith, dear lady, I have long guessed you liked me well." Barbara tossed her head in approved _Beatrician_ fashion. "'Tis my feet, and not my head, hath tripped, good my lord. 'Twas joy at sight of sweet _Ophelia_ there somewhat overcame me, and at her feet, not yours, I lie prostrate. _Ophelia, Ophelia_, and are you really among the living?" And from this point the dialogue continued as in the manuscript. There were many among the audience who understood what had happened, and the rest guessed; everybody recognized and admired the pluck that carried Barbara through a humiliating situation. The entire house rose and shouted, and from the wings came applause no less hearty. Mr. Lane was beside himself with delight. "Such a girl!" he cried rapturously to the world in general. "I never saw such grit! And she saved my play--she and Leighton, bless 'em! Her voice was shaking when she spoke, yet she got herself in hand and went on! I tell you, I never _saw_ such grit." At the end of the play, Barbara and Tom had to reply to a separate recall, an honor that made Grace set her teeth hard. Her spite had turned against herself; she was furious, humiliated, for many knew that she had acted as she had done purposely, and she felt sure that her chance of Mrs. Van Alyn's favor had gone forever. A little supper served later to the actors at Mrs. Van Alyn's gave Bab her opportunity for revenge, and perhaps won for her more than the plaudits of the evening, delightful though they had been. In a few moments' talk snatched with Jessamy, she had decided that it would be both kind and finer to shelter Grace from the consequences of her own meanness. Not one of the actors but stood aloof from the girl after the fatal moment when she had thrust out her sword to trip Barbara and had upset her own reputation. At the supper, looking at Grace's crimson, sullen face, Barbara began actually to pity her, fortified in Christian sentiments by the petting she herself was receiving on all hands, and the way Grace was shunned. As they rose from the table, Bab slipped around to Grace's chair. "I'm sorry you hate me, Grace," she said. "I think I never harmed you; but if we are not friends, at least on the surface, all these people will imagine you put out that sword purposely, and you will be dropped by every one you care to know. Be friends with me, Grace; I will help you, and you will be glad later that the little slip of temper was covered up." Grace looked up, and Grace looked down. It had not seemed possible that she could be redder than before, but a fresh wave of color spread to her hair, then receded, leaving her deadly white. Something good there was in the girl, and Barbara had touched it. She turned and kissed Bab, then burst out crying before them all. "Barbara Wyndham is a saint and a trump," she sobbed. "I was jealous of her--" "There, never mind," interrupted Bab, this time with no need of effort in her kindness, for her warm little heart was melted. "Grace and I are friends, so if I am satisfied, surely no one else need ask what happened, nor imagine she meant to harm me. You are all her friends too, aren't you; and we all think she was a great _Viola_, don't we?" "Splendid! Fine! Lovely!" murmured the guests, and Barbara kissed Grace before them all. Tom took Barbara home that night, while Mr. Lane was the escort of the _Miranda_, whom he seemed to think embodied the charms of land and sea sprites. The girls begged to be allowed to walk a little way toward home, longing for fresh air after the exciting evening, and Mrs. Van Alyn made an exception for once to her rule of allowing no young guest to leave her house late except in her carriage. "I can't tell you how I respect and admire you to-night, Bab," said Tom, earnestly, as he shook her hot little hand in parting. "You are a first-rate actress, but you're more--a first-rate lady." "Don't praise me, Tom," said Bab, gently; she seemed to have played out her rôle of "dear Lady Disdain" for the time. "It was less goodness than a desire to be above all such meanness, I am afraid. I'm rather proud, Tom, and that is not creditable." CHAPTER XIII THE STRAY UNIT While Jessamy and Barbara were tasting the joys of glory and the applause of the public,--at least, a little section of it,--the "Stray Unit," as her aunt called her, was having rather a harder time than even her family suspected. It was not easy to continue in exile, fighting homesickness and longing for all she loved, and know all the while that she had but so to determine to return into the little flat, which looked to her from that distance not only like the Canaan they had jestingly called it, but like Eden itself. Perhaps, however, the knowledge that she was free to turn back from what she had undertaken helped Phyllis stand to her guns; it was not only cowardly but ignoble to relinquish a task set her by her own generosity alone. Phyllis was so fully occupied all day that there was no time for moping; but at night, when the door to her room was closed and locked, the loneliness became almost unbearable, and the time when Tom's misguided fancy should veer straight and allow her to return looked dubiously uncertain and far off. But Phyllis had the gift of sleep common to healthy youth, and though her pillow was often wet, she slept sweetly on it, and arose refreshed to meet the new day. Mrs. Dean was as kind as Phyllis's first letter reported her, but she was an old lady of many interests, and after her little companion was fairly installed in her household she gradually ceased to feel responsible for her entertainment. This was rather a matter for congratulation, for Phyllis was fired with ambition to accomplish something worth the doing while she was away, and welcomed the afternoons, which included two or three hours in that glorious library which was to be the center and crown of the city. Nothing less than a historical story, dealing with New York in the Dutch days, was the work the would-be young author aimed to produce, and she devoured everything relating to her subject which the obliging assistants in the library could furnish. The story, which never saw the light of day served its end in helping Phyllis through her exile, and incidentally in teaching her much that she had not known of her own city, for whose noise and cheery bustle she hungered. One afternoon, when Mrs. Dean omitted her usual after-luncheon drive in favor of the board meeting of a society of which she was president, Phyllis slipped away early to the classic hall, where she had an appointment with Peter Stuyvesant and her beloved Dutch burghers. The first two volumes of the "Memorial History of New York" were brought for her use, and she seated herself to search for material, happy for the time in that delightful feeling of importance born of the consciousness of great plans and the business-like preparations for their fulfilment. After nearly an hour of reading, she decided that the "Memorial History" was not what she needed just then, but the "Documentary History of New York State," and she started to her feet to get it. Phyllis at home and about domestic things was one person, and Phyllis among books was another. The latter Phyllis was a young person of the greatest impetuosity, acting first, and thinking fully five minutes afterward. It was this Phyllis who gathered up her two large volumes and started toward the desk to exchange them, without waiting for an attendant, in the greatest possible hurry, as if the slow old Dutch of two centuries ago were likely to race off before she could capture the volumes in which they were reposing. The result of her haste was that she did not see a young man approaching from the opposite direction as slowly as she was hurrying forward. His nose was buried in a volume that looked like Browning, and he did not see the slender girl in gray, laden with her heavy books, bearing down on him like a runaway pack-pony. The collision was tremendous. Phyllis dropped both volumes of Mr. Grant Wilson's careful editing on the unoffending feet of the stranger, who uttered a loud exclamation of mingled surprise and pain, and leaped aside with a vehemence contrary to all traditions of Bates Hall. But Phyllis did worse: she sat down with marked emphasis, and without loss of a moment, on the stone pavement, her hat rolling merrily away, and her pocket-book leaping under a chair, as though it, as well as the money it was made to contain, had wings. Some school children, reading as decorously as the Boston youngsters of the comic papers, yielded to the irresistible, and laughed aloud, even boisterously. An old gentleman of Teutonic build looked up from a black volume that suggested magic, and exclaimed: "Mein Gott im Himmel! Was für eine Backfisch ist das!" And a lady of that too certain age which is politely called uncertain, dropped several valuable starred pamphlets which she had been consulting, to hasten forward with offers of sal volatile and court-plaster, while four attendants ran from as many directions to rescue the library property which the accident had scattered broadcast. The young man whom she had so unwarrantably assaulted helped Phyllis to her feet, the gingerly manner in which he held up his own right foot meanwhile suggesting that his instep had found the "Memorial History" a solid work in more senses than one. Phyllis's face was crimson with mortification, and she stammered incoherent apologies as she accepted the hat her victim handed her, and smartened the disheartened ribbons as well as she could. The young man went on all fours, and fished out the truant pocket-book from beneath the chair, at the same time gathering up a handful of papers which had escaped from its outer compartment. Among them was a visiting-card; perhaps the impulse that made him glance at the card before returning it was not altogether proper, but it was excusably natural under the circumstances. As he read the name and address, the expression of mingled annoyance and pain his face had worn since the encounter gave way to surprise and amusement. "Mrs. Dean!" he said, and his voice was cultivated and agreeable, even in the low tone necessary to library intercourse. "Let me congratulate you, ma'am; you have found the Fountain of Youth. When I last saw you, you were forty years older than you are now." Phyllis laughed in spite of herself, but she did not see fit to reveal her identity. "Thank you, and please try to forgive me for my awkwardness," she said instead. "The awkwardness was entirely mine," said her victim, fibbing politely, ignoring his aching instep, like the hero and squire of dames he was. "It was unpardonable of me to dash along, with my head buried in 'The Ring and the Book,' though it really does swamp most heads. I cannot forgive myself for knocking you down." There was a merry twinkle in the big blue eyes looking out of the decidedly handsome face, which was preternaturally grave, and, this time, Phyllis did not try not to laugh. "Well, if you call that rushing!" she said, remembering her own pace, and how her victim had been sauntering as she steamed down on him. "You are very good, and I am as grateful as I am mortified; I can't say more." Having had enough of study for the day, and not desiring to loiter on the scene of her discomfiture, Phyllis bowed, and passed out of the library. Her victim gazed after her, thoughtfully. "She's a pretty girl, and a nice one, I'll bet golden guineas to brass buttons," he thought. "Knows Mrs. Dean! I'll consult Rick Dean; he may know who she is." Rick Dean was Mrs. Dean's nephew. When Alan Armstrong, Phyllis's victim, consulted him as to the possible identity of the girl who "caromed on him, and went into a pocket herself like mad," as he described the disaster, in billiard terms, Rick laughed till his eyes were moist. "By Jove, it's my aunt's little companion from New York, Miss Phyllis Wyndham," he said. "She's tremendously nice--pretty, thoroughbred, and all that. They lost their money about a year ago, and she is earning her little living, while preparing to be a second George Eliot, or something. She goes to the library every chance she gets. I don't believe she thinks anything else here is worth wasting time on." "I haven't been to see your aunt for ages, Rick; don't you think the dear old lady must feel hurt, and want me?" blandly inquired Alan, with a broad wink. "I'll take you, but there's no use trying to know Miss Phyllis very well; she's as friendly as pie, but she doesn't care a snap about one," said Rick, with profound conviction. "About the wrong one! She'll welcome the acquaintance of a truly charming fellow, with literary talents of his own," said Alan. "Literary talents! Newspaper reporting!" said Rick, scornfully. "Hang your conceit, you blue-eyed Christmas-card! But I'll take you to see my aunt whenever you like, and if Miss Phyllis doesn't knock the vanity out of you, then I'm mistaken." "She is good at knocking, I'm ready to admit that," said Alan, dodging the sofa pillow Rick aimed at him. Two evenings later Rick came dutifully to call on his aunt, and brought with him Alan, whose solemnity of expression was a study as he made his best bow to Phyllis Wyndham. "I'm thinking of studying law, ma'am," he replied to Mrs. Dean's inquiry as to his future plans. "I want to defend my own suits when I am assaulted and battered, in case it should happen." "No slurs, if you please," laughed Phyllis, seeing Mrs. Dean looked puzzled. "I told Mrs. Dean about my mishap in the library, and she thought it rather funny. Mrs. Dean, this is the young man I pelted with New York history." "Is it possible! Why, he's Rick's dearest chum. I am glad you did not destroy him," said Mrs. Dean. "We used to call Rick the 'Prince of Wales' at school, Miss Wyndham, because Rick Dean sounded so much like 'Ich dien.' That's a school-boy joke that needs considering to appreciate. Have you seen much of Rick's sisters?" asked Alan. "They come here occasionally," replied Mrs. Dean for her; "but Miss Phyllis is such a busy little creature they haven't progressed far in intimacy. I want them to be much together this summer when we are at Hingham." "Still clinging to the south shore, Mrs. Dean?" asked Alan. "Doesn't that little cold Boston, as Tom Appleton called Nahant, attract you?" "I shall always cling to dear old Hingham while I am able to get there," replied Mrs. Dean. "I despise fashionable summer places. You would do well to visit us often this year, young man. I intend making it pleasant for this little girl, and she is well worth knowing." "One of the most striking young ladies I ever had the pleasure of meeting," said Alan, with a deep bow; adding, as though he feared he was impertinent in jesting on such short acquaintance: "Miss Wyndham's the sort of girl that needs no recommending; she's the good wine that needs no bush." It was a curiously open compliment, but the boyish sincerity with which it was uttered deprived it of offense. Mrs. Dean looked pleased, and glanced at Rick as if to suggest that he was missing something. She was too good a woman not to love match-making, and she had hoped that her favorite nephew and Phyllis might become something more than friends, for he had money enough for both, and Phyllis was going to be the woman of Proverbs whose price is above rubies. But so far Rick and Phyllis were not even friends; and Rick wondered to see his chum making speedy progress into favor by the simple method of frank friendliness. The transference of Mrs. Dean's household, including Dundee, the collie, and Phyllis, to Hingham, took place in June; and a pleasant life, that made exile far easier than it had been in town, began for the "Stray Unit." Her duties as reader and amanuensis continued regularly each morning; but the house was full of young people coming and going, and though no one could take Jessamy's and Bab's place, it was natural for Phyllis to be happier for their companionship. Mrs. Dean's nieces were, on the whole, pleasant girls, and their friends frank and jolly. Only one or two looked askance at Phyllis as Mrs. Dean's companion and their social inferior; but they were obliged to veil their prejudices in deference to Mrs. Dean's affection and the boys' admiration for her. For quiet Phyllis, to her own unbounded surprise, was turning out rather a belle. Young men may be silly, and undoubtedly do not always show supreme wisdom in the sort of girls they select for temporary amusement, but, as Rick remarked, they "generally know a good thing when they see it," and the girl who is lively, pretty, and bright, yet never forgets for a moment her maidenly ideals, is sure to have plenty of admiration of a sort to be coveted. Phyllis was full of fun, obliging, and gay; yet in the frolic and freedom of summer-time, when the best regulated families relax much of their vigilance over their younger members, Rick and his comrades realized that, to quote Alan's expressive figure of speech, "Phyllis stayed on her own side of her fence, though she posted no notices to trespassers." Driving parties to Nantasket, Cohasset, and along the beautiful "Jerusalem Road" made those afternoons lively which were not still more pleasantly spent on the yacht which the young Deans had brought down for the summer. Phyllis had been taken to the sea from her earliest summers, but it chanced that this one was the first in which she tasted the joys of sailing, and, as she wrote home, she "discovered that she had been born web-footed." There were long, beautiful days, in which Mrs. Dean excused her from all her duties, and a party of ten to fifteen young folk would start off in the morning, with the younger Mrs. Dean for chaperon, and sail to some definite point, fish, make their chowder on board, and come back on the afternoon tide, burned, sticky, salted by the wind and spray, but happy as robins, and sleepy with a peculiarly delicious sleepiness that made cool linen sheets inexpressibly refreshing. Phyllis was the kind of sailor that a skipper loves--never afraid, happiest when the boat was "on her ear" and the waves breaking over the deck, but contented and cheerful in a calm, and not getting hysterical in thundershowers, and, above all, proof against seasickness, even in the long "ground swell" and the broiling sun. One day, Rick and his sisters, three girls ranging from fifteen to nineteen, Alan Armstrong, Phyllis, Rick's mother, a young Scotchman named David Campbell, and two more of Rick's and Alan's college chums, with three girl friends of the Deans, started out on the _Saxon_ for a day's sailing. The plan was to sail down to the Lower Light, fish off the Brewsters during the turn of the tide, make a chowder of the perch and small cod caught there, and return, with a favorable breeze, just late enough to catch the young moon not yet ending its first quarter. David Campbell was a new element in the party, and one dreaded by all the rest. First of all, he was but just over from the "land of bannocks," and his speech was not as intelligible as English speech might be expected to be. Then he was lame, and there were many subjects engrossing to gay young people, such as sports of all kinds, which must be avoided out of consideration for one debarred from them. And, above all, nobody had the faintest idea what he cared most about; which, added to his burry speech, made conversation formidable. But he had been committed to the elder Mrs. Dean by an old friend who had been good to her when she was in Scotland, and she had laid the strictest injunctions on her kindred to honor to their utmost the draft made upon her. There was a strong, southwesterly breeze in starting out, and the _Saxon_ lay over in fine style, the waves curling around her bow, and occasionally shipping over the fore deck in the way that always made Phyllis long to shout with Viking happiness. She begged the privilege of sitting up by the mast--the _Saxon_ was a sloop--and Captain Rick gladly accorded it; for Phyllis grew so radiant when her blue flannel frock was soaked, and her cheeks got so red, and her hair so curly, that it was a pleasure to look on her. All the party chattered behind her back, but she paid no attention to them till, after a time, she noted that David's long-drawn "Aye" of assent to some proposition was growing less frequent, and she turned to see if the stranger were neglected. Yes, there he sat, rather apart from the rest, a look of loneliness in his blue eyes, gazing eastward. "This won't do," she thought, and heroically resigned her glorious perch to come aft and brave the perils of a Scotch accent so different in reality from reading Barrie, with the privilege of skipping. "I wish we were going to sail all the way over, don't you?" she asked, seating herself beside the stranger, and bringing with her at once an atmosphere of dampness and cordiality. "Aye," said David, somewhat startled, but smiling in spite of himself into the sweet face surrounded by its halo of curling wet hair. "I long for England and Scotland," continued artful Phyllis. "Of course I want to see Italy and its art; but England and Scotland are home. Long ago my father's family came from England, and a little more recently my mother's ancestors came from Scotland." "It's fine," said David, cautiously. "I'm sure it is," cried Phyllis, with honest warmth. "My dearest friends are Scotch and English--in Scott and Thackeray, and our beloved books, you know. Are you a true Scot, and think Burns the greatest of poets?" "Burns is a great poet," said David, cannily. "If you are a Campbell I suppose you would throw me overboard if I quoted 'The Bonnie House o' Airlie,' would you?" asked Phyllis. "The uprooted spray of heather," as Alan called him, looked surprised and pleased; he even ventured into a question on his own part. "How comes it you have heard that tale over here?" he asked; only he pronounced "heard" as if it were "hard," as indeed it was to his companion. "Oh, that's owing to Barrie," she said. "I might never have paid any attention to the note to the ballad in my 'Border Ballads,' but I laughed till I cried at the story of the piper who went piping out of town in a fury because he was a Campbell and some one had sung 'The Bonnie House o' Airlie' in his presence. Do you remember, in the 'Little Minister'?" "Aye, Barrie is humorous," assented David, with an expression so at variance with the word that Phyllis had to turn her head away to keep from laughing. Fearing he had seen her amusement, she hastily asked: "Would you like to be a writer? They say all Scotch--or Scotsmen, as you would say--love learning. What are you to be?" "A merchant. My father sent me over here to get into a New York firm; I hate it," said David. "I was to have gone into the army." "And have you given it up?" asked Phyllis, absent-mindedly, and could have bitten her tongue out the moment she had spoken, remembering his misfortune. "Can a cripple enter the army?" demanded David, a dark-red color rushing up under the freckles his recent sea-voyage had deposited on his handsome face. "Oh, you are so little lame I quite forgot you might be disqualified to serve the queen--no, the king. How can you speak of yourself as a cripple when you are so strong and vigorous?" said Phyllis, reproachfully; though the reproach was for herself. "Would you like to be a man who could do nothing but stand in a counting-house?" asked David. "I'd like to be a man with your breadth of shoulders and splendid vigor," said Phyllis. "Then, we Americans consider a successful merchant a very fortunate and honorable man." "Vera likely; but it's no the career for me," said David, getting more Scotch in the vehemence of his feelings. "Consider, if you were to fall overboard the day, I'd have to sit here, while some of these smart youngsters went after you--I, who could swim with the best of them when I was a lad." "But I promise not to fall overboard," said Phyllis, gently; "and if I did, and you were disqualified from fishing me out, would that prove you unmanly? Surely there is more need of saving people on dry land, so to speak; it's the other sort of strength, not physical strength, that is most needed. Any one would turn to you for help if she had fallen overboard, in a figurative, not literal sense; there is something so reliable in all of you Scotch. You're a wee bit strange to us all at first, but you will like us when you know us; and if I were you, I should forget the trifling misfortune to your foot--it is such a very little thing. Try to be at home; we Americans are rather kindly, 'not a bad sort,' as your English neighbors would say." David Campbell looked into Phyllis's smiling eyes, honest and clear as one of his Highland lakes; her sympathy, unspoken, had penetrated his Scotch reserve finding him lonely, and he had spoken to her as he would not have spoken to his own sister. Now gratitude, and a kindling sense that she had uttered the truth, and that fine opportunities for his strong brain and will were left him, lame though he was, sent a thrill over him, and made his voice vibrate as he said: "One of them is. You've been kind enough; you're not like our notions of the reckless American girl. I am certain to like you--Americans." There was a touch of roguery in his tiny pause. "And if ever you want a friend, and I can be of use to you, on dry land, as you say, count on David Campbell, and you will find one Scotsman reliable, I'm hoping." "Thank you, I will remember, and I'm sure I shall," said Phyllis, heartily; and they shook hands on the bargain. "That was fine of you, Miss Phyllis," said Alan Armstrong that night, as the _Saxon_ crept up the bay, sails free of the light easterly breeze, and the young moon shedding a short track on the ocean. "You were mighty good to our friend from the Tweed-side. I couldn't help hearing what you said to him; I was surprised that he spoke out that way, but it was lucky he did, for he must have been feeling lonely to have done it, and probably thought we were guying him. You handled him like an angel, and hasn't he been different ever since? Only look at him now!" Sure enough, David was chatting with Rick and Annie Dean, giving them bits of Scottish lore and Scottish songs, not minding that they did not always understand the speech, which was correct English in form, but very much like the New England country roads with the raised places across them at intervals, which the natives call "thank-you-marms," and which are so very bumpy that smooth driving is impossible. "Yes, he has decided to trust us, hasn't he?" said Phyllis. "He is a fine fellow, and I am glad he is beginning to feel at home. It must be dreadful to get among a lot of hard-hearted young folks, who see only the funny side of a new-comer's peculiarities." "Do you know, you smooth out all the wrinkles where-ever you go?" asked Alan. "The Heather is not the only blossom that would be proud to be worn as a friend in your buttonhole." "And it shall not be the only blossom I gladly claim," smiled Phyllis. "The 'Stray Unit,' as they call me at home, is in a fair way to be spoiled, and you are all making her a happy unit, in spite of her longing to see the nicest family a girl ever had." "I bet anything you like they are all ciphers by comparison," said Alan, with profound conviction; "and that you were the unit that made them a numeral." Phyllis laughed, and shook her head. "Wait till I go home, and you all come to see me," she said. "Barbara is the brightest, most attractive, dear little scamp you ever knew; and Jessamy--Jessamy is too beautiful to be real, and all pure gold. If you knew them, you would see who was the cipher, if ciphers there are." The _Saxon_ made her mooring in Hingham harbor rather later than usual, for the breeze was very light; but no day on the yacht was ever too long for Phyllis. David Campbell took a pair of oars, and he and Rick raced to the wharf the two small boats in which the _Saxon's_ passengers were landed. Phyllis was glad that the big young Scotsman's strong arms out-pulled slender Rick, with his university training, and that David won the race. It had been a beautiful day, and the little "Stray Unit" went happily to bed, glad in her own pleasure, glad at having made another happy. But she did not know that her sympathy and tactful kindness had won her a friend who was to be a gain to her entire life. CHAPTER XIV THE LITTLE BLIND GOD OPENS HIS EYES While Phyllis was having, as she said in her letters, a pleasant amphibious summer, the rest of the Wyndhams were staying in town for the first time in their lives. New York is not as bad a place during the heated months as people think it who fly from the first touch of the mounting sun. Except for the noise, even Mrs. Wyndham did not find it uncomfortable, and the noises could be forgotten while she rested and read in their little dining-room, the depth of the apartment away from them. Jessamy and Barbara discovered that there was much to be enjoyed in early rising for walks in the park; still more, in trips for which they had started betimes to take a car at the Bridge and go down to the sea, bowling along at a tremendous rate after they had passed the crowded Brooklyn streets, and getting cool and invigorated as the swift flight of the car blew their hair back from their faces with a wind salt from the ocean. Nor were the long sails up the wonderful Hudson less than a revelation of delight, especially to artistic Jessamy, whose soul reveled in beauty such as the whole world can hardly equal--beauty they had heretofore missed, because it lay so near to them and they had wandered away in summer to fashionable resorts. Ruth took her vacation like a dissecting-map, she said, in little bits, which, fitted together, would make a whole of more than two weeks;--she filled the place that would have been Phyllis's in the excursions of that summer. And Tom, graduated now into a full-fledged Doctor of Medicine, with a degree and a diploma, and everything ready for a large practice, except his contract with an undertaker, as he himself declared--Tom was the escort and cicerone on every trip, with Nixie, his hair clipped for the summer, to complete the party when its destination was one that allowed the presence of little dogs. Jessamy, watching the course of affairs, with double eagerness for Bab's happiness and Phyllis's return, sometimes was almost completely discouraged by the behavior of her trying sister. Since the theatricals Tom had been turning with constantly increasing evidences of liking to Babbie, and Jessamy began to feel quite certain that his dawning fancy for Phyllis, nipped timely in the bud, would blossom into real love for wayward Bab, if that young person would allow it to do so. But Barbara behaved in such a way that Jessamy wondered that Tom could be patient with her, and, much more, that he could find attraction in her thorniness. "She is Barbie, not Babbie, mama," Jessamy said, with tears of impatience in her eyes, one night when the four young people had returned from an afternoon at Glen Island. Now that Phyllis was writing so cheerfully, and the choice she had made seemed to be turning out well, for her at least, Jessamy had told her mother Phyllis's motive in going, for she longed to have her unselfish little cousin held at her true worth by all who were dearest to her. "You have not the slightest idea of how Bab behaved to Tom to-day, and he was a perfect saint in patience and kindness," Jessamy continued. "She is driving away her own happiness in spite of Phyllis's sacrifice for her. You know it would have been lovely for Tom and Phyllis to have cared for each other, and now Bab is going to offend him beyond pardon, and we shall lose the dear boy altogether. I feel so sorry for Tom I can hardly keep from saying: 'Oh, Tom dear, just please marry me, and let that naughty girl go!'" "That would be a singular performance on the part of my dignified elder daughter," laughed her mother, "and rather a useless one, because, you see, Tom doesn't want to marry you. Perhaps he will never want to marry Babbie, so try not to worry, Jessamy. I should be glad when the day comes that I must give one of you up, if it could be into the hands of as trustworthy a man as Tom; but I am in no hurry to meet the day, so let matters take their course, Jessamy, my dear." "They aren't taking their course," sighed Jessamy. "And you are forgetting, mama, that Bab is so dreadful because she really likes Tom so very much. Of course he may never want to marry her; that is what bothers me. I should think it would be a miracle if he did. She has made up her mind to be true to her name, and has put a barbed wire fence all around herself. I wish I could get her straightened out, and bring Phyllis home, and all be happy again." "Let matters take their course, Jessamy," said her mother again. "Barbara is very young; I really believe, on the whole, I am glad not to see my baby with a lover--even Tom." Jessamy had not exaggerated Barbara's freakishness toward unoffending Tom. There were days when she treated him quite tolerantly, sometimes even let him get glimpses of the sweet, sunny Barbara he had first known; but most of the time she was sharp of tongue, uncertain in disposition, unjust, and actually pert. The receipt of a small service from Tom was enough to plunge her into saucy, school-girl sarcasm that was so unlike herself, so unworthy of her, that Jessamy held her breath lest she not only offended, but, worst of all, disgusted Tom; and for disgust Jessamy had heard there was no cure. The pitiable part of it was that poor little Babbie evidently hated herself for being so wayward and naughty, and Jessamy often saw her turn away to hide her tears after an especially vicious attack on Tom, to which she was apparently impelled by a force stronger than her will and judgment. For a long time Tom bore this treatment with dignified patience, struggling hard to keep his promise to Phyllis and regain the little Bab he knew and cared for. Then Jessamy saw that he was letting Babbie severely alone, studying her with pained surprise in his honest eyes, and she hoped that the study might give him a clue to the cause of Bab's transformation. For, she thought, she is exactly like _Beatrice_ herself; and when _Benedick_ suspected that she snubbed him because she cared for him, he began to care for her. But Tom was far too modest and inexperienced to construe the little active verb, with its moods, which he was studying, by any such rule. He decided that Barbara had found him a nuisance, and wanted to drop his acquaintance; so, hurt to the core, he silently acquiesced in her decision, and the Wyndhams knew him and Nixie but rarely. As weeks went by, and Tom's sole visit had been to herself when Jessamy and Barbara were known to be out at lectures which they were attending, Mrs. Wyndham began to share Jessamy's feeling that if something were not done a possession more precious than the wealth they had lost might drift away from her girls forever. Mrs. Wyndham was thoroughly unworldly; it would be horrible to her even to think of making a marriage for her children from ambitious motives; but she realized how rarely in a long life one finds a true friend; and she began to feel that it would not do to sit passive while Babbie drove Tom away. Besides, it was dreadful to know that the poor boy was feeling that his friends were changed to him, who had never been less than devoted to all of them in the hard days at the "Blackboard," and ever since. That night Mrs. Wyndham went into Bab's room in the dark to find her crouching, a forlorn little heap of misery, in her chair, sobbing under her breath lest Jessamy hear in the next room. Her mother gathered her up in her arms, and sat down in the rocking-chair, Babbie half in, half off her lap, and rocked and cuddled her without a word. For a while Bab cried tempestuously, but after a time the clasp of the arms which had always soothed her childish griefs quieted her; indeed, Babbie's grief might be of a sentimental nature, but she was a child still. When she was calm enough to listen Mrs. Wyndham said: "Now, my little Babbie, you are unhappy because you have been a saucy little Bab, and have driven away with cruel injustice the best friend you and Jessamy and Phyllis have, except one another. It is a pity, but it is something to set right, not to cry over. We will send a note of apology to Tom, and we will tell him--I will write it--that Babbie is dreadfully contrite over her whimsies of the summer, but that they arose from little private worries of her own, which she was unjust enough to visit upon him. And Tom will come, and Barbara will be kind and cordial, first because she has absolutely no right to treat Tom rudely; secondly, because she will have too much regard for her dignity as a young woman, not a capricious child, to give way to her impulses." "It's too late, mama," moaned Bab. "Tom asked me what was wrong, and I told him nothing, but that I was tired of seeing the same faces all the time. And then he stopped coming. And, Madrina," she added, starting up with sudden resolution to be honest, "I have acted as I have just because he liked Phyllis, and I was afraid--oh, I was afraid he would think she thought I liked him--too much, you know, and so had gone away!" "What a foolish Babbie!" said her mother, stroking her hair. "Tom does not care more for Phyllis than for you. He was beginning to turn to her, but she slipped away in the beginning, and Tom has found my little Babbie more than he realized, now that he has been thrown with her more. Tom would never dream Phyllis, or any one else, suspected you of liking him too well; he is not a coxcomb, but a straightforward, honest young fellow, who loved us all. He is hurt and angry that one of us could be so capriciously unjust to him. You have no right--no moral right, Barbara--to let this go on another day. And if our dearest Phyllis hoped to further your happiness in going away, you surely can do no less than love her better than ever, and return her goodness to Tom." "I'll do my best to behave better, Madrina, if you can get Tom back; but I'm afraid I shall be bad again when I see him," said Barbara, contritely. Mrs. Wyndham smiled in the security of the darkness. "You must behave well for your own sake, Babbie. You know what every one will say if they see you treating Tom abominably, without cause. And if we apologize successfully to him this time, we can never do so again." Mrs. Wyndham wrote a most affectionate note to injured Tom, and Barbara inclosed a note of three lines of her own in brief, but humbly contrite apology. It was probably the latter which produced the desired result, for Tom and Nixie appeared that evening, and Bab sang and played his favorite airs, and peace once more reigned on the banks of the Hudson. But the old, free, unconscious days seemed gone forever; and Jessamy, and even her mother, saw with regret that it was only by a mighty effort that Bab kept up the cool politeness into which her good intentions had degenerated. Tom came much less often. It looked as though matters were settling into the frigid decorum hardest to break up, and more hopeless than quarrels. Thanksgiving came and passed with Phyllis's sacrifice no nearer its reward than at first. On the top floor of the house where "The Land of Canaan" apartment made the third, lived a family whose youngest member, a girl of eleven, frequently held what Bab called "overflow meetings" with her dolls on the steps; for the family was large--as was the doll family, for that matter--and little Margery was forced to the street, the playground of city children, by lack of space. A friendship had sprung up between her and the Wyndhams, especially Bab, born of mutual admiration for Jumeau babies with spasmodic joints, and the little girl's unspeakable worship for an older one. Tom was included in Margery's favor, both for his own and Nixie's sake; once, indeed, when the child had a sore throat, Tom cured her, and henceforth he was brevetted "my doctor," a distinction he valued. Margery was a quaint child, given to the companionship of books and people beyond her age, and with the contradicting childishness and maturity of an only child in a family of adults. She was a welcome and frequent visitor to the Wyndhams', petted and read to by Jessamy and her mother, spoiled and played with by Bab, for whom she cherished a dumb devotion not unlike Nixie's own. As weeks went on, Margery's sharp eyes discovered the estrangement and increasing coolness between "her doctor" and her dearest Bab; and after long puzzling over it, and tentative attempts to sift the matter, she set her nimble wits to work to remedy it. Simple methods did not appeal to the queer little girl; but at last she hit upon a plan that suited her childish love for melodrama and latent longing to be a heroine. It was a gray December day, and Margery, left alone with the servant, recognized her opportunity. Bab--alone too, with Violet, as it chanced--was startled by a violent peal of the bell. Answering the summons herself, she faced the Hortons' maid, white under her Irish freckles, who stood wringing her hands on the door-mat, and who cried at the sight of her: "Oh, Miss Wyndham dear, come up for the love of hiven! I do be alone with Margery, an' she took that bad she'll be dead agen her mother comes back." "Dead! Margery!" gasped Bab, and flew up the stairs, outstripping honest Norah in her alarm. There was cause for alarm to the eyes of inexperienced Bab, as she looked at the little figure stretched on the bed, her face swollen out of all likeness to pretty Margery, or even to human features. A crimson face, with cheeks, eyelids, lips puffed and distorted, lay on the pillow, crimson hands as shapely as tomatoes picked the quilt, while hollow groans issued from the purpling mouth. "Oh, dear, darling little Margery," cried Bab, in an agony of terror, "what has happened? What can be the matter? Run, run, Norah, for Doctor Gilbert; I'll stay with her. It must be poison; oh, what has she eaten?" "Nothin', miss, but her lunch wid the rest of 'em," began Norah, while Margery moaned: "Not Doctor Gilbert. I want my Doctor Tom." "Oh, darling, Doctor Gilbert is so much older and wiser," Bab pleaded, kneeling by the bed; but Margery only burst into plaintive sobs. "I want my doctor; I shouldn't think you'd be cruel now," she sighed. "Then call Doctor Leighton, Norah," said Bab, blushing at this betrayal of Margery's observation. "Only hurry, hurry!" It seemed hours before Tom came, though Norah met him in the street and returned with him in half of one. Bab spent the minutes bathing the still swelling face, soothing the poor little patient, and trying to keep her own nerves under control. Margery grew every moment more ill. Would Tom never come? At last he did come, and as he entered the room the relief was so great that Bab forgot to incase herself in the disguise she had worn so long. Her eyes were so full of love and joy as she raised them to Tom that he stopped short in amazement at the revelation, and a great flood of happiness rushed over him, too great for any circumstances to check. "Oh, Tom, I'm so glad you have come; now it will be all right," she said, in a low voice of utter trust. "Dear little Margery is dreadfully ill, but you will save her. I have done nothing but bathe her, for fear of making some mistake." Tom did not answer; he walked straight to the bed without looking at Barbara. His heart was throbbing so joyously that he had hard work to force his thoughts to duty. "Margery, what have you eaten?" he demanded, having felt the child's pulse and looked closely under the almost closed eyelids. "Nothing," murmured Margery. "Margery, remember that I am a doctor, and know when I am told the truth. You must tell me what you have taken," said Tom, sternly. Bab crept close to Tom, oblivious to everything else in hearing this hint, confirming her own fear of poison. Tom put one hand over the two little ones clasped imploringly on his shoulder, trying to remember only Margery, and to forget that this was Bab coming to him thus voluntarily. "I always tell the truth," said Margery, replying to his question with all the indignation her strength allowed. "I haven't eaten anything; but I didn't say I hadn't taken anything. I took quinine; but it's much worse than before. I wouldn't tell you if I wasn't dying." "Quinine! Ah, that's it! And worse than before, you say? Have you suffered like this before from quinine?" asked Tom, comfortingly patting Bab's head, which had dropped on his shoulder at the word "dying." "Once, but not so much. I didn't think it would be so awful when I took it, though I did think I'd feel very badly. The doctor said I had an idiotsinkersy in me about taking quinine," groaned Margery. "Did you take it purposely?" asked Tom, amazed, as he handed a prescription to Norah and bade her hasten to get it filled. "That was certainly an 'idiotsinkersy.' Why have you done such a thing? Do you like to be ill, Margery?" "No; but--oh, my mama won't like to find me dead!" And Margery burst into open wailing, in which Bab joined. "You are not going to die," said Tom. "Bab dearest, don't feel so dreadfully; Margery will come out all right. But why, in the name of all that's wonderful, have you deliberately taken what you knew would make you ill, little lass?" "For your sake," said suffering Margery, as impressively as her swollen features permitted. "For my sake!" echoed Tom, dumfounded. "I knew if I was awfully ill Miss Bab would be nice to you, and so I took the quinine," murmured Margery. "You dreadful child!" cried Bab, indignantly, springing away from Tom's side. Margery turned away without a word, hiding her swollen face, her tears, and her wounded heart in the pillow. "Bab doesn't mean that, Margery," said Tom, gently. "You are giving her greater pain than her physical suffering, Bab; you know she adores you. Be just to the poor mite, and remember her motives were good, even if you don't like her methods," he whispered hastily. Bab knelt contritely, and took the queer, forlorn little figure in her arms. "No, of course I didn't mean that," she said. "Forgive me, Margery. What made you think of such a very strange thing to do?" "The Bible says you ought to lay down your life for your friends, doesn't it?" sobbed Margery, drying her eyes on the ruffle of her nightgown sleeve in default of a handkerchief. "It says you can't prove greater love than by dying for them--yes," said Bab. [Illustration: "'I KNEW THAT IF I WAS AWFULLY ILL MISS BAB WOULD BE NICE TO YOU,' MURMURED MARGERY."] "Well, then, I thought I ought to be willing just to be sick for you, when all the books say how every one forgives every one else, and foes make up, around sickbeds, and things. I couldn't bear to see how you and my doctor were getting worse foes all the time, so I took the quinine, though I knew I had an idiotsinkersy in me that made it poison to me, and I'd be dreadfully sick. I thought you'd make up around my bed, and love me, and say how I'd saved you, and how you'd never forget me. And you are friends around my bed, and I'm fearfully sick; but you only say I'm dreadful. Oh, why don't my mama come back and take care of me?" And Margery wailed anew over the ingratitude of humankind. What could Bab say? Or how could she do less than express--even if Tom were there--her gratitude to this martyr to her welfare? "Dear little Margery, you are not dreadful. I am dreadful to have called you so, even though I didn't mean it. I was annoyed for a moment; that was all. You are a dear, devoted little friend. Please forgive me, for you know I love you dearly," she said, kissing the wet, shapeless little face. "And my doctor?" stipulated Margery, before according pardon. "I think we shall be better friends. I won't be horrid any more," whispered Barbara. And then Margery gave the kiss of peace. Mrs. Wyndham had come in, and hearing from Violet whither Tom and Barbara had gone, and why, hastened up-stairs, hoping to be of use. In a few moments more Mrs. Horton returned, and Tom escorted Bab downstairs, leaving Margery, much better, to the competent care of the two mothers. Barbara let herself into her own apartment with her key, and for a few moments an awkward silence prevailed, broken at last by Tom. "I think I shall adopt a Margery rampant, with a quinine capsule in the quartering, for my coat of arms," he said. "I've an idea our queer little friend, with a constitutional idiosyncrasy against that drug, has done me a great service. She has proved that you do not quite hate me, do you, Babbie?" "No, Tom; but you--you like Phyllis," stammered Bab. "Like her! I love her--the unselfish, dear, good girl!" cried Tom. "Have you been jealous of Phyllis? Then you love me, Barbara. You couldn't be jealous unless you did! I did imagine once that of all the dear Wyndhams, Phyllis might be dearest; but it was a mistake. I saw straight after she was gone. I never loved her--not that way, Bab; I only fancied that I might. But I do love Phyllis so much that I want her for my cousin. Will you make her my cousin, Babbie?" "She is much nicer than I," said Bab, very low, without raising her eyes, and clinging to her last moment of freedom. "Bab, don't waste any more time; you have treated me badly enough, heaven knows, and I haven't enjoyed it. Tell me you love me, this instant," said Tom, in a tone which Barbara might have resented had not her recent fright and humiliation subdued her. "I love you, Tom," she repeated meekly, and straightway forgot all doubt, all fear, in perfect happiness. When Jessamy came home she nearly dropped in the doorway; for there was Bab throned in the window, looking radiantly pretty with the depth of joy and womanly sweetness the events of the afternoon had called into her face, and beside her, on a low stool, sat Tom, looking entirely blissful and unusually humble. He sprang up as he saw Jessamy. "Come to your brother, Jessamy!" he cried. "Bab has promised to marry me." "I have promised not to marry him," said Bab. "I have told him I will not so much as hear it spoken of for ages. As though I wanted to marry yet!" But Jessamy waited to hear no more. She threw herself at Bab in some mysterious way, and hugged and kissed her sister--with a kiss for Tom, too--in almost hysterical rapture. "It was pretty rough on me to be treated as I have been lately," said Tom, as they tried to settle down to sanity. "But I ought to have known what it meant; for the very first time I ever saw Bab, she threw herself at my feet, for me to pick up, or leave, as I chose." "Why, Thomas Leighton!" cried Bab, indignantly. "Fact, and you know it," affirmed Tom. "Never mind, Babbie; 'some falls are means the happier to rise,' you know. That fall of yours on the 'Blackboard' steps was one of them; for, my heart, aren't we happy!" CHAPTER XV WREATHING HOLLY AND TWINING BAY Two letters were despatched to Boston that night--one from Jessamy, one from Bab--like a duet chanted to Phyllis. The burden of one was, in brief, that the millennium had come upon earth, for Bab was so happy; and of the other: "Come home, come home!" Phyllis read them at the breakfast-table, and her face lighted up with such joy that Mrs. Dean noticed it in spite of the preoccupation her morning mail usually involved. "Dear little Bab is actually engaged to Tom. Oh, I am so thankful!" Phyllis said in reply to Mrs. Dean's inquiry as to the cause of her happiness. "I am afraid, Mrs. Dean, that this means that I shall have to go home as soon as you can get ready to let me." "For the holidays--not longer?" said the old lady, sharply. "For always," said Phyllis, gently. "I should like to know why your cousin's engagement involves breaking yours to me," said Mrs. Dean, disappointment and regret shining even from her eye-glasses and gray curls. "I have tried to make this a home to you, and I hoped to keep you until you should be ready to follow your exasperating 'Bab's' example." "We had not a positive engagement to each other, dear Mrs. Dean. Please don't think I am breaking an agreement," said Phyllis, distressed. "You have been as good to me as you could be, and I love you gratefully for it; but they want me very much at home, and you won't blame me for liking to be there better than anywhere else, however dear the elsewhere may be." "I suppose I can't blame you, but it is most disappointing and annoying. You sly little minx! I believe you only ran away to leave the field clear to this Babbie; and, now the danger is past, you are ready to throw me over," said Mrs. Dean, with sudden acumen. Phyllis laughed, seeing her battle won. She had dreaded the day, and speculated as to the manner in which she should announce to her kind friend that her hour to leave her had come. There were two weeks wanting to the arrival of Christmas day, and Phyllis was not to start homeward until the twenty-third. The time crawled by, in spite of the young friends who filled every spare moment with pleasure, trying to crowd into the unexpectedly brief time left them in which to enjoy Phyllis all the sight-seeing and visiting of a winter. She felt guilty, fond as she had grown of them all, to tell off each sunset, and count each moment by the beats of feverish pulses. At last the twenty-third came, and the hour for starting to the station struck. Rick and his sisters and their friends, Alan Armstrong, and David the Scot, who had become Phyllis's devoted knight, all formed her body-guard, laden with flowers and candy enough to have done credit to a prima donna's farewell. Mrs. Dean held Phyllis fast as she kissed her good-by. "I forgive you for leaving me, my dear, though I hardly know how I am going to get on without you. You have been all and more than I expected you to be to me; and though I do admit your family's claim to you, I dislike your aunt very deeply for being forced to admit it; and you may tell her so from me, with my best wishes for the coming year. But I won't take no for an answer to my invitation to Hingham next summer, if I live; so be prepared," she said, as the carriage drove up to carry Phyllis away from her. At the station there were the usual repeated good-bys, when every one strains hard to think of something to say, original and worth remembering, and thus rise equal to the occasion, but succeeds only in repeating the promise and request to write often, and in giving invitations, and assurances of visits and remembrance, reiterated with a fervor that is intended to conceal the conviction that the speaker is falling far below ordinary intelligence. But hearty good will goes far to make up for lack of conversational brilliancy, and Phyllis was surprised to find how fond she and her new friends really were of one another, and that there were tears on her lashes, glad as she was to turn her face toward Gotham. Alan and David wrung both her hands sore, bidding her not forget them, and assuring her that the very first thing they both did when they arrived in New York to seek their fortune--a plan to be carried out after the New Year--would be to come and see her, without which prospect their farewell would have been more dreary. The train moved out at last, past the smiling young faces lined up to nod good-by to Phyllis,--the girls, with tears in their eyes in spite of the smiles, waving wet handkerchiefs from the platform. Phyllis leaned forward to wave as long as the last of the row was in sight, then settled back in her seat with one long sigh for Boston and what it held that was dear to her, and a leap of the heart forward, for now she was really cut adrift from exile, and was homeward bound. Winter though it was, Phyllis preferred the boat to the train for her journey, and in a short time was tucking away her belongings in her berth, taking supper in the gay dining-room, listening to the band for a little while, then lying down to slumber, which the thought that she was to waken in New York, and not the noise of the engines, rendered very light and fitful. Far from waking in New York, she was up and dressed, with all her books, flowers, and candy strapped up ready to carry off, before the boat had sighted the upper end of Manhattan Island; and she stood, shivering in the gray light of the December dawn, as one by one the islands of the river crept past, looking very picturesque, seen from that view-point, and with proper forgetfulness of the misery and sin they sheltered. Phyllis grew so excited she could not stand still as the boat crept down past the lower east side of the city, under the Brooklyn Bridge, swung around the Battery, and drew near her pier on the North River. How beautiful the spire of Trinity looked, and the new, high office buildings which dwarfed it! How beautiful were even the tall brick chimneys of the factories, for they were part of home! Phyllis could have put both arms around the square tower of the Produce Exchange and kissed the face of its clock, or hugged the Barge Office with enthusiasm, unattractive as it might be, ordinarily. She wondered if the immigrants crowded around it would have been as glad to see their distant homes again as she was to see hers. How painfully slow the boat's crew was in making her fast and getting out the gangway! How exasperating were the passengers--so many, too, though it was December--who were in advance of Phyllis, and moved like snails toward the pier! Phyllis was nearly suffocated with the flutterings of her heart, and she could hardly hold her packages, numerous enough to have warranted her dropping some overboard purposely. At last, at last, she had surrendered her ticket, and was moving off the boat! And there, just at the gangway's end, concealed from her till this moment by the crowd--there was Jessamy, more lovely than ever, with her cheeks glowing, her eyes dancing; pretty Bab, all scintillating with joy; Tom, proud as a whole flock of peacocks in his new dignity, with Nixie--yes, actually Nixie--on a leash, sitting up and behaving like a man and a brother. And her aunt! Phyllis could hardly believe her eyes that Mrs. Wyndham had braved the chill of the winter morning and reached the pier before seven o'clock to prove to the "Unit," who prayed to stray no more, how glad she was to get her back. Just what happened when Phyllis's foot touched the pier no one could say. She recognized her aunt's veil, Jessamy's fur collar, Bab's nose, and even Tom's rough coat, in the indiscriminate, rapturous embracing she was getting; but everybody was hugging her and talking to her at once, and Phyllis only knew that it was rather like a blissful Tower of Babel. The party walked up Warren Street, talking still, all at the same time, Bab walking backward and spinning around like Barney in "Martin Chuzzlewit" after the accident. It took all of Tom's ability to keep her and Nixie from under people's feet. Mrs. Wyndham and Jessamy tried to behave with dignity, but it was not a successful attempt; and those who met the party probably set them down as harmless lunatics under the convoy of one young keeper; though there was one ruddy-faced old gentleman who, seizing the spirit of the occasion and the season, wished Babbie "A merry Christmas, my dear," in return for her having run into his portly form, and trodden on his most sensitive corn. Even Nixie's manners did not admit him to the elevated road, so they took the surface car, Tom remaining on the platform with the small dog and a conductor blinded in the most efficacious manner to his presence; and by the time they had made the long journey to Harlem much of the excitement had cooled down. It broke out afresh, however, as Phyllis ran from room to room through the little apartment, which looked more beautiful to her than Mrs. Dean's big house on Commonwealth Avenue could ever look, exclaiming over every change, and still more surprised over those things which had not altered. Truce was not one of these. The snowy kitten was a white cat now; but, as Phyllis said, "did not seem to know it," for he ran up her skirt to her shoulder, and sat there as he had done when he was not much bigger than a thistle-ball, proving that he recognized her, for this was a mark of affection he had always reserved for his mistress alone. "Do you remember last Christmas eve?" asked Phyllis, after breakfast, as they all pushed back their coffee-cups with the involuntary movement of those who have satisfied hunger. "Are we likely to forget it?" said Jessamy, with a shudder. "It did not mean anything to you, though; oh, Phyllis, this ought to be much more than merely a '_merry_ Christmas' to us!" "We are going to keep it in baronial style," said Tom. "There are tons, to speak comprehensively, of green stuff coming here to-day, and we are going to trim the Land of Canaan till Birnam Wood won't be a twig beside it. And to-morrow we're going to have a Christmas-tree, and invite our friends, preceded by a dinner to which we shall not invite any one, because the dining-room is too small, and the turkey fills all the spaces we do not require. He is to be offered up to you, Phyllis, in honor of your repentant return from your wild wanderings." "Isn't that a delightful program!" cried Phyllis, the joy in her eyes arising more from noting how thoroughly Tom had assumed his place as the son of the little family, than from the prospect of Christmas festivities, however blithe. All day long the girls climbed step-ladders and wound ropes of evergreen till their hands were stiff, but their hearts so light that they hardly knew the discomfort. By night the little place was a bower of green, with red holly-berries shining in every available corner like cheery little lanterns signaling coming gladness. Not one day had passed during the six months of Phyllis's absence without a letter from her crossing another going to her from home; and yet, though the three tongues had rattled as fast as they could move all day, Jessamy, Phyllis, and Bab talked till midnight, and fell asleep exhausted, wishing each other "Merry Christmas," not having told half the history of those eventful days of absence. Christmas day was bright and sunny--not that it mattered with so much sunshine within doors. Violet, who slept at home, "because," said Bab, "the bath-tub was not long enough for a bed, and there was no room for her anywhere else"--Violet arrived earlier than usual, her face beaming with anticipation of pleasure, for she was that rare servant to whom "company" was a delight. Mrs. Wyndham peered at Tom at the foot of the table, from her place at the head, over a barricade of turkey, and each heart throbbed with gratitude that it was their own turkey, served on their own table, and that the year that had passed had proved that a home and happiness might be theirs, although loss of money had made the maintenance of that home not without its difficulties. Barbara sat at Tom's right hand, and Tom's youngest sister at Mrs. Wyndham's right. Phyllis, watching jealously for proofs of Tom's love for Bab, was more than satisfied. Tom and Babbie were not a sentimental pair, but there was a quiet certainty of affection and a perfect comradeship between them that guaranteed a love founded on the best and most enduring basis. And Alice Leighton was a girl after their own hearts. Bab was surely fortunate, and Phyllis rejoiced unselfishly. Although the little parlor had seemed filled in every corner, one had been cleared for the tree, and a curtain hung across it that there might be something in the celebration that Phyllis had not seen, since the festivities had taken on this special form in honor of her return. At a little after eight the bell tingled, and many feet echoed up the stairs. "Open the door, Phyl," cried Bab from her room. Neither she nor Jessamy would allow Phyllis a glimpse of them dressing. Phyllis did as she was bidden, and started back in amazement from a motley assemblage of characters from the four quarters of the globe, and all the realms of fairyland, as bewildered Phyllis at first thought. Santa Claus led the way--a small man, but only when measured perpendicularly; in diameter he was immense. After him came Cinderella and her godmother; then Aunt Henrietta, who disdained masking and costuming, and came in her own proper--most proper--person. Next followed Red Riding Hood, a Viking's Daughter, Old Mother Hubbard, Pocahontas, Little Nell with her grandfather, Bo-peep with a woolly lamb under one arm, and many other old friends, those known in the nursery predominating, since it was a Christmas-tree party, and childhood, human and divine, the ruling spirit of the feast. For a moment Phyllis did not know how to act. She felt out of place, with her own face undisguised confronting the queer figures bowing and saluting her cordially by name, not one of whom she knew. But she rallied quickly, welcomed them politely, wishing that Jessamy and Bab would hasten to help her out. But Jessamy and Bab were not forthcoming. After a few moments Phyllis realized it was because they too were costumed and masked, mixing with the other mummers. Old King Cole stepped out of the crowd as Phyllis was wondering what could be done with so many in such small space, and calling for his fiddlers three, demanded an old English dance. There is nothing like ignoring a difficulty when there is no way of doing away with it. The idea of dancing when she was fearful there would not be room for all the guests merely to stand rather took Phyllis's breath away; but everybody seemed to fold himself or herself up to make room, and the couples for the old country dance were on the floor in a twinkling. "It's because they are used to living in books, so can become quite flat," Bobby Shafto explained to her as he rose to lead out the Sleeping Beauty, who indicated her previous condition by poppies all over her costume and in her hair, but showed no sign of relapsing from decided wakefulness. "Aren't there people outside of books who are flatter than those in them?" asked Phyllis; but she was not thinking of plays on words, but that the dancers of to-night were probably the actors in the theatricals of last May, who had then learned the old dance, and that if she watched she should discover which were Jessamy and Bab, and which Jessamy's friend, Mr. Lane, in regard to whom she felt considerable curiosity. It was not hard to distinguish Jessamy, who had a certain manner of using her hands all her own. She was the Sleeping Beauty, and Phyllis guessed that Bobby Shafto was Mr. Lane--or should it be the other way? It was not long before she discovered Bab in the guise of Little Miss Muffet, and a tall Little Boy Blue, with a huge Japanese spider on a sort of small fishing-pole which he dangled before the nervous little person who lunched out of doors on curds and whey, was Tom. "And who am I?" asked Cinderella's godmother, stopping before Phyllis, smiling behind her muslin mask at the girl's preoccupied face. "I know who the fairy godmother ought to be," said Phyllis. "If you aren't Mrs. Van Alyn, then it's your own character which is the disguise." "Bravo! You have been getting clever over there in the land of Athena Junior," laughed the godmother, and her voice proved Phyllis right. "And me?" cried Cinderella, impatiently. "Who am I?" "I have no idea," Phyllis was slowly beginning, when Cinderella interrupted her. "How can you be so dull?" she cried. "Who is always sitting in the ashes, and likes them?" "Why, Ruth!" cried Phyllis, and hugged her friend until some of the realistic black spots on her gown were transferred to her own. It was not a very conventional party. The room was "so crowded there was no space for stiffness," said Bab, truly; but everybody seemed to be having the nicest time--even Aunt Henrietta. To be sure, Phyllis heard her suggesting to Mrs. Wyndham that parties were a great extravagance for people in straitened circumstances, but that was said rather as an oblation to her custom of fault-finding, and not heartily; and a moment later she added graciously that "the girls are improving daily. Even Phyllis is becoming more and more a Wyndham; they are all clear Wyndhams." "Phyllis is just as much a Wyndham, certainly, as her cousins," laughed Mrs. Wyndham. "Ah, but she is not poor Henry's daughter," said Aunt Henrietta so decidedly that the remark became at once illuminative in effect, if not in matter. "Ladies in the center, as for the quadrille figure," called Old King Cole, who acted as master of ceremonies. "Men join hands around them; ladies form line, hands raised, men dance through, come down outside, take places, a man beside each lady." A quaint and merry air was played by a pretty young girl whom Phyllis had never seen, and King Cole's directions were carried out, almost without a mistake. "Left hand to partner, right hand on mask," called that jovial person. "Ready!" The little creature at the piano struck three chords, while the masqueraders took position. It really was very pretty, small as the space was. Suddenly, obeying another chord, every voice poured out in the carol: "Christ was born on Christmas Day, Wreathe the holly, twine the bay," and sang it through to the end. Then a single chord was struck, and instantly every mask was swept off by the raised right hands, and the company made a deep bow, crying in unison: "Merry Christmas!" It was charming; and while Phyllis and the few who were not a part of the figure applauded wildly, Santa Claus, who proved to be, of all unexpected persons, Lawyer Hurd, began to strip the tree. There were presents for every one. Phyllis had saved her own packages, tucked into her trunk by Mrs. Dean, to open now; and all the little trinkets she had made or got together for her family they had made her keep for the tree. Violet, shining and smiling in the background, was made happy; and Truce received a chicken wish-bone, with plenty of meat on it, and Nixie a French chop, that being the kind of comfit suited to their palates, each placed in a candy-box ornamented with a picture of a cat and a dog respectively. Bab opened a small case Santa Claus handed her, and flushed with pleasure. A little miniature of Tom smiled up at her, and on the back was engraved: "Years pass away; Love lasts alway." Since that morning a diamond, set as lightly as possible, shone on Barbara's little left hand like a drop of dew. But Phyllis's surprise was so complete and delightful that no one was happier than she. She had written since she had been away and sent to Jessamy two or three short stories for her illustrating, and had wondered what had become of them, knowing that Jessamy had done the work and sent them to magazines. No one told her their fate, so she did not ask, being more sensitive about these little attempts than any one suspected. Now the explanation lay before her in the delightful shape of a crisp fifty-dollar bill. The first story, written before she had left home, Jessamy had sent to several of the larger magazines, and received it back each time with a personal note of praise and encouragement. At last it had found its way to a magazine with a larger circulation and smaller subscription price than any of the others, and the editor had not only accepted the story, but told Jessamy he would take all she could give him of equal merit; and especially requested her to illustrate for him other work besides her cousin's. The second story Phyllis sent had been refused, but the third was accepted with praise; and now the money for both lay in her hand to complete the happiness of her home-coming. It was not a great sum--the magazine would have paid more to some one whose name was known; but Phyllis considered it tremendous, and felt as though her five right-hand fingers had suddenly been endowed with the Midas touch. Jessamy and she had a rapture after all their friends had gone. It had been a beautiful Christmas Day, and the very nicest evening the girls remembered to have spent; but it was best of all to bid the people good-night, dear as many of them were to them, and sit down alone, a "square" once more, at their "ain fireside," represented, as Babbie pointed out, by a gilded steam radiator. Jessamy was paid ten to twenty dollars each for her illustrations. She and Phyllis hugged each other in speechless anticipation of the wealth that they were to pile up. Yet a vision of Bobby Shafto, and a look in his eyes that night as they rested on the Sleeping Beauty, as if he would dearly have liked the privilege of waking her in the manner of the prince in the story, filled Phyllis with foreboding that their collaboration might be short. But she was at home again, and everything smiled on their hopes. "A merry Christmas and a happy New Year!" Ah, yes, very, very happy. And with that thought in her grateful heart, Phyllis fell asleep, with Truce purring on her arm. CHAPTER XVI SPOKES FROM THE HUB Four days after New Year's began a week of shut-in weather, the kind of days which drive one nearly frantic, or make one perfectly happy, according to the state of mind in which they find one. The Wyndhams, "squared" once more, with Phyllis back and their home life resumed with nothing to mar it, were in precisely the perfect contentment which hails with rapture weather shutting out the outside world and drawing closer together the inside one. The snow fell steadily for three days, intermittently for four more; the walking was as bad as it could be, and the city lay muffled in stillness that was hypnotic in effect, and helped keep people within doors who had not obligations to force them out. Jessamy, Phyllis, and Barbara reveled in the pleasure of donning old gowns every morning and settling down to the achievement of odd tasks without fear of interruption, and also in the chance to get talked up to date after half a year of absence on Phyllis's part. There was an old chair which had outlived its covering, though in a melancholy state of finish, which had been condemned to the tender mercies of the refuse gatherer by all but Bab. She, fired with economical zeal, had long declared that she would enamel it in black, re-cover it, and have practically a new chair at the trifling expense of a can of paint and three quarters of a yard of worsted and linen tapestry. This was precisely the time for which she had waited, when an old sheet could be spread on the parlor rug, and the chair allowed plenty of time to dry, with no danger of callers to be shocked by the sight and sickened by the odor of paint; so during this "spell of weather," as Violet called it, she began the transformation of the chair. Jessamy had a dress to turn, which she too had been waiting to begin until such time as threads on the floor would not matter; and Phyllis brought out all the piece-boxes into the parlor to set them in order in the midst of the general festive disorder. Jessamy could never be seriously disheveled, but she had put on her oldest gown to do her ripping, and Phyllis was "neat, but not gaudy," Tom said, in a faded pink shirt-waist and a skirt decidedly worse for wear; for boxes were dusty, and sorting scraps hard on skirt fronts. Of course Tom was not deterred by weather or bad walking from dropping in daily to keep his eye on his future family and his particular property in it. Bab said that the worst of being engaged to a young doctor was that, having office hours and few patients, he was obliged to be out at certain times for appearances' sake, and had nowhere else to go except to see his betrothed, which gave her very little security of time to herself. But it was quite apparent to every one that Babbie did not object to an arrangement which allowed Tom to drop in daily at four to join them in their afternoon tea--which was usually chocolate. "It really is too cozy and heavenly to be real!" cried Phyllis, suddenly, looking up from a shabby bit of ribbon she was turning every way in the gray light to determine whether it was to be discarded or retained. "It's the blessedest sort of thing to be busy, and a trifle shabby, and all shut in, with the world shut out." "A good deal shabby, I should say," remarked Jessamy. "Not that it matters. It does seem like 'Myself and my wife; my son John and his wife; us four, and no more,' doesn't it?" "I could purr like Trucie, and I know just how he feels when he cuddles down under the blanket on cold nights," said Phyllis. "Cats are the only things that can express the kind of contentment these days give me." "I might purr if it weren't for this horrid chair," groaned Barbara. "I wish I'd never touched the thing! Girls, that paint isn't one minute more dry than it was the night before last!" Bab was a sight to behold. A long muslin gown, far past its usefulness and beauty, hung over her loosely, betraying through certain rents the fact that she wore a black skirt under it. Black enamel paint stood out in bold relief in great blotches on its faded groundwork, black paint decorated the knuckles and finger-tips of her grimy little hands. One finger was bound up where she had hammered it black and blue; for, her patience exhausted waiting for the paint to dry, she had attempted to cover the chair while it was yet wet. Her hair would have qualified her for Bloomingdale, for Bab had the sort of hair which comes down when its owner goes into any work in earnest, and she had stuck in the hair-pins, hit or miss fashion--chiefly miss--and black paint adorned her forehead where her knuckles had brushed it. But worst of all was the expression of rage and despair gradually transforming her face. The chair was undeniably a failure, and Bab did not like to fail. "It's a shame, Babette. I wouldn't bother with the old thing another minute," said Jessamy, sympathetically. "I don't see why that paint doesn't dry, or even stick to the chair; but it doesn't, so I wouldn't get any more tired over it. It must be poor paint." "It is fast enough anywhere but on the chair," said Barbara, surveying her painted hands, and not grateful for Jessamy's advice. "It dries on me, and sticks wherever it lights." "Give it up, Bab; don't spoil this beautiful, closed-in day with anything that worries," said Phyllis. "Oh, catch Truchi-ki, Jessamy; if he rubs against that enamel paint, he and I will both have an awful time getting it off his fur! Isn't it nice that you've learned how to turn and make over your dresses, Jessamy! It is such an economy!" "Jessamy won't admit, even to herself, that she does it to economize," laughed Bab, the wrinkles smoothing out of her forehead as she sat back on the sheet covering the floor and clasped her knees with her hands. "She pretends she makes over her dresses because she likes to, and regards the dress when it is done as such a bit of elegance that she hypnotizes others into thinking it is elegant. If you notice, Phyl, Jessamy never does admit that we are scrabbling along; and that is the reason she appears so much more high-bred than you and I do. We rather more than merely admit that we consider a turned dress less desirable than a new one. But Jessamy ignores, even to herself, the fact that the goods have another side, and her dresses look cloth-of-goldy because she expects no less of them. We pretend to outsiders, but Jessamy pretends consistently, even to herself, and that's why it is so much better pretense." "Pretense! Oh, Bab!" cried Jessamy, reproachfully; and at that instant the bell rang. "It's the milkman with his bill," said Jessamy, easily. "I know his ring; besides, he is due to-day; Violet has the money ready." It was the milkman; but as Violet, having paid him, was about to close the door, two tall figures bounded up the stairs, and a breezy masculine voice cried: "One moment, please. Is Miss Phyllis Wyndham at home?" "Y-es, sah," stammered Violet, with an apprehensive glance over her shoulder at the disordered parlor, where Bab was sitting on the floor, horror-stricken at the question, and Phyllis was wildly scooping up an armful of bits from the sofa in a frantic effort to flee. But flight was impossible, for the only exit from the small parlor was into the hall, directly opposite the door which Violet was inhospitably holding partly closed. "Please give her these cards," continued the voice, and two young men entered with the serene unconsciousness of their age and sex. "How are you, Miss Phyllis!" cried one of the arrivals, catching sight of the object of his search in his line of vision, and utterly oblivious to the situation. In spite of her chagrin, Phyllis was quite honest in the cry of pleasure with which she recognized him. "Alan Armstrong!" she exclaimed, "and Mr. Campbell! Well, I am glad, though you have caught us in a plight. Girls, these are my Boston friends. Miss Wyndham, Miss Barbara Wyndham--Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Campbell." Jessamy arose with the grace of the princess they called her. It really did not matter whether Jessamy was in rags or velvets while she wore her beautiful manner. "You can't imagine how glad we are to see those who made dear Phyllis happy while she was away from home," Jessamy said with simple graciousness. "It is so good of you to come all the way up-town in this bad weather! We felt sure no one would be kind enough to come to see us to-day, so we got out all sorts of disagreeable work; but you won't mind disorder, I'm sure." "We can't see it," said Alan, thinking privately Jessamy was the loveliest girl he had ever seen, and that it was quite true that no one would waste a glance on a room when she was in it. "If I had known you were coming I would have painted my face more artfully," said Bab, really very much embarrassed as she thought with horror of the muslin wrapper covering her gown, her fly-away hair, and her bedaubed hands and face. "I should think it likely Alan or David Campbell could tell you why your chair won't dry, Babbie," said Phyllis, trying to help her out. "My cousin has been trying to repair this rocker, and she has hammered her finger sore covering it, and the paint sticks to everything but the wood; why is that?" "I can't explain the hammering," said Alan, "but I suspect the trouble with the chair is that the wood was oily when you painted it. There is always a deposit of oil from hands on chair-arms. If you had washed it in an alkali before you began, it would have been all right." "Perhaps I would better try your prescription on myself," said Barbara. "Though I am afraid nothing but a turpentine bath will do for me. It is too late to help the chair, isn't it? If you will forget you met me in this guise, I'll come back in a few moments and let you be introduced to Phyllis's respectable cousin Barbara." "It is too late to do anything with the chair, I'm afraid, but we don't want to forget we have met you," said Alan, rising to open the door for Bab with such politeness that she said afterward he "made her feel as neat and nice as if he had been a paint-eraser." "Call Violet to take away the chair; tell her to send it down to the janitor, and fold up this sheet on the floor, Bab," said Jessamy. "I always did suspect the women's corners in papers that tell one how to make toilet-tables and chairs out of old barrels or packing-cases. Bab has spent three days struggling with this chair, only to throw it away at last." "One of the New York papers had a burlesque Household Department once," said Alan, as he closed the door behind Bab, and turned to help Phyllis tie up her boxes. "Among other things, it told the gentle reader never to throw away her cold buckwheat cakes--that they made a lovely dado glued at irregular intervals on blue denim, or, used in the same way, were most artistic as a portière border. I always think of it when I read these crazy directions for making furniture out of coal-hods and things. Look here; why do you all put away your work, Miss Phyllis? You'll make Heather and me feel ourselves nuisances." "We were only doing these things for want of better interests," said Phyllis. "I'd like to show you my little home looking respectable. I've told you so much of how it came to be. Do you still call David Heather? That was Rick's name for him. And you need not call me _Miss_ Phyllis here, any more than in Boston. We are all going to be informal friends." "There's Tom!" exclaimed Jessamy, as the bell rang twice, and twice again, with a short pause between, and sprang to open the door for the doctor. "How is everything to-day, Jessamy? Where's Bab? What is this--company?" added Tom, lowering his voice, but to a no less audible key. "Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Campbell--Dr. Leighton," said Jessamy, ushering Tom into the room; "Phyllis's Boston friends, you know, Tom. And Nixie," she added, as the little dog followed, shaking off the snow. "Glad to see you," said Tom, with cordial hand-grasps to each. "Here's my little lady," he added, turning joyfully to meet Bab transformed into her pretty self, though black paint still surmounted her knuckles. Jessamy took the opportunity to slip out for like improvements, and Tom cried: "Guess what's happened, Bab! I was called in for croup to the millionaire baby on the corner, and delighted the family by my skill; relieved the choking heir at once--that's not a pun; I didn't mean choking air! Only think! And there are five millionaire offspring in the family, not one of whom has had a single childish disease; the mother told me so! Suppose I should get that practice!" "Hope you will, I'm sure. Phyllis told us about you, and your other prospects," said Alan, glancing at Barbara, who was gazing proudly at Tom. "The door-bell again!" cried Phyllis, as it rang. "That's Ruth's ring." And she opened the door to their friend. "Such walking, Phyl! But I had to come. I have sat over my embroidery without a breath of air for five days, and I was nearly wild. Is it a party?" added Ruth, stopping suddenly as she caught a glimpse of the parlor. "It is rather a good imitation of one for such weather," laughed Phyllis. "My friends from Boston, who, I told you, were to be in New York this winter, are come, and Tom is here; that is all. Here are Jessamy and auntie. I'm going to make myself presentable now; you go in with them." "Your friends have consented to stay to tea, Phyllis; and Ruth will stay all night," said Mrs. Wyndham, as Phyllis came back, looking sweet and fresh in her gray crepon. "We are going to have a real stormy-night good time, though I've no idea of what we shall find for supper." "Supper does not matter," said David Campbell, crossing to Phyllis's side. "I have been waiting to show you a bit of pebble my sister sent over to me. I asked her if she would let me have it for you. It came from the bank of Loch Leven." "Oh, that was ever so kind of you!" cried Phyllis, gratefully, really pleased with the thought for her the lame lad showed. "I always loved poor Mary Stuart; I hope you don't think her bad?" "Bad!" echoed David, with the emphasis of a Scotsman. "Her conduct may have been somewhat erroneous, but she was brought up in an evil court, and was but a young bit lassie when she came to her own, and too beautiful to be left to wicked counselors. But bad! She was never that, you know." "I am sure she wasn't, for I always was too sorry for her not to judge her partially; I shall prize this little stone, thinking her weary feet may have trodden it," said Phyllis. "That's not, so to say, possible," said honest Davy; "for most like the pebbles that were on the surface three hun'er years ago are buried now. It's juist a memento, no mair." "Ah, well; it will do no harm to dream about it," said Phyllis. "I shall want you to tell me all your plans after supper. Now we must all go to work. Alan, you are to make the coffee as you did on the yacht." "I had an aunt," Ruth was saying to Alan at that moment, and Alan did not hear Phyllis as she spoke--"I had an aunt who married an Armstrong. That is, she was my mother's sister-in-law; her husband was Fordyce Armstrong, and he lived in Boston." "He was my father's cousin," said Alan, surprised. "Isn't that odd! Your aunt-in-law married my second cousin. What relation are we then, Miss Wells? Phyllis, your friend and I are relations of some sort; come, unsnarl us. Oh, never mind, though; we are cousins too; that's a nice, elastic relationship, anyway." Mrs. Wyndham brought out the chafing-dish, and Jessamy took it in charge. Jessamy was getting more and more into the way of slipping into vacancies and smoothing out possible complications in the tiny home. Bab was very occupied being engaged, and Phyllis was throwing herself increasingly into her hopes and work. The supper was a success. It was settled that no one should get anything from outside; but Welsh rabbit in the chafing-dish, toast, cold meat, coffee, Bab's fresh cake, preserves, the result of Jessamy's proud first effort in that very feminine, old-time accomplishment of "putting up" fruit--going out of fashion since women's exchanges and fancy groceries make canned goods so easily purchasable--all these things, brought forth from the little pantry, made a supper fit for a king, breaking up even David's silence into merriment. When the feast was over, and the young people once more back in the little parlor, leaving Mrs. Wyndham with Violet to straighten matters in the kitchen, the bell rang again, stopping Barbara's accompaniment to a college song which they were all getting ready to sing. "Isn't it funny how people keep coming when we felt so sure of a solitary day?" said Phyllis, as she went unceremoniously to open the door herself. It was Robert Lane whom she ushered in with more constraint of manner than she had shown the other visitors. Only Jessamy felt well acquainted with the young lawyer. Robert contrived to get Jessamy to himself for a brief but apparently earnest conversation under the cover of the singing; and the little party broke up early, after a few songs had been sung by what Tom called "the invested choir." Barbara bore off Ruth to share her bed. Jessamy called back Phyllis, who was following them, stopping herself to turn off the gas. "Phyl," she said, "do you know why Mr. Lane came here to-night?" "Apparently to see you," returned Phyllis. "He hardly noticed any one else." "Yes; but it was to tell me something particular," said Jessamy, with the suspicion of a blush in the dim light. "He thinks--oh, Phyl, he really thinks that the information he has in regard to Mr. Abbott's actions two years ago is going to get us back some of our money; and he says Mr. Hurd thinks so too. Isn't it fine?" "Oh, Jessamy, wouldn't I be thankful! But not for my own sake," added Phyllis, hastily. "Mr. Lane seems to be very nice, Amy." "So are both your friends very nice, Phyllis," returned Jessamy, turning out the gas, as she spoke, so Phyllis could not see her face. CHAPTER XVII THE LADY OF THE SCALES While Phyllis was climbing the steep hill of fame by the path of her little stories, events in her home were not at a standstill. The pleasantest and most tangible thing that had happened was that Jessamy had been asked by the editor of the magazine which had bought her illustrations and Phyllis's two stories, to illustrate for him other work besides that done by her cousin. Jessamy was very busy and happy during these days. She was blossoming out into fuller, more perfect beauty; her eyes were alight as with a secret joy, her smile grew every day sweeter and more lingering; in a word, Jessamy was leaving the last shadow of that mysterious valley of young maidenhood, and passing into the full sunshine of womanhood. It was two years since the trouble, which was every day less of a regret to the Wyndhams, had come to them; or, it would be two years when May rolled around again, and it was then March. Jessamy and Phyllis were twenty; they had a right to enter upon their kingdom. Barbara, too, at nineteen and engaged, was grown up. Mrs. Wyndham, with the gratitude of a mother who had brought her children safely through the development of character into sweet and good women, yet with the regret of a mother in losing her little girls, realized that her three little maids were little no longer. It was March, and the season was forward after the heavy snows of the winter. The song-sparrow was lilting in the park, the twigs and buds were showing red and swelling on many trees and shrubs. There had been, of late, mystery in the atmosphere of the little apartment, from share in which Mrs. Wyndham felt herself excluded. Evidently the girls were in a conspiracy of some sort; but their mother did not give the matter much thought, knowing that when they were ready they would confide in her, and feeling quite certain if she were not told it was because the plan worked better for her in ignorance of it. Robert Lane came and went frequently, and Mrs. Wyndham watched him with the jealousy of a strong suspicion that he was finding her beautiful elder daughter attractive. But, watch as she would, she could not discover anything in the young lawyer which did not make her like him better as she grew to know him well. Jessamy and he--indeed, all three girls and he--seemed to have an understanding which Mrs. Wyndham learned to associate with the secret in the air; but she could not determine whether Jessamy was growing to care for Robert in the way he was unmistakably learning to care for her. Mrs. Wyndham's watchfulness of Jessamy was divided with Phyllis. Alan haunted the apartment, and there was no mistaking the dumb affection for Phyllis in his eyes, as faithful as a dog's, and less reticent of speech than his newly silent tongue. Phyllis, happy, busy, interested to try her powers, showed no feeling for Alan beyond the frank friendliness she gave all their young men friends impartially, Tom, Robert, and David, and to distant Rick Dean, whose letters grew constantly more frequent and warmer in tone. Mrs. Wyndham began to wonder if Phyllis were the sort of girl who is so cordially kindly to all boys that no especial one becomes important to her. She felt sure that if, by and by, her niece could not return to Alan all that he was pouring out on her, it would be more tragic to the loyal-hearted and earnest young journalist than unrequited affection is likely to be to youths of his age. However, girls were proverbially uncertain and hard to read. Mrs. Wyndham was too wise to worry over a contingency not yet arisen. She saw with pleasure that David Campbell was finding little Ruth decidedly to his liking. There could not have been a better happening for them both. David was an earnest, honest, manly boy, and Ruth would be the very best little housewife a man could ask. Mrs. Wyndham hoped that nothing would divert the course of the romance dawning in that direction. "It is such a nice, quiet time now, mama, with Phyllis settled down again to private life, and no especial work on hand; let's ask Aunt Henrietta to spend the day," said Jessamy one morning in that eventful March. Bab groaned, and even Phyllis looked downcast. "Oh, dear, it's awful to have a sense of duty," sighed Bab. "What does make you so dreadfully conscientious, Jessamy?" "It isn't such a tremendous proof of conscientiousness," Jessamy began; but her mother said: "It is exactly what I have been meaning to suggest for some time. We have scarcely seen anything of aunt all winter, and we owe her attention; she is growing old." "She isn't growing old, Madrina; you know that. She always was old; but she doesn't mean to admit it, nor let it increase," said Bab. "Well, I suppose I can maintain my portion of family virtue. Write your note, Jessamy-Griselda, the patient and heroic." Aunt Henrietta accepted the invitation, which was for three days later, and appeared at half-past twelve precisely, in all the dignity of a stiff black silk, her old-fashioned heavy gold watch-chain with the seals, and a high tortoise-shell comb which had been her mother's. She no more held to the idea of ladies of her age wearing even so much as a widow's cap than she did to the absurdity of arriving ten minutes before luncheon. Half an hour, she declared, was not too long to rest after reaching her destination before sitting down to the table. It was ridiculous to come barely in time to lay off one's things. Hence she arrived at her niece's apartment thirty minutes before the hour for lunch, and before the girls had had time to get ready to greet her. The Wyndhams believed that it was impossible for one servant to do everything, and do it well; so when there was to be a guest in the little home, Jessamy, Phyllis, and Bab took their share of the preparations. "You've been getting a new rug for your dining-room," said Aunt Henrietta, in the tone of disapproval which she kept "for family use," as Bab said. "Yes; that is Phyllis's contribution to our comfort. She bought it with her 'Trumpet' money," replied Mrs. Wyndham, mildly. "The old one we took for Bab's room; her carpet was worn out." "The idea of a girl who pretends to be a lady, a Wyndham, working for a horrible newspaper!" exclaimed Aunt Henrietta. "How do you get on now, Emily? You seem to be branching out." The last remark being called forth by the old lady's discovery of a picture which she had not seen before between the dining-room windows. "It is fortunate Violet is not an ordinary servant, and that we don't mind her hearing these things!" thought Mrs. Wyndham, but she replied aloud: "We have enough to live on, you know, aunt. Of course we must look after the pennies closely; but with care we have all we absolutely need, and the girls have added considerably to our income. Jessamy and Phyllis have great reason to rejoice in their success with their magazine work, especially when one considers how many are rushing into that field." "So Barbara is the only drone?" said Aunt Henrietta. "No, no potatoes; my doctor forbids them. It is often the one who says most who does least." "Barbara is far from a drone, Aunt Henrietta," said Phyllis, seeing Bab fold her lips with a look at once angry and hurt. "There has to be one to help with the housekeeping. Bab is the most competent little person you could imagine, and is so lively and cheery she keeps us all up to the mark." "Humph!" ejaculated Aunt Henrietta, with a world of significance in the sound. "Take away that dreadful cat. I always detested cats! How people can keep animals in such a limited space I can't conceive. When are you to be married, Barbara; or will that young man you are engaged to ever be able to support you?" "Next fall, if Doctor Leighton has his wish," said Bab, while Phyllis gathered up Truce, and bore him, surprised and indignant, from the room, where, as everywhere, he was used to being considered an acquisition. "Doctor Leighton expects to be able to support me. He would not have asked me to marry him, otherwise." Barbara disdained reminding her aunt that Tom was heir to a very good inheritance. It would have been so unbearable if even Aunt Henrietta, for whose opinion in general she had little regard, looked on her marriage from a mercenary point of view. "Very probably. He seems to be a very nice young man," said Aunt Henrietta, to the surprise of Barbara, who was ready to do battle for her lover. But Aunt Henrietta was more lenient in her judgment of boys than of girls. The luncheon passed off with no further passage at arms, and Aunt Henrietta settled herself comfortably to slow knitting in the best chair in the parlor, and to conversation with her niece-in-law. The girls were unmistakably "fidgety," as Aunt Henrietta protestingly remarked. A note had come for Jessamy during lunch. She had read it with quickened breath, and conveyed it to the other two slyly, when opportunity offered. The effect on all three had been disturbing. Bab flitted about from room to room, finding it impossible to keep still. And, while Phyllis had greater nervous control of herself, her answers to remarks addressed to her were so wide of the mark that Aunt Henrietta commented on it severely, and her Aunt Wyndham kindly let her alone. As to Jessamy, her cheeks were burning, her eyes so bright that Aunt Henrietta, looking at her attentively, prescribed: "Six drops of number three aconite in a half-glass of water, and take one teaspoonful every hour. You are certainly feverish, child," she added. Jessamy's beauty had made her Aunt Henrietta's favorite from her childhood. At half-past four, just after Aunt Henrietta had rolled up her work preparatory to taking her afternoon tea before setting out homeward--"You live at such an unearthly distance from civilization," she said, as though the Wyndhams were selfishly inconsiderate of everything but their own pleasure in living so far up-town and seeking low rent--just at half-past four the bell rang, and Mrs. Wyndham met at the door Robert Lane, looking so excited, entering with such a quick step, and with such flashing eyes, that he hardly seemed to be himself, and brought with him instantly an electric atmosphere. "What has happened to you, Mr. Lane?" asked Mrs. Wyndham. "You know my aunt, Mrs. Hewlett? You look as though some one had made you heir to a fortune." "Not a bad guess, Mrs. Wyndham," said Robert, taking the extended hand. "I have as good news as that to tell you. I honestly believe I like it better than a fortune for myself." "Then it is all right? He came to terms?" cried Bab, while Jessamy and Phyllis, knowing the answer before it was given, dropped, quite pale with joy, on the sofa, their arms holding each other tight. "All right, little lady. The check is here," cried Robert, jubilantly, slapping himself on the breast. Mrs. Wyndham turned pale. Even Aunt Henrietta began to tremble. "May we know what you are talking about, young man?" she said sternly. "Evidently the girls have the advantage of us." "My dear Mrs. Wyndham," Robert began, "it is a rather long story; the beginning dates back to the winter before last, when I was first graduated from the law school, and had a desk in one of Mr. Abbott's offices." [Illustration: A BEARER OF GOOD TIDINGS.] At the mention of that fateful name Mrs. Wyndham sat erect, clasping tight the arms of her chair. "Mr. Abbott?" she whispered. "Precisely; the Abbott who robbed you," said Robert, nodding emphatically. "At the time I was frequently asked to witness his signature to papers; among others were three deeds of transfer. I caught a glimpse of their contents, not reading them in detail, of course, but I saw enough to know they were transfer deeds for certain property held by Mr. Abbott in his own name. He made it over to his wife. The dates of those deeds I remembered--I have a good memory for dates, always had. The first was signed on my own birthday, December seventh; the second, on January third, the day on which a chum of mine, whose birthday I have always kept by dining with him, was born; the third was signed the day before Washington's birthday, and I had to witness it with my coat on, ready to start out of town for the holiday--so I was prepared to swear to all three dates with absolute certainty. At the time there were many things which led me to suspect that Mr. Abbott was not all one's fancy paints an honest man, but I was not called upon to meddle in his affairs, merely renting desk-room of him as I did. But the following spring, when I heard of the failure of the Wyndham Corporation, and that your family had lost everything, practically, while Abbott was still prosperous, I began to think seriously. A year ago I met Miss Jessamy, and I--I thought such a--I thought--why, it seemed a shame, don't you know, that she should be deprived of anything, when nothing was good--" Robert broke off, much embarrassed. "And you tried to help us?" suggested Mrs. Wyndham; while Aunt Henrietta looked sharply from blushing Jessamy to the no less crimson young lawyer. "Yes, yes," said Robert, gratefully. "I went to Mr. Hurd and told him what I knew about that rascal having put his property out of his hands when the company was already involved and he could not legally do so. Mr. Hurd jumped at the information. 'Young man,' he said, 'you may be the very witness we needed to establish what we were all morally certain of, yet could never prove.' Then I spoke to Mrs. Van Alyn--no, I had already spoken to her before I met Miss Jessamy. I forgot--I had seen Jessamy when I began to act, but had not met her. Mrs. Van Alyn said you ought not to be told until we were certain, because you were too delicate to be upset on a possibly false clue. So Mrs. Van Alyn asked Jessamy--Miss Wyndham--to meet me at her house, and she gave me all the information necessary to proceed on. We have been at work ever since, more or less. You were not told, for it proved unnecessary; Mr. Hurd having power of attorney for you. Abbott is a sly cur; we couldn't establish illegal transfers beyond the deeds I witnessed, though it is absolutely certain he made others. However, those amounted to forty thousand dollars. Mr. Hurd and I proved to him that we could--and there wasn't much doubt Mr. Hurd would--sue him for that amount, and not only get it, but a pretty tidy sum would be out of his pocket for costs. The old rascal hated to disgorge, but he wanted to economize on his restitution, and handing over forty thousand to Mr. Hurd was cheaper than meeting the suit. So Mr. Hurd got his check for that amount--it's certified--and he let me bring it up to you, and tell you the story, like the trump he is, because he is good enough to say the recovery came through me. Mrs. Wyndham, here is forty thousand dollars, and if you are as glad as I am about it you are a pretty happy woman." So saying, and with a decided choke in his voice, Robert laid a certified check on Mrs. Wyndham's knee, and dropped silently back in his chair. Not a sound broke the stillness of the room for a few moments, then Aunt Henrietta electrified the company. Without a word, she arose to her full stately height, walked slowly over to where Robert sat, put both arms around him, and kissed him soundly, with a kiss that resounded. "You are a second Daniel Webster," she said, and solemnly resumed her seat. Nothing better could have happened. Aunt Henrietta had relieved the tension of a moment that was in danger of becoming hysterical. Following her aunt-in-law's example, though with a difference, Mrs. Wyndham took both of Robert's hands, the tears of joy running down her cheeks. "I can't thank you, my dear," she said simply. "I doubt your wanting me to; but I shall never, never forget that we owe it to you that even this portion of our lost property is restored. And to us, who have been taught the lesson of economy so sharply, forty thousand dollars will be a large sum." Jessamy, Phyllis, and Bab were crying softly, but their faces were flushed with joy and bright with smiles. "Oh, here's Tom!" cried Bab, as she always did when she heard Tom's peculiar ring, and ran to the door to bring him in. "Hallo, Bob, old man! I see you've got it!" cried Tom, the instant he entered and saw the April faces. "Well, talk about special providences; wasn't it about the neatest bit of good fortune you ever knew that you should have witnessed those deeds, and had your desk in old Abbott's office? And I believe you'll get your reward, too," he added for Robert's ear alone. "Leave it to me, and I'll manage the others--give you a chance. I tell you, Mother Wyndham, I'm tremendously glad. Now it's over, and you know the whole story, I'll tell you that my engagement to Bab depended on the recovery of this money. If it hadn't been captured I should have broken it off--I wouldn't marry a girl without a little fortune." "She hasn't married you yet, sir, that girl-with-a-fortune, so you'd better not be too sure of her. I may use my share of the forty thousand to go off to fashionable watering-places this summer, and invest in a little French title attached to a little French man," said Bab, saucily, so saucily that Aunt Henrietta said severely: "Barbara, such jests are not seemly." "Now, Mother Wyndham," continued Tom, "aren't you going to treat on the joyful occasion? In default of champagne and grouse, I propose a Welsh rabbit in the chafing-dish, and anything else to be found; and, as Jessamy is the chief conspirator of the family, the one who got into the plot first, I think she ought to make it. Go out to the kitchen, Princess, please, and make us a rabbit." "Violet is out," began Mrs. Wyndham, hesitating. "Splendid!" said Tom the artful, who had remembered this fact when he spoke. "Violet is no good at rabbits. Please be nice, Jessamy, and make it." "Of course I will," said Jessamy, rising. "Maybe some one will help you," continued Tom, a hand on Phyllis's and Bab's arm warning them not to offer. "I would, only I am not proficient." "I know how to make a rabbit, at least to toast the bread," said Robert. "I'll help." Mrs. Wyndham looked anxiously after the pair disappearing down the hall. It was not hard to see through Tom's Machiavelism, and she longed to follow Jessamy. In the kitchen, empty save for Truce still hopefully waiting for mice, Jessamy lost her usual dignified grace. She cut the bread for the toast on the bias, and lighted the top of the gas-range instead of the broiler to toast it, dropped the cheese in the sink, and at last burned her fingers so badly with a match that Robert had to come to the rescue. "Let me see them," he said, getting possession of her hands. There must have been something in his voice not quite suited to the simple words, for Jessamy trembled violently, and would not raise her eyes to look at him. Taking the little burnt hand in his, Robert forgot why he held it. "Jessamy," he said, "I don't want to take advantage of any little gratitude you may feel toward me; indeed, you ought not to be grateful, for it was chance that enabled me to be a witness for you, and any one would have done what I did for mere justice's sake. But you know that I did it for you with joy, because I was doing it for the girl I loved, and will still love if she doesn't care a bit for me. But do you care for me, just a little, Jessamy?" "No," said Jessamy. "What!" cried poor Robert. "Jessamy, you can't mean that! You knew I was caring for you, and you are not a heartless flirt! Jessamy, don't you care for me?" "Not a little, Robert," whispered Jessamy, and raised her eyes at last to look at him. Beautiful eyes Jessamy had at all times; now they were wonderful, lighted with the best and most precious thing in the world--a pure, unselfish, self-forgetting love. Robert read it, and stood a moment abashed and awed, as a true man should be. Before he had time to recover, and accept the great joy and the priceless gift which were his, Tom's voice was heard talking volubly as feet drew near, quite as though he suspected the situation, and was giving Robert and Jessamy warning. "Not ready yet?" he cried, entering. "Why, you haven't set the table, nor toasted the bread, by Jove!" Jessamy stood motionless a moment, then she looked at her mother. There was no use for her to try to speak of lesser things, her heart was too full. With a swift motion she turned to her mother, who, seeing what had happened, gathered her in her arms. "Will you let Rob have me, mama--for forty thousand dollars, you know?" Jessamy whispered. "Three cheers for Judge Lane and his bride," cried Tom. "Give you joy, old man! Except Bab and Phyllis, she's the best girl in all the world, and I can't say more for you than that you deserve her." The two young men wrung each other's hand with that hearty good will that means so much, and Phyllis and Bab kissed Jessamy with smiles and tears. Then every one rallied to make the occasion worthy of itself. Supper was served, not only the belated rabbit, but lots of other good cheer; and the health of Rob and Jessamy was drunk in coffee of the future bride's making, which may not have been as festive as champagne, but was very delicious. Aunt Henrietta departed in such an amiable frame of mind that her nieces almost hated to have her go. Alan dropped in that evening, and David, who, when he came, was despatched to bring Ruth to hear the double tidings of good and congratulate the happy pair. "But the best part of the whole wonderful afternoon," said Bab, as she bade Tom good-night, helping him on with his greatcoat in the hall, to do which she had to stand on a chair, owing to her five feet and Tom's generous inches, "the best part of it all is that our princess should have become engaged in the kitchen. It is so funny!" "Oh, I don't know," said Tom. "'The queen was in the kitchen, eating bread and honey'--sweet, too, you see." "Oh, Tom, you goose! No, she wasn't. The queen was in the _parlor_," cried Bab. "Well, you never can tell about versions of Mother Goose, nor where love will get you; it may have been the kitchen," said Tom, the wise. CHAPTER XVIII UNDER THE HARVEST MOON The swelling twigs of March had burst into leafage; rough winds had shaken the "darling buds of May," and the fruit hung fully formed, even ripened in many cases, on the branches. The summer had flown past, a happy summer, the last of Jessamy's and Barbara's girlhood. Tom and Robert had urged their claim to begin their own homes by the autumn, and Mrs. Wyndham, who did not approve of long engagements, had yielded. "I am not going to spend the very last summer that I am free to be as jolly as I wish, without responsibilities,--the last summer before I settle down into a frumpy, solemn old married woman,--struggling with clothes," Barbara declared. "If I can't get enough together to be married in a month, I will start life in a shirt-waist and a duck skirt. We are going to have the very best time we ever had, just we four, with our own particular boys for a kind of entrée, all summer until August, and then I will consent to talk dress-making. I think it is abominable the way weddings are turned into bugbears--as though they weren't bad enough in the best regulated households! That's what the nursery rhyme means: "Needles and pins, needles and pins, When a girl's married her trouble begins!" "But it doesn't say _girl_, Babbie; it is when a _man_ marries," said Phyllis. "Misprint!" said Bab. "You ought to know what it is to have your sentiments perverted by a printer's error. That couplet plainly refers to the bride's agonies in the hands of the dressmakers; what would the _man_ have to do with needles and pins? It is perfectly clear to me; but I don't mean to have any troubles begin that way. I'd rather be myself, ready to enjoy my new happiness, than be married all worn out and nervous as so many girls are, just for the sake of a few dresses more or less. People do make themselves so much bother in this world; it makes me ache to see them!" "Hear, hear!" said Jessamy, applauding with two untrimmed hats she was holding like cymbals. "What a sensible wife Doctor Thomas Leighton is to have! However, I confess I agree with her--partly, at least." "Well, I agree with her wholly," said Bab, impartially. "I want this last summer we are three girls together to be light-hearted and happy, with no bother we can possibly dodge." Barbara's program was faithfully carried out. The Wyndhams would not go away because they clung to every day of the few left them of their life in the little apartment where happiness had found them out, and where they had blossomed from inexperienced girls into valuable women. Like the previous summer, when necessity had kept them in the city, they took their country air in small doses, making excursions into the surrounding fields, if fields can be said to surround New York which have to be reached through such long stretches of diminishing tenements. In August the serious business of wedding preparations had to be faced; but both Jessamy and Barbara insisted on their being as simple as possible. How and where to be married was a problem for two brides in one family, when that family lived in an apartment not large enough for their daily needs. It never occurred to the girls to be married separately. Indeed, Tom urged Phyllis to seize some youth--violently, if she must--and be married with the other two; because, he pointed out, it would not only be effective to marry them all at once, but save trouble in the future. Poor Phyllis! She kept her feelings bravely hidden; but it was not easy for her to look forward to parting with Jessamy and Bab. Even though they were to be near by when they were established in their own little nests, Phyllis, and still more their mother, realized that they would never be again as fully their own girls. But Jessamy and Bab were so happy that it would have been cruel to have shown a shadow of regret. Besides, Mrs. Wyndham and Phyllis could not regret what was so certainly for the greater happiness of them all in the end. Aunt Henrietta came out nobly. She returned from the sea-shore early in September, thus breaking up her custom of years' standing, and offered her big house for the wedding. "It is proper in every way that you should be married from my house, and have the reception and breakfast there," she said solemnly. "Your apartment is out of the question for such an occasion, and you must be married suitably to your father's social position." "How about Madrina? I didn't think one could affect the standing of the saints in heaven by unsuitable marriages!" whispered Bab, the incorrigible, to Jessamy. But she answered her great-aunt dutifully, with sincere thanks for the kindness which was very unexpected and great from her. Mrs. Van Alyn made a similar offer, much to Mrs. Hewlett's disgust. "Does she think you have no kindred?" demanded the incensed old dame. "It seems to me," said Jessamy, discussing the matter in a private family conclave, "that it would be more dignified, besides being far sweeter and lovelier, to be married from our own little home, and not from any one's house, no matter how dear or how nearly related to us she might be. No one can understand just what this flat meant to us when we began it so courageously, and so ignorantly of all we had to learn and do. I, for one, should be happier married from it than from anywhere else in the world; it would be mean to turn our backs on it for the greatest event of our lives, for which it has prepared us, and which began for us--I mean found us out--here. Then it is our home, and I don't like borrowed plumage, even an aunt's house. I think we ought to be our very selves, most of all at such a time. If Bab agrees, I should prefer having our friends come here to welcome us and wish us well after the ceremony; and I should like a wedding suited to this sort of living--suited to our means, in a word, though our means have increased lately." "That's crystal Jessamy all over," cried Bab, warmly. "You know, for my part, I loathe show functions. It's much more refined and dignified to use one's own home, and cut your garment according to your cloth--no, cut your friends according to your space. Who wants a crowd, anyway? I detest big weddings." "Of course I should prefer it," said Mrs. Wyndham. "Why not be married quietly at the church, with only the immediate families of Tom and Rob and our own present? Then serve a breakfast to the same people, with the addition of most intimate friends, and go away? A caterer could contrive a table in this room to seat all we should ask under this arrangement." "As far as I am concerned," said Tom, "the less the merrier. I know Bob thinks so. All young men hate being married, and would like to sneak." "I should say I did think so!" cried Rob. "My honest opinion is that the only decent way to be married is to escape on a rope ladder out of a back window, with no one but the parson and the necessary witnesses the wiser." "Dear me!" laughed Jessamy. "I really do not think I should enjoy the ladder. Then it is settled; a quiet church wedding, no one present but our own relatives, a breakfast not much larger attended, and then rush for the carriage, with rice and an old shoe to follow, and that's all." "We are not going to have a stylish wedding--dear me, that sounds like 'Daisy Bell,' doesn't it?--so let's have a pretty one--original, I mean," said Phyllis. "Instead of conventional flowers, let's trim our rooms here with jasmine and barberries; they are ripe now, and they would really be wonderfully pretty, and the decorations would be Jessamy's and Barbara's names written everywhere in white and red." "What a pretty idea, Phyl!" said Rob; "but where would you get the barberries?" "Send an order to a Boston florist; the berries grow abundantly in New England, and he could get them for us," said Phyllis. "It would be lovely, Phyl; what a dear you are!" said Jessamy. "We'll do everything just as we have planned it now, and write grateful refusals to Aunt Henrietta and dear Mrs. Van Alyn for their offers." The wedding was to be on the twenty-fourth of September. On the twenty-third the little apartment was a dream of beauty. Phyllis's plan had been successful, the barberries had arrived, great boxes of them, and hung everywhere, graceful, bright, autumnal, yet cheery, full of suggestions of the woods, yet of homely virtues. They really were rather like Babbie, prickly, pungent, little and slender, bright and cheerful, lighting up the darkest corner wherein they were placed. As a foil to them, white jasmine filled the rooms with its peculiar perfume, suggestive of Jessamy in more than name with its grace, daintiness, and beauty. Phyllis stood, tired but satisfied, surveying the completed work of her hands. Nothing was wanting; dear little Babbie and their Jessamy bride were to have as pretty a wedding as love and taste could make it--mere money could do far less than these. Phyllis's heart was heavy. Both the brides of the morrow had gone with their mother, and Ruth, and Rob's and Tom's sisters, the bridesmaids elect, and little Margery Horton, who had earned the right to be maid of honor, to meet Tom and Rob with their best men at the church to rehearse the ceremony. Phyllis was, of course, a bridesmaid also; but there were so many little last things to attend to at home that she begged off from the rehearsal, promising to learn so well the instructions given her by the others that she would do nothing on the morrow to disgrace her family. The bell rang, and Violet admitted Alan. "I brought a little present," he began, and handed Phyllis two more of the white-wrapped boxes which had been pouring in of late. "The room looks pretty, doesn't it?" said Phyllis, after she had thanked him for her cousins. "It is beautiful; but the best of it is the symbolism," said Alan, gravely. "It will be the sort of wedding I like." "All weddings are dreadful," said Phyllis, out of her increasing loneliness. "Now don't say that, Phyllis," said Alan, suddenly becoming very red. "I want you to look forward to mine--I mean, I--what I want to say is, Phyllis--oh, Phyl, don't you know I love you?" cried poor Alan in deadly earnest, and stammering in a way new to him. "Yes, I do know it, Alan, and I'm dreadfully, bitterly sorry," said Phyllis. "I have tried in every way to make you understand I was sorry. I wish you had not made it necessary for me to hurt you to-day, when there ought to be no sorrow in the air. And don't forget for a minute that I am more fond of you than of any one in all the world, except my dear family. But there ought not to be an exception. I couldn't marry you unless you were dearer than every one, myself, my life, to me." Poor Alan had listened to this outburst in absolute silence, his one refuge under any strong emotion. Phyllis had spoken rapidly, like one who had gone over the ground with herself, and who was under pressure of strong excitement. "Then you won't marry me?" said Alan. "I tell you, Phyllis, I won't give up. You say you are fond of me; I'll make you fonder. It's not a refusal; it's just a postponement. Forget I said anything about it. I'll get you yet to say yes. Have some tea; you look tired, and it's but natural you should not be cheerful with the parting before you, and you all saying good-by, as it were, to your girlhood. I had no right to bother you now. I was a selfish brute. We'll be the same friends, Phyllis; for I could not live without you, my girl." Phyllis felt as though this determined young man, with the quiet, intense face and the eyes that were full of love for her, were something she could never escape, and the feeling frightened her. "I don't want to marry; I have my work," she said. "Oh, your work!" said Alan, with a man's and a fellow writer's scorn for a woman's career. "Fancy giving up love, and a home, and everything best in life for such a thing as writing! If you were as great as George Eliot it would be folly, Phyllis." "The only reason for marrying is that some one is so necessary to you, you can't be happy without him," said Phyllis. "That's what I think." "Quite right; so do I; and you are necessary to my happiness, my dear," said Alan, gravely. "You are not necessary to me, Alan, though I should miss you dreadfully if I lost you. Oh, please, please don't think of this any more, but let us be friends as before," said Phyllis, with tears in her eyes. "Don't mind, my dear; I'll call for your tea. And as to the rest, I'll be necessary to you, if humble trying can make me," said persistent Alan, quietly. The wedding was at noon. The day dawned sunny, warm, and lovely, an ideal day for a wedding. Jessamy and Barbara were dressed early, and shut themselves in their mother's room for one last, sacred, grave little talk before they went forth to assume the vows which must always be solemn to those who remember how much they include, and who make them meaning to fulfil them to the end of life, however long it be. Ruth Wells, Alice Leighton, Evelyn Lane, Phyllis's companion bridesmaids, clustered in Phyllis's room, sweet and blooming in their youthful prettiness, set off by rose-hued gowns. As the hour for starting for the church sounded, they came down the stairs, giving a vision of loveliness to the admiring children gathered from neighboring flats to see the entrancing spectacle of at least so much of a double wedding. The church held but few friends. The simplicity of the service was not to be marred by the presence of those drawn thither by idle curiosity. "Who giveth this woman?" asked the clergyman; but there was not one present who did not give something of dear Jessamy and Barbara. Barbara's responses were inaudible; the solemnity of the occasion overawed gay Babbie, though all her heart vowed to Tom the promises asked of her. But Jessamy looked up at Robert, standing tall and a little pale beside her, and made her vows in a voice low, but so distinct that it reached to the door of the church. And Tom and Robert vowed to cherish and love the precious gifts intrusted to them that day, in tones that admitted no doubt that they meant to keep the promises to the grave, and beyond it, if that might be. The wedding breakfast was spread at the return of the bridal party. The table did crowd the room, it was true, but no one minded in the least. There was not one guest but had a claim to be there through near kinship or closest friendship, not one who did not love more or less the brides sitting side by side at the head of the table, the new and exceeding proud young husbands by their sides, and the bridesmaids clustered as near as circumstances permitted. One of the bridesmaids wore a sparkling diamond on her left hand, and Phyllis learned for the first time that the Scotch friend she had found in Boston was going to take from her the friend who had been so much to her, and to Jessamy and Bab, through their days of trial, for Ruth and David were engaged. Mr. Hurd, present of course, as few had a better claim to be, tried to make a speech, but broke down, and ended more effectively than his carefully prepared sentences would have done in a sincere: "God bless you both!" Aunt Henrietta tried to relate a story of her own wedding, but lost the point in an unusual burst of emotion, and, instead of finishing, produced two old-fashioned jewel-cases, and presented them to Jessamy and Barbara, with the love, as Aunt Henrietta remarked, with unexpected poetry, "of their great-grandmother, though the dear lady had not lived to see this happy day." It was hard not to smile at this bit of sentiment, considering that the brides' great-grandmother had missed that happy day by some seventy years; but it was well to have something to smile at just when there was a little danger of every one growing sentimental. When Jessamy opened the leather case, there lay on the faded red velvet lining of hers a cross set with diamonds, and Barbara's blue-lined case revealed a string of beautiful old pearls. When the toasts had been drunk, and the cake cut, and the little white boxes of cake, already prepared, distributed to the guests, Jessamy and Barbara arose and slipped away to lay off their bridal white and don the traveling-gowns in which they were to go out into the world, no longer Jessamy and Bab Wyndham, but Mrs. Robert Lane and Mrs. Thomas Leighton. Truce and Nixie, with large white satin bows on their collars, superintended the transformation, and both girls stooped to hug the little dog and cat who were so thoroughly associated with their happiness. "Good-by, you dear, loveliest young ladies in all dis yere world," sobbed Violet. "Miss Phyllis and I's goin' take care you ma while you's gone, so don' you worry 'bout nothin', an' you gowns sets lovely." "Good-by, dearies; it is like seeing my own children married," whispered Mrs. Van Alyn, holding Jessamy and Bab close in one long embrace. Phyllis kissed them each, and each clung to her as if the parting were forever. "Come, come," called Tom, who had no desire to let the going away grow tearful. "There's no time for long hugs, children, and we'll be back before you get the flat in order." Mrs. Wyndham held out her arms, and both her girls rested in them for a moment without a word. "Good-by, darlings; the best daughters a mother ever had," Mrs. Wyndham whispered; and Jessamy and Barbara ran down the stairs without daring to stop or look behind. A shower of rice fell on the two carriages. Tom and Robert flew through the storm, the drivers cracked their whips, two flushed, sweet, smiling, tearful faces looked out of the windows for a moment, and Jessamy and Barbara had gone. For a moment Phyllis and her aunt clung to each other, feeling that they alone were left out of a wreck of the world. Then a small boy rushed up the stairs, sent by Tom. "Please, ma'am, Mr. Alan Armstrong is dead--run over by a trolley," he cried. The cry of consternation which Mrs. Wyndham uttered drowned the moan with which poor Phyllis fell unconscious to the floor. "Oh, what an ending!" murmured Ruth, as she rushed to help Mrs. Wyndham raise Phyllis's head. "Is it true?" whispered Phyllis, when they had laid her on the couch and brought her back to knowledge of her pain. "Hush, dear, be still; we have sent to learn the truth. Dear, dear Phyllis, do you care so much?" sobbed her aunt. Phyllis turned her head away without speaking. So much! Ah, now, too late, she knew how much. And she had wounded Alan, had thought her work might suffice her, and had told him he was not necessary to her happiness! That was like her, not to know how dependent she really was, to go on happily in her little ways, nor know what was her most precious possession till too late. That was the cruel thought--too late, too late! As she lay there, numb with agony, Phyllis saw the long, blank years ahead, wherein Alan's dear, leaping step should never fall on her ear again, and could not face them. Thank heaven! Jessamy and Barbara had found their joy, and it would not be marred in its first sweetness by knowledge of her agony. A step came up the stairs; it was curious--would it always be like this, Phyllis wondered. Should she always fancy all steps like his? It sounded so much like Alan, but Alan was dead, crushed-- "Where's my dear, poor Phyllis? 'Twas a cruel trick," cried a voice, and all the house rang with Phyllis's cry of: "Alan, Alan!" There was need of no more words. Trembling, scarce trusting her eyes, Phyllis lay looking up at Alan--Alan in the flesh, come back from the dead, and to her! "I have learned that you are necessary, Alan; I should have died if it had been true," she whispered. "It would have been worth dying for if I couldn't have taught you to love me any other way, my Phyllis," said Alan, with the old-time twinkle in his eye, and with a suggestion of an Irish bull in his meaning. "A telegram, ma'am," said Violet, gingerly holding out the yellow envelope to Mrs. Wyndham. Mrs. Wyndham tore it open; it was dated from the Grand Central, and she read: "'Beg Phyllis to forgive. Nothing less would fetch her; wanted Alan to share happiness. TOM.'" "Well, Phyllis will evidently follow soon, Emily," said Mrs. Van Alyn, kissing her friend good-night very lovingly. "I shall be the only one of the Wyndham girls left," returned Mrs. Wyndham, smiling rather tearfully; "the last corner of our dear square of four. Jessamy, Babbie, Phyllis; they are the best girls in all the world, Mary. Weddings are tearful things to mothers, but who could help rejoicing that all my precious three are so blissfully happy?" 
53049	----	Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/insteadofthornno00burn INSTEAD OF THE THORN A Novel by CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM [Illustration] Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company The Riverside Press Cambridge Copyright, 1916, by Clara Louise Burnham All Rights Reserved Published April 1916 TO C.T.R. WITH LOVING AND GRATEFUL MEMORIES OF JOCKEY HILL _Contents_ I. AT THE SOUTH SHORE 1 II. HOT TEA 10 III. COLD WATER 25 IV. THE JUNE NIGHT 44 V. THE CAPE 57 VI. THE SHINGLED COTTAGE 73 VII. THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED 94 VIII. A BUSINESS INTERVIEW 109 IX. CORRESPONDENCE 122 X. THE SPELL BREAKS 134 XI. EASTWARD HO! 145 XII. EN ROUTE 160 XIII. HOME-COMING 174 XIV. BLANCHE AURORA 189 XV. THE HARBOR 201 XVI. THE VOICE OF TRUTH 218 XVII. THE RAINBOW 231 XVIII. THE PINK DRESS 247 XIX. THE WILD ROSE 261 XX. BEHIND THE BIRCHES 278 XXI. REVELATION 293 XXII. THE PENITENT 306 XXIII. A GOOD NEIGHBOR 321 XXIV. WHITCOMB'S CONFESSION 335 XXV. THE MAN AND THE MAID 350 XXVI. A DIPLOMATIST 366 XXVII. THE FULL MOON 379 INSTEAD OF THE THORN _Instead of the Thorn_ CHAPTER I AT THE SOUTH SHORE On a June evening, Mr. and Mrs. Radcliffe were entertaining their New York friends the Lindsays at dinner at the South Shore Club. The dining-room, with its spacious semicircle of glass, is a place where Chicago may entertain New York with complacence, for the windows give upon Lake Michigan, whose billows break so close to the border of velvety grass that the effect is of dining on a yacht. The Lindsays were enamored of the great marine view, lovely in the long June evening, and with many an admiring comment watched the white gulls hover and wheel above the sunset water. Mrs. Radcliffe was a stout, white-haired woman, costumed with disregard of expense, and she habitually wore an expression of countenance which betokened general optimism. Mrs. Lindsay, of about her friend's age, was spare and lined of face, offering a contrast to the hostess's plump smoothness. She again raised a jeweled lorgnette to watch the wheeling gulls. "Oh, Chicago wouldn't be anything without the lake," remarked Mrs. Radcliffe complacently. "And this clubhouse is such a perfect place to watch it," returned her friend. "We have a very charming ballroom here," said Mrs. Radcliffe. "I'm sorry it isn't a formal dance night." The orchestra was playing a Hesitation Waltz, which reminded her. For the Hesitation had not yet been driven from the field by troops who cantered, and those strains were always sufficient to people the spacious ballroom until it was alive with dancers, old and young. Indeed, as one comic paper had it that season, "He who does not hesitate is lost." Just when or why silver threads among the gold ceased to relegate advancing years to a shelf above the dancers, it would be hard to say; but certain it is that the rosy walls behind the pure white columns in the popular ballroom threw their diffused and becoming light that season upon sometimes agile but always determined middle age, as well as upon slender youth. There is a point, however, where Terpsichore stands inexorably and says, "Thus far and no farther": a point where the wistful dancer realizes that all is Hesitation, and the Waltz balks. This is reached in the matron at the weight of two hundred pounds, and Mrs. Radcliffe had arrived there; so, like the spinster of the story, who settled down to contentment with her lot when she had "stopped strugglin'," Mrs. Radcliffe enjoyed peacefully her visits to the club, and invaded the ballroom only as a spectator. She looked up now at her friend. "Have you and Mr. Lindsay joined the one-stepping legion?" she asked. "No, we have not. We have children and rheumatism. You know that does make a difference." Mrs. Lindsay's bright, nervous eyes snapped, and she showed a set of artistic teeth. Mrs. Radcliffe shrugged a comfortable shoulder. "Well, I have one child, but that wouldn't stop me. He has a child of his own. Let him attend to his own affairs. I haven't the rheumatism, but neither have I any breath to spare. You look at me and you see that." The two ladies laughed and sipped their coffee. Their husbands, with chairs moved sidewise, were talking in low tones over their cigarettes. "We have such a charming ballroom!" repeated the hostess. "It makes me hate my flesh to go in there; but Mr. Radcliffe says it's the terror of his life that I may lose an ounce and want to dance, and he is always urging delicious salads on me." The plump speaker shook again, till the diamonds on her ample breast scintillated. "He's the laziest man in Chicago. I suppose I ought to be thankful that he doesn't improve his slimness and the shining hour by coming and dancing with these buds. Lots of other gray heads do, and the buds can't help themselves, poor little things. Isn't that an attractive nosegay over there?" The speaker indicated the spot where twenty-four young girls and men were gayly dining at a round table, whose roses, violets, and lilies-of-the-valley strove with the material feast. "My daughter-in-law, Harriet, is giving that dinner for her sister, who has just graduated from our University. If you want to see a spoiled child of fortune, look at Linda Barry now. That is she, holding up the glass of grape-juice. Aren't her dimples wonderful? Look at those brown eyes sparkle. Doesn't her very hair look as if electricity were running through the locks? I tell you she's a handful! I've always been so thankful that Henry chose her sister Harriet. Such a quiet, sensible young woman, Harriet is. She wouldn't let them have any wine, you see. She says it sounds like Fourth of July all the year around at this club, and she's terribly particular about Henry. That's Harriet, sitting with her back to us: the one with the velvet around her throat. I admire my daughter-in-law, but I always feel she thinks I'm too frivolous, and spend too much time playing cards." The speaker's husband caught a part of what she was saying. "Yes, Lindsay," he said. "You knew one of Barry's daughters married my boy, didn't you? That's the other one facing us." Mr. Lindsay turned his iron-gray head until he could observe the smiling girl, offering a grape-juice toast. The family of the head of the firm of Barry & Co. was of interest to him. Some one had stuck a spray of leaves in the thick, bright waves of her hair. "Make a corking study of a Bacchante, if some one should paint her just as she is," remarked the New York man. "Shades of my daughter-in-law--if she should hear you! She'd say that Linda had outwitted her after all." Mr. Radcliffe smiled across at his wife. "Harriet is the modern progressive woman,--goes in for Suffrage and Eugenics and all that; but with the reserve and quiet of a Puritan. She can't understand Linda, who is athletic, a comrade of boys, the idol of her father, and a law unto herself." Mr. Lindsay was regarding the girl, who was smiling confidently and making a speech inaudible from the distant corner. "She looks as if she had the world by the tail," he remarked. "That about describes her state of mind," responded the other. "Life has been a triumphal progress for her, so far. She hasn't had a mother for ten years, and her father couldn't spare her to go away to school, so here she has been educated, right in our burg, though she's a millionaire's daughter. You've been in that old-fashioned stone pile of a house of Barry's up there on Michigan Avenue? I should think Barry'd be sick of keeping a boarding-house for servants, and I've told him so." "He's sick of something," returned Mr. Lindsay quietly, "or so it seemed to my wife and me. We dined there last night." "Oh, you did?" "Yes. The daughter wasn't there. Her father said she was away at one of her graduation festivities. What's the matter with Barry?" The speaker's eyes left the dimpling girl with the dancing eyes and came back to his friend as he asked the quiet question. "Why, nothing that I know of," replied the other, surprised. "Cares of state, I suppose." "No rumors on the street?" The slow question was put in a still lower tone. "Haven't heard any," was the quick reply. The other nodded. "Good," he said. "Why, have you?" "There's some talk in the East about the Antlers project. Probably nothing but gossip." "Nothing else, I'm sure. All these big irrigation deals have something of a black eye just now, but Barry & Co. know what they're about. They never buy a pig in a poke." "What are you saying about pigs, Cyrus?" asked Mrs. Radcliffe smartly. "You know it's a tabooed subject in our best families." Mr. Radcliffe paid no attention to her in his disturbance. "You know my nephew, Bertram King? He came straight out of college into that bank, and has been there nearly ten years. Barry likes him, and he's had good luck, and I think another year'll see him in the firm. Everybody believes that Barry doesn't go into any big deal unless King approves. I see Bertram quite often. He's over there in that dinner party now: sitting on Harriet's right. You've met my daughter-in-law?" "Oh, yes, and King, too. He dined with us last night. Seemed to be a brainy chap." "Oh, he's sedate as they make 'em. I often think he's the one that ought to have married Harriet. See Henry sitting between those pink and blue girls, and keeping 'em in a roar? He gets his frivolity from his mother." Mrs. Radcliffe drew down the corners of her lips. "Frivolity that captured Harriet Barry, you'll notice. There they go," she added, as the gay young people at the round table pushed back their chairs; "there they go to their dance. Happy young things!" Mrs. Radcliffe sighed. "With all their troubles before them," she added, and the perfunctoriness of the addition made Mr. Lindsay smile. "I hope they all weather it as well as you have, Mrs. Radcliffe," he said. The host smiled too as they rose from the table. "So say we all of us," he remarked. "Let's go and have a game. Do you play nullos, Mrs. Lindsay?" "I play everything I can get my hands on," she returned promptly. CHAPTER II HOT TEA Linda Barry was looking in the glass. She liked her own reflection, and no wonder. She was coolly critical of her own appearance, however, and granted it her approval only when her costume and coiffure reached the standard of her own prescription. Whether any one else criticized her was a matter of profound indifference. She had been known in her class in the University as a good fellow, a good sport, carelessly generous, and confident of her own powers, physical and mental. Emerson says, if you would have friends you must know how to do without them. Linda Barry was a born leader and took her friends for granted. She never went out of her way to make one. That sort of girl always has some enemies, impotently resenting all that she arrogates to herself and that her admirers grant to her. But such clashes as had taken place left no mark on Linda. Triumphant and careless of triumph, she emerged from college life and asked of an obliging world, "What next?" She was looking in the glass now, this Sunday afternoon, because she had been romping with her nephew, aged five, and he had pulled her hat awry. She had dropped in for tea at her sister's apartment by the lake. It was two days after the dinner dance, and she was still feeling high approval of Harriet for the way in which she had managed the whole affair. Bertram King was sitting opposite her now, holding the panting small boy, whose cheeks were red with exertion, and who chuckled with joy at having won a sudden and tempestuous battle by the simple move of jerking his aunt's hat over her eyes. "I beated Aunt Linda. I beated her," he shrieked gayly. "Hush, hush, Harry dear," said his mother from the tea-table. "Aunt Linda lets you get too excited." Aunt Linda, whose very presence was suggestive of intoxicating rough and tumble to her nephew, winked and nodded at him from the glass. "I'll catch you alone some day," she said, with a significance which filled him with ecstatic terror. He jumped up and down in the encircling arms. "No, you won't, no, you won't!" he shouted. "Uncle Bertram won't let you." The child's active arms caught the ribbon that held his protector's eyeglasses, and jerked them from his nose. "Now, Linda, Linda," protested the mother, looking proudly at the lusty youngster, whose rumpled hair and floating tie-ends told of the bout just finished. "Listen, Harry, there's father coming. If I let you take him his tea, will you be very careful?" Linda, rehabilitated, turned from the mirror and seated herself near the window. "Let him bring me _my_ tea," she said, gazing at the child with eyes that set him again to effervescing with delicious apprehension. "No, _no_, she'll grab me!" yelled the boy, on a yet higher pitch of joy. "Linda dear, it's Sunday. Let's have a little quiet," pleaded her sister. At this moment, the head of the house entered, and his hopeful broke his bonds and, rushing to meet him, was lifted to a safe perch from which he looked down in rosy triumph on his dearest foe. "Hello, everybody," said Henry Radcliffe. "If there isn't the girl that knows everything--including how to dance! You're a bird, Linda. How are you, Bertram?" The men shook hands, then the host approached the tea-table and kissed his wife. "Put Harry right down here, dear. He's going to be a little gentleman and pass the tea." "But not to Aunt Linda," shouted the child. "No, no," agreed his mother pacifically. "You can take her tea to Uncle Bertram, and he'll pass it." "Look out, Uncle Bertram, she'll tickle you," advised the boy out of long experience. Linda, leaning lazily back in her armchair, met King's gray eyes and gave a low laugh. "Just imagine such _lèse majesté_," she said, and the provoking arch of her lips made Bertram feel, as he always did, that she was laughing at him, not with him. He was too used to it to be disconcerted. He had a serious, even-featured, smooth-shaven face, light hair which would have liked to wave had its owner been willing, and short-sighted eyes, which, nevertheless, saw far enough to understand Linda Barry and deplore her. "She'll catch your heels, too, if you go upstairs in front of her," continued the small boy, chuckling breathlessly as he watched his lazily reclining adored one, the sparks in whose eyes gave every hope that she was as ready as ever to spring. "That sort of thing isn't good for a child. It overexcites him," remarked Bertram, unsmiling, dangling his eyeglasses by the ribbon. "Dear, dear," said Linda. "Excuse me! I meant, Hear, hear!" "Now, Harry darling," said Mrs. Radcliffe, "can you be careful? Father will sit between you and Aunt Linda, and don't go the other side of him _at all_. Do you understand?" Then to her sister, "You know how I value these cups, Linda. Please be good." Linda stifled a yawn behind her white-gloved hand and looked very good indeed. "Henry and I," went on the hostess complacently, "think we can't begin any too soon to make Harry at home in the drawing-room. Why, already he can stand and drink his cambric tea, and manage his cup as well as any of you, can't you, dear?" Harry, finding himself under discussion, ceased smiling and scuffed violently across the rug. "That isn't pretty, darling. Now, this is for Uncle Bertram to take to Aunt Linda. Come here. Now, be careful." Henry Radcliffe took a seat near his wife's table, and the little boy seized a lettuce sandwich and took a bite of it before he attempted the cup. "Oh, oh, put that down, Harry. You can have it in a minute." The mother laughed as she placed the cup in the child's hands. "He wouldn't eat a bit of lettuce at his own supper, but because grown-ups are having it he wants it!" she remarked. "That's a good boy," as the transit of the cup was made safely. "Now, come here and get one for Uncle Bertram." As the child obeyed, his mother continued: "I must tell you a very good joke Harry made the other day. He was playing with the cat, and she stretched herself out on the rug, and he lay down with his head on her and said, 'This is my caterpillar.' Wasn't that clever?" Harry glanced around the assembly rather sheepishly. "Bully for the boy!" laughed his father. "Come here, Turk." "Now, don't romp, Henry," pleaded his wife. "Here's Father's tea, Harry dear. Take it nicely. He's learning such a number of German words these days. Fräulein says he has a real talent for languages." The mother regarded her darling fondly. The child's gayety had entirely subsided, and he took his father's cup stolidly. Mrs. Radcliffe gave a low laugh as she continued, "_Now_, whenever he uses a big word in English and isn't quite sure that it is right, he says very carelessly, 'Oh, I said that in Germany.'" The soft laugh increased in merriment, and the speaker looked at her sister and King for appreciation. Linda laughed. The subject of her remarks, having landed his father's cup safely in the paternal hands, eased his embarrassment by stamping again up and down the rug, making guttural noises in his throat. "Now, dear, if you're going to do that you'll have to go away," said his mother, and, the German nurse appearing at that moment in the doorway, she accosted her: "Is Harry's supper ready? Yes? All right. Go on, then, darling, we'll excuse you. Fräulein has your nice supper all ready. I'll come and see you in a little while." When the child, too self-conscious even to exchange parting hostilities with Aunt Linda, had left the room, Bertram King looked up from stirring his tea. "Henry," he said shortly, "have I your leave to lecture Harriet?" "Dear me, Bertram," ejaculated Linda, "are you going to take on another? You'll soon not have time to go the rounds, and the world will go to smash!" King didn't look at her. Henry Radcliffe closed his hand over his wife's as it rested on the handle of the teapot. "Certainly, if you can think of anything to lecture her about." "Can't _you_?" As King asked it he rose and, coming to the tea-table, took a plate of sandwiches and carried them to Linda, and then back to Henry, finally setting them on the table and helping himself. His cousin shook his head. "Rather not!" he ejaculated. "I hope I know my place. I trip after Harriet at a respectful distance." This time he picked up his wife's hand and kissed it. "This is fulsome," murmured Linda from her armchair. "Then you share the lecture, that's all," returned King firmly, resuming his seat. "Here's my text: 'No one should ever talk about a child before him--or her.'" "Harriet has only one, please remember, Bertram," protested Linda kindly. Mrs. Radcliffe set down her teacup, and color began to come up in her cheeks as she regarded King. "Bertram, I never--" she began, for he paused. "It's the rarest thing! But here where we're all Harry's own people"--a little rigidity crept into the speaker's voice--"I didn't mean to bore anybody. Don't you"--with defiance--"don't you think that was very witty for a child of his age, that about the caterpillar? I keep his sayings in a book, and he's really a remarkable baby. It isn't at all because he's ours, is it, Henry? Oh"--with sudden impatience--"it's foolish of me to talk to you about it, Bertram. What do you know about children!" "I've been one; and I see one occasionally; and I marvel to Heaven to see how parents cut themselves out of half the fun they might have with them. You don't seem to have grasped my text. People shouldn't talk _about_ children _before_ them." "Of course, I wouldn't _scold_ a child before others," said Harriet, with some excitement. "Now, Bertram, you know a lot about bonds that I don't, but I know a lot about children that you don't. I'm not just an animal mother. I've looked into pedagogy and kindergarten principles. Harry can work beautifully in cardboard already; but, of course, if it bores you to hear about him--" "Yes," interrupted King, "parents should also take into consideration that the general public doesn't care a copper to hear anything about their children; but I'm not the general public where Harry is concerned. I'll guarantee to sit between you and Henry and listen to an antiphonal recital of everything Harry has said and done since he was born, and not yawn once--with one provision." Harriet flashed him a look. "I don't care to hear your provision. You'll not be called to the martyrdom." "And the provision is," went on Bertram equably, "that Harry shall not be present. Now, Henry, if you will kindly place your hand over Harriet's mouth, I will proceed." Linda stirred. There was something about Bertram King's arrogation of superiority that always exasperated her. "How about my placing my hand kindly over _your_ mouth?" she suggested. He turned and looked directly at her. "I should enjoy that very much," he returned. Linda was disconcerted for only a moment, then her provoking smile shone. "Wonderful facilities for biting me, I suppose," she remarked. "Now, if the children will all be quiet a moment," said Bertram, turning back, "I will take up the cudgels for the rising generation. One of the most charming things on earth, probably the most charming, is a child, unconscious of itself; the most graceful, the most winning; untrammeled in their little speeches as in their movements. Then some grown-up discusses them in their presence, no matter whether flatteringly or not. Their grace changes to awkwardness, their unconsciousness to embarrassment, their freedom to reserve or to resentful, meaningless noises such as those with which Harry lately favored the company. Under moments of flattery they show some chestiness and conceit at times, but for the most part they're stolid under the infliction, and their parents and friends have lost all the joy of their charm until they can forgive by forgetting. One of the bitterest leaves of their tree of knowledge is discovering that the well-meaning giants around them are laughing at them, not with them." "Say, there's something in that, Harriet," remarked her husband good-naturedly. "Harry grew as red as a turkey-cock when you told about his excusing himself for using wrong words. I noticed it." Linda nodded in King's direction. "It's surely a duty Bertram owes to a benighted world to marry." He turned to her again with the same direct, quick movement as before. "Very well. Will you have me, Linda?" She met his gaze, finding some difficulty in giving her own just the right proportion of light scorn. "I should like to see myself married to you!" she exclaimed slowly. "Would you?" he responded with lively interest, and rising, strode across to her, while she retreated to the furthest corner of her chair. "Then we're of the same mind for once." He seized her hand, while the teacup in the other rocked and tinkled in a manner to cause the liveliest apprehension in its owner. "Witness, both of you. Linda and I are engaged." The girl's strong heart pounded violently as she found that vigorous efforts could not free her hand. Color burned her cheeks. Her father's factotum had never seemed to consider her affairs or herself as of any importance, and her habit of thought toward him was an effort to assure him of absolute reciprocation. "Let me go," she said sharply. "Don't be silly." "Come on," he urged. "Let's give your father a pleasant surprise. Henry, Harriet, speak up. Tell her what's for her good." Harriet, the conventional, was anxious under the growing anger in her sister's dark eyes. "Behave, Bertram," she said severely. "I don't like joking on those subjects. Go back to your chair and I'll give you a lecture much more sensible than yours to me." "I'm not joking. I believe I could make something fine out of Linda." He gazed down into the girl's face as he spoke. Henry Radcliffe laughed derisively. "You poor nut," he remarked. "Better not try the Cave-Dweller stunt on Linda. The club would be likely to change hands." The captured fingers struggled a moment more, while the two pairs of eyes exchanged their combative gaze. There had never been any jocose passages between the girl and her father's favorite co-worker. There had been moments when she had even felt desire for his approval. The present audacity amazed and disconcerted her, and coercion was simply hateful. Finding effort to free herself futile, she set her tea down on the arm of her chair, and quickly taking up the cup, deliberately poured the hot, creamy liquid over as much of her captor's cuff as was visible. The cuff collapsed, the tea was hot. King abruptly dropped the girl's hand, and set himself to wiping his own with his handkerchief. "Now, will you be good?" laughed Henry; but Harriet fixed anxious eyes on the arm of the chair, hoping that Bertram's hand and cuff had received the whole of the baptism, and groaned within herself over the talents of her young sister as a trouble-maker. "And who calls it 'the cup that cheers'?" remarked King drily. CHAPTER III COLD WATER June heat dropped down on Chicago promptly that year and caused the Barrys to plan to leave town earlier than it suited the banker to go. Indeed, no weather condition ever made Linda's father willing to leave business. One evening, a few days before their intended departure, Bertram King came to the house to see his employer. The heavy door stood open after the hot day, and with the familiarity of an intimate he stepped inside, intending to take his way to his old friend's den, but in the hall he met Linda: Linda, blooming, dressed in white, and altogether lovely to look upon. Over her arm she carried a silk motor coat and a chiffon veil. The young man's face looked haggard by comparison with her fresh beauty, and he smiled unconscious admiration as he greeted the exhilaration of her breezy appearance. "Father is out," she said, "and I'm so glad!" "Why? Did you want to see me alone?" "I can't see you at all. I'm going out." "But he hasn't come yet." "Who?" "Your motoring friend. Why are you glad your father is out?" "Because I think he sees enough of you in the daytime. Too much. Father's very tired. Can't you see it? I'm going to run away with him on Saturday." "So I hear.--I'm somewhat seedy myself. I think I'll accept your urgent invitation to sit down until he comes." "He isn't coming. He'll be out all the evening." "I'm talking about your beau." There was an empty, nerveless quality to the visitor's voice which began to impress his companion. "Let's set a spell, as they say in Maine," he added. "I've been thinking about Maine to-day." Linda followed his lead into a reception room, where they sat down. "A pretty good place to think about, when Lake Michigan sizzles," she replied; "but I've chosen Colorado. We're going to Estes Park." "Yes, so Mr. Barry told me. I should like to go there too." King's tone was wistful. "Perish the thought!" returned Linda devoutly. "I wouldn't have you within a thousand miles of father." "That's what the doctor says," remarked King, his pensive gaze bent on the ribbon bordering of Linda's thin frock. She started and leaned toward him. "The doctor!" she repeated. "Has Doctor Flagg been talking to you about father? Is he--is he worried about him?" King shook his head. "I didn't go to Doctor Flagg. I went to Doctor Young. We've been getting some golf together lately, and he's a good sort." "What's the matter with _you_, Bertram?" Linda sat up again, and her voice and manner cooled. "What do you want of a doctor?" King shook his head. "Never in my life before: first offense. Everything seemed to go back on me all of a sudden. Sleeping, eating, and all the rest of it." The speaker scowled. "The mischief of it is, Young says I've got to get away for a month at least. He says--Oh, you don't care what he says." Linda regarded the downcast one. He was speaking to her as to an equal, not, as usual, with tacit rebuke for some misdemeanor. This blunt reproach, if it were reproach, merely referred casually to her indifference. "I care a great deal," she returned, with spirit. "I'm sure it will make my father very anxious to have you away at the same time he is." King lifted his weary eyes to hers, eager and bright. "I'm sure Doctor Flagg could give you a tonic or something to tide you over till we return in September," she went on. "You could go then." Her companion leaned back in his chair with a long, inaudible breath. "We have arranged all that. Mr. Barry wants me to go." The speaker did look rather cadaverous. Linda realized it now. It was a strange thing to have in any degree a sense of compassion for him: this masterful man on whom her father leaned, the man who alone in all the world had a hundred times without a word put her in the wrong, and whom as often she had fervently wished she might never see again. She had chafed against that chain of her father's reliance which bound herself as well. There was no escaping King, and when in her busy college life she thought of him at all, it was as a presumptuous creature who was continually making good his presumption; and what could be more exasperating than that? King was a self-made man, one with few connections in Chicago, one of whom was Linda's voice teacher, Mrs. Porter. The girl never had exactly understood this relationship, but the fact that some of Mrs. Porter's blood ran in his veins constituted Bertram's only redeeming trait in the eyes of that lady's adorer. Now as she regarded him, staring with discontented eyes at the rug, a sense came over her for the first time that King was a lonely figure. It was all very well for a man in health to live at the University Club and have his mind and life entirely wrapped up in business; but when eating and sleeping became difficult and the brain was over-weary, the evenings might seem rather long to him. "It serves a young man right," thought Linda, "when he will bind himself on the wheel of business and act as if there was not one thing in the world worth having but money!" Hadn't she seen to what such a course had brought her father? She spoke:-- "There's a lot of nonsense in all this kow-towing to business," she said. "Why do men make such slaves of themselves?" "So their women can have a house like this, several gowns like yours, and a motor like the one you're going out in," responded King dully. Linda's rosy lips curled. "Fred Whitcomb's motor is last year's model." Her companion smiled. "There, you see!" he remarked. "There's nothing for me to do but to keep on hustling so you can always have the latest." Color flashed over Linda's face, but she shrugged carelessly. "Oh, of course," she retorted, "everything is Eve's fault." "Pretty sure to be," returned King, nodding slowly. "_Cherchez la femme. Toujours cherchez la femme._" He regarded her for a moment of silence, during which she was so uncomfortable that she raised both hands to arrange an imaginary hairpin at the back of her head. "Where have you decided to go?" she asked at last, continually warmer under his eyes, and wondering if Fred Whitcomb had had a puncture. "Why, I thought it would be great to spend long Colorado days in the saddle with you." "Did you really?" Linda's little laugh had a most discouraging note. "Yes, but Dr. Young jumped on that. He said I mustn't go within gunshot of your father." Linda shook her head. "I should advise you not to myself. I'm a pretty good shot." King looked up. "It would be great, though. Think of having you through with all this college foolery, and having plenty of time to talk to you." The girl's eyes brightened. "Pray, did you consider Yale foolery?" "A lot of it, yes," replied King, wearily; "but never mind, Linda, we're through with all that. I thought of the long days out there in Estes Park, the divine air, 'the dark pilasters of the pines,' and you, sparkling and radiant, on a good horse, and I with time enough to tell you how I love you!" "Bertram!" Linda shot rather than rose to her feet, and her eyes launched arrows. "Sit down. Sit down. I shall have to stand if you don't, and I'm dog-tired. Didn't you know I loved you, Linda, honest now?" The girl sank into her chair. She was trying to think of the cruelest way to crush him. She opened her lips once or twice to speak and closed them again. King regarded her immovably, his worn look meeting her vital gaze. "Your taste in jokes is very poor," she said at last, and her tone was icy, "and you may rest assured that no regard for you will prevent my telling my father exactly what you have said." "You needn't. He knows it," returned King. His voice, which had brightened, relapsed into nervelessness. "My father knows it!" The girl could not restrain the exclamation. "Yes, of course. I believed you did, upon my honor. I've had so little time, you see, and you've been so busy." He seemed so innocent of offense that her anger gave way to the habitual exasperation. "Bertram King," she said,--and if there is such a thing as stormy dignity her manner expressed it,--"I believe the grind of business has dried up your brains. I could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which you have expressed even approval of me." Her nostrils dilated as she spoke. Her companion's solemn visage suddenly beamed in a smile. "You remember them, then," he returned, with a pleased naïveté which nearly wrecked her severity; but she held her pose. "You dared to speak to my dear father--I think you have him mesmerized, I really do--you dared to speak to him seriously of--of--caring for me, when you have criticized nearly every move I have made at home for four years." "Have I? I don't remember saying anything discourteous to you." "You didn't need to," retorted Linda. She didn't wish to snap, she wished to freeze, but old wounds ached. "Your actions, your looks, were quite enough." "My looks?" repeated King mildly. "I'm sure you exaggerate. It must have been these glasses: the wrong shape or something." He took them off and regarded them critically. "I hate your jokes!" retorted the girl, hotly. "Hate what you like so long as it isn't me!" "It is you!" The words came with emphasis. "Then you do like me." King nodded. "It's an admission." "You disgust me with your silliness," she returned, turning away. "I wonder what has become of Fred Whitcomb." She rose and swept to the bay window. King followed her. "Fred's a good fellow. I always liked Whitcomb," he said. Linda made no response to this. She scanned the road anxiously up and down. There was another interim of silence; then:-- "Your father would be pleased, Linda," ventured King. "He said so." "You hypnotize him. _I_ said so. My father," she added with scorn,--"my father like me to marry a man who always disapproved of me?" "Is that why you try to hate me?" asked King thoughtfully. "I have disapproved of you a good many times, but I do think that--considering everything--you've done very well." Linda, the all-conquering, the leader, the criterion, turned upon the speaker a gaze of amazement; then she laughed. "How kind! You overwhelm me." "Yes, I do really think so. Considering your beauty, your strength, your easy finances, your college crushes, your empress-like reign, you've done pretty well to consider others as much as you have." "Others?" the echo came crisply. "What others?" "Your father mainly." "My father!" Linda faced him now, and sparks were flying from the brown eyes. "Bertram King, I adore my father!" "Yes, I know,--when you have time." "What--what is it? Would you have had me not go to college?" "No,"--King spoke in a reasonable tone,--"you did right to go to college." "Thank you--a thousand times." The crisp waves of the speaker's hair seemed to snap as on a cold night while she bowed her thanks. King played with his glasses; and she turned quickly back to the window in order that he should not see that sudden tears quenched the fire in her eyes. Her father's preoccupied face rose before her. Was it true that she had ever neglected him? A habit of sighing unconsciously had recently grown upon him. She had noticed that, and also that in late months new lines of harassment had come in his face. Never mind, she was going to run away with him, devote herself to him, far from this man who dared to comment, and to pick flaws in her behavior. He should never see her change. "I did want to do some riding with you, Linda. The idea comes to me like a picture or a poem when I think of those forests:-- '--here and there in solemn lines The dark pilasters of the pines Bore up the high woods' somber dome; Between their shafts, like tapestry flung, A soft blue vapor fell and hung.' Nice, isn't it?" "On what bond issue did you find that?" inquired Linda, tapping the window pane with restless fingers, and watching impatiently for her laggard cavalier. "I told Dr. Young I wanted to play with you and your father, but he said Mr. Barry and I didn't know how to play." "He was quite right." King regarded his companion's averted, charming head with a pale smile. "You know," he remarked after a little, "we can love people while seeing their imperfections." "Not I! I love only perfection." King gave a noiseless whistle, and raised his eyebrows. "I'm so glad I'm perfect," he said at last. Linda looked around at him slowly. How pale he was! Ripples of the flood of tenderness that had bathed the thought of her father flowed grudgingly toward her companion, as he stood there in the long twilight, regarding her with lack-lustre eyes. "There are pines outside of Colorado," she remarked. "That's what Mrs. Porter says." "Mrs. Porter?" Linda echoed him with interest; "but she has left town. I went to the studio yesterday, and she's gone; gone to Maine without letting me know." "You've been pretty hard to locate, remember. She told me she was going." Linda sighed. "If she could have gone West with Father and me, it would have been perfect." "I'm said to resemble Maud very strongly," suggested King. Linda regarded him with quick appraisement. "I never thought of it." She turned back to the window. "I can quote poetry, too, when I think of her. The other day I found a verse that fits her:-- 'He that of such a height hath built his mind, And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolvéd powers; nor all the wind Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong His settled peace, or to disturb the same: What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey.' A man named Daniel wrote that. Isn't it perfect?" "H'm," agreed King. "A Daniel come to judgment. Maud likes you very much," he added. "She loves me, thank you," flashed Linda, against his tepid speech. "Then it runs in the family. I've told her how I felt toward you myself." "And told her all my faults, I suppose." The girl bit her lip. "Oh, I knew she could see those. Maud is very penetrating." Fire and dew flashed at him again. "Linda," he added in a different tone, "Whitcomb can't be much longer. Do you know I'm asking you to marry me?" An inarticulate sound from his companion, and continued drumming on the window pane. "I came to your father's employ ten years ago. I climbed the ladder slowly, but just three years and eight months ago I reached the rung from which I could see you." A pause. "You've haunted me ever since." "Unintentional, I assure you." But Linda, her cheeks burning, could not look around again. In her tumult of hurt pride and indignation there penetrated a strain of triumph. "Certainly," returned King; "you had other things to attend to, and so had I. You've attended to them with vast credit, and your father will tell you that I'm not so bad. Now a new chapter begins. Probably no one will ever love you as comprehendingly as I do." "I shouldn't think of marrying any one who didn't consider me perfect," announced Linda clearly. "Remember the chromo that goes with me--Mrs. Porter. Maud would be your cousin." King dangled his eyeglasses as he made the suggestion, and regarded a short curl of hair that had dropped against his companion's white neck. Linda was silent for a moment. "I suppose you'll poison her mind against me now," she said. "No. You've poured hot tea and cold water on my budding hopes, but I'm strictly honorable; and besides, I'm going to remember that both douches are good for plants. Ask your father if I know how to hang on to a proposition." Silence. Linda's strong heart beat against her ribs as the man came a step nearer to her. "Don't you touch me!" she exclaimed. "I wasn't thinking of touching you, Linda. I just wanted to fix your hair. Something has fallen down here; just wait, I see a hairpin." The girl preserved her pose under the caressing hands for a second, but he fumbled the soft lock, and she suspected him. "That will do," she said, jerking her head away. "Oh, well, I fixed it. You might thank me, going out as you are." "I should think Fred had fallen dead!" she exclaimed. "Yes; Maud prescribes Maine for me. She knows the lay of the land pretty well up there. She says she has known it for thirty years. I think that's an exaggeration, don't you?" "I don't know how old she is, and I don't care; I only know that it must have nearly killed her husband to die and leave her." King rocked back and forth on his toes. "I've heard that it did, entirely," he responded. Linda gave her head a quick shake. "No wonder I say idiotic things!" she exclaimed. "It's catching!--Fred! Fred!" The sudden call was a cry of relief, and the girl quickly stepped out of an open glass door upon the piazza, and hurried down the steps. A motor had stopped beside the walk. King caught up his hat and followed her. "I thought you'd never come!" cried Linda, to the joy of the distracted chauffeur. "Great Scott! I thought I never would either!" he responded. "What have you been doing? Climbing trees?" asked King. "Linda and I had nearly decided to be reckless and go to a movie." "Nothing of the sort," averred Linda, "but I had begun to believe all four were punctured." "One was," admitted Whitcomb, "and I've had a dozen delays." And he gnashed his teeth over a wasted hour of June as he handed his fair one into the front seat. "Whither away?" inquired King. "To the North Shore," responded Whitcomb, with fire in his eye which portended speeding. "Drop me at the club, then, will you, Freddy?" And without waiting for the assent Bertram landed in the tonneau as the car started. In front of the University Club he descended, and stepped forward beside Linda. "I may not see you again," he said, standing between the wheels, hatless, and holding her hand. "Have a good time. If you send me a picture postal, it will be all off between us." "What did he mean?" asked Whitcomb, as with a whirr and a jerk they were on their way again. "Why, I'm going to Colorado with my father; or he's going with me. He's tired." "Well, he has nothing on King," remarked Freddy. "Never saw any one run down as that chap has the last month. He'd better get some smaller collars. Don't you care, Linda! Send _me_ a picture postal, and I'll frame it." The look that accompanied this outburst was lost on the adored one. She was trying to remember if Bertram King's collar had looked too large. The University Club was a lonely place! CHAPTER IV THE JUNE NIGHT Linda enjoyed the long flight under the June stars between the waves of the freshwater sea and the star-filled lagoons of Lincoln Park, and returned late to the dark house on the avenue. "Did you ever see anything look so inhospitable!" she exclaimed, as her escort ran with her up the steps. "I wonder why Sedley didn't light up." "Do you want me to go in and look under all the beds for you?" asked Whitcomb gayly. "No. Father's bound to be in one of them by this time. I'm afraid to look at my watch. You shouldn't have kept me out so late, Freddy. You know it was against my will." He could see her dimples in the starlight. They had been dear to him in grammar school; dear to him all the years while he was bereft of them at Harvard. "If I could keep you always!" he ejaculated, in a lower tone. "Against my will?" she laughed. "How about your promise, Freddy?" "Yes, I know I did," was the incoherent response, "but you're going away--and--are you sure you don't feel a bit--not the least bit different, Linda?" She shook her head at the pleading tone, and its low vibration set some chord within her to stirring. The sudden vision of Bertram King rose before her, dangling his eyeglasses and watching to see what she would say and how she would say it. Freddy had none of Bertram's hateful way of taking things for granted. He was all that was manly and humble and appealing. She could see in the dim light his square, strong hands clenched, and she felt again King's slender fingers on her hair; insolent, presumptuous: a man who had never courted her. She liked Whitcomb so much. She approved of him so deeply. "I ought not to have gone with you to-night," she said, and the gentle, regretful voice was so unlike Linda Barry that it frightened her devoted suitor. "No, no. No, no!" he exclaimed quickly, taking a fresh grip on the situation. "I assumed all the responsibility. I haven't forgotten it." His teeth closed, and the two regarded one another. She again contrasted his athletic build and efficient effect with King, very much to the latter's disadvantage. "Oh, Freddy!" she exclaimed appealingly, and her fingers locked together, "there are so many nice girls." She paused, but he was silent. "I should just love your wife, I know. What fun we would have together!" "Afraid not, Linda. Three's a crowd." A sudden thought corrugated the speaker's forehead. "Were you thinking--thinking of making it a quartette?" "What an idea!" The corrugation remained. "I've been suspecting that that dry-as-dust King would pounce on you as soon as you left school." "Really, Freddy, your language--" Linda's cheeks flushed. Were not the boyish words extremely graphic! "Well, wouldn't it occur to any one? He must have some human moments when the machine's resting, and he has eyes in his head. Each man of us wants the best of everything, and aren't you the best of everything? I don't care a hang for your father's money. I got a raise last week." "Bless your dear heart, Freddy!" "Don't!" The young fellow winced. "I abhor that big-sister tone of yours. King's hand in glove with your father. Everybody says Barry & Co. take on nothing that King doesn't sanction, and your father is some business man, as you may know. I only hope he won't ever regret such absolute faith. I know I bought something, and--well, I believe it's shaky to tell the truth, and I've begun to wonder if, after all, King is such a wizard. But--all this is nothing to you. I just want to be sure that if I'm not the leading man it'll be somebody with more flesh and blood than King, somebody gaited more like myself, only a better man. If I've got to give you up, I want it to be to a better man, Linda; not to a long-legged, cadaverous, conceited prig!" "Why, Freddy, Freddy!" Bertram was all that. Why should Linda object to hearing it in good nervous English? "I had no idea you disliked Bertram so," she said. "Didn't you think he had his nerve to start out with us to-night? I don't understand how he was able to make me feel that way, but somehow it was just as if he said: 'Yes, you have my permission to take her driving this once. Be good children and enjoy yourselves.'" Linda laughed. "Imaginative, too! Why, I'm learning a lot about you to-night; and here I was thinking you were an open book!" "Not if you didn't know I was imaginative," declared Whitcomb. "If I should tell you of some pictures I draw--" He came a step nearer, and the girl shrank. "Good-night!" she exclaimed; "Father's pretty indulgent, but if he should wake up he might be worried. Good-night; I've had such a good time, Freddy." She gave him her firm, brief, boyish hand-shake, and glided within the door. It was still open and the house not lighted! Then her father-- "Linda, I'm in here, daughter." The voice came from the reception room, where earlier she had talked with King. With a swish of her motor coat the girl turned and entered the room, noting instantly and with relief that her father was leaning back in an armchair in the corner of the dark room farthest from the window. Then he had not overheard Whitcomb's talk. "Why aren't you in bed? Were you worried, dear?" she asked repentantly. "These June nights are all like day, aren't they?" She hurried forward, and sitting on the arm of her father's chair drew his head toward her and kissed his forehead, taking one of his hands into her lap. "One hasn't sense enough to go in on such a night. We left Sheridan Road as lively as if it were noon. Really I don't know what time it is now. Is it awfully late? I'm sorry if I worried you." "No, little one." The reply was gentle and abstracted. "I knew you were all right. I knew you were with Fred." "Why, how did you know it?" The sprightly, fresh voice sounded gay after the tired one. "Bertram told me." "Bertram!" The ejaculation was accusing. "Where have you seen him?" "At the office." "The office! Of all places this glorious night! Father, dear," reproachfully, "I thought you went off with Mr. Radcliffe to paint the town. That's what he told me. How could Bertram get hold of you? I'd have made Freddy tie him to our machine if I had suspected such a thing." "Mr. Radcliffe had some business to talk over, and the data were at the office." The utter weariness of the reply made the fresh face cling again against the speaker's gray head. "But Bertram came here to find you." "Yes, I got him at the club." Linda gave an inarticulate exclamation. "Oh, doesn't it just do me good to think how soon you'll be where offices and Bertrams are unknown!" she said slowly. The man in her embrace lifted her hand to his lips in silence. "You're the stunningest thing on horseback that was ever seen," she went on, "and the only time you'll be out of the saddle is when you're in bed." Silence. "Why don't you say something?" she mumbled against his hair. "Did you know I was good-looking?" she added after a pause, lifting her head and squeezing him. "Yes, child." "Oh, Father, don't be so meek! Say something nice and impudent, or I'll think you're _too_ tired, and take you away to-morrow. I was leading up tactfully to thanking you for being the best-looking man in Chicago so your daughter could have a nice nose." She burrowed the feature into his thick hair, and kissed it again. "You're my darling girl," he said soberly. "You've been a joy to me ever since you were born." "Hurrah for us!" ejaculated Linda. "I've been no kind of a joy compared to what I'm going to be. Now I have all this school business off my hands, I'm going to trail you--just dog your footsteps. Now, don't say that I won't be near so much of a joy that way, because I can think of more ways to make you have a good time than you dream of now!" "You aren't the sort of girl who stays with Father long." "Do you mean marriage? My dear sir, don't you know that handsome girls are far less apt to marry than the nice, commonplace, cozy ones with turn-up noses? I admit coyly that I'm something of a peach, but I'm going to stay with you." "Have you ever thought,"--the question came gravely,--"have you ever thought of--Bertram?" Color mounted richly over the face against the gray hair. "Thought of him! I should say so! The most critical, disagreeable, _nosey_ man; always interfering and--and trying to make people over into his mold. It never occurs to him that his ideas could be anything less than perfection." "I'm surprised to hear you speak so," came the monotonous voice, "and disappointed too." "Father, dear, don't! You make me sad! When I know you've come into this tired condition, just working for me,--that's one of the pleasant things Bertram said to me to-night." "He was wrong. It wasn't working for you, Linda. Remember that. Money-making gets to be a disease. A millionaire should be satisfied; but the multi-millionaires are ahead of him, and the game is exciting." There was no excitement in the colorless voice. "Mere prosperity palls. He takes chances, hoping and expecting to do great things for himself and every one involved with him. There's the pinch. He should never allow others to take chances with him. That's criminal." "Oh, well." Linda opposed a light tone to what she considered the morbidity of over-fatigue. Her heart reproached her for not having seen the symptoms long ago. She should have thrown up college and taken her dear one away long ago. Resentment against King again flared up in her. His had been daily companionship with her father. How could he have let it come to this! "If Barry & Co.," she went on, "should ever have a setback, they would simply deal out,"--she gestured as if dealing cards,--"deal out to the little people and make up their losses. That would be Barry & Co.'s way," she added proudly. Her father's next words were irrelevant, and came after a short silence. "I'm surprised that you give Bertram such a bad character. He is unconscious of offending you, I'm sure." "Oh, Daddy, dear, don't bother about that. I don't hate him, you understand. It's only that he is flint and perhaps I'm steel. At any rate, there are fireworks when we mingle in society." "Not flint at all, Linda. He loves you." "A queer sort of love, then. It isn't so much what he says, dear,"--Linda's cheeks were burning,--"it's that compelling--oh, sort of--well, compelling's the best word,--that always wants to--to guide me; and I won't be guided by anybody but you. I'll tell you what, Daddy, you haven't any son, and I'm going to be your son after this. If you're very good for two whole weeks after we get out to Colorado, and don't say one word about business, after that I'll get you to tell me all about your affairs, and I'll put my whole mind on understanding them. You know, Daddy, I have a good head for mathematics and for business generally,--truly I have. This isn't bluffing. If you'll take a little pains with me, you'll find Bertram isn't the only one you'll confide in. I think I'd like business. My heart isn't much to boast of, but my head, now, when it comes to my head--Thank Heaven, Bertram will be where he can't write to you about anything but fish. Mrs. Porter has persuaded him to go to Maine. Just think what she did, Daddy. She went off without saying a word to me. I went down to the studio and there was no one there but a caretaker, packing up. The calendar hadn't been torn off, so I tore off a leaf and wrote her a message on the date I was there. It's a calendar of Bible promises, and this one was, 'When thy father and thy mother forsake thee, then the Lord will take thee up.' I added something about her inhumanity in forsaking me." "Why--why,"--Mr. Barry's brow wrinkled,--"I'm afraid I've been remiss. I paid the bill for your lessons, and when she sent back the receipt she wrote something about having tried to get you on the 'phone, but that you were too popular, and that she was going East to tell your aunt that you were a good girl." "Then she has gone to the Cape!" exclaimed Linda, with interest. "I remember when Aunt Belinda was here at Christmas Mrs. Porter talked about it with her." "Yes," responded Mr. Barry, "and I think the plan is for Bertram to join her there if--when he can go." "Right away, won't he?" demanded Linda eagerly. "His doctor says--" "Yes, poor Bertram," said Mr. Barry slowly, "he does need it; but, little one,"--he patted Linda's hand slowly,--"we can't either of us go quite so soon as we expected." "Now, Father!" exclaimed the girl acutely. "Something very important, Linda,"--his voice increased as he repeated it,--"very important. I think we must--" he rose; "but it's late. We must go upstairs now, little one." His repetition of the term of affection impressed Linda. It was associated with sadness. She remembered how often he had used it during the week that her mother died. "I shall read you to sleep, dear. Please let me," she said as they rose. "No, no need of that. Go to bed, little girl. I'll lock up. Good-night, daughter." He put his arms around her, and she clung to him, kissing him again and again. CHAPTER V THE CAPE Maine. Mrs. Porter loved the very word. Always when the train left the North Station in Boston she sank into her chair with a sense of shaking off the cares of life; and to-day the smile she gave the porter as he placed her suit-case beside that chair was valued, even by him, more than the coin she placed in his hand. The cares of life in her case were represented by a busy music studio, where, luckily for her, every half-hour was a busy one; but there were the pupils who didn't supply their own steam, but had to be urged laboriously up the steeps of Parnassus; there were those in whom a voice must be manufactured if it ever appeared; and those whose talent was great and whose application was fitful; those whose vanity was fatuous, and those whose self-depreciation was a ball and chain; those who had been badly taught and who must be guided through that valley of humiliation where bad habits are overthrown. Taking into account all the trials of the profession, any voice teacher in Mrs. Porter's place to-day might give a Boston and Maine porter a seraphic smile as if he were opening to her the gate leading to Elysian Fields where pianos and _vocalises_ have no place. "That woman sure do look happy," was the soliloquy of this particular red-cap as he pocketed the silver and left the car. The traveler leaned back in her chair with a glorious sense of unlimited leisure, and prepared to recognize the landmarks grown as familiar to her as the scenes on the Illinois Central suburban railroad. Probably none of her pupils save Linda Barry, although there were other hero-worshipers among them, would deny that Mrs. Porter's nose was too short, her mouth too wide, and her eyes too small; but the kindly lips revealed such even teeth, and the eyes such light, that no one commented on Maud Porter's looks, nor cared what shape her nose was. One saw, as she leaned back now in her chair, that her brown hair was becoming softly powdered with gray. Her eyes half closed as the express train gained speed, flying away from care, and her humorous lips curved as she considered the mild adventure on which she was embarking. When Miss Belinda Barry had visited her brother during the holidays, she had dropped some remarks concerning her home which had roused Mrs. Porter's curiosity and interest. The idea had been growing on her all the spring that, instead of going out as usual to one of the islands in Casco Bay, she would explore this corner of the mainland from whence had sprung the Chicago financier. She had not, however, communicated since with Miss Barry. She did not wish that lady to feel any responsibility for her. A picture of Linda's aunt rose before her mind as she reflected. Tall, thin, with a scanty coiffure and long onyx earrings. These ornaments Miss Barry had donned in her youth, and declined to renounce with the fashion; so that when they began to be worn again by the daring, they gave her the effect, as Linda had confided to her teacher, of being "the sportiest old thing in town." The naturally severe cast of Miss Barry's features, Mrs. Porter had always observed, rather increased in severity when the good lady looked at her niece, and that holiday visit had been a strain on both sides. It was happy history repeating itself when the traveler alighted to-day at the Union Station in Portland. The same involuntary wonder rose within her that any face could look harassed, ill, or care-worn here. It was Maine. It was the enchanted land! the land of pines, of unmeasured ocean, of supernatural beauty in sunset skies; of dreamful days and dreamless nights. She smiled at her own childish ignoring of the seamy side of existence as evidenced in the look of many of the crowd hurrying through the busy clearing-house of the station. She beamed upon a porter who took her to a waiting carriage--a sea-going hack, Linda would have called it--and drove to a hotel. She would not risk arriving in the evening in a locality where the only inn might be that of the Silver Moon. Till supper time--it would be supper, she considered exultantly--she wandered up Congress Street to some of her favorite shops. Undeniably there are other streets in Portland, but to the summer visitor the dignified city is much like a magnified village with one main street where its life centers. Maud Porter entered one shop after another, repressing with difficulty her longing to tell every clerk how happy she was to be back, and enjoying all over again the good manners and obligingness of everybody. Next morning, as soon as breakfast was over, she made her inquiries and took her train. It was one that stopped at every station, and when, after three quarters of an hour of this sauntering, she alighted on a desolate and unpromising platform, her first thought was to inquire in the small depot for the first train back. The little house seemed to be deserted for the moment, however, and she observed an elderly man with a short white beard, who, with trousers tucked into his boots and thumbs hooked in his armholes, stood at a little distance, regarding speculatively the lady in the gray suit and floating gray veil. Near where he was standing a carryall was waiting by the platform. In Mrs. Porter's indecision she looked again within the weather-beaten station, then across at the motionless, weather-beaten face. "There doesn't seem to be any one in here," she said. "I cal'late Joe's out in the shed luggin' wood," responded the man. His pleasant tone, his drawl, the sea-blue of his eyes, caused her to move toward him as the needle to the magnet. She knew the type. All the suspended Maine exhilaration rushed back upon her. How clean he was! How rough! How adorable! "I've come," she said, gazing up into the eyes regarding her steadily, and said no more. "Want me to haul ye?" he asked kindly, not changing his position. "Yes." "Where to?" "I don't know." The sunlight of her smile evoked a grin from him. "Come on a chance, have ye?" "Yes, So did you, I should think. Nobody but little me getting off here." "No, 't ain't time for 'em really to come yet." "Who? Summer people, do you mean?" "Yes. Folks is beginnin' to think they like it down here; but we don't take summer boarders to the Cape, ye'll have to know that." A prodigious wink enveloped one sea-blue eye. "Oh, I'm so sorry." Mrs. Porter's smile vanished in her earnestness. "Wouldn't--wouldn't your wife, perhaps--" "Haven't got none." "Oh, I'm sorry." "I ain't. Ben glad on't always. Hain't ever repented." "Then you mean you never were married." "That's what I mean." The speaker nodded as if to emphasize a triumph. "But isn't there some one in your--your village--I suppose it's a village, isn't it?" "Shouldn't wonder if 'twas." The visitor tasted that "'t wa-a-as" with appetite, and echoed it mentally. "Some one who would take a boarder if--if I want to stay?" The monotonous landscape was not inviting. "Wall, for accawmodation's sake I cal'late they would; but it's only for accawmodation's sake, ye understand." The speaker winked again. "The Cape don't take boarders." "Oh, I see," laughed the visitor. "But you must have expected somebody. You're here." "Usually git somebody. I haul 'em for hard cash, not for accawmodation's sake, so ye see I'm on hand." "I should hope so. What should I have done if you hadn't been here?" "Oh, they'se a car you could git over there a little piece." The speaker unhooked one thumb and gestured. "I'd far rather go with you, Mr.--Mr.--" "Holt. Jerry Holt. Most folks forgit the Mister. Shall I take yer bag?" It was standing where Mrs. Porter had descended from the train, and Jerry unhooked his thumbs and clumped across the platform in the heavy boots in which he had gone clamming that morning. Maud Porter, her spirits high, entered the old carryall. She suddenly decided not to mention her acquaintance with Miss Barry, but to pursue her way independently. Deliberately her companion placed her bag in the carriage, then lifted the weight which anchored his steed to duty, and took his place on the front seat, half turning with a sociable air to include his passenger. "Git ap, Molly," he remarked, and Molly somewhat stiffly consented to move. "You have a nice horse," remarked his passenger fatuously. She knew her own folly, but reveled in it. Pegasus himself could not have pleased her at this moment so well as Jerry Holt's bay. It proved that her remark was the open sesame to her driver's heart. "There's wuss," he admitted. "Ye see me lift that weight jest now? It's nonsense to use it, but Molly's a female, after all, and in-gines comin' and goin' might git on her nerves; but take her in the ro'd, now, that hoss, she ain't afraid o' no nameable thing!" The sea-blue eyes met his listener with a challenge. "Not autos even?" with open admiration. Jerry Holt snorted. "Shoot! She looks down on 'em. Miss--Miss--" "Oh, excuse me. I forgot you didn't know me. I'm Mrs. Porter, from Chicago." "Chicago, eh? We've got a neighbor out there. Barry his name is. A banker. Ever hear of him?" "Oh, yes, certainly." "Sister lives here still. We all went to school together." They were driving on a good road between green fields, and Mrs. Porter scented the crisp sea air. "There's a handsome new house started over there," she said, indicating a hill which was to their left. "Who's building that?" "Wall, now," the driver responded in his slow, mellifluous tones, "I couldn't tell ye--sudden." Mrs. Porter leaned back in the carriage with a sigh of ineffable contentment, and thought of the corner of State and Madison streets. In a minute more the glorious blue of the ocean came in sight, and scattered cottages, which with delightful irregularity were set down at random, some of them surrounded with trees and shrubs. Mrs. Porter leaned forward with sparkling eyes. "Don't take me anywhere just yet," she said. "Drive about a little. Have you time?" "Plenty," declared her companion. "Hain't got to go to the station only once more to-day. Git ap, Molly." "Oh, let her walk if she wants to. This is beautiful!" The Cape ran out into the sea, bearing lighthouses, and was bordered with high, jagged rocks among which the clear waves rushed and broke in gay, powerful confusion. As they neared the water the visitor observed on the side toward the ship channel a cottage whose piazza touched the rocks. The hill upon which it stood ended abruptly at the water, and daisies waved in the interstices of the natural sea-wall. "Who is the lucky woman who lives clinging to the rocks like that?" asked Mrs. Porter, indicating the shingled house with her slender umbrella. "That? Oh, that's Belinda Barry's cottage. Might's well live in the lighthouse and done with it, I say; but she's got a spyglass and likes to watch the shippin'. See the New York bo't out there comin' in now? There! Hear her blow? Bet Belinda's got her eye on her this minute. Seems if Belinda set on them rocks a lot when she was a girl, and had a cottage in the air, ye might say, 'bout livin' there some day; so when her brother began to have more money'n he knew what to do with, he give Belinda that place. Nobody else wanted it, I can tell ye that. When I'm ashore I'd ruther _be_ ashore, myself." A man with a bucket of clams passed their slow-moving carriage, and looked curiously at Mrs. Porter. "Hello, Cy," said Jerry Holt, jerking his head toward the other's nod. The visitor looked after the figure in the dilapidated coat. "That man had a fine head," she said. "H'm," ejaculated the other. "A pity there ain't more in it." "Oh, is the poor creature--do you mean--" "Oh, no, not so bad as that; but ye know how there are some folks no matter what they try at, they 're allers poundin' and goin' astern. Cy's that kind." "It's a mercy there are always clams," said Mrs. Porter, and Jerry Holt's sea-blue eyes twinkled at her. The visitor's plans for independence suddenly weakened. That cottage clinging to the rocks was undermining it more swiftly the further the carriage advanced. "I believe, Mr. Holt, you'd better leave me at Miss Barry's," she said suddenly. He shook his head. "Not a bit o' use," he replied. "She won't even accawmodate ye, let alone takin' a boarder. Belinda ain't stuck up. Her worst enemy can't say it changed her a mite to have a brother that eats off gold plates. She was always jest that way." "What way?" "Oh, high-headed ye might call it. I dunno exactly what; but Belinda allers claimed to steer; and now she lives to Portland winters in any hotel she's a mind to, she don't act a mite different from what she allers did, though lots o' folks claim she does. 'T ain't no use, though, Mis' Porter, your goin' there. I'd--I'd kind o' hate to have Belinda refuse ye." The speaker cast a kindly glance at his passenger, who smiled back at him appreciatively. "Thank you, but I do know Miss Barry. I met her in Chicago, and I'll just stop for a call, and she'll advise me where to go; for I tell you I'm going to stay, Mr. Holt, even if you have to let me sleep in your carryall. Why haven't you a nice wife, now, who would take me in?" "That's jest why. 'Cause that's the specialty o' wives, and I didn't want to be took in." Mrs. Porter laughed, and the carryall drew up beside Miss Barry's sunlit piazza. She opened her purse. "How much, Mr. Holt?" "Well, I'll have to charge ye twenty-five cents for this outin'," he returned with deliberate cheerfulness. "One minute, till we see if Miss Barry's to home." He got out upon the piazza and knocked on the cottage door, opening it at the same time. "Belinda!" he called. "Leave it on the step," came a loud voice from the back of the house. "Hear that?" he grinned, turning. "She's home, and I'm to leave ye on the step." "That's all right," said Mrs. Porter, alighting. Jerry Holt's clean, rough hand assisted her, and lifted out her suit-case "I'm perfectly charmed to be left on the step," she added, handing her guide a quarter, which he pocketed with a nod. "I'll try not to envy the girl who sat on these rocks and built a cottage in the air that came to earth." "She's welcome to it, welcome to it," observed Jerry, as he climbed back into the carriage. "When I'm to sea I want to be to sea. When I'm ashore I druther be to shore." "Did you ever go to sea?" "Cap'n of a schooner fifteen year or more." "Why didn't you tell me? You're Captain Holt, of course." "Oh," he shook his head, "hain't got nothin' to steer but Molly now." He smiled, nodded a farewell, and turned his horse around with many a cluck of encouragement. The sound of departing wheels was lost in the swish of surf on the rocks. Maud Porter stood looking seaward. Again the New York boat in the distance, lost to sight now, boomed its signal to smaller fry as it advanced to the harbor. The rioting wind carried her thin gray veil out straight. She heard the house door open, and turned to meet the surprised gaze of Miss Barry, in a checked gingham gown, but with her scanty coiffure and long onyx earrings precisely as she had seen them last. Mrs. Porter smiled radiantly, and captured her streaming veil. "I'm what he left on the step," she said. Miss Barry's surprised gaze grew uncertain. There was a familiar look about this radiant face, but where-- "Was you one of the Portland Aid--" she began. "No, no!" Mrs. Porter stepped forward and held out both her hands. "Don't let my suit-case frighten you, dear Miss Barry. I've only come to call. Remember last Christmas in Chicago, and Linda's teacher, Mrs. Porter?" "Mrs. Porter!" exclaimed Miss Barry, letting her hand be captured in the two outstretched ones. "Do excuse me!" Her face beamed welcome. She had liked Linda's voice teacher, and when Belinda Barry liked a person it was once and forever. "Come right into the house this minute," she said cordially. "I'm ashamed o' myself!" CHAPTER VI THE SHINGLED COTTAGE Miss Barry's hard, kindly hands helped remove the visitor's hat and veil, although Mrs. Porter repeated her declaration that she had come only for a call. "You're going to stay to dinner with me," returned the hostess. "I always do have enough for two." Her lips, which had returned to their rather grim line, twitched a little as she spoke, and Maud Porter glanced about the living-room with its old-fashioned furniture and rag rugs. Beyond was the dining-room, divided from this only by an imaginary line, and the table stood ready set for one. "You live here all alone?" asked the visitor. "Not half as alone as I'd like to be. I don't mind the fish and the barnacles, but it's the folks coming to the back door. Sit right down, Mrs. Porter." "Don't let me detain you if you were getting dinner." The caller laughed. "How about these folks that come to the _front_ door; the things Captain Holt leaves on the step?" "Oh, I'm in no hurry. I'm going to sit right down with you now. Things are stewing out there. There's nothing to hurt." Miss Barry suited the action to the word. Mrs. Porter regarded her with curious interest as she sank into a rocker with chintz cushions. The hostess's narrow face, usually as devoid of expression as a mask, was now lighted by pleasure. "How comes it you didn't let a body know?" she asked. "I was going to be so wonderfully independent! I was going to come to the Cape, and find a place to live, and then some day saunter over to your cottage bareheaded, and surprise you." "And all you accomplished was the surprise, eh?" "That's it, and it's entirely your fault. I was driving about with Captain Holt to see the lay of the land, when suddenly the rocks and the water, and this cottage perched on them like a gull's nest, did something to me. I don't know what. I think it gave me a brain-storm. When he told me you lived here, what could I do but rush in to congratulate you?" Miss Barry's lips twitched again. "I ain't any gull, I will maintain that, but--it is sightly, ain't it?" "Wonderful. Nothing less than wonderful. But in a storm, Miss Barry?" "Yes, the windows are all spray then, and the waves try to swallow me up, and I can't hear myself think, but--" "Yes,"--Mrs. Porter nodded as the other hesitated,--"I understand that 'but.'" "How'd you leave my brother?" "Very tired." "That so? Wouldn't you think he'd come up here and rock in the cradle o' the deep awhile? You write him about that hammock out there." Mrs. Porter looked out through the open window toward the end of the porch, where a hammock hung. "The doctor says Colorado," she replied. "Doctor? Is it as bad as that?" Miss Barry frowned questioningly. "Lambert never writes. I don't care for his stenographer's letters, and he knows it. If he can't take time to write himself, let it go." The speaker threw her head to one side, as if disposing of the matter of fraternal affection. "Linda is blooming," remarked Mrs. Porter. Miss Barry's lips took a thinner line. "Let her bloom," she responded dryly; and her visitor laughed again. "Doesn't she write either?" "I should say not." "It will be less difficult now she's out of college," said Mrs. Porter pacifically. "Those girls are absolutely occupied, you know." "Never play at all, I presume," returned her hostess, with a curling lip. "Oh, I wouldn't say that." "Better not if you care where you go to.--No," after a slight pause, "I understand my niece a good deal better than she thinks I do. It's enough that she scorns her own name. She was named for me. Belinda's been good enough for me, and she's no business to slight the name her parents gave her." "Oh, Linda is such a free lance," said Mrs. Porter apologetically; "and 'Linda' sounds so breezy, so--so like her. 'Belinda' is quaint and demure, and--and you know, really, she isn't demure!" "Not a great deal," agreed Miss Barry curtly. "I'm sorry my brother isn't well," she added. "These business men let themselves be driven so. You remember my cousin Bertram King. He and Mr. Barry have been worn down in the same vortex, and both are ordered away. I told Bertram Maine was the best place in the world for him. As soon as I find an abiding-place I shall let him know." Miss Barry rose suddenly. "I'm forgetting that you're starved. Just excuse me while I dish up the chowder," she said, and vanished. Mrs. Porter clasped her hands and lifted her eyes. "Chowder!" she repeated sententiously; then she too rose, went to the open window, and stood looking out. The tide was rising, and the waves, climbing higher and higher, threw white arms toward the shingled cottage, as if claiming its boulder foundation, and striving to pass the barrier of daisies and draw the little house down to its own seething breast. As the visitor stood there, a woman, bareheaded, stepped up from the grass upon the porch, and giving one glance from her prominent, faded eyes at the gray figure standing in the window, crossed the piazza to the front door, which was closed. Mrs. Porter, advancing, opened it, and came face to face with a scrawny little woman, who stood with her head apologetically on the side. Her temples were decorated with those plastered curls of hair known as "beau-catchers," and across the forehead it was strained back and caught in a comb set with large Rhinestones. Her red-and-green plaid calico dress was open girlishly at the throat, around which a red ribbon was tied with the bow in the back. "Why are they always thin here?" thought Maud Porter. "Is it eating fish? Do they never have to reduce?" "Oh, pardon me!" exclaimed the newcomer, with such an elegant lift of her bony shoulders that it twisted her whole body. "I expected to see Belinda--that is--pardon me!--Miss Barry." "She's in the kitchen just at present. Won't you come in?" The newcomer accepted with alacrity, her prominent eyes openly scanning Mrs. Porter's costume. "I wouldn't have thought of intruding had I supposed Miss Barry had a guest. I didn't notice Jerry brought anybody." Another writhe, and a rearrangement of a long necklace of imitation coral beads, which suffered against the red plaid. "Yes, he brought happy me," returned Mrs. Porter, wondering whether, with the chowder so imminent, she should ask this guest to be seated. The newcomer relieved her of responsibility by sinking into the nearest chair. "Comin' for the summer?" she asked hurriedly, as though she felt that her time was short. "I don't know. It's a place to tempt one, isn't it?" "The views is called wonderful," returned the other modestly. "Of course, 't ain't for _us_ to call 'em sumtious, but artists _hev_ called 'em sumtious." "They deserve any praise," was the reply, and Mrs. Porter gave the speaker her sweet smile. "It's very difficult, one might almost say comple-cated, for visitin' folks to find any place to reside on the Cape. We ain't got any hotel." Pen fails to describe the elegant action of shoulders and eyebrows which accentuated this declaration, and Mrs. Porter's smile broadened. "I've understood so," she replied. "My name's Benslow," said the visitor, casting an apprehensive glance toward the dining-room. "I've got one o' these copious houses with so much more room than I can use that sometimes I _hev_--I _hev_ accawmodated parties. I suppose you're from the metrolopous." "Well, we think it is one. I'm from that wild Chicago!" "Oh, I s'posed it was Boston." Here Miss Barry entered, bearing a steaming tureen, which perfumed the atmosphere temptingly. "Hello, Luella," she said quietly. At the word the visitor started from her chair with guilty celerity, and brandished an empty cup she was carrying. "I hadn't an idea you was entertainin', Belinda, and you must excuse my walkin' right in on--on--" Miss Barry kept her eyes fixed imperturbably on the tureen, and turned to get a plate of crackers from a side table. "Mrs. Porter is my name," said the guest, taking pity on Miss Benslow's embarrassed writhings. "Oh, yes, on Mis' Porter. I just wanted to see if you could spare me a small portion of bakin' soda." "Why didn't you come to the back door as you do commonly?" "Why--why, the mornin' was so exhilaratin', I made sure you'd be watchin' the waves, and I thought it would expediate matters for me to come around front." An ingratiating smile revealed Miss Benslow's full set. "Just go right out and help yourself, Luella. You know where 't is, and you can let yourself out the back door. Come, Mrs. Porter, the chowder's good and hot." It was, indeed. Miss Benslow's prominent eyes rolled toward the white-clothed table as she passed it, and inhaled the tantalizing fragrance. She would presently go home and eat bits of cold mackerel with her old father, at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen. Neither he nor she was a "good provider." Miss Barry laughed quietly to herself as she and her guest sat down. "Luella did get ahead of me," she said appreciatively. "I don't know how she slid by. Her uniform never blends with the landscape, either. Perhaps she climbed under the lee of the rocks." "Oh, _why_ does she wear those beads with that frock?" asked Mrs. Porter, accepting a dish of chowder. "I guess if we could find that out we'd know why she does lots of things," returned the hostess. "Simply delicious," commented Mrs. Porter, after her first mouthful. "Do show me how to do it, Miss Barry." "Surely I will; but serve it after an early start from Portland and a ride across country with the wind off the sea. That's the sauce that gives the finishing touch." "Why are all the people in Maine thin? Is it fish? You all have the best things to eat, yet you never get cushiony like us." Miss Barry cast a glance across at the round contours, so different from her own angles. "I think a bit of upholstery helps, myself," she remarked. "Now, that Miss Benslow--why, she's really--really bony." "Yes," responded Miss Barry, eating busily, "but she's got beauty magazines that's full of directions how to reduce, and she's delighted with her bones. Unlucky for her father, because she might do more cooking if she believed flesh was fashionable. Luella's dreadfully slack," added Miss Barry, sighing; "but so's her father, for that matter. He goes out to his traps twice a day, but he wouldn't mind his chicken-house if he lost the whole brood; and just so he has plenty of tobacco the world suits him all right. You know folks can just about live on this air." Mrs. Porter regarded her hostess thoughtfully. "Then," she said, "I don't believe their house would be a very good place to board." Miss Barry looked up suddenly. "Board!" she repeated explosively. Then, after a silent pause, she added, "Is that what Luella came over for?" "Probably not; but she mentioned--" "Yes, I guess she did. She saw Jerry bring you--" "No, she said she didn't see him bring me." Miss Barry snorted. "Luella says lots o' things beside her prayers, and if she uses the same kind o' language for _them_ that she does for other folks, I doubt if the Almighty can understand her half the time. I often think the futurists ought to get hold of her and her clothes and her talk." Mrs. Porter laughed. "Perhaps she was born too soon." "Indeed she was for her own comfort. Luella's as sentimental as they make 'em, and she still feels twenty. Board with her, indeed! You'd reduce fast enough then, I assure you. Folks have lived with her till they were ready to eat stewed barnacles; and the only way they got along was finally to get her to live somewhere else and let them have the house to themselves. They've done that sometimes, and Luella and her father camped out in the boathouse, I guess; I don't know exactly what they did do with themselves. Tried to get you! Well, I do declare! Luella's nerve is all right, whatever else she may lack." "What _I_ want to know," laughed Mrs. Porter, "is, when she says the view is 'sumtious,' whether she means 'scrumptious' or 'sumptuous.'" Miss Barry smiled at her plate. "Luella ought to write a dictionary or a key or something," she said.--"Oh, I don't know what's the matter with women, anyway," she added with a sigh of disgust. "Why, Miss Barry, what do you mean? They're finer every year! There are more of them every year for us to be proud of." "A few high lights, maybe," admitted Miss Barry, "but look at the rank and file of 'em. Look at the clothes they'll consent to wear--and not wear. Just possessed with the devil o' restlessness, most of 'em, and willing to sell their souls for novelty. Isn't it enough to see 'em perspiring under velvet hats and ostrich feathers with muslin gowns in September, and carrying straw hats and roses above their furs in February? I get sick of the whole lot. Do you suppose for a minute they could wait for the season to come around, whichever it is? H'm!" Miss Barry put a world of scorn into the grunt. Mrs. Porter, as she accepted a second helping of chowder, had a vision of Linda, capriciously regnant, and realized the status she must hold in her aunt's estimation. "Oh, I'm an optimist," she replied, "especially when I'm eating your chowder. I don't see how you can look out of these windows and not love everybody." She regarded her vis-à-vis as she said it. It was hard to visualize this spare and hard-featured woman as the young girl who used to sit on these rocks and build castles in the air. "Mortals are ungrateful, I guess," was the reply. "I'm glad you like it here." "It's a paradise to one who is tired of people and pianos," declared Mrs. Porter. "Think you could look out of these windows and love 'em all, do you?" inquired Miss Barry dryly. Mrs. Porter laughed. "At this distance, certainly," she answered. "Some of them I could love even if they were in the foreground," she continued. "I'm very fond of Linda, Miss Barry." "A point in her favor," remarked the hostess, with a cool rising inflection. "Thank you for saying so. One must make lots of allowance for a girl so pretty, so rich, and so overflowing with life." "Let her overflow, only nowhere near me." "Don't say that. She'll settle down under the responsibilities of life. Do you remember my cousin Bertram King?" "Oh, yes. The long-legged, light-haired fellow that aids and abets my brother in overworking." "That's the very one. I must tell you that he's heart and soul in love with Linda." "H'm. I suppose so. I only wish she'd marry him and live out on Sheridan Road somewhere, then I could live with my brother and take care of him winters. He'd get some care then. Are they engaged?" "Oh, no. She's just out of school. He hasn't asked her yet." "What's the matter with him? Is he the kind with boiled macaroni for a backbone?" "No, Bertram's backbone is all right. He wanted to let her get out of school. He has no relations but me. He had to confide in somebody." "Well, he'll get all that's coming to him if he marries her." Miss Barry sniffed. "I guess if there was a prize offered for arrogance she'd get it. I speak plain because you're fond of her, and you're aware that you know her much better than I do, so I couldn't set you against her even if I wanted to; and _I_ need somebody to confide in too." Mrs. Porter smiled. "You'll change your tune some day. Linda has lots of goods that aren't in the show window." Miss Barry nodded. "If she keeps her distance I may change in time. It all depends on that." The visitor could picture how in little things the high-spirited, popular girl might have shown tactlessness during the holidays, and created an impression on the taciturn aunt which it would be hard to efface. Words could never do it, she realized, and wisely forbore to say more. Dinner was over, and the visitor was just considering that during the process of social dishwashing she could broach the subject of a boarding-place, when Jerry Holt's steed again approached the shingled cottage. Both women discerned him at the same moment. "Did you tell Jerry to come back for you? You can't go yet," said Miss Barry. "I didn't, but it might be a good plan for him to take me the rounds." "What rounds?" "Of possible boarding-places." Miss Barry did not reply, for she had to answer the knock at the door. There stood Captain Holt, holding a telegram gingerly between his thumb and finger, and his sea-blue eyes gazed straight into Belinda's. "I want you should bear up, Belinda," he said kindly. "There ain't no other way." His voice shook a little, and Miss Barry turned pale as she took the sinister envelope. Mrs. Porter heard his words, and hastening to her hostess stood beside her as she tore open the telegram. Captain Holt's heavy hand closed the door slowly, with exceeding care, as he shut himself out. Mrs. Porter's arm stole around the other woman as she read the message:-- Mr. Barry died last night. Please come at once. HENRY RADCLIFFE. Miss Barry's limbs shook under her, and she tottered to a chair. Captain Holt sat on the edge of the piazza and bit a blade of grass while he waited. In the silence a pall seemed to fall over the little house, broken only by the sharp rending apart of mounting waves against the rocks. Mrs. Porter knelt by her friend and held her hands. "What can I do for you?" she asked. "Look in the desk over in that corner, and find the time-tables in the drawer." "I know the Chicago trains, Miss Barry. Let me arrange it all for you. You wish to leave to-night?" Miss Barry nodded without speech. Mrs. Porter went out on the piazza and sent Jerry to telegraph, telling him to return. "Did you know my brother was ill?" asked Belinda, when she returned, still without moving. "No. I thought him just overtired." The other nodded. "That's the way they do it. Rush madly after money and more money till they go to pieces all of a sudden." The bereft sister's eyes were fixed on space, seeing who knows what pictures of the past, when a barefooted boy romped with her over these rocks that held the nest he had given her. Suddenly her far-away look came back, and focused on the pitiful eyes regarding her drawn, pale face. "I'm glad you're here," she said simply. "And I am so glad," responded the other, her thoughts busy with Linda and Bertram, and longing to fly to them. "Will you stay here in my cottage till I come back? I have a little girl that comes every day to help. She cooks pretty well. She'll stay with you." "Yes, Miss Barry." It was on the tip of the visitor's tongue to say, "You'll bring Linda back with you," but she restrained the words. This common sorrow would do its work between aunt and niece, she felt sure. There was no further inaction. A trunk was packed, and Mrs. Porter accompanied the traveler as far as Portland, spending the night again at the hotel where she had left her belongings; and Miss Barry pursued her sad journey. Henry Radcliffe met her at the station in Chicago; and when they were in the motor Miss Barry turned to him with dim eyes. "What was the matter with Lambert?" His pale face looked excited and sleepless. "You haven't seen the papers?" "No. My head ached and I didn't read them. What do you mean?" Her voice grew tense. "Barry & Co. have gone to pieces." "What do I care for that? Lambert! My brother! Tell me of him!" "But it carried a lot of innocent ones down in the crash." "Oh, my poor brother! What of him, Henry? Tell me. Tell me." The young man turned his head away, and his voice grew thick. "He died down in the office." "Heart trouble?" "Yes. He never told us if he knew he had a weak heart. The shock was terrible." The young man took his companion's groping hand. "Linda is prostrated. We have had to save her in every way. Poor Harriet! She has had to be a heroine." The speaker's voice thickened and choked again, and hand in hand the two kept an unbroken silence until the motor drew up before the house on Michigan Avenue, where lilies and ferns hung against the heavy door. CHAPTER VII THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED During the monotonous days following the funeral, Miss Barry and her niece dwelt alone in the big, echoing house. Harriet had gone home to her husband and child. The papers still resounded with the Barry tragedy, but it was not difficult to keep them from Linda, whose stormy grief had changed to utter listlessness. One morning Miss Barry sat by the window in her niece's room with some mending, while Linda, in her white négligée, dragged herself about the apartment as if all the spring in her supple young body had grown flaccid. Occasionally the older woman glanced over the rim of her glasses at the girl's expressionless face. Miss Belinda herself felt numbed by shock, but there was present with her the instinctive necessity which all had felt, of standing between Linda and a complete understanding of the situation. Ever since the girl's breakfast tray had been removed that morning they had remained here in silence. "There's one way I can't make any mistake," thought the aunt, "and that's by holding my tongue. She knows I'm here, and that if I can do anything for her I want to do it." The housekeeper had answered her appeal for something to keep her hands busy, and so she worked while Linda moved languidly about, apparently forgetful of her presence. While they still remained thus, a card was brought up. Miss Barry took it from the maid. "Bertram King, Linda," she said. "Will you see him?" She was surprised by the life which sprang for a moment into the girl's eyes. "No," answered Linda clearly. Her aunt stood undecidedly, the linen in one hand and the card in the other. "Shall I see him, then?" she asked. "I don't care, Aunt Belinda." The maid waited, casting curious glances from one to the other. "Henry says Mr. King's been wonderful," said Miss Barry, after a moment of waiting. "The greatest help in the world: always kept his head, and thought of the right thing to do, though he was suffering so." "I'm not--" Linda tried to reply, but her lips quivered, and she bit them. "I can't see him," she ended abruptly. Miss Barry nodded comprehension. The associations would naturally be overwhelming. "I'll go down, then," she said, sighing, and laying down her work. "I suppose I shall tell him you thank him for all he has done, and for the flowers every day." "No." Linda faced her aunt, and again life leaped in her eyes. "I'm not sending any message. Remember that." Miss Barry frowned in perplexity, thinking of Mrs. Porter's confidences concerning King. "Oh, law," she thought wearily, "I suppose she's refused him." So downstairs the good lady went, her black dress trailing after her, to the reception room, where stood a hollow-eyed young man. His face had become familiar to her in the past days. "Good-morning, Mr. King." "Good-morning, Miss Barry." His eyes interrogated her hungrily. "I suppose I should apologize for coming at this hour, but I'm so anxious to know how Linda is." "She's up and about. Sit down." "Would it be impossible for me to see her?" The speaker did not sit, though Miss Barry did so. His wistful eyes were still fixed questioningly. "Yes, Mr. King. Just impossible. She hasn't seen anybody. She doesn't even see me." Miss Belinda smiled ruefully. "I just sit there with her. I don't know whether she knows I'm there or not." Now King did sit down, and his companion proceeded:-- "To tell the truth, I need to see you alone, Mr. King. I need to know what Henry means when he says Barry & Co. have gone to pieces. That isn't so, is it?" "Yes, practically." King looked at the floor, and locked his hands together. "A very big undertaking has failed, and it was the knowledge that it was impossible to satisfy all the investors that killed your brother. A run on the bank put the finishing touch to our misfortunes; but I am taking every step which I know Mr. Barry would wish to have taken, and the excitement will abate when the public sees that we are fellow sufferers." "Then Linda is--Linda will be poor?" Miss Barry asked it in hushed tones. "Comparatively, yes; she will call it poor, but I know Linda. She would wish justice done. I want to see her. I must see her, in fact, as soon as she is able to meet me with Harriet. I know what Mr. Barry would wish, but it must be a mutual agreement. I'm not forgetting, Miss Barry," added the young man, kindly, "that this hits you financially too." "You mean my allowance? I'm very thankful, Mr. King, that I've spent but little of it, and I have the home my dear brother gave me. I never felt perfectly certain that there wouldn't be any reverses. Business men when they get as rich as Lambert are like aëronauts. Who can tell when some current of wind they didn't count on will strike their ship?" "I'm glad you've been so wise. I assure you that since the catastrophe I have often thought of you." Miss Barry regarded the speaker kindly. The difficulties of his position surged upon her. "Have I told you I left Mrs. Porter in my house?" "I knew she expected to see you." "Yes; she was there when the message came, and she helped me in every way. Best of all, she was willing to see that nobody ran off with my cottage while I was gone." "I wish she were here with Linda, though," said King. "I believe she could get nearer to her than anybody." "I suppose there isn't any doubt," returned Miss Barry without enthusiasm, "that my niece will go to her. There don't seem any doubt that I ought to take her home with me and let the sea tone her up. She may prefer to stay with Harriet. I shall give her her choice. I suppose this house will be sold." "I suppose so. That is one of the things Linda will have to help decide." They sat for a moment in silence, Miss Barry liking her companion better and better, finding it easy to believe on general principles that Linda had been cruel to him. King rose suddenly from his brown study. "Will you give her these flowers, please?" he said, indicating a box that lay on a chair. "I shall get Harriet to arrange a meeting for us to discuss the matters that are pressing." Miss Barry rose, and they looked into one another's eyes. "I had hoped that it might be some comfort to Linda to see me, as one who stood so close to her father," said King wistfully. Miss Barry found him pathetic. "Seems to work the other way," she answered curtly. "Some folks would think of your side of it. I can tell you, though, Mr. King, the rest of the family appreciates all you have done and are doing." Miss Barry's hand gave the young man's a decided squeeze as they parted. Her handshakes ordinarily were of the loose and hard variety. She turned and took up the box of flowers. King's offering had come daily among others since the funeral, but Linda would not allow any flowers to be left in her room. "I'd like to know just what she means by flashing up at the mention of that poor fellow's name," soliloquized Miss Belinda, as she mounted the stairs. "Lambert's gone and left him to take the brunt of the situation. Shouldn't wonder if going down to that office every day is some like going to a torture chamber." She entered her niece's room. Linda was sitting before the dresser, pulling over with languid fingers the contents of a drawer. Each article in it was associated with happy, remote days separated from the present by a cold, dark, impassable gulf--the gulf of grief, remorse, and despair. Nothing could bring her father back. Every interest that had kept her from him loomed hateful in her eyes. Just as Miss Barry entered the room her hand had fallen on a morocco box. It contained the necklace which had been her graduation gift from him. She had worn it at the dinner dance at the South Shore Club. What had her father been doing that night? Why had she not insisted on his presence at the dinner? How she loathed each of those triumphant hours when the gems had risen and fallen on her happy breast. Her head suddenly fell forward on the dresser, and her shoulders heaved in deep-drawn sobs. Miss Barry dropped the flower box on a chair, and her cheeks flushed as she advanced uncertainly. Her niece's previous reserve made the older woman feel that Linda might resent her presence now. She retreated a step toward the door; but no. The girl was her own flesh and blood. She didn't know what to say to her, and her own eyes dimmed under the repressed agony of those despairing sobs; but she approached and put a timid hand on the convulsed shoulder. "Linda, Linda," she said. "I wish, poor child, I could do something." And the tremor in her voice carried to the young aching heart. The girl did not raise her bowed head, but she reached up one strong, smooth hand, and quickly it was locked in Miss Belinda's. The latter's eyes regarded the open morocco box on the dresser, and noted the lustrous pearls lying on their white velvet. "That necklace means something special, I suppose," she thought, and winked away big drops from her own sight. "Maybe it'll do you good to cry, Linda," she said. "Did your father give you the beads, dear?" she added tenderly, and the smooth hand clutched hers tighter. After a minute more of the sobbing silence, Miss Belinda reached out her free hand and closed the morocco box. "I wouldn't look over these things yet," she said; and Linda freed her hand, and crossing her arms on the dresser rested her head upon them. "I never did anything for Father," she declared in a choked voice. Miss Barry thought this was probably true, and she winked hard in a big struggle with her New England conscience. "He didn't think that way," she replied at last. "Yes. Yes, he thought that way." "What do you mean, child?" "He left me." The words seemed wrenched from the depths of grief. Again Miss Barry's conscience objected to making the sweeping contradiction for which the occasion called. "How could he help that?" she asked at last, gently. "He couldn't help it, but perhaps I could have helped it," came the weary answer. "If I had been more to him--filled a larger place in his life--been a companion instead of just his pet--" Miss Barry felt coerced to extend meager comfort. "But your school, Linda. I know your time was all taken up." "Yes, because I let it be. I've wasted four years when I was old enough to have been a companion to Father." "Why, you had visits with him once a week. Supposing you had gone East to college." "That is something, no doubt," returned Linda, slowly lifting swollen eyes and looking listlessly out of the window; "but I didn't make myself count with him." "Nonsense, child," said Miss Barry, trying to speak stoutly. "That's morbid, isn't it?" Linda shook her head slowly, still with the dreary eyes looking into space. Miss Barry sank into the nearest chair, and regarded the stricken girl helplessly. "I know you suffer, too, Aunt Belinda," said the girl, at last. "I know I'm selfish, but life--everything--seems blotted out for me. It is only once in a while that I can feel anything." Linda recalled her far-away gaze and looked at her aunt. She saw her now, not as a negligible figure with too-long earrings and too-thin hair, brushed with a New England thoroughness which concealed rather than exhibited what there was of it. Aunt Belinda was a fellow sufferer, and Linda recognized it, but without sympathy. She turned back to the sorting of the articles in the open drawer. Her handbag lay there, and a piece of paper projected from it. She took out the crumpled leaf, and remembered how on one of those remote happy days she had gone to Mrs. Porter's studio and discovered her departure. She had torn off a leaf of the calendar, and seeing no place to bestow it had crumpled it and placed it in her bag. She straightened it now, reflecting on the date, and how little she had known then that it was one of the days she would now give half her life to recall. The clearly printed words looked up at her, and her eyes rested on them heavily. "Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree; and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree." In the present passionate longing to escape from her nightmare, the words seemed significant. Oh, if they could be anything but words! If there were any hope! Her lips moved as she read the verse again. Her aunt was watching her, motionless, helpless, dim-eyed. "Did you ever hear this, Aunt Belinda?" she asked, and read the sentences aloud in her colorless voice. "I think I have," responded Miss Barry. "It's in the Bible, I think." "Yes, it's in Isaiah," returned the girl, her eyes on the paper. "I tore it off Mrs. Porter's calendar. It's a calendar of promises. What's the use of promises made thousands of years ago?" Her breath caught in her throat. "Mrs. Porter is very fond of you, Linda," ventured Miss Barry. The girl nodded. She seemed to see the soft light in her teacher's eyes. The calendar message would probably find response in her optimism. "We took a course in the Bible at school," she went on. "We had to; but Mrs. Porter says she reads it because she likes to. I gave her this calendar as a kind of a joke." Miss Barry made no comment on the dreary irreverence. "I haven't told you," she replied, "that Mrs. Porter is keeping house in my cottage." The girl turned her slow regard upon the speaker. "When the right time comes," went on Miss Barry, "I want you should go back with me, Linda." "I wish to stay here," returned the girl quickly, "and, Aunt Belinda, I don't want you to wait. I know you must long to get home, and there's nothing, really nothing, for you to wait for here. All I wish is to be quiet and just stay where--" her throat closed. She glanced once more at the calendar leaf, and started to drop it in the basket, but changed her mind and put it back in the open drawer. "All in good time, Linda," was the reply. "Here are some flowers Mr. King brought you." The girl turned with a frowning glance toward the long box. "He seems to have plenty of money to waste," she said, "in spite of Barry & Co.'s troubles. Probably his own nest is well feathered." "Why, my child!" exclaimed Miss Barry, bewildered at sight of that strange fire which again illumined the heavy eyes. "What can you have against that poor young man?" Linda's lassitude seemed to drop from her like a garment. She rose suddenly, took the flower box, and moving to the door pushed it into the hall with her foot, and closed the door upon it. Then she stood, her back against the wall, tall in her white garments, and pressed a hand to her throat, choking with her sudden passion. "Not much against him," she said in a stifled voice, her eyes shining upon her bewildered companion. "Bertram King murdered my father. That's all!" CHAPTER VIII A BUSINESS INTERVIEW Miss Barry's brow was troubled as, that afternoon, in much harassment of mind, she wended her way to the home of her elder niece. Miss Belinda had always approved of Harriet. She was wont to declare with energy that there was no nonsense about Harriet. To-day when she went into the apartment she found the young wife in a violet tea-gown sorting a pile of little stockings. "Harry does go through his clothes so," were her first words after their greeting. "Give me a needle, for mercy's sake!" exclaimed Miss Barry avidly, pulling off her black gloves. "If I could feel for five minutes that I was of some use, it would put flesh on my bones." "Then take off your hat, Aunt Belinda, and in a few minutes we'll have a cup of tea. Selma has taken Harry down into the park, but he'll be back before you go. Do you know, he misses Linda dreadfully? You must tell her when you go back. He was asking for her again this morning. There's scarcely been a day since she left school that she hasn't had a romp with him until--and he adores her. Perhaps it would divert her if I should bring him over. What do you think?" The traces of grief and strain were still in Harriet's face, and she asked the question with solicitude. Miss Barry seated herself by the dainty workstand, and seizing the little stockings with eagerness shook her head. "I find my best way is not to think, Harriet," she said emphatically. "Linda acts like a sleep-walker most of the time, but this morning she got to looking over some things in her bureau drawer, and she's been crying her eyes out." Harriet dashed away a quick tear as she sat opposite her aunt, replacing a button on a little white blouse. "I do want to get her away from here, and I broached the subject this morning, but she took fright at once." Miss Belinda's busy needle ran in and out of the spot where a small active toe had peeped through. "I wish," replied Harriet, "that there were something in the world she _must_ do. There's no such blessing at a time like this as not to be able to brood. A husband and baby have rights that can't be put aside. I do wish Linda cared for some one of the men who admire her. I don't believe there's one who would let the changes in her fortune weigh with him at all. I hope, Aunt Belinda, it doesn't hurt your feelings to see me wearing this colored gown." The speaker lifted her eyes to her aunt's somber black. "Father never believed in mourning, but he was a prominent man, and I want to wear the badge of respect before people who would expect it. I'll wear black in the street, but Henry and little Harry would feel the gloom of it in the house, and though Henry hasn't said anything about it, I have decided not to wear mourning at home." "You've got a lot of sense," was her aunt's response. "I believe in that." "We can't mourn any less," and Harriet dashed away another tear. "No girls ever had a better father than ours." Miss Belinda lifted her eyes from her work. "Mr. King called this morning, and brought more flowers for Linda. If flowers would heal hearts Linda would never shed another tear, but she can't seem to bear them. She won't let one blossom be in the room." "I suppose they look too cheerful," said Harriet. "How is poor Bertram?" "Thin as a rail. Looks as if he had the weight of the nation on him, and I suppose he has. I guess from what I hear these days are terribly hard on him." "Terribly," echoed Harriet. "Henry's just heart-broken over the situation." "Has Henry lost money in Barry & Co.? Don't tell me if you don't want to." "No. Of course Henry's young, and has never had much money to invest, but Father never wanted family connections mixed up in his business. I know that sounds as if he didn't feel certain of his propositions; but there isn't a man who knew Father and Barry & Co. who wouldn't tell you he believed in their absolutely honest intention. I've had only one talk with Bertram about the business since--but he called me up this noon and said he must see Linda and me together as soon as she is able." Miss Barry dropped her work again, and regarded her niece's dark head, drooped over her work. "You like Bertram King, don't you?" "Indeed I do." Harriet looked up in surprise. "Henry and I both love him like a brother." "Well, I just wanted to know if you felt him worthy of all confidence." "Oh, you've heard that talk, have you?" "What talk?" asked Miss Belinda cautiously. "About his being the moving spirit of Barry & Co. That always irritates Henry and me beyond everything. As if my father were invertebrate, and couldn't think for himself." "Well, Linda believes it. That is, she believes Mr. King had an abnormal influence over your father. In fact, she blames Mr. King for the disaster." "She's in an abnormal state herself. That's what's the matter. I know her grief at losing Father is profound, and no doubt the money loss means more to her than it does to me. Henry and I have talked it over, and we feel it will be just as well for Harry if he doesn't have so much money to look forward to as we expected. With Linda it's different. It does deprive her of much that perhaps she expected to do. We don't know what her thoughts have been all these days she has lain there so quiet. She thinks Bertram is to blame for taking on that irrigation business?" "To blame for everything. She--she used some pretty strong language this morning." "Oh, but that's Linda," responded Harriet quickly. "She's always extreme." "Do you think Mr. King is in love with her?" asked Miss Barry bluntly. Her niece looked up curiously. "Why? Do you?" Miss Belinda made a protesting gesture with one stockinged hand. "My dear! You'll never prove anything of that sort by me. I think he's all stirred up about her, but if she's right, that might be remorse on his part. He looked to me this morning as if some able-bodied woman ought to take him in her lap and rock him." Harriet smiled and returned to her sewing. "Bertram has always seemed too wrapped up in business to care for girls. He likes to tease Linda and play with her, but her interests have all been apart from him. Henry and I have often talked about it, and said how nice it would be if they should care for each other. I should dislike to believe that he was the cause of our misfortunes; but Henry says that is the rumor and the general feeling. Even Father Radcliffe credits it, but I'm too loyal to Daddy to believe that a young man like Bertram could sway him." "I think," said Miss Barry, "that you girls should give him the interview he wants, and soon. He needs all the help he can get." "I know he does. I promised him we would see him to-morrow." Miss Belinda glanced up. "But you haven't Linda's consent." "She must consent. It will be good for her. It's what she needs, to have something she must do." "She's so fond of Mrs. Porter I thought she'd be glad to go home with me and join her, but she shrinks from everything like a sensitive plant." "She has leisure to think of what she wants, you see," returned Harriet. "I haven't. Perhaps she will come and make me a visit." "Well, you come back with me to the house this afternoon, anyway, and make the plan for to-morrow. I think an interview with Mr. King is just what Linda needs to make her sense what the poor fellow is going through." Accordingly, a little later Harriet donned her black street clothes, and accompanied her aunt to the house on the avenue. They found Linda in her room, stretched in a _chaise longue_ and looking out of the open window at the June sky. An incessant whirr of motors filled the spacious room. "Don't get up," said Harriet, as the white figure moved to rise. She kissed her sister. "I'm so glad to see you dressed. You must soon get over to us. Harry talks about you every day." As this declaration called forth no answering smile, Miss Barry left the sisters together, shaking her head as she went. "I'm glad it isn't my job to persuade her," she thought. Harriet came straight to the point. "I can't stay long, Linda, for I'm never away when Harry has his supper, but I came over to tell you that we must meet Bertram to-morrow." "I can't," returned Linda, her eyes looking startled but determined. "Yes, you can, dear. We can see him right up here if necessary, but it isn't fair not to answer his questions, and help him as much as we can." "He doesn't need to ask any questions. He knows a hundred times as much about it all as we do; and no one can help him. He never wanted any one to help him." "Well, we won't discuss that, dear. He must have our sanction about certain things, and every hour counts. Surely you'll bestir yourself for the honor of Barry & Co." "For the honor of Barry & Co.," repeated Linda, in the tone of one whose fires have burned out. So when the appointed hour arrived next day, it found Linda dressed and ready to descend the stairs at her sister's summons. Any effort was better than to allow King to come up to her room. A stranger he was and a stranger he should always remain. The first sight of her, white and tall in her thin black gown, was a shock to King. The lips held in a tight line, the colorless face and manner, were in such marked contrast to the exuberance of the Linda he had last seen, that he marveled at the change, with a sinking of his tired heart and brain. She might well have been disturbed by his own appearance, but she scarcely looked at him. Miss Belinda was present. The four sat around the massive table in the den; while King slowly and carefully outlined the business situation. Lambert Barry's will left bequests to various charities, ten thousand dollars to his sister in addition to the investment from which for years she had drawn what he called her allowance, and the rest of his fortune was to be divided equally between his two daughters. Bertram paused, and Linda met his hollow gaze. "I judge the chief thing you wish to know from us," she said, "is whether we wish to give more than the law compels, to satisfy creditors." King wondered whether grief could be responsible for the inimical look in her eyes. "Mr. Barry, the day before he died," he returned, "expressed a longing to prevent as far as possible suffering resulting from the--the--misfortunes of Barry & Co." "I'm sure of that," returned Linda. "We spoke of it together one evening. I said that would be Barry & Co.'s way." "Did you see trouble coming, Linda?" asked King gravely. The girl was sitting straight and tense, and her eyes did not drop from his tired gaze. "No. I thought at that time there was no trouble in the world that could touch my wise, honorable father." Miss Barry moved uncomfortably, watching the girl's expression. "I'd like to say," she put in, "that the ten thousand my brother left me I want should go to make up arrears as far as it can." "Dear Aunt Belinda," said Harriet, putting a hand on her aunt's knee as she sat next her. "Now, we don't any of us want to be quixotic," she went on in her moderate manner. "We want to be calm and sensible." "Harriet," her younger sister turned to her, "we do want to be quixotic, if that is what the world calls returning money secured under false pretenses. So far as I am concerned, there is only one possibility for peace for me, and that is to keep our father's memory as clean before the world as it always has been. I can speak only for my share, of course, but my wish is this: that this house, the motors, and all these belongings, be sold--" "You can keep your electric, Linda," interrupted King. She brought her eyes back to him. "You cannot tell me what I may keep," she answered, slowly and incisively, and the young man frowned wonderingly at her tone. "I want everything sold," she went on. "I want my share of money, property, life insurance, everything, added together, and applied _pro rata_ to the losses of every one who put a misplaced trust in Barry & Co." "Linda--" began Bertram gently. She rose suddenly and turned upon him, her nostrils dilating. "Tell me this, Bertram King. Have you a dollar invested in the Antlers Irrigation Company?" King started to his feet, and viewed the girl in amazement. Her brow was furrowed, and the eyes in her white face blazed. "Speak," she insisted. A flood of color rushed to the man's very forehead as he realized her open enmity. In silence they stood thus for a moment. "I refuse to answer you," he said at last. Her gaze swept him scornfully. "It is what I expected." Then she turned to her sister, speaking gently. "Settle it between you now, Harriet. I suppose I may dispose of my own, and you know my wishes. They won't change." After she had gone out, Harriet seized Bertram's hand as he stood dazed. "Forgive her, Bertram," she said anxiously. "I do believe she's nearly crazy." He sat down again, very pale, and with no comment proceeded to sort his papers. Miss Barry's earrings were trembling, and she thought with longing of the peace of her "Gull's Nest." CHAPTER IX CORRESPONDENCE Before Miss Barry's train had reached Chicago, Linda had received a telegram conveying sympathy from Mrs. Porter. A pile of notes and letters lay now unopened on her desk. Her sister had read the telegram at the time of its arrival, and left it on the table beside Linda's bed, where one day she read it; but the girl refused the least pressure on her wound from even the most friendly and delicate fingers. This very afternoon, when, tingling with excitement and antagonism, she swept from the room, she passed the maid who was at the door, just bringing in the mail. Somewhat hesitatingly the girl offered the letters to her young mistress. She and all the other servants stood in awe of the suffering that had so altered the jolly, careless, imperious young woman. Linda, her heart beating tumultuously with its indignation, accepted the package automatically, and went on upstairs to her room. She raised her hand to her throat in the effort to stop its choking, and threw down the letters. The handwriting on the top one was familiar and full of happy association. Here was one person who loved her, and understood her, and whose patience had never failed. With the picture vividly before her of the faces of her scandalized sister and aunt, she caught up this letter and held it to her breast, her large gaze fixed straight ahead. The kindly expression, the humorous smile, the loving eyes of her teacher as they had rested on her hundreds of times, strove with the other picture. She felt she could bear to have Mrs. Porter talk to her. She moved to the door and locked it, conscious suddenly that she was trembling; then she sank into a chair and opened the letter. _My dear Linda_ (it began),-- I have waited a full week to write to you because I felt that at first you wouldn't care to read a letter even from me. Do you notice that "even"? Yes, I feel sure you love me as I do you, sincerely, and it gives me courage to talk to you just as if you were lying beside me on these sun-warmed rocks, with the cool wind trying in spurts to snatch off the duck hat that is shading my eyes. It can't succeed, for the hat is tied on with the white veil you gave me. There is a little scent of orris in it still, marking it as yours, and giving me the pleasant feeling of one of your "bear's hugs." I am sorry to be a thousand miles off from my little girl's troubles, and so all this week I have been trying to know that the opposite of this sense of separation is the truth; that all that I love in you is mine still, and that the greater part of what I could do for you if I were there it is my privilege to do here. The personal touch, the interchange of loving looks, is dear to our human sense, but sometimes even these get in the way of the loftier, broader mission which God's children may perform for one another. I have been thinking much about your father, a man whose keen sense of honor, and large charity, will be discerned more and more clearly when the present confusion is straightened out. Linda's suddenly blinded eyes closed, and she again held the letter to her breast a minute before going on. * * * * * He is incapable of wrong intention. Do you notice that I say "is"? I wonder if you are feeling that sense of continuous immortal life which is your rightful and best comfort at this time. All that you loved best in your father were traits which your hands could not touch. Your heart and mind only discerned them. They are yours still, and they were that real part of him which God sustained and now sustains, and which were the reflections of His Light and Love. I cannot touch your body now, any more than if it had ceased to dwell upon this earth,--any more than you can touch your father's,--but that makes you no less real to me. My tall little Linda speaks to me in her generosity, her lovingness, her gayety, as vividly as if you were beside me this minute, and it would be so if I knew I was never to look upon your face again. "The flesh profiteth nothing," the Bible says; and it is one of those lightning flashes of truth that glance away from us until the trained thought is sensitized to receive it; but after that, little by little it proves itself. Perhaps I am talking too long, but please know that I am thinking of you daily, with thoughts full of love. The Comforter that Jesus promised us is a real Existence, and "underneath are the everlasting arms." "As one whom his mother comforteth so will I comfort you, saith the Lord." How I love to think of that when I think of my dear girl. I found those words a few weeks ago on the calendar you gave me, and now I give the wonderful promise back to you. Say it over to yourself, dear child, even if you don't now see how or when it will come true, for His promises are sure. It only rests with us to open our hearts to receive them. Your loving friend, MAUD PORTER. Linda's lip was caught between her teeth, and her brow frowning, as she finished reading. She turned the letter back to read again the sentences about her father. Here was no uncertain note. She crumpled the sheets between her hands and closed her eyes. "Oh, God, You have taken away my father. Help us now to clear his name!" It was a cry from her heart, the first time in all this eternity of days that her thought had turned to the Higher Power with any feeling save resentment. She saw her friend lying on the sun-warmed rocks in the sunlit atmosphere of a joyous June day, longing to help her, longing to impart to her the sustaining calm of her own faith, and gratitude woke feebly in her. She rose, and carried the letter to her bedroom, folding it again in its envelope. It did not belong in her desk. Such a message from the woman who had long been her ideal was a thing apart. She placed it in the back of a drawer in her dresser, and there her hand encountered a scrap of paper which she drew forth. Its clear lettering stood out against the ivory-white background. "Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree--" She read no further. The calendar again! She recalled also that leaf which in the studio she had marked for Mrs. Porter's reproach:-- "When thy father and thy mother forsake thee, then the Lord will take thee up." She dropped the papers and covered her eyes again with her hands. "Oh, Mother, Mother!" she moaned above her breath. "How could God, if there is a God, comfort me as you would!" Supposing immortality, in which every Sunday in church she declared her belief, were really true. Supposing her father and mother were together. Supposing her mother were now consoling him for his mistakes,--for Bertram King's mistakes,--would that thought not bring consolation? Her worried father! Her lonely father! She sank into a chair, weeping helplessly. She had worn his pearls and danced, while he was lonely! If she could only die and go to her father and mother. Life here was ruined, and no one needed her. Harriet was engrossed with her family. Aunt Belinda's heart was in her home, stern duty alone holding her in this place. After a few minutes the mourner lifted her bowed head, pulled a sheet of paper toward her, and wrote:-- * * * * * I am bleeding. Please write to me again. LINDA. When she had addressed the note to Mrs. Porter, she washed her face and made herself ready for the tête-à-tête dinner with her aunt, which would shortly be served in her sitting-room. She had never entered the dining-room since the last meal she ate there with her father. She set her door open in order that Aunt Belinda should not be afraid to come in, and shortly the much-tried lady did appear, her lips set in a line of endurance. Miss Barry had never approved less of her niece than at the moment of the girl's exit from that business interview. She gave a sharp glance now at her, sitting as usual with eyes gazing from the window at nothing, and hands loosely folded in her lap. "Harriet left her good-bye for you," she said. "She had to hurry home for Harry's supper." "Yes," responded Linda. Miss Belinda sat down, and the gaze she fixed on her niece waited for an explanation or an apology. None came. Miss Barry cleared her throat. "Harriet wishes to put herself on record," she said distinctly, "as entirely disowning any such feeling toward Mr. King as you expressed." "You know he is her husband's cousin," returned Linda passively. "One must keep harmony in a family." "More than that, Linda Barry," continued her aunt crisply, "that young man would have had to be guilty of designing your father's downfall to deserve such words and such a manner as yours." The girl eyed the speaker steadily, and again the fire of excitement glowed in her look. "You saw that he could not answer my question." "I saw that he would not." "It would be a good plan for you to talk with some of the prominent business men of the town," remarked Linda, the light going out of her eyes. "I don't need any business man to tell me that that poor boy is about used up--and in whose service, pray? Answer me that, Linda Barry." "Mammon," was the sententious reply. "Pshaw!" ejaculated her aunt. "A clever man like your father didn't trust that man for no reason. Harriet's and my heart just ached for the poor fellow this afternoon. I thought for a minute after you went out that he was going to faint." "Yes," returned Linda listlessly; "I suppose he had been sure no one would hold him in any way responsible." The servant here came in to spread the little table for dinner, while Miss Barry, her hands tightly locked together, gave her indignant thoughts free rein, and followed Bertram King to his room at the club. Had she really been able to see him, she would have witnessed his finding upon his arrival a letter in Mrs. Porter's handwriting. His white, stoical face did not change while he read it:-- * * * * * _Dear Bertram_,-- I want to send you a few lines to the club, because I feel sure there will be a quieter atmosphere there than at the office these troublous days. There is never an hour in which my thoughts do not go to you and Linda, fellow sufferers and both so dear to me. I can scarcely wait for the day when your duties will let you leave Chicago and come here. Doubtless Linda will arrive soon, and here you will both find healing for your sorrow, and if it is right, find each other. She will have a double reason for nearness to you as the chief earthly link with her dear father, and here in this simplicity and quiet the real things of life are more easily discernible. Complications seem to have no place in these broad, harmonious spaces, and both you dear ones can forget the fevers of sorrowful excitement. Let me hear from you. Yours as ever, MAUD. It was by return mail that Mrs. Porter received the answer to this letter. She opened it with eagerness:-- * * * * * _Dear Maud_,-- Thank you for your letter and far more for your affection. It is some comfort, while I am locking horns with enemies, or endeavoring to untangle labyrinths, to know that there's a good little woman ready to coddle me when I have time to be coddled. I see you remember the heart-to-heart talk you drew me into one day--and I admit I was easy to draw. Now I ask you to forget all that I said if you can. My wishes and plans have undergone a complete change, and I am glad you are the only person living who knows what my designs and hopes were, for they have vanished. Pardon brevity. I'm "that druv," as your Maine friends would have it, that I don't know whether I'm afoot or horseback. I'll look forward, however, to an hour when you and I can elope to some Arcadia for a few weeks, and I'll let you know when such a day looms on the horizon. Your devoted cousin, BERTRAM. Mrs. Porter's face had slowly undergone a change from eagerness to dazed and sad surprise. "I wouldn't have believed it!" she soliloquized, as she let the sheet fall. "People have so often said that Bertram cared for the dollar mark above all else, but I laughed at them. How I hope she doesn't care! How I hope it!" CHAPTER X THE SPELL BREAKS That spot in Miss Belinda's heart which had softened toward her niece in the latter's misery of bereavement bid fair to harden over again every time she thought of Linda's attitude toward Bertram King. It was bad enough to harbor the absurd theory that so young a man had been able to mould the opinions and actions of his employer; but it was unthinkable that in this time of grief and stress the girl had been able to sneer at him, and so evidently cut him to the heart with her accusation. Every time that scene rose before Miss Barry's mental vision her earrings quivered again. What did these weary days that she was undergoing amount to? Linda was civil to her, but indifferent to everything and everybody. The girl made no effort to conceal that the visits of her own sister were a weariness, and, unthinkable to Harriet, she made excuses not to see little Harry. Day after day of the big empty house and the silent girl, the constant whirr of motors through the wide-open windows, caused Miss Barry to find that she was guilty of nerves. Again and again she hinted to Linda that the sea air was what she needed. The girl was usually deaf to the suggestion, or else returned, gently and civilly, it is true, to pleading with her aunt not to remain longer, protesting that she was entirely recovered and able to be left alone. One day her answer became more frank. "Mrs. Porter has written me that she is trying to get Bertram to come there to rest," she said. Miss Barry gazed at the speaker. "Sits the wind in that quarter?" thought she. Her earrings quivered again, and she counted ten. Of what use was it to contend with a statue? At last she spoke. "I only wish we could do something for him," she said, "but it won't be that. I met him on the street yesterday, and he said it wouldn't be possible for him to get away before autumn." Linda making no reply to this, Miss Barry stared at her for a minute more, then sought her own pleasant, spacious room. Hers was not the pen of a ready writer, but she sat down now at her well-appointed desk, and wrote a letter. _Dear Mrs. Porter_,-- I begin to see a loophole of light on our situation. I wrote you a week ago how crazy I am to come home. I'd like to burn every devilish automobile in Chicago, I'm so sick of their noise; but Linda's kept on just as obstinate as a mule, saying she must stay, but wanting me to go. I can't go unless she does. She's taken against everybody. Harriet thinks she's out of her mind because she refuses to see the wonderful baby; and I assure you I'd be squeamish about leaving her, for I couldn't be sure she wouldn't do away with herself, she's so morbid. I haven't told you the greatest proof of her morbidness (perhaps it ought to be morbidity, but no matter)--she acts like the devil incarnate to your cousin Bertram King. You know you told me he wanted to marry her. Well, I guess he's graduated from that notion. At any rate, it seems she thinks he led her father into the business deal that brought on most of this trouble--that big irrigation project out West. My brother wasn't anybody that could be led by the nose, but Linda won't hear to reason, and my patience with her is exhausted. Well, this morning when I returned to the charge about going home, it came out that she was afraid Mr. King was going to you. Now he isn't, because he can't get away for months to come. So won't you write her that you've given up trying to get him, and that you want to see her--if you can make up your mind to a whopper--and that you hope for my sake she'll exert herself and bring me home! That's a good one! Bring me home! If any one can persuade her, you can, for so far as I can find out you're the only person on earth she hasn't taken against. Sometimes I speak of you, sort of carelessly, and say I hope you ain't feeling it too much responsibility to take care of the cottage when you'd _hoped_ to have an entire rest! And if she hears what I say she looks at me real human for an instant. Once I asked her if she wouldn't sit down to that little piano in her sitting-room and let me hear her voice. Law! You ought to have seen the way her eyes turned on me. Truly I never saw anybody who could look so near as if they had a knife in their heart as she can. I'm getting as nervous as a cat. After we've dragged through a day, then comes on the night, when everything on wheels goes past our house. If Gatling guns came small enough I'd rig one in my window and do some of the shooting myself. Now, you do your best to fix it up, Mrs. Porter, and if you can just get us to the Cape, then you can go off somewhere else where there won't be any wet blanket to spoil your fun. Linda ought to be outdoors; but I've never got her out once since we came back from the cemetery. She asks every day if the cars are sold. She has it on the brain to pay back everybody who lost anything in the catastrophe. I'm hanging all my hopes on you, and am Yours truly, BELINDA BARRY. While reading this letter Mrs. Porter's cheeks grew pink, and upon finishing she fell into a prolonged brown study. So it was not mercenary considerations which had altered Bertram's aspirations. Her heart went out to him. She had never known till now how much she cared for Bertram. The impulse attacked her to leave this peaceful scene and take the first train for the spot where her loved ones were in such distress; but Miss Barry's adjuration must be heeded. To get Linda away from those scenes and associations was surely the first necessity. Mrs. Porter found she had to meet and banish some resentment toward the unhappy girl who could so ruthlessly add to another's woe. But she had Linda's appeal. When one is bleeding one may be ruthless without realizing; so again Mrs. Porter sat down and addressed herself to the task of helping the sufferer: _My dear Linda_ (she wrote),-- I'm not on the warm, breezy rocks to-day. A nor'easter is gathering, and I am sitting in Miss Barry's living-room, where her good little Blanche has let me build a roaring, glorious fire of birch logs. It seems almost wicked to burn anything so beautiful as the white birch, and yet anything so airy and poetical should not, perhaps, be allowed to wither and fall into decay. Better, perhaps, that it should be caught up in a chariot of flame. If you knew how lovely it is here, how sweet the smells, how pure and clear the silence of all save Nature's sounds, you would, I am sure, take the first train out of Chicago. I have given up the hope of persuading Bertram to leave. He would far rather die right there than leave one duty to your father unperformed. I shall hope to go back in August and get him to go West with me for a time before my teaching begins. I think of you every day, my little Linda. I received your note. We do bleed when we are wounded; but blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. The blessing of mourning is the finding of real comfort--spiritual comfort; the oil of joy for mourning; the realization that we need never mourn; that this world is not all; that no good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly; that no blessing is ever taken away from God's child. We hear people say, "Shan't I believe the evidence of my own senses?" I once heard a lecturer enlarge upon that theme, showing that our whole education is largely for the purpose of instructing us away from the evidence of our senses, from learning that the sun does not rise or set,--through the whole list of deceitful appearances. If I believed what I see now, I should say that the sun had left the world to storm and darkness, but we know that the glorious sun and cloudless firmament are there to-day as truly as on the brilliant yesterday, and we have no fear that we shall not see it again. The deceitful appearance which you have now to recognize is that your father has died and left you. Life never dies, and Love is immortal. Life is progress, too, and he knows more and greater and happier things than he knew here. Every right motive and act of his life is receiving its logical reward, and opening out new channels for progress. Let us not think of him in the flesh, but in the spirit. Let us not dwell sadly on his mortal harassment or disappointments. How do we know but such thoughts are a drag upon his spirit? Let us speed him on with our own love and courage, and let us try every day to harbor no thought that will hamper our souls and make us less fit to join him. It is easier to sink down under a blow than to rise and go on; and yet rising and going on is what will make you keep step with your loved one and not be left behind. Your sister has an advantage over you, because she _must_ rise and go on. If you are finding that the strong leading-spirit, Linda Barry, is faltering and weak now, you are making a blessed discovery; finding that the strength of the human will is not the true strength, and that like a little child you can turn to your Heavenly Father, and receive from Him strength which no mortal blow can destroy. Keep the fire of Love glowing in your heart, and you will find that it is the fuel that will make strong and bright every faculty. Unselfishness follows where that fire burns; but withdraw the fuel and the heart is cold, and those about you feel the chill. I am hoping daily to hear that you are ready to bring your aunt home. Has she ever told you the pretty story of her girlish day-dreams on these rocks, and how her barefooted brother resolved mentally that he would be a prosperous man some day, and give her a home right here? He was able to fulfill that boyish resolve, and somehow this cottage is to me very full of him. Many men would have forgotten in the rush of business to carry out such a plan, but not your father. I can imagine with just what refreshment his thoughts flew here from the clatter of the city. I am sure Miss Barry's come here every day, and I am sure she will be very happy when you decide to leave. I know you are not detaining her willingly, but in her place I should feel as she does about coming without you. Do you know that I want very much to see you? Here in the nest of your dear father's generous, loving thought, I am resting, and waiting for you to rest too. You'll feel nearer to him than in the crashing city. Come and try. Yours lovingly, MAUD PORTER. Miss Barry had brought this thick letter to her niece, and though her hands were busied with some work as she sat at a distance from her, she glanced furtively at the girl from time to time, striving to glean from her face some hope as to its effect. When Linda finished reading, she dropped the sheets and looked up so quickly that she caught her aunt's inquiring glance. Miss Barry flushed guiltily, and looked back at her work. "How soon do you think we could go to the Cape, Aunt Belinda?" In her excitement and eagerness Miss Barry's words stuck in her throat. "Why--ahem!--how about--how about to-morrow?" "Let us go to-morrow," said Linda. CHAPTER XI EASTWARD HO! Fred Whitcomb felt his eyes sting, but he scorned to wipe them as he strode manfully up Michigan Avenue. Instead, he scowled and set his teeth and threw his shoulders back, as one who yearns to meet the foe hand to hand. His opportunity was near, for Bertram King, having forgotten some papers, was walking hastily toward the club, and Fred, blinded and distrait, turned a corner and ran directly into him. The lighter and taller man seized his assailant. "Don't do that again, Freddy. It's a wonder I didn't go over like a tenpin." "I didn't see you," growled Freddy, winking hard. "I gathered that," remarked King, and was hurrying on, but Whitcomb held him. "Why weren't you at the station to see them off?" he demanded. "I thought of course you'd be there." "More room for you, Freddy," returned the other, looking steadily into his friend's belligerent eyes. "I don't see how you could neglect Linda at such a time." "Do you think she missed me?" asked King quietly. "Of course she did," hotly. "I found out only by accident by what train they were going. They didn't let anybody know, Miss Barry said; but of course you knew. I'd--I'd hardly know Linda." A terrific lump rose in the speaker's throat, and blinded again by grief he turned hastily away to continue his march. This time Bertram detained him. Freddy tried to escape, but it was a grip of steel on his arm. "Come into the club a minute," said King, and his companion obeyed the leading. At least it would be a place where he could use his handkerchief secure from observation. "Now, you're not taking me to your room," objected the younger man, as his captor, not relaxing the hold on his arm, led him toward the elevator. "Guess again, Freddy," said Bertram; and the visitor, after a moment of holding back, found himself in the elevator. When they were in King's room, and the door closed, the host indicated a chair, but the guest remained standing. Bertram smiled a little wistfully as he regarded the other's youthful strength, thinking his face, in its present condition of repressed emotion, looked as it must have done when he was ten. "What do you want with me?" asked Freddy, his head held high. "I wish I knew what you use for a hair tonic," said Bertram, passing his hand over his own fair locks, beginning to feel thin at the crown. "Don't be a--What have you brought me up here for?" "To let you pull yourself together for one thing. You were in a fair way to assault and batter all down the avenue." "You--you _fish_!" ejaculated the visitor, changing his mind suddenly, and dropping into the offered chair. Quite frankly he covered his flushed face with his handkerchief and choked into it. King sat down near an open window, and waited for the paroxysm to pass. "It breaks me up completely to see Linda like that," said Whitcomb at last, wiping his eyes and shaking his shoulders impatiently. He faced his host, and realized the latter's appearance. No one could look seedier than King, he thought. "Of course I know you're rushed," he added, "but in your place I'd rather have sat up all night than not to see her off; and the humorous part of it is that I've been believing you were crazy about her." The two regarded each other for a silent space, and for the first time there crept into the younger man's mind the cold suspicion that the change in Linda's fortune had affected Bertram King. Even so, it could not have made such a brute of him as to let Linda creep off alone! "Harriet was there, and Henry," he said, just for the sake of speaking, while he strove with this strange idea, one which had elements of relief for himself while it added fuel to his indignation with King. "Of course," answered the other coolly. "So that was a pretty good bodyguard, for you're always a host, Freddy." "There was very little I could do for her," declared Whitcomb, "and I'm sure you--you hurt her feelings." "I'm glad you were there," said King. "You've no right to be glad," retorted Freddy. The older man smiled. "Isn't it magnanimous in me to be glad she's wearing your violets instead of mine, eating your chocolates instead of mine, reading your magazines instead--" "Stop!" said Whitcomb, raising his hand imperatively. "It's sacrilege to joke about her." "You're a nice chap, Freddy," declared King slowly. The visitor rose. "Don't you dare to patronize me," he said. "Thanks to your cursed bank I'm a _poor_ chap. I'd begun to hope--to hope--What do you care what I hoped? You're as cold-blooded as that irrigation swindle that's fooled us all." A little slow color crept over Bertram King's lantern jaws. "Sit down," he said briefly. "I brought you up here to talk about that. You didn't attend the meeting of the stockholders last night." "No. I was doing errands for Miss Barry; and I didn't care to sit there and listen to empty platitudes." King hesitated a moment, but he put constraint upon himself. Freddy was desperately in love, and had had a desperate disappointment. "I don't blame you for feeling sore," he said at last, "but I believe I have good news for you. The irrigation proposition would have gone through all right if the panic in that region hadn't suddenly knocked the bottom out for the time being. It's a legitimate thing, and we were able to show the stockholders last night that if they would be patient and give us time, we would issue notes and the bank depositors would be paid." "What?" asked Whitcomb incredulously, and again sat down. King nodded. "The bank closed, but it didn't fail, and if Barry & Co.'s people will trust us, I firmly believe everybody is going to have his own--say in a year or two." "Two!" echoed Whitcomb, the hopeful light fading somewhat. "Of course. Money in the bank, boy." King rose and advanced to him and slapped him on the shoulder. "You don't need it to live on." "No, I need it to get Linda," returned the other bluntly. Bertram smiled wanly, and balanced back and forth on his heels and toes. His visitor regarded him curiously. "I'll bet you've done some tall working on this," he said slowly. "No fish ever worked harder," admitted Bertram. "But when you knew it was your own fault--" suggested Whitcomb. King's quizzical eyes regarded the speaker. "That conviction does always make a fellow rather hump himself, Freddy." The caller rose. He didn't like the look in his host's face. All this heart-breaking business should be treated seriously. King looked worn, but he didn't look humble; and as Mr. Barry's factotum he had been frightfully neglectful of Linda this morning. No, Whitcomb didn't feel like shaking hands with him, even after King had lighted for him a beacon of hope. The caller suddenly assumed an abrupt, businesslike manner. "This won't do for me," he said. "So long, King," and he started precipitately for the door. One backward glance at his host, who was still standing with feet wide apart and thumbs hooked in his vest, gave him pause. King's face showed so plainly the battle he had fought. Freddy returned and took Bertram's hand and wrung it. "Do you know, I was sure you wanted Linda," he said, with sudden frankness. King's slender fingers gave his a viselike grip, and his lips smiled calmly. "It isn't so much a question of what we want as what she wants, is it?" he said. A cloud passed over Whitcomb's face, and again Bertram thought he could see exactly how Freddy had looked at the age of ten. "Don't you believe she'll ever want me?" he asked naïvely. Now that he knew King was out of the running--whether from mercenary reasons or otherwise--he could put the question as to an intimate friend of the family. King laughed softly for the first time since Lambert Barry's death. "Don't know, Freddy. If I were a girl I'd want you, I know that. You're all right." Whitcomb blushed and scowled; and as he took the elevator on its downward trip he reflected on Bertram King's power to irritate his fellowman. * * * * * Ensconced in their stateroom on the train for Boston, Miss Barry heaved a sigh of relief scarcely concealed by the mutter of the moving wheels. They had not taken a stateroom without protest from Linda on the ground of extravagance. Linda considering economy! It was a wonderful circumstance; but Miss Barry, anxious as she was to be gone, delayed their departure a few days to secure the room. Instinctively she felt that a door which she could close on her niece would give her a sense of security. She regarded her now, while the train gained swiftness, with something of the triumph the captor of an elusive, valuable wild animal might feel at seeing it safely in his possession. Linda, passive and white, did not resemble a wild creature at the present moment. The first thing she did after the train started was to withdraw the pin from the huge bunch of violets she had put on to please Whitcomb, and toss them over on the divan. Miss Barry, taking off her hat, watched her furtively. "Put my hat in the bag when you do yours, will you, Linda?" The girl looked vaguely surprised. It was long since she had performed a service for any one, and she even held her own hat a moment uncertainly, after she had removed it, as if she expected her aunt to take charge of it; and she looked at Miss Belinda questioningly. "Yes, put them both in, and hang them up over there." Miss Barry handed her the bags, leaned back in her corner, and sniffed. A dog wags its tail to express emotion. Miss Belinda sniffed--a dry, sharp little sound, which just now expressed determination. "It's time for her to give up sleep-walking," she thought, and she looked industriously out of the window. Linda's eyes fell to the hats, and she slowly performed the office, and more slowly climbed on the seat and hung up the bags. As Miss Barry noted the languid motions of the erstwhile captain of a basket-ball team, she realized that her niece was like a person convalescing from a siege of illness. Was she convalescing? Was she improving or retrograding? No matter which; they were going home, home to the Cape, where Miss Barry would not feel at a constant disadvantage; and her heart sang. Linda was too feeble to jump off the train, and they were as good as there. Miss Belinda sniffed again. Her eye fell on the violets. Linda had sunk back into her corner, her lips apart, her eyes languid. The train was very warm. An electric fan whirred above their door. Miss Barry leaned across and took up the violets. Whitcomb's face had been vibrant with emotion as he left them. "The poor boy!" thought Miss Barry. She had learned a number of masculine names through reading the different cards coming repeatedly with boxes of flowers for Linda; but Fred Whitcomb had been more pushing and insistent than the others. He had, as it were, often put his heart in Miss Belinda's hands to be offered to Linda on a salver; and in the stress of emotion this morning Miss Barry had been afraid once or twice that her niece was going to be kissed by proxy. She certainly felt sorry for Freddy Whitcomb, almost as sorry as for Bertram King, whose absence had moved her keenly. "Wouldn't you like to hold these? They're so refreshing," she said, holding out the violets toward their owner. The girl made a faint, protesting gesture with one hand, and shook her head. Miss Barry plunged her nose into the velvet depths, and looked over the bouquet at the white, immobile face in the opposite corner. "Ch-ch-_choo_, ch-ch-_choo_," went the wheels, faster, faster. Welcome sound. Sweet violets. The scattered fragrance of woodland places, massed together for the joy of woman, offered by an eager heart to a cold one. "Violet time is over at the Cape," she remarked. "What?" "I say, violet time's over at the Cape. Daisies and clover now, and the wild roses swelling up and getting ready." Even the preoccupied Linda observed a new vitality in her companion's face, and life in her eyes in place of endurance. "You're riding backward, Aunt Belinda. I didn't notice till this minute. Change with me." The girl leaned forward. "Sit still, child. It makes no difference to me." "Then come here beside me." Miss Barry hesitated. Once she would have declined on the ground of mutual comfort, but an overture from her captive was remarkable. "Well, if it won't crowd you," she said, and after a moment of reluctance she obeyed. "Don't you want to sit by the window?" asked the girl. "Law, no. I wish the artists who do the Castoria signs would adopt futurist methods." As she spoke, Miss Barry made herself as small as she could against the arm of the seat, and again caressed her nose with Freddy Whitcomb's violets. The divan opposite was filled with American Beauties, magazines, and bon-bon boxes. "I ought to put the flowers in water," she remarked. Linda's large, somber gaze rolled toward the display. "Yes, please do," she said. "H'm," thought Miss Barry as she rose. "One word for the flowers and two for herself. She wants 'em out of sight." "I think we ought to enjoy the violets," she said aloud. "Such a cabbage of 'em must have cost that boy a pretty penny, and they won't live only so long, anyway. Poor Mr. Whitcomb, didn't he look pretty near ready to have apoplexy when he got off!" "He's got over it by now," said Linda, in her quiet expressionless voice. "He's the kindest boy that ever lived. I didn't realize how many little things there were to attend to in leaving, or I'd have had Henry do them; but Mr. Whitcomb came and put himself at my disposal, and I certainly disposed of him, the good boy." "He is a good boy. He ought to hate us," declared the girl languidly. "Why's that?" "He told me a long time ago that he had invested in--in--" the speaker caught her lip under her teeth. "Now, now," returned Miss Barry soothingly, as the other paused. "He's young, and able to stand a few knockdowns. Every business man gets them sooner or later, and they're lucky when disaster comes early in their career instead of late. Now, now, Linda!" for the girl's handkerchief dried a drop stealing under her eyelid. "He adores you, the nice lad." "Don't you see that makes it harder--as if I ought to marry him to make up?" "Now, now!" Miss Barry tried to speak lightly. "He'd be worse than Shylock. I'll bet it's a hundred and thirty pounds when you're in good case. Aren't those candy boxes wonderful! I must take 'count of stock." She started up and laid the violets on the vacated seat. Linda looked at them. She could hear Freddy Whitcomb's voice as it broke boyishly on that last evening of her life:-- "I don't care anything about your father's money, Linda. I had a raise last week." Her hand fell gently on the velvet mass, and rested there. Miss Barry's Argus eyes observed the movement. CHAPTER XII EN ROUTE Miss Barry took the rest of the flowers and placed their stems in the washbowl, where the lovely blossoms lolled over awkwardly in an increasing haze of dust, after the manner of train flowers; then she stepped back to the divan and inspected the boxes of bon-bons, stuffed dates, mints, and so on. A flat tin box met her eye, and a note was tied against the cover. "I didn't notice that preserved ginger," she reflected, and picked up the box with satisfaction, for the confection was her favorite. Her own name appeared on the note in a small, close chirography which was unfamiliar. She slipped off the metal cord and opened the letter. Its beginning brought a smile to her lips, and a recollection of jocose passages between herself and the writer, away back in the Christmas holidays. _Dear Lady of the Earrings_ (she read):-- If you knew the circumstances under which I stopped to buy these coals to send to Newcastle, you would never doubt my devotion. However, I'll not pose, but hasten to tell you of the meeting to-night of stockholders and depositors from which I have just come. There was much antagonism to be overcome, and I'm beginning to feel a little dull in the upper story, so it wasn't an easy experience; but the outcome was so good that I slight my bed to tell you briefly that I now feel the first relief from the crushing pressure of the last few weeks. Those people could have put Barry & Co. in a hole out of which we couldn't climb, and some of them were bitter and inclined to do it; but the majority were willing to listen to my representations, and the minority were finally persuaded. We shall issue notes to everybody concerned, and they have agreed to wait and give Barry & Co. a chance to turn around, and I have good ground for hoping that the memory of that grand man, Lambert Barry, will be cleared of every particle of the reproach which some angry and disappointed people have been flinging about. This night has been a great epoch in my career, and if I anticipated that there were any more such coming to me, that little crib out in the lake would suit me for a downy couch. As it is, I will now surprise my neglected bed by getting into it before three G.M. Bon voyage, dear lady, and I hope you will sleep the better to-night for this message. I shall not communicate with Harriet until after you have gone. Sincerely yours, BERTRAM KING. Miss Barry had stood in the aisle during the reading of this epistle, too absorbed to notice the discomfort of lurching about. Now she held the letter for a space, in excited thought. Her thin face was flushed. She looked at Linda, whose gaze was fixed on the flat, flying landscape. The violets lay on the seat beside her, disregarded. Miss Barry's lips tightened. "She doesn't deserve to know," she thought. "Oh, that wonderful young man! That poor boy!" She seated herself opposite her traveling companion, and Linda languidly turning her head at the movement, her attention was caught by the fact that her aunt was wiping her glasses, and that her eyes were wet. An open letter lay in her lap. Miss Barry was keenly aware of King's failure to mention Linda in this matter so nearly concerning her. It was only the relief of the news to her own heart which softened her sufficiently not to be glad of this punishment to the cruel young sufferer opposite. She hoped remorse would follow the reading in Linda's case. She held out the letter in silence. The girl shrank and made a quick, protesting gesture. "I can't--I can't bear any more!" she said. "You can bear this," returned Miss Barry. "But you're crying!" "With joy, Belinda." When her aunt gave the girl her full name it meant either a climax of indignation or a moment of sacred solemnity. That she knew well. She regarded the letter with apprehension as she accepted it, and at once recognizing King's writing a sort of hard strength stole over her expression as she instinctively prepared to resist his statements. He was smooth and self-contained and clever. He could deceive Aunt Belinda and Harriet, but he could not deceive her. After a moment of vigorous application of her handkerchief to her eyes, Miss Barry put on her spectacles again, and leaning back in the seat deliberately prepared to watch the effect upon her niece of Bertram King's letter. Linda's lips, set firmly as she began, slowly relaxed as she read on, and her eyes grew darker. She began to breathe faster, and before she finished such an expression came over the young face that the older woman could no longer look, but closed her eyes and waited. It seemed to her a long time before she opened them again to find Linda regarding her. Life had revived in the large mourning eyes. "Thank you, Aunt Belinda. May I keep it a little while?" "You may keep it always," said Miss Barry solemnly. "It is more yours than mine. Isn't that a wonderful young man, Belinda Barry? Didn't I always say your father was too clever to trust the wrong people?" "Bertram is clever," said Linda simply. Miss Barry eyed her curiously, far from satisfied. "It's just," she thought, "as if some mental starch had gone all through the girl." She wondered if her niece had no regret, no shame, that she had put herself so beyond the pale that Bertram ignored her. "Really she is a handsome creature," thought Miss Barry, still regarding her vis-à-vis with some sternness. "I hope as soon as we get home you will make haste to tell Mr. King that you appreciate all he has done." "I do appreciate all he has done," said Linda, still with the exalted look in her eyes, "but he is doing his best to make up for it, Aunt Belinda." She leaned over far enough to put her hand on Miss Barry's knee, "If this comes out as Bertram hopes I will believe in God." "Why, my dear child!" exclaimed the other. "I tell you if a man like my father could be remembered in Chicago as touched by the faintest shade of dishonor, I should know that there couldn't be any God of justice." "Very well, Belinda," replied Miss Barry warmly; "if you think so highly of justice you'd better try to practice it more yourself." Her nostrils dilated. Linda relaxed and gave a little one-sided smile as she shook her head and leaned back again. "Well, I never did!" thought Miss Barry; and she too leaned back in the corner, where her niece forgot all about her. What a gift, what a wonder, to dare to think about her lost one! Hitherto to dwell upon the thought of him was to be cut with knives. The only peace possible had been negative; had been to harden herself to insensibility. "It is the Spirit Flower," she thought, and her lips took a tender curve that matched the melting eyes above them. The association of ideas brought thoughts of Mrs. Porter, for it was the song Linda had last studied with her teacher whose words flowed now through her mind. "My heart was frozen, even as the earth That covered thee forever from my sight. All thoughts of happiness expired at birth; Within me naught but black and starless night. "Down through the winter sunshine snowflakes came, All shimmering, like to silver butterflies; They seemed to whisper softly thy dear name; They melted with the tear-drops from mine eyes. "But suddenly there bloomed within that hour, In my poor heart, so seeming dead, a flower Whose fragrance in my life shall ever be: The tender, sacred _memory_ of thee." Linda's eyes closed, and slow crystal drops stole under the lids, but for the first time they were not bitter tears. The journey would now not be wearisome. For a long time she sat motionless, her eyes on the flying clouds, nurturing that spirit flower. She had put Mrs. Porter's letters in her traveling-bag, and after a time she took them out and read them over, this time with more open vision. She could not realize how recent was her bereavement. She seemed to have lived years in this new world into which she was born the day they brought her father home. It was to look back ages to think of their last breakfast together, his last embrace. She had asked that morning to come downtown to lunch with him, and he had told her that he couldn't spare the time. At least she had been assiduous that last week. With that world she had had nothing to do for so long. It was with this world, this world without her father in it, that she had now to deal, a world in which it seemed to her she had had time to grow old. Her mind roved busily to and from the lines of Mrs. Porter's loving letters as she read. This new liberty to think, this hope contained in Bertram King's letter, endowed her with an unrestraint which seemed wonderful, and she sometimes read a line six times before the roving mind grasped its meaning. Miss Barry had fallen asleep in her corner. How weary and haggard her face looked in its repose. Linda's wakened heart went out to the signs of her aunt's unregarded sorrow. An express train going in the opposite direction crashed suddenly by the open windows with a deafening racket. Miss Barry started and waked. Blinking, she realized her surroundings, and sat up. She met her niece's eyes. Linda had taken up the violets and her nose was buried in their soft fragrance. "That was too bad, Aunt Belinda," she said, leaning forward. "It's growing very warm. Can't I get you a drink?" she said. "Glory be!" thought Miss Barry. "Yes, I wish you would," she said aloud. Her eyes followed the girl, as she slowly rose and moved away to get the water. "At last," continued Miss Barry mentally, "she isn't walking in her sleep." She accepted the glass when it came, and drank thirstily, although she had not been thirsty. When Linda returned, moving slowly and holding by the seat, she did not take the place she had vacated, but sat down beside her aunt. "Tell me something about Father," she said. "What sort of thing? What do you mean?" "Not the things the newspapers have printed, about his beating his way to Chicago on the trains, and being an errand boy, and having no education, and all that--his phenomenal rise to fortune. Not that." Miss Barry snorted. "No education! Absurd! The newspapers make me sick. He had education enough to make him one of the smartest men in the country. I should think folks would know better than to believe such stuff." "And you took care of him, didn't you, Aunt Belinda? I never used to want to know anything about his childhood. I grew tired of hearing people say he was a self-made man, and I was ashamed to know that he was barefooted and poor. That was another thorn," finished Linda, under her breath. "Another what?" "A thorn." Miss Barry looked around at the speaker. "Oh, a thorn in your side, you mean. I guess you have always been some high-headed, Linda." She used the past tense instinctively as she viewed the pale, languid face leaning back beside her. "You took care of him like a little mother," persisted the girl. "He has told me so." "Yes, I was only ten when Ma died, and I guess the papers would 'a' been right about your father's education if I hadn't saved her slippers." "You mean figuratively? You stepped into them." "No, I don't. I mean it just as literal as anything could be meant. Pa was easy-going and had enough to attend to, black-smithing and selling flour and feed, so if anybody was going to spank Lambert it had to be me." Linda's lips, pressed tightly against the violets, quivered against them. "I'm sure you loved him tremendously," she said unsteadily. Miss Barry sniffed, with a one-sided smile. "I didn't have much time to think about that. I had to get breakfast and get to school myself, and spank him when he ran away, and when he hitched on trains, and robbed apple orchards, and so on, but mostly when he wouldn't go to school. Ma's slippers were 'most done for, when one day I caught him, and took one of the old tattered things and was going to give him what he deserved, when he just caught my arms in his two hands, and began to laugh. I noticed then for the first time that he was as tall as I was, and his eyes looked straight into mine the fullest of mischief you ever saw. I could feel myself getting as red as a beet. 'Let me go this minute,' I yelled at him. 'Let me go, Lammie.' That's what the schoolboys called him when they wanted to be mean. He fought a lot o' boys for that before they learned better, and I remember exactly how he managed to get both o' my calico sleeves into one hand, and boxed my ears with the other; not real hard, he was laughing all the time. "'Come on, Belinda,' he said, 'let's bury the slipper.' I knew what he meant, because the boys were always playing Indian, and burying hatchets; but, do you know, he made me bury that shoe then and there? He took me outdoors and made me take the hoe and bury that slipper in the garden. He stood over me, and before I finished I was crying, I was so mad. I was fifteen then, and he was eleven, but I was small for my age; and that was the end of the spankings. But you see by that time," continued Miss Barry complacently, "I'd made him a real good boy." "Yes, yes, you did," agreed Linda warmly. "What then?" "Oh, then it was lobster traps, and I helped him with them, and I got Father to buy lobsters off him, and buy his clams, too, and I think Lambert was always sort of sorry for me even when I was scolding him. He knew I had a lot to do for a young one." "Yes," said Linda, with eagerness, "and he resolved to make it up to you, I know." "He did make it up to me. He was the best brother in the world," answered Miss Barry simply. The girl's lips trembled again against the violets, and the two watched the flying landscape in silence. CHAPTER XIII HOME-COMING Often during the remainder of the journey Linda questioned her aunt about her own and her father's childhood. Hitherto she had avoided as far as possible all mention or knowledge of his antecedents and the struggles which preceded his success. Again she felt the relief consequent upon opening a mental door until now painstakingly kept closed. Instead of the thorn again came up the fir-tree, as her thoughts, led by Miss Barry, roved about the hard but wholesome past, and she acquainted herself with the good stock which had produced her lost treasure. "Don't grieve. Speed him on," had been Mrs. Porter's tender and strong admonition. Linda tried to remember it every time that submerging wave of realized loss went sweeping suffocatingly over her head. Miss Barry, rousing from practical thoughts of her home and housekeeping, or waking from a nap, usually saw her niece poring over letters, and occasionally it was Bertram King's that she held in her hands. Once when this was the case Miss Belinda held out a metal box. "Try some of this ginger," she said. "Coals to Newcastle! Did you ever? Isn't Mr. King the impudent one?" Linda leaned politely toward the confection, then drew back again. "Don't waste it on me, Aunt Belinda. I don't seem to care for sweets." "Well, I hope Mrs. Porter will. I can't eat all these things alone," replied Miss Barry, casting a glance toward the varied boxes. At the same time she let that eagle glance come back to her niece. "I hope you're going to remember," she said impressively, "that that fine man to whom we owe so much is related to Mrs. Porter." "What?" asked the girl absent-mindedly. "Oh," suddenly gathering her aunt's meaning. "Yes, certainly." Miss Barry sniffed. "Linda," she said, "I don't know but I'd ought to go and dig up your grandmother's slipper!" The girl smiled, and the older woman shook her head. "She is a handsome thing," she thought. Mrs. Porter thought so too when she met them in Portland. In spite of the change wrought in her pupil's appearance during the last month she reflected how beauty at twenty-one will be beauty still. "There's no place like home!" exclaimed Miss Barry, as she accepted Mrs. Porter's embrace. "I'm aching for one look at the ocean." "Isn't she saucy to our grand lake?" asked Mrs. Porter, putting her hand through Linda's arm, and leading the way to the motor waiting outside. "What does this mean?" asked Miss Barry. "The train's good enough for us." "No, it's such a beautiful afternoon. It will rest you both to motor home," said Mrs. Porter. She supported Linda's arm, noting the feebleness of the girl's movements. The two black-clothed women entered the car, the porter put in their suit-cases, Mrs. Porter jumped in, and they started. As yet Linda had scarcely spoken. It was curious to her to see her teacher thus, off duty, wearing an outing hat and corduroy. She, who had always been surrounded with a wall of delicate formality which no pupil save herself had ever had the audacity to break down, now smiling, tanned and rosy, girlish in her soft white hat, seemed another identity. Linda regarded her teacher gravely, while the latter responded cheerfully to Miss Barry's questions. The sun shone, the breeze was crisp. As they emerged into the suburbs and countryside, all the joyousness of June smote upon the travelers' tired senses. Linda turned her wistful eyes away when Mrs. Porter met them, a reassuring strength in her regard. "Jerry was so disappointed when I told him he needn't come to the station for us," she said. "All your neighbors are excited over your home-coming." "H'm," sniffed Miss Barry in a one-sided smile. "Luella accommodatin' any boarders?" "Yes, a mother and daughter from New York." "H'm. Their bones beginning to show yet?" Mrs. Porter laughed. "If it is as you say, why shouldn't Miss Luella advertise a reducing establishment? I'm sure it would pay." The speaker's cheer covered a pang. Linda's slenderness and pallor spoke eloquently, and made her forget the girl's probable injustice to Bertram King. Linda had made but one visit before to the Cape. That was ten years ago, when her aunt's cottage was first built. It had been a flying trip with her father and mother, and she had slight recollection of the place. Her mother had cared more for mountains than sea, and Linda had visited them on both sides of the ocean. It was now to a practically new place that the motor was carrying her. She straightened herself with interest when the settlement came in sight, and her large gaze sought for the little house that had been her father's gift of love to his sister. Mrs. Porter saw her eagerness. "Just about three minutes away now," she said. "Is that it? The brown one?" asked the girl as they neared the rocky point. "Yes, the Gull's Nest," replied Mrs. Porter. "I don't know what Miss Barry calls it, but how could it have any other name?" "Lambert was always telling me to name it and he'd give me some writing paper, stamped." "And why didn't you?" "I did." Miss Barry tossed her head a little toward the welcoming waves. "What is it?" asked Mrs. Porter eagerly. "Oh, no matter," returned Miss Belinda. "You haven't told? Do you mean you haven't _told_?" Mrs. Porter's eyes twinkled at the proof of New England reticence. "What's in a name, anyway?" returned Miss Belinda evasively. Her niece regarded the flush on her aunt's thin cheek wistfully, and wondered what bit of sentiment she was concealing. The wonder heightened the interest with which she entered the cottage. The little house was unexpectedly roomy within. Lambert Barry had given his sister _carte blanche_ as to coziness, provided she would have room enough for him and his when they could arrange to come; but the nearness to the great diapason of the waves had repelled his wife, and after he lost her the engrossed business man could make only flying visits to the scenes of his childhood. There were the rooms, however, and Linda was soon led to hers. "It's the one I always called your father's room, Linda," said Miss Barry, as she ushered her in. Mrs. Porter, after brief explanation of her preparations, had remained below stairs to leave them alone. Linda looked from the windows on the limitless ocean, dotted with distant sails; on the fleecy islands of cloud in a sky as blue, as limitless. She turned back to her companion. A look of satisfaction had overspread her aunt's wan face. "You've been very good to me, Aunt Belinda," she said deliberately. "I've known it all the time, but I shall appreciate it more and more." "Well, well, that's all right, child," returned the other hastily. "I think there's everything here to make you comfortable. The bathroom's here, between your room and mine; and if there's anything you want that you don't see, just let me know." She went out and left Linda standing there, her wide gaze fixed on the open sea and ships. Islands were but distant scenes from the Cape. Here the granite cliffs rose high and higher. She could get glimpses along the shore of their hollows, which soon would shelter luxuriant deep-pink wild roses, but now waved with snowy daisies, flirting with the foam which ever sought to reach them. An hour afterward she went downstairs, and found Mrs. Porter sitting with a book in the glassed-in end of the veranda. "See? I've been saving this hammock for you," said Mrs. Porter, looking up. Linda stood still and smiled, looking with fascinated eyes at the sea. Mrs. Porter remained quiet, watching the girl's face grow grave. "It's very wonderful after the city, isn't it?" she asked at last. "Yes. The noise on the avenue was constant, then the banging and confusion of trains. This is like being born into a new world. I was wondering just now if Father felt that same great contrast and peace when he waked up." "I'm sure he did," replied Mrs. Porter. She said no more to urge her friend to lie down, but dropped her book and took up some sewing that lay on the table beside her. Pretty soon Linda came over to the hammock and seated herself on its edge, and at that moment Miss Barry appeared with an armful of neglected bon-bon boxes. "This is day before yesterday's candy," she announced, "but most of them haven't been opened at all, and any that you don't want will find a market in the neighborhood." The speaker raised her eyebrows significantly. Mrs. Porter smiled. "Poor little Blanche Aurora, for instance. She's been a good little helper." "You don't mean to say she hasn't broken dishes." "Well, not so very many, really. She's been very much excited over your home-coming." When Jerry came with the trunks, his sea-blue eyes regarded Linda with respectful interest, while he shook hands with her aunt. "Ye look some faded, Belinda," he remarked. "I'll pick up," was the reply. "This is my niece, Cap'n Holt." Linda brought her absent-minded gaze back with a start, realizing that the "expressman" was being introduced to her. He put out his rough hand kindly, and she saw by his expression that he was acknowledging her bereavement. She put her hand in his in silence. "Cap'n Holt knew your father, Linda," said Mrs. Porter. The girl's eyes met his. "Did you work for my father?" she asked. "Dunno 'bout that," was the good-humored response. "I was the oldest, and I guess mebbe he worked fer me some." Cap'n Holt's lips twitched as if a humorous continuation of his declaration was imminent, but Linda's grave looks and her black gown restrained him. A faint color mounted to the girl's cheeks. She must remember hereafter! "He was well liked around here, your father was," finished Jerry Holt warmly. "Thank you," said Linda, and Jerry dropped her smooth young hand awkwardly. "Sometime you must tell me about when he was a little boy," she continued, still gazing at him. Jerry Holt winked hard as he drove his team away from those appealing eyes. "She takes it hard," he said to himself, "she takes it hard." Luella Benslow had seen him drive by with the trunks, and she was working in her garden as he returned. Luella had not succeeded in entirely breaking down the reserve of that pleasant-faced Mrs. Porter, who had been keeping house for Belinda. The socially experienced musician had known how to awe her. Luella was by no means certain that Belinda Barry's loss had dulled her speech, so she restrained the curiosity which urged her to create an immediate errand at the Barry cottage. Jerry must pass her house on his return, so she set herself to work at piling some wood, her father not being amenable to the performing of such an arduous task. Her regimentals for such labor consisted of a deep shaker bonnet provided with a flowing collar, in which her complexion was shielded. She also wore a complication of capes, and a terraced arrangement of aprons, one above the other, the whole giving the strong, sportive sea wind an assorted lot of banners, which it tossed in all directions. As Jerry's wagon approached, Luella was too deafened by the wind and her shaker to hear the wheels on the soft earth. She was at the roadside, gathering the smaller wood which had fallen by the way, and the back view of her stooping figure presented an appearance which Jerry's steed, mentally consulting a long experience, could not remember to have seen paralleled. Deciding that it would be on the safe side to approach no nearer, Molly planted her forefeet, and all Jerry's adjurations failed to persuade her to move. Her eloquent ears went forward and back. At last there came borne to Luella a stentorian yell. "Git up! Git up, I tell ye, Luella." She slowly lifted her head, turned, and brushing her hair out of her eyes beheld Molly with feet planted and ears laid back. Jerry was standing up in his wagon, gesticulating with his whip. "Git up, I tell ye! The hoss won't go _by_ ye!" he yelled. Luella arose with alacrity, but slowly, her arms full of kindling. This she dropped incontinently, and Molly shied as the fluttering figure ran forward. "I want to speak to you, Jerry. Don't go till you tell me about 'em!" she said breathlessly. "Do excuse my looks," she added with a simper. "I can overlook 'em if Molly can," replied Jerry. Both Molly and Luella seemed to be indulging in a return to the skittishness of youth. Jerry had twice taken Luella home from singing school in days gone by, and he had been ticketed as one of her beaux ever since! A might-have-been with whom she consistently played the game. She pushed her shaker back. "Have you seen the orphan?" she added, again brushing stray locks of hair out of her curious eyes. "Yes." "What's she like? Awful proud, I s'pose." "Mebbe. She favors Lambert. He went some on looks, you remember." "How should I remember?" returned Luella with a coy smile, which showed dentally the evenness of piano keys. "I was so _much_ younger than you and Mr. Barry." "I wish Luella's teeth wouldn't kind o' drop," reflected Jerry Holt. "It makes me dizzy." He snapped his whip gently, while Molly, reassured, rested in the first position. "I think I'd ought to call real soon," said Luella. "Don't you?" "Well, 'f I was you I'd let 'em ketch their breath," remarked Jerry impersonally. "The Mrs. Lindsay and her daughter stayin' with me, they're related to a young man in Chicago that's a dear friend o' the Barrys," went on Luella eagerly. "I think 't would make the orphan feel more to home to know she had a mewchal friend in the neighborhood. Don't you?" "Couldn't say," drawled Jerry. "_Sh!_" hissed Luella, lowering her voice portentously. "The ladies are about sure their relation had all his money in Lambert Barry's bank. _Sh!_ They think from all they've heard he was a scoundrel. You can't talk about folks that's dead, though, can you?" "Well, some folks find it's the safest time." "Well, what do _you_ think, Jerry?" she asked, still low-voiced, pressing close to the wagon. "I think I got to be goin'. Careful there, Luella. Don't let Molly step on ye." "Well," she returned, retreating, "I've always believed I could write a play as good as anybody else for those here emotion pictures, and this'd be a splendid story, with Lambert Barry for the villain, and his beautiful daughter believin' in him; don't you think so? I'd make her beautiful, you know." Jerry Holt's lips twitched as he gathered up the reins. "Well, one thing sure, Nature's saved ye the trouble there, Luella. Git ap, Molly." Luella looked after the wagon, her mouth open in her interest. Her friend's meaning slowly percolated. Then she hurried toward the house, removing aprons as she went, to inform her boarders of the arrival. CHAPTER XIV BLANCHE AURORA When Linda waked next morning, she had been dreamless for nine hours; sunk so deep in slumber after weeks of restless, fitful naps that the return to earth was a slow, scarcely credible process. A soothing, rhythmic sweep of sound seemed saying, "Sleep _on_, Sleep _on_"; but a song sparrow perched on the corner of the sloping roof above her window was loudly declaring that it was ecstasy to waken. The rapturous burst, often repeated, won her slow attention. The sun shone through the rosy curtains and a breeze fanned her opening eyes. She turned her face into her pillow. Her first thought as ever of her father, she seemed to commune with him. "I'm here in your room, dear. I dare think about you. The insults are going to cease, dearest, _dearest_!" Her rested brain recalled those sentences in one of Mrs. Porter's letters, prophetic words of what the public verdict would be when truth began to appear. Then had come King's reassurance. She knew each phrase of both letters by heart. Mrs. Porter had put Miss Barry's best photograph of her brother on the dresser in this room. Turning, Linda again opened her eyes and they rested upon it. For a moment she gazed, then rose with a sense of refreshment. How quiet the house was! She took her bath and dressed, still without hearing a human movement, and at last went downstairs to the empty living-room. The old-fashioned clock above the fireplace pointed to nine forty-five. "I surely am a petted child!" thought Linda. She moved through the dining-room and was going to the kitchen when the swing door suddenly opened, nearly striking her, and a girl of thirteen years appeared. By dint of peeking around the corner of the house, Blanche Aurora had obtained a glimpse of the tall slender figure in black when aunt and niece arrived yesterday; and of the two, Linda was the more surprised at the sudden encounter now. In any case, Blanche Aurora was not easily daunted. She had spent years in twitching smaller brothers and sisters into the path of duty. Perhaps the necessity of her being "careful about many things," notwithstanding her youth, had drawn Miss Belinda to her in sympathetic remembrance of her own childhood; but if that was the case, it had resulted in no tenderness given or received. Theirs was a relation of armed neutrality in which neither ever got much the better of the other. Blanche Aurora's eyes were round, expressionless, and light blue. Each of the two pigtails of her red hair had a string braided in with it to discourage relaxation, and this cord was twisted around their ends with a determined hand, the whole so tightly reined that each braid turned up at the end like a fishhook. A dozen times this morning she had pushed open the swing door under the impression that she heard the guest descend: the wonderful guest, who never had to touch foot to the ground, but rolled around in carriages and ate off gold plates. Blanche Aurora had vaguely expected something so overwhelming in the appearance of the millionaire's daughter that the apparition of Linda in a plain white gown, not glittering at any point, was somewhat disappointing. The flat-chested little maid viewed the tall girl's shining, waving hair and her large, grave eyes for a moment; then she spoke:-- "Pretty near hit you, didn't I?" she said airily. "My aunt--" murmured Linda. "They've gone to see the chickens, and I'm to give you your breakfast. There's your place." Blanche Aurora's businesslike, no-time-to-spare finger pointed to the white table which bore a dish of fruit and a single goldbanded plate with its complement of silver and napkin. Linda sat down meekly. "I s'pose you'll want a finger-bowl," said Blanche Aurora. "If--if it's convenient," replied Linda. The other actually smiled. "Ho! We've got lots of 'em," she returned, and stalked to the sideboard, where she poured water into a bowl and placed it close by Linda's elbow. While the guest opened an orange, the light-blue eyes watched her white ringless hands. "She don't look a bit rich," thought Blanche Aurora, "but I'll bet she's stuck-up." She withdrew against the wall, from whence Linda felt her unwinking, round stare. "Are you my aunt's little maid?" asked the girl, after the silence began to be embarrassing. "No," came the prompt reply, "I'm her help." All Blanche Aurora's remarks were made in a loud tone as if she were talking against the sound of the sea. "I come after I git the children to school." "Children?" "My brothers and sisters." Linda glanced up at the short, slight form clad in a faded gingham dress that was outgrown. "Don't you go to school yourself?" "Ho! No! I got through last year; I'm thirteen." A pause, during which the help reluctantly admired Linda's hands and her deft manner of manipulating spoon and orange. As the guest laid down the empty rind, her companion's voice rent the air. "Oatmeal, wheatena, and all the cold cereals!" she vociferated. Linda started. "I--I don't really care--" "One's jest as easy as the other. They're all handy." "I'll take the--oatmeal, please," replied Linda under the pressure of that strenuous reassurance. During the brief absence of the small maid, the girl leaned back in her chair, and looked through the open windows fronting the sea. Presently, Blanche Aurora's foot kicked open the swing door and she advanced with the cereal and noted that the guest shivered. "Be ye cold?" she questioned sharply; "I can shet the winders." "Yes, I wish you would. This is like eating on a boat." "I hate bo'ts," vouchsafed the help, and crossing to the windows slammed them down, after which she resumed her position against the wall while Linda served herself with oatmeal. "There's coffee and rolls and eggs," shouted Blanche Aurora after half a minute of dead silence during which the clock ticked. Linda jumped again. The help was so very responsible and so clean and wiry that she smiled as she lifted her eyes. "I've got an hourglass and you're to tell me when you want 'em put on." "What?" "The eggs; they're good and fresh. Luella Benslow's hens laid 'em." "Are those the hens Aunt Belinda has gone to see?" "Yes; Mis' Porter wanted to see the hens that have hot-water bags." Linda kept on smiling. "Dear me!" she said. "What is your name, please?" "Blanche Aurora Martin," came the prompt report; "but you don't have to say the Martin. It's Blanche Aurora for short." "I see; and I am Miss Barry." "Yes, I know," was the prompt reply; "but I made up my mind to call you Miss Belinda 'cause if there was two Miss Barrys, I couldn't stand it." "Really? Very well; but what did you mean about hens with hot-water bags?" "Why, Luella puts 'em in every nest when it comes cold, and Mis' Porter, she laughed and laughed when she heard about it; Luella's some slack about lots o' things, but she's got real good ideas about helpin' the hens along and Mis' Porter wanted Miss Barry should take her over and see 'em." Blanche Aurora's sharp gaze noted the guest's languid appetite as evinced by the slight diminution of the oatmeal. "The eggs is real good," she continued, "and I've got an hourglass." Linda lifted her somber eyes and showed the tips of her white teeth again. "I hope you don't boil them an hour, Blanche Aurora?" It wasn't very often that Miss Barry's maid was offered a joke, but the relaxing of her thin cheeks now showed that she could take one. "No danger!" she returned smartly. But the suggestion of eggs, even those laid luxuriously in the proximity of a hot-water bag, could not tempt the pale guest this morning. "Coffee and toast sound very good," she said. "No eggs this morning, I think." "Hev it your own way," returned the help; "we cal'late to give you what you want," and at once she attacked the swing door. The little creature's sudden energy of motion after absolute repose was like her stentorian tones breaking dead silence. When coffee and toast were set before the guest, Blanche Aurora again supported the wall and watched her charge with an unremitting stare. "You don't need to wait," said Linda. "I druther," returned Blanche Aurora with a finality which admitted of no argument. The guest followed the line of least resistance. "Is Mrs.---- is the hen lady one of your neighbors?" "Luella Benslow? Yes, she and her father. Her father's a wonderful man--Luella's father is." "What does he do?" "Well, he don't do nothin' much. He never did support his family nor anythin' like that; but he has such wonderful 'complishments. There ain't nobody can ketch a frog like Cy Benslow can." Linda looked up and felt color coming into her cheeks in the novel desire to laugh. "How does he do it?" "Like this." The round light eyes gained a spark of interest as Blanche Aurora began describing large circles in the air with her right hand, and advancing toward the table with a stealthy tread. As she approached, the circles contracted gradually, until close to the guest they had narrowed to a small ring out of which the hand made a jab toward the victim's face, and Linda jerked her head back. Blanche Aurora smiled in triumph and returned to her place. "I--I really thought you had my nose!" "That's jest it. Ye see the frog's got to look so many directions, he don't know which way to jump, so he's jest kind o' par'lyzed and gits ketched." "Very ingenious," laughed Linda. Yes, she laughed. Blanche Aurora, unconscious that she had performed a feat eclipsing Cy Benslow's, warmed to her theme. "And you jest ought to see him git worms for bait." "Now, Blanche Aurora, it was bad enough to be a frog. I positively decline to be a worm." "You don't have to be. I'll jest tell ye about it. He goes up to a post, Cy does." The speaker moved forward, and Linda put out a warning hand. "Nor a post either, Blanche Aurora. I firmly decline to be a post." "And he takes a board and scrapes it back and forrard across the post; it grits somethin' awful, and the shakin' gets to the worms somehow and they begin comin' up out o' the ground to see what's goin' on, and"--Blanche Aurora nodded significantly--"and that's the last they _do_ see, I can tell ye. They go whack into Cy's pail and ketch his dinner for him." "What a wizard!" "No, he don't get no lizards, and I'm glad we don't have 'em. There was a lady once boardin' to Benslows' and she had one with a chain to its leg and she let it run all over her. Bah!" the speaker shuddered. "I'd hate to feel their scrabbly feet, wouldn't you?" "I've finished, Blanche Aurora," said Linda hastily. She pushed her chair back from the table. There was pressure in her throat and in her eyes. She rose abruptly. "Say! you forgot your finger-bowl," shouted her waitress after the figure swiftly retreating toward the piazza. CHAPTER XV THE HARBOR Blanche Aurora's prey could not so easily escape her. She had been left in charge of Linda and she followed her now to the porch: that exciting porch surmounting a castle wall of rock, with soft niches of green where Nature's mother-hand found vulnerable spots to plant her lovely ferns and flowers. To Blanche Aurora the situation of the cottage was objectionably noisy and windy, and she often wished her employer's house could be moved back on the road where one could see the passing. She scowled now against the dazzling sun and boisterous wind. "Be you goin' to set out here?" she roared at Linda. "How beautiful it is!" escaped involuntarily from the guest. "Then I'll git you some warm things. You're sick and delicate!" yelled Blanche Aurora as one whom the roar of old Ocean could not down. Linda looked at the slim child in the faded gingham. The salt air went through her piercingly. "I'm not delicate at all!" she protested, but little cared her mentor for her defense. She straightway brought a steamer-rug, shawl and pillows from a near-by closet. "There!" she said, depositing them in the hammock on the glassed-in end of the porch. She gave her queer little grimace of a smile and again her thin cheeks wrinkled. "Miss Barry said you looked like a hothouse plant, so I guess you'd better stay under glass for a spell." "Aren't you cold yourself in that cal--that thin dress?" asked Linda. "I dunno. I don't believe so." Linda's eyes grew softer. It was so evident that the little caretaker had small leisure to think of her sensations. "Lay down and I'll cover you," commanded Blanche Aurora. "Lie down? No, indeed. I'm just up." The help paused with the rug in her thin arms. She was undecided as to whether to humor this rebellion. "Blanche Aurora, do you like candy?" The slender face lost its worried expression and grew younger. "There ain't much sense to that question," she returned. "Then come into the house with me," said Linda. The wraps were dropped in the hammock and willing feet followed the guest. From a cabinet in the corner of the room Linda chose the reddest of red boxes, generous in size, and placed it in a pair of eager hands. Blanche Aurora viewed the prize, amazed. "I ain't ever in my life had all the candy I wanted," she said in such awed tones that Linda smiled and reached for a violet box which she piled upon the other. "Oh!" gasped the recipient. She looked up at the pale guest with a new realization of what it meant to be a millionaire's daughter. Gold plates and carriages sounded fine, but it was only like hearing about Cinderella and other impossible maidens. Here were tangible chocolates given away recklessly and with nonchalance. What a consciousness that bespoke! As they stood there, Linda, watching her erstwhile mentor endure an ecstatic paralysis, Miss Barry and Mrs. Porter entered. "What are you doing, Linda Barry!" exclaimed her aunt. "I'll keep those boxes myself and give the child a few at a time. She'll make herself sick." She hurried forward, but Linda pressed her back. "Let her make herself sick," she pleaded. "I'll take care of her." Miss Barry looked from one to the other undecidedly. She recognized this surprisingly good symptom in her niece, but such a wholesale relaxation of discipline toward the most willful, stubborn child on the Cape was unheard of. While she hesitated, Linda stepped to one side and made room for the "help" to pass, which Blanche Aurora made haste to do, the wonderful boxes clutched in her arms, and the fishhook braids vibrating with the double excitement of her gift and getting the better of her employer. Mrs. Porter watched Linda thoughtfully. When she and Miss Barry a few minutes ago had left Luella Benslow and her pampered hens, and their hilarious mood had quieted, the younger woman had at once brought up the subject of Bertram King, whose situation dwelt much in her mind. As they walked across the soft grass she took Miss Barry's arm. "Tell me about my cousin, Mr. King. How does he look?" "Like the last run o' shad," returned Miss Barry promptly. "I never met a belated shad." "Well, you've eaten 'em, haven't you? I'd just as soon eat a fried paper of pins." "You mean that Bertram is thin?" "Just so. He looks as if he'd been through the war, and so he has." "I feel as if I ought to go back to him." "Law! Don't leave me yet!" exclaimed Miss Barry in a panic. "You're the only person Linda can stand the sight of. Oh! if I'm not glad to get home!" The speaker inflated her lungs and stepped lightly. "You say she blames Bertram for her father's misfortunes." "Yes; and I guess she ain't the only one, from what Harriet says. Lots o' folks think my brother pinned his faith to Mr. King's judgment in taking on a new proposition." "Yes," returned Mrs. Porter thoughtfully. "I've heard it said." Miss Barry glanced around at her companion quickly. "Well, I hope you didn't take any stock in it," she returned sharply. "Lambert Barry had a backbone of his own. I'm surprised at his own daughter's not knowing him well enough to scout such a notion." "Bertram is very clever. He had been with him a long time." "Clever! I guess he is clever. I could just about worship that man for all he's done," was the warm rejoinder; "and if that cock-and-bull story was true about Bertram King dragging the bank into that Antlers thing that broke the camel's back, he's made up for it with pretty near his life's blood, working night and day to undo the damage." Mrs. Porter's eyes glowed with interest and surprise at such heat from the reserved New England woman. "You do feel that way! I'm so glad. Then, why doesn't Linda?" "Because if Mr. King laid down and died it couldn't bring back her father," returned Miss Barry slowly. Mrs. Porter looked away and shook her head. "How dreadful it seems," she said in a low tone. "Then you have no blame for Bertram?" "Not a particle." "What is the situation now? What has he been able to do?" "Wonders," returned Miss Barry sententiously. "He sent me a letter to the train. I ought to have given it to you as soon as I touched home. I ought to have realized that you were so close to Mr. King that it would mean a lot to you as well as to us. You'll never see the Linda that was before that letter came. It gave her new life." "Then didn't it make her feel kindly toward Bertram?" asked Mrs. Porter. "No. She just accepted it as penance and the best restitution the poor fellow could make for a tragic and unpardonable--mind you, _unpardonable_ mistake." "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," murmured Mrs. Porter. "I know it," returned Miss Barry; "and you'll see when you read that letter that he has some forgiveness to do himself. He never mentioned Linda in it, and good enough for her. She had flouted him and refused to see him for days before he rightly sensed how deep her feeling was against him. It was at a business meeting we had that she came out flat with her suspicion and meanness. Oh, it was perfectly awful. I just have to remember and _remember_ how much provocation she would have had if all she believed was true. That poor boy nearly fainted away in his tracks, the way she spoke to him." Mrs. Porter bit her lip. She could picture the scene and her eyes filled. "He loved her so!" she said softly. "Yes, and there's that Fred Whitcomb, too: as nice a boy as ever lived. He just adores Linda; and it seems there's lots of others. I didn't believe before that I could ever get sick of arranging flowers; but really they were a pest. Linda wouldn't look at one, and I got so I passed them over to the waitress. She fixed them perfectly awful, too. They looked like crazy quilts when she got through--such colors together! Linda was a buxom, healthy girl, and good-looking enough, but for the life of me I can't see why she's such a snare." "Poor child. She shows how she has suffered, but why didn't it soften her? How could she inflict suffering at such a time? I can hardly wait to see that letter," added Mrs. Porter, unconsciously hurrying her steps. "I haven't got it. I gave it to Linda for her comfort, and hoping, too, that she'd get some punishment out of Mr. King's ignoring her. Never mentioned her name, you know." "And didn't she feel it at all?" "Not a mite." "Then I suppose, after all, she never did care anything for Bertram," mused Mrs. Porter. "It was as well, perhaps, for him that she shocked him out of his dream. As well for him--not for her, poor child, it wasn't well for her to be cruel." "I don't want to be too hard on her," said Miss Barry. "Maybe she wasn't really responsible. Land! What we went through! Well," she added, briskness coming into her voice, "that chapter's closed." "Let me," said Mrs. Porter, "let me be the one to ask Linda for the letter. You have been so tried, Miss Barry. I don't want to ask you to reopen the sorrowful chapter; but I long to see what Bertram has to say. I have always thought him an extraordinary young fellow and respected him as much as I loved him." "Just so. Just so," responded Miss Barry warmly. "All right. You ask for the letter. I pass my niece over to you now." They had reached the porch of the shingled cottage and in another minute they walked in upon Linda's presentation scene. Miss Barry was quite prompt in following her maid into the kitchen, but the minute's delay in hanging up her hat and coat was sufficient for all sign of the candy boxes to have disappeared. When she opened the door Blanche Aurora was at the sink letting floods of hot water into the dishpan and singing with vigor, "A charge to keep I have," meanwhile rattling pans and china, the whole giving an amazing effect of clatter. Miss Barry involuntarily clapped her hands to her ears. "You needn't sing," she remarked loudly. "All right," returned the help, ceasing, "but you told me 'twas good for my lungs." "That's all very well when you're alone, Blanche Aurora; but I'm going to be busy out here seeing what shape you've got the closets into while I've been gone and how many dishes I've got left. To-morrow I'm going to begin putting up strawberries." Miss Barry was in the habit of preparing in the summer time of peace for the war of winter, when boarding-houses could not supply her with home-prepared fruit. Meanwhile, in the living-room the light of amusement had died from Linda's pale face and she sank into a chintz-cushioned wicker rocker. Mrs. Porter took a neighboring chair. "You had a good sleep, I hope, Linda." "Wonderful. I went completely out of the world for the first time in--I don't know how many weeks." The girl met the kind regard fixed upon her. "I can't get used," she added, "to seeing you far away from your busy life. It seems as if I must hurry to say what I wish because in half an hour I shall be turned out by another pupil." "Vacation is astonishingly pleasant when you've earned it," replied her friend. "I fancy that a lot of people who thought it would be great fun to retire from business soon made the discovery that when one stops working he stops playing too, because vacation has lost its zest. Familiarity breeds contempt in lots of ways." Linda's large eyes rested upon the speaker, who had retained an orange silk sweater over her white waist and white corduroy skirt. The hero-worship that for two years she had laid at the feet of this woman was among the enthusiasms of that vital past, now gone forever. Once it would have meant wild elation to claim unlimited companionship with the adored one in this isolated, romantic spot. To-day, as she gazed at the wholesome, calm face of her teacher, it was that other teaching she had received from her, those words of balm that had proved the first comfort in her affliction, which gave her friend value. "I owe you so much, Mrs. Porter," she said suddenly, after a mutual silence, full to each of them. "I'm glad," returned the other as simply. "My heart cried out to help you, Linda." The speaker knew that if the hurt, groping soul can find something for which to feel gratitude, healing has begun. She came no nearer to the girl nor took her hand. It was a new Linda, cold, white, and undemonstrative except for her cruelty to Bertram King. Mrs. Porter steadied her own thought as it fled to him, and tried to think only of the needy one before her. "You believed in my father--believed in him from the first. Bertram says now that he will be vindicated to all before very long; but I shall never forget those who believed in him from the first." Mrs. Porter listened quietly to the low, vibrating voice. She saw the girl swallow and exercise self-control. "Miss Barry tells me that my cousin wrote a letter to her, telling of hopeful conditions. She says that you have it. May I see it?" "Yes. You deserve to see it. It is in my envelope of treasures: your letters." Linda's heart spoke through her eyes, then she arose. "Let us go out of doors and read it," said Mrs. Porter. "We waste time in the house on such a day. Bring a warm wrap when you come down." Linda went upstairs slowly. Her friend's eyes followed her inelastic, slow movements. Could this be Linda Barry! She returned wearing a white sweater and Mrs. Porter pinned a white corduroy hat on the dark head and flung a polo coat over her own arm. She also took a cushion from the hammock as they passed. "We won't sit on the piazza this morning," she said. "I have a surprise for you." Leading the way around the corner of the house, the two walked away from the blue breakers, across a wide, grassy field. "Your father did a fine thing in buying so much ground for his sister," said Mrs. Porter. "She says when he built the house he was afraid she would be lonely and he planned to build other attractive cottages through here, but she told him she didn't want any one near enough to shoot. She says he laughed and gave her the deed to all this land and told her to go ahead and suit herself. Do you see that mowing machine at work? That is Cap'n Jerry, who brought your trunk. See him mounted on his little throne and driving Molly--that wonderful horse that he says 'ain't afraid o' no nameable thing.' He is opposed on principle to doing anything 'sudden,' so he has taken his time to get at the mowing; but how sweet it will smell here to-morrow! Passengers will have to get over from the train the best way they can to-day. Cap'n Jerry says, very reasonably, that he can't be 'in two places to once,' and he's just a little bit afraid of your Aunt Belinda. He won't put off her work too long." Linda's grave lips were parted as she looked across the field toward the machine where Captain Jerry was cheering Molly on and calming her disgust when the clipping knife encountered a stone, balking her efforts. "He is the one who went to school with my father?" "They all did. You'll meet others." They crossed the field, then Mrs. Porter turned inland. "Now, down this path, Linda. See, it is a path. I made it myself. Partly by constant use, partly with a sickle. I wish Miss Barry would sell me this spot. I don't believe she could shoot as far as this, do you? And--what do you think of it?" Mrs. Porter paused and regarded her companion in triumph. She had led her around a clump of white birches, the advance guard of a forest of pine and balsam which held back the prevailing south wind. The zephyrs, forcing their way through, here and there, brought delicious odors of the firs. The ocean was sufficiently distant for its roar to be muffled, and an enchanting spring bubbled up in a natural rock pool, falling like liquid crystal over the granite barrier, and meandering away toward the steep bluff where it fell in a narrow rivulet down to the sea. The brooklet had worn a rut for itself and was bordered by greener grass and larger flowers than dotted the surrounding field. It made a gurgling sound, dear to its discoverer, and one of the gray, slanting rocks of a New England pasture rose in the bower of the birches, rising to a sufficient height to serve as a comfortable back for two people sitting side by side on the green couch, secure from the wind. "See what a proof of my affection," said Mrs. Porter, "that I bring you here. I sneak away--I steal away! Not even Blanche Aurora knows where I am when I come here." "I should incline to doubt that," returned Linda. Mrs. Porter laughed. "Those round eyes do see about all that's going on, I admit; but I like to believe in my own cleverness sufficiently to feel that I have guarded this." The speaker proceeded to spread the polo coat in front of the rock. "Sit down," she said, and when Linda obeyed she fitted the pillow in behind her back. "No, indeed," protested Linda. "Blanche Aurora cried aloud that I was sick and delicate, but it's nothing of the kind. You must take the pillow yourself." "Oh, to please me," urged Mrs. Porter. "I never bring a pillow. This sun-warmed rock just fits my back. We haven't tried it on yours yet, and I wanted your first experience to be positively sybaritic." "My first," returned Linda; "then you do intend to let me come again?" "Indeed, I do," was the cheery reply. "I don't know a better object lesson in the fact that nothing is too good to be true." CHAPTER XVI THE VOICE OF TRUTH "And I," returned Linda, clasping her hands behind her head as she leaned back beside her friend, "I have felt that nothing was too bad to be true." Mrs. Porter did not speak; and after a short silence, the girl continued:-- "In the happy days, I tore off a leaf from your Bible calendar, and one morning, when everything was black and despairing, I found it in my bag. It read, 'Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree.' I suppose I was like the drowning man, and this promise, impersonal and silent, was a straw to be clung to blindly. At any rate, I couldn't throw it away; and it persisted in ringing through my confused head. Soon your letter came. Oh, Mrs. Porter--" Linda choked and ceased. Her companion laid a comforting hand upon her for a moment and withdrew it. "You will never know what you did for me," went on the girl presently: "do you know what it means to a despairing one to be given a gleam of hope? You can't, unless you know it by experience." "I know it by experience," returned Mrs. Porter quietly. Her companion glanced around at the calm face for a fleeting instant. Could it be possible that such poise would ever be won for herself? "It was a willingness to listen to you, and the hope that I could believe you, that brought me, shrinking and shuddering as I was, out of my home and into the train and here. Then, on the train, came this letter that Aunt Belinda told you about. It brought me more of peace and hope than I had dreamed of. I have dared to think since then. Here it is." The speaker passed to her companion the envelope she had been holding tightly. Mrs. Porter accepted it in silence and took out the letter. As she read, a deeper color mounted to her cheeks, but Linda did not observe this. She had dropped her hands in her lap and her eyes were fixed on the clear-cut horizon line. "Dear Bertram!" exclaimed Mrs. Porter as she finished. Then she read the letter again. Finally, she folded the sheet, put it in its envelope and handed it back to Linda. Her face wore the radiance for which her pupils were wont to watch as the highest reward for achievement. "Splendid," she said. "Tell me why news so vital should have been addressed to Miss Barry instead of to you." Linda's grave gaze met hers. "I don't like to tell you, Mrs. Porter," she answered. "You needn't fear, dear child." "Oh, I can't go into it again, I can't!" exclaimed Linda, suddenly averting her head. "As you please, dear. I don't want to force you; but I know so well that what you quoted a few minutes ago is as true as that two and two make four. Instead of the thorn _will_ come up the fir tree, as soon as you cease to give the thorn nourishment." "I give it nourishment?" Linda's brow contracted. "Do you mean that I nurse grief? You're mistaken." "No, I didn't mean that. I love Bertram, and something very wrong must have occurred to cause him not to mention you in that letter. I want you to be happy. I want for you just what your father is getting now: greater knowledge of God and His love and wisdom and guidance. You see that guidance is the most everyday thing in the world: the closest; not anything far away or mysterious. If it is your fault that Bertram ignores you in this--" "Oh, no, no!" interrupted Linda. "It is not my fault. It is poor Bertram who brought us all to this. I appreciate more every time I read that letter--and I know it by heart--how valiantly he has worked to undo the mischief. At first I didn't pity him in the least, because the crime of getting my father into all that trouble overwhelmed my thoughts at every turn; but, of course, I can see now that it has been a hard experience for Bertram as well." Linda ceased, catching her lower lip between her teeth. "I know something of what you refer to," rejoined Mrs. Porter. "I know Bertram's reputation for influence in Barry & Co." "And you have been so good to me," said Linda hurriedly, "and Bertram is your cousin, and, as you say, you love him, I--I can't bear to discuss him with you." "But I can bear it, Linda, if you will allow me to ask you one question. Do you believe that Bertram intended any harm to your father?" "No," came the quick answer; "but he is so conceited and so opinionated--" "If you believe him innocent of wrong intention, should you become his enemy--" Linda's pale cheeks flushed and she straightened up. "When a person strikes you a murderous blow, Mrs. Porter, can you, before recovering breath, care much whether it was accidental or intentional?" "No! but after recovering breath, you can. What do you believe your father would say to your treatment of Bertram?" Linda glanced around at her companion quickly. "Aunt Belinda has been talking to you," she said. "She wrote me something of it before she came home. This letter that I have just read tells me most, however. You were very dear to Bertram, Linda. This double and treble sorrow of his appalls me." Linda saw her companion's eyes fill. "You are right," added Mrs. Porter, not very steadily, "we would better not talk about it at present. Better thoughts will come now that, as you say, the clouds have cleared sufficiently for you to think." They both leaned back against the rock for a silent minute and Linda saw her friend press her handkerchief to those brimming eyes. Tears and Mrs. Porter! Impossible connection of thought. "I would like you to tell me one thing, Mrs. Porter," she said. "Are you pitying Bertram, or me?" The older woman turned to her with a sudden flashing smile. "I am not going to pity the devil in any form," she returned, "because there ain't no sech animal. All this discord is no part of the reality of things." Linda frowned in her earnestness and grasped her friend's arm. "I know all that you have written me by heart too. I'm trying to believe in God; but even if I do, that stupendous fact arises--He took my father away from me." "No, little Linda"--Mrs. Porter shook her head slowly. "This world is very full of awful happenings at the present day. Mankind is confronted with the choice between a God of Love or none at all. Love doesn't send war and unspeakable suffering, yet such is existing now in this mortal life of ours. Aren't we reduced to finding some philosophy which will give us an anchor? The arbitrary will of a God of war is no anchor of hope. It would be a cause for apprehension--even terror--to believe in such a power. To come to your own individual loss, your father has gone from your sight like thousands of other girls' fathers, dead on battle-fields; but God, who created man in His image and likeness, knows nothing but the unbroken current of life." "Then, why--where do all these awful things come from? What is the source?" Mrs. Porter smiled. "Where does darkness come from? Did you ever think of trying to trace darkness to its source? Every minute of the day we are called upon to divide between reality and unreality." Silence fell between the two friends in the wide sweep of peace that surrounded them. The heaped foam of cloudlets sailed across the blue and a crow cawed in the neighboring wood. "We had such an amusing visit this morning, Miss Barry and I," said Mrs. Porter at last. "One of the neighbors is a character." "I heard that you went to see her hens." "Yes. Oh, it is funny to see your aunt brought up against the kind of person who lives in a lax, slipshod sort of way." "Yes," assented the other; "Aunt Belinda has no half-tones. Everything with her is either jet-black or snow-white; and if there is anything she can't bear it is a thing she doesn't like." Mrs. Porter smiled and sighed. "That is true; and poor Luella Benslow is such a mixture of airy affectation and slack housekeeping that Miss Barry is obviously on the eve of explosion all the time they are together. Her hens are her fad, and she has hot-water bags for them, Linda. Can you believe it! She puts them in the nests during a cold snap." Mrs. Porter's laugh rang out as merrily as though sorrow had never entered the world. Linda smiled. "Blanche Aurora told me so. It seems that the ingenious lady belongs to a very talented family." "Really? In what way?" "You must get Blanche Aurora to tell you that. I couldn't do the subject justice." "Well, I'm afraid it isn't a talent for cooking. Luella has a couple of boarders; a Mrs. Lindsay and her daughter from New York. Fortunately, they have a sense of humor. It's quite necessary that Luella's boarders should have a sense of humor. Mrs. Lindsay walked with us to the gate when we came away and told us some of their trials; but she is one of those efficient women who are capable of managing, and she and her daughter have funny times. It seems that Miss Lindsay has just been enjoying her first winter in society and has overdone it so greatly that the doctor ordered a dry-land sea voyage, like this, in an uninhabited spot like this, and told her to live the life of a vegetable. Mrs. Lindsay is one of these thin, snappy women, strung on wires, and I judge nervous to a degree. She has a busy time trying to dominate the circumstances. She says if they only were vegetables and didn't have to eat, or to care whether their rooms were swept, it would all be quite simple. The daughter is rather skin-and-bone-y too; but she's the sort who would look smart even in bed. You can see that she is a New Yorker of the New Yorkers." "Oh, why did you visit them, dear Mrs. Porter! You want to get away from people too, don't you?" "No danger, I fancy, of their troubling us. Vegetables don't return calls. Mrs. Lindsay was very much interested, though, in knowing that you were here. She and her husband dined with your father last June, and they are related distantly to that friend of yours--Mr. Whitcomb." "Fred?" "Yes; Mrs. Lindsay said he had told them a great deal about you. Isn't the world small!" "Too small," sighed Linda. "I hope they'll not try to see me." "Miss Lindsay was quite lackadaisical and seemed to have no interest beyond her hammock; and I can easily defend you from the mother," said Mrs. Porter reassuringly. That evening Linda received a letter from her sister. _Dear, dear Linda_ (it began)-- I can hardly wait for the word that will tell us that you are safely at your journey's end. You had such a hot trip; I hope you bore it well. I'm sure the good news Bertram sent by letter helped wonderfully. If Bertram has any sin of commission on his conscience, he has done all he could to make up for it. He looks so badly. I wonder, at times, if he worries at night over misleading Papa instead of sleeping; but Henry says he has had a lot to do nights, beside worrying or sleeping either. Henry thinks Bertram is one in a thousand, even if he has made mistakes. He came to us the evening of the day you went away--it's such a blessed thing Henry wasn't an investor in the Antlers, because it does away with embarrassment--and he told us what he has accomplished for Barry & Co. He didn't express any regrets,--sometimes I think it's strange that he never does,--but he just told us, in a rather light way, the arrangements he has made and I assure you Henry shook hands with him hard. I could see that if he had been a girl he would have hugged him. So I hope that as you grow stronger you can see things more temperately and come to the place where you can write a letter of acknowledgment to Bertram. He deserves it, Linda; he really does. I referred to you once in our talk, but he made no response and I could feel my very ears burning. He knew, and I knew, that we were both thinking of that moment in the library when you rose and left us. You mustn't think I blame you too much, dear, but remember, to err is human--to forgive, divine, and Bertram was young for such heavy responsibilities. If he made mistakes which in any way hastened dear Papa's end, can't you see he will carry the scars forever? We don't need to add to his punishment. Harry is standing by me, and ) ) ) there, he made those wiggles. He says they are his love. He has grown a lot since you saw him, etc., etc., etc. * * * * * Linda could not keep her mind on Harry. She was standing in the living-room reading her letter by the twilight, and she looked up now far across the ocean. The darkness fell while she stood there and a great planet began to ascend the sky. Its brilliancy sent a narrow path across the sea. The isolation and peace were healing. A great thankfulness filled the girl that she was far from those scenes called up by her sister's letter. She wished fervently that she need never return to them. Here was peace: consolation: relief. CHAPTER XVII THE RAINBOW Bertram King, in all the years she had known him, had not dwelt in Linda's mind so often as in these days. She felt aggrieved to have the thought of him thrust upon her as it had been by her aunt and Mrs. Porter and now by Harriet. It had been a settled fact in her thought that she and Bertram could never again be friends. The mental picture of his haggard face as he made love to her on a June evening, again as he bade her good-bye before the University Club, and later, the dazed look in his eyes under her accusation in the library--all these pictures of him were a gallery apart from the remembrance of the successful man whose unspoken criticism had so often piqued her. She thought also of that Sunday afternoon at Harriet's when he had laid his teasing admiration at her feet. She had admired him too, reluctant as was her approval. She exulted in achievement, and Bertram King stood high among young Chicago men who had achieved. Considerable jealousy had entered into her feeling for him. The words, "Bertram thinks," or "Bertram wishes," were often on her father's lips, and occasionally she had felt that she herself was gently set aside in deference to some plan of Bertram's. An unwilling secret acknowledgment of his superiority had fled in the cataclysm of her wild resentment and despair; and now that she was made to feel that she stood alone in her condemnation, and was silently condemned for it by those who loved her, Bertram's image persistently arose as something to be reckoned with. Fairness had been the characteristic upon which, in school, Linda had greatly prided herself: fairness which excluded preferences. She had so impressed her impersonality upon her classmates that she had won a high reputation as social umpire and was often called upon to decide vexed questions. Now, therefore, she looked Bertram King's insistent image straight in the tired eyes, with her grave, severe estimate, and sustained no pricks of conscience. Time, the wondrous healer, brought her, however, as weeks went on, to raise him from the status of a mere criminal to the rank of a fellow sufferer. All the same, they could never again be friends. The thought of her wronged father, her beloved, must rise between them to the end of their lives. It went without saying that the young man must suffer, even though his pride would not permit him to confess his error. He was not a callous person. Doubtless his punishment had been heavy. Thus her thoughts would run on in the hours that she spent alone. She was granted the boon of utter freedom. Mrs. Lindsay and her daughter Madge had essayed to be neighborly, but Mrs. Porter acted as an effective buffer between Linda and all social assaults, and as the weeks went by, slowly they brought the girl back from morbid dwelling on a dead past to recognition of the living present. She remained subdued and quiet, but elasticity was returning to her mind and body. Miss Barry, busy about her home duties, left her niece, with lessening anxiety, to her own devices, and Mrs. Porter was careful to allow Linda to make every advance; but the steady shining of the older woman's happy personality was a magnet toward which the girl was constantly attracted and they were often together. Blanche Aurora was also a little unconscious missionary. There was something about her youth, her intrepid spirit, stern practicality, and scanty wardrobe which continually touched Linda's sense of humor and compassion. One day she sent for the child to come up to her room. Blanche Aurora was always glad when duty sent her to sweep and dust this apartment. The hint of violets in the air, the dainty toilet articles on the dresser, the filmy lingerie, which she put in place caressingly with her tanned hands, all bespoke the world of which she had read. She had adored Linda from the moment when unlimited chocolates had been pressed upon her acceptance, but never before had the guest sent for her to come to her room. As she ascended the stairs, Miss Barry's "help" swiftly reviewed her own sins of commission, but decided that neglect of any duty toward Linda had not been among them. Indeed, her mistress often reprimanded her for lingering over her duties above stairs where perhaps the small chambermaid was hanging hypnotized over a wrist-watch with tiny sparkles that caught the light, or endeavoring to decipher the monogram on a handbag, or examining some other object in the fascinating room from which her round orbs could scarcely detach themselves. To-day as she entered, Linda in her black gown was sitting by her charming window, reading. She looked up as Blanche Aurora, conscience-free, and expressionless as ever of countenance, stepped inside and stood waiting. The faded gingham was getting more outgrown and hueless every day. Linda wondered that her aunt never seemed to observe or care about the child's clean forlornness. "What do you want?" asked the "help" bluntly. Harriet Radcliffe, at this moment rowing her small son around a Wisconsin lake, would have enjoyed seeing her sister's eyes suddenly sparkle and match the little laugh that fell from her lips. "You should say," she remarked to the small maid, all wrists and with her thin legs looking long above the sneakers she wore,--"you should say, 'Did you call me, Miss Linda?'" "Well, you did, didn't you?" returned Blanche Aurora. Linda regarded her for a silent moment, appreciatively. "Are you in a hurry?" she asked then. "If I wasn't I'd get fired," returned the "help" promptly. Linda laughed again. "I do really believe you exaggerate," she returned. "I'm sure Aunt Belinda thinks a great deal of you." "She knows I'm the only kind of a girl she can keep," said Blanche Aurora coolly, "Grown-up ones won't stand it." "What do you mean by 'it,' you naughty child?" asked Linda, her eyes laughing toward the fishhook braids and the freckles. "Aunt Belinda is a very kind woman." "Oh, yes, if you was sick she'd call the doctor, but even if you was sick you'd have to hang each rag on its own separate hook and let her smell o' the fish-pans after you'd scrubbed 'em." "It's nice to be particular," returned Linda, laughing again. "Huh!" vouchsafed Blanche Aurora; but her eyes, roving around the magic room, had seen something unusual. "Good," she thought. "She's goin' out o' mournin'. I'll bet she looks pretty in them." Her round gaze cleaving to the bed saw three gowns lying there; one of blue, one of pink, and a tailored skirt and coat of a small black-and-white check. "Do you like those dresses?" asked Linda, following her regard. "Yes, they're real sightly." "Come here, Blanche Aurora." The child advanced slowly until she stood beside the black-clothed figure. Linda indicated her father's photograph in its silver frame on a neighboring stand. Before it stood a single wild rose in a small glass: a wild rose of the sea: deep in color and twice the size of its inland sisters. Linda took one of the child's hard tanned hands in her satin-smooth one, and Blanche Aurora started and held her own imprisoned hand stiff and straight. "Every morning when I come upstairs I find a fresh rose like that in front of my father's picture. At first I couldn't speak of it." Silence. "There are some things too precious to speak of. At last one day I thanked Mrs. Porter for the lovely thought. She said it was a lovely thought, but not hers. Then I wondered if Aunt Belinda could possibly--but one day I met you as you were coming downstairs." Silence. "Blanche Aurora"--Linda's voice stopped again. Had Blanche Aurora been accused of highway robbery she could not look more guilty. Not one freckle was discernible in the sea of red; but her unwinking stare was fixed on the window. Linda placed her other hand over the one she held. "I thank you," she added. "You gave me the candy," blurted out Blanche Aurora. "I couldn't think of anything else to do. My Pa's dead, too. He drinked, though," she added in a tone which seemed to suggest no flowers. Linda squeezed the hard little hand and released it, to its owner's relief. "Your mother has so many children, and so little time to sew. Have you a suit at home, Blanche Aurora?" "What do you mean--a suit?" "A coat and skirt alike." "Not alike. I've got a brown skirt that was Ma's and a jacket I wear to church when it's cold. 'Tain't cold now, though. I wear a white waist on Sunday." No suspicion of Linda's intentions enlightened her. The girl arose and walked over to the bed and the blue eyes followed her. "I sent to Chicago for these dresses of mine." "I seen the big box come yesterday," returned the other, gravitating toward the bed, and gloating over the color of the fine fabrics. "Yes, I thought perhaps I could fix some of my things for you." "What things?" returned Blanche Aurora mechanically. "These," indicating the bed. Blanche Aurora gasped. "For me!" she cried, the loudness of her usual tones restored, with a crack of excitement added. "They ain't serviceable nor durable." Linda bit her lip. "This one is," she said, picking up the black-and-white checked skirt. Blanche Aurora handled it reverently. "Why, Miss Linda," she said in the same high key, "how can you give away--" "You'd better ask how can I fix them for you. I'm such an ignoramus, and yet I'm just conceited enough to try. Aunt Belinda has a machine." "Oh, yes,"--eagerly,--"she's got a real good one. I can run it, too, if you want me to, and she can spare me." "All right, child." Linda patted the bony shoulder. "Run along now." Her eyes had a humorous light as she observed the string woven tightly in the tortured red braids. "I'll have to do some ripping to these dresses first, and then I'm sure Mrs. Porter will help me, though probably she doesn't know much more than I do." The child's reluctant feet drew slowly away from the bed, but not before she had laid her hand lovingly on the pink and blue gowns. "Miss Linda," she said, looking beatifically at her benefactress, "I used to think that more than anything in this whole world I'd rather have that teeny clock o' yourn that you punch and it tells you jest what time it is; but now I don't even want that!" Without another word she walked on clouds out of the room, and Linda went up to her father's picture, and lifting it, pressed her cheek against the cool glass. "'Instead of the thorn,'" she murmured. Blanche Aurora tripped downstairs, the red still obliterating the freckles on her cheeks. She was too absorbed in her daydream to observe her usual caution in opening the swing door, and simultaneously with her energetic shove a cry sounded from Miss Barry accompanied by a clattering of glass on tin. "Blanche Aurora, will you ever remember to come through that door carefully? You knocked my arm and I nearly spilled all this jelly." Miss Barry glared at the help as she spoke. She had just sealed a trayful of glasses and was about to deposit them on a shelf near the swing door. "I'm glad--I mean I'm sorry!" said the culprit, her eyes still looking far away. "Well," snapped Miss Barry, her elbow still smarting, "it would be well for you to be certain _which_. I _was_ going to give you a glass of this jelly to take home to your mother, but now I think I ought to punish you." "Yes'm," replied Blanche Aurora, gliding through the pantry into the kitchen. Her employer caught her expression as she passed. "Come here," she said sharply, and the little maid obeyed. "Help me set these glasses on the shelf. Don't they look good?" "Yes'm.--Real pink, some of 'em." "Aren't you sorry I can't give you one?" "No'm. Yes'm. I'm tryin' to be." "Let them alone! I never knew you so awkward. You'll break one yet,"--as the glasses tinkled together dangerously. Again Miss Barry scrutinized the flushed face and shining eyes above the flat-chested little figure. "Where have you been, Blanche Aurora?" "Up in Miss Linda's room." "What doing? You got through up there hours ago." "She hollered to me down the stairs to come when I got through in the dinin'-room." Miss Barry's eyes wore their extracting expression. She wondered what form of intoxicant Linda had been administering now. The Scylla of the chocolate gorge had passed safely. What was this Charybdis that threatened? "Well?" said Miss Barry suggestively. "Well," returned the "help," dancing defiance in the round eyes which returned her employer's regard brazenly. "Don't you be sassy, Blanche Aurora," warned Miss Barry. "I ain't," answered the other; and as her mistress watched her radiant countenance, she had her first doubt as to whether Blanche Aurora was really so very homely. There were such things as ugly ducklings who outwitted their neighbors. "Has Miss Linda been giving you more candy?" "No. Clo'es," returned the other in such a high key of ecstasy that Miss Barry recoiled and winked. "How many times must I tell you that I'm not deaf!" she said sternly. "What kind of clothes?" "Pink--and blue--and not worn out," was the blissful reply. "Absurd. I can't imagine my niece having anything sensible and durable enough for a little girl." "They ain't," declared Blanche Aurora, her eyes seeing visions. "They ain't sensible--nor durable--nor serviceable." Her smile was near-seraphic. "Then they're not appropriate," said Miss Barry severely. "No'm," assented the other sweetly. Silence for a moment, then the mistress broke forth:-- "That's what came in that great package yesterday, then." "Yes'm. She sent 'way to Chicago. She can't wear 'em 'count of her Pa dyin'," explained Blanche Aurora, with an evident tempering of grief at the loss of Lambert Barry, Esq., respected head of Barry & Co. "Linda has no judgment!" The low vexed soliloquy was not directed at Miss Barry's "help," but she caught it. "No, she ain't got no judgment," shrilled Blanche Aurora triumphantly, "but I bet she knows how a girl feels that ain't got anything pretty to wear, and has to go 'round lookin' like somethin' put up in the field to scare the crows." The child's eyes glistened anew and her voice grew passionate. "I tell you what I'm goin' to do, Miss Barry, the first day I wear that pink dress. I'm goin' to take this one,"--she plucked scornfully at a fold of the faded gingham,--"and I'm goin' to kick it into the ocean. Kick it--_hard_." She suited the action to the word, and the glasses tinkled again as she thumped the baseboard. "That's very wrong, Blanche Aurora. That dress isn't ragged. Your mother mended that last tear very neatly. It would do quite well for your little sister." "No, sir--I mean ma'am. Nobody else is goin' to have to hate this the way I have!" "Pink," repeated Miss Barry disapprovingly. "The blue would look quite well on you, I dare say, but pink.--Don't you know your hair is red, and you'd look--" Blanche Aurora winced. She was afraid to let her mistress go on for fear she was intending something crushing about freckles. "I don't care--I don't care," she struck in wildly. "You don't know, _she_ don't know, nobody knows how I love pink. Pink's happiness, pink is, whether you see it in the sky or in the roses or where! Don't, Miss Barry, don't!" The loud voice broke, and two big tears suddenly overflowed from the round eyes and rushed down the freckled cheeks, while Blanche Aurora ran stormily through the second swing door into the kitchen. The door swept back and forth under the swift impact, and Miss Barry stared at her jellies. "Don't what!" she said to herself in silent amazement and injury. "Don't what!" CHAPTER XVIII THE PINK DRESS Mrs. Porter was Miss Barry's prop and stay in matters regarding her niece, and she turned to her when succeeding days revealed the fact that Linda had set out deliberately to spoil the "help." The mistress of the house left the kitchen one morning after her plans were perfected for dinner and sought Mrs. Porter. She could hear the faint buzzing of the sewing machine which lived by the front window in the hall upstairs. She ascended with a firm tread. "This is a shame," she announced warmly, as she stood beside her friend, viewing the lengths of silky soft pink stuff which were running beneath the swift needle. "What's a shame?" asked Mrs. Porter, without stopping her work. Miss Barry sat down in a chair opposite her. "That you should be penned up in the house this beautiful morning stitching away hour after hour. You were doing the same thing yesterday." "It's fun," returned Mrs. Porter. "Oh, fun!" scornfully. "You always say everything's fun--walking to the village when Blanche Aurora has carelessly forgotten something, going out in the rain to take in the towels she's overlooked--everything's fun with you." Mrs. Porter smiled without raising her eyes from her fine seam. "I don't believe you ever taught music eight hours a day," she said. "Where's Linda?" demanded Miss Barry, but she lowered her voice. She still regarded her niece as an uncertain quantity, possibly dangerous. "Gone to Portland." "For the land's sake!" ejaculated Miss Barry, her tone no longer _sotto voce_. There was no danger of Linda's hearing from the trolley car. "What takes her there?" "Sh!" warned Mrs. Porter, still with her gay smile. "Underclothes for the little girl, I think. I'm only guessing." "Now, look here!" responded Miss Barry. "Where is this going to stop? I understand Blanche Aurora better than any one else does. Doesn't Linda suppose I take any care of her? She's high-headed enough by nature. She needs a strong hand, and I've held a tight rein over her on principle. She's a loud, stubborn, willful young one who thinks she knows it all." "I'm not sure, I'm not sure," replied Mrs. Porter. "I kept her here nights while you were gone and I used to read to her in the evening--'Little Women' and 'Heidi,' and so on. She was very gentle and nice and seemed to enjoy it." Miss Barry sighed. "I've had her two summers with me. This makes the third. I've taught her quite a little about cooking and I've nearly lost my immortal soul doing it; and I've taught her to be neat. Yes, Blanche Aurora's neat. I ain't afraid to eat after her. I've taught her to take proper care of herself, to brush her teeth and to use plenty of soap. I _give_ her plenty of soap; and such things are enough to give her. This!" Miss Barry picked up a fold of the soft pink and rubbed its thinness between her fingers. "Why, she'll catch it on a nail the first day and it'll be in slithers in no time, and her taste for good tough calico will be gone too." "There's plenty of pink calico," suggested Mrs. Porter. "It's color that makes the difference to a child." Miss Barry continued to regard the zephyr gingham gloomily. That frenzied defiance, "Pink's happiness," seemed to sound again in her ears. "Linda's just going to fill the child's head full of notions and make her discontented," she declared. "Perhaps she has been more discontented than you realized," suggested Mrs. Porter. "Anyway, Miss Barry," she added, stopping the machine and looking up, "I fancy we are more interested in Linda than in any one else just now. Aren't we?" "Well, of course, we are," acknowledged Miss Barry grudgingly, realizing whither the admission tended. "To provide her with a wholesome interest is no small matter." Miss Barry sniffed. "I don't know how wholesome it is. Blanche Aurora's as insubordinate a young one as ever lived. I'd hate to have her think any more of herself than she does already. All these expensive clothes now, and then next winter, nothing. That ain't going to help her mother any." "That black-and-white checked suit can be made warm," returned Mrs. Porter, beginning to stitch the hem of the pink dress. "What started her on it, anyway?" asked Miss Barry. "'Taint a mite like anything I ever knew of Linda." Mrs. Porter smiled at her work for a silent space. "Linda has been born again in some ways," she said at last. "In the school of this world you must have noticed that if people's eyes are not opened by truths vital to right living, they have to learn by suffering. Linda has suffered greatly. It has softened her heart. In this little experience right here she shows she longs to do something for another: to make the lot of another happier. This humble little girl happens to be to her hand." "Humble! Not so you'd notice it," commented Miss Barry. "I feel as if we could just lend a helping hand and be thankful." "Of course, I'm glad she's stopped moping," admitted Miss Barry; "but I don't yet see what started her out on this. It really isn't Linda's business." The speaker was still smarting under the invasion of what she considered her own private and particular territory. "Oh, I'm not so sure. We are our brother's keeper after all and our little sister's too." "It don't do them any good to make them vain," declared Miss Barry. "However," she added, "Blanche Aurora's as homely as a mud fence. I don't know as there's much danger." "Sh! Sh!" warned Mrs. Porter. "Oh, she's outdoors, she won't hear me." "You ask what started it," said Mrs. Porter. "Linda's awakened observation and her desire to add to the sum of happiness might have done so, but it really was Blanche Aurora's own thoughtfulness that did it." And Mrs. Porter told the story of the daily wild rose. "Of all things," remarked Miss Barry when she had finished. "Well, I certainly never would have thought that of that sharp little thing." "We're none of us such sharp things as we seem," returned Mrs. Porter. "I don't know how it is with you," said Miss Barry presently, "but I think a great deal about that poor Mr. King," and her long earrings swung in a challenge. "I do, too," returned the other quietly. "Linda's clothed now and in her right mind, as you might say. I think instead of dressing dolls it would be more to the point, if her heart's so soft, if she'd write that young man a letter with some human kindness in it." Mrs. Porter looked out over the sea which seemed as ever ready to encroach on the cottage and carry it off in triumph. "Perhaps she has done so," she replied. "No, sir. I don't believe it," was the energetic response, earrings swinging in the strong head-shaking. "If she had, he'd have answered, and I've seen every letter that's come to her. I know his writing." "No one sees it very often," said Mrs. Porter, stitching steadily. "I should feel much easier if he would write to me, yet I don't urge it because I won't add a straw to his burdens." "Well, I don't see how Linda, with some of the memories she's got of her own actions, can have the heart to think of clothes instead of trying to atone for her injustice." "We don't have to take care of that," said Mrs. Porter. "I love Bertram so dearly that I've had something to meet, to conquer resentment; but the last thing we need worry about is that people won't get sufficient punishment for their mistakes. The law is working all the time, and when we strike against it until we're sufficiently hurt we turn to the gospel: Love." "H'm," grunted Miss Barry. "Lots o' folks don't seem to get hurt. They just go ahead and flourish like the green bay tree." "You don't see far enough," returned Mrs. Porter, smiling, "that's all. Everything isn't finished when we're through with this world; but many times you can see the working right here." "I'd like to," snapped Miss Barry sententiously. Mrs. Porter finished her hem and drew the dress from the machine. It had a tucked skirt, and narrow fine embroidery edging the sailor collar and cuffs. She shook it out and held it before the other's eyes. "Pretty, isn't it?" she said. Miss Barry made some inarticulate response, arose, and went into her own room. She had some calico in her lower drawer now, designed as a parting gift to her "help" when the summer should be over. It was stone gray with white spots. A little color burned in her cheeks as she opened the drawer and looked at it. "Sensible and suitable," she said to herself: "sensible and suitable. She'll be glad enough of it some day when those flimsy things are in ribbons." It was supper time when Linda returned from the city, and as soon as Blanche Aurora had done the supper dishes she always went home. She kept her eyes on Linda, while she was waiting at table to-night, as nearly all the time as possible; and this evening there was no change in her expression; but she too had been listening for several days to the delectable music of the sewing machine. She had even been fitted to the pink and blue dresses and she saw them in a heavenly mirage floating above dishes, washtubs, and scrubbing-pails. To do Miss Barry justice she never allowed the child to do any heavy work, and the latter's laundry efforts were limited to the dishtowels. From three to five every day Blanche Aurora had two hours to herself; but she was expected to remain within call and to answer the door. She had enjoyed the high happiness, therefore, of doing some of the ripping on these gowns of a millionaire's daughter which were designed to clothe her own slight form. The way her ears listened for Linda's call now at three o'clock of an afternoon, and the celerity with which she obeyed the voice and fled up the back stairs, every freckle on her expectant face seeming to radiate, was observed by her mistress. All the morning of the day following Linda's visit to Portland she received rebukes from Miss Barry for slap-dashing, as that lady called it. Blanche Aurora felt, in every one of her small but evident bones, that the pink dress must be finished. Mrs. Porter had promised her that it should be the first one in hand. She panted for three o'clock to arrive while Miss Barry gave her sundry dissertations on the wear and tear on solid silver when whacked together and the sinfulness of chipping goldbanded china. "You know I told you," she warned, "that I bought a stock set on purpose this summer, so that I could replace everything you break and take it out of your wages. You have fair warning." "Yes'm," replied Blanche Aurora with the loud pedal down. She was possessed by a recklessness of anticipation. What did she care for wages! What had they ever brought her comparable to the treasures, unearned, which had descended upon her from a paradise named Chicago where a Cape boy had been able to pick up a million dollars in the golden streets! It was her experience that three o'clock did finally come every afternoon; but this day was evidently going to be an exception. At dinner, the weather being unusually warm, Linda looked like a dark-haired angel in a plain gown of white crêpe de chine. Blanche Aurora was faintly disappointed because her quiet manner was just as usual. Surely, if her dream was to come true, and to-day was the day, Linda and Mrs. Porter couldn't behave as if nothing had happened. Wandering about within sight of the cottage, those vacation hours were the ones during which the little girl found the perfect wild rose designed for Mr. Barry's picture. She carried it always to the room at the back of the house which was hers, and where she slept when Miss Barry wished her to stay all night. There was a closet there, curtained off, where her waterproof and rubbers and umbrella reposed in bad weather, and a dark calico dress also hung there in case she got wet and had to change. Three hooks in the middle of the closet had lately attained significance. No human being could be cruel enough to ask another to be separated from the new dresses all day by leaving them at home. Besides, her sister Letty was almost as tall as herself. She would be sure to try on those sacred habiliments and wear them all around the neighborhood. The thought was paralyzing. Although Blanche Aurora was quite certain several times between one-thirty and three that the clock had stopped, it did finally laboriously drag its hands around until they looked like the legs of a ballet-dancer she had once seen on a circus poster. It was actually three o'clock. She tiptoed toward the stairs. No sound. "If I don't get the rose I'm afraid I'll forgit it," she soliloquized. So she went out the back door and around to the front of the house to a great rock under whose lee some rosebushes cuddled out of the wind. The minute she felt herself out of sight of Linda's window, however, she panted back for fear by some tragic mischance her fairy godmother might call, and receiving no answer imagine that she had gone home for an hour as Miss Barry sometimes gave her permission to do. Finally, after much darting back and forth, Blanche Aurora secured the rose, and returning to the house, placed it as usual in a glass in her own room to wait for the morning. As she emerged she heard her name called at the head of the back stairs. She landed on the lower step in two leaps. "Yes, Miss Linda," she answered, the heart under the outgrown gingham going like a triphammer. "I want you now." It was as the voice of an angel in the yearning ears. "Yes, ma'am," and Blanche Aurora ascended, two steps at a time. Her dingy sneakers would not have bent daisies had they been growing upon the staircase. CHAPTER XIX THE WILD ROSE As the panting little figure approached and hesitated in her doorway, Linda turned from some white stuff she had been piling on the bed and met the round, expectant eyes, "Come here, Blanche Aurora," she said. "I want to show you something." With long steps the beneficiary was beside her. "Here are some things I found for you in Portland yesterday." Blanche Aurora dragged her gaze from the pink and blue dresses that were lying there, finished, and beheld white underclothing, and large enveloping aprons--a pink-and-white checked one, a blue-and-white checked one, and one all white in a satiny-looking plaid. There was also a pile of stockings and some black low shoes and white sneakers. A bride, inspecting a complete trousseau just arrived from Paris, might experience in faint degree the elation that choked Blanche Aurora now. "For me?" she uttered mechanically. "For you, you good little thing," said Linda. "Now take these, and go into the bathroom and put them on." Like one in a dream, Blanche Aurora accepted the underclothing, stockings, and sneakers put into her arms, and marched toward the bathroom, her head held high and the fishhook braids quivering down her gingham back. She went in and closed the door. Linda smiled, and seating herself in her wicker rocker clasped her hands behind her head. Mrs. Porter came to the door. "What did she say?" she asked, smiling. "Oh, nothing. She's far beyond speech. What did you do with Aunt Belinda?" "Mrs. Lindsay arrived and Miss Barry is showing her her rockery and the ferns, so I thought she was safe and I'd come up for the fun." "You certainly deserve to." Linda sighed unconsciously. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if everybody could be made happy so easily! I believe that is the only satisfaction there is in the world, after all--making others happy, whether you are so yourself or not." Mrs. Porter came in and took another of the wicker chairs. "I don't believe you can avoid the latter if you do the former," she remarked. Linda regarded the speaker, a line appearing in her smooth brow. She often suspected Mrs. Porter to be thinking of Bertram. She had no right to ask impossibilities. The superhuman should not be required of the merely human. "It is easier said than done, though, as a usual thing," said the girl aloud. "There is one man in Chicago, for instance, to whom I owe much kindness, whom I couldn't make happy except by marrying him." "Not Bertram," returned Mrs. Porter quickly. "Of course not Bertram," said Linda coolly. "It may be some relief to you to know that Bertram no longer wishes that," said Mrs. Porter, after a moment of silence. Linda's lip curled as she kept her lazy attitude, her hands clasped behind her dark head. "Of course not," she repeated. "Bertram may make business mistakes occasionally, but he will not commit that of marrying a poor girl." "Linda!" ejaculated Mrs. Porter. Color rushed over her face and she waited a moment to gain control. "How can you insult him in his troubles!" she finished. "Please forgive me," returned the girl in the same tone. "It is the hardest thing in the world for me to remember your relationship." "Your thinking it is quite as bad as saying it." "Be fair to me, dear Mrs. Porter. You can't blame me for not having illusions, after my sledgehammer blows." "You can feel compassion instead of hatred, if any one has wronged you." "That isn't human nature." "Of course not. We have to learn that we can't have any respect for human nature. Spiritual nature is the only thing we must nurture. We don't have to take care of punishing those who have wronged us. 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.' In other words, the working of spiritual law brings inevitable punishment to all who violate it. We may well exercise compassion instead of hatred to wrongdoers. If Bertram has, humanly speaking, deserved all the contempt you send him, you can well afford to feel more kindly toward him than before. Nothing but his own repentance and amends can end his punishment; and rest assured you do not need to add to it." "Mrs. Porter,"--the girl dropped her nonchalant attitude,--"I meant it when I asked you to forgive me. If I lost your friendship I should lose the greatest treasure I have left." "You won't lose it, poor child," was the response, as the deep color faded from Mrs. Porter's face. "You strain it when you speak so of Bertram, but I have to remember exactly the truths I have been telling you." "That I shall be punished?" "Assuredly, dear child--just as far as you are wrong." Linda leaned forward suddenly and laid an affectionate hand on the other's knee. "But I'm right, dear," she said, her eyes bright. Mrs. Porter patted the hand in silence and the bathroom door slowly opened. Blanche Aurora, looking very young indeed, clad in white, with white arms and neck, and tanned face and hands, stood with the old plaid gingham over her arm. Her gaze fled to the bed, then returned to the rusty plaid. So might a butterfly regard the chrysalis from which it had just emerged. "Do I put this on again?" she asked. "No," returned Linda. "Fold it and put it on that chair over there." Light scintillated in Blanche Aurora's eyes as she obeyed; a light which boded ill for the faded gingham. Linda rose and placed a chair in front of her dressing-table. "Come here and sit down," she said. Blanche Aurora hesitated but for an instant before complying. "What be you goin' to do?" she asked as Linda lifted the tortured braids and inspected the white string. "Goin' to cut my hair off?" "Do you want me to?" "I don't care. It's only a bother, anyway. I have to braid it every few days." "Every few days? Oh, Blanche Aurora, you ought to brush it every night." "I should worry," ejaculated the other. "Red hair don't deserve anything like that. If I didn't have red hair I wouldn't have so many freckles and I'd look nicer in the pink dress. I pinch it good when I braid it," added Blanche Aurora savagely. "I should think you did," returned Linda, whose deft fingers were meanwhile unbraiding the hair and removing the disciplinary string. "It is kinky enough to stuff a little mattress. You have a nice lot of it. Mrs. Porter, will you hand me that box at the foot of the bed? I'm glad I remembered to get you these." And Linda opened the box, displaying a white brush and comb which she began using on the bright hair while its owner colored with excitement through all her tan at the possession of such grandeur. She sat silent, watching in the glass the amazing vision of Linda combing and brushing the freed locks which seemed making the most of their escape to fly in all directions and encircle the excited face with a bright aureole. Linda turned and smiled at Mrs. Porter, who nodded appreciation. Many a fine lady would gladly pay a small fortune for the luxuriant shining waves that rippled now under Linda's brush. "I suppose your hair is straight," she said. "As a poker," agreed its owner promptly. "I douse it good when I have to braid it over and you'd better too, Miss Linda. You can't never braid it the way it is now; and it likes to git the best of you." The speaker eyed her halo vindictively. Her hair was an ancient enemy and only her mother's commands had protected its existence. "When did you wash it?" "Last week. I don't never wash it winters, but summers Miss Barry makes me." "You don't need to wash it often in this clean place; but brush it a lot with your white brush. Will you, Blanche Aurora?" This was a more awful demand than Linda realized. Overwhelmed as she was with benefits her beneficiary demurred. "I can't only once in a few days." "But you're going to braid it every day now." "Oh, Miss Linda," was the aghast response. "I ain't got time. I couldn't! You don't know my hair. It acts as ugly as sin; jest as if it knew it was botherin' the life out of me. I have to git the children off to school--" "Not now." "Well, not now; but Miss Barry wants me the middle o' May, and I have to git over early--" "Yes, but it's July now." Blanche Aurora ceased protesting and winced. "Oh, did I pull? I'll be careful." "Pull it good if you want to. Good enough for it." "You must like your pretty hair," said Linda. "Pretty!" uttered Blanche Aurora. Of all the surprising things that had happened to her, that adjective was perhaps the most surprising. "Certainly it is, and it deserves good treatment." Blanche Aurora looked in the mirror at her friend's face. Could Linda, every tiny escaping hair of whose wavy locks curled in a curve of beauty,--could she call this red stubborn mane pretty? Then there was no more to be said. Blanche Aurora leaned back and studied the narrow trimming on her new clothes and rubbed her hard hands surreptitiously against the soft fabric of her white petticoat. Linda divided the modified waves of hair into two parts. "Now your hair will soon straighten out," she said. "Let it stay straight and smooth and well-brushed." "I'd like curly hair like yours," returned Blanche Aurora; "but I guess I'd pretty near die tryin' to comb it." Linda smiled. "You remind me of the tramp who said he didn't see how folks stood it to comb their hair every day. He did his only once a year, and then it most killed him. Now, you mustn't strangle your hair with that string any more," she added. "Strangle it! I think that's real funny," said Blanche Aurora judicially. She was radiant. There was only one small cloud on her horizon and that was the prospect of a daily wrestle with that hair. That hair! Why, angels couldn't go through it and keep their religion. "Now, see what I'm doing?" said Linda. "You'll be glad to do this when you see how nice it looks." With round and solemn gaze Blanche Aurora watched the braiding of first one half and then the other of her captured locks. "Be sure to begin as near the middle of your neck as you can." Linda swiftly doubled the two ends of the braids and fastened them. She looked at Mrs. Porter again as the fluffy braids hung down the slender back, and again Mrs. Porter nodded. "Miss Barry wants 'em tight," declared the child. "Miss Barry will be satisfied with this," rejoined Linda. Then she proceeded to cross the braids and wind them around the small head, tucking the ends out of sight with hair pins. This loosened the hair at the temples and the round eyes took in the fact that the arrangement was becoming even to freckles; but the breath-taking moment was to come. Linda opened a box on her dresser and revealed a fresh pink and a blue ribbon. She took out the pink one and soon a generous bow surmounted those braids, and Blanche Aurora gasped with pleasure. Her white, low-necked, short-sleeved reflection with the new coiffure held her happy gaze, and when Mrs. Porter brought the pink dress and slipped it on and buttoned it up, the red beneath the freckles was very deep, and the modern Cinderella was speechless. At last she turned to Linda and threw her slender arms around her. "I can't say nothin'," she gulped. Linda pushed her gently back and took hold of the hard hands and her eyes were soft with an inner flame as they looked down into the glistening ones. "I can say something, Blanche Aurora," she answered kindly. "I can say that you look like a wild rose. Do you understand?" She put her arm around the happy girl and led her to the small table where stood her father's picture, and blooming before it, the child's offering. "Like a wild rose, Blanche Aurora," she repeated slowly. The pink-crowned head lifted to her. "Oh, Miss Linda," she exclaimed breathlessly. "Now, then," said the fairy godmother in a different tone, "you have a chest of drawers down in your back room; and after a while I want you to put white paper in them and come up and get these things," waving a hand toward the bed. "But first you go down and see Miss Barry." "I'm 'most afraid," declared Blanche Aurora, wringing her hands together. "She thinks a pink dress and red hair is awful." "She won't," returned Linda. "Run along. I think she's outdoors. Yes, I see her there, stooping over the rockery. Mrs. Lindsay has gone and she's alone." Blanche Aurora left the room. She even forgot the chrysalis and her determination to kick it into the ocean. Seraphs, wafted on rosy clouds, forget such earthly longings. Mrs. Porter and Linda stood at the window where they could see all that occurred, and despite Linda's assured words she was not sure that she wished to hear what would be said. Her college chums would have recognized Linda Barry again in the mischievous sparkle of her eyes. Miss Barry, rising from her labors among the ferns, beheld a bareheaded little girl coming slowly toward her. The stranger was clothed in a pink dress with spotless white stockings and sneakers, and as she advanced the sun turned to gold the fluffy hair under a billowy pink bow. Miss Barry pulled her spectacles down from the top of her head, and even then for a second she thought some summer boarder was straying too far from home. In another moment full recognition burst upon her. "For the land's sake!" she exclaimed; and the two stared at one another for a silent space. It would have taken a hard heart to resist the beatified, yet shy, expression on the face of Blanche Aurora, and Miss Barry's was not hard. "Pink's happiness. Pink's happiness!" Miss Belinda saw the statement exemplified. "Come here, you little monkey," she said. It wasn't so pleasant to be called a monkey as a wild rose, but Miss Barry's smile was different from any her "help" had ever yet received from her. Perhaps she liked monkeys. Blanche Aurora came nearer, aware every moment of the fine materials touching her skin. "Well, well, so my niece hasn't got by the doll-dressing stage," said her mistress. The lenient tone restored confidence and unloosed an eager tongue. "Oh, Miss Barry, I ain't a doll. I'll work just as hard. I'll work harder. I've got aprons to cover me all up and I won't break a dish nor slam the silver. The aprons is the most beautiful you ever see and these stockings they feel just like silk." The reference to the stockings flowed forth because Miss Barry was stooping and running her hand down the slim leg. The watchers above were edified to see her lift up the pink skirt and examine the underwear. "You're good clear to the bone," declared Miss Belinda at last, approvingly. "Pretty sensible things, considering that Linda bought them." The speaker rose again to her full stature and looked curiously at her maid's head. "What under the canopy--" she began slowly. "Have you got a wig on?" The broad wavy braids, glinting in the sun as Blanche Aurora turned her head, seemed to bear no relation to the strained tightness usual over her temples. "No'm, it's my same horrid red hair, but I don't look at it, I look at the pink bow," was the eager response. "The kids at school was always teasin' me,"--a gulp of hurting memory interrupted the speech,--"they said I was the homeliest girl on the Cape, and it's nice for homely girls to have somethin' pretty on their heads so folks can look at that instead of at them." "H'm," returned Miss Barry, touched by the ingenuous burst. She had never suspected her willful help of feelings. "Well, you certainly look very nice, and I'm glad that you're happy." "Oh, Miss Barry, may I put some of the white shelf paper in the burer drawers in my room? Miss Linda told me to, and I'm to go back and get the rest o' the clo'es and and fix 'em nice in the burer." "You're going to keep them here, are you?" "Don't you think I'd better?" Blanche Aurora wrung her hands together eagerly. Miss Barry took a mental survey of the child's crowded home and the small marauders who would be likely to molest her treasures. She nodded. "Yes, that's best," she agreed sententiously, and instantly there was a pink flash, and a twinkling of white pipe-stem legs across the grass, and Blanche Aurora was not. CHAPTER XX BEHIND THE BIRCHES When Linda wrote to Chicago for the dresses to be sent on, she asked the caretaker of the house to send a photograph of her mother which she would find in her dresser drawer. The woman had been in doubt as to which picture was wanted, as there were several in the box indicated, so she had packed box and all, and it now lay on Linda's table waiting to be opened. When the radiant little Cape girl had carried downstairs the last of her possessions and Mrs. Porter had gone to her own room, Linda turned her attention to this box. Taking off the string she lifted the cover, and straight up into her eyes looked Bertram King. The likeness was a striking one and color flowed over her face. As she gazed, the thought came to her that Bertram must have consummated a good business deal on the day he sat for this. There was lurking humor in the eyes and lips. It was Bertram at his best: his most prosperous. A clean-cut face, she thought, as she looked, a well-born face: intelligent, full of character and confidence. "Overconfidence," murmured the girl, and turned the picture face down. She closed her eyes in endurance of the flood of associations the photograph had evoked, and stood motionless thus for a minute before delving deeper into the box. It held pictures of several of her friends, among them one of Fred Whitcomb. Her sad lips smiled as she encountered his wide-awake countenance. "Good old Fred," she thought. "Some day I must write to him." She found her mother's pictures and those of several girl friends: also one of Mrs. Porter. Some of these she left out; but the one of Bertram King went back into the box. She took one more glance at it and the veiled humor in the eyes seemed to mock her. Face down it went in, quickly, the cover was put on, and the whole placed in her closet. At the same time her thought was contrasting the pictured face taken one year ago with Bertram's appearance the last time she saw him. At the supper table that evening Blanche Aurora, as she waited on table, was enveloped in the white apron with satiny plaids. "She's not a bad-looking child," said Linda on one occasion when the girl had left the room to get more biscuit. "That little turn-up nose of hers is cute and her teeth are so white." "Those teeth!" ejaculated Miss Barry. "The time I had! But I finally taught her to keep them properly." "Everybody knows happiness is the best beautifier, anyway," remarked Mrs. Porter. "It looks as if you would have an angel in your kitchen from now on, Miss Barry." "Yes, 'looks,'" retorted the hostess. "Familiarity breeds contempt and I don't know how long Blanche Aurora can be subdued by her dry goods. I ought to make her put on her brown calico to go home in." "Oh, don't, Aunt Belinda. Let her have all the fun there is in it." So Miss Barry consented to leave her "help" in freedom; but the shrewd little brain under the fluffy red wig was working. Blanche Aurora knew about where the dividing line would occur in the bosom of her family between respect and ridicule. She felt instinctively that the limit would be reached before that crown of glory, the pink bow, should dazzle the irreverent vision of the home circle. She, therefore, when the dishes were dried, went to her room, took off the ribbon, and laid it reverently in her upper drawer beside the blue one. She gazed soulfully for a minute on the effect, then closed the drawer softly. There was a clean towel on the bureau and upon it reposed the white brush and comb and near that a bottle of violet toilet water. Yes, the last thing the wonderful one had put into her hands was this bottle of green liquid which the child said to herself "smelled purple." She hated to go home. A thief might break in during the night and bereave her. She lifted up the closet curtain and looked at the pretty blue dress hanging there. Well, she thought, with firm lips, the thief shouldn't get the pink one, for she was going to wear it. Further cautious thoughts of rough, teasing brothers caused her to remove the hairpins from her braids and let them hang down her back as of old. Then she put on her new white sweater and started to run across the fields to a properly awestruck family. A week later Blanche Aurora was alone in the house one afternoon cleaning silver. The day was beautiful, and no one stayed indoors who was not obliged to. She glanced up occasionally at the kitchen clock and saw that in half an hour she too would be at liberty to go out and get Miss Linda's rose, and hunt for four-leaved clovers. She enjoyed finding these and placing them beside Linda's plate at the table. "But," objected her friend one day, "I have to find them myself, don't I, in order that they should bring me luck?" "Perhaps so," returned the donor; "but while you're waitin' I'd like to give you some o' my luck.--I got so much." Indeed, Blanche Aurora was beginning to gain curves, and the round eyes to find expression. She sang at her work to-day, the pink bow on her head shaking with her energy as she rubbed. Suddenly the iron knocker on the front door sent a sharp rap-tap through the house. Blanche Aurora arose, laid down a fork, and moved through the rooms to answer the summons. Pulling open the door she beheld behind the screen a broad-shouldered man with a bright, expectant face, and his seeking eyes saw a pink-and-white aproned figure with red hair, and a perky pink bow atop. She was delighted at the prompt manner in which the stranger lifted his hat. "I wonder if I have the right house," he said. "I dunno. What house do you want?" came the stentorian response. "What is your name, please?" asked the young man. "Blanche Aurora." He smiled, a nice gleeful smile. "I mean your last name." "Martin." "I'm sorry. I'm looking for Miss Barry." "Oh, she lives here. I'm the help." "Really? I didn't dream it. I thought you were the nice little daughter of the house." "Miss Barry ain't married," replied Blanche Aurora practically, but she gave full credit to the pink bow. "Is her niece--is Miss Linda Barry here?" The eagerness of the question and of the very good-looking visitor was fully appreciated by the little maid who recognized a kindred spirit. "Oh, yes, she's here,"--the freckled face shone radiant. "Ain't she grand?" "The grandest ever. I want to see her. Aren't you ever going to open the screen door?" Upon this the screen door opened. "But she ain't in the house," replied Blanche Aurora, coming out on the piazza. "There ain't anybody in the house, so I can't leave it to hunt for her, but I can tell you where I bet she is." "You're a good--a particularly good child," was the earnest response as Blanche Aurora's finger pointed across the field. "Do you see that clump o' trees and then there's woods beyond?" "Yes." "Near them white birches you'll likely find her. Mrs. Porter and she's got a secret place." The visitor laughed. "Secret from whom?" "Everybody but me, I guess." The man looked at the smile that was keeping his laugh company. "What do you think they'll say to your telling their secrets?" "Well"--Blanche Aurora gave a comprehensive glance at the city clothes and the gay face above her. "I kinder think Miss Linda might be glad to see you, and if she would, what's the use o' waitin'!" "That's what I say," was the hearty response. "I can't wait. I'm going to scour this Cape till I do find her, and then if she _isn't_ glad to see me, do you know what I'm going to do?" Blanche Aurora's neatly coiffed head shook a denial. The visitor grasped her small shoulder with a strong hand. "I'm going out to that point of rock there,"--he pointed to the height of the cliff,--"and throw myself--dash myself into the sea!" He scowled portentously. "Well, you might wait till she gits used to you," suggested Blanche Aurora. "She might like you better." "I've been waiting two years, but your advice may still be good." "Be you her beau?" the question was roared solemnly. "I be; and if I don't find her this afternoon you tell her that her beau has come to town, and for her not to leave the house again till he arrives." "All right, sir," answered Blanche Aurora, her eyes nearly starting from her head with interest as the caller jumped off the piazza and swung whistling across the field. The soft turf was springy beneath his feet. "'A vagrant's morning, wide and blue,'" he muttered to himself. Gulls wheeled high over his head in the landward sallies from which they sailed back above the sea, their wings glinting like the distant "Foam of the waves, Blown blossoms of ocean, White flowers of the waters." Whitcomb strode along, the picture of Linda as he last saw her in the railway station still fresh in his mind. Miss Barry's "help" had been galvanized into interest at the mention of the girl. She had called her "grand." It sounded hopeful. Beyond the clump of birches, in their favorite spot, the two friends were sitting against their rock with their books and work. Talk amounts to very little. It was Emerson who said, "Don't talk! What you are thunders so loud above what you say, that I can't hear you." What Mrs. Porter was, had in their daily contact impressed itself so increasingly upon her young friend, that Linda, though reluctant, had, through very curiosity, come to be willing to look into the source of her friend's faith and strength. That little nook behind the birches had become dear to her. Near by rose the rich dark grove of firs and pines, the sea murmuring in their tops, and the spring bubbled with a silvery plashing. Here Whitcomb found them. They both started at his sudden appearance and he halted, and rapped on a white birch stem. "May I come in?" The gay, hearty voice set Linda's heart to beating fast. "Don't let me disturb you," and the visitor hurried forward, his hat off, and kneeling on the grass before her, took Linda's hand. "You have met Mrs. Porter?" "Once, I think," said that lady, shaking hands graciously with the young man. The devouring eyes with which he was taking in every detail of Linda's improved appearance made the older woman certain that here was the Chicago man whose happiness the girl had said she could not secure save by extreme measures. "You look wonderful, Linda. Good for the Cape!" said Fred, seating himself comfortably on the grass, and continuing to observe her with huge satisfaction. "But how did you know where to find us?" inquired the girl. "Blanche Aurora told me. Happy name! Dickens himself couldn't have done better. Blanche A-roarer." "But she didn't know about this place. Nobody knows." "So she observed--howling it to high heaven; but you might as well try to keep a locality from the sparrows as from kids of that age." "Well, I'm glad she did know," said Linda graciously, "It's good to see you, Fred,--you have a sort of a white, city look, as if a vacation couldn't hurt you." "Mrs. Lindsay told me you were related to them," said Mrs. Porter. "I suppose you came through her." "Yes, I did. I wouldn't have known there was any place to stay here except for her; and I did feel a bit seedy, as well as King, so I pulled up stakes--there being a strong magnet in this vicinity." He flashed a still further enlightening smile around at Linda. But Mrs. Porter had suddenly lost interest in his possible romance. "Mr. King--Bertram," she said, leaning forward. "He has been ill?" Whitcomb gave a soft significant whistle. "Rather!" he returned briefly. "I'm his cousin, Mr. Whitcomb. Tell me all about it, please." "I know you are. He has talked to me of you." Linda's lips had gained the close line the mention or thought of King always evoked. "Good old King. He's some fighter. You ought to be proud of him, Mrs. Porter." "I am. Tell me all you know of him, please. How is he now?" "On the upward way. He's going to come out all right, but"--the speaker cast an almost apologetic look at Linda--"you doubtless know that King was up against it for a while. It seems that one night there at the club when the strain was over, he felt himself going to pieces and he wrote me a note asking me, in case of his illness, to keep his papers--the contents of his desk--from Henry Radcliffe until he should recover." The blood pressed into Linda's face. She was too charitable to her friend even to glance her way. "The note was not finished. King had evidently taken the precaution to address and stamp the envelope before he began, and the last sane thing he did was to seal the letter inside it. By the time I received it and got over to the club, King was gone." "Gone!" Mrs. Porter gasped. "You said--" Fred nodded reassuringly toward her questioning face as she leaned forward. "Yes, they had taken him to the hospital, you know." "Oh!" cried Mrs. Porter, "and I here. Why didn't somebody write me?" Linda sat erect, in an attitude of courteous attention. "I never thought of it, Mrs. Porter. To tell the truth, I didn't know till he was convalescing that you were at all near to one another, and I didn't want to write anything to add to Linda's worries." He glanced at the girl's unmoved face. "Did you keep his papers from Henry?" she asked dryly. "I'll tell you about that." "But you stayed with him--" There was a little break in Mrs. Porter's low, even voice. "You helped him." "You bet I stayed with him, just as much of the time as my boss and the nurse would stand for. I was there every night." "Oh, Mr. Whitcomb," exclaimed Mrs. Porter gratefully, "you don't know what that means to me. Bertram wasn't entirely deserted." "No. Harriet was up in Wisconsin or she would have wanted to help, too. Henry kept King's illness from her; because even if she had been at home she couldn't really have done anything, you know." CHAPTER XXI REVELATION Linda, looking at Mrs. Porter, saw in the light of their many talks that her friend was striving for the composure with which it was her wont to meet adverse circumstances. Fred Whitcomb, too, recognizing that the older woman was the more interested of his listeners, began to address his narration chiefly to her. "King was pretty badly off," he went on. "He was nutty for days, and some of the things he said in his delirium made me feel that--well, that perhaps he'd had a rather lonely time of it. At any rate, he had asked only that his papers should be kept from Radcliffe, so I made up my mind that I'd go through them myself." Fred paused and gave a rather doubtful and wistful look at Linda's immovable countenance. Mrs. Porter's eyes were shining in their attention. "Well, I hadn't spent much time at his desk before I discovered why King had written me those directions. Henry can do what he pleases about Harriet, but I know Linda's a good sport. I know she wants the truth." "I do," returned Linda, with cold promptness. "What had Bertram against Henry?" "Nothing, bless your heart. The telltale package of papers concerned the Antlers Irrigation proposition. Your father was out in the West on the spot and King was in Chicago and these letters and telegrams were their correspondence at the time. It seems that Mr. Barry was completely fascinated by the proposition, but King knew the people connected with it better than Mr. Barry did; and though it appeared entirely legitimate, King begged your father to have nothing to do with it. He admitted that if it succeeded it would be a fortune, but the whole thing was on such a big scale and would involve Barry & Co. so deeply that King advised strongly and even urged that they let it alone; but after an argument of days Mr. Barry decided against him." Fred met Linda's frowning gaze. He waited while her face flushed, then watched while the red tide sank. In her concentrated look she appeared to be angry; and Fred hurried on defensively. "I tell you, Linda, I thought you ought to know this. You've always stood for fair play, and there the whole business world has been knocking Bertram King for months. He was a good fighter--but they knocked him down at last. If you'd seen him as I did, lying there, burning up with fever, and babbling scraps of talk that showed how he has worried--" Linda leaned forward and took Fred Whitcomb's surprised hand in one as cold as ice. Her brow still frowned, but the relaxed lips parted. "Thank you for telling me; thank you," she said. Mrs. Porter hurriedly gathered together her sewing materials, stuffed them into her silk workbag, and rose. Whitcomb, much relieved by Linda's words, also stood up. "Don't disturb yourselves," said Mrs. Porter; "I am going home to pack. I shall go at once to Chicago." "Do you mean to King?" asked Whitcomb. "Of course." Mrs. Porter also seized the young man's hand, and her moist eyes poured out their gratitude. "I can't tell you, Mr. Whitcomb, how I thank you, for befriending him: it's impossible." Fred smiled broadly. "Oh, say," he returned, "you don't need to pack. King is here." "What!" "Sure thing. I wouldn't have come without him. Not on your life. He didn't care much about it, but then he didn't care much about anything, and Mrs. Lindsay had said it was doing Madge a world of good--and Linda was here,"--the speaker turned and looked down at Linda, leaning back against the rock with a face as stony as its gray wall,--"so I bundled the poor chap on the train, and here we are." "At that awful Benslow place?" gasped Mrs. Porter. "It isn't so worse," said Fred. "I'm a dandy camper and I'll take care of King myself. The doctors told me just what to stuff him with, and, believe me, I'm going to stuff him. He doesn't slide off this planet till he gets some of the justice that's coming to him. Not if I know it. I haven't talked to him yet about my discovery of the letters, but I told Henry Radcliffe all about it the night before we left and he can do as he pleases about telling Harriet." "Mr. Whitcomb, you have earned my life-long gratitude," repeated Mrs. Porter. "Between us we will put that dear boy on his feet again. I'm off to see him. Good-bye." Linda felt hurt that not by word or look did her friend recognize the misery Mrs. Porter must have known she was suffering. Lightly that lady sped away around the clump of birches and was gone; and Fred Whitcomb's sturdy shoulders dropped down again near Linda's rock divan. "I thought you were looking great when I came up a few minutes ago," he said, examining her, "but it seems to me you might raise a little more color in this perfectly wonderful air." "You've given me a great shock, Fred." "Well, I hated to seem to disparage your father in any way," he returned tenderly, "but I knew--I just knew, Linda, you'd want to see King get fair play." "I do. I have blamed him cruelly myself." "How could you help it when everybody was feeling the same way? Does he know you blamed him?" "Yes." "I wonder if that had anything to do with his not seeing you off that morning in Chicago?" "Probably." "I blamed him for that; but now," added Whitcomb, happily, "everything is understood. We mustn't have another sorrowful minute." Linda's lips were looking as if there were only sorrow on earth. "There's a great reaction in Chicago in favor of your father," he added. "The excitement has calmed down, and when Lambert Barry is spoken of now it's with the same old respect, Linda; the same old respect." "And Bertram has done that," she said slowly. "Indeed, he has, and as he comes back to strength he's going to feel pretty good over it, too, I can tell you. So--take a brace, Linda. I'm so happy to see you, I can hardly contain myself." "What a good fellow you are, Fred!" "You mean for standing by King? Think what he's done for me. Snatched my savings like brands from the burning. My boss, too, is a big beneficiary by King's efforts, and he gave me an extra long vacation so I could come up here and look after him." "Is he very weak?" "Not any worse than you'd expect." Whitcomb's constitutional inability to look on the dark side shone in his happy eyes. "That Cap'n Jerry of yours is a dandy, though. He brought us over from the station and he whiled the time away telling how suddenly people either convalesced or died here. King coughs a little, and that inspired the genial captain to tell of his brother who'd been 'coughin' quite a spell'; and how 'sudden' he went off at the last. He said, 'Bill got up one mornin', et a good breakfast; then all to once he fetched a couple o' hacks and was gone!'" "Fred!" Linda frowned and smiled. "He did, for a fact. King says he positively refuses to fetch two consecutively." "He jokes, then," Linda spoke wistfully. "Oh, yes. He's as game as ever." "Fred,"--Linda clasped her hands tightly together,--"you don't know how cruel--how beastly I've been to Bertram." "Oh, forget it," Fred's worshiping eyes met the mourning gaze. "I'd like to; and I could if Bertram would, but he never will, I'm afraid. He hates me." "He'll get over it." "Tell me, Fred,--you must have spoken to him about me. What does he say?" Whitcomb looked off as if consulting his memory. "I can't remember his mentioning your name since Reason resumed her throne. He used to babble about you and your father, too, during his illness; but nothing connected: nothing that I can remember." "I'm really surprised that he was willing to come where I was staying." "I don't believe he knew it till we were on the train. I told him about the Lindsays and that I believed it was the right place for him." "But he must have known this was where Mrs. Porter was, and that she was with Aunt Belinda. He must have known I was with them." Whitcomb shrugged his shoulders under this insistence. "Perhaps he did," he admitted. "I spoke several times about you on the train, of course,--how I anticipated seeing you and all that." The speaker's eyes again sought some personal reassurance from his companion's distant gaze. "And he didn't say anything?" "I don't remember. I didn't notice. I don't think so." "Fred,"--Linda leaned forward in her earnestness and wrung her hands together,--"you don't know how hard it is for me to sit here and wait instead of running--_running_ to Bertram and confessing the wrong I've done and imploring his forgiveness." "None of that: none of that." Whitcomb raised a warning hand. "You mustn't say things to King to excite him. He's glassware, remember, glassware." The speaker sank on his elbow, bringing his eager, boyish face nearer the girl's white gown. His hat was on the grass beside him and his thick hair fell forward in his movement. "But here _I_ am, Linda," he added, in a different tone, "husky to the limit. When it comes to me, go as far as you like. You haven't seemed conscious of me yet." "Oh, yes, I'm conscious of you. I'm very grateful to you for finding out the truth and taking such care of Bertram." The girl's eyes were glowing in her pale face. "'Instead of the thorn';--Fred, did you ever read the Bible?" Whitcomb sat up under the sudden question, and stared at her. "The Bible!" he repeated. "Why, sure thing--some of it." "There's a promise in it, 'Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree.' It struck some chord in me when first I read it and it seems to mean more and more. See those firs,"--Linda waved her hand to where on the other side of the little brook the soft variation of color in the evergreens stood against the sky. "Breathe the balm they send out in the air? Mrs. Porter has shown me how it just rests with us to do away with the wounding thorn, and receive the peace of the stanch, unchanging fir tree, with its soft, invigorating perfume and color, and the music in its branches. It has come to be a great symbol to me--the fir tree." "Hurrah for the Tannenbaum," returned Whitcomb, mechanically, not knowing what to say to this changed Linda with the exalted eyes. "You have done a wonderful thing for me to-day, Fred; and if only I could wipe out from my own and Bertram's memory my wickedness, the fir tree could at once begin to come up; but my father suffered for his mistake and I must suffer for mine. To be patient--to put down my willfulness--to be willing just to guard my thoughts and to think right and to leave all the rest to God--that's my lesson; and you know how hard it is for me, Fred. You know how I've always managed, and dictated, and carried my point, and never had any patience." "You suit me all right, whatever you've done," blurted out Whitcomb, upon whom Linda's matter-of-course mention of the Creator had made a profound impression. "You've changed a lot in some ways," he went on, rather dejectedly, "but in a certain line where I'm interested, you don't seem to have made much progress. I'm the biggest donkey this side of Cairo, I know that; but when I'm away from you, I forget all the discouraging things you've ever said, and I build a lot of castles-in-the-air, each one more attractive than the last, and then the minute I get with you, with a simple twist of the wrist you tumble them all about my ears." "Oh, Freddy!" "Don't you 'Oh, Freddy' me. I was awfully afraid of King at one time, but when I found he wasn't in the race, I felt there wasn't anybody ahead of me and Holdfast's a good dog. I made up my mind to win." "Oh, Fred!" "Why shouldn't my thorn be pulled up, too? Why shouldn't _I_ have a nice Tannenbaum with just one gift hanging on it?" "Because, Fred, we can't any of us outline. We must be faithful and unselfish and let things grow right, and they will, because we were created for happiness. Mrs. Porter says so." "Oh, she has inside information, has she?" returned Whitcomb, with as near an approach to a sneer as his wholesome nature could come. "Yes, that's a very good name for it," returned Linda promptly. "Even I, Fred," she added humbly, "even I have had some inside information. In not getting me," she added gently, "you will get something better if we're all thinking right." Silence, during which Whitcomb gloomily uprooted such long grasses as grew near him. "I have no expectation of marrying anyone," said Linda, "and you are a hero in my eyes to-day, if that is any comfort to you." Whitcomb lifted a frowning, obstinate gaze to hers. "Holdfast's a good dog," he said sententiously. Presently he spoke again. "It's time for King to eat. I must go." "I'll walk with you as far as Aunt Belinda's." Whitcomb helped her gather up books and work and they moved away together. CHAPTER XXII THE PENITENT Blanche Aurora caught sight of the two strolling through the field toward the house and she called her mistress's attention to them. "There's the man I told you come, Miss Barry," she said eagerly; and Miss Belinda pulled down her glasses and viewed the approach. "Why, if that isn't Mr. Whitcomb!" she said. She groaned. "I don't think I've got a supper for a man; I do hate to cater for the great, walloping things." She craned her neck, keeping well out of range of the window in the forlorn hope that the threat might pass by. Forlorn, indeed. What place was there for the visitor to go to? To her surprise the young man's firm step lingered but a moment at the door, then from her vantage-ground she saw him lift his hat, jump off the piazza, and walk away. From another window Blanche Aurora's round eyes were watching too, with an unwinking gaze. She wished to see whether the stranger would seek the rock cliff; but evidently Miss Linda had been glad to see him, for he swung energetically across the grass in the opposite direction. Miss Barry, guiltily conscious of her inhospitable attitude, and remembering with a rush the helpfulness with which Whitcomb had smoothed her path away from Chicago, met Linda as she entered. What meant the glowing expression in her niece's face? Had there really been more than appeared in her friendship for Fred Whitcomb? "That was Mr. Whitcomb, wasn't it? Why didn't he come in? What a surprise to see him here," said Miss Barry. "After all," she added mentally, "those broiled lobsters would probably have satisfied him." Linda put an arm about her aunt's shoulders and drew her into the living-room. There was a roseate gleam in the dusky distance as Blanche Aurora withdrew through the swing door. Miss Barry could feel a nervous tension in the arm about her, and as she looked curiously into the pale, excited face she felt certain that portentous news was impending. "I don't care if she has,"--the swift thought fled through her mind. "He's young and only beginning life, but he's a good boy. I like him; and I grudged the poor fellow a meal!" "Yes, it was Fred," said Linda, seating herself and her captive on a wicker divan. "Why didn't you ask him in?" "Because he had to go to Bertram." "Mr. King here?" "Yes, convalescing from a serious illness; a terrible illness, Aunt Belinda,"--the girl's voice began to shake,--"an illness I helped to bring on. If"--the voice refused to go further, but broke in a flood of tears as the speaker collapsed in Miss Barry's amazed arms. "Wait--wait," sobbed Linda. "There, there, child. There, there," was all Miss Belinda could think of to say in the way of comfort while she, her curiosity effervescent, patted the sufferer. "Where are they, Linda?" she asked gently. "In Portland?" "No, at the Benslows'." "The Benslows'!" ejaculated Miss Belinda. "And I grudged that boy a meal!" "Did you say Mr. King is convalescing from something, dear?" "Yes--yes." "Do they want to kill him, taking him to Luella's?" "It's--it's the Lindsays' doings,--and--and--Fred thinks it's all right. He--he has a tent, and he's taking care of him." Miss Barry's voice was very kind and she kept on her mechanical patting of the sobbing figure. "I didn't know they were such special friends, Linda." "They were--weren't before; but everybody wants to help--help Bertram now. You were right all the time, Aunt Belinda. He was--was behaving nobly and--and protecting Father. It was--was dear Father's mistake about--about the Antlers. It has--has all come out now. Oh, why was I so cruel!" "Now, now, dear. Now, now," soothed Miss Belinda, snapping her moist eyelids together. Feeling her helplessness to say the right thing brought to mind her ally. "Where's Mrs. Porter, Linda?" "Gone to see Bertram. Oh, if I only could!" "Why, you can, of course. He isn't in bed, is he?" "I wouldn't care if he was in bed; but how can he ever want to see me again?" Miss Barry pursed her lips and her head gave a little shake over the bowed one. The remorse she used to wish for her niece had evidently come in an avalanche; and the New England conscience could but admit that it was good enough for her. "Oh, there's such a thing as forgiveness in the world," she suggested comfortingly. "You know Bertram stood next to Papa. I don't think Papa knew any difference in his love of us and him. He was just like a son to him, always so faithful and efficient." Miss Barry raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. A few words longed to pass them, but she bit them back. "I fought my admiration of him always because I thought he didn't admire me. I was jealous of him, too. I was the most selfish girl in the world. I wanted to be absorbed in my own trumpery interests nearly all the time; then when I had an hour for Father I wanted him to put me above Bertram in his confidence and consideration; whereas Bertram was always standing shoulder to shoulder with him." "Now, Linda, do be reasonable. You had to go to school. Don't blame yourself too much." The girl slowly lifted her head and drew a long, sighing breath. "I can't eat supper, Aunt Belinda," she said after a moment of gazing into space. "You'll forgive me, won't you? I feel as if I must rest and think until to-morrow morning, and then I promise to go on as before." "How about Mr. Whitcomb? You don't say a word about him." "He's been splendid--wonderful. We owe it all to him that we know the truth. Bertram would have lived and died and kept silence; but Fred read the letters in his desk while he was ill. His delirious talk had roused Fred's suspicions." Linda gave another sobbing sigh, the aftermath of the storm. "I'm awfully tired, Aunt Belinda. I'll go upstairs and perhaps I'll go to bed. Don't think of me again until to-morrow." "Suit yourself, child," returned Miss Barry kindly. "We shall miss you at supper." Linda vanished up the stairs and Miss Barry went out to the kitchen, where she found her maid with a very red little nose and extremely dolorous wet eyes. "What are you crying for, Blanche Aurora?" she demanded. "'Cause--'cause _she_ did." A loud sniff. "You've been listening," said Miss Barry sternly. The little girl fairly stamped in her outraged feeling. "I guess you ain't got no business to say that," she returned, and the honest wrath of her gaze caused her mistress to clear her throat. "Well, well, I don't suppose you did. Miss Linda has a friend who is ill." "He's a-goin' to drown himself, that's what," gulped Blanche Aurora, the relief of speech overbalancing her righteous wrath. "What do you mean, you crazy child?" "He told me he would if she wasn't glad to see him; and if Miss Linda wants me to, I'll go after him, and stop him." The girl's hands and feet moved restlessly as if she longed to be up and doing. "Nonsense, child. Mr. Whitcomb is always joking." "Oh, no, Miss Barry. He warn't jokin'. He said he was her beau, and Miss Linda wouldn't cry like that--" a spasm constricted the speaker's throat--"if she hadn't given him the mitten and warn't scared what he'd do." "Law! Blanche Aurora, it's another man she was crying about." The restless hands quieted and the little maid listened doubtfully. Her mind was so thoroughly made up as to the tragedy that it changed reluctantly. "Wherever Miss Linda is," went on Miss Barry solemnly, "men spring up through the ground. Who'd ever think of those two coming here to have the finishing touch put on a sick man at Luella Benslow's! If I should hire a boat and take Miss Linda out there,"--Miss Barry indicated the sea,--"out as far as the eye can reach, mermen would begin coming to the surface and swarming up the side of the vessel." "Oh, dear," gasped Blanche Aurora. The situation was worse than she had feared, thus complicated by a man so dear to Miss Linda that loyalty to her beau could not prevent her from sobbing her heart out about him. "Let's take him _here_," she said as the fruit of her swift cogitation. "Who?" "The sick man." "Mr. King!" ejaculated Miss Barry. King! His name was King! That settled it. Blanche Aurora's heart bled for the gay, broad-shouldered young man who had gained her sympathy, but Miss Linda's wishes were paramount. "Let's take him here and cure him," she repeated stoutly. "You're perfectly crazy, child," was the startled reply. "I shouldn't consider taking a man into my house; and I think they'll make out all right at Luella's with our help. I shall let you take nice things over to him once in a while." Blanche Aurora's breast swelled with excitement. She should see the King: see the wonderful person who could wring tears from the powerful and self-contained Miss Linda; but at the same time she felt very, very sorry for Fred Whitcomb. Going about to get supper she narrowly escaped scorching the biscuit and she poured the tea into the water pitcher. The long evening had dimmed to twilight when Mrs. Porter appeared at Linda's open door. The girl had left it ajar as an invitation to her. "What's this? What are you doing?" asked the older woman cheerily as she descried the face on the pillow. "Hating myself," returned Linda briefly. Mrs. Porter's pleasant laugh sounded. "There's nothing in that," she returned, and she came and sat on the foot of the bed. "He's better, or you couldn't laugh," said Linda. "Yes, he is. That nice Whitcomb is a regular steam engine. He has a tent with all the outdoor sleeping paraphernalia and they don't expect to spend many nights indoors. Of course, it's just the right season for the experiment." "Does Bertram--does he look very--very ill?" "Oh, rather frail, of course; but he looks very good to me with his nice gray eyes so care-free." "He has the most lovely teeth I ever saw," said Linda with a gulp. "Yes; they're just as nice as ever." "I wish you were in a serious mood, Mrs. Porter." "How can I be when I'm so relieved and grateful?" "Can't you be a little sorry for me, who am absolutely miserable?" Linda's words were interspersed with catches in the throat, but she was determined to weep no more. "No one should be that. Cheer up, girlie. That nice Whitcomb--" Linda jerked her face around into the pillow. "Oh, don't go on calling him 'that nice Whitcomb!' It seems as if I was born just to make everybody miserable!" Mrs. Porter squeezed the ankle by which she was sitting. "Not everybody. I'm sure Madge Lindsay will give you a vote of thanks if you don't absorb Mr. Whitcomb." "Why? Has she come to life?" inquired Linda gloomily. "I should say she has. Everybody over there is galvanized with all this excitement. Mrs. Lindsay says Luella nearly went out of her mind at first with two men impending, and she told Mrs. Lindsay she couldn't do so much cooking: that she'd have to get a 'chief' from Portland; but I tell you, Mrs. Lindsay is a general. She promised Miss Benslow to help her. She exiled Pa to his boathouse and hired Letty Martin to wash dishes,--that's Blanche Aurora's sister,--and Luella, from being desperate, is now on the top of the wave. That nice Whitcomb--excuse me,"--the speaker gave the ankle a little shake,--"I mean that strong, good-natured Freddy has kissed the blarney stone, probably. At any rate, Luella is his bond slave already." "What relation are the Lindsays to him?" "Mrs. Lindsay told me. She and Fred's father are own cousins." "That's not too near," said Linda dismally. "No, but don't order any wedding presents yet, though I assure you Madge looked very fetching this afternoon in a rose corduroy gown and hat." "Oh, I shan't do anything pleasant yet," responded Linda. "Mrs. Porter, I don't see how you can keep me in suspense. Didn't Bertram speak of me at all?" "I--I don't think so." "Don't think so! Wouldn't you be certain if he had?" "I'm sure he didn't, then." "You know all you've said to me about our being punished for everything wrong we do." "Yes." "How long--how long do you think my punishment will last?" asked Linda naïvely. "What does it consist in? What do you mean?" "Bertram's not forgiving me. I have that awful feeling that Bertram never will forgive me--never can like me again, when--when"--the nervous excitement in the low voice increased--"he's the most important person in the world to me: the one Father loved best and who has helped him most. Think what I've done! Put myself beyond the pale of his liking: his forgiveness." A dry sob shook the speaker. "And Fred hasn't told him about the letters. He doesn't dream yet that we know the truth; and Fred says I mustn't tell him: that he mustn't be excited." "Hush, Linda. Think, dear. You know enough truth to steer by now. 'Cast thy burden on the Lord, and He will sustain thee.' All your part is to think right and do right to-day. You don't want to escape punishment, do you?" "Yes, I do. I've been punished enough, just in the last few hours. I want Bertram to know I suffer and to forgive me, and to accept my appreciation of all he has done." "Look out there, Linda,"--Mrs. Porter indicated the starry firmament visible through the broad window, every golden point scintillating in the crystal clear air. "The marvelous order and peace of that sky will rest you and make you realize what it is to allow yourself to be guided by the same Mind that planned those unthinkable depths yet which notes the sparrow's fall. Turn to Him. Never mind Bertram King and Linda Barry. Just know that God is Love, and that to-morrow you will be guided to take steps in the right direction. 'Commit thy way unto Him and He will bring it to pass.'" "Bring what to pass?" asked Linda eagerly. "What?" "Ah, there comes in the temptation to outline. We can't tell what; but we must have faith that it will be the best thing, the happiest thing." "Yes, I know," dejectedly. "I preached it all to Fred." "That's it, dear. We don't really know these truths--they're not ours until we've lived them." A few minutes longer Mrs. Porter sat on the foot of Linda's bed. The crescent moon dropped into the west, and the waves lapped the rugged shore in long, murmurous sweeps. They talked no more, and when Mrs. Porter said good-night and went to her own room, had it not been so dark she would have observed that a photograph of Bertram King had found a place on Linda's table. CHAPTER XXIII A GOOD NEIGHBOR Miss Benslow was wont to refer to her weather-beaten house, woefully in need of paint, as "the homestead." In her grandfather's time the place had been a small farm, but Cy Benslow had sold all of it but a couple of acres to Portland people who had put up cheap summer cottages. The house was set back some two hundred feet from the sea and a few Balm-of-Gilead trees relieved the monotony of the wind-swept landscape. Madge Lindsay had found places for a couple of hammocks, which Fred Whitcomb observed with satisfaction on his arrival with his charge. "You're perfectly welcome to them," Miss Lindsay assured him. "Did you ever play the rôle of a head of cabbage for six weeks?" "Is it anything like a blockhead?" inquired Whitcomb. "I've played that all my life." "Yes, they're ever so much the same," drawled Madge. Perhaps she had affected a drawl to offset her devoted mother's snappy, nervous manner. At any rate, it was second nature now. "You're not allowed to have an idea when you're assigned the rôle of cabbage head; so it amounts to the same thing as your limitation." "Thanks awfully," returned Whitcomb. "It's worth everything to discover sympathy." He was establishing King in a steamer chair on the piazza while they were talking: a precarious piazza it was, with a list to leeward. Mrs. Lindsay looked on solicitously and held ready a steamer rug. "These slanting boards used to make me seasick at first," she said, "but after a while you don't mind anything here, the air is so divine and there's so much of it." She extinguished King's evident shiver with her rug. "Thank you, Mrs. Lindsay," he said. "Do you guarantee that in a short time I shall act and feel less like a shaky old woman? Or, perhaps, I'm more like a baby. Whitcomb's brought everything along but a nursing-bottle, and his beefiness makes me feel like a rattling skeleton." "Oh, just be a cabbage, Mr. King," advised Madge, "and you'll come out all right. You know how much stress is laid on _thinking_ these days. Don't think a shaky old woman, and don't think a baby, but think a cabbage. It's the most restful thing in the world; and there's nothing and nobody here to inspire a thought." "You have neighbors," said King, "according to Whitcomb. A cousin of mine, Mrs. Porter, is staying here with Miss Barry. Mrs. Porter is the sort to inspire even a cabbage." "Not when she's being one herself," returned Madge. "She's a music teacher! Who can blame her? I know if I were one, I'd be a murderess too.--Yes, they are over there, and so is Linda Barry. I hope neither of you is attached to her, for I think she's the coldest, most impossible girl I ever met." "Surely you know of her sorrow?" said Whitcomb, and his expression was a reproach to the girl's drawling speech. "Oh, so you _are_ attached! Forgive me, won't you? All the same, if I'm ever in mourning I'm determined not to freeze my sister-woman and slink away from her into by-ways." "Madge, dear," warned Mrs. Lindsay. "Oh, Mother and Miss Barry have had some traffic over ferns; and Mrs. Porter's offishness is different from Linda Barry's. She's a queen, Mrs. Porter is. I'd take lessons of her just for the companionship, only that she'd think _I_ thought I had a voice." "And so you have, a very nice one," chirped Mamma. "Her goose is such a swan," exclaimed Madge, with a lazy smile. "No one should be without a mother." "Shoo, all of you," said Whitcomb, motioning with his hands. "I want King to go to sleep." The convalescent's eyes closed as his head rested against the pillow of his reclining chair. "There goes Whitcomb, again," he announced through his nose. "Baby always goes to sleep in his carriage when he hits the oxygen, you know." "No, no, Mr. King. Cabbage, cabbage," exclaimed Madge in reminder, as she jumped off the rickety steps. Her acquaintance with Whitcomb had been very casual heretofore. There had been a few hours in New York and a few hours in Chicago at various times when cousinly amenities were exchanged; and now, as her youthful vitality had reasserted itself, the rôle of vegetable was becoming a frightful bore, and this invasion of the two young men restored an interest in life. There was a level plain back of Miss Benslow's house and Madge had discovered signs that previous boarders had essayed to play tennis there. She led Whitcomb to it now. "Don't you think we might fix it up?" she asked. He looked dubiously at the tufts of grass. "And crack a few tendons over these hummocks?" he suggested. "Do you play much?" Her dark eyes gave him a provocative glance. "I might surprise you," she drawled. "Good enough. It will be better than nothing." "Which? A girl antagonist or the court?" "I'll tell you that later." "Then go and ask Luella for a scythe and a lawn mower. Let's begin right off. I'm aching to play." "Don't believe I can this afternoon," returned Whitcomb, rather consciously. "I ought to go over to Miss Barry's and call the first thing." "Oh, yes. I forgot the attachment." Madge's dark, tanned face lighted brilliantly with a gleam of white teeth. She feigned a shiver. "Be careful that she doesn't freeze you. To call on Linda Barry seems an intrepid act to me." "You didn't grow up with her." "I suppose she's really charming when one knows her," said Madge, as they turned away from the potential court and strolled toward the house. Whitcomb's manner as he replied had suggested danger. "She's certainly lovely to look upon." "You haven't seen her yet in a normal condition," he replied, somewhat mollified. "People can't get over shocks like hers in a minute. This must have been a great place for her, though." Whitcomb's eyes swept the vastness of sea and sky. "If you don't find her much improved, tell her of the cabbage stunt," said Madge. Then she pointed out to her companion the low, broad, shingled cottage, clinging to the rocky shore, and turned away toward the house. "To-morrow morning for the tennis court," said Whitcomb gayly as he left her. "How tiresome," she thought. "That Barry iceberg will never like me, and now Fred will want to drag her into everything. If only Mr. King had his sea legs." She looked disapprovingly toward the piazza, where the convalescent's clear-cut face showed, sleeping against the blue chintz pillow. "Where has Fred gone, dear?" asked her mother's voice at her elbow. The sharp eyes had witnessed her child's desertion. "Gone over to call on Linda Barry. I think that's all he came here for." "H'm. Shows Fred's not mercenary. Still, you know, things aren't going to turn out so badly as people expected. I had a talk with Fred this morning and he's quite optimistic. It seems that that Mr. King is the hero of the whole affair. I'll tell you about it sometime. Hasn't he an aristocratic face!" added Mrs. Lindsay, with an approving snap of her eyes toward the steamer chair. "I wanted to fix the tennis court. I wish that human Thermos bottle was in Kamchatka." Mrs. Lindsay laughed. "They retain heat as well as cold, remember. Perhaps Fred knows what is inside that one better than you do." Madge yawned and put an arm around her mother as they walked toward the house. They were excellent friends. The following morning, when Whitcomb had finished ministering to the convalescent's needs, and had placed him comfortably in the hammock, he was ready for the tennis court proposition. It proved that Luella's lawn mower was an antique whose working days were over; and she indicated to the young people a house where one could be borrowed. It was not Miss Barry's cottage! When they had traversed some distance across the field on the errand, a demurely stepping figure approached them. It was a very young girl in a blue frock, bareheaded, and carrying with great solicitude a bowl covered with a napkin. As she approached, Whitcomb recognized her, and it was with some relief that she recognized him, bareheaded, and in khaki trousers and sweater, with a general appearance of being long for this world. He was laughing and talking with Luella's boarder in a reassuring manner, and when his eyes fell upon her, he spoke. "Why, good-morning, Blanche Aurora." "Good mornin', Mr. Whitcomb," she responded loudly in her best manner and with a sharp glance at the dark young lady in the rose gown. "Whither away, Blanche Aurora?" "I'm carryin' jell to the king," she announced. "What's this?" Fred's eyes lighted curiously on the snowy napkin. "Something nice for King, eh? Bertram the first?" "Lemon jell," announced Blanche Aurora, with a proud accession of lung power, and an evident desire not to be delayed. "Well, Mr. King's over there in a hammock," said Whitcomb, looking doubtful. "I don't believe I need to go back." "Go back? Of course not!" cried Madge.--"Ask for Mrs. Lindsay when you get to Miss Benslow's and she'll see to it. Come on, Fred." Blanche Aurora gave the young lady one look, as cold and impersonal as china-blue optics are capable of bestowing, and moved on her way. Call for Mrs. Lindsay! Not likely, now that she knew the king was easy prey in a hammock. "But poor King," protested Whitcomb, as he followed Madge's determined march. "Is it fair? No cotton for his ears." "Oh, she probably won't see him at all. The young one will give the jelly to Mother and she'll attend to it." Little Madge Lindsay knew of the swelling heart beneath the blue gingham frock. Blanche Aurora's confused and excited meditations had conferred royalty upon the mysterious stranger, and should she find him informally wearing a crown in his hammock, it would not astonish her in the least. Arriving at the Benslow house, she cast glances askance toward piazza and windows, fearing that some one might inquire her business; but it was ten-thirty in the morning, a busy time for housekeepers, and she proceeded unmolested toward the Balm-of-Gilead trees. One hammock hung empty, its fringes stirring but lightly in the protected nook to which the trees owed their life. The visitor caught sight of fair hair on the pillow of the second swinging couch, and continuing from the head a long black chrysalis. She approached eagerly. King, glancing around at a sound, suddenly saw beside him a blue-clothed figure with long, white, pipe-stem legs, and white sneakers. The newcomer's red braided hair glinting in the sun was surmounted by a voluminous blue bow. As he turned his head, the better to see his visitor, she burst forth in one breath: "I'm Miss Belinda Barry's help, Blanche Aurora Martin, Blanche Aurora for short, and I've brought you a snack, O King." The invalid turned, chrysalis and all, the better to view the bowl being extended to him. "Why--why"--he said, exhibiting broadly the teeth Linda had commended,--"somebody is being very kind to me." "It's Miss Barry; but I made the jell and she sent it with her compliments. Snacks is good for folks that's sick and delicate." As she spoke, the visitor was devouring the royal features with intent to verify her suspicion concerning the new photograph, and to understand the great man's influence on Miss Linda. "What did you say was your name?" "Blanche Aurora." "Well, you're a very kind little girl. Do you say that jelly is for me?" "Yes, and you'd better eat it right off, O King, 'cause the middle o' the mornin' is the time for snacks. I've got a spoon in here,"--she took off the napkin and revealed it. "If you eat it now, you see, I can take the bowl back; 'cause if it once gits in with Luella's things, no tellin' when we'd ever see it again." King's gray eyes twinkled. "Blanche Aurora, you're a joy," he declared mildly, "and never in my life have I seen anything look so good as that jelly." "It is good, O King," admitted the visitor, stentorianly modest. "It's got orange juice in it, too." "Then, get that chair over there under the tree, and bring it here where you'll be more sociable; and would you mind getting the pillow out of the other hammock so I can be royally propped up. If I'm a king, nothing's too good for me, eh?" "Of course, nothin's too good for you," declared Blanche Aurora solemnly, as she carried out his directions. "I'm afraid somebody has been--well--stringing you, to put it informally, concerning myself," remarked the invalid when his visitor had propped his shoulders to her liking. "If my head should lie any uneasier if it wore a crown, the game wouldn't be worth the candle. Could you pull that pillow a little higher--there, that's fine. Now, then, for the jelly." The visitor took it from the chair, and handing it to him, seated herself, with her demurest company manner. "One thing more, you good child. Can you tuck the end of that rug under my feet?" "Is your feet cold?" asked Blanche Aurora sharply as she jumped up and complied. "Do you wish you had a hot-water bag?" "I dare say Whitcomb brought one." "But the hens can lend you all you want," declared Blanche Aurora earnestly. "They don't need 'em this weather." "The hens? What sort of a place have I got into?" So the visitor explained Luella's invention, and King laughed till he was weak, while the little girl eyed him solemnly. "Do stop," he begged. "Spare me this last humiliation of being in the old hen's class. Now, Blanche Aurora, here goes." And he began an appreciative attack on the jelly. CHAPTER XXIV WHITCOMB'S CONFESSION Blanche Aurora never removed her eyes from her beneficiary. "The best jelly ever," he remarked between two mouthfuls. "You don't talk a bit like a king," she declared judicially. "Have you known many?" "Only in stories." "Somebody evidently has told you a fairy story about me,"--the speaker continued to eat industriously. "Who tried to induce you to believe that I was anything but an American rack of bones?" "I knew you was a great man, and they said King." "A great man, eh? How's that?" "And I believed nobody but a king could make Miss Linda cry." The gray eyes lifted for a look at the visitor before the eating recommenced. "Not guilty," said King. "She cried somethin' terrible 'cause you was sick." The memory seemed to make the small piquant nose tingle, for Blanche Aurora wiggled it and snapped the china-blue eyes. "She cries a good deal, I suppose." "She never cries," declared the small maid indignantly. "Why should anybody that can have anythin' in the world and do anythin' in the world _cry_? I didn't know Miss Linda could cry; but her beau came over--" The gray eyes lifted again, for a moment, but the convalescent's appetite appeared to be still ravenous. "--And she was walkin' with him, and she come into the house and told Miss Barry you was sick, and--" Again Blanche Aurora's nose and lips wiggled in grievous reminiscence. "Do you mean Mr. Frederick Whitcomb?" "That's him. He told me he was her beau, but I guess he ain't no longer. I don't believe"--a shrewd look coming into the blue gazing eyes--"I don't believe she'd cry like that about _him_, 'cause she never does cry." The addition was made with a return of indignation. "She's the beautifulest, kindest lady in the whole world." "H'm," mumbled King, over an extra large spoonful. "She give me this dress"--the speaker grasped a fold of the azure gingham--"and a pink one, too, and ribbons. She used to wear the dresses herself, 'fore her pa died. When she come here first I looked like a scarecrow." "My compliments, Blanche Aurora." King bowed toward his companion whose small white teeth gleamed in a face thrilled into vivacity. "You do Miss Linda credit." "So I wondered what you was like, O King--I mean Mr. King. I guess you're just plain Mister, ain't you?" "There never was a plainer." "And so, when I seen this new likeness on Miss Linda's table, standin' by her pa's, I wondered if perhaps 'twas you, and it is!" finished Blanche Aurora with all the triumph of a Sherlock Holmes. "I put a wild rose front of her pa every day, and says I to her this mornin', 'Shall I git a rose for the new picture, too?'--but she looked awful sad and she shook her head and says, 'I'm afraid not, Blanche Aurora. We need pansies for that'; and we ain't got a pansy on the place. I'm awful sorry." "Do you know, I don't believe I can quite finish this delicious jelly? I feel now as if my sweater wouldn't give any more." "Well, you've et quite a lot," observed the visitor, looking into the bowl. "I certainly have; and will you thank Miss Barry for me, and tell her that I feel in these noticeable bones that I'm going to be up and around before very long?" "I'll tell her; and, oh, yes! Be you able to see folks?" King's eyes twinkled. "Well, I seem to have seen you without any danger." "Yes, but they didn't expect I was goin' to see you." There was a triumphant gleam in the speaker's eyes. "They told me to leave the jell." "You think for yourself, don't you, Blanche Aurora?" laughed King, settling down comfortably into his pillow. "I was bound I was goin' to see who it was could make Miss Linda sob, and _sob_, and besides, I wanted to see if the likeness was you that wasn't ever on her table before." Long after the visitor's departure King lay, a deep line between his brows, his perplexed thoughts accompanied by the constant sound as of rain in the rustling Balm-of-Gilead leaves above him. Linda in wild tears; Linda placing a photograph of himself beside that of her father and all following Fred Whitcomb's visit; there was something here to be inquired into. It was nearly noon when the laborers on the tennis court returned. King could hear their laughter as they approached the house; and shortly Whitcomb appeared beside the hammock, exasperatingly robust and gay, and wiping his moist brow. "How goes it?" he asked, grasping the rope and swinging the couch. "Stop that, or I'll murder you," growled King. "Sure thing. I forgot," said Whitcomb as he tightened his hold and brought the chrysalis to a standstill. "Madge Lindsay's a scream," he continued. "She's more fun than a barrel of monkeys. She knows every word of the Winter Garden and Follies songs for the last two years. I'll get her started so you can hear her one of these times." "Good Lord, deliver us!" uttered King devoutly. "Got a grouch, old man?" asked Whitcomb with a solicitous change of tone. "Did Blanche A-roarer, the human siren, blow her whistle too near you? We met her and she said she was bringing you jell." "She did, and it's safely stowed away under my sweater. What are you going to do next?" "Why, we thought we'd go into the water. We both took a Turkish bath out there on that Transgressor's Boulevard that we're trying to turn into a tennis court. It's high tide, and Madge says there's a beach down here where we can get a ducking when the water's high. That's the trouble with this place. It's so jagged and deep, only a submarine could go bathing here at low tide. Why?" added Whitcomb. "Did you want me for anything?" "No. What should I want you for? Get out." "All right. You'll be coming with us in a little while. So long. We're watching the time and we'll be on hand for dinner. Mackerel, the fair Luella told me. I can hardly wait." King gazed after his friend as the latter ran across the grass and disappeared within their tent. He closed his eyes, and opening them in a few minutes at a sound, found beside him a figure in a long black cloak, with a dark face beneath a red bathing-cap. Miss Lindsay was smiling down at him. "We're going for a dip, Mr. King. I wish you could come." "Pardon my not rising," said the invalid. "It's such fun to have somebody to play with. I'm so glad you brought Fred here. I was getting so bored." "That's a consoling way of putting it," remarked King. "It's a proud moment when I am spoken of as taking anybody anywhere." "Oh, you'll be out of that hammock in a week. Do you like the banjo, Mr. King?" "I hate it," he replied distinctly; then seeing the dark face fall, "but not more than I do everything." "So discouraging," drawled Madge. "I was going to promise to give you some perfectly jolly darky tunes to-night." "Good Lord, deliver us!" again rose to King's lips, but he swallowed the phrase. "Don't mind about me," he said. "Just give me a few board nails to bite, and let it go at that. I'm not worse than other convalescents, I dare say." "Lemon jelly wasn't the thing to feed him," said Madge to Whitcomb, as a few minutes later they were scrambling down the bank toward a short stretch of pebbly beach. "He should be fed saccharine and nothing else. You never do know what to do with such people. You don't like not to be civil. You have a wonderful disposition, Fred. Yes, you have. I've always noticed it." "I fancy I am something of an optimist," admitted Whitcomb, "but I need to be, as badly as anybody that ever lived. Now I'm trying to think that that sunny water will feel the way it looks." "Come on, then," cried Madge, flinging aside her cloak, and seizing his hand she drew him, protesting and howling, into the icy flood. The wind was offshore, and Madge, thoroughly acclimated, had been anticipating mischievously the effect upon the tenderfoot. He was game, however, and Lake Michigan had made him practically amphibious, so they had an exhilarating swim before coming out on the white pebbles for a sun bath. "I'm afraid it will be a long time before King can stand that," remarked Whitcomb. "What did you mean," asked Madge, "by saying a few minutes ago that you need a happy disposition more than other people? Is it because Mr. King is so difficult?" "No," replied Whitcomb, gathering up a few pebbles and beginning to play jackstones. He avoided his companion's very good-looking but enterprising eyes. "Well, aren't you going to tell me?" "I don't know why I shouldn't. You're my cousin. I adore a girl who doesn't care a hang for me." "The Thermos bottle," thought Madge acutely. "But you won't tell me who?" she hazarded aloud. "Why should I?" "You don't have to; but just remember this, Freddy Whitcomb. Look at this great ocean. It's like the great world. That saying, 'there's just as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it,' is true; and"--Madge captured Whitcomb's reluctant gaze with as bright eyes as ever sparkled under a red cap--"some people are only fish with gold scales," she drawled. "She isn't," blurted out the young man defensively. "Of course not," laughed Madge. "Want to go in once more?" Whitcomb sprang to his feet. "Once more, and then what ho! for the mackerel!" As he helped Madge up the bank a little later he said: "I must stay with King this afternoon." "And call at the Barrys'," thought his companion. "I'm afraid he got sort of down this morning, all alone." "Well, we'll have another go at the court to-morrow," replied Madge good-naturedly. "Freddy needn't have worried," she thought. She was far too clever to satiate a man with her society. King came to the dinner table and did full justice to the meal. "I'm quite sure," he said to Mrs. Lindsay, "that those hammocks were dedicated to the naps of yourself and your daughter, and I want to assure you that I've had my share of them for to-day." The ladies protested kindly. "I've had my eye on a big rock there is over there nearer the water," said King. "I'm going to try my rickety legs that far." A chorus of approval of the plan arose, and after a short time of sitting about the discouraged piazza, he and Whitcomb rambled slowly off. To King's disgust, his friend as they left had picked up a steamer rug. "Oh, cut it out," begged the convalescent. "Shut up!" returned the other cheerfully. Arrived at their goal, he threw down the rug and King was glad to sit on it under the lee of the big rock. "What did you do yesterday, Freddy?" asked King, going directly to the subject uppermost in his mind. "I called on Linda and Mrs. Porter. Mrs. Porter told you, didn't she?" "Yes. She came over, exuding gratitude to you at every pore, and adorably sympathetic and charming to me." "Well, that's all right, isn't it?" returned Whitcomb, a little uncomfortable under his friend's gaze, which seemed more portentous than was necessary. "Women always overdo the gratitude business. Just like her to praise me for engineering an extra long vacation for myself." "Freddy, you haven't told me everything," said King sternly. "Now, spit it right out in Papa's hand." "What are you talking about?" asked the other uneasily. "I don't know, but I'm going to find out. When Linda left Chicago I was the blackest sheep on her black list. What did you tell her to change her attitude? It wasn't that I had been ill, for she would have buried me cheerfully. Now, out with it!" "Is this the third degree?" Whitcomb was gathering the daisies within reach. "Yes. It wasn't any opinion you had of me contrary to hers. She thinks for herself; so give me the real stuff." "Why do you believe she has changed?" Whitcomb returned the other's gaze now doggedly. "Because, after you left, she wept;--according to impartial testimony, loud and long. Also she dug up my photograph and placed it on a table beside her father's. This information was fed to me with the jelly." "Blanche Aurora!" exclaimed Whitcomb, scowling. "Exactly. Now, then!" "Well," said Whitcomb, "it seems the time to tell you. While you were in the hospital your jabbering aroused my suspicions. I wasn't Henry Radcliffe and I hadn't been forbidden; so I went through some of your papers. When I had found the Antlers correspondence I didn't need to go any farther." King's thoughtful frown deepened and his face grew slowly and darkly red. Whitcomb maintained his steady regard. "At that time I didn't know whether you were going to live or not, but I did know that justice was going to be done you." Recollection of Whitcomb's devotion swept over the other man like a tide, submerging the first sensation of outraged privacy: of having been outwitted. "You meant well," he said in a low tone. "Yes, and I did well," said Whitcomb slowly. "I didn't tell Radcliffe till the night before we left Chicago. Harriet was in Wisconsin. I don't know her so well as Linda; but Linda is as fair-minded as another fellow. There was only one thing to do in her case." There was a short silence, then Whitcomb continued:-- "I'll tell you frankly that if I had had any idea of the depth of her feeling in the matter, I should have hesitated. This laying down your life for a friend isn't in my line. It's beyond me. You know how I've banked on seeing her. Well, she can't see me. I used to be awfully afraid of you and it passed. Now I'm afraid of you again." King saw his friend's increasing difficulty of speech, and he put a hand on the big brown arm. "No cause, Freddy. Absolutely no cause," he said. There was silence for a time, then King sank back from the erect posture he had maintained. "It can't be helped," he said, speaking low. "It can't be helped." "No," said Whitcomb roughly, "and it ought not to be helped. There was no sense in your quixotism." "Would you, do you believe," asked King slowly,--"would _you_ do as much for Linda?" The other looked up at him sharply. "Did you do it for Linda?" "Yes; every act of my life I believed was for Linda," returned King quietly. "Then"--began Whitcomb excitedly. "Yes; _then_," interrupted King, still quietly. "Then; not now. It's over. It's finished." Whitcomb frowned off toward the illimitable sea; and Madge's attempt at consolation came back to him. He repudiated it. Linda Barry was peerless. CHAPTER XXV THE MAN AND THE MAID King's improvement was slow, but steady, and the stretch of good weather upon which he happened on arriving at the Cape enabled him to live out-of-doors and was a great factor in his favor. Miss Barry called on him very early in his stay, bringing with her an appetizing little custard. It was a form of food which King had always detested, but feigning polite enthusiasm he tasted it to please her, and promptly discovered that the gastronomic question was no longer, "What is it?" but merely, "Where is it?" He finished the custard. Mrs. Porter was a daily visitor, and one afternoon, when they had walked over to the big rock and were resting there, she told him of her own Arcadian retreat beside the spring. "In such a little while you will be able to walk as far as that," she said. "You will enjoy seeing Miss Barry's cottage, too. Did you know it was her brother's gift?" King nodded. "She was telling me about it the other day." The sun had already begun to paint hues of health on his face and his voice was gaining resonance. "I try to visualize Mr. Barry here in his rôle of 'barefoot boy with cheek of tan,' but it's a hard proposition." "So it is for Linda. She follows up old Jerry or any one else she can find who went to school with her father, and gleans every possible anecdote of his boyhood." King leaned his head back on the rock and gazed up into space. "Isn't it wonderful here?" he said. "I've thought many times since I arrived of the old woman who, when she first beheld the ocean, exclaimed, 'Thank the Lord, that at last He's let me see enough of something!'" "Yes, it's emancipation. Linda and I have often remarked that it would seem impossible to have narrow thoughts here. She doesn't wish to intrude, Bertram, but she would like to come to see you." King met the sweet, questioning expression of his companion's eyes. "I see plainly," he answered with a smile, "that you and I must have it out about Linda. Your persistent references to her each time you come show that she is very much on your mind." "She is very much on my mind," returned Mrs. Porter gravely. "I wish you would send a kindly message to her by me, and say that you would be glad to see her." "But I wouldn't, Maud," returned King mildly. "What would you do in that case? Of course, you know the whole situation, and know that Whitcomb with his grand little revelation bouleversed all Linda's fixed ideas." "Oh, she is so changed, Bertram," exclaimed Mrs. Porter. "She's not the Linda you knew." "Perhaps; but it's safe to say that she's still--still tremendous. I'm more or less shaky yet; and I must confess that the prospect of an interview with Linda in a cyclone of repentance makes me--well, shrink. It croozles me, if you know what that means. Sort of takes me in the pit of the stomach." "You're all wrong. She has been through the fire, and she has learned self-control." Mrs. Porter paused to choose her words. "She longs, Bertram--longs for your forgiveness. "I've nothing to forgive her," he returned pleasantly. "She had plenty of company in the mistake she made." Something in Mrs. Porter's loving look and wistful eyes caused the speaker to change his tone. "I won't fence with you, Maud. I told you once I loved Linda. I did, with a depth which seemed to exhaust my power of loving. It's true that one doesn't feel a pin-prick when at the same moment he is struck a mortal blow. The fatal fact was not that Linda blamed me for the sorrow that had fallen upon her. It was that there was no desire on her part to give me a chance: to hear my side of the story: none of the extenuation which one ray of love would have naturally expressed. Instead, there was hatred in her eyes. That was the only thing that mattered." King leaned back against the rock, breathing fast. "I tell you this, Maud. You're the only person in the world who will know it, and we won't speak of it again. I know Linda so well. I know how this revulsion of feeling would express itself with her. She would like to come over here and wait on me by inches. My wish would be her law; but that would matter no more than her mistake about the Antlers. The essential fact has been revealed, and--nothing else matters." "Is your present feeling for her dislike, then?" asked Mrs. Porter. "Certainly not." "It would be no pain to you to meet her?" "It would be a bore," returned King gently. "Isn't that enough? Of course, it will have to come some day; but I've been a good deal indulged lately, and I believe in putting off an evil day. I should like Linda to have worked off some of her repentant steam before we meet." King, his self-possession regained, smiled again into his companion's face. "Whitcomb is devoted to her. Let her work it off on him," he added. "She will never marry him," said Mrs. Porter. "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that," was the polite response. Mrs. Porter leaned toward her companion with her broad, charming smile. "Bertram King, that's a lie," she remarked slowly. He winked and lifted his eyebrows. "There's a lot for you to learn about love," she went on. "To love unselfishly is the best thing that can happen to anybody." "There's no such thing as unselfish love," declared King. "Oh, yes there is, and you proved that you experienced it. You put Linda's happiness above your own. You willingly endured injustice to mitigate her pain. Don't you know that your nature was enriched by that? Don't you know that your action, now that she understands it, reflects upon her, and uplifts her nature and her ideals? We can't crystallize, because we're the children of God; and God is Infinite Love, and Love is a divine principle which is ever active. You assume too much when you hold Linda to the narrow development of her school-girl days. You can remain behind your human defenses and refuse to forgive her if you choose--" "I told you, and honestly, that I have nothing to forgive." Mrs. Porter shook her head. "God doesn't treat us so when we turn to Him repentantly. He doesn't say there is nothing to forgive and leave us with the sharp thorn unremoved. That sweet sense that God is Love is borne in upon us after a genuine repentance, and gives the consciousness that we shall be upheld if we long to be, and guarded from a repetition of the offense." "My dear Maud, you're way beyond my depth." "No, Bertram, I am not. You reflected something of the divine in that tender protecting love you felt for Linda. I don't despair of you. In spite of all the things you have been saying to fortify your human self, I know, for actions speak louder than words, that a very lofty affection once found place in your heart, and that pure flame cannot die because it was a reflection of that which is immortal and eternal. Never mind Linda. God will take care of her, too. Your business is with your own thought, to keep it in a high place, trusting to be led to that happiness which God has prepared for them that love Him, without outlining what that happiness shall consist in." King drew a long breath and smiled, looking long and affectionately at his companion. "Isn't she the great little preacher!" he remarked. "Oh, it's all so simple!" exclaimed Mrs. Porter softly, clasping her hands together. "Why can't everybody see it!" When she went home to-day, she told Linda nothing of this interview. The girl had ceased to cross-question her friend on her return from these visits; for she never received any satisfaction, and the invitation she longed for never came. Blanche Aurora was very much alive to the fact that her adored one was the only member of the family who had not called on the convalescent. She was not entirely satisfied to have it so. King's photograph had been framed, and Blanche Aurora in the growing scarcity of wild roses made little bouquets of clover and daisies and placed them between the two pictures, and she noticed that Linda allowed the sharing. Whitcomb came to call sometimes, but between his attentions to King and the carrying out of Madge's various plans, his time was pretty well occupied. Late one afternoon Blanche Aurora found Linda in the hammock and alone. She seized her opportunity. "Say, Miss Linda," she began, "we've got a real good Bavarian cream for Mr. King's supper. 'Tain't convenient for me to take it over. I wonder if you could." Linda sat up, and regarded the white-aproned short figure. The pink bow atop quivered with the depth of its owner's imaginings and deep-laid schemes. The keen eyes observed that Linda flushed and hesitated. "Mrs. Porter is still in Portland?" she asked. "Why, yes, and didn't you know Miss Barry went too? I've got to get their supper, you see; and the cream come out awful good." Linda rose. "Yes, I'll go," she said quietly; but there was no quiet within. All the way across the field, her heart hurried. She had never called at the Benslow house. To go for the first time to see King, without his request, and risk his betraying, perhaps, before the others, that she was unwelcome, was an ordeal which she dreaded, but the desire to see him rose above the confusion of her crowding thoughts, and though her hands trembled on the covered bowl she pushed on. The lovely late afternoon light struck across the field. Bertram King, wandering down from the piazza, noted the golden sheen upon the grass and the majestic cloud-effects in the vast arch above. His near-sighted eyes beheld a white figure advancing in the golden light. He hastened his steps in welcome. "Good for you," he cried. "I was getting very tired of myself. There's been an exodus from here to Portland to-day. I know I'm a big boy now, since Whitcomb was willing to leave me. Even Miss Benslow is out and I'm holding the fort." All the time that his words were calling through the still air, he was walking toward the visitor. Linda's face from doubt grew radiant. The relieved, happy color rose in her cheeks. Her lovely eyes beamed. In her white gown and with her shining, grateful joy, she was very beautiful as her light springing step brought her near and into King's field of vision. His breath caught in the shock and he stood stock-still. "I'm glad to see you, too, Bertram," she cried. Her eyes were starry, her smile enchanting. "Why, Linda! I beg your pardon. I thought you were Maud," he exclaimed. The change in his tone, his blank surprise and ebbing eagerness, set Linda's heart to beating wildly. The stricture in her bosom drew back the radiant promise from her face. King saw the transformation with a pang. "Forgive my shouting at you like that," he went on, struggling for his self-possession. It was as if Linda's soul had been revealed to him for an instant, joyous, hopeful, humble: the new Linda of whom Maud had spoken. "You have something for me, I'll wager," he continued. He could see the white napkin trembling in the suddenly unsteady hands. "Let me take it," suiting the action to the word. "I've grown arrogantly used to bowls coming across this field filled with something delicious, designed to upholster these bones." Linda had made good use of the time he gave her. Her throat was free again. She could speak. "You look better than I expected," she said quietly. "And you, too, Linda. You do credit to the place." King was trying to regain some of the plans he had formulated for their first interview; but they had been designed to baffle effusiveness, and this girl in the white gown seemed to radiate calm. "Yes," she returned. "I have Blanche Aurora's word for it that the Bavarian cream in that bowl is good. There has been an exodus to Portland from our house, too, so she asked me to bring it over." "Awfully good of you," said King, hot with mingled sensations. "There never was any one so spoiled as I." "I must run back now," said Linda. "I can see that you will soon have the freedom of the neighborhood, and we shall be looking for you at Aunt Belinda's." "Oh, don't desert me," begged King. It was as if he had obtained the promise of a wonderful gift: the lavish outpouring of a rich nature. A veil had fallen, concealing it: a veil, pure, white, impenetrable. Linda's eyes and voice were friendly, self-possessed. "Blanche Aurora says snacks are good for you when you're sick and delicate," he went on; "but never have I been reduced to eating a snack alone. It's tea-time, too. Couldn't you make me some tea?" Linda's dimple appeared. "I'm afraid the duty of a host presses upon you. I'd better not. I've never called at the Benslows'. Besides, you say there's not a chaperone on the place." "There are the hens," said King eagerly. "Won't they do? You never saw so many in your life. Come. We'll have tea on the piazza. Whitcomb has rigged up an old sail across one end so Boreas shan't strike my frail form too roughly." He turned back toward the house, beseeching her with his eyes, and Linda followed in silence. "I'm getting to know this bowl," continued King, lifting it and investigating its blue stripes. "It's a magic one, never empty excepting when I get through with it. We'll have two spoons. I'm not stingy." As they ascended the rickety piazza steps, King continued: "The tea-table is in there in the living-room. I'll get--" he staggered, and stopped. Whitcomb had been right when he said that his friend couldn't yet bear excitement. Linda, looking up, saw him grow ghastly pale. "Oh, confound it!" he gasped. The blue-and-white bowl fell from his hands down among Luella's sweet-pea vines. He managed to take a step toward the steamer chair, collapsed into it, and fainted away ignominiously. Linda threw herself on her knees beside him. "Bertram, Bertram!" she cried in grief and terror. It was for her father and for her that the strong man had come to this. She slipped her arm around him. In her inexperience she thought he might be dying. "Oh, Bertram, speak to me!" she cried. There was a pitcher of water on the neighboring table. She dipped her handkerchief into it and dabbed his brow and his fair hair, and softly between dry sobs she called his name. They were alone in the remote, tumbledown house. Even the ocean's mighty grasp of its rocks sounded distant. There was no one to call upon save the invisible Reality, and Linda turned her full heart to the very present help. In a minute, which seemed to her an hour, consciousness began to return to King. Her arm was around him; she had drawn his cheek against her bosom. As he slowly realized his position and heard her low voice, he seemed again to see Linda as she had come toward him in her white gown across the green gold of the field. Every paining haunting memory was submerged in a strange, ineffable bliss. Without opening his eyes he spoke her name. "Yes, Bertram, yes," she responded joyfully. "I love you, Linda." Her heart bounded, and he felt it; and she did not change her position. "I shall always love you. Whitcomb has stirred your gratitude toward me. I don't care for it." "Yes, I know," answered the girl, still holding him close. "You wouldn't palm that off on me, would you?" "I want to be fair"--the response was low. King's hands lay loosely before him. "All that I am sure of is that I belong to you, Bertram." "Are you certain that's all? It's a good deal, but it's not enough." Linda's bosom labored. She remembered the longings of the last weeks, the many moments of despair. "Father loved you so," she uttered. "That's not enough, either." She drew herself gently away from him, but remained on her knees. He sat up in the low chair, and their faces were on a level. Into hers returned that look of riches unutterable and her eyes poured their gift into his. She clasped her hands across her breast as she gazed. The arms that had held him so close and protectingly felt empty. "I love you, Bertram," she said, the words falling from her lips like a vow. Instantly the man's loose-lying hands became vital. King clasped her to him. Their cheeks clung together and they kissed. CHAPTER XXVI A DIPLOMATIST Luella Benslow had enjoyed her round of afternoon calls. She had paraded the importance of the guests she was "accommodating" and had swelled with satisfaction in the interest she had elicited. In this complacent state of mind she was passing near Belinda Barry's cottage on the way home when she observed a strange object on the roof of the shed. The thing, whatever it was, moved, seeming to grow and shrink again before her eyes. Luella owned some spectacles, but they were worn only in private and reposed in these days in the kitchen drawer, from which they occasionally emerged stealthily when some exigency arose like the reading of a label on a spice box. It was out of her way to go nearer to the cottage, but that mysterious manifestation on the roof of the shed was too great a temptation for flesh and blood to resist. She changed her route and approached. In a minute the object, recognizing her, rose to its full height and faced her cautious advance. "For the land's sake!" exclaimed Miss Benslow in a minute more. She stood still. "Blanche Aurora Martin, what under the canopy are you doin' up there? Don't you know you'll defame them shingles?" Blanche Aurora looked down on the newcomer, who was dressed in her very best. About her neck hung chains enough to excite the envy of the aborigines. On her head she wore a hat with an ostrich feather which stood up bravely, although its appearance suggested that a sea-bath had been one of its many trying experiences. "I'll bet Belinda ain't to home," went on Miss Benslow accusingly, and the culprit stood at ease, her arms akimbo. "I should think you was old enough by this time not to go caperin' around on roofs. What you up there for?" "Lookin' for my gum," replied Blanche Aurora. "You needed a spyglass for that, did you?" Indeed, the accused was balancing a long slender glass on one hip. "You know the store Miss Barry sets by that glass, and I'll bet she wouldn't let you touch it. Your folks must be all out, the way you're actin'. The idea o' stickin' your gum up on that roof. Get it and come down this minute. It's dretful bad for them shingles." "Oh, I don't care 'bout my gum anyway. I don't chaw no more 'cause Miss Linda don't like to have me." With surprising ease and carelessness the speaker dropped to a sitting posture, slid down the low shed roof and landed upright at Miss Benslow's feet. The visitor started back. "My heart!" she exclaimed, clapping to her breast the hand not burdened with a blue parasol. "A wonder you didn't drop that glass, you naughty girl." "Oh, dry up!" remarked Blanche Aurora nonchalantly. "How dare you address me so! Don't you know your sister is in my employ?" "What's that got to do with the high price o' putty?" inquired the other in a swaggering manner. "Well!" ejaculated Miss Benslow wrathfully. "Your wonderful Miss Linda don't seem to have improved your manners as much as she has your attire. I hope Letty Martin knows there's nobody at my house that's goin' to rig _her_ up in pink ribbons. We ain't such fools over there: though I guess the Lindsays could buy and sell Linda Barry since her c'lamities, and the _gentlemen_ that I'm accawmodatin'--" Miss Benslow raised her scanty eyebrows impressively--"is simply _made_ o' money! Good gracious," she added in a different tone, "here I am wastin' my time with you, and Mr. King left alone all this time. He might want somethin'!" She turned with an air of pressing business. Blanche Aurora had pricked up her ears at the last remark. "Alone?" she repeated, with sudden interest. "Has your folks all gone too?" The spyglass from the roof had discerned a white gown on the Benslow piazza, but the disturbing question had been to whom it belonged. Mrs. Lindsay or her daughter might have been keeping the invalid company, while Miss Linda wandered away for a walk. The little girl's brain worked fast. "Say, I'm sorry I was impident to you," she said, with conciliatory meekness. "Well, you'd better be," snapped Luella, pausing to loosen a point of her parasol from the fringe of her cape. "Say, you don't need to hurry right off, do you? I'm all alone." Miss Benslow looked suspiciously at the speaker. It was too much to ask one to believe that saucy Blanche Aurora, with her tip-tilted nose and her bold eyes, was really penitent. "Yes, I do," she retorted, unmollified. "If this pesky parasol will ever let go that fringe." "Let me fix it," offered the meek one; and she did fix it so effectively that for almost five minutes more Miss Benslow stood there, fuming. "Oh, pshaw, let it go!" she exclaimed at last, jerking away; and with the jerk the parasol freed itself. "Oh, say, Luella--I mean Miss Benslow. I feel so kind o' lonely. You've got a fireless cooker, hain't you? I don't see why you have to hurry so." "Of course I've got a fireless cooker, and a new blue-flame stove, and a receipt book better than any thing _you_ ever saw." "Well, I was only goin' to say wouldn't you like some violet perfume on your handkercher? I've got some perfectly ellergunt and you're a-carryin' such a pretty handkercher." "That there handkercher," announced Miss Benslow proudly, "was brought me by a gentleman, the last time he was to Portland." "Oh, I didn't know as Mr. King was strong enough to go to Portland," said Blanche Aurora humbly, touching the handkerchief admiringly. "He ain't," declared the visitor, with a grand air. "'T warn't him. 'T was somebody quite different: somebody that calls me Luella." The visitor giggled. "He asked me if he might." "I wonder," said Blanche Aurora with an awestruck air, "if it could 'a' ben that spullendid Mr. Whitcomb!" "Well," returned the other, smiling and bridling, "that's jest who it is. He wants me to call him Fred, but I'm awful shy that way. I may some day, but I haven't yet. You needn't tell nobody, but Madge Lindsay is perfectly crazy over him. She tries to hide it, but she can't from me. I've got eyes and ears. She sings to him on the piazza these moonlight nights and plays on a thing that looks like a big potater-bug. She calls it a bandelin." "I think you're real smart to get along with such a big family," said Blanche Aurora with the same admiring air. "Well, I didn't know's I could, fust off; but you see, it was this way. Miss Lindsay she confided in me. Madge was gittin' strong and beginnin' to hanker to git away where things was gay,--the merry whirl, you know--" Oh, yes; Blanche Aurora's nod, and her close, respectful attention showed that though young and inexperienced she did know. --"So jest at that crucical time there come this appeal from Fred--I mean Mr. Whitcomb--in Chicago, and Mis' Lindsay says to me, she says, 'I b'lieve if my daughter had her cousin here to play with she'd settle down contented again. I don't want her to go away yet.' Cousin!"--contemptuously--"'T ain't any very near cousin, I guess; and I can tell you she does play with him--and _to_ him--and _at_ him. Oh"--with sudden recollection--"ain't I smart! I must go." "Well, jest a minute, Miss Benslow. I'll bet it would please Mr. Whitcomb like everything to have that spullendid handkercher smellin' good. Jest come in my room a minute." Once in the room Luella found her hostess so entertaining that she stayed another ten minutes, admiring the pretty things which closet and dresser revealed, and which under ordinary circumstances their owner would have guarded sedulously from these inquisitive eyes and loquacious lips. However, it was all for Miss Linda. Of course, Blanche Aurora couldn't be certain that her adored one wanted this extra latitude, but her absorption in Linda had made her preternaturally observing; besides, she remembered those sobs. Her quick conclusion was that it were better to let Luella Benslow tell all over the neighborhood about her stockings and petticoats than to interrupt the interview which the spyglass had revealed. "Why, it must be time for the folks to be gettin' home!" ejaculated Miss Benslow at last, with a return of panic. "I'll have to run every step o' the way." Blanche Aurora gave a sweet smile of contentment and sought no further to detain her guest. She watched from the window, and laughed wickedly as the ostrich feather veered and swung in the half-lope, half-run of its conscience-smitten wearer. Halfway across the field Miss Benslow met a white-clothed figure moving unhurriedly. "Why, Miss Linda, I thought you was to Portland," she said, breathless from her race. At the same time a hope sprang within her. "Was you to my house?" she added. "Yes." "I'm real sorry we was all out, 'cause you ain't ben neighborly." Miss Benslow strove for easy elegance, but she was out of breath, and again that pesky parasol had caught in her fringe. "Did you see Mr. King?" "Yes." "I'd ought to ben home sooner to give him his tea, but I hadn't a time-piece with me." "I gave him his tea." "Oh, I'm so thankful! Now I can ketch my breath. You'll call again, won't you?" The radiant young girl blessed Miss Benslow with a wonderful smile. "Yes. I'll come again to-morrow," she answered graciously, and passed on her way. Miss Benslow turned to look after the lithe, graceful figure crossing Elysian fields. "It's the first time I ever got a square look at her," she soliloquized in surprise at her own impression. "She's a--a"--she hesitated for a simile for the perfect simplicity of the girl's appearance, and that enchanting smile. "I'd call her a sunlight beauty," she finished, and trudged on. Blanche Aurora, watching the road at the back of the house for Captain Jerry's carriage, didn't see Linda until she had nearly reached the piazza. The child then ran to the front door and in her eagerness slammed the screen behind her and stood waiting. As soon as she met her friend's eyes she began to flush. Yes, it had been worth while! It surely had been worth while! Her heart hammered. The white figure came on out of the sunshine into the shadow where Blanche Aurora stood transfixed. "You good little thing," said Linda slowly, and she put an arm around the small shoulders and stooping, kissed a burning cheek. "Where's the bowl?" demanded Blanche Aurora, her emotion driving her to take refuge in the practical. "Among Miss Benslow's sweet-pea vines," returned Linda, her dimple at its deepest. "He--we dropped it, and it broke." "And that Bavarian cream?" "I suppose the hens ate it up in no time," confessed the messenger. "I won't trust you again," said Blanche Aurora, with shining eyes. "Mr. King must be starved." "No, I fed him with tea and cakes. Please trust me again. Please send me back to-morrow." The little girl and the big girl exchanged a long look; and during it the possibility dawned upon the elder that this infant had designed and carried out a plan! She colored slowly, continuing to gaze into the shining eyes, but Blanche Aurora retired demurely with a word about supper, and alone in the kitchen executed a dance which threatened every stick of furniture in the place. Linda was still standing there watching the violet sea, so different from its morning dazzle of blue, when Jerry Holt's carryall approached. His voice was loud and defensive. "I telled Mis' Lindsay and Madge they could sqwut to the depot till I got back," he was saying. "Why, Jerry," said Miss Barry. "I would have let you take them home first. I thought they decided to go in the street car and walk the half-mile." "My rule's fust come, fust served," responded Captain Jerry inexorably. "I seen you git off the train fust." "But they have an invalid over at their house," pursued Miss Barry. "I know they hev. Thet Whitcomb feller seen a car comin' and he said he could make it quicker'n Molly could." The Captain's feelings had evidently been hurt in the most sensitive spot. "Says I, 'Go it then, young man;' and I made up my mind to haul you fust. Madge wanted to go with him, but her mother didn't want to sqwut alone, nor she didn't want to walk the half-mile neither, so Madge stayed." "Why, we had room for Mrs. Lindsay," said Mrs. Porter. "No"--the driver's response was firm. "Not with all them bags and bundles." He smiled a smile of satisfaction at the punishment he had meted out. "Now, I guess I'll go back and haul 'em," he added, as his passengers alighted. "They'll be tired o' sqwuttin'. They're dretful uneasy folks, anyway. What ye lookin' at, Linda?" he added, loud and cheerfully. The girl turned toward him, and came to meet the arrivals. "My future," she answered. He regarded her admiringly. He had never seen her like this. "Seems to be a bright one," he remarked, grinning. "Ye'd better git some smoked glasses if ye're goin' to look at it long. Git ap, Molly." With a grating of wheels the old carryall turned around and moved on its way. "You bet the Cape agrees with them city folks," he soliloquized. CHAPTER XXVII THE FULL MOON "I declare that was too bad of Jerry," said Miss Barry. "He's usually so"--her voice died away because she became aware of Linda, standing before her, a sort of glorified presence. "Hey?" she finished sharply. The girl had one of Mrs. Porter's hands and with the other arm she now softly embraced her bewildered aunt, then drew away far enough to look into the questioning eyes of first one and then the other. "You've both had so much trouble with me," she said. "Well?" returned Miss Barry crisply. "Is it over?" The girl nodded. "Linda," said Mrs. Porter, with excited urgency, "what has happened, dear?" The girl continued to look at them for a moment of silence, as if loath to let her secret pass her lips. "Bertram!" exclaimed Mrs. Porter. Linda nodded. Miss Barry gave her niece a shake. "Speak out," she said, cross in the mounting excitement of the moment. "Has he been over here?" "No. I went there. Blanche Aurora sent me with a snack. The hens got the snack; but--we had tea." "Oh, you darling!" exclaimed Mrs. Porter under the eloquent eyes and dimples. "You shall kiss her first, Miss Barry. Hurry up. I can't wait." "I don't see any reason for kissing her," said Miss Barry, and her earrings quivered with what she was repressing. "Feeding dainties to the hens. The idea!" "Oh, there is a reason, there is a reason, Aunt Belinda." Her namesake spoke softly, and taking her in her arms kissed her. "How good you've been to me!" she said tenderly. Then Mrs. Porter had her turn, and the eyes of both women grew wet in their long embrace. "Well, give _me_ some place to sit down," said Miss Barry desperately. She looked around and found a piazza chair, into which she dropped. "In all my born days I never saw such a girl. She's either got to hang a man to a sour apple tree, or else she's got to marry him!" * * * * * Over at the homestead Bertram King was winning golden laurels from his self-appointed caretaker. At the supper table his novel vivacity and good appetite gave him the appearance of complete recovery. "See here," remarked Whitcomb, "solitary confinement is evidently all you've been needing. We'll clear out soon again. Even you went away, didn't you, Luella?" The speaker turned to Miss Benslow, whom on his return he had discovered scrambling about to get supper in her robes of state. She was now waiting on table and blessing Jerry Holt for his dilatoriness in bringing the Lindsays home. "I did step out for a spell," she returned in her best manner; "but I guess I warn't missed," she added coyly. "Miss Linda Barry gave Mr. King his tea." "Really!" drawled Madge Lindsay. "How cleverly she chose the right moment for her first call." "There are cats in the room," announced Whitcomb, helping himself to honey. Madge lifted her eyebrows and made a defiant grimace. "I met her as she was a-comin' back," said Luella. "I guess she felt dretful bad not findin' me home, 'cause she said she'd call again to-morrer." This remark coming under the head of what Madge called "juices," she glanced at Whitcomb for sympathy, but he was preoccupied. He was looking curiously at King's debonair countenance. "It's jest as well I warn't in, _I_ think," continued Miss Benslow, casting Whitcomb her most kittenish glance. "Mr. King's tay-a-tay seems to 'a' done him a world o' good." The object of her remark caught his friend's eye and laughed frankly. Whitcomb reflected the laugh with a smile, but his curious interest precluded much notice of Luella's sallies. He regarded King's good cheer and increased color questioningly. Evidently Linda had used tact and succeeded in making her peace, and the talk had relieved King as well as herself. He wondered whether his friend would tell him of the interview or leave it to his imagination. "To-morrow, tennis!" cried Madge triumphantly; "and don't we deserve it, Freddy?" "We do, we do," he replied, returning with gusto to the hot biscuit and honey and lobster salad. When the meal was finished, Whitcomb pantomimed throwing a ball at Madge and raised questioning eyebrows. "All right," she said, rising with alacrity. "Oh, you crazy children," protested Mrs. Lindsay, "are you going to play ball? Can't you be satisfied to be still a minute? Freddy, you'll take all her nice new ten pounds off her." But the young people only laughed. Though Madge Lindsay might drawl, she could throw a ball like a boy, and in default of King, Whitcomb, whose muscles were always crying out to be used, was glad to accept her. Mrs. Lindsay went to the kitchen with Luella to bestow the provisions she had purchased, and King strolled out on the piazza and watched his friend and Madge. The girl was still in her smart tailor gown. From previous observation of her tactics he believed that when the game was over she would change her dress before starting in on her evening; and he watched for that psychological moment when she should disappear. The moon was full to-night, and with the marvelous obligingness of Maine weather the wind had gone down with the sun, making the out-of-doors even more attractive by night than by day. As the twilight deepened, the great planet changed from silver to gold. When at last the ball players took off their leather gloves, Madge spoke wistfully. "I wish we could go out on that moon path! Think of this heavenly night and no boat except that old smelly tub of Mr. Benslow's! When we come again, Freddy--" She stopped, and he smiled down at her brilliant dark face, rosy with exercise and brown from the sun. "Yes, next time sure," he said. "You see I didn't want to do anything about a boat so long as King couldn't go out." "You're the best friend I ever knew," declared the girl. "Wait till I get on another frock. We'll drag him with us over to the rock. The Loreleis will be singing to-night, I am sure." "One will, I hope," returned Whitcomb. She skipped before him. "You've never seen me dance," she said. "Before the moon goes I must dance for you on the grass. I have a costume here and my castanets." "You'd be a wonderful Carmen," returned Whitcomb, regarding her lithe dipping and swinging, admiringly. "Oh, mar-velous!" she rejoined. "So long," and taking the rickety piazza steps two at a time she disappeared into the house. King immediately buttonholed his friend. "Come over to the tent, will you?" he said. "Sure thing," returned Whitcomb, flinging an arm around the other's shoulders. They crossed the grass and entering the tent sat down on camp-stools in the opening, where the increasing mystery and magic of the night was spread before them. "I can see that you and Linda have fixed it up," said Whitcomb. "She has worried her head off for fear the old friendship would never be renewed. She thinks an awful lot of you, old man." At the beginning of this speech King looked up eagerly. Could it be that his task was going to be so easy? But as Whitcomb continued, his look veered away, back to the moon path. "Yes, we fixed it up," he replied. There was a space of silence during which he tried to decide how to go on. "You've been frank with me, Freddy, at various times regarding Linda, and I've been rather surprised lately to notice that you're not very assiduous in your attentions over there." Whitcomb's eyes also sought the moon path and a perplexed line came in his forehead. "No," he admitted. "Something has happened to Linda. She's different. I can't say that she ever let me come very near to her, but now--since she left Chicago, she has grown away from me; far away. She seems to have a lot of new ideas that I can't follow. I don't seem to get on with her." "And you do get on with Madge Lindsay?" suggested King. "Isn't she a peach?" ejaculated Whitcomb, turning to his companion a suddenly bright face. "Why, it's like owning a whole vaudeville company to be with her. Little slender thing that looks as if you could snap her in two between your thumb and finger; but game! Gee, but she's game!" "She is game," agreed King, the vapor-cloud which had obscured a trifle the full sun of his happiness melting away. "Of course, a man doesn't connect sentiment with that sort of girl," went on Whitcomb, "but she's a comrade: just as good as a chap, you know." "I understand perfectly," returned King, "but sometimes these delightful chaps in petticoats have very feminine hearts; and you don't want to break them in two between thumb and finger." "Oh, rot," returned Whitcomb, trying not to look pleased. "There she is," he continued, starting up from his camp-stool as a figure in a pale wrap of some sort came out on the piazza. "That's another thing about Madge. She can change her clothes in a jiffy." "Hold on a bit, will you?" said King quietly. "Sure. Long as you like. Madge and I thought perhaps you'd come over to the rock with us and listen to the Loreleis." "I haven't quite finished telling you, Freddy. You know I said something to you about the past being dead and all that." "Yes." "Well--I was mistaken. Linda and I--" Whitcomb turned like a flash and dropped back on the camp-stool. "What?" "We fixed it up this afternoon for all time." "_What!_" "Yes. It's a trite thing for a fellow to call himself the happiest man on earth, but Linda has given me back everything I had lost. I am as much a new man as if I had been created to-day." The quiet words thrilled through Whitcomb. He tried to answer and gulped. Tried again, and shook his friend's responsive hand. "You deserve it," was all he could manage to utter. "I want to go over there to-night, Freddy." "You can't walk that far." "Try me. I've never seen Miss Barry's cottage, and I--well, I can't stay away." "We'll walk over with you, then," said Whitcomb gravely. He walked toward Madge and called her, and she came springing across the grass. "Ho for the rock?" she cried gayly. "No. King wants to go to Miss Barry's. He thinks he's up to it. We'll walk over with him." The three moved away across the enchanted field. The night was hushed. Even the tide whispered. Not yet sounded the _crescendo_ which would culminate at midnight in a crashing, magnificent choral. Madge scented something novel in the mental atmosphere. Her companions were grateful for her easy chatter. When they neared the shingled cottage she protested tentatively. "Oh, do we have to go into the house on such a glorious night?" "You and I are not going in," answered Whitcomb quietly. They stood a moment near the piazza steps. "Good-night, King." The two men shook hands. "I think that is Linda now over there in the hammock. Give my love to her, will you?" "I will." Above the dazzle of golden water and under the pulsing beat of the stars, King moved up the steps. There was a stir in the shadow at the end of the piazza and in a moment one word sounded on the still air. "Bertram!" The voice and its tone wrenched some deeply rooted fiber in Whitcomb's being and all his blood seemed trying to rush at once to his heart. Madge, too, heard the revealing joy of the single word. As they turned to walk back, her clinging silken draperies stirred, and she slipped her hand through her companion's arm, and clasped it. "It's a vast sea," she said softly. 
36170	----	[Frontispiece: With Eyes Wide and Staring She Looked About Her] THE SON OF HIS FATHER BY RIDGWELL CULLUM AUTHOR OF "THE MEN WHO WROUGHT," "THE WAY OF THE STRONG," "THE NIGHT-RIDERS," "THE WATCHERS OF THE PLAINS," ETC. Illustrations by DOUGLAS DUER PHILADELPHIA GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1915, by George W. Jacobs & Company _Published March, 1917_ All rights reserved _Printed in U. S. A._ TO G. RALPH HALL-CAINE WHOSE SYMPATHY WITH MY WORK HAS NEVER FAILED TO CHEER ME THROUGHOUT OUR LONG AND VALUED FRIENDSHIP CONTENTS CHAP. I Unrepentant II In Chastened Mood III Gordon Arrives IV Gordon Lands at Snake's Fall V A Letter Home VI Gordon Prospects Snake's Fall VII "Miss Hazel" VIII At Buffalo Point IX The First Check X Gordon Makes His Bid for Fortune XI Hazel Mallinsbee's Campaign XII Thinking Hard XIII Slosson Snatches at Opportunity XIV The Reward of Victory XV In Council XVI Something Doing XVII The Code Book XVIII Ways that are Dark XIX James Carbhoy Arrives XX The Boom in Earnest XXI A Trifle XXII On the Trail XXIII In New York XXIV Preparing for the Finale XXV The Rescue XXVI Cashing In ILLUSTRATIONS With eyes wide and staring she looked about her . . . _Frontispiece_ Hazel was waiting for that sign He drew her gently towards his father CHAPTER I UNREPENTANT "To wine, women and gambling, at the age of twenty-four--one hundred thousand dollars. That's your bill, my boy, and--I've got to pay it." James Carbhoy leaned back smiling, his half-humorous eyes squarely challenging his son, who was lounging in a luxurious morocco chair at the other side of the desk. As the moments passed without producing any reply, he reached towards the cabinet at his elbow and helped himself to a large cigar. Without any scruple he tore the end off it with his strong teeth and struck a match. "Well?" Gordon Carbhoy cleared his throat and looked serious. In spite of his father's easy, smiling manner he knew that a crisis in his affairs had been reached. He understood the iron will lying behind the pleasant steel-gray eyes of his parent. It was a will that flinched at nothing, a will that had carved for its owner a great fortune in America's most strenuous financial arena, the railroad world. He also knew the only way in which to meet his father's challenge with any hope of success. Above everything else the millionaire demanded courage and manhood--manhood as he understood it--from those whom he regarded well. "I'm waiting." Gordon stirred. The millionaire carefully lit his cigar. "Put that way it--sounds rotten, Dad, doesn't it?" Gordon's mobile lips twisted humorously, and he also reached towards the cigar cabinet. But the older man intercepted him. He held out a box of lesser cigars. "Try one of these, Gordon. One of the others would add two dollars to your bill. These are half the price." The two men smiled into each other's eyes. A great devotion lay between them. But their regard was not likely to interfere with the business in hand. Gordon helped himself. Then he rose from his chair. He moved across the handsome room, towering enormously. His six feet three inches were well matched by a great pair of athletic shoulders. His handsome face bore no traces of the fast living implied by the enormous total of his debts. The wholesome tan of outdoor sports left him a fine specimen of the more brilliant youth of America. Then, too, in his humorous blue eyes lay an extra dash of recklessness, which was probably due to his superlative physical advantages. He came back to his chair and propped his vast body on the back of it. His father was watching him affectionately. "Dad," he exclaimed, "I'm--sorry." The other shook his head. "Don't say that. It's not true. I'd hate it to be true--anyway." Gordon's face lit. "You're--going to pay it?" "Sure. I'm not going to have our name stink in our home city. Sure I'm going to pay it. But----" "But--what?" "So are you." The faint ticking of the bracket clock on the wall suddenly became like the blows of a hammer. "I--I don't think I----" Young Gordon broke off. His merry eyes had suddenly become troubled. The crisis was becoming acute. For some moments the millionaire smoked on luxuriously. Then he removed his cigar and cleared his throat. "I'm not going to shout. That's not my way," he said in his easy, deliberate fashion. "Guess folks have got to be young, and the younger they're young--why, the better. I was young, and--got over it. You're going to get over it. I figure to help you that way. This is not the first bill you've handed me, but--but it's going to be the last. Guess your baby clothes can be packed right up. Maybe they'll be all the better for it when you hand 'em on to--your kiddie." The trouble had passed out of the younger man's eyes. They were filled with the humor inspired by his father's manner of dealing with the affair in hand. "That's all right," he said. "I seem to get that clear enough." "I'm glad." The millionaire twisted the cigar into the corner of his mouth. "We can pass right on to--other things. You've been one of my secretaries for three years, and it don't seem to me the work's worried you a lot. Still, I put you in early thinking you'd get interested in the source of the dollars you were handing out in bunches. Maybe it wasn't the best way of doing it. Still, I had to try it. You see, it's a great organization I control--though you may not know it. I control more millions than you could count on your fingers and toes, and they've cost me some mental sweat gathering 'em together. Some day you've got to sit in this chair and talk over this 'phone, and when you do you'll be--a man. You see, I don't fancy my pile being invested in cut flowers and automobiles for lady friends. I don't seem to have heard that thousand-dollar parties to boys who can't smoke a five-cent cigar right, and girls who're just out for a good time anyway, are liable to bring you interest on the capital invested, except in the way of contempt. And five-thousand dollar apartments are calculated to rival the luxury of Rome before its fall. Big play at 'draw' and 'auction' are two diseases not provided for amongst the cures in patent med'cine advertisements, and as for the older vintages in wines, they're only permissible in folks who've quit worrying to scratch dollars together. None of these things seem to me good business, and in a man at the outset of his career some of 'em are--immoral. You've had your preliminary run, and I'll admit you've shown a fine turn of speed. But it smacks too much of the race-track, and seems to me quite unsuited to the hard highroad of big finance you're destined to travel. "Just one moment," he went on, as, with flushing cheeks and half-angry eyes, his son was about to break in. "You haven't got the point of this talk yet. This bill you've handed me don't figure as largely in it as you might guess. I've thought about things these months. I don't blame you a thing. I'm not kicking. The fact you've got to grab and get your hind teeth into is that there comes a time when two can't spend one fortune with any degree of amicability. It's a sort of proposition like two dogs and a bone. Now from a canine point of view that bone certainly belongs to one of those dogs. No two dogs ever stole a bone together. Consequently, the situation ends in a scrap, and it isn't always a cert. that the right thief gets the bone. How it would work out between us I'm not prepared to guess, but, as 'scrap' don't belong to the vocabulary between us, we'll handle the matter in another way. Seeing the fortune--at present--belongs to me, I'll do the spending in--my own way. My way is mighty simple, too, as far as you're concerned. I'm going to stake you all you need, so you can get out and find a bone you can worry on _your own_. That's how you're going to pay this bill. You're going to get busy quitting play. We are, and always have been, and always will be, just two great big friends, and I'd like you to remember that when I say that the life you're living is all right for a boy, but in a man it leads to dirty ditches that aren't easy climbing out of, and--you can't do clean work with dirty hands. When you've shown me you're capable of collecting a bone for your own worrying--why, you can come right back here, and I'll be pleased and proud to hand over the reins of this organization, and I'll be mighty content to sit around in one of the back seats and get busy with the applause. Now you talk." Gordon began without a moment's hesitation. Something of his heat had passed, but it still remained near the surface. "Quite time I did," he cried almost sharply. "Look here, father, I don't think you meant all you said the way your talk conveyed it. To me the most important of your talk is the implied immorality of my mode of life. Then the inconsistent fashion in which you point my way towards--big finance." His eyes lit again. They had suddenly become dangerously bright. "Here, we're not going to quarrel, nor get angry," he went on, gathering heat of manner even in his denial. "We're too great friends for that, and you've always been too good a sportsman to me, but--but I'm not going to sit and listen to you or anybody else accusing me of immorality without kicking with all my strength!" He brought one great fist down on the desk with a bang that set the ink-wells and other objects dancing perilously. "I'm not angry with you. I couldn't get angry with you," he proceeded, with a suppressed excitement that added to his father's smile; "but I tell you right here I'll not stand for it from you or anybody. My only crime is spending your money, which you have always encouraged me to do. From my university days to now my whole leisure has been given up to athletics. A man can't live immorally and win the contests I have won. I don't need to name them. Boxing, sculling, running, baseball, swimming. You know that. Any sane man knows that. The money I've spent has been spent in the ordinary course of the life to which you have brought me up. You have always impressed on me the great position you occupy and the necessity for keeping my end up. That's all I have to say about my debts, but I have something to say on the subject of the inconsistency with which you censure immorality in the same breath as you demand my immediate plunge into the mire of big finance." He paused for a moment. Then, as abruptly as it had arisen, his heat died down, and gave place to the ready humor of his real nature. "Gee, I want to laugh!" He sprang from his seat and began to pace the floor, talking as he moved. His father watched him with twinkling, affectionate eyes. "Immorality? Psha! Was there ever anything more immoral than modern finance? You imply I have learned nothing of your organization in the three years I've been one of your secretaries. Dad," he warned, "I've learned enough to have a profound contempt for the methods of big corporations in this country, or anywhere else. It's all graft--graft of one sort or another. Do you need me to tell _you_ of it? No, I don't think so. Twenty-five millions wouldn't cover the fortune you've made. I know that well enough. How has it been made? Here, I'll just give you one instance of the machinations of a big corporation. How did you gain control of the Union Grayling and Ukataw Railroad? Psha! What's the use? You know. You hammered it, hammered it to nothing. You got your own people into it, and sat back while they ran it nearly into bankruptcy under your orders. Then you bought. Bought it right up, and--sent it ahead. Immoral? It makes me sweat to think of the people who must have lost fortunes in that scoop. Immoral? Why, I tell you, Dad, any man can make a pile if he sticks to the old saw: 'Don't butt up against the law--just dodge it.' It's only difficult for the fellow who remembers his Sunday-school days. So far, Dad, I've avoided immorality. I'm waiting till I start on big finance to become its victim. That's my talk. Now you do some." His father nodded. Then he said dryly, "This carpet cost me five hundred dollars, that chair fifty. Try the chair." Gordon laughed at the imperturbable smile on his father's face, but he flung his great body into the chair. James Carbhoy deliberately knocked the ash from his cigar. It was many years since he had received such a straight talk from any man. Some of it had stung--stung sharply, but the justice or injustice of it he set aside. His whole mind and heart were upon other matters. He took no umbrage. He swept all personal feeling aside and regarded the boy whom he idolized. "We've both made some talk," he observed, "but I think the last word's with me. I don't seem to be sure which of us has put up the bluff. Maybe we both have. Anyway, right here and now I'm going to call your hand. I offered you a stake. You say it's easy to make a pile. Can you make a pile?" Gordon shrugged. "Why, yes. If I follow your wish and embark on--big finance. And--forget my Sunday school." The millionaire gathered up the sheaf of loose accounts on the desk and held them up. His smile was grim and challenging. "One hundred thousand dollars these bills represent. The cashier will hand you a check for that amount. Say, you've shown your ability to spend that amount; can you show your ability to make it?" For a moment the boy's blue eyes avoided the half-ironical smile of his father's. Then suddenly they returned the steady gaze, and a flush spread swiftly over his handsome face. Something of his father's purpose was dawning upon him. He began to realize that the man who had made those many millions was far too clever for him when it came to debate. He squared his shoulders obstinately and took up the challenge. There was no other course for him. But even as he accepted it his heart sank at the prospect. "Certainly," he cried. "Certainly--with a stake to start me." His father nodded. "Sure. That goes," he said. Then he laid the papers on the desk, and his whole manner underwent a further change. His eyes seemed to harden with the light of battle. There was an ironical skepticism in them. Even there was a shadow of contempt. For the moment it seemed as if he had forgotten that the man before him was his son, and regarded him merely as some rival financier seeking to beat him in a deal. "I'll hand you one hundred thousand dollars. That's your stake. This is the way you'll pay those bills. You'll leave this city in twenty-four hours. You can go where you choose, do what you choose. But you must return here in twelve months' time with exactly double that sum. I make no conditions as to how you make the money. That's right up to you. I shall ask no questions, and blame you for no process you adopt, however much I disapprove. Then, to show you how certain I am you can't do it--why, if you make good, there's a half-share partnership in my organization waiting right here for you." "A half-share partnership?" Gordon repeated incredulously. "You said--a half-share?" "That's precisely what I said." All of a sudden the younger man flung back his head and laughed aloud. "Why, Dad, I stand to win right along the line--anyway," he exclaimed. The older man's eyes softened. "Maybe it's just how you look at it." The change in his father's manner was quite lost upon Gordon. He only saw his enormous advantage in this one-sided bargain. "Say, Dad, was there ever such a father as I've got?" he cried exuberantly. "Never, never! But you're not going to monopolize all the sportsmanship. I can play the game, too. I don't need one hundred thousand dollars on this game. I don't need twelve months to do it in. I'm not going to cut twelve months out of our lives together. Six is all I need. Six months, and five thousand dollars' stake. That's what I need. Give me that, and I'll be back with one hundred and five thousand dollars in six months' time. I haven't a notion where I'm going or what I'm going to do. All I know is you've put it up to me to make good, and I'm going to. I'll get that money if--if I have to rob a bank." The boy's recklessness was too much for the gravity of the financier. He sat back and laughed. He flung his half-smoked cigar away, and in a moment father and son had joined in a duel of loud-voiced mirth. Presently, however, their laughter died out. The millionaire sprang to his feet. His eyes were shining with delight. "I don't care a darn how you do it, boy," he cried. "As you say, it's up to you. You see, I've got over my Sunday-school days, as you so delicately reminded me. That's by the way. But there's more in this than maybe you get right. You're going to learn that no graft can turn five thousand dollars into one hundred thousand in six months without a mighty fine commercial brain behind it. It's that brain I'm looking for in my son. Now get along and see your mother and sister. You've only got twenty-four hours' grace. Leave these bills to me. You're making a bid for the greatest fortune ever staked in a wager, and things like that don't stand for any delay. Get out, Gordon, boy; get out and--make good." He held one powerful hand out across the desk, and Gordon promptly seized and wrung it. "Good-by, Dad, and--God bless you." CHAPTER II IN CHASTENED MOOD Of course, the whole thing was ridiculous. Gordon knew that. No one could know it better. The more he thought about it the more surely he was certain of it. He told himself that he, personally, had behaved like a first-class madman over the whole affair. How on earth was he to make one hundred thousand dollars in six months? It couldn't be done. That was all. It simply couldn't be done. What power of mischief had driven him to charge his highly respectable father with graft? It was a rotten thing to do anyway. And it served him right that it had come back on him by pointing the way to the present impossible situation. He was perfectly disgusted with himself. But after a while he began to chuckle. The thing was not without an atmosphere of humor--of a sort. No doubt his friends would have seen a tremendous humor in the idea of his making one hundred thousand dollars under any conditions. One hundred thousand dollars! What a tremendous sum it sounded viewed from the standpoint of his having to make it. He had never considered it a vast sum before. But now it seemed to grow and grow every time he thought of it. Then he laughed. What stupid things "noughts" were. They meant so much just now, and, in reality, they mean nothing at all. Oh, dear. The whole thing was a terrible trouble. It was worse. It was a tragedy. But--he mustn't give his friends the laugh on him. That would be the last straw. No. The whole thing should remain a secret between his father and himself. He almost broke into a sweat as he suddenly remembered the Press. What wouldn't the Press do with the story. The son and heir of James Carbhoy, the well-known multi-millionaire, leaving home to show the world how to make one hundred thousand dollars in record time! A stupendous farce. Then the swarm of reporters buzzing about him like a cloud of flies in summer time. The prospect was too depressing. Think of the columns in the Press, especially the cheaper Press. They would haunt him from New York to--Timbuctoo! It couldn't be done. He felt certain that in such circumstances suicide would be justifiable. Thoughts such as these swept on through his disturbed brain as he sped up Broadway on his way to say good-by to his mother and sister. He had been lucky in finding his father's high-powered automobile standing outside the palatial entrance of the towering Carbhoy Building. Nor had he the least scruple in commandeering it. His visit to the east side of Central Park was in the nature of a whirlwind. He had no desire to be questioned, and he knew his young sister, Gracie, too well to give her a chance in that direction. Their friends were wont to say that, for one so young--she was only thirteen--she was all wit and intellect. He felt that that was because she was his father's daughter. For himself he was positive she was all precocity and impertinence. And he told himself he was quite unprejudiced. As for his mother, she was one of those gentle Southern women who declare that no woman has the right to question the doings of the male members of her household, and, in spite of the luxury with which she was surrounded, and which she never failed to feel the burden of--she was originally a small farmer's daughter--still yearned for that homely meal of her youth, "supper"--a collation of coffee, cakes, preserves and cold meats. Experience warned him that he must give her no inkling of the real facts. She would be too terribly shocked at the revelation. So, for an hour or more, in the little family circle, in his mother's splendid boudoir, he talked of everything but his own affairs. Nor was it until he was in the act of taking his leave that he warned them both that he was leaving the city for six months. He felt it was a cowardly thing to do, but, having fired his bombshell in their midst, he fled precipitately before its stunning effect had time to pass away. Off he sped, the automobile urged to a dangerous speed, and it was with a great sense of relief that he finally reached his own apartment on Riverside Drive. Letting himself in, he found his man, Harding, waiting for him. "Mrs. Carbhoy has been ringing you up, sir," he said in the level tones of a well-trained servant. "She wants to speak to you, sir--most important." Gordon hardened his heart. "Disconnect the 'phone then," he said sharply, and flung himself into a great settle which stood in the domed hall. "Very good, sir." The man was moving away. "If my mother or sister should come here, I'm out. Send word down to the office that there's no one in." The valet's face was quite expressionless. Gordon Carbhoy had his own way of dealing with his affairs. Harding understood this. He was also devoted to his master. "Yes, sir." He vanished out of the hall. Left alone a great change came over Gordon. The old buoyancy and humor seemed suddenly to fall from him. For once his eyes were perfectly, almost painfully serious. He stared about him, searching the remoteness of his surroundings, his eyes and thoughts dwelling on the luxury of the apartment he had occupied for the last three years. It was a two-floored masterpiece of builder's ingenuity. It was to be his home no longer. That splendid domed hall had been the scene of many innocent revels. Yes, in spite of the accusation of immorality, his parties had been innocent enough. He had entertained the boys and girls of his acquaintance royally, but--innocently. Well, that was all done with. It was just a memory. The future was his concern. The future. And that depended on his own exertions. For a moment the seriousness of his mood lifted. Surely his own exertions as a business man was a broken reed to---- What about failure? What was to follow--failure? He hadn't thought of it, and his father hadn't spoken of it. Suddenly the cloud settled again, and a sort of panic swept over him. Did his father intend to--kick him out? It almost looked like it. And yet---- Had he intended this stake as his last? What a perfect fool he had been to refuse the hundred thousand dollars. Then, in a moment, his panic passed. He was glad he had done so--anyway. He selected a cigar from his case and sniffed at it. He remembered his father's. His handsome blue eyes were twinkling. His own cigars cost half a dollar more than his father's, and the fact amused him. He cut the end carefully and lit it. Then he leaned back on the cushions and resigned himself to the reflection that these things, too, must go with the rest. They, too, must become a mere memory. "Harding!" he called. The man appeared almost magically. "Harding, have you ever smoked a--five-cent cigar?" he inquired thoughtfully. The valet cleared his throat. "I'm sorry to say, sir, I haven't." "Sorry?" Gordon's eyes were smiling. "A mere figure of speech, sir." "Ah--I see. They must be--painful." "Very, I should think, sir. But, beg pardon, sir, I believe in some--ahem--low places, they sell two for five cents!" "Two? I--I wonder if the sanitary authorities know about it." Gordon smiled into the serious face of his devoted henchman. Then he went on rapidly-- "What baggage do you suggest for a six months' trip?" "Europe, sir?" "No." "South, sir?" "I--haven't made up my mind." "General then, sir. That'll need more. There's the three large trunks. The steamer trunk. Four suit cases. Will you need your polo kit, sir, and your----?" Gordon shook his head. "Guess your focus needs adjusting. Now, suppose you were getting a man ready for a six months' trip--a man who smoked those two-for-five cigars. What would you give him?" Harding's eyelids flickered. He sighed. "It would be difficult, sir. I shouldn't give him clean under-garments, sir. I should suggest the oldest suit I could find. You see, sir, it would be waste to give him a good suit. The axles of those box cars are so greasy. I'm not sure about a toothbrush." "Your focus is adjusting itself." "Yes, sir, thank you, sir." "And the five-cent-cigar man?" Harding's verdict came promptly. "A hand bag with one good suit and ablutionary utensils, sir. Also strong, warm under-garments, and a thick overcoat. One spare pair of boots. You see, sir, he could carry that himself." "Good," cried Gordon delightedly. "You prepare for that five-cent-cigar man. Now I want some food. Better ring down to the restaurant." "Yes, sir. An oyster cocktail? Squab on toast, or a little pheasant? What about sweets, sir, and what wine will you take?" "Great gods no, man! Nothing like that. Think of your five-cent-cigar man. What would he have? Why, sandwiches. You know, nice thick ones, mostly bread. No. Wait a bit. I know. A club sandwich. Two club sandwiches, and a bottle of domestic lager. Two things I hate--eternally. We must equip ourselves, Harding. We must mortify the flesh. We must readjust our focus, and outrage all our more delicate susceptibilities. We must reduce ourselves to the requirements of the five-cent-cigar man, and turn a happy, smiling world into a dark and drear struggle for existence. See to it, good Harding, see to it." The man withdrew, puzzled. Used as he was to Gordon's vagaries, the thought of his master dining off two hideous club sandwiches and a bottle of _domestic_ lager made his staunch stomach positively turn. His perfect training, however, permitted of no verbal protest. And he waited on the diner with as much care for punctilio as though a formal banquet were in progress. Then came another violent shock to his feelings. Gordon leaned back in his chair with a sigh of amused contentment. "Do you think you could get me a--five-cent cigar, Harding?" he demanded. "Say, I enjoyed that food. That unique combination of chicken, hot bacon and--and something pickly--why, it's great. And as for _domestic_ lager--it's got wine beaten a mile. Guess I'm mighty anxious to explore a--five-cent cigar." Harding cleared his throat. "I'll do my best, sir. It may be difficult, but I'll do my best. I'll consult the clerk downstairs. He smokes very bad cigars, sir." "Good. You get busy. I'll be around in my den." "Yes, sir," Harding hesitated. Then with an unusual diffidence, "Coffee, sir? A little of the '48 brandy, sir?" Gordon stared. "Can I believe my ears? Spoil a dinner like that with--'48 brandy? I'm astonished, Harding. That focus, man; that five-cent-cigar focus!" Gordon hurried off into his den with a laugh. Harding gazed after him with puzzled, respectful eyes. Once in the privacy of his den, half office, half library, and wholly a room of comfort, Gordon forgot his laugh. His mind was quite made up, and he knew that a long evening's work lay before him. He picked up the receiver of his private 'phone to his father's office and sat down at the desk. "Hello! Hello! Ah! That you, Harker? Splendid. Guess I'm glad I caught you. Working late, eh? Sure. It's the way in er--big finance. Yes. Got to lie awake at nights to do the other feller. Say. No. Oh, no, that's not what I rang you up for. It's about--finance. Ha, ha! It's a check for me. Did the governor leave me one? Good. Five thousand dollars, isn't it? Well, say, don't place it to my credit. Get cash for it to-morrow, and send it along to---- Let me see. Yes, I know. You send along a bright clerk with it. He can meet me at the Pennsylvania Depot to-morrow, at noon--sharp. Yes. In the waiting-room. Get that? Good. So long." "That's that," he muttered, as he replaced the receiver. "Now for Charlie Spiers." He turned to the ordinary 'phone, picked up the receiver, gave the operator the number, and waited. "Hello! Hello, hello, hello! That you, Charlie? Bully. I wasn't sure getting you. Guess my luck's right in. How are you? Goo---- No, better not come around to-night. Fact is, I'm up to my back teeth packing and things. I've got to be away awhile. Business--important." He laughed. "Don't get funny. It's not play. No. Eh? What's that? A lady? Quit it. If there's a thing I can't stand just about now it's a suggestion of immorality. I mean that. The word 'immoral' 's about enough to set me chasing Broadway barking and foaming at the mouth. I said I'm going away on business, and it's so important that not even my mother knows where I'm going. Yes. Ah, I'm glad you feel that way. It's serious. Now, listen to me; it's up to you to do me a kindness. I'm going to write the mater now and again. But I can't mail direct, or she'll know where I am, see? Well, I can send her mail under cover to you, and you can mail it on to her. Get me? Now, that way, you'll know just where I am. That's so. Well, you've got to swear right along over the wire you won't tell a soul. Not the governor, or the mater, or Gracie, or--or anybody. No, I don't need you to cuss like a railroader about it. Just swear properly. That's it. That's fine. On your soul and honor. Fine. I'm glad you added the 'honor' racket, it makes things plumb sure. Oh, yes, your soul's all right in its way. But---- Good-by, boy. I'll see you six months from to-day. No. Too busy. So long." Gordon hung up the receiver and turned back to his desk with a sigh. He opened a drawer and took out his check-book, and gave himself up to a few minutes of figures. There was not a great deal of money to his credit at the bank, but it was sufficient for his purposes. He wrote and signed three checks. Then he tore the remaining blanks up and flung them into the waste-basket. After that he turned his attention to a systematic examination of his papers. It was a long, and not uninteresting process, but one that took a vast amount of patience. He tore up letter after letter, photographs, bills, every sort of document which a bachelor seems always to accumulate when troubled by the disease of youth. In the midst of his labors he came across his father's private code for cable and telegraph. It brought back to him the memory of his position as one of his father's secretaries. He smiled as he glanced through it. It must be sent back to the office. He would hand it to the clerk who brought him his money in the morning. So he placed it carefully in the inside pocket of his coat and continued his labors. Half an hour later Harding appeared. "Beg pardon, sir," he said. "I had some difficulty, but"--he held up an oily-looking cigar with a flaming label about its middle, between his finger and thumb--"I succeeded in obtaining one. I had to take three surface cars, and finally had to go to Fourth Avenue. It was a lower place than I expected, sir, seeing that it was a five-cent cigar." "That means it cost me twenty cents, Harding--unless you were able to transfer." Gordon eyed the man's expressionless face quizzically. "I'm sorry, sir. But I forgot about the transfer tickets." Gordon sighed with pretended regret. "I'm sure guessing it's--bad finance. We ought to do better." "I could have saved the fares if I'd taken your car, sir," said Harding, with a flicker of the eyelids. "Splendid, gasoline at thirteen cents, and the price of tires going up." Gordon drummed on the desk with his fingers and became thoughtful. He had a painful duty yet to perform. "Harding," he said at last, with a genuine sigh, his eyes painfully serious. "We've got to go different ways. You've--got to quit." The valet's face never moved a muscle. "Yes, sir." "Right away." "Yes, sir." Then the man cleared his throat, and laid the oily-looking cigar on the desk. "I trust, sir, I've given satisfaction?" "Satisfaction?" Gordon's tone expressed the most cordial appreciation. "Satisfaction don't express it. I couldn't have kept up the farce of existence without you. You are the best fellow in the world. Guess it's I who haven't given satisfaction." "Yes, sir." "Oh--you agree?" "Yes, sir. That is, no, sir." Harding passed one thin hand across his forehead, and the movement was one of perplexity. It was the only gesture he permitted himself as any expression of feeling. "I'm going away for six months--as a five-cent-cigar man," Gordon went on, disguising his regret under a smile of humor. "I'm going away on--business." "Yes, sir." The respectful agreement came in a monotonous tone. "So you'll--just have to quit. That's all." "Yes, sir." "Ye-es." "You will--need a man when you come back, sir?" The eagerness was unmistakable to Gordon. "I--hope so." Harding's face brightened. "I will accept temporary employment then, sir. Thank you, sir." Gordon wondered. Then he cleared his throat, and held out two of the checks he had written. "Here's two months' wages," he said. "One is your due. Guess the other's the same, only--it's a present. Now, get this. You'll need to see everything cleared right out of this shanty, and stored at the Manhattan deposit. When that's done, get right along and report things to my father, and hand him your accounts for settlement. All my cigars and cigarettes and wine and things, why, I guess you can have for a present. It don't seem reasonable to me condemning you to five-cent cigars and domestic lager. Now pack me one grip, as you said. I'll wear the suit I've got on. Mind, I need a grip I can tote myself--full." "Very good, sir. Thank you, sir. Anything else, sir?" "Why, yes." Gordon was smiling again. "Hand this check in at the bank when it opens to-morrow, and get me cash for it, and bring it right along. That's all, except you'd better get me another disgusting sandwich, and another bottle of tragedy beer for my supper. There's nothing else." With a resolute air Gordon turned back to his work, as, with an obvious sigh of regret, Harding silently withdrew. CHAPTER III GORDON ARRIVES Gordon Carbhoy sat hunched up in his seat. His great shoulders, so square and broad, seemed to fill up far more space than he was entitled to. His cheerful face showed no signs of the impatience and irritability he was really enduring. A seraphic contentment alone shone in his clear blue eyes. He was a picture of the youthful conviction that life was in reality a very pleasant thing, and that there did not exist a single cloud upon the delicately tinted horizon of his own particular portion of it. In spite of this outward seeming, however, he was by no means easy. Every now and again he would stand up and ease the tightness of his trousers about his knees. He felt dirty, too, dirty and untidy, notwithstanding the fact that he had washed himself, and brushed his hair, many times in the cramped compartment of the train devoted to that purpose. Then he would fling himself into his corner again and give his attention to the monotonously level landscape beyond the window and strive to forget the stale odor so peculiar to all railroad cars, especially in summer time. These were movements and efforts he had made a hundred times since leaving the great terminal in New York. He had slept in his corner. He had eaten cheaply in the dining-car. He had smoked one of the delicious cigars, from the box which the faithful Harding had secreted in his grip, in the smoker ahead. He had read every line in the magazines he had provided himself with, even to the advertisements. The time hung heavily, drearily. The train grumbled, and shook, and jolted its ponderous way on across the vast American continent. It was all very tedious. Then the endless stream of thought, often fantastic, always unconvincing, always leading up to those ridiculous cyphers representing one hundred thousand dollars. If only they were numerals. Nice, odd numerals. He was a firm believer in the luck of odd numbers. But no. It was always "noughts." Most disgusting "noughts." He yawned for about the thousandth time on his two days' journey, and wondered hopelessly how many more times he would yawn before he reached the Pacific. Hello! The conductor was coming through again. Going to tear off more ticket, Gordon supposed. That tearing off was most interesting. He wondered if the ticket would last out till he reached Seattle. He supposed so. Seattle! The Yukon! The Yukon certainly suggested fortune, the making of a rapid fortune. But how? One hundred thousand dollars! There it was again. His eyes were following the movements of the rubicund conductor. The man looked enormously self-satisfied, and was certainly bursting with authority and adipose tissue. He wondered if he couldn't annoy him some way. It would be good to annoy some one. He closed his smiling eyes and feigned sleep. The vast bulk of blue uniform and brass buttons bore down upon him. It reached his "pew," dropped into the seat opposite, and tweaked him by the coat sleeve. Gordon opened his eyes with a pretended start. "Where are we?" he demanded irritably. "Som'eres between the devil an' the deep sea, I guess," grinned the man. "Your--ticket." Gordon began to fumble slowly through his pockets. He knew precisely where his ticket was, but he searched carefully and deliberately in every other possible place. The man waited, breathing heavily. He displayed not the slightest sign of the annoyance desired. At last Gordon turned out the inside pocket of his coat. The first thing he discovered amongst its contents was his father's private code book, and the annoyance was in his eyes rather than in those of the conductor. His resolve to return it had been entirely forgotten. He forthwith produced his ticket. "The devil's behind us, I s'pose," said Gordon. "Anyway, we're told it's the right place for him. I'll be glad when we reach the sea." The conductor examined the ticket, while Gordon returned the code book to his pocket. "Ah, Seattle," the brassbound official murmured. Then he looked into the now smiling face before him. "You ain't for Snake's Fall?" "Guess I shouldn't have paid for a ticket to Seattle if I were," Gordon retorted with some sarcasm. "That's so," observed the official, quite undisturbed. "I knew one guy was for Seattle. I was kind o' wondering 'bout him. Se-attle," he murmured reflectively. "On the coast. A seaport. Puget Sound," said Gordon objectionably. "A low down sailor town on the side of a hill, wher' if you ain't climbin' up you're mostly fallin' down. Wher' it rains nigh six months o' the year, an' parboils you the rest. Wher' every bum going to or coming from the Yukon gets thoroughly soused and plays the fool gener'ly." The man's retort was as pointedly objectionable as Gordon's had been, and the challenge of it stirred the latter's sense of humor. "Guess I'm one of the bums 'going to,'" he said cheerfully. The man's fat-surrounded eyes ceased to grin. "Startin' fer the Yukon in--July? Never heard of it," he said, with a shake of the head. "It's as ridiculous as startin' fer hell in summer time. You'll make Alaska when she freezes up, and sit around till she opens next spring. Say----" "You mean I'll get hung up for--ten months?" cried Gordon aghast. "Jest depends on your business." "Yes, of course." Gordon's heart sank as the man grunted up from his seat, and handed him back his mutilated ticket. He watched him pass on down the car and finally vanish through the doorway of the parlor-car beyond. Then his eyes came back to his surroundings. He stared at the heads of his fellow travelers dotting the tops of the seats about him. Then his eyes dropped to his grip on the opposite seat lying under his overcoat, and again, later, they turned reflectively towards the window. Ten months. Ten months, and he only had six before him in which to accomplish his purpose. Was there ever a more perfect imbecile? Was there ever such a fool trick? A smile of chagrin grew in his eyes as he remembered how he had arrived at the Pennsylvania Depot, and had studied the list of places to which he could go, seeking to find in the names an inspiration for the accomplishment of his purpose. There had been so many that his amazed head had been set whirling. There he had stood, wondering and gawking like some foolish country "Rube," without one single idea beyond the fact that he must go somewhere and make one hundred thousand dollars in six months' time. Then had come that one illuminating flash. He saw the name in great capital letters in an advertisement. "The Yukon." Of course. It was the one and only place in the world for quick fortunes, and forthwith he had booked his passage to Seattle. Nor was he likely to forget his immense satisfaction when he heard Harding's respectful "Yes, sir," in response to his information. Now he certainly was convinced that he was own brother to the finest bred jackass in the whole wide world. However, there was nothing to be done but go on to Seattle. He had paid for his ticket, and, Providence willing, to Seattle he would go. But Providence had its own ideas upon the matter. Furthermore, Providence began at once to set its own machinery working in his behalf. It was the same Providence that looks after drunken men and imbeciles. Half an hour later it impelled him to gather up his traps and pass forward into the smoker, accompanied by one of his own big, expensive cigars. He pushed his way into the car through the narrow door of communication. A haze of tobacco smoke blurred his view, but at once he became aware of a single, melancholy, benevolent eye gazing steadily at him. It was an amiable eye and withal shrewd. Also it was surrounded by a shaggy dark brow. This had a fellow, too, but the eye belonging to the fellow was concealed beneath what was intended to be a flesh-tinted cover, secured in place by elastic round its owner's head. The surrounding face was rugged and weather tanned. And it finished with a mop of iron-gray hair at one end, and an aggressively tufted chin beard at the other. But the thrusting whisker could not disguise the general strength of the face. Below this was a spread of large body clad in a store suit of some pretensions, but of ill fit, and a heavy gold watchchain and a large diamond pin in the neckwear suggested opulence. Furthermore, One Eye suggested the prime of middle life, and robust health and satisfaction. There was only one other occupant of the car. He was two or three seats away, across the aisle. He promptly claimed Gordon's attention. He was amusing himself by shooting "crap" on a baize-covered traveling-table. Both men were smoking hard, and, by the density of the atmosphere, and the aroma, the newcomer estimated that they, unlike himself, were not five-cent-cigar men. He paused at the dice thrower's seat and watched the proceedings. The man appeared not to notice his approach at all, and continued to labor on with his pastime, carrying on a muttered address to the obdurate "bones." "Come 'sev,'" he muttered again and again, as he flung the dice on the table with a flick of the fingers. But the "seven" would not come up, and at last he raised a pair of keen black eyes to Gordon's face. "Cussed things, them durned bones," he said briefly, and went on with his play. Gordon smiled. "It's like most things. It's luck that tells." The player grinned down at the dice and nodded agreement, while he continued his muttered demands. Gordon flung his traps into another seat, and sat himself down opposite the man. Crap dice never failed to fascinate him. The melancholy benevolence of One Eye remained fixed upon the pair. The seven refused to come up, and finally the player desisted. "Sort of workin' calculations," he explained, with an amiable grin. "An' they don't calc worth a cent. As you say, the hull blamed thing is chance. Sevens, or any other old things 'll just come up when they darned please, and neither me nor any other feller can make 'em come--playin' straight." The man bared his gold-filled teeth in another amiable grin. And Gordon fell. His unsuspicious mind was quite unable to appreciate the obvious cut of the man. The rather flashy style of his clothes. The keen, quick, black eyes. The disarming ingenuousness of his manner and speech. These things meant nothing to him. The men he knew were as ready to win or lose a few hundred dollars on the turn of a card as they were to drink a cocktail. The thought of sharp practice in gambling was something which never entered their heads. He drew out a dollar bill and laid it on the table. The sight of it across the aisle made One Eye blink. But the black-eyed stranger promptly covered it, and picked up the dice. He shook them in the palm of his hand and spun them on the baize, clipping his fingers sharply. "Come 'sev,'" he muttered. The miracle of it. The seven came up and he swept in the two dollars. In a moment he had replaced them with a five-dollar bill. Gordon responded. "I'll take two dollars of that," he said, and staked his money. The man spun the dice, and a five came up. Then it was Gordon's turn to talk to the dice, calling on them for a seven each time the man threw. The play became absorbing, and One Eye, from across the aisle, craned forward. The seven came up before the five, and Gordon won, and the dice passed. The game proceeded, and the luck alternated. Then Gordon began to win. He won consistently for awhile, and nearly twenty dollars had passed from the stranger's pocket to his. It was an interesting study in psychology. Gordon was utterly without suspicion, and full of boyish enthusiasm. His blue eyes were full of excited interest. He followed each throw, and talked the jargon of the game like any gambler. All his boredom with the journey was gone. His quest was thrust into the background. Nothing troubled him in the least. The joy of the rolling dice was on him, and he laughed and jested as the wayward "bones" defied or acquiesced to his requirements. The stranger was far more subtle. For a big powerful man he possessed absurdly delicate hands. He handled the dice with an expert touch, which Gordon utterly lacked. He talked to the dice as they fell in a manner quite devoid of enthusiasm, and as though muttering a formula from mere habit. He grumbled at his losses, and remained silent in victory, and all the while he smoked, and smoked, and watched his opponent with furtive eyes. One Eye watched the game from the corner without a sign. A stranger, on his way through the car, paused to watch the game. Presently he passed on, and then returned with another man. After awhile Gordon's luck began to wane. His twenty dollars dropped to fifteen. Then to ten. Then to five. The stranger threw a run of "sevens." Then the dice passed. But Gordon lost them again, and presently the five dollars he was still winning passed out of his hands. From that moment luck deserted him entirely. The stranger threw a succession of wins. Gordon increased his stakes to five-dollar bills. Now and again he pulled in a win, but always, it seemed, to lose two successive throws immediately afterwards. There were times when it seemed impossible to wrest the dice from his opponent. Whenever he held them himself he lost them almost immediately. "Seventy-five dollars, that makes," he said, after one such loss. "They're going your way, sure." "It's the luck of things," replied the stranger laconically. One Eye across the aisle smiled to himself, and abandoned his craning. Gordon plunged. He doubled his bets with the abandon of youth and inexperience. And the stranger never failed to tempt him that way when they were his dice. He always laid more stake than he believed his opponent would accept. The hundred dollars was reached and passed in Gordon's losses. Still the game went on. He passed the hundred and fifty--and then Providence stepped in. By this time a number of onlookers had gathered in the car. The place was full of smoke. They were standing in the aisle. They were sitting on the arms of the seats of the two players. One or two were leaning over the backs of the seats. Suddenly the speeding train jolted heavily over some rough points. It swayed for a moment with a sort of deep-sea roll. The onlooker seated on the arm of the stranger's seat was jerked from his balance and sprawled on the player. In his efforts to save himself he grabbed at the table, which promptly toppled. The gambler made a lunge to save it, and, in the confusion of the moment, a second pair of crap dice, identical with the pair Gordon was about to shoot, rolled out of his hand. Just for an instant there was a breathless pause as Gordon pounced on them. Then one word escaped him, and his face went deathly white as he glared furiously at the man across the table. "Loaded!" One Eye again craned forward. But now the patch was entirely removed from his second eye. The next part of Providence's little game was played without a single word. One great fist shot out from Gordon's direction, and its impact with its object sounded dull and sodden. The gambler's head jolted backwards, and he felt as though his neck had been broken. Then the baize-covered table was projected across the car by Gordon's other great hand, while the spectators fled in the direction of the doorways, and pushed and scrambled their ways through. Then ensued a wild scene. The animal was stirred to offense with a sublime abandon. One Eye remained in his corner, his eyes alight with an appreciation hardly to have been expected, contemplating humorously the tangle of humanity as it moved, with lightning rapidity, all over the car. Once, as the battle swayed in his direction, he even moved his traps under the seat, lest their bulk should incommode the combatants. For a moment, at the outset, the two men appeared to be a fair match. But the impression swiftly passed. The youth, the superb training, the skill of Gordon became like the sledge-hammer pounding of superior gunnery in warfare. He hit when and where he pleased, and warded the wilder blows of his opponent with almost unconcern. But the narrowness of the aisle and the presence of the seats saved the gambler, and both men staggered and bumped about in a way that deprived Gordon of much of the result of his advantage. The train began to slow up. One Eye glanced apprehensively out of the window. He gathered up his belongings, and picked up the litter of money scattered on the floor. Then he sat watching the fight--and his opportunity. The men had closed. Regardless of all, they fought with a fury and abandon as cordial as it now became unscientific. The gambler, clinging to his opponent, strove to ward off the blows which fell upon his features like a hailstorm. Gordon, with superlative ferocity, was bent on leaving them unrecognizable. It was a bloody onslaught, but no more bloody than Gordon intended it to be. He was stirred now, a young lion, fighting for the only finish that would satisfy him. One Eye's opportunity came. He made a run for the door as the train pulled up with a jolt. But the fight went on. The stopping of the train conveyed nothing to the fighting men. Neither saw nor cared that one of the doors was suddenly flung open. Neither saw the rush of men in uniform. The invasion of their ring by the train crew meant nothing to them. Then something happened. CHAPTER IV GORDON LANDS AT SNAKE'S FALL Gordon sat up and rubbed his eyes. Then one blood-stained hand went up to his head, and its fingers passed through his ruffled hair. It smoothed its way down one cheek, and finally dropped to the ground on which he was sitting. Where was he? Suddenly he became aware of the metal track in front of him, and--remembered. He glanced down the track. Far in the distance he could see the speeding train. Then his eyes came back to his immediate surroundings, and discovered that he was sitting on the boarded footway of a small country railroad depot. How did he get there? How on earth did he get there? As no answer to his mute inquiry was forthcoming he explored further. He discovered that his grip and overcoat were beside him, also his hat. And some distance away a number of loungers were idly watching him, with a smile of profound amusement on every face. The latter discovery filled him with a swiftly rising resentment, and, grabbing his hat and thrusting it on his head, he leaped to his feet. He had no intention of permitting amusement at his expense. "I guess you sure had some good time," said a deep, musical voice at his elbow. Gordon swung about and stood confronting the man, One Eye, whom he had seen in the train. For a moment he had it in mind to make some furiously resentful retort. But the man's appearance held his curiosity and diverted his purpose. The patch had been removed from his second eye, which now beamed upon him in company with its fellow. "Guess these are yours," the man went on, thrusting a roll of bills out towards him. "That 'sharp' dropped his wad during the scrap. I hated to think a grafting train boss was goin' to collect it. You see, I guessed how that scrap would end." "Are they mine?" Gordon was not quite sure he wasn't dreaming. "Mostly." The stranger's reply was full of dry humor. Suddenly Gordon's eyes lit. "Where is that 'sharp'? I haven't done with----" The stranger pointed after the train. "You'll need to hustle some." The anger died out of Gordon's eyes and he began to laugh. With some diffidence he accepted the money. "Say, it's--mighty decent of you," he cried cordially. Then, for want of better means of expression, "Mighty decent." The two men stood steadily regarding each other. Tall and broad as Gordon was, the stranger was no less. But he added to his stature the massiveness of additional years. Gordon's feelings were under perfect control now. His eyes began to brighten with their native humor. He was longing to solve the mystery of that eye-shade which had disappeared from his companion's face, but was constrained to check his curiosity. "You said you guessed how the scrap would end?" he said. "There's a sort of blank in my--memory. I mean about the finish." The big stranger began to rumble in his throat. To Gordon the sound was comforting in its wholesome enjoyment. "It don't need a heap of guessing when a train 'sharp,' who's got the conductor grafted from his brassbound cap to the soles of his rotten feet, gets into a scrap how things are going to end. I'd sort of hoped you'd 'out' him before the crew come along. Guess you'd have done it if there'd been more room. That's the worst of scrappin' in a railroad car," he added regretfully. "That train boss got along with his crew and threw you out--on your head. They kept the 'sharp' aboard, being well grafted, and figgered to hold up your baggage. I guessed diff'rently. That all your baggage?" he inquired anxiously. Gordon gazed down at the grip and coat. "That's all," he said. Then he impulsively threw out a hand, and the stranger took it. "It's decent--mighty decent of you." Again his buoyant laugh rang out. "Say, I surely do seem to have had some good time." The twinkling eyes of the stranger nearly closed up in a cordial grin. "Seems to me you're fixed here till to-morrow, anyway. There ain't any sort of train west till then. You best come along over to the hotel. They call it 'hotel' hereabouts. I'm goin' that way." Gordon agreed, gathered up his property, and fell in beside his companion. They moved across the track, and as they went he caught some impression of the ragged little prairie town at which he had so inadvertently arrived. There seemed to him to be but a single, unpaved street, consisting of virgin prairie beaten bare and hard by local traffic. This was lined on one side by a fringe of wooden houses of every size and condition, with gaps here and there for roads, yet to be made, turning out of it. These houses were mostly of a commercial nature. Back of this he vaguely understood there to be a sparse dotting of other houses, but their purpose and arrangement remained a mystery to him. Still farther afield he beheld the green eminence of foothills, and still farther on, away in the distance, the snowy ramparts of the Rocky Mountains. The town seemed to occupy only one side of the track--the south side. The depot was beyond it, on the other. They picked their way across the track and debouched upon the Main Street, the name of which Gordon discovered painted in indifferent characters upon a disreputable signboard. Then they turned westwards in the direction of an isolated building rather larger than anything else in the village. After awhile, as his companion made no further effort at conversation, Gordon's interest and curiosity refused to permit the continued silence. "What State are we in?" he inquired. "Montana." Gordon glanced quickly at his companion. "What place is this?" "Snake's Fall." The announcement set Gordon laughing. "What's amiss with Snake's Fall?" inquired the other sharply. "Why, nothing. I was just thinking. You see, the conductor told me 'most everybody was making for Snake's Fall on the train. I'm sorry that 'sharp' wasn't. Say----" "What?" Gordon laughed again. "I remember you in the smoker, only--you seemed to have a--a patch over your left eye." "Sure." "Now you haven't got it?" "No." "I'm not curious, only----" The stranger's eyes lit ironically. "Sure you ain't. That's the hotel. Peter McSwain's. He's the boss. He's a friend of mine, an' I guess he'll fix you right for the night." The snub was decided but gentle. The man's deep, musical voice contained no suggestion of displeasure. However, he had made the other feel that he had been guilty of unpardonable rudeness. He was reduced to silence for the rest of the journey to the hotel, and gave himself up to consideration of this new position in which he now found himself. The one great fact that stood out in his mind was that he had gained another day on the wrong side of his ledger, and, however wrong he had been in his first attempt at fortune, his course had been hopelessly diverted into a still more impossible channel. The absurdity of the situation inclined him to amusement, but the knowledge of the real seriousness of it held him troubled. As they neared the hotel his curiosity further made itself felt. The place was an ordinary frame building with a veranda. It was square and squat, like a box. It was two-storied, with windows, five in all, and a center doorway. These were dotted on the face of it like raisins in a pudding. Its original paint was undoubtedly white, but that seemed to have long since succumbed to the influence of the weather, and now suggested a hopeless hue which was anything but inspiriting. Leaning against the door-casing, in his shirt-sleeves, was a smallish, florid man with ruddy hair. His waistcoat was almost as cheerful as his face, and, judging by the sound of his voice as he talked to a number of men lounging on the veranda, the latter quite matched the pattern of his violently checked trousers. "That's Peter," remarked One Eye, the name, failing a better, Gordon still thought of his companion by. "He's a bright boy, is Peter," he added, chuckling. "The proprietor of the--hotel?" said Gordon, interested. "Sure." Then a hail reached them from the veranda. "Got back, Silas?" cried the loud-voiced hotel-keeper. "Just what you say yourself," retorted Silas amiably. "Seems to me I bought a ticket and just got off the train. Still, ther' ain't nothing certain in this world except--graft." "That's so," laughed the other. "Still, ther' ain't much of a shadow 'bout you, so we'll take it as real. Who's your friend?" The hotel-keeper eyed Gordon with a view to trade. The man called Silas laughed and turned to Gordon. "Guess I didn't get your name. Mine's Mallinsbee--Silas Mallinsbee. I'm a rancher, way out ther' in the foothills." Gordon thought for a moment. Then he decided to use two of his given names in preference to his father's. "Mine's Gordon Van Henslaer. Glad to meet you." "Van Henslaer?" Mallinsbee's eyes twinkled. "Guess the first and last letters on your grip are spare. Kind of belong back east. How-do?" Then, without waiting for a reply, he turned to McSwain and the men on the veranda who were interestedly surveying Gordon. "This is Mister Gordon Van Henslaer from New York. Thought he'd like to break his journey west and get a look around Snake's Fall." Gordon laughed. "I was persuaded at the last minute," he added. "Can you let me have a room?" McSwain became active. "Sure. Guess we're pretty busy these times, with the town gettin' ready to boom. But I guess I ken fix any friend of Silas Mallinsbee. Ther's a room they calculated makin' into a bathroom back of the house, but some slick Alec figured the boys of Snake's Fall were prejudiced, so cut it out. It's small, but we got a bed fixed ther', an' you ken clean yourself at the trough out back. Come right along in." Gordon was half inclined to protest, but Mallinsbee's voice came opportunely-- "I told you Peter 'ud fix you right. I've slept in that room myself, and you'll find it elegant sleepin', if you don't get a nightmare and get jumping around. We'll go right in." Gordon's protest died on his lips. Mr. Mallinsbee had a persuasion all his own. There was a humorous geniality about him that was quite irresistible to the younger man, nor could he forget the manner in which he had helped him after the debacle on the train. He felt that it would have been churlish to refuse his good offices. They passed into the building. The office was plainly furnished. A few Windsor chairs, a table, an empty stove, a few nigger pictures on the walls, and a large register for guests' names. This was the whole scheme. Gordon flung down his grip. "Well, I'm thankful to be off that train, anyway," he said. "Sign here, eh?" as Peter threw the book towards him. "Say," he added, glancing at the list of names above his, "you sure are busy." Peter grinned complacently, while Mallinsbee looked on. "You've hit this city at the psychological moment in its history, sir," he declared expansively. "You've hit it, sir, when, if I ken be allowed to use the expression, the snow's gone an' all the earth's jest bustin' with new life. You've hit it, sir, when fortunes are just going to start right into full growth with all the impetus of virgin soil. Snake's Fall, sir, is about to become the greatest proposition in the Western States, as a sure thing for soaking dollars into it. And here, sir, standing right at your elbow, is the courage, enterprise and intellect that's made it that way. Mr. Silas Mallinsbee is the father of this city, sir; he's more--he's the creator of it. And, sir, I congratulate you on the friendship of such a man, a friendship, sir, in which I have the honor to share." He grabbed a filthy piece of blotting-paper and dabbed it cheerfully over Gordon's name in the book, while the latter smiled at the monument of enterprise himself. "I was quite unaware----" he began. But Mallinsbee cut him short. "Peter's a good feller," he declared, "but some seven sorts of a galoot once told him he ought to go into Congress, and he's been talking ever since. Ther's jest one thing 'll stop Peter talking, and that's orderin' a drink. Which I'm doin' right now. Peter, you'll jest hand us two cocktails. Your specials. And take what you like yourself." Peter accepted the order with alacrity. His admiration of and friendship for Mallinsbee could not be doubted for a moment. And somehow Gordon felt it was a good sign. He returned in a few moments with the cocktails, and a glass of rye whiskey for himself. "I know a better play than my special cocktails," he said, a huge wink distorting most of his ginger-hued features. "They're all right for customers, but I ain't no use fer picklin' my liver. How?" "Here's to the extermination of all 'sharps,'" said Mallinsbee in his deep, rolling voice, and with a meaning glance in Gordon's direction. Gordon nodded. "And here's to the confusion of graft and grafters." All three drank and set their glasses down. "Graft?" said Mallinsbee thoughtfully. Then he shrugged his massive shoulders and laughed. "It's not a heap of use blaming grafters for their graft. They can't help it, any more than you can help scrappin' when a feller hits your wad on the crook. Graft--why, I just hate to think of the ways of graft. But you can't get through life without it; anyway, not life on this earth. I used to think graft a specialty of this country, but guess I was wrong. I'd localized. It don't belong to any one country more than another. It belongs to life; to our human civilization. It's the time limit of life causes the trouble. Nature makes it a cinch we've all got to be rounded up in the get-rich-quick corral. We start life foolish. Then for a while we get a sight more foolish. Then for a few mousy years we take on quite a nice bunch of sense. After that we start getting foolish again, and then the time limit comes right down on the backs of our necks like an ax. Well, I guess those years of sense are so mighty few we've got to get rich quick against the time we start on the foolish racket again, and graft, of one sort or another, is the short cut necessary. "You see, there's every sort of graft. All through life we're looking around for something we ain't got. Did you ever see a kid around his parents? Graft; it's all graft. No kiddy ever acted right because he fancied that way. He's lookin' ahead fer something he's needing, and his pop or his momma are the folks to pass it along to him. Did you ever know a kid take his physic without the promise of candy, or the certainty it would come his way? That's graft. Say, ain't the gal you fancy the biggest graft of all? You don't get nowhere with her without graft. She'll eat up everything you can hand her, from automobiles and jewels down to five-cent candy. Then when you've started getting old and sick and foolish again, having grafted a pile out of life yourself, don't every grafter you ever knew come around an' hand you cures and listen to your senile wisdom just as though they thought you the greatest proposition ever and hated to see you sick? That's graft. You've got a pile and they're needin' it." The twinkle in the big man's eyes while he was talking found a joyous response in Gordon's. The tongue in the cheek of this native of Snake's Fall pleased him mightily. But the wide-eyed sunset of Peter McSwain's features was one of sober earnestness and admiration. "Gee!" he cried, with prodigious appreciation. "He orter write a book!" CHAPTER V A LETTER HOME The bathroom proved to be a veritable rabbit hutch, though clean. But Gordon was astonished to find how far the old life had fallen away behind him. The bareness of the room did not disturb him in the least, and, after a wash in the trough at the back of the hotel, and having dried himself on a towel that may have seen cleaner days, and refused to be inveigled by the attraction of an unclean comb, securely tied to a defective mirror in the passage to the back door, he came back to his bedroom with an added appreciation for its questionable luxury. Mallinsbee had ridden off on a great chestnut horse, nor, until Gordon saw him in the saddle, was he definitely able to classify him in his mind. Big as the amiable stranger was, he sat in the saddle as though he had been born in it, and he handled his horse as only a cattle man can. At supper-time he had an opportunity of studying something of his fellow guests in the house. They were a mixed gathering, but every table in the dining-room was full to overflowing. Certainly McSwain was justified in his claim to a rush of business. It was quickly obvious to Gordon that these people were by no means natives of the place. The majority were undoubtedly business men. Shrewd, keen men of the speculative type, judging from the babel of talk going on about him. As far as he could make out the whole interest of the place was land. Land--always land--and again land. In view of Mallinsbee's friendship Peter McSwain had requested him to sit beside him at his especial table. And he forthwith began to question his host. "Seems to be a big talk of land going on," he said, as he ate his macaroni soup. Peter gulped violently at a long tube of macaroni and nearly choked. "Sure," he said, his eyes wide with an expression the meaning of which Gordon was never quite certain about. It might have meant mere astonishment, but it also suggested resentment. "Sure it's land. What else, unless it's coal, would they talk in Snake's Fall? Every blamed feller you see settin' around in this room is what Silas Mallinsbee calls a ground shark. Which means," he added, with a grin, "they're out to buy or steal land around Snake's Fall. We guess they prefer stealing. The place is bung full with 'em." Gordon's interest deepened. "But why, if you'll forgive me, around--Snake's Fall?" "Young man," said Peter severely, "you're new to the place, and that's your excuse for such ignorance." He pushed his half-finished soup aside and adopted an impressive pose with both elbows on the table, his hands together, and one finger describing acrobatic gyrations to point his words. The manner of it fascinated his hearer. "Let me tell you, sir, that Snake's Fall is the new coalfield of this great country. Sir," he added, with great dramatic effect, "Snake's Fall is capable of supplying the coal of the _world_! There's hundreds of billions of tons of high-grade coal underlying these silly-lookin' hummocks they call the foothills. All this land around Snake's Fall was Silas Mallinsbee's ranch, and he found the coal. That's why I said Silas Mallinsbee was the father of Snake's Fall. He sold this land to a great coal corporation, and bought land away further up in the hills, where he still runs his ranch. He's a great man with a pile of dollars. And he's clever, too. He's kep' for himself all the land either side of the railroad, except this town. And that's why all these land pirates, or ground sharks, are around. The railroad ain't declared their land yet, and everybody's waiting to jump in. The coal's five miles west of here, and the railroad has got to say if they'll keep the depot where it is, or build a new one further along, right on the coal seams. That's the play we're all watching. We want to buy right. We want to buy for the boom. These guys here are out to get in on the ground floor, and see prices go sky high--when they've bought. There'll be some dandy piles made in this play--and lost." By the time he had finished Gordon was agog with excitement. It had stirred as the man began to talk, without his fully understanding the meaning of it. Then, as he proceeded, it grew, and with its growth came enlightenment. Vaguely he saw the hand of Providence in the affairs of the last few days. He had planned his own little matters, or rather he had drifted into them, and then the gods of fortune had taken a hand. And the way of it. He began to smile. A strangely impish mood must have stirred them. His journey. His discovery of the absurdity of his own plans in the nick of time. His visit to the smoker. His play with a "sharp." His fight, and his sudden and uncalculated arrival at Snake's Fall. Here he was, quite without the least intention of his own, landed into the only sort of place in which it could be reasonably hoped he might pick up a fortune quickly. He wondered how he was likely to fare in competition with these ground sharks about him. And the thought made him begin to laugh. McSwain eyed him doubtfully. "Amusin', ain't it?" he said, without appreciation. Gordon shook his head. "If you only knew--it is." Peter went on with his food for a few moments in silence. "I s'pose the boom will come big when it does start?" hazarded Gordon presently. "Big? Say, you ain't got a grip on things yet. Snake's Fall could supply the whole--not half--world with high-grade stove coal. Does that tell you anything? No? Wal, it jest means that when the railroad says the word, hundred-dollar plots 'll fetch a thousand dollars in a week, and maybe ten thousand in a month or less. I tell you right here that in six months from the time the railroad talks there'll be fifty thousand speculators right here, and we'll most of us rake in our piles. We only got to jump in at the start, maybe a bit before, and the game's right in our hands. Get me? I tell you, sir, this is bigger than the first Kootenay rush and nigh as big as the Cobalt boom in Canada." Gordon was impressed. "And to think I came here by accident." "Accident?" "You see, I was persuaded--against my will." His eyes were twinkling. "Ah, Mallinsbee persuaded you--being a friend of his." "No. As a matter of fact I think it was the train conductor who persuaded me." "He's a wise guy, then." "Ye-es. I don't guess I'll see him again. I surely owe him something for what he did." Peter nodded seriously as he gazed at the humorous eyes of his companion. "He's given you the chance of--a lifetime, sir. And that's a thing ther' ain't many in this country yearning to do." After that the meal progressed in silence until the pie was handed round. Gordon was thinking hard. He was wondering, in view of what he had heard, what he ought to do. Land. What did he know about land? How could he measure his wits against the wits of such land speculators as he saw about him? He studied the faces of some of the clamorous crowd in the dining-room. They were a strangely mixed lot. There were undoubtedly men of substance among them, but equally surely the majority were adventurers looking to step into the arena of the coming boom and wrest a slice of fortune by hook, or, more probably, by crook. What did he know? What could he do? And his mind went back to the sharp on the train, and the way he had fallen to the man's snare. Again he wanted to laugh. He had counted the bills which Mallinsbee had handed him, in the privacy of his bathroom. He only remembered to have lost about two hundred dollars to the gambler. The dollars handed to him amounted to well over three hundred. The miracle of it all. He had nearly killed the gambler, and, instead of losing, he had made over a hundred dollars on the deal. The miracle of it! "Do you believe in miracles?" he laughed abruptly. Peter glanced up from his plate suspiciously. Then he promptly joined in the other's amusement. He always remembered that this newcomer was a friend of Silas Mallinsbee. "Meracles?" he said reflectively. "I can't say I always did. But one or two things have made some difference that way. Takin' one extra drink saved my life once. The takin' of that drink wasn't jest a meracle," he added dryly. "It was more of a habit them days. Still, it was a meracle in a way. Me an' my brother wer' on a bust. We were feeling that good we was handin' out our pasts in lumps to each other, same as if we was strangers, and wasn't raised around the same cabbige patch. Wal, he'd borrowed an automobile and left the saloon to wind it up, and get things fixed. While he was gone the boys handed me another cocktail. Then the bartender slung one at me, an' I hadn't no more sense than to buy another one myself. Then some damn fool thought rye was the best mix for drinkin' on top o' cocktails, an' so they put me to bed. Guess I never see my brother get back from that joy ride." He sighed. "I allow they had to bury a lot of that automobile with him, he was so mussed up. Sort o' meracle, you'd say? Then there was another time. Guess it was my wife. She was one o' them females who make you feel you want to associate with tame earthworms. Sort o' female who never knew what a sick headache was, an' sang hymns of a Sunday evening, and played a harmonium when she was feelin' in sperits. Sort o' female who couldn't help smellin' out when you was lyin' to her, an' gener'ly told you of it. A good woman though, an' don't yer fergit it. Wal, I got sick once an' when I got right again she guessed it was up to 'em to insure myself in her favor. Guess I'd just paid my first premium when she goes an' takes colic an' dies. I did all I knew. I give her ginger, an' hot-water bags, an' poultices. It didn't make no sort o' difference. She died. I ain't paid no premiums since. Sort o' meracle that," he added, with a satisfied smile. "Then there's this coal. I hadn't started this hotel six months when Mallinsbee gets busy an' makes his deal with the corporation. You ain't goin' to make a pile out of a bum country hotel without a--meracle." The man's gravity was impressive, and Gordon strove for sympathy. "Yes," he declared, with smiling emphasis. "There are such things as miracles. One has happened this day--and here. My arrival here was certainly a miracle. A peculiarly earthy miracle, but, nevertheless, a--miracle. Say, I'll have to write some in the office. See you again." Gordon pushed back his chair and hurried away through the crowded room towards the office. But here again was a crowd. Here again was "land"--always "land." And in desperation he betook himself to his bathroom. He felt he must write to his mother. He felt that on this his arrival in Snake's Fall he could do no less than reassure her of his well-being. Mrs. James Carbhoy sighed contentedly as she raised her eyes from the last of a number of sheets of paper in her lap. Her husband turned from his contemplation of the scorching streets, and the parched foliage of the wide expanse of trees beyond the window. "Well?" he inquired. "Where is the boy?" There was the faintest touch of anxiety in his inquiry, but his face was perfectly controlled, and the humor in his eyes was quite unchanged. Mrs. Carbhoy sighed again. "I don't know. He doesn't say. Nor does he give the slightest clew." She examined the envelope of the letter. "It was mailed here in New York. It's a rambling sort of letter. I hope he is all right. This hot weather is---- Do you think he----" Her husband laughed. "I guess he's all right. You see I don't fancy he wants us to know where he is. That's come through some friend, I'd say. Just read it out." Gordon's mother leaned back in her chair again. She was more than ready to read her beloved boy's letter again, in spite of her misgivings. Besides, there was a hope in her thoughts that she had missed some clew as to his whereabouts which her clear-sighted husband might detect. "DEAREST MUM: "Destinations are mighty curious things which have a way of making up their minds as to whom they are terminals for, regardless of the individual. Most of us think the matter of destination is in our own hands. We make up our minds to go to the North Pole; well, if we get there it's because no other terminal on the way has made up its mind to claim us. I've surely arrived at my destination, a place I wasn't going to, nor had heard of, nor dreamed of--even when I had nightmare. I guess this place must have said to itself, 'Hello, here's Gordon Carbhoy on the train; he's every sort of fool, he don't know if it's Palm Sunday or Candlemas, he hasn't got more sense than an old hen with kittens, let's divert him where we think he ought to go.' So I arrived here quite suddenly this afternoon and, in consequence, have wasted some fifty odd dollars of passage money. It's a good beginning, and one the old Dad 'll surely appreciate. "Talking of the old Dad, I'd like you to tell him from me that I don't think graft is confined to--big finance. This is a discovery he's likely to be interested in. Also, since he's largely interested in railroads, though not from a traveling point of view, I would point out that much might be done to improve accommodation. The aisles are too narrow and the corners of the seats are too sharp. Furthermore, the best money-making scheme I can think of at the moment is a billet as a conductor of a transcontinental express. "However, these things are just first impressions. "There are other impressions I won't discuss here. They relate to arrival platforms of depots. When a fellow gets out on his own in the world, there are many things with which he comes into contact liable to strike him forcibly. Those are the things in life calculated to teach him much that may be useful to him afterwards. I have already come into contact with such things, and though they are liable to leave an impression of soreness generally, their lessons are quite sound. "On the whole, in spite of having lost fifty odd dollars on my railroad ticket, my first two or three days' adventures have left me with a margin of profit such as I could not reasonably have expected. I mention this to show you, presuming that the Dad has told you the object of my going, that my eye is definitely focused on the primary purpose of my ramblings. "I am keeping my eyes well open and one or two of my observations might be of interest to you. "I have discovered that the luxurious bath is not actually necessary to life, and, from a hygienic point of view, there's no real drawback to the kind of soap vulgarly known as 'hoss.' Furthermore, the filtration of water for ablutionary purposes is quite unnecessary. All it needs is to be of a consistency that'll percolate through a fish net. Moreover, judging from observations only, I have discovered that a comb and brush, if securely chained up, can be used on any number of heads without damaging results. "Observation cannot be considered complete without its being turned upon one's fellow-creatures. I have already come into contact with some very interesting specimens of my kind. Without worrying you with details I have found some of them really worth while. Generalizing, I'd like to say right here that man seems to be a creature of curious habits--many of which are bad. I don't say this with malice. On the contrary, I say it with appreciation. And, too, I never realized what a general hobby amongst men the collecting of dollars was. It must be all the more interesting that, as a collection, it never seems completed. I'd like to remark that view points change quickly under given circumstances, and I am now bitten with the desire to become a collector. "Furthermore, my focus had readjusted itself already. For instance, I feel no repulsion at the manners displayed in the dining-room of a small country 'hotel.' I feel sure that the man who eats with his mouth open and snores at the same time is quite justified, if he happens to be bigger and stronger than the man who hears and sees him. I also feel that a man is only within his rights in having two or even three helpings of every dish in a hotel run on the American plan, unless the limit to a man's capacity is definitely estimated on the printed tariff. Another observation came my way. Honesty seems to be a matter of variable quality. A nice ethical problem is suggested by the following incident. A man robs his victim; a righteously indignant onlooker sees the transaction, and his honesty-loving nature rebels. He forthwith robs the robber and hands the proceeds of his robbery to the original victim. This seems to me to open up a road to discussion which I'm sure the Dad and I would enjoy--though not at this distance. "I have already learned that there are plenty of great men in the world whose existence I had never suspected. I have a feeling that local celebrities have a greater glory than national heroes. George Washington never told a lie, it is true, and his birthday forms an adequate excuse for a certain stimulation in the enjoyments of a people. But he never discovered a paying field for speculation by the dollar chasers. Until a man does that he can have no understanding of real glory. "I hope you and Gracie are well. I think it would be advisable to check Gracie's appetite for candy. I am already realizing that luxury can be overdone. She might turn her attention to peanuts, which I observe is a popular pastime amongst the people with whom I have come into contact. I would suggest to the old Dad that five-cent cigars have merits in spite of rumor to the contrary. I feel, too, that the dollar ninety-five he would thus save on his smoke might, in time, become a valuable asset. "Your loving son, "GORDON." CHAPTER VI GORDON PROSPECTS SNAKE'S FALL It was a blazing day. The dust of the prairie street smothered boots and trouser-legs with a fine gray powder which even rose high enough to get into the throats of pedestrians, and drive them headlong to the nearest place where they could hope to quench a raging thirst. There was no shelter from the sun, unless it were to be found upon the verandas with which many of the Snake's Fall houses were fronted. Gordon's face was rapidly blistering as he idly wandered through the town. Great streams of perspiration coursed from beneath his soft felt hat. His double collar felt sticky, and suggested imminent collapse. To all of which discomforts were now added a swarm of flies buzzing about his moist face with a distracting persistence which tried even his patience. Gordon was abroad fairly early. He was abroad for several reasons. He possessed a haunting dread of the rapid passing of time. He had slept healthily, if not altogether comfortably. Nor had he yet made up his mind whether the floor of his room would not be preferable to his bed for the passing of future nights. The floor was smooth, there were no hummocks on it. Then, too, the sorely tried and thoroughly slack bed-springs would be avoided, and the horrible groans of a protesting frame would remain silent. It was a matter to be given consideration before the day ended, and, being really of a very thorough nature, he decided to consider it after supper. He had lain awake for a long time that first night under the shelter of Peter McSwain's hospitable roof, and in the interim of dodging the flock hummocks he had closely considered his future movements. He argued, if things were as he had been told they were in Snake's Fall, he did not see how he could do better than throw his lot in with the crowd of "ground sharks" awaiting the boom. Having convinced himself in this direction, he felt that at the very earliest opportunity he must reassure himself of Peter McSwain's veracity. He felt that no member of the get-rich-quick brigade could dare to ignore the claims of a great coal discovery about to boom. Besides, the whole thing had been pitched into his lap; or rather it was he who had been pitched. Nor did the roughness of the method of his arrival detract from the chances spreading out before his astonished eyes. Now he was searching the place for those signs which were to tell him of the accuracy of his information. Nor was it long before he realized that such a search on his part was scarcely likely to prove productive. His knowledge of coal had never been more intimate than the payment of certain fuel bills presented to him at intervals in the past by the faithful Harding. While as for indications of a boom--well, he had heard that a boom came along, everybody robbed everybody else, and in the end a number of widows and orphans found themselves deprived of their savings, and a considerable body of attorneys had increased their year's income out of all proportion to their just deserts. He felt his weakness keenly. However, he persisted. He felt the only thing was to attack the problem with an open mind. He did so, and it quickly became filled with a humorous interest that had nothing to do with his purpose. Surveying his surroundings, he thought that never in his life had he even imagined such a quaint collection of habitations. The long, straight street, running parallel to the railroad track suggested a row of jagged, giant teeth. Each building was set in its own section of jawbone, distinct from its nearest neighbor. Then they reared their heads and terminated in a pointed fang or a flat, clean-cut edge of high boarding. Sometimes they possessed a mere sloping roof, like a well-worn tooth, and, here and there, a half-wrecked building, with its roof fallen in, stood out like a severely decayed molar. Most of the stores--and he counted a dozen or more--suggested a considerable trade. In this direction he noted a hardware store particularly. A drug store, too, with an ice-cream soda fountain, seemed to be in high favor, as also did several dry-goods stores, judging by the number of females in attendance. But the small candy stores were abandoned to the swarming flies. The people were interesting. There certainly was a considerable number about, in spite of the heat. They, anyway the men, all looked hot like himself, but seemed to be surcharged with an energy that appeared to him somewhat artificial. They hurried unnecessarily. They paused and spoke quickly, and passed on. Here and there they fell into groups, and their boisterous laughter suggested the inevitable funny story or risque tale. There were a great number of vehicles rattling about--buggies, buckboards, democrat wagons--while several times he was passed by speeding saddle-horses which smothered him in the dust raised by their unshod hoofs. At last he came to the end of the street, and turned to retrace his steps. It was all too interesting to be readily abandoned on this his first day beyond the conventions of life as his father's son. Just outside a large livery barn he came to an abrupt halt, and stood stupidly staring at the entrance of the largest dry-goods store in the street. The whole thing had caught and held him in a moment. He seemed to remember having seen something of the sort in a moving picture once; perhaps it was years ago. But in real life--never. A great chestnut saddle-horse had dashed up to the tying-post outside the store. It had reined up with a jerk, and its rider had flung out of the saddle with the careless abandon he had read about or seen in the pictures. Hooking the reins over a peg, the rider hurried towards the store. It was then Gordon obtained a full view. In a moment the flies were forgotten and the heat of the day meant nothing to him. What a vision was revealed! The coiled masses of auburn hair, the magnificent hazel eyes and the delightful sun-tanned oval of the face, the trim figure and perfect carriage, the costume! The long habit coat and loose riding-breeches terminated in the daintiest of tan riding-boots and silver spurs. Splendid! What a picture for his admiring eyes! A picture of grace, and health, and beauty. But the vision was gone in a moment. The girl had passed into the store, and it was only left to the enthusiastic spectator to turn to the magnificent chestnut horse she had so unconcernedly left waiting for her. Almost immediately, however, his attention was diverted into another direction. A dark, sallow-faced man had promptly taken up his position at the entrance of the store, and stood gazing in after the vanished figure of the girl. For some absurd reason Gordon took an intense dislike to the man. He looked unhealthy, and he hated that look in a man. Besides, the impertinence of standing there spying upon a lady who was doubtless simply bent on an ordinary shopping expedition. It was most exasperating. All unconsciously he straightened his great figure and squared his shoulders. It would not have required much to have made him go and ask the man what he meant by it. He was rapidly working himself up into a superlative rage, when the girl in the fawn riding-costume reappeared. A delightful smile broke over his good-looking face, but only to be promptly swallowed up in a scowl. The girl had paused, and was speaking to the anæmic creature whose presence he felt to be an outrage. He noted her smile. What a delightful smile! Yes, he could distinctly make out two dimples beyond the corners of her pretty mouth. His dislike of the favored man merged into a regret for himself. Hello! The smile had gone from the girl's face. Her beautiful hazel eyes were sparkling with resentment. The man was looking angry, too. Gordon rubbed his hands. Then he began to grin like a revengeful and malicious schoolboy. The girl had moved on to her horse, and in doing so it almost looked as if she had deliberately pushed past the white-livered creature attempting to detain her. She leaped into the saddle and swung the horse about almost on its haunches. The next moment she was lost in a cloud of dust as she raced down the street. "Mighty fine horsemanship that," said a voice, as Gordon gazed open-mouthed after the girlish vision. "A smart gal, too, eh?" Gordon turned. A small man was sitting at the open doors of the livery barn upon an upturned box. He was leaning forward lazily, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clutching his forearms. His towzled, straw-colored hair stuck out under the brim of his prairie hat, and a chew of tobacco bulged one thin, leathery cheek. His trousers were fastened about his waist with a strap, and his only upper garment was a dirty cotton shirt which disclosed an expanse of mahogany-colored chest below the neck. "Smart gal?" retorted Gordon enthusiastically. "That don't say a thing. She might have stepped right out of the pages of a book." Then he added, as an afterthought, "And it would have to be a mighty good book, too." "Sure," nodded the other in agreement. "Who is she?" The man grinned and spat. "Why, that's Miss Hazel. Every feller in this city knows Miss Hazel. If you need eddication you want to see her astride of an unbroken colt. Ther' never was a cowpuncher a circumstance aside o' her. She's the dandiest horseman out." "I'd say you're right, all right." "Right? Guess ther' ain't no argument. Hosses is my trade. I was born an' raised with 'em. It don't take me guessin' twice 'bout a horseman. I got forty first-class hosses right here in this barn, an' I got a bunch runnin' on old Mallinsbee's grazin'. Y'see, a livery barn is a mighty busy place when a city starts to think o' booming. All them rigs an' buggies you see chasin' around are hired right here," he finished up proudly. Gordon became interested. He felt the man was talking because he wanted to talk. He was talking out of the prevailing excitement which seemed to actuate everybody on the subject of the coming boom. He encouraged him. "I'd say a livery barn should be a mighty fine speculation under these conditions," he said, while the keen gray eyes of the barn proprietor quietly sized him up. "There ought to be a pile hanging to it." "Ye-es." The man's demur roused the other's curiosity. "Not?" he inquired. "'Tain't that. Ther's dollars to it, but--they don't come in bunches. Y'see, I'm out after a wad--quick. We all are. When the railroad talks we'll know where we are. But it's best to be in before. See? Oh, I guess the barn's all right. 'Tain't that. Say, I'd hand you this barn right here, every plug an' every rig I got, if you could jest answer me one question--right." "And the question?" Gordon smiled. "Wher' is the bloomin' depot to be? Here, or yonder to the west at Buffalo Point? Answer that right, an' you can have this caboose a present." The little man sighed, and Gordon began to understand the strain of waiting for these people looking for a big pile quick. He shook his head. "I'm beginning to think I'd like to know myself. Say, I s'pose you figure this is a great place to make money? I s'pose you fancy it's a sure thing?" The man unfolded his arms and waved one hand in a comprehensive gesture. "Do you need to ask me that?" he inquired, almost scornfully. "What does them big coal seams tell you? Can you doubt? Hev' you got two eyes to your head which don't convey no meaning to your brain? Them coal seams could stoke hell till kingdom come, an' shares 'ud still be at a premium. That's the backbone. Wal, we ain't got shares in that corporation, but the quickest road to the pile o' dollars we're yearning for is in town plots. An'," he added regretfully, "every day brings in more sharps, an' every new sharp makes it harder. It's that blamed railroad we're waiting for, an' that railroad needs to graft its way in before it'll talk." "Graft? Graft again," laughed Gordon. "Why, cert'nly." The livery man opened his eyes in astonishment. "Folks don't do nothin' for nix that I ever heard. Specially railroads. That depot 'll be built where their interests lie, an' we'll have to go on guessin' till they get things fixed." "I see." "Which says you ain't blind." "No, I don't think I'm blind exactly. It's just--lack of experience. I must get a peek at those seams. Mallinsbee's the man who'll know about things as soon as anybody, I s'pose. He owns all the land along the railroad, doesn't he?" The man rubbed his hands and grinned. "Sure. He'll know, an' through him us as he's let in on the ground floor. Say, he's a heap of a good feller--an' bright. Y'see, him an' us, some of us fellers who been here right along before the coal was found, are good friends. There's some of us got stakes down Buffalo Point way as well as up here. See? O' course, our pile lies Buffalo Point way, an' we're hopin' he'll fix the railroad corporation that way. If he does, gee! he's the feller we're gamblin' on." Gordon's interest had become almost feverish as he listened. He was gathering the corroboration he needed with an ease he had never anticipated. "I suppose one hundred thousand dollars would be nothing to make if--things go right?" "If things go our way, I'd say a hundred thousand wouldn't be a circumstance," cried the man enthusiastically. "I'd make that out of a few hundred dollars without a worry--if things went right. But it ain't the way of things to go right when you figger up." "No, I s'pose it's a matter of chance. The chance comes, and you've just got to grab it right and hold it." "Sure. Chance! If chance hits you, why, don't go to hit back. Jest hug it--same as you would your best gal." Gordon laughed and peered into the shadowy interior of the barn. "Guess that's good talk," he said, "and I'm going to listen. I've got right hold of that chance, and I'm hugging it. Seems to me I'll need to get out and get a peek at Silas Mallinsbee's coal. Can you hire me a rig?" "I got a dandy top buggy an' team," cried the man, now alert and ready for business. "Ten dollars to supper-time. How?" Gordon nodded, and the man vanished within the barn. Left alone, he reflected on the rapidity of the movement of events. He had had a luck that he surely could not have anticipated. Why, under the influence of the prevailing enthusiasm of the place, he seemed to feel that the whole thing was too utterly simple. He wondered what his father would have said had he been there. It would be a glorious coup to return home with that one hundred thousand dollars well before the expiry of his time limit. From the dark interior of the barn came the sounds of horses' hoofs clattering on the boarded floor. Presently his thoughts drifted from the important matters in hand to a far less consequent matter. It was not in his nature to be long enamored of the hunt for fortune, no matter what the consequences attached to it. He began to think of the vision in fawn-colored riding-costume. So her name was Hazel. Hazel--what? he wondered. A pretty name, and well suited to her. Hazel. Those eyes, and the gorgeous masses of her hair! He sighed. For a moment he thought of inquiring of the livery man her other name. Then he smilingly shook his head and decided to let that remain a secret for the present. It added to the romance of the thing. Of one thing he was certain: he must contrive to see her again, and get to know her. Fortune or no fortune, if his father were to cut him off with the proverbial shilling as a spendthrift and waster, if he never saw a partnership in the greatest financial corporation in the United States, that girl could not be allowed to flash into his life like a ray of spring sunshine, and pass out of it again because he hadn't the snap to get to know her. He had known so many women in his own set at home. He had admired, he had flirted harmlessly enough, he had shed presents and given parties, but somehow he felt that amongst all those society beauties there had not been one comparable to this wild rose of the foothills. "Say, it's a bright team an' 'll need handlin'," said the doubtful voice of the livery man. "Don't worry," returned Gordon, shocked into the affairs of the moment by the anxious voice. "Good." The man sounded relieved. "Which is the best way?" "Why, chase the trail straight away west. You can't miss it. I'll take that ten dollars." Gordon paid and climbed into the buggy. The next moment the vehicle rolled out of the barn. CHAPTER VII "MISS HAZEL" Gordon was in no mood to take things easily. Something of the atmosphere of the place had already got into his blood. His was similar to the mood of those whom he had seen hurrying unnecessarily in the town. Those whom he had seen exchanging hurried words and passing on. Although he lived in the age of automobiles and aeroplanes, nothing of his education had been forgotten by his father. He was a perfect whip with a four-in-hand, and now, as he handled a "bright" team of livery horses, it was child's play to him. He bustled his horses until he had left the ragamuffin town behind him, then he settled down to a steady, round gait, and gave himself up to the prospect of the contemplation of those scenes of industry which he shortly hoped to discover. Within ten minutes of leaving the town he discovered the first signs. Men and horses appeared in the distance upon the hills. At one point he discerned a traction engine hauling a string of laden wagons. It was the first breaking up of the monotonous green of the low hills. And it promptly suggested that, in the hidden hollows, he would probably discover far more energetic signs of the work of the coal corporation, which doubtless must have already begun in real earnest. Things were becoming interesting. He wondered how much work had been done. There was no sign of the coal itself yet. He remembered to have visited coal mines once, and then everything had been black and gloomy. Vast heaps of slack had been piled everywhere, and the pit heads had been surmounted by hauling machinery. There had been great black wastes dotted by houses and streets, which seemed to have taken to themselves something of the hue of the deposits which had brought them into existence. Even the men and women, and particularly the children, had been living advertisements for the great industry which supported them. Here, as yet, there were no such signs. However, doubtless further on there would---- All in a moment his thoughts of coal were broken off, and all his interest vanished like a puff of that coal's smoke in a gale. Coal no longer meant anything to him. He didn't care if the whole wide world starved for coal for all eternity. A chestnut horse was on the trail ahead, and a figure was stooping beside it examining its nearside forefoot. The figure was clad in a _fawn-colored riding-costume_. The electric current of his feelings communicated itself to his team through the whip as its conductor. The team reared and plunged, then, under his strong hands, they bowled merrily along the dusty trail at a great though well-controlled speed towards the distant figures. The girl dropped the horse's hoof and straightened herself abruptly. She turned with a quick movement, and gazed back over the trail, her eyes alert and questioning. Her wide prairie hat was thrust slightly from her forehead, and a coil of abundant auburn hair was displayed beneath its brim. Her finely penciled eyebrows were drawn together in an unmistakable question, and her pretty eyes were obviously speculative. She waited while the buggy drew nearer. She recognized the team as from Mike Callahan's barn, but the occupant of the vehicle was a stranger to her. The latter fact drew her attention more closely. For a moment she had hoped that it was someone she knew. She needed someone she knew just now. Anyway, a stranger was always interesting, even though he could not afford her the assistance she just now happened to need. She descried a boyish, eager face on the top of a pair of wonderful shoulders. But that which made a strong appeal to her was the manner in which he was handling his horses. There was nothing here of the slovenly prairie teamster. The stranger, whoever he was, was a master behind a good team of horses. She delighted in a horseman, whether he were in the driving-seat or the saddle. But all of a sudden she became aware that her regard had been observed, and, with a little smile twinkling in the depths of her hazel eyes, she picked up her horse's forefoot again, and once more probed with her gauntleted finger for the cause of the desperate lameness with which he had been suddenly attacked. She heard the buggy come up. She was aware that the team had swung out to avoid collision. Then a cheery voice greeted her ears with its pleasant and welcome inquiry-- "You seem to be in a fix. Can I help any?" Before the girl looked round she was aware that the teamster had alighted. Then when she finally released her hold of the injured hoof, and stood up, she found herself confronted by Gordon's smiling blue eyes, as he stood bare-headed before her. Somehow or other a smiling response was unavoidable. "That's real kind of you," she said, "but I don't guess you can. You see, poor Sunset's dead lame with a flint in his frog, and--and I just can't get the fool thing out." Gordon endeavored to look serious. But the trouble was incomparable in his mind with the delightful charm of this girl, in her divided riding-suit. However, his effort to conceal his admiration was not without some success. "I don't guess we can stand for any old thing like an impertinent flint," he said impulsively. "Sunset must be relieved. Sunset must be put out of pain. I'm not just a veterinary surgeon, but I'm a specialist on the particular flint which happens to annoy you. Just grab these lines while I have a look." The frank unconventionality of the man was wholly pleasing, and the girl found herself obeying him without question. "It's the nearside," she explained. Then she remained silent, watching the assured manner in which the stranger set about his work. He picked up the hoof and examined it closely. Then he drew out a folding button-hook from a trouser pocket. Then, for a few moments, she watched his deft manipulation of it. Presently he stood up holding a long, thin, sharp splinter of flint between finger and thumb. "Say," he remarked, as he returned the buttonhook to his pocket, while his eyes shone merrily, "I believe if some bright geologist were to set out chasing these flints to their lair, I've a notion he'd pull up in--in--well, aspirate a certain measure in cloth and I'd guess you get the answer right away. It's paved with 'em. That's my secret belief. I could write a treatise on 'em. I've discovered every breed and every species. I tell you if you want to study these rocks right, you need to run an automobile, and find yourself in a hurry, having forgotten to carry spare tires. Ugh!" He flung the stone away from him and turned again to the horse. Still watching him, the girl saw him deliberately tear off a piece of his handkerchief, and, with the point of his pocket-knife, stuff it into the jagged gash in poor Sunset's frog. "That'll keep out some of Snake's Fall," he observed, returning the rest of his handkerchief to his pocket. "We'll take it out when we get him home." Then he deliberately turned to his team and tied Sunset alongside. After that, in the most practical manner, he moved the wheels of the buggy apart. "Jump right in. Guess you know the way, so you can show it me. You see, I'm a stranger. Say, it's an awful thing to be a stranger. Life's rotten being a stranger." The girl was gazing at him with wide, wondering eyes that were half inclined to resentment. She was not accustomed to being ordered about in this cavalier fashion. She had no intention of being incontinently swept off her feet. "Thanks," she said, with an assumption of hauteur. "If you'll untie Sunset I'll ride home." "Ride home? Say, you're joking. Why, you can't ride Sunset with that gash in his frog. Say, you couldn't be so cruel. Think of the poor fellow silently suffering. Think of the mute anguish he would endure at each step. It--it would be a crime, an outrage, a--a----" He broke off, his eyes twinkling merrily. The girl wanted to be annoyed. She told herself she was annoyed, but she nevertheless began to laugh, and Gordon knew he was to have his way. "I really couldn't think of accepting your---- Besides, you weren't going to Buffalo Point. You know you weren't." "Do I?" Gordon's eyes were blankly inquiring. "Now how on earth do I know where I was going? Say, I guess it's true I had in my mind a vision of the glinting summer sun, tinting the coal heaps with its wonderful, golden, ripening rays--though I guess it would be some work ripening stove coal--but as to my ever getting there--well, that just depended on the trail I happened to take. As I said, I'm a stranger. And I may as well admit right here that I've a hobby getting mussed up with wrong trails." The girl's laughter dispelled her last effort at dignity. "I knew you were a stranger. You see, I get to know everybody here--by sight." Gordon made a gesture of annoyance. "There," he exclaimed in self-disgust, "I ought to have thought of that before. How on earth could I expect you to ride in a stranger's buggy, with said stranger on the business end of the lines? Then the hills are so near. Why, you might be spirited off goodness knows where, and your loving relatives never, never hear of you no more, and---- Say, we can easily fix that though. My name's--Van Henslaer. Gordon Van Henslaer from New York. Now if you tell me--what's the matter?" A merry peal of laughter had greeted his announcement, and Gordon looked on in pretended amazement, waiting for her mirth to subside. "Oh dear, oh dear," the girl cried at last. "I might have known. Say, of course I ought to have known. You came here yesterday on the train--by mistake. You----" "That's so. I'd booked through to Seattle, but--some interfering pack of fools guessed I'd made a--mistake," The girl nodded. Her pretty eyes were still dancing with merriment. "Father came by the same train, and told me of someone who got mixed up in--in a fight, and they threw----" "Don't say another word," Gordon cried hurriedly. "I'm--I'm the man. And your father is----?" "Mallinsbee--Silas Mallinsbee!" "Then you are Hazel Mallinsbee." "How do you know my first name?" "Why, I saw you in town, and the livery man told me you were 'Miss Hazel.' Say, this is bully. Now we aren't strangers, and you can ride in my buggy without any question. Jump right in, and I'll drive you--where is it?" Hazel Mallinsbee obeyed without further demur. She sprang into the vehicle, and Gordon promptly followed. The next moment they were moving on at a steady, sober pace. "It's Buffalo Point," the girl directed. "It's only four miles. Then you can go on and enjoy your beautiful pathetic picture of the coal workings. But you won't have much time if we travel at this gait," she added slyly. Gordon shook his head. "It's Sunset," he said. "We must consider his poor foot." There was laughter in Hazel's eyes as she sighed. "Poor Sunset. Perhaps--you're right." "Without a doubt," Gordon laughed. "He might get blood poisoning, or cancer, or dyspepsia, or something if we bustled him." Hazel pointed a branching trail to the north. "That's the trail," she said. "Father's at home. He'll be real glad to see you. Say, you know father ought to know better--at his age. He--he just loves a scrap. He was telling me about you, and saying how you 'hammered'--that's the word he used--the 'sharp.' He was most upset that the train crew spoiled the finish. You know father's a great scallywag. I don't believe he thinks he's a day over twenty. It's--it's dreadful--with a grown-up daughter. He's--just a great big boy for all his gray hair. You should just see him out on the range. He's got all the youngsters left standing. It must be grand to grow old like he does." Gordon listened to the girl's rich tones, and the enthusiasm lying behind her words, and somehow the whole situation seemed unreal. Here he was driving one of the most perfectly delightful girls he had ever met to her home, within twenty-four hours of his absurd arrival in a still more absurd town. Nor was she any mere country girl. Her whole style spoke of an education obtained at one of the great schools in the East. Her costume might have been tailored on Fifth Avenue, New York. Yet here she was living the life of the wonderful sunlit prairie, the daughter of an obscure rancher in the foothills of the Rockies. "Say, your father is just a bully feller," he agreed quickly. "He didn't know me from--a grasshopper, but he did me all sorts of a good service. It don't matter what it was. But it was one of those things which between men count a whole heap." The girl's enthusiasm waxed. "Father's just as good as--as he's clever. But," she added tenderly, "he's a great scallywag. Oh dear, he'll never grow up." A few minutes later she pointed quickly ahead with one gauntleted hand. "That's Buffalo Point," she said. "There where that house is. That's our house, and beyond it, half a mile, you can see the telegraph poles of the railroad track." Gordon gazed ahead. They still had a good mile to go. The lonely house fixed his attention. "Say, isn't there a village?" he inquired. "Buffalo Point?" The girl shook her head. "No. Just that little frame house of ours. Father had it built as--a sort of office. You see, we're both working hard on his land scheme. You see, it's--it's our hobby, the same as losing trails is yours." Gordon laughed. "That's plumb spoiled my day. I'd forgotten the land business. Now it's all come over me like a chill, like the drip of an ice wagon down the back of my neck. I s'pose there'll always be land around, and we've always got to have coal. It seems a pity, doesn't it. Say, there hasn't been a soul I've met in twenty-four hours, but they've been crazy on--on town sites. They're most ridiculous things, town sites. Four pegs and four imaginary lines, a deal of grass with a substrata of crawly things. And for that men would scrap, and cheat, and rob, and--and graft. It's--a wonder." Hazel Mallinsbee checked her inclination to laugh again. Her eyes were gazing ahead at the little frame house, and they grew wistfully serious. "It isn't the land," she said simply. "The scrap, and cheat, and rob, and graft, are right. But it's the fight for fortune. Fortune?" she smiled. "Fortune means everything to a modern man. To some women, too, but not quite in the way it does to a man. You see, in olden days competition took a different form. I don't know if, in spite of what folks say about the savagery of old times, they weren't more honest and wholesome than they are now. However, nature's got to compete for something. Human nature's got to beat someone. Life is just one incessant rivalry. Well, in old times it took the form of bloodshed and war, when men counted with pride the tally of their victories. Now we point with pride to our civilization, and gaze back in pity upon our benighted forefathers. Instead of bloodshed, killing, fighting, massacring and all the old bad habits of those who came before us, we point our civilization by lying, cheating, robbing and grafting." Gordon smiled. "Put that way it sounds as though the old folks were first-class saints compared with us. There's a deal of honesty when two fellers get right up on their hind legs and start in to mush each other's faces to a pulp. But it isn't just the same when you creep up while the other feller isn't wise and push the muzzle of a gun into his middle and riddle his stomach till it's like a piece of gruyère cheese." Hazel shook her head. Her eyes were still smiling, but Gordon detected something of the serious thought behind them. He vainly endeavored to sober his mood in sympathy. "Guess it's the refinement of competition due to the claims of our much proclaimed culture and civilization. I think civilization is a--a dreadful mockery. To call it a whitewash would be a libel on a perfectly innocent, wholesome, sanitary process. That's how I always feel when I stop to think. But--but," her eyes began to dance with a joyous enthusiasm, "I don't often think--not that way. Say, I just love the battle, I mean the modern battle for fortune. It's--it's almost the champagne of life. I know only one thing to beat it." Gordon had forgotten the team he was driving, and let them amble leisurely on towards the house, now so rapidly approaching. "What's--the real champagne?" he inquired. The girl turned and gazed at him with wide eyes. "Why," she cried. "Life--just life itself. What else? Say, think of the moment your eyes open to the splendid sunlight of day. Think of the moment you realize you are living--living--living, after a long, delicious night's sleep. Think of all the perfect moments awaiting you before night falls, and you seek your bed again. It is just the very essence of perfect joy." "It's better after breakfast, and you've had time to get around some." The ardor of the girl's mood received a sudden douche. Just for a moment a gleam of displeasure shadowed her eyes. Then a twinkling smile grew, and the clouds dispersed. "Isn't that just a man? Where's your enthusiasm? Where's your joy of life? Where's your romance, and--and spirit of hope?" A great pretense of reproach lay in her rapid questions. "Oh, they're all somewhere lying around, I guess," returned Gordon simply. "Those things are all right, sure. But--but it's a mighty tough proposition worrying that way on--on an empty stomach. It seems to me that's just one of life's mistakes. There ought to be a law in Congress that a feller isn't allowed to--to think till he's had his morning coffee. The same law might provide for the fellow who fancies himself a sort of canary and starts right in to sing before he's had his bath. I'd have him sent to the electric chair. That sort of fellow never has a voice worth two cents, and he most generally has a repertoire of songs about as bright as Solomon's, and a mighty deal older. Sure, Miss Mallinsbee, I haven't a word to say against life in a general way, but it's about as wayward as a spoilt kid, and needs as much coaxing." Hazel Mallinsbee watched the play of the man's features while he talked. She knew he meant little or nothing of what he said. The fine, clear eyes, the smiling simplicity and atmosphere of virile youth about him, all denied the sentiments he was giving vent to. She nodded as he finished. "At first I thought you meant all--that," she said lightly. "But now I know you're just talking for talking's sake." Then, before he could reply, she pointed excitedly at the house, now less than a hundred yards away. "Why, there's father, standing right there on the veranda!" she exclaimed. Gordon looked ahead. The old man was waving one great hand to his daughter. CHAPTER VIII AT BUFFALO POINT To Gordon's mind Hazel Mallinsbee attached far greater importance to her father's presence on the veranda than the incident warranted. It did not seem to him that there was the least necessity for his being there at all. Truth to tell, the matter appeared to him to be a perfect nuisance. He had rather liked Silas Mallinsbee when he had met him under somewhat distressing circumstances in the town. Now he felt a positive dislike for him. His strong, keen, benevolent face made no appeal to his sympathies now whatsoever. Besides, it did not seem right that any man who claimed parentage of such a delightful daughter as the girl at his side should slouch about in a pair of old trousers tucked into top-boots and secured about his waist by a narrow strap. And it seemed positively indecent that he should display no other upper garment than a cotton shirt of such a doubtful hue that it was impossible to be sure of its sanitary condition. However, he allowed none of these feelings betrayal, and replied appropriately to Hazel's excited announcement. He was glad, later, he had exercised such control, for their arrival at the house was the immediate precursor of an invitation to share their midday meal, which had already been placed on the table by the silent, inscrutable Hip-Lee, the Chinese cook and general servitor in this temporary abode. The horses had been housed and fed in the temporary stable at the back of the house, and a committee of three had sat upon Sunset's injury and prescribed for and treated it. Now they were indoors, ready for the homely meal set out for them. Hip-Lee moved softly about setting an additional place at the table for the visitor. Silas Mallinsbee was lounging in the doorway, looking out across the veranda. Hazel was superintending Hip-Lee's efforts. Gordon was endeavoring to solve the problem of the rapid and unexpected happenings which had befallen him since his arrival, and at the same time carry on a conversation with the rumbling-voiced originator of Snake's Fall boom. "At one time I guessed I'd bumped right into the hands of the Philistines," he said. "That's when I was--er arriving. Since then a Samaritan got busy my way and dumps me right down in the heart of the Promised Land, which just now seems to be flowing with milk and honey. I set out to view the dull black mountains of industry, and instead I arrive at the sparkling plains of delightful ease. Mr. Mallinsbee, you certainly have contrived to put me under enormous obligation." Gordon's eyes were pleasantly following the movements of the girl's graceful figure about the plain but neat parlor. "I suppose all offices in the West are not like this, because----" Mallinsbee rumbled a pleasant laugh. "Office?" he said, without turning. "That's jest how Hazel calls it. Guess she's got notions since she finished off her education at Boston. She's got around with a heap of 'em, includin' that suit she's wearin'. Y'see, she's my foreman hoss-breaker, and reckons skirts and things are--played out. Office? Why, it's just a shack. Some time you must get around out an' see the ranch house. It's some place," he added with simple pride. Hazel went up to her father and pretended to threaten him by the neck. "See, Daddy, you can just quit telling about my notions to--folks. Anyway"--she turned her back to Gordon--"I appeal to you, Mr. Van Henslaer, isn't an office a place where folks transact big deals and make fortunes?" "That's how folks reckon when they rent them," said Gordon. "Of course, I've known folks to sleep in 'em. Others use 'em as a sort of club smoking lounge. Then they've been known to serve some men as a shelter from--home. I used to have an office." Silas Mallinsbee turned from his contemplation of the horizon. He was interested, and his shrewd eyes displayed the fact. Hazel clapped her hands. "And what did you use it for?" she demanded quizzically. "I--oh, I--let's see. Well, mostly an address from which to have word sent to folks I didn't want to see that--I was out. I used to find it useful that way." Mallinsbee's chuckle amused Gordon, but Hazel assumed an air of judicial severity. "A spirit not to be encouraged." Then, at the sound of her father's chuckle, "My daddy, you are as bad as he. Now food's ready, so please sit in. We can talk easier around a table than when people are dreaming somewhere in the distance on the horizon, or walking about a room that isn't bigger than the bare size to sit in. Anyway, Mr. Van Henslaer, this office is for business. I won't have it disparaged by my daddy, or--or anyone else. It serves a great purpose so far as we're concerned." Then she added slyly, "You see, we're in the throes of the great excitement of making a huge pile, for the sheer love of making it. Aren't we, Daddy, dear?" Silas Mallinsbee looked up from the food he was eating with the air of a man who only eats as a matter of sheer necessity. "Say, Mr. Van Henslaer," he said in his deep tones, "I've been a rancher all my life. Cattle, to me, are just about the only things in the world worth while, 'cept horses. I've never had a care or thought outside 'em, till one day I got busy worrying what was under the ground instead of keeping to the things I understood above the ground. Y'see, the trouble was two things," he went on, smiling tenderly in his daughter's direction. "One was I'd fed the ranch stoves with surface coal that you could find almost anywheres on my land, and the other was the fates just handed me the picture of a daughter who caught the dangerous disease of 'notions' way down east at school in Boston. Since she's come along back to us I've had coal, coal, coal all chasin' through my head, an' playing baseball with every blamed common-sense idea that ever was there before. Wal, to tell things quick, I made a mighty big pile out of that coal just to please her. We didn't need it, but she guessed it was up to me to do this. But that didn't finish it. This gal here couldn't rest at that. She guessed that pile was made and done with. She needs to get busy in another direction. Well, she gets to work, and has all my land on the railroads staked out into a township, and reckons it's a game worth playing. The other was too dead easy. This time she reckons to measure her brains and energy against a railroad! She reckons to show that we can match, and beat, any card they can play. That's the reason of this office." Hazel laughed and raised an admonishing finger at the smiling face and twinkling eyes of her father. "What did I tell you, Mr. Van Henslaer?" she cried. "Didn't I say he was just a scallywag? Oh, my great, big daddy, I'm dreadfully, dreadfully ashamed and disappointed in you. I'm going to give you away. I am, surely. There, there, Mr. Van Henslaer, sits the wicked plotter and schemer. Look at him. A big, burly ruffian that ought to know better. Look at him," she went on, pointing a dramatic finger at him. "And he isn't even ashamed. He's laughing. Now listen to me. I'm going to tell you my version. He's a rancher all right, all right. He's been satisfied with that all his life, and prosperity's never turned him down. Then one day he found coal, and did nothing. We just used to talk of it, that was all. Then another day along comes a friend, a very, very old friend and neighbor, whom he's often helped. He came along and got my daddy to sell him a certain patch of grazing--just to help him out, he said. He was a poor man, and my big-hearted daddy sold it him at a rock-bottom price to make it easy for him. Three months later they were mining coal on it--anthracite coal. That fellow made a nice pile out of it. He'd bluffed my daddy, and my daddy takes a bluff from no man. Well, say, he just nearly went crazy being bested that way, and he said to me--these were his words: 'Come on, my gal, you and me are just goin' to show folks what we're made of. If there's money in my land we're going to make all we need before anyone gets home on us. I'm goin' to show 'em I'm a match for the best sharks our country can produce--and that's some goin'.' There sits the money-spinner. There! Look at him; he's self-confessed. I'm just his clerk, or decoy, or--or any old thing he needs to help him in his wicked, wicked schemes!" Mallinsbee sat chuckling at his daughter's charge, and Gordon, watching him, laughed in chorus. "I'm kind of sorry, Mr. Mallinsbee, to have had to listen to such a tale," he said at last, with pretended seriousness, "but I guess you're charged, tried, convicted and sentenced. Seeing there's just two of you, it's up to me to give the verdict Guilty!" he declared. "Have you any reason to show why sentence should not be passed upon you? No? Very well, then. I sentence you to make that pile, without fail, in a given time. Say six months. Failing which you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you have assisted in the ruin of an innocent life." In the midst of the lightness of the moment Gordon had suddenly taken a resolve. It was one of those quick, impulsive resolves which were entirely characteristic of him. There was nothing quite clear in his mind as to any reason in his decision. He was caught in the enthusiasm of his admiration of the fair oval face of his hostess, whose unconventional camaraderie so appealed to his wholesome nature; he was caught by the radiance of her sunny smile, by the laughing depths of her perfect hazel eyes. Nor was the manner of the man, her father, without effect upon his responsive, simple nature. But his sentence on Silas Mallinsbee had caught and held both father's and daughter's attention, and excited their curiosity. "Why six months?" smiled Hazel. "Say, it's sure some time limit," growled Mallinsbee. Gordon assumed an air of judicial severity. "Is the court to be questioned upon its powers?" he demanded. "There is a law of 'contempt,'" he added warningly. But his warning was without effect. "And the innocent's ruin?" demanded Hazel. The answer came without a moment's hesitation. "Mine," said Gordon. And his audience, now with serious eyes, waited for him to go on. Hip-Lee had brought in the sweet, and vanished again in his silent fashion. Then Gordon raised his eyes from his plate and glanced at his host. They wandered across to and lingered for a moment on the strong young face of the girl. Then they came back to his plate, and he sighed. "Say, if there's one thing hurts me it's to hear everybody telling a yarn, and my not having one to throw back at 'em," he said, smiling down at the simple baked custard and fruit he was devouring. "Just now I'm not hurt a thing, however, so that remark don't apply. You see, my yarn's just as simple and easy as both of yours, and I can tell it in a sentence. My father's sent me out in the world with a stake of my own naming to make one hundred thousand dollars in six months!" He was surprised to witness, the dramatic effect of his announcement. Hazel's astonishment was serious and frankly without disguise. But her father's was less marked by outward expression. It was only obvious from the complete lack of the smile which had been in his shrewd eyes a moment before. "One hundred thousand dollars in six months!" Hazel exclaimed. She had narrowly escaped scalding herself with the coffee Hip-Lee had just served. She set her cup down hastily. "Guess your father's takin' a big chance," said Mallinsbee thoughtfully. But their serious astonishment was too great a strain for Gordon. He began to laugh. "It's my belief life's too serious to be taken seriously, so the chance he's taken don't worry me as, maybe, it ought," he said. "You see, my father's a good sportsman, and he sees most things the way every real sportsman sees 'em--where his son's concerned. Morally I owe him one hundred thousand dollars. I say morally. Well, I guess we talked together some. I--well, maybe I made a big talk, like fellows of my age and experience are liable to make to a fellow of my father's age and experience. Then I sort of got a shock, as sometimes fellows of my age making a big talk do. In about half a minute I found a new meaning for the word 'bluff.' I thought I'd got its meaning right before that. I thought I could teach my father all there was to know about bluff. You see, I'd forgotten he'd lived thirty-three more years than I had. Bluff? Why, I'd never heard of it as he knew it. The result is I've got to make one hundred thousand dollars in six months or forfeit my legitimate future." Then he added with the gayest, most buoyant laugh, "Say, it's a terrible thing to think of. It's dead serious. It's as serious as an inter-university ball game." The lurking smile had returned to Mallinsbee's eyes, and Hazel frankly joined in Gordon's laugh. "And you've come to Snake's Fall to--to make it?" she cried. "I can't just say that," returned Gordon. "No." Mallinsbee shook his head, and the two men exchanged meaning glances. Then the old man went on with his food and spoke between the mouthfuls. "You had an office?" "Sure. You see, I was my father's secretary." "Secretary?" Mallinsbee looked up quickly. Gordon nodded. "That's what he called me. I drew the salary--and my allowance. It was an elegant office--what little I remember of it." The old man's regard was very nearly a broad laugh. "Say, you made a talk about an 'innocent's' life gettin' all mussed up?" Gordon nodded with profound seriousness. "Sure," he replied. "Mine. I don't guess you'll deny my innocence." Mallinsbee shook his head. "Good," Gordon went on; "that makes it easy. If you don't make good I lose my chance. I'm going to put my stake in your town plots." The rancher regarded him steadily for some moments. Then-- "Say, what's your stake?" he inquired abruptly. Gordon had nothing to hide. There was, it seemed to him, a fatal magnetism about these people. The girl's eyes were upon him, full of amused delight at the story he had told; while her father seemed to be driving towards some definite goal. "Five thousand dollars. That and a few hundred dollars I had to my credit at the bank. It don't sound much," he added apologetically, "but perhaps it isn't quite impossible." "I don't guess there's a thing impossible in this world for the feller who's got to make good," said Mallinsbee. "You see, you've got to make good, and it don't matter a heap if your stake's five hundred or five thousand. Say, talk's just about the biggest thing in life, but it's made up of hot air, an' too much hot air's mighty oppressive. So I'll just get to the end of what I've to say as sudden as I can. I guess my gal's right, I'm just crazy to beat the 'sharps' on this land scoop, and I'm going to do it if I get brain fever. Now it's quite a proposition. I've got to play the railroad and all these ground sharks, and see I get the juice while they only get the pie-crust. I'm needing a--we'll call him a secretary. Hazel is all sorts of a bright help, but she ain't a man. I need a feller who can swear and scrap if need be, and one who can scratch around with a pen in odd moments. This thing is a big fight, and the man who's got the biggest heart and best wind's going to win through. My wind's sound, and I ain't heard of any heart trouble in my family. Now you ken come in in town plots so that when the boom comes they'll net you that one hundred thousand dollars. You don't need to part with that stake--yet. The deal shall be on paper, and the cash settlement shall come at the finish. Meanwhile, if need be, for six months you'll put in every moment you've got on the work of organizing this boom. Maybe we'll need to scrap plenty. But I don't guess that'll come amiss your way. We'll hand this shanty over for quarters for you, and we'll share it as an office. This ain't philanthropy; it's business. The man who's got no more sense than to call a bluff to make one hundred thousand dollars in six months is the man for me. He'll make it or he won't. And, anyway, he's going to make things busy for six months. You ain't a 'sharp' now--or I wouldn't hand you this talk. But I'm guessin' you'll be mighty near one before we're through. We've got to graft, and graft plenty, which is a play that ain't without attractions to a real bright feller. You see, money's got a heap of evil lyin' around its root--well, the root of things is gener'ly the most attractive. Guess I've used a deal of hot air in makin' this proposition, but you won't need to use as much in your answer--when you've slept over it. Say, if food's through we'll get busy, Hazel." Mrs. James Carbhoy was in bed when she received her morning's mail. Perhaps she and her millionaire husband were unusually old-fashioned in their domestic life. Anyway, James Carbhoy's presence in the great bedstead beside her was made obvious by the heavy breathing which, in a less wealthy man, might have been called snoring, and the mountainous ridge of bedclothes which covered his monumental bulk. A querulous voice disturbed his dreams. He heard it from afar off, and it merged with the scenes he was dwelling upon. A panic followed. He had made a terrible discovery. It was his wife, and not the president of a rival railroad, who was stealing the metals of a new track he was constructing as fast as he could lay them. He awoke in a cold sweat. He thought he was lying in the cutting beside the track. His wife had vanished. He rubbed his eyes. No, she hadn't. There she was, sitting up in bed with a sheaf of papers in her hand. He felt relieved. Now her plaint penetrated to his waking consciousness. "For goodness' sake, James," she cried, "quit snoring and wake up. I wish you'd pay attention when I'm speaking. I'm all worried to death." The multi-millionaire yawned distressingly. "Most folks are worried in the morning. I'm worried, too. Go to sleep. You'll feel better after a while." "It's nothing to do with the morning," complained his wife. "It's--it's a letter from Gordon. The poor boy writes such queer letters. It's all through you being so hard on him. You never did have any feeling for--for anybody. I'm sure he's suffering. He never talked this way before. Maybe he don't get enough to eat; he don't say where he is either. Perhaps he's just nowhere in particular. You'd better ring up an inquiry bureau----" "For goodness' sake read the letter," growled the drowsy man. "You're making as much fuss as a hen with bald chicks." Mrs. Carbhoy withered her husband with a glance that fell only upon the back of his great head. But she had her way. She meant him to share in her anxiety through the text of the, to her, incomprehensible letter. She read slowly and deliberately, and in a voice calculated to rivet any wandering attention. "DEAREST MUM: "There's folks who say that no man knows the real meaning of luck, good or bad, till he takes to himself a wife. This may be right. My argument is, it's only partially so. There may be considerable luck about matrimony. For instance, if any fool man came along and married our Gracie he'd be taking quite a chance. Her native indolence and peevishness suggest possibilities. Her tongue is vitriolic in one so young, as I have frequently had reason to observe. This would certainly be a case where the man would learn the real meaning of luck. But there wouldn't be a question. His luck would be out--plumb out. Jonah would have been a mascot beside him. "This is by the way. "I argue luck can be appreciated fully through channels less worrying. When luck gets busy around its coming is kind of subtle. It's sudden, too; kind of butts in unnoticed, sometimes painfully, and generally without shouting. Maybe it happens with a bump or a jar. Personally I'm betting on the 'bump' play. A bump of that nature got busy my way when I arrived here. I now have a full appreciation of luck. Quite as full an appreciation as the man would who married our Gracie. But in my case I guess it's good luck. This isn't going to tell you all that's in my mind, but, seeing I haven't fallen for fiction yet, I guess I won't try to be more explicit. Luck, in my present position, means the coming responsibility of success. You might hand this on to the old Dad. "Talking of the old Dad, it seems to me that, for a delicate digestion, baked custard and fruit have advantages over ice-cream as a sweet. This again is by the way. "In my last letter I gave you a few first impressions on arrival at my destination. Now, if you'll permit, I'll add what I might call the maturer reflections of a mind wide awake to life as it really is, and to the inner meaning of those things which are so carefully hidden from one brought up in luxury, as I have been. One of the 'dead snips' this way is that cleverness and wisdom are often confused by the ignorant. Cleverness don't mean wisdom, and--vice versa. For instance, loafing idly down a main street six inches deep in a dust that would shame a blizzard when the wind blows, with a blazing sun scorching the marrow of the spine till it's ready to be spread out on toast, escorted by an army of disgusting flies moving in massed formation, and not knowing better than to drive your soul to perdition through the channel of extreme bad language, don't suggest cleverness. Yet there may surely be a deal of wisdom in it if it only keeps you from doing something a heap more foolish. Maybe this don't sound altogether bright, but there's quite a deal in it. Think it out. Another thought is that learning's quite a sound proposition. For instance, a superficial knowledge of geology may come mighty handy at unexpected moments. A knowledge of this served me at a critical moment only to-day. So you see an intimate acquaintance with sharp flints, collected--the acquaintance, not the flints--during my time as the possessor of an automobile, which the Dad provided me with and for the upkeep of which he so kindly paid, has likely had more influence upon my future life than the best talk ever handed out by a Fifth Avenue preacher ever would have done. I have no thought of being irreverent. I am merely handing you a fact. People say that missed opportunities always make you hate to think of them in after life. For my part, I've generally figured this to be the philosophic hot air of a man who's getting old and hates to see youth around him, or else the chin mush of some fool man who's never had any opportunities, talking through the roof of his head. I kind of see it different now. You gave me the opportunity of studying all the beauties of the world seen through an artist's life. I guessed at the time that would be waste of precious moments that might be spent chasing athletics. It's only to-day I've got wise to what a heap I've lost in twenty-four years. Colors just seemed to me messy mixtures only fit to spoil paper and canvas with. Well, to-day I've hit on something in the way of color that's just about set me crazy to see it all the time. It's a sort of yellowy, greeny brown. That don't sound as merry as it might, but to me it talks plenty. It's just the dandiest color ever. I discovered it out on a 'long, lone trail'--that's how folks talk in books--where the surroundings weren't any improvement on just plain grass. Say, Mum, I guess that color is great. It gets a grip on you so you don't seem to care if a local freight train comes along and dissects your vitals, and chews them up ready for making a delicatessen sausage. When I die I'll just have to have my shroud dyed that color, and my coffin fixed that way, too. "This isn't so much of a passing thought as the others. Guess some folks might figure it to be a disease. Maybe the old Dad would. Well, I shan't kick any if I die of it. "Talking of Art, I'm just beginning to get a notion that curves are wonderful, wonderful things. These days of mechanical appliances I've always regarded drawing such things by hand as positively ridiculous. I don't think that way now. If I could only draw the wonderful curves I have in mind now, why, I guess I'd go right on drawing them till the birds roosted in my beard and my bones were right for a tame ancestral skeleton. "The daylight of knowledge is sort of creeping in. "I've learned that frame houses have got Fifth Avenue mansions beat a mile, and the smell of a Chinee can become a dollar-and-a-half scent sachet in given circumstances. I've learned that real sportsmanship isn't confined to athletics by any means, and a lame chestnut horse can be a most friendly creature. I've discovered that one man of purpose isn't more than fifty per cent. of two, when both are yearning one way. I'm learning that life's a mighty pleasant journey if you let it alone and don't worry things. It's no use kicking to put the world to rights. It's going to give you a whole heap of worry, and, anyway, the world's liable to retaliate. Also I'd like to add that, though I guess I'm gathering wisdom, I don't reckon I've got it all by quite a piece. "Having given you all the news I can think of I guess I'll close. "Your affectionate son, "GORDON. "P.S.--My remarks about Gracie are merely the privileged reflections of a brother. When she grows up I dare say she'll be quite a bully girl. It takes time to get sense. "G." "I don't understand it, anyway," sighed Gordon's mother, as she laid the letter aside. "You'll have to get him back to home, James. He's suffering. We'll send out an inquiry----" She broke off, glancing across at the mass of humanity so peacefully snoring at the far side of the bed, and, after a brief angry moment, resigned herself to the reflection that men, even millionaires, were perfectly ridiculous and selfish creatures who had no right whatever to burden a poor woman's life with the responsibility of children. CHAPTER IX THE FIRST CHECK It was characteristic of Gordon to act unhesitatingly once a decision was arrived at. The consideration of Silas Mallinsbee's generous offer was the work of just as many seconds as it took the rancher to make it in. Though, verbally, it was left for a decision the next day, Gordon had no doubts in his mind whatever as to the nature of that decision. When he returned to McSwain's sheltering roof, when another meal had been devoured in the evening, when the soup-like contents of the wash-trough had been stirred in the doubtful effort of cleansing himself, when the busy flies had gone to join the birds in their evening roost, he betook himself to his private bathroom, and sat himself upon his questionable bed and gave himself up to reflection, endeavoring to apply some of the wisdom he believed himself to have already acquired. But the application was without useful effect. He began by an attempt to review the situation from a purely financial standpoint, and in this endeavor he stretched out his great muscular limbs along his bed, and propped his broad back against the wall with a dogged do-or-die look upon his honest face. At once a mental picture of Hazel Mallinsbee obscured the problem. He dwelt on it for some profoundly pleasant moments, and then resolutely thrust it aside. Next he started by frankly admitting that Mallinsbee's offer left him a certain winner all along the line--if things went right. Good. If things went wrong--but they couldn't go wrong with those wonderful yellowy brown eyes of Hazel's smiling encouragement upon him. The thought was absurd. Again for some time his problem was obscured. But after a few minutes he set his teeth and attacked it afresh. Of course, if things did go wrong he was done--absolutely finished. His six months would have expired, his stake would have melted into thin air. His whole future---- But he would have spent six months at Hazel's side, working upon something that was obviously very dear to her brave and loyal heart. What more could a man desire? He felt his great muscles thrill with a mighty sense of restrained effort. Was there any thought in the world so inspiring as that which had the support of the most wonderful creature he had ever met for its inspiration? He thought not. His pulses stirred at the bare idea of being Hazel Mallinsbee's companion all those weeks and months. Of course it would mean nothing to her. She was far too clever, and--and altogether brainy to give him a second thought. But he felt he could help her. He felt that to go back home with the knowledge that he--he had been one of the prime factors in her achieving the hope of her life would not be without compensations. Compensations? He wondered what form such compensations took. They certainly would need to be considerable for the loss of such a companionship. He thought of the vision he had seen upon the trail. The beautifully rounded figure. The graceful movements, so obviously natural. Then those eyes, and---- He smiled and abandoned all further attempt to consider seriously the offer he had received. What was the use? His good fortune was certainly running in a strong tide. To attempt to steer a course was to fly in the face of his own luck. No, he would swim with it, let it take him whither it might. Meanwhile, Hazel had promised to meet him on the morrow, and show him the great coal seam, after which he was to interview her father, and have supper at the--office. Forthwith he hastily retired to his nightly game of hide-and-seek amongst the hummocks of flock in his disreputable bed, that the long hours of night might the more speedily merge into a golden to-morrow. The next day Gordon, at an early hour, spent something over fifty dollars on a pair of ready-made riding-breeches and boots. For once in his life he felt that the faithful Harding had been found wanting. Somehow, in arriving at this conclusion, he had forgotten the episode of the five-cent-cigar man. Anyhow, the purchase had to be made, since it was necessary to ride out to the coal seams. It was during the time spent on these matters an incident occurred which caused him some irritation. He saw in the distance, as he was making his way to the principal store, the pale-faced, sickly-looking creature who had accosted Hazel the day before. The sight of the man put him into a bad temper at once, and he forthwith gave the storekeeper all the unnecessary trouble he could put him to. Then, on returning to his hotel, he discovered the man in the office talking to Peter McSwain. His swift temper left him utterly without shame, and he stood and stared at the object of his dislike, taking him in from head to foot with profoundly contemptuous eyes. Somehow his inspection made him feel glad he disliked the man. He was a broad-chested person with aggressively cut clothes. His black hair was obviously greased, and his general cast of features suggested his Hebrew origin. Gordon had no grudge against him on this latter score. It was not that. It was the narrow, shifty eyes, the hateful way in which he smoked his cigar, with its flaming band about its middle. It was the loud coarse laugh and general air of impertinent arrogance that set his back bristling. And this--this had spoken to Hazel Mallinsbee only the day before. He deposited his parcels in his bathroom, and returned to the office to find McSwain by himself. He had no hesitation in satisfying his curiosity. "Say," he demanded, in a crisp tone. "Who was that rotten-looking 'sharp' you were yarning to when I came in?" Peter's amiable expression underwent the most trifling change. "Guess I lost ten thousand dollars talkin' that way once," he said, smelling cautiously at one of his own cigars. Gordon promptly snapped back. "Maybe I've lost more than that. But it don't cut any ice. Who was he?" Peter smiled as he lit his cigar. "David Slosson. Guess he's chief robber for the railroad company. You've seen him. Are you scared any? Say, we've been waitin' to hear him talk two days now. I guess you could hand us a bunch of emperors, an' kings, an' princes, an' dust over 'em a sprinkling of presidents, but I don't reckon you'd stir a pulse among us like the coming of that man did to this city. That feller's right here to put the railroad in on this land scoop. When he's fixed 'em the way he wants we'll hear from the railroad." Gordon's eyes were thoughtful. "Chief grafter, eh? He surely looks it." "Some of 'em do," agreed Peter. "It's my belief the best of 'em don't, though," he added reflectively. "Yet he surely ought to be right. Railroads don't usual graft with anything but the best. He was talkin' pretty, too." "Pretty? More than he looked," snorted Gordon. Then he began to laugh. "Say, you and I are pretty well agreed about miracles. I sort of feel it'll have to be one of them miracles if the time don't come when I knock seventeen sorts of stuffing out of that man. I feel it coming on like a disease. You know, creeping through my bones, and getting to the tips of my fingers. I'd like to spoil his store suit in the mud, and beautify his features with your 'hoss' soap, and drown 'em in--well, what's in your washing-trough." Peter's smile was cordial enough at the forcefulness of his young guest. He had not forgotten that Gordon was a friend of Mallinsbee. "I wouldn't play that way till we see how he's buying," he said cautiously. "Play?" Gordon laughed and shook his head. "Well, perhaps you're right. It certainly will be some play." After midday dinner Gordon set out on one of Mike Callahan's horses to keep his appointment with Hazel Mallinsbee. All his ill-humor of the morning was forgotten, and he looked forward with unalloyed pleasure to his afternoon, which was to culminate in his entering into his agreement with her father. Hazel was waiting for him on the veranda of the office. Her horse, a fine brown mare, was standing ready saddled. Gordon noted the absence of Sunset, and understood, but he noted also that her smile of welcome was lacking something of the joyous spirit she had displayed the night before. "Sunset off duty?" he inquired, as he came up and leaped out of the saddle to assist her. Hazel scorned his assistance. She was in the saddle almost before he was aware of her intention. "Sunset's father's," she said. "The Lady Jane is my saddle horse. She's the most outrageous jade on the ranch. That's why I like her. Every moment I'm in the saddle she's trying to get the bit between her teeth. If she succeeded she'd run till she dropped." Then, with a deliberate effort, she seemed to thrust some shadow from her mind as they set off at a brisk canter. "You know, father's just dying to show you the ranch. He's quite quaint and boyish. He takes likes and dislikes in the twinkle of an eye, and before all things in his life comes his wonderful ranch. I'll tell you a secret, Mr. Van Henslaer. The day you--arrived, after he'd told me just how you had arrived, he said, 'I'd like to get that boy working around this lay out. I like the look of him. He don't know a lot, but he can do things.' He's certainly taken one of his wonderful, impulsive fancies to you. He's very shrewd, too." Gordon laughed. "Now I wonder how I ought to take that. I'm all sorts of a fool, but I can hit hard. That's about his opinion of me, eh?" Hazel's eyes were slyly watching him. She shook her head. "That's not it," she smiled back. "You don't know my daddy. He might say that, but there's a whole lot of other thoughts stumbling around in his funny old head. If he wants you he thinks you can do more than hit hard." The humor of it all got hold of Gordon. "Good," he cried, with one of his whole-hearted laughs. "Now I'll let you into a secret. This is a great secret. One of those secrets a feller generally hangs on tight to because he's half ashamed of it. I can do more than hit hard!" Then he became serious, and it was the girl's turn to find amusement. "You see, I've been raised in a bit of a hothouse. Maybe it's more of a wind shelter, though. You know, where the rough winds of modern life can't get through the crevices and buffet you. That's why I fell for that sharp on the train. That's why I bumped head first into Snake's Fall. That's why your daddy thinks I don't know a lot. But I tell you right here I've got to make that hundred thousand dollars in six months, and I'm going to do it by hook or crook, if there's half a smell of a chance. I've no scruples whatsoever. I just _must_ make it, or--or I'll never face my father ever again. Do you get me? Whatever you have at stake in this land proposition, it's just nothing to what I have. And you'll know what I mean when I say it's just the youthful pride and foolish egoism of twenty-four years. Say, do you know what it means to a kid when he's dared to do some fool trick that may cost his life? Well, that's my position, but I've done the daring for myself. My mood about this thing is the sort of mood in which, if I couldn't get that money any other way, I'd willingly hold up a bullion train." The girl nodded. For a moment she made no attempt to answer him. She was gazing out ahead at a point where signs of busy life had made themselves apparent. Something of the shadow that had been in her eyes at their meeting had returned. Gordon was watching them, and a quick concern troubled him. "Say," he observed anxiously. "You're--worried. I saw it when I came up." The girl endeavored to pass his inquiry off lightly. "Worried?" she shook her head. "The anxieties of the business are on my poor daddy's shoulders, and will soon be on yours. They're not on mine." But Gordon was not easily put off. He edged his horse closer to her side. "But you _are_ worried," he declared doggedly. Then he added more lightly, "I'll take a chance on it. It's--a man. And he's got a sort of whitewash face, and black, shoe-shined hair. He's got a nose you'd hate to run up against with any vital part. As for his clothes, well--a blind man would hate to see 'em." The girl turned sharply. "What makes you think that way?" Gordon smiled triumphantly. "Guess I've been trying to impress you with the fact that foolishness--like beauty--is only skin deep. The former applies to me. The latter--well, I guess I must have just read about--that." "If you're not careful you'll convince me," Hazel laughed. "That's one of the things I'm yearning to do." "You're talking of David Slosson," she challenged him. Gordon nodded. "The railroad's--chief grafter." "And a hateful creature." "Who's started right away to--annoy you--from the time he got around Snake's Fall." A great surprise was looking back into Gordon's eyes. "You're guessing. You can't know that," Hazel said, with decision. "Maybe. Say,"--Gordon's eyes were half serious, half smiling--"a girl don't push her way past a man when he's talking to her if--he isn't annoying her." "Then you saw him stop me on Main Street yesterday?" "Sure." Then, after a pause, Gordon went on, "Say, tell me. We're to be fellow conspirators." Just for one moment Hazel Mallinsbee looked him straight in the eyes. She was thinking, thinking swiftly. Nor were her thoughts unpleasant. For one thing she had realized that which Gordon had wished her to realize--that he was no fool. She was seeing that something in him which doubtless her father had been quick to discover. She was thinking, too, of his direct, almost dogged manner of driving home to the purpose he had in view, and she told herself she liked it. Then, too, all unconsciously, she was thinking of the open, ingenuous, smiling face of his. The handsome blue eyes which were certainly his chief attraction in looks, although his other features were sound enough. She decided at once that for all these things she liked him and trusted him. Therefore she admitted her worries. "Yes," she said, "it's David Slosson--and your description of him is too good. He's been here two days. He came here the day before you. He came out to see father directly he arrived, but, as you know, father was away. I had to see him. And it wasn't pleasant. Maybe you can guess his attitude. I don't like to talk of it. He took me for some silly country girl, I s'pose. Anyway I got rid of him. Then he saw me yesterday." Suddenly her face flushed, and an angry sparkle shone in her eyes. "His sort ought to be raw-hided," she declared vehemently. Then, after a pause, in which she choked her anger back, "We got a note from him this morning to say he'd be along this afternoon. Father's going to see him. And I was scared to death you wouldn't get along in time. That's why I was waiting ready for you, and hustled you off without seeing father. I was scared the man would get around before we were away. I haven't said a word to my daddy. You see he'd kill him," she finished up, with a whimsical little smile. Gordon was gazing out ahead at the great coal workings they were now approaching. But though he beheld a small village of buildings, and an astonishing activity of human beings and machinery, for the time, at least, they had no interest for him. "I knew I was up against that man directly I saw him peeking into that store after you," he said deliberately. "Miss Mallinsbee, I'm going to ask you all sorts of a big favor. We three are going to work together for six months. Well, any time you feel worried any by that feller, don't go to your daddy, just come right along to me. I guess it would puzzle more than your daddy to kill him after I've done with him. I don't guess it's the time to talk a lot about this thing now. I don't sort of fancy big talk that way, anyhow. All I ask you is to let me know, and to be allowed to keep my own eyes on him." Hazel shook her head. "I don't think I can promise you anything like that," she said seriously. "But I--thank you all the same. You see, out here a girl's got to take her own chances, and I'm not altogether helpless that way." Then she definitely changed the subject and pointed ahead. "There, what do you think of it?" "Think of it? Why, he's a low down skunk!" cried Gordon fiercely, unable any longer to restrain his feelings. "I wasn't speaking of him. It!" the girl laughed. "The coalpits." "Oh!" There was no responsive laugh from Gordon. Then he added with angry pretense of enjoyment, "Fine!" For nearly two hours they wandered round the embryonic coal village, examining everything in detail, and not without a keen interest. The place, hidden away amongst the higher foothills, was a perfect hive of industry. Great masses of machinery were lying about everywhere, waiting their turn for the attention of the engineers. Wooden buildings were in the course of construction everywhere. A small army of miners and their wives and children had already taken up their abode, and the men were at work with the engineers in the preparatory borings already in full operation. Even to Gordon's unpracticed eye there was little doubt of the accuracy of the information he had received relating to Snake's Fall. Here there was everything required to provoke the boom he had been warned of. Here was an evidence that the boom would be a genuine one built on the solid basis of great and lasting commercial interest. Long before they started on their return journey he congratulated himself heartily upon the accident which had brought him into the midst of such an enterprise, and thanked his stars for the further chance which had brought him into contact with the train "sharp," and so with Silas Mallinsbee. It was getting on towards the time for the Mallinsbees' evening meal when the little frame house once more came within view. There was a decided charm in its isolation. On all sides were the undulations of grass which denoted the first steps towards the foothills. There was a wonderful radiance of summer sheen upon the green world about them, and the brightness of it all, and the pleasantness, set Gordon thinking of the pity that all too soon it would be broken up almost entirely by those black and gloomy signs of man's industry when the resources of the old world have to be tapped. However, he was content enough with the moment. The sky was blue and radiant, the earth was all so green, and the wide, wide world opened out before him in whatever direction he chose to gaze. While beside him, sitting her mare with that confident seat of a perfect horsewoman, was the most beautiful girl in all the world, a girl in whose companionship he was to spend the next six months. The gods of Fortune were very, very good to him, and he smiled as the vision of his sportsman father flashed through his mind. But his moments of pleasant reflection were abruptly cut short. Hazel had suddenly raised one pointing arm, and a note of concern was in her voice. "Look," she cried. "Something's--upset my daddy." Gordon looked in the direction of the house. Silas Mallinsbee was pacing the veranda at a gait that left no doubt in his mind. It was the agitated walk of a man disturbed. "What's the matter?" demanded Gordon, with some concern. "It looks like--David Slosson," said Hazel, in a hard voice. They rode up in silence, and the girl was the first to reach the ground. "Daddy----" she began eagerly. But her father cut her short. The flesh-tinted patch, which Gordon had almost forgotten, which he used to cover his left eye with, was thrust up absurdly upon his forehead. His heavy brows were drawn together in an angry frown. His tufty chin beard was aggressively thrust, his two great hands were stuck in the waist of his trousers, which gave him further an air of truculence. "Say," he cried, his deep, rolling voice now raised to a pitch of thunder, "it's taken me fifty-six years to come up with what I've been chasing all my life. Say, I've spent years an' years huntin' around to find something meaner than a rattlesnake. Guess I come up with him to-day." "David Slosson," cried Hazel, her eyes wide with her anger. Her father waved her aside as she came towards him. "No, don't you butt in. I've got to let off hot air, or--or--I'll bust." He paced off down the little veranda, and came back again. Then he stood still, and suddenly brought one great fist down with terrific force into his other palm. "Gee, but it's tough. Say, you ever tried to hold a slimy eel?" he cried, glaring fiercely into Gordon's questioning eyes. "No? It's a heap of a dirty and unsatisfact'ry job, but it ain't as dirty as dealing with Mr. David Slosson, nor half as unsatisfact'ry. You can stamp your heel on it, and crush it into the ground. With David Slosson you just got to talk pretty and fence while you know he's got you beat all along the line, an' all the time you're just needin' to kill him all to death. Of all the white-livered bums. Say, if only the good God would push him right into these two hands an' say squeeze him. Say----" He held out his two clenched fists as though he were wringing out a sponge. Gordon raked his hair with one hand. "Do you need to worry that way, Mr. Mallinsbee? I owe him some myself." The old man glared for some moments. Then a subtle smile crept into his eyes. Hazel saw it, and seized the opportunity. "Let's get right inside and have food. You can tell us then, Daddy. You see, Mr. Van Henslaer's one of our confederates now. He's come along to tell you so." It was with some difficulty that Hazel contrived to pacify her father, but at last she succeeded in persuading him to partake of the pleasant meal provided by Hip-Lee. Gordon was glad when at last they all sat down. The appetizing smell of coffee, the delicious plates of cold meats, the glass dishes of preserves, and steaming hot scones, all these things appealed to the accumulated appetite consequent upon his ride. "Now tell us all about it," Hazel demanded, when the meal was well under way. Old Mallinsbee, still with the absurd eye-shade upon his forehead, had recovered his humor, and he poured out his story in characteristic fashion. "Wall," he said, "maybe I was hot when you come up. He'd been gone best part of an hour. During that time I'd been sort of bankin' the furnaces. Gordon Van Henslaer, my boy, I hate meanness worse 'n any devil hated holy water. Ther's all sorts of meanness in this world, and ther' ain't no other word to describe it. Killing can be just every sort of thing from justifiable homicide down to stringin' up some black scallywag by the neck for doin' the same things white folks do an' get off with a caution. The feller that steals ain't always to blame. As often as not we need to blame the general community. Lyin's mostly a disease, an' when it ain't I guess it's a sort of aggravated form of commercial enterprise, or the budding of a great newspaper faculty. You can find excuse, or other name, fer most every crime of human nature--'cept meanness. David Slosson is just the chief ancestor of all meanness, an' when I say that, why--it's some talk. He's here to put the railroad in on the land scoop, and, in that respect, I guess he's all I could have expected. We were making elegant talk. Or, I guess, he was mostly. He said his chiefs had sent him up to see how the general public could best be served by his road with regard to this coal boom, and I told him I was dead sure that railroads never failed in their service of the public. I pointed out I had always observed it. "That talk of mine seemed to open up the road for things, and I handed him a good cigar and pushed a highball his way. Then he made a big music of railroads in general, and talked so pious that it set me yearnin' for my bed. Then I got wide awake. Say, I ain't done a heap in chapel goin' recently, but I've sort of got hazy recollections of sitting around dozing, while the preacher doped a lot of elegant hot air about things which kind of upset your notions of life generally. Then I seem to recollect getting a sack pushed into my face, and I got visions of the terrible scare of its coming, and the kind of nervous chase for that quarter that I could have sworn I'd set ready in my pocket for such an emergency. That's how I felt--nervous. He was talkin' prices of plots. "Wal, I got easy after awhile, and we fixed things elegant. The railroad was to get a dandy bunch of plots at bedrock prices, if they built the depot right here at Buffalo Point. And that feller was quick to see that I was out for the interests of the public, and to make things easy for the railroad. So he talked pretty. Then--then he hooked me a 'right.' He asked me plumb out how he stood. I was ready for him. I said that nothing would suit me better than he should come in the same way with the railroad." He shook his head regretfully. "That man hadn't the conscience of a louse. He was yearning for twenty town plots, in best positions, five of 'em being corner plots, in the commercial area for--nix! I was feeling as amiable as a she wild-cat, and I told him there was nothing doing that way. He said he'd hoped better from my public-spirited remarks. I assured him my public spirit hadn't changed a cent. He said he was sure it hadn't, and was astonished what a strong public spirit was shown around the whole of Snake's Fall. He said that the old town was just the same as Buffalo Point. They were most anxious to help the railroad out, too. Which, seeing the depot--the old depot--was already standing there, made it a cinch for the railroad. They were dead anxious to save the railroad trouble and expense. I pushed another highball at him, but he guessed he hadn't a thirst any more, and one cigar was all he ever smoked in an afternoon. Then he oozed off, and I was glad. I guess homicide has its drawbacks." "High 'graft,'" said Gordon. "Maybe it's 'high,'" said Mallinsbee, with a smile in which there was no mirth. "Guess I wouldn't spell it that way myself. There's just one thing certain: if my side of the game has to go plumb to hell David Slosson don't get his graft the way _he_ wants it. And that's what you and me are up against." "And we'll beat him." "We got to." "You and----" "You," cried Mallinsbee, thrusting out a hand towards him across the table. The two men gripped. Gordon had joined the conspirators. CHAPTER X GORDON MAKES HIS BID FOR FORTUNE Gordon's new address was Buffalo Point, and, entering upon his duties, he felt like some Napoleon of finance about to embark upon a market-breaking scheme in which the brilliancy of his manipulations were to shine forth for the illumination of the pages of history, yet to be written. That was how he felt. Those were the feelings of the moment. Later the burden of his responsibilities obscured the Napoleonic image, and raised up in his mind a thought as to the wisdom of butting one's head against a brick wall. However, for the time at least the joy of responsibility was considerable, and the greater joy of the companionship and trust of his new friends was something which inspired him to great efforts. He studied the affairs of Buffalo Point with a care for detail and an assiduity which quickly became the surprise and delight of Silas Mallinsbee. He went over every foot of the new township as laid out by a well-known firm of town planners from New York under Mallinsbee's orders and under State supervision. He spent one entire day in studying the drawn plans, and, finally, having committed all the details to memory, he felt himself equipped to devote his whole attention to the cajoling of the railroad which was the sum and substance of their combined efforts. In the first week of his occupation he learned many things which had been obscure. He took the story of Mallinsbee's operations and examined it closely, discovering in the process that he possessed a faculty for clear reasoning altogether surprising. Furthermore, he discovered that Mallinsbee, though possibly unpracticed in the work of a big financial undertaking, yet possessed all, and more, of the shrewdness he had vaguely suspected. One of the first efforts of the old man had been to secure the interest of many of the chief traders in the old township of Snake's Fall. Also that of the Bude and Sideley Coal Company. This had been done very simply but effectively. After having marked off the town sites he required for himself he had then offered, and sold, to pretty well every landowner in Snake's Fall a certain allotment of sites at a merely nominal fee. This, as the man himself declared in the course of his story, left Snake's Fall pretty well "not carin' a whoop which way the old cat jumped." The "cat" in this instance being the railroad. In this way direct and active opposition from the landholders of Snake's Fall was minimized. As he explained, it was "graft," but he felt that it was justifiable. This left him with the good will of the citizens and free to act on broader lines. Then he began to pull all the wires he could command with the coal people, who regarded him in the friendliest spirit. However, there was difficulty here, though the difficulty was not insurmountable. Their engineers were at work already on the plans to be put into almost immediate operation for the construction of a private track to link up the coalfields with Snake's Fall. With them it was a question of time. They could not afford delay, and the exploitation of the new township would mean delay for them, although they admitted they would be relieved of a great expense from its proximity to their workings. Mallinsbee, after stupendous efforts, and careful negotiations of the right kind, finally effected a compromise. He was given three months, of which already one week had elapsed, in which to obtain the definite assurance that the railroad would accept Buffalo Point as the new city. In the meantime the coal people's construction would be held up, and they would assist him with all the influence they could command in persuading the railroad. This concession was not unaided by considerable graft, and the graft took the form of an agreement that Mallinsbee, out of his own pocket, would construct them a coal depot and yards in conjunction with the railroad, and hand them the titles of the land necessary for it. He had just returned from the east, where he had been in consultation with the Bude and Sideley people, and with whom he had ratified this agreement, and, at the same time, the railroad had been induced to move in the matter. All along he had triumphed through the agency of graft, and the crowning point of his triumph had been demonstrated in the arrival at Snake's Fall of Mr. David Slosson. Gordon's first impressions of all these things was that Silas Mallinsbee had contrived with considerable skill, and that all was more or less plain sailing. All that remained was to go on, with the grafting hand thrust ready into the pocket for all eventualities, and he found himself smiling at the thought of his father, and how surely his own theories of financial undertakings were working out. That was his first impression. But it only lasted until he became aware of those subtleties of human nature lying behind human effort and intention. He had reckoned without David Slosson, and, more than all, he had reckoned without Silas Mallinsbee himself. During that first week of his new work David Slosson had called at the office twice. Once he had encountered only Gordon, and Hazel had arrived during the visit. The second time he had had another interview with Silas Mallinsbee. It was immediately after that interview that Gordon gained some appreciation of the point where human psychology stepped into the arena of commercial competition. The revelation came in Silas Mallinsbee's own statement of the result of that interview. "Gordon, my boy," he said. He had quickly abandoned the use of Gordon's formal address. "If that feller gets around here too frequent with his blackmail, I'm going to kill him." Then he thrust the patch over his left eye high up on to his forehead, and Gordon realized the angry light shining in the man's eyes. With one eye covered his face had almost been expressionless. His evident surprise at this realization did not fail to attract the rancher's attention. His angry eyes softened to a smile of amusement. "You're wonderin' 'bout that patch?" he went on. "Wal, when I get up against a feller who's brighter than I am in a deal, I don't figure to take chances. Ever played 'draw' with a one-eyed man? No? Wal, I did--once. An' I ain't recovered from all he taught me yet. He taught me that two eyes can just about give away double as much as one. Which, in financial dealings, is quite a piece. I guess that patch has saved me quite a few dollars in its time. An' it makes me kind of sore to think I didn't meet that one-eyed 'sharp' earlier in life." Gordon nodded as he folded up the plan of the town lying on his desk. "You were using it on--Mr. David Slosson. Say, is he smart, or is he just a--crook?" Mallinsbee rose from his chair and moved cumbersomely over to the doorway, and stood with his back turned, gazing out. "I ain't fixed him that way--yet. He's sure a crook, anyway. That's a cinch. 'Bout the other we'll know later. Say, I'm open to graft anybody on this thing--reasonably. It's part of the game. It's more. It's the game itself. But I don't submit to blackmail." "There doesn't seem much difference," said Gordon, drawing some letter-paper towards him, and preparing to write. The other remained where he was, moodily gazing out at the hills where his beloved ranch lay. "You'd think not--but there is," Mallinsbee went on. "You graft an organization when you're needin' something from them which they ain't under obligation to themselves to do. That's buying and selling, and, as things go, there ain't much kick coming. But when you've done that, and their favor's fixed right, it's blackmail if their servants come along and refuse to carry out their work if you don't pay _their_ price. This feller Slosson is a servant of the railroad. I'm ready to graft all they need. He's out for blackmail. That feller wants to be paid something for nothing. He don't do a thing for us. He's got to do the work I'm paying the railroad for. See? Say, Gordon, boy, happen what likes I won't do it. That feller don't make one cent out of me. I'm on the buck, an' I don't care a curse." Mallinsbee had turned about to deliver his irrevocable decision, and, as Gordon met the man's serious, obstinate expression, he realized something of the psychology lying behind a big financial transaction. If Slosson had been a man of reasonable grafting disposition, if he had been a pleasant, amiable personality, if he had been a--man, if Silas Mallinsbee had been used to affairs such as his father dealt in--well--. But it was useless to speculate further. He only saw a troublous situation growing up for him to contend with. "We've got to get him playing our game," he hazarded. "That we'll never do. We're playing a straight bid for a win. He couldn't play a straight bid for anything." "No." There was a great cordiality in Gordon's negative. "It's us who've got to play him--someways." "It's some proposition," mused Gordon. "It surely is. There's ways." Mallinsbee laughed shortly. "Maybe I'll hand him over to Hazel." Then he gave another short laugh. "Guess the ranch 'll interest him some--too." Gordon's eyes lit apprehensively. "I wouldn't do that," he said almost sharply. Mallinsbee faced about. "Why not? Hazel's a bright girl. She's as wise as any two men. A crook don't worry her a thing." "I guess all that's right enough. But--she's a girl, and--I don't seem to feel it's fair to her." Mallinsbee remained silent for some moments. Gordon watched the broad back of the great, lolling figure in the doorway with an alarm he would not have displayed had he been facing him. Then the sound of clattering hoofs outside broke up the silence and the old man turned. "Here she is," he cried, with a shadowy smile. "Guess she can speak for herself." Gordon could have cursed the luck that had brought the girl there at that moment. He understood the depth of her devotion to her father and his enterprise. Nothing could have been less opportune. But, in a moment, his annoyance became lost in his delight at the sound of her cheery greeting. "Hello, Daddy," he heard her call out. Gordon remained where he was, waiting to feast his eyes upon the fresh beauty of this girl, who occupied so large a portion of his thoughts. Her father stood aside to allow her to pass in, and Gordon had his reward in her radiant smile. "How's our junior partner?" she cried gayly. "Feeling just about ready to turn the office into a twelve-foot ring and--hurt somebody," the junior partner retorted quickly. Hazel pulled a long face. "Is it that way?" she demanded, and turned back to her father. Then she added playfully: "What's ruffled the atmosphere of our--dovecote?" The old man began to chuckle. "Dovecote?" he said. "Guess armed fortress comes nearer describing this lay out. Anyway the temper of its occupants," he added, his twinkling eyes on the determined features of his protégé. "Guess I'll get goin' out to the ranch while you two scrap things out. Seems to me I need to get the cobwebs of David Slosson out of my head." He took his departure without haste, but with the obvious intention of avoiding any further discussion of David Slosson for the present. And Gordon was not sorry for his going. He felt that at all costs his suggestion that Hazel should take her place in the ring with this man Slosson was not to be thought of. But he was reckoning without Hazel herself. He was calculating with all a man's--a young man's--assurance that this girl would regard his opinions in the light he regarded them himself. Hazel sat herself upon the edge of his desk, and flicked the rawhide quirt against the leg of her top boot. Her prairie hat was thrust back from her forehead, and her pretty tanned face was turned in a smiling inquiry upon Gordon. "What is it?" she asked, with that new alertness the man had come to regard as a part of her nature, second only to her delightful camaraderie. He smiled back into her merry eyes. "I'm wondering why two men bent on a joint purpose can't see the same thing in the same light." "Which means you and my daddy have already started an argument which I'll have to settle." Gordon laughed. "Guess you'll settle it, though--there's no need." "Why not? If you can't agree?" "We do agree." "Then where's the argument?" "There isn't one." Hazel began to laugh. "Why did you say there was?" "I didn't. It was you who said that." Hazel's smile had died away. "It's Slosson, of course," she said decidedly. And Gordon began to wish she were not so clearsighted, nor so direct in her challenges. "Oh, he's a constant thorn," he said evasively. "Has he been here to-day?" Gordon nodded. "And the result?" "Your father is--obdurate. Says he won't submit to blackmail." "Has Slosson abated his terms?" "I don't think so." Hazel rose quickly from her seat on the desk. She walked slowly across the room and propped herself in the doorway, in precisely the same position as her father had occupied. Gordon's eyes watched her every movement. He knew she was considering deeply, and intuition warned him that the result of her consideration might easily conflict with that which he had in his mind. But he was not prepared for the announcement which came a moment later. She came back to the desk quickly, and took up her old place on it. Her pretty lips were firmly set, and she gazed soberly and unflinchingly down into Gordon's apprehensive blue eyes. "I shall have to deal with David Slosson," she said quietly. Then, with a light, expressive shrug: "It won't be pleasant--not by quite a lot. But--it's got to be done, and done quickly. Father won't give way, so--he must." But, in a moment, Gordon's protest came with all the enthusiasm of his impulsive nature. To think of this beautiful child having to defile herself by cajoling a creature like this Slosson moved him to a pitch of distraction. Whatever else he did not know, he knew the meaning of expression when men gaze at women. And he had not forgotten his first morning in Snake's Fall. "Miss Mallinsbee," he cried, his big body leaning forward in his earnestness, and all his feelings displayed in his ingenuous face, "I'd rather let this thing go plumb smash than that you should be brought into contact with that filthy scum again. Say, you're too young, and good, to understand such creatures. I know----" Hazel was smiling whimsically down into his anxious eyes. "And you're so old and wise you can see plumb through him," she cried. Then with an exact reproduction of his manner, she leaned forward so that their faces were within a foot of each other. "You two Solomons can't deal with him worth two cents. My daddy's too obstinate, and you--are too prejudiced. He's got to be dealt with, and I'm going to do it. In a case like this a girl's wiser than any two men." "That's--just how your father argued," cried Gordon, in exasperation. And the next moment he could have bitten off his tongue. Hazel clapped her hands. "So that was the argument," she cried delightedly. "My daddy in his wisdom thought of me, and you--you being just a big, big chivalrous boy with notions, couldn't see the same way." Then she sat up, and her eyes grew very serious. That which lay behind them was completely hidden from her companion, as she intended it to be. Had it been possible for him to have read her approval of himself in her attitude, he now made it beyond question by the sudden wave of heat which swept through his heart. "I tell you, you've no right to sacrifice yourself," he cried hotly. "Nor has your father----" "No right? Sacrifice?" Hazel's eyes opened wide, and in their beautiful depths a sparkle of resentment shone. "Who says that?" she demanded. Then in a moment her merry thought banished the clouds of her displeasure. She began to tease. "Why shouldn't I do this? Say, you've roused my curiosity. What's the danger? I--I just love danger. What is the danger I'm running?" But Gordon's sense of humor was unequal to her teasing on such a subject. He remained sulkily silent. "I'm waiting," Hazel urged slyly. Gordon cleared his throat. He glanced up at her a little helplessly. Their eyes met, and somehow he caught the infection of her lurking smile. He was forced to laugh in spite of himself. "If--if you don't know, it's not for me to say," he cried at last, with a shrug. "But I tell you, right here, if you were my sister you wouldn't go near Slosson, if I had to--to chain you up." "But I'm not your sister," retorted Hazel, with her dazzling smile. "And, if I were, I shouldn't be a sister of yours if I didn't." Then she laughed at herself. "Say, isn't that real bright?" Then with a great pretense at severity she flourished an admonitory finger at him. "Gordon Van Henslaer," she said solemnly, "you're just as obstinate as my daddy, but you haven't got his wisdom." Her pretense passed and she became suddenly very earnest. "This thing is just all the world to my daddy," she said, "and I can help him. Wouldn't you help him if you had such a dear, quaint old daddy as I have? I'm sure you would. What does it matter to me what I may have to put up with if I can help him out? True, it doesn't matter a thing. Insults? Why, I'll just deal with them as they come along." Then her mood lightened. "Say, we're just two real good friends, Mr. Van Henslaer, aren't we? Friends. It's got a bully sound. That's just how my daddy and I've been ever since my poor momma died years and years ago. Heigho!" she sighed. "And now I've got another friend, and that's you. Say, we're always going to be friends, too, because you're going to understand that this--this thing is business, and business isn't play. My daddy wants to make good, and I'm going to do all I know. And," she added slyly, "that's quite a lot. Do you know, in this thing I'm dead honest when I'm dealing with honest folk, and I'm a 'sharp' when I'm dealing with 'sharps'? By that I just mean I'm not scared of a thing. Certainly of nothing Mr. David Slosson can do. My daddy can trust me, and he's known me all my life. You've only known me a week, but you can trust me too. I'm out to help things along, so just let's forget this--this talk." Gordon's admiration for the girl was so obvious that no words of his were necessary to illuminate it, but he shook his head seriously as she finished speaking. "I just can't help it, Miss Mallinsbee," he said, a little desperately. "If anything happened to you I'd never forgive myself. What do you mean to do?" Hazel smiled at his manner. Her smile was confident, but it was also an expression of her regard for him. She had no intention of modifying her decision, but she liked him for his dogged protest. "You just leave that to me," she cried buoyantly. "I haven't an idea in my silly head--yet. All I can say is, David Slosson is to be encouraged. He's to be flattered. I'm going to make him smile real prettily with that mealy face of his. Guess I'll have to take him out rides--but I'll promise you it won't be my fault if he don't break his wicked neck." Gordon was forced to join in the girl's infectious laugh, but it was without enjoyment. To think of this man riding at Hazel's side, basking in her smiles, enjoying her company just when and where he pleased. The thought was maddening. And it set his fingers tingling and itching to possess themselves of his throat and squeeze the life out of him. "And how long's this to go on for?" he asked sulkily, in spite of his laugh. Hazel's eyes opened wide. "Why--until he weakens, and we get things fixed." "And if he beats your game?" "He'll hate himself first, and then we'll have to reorganize our plans." "Then I guess I'll get busy on the other plans." "I shall be beaten?" Gordon glanced away towards the window. His eyes had become reflective. "It's the only thing I can see," he said slowly. "He'll finish by insulting you. I know his kind. He'll insult you, sure. And I--well, I shall just as surely pretty near kill him. And then we'll need other--plans." CHAPTER XI HAZEL MALLINSBEE'S CAMPAIGN The seductive mystery of the hills was beyond all words. A wonderful outlook of wide valleys, bounded in almost every direction by the vast incline of wood-clad hills, opened out a world that seemed to terminate abruptly everywhere, yet to go on and on in an endless series of great green valleys and mountain streams. Darkling wood-belts crept up the great hillsides, deep in mysterious shadows, stirring imagination, and carrying it back to all those haunting dreams of early childhood. For the most part these were all untrodden by human foot, and so their mystery deepened. Then above, often penetrating into the low-lying clouds, the crowning glory of alabaster peaks whose snowy sheen dazed the wondering eyes raised towards them. In the valleys below, the green, the wonderful green, bright and delicate, and quite unfaded by the scorching sun of the prairie away beyond. Pastures beyond the dreams of all animal imagination in their humid richness. Water, too, and low, broken scrubs and woodland bluffs--one vast panorama of verdant beauty, such as only the eye of an artist or the heart of a ranchman could appreciate. It was the setting of Silas Mallinsbee's ranch, that ranch which was more to him than all the world, except his motherless daughter. Gordon had seen it all as he rode out to spend the week-end on a ranch horse, placed by Mallinsbee at his disposal. He had marveled then at the delights spread out before his eyes. Now, on the Sunday morning, while he awaited breakfast, he wondered still more as he examined, even more closely, that wealth of natural splendor spread out for his delight. He was lounging on the deep sun-sheltered veranda which faced the south. The ranch house was perched high up on the southern slope of one of the lesser hills. Above him the gentle morning breeze sighed in the rustling tree-tops of a great crowning woodland. Below him, and all around him, were the widespreading buildings and corrals of a great ranching enterprise. It seemed incredible to him that within twenty miles of him, away to the east, there could exist so mundane and sordid an undertaking as the Bude and Sideley Coal Company, and the vicious chorus of ground sharks which haunted Snake's Fall. He felt as though he were gazing out upon some enchanted valley of dreamland, where the soft breezes and glinting sunlight possessed a magic to rest the teeming energy of modern highly tuned brain and nerves. Its seductiveness lulled him to a profound meditation, and into his dreaming stole the figure of the mistress of these miles of perfect beauty. Now he had some understanding of that fascinating buoyancy of spirit, the simple devotion with which she contemplated the life that claimed her. How could it be otherwise? Here was nature in all its wonders of simplicity, shedding upon the life sheltering at its bosom an equal simplicity, an equal strength, an equal singleness of mind with which it was itself endowed. He felt that if he, too, had been brought up in such surroundings no city flesh-pots could ever have offered him any fascination. He, too, must have felt that this--this alone was the real life of man. The play of the dancing sunlight through the distant trees held his gaze. He forgot to smoke, he forgot everything except the beauty about him, the stirring ranch life below him, and the girl whose fascination was daily possessing a greater and greater hold upon him. Then, quite gently, something else subtly merged itself with the pleasant tide of his meditations. It was the deep note of a voice which came from close beside him in a rolling bass that afforded no jar. "A picture that's mighty hard to beat," it said. Gordon nodded without turning. "Sure." "Kind of holds you till you wonder why folks ever build cities and things." "Sure." "There ain't a muck hole in miles and miles around that you could fall into, and not come out of with a clean conscience an' a wholesome mind. Kind of different to a city." Gordon stirred. He turned and looked into Silas Mallinsbee's smiling eyes. "It's--all yours?" he inquired. "For miles an' miles around. I got nigh a hundred miles of grazing in these hills--and nobody else don't seem to want it. Makes you wonder." Gordon laughed. "Say, set a spade into the ground and find a marketable mineral and tell somebody. Then see." Mallinsbee chewed an unlit cigar, and his chin beard twisted absurdly. "That's it," he said slowly. "There's nothing to these hills as they are, except to a cattleman, I guess. Cattle don't suit the modern man. Your profitable crop's a three years' waiting, and that don't mean a thing to folk nowadays, except a dead loss of time on the round-up of dollars. They don't figure that once you're good and going that three years' crop comes around once every year. So they miss a deal." "Yes, they'd reckon it slow, I guess," Gordon agreed. "But," he went on with enthusiasm, "the life of it. The air." He took a deep breath of the sparkling mountain atmosphere. "It's champagne. The champagne of life. Say, it's good to be alive in such a place. And you," he gazed inquiringly into the man's strong face, "you began it from--the beginning?" "I built the first ranch house with my own hands. My old wife an' I built up this ranch and ran it. And now it's rich and big--she's gone. She never saw it win out. Hazel's took her place, and it's been for her to see it grow to what it is. She helped me ship my first single year's crop of twenty thousand beeves to the market ten years ago. She was a small kiddie then, and she cried her pretty eyes out when I told her they were going to the slaughter yards of Chicago. You see, she'd known most of 'em as calves." "The work of it must be enormous," meditated Gordon, after a pause in which he had pictured that small child weeping over her lost calves. "So," rumbled Mallinsbee. "We're used to it. I run thirty boys all the year round, and more at round-up. Guess if I was missing Hazel wouldn't be at a loss to carry on. She's a great ranchman. She knows it all." "Wonderful," Gordon cried in admiration. "It's staggering to think of a girl like that handling this great concern." "There's two foremen, though. They've been with us years," said the other simply. But Gordon's wonder remained no less, and Mallinsbee went on-- "After breakfast we'll take a gun and get up into those woods yonder. Maybe we'll put up a jack rabbit, or a blacktail deer. Anyway, I guess there's always a bunch of prairie chicken around." "Fine," cried Gordon, all his sporting instincts banishing every other thought. "Which----" But Hazel's voice interrupted him, summoning them both to breakfast. "Come along, folks," she cried, "or the coffee 'll be cold." The men hurried into the house. Gordon felt that there was nothing and no power on earth that could keep him from his breakfast in that delicious mountain air, with Hazel for his hostess. The meal was all he anticipated. Simple, ample, wholesome country fare, with the accompaniment of perfect cooking. He ate with an appetite that set Hazel's merry eyes dancing, and her tongue accompanying them with an equally merry banter. And all the time Silas Mallinsbee looked on, and smiled, and rumbled an occasional remark. After breakfast the two men set out with their guns. "We're sure making Sunday service," said Hazel's father, glancing into the breech of his favorite gun. Gordon concurred. "Up in the woods there," he laughed. "With a congregation of fur and feather," laughed Hazel. "Which is as wholesome as petticoats an' swallowtails," said her father, "an' a good deal more healthy fer our bodies." "But what about your souls?" inquired Hazel slyly. "Souls?" Her father snapped the breech closed. "A soul's like a good sailin' ship. If she's driving on a lee shore it's through bad seamanship and the winds of heaven, and you can't save it anyway. If she ain't driving on a lee shore--well, I don't guess she needs saving." "It's a great big scallywag," came through the open doorway after them, as they departed. The tenderness and affection in the manner of the girl's parting words made Gordon feel that his great host had some compensation for the absence of that mother who had blessed him with such a pledge of their love. The two men were returning with their bag. It was not extensive, but it was select. A small blacktail was lying across Mallinsbee's broad shoulders. Gordon was carrying a large jack-rabbit, and several brace of prairie chicken. The younger man was enthusiastic over their sport. "Talk to me of a city! Why, I could do this twice a day and every day, till I was blind and silly, and deaf and dumb. I sort of feel life don't begin to tell you things till you get out in the open, at the right end of a gun. Makes you feel sorry for the fellows chasing dollars in a city." They were approaching the limits of a woodland bluff, from the edge of which the ranch would be in view. "Guess that's how I've always felt--till little Hazel got without a mother," replied Mallinsbee. "After that--well, I just guess I needed other things to fill up spare thoughts." Gordon's enthusiasm promptly lessened out of sympathy. Something of the loneliness of the ranch life--when one of the partners was taken--now occurred to him. "Yes," he said earnestly, "the right woman's just the whole of a man's world. I guess there are circumstances when--this sun don't shine so bright. When a man feels something of the vastness and solitude of these hills, when their mystery sort of gets hold of him. I can get that--sure." "Yep. It's just about then when a bit of coal makes all the difference," Mallinsbee smiled. "I wouldn't just call coal the gayest thing in life. But it's got its uses. When the summer's past, why, I guess the stoves of winter need banking." Gordon nodded his understanding. "But your daughter is just crazy on this life," he suggested. The old man's smile had passed. "Sure." Then he sighed. "She's been my partner ever since, sort of junior partner. But sometime she 'll be--going." Then his slow smile crept back into his eyes. "Then it'll be winter all the time. Then it'll have to be coal, an' again coal--right along." They emerged from the woods, and instinctively Gordon gazed across at the distant ranch. In a moment he was standing stock still staring across the valley. And swiftly there leaped into his eyes a dangerous light. Mallinsbee halted, too. He shaded his eyes, and an ominous cloud settled upon his heavy brows. "Some one driven out," he muttered, examining narrowly a team and buggy standing at the veranda. Gordon emitted a sound that was like a laugh, but had no mirth in it. "It's a man, and he's talking to Miss Mallinsbee on the veranda. It don't take me guessing his identity. That suit's fixed right on my mind." "David Slosson," muttered Mallinsbee, and he hurried on at an increased pace. It was after the midday dinner which David Slosson had shared with them. When her father and Gordon arrived, and before objection could be offered by anybody, Hazel asked her uninvited guest to stay to dinner. David Slosson, without the least hesitation, accepted the invitation. In this manner all opposition from her father was discounted, all display of either man's displeasure avoided. She contrived, with subtle feminine wit, to twist the situation to the ends she had in view. She disliked the visitor intensely. The part she had decided to play troubled her, but she meant to carry it through whatever it cost her, and she felt that an opportunity like the present was not to be missed. Her father accepted the cue he was offered, but Gordon was obsessed with murderous thoughts which certainly Hazel read, even in the smile with which he greeted the man he had decided was to be his enemy. To Gordon, David Slosson was even more detestable socially than in business. Here his obvious vulgarity and commonness had no opportunity of disguise. He displayed it in the very explanation of his visit. "Say," he cried, "Snake's Fall is just the bummest location this side of the Sahara on a Sunday. I was lyin' around the hotel with a grouch on I couldn't have scotched with a dozen highballs. I was hatin' myself that bad I got right up an' hired a team and drove along out here on the off-chance of hitting up against some one interestin'." Then he added, with a glance at Hazel, which Gordon would willingly have slain him for: "Guess I hit." This was on the veranda. But later, throughout the meal, his offenses, in Gordon's eyes, mounted up and up, till the tally nearly reached the breaking strain. The man put himself at his ease to his own satisfaction from the start. He addressed all his talk either to Hazel or to her father, and, by ignoring Gordon almost entirely, displayed the fact that antagonism was mutual. He criticised everything he saw about him, from the simple furnishing of the room in which they were dining, and the food they were partaking of, and its cooking, even to the riding-costume Hazel was wearing. He lost no opportunity of comparing unfavorably the life on the ranch, the life, as he put it, to which her father condemned Hazel, with the life of the cities he knew and had lived in. He passed from one rudeness to another under the firm conviction that he was making an impression upon this flower of the plains. The men mattered nothing to him. As far as Mallinsbee was concerned, he felt he held him in the palm of his hand. Never in his life had Gordon undergone such an ordeal as that meal, which he had so looked forward to, in the pleasant company of father and daughter. Never had he known before the real meaning of self-restraint. More than all it was made harder by the fact that he felt Hazel was aware of something of his feelings. And the certainty that her father understood was made plain by the amused twinkle of his eyes when they were turned in his direction. Then came the _dénouement_. It was at the finish of the meal that Hazel launched her bombshell. Slosson, in a long, coarse disquisition upon ranching, had been displaying his most perfect ignorance and conceit. He finished up with the definite statement that ranching was done, "busted." He knew. He had seen. There was nothing in it. Only in grain or mixed farming. He had had wide experience on the prairie, and you couldn't teach him a thing. "You must let me show you how fallible is your opinion," said Hazel, with more politeness of language than intent. There was a subtle sparkle in her eyes which Gordon was rejoiced to detect. "Let me see," she went on, "it's light till nearly nine o'clock. You see, I mustn't keep you driving on the prairie after dark for fear of losing yourself." She laughed. "Now, I'll lend you a saddle horse--if you can ride," she went on demurely, "and we'll ride round the range till supper. That'll leave you ample time to get back to Snake's Fall without losing yourself in the dark." Gordon wanted to laugh, but forced himself to refrain. Mallinsbee audibly chuckled. David Slosson looked sharply at Hazel with his narrow black eyes, and his face went scarlet. Then he forced a boisterous laugh. "Say, that's a bet, Miss Hazel," he cried familiarly. "If you can lose me out on the prairie you're welcome, and when it comes to the saddle, why, I guess I can ride anything with hair on." "Better let him have my plug, Sunset," suggested Mallinsbee gutturally. But Hazel's eyes opened wide. She shook her head. "I wouldn't insult a man of Mr. Slosson's experience by offering him a cushy old thing like Sunset," she expostulated. Then she turned to Slosson. "Sunset's a rocking-horse," she explained. "Now, there's a dandy three-year-old I've just finished breaking in the barn. He's a lifey boy. Wouldn't you rather have him?" she inquired wickedly. Slosson's inclination was obvious. He would have preferred Sunset. But he couldn't take a bluff from a prairie girl, he told himself. Forthwith he promptly demanded the three-year-old, and his demand elicited the first genuine smile Gordon had been able to muster since he had become aware of Slosson's presence on the ranch. Within half an hour one of the ranch hands brought the two horses to the veranda. Hazel's mare, keen-eyed, alert and full of life, was a picture for the eye of a horseman. The other horse, shy and wild-eyed, was a picture also, but a picture of quite a different type. Hazel glanced keenly round the saddle of the youngster. Then she approached Slosson, who was stroking his black mustache pensively on the veranda, and looked up at him with her sweetest smile. "Shall I get on him first?" she inquired. "Maybe he'll cat jump some. He's pretty lifey. I'd hate him to pitch you." But to his credit it must be said that Slosson possessed the courage of his bluff. With a half-angry gesture he left the veranda and took the horse from the grinning, bechapped ranchman. He knew now that he was being "jollied." "Guess you can't scare me that way, Miss Hazel," he cried, but there was no mirth in the harsh laugh that accompanied his words. He was in the saddle in a trice, and, almost as quickly, he was very nearly out of it. That cat jump had come on the instant. "Stick to him," Hazel cried. And David Slosson did his best. He caught hold of the horn of the saddle, his heels went into the horse's sides, and, in two seconds, his attitude was much that of a shipwrecked mariner trying to balance on a barrel in a stormy sea. But he stuck to the saddle, although so nearly wrecked, and though the terrified horse gave a pretty display of bucking, it could not shed its unwelcome burden. So, in a few moments, it abandoned its attempt. Then David Slosson sat up in triumph, and his vanity shone forth upon his pale face in a beaming smile. "He's some horseman," rumbled Mallinsbee, loud enough for Slosson to hear as the horses went off. "Quite," returned Gordon, in a still louder voice. "If there's one thing I like to see it's a fine exhibition of horsemanship." Then as the horses started at a headlong gallop down towards the valley, the two men left behind turned to each other with a laugh. "He called Hazel's bluff," said the girl's father, with a wry thrust of his chin beard. "Which makes it all the more pleasant to think of the time when my turn comes," said Gordon sharply. David Slosson was more than pleased with himself. He was so delighted that, by a miraculous effort, he had stuck to his horse, that his vanity completely ran away with him. He would show this girl and her mossback father. They wanted to "jolly" him. Well, let them keep trying. Once the horses had started he gave his its head, and set it at a hard gallop. He turned in the saddle with a challenge to his companion. "Let's have a run for it," he cried. The girl laughed back at him. "Where you go I'll follow," she cried. Her words were well calculated. The light of vainglory was in the man's eyes, and he hammered his heels into his horse's flanks till it was racing headlong. But Hazel's mare was at his shoulder, striding along with perfect confidence and controlled under hands equally perfect. "We'll go along this valley and I'll show you our next year's crop of beeves," cried Hazel, later. "They're away yonder, beyond that southern hill, guess we'll find half of them around there. You said ranching was played out, I think." "Right ho," cried the man, with a sneering laugh. "Guess you'll need to convince me. Say, this is some hoss." "Useful," admitted Hazel, watching with distressed eyes the man's lumbering seat in the saddle. They rode on for some moments in silence. Then Hazel eased her hand upon the Lady Jane, and drew up on the youngster like a shot from a gun. "We'll have to get across this stream," she declared, indicating the six-foot stream along which they were riding. "There's a cattle bridge lower down which you'd better take. There it is, away on. Guess you can see it from here." "What are you goin' to do?" asked the man sharply. He was expecting another bluff, and was in the right mood to call it, since his success with the first. But Hazel had calculated things to a nicety. She owed this man a good deal already for herself. She owed him more for his impertinent ignoring of Gordon, and also for his disparagement of the ranch life she loved. Without a word she swung her mare sharply to the left. A dozen strides, a gazelle-like lifting of the round, brown body, and the Lady Jane was on the opposite bank of the stream. Before David Slosson was aware of her purpose, and its accomplishment, his racing horse, still uneducated of mouth, had carried him thirty or forty yards beyond the spot where Hazel had jumped the stream. At length, however, he contrived to pull the youngster up. He smiled as he saw the girl on the other side of the stream. He remembered her suggestion of the bridge, and he shut his teeth with a snap. The stream was narrower here, so he had an advantage which, he believed, she had miscalculated. He took his horse back some distance and galloped at the stream. Hazel sat watching him with a smile, just beyond where he should land. His horse shuffled its feet as it came up to the bank. Then it lifted. Slosson clung to the horn of the saddle. Then the horse landed, stumbled, fell, hurling its rider headlong in a perfect quagmire of swamp. Slosson gathered himself up, a mass of mud and pretty well wet through. Hazel was out of the saddle in a moment and offering him assistance with every expression of concern. She came to the edge of the swamp and reached out her quirt. The man ignored it. He ignored her, and scrambled to dry ground without assistance. "I told you to take the bridge," Hazel cried shamelessly. "You knew you were on a young horse. Oh dear, dear! What a terrible muss you're in. My, but my daddy will be angry with me for--for letting this happen." Her apparently genuine concern slightly mollified the man. "I thought you were putting up another bluff at me, Miss Hazel," he said, still angrily. "Say, you best quit bluffing me. I don't take 'em from anybody." "Bluff? Why, Mr. Slosson, I couldn't bluff you. I--I warned you. Same as I did about the cat-jumping your horse put up. Say, this is just dreadful. We'll have to get right back, and get you dried out and cleaned. I guess that horse is too young for a--city man. I ought to have given you Sunset. He'd have jumped that stream a mile--if you wanted him to. Say--there, I'll have to round up your horse, he's making for home." In a moment Hazel was in the saddle again, and the man alternately watched her and scraped the thick mud off his clothes. He was decidedly angry. His pride was outraged. But even these things began to pass as he noted the ease and skill with which she rounded up the runaway horse. She was doing all she could to help him out, and the fact helped to further mollify him. After all, she _had_ warned him to take the bridge. Perhaps he had been too ready to see a bluff in what she had suggested. After all, why should she attempt to bluff him? He remembered how powerful he was to affect her father's interests, and took comfort from it. She came back with the horse and dismounted. "Say," she cried, in dismay, "that dandy suit of yours. It's all mussed to death. I'm real sorry, Mr. Slosson. My word, won't my daddy be angry." The man began to smile under the girl's evident distress, and, his temper recovered, his peculiar nature promptly reasserted itself. "Say, Miss Hazel--oh, hang the 'miss.' You owe me something for this, you do, an' I don't let folks owe me things long." "Owe?" Hazel's face was blankly astonished. "Sure." The man eyed her in an unmistakable fashion. Suddenly the girl began to laugh. She pointed at him. "Guess we'll need to get you home and cleaned down some before we talk of anything else I owe. That surely is something I owe you. Here, you get up into the saddle. I'll hold your horse, he's a bit scared. We'll talk of debts as we ride back." But Slosson was in no mood to be denied just now. Although his anger had abated, he felt that Hazel was not to go free of penalty. He came to her as though about to take the reins from her hand, but, instead, he thrust out an arm to seize her by the waist. Then it was that a curious thing happened. The young horse suddenly jumped backwards, dragging the girl with it out of the man's reach. It had responded to the swift flick of Hazel's quirt, and left the man without understanding, and his amorous intentions quite unsatisfied. The next moment the girl was in her own saddle and laughing down at him. "I forgot," she cried, "you'd just hate to have your horse held by a--girl. You best hurry into the saddle, or you'll contract lung trouble in all that wet." Slosson cursed softly. But he knew that she was beyond his reach in the saddle. A tacit admission that, at least here, on the ranch, she dominated the situation. "And I've never been able to show you those beeves, and convince you about ranching," Hazel sighed regretfully later on, as they rode back towards the ranch. But her sigh was sham and her heart was full of laughter. She was thinking of the delight she would witness in Gordon's eyes, when he beheld the much besmirched suit of this man, to whom he had taken such a dislike. CHAPTER XII THINKING HARD The days slipped by with great rapidity. They passed far too rapidly for Gordon. The expectation of Silas Mallinsbee that David Slosson would eventually listen to reason, and accept terms for himself similar to those agreeable to him on behalf of the railroad, showed no sign of maturing. The firmness of his front in no way seemed to affect the grafting agent, and from day to day, although the rancher and his assistant waited patiently for a definite _dénouement_, nothing occurred to hold out promise one way or another. Mallinsbee said very little, but he watched events with wide-open eyes, and not altogether without hope that the man would be brought to reason. His eyes were on Hazel, smiling appreciation, for Hazel was at work using every art of which she was capable to frustrate any opposition to her father's plans, and to help on, as she described it, the "good work." "I'm a 'sharper' in this, Mr. Van Henslaer," she declared, in face of one of Gordon's frequent protests. "I'm no better than David Slosson. And I--I want you to understand that. I think your ideas of chivalry are just too sweet, but I want you to look with my eyes. We're a bunch of most ordinary folk who want to win out. If you and my daddy thought by burying him, dead or alive, you could beat his hand, why, I guess it would take an express locomotive to stop you. Well, I'm out to try and put him out of harm's way in my own fashion. If I can't do it, why, he'll find I'm not the dandy prairie flower he's figuring I am just now. That's all. So meanwhile get on with any old plans you can find up your sleeve. By hook or _crook_ we've _got_ to make good." By this expression of the girl's extraordinary determination doubtless Gordon should have been silenced. But he was not silenced, nor anything like it. The truth was he was in love--wildly, passionately, jealously in love. It nearly drove him to distraction to watch the way in which, almost daily, this man Slosson drove out to see Hazel and take her out for buggy rides or horse riding. Not only that, he and her father were practically ignored by the man. They were just so much furniture in the office, and when by any chance the agent did deign to notice them there was generally something offensive in his manner of address. Worst of all, as the outcome of Hazel's campaign there were no signs that matters were one whit advanced towards the successful completion of their project, and the days had already grown into weeks. All Gordon could do was to busy himself with formulating wild and impossible schemes for beating this creature. And a hundred and one strenuous possibilities occurred to him, all of which, however, offered no suggestion of bending the man, only of breaking him. The sum and substance of all his efforts was a deadly yearning to kill David Slosson, kill him so dead as to spoil forever his chances of resurrection. This was much the position when, nearly three weeks later, in response to a peremptory note from Slosson in the morning, Silas Mallinsbee decided that Gordon should deal with him on a business visit in the afternoon. Oh yes, Gordon would interview him. Gordon would deal with him. Gordon would love it above all things. Was he given a free hand? But Mallinsbee smiled into the fiery eyes of the young giant and shook his head, while Hazel looked on at the brewing storm with inscrutable eyes of amusement. "There's no free hand for anybody in this thing, Gordon, boy," said Mallinsbee slowly. "And I don't guess there's any crematoriums or undertakers' corporation around Snake's Fall. Anyway, Hip-Lee wouldn't do a thing if you asked him to bury a white man." "White man?" snorted Gordon furiously. "Remember you're--fighting for my daddy as well as yourself, Mr. Van Henslaer," said Hazel earnestly. Gordon sighed. "I'll remember," he said. And his two friends knew that the matter was safe in his hands. Left alone in his office, Gordon endured an unpleasant hour after his dinner. It was not the thoughts of his coming interview that disturbed him. It was Hazel. It was of her he was always thinking, when not actually engaged upon any duty. Every day made his thoughts harder to bear. For awhile he sat before his desk, leaning back in his chair, gazing blankly at the wooden wall opposite him. She was always the same to him; his worst fits of temper seemed to make no difference. She only smiled and humored or chided him as though he were some big, wayward child. Then the next moment she would ride off with this vermin Slosson, full of merry sallies and smiling graciousness, whom, he knew, if she had any right feeling at all, she must loathe and despise. Well, if she did loathe him, she had a curious way of showing it. He thrust his chair back with an angry movement, and walked off into the bedroom opening out of the office. He looked in. The neatness of it, the scent of fresh air pouring in through its open window, meant nothing to him. He saw none of the work of the guiding hand which, in preparing it, had provided for his comfort. Hip-Lee kept it clean and made his bed, the same as he cooked his food. It did not occur to Gordon to whom Hip-Lee was responsible. There were pictures on the walls, and it never occurred to Gordon that these had been taken from Hazel's own bedroom at the ranch--for his enjoyment. Nor was he aware that the shaving-glass and table had been specially purchased by Hazel for his comfort. There were a dozen and one little comforts, none of which he realized had been added to the room since it had been set aside for his use. He flung himself upon the bed, all regardless of the lace pillow-sham which had once had a place on Hazel's own bed. He was in that frame of mind when he only wanted to get through the hours before Hazel's sunny presence again returned to the office. He was angry with her. He was ready to think, did think, the hardest thoughts of her; but he longed, stupidly, foolishly longed for her return, although he knew that, with her return, fresh evidence of Slosson's attentions to her and of her acceptance of them would be forthcoming. He was only allowed another ten minutes in which to enjoy his moody misery. At the end of that time he heard the rattle of wheels beyond the veranda, and sprang from his couch with the battle light shining in his eyes. But disappointment awaited him. It was not Slosson who presented himself. It was the altogether cheerful face of Peter McSwain which appeared at the doorway. "Say," he cried. Then he paused and glanced rapidly round the room. "Ain't Mallinsbee around?" he demanded eagerly. Gordon shook his head. "Business?" he inquired. "If it's business I'm right here to attend to it." Peter hesitated. "I s'pose you'd call it business," he said, after a considering pause, during which he took careful stock of Mallinsbee's representative. Then he went on, with a suggestion of doubt in his tone, "You deal with his business--confidential?" Gordon smiled in spite of his recent bitterness. He moved over to his desk and sat down, at the same time indicating the chair opposite him. As soon as McSwain had taken his seat Gordon leaned forward, gazing straight into the man's always hot-looking face. "See here, Mr. McSwain, we're at a deadlock for the moment, as maybe you know. Later it'll straighten itself out. I can speak plainly to you, because you're a friend of Mr. Mallinsbee, and you're interested with us in this deal. I'm here to represent Mr. Mallinsbee in everything, even to dealing with the railroad people, so anything you've got to say, why, just go ahead. For practical purposes you are talking to Mr. Mallinsbee." The disturbed Peter sighed his relief. "I'm glad, because what I've got to say won't keep. If you folks don't get a cinch on that dago-lookin' Slosson feller the game's up. He's askin' options up at Snake's. He's not buyin' the land yet, just lookin' for options. Maybe you know I got two plots on Main Street, besides my hotel. Well, he's made a bid for options on 'em for two months. He says other folks are goin' to accept his offer. There's Mike Callahan, the livery man. Slosson's been gettin' at him, too. Mike come along and told me, and asked what he should do. I guessed I'd run out and see Mallinsbee. If ther' ain't anything doin' here at Buffalo, why, it's up to us to accept." The man mopped his forehead with a gorgeous handkerchief. His eyes were troubled and anxious. He felt he would rather have dealt with Mallinsbee. This youngster didn't look smart enough to deal with the situation. Gordon was tapping the desk with a penholder. He was thinking very hard. He knew that the definite movement had come at last, and that it was adverse to their interests. This was the reply to Mallinsbee's resolve. For the moment the matter seemed overwhelming. There seemed to be no counter-move for them to make. Then quite suddenly he detected a sign of weakness in it. "Say," he demanded at last, "why does the man want options? I take it options are to safeguard him _in case_ he wants to buy. This thing looks better than I thought. He's guessing he may quarrel with us. He's thinking maybe we won't come to terms. He's worrying that the news of that will get around, and that, in consequence, up will go prices in Snake's. That'll mean the railroad 'll have to pay through the nose, and he'll get into trouble if they have to buy up there. You see, the bedrock of this layout is--this place has to boom anyway, and they've got to get in either here or at Snake's." Peter rubbed his hands. His opinion of Gordon began to undergo revision. "Then what are we to do?" The anxiety in his eyes was lessening. Gordon sprang from his seat, and brought one hand down on his desk with a slam. "Do? Why, let him go to hell. Refuse him any option," he cried fiercely. "Here, I'll tell you what you do. And do it right away. How do you stand with the folks up there?" "Good. They mostly listen when I talk," said Peter, with some pride. "Fine!" cried Gordon. "We'll roast him some. See here, I know you're holding with us. I know Mike is, and several others. Your interests are far and away bigger here than in Snake's. So you'll get busy right away. You'll get all the boys together who've got interests here. Tell 'em we've fallen out over the railroad deal with Slosson. Tell 'em to get the town together, and then let 'em explain about this rupture. I'll guarantee the rupture's complete. Make 'em refuse all options and boost their prices for definite sale, and threaten to raise 'em sky-high unless the railroad make a quick deal. Put a fancy figure on your land at which he _daren't_ buy. You get that? Now I'll show you how we'll stand. He's _got to come in on this place then_. He'll have to buy at our price, because--_the railroad must get in_. You must play the town folks who've got land there, but none here, to force the prices up on the strength of our quarrel with the railroad, and I'll guarantee that quarrel's complete this afternoon. Well?" The last vestige of Peter's worry had disappeared. His eyes shone admiringly as he gazed at the smiling face of the man who had conceived so unscrupulous a scheme. He nodded. "The railroad's got to get in," he agreed. "If they can't get in here they've got to there. Offer him boom prices there, and if he closes--which he _daren't_--we make our bits, anyway. If he don't, then he's got to buy here _on your terms_, and--the depot comes here, and the boom with it. Say, it's bright. An' you'll guarantee that scrap up?" "Sure." Peter sprang to his feet. "That's Mallinsbee's--word?" "Absolutely." The man's hot face became suddenly hotter, and his eyes shone. "I'll get right back and we'll hold a meetin' to-night. Say, we've got to fool those who ain't got interests here--they ain't more than fifty per cent.--and then we'll send prices sky-high. You can bet on it, Mr. Van Henslaer, sir. All it's up to you to do is to turn him down and drive him our way. We'll drive him back to you. It's elegant." Gordon gave a final promise as they shook hands when Peter had mounted his buggy. Then the hotel proprietor drove off in high glee. Gordon went back to his office without any sensation of satisfaction. He had committed Mallinsbee to a definite policy that might easily fall foul of that individual's ideas. But he had committed him, and meant to carry the thing through against all opposition. The cue had been too obvious for him to neglect. It was Slosson who had made a false move. He was temporizing, instead of acting on a fighting policy, and it was pretty obvious to him that his temporizing was due to his growing regard for Hazel. The man was mad to ask for options. He was a fool--a perfect idiot. No, the opportunity had been too good to miss. If Slosson had shown weakness, he did not intend to do so. Then, as he sat down and further probed the situation, a real genuine sensation of satisfaction did occur. There would no longer be any necessity for Hazel to attempt to play the man. All in a moment he saw the whole thing, and a wild delight and excitement surged through him. He was in the heart of a youngster's paradise once more. The sun streaming in through the window was one great blaze of heavenly light. The world was fair and joyous, and, for himself, he was living in a palace of delight. It was in such mood that he heard the approach of David Slosson. The agent entered the office with all the arrogance of a detestable victor. His first words set Gordon's spine bristling, although his welcoming smile was amiability itself. Slosson glanced round the room, and, discovering only Gordon, flung himself into Mallinsbee's chair and delivered himself of his orders. "Say, you best have your darned Chinaman take my horse around back an' feed him hay. Where's Mallinsbee?" Gordon assumed an almost deferential air, but ignored the order for the horse's care. "I'm sorry, but Mr. Mallinsbee won't be around this afternoon. He's going up in the hills on a shoot," he lied shamelessly. "Maybe for a week or two. Maybe only days." "What in thunder? Say, was he here this morning? I sent word I was coming along." Slosson's black eyes had narrowed angrily, and his pasty features were shaded with the pink of rising temper. Gordon's eyes expressed simple surprise. "Sure, he was here. Your note got along 'bout eleven. He guessed he couldn't stop around for you. You see, a few caribou have been seen within twenty miles of the ranch. They don't wait around for business appointments." Slosson brought one fist down on the arm of his chair, and in a burst of anger almost shouted at the deferential Gordon. "Caribou?" he exploded. "What in thunder is he chasin' caribou for when there's things to be settled once and for all that won't keep? Caribou? The man's crazy. Does he think I'm going to wait around while he gets chasin'--caribou?" Gordon maintained a perfect equanimity, but he wanted to laugh badly. He felt he could afford to laugh. "There's no need to 'wait around,'" he deferred blandly. "I am here to act for Mr. Mallinsbee--absolutely. The entire affairs of the township are in my hands, and I have his definite instructions how to proceed. If you have any proposition to make I am prepared to deal with it." For all his apparent deference a note had crept into Gordon's tone which caught the suspicious ears of the railroad agent. He peered sharply into the blue eyes of the man across the desk. "You have absolute power to deal in Mallinsbee's interest?" he questioned harshly. "In _Mr._ Mallinsbee's interests," assented Gordon. "Wal, what's his proposition?" The man's mustached upper lip was slightly lifted and he showed his teeth. "Precisely what it was when he first explained it to you." The deference had gone out of Gordon's voice. Then, after the briefest of smiling pauses, he added-- "That is in so far as the railroad is concerned. For your own personal consideration his offer of sites to you remains the same as regards price, but the selection of position will be made by--us." Gordon was enjoying himself enormously. He had taken the law into his own hands, and intended to put things through in his own way. He expected an outburst, but none was forthcoming. David Slosson was beginning to understand. He was taking the measure of this man. He was taking other measures--the measure of the whole situation. Of a sudden he realized that he was being told, in his own pet phraseology, to--go to hell. He had consigned many people in that direction during his life, but somehow his own consignment was quite a different matter, especially through the present channel. He pulled himself up in his chair and squared his shoulders truculently. "I guess Mallinsbee knows what this means--for him?" he inquired sharply, but coldly. "I fancy _Mr._ Mallinsbee does." "Now, see here, Mister--I ferget your name," Slosson cried, with sudden heat. "I'm not the man to be played around with. If this is your _Mister_ Mallinsbee's final offer, it just means that the railroad can't do business with him. Which means also that his whole wild-cat land scheme falls flat, and is so much waste ground, only fit for grazing his rotten cattle on. I'm not here to mince words----" "No," concurred Gordon in a steady, cold tone. "I said I'm not here to mince words. If I can't get my original terms there's nothing doing, and I'll even promise, seeing we're alone, to get right out of my way to sew up this concern, lock, stock and barrel." "That seems to be the obvious thing to do from your point of view--if you can," said Gordon calmly. "Seeing that _Mr._ Mallinsbee is nearly as rich as a railroad corporation, there may be difficulties. Anyway, threats aren't business talk, and generally display weakness. So, if you've no business to talk, if you don't feel like coming in on our terms--why, that's the door, and I guess your horse is still waiting for that hay you seemed to think just now he needed." Gordon picked up a pen and proceeded deliberately to start writing a letter. He felt that David Slosson had something to digest, and needed time. All he feared now was that Mallinsbee or Hazel might come in before he rid the place of this precious representative of the railroad. After a few moments he glanced up from his letter. "Still here?" he remarked, with upraised brows. In a moment Slosson started from the brown study into which he had fallen and leaped to his feet. His narrow black eyes were blazing. His pasty features were ghastly with fury, and Gordon, gazing up at him, found himself wondering how it came that the hot summer sun of the prairie was powerless to change its hue. The agent thrust out one clenched fist threateningly, and fairly shouted at the man behind the desk-- "I'll make you all pay for this--Mallinsbee as well as you. You think you can play me--me! You think you can play the railroad I represent! I'll show you just what your bluff is worth. You, a miserable crowd of land pirates! I tell you your land isn't worth grazing price without our depot. And I promise you I'll break the whole concern----" "Meanwhile," said Gordon, deliberately rising from his seat and moving round his desk, "try that doorway, before I--break you. There it is." He pointed. "Hustle!" There comes a moment when the wildest temper reaches its limits. And even the most furious will pause at the brick wall of possible physical violence. David Slosson had spat out all his venom, or as much of it as seemed politic. The threatening attitude of Gordon, his monumental size and obvious strength, his cold determination, all convinced him that further debate was useless. So he drew back at the "brick wall" and negotiated the doorway as quickly as possible. Two minutes later Gordon sighed in a great relief, and passed a hand across his perspiring forehead. Slosson had passed out of view as Mallinsbee, on the back of the great Sunset, appeared on the horizon. "That was a close call," he muttered. "Two minutes more and the old man might have spoiled the whole scheme." Silas Mallinsbee's personality seemed to crowd the little office when, five minutes later, he entered to find Gordon busy at his desk writing a letter home to his mother. Gordon displayed no sign of his recent encounter when he looked up. His ingenuous face was smiling, and his blue eyes were full of an obvious satisfaction. Mallinsbee read the signs and rumbled out an inquiry. "Slosson been around?" Gordon nodded. "Sure." "Fixed anything?" "Quite a--lot." "You're lookin' kind of--happy?" "Guess that's more than--Slosson was." Mallinsbee's eyes became quite serious. "I told Hazel just now I'd get along back. You see, I kind of remembered you just weren't sweet on Slosson, and guessed after all I'd best be around when he came. Hazel thought it might be as well, too. Specially as she didn't want to sit around and find no Slosson turn up. So----" Gordon was on his feet in an instant. All his smile had vanished. A look of real alarm had taken its place. "She was waiting for that skunk? Where?" he demanded in a tone that suddenly filled the father with genuine alarm. "He was to go on to the coalpits after he was through here, and she was to meet him there an' ride over to the young horse corrals where they been breaking. She was to let him see the boys doin' a bit o' broncho bustin'. What's----" "The coalpits? That's the way he took. Say, for God's sake stay right here--and let me use Sunset. I----" But Gordon did not wait to finish what he had to say. He was out of the house and had leaped into the saddle before Mallinsbee could attempt to protest. The next moment he was galloping straight across country in the direction of the Bude and Sideley's Coal Company's workings. CHAPTER XIII SLOSSON SNATCHES AT OPPORTUNITY Gordon had taken David Slosson's measure perfectly, notwithstanding his own comparative inexperience of the world. Apart from the agent's business methods, he had seen through the man himself with regard to Hazel. Hence, now his most serious alarm. The memory of those lascivious eyes gazing after Hazel in the Main Street of Snake's Fall, on his first day in the town, had never left him, and though he had listened to Hazel's positive assurance of her own safety in dealing with the man a subtle fear had continually haunted him. This was quite apart from his own jealous feelings. It was utterly unprejudiced by them. He knew that sooner or later, unless a miracle happened, Hazel would become the victim of insult. Deep down in his heart, somewhere, far underneath his passionate jealousy, he knew that Hazel was only encouraging Slosson that she might help on their common ends, but he had always doubted her cleverness to carry such a matter through successfully. To his mind there could only be one end to it all, and that end--insult. Now the thing was almost a certainty. With Slosson in his present mood anything might happen. So he pressed Sunset to a rattling gallop. If Slosson insulted her----? But he was not in the mood to think--only to act. That his fears were well enough founded was pretty obvious. David Slosson, as he hurried away from Mallinsbee's office, knew that he had played the game of his own advantage and--lost. This sort of thing had not often happened, and on those rare occasions on which it had happened he had so contrived that those who had caused him a reverse paid fairly dearly in the end. He was one of those men who believed that if a man only squeezed hard enough blood could be contrived from a stone. Against every successful offensive of the enemy there was nearly always a way of "getting back." That he could "get back" on the commercial side of the present affair he possessed not the smallest doubt. He would "recommend" to his company that the present depot at Snake's Fall, with certain enlargements, and the private line to be built by the Bude and Sideley Coal people, were all that was sufficient to serve the public, and, through his judicious purchase of sites in the old township, a far more profitable enterprise for them than the new township could offer. Personally, he would have to sacrifice his own interests. But since Mallinsbee and his cub of an office boy would be badly "stung," the matter would not be without satisfaction to his revengeful nature. Then there was that other matter--and he moistened his thin lips as he contemplated it. In spite of all Gordon's lack of faith in Hazel's efforts, they had not been without effect. Slosson had been flattered. His vanity had seen conquest in Hazel's readiness to accept his company. It had been obvious to him from the first that the manner in which he had displayed his "nerve" before her at the ranch pleased her more than a little. After all, she was a mere country girl--a "rube" girl. Nor was it likely that she would be difficult now. She was pretty, pretty as a picture. Her figure appealed to his sensual nature. She didn't know a thing--outside her ranch. Well, he could teach her. Especially now. Oh, yes, it was all very opportune. He would teach her all he knew. He laughed. He would teach her for--her father's sake. And--yes, for the sake of that young cub of a man that had ordered him out of the office. What was his name--"Van Henslaer"? Yes, that was it. A "square-head," he supposed. The country was full of these American-speaking German "square-heads." Then quite suddenly he began to laugh. For the first time since he came to Snake's Fall the thought occurred to him that possibly this fellow was in love with Hazel himself. He had been so busy prosecuting his own attentions to her himself that he had never considered the possibility of another man being in the running. The thought inspired an even more pleasant sensation. It threw a new light upon Van Henslaer's attitude. Well, there was not much doubt as to who was the favored man. The fellow's very attitude suggested his failure. Slosson felt he was going to reap better than had seemed at first. He would ruin Mallinsbee's schemes and satisfy his company at a slight personal loss to himself. He would complete his triumph over the individual in Mallinsbee's office. First of all, through Mallinsbee's failure in the land scheme, by robbing him of a position, and secondly, through robbing him of all chance of success with the girl. It was not too bad a retort. He would have made it harsher if he could, but, for a start, it would have to do. Later, of course, since he would see a great deal of Snake's Fall and his power in the place would increase, he would extend operations against his enemies. Hazel must be his--his entirely. To that he had made up his mind. She was much too desirable to be "running loose," he told himself. Marriage was out of the question, unless he wished to commit bigamy; a pleasantry at which he laughed silently. Anyway, if it were possible, it would not have suited him. Marriage would have robbed him of the right to break up her father's land scheme. No, marriage was---- Well, he was married--to his lasting regret. Hazel was very attractive; very. He could quite understand a man making a fool of himself over her. He had once made a fool of himself, and in consequence marriage was very cheap from his point of view. He regarded women now as lawful prey. And apart from Hazel's attractiveness, which was very, very seductive, it would be a pretty piece of getting back on her father and that other. He laughed again. It was quaint. The prettier a woman the greater the fool she was. So he rode on towards the coalpits. His narrow eyes were alert, watching the horizon on every side. He was looking for that fawn-colored figure on its brown mare. His thoughts were full of it now. The rest was all thrust into the background, leaving full play to his desires, which were fast overwhelming all caution. It would have been impossible to overwhelm his sense of decency. Suddenly it occurred to him that it was ridiculous that he should go on to the coalpits. His eagerness was swaying him. His mad longing for the girl swept everything before it. Why should he not cut across to the westward and intercept her on the way from the ranch? She must come that way, and--he could not possibly miss her. He looked at his watch. It wanted half an hour to their appointment. Why, he would be at the pits in ten minutes, which would leave him a full twenty minutes of waiting. In his mood of the moment it was a thought quite impossible. So he swung his horse westwards, with his eyes even more watchful for the approach of the figure he was seeking. Perhaps Hazel was late. Perhaps Slosson was traveling faster than he knew. Anyway, he was already in the shadow of the bigger hills when he discovered the speeding brown mare with its dainty burden. Hazel discovered him almost at the same instant, and reined in her horse to let him come up. In a moment or two his roughly familiar greeting jarred her ears. "Hello!" he cried. "There never was a woman who could keep time worth a cent. I guessed you'd strayed some, so I got along quick." He had reined up facing her on the cattle track, and his sensual eyes covertly surveyed her from head to foot. "Why, you haven't been near the pits," protested Hazel, avoiding his gaze. "You've come across country. Anyway, it's not time yet." She pulled off a gauntlet and held up her wrist for him to look at the watch upon it. He reached out, caught her hand, and drew it towards him on the pretense of looking at the watch. His eyes were shining dangerously as he did so. Just for an instant Hazel was taken unawares. Then her pretty eyes suddenly lost their smile, and she drew her hand sharply away. Slosson looked up. "Your watch is wrong," he declared, with a grin intended to be facetious, but which scarcely disguised the feelings lying behind it. Hazel was smiling again. She shook her head. "It isn't," she denied. "But come on, or we'll miss the fun. I've got a youngster there in the corrals, never been saddled or man-handled. I'm going to ride him for your edification when the boys are through with the others. It's a mark of my favor which you must duly appreciate." She led the way back towards the hills at a steady canter. "Say, you've got nerve," cried Slosson, in genuine admiration. "Never been saddled?" "Or man-handled," returned Hazel, determined he should lose nothing of her contemplated adventure. "He was rounded up this morning at my orders out of a bunch of three-year-old prairie-bred colts. You'll surely see some real bucking--not cat-jumping," she added mischievously. "Say, you can't forget that play," cried the man, with some pride. "I'd have got on that hoss if he'd bucked to kingdom-come. I don't take any bluff from a girl." "I s'pose girls aren't of much account with you? They're just silly things with no sense or--or anything. Some men are like that." A warm glow swept through the man's veins. "I allow it just depends on the girl." "Maybe you don't reckon I've got sense?" Slosson gazed at her with a meaning smile. "I've seen signs," he observed playfully. "Thanks. You've surely got keen eyes. Black eyes are mostly keen. Say, I wonder how much sense they reckon they've seen in me?" "Well, I should say they've seen that you reckon David Slosson makes a tolerable companion to ride around with. Which is some sense." Hazel turned, and her pretty eyes looked straight into his. A man of less vanity might have questioned the first glance of them. But Slosson only saw the following smile. "Just tolerable," she cried, in a fashion which could not give offense. Then she abruptly changed the subject. "Get through your business at--the office?" she inquired casually. Slosson's eyes hardened. In a moment the memory of Gordon swept through his brain in a tide of swift, hot anger. "There's nothing doing," he said harshly. Hazel turned. A quick alarm was shining in her eyes, and the man interpreted it exactly. Caution was abruptly cast to the winds. "Say, Hazel," he cried hotly, "I'm going to tell you something. Your father's a--a fool. Oh, I don't mean it just that way. I mean he's a fool to set that boy running things for him. He's plumb killed your golden goose. We've broken off negotiations. That's all. The railroad don't need Buffalo Point." "But what's Gordon done?" the girl cried, for the moment off her guard. "Father gave him instructions. You had an offer to make, and it was to be considered--duly." "What's Gordon done?" The man's eyes were hot with fury. "So that's it--'Gordon.' He's 'Gordon,' eh?" All in a moment venom surged to the surface. The man's unwholesome features went ghastly in his rage. "He turned me--me out of the office. He told me to go to hell. Say, that pup has flung your father's whole darned concern right on to the rocks. So it's 'Gordon,' eh? To everybody else he's 'Van Henslaer,' but to you he's 'Gordon.' That's why he's on to me, I guessed as much. Well, say, you've about mussed up things between you. My back's right up, and I'm cursed if the railroad 'll move for the benefit of those interested in Buffalo Point." Hazel had heard enough. More than enough. Her temper had risen too. "Look here, Mr. Slosson. I don't pretend to mistake your inference. Gordon is just a good friend of mine," she declared hotly. "But I've no doubt that whatever he did was justified. If we're going on any farther together you're going to apologize right here and now for what you've said about Gordon." She reined up her mare so sharply that the startled creature was flung upon her haunches, and the man's livery horse went on some yards farther before it was pulled up. But Slosson came back at once and ranged alongside. They were already in the bigger hills, and one shaggy crag, overshadowing them, shut out the dazzling gleam of the westering sun. "There's going to be the need of a heap of apology around," cried Slosson, but something of his anger was melting before the girl's flashing eyes. Then, too, the moment was the opportunity he had been seeking. "See here, Hazel----" "Don't you dare to call me 'Hazel,'" the girl flung out at him hotly. "You will apologize here and now." There was no mistaking her determination, and the man watched her with furtive eyes. He pretended to consider deeply before he replied. At a gesture of impatience from the girl he finally flung out one arm. "See here," he cried, "maybe I oughtn't to have said that, and I guess I apologize. But--you see, I was sort of mad when you talked that way about this--'Gordon.'" His teeth clipped over the word. "You see, Hazel," he insinuated again, "we've had a real good time together, and you made it so plain I'm not--indifferent to you that it just stung me bad to hear you speak of--'Gordon.' I'm crazy about you, I am sure. I'm so crazy I can't sleep at nights. I'm so crazy that I'd let the railroad folk go hang just for you--if you just asked me. I'd even forget all that feller said, and would pool in on Buffalo Point the way your father needs--if you asked me." He waited. He had thrown every effort of persuasion he was capable of into his words and manner, and Hazel was deceived. She did not observe the furtive eyes watching her. She was only aware of the almost genuine manner of his pleading. "If I asked you?" she said thoughtfully. Then she looked up quickly, her eyes half smiling. "Of course I ask you." In a moment the man pressed nearer. "And you'll play the game?" he asked almost breathlessly. All in a moment a subtle fear of him swept through the girl. Instinctively her hand tightened its grip on the heavy quirt swinging from her wrist. "What do you mean?" she demanded in a low tone. The man's eyes were shining with the meaning lying behind his words. There should have been no necessity to ask that question. Quite suddenly he reached farther out and seized her about the waist with one hand, while with the other he caught her reins to check her mare. The next moment he had crushed her to him and his flushed face was close to hers. "There's only one game," he cried hoarsely. "And----" But he got no further. Like a flash of lightning Hazel's quirt slashed furiously at him. The blow was wild and missed its object. It fell on his horse's head and neck. Again it was raised, and again it fell on the horse and on her mare. The horse plunged aside and her own mare started forward. The next moment both riders were on the ground, struggling violently. Sunset plowed along over the prairie. True enough, he was the rocking-horse Hazel had declared him to be. But she might have added that he was the speediest horse ever foaled on her father's range. Gordon was in no mood to spare him. But, press him as he might, he seemed incapable of sounding the full depths of his resources. Had Gordon only taken the course of the impatient Slosson he would have arrived in time to have prevented the catastrophe. But as it was he made the coalpits, and, finding no trace of either Hazel or the agent, with prompt decision he headed at once for the southern corrals. It was some time before he discovered the tracks he sought, and was beginning to think that in some extraordinary fashion he had missed them altogether. The thought stirred his jealousy, and--but he put all doubt from his mind, and further bustled the long-suffering Sunset. Then came the moment when he first saw the hoof-prints in the sand of the cattle track. In a moment his thoughts cleared and his old fears urged him on. He was right now, he knew. The hills about him were growing in height and ruggedness. The corrals were only a few miles on, and Sunset was racing down the track as if he were aware of the threatening danger to the girl whom he had so often carried on his back. But even if he were he was utterly unprepared for the furious thrashing of his present rider's heels which came as they were approaching one great shaggy hill to the south of them, in answer to a thin, high-pitched shrill for "Help!" Gordon heard and understood. He had been right, after all, and a terrible panic and fury assailed him. Sunset was racing now, with his barrel low to the ground. Then as they came into the shadow of the hill the faithful creature felt the bit in his mouth jar suddenly and painfully, and he nearly sank on to his haunches. Gordon was out of the saddle and rushing headlong like some rage-maddened bull. Something had happened, and Hazel, in a partial daze, scarcely understood quite what it was. All she knew was that she was no longer struggling desperately in the arms of a man, with his hideous face thrust towards hers with obvious intention. She had fought as she had never dreamed of having to fight in all her life, and in her extremity she had shrilled again and again for "Help!" which, had she thought, she would have known was miles from the lonely spot where she was struggling. Then had happened that something she could not understand. She only knew that she was no longer struggling, and that hideous, coarse, passion-lit face had vanished from before her terrified eyes. She had heard a voice, a familiar voice, hoarse with passion. The words it had uttered were the foulest blasphemy, such words as only a man uses when in the heat of battle and his desire is to kill. Then had passed that nightmare face from before her eyes. After some moments her mental faculties became less uncertain, and with their clearing she became aware of a confusion of sounds. She heard the sound of blows and the incessant shuffling of feet through the tall prairie grass. She looked about her. All in a minute she was on her feet, her eyes wide and staring with an expression half of terror, half of the wildest excitement. A fight was going on--a fight in which six feet three of science was arrayed against lesser stature but equal strength and a blend of animal fury which yearned to kill. David Slosson came at his hated adversary in lunging rushes and with all his weight and muscle, hoping to clinch and reduce the battle to the less scientific condition of a "rough-and-tumble" as it is known only in America. Once he could achieve a definite clinch he knew that the advantage would lie with him. He knew the game of "chew and gouge" as few men knew it. He had learned it in his earlier days of lumber camps. But Gordon had steadied himself from his first mad rush. It was the sight of Hazel in this man's clutches that had roused the desire for murder in his hot blood. Now it was different. Now it was a fight, a fight such as he could enjoy; and such were his feelings that he was determined it should be a fight to a finish, even if that finish should mean a killing. He had no difficulty in punishing. His opponent's arms came at him wildly, while his own leads and counters struck home with smashes of a staggering nature. Twice he got in an upper-cut which set his man reeling, and in each case he smashed home his left immediately with all the force of his great shoulders. But David Slosson was tough. He seemed to thrive on punishment, and he came again and again. Gordon was in his element. His physical condition had never been more perfect, and, provided that clinch was prevented, nothing on earth could save his man. The blood was already streaming from Slosson's cheek, and an ugly split disfigured his lower lip. Now he came in with his head down--a favorite bull rush of the "rough-and-tumble." Gordon saw it coming and waited. He side-stepped, and smashed a terrific blow behind the left ear. The man stumbled, but saved himself. With an inarticulate attempt at an oath he was at the boxer again. Another rush, but it checked half-way, and a violent kick was aimed at Gordon's middle. It missed its mark, but caught him on the side of the knee. The pain of the blow for a moment robbed the younger man of his caution. He responded with a smashing left and right. They both landed, but in the rush his loose coat was caught and held as the agent fell. Slosson clung to the coat as a terrier will cling to a stick. In spite of the rain of blows battering his head he held on. It was the first hold he needed. The second came a moment later. His other arm crooked about Gordon's right knee. The next moment they were on the ground in the throes of a wild, demoniacal "rough-and-tumble." The science of the boxer could serve Gordon no longer. He knew it. He knew also that the fight was more than leveled up. The struggle had degenerated into an inhuman aim for those vital parts which would leave the victim blind or maimed for life. By the luck of Providence he fell uppermost. His hands being free and his strength at its greatest, also possessing nothing of the degraded mind of the rough-and-tumble fighter, he went for his opponent's throat, and got his grip just as he felt the other's teeth clip, in a savage snap, at his right ear. It was a happy miss, or he knew he would have spent the rest of his life with only one ear, and possibly part of the other. But there were other things to avoid. He crushed the man's head upon the ground, while his great hands tightened their grip upon his throat. But Slosson's hands were not idle. They struggled up, and Gordon felt that they were groping for his throat. His own pressure increased. "Squeal, you swine!" he roared. "Squeal, or I'll choke the life out of you!" The man was unable to squeal under the terrible throat-hold. His breath was coming in gasps. All of a sudden those groping hands made a lunge at Gordon's eyes. One finger even struck his left eye with intent to gouge it out. Gordon threw back his head, but dared not release his hold. His only other defense was an instinctive one. He opened his mouth and made a wolfish snap at the hand that had sought to blind him. He bit three of its fingers to the bone. There was a cry from the man under his hands, and the straining body beneath him ceased to struggle. Gordon released his hold and stood up. He aimed one violent kick of disgust at the man's ribs and turned away. CHAPTER XIV THE REWARD OF VICTORY Gordon breathed hard. He wiped the dust from his perspiring face, as a man almost unconsciously will do after a great exertion. His eyes, however, remained on his defeated adversary. Presently he moved away a little uncertainly. A moment later, equally uncertainly, he picked up his soft felt hat. Then, his gaze still steadily fixed on the object of his concern, he all unconsciously smoothed his ruffled hair and replaced his hat upon his head. Hazel, too, was tensely regarding the deathly silent figure of David Slosson. A subtle fear was clutching at her heart. So still. He was so very still. Gordon's breathing became normal, but his eyes remained absurdly grave. He approached the prostrate man. But before he reached his side he paused abruptly and breathed a deep sigh of relief--and began to laugh. "Right!" he cried. Nor was he addressing any one in particular. Hazel heard his exclamation, and the clutching fear at her heart relaxed its grip. She understood that Gordon, too, had shared her dread. Now she shifted her regard to the victor. Her eyes were full of a deep, unspeakable feeling. Gordon was looking in another direction, so, for the moment, she had nothing to conceal. The man's attention was upon the horses. A strange diffidence made him reluctant to follow his impulse and approach Hazel. He had no pride in his victory. Only regret for the exhibition he had made before her. Sunset and Slosson's horse were grazing amicably together within twenty yards of the trail. The fight had disturbed them not one whit. The Lady Jane had moved off farther, and, in proud isolation, ignored everybody and everything concerned with the indecent exhibition. Gordon secured the livery horse to a bush, and rode off on Sunset to collect the Lady Jane. When he returned the defeated man was stirring. One glance told Gordon all he cared to know, and he passed over to where Hazel was still standing, and in silence and quite unsmilingly he held the Lady Jane for her to mount. Hazel avoided his eyes, but not from any coldness. She feared lest he should witness that which now, with all her might, she desired to conceal. Her feelings were stirred almost beyond her control. This man had come to her rescue--he had rescued her--by that great chivalrous manhood that was his. And somehow she felt that she might have known that he would do so. Gordon was looking at David Slosson, who was already sitting up. Once Hazel was in the saddle he moved nearer to the disfigured agent. "If you're looking for any more," he said coldly, "you can find it. But don't you ever come near Buffalo Point again or Mallinsbee's ranch. If you do--I'll kill you!" David Slosson made no reply. But his eyes followed the two figures as they rode off, full of a bitter hatred that boded ill for their futures should chance come his way. For some time the speeding horses galloped on, their riders remaining silent. A strange awkwardness had arisen between them. There was so much to say, so much to explain. Neither of them knew how to begin, or where. So they were nearing home when finally it was Gordon whose sense of humor first came to the rescue. They had drawn their horses down to a walk to give them a breath. Gordon turned in his saddle. His blue eyes were absurdly smiling. "Well?" he observed interrogatively. The childlike blandness of his expression was all Hazel needed to help her throw off the painful restraint that was fast overwhelming her. Again he had saved her, but this time it was from tears. "Well?" she smiled back at him through the watery signs of unshed tears. "I guess Sunset 'll hate this trail worse than anything around Buffalo Point," Gordon said, with a great effort at ease. "He got a flogging I'll swear he never merited." "Dear old Sunset," said the girl softly. "And--and he can go." "Go? Why, he's an express train. Say, the Twentieth Century, Limited, isn't a circumstance to him." Gordon's laugh sounded good in Hazel's ears, and the last sign of tears was banished. It had been touch and go. She had wanted to laugh and to scream during the fight. Afterwards she had wanted only to weep. Now she just felt glad she was riding beside a man whom she regarded as something in the nature of a hero. "I sort of feel I owe him an apology," Gordon went on doubtfully. "Same as I owe you one. I--I'm afraid I made a--a disgusting exhibition of myself. I--I wish I hadn't nearly bitten off that cur's fingers. It's--awful. It--was that or lose my eyesight." Hazel had nothing to say. A shiver passed over her, but it was caused by the thought that the man beside her might have been left blinded. "You see, that was 'rough and tough,'" Gordon went on, feeling that he must explain. "It's not human. It's worse than the beasts of the fields. I--I'm ashamed. But I had to save my eyes. I thought I'd killed him." "I'm glad you didn't," Hazel said in a low voice. Then she added quickly, "But not for his sake." Gordon nodded. "He deserved anything." Suddenly Hazel turned a pair of shining eyes upon him. "Oh, I wish I were a man!" she cried. "Deserved? Oh, he deserved everything; but so did I. I'll never do it again. Never, never, never! You warned me. You knew. And it was only you who saved me from the result of my folly. I--I thought I was smart enough to deal with him. I--I thought I was clever." She laughed bitterly. "I thought, because I run our ranch and can do things that few girls can that way, I could beat a man like that. Say, Mr. Van Henslaer, I'm--just what he took me for--a silly country girl. Oh, I feel so mad with myself, and if it hadn't been for you I don't know what would have happened. Oh, if I could only have fought like you. It--it was wonderful. And--I brought it all on you by my folly." There was a strange mixture of emotion in the girl's swift flow of words. There was a bitter feeling of self-contempt, a vain and helpless regret; but in all she said, in her shining eyes and warmth of manner, there was a scarcely concealed delight in her rescuer's great manhood, courage and devotion. If Gordon beheld it, it is doubtful if he read it aright. For himself, a great joy that he had been of service in her protection pervaded him. Just now, for him, all life centered round Hazel Mallinsbee and her well-being. "You brought nothing on," he said, his eyes smiling tenderly round at her. "He's a disease that would overtake any girl." Then he began to laugh, with the intention of dispelling all her regrets. "Say, he's just one of life's experiences, and experience is generally unpleasant. See how much he's taught us both. You've learned that a feller who can wear a suit that sets all sense of good taste squirming most generally has a mind to match it. I've learned that no honesty of methods, whether in scrapping or anything else, is a match for the unscrupulous methods of a low-down mind. Guess we'll both pigeon-hole those facts and try not to forget 'em. But say--there's worse worrying," he added, with an absurdly happy laugh. "Worse?" "Only worse because it hasn't happened yet--like the other things have. You see, the worst always lies in those things we don't know." "You're thinking of the Buffalo Point scheme?" "Partly." "Partly?" "Did he tell you anything?" Hazel nodded. "He said you'd--turned him out of the office." "That all?" Gordon was chuckling. "He said you'd told him to go to----" Hazel's eyes were smiling. "Just so. I did," returned Gordon. "That's the trouble now. I've got to face your father. I've hit on a plan to beat this feller. I've got the help of Peter McSwain and some of the boys at Snake's. I'd a notion we'd pull the thing off, so I just took it into my own hands--and your father don't know of it. I'm worrying how he'll feel. You see, if I fail, why, I've busted the whole contract. And now this thing. Say, what's going to happen next?" As he put his final question his smiling face looked ludicrously serene. Hazel had entirely recovered from her recent experiences. She laughed outright. More and more this man appealed to her. His calm, reckless courage was a wonderful thing in her eyes. Their whole schemes might be jeopardized by that afternoon's work, but he had acted without thought of consequence, without thought of anybody or anything beyond the fact that he yearned to beat this man Slosson, and would spare nothing to do so. What was this wild scheme he had suddenly conceived, almost the first moment he was left in sole control? She tried to look serious. "Can you tell it me now?" she asked. "I could, of course, but----" "You'd rather wait to see father about it." "I don't know," said Gordon, with a wry twist of the lips and a shrug. "Say, did you ever feel a perfect, idiotic fool? No, of course you never have, because you couldn't be one. I feel that way. Guess it's a sort of reaction. I just know I've busted everything. The whole of our scheme is on the rocks, through me, and, for the life of me, somehow I--I don't care. I've hit up that cur so he won't want his med'cine again for years, and it was good, because it was for you. So I don't just care two cents about anything. Say, I'm learning I'm alive, same as you talked about the first day I met you, and it's you are teaching me. But the champagne of life isn't just Life. Guess Life is just a cheap claret. You're the champagne of my life. That being so, I guess I'm a drunkard for champagne." Hazel was held serious by some feeling that also kept her silent. Somehow she could no longer face those shining, smiling, ingenuous blue eyes. She wanted to, because she felt they were the most beautiful in the whole world, and she longed to go on gazing into them forever and ever. But something forced her to deny herself, and she kept hers straight ahead. Gordon went on. "Say, I haven't said anything wrong, have I?" he cried, fearful of her displeasure. "You see, I can't put things as they run through my head. That's one of the queer things about a feller. You know, I've got a whole heap of beautiful language running around in my head, and when I try to turn it loose it comes out all mussed up and wrong. Guess you've never been like that. That's where girls are so clever. D'you know, if you were to ask me just to pass the salt at supper it would sound to me like the taste of ice-cream?" Hazel looked round at the earnest face with a swift sidelong glance. Then her laughter would no longer be denied. "Would it?" she cried. "Say, don't laugh at a feller. I'm in great trouble," Gordon went on quickly. "Trouble?" "Sure. Wouldn't you be if you'd bust up a man's scheme the same as I have, and if the only person in the world whose opinion you cared for can't help but think you all sorts of a fool?" Hazel's smile had become very, very tender. "Who thinks you a--fool?" "Anybody with sense." "Then I'm afraid I've got no sense." Gordon found himself looking into the girl's serious eyes. "You--don't think me--a--fool?" he cried incredulously. Hazel had no longer any inclination to laugh. A great emotion suddenly surged through her heart, and her pretty oval face was set flushing. "When a woman owes a man what I owe you, if he were the greatest fool in the world to others, to that woman he becomes all that is great and fine, and--and--oh, just everything she can think good of him. But you--you are not a fool, or anything approaching it. I don't care what you have done in our affairs--for me, whatever it is, it is right. I'll tell you something more. I am certain that if my daddy wins through it will be your doing." Gordon had nothing to say. He was dumbfounded. Hazel, in her generosity, was the woman he had always dreamed of since that first day he had seen her, which seemed so far back and long ago. He had nothing to say, because there was just one thought in his mind, and that thought was, then and there to take her in his arms and release her for no man, not even her---- Hazel was pointing along the trail. "Why, there is my daddy coming along--on foot. I've never--known him to walk a prairie trail ever before, I wonder what's ailing him." And then Gordon had to laugh. They were back in the office. By every conceivable process Silas Mallinsbee had sought to discover what had happened. But Hazel would tell him nothing, and Gordon followed her lead. The old man was disturbed. He was on the verge of anger with both of them. Then Hazel lifted the safety valve as she remounted her mare, preparatory to a hasty retreat homewards. "I'll get back to home, Daddy," she said, in a tone lacking all her usual enthusiasm. "Mr. Van Henslaer has a lot to tell you about things, and when I am not here he'll be able to tell you all that happened--out there." Gordon again took his cue. "Yes, I've a heap to tell you," he said, without any display of enjoyment. The men passed into the office as Hazel took her departure. Her farewell wave of the hand and its accompanying smile for once were not for her father. Even in the midst of his mixed feelings that obvious farewell to Gordon made the old rancher feel a breath of the winter he had once spoken of, nipping the rims of his ears. And his mind settled upon the thought of banking the furnaces with--coal. He took his seat in the big chair he always used and lit a cigar. Gordon went at once to his desk and sat down. He leaned forward with hands clasped, and looked squarely into the strong face before him. "It's bad talk," he said briefly. "So I guessed." Then, after a few moments of silence, Gordon recounted the story of the events of the afternoon right up to Mallinsbee's arrival at the office. The rancher listened without comment, but with obvious impatience. This was not what he wanted to hear first. But Gordon had his own way of doing things. "You see, I took a big chance on the spur of the moment," he finished up. "I just didn't dare to think. The idea took right hold of me. And even now, when I tell it you in cold blood, I seem to feel it was one of those inspirations that don't need to be passed by. In the ordinary way I believe it would succeed. Slosson would have been driven into our plans. But--but now there's worse to come." "So I guessed." Mallinsbee's answer was sharp and dry. "And it's the most important of your talk," he added a moment later. "What happened--out there?" Gordon's eyes took on a far-away expression as he gazed out of the window. "I nearly killed David Slosson," he said simply. Then he added, "I knew I'd have to do it before I'd finished." His gaze came back to Mallinsbee's face. A fierce anger had made his blue eyes stern and cold. Then he told the rancher of his finding Hazel struggling furiously in the man's arms, and of her piteous cry for help, and all that followed. While he was still talking the girl's father had leaped from his seat and began pacing the little room like a caged wild beast. His cigar was forgotten, and every now and then he paused abruptly as Gordon made some definite point. His eyes were darkly furious, his nostrils quivered, his great hands clenched at his sides, and in the end, when the story was told, he stood towering before the desk with a pair of murderous eyes shining down upon the younger man. "God in heaven!" he cried furiously; "and he's still alive?" Then he turned away abruptly. A revolver-belt was hanging on the wall, and he moved towards it. But Gordon was on his feet in a moment. "That gun's mine, and--you can't have it!" Gordon was standing in front of the weapon, facing the furious eyes of the father. "Stand aside! I'm--going to kill him--now." But Gordon made no movement. "No," he said, with a stony calmness. It was a painful moment. It was a moment full of threat and intense crisis. One false move on Gordon's part, and the maddened father's fury would be turned on him. The younger man forced a smile to his eyes. "You once said I could scrap, Mr. Mallinsbee. I promise you I scrapped as I never did before. That man hasn't one whole feature in his face, and if the hangman's rope had been drawn tight around his neck it couldn't have done very much more damage than my fingers did. I tell you he's has his med'cine good and plenty. There's no need for more--that way. But we're going to hurt him. We're going to hurt him more by outing him from this deal of ours than ever by killing him. We're going to stand at nothing now to--'out' him. Let's get our minds fixed that way. If one plan don't succeed--another must." Standing there eye to eye Gordon won his way. He saw with satisfaction the fire in the old man's eyes slowly die down. Then he watched him reluctantly return to his chair. It was not until the rancher had struck a match and relit his cigar that Gordon ventured to return to his desk. "You're right, boy," Mallinsbee said at last. "You're right--and you've done right. If the whole scheme busts we--can't help it. But--but we'll out that--cur." The hall porter at the Carbhoy Building was perturbed. He was more than perturbed. He was ruffled out of his blatant superiority and dignity, and reduced to a condition when he could not state, with any degree of accuracy, whether the Statue of Liberty was a symbol of Freedom or a mere piece of cheap decoration for New York Harbor. The precincts of the beautiful colored marble entrance hall over which he presided had been invaded, against all rules, by a woman who obviously had no business there. Moreover, he had been powerless to stay the invasion. Also he had been forced to submit out of a sheer sense of politeness to the sex, a politeness it was not his habit to display even towards his wife. Furthermore, like the veriest underling, instead of the autocrat he really was, he had been ordered--_ordered_--to announce the lady's arrival to Mr. James Carbhoy, and forthwith conduct her to that holy of holies, which no other female, except the cleaner, had ever been permitted to enter. It was Mrs. James Carbhoy who had caused the deplorable upheaval. But Mrs. James Carbhoy was in no mood to parley with any hall porter, however gorgeous his livery. She was in no mood to parley even with her husband. She was disturbed out of her customary condition of passive acquiescence. She was heartbroken, too, and ready to weep against any manly chest with which her head came into contact. It is doubtful, even, if a Fifth Avenue policeman's chest would have been safe from her attentions in that direction. And surely distress must certainly be overwhelming that would not shrink from such support. James Carbhoy detected the signs the moment his door was opened, and his wife tripped over the fringe of the splendid Turkey carpet and precipitated herself into the great morocco arm-chair nearest to her, waving a bunch of letter-paper violently in his direction. "I've been to the Inquiry Bureau, and had a man detailed right away to go and find the boy," she burst out at once. Then all her mother's anxiety merged into an attack upon the man who silently rose from his desk and closed the door she had left open. "I don't know what to say to you, James," she went on. "I can't just think why I'm sitting right here in the presence of such a monster. Here you've driven our boy from the house. Maybe you've driven him to his death, or even worse, and I can't even get you to make an attempt to discover if he's alive or--or dead. This letter came this morning," she went on, holding the pages aloft, lest he should escape their reproach. "And if he hasn't gone and married some hussy there, out in some uncivilized region, I don't know a thing. S'pose he's married a half-breed or--or a squaw," she cried, her eyes rolling in horror at the bare idea. "It--it'll be your fault--your doing. You're just a cruel monster, and if it wasn't for our Gracie's sake I'd--I'd get a divorce. You--you ought to be ashamed, James Carbhoy. You ought--ought to be in--in prison, instead of sitting there grinning like some fool image." The millionaire leaned back in his chair wearily. "Oh, read the letter, Mary. You make me tired." "Tired? Letter, you call it," cried the excited woman. "I tell you it's--it's a lot of gibberish that no sane son of ours ever wrote. Oh! you're as bad as those men at the bureau. I made them read it, and--and they said he was a--bright boy. Bright, indeed! You listen to this and you can judge for yourself--if you've any sense at all." "DEAREST MUM: "I haven't written you in weeks, which should tell you that I am quite up to the average in my sense of filial duty. It should also tell you that I _hope_ I am prospering both in health and in worldly matters. I say 'hope' because nothing much seems certain in this world except the perfidy of human nature. It has been said that disappointment is responsible for all the hope in the world, but I'd like to say right here that that's just a sort of weak play on words which don't do justice to the meanest intelligence. I am full of hope and haven't yet been disappointed. Not even in my conviction that human nature has some good points, but bad points predominate, which makes you feel you'd, generally speaking, like to kick it plenty. "While I'm on the subject of human nature it would be wrong not to discriminate between male and female human nature. Male can be dismissed under one plain heading: 'Self'--a heading which embraces every unpleasant feature in life, from extreme moral rectitude, with its various branches of self-complacency, down to chewing tobacco, to me a symbol of all that is criminally filthy in life. Female human nature comes under a similar heading, only, in a woman's case, 'Self' is a combination of the two personalities, male and female. You see, 'Self,' in female human nature, is not a complete proposition in itself. Before it becomes complete there must be a man in the case, even if he be a disgrace to his sex. I will explain. You couldn't entertain any feeling or purpose without the old Dad coming into your focus. But with man it's different. The only reason a woman comes into his life at all is so that he can kick her out of it if she don't do just as he says and wants. I guess this sounds better to me writing from here than maybe it will to you in your parlor in New York. But it's easier to say things when you feel yourself shorn of the artificialities of life. "This is merely preliminary, leading up to two pieces of news I have to hand to you. The first is, I have discovered that woman is the greatest proposition inspired by a creative Providence for the delight of man, but in business, unless specially trained, she's liable to fall even below the surface scum which includes the lesser grade of biped called 'man.' The second is that man, generally, is a pretty disgusting brute, and I allow he deserves all he gets in life, even to lynching. Understand I am speaking generally, as a looker-on, whose eyes are no longer blinded by the glamour of wealth in a big city and the comforts of a luxurious home. "I feel I've got to say right here that to me, apart from the foregoing observations, woman is just the most wonderful thing in all this wonderful world. Her perfections and graces are just sublime; her understanding of man is so sympathetic that it don't seem to me she'd need more than two guesses to locate how many dollars he'd got in his pocket or the quality of the brain oozing out under his hat. "I guess her eyes are just the dandiest things ever. Furthermore, when they happen to be hazel, they got a knack of boring holes right through you, and chasing around and finding the smallest spark of decency that may happen to be lying hidden in the general muck of a man's moral makeup. They do more than that. I'd say there never was a man in this world who, under such circumstances, happens to become aware of some such spark, but wants to start right in and fan it into a big bonfire to burn up the refuse under which it's been so long secreted. That's how he's bound to feel--anyway, at first. "A woman's just every sort of thing a man needs around him. It don't seem a matter for worry if the sun-spots became a complete rash and its old light went out altogether. That feller would still see those wonderful eyes shining out of the darkness, giving him all the light he needed in which to play foolish and think himself all sorts of a man. "Guess when he'd worked overtime that way and sleep set him dreaming he'd make pictures he couldn't paint in a year. There'd be every sort of peaceful delight in 'em. There'd be lambs, and children without clothes, and birds and flowers. And the lambs would bleat, and the children sing, and the birds flutter, and the flowers smell, and all the world would be full of joy. Then he'd wake up. Maybe it would be different then. You see, a man awake figures his woman needs to look like the statue of Venus, be bursting with the virtues of a first-class saint, and possess the economical inspiration of a Chinee cook. "In pursuance of these discoveries of mine I feel that maybe I've got a wrong focus of our Gracie. Maybe when she gets sense, and sort of finds herself floating around in the divine beauties of womanhood, some escaped crank may chase along and figure she possesses some of the wonderful charms I've been talking about. Personally I wish our Gracie well, and am hoping for the best. Still, I feel whatever trouble she has getting a husband I don't guess it'll end there--the trouble, I mean. "To come to my second discovery, it has afforded me some pleasant moments, as well as considerable disgust and anger. It may seem difficult to associate these emotions without confusion. But were you to fully understand the situation you would realize that they could be associated in one harmonious whole. With anger coming first, you find yourself in a frenzied state of elation, capable of achieving anything, from murder down to robbing the dead. It is a splendid feeling, and saves one from the rust of good-natured ineptitude. Then come the pleasant moments, which may find themselves in extreme exertion and the general exercise of muscles, and even, in some cases--brains. Disgust is the necessary mental attitude under reaction. This is how my discovery affected me. But I fancy the object through which I made my second discovery was probably affected otherwise. I can't just say offhand. Maybe I'll learn later, and be able to tell you. "There is not a day passes but what I make discoveries of a more or less interesting nature. For instance, I've learned that there's nothing like three people hating one person to make for a bond of friendship between them. I'd say it's far more binding than marriage vows at the altar. This comes under the heading of 'more' interesting. Under the 'less' comes such things as--the only time that impulsive action justifies itself is when you're sure of winning out. I have given myself two examples of impulsive action only to-day. The one in which I have won out seems to have ruined the chances of the other. This is a confusion that doesn't seem to justify anything. Still, a philosopher might be able to disentangle it. "I should be glad if you would give the old Dad my best love, and tell him that the figures representing one hundred thousand dollars grow in size with the advancing weeks. Nor can I tell how big they will appear by the end of six months. If they grow in my view at the present rate, by the end of six months it seems to me I'll need to walk around looking through the wrong end of a telescope so as to get a place for my feet anywhere on this continent. However, as 'disappointment' has not yet appeared to create 'hope,' it is obvious that 'conviction' remains. "I regret that time does not permit me to write more, so I will close. Any further news I have to give you I will embody in another letter. "Your loving son, "GORDON. "P.S.--I have been thinking a great deal about Gracie lately, she being of the female sex. Of course, I could not compare her with a real woman, but I feel, with a little judicious broadening of her mind, say by travel or setting her out to earn her living, she might develop in the right direction. It is a thought worth pondering. Such a process might even have good results. "G." Mrs. James Carbhoy's angry and disgusted eyes were raised from her reading to confront her husband's amused smile. "Well?" she demanded. "Is it sunstroke, or--or----?" "That inquiry agent was a smart feller," the millionaire interrupted. "Gordon surely is a--bright boy." Mrs. Carbhoy's indignation leaped. And with its leap came another. She fairly bounced out of the chair she had occupied and hurled herself at the mahogany door of the office. "James Carbhoy, I shall see to this matter myself. I always knew you were merely a money machine. Now I know you have neither heart nor sense." She flung open the door. Again she tripped over the fringe of the carpet, and, with a smothered ejaculation, flew headlong in the direction of the hall porter's stately presence. CHAPTER XV IN COUNCIL There come days in a man's life which are not easily forgotten. Some poignant incident indelibly fixes them upon memory, and they become landmarks in his career. The next day became one of such in Gordon's life. It was just a little extraordinary, too, that memory should have selected this particular day in preference to the preceding one. The first of the two should undoubtedly have been the more significant, for it partook of a nature which appealed directly to those innermost hopes and yearnings of a youthful heart. Surely, before all things in life, Nature claims to itself the passionate yearning of the sexes as paramount. Gordon had fought for the woman he loved, and basked in her smiles of approval at his victory. Was not this sufficient to make it a day of days? The psychological fact remained, the indelible memory of the next day was planted on the mysterious photographic plates of his mental camera in preference. It was a day of wild excitement. It was a day of hopes raised to a fevered pitch, and then hurled headlong to a bottomless abyss of despair. It was a day of passionate feeling and bitter memories. A day of hopeless looking forward and of depression. Then, as a last and final twist of the whirligig of emotion, it resolved itself into one great burst of enthusiasm and hope. It started in at the earliest hour. Hip-Lee was preparing breakfast, and Gordon was still dressing. A note was brought from Peter McSwain. Gordon opened it, and the first emotions of an eventful day began to take definite shape. The note informed him that McSwain had been faithful to his promise. He, assisted by Mike Callahan of the livery barn, had worked strenuously. The results had been splendid amongst all the principal landholders in Snake's Fall and Buffalo Point. Prices this morning were "skied" prohibitively. The holders saw their advantage. Even if the railroad bought in Snake's Fall they would be "on velvet." They agreed that it was the first sound move made. They agreed that it was good to "jolly" a railroad. The men who did not hold in Buffalo only held insignificant property in Snake's Fall, which would be useless to the railroad. But should the railroad buy there, even these would be benefited. Gordon began to feel that palpitating excitement in the stomach indicative of a disturbed nervous system. Things were stirring. He examined the situation from the view point of yesterday's encounter. With these people working in with him, the future certainty began to look brighter than when he had retired to bed over-night. Mallinsbee came along after breakfast, and Gordon showed him McSwain's message. The rancher read it over twice. Then his opinion came in deep, rumbling notes. "That's sure what you needed," he said, with a shrewd, twinkling smile. "But I don't guess the shoutin's begun." "No?" Gordon eyed him uneasily. He had felt rather pleased. "We can't shout till Slosson talks," the rancher went on. "That talk of Peter's is still only our side of the play." "Yes." Gordon was at his desk. Then a diversion was created by the advent of a fat stranger with a large expanse of highly colored waistcoat, and a watchguard to match. He wanted to talk "sites," and spent half an hour doing so. When he had gone Mallinsbee offered an explanation which had passed Gordon's inexperience by. "That feller's worried," he observed. "He's got wind there's something doing, and is scared to death the speculators are to be shut out. He's going back to report to the boys. Maybe we'll hear from Peter again--later. I wonder what Slosson's thinking?" Gordon smiled. "I doubt if he can think yet," he said. "I allow he was upset yesterday. I'd give a dollar to see him when he starts to try and buy." "You're feeling sure." Mallinsbee's doubt was pretty evident. "Sure? I'm sure of nothing about Slosson except his particular dislike of me, and, through me, of you." "Just so. And when a man hates the way he hates you, if he's bright he'll try to make things hum." "He's bright all right," allowed Gordon. A further diversion was created. Two men arrived in a buckboard, and Mallinsbee's explanation was verified. They were looking for information. It was said the railroad was to boycott Buffalo Point. It was said, even, that they had bought in Snake's Fall. Was this so? And, anyway, what was the meaning of the rise in prices at that end? "Why, say," finished up one of the men, "when I was talking to Mason, the dry goods man, this morning, he told me there wasn't a speculator around who'd money enough to buy his spare holdings in Snake's. And when I asked him the figger he said he needed ten thousand dollars for two side street plots and twenty thousand for two avenue fronts. He's crazy, sure." Mallinsbee shook his head. "Not crazy. Just bright." When the man had departed, and Mallinsbee had removed the patch from his eye, he smiled over at Gordon. "Peter's surely done his work," he said. Gordon warmed with enthusiasm. If those were the prices ruling Mr. Slosson would have no option but to be squeezed between the two interests. Whatever his personal feelings, he must make good with his company. No agent, unless he were quite crazy, would dare face such prices for his principals. "I don't see that Slosson's a leg to stand on," he cried, his enthusiasm bubbling. "We've just got to sit around and wait." Mallinsbee agreed. "Sure. Sit around and wait," he said, with that baffling smile of his. Gordon shrugged, and bent over some figures he had been working on. Presently he looked up. "How's Miss Hazel this morning?" he inquired casually. He had wanted to speak of her before, but the memory of her father's anger yesterday had restrained him. Now he felt he was safe. "Just sore over things," said the old man, with a sobering of the eyes. "I talked to her some last night. She guesses she owes you a heap, but it ain't nothing to what I owe you." Gordon flushed. Then he laughed and shook his head. "No man or woman owes me a thing who gives me the chance of a scrap," he said. The old man smiled. "No," he agreed. "With a name like 'Van Henslaer'--you ain't Irish?" "Descendant of the old early Dutch." "Ah. They were scrappers, too." Gordon nodded and went on with his figures. So the morning passed. It was a waiting for developments which both men knew would not long be delayed. Mallinsbee was unemotional, but Gordon was all on wires drawn to great tension. The subtle warnings from Mallinsbee not to be too optimistic had left him in a state of doubt. And an impatience took hold of him which he found hard to restrain. The two men shared their midday meal. Mallinsbee wanted to get back to the ranch, but neither felt such a course to be policy yet. Besides, now that the crisis had arrived, Gordon was anxious to have his superior's approval for his next move. He had taken a chance yesterday. Now he wanted to make no mistake. The _dénouement_ came within half an hour of Hip-Lee's clearing of the table. It came with the sound of galloping hoofs, with the rush of a horseman up to the veranda. The two men inside the office looked at each other, and Gordon rose and dashed at the window. "It's McSwain," he said, and returned to the haven of his seat behind his desk. His announcement had been cool enough, but his heart was hammering against his ribs. "Then I guess things are going queer," said the rancher pessimistically. Gordon was about to reply when the door was abruptly thrust open, and the hot face and hotter eyes of Peter appeared in the doorway. "Well?" For the life of him Gordon could not have withheld that sharp, nervous inquiry. McSwain came right into the room and drew the door closed after him. Quite suddenly his eyes began to smile in that fashion which so expresses chagrin. He flung his hat on Gordon's desk and sat himself on the corner of it. Then he deliberately drew a long breath. "I'm as worried as a cat goin' to have kittens," he said. "That feller Slosson's beat us. Maybe he's stark, starin' crazy, maybe he ain't. Anyways he came right along to me this morning with a face like chewed up dogs' meat, with a limp on him that 'ud ha' made the fortune of a tramp, and a mitt all doped up with a dry goods store o' cotton-batten, and asked me the price of my holdings in Snake's. I guessed I wasn't selling my hotel lot, but I'd two Main Street frontages that were worth ten thousand dollars each, and a few other bits going at the waste ground price of five thousand each." "Well?" This time it was Mallinsbee's inquiry. "He closed the deal for his company, and planted the deposit." "He closed the deal?" cried Gordon thickly, all his dreams of the future tumbling about his ears. "Why, yes." McSwain regarded the younger man's hopelessly staring eyes for one brief moment. Then he went on: "I was only the first. This was after dinner. Say, in half an hour he's put his company in at Snake's to the tune of nearly a quarter million dollars. He's mad. They'll fire him. They'll repudiate the whole outfit. I tell you he never squealed at any old price. He's beat our play here. But how do we stand up there? A crazy man comes along and makes deals which no corporation in the world would stand for. There ain't a site in Snake's worth more'n a hundred dollars to a railroad who's got to boom a place. Well, if his corporation turns him down, how do we stand? Are they goin' to pay? No, sir; not on your life." "They'll have to stand it," said Mallinsbee. "They'll try and fight it," retorted Peter hotly. "And you can't graft the courts like a railroad can," put in Gordon quickly. "They'll have to stand it," repeated Mallinsbee doggedly. "An' I'll tell you how. Maybe Slosson's crazy. Maybe he's crazy to beat us, an' I allow he's not without reason for doin' it--now. But it would cost the railroad a big pile to shift that depot here. It would have been better for them in the end. You see, they'd have got their holdings in the township here for pretty well nix, and so they wouldn't have felt the cost of the depot. The city would have paid that, as well as other old profits. Anyway, the capital would have had to be laid out. In Snake's they are laying out capital in their holdings only. They'll get it back all right, all right--and profits. Slosson's relying on making up their leeway for them in the boom. He's takin' that chance, because he's crazy to beat--us." "And he's done it," said Gordon sharply. "Yep. He's done it," muttered McSwain regretfully. "He surely has," agreed Mallinsbee, without emotion. Gordon was the only one of the trio who appeared to be depressed. McSwain had the consolation of getting his profit in Snake's Fall. The only sense in which he was a loser was that his holdings in Buffalo Point were larger than in the other place. Therefore he was able to regard the matter more calmly, in the light of the fortunes of war. Mallinsbee, who had staked all his hopes on Buffalo Point, seemed utterly unaffected. A few minutes later McSwain hurried away for the purpose of watching further developments, promising to return in the evening and report. Neither he nor Gordon felt that there was the least hope whatever. Mallinsbee offered no opinion. When Peter had ridden off, and the two men were left alone, Gordon, weighed down with his failure, began to give expression to his feelings. He looked over at the strong face of his benefactor, and took his courage in both hands. "Mr. Mallinsbee," he said diffidently, "I want to tell you something of what I feel at the way things have gone through--my failure. I----" Mallinsbee had thrust his fingers into his waistcoat pocket, and now drew forth a cigar. "Say, have a smoke, boy," he said, in his blunt, kindly fashion. "That's a dollar an' a half smoke," he went on, "an' I brought two of 'em over from the ranch to celebrate on. Guess we best celebrate right now." It was a doleful smile which looked back at the rancher as Gordon accepted the proffered cigar. "But I----" "Say, don't bite the end off," interrupted Mallinsbee. "Here's a piercer." "Thanks. But you must let----" "I'll be mighty glad to have a light," the other went on hastily. Gordon was thus forced to silence, and Mallinsbee continued. "Say, boy," he said, as he settled himself comfortably to enjoy his expensive cigar, "a business life is just the only thing better than ranching, I'm beginning to guess. You got to figure on things this way: ranching you got so many hands around, so much grazin', so many cattle. Your only enemy is disease. So many head of cows will produce so many calves, and Nature does the rest. That's ranching in a kind of outline which sort of reduces it to a question of figures which it wouldn't need a trick reckoner to work out. Now business is diff'rent. Ther's always the other feller, and you 'most always feel he's brighter than you. But he ain't. He's just figurin' the same way at his end of the deal. So, you see, the real principles of commerce aren't dependent on the things you got and Nature, same as ranching. Your assets ain't worth the paper they're written on--till you've got your man where you want him. Now, to do that you got to ferget you ever were born honest. You've just got one object in life, and that is to get the other feller where you want him. It don't matter how you do it, short of murder. If you succeed, folks'll shout an' say what a bright boy you are. If you fail they'll say you're a mutt. The whole thing's a play there ain't no rules to except those the p'lice handle, and even they don't count when your assets are plenty. You'll hear folks shouting at revival meetings, an' psalm-smitin' around their city churches. You'll hear them brag honesty an' righteousness till you feel you're a worse sinner than ever was found in the Bible. You'll have 'em come an' look you in the eye and swear to truth, and every other old play invented to allay suspicions. And all the time it's a great big bluff for them to get you where _they_ want you. An' that's why the game's worth playing--even when you're beat. If business was dead straight; if you could stake your all on a man's word; if ther' weren't a man who would take graft; if you didn't know the other feller was yearning to handle your wad--why, the game wouldn't be a circumstance to ranching." "That sounds pretty cynical," protested Gordon. He, too, was smoking, but the failure of his scheme left him unsmiling. "It's the truth. We were trying to get Slosson where we wanted him. He's doing the same by us. So far he seems to monopolize most of the advantage. The question remaining to us now--and it's the only one of interest from our end of the line--is: Will the President of the Union Grayling and Ukataw Railroad do as I think he will--back his agent's play? Will he stand for his crazy buying? Will he fall for Slosson's game to get us where he wants us? I believe he will, but we can't be dead certain. Our only chance is to try and make it so he won't--even if the Snake's boys lose their stuff up there." Gordon was sitting up. His cigar was removed from the corner of his mouth and held poised over an ash-tray. There was a sharp look of inquiry in his eyes. "What's the President of the Union Grayling and Ukataw Railroad got to do with it?" he demanded quickly. The rancher raised his heavy brows. "This is a branch of his road, I guess." "A--a branch?" Gordon's breath was coming rapidly. "Sure. You see, it's a branch linking up with the Southern Trunk route. It runs into the Grayling line where it enters the Rockies. That's how you make the coast this way." "And this--is part of the Union Grayling system?" Gordon persisted, his blue eyes getting bigger and bigger with excitement. "Sure," nodded Mallinsbee, watching him closely. Then the explosion came. Gordon could contain himself no longer. He flung his newly lit dollar-and-a-half cigar on the floor with all the force of pent feelings and leaped to his feet. "Great Scott!" he cried. "The President of that road is my father!" "Eh?" Then, without another sign, Mallinsbee pointed reproachfully at the fallen cigar. "It cost a dollar an' a ha'f, boy." But Gordon was beside himself with excitement. A great flash of light and hope was shining through his recent mental darkness. It didn't matter to him at that moment if the cigar had cost a thousand dollars. "But--but don't you understand?" he almost yelled. "The President of the Union Grayling and Ukataw is my--father." "James Carbhoy." "Yes, yes. My name's Gordon Van Henslaer Carbhoy." Then quite suddenly Gordon sat down and began to laugh. Then he stooped and picked up his cigar. He was still laughing, while he carefully wiped the dust from the cigar's moistened end. "James Carbhoy's your--father?" Mallinsbee was no longer disturbed at the waste of the cigar. All his attention was fixed on that laughing face in front of him. Gordon nodded delightedly, while he once more thrust his cigar into the corner of his mouth. "You're thinkin' something?" Mallinsbee was becoming infected by the other's manner. "Sure I am." Gordon nodded. "I'm thinking a heap. Say, the fight has shifted its battle-ground. It's only just going to begin. Gee, if I'd only thought of it before! The Union Grayling and Ukataw! It's fate. Say, it isn't Slosson any longer. It's son and father. I've got to scrap the old dad. Gee! It's colossal. Say, can you beat it? I've got to make my little pile out of my old dad. And--he sent me out to make it and show him what I could do." "But how? I don't just see----" "How? How?" Gordon's laughing eyes sobered. He suddenly realized that he had only considered the humorous side of the position. His brain began to work at express speed. How was he to turn this thing to account? How? Yes--how? Mallinsbee watched him for many silent minutes. And during those minutes scheme after scheme, each one more wild than its predecessor, flashed through Gordon's brain. None of them suggested any sane possibility. He knew he was up against one of the most brilliant financiers of the country, who, in a matter like this, would regard his own son simply as "the other feller." He must trick him. But how? How? For a long time, in spite of his excited delight, Gordon saw no glamour of a hope of dealing successfully with his father. Then all in a flash he remembered something. He remembered he still had his father's private code book with him. He remembered Slosson. If Slosson could only be--silenced. In a moment he was on his feet again. "I've got it!" he cried exultantly. "I've got it, Mr. Mallinsbee! You said that it didn't matter, short of murder, how we got the other feller where we needed him. Will you come in on the wildest, most crazy scheme you ever heard of? We can beat the game, and we'll take money for nothing. We can make my dad build the depot right here and scrap Snake's Fall. We can make him--and without any murder. Will you come in?" "In what?" demanded a girlish voice from the veranda doorway. Gordon swung round, and Mallinsbee turned his smiling, twinkling eyes upon his daughter, who had arrived all unnoticed. "It's a scheme he's got to beat his father, gal," laughed Mallinsbee in a deep-throated chuckle. "His father?" Hazel turned her smiling, inquiring eyes upon the man who had rescued her yesterday. "Yes, James Carbhoy," said her father, "the President of this railroad." Hazel's eyes widened, and their smile died out. "Your father--the--millionaire--James Carbhoy?" she said. And her note of regret must have been plain to anybody less excited than Gordon. But Gordon was beyond all observation of such subtle inflections. He was obsessed with his wild scheme. He started forward. Walking past Hazel, he closed and locked the door. Then with alert eyes he glanced at the window. It was open. He shut it and secured it. Then he set a chair for Hazel close beside her father, and finally brought his own chair round and sat himself down facing them. "Listen to me, and I'll tell you," he grinned, his whole body throbbing with a joyous humor. "We're going to get the other feller where we need him, and that other feller is my--dear--old--Dad!" CHAPTER XVI SOMETHING DOING During the next two or three days the entire atmosphere of Snake's Fall underwent a significant change. All doubt had been set at rest. The whole problem of the future boom was solved, and David Slosson received as much homage in the conversation of the general run of the citizens as though he were the victorious general in a military campaign. The lesser people, who would receive the most benefit from the coming boom, regarded him with wide-eyed wonder at the stupendous nature of the wildly exaggerated reports of his dealings in land. They saw in him a Napoleon of finance, and remembered that their concerns were vastly more valuable through his operations. Men of maturer business instincts withheld their judgment and contented themselves with a rather dazed wonder. Others, those who had actually and already profited by his preliminary deals, chuckled softly to themselves, rubbed their hands gently, pocketed his paper and deposit money, and wrote him down "plumb crazy." But even so, there was a sober watchfulness as to the next movements in the approaching boom. Those who were the farthest seeing kept an eye wide open on Buffalo Point. So far as they could see it was not possible for the Buffalo Point interests to go under without a "kick." When would that "kick" come, and where would it be delivered? As for David Slosson, after his first effort, which had been the deciding factor in the future of Snake's Fall, he remained unapproachable. He was living at Peter McSwain's hotel, and occupied a bedroom and parlor, which latter served him as an office. Here he remained more or less invisible, possibly while his disfigured features underwent the process of mending, possibly nursing his wrath and plotting developments against the object of it. There was even another possible explanation. Maybe the plunge into the land market he had taken needed a great concentration of effort to completely manipulate it. Whatever it was, very little of the railroad company's agent was seen after his first setting defiant foot into the arena of affairs. McSwain was more than interested. The hotel-keeper seemed to have become obsessed with the idea that David Slosson was the only creature worth regarding on the face of the earth. This was after he, Peter, had spent the evening of that memorable first day of real movement, in the company of Silas Mallinsbee and Gordon, out at the office at Buffalo Point. Peter McSwain had always been an attentive landlord in his business, now he had suddenly become even more so, especially to David Slosson. There was not a single requirement that the agent could conceive, but Peter was on hand to supply it. He was more or less at his elbow the whole time. Then, too, Mike Callahan became a frequenter of the hotel, and even boarded there. Furthermore, a wonderful friendliness between him and Peter sprang up, which was so marked that the townspeople saw in it a combination of forces possibly foreshadowing the inauguration of a great hotel enterprise under their joint control. This also was after that first evening, when Mike Callahan had also formed one of the party at the office at Buffalo Point. Another point of interest, had it been noticeable by the more curious and interested of the frequenters of the hotel, was, that at any time that Peter McSwain found it necessary to absent himself from the hotel, Mike was always found in his place superintending the running of the establishment. However, these small details were merely an added puff of wind to the breath of general excitement prevailing. The one thought in the place seemed to be of those preparations necessary for the boom. Already certain contracts, long since prepared for such a happening, were put into operation. A number of buildings were started, or prepared to start. The news had been sent broadcast by interested citizens, and a fresh influx of people began and heavy orders from the various traders were placed with the wholesalers in the East. David Slosson in his quarters was made aware of these things, but somehow they raised small enough enthusiasm in him. Truth to tell, he was far too deeply concerned with the subtleties of his own affairs. His course of action had not been the wild plunge which Peter McSwain had suggested. On the contrary, such was his venomous nature that he had pitted his own abilities and fortune against the Buffalo Point interests in a carefully calculated scheme. For years he had been engaged in every corner of the United States and Canada in such work as he was now doing. In the process of such work, by methods of unscrupulous grafting and blackmail he had contrived a fortune of no inconsiderable amount. So that now he was no ordinary agent. He was a "representative" of the interests he worked for. In his case the distinction was a nice one. As the result of his encounter with Gordon he had resolved upon the crushing defeat of his adversaries by hurling the entire weight of his personal fortune into the scale. True enough he had bought without regard to price. He bought all he could in the best positions, and even in the quarters which would not meet with the railroad's approval. So his purchases had to be far greater, both in extent and price, than in the ordinary way he would have made at Buffalo Point. Having thus bought, and thrown his own money into the affair, this was his plan of dealing with the matter. First, he knew this boom was based on sound foundations. The future was assured by the vast coal-fields just opening up. The Bude and Sideley Coal Company was only the first. There would be others, many of them. With the railroad depot at Snake's Fall, the whole of the outlying positions of the city would boom with the rest. _Any land round it would be of enormous value_. So he purchased in every direction. He bought at "skied" prices from the big holders, so that the railroad should be satisfied as to positions, and he bought largely in the outlying parts of the city where no "skied" prices could rule. Then he pooled the price which he knew the railroad would pay, with his own fortune to pay the whole bill, put the railroad in _on the best sites at their own price_, and held the balance of his purchases for himself. It was his only means of justifying to his principals his declining to accept Buffalo Point's terms, and though it meant locking up his available capital in Snake's Fall, he knew, in the end, he would recoup himself with added fortune, and have wrecked those who had rejected his blackmail, and added to their audacity by personal assault. It pleased him to think that Hazel Mallinsbee would also be made to suffer for what he considered her outrageous treatment of himself. His method was certainly Napoleonic, and for its very audacity it should succeed. As he reviewed his position he could find no appreciable flaws. If the coal were there the place must boom, and--_he knew the coal was there_. So he was satisfied. Five days after making his first deal, those deals which had inspired so much derision, his whole operations were completed. He was feeling contented. It had been a strenuous time, and had demanded every ounce of energy and commercial acumen he possessed to complete the work. He knew that his whole future was at stake, but he also knew that he held the four aces which would be the finally deciding factors in the game. He felt free at last to notify the President of the Union Grayling and Ukataw Railroad of his transactions, and was confident of that shrewd financier's approval and felicitations. Nor were the latter the least desirable in his estimation. He had already dined in his parlor, as had been his custom since his encounter with Gordon. But now he intended to move abroad. He felt himself to be the arbiter of the fate of these "rubes," as he characterized the citizens of Snake's Fall, and he did not see the necessity for denying himself the adulation such a position entitled him to. With a self-satisfied feeling he picked up a long code message he had written out and thrust it in his pocket. Then, carefully putting away all other private papers into his dressing-case, and locking it, he sauntered leisurely out of his room. He intended to give himself his first breathing space for five days, and he lounged downstairs to the hotel office. Sure enough, the first person he encountered was Peter McSwain. The man looked hot, but then he always looked hot. His smile of welcome was almost servile, and David Slosson felt pleased at the sign. The consequence was, his manner promptly became something more than autocratic. There was a domineering note in his voice, and a cool insolence in his regard of his host. Peter remained quite undisturbed. His mind went back to the scene in the office at Buffalo Point on the eventful first evening, and an even greater servility beamed out of his hot eyes. "Yes, sir," he cried, in answer to Slosson's inquiry as to the movements in the town. "Movements? Why, I'd sure say you've set this place jumping as though you'd opened up an earthquake under it. I tell you frankly, Mr. Slosson, sir, we been waitin' days and days with our eyes on you for a lead. I don't guess it means a thing to a gentleman like you, but if you'd been a sort o' cock angel right down from the clouds on an aeroplane you couldn't ha' been blessed more'n the folks right here have been blessin' your name these last days, since you outed that bum outfit down at Buffalo Point." "They're a pretty rotten crowd," agreed Slosson, well enough pleased. "Though I say it, it takes a man of experience to handle a crowd like that. They're sheer blackmailers, but I don't stand for a thing like that. You see, our play is to serve the public right. Well, seeing Snake's Fall is a straight proposition I guess I had to treat 'em right. I figure I put a heap of dollars in the way of Snake's Fall. You won't do so bad yourself?" Peter smiled amiably. "I can't kick." "Kick?" Slosson's eyes widened. "Guess you ought to get right on your knees, and thank--me." Then he laughed. "Say, maybe you'll start putting up a--real hotel." His contempt was marked as he let his glance wander over his simple and primitive surroundings. Peter took no sort of umbrage. "Well, that was how I was figurin'. Y'see I got to be first in that line. Since you downed Mallinsbee's crowd of crooks, why, it's going to make things easy. Say, you don't figure to sink dollars that way yourself? Maybe you could get right in on the ground floor." His cordial tone pleased the agent, but he pretended to consider the matter too small for his participation. "I'd need a big holding," he laughed. "I ain't time for one-hossed shows. Still, I thank you for the offer. Guess the Mallinsbee crowd are kicking 'emselves to death. What?" Peter nodded impressively, and drew closer in his confidence. "Kickin'? That don't describe it. They deserve it, too. They kep' us dancing around guessin' with their patch of grazin'. Say, this town owes you a big heap, an' I'm glad. There's one thing owin' a real smart gent like you, Mr. Slosson, sir, an' quite another owin' a crowd of crooks like Mallinsbee's. This town ain't likely to forget. There's things like testimonials around, sir," he added, winking significantly, "and when a city's making a big pile through a man, testimonials are like to take on a mighty handsome shape." Slosson grinned. "I shouldn't discourage 'em," he said pleasantly. "The folks 'll see where they are in a few days. Here." He pulled out his long cypher message from his pocket, and held it out towards Peter triumphantly. "You can read it if you like. You won't be able to get its meaning, but I'll tell you what it is. It's to tell my company to go right ahead. They're in. That means that Snake's Fall is made, sir, completely and finally made, and the Mallinsbee ground sharks are plumb down and out. And I'm glad to say I've been the means of fixing things that way for you." Peter took the message. He took it rather quickly--almost too quickly. He read it. The words were so much gibberish to him, and it was far too long to remember. But with a quick effort he took in the one word of address, and the first six words of the message. Then he handed it back. "Do you need that sent off, sir?" he inquired easily, but his heart was beating quickly. Slosson shook his head. "Guess I'll send it myself. I'm going across to the depot right now." He folded up the paper. "That's the sentence on the Buffalo Point crooks, and its execution will follow--quick." "An' serve 'em darned right," cried Peter sharply. "I ain't time for crooks like them. You're right, sir. Don't take chances. See that sent off yourself, sir. I'm real glad you come along here. There'll be fortunes lying around in your track, an' then there's always them--testimonials. Say, you'll just excuse me, sir, but there's some all-fired 'rubes' shoutin' for drinks in the bar. I----" Slosson laughed. "Yes, you get right on. The boys have money to burn in this city now. They'll have more later. I'll get going." He moved off and passed through the crowded office, and out of the hotel, while Peter dashed swiftly into his private office. He went straight to his desk and wrote on paper all he could remember of the code message. Then he stood up and swore softly to himself. For some moments he let himself go at the expense of the man he had just been talking to. Then he became calmer, and his face grew thoughtful. Then, after awhile, a smile grew in his hot eyes, and he murmured audibly-- "I wonder. Steve Mason's a good boy, an' he don't draw a big pile slamming the keys of his instruments over there. I wonder." After that he left the office and hurried out to the veranda, and stood watching, in the evening light, for the figure of David Slosson leaving the telegraph operator's office. Gordon and Hazel Mallinsbee were riding amongst the hills. Gordon was on Sunset, and Hazel's brown mare was reveling in the joy of a fresh morning gallop through her native valleys and woodlands. Ever since the memorable day when he discovered that Slosson was his father's agent, Gordon had lived in a state of almost feverish delight. At his instigation they had closed up the office at Buffalo Point, to give color to their defeat by the agent. At his instigation they had arranged many other more or less significant matters. But it had been Mallinsbee's own suggestion that Gordon should take up his abode at the ranch instead of sharing the hospitality of Mike Callahan's livery barn in Snake's Fall. It was a glorious summer day and the mountain breezes came down the hillsides with that refreshing cool belonging to the heights above. The joy of living was thrilling both of them as they rode, and their horses, too, seemed to have caught the infection. But there was something more than the mere joy of life and health actuating them now. There was an excitement such as neither could have experienced during those long, dull hours which, during the past weeks, had been spent in the now closed office at Buffalo Point. They raced along down a wide green valley lined upon either side by wood-clad slopes of hills, which mounted up towards the blue for several hundreds of feet. Ahead of them shone the white ramparts of the mountain range. They scintillated in the sunlight, a shimmering wall of snow and ice many thousands of feet high. Before them lay miles and miles of broken hills, rising higher and higher as they approached the ultimate barrier of the Rockies themselves. The riders were in a perfect maze of valleys, and woods, and mountain streams, and hills; a maze from which it seemed well-nigh impossible to disentangle themselves. Yet, with her trained eyes, and wonderful inborn knowledge of hill-craft, Hazel piloted their course without hesitation, without question. The whole region was an open book to her in the summer time. For miles and miles through that broken land she knew every headland, every shadowy wood, every green valley and gurgling stream. As she often told Gordon, it was her world--her home and her world, it belonged to her. "But I should lose myself in five minutes," Gordon protested, as they swung out of the valley and into a narrow cutting between two sheer-faced cliffs, overgrown with scrub and small bush, which left hardly any room for their horses along the banks of a trickling brook which divided them. "Surely you would," Hazel, who was now in the lead, called back over her shoulder. "And I guess I should just as soon lose my way in your wonderful New York. You follow right along, and I'll promise to bring you home by supper." Then, with laughing anxiety, "But for goodness' sake don't lose our lunch out of your saddle bags. We'll be starving after another hour of this." The warning startled Gordon into an apprehensive survey of his saddle bags. They were quite secure, however, and he followed closely on the mare's heels. Quickly it became apparent that they were traveling a well-worn cattle path overgrown by the low scrub. It was difficult, but Hazel followed it unfalteringly. Half a mile up this narrow, the great facets of the hills on either side began to close in on them, and still further ahead Gordon discovered that they almost met overhead, the narrowest possible crack alone dividing them. He was wondering in which direction lay their way out of such a hopeless cul-de-sac when he saw Hazel suddenly bend her body low over her mare's neck, and, at the same moment, she called back a warning to him. "'Ware overhead rocks!" she cried. Gordon instantly followed her example, and kept close behind her as she entered a passage which was practically a tunnel. Now their difficulties were increased tenfold. The tunnel, in spite of the narrow split in its roof, was almost dark. The low bush completely hid the track and the little tumbling creek beside the path had deepened to a six-foot cut bank. Gordon became troubled. But it was not for himself so much as for Hazel. His horse, Sunset, was steady as a rock, but the brown mare ahead was as timid as a kitten. He glanced anxiously at the figure of the girl. The journey seemed not to trouble her one bit. Her mare, too, considering her timidity, was wonderfully steady. No doubt it was the result of perfect confidence in the clever little creature on her back, he thought. His gaze passed still further ahead. He was looking for the termination of this mysterious winding tunnel. But twenty yards was the limit of his vision and, so far, no end was in sight. Suddenly Hazel's merry laugh came echoing back to him. "Say, isn't this a great place?" she cried. "It's like one of those enchanted lands you read of in fairy books." Then she added a further warning. "Keep low. We're nearly through." The horses scrambled on in the semi-darkness. But for Gordon the enchantment of the place was passing, and he was glad to know they were nearly through. A few minutes later he saw Hazel begin to straighten herself up in the saddle. He followed her example with some caution and considerable relief. The roof was becoming higher, so, too, was the light increasing. Gordon breathed a sigh. "I don't know about the lunch," he said. "I've bumped the walls for some considerable time. Is there much more of it?" But before Hazel's reply could reach him his inquiry was answered by the cavern itself. All in an instant they rounded a bend and a dazzling beam of sunlight banished the darkness and nearly blinded him. Two minutes later he pushed his way through a dense screen of willows, and emerged upon the bank of a beautiful, serene lake of absolutely transparent, sunlit water. "Behold the spring which is the source of that little stream," cried Hazel, indicating the lake spread out before them. "Isn't it a fairy-book picture? Look round you. Oh, say, I just love it to death." Gordon gazed about him in wonder. The lake was quite small, but its setting was as beautiful as any artist could have painted it. All around it, on two-thirds of its circumference, a hundred different shades of green illumined the wonderful tangled vegetation. He looked for the place from which they had emerged. It was completely hidden. Gone, vanished as if by magic. All that remained were the great hills at the back and the wooded banks of the lake at their feet. He looked down at the water. Clear, clear; it was clear as crystal. Then he turned towards the sun, and something of the wonder of it all thrilled him. A sea, a calm, unruffled sea of the greenest grass he had ever beheld stretched out before him. Or was it a broad river of grass? Yes, it was a wide river, perhaps two miles wide, with great mountainous banks on either side. To him they seemed to be standing at its source, and its flow carried his gaze away on towards the west, where, above all, miles and miles away, shone the white peaks of the mountains. The banks of this superb valley were deeply wooded from the base to the soaring summits. Only were the hues of the foliage varied. Right at the foot the green was bright, but less bright than the tall sweet grass. While higher, the dark foliage of pine woods rose somberly on stately towering blackened trunks. At last Gordon turned back to the girl, who had sat watching the intent expression of his face. "Tell me," he said, and he made a comprehensive gesture with one hand. Hazel was waiting only for that sign. [Illustration: Hazel Was Waiting for That Sign] "Where we stand now we are twenty miles from the ranch," she said. "The only other outlet to this valley is twenty miles further on to the west. If you could not find our secret passage again, you would have to travel sixty miles through the most amazing country to get back home." "Sixty miles back?" Gordon muttered. "Sure," returned Hazel. Then she laughed. "Even then, unless you'd been pretty well born in these hills you'd never find the way." Gordon nodded, and glanced in the direction whence they had come. There was not a sign of the tunnel to be seen. The foliage screen looked impenetrable. He began to smile. "And your cattle station?" he questioned. "Come on." Hazel turned her mare away, and set off at a brisk canter. She followed the line of the hills at the edge of the wide plain of sweet grass. Gordon followed her, marveling at the place, but more still at his guide. A quarter of an hour's gallop under the shade of the most amazingly beautiful woods he ever remembered to have seen, brought them to a clearing, in the midst of which stood a smallish frame house. It was more or less surrounded by a number of large, heavy-timbered corrals. The whole place was perfectly hidden by the screen of woods from view of the valley beyond. Hazel leaped out of the saddle and passed hurriedly into the house. Next minute she returned with two picket ropes. "We'll picket them both while we eat and get a peek around the place. We aren't yearning for a twenty-mile tramp back." Gordon agreed. He remained silent while they off-saddled and secured their horses beyond the woods on the open grass. He was thinking hard. He was reviewing the purpose which had brought them to this wonderful outworld hiding-place. Nor were his thoughts wholly free from doubts and qualms. At length the work was done. Their saddle blankets were laid out to dry in the sun, and the saddle bags were emptied of the ample lunch Hazel had carefully provided. The girl was entirely mistress of the situation. Gordon felt his helplessness out here in the secret heart of nature. "Shall we eat first or----?" Hazel broke off questioningly. "Can't we look around the house while the kettle boils?" inquired Gordon, looking up from the fire he had kindled after some difficulty. He was kneeling on the bare, dusty ground which had been trodden by the hoofs of thousands of cattle in the past. The girl nodded. Her delight in being this man's cicerone was superlative. This was different from the days she had spent with David Slosson. "Sure. Come on," she cried. "And there's a well out back where we can fill the kettle." They hurried off to the well, and, between them, rather like two children, they filled the kettle. Then they returned and placed it on the fire, and again approached the house. It was a squat, roomy structure of the ordinary frame type, but it was in perfect preservation even to its paint, and Hazel pointed this out as they approached. "You see this was my daddy's first home," she said. "It's where I was born." She drew a deep, happy sigh. "I seem to remember every stick of it. And my daddy, why, he just loves it, too. That's why, though we don't use it now, he has it painted every year, and kept clean. You see, when my daddy built this for my momma he hadn't a pile of dollars. It was just all he could afford, and he didn't ever guess he'd have a great deal to spend on a home. We lived here years, and our cattle grazed out in the valley beyond. I used to spend my whole time on the back of a small broncho mare, chasing up and down the hills and woods. And that's how I found that tunnel we came through. My, but I do love this little place!" "It's great," agreed Gordon warmly. "I'd call it a--a poet's home." The girl flung open the front door and led the way in. Instantly Gordon had the surprise of his life. It was furnished. Completely and comfortably furnished. What was more, the furniture, though old, was in perfect repair, and the room looked as though it had been recently occupied. "When you said 'disused,'" Gordon exclaimed, "I--I--thought it would be empty." The girl smiled a little sadly. "No," she said. "We couldn't forsake it. It would be like forgetting my poor momma. No. The furniture and things are just as we used them when she was with us." She passed from the parlor to the bedrooms, and the lean-to kitchen and washhouse. Everything was in perfect order, except for a slight dust which had gathered. "You see, Hip-Lee and one of the choremen and I can fix it up in a day ready for occupation. That's how my daddy likes to have it. My daddy loved our lovely momma. I don't guess he'll ever get over losing her." Then she looked up, and her shadow of sadness had gone. "Come along," she cried. "You've seen it all. So we'll just shut it up again, and get back to our camp. I'm guessing that kettle'll be boiled dry." But the kettle was only just on the boil, and the girl made the tea while Gordon set out the food and plates. Then, when all was ready, they sat down to their _tête-à-tête_ picnic with all the enjoyment of two children, but with that between them which seemed to fill the whole air of the valley with an intoxicating sense of happiness and delight. "And what about that other place--that log and adobe shack you told me of?" demanded Gordon, taking his tea-cup from the girl's hand. Hazel laughed. "That's a dandy shack, full of ants and crawly things, and its roof leaks water. It's up on a hill where the wind just blows pneumonia through it. If I showed it you I sort of reckon you'd be scared to use it for--for anything." Gordon joined in her laugh. "I guess it'll be the real thing for my job. Say, don't you sort of feel like a criminal? I do." He laughed again as he passed the plate of cut meats to his companion. "Criminals?" laughed Hazel buoyantly. "Why, I just feel as if you and my daddy and I were all hanging by the neck on the highest peak of the Rockies. Say, you're sure--sure of things?" "I guess there's nothing sure in this world, except that no saint was ever a financial genius. Sure? Say, how can we be sure till we've fixed things the way we want 'em? But I tell you we've got to make good. I won't believe we can fail. We mustn't fail. If only Peter can get hold of Slosson's messages. Only one will do. If he can do that, and it's what I expect, why--the whole thing becomes just a practical joke, only not so harmful." Gordon attacked his food with a healthy appetite, and the girl watched him happily. "It's the cleverest thing ever," she cried, "and--and I can't think how you thought of it, and, having thought of it--dared to attempt to carry it out." Gordon smiled. "I'm not clever, but--I did think of it, didn't I? And as to carrying it out, why, I guess we're the same as the others. We're 'sharps.' We're land pirates. We're ground sharks." Hazel set her cup down. "But you are clever. I didn't mean it that way." "You're the first person ever told me." "Am I?" Hazel blushed. Nor did she know why. Gordon, watching her, sat entranced. "Sure. Most everybody reckons I'm just a--a bit of an athlete--that's all. My sister Gracie never gets tired of telling me what an all-sorts-of-fool I am." "How old is your--Gracie?" "Thirteen." "That makes a diff'rence." "Oh, she doesn't get it all her own way," laughed Gordon. "I hide her chocolates. That makes her mad. She's a passion for candy. But the old dad is a bully feller. He's all sorts of a sportsman, and he guesses that the best day in his life will be the one in which he finds I'm not a fool." Hazel gurgled merrily. "That'll come along soon." Gordon nodded. "Gee! It makes me laugh to think of it. But say," he went on, a moment later, "I'm glad you don't think me a fool. I'm just longing for----" But he broke off and abruptly rose from the ground. Their meal was finished. "Do we wash things or do we just pack 'em up?" "Oh, we'll pack 'em," said Hazel, rising hastily. A sort of nervous hurry was in her movement. "We won't rob the choreman and Hip-Lee of their rights. Say, you bring up the horses, and I'll pack. We can water them at the lake as we pass out--the horses, I mean." A few minutes later Gordon returned with the horses. As he rounded the bend in the now overgrown track, which had once formed the main approach to the little ranch, and caught sight of the graceful fawn-clad figure moving about, he stood for a moment to feast his eyes upon the picture the girl made. She was all he had ever dreamed of in life. There was nothing of the delicate exotic here, none of the graceful gowning of a city, concealing an unhealthy body reduced almost to infirmity by the unwholesome night life of modern social demands. She was just a living example of the grace with which Nature so readily endows those who obey her wonderful, helpful laws. The perfect contours, the elasticity of gait, the clear, keen, beautiful eyes, and the pretty tanning under the shade of her wide-brimmed hat. The beating of the man's heart quickened. All his feelings rose, and set him longing to tell her all that was in his heart. He wanted then and there to become her champion for all time. A great passionate wave set the warm blood of youth surging to his head. He felt that she belonged to him, and him alone. Had he not fought for her as those warriors of old would have done? Yes, somehow he felt that she was his, but, with a strange cowardice, he feared to put his fate to the test through words which could never express half of all he felt. He longed and feared, and he told himself---- But Hazel was looking in his direction. She saw him standing there, and peremptorily summoned him to her presence. "For goodness' sake," she cried. "Dreaming when there's work to be done. Bring them right along, or we'll never get started. There's all twenty miles before supper." Gordon hurried forward, and as he came up he made his excuses. "I had to look," he said apologetically. "You see it isn't every day a feller gets a chance to see a real picture--like I've seen. Say, these hills, I guess, can hand all that Nature can paint that way, but you need a human life in it to make a picture real to just an ordinary man's eyes. I--had to look." But Hazel seemed to have become suddenly aware of something of that which lay behind his words, and she hastily, and with flushed cheeks, turned to the work of saddling her horse. Gordon attempted to help, but she laughingly declined any aid. She pointed at the saddle bags on his saddle. "They're packed," she said. "Say, I'll show you how to refold your blanket. This way." Gordon spent some delicious moments struggling with his blanket under the girl's superintendence, and his regret was all too genuine when, at last, it was placed on Sunset's back with the saddle on the top of it. As for the mare, she was saddled and bitted in the time it took him to cinch Sunset up. By the time he had adjusted the bit Hazel was in the saddle, gazing down at his efforts with merry, laughing eyes. "It does seem queer," she said. "Here are you, big and strong, and capable of most anything. Yet it puzzles you around a saddle--which is so simple." Gordon climbed into his saddle at last, and smiled round at her. "I'm learning more than I ever guessed I'd learn when I left New York. I've learned a heap of things, and you've taught me most of them. Sometime I'll have to tell you all you've taught me, and then--and then, why, I guess maybe you'll wonder." He laughed as they moved off. But somehow Hazel kept her eyes averted. "Now for the enchanted tunnel again," he cried, in a less serious mood. "More enchantment, more delight! And then--then to the serious criminal work we have on hand. Criminal. It sounds splendid. It sounds exciting. We're conspirators of the deepest dye." CHAPTER XVII THE CODE BOOK It seemed as though Peter McSwain never did anything without perspiring. He perspired now with the simple effort of thought. But it was a considerable effort and a considerable thought. He crowded more of the latter into five minutes, he assured himself, than a bankrupt Wall Street man could have done on the eve of settling day. The object of his thought was the telegraph operator and the subject of it the interesting thesis of bribery. Then, too, there were the side issues, which included David Slosson, a telegraph message, and two men waiting at the other end of things for the result of his share in the proceedings. He made no attempt at pleasant conversation with the row of guests lounging with feet skywards on the shady veranda. For the time at least the affairs of his hotel were quite secondary. It seemed to him just now that these men were the misfortunes of a commercial interest. They were the things that kept him living concealed beneath an exterior of polite attention which he detested. He had never had a chance of being his real self until this moment. There was work of a delicate nature to be performed, work which was to prove his ability in those finer channels where individuality would count and genuine cleverness must be displayed. A lot was depending upon his capacity. This feeling inspired him, and the dew on his forehead became a moist and shallow lake that was already overflowing its banks. At the end of five minutes, after having seen David Slosson leave the telegraph office and move off down the Main Street, this lake became a streaming torrent as he left the veranda and passed round to the back of the hotel. This retrograde movement was a part of his deeply laid plans. He had no object in visiting either his barn or his kitchens. The Chinese cook possessed no interest for him at the moment, and as for the hens and the team of horses, and his lame choreman who tended them, they had never been farther from his thoughts. He appeared interested, however, and mopped his forehead several times as he surveyed the scene with attentive eye. Then he passed on without a word. Now his route became circuitous. He walked a hundred yards away from the town, and appeared to be contemplating the open country with weighty thoughts in his mind. Then he turned away and moved in another direction, towards the railroad track. Again he paused with measuring eye. Then he crossed the track and strode off in a fresh direction. This time he was moving northwards away from the depot and telegraph office. Those who now chanced to observe him lost all interest in his movements, and for the time his perspiring face was forgotten. By the time he came within view of the hotel veranda again his very existence had been forgotten in the midst of the busy talk of his guests. And so he was enabled to reach the telegraph office from the farther side without arousing comment. He casually opened the door and found himself standing before the barrier of the paper-littered office. The operator was at his instrument table ticking out a message in that alert, concentrated manner peculiar to all telegraphists. The man glanced round at his visitor and continued his work without a sign of recognition, and the hotel-keeper propped himself on the counter and drew a cigar from his vest pocket. By the time he had lit it satisfactorily the ticking of the instrument ceased, and a sigh of relief warned him that Steve Mason was free. He glanced across at the table with his hot eyes and a shadowy smile. "Busy these times, Steve," he said genially. "The old days when we had time to sit around in this office and yarn are as far back as the flood. Say, you ain't got paralysis of the arm yet? Maybe you work 'em both. Hev a smoke?" Steve smiled wearily. "Don't you never take on operatin', Peter," he said, accepting the proffered smoke. "Thanks. What's this? One of those 'multiflavums' of yours you keep for drummers?" Peter shook his head. "My own smokes. They match the times. We're all making fortunes." "Are we?" "Well--ain't we?" "None of it's come my way," said Steve, lighting his cigar. "But that's always the way. We get shunted to a bum town like this on a branch, and they pay us salary according. If the city makes a break and gets busy and we're nearly crazy with overwork they don't boost us up. Overwork don't mean overpay, nor overtime. They ain't raised me a dollar. I'm going to get right on the buck if things keep up. I tell you I've eaten three meals in this office to-day, with my hand on the key, and I--I'm just sick to death. I don't take or send again this night." "Guess you'll be able to make a break when you sell your holdings," McSwain went on sympathetically. He raised the barrier and stepped into the office, and sat himself in a chair he had often occupied in the unruffled days before the coal. Steve laughed and sat himself on the corner of his instrument table. "I ain't got no holding. You can't buy land on a hundred dollars a month. No, sir. What with the Chinee laundry and my boarding-house, I guess I need to smoke your 'multiflavums' and drink your worst rye. Why, I ain't got a balance over to buy an ice-cream-soda in winter." "You sure are badly staked," murmured Peter. They smoked in silence for some moments. The atmosphere of the little office was opening the pores of Peter's skin again. "Say," he went on presently, mopping his brow carefully, "I made quite a stake out of that agent feller, Slosson. Somewheres around ten thousand dollars. Quite a piece of money, eh? I ain't sure he's a fool or a pretty wise guy." "He's the railroad man," said Steve significantly. "Yes. That don't make him out a fool, does it?" "I'd smile." "So'd I--if I knew more. I'd give a hundred dollars to see what's to happen in the next week or so. I've got a big stake here, if the railroad don't shift the depot. Slosson says they won't. Says he's bought all he needs right here for his company. I take it he's helped himself, too. Still, I'd like to know. The boys back at the hotel are fallin' right over 'emselves to get in. They reckon this place is a cinch--since Slosson's bought. I'd like to be sure." Steve laughed. He read through his friend's purpose now. The visit was not, as he told himself, for nothing. Peter was looking for information which it would be a serious offense for him to give--if he possessed any, which he didn't. "Guess there's nothing doing, Peter," he said slyly. "What d'you mean?" The hotel-keeper's eyes were hotter than ever. But there was no resentment in them. "Why, I just don't know a thing what Slosson's doing. And if I did I couldn't tell you. It would be a criminal offense. Slosson ain't sent a word over the line since he started to buy metal until to-night, and the message I've just sent for him is in code, so, as far as I'm concerned, it's so much Greek. I don't know who it's to, even. That's why I guess there's nothing doing." "No--I s'pose not. I s'pose codes can be read, though? There's experts who worry out any old code. Guess it's mighty interestin'. If Slosson's sendin' in code I guess he's got something in it he don't need folks to know. That makes it more worrying." Peter heaved a great sigh of longing. The other shook his head. "You've got to find the key to 'em," he said. "Yep--a Bible, or some queer old book. Maybe the 'History of the United States.' Say, I'd hate to chase up the 'History of the United States' looking for a key. Maybe it would be interestin', though. Say----" "You couldn't do it in a month of years," laughed Steve, humoring his friend. "What would it be worth to you to be able to read his code?" "Oh, maybe I'd make fifty thousand dollars." "Whew! That's some money." "Sure. I'd like to try. Say, boy, I'll hand you five hundred dollars to let me take a copy of that message. All you need do is just leave it on your table there for five minutes and lock the outer door. Then just pass right into the other room till the five minutes is up. I'll hand you the bills right here an' now. I'd like to figure on that message. Is it a bet?" Steve shook his head. He was scared. He knew the consequences of discovery to himself too well. It was penitentiary. It was the equivalent of tapping wires. But Peter was unfolding a big roll of bills, and the temptation of handling that money was very great. "You just need to copy the message out? That all?" "Just that. No more." "You won't need to disfigure my record?" "Sure not." Peter grinned. He was sweating, profusely. He felt he was on a hot scent and likely to make a kill. "Only to make a _copy_. It's a big bunch of money for just a copy," Steve demurred suspiciously. Peter laughed. "Say, boy, we're old friends. I ain't out to do you a hurt. All I need is to try and worry out that code and know things. If I was sure of being able to read it, why, this five hundred would be five thousand, and worth it all to me, every cent of it. If I can't read that code, then I'll just hand you back my copy, and no harm's done. See? I tell you I wouldn't hurt you for more than the money I hope to make. Is it a bet?" Steve passed out through the barrier and turned the key in the door. Then he came back. "I'll take that money." "Good." Peter paid it over, and then watched the other as he took the original message which Slosson had written off a file and laid it on the table beside a blank form. "Say, be as sharp as you can over it," Steve said urgently. Then he passed into the inner room and closed the door. The interior of Mike Callahan's livery barn was typical of a small prairie town. Rows of horse-stalls ran down either side of it, from one end to the other. At the far end sliding doors opened out upon an enclosure, round which were the sheds sheltering a widely varied collection of rigs and buggies. Also here there was further accommodation for horses. Just inside the main barn, to the left, the American Irishman had two small rooms. The one at the front, with its window on Main Street, was his office. Behind this, dependent for light upon a window at the side of the building, was a harness-room crowded with saddles and harness of every description, also a bunk on which Mike usually slept when he kept the barn open at night. It was late at night now, about midnight on the day following Peter McSwain's momentous effort with Steve Mason. Four men were gathered together in profound council in Mike's harness-room. The atmosphere of the place was poisonous. A horse blanket obscured the window, and the door was shut and locked, although the barn itself was closed for the night, and there was small enough chance of intrusion. Still, every precaution had been taken to avoid any such contingency. A single guttering candle stuck in the neck of a black bottle illumined the intent faces of the men. Gordon was sitting at a small table with a sheet of paper in front of him and a small morocco-bound book beside it. Silas Mallinsbee and Peter McSwain were sitting upon Mike Callahan's emergency bunk, while the owner of it contented himself with an upturned bucket near the door. Cigar-smoke clouded the room and left the atmosphere choking, but all of them seemed quite impervious to its inconvenience. For awhile there was no other sound than the rustle of the leaves of Gordon's book and the scratching of the indifferent pen he had borrowed from Mike. Then, after what seemed interminable minutes, he looked up from his task with a transparent smile. "It's all right," he said in a low, thrilling tone. "I guess we've got the game in our hands. He's used the governor's code." "You can read it?" demanded Peter quickly, leaning forward with a stiff, tense motion. "Is it what we guessed?" inquired Mike, with a sigh of relief. Mallinsbee alone offered no comment. Gordon nodded in answer to each inquiry. He was reading what he had written over to himself. Then he turned sharply to Peter. "For goodness' sake give me a cigar. I need something to keep me from shouting." His tone, and the expression of his eyes were full of excitement. "It's the greatest luck ever," he went on, while Peter produced a cigar and passed it across to him. "This feller's in direct communication with the governor. You see, this code is the private one. I had it as the dad's secretary. The manager had it, and, of course, my father. No one else. So it's just about certain this thing was an important matter for Slosson to be allowed to use it. Now I'd never heard of this Slosson before, so that it's also evident he's one of my father's secret agents. A matter which further proves the affair's importance." He lit his cigar and puffed at it leisurely as he contemplated his paper with even greater satisfaction. "This is addressed direct to the old man, which--makes our work doubly easy," he went on. "Also the nature of the message helps us. If it had been to our manager it would have been more difficult to work out my plans." He raised the paper so that the candlelight fell full upon it. "This is the transcript. 'Occipud, New York'--that's my father," he added in parenthesis. "'Have bought in Snake's Fall, working on instructions. Buffalo Point crowd out for a heavy graft. Utterly unscrupulous lot, offering impossible deal. Have turned them down on grounds provided for in your instructions. Snake's Fall everything you require. Would suggest you come up here incognito, if possibly convenient. There are other propositions in coal worth a deep consideration. Coal deposits here the greatest in the country. Must come an enormous boom. Will send word later on this matter. Am sending letter covering operations. I think it will be urgent that you visit this place shortly in interests of boom as well as the coal.--SLOSSON.'" Gordon looked round at the faces of his companions in silent triumph. And in each case he encountered a keen expectancy. As yet his fellow conspirators were rather in the dark. The significance of that transcript was not yet sufficiently clear. "What comes next?" inquired Mallinsbee in his calm, direct fashion. The others simply waited for enlightenment. Gordon chuckled softly. "Now we know we can get at Slosson's messages and my father's messages to him, and, having the code book, by a miracle of good luck, in my possession, the rest is easy. First, Peter must get a copy of my father's reply to this. Meanwhile I shall send an urgent message to my father in Slosson's name to _come up here at once_. The answer to that must never reach Slosson. Get me, Peter? You've got that boy Steve where you need him. You must hold him there and pay his price. I'll promise him he'll come to no harm. When my father finds out things I'll guarantee to pacify him. This way we'll get my father here, I'll promise you. And when he does get here the fun 'll begin--as we have arranged. That clear? Mike's got his work marked out. You yours, Peter. Mr. Mallinsbee and I will do the rest. Peter, you did a great act laying hands on this message. It was worth double the price. The whole game is now in our hands." Gordon folded up the paper and placed it inside the code book, which he carefully returned to his pocket. Mike rubbed his hands. "Say, it's sure a great play," he said gleefully. "And seein' you're his son the risk don't amount to pea-shucks," nodded the perspiring hotel proprietor. "You can be quite easy on that score," laughed Gordon. "I can promise you this: it won't be the old dad's fault, when this is over, if you don't find yourselves gathered around a mighty convivial board somewhere in New York--at his expense. You know my father as a pretty bright financier. I don't guess you know him as the sportsman I do." Mallinsbee suddenly bestirred himself and removed his cigar. "I kind o' wish he weren't your father, Gordon, boy," he said bluntly. "It sort of seems tough to me." Gordon's eyes shot a whimsical smile across at Hazel's father. "I'd hate to have any other, Mr. Mallinsbee," he said. "Maybe I know how you're feeling about it. But I tell you right here, if my father knew I had this opportunity and didn't take it, he'd turn his face to the wall and never own me as his son again. You're reckoning that for a son to do his father down sort of puts that son on a level with David Slosson or any other low down tough. Maybe it does. But I just think my father the bulliest feller on earth, and I love him mighty hard. I love him so well that I'd hate to give him a moment's pain. I tell you frankly that it would pain him if I didn't take this opportunity. It would pain him far more than anything we intend to do to him--when we get him here." He rose from his seat and his good-natured smile swept over the faces of his companions. "How do you say, gentlemen? Our work's done for to-night. Are we for bed?" CHAPTER XVIII WAYS THAT ARE DARK The people of Snake's Fall were in the throes of that artificial excitement which ever accompanies the prospect of immediate and flowing wealth in a community which has been feverishly striving with a negative result. Nor was this excitement a healthy or agreeable wave of emotion. It was aggressive and vulgar. It was hectoring and full of a blatant self-advertisement. Men who had never done better for themselves than a third-rate hotel, or who had never used anything more luxurious than a street car for locomotion in their ordinary daily life, now talked largely of Plaza hotels and automobiles, of real estate corners and bank balances. They sought by every subterfuge to exercise the dominance of their own personalities in the affairs of the place, only that they might the further enhance their individual advantage. Schemes for building and trading were in everybody's minds, and money, so long held tight under the pressure of doubt, now began to flow in one incessant stream towards the coffers of the already established traders. Every boom city is more or less alike, and Snake's Fall was no variation to the rule. Gambling commenced in deadly earnest, and the sharpers, with the eye of the vulture for carrion, descended upon the place. How word had reached them would have been impossible to tell. Then came the accompaniment of loose houses, and every other evil which seems to settle upon such places like a pestilential cloud. To Gordon, looking on and waiting, it was all a matter of the keenest interest, not untinged with a certain wholesome-minded disgust, and when he sometimes spoke of it in the little family circle at the ranch, or to the worldly-wise Mike Callahan in his barn, his talk was never without a hint of real regret. "It makes a feller feel kind of squeamish watching these folks," he observed to Mike, as they sat smoking in the latter's harness-room one afternoon. "You see, if I didn't know the whole game was lying in the palm of my hand I'd just simply sicken at the sordidness of it. We can't feel that way, though. We're worse than them. They're just dead in earnest to beat the game by the accepted rules of it, which don't debar general crookedness. We're out to win by sheer piracy. Makes you laugh, doesn't it? Makes it a good play." Mike was older, and had been brought up in a hard school. "Feelin's don't count one way or the other, I guess," he replied contemptuously. "When it comes to takin' the dollars out of the other feller's pocket I'm allus ready and willin'. You can allus help him out after you beat him. Private charity after the deal is a sort of liqueur after a good dinner." "Charity?" Gordon laughed. "Well, maybe you got another name for it," retorted Mike indifferently. "Several," laughed Gordon. "Rob a man and give him something back needs another name." "They call it 'charity' in the newspapers when them philanthropists hand back part of the wad they've collected from a deluded public--anyway. It don't seem different to me." Mike's tone was sharply argumentative. "It isn't different," agreed Gordon. "They're both a salve to conscience. The only thing is that public charity of the latter nature has the advantage of personal advertisement. I'm learning things, Mike. I'm learning that the moment you get groping for dollars, you've just tied up into a sack all the goodness and virtue handed out to you by the Creator and--drowned it." Though Gordon was never able to carry any sort of conviction on these matters with Mike, his occasional regrets found a cordial sympathy in Hazel Mallinsbee. She watched him very closely during the days of waiting for the maturity of his schemes. She knew the impulse which had inspired him. She understood it thoroughly. It was humor, and she liked him all the better for it. She realized to the full all the depth of love Gordon possessed for his father, an affection which was not one whit the less for the fact that to all intents and purposes his object was the highway robbery of that parent. It was something of a paradox, but one which she perfectly understood. She felt that it was a case of two strong personalities opposed to each other in friendly rivalry. Gordon had propounded his beliefs to a man of great capacity whose convictions were opposed. Opportunity had served the younger man, who now intended to drive his point home ruthlessly, with a deep, kindly humor lying behind his every act. She could imagine, though she had never seen James Carbhoy, these two men, big and strong and kindly, sitting opposite each other, smoking luxuriously when it was all over, discussing the whole situation in the friendliest possible spirit. Her father offered little comment. Curiously enough, this man, who had so much at stake, deep in his heart did not approve of the whole thing. It was not that he possessed ordinary scruples. Had the conspiracy been opposed to anybody but Gordon's father he would have been heart and soul in the affair. He would have reveled in the daring of the trick which Gordon intended to carry out. As it was, he was old-fashioned enough to see some sort of heinous ingratitude and offense in the fact of a son pitted piratically against his father. However, he, like his daughter, watched closely for every sign this son of his father gave. But while Hazel watched with sympathy and real understanding, he saw only with the searching eyes of the observer who is seeking the manner of man with whom he is dealing. Once only, during the days of waiting and comparative inaction, he gave vent to his disapproval, and even then his manner was purely that of regret. They were sitting together in the evening sunlight on the veranda of the ranch. "Gordon, boy," he said in his deep, rumbling voice, after a long, thoughtful pause; "if I had a son, which I guess I haven't, it would hurt like sin to think he'd act towards me same as you're doing to your father." His remark did not bring forth an immediate reply. When, however, it finally came, accompanied as it was by twinkling, mischievous blue eyes, and a smile of infinite amusement, Hazel, who was standing in the doorway of the house, fully understood, although it left her father unconvinced. "If you were my father, I guess you wouldn't hate it a--little bit," Gordon said cheerfully. Then his eyes wandered in Hazel's direction, and presently came back again to her father's face. "Maybe I'll live many a long year yet, and if I do I can tell you right here that perhaps there'll only be one greater moment in my life, than the moment in which we win out on this scheme. I just want you to remember, all through, that I love my old dad with all that's in me. Same as Hazel loves you." From that moment Gordon heard no further protest throughout all the preparations that had to be made. Silas Mallinsbee cheerfully acquiesced in all that was demanded of him. Furthermore, he tacitly acknowledged Gordon's absolute leadership. Under that leadership much had to be done of a subtle, secret nature. The impression had to be created that the Buffalo Point interests had completely abandoned the game. It was an anxious time--anxious and watchful. David Slosson was kept under close surveillance by the four conspirators, and, to this end, Gordon and Silas Mallinsbee spent most of their time in Snake's Fall, which further added to the impression that their interests had been abandoned. Having succeeded in bribing Steve Mason, the telegraph operator, in the first place, Peter McSwain further bought him body and soul over to their interests. Mallinsbee's purse was wide open for all such contingencies, and Steve was left with the comfortable feeling that, whatever happened, he had made sufficient money to throw up his job before any crash came, and clear out to safety with a capital he could never have honestly made out of his work. Thus Gordon had been enabled at last to dispatch his urgent code message to his father, purporting as it did to come from David Slosson. It was an irresistible demand for the Union Grayling and Ukataw Railroad President's immediate presence in Snake's Fall. It had been made as strong as David Slosson would have dared to make it. Nor, when the answer to it arrived, would it ever reach the agent. Nothing was forgotten. Every detail had been prepared for with a forethought almost incredible in a man of Gordon's temperament and experience. It was late evening the second day after the dispatching of Gordon's urgent message. He had not long returned home to the ranch with Hazel's father from a day amidst the excitement reigning in Snake's Fall. Hazel was in the house clearing away supper and generally superintending her domestic affairs. Silas Mallinsbee was round at the corrals in consultation with his ranch foreman. Gordon was alone on the veranda smoking and gazing thoughtfully out at the wonderful ruddy sunset. For him there was none of the peace which prevailed over the scene that spread out before him. How could there be? Every moment of the two days which had intervened since the dispatching of his message had been fraught with tense, nervous doubt. Every plan he had made depended on the answer to that message, and he felt that the time-limit for the answer's arrival had been reached. It must come now within a few hours. He felt that he must get it to-morrow morning or never. And when it came what--what then? Would it be the reply he desired, or an uncompromising negative? He felt that the whole thing depended upon the relations between his father and his agent. He was inclined to think, from the very nature of the work his father had intrusted to Slosson, that those relations were of the greatest confidence. He hoped it was so, but he could not be absolutely sure. Therefore the strain of waiting was hard to bear. While his busy thoughts teemed through his brain, and his unappreciative gaze roamed over the purpling of the distant hills, his ears, rendered unusually acute in the deep evening calm, suddenly caught the faint, distant rumble of a vehicle moving over the trail. His quick eyes turned alertly. There was only one trail, and that was the road to Snake's Fall. The alertness of his eyes communicated itself to his body. He moved off the veranda and gazed down the trail, of which he now obtained a clear view. A team and buggy were approaching at a rapid rate, and, even at that distance, he fancied he recognized it as the one of Mike Callahan's which he had himself driven. A wave of excitement swept over him. Could it be that----? He went back to the veranda. The impulse to summon Mallinsbee was hard to resist. But he forced himself to calmness. Five minutes later Mike Callahan drove up, and his team stood drooping and sweating. "Say," he cried, in aggrieved fashion, "it jest set me whoopin' mad when that wire-tappin' operator fell into my barn with his blamed message, twenty minutes after you an' Mallinsbee had left. Look at the time of it. It had buzzed over the wire ha'f an hour before you went." Then he began to grin, and a keen light shone in his Irish eyes. "But when I see who it was from I guessed I'd need to get busy. 'Tain't in your fancy code. It's jest as plain as my face. Read it. The game's up to us. Guess it's our move next." But Gordon was paying no attention to the Irishman. He was reading the brief message which at last set all his doubts at rest. "Arrive Snake's Fall noon seventeenth." It was addressed to Slosson, but there was no signature. "That's to-morrow." Gordon's eyes lit. Then a shadow of doubt crossed his smiling face. "It's dead safe Steve hasn't sent a copy to Slosson?" Mike grinned. "Steve don't draw his wad till--we're sure." "No." At that moment Mallinsbee appeared round the angle of the building. Gordon's face was wreathed in smiles as he turned to him. "We get to work--to-night," he said. Mallinsbee nodded, without a sign of the other's excitement. "So I guessed when I see Mike's team. Peter wise?" "Yep." The Irishman's spirits had risen to a great pitch. "I put him wise." "Splendid. He's got everything ready?" Gordon was thinking rapidly. "Better send your team round to the barn," said Mallinsbee, with that thoughtful care he had for all animals. "Then come inside and get some supper." Mike prepared to drive round to the barn. "I see the rack in his yard," he grinned. "Good." Then Gordon laughed. The last care had been banished. Now it was action. Now? Ah, now he was perfectly happy. The night was intensely still. The last revelers in Snake's Fall had betaken themselves to their drunken slumbers. The only lights remaining were the glow of a small cluster of red lamps just outside the town at the eastern end of it, and the peeping lights behind the curtained windows of the houses to which these belonged. There was no need to question the nature of these houses. In the West they are to be found on the fringe of every young town that offers the prospect of prosperity. There was a single light burning in the hall of McSwain's hotel. This was as usual, and would burn all night. For the rest, the house was in darkness. The last guest had retired to rest a full hour or more. The stillness was profound. The very profundity of it was only increased by the occasional long-drawn dole of the prairie coyote, foraging somewhere out in the distance for its benighted prey. The shadowed outbuildings behind the hotel remained for a long time as quiet as the rest of the world. The horses in the barn were sleeping peacefully. The fowls and turkeys and geese which populated the yard in daylight were as profoundly steeped with sleep as the rest of the feathered world. Even the two aged husky dogs, set there on the presumption of keeping guard, were composed for the night. But after awhile sounds began to emanate from the dark barn. With the first sound a dog-chain rattled, and immediately a low voice spoke. After that the dog-chain remained still. Next came the sound of hoofs on the hard sand floor of the barn. They were hasty, but swiftly passing. The last sound was heard as two horses emerged upon the open, each led by a shadowy figure quite unrecognizable in the velvety darkness of the starlit night. The horses moved across towards the vague outline of a large hayrack which stood mounted in the running gear of a dismantled wagon, and the figures leading them began at once to hook them up in place. While this was happening two other figures were loading the rack with hay from the corral near by, in which stood a half-cut haystack. Their work seemed to be more intricate than the usual process of loading a hayrack. There seemed to be a sort of wide and long cage in the bottom of the rack, and the hay needed careful placing to leave the interior of this free, while yet surrounding it completely and rendering it absolutely obscured. In less than half an hour the work was completed, and the four men gathered together and conversed in low voices. After this a fresh movement took place. The group broke up, and each moved off as though to carry out affairs already agreed upon. One man mounted the rack and took up his position for driving the team. Another stood near the rear of the wagon and remained waiting, whilst the other two moved towards the hotel. These latter parted as they neared the building. One of them entered it through the back door, and as he came within the radiance of the solitary oil-lamp it became apparent that his face was completely masked. He moved stealthily forward, listening for any unwelcome sound, mounted the staircase, and was immediately swallowed up by the darkness of the corridor above. Meanwhile his companion had taken another route. He had moved along the building to the left of the back door. His objective was the iron fire-escape which went up to the gallery outside the upper windows. He found it almost at the end of the building, and began the ascent. In a few moments he was at the top, and, moving along the narrow iron gallery, he counted the windows as he passed them. At the fifth window he paused and examined it. The blind inside was withdrawn, and he ran over in his mind the various details which had been given him. He knew that the latch inside had been carefully removed. He tried the window cautiously. It moved easily to his pressure, and a smile stole over his masked features when he remembered that ample grease had been placed in its slipway. It was good to think that these contingencies had been so carefully provided for. The window was sufficiently open. The process had been entirely soundless, but he bent down and listened intently. Far away, somewhere inside, he could hear the sound of deep breathing. He made his next move quickly and stealthily. One leg was raised and thrust through the opening, and, bending his great body nearly double, he made his way into the room beyond. Pausing for a few moments to assure himself that the sleeper in the adjoining room had not been disturbed, he next made his way towards the door, aided by the light of a silent sulphur match. He quickly withdrew the bolt, and was immediately joined by the man who had entered the hotel through the back door. Now he turned his attention to the room itself. Yes, everything was as he had been told. It was a largish room, and a small archway, hung with heavy curtains, divided it from another. The portion he had entered was furnished as a parlor, and beyond the curtains was the bedroom. Signing to his companion to remain where he was, he moved swiftly and silently to the heavy drawn curtains. For a second he listened to the breathing beyond; then he parted them and vanished within. David Slosson awoke out of a heavy sleep with a sudden nightmarish start. He thought some one was calling him, shouting his name aloud in a terrified voice. But now he was wide awake in the pitch-dark room: no sound broke the silence. He was on his back, and he made to turn over on to his side. Instantly something cold and hard encountered his cheek and a whispering voice broke the silence. "One word and you're a dead man!" said the voice. "Just keep quite still and don't speak, and you won't come to any harm." David Slosson was no fool, nor was he a coward, but, amongst his other many experiences on the fringe of civilization, he had learned the power of a gun held right. He knew that his cheek had encountered the cold muzzle of a gun. Shocked and startled and helpless as he was, he remained perfectly still and silent, awaiting developments. They came swiftly. The curtains parted and a man, completely masked and clad in the ordinary prairie kit of the West, and bearing a lighted lamp in his hand, entered the room. His first assailant, holding the gun only inches from his head, Slosson could not properly discern. Out of the corners of his eyes he was aware that his face was masked like that of the other, but that was all. The newcomer set the lamp down on a table and advanced to the other side of the bed. Instantly he produced a strap, enwrapped in the folds of a thick towel. Slosson realized what was about to happen, and contemplated resistance. As though his thoughts had been read the man with the gun spoke again-- "Only one sound an' I'll blow your brains to glory. Ther' ain't no help around that you ken get in time. So don't worry any." The threat of the gun was irresistible, and Slosson yielded. The second man forced the strap gag into his mouth and buckled it tightly behind his victim's head. This done, the agent's hands were lashed fast with a rope. Then the gun was withdrawn and the wretched agent was assisted into his clothes, after the pockets had been searched for weapons. In a quarter of an hour the whole transaction was completed, and, with hands securely fastened behind his back and the gag in his mouth fixed cruelly firmly, David Slosson stood ready to follow his captors. During all that time he had used his eyes and all his intelligence to discover the identity of his assailants, but without avail. Even their great size afforded him no enlightenment, with their entire faces hidden under the enveloping masks. In silence the light was extinguished. In silence they left the room and proceeded down the stairs. In silence they came to the waiting hayrack outside. Here Slosson beheld the other two masked figures, one on the wagon, and the other waiting at the rear of it. But he was given no further chance of observation. His captors seized him bodily and lifted him into the cage beneath the hay, while one of the men got in with him and now secured his feet. After that more hay was thrown into the vehicle, till it looked like an ordinary farmer's rack, and then the horses started off, and the prisoner knew that, for some inexplicable reason, he had been kidnaped. Mrs. Carbhoy had been concerned all day. When she was concerned about anything her temper generally gave way to a condition which her youthful daughter was pleased to describe as "gritty." Whether it really described her mother's mood or not mattered little. It certainly expressed Gracie's understanding of it. To-day nothing the child did was right. She had called her physical culture instructress a "cat" that morning, only because she had been afraid to enter into a more drastic physical argument with her. For that her "gritty" mother had deprived her of candy for the day. She had refused to do anything right at her subsequent dancing lesson, in consequence, and for that she had had her week's pocket-money stopped. Then at lunch she had willfully broken the peace by upsetting a glass of ice-water upon the glass-covered table, and incidentally had broken the glass. For this she was confined to her school-room for the rest of the day, and was only allowed to appear before her disturbed mother at her nine-o'clock bed hour. When a very indignant Gracie appeared before her mother to fulfill her final duty of kissing her "good-night," that individual was more "gritty" than ever. She was in the act of opening a bulky letter addressed to her in a familiar handwriting. Gracie knew at once from whom it came. Instantly the imp of mischief stirred in her bosom. "What nursing home will you send Gordon to when he gets back?" she inquired blandly. Her mother eyed her coldly while she drew out the sheets of letter-paper. She pointed to a wall bell. "Ring that bell," she ordered sharply. Gracie obeyed, wondering what was to be the consequence of her fresh effort. She had not long to wait. Her mother's maid entered. "Tell Huxton to pack Miss Gracie's trunks ready for Tuxedo. She will leave for Vernor Court by the midday express. Her governesses will accompany her." The maid retired. In an instant all hope had fled, and Gracie was reduced to hasty penitence. "Please, momma, don't send me out to the country. I'm sorry for what I've done to-day, real sorry--but I've just had the fidgets all day, what with pop going away and--and that silly Gordon never coming near us, or--or anything. True, momma, I won't be naughty ever again. 'Deed I won't. Oh, say you won't send me off by myself," she urged, coming coaxingly to her mother's side. "There's Jacky Molyneux going to take me a run in his automobile to-morrow afternoon, and we're going to Garden City, and he always gives me heaps of ice-cream. Oh, momma, don't send me off to that dreadful Tuxedo." At all times Mrs. Carbhoy was easily cajoled, and just now she was feeling so miserable and lonely since her husband had been called away on urgent business, she knew not where. Then here was another of Gordon's troublesome letters in her lap. So in her trouble she yielded to her only remaining belonging. But she forthwith sat her long-legged daughter on a footstool at her feet, and as penance made her listen to the reading of the letter which had just arrived. Somehow, in view of the previous letters from her son, Mrs. Carbhoy felt it to be impossible to face this new one without support, even if that support were only that of her wholly inadequate thirteen-year-old daughter. "DEAREST MUM: "Since Cain got busy shooting up his brother Abel, since Delilah became a slave to the tonsorial art and practiced on Samson, since Jael turned her carpentering stunts to considerable account by hammering tacks into poor Sisera's head, right through the long ages down to the record-breaking achievements of the champion prevaricator Ananias, I guess the crookedness of human nature has progressed until it has reached the pitch of a fine art, such as is practiced by legislators, diplomats and New York police officers. "This is a sweeping statement, but I contend it is none the less true. "I'd say that in examining the facts we need to study the real meaning of 'crookedness.' We must locate its cause as well as effect. Now 'crookedness' is the divergence from a straight line, which some fool man spent a lifetime in discovering was the shortest route from one given point to another. No doubt that fellow thought he was making some discovery, but it kind of seems to me any chump outside the bug-house and not under the influence of drink would know it without having to spend even a summer vacation finding it out, and, anyway, I don't guess it's worth shouting about. "I guess it's up to us to track this straight line down in its application to ethics. That buzzy-headed discoverer also says a line is length without breadth. Consequently, I argue that a straight line is just 'nothing,' anyway. Then when a mush-headed dreamer starts right out to walk the straight line of life it's a million to one chance he'll break his fool neck, or do some other positively ridiculous stunt that's liable to terminate what ought to have been a promising career. I submit, from the foregoing arguments, the straight line of ethical virtue is just a vision, a dream, an hallucination, a nightmare. It's one of those things the whole world loves to sit around on Sundays and yarn about, and just as many folks would hate to practice, anyway. And this is as sure as you'll find the only bit of glass on the road when you're automobiling if you don't just happen to be toting a spare tyre. "Seeing that you can't everlastingly keep trying to walk on 'nothing' without disastrous consequences, and, further, seeing the days of miracles have died with many other privileges which our ancestors enjoyed, such as being burned at the stake and painting up our bodies in fancy colors, it is natural, even a necessity, that 'crookedness' should have come into its own. "Let's start right in at the first chapter of a man's life. It'll point the whole argument without anything else. It's ingrained even in the youngest kid to resort to subterfuge. Subterfuge is merely the most innocent form in a crook's thesis. Maybe a kid, lying in its cradle, with only a few days of knowledge to work on, don't know the finer points he'll learn later. But he knows what he wants, and is going to get it. He's going to get the other feller where he wants him, and then force him to do his bidding. It's his first effort in 'crookedness' when he finds the straight line of virtue is just a most uncomfortable nightmare. How does he do it? "I guess it's this way. He needs his food. He guesses his gasoline tank needs filling. He don't guess he's going to lie around with a sort of mean draught blowing pneumonia through his vitals. He just waits around awhile to see if any one's yearning to pump up his infantile tyre, and when he finds there's nothing doing, why, he starts right in to make his first fall off the straight line of virtue. You see, the straight line says that kid's tank needs filling only at stated intervals. The said kid don't see it that way, so he turns himself into a human megaphone, scares the household cat into a dozen fits, starts up a canine chorus in the neighboring backyards, makes his father yearn to shoot up the feller that wrote the marriage service, sets the local police officer tracking down a murder that was never committed, and maybe, if he only keeps things humming long enough, sets all the State legal machinery working overtime to have his parents incarcerated for keeping an insanitary nuisance on the premises. "See the crookedness of that kid? The moment he finds himself duly inflated with milk he lies low. Do you get the lesson of it? It's plumb simple. That kid wanted something. He didn't care a cuss for regulations. He just laid right there and said, 'Away with 'em!' He was thirsty, or hungry, or greedy. Maybe he was all three. Anyway, he wanted, and set about getting what he wanted the only way he knew. All of which illustrates the fact that when human nature demands satisfaction no laws or regulations are going to stand in the way. And that's just life from the day we're born. "From the foregoing remarks you may incline to the belief that I have set out willfully to outrage every moral and human law. This is not quite the case. I am merely giving you the benefit of my observations, and also, since I am merely another human unit in the perfectly ridiculous collection of bipeds which go to make up the alleged superior races of this world, I must fall into line with the rest. "If Abel gets in my way I must 'out' him. If I can manufacture a down cushion out of old Samson's hair to make my lot more comfortable, I'm just going to get the best pair of shears and get busy. If I'm going to collect amusement from studding that chump Sisera's head with tacks, why, it's up to me to avoid delay that way. And as for Ananias, he seems to me to have been a long way ahead of his time. They'd have had his monument set up in every public office in the country to-day. He'd have been the emblem of every trading corporation I know, and his effigy would have served as the coat-of-arms for the whole of the present-day creation. "I trust you are keeping well, and the responsibility of guiding the development of our Gracie is showing no sign of undermining your constitution. Gracie is really a good girl, if a little impetuous. I notice, however, that impetuosity gives way before the responsibilities of life. So far she is quite young. I'm hoping good results when she gets responsibility. "Give my best love to the old Dad, and tell him that he must be careful of his health in such a desperate heat as New York provides in summer time. I think a month's vacation in the hills would be excellent for him at this time of year. I am looking forward to the time when I shall see him again. "You might tell him I hope to fulfill my mission under schedule time. If you do not hear from me again you will know I am working overtime on the interests in which I left New York. "Your loving son, "GORDON. "P.S.--It occurs to me I have not told you all the news I would have liked to tell you. But two pieces occur to me at the moment. First, that achievement in life demands not the fostering of the gentler human emotions, but their outraging. Also, no man has the right to abandon honesty until dishonesty pays him better. "G." The mother's sigh was a deep expression of her hopeless feelings as she finished the last word of her son's postscript. Gracie watched her out of the corners of her eyes. "What's the matter, momma?" she inquired. Her mother broke down weakly. "They haven't found a trace of him yet. They can't locate how these letters are mailed. They can't just find a thing. And all the time these letters come along, and--and they get worse and worse. It's no good, Gracie; the poor boy's just crazy. Sure as sure. It's the heat, or--or drink, or strain, or--maybe he's starving. Anyway, he's gone, and we'll never see our Gordon again--not in his right mind. And now your poor father's gone, too. Goodness knows where. I'll--yes, I'll have to set the inquiry people to find him, too, if--if I don't hear from him soon. To--to think I'd have lived to see the day when----" "I don't guess Gordon's in any sort of trouble, momma," cried Gracie, displaying an unexpected sympathy for her distracted parent. Then she smiled that wise little superior smile of youth which made her strong features almost pretty. "And I'm sure he's not--crazy. Say, mom, just don't think anything more about it. And I'd sort of keep all those letters--if they're like that. You never told me the others. May I read them? I never would have believed Gordon could have written like that--never. You see, Gordon's not very bright--is he?" CHAPTER XIX JAMES CARBHOY ARRIVES Snake's Fall was in that sensitive state when the least jar or news of a startling nature was calculated to upset it, and start its tide of human emotions bubbling and surging like a shallow stream whose course has been obstructed by the sudden fall of a bowlder into its bed. Early the following morning just such a metaphorical bowlder fell right into the middle of the Snake's Fall stream. The news flew through the little town, now so crowded with its overflowing population of speculators, with that celerity which vital news ever attains in small, and even large places. It was on everybody's lips before the breakfast tables were cleared. And, in a matter of seconds, from the moment of its penetration to the individual, minds were searching not only the meaning, but the effect it would have upon the general situation, and their own personal affairs in particular. David Slosson, the agent of the Union Grayling and Ukataw Railroad, had defected in the night! He had gone--bolted--leaving his bill unpaid at McSwain's hotel! For a while a sort of paralysis seized upon the population. It was staggered. No trains had passed through in the night. Not even a local freight train. How had he gone? But most of all--why? The next bit of news that came through was that Peter's best team had been stolen from the barn, also an empty hay-rack. This was mystifying, until it became known that Peter's buggy was laid up at Mike Callahan's barn, undergoing repairs. The hayrack was the only vehicle available. But what about saddle horses for a rapid bolt? Curiously enough it was discovered that Peter's saddle horses were out grazing. Besides, the story added that the man had taken his baggage with him. Not a thing had been left behind, and baggage like his could not have been carried on a saddle horse. The story grew as it traveled. It was the snowball over again. It was said that Peter had been robbed of a large amount of money which he kept in his safe. Also his cash register had been emptied. An added item was that Peter himself had been knifed, and had been found in a dying condition. In fact every conceivable variation of the facts were flung abroad for the benefit of credulous ears. Consequently the tide of curious, and startled, and interested news-seekers set in the direction of Peter's hotel at an early hour. Then it was that something of the real facts were discovered. And, in consequence, those who had participated in Slosson's land deals, and had received deposit money, congratulated themselves. While those who had not so profited felt like "kicking" themselves for their want of enterprise. Peter stormed through his house the whole morning. He was like a very hot and angry lion in a cage far too small for it. His story, as he told it in the office, was superlative in furious adjectives. "I tell you fellows," he cried, at a group of wondering-eyed boarders in his establishment, "I ha'f suspected he was a blamed crook from the first moment I got my eyeballs onto him. The feller that 'll bilk his board bill is come mighty low, sirs. So mighty low you wouldn't find a well deep enough for him. He had the best rooms in the house at four an' a ha'f dollars a day all in, an' I ain't see a fi' cent piece of his money, cep' you ken count the land deposit he paid me. I just been right through his rooms, an' he ain't left a thing, not a valise, nor a grip. Not even a soot of pyjamas, or a soap tablet. He's sure cleared right out fer good, and we ain't goin' to see him round again," he finished up gloomily. Then his fire broke out again. "But that ain't what I'm grievin' most, I guess. Ther's allus skunks around till a place gets civilized up, an' their bokay ain't pleasant. But he's a hoss thief, too. There's my team. You know that team of mine, Mr. Davison," he went on, turning to the drug storekeeper who had dropped in to hear his friend's news. "You've drove behind 'em many a time. They got a three-minute gait between 'em which 'ud show dust to any team around these parts. That team was worth two thousand dollars, sirs, and was matched to an inch, and a shade of color. Say, if I get across his tracks, an' Sheriff Richardson is out after him with a posse, I'm goin' to get a shot in before the United States Authorities waste public money feeding him in penitentiary. I'm feelin' that mad I can't eat, an' I don't guess I'd know how to hand a decent answer to a Methodist minister if he came along. If I don't get news of that team I'm just going to start and break something. I don't figure if he'd burned this shack right over my head I'd have felt as mad as I do losin' that dandy team." When questioned as to how the man had got away his answer came sharply. "How? Why, what was there to stop him, sir? I tell you right here we ain't been accustomed to deal with his kind in Snake's. The folk around this layout, till this coal boom started, has all been decent citizens." He glared with hot eyes upon the men about him, who were nearly all speculators attracted by that very coal boom. "There's that darned fire-escape out back, right down from his room, an' what man has ever locked his barn in these parts? Psha!" he cried, in violent disgust. "I've had that team three years, and I've never so much as had a lock put to the barn." So it went on all the morning. Peter's fury was one of the sights of the township for that day. He was never without an audience which flowed and ebbed like a tide, stimulated by curiosity, self-interest, and the natural satisfaction of witnessing another's troubles which is so much an instinct of human nature. And beneath every other emotion which the agent's sudden defection aroused was a wave of almost pitiful meanness. The dreams of the last week and more had received a set back. In many minds the boom city was tottering. The crowding hopes of avarice and self-interest had suddenly received a douche of cold water. What, these speculators asked themselves, and each other, did the incident portend, what had the future in store? So keen was the interest worked up about Peter McSwain's house that every other consideration for the time being was forgotten. Party after party visited Slosson's late quarters with a feeling of conviction that some trifling clew had been overlooked, and, by some happy chance, the luck and glory of having discovered it might fall to their lot. But it was all of no avail. The room was absolutely empty of all trace of its recent occupant, as only an hotel room can become. With the excitement the daily west-bound passenger train was forgotten, and by the time it was signaled in, the little depot was almost deserted. There were one or two rigs backed up to it on the town side, and perhaps a dozen townspeople were present. But the usual gathering was nowhere about. Amongst the few present were Hazel Mallinsbee and Gordon. They had driven up in a democrat wagon with a particularly fine team, and having backed the vehicle up to the boarded platform, they stood talking earnestly and quite unnoticed. Hazel was dressed in an ordinary suit that possessed nothing startling in its atmosphere of smartness. Her skirt was of some rather hard material, evidently for hard wear, and the upper part of her costume was a white lawn shirtwaist under a short jacket which matched her skirt. Her head was adorned by her customary prairie hat, which, in Gordon's eyes, became her so admirably. Gordon was holding up a picture for the girl's closest inspection. "Say, it's sheer bull-headed luck I got this with me," he was saying. "I found it amongst my old papers and things when I left New York, and I sort of brought it along as a 'mascot.' The old dad's older than that now, but you can't mistake him. It's a bully likeness. Get it into your mind anyway, and then keep it with you." Hazel gazed admiringly at the portrait of the man who claimed Gordon as his son. For the moment she forgot the purpose in hand. "Isn't he just splendid?" she exclaimed. "You're--you're the image of him. Why, say, it seems the unkindest thing ever to--to play him up." Gordon laughed. "Don't worry that way. We're going to give him the time of his life." Then he glanced swiftly about him, and noted the emptiness of the depot. "I guess Peter's keeping the folks busy. He's a bright feller. I surely guess he's working overtime. Now you get things fixed right, Hazel. The train's coming along." The girl nodded. "You can trust me." "Right." Gordon sighed. "I'll make tracks then. But I'll be around handy to see you don't make a mistake." He left the depot and disappeared. Hazel stood studying the picture in her hand, and alternating her attention with the incoming train. She was in a happy mood. The excitement of her share in Gordon's plot was thrilling through her veins, and the thought that she was going to meet his father, the great multi-millionaire, left her almost beside herself with delighted interest. She wondered how much she would find him like Gordon. No, she thought softly, he could never be really like Gordon. That was impossible. A multi-millionaire could never have his son's frank enthusiasm for life in all its turns and twistings of moral impulse. Gordon faced life with a defiant "don't care." That glorious spirit of youth and moral health. His father, for all his physical resemblance, would be a hard, stern, keen-eyed man, with all experience behind him. Then she remembered Gordon's injunctions. "Be just yourself," he had said. Then he had added, with a laugh, "If you do that you'll have the dear old boy at your feet long before the day's had time to get cool." It was rather nice Gordon talking that way, and the smile which accompanied her recollection was frankly delighted. Anyway she would soon know all about it, for the train was already rumbling its way in. James Carbhoy had done all that had been required of him by his agent's message. He had not welcomed the abandonment of his private car in favor of the ordinary parlor car and sleeper. Then, too, the purchase of a ticket for his journey had seemed strange. But somehow, after the first break from his usual method of travel, he had found enjoyment in the situation. His fellow passengers, with whom he had got into conversation on the journey, had passed many pleasant hours, and it became quite absorbing to look on at the affairs of the world through eyes that, for the time being, were no longer those of one of the country's multi-millionaires. However, the journey was a long one, and he was pleased enough when he reached his destination all unheralded and unrecognized. It amused him to find how many travelers in the country knew nothing about James Carbhoy and his vast financial exploits. As the train slowed down he gathered up his simple belongings, which consisted of a crocodile leather suitcase, a stout valise of the same material; and a light dust coat, which he slung over his arm. Armed with these, he fell in with the queue making its way towards the exit of the car. He frankly and simply enjoyed the situation. He told himself he was merely one of the rest of the get-rich-quick brigade who were flocking to the Eldorado at Snake's Fall. He was the last to alight, and he scanned the depot platform for the familiar figure of his confidential agent. As he did so the locomotive bell began to toll out its announcement of progress. The train slowly slid out of the station behind him. David Slosson was nowhere to be seen, and he had just made up his mind to search out a hotel for himself when he became aware of the tailored figure of a young girl standing before him, and of the pleasant tones of her voice addressing him. "Your agent, David Slosson, Mr. Carbhoy, has been detained out beyond the coalfields on your most urgent business," she said. "So I was sent in with the rig to drive you out to your quarters." The millionaire was startled. Then, as his steady eyes searched the delightful face smiling up at him, his start proved a pleasant one. There was something so very charming in the girl's tone and manner. Then her extremely pretty eyes, and--Gordon's father mechanically bared his head, and Hazel could have laughed with joy as she beheld this strong, handsome edition of the Gordon she knew. "Well, come, that was thoughtful of Slosson," he said kindly. "He certainly has shown remarkable judgment in substituting your company for his own. My dear young lady, Slosson as a man of affairs is possible, but as a companion on a journey, however short--well, I---- And you are really going to drive me to my hotel. That's surely kind of you." Hazel flushed. She felt the meanest thing in the world under the great man's kindly regard. However, she reminded herself of the great and ultimate object of the part she was playing and steeled her heart. "The team's right here, sir." She felt justified in adding the "sir." She felt that she must risk nothing in her manner. "I'll just take your baggage along." She was about to relieve the millionaire of his grips, but he drew back. "Say, I just couldn't dream of it. You carry my grips? No, no, go right ahead, and I'll bring them along." In a perfect maze of excitement and confusion the girl hastily crossed over to her team. Somehow she could no longer face the man's steady eyes without betraying herself like some weak, silly schoolgirl. This was Gordon's father, she kept telling herself, and--and she was there to cheat him. It--it just seemed dreadful. However, no time was wasted. She sprang into the driving-seat of the democrat spring rig, and took up the reins. The millionaire deposited his grips in the body of the vehicle, and himself mounted to the seat beside her. In a moment the wagon was on the move. As they moved away, out of the corners of her eyes Hazel saw the grinning face of Gordon peering out at them from the window of Steve Mason's telegraph office, smiling approval and encouragement. Curiously enough, the sight made her feel almost angry. They moved down Main Street at a rattling pace, and, in a few moments, turned off it into one of those streets which only the erection of dwelling-houses marked. There were no made roads of any sort. Just beaten, heavy, sandy tracks on the virgin ground. Hazel remained silent for some time. She was almost afraid to speak. Yet she wanted to. She wanted to talk to Gordon's father. She wanted to tell him of the mean trick she was playing upon him, for, under the influence of his steady eyes and the knowledge that he was Gordon's father, a great surge of shame was stirring in her heart which made her hate herself. For some time the man gazed about him interestedly. Then, as they lost themselves among the wooden frame dwelling-houses, he breathed a deep sigh of content and drew out one of those extravagant cigars which Gordon had not tasted for so many weeks. "Say, will smoke worry you any, young lady?" he inquired kindly. Hazel was thankful for the opportunity of a cordial reply. "Why, no," she cried. Then on the impulse she went on, "I just love the smell of smoke where men are." She laughed merrily. "I guess men without smoke makes you feel they're sick in body or conscience." Gordon's father laughed in his quiet fashion as he lit his cigar. "That way I guess folks of the Anti-Tobacco League need to start right in and build hospitals for themselves." The girl nodded. "Anti-Tobacco?" she said. "Why, 'anti' anything wholesomely human must be a terrible sick crowd. I'd hate to trust them with my pocket-book, and, goodness knows, there's only about ten cents in it. Even that would be a temptation to such folks." Again came the millionaire's quiet laugh. "That's the result of the healthy life you folks live right out here in the open sunshine," he said, noting the pretty tanning of the girl's face. "I don't guess it's any real sign of health, mentally or physically, when folks have to start 'anti' societies, eh?" "No, sir," replied the girl. "Did you ever know anybody that was really healthy who started in to worry how they were living? It's just what I used to notice way back at college in Boston. The girls that came from cities were just full of cranks and notions. This wasn't right for them to eat, that wasn't right for them to do. And it seemed to me all their folks belonged to some 'anti' society of some sort. If the 'anti' wasn't for themselves it was for some other folks who weren't worried with the things they did or the way they lived. It just seems to me cities are full of cranks who can run everything for other folks and need other folks to run everything for them. It's just a sort of human drug store in which every med'cine has to be able to cure the effects of some other. Out here it's different. We got green grass and sunshine, the same as God started us with, and so we haven't got any use for the 'anti' folks." "No." James Carbhoy had forgotten the journey and its object. He was only aware of this fresh, bright young creature beside him. He stirred in his seat and glanced about him from a sheer sense of a new interest, and in looking about he became aware of a horseman riding on the same trail some distance behind them. "You said Boston just now," he said curiously. "You were educated in Boston?" Hazel nodded. "Yes, my poppa sent me to Boston. He just didn't reckon anything but Boston was good enough. But I was glad to be back here again." The millionaire would have liked to question her more closely as to how she came to be driving a team at Slosson's command. He had no great regard for his agent outside of business, But somehow he felt it would be an impertinence, and so refrained. Instead, he changed the subject. "How far out are the coalfields?" he inquired. "About five miles." The memory of her purpose swept over the girl again, and her reply came shortly, and she glanced back quickly over her shoulder. As she did so she became sickeningly aware that two horsemen were on the trail some distance behind them. How she wished she had never undertaken this work! "I suppose there's quite a town there now?" was the millionaire's next inquiry. "Not a great deal, but there's comfortable quarters the other side of it. It's going to be a wonderful, wonderful place, sir, when the railroad starts booming it." Hazel felt she must get away from anything approaching a cross-examination. "I don't just get that," said Carbhoy evasively. "Well, it's just a question of depot. You see, there's coal right here enough to heat the whole world. That's what folks say. And when the railroad fixes things so transport's right, why, everybody 'll just jump around and build up big commercial corporations, and--there'll be dollars for everybody." "I see--yes." "Mr. Slosson is working that way now," the girl went on. Then she added, with a shadowy smile, "That's why he couldn't get in to meet you, I guess." "He must be very busy," said the millionaire dryly. "However, I'm glad." And Hazel turned in time to discover his kindly smile. Carbhoy gazed about him at the open plains with which they were surrounded. The air, though hot, was fresh, and the sunlight, though brilliant, seemed to lack something of that intensity to be found in the enclosed streets of a city. He threw away his cigar stump, and in doing so he glanced back over the trail again. He remained gazing intently in that direction for some moments. Then he turned back. "I guess those fellers riding along behind are just prairie men," he said. Hazel started and looked over her shoulder. There were four men now riding together on the trail. They were steadily keeping pace with her team some two hundred yards behind. It was some moments before the man received his answer. Hazel was troubled. She was almost horrified. "Yes," she said at last, with an effort. "They're just prairie men." Then she smiled, but her smile was a further effort. "They're pretty tough boys to look at, but I'd say they're all right. Maybe you're not used to the prairie?" The millionaire smiled. "I've seen it out of a train window," he said. "Through glass," said Hazel. "It makes a difference, doesn't it? It's the same with everything. You've got to get into contact to--to understand." "But there hasn't always been glass between me and--things." Hazel's smile was spontaneous now as she nodded her appreciation. "I'm sure," she said. "You see, you're a millionaire." Carbhoy smiled back at her. "Just so." This girl was slowly filling him with amazement. "It's real plate-glass now," Hazel went on. "And plate-glass sometimes gets broken." "Yes, I s'pose it does. But you can fix it again--being a millionaire." "Yes----" The millionaire broke off. There was a rush of hoofs from behind. The horsemen were close up to them, coming at a hard gallop. Carbhoy turned quickly. So did Hazel. The millionaire's eyes were calmly curious. He imagined the men were just going to pass on. Hazel's eyes were full of a genuine alarm. She had known what to expect. But now that the moment had come she was really terrified. What would Gordon's father do? Had he a revolver? And would he use it? This was the source of her fear. It was a breathless moment for the girl. It was the crux of all Gordon's plans. She was the center of it. She, and these men who were to execute the lawless work. She was given no time to speculate. She was given no time but for that dreadful wave of fear which swept over her, and left her pretty face ghastly beneath its tanning. A voice, harsh, commanding, bade her pull up her team, and the order was accompanied by a string of blasphemy and the swift play of the man's gun. "Hold 'em up, blast you! Hold 'em, or I'll blow the life right out o' you!" came the ruthless order. At the same time James Carbhoy was confronted with a gun from another direction, and a sharp voice invited him to "push his hands right up to the sky." Both orders were obeyed instantly, and as Hazel saw her companion's hands thrown up over his head a great reaction of relief set in. She sat quite still and silent. Her reins rested loosely in her lap. She no longer dared to look at her companion. Now that all danger of his resistance was past she feared lest an almost uncontrollable inclination to laugh should betray her. She kept her eyes steadily fixed upon these men, every one of whom she had known since her childhood, and to whom she fully made up her mind she intended to read a lecture on the subject of the use of oaths to a woman, sometime in the future. As she watched them her inclination to laugh grew stronger and stronger. They had carried out their part with a nicety for detail that was quite laudable. Each man was armed to the teeth, and was as grotesque a specimen of prairie ruffianism as clothes could make him--the leader particularly. And he, in everyday life, she knew to be the mildest and most quaintly humorous of men. But his work was carried out now without a shadow of humor. He looked murder, or robbery, or any other crime, as he ordered her out of the driving seat, and waited while she scrambled over the back of the seat to one of those behind with a movement well-nigh precipitate. Then, at a sign, one of the other men took her place, and, at another short command to "look over" the millionaire, the same man proceeded to search Gordon's father for weapons. The production of an automatic pistol from one of his coat pockets filled Hazel with consternation at the thought of the possibilities of disaster which had lain therein. But the four assailants gave no sign. Their work proceeded swiftly and silently. The millionaire's feet were secured, and he was left in his seat. Then, under the hands of the man who had replaced Hazel, the journey was continued with the escort beside and behind the vehicle. As they drove on Hazel wondered. Her eyes, very soft, very regretful, were fixed on the iron-gray head of the man in the front seat. She registered a vow that if he were hurt by the bonds that held his ankles fast some one was going to hear about it. Now that the whole thing was over and done with she felt resentful and angry with anybody and everybody--except the victim of the outrage. She was even mad with herself that she had lent assistance to such a cruel trick. But the millionaire gave no sign. Hazel longed to know something of his feelings, but he gave neither her nor his assailants the least inkling of them for a long time. At last, however, a great relief to the girl's feelings came at the sound of his voice, which had lost none of its even, kindly note. "Say," he observed, addressing the ruffian beside him, who was busily chewing and spitting, "you don't mind if I smoke, do you?" Then Hazel made a fresh vow of retribution for some one as the answer came. "You can smoke all the weed you need," the man said, with a fierce oath, "only don't try no monkey tricks. You're right fer awhile, anyways, if you sit tight, I guess, but if you so much as wink an eye by way of kickin', why, I'll blow a whole hurricane o' lead into your rotten carcase." It was a long and weary journey that ended somewhere about midnight. Nor was it until the teamster drew up at the door of a small, squat frame house that James Carbhoy's bonds were finally released. He was thankful enough, in spite of his outward display of philosophic indifference. He knew that he was the victim of a simple "hold-up," and had little enough fear for his life. The matter was a question of ransom, he guessed. It was one of those things he had often enough heard of, but which, up to now, he had been lucky enough to escape. He only wondered how it came about that these "toughs" had learned of his coming. He felt that it must have been Slosson's fault. He must have opened his mouth. Well, for the time, at least, there was little to do but hope for the best and make the best of things generally. He was given no option now but to obey. His captors ordered him out of the wagon in the same rough manner in which they ordered Hazel. And the leader conducted them both into the house. There was a light burning in the parlor, and the millionaire looked about him in surprise at the simple comfort and cleanliness of the place. He had expected a mere hovel, such as he had read about. He had expected filth and discomfort of every sort. But here--here was a parlor, neatly furnished and with a wonderful suggestion of homeness about it. He was pleasantly astonished. But the leader of the gang was intent upon the business in hand. He turned to Hazel first and pointed at the door which led into the kitchen. "Say, you!" he cried roughly. "You best get right out wher' you'll belong fer awhiles. We ain't used to female sassiety around this layout, an' I don't guess we need any settin' around now. Say, you'll jest see to the vittles fer this gent an' us. Ther's a Chink out back ther' what ain't a circumstance when it comes to cookin' vittles. You'll see he fixes things right--seein' we've a millionaire fer company. Get busy." Hazel departed, but a wild longing to box the fellow's ears nearly ruined everything. There certainly was a reckoning mounting up for some one. The moment she had departed the man turned his scowling, repellent eyes upon his male prisoner. "Now, see here, Mister James Carbhoy. I guess you're yearning for a few words from me. Wal, I allow they're goin' to be mighty few. See?" he added brutally. "I ain't given to a heap of talk. There's jest three things you need to hear right here an' now. The first is, it's goin' to cost you jest a hundred thousand dollars 'fore you get into the bosom o' your family again. The second is, even if you got the notion to try and dodge us boys, you couldn't get out o' these mountains without starvin' to death or breakin' your rotten neck. You're jest a hundred miles from Snake's Fall, and ninety o' that is Rocky Mountains an' foothills. You ain't goin' to be locked in a prisoner here. There ain't no need. You can jest get around as you please--in daylight--and one of the boys 'll always be on your track. At night you're just goin' to stop right home--in case you lose yourself. The third is, if you kick any or try to get away--well, I don't guess you'll try much else on this earth. The room over this is your sleep-room, an' I guess you can tote your baggage right there now. So long." Without waiting for a reply the man beat a retreat out through the front door, which he locked behind him with considerable display. Once outside, the man hurried away round to the back of the house, where, to his surprise, he found Hazel waiting for him. She addressed him by name in a sharp whisper. "Bud!" she commanded. "Come right here!" Then, as the man obeyed her, she led him silently away from the house in the direction of the corrals. Once well out of earshot of the house she turned on him. "Now see here, Bud," she cried. "I've had all I'm yearning for of you for the next twenty-four years. Now you're going to light right out back to the ranch right away, and don't you ever dare to come near here again--ever. My! but your language has been a disgrace to any New York tough. I've never, never heard such a variety of curse words ever. If I'd thought you could have talked that way I'd have had you go to Sunday school every Sunday since you've been one of our foremen." "'Tain't just nothin', Miss Hazel," the man deprecated. "I ken do better than that on a round-up when the boys get gay. Say, it just did me good talkin' to a multi-millionaire that way. I don't guess I'll ever get such a chance again." "That you won't," cried Hazel, smiling in the darkness, in spite of her outraged feelings. "But I acted right, Miss," protested the man. "I don't guess he'd have located me fer anything but a 'hold-up.' Say, we'd got it all fixed. We just acted it over. I was plumb scared he'd shoot, though. You never can tell with these millionaires. I was scared he wouldn't know enough to push his hands up. Say, we'd have had to rush him if he hadn't, an' maybe there'd have been damage done." Hazel sighed. "There's enough of that done already. Say, you're sure you didn't hurt his poor ankles. You see," she explained, "he's Mr. Gordon's father." The man began to laugh. "Say, don't it beat all, Miss Hazel, stealin' your own father? How 'ud you fancy stealin' Mr. Mallinsbee? Gee! Mr. Gordon's a dandy. He sure is. He's a real bright feller, and I like him. What's the next play, Miss?" "Goodness only knows," cried Hazel. Then she began to laugh. "Some harebrained, mad scheme, or it wouldn't be Gordon's. Anyway, you made it plain I'm to look after the--prisoner?" "Sure. I also told him it would cost him a hundred thousand dollars before he gets out of here." Hazel nodded and laughed. "It'll do that." Then she sighed. "It'll take me all my wits keeping him from guessing I'm concerned in it. I don't know. Well, good-night, Bud. You're going back to the ranch now. You've only one of the boys here? That's right. Which is it? Sid Blake?" "Yes, Miss. I left Sid. You see, he's bright, and up to any play you need. I'll get around once each day. Good-night, Miss." CHAPTER XX THE BOOM IN EARNEST It was late in the evening. The lonely house at Buffalo Point stood out in dim relief against the purpling shades of dusk. At that hour of the evening the distant outline of Snake's Fall was lost in the gray to the eastwards. South, there were only the low grass hillocks, now blended into one definite skyline. To the westward, the sharp outline of the mountains was still silhouetted against the momentarily dulling afterglow of sunset. The evening was still, with that wonderful silence which ever prevails at such an hour upon the open prairie. A light shone in the window of the hitherto closed office at Buffalo Point, and, furthermore, a rig stood at the door with a team of horses attached thereto, which latter did not belong to Mike Callahan. An atmosphere not, perhaps, so much of secrecy as of portent seemed to hang about the place. The solitary light in the surroundings of gathering night seemed significant. Then the team, too, waiting ready to depart at a moment's notice. But above all, perhaps, this was the first time a sign of life had been visible in the house since the closing down at the moment when Slosson's sudden plunge into the real estate world of Snake's Fall had apparently swept all rivalry from his triumphant path. Of a truth, a portentous moment had arrived in the affairs of those interested in Buffalo Point. And the significance of it was displayed in the earnest faces of the four men gathered together in the office. Silas Mallinsbee sat smoking in his own armchair, and with a profound furrow of concentration upon his broad forehead. His usually thrusting chin-beard rested upon the front of his shirt by reason of the intent inclination of his great head. Mike Callahan was seated on a small chair his elbows resting upon his parted knees, and his chin supported upon the knuckles of his locked fingers. His eyes were intently fixed upon the desk, behind which Gordon was frowning over a sheet of paper, upon which the scratching of his pen made itself distinctly audible in the silence. Peter McSwain, the fourth conspirator, was still suffering from a fictitious heat, and was comfortably, but wakefully, snoring under its influence, with a sort of nasal ticking noise which harmoniously blended with the scratching of Gordon's pen. It was fairly obvious that the work Gordon was engaged upon was the central interest of all present, for every eye was steadily, almost anxiously, riveted upon the movement of his pen. After a long time Gordon looked up, and a half smile shone in his blue eyes. "Give us a light, some one," he demanded, as he turned his sheet of paper over on the blotting-pad, and drew his code book from an inner pocket and laid it beside it. Mike Callahan produced and struck the required match. He held it while Gordon re-lit his half-burned cigar, which had gone out under the pressure of thought its owner had been putting forth. "Good," the latter exclaimed, as the tobacco glowed under the draught of his powerful lungs. Then he turned the paper over again. "Guess I got it fixed. I haven't coded it yet, but I'll read it out. It's to Spenser Harker, my father's chief man." "Cancel all previous arrangements made through Slosson for Snake's Fall. Take following instructions. Have bought heavily at Buffalo Point, which is right on the coal-fields. Depot to be built at once at Buffalo Point. Make all arrangements for dispatch of engineers and surveyors at once. There must be no delay in starting a boom. My son, Gordon, is here to represent our interests. Put this to the general manager of the Union Grayling and Ukataw, and yourself see no delay. Am going on to coast on urgent affairs. Gordon has the matter well in hand and will control at this end. This should be a big coup for us. "JAMES CARBHOY." As Gordon finished reading he glanced round at his companions' faces through the smoke of his cigar. Mike was audibly sniggering. Mallinsbee's eyes were smiling in that twinkling fashion which deep-set eyes seem so capable of. As for Peter McSwain, from sheer force of habit he drew forth a colored handkerchief and mopped his grinning eyes. "You ain't going to send that?" he said incredulously. "Why not?" "But--that piece about yourself?" grinned Mike. "You darsen't to do it." "I think I get his point," nodded Mallinsbee, his broad face beaming admiration. "Sort of local color, I guess." Gordon twisted his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. His blue eyes were shining with a sort of earnest amusement. His sharp white teeth were gripping the mangled end of his cigar firmly. "Say, fellows," he said, after a moment's thought, "I'm kind of wondering if you get just what this thing means to me. It just needs a sum in dollars to get its meaning to you. But for me it's different. I need to make dollars, too. But still it's different. You see, some day I've got to sit right in my father's chair, and run things with a capital of millions of dollars. But before I do that I've got to get right up and convince my father I can handle the work right. He doesn't figure I can act that way--yet. So it's up to me to show him I can. Well, I've started in, and I'm going to see the game through to the end. I've backed my wits to push this boat right into harbor safe. And in doin' that I've got to squeeze the biggest financier in the country. When I've done it right, that financier will know he can hand over his particular craft to my steering without fear of my running it on the rocks. The dollars I need to make out of this are just a circumstance. They are the outward sign of my fitness for my father's edification. That piece about my representing my father isn't just local color either. I actually intend to assume that character, and, from now on, I intend to work direct with headquarters, ordering the whole transaction for the railroad myself in _my own name_. Do you get me? From now on I _am_ my father's representative. If Spenser Harker chooses to come right along here, if the general manager of the Union Grayling chooses to come along, I shall meet them, and insist that the work goes through. You see, I am my father's son, I am still his secretary, and they have word in private code _from my father_ that I represent him. There can be no debate. All they know of me is that I left New York on confidential work for my father. Well, this, I guess, is the confidential work. Gentlemen, we've simply got to sit right back and help ourselves to our profits. And while we're doing that, why, I guess the dear old dad is taking his well-earned vacation in the hills, while David Slosson is feeling a nasty draught through the chinks in an old adobe and log shack which I hope will blow the foul odors out of his fouler mind. You can leave the after part of this play safely in my hands. Meanwhile, if you'll just give me five minutes I'll code this message. Then we'll drive right into town and send it over the wire." Sunday in an obscure country hotel on the western plains is usually the dullest thing on earth. The habit of years is a whitewash of respectability and a moderation of tone, both assumed through the medium of a complete change of attire from that worn during the week. There is nothing on earth but the loss by fire, or the definite destruction of them, which will stop the citizen, who possesses such things, from arraying himself in a "best suit." It is the outward sign of an attempted cleansing of the soul. There can be no doubt of it. That suit is not adjusted for the purpose of holiday enjoyment. That is quite plain. For each man is as careful not to do anything that can destroy the crease down his trousers, as he is not to sit on the tails of his well-brushed Prince Albert coat. The day is spent in just "sitting around." The citizen will talk. That is not calculated to spoil his suit. He will even write his mail after a careful adjustment of the knees of his trousers. He will sneak into the bar by a back door to obtain an "eye-opener." This, again, will involve no great risk to his suit. Then he will dine liberally off roast turkey and pie of some sort. If the hotel is fairly well priced he will even get an ice-cream with his midday dinner. In the afternoon he will again sit around and talk. He may even venture a walk. Then comes the evening supper. It is the worst function of a dreary day--a meal made up of cakes, preserves, tea or coffee, and any cold meats left over during the week. After that the "best suits" somehow seem to fade out of sight, and a generally looser tone prevails. Such had been the Sundays in Snake's Fall since ever the town had boasted an hotel with boarding accommodation. No guest had ever dared to break through the tradition. It would have required heroic courage to have done so. But now changes in the town were rapidly taking place. So rapidly, indeed, that the times might well have been characterized as "breathless." On this particular Sunday a perfect revolution was in progress. Amongst the older inhabitants who managed to drift to the vicinity of the hotel a feeling of unreality took possession of them, and they wondered if it were not some curious and not altogether pleasant dream. The hotel was thronged with a blending of strangers and townspeople, clad, regardless of the day, in a state of excitement such as might only have been expected at the declaration of a world war, or a presidential election. It was the culmination of the excitement inspired originally by the news of Slosson's defection, and which, in the course of less than a week, had been augmented by happenings in swift and rapid succession, such as set sober business men wondering if they were living on a volcano instead of a coalmine, or if the days of miracles had indeed returned upon the world. Well before the excitement over Slosson had died down it became known that the Buffalo Point interests were at work again. Mallinsbee's office was opened once more. Furthermore, he had acquired two clerks, and was securing others from down east. This was more than significant. It attracted every eye in the new direction. Men strove to solve the question with regard to its relationship to Slosson's going. The thought which promptly came to each mind was that Slosson's going was less a miracle than a natural disappearance. His wild buying had inspired doubt from the first. The man had gone crazy, and his employers had turned him down. So he had bolted. The opening of Buffalo Point warned them that the railroad had in consequence come to terms with Mallinsbee. So there had been a fresh rush for information in that direction. But this rush received no encouragement and less information, and the sorely tried speculators were once more flung back into their own outer darkness. Then came the next, the culminating excitement. The news drifted into the place from outside sources. It came from agents and friends in the east. Surveyors and engineers and construction gangs were about to be sent to _Buffalo Point_! The news was quite definite, quite decided. It was more. It was accompanied by peremptory orders and urgent requests that those who were on the spot should get in on the Buffalo Point township without a moment's delay, and price was not to hinder them. Had it been needed, there were no two people in the whole of Snake's Fall better placed for the dissemination and exaggeration of the news than Peter McSwain at the hotel and Mike Callahan at the livery barn. Nor were they idle. Nor did they miss a single opportunity. In the office of the hotel, while service was on at the little church, and all the womenfolk and children were singing their tender hearts out in an effort to get an appetite for Sunday's dinner, Peter was the center of observation amidst a crowd of bitterly complaining commercial sinners, each with his own particular ax to grind and a desperate grievance against the crooks who were rigging the land markets in the neighborhood for their own sordid profit. He was holding forth, debating point for point, and, as he would have described it himself, "boosting the old boat over a heavy sea." Some one had suggested that Buffalo Point had been in league with Slosson to hold up the situation, while the former completed their own arrangements to the detriment of the community. Peter promptly jumped in. "Say, youse fellers are all sorts of 'smarts,' anyway," he said, with a pitying sort of contempt. "What you need is gilt-edged finance. You're scared to death pulling the chestnuts out o' the fire. You're mostly looking for a thousand per cent. result, with only a five per cent. courage. That's just about your play. What's the use in settin' around here talking murder when the plums are lyin' around? Pick 'em up, I says. Pick 'em right up an' get your back teeth into 'em so the juice jest trickles right over your Sunday suits. They're there for you. Just grab. I'm tired of talk. The truth is, some o' youse feelin' you've burnt your fingers over Slosson. Slosson was the railroad's agent. Your five per cent. minds saw the gilding in following Slosson. When he skipped out with my team you were stung bad. You've got stakes in Snake's, while you're finding out now the railroad ain't moved that way. An' so you're just scared to death to show the color of your paper till you see the depot built and the locomotives passing this place ringing a chorus of welcome for Buffalo. Then where are you? You're going to pay sucker prices then, or get right back east with a big debit for wasted board and time. I'm takin' a chance myself, and it ain't with any five per cent. courage. I got a big stake in both places, and I don't care a continental where they build the depot." Mike Callahan was talking in much the same strain in the neighborhood of his barn, which somehow always became a sort of Sunday meeting-place for loungers seeking information. But Mike, acting on instructions, went much further. He spoke of the reports of the movements of the railroad's engineers and surveyors. He assured his hearers he had had definite word of it himself, and then added a hint that started something in the nature of a panic amongst his audience. "It ain't no use in guessing," he said from his seat on an upturned bucket at the open door of his barn. "I ain't got loose cash to fling around. Mine is just locked right up in hossflesh and rigs, so I ain't got no ax needs sharpening. But I drive folks around and I hear them yarning. I drove a crowd out to Mallinsbee's place--the office at Buffalo Point yesterday. They were guests of his. They were talkin' depots and things the whole way. Say, ever heard the name of Carbhoy? Any of youse?" Some one assured him that Carbhoy was President of the Union road, and Mike winked. "Jest so," he observed. "As sure as St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, one of that gang was called 'Carbhoy.' I heard one of 'em use the name. And I heard the feller called 'Carbhoy' tell him to close his map. Not just in them words, but the sort of words a millionaire might use. That gang are guests of Mallinsbee. Wher' they are now I can't say. I didn't drive 'em back." It was small enough wonder that the conflagration of excitement fairly swallowed up the town of vultures. The Buffalo Point interests intended it to do so. Nor could their agents have been better selected. They were established citizens who came into contact with the whole floating population of the place. They were above suspicion, and they just simply laughed and talked and pushed their pinpricks home, preparing the way for the _dénouement_. On the Monday following, the effect of their work began to show itself. Amongst other visitations Mallinsbee was invaded by a deputation representing large real-estate interests. Under Gordon's management the office had been entirely converted. Now the original parlor office had been turned over to the use of the clerical staff. The bedroom Gordon had occupied had become Mallinsbee's private office, and the other bedroom had been made into an office for Gordon himself. There was no longer any appearance of a makeshift about the place. It was an organized commercial establishment ready for the transaction of any business, from battling with a royal eagle of commerce down to the plucking of the half-fledged pigeon. The deputation arrived in the morning, and consisted of Mr. Cyrus P. Laker and Mr. Abe Chester. These two men represented two Chicago real-estate corporations who were prepared to shed dollars that ran into six figures in a "right" enterprise. The rancher had been notified of their coming, and had sat in consultation with Gordon for half an hour before their arrival. When the clerk showed them into Mallinsbee's private office they found him fully equipped, with his hideous patch over one eye, and Gordon sitting near by at a small table under the window. Abe Chester overflowed the chair the clerk set for him, and Laker possessed himself of another. They were in sharp contrast, these two. One was lean and tall, the other was squat and breathed asthmatically. But both were men of affairs, and equal to every move in a deal. The tall man opened the case, with his keen eyes searching the baffling face of the rancher. Just for one moment he had doubtfully eyed Gordon's figure, so intently bent over his work, but Mallinsbee had reassured him with the words, "My confidential secretary." Mr. Laker assumed an air of simple frankness. "Our errand is a simple one, Mr. Mallinsbee," he began in hollow tones which seemed to emanate from somewhere in the region of his highly shined shoes. Then he smiled vaguely, a smile which Gordon mentally registered as being "childlike," as he observed it out of the corners of his eyes. "We are looking for two little pieces of information which you, as a business man, will appreciate as being a justifiable search on our part. You see, we are open to negotiating a deal of several hundred thousand dollars, of course depending on the information being satisfactory." "There's several rumors afloat that maybe you can confirm or deny," broke in Abe Chester shortly. His _confrère's_ "high-brow" methods, as he termed them, irritated him. "Just so," agreed Laker suavely. "Two rumors which affect the situation very nearly. The first is, is it a fact that the President of the Union Grayling and Ukataw Railroad is your guest at the present moment? The second is, there is a rumor afloat that the railroad company are actually preparing to build their depot here. Is this so?" Mallinsbee's expression was annoyingly obscure. Mr. Laker felt that he was smiling, but Abe Chester was convinced that a smile was not within a mile of his large features. Both men were agreed, however, that they distrusted that eye-patch. Gordon awaited the rancher's reply with amused patience. It came in the rumbling, heavy voice so like an organ note, after a duly thoughtful pause. "Well, gentlemen," he said, with the air of a man who has bestowed a weight of consideration upon his answer, "you have put what a legal mind maybe 'ud consider 'leading' questions. Not having a legal mind, but just the mind of an _honest_ trader, I'll say they certainly are _some_ questions. However, it don't seem to me they'll prejudice a thing answering 'em straight. You are yearning to deal--well, so am I; an' if my answer's going to help things that way, why, I thank you for asking. Mr. Carbhoy is my guest at this moment. How long he'll remain my guest I can't just say. You see, he's going along to the coast when we're through fixing things right for Buffalo Point. That answers your first question, I guess. The second's even easier. The railroad's engineers will be right here with plans and specifications and materials and workers for building the depot at Buffalo Point on _Wednesday noon_." Abe Chester drew a short asthmatical breath. His leaner companion smiled cadaverously. "Then it will give us both much pleasure to talk business," said the latter. "Sure," agreed Chester, sparing words which cost him so much breath, of which he possessed such a small supply. Mallinsbee pushed cigars towards them. He felt the occasion needed their moral support. "Help yourselves, gentlemen," he said. "Guess it'll make us talk better. There's a whole heap of talk coming." The two men helped themselves, tenderly pressing the cigars and smelling them. The rancher took one himself, with the certainty of its quality, and lit it. "A lot to talk about?" inquired Mr. Laker, not without misgivings. "Why, yes." The rancher pulled deeply at his cigar and examined the ash thoughtfully. "Yes," he went on after a moment, "I guess I'll have to say quite a piece before you talk money. You see, I'd just like you to understand the position. It's perhaps a bit difficult. This scheme has been lying around quite a time, inviting folks to put money into it at a profitable price to themselves. A number of wise friends of mine have taken the opportunity and are in, good and snug. There's a number of others hadn't the grit. Maybe I don't just blame them. You see, it was some gamble, and needed folks who could take a chance. Wall, those days are past. There's no gamble now. It's as good as American double eagles. You see, Snake's will just become a sort of flag station, while Buffalo Point will sit around in a halo of glory with a brand-new swell depot. It's been some work handling this proposition, and the folks interested, including the Bude and Sideley Coal Company, need a deal of compensation for their work. Personally, I am not selling a single frontage now until the depot is well on the way. In short, I need a fancy price. In conclusion, gentlemen, let me say quite plainly that what I would have sold originally for three figures will now, or rather when the time comes, cost four--and maybe even five." "You mean to shut us out," snapped Abe Chester. "Is it graft?" inquired Laker, with something between a sneer and anger. "Call it what you like," said Mallinsbee coldly. "I've told you the plain facts, as I shall tell everybody else. Those who want to get in on the Buffalo Point boom will have to pay money for it--good money. I think that is all I have to say, gentlemen." CHAPTER XXI A TRIFLE Few men were less given to dreaming than James Carbhoy. Usually he had no spare time on his hands for such a pastime. Dreams? Well, perhaps he occasionally let imagination run riot amidst seas of amazing figures, but that was all. All other dreams left him cold. Now it was different. He was reclining in an old-fashioned rocker chair outside the front door of his prison. The air of the valley was soft and balmy, the sun was setting, and a wealth of ever-changing colors tinted the distant mountain-tops; a wonderful sense of peace and security reigned everywhere. So, somehow, he found himself dreaming. He filled the chair almost to overflowing and reveled in its comfort, just as he reveled in the comfort even of his prison. His hands were clasped behind his iron-gray head, and he drank deeply of the pleasant, perfumed air. His captivity had already exceeded three weeks, and the first irritation of it had long since passed, leaving in its place a philosophic resignation characteristic of the man. He no longer strove seriously to solve the problem of his detention. During the first days of his captivity he had thought hard, and the contemplation of possible disaster to many enterprises resulting from this enforced absence had troubled him seriously, but as the days wore on and no word came from his captors his resignation quietly set in, and gradually a pleasant peace reigned in place of stormy feelings. James Carbhoy possessed a considerable humor for a man who spent his life in multiplying, subtracting and adding numerals which represented the sum of his gains and losses in currency, and perhaps it was this which so largely helped him. His temperament should undoubtedly have been at once harsh, sternly unyielding and bitterly avaricious. In reality it was none of these things. It was his lot to cause money to make money, and the work of it was something in the nature of an amusement. He was warm-hearted and human; he loved battle and the spirit of competition. Then, too, he possessed a deplorable love for the knavery of modern financial methods. This was the underlying temperament which governed all his actions, and a warm, human kindliness saved him from many of the pitfalls into which such a temperament might well have trapped him. As he sat there basking in the evening sunlight he felt that on the whole he rather owed his captors a debt of gratitude for introducing him to a side of life which otherwise he might never have come into contact with. He knew at the same time that such a feeling was just as absurd as that the spirit of fierce resentment had so easily died down within him. All his interests were dependent upon his own efforts for success, and here he was shut up, a prisoner, with these very affairs, for all he knew, going completely to the dogs. His conflicting feelings made him smile, and here it was that his humor served him. After all, what did it matter? He knew that some one had bested him. It was not the first time in his life that he had been bested. Not by any means. But always in such cases he had ultimately made up the leeway and gained on the reach. Well, he supposed he would do so again. So he rested content and submitted to the pleasant surroundings of his captivity. There was one feature of his position, however, which he seriously did resent. It was a feature which even his humor could not help him to endure with complacency. It was the simple presence of a Chinaman near him. He cordially detested Chinamen--so much so that, in all his great financial undertakings, he did not possess one cent of interest in any Chinese enterprise. Hip-Lee was maddeningly ubiquitous. There was no escape from him. If the millionaire's fellow prisoner, the pretty teamstress, entered his room to wait on him--and their captors seemed to have forced such service upon her--Hip-Lee was her shadow. If he himself elected to go for a walk through the valley--a freedom accorded him from the first--there was not a moment but what a glance over his shoulder would have revealed the lurking, silent, furtive figure in its blue smock, watchful of his every movement, while apparently occupied in anything but that peculiar form of pastime. James Carbhoy resented this surveillance bitterly. Nor did he doubt that beneath that simple blue smock a long knife was concealed, and, probably, a desire for murder. However, nothing of this was concerning him now. The hour was the hour of peace. The perfection of the scene he was gazing upon had cast its spell about him, and he was dreaming--really dreaming of nothing. The joy of living was upon him, and, for the time being, nothing else mattered. In the midst of his dreaming the sound of a footstep coming round the angle of the building to his right roused him to full alertness. He glanced round quickly and withdrew his hands from behind his head. Mechanically he drew his cigar-case from an inner pocket and selected a cigar. But he was expectant and curious, his feelings inspired by his knowledge that Hip-Lee always moved soundlessly. His eyes were upon the limits of the house when the intruder materialized. Promptly a wave of pleasurable relief swept over him as he beheld the pretty figure of his fellow captive. But he gave no sign, for the reason that the girl was obviously unaware of his presence, and it yet remained to be seen if the yellow-faced reptile, Hip-Lee, was at hand as usual. He watched her silently. He was struck, too, by her expression of rapt appreciation of the scene before her, which added further to his reluctance to break the spell of her enjoyment. But as the hated blue smock did not make its appearance, the man could no longer resist temptation. The opportunity was too good to miss. "It's some scene," he said in a tone calculated not to startle her, his gray eyes twinkling genially. But Hazel was startled. She was startled more than she cared about. Her one object was always to avoid contact with Gordon's father, except under the watchful eyes, of Hip-Lee. She feared that keen, incisive brain she knew to lie behind his steady gray eyes. She feared questions her wit was not ready enough to answer without disaster to the plans of her fellow conspirators. She hated the part she was forced to play, but she was also determined to play it with all her might. She must act now, and act well. So, with a resolute effort, she faced her victim. "I--I just didn't know you were here, sir," she said truthfully, while her eyes lied an added alarm. "But--but talk low, or the----" "You're worrying over that mongrel Chink," said Carbhoy quickly. "I expected to see his leather features following you around. I guess he's got ears as long as an ass, and just about twice as sharp. Say, I'm going to kill that mouse-colored serpent one of these times if he don't quit his games. Say----" He broke off, studying the girl's pretty face speculatively. There was no doubt her eyes wore a hunted expression--she intended them to. "They treating you--right?" he demanded. Hazel's effort was better than she knew as she strove for pathos. "Oh, yes, I s'pose so," she said hopelessly. "I'm let alone, and--I get good food. It--it isn't that." "What is it?" The man's question came sharply. Hazel turned her face to the hills and sighed. The movement was well calculated. "It's my folks." Then, with a dramatic touch, "Say, Mr. Carbhoy, do you guess we'll ever--get out of this? Do you think we'll get back to our folks? Sometimes I--oh, it's awful!" Her words carried conviction, and the man was taken in. "Say," he said quickly, "I'm making a big guess we'll get out later--when things are fixed. This is not a ransom. But it means--dollars." He lit his cigar, and its aroma pleasantly scented the air. Hazel sighed with intense feeling--to disguise her inclination to laugh. "Yes, sir," she said hopelessly. "One hundred thousand dollars." Gordon's father smiled back at her. "I'd hate to think I was held up for less," he said. "It would sort of wound my vanity." The girl could have hugged him for the serenity of his attitude. Nothing seemed to disturb him. She felt that Gordon had every reason for his devotion to his father, and ought to be well ashamed of himself for submitting him to the outrage which had been perpetrated. "Who--who do you think has done this?" she hazarded hesitatingly. "Slosson?" "Maybe. Though----" "Slosson should have met you himself," the girl declared emphatically. "He certainly should," replied Carbhoy, with cold emphasis. "He'll need to explain that--later. Say, how did you come to be driving me?" Hazel suddenly felt cold in the warm air. "I was just engaged to, because Mr. Slosson couldn't go himself. You see, father has a spare team, and I do a goodish bit of driving. You see, we need to do 'most anything to get money here." "Yes, that's the way of things." The man's eyes were twinkling again, and Hazel began to hope that she was once more on firm ground. Nor was she disappointed when the man went on. "I guess we're all out after--dollars," he said reflectively. Then he removed his cigar and luxuriously emitted a thin spiral smoke from between his pursed lips. "It don't seem the sort of work a girl like you should be at, though. Still, why not? It's a great play--chasing dollars. It's the best thing in life--wholesome and human. I've always felt that way about it, and as I've piled up the years and got a peek into motives and things I've felt more sure that competition--that's fixing things right for ourselves out of the general scrum of life--is the life intended for us by the Creator." Hazel nodded. "Life is competition," she observed, with a wise little smile. "Sure. That's why human nature is dishonest--has to be." There was a question in the girl's eyes which the millionaire was prompt to detect. "Sure it's dishonest. Can you show me a detail of human nature which is truly honest? Say, I've watched it all my life, I've built every sort of construction on it. Wherever I have built in the belief that honesty is the foundation of human nature things have dropped with a smash. Now I know, and my faith is none the less. Human nature is dishonest. It's only a question of degree. I'm dishonest. You're dishonest. But in your case it's only in the higher ethical sense. You wouldn't steal a pocket-book. You wouldn't commit murder. But put yourself into competition with a girl friend baking a swell layer cake, calculated to disturb the digestion of an ostrich. Say, you'd resort to any old trick you could think of to fix her where you wanted her." Hazel laughed. "I wouldn't shoot her up, but--I'd do all I knew to beat her." "Just so." "After what's happened to us here I guess human nature isn't going to find a champion in me," Hazel went on. "Still, it's pretty hard to lose your faith in human nature that way." "Lose? Who said 'lose'?" cried the man, with a cordial laugh. "Not I. If I suddenly found it 'honest,' why, I'd hate to go on living. Human nature's got to be just as it is. Honesty lies in Nature. That's the honesty that folks talk about and dream about. It isn't practicable in human life. Dishonesty is the leavening that makes honesty, in the abstract, palatable. Say, think of it--if we were all honest like idealists talk of. What would we have worth living for? Do you know what would happen? Why, we'd all be sitting around making hymns for everybody else to sing, till there was such an almighty hullabaloo we'd all get crazy and have to sign a petition to get it stopped. We'd all be fixed up in a sort of white suit that wouldn't ever need a laundry, and every blamed citizen would start right in to turn the world into a sort of hell by always telling the truth. Just think what it would mean if you had to tell some friend of yours what you thought of her for sneaking your latest beau." "It certainly would be liable to cause a deal of trouble," laughed Hazel. "Trouble? I should say." The millionaire chuckled softly as he returned his cigar to his mouth. "Say, I was reading the obituary of a preacher--my wife's favorite--the other day. He lost his grip on life and fell through. That reporter boy was bright, and I wondered when I was reading what he'd have said if he'd spoke the truth as he saw it. To read that obituary you'd think that preacher feller was the greatest saint ever lived. I felt I could have wept over that poor feller, the talk was so elegant and poetic. I just felt the worst worm ever lived beside that preacher. I felt I ought to spend the last five dollars I had to fix his grave up with pure white lilies, if I had to go without food to do it. It was fine. But the writer never said a word about that preacher living in a swell house in Fifth Avenue, and the $20,000 he took every year for his job, and the elegant automobile he chased around to the houses of his rich congregation in. If he'd died in the slums on the east side I guess that newspaper wouldn't ever have heard of him, and that writer wouldn't have got dollars for the pretty language it was his job to scratch together for such an occasion." "It doesn't sound nice put that way," sighed Hazel. "I suppose it's all competition even trying to make folks live right. I suppose that preacher was successful in his calling--the same as you are in yours. I suppose his human nature was no different to other folks'." "That's it. Life's splendidly dishonest and a perfect sham. Come to think of it, Ananias must have been all sorts of a great man to be singled out of a world of liars. On the other hand, he'd have had some rival in the feller who first accused George Washington of never lying. Psha! life's a great play, and I'd hate it to be different from what it is. We're all just as dishonest as we can be and still keep out of penitentiary: which makes me feel mighty sorry for them that don't. From the fisherman to the Sunday-school teacher we're all liars, and if you charged us with it we'd deny it, or worse, and thereby add further proof to the charge. I've thought a deal over this hold-up, and it seems to me those guys bluffed us some." "You mean about the--ransom," said Hazel, the last sign of amusement dying swiftly out of her eyes. "Why, yes." The millionaire smoked in silence for some moments. Then quite suddenly he removed the cigar from between his lips. "Maybe you don't know I'm working on a big land scheme in these parts. It seems to me some bright gang intend to roll me for my wad. I don't guess Slosson's in it." "Then who is it, sir?" demanded the girl, with unconscious sharpness. The man's steady eyes surveyed her through their half-closed lids. He shook his head. "I can't just say--yet. We'll find out in good time." His smile was quietly confident. "Anyway, for the moment some one's got the drop on me, and I'll just have to sit around. But--it's pretty tough on you, Miss--Miss----" "Mallinsbee," said Hazel, without thinking. "Mallinsbee?" The man's gray eyes became suddenly alert, and Hazel felt like killing herself. She believed, in that one unguarded moment, she had ruined everything. She held her breath and turned quickly towards the setting sun, lest her face should betray her. Then her terror passed as she heard the quiet, kindly laugh of the man as he began speaking again. "Well, Miss Mallinsbee, here we are, and here we've just got to stay. I came here to get the best of a deal. We're all out to do some one or something, somehow or somewhere. It don't much matter who. And when a man acts right he don't squeal when the other feller's on top. He just sits around till it's his move, and then he'll try and get things back. I'm not squealing. It's my turn to sit around--that's all. Meanwhile, with the comforts at my disposal--good wines, good cigars and mountain air--I'm having some vacation. If it weren't for that darned Chink with his detestable blue suit I'd----" "Hush!" Hazel had turned and held up a warning finger. In response the man glanced sharply about him. There, sure enough, standing silent and immovable at the corner of the building, was the hated vision of blue with its crowning features of dull yellow. James Carbhoy flung himself back in his rocker. All the humor and pleasure had been banished from his strong face, and only disgust remained. "Oh, hell!" he exclaimed, and flung his cigar with all his force in the direction of the intruder. CHAPTER XXII ON THE TRAIL It was a night to remember, if for nothing else for the exquisite atmospheric conditions prevailing. The moon was at its full, like some splendid jewel radiating a silvery peace upon a slumbering world. The jeweled sky suggested the untold wealth of an infinite universe. The perfumed air filled lungs and nostrils with a beatific joy in living, and the darkened splendor of the crowding hills inspired a reverence in the human heart so profound, that it left scarce a place for the smallness of mundane hopes and yearnings. The splendor, the breadth of beauty sank into the human soul and left the spirit straining at its earthly bonds, and gazing with longing towards the infinite power which ordered its existence. For ten miles of the journey from the old ranch-house Hazel rode under the sublime influence of feelings so inspired. Nothing of the conditions were new to her. The mountain nights in summer were as much a part of her existence as was the ranching life of her home. She knew them as she knew the work that filled her daylight hours. But their effect upon her never varied--never weakened. No familiarity with them could change that feeling of the infinite sublimity somewhere beyond the narrow confines of human life. She drank in the deep draughts of perfect life, she gazed abroad with shining eyes of simple happiness on the splendid world, and a superlative thankfulness to the Creator of all things that life had been thus vouchsafed her uplifted her heart and all that was spiritual within her. The journey to her home was twenty miles, but her favorite mare possessed wings so far as its mistress was concerned. The distance was all too short for the splendid young body, and that youthful mood of delight. Hazel reveled in the expenditure of the energy required, as the mare, beneath her, seemed to revel in the physical effort of the journey. For the greater part of the road the cobwebs of affairs she was engaged upon left Hazel indifferent. The delight of life left no room for them. But after the half way had been passed there came to her flashes of thought which reduced her feelings to a more human mood. Nor was that mood of the easiest. She experienced feelings of disquiet, even alarm. She felt vexed, and a great resentment, and even genuine anger, began to take possession of her. But these were interspersed with moments when a certain irresponsibility and humor would not be denied, and underlying all and every other emotion was a great passionate longing, which she scarcely admitted even to herself. Her mind was fixed upon two men: father and son. For the time at least, they were the pivot of all things worldly for her. In her thoughts the son possessed attributes little short of a demi-god, while the father had become a being endowed with a deep, reflected regard. There was room in her woman's heart for both in their respective places. She knew she loved them, and her variations of mood were inspired by the cruelly farcical atmosphere of the position surrounding them both. She was angry with Gordon, bitterly angry at one moment, at the next she reveled in the exquisite impudence of his daring. At one moment her woman's tender pity went out to the big-hearted man who had been submitted to such indignities by his own son and herself, and all those concerned in the conspiracy, and, at the next, she found herself smiling at the humor of his attitude towards his persecutors. Then, too, over all these complications of feeling she was stirred with alarm at that painful memory of the unguarded moment, when, lulled by her interest in the millionaire's talk, she had admitted her name to him. Visions of hideous possibilities rose before her eyes. If he should chance to know her father's name. Why not? Surely he knew. But after that one sharp interrogation he had given no sign. She sighed a sort of half-hearted relief, but remained unconvinced. It was this last contingency which had inspired her night journey home. She had ridden out the moment she had been certain that their captive had retired for the night. There were still some eight miles to go before the ranch would be reached when Hazel experienced a fright, which left her ready to turn and flee back over the way she had come as swiftly as the legs of her mare could carry her. On clearing a bluff of spruce, around which her course lay, in the full radiance of the moon's high noon, she suddenly beheld a horseman riding towards her, a ghostly figure moving soundlessly over the high grass. Such was the effect of this vision upon her, that, beyond being able to bring her mare to an abrupt halt, panic left her paralysed. In all her years she had never encountered a horseman riding late at night in the mountains. Who was he? Who could he be? And an eerie feeling set her flesh creeping at the ghostliness and noiselessness of his coming. She sat there stupidly, her pretty cheeks ashen in the moonlight. And all the time the man was coming nearer and nearer, traveling the same trail she would have done had she pursued her course. Then an abject terror surged upon her. He must meet her! In an instant her paralysis left her, and she gathered her reins to turn her mare about. But the maneuver was never effected. She had suddenly recognized the horse the man was riding. It was Sunset. The next moment she further recognized the broad shoulders of the man in the saddle, and a glad cry broke from her, and she urged her mare on to meet him. "Gordon!" she cried, in a world of delight and relief as she came up with him. "You, Hazel?" came the joyous response of her ghostly visitor. "You just scared me all to death," protested the girl, as the big chestnut ranged up beside her. "I did?" Gordon was smiling tenderly down at the pretty figure, so fascinating in the moonlight as it sat astride the brown mare. "My, but I thought--I--oh, I don't know what I thought. But what are you doing around--now?" The girl was smiling happily enough. Even in the silver of the moonlight it was obvious that the color had returned to her cheeks. "I was going to ask you that," returned Gordon. "But I guess I best tell you things first." Then he began to laugh. "I was coming out to see you, but--not you only. Say, I'm just the weakest conspirator ever started out to trap a mouse. Look at me. Say, get a good look. It isn't the sort of thing you'll see every time you open your eyes. I was sick to death feeling the old dad was shut up a prisoner, and I felt I must get along, even if it was only just to get a peek, and be sure he wasn't suffering." Hazel's eyes were tenderly regarding the great creature in the bright moonlight. She had been so recently angry at this son's heartless action, that his expression of contrition made her feel all the more tender towards him. "He's in bed, and--I'd guess he's snoring elegantly by now," she said, with a smile. "I--I waited to start out till he was in bed." Then her eyes met his. "What were you coming to--see me for?" The direct challenge very nearly precipitated matters. Gordon had excuses enough for seeing her, but only one real purpose. He hesitated before replying. "We've made good," he said at last, by way of subterfuge, and the girl drew a deep breath of joyous content. "You've--made--good?" she questioned, more in the way of reassuring herself than desiring a reply. Gordon moved his horse so that she could turn about. "Let's go back to the--prison," he said, his words charged with the excited delight stirring within him. "Yes, we've made good." The girl turned her mare about and the two moved on the way she had already come, side by side. "Listen, while I tell you. Say, I could sort of shout it around the hill-tops--if they weren't so snowy and cold. Snake's Fall is just a surging land market for us at Buffalo. There are real estate offices opening everywhere, and everybody you meet on the sidewalk is a broker of some sort. The Bude and Sideley folk turned their holdings loose directly we got the surveyors and engineers of the railroad up, and the folks all jumped. Then the men at Snake's, who held in ours, followed suit. But your father, bless him, held tight. The boom fairly rose to a shriek, and we've been fighting to sit tight, and let the prices go up skywards. Then we had a meeting, and your father loosened up a bit. Just to keep the spurt on. Meanwhile I've handled things down east, and kept the wires singing. The railroad have started a great advertising campaign at my orders. The coal company, too, are talking Snake's Fall, and Buffalo Point. In a month there'll be such a rush as only America, and this continent generally knows how to make. Even now sites are changing hands at ridiculous prices. Meanwhile I've got the railroad busy. Already ten construction trains have come through, and they've started on the new depot." He drew a deep sigh of satisfaction. Then in a sort of shamefaced manner he went on. "But I've had to weaken in the old dad's direction. I can't make good and leave him out all together. You see, that play of Slosson's in Snake's will have to be made good, and my father will have to make it that way. So I've got your father to give me a six months' option on a stretch of land adjoining the coalpits which he hadn't ceded to the Bude people. You see, if there's coal there it'll put my father right with the game, and we shan't have hurt him any. Meanwhile things will go on, and we'll have to keep the old dad for another month. Then I sell, and----" "You'll have won out," broke in Hazel, her eyes shining in the moonlight. Then a shadow crossed her face. "But when your father knows what you've done? What then?" Gordon seemed to consider his reply carefully. "You can leave that to me, Hazel," he said at last, with a whimsical smile. "There's surely got to be a grand finale to this, and when it comes I'll still need your help. Say, why were you riding in to the ranch--at dead of night?" The abrupt question shocked the girl out of her delighted content. The memory of her trouble came overwhelmingly upon her. But Gordon was waiting. "You're making good, but I've made pretty bad," she said, thrusting a desire to burst into tears resolutely from her. "I'm just every sort of fool and I--don't know how much damage I haven't done. Everything's gone right until this evening. Hip-Lee has just been as near perfect as a Chinaman can be. We've carried out all our plans right through, and I've never been near your father without Hip-Lee looking on. That is--until this evening." The girl sighed. The confession of her blundering was hard to make. "It was this way," she went on presently. "Your father was out walking. I hadn't seen him return. I was in the kitchen fixing his supper, and it was sticky hot, and I just hated the flies, so I went out for a breath of air. Hip-Lee had been playing his spy game on your father. Well, I just stood out front of the house taking a look at the hills, and wishing I was amongst their snows, when your father spoke. He had got back, and was sitting outside the house, and, maybe, like me he was yearning for that snow. Well, I just couldn't run away--so we talked. I guess we'd talked quite awhile, and I'd kind of forgotten things, and in the middle of his talk he started to address me by my name, and got as far as 'Miss.' Then, without a thought, I spoke my name. He just seemed startled, but never said a word about it, and now I'm worried to death. Was there ever such----" The girl broke off, and it seemed to Gordon, in spite of her attempted smile, she was very near tears. Instantly he smothered his own feelings of alarm at her story and endeavored to console her. He laughed, but in Hazel's hyper-sensitive condition of anxiety, his laugh lacked its usual buoyancy. "That's nothing to worry over," he said. "I'd say if your name had meant anything to him he wouldn't have given you breathing time before you'd learned a heap of things that wouldn't have sounded pretty. Dad's no end of a sport, but when he gets a punch, and the fellow who gives it him don't vanish quick, he's got a way of hitting back mighty hard. I don't guess that break's going to figure any in our play. He never said a word?" "Not a word." Hazel tried to take comfort, but still remained unconvinced. "Anyway what could he do?" Gordon remained serious for some moments. Then his eyes lit again. "Not a thing," he said emphatically, and Hazel knew he meant it. For some time they rode on in silence, and thought was busy with them both. Hazel was thinking of so many things, all of which somehow focussed round the man at her side, and her ardent desire to obey his lightest commands in the schemes of his fertile brain. Gordon had dismissed every other thought from his mind but the delightful companionship of this ride, which had come all unexpectedly. The girl's mare led slightly, and the sober chestnut kept his nose on a level with her shoulder, and thus Gordon was left free to regard the girl he loved without fear of embarrassment to her. But somehow Hazel was not unaware of his regard. A curious subconsciousness left her with the feeling that her every movement was observed, and a pleasant, excited nervousness began to stir her. She hastily broke the silence. "You said you'd still need my help when--the grand finale came," she demanded. "Sure," came the prompt reply. Then very slowly the man added; "I can't do anything without your help--now." The girl glanced round quickly. "You mean--with your father a prisoner?" The man's smile deepened, and his blue eyes gazed thoughtfully, ardently, into the hazel eyes, which, in a moment, became hidden from him. "I don't think I meant--quite that," he said. The girl offered no reply, and the man went on. "You see, we have become sort of partners in most everything, haven't we? I don't seem to think of anything without you being in it." Then he laughed, a little nervous laugh. "I don't try to either. Say, I went out to the cattle station, and had a look at Slosson the other day. The boys have got him pretty right, and--I felt sorry for him." "Why?" Hazel asked her question without thinking. She somehow felt incapable of thought just now. She felt like one drifting upon some tide which was beyond her control, and the only guiding hand that mattered was this man's. Gordon gave one of his curious short laughs, which might have meant anything. "I don't know," he said. Then: "Yes, I do though. Think of a fellow who's had his business queered, who's staked a big gamble and lost, not only that, but the girl he's crazy about, and meanwhile is rounded up in a shack that wouldn't keep a summer shower out, and seems as though it was set up on purpose by some crazy genius as a sort of playground for every sort of wind ever blew. Say, if I lost my partner now, I'd---- Guess our partnership ought to expire in a month. This play will be through then." "Yes." With all her desire to talk on indifferently, Hazel could find no word to add to the monosyllable. She was trembling with a delightful apprehension she could not check. And somehow she had no desire to check it. This man was all powerful to sway her emotions, and she knew it. The moments were growing almost painful in the tenseness of her emotions. "Another month. It's--awful for me to think of." "Is it?" The inanity of her remark would have made Hazel laugh at any other time. Now, it passed her by, its meaninglessness conveying nothing with the submerging of her humor in the sea of stronger emotions. Gordon urged his horse to draw level with the mare. Then he deliberately drew it down to a walk on the rustling grass, and Hazel followed his example without protest. All about them was the delicate silver tracery of the moonlight through the trees. The warmth of the perfumed night air possessed a seductiveness only equaled by the night beauties of the scene about them. It was such a moment when the most timorous lover must become emboldened, and emulate the bravest. But Gordon knew no timidity. His only fear was for failure. Had he realized the tumult which his words had stirred within this girl's bosom he might well have flung all hesitation to the winds. As it was he threw the final cast with all the strength of his virile, impetuous nature. "Another month. Must it end then, Hazel?" He reached out and seized, with gentle firmness, the girl's bridle hand. "Must it? Say, can't it be partners--for life?" His eyes were very tender, but their humor was still lurking in their depths. He leaned towards her and the girl's hand remained unresistingly in his. "D'you know, dear, I sort of feel to-night I'd like to have a dozen Slossons standing around waiting, while I scrapped 'em all in turn for you. Maybe that don't tell you much. It can't mean anything to you. It means this to me. It means I just want to be the fellow who's got to see to it that life runs as smooth as the wheels of a Pullman for you. It means I don't care a thing for anything else in the world but you, not even this play we're at now. I guess I just loved you the day I first saw you, and have gone on loving you worse and worse ever since, till I don't guess there's any doctor, but having you always with me, can save me from an early grave." Somehow the two horses had come to a standstill. Nor were they urged on. "I just want you, Hazel, all the time," Gordon went on, more and more tenderly. "You'll never get to know how badly I want you. Will you--shall it be--partners--always?" The girl was gazing out over the moonlight scene so that Gordon could see nothing of the light of happiness shining in her pretty eyes. All he knew was the trembling of the hand he still held in his. Then, suddenly, while he waited, he felt the girl's other hand, soft, warm, full of that quiet strength which he knew to be hers, close over his, and a wild thrill swept through his whole body. "Is it 'yes'?" he demanded, with a passionate pressure of his hand, and a great light burning in his eyes. "Mine! Mine! For--as long as we live?" The girl still made no verbal reply, but she bowed her head and gently raised his hand, and tenderly pressed it to her soft bosom. In an instant she lay crushed in his arms while the two horses, with heads together, seemed lost in a friendly discussion of the extraordinary proceedings going on between their riders. What they thought about them was apparently on the whole favorable, for presently, with mute expressions of good will, their handsome heads drew apart and lowered significantly. The next moment they were enjoying a pleasant siesta, such as only a four-footed creature can accomplish standing without risk to life and limb. Half an hour later they were wide awake and full of bustling activity. The closed heels on their saddle cinchas warned them that even lovers' madness has its limits of duration, and that the practical affairs of life must inevitably become paramount in the end. So they answered the call, and raced down the trail in the cool of the night. CHAPTER XXIII IN NEW YORK Mrs. James Carbhoy had endured anything but a happy time for several weeks. She had received no news from her beloved son; her husband had spirited himself away on business and left her without a word of definite information as to his whereabouts; while even the trying presence of her young daughter was denied her, since she had been forced to dispatch that personification of childish willfulness to their estate at Tuxedo, that she might be put through a course of disciplining by her various governesses. She was alone, she reminded herself not less than three times a day, and to be alone in her great mansion at Central Park was the limit of earthly punishment as she understood it. She detested it. She hated the hot summer landscape of the park; she was worried to death by the chorus of automobile hooters as the cars sped up and down the great asphalt way; she felt that the red-and-white stone palaces with which she was surrounded were the ugliest things ever hidden from blind eyes, and an army of servants could be, and was, the most nerve-racking thing she had ever been called upon to endure. For two peas she would pack a bag--no, her maid would have to pack it; she was denied even that pleasure--and hie herself to Europe. This was something of the condition of mind to which she was reduced, when one morning two events happened almost simultaneously which changed the whole aspect of things, and created in her something approaching a desire to continue the dreary monotony of life. The first was the advent of her mail, with a long letter from her son _dated at Buffalo Point_, and the second was an urgent request from her husband's manager, Mr. Harker, desiring permission to wait upon her, as he had the most encouraging news from the long-lost Gordon and her husband's affairs generally. Gordon's mother did not read her son's letter at once. She saw the heading and glanced at the opening paragraph. The satisfaction so inspired caused her to set it aside for careful perusal after her breakfast. Mr. Harker would be up to see her at about eleven o'clock. That would give her ample time to have digested its contents before he arrived. For the first time in weeks she ate an ample breakfast at her customary early hour. She further forgot to make her maid's life a burden during the process of dressing, and she even enjoyed glancing over the advertisements of the daily newspapers. Then came the hour of seclusion in her boudoir when she yielded herself to the perusal of her boy's letter. "BUFFALO POINT, Near Snake's Fall. "DEAREST MUM: "It seems so long since I sent you any mail, and I seem to have so much news to tell you, and I've so completely forgotten what I have already told you, that I hardly know where to begin. However, you'll see by the heading of this letter I am at Buffalo Point, and am glad to say I have received a visit from the dear old Dad, who is just as happy as any man of his devotion to work can be--on vacation. His visit to me here has placed me in a position of great trust in his affairs in the neighborhood, and I am very proud that, through my own efforts, I have been so placed. After this I feel that the dear old Dad will never have cause to question my ability in dealing with big affairs. I feel he will acknowledge that the seed of his example has really fallen on fruitful soil, and that, after all, perhaps I shall yet prove a worthy son of a great father. "This, I guess, brings me to the discussion of a subject which has kind of interested me some these last days. It is the modern understanding of filial duty. I s'pose even such a duty changes in its aspect, as everything else seems to change, with the passage of time. Chasing around in the dark days of pre-civilized times filial duty seemed pretty clearly marked. One of the first duties of a son was, when his mother wasn't around to claim the privilege, to get in the way when his father wanted to hit something with his club. He was also kind of handy as a sacrifice, either well broiled or minced into fancy chunks, to make his father's Gods feel good and get benevolent. Then he was mighty useful doing chores around the home, so his father didn't have to do more work than it took him filling his stomach with Saurian steaks and Pterodactyl cutlets, and getting drunk on a sort of beer, which his wife had contracted the habit of making for him in the intervals between being laid out cold with a stone club. "There don't seem to be much doubt about those days. A son's filial duty lasted just as long as his father could enforce it with physical discipline. When he couldn't do it that way any longer, then the son and father generally made a big talk together, and whatever odds and ends of the father could be collected at the finish of the pow-wow were handed over to some local soup kitchen to make stock. "Then the son usually took a wife, and so the same old play went on. "With variations and moderations these things seem to have gone on, on some such general lines, right down to our present day. In some grades of present-day life I don't think there's such a heap of change as you'd guess. The conditions prevail, only the weapons and things are different. However, that's by the way. The thing that requires careful study is how far filial duty is justified. "Filial duty is a pretty arbitrary thing when a man who can really think looks into it. I maintain that obligation is too much imposed upon offspring. I contend they don't owe a thing to their parents. It's the parents who owe to the offspring. This may shock you, but I hope you will put all personal feeling aside and regard it in the nature of an academic discussion. First of all, the fact of life is dependent upon the whim of parents to impose it. It is not a thing which a child owes gratitude for. Say, take a feller who can't swim, tie half a ton of lead around his neck and boost him into a whirlpool full of rocks and things, and ask him for gratitude. I'm open to gamble when he gets his breath he won't say a thing--not a thing--about gratitude. Maybe he'll remember every other emotion ever given to erring humanity, but I don't guess he'd be able to spell the word gratitude, let alone talk it. "We'll pass the subject of life for the moment. We've got it. We didn't want, but we got. And all the kicking won't alter it. Now filial duty demands obedience, and parents start right in from the first to make a kid's life a burden that way. Say, we'll take that whirlpool racket again. It's like two folks standing high and dry on a rock above it, and firing stones all around the poor darned fool struggling to win out. It don't matter which way he turns he's headed off with a rock dropped plumb ahead of him. Those rocks are labeled 'obey.' Say, after about twenty years of dodging those rocks parents 'll tell that feller of all they did for him in his youth, and say he's ungrateful just because he's learned enough sense to realize his parents are fools, anyway, and ought to be petrified mummies in a public museum. "One of the worst sins of parents toward children is the fact that as soon as they take to sitting around in rockers, and their hinges start to creak when they get up, they don't ever seem to remember the time when their joints didn't have to make queer noises. When folks get that way they reckon it's the duty of all offspring just to sit around and gape in fool credulity, while they tell 'em what wonderful folk their parents--used to be, and how they--the children--if they lived a century, could never hope to be half as wonderful. A really bright kid generally hopes that for once his parent is talking truth. I say it with all respect that the gentlest, most harmless, most inoffensive father would resort to any subterfuge to have his son think he could lick creation if he fancied that way; and there isn't a woman so almighty plain but what she'll contrive to get her daughters--while they're still children--crazy enough to believe she was the beauty of her family, and that all their good looks are due to her side of the matrimonial contract. "Of course, it isn't a desirable thought to picture your mother playing at holding hands in dark corners with fellers who never had a hundred-to-one chance of being your father; also it isn't just pleasant to speculate on the tricks she had to play to get your father to the jumping-off mark; neither do you care to dwell on what she thought of the chorus girls your father was in the habit of buying wine for, and decorating up with fancy clothes and jewels in his spare moments. You don't feel it's a nice thing to think of the numbers of times some one else has had to take off your father's boots for him overnight, and bathe his aching head with ice-water to get him down town in the morning to his office. But it wouldn't hurt you a thing if parents made a point of remembering all these things for themselves, and would give up making you quit playing parlor games during sermon in church on Sundays and inventing your own words to the hymn tunes. "Now let's jump to what I call the breaking-point of filial duty. It's the point when a kid gets old enough to master the inner meaning of the expression 'damn fool,' which has probably been liberally applied to him for years. It's the moment when physical discipline can no longer obtain for--physical reasons. It's the point when two real live men, or two real live women, face each other with a contentious situation lying between them. Where does obligation lie? Does it remain--anyway? "In Nature it does not. In human nature it remains--chiefly because of undue sentimentalism. Now sentimentalism should be a luxury, and not a law. This is obvious to any mind not suffocated by the gases of decadence. I'd like to say Nature's laws are sane and just, and, since they are inspired by a great and wise Providence, it's not reasonable to guess they can be improved upon by a psalm-smiting set of folks, who spend their whole lives in wrapping 'emselves around with cotton batten to keep out the wholesome draughts of Nature's lungs. "So I feel that when the breaking-point of filial duty is reached it is no longer mother and daughter, father and son, in the practicalities of life. Take commerce. Father and son are in competition. Each is fighting for his own. How far is a son justified in emptying an automatic pistol into his father's food depot, when that mistaken parent guesses he's yearning to storm his son's stronghold of commercial enterprise? How far is that father justified in doping his son's liquor, so he won't lie awake at nights planning to roll him for his wad next morning? Take a daughter and her momma. Most mothers act as though they had to live all their lives with their daughters' husbands. And most daughters act as though they preferred their mommas should. I ask: how far has a mother right to butt in to run her daughter's home doings, and so muss up for some one else what she was never able to do right for herself? Why shouldn't a daughter be allowed to make her own mess of things, and later on, when she collects sense, clean it up again the best she knows? "These are questions in my mind. These are questions I don't just seem able to answer right myself, and sort of feel they'd have given old Sol some insomnia, in spite of all his glory over the baby episode he made such a song about. Well, I put 'em down here, and maybe you can tell me about 'em, and, anyway, they make some problem. "Maybe I haven't set out my news to the best advantage, but my mind is very busy with fixing things as they should go. You see, I'm working hard in the old Dad's interest, and am hoping soon to get that little word of approval from him which means so much, coming from so great a man. I am looking forward to seeing you again soon, and hope to see your dear, smiling face and pretty eyes just as bright and happy as I always remember them. Give my love to our Gracie, and tell her that the only way to get rid of those peculiarly spindle lower legs, which have always been one of her worst physical defects, is to adopt ankle exercises. It's a defect, like many others in her character, which can be improved with conscientious effort and patience. "Your loving son, "GORDON. "P.S.--Your future daughter-in-law is just crazy to be taken into your motherly fold. "G." Mr. Harker's face was wreathed in smiles at the thought of the pleasant news it was his good fortune to be conveying to the wife of his chief. His smile remained until he heard the trim maid's announcement at the door of Mrs. Carbhoy's boudoir. Then the smile vanished, as though it had never been, and his well-nourished features became an assortment of troubled bewilderment. Furthermore, within five minutes of his ushering into the lady's presence he had registered a solemn vow that celibacy should remain his lot, until the day that saw his ample remains become a subject for cooking operations by the crematorium experts. Mr. Harker was certainly unfortunate in his selection of the moment at which to pay his call. Mrs. James Carbhoy had had half an hour since reading her son's letter, in which to pursue that hateful hyphenated word "daughter-in-law" through every darkened channel of her somewhat limited mental machinery. Daughter-in-law! It was everywhere. She could not lose sight of it. She could not escape its haunting meaning. It pursued her wherever she went. It was there, lurking amidst the folds of her gowns if she peered inside the great hanging wardrobes. It danced like a will-o'-the-wisp in every mirror which her troubled eyes chanced to encounter. It was interwoven with the patterns of the carpets; and the wall-paperings found a lurking-place for it amidst the unreal foliage which adorned them. It laughed at her when she angrily turned away to avoid it, and when she endeavored to defy it its mocking only increased. So it was that the unoffending Harker encountered the full tide of her angry alarm and maternal despair. Mr. Harker had prepared a well-turned opening for his excellent news. But it was never used. Even as his lips moved to speak they remained sealed, held silent by the bitter cry of outraged maternal pride. "He's married!" she cried. "Married--and I--I have never been consulted!" Mr. Harker felt as though he had been caught up in the whirl of a physical encounter in which his opponent held all the advantage. Mrs. Carbhoy waited for no comment. She rushed headlong, following up her advantage, smashing in "lefts" and "rights" indiscriminately. "It's disgraceful--terrible! The ingratitude of it! After all his father and I have done for him! To think how we've always guided and taught him! The callous selfishness! The moment he's out of our sight--this--this is what happens. He's picked up with some wicked, designing female, whose father's certain to be a--a--gaolbird--or, anyway, ought to be. Not a word to a soul. We--we don't know who she is--or--or what. He don't even say her name. Daughter-in-law! It's--it's---- Mr. Harker, I'm just wondering when I'll come over all crazy." Mr. Harker welcomed the pause. "You say Mr. Gordon's married?" he demanded incredulously. "Yes--no. That is, he--he says 'your future daughter-in-law'!" Mr. Harker breathed a deep relief and strove to smile confidence upon his chief's wife. "Ah, yes. Mr. Gordon was always one for the girls. But he wouldn't make a fool of himself that way----" In a moment the second round of the battle was raging. "Fool? Fool? Every man's a fool, if some woman chooses!" cried Mrs. Carbhoy, and promptly hurled herself into a bitter tirade against her sex, sparing no race of monsters from likeness to it. Mr. Harker was forced to submit from sheer inability to compete with the rapid flow of expression. But later on he had his opportunity at what he considered to be the termination of the "second round," while his opponent retired to her corner to be fanned by her seconds. "Anyway, ma'am, if he's not yet married there's still hope. I guess Mr. Carbhoy's wise to what's doing with him. You see, he's been there with him." "James Carbhoy!" The contemptuous emphasis on her husband's name opened the "third round," and Mr. Harker felt that the timekeeper had called "time" before he was ready. For three full minutes the scornful wife of the millionaire recited an amplified denunciation upon husbands in general and millionaires in particular. But even so the round had to come to its natural conclusion, and when they were both resting once more in their "corners," Mr. Harker achieved something almost approaching success. "You know, Mrs. Carbhoy, I was feeling pretty good coming along here in my automobile. Mr. Gordon's something more to me than just your son. We're real good friends, and I was feeling as anxious for his future as maybe you were. Well, when I got word from your husband at Snake's saying that he'd turned our affairs over to Mr. Gordon I was real glad, and I felt now here was the boy's chance. Then, day after day, along come his instructions, and I saw by the grip he'd got on things he'd taken his chance, and was pushing it through with as much smartness as Mr. Carbhoy himself might have shown. I was more than gratified, ma'am. Why, only to-day I've received word of a big coal option he's taken for us. As he's got it it's something for nothing. Nobody could have done better, not even your husband, ma'am. I really can't think there's going to be any mistakes about--strange females." The man's tribute had a mollifying effect upon the mother. But she was still the "mother" rather than a creature of logic. She saw her boy being led to his undoing by some designing creature of her own sex, and her instinct warned her of the hideous dangers to millionaires' sons inherent in so guileful a race. "If I could only feel that he was experienced in the world," she said helplessly. "But what does our poor Gordon know of women?" Mr. Harker smiled. He was thinking with the intimacy of one man who knows another. He knew, too, something of the way in which Gordon's money had generally been spent. "We must hope the best, ma'am," he said, with a hypocritical sigh. "He's evidently not married, so--what do you intend to do about it while Mr. Carbhoy is on the coast?" "Do? Do? Why, I shall just go up to Snake's whatever-it-is, or Buffalo what's-its-name, and--and----" "I should wait awhile, ma'am, if I were you," Mr. Harker interrupted her, fearing another outburst. "I'm expecting David Slosson in the city soon. He's one of our confidential men who's been working up at Snake's for us. I haven't heard from him for quite a while. He's sure to be along down soon, because he's got to make a report. Maybe he can tell us just how things are. Anyway, I wouldn't go up there. It's a queer, wild sort of place, and in no way fit for you." "Will Slosson be around soon?" "Sure, ma'am." "Then I'll wait," cried the troubled mother, without cordiality. Then she appealed to the man who had always been something more than a mere commercial figure in her husband's life. "You know, if anything went wrong with my boy, Mr. Harker, it would just break my heart. I--I couldn't bear it. But I tell you right here there's no wretched female going to play her tricks on our Gordon with me around, and while I've got James Carbhoy's millions to my hand. And if your man Slosson don't give us satisfactory news of the boy, then, if Snake's what's-its-name were the worst place on earth--I should make it." "If it comes to that, ma'am, there are other folks feel that way, too," said the manager earnestly. "But meanwhile I'd say don't worry a thing." "I don't!" snapped the mother sharply. "The person who'll need to do all the worrying is that--female." CHAPTER XXIV PREPARING FOR THE FINALE "I'm getting scared, Gordon. Real truth, I am." Hazel was in the saddle. Gordon had just mounted Sunset. It was the close of a long, arduous, triumphant day for Gordon, and he was feeling very happy, though mentally weary. The horses moved off before he made any reply. He had just dismissed Peter McSwain and Mike Callahan, with whom he had been in close consultation, and Hazel's father was still within the office to see to its closing for the night and the departure of the clerical staff. The way lay towards the ranch, and the trail the horses were taking skirted the new township, now no longer a waste of untrodden grass, but a busy camp with a strongly flowing human tide. Hazel had come to meet him at her lover's urgent request, and she was glad enough to get away from the old ranch house, where the charge of her captive there was seriously beginning to trouble her. Now she had at last voiced something of those feelings which the rapid passing of the weeks had steadily inspired. She knew that her peace of mind demanded some change from this worrying situation. In her loyalty she had struggled to perform her share in the conspiracy. She knew, too, that she had succeeded fairly well, and that her efforts were all appreciated to their full. She had contrived that her lover's father should never know a moment's discomfort. That his life in captivity should be made as easy and pleasant as possible. There were no signs that it had been otherwise, but now, seven weeks had elapsed since his arrival, and what had just seemed a scandalous joke to her originally, had become a sort of painful nightmare which she was longing to throw off. The moment she and Gordon were actually alone, she had been impelled to break the silence which was steadily undermining her nerve. Gordon's horse was close abreast of the brown mare, and its rider smiled down from his great height upon the pretty tailored figure of the girl who had become all the world to him. "I know," he said sympathetically. "It's sort of that way with me, too. I don't just mean I'm scared. There's nothing for me to be scared about. It's--sort of conscience with me. As for your father--say"--his smile broadened--"he's taken to his eye-patch with everybody--me, too. I guess that means he's worried no end." "What--what are you going to do--then?" Hazel eagerly watched that big, open, ingenuous face with its widely smiling blue eyes. And, watching it, she discerned added signs of a growing humor. Finally he laughed outright. "Say, we're just the limit for a bunch of conspirators. Yes--the limit. You're the only one of us who's had the moral courage to put your feelings into words. We're all scared. We've all been scared these weeks. Your father's scared, so he can't look at any man with two eyes. Peter's all of a shiver every time he comes within hailing distance of the sheriff. As for Mike--well, Mike's sold all his holdings, and is bursting to sell his livery business, all but one team, so he'll have the means of skipping the border at a minute's notice. Say, have you figured out how we stand? How I stand? Well, from a point of law I guess I'm a good candidate for ten years' penitentiary. I've kidnapped two men; one's a dirty dog, anyway, and the other's one of the biggest millionaires in the country. I've fraudulently played up a railroad. I've started this boom on the biggest fraud ever practiced. I've--say, ten years! Why, I guess the tally of this adventure looks to me like twenty in the worst penitentiary to be found in the country. It--makes me perspire to think of it." He was laughing in a perfectly reckless fashion, and, in spite of her very real fears, Hazel perforce found herself joining in. "It's desperate, Gordon," she cried. "And as for you, who worked it all out, and led it, you--you are the dearest blackguard ever breathed." Then quite suddenly her eyes sobered, and her apprehension returned with a rush. "But how long is--it to last? I--I can't go on much longer, and your father's getting restive and suspicious." Gordon reached down and patted Sunset's crested neck. "It's finished now. That's why I asked you to come and meet me. I've sold." "You've sold?" In a moment the last shadow of fear had passed out of the girl's pretty eyes. Now she was agog with excited admiration. "Yes." The man nodded. "It had to be done carefully. I've been selling quietly for days and now it's finished. I didn't get the prices I hoped quite, but that was because I felt I dared not wait longer to clear up the general mess I'd made. Your father helped me, and I now sit here with a roll of precisely one hundred and five thousand dollars, and a definite promise to your father to fix things with the great James Carbhoy so no trouble is coming to any one--not even Slosson. I don't know. Now it's all over I'm sort of sorry. You know this sort of thing--the excitement of beating folks--is a great play. I want to be at it all the time." "You've got to meet your father yet," said the girl warningly. "The old dad? Why, yes, I s'pose I have." Gordon chuckled. "Say, I don't wonder folks taking to crooked ways. They just set your blood tingling like--like a glass of champagne on an empty stomach. Just look out there." He pointed at the new township. "Say, isn't it wonderful? All in a few weeks. And all the result of one man's crookedness." "And your father has been a--prisoner--the whole time. Over seven weeks," rebuked the girl. "But it's only three weeks since I met you that night on the trail, Hazel. No other time concerns me. Not even the dear old dad's captivity. That was the beginning of all things that matter for me." "You seem to date everything around that--ridiculous episode," said Hazel slyly. "I----" "I do." "Don't interrupt me, sir. I was going to assure you that your proper spirit should be one of contrition for what you have made your father endure." "It is." "You said you didn't care." "I don't." "Then----" Gordon burst out into a happy laugh. "Don't you see, dear? I just don't care for, or think about anything else in the world. You--you--you are just mine, so what's the use of talking of the old dad." "Really? True? True?" The girl's tender eyes were melting as they gazed up into her lover's. "More to you than all--this?" She indicated the busy life on the new township. The miracle, as she regarded it, which he had worked. The man smiled, his eyes full of a great, tender love. "I'm glad," the girl sighed. "It isn't always so with men--where the making of money is concerned, is it?" She breathed a great contentment and happiness. "Yes, I'm--so glad. It's the same with me, but--I want all this to go on right--because of you. I want your success. I want your success as a man, and--with your father. I'm very jealous for those things now. You see, you belong to me, don't you?" She turned and gazed away across the plain. "Oh, it's good to see it all--to see all the busy work going on. Look there--and there," she pointed quickly in many directions. "Buildings going up. Temporary buildings. The substantial structures to come later. Then the road gangs at work. The carpenters at the sidewalks. The surveyors. The teams and wagons. Above all, that depot being built with all expedition by--your father." She laughed happily and clapped her hands. "It's all growing every day. A mushroom town. And you--you have made that money your great father dared you to make. Dared you--you, and you have made it out of him! Oh, dear! the humor of it is enough to make a cat laugh. Here you, by sheer audacity and roguery, have held up a railroad and coolly played the highwayman on your own father!" Gordon shook his head. "Call it grabbing opportunity. It was an opportunity which came my way through the trifling oversight of forgetting to return the private code book which the old dad had entrusted to my care. Say, I can never thank the dad enough for that half-hour talk in his office which sent me out into the wilderness. If he hadn't handed it to me, I should never have blundered into Snake's; and if I hadn't blundered into Snake's I shouldn't have found you. I guess my parent's just one of the few to whom a son owes anything. He gave me life, but didn't stop at that. He gave me you." Hazel's eyes were smiling happily. "And in return you lay violent hands on him, and incarcerate him while you do your best to rob him." "It sounds pretty bad." "If I didn't know you I'd say that gratitude fell out of your cradle and killed herself when the fairies got around at your birth. But you didn't ask me to ride all these miles in to--to say just all these nice things to me, Gordon? Besides, now you've completed your--graft, what about your poor long-suffering prisoners? How are you going to save us all from the consequences of your evil ways? Your father will hate me." The girl sighed in pretended despair. "He'll never consent to--to----" "Our marriage? Say, if I'm a judge of things I'll have to stand by so he don't embrace you too often, himself." They both laughed like the two happy children they were. There was no cloud that could mar the sun of their delight now. Hazel, for all her fears, had perfect faith in this great reckless creature. She had never been able to obscure the memory of his battle with Slosson on her behalf. Her faith was unbounded. So they rode on, leaving the busy new world the man had created behind them, as they made their way on towards the ranch. They were leaving everything behind them, the shadows and sunlight of past strenuous days, which is the way of youth. They gazed ahead towards the future with every confidence, and lived in a perfect present which contained only their two selves. It was not until they had nearly reached the ranch, and the wide pasture stocked with grazing cattle came into view, that the girl was able to pin her lover down to the urgent matters which lay ahead of him. Then she received from that simple creature the brief account of his intentions. For a moment she was staggered. Then, after a brief digestion of the details, she began to laugh. The rank absurdity and impudence of them took her fancy, and she found herself caught in the humor of it all, and ready again to carry out his lightest wish. "It's still the same, you see," Gordon finished up. "I still want you, and your precious help, the same as I always shall. I just can't do a thing without you, and as long as you are with me, why, I don't guess failure's got a chance of getting its nose in front. I've got it all fixed, if you'll play your part. All I ask is, for the Lord's sake don't start in to laugh at the critical time. I want you scared to death till I appear, and then you'll just need to chase up an attack of hysterics or something, throw your heels around and yell blue murder, and finish up by grabbing me around the neck, and fainting dead away with happiness. The rest I'll see to. It's some situation for you, but don't worry when the limelight leaves you in the dark and finds its way to me. It's just the sort of thing you can find in any old dime novel. The heroines always act that way, and the hero, too. When you get back, start right in to think about every dime story you've ever read. Remember all the things the heroines ever did, and then do 'em all yourself. See? Guess that isn't as clear as it might be, but when you've filtered it through that bright little head of yours it'll be like spring water in a moss-grown mountain creek." "Whatever will he say when he knows?" laughed the girl. "Say? well, that's not an easy guess," retorted Gordon, with a responsive laugh. "But, anyway, it's dead sure he'll think a heap more. Say, there's just one thing more. When you come-to out of that joyous faint, you got to leave us together for half an hour. Maybe you'll have some sort of preparation to make, or something. Sort of stagger out of the room supported by me, and if Hip-Lee attempts to butt in during that half hour--kill him." "You really want me to do--all this?" Hazel's laughing eyes were raised questioningly. "Everything, but--the killing." "The fainting--really?" "Sure." The man's eyes opened wide. "It's the picture. It's the reality. It's the local color." "Oh, dear!" laughed Hazel, as they rode up to the ranch house. "I suppose I've got to do it." "You will?" Gordon flung himself out of the saddle. Hazel laughingly held out her hand in assurance. "My hand on it, Gordon, dear," she cried. The man seized it in both of his. Then, regardless of what sharp eyes might be peeping in their direction, he reached up, and, catching her about the waist, drew her down towards him till her head was level with his, and kissed her rapturously. "Say, you're the greatest little woman on earth, and--I love you to death." Hazel hastily drew herself out of his strong arms, and, with flushed face, straightened herself up in the saddle. "And you are the greatest and most ridiculous creature ever let loose to roam this world--and I--love you for it." The man laughed. Hazel's laugh joined in. "Then--to-night?" Hazel nodded. "Good-by, dear--till to-night." CHAPTER XXV THE RESCUE It was nearly midnight. The house was quiet. It was so still as to suggest no life at all within its simple, hospitable walls. It was in darkness, too, at least from the outside, for all curtains had been drawn for the night, with as much care as though it were a dwelling facing upon some busy thoroughfare in a city. But, late as the hour was, the occupants of the old ranch house were not in bed. Hazel was awake, and sitting expectantly waiting in her bedroom, while somewhere within the purlieus of the kitchen Hip-Lee sat before an open window in the darkness, doubtless dreaming wakefully of some flea-ridden village up country in his homeland. Upstairs, too, there were no signs of those slumbers which were so long overdue. Mr. James Carbhoy was seated in a comfortable rocker-chair adjacent to his dressing bureau, making an effort to become interested in the "History of the Conquest of Mexico" by the light of a well-trimmed oil lamp. Not one word, however, of the pages he had read had conveyed interest to his preoccupied mind. It is doubtful if their meaning had been conveyed with any degree of continuity. He was irritable--irritable and a shade despondent. He had been a captive in that valley for over seven weeks, and the imprisonment had begun to tell upon his stalwart hardihood. Seven long weeks of his own company, under easy and even pleasant circumstances. Even Hazel's company, shadowed as she was by the hated Hip-Lee, had been denied him. Had it been otherwise he might have felt less dispirited, for he liked and admired her; and, in spite of the fact that on that one memorable occasion when he had talked to her alone she had betrayed, what he now was firmly convinced was her own perfidious share in his kidnapping, he was human enough to disregard it, and only remember that she was an extremely pretty and wholly charming creature. Yes, he knew now that he had been duped by this daughter of Mallinsbee, whom he knew owned Buffalo Point, and the whole thing had been a financial coup engineered by the "smarts" who belonged to his faction. He had solved the whole problem of his captivity in one revealing flash, the moment he had learned that this girl was the daughter of Mallinsbee. He had needed no other information. His keenly trained mind, with its wide understanding of the methods of financial interests, had driven straight to the heart of the matter. It was only the details which had been lacking. But even these had, in a measure, been filled in during his long hours of solitude and concentrated thought. It was some of the obscured riddles which beset him now, as they had beset him for days. He could not account for his own confidential agent Slosson in the matter. Had he been bought over? It seemed impossible, since Slosson had advised the depot remaining at Snake's Fall, which was against Mallinsbee's interests. Had he been dealt with, too? It seemed more likely. But if this were so it made the daring or desperation of the whole coup suggest to his mind that he was dealing with men of unusual caliber, and consequently the situation possessed for him possibilities of a most unpleasant character. Then, again, the fact that they were content to leave him unapproached in his captivity puzzled and disquieted him even more. What could they achieve with regard to the railroad without his authority? Nothing, positively nothing, he assured himself. Then what was the purpose to be served? He could not even guess, and the uncertainty of it all annoyed, irritated, worried him as the time went on. His mind was full of all these concerns as he sat reading the romantic story of a people with impossible names, and so he lost all the beauties of one of the most perfect romances in the world. Finally, he set the book aside and prepared for bed and more hours of worried sleeplessness. James Carbhoy was a typical New Yorker of the best type. In an unexaggerated way he was fastidious of his appearance and gave a careful regard to his bodily welfare. He was a man who luxuriated in cleanly habits of living, and his linen was a sort of passion with him. In his captivity he had been well cared for in this respect, and the only cause he had for complaint was the absence of his daily bath, which he seriously deplored. Now he went to the old-fashioned washstand, prepared for his nightly ablutions, and laid himself out a clean suit of pyjamas. Then he divested himself of some of his upper garments. He had just started to remove his shirt, and one arm still remained in its sleeve as he proceeded to remove it coatwise, when all further action was quite suddenly suspended and he stood listening. A sound had reached his quick ears, a curious sound which, at that hour of the night, was quite incomprehensible to him. After some breathless moments he abandoned the divestment of his clothing and swiftly restored his coat and vest. Then he extinguished his light and drew the curtains from before the window and opened it further. He sat down on his bedstead and, resting an elbow on the window-ledge, gazed out into the starlit, moonless night. The sound which had held his attention was still evident. It was the sound of galloping horses in the distance, the soft plod of many hoofs over the rich grass of the valley. It was faint but distinct, and, to this man's inexperienced ears, suggested a large party of horses, probably horsemen, approaching his prison. With what object? he wondered, and, wondering, a feeling of excitement took possession of him. Five minutes later his attention was distracted to another direction. Other sounds reached him, sounds which emanated from close about his prison itself. There was a movement going on just below him, and horses were moving about, apparently somewhere in front, where he knew the corrals to be. His excitement increased. In all his long weeks of imprisonment he had seen nothing of his captors and no signs of them. Now, apparently, they were below him, possibly keeping guard, and he wondered if they had been there every night, silent warders, whose presence had been all undiscovered by himself. It was difficult, difficult to understand or to believe. Yet there was no doubt that men were gathered below; he could faintly hear their voices talking in hushed tones, and, equally, he could plainly hear the sound of their horses. He wished there was a moon to give him light enough to see what was going on. But now the more distant sounds had grown louder, and as they grew the voices below spoke in less guarded tones. And from the manner of their speech the listening man knew that something serious was afoot. A sudden resolve now formulated in his mind, and he left his place at the window and stood up. Then he moved swiftly to his door and opened it. The house seemed wrapped in silence, and he moved out to the head of the small flight of stairs leading to the floor below. He passed down and reached the door of the parlor. Here he paused for a moment listening. All was still within, and he cautiously opened the door. The lamp was lit, and, standing beside the table, upon which the breakfast things were already set, he discovered the figure of the daughter of Mallinsbee with her back turned towards him. There was another figure present, too, and, to his intense chagrin, the millionaire beheld the yellow features of Hip-Lee near the curtained window. However, he passed into the room, and Hazel turned confronting him. He gazed intently into her face, so serious and apparently troubled. The yellow lamplight imparted a curious hue, and the man fancied she looked seriously frightened. "What's happening?" he demanded, and an unusual brusqueness was in his tone. The girl's eyes surveyed his expression swiftly. She looked for something she feared to discover there, and the faintest sigh of relief escaped her as she realized that her fears were unfounded. "That's what we--are trying to find out," she replied, her words accompanied by a glance of simple, half-fearful helplessness. The man checked the reply which promptly rose to his lips. He remembered in time that this girl was the daughter of Mallinsbee and that she was exceedingly pretty. To the former he had no desire to give anything away, while to the latter he desired to display every courtesy. "Our guards seem to be on the alert, and--somebody is approaching," said the millionaire, with a baffling smile. "If it weren't such a peaceful spot I'd say there was an atmosphere of--trouble." "I--I sort of feel that way, too," said Hazel in a scared manner. She had gathered all her histrionic abilities together, and intended to use them. "I wonder what trouble it is?" "Seems as if it was for the men who--took us," observed Carbhoy, with a dryness he could not quite disguise. "You--mean our folks have located our whereabouts and--are going to rescue us?" The millionaire smiled into the innocent, questioning eyes, which, he knew, concealed a humorous guile. "I didn't just mean that," he said. "Maybe the trouble won't come yet." He glanced at the Chinaman standing sphinx-like at the curtains. "Must he remain?" he said, appealing directly to the girl. Hazel felt the necessity for a bold move. "Don't let him worry you. We can't help ourselves. I dare not risk offending him." She conjured a well-feigned shudder. The millionaire laughed, and his laugh left the girl troubled and disconcerted. She would have liked to know what lay behind it. However, she kept to her attitude of fear. She must play her part to the end. "Hark!" Carbhoy turned his head, listening intently. The girl followed his example. "Say----" The millionaire broke off, and his smile was replaced by a look of puzzled incredulity. A shot had been fired. It was answered by a shot from somewhere close to the house. A look of doubt sprang into his gray eyes, and he darted to the window and unceremoniously brushed the hated Chinaman aside. He drew the curtain cautiously aside and peered out into the bight. Hazel beheld the change of expression and his quick, alert movements with satisfaction. She knew that the sounds of the shots had disconcerted him. He was more than impressed. He was convinced. Then followed a portentous few moments. The two single shots were converted into something like a rattle of musketry. And intermingled with it came the hoarse, blasphemous cries of men, and the pounding of horses' hoofs racing hither and thither. The man at the window remained silent, his eyes glued to the crack of the divided curtains. He saw flashes of gunfire and the dim outline of moving figures. But the details of the scene were hidden from him by the darkness. Hazel, standing close behind him, rose to a great effort. One hand was laid abruptly upon his arm, and her nervous fingers clutched at his coat-sleeve as though she were seeking support. She caught a sharp breath. "My God!" she cried in a tense whisper, while somehow her whole body shook. Carbhoy gave one glance in her direction. His eyes and features had become tense with excitement. With his disengaged hand he patted the girl's with a reassuring gentleness, and finally it remained resting upon her clutching fingers. "It's a scrap up all right," he said, with conviction that had no fear in it. "But it's their game, not----" But his words were cut short by the great shouting that went up outside the house. Then came more firing, and the sharp plonk of bullets as they struck the building were plainly heard by the watchers. Hazel urged the man at the curtains-- "Come away. For goodness' sake come away. A stray shot! That window! You----" She strove to drag the man away in a wild assumption of panic. But the millionaire intended to miss nothing of what was going on. The danger of his position did not occur to him. He firmly released himself from her clutch. "You sit right down, my dear," he said kindly. "Just get right out of line with this window. I want to see this out. Say, hark! They're hitting it up good, eh?" His eyes were alight with the excitement of battle, and Hazel, watching him, with fear carefully expressed in her eyes, could not help but admire the spirit of her lover's father, and more than ever regret the part she was forced to play. She withdrew obediently as the sounds of battle waxed and the cries of the combatants made the still night hideous. The firing had become almost incessant, and the bullets seemed to hail upon the building from every direction. Then, too, the galloping horses added to the tumult, and it was pretty obvious the defenders were charging their opponents. "There seems to be about two to one attacking," said the millionaire over his shoulder presently. As he turned he surveyed with pity the strong look of terror the girl had contrived. He never once looked in the detested Chinaman's direction. In his heart he would not have regretted a chance shot disturbing those yellow, immobile features. Then, turning back again quickly-- "I wonder!" Now that the battle seemed to be at its height, and whilst awaiting its issue, he had time for conjecture. What was the meaning of it? And who were the attacking party? Was Slosson at its head? Had Harker sent up and was this a sheriff's posse? Both seemed possible. Yet neither, somehow, convinced him. Whoever were attacking, it was pretty certain in his mind that his release was the object. But the moment passed, and he became absorbed once more in the battle itself. It seemed miraculous to his twentieth-century ideas that such a condition of things could prevail. Why, it was like the old romantic days of the hard drinking, hard swearing "bad men," and a sort of boyish delight in the excitement of it all swept through his veins. He had no time or thought for the part the now terror-stricken girl had played in his captivity. All he felt was a large-hearted, chivalrous regret for her present condition, of which no doubt remained in his mind. A rush of horsemen charged up to the building. The watching man saw their outline distinctly. There seemed to him at least eight or ten. He saw another crowd, smaller numerically, charge at them, and then the revolvers spat out their vicious flashes of ruddy fire. The crowd dispersed and gathered again. Another fusillade. Then something seemed to happen. The whole crowd swept away in the darkness, and the sounds of shooting and the cries of men died away into the distance. He waited awhile to assure himself that, so far as their position was concerned, the battle was at an end. Then he turned away from the window. "They've cleaned 'em out," he said sharply. "I can't tell whose outed. They've ridden off at the gallop, firing and cursing as they went. Maybe our captors have driven the others off. Maybe it's the other way. We'll--hark!" He was back at the window again in a second. "They're coming back," he cried. "Say----" Hazel was at his side in a moment. "Are they the----?" "Can't say who," cried Carbhoy, peering intently. "A big bunch of 'em." "Our men were only four," said Hazel quickly. The millionaire was too intent to look round, and so he missed the girl's smile over at Hip-Lee. But the tone of her voice was unmistakable in its anxiety. "There's eight or more here," he cried. "Say, they're dismounting! They're----" "They're coming into the house!" cried Hazel in an extravagant panic. "They----" At that instant a loud voice beyond the door of the room was heard shouting to the men outside-- "Keep a keen eye while I go through the house! Don't let a soul escape. If they've hurt one hair of her head somebody's going to pay, and pay dear." The millionaire was standing stock still in the middle of the room. A curious look was gleaming in his steady eyes. Hazel, in the midst of her pretended panic, beheld it and interpreted it. She read in it a recognition of the speaker's voice, but she also read incredulity and amazement. But at that instant the door burst open and a great figure rushed headlong into the room. As the girl beheld it she flung wide her arms and, with a cry, ran towards the intruder. "Gordon! Gordon! At last, at last!" she cried. "Oh, I thought you would never find me! Never, never!" Her final exclamations were lost in the bosom of his tweed coat, as she flung herself into his arms and burst into a flood of hysterical weeping and laughter. "Hazel! My poor little Hazel! Say, I've been nearly crazy. I----" Gordon broke off, the girl still lying in his arms. His eyes had lifted to the face of his father, and their keen, steady glance became instantly absorbed by the gray speculation behind the other's. "Dad! You?" The astonishment, the incredulity were perfect. They might well have deceived anybody. "Sure," said the millionaire dryly. Then, "I don't guess they've hurt her any, though. Maybe you best hand her over to her father," he went on, pointing at the burly figure of Silas Mallinsbee, who, with his patch well down over his eye, had appeared at that moment in the doorway. "Guess he'll know how to soothe her some. Meanwhile you'll maybe tell me how you lit on our trail." The man's smile was disarming, yet Gordon fancied he detected a shadow of that lurking irony which he knew so well in his father. He turned about, however, and passed Hazel over to the rancher, while he added tender injunctions-- "Say, Mr. Mallinsbee, she's scared all to death. You best get her to bed. Poor little girl! Say, I'd like----" But he did not complete his sentence. Instead he turned to his father, as Hazel, with difficulty restraining her laughter, was led from the room by her solemn-faced, fierce-eyed parent. "Say, Dad, what in the name of all creation has brought you here?" The millionaire turned, and a cold eye of hatred settled upon the background which Hip-Lee formed to the picture. "Do we need that yellow reptile present?" he said unemotionally. "I guess not," said Gordon readily. Then he pointed the door to the Mongolian. "Get!" he ejaculated. And the injunction was acted upon with silent alacrity. Then the two men faced each other. "Well?" demanded the father. The son smiled amiably. "Well?" he retorted. And both men sat down. CHAPTER XXVI CASHING IN Gordon's eyes were alight with a wonder that somehow lacked reality as he dropped into the chair beside the table. "You? You?" he murmured. Then aloud: "It--it's incredible!" Then, with an impulsive gesture. "In the name of all that's crazy what's--what's the meaning of it? How in the world have you got into the hands of these ruffians?" His father selected one of the two remaining cigars in his case, and passed the other across. "Try again," he said quietly, as he bit the end off his. But Gordon did not "try again." He took the proffered cigar, and sat devouring the silent figure and sphinx-like face of the other, while he felt like one who had received a douche of ice-cold water from a pail. His acting had missed fire, and he knew it. He wondered how much else of his efforts had missed fire with this abnormally acute man. He had intended this to be the moment of his triumph. He had intended to lay before his father his talent of silver, doubled and redoubled an hundredfold. He had intended, with all the enthusiasm of youthful vanity, to display the triumph of his understanding of the modern methods of dealing with the affairs of finance. He was going to prove his theories up to the hilt. Now, somehow, he felt that whatever victory he had achieved the clear, keen brain behind his father's steady gray eyes saw through him completely, right down into the deepest secrets which he had believed to be securely hidden. Face to face with this man, who had spent all the long years of his life studying how best to beat his fellow man, his acting became but a paltry mask which obscured nothing. "Try again." Such simple words, but so significant. No, it was useless to "try again" with this dear, shrewd creature he was so futilely endeavoring to deceive. The cold of the gray eyes had changed. It was only a slight change, but to Gordon, who understood his father so well, it was clearly perceptible and indicative of the mood behind. There was a suggestion of a smile in them, an ironical, half-humorous smile that scattered all his carefully made plans. The millionaire struck a match and held it out to light his son's cigar, and, as Gordon leaned forward, their eyes met in a steady regard. "Nothing doing?" inquired the father, as he carefully lit his own cigar from the same match. Gordon shook his head, and his eyes smiled whimsically. "Then I best do first talk." The millionaire leaned back in his chair and breathed out a thin spiral of smoke. Then he sighed. "Good smokes these. Mallinsbee's a man of taste." "Mallinsbee?" "Sure." "Go on." "He's kept me well supplied. Also with good wine. I owe him quite a debt--that way. Say----" The millionaire paused reflectively. Then he went on in the manner of a man who has arrived at a complete and definite decision: "Guess it would take hours asking questions and getting answers. It's not my way, and I don't guess I'm a lawyer anyway, and you aren't a shady witness. We know just how to talk out straight. I've had over seven weeks to think in--and thinking with me is--a disease. Let's go back. I had a neat land scoop working up here. Slosson was working it. He's been a secret agent of mine for years. I've no reason to distrust him. He fixes things right for us and sends word for me to come along. That's happened many times before. It's not new, or--unusual. When I get here I'm met by a very charming young girl with a rig and team. Her excuse for meeting me is reasonable. The rest is easy. We are both held up, and brought here--captives. Then I start in to think a lot. Argument don't carry me more than a mile till that same charming girl, who's just done all she knew to make things right for me, makes her first break. When I found out she was the daughter of Mallinsbee I did all the thinking needed in half an hour. I knew I was to be rolled on this land deal by Mallinsbee's crowd, and, judging by the methods adopted, to be rolled good. You see we'd had negotiations with Mallinsbee about his land at Buffalo Point before. See?" Gordon silently nodded. His father breathed heavily, and, with a wry twist of his lips, rolled his cigar firmly into the corner of his mouth. "Now, when I'd done thinking it just left me guessing in two directions. One of 'em I answered more or less satisfactorily. This was the one I answered. What had become of Slosson? Had he been handled by these folk, or had he doubled? The latter I counted out. I've always had him where I wanted him. He wouldn't dare. So I said he'd been 'handled.' The other was how could they hope to deal with the Union Grayling without my authority? That's still unanswered, though I see a gleam of daylight--since meeting you here. However, Gordon boy, you've certainly given me the surprise of my life--finding you associated with Mallinsbee--and taken to play-acting. That was a pretty piece outside with guns. I allow it got me fine. But you overdid it showing in here. That also told me another thing. It told me that a feller can spend a lifetime making a bright man of himself, while it only takes a pretty gal five seconds yanking out one of the key-stones to the edifice he's built. I guess I've been mighty sorry for your lady friend. I guessed she was pining to death for her folks, and was scared to death of that darnation Chink. However, I'm relieved to find she's just a bunch of bright wits, and don't lack in natural female ability for play-acting. Maybe you can hand me some about those directions I'm still guessing in. I'll smoke while you say some." Father and son smiled into each other's faces as the elder finished speaking. But while Gordon's smile was one of genuine admiration, his father's still savored of that irony which warned the younger that all was by no means plain sailing yet. "I'm glad you feel that way about Hazel, Dad," cried Gordon, his face flushing with genuine pleasure. "She's some girl. I guess I'm the luckiest feller alive winning her for a wife, eh?" "You're going to--marry her?" "Why, yes. She's the greatest, the best, the----" "Just so. But we're not both going to marry her." Gordon flung back in his chair with a great laugh. But his father's eyes still maintained their irony. "Say, I'm sort of sorry talking that way now. There's other things." Gordon fumbled in his pocket while he went on. "Slosson? Why Slosson's trying to stave off pneumonia in a disused, perforated shack way up on Mallinsbee's ranch. He's a skunk of a man anyway, and I had to let him know I thought that way. I haven't heard about the pneumonia yet, but if he got it I don't guess it would give me nightmare." Then he handed across a small volume in morocco binding which he had taken from his pocket. "I don't seem to think you'll need much explanation about the other. That's your code book, which I forgot to return in the hurry of quitting New York." The millionaire turned the cover, closed it again, and quietly bestowed it in his pocket. "Guess I'll keep this," he said without emotion. "Yes, it tells me a lot. It tells me I've credited Mallinsbee and his crowd with the work of my son. It tells me that my own son is solely responsible for the idea, and execution, of rolling his father on this land deal. It tells me that the principles of big finance must have a fertile resting place somewhere in my son. Well, there's quite a lot of time before daylight." It had been an anxious moment for Gordon when he handed back the private code book, and he had watched his father closely. He was seeking any sign of anger, or regret, or even pain, as his own actions became apparent to the other. There were no such signs. There was only that non-committal half smile, and it left him still uncertain. His father's patience seemed inexhaustible. Had Gordon only realized it this was the very sign he should have looked for in such a man. James Carbhoy loved his son as few men regard their offspring, but he wanted his son to be something more than a mere object of his affection. He wanted him to be an object upon which he could bestow all the enormous pride of a self-made man. He wanted to feel that exquisite thrill of triumph resulting to his vanity, that Gordon was his son--the son of his father. "Yes, there's quite a while before daylight, Dad, and I'm glad." Gordon ran his fingers through his hair. "So I'd better hand it you from the beginning. I want you to get a right understanding of my motives. It was opportunity. That thing you've always taught me fools most always try to dodge, and most good men generally miss." His father nodded and Gordon settled himself afresh in his chair. "Yes, I'm in this thing, Dad," he went on, after the briefest of pauses. "In it right up to my neck," he added, with a whimsical smile. "It was the opportunity I needed to make good. Being neither a fool nor a good man I took it, and now I sit with a wad of one hundred and five thousand dollars in good United States currency. It's here in my pocket, and I'm ready to hand it over to you in payment for those old debts. You will observe I have still eight weeks of my six months to run. I want to say, as you'll no doubt agree when you've heard my story, that I've made, or acquired it, through graft and piracy, such as I talked about to you awhile back, and, as far as I can see, my method has been as completely dishonest as an honest man could adopt. Dad, I've always regarded your sense of humor as one of your greatest attributes, but whether it'll stand for the way I've treated you, even with my intimate knowledge of you, I'm not prepared to guess. This is the yarn." Gordon plunged into the story without further preamble while his father sat and smoked on with that half smile still fixed in his gray eyes. The younger man watched the still, inscrutable, sphinx-like figure with eyes of grave speculation. He missed no detail in the story of his irresponsibility and haphazard adventure. He started at the moment when he booked his passage for Seattle, and carried it on right down to the melodramatic moment when he burst into that parlor to rescue the girl he loved from a peril which he knew had never threatened her. He told it all with a detail that spared neither himself, nor the confidential agent Slosson, nor any one else concerned. He showed up the spirit of graft which actuated every step of his progress, and did not hesitate to apply the lash with merciless force upon the railroad organization his father controlled. And right through, from beginning to end, the millionaire listened without sign or comment. He wanted to hear all this boy--his boy--had to say. And as he went on that pride, parental pride, in him grew and grew. At the end of the story Gordon added a final comment-- "I want to say, Dad, I haven't done this all myself. I've had the help of two of the most cheerful, lovable rascals I've ever met. Also the help of one honest man. But above all, through the whole thing, I've been supported by the smile of the sweetest and best woman in the world, the girl who's done her best to care for your comfort here. She's sacrificed all scruples to help me out, while her father, bless him, has never approved any of my dirty schemes. There you are, Dad, that's the yarn. I don't guess it'll make you shout for joy, but, anyway, you started me out to make good--anyway I chose--and I've made good. Furthermore, I've made good within the time limit, and, in making good, I'm bringing back a wife to our home city. I'm standing on my own legs now, as you always guessed you wanted me to, and if you don't just fancy the gait I travel--why, it's up to you. That's mine--now you say." The fixity of his father's attitude had driven Gordon to say more than he had intended, but he meant it, every word, nor did he regard his parent with any less affection for it. But now, as he awaited a response, a certain unease was tugging at his heartstrings. At last the millionaire rose from his seat and crossed to the curtained window. He drew the curtains aside, and, raising the sash, flung out his cigar stump. Then for a moment he gazed out at the moonless night. While he stood thus the smile in his thoughtful eyes deepened. At last, however, he turned back, and the face that confronted the son he loved wore the sharp, hawk-like look which his opponents in the business world of New York were so familiar with. "That's all right," he said sharply. "But--you've forgotten something." Gordon became extremely alert. "Have I?" Then he laughed. "It 'ud be a miracle if I hadn't." "Sure. Most folks forget something. I forgot that code book." "Yes." Their eyes met. "You've forgotten that I can stop the work at Buffalo Point. You've forgotten that you've passed out of the realms of simple graft and plunged into criminal proceedings, which brings you within the shadow of the law. You've forgotten that I can smash your schemes, break you, and send you to penitentiary--you and your entire gang." The steady eyes were deadly as they coldly backed the sharp pronouncement of the words. Gordon was caught by the painful emotion which the harshness of them inspired. He knew that his father had spoken the simple truth. He knew that in the eyes of the world he was a plain criminal. The unpleasant feeling was instantly thrust aside, however. He had not embarked upon this affair without intending to carry it through to the end he desired. "I haven't forgotten those things, Dad," he said, with a sharpness equal to the other's. "I thought of 'em all--and prepared for 'em. I'm not playing. You put this thing up to me. I'm here to see it through." "And then?" There was a shade of sarcasm in the millionaire's tone. "Then? Why, I could tell you lots of reasons why you can't do any of these things. There's arguments that I don't guess you've missed already. But, anyway, just one little fact 'll be sufficient to go on with. You're here a captive, and you can't get away till I give the word." For one of the very few times in his life James Carbhoy was seriously disconcerted. Choler began to rise, and a hot flush tinged his cheeks and his eyes sparkled. "You--would keep me here a prisoner--indefinitely?" he exploded. "I'm not playing, Dad," Gordon warned. Gordon had risen from his chair, and the two stood eye to eye. It was a tense moment, full of potent possibilities. One of them must give way, or a clash would inevitably follow, a clash which would probably destroy forever that perfect devotion which had always existed between them. For Gordon it was a moment of extreme pain. But in him was no thought of yielding. From his father it was his invincible determination to force an acknowledgment of fitness in human affairs as he understood them. At that moment there was no humor in the situation for him. In the older man, however, humor was perhaps more matured. Parental affection, too, is perhaps a bigger, wider, deeper thing than the filial emotions of youth. He had only intended to test this son of his. His challenge had been intended to try him, to confound. But the confounding had been with him in the shock of his son's irrevocable determination. That moment of natural resentment passed as swiftly as it had arisen. Gordon was all, and even more, he told himself dryly, than he had hoped. And so the moment passed, and the hard, gray eyes melted to a kindly, whimsical smile which had not one vestige of irony in it. "You're a blamed young scamp," he said cordially; "but--I'm afraid I like you all the better for it. Say, do you think that little girl of yours and her father have gone to bed yet?" Gordon reached across, holding out his hand. "Dear old Dad," he cried, "I'm dead sure we'll find 'em both not a mile the other side of that door. The game's played out, and--we quit?" The father caught his son's hand and wrung it. "It's played out, boy; and God bless you!" They stood for a moment hand gripped in hand. Then the millionaire pointed at the door. "I'd like to see 'em before--daylight." With a delighted laugh Gordon turned away to the door and flung it open. "Say," he called, "Hazel! Ho! Mr. Mallinsbee!" In a moment Hazel had darted to her lover's side, and was followed more decorously by the burly rancher, with his patch well down over one eye. Gordon pointed at it. "Guess you can do without that, Mr. Mallinsbee. You're not going to face an opponent; you're going to meet a--friend." He slid his arm about the girl's waist and drew her gently forward towards his father standing waiting to receive her with humorously twinkling eyes. [Illustration: He Drew Her Gently Towards His Father] "So you're to be my little daughter," cried the millionaire kindly. "Well, my dear, I'm glad. I like grit, and you've got it plenty. I like a pretty face, and--but I guess Gordon's told you all about that. Seeing you're to be my daughter--and Gordon's left me no choice in the matter, the same as he left me no choice in other things--I feel I've the right to tell you you're a pair of--as impertinent young rascals as I've ever had the happiness to claim relationship with. Let me see, just come here, and--Gordon owes me for many nights of anxiety, and I guess I've a right to make him pay. I'll be satisfied with the payment of a kiss from you." He held out his arms, and Hazel, with a joyous laugh and blushing cheeks, ran to them. "Thank you, my dear," laughed the millionaire, as the girl frankly kissed him. "And that's the change." He closed his arms about her and returned her kiss. Then, when he had released her, he turned to Mallinsbee and held out his hand. "I can always make friends with the fellow who licks me, Mr. Mallinsbee. I'm glad to meet you--with that patch removed from your eye. The game's played and you've won, and I promise you all that's been done in my name by my son goes. You see, henceforth he's my partner now, so he's the right to act in my name. I'm trusting him with my dollars, but you are trusting him with something far more precious. I hope he'll prove as good a son to you as, I'm glad to say, I consider he's been to me." Mallinsbee smiled a little sadly, and his eyes gazed tenderly in Hazel's direction. "Directly that boy of yours come around, Mr. Carbhoy, I felt the chill of winter beating up. I'm glad he come, though--I like him. But," he added, with a sigh, "I'll sure need to bank those furnaces some." Hazel left the millionaire's side and crossed to her father, and passed her arm about his vast waist. "Don't start yet, Daddy," she said, smiling up at the rugged face. "I haven't left you yet, and when I do it's only going to be for a small piece at a time." Silas Mallinsbee shook his head. "Don't you worry, little gal," he said gently. "I guess this winter's goin' to be a mild one. You see, I'm goin' to have a son as well as a daughter, and--who knows?--maybe grandsons----" But Hazel had quickly pressed one hand over his lips and stifled the possibilities he was about to enumerate. Gordon laughed, and his father smiled over at the other father. "See, Mr. Mallinsbee, we don't need to worry with the summer," Gordon cried. "Summer generally fixes things right for itself. Meanwhile we'll just make the winter as easy as we can. You've given your little girl to me, and she's all you care for in the world. Well, that's a trust that demands all the best I can give. I won't fail you. I won't fail her. And you, Dad, I won't fail you." "Good boy," said the millionaire, with a glow of pride. "I just know it, and--I know it for Mr. Mallinsbee and Hazel, too, if they don't know it for themselves. Say----" For a moment his eyes grew serious. Then into them crept a gleam of twinkling humor which found reflection on the faces of both Gordon and Hazel, who waited for him to complete what he had to say. "You've told your mother, Gordon?" he inquired. "Seems to me you've told her 'most everything in those--chatty--letters of yours." Gordon grinned and shook his head, while Hazel waited--not without some apprehension. His father's smile gave way to a quaint expression of awe at such negligence. "I'd say she'd be pleased, of course," the millionaire said, without conviction. "It's a mercy not always bestowed on a boy to get a wife like--Hazel. Your mother's a mighty good woman, Gordon, and I'll allow she's got her ways about things. But she's good, and I guess she'll just take to Hazel right away." There was no confidence in his manner, in spite of the bravery of his words. But Gordon quickly cleared the atmosphere with his cheery confidence. "You leave the dear old mater to me, Dad," he cried. "You see, you only married her--she raised me. I'll write her to-night, and--say, that reminds me," he added, glancing at his watch. "Daylight'll be around directly. Hazel needs her rest. Hadn't we----" Hazel laughed. She had no real desire for bed, but she was tired, weary with the strain of all the swiftly moving events. She caught at his suggestion and demanded compliance. "Yes," she cried. "There's another day to-morrow. Oh, that wonderful to-morrow! A long, bright, happy day in which we have nothing to conceal, no wicked schemes to be worked out. A day of real happiness, when we can just be our real selves. Let's all go to bed and dream our dreams with the full certainty that, however happy our to-day is, to-morrow has always the possibility of being happier." But Gordon did not write the promised letter that night. He held long communion with himself, and decided to send a telegram. He realized that diplomacy must be brought to bear, for his mother, with all her exquisite qualities, possessed a slightly arbitrary side to her character where her home and belongings were concerned. Therefore he decided on a bold stroke. He sacrificed his own rest that night, and in doing so sacrificed that of certain others. Sunset was roused from his equine slumbers, as also was Steve Mason disturbed out of a portion of his night's rest. Gordon rode hard into Snake's Fall. He wished to make the return journey before breakfast. On arrival at the township he ignored every protest from the operator. He overruled him on every point, and was prepared to back his overruling with physical force. Steve Mason was literally scrambled into his clothes and set to work at those hated keys, and the New York call was sent singing over the wires. Meanwhile Gordon was left at work upon a sheet of paper upon which, after considerable thought, his diplomatic effort resolved itself into a piece of superlative effrontery. And this was the message which startled his mother over her morning coffee and rolls, and incidentally sent a current of furious feminine excitement through the entire Carbhoy establishment at Central Park, like a sharp electric storm. "_Mrs. James Carbhoy,_ "_New York._ "Gordon's work here beyond praise. Boy has done wonders. When you hear all you will be proud of him. I am with him here now. Great events developing. Am most anxious to form alliance with certain people for financial reasons. Your influence required on social side. You will understand when I say rich, desirable heiress. Gordon needs persuasion. Come at once. Special to Snake's Fall. Will meet you at latter depot. "JAMES CARBHOY." When this message was handed to the impatient operator and he had carefully read it over, the man looked up with what Gordon regarded as an impertinent grin. His resentment promptly leaped. "Say," he cried in a threatening tone, "there's some faces made for grinning, and others that couldn't win prizes that way amongst a crowd of fool-faced mules. Guess yours was spoiled for any sort of chance whatever, so cut out trying to make it worse than your parents made it for you. Get me? Just play about on those fool keys and set the tune of that message right, or Mr. James Carbhoy's going to hear things quick." The threat of the President of the railroad was sufficient to enforce compliance, but Steve Mason was no respector of persons outside that authority, and his retort came glibly. "You wrote this, Mister, and--you ain't Mr. James Carbhoy," he said, with a sneer and a half-threat. But Gordon was in no mood for trifling about anything. He was anxious to be off back to the ranch. "Mr. James Carbhoy is my father," he cried sharply, "and if that don't penetrate your perfectly ridiculous brain-box I'll add that I'm the son of my father--Mr. James Carbhoy. Are you needing anything, or--will you get busy?" Steve Mason decided to "get busy," and so the message winged its way over the wires. THE END BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Son of His Father The Men Who Wrought The Golden Woman The Law-Breakers The Way of the Strong The Twins of Suffering Creek The Night-Riders The One-Way Trail The Trail of the Axe The Sheriff of Dyke Hole The Watchers of the Plains 
5119	----	The Lion and the Mouse by Charles Klein A Story of an American Life Novelized from the play by Arthur Hornblow "Judges and Senates have been bought for gold; Love and esteem have never been sold." POPE CONTENTS Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV Chapter V Chapter VI Chapter VII Chapter VIII Chapter IX Chapter X Chapter XI Chapter XII Chapter XIII Chapter XIV Chapter XV Chapter XVI THE LION AND THE MOUSE CHAPTER I There was unwonted bustle in the usually sleepy and dignified New York offices of the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad Company in lower Broadway. The supercilious, well-groomed clerks who, on ordinary days, are far too preoccupied with their own personal affairs to betray the slightest interest in anything not immediately concerning them, now condescended to bestir themselves and, gathered in little groups, conversed in subdued, eager tones. The slim, nervous fingers of half a dozen haughty stenographers, representing as many different types of business femininity, were busily rattling the keys of clicking typewriters, each of their owners intent on reducing with all possible despatch the mass of letters which lay piled up in front of her. Through the heavy plate-glass swinging doors, leading to the elevators and thence to the street, came and went an army of messengers and telegraph boys, noisy and insolent. Through the open windows the hoarse shouting of news-venders, the rushing of elevated trains, the clanging of street cars, with the occasional feverish dash of an ambulance--all these familiar noises of a great city had the far-away sound peculiar to top floors of the modern sky-scraper. The day was warm and sticky, as is not uncommon in early May, and the overcast sky and a distant rumbling of thunder promised rain before night. The big express elevators, running smoothly and swiftly, unloaded every few moments a number of prosperous-looking men who, chatting volubly and affably, made their way immediately through the outer offices towards another and larger inner office on the glass door of which was the legend "Directors Room. Private." Each comer gave a patronizing nod in recognition of the deferential salutation of the clerks. Earlier arrivals had preceded them, and as they opened the door there issued from the Directors Room a confused murmur of voices, each different in pitch and tone, some deep and deliberate, others shrill and nervous, but all talking earnestly and with animation as men do when the subject under discussion is of common interest. Now and again a voice was heard high above the others, denoting anger in the speaker, followed by the pleading accents of the peace-maker, who was arguing his irate colleague into calmness. At intervals the door opened to admit other arrivals, and through the crack was caught a glimpse of a dozen directors, some seated, some standing near a long table covered with green baize. It was the regular quarterly meeting of the directors of the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad Company, but it was something more than mere routine that had called out a quorum of such strength and which made to-day's gathering one of extraordinary importance in the history of the road. That the business on hand was of the greatest significance was easily to be inferred from the concerned and anxious expression on the directors' faces and the eagerness of the employes as they plied each other with questions. "Suppose the injunction is sustained?" asked a clerk in a whisper. "Is not the road rich enough to bear the loss?" The man he addressed turned impatiently to the questioner: "That's all you know about railroading. Don't you understand that this suit we have lost will be the entering wedge for hundreds of others. The very existence of the road may be at stake. And between you and me," he added in a lower key, "with Judge Rossmore on the bench we never stood much show. It's Judge Rossmore that scares 'em, not the injunction. They've found it easy to corrupt most of the Supreme Court judges, but Judge Rossmore is one too many for them. You could no more bribe him than you could have bribed Abraham Lincoln." "But the newspapers say that he, too, has been caught accepting $50,000 worth of stock for that decision he rendered in the Great Northwestern case." "Lies! All those stories are lies," replied the other emphatically. Then looking cautiously around to make sure no one overheard, he added contemptuously, "The big interests fear him, and they're inventing these lies to try and injure him. They might as well try to blow up Gibraltar. The fact is the public is seriously aroused this time and the railroads are in a panic." It was true. The railroad, which heretofore had considered itself superior to law, had found itself checked in its career of outlawry and oppression. The railroad, this modern octopus of steam and steel which stretches its greedy tentacles out over the land, had at last been brought to book. At first, when the country was in the earlier stages of its development, the railroad appeared in the guise of a public benefactor. It brought to the markets of the East the produce of the South and West. It opened up new and inaccessible territory and made oases of waste places. It brought to the city coal, lumber, food and other prime necessaries of life, taking back to the farmer and the woodsman in exchange, clothes and other manufactured goods. Thus, little by little, the railroad wormed itself into the affections of the people and gradually became an indispensable part of the life it had itself created. Tear up the railroad and life itself is extinguished. So when the railroad found it could not be dispensed with, it grew dissatisfied with the size of its earnings. Legitimate profits were not enough. Its directors cried out for bigger dividends, and from then on the railroad became a conscienceless tyrant, fawning on those it feared and crushing without mercy those who were defenceless. It raised its rates for hauling freight, discriminating against certain localities without reason or justice, and favouring other points where its own interests lay. By corrupting government officials and other unlawful methods it appropriated lands, and there was no escape from its exactions and brigandage. Other roads were built, and for a brief period there was held out the hope of relief that invariably comes from honest competition. But the railroad either absorbed its rivals or pooled interests with them, and thereafter there were several masters instead of one. Soon the railroads began to war among themselves, and in a mad scramble to secure business at any price they cut each other's rates and unlawfully entered into secret compacts with certain big shippers, permitting the latter to enjoy lower freight rates than their competitors. The smaller shippers were soon crushed out of existence in this way. Competition was throttled and prices went up, making the railroad barons richer and the people poorer. That was the beginning of the giant Trusts, the greatest evil American civilization has yet produced, and one which, unless checked, will inevitably drag this country into the throes of civil strife. From out of this quagmire of corruption and rascality emerged the Colossus, a man so stupendously rich and with such unlimited powers for evil that the world has never looked upon his like. The famous Croesus, whose fortune was estimated at only eight millions in our money, was a pauper compared with John Burkett Ryder, whose holdings no man could count, but which were approximately estimated at a thousand millions of dollars. The railroads had created the Trust, the ogre of corporate greed, of which Ryder was the incarnation, and in time the Trust became master of the railroads, which after all seemed but retributive justice. John Burkett Ryder, the richest man in the world--the man whose name had spread to the farthest corners of the earth because of his wealth, and whose money, instead of being a blessing, promised to become not only a curse to himself but a source of dire peril to all mankind--was a genius born of the railroad age. No other age could have brought him forth; his peculiar talents fitted exactly the conditions of his time. Attracted early in life to the newly discovered oil fields of Pennsylvania, he became a dealer in the raw product and later a refiner, acquiring with capital, laboriously saved, first one refinery, then another. The railroads were cutting each other's throats to secure the freight business of the oil men, and John Burkett Ryder saw his opportunity. He made secret overtures to the road, guaranteeing a vast amount of business if he could get exceptionally low rates, and the illegal compact was made. His competitors, undersold in the market, stood no chance, and one by one they were crushed out of existence. Ryder called these manouvres "business"; the world called them brigandage. But the Colossus prospered and slowly built up the foundations of the extraordinary fortune which is the talk and the wonder of the world today. Master now of the oil situation, Ryder succeeded in his ambition of organizing the Empire Trading Company, the most powerful, the most secretive, and the most wealthy business institution the commercial world has yet known. Yet with all this success John Burkett Ryder was still not content. He was now a rich man, richer by many millions that he had dreamed he could ever be, but still he was unsatisfied. He became money mad. He wanted to be richer still, to be the richest man in the world, the richest man the world had ever known. And the richer he got the stronger the idea grew upon him with all the force of a morbid obsession. He thought of money by day, he dreamt of it at night. No matter by what questionable device it was to be procured, more gold and more must flow into his already overflowing coffers. So each day, instead of spending the rest of his years in peace, in the enjoyment of the wealth he had accumulated, he went downtown like any twenty-dollar-a-week clerk to the tall building in lower Broadway and, closeted with his associates, toiled and plotted to make more money. He acquired vast copper mines and secured control of this and that railroad. He had invested heavily in the Southern and Transcontinental road and was chairman of its board of directors. Then he and his fellow-conspirators planned a great financial coup. The millions were not coming in fast enough. They must make a hundred millions at one stroke. They floated a great mining company to which the public was invited to subscribe. The scheme having the endorsement of the Empire Trading Company no one suspected a snare, and such was the magic of John Ryder's name that gold flowed in from every point of the compass. The stock sold away above par the day it was issued. Men deemed themselves fortunate if they were even granted an allotment. What matter if, a few days later, the house of cards came tumbling down, and a dozen suicides were strewn along Wall Street, that sinister thoroughfare which, as a wit has said, has a graveyard at one end and the river at the other! Had Ryder any twinges of conscience? Hardly. Had he not made a cool twenty millions by the deal? Yet this commercial pirate, this Napoleon of finance, was not a wholly bad man. He had his redeeming qualities, like most bad men. His most pronounced weakness, and the one that had made him the most conspicuous man of his time, was an entire lack of moral principle. No honest or honourable man could have amassed such stupendous wealth. In other words, John Ryder had not been equipped by Nature with a conscience. He had no sense of right, or wrong, or justice where his own interests were concerned. He was the prince of egoists. On the other hand, he possessed qualities which, with some people, count as virtues. He was pious and regular in his attendance at church and, while he had done but little for charity, he was known to have encouraged the giving of alms by the members of his family, which consisted of a wife, whose timid voice was rarely heard, and a son Jefferson, who was the destined successor to his gigantic estate. Such was the man who was the real power behind the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad. More than anyone else Ryder had been aroused by the present legal action, not so much for the money interest at stake as that any one should dare to thwart his will. It had been a pet scheme of his, this purchase for a song, when the land was cheap, of some thousand acres along the line, and it is true that at the time of the purchase there had been some idea of laying the land out as a park. But real estate values had increased in astonishing fashion, the road could no longer afford to carry out the original scheme, and had attempted to dispose of the property for building purposes, including a right of way for a branch road. The news, made public in the newspapers, had raised a storm of protest. The people in the vicinity claimed that the railroad secured the land on the express condition of a park being laid out, and in order to make a legal test they had secured an injunction, which had been sustained by Judge Rossmore of the United States Circuit Court. These details were hastily told and re-told by one clerk to another as the babel of voices in the inner room grew louder, and more directors kept arriving from the ever-busy elevators. The meeting was called for three o'clock. Another five minutes and the chairman would rap for order. A tall, strongly built man with white moustache and kindly smile emerged from the directors room and, addressing one of the clerks, asked: "Has Mr. Ryder arrived yet?" The alacrity with which the employe hastened forward to reply would indicate that his interlocutor was a person of more than ordinary importance. "No, Senator, not yet. We expect him any minute." Then with a deferential smile he added: "Mr. Ryder usually arrives on the stroke, sir." The senator gave a nod of acquiescence and, turning on his heel, greeted with a grasp of the hand and affable smile his fellow-directors as they passed in by twos and threes. Senator Roberts was in the world of politics what his friend John Burkett Ryder was in the world of finance--a leader of men. He started life in Wisconsin as an errand boy, was educated in the public schools, and later became clerk in a dry-goods store, finally going into business for his own account on a large scale. He was elected to the Legislature, where his ability as an organizer soon gained the friendship of the men in power, and later was sent to Congress, where he was quickly initiated in the game of corrupt politics. In 1885 he entered the United States Senate. He soon became the acknowledged leader of a considerable majority of the Republican senators, and from then on he was a figure to be reckoned with. A very ambitious man, with a great love of power and few scruples, it is little wonder that only the practical or dishonest side of politics appealed to him. He was in politics for all there was in it, and he saw in his lofty position only a splendid opportunity for easy graft. He did not hesitate to make such alliances with corporate interests seeking influence at Washington as would enable him to accomplish this purpose, and in this way he had met and formed a strong friendship with John Burkett Ryder. Each being a master in his own field was useful to the other. Neither was troubled with qualms of conscience, so they never quarrelled. If the Ryder interests needed anything in the Senate, Roberts and his followers were there to attend to it. Just now the cohort was marshalled in defence of the railroads against the attacks of the new Rebate bill. In fact, Ryder managed to keep the Senate busy all the time. When, on the other hand, the senators wanted anything--and they often did--Ryder saw that they got it, lower rates for this one, a fat job for that one, not forgetting themselves. Senator Roberts was already a very rich man, and although the world often wondered where he got it, no one had the courage to ask him. But the Republican leader was stirred with an ambition greater than that of controlling a majority in the Senate. He had a daughter, a marriageable young woman who, at least in her father's opinion, would make a desirable wife for any man. His friend Ryder had a son, and this son was the only heir to the greatest fortune ever amassed by one man, a fortune which, at its present rate of increase, by the time the father died and the young couple were ready to inherit, would probably amount to over SIX BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. Could the human mind grasp the possibilities of such a colossal fortune? It staggered the imagination. Its owner, or the man who controlled it, would be master of the world! Was not this a prize any man might well set himself out to win? The senator was thinking of it now as he stood exchanging banal remarks with the men who accosted him. If he could only bring off that marriage he would be content. The ambition of his life would be attained. There was no difficulty as far as John Ryder was concerned. He favoured the match and had often spoken of it. Indeed, Ryder desired it, for such an alliance would naturally further his business interests in every way. Roberts knew that his daughter Kate had more than a liking for Ryder's handsome young son. Moreover, Kate was practical, like her father, and had sense enough to realize what it would mean to be the mistress of the Ryder fortune. No, Kate was all right, but there was young Ryder to reckon with. It would take two in this case to make a bargain. Jefferson Ryder was, in truth, an entirely different man from his father. It was difficult to realize that both had sprung from the same stock. A college-bred boy with all the advantages his father's wealth could give him, he had inherited from the parent only those characteristics which would have made him successful even if born poor--activity, pluck, application, dogged obstinacy, alert mentality. To these qualities he added what his father sorely lacked--a high notion of honour, a keen sense of right and wrong. He had the honest man's contempt for meanness of any description, and he had little patience with the lax so-called business morals of the day. For him a dishonourable or dishonest action could have no apologist, and he could see no difference between the crime of the hungry wretch who stole a loaf of bread and the coal baron who systematically robbed both his employes and the public. In fact, had he been on the bench he would probably have acquitted the human derelict who, in despair, had appropriated the prime necessary of life, and sent the over-fed, conscienceless coal baron to jail. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." This simple and fundamental axiom Jefferson Ryder had adopted early in life, and it had become his religion--the only one, in fact, that he had. He was never pious like his father, a fact much regretted by his mother, who could see nothing but eternal damnation in store for her son because he never went to church and professed no orthodox creed. She knew him to be a good lad, but to her simple mind a conduct of life based merely on a system of moral philosophy was the worst kind of paganism. There could, she argued, be no religion, and assuredly no salvation, outside the dogmatic teachings of the Church. But otherwise Jefferson was a model son and, with the exception of this bad habit of thinking for himself on religious matters, really gave her no anxiety. When Jefferson left college, his father took him into the Empire Trading Company with the idea of his eventually succeeding him as head of the concern, but the different views held by father and son on almost every subject soon led to stormy scenes that made the continuation of the arrangement impossible. Senator Roberts was well aware of these unfortunate independent tendencies in John Ryder's son, and while he devoutly desired the consummation of Jefferson's union with his daughter, he quite realized that the young man was a nut which was going to be exceedingly hard to crack. "Hello, senator, you're always on time!" Disturbed in his reflections, Senator Roberts looked up and saw the extended hand of a red-faced, corpulent man, one of the directors. He was no favourite with the senator, but the latter was too keen a man of the world to make enemies uselessly, so he condescended to place two fingers in the outstretched fat palm. "How are you, Mr. Grimsby? Well, what are we going to do about this injunction? The case has gone against us. I knew Judge Rossmore's decision would be for the other side. Public opinion is aroused. The press--" Mr. Grimsby's red face grew more apoplectic as he blurted out: "Public opinion and the press be d---d. Who cares for public opinion? What is public opinion, anyhow? This road can manage its own affairs or it can't. If it can't I for one quit railroading. The press! Pshaw! It's all graft, I tell you. It's nothing but a strike! I never knew one of these virtuous outbursts that wasn't. First the newspapers bark ferociously to advertise themselves; then they crawl round and whine like a cur. And it usually costs something to fix matters." The senator smiled grimly. "No, no, Grimsby--not this time. It's more serious than that. Hitherto the road has been unusually lucky in its bench decisions--" The senator gave a covert glance round to see if any long ears were listening. Then he added: "We can't expect always to get a favourable decision like that in the Cartwright case, when franchise rights valued at nearly five millions were at stake. Judge Stollmann proved himself a true friend in that affair." Grimsby made a wry grimace as he retorted: "Yes, and it was worth it to him. A Supreme Court judge don't get a cheque for $20,000 every day. That represents two years' pay." "It might represent two years in jail if it were found out," said the senator with a forced laugh. Grimsby saw an opportunity, and he could not resist the temptation. Bluntly he said: "As far as jail's concerned, others might be getting their deserts there too." The senator looked keenly at Grimsby from under his white eyebrows. Then in a calm, decisive tone he replied: "It's no question of a cheque this time. The road could not buy Judge Rossmore with $200,000. He is absolutely unapproachable in that way." The apoplectic face of Mr. Grimsby looked incredulous. It was hard for these men who plotted in the dark, and cheated the widow and the orphan for love of the dollar, to understand that there were in the world, breathing the same air as they, men who put honour, truth and justice above mere money-getting. With a slight tinge of sarcasm he asked: "Is there any man in our public life who is unapproachable from some direction or other?" "Yes, Judge Rossmore is such a man. He is one of the few men in American public life who takes his duties seriously. In the strictest sense of the term, he serves his country instead of serving himself. I am no friend of his, but I must do him that justice." He spoke sharply, in an irritated tone, as if resenting the insinuation of this vulgarian that every man in public life had his price. Roberts knew that the charge was true as far as he and the men he consorted with were concerned, but sometimes the truth hurts. That was why he had for a moment seemed to champion Judge Rossmore, which, seeing that the judge himself was at that very moment under a cloud, was an absurd thing for him to do. He had known Rossmore years before when the latter was a city magistrate in New York. That was before he, Roberts, had become a political grafter and when the decent things in life still appealed to him. The two men, although having few interests in common, had seen a good deal of one another until Roberts went to Washington when their relations were completely severed. But he had always watched Rossmore's career, and when he was made a judge of the Supreme Court at a comparatively early age he was sincerely glad. If anything could have convinced Roberts that success can come in public life to a man who pursues it by honest methods it was the success of James Rossmore. He could never help feeling that Rossmore had been endowed by Nature with certain qualities which had been denied to him, above all that ability to walk straight through life with skirts clean which he had found impossible himself. To-day Judge Rossmore was one of the most celebrated judges in the country. He was a brilliant jurist and a splendid after-dinner speaker. He was considered the most learned and able of all the members of the judiciary, and his decisions were noted as much for their fearlessness as for their wisdom. But what was far more, he enjoyed a reputation for absolute integrity. Until now no breath of slander, no suspicion of corruption, had ever touched him. Even his enemies acknowledged that. And that is why there was a panic to-day among the directors of the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad. This honest, upright man had been called upon in the course of his duty to decide matters of vital importance to the road, and the directors were ready to stampede because, in their hearts, they knew the weakness of their case and the strength of the judge. Grimsby, unconvinced, returned to the charge. "What about these newspaper charges? Did Judge Rossmore take a bribe from the Great Northwestern or didn't he? You ought to know." "I do know," answered the senator cautiously and somewhat curtly, "but until Mr. Ryder arrives I can say nothing. I believe he has been inquiring into the matter. He will tell us when he comes." The hands of the large clock in the outer room pointed to three. An active, dapper little man with glasses and with books under his arm passed hurriedly from another office into the directors room. "There goes Mr. Lane with the minutes. The meeting is called. Where's Mr. Ryder?" There was a general move of the scattered groups of directors toward the committee room. The clock overhead began to strike. The last stroke had not quite died away when the big swinging doors from the street were thrown open and there entered a tall, thin man, gray-headed, and with a slight stoop, but keen eyed and alert. He was carefully dressed in a well-fitting frock coat, white waistcoat, black tie and silk hat. It was John Burkett Ryder, the Colossus. CHAPTER II At fifty-six, John Burkett Ryder was surprisingly well preserved. With the exception of the slight stoop, already noted, and the rapidly thinning snow-white hair, his step was as light and elastic, and his brain as vigorous and alert, as in a man of forty. Of old English stock, his physical make-up presented all those strongly marked characteristics of our race which, sprung from Anglo-Saxon ancestry, but modified by nearly 300 years of different climate and customs, has gradually produced the distinct and true American type, as easily recognizable among the family of nations as any other of the earth's children. Tall and distinguished-looking, Ryder would have attracted attention anywhere. Men who have accomplished much in life usually bear plainly upon their persons the indefinable stamp of achievement, whether of good or evil, which renders them conspicuous among their fellows. We turn after a man in the street and ask, Who is he? And nine times out of ten the object of our curiosity is a man who has made his mark--a successful soldier, a famous sailor, a celebrated author, a distinguished lawyer, or even a notorious crook. There was certainly nothing in John Ryder's outward appearance to justify Lombroso's sensational description of him: "A social and physiological freak, a degenerate and a prodigy of turpitude who, in the pursuit of money, crushes with the insensibility of a steel machine everyone who stands in his way." On the contrary, Ryder, outwardly at least, was a prepossessing-looking man. His head was well-shaped, and he had an intellectual brow, while power was expressed in every gesture of his hands and body. Every inch of him suggested strength and resourcefulness. His face, when in good humour, frequently expanded in a pleasant smile, and he had even been known to laugh boisterously, usually at his own stories, which he rightly considered very droll, and of which he possessed a goodly stock. But in repose his face grew stern and forbidding, and when his prognathous jaw, indicative of will-power and bull-dog tenacity, snapped to with a click-like sound, those who heard it knew that squalls were coming. But it was John Ryder's eyes that were regarded as the most reliable barometer of his mental condition. Wonderful eyes they were, strangely eloquent and expressive, and their most singular feature was that they possessed the uncanny power of changing colour like a cat's. When their owner was at peace with the world, and had temporarily shaken off the cares of business, his eyes were of the most restful, beautiful blue, like the sky after sunrise on a Spring morning, and looking into their serene depths it seemed absurd to think that this man could ever harm a fly. His face, while under the spell of this kindly mood, was so benevolent and gentle, so frank and honest that you felt there was nothing in the world--purse, honour, wife, child--that, if needs be, you would not entrust to his keeping. When this period of truce was ended, when the plutocrat was once more absorbed in controlling the political as well as the commercial machinery of the nation, then his eyes took on a snakish, greenish hue, and one could plainly read in them the cunning, the avariciousness, the meanness, the insatiable thirst for gain that had made this man the most unscrupulous money-getter of his time. But his eyes had still another colour, and when this last transformation took place those dependent on him, and even his friends, quaked with fear. For they were his eyes of anger. On these dreaded occasions his eyes grew black as darkest night and flashed fire as lightning rends the thundercloud. Almost ungovernable fury was, indeed, the weakest spot in John Ryder's armour, for in these moments of appalling wrath he was reckless of what he said or did, friendship, self-interest, prudence--all were sacrificed. Such was the Colossus on whom all eyes were turned as he entered. Instantly the conversations, stopped as by magic. The directors nudged each other and whispered. Instinctively, Ryder singled out his crony, Senator Roberts, who advanced with effusive gesture: "Hello, Senator!" "You're punctual as usual, Mr. Ryder. I never knew you to be late!" The great man chuckled, and the little men standing around, listening breathlessly, chuckled in respectful sympathy, and they elbowed and pushed one another in their efforts to attract Ryder's notice, like so many cowardly hyenas not daring to approach the lordly wolf. Senator Roberts made a remark in a low tone to Ryder, whereupon the latter laughed. The bystanders congratulated each other silently. The great man was pleased to be in a good humour. And as Ryder turned with the senator to enter the Directors Room the light from the big windows fell full on his face, and they noticed that his eyes were of the softest blue. "No squalls to-day," whispered one. "Wait and see," retorted a more experienced colleague. "Those eyes are more fickle than the weather." Outside the sky was darkening, and drops of rain were already falling. A flash of lightning presaged the coming storm. Ryder passed on and into the Directors Room followed by Senator Roberts and the other directors, the procession being brought up by the dapper little secretary bearing the minutes. The long room with its narrow centre table covered with green baize was filled with directors scattered in little groups and all talking at once with excited gesture. At the sight of Ryder the chattering stopped as if by common consent, and the only sound audible was of the shuffling of feet and the moving of chairs as the directors took their places around the long table. With a nod here and there Ryder took his place in the chairman's seat and rapped for order. Then at a sign from the chair the dapper little secretary began in a monotonous voice to read the minutes of the previous meeting. No one listened, a few directors yawned. Others had their eyes riveted on Ryder's face, trying to read there if he had devised some plan to offset the crushing blow of this adverse decision, which meant a serious loss to them all. He, the master mind, had served them in many a like crisis in the past. Could he do so again? But John Ryder gave no sign. His eyes, still of the same restful blue, were fixed on the ceiling watching a spider marching with diabolical intent on a wretched fly that had become entangled in its web. And as the secretary ambled monotonously on, Ryder watched and watched until he saw the spider seize its helpless prey and devour it. Fascinated by the spectacle, which doubtless suggested to him some analogy to his own methods, Ryder sat motionless, his eyes fastened on the ceiling, until the sudden stopping of the secretary's reading aroused him and told him that the minutes were finished. Quickly they were approved, and the chairman proceeded as rapidly as possible with the regular business routine. That disposed of, the meeting was ready for the chief business of the day. Ryder then calmly proceeded to present the facts in the case. Some years back the road had acquired as an investment some thousands of acres of land located in the outskirts of Auburndale, on the line of their road. The land was bought cheap, and there had been some talk of laying part of it out as a public park. This promise had been made at the time in good faith, but it was no condition of the sale. If, afterwards, owing to the rise in the value of real estate, the road found it impossible to carry out the original idea, surely they were masters of their own property! The people of Auburndale thought differently and, goaded on by the local newspapers, had begun action in the courts to restrain the road from diverting the land from its alleged original purpose. They had succeeded in getting the injunction, but the road had fought it tooth and nail, and finally carried it to the Supreme Court, where Judge Rossmore, after reserving his opinion, had finally sustained the injunction and decided against the railroad. That was the situation, and he would now like to hear from the members of the board. Mr. Grimsby rose. Self-confident and noisily loquacious, as most men of his class are in simple conversation, he was plainly intimidated at speaking before such a crowd. He did not know where to look nor what to do with his hands, and he shuffled uneasily on his feet, while streams of nervous perspiration ran down his fat face, which he mopped repeatedly with a big coloured handkerchief. At last, taking courage, he began: "Mr. Chairman, for the past ten years this road has made bigger earnings in proportion to its carrying capacity than any other railroad in the United States. We have had fewer accidents, less injury to rolling stock, less litigation and bigger dividends. The road has been well managed and"--here he looked significantly in Ryder's direction--"there has been a big brain behind the manager. We owe you that credit, Mr. Ryder!" Cries of "Hear! Hear!" came from all round the table. Ryder bowed coldly, and Mr. Grimsby continued: "But during the last year or two things have gone wrong. There has been a lot of litigation, most of which has gone against us, and it has cost a heap of money. It reduced the last quarterly dividend very considerably, and the new complication--this Auburndale suit, which also has gone against us--is going to make a still bigger hole in our exchequer. Gentlemen, I don't want to be a prophet of misfortune, but I'll tell you this--unless something is done to stop this hostility in the courts you and I stand to lose every cent we have invested in the road. This suit which we have just lost means a number of others. What I would ask our chairman is what has become of his former good relations with the Supreme Court, what has become of his influence, which never failed us. What are these rumours regarding Judge Rossmore? He is charged in the newspapers with having accepted a present from a road in whose favour he handed down a very valuable decision. How is it that our road cannot reach Judge Rossmore and make him presents?" The speaker sat down, flushed and breathless. The expression on every face showed that the anxiety was general. The directors glanced at Ryder, but his face was expressionless as marble. Apparently he took not the slightest interest in this matter which so agitated his colleagues. Another director rose. He was a better speaker than Mr. Grimsby, but his voice had a hard, rasping quality that smote the ears unpleasantly. He said: "Mr. Chairman, none of us can deny what Mr. Grimsby has just put before us so vividly. We are threatened not with one, but with a hundred such suits, unless something is done either to placate the public or to render its attacks harmless. Rightly or wrongly, the railroad is hated by the people, yet we are only what railroad conditions compel us to be. With the present fierce competition, no fine question of ethics can enter into our dealings as a business organization. With an irritated public and press on one side, and a hostile judiciary on the other, the outlook certainly is far from bright. But is the judiciary hostile? Is it not true that we have been singularly free from litigation until recently, and that most of the decisions were favourable to the road? Judge Rossmore is the real danger. While he is on the bench the road is not safe. Yet all efforts to reach him have failed and will fail. I do not take any stock in the newspaper stories regarding Judge Rossmore. They are preposterous. Judge Rossmore is too strong a man to be got rid of so easily." The speaker sat down and another rose, his arguments being merely a reiteration of those already heard. Ryder did not listen to what was being said. Why should he? Was he not familiar with every possible phase of the game? Better than these men who merely talked, he was planning how the railroad and all his other interests could get rid of this troublesome judge. It was true. He who controlled legislatures and dictated to Supreme Court judges had found himself powerless when each turn of the legal machinery had brought him face to face with Judge Rossmore. Suit after suit had been decided against him and the interests he represented, and each time it was Judge Rossmore who had handed down the decision. So for years these two men had fought a silent but bitter duel in which principle on the one side and attempted corruption on the other were the gauge of battle. Judge Rossmore fought with the weapons which his oath and the law directed him to use, Ryder with the only weapons he understood--bribery and trickery. And each time it had been Rossmore who had emerged triumphant. Despite every manoeuvre Ryder's experience could suggest, notwithstanding every card that could be played to undermine his credit and reputation, Judge Rossmore stood higher in the country's confidence than when he was first appointed. So when Ryder found he could not corrupt this honest judge with gold, he decided to destroy him with calumny. He realized that the sordid methods which had succeeded with other judges would never prevail with Rossmore, so he plotted to take away from this man the one thing he cherished most--his honour. He would ruin him by defaming his character, and so skilfully would he accomplish his work that the judge himself would realize the hopelessness of resistance. No scruples embarrassed Ryder in arriving at this determination. From his point of view he was fully justified. "Business is business. He hurts my interests; therefore I remove him." So he argued, and he considered it no more wrong to wreck the happiness of this honourable man than he would to have shot a burglar in self-defence. So having thus tranquillized his conscience he had gone to work in his usually thorough manner, and his success had surpassed the most sanguine expectations. This is what he had done. Like many of our public servants whose labours are compensated only in niggardly fashion by an inconsiderate country, Judge Rossmore was a man of but moderate means. His income as Justice of the Supreme Court was $12,000 a year, but for a man in his position, having a certain appearance to keep up, it little more than kept the wolf from the door. He lived quietly but comfortably in New York City with his wife and his daughter Shirley, an attractive young woman who had graduated from Vassar and had shown a marked taste for literature. The daughter's education had cost a good deal of money, and this, together with life insurance and other incidentals of keeping house in New York, had about taken all he had. Yet he had managed to save a little, and those years when he could put by a fifth of his salary the judge considered himself lucky. Secretly, he was proud of his comparative poverty. At least the world could never ask him "where he got it." Ryder was well acquainted with Judge Rossmore's private means. The two men had met at a dinner, and although Ryder had tried to cultivate the acquaintance, he never received much encouragement. Ryder's son Jefferson, too, had met Miss Shirley Rossmore and been much attracted to her, but the father having more ambitious plans for his heir quickly discouraged all attentions in that direction. He himself, however, continued to meet the judge casually, and one evening he contrived to broach the subject of profitable investments. The judge admitted that by careful hoarding and much stinting he had managed to save a few thousand dollars which he was anxious to invest in something good. Quick as the keen-eyed vulture swoops down on its prey the wily financier seized the opportunity thus presented. And he took so much trouble in answering the judge's inexperienced questions, and generally made himself so agreeable, that the judge found himself regretting that he and Ryder had, by force of circumstances, been opposed to each other in public life so long. Ryder strongly recommended the purchase of Alaskan Mining stock, a new and booming enterprise which had lately become very active in the market. Ryder said he had reasons to believe that the stock would soon advance, and now there was an opportunity to get it cheap. A few days after he had made the investment the judge was surprised to receive certificates of stock for double the amount he had paid for. At the same time he received a letter from the secretary of the company explaining that the additional stock was pool stock and not to be marketed at the present time. It was in the nature of a bonus to which he was entitled as one of the early shareholders. The letter was full of verbiage and technical details of which the judge understood nothing, but he thought it very liberal of the company, and putting the stock away in his safe soon forgot all about it. Had he been a business man he would have scented peril. He would have realized that he had now in his possession $50,000 worth of stock for which he had not paid a cent, and furthermore had deposited it when a reorganization came. But the judge was sincerely grateful for Ryder's apparently disinterested advice and wrote two letters to him, one in which he thanked him for the trouble he had taken, and another in which he asked him if he was sure the company was financially sound, as the investment he contemplated making represented all his savings. He added in the second letter that he had received stock for double the amount of his investment, and that being a perfect child in business transactions he had been unable to account for the extra $50,000 worth until the secretary of the company had written him assuring him that everything was in order. These letters Ryder kept. From that time on the Alaskan Mining Company underwent mysterious changes. New capitalists gained control and the name was altered to the Great Northwestern Mining Company. Then it became involved in litigation, and one suit, the outcome of which meant millions to the company, was carried to the Supreme Court, where Judge Rossmore was sitting. The judge had by this time forgotten all about the company in which he owned stock. He did not even recall its name. He only knew vaguely that it was a mine and that it was situated in Alaska. Could he dream that the Great Northwestern Mining Company and the company to which he had entrusted his few thousands were one and the same? In deciding on the merits of the case presented to him right seemed to him to be plainly with the Northwestern, and he rendered a decision to that effect. It was an important decision, involving a large sum, and for a day or two it was talked about. But as it was the opinion of the most learned and honest judge on the bench no one dreamed of questioning it. But very soon ugly paragraphs began to appear in the newspapers. One paper asked if it were true that Judge Rossmore owned stock in the Great Northwestern Mining Company which had recently benefited so signally by his decision. Interviewed by a reporter, Judge Rossmore indignantly denied being interested in any way in the company. Thereupon the same paper returned to the attack, stating that the judge must surely be mistaken as the records showed a sale of stock to him at the time the company was known as the Alaskan Mining Company. When he read this the judge was overwhelmed. It was true then! They had not slandered him. It was he who had lied, but how innocently--how innocently! His daughter Shirley, who was his greatest friend and comfort, was then in Europe. She had gone to the Continent to rest, after working for months on a novel which she had just published. His wife, entirely without experience in business matters and somewhat of an invalid, was helpless to advise him. But to his old and tried friend, ex-Judge Stott, Judge Rossmore explained the facts as they were. Stott shook his head. "It's a conspiracy!" he cried. "And John B. Ryder is behind it." Rossmore refused to believe that any man could so deliberately try to encompass another's destruction, but when more newspaper stories came out he began to realize that Stott was right and that his enemies had indeed dealt him a deadly blow. One newspaper boldly stated that Judge Rossmore was down on the mining company's books for $50,000 more stock than he had paid for, and it went on to ask if this were payment for the favourable decision just rendered. Rossmore, helpless, child-like as he was in business matters, now fully realized the seriousness of his position. "My God! My God!" he cried, as he bowed his head down on his desk. And for a whole day he remained closeted in his library, no one venturing near him. As John Ryder sat there sphinx-like at the head of the directors' table he reviewed all this in his mind. His own part in the work was now done and well done, and he had come to this meeting to-day to tell them of his triumph. The speaker, to whom he had paid such scant attention, resumed his seat, and there followed a pause and an intense silence which was broken only by the pattering of the rain against the big windows. The directors turned expectantly to Ryder, waiting for him to speak. What could the Colossus do now to save the situation? Cries of "the Chair! the Chair!" arose on every side. Senator Roberts leaned over to Ryder and whispered something in his ear. With an acquiescent gesture, John Ryder tapped the table with his gavel and rose to address his fellow directors. Instantly the room was silent again as the tomb. One might have heard a pin drop, so intense was the attention. All eyes were fixed on the chairman. The air itself seemed charged with electricity, that needed but a spark to set it ablaze. Speaking deliberately and dispassionately, the Master Dissembler began. They had all listened carefully, he said, to what had been stated by previous speakers. The situation no doubt was very critical, but they had weathered worse storms and he had every reason to hope they would outlive this storm. It was true that public opinion was greatly incensed against the railroads and, indeed, against all organized capital, and was seeking to injure them through the courts. For a time this agitation would hurt business and lessen the dividends, for it meant not only smaller annual earnings but that a lot of money must be spent in Washington. The eyes of the listeners, who were hanging on every word, involuntarily turned in the direction of Senator Roberts, but the latter, at that moment busily engaged in rummaging among a lot of papers, seemed to have missed this significant allusion to the road's expenses in the District of Columbia. Ryder continued: In his experience such waves of reform were periodical and soon wear themselves out, when things go on just as they did before. Much of the agitation, doubtless, was a strike for graft. They would have to go down in their pockets, he supposed, and then these yellow newspapers and these yellow magazines that were barking at their heels would let them go. But in regard to the particular case now at issue--this Auburndale decision--there had been no way of preventing it. Influence had been used, but to no effect. The thing to do now was to prevent any such disasters in future by removing the author of them. The directors bent eagerly forward. Had Ryder really got some plan up his sleeve after all? The faces around the table looked brighter, and the directors cleared their throats and settled themselves down in their chairs as audiences do in the theatre when the drama is reaching its climax. The board, continued Ryder with icy calmness, had perhaps heard, and also seen in the newspapers, the stories regarding Judge Rossmore and his alleged connection with the Great Northwestern Company. Perhaps they had not believed these stories. It was only natural. He had not believed them himself. But he had taken the trouble to inquire into the matter very carefully, and he regretted to say that the stories were true. In fact, they were no longer denied by Judge Rossmore himself. The directors looked at each other in amazement. Gasps of astonishment, incredulity, satisfaction were heard all over the room. The rumours were true, then? Was it possible? Incredible! Investigation, Ryder went on, had shown that Judge Rossmore was not only interested in the company in whose favour, as Judge of the Supreme Court, he had rendered an important decision, but what was worse, he had accepted from that company a valuable gift--that is, $50,000 worth of stock--for which he had given absolutely nothing in return unless, as some claimed, the weight of his influence on the bench. These facts were very ugly and so unanswerable that Judge Rossmore did not attempt to answer them, and the important news which he, the chairman, had to announce to his fellow-directors that afternoon, was that Judge Rossmore's conduct would be made the subject of an inquiry by Congress. This was the spark that was needed to ignite the electrically charged air. A wild cry of triumph went up from this band of jackals only too willing to fatten their bellies at the cost of another man's ruin, and one director, in his enthusiasm, rose excitedly from his chair and demanded a vote of thanks for John Ryder. Ryder coldly opposed the motion. No thanks were due to him, he said deprecatingly, nor did he think the occasion called for congratulations of any kind. It was surely a sad spectacle to see this honoured judge, this devoted father, this blameless citizen threatened with ruin and disgrace on account of one false step. Let them rather sympathize with him and his family in their misfortune. He had little more to tell. The Congressional inquiry would take place immediately, and in all probability a demand would be made upon the Senate for Judge Rossmore's impeachment. It was, he added, almost unnecessary for him to remind the Board that, in the event of impeachment, the adverse decision in the Auburndale case would be annulled and the road would be entitled to a new trial. Ryder sat down, and pandemonium broke loose, the delighted directors tumbling over each other in their eagerness to shake hands with the man who had saved them. Ryder had given no hint that he had been a factor in the working up of this case against their common enemy, in fact he had appeared to sympathise with him, but the directors knew well that he and he alone had been the master mind which had brought about the happy result. On a motion to adjourn, the meeting broke up, and everyone began to troop towards the elevators. Outside the rain was now coming down in torrents and the lights that everywhere dotted the great city only paled when every few moments a vivid flash of lightning rent the enveloping gloom. Ryder and Senator Roberts went down in the elevator together. When they reached the street the senator inquired in a low tone: "Do you think they really believed Rossmore was influenced in his decision?" Ryder glanced from the lowering clouds overhead to his electric brougham which awaited him at the curb and replied indifferently: "Not they. They don't care. All they want to believe is that he is to be impeached. The man was dangerous and had to be removed--no matter by what means. He is our enemy--my enemy--and I never give quarter to my enemies!" As he spoke his prognathous jaw snapped to with a click-like sound, and in his eyes now coal-black were glints of fire. At the same instant there was a blinding flash, accompanied by a terrific crash, and the splinters of the flag-pole on the building opposite, which had been struck by a bolt, fell at their feet. "A good or a bad omen?" asked the senator with a nervous laugh. He was secretly afraid of lightning but was ashamed to admit it. "A bad omen for Judge Rossmore!" rejoined Ryder coolly, as he slammed to the door of the cab, and the two men drove rapidly off in the direction of Fifth Avenue. CHAPTER III Of all the spots on this fair, broad earth where the jaded globe wanderer, surfeited with hackneyed sight-seeing, may sit in perfect peace and watch the world go by, there is none more fascinating nor one presenting a more brilliant panorama of cosmopolitan life than that famous corner on the Paris boulevards, formed by the angle of the Boulevard des Capucines and the Place de l'Opera. Here, on the "terrace" of the Cafe de la Paix, with its white and gold facade and long French windows, and its innumerable little marble-topped tables and rattan chairs, one may sit for hours at the trifling expense of a few sous, undisturbed even by the tip-seeking garcon, and, if one happens to be a student of human nature, find keen enjoyment in observing the world-types, representing every race and nationality under the sun, that pass and re-pass in a steady, never ceasing, exhaustless stream. The crowd surges to and fro, past the little tables, occasionally toppling over a chair or two in the crush, moving up or down the great boulevards, one procession going to the right, in the direction of the Church of the Madeleine, the other to the left heading toward the historic Bastille, both really going nowhere in particular, but ambling gently and good humouredly along enjoying the sights--and life! Paris, queen of cities! Light-hearted, joyous, radiant Paris--the playground of the nations, the Mecca of the pleasure-seekers, the city beautiful! Paris--the siren, frankly immoral, always seductive, ever caressing! City of a thousand political convulsions, city of a million crimes--her streets have run with human blood, horrors unspeakable have stained her history, civil strife has scarred her monuments, the German conqueror insolently has bivouaced within her walls. Yet, like a virgin undefiled, she shows no sign of storm and stress, she offers her dimpled cheek to the rising sun, and when fall the shadows of night and a billion electric bulbs flash in the siren's crown, her resplendent, matchless beauty dazzles the world! As the supreme reward of virtue, the good American is promised a visit to Paris when he dies. Those, however, of our sagacious fellow countrymen who can afford to make the trip, usually manage to see Lutetia before crossing the river Styx. Most Americans like Paris--some like it so well that they have made it their permanent home--although it must be added that in their admiration they rarely include the Frenchman. For that matter, we are not as a nation particularly fond of any foreigner, largely because we do not understand him, while the foreigner for his part is quite willing to return the compliment. He gives the Yankee credit for commercial smartness, which has built up America's great material prosperity; but he has the utmost contempt for our acquaintance with art, and no profound respect for us as scientists. Is it not indeed fortunate that every nation finds itself superior to its neighbour? If this were not so each would be jealous of the other, and would cry with envy like a spoiled child who cannot have the moon to play with. Happily, therefore, for the harmony of the world, each nation cordially detests the other and the much exploited "brotherhood of man" is only a figure of speech. The Englishman, confident that he is the last word of creation, despises the Frenchman, who, in turn, laughs at the German, who shows open contempt for the Italian, while the American, conscious of his superiority to the whole family of nations, secretly pities them all. The most serious fault which the American--whose one god is Mammon and chief characteristic hustle--has to find with his French brother is that he enjoys life too much, is never in a hurry and, what to the Yankee mind is hardly respectable, has a habit of playing dominoes during business hours. The Frenchman retorts that his American brother, clever person though he be, has one or two things still to learn. He has, he declares, no philosophy of life. It is true that he has learned the trick of making money, but in the things which go to satisfy the soul he is still strangely lacking. He thinks he is enjoying life, when really he is ignorant of what life is. He admits it is not the American's fault, for he has never been taught how to enjoy life. One must be educated to that as everything else. All the American is taught is to be in a perpetual hurry and to make money no matter how. In this mad daily race for wealth, he bolts his food, not stopping to masticate it properly, and consequently suffers all his life from dyspepsia. So he rushes from the cradle to the grave, and what's the good, since he must one day die like all the rest? And what, asks the foreigner, has the American hustler accomplished that his slower-going Continental brother has not done as well? Are finer cities to be found in America than in Europe, do Americans paint more beautiful pictures, or write more learned or more entertaining books, has America made greater progress in science? Is it not a fact that the greatest inventors and scientists of our time--Marconi, who gave to the world wireless telegraphy, Professor Curie, who discovered radium, Pasteur, who found a cure for rabies, Santos-Dumont, who has almost succeeded in navigating the air, Professor Rontgen who discovered the X-ray--are not all these immortals Europeans? And those two greatest mechanical inventions of our day, the automobile and the submarine boat, were they not first introduced and perfected in France before we in America woke up to appreciate their use? Is it, therefore, not possible to take life easily and still achieve? The logic of these arguments, set forth in Le Soir in an article on the New World, appealed strongly to Jefferson Ryder as he sat in front of the Cafe de la Paix, sipping a sugared Vermouth. It was five o'clock, the magic hour of the aperitif, when the glutton taxes his wits to deceive his stomach and work up an appetite for renewed gorging. The little tables were all occupied with the usual before-dinner crowd. There were a good many foreigners, mostly English and Americans and a few Frenchmen, obviously from the provinces, with only a sprinkling of real Parisians. Jefferson's acquaintance with the French language was none too profound, and he had to guess at half the words in the article, but he understood enough to follow the writer's arguments. Yes, it was quite true, he thought, the American idea of life was all wrong. What was the sense of slaving all one's life, piling up a mass of money one cannot possibly spend, when there is only one life to live? How much saner the man who is content with enough and enjoys life while he is able to. These Frenchmen, and indeed all the Continental nations, had solved the problem. The gaiety of their cities, and this exuberant joy of life they communicated to all about them, were sufficient proofs of it. Fascinated by the gay scene around him Jefferson laid the newspaper aside. To the young American, fresh from prosaic money-mad New York, the City of Pleasure presented indeed a novel and beautiful spectacle. How different, he mused, from his own city with its one fashionable thoroughfare--Fifth Avenue--monotonously lined for miles with hideous brownstone residences, and showing little real animation except during the Saturday afternoon parade when the activities of the smart set, male and female, centred chiefly in such exciting diversions as going to Huyler's for soda, taking tea at the Waldorf, and trying to outdo each other in dress and show. New York certainly was a dull place with all its boasted cosmopolitanism. There was no denying that. Destitute of any natural beauty, handicapped by its cramped geographical position between two rivers, made unsightly by gigantic sky-scrapers and that noisy monstrosity the Elevated Railroad, having no intellectual interests, no art interests, no interest in anything not immediately connected with dollars, it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to LIVE in. The millionaires were building white-marble palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls--and Jefferson insisted that in this one important particular New York had no peer--in spite of its comfortable theatres and its wicked Tenderloin, and its Rialto made so brilliant at night by thousands of elaborate electric signs, New York still had the subdued air of a provincial town, compared with the exuberant gaiety, the multiple attractions, the beauties, natural and artificial, of cosmopolitan Paris. The boulevards were crowded, as usual at that hour, and the crush of both vehicles and pedestrians was so great as to permit of only a snail-like progress. The clumsy three-horse omnibuses--Madeleine-Bastille--crowded inside and out with passengers and with their neatly uniformed drivers and conductors, so different in appearance and manner from our own slovenly street-car rowdies, were endeavouring to breast a perfect sea of fiacres which, like a swarm of mosquitoes, appeared to be trying to go in every direction at once, their drivers vociferating torrents of vituperous abuse on every man, woman or beast unfortunate enough to get in their way. As a dispenser of unspeakable profanity, the Paris cocher has no equal. He is unique, no one can approach him. He also enjoys the reputation of being the worst driver in the world. If there is any possible way in which he can run down a pedestrian or crash into another vehicle he will do it, probably for the only reason that it gives him another opportunity to display his choice stock of picturesque expletives. But it was a lively, good-natured crowd and the fashionably gowned women and the well-dressed men, the fakirs hoarsely crying their catch-penny devices, the noble boulevards lined as far as the eye could reach with trees in full foliage, the magnificent Opera House with its gilded dome glistening in the warm sunshine of a June afternoon, the broad avenue directly opposite, leading in a splendid straight line to the famous Palais Royal, the almost dazzling whiteness of the houses and monuments, the remarkable cleanliness and excellent condition of the sidewalks and streets, the gaiety and richness of the shops and restaurants, the picturesque kiosks where they sold newspapers and flowers--all this made up a picture so utterly unlike anything he was familiar with at home that Jefferson sat spellbound, delighted. Yes, it was true, he thought, the foreigner had indeed learned the secret of enjoying life. There was assuredly something else in the world beyond mere money-getting. His father was a slave to it, but he would never be. He was resolved on that. Yet, with all his ideas of emancipation and progress, Jefferson was a thoroughly practical young man. He fully understood the value of money, and the possession of it was as sweet to him as to other men. Only he would never soil his soul in acquiring it dishonourably. He was convinced that society as at present organized was all wrong and that the feudalism of the middle ages had simply given place to a worse form of slavery--capitalistic driven labour--which had resulted in the actual iniquitous conditions, the enriching of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor. He was familiar with the socialistic doctrines of the day and had taken a keen interest in this momentous question, this dream of a regenerated mankind. He had read Karl Marx and other socialistic writers, and while his essentially practical mind could hardly approve all their programme for reorganizing the State, some of which seemed to him utopian, extravagant and even undesirable, he realised that the socialistic movement was growing rapidly all over the world and the day was not far distant when in America, as to-day in Germany and France, it would be a formidable factor to reckon with. But until the socialistic millennium arrived and society was reorganized, money, he admitted, would remain the lever of the world, the great stimulus to effort. Money supplied not only the necessities of life but also its luxuries, everything the material desire craved for, and so long as money had this magic purchasing power, so long would men lie and cheat and rob and kill for its possession. Was life worth living without money? Could one travel and enjoy the glorious spectacles Nature affords--the rolling ocean, the majestic mountains, the beautiful lakes, the noble rivers--without money? Could the book-lover buy books, the art-lover purchase pictures? Could one have fine houses to live in, or all sorts of modern conveniences to add to one's comfort, without money? The philosophers declared contentment to be happiness, arguing that the hod-carrier was likely to be happier in his hut than the millionaire in his palace; but was not that mere animal contentment, the happiness which knows no higher state, the ignorance of one whose eyes have never been raised to the heights? No, Jefferson was no fool. He loved money for what pleasure, intellectual or physical, it could give him, but he would never allow money to dominate his life as his father had done. His father, he knew well, was not a happy man, neither happy himself nor respected by the world. He had toiled all his life to make his vast fortune and now he toiled to take care of it. The galley slave led a life of luxurious ease compared with John Burkett Ryder. Baited by the yellow newspapers and magazines, investigated by State committees, dogged by process-servers, haunted by beggars, harassed by blackmailers, threatened by kidnappers, frustrated in his attempts to bestow charity by the cry "tainted money"--certainly the lot of the world's richest man was far from being an enviable one. That is why Jefferson had resolved to strike out for himself. He had warded off the golden yoke which his father proposed to put on his shoulders, declining the lucrative position made for him in the Empire Trading Company, and he had gone so far as to refuse also the private income his father offered to settle on him. He would earn his own living. A man who has his bread buttered for him seldom accomplishes anything he had said, and while his father had appeared to be angry at this open opposition to his will, he was secretly pleased at his son's grit. Jefferson was thoroughly in earnest. If needs be, he would forego the great fortune that awaited him rather than be forced into questionable business methods against which his whole manhood revolted. Jefferson Ryder felt strongly about these matters, and gave them more thought than would be expected of most young men with his opportunities. In fact, he was unusually serious for his age. He was not yet thirty, but he had done a great deal of reading, and he took a keen interest in all the political and sociological questions of the hour. In personal appearance, he was the type of man that both men and women like--tall and athletic looking, with smooth face and clean-cut features. He had the steel-blue eyes and the fighting jaw of his father, and when he smiled he displayed two even rows of very white teeth. He was popular with men, being manly, frank and cordial in his relations with them, and women admired him greatly, although they were somewhat intimidated by his grave and serious manner. The truth was that he was rather diffident with women, largely owing to lack of experience with them. He had never felt the slightest inclination for business. He had the artistic temperament strongly developed, and his personal tastes had little in common with Wall Street and its feverish stock manipulating. When he was younger, he had dreamed of a literary or art career. At one time he had even thought of going on the stage. But it was to art that he turned finally. From an early age he had shown considerable skill as a draughtsman, and later a two years' course at the Academy of Design convinced him that this was his true vocation. He had begun by illustrating for the book publishers and for the magazines, meeting at first with the usual rebuffs and disappointments, but, refusing to be discouraged, he had kept on and soon the tide turned. His drawings began to be accepted. They appeared first in one magazine, then in another, until one day, to his great joy, he received an order from an important firm of publishers for six washdrawings to be used in illustrating a famous novel. This was the beginning of his real success. His illustrations were talked about almost as much as the book, and from that time on everything was easy. He was in great demand by the publishers, and very soon the young artist, who had begun his career of independence on nothing a year so to speak, found himself in a handsomely appointed studio in Bryant Park, with more orders coming in than he could possibly fill, and enjoying an income of little less than $5,000 a year. The money was all the sweeter to Jefferson in that he felt he had himself earned every cent of it. This summer he was giving himself a well-deserved vacation, and he had come to Europe partly to see Paris and the other art centres about which his fellow students at the Academy raved, but principally--although this he did not acknowledge even to himself--to meet in Paris a young woman in whom he was more than ordinarily interested--Shirley Rossmore, daughter of Judge Rossmore, of the United States Supreme Court, who had come abroad to recuperate after the labours on her new novel, "The American Octopus," a book which was then the talk of two hemispheres. Jefferson had read half a dozen reviews of it in as many American papers that afternoon at the New York Herald's reading room in the Avenue de l'Opera, and he chuckled with glee as he thought how accurately this young woman had described his father. The book had been published under the pseudonym "Shirley Green," and he alone had been admitted into the secret of authorship. The critics all conceded that it was the book of the year, and that it portrayed with a pitiless pen the personality of the biggest figure in the commercial life of America. "Although," wrote one reviewer, "the leading character in the book is given another name, there can be no doubt that the author intended to give to the world a vivid pen portrait of John Burkett Ryder. She has succeeded in presenting a remarkable character-study of the most remarkable man of his time." He was particularly pleased with the reviews, not only for Miss Rossmore's sake, but also because his own vanity was gratified. Had he not collaborated on the book to the extent of acquainting the author with details of his father's life, and his characteristics, which no outsider could possibly have learned? There had been no disloyalty to his father in doing this. Jefferson admired his father's smartness, if he could not approve his methods. He did not consider the book an attack on his father, but rather a powerfully written pen picture of an extraordinary man. Jefferson had met Shirley Rossmore two years before at a meeting of the Schiller Society, a pseudo-literary organization gotten up by a lot of old fogies for no useful purpose, and at whose monthly meetings the poet who gave the society its name was probably the last person to be discussed. He had gone out of curiosity, anxious to take in all the freak shows New York had to offer, and he had been introduced to a tall girl with a pale, thoughtful face and firm mouth. She was a writer, Miss Rossmore told him, and this was her first visit also to the evening receptions of the Schiller Society. Half apologetically she added that it was likely to be her last, for, frankly, she was bored to death. But she explained that she had to go to these affairs, as she found them useful in gathering material for literary use. She studied types and eccentric characters, and this seemed to her a capital hunting ground. Jefferson, who, as a rule, was timid with girls and avoided them, found this girl quite unlike the others he had known. Her quiet, forceful demeanour appealed to him strongly, and he lingered with her, chatting about his work, which had so many interests in common with her own, until refreshments were served, when the affair broke up. This first meeting had been followed by a call at the Rossmore residence, and the acquaintance had kept up until Jefferson, for the first time since he came to manhood, was surprised and somewhat alarmed at finding himself strangely and unduly interested in a person of the opposite sex. The young artist's courteous manner, his serious outlook on life, his high moral principles, so rarely met with nowadays in young men of his age and class, could hardly fail to appeal to Shirley, whose ideals of men had been somewhat rudely shattered by those she had hitherto met. Above all, she demanded in a man the refinement of the true gentleman, together with strength of character and personal courage. That Jefferson Ryder came up to this standard she was soon convinced. He was certainly a gentleman: his views on a hundred topics of the hour expressed in numerous conversations assured her as to his principles, while a glance at his powerful physique left no doubt possible as to his courage. She rightly guessed that this was no poseur trying to make an impression and gain her confidence. There was an unmistakable ring of sincerity in all his words, and his struggle at home with his father, and his subsequent brave and successful fight for his own independence and self-respect, more than substantiated all her theories. And the more Shirley let her mind dwell on Jefferson Ryder and his blue eyes and serious manner, the more conscious she became that the artist was encroaching more upon her thoughts and time than was good either for her work or for herself. So their casual acquaintance grew into a real friendship and comradeship. Further than that Shirley promised herself it should never go. Not that Jefferson had given her the slightest hint that he entertained the idea of making her his wife one day, only she was sophisticated enough to know the direction in which run the minds of men who are abnormally interested in one girl, and long before this Shirley had made up her mind that she would never marry. Firstly, she was devoted to her father and could not bear the thought of ever leaving him; secondly, she was fascinated by her literary work and she was practical enough to know that matrimony, with its visions of slippers and cradles, would be fatal to any ambition of that kind. She liked Jefferson immensely--more, perhaps, than any man she had yet met--and she did not think any the less of him because of her resolve not to get entangled in the meshes of Cupid. In any case he had not asked her to marry him--perhaps the idea was far from his thoughts. Meantime, she could enjoy his friendship freely without fear of embarrassing entanglements. When, therefore, she first conceived the idea of portraying in the guise of fiction the personality of John Burkett Ryder, the Colossus of finance whose vast and ever-increasing fortune was fast becoming a public nuisance, she naturally turned to Jefferson for assistance. She wanted to write a book that would be talked about, and which at the same time would open the eyes of the public to this growing peril in their midst--this monster of insensate and unscrupulous greed who, by sheer weight of his ill-gotten gold, was corrupting legislators and judges and trying to enslave the nation. The book, she argued, would perform a public service in awakening all to the common danger. Jefferson fully entered into her views and had furnished her with the information regarding his father that she deemed of value. The book had proven a success beyond their most sanguine expectations, and Shirley had come to Europe for a rest after the many weary months of work that it took to write it. The acquaintance of his son with the daughter of Judge Rossmore had not escaped the eagle eye of Ryder, Sr., and much to the financier's annoyance, and even consternation, he had ascertained that Jefferson was a frequent caller at the Rossmore home. He immediately jumped to the conclusion that this could mean only one thing, and fearing what he termed "the consequences of the insanity of immature minds," he had summoned Jefferson peremptorily to his presence. He told his son that all idea of marriage in that quarter was out of the question for two reasons: One was that Judge Rossmore was his most bitter enemy, the other was that he had hoped to see his son, his destined successor, marry a woman of whom he, Ryder, Sr., could approve. He knew of such a woman, one who would make a far more desirable mate than Miss Rossmore. He alluded, of course, to Kate Roberts, the pretty daughter of his old friend, the Senator. The family interests would benefit by this alliance, which was desirable from every point of view. Jefferson had listened respectfully until his father had finished and then grimly remarked that only one point of view had been overlooked--his own. He did not care for Miss Roberts; he did not think she really cared for him. The marriage was out of the question. Whereupon Ryder, Sr., had fumed and raged, declaring that Jefferson was opposing his will as he always did, and ending with the threat that if his son married Shirley Rossmore without his consent he would disinherit him. Jefferson was cogitating on these incidents of the last few months when suddenly a feminine voice which he quickly recognised called out in English: "Hello! Mr. Ryder." He looked up and saw two ladies, one young, the other middle aged, smiling at him from an open fiacre which had drawn up to the curb. Jefferson jumped from his seat, upsetting his chair and startling two nervous Frenchmen in his hurry, and hastened out, hat in hand. "Why, Miss Rossmore, what are you doing out driving?" he asked. "You know you and Mrs. Blake promised to dine with me to-night. I was coming round to the hotel in a few moments." Mrs. Blake was a younger sister of Shirley's mother. Her husband had died a few years previously, leaving her a small income, and when she had heard of her niece's contemplated trip to Europe she had decided to come to Paris to meet her and incidentally to chaperone her. The two women were stopping at the Grand Hotel close by, while Jefferson had found accommodations at the Athenee. Shirley explained. Her aunt wanted to go to the dressmaker's, and she herself was most anxious to go to the Luxembourg Gardens to hear the music. Would he take her? Then they could meet Mrs. Blake at the hotel at seven o'clock and all go to dinner. Was he willing? Was he? Jefferson's face fairly glowed. He ran back to his table on the terrasse to settle for his Vermouth, astonished the waiter by not stopping to notice the short change he gave him, and rushed back to the carriage. A dirty little Italian girl, shrewd enough to note the young man's attention to the younger of the American women, wheedled up to the carriage and thrust a bunch of flowers in Jefferson's face. "Achetez des fleurs, monsieur, pour la jolie dame?" Down went Jefferson's hand in his pocket and, filling the child's hand with small silver, he flung the flowers in the carriage. Then he turned inquiringly to Shirley for instructions so he could direct the cocher. Mrs. Blake said she would get out here. Her dressmaker was close by, in the Rue Auber, and she would walk back to the hotel to meet them at seven o'clock. Jefferson assisted her to alight and escorted her as far as the porte-cochere of the modiste's, a couple of doors away. When he returned to the carriage, Shirley had already told the coachman where to go. He got in and the fiacre started. "Now," said Shirley, "tell me what you have been doing with yourself all day." Jefferson was busily arranging the faded carriage rug about Shirley, spending more time in the task perhaps than was absolutely necessary, and she had to repeat the question. "Doing?" he echoed with a smile, "I've been doing two things--waiting impatiently for seven o'clock and incidentally reading the notices of your book." CHAPTER IV "Tell me, what do the papers say?" Settling herself comfortably back in the carriage, Shirley questioned Jefferson with eagerness, even anxiety. She had been impatiently awaiting the arrival of the newspapers from "home," for so much depended on this first effort. She knew her book had been praised in some quarters, and her publishers had written her that the sales were bigger every day, but she was curious to learn how it had been received by the reviewers. In truth, it had been no slight achievement for a young writer of her inexperience, a mere tyro in literature, to attract so much attention with her first book. The success almost threatened to turn her head, she had told her aunt laughingly, although she was sure it could never do that. She fully realized that it was the subject rather than the skill of the narrator that counted in the book's success, also the fact that it had come out at a timely moment, when the whole world was talking of the Money Peril. Had not President Roosevelt, in a recent sensational speech, declared that it might be necessary for the State to curb the colossal fortunes of America, and was not her hero, John Burkett Ryder, the richest of them all? Any way they looked at it, the success of the book was most gratifying. While she was an attractive, aristocratic-looking girl, Shirley Rossmore had no serious claims to academic beauty. Her features were irregular, and the firm and rather thin mouth lines disturbed the harmony indispensable to plastic beauty. Yet there was in her face something far more appealing--soul and character. The face of the merely beautiful woman expresses nothing, promises nothing. It presents absolutely no key to the soul within, and often there is no soul within to have a key to. Perfect in its outlines and coloring, it is a delight to gaze upon, just as is a flawless piece of sculpture, yet the delight is only fleeting. One soon grows satiated, no matter how beautiful the face may be, because it is always the same, expressionless and soulless. "Beauty is only skin deep," said the philosopher, and no truer dictum was ever uttered. The merely beautiful woman, who possesses only beauty and nothing else, is kept so busy thinking of her looks, and is so anxious to observe the impression her beauty makes on others, that she has neither the time nor the inclination for matters of greater importance. Sensible men, as a rule, do not lose their hearts to women whose only assets are their good looks. They enjoy a flirtation with them, but seldom care to make them their wives. The marrying man is shrewd enough to realize that domestic virtues will be more useful in his household economy than all the academic beauty ever chiselled out of block marble. Shirley was not beautiful, but hers was a face that never failed to attract attention. It was a thoughtful and interesting face, with an intellectual brow and large, expressive eyes, the face of a woman who had both brain power and ideals, and yet who, at the same time, was in perfect sympathy with the world. She was fair in complexion, and her fine brown eyes, alternately reflective and alert, were shaded by long dark lashes. Her eyebrows were delicately arched, and she had a good nose. She wore her hair well off the forehead, which was broader than in the average woman, suggesting good mentality. Her mouth, however, was her strongest feature. It was well shaped, but there were firm lines about it that suggested unusual will power. Yet it smiled readily, and when it did there was an agreeable vision of strong, healthy-looking teeth of dazzling whiteness. She was a little over medium height and slender in figure, and carried herself with that unmistakable air of well-bred independence that bespeaks birth and culture. She dressed stylishly, and while her gowns were of rich material, and of a cut suggesting expensive modistes, she was always so quietly attired and in such perfect taste, that after leaving her one could never recall what she had on. At the special request of Shirley, who wanted to get a glimpse of the Latin Quarter, the driver took a course down the Avenue de l'Opera, that magnificent thoroughfare which starts at the Opera and ends at the Theatre Francais, and which, like many others that go to the beautifying of the capital, the Parisians owe to the much-despised Napoleon III. The cab, Jefferson told her, would skirt the Palais Royal and follow the Rue de Rivoli until it came to the Chatelet, when it would cross the Seine and drive up the Boulevard St. Michel--the students' boulevard--until it reached the Luxembourg Gardens. Like most of his kind, the cocker knew less than nothing of the art of driving, and he ran a reckless, zig-zag flight, in and out, forcing his way through a confusing maze of vehicles of every description, pulling first to the right, then to the left, for no good purpose that was apparent, and averting only by the narrowest of margins half a dozen bad collisions. At times the fiacre lurched in such alarming fashion that Shirley was visibly perturbed, but when Jefferson assured her that all Paris cabs travelled in this crazy fashion and nothing ever happened, she was comforted. "Tell me," he repeated, "what do the papers say about the book?" "Say?" he echoed. "Why, simply that you've written the biggest book of the year, that's all!" "Really! Oh, do tell me all they said!" She was fairly excited now, and in her enthusiasm she grasped Jefferson's broad, sunburnt hand which was lying outside the carriage rug. He tried to appear unconscious of the contact, which made his every nerve tingle, as he proceeded to tell her the gist of the reviews he had read that afternoon. "Isn't that splendid!" she exclaimed, when he had finished. Then she added quickly: "I wonder if your father has seen it?" Jefferson grinned. He had something on his conscience, and this was a good opportunity to get rid of it. He replied laconically: "He probably has read it by this time. I sent him a copy myself." The instant the words were out of his mouth he was sorry, for Shirley's face had changed colour. "You sent him a copy of 'The American Octopus?'" she cried. "Then he'll guess who wrote the book." "Oh, no, he won't," rejoined Jefferson calmly. "He has no idea who sent it to him. I mailed it anonymously." Shirley breathed a sigh of relief. It was so important that her identity should remain a secret. As daughter of a Supreme Court judge she had to be most careful. She would not embarrass her father for anything in the world. But it was smart of Jefferson to have sent Ryder, Sr., the book, so she smiled graciously on his son as she asked: "How do you know he got it? So many letters and packages are sent to him that he never sees himself." "Oh, he saw your book all right," laughed Jefferson. "I was around the house a good deal before sailing, and one day I caught him in the library reading it." They both laughed, feeling like mischievous children who had played a successful trick on the hokey-pokey man. Jefferson noted his companion's pretty dimples and fine teeth, and he thought how attractive she was, and stronger and stronger grew the idea within him that this was the woman who was intended by Nature to share his life. Her slender hand still covered his broad, sunburnt one, and he fancied he felt a slight pressure. But he was mistaken. Not the slightest sentiment entered into Shirley's thoughts of Jefferson. She regarded him only as a good comrade with whom she had secrets she confided in no one else. To that extent and to that extent alone he was privileged above other men. Suddenly he asked her: "Have you heard from home recently?" A soft light stole into the girl's face. Home! Ah, that was all she needed to make her cup of happiness full. Intoxicated with this new sensation of a first literary success, full of the keen pleasure this visit to the beautiful city was giving her, bubbling over with the joy of life, happy in the almost daily companionship of the man she liked most in the world after her father, there was only one thing lacking--home! She had left New York only a month before, and she was homesick already. Her father she missed most. She was fond of her mother, too, but the latter, being somewhat of a nervous invalid, had never been to her quite what her father had been. The playmate of her childhood, companion of her girlhood, her friend and adviser in womanhood, Judge Rossmore was to his daughter the ideal man and father. Answering Jefferson's question she said: "I had a letter from father last week. Everything was going on at home as when I left. Father says he misses me sadly, and that mother is ailing as usual." She smiled, and Jefferson smiled too. They both knew by experience that nothing really serious ailed Mrs. Rossmore, who was a good deal of a hypochondriac, and always so filled with aches and pains that, on the few occasions when she really felt well, she was genuinely alarmed. The fiacre by this time had emerged from the Rue de Rivoli and was rolling smoothly along the fine wooden pavement in front of the historic Conciergerie prison where Marie Antoinette was confined before her execution. Presently they recrossed the Seine, and the cab, dodging the tram car rails, proceeded at a smart pace up the "Boul' Mich'," which is the familiar diminutive bestowed by the students upon that broad avenue which traverses the very heart of their beloved Quartier Latin. On the left frowned the scholastic walls of the learned Sorbonne, in the distance towered the majestic dome of the Pantheon where Rousseau, Voltaire and Hugo lay buried. Like most of the principal arteries of the French capital, the boulevard was generously lined with trees, now in full bloom, and the sidewalks fairly seethed with a picturesque throng in which mingled promiscuously frivolous students, dapper shop clerks, sober citizens, and frisky, flirtatious little ouvrieres, these last being all hatless, as is characteristic of the work-girl class, but singularly attractive in their neat black dresses and dainty low-cut shoes. There was also much in evidence another type of female whose extravagance of costume and boldness of manner loudly proclaimed her ancient profession. On either side of the boulevard were shops and cafes, mostly cafes, with every now and then a brasserie, or beer hall. Seated in front of these establishments, taking their ease as if beer sampling constituted the only real interest in their lives, were hundreds of students, reckless and dare-devil, and suggesting almost anything except serious study. They all wore frock coats and tall silk hats, and some of the latter were wonderful specimens of the hatter's art. A few of the more eccentric students had long hair down to their shoulders, and wore baggy peg-top trousers of extravagant cut, which hung in loose folds over their sharp-pointed boots. On their heads were queer plug hats with flat brims. Shirley laughed outright and regretted that she did not have her kodak to take back to America some idea of their grotesque appearance, and she listened with amused interest as Jefferson explained that these men were notorious poseurs, aping the dress and manners of the old-time student as he flourished in the days of Randolph and Mimi and the other immortal characters of Murger's Bohemia. Nobody took them seriously except themselves, and for the most part they were bad rhymesters of decadent verse. Shirley was astonished to see so many of them busily engaged smoking cigarettes and imbibing glasses of a pale-green beverage, which Jefferson told her was absinthe. "When do they read?" she asked. "When do they attend lectures?" "Oh," laughed Jefferson, "only the old-fashioned students take their studies seriously. Most of the men you see there are from the provinces, seeing Paris for the first time, and having their fling. Incidentally they are studying life. When they have sown their wild oats and learned all about life--provided they are still alive and have any money left--they will begin to study books. You would be surprised to know how many of these young men, who have been sent to the University at a cost of goodness knows what sacrifices, return to their native towns in a few months wrecked in body and mind, without having once set foot in a lecture room, and, in fact, having done nothing except inscribe their names on the rolls." Shirley was glad she knew no such men, and if she ever married and had a son she would pray God to spare her that grief and humiliation. She herself knew something about the sacrifices parents make to secure a college education for their children. Her father had sent her to Vassar. She was a product of the much-sneered-at higher education for women, and all her life she would be grateful for the advantages given her. Her liberal education had broadened her outlook on life and enabled her to accomplish the little she had. When she graduated her father had left her free to follow her own inclinations. She had little taste for social distractions, and still she could not remain idle. For a time she thought of teaching to occupy her mind, but she knew she lacked the necessary patience, and she could not endure the drudgery of it, so, having won honors at college in English composition, she determined to try her hand at literature. She wrote a number of essays and articles on a hundred different subjects which she sent to the magazines, but they all came back with politely worded excuses for their rejection. But Shirley kept right on. She knew she wrote well; it must be that her subjects were not suitable. So she adopted new tactics, and persevered until one day came a letter of acceptance from the editor of one of the minor magazines. They would take the article offered--a sketch of college life--and as many more in similar vein as Miss Rossmore could write. This success had been followed by other acceptances and other commissions, until at the present time she was a well-known writer for the leading publications. Her great ambition had been to write a book, and "The American Octopus," published under an assumed name, was the result. The cab stopped suddenly in front of beautiful gilded gates. It was the Luxembourg, and through the tall railings they caught a glimpse of well-kept lawns, splashing fountains and richly dressed children playing. From the distance came the stirring strains of a brass band. The coachman drove up to the curb and Jefferson jumped down, assisting Shirley to alight. In spite of Shirley's protest Jefferson insisted on paying. "Combien?" he asked the cocher. The jehu, a surly, thick-set man with a red face and small, cunning eyes like a ferret, had already sized up his fares for two sacre foreigners whom it would be flying in the face of Providence not to cheat, so with unblushing effrontery he answered: "Dix francs, Monsieur!" And he held up ten fingers by way of illustration. Jefferson was about to hand up a ten-franc piece when Shirley indignantly interfered. She would not submit to such an imposition. There was a regular tariff and she would pay that and nothing more. So, in better French than was at Jefferson's command, she exclaimed: "Ten francs? Pourquoi dix francs? I took your cab by the hour. It is exactly two hours. That makes four francs." Then to Jefferson she added: "Give him a franc for a pourboire--that makes five francs altogether." Jefferson, obedient to her superior wisdom, held out a five-franc piece, but the driver shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. He saw that the moment had come to bluster so he descended from his box fully prepared to carry out his bluff. He started in to abuse the two Americans whom in his ignorance he took for English. "Ah, you sale Anglais! You come to France to cheat the poor Frenchman. You make me work all afternoon and then pay me nothing. Not with this coco! I know my rights and I'll get them, too." All this was hurled at them in a patois French, almost unintelligible to Shirley, and wholly so to Jefferson. All he knew was that the fellow's attitude was becoming unbearably insolent and he stepped forward with a gleam in his eye that might have startled the man had he not been so busy shaking his fist at Shirley. But she saw Jefferson's movement and laid her hand on his arm. "No, no, Mr. Ryder--no scandal, please. Look, people are beginning to come up! Leave him to me. I know how to manage him." With this the daughter of a United States Supreme Court judge proceeded to lay down the law to the representative of the most lazy and irresponsible class of men ever let loose in the streets of a civilised community. Speaking with an air of authority, she said: "Now look here, my man, we have no time to bandy words here with you. I took your cab at 3.30. It is now 5.30. That makes two hours. The rate is two francs an hour, or four francs in all. We offer you five francs, and this includes a franc pourboire. If this settlement does not suit you we will get into your cab and you will drive us to the nearest police-station where the argument can be continued." The man's jaw dropped. He was obviously outclassed. These foreigners knew the law as well as he did. He had no desire to accept Shirley's suggestion of a trip to the police-station, where he knew he would get little sympathy, so, grumbling and giving vent under his breath to a volley of strange oaths, he grabbed viciously at the five-franc piece Jefferson held out and, mounting his box, drove off. Proud of their victory, they entered the gardens, following the sweet-scented paths until they came to where the music was. The band of an infantry regiment was playing, and a large crowd had gathered. Many people were sitting on the chairs provided for visitors for the modest fee of two sous; others were promenading round and round a great circle having the musicians in its centre. The dense foliage of the trees overhead afforded a perfect shelter from the hot rays of the sun, and the place was so inviting and interesting, so cool and so full of sweet perfumes and sounds, appealing to and satisfying the senses, that Shirley wished they had more time to spend there. She was very fond of a good brass band, especially when heard in the open air. They were playing Strauss's Blue Danube, and the familiar strains of the delightful waltz were so infectious that both were seized by a desire to get up and dance. There was constant amusement, too, watching the crowd, with its many original and curious types. There were serious college professors, with gold-rimmed spectacles, buxom nounous in their uniform cloaks and long ribbon streamers, nicely dressed children romping merrily but not noisily, more queer-looking students in shabby frock coats, tight at the waist, trousers too short, and comical hats, stylishly dressed women displaying the latest fashions, brilliantly uniformed army officers strutting proudly, dangling their swords--an attractive and interesting crowd, so different, thought the two Americans, from the cheap, evil-smelling, ill-mannered mob of aliens that invades their own Central Park the days when there is music, making it a nuisance instead of a pleasure. Here everyone belonged apparently to the better class; the women and children were richly and fashionably dressed, the officers looked smart in their multi-coloured uniforms, and, no matter how one might laugh at the students, there was an atmosphere of good-breeding and refinement everywhere which Shirley was not accustomed to see in public places at home. A sprinkling of workmen and people of the poorer class were to be seen here and there, but they were in the decided minority. Shirley, herself a daughter of the Revolution, was a staunch supporter of the immortal principles of Democracy and of the equality of man before the law. But all other talk of equality was the greatest sophistry and charlatanism. There could be no real equality so long as some people were cultured and refined and others were uneducated and vulgar. Shirley believed in an aristocracy of brains and soap. She insisted that no clean person, no matter how good a democrat, should be expected to sit close in public places to persons who were not on speaking terms with the bath-tub. In America this foolish theory of a democracy, which insists on throwing all classes, the clean and the unclean, promiscuously together, was positively revolting, making travelling in the public vehicles almost impossible, and it was not much better in the public parks. In France--also a Republic--where they likewise paraded conspicuously the clap-trap "Egalite, Fraternite," they managed these things far better. The French lower classes knew their place. They did not ape the dress, nor frequent the resorts of those above them in the social scale. The distinction between the classes was plainly and properly marked, yet this was not antagonistic to the ideal of true democracy; it had not prevented the son of a peasant from becoming President of the French Republic. Each district in Paris had its own amusement, its own theatres, its own parks. It was not a question of capital refusing to fraternize with labour, but the very natural desire of persons of refinement to mingle with clean people rather than to rub elbows with the Great Unwashed. "Isn't it delightful here?" said Shirley. "I could stay here forever, couldn't you?" "With you--yes," answered Jefferson, with a significant smile. Shirley tried to look angry. She strictly discouraged these conventional, sentimental speeches which constantly flung her sex in her face. "Now, you know I don't like you to talk that way, Mr. Ryder. It's most undignified. Please be sensible." Quite subdued, Jefferson relapsed into a sulky silence. Presently he said: "I wish you wouldn't call me Mr. Ryder. I meant to ask you this before. You know very well that you've no great love for the name, and if you persist you'll end by including me in your hatred of the hero of your book." Shirley looked at him with amused curiosity. "What do you mean?" she asked. "What do you want me to call you?" "Oh, I don't know," he stammered, rather intimidated by this self-possessed young woman who looked him calmly through and through. "Why not call me Jefferson? Mr. Ryder is so formal." Shirley laughed outright, a merry, unrestrained peal of honest laughter, which made the passers-by turn their heads and smile, too, commenting the while on the stylish appearance of the two Americans whom they took for sweethearts. After all, reasoned Shirley, he was right. They had been together now nearly every hour in the day for over a month. It was absurd to call him Mr. Ryder. So, addressing him with mock gravity, she said: "You're right, Mr. Ryder--I mean Jefferson. You're quite right. You are Jefferson from this time on, only remember"--here she shook her gloved finger at him warningly--"mind you behave yourself! No more such sentimental speeches as you made just now." Jefferson beamed. He felt at least two inches taller, and at that moment he would not have changed places with any one in the world. To hide the embarrassment his gratification caused him he pulled out his watch and exclaimed: "Why, it's a quarter past six. We shall have all we can do to get back to the hotel and dress for dinner." Shirley rose at once, although loath to leave. "I had no idea it was so late," she said. "How the time flies!" Then mockingly she added: "Come, Jefferson--be a good boy and find a cab." They passed out of the Gardens by the gate facing the Theatre de l'Odeon, where there was a long string of fiacres for hire. They got into one and in fifteen minutes they were back at the Grand Hotel. At the office they told Shirley that her aunt had already come in and gone to her room, so she hurried upstairs to dress for dinner while Jefferson proceeded to the Hotel de l'Athenee on the same mission. He. had still twenty-five minutes before dinner time, and he needed only ten minutes for a wash and to jump into his dress suit, so, instead of going directly to his hotel, he sat down at the Cafe de la Paix. He was thirsty, and calling for a vermouth frappe he told the garcon to bring him also the American papers. The crowd on the boulevard was denser than ever. The business offices and some of the shops were closing, and a vast army of employes, homeward bound, helped to swell the sea of humanity that pushed this way and that. But Jefferson had no eyes for the crowd. He was thinking of Shirley. What singular, mysterious power had this girl acquired over him? He, who had scoffed at the very idea of marriage only a few months before, now desired it ardently, anxiously! Yes, that was what his life lacked--such a woman to be his companion and helpmate! He loved her--there was no doubt of that. His every thought, waking and sleeping, was of her, all his plans for the future included her. He would win her if any man could. But did she care for him? Ah, that was the cruel, torturing uncertainty! She appeared cold and indifferent, but perhaps she was only trying him. Certainly she did not seem to dislike him. The waiter returned with the vermouth and the newspapers. All he could find were the London Times, which he pronounced T-e-e-m-s, and some issues of the New York Herald. The papers were nearly a month old, but he did not care for that. Jefferson idly turned over the pages of the Herald. His thoughts were still running on Shirley, and he was paying little attention to what he was reading. Suddenly, however, his eyes rested on a headline which made him sit up with a start. It read as follows: JUDGE ROSSMORE IMPEACHED JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT TO BE TRIED ON BRIBERY CHARGES The despatch, which was dated Washington two weeks back, went on to say that serious charges affecting the integrity of Judge Rossmore had been made the subject of Congressional inquiry, and that the result of the inquiry was so grave that a demand for impeachment would be at once sent to the Senate. It added that the charges grew out of the recent decision in the Great Northwestern Mining Company case, it being alleged that Judge Rossmore had accepted a large sum of money on condition of his handing down a decision favourable to the company. Jefferson was thunderstruck. He read the despatch over again to make sure there was no mistake. No, it was very plain--Judge Rossmore of Madison Avenue. But how preposterous, what a calumny! The one judge on the bench at whom one could point and say with absolute conviction: "There goes an honest man!" And this judge was to be tried on a charge of bribery! What could be the meaning of it? Something terrible must have happened since Shirley's departure from home, that was certain. It meant her immediate return to the States and, of course, his own. He would see what could be done. He would make his father use his great influence. But how could he tell Shirley? Impossible, he could not! She would not believe him if he did. She would probably hear from home in some other way. They might cable. In any case he would say nothing yet. He paid for his vermouth and hurried away to his hotel to dress. It was just striking seven when he re-entered the courtyard of the Grand Hotel. Shirley and Mrs. Blake were waiting for him. Jefferson suggested having dinner at the Cafe de Paris, but Shirley objected that as the weather was warm it would be more pleasant to dine in the open air, so they finally decided on the Pavilion d'Armonville where there was music and where they could have a little table to themselves in the garden. They drove up the stately Champs Elysees, past the monumental Arc de Triomphe, and from there down to the Bois. All were singularly quiet. Mrs. Blake was worrying about her new gown, Shirley was tired, and Jefferson could not banish from his mind the terrible news he had just read. He avoided looking at Shirley until the latter noticed it and thought she must have offended him in some way. She was more sorry than she would have him know, for, with all her apparent coldness, Jefferson was rapidly becoming very indispensable to her happiness. They dined sumptuously and delightfully with all the luxury of surroundings and all the delights of cooking that the French culinary art can perfect. A single glass of champagne had put Shirley in high spirits and she had tried hard to communicate some of her good humour to Jefferson who, despite all her efforts, remained quiet and preoccupied. Finally losing patience she asked him bluntly: "Jefferson, what's the matter with you to-night? You've been sulky as a bear all evening." Pleased to see she had not forgotten their compact of the afternoon in regard to his name, Jefferson relaxed somewhat and said apologetically: "Excuse me, I've been feeling a bit seedy lately. I think I need another sea voyage. That's the only time when I feel really first-class--when I'm on the water." The mention of the sea started Shirley to talk about her future plans. She wasn't going back to America until September. She had arranged to make a stay of three weeks in London and then she would be free. Some friends of hers from home, a man and his wife who owned a steam yacht, were arranging a trip to the Mediterranean, including a run over to Cairo. They had asked her and Mrs. Blake to go and she was sure they would ask Jefferson, too. Would he go? There was no way out of it. Jefferson tried to work up some enthusiasm for this yachting trip, which he knew very well could never come off, and it cut him to the heart to see this poor girl joyously making all these preparations and plans, little dreaming of the domestic calamity which at that very moment was hanging over her head. It was nearly ten o'clock when they had finished. They sat a little longer listening to the gipsy music, weird and barbaric. Very pointedly, Shirley remarked: "I for one preferred the music this afternoon." "Why?" inquired Jefferson, ignoring the petulant note in her voice. "Because you were more amiable!" she retorted rather crossly. This was their first misunderstanding, but Jefferson said nothing. He could not tell her the thoughts and fears that had been haunting him all night. Soon afterward they re-entered their cab and returned to the boulevards which were ablaze with light and gaiety. Jefferson suggested going somewhere else, but Mrs. Blake was tired and Shirley, now quite irritated at what she considered Jefferson's unaccountable unsociability, declined somewhat abruptly. But she could never remain angry long, and when they said good-night she whispered demurely: "Are you cross with me, Jeff?" He turned his head away and she saw that his face was singularly drawn and grave. "Cross--no. Good-night. God bless you!" he said, hoarsely gulping down a lump that rose in his throat. Then grasping her hand he hurried away. Completely mystified, Shirley and her companion turned to the office to get the key of their room. As the man handed it to Shirley he passed her also a cablegram which had just come. She changed colour. She did not like telegrams. She always had a dread of them, for with her sudden news was usually bad news. Could this, she thought, explain Jefferson's strange behaviour? Trembling, she tore open the envelope and read: Come home at once, Mother. CHAPTER V. Rolling, tumbling, splashing, foaming water as far as the eye could reach in every direction. A desolate waste, full of life, movement and colour, extending to the bleak horizon and like a vast ploughed field cut up into long and high liquid ridges, all scurrying in one direction in serried ranks and with incredible speed as if pursued by a fearful and unseen enemy. Serenely yet boisterously, gracefully yet resistlessly, the endless waves passed on--some small, others monstrous, with fleecy white combs rushing down their green sides like toy Niagaras and with a seething, boiling sound as when flame touches water. They went by in a stately, never ending procession, going nowhere, coming from nowhere, but full of dignity and importance, their breasts heaving with suppressed rage because there was nothing in their path that they might destroy. The dancing, leaping water reflected every shade and tint--now a rich green, then a deep blue and again a dirty gray as the sun hid for a moment behind a cloud, and as a gust of wind caught the top of the combers decapitating them at one mad rush, the spray was dashed high in the air, flashing out all the prismatic colours. Here and yonder, the white caps rose, disappeared and came again, and the waves grew and then diminished in size. Then others rose, towering, became larger, majestic, terrible; the milk-like comb rose proudly, soared a brief moment, then fell ignominiously, and the wave diminished passed on humiliated. Over head, a few scattered cirrus clouds flitted lazily across the blue dome of heaven, while a dozen Mother Carey chickens screamed hoarsely as they circled in the air. The strong and steady western breeze bore on its powerful pinions the sweet and eternal music of the wind and sea. Shirley stood at the rail under the bridge of the ocean greyhound that was carrying her back to America with all the speed of which her mighty engines were capable. All day and all night, half naked stokers, so grimed with oil and coal dust as to lose the slightest semblance to human beings, feverishly shovelled coal, throwing it rapidly and evenly over roaring furnaces kept at a fierce white heat. The vast boilers, shaken by the titanic forces generating in their cavern-like depths, sent streams of scalding, hissing steam through a thousand valves, cylinders and pistons, turning wheels and cranks as it distributed the tremendous power which was driving the steel monster through the seas at the prodigious speed of four hundred miles in the twenty-four hours. Like a pulsating heart in some living thing, the mammoth engines throbbed and panted, and the great vessel groaned and creaked as she rose and fell to the heavy swell, and again lurched forward in obedience to each fresh propulsion from her fast spinning screws. Out on deck, volumes of dense black smoke were pouring from four gigantic smoke stacks and spread out in the sky like some endless cinder path leading back over the course the ship had taken. They were four days out from port. Two days more and they would sight Sandy Hook, and Shirley would know the worst. She had caught the North German Lloyd boat at Cherbourg two days after receiving the cablegram from New York. Mrs. Blake had insisted on coming along in spite of her niece's protests. Shirley argued that she had crossed alone when coming; she could go back the same way. Besides, was not Mr. Ryder returning home on the same ship? He would be company and protection both. But Mrs. Blake was bent on making the voyage. She had not seen her sister for many years and, moreover, this sudden return to America had upset her own plans. She was a poor sailor, yet she loved the ocean and this was a good excuse for a long trip. Shirley was too exhausted with worry to offer further resistance and by great good luck the two women had been able to secure at the last moment a cabin to themselves amidships. Jefferson, less fortunate, was compelled, to his disgust, to share a stateroom with another passenger, a fat German brewer who was returning to Cincinnati, and who snored so loud at night that even the thumping of the engines was completely drowned by his eccentric nasal sounds. The alarming summons home and the terrible shock she had experienced the following morning when Jefferson showed her the newspaper article with its astounding and heart rending news about her father had almost prostrated Shirley. The blow was all the greater for being so entirely unlooked for. That the story was true she could not doubt. Her mother would not have cabled except under the gravest circumstances. What alarmed Shirley still more was that she had no direct news of her father. For a moment her heart stood still--suppose the shock of this shameful accusation had killed him? Her blood froze in her veins, she clenched her fists and dug her nails into her flesh as she thought of the dread possibility that she had looked upon him in life for the last time. She remembered his last kind words when he came to the steamer to see her off, and his kiss when he said good-bye and she had noticed a tear of which he appeared to be ashamed. The hot tears welled up in her own eyes and coursed unhindered down her cheeks. What could these preposterous and abominable charges mean? What was this lie they had invented to ruin her father? That he had enemies she well knew. What strong man had not? Indeed, his proverbial honesty had made him feared by all evil-doers and on one occasion they had gone so far as to threaten his life. This new attack was more deadly than all--to sap and destroy his character, to deliberately fabricate lies and calumnies which had no foundation whatever. Of course, the accusation was absurd, the Senate would refuse to convict him, the entire press would espouse the cause of so worthy a public servant. Certainly, everything would be done to clear his character. But what was being done? She could do nothing but wait and wait. The suspense and anxiety were awful. Suddenly she heard a familiar step behind her, and Jefferson joined her at the rail. The wind was due West and blowing half a gale, so where they were standing--one of the most exposed parts of the ship--it was difficult to keep one's feet, to say nothing of hearing anyone speak. There was a heavy sea running, and each approaching wave looked big enough to engulf the vessel, but as the mass of moving water reached the bow, the ship rose on it, light and graceful as a bird, shook off the flying spray as a cat shakes her fur after an unwelcome bath, and again drove forward as steady and with as little perceptible motion as a railway train. Shirley was a fairly good sailor and this kind of weather did not bother her in the least, but when it got very rough she could not bear the rolling and pitching and then all she was good for was to lie still in her steamer chair with her eyes closed until the water was calmer and the pitching ceased. "It's pretty windy here, Shirley," shouted Jefferson, steadying himself against a stanchion. "Don't you want to walk a little?" He had begun to call her by her first name quite naturally, as if it were a matter of course. Indeed their relations had come to be more like those of brother and sister than anything else. Shirley was too much troubled over the news from home to have a mind for other things, and in her distress she had turned to Jefferson for advice and help as she would have looked to an elder brother. He had felt this impulse to confide in him and consult his opinion and it had pleased him more than he dared betray. He had shown her all the sympathy of which his warm, generous nature was capable, yet secretly he did not regret that events had necessitated this sudden return home together on the same ship. He was sorry for Judge Rossmore, of course, and there was nothing he would not do on his return to secure a withdrawal of the charges. That his father would use his influence he had no doubt. But meantime he was selfish enough to be glad for the opportunity it gave him to be a whole week alone with Shirley. No matter how much one may be with people in city or country or even when stopping at the same hotel or house, there is no place in the world where two persons, especially when they are of the opposite sex, can become so intimate as on shipboard. The reason is obvious. The days are long and monotonous. There is nowhere to go, nothing to see but the ocean, nothing to do but read, talk or promenade. Seclusion in one's stuffy cabin is out of the question, the public sitting rooms are noisy and impossible, only a steamer chair on deck is comfortable and once there snugly wrapped up in a rug it is surprising how quickly another chair makes its appearance alongside and how welcome one is apt to make the intruder. Thus events combined with the weather conspired to bring Shirley and Jefferson more closely together. The sea had been rough ever since they sailed, keeping Mrs. Blake confined to her stateroom almost continuously. They were, therefore, constantly in one another's company, and slowly, unconsciously, there was taking root in their hearts the germ of the only real and lasting love--the love born of something higher than mere physical attraction, the nobler, more enduring affection that is born of mutual sympathy, association and companionship. "Isn't it beautiful?" exclaimed Shirley ecstatically. "Look at those great waves out there! See how majestically they soar and how gracefully they fall!" "Glorious!" assented Jefferson sharing her enthusiasm. "There's nothing to compare with it. It's Nature's grandest spectacle. The ocean is the only place on earth that man has not defiled and spoiled. Those waves are the same now as they were on the day of creation." "Not the day of creation. You mean during the aeons of time creation was evolving," corrected Shirley. "I meant that of course," assented Jefferson. "When one says 'day' that is only a form of speech." "Why not be accurate?" persisted Shirley. "It was the use of that little word 'day' which has given the theologians so many sleepless nights." There was a roguish twinkle in her eye. She well knew that he thought as she did on metaphysical questions, but she could not resist teasing him. Like Jefferson, she was not a member of any church, although her nature was deeply religious. Hers was the religion the soul inculcates, not that which is learned by rote in the temple. She was a Christian because she thought Christ the greatest figure in world history, and also because her own conduct of life was modelled upon Christian principles and virtues. She was religious for religion's sake and not for public ostentation. The mystery of life awed her and while her intelligence could not accept all the doctrines of dogmatic religion she did not go so far as Jefferson, who was a frank agnostic. She would not admit that we do not know. The longings and aspirations of her own soul convinced her of the existence of a Supreme Being, First Cause, Divine Intelligence--call it what you will--which had brought out of chaos the wonderful order of the universe. The human mind was, indeed, helpless to conceive such a First Cause in any form and lay prostrate before the Unknown, yet she herself was an enthusiastic delver into scientific hypothesis and the teachings of Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel had satisfied her intellect if they had failed to content her soul. The theory of evolution as applied to life on her own little planet appealed strongly to her because it accounted plausibly for the presence of man on earth. The process through which we had passed could be understood by every intelligence. The blazing satellite, violently detached from the parent sun starting on its circumscribed orbit--that was the first stage, the gradual subsidence of the flames and the cooling of the crust--the second stage: the gases mingling and forming water which covered the earth--the third stage; the retreating of the waters and the appearance of the land--the fourth stage; the appearance of vegetation and animal life--the fifth stage; then, after a long interval and through constant evolution and change the appearance of man, which was the sixth stage. What stages still to come, who knows? This simple account given by science was, after all, practically identical with the biblical legend! It was when Shirley was face to face with Nature in her wildest and most primitive aspects that this deep rooted religious feeling moved her most strongly. At these times she felt herself another being, exalted, sublimated, lifted from this little world with its petty affairs and vanities up to dizzy heights. She had felt the same sensation when for the first time she had viewed the glories of the snow clad Matterhorn, she had felt it when on a summer's night at sea she had sat on deck and watched with fascinated awe the resplendent radiance of the countless stars, she felt it now as she looked at the foaming, tumbling waves. "It is so beautiful," she murmured as she turned to walk. The ship was rolling a little and she took Jefferson's arm to steady herself. Shirley was an athletic girl and had all the ease and grace of carriage that comes of much tennis and golf playing. Barely twenty-four years old, she was still in the first flush of youth and health, and there was nothing she loved so much as exercise and fresh air. After a few turns on deck, there was a ruddy glow in her cheeks that was good to see and many an admiring glance was cast at the young couple as they strode briskly up and down past the double rows of elongated steamer chairs. They had the deck pretty much to themselves. It was only four o'clock, too early for the appetite-stimulating walk before dinner, and their fellow passengers were basking in the sunshine, stretched out on their chairs in two even rows like so many mummies on exhibition. Some were reading, some were dozing. Two or three were under the weather, completely prostrated, their bilious complexion of a deathly greenish hue. At each new roll of the ship, they closed their eyes as if resigned to the worst that might happen and their immediate neighbours furtively eyed each of their movements as if apprehensive of what any moment might bring forth. A few couples were flirting to their heart's content under the friendly cover of the life-boats which, as on most of the transatlantic liners, were more useful in saving reputations than in saving life. The deck steward was passing round tea and biscuits, much to the disgust of the ill ones, but to the keen satisfaction of the stronger stomached passengers who on shipboard never seem to be able to get enough to eat and drink. On the bridge, the second officer, a tall, handsome man with the points of his moustache trained upwards a la Kaiser Wilhelm, was striding back and forth, every now and then sweeping the horizon with his glass and relieving the monotony of his duties by ogling the better looking women passengers. "Hello, Shirley!" called out a voice from a heap of rugs as Shirley and Jefferson passed the rows of chairs. They stopped short and discovered Mrs. Blake ensconced in a cozy corner, sheltered from the wind. "Why, aunt Milly," exclaimed Shirley surprised. "I thought you were downstairs. I didn't think you could stand this sea." "It is a little rougher than I care to have it," responded Mrs. Blake with a wry grimace and putting her hand to her breast as if to appease disturbing qualms. "It was so stuffy in the cabin I could not bear it. It's more pleasant here but it's getting a little cool and I think I'll go below. Where have you children been all afternoon?" Jefferson volunteered to explain. "The children have been rhapsodizing over the beauties of the ocean," he laughed. With a sly glance at Shirley, he added, "Your niece has been coaching me in metaphysics." Shirley shook her finger at him. "Now Jefferson, if you make fun of me I'll never talk seriously with you again." "Wie geht es, meine damen?" Shirley turned on hearing the guttural salutation. It was Captain Hegermann, the commander of the ship, a big florid Saxon with great bushy golden whiskers and a basso voice like Edouard de Reszke. He was imposing in his smart uniform and gold braid and his manner had the self-reliant, authoritative air usual in men who have great responsibilities and are accustomed to command. He was taking his afternoon stroll and had stopped to chat with his lady passengers. He had already passed Mrs. Blake a dozen times and not noticed her, but now her pretty niece was with her, which altered the situation. He talked to the aunt and looked at Shirley, much to the annoyance of Jefferson, who muttered things under his breath. "When shall we be in, captain?" asked Mrs. Blake anxiously, forgetting that this was one of the questions which according to ship etiquette must never be asked of the officers. But as long as he could ignore Mrs. Blake and gaze at Shirley Capt. Hegermann did not mind. He answered amiably: "At the rate we are going, we ought to sight Fire Island sometime to-morrow evening. If we do, that will get us to our dock about 11 o'clock Friday morning, I fancy." Then addressing Shirley direct he said: "And you, fraulein, I hope you won't be glad the voyage is over?" Shirley sighed and a worried, anxious look came into her face. "Yes, Captain, I shall be very glad. It is not pleasure that is bringing me back to America so soon." The captain elevated his eyebrows. He was sorry the young lady had anxieties to keep her so serious, and he hoped she would find everything all right on her arrival. Then, politely saluting, he passed on, only to halt again a few paces on where his bewhiskered gallantry met with more encouragement. Mrs. Blake rose from her chair. The air was decidedly cooler, she would go downstairs and prepare for dinner. Shirley said she would remain on deck a little longer. She was tired of walking, so when her aunt left them she took her chair and told Jefferson to get another. He wanted nothing better, but before seating himself he took the rugs and wrapped Shirley up with all the solicitude of a mother caring for her first born. Arranging the pillow under her head, he asked: "Is that comfortable?" She nodded, smiling at him. "You're a good boy, Jeff. But you'll spoil me." "Nonsense," he stammered as he took another chair and put himself by her side. "As if any fellow wouldn't give his boots to do a little job like that for you!" She seemed to take no notice of the covert compliment. In fact, she already took it as a matter of course that Jefferson was very fond of her. Did she love him? She hardly knew. Certainly she thought more of him than of any other man she knew and she readily believed that she could be with him for the rest of her life and like him better every day. Then, too, they had become more intimate during the last few days. This trouble, this unknown peril had drawn them together. Yes, she would be sorry if she were to see Jefferson paying attention to another woman. Was this love? Perhaps. These thoughts were running through her mind as they sat there side by side isolated from the main herd of passengers, each silent, watching through the open rail the foaming water as it rushed past. Jefferson had been casting furtive glances at his companion and as he noted her serious, pensive face he thought how pretty she was. He wondered what she was thinking of and suddenly inspired no doubt by the mysterious power that enables some people to read the thoughts of others, he said abruptly: "Shirley, I can read your thoughts. You were thinking of me." She was startled for a moment but immediately recovered her self possession. It never occurred to her to deny it. She pondered for a moment and then replied: "You are right, Jeff, I was thinking of you. How did you guess?" He leaned over her chair and took her hand. She made no resistance. Her delicate, slender hand lay passively in his big brown one and met his grasp frankly, cordially. He whispered: "What were you thinking of me--good or bad?" "Good, of course. How could I think anything bad of you?" She turned her eyes on him in wonderment. Then she went on: "I was wondering how a girl could distinguish between the feeling she has for a man she merely likes, and the feeling she has for a man she loves." Jefferson bent eagerly forward so as to lose no word that might fall from those coveted lips. "In what category would I be placed?" he asked. "I don't quite know," she answered, laughingly. Then seriously, she added: "Jeff, why should we act like children? Your actions, more than your words, have told me that you love me. I have known it all along. If I have appeared cold and indifferent it is because"--she hesitated. "Because?" echoed Jefferson anxiously, as if his whole future depended on that reason. "Because I was not sure of myself. Would it be womanly or honourable on my part to encourage you, unless I felt I reciprocated your feelings? You are young, one day you will be very rich, the whole world lies before you. There are plenty of women who would willingly give you their love." "No--no!" he burst out in vigorous protest, "it is you I want, Shirley, you alone." Grasping her hand more closely, he went on, passion vibrating in every note of his voice. "I love you, Shirley. I've loved you from the very first evening I met you. I want you to be my wife." Shirley looked straight up into the blue eyes so eagerly bent down on hers, so entreating in their expression, and in a gentle voice full of emotion she answered: "Jefferson, you have done me the greatest honour a man can do a woman. Don't ask me to answer you now. I like you very much--I more than like you. Whether it is love I feel for you--that I have not yet determined. Give me time. My present trouble and then my literary work---" "I know," agreed Jefferson, "that this is hardly the time to speak of such matters. Your father has first call on your attention. But as to your literary work. I do not understand." "Simply this. I am ambitious. I have had a little success--just enough to crave for more. I realize that marriage would put an extinguisher on all aspirations in that direction." "Is marriage so very commonplace?" grumbled Jefferson. "Not commonplace, but there is no room in marriage for a woman having personal ambitions of her own. Once married her duty is to her husband and her children--not to herself." "That is right," he replied; "but which is likely to give you greater joy--a literary success or a happy wifehood? When you have spent your best years and given the public your best work they will throw you over for some new favorite. You'll find yourself an old woman with nothing more substantial to show as your life work than that questionable asset, a literary reputation. How many literary reputations to-day conceal an aching heart and find it difficult to make both ends meet? How different with the woman who married young and obeys Nature's behest by contributing her share to the process of evolution. Her life is spent basking in the affection of her husband and the chubby smiles of her dimpled babes, and when in the course of time she finds herself in the twilight of her life, she has at her feet a new generation of her own flesh and blood. Isn't that better than a literary reputation?" He spoke so earnestly that Shirley looked at him in surprise. She knew he was serious but she had not suspected that he thought so deeply on these matters. Her heart told her that he was uttering the true philosophy of the ages. She said: "Why, Jefferson, you talk like a book. Perhaps you are right, I have no wish to be a blue stocking and deserted in my old age, far from it. But give me time to think. Let us first ascertain the extent of this disaster which has overtaken my father. Then if you still care for me and if I have not changed my mind," here she glanced slyly at him, "we will resume our discussion." Again she held out her hand which he had released. "Is it a bargain?" she asked. "It's a bargain," he murmured, raising the white hand to his lips. A fierce longing rose within him to take her in his arms and kiss passionately the mouth that lay temptingly near his own, but his courage failed him. After all, he reasoned, he had not yet the right. A few minutes later they left the deck and went downstairs to dress for dinner. That same evening they stood again at the rail watching the mysterious phosphorescence as it sparkled in the moonlight. Her thoughts travelling faster than the ship, Shirley suddenly asked: "Do you really think Mr. Ryder will use his influence to help my father?" Jefferson set his jaw fast and the familiar Ryder gleam came into his eyes as he responded: "Why not? My father is all powerful. He has made and unmade judges and legislators and even presidents. Why should he not be able to put a stop to these preposterous proceedings? I will go to him directly we land and we'll see what can be done." So the time on shipboard had passed, Shirley alternately buoyed up with hope and again depressed by the gloomiest forebodings. The following night they passed Fire Island and the next day the huge steamer dropped anchor at Quarantine. CHAPTER VI. A month had passed since the memorable meeting of the directors of the Southern and Transcontinental Railroad in New York and during that time neither John Burkett Ryder nor Judge Rossmore had been idle. The former had immediately set in motion the machinery he controlled in the Legislature at Washington, while the judge neglected no step to vindicate himself before the public. Ryder, for reasons of his own--probably because he wished to make the blow the more crushing when it did fall--had insisted on the proceedings at the board meeting being kept a profound secret and some time elapsed before the newspapers got wind of the coming Congressional inquiry. No one had believed the stories about Judge Rossmore but now that a quasi-official seal had been set on the current gossip, there was a howl of virtuous indignation from the journalistic muck rakers. What was the country coming to? they cried in double leaded type. After the embezzling by life insurance officers, the rascality of the railroads, the looting of city treasuries, the greed of the Trusts, the grafting of the legislators, had arisen a new and more serious scandal--the corruption of the Judiciary. The last bulwark of the nation had fallen, the country lay helpless at the mercy of legalized sandbaggers. Even the judges were no longer to be trusted, the most respected one among them all had been unable to resist the tempter. The Supreme Court, the living voice of the Constitution, was honeycombed with graft. Public life was rotten to the core! Neither the newspapers nor the public stopped to ascertain the truth or the falsity of the charges against Judge Rossmore. It was sufficient that the bribery story furnished the daily sensation which newspaper editors and newspaper readers must have. The world is ever more prompt to believe ill rather than good of a man, and no one, except in Rossmore's immediate circle of friends, entertained the slightest doubt of his guilt. It was common knowledge that the "big interests" were behind the proceedings, and that Judge Rossmore was a scapegoat, sacrificed by the System because he had been blocking their game. If Rossmore had really accepted the bribe, and few now believed him spotless, he deserved all that was coming to him. Senator Roberts was very active in Washington preparing the case against Judge Rossmore. The latter being a democrat and "the interests" controlling a Republican majority in the House, it was a foregone conclusion that the inquiry would be against him, and that a demand would at once be made upon the Senate for his impeachment. Almost prostrated by the misfortune which had so suddenly and unexpectedly come upon him, Judge Rossmore was like a man demented. His reason seemed to be tottering, he spoke and acted like a man in a dream. Naturally he was entirely incapacitated for work and he had applied to Washington to be temporarily relieved from his judicial duties. He was instantly granted a leave of absence and went at once to his home in Madison Avenue, where he shut himself up in his library, sitting for hours at his desk wrestling with documents and legal tomes in a pathetic endeavour to find some way out, trying to elude this net in which unseen hands had entangled him. What an end to his career! To have struggled and achieved for half a century, to have built up a reputation year by year, as a man builds a house brick by brick, only to see the whole crumble to his feet like dust! To have gained the respect of the country, to have made a name as the most incorruptible of public servants and now to be branded as a common bribe taker! Could he be dreaming? It was too incredible! What would his daughter say--his Shirley? Ah, the thought of the expression of incredulity and wonder on her face when she heard the news cut him to the heart like a knife thrust. Yet, he mused, her very unwillingness to believe it should really be his consolation. Ah, his wife and his child--they knew he had been innocent of wrong doing. The very idea was ridiculous. At most he had been careless. Yes, he was certainly to blame. He ought to have seen the trap so carefully prepared and into which he had walked as if blindfolded. That extra $50,000 worth of stock, on which he had never received a cent interest, had been the decoy in a carefully thought out plot. They, the plotters, well knew how ignorant he was of financial matters and he had been an easy victim. Who would believe his story that the stock had been sent to him with a plausibly-worded letter to the effect that it represented a bonus on his own investment? Now he came to think of it, calmly and reasonably, he would not believe it himself. As usual, he had mislaid or destroyed the secretary's letter and there was only his word against the company's books to substantiate what would appear a most improbable if not impossible occurrence. It was his conviction of his own good faith that made his present dilemma all the more cruel. Had he really been a grafter, had he really taken the stock as a bribe he would not care so much, for then he would have foreseen and discounted the chances of exposure. Yes, there was no doubt possible. He was the victim of a conspiracy, there was an organized plot to ruin him, to get him out of the way. The "interests" feared him, resented his judicial decisions and they had halted at nothing to accomplish their purpose. How could he fight them back, what could he do to protect himself? He had no proofs of a conspiracy, his enemies worked in the dark, there was no way in which he could reach them or know who they were. He thought of John Burkett Ryder. Ah, he remembered now. Ryder was the man who had recommended the investment in Alaskan stock. Of course, why did he not think of it before? He recollected that at the time he had been puzzled at receiving so much stock and he had mentioned it to Ryder, adding that the secretary had told him it was customary. Oh, why had he not kept the secretary's letter? But Ryder would certainly remember it. He probably still had his two letters in which he spoke of making the investment. If those letters could be produced at the Congressional inquiry they would clear him at once. So losing no time, and filled with renewed hope he wrote to the Colossus a strong, manly letter which would have melted an iceberg, urging Mr. Ryder to come forward now at this critical time and clear him of this abominable charge, or in any case to kindly return the two letters he must have in his possession, as they would go far to help him at the trial. Three days passed and no reply from Ryder. On the fourth came a polite but frigid note from Mr. Ryder's private secretary. Mr. Ryder had received Judge Rossmore's letter and in reply begged to state that he had a vague recollection of some conversation with the judge in regard to investments, but he did not think he had advised the purchase of any particular stock, as that was something he never did on principle, even with his most intimate friends. He had no wish to be held accountable in case of loss, etc. As to the letter which Judge Rossmore mentioned as having written to Mr. Ryder in regard to having received more stock than he had bought, of that Mr. Ryder had no recollection whatsoever. Judge Rossmore was probably mistaken as to the identity of his correspondent. He regretted he could not be of more service to Judge Rossmore, and remained his very obedient servant. It was very evident that no help was to be looked for in that quarter. There was even decided hostility in Ryder's reply. Could it be true that the financier was really behind these attacks upon his character, was it possible that one man merely to make more money would deliberately ruin his fellow man whose hand he had grasped in friendship? He had been unwilling to believe it when his friend ex-judge Stott had pointed to Ryder as the author of all his misfortunes, but this unsympathetic letter with its falsehoods, its lies plainly written all over its face, was proof enough. Yes, there was now no doubt possible. John Burkett Ryder was his enemy and what an enemy! Many a man had committed suicide when he had incurred the enmity of the Colossus. Judge Rossmore, completely discouraged, bowed his head to the inevitable. His wife, a nervous, sickly woman, was helpless to comfort or aid him. She had taken their misfortune as a visitation of an inscrutable Deity. She knew, of course, that her husband was wholly innocent of the accusations brought against him and if his character could be cleared and himself rehabilitated before the world, she would be the first to rejoice. But if it pleased the Almighty in His wisdom to sorely try her husband and herself and inflict this punishment upon them it was not for the finite mind to criticise the ways of Providence. There was probably some good reason for the apparent cruelty and injustice of it which their earthly understanding failed to grasp. Mrs. Rossmore found much comfort in this philosophy, which gave a satisfactory ending to both ends of the problem, and she was upheld in her view by the rector of the church which she had attended regularly each Sunday for the past five and twenty years. Christian resignation in the hour of trial, submission to the will of Heaven were, declared her spiritual adviser, the fundamental principles of religion. He could only hope that Mrs. Rossmore would succeed in imbuing her husband with her Christian spirit. But when the judge's wife returned home and saw the keen mental distress of the man who had been her companion for twenty-five long years, the comforter in her sorrows, the joy and pride of her young wifehood, she forgot all about her smug churchly consoler, and her heart went out to her husband in a spontaneous burst of genuine human sympathy. Yes, they must do something at once. Where men had failed perhaps a woman could do something. She wanted to cable at once for Shirley, who was everything in their household--organizer, manager, adviser--but the judge would not hear of it. No, his daughter was enjoying her holiday in blissful ignorance of what had occurred. He would not spoil it for her. They would see; perhaps things would improve. But he sent for his old friend ex-Judge Stott. They were life-long friends, having become acquainted nearly thirty years ago at the law school, at the time when both were young men about to enter on a public career. Stott, who was Rossmore's junior, had begun as a lawyer in New York and soon acquired a reputation in criminal practice. He afterwards became assistant district attorney and later, when a vacancy occurred in the city magistrature, he was successful in securing the appointment. On the bench he again met his old friend Rossmore and the two men once more became closely intimate. The regular court hours, however, soon palled on a man of Judge Stott's nervous temperament and it was not long before he retired to take up once more his criminal practice. He was still a young man, not yet fifty, and full of vigor and fight. He had a blunt manner but his heart was in the right place, and he had a record as clean as his close shaven face. He was a hard worker, a brilliant speaker and one of the cleverest cross-examiners at the bar. This was the man to whom Judge Rossmore naturally turned for legal assistance. Stott was out West when he first heard of the proceedings against his old friend, and this indignity put upon the only really honest man in public life whom he knew, so incensed him that he was already hurrying back to his aid when the summons reached him. Meantime, a fresh and more serious calamity had overwhelmed Judge Rossmore. Everything seemed to combine to break the spirit of this man who had dared defy the power of organized capital. Hardly had the news of the Congressional inquiry been made public, than the financial world was startled by an extraordinary slump in Wall Street. There was nothing in the news of the day to justify a decline, but prices fell and fell. The bears had it all their own way, the big interests hammered stocks all along the line, "coppers" especially being the object of attack. The market closed feverishly and the next day the same tactics were pursued. From the opening, on selling orders coming from no one knew where, prices fell to nothing, a stampede followed and before long it became a panic. Pandemonium reigned on the floor of the Stock Exchange. White faced, dishevelled brokers shouted and struggled like men possessed to execute the orders of their clients. Big financial houses, which stood to lose millions on a falling market, rallied and by rush orders to buy, attempted to stem the tide, but all to no purpose. One firm after another went by the board unable to weather the tempest, until just before closing time, the stock ticker announced the failure of the Great Northwestern Mining Co. The drive in the market had been principally directed against its securities, and after vainly endeavoring to check the bear raid, it had been compelled to declare itself bankrupt. It was heavily involved, assets nil, stock almost worthless. It was probable that the creditors would not see ten cents on the dollar. Thousands were ruined and Judge Rossmore among them. All the savings of a lifetime--nearly $55,000 were gone. He was practically penniless, at a time when he needed money most. He still owned his house in Madison Avenue, but that would have to go to settle with his creditors. By the time everything was paid there would only remain enough for a modest competence. As to his salary, of course he could not touch that so long as this accusation was hanging over his head. And if he were impeached it would stop altogether. The salary, therefore, was not to be counted on. They must manage as best they could and live more cheaply, taking a small house somewhere in the outskirts of the city where he could prepare his case quietly without attracting attention. Stott thought this was the best thing they could do and he volunteered to relieve his friend by taking on his own hands all the arrangements of the sale of the house and furniture, which offer the judge accepted only too gladly. Meantime, Mrs. Rossmore went to Long Island to see what could be had, and she found at the little village of Massapequa just what they were looking for--a commodious, neatly-furnished two-story cottage at a modest rental. Of course, it was nothing like what they had been accustomed to, but it was clean and comfortable, and as Mrs. Rossmore said, rather tactlessly, beggars cannot be choosers. Perhaps it would not be for long. Instant possession was to be had, so deposit was paid on the spot and a few days later the Rossmores left their mansion on Madison Avenue and took up their residence in Massapequa, where their advent created quite a fluster in local social circles. Massapequa is one of the thousand and one flourishing communities scattered over Long Island, all of which are apparently modelled after the same pattern. Each is an exact duplicate of its neighbour in everything except the name--the same untidy railroad station, the same sleepy stores, the same attractive little frame residences, built for the most part on the "Why pay Rent? Own your own Home" plan. A healthy boom in real estate imparts plenty of life to them all and Massapequa is particularly famed as being the place where the cat jumped to when Manhattan had to seek an outlet for its congested population and ever-increasing army of home seekers. Formerly large tracts of flat farm lands, only sparsely shaded by trees, Massapequa, in common with other villages of its kind, was utterly destitute of any natural attractions. There was the one principal street leading to the station, with a few scattered stores on either side, a church and a bank. Happily, too, for those who were unable to survive the monotony of the place, it boasted of a pretty cemetery. There were also a number of attractive cottages with spacious porches hung with honeysuckle and of these the Rossmores occupied one of the less pretentious kind. But although Massapequa, theoretically speaking, was situated only a stone's throw from the metropolis, it might have been situated in the Great Sahara so far as its inhabitants took any active interest in the doings of gay Gotham. Local happenings naturally had first claim upon Massapequa's attention--the prowess of the local baseball team, Mrs. Robinson's tea party and the highly exciting sessions of the local Pinochle Club furnishing food for unlimited gossip and scandal. The newspapers reached the village, of course, but only the local news items aroused any real interest, while the women folk usually restricted their readings to those pages devoted to Daily Hints for the Home, Mrs. Sayre's learned articles on Health and Beauty and Fay Stanton's Daily Fashions. It was not surprising, therefore, that the fame of Judge Rossmore and the scandal in which he was at present involved had not penetrated as far as Massapequa and that the natives were considerably mystified as to who the new arrivals in their midst might be. Stott had been given a room in the cottage so that he might be near at hand to work with the judge in the preparation of the defence, and he came out from the city every evening. It was now June. The Senate would not take action until it convened in December, but there was a lot of work to be done and no time to be lost. The evening following the day of their arrival they were sitting on the porch enjoying the cool evening air after dinner. The judge was smoking. He was not a slave to the weed, but he enjoyed a quiet pipe after meals, claiming that it quieted his nerves and enabled him to think more clearly. Besides, it was necessary to keep at bay the ubiquitous Long Island mosquito. Mrs. Rossmore had remained for a moment in the dining-room to admonish Eudoxia, their new and only maid-of-all-work, not to wreck too much of the crockery when she removed the dinner dishes. Suddenly Stott, who was perusing an evening paper, asked: "By the way, where's your daughter? Does she know of this radical change in your affairs?" Judge Rossmore started. By what mysterious agency had this man penetrated his own most intimate thoughts? He was himself thinking of Shirley that very moment, and by some inexplicable means--telepathy modern psychologists called it--the thought current had crossed to Stott, whose mind, being in full sympathy, was exactly attuned to receive it. Removing the pipe from his mouth the judge replied: "Shirley's in Paris. Poor girl, I hadn't the heart to tell her. She has no idea of what's happened. I didn't want to spoil her holiday." He was silent for a moment. Then, after a few more puffs he added confidentially in a low tone, as if he did not care for his wife to hear: "The truth is, Stott, I couldn't bear to have her return now. I couldn't look my own daughter in the face." A sound as of a great sob which he had been unable to control cut short his speech. His eyes filled with tears and he began to smoke furiously as if ashamed of this display of emotion. Stott, blowing his nose with suspicious vigor, replied soothingly: "You mustn't talk like that. Everything will come out all right, of course. But I think you are wrong not to have told your daughter. Her place is here at your side. She ought to be told even if only in justice to her. If you don't tell her someone else will, or, what's worse, she'll hear of it through the newspapers." "Ah, I never thought of that!" exclaimed the judge, visibly perturbed at the suggestion about the newspapers. "Don't you agree with me?" demanded Stott, appealing to Mrs. Rossmore, who emerged from the house at that instant. "Don't you think your daughter should be informed of what has happened?" "Most assuredly I do," answered Mrs. Rossmore determinedly. "The judge wouldn't hear of it, but I took the law into my own hands. I've cabled for her." "You cabled for Shirley?" cried the judge incredulously. He was so unaccustomed to seeing his ailing, vacillating wife do anything on her own initiative and responsibility that it seemed impossible. "You cabled for Shirley?" he repeated. "Yes," replied Mrs. Rossmore triumphantly and secretly pleased that for once in her life she had asserted herself. "I cabled yesterday. I simply couldn't bear it alone any longer." "What did you say?" inquired the judge apprehensively. "I just told her to come home at once. To-morrow we ought to get an answer." Stott meantime had been figuring on the time of Shirley's probable arrival. If the cablegram had been received in Paris the previous evening it would be too late to catch the French boat. The North German Lloyd steamer was the next to leave and it touched at Cherbourg. She would undoubtedly come on that. In a week at most she would be here. Then it became a question as to who should go to meet her at the dock. The judge could not go, that was certain. It would be too much of an ordeal. Mrs. Rossmore did not know the lower part of the city well, and had no experience in meeting ocean steamships. There was only one way out--would Stott go? Of course he would and he would bring Shirley back with him to Massapequa. So during the next few days while Stott and the judge toiled preparing their case, which often necessitated brief trips to the city, Mrs. Rossmore, seconded with sulky indifference by Eudoxia, was kept busy getting a room ready for her daughter's arrival. Eudoxia, who came originally from County Cork, was an Irish lady with a thick brogue and a husky temper. She was amiable enough so long as things went to her satisfaction, but when they did not suit her she was a termagant. She was neither beautiful nor graceful, she was not young nor was she very clean. Her usual condition was dishevelled, her face was all askew, and when she dressed up she looked like a valentine. Her greatest weakness was a propensity for smashing dishes, and when reprimanded she would threaten to take her traps and skidoo. This news of the arrival of a daughter failed to fill her with enthusiasm. Firstly, it meant more work; secondly she had not bargained for it. When she took the place it was on the understanding that the family consisted only of an elderly gentleman and his wife, that there was practically no work, good wages, plenty to eat, with the privilege of an evening out when she pleased. Instead of this millennium she soon found Stott installed as a permanent guest and now a daughter was to be foisted on her. No wonder hard working girls were getting sick and tired of housework! As already hinted there was no unhealthy curiosity among Massapequans regarding their new neighbors from the city but some of the more prominent people of the place considered it their duty to seek at least a bowing acquaintance with the Rossmores by paying them a formal visit. So the day following the conversation on the porch when the judge and Stott had gone to the city on one of their periodical excursions, Mrs. Rossmore was startled to see a gentleman of clerical appearance accompanied by a tall, angular woman enter their gate and ring the bell. The Rev. Percival Pontifex Beetle and his sister Miss Jane Beetle prided themselves on being leaders in the best social circle in Massapequa. The incumbent of the local Presbyterian church, the Rev. Deetle, was a thin, sallow man of about thirty-five. He had a diminutive face with a rather long and very pointed nose which gave a comical effect to his physiognomy. Theology was written all over his person and he wore the conventional clerical hat which, owing to his absurdly small face, had the unfortunate appearance of being several sizes too large for him. Miss Deetle was a gaunt and angular spinster who had an unhappy trick of talking with a jerk. She looked as if she were constantly under self-restraint and was liable at any moment to explode into a fit of rage and only repressed herself with considerable effort. As they came up the stoop, Eudoxia, already instructed by Mrs. Rossmore, was ready for them. With her instinctive respect for the priestly garb she was rather taken back on seeing a clergyman, but she brazened it out: "Mr. Rossmore's not home." Then shaking her head, she added: "They don't see no visitors." Unabashed, the Rev. Deetle drew a card from a case and handing it to the girl said pompously: "Then we will see Mrs. Rossmore. I saw her at the window as we came along. Here, my girl, take her this card. Tell her that the Reverend Pontifex Deetle and Miss Deetle have called to present their compliments." Brushing past Eudoxia, who vainly tried to close the door, the Rev. Deetle coolly entered the house, followed by his sister, and took a seat in the parlour. "She'll blame me for this," wailed the girl, who had not budged and who stood there fingering the Rev. Deetle's card. "Blame you? For what?" demanded the clerical visitor in surprise. "She told me to say she was out--but I can't lie to a minister of the Gospel--leastways not to his face. I'll give her your card, sir." The reverend caller waited until Eudoxia had disappeared, then he rose and looked around curiously at the books and pictures. "Hum--not a Bible or a prayer book or a hymn book, not a picture or anything that would indicate the slightest reverence for holy things." He picked up a few papers that were lying on the table and after glancing at them threw them down in disgust. "Law reports--Wall Street reports--the god of this world. Evidently very ordinary people, Jane." He looked at his sister, but she sat stiffly and primly in her chair and made no reply. He repeated: "Didn't you hear me? I said they are ordinary people." "I've no doubt," retorted Miss Deetle, "and as such they will not thank us for prying into their affairs." "Prying, did you say?" said the parson, resenting this implied criticism of his actions. "Just plain prying," persisted his sister angrily. "I don't see what else it is." The Rev. Pontifex straightened up and threw out his chest as he replied: "It is protecting my flock. As Leader of the Unified All Souls Baptismal Presbytery, it is my duty to visit the widows and orphans of this community." "These people are neither widows or orphans," objected Miss Deetle. "They are strangers," insisted the Rev. Pontifex, "and it is my duty to minister to them--if they need it. Furthermore it is my duty to my congregation to find out who is in their midst. No less than three of the Lady Trustees of my church have asked me who and what these people are and whence they came." "The Lady Trustees are a pack of old busybodies," growled his sister. Her brother raised his finger warningly. "Jane, do you know you are uttering a blasphemy? These Rossmore people have been here two weeks They have visited no one, no one visits them. They have avoided a temple of worship, they have acted most mysteriously. Who are they? What are they hiding? Is it fair to my church, is it fair to my flock? It is not a bereavement, for they don't wear mourning. I'm afraid it may be some hidden scandal--" Further speculations on his part were interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Rossmore, who thought rightly that the quickest way to get rid of her unwelcome visitors was to hurry downstairs as quickly as possible. "Miss Deetle--Mr. Deetle. I am much honoured," was her not too effusive greeting. The Reverend Pontifex, anxious to make a favourable impression, was all smiles and bows. The idea of a possible scandal had for the moment ceased to worry him. "The honour is ours," he stammered. "I--er--we--er--my sister Jane and I called to--" "Won't you sit down?" said Mrs. Rossmore, waving him to a chair. He danced around her in a manner that made her nervous. "Thank you so much," he said with a smile that was meant to be amiable. He took a seat at the further end of the room and an awkward pause followed. Finally his sister prompted him: "You wanted to see Mrs. Rossmore about the festival," she said. "Oh, of course, I had quite forgotten. How stupid of me. The fact is, Mrs. Rossmore," he went on, "we are thinking of giving a festival next week--a festival with strawberries--and our trustees thought, in fact it occurred to me also that if you and Mr. Rossmore would grace the occasion with your presence it would give us an opportunity--so to speak--get better acquainted, and er--" Another awkward pause followed during which he sought inspiration by gazing fixedly in the fireplace. Then turning on Mrs. Rossmore so suddenly that the poor woman nearly jumped out of her chair he asked: "Do you like strawberries?" "It's very kind of you," interrupted Mrs. Rossmore, glad of the opportunity to get a word in edgeways. "Indeed, I appreciate your kindness most keenly but my husband and I go nowhere, nowhere at all. You see we have met with reverses and--" "Reverses," echoed the clerical visitor, with difficulty keeping his seat. This was the very thing he had come to find out and here it was actually thrown at him. He congratulated himself on his cleverness in having inspired so much confidence and thought with glee of his triumph when he returned with the full story to the Lady Trustees. Simulating, therefore, the deepest sympathy he tried to draw his hostess out: "Dear me, how sad! You met with reverses." Turning to his sister, who was sitting in her corner like a petrified mummy, he added: "Jane, do you hear? How inexpressibly sad! They have met with reverses!" He paused, hoping that Mrs. Rossmore would go on to explain just what their reverses had been, but she was silent. As a gentle hint he said softly: "Did I interrupt you, Madam?" "Not at all, I did not speak," she answered. Thus baffled, he turned the whites of his eyes up to the ceiling and said: "When reverses come we naturally look for spiritual consolation. My dear Mrs. Rossmore, in the name of the Unified All Souls Baptismal Presbytery I offer you that consolation." Mrs. Rossmore looked helplessly from one to the other embarrassed as to what to say. Who were these strangers that intruded on her privacy offering a consolation she did not want? Miss Deetle, as if glad of the opportunity to joke at her brother's expense, said explosively: "My dear Pontifex, you have already offered a strawberry festival which Mrs. Rossmore has been unable to accept." "Well, what of it?" demanded Mr. Deetle, glaring at his sister for the irrelevant interruption. "You are both most kind," murmured Mrs. Rossmore; "but we could not accept in any case. My daughter is returning home from Paris next week." "Ah, your daughter--you have a daughter?" exclaimed Mr. Deetle, grasping at the slightest straw to add to his stock of information. "Coming from Paris, too! Such a wicked city!" He had never been to Paris, he went on to explain, but he had read enough about it and he was grateful that the Lord had chosen Massapequa as the field of his labours. Here at least, life was sweet and wholesome and one's hopes of future salvation fairly reasonable. He was not a brilliant talker when the conversation extended beyond Massapequa but he rambled on airing his views on the viciousness of the foreigner in general, until Mrs. Rossmore, utterly wearied, began to wonder when they would go. Finally he fell back upon the weather. "We are very fortunate in having such pleasant weather, don't you think so, Madam? Oh, Massapequa is a lovely spot, isn't it? We think it's the one place to live in. We are all one happy family. That's why my sister and I called to make your acquaintance." "You are very good, I'm sure. I shall tell my husband you came and he'll be very pleased." Having exhausted his conversational powers and seeing that further efforts to pump Mrs. Rossmore were useless, the clerical visitor rose to depart: "It looks like rain. Come, Jane, we had better go. Good-bye, Madam, I am delighted to have made this little visit and I trust you will assure Mr. Rossmore that All Souls Unified Baptismal Presbytery always has a warm welcome for him." They bowed and Mrs. Rossmore bowed. The agony was over and as the door closed on them Mrs. Rossmore gave a sigh of relief. That evening Stott and the judge came home earlier than usual and from their dejected appearance Mrs. Rossmore divined bad news. The judge was painfully silent throughout the meal and Stott was unusually grave. Finally the latter took her aside and broke it to her gently. In spite of their efforts and the efforts of their friends the Congressional inquiry had resulted in a finding against the judge and a demand had already been made upon the Senate for his impeachment. They could do nothing now but fight it in the Senate with all the influence they could muster. It was going to be hard but Stott was confident that right would prevail. After dinner as they were sitting in silence on the porch, each measuring the force of this blow which they had expected yet had always hoped to ward off, the crunching sound of a bicycle was heard on the quiet country road. The rider stopped at their gate and came up the porch holding out an envelope to the judge, who, guessing the contents, had started forward. He tore it open. It was a cablegram from Paris and read as follows: Am sailing on the Kaiser Wilhelm to-day. Shirley. CHAPTER VII. The pier of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, at Hoboken, fairly sizzled with bustle and excitement. The Kaiser Wilhelm had arrived at Sandy Hook the previous evening and was now lying out in midstream. She would tie up at her dock within half an hour. Employes of the line, baggage masters, newspaper reporters, Custom House officers, policemen, detectives, truck drivers, expressmen, longshoremen, telegraph messengers and anxious friends of incoming passengers surged back and forth in seemingly hopeless confusion. The shouting of orders, the rattling of cab wheels, the shrieking of whistles was deafening. From out in the river came the deep toned blasts of the steamer's siren, in grotesque contrast with the strident tooting of a dozen diminutive tugs which, puffing and snorting, were slowly but surely coaxing the leviathan into her berth alongside the dock. The great vessel, spick and span after a coat of fresh paint hurriedly put on during the last day of the voyage, bore no traces of gale, fog and stormy seas through which she had passed on her 3,000 mile run across the ocean. Conspicuous on the bridge, directing the docking operations, stood Capt. Hegermann, self satisfied and smiling, relieved that the responsibilities of another trip were over, and at his side, sharing the honours, was the grizzled pilot who had brought the ship safely through the dangers of Gedney's Channel, his shabby pea jacket, old slouch hat, top boots and unkempt beard standing out in sharp contrast with the immaculate white duck trousers, the white and gold caps and smart full dress uniforms of the ship's officers. The rails on the upper decks were seen to be lined with passengers, all dressed in their shore going clothes, some waving handkerchiefs at friends they already recognized, all impatiently awaiting the shipping of the gangplank. Stott had come early. They had received word at Massapequa the day before that the steamer had been sighted off Fire Island and that she would be at her pier the next morning at 10 o'clock. Stott arrived at 9.30 and so found no difficulty in securing a front position among the small army of people, who, like himself, had come down to meet friends. As the huge vessel swung round and drew closer, Stott easily picked out Shirley. She was scanning eagerly through a binocular the rows of upturned faces on the dock, and he noted that a look of disappointment crossed her face at not finding the object of her search. She turned and said something to a lady in black and to a man who stood at her side. Who they might be Stott had no idea. Fellow passengers, no doubt. One becomes so intimate on shipboard; it seems a friendship that must surely last a lifetime, whereas the custom officers have not finished rummaging through your trunks when these easily-made steamer friends are already forgotten. Presently Shirley took another look and her glass soon lighted on him. Instantly she recognized her father's old friend. She waved a handkerchief and Stott raised his hat. Then she turned quickly and spoke again to her friends, whereupon they all moved in the direction of the gangplank, which was already being lowered. Shirley was one of the first to come ashore. Stott was waiting for her at the foot of the gangplank and she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him. He had known her ever since she was a little tot in arms, and bystanders who noticed them meet had no doubt that they were father and daughter. Shirley was deeply moved; a great lump in her throat seemed to choke her utterance. So far she had been able to bear up, but now that home was so near her heart failed her. She had hoped to find her father on the dock. Why had he not come? Were things so bad then? She questioned Judge Stott anxiously, fearfully. He reassured her. Both her mother and father were well. It was too long a trip for them to make, so he had volunteered. "Too long a trip," echoed Shirley puzzled. "This is not far from our house. Madison Avenue is no distance. That could not have kept father away." "You don't live on Madison Avenue any longer. The house and its contents have been sold," replied Stott gravely, and in a few words he outlined the situation as it was. Shirley listened quietly to the end and only the increasing pallor of her face and an occasional nervous twitching at the corner of her mouth betrayed the shock that this recital of her father's misfortunes was to her. Ah, this she had little dreamed of! Yet why not? It was but logic. When wrecked in reputation, one might as well be wrecked in fortune, too. What would their future be, how could that proud, sensitive man her father bear this humiliation, this disgrace? To be condemned to a life of obscurity, social ostracism, and genteel poverty! Oh, the thought was unendurable! She herself could earn money, of course. If her literary work did not bring in enough, she could teach and what she earned would help out. Certainly her parents should never want for anything so long as she could supply it. She thought bitterly how futile now were plans of marriage, even if she had ever entertained such an idea seriously. Henceforward, she did not belong to herself. Her life must be devoted to clearing her father's name. These reflections were suddenly interrupted by the voice of Mrs. Blake calling out: "Shirley, where have you been? We lost sight of you as we left the ship, and we have been hunting for you ever since." Her aunt, escorted by Jefferson Ryder, had gone direct to the Customs desk and in the crush they had lost trace of her. Shirley introduced Stott. "Aunt Milly, this is Judge Stott, a very old friend of father's. Mrs. Blake, my mother's sister. Mother will be surprised to see her. They haven't met for ten years." "This visit is going to be only a brief one," said Mrs. Blake. "I really came over to chaperone Shirley more than anything else." "As if I needed chaperoning with Mr. Ryder for an escort!" retorted Shirley. Then presenting Jefferson to Stott, she said: "This is Mr. Jefferson Ryder--Judge Stott. Mr. Ryder has been very kind to me abroad." The two men bowed and shook hands. "Any relation to J.B.?" asked Stott good humouredly. "His son--that's all," answered Jefferson laconically. Stott now looked at the young man with more interest. Yes, there was a resemblance, the same blue eyes, the fighting jaw. But how on earth did Judge Rossmore's daughter come to be travelling in the company of John Burkett Ryder's son? The more he thought of it the more it puzzled him, and while he cogitated, Shirley and her companions wrestled with the United States Customs, and were undergoing all the tortures invented by Uncle Sam to punish Americans for going abroad. Shirley and Mrs. Blake were fortunate in securing an inspector who was fairly reasonable. Of course, he did not for a moment believe their solemn statement, already made on the ship, that they had nothing dutiable, and he rummaged among the most intimate garments of their wardrobe in a wholly indecent and unjustifiable manner, but he was polite and they fared no worse than all the other women victims of this, the most brutal custom house inspection system in the world. Jefferson had the misfortune to be allotted an inspector who was half seas over with liquor and the man was so insolent and threatening in manner that it was only by great self-restraint that Jefferson controlled himself. He had no wish to create a scandal on the dock, nor to furnish good "copy" for the keen-eyed, long-eared newspaper reporters who would be only too glad of such an opportunity for a "scare head". But when the fellow compelled him to open every trunk and valise and then put his grimy hands to the bottom and by a quick upward movement jerked the entire contents out on the dock, he interfered: "You are exceeding your authority," he exclaimed hotly. "How dare you treat my things in this manner?" The drunken uniformed brute raised his bloodshot, bleary eyes and took Jefferson in from tip to toe. He clenched his fist as if about to resort to violence, but he was not so intoxicated as to be quite blind to the fact that this passenger had massive square shoulders, a determined jaw and probably a heavy arm. So contenting himself with a sneer, he said: "This ain't no country for blooming English docks. You're not in England now you know. This is a free country. See?" "I see this," replied Jefferson, furious, "that you are a drunken ruffian and a disgrace to the uniform you wear. I shall report your conduct immediately," with which he proceeded to the Customs desk to lodge a complaint. He might have spared himself the trouble. The silver-haired, distinguished looking old officer in charge knew that Jefferson's complaint was well founded, he knew that this particular inspector was a drunkard and a discredit to the government which employed him, but at the same time he also knew that political influence had been behind his appointment and that it was unsafe to do more than mildly reprimand him. When, therefore, he accompanied Jefferson to the spot where the contents of the trunks lay scattered in confusion all over the dock, he merely expostulated with the officer, who made some insolent reply. Seeing that it was useless to lose further time, Jefferson repacked his trunks as best he could and got them on a cab. Then he hurried over to Shirley's party and found them already about to leave the pier. "Come and see us, Jeff," whispered Shirley as their cab drove through the gates. "Where," he asked, "Madison Avenue?" She hesitated for a moment and then replied quickly: "No, we are stopping down on Long Island for the Summer--at a cute little place called Massapequa. Run down and see us." He raised his hat and the cab drove on. There was greater activity in the Rossmore cottage at Massapequa than there had been any day since the judge and his wife went to live there. Since daybreak Eudoxia had been scouring and polishing in honour of the expected arrival and a hundred times Mrs. Rossmore had climbed the stairs to see that everything was as it should be in the room which had been prepared for Shirley. It was not, however, without a passage at arms that Eudoxia consented to consider the idea of an addition to the family. Mrs. Rossmore had said to her the day before: "My daughter will be here to-morrow, Eudoxia." A look expressive of both displeasure and astonishment marred the classic features of the hireling. Putting her broom aside and placing her arms akimbo she exclaimed in an injured tone: "And it's a dayther you've got now? So it's three in family you are! When I took the place it's two you tould me there was!" "Well, with your kind permission," replied Mrs. Rossmore, "there will be three in future. There is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that says we can't have a daughter without consulting our help, is there?" The sarcasm of this reply did not escape even the dull-edged wits of the Irish drudge. She relapsed into a dignified silence and a few minutes later was discovered working with some show of enthusiasm. The judge was nervous and fidgety. He made a pretence to read, but it was plain to see that his mind was not on his book. He kept leaving his chair to go and look at the clock; then he would lay the volume aside and wander from room to room like a lost soul. His thoughts were on the dock at Hoboken. By noon every little detail had been attended to and there was nothing further to do but sit and wait for the arrival of Stott and Shirley. They were to be expected any moment now. The passengers had probably got off the steamer by eleven o'clock. It would take at least two hours to get through the Customs and out to Massapequa. The judge and his wife sat on the porch counting the minutes and straining their ears to catch the first sound of the train from New York. "I hope Stott broke the news to her gently," said the judge. "I wish we had gone to meet her ourselves," sighed his wife. The judge was silent and for a moment or two he puffed vigorously at his pipe, as was his habit when disturbed mentally. Then he said: "I ought to have gone, Martha, but I was afraid. I'm afraid to look my own daughter in the face and tell her that I am a disgraced man, that I am to be tried by the Senate for corruption, perhaps impeached and turned off the bench as if I were a criminal. Shirley won't believe it, sometimes I can't believe it myself. I often wake up in the night and think of it as part of a dream, but when the morning comes it's still true--it's still true!" He smoked on in silence. Then happening to look up he noticed that his wife was weeping. He laid his hand gently on hers. "Don't cry, dear, don't make it harder for me to bear. Shirley must see no trace of tears." "I was thinking of the injustice of it all," replied Mrs. Rossmore, wiping her eyes. "Fancy Shirley in this place, living from hand to mouth," went on the judge. "That's the least," answered his wife. "She's a fine, handsome girl, well educated and all the rest of it. She ought to make a good marriage." No matter what state of mind Mrs. Rossmore might be in, she never lost sight of the practical side of things. "Hardly with her father's disgrace hanging over her head," replied the judge wearily. "Who," he added, "would have the courage to marry a girl whose father was publicly disgraced?" Both relapsed into another long silence, each mentally reviewing the past and speculating on the future. Suddenly Mrs. Rossmore started. Surely she could not be mistaken! No, the clanging of a locomotive bell was plainly audible. The train was in. From the direction of the station came people with parcels and hand bags and presently there was heard the welcome sound of carriage wheels crunching over the stones. A moment later they saw coming round the bend in the road a cab piled up with small baggage. "Here they are! Here they are!" cried Mrs. Rossmore. "Come, Eudoxia!" she called to the servant, while she herself hurried down to the gate. The judge, fully as agitated as herself, only showing his emotion in a different way, remained on the porch pale and anxious. The cab stopped at the curb and Stott alighted, first helping out Mrs. Blake. Mrs. Rossmore's astonishment on seeing her sister was almost comical. "Milly!" she exclaimed. They embraced first and explained afterwards. Then Shirley got out and was in her mother's arms. "Where's father?" was Shirley's first question. "There--he's coming!" The judge, unable to restrain his impatience longer, ran down from the porch towards the gate. Shirley, with a cry of mingled grief and joy, precipitated herself on his breast. "Father! Father!" she cried between her sobs. "What have they done to you?" "There--there, my child. Everything will be well--everything will be well." Her head lay on his shoulder and he stroked her hair with his hand, unable to speak from pent up emotion. Mrs. Rossmore could not recover from her stupefaction on seeing her sister. Mrs. Blake explained that she had come chiefly for the benefit of the voyage and announced her intention of returning on the same steamer. "So you see I shall bother you only a few days," she said. "You'll stay just as long as you wish," rejoined Mrs. Rossmore. "Happily we have just one bedroom left." Then turning to Eudoxia, who was wrestling with the baggage, which formed a miniature Matterhorn on the sidewalk, she gave instructions: "Eudoxia, you'll take this lady's baggage to the small bedroom adjoining Miss Shirley's. She is going to stop with us for a few days." Taken completely aback at the news of this new addition, Eudoxia looked at first defiance. She seemed on the point of handing in her resignation there and then. But evidently she thought better of it, for, taking a cue from Mrs. Rossmore, she asked in the sarcastic manner of her mistress: "Four is it now, M'm? I suppose the Constitootion of the United States allows a family to be as big as one likes to make it. It's hard on us girls, but if it's the law, it's all right, M'm. The more the merrier!" With which broadside, she hung the bags all over herself and staggered off to the house. Stott explained that the larger pieces and the trunks would come later by express. Mrs. Rossmore took him aside while Mrs. Blake joined Shirley and the judge. "Did you tell Shirley?" asked Mrs. Rossmore. "How did she take it?" "She knows everything," answered Stott, "and takes it very sensibly. We shall find her of great moral assistance in our coming fight in the Senate," he added confidently. Realizing that the judge would like to be left alone with Shirley, Mrs. Rossmore invited Mrs. Blake to go upstairs and see the room she would have, while Stott said he would be glad of a washup. When they had gone Shirley sidled up to her father in her old familiar way. "I've just been longing to see you, father," she said. She turned to get a good look at him and noticing the lines of care which had deepened during her absence she cried: "Why, how you've changed! I can scarcely believe it's you. Say something. Let me hear the sound of your voice, father." The judge tried to smile. "Why, my dear girl, I---" Shirley threw her arms round his neck. "Ah, yes, now I know it's you," she cried. "Of course it is, Shirley, my dear girl. Of course it is. Who else should it be?" "Yes, but it isn't the same," insisted Shirley. "There is no ring to your voice. It sounds hollow and empty, like an echo. And this place," she added dolefully, "this awful place--" She glanced around at the cracked ceilings, the cheaply papered walls, the shabby furniture, and her heart sank as she realized the extent of their misfortune. She had come back prepared for the worst, to help win the fight for her father's honour, but to have to struggle against sordid poverty as well, to endure that humiliation in addition to disgrace--ah, that was something she had not anticipated! She changed colour and her voice faltered. Her father had been closely watching for just such signs and he read her thoughts. "It's the best we can afford, Shirley," he said quietly. "The blow has been complete. I will tell you everything. You shall judge for yourself. My enemies have done for me at last." "Your enemies?" cried Shirley eagerly. "Tell me who they are so I may go to them." "Yes, dear, you shall know everything. But not now. You are tired after your journey. To-morrow sometime Stott and I will explain everything." "Very well, father, as you wish," said Shirley gently. "After all," she added in an effort to appear cheerful, "what matter where we live so long as we have each other?" She drew away to hide her tears and left the room on pretence of inspecting the house. She looked into the dining-room and kitchen and opened the cupboards, and when she returned there were no visible signs of trouble in her face. "It's a cute little house, isn't it?" she said. "I've always wanted a little place like this--all to ourselves. Oh, if you only knew how tired I am of New York and its great ugly houses, its retinue of servants and its domestic and social responsibilities! We shall be able to live for ourselves now, eh, father?" She spoke with a forced gaiety that might have deceived anyone but the judge. He understood the motive of her sudden change in manner and silently he blessed her for making his burden lighter. "Yes, dear, it's not bad," he said. "There's not much room, though." "There's quite enough," she insisted. "Let me see." She began to count on her fingers. "Upstairs--three rooms, eh? and above that three more--" "No," smiled the judge, "then comes the roof?" "Of course," she laughed, "how stupid of me--a nice gable roof, a sloping roof that the rain runs off beautifully. Oh, I can see that this is going to be awfully jolly--just like camping out. You know how I love camping out. And you have a piano, too." She went over to the corner where stood one of those homely instruments which hardly deserve to be dignified by the name piano, with a cheap, gaudily painted case outside and a tin pan effect inside, and which are usually to be found in the poorer class of country boarding houses. Shirley sat down and ran her fingers over the keys, determined to like everything. "It's a little old," was her comment, "but I like these zither effects. It's just like the sixteenth-century spinet. I can see you and mother dancing a stately minuet," she smiled. "What's that about mother dancing?" demanded Mrs. Rossmore, who at that instant entered the room. Shirley arose and appealed to her: "Isn't it absurd, mother, when you come to think of it, that anybody should accuse father of being corrupt and of having forfeited the right to be judge? Isn't it still more absurd that we should be helpless and dejected and unhappy because we are on Long Island instead of Madison Avenue? Why should Manhattan Island be a happier spot than Long Island? Why shouldn't we be happy anywhere; we have each other. And we do need each other. We never knew how much till to-day, did we? We must stand by each other now. Father is going to clear his name of this preposterous charge and we're going to help him, aren't we, mother? We're not helpless just because we are women. We're going to work, mother and I." "Work?" echoed Mrs. Rossmore, somewhat scandalized. "Work," repeated Shirley very decisively. The judge interfered. He would not hear of it. "You work, Shirley? Impossible!" "Why not? My book has been selling well while I was abroad. I shall probably write others. Then I shall write, too, for the newspapers and magazines. It will add to our income." "Your book--'The American Octopus,' is selling well?" inquired the judge, interested. "So well," replied Shirley, "that the publishers wrote me in Paris that the fourth edition was now on the press. That means good royalties. I shall soon be a fashionable author. The publishers will be after me for more books and we'll have all the money we want. Oh, it is so delightful, this novel sensation of a literary success!" she exclaimed with glee. "Aren't you proud of me, dad?" The judge smiled indulgently. Of course he was glad and proud. He always knew his Shirley was a clever girl. But by what strange fatality, he thought to himself, had his daughter in this book of hers assailed the very man who had encompassed his own ruin? It seemed like the retribution of heaven. Neither his daughter nor the financier was conscious of the fact that each was indirectly connected with the impeachment proceedings. Ryder could not dream that "Shirley Green", the author of the book which flayed him so mercilessly, was the daughter of the man he was trying to crush. Shirley, on the other hand, was still unaware of the fact that it was Ryder who had lured her father to his ruin. Mrs. Rossmore now insisted on Shirley going to her room to rest. She must be tired and dusty. After changing her travelling dress she would feel refreshed and more comfortable. When she was ready to come down again luncheon would be served. So leaving the judge to his papers, mother and daughter went upstairs together, and with due maternal pride Mrs. Rossmore pointed out to Shirley all the little arrangements she had made for her comfort. Then she left her daughter to herself while she hurried downstairs to look after Eudoxia and luncheon. When, at last, she could lock herself in her room where no eye could see her, Shirley threw herself down on the bed and burst into a torrent of tears. She had kept up appearances as long as it was possible, but now the reaction had set in. She gave way freely to her pent up feelings, she felt that unless she could relieve herself in this way her heart would break. She had been brave until now, she had been strong to hear everything and see everything, but she could not keep it up forever. Stott's words to her on the dock had in part prepared her for the worst, he had told her what to expect at home, but the realization was so much more vivid. While hundreds of miles of ocean still lay between, it had all seemed less real, almost attractive as a romance in modern life, but now she was face to face with the grim reality--this shabby cottage, cheap neighbourhood and commonplace surroundings, her mother's air of resignation to the inevitable, her father's pale, drawn face telling so eloquently of the keen mental anguish through which he had passed. She compared this pitiful spectacle with what they had been when she left for Europe, the fine mansion on Madison Avenue with its rich furnishings and well-trained servants, and her father's proud aristocratic face illumined with the consciousness of his high rank in the community, and the attention he attracted every time he appeared on the street or in public places as one of the most brilliant and most respected judges on the bench. Then to have come to this all in the brief space of a few months! It was incredible, terrible, heart rending! And what of the future? What was to be done to save her father from this impeachment which she knew well would hurry him to his grave? He could not survive that humiliation, that degradation. He must be saved in the Senate, but how--how? She dried her eyes and began to think. Surely her woman's wit would find some way. She thought of Jefferson. Would he come to Massapequa? It was hardly probable. He would certainly learn of the change in their circumstances and his sense of delicacy would naturally keep him away for some time even if other considerations, less unselfish, did not. Perhaps he would be attracted to some other girl he would like as well and who was not burdened with a tragedy in her family. Her tears began to flow afresh until she hated herself for being so weak while there was work to be done to save her father. She loved Jefferson. Yes, she had never felt so sure of it as now. She felt that if she had him there at that moment she would throw herself in his arms crying: "Take me, Jefferson, take me away, where you will, for I love you! I love you!" But Jefferson was not there and the rickety chairs in the tiny bedroom and the cheap prints on the walls seemed to jibe at her in her misery. If he were there, she thought as she looked into a cracked mirror, he would think her very ugly with her eyes all red from crying. He would not marry her now in any case. No self-respecting man would. She was glad that she had spoken to him as she had in regard to marriage, for while a stain remained upon her father's name marriage was out of the question. She might have yielded on the question of the literary career, but she would never allow a man to taunt her afterwards with the disgrace of her own flesh and blood. No, henceforth her place was at her father's side until his character was cleared. If the trial in the Senate were to go against him, then she could never see Jefferson again. She would give up all idea of him and everything else. Her literary career would be ended, her life would be a blank. They would have to go abroad, where they were not known, and try and live down their shame, for no matter how innocent her father might be the world would believe him guilty. Once condemned by the Senate, nothing could remove the stigma. She would have to teach in order to contribute towards the support, they would manage somehow. But what a future, how unnecessary, how unjust! Suddenly she thought of Jefferson's promise to interest his father in their case and she clutched at the hope this promise held out as a drowning man clutches at a drifting straw. Jefferson would not forget his promise and he would come to Massapequa to tell her of what he had done. She was sure of that. Perhaps, after all, there was where their hope lay. Why had she not told her father at once? It might have relieved his mind. John Burkett Ryder, the Colossus, the man of unlimited power! He could save her father and he would. And the more she thought about it, the more cheerful and more hopeful she became, and she started to dress quickly so that she might hurry down to tell her father the good news. She was actually sorry now that she had said so many hard things of Mr. Ryder in her book and she was worrying over the thought that her father's case might be seriously prejudiced if the identity of the author were ever revealed, when there came a knock at her door. It was Eudoxia. "Please, miss, will you come down to lunch?" CHAPTER VIII A whirling maelstrom of human activity and dynamic energy--the city which above all others is characteristic of the genius and virility of the American people--New York, with its congested polyglot population and teeming millions, is assuredly one of the busiest, as it is one of the most strenuous and most noisy places on earth. Yet, despite its swarming streets and crowded shops, ceaselessly thronged with men and women eagerly hurrying here and there in the pursuit of business or elusive pleasure, all chattering, laughing, shouting amid the deafening, multisonous roar of traffic incidental to Gotham's daily life, there is one part of the great metropolis where there is no bustle, no noise, no crowd, where the streets are empty even in daytime, where a passer-by is a curiosity and a child a phenomenon. This deserted village in the very heart of the big town is the millionaires' district, the boundaries of which are marked by Carnegie hill on the north, Fiftieth Street on the south, and by Fifth and Madison Avenues respectively on the west and east. There is nothing more mournful than the outward aspect of these princely residences which, abandoned and empty for three-quarters of the year, stand in stately loneliness, as if ashamed of their isolation and utter uselessness. Their blinds drawn, affording no hint of life within, enveloped the greater part of the time in the stillness and silence of the tomb, they appear to be under the spell of some baneful curse. No merry-voiced children romp in their carefully railed off gardens, no sounds of conversation or laughter come from their hermetically closed windows, not a soul goes in or out, at most, at rare intervals, does one catch a glimpse of a gorgeously arrayed servant gliding about in ghostly fashion, supercilious and suspicious, and addressing the chance visitor in awed whispers as though he were the guardian of a house of affliction. It is, indeed, like a city of the dead. So it appeared to Jefferson as he walked up Fifth Avenue, bound for the Ryder residence, the day following his arrival from Europe. Although he still lived at his father's house, for at no time had there been an open rupture, he often slept in his studio, finding it more convenient for his work, and there he had gone straight from the ship. He felt, however, that it was his duty to see his mother as soon as possible; besides he was anxious to fulfil his promise to Shirley and find what his father could do to help Judge Rossmore. He had talked about the case with several men the previous evening at the club and the general impression seemed to be that, guilty or innocent, the judge would be driven off the bench. The "interests" had forced the matter as a party issue, and the Republicans being in control in the Senate the outcome could hardly be in doubt. He had learned also of the other misfortunes which had befallen Judge Rossmore and he understood now the reason for Shirley's grave face on the dock and her little fib about summering on Long Island. The news had been a shock to him, for, apart from the fact that the judge was Shirley's father, he admired him immensely as a man. Of his perfect innocence there could, of course, be no question: these charges of bribery had simply been trumped up by his enemies to get him off the bench. That was very evident. The "interests" feared him and so had sacrificed him without pity, and as Jefferson walked along Central Park, past the rows of superb palaces which face its eastern wall, he wondered in which particular mansion had been hatched this wicked, iniquitous plot against a wholly blameless American citizen. Here, he thought, were the citadels of the plutocrats, America's aristocracy of money, the strongholds of her Coal, Railroad, Oil, Gas and Ice barons, the castles of her monarchs of Steel, Copper, and Finance. Each of these million-dollar residences, he pondered, was filled from cellar to roof with costly furnishings, masterpieces of painting and sculpture, priceless art treasures of all kinds purchased in every corner of the globe with the gold filched from a Trust-ridden people. For every stone in those marble halls a human being, other than the owner, had been sold into bondage, for each of these magnificent edifices, which the plutocrat put up in his pride only to occupy it two months in the year, ten thousand American men, women and children had starved and sorrowed. Europe, thought Jefferson as he strode quickly along, pointed with envy to America's unparalleled prosperity, spoke with bated breath of her great fortunes. Rather should they say her gigantic robberies, her colossal frauds! As a nation we were not proud of our multi-millionaires. How many of them would bear the search-light of investigation? Would his own father? How many millions could one man make by honest methods? America was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, not because of her millionaires, but in spite of them. The United States owed its high rank in the family of nations to the country's vast natural resources, its inexhaustible vitality, its great wheat fields, the industrial and mechanical genius of its people. It was the plain American citizen who had made the greatness of America, not the millionaires who, forming a class by themselves of unscrupulous capitalists, had created an arrogant oligarchy which sought to rule the country by corrupting the legislature and the judiciary. The plutocrats--these were the leeches, the sores in the body politic. An organized band of robbers, they had succeeded in dominating legislation and in securing control of every branch of the nation's industry, crushing mercilessly and illegally all competition. They were the Money Power, and such a menace were they to the welfare of the people that, it had been estimated, twenty men in America had it in their power, by reason of the vast wealth which they controlled, to come together, and within twenty-four hours arrive at an understanding by which every wheel of trade and commerce would be stopped from revolving, every avenue of trade blocked and every electric key struck dumb. Those twenty men could paralyze the whole country, for they controlled the circulation of the currency and could create a panic whenever they might choose. It was the rapaciousness and insatiable greed of these plutocrats that had forced the toilers to combine for self-protection, resulting in the organization of the Labor Unions which, in time, became almost as tyrannical and unreasonable as the bosses. And the breach between capital on the one hand and labour on the other was widening daily, masters and servants snarling over wages and hours, the quarrel ever increasing in bitterness and acrimony until one day the extreme limit of patience would be reached and industrial strikes would give place to bloody violence. Meantime the plutocrats, wholly careless of the significant signs of the times and the growing irritation and resentment of the people, continued their illegal practices, scoffing at public opinion, snapping their fingers at the law, even going so far in their insolence as to mock and jibe at the President of the United States. Feeling secure in long immunity and actually protected in their wrong doing by the courts--the legal machinery by its very elaborateness defeating the ends of justice--the Trust kings impudently defied the country and tried to impose their own will upon the people. History had thus repeated itself. The armed feudalism of the middle ages had been succeeded in twentieth century America by the tyranny of capital. Yet, ruminated the young artist as he neared the Ryder residence, the American people had but themselves to blame for their present thralldom. Forty years before Abraham Lincoln had warned the country when at the close of the war he saw that the race for wealth was already making men and women money-mad. In 1864 he wrote these words: "Yes, we may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its close. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the nation might live. It has been indeed a trying hour for the Republic, but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Truly prophetic these solemn words were to-day. Forgetting the austere simplicity of their forebears, a love of show and ostentation had become the ruling passion of the American people. Money, MONEY, _MONEY_! was to-day the only standard, the only god! The whole nation, frenzied with a wild lust for wealth no matter how acquired, had tacitly acquiesced in all sorts of turpitude, every description of moral depravity, and so had fallen an easy victim to the band of capitalistic adventurers who now virtually ruled the land. With the thieves in power, the courts were powerless, the demoralization was general and the world was afforded the edifying spectacle of an entire country given up to an orgy of graft--treason in the Senate--corruption in the Legislature, fraudulent elections, leaks in government reports, trickery in Wall Street, illegal corners in coal, meat, ice and other prime necessaries of life, the deadly horrors of the Beef and Drug Trusts, railroad conspiracies, insurance scandals, the wrecking of savings banks, police dividing spoils with pickpockets and sharing the wages of prostitutes, magistrates charged with blackmailing--a foul stench of social rottenness and decay! What, thought Jefferson, would be the outcome--Socialism or Anarchy? Still, he mused, one ray of hope pierced the general gloom--the common sense, the vigour and the intelligence of the true American man and woman, the love for a "square deal" which was characteristic of the plain people, the resistless force of enlightened public opinion. The country was merely passing through a dark phase in its history, it was the era of the grafters. There would come a reaction, the rascals would be exposed and driven off, and the nation would go on upward toward its high destiny. The country was fortunate, too, in having a strong president, a man of high principles and undaunted courage who had already shown his capacity to deal with the critical situation. America was lucky with her presidents. Picked out by the great political parties as mere figureheads, sometimes they deceived their sponsors, and showed themselves men and patriots. Such a president was Theodore Roosevelt. After beginning vigorous warfare on the Trusts, attacking fearlessly the most rascally of the band, the chief of the nation had sounded the slogan of alarm in regard to the multi-millionaires. The amassing of colossal fortunes, he had declared, must be stopped--a man might accumulate more than sufficient for his own needs and for the needs of his children, but the evil practice of perpetuating great and ever-increasing fortunes for generations yet unborn was recognized as a peril to the State. To have had the courage to propose such a sweeping and radical restrictive measure as this should alone, thought Jefferson, ensure for Theodore Roosevelt a place among America's greatest and wisest statesmen. He and Americans of his calibre would eventually perform the titanic task of cleansing these Augean stables, the muck and accumulated filth of which was sapping the health and vitality of the nation. Jefferson turned abruptly and went up the wide steps of an imposing white marble edifice, which took up the space of half a city block. A fine example of French Renaissance architecture, with spire roofs, round turrets and mullioned windows dominating the neighbouring houses, this magnificent home of the plutocrat, with its furnishings and art treasures, had cost John Burkett Ryder nearly ten millions of dollars. It was one of the show places of the town, and when the "rubber neck" wagons approached the Ryder mansion and the guides, through their megaphones, expatiated in awe-stricken tones on its external and hidden beauties, there was a general craning of vertebrae among the "seeing New York"-ers to catch a glimpse of the abode of the richest man in the world. Only a few privileged ones were ever permitted to penetrate to the interior of this ten-million-dollar home. Ryder was not fond of company, he avoided strangers and lived in continual apprehension of the subpoena server. Not that he feared the law, only he usually found it inconvenient to answer questions in court under oath. The explicit instructions to the servants, therefore, were to admit no one under any pretext whatever unless the visitor had been approved by the Hon. Fitzroy Bagley, Mr. Ryder's aristocratic private secretary, and to facilitate this preliminary inspection there had been installed between the library upstairs and the front door one of those ingenious electric writing devices, such as are used in banks, on which a name is hastily scribbled, instantly transmitted elsewhere, immediately answered and the visitor promptly admitted or as quickly shown the door. Indeed the house, from the street, presented many of the characteristics of a prison. It had massive doors behind a row of highly polished steel gates, which would prove as useful in case of attempted invasion as they were now ornamental, and heavily barred windows, while on either side of the portico were great marble columns hung with chains and surmounted with bronze lions rampant. It was unusual to keep the town house open so late in the summer, but Mr. Ryder was obliged for business reasons to be in New York at this time, and Mrs. Ryder, who was one of the few American wives who do not always get their own way, had good-naturedly acquiesced in the wishes of her lord. Jefferson did not have to ring at the paternal portal. The sentinel within was at his post; no one could approach that door without being seen and his arrival and appearance signalled upstairs. But the great man's son headed the list of the privileged ones, so without ado the smartly dressed flunkey opened wide the doors and Jefferson was under his father's roof. "Is my father in?" he demanded of the man. "No, sir," was the respectful answer. "Mr. Ryder has gone out driving, but Mr. Bagley is upstairs." Then after a brief pause he added: "Mrs. Ryder is in, too." In this household where the personality of the mistress was so completely overshadowed by the stronger personality of the master the latter's secretary was a more important personage to the servants than the unobtrusive wife. Jefferson went up the grand staircase hung on either side with fine old portraits and rare tapestries, his feet sinking deep in the rich velvet carpet. On the first landing was a piece of sculptured marble of inestimable worth, seen in the soft warm light that sifted through a great pictorial stained-glass window overhead, the subject representing Ajax and Ulysses contending for the armour of Achilles. To the left of this, at the top of another flight leading to the library, was hung a fine full-length portrait of John Burkett Ryder. The ceilings here as in the lower hall were richly gilt and adorned with paintings by famous modern artists. When he reached this floor Jefferson was about to turn to the right and proceed direct to his mother's suite when he heard a voice near the library door. It was Mr. Bagley giving instructions to the butler. The Honourable Fitzroy Bagley, a younger son of a British peer, had left his country for his country's good, and in order to turn an honest penny, which he had never succeeded in doing at home, he had entered the service of America's foremost financier, hoping to gather a few of the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table and disguising the menial nature of his position under the high-sounding title of private secretary. His job called for a spy and a toady and he filled these requirements admirably. Excepting with his employer, of whom he stood in craven fear, his manner was condescendingly patronizing to all with whom he came in contact, as if he were anxious to impress on these American plebeians the signal honour which a Fitzroy, son of a British peer, did them in deigning to remain in their "blarsted" country. In Mr. Ryder's absence, therefore, he ran the house to suit himself, bullying the servants and not infrequently issuing orders that were contradictory to those already given by Mrs. Ryder. The latter offered no resistance, she knew he was useful to her husband and, what to her mind was a still better reason for letting him have his own way, she had always had the greatest reverence for the British aristocracy. It would have seemed to her little short of vulgarity to question the actions of anyone who spoke with such a delightful English accent. Moreover, he dressed with irreproachable taste, was an acknowledged authority on dinner menus and social functions and knew his Burke backwards--altogether an accomplished and invaluable person. Jefferson could not bear the sight of him; in fact, it was this man's continual presence in the house that had driven him to seek refuge elsewhere. He believed him to be a scoundrel as he certainly was a cad. Nor was his estimate of the English secretary far wrong. The man, like his master, was a grafter, and the particular graft he was after now was either to make a marriage with a rich American girl or to so compromise her that the same end would be attained. He was shrewd enough to realize that he had little chance to get what he wanted in the open matrimonial market, so he determined to attempt a raid and carry off an heiress under her father's nose, and the particular proboscis he had selected was that of his employer's friend, Senator Roberts. The senator and Miss Roberts were frequently at the Ryder House and in course of time the aristocratic secretary and the daughter had become quite intimate. A flighty girl, with no other purpose in life beyond dress and amusement and having what she termed "a good time," Kate thought it excellent pastime to flirt with Mr. Bagley, and when she discovered that he was serious in his attentions she felt flattered rather than indignant. After all, she argued, he was of noble birth. If his two brothers died he would be peer of England, and she had enough money for both. He might not make a bad husband. But she was careful to keep her own counsel and not let her father have any suspicion of what was going on. She knew that his heart was set on her marrying Jefferson Ryder and she knew better than anyone how impossible that dream was. She herself liked Jefferson quite enough to marry him, but if his eyes were turned in another direction--and she knew all about his attentions to Miss Rossmore--she was not going to break her heart about it. So she continued to flirt secretly with the Honourable Fitzroy while she still led the Ryders and her own father to think that she was interested in Jefferson. "Jorkins," Mr. Bagley was saying to the butler, "Mr. Ryder will occupy the library on his return. See that he is not disturbed." "Yes, sir," replied the butler respectfully. The man turned to go when the secretary called him back. "And, Jorkins, you will station another man at the front entrance. Yesterday it was left unguarded, and a man had the audacity to address Mr. Ryder as he was getting out of his carriage. Last week a reporter tried to snapshot him. Mr. Ryder was furious. These things must not happen again, Jorkins. I shall hold you responsible." "Very good, sir." The butler bowed and went downstairs. The secretary looked up and saw Jefferson. His face reddened and his manner grew nervous. "Hello! Back from Europe, Jefferson? How jolly! Your mother will be delighted. She's in her room upstairs." Declining to take the hint, and gathering from Bagley's embarrassed manner that he wanted to get rid of him, Jefferson lingered purposely. When the butler had disappeared, he said: "This house is getting more and more like a barracks every day. You've got men all over the place. One can't move a step without falling over one." Mr. Bagley drew himself up stiffly, as he always did when assuming an air of authority. "Your father's personality demands the utmost precaution," he replied. "We cannot leave the life of the richest and most powerful financier in the world at the mercy of the rabble." "What rabble?" inquired Jefferson, amused. "The common rabble--the lower class--the riff-raff," explained Mr. Bagley. "Pshaw!" laughed Jefferson. "If our financiers were only half as respectable as the common rabble, as you call them, they would need no bars to their houses." Mr. Bagley sneered and shrugged his shoulders. "Your father has warned me against your socialistic views." Then, with a lofty air, he added: "For four years I was third groom of the bedchamber to the second son of England's queen. I know my responsibilities." "But you are not groom of the bedchamber here," retorted Jefferson. "Whatever I am," said Mr. Bagley haughtily, "I am answerable to your father alone." "By the way, Bagley," asked Jefferson, "when do you expect father to return? I want to see him." "I'm afraid it's quite impossible," answered the secretary with studied insolence. "He has three important people to see before dinner. There's the National Republican Committee and Sergeant Ellison of the Secret Service from Washington--all here by appointment. It's quite impossible." "I didn't ask you if it were possible. I said I wanted to see him and I will see him," answered Jefferson quietly but firmly, and in a tone and manner which did not admit of further opposition. "I'll go and leave word for him on his desk," he added. He started to enter the library when the secretary, who was visibly perturbed, attempted to bar his way. "There's some one in there," he said in an undertone. "Someone waiting for your father." "Is there?" replied Jefferson coolly. "I'll see who it is," with which he brushed past Mr. Bagley and entered the library. He had guessed aright. A woman was there. It was Kate Roberts. "Hello, Kate! how are you?" They called each other by their first names, having been acquainted for years, and while theirs was an indifferent kind of friendship they had always been on good terms. At one time Jefferson had even begun to think he might do what his father wished and marry the girl, but it was only after he had met and known Shirley Rossmore that he realized how different one woman can be from another. Yet Kate had her good qualities. She was frivolous and silly as are most girls with no brains and nothing else to do in life but dress and spend money, but she might yet be happy with some other fellow, and that was why it made him angry to see this girl with $100,000 in her own right playing into the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer. He had evidently disturbed an interesting tete-a-tete. He decided to say nothing, but mentally he resolved to spoil Mr. Bagley's game and save Kate from her own folly. On hearing his voice Kate turned and gave a little cry of genuine surprise. "Why, is it you, Jeff? I thought you were in Europe." "I returned yesterday," he replied somewhat curtly. He crossed over to his father's desk where he sat down to scribble a few words, while Mr. Bagley, who had followed him in scowling, was making frantic dumb signs to Kate. "I fear I intrude here," said Jefferson pointedly. "Oh, dear no, not at all," replied Kate in some confusion. "I was waiting for my father. How is Paris?" she asked. "Lovely as ever," he answered. "Did you have a good time?" she inquired. "I enjoyed it immensely. I never had a better one." "You probably were in good company," she said significantly. Then she added: "I believe Miss Rossmore was in Paris." "Yes, I think she was there," was his non-committal answer. To change the conversation, which was becoming decidedly personal, he picked up a book that was lying on his father's desk and glanced at the title. It was "The American Octopus." "Is father still reading this?" he asked. "He was at it when I left." "Everybody is reading it," said Kate. "The book has made a big sensation. Do you know who the hero is?" "Who?" he asked with an air of the greatest innocence. "Why, no less a personage than your father--John Burkett Ryder himself! Everybody says it's he--the press and everybody that's read it. He says so himself." "Really?" he exclaimed with well-simulated surprise. "I must read it." "It has made a strong impression on Mr. Ryder," chimed in Mr. Bagley. "I never knew him to be so interested in a book before. He's trying his best to find out who the author is. It's a jolly well written book and raps you American millionaires jolly well--what?" "Whoever wrote the book," interrupted Kate, "is somebody who knows Mr. Ryder exceedingly well. There are things in it that an outsider could not possibly know." "Phew!" Jefferson whistled softly to himself. He was treading dangerous ground. To conceal his embarrassment, he rose. "If you'll excuse me, I'll go and pay my filial respects upstairs. I'll see you again." He gave Kate a friendly nod, and without even glancing at Mr. Bagley left the room. The couple stood in silence for a few moments after he disappeared. Then Kate went to the door and listened to his retreating footsteps. When she was sure that he was out of earshot she turned on Mr. Bagley indignantly. "You see what you expose me to. Jefferson thinks this was a rendezvous." "Well, it was to a certain extent," replied the secretary unabashed. "Didn't you ask me to see you here?" "Yes," said Kate, taking a letter from her bosom, "I wanted to ask you what this means?" "My dear Miss Roberts--Kate--I"--stammered the secretary. "How dare you address me in this manner when you know I and Mr. Ryder are engaged?" No one knew better than Kate that this was not true, but she said it partly out of vanity, partly out of a desire to draw out this Englishman who made such bold love to her. "Miss Roberts," replied Mr. Bagley loftily, "in that note I expressed my admiration--my love for you. Your engagement to Mr. Jefferson Ryder is, to say the least, a most uncertain fact." There was a tinge of sarcasm in his voice that did not escape Kate. "You must not judge from appearances," she answered, trying to keep up the outward show of indignation which inwardly she did not feel. "Jeff and I may hide a passion that burns like a volcano. All lovers are not demonstrative, you know." The absurdity of this description as applied to her relations with Jefferson appealed to her as so comical that she burst into laughter in which the secretary joined. "Then why did you remain here with me when the Senator went out with Mr. Ryder, senior?" he demanded. "To tell you that I cannot listen to your nonsense any longer," retorted the girl. "What?" he cried, incredulously. "You remain here to tell me that you cannot listen to me when you could easily have avoided listening to me without telling me so. Kate, your coldness is not convincing." "You mean you think I want to listen to you?" she demanded. "I do," he answered, stepping forward as if to take her in his arms. "Mr. Bagley!" she exclaimed, recoiling. "A week ago," he persisted, "you called me Fitzroy. Once, in an outburst of confidence, you called me Fitz." "You hadn't asked me to marry you then," she laughed mockingly. Then edging away towards the door she waved her hand at him playfully and said teasingly: "Good-bye, Mr. Bagley, I am going upstairs to Mrs. Ryder. I will await my father's return in her room. I think I shall be safer." He ran forward to intercept her, but she was too quick for him. The door slammed in his face and she was gone. Meantime Jefferson had proceeded upstairs, passing through long and luxuriously carpeted corridors with panelled frescoed walls, and hung with grand old tapestries and splendid paintings, until he came to his mother's room. He knocked. "Come in!" called out the familiar voice. He entered. Mrs. Ryder was busy at her escritoire looking over a mass of household accounts. "Hello, mother!" he cried, running up and hugging her in his boyish, impulsive way. Jefferson had always been devoted to his mother, and while he deplored her weakness in permitting herself to be so completely under the domination of his father, she had always found him an affectionate and loving son. "Jefferson!" she exclaimed when he released her. "My dear boy, when did you arrive?" "Only yesterday. I slept at the studio last night. You're looking bully, mother. How's father?" Mrs. Ryder sighed while she looked her son over proudly. In her heart she was glad Jefferson had turned out as he had. Her boy certainly would never be a financier to be attacked in magazines and books. Answering his question she said: "Your father is as well as those busybodies in the newspapers will let him be. He's considerably worried just now over that new book 'The American Octopus.' How dare they make him out such a monster? He's no worse than other successful business men. He's richer, that's all, and it makes them jealous. He's out driving now with Senator Roberts. Kate is somewhere in the house--in the library, I think." "Yes, I found her there," replied Jefferson dryly. "She was with that cad, Bagley. When is father going to find that fellow out?" "Oh, Jefferson," protested his mother, "how can you talk like that of Mr. Bagley. He is such a perfect gentleman. His family connections alone should entitle him to respect. He is certainly the best secretary your father ever had. I'm sure I don't know what we should do without him. He knows everything that a gentleman should." "And a good deal more, I wager," growled Jefferson. "He wasn't groom of the backstairs to England's queen for nothing." Then changing the topic, he said suddenly: "Talking about Kate, mother, we have got to reach some definite understanding. This talk about my marrying her must stop. I intend to take the matter up with father to-day." "Oh, of course, more trouble!" replied his mother in a resigned tone. She was so accustomed to having her wishes thwarted that she was never surprised at anything. "We heard of your goings on in Paris. That Miss Rossmore was there, was she not?" "That has got nothing to do with it," replied Jefferson warmly. He resented Shirley's name being dragged into the discussion. Then more calmly he went on: "Now, mother, be reasonable, listen. I purpose to live my own life. I have already shown my father that I will not be dictated to, and that I can earn my own living. He has no right to force this marriage on me. There has never been any misunderstanding on Kate's part. She and I understand each other thoroughly." "Well, Jefferson, you may be right from your point of view," replied his mother weakly. She invariably ended by agreeing with the last one who argued with her. "You are of age, of course. Your parents have only a moral right over you. Only remember this: it would be foolish of you to do anything now to anger your father. His interests are your interests. Don't do anything to jeopardize them. Of course, you can't be forced to marry a girl you don't care for, but your father will be bitterly disappointed. He had set his heart on this match. He knows all about your infatuation for Miss Rossmore and it has made him furious. I suppose you've heard about her father?" "Yes, and it's a dastardly outrage," blurted out Jefferson. "It's a damnable conspiracy against one of the most honourable men that ever lived, and I mean to ferret out and expose the authors. I came here to-day to ask father to help me." "You came to ask your father to help you?" echoed his mother incredulously. "Why not?" demanded Jefferson. "Is it true then that he is selfishness incarnate? Wouldn't he do that much to help a friend?" "You've come to the wrong house, Jeff. You ought to know that. Your father is far from being Judge Rossmore's friend. Surely you have sense enough to realize that there are two reasons why he would not raise a finger to help him. One is that he has always been his opponent in public life, the other is that you want to marry his daughter." Jefferson sat as if struck dumb. He had not thought of that. Yes, it was true. His father and the father of the girl he loved were mortal enemies. How was help to be expected from the head of those "interests" which the judge had always attacked, and now he came to think of it, perhaps his own father was really at the bottom of these abominable charges! He broke into a cold perspiration and his voice was altered as he said: "Yes, I see now, mother. You are right." Then he added bitterly: "That has always been the trouble at home. No matter where I turn, I am up against a stone wall--the money interests. One never hears a glimmer of fellow-feeling, never a word of human sympathy, only cold calculation, heartless reasoning, money, money, money! Oh, I am sick of it. I don't want any of it. I am going away where I'll hear no more of it." His mother laid her hand gently on his shoulder. "Don't talk that way, Jefferson. Your father is not a bad man at heart, you know that. His life has been devoted to money making and he has made a greater fortune than any man living or dead. He is only what his life has made him. He has a good heart. And he loves you--his only son. But his business enemies--ah! those he never forgives." Jefferson was about to reply when suddenly a dozen electric bells sounded all over the house. "What's that?" exclaimed Jefferson, alarmed, and starting towards the door. "Oh, that's nothing," smiled his mother. "We have had that put in since you went away. Your father must have just come in. Those bells announce the fact. It was done so that if there happened to be any strangers in the house they could be kept out of the way until he reached the library safely." "Oh," laughed Jefferson, "he's afraid some one will kidnap him? Certainly he would be a rich prize. I wouldn't care for the job myself, though. They'd be catching a tartar." His speech was interrupted by a timid knock at the door. "May I come in to say good-bye?" asked a voice which they recognized as Kate's. She had successfully escaped from Mr. Bagley's importunities and was now going home with the Senator. She smiled amiably at Jefferson and they chatted pleasantly of his trip abroad. He was sincerely sorry for this girl whom they were trying to foist on him. Not that he thought she really cared for him, he was well aware that hers was a nature that made it impossible to feel very deeply on any subject, but the idea of this ready-made marriage was so foreign, so revolting to the American mind! He thought it would be a kindness to warn her against Bagley. "Don't be foolish, Kate," he said. "I was not blind just now in the library. That man is no good." As is usual when one's motives are suspected, the girl resented his interference. She knew he hated Mr. Bagley and she thought it mean of him to try and get even in this way. She stiffened up and replied coldly: "I think I am able to look after myself, Jefferson. Thanks, all the same." He shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. She said good-bye to Mrs. Ryder, who was again immersed in her tradespeople bills, and left the room, escorted by Jefferson, who accompanied her downstairs and on to the street where Senator Roberts was waiting for her in the open victoria. The senator greeted with unusual cordiality the young man whom he still hoped to make his son-in-law. "Come and see us, Jefferson," he said. "Come to dinner any evening. We are always alone and Kate and I will be glad to see you." "Jefferson has so little time now, father. His work and--his friends keep him pretty busy." Jefferson had noted both the pause and the sarcasm, but he said nothing. He smiled and the senator raised his hat. As the carriage drove off the young man noticed that Kate glanced at one of the upper windows where Mr. Bagley stood behind a curtain watching. Jefferson returned to the house. The psychological moment had arrived. He must go now and confront his father in the library. CHAPTER IX The library was the most important room in the Ryder mansion, for it was there that the Colossus carried through his most important business deals, and its busiest hours were those which most men devote to rest. But John Burkett Ryder never rested. There could be no rest for any man who had a thousand millions of dollars to take care of. Like Macbeth, he could sleep no more. When the hum of business life had ceased down town and he returned home from the tall building in lower Broadway, then his real work began. The day had been given to mere business routine; in his own library at night, free from inquisitive ears and prying eyes, he could devise new schemes for strengthening his grip upon the country, he could evolve more gigantic plans for adding to his already countless millions. Here the money Moloch held court like any king, with as much ceremony and more secrecy, and having for his courtiers some of the most prominent men in the political and industrial life of the nation. Corrupt senators, grafting Congressmen, ambitious railroad presidents, insolent coal barons who impudently claimed they administered the coal lands in trust for the Almighty, unscrupulous princes of finance and commerce, all visited this room to receive orders or pay from the head of the "System." Here were made and unmade governors of States, mayors of cities, judges, heads of police, cabinet ministers, even presidents. Here were turned over to confidential agents millions of dollars to overturn the people's vote in the National elections; here were distributed yearly hundreds of thousands of dollars to grafters, large and small, who had earned it in the service of the "interests." Here, secretly and unlawfully, the heads of railroads met to agree on rates which by discriminating against one locality in favour of another crushed out competition, raised the cost to the consumer, and put millions in the pockets of the Trust. Here were planned tricky financial operations, with deliberate intent to mislead and deceive the investing public, operations which would send stocks soaring one day, only a week later to put Wall Street on the verge of panic. Half a dozen suicides might result from the coup, but twice as many millions of profits had gone into the coffers of the "System." Here, too, was perpetrated the most heinous crime that can be committed against a free people--the conspiring of the Trusts abetted by the railroads, to arbitrarily raise the prices of the necessaries of life--meat, coal, oil, ice, gas--wholly without other justification than that of greed, which, with these men, was the unconquerable, all-absorbing passion. In short, everything that unscrupulous leaders of organized capital could devise to squeeze the life blood out of the patient, defenceless toiler was done within these four walls. It was a handsome room, noble in proportions and abundantly lighted by three large and deeply recessed, mullioned windows, one in the middle of the room and one at either end. The lofty ceiling was a marvellously fine example of panelled oak of Gothic design, decorated with gold, and the shelves for books which lined the walls were likewise of oak, richly carved. In the centre of the wall facing the windows was a massive and elaborately designed oak chimney-piece, reaching up to the ceiling, and having in the middle panel over the mantel a fine three-quarter length portrait of George Washington. The room was furnished sumptuously yet quietly, and fully in keeping with the rich collection of classic and modern authors that filled the bookcases, and in corners here and there stood pedestals with marble busts of Shakespeare, Goethe and Voltaire. It was the retreat of a scholar rather than of a man of affairs. When Jefferson entered, his father was seated at his desk, a long black cigar between his lips, giving instructions to Mr. Bagley. Mr. Ryder looked up quickly as the door opened and the secretary made a movement forward as if to eject the intruder, no matter who he might be. They were not accustomed to having people enter the sanctum of the Colossus so unceremoniously. But when he saw who it was, Mr. Ryder's stern, set face relaxed and he greeted his son amiably. "Why, Jeff, my boy, is that you? Just a moment, until I get rid of Bagley, and I'll be with you." Jefferson turned to the book shelves and ran over the titles while the financier continued his business with the secretary. "Now, Bagley. Come, quick. What is it?" He spoke in a rapid, explosive manner, like a man who has only a few moments to spare before he must rush to catch a train. John Ryder had been catching trains all his life, and he had seldom missed one. "Governor Rice called. He wants an appointment," said Mr. Bagley, holding out a card. "I can't see him. Tell him so," came the answer, quick as a flash. "Who else?" he demanded. "Where's your list?" Mr. Bagley took from the desk a list of names and read them over. "General Abbey telephoned. He says you promised--" "Yes, yes," interrupted Ryder impatiently, "but not here. Down town, to-morrow, any time. Next?" The secretary jotted down a note against each name and then said: "There are some people downstairs in the reception room. They are here by appointment." "Who are they?" "The National Republican Committee and Sergeant Ellison of the Secret Service from Washington," replied Mr. Bagley. "Who was here first?" demanded the financier. "Sergeant Ellison, sir." "Then I'll see him first, and the Committee afterwards. But let them all wait until I ring. I wish to speak with my son." He waved his hand and the secretary, knowing well from experience that this was a sign that there must be no further discussion, bowed respectfully and left the room. Jefferson turned and advanced towards his father, who held out his hand. "Well, Jefferson," he said kindly, "did you have a good time abroad?" "Yes, sir, thank you. Such a trip is a liberal education in itself." "Ready for work again, eh? I'm glad you're back, Jefferson. I'm busy now, but one of these days I want to have a serious talk with you in regard to your future. This artist business is all very well--for a pastime. But it's not a career--surely you can appreciate that--for a young man with such prospects as yours. Have you ever stopped to think of that?" Jefferson was silent. He did not want to displease his father; on the other hand, it was impossible to let things drift as they had been doing. There must be an understanding sooner or later. Why not now? "The truth is, sir," he began timidly, "I'd like a little talk with you now, if you can spare the time." Ryder, Sr., looked first at his watch and then at his son, who, ill at ease, sat nervously on the extreme edge of a chair. Then he said with a smile: "Well, my boy, to be perfectly frank, I can't--but--I will. Come, what is it?" Then, as if to apologize for his previous abruptness, he added, "I've had a very busy day, Jeff. What with Trans-Continental and Trans-Atlantic and Southern Pacific, and Wall Street, and Rate Bills, and Washington I feel like Atlas shouldering the world." "The world wasn't intended for one pair of shoulders to carry, sir," rejoined Jefferson calmly. His father looked at him in amazement. It was something new to hear anyone venturing to question or comment upon anything he said. "Why not?" he demanded, when he had recovered from his surprise. "Julius Caesar carried it. Napoleon carried it--to a certain extent. However, that's neither here nor there. What is it, boy?" Unable to remain a moment inactive, he commenced to pick among the mass of papers on his desk, while Jefferson was thinking what to say. The last word his father uttered gave him a cue, and he blurted out protestingly: "That's just it, sir. You forget that I'm no longer a boy. It's time to treat me as if I were a man." Ryder, Sr., leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily. "A man at twenty-eight? That's an excellent joke. Do you know that a man doesn't get his horse sense till he's forty?" "I want you to take me seriously," persisted Jefferson. Ryder, Sr., was not a patient man. His moments of good humour were of brief duration. Anything that savoured of questioning his authority always angered him. The smile went out of his face and he retorted explosively: "Go on--damn it all! Be serious if you want, only don't take so long about it. But understand one thing. I want no preaching, no philosophical or socialistic twaddle. No Tolstoi--he's a great thinker, and you're not. No Bernard Shaw--he's funny, and you're not. Now go ahead." This beginning was not very encouraging, and Jefferson felt somewhat intimidated. But he realized that he might not have another such opportunity, so he plunged right in. "I should have spoken to you before if you had let me," he said. "I often--" "If I let you?" interrupted his father. "Do you expect me to sit and listen patiently to your wild theories of social reform? You asked me one day why the wages of the idle rich was wealth and the wages of hard work was poverty, and I told you that I worked harder in one day than a tunnel digger works in a life-time. Thinking is a harder game than any. You must think or you won't know. Napoleon knew more about war than all his generals put together. I know more about money than any man living to-day. The man who knows is the man who wins. The man who takes advice isn't fit to give it. That's why I never take yours. Come, don't be a fool, Jeff--give up this art nonsense. Come back to the Trading Company. I'll make you vice-president, and I'll teach you the business of making millions." Jefferson shook his head. It was hard to have to tell his own father that he did not think the million-making business quite a respectable one, so he only murmured: "It's impossible, father. I am devoted to my work. I even intend to go away and travel a few years and see the world. It will help me considerably." Ryder, Sr., eyed his son in silence for a few moments; then he said gently: "Don't be obstinate, Jeff. Listen to me. I know the world better than you do. You mustn't go away. You are the only flesh and blood I have." He stopped speaking for a moment, as if overcome by a sudden emotion over which he had no control. Jefferson remained silent, nervously toying with a paper cutter. Seeing that his words had made no effect, Ryder thumped his desk with his fist and cried: "You see my weakness. You see that I want you with me, and now you take advantage--you take advantage--" "No, father, I don't," protested Jefferson; "but I want to go away. Although I have my studio and am practically independent, I want to go where I shall be perfectly free--where my every move will not be watched--where I can meet my fellow-man heart to heart on an equal basis, where I shall not be pointed out as the son of Ready Money Ryder. I want to make a reputation of my own as an artist." "Why not study theology and become a preacher?" sneered Ryder. Then, more amiably, he said: "No, my lad, you stay here. Study my interests--study the interests that will be yours some day." "No," said Jefferson doggedly, "I'd rather go--my work and my self-respect demand it." "Then go, damn it, go!" cried his father in a burst of anger. "I'm a fool for wasting my time with an ungrateful son." He rose from his seat and began to pace the room. "Father," exclaimed Jefferson starting forward, "you do me an injustice." "An injustice?" echoed Mr. Ryder turning round. "Ye gods! I've given you the biggest name in the commercial world; the most colossal fortune ever accumulated by one man is waiting for you, and you say I've done you an injustice!" "Yes--we are rich," said Jefferson bitterly. "But at what a cost! You do not go into the world and hear the sneers that I get everywhere. You may succeed in muzzling the newspapers and magazines, but you cannot silence public opinion. People laugh when they hear the name Ryder--when they do not weep. All your millions cannot purchase the world's respect. You try to throw millions to the public as a bone to a dog, and they decline the money on the ground that it is tainted. Doesn't that tell you what the world thinks of your methods?" Ryder laughed cynically. He went back to his desk, and, sitting facing his son, he replied: "Jefferson, you are young. It is one of the symptoms of youth to worry about public opinion. When you are as old as I am you will understand that there is only one thing which counts in this world--money. The man who has it possesses power over the man who has it not, and power is what the ambitious man loves most." He stopped to pick up a book. It was "The American Octopus." Turning again to his son, he went on: "Do you see this book? It is the literary sensation of the year. Why? Because it attacks me--the richest man in the world. It holds me up as a monster, a tyrant, a man without soul, honour or conscience, caring only for one thing--money; having but one passion--the love of power, and halting at nothing, not even at crime, to secure it. That is the portrait they draw of your father." Jefferson said nothing. He was wondering if his sire had a suspicion who wrote it and was leading up to that. But Ryder, Sr., continued: "Do I care? The more they attack me the more I like it. Their puny pen pricks have about the same effect as mosquito bites on the pachyderm. What I am, the conditions of my time made me. When I started in business a humble clerk, forty years ago, I had but one goal--success; I had but one aim--to get rich. I was lucky. I made a little money, and I soon discovered that I could make more money by outwitting my competitors in the oil fields. Railroad conditions helped me. The whole country was money mad. A wave of commercial prosperity swept over the land and I was carried along on its crest. I grew enormously rich, my millions increasing by leaps and bounds. I branched out into other interests, successful always, until my holdings grew to what they are to-day--the wonder of the twentieth century. What do I care for the world's respect when my money makes the world my slave? What respect can I have for a people that cringe before money and let it rule them? Are you aware that not a factory wheel turns, not a vote is counted, not a judge is appointed, not a legislator seated, not a president elected without my consent? I am the real ruler of the United States--not the so-called government at Washington. They are my puppets and this is my executive chamber. This power will be yours one day, boy, but you must know how to use it when it comes." "I never want it, father," said Jefferson firmly. "To me your words savour of treason. I couldn't imagine that American talking that way." He pointed to the mantel, at the picture of George Washington. Ryder, Sr., laughed. He could not help it if his son was an idealist. There was no use getting angry, so he merely shrugged his shoulders and said: "All right, Jeff. We'll discuss the matter later, when you've cut your wisdom teeth. Just at present you're in the clouds. But you spoke of my doing you an injustice. How can my love of power do you an injustice?" "Because," replied Jefferson, "you exert that power over your family as well as over your business associates. You think and will for everybody in the house, for everyone who comes in contact with you. Yours is an influence no one seems able to resist. You robbed me of my right to think. Ever since I was old enough to think, you have thought for me; ever since I was old enough to choose, you have chosen for me. You have chosen that I should marry Kate Roberts. That is the one thing I wished to speak to you about. The marriage is impossible." Ryder, Sr., half sprang from his seat. He had listened patiently, he thought, to all that his headstrong son had said, but that he should repudiate in this unceremonious fashion what was a tacit understanding between the two families, and, what was more, run the risk of injuring the Ryder interests--that was inconceivable. Leaving his desk, he advanced into the centre of the room, and folding his arms confronted Jefferson. "So," he said sternly, "this is your latest act of rebellion, is it? You are going to welsh on your word? You are going to jilt the girl?" "I never gave my word," answered Jefferson hotly. "Nor did Kate understand that an engagement existed. You can't expect me to marry a girl I don't care a straw about. It would not be fair to her." "Have you stopped to think whether it would be fair to me?" thundered his father. His face was pale with anger, his jet-black eyes flashed, and his white hair seemed to bristle with rage. He paced the floor for a few moments, and then turning to Jefferson, who had not moved, he said more calmly: "Don't be a fool, Jeff. I don't want to think for you, or to choose for you, or to marry for you. I did not interfere when you threw up the position I made for you in the Trading Company and took that studio. I realized that you were restless under the harness, so I gave you plenty of rein. But I know so much better than you what is best for you. Believe me I do. Don't--don't be obstinate. This marriage means a great deal to my interests--to your interests. Kate's father is all powerful in the Senate. He'll never forgive this disappointment. Hang it all, you liked the girl once, and I made sure that--" He stopped suddenly, and the expression on his face changed as a new light dawned upon him. "It isn't that Rossmore girl, is it?" he demanded. His face grew dark and his jaw clicked as he said between his teeth: "I told you some time ago how I felt about her. If I thought that it was Rossmore's daughter! You know what's going to happen to him, don't you?" Thus appealed to, Jefferson thought this was the most favourable opportunity he would have to redeem his promise to Shirley. So, little anticipating the tempest he was about to unchain, he answered: "I am familiar with the charges that they have trumped up against him. Needless to say, I consider him entirely innocent. What's more, I firmly believe he is the victim of a contemptible conspiracy. And I'm going to make it my business to find out who the plotters are. I came to ask you to help me. Will you?" For a moment Ryder was speechless from utter astonishment. Then, as he realized the significance of his son's words and their application to himself he completely lost control of himself. His face became livid, and he brought his fist down on his desk with a force that shook the room. "I will see him in hell first!" he cried. "Damn him! He has always opposed me. He has always defied my power, and now his daughter has entrapped my son. So it's her you want to go to, eh? Well, I can't make you marry a girl you don't want, but I can prevent you throwing yourself away on the daughter of a man who is about to be publicly disgraced, and, by God, I will." "Poor old Rossmore," said Jefferson bitterly. "If the history of every financial transaction were made known, how many of us would escape public disgrace? Would you?" he cried. Ryder, Sr., rose, his hands working dangerously. He made a movement as if about to advance on his son, but by a supreme effort he controlled himself. "No, upon my word, it's no use disinheriting you, you wouldn't care. I think you'd be glad; on my soul, I do!" Then calming down once more, he added: "Jefferson, give me your word of honour that your object in going away is not to find out this girl and marry her unknown to me. I don't mind your losing your heart, but, damn it, don't lose your head. Give me your hand on it." Jefferson reluctantly held out his hand. "If I thought you would marry that girl unknown to me, I'd have Rossmore sent out of the country and the woman too. Listen, boy. This man is my enemy, and I show no mercy to my enemies. There are more reasons than one why you cannot marry Miss Rossmore. If she knew one of them she would not marry you." "What reasons?" demanded Jefferson. "The principal one," said Ryder, slowly and deliberately, and eyeing his son keenly as if to judge of the effect of his words, "the principal one is that it was through my agents that the demand was made for her father's impeachment." "Ah," cried Jefferson, "then I guessed aright! Oh, father, how could you have done that? If you only knew him!" Ryder, Sr., had regained command of his temper, and now spoke calmly enough. "Jefferson, I don't have to make any apologies to you for the way I conduct my business. The facts contained in the charge were brought to my attention. I did not see why I should spare him. He never spared me. I shall not interfere, and the probabilities are that he will be impeached. Senator Roberts said this afternoon that it was a certainty. You see yourself how impossible a marriage with Miss Rossmore would be, don't you?" "Yes, father, I see now. I have nothing more to say." "Do you still intend going away?" "Yes," replied Jefferson bitterly. "Why not? You have taken away the only reason why I should stay." "Think it well over, lad. Marry Kate or not, as you please, but I want you to stay here." "It's no use. My mind is made up," answered Jefferson decisively. The telephone rang, and Jefferson got up to go. Mr. Ryder took up the receiver. "Hallo! What's that? Sergeant Ellison? Yes, send him up." Putting the telephone down, Ryder, Sr., rose, and crossing the room accompanied his son to the door. "Think it well over, Jeff. Don't be hasty." "I have thought it over, sir, and I have decided to go." A few moments later Jefferson left the house. Ryder, Sr., went back to his desk and sat for a moment in deep thought. For the first time in his life he was face to face with defeat; for the first time he had encountered a will as strong as his own. He who could rule parliaments and dictate to governments now found himself powerless to rule his own son. At all costs, he mused, the boy's infatuation for Judge Rossmore's daughter must be checked, even if he had to blacken the girl's character as well as the father's, or, as a last resort, send the entire family out of the country. He had not lost sight of his victim since the carefully prepared crash in Wall Street, and the sale of the Rossmore home following the bankruptcy of the Great Northwestern Mining Company. His agents had reported their settlement in the quiet little village on Long Island, and he had also learned of Miss Rossmore's arrival from Europe, which coincided strangely with the home-coming of his own son. He decided, therefore, to keep a closer watch on Massapequa now than ever, and that is why to-day's call of Sergeant Ellison, a noted sleuth in the government service, found so ready a welcome. The door opened, and Mr. Bagley entered, followed by a tall, powerfully built man whose robust physique and cheap looking clothes contrasted strangely with the delicate, ultra-fashionably attired English secretary. "Take a seat, Sergeant," said Mr. Ryder, cordially motioning his visitor to a chair. The man sat down gingerly on one of the rich leather-upholstered chairs. His manner was nervous and awkward, as if intimidated in the presence of the financier. "Are the Republican Committee still waiting?" demanded Mr. Ryder. "Yes, sir," replied the secretary. "I'll see them in a few minutes. Leave me with Sergeant Ellison." Mr. Bagley bowed and retired. "Well, Sergeant, what have you got to report?" He opened a box of cigars that stood on the desk and held it out to the detective. "Take a cigar," he said amiably. The man took a cigar, and also the match which Mr. Ryder held out. The financier knew how to be cordial with those who could serve him. "Thanks. This is a good one," smiled the sleuth, sniffing at the weed. "We don't often get a chance at such as these." "It ought to be good," laughed Ryder. "They cost two dollars apiece." The detective was so surprised at this unheard of extravagance that he inhaled a puff of smoke which almost choked him. It was like burning money. Ryder, with his customary bluntness, came right down to business. "Well, what have you been doing about the book?" he demanded. "Have you found the author of 'The American Octopus'?" "No, sir, I have not. I confess I'm baffled. The secret has been well kept. The publishers have shut up like a clam. There's only one thing that I'm pretty well sure of." "What's that?" demanded Ryder, interested. "That no such person as Shirley Green exists." "Oh," exclaimed, the financier, "then you think it is a mere nom de plume?" "Yes, sir." "And what do you think was the reason for preserving the anonymity?" "Well, you see, sir, the book deals with a big subject. It gives some hard knocks, and the author, no doubt, felt a little timid about launching it under his or her real name. At least that's my theory, sir." "And a good one, no doubt," said Mr. Ryder. Then he added: "That makes me all the more anxious to find out who it is. I would willingly give this moment a check for $5,000 to know who wrote it. Whoever it is, knows me as well as I know myself. We must find the author." The sleuth was silent for a moment. Then he said: "There might be one way to reach the author, but it will be successful only in the event of her being willing to be known and come out into the open. Suppose you write to her in care of the publishers. They would certainly forward the letter to wherever she may be. If she does not want you to know who she is she will ignore your letter and remain in the background. If, on the contrary, she has no fear of you, and is willing to meet you, she will answer the letter." "Ah, I never thought of that!" exclaimed Ryder. "It's a good idea. I'll write such a letter at once. It shall go to-night." He unhooked the telephone and asked Mr. Bagley to come up. A few seconds later the secretary entered the room. "Bagley," said Mr. Ryder, "I want you to write a letter for me to Miss Shirley Green, author of that book 'The American Octopus. We will address it care of her publishers, Littleton & Co. Just say that if convenient I should like a personal interview with her at my office, No. 36 Broadway, in relation to her book, 'The American Octopus.' See that it is mailed to-night. That's all." Mr. Bagley bowed and retired. Mr. Ryder turned to the secret service agent. "There, that's settled. We'll see how it works. And now, Sergeant, I have another job for you, and if you are faithful to my interests you will not find me unappreciative. Do you know a little place on Long Island called Massapequa?" "Yes," grinned the detective, "I know it. They've got some fine specimens of 'skeeters' there." Paying no attention to this jocularity, Mr. Ryder continued: "Judge Rossmore is living there--pending the outcome of his case in the Senate. His daughter has just arrived from Europe. My son Jefferson came home on the same ship. They are a little more friendly than I care to have them. You understand. I want to know if my son visits the Rossmores, and if he does I wish to be kept informed of all that's going on. You understand?" "Perfectly, sir. You shall know everything." Mr. Ryder took a blank check from his desk and proceeded to fill it up. Then handing it to the detective, he said: "Here is $500 for you. Spare neither trouble or expense." "Thank you, sir," said the man as he pocketed the money. "Leave it to me." "That's about all, I think. Regarding the other matter, we'll see how the letter works." He touched a bell and rose, which was a signal to the visitor that the interview was at an end. Mr. Bagley entered. "Sergeant Ellison is going," said Mr. Ryder. "Have him shown out, and send the Republican Committee up." CHAPTER X "What!" exclaimed Shirley, changing colour, "you believe that John Burkett Ryder is at the bottom of this infamous accusation against father?" It was the day following her arrival at Massapequa, and Shirley, the judge and Stott were all three sitting on the porch. Until now, by common consent, any mention of the impeachment proceedings had been avoided by everyone. The previous afternoon and evening had been spent listening to an account of Shirley's experiences in Europe and a smile had flitted across even the judge's careworn face as his daughter gave a humorous description of the picturesque Paris student with their long hair and peg-top trousers, while Stott simply roared with laughter. Ah, it was good to laugh again after so much trouble and anxiety! But while Shirley avoided the topic that lay nearest her heart, she was consumed with a desire to tell her father of the hope she had of enlisting the aid of John Burkett Ryder. The great financier was certainly able to do anything he chose, and had not his son Jefferson promised to win him over to their cause? So, to-day, after Mrs. Rossmore and her sister had gone down to the village to make some purchases Shirley timidly broached the matter. She asked Stott and her father to tell her everything, to hold back nothing. She wanted to hear the worst. Stott, therefore, started to review the whole affair from the beginning, explaining how her father in his capacity as Judge of the Supreme Court had to render decisions, several of which were adverse to the corporate interests of a number of rich men, and how since that time these powerful interests had used all their influence to get him put off the Bench. He told her about the Transcontinental case and how the judge had got mysteriously tangled up in the Great Northern Mining Company, and of the scandalous newspaper rumours, followed by the news of the Congressional inquiry. Then he told her about the panic in Wall Street, the sale of the house on Madison Avenue and the removal to Long Island. "That is the situation," said Stott when he had finished. "We are waiting now to see what the Senate will do. We hope for the best. It seems impossible that the Senate will condemn a man whose whole life is like an open book, but unfortunately the Senate is strongly Republican and the big interests are in complete control. Unless support comes from some unexpected quarter we must be prepared for anything." Support from some unexpected quarter! Stott's closing words rang in Shirley's head. Was that not just what she had to offer? Unable to restrain herself longer and her heart beating tumultuously from suppressed emotion, she cried: "We'll have that support! We'll have it! I've got it already! I wanted to surprise you! Father, the most powerful man in the United States will save you from being dishonoured!" The two men leaned forward in eager interest. What could the girl mean? Was she serious or merely jesting? But Shirley was never more serious in her life. She was jubilant at the thought that she had arrived home in time to invoke the aid of this powerful ally. She repeated enthusiastically: "We need not worry any more. He has but to say a word and these proceedings will be instantly dropped. They would not dare act against his veto. Did you hear, father, your case is as good as won!" "What do you mean, child? Who is this unknown friend?" "Surely you can guess when I say the most powerful man in the United States? None other than John Burkett Ryder!" She stopped short to watch the effect which this name would have on her hearers. But to her surprise neither her father nor Stott displayed the slightest emotion or even interest. Puzzled at this cold reception, she repeated: "Did you hear, father--John Burkett Ryder will come to your assistance. I came home on the same ship as his son and he promised to secure his father's aid." The judge puffed heavily at his pipe and merely shook his head, making no reply. Stott explained: "We can't look for help from that quarter, Shirley. You don't expect a man to cut loose his own kite, do you?" "What do you mean?" demanded Shirley, mystified. "Simply this--that John Burkett Ryder is the very man who is responsible for all your father's misfortunes." The girl sank back in her seat pale and motionless, as if she had received a blow. Was it possible? Could Jefferson's father have done them such a wrong as this? She well knew that Ryder, Sr., was a man who would stop at nothing to accomplish his purpose--this she had demonstrated conclusively in her book--but she had never dreamed that his hand would ever be directed against her own flesh and blood. Decidedly some fatality was causing Jefferson and herself to drift further and further apart. First, her father's trouble. That alone would naturally have separated them. And now this discovery that Jefferson's father had done hers this wrong. All idea of marriage was henceforth out of the question. That was irrevocable. Of course, she could not hold Jefferson to blame for methods which he himself abhorred. She would always think as much of him as ever, but whether her father emerged safely from the trial in the Senate or not--no matter what the outcome of the impeachment proceedings might be, Jefferson could never be anything else than a Ryder and from now on there would be an impassable gulf between the Rossmores and the Ryders. The dove does not mate with the hawk. "Do you really believe this, that John Ryder deliberately concocted the bribery charge with the sole purpose of ruining my father?" demanded Shirley when she had somewhat recovered. "There is no other solution of the mystery possible," answered Stott. "The Trusts found they could not fight him in the open, in a fair, honest way, so they plotted in the dark. Ryder was the man who had most to lose by your father's honesty on the bench. Ryder was the man he hit the hardest when he enjoined his Transcontinental Railroad. Ryder, I am convinced, is the chief conspirator." "But can such things be in a civilized community?" cried Shirley indignantly. "Cannot he be exposed, won't the press take the matter up, cannot we show conspiracy?" "It sounds easy, but it isn't," replied Stott. "I have had a heap of experience with the law, my child, and I know what I'm talking about. They're too clever to be caught tripping. They've covered their tracks well, be sure of that. As to the newspapers--when did you ever hear of them championing a man when he's down?" "And you, father--do you believe Ryder did this?" "I have no longer any doubt of it," answered the judge. "I think John Ryder would see me dead before he would raise a finger to help me. His answer to my demand for my letters convinced me that he was the arch plotter." "What letters do you refer to?" demanded Shirley. "The letters I wrote to him in regard to my making an investment. He advised the purchase of certain stock. I wrote him two letters at the time, which letters if I had them now would go a long way to clearing me of this charge of bribery, for they plainly showed that I regarded the transaction as a bona fide investment. Since this trouble began I wrote to Ryder asking him to return me these letters so I might use them in my defence. The only reply I got was an insolent note from his secretary saying that Mr. Ryder had forgotten all about the transaction, and in any case had not the letters I referred to." "Couldn't you compel him to return them?" asked Shirley. "We could never get at him," interrupted Stott. "The man is guarded as carefully as the Czar." "Still," objected Shirley, "it is possible that he may have lost the letters or even never received them." "Oh, he has them safe enough," replied Stott. "A man like Ryder keeps every scrap of paper, with the idea that it may prove useful some day. The letters are lying somewhere in his desk. Besides, after the Transcontinental decision he was heard to say that he'd have Judge Rossmore off the Bench inside of a year." "And it wasn't a vain boast--he's done it," muttered the judge. Shirley relapsed into silence. Her brain was in a whirl. It was true then. This merciless man of money, this ogre of monopolistic corporations, this human juggernaut had crushed her father merely because by his honesty he interfered with his shady business deals! Ah, why had she spared him in her book? She felt now that she had been too lenient, not bitter enough, not sufficiently pitiless. Such a man was entitled to no mercy. Yes, it was all clear enough now. John Burkett Ryder, the head of "the System," the plutocrat whose fabulous fortune gave him absolute control over the entire country, which invested him with a personal power greater than that of any king, this was the man who now dared attack the Judiciary, the corner stone of the Constitution, the one safeguard of the people's liberty. Where would it end? How long would the nation tolerate being thus ruthlessly trodden under the unclean heels of an insolent oligarchy? The capitalists, banded together for the sole purpose of pillage and loot, had already succeeded in enslaving the toiler. The appalling degradation of the working classes, the sordidness and demoralizing squalor in which they passed their lives, the curse of drink, the provocation to crime, the shame of the sweat shops--all which evils in our social system she had seen as a Settlement worker, were directly traceable to Centralized Wealth. The labor unions regulated wages and hours, but they were powerless to control the prices of the necessaries of life. The Trusts could at pleasure create famine or plenty. They usually willed to make it famine so they themselves might acquire more millions with which to pay for marble palaces, fast motor cars, ocean-going yachts and expensive establishments at Newport. Food was ever dearer and of poorer quality, clothes cost more, rents and taxes were higher. She thought of the horrors in the packing houses at Chicago recently made the subject of a sensational government report--putrid, pestiferous meats put up for human food amid conditions of unspeakable foulness, freely exposed to deadly germs from the expectorations of work people suffering from tuberculosis, in unsanitary rotten buildings soaked through with blood and every conceivable form of filth and decay, the beef barons careless and indifferent to the dictates of common decency so long as they could make more money. And while our public gasped in disgust at the sickening revelations of the Beef scandal and foreign countries quickly cancelled their contracts for American prepared meats, the millionaire packer, insolent in the possession of wealth stolen from a poisoned public, impudently appeared in public in his fashionable touring car, with head erect and self-satisfied, wholly indifferent to his shame. These and other evidences of the plutocracy's cruel grip upon the nation had ended by exasperating the people. There must be a limit somewhere to the turpitudes of a degenerate class of nouveaux riches. The day of reckoning was fast approaching for the grafters and among the first to taste the vengeance of the people would be the Colossus. But while waiting for the people to rise in their righteous wrath, Ryder was all powerful, and if it were true that he had instituted these impeachment proceedings her father had little chance. What could be done? They could not sit and wait, as Stott had said, for the action of the Senate. If it were true that Ryder controlled the Senate as he controlled everything else her father was doomed. No, they must find some other way. And long after the judge and Stott had left for the city Shirley sat alone on the porch engrossed in thought, taxing her brain to find some way out of the darkness. And when presently her mother and aunt returned they found her still sitting there, silent and preoccupied. If they only had those two letters, she thought. They alone might save her father. But how could they be got at? Mr. Ryder had put them safely away, no doubt. He would not give them up. She wondered how it would be to go boldly to him and appeal to whatever sense of honour and fairness that might be lying latent within him. No, such a man would not know what the terms "honour," "fairness" meant. She pondered upon it all day and at night when she went tired to bed it was her last thought as she dropped off to sleep. The following morning broke clear and fine. It was one of those glorious, ideal days of which we get perhaps half a dozen during the whole summer, days when the air is cool and bracing, champagne-like in its exhilarating effect, and when Nature dons her brightest dress, when the atmosphere is purer, the grass greener, the sky bluer, the flowers sweeter and the birds sing in more joyous chorus, when all creation seems in tune. Days that make living worth while, when one can forget the ugliness, the selfishness, the empty glitter of the man-made city and walk erect and buoyant in the open country as in the garden of God. Shirley went out for a long walk. She preferred to go alone so she would not have to talk. Hers was one of those lonely, introspective natures that resent the intrusion of aimless chatter when preoccupied with serious thoughts. Long Island was unknown territory to her and it all looked very flat and uninteresting, but she loved the country, and found keen delight in the fresh, pure air and the sweet scent of new mown hay waited from the surrounding fields. In her soft, loosefitting linen dress, her white canvas shoes, garden hat trimmed with red roses, and lace parasol, she made an attractive picture and every passer-by--with the exception of one old farmer and he was half blind--turned to look at this good-looking girl, a stranger in those parts and whose stylish appearance suggested Fifth Avenue rather than the commonplace purlieus of Massapequa. Every now and then Shirley espied in the distance the figure of a man which she thought she recognized as that of Jefferson. Had he come, after all? The blood went coursing tumultuously through her veins only a moment later to leave her face a shade paler as the man came nearer and she saw he was a stranger. She wondered what he was doing, if he gave her a thought, if he had spoken to his father and what the latter had said. She could realize now what Mr. Ryder's reply had been. Then she wondered what her future life would be. She could do nothing, of course, until the Senate had passed upon her father's case, but it was imperative that she get to work. In a day or two, she would call on her publishers and learn how her book was selling. She might get other commissions. If she could not make enough money in literary work she would have to teach. It was a dreary outlook at best, and she sighed as she thought of the ambitions that had once stirred her breast. All the brightness seemed to have gone out of her life, her father disgraced, Jefferson now practically lost to her--only her work remained. As she neared the cottage on her return home she caught sight of the letter carrier approaching the gate. Instantly she thought of Jefferson, and she hurried to intercept the man. Perhaps he had written instead of coming. "Miss Shirley Rossmore?" said the man eyeing her interrogatively. "That's I," said Shirley. The postman handed her a letter and passed on. Shirley glanced quickly at the superscription. No, it was not from Jefferson; she knew his handwriting too well. The envelope, moreover, bore the firm name of her publishers. She tore it open and found that it merely contained another letter which the publishers had forwarded. This was addressed to Miss Shirley Green and ran as follows: DEAR MADAM.--If convenient, I should like to see you at my office, No. 36 Broadway, in relation to your book "The American Octopus." Kindly inform me as to the day and hour at which I may expect you. Yours truly, JOHN BURKETT RYDER, per B. Shirley almost shouted from sheer excitement. At first she was alarmed--the name John Burkett Ryder was such a bogey to frighten bad children with, she thought he might want to punish her for writing about him as she had. She hurried to the porch and sat there reading the letter over and over and her brain began to evolve ideas. She had been wondering how she could get at Mr. Ryder and here he was actually asking her to call on him. Evidently he had not the slightest idea of her identity, for he had been able to reach her only through her publishers and no doubt he had exhausted every other means of discovering her address. The more she pondered over it the more she began to see in this invitation a way of helping her father. Yes, she would go and beard the lion in his den, but she would not go to his office. She would accept the invitation only on condition that the interview took place in the Ryder mansion where undoubtedly the letters would be found. She decided to act immediately. No time was to be lost, so she procured a sheet of paper and an envelope and wrote as follows: MR. JOHN BURKETT RYDER, Dear Sir.--I do not call upon gentlemen at their business office. Yours, etc., SHIRLEY GREEN. Her letter was abrupt and at first glance seemed hardly calculated to bring about what she wanted--an invitation to call at the Ryder home, but she was shrewd enough to see that if Ryder wrote to her at all it was because he was most anxious to see her and her abruptness would not deter him from trying again. On the contrary, the very unusualness of anyone thus dictating to him would make him more than ever desirous of making her acquaintance. So Shirley mailed the letter and awaited with confidence for Ryder's reply. So certain was she that one would come that she at once began to form her plan of action. She would leave Massapequa at once, and her whereabouts must remain a secret even from her own family. As she intended to go to the Ryder house in the assumed character of Shirley Green, it would never do to run the risk of being followed home by a Ryder detective to the Rossmore cottage. She would confide in one person only--Judge Stott. He would know where she was and would be in constant communication with her. But, otherwise, she must be alone to conduct the campaign as she judged fit. She would go at once to New York and take rooms in a boarding house where she would be known as Shirley Green. As for funds to meet her expenses, she had her diamonds, and would they not be filling a more useful purpose if sold to defray the cost of saving her father than in mere personal adornment? So that evening, while her mother was talking with the judge, she beckoned Stott over to the corner where she was sitting: "Judge Stott," she began, "I have a plan." He smiled indulgently at her. "Another friend like that of yesterday?" he asked. "No," replied the girl, "listen. I am in earnest now and I want you to help me. You said that no one on earth could resist John Burkett Ryder, that no one could fight against the Money Power. Well, do you know what I am going to do?" There was a quiver in her voice and her nostrils were dilated like those of a thoroughbred eager to run the race. She had risen from her seat and stood facing him, her fists clenched, her face set and determined. Stott had never seen her in this mood and he gazed at her half admiringly, half curiously. "What will you do?" he asked with a slightly ironical inflection in his voice. "I am going to fight John Burkett Ryder!" she cried. Stott looked at her open-mouthed. "You?" he said. "Yes, I," said Shirley. "I'm going to him and I intend to get those letters if he has them." Stott shook his head. "My dear child," he said, "what are you talking about? How can you expect to reach Ryder? We couldn't." "I don't know just how yet," replied Shirley, "but I'm going to try. I love my father and I'm going to leave nothing untried to save him." "But what can you do?" persisted Stott. "The matter has been sifted over and over by some of the greatest minds in the country." "Has any woman sifted it over?" demanded Shirley. "No, but--" stammered Stott. "Then it's about time one did," said the girl decisively. "Those letters my father speaks of--they would be useful, would they not?" "They would be invaluable." "Then I'll get them. If not--" "But I don't understand how you're going to get at Ryder," interrupted Stott. "This is how," replied Shirley, passing over to him the letter she had received that afternoon. As Stott recognized the well-known signature and read the contents, the expression of his face changed. He gasped for breath and sank into a chair from sheer astonishment. "Ah, that's different!" he cried, "that's different!" Briefly Shirley outlined her plan, explaining that she would go to live in the city immediately and conduct her campaign from there. If she was successful, it might save her father and if not, no harm could come of it. Stott demurred at first. He did not wish to bear alone the responsibility of such an adventure. There was no knowing what might happen to her, visiting a strange house under an assumed name. But when he saw how thoroughly in earnest she was and that she was ready to proceed without him, he capitulated. He agreed that she might be able to find the missing letters or if not, that she might make some impression on Ryder himself. She could show interest in the judge's case as a disinterested outsider and so might win his sympathies. From being a skeptic, Stott now became enthusiastic. He promised to cooperate in every way and to keep Shirley's whereabouts an absolute secret. The girl, therefore, began to make her preparations for departure from home by telling her parents that she had accepted an invitation to spend a week or two with an old college chum in New York. That same evening her mother, the judge, and Stott went for a stroll after dinner and left her to take care of the house. They had wanted Shirley to go, too, but she pleaded fatigue. The truth was that she wanted to be alone so she could ponder undisturbed over her plans. It was a clear, starlit night, with no moon, and Shirley sat on the porch listening to the chirping of the crickets and idly watching the flashes of the mysterious fireflies. She was in no mood for reading and sat for a long time rocking herself, engrossed in her thoughts. Suddenly she heard someone unfasten the garden gate. It was too soon for the return of the promenaders; it must be a visitor. Through the uncertain penumbra of the garden she discerned approaching a form which looked familiar. Yes, now there was no doubt possible. It was, indeed, Jefferson Ryder. She hurried down the porch to greet him. No matter what the father had done she could never think any the less of the son. He took her hand and for several moments neither one spoke. There are times when silence is more eloquent than speech and this was one of them. The gentle grip of his big strong hand expressed more tenderly than any words, the sympathy that lay in his heart for the woman he loved. Shirley said quietly: "You have come at last, Jefferson." "I came as soon as I could," he replied gently. "I saw Father only yesterday." "You need not tell me what he said," Shirley hastened to say. Jefferson made no reply. He understood what she meant. He hung his head and hit viciously with his walking stick at the pebbles that lay at his feet. She went on: "I know everything now. It was foolish of me to think that Mr. Ryder would ever help us." "I can't help it in any way," blurted out Jefferson. "I have not the slightest influence over him. His business methods I consider disgraceful--you understand that, don't you, Shirley?" The girl laid her hand on his arm and replied kindly: "Of course, Jeff, we know that. Come up and sit down." He followed her on the porch and drew up a rocker beside her. "They are all out for a walk," she explained. "I'm glad," he said frankly. "I wanted a quiet talk with you. I did not care to meet anyone. My name must be odious to your people." Both were silent, feeling a certain awkwardness. They seemed to have drifted apart in some way since those delightful days in Paris and on the ship. Then he said: "I'm going away, but I couldn't go until I saw you." "You are going away?" exclaimed Shirley, surprised. "Yes," he said, "I cannot stand it any more at home. I had a hot talk with my father yesterday about one thing and another. He and I don't chin well together. Besides this matter of your father's impeachment has completely discouraged me. All the wealth in the world could never reconcile me to such methods! I'm ashamed of the role my own flesh and blood has played in that miserable affair. I can't express what I feel about it." "Yes," sighed Shirley, "it is hard to believe that you are the son of that man!" "How is your father?" inquired Jefferson. "How does he take it?" "Oh, his heart beats and he can see and hear and speak," replied Shirley sadly, "but he is only a shadow of what he once was. If the trial goes against him, I don't think he'll survive it." "It is monstrous," cried Jefferson. "To think that my father should be responsible for this thing!" "We are still hoping for the best," added Shirley, "but the outlook is dark." "But what are you going to do?" he asked. "These surroundings are not for you--" He looked around at the cheap furnishings which he could see through the open window and his face showed real concern. "I shall teach or write, or go out as governess," replied Shirley with a tinge of bitterness. Then smiling sadly she added: "Poverty is easy; it is unmerited disgrace which is hard." The young man drew his chair closer and took hold of the hand that lay in her lap. She made no resistance. "Shirley," he said, "do you remember that talk we had on the ship? I asked you to be my wife. You led me to believe that you were not indifferent to me. I ask you again to marry me. Give me the right to take care of you and yours. I am the son of the world's richest man, but I don't want his money. I have earned a competence of my own--enough to live on comfortably. We will go away where you and your father and mother will make their home with us. Do not let the sins of the fathers embitter the lives of the children." "Mine has not sinned," said Shirley bitterly. "I wish I could say the same of mine," replied Jefferson. "It is because the clouds are dark about you that I want to come into your life to comfort you." The girl shook her head. "No, Jefferson, the circumstances make such a marriage impossible. Your family and everybody else would say that I had inveigled you into it. It is even more impossible now than I thought it was when I spoke to you on the ship. Then I was worried about my father's trouble and could give no thought to anything else. Now it is different. Your father's action has made our union impossible for ever. I thank you for the honour you have done me. I do like you. I like you well enough to be your wife, but I will not accept this sacrifice on your part. Your offer, coming at such a critical time, is dictated only by your noble, generous nature, by your sympathy for our misfortune. Afterwards, you might regret it. If my father were convicted and driven from the bench and you found you had married the daughter of a disgraced man you would be ashamed of us all, and if I saw that it would break my heart." Emotion stopped her utterance and she buried her face in her hands weeping silently. "Shirley," said Jefferson gently, "you are wrong. I love you for yourself, not because of your trouble. You know that. I shall never love any other woman but you. If you will not say 'yes' now, I shall go away as I told my father I would and one day I shall come back and then if you are still single I shall ask you again to be my wife." "Where are you going?" she asked. "I shall travel for a year and then, may be, I shall stay a couple of years in Paris, studying at the Beaux Arts. Then I may go to Rome. If I am to do anything worth while in the career I have chosen I must have that European training." "Paris! Rome!" echoed Shirley. "How I envy you! Yes, you are right. Get away from this country where the only topic, the only thought is money, where the only incentive to work is dollars. Go where there are still some ideals, where you can breathe the atmosphere of culture and art." Forgetting momentarily her own troubles, Shirley chatted on about life in the art centres of Europe, advised Jefferson where to go, with whom to study. She knew people in Paris, Rome and Munich and she would give him letters to them. Only, if he wanted to perfect himself in the languages, he ought to avoid Americans and cultivate the natives. Then, who could tell? if he worked hard and was lucky, he might have something exhibited at the Salon and return to America a famous painter. "If I do," smiled Jefferson, "you shall be the first to congratulate me. I shall come and ask you to be my wife. May I?" he added. Shirley smiled gravely. "Get famous first. You may not want me then." "I shall always want you," he whispered hoarsely, bending over her. In the dim light of the porch he saw that her tear-stained face was drawn and pale. He rose and held out his hand. "Good-bye," he said simply. "Good-bye, Jefferson." She rose and put her hand in his. "We shall always be friends. I, too, am going away." "You going away--where to?" he asked surprised. "I have work to do in connection with my father's case," she said. "You?" said Jefferson puzzled. "You have work to do--what work?" "I can't say what it is, Jefferson. There are good reasons why I can't. You must take my word for it that it is urgent and important work." Then she added: "You go your way, Jefferson; I will go mine. It was not our destiny to belong to each other. You will become famous as an artist. And I--" "And you--" echoed Jefferson. "I--I shall devote my life to my father. It's no use, Jefferson--really--I've thought it all out. You must not come back to me--you understand. We must be alone with our grief--father and I. Good-bye." He raised her hand to his lips. "Good-bye, Shirley. Don't forget me. I shall come back for you." He went down the porch and she watched him go out of the gate and down the road until she could see his figure no longer. Then she turned back and sank into her chair and burying her face in her handkerchief she gave way to a torrent of tears which afforded some relief to the weight on her heart. Presently the others returned from their walk and she told them about the visitor. "Mr. Ryder's son, Jefferson, was here. We crossed on the same ship. I introduced him to Judge Stott on the dock." The judge looked surprised, but he merely said: "I hope for his sake that he is a different man from his father." "He is," replied Shirley simply, and nothing more was said. Two days went by, during which Shirley went on completing the preparations for her visit to New York. It was arranged that Stott should escort her to the city. Shortly before they started for the train a letter arrived for Shirley. Like the first one it had been forwarded by her publishers. It read as follows: MISS SHIRLEY GREEN, Dear Madam.--I shall be happy to see you at my residence--Fifth Avenue--any afternoon that you will mention. Yours very truly, JOHN BURKETT RYDER, per B. Shirley smiled in triumph as, unseen by her father and mother, she passed it over to Stott. She at once sat down and wrote this reply: MR. JOHN BURKETT RYDER, Dear Sir.--I am sorry that I am unable to comply with your request. I prefer the invitation to call at your private residence should come from Mrs. Ryder. Yours, etc., SHIRLEY GREEN. She laughed as she showed this to Stott: "He'll write me again," she said, "and next time his wife will sign the letter." An hour later she left Massapequa for the city. CHAPTER XI The Hon. Fitzroy Bagley had every reason to feel satisfied with himself. His affaire de coeur with the Senator's daughter was progressing more smoothly than ever, and nothing now seemed likely to interfere with his carefully prepared plans to capture an American heiress. The interview with Kate Roberts in the library, so awkwardly disturbed by Jefferson's unexpected intrusion, had been followed by other interviews more secret and more successful, and the plausible secretary had contrived so well to persuade the girl that he really thought the world of her, and that a brilliant future awaited her as his wife, that it was not long before he found her in a mood to refuse him nothing. Bagley urged immediate marriage; he insinuated that Jefferson had treated her shamefully and that she owed it to herself to show the world that there were other men as good as the one who had jilted her. He argued that in view of the Senator being bent on the match with Ryder's son it would be worse than useless for him, Bagley, to make formal application for her hand, so, as he explained, the only thing which remained was a runaway marriage. Confronted with the fait accompli, papa Roberts would bow to the inevitable. They could get married quietly in town, go away for a short trip, and when the Senator had gotten over his first disappointment they would be welcomed back with open arms. Kate listened willingly enough to this specious reasoning. In her heart she was piqued at Jefferson's indifference and she was foolish enough to really believe that this marriage with a British nobleman, twice removed, would be in the nature of a triumph over him. Besides, this project of an elopement appealed strangely to her frivolous imagination; it put her in the same class as all her favourite novel heroines. And it would be capital fun! Meantime, Senator Roberts, in blissful ignorance of this little plot against his domestic peace, was growing impatient and he approached his friend Ryder once more on the subject of his son Jefferson. The young man, he said, had been back from Europe some time. He insisted on knowing what his attitude was towards his daughter. If they were engaged to be married he said there should be a public announcement of the fact. It was unfair to him and a slight to his daughter to let matters hang fire in this unsatisfactory way and he hinted that both himself and his daughter might demand their passports from the Ryder mansion unless some explanation were forthcoming. Ryder was in a quandary. He had no wish to quarrel with his useful Washington ally; he recognized the reasonableness of his complaint. Yet what could he do? Much as he himself desired the marriage, his son was obstinate and showed little inclination to settle down. He even hinted at attractions in another quarter. He did not tell the Senator of his recent interview with his son when the latter made it very plain that the marriage could never take place. Ryder, Sr., had his own reasons for wishing to temporize. It was quite possible that Jefferson might change his mind and abandon his idea of going abroad and he suggested to the Senator that perhaps if he, the Senator, made the engagement public through the newspapers it might have the salutary effect of forcing his son's hand. So a few mornings later there appeared among the society notes in several of the New York papers this paragraph: "The engagement is announced of Miss Katherine Roberts, only daughter of senator Roberts of Wisconsin, to Jefferson Ryder, son of Mr. John Burkett Ryder." Two persons in New York happened to see the item about the same time and both were equally interested, although it affected them in a different manner. One was Shirley Rossmore, who had chanced to pick up the newspaper at the breakfast table in her boarding house. "So soon?" she murmured to herself. Well, why not? She could not blame Jefferson. He had often spoken to her of this match arranged by his father and they had laughed over it as a typical marriage of convenience modelled after the Continental pattern. Jefferson, she knew, had never cared for the girl nor taken the affair seriously. Some powerful influences must have been at work to make him surrender so easily. Here again she recognized the masterly hand of Ryder, Sr., and more than ever she was eager to meet this extraordinary man and measure her strength with his. Her mind, indeed, was too full of her father's troubles to grieve over her own however much she might have been inclined to do so under other circumstances, and all that day she did her best to banish the paragraph from her thoughts. More than a week had passed since she left Massapequa and what with corresponding with financiers, calling on editors and publishers, every moment of her time had been kept busy. She had found a quiet and reasonable priced boarding house off Washington Square and here Stott had called several times to see her. Her correspondence with Mr. Ryder had now reached a phase when it was impossible to invent any further excuses for delaying the interview asked for. As she had foreseen, a day or two after her arrival in town she had received a note from Mrs. Ryder asking her to do her the honour to call and see her, and Shirley, after waiting another two days, had replied making an appointment for the following day at three o'clock. This was the same day on which the paragraph concerning the Ryder-Roberts engagement appeared in the society chronicles of the metropolis. Directly after the meagre meal which in New York boarding houses is dignified by the name of luncheon, Shirley proceeded to get ready for this portentous visit to the Ryder mansion. She was anxious to make a favourable impression on the financier, so she took some pains with her personal appearance. She always looked stylish, no matter what she wore, and her poverty was of too recent date to make much difference to her wardrobe, which was still well supplied with Paris-made gowns. She selected a simple close-fitting gown of gray chiffon cloth and a picture hat of Leghorn straw heaped with red roses, Shirley's favourite flower. Thus arrayed, she sallied forth at two o'clock--a little gray mouse to do battle with the formidable lion. The sky was threatening, so instead of walking a short way up Fifth Avenue for exercise, as she had intended doing, she cut across town through Ninth Street, and took the surface car on Fourth Avenue. This would put her down at Madison Avenue and Seventy-fourth Street, which was only a block from the Ryder residence. She looked so pretty and was so well dressed that the passers-by who looked after her wondered why she did not take a cab instead of standing on a street corner for a car. But one's outward appearance is not always a faithful index to the condition of one's pocketbook, and Shirley was rapidly acquiring the art of economy. It was not without a certain trepidation that she began this journey. So far, all her plans had been based largely on theory, but now that she was actually on her way to Mr. Ryder all sorts of misgivings beset her. Suppose he knew her by sight and roughly accused her of obtaining access to his house under false pretences and then had her ejected by the servants? How terrible and humiliating that would be! And even if he did not how could she possibly find those letters with him watching her, and all in the brief time of a conventional afternoon call? It had been an absurd idea from the first. Stott was right; she saw that now. But she had entered upon it and she was not going to confess herself beaten until she had tried. And as the car sped along Madison Avenue, gradually drawing nearer to the house which she was going to enter disguised as it were, like a burglar, she felt cold chills run up and down her spine--the same sensation that one experiences when one rings the bell of a dentist's where one has gone to have a tooth extracted. In fact, she felt so nervous and frightened that if she had not been ashamed before herself she would have turned back. In about twenty minutes the car stopped at the corner of Seventy-fourth Street. Shirley descended and with a quickened pulse walked towards the Ryder mansion, which she knew well by sight. There was one other person in New York who, that same morning, had read the newspaper item regarding the Ryder-Roberts betrothal, and he did not take the matter so calmly as Shirley had done. On the contrary, it had the effect of putting him into a violent rage. This was Jefferson. He was working in his studio when he read it and five minutes later he was tearing up-town to seek the author of it. He understood its object, of course; they wanted to force his hand, to shame him into this marriage, to so entangle him with the girl that no other alternative would be possible to an honourable man. It was a despicable trick and he had no doubt that his father was at the back of it. So his mind now was fully made up. He would go away at once where they could not make his life a burden with this odious marriage which was fast becoming a nightmare to him. He would close up his studio and leave immediately for Europe. He would show his father once for all that he was a man and expected to be treated as one. He wondered what Shirley was doing. Where had she gone, what was this mysterious work of which she had spoken? He only realized now, when she seemed entirely beyond his reach, how much he loved her and how empty his life would be without her. He would know no happiness until she was his wife. Her words on the porch did not discourage him. Under the circumstances he could not expect her to have said anything else. She could not marry into John Ryder's family with such a charge hanging over her own father's head, but, later, when the trial was over, no matter how it turned out, he would go to her again and ask her to be his wife. On arriving home the first person he saw was the ubiquitous Mr. Bagley, who stood at the top of the first staircase giving some letters to the butler. Jefferson cornered him at once, holding out the newspaper containing the offending paragraph. "Say, Bagley," he cried, "what does this mean? Is this any of your doing?" The English secretary gave his employer's son a haughty stare, and then, without deigning to reply or even to glance at the newspaper, continued his instructions to the servant: "Here, Jorkins, get stamps for all these letters and see they are mailed at once. They are very important." "Very good, sir." The man took the letters and disappeared, while Jefferson, impatient, repeated his question: "My doing?" sneered Mr. Bagley. "Really, Jefferson, you go too far! Do you suppose for one instant that I would condescend to trouble myself with your affairs?" Jefferson was in no mood to put up with insolence from anyone, especially from a man whom he heartily despised, so advancing menacingly he thundered: "I mean--were you, in the discharge of your menial-like duties, instructed by my father to send that paragraph to the newspapers regarding my alleged betrothal to Miss Roberts? Yes or No?" The man winced and made a step backward. There was a gleam in the Ryder eye which he knew by experience boded no good. "Really, Jefferson," he said in a more conciliatory tone, "I know absolutely nothing about the paragraph. This is the first I hear of it. Why not ask your father?" "I will," replied Jefferson grimly, He was turning to go in the direction of the library when Bagley stopped him. "You cannot possibly see him now," he said. "Sergeant Ellison of the Secret Service is in there with him, and your father told me not to disturb him on any account. He has another appointment at three o'clock with some woman who writes books." Seeing that the fellow was in earnest, Jefferson did not insist. He could see his father a little later or send him a message through his mother. Proceeding upstairs he found Mrs. Ryder in her room and in a few energetic words he explained the situation to his mother. They had gone too far with this matchmaking business, he said, his father was trying to interfere with his personal liberty and he was going to put a stop to it. He would leave at once for Europe. Mrs. Ryder had already heard of the projected trip abroad, so the news of this sudden departure was not the shock it might otherwise have been. In her heart she did not blame her son, on the contrary she admired his spirit, and if the temporary absence from home would make him happier, she would not hold him back. Yet, mother like, she wept and coaxed, but nothing would shake Jefferson in his determination and he begged his mother to make it very plain to his father that this was final and that a few days would see him on his way abroad. He would try and come back to see his father that afternoon, but otherwise she was to say good-bye for him. Mrs. Ryder promised tearfully to do what her son demanded and a few minutes later Jefferson was on his way to the front door. As he went down stairs something white on the carpet attracted his attention. He stooped and picked it up. It was a letter. It was in Bagley's handwriting and had evidently been dropped by the man to whom the secretary had given it to post. But what interested Jefferson more than anything else was that it was addressed to Miss Kate Roberts. Under ordinary circumstances, a king's ransom would not have tempted the young man to read a letter addressed to another, but he was convinced that his father's secretary was an adventurer and if he were carrying on an intrigue in this manner it could have only one meaning. It was his duty to unveil a rascal who was using the Ryder roof and name to further his own ends and victimize a girl who, although sophisticated enough to know better, was too silly to realize the risk she ran at the hands of an unscrupulous man. Hesitating no longer, Jefferson tore open the envelope and read: My dearest wife that is to be: I have arranged everything. Next Wednesday--just a week from to-day--we will go to the house of a discreet friend of mine where a minister will marry us; then we will go to City Hall and get through the legal part of it. Afterwards, we can catch the four o'clock train for Buffalo. Meet me in the ladies' room at the Holland House Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. I will come there with a closed cab. Your devoted FITZ. "Phew!" Jefferson whistled. A close shave this for Senator Roberts, he thought. His first impulse was to go upstairs again to his mother and put the matter in her hands. She would immediately inform his father, who would make short work of Mr. Bagley. But, thought Jefferson, why should he spoil a good thing? He could afford to wait a day or two. There was no hurry. He could allow Bagley to think all was going swimmingly and then uncover the plot at the eleventh hour. He would even let this letter go to Kate, there was no difficulty in procuring another envelope and imitating the handwriting--and when Bagley was just preparing to go to the rendezvous he would spring the trap. Such a cad deserved no mercy. The scandal would be a knock-out blow, his father would discharge him on the spot and that would be the last they would see of the aristocratic English secretary. Jefferson put the letter in his pocket and left the house rejoicing. While the foregoing incidents were happening John Burkett Ryder was secluded in his library. The great man had come home earlier than usual, for he had two important callers to see by appointment that afternoon. One was Sergeant Ellison, who had to report on his mission to Massapequa; the other was Miss Shirley Green, the author of "The American Octopus," who had at last deigned to honour him with a visit. Pending the arrival of these visitors the financier was busy with his secretary trying to get rid as rapidly as possible of what business and correspondence there was on hand. The plutocrat was sitting at his desk poring over a mass of papers. Between his teeth was the inevitable long black cigar and when he raised his eyes to the light a close observer might have remarked that they were sea-green, a colour they assumed when the man of millions was absorbed in scheming new business deals. Every now and then he stopped reading the papers to make quick calculations on scraps of paper. Then if the result pleased him, a smile overspread his saturnine features. He rose from his chair and nervously paced the floor as he always did when thinking deeply. "Five millions," he muttered, "not a cent more. If they won't sell we'll crush them--" Mr. Bagley entered. Mr. Ryder looked up quickly. "Well, Bagley?" he said interrogatively. "Has Sergeant Ellison come?" "Yes, sir. But Mr. Herts is downstairs. He insists on seeing you about the Philadelphia gas deal. He says it is a matter of life and death." "To him--yes," answered the financier dryly. "Let him come up. We might as well have it out now." Mr. Bagley went out and returned almost immediately, followed by a short, fat man, rather loudly dressed and apoplectic in appearance. He looked like a prosperous brewer, while, as a matter of fact, he was president of a gas company, one of the shrewdest promoters in the country, and a big man in Wall Street. There was only one bigger man and that was John Ryder. But, to-day, Mr. Herts was not in good condition. His face was pale and his manner flustered and nervous. He was plainly worried. "Mr. Ryder," he began with excited gesture, "the terms you offer are preposterous. It would mean disaster to the stockholders. Our gas properties are worth six times that amount. We will sell out for twenty millions--not a cent less." Ryder shrugged his shoulders. "Mr. Herts," he replied coolly, "I am busy to-day and in no mood for arguing. We'll either buy you out or force you out. Choose. You have our offer. Five millions for your gas property. Will you take it?" "We'll see you in hell first!" cried his visitor exasperated. "Very well," replied Ryder still unruffled, "all negotiations are off. You leave me free to act. We have an offer to buy cheap the old Germantown Gas Company which has charter rights to go into any of the streets of Philadelphia. We shall purchase that company, we will put ten millions new capital into it, and reduce the price of gas in Philadelphia to sixty cents a thousand. Where will you be then?" The face of the Colossus as he uttered this stand and deliver speech was calm and inscrutable. Conscious of the resistless power of his untold millions, he felt no more compunction in mercilessly crushing this business rival than he would in trampling out the life of a worm. The little man facing him looked haggard and distressed. He knew well that this was no idle threat. He was well aware that Ryder and his associates by the sheer weight of the enormous wealth they controlled could sell out or destroy any industrial corporation in the land. It was plainly illegal, but it was done every day, and his company was not the first victim nor the last. Desperate, he appealed humbly to the tyrannical Money Power: "Don't drive us to the wall, Mr. Ryder. This forced sale will mean disaster to us all. Put yourself in our place--think what it means to scores of families whose only support is the income from their investment in our company." "Mr. Herts," replied Ryder unmoved, "I never allow sentiment to interfere with business. You have heard my terms. I refuse to argue the matter further. What is it to be? Five millions or competition? Decide now or this interview must end!" He took out his watch and with his other hand touched a bell. Beads of perspiration stood on his visitor's forehead. In a voice broken with suppressed emotion he said hoarsely: "You're a hard, pitiless man, John Ryder! So be it--five millions. I don't know what they'll say. I don't dare return to them." "Those are my terms," said Ryder coldly. "The papers," he added, "will be ready for your signature to-morrow at this time, and I'll have a cheque ready for the entire amount. Good-day." Mr. Bagley entered. Ryder bowed to Herts, who slowly retired. When the door had closed on him Ryder went back to his desk, a smile of triumph on his face. Then he turned to his secretary: "Let Sergeant Ellison come up," he said. The secretary left the room and Mr. Ryder sank comfortably in his chair, puffing silently at his long black cigar. The financier was thinking, but his thoughts concerned neither the luckless gas president he had just pitilessly crushed, nor the detective who had come to make his report. He was thinking of the book "The American Octopus," and its bold author whom he was to meet in a very few minutes. He glanced at the clock. A quarter to three. She would be here in fifteen minutes if she were punctual, but women seldom are, he reflected. What kind of a woman could she be, this Shirley Green, to dare cross swords with a man whose power was felt in two hemispheres? No ordinary woman, that was certain. He tried to imagine what she looked like, and he pictured a tall, gaunt, sexless spinster with spectacles, a sort of nightmare in the garb of a woman. A sour, discontented creature, bitter to all mankind, owing to disappointments in early life and especially vindictive towards the rich, whom her socialistic and even anarchistical tendencies prompted her to hate and attack. Yet, withal, a brainy, intelligent woman, remarkably well informed as to political and industrial conditions--a woman to make a friend of rather than an enemy. And John Ryder, who had educated himself to believe that with gold he could do everything, that none could resist its power, had no doubt that with money he could enlist this Shirley Green in his service. At least it would keep her from writing more books about him. The door opened and Sergeant Ellison entered, followed by the secretary, who almost immediately withdrew. "Well, sergeant," said Mr. Ryder cordially, "what have you to tell me? I can give you only a few minutes. I expect a lady friend of yours." The plutocrat sometimes condescended to be jocular with his subordinates. "A lady friend of mine, sir?" echoed the man, puzzled. "Yes--Miss Shirley Green, the author," replied the financier, enjoying the detective's embarrassment. "That suggestion of yours worked out all right. She's coming here to-day." "I'm glad you've found her, sir." "It was a tough job," answered Ryder with a grimace. "We wrote her half a dozen times before she was satisfied with the wording of the invitation. But, finally, we landed her and I expect her at three o'clock. Now what about that Rossmore girl? Did you go down to Massapequa?" "Yes, sir, I have been there half a dozen times. In fact, I've just come from there. Judge Rossmore is there, all right, but his daughter has left for parts unknown." "Gone away--where?" exclaimed the financier. This was what he dreaded. As long as he could keep his eye on the girl there was little danger of Jefferson making a fool of himself; with her disappeared everything was possible. "I could not find out, sir. Their neighbours don't know much about them. They say they're haughty and stuck up. The only one I could get anything out of was a parson named Deetle. He said it was a sad case, that they had reverses and a daughter who was in Paris--" "Yes, yes," said Ryder impatiently, "we know all that. But where's the daughter now?" "Search me, sir. I even tried to pump the Irish slavey. Gee, what a vixen! She almost flew at me. She said she didn't know and didn't care." Ryder brought his fist down with force on his desk, a trick he had when he wished to emphasize a point. "Sergeant, I don't like the mysterious disappearance of that girl. You must find her, do you hear, you must find her if it takes all the sleuths in the country. Had my son been seen there?" "The parson said he saw a young fellow answering his description sitting on the porch of the Rossmore cottage the evening before the girl disappeared, but he didn't know who he was and hasn't seen him since." "That was my son, I'll wager. He knows where the girl is. Perhaps he's with her now. Maybe he's going to marry her. That must be prevented at any cost. Sergeant, find that Rossmore girl and I'll give you $1,000." The detective's face flushed with pleasure at the prospect of so liberal a reward. Rising he said: "I'll find her, sir. I'll find her." Mr. Bagley entered, wearing the solemn, important air he always affected when he had to announce a visitor of consequence. But before he could open his mouth Mr. Ryder said: "Bagley, when did you see my son, Jefferson, last?" "To-day, sir. He wanted to see you to say good-bye. He said he would be back." Ryder gave a sigh of relief and addressing the detective said: "It's not so bad as I thought." Then turning again to his secretary he asked: "Well, Bagley, what is it?" "There's a lady downstairs, sir--Miss Shirley Green." The financier half sprang from his seat. "Oh, yes. Show her up at once. Good-bye, sergeant, good-bye. Find that Rossmore woman and the $1,000 is yours." The detective went out and a few moments later Mr. Bagley reappeared ushering in Shirley. The mouse was in the den of the lion. CHAPTER XII Mr. Ryder remained at his desk and did not even look up when his visitor entered. He pretended to be busily preoccupied with his papers, which was a favourite pose of his when receiving strangers. This frigid reception invariably served its purpose, for it led visitors not to expect more than they got, which usually was little enough. For several minutes Shirley stood still, not knowing whether to advance or to take a seat. She gave a little conventional cough, and Ryder looked up. What he saw so astonished him that he at once took from his mouth the cigar he was smoking and rose from his seat. He had expected a gaunt old maid with spectacles, and here was a stylish, good-looking young woman, who could not possibly be over twenty-five. There was surely some mistake. This slip of a girl could not have written "The American Octopus." He advanced to greet Shirley. "You wish to see me, Madame?" he asked courteously. There were times when even John Burkett Ryder could be polite. "Yes," replied Shirley, her voice trembling a little in spite of her efforts to keep cool. "I am here by appointment. Three o'clock, Mrs. Ryder's note said. I am Miss Green." "You--Miss Green?" echoed the financier dubiously. "Yes, I am Miss Green--Shirley Green, author of 'The American Octopus.' You asked me to call. Here I am." For the first time in his life, John Ryder was nonplussed. He coughed and stammered and looked round for a place where he could throw his cigar. Shirley, who enjoyed his embarrassment, put him at his ease. "Oh, please go on smoking," she said; "I don't mind it in the least." Ryder threw the cigar into a receptacle and looked closely at his visitor. "So you are Shirley Green, eh?" "That is my nom-de-plume--yes," replied the girl nervously. She was already wishing herself back at Massapequa. The financier eyed her for a moment in silence as if trying to gauge the strength of the personality of this audacious young woman, who had dared to criticise his business methods in public print; then, waving her to a seat near his desk, he said: "Won't you sit down?" "Thank you," murmured Shirley. She sat down, and he took his seat at the other side of the desk, which brought them face to face. Again inspecting the girl with a close scrutiny that made her cheeks burn, Ryder said: "I rather expected--" He stopped for a moment as if uncertain what to say, then he added: "You're younger than I thought you were, Miss Green, much younger." "Time will remedy that," smiled Shirley. Then, mischievously, she added: "I rather expected to see Mrs. Ryder." There was the faintest suspicion of a smile playing around the corners of the plutocrat's mouth as he picked up a book lying on his desk and replied: "Yes--she wrote you, but I--wanted to see you about this." Shirley's pulse throbbed faster, but she tried hard to appear unconcerned as she answered: "Oh, my book--have you read it?" "I have," replied Ryder slowly and, fixing her with a stare that was beginning to make her uncomfortable, he went on: "No doubt your time is valuable, so I'll come right to the point. I want to ask you, Miss Green, where you got the character of your central figure--the Octopus, as you call him--John Broderick?" "From imagination--of course," answered Shirley. Ryder opened the book, and Shirley noticed that there were several passages marked. He turned the leaves over in silence for a minute or two and then he said: "You've sketched a pretty big man here--" "Yes," assented Shirley, "he has big possibilities, but I think he makes very small use of them." Ryder appeared not to notice her commentary, and, still reading the book, he continued: "On page 22 you call him 'the world's greatest individualized potentiality, a giant combination of materiality, mentality and money--the greatest exemplar of individual human will in existence to-day.' And you make indomitable will and energy the keystone of his marvellous success. Am I right?" He looked at her questioningly. "Quite right," answered Shirley. Ryder proceeded: "On page 26 you say 'the machinery of his money-making mind typifies the laws of perpetual unrest. It must go on, relentlessly, resistlessly, ruthlessly making money-making money and continuing to make money. It cannot stop until the machinery crumbles.'" Laying the book down and turning sharply on Shirley, he asked her bluntly: "Do you mean to say that I couldn't stop to-morrow if I wanted to?" She affected to not understand him. "You?" she inquired in a tone of surprise. "Well--it's a natural question," stammered Ryder, with a nervous little laugh; "every man sees himself in the hero of a novel just as every woman sees herself in the heroine. We're all heroes and heroines in our own eyes. But tell me what's your private opinion of this man. You drew the character. What do you think of him as a type, how would you classify him?" "As the greatest criminal the world has yet produced," replied Shirley without a moment's hesitation. The financier looked at the girl in unfeigned astonishment. "Criminal?" he echoed. "Yes, criminal," repeated Shirley decisively. "He is avarice, egotism, and ambition incarnate. He loves money because he loves power, and he loves power more than his fellow man." Ryder laughed uneasily. Decidedly, this girl had opinions of her own which she was not backward to express. "Isn't that rather strong?" he asked. "I don't think so," replied Shirley. Then quickly she asked: "But what does it matter? No such man exists." "No, of course not," said Ryder, and he relapsed into silence. Yet while he said nothing, the plutocrat was watching his visitor closely from under his thick eyebrows. She seemed supremely unconscious of his scrutiny. Her aristocratic, thoughtful face gave no sign that any ulterior motive had actuated her evidently very hostile attitude against him. That he was in her mind when she drew the character of John Broderick there was no doubt possible. No matter how she might evade the identification, he was convinced he was the hero of her book. Why had she attacked him so bitterly? At first, it occurred to him that blackmail might be her object; she might be going to ask for money as the price of future silence. Yet it needed but a glance at her refined and modest demeanour to dispel that idea as absurd. Then he remembered, too, that it was not she who had sought this interview, but himself. No, she was no blackmailer. More probably she was a dreamer--one of those meddling sociologists who, under pretence of bettering the conditions of the working classes, stir up discontent and bitterness of feeling. As such, she might prove more to be feared than a mere blackmailer whom he could buy off with money. He knew he was not popular, but he was no worse than the other captains of industry. It was a cut-throat game at best. Competition was the soul of commercial life, and if he had outwitted his competitors and made himself richer than all of them, he was not a criminal for that. But all these attacks in newspapers and books did not do him any good. One day the people might take these demagogic writings seriously and then there would be the devil to pay. He took up the book again and ran over the pages. This certainly was no ordinary girl. She knew more and had a more direct way of saying things than any woman he had ever met. And as he watched her furtively across the desk he wondered how he could use her; how instead of being his enemy, he could make her his friend. If he did not, she would go away and write more such books, and literature of this kind might become a real peril to his interests. Money could do anything; it could secure the services of this woman and prevent her doing further mischief. But how could he employ her? Suddenly an inspiration came to him. For some years he had been collecting material for a history of the Empire Trading Company. She could write it. It would practically be his own biography. Would she undertake it? Embarrassed by the long silence, Shirley finally broke it by saying: "But you didn't ask me to call merely to find out what I thought of my own work." "No," replied Ryder slowly, "I want you to do some work for me." He opened a drawer at the left-hand side of his desk and took out several sheets of foolscap and a number of letters. Shirley's heart beat faster as she caught sight of the letters. Were her father's among them? She wondered what kind of work John Burkett Ryder had for her to do and if she would do it whatever it was. Some literary work probably, compiling or something of that kind. If it was well paid, why should she not accept? There would be nothing humiliating in it; it would not tie her hands in any way. She was a professional writer in the market to be employed by whoever could pay the price. Besides, such work might give her better opportunities to secure the letters of which she was in search. Gathering in one pile all the papers he had removed from the drawer, Mr. Ryder said: "I want you to put my biography together from this material. But first," he added, taking up "The American Octopus," "I want to know where you got the details of this man's life." "Oh, for the most part--imagination, newspapers, magazines," replied Shirley carelessly. "You know the American millionaire is a very overworked topic just now--and naturally I've read--" "Yes, I understand," he said, "but I refer to what you haven't read--what you couldn't have read. For example, here." He turned to a page marked in the book and read aloud: "As an evidence of his petty vanity, when a youth he had a beautiful Indian girl tattooed just above the forearm." Ryder leaned eagerly forward as he asked her searchingly: "Now who told you that I had my arm tattooed when I was a boy?" "Have you?" laughed Shirley nervously. "What a curious coincidence!" "Let me read you another coincidence," said Ryder meaningly. He turned to another part of the book and read: "the same eternal long black cigar always between his lips..." "General Grant smoked, too," interrupted Shirley. "All men who think deeply along material lines seem to smoke." "Well, we'll let that go. But how about this?" He turned back a few pages and read: "John Broderick had loved, when a young man, a girl who lived in VERMONT, BUT CIRCUMSTANCES SEPARATED THEM." He stopped and stared at Shirley a moment and then he said: "I loved a girl when I was a lad and she came from Vermont, and circumstances separated us. That isn't coincidence, for presently you make John Broderick marry a young woman who had money. I married a girl with money." "Lots of men marry for money," remarked Shirley. "I said WITH money, not for money," retorted Ryder. Then turning again to the book, he said: "Now, this is what I can't understand, for no one could have told you this but I myself. Listen." He read aloud: "WITH ALL HIS PHYSICAL BRAVERY AND PERSONAL COURAGE, JOHN BRODERICK WAS INTENSELY AFRAID OF DEATH. IT WAS ON HIS MIND CONSTANTLY." "Who told you that?" he demanded somewhat roughly. "I swear I've never mentioned it to a living soul." "Most men who amass money are afraid of death," replied Shirley with outward composure, "for death is about the only thing that can separate them from their money." Ryder laughed, but it was a hollow, mocking laugh, neither sincere nor hearty. It was a laugh such as the devil may have given when driven out of heaven. "You're quite a character!" He laughed again, and Shirley, catching the infection, laughed, too. "It's me and it isn't me," went on Ryder flourishing the book. "This fellow Broderick is all right; he's successful and he's great, but I don't like his finish."' "It's logical," ventured Shirley. "It's cruel," insisted Ryder. "So is the man who reverses the divine law and hates his neighbour instead of loving him," retorted Shirley. She spoke more boldly, beginning to feel more sure of her ground, and it amused her to fence in this way with the man of millions. So far, she thought, he had not got the best of her. She was fast becoming used to him, and her first feeling of intimidation was passing away. "Um!" grunted Ryder, "you're a curious girl; upon my word you interest me!" He took the mass of papers lying at his elbow and pushed them over to her. "Here," he said, "I want you to make as clever a book out of this chaos as you did out of your own imagination." Shirley turned the papers over carelessly. "So you think your life is a good example to follow?" she asked with a tinge of irony. "Isn't it?" he demanded. The girl looked him square in the face. "Suppose," she said, "we all wanted to follow it, suppose we all wanted to be the richest, the most powerful personage in the world?" "Well--what then?" he demanded. "I think it would postpone the era of the Brotherhood of man indefinitely, don't you?" "I never thought of it from that point of view," admitted the billionaire. "Really," he added, "you're an extraordinary girl. Why, you can't be more than twenty--or so." "I'm twenty-four--or so," smiled Shirley. Ryder's face expanded in a broad smile. He admired this girl's pluck and ready wit. He grew more amiable and tried to gain her confidence. In a coaxing tone he said: "Come, where did you get those details? Take me into your confidence." "I have taken you into my confidence," laughed Shirley, pointing at her book. "It cost you $1.50!" Turning over the papers he had put before her she said presently: "I don't know about this." "You don't think my life would make good reading?" he asked with some asperity. "It might," she replied slowly, as if unwilling to commit herself as to its commercial or literary value. Then she said frankly: "To tell you the honest truth, I don't consider mere genius in money-making is sufficient provocation for rushing into print. You see, unless you come to a bad end, it would have no moral." Ignoring the not very flattering insinuation contained in this last speech, the plutocrat continued to urge her: "You can name your own price if you will do the work," he said. "Two, three or even five thousand dollars. It's only a few months' work." "Five thousand dollars?" echoed Shirley. "That's a lot of money." Smiling, she added: "It appeals to my commercial sense. But I'm afraid the subject does not arouse my enthusiasm from an artistic standpoint." Ryder seemed amused at the idea of any one hesitating to make five thousand dollars. He knew that writers do not run across such opportunities every day. "Upon my word," he said, "I don't know why I'm so anxious to get you to do the work. I suppose it's because you don't want to. You remind me of my son. Ah, he's a problem!" Shirley started involuntarily when Ryder mentioned his son. But he did not notice it. "Why, is he wild?" she asked, as if only mildly interested. "Oh, no, I wish he were," said Ryder. "Fallen in love with the wrong woman, I suppose," she said. "Something of the sort--how did you guess?" asked Ryder surprised. Shirley coughed to hide her embarrassment and replied indifferently. "So many boys do that. Besides," she added with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, "I can hardly imagine that any woman would be the right one unless you selected her yourself!" Ryder made no answer. He folded his arms and gazed at her. Who was this woman who knew him so well, who could read his inmost thoughts, who never made a mistake? After a silence he said: "Do you know you say the strangest things?" "Truth is strange," replied Shirley carelessly. "I don't suppose you hear it very often." "Not in that form," admitted Ryder. Shirley had taken on to her lap some of the letters he had passed her, and was perusing them one after another. "All these letters from Washington consulting you on politics and finance--they won't interest the world." "My secretary picked them out," explained Ryder. "Your artistic sense will tell you what to use." "Does your son still love this girl? I mean the one you abject to?" inquired Shirley as she went on sorting the papers. "Oh, no, he does not care for her any more," answered Ryder hastily. "Yes, he does; he still loves her," said Shirley positively. "How do you know?" asked Ryder amazed. "From the way you say he doesn't," retorted Shirley. Ryder gave his caller a look in which admiration was mingled with astonishment. "You are right again," he said. "The idiot does love the girl." "Bless his heart," said Shirley to herself. Aloud she said: "I hope they'll both outwit you." Ryder laughed in spite of himself. This young woman certainly interested him more than any other he had ever known. "I don't think I ever met anyone in my life quite like you," he said. "What's the objection to the girl?" demanded Shirley. "Every objection. I don't want her in my family." "Anything against her character?" To better conceal the keen interest she took in the personal turn the conversation had taken, Shirley pretended to be more busy than ever with the papers. "Yes--that is no--not that I know of," replied Ryder. "But because a woman has a good character, that doesn't necessarily make her a desirable match, does it?" "It's a point in her favor, isn't it?" "Yes--but--" He hesitated as if uncertain what to say. "You know men well, don't you, Mr. Ryder?" "I've met enough to know them pretty well," he replied. "Why don't you study women for a change?" she asked. "That would enable you to understand a great many things that I don't think are quite clear to you now." Ryder laughed good humouredly. It was decidedly a novel sensation to have someone lecturing him. "I'm studying you," he said, "but I don't seem to make much headway. A woman like you whose mind isn't spoiled by the amusement habit has great possibilities--great possibilities. Do you know you're the first woman I ever took into my confidence--I mean at sight?" Again he fixed her with that keen glance which in his business life had taught him how to read men. He continued: "I'm acting on sentiment--something I rarely do, but I can't help it. I like you, upon my soul I do, and I'm going to introduce you to my wife--my son--" He took the telephone from his desk as if he were going to use it. "What a commander-in-chief you would have made--how natural it is for you to command," exclaimed Shirley in a burst of admiration that was half real, half mocking. "I suppose you always tell people what they are to do and how they are to do it. You are a born general. You know I've often thought that Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander must have been great domestic leaders as well as imperial rulers. I'm sure of it now." Ryder listened to her in amazement. He was not quite sure if she were making fun of him or not. "Well, of all--" he began. Then interrupting himself he said amiably: "Won't you do me the honour to meet my family?" Shirley smiled sweetly and bowed. "Thank you, Mr. Ryder, I will." She rose from her seat and leaned over the manuscripts to conceal the satisfaction this promise of an introduction to the family circle gave her. She was quick to see that it meant more visits to the house, and other and perhaps better opportunities to find the objects of her search. Ryder lifted the receiver of his telephone and talked to his secretary in another room, while Shirley, who was still standing, continued examining the papers and letters. "Is that you, Bagley? What's that? General Dodge? Get rid of him. I can't see him to-day. Tell him to come to-morrow. What's that? My son wants to see me? Tell him to come to the phone." At that instant Shirley gave a little cry, which in vain she tried to suppress. Ryder looked up. "What's the matter?" he demanded startled. "Nothing--nothing!" she replied in a hoarse whisper. "I pricked myself with a pin. Don't mind me." She had just come across her father's missing letters, which had got mixed up, evidently without Ryder's knowledge, in the mass of papers he had handed her. Prepared as she was to find the letters somewhere in the house, she never dreamed that fate would put them so easily and so quickly into her hands; the suddenness of their appearance and the sight of her father's familiar signature affected her almost like a shock. Now she had them, she must not let them go again; yet how could she keep them unobserved? Could she conceal them? Would he miss them? She tried to slip them in her bosom while Ryder was busy at the 'phone, but he suddenly glanced in her direction and caught her eye. She still held the letters in her hand, which shook from nervousness, but he noticed nothing and went on speaking through the 'phone: "Hallo, Jefferson, boy! You want to see me. Can you wait till I'm through? I've got a lady here. Going away? Nonsense! Determined, eh? Well, I can't keep you here if you've made up your mind. You want to say good-bye. Come up in about five minutes and I'll introduce you to a very interesting person." He laughed and hung up the receiver. Shirley was all unstrung, trying to overcome the emotion which her discovery had caused her, and in a strangely altered voice, the result of the nervous strain she was under, she said: "You want me to come here?" She looked up from the letters she was reading across to Ryder, who was standing watching her on the other side of the desk. He caught her glance and, leaning over to take some manuscript, he said: "Yes, I don't want these papers to get--" His eye suddenly rested on the letters she was holding. He stopped short, and reaching forward he tried to snatch them from her. "What have you got there?" he exclaimed. He took the letters and she made no resistance. It would be folly to force the issue now, she thought. Another opportunity would present itself. Ryder locked the letters up very carefully in the drawer on the left-hand side of his desk, muttering to himself rather than speaking to Shirley: "How on earth did they get among my other papers?" "From Judge Rossmore, were they not?" said Shirley boldly. "How did you know it was Judge Rossmore?" demanded Ryder suspiciously. "I didn't know that his name had been mentioned." "I saw his signature," she said simply. Then she added: "He's the father of the girl you don't like, isn't he?" "Yes, he's the----" A cloud came over the financier's face; his eyes darkened, his jaws snapped and he clenched his fist. "How you must hate him!" said Shirley, who observed the change. "Not at all," replied Ryder recovering his self-possession and suavity of manner. "I disagree with his politics and his methods, but--I know very little about him except that he is about to be removed from office." "About to be?" echoed Shirley. "So his fate is decided even before he is tried?" The girl laughed bitterly. "Yes," she went on, "some of the newspapers are beginning to think he is innocent of the things of which he is accused." "Do they?" said Ryder indifferently. "Yes," she persisted, "most people are on his side." She planted her elbows on the desk in front of her, and looking him squarely in the face, she asked him point blank: "Whose side are you on--really and truly?" Ryder winced. What right had this woman, a stranger both to Judge Rossmore and himself, to come here and catechise him? He restrained his impatience with difficulty as he replied: "Whose side am I on? Oh, I don't know that I am on any side. I don't know that I give it much thought. I--" "Do you think this man deserves to be punished?" she demanded. She had resumed her seat at the desk and partly regained her self-possession. "Why do you ask? What is your interest in this matter?" "I don't know," she replied evasively; "his case interests me, that's all. Its rather romantic. Your son loves this man's daughter. He is in disgrace--many seem to think unjustly." Her voice trembled with emotion as she continued: "I have heard from one source or another--you know I am acquainted with a number of newspaper men--I have heard that life no longer has any interest for him, that he is not only disgraced but beggared, that he is pining away slowly, dying of a broken heart, that his wife and daughter are in despair. Tell me, do you think he deserves such a fate?" Ryder remained thoughtful a moment, and then he replied: "No, I do not--no--" Thinking that she had touched his sympathies, Shirley followed up her advantage: "Oh, then, why not come to his rescue--you, who are so rich, so powerful; you, who can move the scales of justice at your will--save this man from humiliation and disgrace!" Ryder shrugged his shoulders, and his face expressed weariness, as if the subject had begun to bore him. "My dear girl, you don't understand. His removal is necessary." Shirley's face became set and hard. There was a contemptuous ring to her words as she retorted: "Yet you admit that he may be innocent!" "Even if I knew it as a fact, I couldn't move." "Do you mean to say that if you had positive proof?" She pointed to the drawer in the desk where he had placed the letters. "If you had absolute proof in that drawer, for instance? Wouldn't you help him then?" Ryder's face grew cold and inscrutable; he now wore his fighting mask. "Not even if I had the absolute proof in that drawer?" he snapped viciously. "Have you absolute proof in that drawer?" she demanded. "I repeat that even if I had, I could not expose the men who have been my friends. It's noblesse oblige in politics as well as in society, you know." He smiled again at her, as if he had recovered his good humour after their sharp passage at arms. "Oh, it's politics--that's what the papers said. And you believe him innocent. Well, you must have some grounds for your belief." "Not necessarily--" "You said that even if you had the proofs, you could not produce them without sacrificing your friends, showing that your friends are interested in having this man put off the bench--" She stopped and burst into hysterical laughter. "Oh, I think you're having a joke at my expense," she went on, "just to see how far you can lead me. I daresay Judge Rossmore deserves all he gets. Oh, yes--I'm sure he deserves it." She rose and walked to the other side of the room to conceal her emotion. Ryder watched her curiously. "My dear young lady, how you take this matter to heart!" "Please forgive me," laughed Shirley, and averting her face to conceal the fact that her eyes were filled with tears. "It's my artistic temperament, I suppose. It's always getting me into trouble. It appealed so strongly to my sympathies--this story of hopeless love between two young people--with the father of the girl hounded by corrupt politicians and unscrupulous financiers. It was too much for me. Ah! ah! I forgot where I was!" She leaned against a chair, sick and faint from nervousness, her whole body trembling. At that moment there was a knock at the library door and Jefferson Ryder appeared. Not seeing Shirley, whose back was towards him, he advanced to greet his father. "You told me to come up in five minutes," he said. "I just wanted to say--" "Miss Green," said Ryder, Sr., addressing Shirley and ignoring whatever it was that the young man wanted to say, "this is my son Jefferson. Jeff--this is Miss Green." Jefferson looked in the direction indicated and stood as if rooted to the floor. He was so surprised that he was struck dumb. Finally, recovering himself, he exclaimed: "Shirley!" "Yes, Shirley Green, the author," explained Ryder, Sr., not noticing the note of familiar recognition in his exclamation. Shirley advanced, and holding out her hand to Jefferson, said demurely: "I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Ryder." Then quickly, in an undertone, she added: "Be careful; don't betray me!" Jefferson was so astounded that he did not see the outstretched hand. All he could do was to stand and stare first at her and then at his father. "Why don't you shake hands with her?" said Ryder, Sr., "She won't bite you." Then he added: "Miss Green is going to do some literary work for me, so we shall see a great deal of her. It's too bad you're going away!" He chuckled at his own pleasantry. "Father!" blurted out Jefferson, "I came to say that I've changed my mind. You did not want me to go, and I feel I ought to do something to please you." "Good boy," said Ryder pleased. "Now you're talking common sense." He turned to Shirley, who was getting ready to make her departure: "Well, Miss Green, we may consider the matter settled. You undertake the work at the price I named and finish it as soon as you can. Of course, you will have to consult me a good deal as you go along, so I think it would be better for you to come and stay here while the work is progressing. Mrs. Ryder can give you a suite of rooms to yourself, where you will be undisturbed and you will have all your material close at hand. What do you say?" Shirley was silent for a moment. She looked first at Ryder and then at his son, and from them her glance went to the little drawer on the left-hand side of the desk. Then she said quietly: "As you think best, Mr. Ryder. I am quite willing to do the work here." Ryder, Sr., escorted her to the top of the landing and watched her as she passed down the grand staircase, ushered by the gorgeously uniformed flunkies, to the front door and the street. CHAPTER XIII Shirley entered upon her new duties in the Ryder household two days later. She had returned to her rooms the evening of her meeting with the financier in a state bordering upon hysteria. The day's events had been so extraordinary that it seemed to her they could not be real, and that she must be in a dream. The car ride to Seventy-fourth Street, the interview in the library, the discovery of her father's letters, the offer to write the biography, and, what to her was still more important, the invitation to go and live in the Ryder home--all these incidents were so remarkable and unusual that it was only with difficulty that the girl persuaded herself that they were not figments of a disordered brain. But it was all true enough. The next morning's mail brought a letter from Mrs. Ryder, who wrote to the effect that Mr. Ryder would like the work to begin at once, and adding that a suite of rooms would be ready for her the following afternoon. Shirley did not hesitate. Everything was to be gained by making the Ryder residence her headquarters, her father's very life depended upon the successful outcome of her present mission, and this unhoped for opportunity practically ensured success. She immediately wrote to Massapequa. One letter was to her mother, saying that she was extending her visit beyond the time originally planned. The other letter was to Stott. She told him all about the interview with Ryder, informed him of the discovery of the letters, and after explaining the nature of the work offered to her, said that her address for the next few weeks would be in care of John Burkett Ryder. All was going better than she had dared to hope. Everything seemed to favour their plan. Her first step, of course, while in the Ryder home, would be to secure possession of her father's letters, and these she would dispatch at once to Massapequa, so they could be laid before the Senate without delay. So, after settling accounts with her landlady and packing up her few belongings, Shirley lost no time in transferring herself to the more luxurious quarters provided for her in the ten-million-dollar mansion uptown. At the Ryder house she was received cordially and with every mark of consideration. The housekeeper came down to the main hall to greet her when she arrived and escorted her to the suite of rooms, comprising a small working library, a bedroom simply but daintily furnished in pink and white and a private bathroom, which had been specially prepared for her convenience and comfort, and here presently she was joined by Mrs. Ryder. "Dear me," exclaimed the financier's wife, staring curiously at Shirley, "what a young girl you are to have made such a stir with a book! How did you do it? I'm sure I couldn't. It's as much as I can do to write a letter, and half the time that's not legible." "Oh, it wasn't so hard," laughed Shirley. "It was the subject that appealed rather than any special skill of mine. The trusts and their misdeeds are the favourite topics of the hour. The whole country is talking about nothing else. My book came at the right time, that's all." Although "The American Octopus" was a direct attack on her own husband, Mrs. Ryder secretly admired this young woman, who had dared to speak a few blunt truths. It was a courage which, alas! she had always lacked herself, but there was a certain satisfaction in knowing there were women in the world not entirely cowed by the tyrant Man. "I have always wanted a daughter," went on Mrs. Ryder, becoming confidential, while Shirley removed her things and made herself at home; "girls of your age are so companionable." Then, abruptly, she asked: "Do your parents live in New York?" Shirley's face flushed and she stooped over her trunk to hide her embarrassment. "No--not at present," she answered evasively. "My mother and father are in the country." She was afraid that more questions of a personal nature would follow, but apparently Mrs. Ryder was not in an inquisitive mood, for she asked nothing further. She only said: "I have a son, but I don't see much of him. You must meet my Jefferson. He is such a nice boy." Shirley tried to look unconcerned as she replied: "I met him yesterday. Mr. Ryder introduced him to me." "Poor lad, he has his troubles too," went on Mrs. Ryder. "He's in love with a girl, but his father wants him to marry someone else. They're quarrelling over it all the time." "Parents shouldn't interfere in matters of the heart," said Shirley decisively. "What is more serious than the choosing of a life companion, and who are better entitled to make a free selection than they who are going to spend the rest of their days together? Of course, it is a father's duty to give his son the benefit of his riper experience, but to insist on a marriage based only on business interests is little less than a crime. There are considerations more important if the union is to be a happy or a lasting one. The chief thing is that the man should feel real attachment for the woman he marries. Two people who are to live together as man and wife must be compatible in tastes and temper. You cannot mix oil and water. It is these selfish marriages which keep our divorce courts busy. Money alone won't buy happiness in marriage." "No," sighed Mrs. Ryder, "no one knows that better than I." The financier's wife was already most favourably impressed with her guest, and she chatted on as if she had known Shirley for years. It was rarely that she had heard so young a woman express such common-sense views, and the more she talked with her the less surprised she was that she was the author of a much-discussed book. Finally, thinking that Shirley might prefer to be alone, she rose to go, bidding her make herself thoroughly at home and to ring for anything she might wish. A maid had been assigned to look exclusively after her wants, and she could have her meals served in her room or else have them with the family as she liked. But Shirley, not caring to encounter Mr. Ryder's cold, searching stare more often than necessary, said she would prefer to take her meals alone. Left to herself, Shirley settled down to work in earnest. Mr. Ryder had sent to her room all the material for the biography, and soon she was completely absorbed in the task of sorting and arranging letters, making extracts from records, compiling data, etc., laying the foundations for the important book she was to write. She wondered what they would call it, and she smiled as a peculiarly appropriate title flashed through her mind--"The History of a Crime." Yet she thought they could hardly infringe on Victor Hugo; perhaps the best title was the simplest "The History of the Empire Trading Company." Everyone would understand that it told the story of John Burkett Ryder's remarkable career from his earliest beginnings to the present time. She worked feverishly all that evening getting the material into shape, and the following day found her early at her desk. No one disturbed her and she wrote steadily on until noon, Mrs. Ryder only once putting her head in the door to wish her good morning. After luncheon, Shirley decided that the weather was too glorious to remain indoors. Her health must not be jeopardized even to advance the interests of the Colossus, so she put on her hat and left the house to go for a walk. The air smelled sweet to her after being confined so long indoor, and she walked with a more elastic and buoyant step than she had since her return home. Turning down Fifth Avenue, she entered the park at Seventy-second Street, following the pathway until she came to the bend in the driveway opposite the Casino. The park was almost deserted at that hour, and there was a delightful sense of solitude and a sweet scent of new-mown hay from the freshly cut lawns. She found an empty bench, well shaded by an overspreading tree, and she sat down, grateful for the rest and quiet. She wondered what Jefferson thought of her action in coming to his father's house practically in disguise and under an assumed name. She must see him at once, for in him lay her hope of obtaining possession of the letters. Certainly she felt no delicacy or compunction in asking Jefferson to do her this service. The letters belonged to her father and they were being wrongfully withheld with the deliberate purpose of doing him an injury. She had a moral if not a legal right to recover the letters in any way that she could. She was so deeply engrossed in her thoughts that she had not noticed a hansom cab which suddenly drew up with a jerk at the curb opposite her bench. A man jumped out. It was Jefferson. "Hello, Shirley," he cried gaily; "who would have expected to find you rusticating on a bench here? I pictured you grinding away at home doing literary stunts for the governor." He grinned and then added: "Come for a drive. I want to talk to you." Shirley demurred. No, she could not spare the time. Yet, she thought to herself, why was not this a good opportunity to explain to Jefferson how he came to find her in his father's library masquerading under another name, and also to ask him to secure the letters for her? While she pondered Jefferson insisted, and a few minutes later she found herself sitting beside him in the cab. They started off at a brisk pace, Shirley sitting with her head back, enjoying the strong breeze caused by the rapid motion. "Now tell me," he said, "what does it all mean? I was so startled at seeing you in the library the other day that I almost betrayed you. How did you come to call on father?" Briefly Shirley explained everything. She told him how Mr. Ryder had written to her asking her to call and see him, and how she had eagerly seized at this last straw in the hope of helping her father, She told him about the letters, explaining how necessary they were for her father's defence and how she had discovered them. Mr. Ryder, she said, had seemed to take a fancy to her and had asked her to remain in the house as his guest while she was compiling his biography, and she had accepted the offer, not so much for the amount of money involved as for the splendid opportunity it afforded her to gain possession of the letters. "So that is the mysterious work you spoke of--to get those letters?" said Jefferson. "Yes, that is my mission. It was a secret. I couldn't tell you; I couldn't tell anyone. Only Judge Stott knows. He is aware I have found them and is hourly expecting to receive them from me. And now," she said, "I want your help." His only answer was to grasp tighter the hand she had laid in his. She knew that she would not have to explain the nature of the service she wanted. He understood. "Where are the letters?" he demanded. "In the left-hand drawer of your father's desk," she answered. He was silent for a few moments, and then he said simply: "I will get them." The cab by this time had got as far as Claremont, and from the hill summit they had a splendid view of the broad sweep of the majestic Hudson and the towering walls of the blue palisades. The day was so beautiful and the air so invigorating that Jefferson suggested a ramble along the banks of the river. They could leave the cab at Claremont and drive back to the city later. Shirley was too grateful to him for his promise of cooperation to make any further opposition, and soon they were far away from beaten highways, down on the banks of the historic stream, picking flowers and laughing merrily like two truant children bent on a self-made holiday. The place they had reached was just outside the northern boundaries of Harlem, a sylvan spot still unspoiled by the rude invasion of the flat-house builder. The land, thickly wooded, sloped down sharply to the water, and the perfect quiet was broken only by the washing of the tiny surf against the river bank and the shrill notes of the birds in the trees. Although it was late in October the day was warm, and Shirley soon tired of climbing over bramble-entangled verdure. The rich grass underfoot looked cool and inviting, and the natural slope of the ground affording an ideal resting-place, she sat there, with Jefferson stretched out at her feet, both watching idly the dancing waters of the broad Hudson, spangled with gleams of light, as they swept swiftly by on their journey to the sea. "Shirley," said Jefferson suddenly, "I suppose you saw that ridiculous story about my alleged engagement to Miss Roberts. I hope you understood that it was done without my consent." "If I did not guess it, Jeff," she answered, "your assurance would be sufficient. Besides," she added, "what right have I to object?" "But I want you to have the right," he replied earnestly. "I'm going to stop this Roberts nonsense in a way my father hardly anticipates. I'm just waiting a chance to talk to him. I'll show him the absurdity of announcing me engaged to a girl who is about to elope with his private secretary!" "Elope with the secretary?" exclaimed Shirley. Jefferson told her all about the letter he had found on the staircase, and the Hon. Fitzroy Bagley's plans for a runaway marriage with the senator's wealthy daughter. "It's a godsend to me," he said gleefully. "Their plan is to get married next Wednesday. I'll see my father on Tuesday; I'll put the evidence in his hands, and I don't think," he added grimly, "he'll bother me any more about Miss Roberts." "So you're not going away now?" said Shirley, smiling down at him. He sat up and leaned over towards her. "I can't, Shirley, I simply can't," he replied, his voice trembling. "You are more to me than I dreamed a woman could ever be. I realize it more forcibly every day. There is no use fighting against it. Without you, my work, my life means nothing." Shirley shook her head and averted her eyes. "Don't let us speak of that, Jeff," she pleaded gently. "I told you I did not belong to myself while my father was in peril." "But I must speak of it," he interrupted. "Shirley, you do yourself an injustice as well as me. You are not indifferent to me--I feel that. Then why raise this barrier between us?" A soft light stole into the girl's eyes. Ah, it was good to feel there was someone to whom she was everything in the world! "Don't ask me to betray my trust, Jeff," she faltered. "You know I am not indifferent to you--far from it. But I--" He came closer until his face nearly touched hers. "I love you--I want you," he murmured feverishly. "Give me the right to claim you before all the world as my future wife!" Every note of his rich, manly voice, vibrating with impetuous passion, sounded in Shirley's ear like a soft caress. She closed her eyes. A strange feeling of languor was stealing over her, a mysterious thrill passed through her whole body. The eternal, inevitable sex instinct was disturbing, for the first time, a woman whose life had been singularly free from such influences, putting to flight all the calculations and resolves her cooler judgment had made. The sensuous charm of the place--the distant splash of the water, the singing of the birds, the fragrance of the trees and grass--all these symbols of the joy of life conspired to arouse the love-hunger of the woman. Why, after all, should she not know happiness like other women? She had a sacred duty to perform, it was true; but would it be less well done because she declined to stifle the natural leanings of her womanhood? Both her soul and her body called out: "Let this man love you, give yourself to him, he is worthy of your love." Half unconsciously, she listened to his ardent wooing, her eyes shut, as he spoke quickly, passionately, his breath warm upon her cheek: "Shirley, I offer you all the devotion a man can give a woman. Say the one word that will make me the happiest or the most wretched of men. Yes or no! Only think well before you wreck my life. I love you--I love you! I will wait for you if need be until the crack of doom. Say--say you will be my wife!" She opened her eyes. His face was bent close over hers. Their lips almost touched. "Yes, Jefferson," she murmured, "I do love you!" His lips met hers in a long, passionate kiss. Her eyes closed and an ecstatic thrill seemed to convulse her entire being. The birds in the trees overhead sang in more joyful chorus in celebration of the betrothal. CHAPTER XIV It was nearly seven o'clock when Shirley got back to Seventy-fourth Street. No one saw her come in, and she went direct to her room, and after a hasty dinner, worked until late into the night on her book to make up for lost time. The events of the afternoon caused her considerable uneasiness. She reproached herself for her weakness and for having yielded so readily to the impulse of the moment. She had said only what was the truth when she admitted she loved Jefferson, but what right had she to dispose of her future while her father's fate was still uncertain? Her conscience troubled her, and when she came to reason it out calmly, the more impossible seemed their union from every point of view. How could she become the daughter-in-law of the man who had ruined her own father? The idea was preposterous, and hard as the sacrifice would be, Jefferson must be made to see it in that light. Their engagement was the greatest folly; it bound each of them when nothing but unhappiness could possibly come of it. She was sure now that she loved Jefferson. It would be hard to give him up, but there are times and circumstances when duty and principle must prevail over all other considerations, and this she felt was one of them. The following morning she received a letter from Stott. He was delighted to hear the good news regarding her important discovery, and he urged her to lose no time in securing the letters and forwarding them to Massapequa, when he would immediately go to Washington and lay them before the Senate. Documentary evidence of that conclusive nature, he went on to say, would prove of the very highest value in clearing her father's name. He added that the judge and her mother were as well as circumstances would permit, and that they were not in the least worried about her protracted absence. Her Aunt Milly had already returned to Europe, and Eudoxia was still threatening to leave daily. Shirley needed no urging. She quite realized the importance of acting quickly, but it was not easy to get at the letters. The library was usually kept locked when the great man was away, and on the few occasions when access to it was possible, the lynx-eyed Mr. Bagley was always on guard. Short as had been her stay in the Ryder household, Shirley already shared Jefferson's antipathy to the English secretary, whose manner grew more supercilious and overbearing as he drew nearer the date when he expected to run off with one of the richest catches of the season. He had not sought the acquaintance of his employer's biographer since her arrival, and, with the exception of a rude stare, had not deigned to notice her, which attitude of haughty indifference was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the Hon. Fitzroy usually left nothing unturned to cultivate a flirtatious intimacy with every attractive female he met. The truth was that what with Mr. Ryder's demands upon his services and his own preparations for his coming matrimonial venture, in which he had so much at stake, he had neither time nor inclination to indulge his customary amorous diversions. Miss Roberts had called at the house several times, ostensibly to see Mrs. Ryder, and when introduced to Shirley she had condescended to give the latter a supercilious nod. Her conversation was generally of the silly, vacuous sort, concerning chiefly new dresses or bonnets, and Shirley at once read her character--frivolous, amusement-loving, empty-headed, irresponsible--just the kind of girl to do something foolish without weighing the consequences. After chatting a few moments with Mrs. Ryder she would usually vanish, and one day, after one of these mysterious disappearances, Shirley happened to pass the library and caught sight of her and Mr. Bagley conversing in subdued and eager tones. It was very evident that the elopement scheme was fast maturing. If the scandal was to be prevented, Jefferson ought to see his father and acquaint him with the facts without delay. It was probable that at the same time he would make an effort to secure the letters. Meantime she must be patient. Too much hurry might spoil everything. So the days passed, Shirley devoting almost all her time to the history she had undertaken. She saw nothing of Ryder, Sr., but a good deal of his wife, to whom she soon became much attached. She found her an amiable, good-natured woman, entirely free from that offensive arrogance and patronizing condescension which usually marks the parvenue as distinct from the thoroughbred. Mrs. Ryder had no claims to distinguished lineage; on the contrary, she was the daughter of a country grocer when the then rising oil man married her, and of educational advantages she had had little or none. It was purely by accident that she was the wife of the richest man in the world, and while she enjoyed the prestige her husband's prominence gave her, she never allowed it to turn her head. She gave away large sums for charitable purposes and, strange to say, when the gift came direct from her, the money was never returned on the plea that it was "tainted." She shared her husband's dislike for entertaining, and led practically the life of a recluse. The advent of Shirley, therefore, into her quiet and uneventful existence was as welcome as sunshine when it breaks through the clouds after days of gloom. Quite a friendship sprang up between the two women, and when tired of writing, Shirley would go into Mrs. Ryder's room and chat until the financier's wife began to look forward to these little impromptu visits, so much she enjoyed them. Nothing more had been said concerning Jefferson and Miss Roberts. The young man had not yet seen his father, but his mother knew he was only waiting an opportunity to demand an explanation of the engagement announcements. Her husband, on the other hand, desired the match more than ever, owing to the continued importunities of Senator Roberts. As usual, Mrs. Ryder confided these little domestic troubles to Shirley. "Jefferson," she said, "is very angry. He is determined not to marry the girl, and when he and his father do meet there'll be another scene." "What objection has your son to Miss Roberts?" inquired Shirley innocently. "Oh, the usual reason," sighed the mother, "and I've no doubt he knows best. He's in love with another girl--a Miss Rossmore." "Oh, yes," answered Shirley simply. "Mr. Ryder spoke of her." Mrs. Ryder was silent, and presently she left the girl alone with her work. The next afternoon Shirley was in her room busy writing when there came a tap at her door. Thinking it was another visit from Mrs. Ryder, she did not look up, but cried out pleasantly: "Come in." John Ryder entered. He smiled cordially and, as if apologizing for the intrusion, said amiably: "I thought I'd run up to see how you were getting along." His coming was so unexpected that for a moment Shirley was startled, but she quickly regained her composure and asked him to take a seat. He seemed pleased to find her making such good progress, and he stopped to answer a number of questions she put to him. Shirley tried to be cordial, but when she looked well at him and noted the keen, hawk-like eyes, the cruel, vindictive lines about the mouth, the square-set, relentless jaw--Wall Street had gone wrong with the Colossus that day and he was still wearing his war paint--she recalled the wrong this man had done her father and she felt how bitterly she hated him. The more her mind dwelt upon it, the more exasperated she was to think she should be there, a guest, under his roof, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that she remained civil. "What is the moral of your life?" she demanded bluntly. He was quick to note the contemptuous tone in her voice, and he gave her a keen, searching look as if he were trying to read her thoughts and fathom the reason for her very evident hostility towards him. "What do you mean?" he asked. "I mean, what can you show as your life work? Most men whose lives are big enough to call for biographies have done something useful--they have been famous statesmen, eminent scientists, celebrated authors, great inventors. What have you done?" The question appeared to stagger him. The audacity of any one putting such a question to a man in his own house was incredible. He squared his jaws and his clenched fist descended heavily on the table. "What have I done?" he cried. "I have built up the greatest fortune ever accumulated by one man. My fabulous wealth has caused my name to spread to the four corners of the earth. Is that not an achievement to relate to future generations?" Shirley gave a little shrug of her shoulders. "Future generations will take no interest in you or your millions," she said calmly. "Our civilization will have made such progress by that time that people will merely wonder why we, in our day, tolerated men of your class so long. Now it is different. The world is money-mad. You are a person of importance in the eyes of the unthinking multitude, but it only envies you your fortune; it does not admire you personally. When you die people will count your millions, not your good deeds." He laughed cynically and drew up a chair near her desk. As a general thing, John Ryder never wasted words on women. He had but a poor opinion of their mentality, and considered it beneath the dignity of any man to enter into serious argument with a woman. In fact, it was seldom he condescended to argue with anyone. He gave orders and talked to people; he had no patience to be talked to. Yet he found himself listening with interest to this young woman who expressed herself so frankly. It was a decided novelty for him to hear the truth. "What do I care what the world says when I'm dead?" he asked with a forced laugh. "You do care," replied Shirley gravely. "You may school yourself to believe that you are indifferent to the good opinion of your fellow man, but right down in your heart you do care--every man does, whether he be multi-millionaire or a sneak thief." "You class the two together, I notice," he said bitterly. "It is often a distinction without a difference," she rejoined promptly. He remained silent for a moment or two toying nervously with a paper knife. Then, arrogantly, and as if anxious to impress her with his importance, he said: "Most men would be satisfied if they had accomplished what I have. Do you realize that my wealth is so vast that I scarcely know myself what I am worth? What my fortune will be in another fifty years staggers the imagination. Yet I started with nothing. I made it all myself. Surely I should get credit for that." "How did you make it?" retorted Shirley. "In America we don't ask how a man makes his money; we ask if he has got any." "You are mistaken," replied Shirley earnestly. "America is waking up. The conscience of the nation is being aroused. We are coming to realize that the scandals of the last few years were only the fruit of public indifference to sharp business practice. The people will soon ask the dishonest rich man where he got it, and there will have to be an accounting. What account will you be able to give?" He bit his lip and looked at her for a moment without replying. Then, with a faint suspicion of a sneer, he said: "You are a socialist--perhaps an anarchist!" "Only the ignorant commit the blunder of confounding the two," she retorted. "Anarchy is a disease; socialism is a science." "Indeed!" he exclaimed mockingly, "I thought the terms were synonymous. The world regards them both as insane." Herself an enthusiastic convert to the new political faith that was rising like a flood tide all over the world, the contemptuous tone in which this plutocrat spoke of the coming reorganization of society which was destined to destroy him and his kind spurred her on to renewed argument. "I imagine," she said sarcastically, "that you would hardly approve any social reform which threatened to interfere with your own business methods. But no matter how you disapprove of socialism on general principles, as a leader of the capitalist class you should understand what socialism is, and not confuse one of the most important movements in modern world-history with the crazy theories of irresponsible cranks. The anarchists are the natural enemies of the entire human family, and would destroy it were their dangerous doctrines permitted to prevail; the socialists, on the contrary, are seeking to save mankind from the degradation, the crime and the folly into which such men as you have driven it." She spoke impetuously, with the inspired exaltation of a prophet delivering a message to the people. Ryder listened, concealing his impatience with uneasy little coughs. "Yes," she went on, "I am a socialist and I am proud of it. The whole world is slowly drifting toward socialism as the only remedy for the actual intolerable conditions. It may not come in our time, but it will come as surely as the sun will rise and set tomorrow. Has not the flag of socialism waved recently from the White House? Has not a President of the United States declared that the State must eventually curb the great fortunes? What is that but socialism?" "True," retorted Ryder grimly, "and that little speech intended for the benefit of the gallery will cost him the nomination at the next Presidential election. We don't want in the White House a President who stirs up class hatred. Our rich men have a right to what is their own; that is guaranteed them by the Constitution." "Is it their own?" interrupted Shirley. Ryder ignored the insinuation and proceeded: "What of our boasted free institutions if a man is to be restricted in what he may and may not do? If I am clever enough to accumulate millions who can stop me?" "The people will stop you," said Shirley calmly. "It is only a question of time. Their patience is about exhausted. Put your ear to the ground and listen to the distant rumbling of the tempest which, sooner or later, will be unchained in this land, provoked by the iniquitous practices of organized capital. The people have had enough of the extortions of the Trusts. One day they will rise in their wrath and seize by the throat this knavish plutocracy which, confident in the power of its wealth to procure legal immunity and reckless of its danger, persists in robbing the public daily. But retribution is at hand. The growing discontent of the proletariat, the ever-increasing strikes and labour disputes of all kinds, the clamour against the Railroads and the Trusts, the evidence of collusion between both--all this is the writing on the wall. The capitalistic system is doomed; socialism will succeed it." "What is socialism?" he demanded scornfully. "What will it give the public that it has not got already?" Shirley, who never neglected an opportunity to make a convert, no matter how hardened he might be, picked up a little pamphlet printed for propaganda purposes which she had that morning received by mail. "Here," she said, "is one of the best and clearest definitions of socialism I have ever read: "Socialism is common ownership of natural resources and public utilities, and the common operation of all industries for the general good. Socialism is opposed to monopoly, that is, to private ownership of land and the instruments of labor, which is indirect ownership of men; to the wages system, by which labor is legally robbed of a large part of the product of labor; to competition with its enormous waste of effort and its opportunities for the spoliation of the weak by the strong. Socialism is industrial democracy. It is the government of the people by the people and for the people, not in the present restricted sense, but as regards all the common interests of men. Socialism is opposed to oligarchy and monarchy, and therefore to the tyrannies of business cliques and money kings. Socialism is for freedom, not only from the fear of force, but from the fear of want. Socialism proposes real liberty, not merely the right to vote, but the liberty to live for something more than meat and drink. "Socialism is righteousness in the relations of men. It is based on the fundamentals of religion, the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of men. It seeks through association and equality to realize fraternity. Socialism will destroy the motives which make for cheap manufacturers, poor workmanship and adulterations; it will secure the real utility of things. Use, not exchange, will be the object of labour. Things will be made to serve, not to sell. Socialism will banish war, for private ownership is back of strife between men. Socialism will purify politics, for private capitalism is the great source of political corruption. Socialism will make for education, invention and discovery; it will stimulate the moral development of men. Crime will have lost most of its motive and pauperism will have no excuse. That," said Shirley, as she concluded, "is socialism!" Ryder shrugged his shoulders and rose to go. "Delightful," he said ironically, "but in my judgment wholly Utopian and impracticable. It's nothing but a gigantic pipe dream. It won't come in this generation nor in ten generations if, indeed, it is ever taken seriously by a majority big enough to put its theories to the test. Socialism does not take into account two great factors that move the world--men's passions and human ambition. If you eliminate ambition you remove the strongest incentive to individual effort. From your own account a socialistic world would be a dreadfully tame place to live in--everybody depressingly good, without any of the feverish turmoil of life as we know it. Such a world would not appeal to me at all. I love the fray--the daily battle of gain and loss, the excitement of making or losing millions. That is my life!" "Yet what good is your money to you?" insisted Shirley. "You are able to spend only an infinitesimal part of it. You cannot even give it away, for nobody will have any of it." "Money!" he hissed rather than spoke, "I hate money. It means nothing to me. I have so much that I have lost all idea of its value. I go on accumulating it for only one purpose. It buys power. I love power--that is my passion, my ambition, to rule the world with my gold. Do you know," he went on and leaning over the desk in a dramatic attitude, "that if I chose I could start a panic in Wall Street to-morrow that would shake to their foundations every financial institution in the country? Do you know that I practically control the Congress of the United States and that no legislative measure becomes law unless it has my approval?" "The public has long suspected as much," replied Shirley. "That is why you are looked upon as a menace to the stability and honesty of our political and commercial life." An angry answer rose to his lips when the door opened and Mrs. Ryder entered. "I've been looking for you, John," she said peevishly. "Mr. Bagley told me you were somewhere in the house. Senator Roberts is downstairs." "He's come about Jefferson and his daughter, I suppose," muttered Ryder. "Well, I'll see him. Where is he?" "In the library. Kate came with him. She's in my room." They left Shirley to her writing, and when he had closed the door the financier turned to his wife and said impatiently: "Now, what are we going to do about Jefferson and Kate? The senator insists on the matter of their marriage being settled one way or another. Where is Jefferson?" "He came in about half an hour ago. He was upstairs to see me, and I thought he was looking for you," answered the wife. "Well," replied Ryder determinedly, "he and I have got to understand each other. This can't go on. It shan't." Mrs. Ryder put her hand on his arm, and said pleadingly: "Don't be impatient with the boy, John. Remember he is all we have. He is so unhappy. He wants to please us, but--" "But he insists on pleasing himself," said Ryder completing the sentence. "I'm afraid, John, that his liking for that Miss Rossmore is more serious than you realize--" The financier stamped his foot and replied angrily: "Miss Rossmore! That name seems to confront me at every turn--for years the father, now the daughter! I'm sorry, my dear," he went on more calmly, "that you seem inclined to listen to Jefferson. It only encourages him in his attitude towards me. Kate would make him an excellent wife, while what do we know about the other woman? Are you willing to sacrifice your son's future to a mere boyish whim?" Mrs. Ryder sighed. "It's very hard," she said, "for a mother to know what to advise. Miss Green says--" "What!" exclaimed her husband, "you have consulted Miss Green on the subject?" "Yes," answered his wife, "I don't know how I came to tell her, but I did. I seem to tell her everything. I find her such a comfort, John. I haven't had an attack of nerves since that girl has been in the house." "She is certainly a superior woman," admitted Ryder. "I wish she'd ward that Rossmore girl off. I wish she--" He stopped abruptly as if not venturing to give expression to his thoughts, even to his wife. Then he said: "If she were Kate Roberts she wouldn't let Jeff slip through her fingers." "I have often wished," went on Mrs. Ryder, "that Kate were more like Shirley Green. I don't think we would have any difficulty with Jeff then." "Kate is the daughter of Senator Roberts, and if this marriage is broken off in any way without the senator's consent, he is in a position to injure my interests materially. If you see Jefferson send him to me in the library. I'll go and keep Roberts in good humour until he comes." He went downstairs and Mrs. Ryder proceeded to her apartments, where she found Jefferson chatting with Kate. She at once delivered Ryder Sr.'s message. "Jeff, your father wants to see you in the library." "Yes, I want to see him," answered the young man grimly, and after a few moments more badinage with Kate he left the room. It was not a mere coincidence that had brought Senator Roberts and his daughter and the financier's son all together under the Ryder roof at the same time. It was part of Jefferson's well-prepared plan to expose the rascality of his father's secretary, and at the same time rid himself of the embarrassing entanglement with Kate Roberts. If the senator were confronted publicly with the fact that his daughter, while keeping up the fiction of being engaged to Ryder Jr., was really preparing to run off with the Hon. Fitzroy Bagley, he would have no alternative but to retire gracefully under fire and relinquish all idea of a marriage alliance with the house of Ryder. The critical moment had arrived. To-morrow, Wednesday, was the day fixed for the elopement. The secretary's little game had gone far enough. The time had come for action. So Jefferson had written to Senator Roberts, who was in Washington, asking him if it would be convenient for him to come at once to New York and meet himself and his father on a matter of importance. The senator naturally jumped to the conclusion that Jefferson and Ryder had reached an amicable understanding, and he immediately hurried to New York and with his daughter came round to Seventy-fourth Street. When Ryder Sr. entered the library, Senator Roberts was striding nervously up and down the room. This, he felt, was an important day. The ambition of his life seemed on the point of being attained. "Hello, Roberts," was Ryder's cheerful greeting. "What's brought you from Washington at a critical time like this? The Rossmore impeachment needs every friend we have." "Just as if you didn't know," smiled the senator uneasily, "that I am here by appointment to meet you and your son!" "To meet me and my son?" echoed Ryder astonished. The senator, perplexed and beginning to feel real alarm, showed the financier Jefferson's letter. Ryder read it and he looked pleased. "That's all right," he said, "if the lad asked you to meet us here it can mean only one thing--that at last he has made up his mind to this marriage." "That's what I thought," replied the senator, breathing more freely. "I was sorry to leave Washington at such a time, but I'm a father, and Kate is more to me than the Rossmore impeachment. Besides, to see her married to your son Jefferson is one of the dearest wishes of my life." "You can rest easy," said Ryder; "that is practically settled. Jefferson's sending for you proves that he is now ready to meet my wishes. He'll be here any minute. How is the Rossmore case progressing?" "Not so well as it might," growled the senator. "There's a lot of maudlin sympathy for the judge. He's a pretty sick man by all accounts, and the newspapers seem to be taking his part. One or two of the Western senators are talking Corporate influence and Trust legislation, but when it comes to a vote the matter will be settled on party lines." "That means that Judge Rossmore will be removed?" demanded Ryder sternly. "Yes, with five votes to spare," answered the senator. "That's not enough," insisted Ryder. "There must be at least twenty. Let there be no blunders, Roberts. The man is a menace to all the big commercial interests. This thing must go through." The door opened and Jefferson appeared. On seeing the senator talking with his father, he hesitated on the threshold. "Come in, Jeff," said his father pleasantly. "You expected to see Senator Roberts, didn't you?" "Yes, sir. How do you do, Senator?" said the young man, advancing into the room. "I got your letter, my boy, and here I am," said the senator smiling affably. "I suppose we can guess what the business is, eh?" "That he's going to marry Kate, of course," chimed in Ryder Sr. "Jeff, my lad, I'm glad you are beginning to see my way of looking at things. You're doing more to please me lately, and I appreciate it. You stayed at home when I asked you to, and now you've made up your mind regarding this marriage." Jefferson let his father finish his speech, and then he said calmly: "I think there must be some misapprehension as to the reason for my summoning Senator Roberts to New York. It had nothing to do with my marrying Miss Roberts, but to prevent her marriage with someone else." "What!" exclaimed Ryder, Sr. "Marriage with someone else?" echoed the senator. He thought he had not heard aright, yet at the same time he had grave misgivings. "What do you mean, sir?" Taking from his pocket a copy of the letter he had picked up on the staircase, Jefferson held it out to the girl's father. "Your daughter is preparing to run away with my father's secretary. To-morrow would have been too late. That is why I summoned you. Read this." The senator took the letter, and as he read his face grew ashen and his hand trembled violently. At one blow all his ambitious projects for his daughter had been swept away. The inconsiderate act of a silly, thoughtless girl had spoiled the carefully laid plans of a lifetime. The only consolation which remained was that the calamity might have been still more serious. This timely warning had saved his family from perhaps an even greater scandal. He passed the letter in silence to Ryder, Sr. The financier was a man of few words when the situation called for prompt action. After he had read the letter through, there was an ominous silence. Then he rang a bell. The butler appeared. "Tell Mr. Bagley I want him." The man bowed and disappeared. "Who the devil is this Bagley?" demanded the senater. "English--blue blood--no money," was Ryder's laconic answer. "That's the only kind we seem to get over here," growled the senator. "We furnish the money--they furnish the blood--damn his blue blood! I don't want any in mine." Turning to Jefferson, he said: "Jefferson, whatever the motives that actuated you, I can only thank you for this warning. I think it would have broken my heart if my girl had gone away with that scoundrel. Of course, under the circumstances, I must abandon all idea of your becoming my son-in-law. I release you from all obligations you may have felt yourself bound by." Jefferson bowed and remained silent. Ryder, Sr. eyed his son closely, an amused expression hovering on his face. After all, it was not so much he who had desired this match as Roberts, and as long as the senator was willing to withdraw, he could make no objection. He wondered what part, if any, his son had played in bringing about this sensational denouement to a match which had been so distasteful to him, and it gratified his paternal vanity to think that Jefferson after all might be smarter than he had given him credit for. At this juncture Mr. Bagley entered the room. He was a little taken aback on seeing the senator, but like most men of his class, his self-conceit made him confident of his ability to handle any emergency which might arise, and he had no reason to suspect that this hasty summons to the library had anything to do with his matrimonial plans. "Did you ask for me, sir? he demanded, addressing his employer. "Yes, Mr. Bagley," replied Ryder, fixing the secretary with a look that filled the latter with misgivings. "What steamers leave to-morrow for England?" "To-morrow?" echoed Mr. Bagley. "I said to-morrow," repeated Ryder, slightly raising his voice. "Let me see," stammered the secretary, "there is the White Star, the North German Lloyd, the Atlantic Transport--" "Have you any preference?" inquired the financier. "No, sir, none at all." "Then you'll go on board one of the ships to-night," said Ryder. "Your things will be packed and sent to you before the steamer sails to-morrow." The Hon. Fitzroy Bagley, third son of a British peer, did not understand even yet that he was discharged as one dismisses a housemaid caught kissing the policeman. He could not think what Mr. Ryder wanted him to go abroad for unless it were on some matter of business, and it was decidedly inconvenient for him to sail at this time. "But, sir," he stammered. "I'm afraid--I'm afraid----" "Yes," rejoined Ryder promptly, "I notice that--your hand is shaking." "I mean that I----" "You mean that you have other engagements!" said Ryder sternly. "Oh no--no but----" "No engagement at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning?" insisted Ryder. "With my daughter?" chimed in the senator. Mr. Bagley now understood. He broke out in a cold perspiration and he paled visibly. In the hope that the full extent of his plans were not known, he attempted to brazen it out. "No, certainly not, under no circumstances," he said. Ryder, Sr. rang a bell. "Perhaps she has an engagement with you. We'll ask her." To the butler, who entered, he said: "Tell Miss Roberts that her father would like to see her here." The man disappeared and the senator took a hand in cross-examining the now thoroughly uncomfortable secretary. "So you thought my daughter looked pale and that a little excursion to Buffalo would be a good thing for her? Well, it won't be a good thing for you, young man, I can assure you of that!" The English aristocrat began to wilt. His assurance of manner quite deserted him and he stammered painfully as he floundered about in excuses. "Not with me--oh dear, no," he said. "You never proposed to run away with my daughter?" cried the irate father. "Run away with her?" stammered Bagley. "And marry her?" shouted the senator, shaking his fist at him. "Oh say--this is hardly fair--three against one--really--I'm awfully sorry, eh, what?" The door opened and Kate Roberts bounced in. She was smiling and full of animal spirits, but on seeing the stern face of her father and the pitiable picture presented by her faithful Fitz she was intelligent enough to immediately scent danger. "Did you want to see me, father?" she inquired boldly. "Yes, Kate," answered the senator gravely, "we have just been having a talk with Mr. Bagley, in which you were one of the subjects of conversation. Can you guess what it was?" The girl looked from her father to Bagley and from him to the Ryders. Her aristocratic lover made a movement forward as if to exculpate himself but he caught Ryder's eye and remained where he was. "Well?" she said, with a nervous laugh. "Is it true?" asked the senator, "that you were about to marry this man secretly?" She cast down her eyes and answered: "I suppose you know everything." "Have you anything to add?" asked her father sternly. "No," said Kate shaking her head. "It's true. We intended to run away, didn't we Fitz?" "Never mind about Mr. Bagley," thundered her father. "Haven't you a word of shame for this disgrace you have brought upon me?" "Oh papa, don't be so cross. Jefferson did not care for me. I couldn't be an old maid. Mr. Bagley has a lovely castle in England, and one day he'll sit in the House of Lords. He'll explain everything to you." "He'll explain nothing," rejoined the senator grimly. "Mr. Bagley returns to England to-night. He won't have time to explain anything." "Returns to England?" echoed Kate dismayed. "Yes, and you go with me to Washington at once." The senator turned to Ryder. "Good-bye Ryder. The little domestic comedy is ended. I'm grateful it didn't turn out a drama. The next time I pick out a son-in-law I hope I'll have better luck." He shook hands with Jefferson, and left the room followed by his crestfallen daughter. Ryder, who had gone to write something at his desk, strode over to where Mr. Bagley was standing and handed him a cheque. "Here, sir, this settles everything to date. Good-day." "But I--I--" stammered the secretary helplessly. "Good-day, sir." Ryder turned his back on him and conversed with his son, while Mr. Bagley slowly, and as if regretfully, made his exit. CHAPTER XV It was now December and the Senate had been in session for over a week. Jefferson had not forgotten his promise, and one day, about two weeks after Mr. Bagley's spectacular dismissal from the Ryder residence, he had brought Shirley the two letters. She did not ask him how he got them, if he forced the drawer or procured the key. It sufficed for her that the precious letters--the absolute proof of her father's innocence--were at last in her possession. She at once sent them off by registered mail to Stott, who immediately acknowledged receipt and at the same time announced his departure for Washington that night. He promised to keep her constantly informed of what he was doing and how her father's case was going. It could, he thought, be only a matter of a few days now before the result of the proceedings would be known. The approach of the crisis made Shirley exceedingly nervous, and it was only by the exercise of the greatest self-control that she did not betray the terrible anxiety she felt. The Ryder biography was nearly finished and her stay in Seventy-fourth Street would soon come to an end. She had a serious talk with Jefferson, who contrived to see a good deal of her, entirely unsuspected by his parents, for Mr. and Mrs. Ryder, had no reason to believe that their son had any more than a mere bowing acquaintance with the clever young authoress. Now that Mr. Bagley was no longer there to spy upon their actions these clandestine interviews had been comparatively easy. Shirley brought to bear all the arguments she could think of to convince Jefferson of the hopelessness of their engagement. She insisted that she could never be his wife; circumstances over which they had no control made that dream impossible. It were better, she said, to part now rather than incur the risk of being unhappy later. But Jefferson refused to be convinced. He argued and pleaded and he even swore--strange, desperate words that Shirley had never heard before and which alarmed her not a little--and the discussion ended usually by a kiss which put Shirley completely hors de combat. Meantime, John Ryder had not ceased worrying about his son. The removal of Kate Roberts as a factor in his future had not eliminated the danger of Jefferson taking the bit between his teeth one day and contracting a secret marriage with the daughter of his enemy, and when he thought of the mere possibility of such a thing happening he stormed and raved until his wife, accustomed as she was to his choleric outbursts, was thoroughly frightened. For some time after Bagley's departure, father and son got along together fairly amicably, but Ryder, Sr. was quick to see that Jefferson had something on his mind which was worrying him, and he rightly attributed it to his infatuation for Miss Rossmore. He was convinced that his son knew where the judge's daughter was, although his own efforts to discover her whereabouts had been unsuccessful. Sergeant Ellison had confessed absolute failure; Miss Rossmore, he reported, had disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed her, and further search was futile. Knowing well his son's impulsive, headstrong disposition, Ryder, Sr. believed him quite capable of marrying the girl secretly any time. The only thing that John Ryder did not know was that Shirley Rossmore was not the kind of a girl to allow any man to inveigle her into a secret marriage. The Colossus, who judged the world's morals by his own, was not of course aware of this, and he worried night and day thinking what he could do to prevent his son from marrying the daughter of the man he had wronged. The more he pondered over it, the more he regretted that there was not some other girl with whom Jefferson could fall in love and marry. He need not seek a rich girl--there was certainly enough money in the Ryder family to provide for both. He wished they knew a girl, for example, as attractive and clever as Miss Green. Ah! he thought, there was a girl who would make a man of Jefferson--brainy, ambitious, active! And the more he thought of it the more the idea grew on him that Miss Green would be an ideal daughter-in-law, and at the same time snatch his son from the clutches of the Rossmore woman. Jefferson, during all these weeks, was growing more and more impatient. He knew that any day now Shirley might take her departure from their house and return to Massapequa. If the impeachment proceedings went against her father it was more than likely that he would lose her forever, and if, on the contrary, the judge were acquitted, Shirley never would be willing to marry him without his father's consent; and this, he felt, he would never obtain. He resolved, therefore, to have a final interview with his father and declare boldly his intention of making Miss Rossmore his wife, regardless of the consequences. The opportunity came one evening after dinner. Ryder, Sr. was sitting alone in the library, reading, Mrs. Ryder had gone to the theatre with a friend, Shirley as usual was writing in her room, giving the final touches to her now completed "History of the Empire Trading Company." Jefferson took the bull by the horns and boldly accosted his redoubtable parent. "May I have a few minutes of your time, father?" Ryder, Sr. laid aside the paper he was reading and looked up. It was unusual for his son to come to him on any errand, and he liked to encourage it. "Certainly, Jefferson. What is it?" "I want to appeal to you, sir. I want you to use your influence, before it is too late, to save Judge Rossmore. A word from you at this time would do wonders in Washington." The financier swung half-round in his chair, the smile of greeting faded out of his face, and his voice was hard as he replied coldly: "Again? I thought we had agreed not to discuss Judge Rossmore any further?" "I can't help it, sir," rejoined Jefferson undeterred by his sire's hostile attitude, "that poor old man is practically on trial for his life. He is as innocent of wrongdoing as a child unborn, and you know it. You could save him if you would." "Jefferson," answered Ryder, Sr., biting his lip to restrain his impatience, "I told you before that I could not interfere even if I would; and I won't, because that man is my enemy. Important business interests, which you cannot possibly know anything about, demand his dismissal from the bench." "Surely your business interests don't demand the sacrifice of a man's life!" retorted Jefferson. "I know modern business methods are none too squeamish, but I should think you'd draw the line at deliberate murder!" Ryder sprang to his feet and for a moment stood glaring at the young man. His lips moved, but no sound came from them. Suppressed wrath rendered him speechless. What was the world coming to when a son could talk to his father in this manner? "How dare you presume to judge my actions or to criticise my methods?" he burst out, finally. "You force me to do so," answered Jefferson hotly. "I want to tell you that I am heartily ashamed of this whole affair and your connection with it, and since you refuse to make reparation in the only way possible for the wrong you and your associates have done Judge Rosmore--that is by saving him in the Senate--I think it only fair to warn you that I take back my word in regard to not marrying without your consent. I want you to know that I intend to marry Miss Rossmore as soon as she will consent to become my wife, that is," he added with bitterness, "if I can succeed in overcoming her prejudices against my family--" Ryder, Sr. laughed contemptuously. "Prejudices against a thousand million dollars?" he exclaimed sceptically. "Yes," replied Jefferson decisively, "prejudices against our family, against you and your business practices. Money is not everything. One day you will find that out. I tell you definitely that I intend to make Miss Rossmore my wife." Ryder, Sr. made no reply, and as Jefferson had expected an explosion, this unnatural calm rather startled him. He was sorry he had spoken so harshly. It was his father, after all. "You've forced me to defy you, father," he added. "I'm sorry---" Ryder, Sr. shrugged his shoulders and resumed his seat. He lit another cigar, and with affected carelessness he said: "All right, Jeff, my boy, we'll let it go at that. You're sorry--so am I. You've shown me your cards--I'll show you mine." His composed unruffled manner vanished. He suddenly threw off the mask and revealed the tempest that was raging within. He leaned across the desk, his face convulsed with uncontrollable passion, a terrifying picture of human wrath. Shaking his fist at his son he shouted: "When I get through with Judge Rossmore at Washington, I'll start after his daughter. This time to-morrow he'll be a disgraced man. A week later she will be a notorious woman. Then we'll see if you'll be so eager to marry her!" "Father!" cried Jefferson. "There is sure to be something in her life that won't bear inspection," sneered Ryder. "There is in everybody's life. I'll find out what it is. Where is she to-day? She can't be found. No one knows where she is--not even her own mother. Something is wrong--the girl's no good!" Jefferson started forward as if to resent these insults to the woman he loved, but, realizing that it was his own father, he stopped short and his hands fell powerless at his side. "Well, is that all?" inquired Ryder, Sr. with a sneer. "That's all," replied Jefferson, "I'm going. Good-bye." "Good-bye," answered his father indifferently; "leave your address with your mother." Jefferson left the room, and Ryder, Sr., as if exhausted by the violence of his own outburst, sank back limp in his chair. The crisis he dreaded had come at last. His son had openly defied his authority and was going to marry the daughter of his enemy. He must do something to prevent it; the marriage must not take place, but what could he do? The boy was of age and legally his own master. He could do nothing to restrain his actions unless they put him in an insane asylum. He would rather see his son there, he mused, than married to the Rossmore woman. Presently there was a timid knock at the library door. Ryder rose from his seat and went to see who was there. To his surprise it was Miss Green. "May I come in?" asked Shirley. "Certainly, by all means. Sit down." He drew up a chair for her, and his manner was so cordial that it was easy to see she was a welcome visitor. "Mr. Ryder," she began in a low, tremulous voice, "I have come to see you on a very important matter. I've been waiting to see you all evening--and as I shall be here only a short time longer I--want to ask yon a great favour--perhaps the greatest you were ever asked--I want to ask you for mercy--for mercy to--" She stopped and glanced nervously at him, but she saw he was paying no attention to what she was saying. He was puffing heavily at his cigar, entirely preoccupied with his own thoughts. Her sudden silence aroused him. He apologized: "Oh, excuse me--I didn't quite catch what you were saying." She said nothing, wondering what had happened to render him so absent-minded. He read the question in her face, for, turning towards her, he exclaimed: "For the first time in my life I am face to face with defeat--defeat of the most ignominious kind--incapacity--inability to regulate my own internal affairs. I can rule a government, but I can't manage my own family--my own son. I'm a failure. Tell me," he added, appealing to her, "why can't I rule my own household, why can't I govern my own child?" "Why can't you govern yourself?" said Shirley quietly. Ryder looked keenly at her for a moment without answering her question; then, as if prompted by a sudden inspiration, he said: "You can help me, but not by preaching at me. This is the first time in my life I ever called on a living soul for help. I'm only accustomed to deal with men. This time there's a woman in the case--and I need your woman's wit--" "How can I help you?" asked Shirley. "I don't know," he answered with suppressed excitement. "As I told you, I am up against a blank wall. I can't see my way." He gave a nervous little laugh and went on: "God! I'm ashamed of myself--ashamed! Did you ever read the fable of the Lion and the Mouse? Well, I want you to gnaw with your sharp woman's teeth at the cords which bind the son of John Burkett Ryder to this Rossmore woman. I want you to be the mouse--to set me free of this disgraceful entanglement." "How? asked Shirley calmly. "Ah, that's just it--how?" he replied. "Can't you think--you're a woman--you have youth, beauty--brains." He stopped and eyed her closely until she reddened from the embarrassing scrutiny. Then he blurted out: "By George! marry him yourself--force him to let go of this other woman! Why not? Come, what do you say?" This unexpected suggestion came upon Shirley with all the force of a violent shock. She immediately saw the falseness of her position. This man was asking for her hand for his son under the impression that she was another woman. It would be dishonorable of her to keep up the deception any longer. She passed her hand over her face to conceal her confusion. "You--you must give me time to think," she stammered. "Suppose I don't love your son--I should want something--something to compensate." "Something to compensate?" echoed Ryder surprised and a little disconcerted. "Why, the boy will inherit millions--I don't know how many." "No--no, not money," rejoined Shirley; "money only compensates those who love money. It's something else--a man's honour--a man's life! It means nothing to you." He gazed at her, not understanding. Full of his own project, he had mind for nothing else. Ignoring therefore the question of compensation, whatever she might mean by that, he continued: "You can win him if you make up your mind to. A woman with your resources can blind him to any other woman." "But if--he loves Judge Rossmore's daughter?" objected Shirley. "It's for you to make him forget her--and you can," replied the financier confidently. "My desire is to separate him from this Rossmore woman at any cost. You must help me." His sternness relaxed somewhat and his eyes rested on her kindly. "Do you know, I should be glad to think you won't have to leave us. Mrs. Ryder has taken a fancy to you, and I myself shall miss you when you go." "You ask me to be your son's wife and you know nothing of my family," said Shirley. "I know you--that is sufficient," he replied. "No--no you don't," returned Shirley, "nor do you know your son. He has more constancy--more strength of character than you think--and far more principle than you have." "So much the greater the victory for you," he answered good humouredly. "Ah," she said reproachfully, "you do not love your son." "I do love him," replied Ryder warmly. "It's because I love him that I'm such a fool in this matter. Don't you see that if he marries this girl it would separate us, and I should lose him. I don't want to lose him. If I welcomed her to my house it would make me the laughing-stock of all my friends and business associates. Come, will you join forces with me?" Shirley shook her head and was about to reply when the telephone bell rang. Ryder took up the receiver and spoke to the butler downstairs: "Who's that? Judge Stott? Tell him I'm too busy to see anyone. What's that? A man's life at stake? What's that to do with me? Tell him--" On hearing Stott's name, Shirley nearly betrayed herself. She turned pale and half-started up from her chair. Something serious must have happened to bring her father's legal adviser to the Ryder residence at such an hour! She thought he was in Washington. Could it be that the proceedings in the Senate were ended and the result known? She could hardly conceal her anxiety, and instinctively she placed her hand on Ryder's arm. "No, Mr. Ryder, do see Judge Stott! You must see him. I know who he is. Your son has told me. Judge Stott is one of Judge Rossmore's advisers. See him. You may find out something about the girl. You may find out where she is. If Jefferson finds out you have refused to see her father's friend at such a critical time it will only make him sympathize more deeply with the Rossmores, and you know sympathy is akin to love. That's what you want to avoid, isn't it?" Ryder still held the telephone, hesitating what to do. What she said sounded like good sense. "Upon my word--" he said. "You may be right and yet--" "Am I to help you or not?" demanded Shirley. "You said you wanted a woman's wit." "Yes," said Ryder, "but still--" "Then you had better see him," she said emphatically. Ryder turned to the telephone. "Hello, Jorkins, are you there? Show Judge Stott up here." He laid the receiver down and turned again to Shirley. "That's one thing I don't like about you," he said. "I allow you to decide against me and then I agree with you." She said nothing and he went on looking at her admiringly. "I predict that you'll bring that boy to your feet within a month. I don't know why, but I seem to feel that he is attracted to you already. Thank Heaven! you haven't a lot of troublesome relations. I think you said you were almost alone in the world. Don't look so serious," he added laughing. "Jeff is a fine fellow, and believe me an excellent catch as the world goes." Shirley raised her hand as if entreating him to desist. "Oh, don't--don't--please! My position is so false! You don't know how false it is!" she cried. At that instant the library door was thrown open and the butler appeared, ushering in Stott. The lawyer looked anxious, and his dishevelled appearance indicated that he had come direct from the train. Shirley scanned his face narrowly in the hope that she might read there what had happened. He walked right past her, giving no sign of recognition, and advanced direct towards Ryder, who had risen and remained standing at his desk. "Perhaps I had better go?" ventured Shirley, although tortured by anxiety to hear the news from Washington. "No," said Ryder quickly, "Judge Stott will detain me but a very few moments." Having delivered himself of this delicate hint, he looked towards his visitor as if inviting him to come to the point as rapidly as possible. "I must apologize for intruding at this unseemly hour, sir," said Stott, "but time is precious. The Senate meets to-morrow to vote. If anything is to be done for Judge Rossmore it must be done to-night." "I fail to see why you address yourself to me in this matter, sir," replied Ryder with asperity. "As Judge Rossmore's friend and counsel," answered Stott, "I am impelled to ask your help at this critical moment." "The matter is in the hands of the United States Senate, sir," replied Ryder coldly. "They are against him!" cried Stott; "not one senator I've spoken to holds out any hope for him. If he is convicted it will mean his death. Inch by inch his life is leaving him. The only thing that can save him is the good news of the Senate's refusal to find him guilty." Stott was talking so excitedly and loudly that neither he nor Ryder heard the low moan that came from the corner of the room where Shirley was standing listening. "I can do nothing," repeated Ryder coldly, and he turned his back and began to examine some papers lying on his desk as if to notify the caller that the interview was ended. But Stott was not so easily discouraged. He went on: "As I understand it, they will vote on strictly party lines, and the party in power is against him. He's a marked man. You have the power to help him." Heedless of Ryder's gesture of impatience he continued: "When I left his bedside to-night, sir, I promised to return to him with good news; I have told him that the Senate ridicules the charges against him. I must return to him with good news. He is very ill to-night, sir." He halted for a moment and glanced in Shirley's direction, and slightly raising his voice so she might hear, he added: "If he gets worse we shall send for his daughter." "Where is his daughter?" demanded Ryder, suddenly interested. "She is working in her father's interests," replied Stott, and, he added significantly, "I believe with some hope of success." He gave Shirley a quick, questioning look. She nodded affirmatively. Ryder, who had seen nothing of this by-play, said with a sneer: "Surely you didn't come here to-night to tell me this?" "No, sir, I did not." He took from his pocket two letters--the two which Shirley had sent him--and held them out for Ryder's inspection. "These letters from Judge Rossmore to you," he said, "show you to be acquainted with the fact that he bought those shares as an investment--and did not receive them as a bribe." When he caught sight of the letters and he realized what they were, Ryder changed colour. Instinctively his eyes sought the drawer on the left-hand side of his desk. In a voice that was unnaturally calm, he asked: "Why don't you produce them before the Senate?" "It was too late," explained Stott, handing them to the financier. "I received them only two days ago. But if you come forward and declare--" Ryder made an effort to control himself. "I'll do nothing of the kind. I refuse to move in the matter. That is final. And now, sir," he added, raising his voice and pointing to the letters, "I wish to know how comes it that you had in your possession private correspondence addressed to me?" "That I cannot answer," replied Stott promptly. "From whom did you receive these letters?" demanded Ryder. Stott was dumb, while Shirley clutched at her chair as if she would fall. The financier repeated the question. "I must decline to answer," replied Stott finally. Shirley left her place and came slowly forward. Addressing Ryder, she said: "I wish to make a statement." The financier gazed at her in astonishment. What could she know about it, he wondered, and he waited with curiosity to hear what she was going to say. But Stott instantly realized that she was about to take the blame upon herself, regardless of the consequences to the success of their cause. This must be prevented at all hazards, even if another must be sacrificed, so interrupting her he said hastily to Ryder: "Judge Rossmore's life and honour are at stake and no false sense of delicacy must cause the failure of my object to save him. These letters were sent to me by--your son." "From my son'" exclaimed Ryder, starting. For a moment he staggered as if he had received a blow; he was too much overcome to speak or act. Then recovering himself, he rang a bell, and turned to Stott with renewed fury: "So," he cried, "this man, this judge whose honour is at stake and his daughter, who most likely has no honour at stake, between them have made a thief and a liar of my son! false to his father, false to his party; and you, sir, have the presumption to come here and ask me to intercede for him!" To the butler, who entered, he said: "See if Mr. Jefferson is still in the house. If he is, tell him I would like to see him here at once." The man disappeared, and Ryder strode angrily up and down the room with the letters in his hand. Then, turning abruptly on Stott, he said: "And now, sir, I think nothing more remains to be said. I shall keep these letters, as they are my property." "As you please. Good night, sir." "Good night," replied Ryder, not looking up. With a significant glance at Shirley, who motioned to him that she might yet succeed where he had failed, Stott left the room. Ryder turned to Shirley. His fierceness of manner softened down as he addressed the girl: "You see what they have done to my son--" "Yes," replied Shirley, "it's the girl's fault. If Jefferson hadn't loved her you would have helped the judge. Ah, why did they ever meet! She has worked on his sympathy and he--he took these letters for her sake, not to injure you. Oh, you must make some allowance for him! One's sympathy gets aroused in spite of oneself; even I feel sorry for--these people." "Don't," replied Ryder grimly, "sympathy is often weakness. Ah, there you are!" turning to Jefferson, who entered the room at that moment. "You sent for me, father?" "Yes," said Ryder, Sr., holding up the letters. "Have you ever seen these letters before?" Jefferson took the letters and examined them, then he passed them back to his father and said frankly: "Yes, I took them out of your desk and sent them to Mr. Stott in the hope they would help Judge Rossmore's case." Ryder restrained himself from proceeding to actual violence only with the greatest difficulty. His face grew white as death, his lips were compressed, his hands twitched convulsively, his eyes flashed dangerously. He took another cigar to give the impression that he had himself well under control, but the violent trembling of his hands as he lit it betrayed the terrific strain he was under. "So!" he said, "you deliberately sacrificed my interests to save this woman's father--you hear him, Miss Green? Jefferson, my boy, I think it's time you and I had a final accounting." Shirley made a motion as if about to withdraw. He stopped her with a gesture. "Please don't go, Miss Green. As the writer of my biography you are sufficiently well acquainted with my family affairs to warrant your being present at the epilogue. Besides, I want an excuse for keeping my temper. Sit down, Miss Green." Turning to Jefferson, he went on: "For your mother's sake, my boy, I have overlooked your little eccentricities of character. But now we have arrived at the parting of the ways--you have gone too far. The one aspect of this business I cannot overlook is your willingness to sell your own father for the sake of a woman." "My own father," interrupted Jefferson bitterly, "would not hesitate to sell me if his business and political interests warranted the sacrifice!" Shirley attempted the role of peacemaker. Appealing to the younger man, she said: "Please don't talk like that, Mr. Jefferson." Then she turned to Ryder, Sr.: "I don't think your son quite understands you, Mr. Ryder, and, if you will pardon me, I don't think you quite understand him. Do you realize that there is a man's life at stake--that Judge Rossmore is almost at the point of death and that favourable news from the Senate to-morrow is perhaps the only thing that can save him?" "Ah, I see," sneered Ryder, Sr. "Judge Stott's story has aroused your sympathy." "Yes, I--I confess my sympathy is aroused. I do feel for this father whose life is slowly ebbing away--whose strength is being sapped hourly by the thought of the disgrace--the injustice that is being done him! I do feel for the wife of this suffering man!" "Ah, its a complete picture!" cried Ryder mockingly. "The dying father, the sorrowing mother--and the daughter, what is she supposed to be doing?" "She is fighting for her father's life," cried Shirley, "and you, Mr. Jefferson, should have pleaded--pleaded--not demanded. It's no use trying to combat your father's will." "She is quite right, father I should have implored you. I do so now. I ask you for God's sake to help us!" Ryder was grim and silent. He rose from his seat and paced the room, puffing savagely at his cigar. Then he turned and said: "His removal is a political necessity. If he goes back on the bench every paltry justice of the peace, every petty official will think he has a special mission to tear down the structure that hard work and capital have erected. No, this man has been especially conspicuous in his efforts to block the progress of amalgamated interests." "And so he must be sacrificed?" cried Shirley indignantly. "He is a meddlesome man," insisted Ryder "and--" "He is innocent of the charges brought against him," urged Jefferson. "Mr. Ryder is not considering that point," said Shirley bitterly. "All he can see is that it is necessary to put this poor old man in the public pillory, to set him up as a warning to others of his class not to act in accordance with the principles of Truth and Justice--not to dare to obstruct the car of Juggernaut set in motion by the money gods of the country!" "It's the survival of the fittest, my dear," said Ryder coldly. "Oh!" cried Shirley, making a last appeal to the financier's heart of stone, "use your great influence with this governing body for good, not evil! Urge them to vote not in accordance with party policy and personal interest, but in accordance with their consciences--in accordance with Truth and Justice! Ah, for God's sake, Mr. Ryder! don't permit this foul injustice to blot the name of the highest tribunal in the Western world!" Ryder laughed cynically. "By Jove! Jefferson, I give you credit for having secured an eloquent advocate!" "Suppose," went on Shirley, ignoring his taunting comments, "suppose this daughter promises that she will never--never see your son again--that she will go away to some foreign country!" "No!" burst in Jefferson, "why should she? If my father is not man enough to do a simple act of justice without bartering a woman's happiness and his son's happiness, let him find comfort in his self-justification!" Shirley, completely unnerved, made a move towards the door, unable longer to bear the strain she was under. She tottered as though she would fall. Ryder made a quick movement towards his son and took him by the arm. Pointing to Shirley he said in a low tone: "You see how that girl pleads your cause for you! She loves you, my boy!" Jefferson started. "Yes, she does," pursued Ryder, Sr. "She's worth a thousand of the Rossmore woman. Make her your wife and I'll--" "Make her my wife!" cried Jefferson joyously. He stared at his parent as if he thought he had suddenly been bereft of his senses. "Make her my wife?" he repeated incredulously. "Well, what do you say?" demanded Ryder, Sr. The young man advanced towards Shirley, hands outstretched. "Yes, yes, Shir--Miss Green, will you?" Seeing that Shirley made no sign, he said: "Not now, father; I will speak to her later." "No, no, to-night, at once!" insisted Ryder. Addressing Shirley, he went on: "Miss Green, my son is much affected by your disinterested appeal in his behalf. He--he--you can save him from himself--my son wishes you--he asks you to become his wife! Is it not so, Jefferson?" "Yes, yes, my wife!" advancing again towards Shirley. The girl shrank back in alarm. "No, no, no, Mr. Ryder, I cannot, I cannot!" she cried. "Why not?" demanded Ryder, Sr. appealingly. "Ah, don't--don't decide hastily--" Shirley, her face set and drawn and keen mental distress showing in every line of it, faced the two men, pale and determined. The time had come to reveal the truth. This masquerade could go on no longer. It was not honourable either to her father or to herself. Her self-respect demanded that she inform the financier of her true identity. "I cannot marry your son with these lies upon my lips!" she cried. "I cannot go on with this deception. I told you you did not know who I was, who my people were. My story about them, my name, everything about me is false, every word I have uttered is a lie, a fraud, a cheat! I would not tell you now, but you trusted me and are willing to entrust your son's future, your family honour in my keeping, and I can't keep back the truth from you. Mr. Ryder, I am the daughter of the man you hate. I am the woman your son loves. I am Shirley Rossmore!" Ryder took his cigar from his lips and rose slowly to his feet. "You? You?" he stammered. "Yes--yes, I am the Rossmore woman! Listen, Mr. Ryder. Don't turn away from me. Go to Washington on behalf of my father, and I promise you I will never see your son again--never, never!" "Ah, Shirley!" cried Jefferson, "you don't love me!" "Yes, Jeff, I do; God knows I do! But if I must break my own heart to save my father I will do it." "Would you sacrifice my happiness and your own?" "No happiness can be built on lies, Jeff. We must build on truth or our whole house will crumble and fall. We have deceived your father, but he will forgive that, won't you?" she said, appealing to Ryder, "and you will go to Washington, you will save my father's honour, his life, you will--?" They stood face to face--this slim, delicate girl battling for her father's life, arrayed against a cold-blooded, heartless, unscrupulous man, deaf to every impulse of human sympathy or pity. Since this woman had deceived him, fooled him, he would deal with her as with everyone else who crossed his will. She laid her hand on his arm, pleading with him. Brutally, savagely, he thrust her aside. "No, no, I will not!" he thundered. "You have wormed yourself into my confidence by means of lies and deceit. You have tricked me, fooled me to the very limit! Oh, it is easy to see how you have beguiled my son into the folly of loving you! And you--you have the brazen effrontery to ask me to plead for your father? No! No! No! Let the law take its course, and now Miss Rossmore--you will please leave my house to-morrow morning!" Shirley stood listening to what he had to say, her face white, her mouth quivering. At last the crisis had come. It was a fight to the finish between this man, the incarnation of corporate greed and herself, representing the fundamental principles of right and justice. She turned on him in a fury: "Yes, I will leave your house to-night! Do you think I would remain another hour beneath the roof of a man who is as blind to justice, as deaf to mercy, as incapable of human sympathy as you are!" She raised her voice; and as she stood there denouncing the man of money, her eyes flashing and her head thrown back, she looked like some avenging angel defying one of the powers of Evil. "Leave the room!" shouted Ryder, beside himself, and pointing to the door. "Father!" cried Jefferson, starting forward to protect the girl he loved. "You have tricked him as you have me!" thundered Ryder. "It is your own vanity that has tricked you!" cried Shirley contemptuously. "You lay traps for yourself and walk into them. You compel everyone around you to lie to you, to cajole you, to praise you, to deceive you! At least, you cannot accuse me of flattering you. I have never fawned upon you as you compel your family and your friends and your dependents to do. I have always appealed to your better nature by telling you the truth, and in your heart you know that I am speaking the truth now." "Go!" he commanded. "Yes, let us go, Shirley!" said Jefferson. "No, Jeff, I came here alone and I'm going alone!" "You are not. I shall go with you. I intend to make you my wife!" Ryder laughed scornfully. "No," cried Shirley. "Do you think I'd marry a man whose father is as deep a discredit to the human race as your father is? No, I wouldn't marry the son of such a merciless tyrant! He refuses to lift his voice to save my father. I refuse to marry his son!" She turned on Ryder with all the fury of a tiger: "You think if you lived in the olden days you'd be a Caesar or an Alexander. But you wouldn't! You'd be a Nero--a Nero! Sink my self-respect to the extent of marrying into your family!" she exclaimed contemptuously. "Never! I am going to Washington without your aid. I am going to save my father if I have to go on my knees to every United States Senator. I'll go to the White House; I'll tell the President what you are! Marry your son--no, thank you! No, thank you!" Exhausted by the vehemence of her passionate outburst, Shirley hurried from the room, leaving Ryder speechless, staring at his son. CHAPTER XVI When Shirley reached her rooms she broke down completely, she threw herself upon a sofa and burst into a fit of violent sobbing. After all, she was only a woman and the ordeal through which she had passed would have taxed the strongest powers of endurance. She had borne up courageously while there remained the faintest chance that she might succeed in moving the financier to pity, but now that all hopes in that direction were shattered and she herself had been ordered harshly from the house like any ordinary malefactor, the reaction set in, and she gave way freely to her long pent-up anguish and distress. Nothing now could save her father--not even this journey to Washington which she determined to take nevertheless, for, according to what Stott had said, the Senate was to take a vote that very night. She looked at the time--eleven o'clock. She had told Mr. Ryder that she would leave his house at once, but on reflection it was impossible for a girl alone to seek a room at that hour. It would be midnight before she could get her things packed. No, she would stay under this hated roof until morning and then take the first train to Washington. There was still a chance that the vote might be delayed, in which case she might yet succeed in winning over some of the senators. She began to gather her things together and was thus engaged when she heard a knock at her door. "Who's there?" she called out. "It's I," replied a familiar voice. Shirley went to the door and opening it found Jefferson on the threshold. He made no attempt to enter, nor did she invite him in. He looked tired and careworn. "Of course, you're not going to-night?" he asked anxiously. "My father did not mean to-night." "No, Jeff," she said wearily; "not to-night. It's a little too late. I did not realize it. To-morrow morning, early." He seemed reassured and held out his hand: "Good-night, dearest--you're a brave girl. You made a splendid fight." "It didn't do much good," she replied in a disheartened, listless way. "But it set him thinking," rejoined Jefferson. "No one ever spoke to my father like that before. It did him good. He's still marching up and down the library, chewing the cud--" Noticing Shirley's tired face and her eyes, with great black circles underneath, he stopped short. "Now don't do any more packing to-night," he said. "Go to bed and in the morning I'll come up and help you. Good night!" "Good night, Jeff," she smiled. He went downstairs, and after doing some more packing she went to bed. But it was hours before she got to sleep, and then she dreamed that she was in the Senate Chamber and that she saw Ryder suddenly rise and denounce himself before the astonished senators as a perjurer and traitor to his country, while she returned to Massapequa with the glad news that her father was acquitted. Meantime, a solitary figure remained in the library, pacing to and fro like a lost soul in Purgatory. Mrs. Ryder had returned from the play and gone to bed, serenely oblivious of the drama in real life that had been enacted at home, the servants locked the house up for the night and still John Burkett Ryder walked the floor of his sanctum, and late into the small hours of the morning the watchman going his lonely rounds, saw a light in the library and the restless figure of his employer sharply silhouetted against the white blinds. For the first time in his life John Ryder realized that there was something in the world beyond Self. He had seen with his own eyes the sacrifice a daughter will make for the father she loves, and he asked himself what manner of a man that father could be to inspire such devotion in his child. He probed into his own heart and conscience and reviewed his past career. He had been phenomenally successful, but he had not been happy. He had more money than he knew what to do with, but the pleasures of the domestic circle, which he saw other men enjoy, had been denied to him. Was he himself to blame? Had his insensate craving for gold and power led him to neglect those other things in life which contribute more truly to man's happiness? In other words, was his life a mistake? Yes, it was true what this girl charged, he had been merciless and unscrupulous in his dealings with his fellow man. It was true that hardly a dollar of his vast fortune had been honestly earned. It was true that it had been wrung from the people by fraud and trickery. He had craved for power, yet now he had tasted it, what a hollow joy it was, after all! The public hated and despised him; even his so-called friends and business associates toadied to him merely because they feared him. And this judge--this father he had persecuted and ruined, what a better man and citizen he was, how much more worthy of a child's love and of the esteem of the world! What had Judge Rossmore done, after all, to deserve the frightful punishment the amalgamated interests had caused him to suffer? If he had blocked their game, he had done only what his oath, his duty commanded him to do. Such a girl as Shirley Rossmore could not have had any other kind of a father. Ah, if he had had such a daughter he might have been a better man, if only to win his child's respect and affection. John Ryder pondered long and deeply and the more he ruminated the stronger the conviction grew upon him that the girl was right and he was wrong. Suddenly, he looked at his watch. It was one o'clock. Roberts had told him that it would be an all night session and that a vote would probably not be taken until very late. He unhooked the telephone and calling "central" asked for "long distance" and connection with Washington. It was seven o'clock when the maid entered Shirley's room with her breakfast and she found its occupant up and dressed. "Why you haven't been to bed, Miss!" exclaimed the girl, looking at the bed in the inner room which seemed scarcely disturbed. "No, Theresa I--I couldn't sleep." Hastily pouring out a cup of tea she added. "I must catch that nine o'clock train to Washington. I didn't finish packing until nearly three." "Can I do anything for you, Miss?" inquired the maid. Shirley was as popular with the servants as with the rest of the household. "No," answered Shirley, "there are only a few, things to go in my suit case. Will you please have a cab here in half an hour?" The maid was about to go when she suddenly thought of something she had forgotten. She held out an envelope which she had left lying on the tray. "Oh, Miss, Mr. Jorkins said to give you this and master wanted to see you as soon as you had finished your breakfast." Shirley tore open the envelope and took out the contents. It was a cheque, payable to her order for $5,000 and signed "John Burkett Ryder." A deep flush covered the girl's face as she saw the money--a flush of annoyance rather than of pleasure. This man who had insulted her, who had wronged her father, who had driven her from his home, thought he could throw his gold at her and insolently send her her pay as one settles haughtily with a servant discharged for impertinence. She would have none of his money--the work she had done she would make him a present of. She replaced the cheque in the envelope and passed it back to Theresa. "Give this to Mr. Ryder and tell him I cannot see him." "But Mr. Ryder said--" insisted the girl. "Please deliver my message as I give it," commanded Shirley with authority. "I cannot see Mr. Ryder." The maid withdrew, but she had barely closed the door when it was opened again and Mrs. Ryder rushed in, without knocking. She was all flustered with excitement and in such a hurry that she had not even stopped to arrange her toilet. "My dear Miss Green," she gasped; "what's this I hear--going away suddenly without giving me warning?" "I wasn't engaged by the month," replied Shirley drily. "I know, dear, I know. I was thinking of myself. I've grown so used to you--how shall I get on without you--no one understands me the way you do. Dear me! The whole house is upset. Mr. Ryder never went to bed at all last night. Jefferson is going away, too--forever, he threatens. If he hadn't come and woke me up to say good-bye, I should never have known you intended to leave us. My boy's going--you're going--everyone's deserting me!" Mrs. Ryder was not accustomed to such prolonged flights of oratory and she sank exhausted on a chair, her eyes filling with tears. "Did they tell you who I am--the daughter of Judge Rossmore?" demanded Shirley. It had been a shock to Mrs. Ryder that morning when Jefferson burst into his mother's room before she was up and acquainted her with the events of the previous evening. The news that the Miss Green whom she had grown to love, was really the Miss Rossmore of whose relations with Jefferson her husband stood in such dread, was far from affecting the financier's wife as it had Ryder himself. To the mother's simple and ingenuous mind, free from prejudice and ulterior motive, the girl's character was more important than her name, and certainly she could not blame her son for loving such a woman as Shirley. Of course, it was unfortunate for Jefferson that his father felt this bitterness towards Judge Rossmore, for she herself could hardly have wished for a more sympathetic daughter-in-law. She had not seen her husband since the previous evening at dinner so was in complete ignorance as to what he thought of this new development, but the mother sighed as she thought how happy it would make her to see Jefferson happily married to the girl of his own choice, and in her heart she still entertained the hope that her husband would see it that way and thus prevent their son from leaving them as he threatened. "That's not your fault, my dear," she replied answering Shirley's question. "You are yourself--that's the main thing. You mustn't mind what Mr. Ryder says? Business and worry makes him irritable at times. If you must go, of course you must--you are the best judge of that, but Jefferson wants to see you before you leave." She kissed Shirley in motherly fashion, and added: "He has told me everything, dear. Nothing would make me happier than to see you become his wife. He's downstairs now waiting for me to tell him to come up." "It's better that I should not see him," replied Shirley slowly and gravely. "I can only tell him what I have already told him. My father comes first. I have still a duty to perform." "That's right, dear," answered Mrs. Ryder. "You're a good, noble girl and I admire you all the more for it. I'll let Jefferson be his own advocate. You'll see him for my sake!" She gave Shirley another affectionate embrace and left the room while the girl proceeded with her final preparations for departure. Presently there was a quick, heavy step in the corridor outside and Jefferson appeared in the doorway. He stood there waiting for her to invite him in. She looked up and greeted him cordially, yet it was hardly the kind of reception he looked for or that he considered he had a right to expect. He advanced sulkily into the room. "Mother said she had put everything right," he began. "I guess she was mistaken." "Your mother does not understand, neither do you," she replied seriously. "Nothing can be put right until my father is restored to honour and position." "But why should you punish me because my father fails to regard the matter as we do?" demanded Jefferson rebelliously. "Why should I punish myself--why should we punish those nearest and dearest?" answered Shirley gently, "the victims of human injustice always suffer where their loved ones are tortured. Why are things as they are--I don't know. I know they are--that's all." The young man strode nervously up and down the room while she gazed listlessly out of the window, looking for the cab that was to carry her away from this house of disappointment. He pleaded with her: "I have tried honourably and failed--you have tried honourably and failed. Isn't the sting of impotent failure enough to meet without striving against a hopeless love?" He approached her and said softly: "I love you Shirley--don't drive me to desperation. Must I be punished because you have failed? It's unfair. The sins of the fathers should not be visited upon the children." "But they are--it's the law," said Shirley with resignation. "The law?" he echoed. "Yes, the law," insisted the girl; "man's law, not God's, the same unjust law that punishes my father--man's law which is put into the hands of the powerful of the earth to strike at the weak." She sank into a chair and, covering up her face, wept bitterly. Between her sobs she cried brokenly: "I believed in the power of love to soften your father's heart, I believed that with God's help I could bring him to see the truth. I believed that Truth and Love would make him see the light, but it hasn't. I stayed on and on, hoping against hope until the time has gone by and it's too late to save him, too late! What can I do now? My going to Washington is a forlorn hope, a last, miserable, forlorn hope and in this hour, the darkest of all, you ask me to think of myself--my love, your love, your happiness, your future, my future! Ah, wouldn't it be sublime selfishness?" Jefferson kneeled down beside the chair and taking her hand in his, tried to reason with her and comfort her: "Listen, Shirley," he said, "do not do something you will surely regret. You are punishing me not only because I have failed but because you have failed too. It seems to me that if you believed it possible to accomplish so much, if you had so much faith--that you have lost your faith rather quickly. I believed in nothing, I had no faith and yet I have not lost hope." She shook her head and gently withdrew her hand. "It is useless to insist, Jefferson--until my father is cleared of this stain our lives--yours and mine--must lie apart." Someone coughed and, startled, they both looked up. Mr. Ryder had entered the room unobserved and stood watching them. Shirley immediately rose to her feet indignant, resenting this intrusion on her privacy after she had declined to receive the financier. Yet, she reflected quickly, how could she prevent it? He was at home, free to come and go as he pleased, but she was not compelled to remain in the same room with him. She picked up the few things that lay about and with a contemptuous toss of her head, retreated into the inner apartment, leaving father and son alone together. "Hum," grunted Ryder, Sr. "I rather thought I should find you here, but I didn't quite expect to find you on your knees--dragging our pride in the mud." "That's where our pride ought to be," retorted Jefferson savagely. He felt in the humor to say anything, no matter what the consequences. "So she has refused you again, eh?" said Ryder, Sr. with a grin. "Yes," rejoined Jefferson with growing irritation, "she objects to my family. I don't blame her." The financier smiled grimly as he answered: "Your family in general--me in particular, eh? I gleaned that much when I came in." He looked towards the door of the room in which Shirley had taken refuge and as if talking to himself he added: "A curious girl with an inverted point of view--sees everything different to others--I want to see her before she goes." He walked over to the door and raised his hand as if he were about to knock. Then he stopped as if he had changed his mind and turning towards his son he demanded: "Do you mean to say that she has done with you?" "Yes," answered Jefferson bitterly. "Finally?" "Yes, finally--forever!" "Does she mean it?" asked Ryder, Sr., sceptically. "Yes--she will not listen to me while her father is still in peril." There was an expression of half amusement, half admiration on the financier's face as he again turned towards the door. "It's like her, damn it, just like her!" he muttered. He knocked boldly at the door. "Who's there?" cried Shirley from within. "It is I--Mr. Ryder. I wish to speak to you." "I must beg you to excuse me," came the answer, "I cannot see you." Jefferson interfered. "Why do you want to add to the girl's misery? Don't you think she has suffered enough?" "Do you know what she has done?" said Ryder with pretended indignation. "She has insulted me grossly. I never was so humiliated in my life. She has returned the cheque I sent her last night in payment for her work on my biography. I mean to make her take that money. It's hers, she needs it, her father's a beggar. She must take it back. It's only flaunting her contempt for me in my face and I won't permit it." "I don't think her object in refusing that money was to flaunt contempt in your face, or in any way humiliate you," answered Jefferson. "She feels she has been sailing under false colours and desires to make some reparation." "And so she sends me back my money, feeling that will pacify me, perhaps repair the injury she has done me, perhaps buy me into entering into her plan of helping her father, but it won't. It only increases my determination to see her and her--" Suddenly changing the topic he asked: "When do you leave us?" "Now--at once--that is--I--don't know," answered Jefferson embarrassed. "The fact is my faculties are numbed--I seem to have lost my power of thinking. Father," he exclaimed, "you see what a wreck you have made of our lives!" "Now, don't moralize," replied his father testily, "as if your own selfishness in desiring to possess that girl wasn't the mainspring of all your actions!" Waving his son out of the room he added: "Now leave me alone with her for a few moments. Perhaps I can make her listen to reason." Jefferson stared at his father as if he feared he were out of his mind. "What do you mean? Are you--?" he ejaculated. "Go--go leave her to me," commanded the financier. "Slam the door when you go out and she'll think we've both gone. Then come up again presently." The stratagem succeeded admirably. Jefferson gave the door a vigorous pull and John Ryder stood quiet, waiting for the girl to emerge from sanctuary. He did not have to wait long. The door soon opened and Shirley came out slowly. She had her hat on and was drawing on her gloves, for through her window she had caught a glimpse of the cab standing at the curb. She started on seeing Ryder standing there motionless, and she would have retreated had he not intercepted her. "I wish to speak to you Miss--Rossmore," he began. "I have nothing to say," answered Shirley frigidly. "Why did you do this?" he asked, holding out the cheque. "Because I do not want your money," she replied with hauteur. "It was yours--you earned it," he said. "No, I came here hoping to influence you to help my father. The work I did was part of the plan. It happened to fall my way. I took it as a means to get to your heart." "But it is yours, please take it. It will be useful." "No," she said scornfully, "I can't tell you how low I should fall in my own estimation if I took your money! Money," she added, with ringing contempt, "why, that's all there is to YOU! It's your god! Shall I make your god my god? No, thank you, Mr. Ryder!" "Am I as bad as that?" he asked wistfully. "You are as bad as that!" she answered decisively. "So bad that I contaminate even good money?" He spoke lightly but she noticed that he winced. "Money itself is nothing," replied the girl, "it's the spirit that gives it--the spirit that receives it, the spirit that earns it, the spirit that spends it. Money helps to create happiness. It also creates misery. It's an engine of destruction when not properly used, it destroys individuals as it does nations. It has destroyed you, for it has warped your soul!" "Go on," he laughed bitterly, "I like to hear you!" "No, you don't, Mr. Ryder, no you don't, for deep down in your heart you know that I am speaking the truth. Money and the power it gives you, has dried up the well-springs of your heart." He affected to be highly amused at her words, but behind the mask of callous indifference the man suffered. Her words seared him as with a red hot iron. She went on: "In the barbaric ages they fought for possession, but they fought openly. The feudal barons fought for what they stole, but it was a fair fight. They didn't strike in the dark. At least, they gave a man a chance for his life. But when you modern barons of industry don't like legislation you destroy it, when you don't like your judges you remove them, when a competitor outbids you you squeeze him out of commercial existence! You have no hearts, you are machines, and you are cowards, for you fight unfairly." "It is not true, it is not true," he protested. "It is true," she insisted hotly, "a few hours ago in cold blood you doomed my father to what is certain death because you decided it was a political necessity. In other words he interfered with your personal interests--your financial interests--you, with so many millions you can't count them!" Scornfully she added: "Come out into the light--fight in the open! At least, let him know who his enemy is!" "Stop--stop--not another word," he cried impatiently, "you have diagnosed the disease. What of the remedy? Are you prepared to reconstruct human nature?" Confronting each other, their eyes met and he regarded her without resentment, almost with tenderness. He felt strangely drawn towards this woman who had defied and accused him, and made him see the world in a new light. "I don't deny," he admitted reluctantly, "that things seem to be as you describe them, but it is part of the process of evolution." "No," she protested, "it is the work of God!" "It is evolution!" he insisted. "Ah, that's it," she retorted, "you evolve new ideas, new schemes, new tricks--you all worship different gods--gods of your own making!" He was about to reply when there was a commotion at the door and Theresa entered, followed by a man servant to carry down the trunk. "The cab is downstairs, Miss," said the maid. Ryder waved them away imperiously. He had something further to say which he did not care for servants to hear. Theresa and the man precipitately withdrew, not understanding, but obeying with alacrity a master who never brooked delay in the execution of his orders. Shirley, indignant, looked to him for an explanation. "You don't need them," he exclaimed with a quiet smile in which was a shade of embarrassment. "I--I came here to tell you that I--" He stopped as if unable to find words, while Shirley gazed at him in utter astonishment. "Ah," he went on finally, "you have made it very hard for me to speak." Again he paused and then with an effort he said slowly: "An hour ago I had Senator Roberts on the long distance telephone, and I'm going to Washington. It's all right about your father. The matter will be dropped. You've beaten me. I acknowledge it. You're the first living soul who ever has beaten John Burkett Ryder." Shirley started forward with a cry of mingled joy and surprise. Could she believe her ears? Was it possible that the dreaded Colossus had capitulated and that she had saved her father? Had the forces of right and justice prevailed, after all? Her face transfigured, radiant she exclaimed breathlessly: "What, Mr. Ryder, you mean that you are going to help my father?" "Not for his sake--for yours," he answered frankly. Shirley hung her head. In her moment of triumph, she was sorry for all the hard things she had said to this man. She held out her hand to him. "Forgive me," she said gently, "it was for my father. I had no faith. I thought your heart was of stone." Impulsively Ryder drew her to him, he clasped her two hands in his and looking down at her kindly he said, awkwardly: "So it was--so it was! You accomplished the miracle. It's the first time I've acted on pure sentiment. Let me tell you something. Good sentiment is bad business and good business is bad sentiment--that's why a rich man is generally supposed to have such a hard time getting into the Kingdom of Heaven." He laughed and went on, "I've given ten millions apiece to three universities. Do you think I'm fool enough to suppose I can buy my way? But that's another matter. I'm going to Washington on behalf of your father because I--want you to marry my son. Yes, I want you in the family, close to us. I want your respect, my girl. I want your love. I want to earn it. I know I can't buy it. There's a weak spot in every man's armour and this is mine--I always want what I can't get and I can't get your love unless I earn it." Shirley remained pensive. Her thoughts were out on Long Island, at Massapequa. She was thinking of their joy when they heard the news--her father, her mother and Stott. She was thinking of the future, bright and glorious with promise again, now that the dark clouds were passing away. She thought of Jefferson and a soft light came into her eyes as she foresaw a happy wifehood shared with him. "Why so sober," demanded Ryder, "you've gained your point, your father is to be restored to you, you'll marry the man you love?" "I'm so happy!" murmured Shirley. "I don't deserve it. I had no faith." Ryder released her and took out his watch. "I leave in fifteen minutes for Washington," he said. "Will you trust me to go alone?" "I trust you gladly," she answered smiling at him. "I shall always be grateful to you for letting me convert you." "You won me over last night," he rejoined, "when you put up that fight for your father. I made up my mind that a girl so loyal to her father would be loyal to her husband. You think," he went on, "that I do not love my son--you are mistaken. I do love him and I want him to be happy. I am capable of more affection than people think. It is Wall Street," he added bitterly, "that has crushed all sentiment out of me." Shirley laughed nervously, almost hysterically. "I want to laugh and I feel like crying," she cried. "What will Jefferson say--how happy he will be!" "How are you going to tell him?" inquired Ryder uneasily. "I shall tell him that his dear, good father has relented and--" "No, my dear," he interrupted, "you will say nothing of the sort. I draw the line at the dear, good father act. I don't want him to think that it comes from me at all." "But," said Shirley puzzled, "I shall have to tell him that you--" "What?" exclaimed Ryder, "acknowledge to my son that I was in the wrong, that I've seen the error of my ways and wish to repent? Excuse me," he added grimly, "it's got to come from him. He must see the error of HIS ways." "But the error of his way," laughed the girl, "was falling in love with me. I can never prove to him that that was wrong!" The financier refused to be convinced. He shook his head and said stubbornly: "Well, he must be put in the wrong somehow or other! Why, my dear child," he went on, "that boy has been waiting all his life for an opportunity to say to me: 'Father, I knew I was in the right, and I knew you were wrong.' Can't you see," he asked, "what a false position it places me in? Just picture his triumph!" "He'll be too happy to triumph," objected Shirley. Feeling a little ashamed of his attitude, he said: "I suppose you think I'm very obstinate." Then, as she made no reply, he added: "I wish I didn't care what you thought." Shirley looked at him gravely for a moment and then she replied seriously: "Mr. Ryder, you're a great man--you're a genius--your life is full of action, energy, achievement. But it appears to be only the good, the noble and the true that you are ashamed of. When your money triumphs over principle, when your political power defeats the ends of justice, you glory in your victory. But when you do a kindly, generous, fatherly act, when you win a grand and noble victory over yourself, you are ashamed of it. It was a kind, generous impulse that has prompted you to save my father and take your son and myself to your heart. Why are you ashamed to let him see it? Are you afraid he will love you? Are you afraid I shall love you? Open your heart wide to us--let us love you." Ryder, completely vanquished, opened his arms and Shirley sprang forward and embraced him as she would have embraced her own father. A solitary tear coursed down the financier's cheek. In thirty years he had not felt, or been touched by, the emotion of human affection. The door suddenly opened and Jefferson entered. He started on seeing Shirley in his father's arms. "Jeff, my boy," said the financier, releasing Shirley and putting her hand in his son's, "I've done something you couldn't do--I've convinced Miss Green--I mean Miss Rossmore--that we are not so bad after all!" Jefferson, beaming, grasped his father's hand. "Father!" he exclaimed. "That's what I say--father!" echoed Shirley. They both embraced the financier until, overcome with emotion, Ryder, Sr., struggled to free himself and made his escape from the room crying: "Good-bye, children--I'm off for Washington!" THE END 
61246	----	available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/prisonersofhartl00bereuoft/mode/2up THE PRISONERS OF HARTLING * * * * * * BY J. D. BERESFORD THE JERVAISE COMEDY AN IMPERFECT MOTHER * * * * * * THE PRISONERS OF HARTLING by J. D. BERESFORD 'There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt.' _Ecclesiastes_ v. 13. New York The Macmillan Company 1922 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Company. Set up and printed. Published February, 1922. Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. To H. H. BASHFORD THE PRISONERS OF HARTLING I "Dog's life, old man, a dog's life; you can't get away from that." Arthur Woodroffe's voice was quite cheerful as he framed this indictment of the life of a general practitioner in a poor neighbourhood, but his companion frowned and shook his head impatiently. "You are still re-acting to the pernicious influences of that damnable war," he said. "You're hankering after the intoxication of saving wounded under fire; exciting stunts of that sort; Sbana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. You've got to learn to be content with Jordan. Risk your life in more homely ways saving the sick in Peckham. Same thing, really; only you don't get orders for it. And of course ..." he hesitated, pushed up his gold-rimmed spectacles, and stared hard at his friend and paid assistant. "Any way, what is it you're hankering after, my good chap?" he concluded. Woodroffe looked critically round the little room, and then at Somers glowering down at him from the hearthrug. "More space," he said briefly; "and more...." He seemed to jib at the word that was obviously in his mind. "More beauty," Somers suggested. "If you like," Woodroffe agreed carelessly. "Something of that sort. I'd like to get about the world a bit, too." "As medical attendant to a hypochondriac millionaire?" "Or some job abroad; or...." "What you really want, my lad, is an independent income and lots of leisure," Somers commented. "You can't say I've ever been a slacker, Bob," Woodroffe said. "No, but you'd soon pick it up if you had got enough to live on without worrying." Woodroffe considered that before he replied. "Don't believe I should. Go in for research or something. Hate having nothing to do." "There's always hunting and golf, and bridge and billiards, and cricket, and so on," Somers said. "Life of a country gentleman. Also, you might marry and beget a family, and go in for politics. Quite a strenuous life it seems, for a lot of 'em." "Bit of a change wouldn't it, after the life of a panel doctor in Peckham," Woodroffe remarked; "but I don't think it's my style all the same. I'd like to _do_ something, something useful. And by the way, old thing, if you're taking on Nellie Mason, I'd advise you to turn in. I saw her this morning, and she's pretty near her time. Rotten job it'll be, too. But I'll take her on if you like. A fat primip like her would be good for my character." "No, I'll take it," Somers said. "I promised her I would. She thinks you're a bit young. All the same, I'm not going to bed yet. I want to have this out with you. It's interesting, for one thing. I suppose nothing particular has upset you lately, has it? Nothing that's set your mind roving." "I don't know. Yes. In a way. Had a letter this morning asking me to spend a week-end with a wealthy sort of connection of mine in Sussex--or Surrey, is it? Hartling's the name of the place." "Never heard of it, nor of your connection with wealth," Somers said. "It's a bit distant," Woodroffe explained. "My aunt, my mother's sister that is, married the old man's son. His name's Garvice Kenyon. Ever heard of _him_?" Somers shook his head. "It'd be a bit before your time," Woodroffe acknowledged. "The old chap must be about ninety. I've only seen him once. I went there to stay with my mother when I was a kid of about nine or ten. Some idea of keeping up the connection, I suppose. But after my father got that living in Yorkshire, we dropped out. I don't remember much about the place or the people. General impression of grandeur, and so on, that's all. Mighty fine place, I believe." "How did you pick 'em up again?" Somers asked. "Well, I haven't picked 'em up again yet," Woodroffe said. "But I sat next to old Beddington at that public dinner you took me to a fortnight ago, and in the course of conversation--the sort of tosh one does talk to your next door neighbour on those occasions--he happened to mention that he was going down to see old Kenyon. So I claimed the connection for the sake of something to say. After that Beddington talked a lot about Kenyon; in fact he told me more than I had ever heard before. And, well, I suppose in much the same sort of way he must have talked to old Kenyon about me, when he was down there. Anyhow, this morning I got a letter from my aunt--forwarded from Holt's--Beddington probably told 'em I'd been in the R.A.M.C.--asking me to go down there the week-end after next. She says the old man would be 'very interested to hear some of my war experiences.' Bright old bird, apparently, for ninety. Beddington said he was as fit as a flea, still, but a bit absent-minded." "And the thought of going down there has unsettled you, has it?" Somers asked. "Don't know that I am going," Woodroffe said. "My togs are a bit rusty for that kind of show." "I'd almost forgotten that one felt like that at twenty-eight," commented Somers. "After the war, too. Accept the wisdom of forty-five, my dear boy, and believe me that rusty togs are quite distinguished these days." "Makes you feel rotten, all the same," Woodroffe thought. "But you still avoid the real issue," Somers persisted; "why this invitation has unsettled you." "I don't know," Woodroffe said, settling himself a little deeper in his arm-chair. "I suppose if one analyses it, the thing set me thinking of--of the differences between Kenyon's position and mine. Here I am with no decent clothes, and no money; sweating myself thin over a dirty job like trying to mitigate the sickness of Peckham, while old Kenyon's got more money than he knows what to do with." "Incipient socialism, this," Somers confided to the wall opposite. "It isn't," Woodroffe said. "I've no sympathy with the greasy proletariat; not my line at all. It is that the whole thing has just set me wondering how I'm going to get out of it. It's no damned good pretending, my dear Bob, that I wouldn't sooner be lying snug in a clean comfortable bed than delivering women like Nellie Mason. And, oh! Lord, the accent is on the _clean_ all the time." "You don't mean to imply ..." Somers began. "My dear chap, of course I don't," Woodroffe cut in. "My bed here is clean enough for any one, but for about twelve hours of the day I am mixing with dirtiness of every sort and kind, and I had more than my fill of it in the war--lice by the yard and every sort of filth. You blooming base-wallahs never knew your blessings. Well, all I know is that I used to tell myself stories of getting clean, fantasy hot baths in exquisite surroundings, and picture myself going straight from them into brand new clothes and that sort of thing. Instead of which I've dropped straight into this. I know I'm clean all right, Bob, but I can't _feel_ clean. You've got to admit now, haven't you, that ours is a dirty job, take it all round?" Somers put his hand under his coat and scratched his left shoulder vigorously. "Oh! damn," he remarked, after a thoughtful interval. "I might come back to it, after a couple of years or so," Woodroffe began again apologetically. "But it's becoming almost an obsession with me just now. I expect these psycho-analysis Johnnies would say I was suffering from some suppression or shock or something." "You've definitely made up your mind to chuck this job, then?" Somers asked. "I hadn't when we began," Woodroffe replied. "But talking to you about it seems to have cleared my mind. Honestly I'd no idea of chucking it when we started this jaw, and now it seems the only possible thing to do." "What are you going to live on?" Somers asked. "I've saved between four and five hundred pounds," Woodroffe said. "Carry me on for a bit, though I suppose it isn't worth two hundred these days. And then I might have a look round one of the colonies, Canada or New Zealand, or somewhere. It'd be cleaner than Peckham." Somers sighed, and made a gesture of renunciation. "I'm sorry about this, Arthur," he said; "very sorry--not only because I shall lose you--though that's bad enough, but also, because, well, your attitude disappoints me." Woodroffe hunched himself in his chair and began to fidget, touching various marks here and there on the hearthrug with the toe of his slipper. "You've always said we ought to express ourselves," he grumbled, "and here I'm going contrary to my inclinations all the time. I haven't forgotten your yarns on that subject at the hospital eight years ago." "My dear old chap, that's the very point," Somers replied. "That's what disappoints me. I thought you had something better to express than these calf-like yearnings for change and luxury." Woodroffe's handsome face had taken on the expression of a sulky schoolboy. He was still intent on tracing some ideal pattern in the design of the hearthrug as he said: "Had nearly five years of it. Over four years in the Army and six months here. Don't see why in the name of God I shouldn't at least get out into some clean, decent country like Canada." "I shan't try to stop you," Somers replied. "All the same you're making me feel perfectly rotten about it," Woodroffe said. "Making me feel as if I were a deserter, slinking off and leaving you here. Might just as well say at once that you won't let me go. Of course I shan't, now I know how you feel about it." Somers stared hard at the opposite wall, tucked his hands under his short coat-tails, and as he spoke alternately raised himself on his toes, and let himself down on his heels with an effect of emphasising his points. "I stand reproved, Arthur," he said. "I was wrong--quite wrong. Purely selfish. I've been a bit tired lately and bad-tempered." "Not you," Woodroffe mumbled. "I have," Somers insisted. "I'm in a nasty mood to-night." "I wish you'd let me take Nellie Mason," Woodroffe put in. "I can't. I promised her, five months ago. Never mind that. We're talking about you. And I want you to go. Yes; I mean it. You ought to go. I'm a short-sighted old fool; much too wrapped up in myself and my own affairs; but now that I've heard the case stated I can see the truth. You'd only stultify and repress yourself by staying here. I know how loyal you are, and I know that at a word from me you'd go on. You mustn't. You'd do harm to yourself and to the practice by denying your impulse. As you reminded me, that's a well-established principle of mine, though I haven't thought much about it for the last five years--there's been too much to do. The point is, however, that you'll do no good to yourself or any one while you're working against the grain. _Fay ce que voudra._ It's possible that you may come a tremendous cropper, and that might do you all the good in the world. But go you must. I wouldn't keep you now if you wanted to stay." Woodroffe had stopped fidgeting. "But look here, Bob, old man," he said. "As a matter of fact, I can't go yet, not for a month or two." "You can go to-morrow if you want to," Somers replied. "Bates wants a job and he'd be glad to come." "Oh! Lord! Bates!" interjected Woodroffe. "Yes, ohlordbates!" Somers corroborated him. "Dear old wooden-headed, persistent, patient, uninspired Bates. He's just the man I want. The panel patients'll love him, because he'll take so much trouble over 'em. It's true that he'll have to work eighteen hours a day to get through, but he likes that sort of thing. Makes him feel as if he were being some use in the world, poor chap. Oh! yes, I can do with Bates, but God! I'll miss you, Arthur." "I'm damned if I'll go," Woodroffe announced, getting up. "Everlastingly damned if I will." "You will, my son, because I won't keep you," Somers said. "But I don't say that I won't ever have you back. That depends, of course, on how you return to me. If you _want_ to come back in two, or three, or five years' time; just turn up and say, 'Bob, I think I'd like to take up the old work again! and we'll go into partnership.' You'll be ripe for it. Now you've got to go and find out what you are fit for. You're not just now fit for this job or you wouldn't be feeling as you do about it. I know you'd stay out of friendship for me, but that's no good--no good at all. I'd sooner have ohlordbates trying to be some use in the world." Woodroffe sat down again and stared rather gloomily at the pattern of the hearthrug. "I feel rather a swine, all the same, Bob," he said. "You won't in a month's time," Somers assured him. Woodroffe contemplated that remark for a moment and then smiled rather grimly. "In a way I hope I will," he said, "and in another way I hope I won't. You needn't think it'll be a case of 'out of sight, out of mind,' Bob; but I shouldn't care to live permanently with the thought of myself as being a swine for having left you." "You're not leaving me, my dear man, I'm sending you away for your own good and that of the practice," Somers returned. "Comes to the same thing. It means I've failed you." "It means that you've failed yourself," Somers corrected him. "Now I want you to go out into the world and find out where and why. You'll do it. I shall expect you back sometime." Woodroffe sighed and got up, but his face had cleared. "I'll come back," he said; "but I'll admit it's a relief to go in a lot of ways. I--good Lord, I want more space," and he stretched out his arms as if to demonstrate how very little space there was in that small room. Somers nodded. "That's settled," he said. "And I don't know that you could make a better beginning, Arthur, than by accepting that invitation of your rich connections for a week-end." "Oh! ah! I'd forgotten that," Woodroffe said, looked down at the knees of his trousers, and added with a faint blush: "Might get myself some new togs out of capital? I'm sure to want 'em sooner or later. Only things are such a filthy price just now. They rook you about thirty quid for a dress suit." "I should certainly get some new togs," Somers advised him. "Treat it as an investment." "Of course, if you put it like that," Woodroffe said, with a grin. "I'll take the responsibility of letting you squander your capital," Somers replied gravely. "Facetious old dog, you!" Woodroffe returned. "Like to pretend I'm still in leading strings, don't you?" "Lord, you're not ready for leading strings yet," Somers said. "Wait till you're weaned before you try to walk." Woodroffe thumped him playfully on the chest. "Oh! go to bed," Somers growled. "I'm going to try and snatch an hour before I'm fetched for Nellie Mason; if I am fetched. Personally, I shouldn't be surprised if it wasn't for another week yet." "Dog's life, old man, a dog's life," Woodroffe commented as he left the room. When he had gone Somers threw himself down with a groan into the arm-chair. "I wonder how long it'll be before he comes back?" he thought. "If he'll ever come back?" In his mind's eye he had a disgustingly clear image of the solemn, earnest face of young Bates. II Arthur Woodroffe's true defence of his action in leaving Peckham did not occur to him until after he had parted with Somers. In the course of the ten days that had passed since his sudden arrival at a decision, he had fallen into a perfect intoxication of spending. In that time he had spent over two hundred pounds. And with that expenditure he had broken another habit of thought. His early life had always been overshadowed by the cares and threats of respectable poverty, and when his last financial responsibility had been closed by his mother's death, eighteen months earlier, he had continued to save money, with the prudent thought that he might presently need capital. But just as he had suddenly and surprisingly realised that there was no compelling reason why he should stay on as Somers' assistant at Peckham, so, also, he had realised when he began his shopping, that he might, if he wished, do the thing in style. He was beginning a new life. He was young and competent, and he had a profession. He would let the future take care of itself. And here was one of his fantasies coming true; he would have everything new and clean. He remembered his dream of stripping naked and plunging into a deep wide river, a sweet and rapid flood of purifying water; of swimming many miles until he came to a new land where vermin were unknown; and of walking out of the river, cool, and refreshed, to dress--he had never told any one that--in white silk from head to foot. Nothing but the smoothest silk would do. He had seen that silk in imagination glimmering with the sheen of a fine pearl. He smiled now at the extravagance of that fancy, but the temptation to buy an entirely new outfit was too strong to be resisted. He had deserved it. The impulse marked his real recovery from the effects of the war. The world owed him five years of youth! That was the true defence of his action in leaving Peckham. He saw his justification with astounding clearness as he stood on Westminster Bridge looking up the river, half an hour before his train was timed to leave Charing Cross--the train that was to take him to Hartling for his promised week-end. In a re-action against his orgie of spending, he had come as far as that by tram, lugging his new kit-bag and dressing-case. The tram would have taken him on to Charing Cross, but when it had stopped close to his old hospital, he had felt an urgent desire to see the river from the old standpoint. The thought of his bags had not deterred him. He was bursting with vigour and energy that morning. Society, the World, Life owed him five years for those he had given. The years from twenty-two to twenty-seven. He had joined up in August, 1914, had been sent down to Salisbury Plain for his training, and had been in France by the summer of next year. He had been lucky in some ways. He had not been wounded or gassed or suffered from shell-shock, and in the following winter he had been combed out and sent back to the hospital for two years to finish his training, before returning to France as a Lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. But looking back now, it seemed to him that he had had no relaxation in all that time. He had taken the war too seriously and the shadow of it had lain over him. If it had not been for that, he would not have joined dear old Bob Somers on the very day that he had been demobilised. He had got the habit of being strenuous and self-sacrificing and all the rest of it, and the habit, or whatever it was, had apparently dropped from him almost miraculously in the course of that conversation. It was unquestionably gone. He felt himself, unexpectedly and delightfully, not only free but also young again. He must write to Bob and explain that theory of the lost years of youth and the world's debit account. He would not be hard on his debtor. He would not exact a full repayment of the original loan. He would take only two years. After that he would go back to the strenuous habit of self-sacrifice and leave his youth behind. He could recover the very spirit of it in this place. How often he had glanced down from the end of a ward and taken back to his work a picture of the river, of the bridge, or of the Gothic dignities of the Houses of Parliament. In retrospect those pictures were all coloured with the vivid emotions of youth. He could place some of them with the distinctness of a clearly remembered dream. There was, for instance, that wonderful morning in February, mild and clear as a day in April, associated with the thought that he was playing for his hospital in one of the "Rugger" cup ties that afternoon. Great days, those were; and in effect, he was physically little older now than he was then. He was splendidly fit. He laid hold again of his two bags, and strode triumphantly across the bridge. And that mood held, even mounted, unchecked by the deliberations of the South-Eastern and Chatham train service. Indeed, the semi-torpid movements of the railway servants on the branch line to which he changed at the junction afforded a pleasant contrast to his own exuberance. He was beginning life again. Everything was coming right. He had visions of some delightful, improbable enlargement of his condition. Old Kenyon might take a fancy to him. Some one in the house, some special favourite of the old man's, might be taken seriously ill, and Arthur Woodroffe, the brilliant young general practitioner from Peckham, would work a miracle at the eleventh hour. Old Mr Kenyon's gratitude would take a practical form, and the thing was done. There were other variants of the dream, but this seemed to be the most promising. A car was waiting for him at Hartling Station, but neither his aunt nor any of his connections by marriage had come to meet him. Arthur had his bags put into the tonneau and sat in front. He wanted to talk to some one, and found the chauffeur quite willing for conversation. They began with the obvious subject of motors and presently the chauffeur volunteered the statement that the Vauxhall in which they were riding was not their best car. "Use this for station work and short trips mostly, sir," he said. "But Mr Kenyon always has the Rolls-Royce for going up to town. Never goes any other way. Wonderful old gentleman, Mr Kenyon, sir." "I haven't seen him for twenty years," Arthur said. "He's getting on for ninety, isn't he?" "Ninety-one last October, sir," the chauffeur told him, "and he'd make a good seventy in a manner of speaking. A bit absent-minded sometimes, he don't always hear you when you speak to him; but no doubt that's because he's thinking o' something else. He's not what you call deaf, not in the least." "Good Lord. Wonderful!" Arthur commented. His mind was engaged in framing a tentative essay on the causes of disability in old age, more particularly with reference to arterio-sclerosis, but he reserved that as being a shade too technical. "Though there's no real reason, you know," he said, "why we shouldn't live to be a hundred or even a hundred and twenty. There's a fellow in Asia Minor who is supposed to be a hundred and fifty." "I suppose not, sir," the chauffeur replied without enthusiasm, and added, apparently as an afterthought, "You're a doctor, I was told, sir." Arthur nodded. "I haven't come down here professionally, though," he said. "No, sir; I shouldn't say as Mr Kenyon had much faith in doctors...." The chauffeur's sentence tailed off on a high note, with an effect of there being more to come; also he reduced the pace of the car as if he had something of importance to add before they reached the house. "I've wondered sometimes, sir," he continued, after a short pause, "whether he oughtn't to--to take advice, as they say. Them fits of absent-mindedness I was telling you about, for instance, come on very queer sometimes. It's like as if he was sound asleep with his eyes wide open. Scared me once or twice he has. I thought perhaps being a doctor you might be able to say if it was anything serious. Of course, being ninety-one...." Arthur would have liked to give a ready diagnosis of this abnormal condition, but his expertise was not equal to the task, and he fell back on the usual defence of his profession. "Couldn't possibly say without examining him," he said. "It might be due to one of several conditions." The car running down a slight incline with a free engine had almost stopped. The chauffeur appeared to be deep in thought. "At Mr Kenyon's age ..." he began tentatively "One would not expect him to be quite the man he was at twenty-eight," Arthur supplied. "Exactly, sir, one wouldn't," the chauffeur replied in the tone of one aroused to a consciousness of his immediate duties; and he let in the clutch and speeded up the car with an effect of turning his attention to more pressing affairs. For the last quarter of a mile they had been running alongside a high brick wall, and as they now swerved in between a pair of wide-open iron gates, Arthur realised that the rather ugly wall was the boundary of Mr Kenyon's property. The contrast between the outside and the inside was, as perhaps it was designed to be, sudden and startling. From the dusty side road flanked on one side by that erection of crude brickwork, he was transported without any kind of preparation into a finished and extensively cultivated garden of unusual extent and beauty. Seen from that entrance by the little lodge, the garden wonderfully displayed itself. It lay on a moderate slope, lifting up in a steady rise from the entrance gates to the climax of the house, that spread itself along the crest of the hill with an effect of dignified watchfulness. And the designer of that garden had had fine natural material to work upon other than the slope that provided the excuse for that triple tier of terraces with their shallow stone steps and low balustrading. He had had, for example, a fine selection of forest trees, elm, oak, and beech, with as a contrast a plantation of larches and silver birch bounding the estate on the east side. Also he had had an abundance of running water. A little river, its point of entrance hidden by the close shrubberies and plantations that shut out all sight of the ugly boundary wall on the garden side, cascaded not too artificially, out of obscurity into the sunlight, ran as a decently restrained little river for a hundred yards or so between close-cut lawns, the upper one of which was bordered by a row of graceful wych elms; and then spread itself into an irregular lake, over which the main drive to the house was carried by the spring of a slender bridge. But any catalogue of that garden's innumerable "features" must inevitably convey a false impression. Whoever had planned it, had had the genius to conceive his effect as a whole. It was arranged, composed, to display itself from the entrance lodge as a broad mass that was presented to the mind as a miniature park, abounding with natural opportunities, which had for many years been scrupulously kept, planted, and mown. And seen thus on the broad, it could not be classified as belonging either to the formal or the landscape type; rather it had the air of a diligently cultivated suburban garden enormously enlarged. There was something new, bright, almost deliberately factitious in its pretensions. The chauffeur had but one comment to offer as they spun up the long curve of the gravel drive to the house. As they crossed the stone bridge over the pond, he pointed to the right, indicating a rough-cast and half-timbered building nearly hidden by the trees of the larch plantation into which the little river plunged out of sight. "Power house, sir," he explained. "We do all our own lighting and pumping by water-power. Pleased to show you over, sir, if you have time. Nice little plant we've got." Arthur found a sense of satisfaction in the thought of the completeness of the place. III Arthur remembered the bridge and the lake now that he saw them again. He had had some vague recollection of an immense sheet of water and an equally immense bridge that he had vaguely connected--he thought, mistakenly--with his boyhood visits to Hartling. The only other thing he remembered was a colossal elephant's pad in the hall. He found it still there, and in the interval of twenty years, it had diminished less than the lake. The detail of the house itself had apparently left little impression on his boyish mind. As he glanced round the hall, he had an uncertain feeling of being familiar with that massive staircase, but he had no idea how the rooms were placed. His bags had gone round to some other entrance with the car; and as he gave his keys to the butler Arthur realised the splendid support of his expensive outfit. It made a difference, gave him assurance, a sense of being at home in these surroundings. That outfit was worth the money if only for the one week-end. It would have been absolutely rotten to have spent his whole time in trying to live down shabby clothes. There seemed to be a perfect crowd of people in the room into which he was shown by the butler after having elected to go straight in to tea. He presumed it was a regular week-end party. His aunt got up when he was announced and came across the room to greet him. She was a little tired-looking woman with a distinct likeness to his own mother, who had died in the first year of the war. He had always attributed that gray, pinched, slightly distracted air, in his mother's case, to the difficulties of life in a country parish on insufficient means; but as his aunt had the same air it was probably a family characteristic. Mrs Kenyon's voice and manner also reminded him of his mother. "How you've altered, Arthur," she said in a low, even voice. "In twenty years, aunt," he reminded her cheerfully, "one grows a certain amount." "I've seen you since then," she said quietly, "in town. Your poor mother brought you to see me off at Charing Cross: your first year at the hospital, I think it was. Now, come and have some tea." She led him towards the tea-table as she spoke, and introduced him in passing to her husband, a bald, rather untidy man, who was lying back in an arm-chair. "How're you?" he said indifferently to the newly recovered nephew. "Little chap in knickerbockers, about three foot nothing, last time I saw you." Arthur smiled his acknowledgment of this reminiscence with, he hoped, an effect of not caring whether he was remembered or not. These people were certainly not effusive; but probably this was their usual manner. The more money you had the less you troubled about manners and personal appearance. His uncle had been wearing a soft, rather crumpled collar and old flannel bags. Miss Kenyon, the eldest of the family, was presiding at the tea-table. She was a tall, white-haired woman of sixty or so, with what Arthur mentally described to himself as a "domineering expression." She hardly smiled as she shook hands with him. "I remember your first visit here very well," she said, and he grasped at the opportunity to avoid the usual futilities of an opening conversation. "Only the vaguest recollection of it myself, Miss Kenyon," he replied brightly, as he accepted the tea she offered him. "I dare say that's because my earlier memories have been rather overlaid by the experiences of the last six years." He felt that he had taken rather a sound line. He could see chances of quite good talking ahead, supported by a backing of medical and psychological authority. Miss Kenyon, however, cut him off by saying in her cold, clear voice, "One wouldn't expect you to remember much, you were only five." He couldn't believe it. "Oh! surely a lot more than that," he protested. "About nine or ten, I thought." "Jubilee year," Miss Kenyon affirmed quietly, but with an air of final authority. "In August." Arthur did not care to contradict her again, but he was still unconvinced. "Was it really?" he asked. "Astonishing how one forgets!" Miss Kenyon was not to be deceived by this simulation of agreement. "Don't you remember, Hannah?" she asked, turning to her sister-in-law, who had sat down near them, and was apparently brooding over the emptiness of life. Mrs Kenyon started. "Remember, Esther? Oh! when Arthur came before," she said. "Not very distinctly, I am afraid. But he was quite a little fellow, in a holland tunic. I remember that because he got himself very dirty one morning, and poor Emily hadn't got a change for him." Miss Kenyon nodded calmly. "In any case," she remarked, "we can verify the date without difficulty. I shall have a note of it in my diary." "Esther is always accurate in her facts," her sister-in-law murmured. "Her memory is simply wonderful." Miss Kenyon did not acknowledge this compliment. She was looking out through the great bay-window that was one of the principal features of the room in which they were sitting. Her expression was one of conscious authority--supreme, unquestionable. Arthur felt snubbed, and, for the moment could think of no other suitable topic of conversation. Perhaps it would be advisable to admit that he was wrong, before he tried another subject. "Stupid of me," he tried. "But as I was saying just now, the experiences of the past few years have rather altered one's scale of values. I probably mixed up my visit here with some other visit I paid with my mother when I was a bit older. One does that, sometimes." He paused. Miss Kenyon was regarding him with a quiet, detached interest. It was evident that she had no further intention of interrupting him if he cared to go on talking, but that he must not expect any sort of response. Arthur dropped his thesis with a slight sense of irritation and turned to his aunt. "Aren't there some cousins of mine I ought to know?" he asked. She indicated her two children with what Arthur thought to be a singular lack of enthusiasm. "That is Hubert by the fireplace. Elizabeth is over there in the window. I will introduce you to them when you have finished your tea." Arthur took stock of his two cousins with attention. He was beginning to wonder if he were not in for an uncommonly depressing week-end. His observations of the third generation did little to reassure him. Hubert was a young man of about twenty-five, with a long, melancholy face. He was dressed in rough tweeds, and wearing cloth gaiters, that gave him the look of a man whose interests lay among horses. And in Arthur's experience men who talked about horses were quite unable to talk about anything else. Elizabeth, a rather pretty girl, probably two or three years younger than her brother, was more interesting, but she, too, had the same expression of lassitude. Arthur, still brightly aware of his newly recovered youth, felt as if he would like to take her by the arm and run with her out into the sunlight; shake her, make her sing and dance, force her to show some signs of enjoying her consciousness of life. "And the little man talking to Hubert, who is he?" Arthur had no urgent desire to hurry the introduction to his cousins, and he was thoroughly enjoying the various cakes provided for tea. He had not tasted cakes like these since the war. Also, Miss Kenyon had now gone from the table and left the room, and he felt more free to talk. Aunt Hannah might be rather dull but she was at least reasonably polite. "That's Charles Turner," she told him. "He married Mr Kenyon's second daughter, Katherine--she's over there in the window by Elizabeth. Charles is the uncle of the present Lord Greening, you know." Arthur did not know, but he nodded as he replied, "Are they staying here for the week-end?" "Oh! no," Mrs Kenyon said. "We all live here. There is no one from outside here this week-end--except yourself." Was that the reason for their tepidity? Arthur reflected. He was some one "from the outside" intruding upon the family circle. Perhaps, in spite of their wealth, the Kenyon family mixed very little with the outside world. They were a complete group living within the enceinte of that ten-foot brick wall, self-sufficient, and it might be a little self-conscious in the presence of a stranger. That general air of lassitude and of--there was some other element in it that he could not quite define--might be the effect of shyness which, as he knew, often took strange forms. Not that Miss Kenyon had appeared to suffer from any known form of shyness. She was evidently an overbearing woman. "You're quite a large family party, aunt," he commented to keep the conversation going. Mrs Kenyon blinked as if he had in some way touched upon a sore subject. She gave, however, no hint of that in her reply. "And there's Eleanor, whom you haven't seen yet," she said. "She acts as a sort of secretary to Mr Kenyon. She's the daughter of James, the second son. He and his wife are both dead, and so is their elder daughter Margery." She looked at her son as she added, "Charles and Katherine have a son too, but he does not live with us. He is acting as a clerk to a stockbroker. Quite a good position, I believe. Have you finished your tea? I am sure Hubert is waiting to talk to you." "All but, aunt," Arthur said. "Sorry to bother you with all these questions, but I want to know who's who to begin with. And Mr Kenyon? He isn't down here of course." "He never takes tea," Mrs Kenyon said; "and we don't see a great deal of him at any time. I don't mean that he is in any way an invalid or a recluse, you know, but at his age...." "Oh! precisely," Arthur agreed. His aunt's sentence had tailed out into nothing, in much the same tone as that of the chauffeur when he had hesitated over precisely the same words. At his age.... The inference undoubtedly was that anything might happen when a man reaches the age of ninety-one. "He keeps awfully fit, though, doesn't he?" Arthur went on. "Yes. He's remarkably well and active ..." his aunt replied, paused again, and then concluded firmly, "but you will see him at dinner." Arthur noted again that effect of some unstated contingent. Possibly his aunt, also, was a trifle uneasy about the old man's health. "I've really finished at last, Aunt Hannah," he said, with a smile. She did not return the smile, but rose at once with an appearance of relief. Arthur felt as if he ought to apologise for having bored her. His cousin Hubert greeted him, as Arthur had expected, without enthusiasm. He turned almost at once to the Hon. Charles Turner, hoping that there he might perhaps find some kind of response. Turner was a small man whose age might have been anything between sixty and seventy, but he at least, obviously took trouble over his dress, and his rather elvish face was crinkled into an expression that gave promise of a rather satirical humour. Once or twice Arthur had caught Turner's gaze resting upon him with a slightly quizzical look. "You've gone in for medicine, I hear," Turner began, and without waiting for a reply, continued: "Depressing kind of profession, isn't it? Always listening to other people's complaints?" Arthur had never considered that aspect of the doctor's life. "Oh! I don't know," he said. "There are other things besides diagnosis. I mean...." "Oh! quite," Turner cut in; "but you're always with sick people. That's what you're for. Don't you find yourself getting in the way of looking at every one as a possible patient?" "Lord, no," Arthur replied, laughing. "You don't get so wrapped up in it as all that." "_You_ don't, perhaps," Turner said. "You're young yet, and I dare say you can drop your work when you are away from it. But I know a fellow, a Harley Street specialist, great authority on the heart...." "Sir Stephen Hunt?" Arthur put in. "That's the chap," Turner agreed. "Well, he's a terrible fellow. You'll see him looking round a dinner table and spotting symptoms. I remember sitting near him at dinner one night, and after the women had gone, he leant over to me and said, 'D'you know how long Lady Spendale has been suffering from'--let's see what did he call it--some sort of goitre?" "Exophthalmic, possibly," Arthur supplied. "I believe it was. She had rather protuberant eyes, I remember." "That's it," Arthur confirmed him. "Well, naturally I didn't even know she'd got it, if she had," Turner continued. "But what I mean is--ghastly sort of life to lead, always trying to spot something wrong with people's hearts or what not. Now, d'you mean to tell me honestly that you can help looking out for symptoms like that, more or less? Supposing I'd got protuberant eyes, for instance?" "That's such a frightfully obvious thing," Arthur objected. "As a matter of fact, there aren't so many diseases that can be diagnosed like that at sight. And--and--well, one rather gets out of the way of looking for them when one's off duty. As a student, I'll admit, one did a certain amount of showing off; kind of a game, you know, trying to spot the symptoms you'd just been reading up. But one soon dropped that." "H'm! Well! And so you like doctoring, do you? Got a practice, or what?" Turner asked. "No, nothing at the moment," Arthur said. "I've been helping a friend down in Peckham, but I've chucked that for the time being." "Loose end? What?" Turner inquired. "Got some notion of going to Canada," Arthur said. Turner pursed his mouth and looked down at his neat patent-leather shoes. "Fine climate and splendid opportunities there," he commented softly. "Free, open-air life and all that sort of thing. Just suit a vigorous young chap like you, I should say." Hubert Kenyon, who had been gloomily listening to the conversation without attempting to join in it, drew a long breath and exhaled it in a deep sigh. "That how you feel about it?" Arthur inquired. "I? Oh! How d'you mean?" Hubert asked. "Blowing a bit, weren't you, at the mention of Canada?" Arthur said. "Oh! That! I don't know," Hubert replied, without throwing much light on the meaning of his sigh. The conversation was dropping again. Arthur felt the silence coming, and did not care. He was a guest and it was the family's duty to entertain him. But what was the matter with them all? Or with him? He looked down the room. Miss Kenyon had come back, and they were all sitting about, reading or working in an uninterested kind of way--doing something or other as if it did not matter whether the thing was done or not. What was it the place and the people reminded him of? Yes! It was that boarding-house he had stayed in at Scarborough one winter. He had been there for a week with his mother. But that was a very different kind of place, and those were very different people. This room was beautifully designed and furnished, and these relations and connections of his were all rich and presumably care-free. Nevertheless there was something that reminded him of that Scarborough boarding-house. Something in the pose of those indifferently diligent women, perhaps? The voice of Hubert broke in on his meditations. "I don't know what we're waiting here for?" he said. "Care to come and have a look at the garden?" "Thanks. Yes, I should," Arthur replied cheerfully. He had it now. They all had the effect of waiting for something; for some climax, or change, or interruption; of waiting interminably for some known or unknown crisis that might never develop. Mr Turner was politely yawning as he stooped to pick up the _Times_. IV The garden was certainly wonderful. The modern house, although it had a well-designed south elevation, in which effective use had been made of mullioned oriel windows corbelled out from the first floor, was less successful inside--if the architect's intention had been to give the impression of age and dignity. The decoration and arrangement conveyed the effect of a really first-class hotel rather than that of an Elizabethan Manor, or even of a gentleman's country-house. This may have been due to the fact that it had been built in the late 'seventies of the last century, a bad period for country-house architecture; or it may have been a result of the exercise of old Mr Kenyon's domestic taste in furniture arrangement. No such indictment could be brought against the garden. It was unique in its variety--full of contrasts and surprises; a place to explore, and to get lost in, but more particularly a place that had a dozen settings from which the seeker might choose a mood. Arthur, finding new cause for astonishment and rapture at every turn, was enthusiastic in his expressions of admiration. After French battlefields, base hospitals, and Peckham, this garden seemed to him a true fairyland. Even the melancholy Hubert became a trifle more cheerful. "Yes, it is pretty good, isn't it?" he agreed. "'Course it has been worked at, day and night almost, you might say, for forty years." "What happened to it during the war?" Arthur asked. "Four of our gardeners were over age," Hubert said, "and we got boys to work under them. At first, that is. We had some wounded Tommies afterwards." "You weren't in it yourself?" Arthur asked. Hubert coloured faintly. "No, my grandfather got me a job in a Government office," he said. "I wanted to join up, but he wouldn't let me. I'm sort of steward to this place, you know. There are a couple of farms and so on to look after. Not that I have much to do. However, what I mean is that my grandfather made a tremendous point of keeping me out of the Army, and it was rather difficult for me to disobey him right out. He's--he's not altogether easy to handle." "Bit of an autocrat in his way?" Arthur suggested. Hubert looked uneasy. "In a way, yes," he agreed; and Arthur inferred that a tactful change of subject was advisable. "Have you got names for all these different parts of the garden?" he asked, choosing the most obvious topic. Hubert did not appear to have heard the question. He was frowning and fidgeting; he had the look of a weak man trying to make an important decision. "You don't know him, do you?" he said. "What I mean is, you've never been here since you came as a boy, and you've never kept in with us or anything?" "No, he's to all intents and purposes an utter stranger to me," Arthur agreed. "Just come down to have a look at us, then?" Hubert continued, with a feeble affectation of sprightliness. "Well, you and my aunt are about the only relations I've got," Arthur replied. "And as Aunt Hannah wrote out of the blue, as it were, and invited me to come down, I was glad of the opportunity." "Oh! yes, exactly," Hubert said. "I can understand that all right." Arthur was aware again of that sense of irritation that had come to him when he had been trying to talk to Miss Kenyon. He felt as if his cousin, in another manner, was also opposing him, was in some way suspicious and inimical. "Well what is it you don't understand?" he asked curtly. Hubert smiled, with the placatory air of a dog that has been threatened. He was standing with his feet crossed and rocked slowly from one to the other as he spoke. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing, I was just wondering if you wanted the old man's influence for anything, get you a job as medical attendant to anyone or something of that sort." "Good Lord, no," Arthur returned brusquely. "Never entered my head for a moment. Didn't I tell you that I thought of going out to Canada for a year or two?" So that was why these Kenyons had been unfriendly. They believed that he had come down there cadging for influence. He grew warm at the thought of that implication, and raised his voice slightly as he continued:-- "Pretty rotten aspersion to make that, wasn't it, Hubert? After Aunt Hannah had written and invited me to come down?" "Don't see anything rotten in it. Natural enough," Hubert replied, still rocking gently and looking down at his crossed ankles. "However--sorry. There's no need to get excited about it." He looked up and added: "Here's Eleanor. You haven't met her yet." They had been standing in a little cloister of formal garden, shut in by a sturdy box hedge, pierced only by two openings at the opposite corners, and Arthur's back had been presented to the opening through which they had entered. He turned with a touch of impatience at the indication of Hubert's introduction, to meet this new Kenyon connection--the orphan who acted as secretary to her grandfather. He was not predisposed in her favour. Hubert had put a new idea into his head by accusing him of cadging for influence. Was it not probable that all these descendants of the old man were, in some sense, at least, trying to "keep in" with him, trying to win his special favour for their own ends? But at his first sight of her, Arthur saw that Eleanor was different from the others. There was something alive and individual about her, she had not that effect of a slight staleness which the other members of the family seemed to convey. "This is Arthur Woodroffe," Hubert said, completing the introduction. She gave Arthur her hand, regarding him, he thought, with a strangely intent look of anxiety. "I heard you quarrelling as I came," she said. "Rather soon, isn't it?" She had a pleasant voice, with a musical, soothing tone; the voice of a woman who would make a good nurse, Arthur thought. "I don't know that we'd got as far as a quarrel," he said. "I confess that my new-found cousin, Hubert, annoyed me rather." Hubert raised his eyebrows. He had not moved when Eleanor joined them, and still stood in that uneasy looking pose of his. "Can't imagine why," he said. "Only asked him if he wanted grandfather's influence to get a job anywhere." Eleanor frowned faintly and shrugged her shoulders. "Oh! my good Hubert, how unoriginal of you," she said. Arthur was faintly perplexed by the adjective. "As a matter of fact," he said, "I was just telling Hubert that what I want to do is to go out to Canada." Eleanor's expression perceptibly brightened. She might have been the recipient of good news. "How splendid," she said warmly, "to go to a new and _free_ country like that." Arthur accepted that statement as a true expression of feeling. There had been a warmth, an air of admiring congratulation in her tone, that enchanted him after the chilliness of his reception in the drawing-room. "It would be rather a jolly adventure," he said. "I've got enough money for my passage, and outfit, and all that, and I don't suppose I should have any difficulty in getting a post of some kind out there." She was about to reply when Hubert unhitched himself and remarking that he had something to do before dinner, wandered aimlessly away in the direction of the lower garden. For a moment the thread of the conversation was broken. Both Arthur and Eleanor were watching the departing figure of their cousin, and, as often happens when a third person leaves a group, the other two were aware of an impulse to speak of him. "Poor old Hubert," Eleanor murmured in an undertone. "There's probably nothing in the world he would like better than to go to Canada." Arthur was surprised. He had already made some sort of estimate of his cousin's character, and sized him up roughly as a "feeble sort of rotter." "Well, then, why doesn't he?" he asked. "I shouldn't be surprised if he did," Eleanor replied, looking thoughtfully across the formal garden. "However, I dare say he'll tell you about it himself when he knows you a little better. You're--you're rather _new_ to us just at present. We're so secluded here. We don't very often see people from the outside." Arthur marked that repetition of his aunt's phrase with a slight sense of uneasiness. "Queer thing to say," he remarked. "Why from the 'outside'? Aunt Hannah used the same expression at tea. Sounds rather as if you were all confined in a prison or an asylum." Eleanor blushed and bit her lip. "Yes, it's a stupid phrase," she said quickly. "I didn't mean it the least in that way. Only we are so--what shall I say?--so self-sufficient. We've everything we want, nearly; and--oh! never mind. Is this as much of the garden as you've seen?" She led him across the little quadrangular enclosure as she continued: "I should like to show you my favourite place, if you haven't been there yet. It's just a little lower down, on the terrace, overlooking the stream and the lake. And I want you to tell me about Canada. You're a full-fledged doctor, aren't you? Aunt Hannah said you wrote from Peckham. Were you practising there?" As they made their way to the terrace she had indicated, Arthur told her something of his work in Peckham and of his reasons for wishing to leave it. He expected sympathy from her, but he found none. "I dare say it was dirty," was her comment--his insistence on that aspect had demanded a reply--"but it was work, real work. You _were_ doing some good in the world." They had reached the terrace now, and from where they stood they overlooked a croquet lawn--flush and smooth as a green carpet--bounded on its further side by the row of wych elms and the stream. Beyond, they could see the falling slope of the garden down to the shrubberies that hid the wall; but from this point there was no vista of the rich Sussex landscape without. Arthur sighed. "I had had six years of it," he said, "and I had a sort of feeling that I wanted to--to recover my youth for a bit. I wanted to try something of this sort for a change." "Of _this_ sort?" she repeated on a note of perplexity. "I suppose it's impossible for you to realise what it means to me," he replied. "You've had it always. You think just because this is what you're used to and perhaps tired of, that it's very splendid and exhilarating to work in the slums. If you had had my experience, you'd understand that to me this garden seems a sort of Paradise. You can't appreciate the attractions of this sort of life unless you come in, as I do--from the outside." She was obviously troubled by that outburst. "And how long do you think you could stand being shut in here?" she asked, after a pause. "At this moment, it seems to me that I could stand quite a lot of it," Arthur said. He knew that he was not saying the things she wanted him to say. He could feel her longing to hear him disparage the delights of Hartling and enlarge upon those of what she had called "real work." But her very urgency made it impossible for him to respond in his present mood. Also, he was aware of a curious desire to contradict her, even to hurt her. It was, as he put it to himself, all very well for her to talk about things she knew nothing about. He looked at her with a new criticism, and her youth and freshness seemed almost an offence. The whiteness of her hands, the spotlessness of her pale gray linen dress, the clearness of her complexion and of her blue eyes, even the lines of her firm, well-nourished young figure were all effects of the protected life she had lived. It was not for her to find fault with him for wanting some share of the luxury that to the Kenyons had become commonplace. "You surely don't mean that you would care to stay--to _live_ here?" she was saying. The little bark of laughter with which he replied held a note of derision. "Does it seem so extraordinary," he said, "that after five years of dirt and disease and unmentionable minor tortures, a man should hanker after a little cleanliness and comfort?" She shook her head. "No, no, of course not," she said. "I didn't in the least mean that. I'd like you to have a rest. You've earned it. It's just that ... this sort of thing can't go on always. You wouldn't like, would you, to stay here indefinitely, even if you could?" He knew that he was being a trifle perverse as he answered that. "Too good to be true," he said. She looked at him again with that look of earnest inquiry with which she had first greeted him. "If you really think that ..." she began, and then stopped abruptly. "We ought to be getting back," she went on in another tone. "Dinner is at eight. We shall only have half an hour to dress. You'll see my grandfather this evening. He sent you a message and I came out to give it to you, but.... However, he told me to ask you if you couldn't stay on for a day or two; whether you need go back to town on Monday? I'll tell him what you've said. Do you mind if I go on? I have one or two things to see to before dinner." Before he had time to answer, she was running back towards the house. She ran lightly and gracefully, with the ease and vigour of an active girl of twenty. Arthur following, kept her in sight as long as he could. "Rather a 'ripper,'" was the comment that came first to his mind. It was followed by the determination to stay at Hartling as long as they could put up with him--or he with them. In his thought of "them" he was picturing the "crowd" he had met at tea-time. Dressing for dinner was a delightful experience. Eleanor, whether deliberately or not, had made a mistake in the time, and when Arthur had found his room with the help of the butler, he had a full thirty-five minutes in which to dress. The first five of them were spent in a blissful revel in his surroundings. He had a bathroom all to himself--a perfect bathroom with white walls above a tiled dado of pale green that curved round smoothly at its base to form a tiled floor of the same colour. The bath and lavatory basin were of white porcelain with nickel-silver taps, and the ample bossy towel rails heated by hot water, were also of nickel silver. And his bedroom was so bright and exquisitely clean. It was done in the modern style with simple effective furniture almost devoid of mouldings. The motive of the colour scheme was an unobtrusive blue, taken up in the carpet, the faintly patterned wallpaper and the linen curtains at the window. And from the window itself, the approach to which was not encumbered by furniture, he could look out above the shrubberies and the wall and catch glimpses between the trees of the great swelling lines of Sussex, of the immense background and setting of this jewelled Hartling garden. He leaned out and sniffed the sweetness of the evening air. Twenty-four hours ago, he had been in the midst of London foulness, irritable with the grit and dust of a hot evening in late May. Now he had this freshness and sweetness to savour and delight in. The contrast was that between Hell and Heaven. Already his skin felt cleaner. With a sudden whoop of joy he came back into the room and began to strip himself. He would have a bath at once, and another when he came to bed. Lovely hot water, nice soap, and splendid warm towels. Ripping house! Would he stay as long as he could? Wouldn't he rather! He would stay altogether if he had the chance. Lord, what fools these people were downstairs, not to know when they were well off. He was putting on his dinner jacket as the second gong sounded, and he tore down the stairs just in time to join the straggling procession that was crossing the hall. They had not waited for him. He caught his uncle looking at him with a smile, and ranged himself beside him. "Feel pretty young, what?" his uncle said with a chuckle. "Fairly fresh," Arthur agreed. "Jolly place, this." "Yes, fine place," his uncle admitted. Arthur, remembering that his uncle was the eldest son, and would probably inherit the property, decided that he was a person to be propitiated. Also, he seemed, on the whole, to be less inimical than the others. When they reached the dining-room, Arthur had his first sight of the founder and head of the House of Kenyon. He was already seated at the far end of the long, narrow table, and as the family went to their places he watched them with a calm paternal smile of satisfaction. Then, almost by chance it seemed, his glance rested on the new-comer, and his expression changed to one of more vivid interest. He made a slight inclination of the head in Arthur's direction, and turning to his daughter-in-law said in a clear, thin voice:-- "Hannah! Bring Arthur Woodroffe up and introduce him to me." He called it an introduction, but there was, Arthur thought, a dignity about the formal request that gave the function almost the air of a presentation. But here, at least, was no sign of that aloofness which had marked his reception by the rest of the family. The old man was gracious and friendly. "Eleanor gave me your message," he said. "I'm so glad that you will be able to stay with us for a few days. We must have a talk. I want to hear something of your experiences in the war. But not to-night." His smile had again that gentle, paternal quality as he concluded with a nod of dismissal. "You must indulge the humours of a very old man, and let me choose my own time." Arthur went back to his place at the other end of the table, with a faint sense of awe. Mr Kenyon was certainly a wonderful old man. Arthur's mind reverted continually to that thought in the fairly long intervals between the snatches of polite conversation he held with Miss Kenyon, who was on his right at the foot of the table, or with his pretty but uninteresting Cousin Elizabeth on his other side. Hubert, who was immediately opposite, was plunged in a melancholy silence. But in what, precisely, the wonder of Mr Kenyon lay, Arthur was a little uncertain. His appearance was certainly striking. He had abundant white hair, not dead white like his eldest daughter's, but with the smooth sheen like the gloss of a pearl, and with something too of an old pearl's cream in the colour. His eyes were a pale blue, with a hint of brilliance that was lacking in his daughter, who greatly resembled him in many ways. But the queer thing that Arthur presently disentangled from his analysis was that the old man, in spite of his alertness and vigour, looked his age; looked, indeed, as if he might have been any age. His skin was not so much lined as crinkled. There were no deep furrows in his face, but the skin had the appearance of a piece of paper that had been crushed into a tight ball and then partly smoothed out. He seemed to have arrived at a stage in which he might remain indefinitely. He had achieved a physical type of the old man. He might very well look precisely as he did now, in ten, twenty, or fifty years' time. Yet, when all the effect of his appearance had been allowed for, there remained a cause for wonder about him that had not been explained. He was so amazingly self-confident and serene. With all his air of gentleness and affection, he had some quality of supremacy. Two things Arthur noted in the course of dinner, that gave him still further material for reflection. The first, in so far as its immediate consequences were concerned, he could not understand. The older generation at the further end of the table had been talking about Italy, and Arthur's uncle had apparently come to life and began an enthusiastic account of the beauties of a North Italian spring. He was talking, Arthur thought, surprisingly well. He had evidently the eyes of an artist for colour. Moreover, there was an emotional undertone in his descriptions that made them peculiarly vivid. And then old Mr Kenyon, who had been listening with a kind, approving smile, said gently:-- "I have often wondered, Joe, why you don't live in Italy. I feel that, in many ways, you would be more at home there than here." It seemed such a friendly, fatherly speech, but the effect of it was as if his son had been brutally reproved. He coloured slightly, hung his head, and went on with his dinner in an embarrassed silence. He had the look of a man who was thoroughly cowed. His sister, Mrs Turner, who was sitting on his right, also looked rather embarrassed. The second observation was of another kind. The entrée had just been removed when Arthur became aware of a curious hush that had fallen upon the room. The service throughout had been quiet, unostentatiously efficient, but now the butler and his two attendant parlour-maids were moving about on tip-toe, and every sound of conversation had ceased. Instinctively Arthur looked up the table at Mr Kenyon. He was leaning back in his chair, his hands clasping the arms, his eyes were wide open, but stared unseeingly down the room. He looked like a man in a trance; it flashed into Arthur's mind that he looked like a dreaming god. The servants were standing now by the sideboard, doing nothing. And for perhaps a couple of minutes the progress of the dinner was suspended. Every one sat in silence and waited until the dreaming god smiled and leaned forward again in his chair. He came back to his world with no sign of disturbance or shock. He was to all appearances unaware of the interval that had passed. And immediately, with a quiet inevitableness the subdued sounds of footsteps and low conversation crept back into the room. Arthur remembered the remark of the chauffeur who had driven him from the station. What was it he had said? "It's as if he were sound asleep with his eyes wide open." That explanation did not satisfy Arthur's feeling for physiological probability. He wondered if it might be a case of _petit mal_, minor epilepsy? He looked round the table and thought that he could detect a general air of demure resignation in the bowed faces around him. Ninety-one! They were all remembering that the old man was ninety-one. Anything might happen at that age! He glanced across the table again and saw that Eleanor was watching him. He smiled at her, but the smile with which she answered him had no warmth in it. It was nothing but a polite response. How jolly she looked in that soft white dress! He returned to the enjoyment of his dinner, which seemed to him to be the best he had ever eaten. It was a simple dinner: soup, entrée, a saddle of mutton, sweet, savory, and dessert; but it was perfectly cooked and served. The clear soup had had wine in it, and a flavour that was at once delicate and strong; the entrée had had just that touch of piquancy that gave one an appetite for the joint. And the saddle was a joint to remember, so firm and tender, its richness nicely mitigated by the new potatoes and green peas that accompanied it. Arthur had a palate and could appreciate these good things. Also, although he had had a limited experience of wine, he knew that the claret was no ordinary vintage. It had an aroma like fruit. At dessert there were magnificent strawberries. Arthur found a justification for the theory that such things as new peas, potatoes, and strawberries taste better in the third week of May than at the end of June. It was, he decided, because they brought a foretaste of summer, and the anticipation has always some exquisite flavour that is lacking in the present reality. He was pleased with this conceit and tried it on Miss Kenyon. She regarded him thoughtfully. "It may be true when one is under forty," she said. "After that, one prefers to live in the present." He was emboldened by the claret to press the old psychological truism to its conclusion. "And later still there comes a time, I believe, when one lives chiefly in the past," he hazarded. "It may come to some people," Miss Kenyon said, and glanced at her father down the length of the table. She had an unimpeded sight of him above the low silver dishes of fruit, that with their reflection in the rich dark mirror of the polished mahogany were an ample decoration. Arthur had not enough courage to name the exception she so obviously had in her mind. Over the dessert and the coffee and cigarettes that followed before Miss Kenyon rose from the table, Arthur at last discovered a subject for discussion with his cousin Elizabeth. She was, it seemed, an expert croquet player, and wanted to play in tournaments. She grew quite animated in her talk of the game, although her technicalities were beyond his knowledge. "I'll teach you, if you like," she said. "It'll be jolly to have some one new to play with. None of the others are any good really." "I expect I'd pick it up pretty quickly," Arthur replied with a touch of pique. "I'm fairly good at those sort of games, billiards, and golf, and so on, you know." Elizabeth smiled the condescending smile of the expert. "It's chiefly a matter of constant practice, of course," she said. "I generally put in a couple of hours every day." In his heart Arthur thought that croquet was rather a piffling game, and had an inner conviction that he would very soon be able to give his cousin a good match. He made an appointment with her to take his first lesson the next morning. The Kenyons were not Sabbatarians. "No one goes to church, hardly, except mother," Elizabeth told him. Later he discovered another example of expertise in the family. Old Mr Kenyon did not accompany his family to the drawing-room, and after a few aimless minutes, in the course of which most of the family settled themselves down to the same occupations that had engaged them after tea, Mr Turner came across the room and asked if he would "care for a game of billiards." Arthur assented with enthusiasm. He rather fancied himself as a billiard player, and in any case there was nothing else to do. Presently he might get up a flirtation with Elizabeth, but the beginning of that could very well wait until the croquet lesson. She had looked up at him and smiled as he was leaving the drawing-room, and he had returned the smile and waved his hand. Eleanor, presumably, was with her grandfather. His evening's billiards served him as an object-lesson, in how the game ought to be played. After the first game, Turner gave him two hundred start in three hundred up; a handicap that produced a fairly close finish. Turner admitted that he kept himself in practice. "Nothing much else to do," he explained, "except get licked by Elizabeth at croquet." "And what's your game?" Arthur asked Hubert, who had strolled in while they were playing and had been marking for them. "Play golf a bit," Hubert said. "There's quite a decent course about a mile from here. I go over most days. Give you a game any time you like." "Well, I didn't bring any clubs down," Arthur replied. "Had no practice to speak of, you see, in the last six years, but I used to be rather keen." "Hubert is hot stuff," Turner commented. "Plus two, isn't it, now, Hubert?" "Three, since I won the last medal," was his nephew's reply. "Good Lord! Why that's Amateur Championship form," Arthur exclaimed. "Oh! hardly that!" Hubert thought. He appeared to be quite indifferent to Arthur's admiration. When he was alone in his delightful bedroom, Arthur made a reflective audit of his day's experience. The balance he arrived at was that he would thoroughly enjoy his visit to Hartling. Miss Kenyon was rather a dragon--a cold, practical woman, probably a very good manager, was his estimate of her--and none of them had been particularly cordial to him, although old Turner had relaxed to a certain extent when they were playing billiards. But there were overwhelming compensations to set against this small discouragement. He looked round his bedroom and drew a deep breath of contentment, then went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water. The window was open and he drew back the curtain and leaned out. What a comfort it was not to be overlooked, to know that there was nothing out there but the sweetness and serenity of the night! It gave him a sense of freedom and cleanliness, of being in touch with Nature. But when he was in his bath his thoughts turned back to less æsthetic compensations. The great and essential question of what he was going to _do_ at Hartling, had been solved for him. There would be games, a succession of games of various kinds, to be played with skill against opponents from whom he would be learning all the time. (That old chap Turner was a fair nailer at billiards! He played all his shots with "drag" like a professional!) He would not, of course, be able to improve his own game appreciably in three or four days, but with luck he might be asked to stay a week. He would accept like a bird if they did ask him.... He must try to entertain the old man when that promised talk came off. He was evidently the boss still, in spite of his age. The invitation to stay had come straight from him. He was an impressive old fellow too, with a remarkable air of dignity and what one spoke of vaguely as "personality." He gave you the feeling that he would get his own way about things.... His eldest son did not take after him. Rather a sloppy chap, Uncle Joe. His tie had been all round his neck by the end of dinner. Funny the way he had shut up about Italy. He was probably only a gasser, and did not in the least want to live there. He would certainly let the property down when he came into it, unless he had some one to look after it for him. Arthur had a contempt for slackness. His opinion of his cousin had gone up a hundred per cent. since he had learnt that Hubert's handicap was "plus three." That was a form of efficiency. Melancholy-looking devil, though. They were all a bit on that side for some reason or another; looked depressed and bored, as if they were tired of waiting for something ... except Eleanor. She was different from the others. Different, but not necessarily nicer. There was a touch of the schoolmistress about her. She wanted to do what she thought were the right things. Elizabeth might be amusing when one got to know her better. V Arthur saw very little of Eleanor and old Mr Kenyon in the course of the next few days. They had lunch and dinner with the family, and once or twice he caught sight of them in the garden while he was playing croquet with Elizabeth; but on none of these occasions did he find an opportunity of speaking to either of them. Meanwhile, he was improving his acquaintance with the other members of the party permanently assembled at Hartling; although further than that he was unable to go. He had revised his first impression of them as being definitely inimical, but they remained acquaintances. His uncle and Mr Turner had come nearest to passing beyond the limitations of polite intercourse; and the latter had shown an interest in Arthur's plans for the future; had, indeed, discussed with him the prospects of getting an appointment in Canada, and promised him two or three introductions. But the point at which he and all the others had drawn back, had been the returning of any sort of confidence. They offered none, and put him off if he attempted any question. They left him with the impression of some important reserve behind all their treatment of him. It was as if they all shared some secret that he could never know. When he was with them he could never forget that he was an outsider, not one of the family. He had even been aware of that reserve as a check upon the development of his flirtation with Elizabeth. She at once encouraged him and kept him at a distance. She might have been a princess of the blood, amusing herself with a member of the nobility whom she might know but could never marry. He had been definitely piqued by that attitude in his own first cousin, and had tried to break down her defence, to claim her as an equal and a contemporary. So far, however, that attempt had been a failure. She had not apparently resented his overtures, but they had not advanced his intimacy with her. There was some invisible barrier always between them, a barrier that seemed to be essential and permanent. He was sorry because he believed that he was ready to fall in love with her if she would let him. She was certainly pretty in a general sort of way, with brown eyes, rather dark hair, and a fair skin that had freckled over the bridge of her snub nose. And her mastery of the game of croquet had been a revelation to him. He had realised on that first Sunday morning how scientific a game croquet could be, played on that perfect lawn. She was as much his superior, hopelessly beyond rivalry in her own game as Charles Turner or Hubert were in theirs. Her tennis was fairly good, too; quite as good as his own, but she complained that she got no practice. Hubert played, but none of the others, except Eleanor, who seldom had any time for games. Arthur was taking a lesson from Mr Turner in the billiard-room at a quarter to seven on Tuesday evening when Eleanor came in to him with a message. She waited while her uncle played his shot and then turning to Arthur said:-- "Would you mind dressing early to-night, Mr Woodroffe? My grandfather thought he might find a chance of talking to you before dinner." "Ah! yes, of course," Arthur agreed. "I'll go now." He could have no doubt that this was a command. Turner had put down his cue as if he had been prepared for some such development as this, and took no further interest in the game. Nevertheless there must have been still something that he did not know, for he looked at Eleanor with raised eyebrows, plainly hinting a question the nature of which she, presumably, could guess; although the slight shrug of her shoulders with which she replied intimated that she did not, as yet, know the answer. Arthur pondered that exchange of signals as he dressed. He had begun to wonder whether he might not find an explanation of various things that had puzzled him at Hartling; in the desire of the Kenyons to conceal a family secret. Was it not possible that the head of the house was slightly insane? If that were so, everything could be accounted for: their references to people coming in "from the outside"; their half-suspicious reception of himself; the separation of the old man from the family-life except at lunch and dinner; the constant attendance of Eleanor.... Arthur was inclined to believe that he had guessed the riddle, and resolved to be very observant during the coming interview. He was tying his bow when some one knocked at his bedroom door. He guessed that it was Eleanor come to fetch him, and snatching at his waistcoat, called out, "One minute! I won't be a moment." But when he opened the door a few seconds later, he was amazed to find old Mr Kenyon himself standing outside. "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't realise ..." Arthur began. The old man waved aside his apology. "I quite understand," he said. "Naturally you were not expecting me. May I come in?" "Oh! please. Yes, do," Arthur responded. He felt embarrassed by this strange mark of favour. He had pictured the promised interview as likely to be something of a function. Was it possible that the old man had temporarily escaped from his keeper? Mr Kenyon had seated himself in a little chintz-covered arm-chair and appeared quite at his ease. "We shall be quieter here," he said with a smile. "Smoke if you want to. I haven't smoked now for fifty years, but I don't at all dislike it." Arthur took advantage of this indulgence with a faint smile at the whimsical reflection that the old man had abandoned the habit of smoking more than twenty years before Arthur himself had been born. Mr Kenyon apparently read the young man's thought, for he went on:-- "Yes, there is a long gap between you and me, Woodroffe. I was born in the reign of George the Fourth. And I have no doubt that you find it a little difficulty to realise that I still keep in touch with present-day affairs." Arthur, with his new suspicion fresh in his mind, was watching the old man with a more or less informed eye, and although he could find at present no least confirmation of his theory, he thought there would be no harm in attempting a leading question. "Do you really, sir?" he commented. "You mean that you can still take a pleasure in reading about modern life, and hearing about it?" "And in living it," Mr Kenyon said, with his gentle smile. "You must not suppose that I keep myself shut in here. I often go to town in the car. More often, in fact, than any other member of the family." "You must have a perfectly marvellous constitution, sir," Arthur said. Mr Kenyon slightly shrugged his shoulders. "It seems a commonplace to me," he returned. "Perhaps because I have always had it. I have never been ill. But I did not come here to talk about myself. I am more interested in you. I want you to tell me something of your experiences in the war; and then...." He broke off suddenly. His keen blue eyes were intently watching Arthur's face. "And then, sir?" Arthur prompted him. Mr Kenyon's expression of watchfulness relaxed. "And then," he said graciously, "something of what you intend to do in the future." Arthur would have preferred to take the second point first. He had already abandoned his theory of insanity. And it had come to him with an exhilarating sense of certainty that Mr Kenyon intended to "do something for him." When the old man had concluded his sentence, he had worn the benign, generous air of patron. "Well, you see, sir, I joined up in August, '14," Arthur began, meaning to get the history done with as quickly as possible; but Mr Kenyon pulled him up before he had gone very far with the brief outline he had intended to draw of the main facts of his experience. "Then you saw service in the trenches?" he put in, and when Arthur admitted that he had, began to pose some very shrewd questions as to the effect that terrible experience might have on a young man's nerves and temperament. "But you, yourself, came through without any permanent disaffection?" he continued, after Arthur had let himself go a little on the pathology of war-shock. "Absolutely, as far as one can judge, sir," Arthur replied. Mr Kenyon nodded. "I believe it is true, is it not," he asked, "that the really normal man was not subject to these nerve troubles?" "As far as we know, sir," Arthur replied. "It's the general theory that in the bad cases of psychoneurosis, there was always a predisposition before the man went out." He would have gone on with a youthful pride in his knowledge to elaborate the theory, but Mr Kenyon switched him off by saying, with a change of tone that suddenly quickened Arthur's interest:-- "You are, now, a fully qualified medical man, I understand?" "Oh! yes, fully qualified," Arthur said promptly. Mr Kenyon nodded, and then rose and began to walk slowly up and down the room. He had a silver-headed, ebony stick with him, but he hardly leaned upon it, his back was not bowed, and his step was perfectly firm. His figure and general activity might have been that of a man of sixty. Arthur watched him with admiration. It was almost incredible to him that the old man could be ninety-one. And it crossed his mind that his uncle might have to wait many years yet before he came into the property. Mr Kenyon continued to walk up and down the room as he went on:-- "I have thought once or twice lately that I should like to have some one living here in the house who might ..." he paused before he added, "who would be competent in an emergency. There is a doctor in the village--an able, pleasant man, for whom I have considerable respect--but he lives two miles from us, and...." He let the sentence die away without completing it, beginning again in a firmer voice, "At my age, Arthur--I must call you that! we are, after all, connected--one has fancies. I don't deceive myself with any foolish idea that I can live for ever. And one of my fancies, a fairly common one, I believe, is a fear of premature burial. I should like to have some one permanently here whom I could trust. Moreover, I have felt that a competent medical man with whom I was in touch, would be in a position to give me--shall I say--warning. You may be surprised to learn that I--a business man by training and inclination--have been so unbusinesslike as to have left my own affairs unsettled. There are reasons, of course, family reasons that I need not trouble you with, but you must think it very lax in a man of ninety-one not to have completed his testamentary dispositions. I have, it is true, made a will, but not a final one. I have an eccentric inclination--a touch of superstition perhaps--to postpone that duty, although my present will," he turned and faced Arthur with an expression of humorous despair, "is nothing more or less than an untidy mass of codicils. In my opinion, it is dangerously contestable in its present state. Fleet, my lawyer, thinks otherwise, but I have had more experience than he has. "In any case, I mean to make a new one, and since you have been here it has occurred to me that I might indulge my little eccentricity more safely if I had some competent and experienced person on whom I could rely, permanently in the household; some one who would be with me for an hour or so every day, an expert who would be in a position to say to me: "Kenyon, I must warn you that your days are running out and it is time for you to put your affairs in order." Also, as I have said, I should prefer to trust the matter of my death certificate to a medical man in whose integrity I could have perfect confidence. These are the fancies of a very old man, no doubt, but after all why should I not indulge them if I can? I may tell you quite frankly, Arthur, that I am not of those who make a virtue of self-sacrifice." He broke off abruptly, stood staring in front of him for a moment, as if he reflected on that last statement, and then sat down again in the chintz-covered arm-chair. Arthur realised that the time had come for him to reply, and that he was not ready with an answer. If the arrangement that was now suggested had been hypothecated while he was dressing, he would have laughed at the idea of refusing it; but as Mr Kenyon had been speaking, Arthur had seen a vision of his own future that had been vaguely repellent--a vision of idle, satisfied days spent in perfecting himself at various games, waiting for something that he could not precisely define. What was there to wait for in such a life as that--except death? Marriage and the begetting of children would only be incidents, comparable, perhaps, to the making of his first hundred break or doing the course in "bogey." And yet, what else had life, any life, to offer him? He had no peculiar gifts. He would never become famous. The end of him would almost certainly be a small practice somewhere and a perpetual struggle to live within his income. Nevertheless, his spirit drooped at the prospect of the life he anticipated if he accepted this offer. There was no adventure in it. "Frightfully flattered, sir, by your--your confidence in me and so on," he muttered, "and, of course, in many ways, almost every way...." Mr Kenyon stopped him. "No, no, Arthur," he said, "I haven't even made my proposal yet; and in any case I do not want you to give me an answer to-night. I understand that at your age you naturally have ambitions, that the future has romantic possibilities for you. I have not forgotten that. But," he leant forward, dropping his forehead on to the ivory handle of the stick he held between his knees, "I have a feeling that your service would not be a very long one--six months, a year perhaps, at the outside." His voice was so low that Arthur could hardly follow him as he concluded: "And then you would have ... opportunity, greater opportunity ... pecuniary advantages ... I would provide for that." Six months, a year at the outside! He probably knew as well as any one. He looked as sound as a bell, but he might go to pieces all at once. Those queer trances of his were no doubt symptomatic of some deep-seated trouble. Would it be very rotten to take on a job like that with the idea of having money left to you? Arthur fancied that he could make out a good case for himself on that score. And beyond all that personal issue there was a greater one. Putting that hypothetical legacy out of the question, would he not be doing this old man a real service by accepting his offer? He undoubtedly felt the need of some one to perform the two offices he had indicated. "If I might consider ..." Arthur began, and was interrupted by the sound of the second gong booming through the house. Mr Kenyon raised his head. "Well, well, Arthur, think it over, think it over," he said, getting to his feet. "I will only add now that it would be a great relief to me if you saw your way to accept my offer. Do not forget that side of it. And--we will have another talk to-morrow." Arthur was aware of a new atmosphere at the dinner-table that night. For the first time since he had been in the house, the Kenyons were wide-awake and curious; the object of their curiosity was unquestionably himself. They seemed to be watching him. Whenever he looked up the table, he had the impression that one of them had just averted his or her eyes, and when he was talking to Elizabeth or Miss Kenyon, he was conscious of being under steady observation from every part of the table. Only Eleanor kept her eyes down, and to the best of his knowledge never once looked in his direction. Yet this new attitude towards him had no effect of being hostile. It was merely as if he had suddenly become an object of peculiar interest. Even Miss Kenyon's manner was changed, although it was not until they were half-way through dinner that she put a direct question to him. "You had your little talk with my father this evening?" she said then in a tone that sounded, he thought, a faint note of propitiation. "Yes, I did; quite a long talk," he replied, feeling no inclination to make a confidante of Miss Kenyon. "Has he asked you to prolong your visit to us?" she went on, making a more direct attack. "I hope you may be able to stay over the next week-end in any case." "Thanks very much, I should like to immensely," Arthur returned. "Yes, Mr Kenyon did suggest something of the sort. In fact...." "Well!" Miss Kenyon prompted him with a touch of asperity. "Oh! well, in fact he made a kind of proposal to me that we are going to discuss again to-morrow," Arthur admitted. Miss Kenyon stared at him thoughtfully for a moment. "One more or less doesn't after all make much difference in a family like this," she said, with a touch of resignation. "But I haven't decided yet," Arthur began. "You will," she interrupted him dryly, and at once devoted her attention to Hubert on the other side. "Does that mean that you're staying on indefinitely?" Elizabeth asked. Arthur shrugged his shoulders. "It seems as if you all knew more about it than I do myself," he said. "I really don't know yet." "But he wants you to?" Elizabeth pressed him. "Apparently," Arthur admitted. Elizabeth sighed thoughtfully. "You're a kind of grand-nephew, I suppose," she remarked, addressing no one in particular, and then added, "Are you going to be a sort of tame medical attendant?" "If I stay," Arthur agreed. "You'll stay all right," Elizabeth replied, echoing her aunt's tone. "Why shouldn't you?" "Don't you want me to stay?" Arthur asked. "Might teach you to play croquet in time," she replied pertly. "Is that all?" he inquired. He felt as if he were at last getting past that barrier she had set up against him. She met his eyes frankly and pursed her undoubtedly pretty mouth. "Oh, wait and see," she said. "I can see now, and I don't want to wait," Arthur returned boldly. Her smile was not one of encouragement. She had suddenly ceased to flirt with him. "Even puppies don't get their eyes open for nine days," she said coldly, "and you haven't been here four yet. You haven't the least idea what you're talking about." Arthur frowned impatiently. He was not vexed by the snub he had received--girls of Elizabeth's type thought it "smart" to be rude--but by the reintroduction of that suggestion of a family secret which separated the Kenyons from the outside world. There was an air of arrogance about the thing that annoyed him. "Is there so much for me to learn here?" he asked dryly. Elizabeth told him to "shut up." This was the way in which she always treated him; and as he rather sulkily continued his dinner he asked himself if it was "good enough." If she were willing to be decent, he might possibly fall in love with her, but he was not going to stand being treated like a schoolboy. Elizabeth might go and hang herself. She made no attempt to entice him out of the silence he was thus too easily able to maintain for the rest of the meal. But in the drawing-room after dinner, he found that the family as a whole seemed inclined to put him on a new footing. Even Mrs Turner, who had so far almost ignored him, came up and began to talk about the gardens. She was a rather stout woman with something of her brother's carelessness in the matter of dress, and Arthur had wondered how her husband had ever managed to fall in love with her. To-night, however, it occurred to him for the first time that she might in her youth have been the very prototype of her niece Elizabeth. They had only been talking for a few minutes when her brother joined them. As usual, after dinner, his face was flushed and puffy--an effect due, Arthur judged, to the food rather than to the wine he had taken. "So you're thinking of joining the family party for a time, I hear?" he began in a friendly voice. "Well, I haven't decided anything yet," Arthur replied, and waited to see if his uncle would echo his sister's and his daughter's "You will." He did not. He was fidgeting with his cigar, the ash of which he had dropped and smeared all over his dinner-jacket and waistcoat. "Giving up the Canada idea, any way?" was his response. "It was never more than an idea," Arthur said. "Not a bad one, all the same," his uncle murmured, and then apparently feeling that he was making a mess of what he had to say, he went on, "However, it's not for me to advise you. I can't boast that I'm any sort of example for you, eh, Catherine?" Mrs Turner kept her eyes on the bead bag she was making, an occupation that certainly necessitated close attention. "Don't you think, Joe ..." she began, and then stopped, picking up a bead on the point of her needle with a slightly exaggerated intentness. "No, no, of course not," her brother said. "It was only that I thought, as Arthur's uncle, he might care to know--to hear, that is...." "Oh! rather. I should," Arthur put in, as the sentence failed to get itself completed. "I should be very glad of your advice." "I was only going to say," his uncle responded, "speaking from my own experience, you know, that the life here, jolly enough as it is in many ways, does not offer much scope for a young fellow with any ambition. There's Hubert, for instance--he's--he's getting lazy--can't blame him; got nothing much to do except play golf--but it's hardly the life one would have chosen for him, eh?" Arthur smiled. "But I'm not proposing to stay here _permanently_, uncle," he said. "Six months or a year at the outside. I've been having rather a strenuous time you see, and I thought a rest of sorts might do me good." Joe Kenyon and his sister exchanged a glance that Arthur could not interpret; they might have been recalling some old and rather terrible reminiscence. "My father said that, did he?" Kenyon said. "Six months or a year at the outside?" Arthur nodded. He could not possibly tell them why that limit had been assigned. Mrs Turner sighed and returned to her niggling beads. He brother leaned back in his chair and blew a cloud of smoke. Arthur longed to warn him that the ash was again in danger of falling. "I've been here over thirty years," his uncle remarked thoughtfully. Arthur failed to see the relevance of this statement. "Have you really?" he commented politely. "And in the first instance," his uncle continued, "I came back on the understanding that it was to be for twelve months, at the outside. However," he went on more briskly, sitting up and incidentally dropping another large instalment of cigar ash down his shirt front and waistcoat, "that's nothing to do with you; nothing whatever, and I shouldn't like you to be influenced by anything I've said. Your case is entirely different in every way." He had the air of a man who has been tempted into an indiscretion and wanted to cover it without delay. "Oh, yes! obviously," Arthur agreed. "You could hardly be called a relation of Mr Kenyon's, could you?" Mrs Turner added, by way of giving point to her brother's retraction of his instance. "Oh! if I came here, it wouldn't be in any way as a relation," Arthur explained. "I should come as a medical man for--for a certain purpose." Enlightenment had come to him at last, he believed. These people were jealous of his possible share in the Kenyon fortune. They, too, no doubt knew of that untidy will and its projected supersession; and they were afraid of his having too great an interest in it. They wanted to get rid of him. All this talk of his uncle's had been designed to prevent him from accepting the appointment that had been offered. Arthur blushed with shame at the thought of their suspicion, the more readily in that the anticipation of some legacy had been already in his mind. "As a matter of fact, I don't think I _shall_ stay on here," he said, getting up. He felt that he could not tolerate the company of these two Kenyons for another moment. They were like all rich people, mean and grasping. They had lived in comfort all their lives and yet hated to part with a single penny. What difference would a few thousands out of the Kenyon fortune make to them? He looked round for Turner, but he was not to be seen. And then he saw that Eleanor had come in while he had been talking and was sitting alone, reading, on the far side of the room. She looked up at the same moment and let her book fall in her lap, with a gesture that was an invitation to him to join her. As he crossed the room he reflected that Eleanor at least would give him an unprejudiced opinion. There was something honest and straightforward about her. She was, for instance, utterly unlike Elizabeth. She rose to meet him, anticipating, it seemed, what he had to say, for before he could speak the polite sentence with which he was prepared, she said,-- "It's rather hot in here to-night, isn't it? Would you care to come out into the garden?" "Love to," Arthur responded eagerly. He drew a deep breath of enjoyment as they came out into the open. It was not yet ten o'clock, twilight still lingered in the garden, and the air was sweet with the aftermath of the perfumes that lilac and pinks and honeysuckle had been giving out so generously during the day, and that were now being refined by the fresh, cool scents of the night. To Arthur it seemed that in such a garden as this was attained the ultimate triumph of the liaison between nature and cultivation. Everything that grew here was the result of the sympathetic collaboration between man and the wild, of art using the natural forces of the world itself in the technique of its design. And the design was a sketch of man's ideal for the perfected earth; the setting for the more orderly, leisured life that he might live when the elemental forces were subdued. After all, riches served a great purpose. Might it not be said that old Mr Kenyon had made a worthy use of his wealth in creating this garden? "I suppose you want to ask my advice," the clear voice of Eleanor broke in upon his meditations, recalling him rather unpleasantly to the realisation that he had been five minutes before announcing his intention of leaving this pleasance in order to take up the primitive struggle with the wild. It was strange how different everything appeared to him out here, away from the influences of that luxurious house and its bored inhabitants. "Yes, I do," he said. "I very much want your advice. Shall we go to that place where you found me with Hubert the day I came? It's sort of shut in, gives one a feeling of seclusion." She assented quietly, and they descended the shallow steps of the upper terrace in silence, and did not speak again until they were pacing the rectangular lawn of the "cloister." "Will you let me explain my case to you in the first instance?" Arthur began, and then went on apologetically, "It is frightfully good of you to listen to me at all. I don't know why you should. We've only met once before practically. But you said one or two things on that occasion, didn't you, that made me feel you understand better than any of the others? I can't help guessing in a sort of way that they're rather prejudiced against my accepting the appointment, and I feel that you...." "Why should they be prejudiced?" Eleanor broke in. Arthur was embarrassed by that direct question. He saw, now, that he had had no right to make any insinuation against the motives of the family to which his companion belonged. For the moment he had been tempted to regard her, also, as being an outsider. "I didn't mean that," he said; "at least I only meant that they all seem so bound up in a kind of clique, rather suspicious of strangers." Within that enceinte of box hedges it was too dark now for him to see her face, but the tone of her voice was appreciably colder as she said:-- "And you want to join the clique?" "No! I don't!" he protested with a touch of temper. "That's what they all seem to think; and as a matter of rather brutal fact, that doesn't tempt me in the very least. I wanted to explain to you, I thought you'd understand, that the only thing that tempts me in the offer your grandfather made me, was the prospect of a little rest and quiet. I feel that I've earned it. I've had my youth stolen from me and I want to get a little of it back--six months or a year isn't too much return to ask surely? And when this miraculous opportunity drops out of the skies, as it were, you want to deny it me. Why? I can understand the others. They've got no imagination. They have always had everything they want and they cannot see what this rest would mean for me. But I thought, I don't know why, that you were different. I didn't expect you to accuse me of wanting to join the clique." She ignored his reference to herself; taking up a single sentence in his speech by the half-whispered comment: "'They've always had everything they want!' To any one from outside, I suppose they do seem to have had everything." He overlooked the possible implications of that. "Oh! well; you know what I mean," he said impatiently; "everything that money can buy." He was afraid that she was going, as he put it, to preach. "But you've evidently made up your mind to stay and have your rest," she replied, going off at another angle. "I can't see why you should bother to ask my advice." "I haven't made up my mind," he asserted, "and I do want your advice. I only thought you might as well know first just why it tempts me so frightfully to stay." "And there's Elizabeth," she put in, "you rather like her, don't you?" "She's quite a jolly girl," Arthur replied coldly. Jolly? he questioned that the moment he had spoken, but made no effort to retract the adjective. He had an inclination to depreciate Elizabeth now that he was with Eleanor, an inclination that he repressed as being in bad taste, even a trifle vulgar. Nevertheless, he would have liked to make it quite clear that he was not in love with Elizabeth. When Eleanor spoke again, however, Elizabeth had fallen out of the conversation. "I do see that it looks like hard lines on you," she said more gently; "but as you want to know what I really think, I must tell you. And all that I can say is," she paused, and there was a thrill of passion in her voice as she concluded: "that if I were you I would get away from here, now, at once, to-night...." "But, why?" he protested, half amused at the fantastic suggestion of his leaving Hartling that night. "There must be some reason, I mean, for--well--such an extravagant remedy as that." "I can't give you any reasons," she said. He groaned with an intentional effect of exaggeration. "Have you all got some terrible secret that you're hiding?" he asked. "I assure you one really gets that impression. I had begun to wonder whether perhaps Mr Kenyon was a dangerous lunatic or something, before I saw him this evening. Now, I wonder if he's the only one of you that's perfectly sane. Or is it just this beastly money of yours? Are they afraid up at the house that I want some of it, because if they are you can tell them that I don't. They all seem to think I'm cadging. Hubert began it the first afternoon I was here. I tell you it's simply incomprehensible to me--the whole attitude." Eleanor did not appear to be in the least offended by this outbreak, but her voice had a new note of agitation in it as she said,-- "Didn't my grandfather offer to do anything for you, when you were talking this evening? Didn't he say anything to you about his will?" Arthur was glad that she could not see the blush that again burnt his face. "What made you ask that?" he said in what he congratulated himself was a non-committal tone. "I guessed," she replied quietly. "Was I right?" "He did mention it," Arthur admitted. "But that doesn't weigh with you?" "Not a scrap; not the least little bit in the world." "Bet it might presently." "I don't think so." "Think how you might feel in six months' time," she persisted; "after living here in a sort of luxury, at the prospect of having to rough it again, when by simply going on you might never have to bother about money any more. Think of the temptation to take life easily, with the probability of having quite enough money to live on when my grandfather dies. And that would always seem to be a possibility only just ahead. He'll be ninety-two in October, you know. Even if you did begin to want work again for its own sake, you'd put off going because it would seem silly to risk losing that legacy just for the sake of staying on for another month or two. Can't you put yourself in that position and see what a temptation it would be?" Her speech had been delivered in a level, weary voice, the voice of one who speaks out of experience rather than from the stimulus of imagination; and for a moment Arthur was impressed by her earnestness. She was, he supposed, in her modern way, what one called "pious." She believed in the great gospels of work and self-sacrifice. She wanted to save him from the snares of wealth as his own mother had once wanted to save him from the snares of the devil. And just as he had always been tender and forbearing with his mother when she had preached to him of the dangers of the world, so now he must be tender to this preacher of the new gospel of.... Perhaps she was a Socialist? "Really, you needn't be afraid," he said gently. "There isn't the least fear of that. As a matter of fact I'm too keen on adventure." (He had told his mother in precisely the same way, he remembered, that he had been too keen on his work to want to go to music-halls.) "Perhaps that's why this offer attracts me so much. It'll be a sort of adventure to stay here for a month or two--a sort of experience anyway. So, honestly, Miss Kenyon, if that's all you've got against it, I don't see why I shouldn't accept. I think, in any event, I shall tell your grandfather that I couldn't pledge myself in any way; that I could only agree, at the most, to stay for three months." He heard her sigh deeply, and her reply when it came was unexpected. "Oh, well," she said, "nothing that any of us could say is likely to make the least difference. He means to have you. I'm going in now, good-night." She had slipped away into the darkness almost before he was aware of her intention, and he was unable to find her again. There were still many secrets in that garden which he had not explored, and he caught no glimpse of her as he made his way back to the house. He was annoyed. He wanted to cross-examine her, make her give him some kind of explanation of her minatory attitude, and especially of that last cryptic speech. What did she mean by saying, "He means to have you?" There was, certainly, a fairly obvious interpretation, namely that old Mr Kenyon had set his mind on getting his own way in this matter of having a resident medical attendant at Hartling--a perfectly reasonable wish. But she had not meant that, or at least not in a reasonable way. Was it possible that Eleanor also was poisoned by this degrading love of wealth; that all this talk and admiration for work and independence was nothing more than an assumption to hide her own fear of another rival for her grandfather's testamentary favour? Indeed, was not that the explanation of the pretended secret of Hartling? The explanation was that there was no secret--unless it were that the whole Kenyon family were vultures, crouched in a horrible group about this one aged man; waiting gluttonously for his death in order to divide the spoil; determined that their share should not be decreased by the addition of a single new member to that gloating circle. That might be called a secret; it was certainly a detestable fact that every one of them would wish to hide. Arthur straightened his back and lifted his chin with a gesture of disgust, but he no longer felt any desire to leave Hartling. It had come to him that he had an honourable purpose to serve by remaining: he might be a true help and support to the aged head of the house. Old Kenyon was so pitiably isolated from his family. He must always be aware that he was marked down, that the circle of harpies was forever closing more tightly about him, that the only interest that his descendants took in him was in the search for symptoms of his approaching death. He would surely welcome some one coming from the outside, who would have no selfish object in view, who would give him real sympathy and understanding. Arthur felt a glow of self-satisfaction at the thought. He would make it quite clear, of course, in the coming interview, that no question of any legacy must complicate the arrangement. That should be absolutely definite; and yet--it was just a whimsical fancy, and he shrugged his shoulders--what fun it would be to cut out the rest of the family, to be made one of the principal heirs and disappoint those ghastly birds of prey! Their disappointment would be only momentary. He would take the fortune solely in order to hand it back to them, but in doing that what an admirable lesson he might read them; what contempt he might show for the pitiful gaud of wealth. (He might possibly retain just enough to give him a small--a very small independent income?) Above all, he would like to show Eleanor how miserable a vice was this love of money, begetting as it did every kind of sham, insincerity and pretence. In her, at least, the vice could not be deep-seated, and she would be worth saving. She would look back on the worship of riches with horror once she were away from the influence of this house. He paused on the terrace and looked up at the perpendicular lines of the imitation Tudor facade, dim and impressive in the half-darkness. Yet, the very house itself was a sham, an anachronism. The Tudors had been autocrats and the principles of autocracy were out of date. Even wealth was no longer the power it had once been. The rich were threatened on every side, by taxation from above and the increasing clamour and power of labour from below. They had lost prestige and influence.... Arthur Woodroffe felt remarkably full of vigour that evening, confident in the knowledge of his own abilities, and delightfully aware of his glorious independence. When he reflected on the lives of the Kenyons he at once despised and pitied them for their insane worship of wealth. He thought of them as poor trammelled creatures, as vultures that had lost the power of flight. VI When Arthur had been five weeks at Hartling, he believed that he knew the other inmates of the house as well as he would ever know them, although he had to admit to himself that he knew none of them any better, now, than he had after he had been there three days. His social relations with some of the Kenyons had lost formality. He was familiar in his treatment of Hubert, on terms of impudence with Elizabeth, and of occasional persiflage with Joe Kenyon and Charles Turner. But these intimacies were only such as he might have developed in a month's stay with them at the same hotel. On both sides there was an effect of enforced toleration, of making the best of a casual temporarily unavoidable proximity. He was still some one who had come in from the "outside." The Kenyons never snubbed him, but he could not be quite at his ease with them; he knew that if for any reason he left Hartling, the whole family would become for him the chance acquaintances of a prolonged visit. He could see himself, a few months hence, meeting one of them in the street, pausing to exchange a few conventional inquiries, and passing on with no more than a whimsical smile at a recollection of an old adventure. There was, however, one exception. If the descendants of old Mr Kenyon had not emerged from the indeterminate background of humanity in general, the old man himself stood out as a distinctive, even a slightly impressive figure. Arthur's original inclination, to pity the head of the house, had been gradually diverted; he was not on closer acquaintance, a figure that called for pity; and once or twice Arthur had had a strange sensation that was almost akin to fear. There was, indeed, something about old Kenyon that was not quite human, something more than that indescribable appearance of immortal old age. He appeared so intimidatingly detached from the common cares and interests of human life. He had boasted of his power to keep in touch with contemporary movements and affairs, but he was never disturbed by them. Nearly every morning Arthur spent an hour in the old man's company, and in that time he usually discussed the morning's news, but never as yet, had Arthur seen him display the least emotion with regard to any question of politics or finance. He would speak of the Irish situation, the starvation of Austria, the threat of labour troubles, the cost of living, or the burden of the Income Tax as if they were incidents in the reign of George IV. rather than in that of George V. And if Arthur himself gave any sign of heat or partisanship the old man would regard him with the cold speculative eye of one who watches the lives and furies of infusoria under a microscope. He seemed to have completely lost the warm-blooded human passion for interference in other people's affairs. There was another aspect of him also that was giving Arthur an occasional qualm of uneasiness. He had found that the old man was not dependable in such things as the consideration of one's natural needs in the matter of ready money. In that second interview when Arthur had put his position quite plainly, acknowledged himself willing to accept the post offered him for three months on trial, and hinted more or less indirectly, but as he believed quite plainly, that he would greatly prefer that there should be no question of any posthumous gratitude, the essential point of present remuneration in the form of salary had not been mentioned. Nor had any reference been made to it since that occasion. And the truth was that Arthur had been spending quite a lot of money in the last five weeks. His original outfit had only been intended to carry him over a glorified week-end, and he had found it necessary to add to it. Also, he had paid his entrance fee, and a year's subscription to the golf club, bought himself some new clubs, a croquet-mallet, a new racket, and a billiard cue, and although he still had a balance at his bank, it had begun to appear rather inadequate when regarded as capital for starting a new life in Canada. The thought of his shrinking resources had begun to embarrass him, but he had felt a strong disinclination to approach the subject in his conversations with Mr Kenyon, moreover, the very fact that he was being paid nothing held a kind of implicit promise that he would be "remembered" later. A man of old Kenyon's wealth and position would not expect a qualified medical man, who was at best quite a distant connection to give his services, to say nothing of his immediate chances, and receive no sort of compensation. For in the course of those five weeks Arthur had lost some of his scruples with regard to figuring in Mr Kenyon's will. The atmosphere of the house may have had its influence on him. Living, as he presumed he did, among the people who had no other ideal other than that of inheriting as capital what they now enjoyed as interest, he had come by unnoticed degrees to think of that way of life as being more or less normal and reasonable. And when he thought of the future he had already begun to anticipate the probability of his staying on at Hartling until old Kenyon died. It was so easy to find reasons for planning that mode of life, so difficult to contemplate any other; more particularly when it seemed probable that only by staying could he hope to be rewarded for his services. He still fidgeted occasionally at the thought that he was wasting his time, perhaps his life; but he was steadily accustoming himself to luxury, and the thought of Peckham grew more and more repulsive every day. He had not written to Bob Somers for nearly a month. He had a definite disinclination even to think of Somers. The life at Hartling was very easy. He was enormously improving his game at golf, croquet, and billiards; and, take it all round, he got on quite well with the family--with all the family--except Eleanor. For some reason, he and she were still strangers to one another. If there was a barrier between him and the rest of the Kenyons, there was a gulf between him and Eleanor; although, in the first instance, she had seemed to be the only one of them who was prepared to come out and greet him as a friend. But, since he had made his decision to stay on at Hartling for a trial period of three months, there had been little intercourse between them, and never once had he been alone with her. She treated him with a calm aloofness, and he on his side had made no overtures. He supposed that, for some reason she disliked him, and had decided that he, also, disliked her. The first break in the general stagnation in the Hartling mode of life came with the intrusion of another member of the family, young Kenyon Turner, the budding stockbroker. He came down for a week-end, and Arthur detested him from the outset. He had been playing golf with Hubert until six o'clock, and his first sight of the new arrival was in the garden. He was walking up and down the middle of the terrace with Eleanor, deep in what appeared to be a very engrossing conversation. He was an almost deliberately handsome young man, just too well-dressed in Arthur's estimation. His own Conduit Street tailor had never been able to produce that, perhaps too noticeable effect of absolute correctitude. It was probably not the tailor's fault, he was too careless, or the wrong figure or something. And in any case, he despised a man who took too much trouble with his clothes. He decided on the spur of the moment to interrupt the _tête-à-tête_; an intrusion that young Turner quite obviously resented. "Been playin' golf?" he asked, with a supercilious air when Eleanor had made the introduction. "Not my game. Don't get enough time for it." Arthur noted that Turner's eyes were those of a man who was making too great demands on his vitality; tired eyes, shadowed with dark lines, and already thinly creased at the outer corners. "Good, healthy game," he commented, staring rather contemptuously. "Keeps you in the open air." "Oh! do you play for medical reasons?" Turner replied. "'Fraid I haven't the determination for that." And as he spoke he turned back to Eleanor intimating as plainly as he could that he had no further use for Arthur's company. Eleanor's tone had a faint note of apology as she said: "Kenyon was asking my advice about something." Arthur could not resist that chance. "You're rather great on giving advice, aren't you?" he asked, and was surprised to see that she winced as if he had hurt her. "Am I?" was all she said, and Arthur instantly regretted his rudeness. "I only meant," he began, "that you.... I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way." She smiled sadly. "It's an ungrateful task in any case," she said, "and I'm afraid that in this case, too, my advice will not be taken." Arthur excused himself and went on towards the house, wondering if she were advising young Turner, as she had advised himself, to fly the temptation of Hartling. Why had she done that? He was still unable to find any satisfactory reason for her recommendation of so drastic a course. He could not now believe that she had been jealous of his influence with her grandfather, and the theory that she had conceived so strong an aversion for his personality that she had desired to scare him away, was foolishly improbable. Eleanor was not like that. In some ways he rather admired her. Even Elizabeth always spoke nicely about her. He was surprised to find an air of disturbance up at the house. Most of the Kenyons were in the drawing-room, but instead of sitting about their familiar occupations, they were gathered together in a group, engaged in what appeared to be a somewhat anxious conference. Their talk ceased abruptly as he came in, and both Mr and Mrs Turner faced round with an expression that was at once expectant and apprehensive. Arthur would have gone out again at once, but Turner hailed him by saying:-- "Hallo! Arthur. Seen my son anywhere?" "Yes, he's on the middle terrace with Eleanor," Arthur said. "I was just introduced to him, but as they obviously did not want me, I came on up." Turner looked at his brother-in-law, Kenyon, who shrugged his shoulders, but made no further comment; and they had returned to their discussion with an effect of rather desperate resignation before Arthur was fairly out of the room. He wondered if there were some sort of affair, perhaps an engagement, between Eleanor and young Turner; and if the family as a whole objected on account of the nearness of the relationship? He decided that if they consulted him, as they generally did on any matter presumed to be within his province as a medical man, he would make it clear that a marriage of first cousins was not necessarily dangerous. Nevertheless, he despised Eleanor for her choice. The function of dinner was even more formal than usual that night, and old Mr Kenyon had a prolonged lapse of consciousness that kept them all waiting for more than five minutes. These solemn intervals of suspense always produced in Arthur an effect of being present at some religious observance, and to-night he was more aware of it than usual. He remembered how, as a youth, he had been half-awed and half-exasperated when he attended the Sacrament at home by the ceremonial deliberation of his father. He had had an evangelical tendency, but in this service he had favoured quite an elaborate ritual of his own, and his bearing of the chalice and the paten from the ambry to the altar, and the subsequent presentation consecration, and personal acceptance of the elements had been conducted in a low, scarcely audible voice, and with an air of almost exaggerated reverence. Once or twice Arthur had sacrilegiously wondered if his father had found an unusual satisfaction in being the sole human instrument and representative of this mystery of the consecration, and had unduly prolonged the periods of silence involved? And to-night, the same thought crossed his mind with regard to old Kenyon. Was he, perhaps, extending the interval of waiting after he had recovered consciousness, exulting in the exercise of his power? Instinctively Arthur glanced across the table at Eleanor. She was sitting very still, her hands in her lap, her eyes downcast, but he fancied that her expression conveyed something of impatience and revolt. Did she know? he asked himself. Was she inclined to be critical of her grandfather's whims? Was she, perhaps, desperately ready to marry young Turner in order to escape from Hartling? As soon as the service was released again, he turned for information to Elizabeth. "Is anything up?" he asked in an undertone. "Anything out of the ordinary?" She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes and softly blew her relief. "We got a good dose to-night," she whispered, and continued, "That means there's going to be a fuss." "About young Turner and Eleanor?" he tried. "Eleanor? Where does Eleanor come in?" was her surprised response. "I don't know. I thought possibly...." He hesitated, finding an unexpected difficulty in putting his guess into words. "Nothing whatever to do with Eleanor," Elizabeth said, without waiting for him to finish his sentence. "What is it, then?" he insisted. "About him," she said, indicating Kenyon Turner. "I can't possibly tell you now." But after dinner he received enlightenment as to the cause of the impending "fuss" from the prime disturber of the peace himself. "Care to have a game of pills?" he asked, coming over to Arthur as they were leaving the dining-room. His first instinct was to refuse. The conceit of the fellow annoyed him--he had two lines of braid down his dress trousers--but Arthur was on the top of his form just then, and was spurred by a desire to beat him at what was, no doubt, his own game. He had been so cursedly supercilious about playing golf for "medical reasons." "Don't mind," he said in the true Hartling manner of one condescending to a casual visitor from the outside. But although he did, in fact, beat young Turner, he realised that his victory was due to the fact that his opponent was "off his game," and could probably give him twenty in a hundred on ordinary occasions. Young Turner's touch was almost as delicate as his father's. "I'm no earthly good to-night," he said, putting down his cue at the conclusion of the game. "All this business is such an infernal worry." As he spoke he looked at Hubert--who had been exercising his predestinate function of marker--rather than at Arthur. "You're not the only one," Hubert commented morosely. Arthur, who had been continuing a break that had not been completed when he reached game, straightened his back and faced his cousin. "What is this business?" he asked. Hubert, who had got into that uneasy-looking pose of his, looked down at his crossed ankles. "The old man's so infernally difficult," he said. "So cursedly tight with the money-bags," Turner explained. "Have you been trying to milk him, then?" Arthur asked. "Oh, well! the fact is I'm in a hole, on the rocks," Turner admitted. "I've put it off as long as I can, but something has cursedly well _got_ to be done now." Hubert smiled contemptuously. "_Got_ to be done," he repeated. "Who's going to make him? What it'll end in 'll be your coming to live down here!" "I'm damned if it will," Turner declared vehemently, but there was a note of fear in his voice as he continued: "It's out of the question. I mean I'm not doing so badly at the office and all that. If only the old man allowed me a decent screw, I should be all right. In an office like ours you simply have to be in everything that's going. Sometimes one of the partners 'll put you in to what he thinks is a good thing, for instance, and you're practically bound to have a fiver on. There's a lot of that sort of thing anyhow you can't keep out of." "And how much notice d'you think the old man'll take of that?" Hubert asked, without looking up. Turner almost whimpered. "He's _got_ to put me right," he protested, "absolutely _got_ to." Hubert rocked silently from foot to foot. "He hasn't," he said quietly, "and you can't make him. You know that well enough. What did Eleanor say?" "She promised to do all she could," Turner replied unhopefully, and added: "I'd sooner emigrate than come to live down here." "Got the money for your passage?" Hubert inquired. "I suppose I could get that somehow," Turner said. "Trouble'd be to dodge my creditors. Besides, some of the money must be paid--fellows in the office and so on. I couldn't let them down." "You'll be living here before you're a week older," Hubert decided. "Safe as houses." Turner began to pace up and down the billiard room. There was possibly a touch of the histrionic in his manner of doing it, but he was without question genuinely distressed. "Oh, I'll be double damned if I do!" he repeated. "It's all very well for you--you seem to like this sort of life--but I'd be a raving lunatic in a month. I simply couldn't stand it. I--oh! God! I'll make the old man pay. Why the devil shouldn't he? He's got more money than he knows what to do with." Hubert was quite unmoved by his cousin's emotion; indeed he seemed to take a melancholy pleasure in watching him. "When are you going to see him?" he asked. "To-morrow morning," Turner said. "And, by the Lord, if he refuses I'll give him a piece of my mind." Hubert smiled sadly. "Not you," he commented. Arthur had not attempted to interrupt this conversation. Once more he had a sense of some curious mystery behind the commonplace situation. Both Hubert's dismal resignation and young Turner's too violent asseverations hinted at some quality in their grandfather's treatment of them that Arthur found it difficult to associate with the old man himself. It was true, certainly, that he had overlooked or forgotten to offer his medical attendant a salary, but he had none of the signs of the miser. Arthur knew that he gave freely to charities, and spent money without stint on the upkeep of Hartling. And did he not keep his whole family in idleness from one year's end to another? "Why are you so sure that your grandfather will refuse?" Arthur now broke in, looking at Hubert. Hubert exchanged a glance with young Turner, and it was the latter who answered. "He's not sure," he protested. "Anyway, I'm not." Hubert pursed his mouth and stared thoughtfully at the billiard table. "Do you think he'll have a down on you for gambling?" Arthur asked. Turner laughed brusquely. "Well, hardly," he said. "Been a pretty good gambler himself in his day. That was the way he made most of his money. Jolly shady some of his business was too, I've heard. He happened to bring it off, so it was all right. If he hadn't he'd have found himself on the wrong side of the big door." "You _are_ a pretty damned fool, Ken, to talk like that," Hubert put in softly. "Oh, well! it makes me so _wild_," Turner protested. "You know the whole amount's under fifteen hundred, and what's that to a man worth over half a million? The pater told me this evening that the old chap's worth _all_ that. Quite likely a heap more." Hubert solemnly closed his left eye, and continued to stare at the billiard table with the other. "If you come to live down here, he'll put you in the will," he remarked. Turner snorted impatiently. "It isn't _good_ enough," he said crossly. "Besides, it's a rotten game waiting for dead men's shoes." "Specially if you can't damned well help yourself," Hubert agreed, without the least sign of being offended. Arthur's general perplexity was not enlightened by this conversation, although he had now no further doubts as to the reason for Kenyon Turner's visit. There still remained that old suggestion of something taken for granted, something that was hidden from Arthur himself. The two men had apparently spoken quite frankly before him, and Turner, at least, had verged upon the indiscreet until Hubert had pulled him up. But behind all their talk lay the hint of an assumption that violated Arthur's feeling for common sense. This particular refusal of money could be accounted for. Old Mr Kenyon, if he had been a successful gambler himself, might feel a contempt for the failure, or he might, very reasonably, dislike young Turner. But why should he, in either case, want him to come and live at Hartling? Unless that alternative was being held over him as a kind of threat? Nor did the temporary solution of the immediate problem elucidate the general situation. Kenyon Turner had his interview with his grandfather on Sunday morning, and left for town half an hour later in the Vauxhall. Arthur, burning with curiosity, made an opportunity to get Hubert alone after lunch. "Well, what happened this morning?" he asked. "Given him a month," Hubert replied. "How do you mean?" Arthur said. "Month to think it over," Hubert elaborated. "If he'll chuck the city and come to live down here, the old man'll put him straight." "And if he won't?" "Then he can jolly well look out for himself." "But, good Lord, why does Mr Kenyon want him to come and live here?" Arthur broke out. "Thinks he'll be company for you and me, perhaps?" Hubert suggested. "Oh! rot! He must have some reason," Arthur protested. Hubert scratched his eyebrow. "Don't you know what it is?" Arthur persisted. Hubert seemed to purse not only his mouth but his whole face. "Can't say I do," he said, paused, and then continued in another voice: "I'm up against it too. You know Miss Martin, don't you? Didn't you meet her up at the club-house? Well--it's a case with her and me. And what the devil I'm going to do about it, I don't know." VII Arthur was instantly aware of a change of relationship between himself and Hubert. His cousin's statement constituted a confidence, the first he had received since he had been at Hartling. And it seemed that the mere offer of such a confidence revealed Hubert in a new light. At the moment he was no longer the "plus three" golfer, or the holder of a sinecure waiting for dead men's shoes, but a man with a personal history; he had ceased to be a type and had become an individual. Arthur responded without hesitation. "Does the old man know?" he asked. "Not yet; I haven't dared to tell him," Hubert said. "But you think he'll object?" "Sure to." "Why. Doesn't he approve of Miss Martin for some reason?" Arthur asked. He remembered her now--a jolly, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl of twenty or so, who had chaffed him for his devotion to golf. "You're all so dreadfully serious over it," she had said, or words to that effect. Odd that she should fall in love with the melancholy Hubert! "He has never seen her--or heard of her probably," was Hubert's answer. "But, good Lord, why are you so sure that he'll object then," Arthur said. "Well, the truth is that we aren't too keen on staying here--afterwards--after we're married, I mean," Hubert admitted. "And you don't think the old man could do without you?" "Oh! it isn't that. I don't do anything, really," Hubert said. "Rankin runs the place. I'm only a figurehead." Arthur had already suspected this fact, but he was surprised to hear his cousin state the case so frankly. "I thought you seemed to have plenty of time on your hands," he commented. "Simply nothing to do," Hubert agreed. "All the same, you know that your grandfather wants to keep you here?" "He wants to keep us all here, you included," Hubert said. Arthur knew now that that was true. But this calm acknowledgment of the old man's peculiarity seemed to imply a comprehension of motive that was as yet quite beyond his own understanding. They had been walking down through the spinney towards the power-house, and Arthur stopped in the quietness of the wood and laid his hand on his cousin's shoulder. "I say," he said, "I can see that. He _does_ want to keep us here. But _why_ does he? Do you know? Is there some secret about it?" "Lord, no--secret? Why should there be?" Hubert returned with perfect candour. "Seems so damned rum," Arthur said, frowning. "Doesn't it to you?" And then a queer analogy flitted across his mind and he added: "It's like Pharaoh and the Israelites. I never could make out why he wanted to keep them." "Oh! he's like that, always has been," Hubert replied, ignoring the uncomplimentary parallel. "And he gets worse. He's been frightfully difficult lately." He paused and warming to a closer confidence, went on, "The devil of it is that you never know what he's really after. If he got into a fearful pad, you'd know where you were, more or less. But he's always as cool as a cucumber. Makes you feel such an infernal ass." "But suppose," Arthur suggested, "that you simply _didn't_ do what he wanted you to? Suppose, for instance, that you stuck it out you were going to marry Miss Martin and be damned to him. What could he do?" The mere suggestion seemed to make Hubert uneasy. "Couldn't _do_ anything in a way," he grumbled. "But--well--no more could I. Her people aren't well off and I simply haven't got a bean of my own." "You might get a job somewhere else as an estate agent?" Arthur put in. Hubert shook his head. "Those jobs are jolly hard to get," he said. "I have thought about it. But I've had no experience really, not to count. And naturally I shouldn't get any testimonial from the old man, if I chucked this. Rankin would have ten times the chance I've got of a job like that, and you should hear him let himself go when he gets cold feet about anything. He's got five kids, you know, and he'd do any mortal thing not to offend the old man. And then, of course, he guesses that he's down for a bit in the will. They all do--all the servants, I mean. They're all hanging on on low wages." He gave a little bark of laughter as he concluded: "Like the rest of us." "Rotten," Arthur agreed sympathetically. He had begun to like Hubert. It was not his fault that he had no backbone. He had never had a chance to develop one. And this affair with the jolly Miss Martin was quite the worst kind of luck. They were still standing in the spinney wrapped about by the peace of the Sunday afternoon. It was a dull, windless day, threatening rain; and the very sounds of the wood served to emphasise the repose of humanity. The wheel at the generating station was not working, and except for the distant splash of the overfall and the faint humming of undistinguishable insects, the whole of Hartling seemed to be plunged in sleep. Hubert took his cousin's arm and they walked on slowly toward the power-house. "I expect you'll think it perfectly rotten of me to ask," he said in a low confidential voice; "but--you don't think there is any chance of his breaking up, do you?" Arthur sincerely wished at the moment that he could give an encouraging reply, but he could find none. "Don't see any signs of it," he said almost apologetically. "He's tremendously sound, lungs and heart and so on." "But what about those fits of his?" Hubert asked. "Well, I'm not sure," Arthur said. "They're a bit hard to diagnose. But I'm pretty sure they're not a sign of impending death." "And he might go on like he is--perhaps for years." Arthur hesitated. Desire was urging his thought, but he believed that he was giving a carefully weighed opinion when he replied: "Well, it wouldn't surprise me, as a matter of fact, if he went to pieces all at once. Physically, I can't find anything the matter with him, but I've never made a thorough examination. And, in a case like his, there's much more than the actual physical condition of the principal organs to be considered. I've wondered if he isn't held up, in a way, by his will-power. He keeps himself so aloof--if you know what I mean? Never lets himself get excited about any mortal thing; hardly seems interested, really...." "Well, but is there any reason why he shouldn't go on holding himself up?" Hubert inquired, as Arthur paused. "It might break him down if he were badly crossed," Arthur said. They walked on in silence for a few yards, pondering the significance of that last pronouncement before Hubert said,---- "Couldn't do that, though, not on purpose. Be pretty much like murder, wouldn't it?" "Pretty much," Arthur agreed. "And anyway, it's pure speculation on my part." "I can't afford to cross him," Hubert went on, as though he had finally dismissed the thought of his cousin's speculations in pathology. "I expect you'll think I'm jolly soft, but I couldn't face being chucked out of here without a penny and no prospect of getting a job." "But surely Uncle Joe would help you," Arthur put in. "The pater! Good Lord! what could _he_ do?" Hubert said. "He hasn't got a red cent of his own. I don't suppose he could lay his hands on a fiver to save his life." Once or twice in the course of the last few weeks Arthur had had a faint suspicion that ready money was rather scarce among the Kenyons, but he was shocked by this plain statement. "Doesn't the old man allow them anything?" he asked. "Not a bean--in cash," Hubert said. "Of course we can get anything we want in reason, but the old man pays all the bills. He isn't a bit mean that way. Never grumbles. Draws the line at jewellery, though, as you've probably noticed." Arthur had not noticed that omission, but he instantly remembered it, and he saw now that the absence of jewellery gave some air of distinction to the Kenyon women. He approved the old man's taste in this particular. He hated to see women smothered in diamonds. "Why's that?" he asked, passing by the admission of his failure to observe the phenomenon. "Hates jewellery; always has," Hubert explained. "One of his fads. Says he'd as soon see women wear a ring in their nose as in their ears." Arthur nodded. He had no inclination to enter into any discussion of the æsthetic value of jewellery as an aid to the enhancing of woman's beauty. And he was intrigued for the moment by the new aspect of Hartling that Hubert's confidences had unexpectedly revealed to him. The Kenyons seemed to be living a sort of communistic life, he reflected. They had goods, everything they wanted in reason, but no money. Well, it was an easy life--for the elderly and middle-aged. They had no responsibilities, no anxieties. He could understand now why they had all got into such slack habits. After all, why shouldn't they? They had no incentive to do anything but what they were doing. Indeed, it seemed that they had no power to alter their way of life. They were the slaves of a benevolent autocrat who demanded no service from them except respect. Hartling was a Utopia, a Thelema in which there was no necessity for work; and one soon forgot that it was also a prison. He realised at the same time that he might have drawn these inferences for himself, and was slightly annoyed with his own obtuseness. He was, he thought, too much inclined to take things for granted. He had come down to Hartling with ready-made opinions and formal judgments. He had certainly been far too willing to judge the Kenyons, without knowing any of the facts of the case. But he condemned them no longer. It is true that they were not, as Eleanor might say, doing any good in the world, but they were no worse in that respect than the majority of rich people, and the Kenyons had the valid excuse that they could not help themselves. Abruptly his thoughts returned to Hubert's troubles. "I'll admit it's rotten luck about Miss Martin," he said, as if he were continuing their conversation. "But you do get a good time down here." "If I'd the money to emigrate and she'd come with me, I'd go to-morrow," Hubert said, "and be damned to the good time." Hubert was in love, Arthur reflected. Also, he had never known any other condition and could not realise the horrible realities of dirt and disease. "Feel a bit uplifted, I expect, just now," he remarked casually. Hubert stopped and faced him. "Do I look uplifted?" he asked. He certainly did not. He had an air of settled melancholy at the best of times, and at this moment he had apparently abandoned himself to the deepest gloom. Five weeks earlier Arthur would have advised his cousin to take his courage in his hands and break away from Hartling at any cost--even as Eleanor had once advised himself--but now he could appreciate to the full Hubert's difficulty. And then it occurred to him that he had still just enough money to solve the present problem. If that expression of the wish to emigrate had been sincere, he might free his cousin by offering him the loan of, say two hundred pounds. It would, in any case, be interesting to see whether or not he would accept the chance if it were given to him. But he knew, even as the will to help Hubert rose up in him, that he was afraid. Old Kenyon would surely find out who had advanced that money and then he would.... Arthur was not quite sure what he would do, but he feared the consequences. He might be turned out of Hartling; he would certainly lose any hope of that future remuneration for which he was now working. The thought of making an offer flashed through his mind and was rejected. He must, at least, have his three months. "Oh! cheer up, old man," he advised the gloomy Hubert with an assumption of hopefulness. "Things are never as bad as you think they're going to be. Something will happen, right enough." "There's only one thing that'll help me," Hubert muttered, as they once more continued their walk. "And that's bound to happen sooner or later," Arthur returned. "I dare say you won't have to wait much longer." Hubert gave a little snort of impatience. "Jolly fine," he said; "but the pater, for instance, has been practically waiting all his life." Arthur was stirred to candour. "In a way," he said, "but I don't suppose it has worried him much." "Hasn't it? You ask him," retorted Hubert. Arthur thought over that for a moment before he said, "If I did, he probably wouldn't tell me. You're a secretive lot down here, you know. You're absolutely the first person who has given me any sort of confidence." "We can't," Hubert replied. "It isn't safe. You never know what the old man'll find out--he's damnably sharp in some things, and he's got us all as tight as wax. If he chose to cut up rough, he could turn any of us out of here without a blessed penny. I don't suppose he'd like it, for instance, if he knew that I was talking like this to you. But--I don't know--I wanted to tell you, and that affair of Ken's makes you think a bit, doesn't it? He's in a cleft stick all right now--like the rest of us." Arthur had a memory of his first night at Hartling, and of the way in which his uncle had suddenly dropped out of the conversation after his father had, with apparent gentleness, expressed surprise that his son did not go to live in Italy. Was it possible that that quiet expression veiled a threat? "But the old man's a good sort, surely," Arthur protested. "He wouldn't do anything absolutely rotten, I mean." "You never know what he'll do," Hubert said. "You ask the pater about Uncle Jim, Eleanor's father. I don't suppose he'd mind telling you. You're practically one of us now, aren't you?" But some spirit in Arthur rebelled furiously against that suggestion. "Good Lord, no; not in that way," he asserted vigorously. "I'm perfectly free to go whenever I want to. Even if I haven't got a cent, I could always get a job as a doctor." "Yes, you score there," Hubert agreed, without enthusiasm. "Wish to God I'd got a profession." Their conversation was interrupted at this point by their arrival at the little power-house in which Scurr, the engineer-chauffeur, was busily engaged on a minor repair to one of the temporarily dismantled dynamos. And as they returned to the house half an hour later, Arthur determinedly discussed certain alterations the Committee were proposing in connection with the thirteenth and fourteenth holes of the golf course. He had definitely quashed the assertion that he was now to be numbered among those who were waiting for a certain long deferred event, and chose to think no more about that subject at present. He was, as he had asserted, free to leave Hartling whenever he wished. He was not tied in any way, he never could be. And there was no reason why he should not enjoy his three months' holiday. He was sorry for Hubert, but if he had that £200, he probably would not dare to break away. It would not be worth while for one thing, and for another he was too "soft," spoilt by the ease of a luxurious life. And Hubert, on his side, made but one further reference to his love affair. No doubt he was afraid that he had already been rather indiscreet, for just before they reached the house he said,-- "Absolutely between you and me, of course, what I told you this afternoon." "Rather. Absolutely," Arthur assured him. It was impossible not to have a slight feeling of contempt for them all, Arthur thought, even though he had began to pity them. Congratulating himself anew on his own magnificent independence, he was inclined, just then, to regard the Kenyons as parasitic, bloodless creatures. He had once pictured them as vultures; now he saw them rather as jackals. After dinner that evening, however, he was influenced to modify once again the continually fluctuating impression he received of the Hartling household. He was warm with the comfort of good food and good wine, and inclined to be generous and a trifle sentimental when this new record was laid before him. His uncle apparently knew something of the confidences his son had given that afternoon, for it was with a new, a more intimate manner that he came across to Arthur in the drawing-room after dinner. "Having your usual game to-night?" he asked. "Oh! I don't know. Why?" Arthur said. Of all the Kenyons, his uncle was, he considered, the most to be despised. He was so confounded sloppy. Joe Kenyon made a vague gesture with the hand that held his cigar and the long ash fell and broke on the carpet. He frowned impatiently, looked down at the ash and apparently decided to forget it. "Didn't know if you'd come for a stroll in the garden," he said. "Right you are. Come along," Arthur agreed, in a spasm of pity for the futility of the man. The Kenyons always sought the garden if they had anything of the least importance to say, and he inferred that his uncle had some admission to make now concerning Hubert's unfortunate engagement. Was it possible that they wanted him to be a sort of intermediary between them and the old man? But when they were in the garden and out of earshot of the house, Mr Kenyon displayed no immediate anxiety to discuss his son's affairs. Instead of that he began to give Arthur what seemed to be rather paternal advice. "Can't think why you go off to the billiard-room directly after dinner," he said, "when you've got this. Billiards are all right after dark, but you miss the best hour of daylight going in there at nine o'clock this time o' year." "Well, I'm out of doors all day," was Arthur's excuse. "Playing golf or croquet or tennis," his uncle commented. Arthur was startled. This was the last quarter from which he had expected a criticism of his way of life. "Didn't know you objected to games," he said curtly. Joe Kenyon did not appear to hear that. The gray sky of the afternoon had broken, the sun was setting among a tangled mass of cloud, and he was watching the spectacle with the entranced eyes of a dreamer. "I'll admit," he murmured half apologetically, "that it's a trifle too dramatic. But at my age one wants the broad effects. However, I suppose you don't _see_ these things." Arthur turned his attention to the sunset. "Looks uncommonly like rain," he said. His uncle laughed. "We all have our different compensations," he said. "Yours is games and mine the ability to see things. However, I don't know what we should do without 'em." "Compensations?" Arthur repeated. "I don't know that I'd thought of games in that light." "You will in time, if you stay here," was his uncle's answer, given a little sadly. "But I don't mean to," Arthur asserted. Joe Kenyon turned reluctantly from the contemplation of the sunset and looked at his nephew. "Then you'd better break away while you have the chance," he said. "I'm a fool to say this to you, but Hubert told me of your talk this afternoon, and I--well, I'm sorry for you." Arthur raised his eyebrows. "You're getting drawn in, though you mayn't know it," his uncle continued, "and if you do your life will be wasted. You'll be sucked dry like the rest of us. Damn it, I can't say more than that. I shouldn't have said as much if you hadn't been so decent to Hubert this afternoon." Arthur's conscience pricked him, and at the same moment he had a warm sense of friendship for his cousin. "Did he tell you that?" he said. "I'm glad he thought so anyhow. I thought I'd been rather rotten to him as a matter of fact." "I gathered that you'd been very friendly," Joe Kenyon replied, his attention returning to the sunset. "Not that you can be of any help in his case." "I don't know, I might," Arthur blurted out on the impulse of the moment. "Look here, I've got a couple of hundred pounds he's welcome to, if he'd care to have it. He said something about trying his luck in Canada if he could raise the money." His uncle made no answer for a few seconds, then he definitely resigned himself to the loss of the sunset, drew his nephew's arm through his own, and began to walk slowly up and down the length of the broad gravel walk upon which they had been standing. "Good of you, Arthur, very good and generous of you," he said; "but it's no use. Hubert's in love and he's a bit above himself, but he'd never do anything in Canada. He's too soft and ignorant. We only guess what the world's like outside this place, but the things we do guess don't tempt us to explore it." He paused a moment before he continued: "We don't talk about ourselves, of course, but you must know the truth pretty well by this time--besides, you're practically one of us now." Arthur was keenly interested. "I'm not sure that I do know the truth, Uncle Joe," he said. "Except--well, Hubert told me this afternoon that your father--er--keeps you pretty short of cash and so on; makes it jolly difficult for you to sort of--well--break away." Joe Kenyon smiled grimly. "Difficult!" he repeated, and then, "I suppose you haven't got a cigar on you? All right, never mind. I smoke too much: that's another compensation." "Couldn't you tell me how things are, a bit more?" Arthur ventured. "You know I might be able to help." "It isn't easy to tell you, you see," Joe Kenyon said, after a short pause. "Let's sit down. But ..." he hesitated, grunting and sighing, before he blurted out, "But you might just run up to the house and get me a couple of cigars, there's a good fellow. Then, I'll--I'll tell you a story. Only you needn't, that is, I shouldn't say anything to the others about our being down here." While his uncle had been talking, Arthur's heart had warmed to him, but in the ten minutes that now intervened while he went to the house for the cigars, he had a brief reaction. As he entered the house, the habit of mind that had been growing upon him for the past five weeks strangely reasserted itself. He was aware again of the futility and weakness of the Kenyons, their laziness, their self-indulgence, and what he could only regard as the meanness of their attitude towards the expected inheritance. And his uncle seemed to be the very type of all these aspects of the family--a man so idle and weak that he could not exist without his cigar for half an hour. He might have endless excuses, but there must be a horribly lax strain in him somewhere. He was afraid even of his own sisters and his brother-in-law. He had not wanted them to know where he was and what he was saying. In deference to that wish, however, Arthur went to the smoking-room for the desired cigars--a room that was used as a store and in which no one ever sat. There was more or less realisable wealth there, he reflected, as he opened a box of his uncle's cigars. Why, these cigars must have cost over five pounds a hundred before the war. He was crossing the hall on his return to the garden, when the drawing-room door opened and Miss Kenyon came out. Arthur had a feeling that she had deliberately tried to catch him. He had always disliked and rather feared her. She was different from the other Kenyons, more decided and more efficient. He had not modified his original opinion of her as a hard woman. "Going out?" she asked coldly. "Yes; it's jolly in the garden," Arthur said. "Is my brother out there?" she continued. Arthur hesitated on the edge of an implied untruth, but she gave him no opportunity to prevaricate, adding almost immediately,-- "I wish you would tell him I want to speak to him." "I will, if I can find him," Arthur said. "Oh! You'll know where to find him," Miss Kenyon replied, and re-entered the drawing-room. It was almost certain, then, Arthur reflected, that she had heard him and had come out to give him that message. She had probably seen him coming up the garden, and had some purpose in putting an end to his conversation with her brother. He was annoyed by the interruption. He felt bound now to deliver her message and had no doubt that it would put an end to his uncle's confidences. "I met Miss Kenyon in the hall as I was coming out," he said, as he rejoined his uncle. "At least, I think she must have seen me coming up from the drawing-room window. She came out and told me to tell you that she wanted to speak to you, and went back again." Joe Kenyon was leaning back in one of the comfortable wicker chairs that were scattered about the garden, and gave no sign of being perturbed by the message. "Got the cigars?" he asked, stretching out his hand, and then after an interval in the course of which he had got the cigar satisfactorily going, he went on: "Esther's so cautious. She thinks I'm indiscreet. Perhaps I am, but I can't really see what difference it can make, so long as we don't say anything against the old man. And in any case, I trust you, Arthur. I can trust you, can't I?" There was a wistful note in the last sentence that robbed it of any offence, and Arthur was touched by it. The effect of his brief visit to the house was being dissipated already by the surroundings of the garden. "Rather. Yes, absolutely," he said gently. "I mean what possible reason could I have for giving you away?" Joe Kenyon sighed. "Reason?" he reflected. "Well, reason enough in all conscience." Arthur was puzzled. "What?" he asked. "Oh! there you are," his uncle replied. "Either you know too little or too much, and one has to trust you in either case. But surely, my dear boy, you can at least see that you've got it in your power to give any of us away to the old man?" "Oh, good Lord!" Arthur ejaculated in an undertone. He had a horrible picture of the Kenyons living a life of eternal suspicion and distrust, fearing that one or other of them might by some trick or disloyalty obtain an unfair hold on the old man's affection. His uncle's next speech, however, destroyed that picture even as it began to take shape. "That doesn't apply to us, of course," he said. "We've got a sort of unspoken agreement between ourselves. Had to have. We _hadn't_ at first though, you know," he continued, looking round and changing his voice as if he were making an unexpected announcement. "Hadn't you?" Arthur murmured encouragingly. "By Jove, no," his uncle went on reminiscently. "But that was nearly forty years ago, of course; just after this place was built; at the time when I tried to break away." He paused a moment and then went on: "I wanted to be an artist. I've got portfolios of stuff upstairs if you'd ever care to look at 'em. I dare say I shouldn't have been any good, not really first-class, but I can see things, and now and again I can get something down. There was a note of the wood I made when we first came here, that was rather good. I'll show it to you sometime. The wood was pretty nearly all pines then. The old man planted those larches--said the pines were too gloomy. I dare say he was right." "And he wouldn't let you become an artist?" Arthur put in. "He didn't actually forbid it," Joe Kenyon said. "But he made it simply impossible. He--well"--he lowered his tone almost to a whisper--"we used to believe in those days that he had some insidious disease or other. I suppose he must have started the idea himself. I can't remember. But I know that my poor mother used to be very depressed about it at times. She died in '83, you know, a year or two after we came here to live. However, what with one thing and another, there seemed to be no alternative except to put off my going to Paris--from month to month at first, and afterwards from year to year." He gave a grim laugh as he added. "In a way of speaking you may say it's going on still. Not long ago at dinner I was talking about Italy and the old man asked me why I didn't go there." "Yes, it was after I came. I heard him," Arthur said. "But--I didn't understand...." "Oh, well! if I'd said I would, I shouldn't have got the money to go with in the first place," his uncle explained, "and in the second it would have been all up with me so far as the old man's will was concerned. He never threatens one, not directly, but we _know_. And, well, I can't face the thought of the workhouse. They don't allow you cigars there, I'm told," he concluded whimsically. Arthur thought that he could realise the old situation fairly accurately. His uncle's original weakness showed so clearly through his narration. He had, no doubt, procrastinated, and bargained with himself, continually shirking the immediate necessity to take definite action. All that side of the affair was comprehensible enough, but what of that other point from which the narrative had so casually rambled away? "Yes, I see," Arthur agreed sympathetically; "but what was it you were going to say about your having some agreement among yourselves, uncle? It was apropos of my being an outsider, you know." "We got to understand it wouldn't do, that's all," Joe Kenyon said, "not to quarrel among ourselves, that is. Esther was inclined to make mischief in the old days. I don't know whether I ought to be telling you all this. Anyhow, we soon saw that it would never do for us to be jealous of one another. We had to find a _modus vivendi_ and--and take our chance. That was after Catherine married Charles and they had come to live with us. The idea at that time was that Charles was going into the Diplomatic later on." Kenyon paused, but made no movement to rise and go up to the house in obedience to his sister's summons. His next sentence, however, apparently referred to that issue. "Seems to me," he said, "that there can't be any harm, now, in telling you these things. I don't mind admitting that we've discussed it among ourselves--Esther, Catherine, Charles, and myself, that is. Of course what Esther says is that you might go behind us, as it were, but I know there's no sort of fear of that." Arthur had never liked Miss Kenyon; but now he began quite actively to hate her. "She must have a disgustingly low opinion of me if she could think a thing like that," he said bitterly. "Oh, well," his uncle replied calmly, "you get like that when you've lived here long enough. Can't trust any one from outside. Never know, that after all these years, we mayn't be left in the lurch. But, as I've pointed out to 'em, you're different." Nevertheless he was, without doubt, distinctly uneasy. He knew that he had been indiscreet, and now was anxious for reassurance. Twice in the last minute he had ended with an assertion of belief in his nephew's trustworthiness. And it was with a strong feeling of desire to confirm that belief both for his uncle's sake and his own, that Arthur now said,-- "I wish I could do something to help--to help Hubert, I mean. Don't you think I might say something to Mr Kenyon about it? Reason with him? I wouldn't mind doing it in the least. He always seems reasonable enough when we're talking together. A bit hard, perhaps, rather--what shall I say?--not really interested in life, and so on; but not a bit--well--unkind--cruel, if you know what I mean?" He had expected an almost scornful refusal of his offer to act as an intermediary, but his uncle appeared ready, at least to consider the proposal. "That's good of you, Arthur," he said, "but there's another thing to be thought of, too; Esther's dead against the engagement." That announcement instantly stiffened Arthur in his resolve. The thing was worth doing in any case, but the possibility of inflicting defeat upon Miss Kenyon afforded an immense additional inducement. "I'd like to do it," he said, with sudden ardour. Joe Kenyon sat up in his chair and turned to face his nephew with an effect of new interest. "I don't for a moment believe your embassy will make the least difference, my dear boy," he said earnestly; "but I, personally, should be grateful if you'd undertake it. For Hubert's sake. It would be a--a tremendous compensation for him if he were married, and--well, we don't know yet that the old man will oppose the idea. At the same time I suppose you realise what it may mean for you?" "Mean? Yes. Well, I suppose ..." Arthur began, uncertain of his uncle's precise intention. "Mean that you may be turned out of the place at an hour's notice," Joe Kenyon interrupted him. "If you get on the old man's wrong side he'll have no scruples. That's what happened with my brother James, Eleanor's father, you know. He wanted to marry a girl, such a charming girl she was too--Eleanor takes after her--and somehow or other he put the old man's back up. Poor old Jim, he had an awful time--married Eleanor--Eleanor's mother, you understand--out of hand, and they practically starved. He used to write, but we couldn't help him, of course not to count; and the old man wouldn't. He was as hard as nails--hard as nails. They were in South America somewhere, Rio, I think it was, when Jim's wife died, and he only survived her about six months. We heard all about it from a fellow called Payne and his wife. Payne was in the Cable Company out there, and Jim knew them and asked them to bring Eleanor home. She was only seven or eight then, a dark, solemn little chit as ever you saw, poor dear. By God! you could tell she'd been through it. I can see them all standing in the hall now. Payne was a great stout chap with a grayish beard. His wife was a big woman too. They had Lord knows how many children of their own, I believe. And that little solemn elf Eleanor looked like a midget beside them. Thin as a herring she was, but as pretty as a fairy. She was always graceful, even as a bit of a child--sure in her movements--it was a pleasure to watch her...." Joe Kenyon paused as if savouring his recollection, taking reflective pride, perhaps, in his power of "seeing," and then continued with a chuckle, "And this chap Payne was all taken aback. He hadn't expected a place like this evidently. Jim hadn't told him anything, I suppose, and Payne probably thought we weren't much better off than Jim. He put it in a bit thick, I remember, about Jim's poverty over there. Nice, decent sort of people. We heard from 'em once or twice afterwards, inquiring after Eleanor, and then they went back to South America and we lost touch with them; though I believe Eleanor still hears from them occasionally. However, what I was going to say was that we didn't know, of course, whether the old man would have Eleanor or not. Esther wouldn't have anything to do with it, so in the end your aunt and I took Eleanor up to show her to the old man, and as luck would have it he took a tremendous fancy to her. She's been his favourite ever since." He hesitated a moment before he added: "But there's never been any question of our being jealous of her, of course. She has told us that if by any chance the old man left her the bulk of his property, she wouldn't keep it. She wouldn't, either. In fact I shouldn't be at all sorry if it was that way. You could trust Eleanor to be absolutely fair--and generous." Joe Kenyon stopped speaking, but for a time Arthur made no comment on the story he had just heard. His attention seemed to be following two strands at the same moment. One side of his mind was attempting to weigh his uncle's motives in making all these confidences. Had he and his sister been quarrelling? There had been more than one reference to Miss Kenyon that had sounded distinctly bitter, and the emphasis he had laid on his last sentence might have implied that he hoped that if in some moment of aberration his father made an unjust will, he might be at the mercy of Eleanor rather than be dependent on the goodwill of his sister. The other side of Arthur's mind was engaged in the contemplation of a desolate little fairy standing in the hall of Hartling House solemnly awaiting her fate. Even now, she had sometimes a look of desolation, of loneliness. He wondered if she still remembered her early troubles, if she occasionally grieved for her father and mother? "I hope I haven't bored you with all this?" his uncle's voice murmured. "It is--to tell you the truth--a relief to let oneself go a little to some one who doesn't know. I dare say you can't understand that?" "I can. Rather," Arthur said, suddenly appreciating the fact that his uncle's motive was the purely personal one of relief. "I can quite understand now you must get fed up with all this sometimes." Joe Kenyon sighed, but he did not otherwise comment on this expression of sympathy. "I've been yarning so, we've got rather away from the point," he said. "But you know, Arthur, I don't want you to go into this affair of Hubert's without knowing what you are doing. There it is, my boy. You may be cutting your own throat. I assure you the old man will put you out at an hour's notice if you happen to get on his wrong side." "Honestly, uncle, I don't care a little hang about that," Arthur affirmed bravely. "I never meant to stay here and I've had a jolly six weeks." "Of course we shall have to say something to Esther first," his uncle replied. "Oh, of course," Arthur agreed readily, but for a moment his heart sank. Miss Kenyon's influence was probably very considerable, he reflected. A few minutes earlier he had been eager to come to a clash of wills with her. He was still ready to do that. But it might be that, even if he defeated her in this, she would work against him afterwards, and that he would have to leave Hartling. And when he faced that possibility he was sure that, after all, he did not want to go. The world outside was an uncomfortable, unprotected place, in which there would be no luxuries for him, and he would have to work very hard in uncongenial circumstances in order to make a bare living. Also, he would be sorry to go now that he was just beginning to know these relations of his a little better. Hubert was a good chap, and so was Uncle Joe. He had not properly understood them until to-day. And now that he knew her story, he would like to know something more of Eleanor. There was something fine about her, and the thought of that "dark, solemn little chit" in the hall made him feel oddly tender towards her. The darkness had fallen, and the clouds had reassembled in tremendous masses that were moving with strange swiftness across the sky. Leaning back and looking upward it was interesting to contrast the windless quiet of the garden in which they were sitting with the evidences of the tumult above. "It's beginning to rain," his uncle suddenly exclaimed, breaking a long silence. "We'd better go." Arthur was prepared for some display of temper on the part of Miss Kenyon when he and his uncle entered the drawing-room, and was disappointed to find that she displayed her habitual air of cold reserve. He was a trifle nervous and apprehensive now, about this projected embassy of his, and would have been glad to have been stiffened by some show of active opposition. Miss Kenyon had, he thought, something of the same awful detachment that her father exhibited towards every-day affairs. All the older members of the party were there. Turner had a novel in his hand, the three women were busy with their usual fancy-work, but to-night they had drawn together in a group by one of the windows, with an effect of being in conference. Joe Kenyon's action in pulling up a chair and joining the group held a faint suggestion of bravado. He had the uneasy air of a man coming to a confession of his own weakness. Arthur preferred to stand, leaning against the jamb of the window. It gave him a physical sense of superiority to look down upon his antagonist. Joe Kenyon plunged at once into what Arthur judged to be relatively a side issue. "Arthur and I have been talking about Hubert's engagement," he said. "Hubert had been telling him all about it this afternoon; and Arthur has suggested that he should say something to my father." If he had deliberately intended an effect of surprise he had attained his object. They were undoubtedly startled by this announcement, and not less obviously puzzled. It was not, however, Arthur's part in the affair that seemed to perplex them. None of them looked up at him, they were all staring at Joe Kenyon, with an expression that seemed, Arthur thought, to be seeking for a private sign. But so far as he could see, none was given. Joe Kenyon was leaning back in his chair and wiping his forehead. "This rain ought to cool the air a bit," he interjected in an undertone. "Beastly hot in here." "Very friendly of Arthur," Turner commented, turning slightly towards the young man as he spoke. "No reason, after all, why he should bother himself about our affairs." "I suppose he understands ..." his wife began, and then stopped abruptly. She was still looking anxiously at her brother as if inviting further confidences. Joe Kenyon nodded. "Oh, of course, of course," he said. "Hubert told him all about it this afternoon." "About what, Joe?" Miss Kenyon put in, speaking for the first time. She gave him no indication of perturbation or anxiousness, but she was reading her brother's face as if she sought some evidence of his secret motive. "Well, about the engagement, and having no money and so on," Joe Kenyon rather desperately explained. "No money?" his sister returned, with a lift of her eyebrows. "What do you mean, by having no money?" "Well, Hubert hasn't any, not of his own," her brother replied. "And he was saying, I gather, that he would like--well--a change of air if he were married. About enough of us here, without him, perhaps. That sort of thing. And Arthur very generously offered through me to lend him a couple of hundred pounds if he wanted it." Whether or not he had intended to create a diversion by this further announcement, he had certainly achieved that object. Turner gave an exclamation of surprise, but it was Mrs Kenyon who answered. "Oh, but we couldn't _possibly_ accept that," in an agitated voice; and Arthur, looking down, saw that her hands were trembling. She was, he realised then, by far the most nervous of the five, and he recognised in her at that moment a strong likeness to his own mother. She, too, had been a timid woman, apprehensive not only of danger, but also of change. Miss Kenyon had let her work fall in her lap, and was sitting, plunged, apparently, in a fit of deep abstraction. "No, no, of course not," Joe Kenyon replied. "I have already refused that." "On what grounds?" Miss Kenyon put in sharply. "Er--I don't think--I suggested, Esther, that Hubert would be--well, rather lost if he were to find himself in a new country with a wife to support on a capital of £200." Miss Kenyon gave a short impatient sniff, and turned to Arthur. "A little strange, isn't it," she asked, "for you to offer to finance us?" "Only Hubert, you know," Arthur explained. "Hubert has a father and mother alive, to say nothing of uncles and aunts," she returned. "I don't know why he should need help from a comparative stranger." "He seemed to need it," Arthur said dryly, "or I shouldn't have made the offer." Miss Kenyon shrugged her shoulders and turned back to her brother. "Are we to understand, Joe," she said, "that Arthur Woodroffe knows all about us now? Have you told him everything?" "Damn it, Esther, what do you mean by everything?" Joe Kenyon exploded defensively. "I--it seems to me--Hubert had pretty well told him all that mattered, before I said a word. I told him about Jim, if that's what you mean?" Miss Kenyon began to drum her fingers on the arm of her chair. "And what good do you expect to do to yourself or anybody else by speaking to my father about Hubert's engagement?" she asked Arthur. Turner leant back in his chair and crossed his legs. "Precisely, that's the real point," he agreed. "Well, naturally, I hope to persuade Mr Kenyon to sanction the engagement," Arthur said. "Why?" snapped Miss Kenyon. "Friendship for Hubert," Arthur said. "I wasn't aware that you and he were such great friends," was Miss Kenyon's criticism of that explanation. "Oh, well, pretty fair," Arthur compromised. "Anyhow, I'll be glad to help him if I can." "I can't imagine that anything you could say to my father would carry the least weight," Miss Kenyon said dryly. "Perhaps not," Arthur agreed. "No harm in trying, though, is there?" "I think that's quite true, you know, Esther," Mrs Kenyon put in, "and it would be rather a relief if--that is, I hope, for Hubert's sake at all events, something can be done to smooth things over." Miss Kenyon turned from her sister-in-law with a slight suggestion of contempt. "Do you know this girl, Dorothy Martin?" she asked, looking at her brother. "Slightly," he said. "Met her twice, I think. Seemed a jolly girl, I thought. Full of life." "Quite a nice girl," his wife put in eagerly. "Oh! you've met her too, have you?" Miss Kenyon commented coldly. "At the Club House. Hubert took me up there to tea, the day before yesterday, on purpose to introduce me," Mrs Kenyon explained, with a pathetic air of apology. Arthur had drawn many false inferences about the affairs at Hartling, but it was quite clear to him now that although there might, as his uncle had said, be some tacit agreement as to the Kenyons' attitude toward the head of the house, Miss Kenyon had certainly not been given any confidences concerning Hubert's engagement. "She has no money of her own, I suppose?" was the next question. Joe Kenyon and his wife looked at each other rather helplessly, and it seemed that no further answer was needed, for Miss Kenyon at once continued, "Folly, absurd folly, and you know it. If Arthur Woodroffe likes to make a fool of himself, he can. What he does or does not do is neither here nor there. But I shall have no hand in it, and any influence I have with my father...." She had risen to her feet as she spoke, and now stood with her hands clenched, an erect and dominating figure. She was over sixty, but she was still a handsome woman, full of vitality and energy; and at that moment Arthur could not but concede her a grudging measure of admiration. He felt as if he had seen her fully awake for the first time. Her rather pale blue eyes were suddenly keen and alert, and there was an air of mastery about her that reminded him of her father. By the side of her, Mrs Turner and her brother with their sandy-gray hair and their tendency to an untidy corpulence, seemed to belong to another race. Esther, if the head of the house was to be taken as the standard, was the only true Kenyon of the second generation, unless Eleanor's father, the errant, independent James, had been of his sister's breed? Had he, perhaps, had his sister's hands also; those white, strong managing hands that were now so threateningly clenched? She stood there for a moment, dominating them all, while she allowed the threat of her unfinished sentence to take effect; then she turned and left the room with a quiet dignity that was in itself a menace. Nevertheless, Arthur at least had not been intimidated by her outburst, and her contemptuous reference to himself had provided him with the very stimulant he desired. Moreover, he had now a fierce desire to humiliate his handsome opponent, a desire that arose from a new source. He had seen her as a woman for the first time, and he was aware in himself of a hitherto unrealised impulse to cruelty. He wanted to break and dominate that proud, erect figure. However sneeringly she had challenged him, and in the zest of his unsatisfied youth, he longed to conquer her, although his victory could be but the barren victory of the intellect. He took the seat Miss Kenyon had just vacated with a pleasant sense of mastery. He felt that he could do anything he liked with the other four. They were all of them looking, just then, so completely cowed and depressed. Joe Kenyon and his sister were crumpled into their chairs, with an air of rather absurd dejection. Mrs Kenyon had resumed her fancy work and was bending over it in an attitude that suggested the possibility of hidden tears; and Turner, nervously twisting his exquisitely neat little moustache, was staring thoughtfully at his own reflection in the darkened window. "I don't see why _we_ shouldn't help Hubert, all the same," Arthur tried, by way of making a beginning. Little Turner withdrew his gaze from the window and regarded the intrepid youth with an expression of half-amused pity. "You don't _know_," was his only comment. "Well, I think I do, to a certain extent," Arthur said boldly. "Uncle Joe told me a good many things to-night, one way and another. More than he cared to admit, perhaps, before Miss Kenyon." He had made a deliberate bid for inclusion into their secret counsels by that last sentence, and he had at least succeeded in stimulating their interest. "Oh, well, well," his uncle said, sitting up with an effect of reinflation, "perhaps I did. Esther's got a queer temper, now and then. And possibly I told you more than was altogether discreet." He looked at his brother-in-law as he added, "I'll admit to being a bit down in the mouth about the whole affair." "But do you really think," Mrs Kenyon began unhopefully, "that it would be any _good_ for you to come into the affair at all?" "Well, I'm perfectly free, you know," Arthur said, and instantly realised that he had said the forbidden thing. They could not bear that admission of bondage in a full company. "Can't see that that's anything to do with it," Turner replied. "We're all free enough, so far as that goes. Point is, whether your interference is advisable; whether you might not put Mr Kenyon's back up and make things a hundred times worse for Hubert." Arthur chose to overlook the snub. "Well, I don't see that it could do any harm," he said. He felt pleasantly young and capable among those four old people; he believed that they were too inert to oppose him, that they would accept any leader capable of taking the initiative. "Anything I did," he continued, "would only react on me, and I--don't care. Uncle Joe has warned me that Mr Kenyon may sling me out of the house at an hour's notice, but I'm perfectly willing to take that risk." No one answered him. For the second time in two minutes he had all too clearly displayed their weakness with his youthful boast of freedom, and this time they had no defence but to ignore him. For a few seconds there was a painful, uneasy silence, and then Turner looked at Mrs Kenyon and said, in a confidential tone,-- "What does Eleanor say about it all? I suppose you've asked her advice?" "She thinks he'll be against it," Mrs Kenyon said timidly. "But nothing has been said to him as yet. She--she would like Hubert to go away--but I can't see how--even if we accepted...." She glanced at Arthur as she concluded. "Oh, well," Turner replied, standing up, "we'll have to leave it at that presumably. No good in our interfering, obviously." And he looked at his wife, who began to fumble her work into an untidy bundle, preparatory to getting to her feet. "With our own trouble hanging over us," she remarked allusively, and added, "What's going to happen to poor Ken, I don't know. He's determined that he won't come to live here." They were all standing now, saying good-night, but Joe Kenyon lagged behind with Arthur as they trailed across the spaces of the drawing-room. "I'm afraid it's no good, you know," he murmured, "very generous of you to make the offer, all the same." When he was alone in his own delightful bedroom, Arthur stood at the open window, listening to the sound of the rain and inhaling the welcome scents of the grateful earth. Already his mood of resentment against these four impotent old people had passed. They had snubbed and checked him, given him to understand that though he might, indeed, know something of the facts of their position, he knew nothing of the spirit. But he could not cherish anger against them, nor even contempt. They had been in shackles too long; he could not reasonably expect them to enter with him into any kind of conspiracy against the old man. They were so helpless, so completely dependent upon his goodwill. Nevertheless, although they had given him no authority, he meant to persist in his endeavour although he risked expulsion from this Paradise of comfort and well-being. He was genuinely anxious to help his uncle, aunt, and cousin, and he thrilled at the thought of crossing swords with Miss Kenyon. If he defeated her, it would, indeed, be a glorious victory. And, possibly, Eleanor would be on his side? He had an amazingly clear picture of her in his mind, a forlorn, independent child, in the midst of the splendours of the Hartling hall. He could see her standing by the side of the colossal elephant's pad; an amazing contrast between the slender and the gross. What was it his uncle had called her? "A lovely, solemn little chit?" Yes, she was lovely. He had hardly realised it until now. Perhaps she would change her opinion of him after to-morrow. VIII Arthur's usual hour for his morning interview with old Mr Kenyon was 11 o'clock, but two or three times a week he received a message either at breakfast or immediately after, releasing him from attendance. He had been prepared for such a reprieve this morning, imagining that the old man might be a trifle exhausted by his passage of arms with Kenyon Turner the day before, but as no message arrived he went into the library to read the morning papers for an hour and a half before going upstairs. All the important journals were taken at Hartling, most of them in duplicate; and Arthur was probably the only member of the household who had ever considered the expense involved. He had calculated once that, including magazines and other periodicals, more than a hundred pounds a year were spent under this head alone. But the expenditure of the place was all on the same magnificent scale. Arthur remembered his uncle's whimsical comment that cigars were not provided in the workhouse, and smiled grimly at the thought that the inmates of Hartling were the most pampered paupers in the world. The library was empty that morning. Arthur generally found Hubert there at that time, but he had presumably had breakfast even earlier than usual and gone out. Nor did Mr Turner, who came in half an hour later, settle himself down there to his customary study of the _Times_. Instead he nodded a curt good-morning to Arthur, selected half a dozen papers, and immediately retired with them to some other room. After that Arthur was left severely alone. The inference was clear enough: the Kenyons did not wish to appear in the cause he was going to plead. They might approve his intention but they preferred not to influence it. If he failed, they would deny any kind of responsibility for what he had said. Their attitude had been foreshadowed in the course of their conversation the previous night. "No good _our_ interfering," Turner had said. They were afraid of being dismissed from their luxurious almshouse. Arthur put down his paper, walked across to the window, and stood there looking out into the gardens. It had rained heavily in the night and there was more rain coming. Low wisps of ashen gray cloud were travelling intently across the dark purples of the heavy background, and the horizon was hidden by the mist of an approaching downpour. It was not a day, he reflected, remembering many such days, to spend in going from house to house through fountains of London mud; nor in receiving poor patients at the surgery. How their wet clothes reeked! They brought all the worst of the weather in with them, the mud and the wet invaded the consulting room; one was never dry or clean on such days as these. Instinctively he rubbed his hands together, and then looked down at them. They were better kept than when he had first come to Hartling; it had been impossible to keep his hands like that in Peckham. He liked the brown of their tan, deeper on the back than at the finger tips, and his nails were rather good. It was worth while now to spend a little time on them. Were the Kenyons to be pitied? They were not free, of course, but no one was free. They were certainly more free living their life here than he would be if he went back to Peckham. It was a dog's life that, even Somers couldn't deny it. The tall trees in the garden were bent by a rush of wind, and the rain suddenly spattered furiously against the plate glass of the window. How protected one was here! Hartling windows did not rattle in the gale, nor let in the wet. A day such as this gave a zest to the comfort of it all. And although one could not go out there was plenty to do, any amount of books to read, billiards with Turner, and probably they would play bridge in the afternoon--his uncle, Turner, and Elizabeth all played quite a good game.... If the old man turned him out for interfering in a matter in which he was not concerned, he would have to go back to Somers for a night or two. If he was not very careful with the little money still left to him, he would have to give up the idea of Canada altogether. Living in a place like this for five weeks changed one's scale of values. He did not look forward to "roughing it" so much as he had before he came away from Peckham. Was he pledged in any way to plead Hubert's cause with his grandfather? Would it not be better from every point of view to leave it alone? If Hubert's own family would not put in a word for him, why should a comparative stranger interfere? The old man would almost certainly be annoyed. How on earth could one open the subject to him without impertinence? That offer last night had been made in a moment of sentimental benevolence. He had been worked up by that pathetic story Uncle Joe had told him, and they--he bunched the whole Kenyon family together in this thought of them--could not blame him if he backed out at the last minute. _They_ could not put on airs in that connection. His only regret would be that Miss Kenyon would score. He would have liked to have beaten _her_, but what possible chance had he of doing that? The fact was that he was standing it all to nothing. He would be a damned fool to risk being turned out of Hartling just now, for the sake of a romantic notion of generosity. It was not as if his pleading were likely to help Hubert; it would probably make things ten times worse for him by putting the old man's back up.... He heard the mellow chime of the hall clock striking eleven, and reluctantly turned to the door. He passed through the main drawing-room on his way, and found all the family except Hubert and Eleanor, sitting there engrossed in their usual occupations. None of them spoke to him as he passed through. Miss Kenyon looked up at him for a moment as he came in, but he could not decide whether her expression was one of challenge or confidence in her own ability to get what she wanted. As he slowly mounted the wide staircase he still saw them all in imagination, waiting with a rather pleasurable excitement for the news of his interview. No doubt they knew well enough that he was going to sign the order for his own exile. Had they waited in just the same way when James Kenyon had defied his father twenty-five years earlier? He paused half-way up the stairs and looked down into the hall. He could see the great elephant's pad standing there, with an effect of gross and imperturbable solidity. Since last night, he had come in some odd way to associate that clumping thing with Eleanor. He could almost see her now, a slender, solemn child, dusty with recent travel, waiting to learn her destiny.... And it was Eleanor whom he saw first when he entered Mr Kenyon's suite of apartments. She had answered his knock--no one went into those rooms without knocking--and he found her standing near the door with an effect of impatience. "Are you going to say anything to him about Hubert?" she asked at once in a low voice. Arthur hesitated before he said, "I've been thinking that perhaps, on the whole, it would be better if I didn't. It might make it worse for him. I've no sort of influence with Mr Kenyon, I mean." She looked at him suspiciously. He could not mistake the doubt in her eyes. She did not believe in the excuse that he had put forward. She had always mistrusted him for some reason or other. "Well, have I?" he persisted feebly. "None whatever, I should imagine," she said; "only, I thought...." She paused and looked towards the closed door of the inner room. "You're ten minutes late now," she added inconsequently. He was irated by her attitude towards him, her dismissal of him as a person of no importance. He longed to show her that he was not a man to be lightly despised. But all he could find to say was a foolish, petulant accusation of her own motives. Had she not impugned his? "No doubt you would be glad enough to see me turned out," he said, with an almost childlike sullenness. "You've always disliked me." She stood quite still, staring past him towards the door of her grandfather's room. She was again wearing the dress of pale gray linen in which he had first seen her; and she looked exquisitely sweet, fresh, and young. But he was glad that he had been rude to her. By that rudeness he had shown that he thought of her, and that he resented her opinion of him. He would sooner that she hated him than that she should be indifferent. "You think, then," she said, after what seemed to be a long pause, "that you might get--turned out, if you said anything to my grandfather about Hubert? You know enough for that?" "I suppose I know pretty nearly everything there is to know now," he replied sulkily. She looked at him quickly, and then turned her eyes away again. "Uncle Joe told you?" she asked. With some vague idea of loyalty in his mind, Arthur tried to exculpate his uncle by saying, "Partly, yes; but he had nothing to do with the suggestion of my speaking to Mr Kenyon about Hubert." "No, of course not," Eleanor said; "and in any case you've decided not to." He thought there was still a hint of question in her tone, as if she still hoped that he might be persuaded to champion his cousin's cause; and he grasped the opportunity to get back to the point she had, as he believed, deliberately passed by. "You admit that I shan't do any good to Hubert," he said. "Why are you so anxious that I should get myself into trouble by interfering--unless it is that you want to be rid of me? Because if that's all, I can go at any time of my own free will." "I don't want you to go," she said coldly. "Then why are you so keen on--on my taking the chance of offending Mr Kenyon?" he insisted. She faced him with a cool, steady stare. "You can't seriously believe," she said, "that I should be so mean and small as to persuade you into this for any purely selfish purpose of my own? Why, none of them would be as paltry as that." He blushed, but he would not drop his eyes from hers. "I'm to respect _your_ motives, of course," he said defiantly; "but you're at liberty to impute any sort of cowardice to me?" "Isn't it cowardice then?" she asked, returning his stare without flinching. "Haven't you changed your mind because you're afraid of having to leave here?" She had defeated him; and realising that he dared not answer that question truthfully, he sought refuge in a youthful petulance. "Oh! very well," he said, turning his back on her, and crossing the room towards the inner door. "Have it your own way. You can think anything you like about me. _I_ don't care." He knocked and then entered Mr Kenyon's room, without looking back to see what effect this speech might have on her. He was persuaded that he did not care any longer what she thought of him. She was so confoundedly self-sufficient and superior. Mr Kenyon was reading the _Times_, a thing he could do without the aid of glasses. His sight and hearing were apparently as good as Arthur's own. But he dropped the paper on his knees as Arthur came in. "You've been having a talk with Eleanor?" he remarked in his usual friendly tone. "What a wonderful girl she is, isn't she? I'm surprised that you and she don't get on better together. I had hoped you might be friends." Arthur was slightly taken aback. It had never occurred to him that the old man might wish him to be on more friendly terms with Eleanor. He had never before referred to the subject in any way. Had he, perhaps, heard or guessed at the quarrel between them in the next room? "I'm afraid she doesn't like me," he explained. "Oh! in that case there's nothing more to be said," the old man replied quietly. "Well, you needn't stay this morning, if you've anything else to do. I had meant to send you a message." Arthur understood that he was dismissed, that he might now go back and explain to the people downstairs that he had been given no opportunity to act as the family's catspaw that morning. For twenty-four hours at least he was relieved from any kind of obligation, and in the meantime he could re-discuss the whole question with Hubert and his father. There was but one objection to this plan; he would have to tell Eleanor as he returned through the next room. He sighed and stood irresolute. Mr Kenyon had returned to his study of the _Times_. No encouragement could be hoped from that quarter. The old man had an amazing gift of detaching his interest from his surroundings. He had probably forgotten that his attendant was still in the room. Why could not Eleanor have undertaken this mission herself? Oh! obviously because she knew that it was futile, purposeless, utterly foolish. Nevertheless, he was not going to be accused of cowardice, nor of trying to propitiate the old man for the sake of being remembered in his will. "Might I speak to you a minute, sir?" Arthur made his opening curtly, almost contemptuously. By the very act of asking the question he had regained his freedom. He saw that his fear and respect of the old man before him were based on nothing but the longing for comfort and luxury, for abundance and idleness. Now that he had resolved to leave Hartling rather than endure the accusation of cowardice, all his fears had slipped from him. Mr Kenyon put down his paper and looked up. His pale blue eyes were suddenly intent, the eyes of a hunting animal or a bird of prey, in sight but not yet sure of its quarry. "Sit down, Arthur," he said quietly, pointing to a chair nearly opposite to his own. "You may speak for an hour if you wish. I have nothing to do this morning." "It was about Hubert," Arthur said, accepting the invitation to sit down. He did not care now, so far as he himself was concerned, what was the upshot of this conversation, but while he was about it he might as well do his best for poor old Hubert. Mr Kenyon nodded, gravely attentive. "No doubt, sir, you'll wonder what concern it is of mine," Arthur continued, "but the truth is that I like Hubert, and I'm rather sorry for him...." "_Sorry_ for him?" Mr Kenyon repeated with a faint surprise. "We young men of the present generation, sir," Arthur explained, revelling now in his sense of liberty, "think a great deal of our freedom. I don't mean to say that _Hubert_ has any particular ambition in that direction. He was brought up in a different atmosphere. But from my point of view, you see, his life seems dreadfully confined and limited, though perhaps it _is_ a trifle presumptuous for me to be sorry for him on that account." "And you wish ...?" Mr Kenyon suggested, without the least sign of displeasure. "Oh, well! that's another matter," Arthur said. "The fact is, sir, that Hubert has fallen in love, and for some reason that I can't pretend to understand, neither he nor my uncle seem to care about coming to ask your consent to his marriage. So--so I've come to plead his cause for him." "Who is the girl he wants to marry?" Mr Kenyon put in. A change had come over him in the course of Arthur's last sentences. He sat less stiffly in his chair; he had the air of a man re-confronted by some familiar trouble with which he had often battled in the past. "Her name is Dorothy Martin," Arthur began. "She...." Mr Kenyon interrupted him with a gesture of his hand. "I know," he said, "her father is Lord Massey's agent--a homely fellow and rather stupid. So Hubert wants to marry Miss Martin, does he?" His head drooped a little forward and he began to slide his hands slowly backward and forward along his knees. Arthur felt suddenly sorry for him. Neither Hubert nor his father had told him that Miss Martin's father was, to put it bluntly, not in the Kenyons' class. He understood better now why they had hesitated to approach the old man. And how decently he had taken it! Without any sign of anger, even of vexation. "I believe he's very much in love with her," Arthur murmured. Mr Kenyon sighed and sat up. "As you remarked just now, Arthur," he said, "you naturally can't be expected to understand, and I wonder if it would be indiscreet of a very, very old man to enlighten you?" His expression as he spoke was pathetic, wistful; he looked at Arthur as if he besought him to approve the offered confidence. "You may be absolutely sure, sir, that I shall not repeat anything you care to tell me," Arthur assured him. "Nor let it affect your relations with my family?" the old man added, and then while Arthur still sought a convincing reply to that rather difficult question, went on: "We are necessarily lonely in our old age, my boy, but I sometimes wonder if my case is not in some ways unusual. Or is it that I have suffered for overstepping the reasonable limit of mortality?" He rose from his chair as he spoke and began to pace slowly up and down the room. "I have taken a peculiar fancy to you, Arthur," he continued after a brief pause, "and I need not be ashamed to tell you why; it is because I admire the independence of your spirit. I liked the way you spoke to me just now; your disregard of what might have been against your own interests; your championship of Hubert. I could wish--I have often wished--that there was more of the same spirit in my own family." Arthur flushed with pleasure. But it seemed to him that he understood now, finally, conclusively, the secret of the Kenyons. They were all cowards, and the old man despised them for their cowardice; not one of them had ever had the courage to stand up to him. If he had, in a sense, bullied them, it was because he had tried to stimulate them into some show of active response. Nevertheless, Arthur attempted an excuse for them. "Perhaps, sir," he said, "if they had had to face the world as I have...." Mr Kenyon had paused in his walk and now stood in front of him, gravely attentive. But as Arthur hesitated, trying to frame a statement that should not sound too boastful, the old man held up his hand. "Well, well," he said, "I don't wish to discuss my family with you. My purpose is more selfish than that. I only want you not to misjudge me, as you might very reasonably do, in the circumstances. Downstairs, no doubt, I may sometimes appear in the light of an autocrat." And he lifted his head with a little jerk that wonderfully expressed his own awareness of the absurdity of that accusation. "You see, my boy," he went on, resuming his deliberate pacing of the room, "I have long been aware that none of my children, unless it be Esther, resemble me in character. They are not," he smiled with an air of excusing his choice of a metaphor, "not fighters. There was my poor boy James, Eleanor's father. I don't know if they have told you anything about him?" "I have heard something," Arthur admitted. "Oh, well! then you will understand what a grief his career was to me," Mr Kenyon said with a sigh. "I knew his weakness better than he knew it himself," he continued reflectively, "but he would not listen to me. I've been forced to take care of them all, because they are none of them able to take care of themselves. I would have saved James, too, if he would have let me. And all I insist upon, in return, is that they should stay here with me, where I can, in a sense, watch over them. Perhaps I'm getting senile. The old habit of thought is too strong in me. If I let them go out into the world, at their age, they would surely be safe enough; but the thought of it arouses all my old uneasiness. But in any case it can't be long now." He had fallen into a brooding monotone, as if he spoke his thoughts aloud; and now he raised himself with an effort and stared at Arthur as though he had become suddenly aware of his presence in the room. "So Hubert wants to marry Miss Martin, does he?" he asked, returning to the point at issue; "and has sent you to plead for him." "No, he didn't send me, sir," Arthur explained. "It was entirely my own idea." Mr Kenyon smiled paternally. "Rash youth! rash youth!" he said. "Have you no battles of your own to fight?" "Well, at the moment, no sir," Arthur replied, "I have been having a very easy time here for the last five weeks." "And now you're pining to get back into the struggle again, eh?" Mr Kenyon said, with a lift of his eyebrows. "Well, youth and senility are the ages of selfishness, and when there comes a clash between them it is senility that always must give way. And yet, Arthur, I should be so glad if you _could_ stay with me--till the end. I gave you my reasons when we first talked the matter over together. I can add still another, now; I've taken a great liking for you. Are you absolutely determined to go?" "I? No, sir. I didn't mean ..." Arthur stammered. The old man was watching him keenly. "But you don't deny that you had that in your mind, when you began to speak to me about Hubert?" he said, and then, reading confirmation of that statement in Arthur's embarrassment, he came up to him and laid his hands on his shoulders. "Natural enough; natural enough, my boy," he said, "there's nothing to be ashamed of. And I wouldn't ask you to make the sacrifice if I were a younger man. But as it is what difference will a year, two years at most, make to you at your time of life? Come, now," he smiled with a flash of roguery, "let's make a bargain! Your friend Hubert shall have his Miss Martin, if you'll promise to stay with me and perform those little duties I mentioned when I'm gone." "Oh, of course, sir, rather," Arthur said, blushing with pleasure and embarrassment. "I would promise that in any case. There's no need for any--any _quid pro quo_, I mean." Mr Kenyon still had his hands on the young man's shoulders, and he gave him a gentle shake as he said, "Very well, that's a bargain then; and I may tell you that you've taken a great weight off my mind. Now, go and tell Hubert to come up to me. I'll promise to let him off more lightly than he deserves." Arthur strode out of the room with the conscious pride of one who has all life at his feet. Eleanor rose from the desk at which she was writing as he entered. "So you did speak to him after all?" she said, searching his face with an eager, inquiring stare. "Yes, I did. It's all right," Arthur returned, disciplining his expression of triumph to a becoming modesty. "He wants to see Hubert now. He has promised to let him off lightly," he said. "And you're staying on?" Eleanor inquired. "Yes. He--he made me promise that." Arthur found himself inexplicably dropping into apology. "I couldn't possibly refuse him, could I? You see he wants me to be here--at the end." "I understand," Eleanor said coldly, turning her back on him and reseating herself at the desk. "Will you give Hubert the message or shall I send some one?" "I'll go," Arthur replied curtly. He was suddenly vexed and disheartened. She had dispersed all the glamour of his achievement; had made him feel as if he had done a mean rather than a splendid thing. There could be but one explanation of her attitude--she suspected him of working on her grandfather's affections. No doubt she knew that he had become a special favourite; had known it probably before he knew it himself. Yet even so, if there were no jealousy on her part--and Uncle Joe had made it certain last night that her motives were above suspicion--why should she be so annoyed? Was she afraid that he might be designing to cut out the rest of the family? He had reached the hall when that explanation came to him, and he paused there, burnt with shame by the bare thought of such a suspicion. It was degrading, infamous. He felt that he could not endure that she should hold such an opinion of him for another moment. He turned back towards the staircase with the intention of instantly challenging her, and then a better means of vindication occurred to him, and he went on into the drawing-room. They were all there now, except Eleanor; and they made no attempt to disguise their interest and excitement. They faced the door with what seemed to be a concerted movement as he entered--and at once misread the signs of his still evident emotion. Miss Kenyon, indeed, made so sure of the correctness of her inference that she acted upon it without further consideration. Arthur saw her then, he believed, in her true character. She rose and came towards him across the room with an effect of vindictive triumph. Her pale blue eyes were bright, the pupils contracted almost to a pin-point; they were the eyes of some fierce bird that is at last within sight of the kill. "Well?" she said in a clear, cold voice, "so you've seen my father." Arthur made no attempt to prevaricate. "Yes, he wants to see Hubert," he said, and looked across the room at his cousin as he added, "I understand that he won't raise any objection." He saw, as he spoke, the lift of Hubert's head and the quick change of his expression, before his attention was snatched back to Miss Kenyon. "And you?" she asked sharply. There was no need to put the question more plainly. He knew they all knew what she meant. "Your father has asked me to stay on--indefinitely," he said quietly. She made no reply, but she instantly veiled her eyes, lowering her glance to the simple brooch she was wearing at her breast, at the same time putting up a hand as if to adjust it. And when she looked up again her expression betrayed no sign of anger or resentment. He was disappointed. He had expected, even hoped, for some indication of defeat from her. Vaguely he had pictured her going up to her father to enter a violent protest. This apparently meek submission annoyed him. "I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said provocatively. "I have forgotten the meaning of the word disappointment," she returned gravely, looked him full in the eyes for a moment, and then passed on towards the door. Her self-control was superb, but the picture that remained in Arthur's mind was of her advance towards him across the room. For one instant he had been afraid of her. "I say! is it all right, do you think?" Hubert eagerly asked, as Arthur joined the group at the farther end of the room. "Perfectly all right, old chap--I believe," Arthur replied. "Hadn't you better toddle up and see him at once?" "But what did you tell him?" Hubert persisted. "Everything I knew," Arthur said. "Cut along." "I suppose you're very proud of yourself?" Elizabeth put in demurely as her brother went out. "I'm very glad for Hubert's sake," was Arthur's amendment. "Only for his sake?" Elizabeth commented carelessly. Turner, with the _Times_ on his knees, was thoughtfully twisting his neat little moustache. "So you're going to stay on indefinitely?" he remarked. "Well, yes; that's to say Mr Kenyon said he would like me to," Arthur replied rather lamely. He was aware of a sense of antagonism between him and the others. None of them so far had shown the least inclination to thank him for acting as their catspaw. All they thought about apparently was the fact that he was going to remain permanently at Hartling. And he knew that the time had come to vindicate his motives, to express that purpose which had come to him in the hall when he relinquished the idea of confronting and, if possible, confounding Eleanor. He drew up a chair and sat down, with an air that he felt claimed his right to be included in the family conclave. "I wonder if you'll let me say something to you all about a rather delicate matter?" he asked, looking at his uncle. Joe Kenyon raised himself uneasily in his chair and glanced round the faces of the little circle. They were all alert now. There could be no question that they correctly anticipated the nature of the "matter" the new-comer was going to discuss, although they were uncertain what precisely he might have to say about it. "Yes, Arthur, yes. Say anything you like," Joe Kenyon replied rather doubtfully. "Now we know that you've come to stay for good, of course, there's no reason why you shouldn't have--well--our confidence." "I don't want that," Arthur said. "I want to give you mine. I feel, you know, in a confoundedly awkward position, and I'd like to clear it up if I could. I do want you all to understand more particularly that I'm--that I'm not 'on the make' in this business." He paused a moment, but no one made any comment--unless Turner's slight nod of the head could be regarded as an invitation for him to continue. "I feel, you see, for one thing," Arthur went on, "that I am in a sense at least an outsider, not one of the family anyhow, and I do realise too that the circumstances are pretty well unique. So what I thought of proposing was that I should make some sort of undertaking--I'd put it in writing--that if by any extraordinary chance I should be--be specially favoured later, if you know what I mean, I would hand most of anything I got, back to the family. I should think we could get some sort of binding deed drawn up to that effect, couldn't we?" Not until he stopped speaking did Arthur see how terribly he had embarrassed them by thus naming the secret thing in public. Mrs Turner was fumbling with her work; her husband leaned back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling; and Elizabeth, flushing slightly, got up and walked over to the window. It was his aunt who answered him, however, indirectly. "Perhaps we'd better go into another room, Catherine," she said, addressing her sister-in-law. "I've never been able to understand legal affairs, and this proposal of Arthur's, so far as I understand it, seems to be something of the kind." Mrs Turner grabbed her work and got up with a nod of agreement, but then some purpose seemed to stiffen her. She hesitated, nearly dropped the bead bag she was making, and said in a scarcely audible voice, "But we do appreciate the spirit of it all the same." "Oh, rather! of course," her brother echoed her. Turner returned to that as an opening, when the three men were left alone to discuss the proposition that had been vaguely indicated. "Very decent of you, Woodroffe," he said; "and you put the thing quite delicately too; but you understand, don't you, that it would never do to have any kind of formal agreement?" "I don't. I should prefer it to be as formal and binding as possible," Arthur protested. Joe Kenyon shook his head. "No, no, it would never do," he said. "You see, my boy, the old man might think we'd been influencing you." "Good Lord! I'd make that clear enough to him," Arthur exclaimed. The two older men exchanged a smile that pitied his innocence. "You don't know him," Turner remarked caustically. Arthur was a trifle disgusted. He was still warm with gratitude to the old man who had treated him so delightfully that morning, and he resented the bitter note of aspersion in Turner's voice. "He has been most frightfully decent to me," he said coldly. Joe Kenyon began to drum on the arm of his chair. "Well, no need to go into that, eh, Charles?" he asked nervously. "The point is--what we've got to make clear to Arthur comes to this, that we're quite glad, what! to trust his word without any damned deeds and so on?" "Oh, quite! quite!" Turner agreed. "But you know ..." Arthur began to protest. "My dear chap," Turner interrupted him, "if we can trust you to do the straight thing that's surely all that's necessary. Shake hands on it, if you like; but no parchments, for the Lord's sake." "Very good of you," Arthur mumbled, a little overwhelmed by this evidence of their faith in him. "If we hadn't trusted you, I couldn't have said what I did last night," his uncle put in. "And I for one am very grateful to you for interfering in Hubert's affair." He sighed profoundly as he concluded: "It will help him in some ways, I don't doubt." There was apparently nothing more to be said, and Arthur was on his feet preparing to go when Turner remarked casually to his brother-in-law, "Totting 'em up pretty fast just now, isn't he? That'll make three more of us if poor old Ken has to come in." Joe Kenyon's only reply was to draw down the corners of his mouth and raise his eyebrows. Arthur did not want to hear any more. He was sorry that he had heard so much. These petty criticisms of old Kenyon made him despise Turner and his uncle; they represented another aspect of their cowardice. Damn it, the old man was worth the lot of them, if you excluded Eleanor. He supposed that she would hear of his agreement with the family, and wondered if she would apologise to him. IX Arthur received a letter from Somers by the second post. It was still raining, and he was playing billiards with Turner when the letter arrived, so he did not open it until after tea. Somers had written in a mood of depression. Bates, Arthur's successor at the Peckham surgery, was not a success. "The fool means well, too well," Somers wrote; "but I was wrong in anticipating that the panel patients would like him. They don't. They have taken his measure, and all his good intentions can't disguise the fact that he is pudden-headed. When are you going to Canada? If you _are_ going? Isn't that visit of yours being amazingly protracted? I suppose you're lapped in luxury and can't tear yourself away. Or have you got a permanent job there as tame medico to the old man? Or is it a girl? I wish to God you would write and tell me in any case. I can't keep Bates (he has got on my nerves) and I should like to know for certain if there is the least hope of your coming back. I can't see you marrying for money, and if the hypothecated girl is the right sort, she would face the world with you on five hundred a year. I might make it up to that. The private practice is better than it was. Sackville, who has been here so long, is getting too old. You and I between us would get pretty nearly all the new people. And if my first guess was the right one and you've got some sort of sinecure in the Hartling household, the sooner you chuck it the better, my son. For one thing you'll get soft, and for another you'll get no experience. If you were doing hospital work (which you ought to be), I should not try to tempt you away, but if you are just letting your mind rot, I shall think it is my duty to save you at any cost." As he read, Arthur lost the sense of his surroundings. He visualised the narrow sitting-room of the little Peckham house, and heard Somers's voice telling him that he ought to be doing hospital work or getting varied experience in a general practice; that he was becoming soft, going to pieces from a professional point of view. He blushed like a student under the rebuke of the demonstrator. Then he looked up and the illusion vanished. He saw that all his circumstances were now changed. All that advice would be sound enough if he were forced to return to such a general practice as Peckham. But if the old man left him, say £10,000, he might have a shot for his Fellowship; try for a registrarship at one of the bigger hospitals; perhaps get on the staff of one and set up in Wimpole Street. With a certain amount of capital, this would be so much easier, and the war had given him a taste for minor surgery. Indeed, it had always appealed to him more than medicine. Meanwhile, it was true that he must not let himself get rusty. He ought to go on reading, order some books from town; or at least have the _Lancet_ sent to him every Friday. He must keep himself up to date while he was waiting. At the outside, he could not have to wait more than five years. He would only be thirty-three then.... He paused doubtfully on that thought, but just then Hubert came in, and the moment of uneasiness passed and was forgotten. It had stopped raining and Hubert thought that they might put in nine holes before dinner. It was made clear on the way up to the links, however, that golf was not Hubert's goal on this occasion. He had a wild hope that Miss Martin might be found at the Club House. He had wanted, naturally enough, to tell her at once that the engagement was to be permitted, but his grandfather had sent him up to the farm on a job that had kept him busy all the afternoon. "Probably did it just to tantalise me a bit," Hubert complained; "teach me that I couldn't have everything my own way." "Oh, surely not!" Arthur protested. He was offended, again, by this imputation of unworthy motives to old Mr Kenyon. "I don't believe any of you understand him," he continued warmly. "We had quite a long talk this morning and he rather came out of his shell. He may seem a bit hard and inhuman at times, you know, but underneath, I'm certain he's trying to do the best for everybody." Hubert looked faintly surprised. "Oh! that was the way he took you, was it?" he remarked. "There you go again," Arthur said. "You, all of you, seem to have made up your minds that--that--I don't know----" He could not complete his sentence. He could see that they all feared the old man, but they never brought any explicit charge against him unless it were that he bullied them into staying on at Hartling. And all that had been explained. Arthur, remembering his conversation of the morning, was strongly inclined now to take the old man's side. He knew their weaknesses. They were a poor lot obviously. They lacked independence of spirit; if they were allowed to go out into the world they would come awful croppers like the unfortunate, hot-headed James, Eleanor's father. The old man had learnt a lesson in the course of that affair. He was a bit of an autocrat, no doubt; but he had good reason to be, with a family that could not be trusted. Hubert appeared either unwilling or unable to provide a definition of the family's attitude. "Oh, well," he said, "no good discussing that, is it? Here we are and we've got to put up with it. And, personally, you know, I don't care much now--partly thanks to you, old man." Only "partly," Arthur reflected, but he made no comment on that. "That's all right, then," was all he said. Hubert was in luck, for Miss Martin was at the Club House, drawn thither, no doubt, by the same hope that had stimulated her lover, and although they cheerfully proposed a foursome, Arthur knew that they would sooner be alone, and declined. The proposed fourth player in the case was Fergusson, the general practitioner from the village, to whom reference had been made when the post of medical attendant had been first offered to Arthur. He and Fergusson had met once or twice on the links, but their brief conversations had so far been limited to golf. The doctor was a man of sixty or so, with thick gray hair and moustache and a strong, clumsy figure. Arthur had formed the opinion that he was rather a surly fellow. "Care to take me on for nine holes--haven't time for more?" Arthur asked him. Fergusson nodded. "Not that I'm particularly anxious to play," he said. "The ground will be very wet, I'm thinking, after all the rain we've had to-day. I just looked in on my way home, without much idea of getting a game. Indeed, to be honest, I've had a very long day and am not so anxious to exert myself." "Scattered sort of practice, I expect," Arthur commented. "Have a cigar." Fergusson accepted the cigar with a nod of thanks. "One of your perquisites?" he asked, smiling rather grimly. Arthur stiffened. "Never thought of it like that," he said. "They're all over the shop up there. You just take 'em as you want 'em." "No need to get ruffled," Fergusson replied quietly. "I know. I used to be up there once a week or so before you came. Nice little sinecure." "But I say, look here," Arthur said, suddenly conscious for the first time that he might have been guilty of a breach of medical etiquette, "you don't mean to tell me that I've taken away one of your cases?" Fergusson laughed dryly. "Well, you have and you haven't," he said. "But your conscience is no doubt clear enough and everything was done in proper form. The old man wrote to me and explained, and I went up and talked it all over with him. You were playing golf on that occasion, I'm thinking. However, it'll be a soft job for you." Arthur still looked uneasy. "I never once thought about you in that connection, you know," he said. "I ought, anyhow, to have come and seen you." "Oh, no need to fash yourself," Fergusson returned. "Mr Kenyon was very considerate about the affair. I'm not complaining." "Yes, he is very considerate," Arthur agreed, automatically. Had Fergusson been promised a place in that untidy will as compensation? was the thought that flashed across his mind, a thought that was in some indefinable way unpleasant. He did not grudge the doctor his possible legacy, he sincerely hoped that it might be a big one, but he had a feeling of vague distaste for the principle involved. Why should the old man trade on these rather equivocal promises of future reward? He had given convincing reasons with regard to his own family, but they did not apply to Fergusson, nor to Scurr, the chauffeur, and the other servants. Arthur decided to try a "feeler." "But hang it," he said, "I've done you out of a certain amount of income. All the consideration in the world doesn't make up for that." Fergusson, looking slightly self-conscious, studied the ash of his cigar. "He's a queer old customer in some respects," he remarked illusively. Arthur chose to overlook that comment. "I think you ought to know," he said, "that I'm not being paid any salary for my job. There's my keep, of course, but in a house like that one person more or less can't make any difference." "Eh! Is that so?" Fergusson said. "And are you staying on indefinitely?" "Well ..." Arthur explained, with a wave of his hand. "I take you," Fergusson acknowledged. "I was on much the same terms. And how d'you think the old man's looking? I've known him for twenty-five years, and he has hardly changed a hairsbreadth in that time. He'll be ninety-two this year, I'm told; but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he was seventy or a hundred and ten. Indeed, it's come to me lately that I'd have been better advised to have sent him in a whacking account when he turned me off, for it's likely enough that he'll outlive me. However, you stand a better chance than I do, for I presume you can give me thirty years." Arthur shivered slightly. His suspicion had been fully confirmed, and the thought of it troubled him. Still, from one point of view, it was reasonable enough that Mr Kenyon should have this particular eccentricity. All his life he had been wrestling with a family that could not be trusted with money, and the habit had possibly grown into an obsession. He looked at Fergusson, who was somewhat grimly enjoying his cigar. He had all the appearance of an honest man. "Known him twenty-five years, have you?" he commented. "Ay!" Fergusson said. "I came to this damned place when I was thirty-seven, and I thought I was in luck to get hold of a rich patient like Kenyon. Well, as you can judge from what I told you, he looked an oldish man then. Not so withered naturally, but if he was only sixty-six at that time I should say that he looked more than his age. But there you are. I knew an old chap of the name of Simon--he has been dead God knows how long--who was a contemporary of Kenyon's, used to do business with him in the 'sixties, and he has told me that Kenyon was always a dry stick--one of those men who look old at forty and never change afterwards. "And there's another queer thing he told me," Fergusson went on, after a slight pause, "a thing you'll be disinclined to credit, which is, that Kenyon was never a good business man--not really able or far-sighted, that is." "But he made a pile of money," Arthur put in. "He did," Fergusson said, "but Simon used to say that he got it by sheer luck; that he never touched an investment that didn't go right by some fluke or another, though by all the laws of probability, it ought to have gone just the other way. Maybe Simon was a bit jealous, but he had a mighty poor opinion of Kenyon as a business man--though begob, I'm inclined to differ from him, myself." "He has been most frightfully decent to me," Arthur commented uneasily; and remembered that he had made the same remark to Turner a few hours earlier. "Ay, he would be that," Fergusson said. "There have been times when I have liked him very well myself; but I always had the feeling that there was something queer about him--a trifle uncanny, if you know what I mean." "Oh, well! Perhaps. I don't know," Arthur said. "He seems sometimes to be extraordinarily detached; as if he were living a sort of life of his own." "Hm! Likely enough," Fergusson agreed. "Simon told me that Kenyon had a hell of a time when he was a young man. His father, who was in the business before him, was one of your old-fashioned bullies. Used to treat his son like a dog, Simon said. So no doubt Kenyon got the habit of keeping things to himself then, and it stuck to him after his father was dead." "Yes, that might account for it, in a way," Arthur admitted. Arthur's thoughts went back to that conversation as he dressed for dinner. He was inclined to trust Fergusson. Fergusson had been very decent about his supersession at Hartling, and it did not seem likely that his rather disparaging attitude had been designed to frighten his rival out of the field. Indeed, a few weeks ago such a suspicion would not have crossed Arthur's mind; but there was some influence in the air of Hartling that bred suspicions of that kind, and he put them from him now with a just perceptible sense of self-approval. The trouble that still faced him was that even when he had deliberately cleared his mind of any doubts concerning the good-faith of all the many potential legatees, he was thrust back upon a doubt of the man who appeared in the rôle of his benefactor. A few hours ago he had whole-heartedly advised and trusted him. When he had come away from his interview that morning, he had definitely ranged himself on the old man's side, had, as he believed, learnt at last to understand and approve the old man's motives. But then, as always, he had been induced by various influences to doubt again. It seemed so impossible in this place to arrive at any certainty. No theory he had been able to formulate accounted for all the facts, not even the far-reaching, comfortable theory that there was a certain amount of right--and wrong--on both sides. There appeared to be some secret, some key to the whole situation, that was as yet beyond his reach. Could Eleanor put it in his hands? His thought turned towards her with a leap of hopeful anticipation. She had given him no sign so far that she had repented her manifest disapproval of him that morning. She, too, perhaps, was being continually swayed by the uncertainties bred of the Hartling condition. But it might be that she had not yet heard of the unsigned agreement that he had made in imitation of her own method? In any case, he had an excuse for asking her to have a little quiet talk with him. She owed him an explanation. He could even demand it.... He might be able to judge by her expression at dinner whether she had changed her opinion of his motives since the morning, and if he found the least evidence of her softening towards him, he would ask her to listen to what he had to say; to the reasons that had decided him to stay on at Hartling until her grandfather died. But he received no sign from Eleanor in the course of dinner. She would not look at him. Though he persistently stared at her, trying to attract her attention, she managed to avoid his glance with a steadiness which could not have been accidental. She talked more than usual both to Hubert and his father who sat on her other side, but so far as he was able to overhear her conversation, the subject of it had no relation to his own plans or doings. Most of her talk seemed to be concerned with Hubert's fiancée, Dorothy Martin. And Arthur's own attention was continually being distracted by Elizabeth. Never before had she been so ready to flirt with him. It seemed that she had dressed for the part. She was wearing a gown that he had not seen before, and that was something too elaborate for a family dinner. Her plump, well-developed bust and shoulders emerging with an effect of challenge from a foam of pink chiffon, looked almost startlingly naked. Nevertheless, if it were a trifle theatrical, the dress suited her brunette prettiness, and gave value to the air of vivacity that she had, also, assumed. This was one of Elizabeth's most effective moods. He had seen her pert and rather forward on other occasions but never quite so daring as she was to-night. Yet he lacked the least inclination to flirt with her. He recognised her feminine attractions, but they failed to arouse him. Indeed, when he compared her with her cousin, dressed as usual in a soft, simple white frock, he found Elizabeth's forwardness vulgar, almost to him in his present mood repulsive. He responded to the best of his ability, he had no wish to snub her, but he felt that she must be distressingly conscious of her failure to strike fire from him. Miss Kenyon on his other side gave no indication of cherishing any ill-will against him for having defeated her that morning. He and she rarely talked to each other at the dinner table. They had nothing to say. And to-night her manner discovered no shade of difference from her habitual attitude towards him. Nevertheless, it was Miss Kenyon who, whether deliberately or not, thwarted him as they were leaving the table. She addressed some unnecessary remark to him as they were getting up, and thus gave Eleanor time to leave the room in front of them. When he was able to escape and follow her into the hall, she was half-way up the stairs. He paused in the hall, staring after her, and when she reached the second landing he caught her eye for an instant looking down at him. But she turned away again at once, and he had not the courage either to attempt to address her from that distance, or to follow her upstairs. He avoided Elizabeth when he went into the drawing-room and almost immediately haled Turner out into the billiard-room. Elizabeth did not follow them. No doubt she believed that her attractions had no power over him in his present mood. Arthur himself would have declared that they had not at that moment, and yet little more than an hour later he was seriously debating whether he would or would not propose to her. Billiards was a failure so far as he was concerned that evening. He could not get a shot himself and Turner's slick facility began to irritate him. He had to keep himself firmly in hand in order to hide his annoyance. And as the game went on his spirits sank lower and lower into a mood of profound depression. "You're off your game to-night," Turner commented jauntily, when Arthur rather impatiently refused to play again. "Anything the matter?" They were alone in the billiard-room--Hubert had not joined them to-night as usual--and Turner suddenly dropped into a mood of confidence. "Feel a bit doubtful about settling down here?" he went on. "You needn't. We've all passed through that stage, but you soon become reconciled; why shouldn't you? Get everything you can possibly want here except a certain measure of freedom, and no one's really free. It's one sort of slavery or another for every one of us. If I were you, my boy, I'd marry Elizabeth and make up my mind to it. Then you won't be continually on tenterhooks as to whether the old man's going to last one year more or ten." "Oh! Good Lord!" Arthur gesticulated. "It isn't that. I'm a bit out of sorts, that's all, touch of indigestion, I expect. No need to resort to desperate remedies for that." Turner smiled. "I won't tell Elizabeth," he commented dryly. "And if you take my advice you'll think it over. Coming back into the other room?" "No, I've got a letter to write," Arthur said, remembering that Somers would expect an answer to his main question. "I'll go upstairs, I think, good-night." He had wanted, savagely, to get away from Turner just then, but when he was upstairs in his bedroom he was oppressed by a sense of loneliness. There was not a single human being in that house in whom he could confide. He had, for instance, to write to Somers; he had to say that there was no chance of his returning to Peckham, and although he had given his promise and had really no option, he would have liked to talk it over with some one before making an irrevocable decision. Had not Turner been right after all? If Elizabeth was willing to marry him, would not her companionship alleviate the occasional tediousness and loneliness of life at Hartling? If they were married they might become friends. It was impossible to be on terms of real confidence with a girl of that sort until you were married to her. She was always too conscious of her sex and doubtful about your intentions. Now that he came to think of it, she had certainly looked very tempting in that pink frock. She was one of the prettiest girls he had ever known--though she might run to flesh in a few years' time. He got up from the table at which he had been sitting before a still virgin sheet of Hartling note-paper, and began to walk up and down the room. How familiar, even commonplace, that room had become to him, he reflected. A few weeks ago it had been a delicious enticement, a thing ardently desired. But he would have missed it horribly if he had had to go back to Peckham. Would his marriage with Elizabeth produce a like development of sensation, beginning with enticements and ardent luxuries that would gradually become familiar, a matter of habit? He was not in love with her, but he might be when he knew her better. At present he knew absolutely nothing about her inner life. They had never talked about anything but games for more than a minute at a time.... One thing was certain, he must write that letter and announce his decision. No other had been possible. Apart from his promise to Mr Kenyon, no sane man would hesitate a moment between the alternatives of Hartling and Peckham. He would ask Somers to recommend him some modern works on surgery. He would not allow himself to rust, although it was the practical experience that was most useful. Still, he would get that in hospital--later. No one could say how long he would have to wait, but Fergusson had been talking through his hat when he had said that the old man would probably outlive him. Fergusson was good for at least another ten or fifteen years, probably more; and people did not live to over a hundred. Give the old man five years at the outside. He would probably collapse quite suddenly at the end. But suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the old man left him, Arthur, nothing after all? No! he would not consider that. It was disloyal. He had had what amounted to a promise from him, and in common justice some compensation would have to be made for taking the best years of his life. The very fact that he was getting no salary was a guarantee--an absolute guarantee. Old Kenyon might have various eccentricities, they were only to be expected at his age, but he was a good sort, and if anything a shade too impartial in his administration of justice. And then, what about the idea of marrying Elizabeth if she would have him? He walked over to the window and leaned out. It was raining again, a light, steady rain. It looked as if they might be in for a lot of rain. Getting engaged to and marrying Elizabeth would be something to do, an excitement that would be a pleasant change from golf, billiards, croquet, and tennis. Should he go down now and try his luck? She had looked rather ripping in that pink frock. He would be able to put more ardour into his proposal when she was dressed like that. And, unless she had changed since dinner, she was in just the right mood. Still leaning out of the window, he began to picture the proposal. He saw himself alone with Elizabeth somewhere--he might make some excuse to take her into the library--and then, beginning to overcome her levity and caprice by his earnestness--he would say that he had been in love with her from the first, but that he had been afraid to tell her--no prospects--that sort of thing. He imagined her becoming suddenly serious, reciprocating his seriousness, confessing that she, too, had always--liked him. They would be quite close together when she admitted that, and he would put his arms round her waist or over her shoulders--she had lovely shoulders--and kiss her.... He came back into the room at that point of his dream and began to walk impatiently up and down. It was very queer, he couldn't in any way account for it; but he did not in the least want to kiss Elizabeth. He had just done the thing in imagination, very vividly and realistically, and it had not stirred him in the least degree. On the contrary, it had produced a sense of being mean and contemptible. He had often kissed girls in the past, and had always liked doing it. Did he feel like that now because Elizabeth was in a different class of life, or because that kiss would be the seal of his engagement to her? He conjured up the image of her as he had seen her that night at dinner, held it before him and studied it. No, the whole truth of the matter was that he did not want to kiss her, and that was the end of it. She was not, for some reason or other, his sort. He would now write his letter to Somers, and then go to bed. To-morrow he might make an opportunity to have that talk with Eleanor. He would like her to understand his reasons for staying on at Hartling. She ought to know that, as he had just written to Somers, he meant to go in for a serious course of study.... He could not conjure up the image of Eleanor at will, for some reason, but sometimes it came unexpectedly with amazing vividness when he was not thinking of her--some such picture of her as her swift glance down at him in the hall when she had been going upstairs that evening. X The arrangements for breakfast at Hartling were in keeping with Arthur's early estimate of the place as a first-class hotel. The members of the family came down when they chose, and between eight and ten o'clock there were rarely more than two people in the breakfast-room at the same time. Miss Kenyon and Hubert came first. Hubert had a habit of getting up at six in the summer, and Miss Kenyon was a precisian. Arthur succeeded them between half-past eight and nine and sometimes had his aunt for a companion. The other four straggled in uncertainly--Joe Kenyon or his sister was always the last--and occasionally their meals overlapped. So much Arthur knew from experience, and as he had never seen Eleanor in the morning, he had inferred that she probably breakfasted with her grandfather upstairs. He was greatly surprised, therefore, to find her at the table when he entered the room at half-past eight the next morning, surprised and for a minute or two distinctly embarrassed. He was never now in the mood for conversation so early in the day. Until he had come to Hartling he had always been fresh and eager in the morning, but the Kenyons were taciturn and inclined to be irritable at that time, and by degrees their example had influenced him. He presumed that it was their example, but he was not sure whether or not he could attribute to the same source the sense of dissatisfaction with himself that commonly haunted him now when he first woke; dissatisfaction and a strange feeling of staleness and of disinclination to begin his easy, amusing day. He addressed her as he might have addressed a casual acquaintance in a hotel. "Don't often see you down here in the morning," he remarked vapidly, as he rang the bell. "I've been given a holiday to-day," she said, without looking up. "And I was to tell you that you needn't go up this morning. My grandfather says he's feeling a little tired." "He had rather an exciting day," Arthur agreed; investigated the cold dishes on the sideboard, and then crossed the room and sat down opposite her. Eleanor went on quietly with her breakfast. She seemed prepared, he thought, to sit there in silence for the rest of the meal, while he on his part could think of no reasonably intelligent conversation. After the interval provided by the entrance of the butler, however, an opening presented itself to him. "What are you going to do with your holiday?" he asked. "It'll be rather too wet for tennis, won't it?" "I'm going for a long walk into Sussex," she said. His first thought was that he would now find no opportunity for a quiet talk alone with her that day. "All alone?" he asked. "I long to be alone, sometimes," she murmured. "It seems to me that you spend most of your time alone," he said. "We don't see much of you." She looked up at him with an expression that seemed to indicate both surprise and disappointment. "One can never be alone in the house," she said. He did not understand. "Are you always with your grandfather?" he asked. She shook her head and looked down again at her plate, as she said, "I meant that I couldn't think my own thoughts here." "And what do you think about when you're out all by yourself in Sussex?" he inquired. He felt that his tone was not right, that it held a suggestion of the jocular; but he felt shy and ill at ease, afraid of being too serious. "Just my own thoughts," she said quietly. He wanted to say something rather profound to show that he understood and sympathised, but every sentence he tried over in his mind appeared trivial and banal. He kept his head down as he muttered finally. "I've often wondered what you think about things." She made no reply to that, and he was afraid to look at her. His speech had sounded rather surly, he thought, and with the idea of amending it, he continued, "I mean that every one seems to take things for granted here, except you." "What sort of things?" she asked in a low voice. "Oh, well! speculations about life in general," he tried. "Yes, I don't think any of us are much given to that sort of thing," she replied. There had been some effect of a smile in her tone as she spoke, and he looked up and saw that she was indeed smiling, if a trifle ruefully. "Not even you?" he asked. She disregarded the implied flattery that distinguished her from all the other members of the family. "Have you done much speculating about life in general since _you've_ been here?" she returned. He had hardly begun his breakfast yet, but he laid his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair. "I wish you would let me come with you to-day," he said. "There are a heap of things I want to talk to you about. I know you don't like me, but it would be a real kindness if you would let me talk to you a little sometimes. There's simply no one here I can explain things to." "Why me?" she replied. "You're so different from all the others," he said. "And are you?" she asked. "Different from the others?" he repeated, staggered by the suggestion that he could be thought to resemble, in any particular, the other members of the Hartling circle. "Yes," she prompted him quietly. He stared at her frowning. "Am I the least like them?" he inquired with a faint trepidation in his voice. "Not yet, perhaps; but you will be," she said. "But they aren't like each other," he remonstrated. "Which of them shall I be like if I stay long enough, Uncle Joe, or Mr Turner, or Hubert ...?" "Aren't they all rather alike in one way?" she asked. He saw at once that they were; that there was some characteristic common to every one of them, even Miss Kenyon. Seen as individuals they were as different from each other as are the ears of wheat in a cornfield, but they all bowed the same way to the prevailing wind. In their attitude towards the head of the house they could all be relied upon to present the same face. "But you've been here fourteen years," he said, "and you're still different. Or do you think it takes longer than that to get assimilated?" "I'm not different," she replied. "Or I shouldn't be here still." "Of course, I don't know you," he said. "I've hardly seen you since the first three or four days I was here. But--well--I can't agree with you about that." She just perceptibly shrugged her shoulders. "You haven't said whether you will let me come with you on your walk," he began again, after a short pause. "I would sooner you didn't," she told him. "It can't do any good. There can be nothing new that you want to ask my advice about. I said all I had to say to you about that five weeks ago, and you took no notice. I can only repeat what I said then." "But I can't go now," he protested. "I've given my promise. I made a sort of bargain in fact." She shook her head impatiently. "You needn't keep it," she said. "That's absurd," he remonstrated, getting to his feet. "Of course I must keep my promise in any circumstances." "I suppose you do really believe that?" she asked, looking up at him. "Would you keep it just the same, for instance, if you knew for certain that it meant staying on here for ten years and getting nothing, absolutely nothing, at the end of it? Would you, honestly? Or don't you think you'd ask to be let off?" "I might ask to be let off," he admitted, after a few seconds' thought. "Then you'll only be keeping your promise or bargain or whatever it is because you want to stay--or because you've got to," she said. "Perhaps," he agreed. "But I've never said that I _didn't_ want to stay. I do." She sighed. "Precisely, and now we're back again to what I said just now. Whatever is the good of talking to _me_ about it?" "We might talk about other things," he suggested. "I should very much like to get away, too, for a few hours." She hid her face in her hands, leaning her elbows on the table, and he waited patiently for her answer. "Why don't you finish your breakfast?" she asked, when she looked up after what seemed to him a long interval of silence. "I have. I don't want anything more," he said. She got up then, and he thought she was going to leave him without deigning to take any further notice of his request, but when she was half-way across the room, she looked back and said, "Can you be ready in ten minutes?" He started forward with the eagerness of a dog beckoned by its mistress. "Do you really mean that?" he asked, hardly understanding his own excitement. She stood still regarding him with an expression that was half-amused and half-disdainful. "I didn't know you were so keen on long walks," she remarked, "or on getting away from here. Isn't this rather a new departure for you?" The look of eagerness left his face. "Perhaps it is," he said stiffly. "And it's hardly likely to be much of a success if--if you're going to take that sort of tone." "I told you that I didn't want you to come," she replied, and there was something of defiance in her tone and in the pose of her firm, upright figure. "I should at least like to know why you have taken such a dislike to me," he said. "But you might not feel inclined to tell me that in any case." "Oh! dislike," she responded, almost contemptuously. "That's much too strong a word." He had a sense of hopeless frustration. All her half-unwilling responses appeared now to have been nothing more than a condescension to his ineptitude. And he was all too horribly conscious of the fact that he deserved nothing better than her contemptuous opinion of him. He was just an average young man of twenty-eight. He had done nothing that thousands of other young men had not done as well or better. The only boast he could have made would have been that of ambition, a boast that was no longer possible for him after his recent admission that he meant to stay on at Hartling and liked being there. He knew intuitively what her reply would be, if he told her that he meant to study, to prepare himself for the work of a specialist. Indeed, he himself saw that project, now, as little more than a fatuous piece of self-deception. Practice was what he wanted: book-work would be no good without that. And in five years he would be soft and over-fed; his nerve would be gone. He looked down and began to trace the pattern of the carpet with his toe. "Yes, I'm not worth hating," he muttered. She turned away with a gesture of impatience. "Well, shall you be ready in ten minutes?" she threw at him over her shoulder. "But if you would so much sooner I didn't come ..." he conceded humbly. "I'll meet you in the hall," she said, as she went out. He hesitated again while he was putting on his shoes. If she merely despised him, as she obviously did, what was the use of trying to win her confidence? Nothing he could say or do would alter her opinion of him. He had nothing to say. There was nothing he could do. The most he could hope for would be to defend his position by argument. He had little doubt that her contempt for him was based on the fact that he had consented to stay on at Hartling; and it might be well that she had not, as yet, a proper understanding of his reasons. She might not have heard of his verbal compact with the family made the previous day? Was it worth while attempting his own defence? He was still weighing that question when she joined him in the hall. He continued to weigh it as they walked together in silence down the length of the garden. The clouds were lifting, and before they reached the big gates the sun broke through. He looked up, noted the promise of a hot, fine day, and his spirits began to rise. What did it matter whether or not she despised him? He was a free man. He was not in any way dependent upon her opinion. If she chose to snub him, he could leave her to continue her walk alone. He could be perfectly happy without her. He was twenty-eight, in perfect health, and without a care in the world. Why shouldn't he enjoy life in his own way? If he had a regret at that moment, it was that he had eaten hardly any breakfast. He began to whistle softly under his breath. He had no intention of beginning the conversation. He was content to enjoy the day and the adventure of this walk--the first he had undertaken since he had come to Hartling. Except for the path to the links and the links themselves, he knew nothing of the country round about. None of the family ever seemed to bother about going outside the grounds. They had this amazing garden and were, presumably, satisfied with that. How little Eleanor was satisfied with it, however, was shown the moment they passed through the gates into the dusty high-road. She set back her shoulders, lifted her head, and gave a sigh of relief. "It's going to be fine, after all," she said. "I think we'll strike across country to a place I know where we can look right over to the South Downs. It's so big and open there." There was no hint of embarrassment or restraint in her manner. She might have forgotten everything that had passed between them that morning; and Arthur, on his side, was quite willing to postpone his arguments and explanations, or even to omit them altogether. If she were going to treat him decently for the time being, that was all he asked. "Sounds jolly," he said. "It's seven or eight miles," she warned him. "Oh! that's nothing," he returned. "_I'm_ good for all that and more. But are _you_?" "I've done it twice in the last ten days," she said. "This holiday of yours is not altogether an exception to the general rule, then?" he asked. "I've been out several times--lately," she admitted. He thought he detected the suggestion of some reservation in her answer, and said, "Only lately? Do you mean that this is a new freedom for you?" She manifestly hesitated before she replied to that, and her "Oh, no! not new exactly," still left him in doubt as to what was in her mind. They had left the main road now, and were walking in an olive-green twilight along a deep, narrow lane, its banks lush with fern luxuriating in the warm shade afforded by high banks, topped by hornbeam and hazel hedges that nearly met overhead. Arthur lifted his hat, and wiped his forehead. "It's exactly like being in a hothouse down here," he said. "Rather ripping though." "We shall come out on to the common a few yards farther on," Eleanor replied. "It's almost too hot to talk here, isn't it?" He conceded that, but when they had walked on in silence for fifty yards or so she suddenly said, "I know I'm not being honest with you, but I will be presently, even if it does mean talking about things I would so much sooner forget. Forgetting isn't being honest, even with oneself. Only not till we're right out in the open if you don't mind." "Of course I don't mind," Arthur responded warmly. "And I'd like you to do exactly what you want to about--being honest. If you'd sooner not talk about the other affair, we won't." She nodded her agreement, but he was uncertain whether or not she meant to revert to Hartling as a topic of conversation when they were "in the open." And, when presently they came out on to the common, it seemed that she was still skirting that topic, for she began to talk about the war. "I was only fifteen when it began," she said, in answer to some comment of Arthur's. "And I really didn't understand all that it meant until it was nearly over. My grandfather used to keep the papers away from me, and told my governess--Elizabeth and I shared a governess then--not to tell us about it. But we all shirked it; tried to pretend that we couldn't do anything. And in a way it never touched us. Hubert would have gone if my grandfather had let him, and at that time I thought Hubert was being silly about it." She paused and drew in her breath with an effect of lamenting her own blindness. "But you couldn't have helped if you'd known, you, personally, I mean," Arthur said. "I might have been a nurse," she protested. "If you had you couldn't have come in till right at the end," he returned, "and, Lord, we had quite enough amateurs at that game as it was. Though, as it happens, it crossed my mind that you would make a good nurse the first time I saw you." "_I_ believe I should, too," she agreed. "I hope I may be some day." He made no comment on that though he was aware that something within him resented the thought of her ever becoming a professional nurse. "You _did_ go through the war, at all events," she went on, rather as if she sought an excuse for him. "I, and about five million other men," he put in, determined to take no credit on that score. "It makes a difference, all the same," she returned. "To what?" he asked. "Oh! everything comes back to the same place," she said, looking out straight in front of her. "I knew it would, when you asked to come with me. When I'm alone I'm dishonest enough to forget--deliberately. I can--generally. I lose myself in other thoughts." "Meaning that I'm spoiling your day," he put in. "But I don't see why we should talk about--_that_--if you'd sooner not. I can forget too." "No, no, we _must_ talk about it," she said, "only I find it so difficult to begin. There are some things--one thing at all events that you don't know and that I find it very hard to tell you. But let's wait until after lunch. You had no breakfast, and I know a funny little lost place on our way, where we can get something to eat. It won't be anything but ham and eggs, and bread and cheese, of course." Arthur felt that he wanted nothing better just then, and said so. "Afterwards," she concluded, "we will go to that place where you look across to the South Downs, and--and--have it all out." He was quite content with that. Whatever "having it all out" might portend, she was treating him now frankly and with a certain confidence. Her manner since they had left Hartling behind them, had completely changed. She might presently criticise him in a way that he would find intolerable. They might openly quarrel. But anything would be better to endure than that air of contempt and reserve she had displayed at breakfast. He would, at least, be given the opportunity to defend himself. He felt sure that she had not understood his attitude, as yet. Their immediate difficulty was to find a topic of conversation that would avoid any kind of reference to the affairs of Hartling, and a few experiments further demonstrated how the thought of those affairs was, just then, obsessing them to the exclusion of all other interests. All that seemed possible were disjointed scraps of comment upon the scenery, or the wild flowers and ferns of that luxuriant Sussex country--until they reached Eleanor's little wayside inn, and could drop into the familiar interchanges of two rather hungry young people awaiting the inevitable fried ham and eggs that was being prepared for them. The inn lay in a valley, and as soon as they finished their meal, Eleanor pointed to the hill in front of them. "We have to climb that and then we are there," she said. "Shall we go now?" Arthur agreed willingly enough. He was both eager and apprehensive; at once anxious to hear what she had to say and a little fearful of the effect. So long as they could walk together in silence he had a pleasant feeling of content in her company. Surely she liked him better since they had been alone together? She had not given the least sign of despising him in the course of the past two hours. Yet even when they had reached the summit of the hill that marked the limit of their journey, Eleanor still hesitated. She was sitting on the grass, leaning a little backward and supporting herself on the out-thrown struts of her arms and hands. Arthur lay on the ground a few feet away from her. Both of them were looking out across the weald to the broad, blue contours of the South Downs that determined their horizon, and hid the foundations of the massed and shining range of cumulus, slowly setting beyond. A light, cool wind was blowing up from the invisible sea, and the heat of the early July sun was screened by a thin veil of haze that trailed an immense scarf of almost transparent cloud across the sky. Arthur was enjoying a sense of great comfort. He wanted neither to move nor to speak, and he seemed to be aware that Eleanor's inclination ran with his own. Yet he knew that the crisis could not be much longer postponed. If they merely enjoyed their pleasant idleness and returned to Hartling without having approached the important issue that had been impending ever since he had made his decision on the previous day, they would only continue in their present impossible relations. What the alternative might be he could not guess, though he had a premonition that it would not, in any case, be entirely agreeable. Some conflict was inevitable, and it must be faced. It might well be, he thought, that here on this Sussex hill, he would be confronted with a choice that would prove the turning point of his whole life. They had sat there in absolute silence for more than ten minutes when Arthur at last said,-- "Well, shall we talk now and--and get it over?" She did not change her position nor turn her gaze from the distances of the South Downs as she replied,-- "We will talk, but you mustn't think that we can ever 'get it over.' It will go on just the same--perhaps for years and years." "In one sense, perhaps," he admitted, his eyes admiringly intent on her steady profile; "but it will get over this--this misunderstanding between you and me, I hope." "It may," she said; "but you don't in the least understand yet. You don't understand, for instance, that after this, either you or I will have to leave Hartling." He sat up with a start of surprise, and moved a little nearer to her. "But, good Lord; _why_?" he asked in a voice that sufficiently expressed the depth of his incomprehension. "Because of that thing you don't know," she said, still without turning her head; "because my grandfather wants to--to throw us together." And then, having unburdened herself of this difficult essential, she continued quickly before he had time to reply, "That's why I've been given so many holidays lately, though that isn't my chief reason for knowing. Not that that matters, does it? I do know for certain; never mind how. And I have known, oh! for a month or more, though he has never said a word to me directly. So you see now, don't you, that that's a fact which makes all the difference to our talk, and how impossible it was for me to say anything to you until you knew it too?" He waited for a few seconds after she had finished before he said quietly, "I ought to have guessed really; but I didn't. He said something to me about it yesterday morning--that he had hoped you and I would be friends, or something of the sort." "And you, what did you say?" she put in. "I told him that I was afraid you didn't like me, and then he said that in that case there was nothing more to be done. We didn't mention it again. It was before I told him about Hubert." "Though, whether I like you or not has nothing whatever to do with it, of course," she commented thoughtfully. "Hasn't it?" he asked, as if he doubted that inference. "Nothing whatever," she insisted. "Still if--I mean--it seems to me that ..." he began; but she cut him short by saying with an impatient lift of her chin,-- "I know what you mean, perfectly well. You needn't try to put it into words. That isn't really the point at all." "What is the point then?" he asked in bewilderment. "I may be frightfully stupid, but I can't quite see...." She turned her face still farther away from him as she said in a scarcely audible voice, "Nothing should ever induce me to be a bait for you." A bait! He saw in a flash the peculiar implications of the word she had used, but hesitated to accept them. "You can't mean that Mr Kenyon has deliberately tried to--throw us together, in order to keep me in the house?" he urged, his tone apologising for the unlikelihood of such a wild deduction. "Of course I mean that," she returned bitterly. "But why?" he pressed her. "Why should he want to keep me as much as all that?" "He does," she said, and then as he was manifestly still doubtful, continued, "I can't tell you why. I don't know. I only know that he wants to keep us all there till he dies. But you--you were different. I wondered when he first invited you what he meant to do. There was something I disliked, instinctively, in the way he asked about you. It was just as if he--he was trying to catch you then. And when I saw you that first night I tried to warn you. I daren't say very much. We none of us dare because we know that he's--oh! inhuman in a way; that he would turn any one of us out to-morrow without a penny if he thought that we were working against him. "Oh! surely not," Arthur protested. She laughed scornfully. "He seems to have made you believe in him," she said. "He has been most frightfully decent to me, you see," Arthur replied emphatically. "Did he say anything to you about my father yesterday?" she asked, turning to face him for the first time. "Something," he acknowledged. "Did he tell you how my father pleaded with him, offered to do or to be anything, if only he might be allowed to marry my mother?" Arthur shook his head. "No, he didn't tell me that. What was his objection?" he said. "My father never knew--unless it was that my mother had no money of her own. I only know what Uncle Joe told me, of course, but he heard all about it at the time. I don't believe that he had any real objection. You can never be sure whether he will say yes or no to anything, but you may be quite certain whichever it is, that he will stick to it afterwards whatever happens. And he said 'No' to my father, and turned him out of the house because he was willing to give up anything in the world rather than my mother. And when he had been gone about a month he sent that elephant's foot that stands in the hall. He meant it as an insult. Uncle Joe says that they were afraid to tell him. They all knew what it meant, of course; that it was a sort of symbol of his methods. But he wasn't the least bit insulted. He seemed to be proud of it, and had it put where it is now, for every one to see." She had been speaking rapidly, almost fiercely, with an excitement completely unlike her usual rather staid manner. "But why have you gone on staying there if you feel like that?" Arthur asked. She put her hands up to her face for a moment and then looked at him with a whimsical smile. "You aren't the only person who has been blind," she said. "Do you mean that you have only been feeling like that just lately?" he asked. "I was only seven when I came," she said, "and I was brought up there. I never went to school. And you take things for granted when you're brought up in a place because it's the only world you know, and you think the others must be much about the same. I did begin to wake up a little in the last year of the war, but even then it all seemed natural enough in a way. He was so old, and one made all sorts of excuses for him. And then, of course, for months or even years at a time he seems to be as sweet and gentle as any one could be. He can be most awfully kind to people...." She paused on a reflective note, as if she still sought excuses for him. "But what happened to make you change your mind just lately?" Arthur prompted her. She blushed vividly, and again turned her eyes towards the lavender distances of the downs. "I've really seen the thing happening for myself," she said in a low voice. "I'd had hints from Uncle Joe before, plenty of them; but like you I didn't believe them. There was more excuse for me. I had been brought up with it. I believed he was odd, eccentric. He might seem rather cruel sometimes; but I thought, as I suppose you do still, that he was really trying to do the best for every one." "But you don't now?" Arthur asked. "I've been watching him--and thinking--since you came," she said slowly, hesitating between her phrases. "And it has seemed--as if I had got the key of a puzzle that had been worrying me. It--it worked. It accounted for so much that had been just a little mysterious. I have had, sometimes, a horrid feeling of uneasiness and have been angry with myself for doubting him. But after you came--I suppose it was just an accident that it was connected with you, more particularly; it would have been just the same with any one else, of course--well after that, as I said just now, I saw it all happening." She paused, but Arthur made no reply. He was leaning on his elbow looking down over the broken sweep of the weald. For him, the "key" of which she had spoken was not yet plain. There were traits in the character of the old man, that Arthur believed were not consistent with Eleanor's judgment of him as "inhuman." His mind was busy with the search for excuses and extenuations, when Eleanor began in a new voice, "I suppose you think it very rotten of me to have said all that about him, and, in any case, you don't believe me." "I do; I do," Arthur protested, rousing himself from his abstraction. "I don't think it's rotten of you in the very least. What I'm doubting is whether your deductions are sound." She appeared now to have given up any hope of persuading him, and looked at him with a frank smile as she said, "Well, I suppose we ought to be setting our faces towards home?" "Oh, no! not yet," Arthur replied, with such evident distress in his voice that she laughed outright. "But surely you must be pining to get back to your golf and billiards and croquet?" she suggested. "Or, if we start now, we might get in some tennis after tea." "I don't believe I have ever heard you laugh before to-day," was Arthur's answer. "It isn't exactly a gay house, is it?" she replied. "My Lord, no, it isn't," Arthur agreed, after a moment's reflection; "though I don't think I'd thought of it like that before. Elizabeth always laughs as if she had been wound up inside and set going, and none of the others really laugh at all. Certainly Hubert doesn't. I wonder if Miss Martin will?" Eleanor's face grew grave again. "Oh! the poor dear," she exclaimed. "She'll probably get my job." "Your job?" Arthur ejaculated. "But you're not going to give it up, are you?" She smiled tolerantly. "Didn't I begin by saying that?" she reminded him. "Either you or I will have to go, and it's quite clear that you can't." "Can't?" he repeated "If _you_ go...." She gave him no time to complete his sentence. "As you pointed out this morning," she put in quickly, "you've promised to stay. My conscience is clear of promises, at any rate." "But, good Lord, where could you _go to_? What could you do?" he remonstrated. "I could go to the Paynes," she said, "the people who brought me over from Rio. He has retired from the Cable Company and they're living at a place called Northwood, somewhere near London, I think. I couldn't stay with them indefinitely, of course, but they would help me to get something to do. I'm quite well educated for a commercial career. Grandfather didn't want me to learn typewriting and shorthand, but he's glad now, because they're so useful to him. _My_ job isn't a sinecure, you know. I do really work quite hard. You'd be surprised what a big correspondence my grandfather has about his money affairs. And then I've got French, and I can read German, though I write it rather badly. I should think I ought to be worth about three pounds a week." "Oh, no!" Arthur exclaimed in despair. He could not endure the thought of her working in a city office. "But oh, yes!" she said. "I was thinking about it all before you came. The war made me dissatisfied. We none of us did anything, and I couldn't help feeling what empty, useless lives we were living here." "I don't see that you'd be doing anything more by working for a millionaire in the city than by working for Mr Kenyon," Arthur put in. "I know. That weighed with me," she agreed. "What I really want is to be a nurse. Only I don't quite know how to begin. But you can tell me about that, can't you?" He pushed her inquiry on one side. "I can't see," he said, "why either you or I have to leave. I can't really." She had been talking to him freely, almost gaily, but now her manner took on the air of constraint with which she had begun the conversation. "Need we go back to that?" she asked. "Why, of course we must," he said in an aggrieved tone. "As far as I can see that's what we came out to talk about." "But we settled it," she returned. "I'm going!" "And if I went? If I broke my promise and went instead, would you stay?" "I might for the sake of the others," she said. "I do help them a little. And in spite of everything, I'm sorry for him--for that wicked old man upstairs." She dropped her voice and looked down at her clasped hands as she concluded, "He _is_ wicked, although you may not believe it." "Even so," Arthur argued, choosing to ignore that point for the moment, "I don't in the least understand why my going should make any difference one way or the other." She bent her head a little lower as she said, "No doubt it's very quixotic and sentimental of me, but I can't bear to watch your life being ruined. It's different with the others. They're so helpless. Hubert is not fit to earn his own living, and Ken--if he comes--would probably be safer there than he would in town. He is very wild. If he comes, he'll probably marry Elizabeth and settle down." Arthur saw that at last the time had come to set out his defence. "Yes, but why take it for granted that I should be wasting my life?" he began, and then, with one or two pauses at first, but gathering confidence in his own argument as he went on, he laid before her his plans for studying at Hartling and his hope for the future. She listened to him attentively, attempting no comment, either by word or gesture until he had finished. He believed that he had convinced her, until she said gently,-- "And if my grandfather lives more than five years? What then?" "He can't," Arthur expostulated. "People don't live as long as that." "A few do," she said, "I saw in one of the papers a day or two ago, that Miss Spurgeon, the preacher's aunt, would be one hundred and one next month." Arthur shrugged his shoulders. "Frightfully exceptional case," he muttered. "This might be a frightfully exceptional case, too," she insisted. "You don't find anything wrong with him, do you? And he lives such a sheltered, detached sort of life. Nothing ever upsets him. He hasn't altered the least little bit, all the years I have known him. And you know, don't you, that thirty years ago it began in just the same way with the others? They thought that he wouldn't live more than five years, or ten at the outside." She could not look at him, as she concluded gently, "Don't waste your life as they've done. Anything would be better than that." He saw it all quite clearly. He knew that she was right. But something within him continued to protest fiercely against her advice. He could no longer doubt that she was entirely disinterested. He was consoled, even a trifle flattered, by the fact that she so evidently desired his welfare. But he didn't want to leave Hartling, and he feverishly sought excuses for staying. He could find half a dozen that would satisfy himself, but he knew them for sophistries and dared not put them into words. She, on her side, seemed disinclined to add anything to what she had already said, and for some minutes they sat in silence. Eleanor returned to her study of the distant downs and Arthur, with his head in his hands, furiously sought an escape from the dilemma imposed by her two alternatives. It was Eleanor who at last broke the long silence. "I must be going now," she said--sighed, rose to her feet, and began to brush and shake the grass from her skirt. "There is absolutely nothing more to be said," she continued, "and in any case we shall have plenty of time to say it on the way back." He nodded rather resentfully and followed a pace or two behind her as they made their way down the hill. He could not as yet overcome the feeling that it was "hard lines" on him to be sent away from Hartling. For that was what it all amounted to. _He_ would have to go--promise or no promise. He could not possibly allow her to get work in some city office, or enter herself as probationer at a hospital, while he idled away his time at Hartling. Also he hated the thought of her mixing either with city clerks or young medical students. They were a coarse lot, and she would certainly meet with all kinds of beastly advances. In imagination he could hear the men at the hospital talking about her among themselves, and his face burnt with anger, first at the intolerable familiarities of his hypothetical students, and then with himself for thinking these thoughts in connection with her. Still she would know how to protect herself. No one could be more aloof and cold than she was sometimes. If that warm generosity of hers did not betray her? Those silly young fools at the hospital would not understand. They.... He found a relief in mentally cursing the particular type of young medical student he had all too vividly pictured. He saw himself taking one of them by the throat and choking the life out of him. No, it was obvious that in no circumstances whatever, could she be permitted to face that kind of life. Plenty of nice girls did, of course; but she was different. And a city office would be just as bad, or worse. It was impossible to imagine her mixing with a crowd of dirty little Cockney clerks or greasy business men. Damn them. After all, Peckham would not be so bad. Somers was one of the best and would be tremendously glad to hear that he was coming back. Only--that would be the end, so far as any hope of seeing Eleanor was concerned--until the old man died--and it was perfectly true, as she had said, that he might be an example of one of those exceptional cases of longevity. He saw the probability more clearly now that his interest was more detached. Up there at the house, they were compelled to cheat themselves with the belief that it could not last much longer. Life would not be endurable without that hope. They had been living on it, some of them, for forty years.... He suddenly awoke to the fact that this might be the last time he would be alone with Eleanor and that he was wasting it in these perfectly detestable reflections, when he might be talking to her. "I've made up my mind," he said, quickening his pace to catch her up. "I'll go. You're quite right. I can't stay there now." She looked up at him with a hint of question in her face. "I couldn't stand the thought of your going into a hospital or an office," he continued. "You've no idea of the sort of thing that you have to put up with and the people that you have to mix with; no idea." "Oh! but I don't want you to go in order to save _me_," she exclaimed. "But _you'd_ go to save _me_," he returned. She gave a little protesting laugh. "No, I shouldn't save you if I went," she said. "You would stay on here then. All I said was that I would not be used as an influence to make you stay. You remember what I told you about my grandfather's plans. Well, sooner than that, I'd do anything. It's purely selfish, I admit that. I don't mind your being ruined, you see, but I won't take any sort of responsibility for it." "But in that case," he submitted. "I might stop on for a time at all events, if it was quite certain that _you_ weren't the case of my staying. "No, no; don't begin like that," she broke out passionately. "Once you begin to procrastinate and find excuses there'll be no end to it. That must have been how they all began." "You're evidently most frightfully anxious to get rid of me," he grumbled. He had seen a ray of hope and resented her instant extinction of it. "Oh! don't be so babyish!" she said petulantly. "You must know that it hasn't anything to do with getting rid of you." "I don't see what else it can be," he returned sulkily. She shrugged her shoulders but attempted no other answer, and they did not speak again until they were back in the deep, overhung lane and within half a mile of Hartling. It was there that he made his last effort. "Would it be risking too much if I stayed on for just one more week?" he asked. His spurt of temper had evaporated and he was once more humble, conciliating. "Why a week?" she replied doubtfully. He braced himself to make the test he had been considering for the last half-hour. "I should like to have one more talk with you before I go." "And you wouldn't say anything to my grandfather in the meanwhile?" "No. If I did he might sling me out." "You believe he'd do that, then?" "Oh, yes! I believe that." "But not that he is--inhuman?" "I find it difficult. No, I can't credit that." "But you _would_ stick to your idea of going at the end of a week from now?" "Absolutely." "I wonder if it's wise to let you stay a week?" she murmured half to herself. "Seven days surely can't make any difference," he pleaded. "Exactly; so why have them?" she returned. "No difference so far as my prospects are concerned," he said. "Oh, no!" she replied quickly, as if she were afraid that he might go on to elaborate his reasons for wanting his week's grace. "But are you quite sure of yourself? Are you sure that at the end of the week you won't want to put it off again?" "I give you my word of honour," he said solemnly, and went on, "I've made up my mind. I'll write to Somers as soon as I get in and tell him to expect me next Tuesday." They reached the gates of Hartling as he was speaking, and automatically they both paused as if this agreement were one that must necessarily be made outside that enclosure. "Very well," she said, and gave him her hand. He took it and held it as he replied. "And that other favour? You haven't granted it yet. Will you give me at least one more chance to talk to you alone before I go?" "Oh! you're sure to have that," she said lightly. "But will you promise?" "If you like," she agreed. It was as they were walking up the garden that they decided upon the necessity for keeping the news of his departure from the rest of the family. Some sense of freedom had left them as they passed through the gates, and already Arthur was beginning to wonder at the comparative ease with which he had made his decision to leave Hartling. Now that he was back again in the garden that had become so familiar to him in the course of the last five weeks he felt again the lure of its shelter. The place was so secure, so rich with the promise of comfort and rest, of freedom from all the struggles and responsibilities of the world. Probably none of the Kenyons had ever wanted to leave it (Hubert was happy enough now that he was going to marry Dorothy Martin. If he were offered £5000 to go to Canada with her, he probably would not take it). They pretended to be imprisoned, played with the idea of having ambitions. It was a sort of boasting. No doubt they wanted their jailor to die. He stood between them and the semblance of freedom. But when he was dead and they were independent, they would almost certainly go on living there just as they were doing now. They wouldn't want to change their habits after all these years. It was amazing how differently he saw the problem, now that he was back again within the enclosure of those protecting walls. Nevertheless, he wrote to Somers, even giving him the time of the train by which he might be expected on the following Tuesday. He was, he thought, being rather quixotic, but he meant to keep his promise to Eleanor, and ask to be released from the one he had made to the old man. And if that release were denied, what could he do? Insist? Say calmly that he meant to go whether he were released or not? Allow the old man to regard him as an ungrateful cad? Or make Eleanor bear witness? Make a clean breast of everything and say that one or the other of them had to go, and he preferred that it should be himself, for excellent reasons? It was just possible that they might both be turned out if the old man knew that they had been plotting against him as it were. On the other hand, he might suggest that the difficulty could be overcome--in another way. Arthur jumped to his feet and began to pace fiercely up and down his bedroom. Lord, if only that had been possible, what a difference it might have made. She had been kind enough to him while they were out together. He had some reason to believe that she did not, after all, really dislike him. But it was absolutely futile to hope that she would ever marry him. He was not good enough for her. She was the sort of woman who would love with all her heart and soul, if she ever loved at all. Probably she never would. There were not any men good enough for her.... He seemed to know her infinitely better since that walk. Before that he had had a vision of her as a forlorn little child of seven, but what she had told him this afternoon gave him the material to follow her development up to the present day. He could see her as a girl of sixteen, having lessons with her governess, and being kept in comparative ignorance of the war; and again a year or two later, beginning to guess at the true significance of that great catastrophe. He had a new sense of having known her all her life. It was difficult to imagine life without her. Yet, if this affair turned out as he had every reason to expect it would, he might never see her again.... A man was so impotent. If she did not care for him, that was the end of it. He could not make her care for him. The root of the whole trouble probably was that she despised him for staying on there in the first instance. She had classed him in her mind with all the others, a hanger-on, a weak fool who preferred to inherit money rather than to earn it! And, good God, she had been right! That was what he had been, a cursed parasite, living on a friendly host. Commensalism. Somers had guessed it too. Any one who had not been perverted by this infernal Hartling atmosphere could see it. And Eleanor, who had not been perverted, the one exception in that place, had judged him without bias, had seen him as he was. Little wonder that she had despised him. His one hope now was to prove that she had in effect misjudged him. He must tell her that he had realised, however tardily, the kind of weak fool that he had been, and he would support his confession by action. He would not wait for a week, he would go the next day. He would see her for a minute after dinner, and just announce his determination, ask her to make sure of his appointment with the old man next morning.... Before he went, he would make an opportunity to say good-bye to her. It was a heroic measure, but the only way by which he could hope to recover her esteem. In his bath, and while he was dressing for dinner, he deliberately took his leave of luxury. He had lived the life of a millionaire for more than five weeks; might live it, if he chose, for perhaps another five years. But he was willing, eager, to renounce it all in order that he might recover Eleanor's esteem. He would make still greater sacrifices if he could win that reward. And, oddly enough, there was another compensation which he had not consciously sought, but which he was instantly aware of as a result of his decision--he was a free man again. As he stood and looked at his reflection in the glass before going down to dinner, he was aware of that same feeling of release that had come to him when he had made his petition on behalf of Hubert, the day before. He lifted his head with a touch of arrogance and squared his shoulders. Good God! what a damned fool he had been ever to dally with the thought of staying on indefinitely at Hartling. He was an independent man now, in a kingdom of slaves. The Kenyons, after all, were to be pitied rather than condemned. What was the good of all this luxury if you were not the captain of your own soul? Ambition, work, and independence were the only things worth living for--if you could not have love. But if it had not been for _her_.... He was so full of his new resolve and so anxious to tell Eleanor, that he completely overlooked the unusually chastened air of the dinner-table that evening. He was trying to make an appointment with Eleanor by some almost invisible signal, and she persistently avoided his eloquent stare. Only twice did she meet his eyes, and on both occasions she turned away her head almost immediately. It seemed that he had lost all that he believed he had gained at the conclusion of their walk. Yet it was impossible that anything could have happened since, to change her new opinion of him. In any case, he would see her after dinner, even if he had to follow her upstairs. She would forgive him when she heard what he had to say. He hardly noticed that Elizabeth--who was dressed in black that evening, a colour that did not suit her--was moody and depressed, or that Miss Kenyon seemed to have temporarily lost something of her autocratic, self-contained manner. And he was far too engrossed with his own affairs to attempt any inferences from the slight indications that he could not altogether overlook. He merely assumed that they were a little duller than usual--and pitied them. He looked up once or twice at the head of the table, turning over in his mind the various approaches by which he might most gently break his news the next morning, but the old man showed no sign of any unusual disturbance. The moment Miss Kenyon gave her sister-in-law the signal to rise, Arthur jumped to his feet. He meant to allow no interference with his plans on this occasion. He was ready, if Miss Kenyon spoke to him, to pretend that he had not heard her. But no one intervened between him and Eleanor. They actually left the dining-room together. She turned towards the staircase as they entered the hall, and afraid that she might run away, he began at once, "Could I speak to you for one minute? It's important. I...." "Yes, I saw your signals at dinner," she interrupted him, none too graciously. "Oh! did you? I'm sorry. I thought you didn't understand," he apologised. "You see, the fact is that I have decided to go, to leave here, to-morrow. I wanted to tell you, because I must see Mr Kenyon before I go." They had reached the foot of the staircase now and she went up two stairs before she turned and looked at him, their eyes almost on a level. Her forehead was puckered into a little anxious frown. "Why have you changed your mind?" she asked. He was warmed to a boldness that he had not dared hitherto. "I've been thinking over all our talk this afternoon," he said, "particularly yours, and I realised how absolutely right you were in despising me for hanging on here, and I felt that I could not stay another twenty-four hours." She stretched out her arm and rested her fingers on the magnificent width of the mahogany handrail. "Why?" she asked. "I could not bear the thought that you despised me," he said. "I never did," she replied gently; "only I was sorry." He was too drunk with the vapours of his own resolve to catch the finer significance of her answer. "It's frightfully kind of you to say that," he said, "but you've made me despise myself, and anyhow I'm going. So will you ask Mr Kenyon if he can see me to-morrow morning?" She smiled faintly at the impetuosity of his boasting. "I'm afraid he can't," she said. "He won't be here to-morrow." "Not here?" he repeated in astonishment, and then as the implications of that unexpected news became clearer to him, he added, "Then it's possible that I might--that we could have another walk or something?" She smiled more openly now. "It is, just possible," she said. "If you feel that you can, after all, put off your departure for another day." "Oh, of course, in that case!" he said eagerly, and added, "Besides, I must see him before I go. How long will he be away?" "He'll be back to-morrow afternoon," she told him. "He's only going up to town in the car for the day. Haven't you heard?" "Heard? What? No, I don't believe I've spoken to any one hardly since we came in. Has anything happened?" "One of the periodical rumblings of the earthquake," she said. He was alive now to this new issue. "Can't you tell me?" he asked. She glanced round the hall and up the stairs before she said in a low voice, "He had a letter from Ken by the second post, a defiant letter, and rather rude. Ken's going to break away, he has borrowed the money to pay the worst of his debts, and leave enough over to pay his passage to South Africa. He knows some one who has a farm there and he's going to join him. Uncle Charles and Aunt Catherine are fearfully upset, of course, and it's one of those rare occasions when the foundations of the house begin to shake. I've only seen it happen before in the case of servants who have--well--broken away, but the effect is much the same, though the rumblings are deeper this time." "Is he very annoyed?" Arthur asked. "He didn't seem upset at dinner." "He? Oh, no! He's as calm as Fate," Eleanor said, "and as cruel." "But why is he going up to town? Is he going to see Ken himself?" She shook her head, glanced once more round the hall, and then bending towards him, whispered, "He's going to see his lawyer and alter the will. He hasn't said so, but every one knows." Arthur pursed his mouth. "Pity I couldn't see him before he goes," he remarked. "Might save him another journey." She looked at him with a frank approval, smiling her appreciation of his humour. "You're not afraid of him, are you?" she said. He was afraid of nothing, as long as he could win her smiles, but he didn't brag. "There's no reason why I should be, is there?" he replied. "Absolutely none," she said confidently. "But you may find him difficult, harder to deal with than you think. It was different with Ken. He didn't want to keep Ken. He does want to keep you. I must go now. I've a heap of letters to do for him." "But shall I see you to-morrow?" he said, as she turned and began to ascend the shallow stairs. She did not answer that, but when she was half-way up the second flight she looked back at him and waved her hand. He was more than content. That last glance of hers had again approved him. He had won a measure of admiration from her by his decision. And to-morrow, he would have her to himself--possibly for the whole day.... He was still standing at the foot of the stairs, and after a moment's hesitation he went on up to his own room. He could not stand that crowd downstairs to-night. They would be depressingly gloomy, full of horrible forebodings about the impending alterations to that untidy will. He wanted to be alone with his own glorious thoughts. XI Arthur hoped that he might meet Eleanor at the breakfast-table again the next morning, but although he put in an appearance before Miss Kenyon and Hubert had finished, and waited until after his aunt had come down, he saw nothing of Eleanor. He consoled himself with the reflection that she was probably busy with some preparation for her grandfather's visit to town. He was awake now to the effect that the visit was having on the household. They were all uneasy, even Miss Kenyon, all as it seemed to him, unnecessarily nervous about their future. He inferred something of this attitude from the preoccupation of the three members of the family he met at the breakfast-table; and later, his inference was fully confirmed. They were momentarily shaken out of the belief into which they habitually lulled themselves, the belief that eventually they must all be decently provided for. The security of Hartling itself was threatened. Who knew what the old man might do in some fit of eccentricity? He might devise the estate to be used as a convalescent home or as a country house for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he chose. No one had the power to stop him or dispute his testament afterwards. For all legal purposes he was sane enough. Joe Kenyon, Turner, and Hubert were all in the library at ten o'clock, but it was certainly not their interest in the morning papers that kept them there. Yet, although they were manifestly unable to keep their attention on what they were reading, they appeared disinclined to talk. Arthur was not less fidgety than the other three. He could not decide whether it would be better to wait for Eleanor after the old man had gone, or to go and find her. She might have a certain amount of work still to do that morning, and if so, might prefer to remain undisturbed until she had done it. On the other hand, she might expect him to come and fetch her. "What time is Mr Kenyon going?" he asked at last, addressing his question vaguely to the company at large. Neither Turner nor Hubert took any notice, but after a slight hesitation Joe Kenyon pulled out his watch, stared at it absent-mindedly, and then said, "Oh, I don't know! About half-past ten or eleven probably. He generally does." Arthur put down his paper and walked over to the window. From there he could see the car already drawn up at the front door, but the attitude of Scurr, comfortably reclining in the driver's seat, seemed to imply that he was well accustomed to waiting. Waiting was an art in which one acquired proficiency at Hartling. Those who could not acquire it, like Ken Turner, had no place there. Eleanor was the single exception to all rules. She worked.... So did Miss Kenyon, for that matter. She ran the house amazingly well. But she waited, just as much as the others. She had been disturbed by the "rumblings of the earthquake"--was doubtful of her security. Eleanor did not care. She would be glad to go. The front door opened soon after eleven o'clock, and Arthur saw the head of the house come out with Eleanor in attendance. "He's just going," Arthur announced to the other occupants of the library, and they dropped their papers at once and came over to the window. The old man was just getting into the car. He needed no help. Eleanor stood by with a despatch case, which she gave to him after he was seated, but she did not offer to assist him in any other way. He was quite capable of looking after himself. He stepped into the car like a man of sixty. Then Scurr closed the door, and touched his cap, and in another minute they were slipping down the drive. None of the family had gone to the door to see him off. Not once, since he had been at Hartling, had Arthur seen any sign of filial affection displayed by the family. The old man patronised them with his gentle smile, but apparently he never looked for any return other than obedience and respect. He did not expect gratitude. Joe Kenyon stretched himself in a prodigious yawn as the car vanished over the bridge. "Reminds me of the day poor old Jim went," he said. Little Turner had begun to pace the width of the room under the windows. He had his hands on his hips, slowly smoothing them as he walked. He looked even neater and sleeker than usual this morning, but he was manifestly agitated. That odd, mechanical rubbing of his hands up and down his hips was the action of a man unconsciously seeking some relief. "Well, it didn't so far as we know, make any difference to us, then," he commented, in reply to his brother-in-law's remark. "So far as we know," Joe Kenyon repeated, awkwardly settling himself down in the window-seat. "All U.P. with Ken, of course," Turner went on. "I hope to God he'll make some sort of a do of it in South Africa. He might--one never knows. I wish I could have done more to help him." "Absolutely impossible to do anything," Joe Kenyon said, looking out of the window. "Fact was he didn't really want Ken. Got a strong streak of Jim in him. I've noticed it before. He'll do all right, I expect. Jim would have, in time. He had bad luck, that was all. Damned sorry for you and Catherine all the same." "Wish to God I could go with him," Turner said. His brother-in-law thrust out his under-lip and shook his head. "Too soft for that kind of life," he murmured, still staring out of the window. Turner chose to overlook that remark. "It's this cursed lack of ready money that beats you every time," he grumbled, as he paced up and down. "No getting round that anyway. We couldn't raise five hundred pounds between us to save our eternal souls." Hubert, leaning against the end of the massive oak table that stood in the centre of the room, solemnly nodded his head. "Not three hundred," he said judicially. Turner looked at him for an instant, but made no reply. "Nothing whatever to be done," he went on. "We know that by this time. No need for him to show his fangs again to teach us that." "Glad to have the opportunity all the same," Joe Kenyon put in. Arthur, despite his immense preoccupation with the thought of Eleanor, could not help listening. They had never hitherto spoken as frankly as this before him. "Do you mean," he put in, "that he is sort of intimidating you by going up to town?" He did not realise until he had spoken that by saying "you" instead of "us" he had implied the separateness of his own interest in the affair. Turner stopped his walk and the nervous movement of his hands and stared at Arthur with a look that was not quite free from suspicion. "What else?" he jerked out, frowned impatiently, and then resumed his pacing, but this time with more deliberation. Joe Kenyon, huddled into an ungainly heap in the window seat, was more honest or less discreet. "We're all in the same boat, my boy," he said, a remark that might have been addressed either to his brother-in-law or his nephew, and continued: "Of course it's done to intimidate us. We've seen that trick played too often to doubt it. Any excuse'll do. It hasn't been one of the family since Jim went, so this is a very special occasion; but even if it's only been one of the servants going to leave, he has never missed the chance of underlining the fact that he can alter his will whenever he feels like it." Turner had come to rest in front of Arthur while this explanation was being made, and now prodded him gently in the chest with an elegant forefinger. "All the same, my lad," he said on a note of warning, "you'd better keep quiet about what you know or think you know. We've been a trifle upset this morning; it isn't altogether pleasant for a father to see his son turned adrift without a penny in his pocket, but getting excited won't make matters better for any of us." "Well, as a matter of fact," Arthur began, and stopped abruptly. He had been on the verge of telling them that they need have no more doubts about him, since this was almost certainly his last day at Hartling, but as he began to speak a doubt of his prudence in making that announcement overtook him. Once they knew he was going, they would again look upon him as an outsider and cease to have the least regard for him. Turner or Miss Kenyon--he trusted the others--might use him as a pawn in their own interests and anticipate him in conveying the news to old Kenyon--an eventuality that he wished to avoid, for despite all the evidence that was being presented to him, he still believed that they did the old man less than justice, and it was his disappointment rather than his anger that Arthur feared at the coming interview. "As a matter of fact?" Turner repeated, with raised eyebrows, after a decent pause. "Well, I've no personal interest to serve, have I?" Arthur said. "I made it quite clear to you, I hope, that I have no--no expectations, and shouldn't accept any legacy if it were left to me." "You wouldn't accept _anything_, not even a thousand pounds, for instance?" Turner asked. "Not a red cent," Arthur returned with decision. He could say that now, he reflected, with perfect safety. "Then why stay?" Turner said. Arthur blushed vividly, the blush of a naturally honest man caught in an equivocation, but Turner misread its origin. "No need to be embarrassed," he went on. "We guessed it would be like that, and the old man seems favourable. But doesn't it strike you as probable that if the affair comes off you may change your mind about those possible expectations? I'm not talking without something to go on, my boy. I've been through precisely the same experience myself." He sighed and looked out of the window as he concluded. "And a damned dirty mess I've made of it." Arthur's blush had been restimulated by Turner's misconception as to its cause, and still burnt his face as he replied, "There's no earthly chance of that, if you mean ... what I presume you do. And in any case, I'm not _going_ to stay. I've made up my mind about that. I shall be leaving here, for good, fairly soon." Joe Kenyon looked up hopefully. "Wise man," he commented, and Hubert nodded a melancholy agreement. "Fairly soon?" Turner rolled the words over with a rather impish enjoyment. "Ah, well! we can re-discuss the precise intention of 'fairly soon' in a month's time." Ever since Mr Kenyon had gone Arthur had been fretting intermittently over the problem of whether he should take the initiative or leave it to Eleanor, and this indirect talk of her was increasing his impatience. It was nearly a quarter to twelve now, and the morning was slipping away. He had hoped that she might either come to look for him or send him a message but every minute that possibility grew less probable. Yet he did not care to leave the library at this point in the conversation. It would look as if he were trying to shirk the issue. "I certainly shan't be here a month," he said, addressing little Turner; "almost certainly not another week." "Does the old man know that?" Turner asked. "Not yet," Arthur said. "But I'm going to tell him at once. To-morrow morning at latest." Turner was reflectively twisting the ends of his neat moustache. "Oh, well! my boy," he remarked, "we'll wait to settle that point of _when_ you'll go until after you've seen him. He may have a card or two to play that you haven't guessed at so far. Eh, Joe?" Joe Kenyon pursed his mouth. His expression was not hopeful. "I've quite made up my mind," Arthur said, with what he hoped was an effect of complete finality. He had settled his problem now. He would go and find Eleanor. All the day, his last day, might be lost if he waited for her. She might be angry with him, but he would risk that. He could not endure this suspense any longer. He could hear the hall clock striking twelve. Little Turner with a knowing, half-whimsical look of doubt on his face, still stood in front of him. "Well, it's no good arguing that, is it?" Arthur continued irritably. "You'll know for certain to-morrow." Turner turned away with a shrug of his neat shoulders. "Wonderful house for to-morrows, this," he said. "Always has been." Arthur, inspired to pretend that he considered himself insulted, walked out of the room. By that little piece of chicane he escaped from all his dilemmas at a stroke. He had been horribly afraid that if he attempted some excuse to get away, Hubert might offer to accompany him. The suggestion of golf had hung in the air as a way of passing the afternoon, and some sort of untruthful evasion would have been necessary to avoid it. He went first to the drawing-room on the off-chance that Eleanor might have come as far as that in search of him, but no one was there except his aunt and Mrs Turner; the latter, sitting with her hands in her lap staring fixedly out of the window. She had obviously been crying. His aunt did not look up from her fancy-work as he passed through with an air of having accidentally intruded upon a private ceremony. Poor old Mrs Turner; it had not occurred to him that she would be so upset by her son's departure for South Africa. He was, as a matter of fact, lucky to have broken away; but to the Kenyons, no doubt, the evils of the outer world appeared altogether monstrous compared with the securities of Hartling. He had no hesitation now as to where he should seek Eleanor. Unless she had gone out without him--a ghastly alternative that he refused to believe--she must be upstairs somewhere in old Mr Kenyon's private suite. But when he knocked at the door of the little room whose chief use appeared to be that of a lobby, no one answered. He had never before entered the suite unannounced, and he opened the door and went in with a faint sense of trepidation. The room was empty and the door to the next room closed, but this time he entered without knocking. He was now in the apartment in which he had always been received when he paid his morning visit, and farther than this he had never penetrated. Obviously, however, there were other rooms beyond. He remembered that he had seen Eleanor go through that way sometimes when he had been engaged with the old man, and as he stood hesitating he thought he heard very remotely the clicking of a typewriter. He went over to the farther door and knocked, and was answered faintly from within. He discovered then that there were double doors, four feet apart, between him and the next room. When he had opened the second he found himself in what appeared to be a perfectly appointed office. The walls were nearly hidden by white-lettered deed-boxes, pedestals of standard letter-files, a tremendous nest of card-index drawers, and a bookcase containing four or five hundreds works of reference: law-books, encyclopædias, directories, gazetteers, registers and official reports. Flush with the face of the wall that divided this office from the room through which he had just passed was the door of what was, no doubt, an enormous safe. The centre of the room was occupied by an extensive solid oak table, at which, seated with her back to him, Eleanor was engaged with a typewriter. She did not turn round as he came in, and said, without stopping her work or looking up, "Shut both doors behind you, and sit down over there. I shan't be very long." So she was expecting him, was his thought as he followed her instructions, and she was not presumably altogether displeased with him for coming. He sat down on the seat of one of those oriel windows that were the most pleasing feature of Hartling's south elevation. He did not, however, turn his attention to the panorama of the gardens that stretched out below him, nor to the glimpses of the rolling Sussex country visible as an effect of blue mysterious freedoms beyond the wardenship of that stiff, enclosing wall. He had no eyes, no thought for anything but Eleanor. From here, he could watch her earnest, intent profile, bent a little forward over the typewriter. She looked, he thought a trifle flushed, and something in her intense concentration on her work gave her the air of being faintly embarrassed, an air that was not less marked when she whirled the letter off the roller and having glanced at it said in a formal voice, "This is our office, the heart of the house. Don't you think it looks very orderly and business-like?" He agreed without enthusiasm. His mind was still obsessed with the idea that they were again going out together to the hill that had the view of the South Downs. He felt no inclination just then to discuss the business affairs of old Kenyon. "This is the mainspring of the whole machine," Eleanor went on, looking at the range of deed boxes in front of her; "and I don't think there is the least fear of the machine breaking down. We are very methodical and very safe. We never gamble. We don't pretend to be far-sighted or ingenious, we're just plodders, adding a few thousands to our capital every year. Do you know that there are securities in this room worth well over half a million? I can't give you exact figures because there are one or two secrets into which the private secretary is not admitted. But I do know that even after we've paid the enormous sums demanded from us in taxes, our income considerably exceeds our disbursements." She looked round at him as she added, "Aren't you dazzled? Don't you feel exalted by being in the presence of all this wealth?" He was puzzled, uncertain of her mood. Her speech had had a strong flavour of irony, but there was no trace of it in her manner. "Oh! confound the beastly money," he said, "I came up to see if we were going for another walk." "Not to-day," she said. "I have far too much to do. Perhaps this letter I've just written will explain why." She held it out towards him, and he jumped up and took it from her and then read it, leaning against the edge of the table. It was addressed to Mrs Payne, and after a few opening phrases, continued: "I want to come and stay with you for a week or two if you could possibly manage to have me. I can't tell you why till I see you, but I should like to come on Friday, the day after to-morrow. I know it is dreadfully short notice...." He broke off there and looked at her in bewilderment. His mind had leapt back to their talk on the hill. Was she doing this, he wondered, in order that he might stay on? "But I don't in the least understand why you have written this," he said frowning. "Why are you going? Do you mean that you're leaving here for good?" She nodded gravely. "But why?" he persisted. "I thought that we agreed...." "Don't you want me to go?" she asked. "No. I don't," he said emphatically. "Would you stay on if I went?" she returned. "No, I wouldn't. Nothing on earth should induce me to," he declared vehemently, still regarding her departure as an alternative to his own. "Then what's your objection?" she said. His eyes were suddenly opened then to a new prospect. He would not lose sight of her if they both left Hartling. He hated the thought of her working in a London office, but she would be within his reach there. He could, in a sense, look after her. They could meet quite often--if she were willing. "You mean," he said, "that we might both go?" "I know of no reason why your going should affect me one way or the other." Her tone was cold, even a trifle disdainful. He was slightly taken aback. "No, no, of course not. It has nothing to do with me," he agreed. "But what has made you change your mind? Or don't you want to tell me that?" She got up from her chair and walked over to the window. "There's one thing I want you to tell me first," she said. "Will my going have the least effect on your own plans?" He considered that for a moment before he replied with perfect sincerity. "Absolutely none. Whatever happens, I'm going back to Somers to-morrow afternoon." She had turned her back on him and was looking out over the prospect that had so recently failed to interest him. "It isn't altogether that," she said over her shoulder, making a gesture with her hand that may have indicated the distant weald of Sussex. "I shouldn't go if it were only that I wanted to be free and independent." She paused so long after this statement that he was emboldened to prompt her by saying, "You seem to have made up your mind so suddenly." "The truth is that I can't stand it any longer," she said in a low voice. "I simply can't stand it." He waited patiently this time for her to continue. He saw that she had something to say which she found difficult to put into words. The pose of her upright figure suggested a certain tensity of motion and when after another silent interval she turned and faced him, her hands were clenched. "And I'm haunted by the fear that I may be wrong after all," she said, looking at him as if for help. "And you are the last person in the world, I suppose, who can tell me whether I am wrong or not." "I don't quite understand yet. Is it about him--Mr Kenyon?" he asked. She did not deign to answer his question directly. "You're supposed to know something about psychology, aren't you?" she went on. "Well, is it possible for a man to lose all decent, human feeling even for his own family?" "Lord, yes," Arthur replied. "Speaking generally, of course, misers, for instance. Some of them seem to lose all human feeling." "He isn't the least a miser," she put in. "He's often extraordinarily generous outside his own family." "I only instanced that as a well-known type," he said. "But drink or drugs will do the same thing." "Yes, but in all those cases there is always a definite _vice_ of some sort," she complained. "Something that you can take hold of, understand more or less, as a cause for it all. But he hasn't any vices, unless you can call it a vice to be deliberately cruel to your own children and grandchildren without any apparent reason." "But is he actually cruel?" Arthur remonstrated. "Doesn't he perhaps really mean it all for their own good. He may be deluded--he almost said as much to me--into thinking that they are weaker and less capable than they actually are; but that would be a natural delusion enough in a man of his age." Eleanor threw out her hands with a gesture of confutation. "And you!" she exclaimed. "Does he believe that you aren't capable of looking after your own interests too?" "Why me?" Arthur objected. "Because he has been trying to _get_ you. Oh! manifestly trying to--to add you to his collection," she exclaimed passionately. "It was that that opened my eyes. Until you came, I had hardly a doubt of _him_. I didn't like the life we lead here. It bored me. I believe I've always hated money--it must have been born in me, if that's possible. But I believed more or less what you do now, that he--looked after them, that his only fault, if anything, was that he looked after them too much. "And then there was the suggestion of your coming here for a week-end visit. That was something rather exceptional. We'd had old Mr Beddington not long before--it was he who told my grandfather about you--and I remember wondering whether he was beginning to pine for more company or something. And I--I was rather interested in what I heard of you; we talked a little about you once or twice, and one day, after you had accepted the invitation, he threw out a kind of hint that he'd like to keep you here. That bothered me somehow. I'd made some sort of picture of you in my mind, and I--it's difficult to explain exactly--but I didn't like the idea of your--getting like the others. Some silly, romantic school-girl notion or other. I don't know quite why." She paused and turned back to the window. Her colour had risen again, and Arthur believed that she was embarrassed by her thought of him as the hero of her old dream. How bitterly disappointed she must have been when she had found that her imagined hero had been a mere idler, like the others, willing to slack about and play games, in the hope of a place in the old man's will! Good God, what a poor thing she must have thought him! He looked down and began aimlessly to smooth the carpet with his foot. He felt utterly humiliated and miserable. Without a word of reproach she had exposed the weakness and unworthiness of him; and he could only acknowledge that she was right. He did not look up at once when she turned back to him and went on. "It was the first time that I had seen the thing happening, if you know what I mean. I could follow all the stages of it. I saw how he let you enjoy the easiness of the life here before he made any sort of offer, and then just dangled it in front of you and tried to make it look as if you would be doing him a favour. Well, that was true enough in a way--you were. But the horrible thing, to me, was that he never paid you any salary. That really opened my eyes more than anything. He believed that you had given up your work at Peckham; that what would mostly likely tempt you away from here was the idea of going to Canada, and he wanted to make that impossible. I know that was it. I'm perfectly certain of it. And on the top of it there came that affair about Hubert's engagement and this fuss over Ken. That finished it for me. Ken isn't really bad. Most young men in his place would have got into debt, and I don't believe that he was the least angry about that. Of course the money to put the debts straight was nothing at all to him. He wouldn't have thought twice about that, but he has just turned Ken out without the least thought for poor Aunt Catherine, who is simply heartbroken about it. I believe Uncle Charles is really more upset, too, than he cares to admit." "I know. I was talking to him this morning," Arthur put in. "Well, will you tell me why he does these things if he is not an inhuman, heartless brute?" Eleanor concluded. Arthur could find no answer to that. "But you still believe in him?" she asked. "It's so--so incredible," he said. "Oh! and this morning!" Eleanor broke out, with a passion of resentment in her voice. "All this petty, silly, detestable business of his going up to town to alter his will. Why? I don't believe for a moment that he ever left Ken anything. He never liked him. Ken was too independent to please him. No; I believe that he has gone to see Mr Fleet to-day, just to make them feel his power over them. He was glad of the opportunity...." "That's exactly what they were saying downstairs just now," Arthur admitted. "That he was glad of the opportunity to shake them up a bit. But I suppose I'm prejudiced; I'm so new to it all; only it doesn't seem to me, somehow, as if he were that kind of a man." "He has been nice to you, of course," Eleanor commented. "He would be, just yet. And you've only seen one side of him. But doesn't it strike you that this is a queer household? I don't remember any other; but I've read novels, and if they're anything like life, it must be very unusual for a man to live with his family and never receive any sign of affection from them. Doesn't it seem to you as if he were their master rather than their father?" "Yes. I was thinking something of the kind this morning," Arthur agreed. "But I wondered if there weren't faults on both sides in a way." Eleanor looked at him doubtfully. "I don't know; it's beyond me," she said. "But now you know why I'm going, don't you? It isn't as if I could help any of them by staying. No one has the least influence with him, not the very least. It may have looked as if you had helped Hubert about that engagement. You did in one way, but it was all because he was trying to get a tighter hold of you. Oh, well!" she sighed, and half turned away from him, before adding unexpectedly, "I'm glad you're going." "You despised me for wanting to stay, didn't you?" he said. "I was sorry," she admitted. "More than that, you despised me," he insisted. "You were right, too, absolutely right. I really only saw it properly when you said just now that you were interested in me, in a way, before I came. And then, of course, you were bitterly disappointed. I can see all that now." She was looking out of the window again, and the fact that he could not see her face gave him courage. He came a little nearer to her, as he went on, "I haven't any excuse to offer. None at all. I was a silly, weak fool, and I should have gone on being a fool if it hadn't been for you. But now I _have_ come to my senses, and I'm going back to work, and it would help me frightfully if--when I'm in Peckham--if you're ever up in town--if I could see you now and again. You've only seen me here and I've been a different person since I've been here. Would it be possible for me to see you ever, after you go to stay with those people?" She was kneeling up on the window seat now, leaning her forehead against the glass, and she did not move her position as she said, in the tone of one who quietly weighs a proposition, "Oh, yes. Why not?" "It would help me tremendously," he submitted. She was silent for a few seconds before she suddenly said in a light conversational tone, "It was all bosh, of course, what you said just now." "What was?" he asked in surprise. "All that about your being a weak fool and my despising you for it," she said, still with her forehead pressed against the glass of the window. "Do you mean that you didn't despise me?" he asked eagerly, and then as an afterthought, "But in that case why were you so fearfully down on me?" "I didn't want you to waste your life here," she murmured, "I know it wasn't any business of mine, but I simply couldn't stand the thought of your becoming one of--them." He could not mistake the implication of those last two sentences. She had confessed to an interest in his welfare that deeply stirred and aroused him. Something of his humility began to fall from him, his recent passion of self-condemnation assuaged by her belief in the promise of his life. And with that reaction all those phases of his admiration which had for so long been secretly merging into love, were suddenly tinged by an ecstasy of gratitude. She appeared infinitely more to him at the moment than either friend or possible lover. She was the supreme miracle of creation embodied in that graceful form, outlined against the window. The benefactor, the giver, the maker of himself. By her simple expression of belief in him, she had given him a soul. He wanted to kneel before her in adoration.... Intrigued and a little embarrassed by his prolonged silence, she slipped off the window seat and turned to him with the beginning of a conversational commonplace that was checked by the adoring intensity of his gaze. "It must be nearly ..." she had begun, and then stopped and put her hands to her face to hide the flood of colour that leapt to her cheeks. And still he could not speak. All the love and poetry that surged within him could find no expression in his modern phrase. At the mere thought of any gesture, movement, or word, he was frozen by his self-consciousness; all too aware of himself as a product of his own time, of the little conventional self that he had always presented as a representative of the authentic Arthur Woodroffe. And yet he knew that this was his moment, that if he let it slip he might never again find an opportunity to say what he knew, now, was within him, and so he grasped at an opening, however conventional, in order to anticipate some slipping back into the everyday manner, on her part or his own, that might release the fatuities of the manikin. "There is something I must say to you," he broke out. "Please don't interrupt me. It's--oh! necessary. I...." He found that he could not lose himself, standing there in stark inaction with her before him, and began to pace up and down the room, keeping his eyes on the ground. "To begin with, I must thank you," he went on, trying not to think of himself in any future relation to her. "I want to go on thanking you. I can't possibly tell you what you've done for me. Everything, all life, is different now that I've got just the hope that you believe in me. It has given me a hope of--myself. If you can believe in me, nothing can ever be the same again. Oh! I wish I could tell you all that it has done for me, just knowing you. But I can't. I can't say it, but I can live it, and you know that I will. I'm sure you know that. I can feel it. If...." He paused and looked up. She was sitting in the window-seat, her head bent and her hands in her lap. And with that he forgot his self-consciousness, plunged across the room, and went down on his knees before her. "Eleanor," he said. "Do you know how I worship you?" She did not answer him in words, but it seemed as if by a series of infinitely delicate movements they came slowly together, until her hands, with his own clasping them, were on his breast and they were looking into each other's eyes. There was no need then for them to say that they had loved from their first meeting, but now that the pressure of that first overpowering urgency had weakened, words came more easily. It was not, however, until some time later that he found one essential explanation. "But the first time that I really _knew_ how much I loved you," he said, "was when I saw you in imagination, as a solemn little chit of seven standing by the elephant's pad in the hall. You seemed so precious then." XII They had their afternoon together--free from embarrassment, for they constrained themselves to conceal their happiness during the ordeal of lunch in order that they might enjoy for an hour or two the sacred reserves of their precious secret. After that, as they well understood, the family would have to know, and more than the fact of their engagement. They would have to be told, also, that Hartling was to lose two of its members. They debated that last decision before they were agreed. Arthur, still suspicious of the good faith of Miss Kenyon and Charles Turner, was for postponing what he regarded as the lesser announcement until after his interview with the old man. Eleanor saw more clearly. "They would never dare to anticipate us," she said. "It would be too risky. Haven't you realised that they never interfere with him? For one thing they are agreed that there shan't be any kind of competition between them, for favours and so on--which is awfully wise of them, if you come to think of it. And for another, they would not like to be the bearer of bad news or even disturbing news. Their fear of him goes as deep as that." "And yet he never loses his temper with them, does he? Or threatens them in any way?" Arthur asked. "He threatens them all the time, indirectly," she said. "But I've never seen him lose his temper. He doesn't seem to care enough for that." They had found a delightfully secluded spot in the larch plantation for their talk, and it was from there that they saw the car return a little before five o'clock. By that time, however, their plans were settled. The fact of their engagement was to be whispered to some member of the family when they went in to tea, in the certain hope that thereafter the news would instantly spread through the household. The second, and, for the Kenyons, the more important announcement was to follow, with the warning that the head of the house was to be told nothing until the next morning, when it should be Arthur's duty to inform him. And so far as the future was concerned they were content to await the day. If the expected explosion took place, Eleanor was to go to the Paynes; she had sent her letter and seemed to have no doubt that they would receive her. Arthur was prepared in any case to return to Peckham the next afternoon. They rose reluctantly when they saw the car softly running up the drive. No caresses had been exchanged between them as yet, but they had been exquisitely content in each other's company. Arthur asked for nothing better than to sit at her feet, and enjoy the bliss of her favour. And they had so much to say that had so far been impeded by the necessity for making their immediate plans. They wanted to tell one another the stories of their lives. He knew more of her life than she knew of his, Eleanor complained, and made it clear that every detail of his youth and young manhood must be told to her. Moreover, for those two hours they had been temporarily emancipated from every restraint of Hartling, and now they had to face the task of finally cutting themselves free. And Eleanor knew that that task would not be performed without effort. Her grandfather would exert himself to the utmost to keep them both, and she had an uneasy fear that he might discover some form of suasion which might appear morally to bind them. She had never yet seen him exert himself in any connection of this kind. Until now he had always been so easily and so disinterestedly master of the situation. She had been present when he had dismissed Ken Turner's request for the payment of his debts, and had seen her grandfather refuse that petition with the emotional indifference of a man who decided between his investments. He had not shown a spark of temper, and his refusal, however final, had been almost gentle. She hoped that he would display the same methods on this occasion. But she was afraid that he might draw upon some hitherto untouched reserve of power. He had so much the air of a man with immense hidden reserves. Also, she expected a chorus of remonstrance and dissuasion from the rest of the family. She knew that they all, with the exception of Miss Kenyon, were genuinely fond of her--it was impossible to picture Miss Kenyon as being _fond_ of any one--and she guessed that their pleading might be hard to resist. Indeed, if anything could have altered her decision, it would have been her sense of compassion for them. If she could have helped them, she might have stayed. But she knew that her departure would make no real difference to their lives. Only one event could do that. The announcement of the engagement created only a mild stir in the Hartling drawing-room. Evidently the thing had been expected; no opposition was anticipated in this instance from the ruler of destinies, and the affair was amply justified by precedent. Mrs Turner was still very depressed, and the news seemed to add another melancholy to her very depressed thoughts. No doubt she was reflecting that if her son had fallen in love with his Cousin Elizabeth, he too might now be settling down with the others to await the inevitable event that must finally determine their period of bondage. And if he had done that, the family would have been complete, with no further fear of any intrusion from the outside. Hubert gave the fullest expression to his congratulations. He appeared genuinely pleased, and went as far as suggesting that his own marriage and Arthur's might take place on the same day. And Elizabeth was at least outwardly complacent; although Arthur wondered if her almost incessant chatter, that afternoon, concealed a faint chagrin. Probably she would have married him if he had asked her. Not because she was in love with him, but because he happened to be the only man available. Joe Kenyon alone exhibited any signs of uneasiness, glancing across at Arthur more than once over the tea-table with a look that conveyed a hint of doubt and suspicion. Arthur himself was far from confident. He was unhappily aware of the fact that he was accepting their congratulations under false pretences. And he could not bring himself to announce his further plans to the full company. If Eleanor had been present they might have dared it together. But she had gone straight up to her grandfather after confiding the news of the engagement to Mrs Kenyon, and had not come down again. It was inevitably his uncle that Arthur chose as his first confidant. There was a certain honesty and heartiness about him that the others lacked, and from him alone, perhaps, could be expected disinterested encouragement and advice. Moreover, Arthur was a trifle curious about that look of suspicion he had caught on his uncle's face. "Care to come for a stroll down the garden," he asked, going up to him before the meal was actually finished. "Eh? Oh! Wait till I get a cigar on," Joe Kenyon replied. "I'd like to have a talk with you." As usual all essentials were deferred until they were out of earshot of the house, and then Joe Kenyon began somewhat abruptly by saying,-- "Changed your mind, I suppose, about what you said to Charles this morning. You won't be leaving us now, I take it." "I shall," Arthur said. "She's coming too." Joe Kenyon stopped in his walk and stared his surprise. "Good God!" he ejaculated on a note of alarm. "Surely you don't mean it?" "I do," Arthur affirmed. "That was what I wanted to talk to you about. We settled it all between us this afternoon. It is quite possible that we may both go to-morrow." Joe Kenyon again sought refuge in his "Good God!" He appeared to be completely staggered for the moment, looked back at the house, down towards the iron gates, then threw back his head and gently blew a thin wreath of cigar smoke into the air. "What you going to live on?" he asked abruptly. "I'm going into partnership with the man I was working with before I came here," Arthur said. "We shall have about five hundred a year, I expect, to begin with." "Is it possible to live on that, in these days?" his uncle asked. "Oh, yes! rather. It isn't much, of course," Arthur said. "Both of you?" "For a time. I hope to make more--in a year or two." "Then why doesn't Eleanor wait until you've felt your feet a bit?" "She won't. She wants to get away quite as much as I do--more, I think." "But where's she going to--to-morrow? If she goes to-morrow?" "To the Paynes. The people who brought her over from South America." "Seem to have worked it all out," Joe Kenyon commented, with a deep sigh. "How long have you been making these plans?" "Only this afternoon." Arthur said. "But she had written to the Paynes before we--before I said anything to her, you know. She meant to go in any case." "The old man doesn't know yet, of course," his uncle continued. "Going to tell him to-morrow morning." Joe Kenyon considered that thoughtfully for a few seconds before he said, "Can't do anything to _you_, of course. You may have a pretty stiff time, both of you, but damn it, you're free. He's got no hold on _you_. Can't _do_ anything--except chuck you out, which is all you're asking for." "Quite," Arthur agreed, and then added: "This won't affect you in any way, will it, uncle?" Joe Kenyon pursed his mouth. "Can't put it down to us. Can he?" he inquired. "You'll make that plain enough, between you. What I mean is, this'll be a knock for him, worst in twenty-five years, and he may be spiteful, work off his annoyance on one of us after you've gone, if there's the least excuse." "Oh! there can't be the least question of involving any one but our two selves," Arthur assured him. "Damn it, I wish it hadn't been Eleanor," his uncle grumbled, adding inconsequently, "Pretty stiff coming the day after the other affair. If anything'll upset him this will. He'll put up a devil of a fight for Eleanor. She's damned useful to him. But, Good Lord! what can he _do_, when it comes to the point? If you're determined to go, there's the end of it. He can't _make_ you stay." He looked apologetically at Arthur as he continued: "It's different for you. You've got a profession, prospects. None of _us_ have. And then we'd been brought up to it. So has Hubert.... All the same, we'd thought you'd stay. We shouldn't have blamed you either if you had. Very glad in a way. Oh, well! Good Lord; I don't know. Honestly, Arthur, how long do you think it's _possible_ he might hang on?" Arthur shook his head. "You can't tell," he admitted. "He's as sound as a bell physically, and he has got the will to live. And so long as a man has that, you know, and there's nothing organically wrong...." "Might easily live another ten years?" Joe Kenyon said. "Quite easily," Arthur replied. He realised later in the evening that in his conversation his uncle had summarised the family opinion. Their attitude towards himself was marked by that same discretion which had characterised it immediately before his championship of Hubert. They were afraid of the least appearance of complicity; and avoided too direct a reference to the subject that must have been uppermost in their thoughts. Turner's casual, "Hear you're going to take up your work again. Pretty dull for you down here, I suppose, without any settled employment," was a mere acknowledgment of the fact, and manifestly deprecated any further elaboration of the topic. And Hubert contented himself with spasms of melancholy gazing, as if he were trying to intimate as tactfully and safely as possible his personal sorrow and regret. Miss Kenyon was more nearly affable than Arthur had ever known her to be, and talked to him at dinner about his profession with every sign of interest. The meal had an unprecedented air of informality that night owing to the absence of the head of the house, who dined in his own room. Eleanor, also, was absent from the table--to Arthur's great disappointment. He hoped to have another talk with her before his interview with the old man, and had fully expected to see her in the dining-room and be able to make some appointment with her afterwards. About half-past nine, however, this particular anxiety was relieved, if none too satisfactorily, by a note that was brought down to him by one of the maids. "No hope this evening," Eleanor had written, "but I will see you upstairs before you go in to him to-morrow. Come up at half-past ten. I have told him about our engagement and he seemed to be pleased--chiefly, I think, because he believes it will give him a greater hold over you. It's rather awful, somehow. I'm not a bit happy about your seeing him. I'm afraid of something, though I don't in the least know what. Sleep well." Arthur cherished that little letter for its first sentence. "No hope this evening" thrilled him by its sweet familiarity and its quiet acceptance of the fact that they wanted to be together. It said so much more than any stereotyped term of endearment. Her final note of foreboding did not disturb him. He had no fear for the future, since the only future he saw was life with Eleanor. He had begun to plan the possibility of a small flat somewhere, if one could be found. There was no reason why they should not be married quite soon. He looked up to find the eye of little Turner fixed upon him with a half-whimsical smile. "What about a last game?" he asked, making a daring reference to the forbidden topic. "Rather," Arthur agreed cheerfully. "I'll come and mark," Hubert volunteered in much the tone he might have used if he had been offering his services as chief mourner. Arthur found no difficulty in following Eleanor's advice to sleep well. He lay awake for half an hour or so thinking of her, but after that he slept soundly and his sleep was undisturbed. He did not even remember his dreams when he woke. And he had no sinking of the heart, no sick qualms of anticipation the following morning. His waking thoughts were all of Eleanor, the incident of the necessary interview with old Kenyon appeared to him as no more than one of the many necessary steps that he must take before he could enter the Paradise of his life with her. He was, for the time being, obsessed with a single idea, and his one annoyance was the fact that two and a half hours must elapse before he would see her again. His uncle misread his evident abstraction when they met in the library after breakfast. "Worried, Arthur?" he asked in a confidential voice behind the shield of the _Times_, although there was no one in the room just then but himself and his nephew. "Worried? Lord, no," Arthur replied frankly. "Quite the contrary." "All right for you, my boy, but you'll have a rare trouble to make him give up Eleanor," his uncle said. "He can't keep her if she wants to go," Arthur returned, but Joe Kenyon refused to commit himself any further. "Oh, well! Wait and see," he said. Arthur's peace of mind was in no way disturbed by that hint of the possible difficulties ahead of him. His uncle's warning seemed to him nothing more than a symptom of the characteristic Kenyon weakness. They were timid, apprehensive creatures, sapped and enfeebled by their life of comfort and seclusion. He was, however, suddenly startled into doubt by Eleanor's reception of him in the little ante-room. He had expected to find her as confident and self-reliant as he was himself. He had hoped that their half-hour's talk would be all of their own delightful future. He found her anxious, trembling, on the verge of tears. "Sit down," she said, when Arthur came in. "I want to talk to you first. It's quite safe. He's in the office, and in any case you can't hear what's said from the next room." But after he had obeyed her, she could not come at once to what she had to say. She turned her back on him and began to arrange some papers on a side table, standing, he thought, less erectly than she usually stood. And when she faced him, there was in her expression the reluctance of one who has to admit defeat. "Do you think, after all, that we had better go?" she asked. He was too astonished to reply directly. He got up and took a step towards her. "Why? What's the matter?" he said. She backed away from him and held up her hands, as if to defend herself. "There's no reason why you shouldn't go--alone," she said. "Go alone?" he repeated in a voice of such dismay that any repetition of that suggestion would have been ridiculous. "Very well," she continued, soothing him with a faint smile. "If that's quite out of the question, is it possible that we might both stay?" "Indefinitely?" "Or for a time." "Like the rest of them? Isn't that how they all began?" he asked. She sighed and clasped her hands together. "Oh, Arthur, I'm afraid," she confessed. "I don't know _what_ I'm afraid of. It isn't of him or of anything he can do to us. I've been arguing with myself, but it's no good. It just comes down to the one fact that I'm afraid." Almost instinctively Arthur put out his hand and laid a finger on her pulse. "Since when have you been afraid?" he asked her. "Ever since he came in yesterday," she told him. "He was just as usual, not overtired as far as I could see, or put out, or anything. But directly I began to talk to him this queer feeling of fear came over me. It was ... Arthur, it was just as if I knew something terrible was going to happen." She slipped her pulse from his fingers, thrust her hand into his, and clung to it tightly as she continued, "And I've been thinking that perhaps I may have been wrong about him. I don't believe I slept an hour last night. I kept going over it all again and again until I nearly persuaded myself that he had always meant well--underneath. And if he has, and I desert him now, and the shock of it made him ill--it might, mightn't it?--I should feel so awful about it. Oh! what do you think we ought to do? You know we might be--be married--here--and go on much as we have been--with that difference." For a moment Arthur was tempted, realising in his own feelings something of what the other dwellers in the house must have gone through before they descended to their present level of fatalistic acceptance. And if he had not been so deeply in love with Eleanor he would almost certainly have yielded as the others had done before him. He was saved by the memory of his own abasement the previous morning. He had known then that he could never be worthy of her so long as he was too inert to face the struggle of life. He put his arm round her and drew her close to him--the first caress he had dared. "No," he said. "Quite definitely no! I should hate myself if we did that. You have cured me of the least wish to slack my life away. I shouldn't be good enough for you, if I did. I don't mean to say that I'm good enough in any case, but I shall try to be...." He paused, and with the lingering fondness of one who murmurs the tenderest of all endearments, added softly, "Eleanor." Her only answer was to press a little nearer to him, and he felt that she was now leaning upon his strength; she who had given him that strength in the first instance. "It was you who made me see everything so clearly, yesterday," he went on. "I saw myself as I was, a detestable parasite. I could have hated myself for daring to love you. And whatever happens, I could not face that feeling again. It has gone absolutely. I don't believe I should ever have had it if it hadn't been for the influences and temptations of this place. It undermines one's will--though it has never undermined yours." She hid her face. "It has, it has," she whispered. "I didn't know it until last night. I thought I was strong." He was seized with a momentary panic. "You mean that you're afraid to face life with me on five hundred a year?" he asked. She lifted her head and smiled at him. "I'd face life with you on a hundred a year, cheerfully," she said. "It isn't that." He was infinitely relieved by that assurance, for he had had a glimpse of a condition that might still defeat him. If she had been afraid of the life he had had to offer her, he might have been forced to compromise. "What is it, then?" he asked tenderly. "My grandfather," she said. "He--he paralyses my will, I think. I can feel his power over me here, this very minute. I'm afraid of him now that I'm going to oppose him, just as they are all afraid of him. It's like the fear one has in a dream, the fear of something with an unearthly power that you can't escape from--something--something evil. I--do you know I meant to tell him last night, that I--that we were going? And I couldn't. He was sitting there perfectly quiet and good-tempered--we were having dinner together--and I thought, why shouldn't I break it to him--at once--about us? But as soon as that idea came into my mind I began to tremble. It was like--oh! like having to plunge your hand down into some horrible dark hole, not knowing what ghastly unclean thing you might find there. And I couldn't do it. I _couldn't_, I _couldn't_." Her voice had risen to a slightly hysterical note as she concluded, and he held her to him and gently fondled and soothed her as he said reassuringly, "It's only because he has been your employer and master all these years. And in any case he has no power over me. I have never been the least afraid of him." "Oh, Arthur! you're strong," she murmured, and then recovered herself almost as quickly as she had given way. "I'm a fool," she said, with a sudden effect of briskness, drawing herself away from him, and putting her hands up to her hair. "However, you know now the sort of hysterical creature you'll have to put up with." "I'm glad," he said, with a fond smile. "You were almost too wonderful before. I don't believe I should be afraid to kiss you now." She blushed and turned away. "I suppose you know that it's ten minutes past eleven," she said, and added with a sudden return of agitation, "Oh! go--at once. And get it over." Then as though she doubted her own powers of resolution, she went quickly over to the door of her grandfather's room and opened it. "Can you see Arthur now? He's here," she said coldly; and having received her reply she looked at Arthur and formally beckoned him to go in. But as he passed her in the doorway she momentarily clasped his arm with her two hands as if she were loath, even now, to let him go. Yet, despite all this ominous introduction, it was pity and not fear that Arthur felt as he sat down by the old man, who had, so mysteriously it seemed, terrified his own family. He looked even less intimidating than usual this morning. He was obviously pleased by the news of the engagement, and his first words were almost roguish. "Well, well, Arthur: I mustn't keep you long to-day," he said. "And I suppose, after this, that I shall have to reconcile myself to seeing rather less of Eleanor. However...." He completed his sentence with a gesture of his delicate, shrivelled hand. Arthur knew the inference that he was expected to draw: in a few months--a year or two, at longest--all these little cares and troubles would have ceased for ever. And it crossed his mind that he might open his extraordinarily difficult announcement by some well-considered professional assurance that his patient might quite conceivably live another ten or fifteen years. He rejected that as being clumsy and tactless--although every form of approach seemed to him, just then, to be either clumsy or cruel. And it was in desperation, alarmed by the growing significance of his own silence, that he at last said,-- "Yes, sir, I'm afraid you'll miss her--rather--at first." The old man appeared to be unaware that this sentence held any unusual suggestion. "Have you had it in your mind that you might be married quite soon?" he asked. "I think so, sir; yes, quite soon," Arthur replied, and then frowning and keeping his eyes averted from the old man's face--he went on quickly. "As soon as ever we can find somewhere to live, in fact. Flats and so on are fearfully difficult to get just now. And in Peckham, where I shall be practising...." He paused and looked up. The old man had changed neither his position nor his expression. "But I know of no reason why you shouldn't be married while you are still here," he said, apparently missing all the implications of Arthur's speech. "We--we thought of leaving here--at once," he replied, making an effort that even as he made it seemed gross and brutal. "In fact I meant--that is, I'm leaving to-day." Mr Kenyon's keen blue eyes slowly concentrated their gaze with an effect of extraordinary attention on Arthur's face; and as they did so, their lids, which commonly drooped so that the iris was partly hidden, were lifted until the pupils, completely ringed by white, stared with the cold, intense watchfulness of a great bird. "But that's impossible," he said very quietly. And indeed it seemed to Arthur quite impossible at that moment to give any _reason_ for his going at such foolishly short notice. Downstairs, or talking to Eleanor, the situation appeared so entirely different. Then, this quiet old man, with his deliberate movements, took the shape of a tyrant, cruel, and malignant. Here, in this room, he was a stately old gentleman, naturally affronted by what was almost an insult. Arthur blushed vividly. "You see, sir," he blurted out, with the gaucheness of a peccant schoolboy, "I feel rather--as if--if I were wasting my time here--in a way. I don't really want to be ungrateful, you know, although I suppose it must seem like it, but--I'd be awfully glad if you could see your way to letting me off." "And your promise?" Mr Kenyon asked, still in the same cool, formal voice. "Does that count for nothing with you?" "I'm sorry, sir. I feel that I can't stay," Arthur looked down again as he spoke. He found it difficult to meet the stare of those fierce hunting eyes. "You realise, of course," Mr Kenyon continued, "that this will put an end to your engagement? I could not spare Eleanor." "She--she wants to go too, sir," Arthur said. "But she can't," Mr Kenyon replied, in the tone of a man who pronounces an unimpeachable judgment. "If you go, Arthur, you will go alone." Then, with a change of voice, he went on, "But you will alter your mind about this, I am sure. When you come to think it over, you will realise, I hope, how dishonourable it would be for you to leave me, after the bargain we made and the promise you gave me. In any case, take a week to think it all over. Take a month if you like." Arthur sat in silence for what seemed to him a considerable time after the old man had finished speaking. He was thinking of the rest of the Kenyons downstairs. He had blamed them many times for their weakness, but he understood now how nearly impossible it must have been for them to have done anything but wait, postponing any decision from month to month. He himself, with all their experience behind him, was faltering; though surely he could not be mistaken now in assuming that all this effect of persuasion was nothing more than a method. When he was bound--fairly caught in the meshes of the net--he would become as all the others had become, an object of indifference, subject now and again to subtle forms of intimidation, but never to any form of affection. In ten years, he would become like them, and Eleanor.... "No," he said, with sudden determination, jumping to his feet and almost forgetting the person of the old man in front of him. "No! I'm going to-day, and Eleanor goes with me. You have no power to keep her, no sort of authority over her. We have made up our minds." He had taken a couple of steps up the room as he spoke, and as he concluded he turned and faced his antagonist, prepared for an outburst, for some tremendous call upon those immense reserves of personality that had hitherto been hidden from him. But Mr Kenyon was still sitting quietly in his chair, his hands resting on the arms, and the wide-open eyes that had recently gazed with such furious attention at Arthur were now fixed unseeingly upon the opposite wall. He was in one of his "trances," the dreaming god calm, powerful, detached, above all unapproachable, existing in his own world remote from all opposition and argument. Arthur, tensely braced for an encounter, found himself surprisingly without a purchase. The influence of habit made him pause, he stood stock still, waiting tensely for the first signs of the old man's return to consciousness. But as the minutes passed his professional curiosity was aroused. He had never before had an opportunity to observe one of these "trances" at close quarters, and he quietly approached the dreamer, looked keenly at him, and began to pass his hand slowly up and down before the staring eyes. And then in a moment, in one amazing flash of enlightenment, the truth was made clear to him. These "trances" were nothing more than a pose, a deliberate well-practised piece of acting, brilliant enough to stand any test except this cool, professional observation. For it was clear enough to Arthur that the old man before him was making an effort to keep his gaze fixed on some object beyond the interference of that deliberate testing hand. And that the effort became increasingly difficult to maintain. The effect of rapt contemplation began to break. The old withered face suddenly puckered into an expression of fierce indignation, his hands first trembled, and then gripped the arms of his chair, and his eyes turned upon Arthur with a look of desperate malignity. He was roused at last from his indifference. He was obviously shaking with rage. And, amazingly, he was impotent. The effect of calm power was stripped from him. He was nothing more than a pitiable old man in a furious, senile temper. He tried to speak and could only splutter. He grasped the stick that lay always ready to his hand, and had not the strength to strike more than the feeblest blow with it. Arthur did not even wince as that futile stroke fell upon his shoulders. "G-get away--get away," the old man stuttered. "Get out of my house...." With a great effort he raised himself from his chair, his face working, his knees trembling. Again he lifted his stick and feebly struck with it at Arthur. Then his knees gave way, and he crumpled pitifully, collapsing like a broken doll without making the least effort to save himself. Arthur bent over him, lifted him, laid him out on his back, and rapidly unfastened his collar.... There was nothing to be done but get him to bed. He knew that perfectly well. But first he must have help. He jumped up and flung open the door into the ante-room. "Eleanor," he said in a voice that he found difficult to control, "he has had a stroke. Send some one at once in the car for Fergusson. If he's not at the surgery they must go after him; find him somehow." Clear and suddenly familiar in his mind, as if it were a tune that he had been trying to recall, was a sentence that he had spoken to Hubert a few days earlier:-- "It might break him down if he were badly crossed," he had said. XIII The gates were standing open. They may have been opened in expectation of the coming of the specialist who might arrive at any minute, but even the garden wore a new aspect that morning. It was as if the wide airs of Sussex were creeping in and subtly perverting the seemly splendour of that suburban super-garden. Old Kenyon had been unconscious for twenty-four hours. Both Arthur and Fergusson knew with almost absolute certainty what was the matter with him. A cerebral artery had been ruptured and the area of damaged tissue appeared to be slowly extending. No remedy was possible. The chances were that within another twenty-four hours he would die without recovering consciousness. But he had trained nurses in constant attendance and a specialist had been sent for. Scurr had gone with Fergusson to fetch him in the big car. Arthur had been up with the unconscious man all night, and had come out into the garden now for a breath of fresh air. When he came downstairs he had found himself a centre of burning interest. All the family, except the one he most wanted to be with, were drawn towards him as if he were the newly found vortex of a whirlpool. They tried desperately hard to be casual and decorous, but they found it impossible to keep their eyes off him. It seemed to Arthur that they almost gaped. They were all extraordinarily wide-awake and feverishly inactive. The women's fancy-work had not been taken out, nor the daily papers opened. The news they desired to learn that morning was not to be found in the _Times_. They drifted about the drawing-room and library, and held brief, useless conversations with one another. But when Arthur had passed through the suite a little after eleven o'clock looking for Eleanor, they had suddenly found a focus. He had seen the look of expectancy on their faces and had thrown them a crumb of news. "He is still unconscious," he had said, and had understood that they asked more from him than that. Then, feeling that he could not endure the greediness of their attention, he had beckoned Joe Kenyon to come out with him into the garden. They had come within sight of the open gates before either of them spoke. "No hope, I suppose?" his uncle said then, as if released by the sight of the Sussex lane. "I should say absolutely none," Arthur replied. "Not likely to recover consciousness before the end?" "Extremely unlikely," Arthur said. "In fact, scarcely possible, I think." Joe Kenyon began to whistle softly between his teeth and abruptly checked himself. "If this property comes to me, I shall have that blasted wall taken down," he remarked, and continued, "You know, Arthur, I'm not going to play the hypocrite, especially to you. This isn't an occasion for mourning. It's as if we'd been living in the dark for half a lifetime and some one had taken the roof off and let the air and light in. I--I feel as if I can see the sky again for the first time in thirty years. It'd be loathsome, crawling hypocrisy to pretend that I'm the least sorry." "Oh, obviously," Arthur agreed. "But I say, how did it happen?" his uncle asked. "We haven't the shakiest notion you know--and...." "I just murdered him," Arthur said quietly. "Eh! What's that?" Joe Kenyon ejaculated. "For all intents and purposes," Arthur explained. "I opposed him, and he tried to take cover--went into one of his 'trances.' Did you know they weren't trances, by the way?" "No. What the devil were they, then?" "Pretences, pieces of acting, fantasies of his own making. He used to hide himself in them, as it were. Dream what a great and powerful being he was, able to keep you all in attendance, keep you waiting for ten minutes in the middle of dinner if he liked, while he enjoyed the sense of holding you there. And when he was in danger of losing his temper with me, he tried to get under that cover, to shelter himself, rehabilitate his own pride." "And you? What did you do?" "Treated him as if he were a case in a clinic. Began to test his reactions. And--and--well, he couldn't keep it up." "And then?" "Couldn't control himself. Lost his temper--frightfully. Whacked at me with his stick--and collapsed. It was losing his temper did it--first time he has done it probably for forty years. Had you ever seen him lose his temper?" Joe Kenyon considered that question for a moment or two before he said, "No! That was something he always had in reserve, something we were afraid of. He was always terrible to us, in a way, and we felt that if he went one step further he'd be--oh! devastating." "He wasn't, you know," Arthur said. "He wasn't terrible, I mean. Not in the least. He was essentially a weak man and not even clever. I sat up with him all last night, and everything came to me as clearly as if I'd read it somewhere. He has altered, you see, in face and expression since he became unconscious. His chin seems to have retreated and all the lines round his mouth have changed. I couldn't keep the idea of a _rat_ out of my mind when I looked at him. I got that effect somehow--something horribly intent and voracious but essentially weak. I remember looking at a dead rat in the stables when I was a boy. It was lying on its back with its feeble little front paws stuck up and the feet dangling.... And he had just the same expression on his face--ineffectual and yet cruel--as if his one regret was that he couldn't hurt any one again. I was almost sorry that he couldn't--especially as I had murdered him." "Oh, nonsense, Arthur; nonsense," his uncle interposed. "Don't say that." "True, though, in a way, isn't it?" Arthur said. "Truer than you guess, because I had known that it might kill him if he had a great shock. I'd even said so to Hubert, a few days ago--Sunday, I think it was. But I'd forgotten it. When I was telling him that I meant to go and take Eleanor with me whatever he did, I never once considered that it might be too much for him. And that was criminal carelessness in a medical man. I've been thinking about it more or less ever since." He paused and looked ahead of him, out through the gate into the Sussex lane, and it was manifest that he was confessing to himself rather than to Joe Kenyon as he continued: "Not that I propose to take any responsibility for his death. That wouldn't help any one. It happened so, and I shan't forget it, but that's all. Fergusson knows. There's no need to worry about it. Only--I've grown up. I'm not quite the same man I was twenty-four hours ago. I came down here to get back some of the years of youth that I'd lost in the war. Well, they're gone for good and all. I shall never be able to recover them now." "Oh, nonsense!" his uncle repeated, taking his arm. "You've got a thundering good time ahead of you." Arthur smiled. "I've got the best time any man could have ahead of me," he said, "but I shall enjoy it as a man, not as a boy. I didn't say that I regretted the passing of my youth, uncle." "No, no, of course not," Joe Kenyon agreed. "And look here, old boy, we've been talking about you since yesterday morning, about you and Eleanor, that is; and Turner and I--and Hubert, of course--are quite agreed that if the old man has, after all, overlooked you in his will, that we shall take it for granted that it was just an oversight--though probably Eleanor will be left pretty well off. If he had a favourite, it was Eleanor." "Good of you, uncle," Arthur replied warmly. "Awfully good and generous of you, but you must see that I couldn't take a farthing, even if the old man left it to me." "I don't see why not," Joe Kenyon began, but Arthur stopped him by saying. "No! Absolutely! In no circumstances whatever! It isn't simply that I could not bear to profit now by his death--though that counts. But--well--perhaps it needn't apply to you and the rest of them--but last night, while I was watching that poor thing on the bed, I realised so profoundly that his one source of power had been his money. I assure you that he was a weak man and not clever. If you can't believe me, go upstairs and look at him. And without his money he would have had no authority, no power over you of any sort. It was just his money that gave him the chance to spoil all your lives. Oh, Lord! I'm talking like a father to you. Honestly, uncle, I feel nearly old enough for that, this morning. Want of sleep, perhaps. It does clear the head in a queer way sometimes." "Hm! I dare say you're right, Arthur, about the money," Joe Kenyon mumbled. "I--I hope we shall make a better use of it. I don't think any of us has got the old man's cruelty--he was damned cruel, that's true enough." "Not even Miss Kenyon?" Arthur put in. "Esther? Oh, well! I don't know. Perhaps a little. But she has suffered like all the rest of us, and learnt her lesson." There was no time to reply to that; for while Joe Kenyon was still speaking, the car turned in at the front gates, and they both hurried forward to meet it. When it stopped at their signal to Scurr, the specialist was introduced, and then both Arthur and his uncle got into the car, and they all went on together up to the house. The conference in the old man's bedroom was a very short one, and the specialist had nothing to add to what they already knew, save the prestige of his authority. He was a tired, gray-looking little man of fifty or so, with an absent-minded manner, but when his anticipated acceptance of the diagnosis had been given, he looked keenly at Fergusson and said,-- "Made a lot of money, didn't he? All by his own efforts." "It's more than half a million I've been told," Fergusson answered. The specialist faintly shrugged his shoulders. "Wouldn't think it to look at him now. What?" he commented, and with the indifference of his profession he carelessly pinched the retreating chin of the little lax figure in the great bed. "The predatory type, I presume," he added thoughtfully. "Ay; he was that," Fergusson agreed. "More cunning than clever, though he had eyes that made you think of the eyes of a kite when he was roused. But he has altered greatly since this seizure. Maybe you'd hardly credit it now, but he has been a rare autocrat with his family." "You see," Arthur put in, "he had them so absolutely in his power. He could leave his money as he liked, and they were all dependent upon him." "And yet he must have had a certain generosity," Fergusson added, "for he kept the whole lot of them." The specialist looked shrewdly at Arthur and slightly pursed his mouth. "That was his one interest and amusement, perhaps," he said. "The love of power of a naturally weak man. It's common enough if you care to look for it. Who succeeds?" "We don't know yet," Arthur replied. "His lawyer is coming down by train this afternoon, and will stay here until the end--in case of a possible return to consciousness. But I suppose he'll tell us nothing until the old man's dead." "You interested?" the specialist asked. "No," Arthur said. "Not even to the extent of a five-pound note." "You know that much, then?" "I know that for certain," Arthur affirmed. Fergusson whistled softly under his breath, but made no other comment. They were quite a large party at dinner that night. Ken Turner had been telephoned for, and had come down by the same train as Mr Fleet, the solicitor. Joe Kenyon had taken his father's place at the head of the table, but occupied it as deputy only, for his sister and not his wife faced him from the other end. They had nearly finished, when one of the trained nurses entered the room and made a sign across the table to Arthur. He jumped up at once and followed her. He knew even before she spoke to him just outside the dining-room door why she had fetched him. There was nothing more to be done, but he sat for a few minutes beside the dead, remembering that he had promised some kind of autopsy to insure the body against premature burial. He would keep that promise, although he knew that the precaution was quite unnecessary. Also he thought again of the dead rat in the stable at home. The likeness was more pronounced than ever. He found them all collected in the drawing-room when he returned to make his expected announcement. "Yes! It's all over. He is dead," he said gravely, in answer to the look of inquiry they thrust at him. And with that statement his function in the household ceased. They had eyes for him no longer. The centre of interest had shifted from the doctor to the lawyer.... His head drooped, he was very tired, and he went over and sat down by Eleanor. They had made no new plans, but he did not want to discuss their future just then. He wanted nothing but to be near her, to rest in his confidence of her love for him. She alone could give him peace and quietness, and he felt worn out. They sat close together in silence, happy in each other's company, and attentive to nothing that was going on around them until their interest was aroused by the voice of Mr Fleet, speaking in a raised tone that was evidently meant to carry. He was a tall, spare man, almost completely bald, with a long thin nose and an expression of careworn good nature. He looked, Arthur thought, rather like a benevolent old stork, and he kept clearing his throat as he spoke with a queer little croak that was curiously birdlike. It seemed that he was painfully aware at this moment of the importance of what he had to say and that the knowledge embarrassed him. Whether by accident or design, a certain grouping had been effected that gave him the centre of the stage. He was standing with his back to the great carved stone mantelpiece that was one of the features of the Hartling drawing-room, with a clear space between him and the eight people who in their characteristic ways were exhibiting the various indications of the intense excitement that was stirring them. After all those years of waiting and uncertainty they were about to learn the truth, at last. They had awakened from their long nightmare of impalpable, inoppugnable resistances to the grateful sanity of everyday life. And they hoped. They had good cause for hope. After all, it could not be so bad for them now. The old man had never had any spite against them. He had been generous in his own quiet way. He would have done the right thing by them. Only Miss Kenyon, Arthur thought, looked doubtful and uneasy. She sat a little apart from the others and something of her habitual resolution and confidence had gone from her. For the first time since he had known her, Arthur saw her truly as her father's daughter. She too, perhaps, suffered from some intrinsic weakness of character, a weakness that had been hidden by the commanding office she had held in the household.... "No need in this case," the embarrassed lawyer was saying, "to await any formal occasion. I have, as a matter of fact, the will in my bag upstairs. But it is so unusually simple and--and I might almost say drastic, that no direct reference to it is necessary." Arthur and Eleanor looked at each other with a little start of surprise. They had never before doubted the legend of that untidy will. "Er--er--er--in short," Mr Fleet continued, wiping his forehead, "the will could, in this case, certainly have been written on a half-sheet of note-paper. Er--er--it was made in '84, thirty-six years ago, soon after Mrs Kenyon's death. And--er--er--" his hesitation and distress became positively painful--"er--in short--he--he left everything absolutely to Miss Kenyon--to Miss Esther Kenyon--at her absolute disposal--er--there were no legacies of any other kind, and Miss Kenyon is the sole executrix." Eleanor's hand had crept into Arthur's and at this announcement clasped his with such a sudden grip of anguish that he almost cried out. Then his heart seemed to miss a beat as realisation burst on him, and his eyes turned as the eyes of every other person in the room inevitably turned, to stare at Miss Kenyon. She was sitting very upright in her chair, gazing out before her with a look of rapt contemplation. Her right hand was lightly clenched as if she grasped a sceptre, and her widely opened eyes had the cruel, predatory stare of a hawk. And clear and bright, a text from the Old Testament leapt into Arthur's mind. How did it go? "Whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions." Eleanor had suddenly leaned upon him and the grasp of her hand was relaxed. +-------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's note: | | | |Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. | | | +-------------------------------------------------+ 
38181	----	Transcriber's Note: 1. Page scan source: http://books.google.com/books?id=ezkPAAAAQAAJ 2. The dipthong oe is represented by [oe]. A Woman Perfected _By the same Author_ THE ROMANCE OF A MAID OF HONOUR ADA VERNHAM, ACTRESS CURIOS: SOME STRANGE ADVENTURES OF TWO BACHELORS MRS. MUSGRAVE AND HER HUSBAND MISS ARNOTT'S MARRIAGE THE MAGNETIC GIRL CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG LADY THE GARDEN OF MYSTERY UNDER ONE FLAG JOHN LONG, Publisher, London A Woman Perfected By Richard Marsh "Earth's noblest thing, a woman perfected" London John Long Norris Street, Haymarket [_All Rights Reserved_] _First published in_ 1907 Contents CHAPTER I. Stricken. II. The Open Window. III. Little by Little. IV. The Avernian Slope. V. Peter Piper's Popular Pills. VI. Her Love Story. VII. The Puzzle which Donald Lindsay left behind him. VIII. A Philanthropist. IX. The Butler. X. The Earl and the Countess. XI. Robert. XII. In the Wood. XIII. Lovers' Tiffs. XIV. The Parting of the Ways. XV. 'So Early in the Morning.' XVI. GULDENHEIM. XVII. Nora goes. XVIII. Miss Gibb. XIX. A Young Lady in Search of a Living. XX. King Solomon. XXI. Nora Finds Something to do. XXII. Master and Man. XXIII. A Jobbing Secretary. XXIV. Mr. Morgan's Experiences of the Unexpected. XXV. On their Honeymoon. XXVI. An Offer of Friendship. XXVII. A Royal Road to Fortune. XXVIII. To be--or not to be--Postponed. XXIX. In Joseph Oldfield's Flat. XXX. When Thieves fall out. XXXI. Husband and Wife. XXXII. A Forgotten Coat. XXXIII. The Autograph Album. XXXIV. Unto the Light. XXXV. Bread upon the Waters. A Woman Perfected CHAPTER I STRICKEN Donald Lindsay was prostrated by a stroke of apoplexy on Thursday, April 3. It was surmised that the immediate cause was mental. He arrived home apparently physically well, but in a state of what, for him, was a state of unusual agitation. As a rule he was a dour man; much given to silence; self-contained. At that time there was staying at Cloverlea, with his daughter Nora, a school-friend, Elaine Harding. During lunch both girls were struck by his unusual talkativeness. Often during a meal he would hardly open his lips for any other purpose except eating and drinking. That morning he talked volubly to both girls on all sorts of subjects. After lunch Nora said laughingly to Elaine-- "I wonder what's the matter with papa. I don't know when I remember him so conversational." He put in no appearance at tea; but as that was a common occurrence his absence went unnoticed. When, however, the gong having sounded for dinner, the girls were waiting for him in the drawing-room, and still he did not come, Nora sent a servant to his dressing-room to inquire if he would be long. The man returned to say that his master was neither in his dressing-room nor his bedroom; that he had spent the afternoon in his study, from which no one had seen him issue; that the study door was locked, and knockings went unheeded. Nora, opening a French window in the drawing-room, went along the terrace towards the study. The study opened on to the terrace. It had two long windows. At neither of them were the blinds down or the curtains drawn. It was elicited afterwards that the servant whose duty it was to attend to such matters had knocked at the door when the shadows lowered. On turning the handle, he found that it was locked; Mr. Lindsay informed him from within that he would draw the blinds himself. It seemed that he had not done so. The room was in darkness, with the exception of the flicker of the firelight. Nora said to Miss Harding, who had followed at her heels-- "Whatever does papa want with a fire on a day like this?" All that week the weather had been not only warm, but positively hot. There had been one of those hot spells which we sometimes get in April; and, as frequently, have to do without in August. Save in the evenings and early mornings fires had remained unlit in all the living rooms. That Thursday had been the hottest day of all. Mr. Lindsay was one of those persons who seldom felt the cold, but quickly suffered from the heat. He preferred to be without a fire in his own apartments when the rest of the establishment was glad enough to be within reach of a cheerful blaze. That there should be one in his study on such a day as that struck his daughter as strange. She stood close up to the window, her friend at her side. "The room seems empty." "It is empty," said Miss Harding. Nora knocked, without result. "What's the use of knocking? There's no one there." Nora tried the handle first of one window, then of the other; both were fastened. "What's the use?" asked Miss Harding. "Any one can see that the room is empty. There's light enough for that." At that moment the fire flared up in such a way that all the room within was lit by its radiance; so clearly lit as to make it plain that it had no occupant. "But," observed Nora, "if it's empty why should the door be locked? Papa never leaves it locked when he's not inside." Two figures approached through the darkness. In front was the housekeeper, Mrs. Steele. "Miss Nora," she began, "you'd better go indoors. I'm afraid there's something wrong." "Why should I go indoors?" the girl demanded. "And what can be wrong? We can see all over the room; we saw plainly just now, didn't we, Elaine? There's no one there." "Your father's there," said Mrs. Steele. Her tone was grim. Before Nora could ask how she knew that, there was a crash of glass. Looking round with a start she found that Stephen Morgan, the butler, had broken a pane in the other window. "Morgan," she cried, "what are you doing?" "This is the shortest way in," he answered. He thrust his arm through the broken pane; lifted the hasp; the window was open. He went through it. Nora was following when she was checked by Mrs. Steele. "Miss Nora," she persisted, "you had better go indoors." "I am going indoors; isn't this indoors? If, as you put it, there is something wrong, who is more concerned than I?" All four entered. Morgan, who had passed round to the other side of the large writing-table, which was in the centre of the room, gave a sudden exclamation. Nora hurried round to where he was. Some one was lying huddled up on the floor; as if, slipping awkwardly out of his chair, he had lain helplessly where he had fallen. Nora dropped on her knees by his side. "Papa!" she cried. "Father!" No one answered. Morgan lit the lamp which always stood on Mr. Lindsay's writing-table. In the days which followed Nora often had occasion to ask herself what, exactly, happened next. She was conscious that in the room there was a strong smell of burnt paper; always, afterwards, when her nostrils were visited by the odour of charred paper that scene came back to her. The cause of the smell was not far to seek; the hearth was full of ashes. Evidently Mr. Lindsay had been burning papers on a wholesale scale; apparently for that reason he had had a fire; Nora had a vague impression--which recurred to her, later, again and again--that many of the papers were only partially consumed. The room was littered with papers; they were all over the table; on chairs, on the floor; drawers stood open, papers peeped out of them; which was the more remarkable since Mr. Lindsay was the soul of neatness. Plainly the finger of God had touched him when he was still in the midst of the task which he had set himself. There came a time when Nora had reason to wish that she had retained her self-possession sufficiently to give instructions that all papers, both burnt and unburnt, were to be left exactly as they were; and had taken steps to ensure those instructions being carried out. But at the moment all she thought of was her father. He was not dead; his stertorous breathing was proof of that. They carried him up-stairs; undressed him, put him to bed, who an hour or two before had been the hale, strong man; who had never known what it was to be sick; who had so loved to do everything for himself. Apoplexy was Dr. Banyard's pronouncement, when he appeared upon the scene; though there were features about the case which induced him to fall in readily with Nora's suggestion that a specialist should be sent for from town. The great man arrived in the middle of the night. When he saw Nora he was sententious but vague, as great doctors are apt to be; the girl gathered from his manner that the worst was to be feared. On the following day, the Friday, towards evening, Mr. Lindsay partially regained consciousness--that is, he opened his eyes, and when his child leaned over him it was plain he knew her, though he got no further than the mere recognition. He could neither speak, nor move, nor do anything for himself at all. That night Nora dreamed a dream. She dreamed that her father came into her room in his night-shirt, and leaned over her, and whispered that he had something to say to her--which he must say to her; but which was for her ear alone--he was just about to tell her what it was when she woke up. So strong had the conviction of his actual presence been that for some moments she could not believe that it was a dream; she started up in bed fully expecting to find him standing by her side. When she found that he was not close enough to touch she leaned out of bed, murmuring-- "Father! father!" It was only after she had lit a candle that she was constrained to the belief that it was a dream. Even then she was incredulous. She actually carried her candle to the door, and looked out into the passage, half expecting to see him passing along it. When she returned into her room she was in a curious condition, both mentally and bodily. She trembled so that she had to sink on to a chair. Then she did what she had not done for years--she cried. If she had had to say what prompted her tears, her explanation would have been a curious one; she would have had to say that she cried because of her father's grief; that it was his anguish which moved her to tears. Dream or no dream, what had struck her about him, as he leaned over her as she lay in bed, was his agony. In all the years she had known him she had never known him show signs of emotion; yet, as he leant over her she had felt, even in her sleep, that he was under the stress of some terrible trouble; that he wished to say to her what he had to say so much that his anxiety to say it was tearing at the very roots of his being. It was some minutes before she regained her self-control; when she did she slipped on a dressing-gown and went to her father's room. The night nurse answered her unspoken question by informing her that no change had taken place; that the sick man was just as he had been. Nora moved to his bed. There he lay, on his back, exactly as before. She had the feeling strong upon her that he had heard her coming; that, in some strange fashion, he was glad to see her; though, when she stood beside him, he looked up at her with such agony in his eyes that the sight of it brought tears to hers. Again there came to her that odd conviction which had possessed her when she woke out of sleep, that there was something which he strenuously wished to say to her; that he was torn by the desire to relieve himself of a burden which was on his mind. On the Saturday his condition remained the same; he was conscious but motionless, helpless, and, above all, speechless. So convinced was she that if he could only speak, if only some means could be found by which he could convey his thoughts to her, that he would be more at his ease, that she appealed to Dr. Banyard. "Can nothing be done to restore to him the power of speech, if only for a few minutes?" "I believe that I am doing all that medicine can do; you heard Sir Masterman say that he could do no more." "Can you think of no way in which he can convey to us his meaning? I believe that he has something which he wishes very much to say--something on his mind; and that if he could only say it--get it off his mind--he would at least be happier." The doctor eyed her shrewdly. "Have you any notion what it is?" "Not the slightest. If I had I might prompt him, and get at it that way. But my father has never been very communicative with me; I know nothing of his private affairs--absolutely nothing; I only know that he is my father." "Have you any other relations?" "So far as I know only an aunt, his sister. I have never seen her--I don't think they have been on good terms; I don't know her address; I believe she lives abroad." "Had your mother no relations?" "I cannot tell you; I know nothing of my mother--she died when I was born. I have been wondering if what he wishes to say is that, if--if the worst comes, he would like to be buried in her grave. I don't know where her grave is; he has never spoken of her to me." The doctor continued to eye her intently. He had a clever face, with a whimsical mouth, which seemed to be a little on one side; his eyes were deep-set, and were surrounded by a thick thatch of iron-grey hair. "How old are you?" "I shall be twenty in June." "That's a ripe age." She sighed. "I feel as if I were a hundred." "You don't look it; however, that's by the way. At such a time as this, Miss Lindsay, you ought not to be alone in this great house, with all the weight upon your shoulders." "I'm not alone; Elaine is with me." "Yes; and she--is even older than you." "Elaine is twenty-four." "I don't doubt it. If you're a hundred I should say that she is a thousand." "What do you mean?" "Nothing." But she felt that he had meant something; she wondered what. He went on. "What I intended to remark was that I think you ought to have some one with you who would give proper attention to your interests. As it is, you are practically at the mercy of a lot of servants and--and others. Hasn't your father an old friend, in whom you yourself have confidence--a business friend? By the way, who is his man of business--his lawyer?" She shook her head. "If father has any friends I don't know them. He has never been very sociable with anybody about here; I can't say what old acquaintances he may have had elsewhere. As you are probably aware, he was frequently away." "Did you never go with him?" "Never--never once. I have never been with my father anywhere out of this immediate neighbourhood, except when I first went to school, when he escorted me." "But you always knew where he was?" "Sometimes; not always." "Had he an address in town?" "Only his club, so far as I know." "Which was his club?" "The Carlton." "That sounds good enough. Did you use to write to him there?" "Not often; he only liked me to write to him when I had something of importance to say. He cared neither for reading nor for writing letters. He once told me that there were a lot of women who seemed to have nothing better to do than waste their own and other people's time by scribbling a lot of nonsense, which they cut up into lengths, sent through the post, and called letters. He hoped I should never become one of them. I remembered what he said, and never troubled him with one of the 'lengths' called letters if I could help it." Both of them smiled; only the doctor's was a whimsical smile, and hers was hardly suggestive of mirth. "You haven't told me who his lawyer is." "The only lawyer I ever heard him mention was Mr. Nash." "Nash? He only employed him in little local jobs; in no sense was he his man of business; I've reasons for knowing that his opinion of Herbert Nash's legal ability is not an unduly high one." As before, Nora shook her head. "He is the only lawyer I ever heard papa mention." "But, my dear Miss Lindsay, your father is a man of affairs--of wealth; he lives here at the rate of I don't know how many thousand pounds a year, and has never owed a man a penny; you must know something of his affairs." "All I know is that he has always given me all the money I wanted, and not seldom more than I wanted; I have never had to ask him for any; but beyond that I know nothing." When Dr. Banyard got home he said to his wife-- "Helen, if I had to define a male criminal lunatic, I am inclined to think that I should say it was a man who brought up his women-folk in the lap of luxury without giving them the faintest inkling as to where the wherewithal to pay for that luxury came from." His wife said mischievously-- "It is at least something for women-folk, as you so gracefully describe the salt of the earth, to be brought up in the lap of luxury; please remember that, sir. And pray what prompts this last illustration of the wisdom of the modern Solomon?" "That man Lindsay; you know how he's been a mystery to all the country-side; the hints which have been dropped; the guesses which have been made; the clues which the curious have followed, ending in nothing; the positive libels which have been uttered. It turns out that he's as much a mystery to his own daughter as he is to anybody else; I've just had it from her own lips. The man lies dying, leaving her in complete ignorance of everything she ought to know--at the mercy, not impossibly, of those who do know. Just as God is calling him home he wants to tell her; I can see it in his eyes, and so can she; but he is dumb. Unless a miracle is worked he'll die silent, longing to tell her what he ought to have told her years ago." CHAPTER II THE OPEN WINDOW On the Sunday Donald Lindsay died, in the afternoon, about half-past four; probably about the time, Dr. Banyard said, when he had first been stricken. Although, apparently, conscious to the last, he died speechless, without being able to do anything to relieve himself of the burden which lay upon his mind; a burden which, it seemed not improbable, had been the first cause of the fate which had so suddenly overtaken him. To Nora the blow was, of course, a bad one; when she realized that her father was dead it seemed as if all the light had gone out of the world for her. And yet, in the nature of things, it was impossible that she should feel for him the affection which sometimes associates the parent with the child. He himself had scoffed at love; sentiment, he had repeatedly told her, was the thing in life which was to be most avoided; he had illustrated his meaning in his own practice. He had never been unkind, but he had certainly never been tender; so far as she was aware he had never kissed her in his life; on those rare occasions on which she had ventured to kiss him he had brushed her aside as if she had been guilty of some folly. His attitude towards her was one of more or less genial indifference. He had provided her with a beautiful home; he had bought Cloverlea, as he was careful to inform her, for her, and in it he left her very much alone. He supplied her liberally with money, and there he seemed to think his duty towards her ended. She was welcome to have any companions she chose; he asked no questions about her comings and her goings; took no sort of interest in the young women of her own age whom, at rare intervals, she induced to stay with her. He made no attempt whatever to find for her a place in local, or any other, society; yet, unaided, she began, by degrees, to occupy a somewhat prominent place on the local horizon. Living in one of the finest places in the neighbourhood, with horses and carriages at her disposal, and even, latterly, motor cars; possessed of a sufficiency of ready money, it was hardly likely that she should remain unnoticed; her father's peculiarities threw her, if anything, into bolder relief. There was not a house for miles in which she was not a welcome visitor, and for this she had, largely, to thank herself. Not only was she good to look at, she was good to be with; she had that indefinable thing, charm. Not all the pens which ever wrote could make clear to Us the secret of a young girl's charm. Whilst she was still the mistress of Cloverlea her father seemed to be the only living creature who remained impervious to its magic influence; afterwards--that influence waned. On the Sunday on which her father died she was left alone with her grief; but on the Monday morning Dr. Banyard called and insisted on her seeing him. His manner, while it was brusque, was sympathetic. "Now, my dear young lady," he began, almost as soon as she was in the room, "what you have first of all to remember is that you, at any rate, are still alive, and likely, in all human probability, to remain so for some considerable time to come; your first duty therefore, towards yourself, and towards your father, is to see that your interests are properly safeguarded." "I don't know what you mean." "Then I will endeavour to make myself clear. I believe you are engaged to be married." "You know I am." "Where, at the present moment, is Mr. Spencer?" "He is on his way home from Cairo, where he has been staying with his aunt, Lady Jane Carruthers, who is ill." "Does he know what has happened?" "I don't quite know where he is. When he last wrote he told me that he was going to take what he called an 'after-cure' in Italy "--she smiled, as if at some thought of her own--"but he entered into no particulars, and until I hear from him again I don't quite know where he's to be found; all I do know is that he's to be home before the first of May." "As things stand, that's some distance ahead. I believe that his father and mother, the Earl and Countess, are also absent." She nodded. "You say you don't know who was your father's man of business; then who is there to whom you feel yourself entitled to turn for the kind of assistance of which you stand in such imperative need, at once; certainly in the course of to-day?" "There's Elaine." "You mean Miss Harding?" It was his turn to smile. "I'm afraid she's not the kind of person I'm thinking of; though I do not for a moment doubt her cleverness. She suffers from one disqualification; she's not a man. What you want is a dependable, and thoroughly capable lawyer." "There's Mr. Nash." "Mr. Nash is, again, hardly the sort of person you're in want of. To begin with, he's too young, has too little experience; it was only the other day he qualified--with difficulty." "He has been qualified more than three years; he did a good many things for papa." "Yes, but what kind of things? Not the kind which will have to be done for you; and I happen to know that what he did he bungled." "I believe he's coming here to-day." "Have you sent for him?" "I haven't; but Elaine came into my room this morning and asked if she should, and I believe she has." "Miss Harding sent for him?" The doctor eyed her intently for a moment; then, turning, he went to the window and looked out; presently he spoke to her from there. "And do you propose to give Herbert Nash the run of your father's papers?" "I don't know what I propose to do; I haven't thought about it at all; I want him to do what he can to help me; I don't feel as if I could do very much to help myself." "Is it any use my saying that I can give you the name of a well-known firm of family lawyers; and that you have only to send them a wire, and before the day is over you'll have one of the best men in England--in every sense--on the premises, making your interests his own?" "Elaine seemed to think that Mr. Nash has only to glance through some of my father's papers to discover who my father's man of business really was, and that then all we shall have to do will be to communicate with him." "I see; there's something in that--Miss Harding has her wits about her. Do you know what time Mr. Nash is coming?" "I don't--Elaine sent the message, if one was sent, and of that I'm not certain; anyhow I don't know what arrangements she has made." "Would you mind inquiring?" "I'll ask her to come here, then you can inquire yourself." The bell was rung, and presently Miss Harding appeared. She was short and slight; with dark hair, big dark eyes, a dainty little mouth, and very red lips. She made at once for Nora, ignoring the doctor, who was still standing by the window. "They tell me that you want me." "It isn't I, it's Dr. Banyard; he wants to know if you have sent to Mr. Nash; and, if so, at what time he's coming." Miss Harding opened her big eyes wider, which was a trick she had. "Dr. Banyard wants to know?--why does Dr. Banyard want to know?" "That I cannot tell you; you had better ask him; here he is. Is Mr. Nash coming?" "Of course he's coming, but he doesn't seem to know quite when; it seems he has some sort of case on at the police court." "I know; he's defending that young scoundrel, Gus Peters, who's been robbing his master." This was the doctor; Miss Harding turned to him. "Is the gentleman you call Gus Peters a scoundrel?" "Isn't a fellow who robs his master a scoundrel?" "Has it been proved that he robbed his master?" "It's a matter of common notoriety." "Common notoriety is not infrequently a liar. However, that's not the point; I suppose Mr. Nash will do his duty to his client in any case, and he'll come here as soon as he's done it." "I'd wait for him if I could, but I have to go my round; I'll look in afterwards on the off-chance of finding him; there's something I particularly wish to say to him. I fancy the magistrates, in spite of Mr. Nash, will make short work of Mr. Peters." After the doctor had gone Miss Harding said to Miss Lindsay, "Nora, dear, don't you think that Dr. Banyard is inclined to be a little interfering?" "It has never struck me that he was." "It has struck me, more than once. But then I think that G.P.s are apt to be interfering; they hope, by having a finger in everybody's pie, to get a plum out of each. Dr. Banyard doesn't like Mr. Nash, does he?" "He has never told me that he doesn't." "Has he never breathed words to the same effect?" "He has certainly hinted that he doesn't think much of Mr. Nash's legal abilities; but then who does?" "I do." "Really, Elaine?" "Really, Nora. I believe that if he's truly interested in a person he can do as much for that person as anybody else--perhaps more." "Possibly; but is he ever truly interested in anybody but himself?" Miss Harding was silent for an instant; then she smiled rather oddly. "Entirely between ourselves, Nora, that's what I wonder." She had cause to. It happened on the Thursday evening on which Mr. Lindsay was taken ill, that Elaine Harding was left with nothing to do, and no one to do it with. It is true that, had she insisted, she might have made herself of use in some way; but, as she herself admitted, she was no good when there was illness about. Indeed, she was one of those persons--though this she kept to herself--who shrunk from suffering in any form with a sort of instinctive physical repugnance. She only needed half-a-hint to the effect that her services were not required, and she was ready to give the sick-room as wide a berth as any one could possibly require. To be plain, she was disposed to regard Mr. Lindsay's attack almost as if it had been an injury to herself. Had she been perfectly free, she would have packed up her boxes and left the house within the hour; it would have been better for her if she had. The idea of having to remain under the same roof with a man who was suffering from an apoplectic stroke was horrid; but, at the same time, there were reasons, of divers sorts, why she should not flee from the dearest friend she had in the world at the first sign of trouble. Instead of packing up her boxes she dined alone, off food which had been ruined by being kept waiting. That was another grievance. She did like good food, perfectly cooked. She was conscious that the servants were regarding her askance, as if they were surprised that she should dine at all; that also was annoying. When she rose from table she was in quite a bad temper--what Mr. Lindsay meant by falling ill when she was in the house she could not imagine. The solitude of the empty drawing-room was appalling. The French window still stood open; better the solitude of the grounds than that great bare chamber. She went out on to the terrace. It was a lovely night, warmer than many nights in June. There was not a cloud in the sky. A moon, almost at the full, lighted the world with her silver glory. She looked about her. Suddenly she perceived that a light was shining out upon the terrace from what was evidently an uncurtained window. She remembered; no doubt it was the lamp in Mr. Lindsay's study, the lamp which Morgan had lit; in that case the window must still be open. She went to see; her slight form moved along the terrace with something stealthy in its movements, as if she was ashamed of what she was doing. She reached the study; it was as she supposed; the lamp was lit, the window was open, the room was empty. She was seized by what she would afterwards have described as a sudden access of curiosity. She glanced over her shoulder, to left and right; there was no one in sight; not a sound. She put her dainty head inside the window, to indulge herself with just one peep; after all, there is very little harm in innocent peeping; then she passed into the room. CHAPTER III LITTLE BY LITTLE It was just as it was when its owner had been stricken down; in the same state of disorder. Cupboards yawned; drawers were open; letters and papers were everywhere; a fire still smouldered in the grate; the hearth was littered with the ashes of burned and half-burned papers; everywhere were indications that Mr. Lindsay had been interrupted, possibly just as he was setting his house in order. Glancing round her Elaine perceived that the door which led into the passage was open, though only an inch or two; probably it had been left unlatched when they bore the master through it. Moving lightly, on tiptoe, she shut it, noiselessly; but she made sure she had shut it fast. She even laid her small fingers about the handle of the key, seeming to hesitate whether or not to turn it; then, smiling, as if at the absurdity of the notion, she returned towards the centre of the room; standing for some seconds glancing about her in all directions, as if in search of something which it might be worth her while to look at; a pretty, dainty, girlish figure, herself the one thing in the whole room which was best worth looking at. By degrees her quick, bright eyes, roving hither and thither, reached the writing-table in the centre, by which its owner had been sitting when he had slipped from off his chair; instantly they noted something which gleamed amid the litter of papers with which it was covered. Moving a little towards it she saw that there were coins on a little oasis about the centre; quite a heap of them--gold coins. On the top of them was half-a-sheet of note-paper. Going close to the table she picked this half-sheet up, gingerly, as if it were dangerous to touch. As a matter of fact to her, at that moment, a dynamite bomb could not have been more charged with peril. On the piece of paper were some figures--"£127"--nothing more. She knew that the writing was Mr. Lindsay's. Evidently he had been counting the coins, and had made a note upon that slip of paper of the value they represented; there were one hundred and twenty-seven pounds in gold. Elaine Harding was poor. Her father was the vicar of a parish in the West of England. His parish was large; his family was large; but his income was small. His wife had died some three years ago, worn out by her efforts to make a pound do the work of at least thirty shillings. Elaine had been sent to an expensive school by a relation; there she had met Nora Lindsay. Just as the time came for her to be leaving school the relation died. It had been expected that he would have done something to establish her in life; had he lived he probably would have done; as it was he left her nothing. So he had done her harm instead of good; that expensive school filled her with notions which might never have got into her head had it not been for him; a fashionable boarding-school is a bad school for a poor man's daughter. Ever since she had left it she had been discontented, inwardly if not outwardly, for nature had made her one of those persons who always, if they can, show a smiling face to the world. Nora Lindsay had been her chief solace. She never refused Nora's invitations to pay her a visit, and when at Cloverlea stayed as long as she could; indeed, she had been there so much just lately, during Mr. Lindsay's almost continual absences, that she knew the people round about almost as well as Nora did herself. She allowed Nora to make her presents; she would have been hard put to it if Nora had not had promptings in that direction. And then the girl had such a pretty way of giving, as if she were receiving a favour instead of bestowing one, that Elaine had no difficulty in preserving her dignity in face of the most delicate donations. Yet in spite of Nora's generosity she was always in need of money; there were special reasons why she was very much in need of it just now. Only the night before she had spent nearly an hour on her knees praying to God to show her some way to the cash she stood so much in want of; and now here were one hundred and twenty-seven pounds in gold at her finger-tips. It could hardly be called an answer to her prayer. It is said that prayers are heard in two places, in heaven and in hell; Elaine realized with a sudden, shrinking terror that this answer must have come from hell. The owner of that money was up-stairs, dying; she believed that he was dying, speechless; she thought it possible that he might never be able to speak again, this side the grave. The chances were that he was the only person living who knew that that money was where it was. It was hardly likely that he would ever again be able to refer to its existence; she might, therefore, safely regard it as--what? Say, treasure-trove; it was a convenient word, treasure-trove; especially as she was placed. One hundred and twenty-seven pounds! in gold! no one would ever be able to trace it! ever! Her eyes, which had opened wider and wider, having in them a very singular look, a look which would have startled her had they suddenly glared back at her from a mirror, wandered from the heap of gold coins to a bag, a canvas bag--a good-sized canvas bag, stuffed, apparently, to repletion, tied round the top with red tape; the kind of bag, she was aware, which is used by bankers to contain coin. She touched it, lightly, with her finger-tips; there were coins inside, undoubtedly; she could see them bulging through the canvas. She picked it up, again gingerly, as if, if she did not observe great care, it might explode in her hand; it had been better for her, perhaps, if it had. It was heavy, heavier than she had expected; wedged full of money. Beneath it there was another half-sheet of writing-paper; on it, in Donald Lindsay's writing, was what was probably a statement of what the bag contained--"£500." Five hundred pounds! obviously again in gold! She could feel the sovereigns! and the one person who knew of its existence dumb and dying! What was the matter with Elaine? The sheet of paper fell from her hand. She reeled as if attacked by sudden vertigo; she leaned against the table as if to save herself from falling; she went quite white; she stared about her as if afraid. Six hundred and twenty-seven pounds in gold! ownerless! practically ownerless, for how could it be said to have an owner when the only creature who knew of its existence was dumb and dying? Six hundred and twenty-seven pounds! what might not that money mean to her?--and--and to some one else who had grown of late to be almost more to her than herself? She turned again to clutch at it; when she saw that on the writing-table there still was something else; a roll of notes, enclosed in a rubber band; banknotes, if she could believe her eyes. She picked them up, to make sure; heedlessly, fearlessly this time; the other things had proved so innocuous that, already, she had grown careless. They were bank-notes, unmistakably; and beneath them, was the inevitable half-sheet of paper. This time it was covered with quite an array of figures, in Donald Lindsay's neat handwriting. Seemingly, according to those figures, the roll of notes contained forty at £5, fifty at £10, twenty-five at £20, six at £50, ten at £100; in all one hundred and twenty-one notes of the value of £2500. The numbers were given of every note of each denomination; Elaine's quick eyes perceived that the numbers were by no means consecutive, from which she deduced that they had not been issued from a bank all at one time, but had come together at different dates, from various quarters. She perceived on the instant that the discovery of that roll gave the situation quite a different character; she herself was conscious of being surprised at the rapidity with which her brain was working. One hundred and twenty pounds, even six hundred and twenty pounds in gold, was one thing; two thousand five hundred pounds in notes was quite another; the one might provide for her immediate necessities, with the other she might be secure for life. Properly invested the whole sum ought to bring her in three pounds a week--for ever; she believed she knew of an investment in which it might bring her more than that; much more. The point was, would it be safe to treat that as--treasure-trove? She was inclined to think it would. Probably the existence of the entire amount was known only to the dying man, if he was dying. There was, of course, the risk that he might come back to life again, in which case it might be awkward. But some ghoul-like intuition told her that she might dismiss that possibility from her mind; some dreadful voice within proclaimed that he was as good as dead already; in some horrible way she was sure of it. It was a heterogeneous gathering, that roll of notes; probably their owner himself could not have told how most of them came into his possession. The only record of their identity was on that sheet of paper; if that vanished there was nothing by which they could be identified; that seemed pretty obvious. The devil whispered that it would be just as safe to take the notes as to take the gold; and she knew that she would run no risk by taking that. There was still one point to be considered; she was clear-sighted and logical enough to be aware of that. If Donald Lindsay was dying then this money was, in all human probability, his child's, who was the dearest friend she had in the world, Nora. She loved Nora, really loved her; she was always telling herself that she really loved her. Then Nora had done her nothing but kindnesses; how great some of those kindnesses were only she and Nora knew. The idea that she would allow any one to rob Nora was monstrous; that she should rob her herself was inconceivable. Had any one accused her of being capable of such base ingratitude even then she would have repudiated the charge with honest indignation; nothing would ever induce her to do anything which could injure Nora. She knew herself well enough to be assured of that. And then she glozed the thing over with one of those patent glosses which the devil provides when the occasion needs them. She argued this way; if her father died then Nora would be a rich woman, immensely rich; rich, possibly, beyond the dreams of avarice. She would never miss such a detail as, say, three thousand pounds; such a sum would be a trifle to her, a nothing; especially if she never knew that the sum had ever existed. There was that to be borne in mind; we do not miss what we never had, especially if we do not know it ever was. And in the case of a rich woman like Nora, with twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps fifty thousand pounds a year, perhaps even more, in such an income there were bound to be leakages; through one of them such a drop in the ocean as three thousand pounds might easily slip, and no one even be aware of it, least of all would the knowledge ever come to Nora, or touch her in any way. No; certainly darling Nora would suffer no injury if what was on the writing-table was regarded as treasure-trove. At the same time far be it from her--Elaine--to do anything which could be regarded by any one as in the slightest degree unworthy. She was seized with a sudden access of virtue. Take the money--she! Sully her fingers by even touching it! who dare hint that she could do a thing like that! The idea was really too ridiculous; it was not to be taken seriously. It only showed what notions came to people when money was left about. She had always maintained that it was wrong to leave money about. Mr. Lindsay ought to have known better, putting temptation in some weak-minded person's way; she did not stop to consider that for that he could hardly be held responsible. What she had to do was to see that temptation was removed; some servant might stray into the room, and then what might not happen? The least she could do was to see that the money was put out of sight, in a drawer, or anywhere. She glanced about her, and was struck by a rather curious notion. The door of a bookcase stood wide open. A book had obviously been taken down from one of the shelves; a large volume, one of a set; there it lay by her elbow on the table. She looked at it, without clearly apprehending what the title was; she had a vague idea that in it was something about law. Here was the very hiding-place she wanted; no thief would be tempted to take money which was snugly hidden behind a great book like that, if only for the simple reason that he would never know that it was there. She slipped the loose gold into a big blue envelope; then she placed it, and the canvas bag, and the roll of notes, on that shelf in the bookcase. It so chanced that while the backs of the set of books were plumb with the front of the shelf they did not go right against the wall, so that there was space enough behind them to enable her, after a little manipulation, to do what she desired. When the volume had been returned to its place there was nothing whatever to show that behind it were more than three thousand pounds in notes and gold. She surveyed this result with satisfaction. "Now," she told herself, "I've removed temptation from everybody's way." The three half-sheets of paper on which Mr. Lindsay had noted the several amounts she folded up together and thrust into the bodice of her dress; possibly she thought that they would be out of harm's way there. She had just done this, and had shut the bookcase door, when, in the silence which prevailed, she distinctly heard the footsteps of some one moving in the grounds without. Instantly she blew the lamp out, and went fluttering through the open window. So soon as she was on the terrace she stood still to listen. Her ear had not deceived her. Some one, not far off, was moving along a gravel path; apparently the sound proceeded from the other side of the house. Either her perceptions must have been very keen, or there was something unusual about the step; though it is strange how quick the ear is to recognize a step with which one is familiar. "I do believe," she told herself, "that it's his step." She ran along to the end of the terrace; then stopped again. "It is!" she said. With lifted skirts she tiptoed round the side of the house till she came to where a path branched off among the trees, then, drawing herself under their shadow, she stood and waited, smiling. The steps came nearer, close to where she was. She moved out from under the shadow. "Herbert!" she said. The man--it was a man--was evidently taken by surprise; he stepped back so quickly that he almost stumbled. "By George!" he exclaimed, "what a start you gave me!" She laughed, half to herself. "Did she frighten him, the poor thing! I heard you coming ever so far off; I knew it was you. And pray what are you doing here at this time of night?" "I came upon the off-chance of getting a word with you." "With me--at this hour!" "Well, I've found you, and that's what I wanted." "Herbert!" She went still closer, almost as if expecting a caress; but when he showed no inclination to take advantage of his opportunities, she saw from his face, in the moonlight, that there was something wrong. "My lord, what ails you?" "Everything; I've come up to tell you that what we were talking about yesterday is clean off." "And of what were we talking--yesterday?" "Why, about our marriage, and all that kind of thing. I can't marry; I don't suppose I ever shall be able to; you'd better give me the mitten right away. To begin with, I've found out--or, rather, I've had the fact forced upon me, that I'm in a mess." "What kind of mess?" "Money, of course; what else counts?" "How much?" "If I don't get two hundred pounds--and where am I going to get two hundred pounds? why, I haven't as many shillings--and get it pretty soon, I shall have to----" "What?" He had left his sentence unfinished; he gave it a conclusion which one felt had not been originally intended. "Well, I shall be in Queer Street." He paused, and she was silent; she was thinking. CHAPTER IV THE AVERNIAN SLOPE When she spoke again a quick observer might have noticed that in her voice there was a new intonation. "Two hundred pounds is not such a very large sum." "Isn't it? I'm glad you think so. It's a large sum to me; a lot too large. I've about as much chance of getting it as I have of getting the moon. And if I did get it I shouldn't be much forwarder so far as marriage is concerned. What's the use of my talking of marrying when I hardly earn enough to buy myself bread and cheese? and it's as certain as anything can be that in this place I never shall earn enough." "Why not?" "For one reason, if for no other, because in this place there's only room for one solicitor; and old Dawson's that one. He's got all the business that's worth having; and, what's more, he'll keep it. Now if I could buy old Dawson out--I happen to know that he's made what he considers pile enough for him, and would be quite willing to retire; or even if I could buy a share in his business, he might be willing to sell that; then it might be a case of talking; but as it is, so far as I'm concerned, marriage is off." "How much would be wanted?" "If I could lay my hands on a thousand, or fifteen hundred pounds in cash, then I might go to Dawson and make a proposal; but as I never shall be able to lay my hands on it, it would be better for both of us if we talked sense; that's what I've come for, to talk sense." "Does all this mean that you've found out that you made a mistake when you told me that you loved me?" "It means the exact opposite; I've found out that I love you a good deal more than I thought I did. If I didn't love you I might be disposed to behave like a cad, and marry you out of hand; but as I do love you I'm not taking any chances." "I don't quite follow your reasoning." "Don't you? It's clear enough to me. I'm in a hole, and because I love you I'm not going to drag you in as well." "But suppose I should like to be dragged?" "You don't understand, or you wouldn't talk like that." "Shouldn't I? Don't be too certain. You are sure you love me?" "I love you more than I thought I could love any one, and that's the mischief." "Is it? I don't agree; because, you see, I love you." "It's no good; I wish you didn't." "Do you? Then I don't. If you wanted me to, I'd marry you to-morrow." "Elaine!" Then he did take her in his arms, and he kissed her. And she kissed him. Suddenly he put her from him. "Don't! for God's sake, don't! Elaine, don't you tempt me! I'm not much of a chap, and I'm not much of a hand at resisting temptation--there's frankness for you!--and I want to keep straight where you're concerned. I'll make a clean breast of it; the only way I can see out of the mess I'm in is to make a bolt for it, and I'm going to bolt; there you have it. I've come up here to say good-bye." "Good-bye?" Her voice was tremulous. "If ever I come to any good, which isn't very probable, you'll hear from me; you'll never hear from me if I don't; so I'm afraid that this is going to be very near a case of farewell for ever." "You say two hundred pounds will get you out of that mess you're in?" "About that; I dare say I could manage with less if it was ready money. But what's the use of talking? I don't propose to rob a bank, and that's the only way I ever could get it." "And if you had fifteen hundred to offer Mr. Dawson, what then?" "What then? Elaine, you're hard on me." "How hard? I don't mean to be." "To dangle before my face the things which I most want when you know they're not for me! Why, if I had fifteen hundred pounds, and could go to Dawson with a really serious proposition, the world would become another place; I should see my way to some sort of a career. I'd begin by earning a decent living; in no time I'd be getting together a home; in a year we might be married." "A year? That's a long time." He laughed. "If I were Dawson's partner, with a really substantial share, we might be married right away." "How soon, from now?" "Elaine, what are you driving at? what is the use of our deceiving ourselves? I shall become Dawson's partner when pigs have wings, not before. What I have to do is bolt, while there still is time." There was an interval of silence. They were standing very close together; but he kept his hands in his jacket pockets, as if he were resolved that he would not take her in his arms; while she stood, with downcast eyes, picking at the hem of her dress. When she spoke again it was almost in a whisper. "Suppose I were able to find you the money?" He smiled a smile of utter incredulity, as if her words were not worth considering. "Suppose you were able to buy me the earth? Yesterday you told me that you had not enough money to buy yourself a pair of shoes; in fact, you said that your whole worldly wealth was represented by less than five shillings." Once more she was still--oddly still. "Herbert!" The name was rather sighed than spoken. He saw that she was trembling. The appeal was irresistible. Again he put his arms about her and held her fast. "Little lady, you've troubles enough of your own without worrying yourself about mine. You'll easily find better men than I am who'll be glad enough to worship the ground on which you stand, and then you'll recognize how much you owe me for running away, and leaving you an open field. The best thing that can happen to you is that I should go." "I don't think so. I--I don't want you to go." There was a catching in her breath. "I don't want to go, but--I might find it awkward if I stayed." "Herbert, I--I want to tell you something." "What is it? By the sound of you it must be something very tremendous." Her manner certainly was strange. As a rule she was a most self-possessed young woman; now she seemed to be able to do nothing but shiver and stammer. Not only was she hardly audible, but her words came from her one by one, as if she found it difficult to speak at all. "What I--said to you--yesterday--wasn't true; I--said it to try you." "What did you say to try me? Elaine, you're what I never thought you would be--you're mysterious." "Suppose--you had fifteen hundred pounds--are you sure Mr. Dawson would make you a partner?" "Well, I've never asked him, but I'm betting twopence." "What would your income be if he did? You're not to laugh--answer my questions." "Oh, I'll answer them; although, as I've already remarked, I've not the faintest notion what you're driving at; and that particular question is rather a wide one. If I were to buy a share I should try to do it on the understanding that some day I was to have the lot. I should probably commence with an income of between three and four hundred, which would become more later on; I dare say old Dawson is making a good thousand a year." "A thousand? We might live on that." "I should think we might; we might start on three hundred; I should like to have the chance." "I'd be willing. And how much would it cost to furnish a house?" "I've a few sticks in those rooms of mine." "I know; I also know what kind of sticks they are--we shouldn't want them." "There at last we are agreed. I suppose that to furnish the kind of house we should want to start with would make a hole in a couple of hundred--you probably know more about that sort of thing than I do. But, my dear Elaine, what is the use of our playing at fairy tales? You haven't five shillings in the world, and I've only just enough to take me clear away, and to keep the breath in my body while I have one look round." Again there was an interval of silence, which was broken by her in a scarcely audible whisper. "That--that was what I was trying to explain; what--I said to you yesterday was--to prove you." "What particular thing did you say? I haven't a notion what you mean." "Every girl likes to be--wooed for herself alone." "Of course she does, and it's dead certain you'll never be wooed for anything but your own sweet self; I've known you, and all about you, long enough to be aware that you're no heiress." "That's--that's where you're wrong." "Wrong! Elaine, where's the joke?" "I--I am an heiress; of course, in a very moderate way." "What do you call an heiress? when yesterday you told me that you didn't possess five shillings!" "That was said to try you." Raising her eyes she looked him boldly in the face; there in the bright moonlight they could see each other almost as clearly as if it had been high noon. "To try me? You're beyond me altogether; Elaine, are you pulling my leg?" "I have about two thousand pounds." "Two thousand pounds! Great Scott! where did you get it from? I didn't know there was so much money in all your family." "There, again, you were mistaken. I got it from an aunt who died--not long ago." "When did she die?" "Oh, about six months ago." "What was her name?" "The same as mine--Harding." "Was she an aunt by marriage?" "She was my father's sister." "A spinster? But I thought you told me that none of your father's relatives had two pennies to rub together." "So I thought; but I was wrong. At any rate, when she died she left me about two thousand pounds." "You've kept it pretty dark." He was staring at her as if altogether amazed; she smiled at him as if amused by his surprise. "I have; I've told nobody--not even Nora." "Doesn't Miss Lindsay know?" "She doesn't. Nobody knows--except you; and I shall be obliged by your respecting my confidence." "I'll respect your confidence; but--of all the queer starts! What fibs you've told!" "I know I've told some; in a position like mine, one had to. But I'd made up my mind that you shouldn't know I had money, and--you didn't know." "I certainly did not; I scarcely realize it now; I wonder if you're joking." "No, I'm not joking." She shook her pretty head, with a grave little smile. Her face looked white in the moonshine. "Can you touch the capital? Is it in the hands of trustees? Or do you only have the income?" "It is not in the hands of trustees; it is entirely at my own disposal; I can get it when I want." "All of it?" "All of it." He drew a long breath, as if moved by some new and sudden strength of feeling. "Can you--can you get two hundred pounds before next Tuesday?" "I can, and I will--if you want it. You are sure you want it?" "Elaine, if--if you will I'll--I'll never forget it." "You shall have it on Monday if you like." He covered his face with his hands, seeming to be shaken by the stress of a great emotion. She drew closer to him, as if frightened; her voice trembled. "Herbert, what--what is wrong?" Uncovering his face, clenching his fists, he stared straight in front of him, resolution in his eyes. "Nothing now--nothing!--and there never shall be anything again!--thank-God. Thank God! Considering what sort of mess it was that I was in, I didn't dare to ask God to help me out of it; but He's done it without my asking Him. Elaine, upon my word I believe it's true that God moves in a mysterious way." Elaine, hiding her face against his shoulder, burst into tears, which surprised him more than anything which had gone before. She was not a girl who cries easily, yet now she was shaken by her sobs. Putting his arms about her, he strove to comfort her, showering on her endearing epithets. "My sweet, my dear, my darling, what troubles you? Don't you--don't you want me to have the money? You have only to say so; I shan't mind." "Of course I want you to have it! I only want it for you!--you know I only want it for you! Herbert, are you--are you sure you love me? Tell me--tell me quite truly." "I am as sure as that there is the moon above us; and now I dare to tell you so; no man ever loved a woman better than I love you. I know I am unworthy; I know how, in all essentials, you are infinitely above me----" "I'm not--I'm not!" "But it shall be my constant endeavour to raise myself to your level----" "Don't!--you don't know what you're saying! Don't!" "I do know what I'm saying, and I mean it; if God gives me strength I hope, before I've finished, to prove myself worthy of the wife I've won. You hear? Then make a note of it." Then there were divers passages. "Herbert, I want you to go to Mr. Dawson tomorrow, and arrange about that partnership. I'll find the fifteen hundred pounds." "Sweetheart, you've turned all my sorrow into joy." "And--this, sir, is supposed to be spoken in the faintest whisper--I--I think I'd like to be married pretty soon." "As soon as it is legally possible, madam, you shall be married, if you choose to say the word." "I don't want it in quite such a hurry as that; but--you know what I mean!--I don't want to have to wait a horrid year." Presently she asked, "Do you know that Mr. Lindsay's very ill?" "I heard it as I came along." "I think he's dying. I suppose Nora'll be very rich if he does." "Let's hope that he'll not die." "Not die?" She looked at him with such a strange expression on her face that he smiled. "Why, girlie, you don't want the father to die to make the daughter rich!" "No; of course not." But, afterwards, she was not the same; it was as if he had struck some jarring note. When they parted she went round to the back of the house, along the terrace, towards the study window, which still stood open. She paused upon the threshold. "Suppose he were not to die? suppose he doesn't?" The problem the supposition presented to her mind seemed to cause her no slight disturbance; still she passed into the room. Which explains why, when Nora said she doubted if Mr. Nash was ever really interested in anybody but himself, Elaine Harding had good cause to wonder if the thing was true. CHAPTER V PETER PIPER'S POPULAR PILLS On the Monday, after Dr. Banyard had been gone perhaps a couple of hours, Mr. Nash drove up to Cloverlea in a dogcart. Miss Harding met him in the drive. At sight of her the gentleman descended; the cart went on up to the house, to wait for him. So soon as it was out of sight the lady, taking a packet from the bodice of her dress, gave it to her lover. "That's the two hundred; put it in your pocket; I want you to promise that you'll not breathe a word to any one about the money having come from me." "I promise readily." "Nor about any other money which--I may find. I want you to keep your own counsel; I want people to suppose that the money is your own; I don't want them to think I'm buying a husband." "I certainly will neither do nor say anything to make them think so. All the same, darling, I don't know how to thank you; you don't know what this means to me. It seems to be all in gold?" He was fingering the parcel in his jacket pocket. "It is; I thought you might find it more convenient." "I think it's possible you're right; I believe you always are." As he had been coming along in the dogcart he had not seemed to be in the best of spirits; now he was unmistakably cheerful; that package had made a difference. A question, however, which she asked seemed to annoy him more than, on the surface, it need have done. "What became of Mr. Peters?" "They gave him six months--confound the idiots?" "Why confound them?" The smile with which he accompanied his reply seemed forced. "A lawyer likes his client to be acquitted." "But Dr. Banyard says that he's a scoundrel." "Dr. Banyard! You can tell Dr. Banyard, with my compliments, that he's a Pharisee." "I think nothing of the man; I think he's an interfering prig. I don't like him, and he doesn't like me." "Which shows that he must be all kinds of a fool." "I don't know about that; but I do know that I don't like him. By the way, I suppose you understand what you're coming for. Everything here is at sixes and sevens. Nora knows absolutely nothing about her father's business affairs; he never told her anything; he kept his own counsel with a vengeance." "So I gathered from your note." "She doesn't even know who his man of business was. She wants you to find out; she thinks that if you look through his papers you will." "There should be no difficulty about that. If I have access to his papers I ought to find that out inside ten minutes." "I suppose so. But even if you do find out I don't see why you shouldn't keep the conduct of her affairs as much as possible in your hands; I think it might be done; you'll have my influence upon your side. You needn't say anything about there being an understanding between us; we can't keep people from guessing; but don't let them know--till it suits us." He saw something in her eyes which caused him to pay her what some people would have regarded as an ambiguous compliment. "By George, you're a clever one; you're the sort of girl I like!" "I'm glad of that; because you happen to be the sort of man I like." He laughed. "I'd like to kiss you!" "Quite impossible, here. You see, it might be rather a good thing for you to have the management of Nora's estate." "True, oh queen!" "Then why shouldn't you have it?" "I know of no reason." "There is no reason, if you take proper advantage of the fact that you're first on the field." They had entered the house and were standing outside the study door. She produced a key. "Nora's not appearing; poor dear, she's more distressed than I ever thought she would have been! so, on this occasion only, I am doing the honours. We've kept this room locked up since the day on which Mr. Lindsay was taken ill; no one has crossed the threshold; you'll find everything in the same condition in which he left it." They entered the room. So soon as they were in he kissed her, and she kissed him, though she protested. "Hush! Nora's waiting for me! Remember what I told you; there's no reason why you shouldn't have the management of everything--if you like." He communed with himself when she had left him. "I wonder what she means, exactly; she's careful not to dot her i's. She's the dearest girl in the world, even dearer than I thought. This is something like a windfall." He took out the packet, fingering it, smilingly, with the fingers of both hands. Then, replacing it in his pocket, glancing round the room, he was struck by the state of disorder it was in. "It's as well they kept the door locked; everything seems to have been left about for the first comer to admire. Lindsay must have been having a regular turn-out when he was taken ill; I wonder why." On the writing-table the first thing which caught his eye were some slips of blue paper secured by a rubber band. He snatched them up. They were four promissory notes, payable at various dates; they all bore the same signature, Herbert Nash. He chuckled. "We'll consider those as paid, until they prove the contrary; which they'll find it hard to do." He slipped them into his breast pocket. Settling himself on the chair on which Mr. Lindsay had been seated when death first touched him on the shoulder, he began to go methodically through the papers which were about him, practically, on all sides. He came on one, the contents of which seemed to occasion him profound surprise. "What on earth is this? what the dickens does it mean?" There was not a great deal on the paper; what there was he read again and again, as if he found its meaning curiously obscure. "This is queerish; I'd give a trifle to know what it does mean; it might be worth one's while to inquire." Folding up the paper he placed it in his breast pocket, with the promissory notes. Hardly had he done so than the door was opened, without any warning, and Dr. Banyard came into the room. "Hallo, Nash! have you found anything? have you found out who his man of business was?" Mr. Nash glanced up from the papers he was studying; if he was a little startled by the doctor's unheralded appearance he gave no sign of it. "I haven't discovered his man of business; but I have found something." "You haven't come upon anything which shows who it was he generally employed; I understand you've been here some time." Mr. Nash shook his head. "I don't know how long I have been here, but I've come on nothing which shows that he ever employed any one at all." "He must have employed some one." The other shrugged his shoulders. "I've gone through a good many of his papers; I've not hit on one which suggests it." "You said you'd found something; what is it?" "His will; or, rather, a will." "That is something." "Especially as, beyond a shadow of doubt, it's the last will he ever made. It was drawn up on the third, last Thursday, probably just before he was taken ill. It's in his own writing, brief, and to the point, and apparently quite in order, since it was witnessed by Morgan, the butler here, and Mrs. Steele the housekeeper." "Let's have a look at it." "Here it is, in the envelope in which I found it." The doctor examined the paper which he took out of the envelope; it seemed that its contents gave him satisfaction. "I see that, by this, he's left everything to his daughter unconditionally." "That is so, the intention's unmistakable." "Then she's safe; that's all right. It ought to be something handsome; I wonder how much it is." "That's the question." "I suppose you've come across something which gives you, at any rate, some vague notion." "I haven't, that's the odd part of it." "What do you mean?" "Well, I'm glad you've come." "Why? what's up? Found the job too big to tackle single-handed? I thought you would." "You're mistaken; that is not what I mean. I've gone through--hurriedly, but still thoroughly enough to have a pretty good idea of what it is that they contain--all the available books and papers; and, as you see, most of them seem available, everything seems open; and I've not found anything which even hints that he died the possessor of any property at all; with two exceptions. There is his pass-book at the local bank, showing a balance of about a hundred pounds, which may have been drawn on since; and there are the Cloverlea title-deeds, there, in that deed-box." "That only shows that everything essential is in the hands of his London lawyer." "You seem to take the existence of such a person very much for granted. He told me himself he hadn't one." "Told you? when?" "Not long ago there was a little difficulty about a right of way; I don't know if you heard of it. He came to me about it; I then asked him who acted for him in town; he said no one." "You are sure?" "I am; for a man in his position it struck me as odd." "He must have had a man in town, you misunderstood him. You haven't gone through all the papers?" "Not all." "Then we shall come upon it; I'll help you with the rest. There are no doubt papers elsewhere; probably in his bedroom, or at his rooms in town. Have you found out what was his London address?" "I have found nothing which shows that he had one." "But he must have had a London address; why, he spent quite a large part of the year in town." "I happen to know that the only London address Miss Lindsay ever had was the Carlton Club; they may be able to tell us there." "Of course they'll be able to tell us. Found any cash?" "Not a penny." "Anything which stands for cash?" "Nothing; except what I have told you." He had said nothing about what was in his breast-pocket. "Lindsay was a man of secretive habits; if he could help it he never let his left hand know what his right hand was doing. When you come to deal with the affairs of a man like that you're handicapped; but there can be no sort of doubt that he was a man of considerable means. It must have cost him something to live here; where did the money to do that come from? It must have come from somewhere." "It seems that there are a good many debts; as you are possibly aware, there is a good deal owing round here." "He was a man who hated paying." Suddenly the doctor glanced up from the papers he was examining to glare at his companion. "Look here, Nash, what are you hinting at?" "I am merely answering your questions." "Yes, but you're answering them in a way I don't like." The younger man smiled. "I am afraid that I didn't realize that my answers had to be to your liking, whatever the facts might be." The doctor returned to the papers; he looked as if he could have said something vigorous, but refrained. After a while he had to admit that his researches, so far, had been without result. "Well, there seems to be nothing here, and that's a fact. These papers seem to contain material for a history of the Cloverlea estate since it came into Lindsay's possession; and that's all. Now for the safe." "I've gone through that." "I'll go through it also; though from the look of it, it doesn't seem as if there were much to go through." He pulled out one of the small drawers at the bottom. "Hallo, what have we here?" He took out an oblong wooden box. "What's this on the lid? 'Peter Piper's Popular Pills.'" "What!" The exclamation came from Nash. "Here it is, large as life, in good bold letters; there ought to be something valuable in here." He opened the lid. "An envelope with papers in it; what's this writing on it? 'Analyses of the constituent parts of Peter Piper's Popular Pills by leading analytical chemists.' What fools those fellows are! Lindsay's writing; he doesn't seem to have had a high opinion of some one; let's hope there's nothing libellous. What's here besides? A bottle purporting to contain Peter Piper's Popular Pills; the man seems to have had them on the brain. And--other bottles containing the ingredients of which they're made; so it says outside them; as I'm alive! and the man kept this stuff inside his safe! Nash, why are you looking at me like that?" Mr. Nash was regarding the doctor with a somewhat singular expression on his face; when the doctor put the question to him he started, as if taken by surprise. "Looking at you? was I looking at you?" "Glaring was the better word." "It was unconscious. Are you--are you sure that they are Peter Piper's Popular Pills in that box?" "Sure? As if I could be sure about a thing like that! what do I know about such filth? look for yourself." Mr. Nash examined the box with a show of interest which its contents scarcely seemed to warrant. "How extremely--curious." "Fancy a man like Lindsay harbouring such stuff as that! I should think it was curious!" Though both men used the same adjective one felt that each read into it a different meaning. When Mr. Nash started to leave the house he found that the dogcart, which he supposed was still in waiting, had disappeared. He asked no questions, but drew his own conclusions. As he passed down the avenue, and perceived that Miss Harding was strolling among the trees, he smiled. So soon as the lady saw him she began to ply him with questions. "Well, what's happened?" "One thing's happened, you've sent away my dogcart." She looked at him with mischief in her eyes. "Walking will do you more good than driving; and it will cost you less. Besides, it will give you an opportunity of exchanging a few words with me. I hope you don't mind." "On the contrary, I'm delighted." "What have you found?" "I've found his will; he's left his daughter everything." "Everything! How splendid! I'm so glad he's left her everything!" Miss Harding's face could not have been more radiant had she received a personal benefit. "I shouldn't be over hasty in offering her your congratulations if I were you; it's quite possible that everything won't amount to very much." She seemed struck by his tone even more than by his words. "Herbert! What do you mean?" Mr. Nash kicked a pebble with his toe; then he whistled to himself; then he said, just as her patience was at an end-- "It's a bit awkward to explain, but it's this way; Banyard and I have been going through his books and papers, and everything there was to go through; and there was a good deal, as you know; and we haven't come on anything which points to money or money's worth. I've been putting two and two together, and I rather think I understand the situation; when all's over and settled I shouldn't be surprised if Miss Lindsay would be very glad indeed to have your little fortune." "My--my little fortune?" "I'm alluding to the snug little legacy left you by your venerated aunt." "It's--it's impossible!" "More impossible things have happened; and I think I'm almost inclined to bet twopence that her fortune's nearer two thousand shillings than two thousand pounds." "Herbert! Herbert!" "What's the matter? Why, little girl, you mustn't take on like that; what a sensitive little thing it is! it'll be through no fault of yours if she's left penniless! She's never been over nice to me, and I'm sure I shan't worry myself into an early grave if she is." "You don't understand!" she wailed. "You don't understand." By the domestic hearth that evening Dr. Banyard addressed to his wife some more or less sententious remarks, as he puffed at his pipe. "There's something wrong up at Cloverlea, confoundedly wrong. I don't understand what it is, and I don't like what I do understand. There's a riddle somewhere, and I'm half afraid we're not going to find the answer. Mind you, I've actually no grounds to go upon, but I don't trust that man, Nash; I've all sorts of doubts about the fellow." Mrs. Banyard looked up from her sewing, and smiled; as is the way with wives of some years' standing she did not always take her husband so seriously as she might have done. "Poor Mr. Nash! you never do like good-looking men." "It isn't only that." "No; but it's partly that. You funny old man! It doesn't follow because you're ugly yourself that all good-looking men are necessarily worthless." "Generally speaking, a certain type of good-looking man is worth nothing." "And Mr. Nash represents the type? And do you represent Christian charity? What do you suspect him of now? of having the answer to that mysterious riddle?" "I don't know; that's just it, I don't know; but I doubt him all the same." CHAPTER VI HER LOVE STORY That night Nora dreamed again--the same dream. It was more real even than before. She was lying in bed--she knew she was in bed, and her father came in at the door. In some strange fashion she had expected him; it was not that she heard him moving along the passage, yet, somehow, she knew that he was there, that he was coming. And, before he actually appeared, she knew that he was in great trouble; when he opened the door, so noiselessly, and without a sound came in, and closed the door again, also without a sound, she knew it even better than before, and his trouble communicated itself to her. In such trouble was he that he was even afraid of her. He remained close to the door, looking timidly towards her as she lay in bed, not daring to approach. So moved was she by his strange timidity that she sat up, and held out her arms to him, calling-- "Father!" She was sure she called, because she heard her own voice quite clearly; not as it mostly is in dreams, when one hears nothing. But yet he came no closer. Then she saw that he was crying. She called to him again, more eagerly. Then he went, step by step, timidly towards her; until she had her arms about him, and whispered, "Father, tell me what it is that troubles you." And he tried to tell her, but he could not; he was speechless, and to him his speechlessness was agony. If he only could speak she felt that all might be well with him--and with her; but he was tongue-tied. She tried to think of what it could be that he wished to say to her, and to prompt him; whispering into his ear first this, then that; but it was plain that none of her hints had anything to do with what was in his mind, though once she thought that she might not be far off. When she whispered, "Is it about what I am to do in the future?" his face changed; a sort of convulsion passed all over him; he drew himself away from her, and stood up, raising his arms, seeming to make a frenzied effort to achieve articulation; it even seemed that speech had come to him at last, when, just as words were already almost issuing from his lips, he vanished, and she was alone in the darkness. Not the least strange part of it was that she was wide awake, having no consciousness of being roused out of sleep; she was sitting up in bed, the tears were streaming down her cheeks, her arms were held out, with about them the oddest feeling of somebody having just been in them. Indeed for a moment or two she could not believe that there was not some one in them still. When she did realize that they were empty she threw herself face downwards in the bed, crying as if her heart would break, because of her father's woe. Donald Lindsay was buried on the Thursday--exactly a week after he had been stricken with his death. On the Tuesday and Wednesday she had variations of the same dream, and on the Thursday, the day of the funeral, it was so terrible a dream that the agony of it remained with her until the morning. For a long time afterwards some form of that dream would come to her at intervals. She said nothing of it to any one, though there was a moment when she was on the point of speaking of it to Elaine Harding; but she had it sometimes even in her waking thoughts. The course of events induced in her a kind of dormant conviction not only that the dream was sent to her for some special purpose, and that it had a meaning; but, also, that some day both the purpose and the meaning would be made clear. She knew that it is written that, of old, God spake to men in dreams; she believed it to be possible that, in a dream, God might speak to her. The dream always ended at the same point: just as her father, after an agonizing effort, seemed to be about to speak. She fancied that, some night, it might go on further, and that he might speak to her in his dream, and that with his speaking the purpose and the meaning of it all would be discovered. On the morning of the funeral, among the other letters, Mrs. Steele, the housekeeper, called her attention to one in particular. No doubt she was aware that, during the last few days, either letters had been left unopened, or the task of opening them relegated to Elaine Harding, who communicated their contents if she pleased. "Miss Nora," she said, "this is a letter from Mr. Spencer." The girl caught eagerly at it; it was the first sign of eagerness she had lately shown. So soon as Mrs. Steele had gone she opened it. It was from her lover, Robert Spencer; a long letter, on three closely written sheets of foreign note-paper. He was in Sicily; had sent her a gossipy narrative of his wanderings among its ancient places, and among its scenes of beauty. It was full of love, and life, and high spirits; the sort of letter which makes a girl's heart beat happily; which she cherishes amid her most precious possessions. He told her how he wished that she was with him; that she at least was close at hand, that they might see and enjoy, together, what was so much worth seeing, and enjoying. In mischievous mood he added that when the great day came, on which the sun would rise in their sky for ever, and they were married, he humbly ventured to suggest that part of their honeymoon might be spent where he was then--"that would be to invest Taormina, which is already nearly all halos, with another, the brightest and the best." To a girl's thinking there could be no pleasanter reading than such a letter; she could desire nothing better of the future than that its savour might remain unchanged, and that, throughout the years which were to come, the love of which it was a sign might walk always by her side. So great was its power that, for a moment, it charmed her to forgetfulness. She saw in it her lover's face, and looked into his eyes; his voice spoke to her from the pages, and sounded sweetly in her ears. When he wrote of honeymooning the blood came to her cheeks; her lips were parted by a smile; her heart seemed speaking unto his. Even when she remembered, and recalled what day it was, and what shortly was about to happen, the light did not quite fade from her eyes, and the world was not all darkness. The match had been one of the few things respecting which her father had expressed to her his audible satisfaction. It was tacitly understood that the marriage was to take place during the current year. Both lovers were young--Robert Spencer had only just turned twenty-four. The only thing which could be said against him was his lack of means. He had done well both at school and at the university. Without being the least bit of a prig, he was exempt from those vices which the facile standard of the world in which he lived associates with youth. He was tall and strong and handsome; easy-mannered, more than is apt to be the case with the young Englishman of twenty-four; of fluent speech--he had been, in his time, one of the stars of the Union; there was no apparent reason why he should not make for himself, among the men of his own generation, a great name for good. The chief obstacle with which he would have to contend might be, as has been said, the eternal question of pence. He was the fourth, and youngest, son of the Earl of Mountdennis. Everybody knows that his lordship had more children than money; four sons and five daughters is a liberal allowance for any man; the Earl and the Countess have that number living, and three of their children are dead. At the period of which we are writing all the five daughters were married, though by no means, from their mother's point of view, all satisfactorily married. The Countess never attempted to conceal the fact that only the first and third had done really well for themselves. According to the same authority, the boys had not done all that they might have done; the heir, Lord Cookham, in particular, had been a bitter disappointment, having been--his mother called it--wicked enough to marry a girl who had no money, and, practically, no family, merely because he loved her. He had been perfectly well aware that, in his case, marriage must mean money; it had been drummed into his ears from his earliest childhood;--family was of no consequence; he had family enough of his own. The one thing wanted was money--sacks full. And the thing was made more cruel by the fact that he might have had any amount of money, had he chosen. He might have had an English girl with a hundred thousand a year, to say nothing of several Americans with a great deal more; instead of which he married a young woman whom he met, as the Countess put it, at "some horrid foreign place," whose only qualification was that she was generally admitted, by some excellent judges, to be delightful. What, as the Countess pungently inquired, was the use of being delightful if she and her husband had not enough money between them to pay off the family debts, to say nothing of keeping up the family seats. And then they actually started by having three children in less than six years--all girls. It was too perfectly ridiculously absurd! Montagu, the second son, had refused to marry at all, so his mother said; though it was not known that any girls had ever actually asked him. It was understood that he had made money in Africa, though he showed not the slightest inclination to squander it among his relatives; he had even declined to what his mother termed "lend" her five thousand pounds to be spent on "doing up" Holtye, which was the seat the Earl and the Countess principally favoured. Such conduct, she declared, was inhuman, but "so like Montagu." Arthur, the third son, had done best for himself from at least a financial point of view. He had married Mrs. Parkes-Peters, the widow of the contractor who left three millions. It was true that nasty things had been said of some of his most successful contracts; but, after all, the man was dead. It was also true that no one knew who, or what, his widow was before he married her; it was, if possible, even more true that she was older than her second husband. She herself admitted that she was his senior by ten years--the world said it ought to be twenty. But as she proved to be an ideal wife from the point of view of the man who marries for money, such trifles could hardly be said to count. Their friends asserted that she gave him a thousand pounds every time he kissed her--really no husband could want more. And yet both his parents were aware that one need not be hypercritical to be able to see objections even against Arthur's wife. There remained, therefore, to them but one hope--their fourth son, Robert. Theirs must have been a sanguine temperament--when one knew them one felt as if they had only one between them--because, after all their disappointments, they still built on him a castle in Spain, of their own design. It really seemed as if that castle was to be actually reared. Robert had set his affections on Miss Lindsay, and that without the least prompting from either of them; as they knew, from painful experience, in such cases one sometimes had to do such a lot of prompting. They frankly admitted that, looking at the matter as a whole, he could hardly have been expected to do better--to begin with. Cloverlea was quite a nice place, and, as it were, next door to Holtye; there were only nine miles between them. It was kept up in excellent style; the Earl, who was supposed to know something about such things, assured his wife that it probably cost Donald Lindsay at least ten thousand a-year. It was true that its owner was by way of being a curiosity; but then his eccentricities--if they could be called eccentricities--were not of a kind which would be likely to injure his daughter. And she was his only child. In her capacity of young woman nothing whatever could be urged against her; the Earl and Countess were entirely at one in agreeing with Robert that, in that respect, she was all that there was of the most charming. Obviously, when her father died, she would be more than comfortably off. The only thing to be considered was, what would she have until he died--in case she took unto herself a husband. On this point, also, everything was as it should be. The Earl rode over to Cloverlea one day, when its master happened to be at home, and had a talk with him--than which nothing could be more satisfactory. Lindsay told his visitor, in that plain outspoken way of his, that he was satisfied with the result of inquiries he had been making about the Hon. Robert, and that, in consequence, five thousand a year would be settled on Nora if he married her. Besides this, he would present her, as a wedding gift, with a suitable house in town, and all the furniture. He added, with one of his rare, grim smiles, which the earl interpreted in a fashion of his own, that it was possible that one day she would be much richer than people thought. The Earl told the Countess, on his return to Holtye, that he should not be surprised if the man was a millionaire. Anyhow his offer was most generous; especially as Robert was the youngest of nine, and had, literally, nothing but himself and his family to bring his wife. The Countess wondered vaguely if, on the strength of the matrimonial alliance which was to unite the two families, Mr. Lindsay might not be induced to advance what she described as "something decent" in order that something might be done to Holtye, which was falling to pieces, and where the furniture was in a scandalous condition. The Earl, who knew that his wife had been searching for years for some one who would play the part of fairy prince towards their family domain, merely remarked that it would be time enough to think of all that kind of thing when the pair were married. Nora had not been actually informed of the arrangements which had been made for the commercial success of her love-match, but she knew quite well that it never would have entered the domain of practical politics if they had not been satisfactory. Robert was perfectly frank upon the point; he was frank with her about everything; it was his nature to be frank. He told her that he had not a shilling of his own, and never had. "My aunt paid for me at Eton, and, afterwards, at the 'Varsity; so far as I know, she's paid for me ever since I was born; I believe she's even bought my clothes. I don't know why, because we're not a bit in sympathy; though she's a dear, on lines of her own, which are peculiar. She's only just on speaking terms with my mother, who's her own sister; and the things she says of my father are dreadful--he's really the most inoffensive of men. She has never lived in England since I can remember; she says she can't afford it. The truth is, she's never happy except in pursuit of her health; she passes from one 'cure' place to another, in possession of a number of complaints which nobody understands, but which suit her constitution admirably. She has about two thousand a year of her own, and spends most of it on doctors; though she declares, to their faces, that she never met one yet who knew what he is talking about. Out of what is left after the doctors are paid she is at present allowing me three hundred pounds a year, which is very good of her; especially considering two facts, the one being that I really have no claim on her at all, and the other that the three hundred is sometimes nearly four; for instance, last year she gave me fifty pounds as a birthday present, and twenty-five as a Christmas-box. So you see that I really am a pauper, living upon charity, and that I never ought to have dared to love you at all; only I couldn't help it--who could?" She had laughed at him. "Lots of people. Of course, it's very sad that you should be so poor; but I dare say, if we are careful, we can manage; and you know there is such a thing as love in a cottage--would the prospect of such a fate as that seem to you so very frightful?" "Frightful! I wouldn't mind it a bit; would you?" "I dare say I could put up with it for a time." "It should only be for a time, I promise you. I'm handicapped by being who I am, but I don't think I'm an utter fool. I've always taken it for granted that I should have to make my own way, and, to the best of my ability, I've provided myself with the necessary tools; I believe that I could make my own way in the world as well as another man. You have only to say the word, and I'll make it first and woo you afterwards." "Thank you; I'm content with things as they are; I'm sorry you're not." This was said with a twinkle in her eyes which was meant to provoke him to warmth, and it did. "Nora! do you wish me to--shake you?" "I don't mind." He did do something to her; but she was not shaken. CHAPTER VII THE PUZZLE WHICH DONALD LINDSAY LEFT BEHIND HIM Donald Lindsay was buried on a glorious afternoon, when all the world seemed at its best and brightest. Carriages from all parts of the district represented their absent owners, but only four mourners were actually present. Nora and Elaine stood together on one side of the grave, confronting Dr. Banyard and Mr. Nash. Afterwards the four were again together in the room at Cloverlea which Nora regarded as in an especial sense her own. The blinds at last were drawn; the windows stood wide open; the April sun, warm enough for June, came streaming in, but it brought no brightness to those within. Each of the quartette seemed to be singularly ill at ease. It was not strange that such should have been the case with Nora; it was her hour of trial. But why Elaine Harding should have been unlike her usual self was not so obvious. An impartial observer, knowing her well, would have said that she had never appeared to such little advantage. Black never became her; either because she was physically unwell, or for some more obscure reason, that afternoon, in her mourning, she looked almost hideous. Had she been at liberty to choose, she would have been present neither at the funeral nor afterwards in Nora's room; but she had not seen her way to refuse compliance with Nora's positive request. Since Mr. Nash had told her of his, and Dr. Banyard's, failure to find among the dead man's papers anything to show that he had left any real provision for his daughter at all, she had been living in what seemed to her to be a continual nightmare. Day and night she was haunted by the three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven pounds which she had regarded as treasure-trove. Had she not taken it for granted that Nora would be a rich woman she would not have touched a farthing; of that she was certain. It was the conviction that such a sum would mean nothing to Nora which had been the irresistible temptation. Had it been in her power she would have replaced the money even then, and would have been only too glad to do it, though it left her penniless. But she had learnt what has to be learnt by all of us, how much easier it is to do than to undo. Any attempt in the direction of restitution would mean not only exposure, but ruin. Herbert Nash had to be considered. He had had two hundred pounds of the money; what he had done with it he alone knew. Then he had swallowed the tale of her aunt's legacy; she was perfectly well aware that if it had not been for that supposititious two thousand pounds she would never have been his promised wife. Was she to tell him now that she had lied? What explanation was she to offer him if she did? Would he not be entitled to regard her as some unspeakable thing? She did not doubt that his love would turn to scorn; that he would cast her from him with loathing and disgust. No; anything rather than that; for she loved him. On the other hand, if it was true that Nora had been left a pauper? and she had robbed her of her all! Would that fact not be shouted at her from out of the flaming sky for ever and for aye? would not the face of God be turned from her through all eternity? And how often, and how fervently, she had prayed that God might guide and bless her. She dared not think of the punishment which must inevitably crown so great a sin. She racked her brain to find some way out of the peril which threatened her on every hand; if only she could light on some plausible compromise. And at last she thought--she hoped--that she had discovered something which would relieve the situation at the point of its greatest strain. Three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven pounds she had--found; she had told Mr. Nash that her aunt had left two thousand. Her idea had been that she would have a good, round sum in hand, unknown to him, which, in case of need, would be of service in a tight place. What was to prevent her, should the tale of Nora's impoverishment turn out to be correct, disclosing the existence of that balance of over a thousand pounds; her fertile brain would easily invent some reasonable explanation; though that tale of the legacy would not do for Nora, who knew too much of her family affairs. Then she might insist on Nora accepting it as--what should she call it? a gift? a loan? It did not matter what she called it so long as Nora took the money; and she would have to take it. In that case Nora would regard her as her benefactor, instead of--what she was. It is wonderful with what ointments we try to salve our consciences. At intervals Elaine was almost pleased with herself as she thought of how, if the worst came to the worst, she was going to present Nora with more than a thousand pounds. Yet that afternoon, in that pleasant room, in which she and her friend had spent so many happy hours, she was as one who knew not peace. Nor did it seem to be peace with Mr. Nash. If one might judge from his physiognomy he did not appear to be at all inclined to congratulate himself on the position which it seemed likely he would occupy, of administrator of the dead man's estate. Such a position would mean something for him, if it meant nothing for anybody else; in such a case a lawyer always esteems himself worthy of his hire; and he sees that he gets it. Yet he looked as if he would have preferred to have been almost anywhere else rather than where he was. The same remark applied to Dr. Banyard; though even a superficial observer might have guessed that the two men were troubled because of different things. A keen judge of human nature might have perceived that the doctor was troubled because of Nora; Herbert Nash because of himself. The order of the proceedings was singular; it required pressure to induce Nora to sit down. "I would much rather stand," she said. "I don't know what you have to say to me; but I hope that, whatever it is, it won't take long; I feel as if I can't sit; I would much sooner listen standing if you don't mind." But the doctor did mind; he would not have it; he made her sit. Then nothing would satisfy her but that Elaine should sit by her; which was agony to Miss Harding, who was in the condition which is known as being all over pins and needles; it would have been a relief to have been able to scream. "Now, Nash," inquired the doctor, when the two young women, looking, in their several ways, pictures of misery, were seated on adjacent chairs, "where are those papers? Let's get to business; and be as brief and as clear as you can." Nash, with what was almost a hang-dog air, took some papers out of a black leather bag. Untying the tape which bound them together he began. His tale was neither very brief nor very clear; though his meaning was plain enough when it was ended. The dead man had left everything to his daughter; but he had nothing to leave; that was what it came to. There was less than a hundred pounds at the bank; and there was Cloverlea and the contents of the house. On the debit side there were debts amounting, so far as could be ascertained, to several thousand pounds; claims had come in from wholly unexpected quarters for large sums. If they had to be paid at once that would involve a forced sale of Cloverlea, and that would probably mean that very little would be left for Nora. The faces of the two girls, as this state of affairs was being unfolded, were studies. On Miss Harding's face there came, by degrees, an expression of actual agony, as if her lover was playing the part of a torturer, whose every word was a fresh turn of the rack, or of the thumbscrew. Nora's face, on the other hand, as she began to perceive the point at which Mr. Nash was aiming, suggested anger rather than pain; the same suggestion was in her voice, as she addressed a question to him, so soon as he showed signs of having finished. "Do you wish me to understand that my father has left no money?" Mr. Nash looked down, as if unwilling to meet her eyes. "Neither Dr. Banyard nor I have been able to find anything which points to money, I am sorry to say." "You needn't be sorry." She turned to Dr. Banyard; with, as she did so, something in her manner which was hardly flattering to Mr. Nash. "If my father has left no money on what have we been living? Does Mr. Nash mean that my father spent all his money before he died? because, if he does, I tell him, quite plainly, that I don't believe it." The doctor got up. It was a peculiarity of his that, while he was always anxious that others should sit still, he never could do so himself when he was moved. Thrusting his hands into his trousers pockets he began to fidget about the room. "That's the point," he exclaimed. "It's a pity, my dear Miss Lindsay, that your father didn't take you more into his confidence." "He was entitled to do as he pleased." "Precisely! and he did as he pleased! and this is the result! that you know nothing; that we know nothing; and, apparently, that we can find out nothing. We have been in communication with his London club; they tell us that he was an occasional attendant; that, so far as they know, this was his only address; that sometimes, but not often, letters came for him; but there are none awaiting him at present; they can give us no further information, and we have not the dimmest notion who can. Let me add a sort of postscript to what Mr. Nash has told you, which will shed another sidelight on the position. It is now about five years since your father bought Cloverlea. Ever since he bought it he has paid three thousand pounds into the local bank four times each year, always in notes and gold, which, as you are possibly aware, is not a form in which such payments are usually made. His next payment, if he intended to follow his usual rule, was due last week, to be exact, last Friday; for four years in succession he has paid in three thousand pounds, in notes and gold, on the first Friday in April. He was taken ill, as you know, on Thursday; if he had intended to make his usual payment on the following day the money would have been in his possession; we should have found it; we have found nothing." Although no one seemed to notice it, Miss Harding looked as if she were trembling on the verge of a serious attack of illness. Her face was white and drawn, her eyes were half closed, her mouth was tightly shut, her hand was pressed against her side, as if compelled to that position by sudden pain. The doctor, oblivious of the fact that it looked as if his services would presently be required, went remorselessly on. "The only possible alternative is that the money was stolen, and that after he was taken ill; you know what likelihood there is of that. But in order to leave no room for doubt we have questioned every one connected with the household; I am bound to say that we have discovered nothing in the least suspicious." "Of course not; I wish I had known what you were doing, I would have stopped it. The idea of supposing that any one here would rob me; there is not a creature about the place I would not trust with my life." This was Nora; her words were like poisoned darts to at least one of her hearers. The doctor continued. "Just so; but allow me to point out, Miss Lindsay, the inference which may be drawn from what we have been able to learn of your father's methods. He has paid twelve thousand pounds a year into the local bank, invariably in notes and gold, never a cheque among the lot; does not this suggest that he wished to conceal, even from his bankers, the source from which the money came?" "I don't see why you say that." "If their ledgers contained the record of his having paid in even so much as a single cheque we might have been able to trace the history of that cheque, and in so doing might have lighted upon something which would have served as the key to the whole puzzle; if, that is, we could discover some one who ever paid him anything we might find out why he paid, and so might chance upon a clue which in the end might show us where his income came from. As it is we have nothing to go upon; and I can't help thinking that he meant his bankers should have nothing to go upon; whether he intended that you should be in the same position is another question. The consequence is, as matters stand, I am bound to say so, my dear Miss Nora, it is no use blinking the truth----" "Please tell me what you believe to be the truth; pray don't what you call blink it." "It is a perfectly fair deduction to draw that he had come to the end of his resources, whatever they may have been; quite conceivably the immediate cause of his illness was the consciousness that it was so; I am free to confess that, in this connection, the absence of the three thousand pounds, his usual quarterly payment into the bank, and, indeed, of any cash, is significant. I can only hope, Miss Nora, that you know something which will place the matter in quite a different aspect." When the doctor ceased there was silence. Mr. Nash, fidgeting with his papers, seemed disposed to let his eyes rest anywhere rather than on the faces of his companions. Miss Harding, judging from her appearance, continually hovered on the verge of collapse; that no one noticed her condition showed how the others were preoccupied. Of the four Nora still bore herself as the one who was most at ease. She sat up straight; well back on her chair; her hands lying idle on her lap; a look upon her face which suggested an assurance which nothing they might say to her could touch; when she spoke she held her head a little back, with, in her wide-open eyes, what was almost the glint of a smile. "I don't know what you call knowledge. I can only say that I am sure that you have not yet got to the root of the matter; that there is still something to be explained; because I am convinced that my father has left behind him a great deal of money." "It is more than probable you are right; nothing will surprise me more than to learn that he hasn't; all that is wanted is a clue. Tell us on what you found your conviction." "It is not altogether easy, but I'll try." The faintest touch of colour tinged her cheeks. "You know I am engaged to be married. My father, in congratulating me, said that the fact that Mr. Spencer had no money wouldn't matter, because I should have enough for both. I am sure he would not have said that had it not been true; I know my father." "In other words, he practically told you that, after he was gone, he would leave you well provided for." "That was what it amounted to, yes." "He said nothing about the quarter from which the provision was to come?" "He said nothing except what I have told you; but, for me, that is enough." "No doubt, Miss Nora, but what we want is something which will tell us where the money which he spoke of is to be found." "It will be found." "Where? how? when? These questions must be answered." "They will be answered, in God's good time." The doctor gave an impatient gesture. "I wish to say nothing in the least impious; but if it is to be in good time the answer must come now; before Cloverlea is sold, and you are homeless." "Cloverlea--sold?" The notion seemed to startle her. "Who talks of selling Cloverlea?" "My dear young lady, here's a creditor for over four thousand pounds, who writes to say that if his claim is not settled at once proceedings will immediately be taken against your father's estate----" "Four thousand pounds! To whom did my father owe four thousand pounds?" "That's the worst of it; it's a money-lender." "A money-lender?" "The fellow holds your father's paper--promissory notes--to the amount of nearly four thousand five hundred pounds, which is now overdue; and he says he has other paper, which will mature shortly, to the extent of another five thousand pounds. And he is not the only one; claims have been raining in from similar gentry. It actually appears that your father owed them at least thirty thousand pounds." "I don't believe it." The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "I found it hard to credit; but--there are the bills, accepted by your father; what do you suggest? that they are forgeries?" "At present I suggest nothing; what can I suggest? But I do not believe that my father ever borrowed money from a usurer." "I am afraid that this is not a matter with which we can deal as a question of belief; do you propose to contest these claims? If so, notice must be given at once; you must clearly understand what that would mean; you would have to prove that the signatures upon these bills, which purport to be your father's, are forgeries; I don't know in which event the consequences would be more serious, if you proved it or if you failed to prove it." "How do the people who hold these bills pretend they got them?" "Guldenheim, who is the chief holder, is, in his way, a perfectly respectable man, and enormously rich. I called on him yesterday to put that question. He looked me up and down; and then observed that if payment was not made this week he should commence proceedings, when he would supply the Court with all the necessary information; then he asked his clerk to show me to the door. I am afraid there was something in the manner in which I asked the question which he resented, and perhaps was entitled to resent." "What will be the result if he does take proceedings?" "Probably in a short time you'll have the sheriff's officers in the house, and, perhaps before you've had time to turn round, you'll be left without a roof to cover you. Whatever happens we must avoid that." "How are we going to avoid it? How are we going to find money with which to pay these men?" "My proposal is that the creditors should be called together all of them; we will explain to them exactly how matters stand; and then I think, for their own sakes, they will join with us in making the best of what your father has left." "As you say that Cloverlea is all that my father has left I presume that means that, in any case, Cloverlea will have to be sold, that we, my home and I, are at the mercy of a gang of usurers." "I am afraid I don't see what else is to be done." "Thank you; that is all I wish to know." She stood up, very erect; on her face there was still no sign of bitterness, only a quiet calmness, which was in strange contrast with the conspicuous lack of ease which marked the bearing of the others. "Do not suppose," she said, in a voice which was very soft and gentle, "that I am not grateful to you both for all that you have done for me. I had thought it possible, Mr. Nash, that the share you were taking in straightening out my small affairs might be of permanent use to you; I hoped you would allow me to retain you as my lawyer; but it seems that's not to be, that I'm not likely to want a lawyer very long. I'm sorry for both our sakes. For the trouble you have taken, doctor, no words of mine can thank you; because you--you're my very dear friend, and I fear you'll insist on making my sorrows your own, and--and that mustn't be." She stopped, as if, for the moment, she was unable to continue; and then added, "I'll think over all that you have said." Without another word she left the room. The trio neither moved nor spoke some seconds after she had gone. Then Elaine Harding started to her feet with what sounded like a sob of passion. "It's cruel!" she cried. "Cruel! I don't believe it's so bad as you make it out to be, I won't believe it! If Mr. Lindsay were still alive you wouldn't accuse him of the dreadful things you now pretend he's done, you wouldn't dare to do it!" She rushed away in what seemed an agony of tears. The doctor stared at the door through which she had vanished; then he turned and stared at Nash; then he laughed queerly. "Well! who'd have thought she'd such a temper! I like her better for it, the little whirlwind! She might as well have accused us of conspiracy to defraud Miss Lindsay; what do you think of that?" "Women," observed Mr. Nash, with downcast eyes, and a wry smile, "are capable of anything." CHAPTER VIII A PHILANTHROPIST Nora went to her bedroom. It was a pleasant room; as it was then it was practically her own creation; it represented her ideal of what her sleeping chamber ought to be. She had even invested it with an air of romance, as girls, when they are at the most romantic period of their lives, sometimes will do. There are girls who regard their bedrooms as if they were parts of themselves. Nora was one of them; she regarded her bedroom as if it were part of herself. As she entered it that afternoon, it seemed to her that there was something strange about it, as if something had come into the atmosphere which was not present when she was in it last. It disturbed her, until she understood that the change was in her; that she had already unconsciously realized that this room, which had meant to her so many things, which she supposed would be hers for ever, might, probably, soon be hers no longer. With that feeling in her mind the room could never again be to her what it had been before; she felt almost as if she were a stranger in it then. Seating herself at her writing-table, she took the Bible which lay on the little shelf in front, and read in it, trying her hardest to concentrate her attention on its pages; but it was not easy, even the sacred words came to her through a mist. But when she closed the book, and went and knelt beside the bed, pillowing her face on the coverlet, as she had done again and again, times without number; alike in her infrequent moments of sorrow--she knew then what pigmy things those sorrows had been! and in her abounding hours of joy;--it was almost with a sense of terror that it was borne in upon her what great happiness she in truth had known--there came to her, as she continued to kneel, that peace which she so earnestly desired; so that she arose from prayer refreshed, and with that courage in her heart which refreshment brings. Placing herself on the armchair which stood by the open window, resting her arms on the sill, looking at the green world, perhaps without seeing how green and beautiful it was, so far as she could, she thought it all out. And the more she thought the more clearly she apprehended that life for her--life as she hitherto had understood it--was at an end already, before it had scarcely begun, if the things which she had heard were true. She must depart from Cloverlea, and all that it stood for, and go out into a world, of which she knew nothing, to earn her own bread; she wondered, with an odd little smile, how she was going to set about it; if the picture was as black as it had just been painted. But was it? In her heart of hearts she doubted. Although she had been in such slight communion with her father; although his attitude towards her had been, in many respects, so unfatherlike; she believed that she had understood him, and that they had had much more in common than he had chosen to let it appear;--it would require a great deal to convince her that she was wrong. She was fortified in her belief by a curious idea which, almost in spite of herself, obsessed her more and more; that she understood him better now that he was dead than she had done when he was living; that she was closer to him now than she had been then; that she saw more clearly into his very heart, and knew what manner of man he really was; and she knew that he was not the kind of man he must have been if the things which she had heard were true. He was incapable of falsehood; in small things, as in large, the soul of honour; he had not lied when he had told her that there would be enough for Robert as well as for her. Even then she had gathered more from what he said than his actual words; and she had understood that he had meant that she should gather more. She believed that he had wished her to know that in the future she would be a rich woman, and that his brief speech had been intended to convey that meaning; she was persuaded that he would not have meant it if it had not been true. Yet, how was she to reconcile these things with the facts as they appeared at present? What explanation would make them harmonize? She did not know; she admitted to herself that she did not know; still she was convinced that, when everything was known, her father's truth would be established. While Nora thought and thought; in the pretty bedchamber which had been assigned to her as an honoured guest, Elaine Harding was wrestling with troubles of her own, and her troubles were worse than Nora's. In her dressing-case, under a false bottom, were nearly three thousand pounds which did not belong to her; the dressing-case itself had been a gift from Nora, who had shown her the false bottom with glee, pointing out what a safe hiding-place it would be for any special treasures she might desire to keep from prying eyes. Almost the first use she had made of it had been to conceal the huge sum of which she had robbed the giver. How she hated herself for what she had done! how gladly she would have restored the money to its place upon the dead man's table! She understood now what it had been doing there; doubtless it was the amount which it was his custom to pay into the bank each quarter, which it had been his intention to deliver on the morrow. God had intervened on the one hand, the devil on the other; she had played the devil's game;--fool! idiot! wretch that she had been! She realized quite clearly that that money would never bring any good to her; that it would lie like some obscene incubus on her whole life; even if she bought a husband with the proceeds of her stealing, how could she expect that such a marriage would be blest? The dressing-case itself had become a sort of monomania; not only did she keep it locked, but she hid it in her trunk and kept that locked; even then she was continually haunted by fears that some one was taking liberties with her property, as she had done with that of others. Suppose, by some mischance, the secret of that false bottom was discovered, what would happen then? She did not dare to think. What a fool she had been to tell Herbert Nash that tale about the legacy. It was not only a gratuitous, it was a foolish lie; she had seen that for herself almost as soon as it was told. He had only to make the most superficial inquiries, the falsehood would be discovered. She felt like biting her tongue out every time she thought of it. Her only excuse was that she had done it on the spur of the moment, without thinking; yielding to a temptation which was stronger than her. If only she did not love him! with so strange and violent a love that she had been willing to do what she had done rather than that he should not love her, rather than that she should not win him for her own! If, now, he were to find her out--what she had done--for his sake, what would he think of her then? But he should not find out; she would take care that he did not find out; rather than he should find out she would continue as she had begun, at whatever cost to herself, and to others. Therefore it seemed to her disordered, tortured, twisted brain, that there was only one thing to be done, to make amends, to wipe off some of the blackness from her sin. She had told him that her aunt had left two thousand pounds. Well, he should have it. He had already had two hundred; there would be fifteen hundred for a share in Mr. Dawson's practice; the rest would be required to furnish a house, so that they might be married at once--on that point she was resolved, that there should be no delay about their being married; after what had happened she would be in constant agony till she had become his wife, and, so far, safe. He could not put his wife from him, even if he did find out. She was inclined to make it a condition that he should marry her before she gave him another farthing; in that way she would make sure of him. Even then, after the whole of the two thousand had been expended, more than a thousand pounds would still remain. It looked as if a thousand pounds would be a fortune to Nora Lindsay; a windfall from the skies; manna from heaven, which would at least preserve her from starvation. Nora should have the superfluous thousand; she would insist on it. It was true that such a sum would be most useful to a young couple, just married; but what did that matter, in face of Nora's pressing need? It was only too probable that they would be occasionally pinched; Herbert had explained that his income from a share of Mr. Dawson's practice would not, at the beginning, be large; there were eventualities for which they ought to be prepared; but such considerations were as nothing when one thought of Nora. She must be considered before anything else; she who had been such a faithful, such a generous friend; the whole of that thousand pounds should be hers. By the time that Miss Harding had finally decided that this should be so she had nearly worked herself into a consciousness of virtue. When you looked facts in the face, from one point of view, it was generous to give away such a sum as that, especially when you remembered how much she stood in need of it herself; beyond a doubt that was how it would appear to Nora. Nora would appreciate her beneficence; would realize that this was the result of being kind to her humble friend in the days of her prosperity; the knowledge that the bread which she had cast upon the waters had returned to her after many days ought to make her--well, it ought to make her more contented with the measure which had been meted out to her; Elaine felt that it ought. What Miss Harding had to do next was to invent some plausible explanation of how the money had come into her hands, and she was aware that that was not easy. So hard, indeed, was it to find that explanation that, in her despair, she nearly decided, after all, to relinquish her philanthropic scheme. But she would not do that--she could not do it; she had said that Nora should have the money, and she should. The misfortune was that Nora knew so much about her; it would be impossible to produce an aunt for her; Nora would refuse to swallow that aunt. Being intimately acquainted with the family history, she was pretty well aware that all the members of the Harding family would not be able to produce a thousand pounds between them. And then--there were other things. Only a short time ago Nora had "obliged" her, as Elaine phrased it, with the "loan" of a ten-pound note; if Miss Harding had had a thousand pounds laid by she would hardly have wanted those ten sovereigns. So elusive did that explanation seem, so persistently did it refuse to come at her bidding, that Elaine brushed back her pretty hair with her pretty hands with what she intended to be a frenzied gesture, which was certainly not unbecoming, and at that moment she formed a resolution. She would go to Nora there and then, straight off, and approach the subject gently, trusting to the inspiration of the moment to provide her with the lie which would sound like truth, which it was so necessary that she should find to aid her in her beneficent purpose. No one knew better than she did how quickly her wits could come to her assistance at a pinch; with characteristic courage she took it for granted that they would not fail her when she was alone with Nora, and heart was speaking unto heart. In so doing she overlooked one factor--the unexpected. Experience had taught her that when she was hard pressed her wits could be relied upon, but hitherto she had always found herself in situations for which she was more or less prepared. The immediate future had something in store for her which was wholly unexpected. CHAPTER IX THE BUTLER Elaine's room was at some distance from Nora's; they were in different wings. Miss Harding, whose habits were, in some respects, peculiar, always preferred that her room should not be too close to her friend's; though Nora herself would have liked to have had her nearer. To reach Miss Lindsay Elaine had to traverse a lengthy passage, which was divided in the centre by a square opening, which was used sometimes as a lounge. As Miss Harding moved along some one came out of this recess, and addressed her. It was Morgan, the butler. Mr. Morgan was tall and fair--very fair. His face and eyebrows, and eyelashes, and hair were all of the same colour; it had rather an odd effect, which some people thought unpleasant. Many persons have an uncomfortable habit of never looking you in the face; he had what some felt was a nearly equally uncomfortable habit of never looking away from your face; he regarded any one with whom he might be talking with a fixed, impassive stare, which never faltered; there was a quality in his light greyish-blue eyes which, under such circumstances, was occasionally disconcerting. Miss Harding, who, in her way, was shrewd enough, had never known what to make of him; more than once, during her visits to Cloverlea, she had had a vague feeling that his demeanour towards her was not quite all that it ought to have been; the feeling came to her with unpleasant force as he stood before her then. Yet nothing could have been more decorous than his bearing; while he spoke with the softly modulated voice with which a well-trained servant ought to speak. "I beg your pardon, Miss Harding, but can I speak to you for a moment?" She said him neither yea nor nay, but put to him a question in return. "What is it, Morgan?" "It's about these." He was extending towards her, on his open palm, what she perceived were three sovereigns. Whose they were, whence they came, what they meant, she had not a notion; but all at once she was conscious, not only of a curious fluttering of the heart, but of a desire to get away from him as quickly as she could. "I can't stop now; if you have anything you wish to say you must say it later; I'm going to Miss Lindsay, she's waiting for me; and--I'm not feeling very well." Why she added that last remark she did not know; a second after she wished it had been left unuttered--he fastened on it with such singular eagerness. "You're not looking well--I've noticed it." She was just about to hurry on, but there was something about the way in which he spoke which induced her to pause; something impertinent, which stung her, so that she regarded him with angry eyes, and replied to him with scorn. "It's very good of you." "I've noticed that you've not been looking well--ever since last Thursday." This time he spoke with a significance which startled her, though she did not understand. "Why since last Thursday?" "I'll tell you. I was in the study when you were. After you had gone I found these three sovereigns. One was lying on the floor, and the other two were lodged on the shelves of the bookcase. And ever since then I've noticed that you've not been looking well." A great horror was stealing over her, which she tried to get the better of, but failed. He regarded her with that impassive stare of his, which compelled her eyes to be fixed on his, whether they would or they would not. "I--I don't know what you--what you mean." It was strange how her voice trembled; his was steady enough, like the voice of doom. "I'll explain. You remember last Thursday, the day on which the master was taken ill? I don't think you're ever likely to forget it. It occurred to me, after dinner, that the lamp had been left lighted, and the window open; so I went to put out the one and shut the other. When I got into the room, rather to my surprise, I found that the lamp was out, though the window was still open. As I stood there, in the darkness, I heard some one outside, coming along the terrace; presently you appeared at the open window. The moon was shining through the window, and you stood right in the moonshine, so that I saw you as plainly as if it had been daylight. But in the room it was darker; I expect that, coming in out of the moonlight, it seemed darker to you than it did to me. You didn't know I was there; I suppose that, being in a bit of a hurry, and with your thoughts all fixed on one thing, you took it for granted that the room was empty. It was rather funny--that's how it struck me at the time, and that's how it's struck me more than once; but perhaps that's because I've got a very keen eye for anything humorous. "You went right across the room towards the oak bookcase which stands on the other side of the door, passing so close to me that I felt the wind of your skirts against my trousers as you passed, and I guessed that you knew what you were after before you came there, though I never guessed for a moment what it was. The bookcase was in the shadow, and mine not being cat's eyes, I couldn't see all that you were doing; but I could hear; and there are times when the sense of hearing conveys a good deal of information. I heard you takedown some of the books, then a rustling, then the chink of money. By that time you may be sure that I was all ears, and eyes--mine had almost become cat's eyes before you'd finished. I saw that you had something white in your hand, which I guessed was your pocket-handkerchief; and I partly saw, and partly heard, that you were shovelling coins on it which you were taking from one of the bookcase shelves. Either there were too many coins for such a small handkerchief--those handkerchiefs of yours are pretty, but they're small; I like one which is about the size of a towel--or else you were a little clumsy; you're not, as a rule, I know; I've often been struck by the natty way you have of doing things; but perhaps being in such a hurry made you a trifle nervous. Anyhow, as you're aware, you dropped some of the coins which you were putting into the handkerchief; I heard them fall, and so did you. You stooped to pick them up. I expected every second that you'd strike a match, or get a light somehow; in which case you'd have seen me, and it might have been funnier still. But you didn't. You felt, and felt, and felt; I take it that you thought you'd felt everywhere, and that as you could feel no more of the coins, that you'd picked up all you'd dropped. Presently, whether satisfied or not upon that point, you went out the way that you'd come in." Mr. Morgan paused, and Miss Harding tried to breathe. It seemed to her that she was choking; that she was bound about as if with bands of iron. If there was anything peculiar in her appearance the butler made no comment; he went on in his easy, softly modulated tones. "I heard you return along the terrace; I waited till I could hear no more of you; then I shut the window, and drew the curtains; then I lit the lamp, and with its aid I subjected the room to a careful examination, and in less than five seconds I found a sovereign on the floor by the bookcase, and then two more on the shelves. Here they are." He again extended his hand, with the three shining discs on the open palm. She started back from them, gasping, as if they were dangerous things, of which she stood in physical terror. "I've marked each coin--see? I want you to notice them carefully, so that you may recognize them, if you see them again." He held up one of the coins between his finger and thumb. "Of course when I found these I knew what had happened; understood it all--better even than you did. I knew some of the governor's little ways, which perhaps you didn't; a man in my position has to keep a sharp look-out; it's part of his duty--to himself. I knew all about the governor's habit of paying into his banking account three thousand pounds every quarter, in notes and gold, which Dr. Banyard has been telling you young ladies about, as if it was news; I'd seen the money on his table, that afternoon when I was helping to carry him away, the next day being his usual one for paying in, I knew what it was there for. He was a man of regular habits, was my late governor; though some of them were queer ones. There wasn't any of it left, except these three sovereigns which, in the dark, had escaped your notice. Because why?--because you'd taken the lot. I consider that a remarkable thing for any one to do, especially for a real young lady. Never before, in my experience, have I known the friend of the house take instant advantage of the host's sudden illness to play a game like that. Remarkable, I call it; most remarkable." Each time that Mr. Morgan paused the girl before him gasped, as if the mere cessation of his speech removed from her some sense of constriction, which prevented the free play of her lungs. "Don't suppose," he continued, with what he possibly intended to be affability, "that I am saying this to you in any unfriendly spirit; because I'm not--nothing of the kind. I've always felt that there was in you the makings of something remarkable, though I must admit that you've gone beyond my expectations. I've always liked you, Miss Harding; in fact, I've nearly more than liked you. I want you to understand that you've made of me what you might call an unintentional confidant; so why should there be any barriers between us? Socially there are none to speak of. Your father's a poor country parson, mine was a schoolmaster; there isn't much to choose between them; if I was asked I should say that I don't think much of either. Pecuniarily the advantage is all on my side, as I happen to know; and that in spite of the three thousand pounds you have of somebody else's. Very comfortable I could make a wife, if I had one; she'd be quite the lady. I've no complaint to make about your manner towards me in public; I humbly venture to hope that after this intimation of my friendly feeling towards you, you'll be even affable when we're alone together--if ever we are. It's all up with everything here; from what I happen to know, I shouldn't be surprised if the house, and all that's in it, was sold for what it will fetch in a surprisingly short space of time. Then we shall all be parted. Miss Lindsay will go her way--though I don't know what way that'll be; you'll go yours, and I shall go mine. This will be my last taste of service. When you meet me again afterwards you'll find me a perfect gentleman, whom you won't be a bit ashamed to introduce to your friends; and I assure you I'll do my best to earn their respect and esteem. I won't detain you any longer, Miss Harding--you'll understand that I had to speak to you; and that, situated as I am, I had to take the first chance that offered. Now you can go to Miss Lindsay with a mind at ease. If an opportunity offers you might inform her what a feeling of true sympathy there is for her in the servants' hall. It's very hard for a young lady, who has been brought up in the lap of luxury, to be all at once left with hardly clothes enough to cover her, because, between ourselves, that's what's going to happen to her; and down-stairs we earnestly trust, if I may use the language of metaphor, that her back will be broadened for the burden. There's many a young girl like her who has to earn her bread in ways I shouldn't like to mention; let's hope she won't come to any of those. You might mention, if you have the chance, that we all of us wish her the very best of luck." With a slight inclination of his head, which might almost have been mistaken for a nod, Mr. Morgan went past her towards the staircase. She remained where he had left her, as if her feet were glued to the carpet. Her inclination would have been to return to her own bedroom; there she would at least be alone, to try to think; but the butler was between it and her. As she glanced in the direction of her room, looking over his shoulder he glanced towards her, and she ran towards Nora's room. Without knocking she opened the door and entered; but so soon as she had crossed the threshold she stood motionless, as if all her limbs were locked together. Nora, seated on an arm-chair, was leaning on the sill of the open window, trying, in her own fashion, to find light in the darkness which threatened to encompass her round about; when she turned it seemed, from the expression which was on her face, as if she had found it. Certainly a stranger, observing the two girls, would have said that it was Elaine Harding who stood most in need of consolation; and so Nora seemed herself to think. That divine instinct which, in some people, wakes to life in the presence of suffering, was quick to perceive that here was trouble which was greater than hers. She held out her arms, crying-- "You poor child!" It was enough; Elaine needed no further invitation. With eager, tremulous steps, and a cry which was half gasp, half sob, she went fluttering across the room, sinking in a heap at Nora's feet, pillowing her head upon her lap, crying as if the violence of her grief would tear her asunder. Smoothing her hair with her soft hands, stooping down and kissing her tenderly, using towards her all manner of endearments, Nora strove her utmost to assuage the passion of her woe, in seeming forgetfulness of how much she herself was in need of comfort. But Elaine was not to be consoled. CHAPTER X THE EARL AND THE COUNTESS Events moved quickly; as, at certain crises of our lives, they have a knack of doing. During twenty years very little had really happened to Nora; in a few crowded, bewildering days for her the whole world was turned upside down. On the Friday--the day after the funeral--Nora told Dr. Banyard that she was inclined to be of his opinion, that the creditors had better be called together, and matters left in their hands. She did not tell him that her faith in her father remained unshaken. It was made clear to her that this was a question of hours, possibly even of minutes, if something was not done to appease the creditors at once then the worst would befall; it was no use delivering herself of pious expressions of faith when action was required. So she authorized the doctor to do his best for her, and left everything to his discretion. Throughout that day she was puzzled by the singularity of Miss Harding's behaviour; she had cares enough of her own to occupy her mind, yet she could not help but notice that there was something very strange the matter with Elaine. The young lady's outburst of the evening before had not been explained. All day long she was in a state of nervous tremor which was almost hysterical; such conduct was unusual in Elaine, who had been wont to laugh at the idea both of nerves and of hysterics. Nora did not know what to make of her. So far as she could gather, from the cryptic utterances which the girl now and then let fall, she was troubled about three things. First, because of the poverty which apparently was in store for Nora; then because of the various amounts, which together did not amount to a very large sum, and most of which, to tell the truth, the creditor had herself forgotten, in which she was indebted to Nora; and, in the third part, because of a nebulous scheme she had for endowing Nora with unnamed, but seemingly immense supplies of ready money. It was this scheme which, apparently, was worrying her more than anything else; though what it really was, was beyond Nora's comprehension. Elaine talked--vaguely, it is true, but passionately, none the less--of being in possession of funds which Nora knew perfectly well she never had had, and probably never would have; and about which she waxed quite warm when Nora smilingly asked if she was quite sure she was not dreaming. "You're not to laugh!" she cried. "You're not to laugh! You are to have it! you shall have it!" "I shall have what?" "The money I'm telling you about!" "But what money are you telling me about? Elaine, you don't seriously wish me to believe that you have money. Only this week you were crying because of what you said you owed me; though I say you owe me nothing, since all that has been between us has been for love's sake. And only last week you told me that your pockets were empty, and you didn't know where you were going to get something to put in them; don't you remember?" "But I may know where money is!" "Yes, and so may I; there's money in the bank, but it's neither yours nor mine; and I'm sure--don't you know I'm sure? you must be a goose if you don't--that you've no more idea how, honestly, it's to be wooed and won than I have; so what's the use of our pretending?" To the speaker's surprise Miss Harding glared at her for some moments in silence; then, as if in sudden rage, she flung herself out of the room without a word; sounds were audible as if she were sobbing as she went. "What," inquired Nora of herself, not by any means for the first time that day, "can be the matter with Elaine?" On the Saturday the storm broke on her from a quarter for which, at the moment, she was unprepared. Word had been brought that the Earl and Countess of Mountdennis were in the drawing-room, waiting to see her. Her first impulse was to send an excuse; the mere announcement of their presence made her conscious of a sinking heart; but it was not her way to excuse herself because she feared unpleasantness; second thoughts prevailed. She recognized that, from their point of view, they were entitled to see her, even in these first days of her bereavement. She needed none to tell her that the purport of their presence was not likely to be an agreeable one; that they probably had not come upon an errand of love; she had too shrewd a notion of their characters. Under the circumstances the last thing she might expect from them was sympathy; she was aware that they had a standard of their own; and that according to that the more a person stood in need of sympathy the less likely they were to vouchsafe it. Still they were Robert's parents; it was for her to consider him rather than herself; so, for the first time since her father was taken ill she ventured into the drawing-room. The frigidity of the reception which they accorded her was ominous; she knew at once that so far from having deserved their sympathy she had incurred their displeasure. The last time they had met they had both of them taken her, not only metaphorically, but literally, to their bosoms; showering oh her tokens of affection which erred, if anything, on the side of redundance. Now the lady permitted her to touch a fish-like hand, taking care not to allow her to approach too near; while the gentleman merely bowed. It was he who spoke first, as if he were addressing some one whose behaviour had both pained and shocked him. "We only learnt this morning, actually by the merest accident, that your father was not only dead, but buried." "Not only dead but buried!" This was the Countess. It was a standing joke that, if they were both engaged in the same conversation, when he did not echo her she echoed him. If they ever differed it must have been in private; in public their agreement was so complete as sometimes to approach almost to the verge of the exasperating. "We were not even aware that your father was unwell; we had received positively no information on the subject whatever." "Positively none whatever!" "It seems to me--to us--a most extraordinary thing that you should not have apprised us of the condition of your father's health; that you should have given us no intimation of any kind; that you should have kept us in utter ignorance." "In utter ignorance!" "May I ask, may we ask, Miss Lindsay, why you have not treated us with at least some approximation to that consideration which our position obviously demanded?" "Our position obviously demanded!" "To begin with, it was all very sudden; and then I didn't know where you were. "But you might have made inquiries, anybody would have told you; almost, one might say, the first person you met in the street. We are not the kind of people who hide ourselves in holes." "No, not in holes!" "The moment we learnt what had occurred--learnt, as I have observed, by the sheerest accident,--we rushed back to Holtye, that very moment; though to do so involved us in the most serious inconvenience; but we had no option." "We had no option." "Because, not only were we informed, by accident, that your father was dead and buried, but we were also told, at the same time, what struck us as being so surprising as to be almost incredible, that he had not left behind him even so much as a sixpence." "Not even so much as a sixpence!" "You will remember, Miss Lindsay--that is, I take it for granted that information was given to you to that effect, that before sanctioning my--our--son Robert's engagement to you I made a special point of calling upon your father, who then and there informed, I may say, assured, me that, on the occasion of your marriage, he would present you with a house and furniture, and settle on you five thousand pounds a year. On the strength of that positive and definite assurance I--we--gave our consent, which, without it, we never should have dreamt of doing. We have our duty to perform, not only to our son, but to ourselves, and I may say, to our family, of which we are the representatives; I therefore offer no excuse for taking advantage of the first opportunity which arises to ask if your father has left his affairs in a condition which will enable you to carry out that assurance. On behalf of the Countess of Mountdennis, and of myself, I beg you, Miss Lindsay, in answering that question, to be perfectly plain and perfectly candid." "Perfectly plain and perfectly candid!" The Earl, very tall, very straight, very thin, waved his hard felt hat in one hand, and his gold-knobbed malacca cane in the other, in a manner which was hardly so impressive as he perhaps intended; the Countess, her gloved hands clasped in front of her, wagged not only her head, but her whole body, as if to punctuate, and notify her approval, of his remarks as they fell from him. Nora was silent. At the back of her mind had been the consciousness that, sooner or later, this question would have to be confronted; but she had not anticipated that it would be addressed to her so suddenly, so brusquely, with such a stand-and-deliver air. When she began to speak her lips were tremulous; and, though she might not have been aware of it, her eyes were moist; the feeling was strong upon her how different it all was from what she had expected. "I--I'm sorry to say that, so far as we have been able to ascertain, the state of my father's affairs is not--not altogether satisfactory." It was the Countess who took up the running then; the Earl who played the part of echo; but as her volubility was much greater than his she did not give him so many opportunities to shine as he had given her. "Not altogether satisfactory! my good young woman, what do you mean? I suppose all ideas of a house and furniture and five thousand a year must be given up, though your father led us to expect that there would be much more than that after he was dead; but the Earl has asked you a plain question and what we want is a plain answer; how much has he left you? If you can't give us the exact sum let's have it approximately, in pounds, shillings and pence." "I'm afraid that I'm not yet in a position which enables me to do that." "Not in a position? what do you mean, you're not in a position? are you in a position to say that he has left you anything, except debts?" "I'm certain that when he said he had that money he had it; I believe he was a rich man when he died. Only he was very reserved; and, in consequence, we have not been able to find where the money is." "Stuff and nonsense! you'd have found the money if there'd been any to find; it's only when there is none that none's found! Have you any sort of solid foundation for thinking that he did leave money?" "He gave me to understand that I should be left well off; and I can't believe he would have done so if it had not been true." "Some people can't believe anything; I know a woman who can't believe that her husband committed murder, though he was found guilty on the clearest possible evidence, confessed his guilt, and was hung ten years ago. Husbands and wives can't exist on the incomes they believe they have; tradesmen want coin of the realm. I'm informed that by the time everything's sold, and everything will have to be sold, and the debts paid, there'll be nothing left for you; I want you to tell me, plainly, please, if that's true." At last the Earl had his chance. "Yes, plainly, please, if that's true!" "I am afraid that, as matters stand at present, it does seem as if it were likely to be true." The Countess, putting up her lorgnettes, surveyed her fixedly, and severely. "You must allow me to remark, Miss Lindsay, that you have a way of fencing with a plain question which, under the circumstances, seems peculiar, and which compels me to wonder if it can be possible that you knowingly obtained my son's consent to marry you under false pretences." At this Nora did fire up. "How dare you say such a thing! I did not obtain his consent, he obtained mine." "We know very well what that means. I have not arrived at my time of life without understanding what are the wiles with which a young woman of no position lures a handsome young fellow of good family; I have not the slightest doubt that my son would never have asked you to be his wife had you not made it quite clear to him that you wished him to." Nora stood up; one could see that the colour kept coming and going in her cheeks; that she was trembling; that she seemed to be panting for breath. "I--I think you'd better go." The Countess went calmly on; the girl's agitation seemed to make the elder woman calmer, and more corrosive. "I am going when it suits me; I assure you I have no wish to stay a moment longer in this abode of misrepresentation than I am compelled to. But before I go I wish to appeal to your sense of decency, if you have any sense of decency----" "How--how dare you! how dare you speak to me like this!" "I say, if you have any sense of decency, to release him from the most unfortunate position in which your father's misrepresentations, and your own peculiar behaviour, have entangled him." "Has--has he sent you here?" "If you persist in putting such a question I shall understand that you have no sense of decency; surely any young woman with a spark of honour in her composition, must perceive that in such a situation the man would not be likely to send--that the initiative must come from her, not from him." "I simply wish to learn if Mr. Robert Spencer knows that you have come to me upon this errand." "He does not know; which gives you an opportunity to free him gracefully before the true state of affairs does come to his knowledge." "If he wishes to be what you call 'free,' do you suppose that for one moment I would stand in his way?" "It is not so much a question of what he wishes, as of what you wish. If you wish, though ever so slightly, to hold him to his bargain, I dare say he'll be held, even to the extent of making you his wife; though he will regret it ever afterwards, and will probably live to curse the day on which you first placed yourself in his path. Young men have married undesirable women, who were in no way fitted to be their wives, and who were thinking only of themselves, before to-day, and will again; I have seen examples of it in my own family, to my great sorrow. I intend, if I can, to save my son Robert from such a fate, whatever you may say or do; the purport of my presence here is merely to learn if you are, or are not, possessed of a shred of principle." "I cannot conceive why you talk to me like this; what makes you think yourself entitled to take up such an attitude towards me; what I have done which causes you to address me in such a strain." "That's high-faluting, it's talk of that sort which makes me suspect that you must be even worse than I supposed. Your father held you out to the world as a young woman who was rich already, and who would be still richer later on, and you tacitly endorsed his positive statements; then he dies just in time to save himself from being made a fraudulent bankrupt, leaving you worse than a pauper, and you have the assurance to pretend to wonder why I and the Earl regard you--I will be as civil as I can--askance. Talk sense, Miss Lindsay; don't presume on our simplicity any longer. You are perfectly well aware that, had we been aware of the truth from the first, we should never have countenanced you in any way whatever. Your father's lies, with which you went out of your way to associate yourself--I know!--deceived us; and they deceived my son; there's the truth for you, if you never heard it before." Nora looked as if she could have said many things; but she only asked a question. "What, precisely, is it that you wish me to do?" "I wish you to do something to, at least in part, undo the mischief which you have done already, to atone for the evil of which you have been the cause; I wish you to show by your demeanour your consciousness of the miserably false position in which you have been placed by others, or in which you have placed yourself, it doesn't matter which. In other, and plainer words, I wish you to hand me my son's letters and presents, and to sit down at once and write a letter, which I will hand him, in which you express your appreciation of the fact that he asked you to become his wife under an entire misapprehension, and that now, since circumstances have turned out so wholly different to what they were represented to be, your own self-respect forbids you to allow any association to continue between you; and that, in short, all is over between you, in every possible sense of the phrase. I want you to put that down, as plainly, and as finally, as it can be put, in black and white, because, Miss Lindsay, I wish to save my son Robert, at the earliest possible, from the danger in which he stands, and to do it while he is still absent." "But, my dear mother," exclaimed the voice of some new-comer, "your son Robert is not still absent, he is here." Looking round the trio saw that the Honourable Robert Spencer was standing at the open window. CHAPTER XI ROBERT Robert Spencer was not only, as his mother put it, a handsome young fellow; he had more than good looks, he had that air of distinction which goes with character. No one with even a slight knowledge of physiognomy could see him once without perceiving that he was physically, mentally, and probably morally, a strong man, and, what was almost as much, a likable man. As he stood framed in the open window, with the glory of that almost uncannily glorious April sun lighting up the frame, each of those who saw him was conscious of an impulse which, had it been yielded to, would have resulted in a scene of tenderness. He was dear to his parents, and he knew it; they themselves scarcely knew how dear, and that also he suspected. He was dear, with a different sort of dearness, to the girl who moved towards him, as if impelled by a power against which she was helpless; only to start back, shrinking timidly, with frightened, longing eyes, and cheeks on which the crimson faded to pallor. Yet, though he was dear to all of them, there was not one of the three who would not rather he had not appeared upon the scene just then. His mother, with characteristic courage, gave expression to her feeling on the spot. "Robert! my boy! we don't want you. Where have you come from? and what are you doing here?" He smiled, and his was such a pleasant smile it did one good to see it. "Why, mother, I'm sorry to hear that you don't want me. I've rushed from the station to tell Nora, what I've not a doubt she knows already, that I hope she'll find in me some one who'll take the place, at least in part, of him whom she has lost." When he advanced into the room his mother placed herself in his path. "Robert, my dear boy, you ought not to be here. Go back to Holtye, and when I return I will explain to your perfect satisfaction why I say it." "Ought not to be here!--where Nora is! My dear mother! Nora, why do--why don't--Nora, what's the matter?" He made a sudden forward movement, but once more his mother was too quick for him; again she interposed; if he did not wish to knock her over he had to stand still. "Robert, I must beg you to do as I desire, and return at once to Holtye." "My dear mother, I must beg you to stand aside, and let me speak to Nora." The old woman turned to the girl. "Miss Lindsay, you perceive how my son treats me; have you nothing which you wish to say?" "Of course," replied the son in question, "Nora has something which she wishes to say--I'm sure I don't know why you call her Miss Lindsay; she's not likely to say it when addressed like that. I'll make a suggestion, mother; you go back to Holtye, with the dad, and I'll talk to Nora when you're gone, and I'll tell you some of the things she says to me when I return to Holtye." The old lady stuck to her guns. "Miss Lindsay, is there nothing that you wish to say?" "Yes, Mr. Spencer, there is something which I wish to say--your mother is right; you ought not to be here." With a great effort she had brought herself to the sticking-point. She was one of those women who have in them an infinite capacity for suffering, yet who remain unbeaten though they suffer. If she once saw what she believed to be her duty straight in front of her, though her flesh might quail, her soul would not falter; she would do her duty as certainly as any of that great host who have died for duty, smiling as they died. The Countess had not put things pleasantly, but it seemed to Nora that she had put them correctly; she ought not to marry the man she loved, for his own sake; and because she loved him with something of that love which passes understanding, she would not marry him--to his own hurt. She proceeded to make this as clear to him as she could. "There has been a misunderstanding between us from the first; I don't know that the fault has been altogether mine, but there has been. It is necessary that we should understand each other now. When I consented to become your wife it was under a misapprehension; I did not know it then; I know it now. Now that I do know it, it is quite clear to me that it is impossible that I should be your wife, and I never will be. Therefore, since what your mother says is obviously correct, and you ought not to be here, I would join with her in asking you to go." Robert Spencer stared as if he found it difficult to credit that this formal, cold, somewhat pedantic young woman was the girl whom he had found all love and tenderness; indeed he refused to credit it. "Nora, you're--not well." He said this with such a comical twist, and such a sunny smile, that she all but succumbed, she loved him for it so; she was all of a quiver, her heart seemed melting. It was possibly because she perceived the girl's sad plight that the sharp-eyed old woman took another hand in the game. "Robert, is it necessary that Miss Lindsay and I should retire? I should not have thought that you would have required two women to ask you to go, before you went. I repeat that you shall have all explanations--from Miss Lindsay and from me--when I see you at Holtye." But Robert still smiled, and he shook the handsome, clever head, which the Countess ought to have known was too clever to be hoodwinked quite so easily. "It won't do, mother; I'm sorry to seem to run counter to your wishes; but it's clear to my mind that it is I who am entitled to ask you to leave me alone with Nora; it pains me to observe your seeming reluctance to do what you know you ought to do. Dad, you'll understand; won't you take my mother away?" The Earl, thus appealed to, cleared his throat, and then observed-- "Robert, you're a fool; leave this business to your mother; you come and talk to me." He moved towards the window, as though inviting his son to accompany him into the grounds, and to have that talk out there and then; but Robert stood still. "Thank you, dad; it's very good of you, and I'll have all the talk with you you can possibly desire--after I have had a talk with Nora." All at once the girl solved the question in her own fashion; she spoke tremulously, yet in haste. "I--I think that if Mr. Spencer won't go, then--then it is better that I should." And she did go, towards the door, and through it like a flash, before the person principally concerned had a chance to stop her. "Nora!" he cried, the instant she had gone, and he went rushing towards the door through which she had vanished; but again his mother, showing an agility which, in a person of her years, was remarkable, stood in his way. "Robert, I insist upon your conducting yourself like a gentleman! If you will not show me the respect which is due to your mother, you at least shall not behave in a stranger's house in a way which is unbecoming to my son." He looked at the old woman, who had planted herself in front of him, upright and stiff as a post, and he drew back; this time his smile was grave. "Mother, I trust that you are not forgetting that there is a respect which a mother owes to her son. Why do you object to my having any conversation with my affianced wife?" "Don't you know that her father is dead?" "Certainly I know it; just dead, and just buried; it is on that account that I feel so strongly that my place is with her." "Don't talk nonsense!" "Mother, when you were alone in the world, didn't you feel that my father's place was with you?" "Robert, your brothers have behaved like fools, but I hope you won't; you are all the hope I have left; it will break my heart if you do. This girl's father has turned out to be an impostor!" "An impostor? Mother, in saying what you have to say to me will you please remember you are speaking of the woman who is to be my wife, and your daughter, and so choose language which does not convey more than you intend?" "Don't presume to lecture me! that is going too far. I say he has turned out to be an impostor--and he has!" "In what sense?" "He told your father he was going to give his girl a house and furniture and five thousand a year, besides leaving her a rich woman when he died; and now he hasn't left enough to pay his debts; if that isn't being an impostor I don't know what is!" "A good deal of water has gone over the mill since he said that; he may have had money then, and yet have lost every penny of it since." "Then he ought to have told you." "Why?" "Why! you know perfectly well why. I believe it is your wish to irritate me, when I'm very far from well, as your father here will tell you. That man knew that you were not in a position to marry a poor woman, and that we should never have given our consent if it had not been for this distinct assurance that his daughter would be amply provided for." "Well?" "Well! it's not well; there's nothing well about it! You shan't speak to me like this--I won't have it! Robert, I want you to promise that all shall be at an end between Miss Lindsay and you; she herself sees the matter in the proper light----" "Does that mean that you have been talking: to her?" "Certainly I have been talking to her; and I will say this, that she did not take long to see where her duty lay." "Is it possible that she took it for granted that I should behave like a blackguard--at my mother's bidding?" "Robert, how dare you!" "It is not I, mother, who dare; I dare not. I asked Miss Lindsay to be my wife when her father was alive, and a rich man and all was well with her. If, now that all is not well with her, I attempt to repudiate the solemn engagements into which I then entered----" "Fiddle-de-dee! solemn engagements indeed! You entered into no solemn engagements, and I'll take care you don't. Robert, you are the only creature I have left to love." "I don't see how that can be, since you have eight other children and a husband." "My boy, my boy, don't you be so cruel as to pretend that you don't understand! You're my youngest born, the child of my old age, my baby--you're dear to me in a special sense, as you know very well. If you marry this girl, who is not only penniless, but who is in honour bound to pay her father's debts, and who'll drag you down into the gutter, because your aunt will never give you another penny when she knows the facts, on the day of your marriage I'll commit suicide." "Mother!" "I will, so now you're warned; and she shall know why I do it. I'll not live to be mocked by all my children; I've had nine of them, as you say, and if not one of them will try to please his mother--then God help us mothers." The young man turned to the Earl. "Do you associate yourself, sir, with my mother in this matter?" "Certainly I do--most distinctly I do; with what she says respecting this young woman most emphatically I do; I can't conceive of a rational creature doing anything else. As matters have turned out the girl's impossible--absolutely out of the question. If you can't see it, Robert, you're a fool." "Thank you, sir." The young man regarded his plain-speaking sire with a wry little smile. "I think it probable that when you have thought things over, sir, you will modify your views; but while you hold them so warmly, plainly it is desirable that I should restrict myself to a bare announcement of the fact that they are not mine." He moved towards the window; his mother called out to him. "Robert, where are you going? You will return with us. We came in the landau; there is plenty of room. I beg you will give us your company; indeed, if it is not sufficient for a mother to beg of her son, then I insist upon your doing so." "Pardon me, mother, but I am not going to Holtye; I have taken a room at the 'Unicorn.'" "The 'Unicorn!' Robert! Harold, will you be so good as to ask him what he means?" The Earl did as he was bid. "Robert, what do you mean by saying that you have taken a room at the 'Unicorn'?--an inn!--a mere tavern! at the gate of your father's house!" "The 'Unicorn' can hardly be said to be at the gate of Holtye, since it is at a distance of a good five miles." "Stuff, sir! Five miles or fifty, what does it matter? Holtye is your home, and you will be so good as to come home; we've been expecting you; we've been looking forward to your return; I trust that the day is far distant on which you will cease to regard Holtye as your home." "Unless he wishes to break his mother's heart." The interpolation was the lady's. "So no nonsense, sir; get into the carriage and we'll drive you home." "You are very kind; permit me, sir, to finish. It is plain that my mother and you have made up your minds that Miss Lindsay shall not become my wife; you will probably leave no stone unturned which will keep us apart. I appreciate your motives, and though I think them unworthy, I know you think they're for my good; but I have made up my mind that she shall be my wife, and I will stop at nothing which will bring about that desirable consummation. Under these conditions obviously the more we are together the more friction there will be; and therefore, equally obviously, it is desirable that, for the present at least, I should not come to Holtye. But I promise you this, that when she's my wife I'll come--and I'll bring her with me." "You'll do nothing of the kind; if you ever do marry her you'll never set foot inside the door again." This, of course, was the Countess; her son laughed. "You hear my mother, sir! Isn't that conclusive?" He passed through the window and out of sight, the Earl and the Countess staring at the place where he had been. The Earl was the first to speak. "Jemima, what on earth was the use of saying a thing like that? Don't you know him better than to threaten?" "What am I to say? what am I to do? Who'd have children!--they're the cause of suffering and sorrow to their mothers from their cradles to their graves! I wish I'd never had one!" "My dear Jemima, I dare say, also, you wish you had two heads, but you haven't. For my part, I don't know that I regret the line he's taken up." "Harold! Do you wish to see him ruined?" "Not at all; quite the other way; that's exactly it. In cases of this sort, when the man throws over the woman there's a certain amount of odium attached to his conduct--I realize that as clearly as he does; but when she throws him over that's another thing. Robert's pig-headed----" "Like his father!" "And his mother! he's no worse on that account, Jemima, not in the sense in which I use the word. You'll not move him, but you will the girl; there's your objective. In her way, unless I'm mistaken, she's as pig-headed as he is. He may use all the eloquence he has at his command, but, after what you said to her, and the way in which you put things, I doubt if she'll marry him though he pleads till he is dumb--they are a pair of Quixotes; when it comes to rank, downright Quixotry, she'll beat him on his own ground." And the lady considered her lord's words. "I shouldn't be surprised," she admitted, "if you are right." "I know I'm right," he said. "I haven't come to my time of life without being a student of human nature." CHAPTER XII IN THE WOOD On the Sunday morning Nora went to church alone. Miss Harding, who did not appear at breakfast, sent word that she had a headache and hoped that Nora would excuse her; which Nora was glad to do; she preferred to go alone. For the first time for some days the sky was overcast; the sun was hidden, as if the clerk of the weather desired to show that he was in sympathy with the girl's feelings. Certainly the girl's mood was not a sunny one. The church was distant from the house about a mile. The way to it was through the grounds; along a footpath through the wood, across Farmer Snelling's thirty-acre field, into the copse on the other side, where the first daffodils were always found; when you were out of the copse almost in front of you was the Rectory Lane; a hundred yards along the lane, turn sharply to the left, there was the lych-gate under which, aforetime, more parish coffins rested than men had count of. As she went the familiar way, amid the many evidences of the hasting spring, the spirit of the morning seemed to enter into her, so that, as she passed into the church, and knelt where she had knelt so many times in happier days, the peace of God came into her soul and she knew, with an abiding sense of comfort, that indeed all things are in His hands. She never forgot that morning's service; the last at which she was privileged to be a worshipper in what she had thought would always be, in a special sense, her own church; the memory was with her, as a sweet savour, in the still darker days which were to come. It was Palm Sunday, for Easter was late that year; the hour of the Church's mourning was close at hand; the appointed service for the day seemed to be peculiarly suited to her own case; before it was at an end her thoughts ceased to be centred on herself; her head, and her heart, were both abased before a sorrow that was greater than hers. When she came out, at the close of service, she was surrounded by people, villagers and others, for there was not a creature in the parish, good or bad, high or low, with whom she was not on terms of intimacy; unconsciously she illustrated the doctrine that-- "He prayeth best who loveth best All things, both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all." They had all a word of sympathy to offer, crude words some of them were, but she knew that all of them were well meant, and that was something; what was hidden from her, and from them, was knowledge of the fact that to most of those who clustered round her, and who waylaid her as she went, the words which were uttered were words of farewell; that before another Sunday came round she was to be parted from them as by a great sea. At the church porch, in the Rectory Lane, in the copse across Farmer Snelling's field, she found some one who had at least a word to say; sometimes it was an ancient, sometimes a toddling child. She had gained the stile which one had to climb to get into the wood before she was able to feel that the last of the interviewers was done with; she did not guess that on the other side of that stile lurked the most irrepressible of them all. Although there was a right of way through the wood it was one which was seldom used, except by the household at Cloverlea; and how often they went that way was shown by the untrodden moss which almost hid the track. And yet it was a pleasant wood, and an inviting path; it had only to be followed a very little way, there were delicious nooks and dells. Most of the trees were old, and many of them were stately; yet they were excellent company, if one chanced to be alone. As Nora had found, many a time. She loved that wood; it was to her as a dear friend; so often had she come to it to dream, waking dreams, and to be alone in it, with her joys. The season, that year, was early. The chestnuts--there were not many in the wood, only about a dozen, but they were all fine trees--were already nearly in full leaf; the elms were showing green; there was promise of green upon the beeches; only the oaks were still bare; in all the wood, somewhere, was the gleam and glow and glory of that lustrous, delicate, fleeting green which is spring's greatest marvel. And though the sun still was hidden, she felt how beautiful it was, and how good to be in it there alone; until she came upon a man who was leaning against a tree, the finest chestnut in the wood, the splendour of whose leafing branches formed a canopy above him. The man was Robert Spencer; the tree was just round a bend in the path, so that she was almost up against him before she had the faintest notion that any one was there. To judge from her demeanour the sight of him alarmed her; she drew back with a half-stifled cry, staring at him as if he were some dangerous thing. He, on his side, was all smiles, as if he was very conscious that she was the pleasantest thing he had seen that day. He held out both hands, with his cap in one. "Nora! at last! I was afraid you were never coming!" There was no mistake about the joyous ring which was in his voice. On her part she seemed not to know what to say, or do, or make of him, as if his presence there was a possibility of which she had never dreamed. "Mr. Spencer, you--you ought not to be here; I--I must beg of you to let me pass." "Why, my dear Nora, of course I'll let you pass; do you suppose I want to block the way? But why do you call me Mr. Spencer? and why do you keep out of kissing distance? Do you know how long it is since I had a kiss? and how often of late I've pictured the delicious moment in which I was to have another? Nora!" The colours chased each other across her cheeks in rainbow hues; she strove her utmost to look dignified; but, to his thinking, she only looked more delightful; her very severity he thought became her. "Mr. Spencer, you--you have no right to talk to me like this. You have had my letter----" "Your letter? what letter?" "The one I sent you yesterday; it ought to have been delivered this morning." "It wasn't; I've had no letter of yours which you sent me yesterday; where did you send it? to what address?" "I addressed it to you at Holtye." "Then that's why I've not had it; possibly I never shall have it. You rushed off in such a flurry, before I could speak a word to you, that I had no chance to tell you that I wasn't staying at Holtye." "Not staying at Holtye? then where are you staying?" "At the 'Unicorn,' I've taken a room there; it's only another illustration of the truth of what I've so often told you, the more haste the worse speed. I can see now that you'd go tearing off if I'd let you; but I won't. I want to explain." "I--I'd rather you explained through the post." "Then I wouldn't; and I'm not going to. When people wish to understand each other in matters of real importance I hold that they'd better do so face to face; I've no faith in pen and ink; microbes breed in ink-bottles, which breed all sorts of misconceptions. Now I can see that you're rushing at your fences again. You're taking it for granted that I wish to speak to you on one subject, when I principally wish to speak to you about your father. I want to tell you something about him which you ought to know." "What is it?" Her voice was faint, as if she felt that unfair engines of war were being used against her. "Your father hoped that we should marry; he knew that I loved you, and would always love you; and he thought you loved me, and would always love me; and therefore----" "What were you going to tell me about my father?" She perceived that he was trenching on dangerous ground, and tried to get him off it; he came off with much agility. "I met him on the morning on which I was starting for Cairo----" "You never told me." "I had an idea that he didn't wish me to mention that I'd met him, so I didn't. We lunched together; he gave me a most excellent lunch----" "I'm glad he gave you an excellent lunch." "There, Nora! that's much more like you! thank you! It was an excellent lunch; it was after lunch he said he hoped that we should marry, because, as I have already observed, he knew that----" "Yes; we'll take that for granted; please go on." "I'm going on as fast as ever I can; but it'll only be another case of more haste worse speed if you won't let me tell my tale my own way, because, if I don't, I'm nearly sure to leave out essential details. Among other things he remarked that, one day, you'd be a rich young woman." "You're sure he said that?" "Quite; your father could express himself clearly enough if he chose; and he expressed himself clearly then." "But--I don't understand." "Wait a bit; I'm going to make you understand, if you'll have a little patience. Later, I cannot say that he said so clearly, but he intimated, that he obtained his income from some business with which he was connected, and which represented to him a large sum of money." "Business! I didn't know that he had anything to do with any business." "Mind, he didn't state definitely that he had; and I asked no questions, but that was what he hinted. Then he said something which, in the light of recent events, appears to me to have been rather remarkable. He observed that life was always uncertain; that one could never tell the hour when one would die, and that, therefore, since I was going to be the husband of his only child, he would like to place in my hands directions as to what he would desire to have done, in case death took him unawares; or before he completed certain arrangements which he then had in view." "What a strange thing for him to say!" "You see how necessary it was that I should see you face to face, and how difficult it would have been to put this on to paper? Nora, I love you!" "Are you--are you really telling me what my father said?" "I'm going to tell you everything he said, if you'll give me time enough; only don't suppose for a moment that you're going to keep me from saying that I love you; especially as it was because he knew I loved you, and believed that you loved me, that he told me what he did." "I--I wish you'd go on." "After I'd been a few days in Cairo there came a package in which there was a note from him; a brief and characteristic note, to this effect. 'Dear Robert,' you see he called me Robert." He paused, as if to challenge her. "Nora, I wish you'd call me Robert; it's a stupid, ugly, vulgar, clumsy name, but you don't know how I long to hear it on your lips." "I--I don't know that it's any of the things you say it is; I--I don't know that there's anything particularly the matter with the name." "That's very sweet of you." "But I don't think it's either fair or kind of you to try to take advantage of me like this!" "Take advantage of you! is your sense of justice so warped that you can say a thing like that! In what sense am I supposed to be trying to take advantage of you, Nora?" "You're pretending to tell me about my father, and--and you keep trying to tell me about other things instead." "The only tie which bound me to your father, the only reason he had for placing his confidence in me, was his knowledge of my love for you." "Very well; if you like we'll take that for granted----" "I don't like." "Tell me what was in the note!" "'Dear Robert, referring to our conversation of' such and such a date; at this moment I can't give it you exactly----" "It doesn't matter." "'You will find in envelope enclosed herewith the instructions of which I spoke. It is understood that it is only to be opened in the event of my demise; and that, should I for any reason whatever desire its return, you will at once hand it me intact. In acknowledging kindly state that you understand.--Faithfully yours, DONALD LINDSAY.' That was the note. With it was a sealed envelope, inscribed, 'To ROBERT SPENCER. Not to be opened until after my death.--DONALD LINDSAY.'" "And have you opened it?" "That's the gist and point of the whole affair--I haven't it." "I don't understand; I thought you said----" "I did say. What's that?" Mr. Spencer's question referred to a sound like the rustling of bushes. "It's only a rabbit, or a hare." "It must be a large specimen of either animal, and an awkward one, to make a noise like that." "What were you going to say?" "I placed the sealed envelope in my suit-case, together with my other most valuable possessions; which, with the exception of some of your dear letters, were worth about twopence; at the moment I'd nowhere else to put it. When I left, the suitcase was placed, with my other luggage, on the train, and, I presumed, transferred from the train to the boat; yet, when I went down to my cabin, after the boat was fairly off, the suit-case wasn't there." "What had become of it?" "That's the problem which I have still to solve, and which I'm going to solve. Either it was left behind at my aunt's, which she denies, or it was left on the train, which the railway company denies, or it was taken by mistake to somebody else's cabin, which every one denies, or it was stolen, of which I haven't the faintest proof. Anyhow, it was, and, at present, it isn't; as yet that's as far as I've got." "Then my father's letter to you is lost." "But it's not going to continue lost; I have lost things before, but I'm not going to lose the only thing I ever had worth losing; I've a ridiculous sort of fatalistic feeling that, as matters have chanced, if I lose that letter--really, and truly, and finally lose it--I may lose you; you don't suppose I'm going to sit down quietly and endure that loss with equanimity? You don't know me, my lady, if you do. What is that? Don't tell me that that's either a rabbit or a hare." "Perhaps it's a fox." "Foxes don't set the whole countryside in a clatter when they start moving; they're of much too retiring a nature. It's some one making off through the bushes, that's who it is. Hi! you there, who are you?" There was no reply to his call. "Perhaps it was some one who came upon us unexpectedly, and--and didn't wish to disturb us." "Perhaps so; we're obliged to his taste for self-effacement if it is." "I suppose you've no idea what was in the envelope." "I've been putting two and two together, and I've formed a hypothesis which I'm convinced can't be very far out. Your father was not a man to say the thing which is not." "I'm sure of it." "I also; he did not say you would be a rich woman without cause. The hypothesis I've deduced is this. Your father was a gentleman of the old school; he didn't like commerce; he didn't wish people to think that he had anything to do with commerce; yet all the while he was drawing his income from a business with which he had probably been associated more or less unwillingly. At the time I saw him he was making arrangements to dispose of it; whether or not they were completed I cannot say; that envelope contains the clue. When he spoke of the suddenness of death he was possibly aware that he had a congenital predisposition towards the end which was actually his; and that envelope contained the secret--which he was even perilously anxious to preserve in life--of what was the source of his income, and of the fortune which he had built up for you." "All this, of course, is surmise." "You know it's more than surmise; you know that you're a rich woman, as you stand there." "I know, from the only facts which as yet are established, that, at present, I'm a pauper." "Well, we're both of us paupers; all the better." "I don't agree." "You're taking your cue from my mother." "I should prove myself very foolish if I need take such a cue from any one." "There's a wisdom of the foolish which is sometimes wonderful. If you were to marry me tomorrow----" "As if I should!" "You'd make my fortune!" "When, as you've told me again and again, you live on charity; and directly you married me that charity would stop?" "I know a way by which I could earn two or three hundred a year right off; before long I'd be earning thousands; I'm not incapable, I only need a spur; to work for the woman I love! I ask for nothing better. If I marry a woman with money the probability is that I should never earn a penny." "No, but you'd earn a name for yourself instead; one can earn something better than money." "May be." "And she'd be proud of you." "Even supposing that you're not buttering me up----" "As if I would!" "As if you would! as if you haven't done it over and over again! I know! I say, even granting I'm a swan of the very finest plumage----" "Mr. Spencer!" "Miss Lindsay; since you will interrupt me; and will descend to surnames; though, Nora, you're a darling." "It's no use our indulging in abstract discussions. I've no doubt you'll be able to clothe charming sentiments in the very best language. I know how clever you are." "Thanks very much." "But what's the use, since my mind's made up that I won't marry you while I'm a pauper?" "Acting on my mother's instructions." "If you like to put it that way; though I wouldn't even if your mother hadn't interposed; if I'd thought I was going to be a pauper I'd never have said I would." "Although you love me?" "Because I love you." "Nora! You're going to make a mess of things." "I'm going to try not to make a mess of things." "You're starting the wrong way." "Listen. I don't think you've behaved well about that envelope my father sent you." "Do you imagine that I think I have? do I look it? How my countenance belies me!" "There appear to have been some letters of mine in that suit-case; I didn't think you'd have left my letters lying about." "Nora!" "You seem to have left the suit-case lying about, so I suppose you left my letters too." "Of all the--of all the----! Well, I deserve it." "I think you do. When you find that envelope you can come and show me what is in it; until then--good-bye." "Do you mean that?" "I hope that I am like my father in not saying what I don't mean; I do mean it." "I'll find that envelope!" "And I hope you'll find my letters." "I'll find them too." "I hope there was nothing in them very--very amusing; it isn't nice to feel that strangers are reading one's--one's private letters." "You rub it in." "That's not my intention; would you like to feel that people you know nothing about were reading some of the letters you wrote to me?' "I know what you mean; I'll find the letters and the envelope, and the suit-case; and if any one has opened that suit-case I'll--I'll make them smart." "Good-bye." Already she was moving off; he exclaimed--"Like that! Nora! won't you even give me your hand?" She stopped, and turned; with something on her face which, in his eyes, made her very beautiful. "If you'll promise only to take my hand." "I promise; I'll take only what you're willing to give." They stood, for some seconds, hand in hand, eyes looking into eyes, as if they found it difficult to speak. Then he said, "Don't suppose I don't think you're right; I know you're doing this for me, and I know you're always right. This good-bye is only the prelude to a time of waiting, and hope, and work. First of all I'll find that envelope, then if there's nothing in it to show that you're a millionaire, I'm going to work and be a millionaire--I'll win you in my own way. I'm not afraid of waiting; you'll not marry any one but me." "I don't think I shall." "I don't think you will either." "There's something I'd like to ask, if you won't misunderstand." "I'll not misunderstand." "I'd like to kiss you before I go, only--I don't want you to kiss me." "Nora!" She moved closer to him, and, while he stood still, she touched her lips to his, a butterfly kiss, then, turning, went quickly down the path. He stood and watched her as she went. CHAPTER XIII LOVERS' TIFFS Nora had not long been gone to church before Miss Harding became sufficiently cured of her headache to permit of her quitting her own apartment. Perhaps she was of opinion that fresh air would do it good; and, notoriously, fresh air is good for headaches; certainly she looked very far from well. She donned her smartest hat, and one of her prettiest frocks, relinquishing, for the nonce, the black dress she had been wearing for her lately departed host. She attired herself with the greatest care, giving minute attention to those small details which mean so much; possibly she was under the impression that costume might have something to do with a cure--yet all her care could not conceal the fact that she was looking ill. When she saw how white she was, and the black marks under the eyes--and actually wrinkles in the corners, and how thin and worn and pinched her face seemed to have suddenly become, she could have cried, only she was painfully conscious that tears had already had too large a share in bringing her to the state in which she was. If she could she would have "assisted nature," only she had nothing with which to do it. Nora's opinions on the subject of "aids to beauty" were strong; Elaine had frequently declared that hers were even stronger. That was the worst of being in the position of "humble friend"; one had sometimes to pretend that one thought what one really did not think, or so it seemed to her. If she had only had a little "something," in a jar, or in a tube, or a stick, or anything--but she would not have dared to run the risk of allowing Nora to find such a thing in her possession. Moreover, until then she had never wanted it. Still, if she had been left alone--that was how she put it--she might have had it by her. Now that she really wanted something, she had absolutely not a thing--obviously the fault of that was Nora's. The consequence was that when at last she sallied out into the grounds she was conscious that she was not looking her best, in spite of her hat and frock--she knew that there was nothing amiss with them; and that morning it was so very desirable that she should look even better than her best, because she was going to meet Mr. Herbert Nash, and was particularly anxious to twist him round her finger. Every one knows that, where a man's concerned, the better one looks the easier that operation is apt to be found. Miss Harding made one slight error; she ought to have remembered that when one is not looking one's best matters are not improved by being in a bad temper. Good temper may almost act as an "aid to beauty," bad temper certainly won't; and, unfortunately, Miss Harding was so conscious of her defects that her temper suffered. Nor was it mended by the fact that the gentleman kept her waiting. Perhaps that headache of hers had had something to do with the accident that she had an appointment to keep. She had asked Mr. Nash to let her see him somewhere on Sunday morning, where they could be alone, and he had told her he would be by the fish-pond at such and such an hour. She herself was a little late at the trysting-place; her toilette had taken longer than she had intended; still she was first. She waited--she had no watch, but it seemed that she waited hours, yet he did not come. By the time he did appear her mood was hardly lover-like; nor, it seemed, was his. He came strolling leisurely through the trees, his hands in his jacket pockets, a cane under his arm, a big cigar in his mouth, his hat at a rakish angle--quite at his ease; there was something in his appearance which would hardly have induced the average client to select him as his legal adviser. Elaine always had a more or less vague feeling that this was so; the feeling was stronger than usual as she watched him coming; yet the man had for her such an intense physical fascination that she deliberately refused to let her eyes see what they would have perceived plainly enough if she had only let them. More or less, it was possibly because she realized that that Sunday morning he did not look quite so desirable an example of his sex as he might have done that her greeting was hardly saccharine. "You've taken your time in coming." He planted himself in front of her, without removing his hands from his pockets, his cane from under his arm, his cigar from his mouth, or his hat from his head. "Well, what's the hurry? I had to see a man." "You knew I was waiting; you might have let him wait." "I might; but I didn't. Hello! what's wrong?" He was looking her up and down in a way which made her tingle. "What do you mean--what's wrong?" "You look--no offence intended--but you look as if you'd been up all night--a hot night too." "I have a headache, and waiting for you hasn't made it any better." "A headache? My mother used to have headaches, and, my word! when she had them didn't she use to make it warm for us. I used to say----" He stopped, and laughed. "What did you use to say?" "I used to say--again no offence intended--that I'd never marry a woman who had headaches." "I'm not subject to headaches--don't suppose it; I scarcely ever have them; in fact, I don't ever remember having had one before; only--I've been worried." "Have you? that's bad. Don't do it; be like me--don't let yourself be worried by anything." He took out his cigar and surveyed the ash. "I read somewhere the other day that it's worry makes people grow old before their time; I don't believe much I read, but I do believe that. No matter what goes wrong, don't worry, it will come right; that's my theory of life." "It's very easy to talk, it's harder to do. You don't seem very pleased to see me now that you have come." "Don't I? I am; I'm as pleased as Punch." "You don't show it." "How do you expect me to show it? By taking you in my arms and kissing you out here in broad daylight, with you don't know what eyes enjoying the fun? If you'll come over the stile into the wood you shall have all the kissing you want--before lunch." "I shall do nothing of the kind, and I expect you to do nothing of the kind, as you very well know; only----" She suddenly changed the subject. "Did you see Mr. Dawson yesterday, and arrange about the partnership?" "I saw him, but I can't say I did much more than see him. He didn't seem to be so enthusiastic about the idea of having me for a partner as I expected, and--I can't say I'm very enthusiastic." "What do you mean? The other day you said it was just the thing you would like to be." "Yes, in a sense--in default of something better; but I don't want to be premature; since the other day something has occurred to me which may turn out to be better than a partnership with the venerable Mr. Dawson--who, between ourselves, is as supercilious an old beast as I ever want to meet--a good deal better." "What is it, Herbert?" She was observing him with--in her eyes, and on her face--an eagerness, a something strained, of which he seemed unconscious, and of which, no doubt, she was unconscious also. "Excuse me, but that's exactly what I can't tell you--not at the present moment. It's still, as you may say, in the embryo--in the making; but it's there." He touched his forehead with his finger, as if to denote that the something in question had a safe location in his brain. "Can't--can't you give me some idea of what it is?" "It depends on what you call an idea. I'll tell you this much; I'm meditating a coup--a great coup; if I bring it off it'll mean a really big thing; how big I can't tell you, not just now--I don't know myself; but something altogether beyond anything a partnership with old Dawson would mean. "Herbert, I hope it's nothing risky." She had run such a risk herself she wanted him to run none; she had had enough of risks, for ever. "That depends again on what you mean by risky. I'm not sure that I shall go in for it; I haven't quite finished turning it over in my mind; I don't altogether see my way; but if, by the time I have finished turning it over in my mind, I do see my way, why, there you are; I'm a starter. Of course there's always the risk of my not bringing it off, though you may bet I'll do my best"--he said this with a very curious smile; a smile which, for some reason, seemed to bring a sense of chill to her heart. "But I shall be no worse off if I don't--there's no risk in that sense. Then will be the time to join myself in partnership with dear old Dawson." She drew a long breath. The position was becoming complicated. She had not dreamed that he would have formed a scheme of his own, which she was to be kept out of, or she would not have gone, the second time, through the study window. "Will--will any money be wanted for what you're thinking of?" "No; not, at least, from you; of course, money will be wanted, but--it will come from some one else, if it comes at all; that's the idea; plenty of it too." Again that curious smile came on his face; that, this time, it positively frightened her, showed what a state her nerves were in. "Herbert, of what are you thinking?" "I'm thinking--of a real big thing." As she watched him some instinct warned her not to push her curiosity too far; yet there were certain things she must know. "How long--will it take you to make up your mind?" "That's something else I can't tell you; I never may make it up. You see, I'm only mentioning this so that you can understand why I'm not anxious to press old Dawson, just yet awhile. There's nothing to be lost by waiting; I'm in no hurry." "How about our marriage?" "What do you mean--how about our marriage?" She would have liked to have told him just what she did mean--that she had invented her aunt's legacy simply because she wanted to be married at once. But she could not do that; she had to get to the point some other way. "You said if you had enough money to buy a partnership in Mr. Dawson's business we might be married at once; that's why I told you about my aunt's legacy." "That's all right; the legacy'll keep; what's the harm?" "The harm is--it's not nice of you to make me say so, though--you ought to be--you ought to be flattered." "I am flattered." "You're not! I don't believe you care for me one bit, or--or you'd know I want to be married." "So you shall be." "When?" "Oh, when I've had time enough to find out where I'm standing; say in a month or two." "Herbert, you should never have had that two hundred pounds if you hadn't promised me that we should be married at once." "What do you call at once?" "Next week." "Next week! why, that's Easter!" "Well, why shouldn't we be married at Easter?" "Good gracious! Where do you propose to set up housekeeping? in my rooms?" "Not necessarily in your rooms; but in some rooms--nice rooms, for the present; they needn't be just about here. I've money enough to go on with--plenty of money; and you might think over what you've been talking about, and come to a decision, while--while we're on our honeymoon." Again he took the cigar out of his mouth, and again he regarded the ash; it was white, and long, and firm; it seemed it was a good cigar; and while he was still regarding the ash, he observed-- "Young woman, there's more in you than meets the eye. There's something in what you say; I admit there's a good deal in what you say. I'll give it my serious attention." "Your serious attention! Won't you understand? Any day I may have to leave this place." "That's true enough, unless you propose to remain on the premises while the catalogue s being drawn up, and the lots are being ticketed." "Herbert! What do you mean?" "Nothing to speak of; only I happen to know that the principal creditors don't mean to wait for their money a moment longer than they can help. Either the estate will have to be administered in bankruptcy, or Miss Nora Lindsay will have to agree to the whole thing being sold--lock, stock and barrel, for what it will fetch." "When?" "As a matter of fact, they want to come into the place and start the catalogue to-morrow." "But what will become of Nora?" "Quite so." "Where will she go?" "Where will she?" "Couldn't she--couldn't she come and live with us?" "What's that?" "Couldn't she--live with us?" "Who's us?" "With you and me--just for a time--when we're married?" Mr. Nash looked the lady straight in the face, significantly; his tone was as significant as his look. "My dear, I don't think you care for Miss Nora Lindsay one snap of your fingers, and I'm sure I don't." "You've no right to say that." "I fancy that you've a sort of notion that you ought to behave prettily to her because she's let you come and liven her up when she hadn't a soul in the place to speak to. So far as I can see, she's at least as much under an obligation as you are. She'd have been deadly dull without you; she'd have had to pay a companion, and pay her well, if it hadn't been for your society. You got nothing for your services; seems to me she owes you. Don't talk about her living with us! I wouldn't live under the same roof as Miss Nora Lindsay, not for a million a year. I don't like her--never did--never could; she's not the kind of girl I care about. What does it matter to me what becomes of her? Do you think she'd trouble if I came to eternal grief? Very much so! I fancy I see her at it! No, if you're going to take up with Miss Nora Lindsay you've done with me. There never has been any love lost between us, and now if I had my way I'd never see her or speak to her again. So if your sentiments are different I'll hand you back the two hundred pounds you so kindly threw into my face just now, and we'll cry quits. I'm not going to start by letting the girl who's going to be my wife mix herself up with people who are objectionable to me." The expression which was on the girl's face, as she looked at him, was pitiful; had he been aware of the emotions which seemed to be tearing at her in a dozen different places at once, even he might have been moved to pity. Had his words been lashes they could hardly have hurt her more. She stood trembling, hardly able to speak. "I--I'd no idea you--you felt like this--about--Nora." "Hadn't you? Well, you know now; and as perhaps you'd like to have a little time to get the idea well into your head, I'll say good-day." "Herbert, you--you mustn't go." "Mustn't go? Why mustn't I go?" "How about our marriage?" "How about our marriage?--when just now you were talking about her coming to live with us." "I--I--was only--suggesting." "Then let me tell you that the suggestion's made me feel sick. I don't want any words--I hate them; and as I'm not going to be bustled, when I know that I ought not to allow myself to be bustled, as I remarked, I'll return you the money which you threw into my face just now." "I--I didn't mean to throw it in your face." "Then what did you mean? You as good as said that I'd been up for sale, and that you'd bought me; but as I didn't understand that I was being bought, I'll hand you back the purchase price, then perhaps I shall be able to call my soul my own." "I--I--Herbert, don't--don't let's quarrel. I--I--you don't know how I love you." "Very well, then, and I love you; so that's all right." "Are you sure you love me? If I were only sure!" "You may be dead sure; at the same time you must allow me to speak a few plain words. There's something the matter with you, and there has been for some little time; I don't know what it is--it may be a headache, as you say, but if it is it's the kind of headache which, if I were you, I should take something for. You've changed altogether during the last few days; the little girl I used to know wouldn't have tried to bully me into marrying her at a moment's notice, when I told her that I thought it would be better, for both our sakes, that we should wait a little. I promise you that as soon as I see my way I'll come and ask you to name the day, and I hope you'll name an early one. But, in the meantime, where's the hurry? So far as I know you'll get no harm by waiting; it isn't as though I was asking you to wait long--a month or two at most; and it isn't as though you were hard up; you've got the cash, not I. As for leaving the place, I should say the sooner you leave it the better; you've got a home to go to--what's wrong with your home? You can write to me, I can come and see you; or, if I can't manage to come, after a bit you might step over to see me; you might find quarters with a mutual friend--why not? My present advice to you is to take a dose of medicine, that is medicine, and lie down, and sleep it off; then when you're feeling more like yourself you'll see that I'm quite right; and then you might let me know, and we can have another little talk together. In the meantime, as I observed before, I'll say good-day. By the bye, if you do want that money back again, you've only got to let me have a line, and you shall have it." CHAPTER XIV THE PARTING OF THE WAYS Mr. Nash strolled leisurely off, lighting another cigar as he went. Elaine could have done nothing to stop him, had her entire future depended on her making the effort. Indeed she only dimly realized that he was going; something seemed to be pressing on her brain, and numbing it; until all at once the pressure lightened, and, with a start, she perceived that he had gone. For a second or two she stood staring about her on all sides, as if, just roused out of sleep, she was wondering where she was. When she understood that he had left her, and had passed out of sight, and that she was alone, oblivious of her smart hat and pretty frock, she sank down on to the grass, just where she was, and hid her face in her hands. She stayed like that some time; she herself did not know how long; then, uncovering her face, again she looked about her; and, possibly recognizing that nothing was to be gained by behaving like that, she scrambled to her feet, shaking herself, touching herself here and there, where she thought that her costume might stand in need of a touch, then she started to return to the house. She had just got on to the path which wound among the trees when she encountered the person she would have most wished to avoid--the butler, Morgan. Elaine had never before seen him attired in anything but what might be described as his official garments; such was her mental confusion that, at her first sight, in his well-cut, neat grey suit, she hardly knew him; it had to be admitted that in it he looked more like a gentleman is supposed to look than Mr. Nash had done. He carried himself with less swagger than Herbert Nash; what was still more marked, he uncovered when he saw Miss Harding, showing all those signs of outward respect which a gentleman is supposed to show in the presence of a lady, but which Mr. Nash had entirely ignored; yet Miss Harding shrank back from Mr. Morgan as if he had been some noxious thing. Nothing could have been more deferential than the air with which he addressed her. "With your permission, Miss Harding, I should like to speak to you." She looked as if she was afraid that he would whip her. "Not--not now; I'm afraid I shall be late for lunch; I--I don't want to keep Miss Lindsay waiting." "We don't lunch on Sunday; you forget, Miss Harding; we take early dinner; I assure you you shan't be late; they can't begin without me, and I'm always punctual. Pray don't be distressed." "I--I can't stop now; I--I'm not feeling very well." "You're not looking very well, I'm sorry to say; as Mr. Nash informed you." She started. "Mr.---- What do you mean?" "You were so engrossed with each other that you had no eyes for anything but yourselves; or you would certainly have noticed me. I was so close that I actually heard everything you said." "Are you always spying?" "Candidly, I very often am. I regard it as my duty to keep at least one eye on everything that's going on; that's a high ideal, but I do my best to live up to it. When I had that little conversation with you with reference to the three thousand pounds you found, I endeavoured to assure you that you might rely implicitly on my discretion; but, at the same time, I did not bargain that you would throw the money away on such a man as Herbert Nash." "Morgan! you--you forget yourself." "Not at all, Miss Harding, not at all. When first I saw you together my feeling was one of resentment; but, when I heard what was said, my resentment grew less; for one reason, because I perceived that I might be able to work with Mr. Nash, as well as with you." "You might work with Mr. Nash? What do you mean?" "Is it not obvious? As you are doubtless aware, Mr. Nash is a young man of many possibilities." "Possibilities?" "You will remember that I told you that I saw possibilities in you, which have become facts. In the same sense I see possibilities in Herbert Nash, so that I may be able to work with him. We shall be a united trio." "Do you--do you dare to hint----" "Yes? do I dare to hint? pray finish." "Let me pass! I'll have nothing to say to you! Get out of my way!" "Still one moment, Miss Harding, if you please. I heard you ask Mr. Nash to marry you, which was rather 'coming on,' to use a kitchen phrase, wasn't it? Luckily he declined; the anxiety was plainly all on your side; or I should have objected." "You would have objected! Do you suppose I should ask your permission?" "If you didn't, and I did object, on your wedding-day I'd have you arrested at the church door; and if your husband was Herbert Nash that would be the last you'd see of him. When you came out of jail he'd slam the door in your face, unless I mistake the man, and he'd stick up a notice in his front garden, 'No convicted felons need apply.' It's not my wish to be disagreeable, Miss Harding, quite the other way; but I've a feeling that you don't want to treat me fairly; and in matters of this sort both sides expect fair treatment, it's only natural. I can tell you, at this moment, exactly what I propose, as Herbert Nash put it; I want time to find out where I'm standing; as you must see for yourself, everything's at sixes and sevens. But I can tell you what I don't propose; that you should hand over that three thousand pounds to a man who doesn't deserve it. You catch what I mean? I fancy you will if you think it over." He glanced at his watch. "Now I am afraid that I must go; if you go straight home you'll have plenty of time to tittivate; and I do trust, Miss Harding, that, at dinner, you'll be once more the charming, lively, high-spirited young lady I've always loved to rest my eyes upon." When the gong sounded for dinner Miss Lindsay was informed, by the butler, that although Miss Harding had been out, and had returned, she had sent down word that her headache was still so bad that she wanted nothing to eat, and preferred to remain in her own room. Whereupon Nora went up-stairs to make inquiries on her own account. She found the young lady's door was locked. Having tapped twice without eliciting a response, the third time she knocked more peremptorily, exclaiming-- "Elaine! please let me in! it's Nora." A shrill voice cried out within. "I can't let you in! I won't! I only want people to let me alone." Wondering, Nora let her alone, and went down to a solitary dinner; while Elaine lay face downward on the bed, wildly asking herself if suicide was not the best way out of it. That night there came to Nora still another variation of the dream which she had dreamed before. Throughout the day she had been conscious of a sense of curious depression; as if she was realizing, for the first time, how wholly alone in the world she was, and was likely to remain. She had said good-bye to the man she loved; Mr. Spencer's story of the envelope which her father had sent him was an odd one; but the envelope was lost. She resented with a bitterness of which she had not imagined herself capable the fact that he had lost it; she had not put her bitterness into words, she had not wished to reproach him; it was contrary to her nature to reproach any one; but it had seemed to her the hardest blow which fate had dealt her yet, and that it should have come from him! If the envelope were found it was possible that it might contain the key to the mystery of Donald Lindsay's money; so that it would be shown that she was, after all, pecuniarily, in the fortunate position her father had led her to suppose she would be. But, to begin with, it had to be found. It seemed that its loser had already been making strenuous efforts to recover it, without success; if it was to be retrieved surely it was most likely to be the case when the scent was hot. What reason was there to suppose that the search which had failed when the conditions were more favourable was likely to have a more satisfactory result now that everything was against it? Even if the envelope was regained there was still the--should she say probability, or possibility?--that its contents might lead to nothing after all. Disappointments had crowded on her so fast lately that it would only be in the natural order of things if she was to be visited by yet another. Almost worse than all the rest; suppose the envelope was recovered, and it was found that she was indeed an heiress, still to her the world would never again be what it was; in her heart of hearts she knew it; it was that knowledge which, that Sunday, weighed on her so heavily. During the last few days disillusions had come to her from every quarter. Whatever the future might have in store for her the attitude taken up by the Earl and Countess of Mountdennis was one which she never could forget. That her position as an heiress had heightened her charms in their eyes she had known; but she had supposed that they had cared for her a little for herself. That bubble was blown. Common decency, it seemed to her, would have bade them extend to her at least some show of sympathy. Plainly such an idea had not occurred to them. All they had done was to revile her for having lost everything she valued most, father, home, all; as if the fault was hers, and she had been engaged in a conspiracy to bring about her own destruction; they had made it so hideously clear that, from the first, and all along, they had only thought of her as a representative of so many pounds, shillings and pence; not a creature of flesh and blood, who was one day to stand to them in the place of a daughter, to be loved and cherished by their son. Though to-morrow millions were to come tumbling into her lap her lovers' parents could never now be what she had once hoped they would become; with their own hands they had rent into nothing the veil of illusion through which she had seen them. That Robert was not as they were she admitted, gladly admitted. Yet he was their son; if she became his wife she would be in duty bound to regard his parents, in a sense, as hers; how could she pretend filial attachment and respect for such persons as they had shown themselves to be? Hers was the young girl's high ideal of marriage; husband and wife ought to be one; they ought to have a common community of interest; what was dear to the one should be dear to the other; how would that ideal work out if she were to marry Robert Spencer? Obviously, it would not work at all; he would be on one side; his parents--not improbably all his relatives and friends--would be on the other side, against her. It would begin in dissension, and end--where? Even the discovery that she was rich would make but little difference; she was not going to buy a husband from his father and mother, well knowing that all they wanted for the light of their countenance was their price, and that they would only consent to receive her into the family circle if she came plastered with gold. Rather than become a wife upon those terms she would remain a spinster all her life. She knew her weakness; if she came within reach of Robert her love--his love--might prove greater than her strength; that morning it had been all that she could do to keep herself out of his arms. Next time--and she was pretty sure that if Robert was in the neighbourhood there would be a next time before very long--she might succumb, and regret it ever afterwards. Better that she should leave Cloverlea than run such a risk. The probability that she would have to go--whether she wanted to go or not--had been continually in her mind since she had heard Dr. Banyard's statement of her affairs; and with it there had been a hazy sort of notion that, when the moment of parting came, she might find temporary refuge in Elaine Harding's home in the west country, as a guest in her father's vicarage. Elaine had asked her often; it was true that the invitations had been coupled with intimations that the vicarage was but a humble one, and would seem but a poor place to the heiress of Cloverlea. But now circumstances had changed; to Nora any place seemed desirable where she would be welcome; especially her dear friend's home, however modest it might be. Although she would not confess it even to herself she had vaguely expected that Elaine would have spoken to her on the subject before now; Elaine had always been so full of protestations of what she would do--of what she would love to do--for Nora, if opportunity ever offered, in return for all that Nora had done for her. But now that opportunity did offer, and Elaine was well aware of the plight which Nora was shortly likely to be in, not a hint had she dropped of a disposition to be of service to her in any way whatever. More, it seemed to Nora that Elaine was avoiding her as if misfortune had made of her a pariah. It was true that she excused herself by alleging illness; and Nora was not prepared to say that her illness was diplomatic. But during all the time they had known each other Elaine had always enjoyed excellent health; so far as Nora knew--and they had been intimate for years--she had not endured an ache or pain until the moment arrived when it seemed likely that she might be able to render some slight services to the friend who had done so much for her. It was not strange that Nora took it for granted that she need expect nothing from the dearest friend she had in the world; and that that feeling did not tend to lighten the load of depression which, that Sunday, weighed on her so heavily. In the evening she took stock of such possessions as, in any case, she might be entitled to call her own. She had it strongly in her mind that she and Elaine might soon be parted; just how close the hour of parting was she could not tell, but she felt that, whenever it came, it would be as well that it should find her ready. There had been, she knew, a meeting of the creditors yesterday; exactly what course they had decided to pursue she had not learnt; and, again, that troubled her; she felt that either Dr. Banyard or Mr. Nash might have let her have some sort of intimation. But, anyhow, from what she had gathered it seemed likely that before long there would be strangers at Cloverlea; when they came she must go, practically on the instant. Even if their coming was postponed it appeared to her that she must go. It cost money to keep up Cloverlea; since the little money which her father had left belonged to the creditors, when she came to consider the matter calmly, it seemed to her that she had no real right to remain another hour. Her continued stay in that huge house involved the expenditure of money to which it had not yet been shown that she had any claim; even if money enough had been discovered to keep it going for another week, which she doubted. No; it seemed to her, from whatever point of view she regarded the position, that the hour was close at hand for the parting of the ways; and that it behoved her to be ready for it when it came. CHAPTER XV 'SO EARLY IN THE MORNING' So she took stock of such things as, whatever befell, she felt that she would have a right to take away with her from Cloverlea; it seemed to her that, since God had opened her eyes to her actual situation, He would forgive her for undertaking, on the Sabbath evening, what He had shown her was a work of necessity. A pathetic business that stocktaking was, and a queer one, and not a very heavy one either. She began with the money. She concluded that such cash as her father had given her for her own separate and private use she might still call her own, and use as her own. Had she been dealing with a sum of any magnitude she would have hesitated; for this young woman was a Don Quixote in petticoats, and would rather starve than eat food which she even fancied belonged to others; but she was not dealing with a sum of any magnitude. Her father had always made her a generous allowance, of which she had always made a generous use; regarding herself as, in a sense, her father's almoner, she used far the larger part of it in works of charity. Since she left school it had been his custom to give her, four times a year, a sum of one hundred and twenty-five pounds, always in gold. It had been one of his peculiarities that he had never given her either cheques or bank-notes, but always sovereigns. One of the quarterly sums had always been handed to her during the first week in April; she had been expecting it when her father had been taken ill. As a matter of fact, it was her hundred and twenty-five sovereigns, plus two more, which had formed that little heap of gold which was on the study table when Elaine Harding first adventured through the window. So, as that little heap had never found its way to her, all she actually possessed was what was left from last quarter--and the first three months of the year always were such expensive months. During the winter there was apt to be so much want and suffering; sometimes she found it hard to make both ends meet, even though she spent scarcely anything on herself at all. However, that winter quarter there had been something over; that something represented her entire fortune, nearly nine pounds; to be exact, eight pounds fourteen and eightpence. Even the most clamorous creditor might have suffered her to go out to face the world with that. Especially as beyond that Nora had very little of a portable nature which she considered she would be justified in regarding as her own, except her clothes. Among the other things to which he had objected Donald Lindsay included jewellery. He wore none himself; had he had his way he would have called no man an acquaintance who did. He disliked to see jewellery even on a woman. On an elderly woman he esteemed it bad enough; like the cynic he was, he held that the average elderly woman very properly felt that she was only worth the net value of what she had on her. On a girl, to his thinking, it was impossible; if ever he encountered, under his own roof, young women who were, as they fancied, ornamented by products of the jeweller's art, he was apt to make such plain-spoken comments that Nora always endeavoured to warn her girl acquaintances to put aside their ornaments while, at any rate, her father was about. Nora herself had only had four pieces of jewellery in her life. One was a plain gold watch, which her father had given her when she was at school, which she then wore attached to a plain black ribbon; another was a gold locket, in which was her father's portrait, which she had worn on the same black ribbon. The other two articles had been presents from Robert Spencer--her engagement ring, and another locket, in which was his portrait. These she had returned to him on the previous day, together with his letters. So that all the jewellery she now had was the gold watch and the locket with the portrait of her father. These, she decided, came in the same category as the eight pounds fourteen and eightpence; she was entitled to regard them as her very own. Her wardrobe presented difficulties. She had heaps of pretty dresses; quantities of all sorts of pretty clothes; the puzzle was, what to take and what to leave. She knew, from experience, that if her garments were turned into cash they would not fetch a great deal, however much they might previously have cost, or however little they might have been worn; so that if she took all her clothes she was aware that she would not be depriving her creditors of an appreciable sum of money. It was the difficulty of selection which troubled her. Obviously elaborate and costly evening dresses consorted ill with a fortune of eight pounds fourteen and eightpence, which represented both capital and income; in that sense the daintier and prettier they were, the more undesirable they were. Yet--she loved her pretty frocks; only a woman could understand how hard it seemed to her to have to part from them. With them were entwined so many associations; she wore this one on that never-to-be-forgotten night when Robert first asked her to be his wife; that when he slipped the engagement ring upon her finger; how pretty she had thought it! how she had kissed it when she was alone! She blushed at the memory. After all, those were sentimental considerations which reached back to the life with which she had done for ever. It was quite another sort of life which was in front of her; she must be equipped for that. Three Or four plain, substantial dresses would be sufficient; the rest--those triumphs of the dressmaker's art--she was not likely to require garments of that sort again, ever. So she packed the few clothes she thought she would require into a trunk, together with her Bible, her writing-case, and a few odds and ends; looking round the room, she decided that all her other things, which she had so treasured, must remain behind. She undressed, feeling as if she was undressing in a room peopled with ghosts, all of them memories of the many-sided Nora of the days which were gone; then, all radiant in her white attire, she knelt in prayer; supposing, as she poured forth all the dear, secret things which were in her heart, that she was a woman; but God, who heard her, knew that she was a child; and, as she prayed, He breathed peace into her soul; so that hardly, at last, was she between the sheets when she fell fast asleep. And in her sleep she dreamed the dream which she had dreamed before; of her father, stealing timidly into her room, filled with a great longing to tell her something, which he would have given much that she should know, yet speechless. And to him the knowledge that he was dumb was agony, and to her; so that she put her arms about him, and whispered in his ear words which were meant to assist him in the efforts he was making to say what he so yearned to tell her. But struggle as he might, speech would not come; until, all at once, in the exceeding bitterness of his grief he made her understand that, because he had been still so long, and so had sinned, God would not let him speak now; He would not forgive him for the opportunities he had wasted. Mingling her anguish with his, she held him closer, crying-- "God will forgive you, father! God will forgive you!" and, with her own crying, she woke herself up, to find herself in the darkness, alone, and the sound of her own voice in her ears. As before, the delusion of her father's presence was so real that, at first, she could not believe it was delusion. She put out her hands to feel for him; when they found nothing, she whispered-- "Father!" When none answered she got out of bed, and crossed the room, and stood at the open door, listening for the sound of his retreating footsteps; she had heard them so plainly when he entered. When she remembered that he was dead, and that it must have been a dream, she began to tremble all over; she did not dare to ask herself if this dream had been sent to her of God; she was afraid. Throughout the remainder of the night she lay awake. Day had scarcely dawned when she rose and dressed. Recollections of the awe which had obsessed her spirit were with her still. She was conscious of an uncomfortable feeling that something unusual was about to happen. So soon as she was dressed she left her own room and went to the bedroom which had been her father's. As she crossed its threshold she had an odd sensation of having come again into his presence. Impelled by she knew not what motive of curiosity, she examined methodically all that the room contained, opening drawers and wardrobes, going through their contents. It seemed to her that they were emptier than they used to be. Her father had accumulated clothes until every store-place he had was filled to over-flowing; she had told him not long ago that if he would keep on getting more, without ridding himself of some of those he had, he would require another room to put them in. She knew he had got rid of nothing, yet drawers and cupboards in bedroom and dressing-room were nearly empty. Certainly more than three-quarters of them were gone; what were left were scarcely more than odds and ends. And not only clothes; as she looked about her she began to miss all sorts of things. Both rooms had been nearly stripped of all her father's personal belongings. By whom had they been taken? who had given the necessary authority? From the bedroom she passed through the still silent house to the rooms below, and presently to her father's study. Here again was some subtle suggestion of its late owner. He seemed to be standing by her as she touched this and that, moving from one familiar object to another. Nor had she been there very long before she perceived that here also things were missing; and, in this case, they were things which mattered. A pair of bronzes had gone from the mantel, for which her father had paid a large sum, and which he valued highly; some ivory antiques, fine specimens of the carver's art, which he had brought with him from China, had also vanished; a Satsuma vase, two costly examples of powder blue, even prints and pictures from the walls, all kinds of curiosities, the possession of which would gladden a collector's heart, had disappeared. Of course their absence was capable of a natural and legitimate interpretation; they might have been put out of sight for safer keeping. Still--they were there on Saturday; she was sure she had noticed them when she came in a moment for some ink; why should they have been removed during the course of yesterday? While she stood looking about her, feeling a little bewildered, the door was opened suddenly, and Morgan, the butler, came hastily in. He stared at her as if she was not at all the person he had expected to see; indeed, he said as much. "I beg your pardon, Miss Lindsay, I thought--" He left his sentence unfinished, and began another. "I heard some one moving about below, and knowing that the household was still upstairs, I thought it might be some one who had no business here, so hurried down to see who it was." He made as if to withdraw, but Nora stopped him. "Morgan, who has been interfering with my father's things?" "I beg your pardon; I don't quite follow." "Where's the Satsuma vase? and the powder blues? and the bronzes? and all sorts of things?" "Have they been removed?" "You can see for yourself that they've been removed; who has taken them? where are they?" Morgan glanced round the room with, in his air, as it seemed to Nora, almost a suggestion of amusement. "They do seem to have been removed, don't they? As you say, all sorts of things." "Didn't you know they had been removed?" "Perhaps Mr. Nash has had it done; or Dr. Banyard." "Why should they? Besides, neither of them has been here since Saturday; and the things were here then, because I saw them." "Ah, if you saw them that doesn't look as if they could have had it done, does it? But--may I ask, Miss Lindsay, how it matters?" "How it matters, Morgan--the things are worth a great deal of money." "Isn't that all the more reason why they shouldn't be allowed to fall into the hands of--I don't wish to cause you pain, Miss Lindsay--of those who are coming?" "What do you mean?" "Don't you know? Then, in that case, Miss Lindsay, I will have inquiries made, and will inform you, at the earliest possible moment, of the result." He slipped out of the room so rapidly that she had not a chance to question him further, leaving her more bewildered than he had found her. What did he mean? what could he mean? She did not like to suspect him of impertinence, or even something worse; yet--what had he implied? That it would be just as well that these most valuable possessions of her father should be kept out of the hand--of those who were coming? She did not doubt that the state of affairs was known to the household; could he have been referring to the creditors? was he suggesting that they should be defrauded of what might go some distance towards settling their claims, and that she should connive at such a fraud? If he had not meant that, what had he meant? Her impulse was to call him back, and insist upon an explanation there and then. But she reflected that, whatever his meaning might have been, she had made herself quite plain; his manner had shown it. His error, perhaps, had been one of over-zeal for her service; though that was not a fault of which she had supposed Morgan would have been likely to be guilty. Still, that was how it might have been. If so, now he understood--that that was not the sort of zeal which she desired. If--as, in spite of his evasions, she thought was possible, he knew where the missing articles were to be found--she gave him an opportunity to restore them, in his own fashion, to their former places, no doubt, when she returned again to the study, she would find them where they had always been. With some vague notion of giving him such an opportunity, there and then, she opened the French window which led into the grounds--through which Elaine Harding had made that entry she was never to forget, which had changed the whole face of the world for her, as well as for others--and, hatless, passed out into the morning air. Although she did not know it, she was setting out on what was to be her last walk through the familiar places she had known so long, and loved so well. CHAPTER XVI GULDENHEIM It was hardly the morning she would have chosen for such a jaunt. A change was impending in the weather. Fickle April seemed to be of opinion that the world thereabouts had already had too fair a taste of summer, and that the time had come for quite a different sort of thing. Heavy banks of cloud scudded across the sky, blown by a cold north-easterly wind, which at times almost amounted to a gale. But Nora was heedless of the weather; her mood was in tune with the wind, wild and vagrant. The chilly breezes blew her hair this way and that, she cared nothing. Now and then a splash of rain was dashed on her uncovered head; she paid no heed. She walked rapidly, delighting in the sensation of striding swiftly through the open air, careless of all else. How far she walked, or how long, she did not know; she kept no count; one could walk some distance without quitting the grounds of Cloverlea; but even she awoke to the fact, at last, that she had better seek shelter, or else go home. The rain threatened to fall in earnest; without hat or jacket, or protection of any sort, she would soon be soaked to the skin. She stood up under the shelter of a tree; as much to enable her to take her bearings as for anything else; and had just realized that the road ran on the other side of the hedge which was close at hand, when a trap came bowling along it, whose driver, seeing her peeping out from behind her tree, brought his horse to a sudden standstill. It was Dr. Banyard. "Why, Miss Nora," he exclaimed, "you're early abroad. And have you joined the anti-hat brigade that you venture so far afield without one on, and in such weather? I'll give you a lift, I'll get you home now before the rain; and if I don't Sam and I between us will find something which will keep you dry. There's a gate a little further on; if you hurry I'll be there to meet you." She shook her head; and stood closer to the tree. "You're very good; but I'd sooner walk if you don't mind." "Walk! but it's going to pour! and you haven't even so much as an umbrella!" "It's not going to be so much, only a shower; I can see blue sky there." The doctor looked in the direction to which she pointed, and, seeing the peeping blue, perceived that, probably, after all, it was only going to be an April whimper. "You're a refractory young person; if you catch a cold don't look for sympathy from me; and, I say, I want to speak to you. In fact, I've been wanting to speak to you since Saturday; but of course the parish chooses the wrong moment to get itself ill, I haven't had a moment to call on you. I've been up practically all night, and when I do get home I expect I'll be dragged out again directly; I know them! But you will have heard from Nash." "I have heard-nothing from Mr. Nash since I saw you last." "No? How's that? I told him to communicate with you in case I couldn't, and he said he would." Again she shook her head. Leaning over the side of the trap he eyed her with his shrewd grey eyes. "In that case, here, Sam, take the reins, and drive a little way down the road; I'll call you when I want you; I have something which I wish to say to Miss Lindsay, in the rain." As a matter of fact when he alighted, and the trap had gone on, the shower had already nearly died away; she stood close up to the hedge on one side and he on the other. "I am sorry to be the first bearer of the bad news, I had hoped Nash would have broken the ice. I was present on Saturday at the meeting of Guldenheim and his friends." He did not tell her at what inconvenience he had been present, and of how, in consequence, all his work had got into confusion. "I said all we had arranged that I should say; but I am sorry to have to inform you that the only terms on which they would consent not to throw your father's estate into bankruptcy were that everything should be realized at once." She smiled, a rather wintry smile, but still it was a smile. "Thank you; it is very kind of you to take so much trouble; but would you mind telling me exactly what that means." "I'm afraid it means that Guldenheim and his friends, or their representative, may arrive at Cloverlea to-day. They seem to be hot against your father with a heat I confess I don't understand, and declare they won't wait a moment longer for their money than they can help." "They need not; I am quite ready to go." Her pale face grew perhaps a little paler, and her lips were closed a little tighter; but the girl still smiled. He seemed to be more moved than she was. "If you take my advice, my dear young lady, you'll at once get together as much as you possibly can, and have the things removed from the premises before they come; you can have them sent over to us if you like. Anyhow you're entitled to personal belongings; and in a case like yours the law takes a liberal view of what that term covers." "I think I've packed up everything already, practically." "I hope you've treated the situation broadly, and have not been unduly generous to persons who you may be quite sure will show no generosity to you." She nodded; she did not care to tell him, in so many words, that what she chose to regard as her personal belongings were all contained in one small trunk. "And of course you'll come over to us till you have had time to look round; things may turn out much better than at present they promise; you never can tell. The wife is taking it for granted that you're coming, you can take that from me; but, if you think it's necessary, so soon as I get home she'll come and fetch you." Perhaps it was because that was the first offer of real assistance she had received that her voice was tremulous. "Thank you; you--you know I thank you and Mrs. Banyard; but--I can't come, I've made other arrangements." He eyed her suspiciously; his tone was brusque. "What arrangements have you made?" "Just for a while they're private." "Are you going to be married? It would be the best thing you could possibly do, to get married out of hand; I hear your young man's back again, and I've no doubt he's willing; Robert Spencer's not a fool." Her voice sank nearly to a whisper. "I'm not going to be married." "Then what are you going to do?" "If you don't mind, doctor, I prefer to keep my own counsel for a while." He broke into alliterative violence. "You're contemplating some feebly foolish female knight-errantry. I know you! But it won't be allowed; directly I get home I'll send my wife to talk to you; she'll do it better than I can. Your best friends are here; it's they who have your best interests at heart; and you're going to consider their feelings whether you like it or not; you're not going to be allowed to ride over them roughshod, young lady. Sam, bring that pony." He discharged a parting shaft at her as he climbed into the trap. "You understand, my wife will come and talk to you as soon as she gets her hat on; or whatever it is she does put on when she goes out visiting. And I hope you'll have the grace to listen to what she says." Nora re-entered the house through the open study-window. As she passed through the room she saw that the butler had taken her hint; the missing articles had been replaced. As she was sitting at her lonely early breakfast--for it seemed that Elaine Harding had not yet sufficiently recovered to put in an appearance at so matutinal a meal--she commented on the fact to Morgan. "I am glad to see that the study is again as it always has been. I wish everything, throughout the house, to remain exactly as it was when my father was alive; nothing is to be touched. Let the servants understand that this is my wish." Morgan slightly inclined his head, as if to express both perfect comprehension and his readiness to carry out her directions. Then, when, feeling that she preferred to be alone, she told him that he need not wait, he returned straight to the study, gathered together the articles which he had only recently replaced, and walked off with them to a hiding-place of which he flattered himself he alone knew the secret. "She's had her way," he told himself, as he was stowing them in what he hoped was a place of safety. "Always let a woman have her way, if you can, especially if she's young and good to look at; now it's my turn. She's not likely to go back to the study for a bit; it's worth chancing, anyhow, these things mean quite a heap of money; from what I hear others are likely to get here before she does, and they can look after themselves. At a time like we're going to have every one has to look after himself. If the things are missed, why they can be produced, and everything explained; if they're not missed, and I don't see how they're going to be, if there's a little management, there's no reason why I shouldn't have them, instead of that pack of thieves. I have got some artistic taste; it's born in me; I doubt if they've got any." He grinned, as he wrapped the Satsuma vase carefully in a large white silk handkerchief. Having finished breakfast Nora went up to her own sitting-room; but had not been there very long before a servant first knocked shakily, then entered hastily. "If you please, miss, there's a lot of men downstairs; they didn't ask for you, and I don't know what they want, but they've got such a free and easy way about them that I thought I'd better let you know that they were there; Morgan let them in; they came in a wagonette." Nora went down without a word. In the hall there was quite a little crowd of men; ten or twelve of them there seemed; among them some sufficiently rough-looking customers. None of them had troubled to remove their hats; but at sight of Nora one of them, a big fat man, beautifully dressed, with a red face, a large nose, and curly shining black hair, removing his hat, advanced to meet her. "Are you Miss Lindsay?" He spoke with a curious nasal utterance. "I am." "I'm Guldenheim, you know all about me; and these are my friends, who are in the same boat with me, you've heard about them; and these are our chaps. I suppose you know we've agreed not to make a fuss on condition that you give us possession of everything, to cut up between us so that we can get a bit of our own back again, what there is of it to cut up." "I do know." "Well, we've come into possession." As he looked at the girl and saw, dimly, what manner of girl she was, he seemed to think that he owed her some sort of apology, which he offered in a fashion of his own. "I dare say it seems hard to you, our coming in like this, but you must know that your father had our money, and my friends' money, and we can't afford to lose it, it isn't to be expected that we should; you must understand that." "I quite understand," said Nora. "Then that's all right," said Mr. Guldenheim. About that time some one was rapping at Miss Harding's bedroom door, on the other side of which Miss Harding was completing her toilette. "Who's there?" she asked. "It's me, Morgan; here, come closer to the door, I want to speak to you." She went so close to the door that even a whisper of his would have been audible. "What is it?" "The bailiffs are in down-stairs, the whole show's burst up. You'd better pack up--you know what, as soon as you can; and everything else you've got as well; and anything you see lying about worth packing; at a time like this anything's any one's. Only get a move on you; they may be up here directly, there's a lot of them, and there's no telling how they're going to do things, those sort of people can make themselves very nasty if they like; you don't want to have them superintending your packing; don't you let them in, if you can help it, till you've got your boxes locked. I thought I'd just give you a tip, so that you might look lively." Miss Harding acted on Mr. Morgan's "tip," beginning, so soon as he had gone, to pack everything she had got, and doing it with feverish haste; but had not proceeded far when something came rattling against the window-panes, something which sounded as if it were a handful of gravel. She drew aside the curtain and looked out. Mr. Nash was below, he waved his hand; apparently it was he who had saluted the window. Hurriedly throwing a dressing-jacket over her bare shoulders, she raised the sash sufficiently to enable her to put her head out, apparently oblivious of the fact that her black hair was streaming loose; she had been engaged in "doing" it when Morgan had knocked at the door. "Herbert! Did you throw those stones at my window? What do you want?" The reply from below was hardly an answer to her question. "I say! Now you are worth looking at! Now you're what I call something like a picture!" Her cheeks were flushed with excitement; there was a light in her eyes; the streaming locks certainly were not unbecoming; nor did the blush with which she received his words detract from the general effect. "Herbert, you naughty boy, you don't mean to say you nearly broke my window simply to make me put my head out, and I'm in this state!" "Well, not exactly; though it would have been worth breaking a window for. I chucked that gravel up at your window because I've something to say to you which has got to be said now, if it's to be said at all; only don't shout." "Am I shouting?" "I thought I'd just give you the hint in case you felt as if you'd like to. Somehow, do you know, the more I look at you the more I seem to want to; if I could only get at you." "It's lucky you can't; what do you want to say? Do you know I'm freezing?" "You remember what we were talking about yesterday?" "Am I likely to have forgotten?" "I've been thinking things over, and I've come to the conclusion that if you're game I am." "Game? game for what? what do you mean?" Mr. Nash glanced round, as if to ascertain if any one was in sight, then dropped his voice. "To marry." "Herbert!" Her heart seemed to leap into her mouth, as if the word, coming from his lips, touched a spring and made it bound. "You said you'd like the marriage to be at once; what do you say to our being married to-morrow?" "Herbert!" At the moment she could only trust herself to repeat his name, she was in such a curious state of tremblement. "Do you know that Guldenheim and his crowd are in the house?" "I've just heard." "A nice lot they are; you can't stop in the house with them; you'll have to clear." "I told you I should." "You'd better pack everything you've got and I'll send a trap for you; they may object to your taking anything out of the stable; it's quite possible that they've laid hands on the lot. Anyhow I'll send something for you; how long'll you be?" "Half-an-hour." "Not more?" "I can't tell you to the exact moment how long I'll be; don't be absurd. You send the trap in half-an-hour, and I'll be as quick as ever I can. Where's it going to take me?" "To the station; I'll meet you there." "Why at the station?" "You poor little thing! we're going off together; it's going to be a regular elopement." "Herbert! How are we going to get married?" "How soon can you get some of your aunt's money?" "I've got enough by me to go on with." "How much do you call enough?" "Oh, about ninety pounds." "You sly little thing! Who'd have thought you were stuffed with money like this? It's not so long ago since I pointed out a big hole in your glove, and you said you had to wear old gloves, because you couldn't afford to buy yourself a pair of new ones." "I dare say; that was a hint to you." "Was it? then it was thrown away, because if I possessed the price of a pair of gloves it was as much as I did have; though in the sweet by and by I'm going to be a millionaire." "You haven't said how we're going to get married." "I'm going to get the licence the other end, and we're going to be married to-morrow." "Are you sure we can get married to-morrow?" "Of course I'm sure." "In church?" "In church; in St. Paul's Cathedral if you like; though to arrange that might take a little longer." "I don't want to be married in St. Paul's Cathedral; I want to be married quietly." "That's what I want; so there we are agreed; hooray!" This cry of jubilation was uttered in a sepulchral whisper. "Now you quite understand? Trap's coming in half-an-hour; you're to be ready; you're going to meet me at the station; we're going to elope; we're going together to get the licence; and to-morrow we're going to be married together; is that perfectly clear?" "Don't be silly! Are you glad?" "What for?" "That we're going to be married; you know!" "Of course I'm glad; how do you want me to show it? would you like me to stand on my head and dance?" "No; I only want to know you're glad." "You wait; you shall have all the knowledge you feel you stand in need of." "Herbert!" CHAPTER XVII NORA GOES When Elaine brought back her head into the room, the window was closed, Mr. Nash had vanished; the young lady was in such a state of palpitation, that for some seconds she was incapable of continuing the operation of packing, conscious though she was of how time was pressing. Half-an-hour is not long. She was not yet fully dressed; it seemed that now she was to dress to meet her lover, to elope with him; if she had known that before she would have arrayed herself in some quite different garments. There was no time to change now; it was out of the question. Really, there was not time even to finish packing properly; her things would have to be squashed in anyhow; if she could get them in at all she would have to be content. There was one comfort, she would buy herself an entirely new outfit when she had once got clear away. Herbert need not think--no one need think--that she was going to do without a trousseau; she was not. She was going to have a proper trousseau; a complete trousseau. Only it seemed that in her case the various articles would have to be purchased after marriage instead of before; but she would have them. While such thoughts chased themselves through her excited little head, she returned to the process of packing with still greater zeal than before. Cherished garments received unceremonious treatment; if they could have felt they would have wondered why their mistress was using them as she had never done before. Rolled up anyhow; squeezed in anywhere; no regard paid to frills or dainty trimmings; plainly Elaine's one and only desire was to get her things in somewhere, somehow. Yet as if it was not enough to have to pack against time, she was not allowed to pack in peace; she was doomed to interruption. Just as the first box seemed full as it could hold, and she was wondering if her weight would be enough to induce the hasp to meet the lock, there came a tapping at the bedroom door. The sound was to her an occasion of irritation; her voice suggested it. "Now who's that?" "It is I." It was a voice she knew--at that moment it seemed to her--too well. So entirely was this young woman a creature of mood that there was only room in her for one mood at a time, and while that possessed her she forgot everything else; before she heard that voice she had forgotten Nora. And it was Nora who stood on the other side of the door. Elaine's selfish little soul shook with fear when the sound of the voice without recalled her friend's existence to her recollection. "What am I to do?" was the question which instantly sprang up within her. She could scarcely put her off with an excuse now. Nora was probably at her wit's end; all the seas of trouble had been opened on her unprotected head. If ever there was a moment in which she was in need of friendly service it was this; unless some one held out to her a helping hand she might sink in the deep waters, never to rise again. In the box which she had just been packing was the money which Elaine had "found" on the study table; that huge sum which, of course, was Nora's. Here was a chance to show that, after all, she was not altogether the worthless wretch she had seemed to be. Should she? No, she told herself, Herbert would not like it; then there was Morgan, and the trousseau, and the honeymoon; if she kept all the money she might have the kind of honeymoon of which she had so often dreamed; and--there were other things. All the uses she might have for the money crowded into her brain, treading on each other's heels. She dropped the lid and ran to the door. "I'm awfully sorry, Nora, to keep you waiting, but----" She stopped, to stare. "Why, you've got your hat on; where are you going?" Nora was dressed for travelling. It was Elaine's cue to be surprised at everything; she meant to be so surprised that the mere force of her surprise should drive all other things clean out of her. Nora came into the room. "I see you are packing." For a second Elaine was slightly embarrassed, but she quickly got over that. "Yes, I've had a letter from papa this morning." "A letter from your father?" The calm eyes looked Elaine straight in the face. The girl turned away; the glib tongue began to reel off lies. "Just now--I should think I ought to have had it yesterday; I don't know why I only had it to-day. He wants me to come home; of course he feels I'm frightfully in the way; and then it seems Polly has the scarlet fever, and Jennie looks as if she were sickening for it, and there are the other children, and papa has no one to help him--he can't afford a nurse; so you see I must go; the poor man writes as if he were half distracted." "Of course you must go; and, perhaps, in a way it's as well you must, though I'm so sorry to hear about Polly and Jennie; but I'm afraid that in any case I should have had to ask you to go." "Nora! Am I so much in the way as that?" "It is not only you who are in the way; we both of us are, both you and me. Mr. Guldenheim and his friends have come, and, in consequence, I also am leaving Cloverlea." "Nora! What do you mean?" Nothing could have been more eloquent than the amazement on Elaine's face. "You knew that they were going to sell everything to pay what it appears were my father's debts; well, it's come a little sooner than I expected, that's all." "But where will you go? What will you do?" "Something; don't fear. 'God's in His heaven, all's well with the world.' I don't doubt there's a place in it somewhere for me." "Oh, Nora, if I could only take you home with me! But it's such a poor place, and so small; and now it's like a hospital, with all the children ill of that dreadful fever, and papa writing that he's nearly penniless; what do you think yourself?" It was rather a neat way of passing on the responsibility. "I think it's out of the question. With that poor father of yours already nearly borne down beneath his troubles, do you think I'd add to them? What I'm wondering is if you've enough money to take you home." "Papa hasn't sent me any--I'm afraid he's none to send; but I've been reckoning--I've just enough, with a squeeze; but then I'm used to squeezing. Nora, I do hope you've plenty of money." "I've enough to go on with. Can I help you with your packing?" "The idea! As if I'd let you, you poor dear!" "Then, Elaine, if you won't mind very much----" Nora stopped, as if at a loss to find words with which to clothe her thoughts. Miss Harding was gushing. "I shan't mind anything, my darling. What is it?" "It--it's only, if you won't think me very unkind, that I'd--I'd like to catch a train which starts almost at once." She was thinking, perhaps, of Dr. Banyard's promise to send his wife to talk to her, and desired to avoid that talking. Miss Harding leapt at the hint. "And you want to get away immediately? And do you think I'd wish to stop you from doing anything you want to do?--you sweet! Good-bye, Nora, my darling! God bless you! I hope everything will turn out all right yet; I feel sure it will; it's bound to. And mind you write!" "I will--when I am settled." "And what address will find you?" "I'll let you know that also, when I'm settled." So they parted, with fond embraces, many kisses, words of endearment, tears in their eyes. Nora's heart was very full, and Elaine felt hers ought to be. So soon as Nora had left the room Elaine banged her foot against the floor; clapped her hands together with such violence that she actually stung her tender palms, and cried-- "What a little beast I am! what a little beast!" Then, instantly, she resumed her packing, remembering that the trap was coming in less than half-an-hour, but not with quite so much zest as before. There was a vague consciousness in her somewhere that her conduct had not been--and still was not--altogether without reproach. When Nora got down-stairs she found the hall door open, a dog-cart without, a footman keeping guard over the single trunk which he had brought from her room, and Morgan, as it were, keeping watch and ward over him; otherwise the hall was deserted. Nora recognized the fact with something like a pang. She knew then that she had hoped that at least some of the servants would have been gathered together to wish her God-speed; then she told herself, with the quick philosophy which was eminently hers, that it did not matter after all. Morgan greeted her with a question. "Is there any more luggage?" "No; none." "What directions are there as to what is to be done with the contents of your own rooms--your two rooms, bedroom and boudoir? Perhaps I may be allowed to remark, Miss Lindsay, that I believe you've a right to whatever is in your own rooms; no one's a right to touch anything that's in them except you." "Thank you, Morgan; there are no directions. By the bye, if you like I will write you two or three lines, before I go, which you will be able to use as a reference when you are applying for another situation. I don't wish you to suffer by what has happened." "Thank you, Miss Lindsay, you are very good; but I don't propose to seek another situation. I am giving up service. I trust, Miss Lindsay, that in the future everything will turn out as you would like it to." "Thank you, Morgan, I hope it will. Say goodbye to the others for me, and say I wish them all well." The butler inclined his head with his most deferential air. The trunk had been lifted into its place at the back of the cart, the footman had ascended to the driver's seat, and Nora was climbing up to his side, when a seedy-looking man came shambling along the drive, apparently in a state of some excitement. "Here, what's all this!" he cried. "This won't do, you know." "What won't do?" inquired the footman. "What you're doing of--that won't do. I'm in charge of the stable, and that horse and cart have been took out of it; can't have that; nothing's to be took off the premises without the governor's express permission." "Isn't it? We'll see about that; and so will you see if you don't watch out." The footman evinced an inclination to use his whip with some degree of freedom. Nora laid a restraining hand upon his arm. She addressed the seedy-looking man. "The dog-cart is only going to drive me to the station; it will be returned to the stable, uninjured, probably in less than half-an-hour. You need fear nothing." There she was mistaken; the man was in imminent peril of being run over. The footman flicked the mare on the shoulder, she gave a startled bound, then went dashing down the drive; if the fellow had not sprung nimbly aside both the mare and the cart might have gone right over him. And that was how Nora left Cloverlea. While the vehicle was still in sight Mr. Morgan addressed a few outspoken remarks to the seedy-looking man on his own account. "You're a fool, my lad, that's what you are; you don't know when you're well off. You and your governor have no more right to be where you are than you have to be in the moon. That young lady's been badly advised. If she'd had your governor, and his friends, thrown out of the house, and dragged down the drive, and deposited in the high road--your governor, for one, wouldn't have wanted much dragging; he knows enough to get in out of the rain--he'd have taken to his heels as fast as ever he could, to save himself from something worse. As for your laying your hand upon her horse, and her cart--because they are hers, and hers only--if she'd had you locked up you'd have got six months, and serve you right. I call you a low down thief, because that's exactly what you are; and I call your governor a low down thief, because that's exactly what he is; and if I have an opportunity so I'll tell him. Taking rascally advantage of a fatherless girl. Poor young lady! it goes to my heart to see the way she's being put upon." Mr. Morgan ascended the steps with an air of virtuous indignation which caused the other to stare at him open-mouthed, as if an assault from that quarter was the last thing he had expected. Before many minutes had passed a trap drew up before the hall door, from which Mrs. Banyard alighted. She was received by Morgan; her air was a trifle imperious; she had come, as her husband had promised she should come, to talk to Nora. "Where is Miss Lindsay? I wish to see her; take me to her at once." The butler was affable, but unsatisfactory. "I am afraid I cannot do that." "What do you mean? Why can't you? Has she given instructions that she doesn't wish to see me?" "Miss Lindsay has gone." "Gone! Gone where?" "I apprehend that Miss Lindsay has left Cloverlea for ever." "You apprehend! Man, you're dreaming! How long is it since she has been gone?" She glanced towards the trap, as if she meditated jumping into it, and starting in instant pursuit; but if she entertained such an idea Morgan's answer put an end to it. "Possibly an hour, possibly not quite so much; I cannot say exactly when she started." He must have been aware that she had not been gone ten minutes; possibly he wished to spare his late mistress the indignity of being chased--even by a friend. "Where do you say she's gone?" "The directions were to drive her to the station." "To the station? Then what address has she left?" "None with me." "She must have left an address with some one." "Not with any member of the household." "But where are her letters to be forwarded?" "That I cannot say." "Man! why did you let her go?" Probably this time the expression of surprise which was on Morgan's face was genuine. "I'm afraid I don't understand." "Oh-h-h!" She clenched her fists, and, so to speak, she ground her teeth; she looked as if she would have liked to have beaten the butler; only just then another dog-cart drew up, from which the Hon. Robert Spencer descended. He hailed the butler. "Morgan, I want to speak to Miss Lindsay; where is she? I'll show myself in." Then he saw the doctor's wife. "Oh, Mrs. Banyard, how are you? But I needn't ask, you're looking so well." He returned to the butler. "Morgan, where is Miss Lindsay?" "Miss Lindsay, sir, has gone." Mr. Spencer did what Mrs. Banyard had done--he echoed the butler. "Gone! Gone where?" Mrs. Banyard took it on herself to explain. "The headstrong girl has gone to the station, and probably to London, and as she's left no address she's gone goodness only knows where. But I know--I understand perfectly well. She's got some Quixotic notion into her head, and because she's got it she's bent on suffering martyrdom, and she will too, if somebody doesn't stop her; though who for, or what for, nobody knows." Mr. Spencer laughed, as if he thought the doctor's wife was joking; but he seemed to do it with an effort. "If she's gone we'll find her, wherever she's gone; don't let your imagination paint any very frightful pictures, Mrs. Banyard. I'll undertake to find her, and save her from the martyrdom at which you hint--well, I'll be on the safe side, and say within four-and-twenty hours." But he was undertaking more than he was able to perform. CHAPTER XVIII MISS GIBB Nora's knowledge of London was as slight as the average young lady's, who has lived mostly in the country, is apt to be; yet, when she left Cloverlea, she went straight to London, with eight pounds, four and twopence in her pocket, intending to live upon that sum until she had discovered some means of earning more. There was some method in her madness. She had been reading a story lately about a young woman who had struggled to make a living in town, and she had had rooms in Newington Butts. Nora had gathered that, while Newington Butts was not an abode of fashion, nor a particularly salubrious neighbourhood, it was within reasonable distance of places where young women could earn money; and, above all, that thereabouts lodgings were both plentiful and cheap. The train deposited Nora at Paddington. Had she known her way about she would have left her trunk in the cloak-room, and crossed London by one of half-a-dozen different routes, for a few coppers; when she had found lodgings the box would have been delivered at her address for a few more coppers. What she did do was to charter a four-wheeler. It is some distance from Paddington to Newington Butts; to Nora, an unaccustomed traveller, already tired with her journey, hungry and thirsty, the way seemed interminable. She began to wonder if the driver quite knew where he was going; he seemed to go on and on and never get there. At last, a little desperate, she put her head out of the window and asked him-- "Are you sure this is the right way?" The cab stopped. The driver screwed himself round in his seat, and he observed, in the tone of one who is offended-- "You said Newington Butts, didn't you?" "Yes." Hers was the voice of deprecation. "Very well then; I'm driving you to Newington Butts. If you think you know the way better than I do you can come outside and I'll get inside. I've been driving this cab two and twenty years, and if there's any one who knows the way to Newington Butts better than I do, I should like to know who it is." She drew her head back and subsided on the seat, doubting no longer. She felt that a man who had been a cabman for two and twenty years ought to know the way to Newington Butts better than she did. The cab went on. There was another period of seemingly interminable jolting; it seemed likely that the springs had been on that cab as long as the driver had. Once more the vehicle stopped. This time the driver asked a question. "What address?" As Nora put her head out again hers was the tone of anxiety. "Is this Newington Butts?" "It used to be when I was here last, but perhaps it's been and gone and turned itself into something else since; you might ask a policeman if you think it has been up to any game of the kind. There's one standing over there; I'll call him if you like; he might know." "Thank you; I--I don't think I'll trouble you. The fact is I want lodgings; do you know of any round here?" "Lodgings? I shouldn't have thought there was any round here to suit you." "Oh, I'm so sorry; why not?" "There's about two hundred thousand, I dare say, so perhaps one of them might suit. Anyhow, I'll show you a few samples. Only, mind you, I'm not engaged by the hour, nor yet by the week." When next the cab stopped the main thoroughfare had been left behind, and they were in a street of private houses. "Here you are; here's a street pretty nearly full of them; all you've got to do is pick and choose." Nora, getting out, perceived that in many of the windows there were cards announcing that there were rooms to let. She began her search. At some houses they asked too much; at others they did not take ladies; and there were rooms in which she would not have lived rent-free; perhaps she tried a dozen without success. The cabman, who had followed her from house to house, did not appear to be so disheartened by this result as she did. "That's nothing," he declared, as she regarded him with doubtful eyes. "Sometimes people go dodging about after rooms the whole day long, and then don't find what they want. There's more round the corner; try them." Nora went round the corner, the cab moving at a walking pace beside her. The first door at which she knocked was opened by a girl, a small girl, who looked about twelve; but she wore her hair in a knob at the back of her head, and there was something in her manner which seemed intended to inform the world at large that she was to be regarded as a grown woman. "What rooms have you to let?" asked Nora. The girl looked at her with sharp, shrewd eyes; her reply was almost aggressive. "We don't care for ladies, not in the ordinary way we don't." Nora had been told this before. Though she had not understood why a woman should be objected to merely because she was a woman, she had meekly withdrawn. But there was that about this child--who bore herself as if she were so old--which induced her to persevere. "I am sorry to hear that. If you were to make an exception in my case I would try not to make myself more objectionable than I could help." The girl remained unsoftened. "That may be; but you never can tell. Some give more trouble than they're worth, and some aren't worth anything; this is a respectable house. Still there's no harm in letting you see what we have got." On the upper floor were a small sitting-room in front and a still smaller bedroom behind; barely, poorly furnished, with many obvious makeshifts, but scrupulously clean. "What rent are you asking?" "Ten shillings a week, and not a penny less; it ought to be fourteen." "I'm afraid I can't pay fourteen shillings a week just yet, but I think I can manage ten; I like the rooms because they seem so clean." "They are clean; no one can say they're not clean; I defy 'em to." "Can I see the landlady?" "My mother's the landlady; she's not very well just now; I can make all arrangements." "Then in that case don't you think that if I were to take the rooms for a week on trial, at the end of that time we might find out if we were likely to suit each other?" "We might; there's no knowing. When would you want them?" "At once; my luggage is at the door." "Then mind you make the cabman bring it up before you pay him; I know them cabmen." But the cabman would not be made; he pleaded inability to leave his horse. An individual had appeared who offered to carry up the box for threepence; so Nora let him. After the cabman had been paid there remained of her capital less than eight pounds. When they were again up-stairs she said to the girl-- "What's your name? I'm Miss Lindsay." "I'm Miss Gibb." Nora smiled; the child said it as if she wished the fact to be properly appreciated. "I meant, what is your Christian name?" "Angelina; though I'm generally known as Angel, you see it's shorter; though I don't pretend that there's anything of the angel about me, because there isn't." "I fancy I'm tired, my head aches; do you think you could let me have some tea?" "Course I could; are you going to do for yourself, or are we going to do for you?" "I'm afraid I don't understand." "Are we going to do your marketing, or are you going to do it for yourself? If you take my advice you'll do it for yourself; it'll save you trouble in the end, and then there won't be no bother about the bills. The last lodger we had in these rooms he never could be got to see that he'd had what he had had, there was always a rumpus. Quarter of a pound of tea a week he used to have, yet he never could understand how ever it got into his bill. I'll let you have a cup of tea, and some bread and butter, and perhaps an egg; then afterwards I dare say you might like to go out and lay in a few stores for yourself." The girl turned as she was leaving the room to supply the new-comer with a piece of information. "Number 1, Swan Street, Stoke Newington, S.E., that's the address you're now in, in case you might be wanting to tell your friends." In Swan Street Nora continued to reside, while the days went by, though she never told her friends. From Cloverlea, and the position of a great heiress, with all the world at her feet to pick and choose from, to Swan Street and less than eight pounds between her and beggary, was a change indeed. Used only to a scale of expenditure in which cost was never counted she was incapable of making the best of such resources as she had. Miss Gibb took her to task, on more than one occasion, for what that young woman regarded as her extravagance. "Don't want it again? What's the matter with the bread? Why, there's the better part of half a loaf here." "Yes, but I had it the day before yesterday." Nora spoke with something like an air of timidity, as she stood rather in awe of Miss Gibb when that young person showed a disposition to expand herself on questions of domestic economy. "Day before yesterday? Let's hope you'll never be wanting bread. I've known the time when I'd have been glad to have the week before last's. Then look at those two rashers of bacon you told me to take away yesterday, what was the matter with them?" "They weren't--quite nice." "Not nice?" "I didn't think they were--quite fresh." "Not fresh? I know I cooked them for my dinner and there didn't seem to be anything wrong about them to me. Then there was that lump of cheese which you said was all rind, it made me and Eustace a handsome supper. Of course I know it's none of my business, and of course any one can see you're a lady from the clothes you send to the wash; but if there's one thing I can't stand it's waste; perhaps that's because I've known what want is." Nora had been in the house more than a week without seeing or hearing anything of her landlady, or of any managing person except Miss Gibb. She made constant inquiries, but each time it seemed that Mrs. Gibb was "not very well just now," though what ailed her Miss Gibb did not explain. One afternoon, as she was removing the tea-things, Nora was struck by the look of unusual weariness which was on the preternaturally old young face; something in the look determined her to make an effort to solve the mystery of the invisible and inaudible landlady. "Angel, whenever I ask you how your mother is you always say she's not very well just now; but the only person I've seen or heard moving about the house is you. I'm beginning to wonder if your mother is a creature of your imagination." Angel said nothing; she continued to scrape the crumbs off the tablecloth with the blunt edge of a knife. "Are you alone in the house?" "Course I'm not; how about my brother, Eustace? You've seen and heard him, haven't you?" Eustace, it appeared, was only slightly his sister's senior, and almost as old; though Nora felt that no one could really be as old as Angel seemed; she admitted that she had seen Eustace. "Very well then; he don't go till after nine and he's back most days before six, so how can I be alone in the house?" "I know about Eustace; as you say, I've seen him. But I was thinking of your mother. Where is she; or have you reasons why you would rather not tell me?" "What do you mean by have I reasons?" The light of battle came into the child's eyes; it was extraordinary how soon it did come there. "I was wondering if, for any reason, you would prefer to keep your own counsel." "We don't all of us care to turn ourselves inside out; seems to me you don't for one." The accusation was so true that Nora was routed. "I beg your pardon, Angel; I didn't mean to seem to pry." "No harm done that I know of; bones aren't broke by questions." She folded the tablecloth. As she placed it in its drawer, and her back was turned to Nora, she said, as with an effort, "Mother's paralyzed." "Paralyzed? Oh, Angel, I'm so sorry; where is she?" Miss Gibb faced round, again all battle. "Where is she? This is her own house, isn't it? In whose house do you suppose she'd be if she wasn't in her own? I can't think what you mean by keeping on asking where is she?" Nora was properly meek. "You see, I only asked because I never hear her moving about; I never hear any one but you, and Eustace." "Mean I make a clatter?" "Angel! you know I don't. You are nearly, as quiet as a mouse; but your mother is so very quiet. I hope the paralysis is only slight." "That's the trouble, it isn't. It's been coming on for years; during the last three years it's been downright bad; and during the last twelve months she's hardly been able to move so much as a finger." Nora reflected; how old could the child have been when the mother was taken "downright bad"? "Can she do nothing for herself?" "Can't even feed herself." "But how does she manage?" "What do you mean, how does she manage?" "Who does everything for her?" "I never heard such questions as you do ask! Who do you suppose does everything for her? Isn't there me? and isn't there Eustace? Me and Eustace always have done everything for her; she wouldn't have anybody else do anything for her not if it were ever so." "Has she any income of her own?" "I wish she had; that would be heaven below." "But on what do you live?" "Don't we let lodgings? What do you think we let 'em for? We live on our lodgings, that's what we live on; leastways mother and me; Eustace keeps himself, and a bit over now that Mr. Hooper's started giving him his old clothes. I only hope he'll keep on giving him them. The way Eustace wears out his clothes is something frightful; it always has been Eustace's weakness, wearing out his clothes." Later Nora did a sum in arithmetic. Miss Gibb had previously told her that, including rent, rates, and taxes the house cost more than forty pounds a year. Nora paid ten shillings a week; Mr. Carter, on the floor below, paid twelve and six; which meant twenty-two and sixpence a week, or fifty-eight pounds ten shillings a year; so that when rent, rates, and taxes had been paid under eighteen pounds per annum were left for the support of the Gibb family, or less than seven shillings a week. And this when times were flourishing! The rooms Nora had had been vacant more than a month before she came; small wonder Miss Gibb--as she would have put it--had "chanced" a lady. More than another week elapsed before Nora was permitted to see her landlady. She found her in the front room in the basement, which was used by Miss Gibb as well as herself to live and sleep in. There, also, were performed most of the necessary cooking operations. "Mother," explained Miss Gibb, "always does feel the cold; we can't have a fire going both in the kitchen and in here, so that's how it is. Besides, mother likes to see what's going on, don't you, mother?" Mother said she did; for she could talk, and that was the only thing she still could do; it seemed to Nora that even the faculty of speech was threatened. Mrs. Gibb spoke very quietly and very slowly, and sometimes she paused, even in the middle of a word; as she listened Nora wondered how long it would be before that pause remained unbroken. Her landlady lay on a chair bedstead. Miss Gibb and her brother, between them, had contrived a method, of which every one was proud, by means of an arrangement of sloping boards, to raise her head and shoulders, when she desired to be raised. Nora was not surprised to find that, in common with the rest of the house, she was spotlessly neat and clean; but she was conscious of something akin to a feeling of surprise when she observed the expression which was on her face; and the more attentively she observed the more the feeling grew. Although she seemed so old--the cares of this world had pressed heavily on her--still, in a sense, she seemed younger than her daughter; for on her face was a look of peace, as on the face of those who are conscious that they also serve although they only stand and wait. "I have nothing of which to complain," she told her lodger; "only--it's hard on Angelina." Nora noticed that she always referred to her daughter by her full Christian name. Angelina remonstrated. "Now, mother, don't you be silly; if you are going to say things like that I shall have to send Miss Lindsay away." The mother looked at her daughter with a look in her eyes which, when she saw it, brought the tears into Nora's; there was in it an eloquence which she wondered if, with all her wisdom, Angelina comprehended. If she had only been able to take the burden of the mother off the daughter's shoulders, how gladly she would have done it. But the days when she was able to bear the burdens of others were gone; it seemed not unlikely that she would be crushed out of existence by her own. CHAPTER XIX A YOUNG LADY IN SEARCH OF A LIVING The more Nora sought for means to earn her own livelihood, the more they seemed to evade her. In her time she had heard a good deal about how difficult it sometimes is to earn one's own living, but she never realized what that meant until she started to earn hers. To begin with, she had only the very vaguest notions of how to set about it. She could not serve in a shop; at least she did not feel as if she could; she was conscious that she was not qualified to be a governess; she had no leaning towards domestic service, though she would have preferred that to serving in a shop; she had no woman's trade at her fingers' ends, so that she was unfit for a workroom. What remained? It seemed to her very little, except some sort of clerkship; she had heard that thousands of women were employed as clerks; or if she could get a post as secretary. That was the objective she had in her mind when she left Cloverlea, a secretaryship; for that she believed herself to have two necessary qualifications--she wrote a very clear hand, and she had some knowledge of typewriting. She had once started a typewriting class in the village; she had taken lessons herself. She had bought a machine and practised on that, until she gave it away to one of the pupils, who wished to take advantage of the information she had acquired to earn something for herself. That was nearly a year ago; she had not practised since; but she did not doubt that if she came within reach of a machine it would all come back to her; and she had attained to a state of considerable proficiency. So she bought the daily papers and answered all the advertisements for secretaryships which they contained. There were not as many as she would have wished; some days there were none; and the only answers she received were from agents, who offered to place her name upon their books, in consideration of a fee, which she did not see her way to give them. The way those eight pounds were slipping through her fingers was marvellous; when three weeks had gone she had scarcely thirty shillings left, between her and destitution. Of course, she had been extravagant--monstrously extravagant, as Miss Gibb occasionally told her; but when you have been accustomed all your life to an establishment kept up at the rate of some twelve thousand pounds a year, to say nothing of having five hundred a year for pocket money, it is not easy, all at once, to learn the secret of how to make a shilling do the work of eighteenpence; that is a secret which takes a great deal of learning; by many temperaments it can never be learnt at all. She had been a month in Swan Street; had paid three weeks' bills; the fourth lay in front of her. It was such a modest bill--Miss Gibb's bills were curiosities; yet when it was paid she would not have six shillings left in the world. It frightened her to think of it; the effort to think seemed to set her head in a whirl; her heart was thumping against her ribs; it made her dizzy. What was she to do? where was she to go? She could not stay in Swan Street; she had not enough to pay next week's rent, to say nothing of food. Yet, what was the alternative? With less than six shillings in the world what could she do? In a sense, since her coming to Newington Butts she had kept herself to herself. She had this much in common with her father, she could not wear her heart upon her sleeve. She had kept her own counsel; told no one of the straits she was in, of the efforts she was making to find a way to earn her daily bread. But it was plain even to her, as she regarded her few shillings, that the time had come when she must take counsel of some one. If she had to go out into the highways and byways, with her scanty capital, she must learn of some one what highways and byways there were for her to go out into; of herself she knew nothing. As she cast about in her mind for some way out of her trouble, it seemed to her that the only person to whom she could unbosom herself was Miss Gibb. She rang the bell, paid her bill, and as she watched Angelina, with her tongue out and her head on one side, making magnificent efforts to affix her signature to the receipt, she prepared herself for the ordeal. When the receipt was signed, and Angelina was about to go, Nora stopped her. "If you have nothing particular to do just now, and you don't mind, there is something which I should like to say to you." "I don't know that there's anything you might call particular that I've got to do, but there's always something." Which was true enough; from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night, Miss Gibb was always doing something; and sometimes also, Nora suspected, in the silent watches of the night. Nora hesitated; she found the subject a difficult one to broach. "I'm in rather an uncomfortable position; I--I'm afraid I shall have to leave you." "Why? Aren't we giving satisfaction?" "If I give you as much satisfaction as you give me there'd be no trouble on that score." "Oh, you give us satisfaction all right enough; although, of course, any one can see you're several cuts above our place." "You are likely to be several cuts above me; I am having to leave you because I have not money enough left to pay you next week's rent." "Not enough money left? How much have you?" "Five and eightpence halfpenny, to be precise." Miss Gibb changed countenance. "Five and eightpence halfpenny! That's not much." "No one can appreciate the fact better than I do." "But however come you to have so little?" "I hadn't much when I came, and I suppose I've been extravagant." "You have been that." "You see,"--despite herself Nora sighed--"I haven't been used to economy." "Any one could see that with half-an-eye; I shouldn't be surprised to learn that you're one of those who've been used to spend as much as five pounds a week." "I'm afraid I am. "Then of course there's excuses. We can't get out of ways like that with a hop, skip and a jump; it's not to be expected. But haven't you got any friends who'd help you?" "I haven't a friend to whom I can apply for help." "I should have thought you were the kind who'd have had lots of friends. Have you fell out with them?" "I thought my father was a rich man; but when he died--it was only a very little while ago--it appeared that he wasn't; so I have to make my own way in the world, and that is how I came to Swan Street." "I know them fathers; I had one of my own, and he wasn't of any account; though I will say this, I always liked him." "I have been trying to find something by means of which I could earn enough money to keep me. I hoped to have found it before now, but I haven't, and that's the trouble." "What sort of work have you been looking for?" "I've been endeavouring to get a post as secretary, among other things, and I've answered no end of advertisements, but nothing has come of one of them." "Secretary? what's that? The notices that the water'll be cut off if it's not paid for, they're signed by a secretary; I always took him to be some kind of a bailiff." Nora endeavoured to explain, but her explanation was not very lucid, and Miss Gibb was not extremely impressed. "Is that the only kind of work you want?" she asked; "a secretary?" "Indeed it isn't; I should be glad to do anything." "Some people, when they say they'd be glad to do anything, mean nothing, which is about all they're good for; I know. How would you like to go out charing?" "Charing? Well, I may be glad to have an opportunity of doing that." "Yes, no doubt; I fancy I see you at it! you charing! My word! Strikes me you're the kind who'll find it difficult to get work of any sort." "You're not very reassuring." "Facts is facts." "That's true enough; and it's no use blinking them. I fear you're right; I shall find it hard; anyhow while I'm looking for work it's clear that I can't continue to be your lodger. That's what I wanted to explain." "And pray why not?" "Isn't it pretty obvious? With five and eightpence halfpenny, and no prospect of more, how am I to pay you next week's rent?" "I did think you'd have talked better sense than that." "Angel!" "If there's one thing I cannot stand it is to hear people talk right-down silly; I never could stand it, and I never shall. I wouldn't take this week's bill if it wasn't that we were so short; but if that there poor-rate isn't paid next week we shall have the brokers in, so paid it must be; them there poor-rates is demons; they'll turn me grey yet before I've done. But as for your next week's rent--we'll talk about that when it's due." "Are you proposing that I should run up debts with you, which I may never be able to pay? Do you call that sense?" "As it happens that's not what I'm proposing; though if I were as sure of most things as I am of that you'll pay me first chance you get, it might be better for me; but you can hardly say you've got no money when you've got plenty of things you can get money on." "I don't understand." "Look at your clothes--lovely some of them are; you can get money on them." "Get money on my clothes? How?" "Why, bless me, aren't there pawnbrokers? What do you think they're for? Taken to the proper place, by the proper person, you'd get a lot of money on those things of yours; I know. I always say that so long as you've something to pawn it's like having money at the bank." It was to Nora as though Miss Gibb's words had opened out to her a new world, of which she had not dreamed. In none of the country towns within miles of Cloverlea was there a pawnshop; to her knowledge she had never seen one; there were plenty within an easy stroll of Swan Street; she had passed and re-passed them, but her attention had not been called to what they were; they had escaped her notice. In her mind the word pawnshop stood for almost the lowest word in the scale of degradation; it was the drunkard's last hope; the friend of the felon; the resource of those to whom there was no resource left; that gate into the unthinkable which was associated only with despair. And that it should be suggested to her that she should enter a pawnbroker's den--she had heard it spoken of as a "den"--to "raise" money on the clothes she had worn yesterday, and had hoped to wear again to-morrow--in her blackest hours she had not anticipated such a fate for herself as that. The proposal actually appalled her; filled her with a fear of she knew not what; shamed her; hurled her from a pedestal into a morass. She stammered as she replied, conscious of the crass banality of what she was saying-- "I--I don't think I--I should like to pawn any--any of my things if--if I could help it." Miss Gibb's scorn was monumental, as if she resented something which the other implied, though it had been left unuttered. "And who do you think does like to pawn their things if they can help it? Do you suppose people pawn their boots because they've got their pockets full of money? I am surprised to hear you talk, I really am; should have thought at your time of life you'd have known better. Wouldn't you rather pawn your clothes than starve?" "If you--if you put it in that crude way, I suppose I would." Nora smiled; a horrible libel on what a smile ought to be. There was no pretence of a smile about Miss Gibb; there never was; she was always like a combatant, who, armed at all points, is ever ready for the fray. "Very well, then; you say you've got no money, and I say how do you make that out when you have got things that you can pawn? If you like to go hungry rather than put away a lace petticoat--which you can get out again, mind you, whenever you've a chance--all I can say is I don't; I've known what it is to be hungry, I have." "But I fear that I--I shouldn't know how to set about pawning a lace petticoat even if I wanted to save myself from going hungry." "Who said you would? Who said anything about your setting about it? Not me; I do hope I have more sense than that. Why, you'd be worse than a baby at the game; it needs some knowing. I'll do all in that way that's wanted; if I don't know pretty well all about pawning that there is to know I ought to, I've been pawning pretty nearly ever since I could walk. What's more, I've pawned pretty nearly every blessed thing that there is to pawn, down to a towel-horse and a kitchen fender. Mother and Eustace and me would have been a case for a coroner's inquest long ago if I hadn't; and I will say this for them there pawnbrokers, that, considering the class they've got to do with, and that they have got to make a living, they've got as much of the milk of human kindness in them as most. You're going to stop here, that's what you're going to do, and mother and Eustace and me will put our heads together to see about finding you some work to do, though I don't know about that there secretary. Only for goodness' sake don't you lose heart; no one ever gained anything by doing that. I've seen as much of the world as most, and I know from my own experience that when things are tightest is just the moment when help comes. Mother says it comes from heaven; but I don't know, it may or it may not; but it comes from somewhere, and that often from where you least expected it. When next week's bill comes due, if nothing's turned up, you give me something, and I'll take it round to Mr. Thompson--he's about as good as any--and I'll get as much on it as ever I can, and you'll be able to pay all right; you see, I'm not concealing from you that we've got to live as well as you, and them poor-rates there's no shirking. But don't you fear; mother and Eustace and me will have found you something to do between us long before you've spent all the money you've got in the bank; but whatever you do do, don't you go losing heart." So the child taught the woman, who was learning rapidly that age is not measured by the years one has lived; Miss Gibb was a century older than she was, though she was only just in her teens. Two visits were paid to Mr. Thompson, each time with a petticoat. Nora lived on the proceeds of those two petticoats for nearly another month, during which all the members of the establishment were putting their heads together in endeavours to find her something to do. The heart-sickness it meant for her; the consciousness of wasted effort; the sense of shame; the realization of her own futility; she had aged more during the time she had been in Swan Street than in all the preceding years. She had long ceased to confine herself to attempts to find a post as secretary, or as clerk. She tramped half over London in her desire to answer, in person, advertisements of all sorts and kinds, always in vain. Any one but a sheer ignoramus--Miss Gibb's ignorance outside her own sphere of action was colossal--would have told her at a glance that her efforts were foredoomed to failure. And why? The idea of such a one as she was occupying some of the situations for which she applied was in itself an absurdity; her appearance, her bearing, her manners, her dress, all were against her; perhaps her dress handicapped her worst of all. She did not know it; she thought her frocks were as simple as they could be; and so they were, in the sense of the great costumier, with the simplicity which is the hall-mark of the dressmaker's art. There was not one of them which had not cost her ten or fifteen guineas. The would-be employer saw this at once, and decided that the applicant was unsuited, which she was; so Nora was sent sorrowing away. So with Nora the world went from bad to worse; until, as if to justify Miss Gibb's prophetic instinct, when things seemed really at their "tightest," help came to her from a quarter--as Angelina had foretold--from which she had least expected it. CHAPTER XX KING SOLOMON John Hooper, Esquire, barrister-at-law, of Fountain Court, Inner Temple, was the employer of Mr. Eustace Gibb, who was the brother of Miss Gibb. It is not easy to define the relation which Mr. Gibb occupied with regard to Mr. Hooper. Mr. Hooper, although, presumably, learned in the law, had never held a brief in his life, and, to be frank, did not particularly want one; only his uncle worried. He had a small income of his own, and great expectations from his uncle; as his expenditure always exceeded his income, he regarded it as of the first importance that he should continue to stand in what he called his uncle's "good books," since he looked to that gentleman for sufficient financial assistance to enable him to what he termed "rub along." To please his uncle, who appeared to think he ought, very shortly, to be sitting on the woolsack, since he could get no briefs of his own he worked on those of other people; in other words he devilled for a gentleman who was always promising to do more work than, as he knew very well, he could do, and who, therefore, allowed Mr. Hooper, among others, to do some of the work which he was paid to do, but for which he paid Mr. Hooper nothing; there was not so much of this as Mr. Hooper chose to allow his uncle to imagine; still, from his point of view, there was emphatically enough. What position Mr. Gibb filled in his chambers he himself occasionally wondered. To those whom he wished to impress with his legal standing he spoke of him as his clerk; to those whom it was impossible to impress, and they were many, as his office boy; while in his own circle of intimates, which was of rather a peculiar kind, he generally referred to him as King Solomon. Mr. Gibb generally referred to himself as Mr. Hooper's right-hand man. "I'm his right hand man, that's what I am," he was wont to tell any one who showed interest in the subject; whereat the listener whistled, or did worse, and wondered, if he stopped at that. His duties appeared chiefly to consist in sitting, if Mr. Hooper was in his chambers, in a sort of lobby, which opened on to the staircase, which he called his office, and where he did nothing; or if Mr. Hooper was not in his chambers, he went out, as far out as he thought was discreet, and did nothing there. Sometimes when, as was not infrequently the case, both employer and employed had nothing to do, Mr. Hooper would summon Mr. Gibb into his inner room, and would talk to him--and Mr. Gibb would talk to him. It was the words of wisdom which Mr. Gibb would casually let drop in the course of these conversations which induced Mr. Hooper to allude to him, in the privacy of his own circle, as King Solomon; the barrister declared that it was worth his while to pay Mr. Gibb ten shillings a week, which he with difficulty did, merely on account of the benefit which he derived from hearing him talk. It was during one of these conversations that Mr. Gibb touched on a subject which was foremost both in his heart and head. He had taken a strenuous part in the family endeavours to find for Miss Lindsay some employment by means of which she could at least provide herself with the wherewithal to keep herself alive. He had entered on the search with sanguine zest. Apart from any feeling which he might himself entertain for the lady he felt that his reputation was at stake. He had pledged himself to find for her at least half-a-dozen ways of earning a living in a ridiculously short space of time; and as yet he had not found her one; and she herself still searched. He was aware of the visits to Mr. Thompson; they troubled him nearly as much as they troubled Nora; he felt almost as if he was himself responsible for their continuation. He knew that any day another might have to be paid; the knowledge made him desperate. He had had, for some time, a vague intention of speaking to his employer on the matter; but he was aware that Mr. Hooper did not always take him seriously, and he was curiously unwilling to have Miss Lindsay made the subject of that gentleman's chaff. Yet the thought of that further impending visit pressed heavily on his mind; so that presently the barrister perceived that in his air there was something singular. "You're not up to your usual mark, Mr. Gibb; those pearls of wisdom which I love to cherish as they drop from your lips don't seem dropping; stock run out?" Mr. Gibb looked up at the ceiling, then down to Mr. Hooper. "The fact is, sir, I've got something on my mind." "Is it possible? My good Mr. Gibb, do I ever allow anything to stop on my mind? Get it off!" "It's easy to talk, sir, but I don't seem as though I can." "Perhaps it would do your mind good to tell me what's on it; I have known that prescription work a cure. Give your mind its head, Mr. Gibb, let her go." Mr. Gibb hesitated; he was trying to find fitting words in which to express what he had to say. "It's like this, sir; I know somebody who very much wants to find the means of earning a living." "Not an uncommon character, Mr. Gibb. I suppose there are the usual requirements, large salary wanted, and very little work." "Not at all, sir, not in this case. The person to whom I'm alluding would be only too glad to do any amount of work, for very little wages." "That is unusual; I fear an effort has been made to impose upon your innocence. Who's the gentleman?" "It's not a gentleman, sir, it's a lady." "A lady? I say, Mr. Gibb! warnings out all along that coast; if at this period of your existence you get yourself mixed up with a lady, especially one who is on the look out for means of earning a living, your whole career may be blighted. She may look upon you as her living, and then where are you?" "No fear of that, sir; this is a lady born and bred; she's as high as the heavens above me." "Is she? Then she's tallish. Old?" "No, sir; in her early prime." "Meaning?" "I couldn't say exactly, sir; I should say somewhere about twenty. You could tell better than me. "What on earth do you mean?" "If you saw her." "If I saw her! Look here, Mr. Gibb, have you got anything at the back of your head?" Mr. Gibb sighed. "Is she hideous?" "No, sir; she's the most beautiful young lady ever I set eyes on; and I've seen a few." "You have, Mr. Gibb, I admit it; still as I don't know what your type of beauty really is your remark conveys little to me." "It would convey more, sir, if you were to see her. You wouldn't want to see her twice to know that she's the most beautiful young lady ever you set eyes on. I feel sure of it. I wish you would see her, sir." "May I ask, Mr. Gibb, what it is you're driving at? Why should I see her?" "So that you might understand." "Understand what?" "How it is." "How what is? I'll trouble you, Mr. Gibb, to be a trifle more explicit. Where's this lady of birth and breeding, who's as high as the heavens above you, to be found?" "She's lodging at my mother's. Yes, sir, I don't wonder you look surprised; I know it's no place for a lady, especially one like her; and that's the trouble, she is a lady; I know a lady when I see one as well as I know a gentleman." "You must forgive me, Mr. Gibb, but I'm wondering if you do; it's not every one who can tell a lady by the look of her." "Perhaps not, sir; but you can. If you saw her you'd soon tell. She'd have found something long ago she could have turned her hand to if she'd been one of your common sort; but that's the mischief, she's a lady; and I happen to know that she's in a very bad way. She lost her father and her mother, and she doesn't seem to have a friend in the world; if she doesn't find something soon by which she can earn a little money I don't know what will become of her. I wish you would see her, sir." "What good do you suppose will be gained by my seeing her? What sort of work does she want?" "She has been trying for a secretaryship; but she's tried, and tried, and nothing's come of it; and now she'd be only too glad to do anything by which she could earn money. You see, sir, you know all kinds of people, and I thought that if you saw her, so that you might know what she's like, and how it is with her, you might think of some one who could give her work; I know you wouldn't regret it if you did." "Mr. Gibb, you're a--you're a person of a Mephistophelian habit! Mind you, I've no more chance of putting anything in the way of your lady born and bred, who's as high as the heavens above you, than the man in the moon; but I've got plenty of time on my hands; I'm always ready to see any one; and I've no objection to see her." "Thank you, sir. Will you see her to-morrow morning?" "Look here, Mr. Gibb, are you trying to bustle me?" "Well,' sir, you see she's pawning her things----" "Pawning her things! and you say she's a lady." "Yes, sir, she is pawning her things, and she is a lady; and it's because I've reason to know that she may have to pawn something else either to-day or to-morrow that I've mentioned her to you at all; because when she's pawned all she's got what will she do?" "Do you want me to lend her some money? or to give her some?" Mr. Gibb smiled. "When you've seen her, sir, you won't need to ask me that. Then you'll see her to-morrow morning?" "Now don't you go putting any false hopes in her head, you'll only be doing her a disservice if you do; nothing will come of my seeing her, I'm only doing it to oblige you; let that be clearly understood." "Yes, sir; thank you very much." When Mr. Gibb got home he rushed straight up to Miss Lindsay, who was commencing the nondescript apology for a meal which served her as tea and supper. "Miss Lindsay, I believe I've found you something which may lead to something." "Oh, Eustace! have you? what is it?" "It's my chief." Mr. Gibb never would refer to him as "governor," as other clerks did; he thought it vulgar. "It's Mr. Hooper!" "Mr. Hooper?" "I happened to mention to him to-day that you were looking out for a secretaryship, and he said would you call round and see him to-morrow morning." "Oh, Eustace! how shall I ever thank you? Is it for himself he wants a secretary?" "That I can't say; but if you'll take my advice you'll call and see him." "Of course I'll call and see him; I'm--I'm all trembling! as if I wouldn't call and see him! Do you think I've any chance?" "That also I can't say; but if you'll allow me to give you what I should describe as a hint----" "Please do! What is it? You are so clever!" "If I were you I should put on your prettiest frock, and your prettiest hat, and the prettiest everything you've got." "Eustace! Why?" Mr. Gibb put his hand up to his mouth, and coughed discreetly. "Fact is, Mr. Hooper's more of an eye for female beauty than he thinks, and if you come to him looking as I've seen you look, you'll knock him." "Knock him?" Mr. Gibb was apologetic. "It's not often that I do use words of that kind, but, asking your pardon, this time I mean it." "But--I don't understand what you do mean. You can't mean that Mr. Hooper would engage me as his secretary merely because I happened to be wearing my prettiest frock?" "I don't say anything of the kind; not at all. I don't know that he wants a secretary; I only know he told me to ask you to call. You want to make a good impression when you do call, don't you?" "Of course I do." "Exactly; of course you do! What I say is don't leave anything undone which will help you to make a good impression; and that's all I do say." When Mr. Gibb went Nora was left blushing, trembling, excited, and slightly bewildered; she continued her meal without having any clear idea of what it was that she was eating. "That's a queer boy," she said to herself, more than once. Mr. Gibb was a queer boy; which was why his "chief" occasionally alluded to him as King Solomon. CHAPTER XXI NORA FINDS SOMETHING TO DO Mr. Hooper had not long arrived at his chambers, on the following morning; he was lounging in his chair, his hat still on the back of his head, his pipe between his lips, studying, in the newspaper which he held out in front of him, reports of cricket, golf, and similar legal matters, when the door was opened and Mr. Gibb came in. "Lady to see you, sir." Mr. Hooper started. "Lady? What lady?" "Lady you made an appointment with yesterday, sir." "Lady I made an appointment with yesterday?" Mr. Hooper seemed to be making an effort to collect his wits, which Mr. Gibb's announcement had scattered. "You young scoundrel! I'd forgotten----" Fortunately he had got no further; because, even as he was speaking, the lady entered; whereupon Mr. Gibb vanished with a degree of haste which was almost suspicious. Mr. Hooper dropped his newspaper, removed his hat with one hand, his pipe with the other, and sprang to his feet, to stare; forgetful altogether, for the moment, of his manners, so completely was he taken by surprise. What he had expected to see he could not have said; what he actually did see, standing "in his room, Making it rich and like a lily in bloom," was the most beautiful girl he ever had seen. She was tall and most divinely fair, perfectly dressed, in a long, trailing black gown, which became her slender form, and a big black hat, which threw into strong relief what seemed to him to be the almost ethereal beauty of her face; and she held herself daintily erect, like the great lady he could have sworn she was. The fact that the bowl of his pipe was burning his hand recalled him to his senses. "I--I beg your pardon; I'm afraid I've been smoking; if you'll allow me I'll open the windows." He opened them; the three windows the room contained. "You are Mr. Hooper?" Her voice was just the kind of voice it was fitting should be hers, soft, clear, sweet; it was to him like the sound of music which he loved; and, when he heard it, off went his wits again. "Yes, that--that is my name; yes--exactly--I--I am Mr. Hooper--yes." "I am Nora Lindsay." Nora! That was one of his pet names; as she pronounced it it seemed to him to be the sweetest name a woman could have; like everything about her, it became her so. "May I--may I offer you a seat, Miss Lindsay? I--I am very glad to see you." She sat down, with what seemed to him almost awful calmness; but she was all tremblement within, a maze of conflicting emotions, for already it was clear to her that this was quite a singular young man; only she was able to exhibit more outward self-control than he was. When she saw that he showed no immediate disposition to touch on the subject on which she had come, but seemed to be able to do nothing but fidget, she began on the theme herself. "Eustace tells me that he mentioned to you that I am looking for a post as secretary." "Eustace? Oh, you mean King Solomon--that is, young Gibb. Young Gibb's a curious boy." "Curious? I think he's delightful." "Delightful? Yes, so--so he is; a--a most valuable acquisition for a man like me." "Do you yourself require a secretary, Mr. Hooper. "Do I--require a secretary--myself? I--I--the fact is----" A wild idea was germinating in the erratic young gentleman's brain. "What are your qualifications, Miss Lindsay?" "I can work a typewriter." "Can you? That's splendid." "At least I could about twelve months ago, and I dare say I could again, after a little practice." "Of course you could; not a doubt of it. And--and can you write shorthand?" "No, I can't write shorthand; is that indispensable?" "No, not--not indispensable." "I can speak and write French, and I know some German." "Those--those are decidedly advantages." "And I write a very clear hand; I don't think any one would have any difficulty in reading what I write; I will show you a specimen if you like." "There's--there's not the slightest necessity; not the least; I feel sure you write a clear hand. And--when are you disengaged?" "At once; I should like to begin as soon as I possibly could; I am very anxious to begin." Something which she fancied she saw on his face seemed to trouble her. "Isn't the secretary wanted at once?" "Well, the fact is, it's this way----" "I could come for a week on trial, so that you might see if I suited." The idea of this divine creature coming to his chambers, day after day, for a whole week, made his brain whirl round. "I'm sure you'd suit; I--I've not the slightest doubt about that." "You can't be quite sure; but I'd try to please you." "I--I--I----" He was about to remark that there was not the slightest necessity for her to try, since she could not help but please him, whether she tried or not, when a sudden fear came to him that his remark might be misconstrued; so he pulled himself up in time. "The remark I was about to make is, since--since I desire to be quite plain, in order that we may not commence with--with a misunderstanding; what it is I wish to point out is that the post may be of a purely temporary nature." "That doesn't matter; it would be something; and that's better than nothing. How long would it be likely to last?" "That's--that's not easy to determine; the fact is it's really a jobbing secretary that's wanted." "What is a jobbing secretary?" "One who works by the job." "By the job?" "Let me explain. Say there's a job--that is, a piece of work--wants doing; when that's done there may be an interregnum before more's required." "I see. And--will the secretary be paid by the job?" "Paid by the job?" "Or--by the week--or how?" "That--that reminds me." It seemed to Nora that Mr. Hooper drew in a long breath, as if he desired to lay in a stock in case of emergency. "What honorarium were you thinking of asking, Miss Lindsay?" "I was thinking of asking two guineas a week." She fancied his jaw fell; so she hedged, quickly. "But, of course, if that's too much----" "Not at all; not in the least; practically it's less than I expected." Although he had not the faintest notion where the money was to come from, if it had to come from him, he was thinking that if she proposed to keep herself on two guineas a week it would be some time--slight though his knowledge of such matters was, before she would be able to buy another dress like the one which she had on. "Well, Miss Lindsay, we'll leave it like this; I will think it over and let you know my decision." "Couldn't you decide now? I've found that when people say they'll let me know their decision they mean no. Please--please give me a trial; do let me try. If--if you'll give me a chance I'll--I'll do my very best, so that you--you shan't regret it." Unless he was mistaken, something very much like tears stood in her eyes; they affected him in a way nothing ever had done before; he would have liked to have knocked his head against the wall. "My dear Miss Lindsay, you altogether misunderstand me--entirely misunderstand me; I shall be delighted to offer you the post--delighted." "Mr. Hooper! Do you mean it? Really?" It was worth two guineas a week to see the look which came into her face. "Certainly I mean it." "But--what did you mean when you said you'd let me know your decision?" "I meant my decision with--with reference to--to when your duties are to commence." "Oh! Will it be very long before you want me?" "Emphatically no. As to wanting you, I--I want you immediately. Shall we say----" "To-morrow? If you could let me begin tomorrow!" "Undoubtedly you can begin to-morrow." "At what time?" "Shall we put it--at eleven? or would you prefer to make it twelve?" "Twelve! But Eustace comes at ten." "Yes, Eustace comes at ten; but I don't want to put you to any inconvenience." "You don't want to put me to any inconvenience!" She got up from her chair with something in her way of doing it which frightened him. "But I don't want you to study my convenience; in the future it will be my duty to study yours; please understand that, before all else, I wish to do my duty. I want to do a man's work and to earn a man's wage--to deserve a man's wage. Of course I know I shan't deserve it at first; but I'm going to try hard, and if you'll only give me a chance, and treat me as if I were a man, I think you'll admit that I do deserve it before very long. I know that being a woman is against me----" "Really, Miss Lindsay, I can't admit that." "But I know it is--I learnt that long ago; and only when I have succeeded in making you forget that I am a woman shall I know that I am beginning to earn my wage--as a man. Then I am to come to-morrow with Eustace, at ten." "With Eustace? Oh yes; quite so--that is--certainly; that will suit me very well." She went out of the room without another word; he stood staring at the door through which she had passed. "This is uncommonly awkward; ought I to have opened the door for her or not? It wouldn't have been treating her like a man, and she might have resented it. She has a way of speaking, to say nothing of looking, which takes the stiffening right out of me. I'd have given anything to have dared to ask her to lunch; but--if I had dared, anything might have happened. One thing's certain, I've been and gone and done it. I've given myself two problems to solve; one thing is, what am I to find for her to do?--for even a jobbing secretary must do something, especially when she's full of enthusiasm to the bursting-point. And the other is, how I am going to find the cash to pay her for doing it; I'll be hanged if I know which of the problems is likely to prove the most insoluble." When Nora reached the office Mr. Gibb assailed her with questions; her answers seeming to amaze him in an ascending scale. "Well, what did he say to you?" "He's engaged me." "Engaged you? What for?" "As jobbing secretary." "As what?" "As jobbing secretary." "Who to?" "Why, to himself, of course." "He's engaged you as jobbing secretary to himself? What are you going to do?" "How can I tell? I suppose he has something very important which he wants me to do." "Has he? Oh! When are you going to start on it?" "To-morrow!" "To-morrow? What's he going to pay you?" "Two guineas a week; isn't it splendid?" The announcement seemed to startle Mr. Gibb out of the faculty of asking further questions. She went on. "And I have to thank you for it! Only think! if it hadn't been for you such luck never would have come my way; you dear, dear boy! I should like to kiss you for it; and I will!" And she did, quite heartily too, though she had to stoop to do it. "And out of my first two guineas I'll buy you something; what shall it be?" "Nothing you could buy could ever equal what you've given me." "What I've given you? what have I given you?" "A kiss; I never shall forget you kissed me as long as I live." "Eustace, you are--you are a queer boy!" She went out, all blushes. When she had gone Mr. Gibb did what his employer had done; he stared at the door through which she had passed. "Well, I call this of the nature of a startler; she must have knocked him. His jobbing secretary! What's he going to find for her to do, when there's nothing for him to do? or, for the matter of that, for me either. And two guineas a week! When the other day he sent me out to change his last fiver, and told me he'd have to make it do till quarter day, and there's still three weeks to that. Looks to me as if he'd rather overdone it." The door of Mr. Hooper's room was opened; his voice was heard. "Mr. Gibb, come in here!" Mr. Gibb went in there. CHAPTER XXII MASTER AND MAN When Mr. Gibb entered he found Mr. Hooper in a state of agitation; there was nothing very amazing in that, as he had found him in that condition on previous occasions; but it seemed to Mr. Gibb that, in his agitation then, there was a quality which was new. Mr. Hooper assailed him the moment he was past the door. "Now, Mr. Gibb, you have been and gone and done it." "Done what, sir?" "I think it's extremely possible that you've laid yourself open to an indictment for conspiracy." "Have I, sir?" "You brought Miss Lindsay here?" "Excuse me, sir, but if you'll remember you told me to ask her to come." "You put me up to it." "I merely happened to mention that she was looking for something to do, and so she is." "No she isn't." "Isn't she, sir?" "No, she's found it! And that's where I'm in a position to prove conspiracy. Mr. Gibb, do you mean to tell me that Miss Lindsay has been pawning her things?" "I hope you won't let it go any further, sir." "Do you think I'm---- What do you think I am?" "I haven't thought, sir; only it happened to come to my knowledge, and it seemed to me to be a sad thing for her to have to do." "All I can say is that she hasn't pawned all her things." "No, sir, but she soon would have done." "Have you any idea of how much that dress cost which she had on? to say nothing of the hat!" "Not exactly, sir, I haven't; but my sister told me that some of her things must have cost a good bit of money." "That dress cost every penny of five-and-twenty or thirty pounds, and I dare say the hat cost another tenner; and she's been walking about in those kind of things her whole life long, I'm sure of it." "I told you, sir, she was a lady born and bred." "Mr. Gibb, you see advertisements for a lady, as barmaid; when I think of that I don't want to think of Miss Lindsay as a lady; she's on a different plane; she's of heaven, not of earth." "I told you, sir, she was high as the heavens above me." "So she is; you were right there; although the construction of your sentence is faulty, Mr. Gibb. She's a divinity among women; a poem among girls; the ideal which a man sets up for himself of what a woman may be when God chooses." "Is she, sir?" "Look at her! how she walks, how she moves, how she bears herself! And what a voice! had Orpheus had it he'd have needed no warbling string to aid him to draw 'iron tears down Pluto's cheek!' Then what beauty's in her face; but there's in it what not one beautiful woman in a thousand has, there's a soul! Mr. Gibb, I've only seen Miss Lindsay about twenty minutes, but I regard her as 'a perfect woman, nobly planned'; and I may add 'she was a phantom of delight, when first she gleamed upon my sight,' therefore I say you were guilty of conspiracy in luring me on to ask her to come here; because what has the result been?" "What has it, sir?" "The result has been that I've made an idiot of myself; a complete and perfect ass." "Have you, sir?" "I don't like your tone, Mr. Gibb, it exacerbates. It is in itself enough to prove your guilt. Had you not been engaged in a conspiracy you would have been surprised beyond measure at the wholly unforeseen result. But, as it is, I put it to you, Mr. Gibb; are you surprised?" "Well, sir, in a way I can't say I am, not exactly." "There you are! there you are! Do you know, Mr. Gibb, that I've given Miss Lindsay to understand that I've retained her services as a member of my staff?" "She told me you'd engaged her, sir." "Oh, she did, did she? What did she tell you I'd engaged her as?" "As jobbing secretary, sir." "And pray what is a jobbing secretary?" "That's what I was wondering." "She asked me what a jobbing secretary was; and I explained as clearly as I could under the circumstances, and considering that I don't know myself. When you reflect on the fact that I have engaged her to be something which I never heard of before you will have grasped the initial difficulty of my position; which is complicated by the further fact that she is, what she certainly is, a divinity among women. If she'd come, say, about twelve and leave before one; or if she'd spend a few hours daily in intellectual conversation with me in here; or if she'd come out with me to enjoy the air, say on the top of an omnibus; or even if she'd go out with you, for a little pedestrian exercise, from two to six; the situation might be lightened. But she'll do none of these things; she's as good as said so. She told me, with a delicious seriousness which took all idea of resistance clean out of me, that she meant to do a man's work for a man's wage. Now, Mr. Gibb, in this office I don't see how it's going to be done." "I'm sure I don't." "I don't do a man's work." "No, sir, you don't." "You do still less." On this point Mr. Gibb was discreetly silent; he seemed to be turning something over in his mind, of which he presently gave Mr. Hooper the benefit. "I think, sir, I've got an idea of something you might give Miss Lindsay to do." "Let's have it; you know, Mr. Gibb, any pearls of wisdom which you may drop are always welcome." "You remember, sir, when I first came you gave me some papers which you said I might copy when I'd nothing else to do." "I have some dim recollection of something of the kind. Well, have they been copied?" "No, sir, they haven't." "How long have you had them?" "Oh, rather more than two years." "Then it's time they were copied. What papers are they?" "I never could make out, and I don't think you could either; they're counsels' opinions, or judges' rulings, or something like that. I know when I asked you what they were you told me not to ask any questions; so I knew you didn't know." "Mr. Gibb, you have a way of your own of arriving at conclusions. I think I recall those papers; they were here when I came into possession; they'd been stuffed up the chimney to keep out the draught or something." "I was thinking, sir, if you could think of nothing else, that you might get Miss Lindsay to copy them." "There's--there's something in the idea. Could we pass them off as genuine?" "As how, sir?" "Are they of an appearance, and character, which would enable us to induce Miss Lindsay to believe that they really are papers of importance?" "I should think so, sir; I know it took me ever so long before I found them out." "Ah; then it might take her a week. By that time we may have hit upon something else. Where are those papers?" "They're in my desk." "Then get them out of your desk. Have them cleaned, tidied, made presentable; Miss Lindsay shall commence on them as soon as she arrives. And I tell you something else I'll do. Miss Lindsay tells me she can work a typewriter." "Can she?" "I'll get her one. I think I should prefer to have good, clear typewritten copies of those papers, Mr. Gibb; they'll be so much more accessible for reference. I--I suppose a typewriter can be hired." "Oh yes, sir; I believe from about half-a-crown a week." "That doesn't seem to be a prohibitive figure; I'll hire one; I'll go out this afternoon to see about it. You see, Mr. Gibb, how one thing leads to another. I propose to increase my staff; the mere proposition adds materially to my own labours. I know no more about typewriters than I do about sewing-machines; of which I know nothing; so I foresee that my afternoon will be fully occupied. By the way, Mr. Gibb, a further point; you have found an idea which has been of assistance in one direction, perhaps you might find a second which would be of some service to me in another." "What is it, sir?" "As you put it to me, I take it that you will allow it to go no further; but, between ourselves, I have undertaken to pay Miss Lindsay, as jobbing secretary, since she proposes to do a man's work for a man's wage, an honorarium of two guineas a week." "So she told me, sir." "So she told you, did she? Oh! Then I suppose she expects to get it." "I expect she does, sir." "Then in that case I think that, perhaps, I had better make it perfectly clear to you how, precisely, the land lies." From a drawer which he unlocked in his writing-table Mr. Hooper took three sovereigns and some silver; he displayed the coins to the best advantage on the table. "This choice, but small, collection of bullion has to last me, Mr. Gibb, to quarter day. There are still three clear weeks. I have to pay you thirty shillings; being three weeks' wages at ten shillings a week; out of the balance I have to pay Miss Lindsay six guineas, and keep myself; besides having to meet certain small liabilities which must be met. I should be glad, Mr. Gibb, if you would give me some idea of how it is to be done." "I think, sir, if I were you, I should let me explain to Miss Lindsay." "Explain what, Mr. Gibb?" "What kind of gentleman you are." "And pray, in your opinion, what kind of gentleman am I?" "Well, considering how you've gone and done it with Miss Lindsay I shouldn't think you'd want much explaining, sir." "That's true, Mr. Gibb, most true. Still, I'm curious to hear what you'd tell her." "I wouldn't give you away, sir." "Wouldn't you? Oh! What would you do?" "I should simply tell her, sir, that you'd been thinking things over, and that you'd come to the conclusion that two guineas a week was too much to pay her at the start; and that you thought--should I say fifteen shillings ought to be enough at the beginning, sir?" "Fifteen shillings! And I promised her two guineas!" "Yes, sir, you promised her." "What kind of a person do you suppose she'd think I am?" "I don't see how it matters, sir." "You don't see how it matters!" "Well, sir, you can't pay her two guineas a week, no matter what she thinks of you; and you might manage to pay her fifteen shillings--somehow. I expect you'd find she'd sooner have fifteen shillings in cash than two guineas in promises." "Mr. Gibb, you appear to have a high opinion of me." "I have, sir; I couldn't have a higher." "Couldn't you? you young scoundrel! Pray when did I make a promise to you which I didn't keep, to the letter?" "When I came, sir, you gave me six shillings a week, now you give me ten; but there's a difference between ten shillings and two guineas." "Yes, Mr. Gibb, and there's a difference between you and Miss Lindsay." "Don't I know it, sir? There's all the difference in the world." "As you say, there's all the difference in the world. Miss Lindsay is a divinity among women." "That's exactly my opinion, sir; and has been from the first." "It has been your opinion, has it, Mr. Gibb? Then allow me to inform you that when I enter into an undertaking with--with a divinity among women, to do a certain thing, I do that thing. I have undertaken to pay Miss Lindsay two guineas a week; I will pay her two guineas a week. The money shall be found; I will find it. Be so good, Mr. Gibb, as to look up those papers you spoke about, and see that they are in a presentable condition, so that Miss Lindsay can begin on them directly she arrives." CHAPTER XXIII A JOBBING SECRETARY The next morning Nora did not start for Fountain Court with Mr. Gibb; he positively forbade her, explaining that he had certain duties to perform immediately on his arrival which he preferred, and which Mr. Hooper preferred, that he should perform before anybody else appeared upon the scene; so he started at half-past nine, and she followed thirty minutes later. When she reached Fountain Court the door was promptly opened by Mr. Gibb, who called her attention to a curtained recess, with the remark-- "Please hang your hat and coat up there." Behind the curtain she found three pegs and a looking-glass; which articles, if she had not been too nervous to observe closely, might have struck her as being even suspiciously new. She had no coat on, but she had a hat, which she hung upon one of the pegs, with a breathless feeling, as if the simple action, in that strange place, stood to her as an emblem of the passage she was about to take from the old world to the new; as she hung up her hat, with Mr. Gibb's stony gaze fixed on her coldly from behind, it almost seemed to her that with it she hung up her freedom, and passed into servitude. Nor was this feeling lessened by the unaccustomed, and unnatural, rigidity of Mr. Gibb's bearing; she being unaware of the fact that Mr. Hooper had informed the young gentleman, not ten minutes before she came, that if he did not treat her with the profound and distant respect with which a divinity ought to be treated, the consequences would be serious for him. While she was still touching her hair with her fingers, as a girl must do when she has just taken her hat off, he inquired, with what he felt to be cutting coldness-- "Have you quite finished?" "Yes, Eustace, I--I think I have--quite, thank you." "Then Mr. Hooper is waiting to see you; kindly step this way." She stepped that way, Mr. Gibb moving as stiffly as if he had a poker down his back. She found Mr. Hooper seated at a table which was littered with a number of papers and documents which were of a most portentous looking nature, over one of which he was bending with an air of earnest preoccupation which, it is to be feared, had been put on about thirty seconds before she had entered the room, and would be taken off in less than thirty seconds after she had left it. "Miss Lindsay has come, sir." As Mr. Gibb made this announcement Mr. Hooper looked up with a start, which was very well done, as if nothing could have surprised him more; he rose, a little doubtfully, as if the professional cares of this world were almost more than he could bear. "Miss Lindsay? Yes, yes, quite so; Miss Lindsay, of course. I hope, Miss Lindsay, I see you well." "Quite well, thank you." She ignored the hand which he extended, possibly in a moment of absence of mind, in a manner which seemed to him to be marked; he trusted Mr. Gibb had not noticed it before he left the room. He continued to be as professional in his manner as he knew how. "Miss Lindsay--eh--might I--eh--ask you to take a seat?" "Thank you, sir, I prefer to stand." Really this young woman was trying; she was reversing the positions; it was she who was keeping him at a distance, not he her; there was something in the way in which she said "sir" which made him wince; however, he was still professional. "Quite so, Miss Lindsay, quite so--whichever you prefer. Now, Miss Lindsay, here are some papers of a--of an abstract nature; privacy with regard to them is of the first importance; serious consequences might result were their character to become known outside these chambers." The jobbing secretary inclined her head; he thought she did it very gracefully. "Now, what I require are copies of these papers; you understand, copies--perfectly clean copies. How long do you think it will take you to let me have them?" "There seem to be a good many." "There are--oh, there are; quite a number; only they are not all of the same character. Now, for instance, how long will it take you to let me have a perfectly clean copy of that?" He held out what looked like a musty document, consisting of several foolscap pages, covered with close writing on both sides of each page. She turned it nervously over. "Is it--is it to be typed?" "Certainly; oh yes, emphatically." "What--what machine have you?" He mentioned the maker's name; fortunately it was on one of the same maker's machines she had learnt. "I told you that I had not used a machine recently; I fear, therefore, that I may be rather awkward at first, so that I can hardly tell how long it will take me to let you have a perfectly clean copy of this. There--there appears to be a good deal of it." "There does--oh yes, I admit it, there does--and of course I shouldn't want an absolutely clean copy." She looked at him; there was something in her look which caused him to look away, with some appearance of confusion; he realized that he had made a mistake. "By that I--I should wish you to understand that--that I shouldn't require you to destroy the entire document merely--merely because of one slight error." She spoke with what seemed to him to be magisterial severity; he felt that there was more than a touch of that severity in her demeanour. "You said that you wanted perfectly clean copies, and you shall have perfectly clean copies; I quite understand that only perfectly clean copies will be of the slightest use. I hope you do not think that I wish you to put up with indifferent work. I merely wished to point out that I am afraid that I may be a little clumsy at first." She turned to go. "The--the typewriter's in the next room." "I saw it as I came in." "Pray--pray allow me to open the door for you." But she would not. "If you don't mind, sir"--the stress upon that "sir"!--"I would rather open it for myself; and I do hope that you won't allow a difference in sex to alter the relations which ought to exist between employer and employed. You wouldn't open the door for Eustace Gibb; I would like you to regard me in the same light as you do him." No, he certainly would not open the door for Eustace Gibb, but the idea of regarding her in the same light as Mr. Gibb was preposterous; the trouble was that he could only see her through a golden haze. The typewriter was in the next room to Mr. Hooper's, with beyond it the lobby which Mr. Gibb termed his office; the room was known to Mr. Gibb as the waiting-room, though no one had ever been known to wait in it. It was furnished with an old wooden table, and three older wooden chairs, and nothing else. On the table was the typewriter, and a plentiful supply of paper. After about an hour's interval, Mr. Hooper, who felt as if he were a prisoner in his own rooms, began to find himself in a state of fidgetiness which was beyond endurance. It was ridiculous to suppose that he did not dare to venture into the presence of his own jobbing secretary, yet--he did not dare. What was worse, he found himself incapable of smoking in the room next to her, and that in spite of her expressed desire that he should treat her as he treated Mr. Gibb. When the tension had reached a point at which he could stand it no longer, snatching up his hat, he burst into the room with an air of haste, seeming, when he was in it, to realize her presence there with a touch of surprise. "Miss Lindsay!--oh yes, yes, quite so. And--and how are we getting on?" The moment he had asked he saw that he had made another mistake. This time there was something on her face which moved him in a manner which really did surprise him. She looked as if she had at least been near to tears, and still was not far off. "I--I'm not getting on at all well," she said. "I've not the slightest doubt, Miss Lindsay, that you are getting on much better than you imagine." "I--I suppose I ought to know how I am getting on." "But your--yours is such a strenuously high standard." "I--I've spoilt I don't know how many sheets of paper." "What does it matter how many sheets of paper you spoil? The more you spoil the better I'll be pleased." "Will you? Then all I can say is that if I--I spoil many more I shall know that I'm not fit for the situation which you've been so kind as to offer me, and--I shall go." "Really you must not talk like that." He picked up one of the ominously numerous sheets of paper which lay at her side, all of which had plainly had at any rate some slight acquaintance with the machine. "Now this is not at all bad." "There are three errors in the first line." "Are there? So many as that?" "And five in the second." "Indeed! you don't say so!" "And the third line's wrong altogether." "That only shows that with a little practice you'll regain all your old facility." "I'm not sure that I ever had any facility; I can see that now; I'm afraid I only used to play at typing." "Then in that case you shall copy them by hand; I'm disposed to think that perhaps good clear writing is best after all." "Copy them by hand?" Suddenly a look came on her face which actually frightened him; his words had evidently been to her an occasion of serious offence. "I applied for your situation, Mr. Hooper, in the belief that I could work a typewriter; you gave it me on that understanding. If, now, it turns out that I cannot work a typewriter it would look as if I had applied for your situation under false pretences; do you suppose that I will continue to hold it knowing that to be the case, and that you are paying me for something which it turns out I cannot do? Either you shall have perfectly clean typewritten copies, Mr. Hooper, or I must resign; I will not go through the farce of pretending to occupy a position for which I have been proved to be unfit." He could have answered her many things, but he answered her nothing; he was afraid. Instead, he shuffled out of the room, excusing himself. "I've a most pressing appointment, Miss Lindsay." He was longing for a pipe; the appointment was to smoke, all by himself, in the Temple Gardens. "When I return I've no doubt you'll have advanced beyond your expectations. Rome wasn't built in a day; you must persevere, persevere!" In the office Mr. Hooper, placing his hand on King Solomon's shoulder, whispered in his ear, as if anxious not to be overheard, "Mr. Gibb, I am inclined to the opinion that having a divinity on the premises is not all lavender." To which Mr. Gibb replied, with a sigh, as if he himself was vaguely conscious of a feeling of being "cribbed, cabined and confined"-- "No, sir; that's what I was thinking." For two days Nora continued to wrestle with the typewriter, and on the third something happened which ultimately resulted in another upheaval of the world for her. She had found the "document" which she had to copy--it was one of those which Mr. Hooper had discovered stuffed up the chimney--not easy to decipher, which perhaps was not surprising; she was puzzling over a part of it which seemed even worse than usual when the office door was opened, and a masculine person came striding in who had not even troubled to remove his hat. At sight, however, of the girl poring over that refractory passage, with her pretty brows all creased, off came his hat; but no sooner was he uncovered than, with something in his bearing which almost suggested that he was unconscious of what he was doing, he stood and stared. The girl glanced up and looked at him. For some seconds there was silence; then, seeming to come to himself with a start, he ejaculated--. "I beg your pardon; I--I'd no idea!" He did not stay to explain what he had no idea of, but passed into Mr. Hooper's room beyond. As he entered Mr. Hooper rose from his chair; then stared in his turn, as if this was not at all the kind of person he had expected to see. "Frank!" he exclaimed. "What on earth has brought you here?" The gentleman addressed as Frank replied to the question with a statement which was sufficiently startling. "Jack, I've seen a ghost!" Mr. Hooper, as was not unnatural, stared still more. "You've seen what?" "Of course I don't mean that I've seen an actual ghost, but I feel as if I had." "What's given you such a very curious feeling at this hour of the morning? And what's brought you here, anyhow?" The gentleman addressed seemed genuinely disturbed. "I'll tell you, what's brought me if you'll give me time; I'm in a frightful mess, that's what's brought me; but before I tell you anything, you tell me who--who's that girl in the next room?" Mr. Hooper's bearing betrayed annoyance, which was perhaps caused by the singularity of the other's demeanour. "The lady in the next room, whom you speak of as 'that girl,' is----" There was a tapping; the door was opened; the girl in question entered, the "document" over which she had been puzzling in her hand. She crossed to Mr. Hooper. "I beg your pardon if I am interrupting you, but there is something here which I cannot make out; I thought that perhaps you would not mind telling me what it is before you become really engaged." Mr. Hooper took the paper which she held out to him, with a glance towards the gentleman who had just now entered, in which there was a hint of mischief. "Will you allow me to present to you my cousin, Mr. Frank Clifford? Frank, this is Miss Lindsay." "Lindsay!" Mr. Clifford was staring more than ever. "Lindsay! Not--not--I beg your pardon, but--would you mind telling me if you are related to Mr. Donald Lindsay of Cloverlea?" "I am his daughter." "His--daughter? Thank you; thank you." He sank on to a chair as one who had been dealt a crushing blow. Nora's bearing was frigid; the stranger's unexpected question had touched in her a chord of memory which hurt her more than she would have cared to say. She returned to Mr. Hooper. "Can you tell me what that sentence is? One or two of the words seem quite illegible." He explained, to the best of his ability, which was not much greater than hers. When she had gone back to her own apartment, Mr. Hooper said to his visitor, with what was possibly meant to be an air of politeness-- "May I venture to inquire if that is how you generally behave when you're introduced to a lady, Frank? because if it is I shall know better than to attempt to introduce you to another." Mr. Clifford's reply was remarkable. "I told you that when I first saw her I felt as if I had seen a ghost; now I know my instinct was right; I have seen a ghost. If you knew--what I know, and had had to go through what I've had to go through, and still have to go through, you would understand how meeting Donald Lindsay's daughter like this makes it seem to me as if the hand of God had been stretched out of the skies." CHAPTER XXIV MR. MORGAN'S EXPERIENCES OF THE UNEXPECTED It was a shock to Mr. Morgan when he learnt that Miss Harding had quitted Cloverlea without a word to him. At first he could not believe that she had gone; that she could have gone without his knowledge. When belief was forced on him his language was unbecoming. While he was engaged in little matters of a sort which demanded privacy, and which had to do with the safe storage of certain articles which he had brought himself to believe were his own property, a wagonette arrived at the front door, which, the driver explained to the footman who appeared, had come to fetch Miss Harding. The footman, with the aid of a colleague, had borne the young lady's belongings down the stairs; for which she liberally recompensed them with a sovereign apiece; and she and her possessions were safely away before Mr. Morgan had a notion she was going. Mr. Morgan abused the footmen for not having said a word to him; which abuse they, having no longer the fear of him before their eyes, returned in kind. The butler had to console himself as best he could. "Given me the slip, have you, Miss Harding?" That was what he said to himself. "Very well, my dear, we'll see; I'm not so easily got rid of as you may perhaps suppose. You're a pretty darling, upon my Sam you are!" As soon as circumstances permitted--at Cloverlea there were a great many things which he thought it desirable that he should do that day--he went out on a little voyage of discovery. He learnt at the local station that Miss Harding had not taken a ticket for her home in the west country; she had not taken a ticket for herself at all, Mr. Nash had taken one for her, and another for himself; they had gone up to London in the same compartment, and both had luggage. This news added to Mr. Morgan's pleasure. "Dear me, has she? And I meant her to be Mrs. Morgan, and so she would have been if I'd put on the screw when I'd the chance. As my wife she might have come to something; but as his wife--I'll show her, and I'll show him. If she thinks she's going to hand over to him, by way of a dowry, that nice little lot of money, and leave me out; if that really is her expectation she'll be treated to another illustration of the vanity of human wishes. That sweet young wife will have an interrupted honeymoon." Mr. Morgan called at an inn which it was his habit to honour with his custom in quest of something to soothe his ruffled feelings. There he met a friend, George Wickham, the Holtye head groom. Mr. Wickham had a grievance, in which respect, if he had only known it, he resembled Mr. Morgan. It seemed that he was the bearer of letters which had been addressed to the Hon. Robert Spencer at Holtye, which he was carrying to that gentleman's actual present address, the Unicorn Hotel, Baltash. It was supposed to be Mr. Wickham's "night out"; he wanted to spend his hours of freedom in one direction while Baltash lay in another. "Might as well have sent 'em by post, or by one of the other chaps; but no, nothing would please the old woman"--by "old woman" it is to be feared that he meant the Countess of Mountdennis--"but that I should go. I had half a mind to tell her I'd an appointment." Mr. Morgan was sympathetic; he explained that he was going to Baltash, and even carried his sympathy so far as to offer to take the letters for him. The groom hesitated; then decided to take advantage of his friend's good-nature. "There's thirteen letters," he pointed out, "five post-cards, four newspapers, eighteen circulars, and these parcels, about enough to fill a carrier's cart." Mr. Morgan laughed. "I shall make nothing of that little lot," he said. "And I'll charge nothing for carriage." On the way to Baltash he leaned against a gate to light a cigar; it was one of his peculiarities to smoke nothing but cigars; he held that a pipe was low. When the cigar was lighted he remained a moment to glance at the letters he was carrying. He noticed that one of them was from the London offices of a steamship company; the name of the company was printed on the envelope. While Miss Lindsay had been talking to Mr. Spencer in the copse on the preceding Sunday morning Mr. Morgan had been quite close at hand; the lady had supposed that the noise he made among the undergrowth was caused by a hare or a rabbit; had Mr. Spencer proceeded to investigate the cause of the noise the butler would have been discovered in a somewhat ignominious position. As it was Mr. Morgan, remaining undetected, heard a good deal that was said; among the things he heard Mr. Spencer's story of the letter which Donald Lindsay had sent to him at Cairo, which was only to be opened after the writer's death, which Mr. Spencer had put in his suit-case, and which suit-case Mr. Spencer had lost, containing not only Mr. Lindsay's letters, but also some more intimate epistles from that gentleman's daughter. Mr. Morgan remembered the story very well; he had a knack of remembering nearly everything he heard, and he managed to hear a good deal. He was struck by the fact that the letter which he held in his hand was from the steamship company by one of whose boats Mr. Spencer had travelled on his homeward journey; it might contain news of the missing suit-case. On the other hand, emphatically, it might not. Still! It is notorious how carelessly some envelopes are fastened. Here was a case in point; the gummed flap only adhered in one place, and there so slightly that Mr. Morgan had only to slip the blade of a penknife underneath and--it came open. It was as he had guessed. The steamship company wrote to say that the missing suit-case had turned up. It had strayed among the voluminous luggage of an American family, where it remained unnoticed until the luggage had been divided up among the members of the family; the explanation seemed rather lame, but it appeared it was the only one that steamship company had to offer. Now the suit-case was at Mr. Spencer's disposition, and the company would be glad to hear what he wished them to do with it. As Mr. Morgan enjoyed his cigar, and leaned against the gate, and looked up at the glories of the evening sky, he indulged in some philosophical reflections. "It's an extraordinary world; extraordinary. To think that George Wickham's burning desire to see that red-headed girl of his at Addlecombe should have thrown a thing like this right into my hands. It's quite possible that that suit-case may turn out to be worth more to me than that nice little sum of money with which Miss Elaine Harding erroneously supposes she's going to set her husband up in life. Beyond a shadow of doubt things are managed in a mysterious way." Mr. Morgan faithfully delivered those letters at the Unicorn Hotel at Baltash, with the exception of one letter; and on the morrow he treated himself to a trip up to town. He took a bedroom at a quiet hotel in the neighbourhood of the Strand, and he sent a messenger boy to the steamship company's office with an envelope. In the envelope was the Hon. Robert Spencer's visiting card; on the back of which was written-- "Your letter duly received; please give suit-case to bearer." Some one at the office gave it to the bearer; who took it to the hotel, where it was sent up to Mr. Spencer's room; it happened that Mr. Morgan had registered as Robert Spencer. Mr. Morgan opened it with difficulty; none of his keys fitted the lock, which was of a curious make; but he did open it; he was an ingenious man. And when he had opened the suit-case he found that the letter, for whose sake he had taken so much trouble, was not in it. It was a painful shock; he was loth to believe that a man of the Hon. Robert Spencer's character could have played him such a trick; to say nothing of the deceit which, in that case, he must have practised on Miss Lindsay. He turned the contents of the case over and over, subjecting each article to a close examination. No, there was nothing there which in any way resembled the letter which he had heard Mr. Spencer describe. What was almost worse, as showing the lover's utter unreliability, there were none of Miss Lindsay's letters either. Mr. Morgan had distinctly heard Mr. Spencer tell Miss Lindsay that in his missing suitcase were not only her father's unopened letter, but also some letters of hers. What confidence could be placed in the man who, at such a sacred moment, made such a gross mis-statement to the woman whom he professed to love? It was dreadful; Mr. Morgan was pained beyond measure. In the future he would never be able to believe anything he overheard; even though his ear was glued to the keyhole. He was a dispirited man. He did not return at once to Cloverlea. As a matter of fact he had brought with him to town a number of packages of various shapes and sizes. He had some trouble in removing them from Cloverlea; but he had removed them, having dared Mr. Guldenheim and his friends and minions to do anything to try to stop him. He devoted a few days to the bestowal of these trophies in a safe place. When he did return to Cloverlea he put up at the village inn, whence he kept an eye on the doings of the neighbourhood. Having succeeded in screwing out of Mr. Guldenheim more than was due to him for wages, and in lieu of notice, he attended the sale with melancholy feelings, going so far as to purchase some lots for which he felt a sentimental interest, and which he had reasons for knowing were going for much less than they were worth. It was only after the sale that he ascertained what he thought was likely to be Miss Harding's present address. He had made regular, and persistent, inquiries at Mr. Nash's office; but nothing had been heard of that promising solicitor by his staff, which consisted of a weedy youth of seventeen summers, with whom Mr. Morgan was on terms of the closest intimacy; until there came one morning a curtly worded request to forward any letters which might be awaiting him to Mr. Nash at an address which he gave. Mr. Morgan saw that address; a couple of days after he called there. The address was at that charming south-coast seaside resort, Littlehampton, 27, Ocean Villas. Ocean Villas proved to be some quite picturesque cottages fronting both the common and the sea; 27 was, perhaps, the most picturesque of them all. The front door was open in the confiding way one finds at seaside resorts, and which saves the trouble of having to open it; Mr. Morgan, entering, rapped on the floor with his stick. A diminutive maid instantly appeared who, without waiting for him to state his business, instantly broke into breathless speech. "If you've come after the rooms, sir, if you please Mrs. Lorrimer's not in, but if you'll wait half-a-minute I'll fetch her." Mr. Morgan explained that he had not come after the rooms; he asked if Mrs. Nash was in. "Mrs. Nash is out, sir, along with Mr. Nash; I did hear them say they were going to Arundel." "I'll wait till they return; which are their apartments?" "This is their sitting-room, sir." She opened the door of what, for a lodging-house, was quite a pleasant room. Mr. Morgan entered; the maid went; the moment he was alone Mr. Morgan did what he always did do when he found himself alone in a strange apartment, he treated everything it contained to a rigorous inspection, and was still engaged in doing so when the diminutive maid reappeared. "If you please, sir, I'm going out to do some errands, and if there's anything you want would you mind letting me know before I go; though I really shan't hardly be five minutes before I'm back again." On the visitor assuring her that he was not likely to require her services during the next five minutes she departed to do those errands; scarcely was her back turned than Mr. Morgan started on what might have been a tour of curiosity through the house. He got no further, however, than the room behind the sitting-room, which proved to be a bedroom; unmistakably the sleeping apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Nash. Against the window stood a large trunk, a lady's; Mr. Morgan tried it; it was locked. He surmised as he eyed it. "What's the betting that in there isn't that nice little sum of money? I wonder if she's told her loving husband that she's got it, and where it is; if she has I wonder how much he's left her. It might be worth my while to look and see; but I think I can manage to get all I want without what would look to the ignorant eye like dabbling in felony. What's that?" "That" was something which lay on the floor just underneath the bed; something which resembled a letter-case. He picked it up. "I rather fancy that this is the property of my friend Nash. Looks as if it had fallen out of his pocket while he was putting on his coat, and that he hadn't noticed it had fallen; extraordinary how careless some people are about things of that kind. It is a letter-case; let's hope there's nothing in it which he would not like to meet the public eye. What have we here? Papers which, apparently, are of value only to the owner. What's in this?" In one of the compartments of the case was a single paper. Mr. Morgan took it out, unfolded it, read it, not once only, but twice, and again a third time. The contents of the paper seemed to puzzle him; he stared at it hard, rubbing his forehead as he did so, as if he hoped by the mere force of vision to get at its meaning. Then he smiled, as if suddenly a light had dawned on him. "So that's it, is it? To think of his leaving a thing like this lying about on the floor! What a foolish man! I never had a high opinion of Herbert Nash; but that he should leave a thing like this for any one to find, and borrow; dear, dear! I never should have thought it. Let's replace these papers which are of no value to any one but the owner. And the case we'll put upon the mantelpiece; so that he'll see it directly he returns, when he'll understand the risk he's run." The letter-case which he had picked up from the floor he put on the mantelpiece, in plain sight; but the paper which he had taken from it he slipped into a case of his own; and that case he placed in his own pocket. When the diminutive maid returned with a basket full of parcels, she found him lounging on the doorstep. His manner to her was affable; as it nearly always was to every one. "You've been rather more than five minutes, haven't you?" "Yes, sir, I'm afraid I have; but they kept me at the grocer's." "Did they? Ah! I don't think I shall wait for my friends to return." He grinned as he said "friends." "Tell them that Mr. Morgan called; Mr. Stephen Morgan, of Cloverlea. Do you understand?" "Yes, sir; Mr. Stephen Morgan, of Cloverlea." "Exactly. And you can also tell them that I shall call again; I can't say quite when, but I certainly shall call again before they leave Littlehampton. You understand that also?" "Yes, sir; you'll call again; you can't say quite when, but certainly before they leave Littlehampton." "That's it; you have it just right. Mind you give them the messages as I gave them you; and here's a shilling for your trouble." He presented her with a shilling; and left the maid all smiles. CHAPTER XXV ON THEIR HONEYMOON Mr. and Mrs. Nash had been spending the afternoon in Arundel Park. When they returned to their rooms at Littlehampton they were met by the diminutive maid with a message. "If you please, Mr. Stephen Morgan of Cloverlea called." "Mr.---- who?" asked Mr. Nash. Mrs. Nash changed colour. The maid repeated the visitor's name. "She must mean Morgan the butler; what does he mean by coming here?" "I--I can't think." She was conscious of that sudden sickness which she had experienced once before; all at once the room seemed to be whirling round and round. The maid went on. "He said he'd call again; he couldn't say quite when, but he'd certainly call again before you left Littlehampton." "Like his impudence! What on earth can the fellow mean? By the way, Louisa, have you seen a letter-case of mine lying about?" "No, sir, that I haven't." Mr. Nash went into the next room, hurriedly. So soon as he was through the door he saw the letter-case upon the mantelpiece, where Mr. Morgan had left it. The sight of it seemed to surprise him. "Who put it there? I'll swear I didn't. Louisa, have you been in here since I went out?" "No, sir; not once." "Has Mrs. Lorrimer?" "I don't think so, sir; she's been out; she only come in just before you did." He was searching the letter-case, turning it literally inside out. Suddenly he went to the door. "Louisa, come here!" Louisa came. He spoke to her in lowered tones, as if he did not wish what he said to be heard in the next room, where his wife still was. "Who was in when Mr. Morgan came?" "If you please, sir, I was; Mrs. Lorrimer, she was out." "Where you in all the time that he was here?" "No, sir; I had to go out and do some errands." "And was he alone in the house while you were gone?" "Yes, sir; he was outside the front door when I came back; it was then he gave me the message about his calling again." So surprising a look came on Mr. Nash's face that the girl shrunk back, almost as if she had been afraid that he would strike her. He went back into the bedroom, shutting the door with a bang. He stood glaring about him, as if beside himself with rage. Then, with an effort, he steadied himself. Again he turned the letter-case inside out, going carefully through the papers it contained. Then he searched the room so methodically that even a pin could hardly have escaped his notice, moving every article it contained, his wife's trunks, his own boxes, even turning down the bedclothes and looking under the pillows, going down on his knees to peer under the bed. When all his hunting came to nothing he leaned his elbows on the mantelpiece and shut his eyes, as if suffering physical pain. In the next room his wife was fighting a fight of her own. So soon as he left her she dropped on to a chair, as if her legs refused her support. A curious change had come over her face, and her lips were twitching; she looked furtively about her, as if she was afraid of she knew not what. When she heard the bedroom door banged, and she knew that her husband had dismissed the maid, she called, "Louisa," softly; so softly that one wondered if she wished to be heard. But Louisa did hear, appearing with a startled visage in the doorway. "Who--who did Mr. Morgan ask for?" The question was put so softly that it was nearly whispered; the speaker's tongue and lips seemed parched. "Please, ma'am, he asked for you." "For me? What--what did he say?" "Please, ma'am, he said 'Is Mrs. Nash in?'" "Mrs. Nash? You're sure he said Mrs. Nash?" "Yes, ma'am, quite sure." "And when you told him I wasn't in, did he ask for Mr. Nash?" "No, ma'am; he said he'd wait." "How--how long did he wait?" "Maybe twenty minutes, maybe half-an-hour; please, ma'am, I couldn't say exactly." "And did he seem angry?" "No, ma'am; quite pleasant. He gave me a shilling as he was going." "A shilling! Oh! Now tell me, exactly, what was the message he left." "If you please, ma'am, he told me to tell you exactly what he said, so I took particular notice." She repeated word for word what Mr. Morgan had said; Mrs. Nash listening with singular intentness, as if her attention was fixed not so much on the actual words as on what was behind them. When the girl had finished she sat still, as if pondering. Louisa roused her. "If you please, ma'am, can I lay for supper?" Mrs. Nash rose with a little jump. "Supper! of course; how silly I am! I was quite forgetting about supper. Certainly, Louisa, you can lay for supper; I--I think I'm quite ready for it." When she went into the bedroom her husband was still standing with his elbows on the mantelpiece and his face to the wall. As she entered he looked round with a start; the pair stood looking at each other as if each was taken aback by something which was on the other's face. She spoke first, in a voice which seemed to tremble. "Herbert, what--what's the matter?" "The matter?" He laughed, a forced laugh. "Nothing's the matter; why do you ask what's the matter?" "You're--you're looking so strange." "That's your imagination, my dear. What is the matter is that I've got a touch of headache--one of my mother's headaches; you remember what I've told you about the headaches she used to have. I fancy the sun was stronger than I thought." "I didn't notice it; you said nothing about it." "No; I didn't notice it at the time. I expect that what I want is my supper; it'll be better after I've had something to eat." "Have you found your letter-case?" "Oh yes, yes; I've found my letter-case; I must have dropped it out of my pocket as I was putting on my coat--very stupid of me; but I've found it all right. Anyhow there wasn't anything in it of very great consequence, so it wouldn't have mattered much if I hadn't." It was a curious meal, that supper of theirs. It was as if ghosts sat with them at the table; phantoms of horror; one by his side, and one at hers, whose presence each hoped was hidden from the other. Conversation languished, and they were in general so talkative; the efforts they made to disguise their incapacity for speech were pathetic. Their appetites were as poor as their talking powers, and that although each had professed to be ready to make an excellent meal. He ate little, and what he did eat was with an obvious effort; she ate still less, each mouthful seemed to choke her. When the make-believe repast was at an end Mr. Nash got up. "I'm afraid my headache isn't much better; I think I'll go for a turn on the front; the night air may do it good." She also rose. "It won't take me a minute to put on my hat; I'll come with you." He was not so pleased at her suggestion as he might have been. "I think, if you don't mind, I'll go alone; I don't feel as if I were in a mood for company." She seemed hurt. "Oh, Herbert, don't leave me behind! I won't keep you waiting; I'll come without my hat." But he still professed unwillingness for her society, speaking almost roughly. "Don't I tell you I'd sooner go alone? Can't you take a hint?" It was the first time he had spoken to her like that since they had been married, which was not so very long ago. Had he struck her he could not have hurt her more. When he had gone, without another word, or a kiss, or a sign of tenderness, she sat staring at the nearly untouched meal, and shivered, although the night was warm. What had happened to Herbert, to have produced such a change in his manner? Could Morgan have left a note for him, or a message for his own private ear; or dropped a hint; or communicated with him without her knowledge? As Louisa cleared away the supper things she cross-examined her. The girl told all that she had to tell again; Elaine could find nothing in her story which would account for the singularity of her husband's demeanour; but on one point she fastened, when the maid told her that she had left the visitor in the house alone. With Mr. Morgan in sole possession of the premises, Elaine saw instant possibilities. What might he not have been doing while Louisa was out? He might--he certainly might have intruded himself in her bedroom; if he had gone so far he might have gone much farther. At the thought of what he might have done she felt inclined to shake Louisa for giving him the chance of doing it; instead, however, of assaulting the maid she hurried off to learn, if she could, what he had done. Apparently nothing. So far as she could perceive everything in the bedroom remained untouched, just as she had left it. She opened her trunk, and took out her dressing-case, to make sure; she kept her dressing-case in her locked trunk for greater security. Herbert laughed at her for her caution, but she did not mind; she knew its secret, he did not. After all it was perhaps as well he had left her behind; she never had a chance of peeping at her hidden hoard while he was there. Morgan had not touched that; that was safe enough. She examined it with feverish fingers, fearful every moment of her husband's return. The tale of the money was correct; nothing was missing there. When she had done counting she hesitated, and thought, a big bundle of notes in her hand. She slipped some of them into the bosom of her dress--notes for a hundred pounds. Now that Morgan had thrust himself again upon the scene they might be wanted; anything might happen; she might not be able to get at her store at a moment's notice, with Herbert always hovering round. She was just as anxious to keep the secret of her hiding-place from her husband as from Morgan, or from any one. She had not long returned the dressing-case to the trunk, and locked the trunk, and placed the notes representing a hundred pounds in a more convenient spot than her bodice, when her husband returned. As he came bustling into the bedroom she perceived at once that his mood had changed. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her, rather boisterously; his breath told her he had been drinking. "Hello, old girl! that headache's better; the stroll has done it good." She wondered if it was the stroll or the refreshment he had taken; she had already discovered that stimulants made of him another man; even after one bottle of ale he was not the same man he had been before. Her cue was to ignore the part which alcohol might have played in affecting a cure. "I am so glad you're better, dear; I know what it is to have a headache; I believe I've got one. Please mayn't I go out on to the common now?" He laughed at her, lifting her off her feet. "I'll carry you," he said. And he did; out of the house, across the road, not putting her down till he had borne her on to the grass; then, running the risk of what eyes there might be about to see, she gave him a kiss to pay for porterage. Presently they were, outwardly, on proper honeymooning terms again, each making a gallant, and not wholly unsuccessful, effort to shut out from actual vision the ghosts which kept step at their sides. When they had retired to rest Herbert Nash said to his wife-- "Do you know, I think I have had about enough of Littlehampton; what do you say?" "I say what you say; only the question is, wherever shall we go to? and when?" "There are heaps of places we can go to; and as for when, we can leave this to-morrow. I'll think it over." He thought it over; all through the night he lay thinking, with wide-open eyes, and so did she. But they did not leave on the morrow, nor the next day. And on the morning of the third day there came a letter addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Nash," which Mr. Nash, being first at the breakfast table, opened. It ran-- "DEAR FRIENDS, "Mrs. Lorrimer's servant will have told you that I called to see you, and also that I propose to call again. Apart from the pleasure which I anticipate from meeting you once more, I have something of the utmost importance which I wish to say to both of you. As I believe you have no pressing engagements, I confidently hope that you will not leave Littlehampton till I have had an opportunity of saying it. I will let you have a wire, advising you of my coming, and shall be glad if you will leave word at the house where, at any moment, you are to be found, as I should not like to miss you a second time. "Adding my congratulations to the numerous expressions of goodwill which, I do not doubt, you have already received on the auspicious occasion of your marriage, believe me to be, "Yours most sincerely, "STEPHEN MORGAN." Mr. Nash was reading this epistle a second time when his wife came in. "What have you got there?" she asked. He looked up with a frown, seeming to hesitate about what to say, then answered-- "It's from that fellow Morgan; the most insolent, presumptuous scrawl. What he's driving at I can't imagine; the fellow must be stark, staring mad." If Mr. Nash had been in an observant mood he might have noticed that the smile which had been on his wife's face gave way to quite a different expression, and that she shivered, as she always did do when Mr. Morgan's name was mentioned. "What does he say? Let me look at his letter." He was folding it up, as with the intention of consigning it to his pocket unseen by his wife; at her point-blank request he seemed to hesitate, then tossed it to her across the table. "If you can explain what the fellow means by sending a letter like that I can't; it's beyond me altogether." As she read he commented. "Fancy calling us 'Dear friends.'" "What an extraordinary thing for him to do." "A butler!" "It's quite inexplicable." "What on earth has he to say to us which is of the least importance?" "That's it; what can he have?" "He practically orders us not to leave the place till it pleases him to come." "It does--it does amount to that, doesn't it?" "Fancy his telling us to let them know in the house where, at any moment, we're to be found, as if the one thing to be considered was his sovereign pleasure!" "That is really remarkable." "Remarkable! I should say so; remarkable is a mild way of putting it. I've half-a-mind to pack directly after breakfast and leave the place this morning; the idea of his attempting to dictate to us! As I say, the only explanation I can think of is that the fellow's stark, staring mad." "That--that must be it." Mr. Nash continued to comment on Mr. Morgan's insolent epistle while he trifled with his breakfast; but it was noticeable that he only trifled. If he had had an appetite it had vanished; it seemed as if the man's impertinence must have affected him more than he would have cared to own. It was the same with his wife, she had no appetite either. Indeed, when one came to think of it, neither of them had eaten much since they had first heard of Mr. Morgan's call. The fact had even been noticed by the landlady. "I can't think what's the matter with them all at once," she declared to her diminutive maid, Louisa. "They used to eat heartily enough; as you know, I remarked on it to you." "Yes, Mrs. Lorrimer, that you did." "But these last couple of days they've scarcely touched a thing. There's been nothing the matter with the food, and I'm sure there's been nothing the matter with the cooking; it must be them that's wrong." When breakfast was finished--such a breakfast as it was; even the soles went out practically as they came in--Mrs. Nash went to put on her hat preparatory to going out with her husband on to the front, as she usually did on fine mornings; he with a newspaper, and she with a book. That morning the process was a lengthy one; she seemed preoccupied, as if her mind was so full that there was no room in it for her hat. She moved restlessly about the room, as if her thoughts kept her in motion. All at once it seemed that she arrived at a sudden resolution. "I know what I'll do; I'll get Herbert to go; we will go, before he comes; we'll go to-day. I'll talk to Herbert directly we get outside. I believe he wants to go as much as I do; though I--I don't know why. And this time we won't stay in England; we'll go abroad, as far away as ever we can; somewhere where that wretch can't get at us; and--and we'll leave no address behind." While the lady so resolved the gentleman--unconscious of her resolution--waited for her on the doorstep. As he waited he saw, advancing towards the house on a bicycle, a telegraph boy. Some instinct induced him to leave that doorstep and move to meet him. "Got a telegram for me--Nash?" "Nash? Yes, sir." The boy jumped off; he produced the familiar yellow envelope. "Herbert Nash." "That's for me; that's all right. Wait while I see if there's an answer." He tore the envelope open; this was the message it contained: "Coming by the train due 12.28. You had better meet me at the station alone.--STEPHEN MORGAN." "There is no answer," Mr. Nash informed the boy. The boy got on his machine and rode away. Mr. Nash read that telegram again, then stuffed it into his jacket pocket, swearing beneath his breath. He looked quite ugly when he swore. He glanced at his watch, as if to make sure about the time, then returned to his place upon the doorstep. He said nothing about the telegram to his wife. CHAPTER XXVI AN OFFER OF FRIENDSHIP Mr. Nash was at the station when the 12.28 came in, and alone; it might have been by some sort of coincidence that he happened to be there just then, but Mr. Morgan seemed to take it for granted that he had come to meet him, an inference which Mr. Nash apparently resented. Mr. Morgan came up to him smiling in the most friendly fashion, and with hand held out. "My dear Nash, how are you?" There was no smile on Mr. Nash's face, and he ignored the proffered hand. "Thank you, Mr. Morgan, I am well." "And my good friend, your dear wife? blooming, eh?" "I'm not aware that Mrs. Nash ever was a friend of yours." "No! my dear fellow! when we were so often under the same roof together." "Do the servants of a house always regard their master's friends as their own?" "My dear Nash, if you hadn't said that I should have said it was meant to be nasty. I was in the service of the head of the house, and your wife was a sort of attendant of the daughter's. "Do you dare to say that my wife was ever Miss Lindsay's attendant?" "Unpaid attendant, my boy, unpaid; sort of hanger-on--poor companion. I received a regular income; she got an occasional frock; some article of clothing; now and then a few pounds; as it were, the crumbs which fell from Miss Lindsay's table. Of course, pecuniarily mine was much the better position of the two; but I always have been one to overlook a mere financial difference, and I hope I always shall be." "Look here, Morgan, if you're come down with the express intention of being insolent, I'll wring your neck, here, in the station." Mr. Nash looked as if he were capable of at least trying to perform that operation on Mr. Morgan there and then, but Mr. Morgan only smiled. "My dear Nash! the idea! Nothing can be further from my wish than to be insolent to you; as I'll show you before I've done. Where can we go where we can be quiet, and have a little chat together? And afterwards if you'll take me to 37, Ocean Villas, and offer me a little lunch, and give me an opportunity of renewing my acquaintance with your charming wife, I think you'll find that we are on better terms than you seem to suppose. Where are you going?" Mr. Nash was striding out of the station. "To the golf-links; you say you want to go somewhere where we can be quiet; you'll have the quietude you want there." "Thank you; I don't think we need go quite so far as the golf-links, really; nor is that exactly the sort of solitude I was thinking of. You come with me; I'll be conductor." He opened the door of a fly which was by the kerb, and stood with the handle in his hand. "Step in." The two men looked at each other, as if each was measuring the other's strength. Then Mr. Nash said-- "Where do you think you're going?" Mr. Morgan spoke to the driver. "Take us to the east end of the promenade, right to the extreme end." Then he turned to Nash. "We shall have all the quietude we want there. After you." Nash hesitated, then entered the fly; Morgan followed; the fly drove off. As it rumbled along Mr. Morgan beguiled the way by spirited attempts at conversation; but he had all the talking to himself; not once did his companion open his lips. Mr. Nash sat with unbending back, stiff neck, grim face, looking straight in front of him; Mr. Morgan might not have been in the same vehicle for all the notice he took of him. Under the circumstances his unruffled affability did the latter gentleman credit. The vehicle set them down not only at the extreme end of the promenade, but beyond it. When the fly had gone Mr. Morgan called his companion's attention to their surroundings. "You see! where could we have more privacy, even on the golf-links? Not a creature within many yards of us. We can sit on the beam of this groyne--could it be at a more convenient height?--and talk at our leisure." Again Mr. Nash seemed to be measuring the other with his eye; his bearing did not point to his being at all in the conversational frame of mind which Mr. Morgan's words suggested; indeed he said as much. "Now, my man, if you have anything to say, out with it; I've not the dimmest notion what it is you think you've got to say; to be quite frank, your whole conduct looks to me like infernal insolence; but, whatever it is, make it short; and take my advice, and be careful how you say it." "My dear Nash, I assure you that no one could be more careful than I shall be." "And don't you call me your dear Nash! you swollen-headed butler! I don't propose to allow a servant to treat me as an equal, nor do I propose to consort with him." "Don't you? Now that shows how different we are. I don't mind with whom I consort; I'm even willing to consort with a thief." "What--what the devil do you mean?" Mr. Nash's eyes blazed; but they blazed out of a face which, consciously to himself or not, had suddenly grown pale. Mr. Morgan smiled as affably as ever; he offered Mr. Nash his cigar-case. "Try one of my cigars; I think you'll find them something rather exceptional." "Confound your cigars! I don't want your cigars! What do you mean by what you said just now?" "You know what I mean as well as I do. There are moments when it's so unpleasant to have to dot one's i's; surely this is one. Then isn't it rather childish to pretend that you don't know what I mean when you do?" "Are you going to tell me what you mean?" "Certainly, if you insist; but is it wise?" "Morgan, am I to knock you down?" "You can try if you like; I dare say I can put up as good a fight as you can." Again they seemed to gauge each other, eye to eye; Nash as if half beside himself with rage, Morgan all smiles. "Will you tell me what you mean?" Morgan looked away from the other's face, up into the air. He blew a ring of smoke from the cigar which he had lighted, following it with his eyes. Nothing could have been pleasanter than his manner, or more affable than his smile; he spoke as one who meditated. "I happen to know that you borrowed certain sums of money from the late Mr. Donald Lindsay, for which you gave him notes of hand, amounting altogether to a little over a hundred pounds; a flea-bite to him, but a deal to you. When you were going through Mr. Lindsay's papers, on behalf of his daughter, you came upon those notes of hand; you put them into your pocket; you concealed their existence; in plainer words, you stole them." "It's--it's an infernal lie!" "My dear Nash, I saw you do it." "You saw me!" "I did. If you like I can describe to you, in detail, how you found them, and where, and how you looked to an unprejudiced observer, and precisely what you did when you had found them; but is it necessary?" "Why--why don't I knock you down?" "Because you have more sense. Pray don't indulge in heroics for my benefit, I beg of you; I know! I know! I also saw you steal another paper." "What other paper?" "That's what I said to myself; what can that other paper be? I confess that I was gravelled; and I continued gravelled until I called on you the other day at Ocean Villas, and found it in your letter-case." "You--you scoundrel!" "That's a hard word, from one who is both a scoundrel and a thief. Don't let us bandy epithets. Here is the paper--gently! I should have said, here is a copy of the paper. You and I know how desirable it is that so important a document should be in safe keeping. I have arranged that if I don't turn up at a certain place, at a certain time, the actual letter--you know it is a letter--will be posted to Dr. Banyard, together with a history of how it came into my possession, and particulars of those notes of hand you stole; so let us hope, for your sake, that no accident will happen to me. I will read you the copy I made of the letter; you will possibly have forgotten the precise wording, and the precise wording is of such importance-- 'DEAR SIR, 'Referring to the acceptances of yours which we hold, and which fall due on the 7th inst., they reached us, in the ordinary course, through a client with whom we have done business before; who informed us that they came to him from Mr. Frank Clifford, of Marlborough Buildings, Farringdon Road, E.C., who, we presume, discounted them for you. We do not know that we are called upon to furnish you with this information, and, as your inquiry is an unusual one, we shall be glad to know why you make it. 'Your obedient servants, 'GULDENHEIM AND CO.' Now that, my dear Nash, is the letter which you found; I don't know if your memory will enable you to recognize the accuracy of the copy." Mr. Nash was silent, presenting a curious picture of indecision; of the man who lets "I dare not" wait upon "I would." Mr. Morgan went affably on, diplomatically ignoring the singularity of the other's attitude. "To the superficial eye there is nothing in that letter; it is a mere routine business communication; in fact, however, as matters were, you could scarcely have found anything more important. I take it that you recognized this, or you would hardly have appropriated it; but I fancy that you only recognized it dimly. Your whole after-behaviour seems to point to it." Mr. Morgan glanced round at the moment, in time to catch the ghost of a smile, which seemed to flicker across Mr. Nash's face; Mr. Morgan's comment on that flickering smile was characteristic. "Perhaps not so dimly as I supposed; the springs of human action do lie so deep. Perhaps, after all, it has occurred to you, as it has to me, that that letter killed Donald Lindsay. You remember where you found it? Lindsay's was a pedestal writing-table; it was on the floor, under one of the pedestals, with one corner of the paper just showing. I think that was the last letter Donald Lindsay ever read. He had read it again and again before, and was re-reading it; but that re-reading was just the one too many. The strain of that cumulative shock was greater than he could bear; something snapped; he fell forward; the letter slipped from his fingers, under one of the pedestals, where it might have remained but for your sharp eyes." Mr. Morgan held the paper out in front of him with the air of one who is explaining something which he desires to make quite plain. "Now what is there in this letter which could have produced so extraordinary an effect upon a person possessed of so much self-restraint as Donald Lindsay undoubtedly was? What does the letter itself tell us? It tells us that Messrs. Guldenheim, as is the custom, I have reason to know, of a certain type of usurer, had written to advise him that certain acceptances of his, which matured at a certain date, had come into their hands. I'll bet sixpence that Lindsay was a man who never in his life put his name on a piece of paper which was likely, in the ordinary course, as they put it, to fall into the hands of carrion like the Guldenheims; that first communication of theirs must in itself have been a shock to him. But he was a cautious man; he liked to move gently; whether he already had suspicions I cannot say; evidently he wrote a non-committal letter, asking them from whom they had obtained acceptances of his. This was their reply; they informed him that originally the acceptances came from Mr. Frank Clifford, of Marlborough Buildings, Farringdon Road, and that information killed him. Is that how it occurred to you?" "Never mind what occurred to me." "Quite so, I won't; I'll content myself with telling you what occurred to me. I've only known what was in this letter a couple of days, and, with its aid, I have already learned that, when he died, Donald Lindsay was, probably, one of the richest men in England. Have you learned that?" "I--I had my doubts." "But you hadn't verified them? I see. Other matters interfered; for instance, your marriage. Now, my dear Nash, pray understand that I congratulate you, from the bottom of my heart, on what is, in all respects, an auspicious event; but you must forgive my saying that you were one of the last persons I should have associated with a love match. Now I happen to know that neither Miss Harding nor you had money, or prospects. Indeed, I've been wondering how you managed between you to pay the marriage fees, to say nothing of the expenses of your honeymoon. Did a good fairy drop down from the skies?" "It strikes me, Morgan, that you are constitutionally incapable of seeing how infernally insolent you are." "Am I? Perhaps; you should be a better judge of insolence than I. And believe me that I quite understand that a man is entitled to keep his own counsel; I don't wish to pry into your secrets; only I was wondering if you had a secret. However, to return to business. Do you know that this letter means a fortune for you, and incidentally, perhaps, also one for me; but certainly a fortune for you. All we have to do is to pull together; treat each other as friends, not enemies; although I say it, you'll find my friendship well worth having, from every point of view. Don't let the accident of my having once been a butler stand in the way; that's nonsense. Let me tell you that the butler at Cloverlea had a better position, in every respect, than the average clerk in a government office; as for your banks, and such dustbins--pah! he was better off than many a solicitor; though I know that's a delicate subject. But don't let's cut each other's throats for the sake of a merely imaginary social distinction; let's be friends, and I'll undertake to make your fortune. That's the proposition I've come down to Littlehampton to make." CHAPTER XXVII A ROYAL ROAD TO FORTUNE Mr. Nash considered. The expression which had been on his face a few minutes ago had nearly vanished. The ex-butler had expressed himself in terms which the solicitor felt might justify him in modifying the attitude he had been disposed to take up. That Morgan had been, and still was, presumptuous went without saying; at the same time, as matters were turning out, it seemed that there were things which might be said on the other side; at least so it appeared to Herbert Nash. On the whole, he was inclined to concede as much. He took a few steps, to and fro, beside the groyne; then planting himself directly in front of Morgan, he told him his mind, rather in sorrow, perhaps, than in anger; indeed his bearing altogether was very different from what it had been. "I tell you what it is, Morgan, your conduct, from first to last, has been bad." Mr. Morgan smiled at him, affably. "Has it? That's good, coming from you." "That's where you've got the wrong end of the stick; whatever I've done I've done nothing to you." "No; and therefore you think that I've no right to put a finger in the pie you've found." "You'd no right to force yourself into my place, and run the rule over my things." "That was luck, Nash, pure luck. I didn't call intending to run the rule over your things; is it likely? But if you will carry papers in your letter-case, you shouldn't leave your letter-case lying about." "Idiot that I was! I found what I'd done soon after I'd started, but I was fool enough not to come back for it." "You weren't an idiot; not at all; it was the best thing that could have happened for both of us--that I should find it." "I'm afraid I can't agree. To begin with, see how awkward you've made it for me with my wife." "Have I?" "She can't understand what I have done which gives you any title to call yourself my friend--you!" "Can't she?" "And how am I going to explain? I may only be--as you suggest--a poor brute of a country solicitor; but you forget that she's a lady." "Not for one moment. Mrs. Nash is a perfect lady; none knows that better than I do. But, if I help you to make your fortune; if we become partners in, say, a mercantile speculation; if I show you how to pour gold, and all the pretty things gold can buy, into her lap, will she require any better explanation? I think not. My dear fellow, you exaggerate the difficulties she will make; believe me. "You talk very largely, but how are you going to do these things? I had the letter, and I didn't see my way." "You didn't? Then that shows how fortunate it was that you communicated the contents of the letter to me; because I do. Tell me--now be frank; I'll be perfectly frank with you; it's to our common interest to be frank with each other--how far did you go?" "I looked up Mr. Frank Clifford." "And found?" "That Marlborough Buildings is the head office of Peter Piper's Popular Pills; of which business Clifford's the managing director." "And what else?" "That's as far as I got; I meant to go on after--after----" "After the honeymoon? I see; I've got a great deal further than that, a great deal. I take it you're aware that Peter Piper's Popular Pills is one of the medicines of the hour; the profits are stupendous; sometimes amounting to a hundred thousand pounds in a year, possibly more." "I dare say; that doesn't want much finding out, everybody knows it; but what's it to do with us?" "A good deal." "How?" "We're going to have a share of the business, and of the profits, and probably of former profits also." "Are we indeed? How are we going to manage it?" "Do you know who the proprietor was?" Again the two men eyed each other; this time as if Nash was trying to read in Morgan's eyes the answer to his question. "He was Donald Lindsay of Cloverlea." "You don't mean it?" "I do." "Are you sure?" "Perfectly. He called himself Joseph Oldfield; he was a bachelor; he was a reserved man, standoffish, of secretive habits. He had a flat in Bloomsbury Square, I've seen it, where he was supposed to spend most of his time in thinking out new advertising dodges; the present position of Peter Piper's Popular Pills is principally owing to clever advertising. The proprietor was his own advertising agent, he was a master of the art. He called himself, as I've said, Joseph Oldfield in town, and in the country he was Donald Lindsay of Cloverlea." "The old fox!" "I don't think you can exactly call him that; there was nothing in the opprobrious sense foxy about him. He was one of those men who live double lives, owing, one might say, to the pressure of circumstances; there are more of them about than is supposed. He bought the pill business when it was at a very low ebb; he hadn't very much money himself, at that time, and I dare say he got it for a song. Mrs. Lindsay was just dead; his girl was with her nurses, or at school; for business purposes he called himself Oldfield; it isn't every man who cares to have it known that he's associated with a patent medicine; in England it's quite a common custom for a man to carry on a business under an alias, under half-a-dozen aliases sometimes. As time went on I take it that his secretive habit grew stronger; he became less and less disposed to have it known that Donald Lindsay had anything to do with pills, which do rather stink in people's nostrils; and so he drifted into the double life. That's the word, drifted." "You seem to have got up his history." "I have a way of finding out things; people have noticed it before. Now take Mr. Frank Clifford; I can tell you something about him. He's a young man, a _protégé_ of Oldfield's--we'll call him Oldfield. Oldfield had faith in him, he'd have trusted him with his immortal soul. That's how it was that it was such a shock to him to learn that he had been taking liberties with his name." "But had he?" "Had he what?" "Been taking liberties with Lindsay's name?" "He forged those bills which Guldenheim and his friends got hold of." "That's what I guessed; but guessing's one thing, proof's another." "Of course it is; I've the proof. I have some of the bills; I got hold of them rather neatly, though, as a matter of abstract right, I've as much title to them as anybody else. When you show Mr. Clifford one of them he won't deny he forged it." "Yes; when I show it." "Exactly. I said when you show it to him; and you're going to show it, if necessary, that's part of the scheme; though it mayn't be necessary, since it's quite possible he'll capitulate at once. My dear chap, at the present moment, to all intent's and purposes, Mr. Frank Clifford is the sole proprietor of one of the finest businesses in the world, and one of the largest fortunes in England, while the actual owner is starving in town." "It's hard upon Miss Lindsay." "It's the fortune of war. A little starving won't do her any harm; and I dare say she won't starve long. I never liked the girl." "Nor I." "Then there you are; why worry? She's too superior for me, too good; knocking about in the gutter may bring her down to your level, and mine; I've known it pan out that way where a young woman's concerned. I don't like any one to be too good, it makes me conscious of my own deficiencies; you see, I'm candid. However, she's a factor with whom we may, or may not, deal later. At present we've to concentrate our attention on Clifford; think of the possibilities for him, and for us. No one knows of the connection between Oldfield and Lindsay; no one even knows that he's dead. Clifford already has powers to draw cheques in the name of the firm, within certain limits; a man capable of committing forgery will soon be able to make those limits wider; there's no reason why he shouldn't appropriate to his own use every penny that comes in; as things stand nobody'll be able to call him to account for it; there's no reason why he should not lay hands on the whole of the old gentleman's investments; and they're--you may take it from me that they're magnificent. We're the only persons on this side of the grave who can stop him, and there's no reason why we should, if he gives us a proper share; in other words, if he takes us in as partners." "It's playing with fire." "Not a bit of it; it's playing with nothing that's in the least dangerous, if it's managed as I propose to manage it. You think it over. And now you take me in to lunch, and let me have the pleasure of meeting that charming wife of yours again; I'm starving! And if by the time we've done lunch you haven't formulated a scheme of your own I'll tell you what mine is, and then you'll see that without the slightest danger to either of us, without the shadow of a shade of danger--there's no reason why we shouldn't, within a very short space of time, be worth a quarter of a million apiece." "A quarter of a million!" "At least; we're going to deal with big figures, my boy. It'll pay Clifford, pay him handsomely, to split it up into three parts; and let me tell you that a third ought to come out at a good deal more than a quarter of a million." Herbert Nash hesitated--for his credit's sake let it be written that he did hesitate--but he took Mr. Morgan home with him to lunch. And when his wife saw the visitor coming she would have been almost glad if the earth could have opened to swallow her up; it was as if she beheld avenging fate advancing towards her in the shape of a policeman. Her husband was late; it was long after their usual hour for lunch; he had left no word as to where he had gone; half beside herself with anxiety, she would have liked to send the town crier round in search of him; she had been along the pavement to the corner of this street and the corner of that, to and fro across the common for a glimpse of him along the front; these man[oe]uvres she had repeated again and again, and, standing on the doorstep, was frantically debating within herself as to what could have become of him, as to what she should do, when she saw him coming with Morgan at his side. Then, if she could, she would have run away, but she could not, her feet were as if they had been shod with iron weights, she could not lift them; she could not move; when they came to her she was a white-faced, shivering, terror-stricken little wretch; a poor ghost of the sunny-faced, light-hearted Elaine Harding of such a little while ago. Mr. Nash offered a pretty lame explanation of his appearance with the man of whose presumption in claiming his acquaintance he had spoken with such scorn in the morning. "This is Mr. Morgan; he is going to have some lunch with us; we have business to transact together. You remember Mr. Morgan, Elaine?" As if she ever could forget him! How she would have prayed for the power to forget him if she had dared to hope that such prayers were answered. She hardly heard her husband's words; her white face was turned towards Morgan, as the convicted criminal has eyes only for the judge who is to pronounce his doom. Yet nothing could have been less judge-like than Mr. Morgan's bearing; nothing more affably respectful than the manner of his greeting. He stood before her with uncovered head, without even presuming to offer his hand. "This is indeed an honour to be permitted to meet you again. May I venture to hope that you will allow me to offer my congratulations on the fortunate event which has occurred since I saw you last?" She had to moisten her parched lips with her tongue before she could speak at all. Then-- "Thank you," was all she said to him; and to her husband, "I--I was wondering what had become of you." Nash replied-- "Mr. Morgan had something which he wished to say to me." He led the way into the house; his wife and Morgan followed. He paused at the sitting-room door. "Take Mr. Morgan in there," he said to her. "I will join you in a minute." Dumbly she obeyed; not realizing that he wanted what she did, a few minutes' solitude to enable him to pull himself together. He meant to have them, she had to do without; so that when she was in the room, and the ex-butler, coming after her, closed the door behind him he had her wholly at his mercy. She was still limp and helpless, having had no chance to recover from the shock and horror of encountering him again; a fact of which he, instantly perceiving, took prompt advantage. As he pulled the door to behind him a subtle change took place in his manner; he still smiled, but neither respectfully nor affably. He addressed the cowering woman in front of him as if she were some base creature. "A pretty trick you played me, slipping away like that and leaving no address! Sneaking off with the man you'd paid to marry you, when, if it hadn't been for me, you'd have been in jail; and you call yourself a lady! and I'd treated you as one! Never again, my beauty, never again need you expect me to treat you like a lady, because you've shown me what you are. Now you listen to me! You'll give me five hundred pounds before I leave, or to-night you'll sleep in Littlehampton jail; and when your husband's told what kind of a character he's been diddled into marrying by way of a start he'll throw you out into the road. Now then! that five hundred pounds!" He held out his hand, as if he expected her to give him the money there and then. She presented a pitiable spectacle; being scarcely able to stammer. "I--I--I can't--can't give it you now." "No lies! I'm off them! How much have you got in the house?" "I--I--I might----" Her voice failed her; there was a hiatus in her sentence. "A hundred pounds." "Then you'll give me a hundred pounds within half-an-hour after lunch, and you'll send another four hundred to an address I'll give you within four-and-twenty hours, or I promise you that, in less than an hour after, the man you've bought shall kick you out of this house into a policeman's arms." Before he could speak again, or she either, the door opened to admit the diminutive maid; how she managed to open the door, as she apparently had done, was a mystery, since she was carrying a tray which was nearly as big as herself. And Mr. Nash presently appearing, the three sat down to lunch. CHAPTER XXVIII TO BE--OR NOT TO BE--POSTPONED Daisy Ross was annoyed, almost indignant, and with reason. As she said to Mr. Clifford-- "It's really too ridiculous! One's wedding day is an occasion of some importance, even to a man." Mr. Clifford admitted that it was. "While to a woman it involves a frightful strain." Mr. Clifford again agreed. "Very well, then; a little consideration surely should be shown; Mr. Oldfield's conduct is absurd." "He certainly is placing me in a very awkward position." "I should think he was; considering that the bridesmaids' dresses are practically finished, and that two of them have to go away on the day after the one we fixed, how are we going to postpone the wedding?" "I'm sure I don't know; but what am I to do? His conduct's most mysterious." "My dear Frank, his conduct's not only mysterious, it's monstrous; and I don't care what you say. He knows you are going to be married." "Of course he does; he's known about it all along." "He knows when you are going to be married." "Certainly, I asked him to be present; he gave me to understand that probably he would be." "Then probably he will be." "But suppose I see or hear nothing of him in the meanwhile?" "He is a most exasperating man. How long is it since you have heard anything of him?" "About two months; rather over than under." "Something must have happened to him." "You know his ways; I've told you about them often enough. When he leaves the office, unless he volunteers the information, I never know when I shall see him again, and unless I've some pressing reason for wanting to know I never ask; I've more sense. He dislikes being questioned about anything, and he's always shown what I've felt is really a morbid objection to being questioned about his movements; it's only quite recently that I've known his private address. It isn't as if this sort of thing hadn't happened before; it has, again and again. One evening, about a couple of years ago, he left the office quite late, after being in regular daily attendance, early and late, for some weeks; I expected he would come on the following day in the ordinary course, but I never saw or heard anything of him for close upon four months; then one morning he walked in, and, without offering a word of explanation, took up the thread of affairs just where he had left it, and, what's more, showed quite a good knowledge of what had been going on during his absence." "But what a state things would have got into if it hadn't been for you." "Quite so; that's just the point, he trusts me. In the ordinary course of business I have complete control of everything. If anything unusual turns up, which is of importance, I hold it over for reference to him; but in the general way I run the entire show; which, after all, isn't saying so very much, because, when all is said and done, he's a first-rate man of business and a splendid organizer, so that it's quite easy for me to do. And you know, Daisy, he treats me very generously, and always has done; I've practically a share in the concern, which is a free gift from him." "I suppose you're worth what he gives you." "All the same, I never put in a penny--I never had one to put; and there are hundreds, I dare say thousands, of men who could do all I do, and who'd be only too glad to do it, for a tenth part of what he gives me." "If I were you, I shouldn't tell him so." "He knows, my dear, he knows. He's the same with everybody about the place; it's a principle of his to treat everybody generously who does honest work for him; he wouldn't be happy if he thought that a man wasn't getting a fair share of the fruits of his own labours. In spite of his little eccentricities he's a magnificent fellow, and I couldn't do anything to annoy or disappoint him--not--well, I wouldn't do it." Miss Ross sighed. "You hadn't arranged to be married during that four months' absence of his." "I certainly hadn't." "Suppose the wedding-day had been fixed for two months after he had gone, and he had known it, would you have postponed it indefinitely, till he condescended to turn up again?" "I don't know what I should have done, I really don't; but I tell you what we might do--that is, if you wouldn't mind very much." "Oh, never mind what I mind; my wishes aren't of the slightest consequence; I shall begin to wish that I wasn't going to be married!" "Daisy! don't say that, even in jest. It's as hard upon me as it is upon you." "Honestly, Frank, I don't see it. To a man, having his wedding-day postponed, and that indefinitely, is, of course, rather a nuisance; but to a woman, it's--it's quite a different thing." "But I'm not going to suggest that it shall be postponed." "Then what are you going to suggest? What have you been suggesting for the last--I don't know how long?" "That's because the idea never occurred to me until just now; I don't know why; I suppose it's because I'm stupid." "Now what idea have you got into your head?" "I think I see a way out of the difficulty; that is, if you'll agree." "Agree to what?" "The great thing for us is to be married, isn't it?" "I don't know that I'm prepared to admit it till I know what you're leading up to." "Very well, then, as one of the parties I'll admit it; the one thing for which I'm living is to be married to you; when I am married I'll be happy." "Thank you; that's very nice of you; but I'm not going to admit anything till I know what it is you've got at the back of your head." "We're going to be married on Thursday--that is, this day week." "We were to have been married on Thursday; I know my wedding dress is coming home on Wednesday." "And after the wedding we're to start for a three months' tour on the continent, something like a honeymoon." "We were to have started for a three months' tour." "That's what I arranged with Mr. Oldfield. I said to him, 'Mr. Oldfield, after my marriage--at which I trust you'll be present--I hope to go abroad with my wife for a month, if I can be spared from the office.' He said to me, 'Clifford, why not make it three months?' I stared; he went on: 'A man isn't married often!'" "Frank!" "That's what he said; and it's true. 'Therefore there's no reason why he shouldn't make the most of it when he is; you take your wife abroad for three months, I'll see you're spared from the office.' And that's how it was arranged." "Yes, and then he goes and disappears, and I'm not to be married at all, and that's how it's disarranged." "Not a bit of it; the wedding needn't be postponed; the more I think of it the less reason do I see why it should." "Frank! Then what ever have you been talking to me about ever since I don't know when!" "Mr. Oldfield's continued absence needn't prevent my sparing a day to get away from the office to be married." "Needn't it! I'm sure it's very nice of you to talk about sparing a whole day for a trifling thing like that." "In any case, all that need suffer is the three months' tour. If Mr. Oldfield hasn't turned up by Thursday, after we're married we'll go for a weekend honeymoon. I'll return to the office on Monday. The house is ready, all it needs is its mistress; you'll be installed a little sooner than you thought, and when Mr. Oldfield does appear we'll go for our three months' tour." Miss Ross sat looking at him with rather a complicated expression on her pretty face, as if she did not quite know what to make of his proposition. "Frank, why didn't you think of it before? instead of worrying me, and making my hair come out by handfuls, by keeping on saying that if Mr. Oldfield didn't return in time, you couldn't possibly desert Peter Piper's Popular Pills, and that therefore the wedding would have to be postponed till you didn't know when." "I don't know; but I didn't. I fancy, sweetheart, that it's because I was so looking forward to that scamper through Europe. It's so long since I had a real holiday--and such a holiday--with you! If you only knew how often I have dreamed of it!" "And do you think I haven't dreamed of it too?" They were sitting very close together; she looked at him with almost comic wistfulness as she added, "A week-end honeymoon will be rather a comedown, won't it?" "Compared to that elaborate tour, which we have so carefully planned, in which we were to go to so many delightful places, and do so many delicious things, rather! But it won't spoil by being kept; we'll have it; and in the meanwhile a week-end will be better than nothing." "Frank, I'll tell you something. Rather than that the wedding should be put off I'd go straight home with you to our home, from the church doors; or I'd return with you to the office, and sit on a stool, till your day's work was done." "Sweetheart!" There was an interval, during which more was done than said. Then she observed-- "Now let me clearly understand; even if Mr. Oldfield returns on Wednesday we go for our tour." "Even if he puts in an appearance in the church." "Well, let's hope he won't put it off till quite so late as that; because, though perhaps you mayn't be aware of it, there is such a thing as packing; one doesn't pack for a week-end just as one packs for three months on the Continent. But, in any case, the wedding is not to be postponed." "It is not to be postponed. Let me put it like this. You talk it over with your father----" "Frank! don't be absurd! I fancy I see myself talking it over with papa. Why, do you know what he says? He says he can't see why a girl need make such a fuss about such a little thing as being married; he wonders why she can't go in a 'bus to the nearest registrar's, and then go, in a spirit of meek thankfulness, to her new home in another 'bus, and start darning the old socks which her husband has been storing up against her coming." "Well, there's something in it." "Is there? At any rate, I'm not going to talk it over with papa; he wouldn't talk it over with me if I wanted him to." "Then talk it over with your mother, and--and the rest of the family." "It is a matter for my decision, not for theirs." "Precisely; only there's no harm in observing certain forms. And I'll make another effort to see if I can find out something which will point to Oldfield's whereabouts. I'll go round to his flat in Bloomsbury Mansions; they sometimes do hear something of him there; then I'll try every other place I can think of--there aren't many places, but there are some--then I'll come round to-morrow and tell you the result of my efforts, and you'll tell me the result of the family consultation." "I can tell you that before you go; the wedding is not to be postponed." "Of course the wedding is not to be postponed; but still there are things you'll like to talk over with them--they'll expect it; and then they can talk them over with me--you know the sort of thing. And anyhow I hope you don't object to my coming again to-morrow, if only to be told once more that the wedding is not to be postponed." "Of course I don't object to your coming again to-morrow; you'll hear of it if you don't." "But in case I should be prevented, don't you think you'd better give me an extra kiss or two?" "Frank! I'm always kissing you." "Not always; sometimes I'm kissing you." "You'll soon grow tired." "Shall I? Be careful what you say! you'll be punished if you say it." "I hope you never will grow tired." "Sweetheart, you mustn't even say it in jest!" The rest was that sort of talk which we have most of us talked once; those of us who haven't are to be pitied; it is a kind of talk which is well worth talking. Then Mr. Clifford went on to Bloomsbury Mansions, which was Joseph Oldfield's London address; indeed, so far as his manager knew, it was the proprietor of Peter Piper's Popular Pills' only address. As usual he found the porter in the entrance hall; of him he made inquiry. "Well, Coles, any news of Mr. Oldfield?" In the porter's manner, as he replied, there was a significance which Mr. Clifford did not understand. "I can't say that there's any news of Mr. Oldfield exactly; but there's something going on." "Going on? What do you mean?" "In his flat." "In his flat! What's going on in his flat?" "That's more than I can tell you, sir; but there's some one in there; in fact, there's two people in there. One of them says he's Mr. Oldfield's solicitor; I don't know who the other is, but he may be another solicitor for all I can tell; he looks as if he might be something in that line." Frank Clifford opened his eyes. "His solicitor? What solicitor? What's his name?" "Seemed to me he was shy about giving his name; but when I made it clear that he wasn't going up unless he did, he said his name was Nash--Herbert Nash. He's quite a young chap--younger than the other, though he's not old." "Nash? Herbert Nash? I never heard Mr. Oldfield speak of a solicitor named Nash; but of course he may have a dozen solicitors of whom I know nothing. How did they get in? Did you let them in?" "Not me; they brought Mr. Oldfield's own key; Mr. Nash had it." "That looks as if they'd at least heard from Mr. Oldfield quite recently, which is more than I have. It's lucky I happened to come just now. Take me up, Coles; I should like to see Mr. Nash." The porter said, as they were stepping into the lift-- "I hope, sir, there's nothing wrong with Mr. Oldfield--that he's not ill, or anything like that; but it looks odd his solicitor coming instead of him, and that without giving any notice." "It doesn't necessarily follow, Coles, that there's anything wrong with him on that account; most probably Mr. Oldfield is abroad, and has sent his solicitor instructions, in order to carry out which Mr. Nash has to visit his flat." The lift stopped; the porter pointed to a door. "I hope you're right, sir; I should be sorry to hear that anything had happened to Mr. Oldfield; to my thinking he's the pleasantest gentleman we've got in the Mansions, and I don't care who hears me say so. That's his flat, sir. You'll find them in there now. Shall I ring, sir?" "No; I'll ring." Mr. Clifford rang. CHAPTER XXIX IN JOSEPH OLDFIELD'S FLAT The idea was Morgan's. "We're going to call at Bloomsbury Mansions to begin with; that's to be the first move in our plan of campaign." Herbert Nash looking a note of interrogation, Mr. Morgan condescended to explain. "How many times am I to tell you that Bloomsbury Mansions was where Mr. Joseph Oldfield lived when he was in town? When he was there he was Peter Piper's Popular Pills; when he wasn't there if you'd talked to him about pills I dare say he wouldn't have known what you meant." "But why should we go to Bloomsbury Mansions?" "Doesn't your own common-sense tell you, my dear Nash, that the more a man knows about the game he's going to play the better chance he has of winning? Certainly it does, because you're one of the cleverest men I know. Very well then; if you and I can manage to be alone together in that flat for, say, half-an-hour, there's very little about Joseph Oldfield which, at the end of that time, we shan't know. Unless I'm mistaken, that's where the key to the situation is; it must be somewhere, and I tell you it's there. That's where all his business papers are, which you and Baynard couldn't find at Cloverlea; his books, his accounts, the lists of his securities; perhaps some of the securities themselves; and, what's more, the whole financial history of those immortal pills. We shall be able to find out what exactly Mr. Frank Clifford's position is, and how we shall best be able to get at him. I'm no gamester; I object to gambling on principle; yet I'm willing to bet a trifle that after I've been there half-an-hour I'll be in a position--with the aid of what I know already--to squash Mr. Frank Clifford between my finger and thumb; and between us, my boy, we'll have Peter Piper's Popular Pills, and the pile they represent, lying at our feet." "I tell you again, Morgan, what I've told you before, that I think you pitch your anticipations too high; there are all sorts of difficulties in the way which you don't seem to appreciate. Anyhow how do you intend to get into this flat? do you propose to commit burglary?" "Am I a criminal? a felon? I've been an honest man all my life, and I mean to die an honest man. No, my dear Nash, we're going in through the front door, in broad daylight, before the eyes of the whole staff of the Mansions, if the whole staff chooses to look on, and, as about flats they're mostly a prying lot, they may do; we're going to let ourselves in with Mr. Joseph Oldfield's own private and particular latch-key, and a very private and particular latch-key it is. I lay--betting again! you see, Nash, how a bad habit, once indulged in, grows on one--that, knowing what kind of people they are about flats, he had both lock and key specially made for him; and here that key is." He held out a small and curious-looking key, of the Bramah type. Mr. Nash eyed it dubiously, as if it were something which he would rather leave alone. "How do you know it is the key? and where did you get it from?" "Question No. 2 first, as to where I got it. When the late Donald Lindsay was seized with that most unfortunate stroke I assisted in undressing him; afterwards I folded up his clothes and put them away, and, in the ordinary course of my duty, I examined the pockets. In a small and ingeniously placed pocket inside his waistcoat--which the commonplace searcher would have overlooked--I found this key, secreted. That set me thinking. You will observe that on the tiny ring to which it is attached there is a number. When I learnt certain facts I caused inquiries to be made of a firm which I happen to know manufactures keys like this, asking how long it would take them to make Mr. Joseph Oldfield a duplicate key to his fiat in Bloomsbury Mansions, quoting this number. They replied to the effect that they could let him have another key in four-and-twenty hours; so that's how I know that this is the key to the flat in Bloomsbury Mansions." "You've a roundabout way of your own of finding out things." "Roundabout ways are sometimes the shortest, and the safest. Now, my dear Nash, you and I are going together to Bloomsbury Mansions; you will be the bearer of the key; you will show the key to the porter who we shall probably find there; you will tell him that you are Mr. Oldfield's solicitor--which you are; let us keep to the strict and literal truth; he will say 'Walk in!' and, when we have walked in, I think that the rest you can leave to me." Herbert Nash did not like Mr. Morgan's little plan; he disliked it very much, and said so with considerable force of language, which the gentleman to whom it was addressed did not at all resent. He simply smiled, and persuaded Mr. Nash; having means of persuasion at his command which that person seemed most unwillingly to feel that he was not in a position to resist; the result being that, as we have heard, the pair did gain access to the flat in Bloomsbury Mansions; the porter, as Mr. Morgan had prophesied, looking on as they went in. When they had entered they found themselves in a fair-sized hall. "I wonder," said Nash, as if struck by the silence of the place, "how he managed for servants." "The flat people provided service, I expect; they cater, and do everything for tenants if they're wanted to." "Do you mean to say that he lived here all alone?" "Generally, I fancy; though when the humour took him he may have kept up any sort of an establishment for all I know; I'll be able to tell you more on that head when I've been over the place. Now let me see. From what I know of the arrangements of flats I should say that that room over there was his own particular apartment." He moved to the door to which he referred. "Locked; however, there's the key in the lock, and it turns quite easily." He threw it open. "Right I am! Nash, this is Joseph Oldfield's Ali Baba's treasure-cave; perhaps presently you'll be fingering some of his precious things. But before we start at that let's see what's behind these other doors; I always like to know the lay of the land before I commence actual operations." Mr. Morgan began opening door after door, glancing at what was behind each, then shutting it again; Herbert Nash stood in the hall and watched. "Looks like a drawing-room; what did he want with a drawing-room, a lone-lorn bachelor? Seem to be some nice things in it too. A bedroom, furnished up to the knocker. My word! that bed cost money; he lay well. Bathroom; spared nothing even over his bath. Dining-room; nothing cheap about that either; he spent money upon this place; I suppose he walked straight out of the bath to his food. Another bedroom; everything in the palest pink; that's meant for a woman's occupation I'll swear. I wonder who it was meant for? Looks as if it had never been lived in. What are those over the way? Domestic offices, I take it; kitchen; yes, and the rest of it, I know; we'll pay attention to you perhaps a trifle later. Now we'll return to Ali Baba's treasure-cave. Come along, Nash." Mr. Nash followed him into the room; he entered with what seemed dragging footsteps, glancing round, when he was in, with a shame-faced air. "Morgan," he protested, "I don't like this; I don't care what you say, I don't like it; if we're not committing burglary, we're doing something which is not far off." "Don't talk nonsense; you a lawyer! and talking about burglary! stuff! If you imagine, Mr. Nash, that I'm the sort of person who would commit burglary you're mistaken. Haven't you got all your explanations pat? You've as much right to be here as any man on this side the grave. Very nice room I call this; very nice; well adapted for a gentleman's occupation. The late Oldfield had a pretty taste in bric-a-brac; like Mr. Donald Lindsay, he'd a good eye for a promising investment. I'm a bit of an authority on the subject myself, so I know. There's a pair of powder blue vases over there--both Oldfield and Lindsay seem to have had a liking for powder blue--which wouldn't be out of the way at a thousand. And unless I'm mistaken that cabinet in the corner is a genuine Boule; Oldfield wasn't likely to have anything imitation about his place; if it is I should like to have the coin it's worth in my pocket; perhaps we shall have it in both our pockets before very long, eh, Nash? What do you think? My dear boy, the contents of this room, the mere trimmings, so to speak, are worth a small fortune in themselves, you can take it from me; I was quite right in calling it Ali Baba's treasure-cave." "Morgan, look at this!" "Look at what? Hello! what's that?" Nash was pointing to a large framed photograph, which stood upon a centre table. "It's Miss Lindsay; it's his daughter." "So it is; and a fine photograph too; and a good likeness." "She--she was with him even when he was here." There was an odd catch in his voice; Mr. Morgan was as unmoved as ever. "You mean her effigy was." "And--and look at that portrait over the mantel." "Rather a fine bit of painting; quite decent; good colour; clever drawing; face seems alive." "Can't you see who it is? It's his wife." "Never saw the lady; but I shouldn't be surprised; there's no mistaking the likeness to the girl. So while he was living a double life he was living it with his wife and child; queer thing human nature." "Morgan, I feel as if those women were looking at us." "Looking at us? What do you mean?" "I--I'm sure they can see us; look how they're staring!" "Staring! Nash! Stop that! One would think you'd been drinking; or perhaps it's a nip of something you want; there ought to be a decanter somewhere about." "I want nothing; it would make no difference." "Then let's get to business. I've a theory; you listen, and tell me what you think of it. From what we know of the late Oldfield I rather infer that when he left the flat he left the keys of all these drawers, and cupboards, and things, behind him; that's the kind of thing he would do; and I know that they weren't at Cloverlea; I'm guessing that they're somewhere about the place at this moment. Now what's your idea of the kind of hiding-place he'd choose?" "I don't know; and I don't care." "What do you mean by you don't care? You seem to be in a nice mood, my lad." "I'll not touch a thing here; nothing!" "Won't you? Then don't! Who asked you? I'll do all the touching that's wanted; only--mind! if you shirk now you'll pay for it when the time for sharing comes." "I'm not quite the scoundrel you take it for granted that I am." "No, you're another and a worse kind, you're a white-livered cur. You do the sneak game, when you think it's safe, for pennies; but when it comes to the man's game, for something worth having, you whine. I can see that I shall have to talk to you as I haven't done yet before you really do begin to find out where you are; but I haven't time to do it now. Where's he likely to have put those keys? Anyhow we ought to be able to get at his writing-table drawers without them; I shouldn't say that there was anything very special about their locks." He took something out of his pocket which he inserted in the keyhole of the top drawer. "It only wants a little--a little management. I thought so; that's done it; drawer No. 1." He drew the top drawer open, and instantly pushed it back again. "What's that?" There was the sound of an electric bell. "It's--it's somebody ringing." "I know it's somebody ringing; I'm not deaf, am I? I don't need you to tell me that it's somebody ringing; but who's ringing? Who knows that we're here?" "Perhaps it's the porter; or somebody connected with the Mansions." The two men stood staring at each other; Nash white-faced. The bell was heard again. "You go and see who's there; if it's the porter, or any one of that sort, you bluff him off. And mind, if you make a mess of things through funk, it'll be you who'll pay." "I'm not afraid, Mr. Morgan; at least, not in the sense you mean." Herbert Nash went to the front door; Morgan remained in the room, listening. Without was a young man; behind him was the porter. "I beg your pardon," said the young man; "but the porter tells me that Mr. Oldfield's solicitor, Mr. Nash, is here; are you Mr. Nash?" "I am." "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Clifford--Frank Clifford; I am Mr. Oldfield's manager--at Marlborough Buildings; possibly he has mentioned my name to you." A voice came from within--Morgan's. "Certainly he has mentioned your name to us, Mr. Clifford; we know it very well, and all about you. Step in, you're the very man we want to see. Nash, let Mr. Clifford in." After what seemed to be a moment's hesitation Mr. Nash drew the door wider open, so as to permit of Clifford's entering. When he was in the door was shut. CHAPTER XXX WHEN THIEVES FALL OUT "Come in here, Mr. Clifford; it's a very fortunate chance your dropping in on us like this; you couldn't have arranged it better if you'd tried. I've no doubt Mr. Nash is glad to see you, and I'm quite sure I am." As Clifford followed Morgan into the sitting-room he eyed him a little askance. "To whom have I the pleasure of speaking?" "I'm Mr. Oldfield's most intimate friend; I know more about his affairs than any man living." "May I ask your name?" "Morgan; Stephen Morgan." "Are you also a solicitor?" "Not yet, exactly; I think I may describe myself as Mr. Oldfield's confidential agent. Come in, Nash; don't stop out there; then we can have the door closed--it'll be snugger." Mr. Nash had stayed in the hall, as if unwilling to associate himself with Morgan's reception of the new-comer; indeed from his bearing one might almost have suspected him of an inclination to march out of the flat, and leave Morgan to deal with Mr. Clifford; possibly he was deterred by the prosaic accident that his hat was in the sitting-room. When Morgan bade him go in he went in, and Morgan closed the door behind him. Clifford looked from one to the other, as if there was something in the attitude of the two men which he could not make out. "May I ask what you gentlemen are doing here?" "You may ask; but, so far as I can see, it's no business of yours." "Quite so; still--at the same time----" "Yes, Mr. Clifford; at the same time?" "I wondered." "There's no harm in your wondering, Mr. Clifford; none at all." Mr. Clifford turned to Nash, as if he preferred his appearance to Morgan's. "Can you tell me, Mr. Nash, where Mr. Oldfield is? or how I can place myself in communication with him? As you are possibly aware, he has not been at the office now for some time, and his continued absence--and I may add, silence, because I have heard nothing from him--is occasioning much inconvenience." "To whom?" This was Morgan. Clifford seemed to hesitate, then replied--"To me." "To you? Mr. Oldfield hasn't been in the habit of studying your convenience, has he, Mr. Clifford?" The new-comer flushed, as if he felt that the other's words were meant unpleasantly. When he answered he looked the speaker straight in the face. "Mr. Oldfield has been in the habit of studying not only my convenience, but every one's convenience, Mr. Morgan; if you suppose the contrary, I know him better than you do. And, just now, the circumstances are peculiar. I am to be married next week, and I can hardly carry out in their entirety the arrangements I have made unless I know what Mr. Oldfield's movements are likely to be." "I see; you are to be married next week?" "Mr. Oldfield knows that I am to be married next week." "Does he? What's the lady's name?" "Mr. Oldfield also knows the lady's name; I told him." "Did you? Then I fancy he's forgotten." "I never knew Mr. Oldfield forget anything that was of importance to any one in whom he was interested; so I take leave to doubt your fancy, Mr. Morgan." Mr. Morgan looked at the speaker, for some moments, in rather a peculiar way; then he thrust his hands deeper into his trousers pockets, leaned back his head, and laughed. Clifford flushed again. "What is the jest, Mr. Morgan?" "Jest? Clifford, you're a funny one! you're all the jest I want." "Sir!" "I give you my word, my dear fellow--" Morgan advanced, with the apparent intention of laying his hand upon the other's shoulder; Clifford retreated; Morgan stared. "What's the matter? Why do you draw back?" Clifford's manner was courteously frigid. "You will be able to say anything you wish to say to me from where you are." "Oh yes, I'm quite able to say to you all I wish from where I am; or from anywhere. Don't you think, Mr. Clifford, you're cutting it a trifle fine?" "I don't understand." "No? Surely you're not dull. I beg you to believe I'm not. Haven't I told you I'm Mr. Oldfield's confidential agent?" "You have, sir; though what especial interest that fact should have for me I still fail to understand; and yet I believe that I am not dull beyond the average man. Mr. Nash, while Mr. Morgan is endeavouring to find words with which to convey his meaning to my comprehension, may I again ask you how I can place myself in immediate communication with Mr. Oldfield?" Before Nash could answer, Morgan made a hasty movement towards the speaker, crying-- "You miserable hypocrite! trying to play the innocent with us! asking how you can place yourself in communication with Mr. Oldfield, when you know he's dead!" "Dead! Mr. Oldfield dead, Mr. Morgan!" "Stop that game of pretending, or I shan't be able to keep my hands off you! Not only is Mr. Oldfield dead, and you know it, but you killed him!" "Killed him! I! Mr. Nash, is your friend sane?" "Did ever rogue play the hypocrite so brazenly? and actually I've one of the weapons with which he killed him on me! and here it is. You killed him, Mr. Clifford, with that." Morgan held out a slip of blue paper on which there was some writing. "With that? And what is that? It looks to me rather a singular weapon with which to commit murder." "Does it? you sneering villain! When Brown does all in his power to make of Smith an honest man, and Smith turns out to be a blackguard and a thief, do you think that isn't a blow to Brown? It was that kind of blow killed Joseph Oldfield; it was the shock of learning that you were a forger." "Learning that I was a forger! Mr. Morgan, you--you said just now that you found it difficult to keep your hands off me; now I'm finding it difficult to keep mine off you. What justification have you for the statement you have just made, that I am a forger?" "Isn't that justification enough?" Again Morgan held out the slip of paper. "I repeat the question I put to you just now--what is that?" "It's news to you that it's one of the bills you forged?" "One? Do you charge me with forging others?" "I don't know what you got for them, Mr. Clifford, but you forged bills to the face value of over forty thousand pounds. Are incidents of the kind of such frequent occurrence in your career that it is necessary to recall this one to your recollection?" "And do you seriously accuse me of forging bills for more than forty thousand pounds? Was ever anything heard like it?" "Often; there have been plenty of scoundrels before you, if you find that any consolation." "Don't imagine that because I endeavour to retain my self-control in the midst of this--this sudden nightmare that I am incapable of showing resentment; if that is what you imagine, you are wrong, Mr. Morgan. What grounds have you for asserting that I forged that bill, or any bill?" "Mr. Clifford, drop the mask; the time for bluff has gone; try to be candid. You see, Mr. Nash and I know all about it." "Do you? It so happens that I don't. I ask you again, what grounds have you for asserting that I've committed forgery? Don't be vague; be specific." "I happen to know the man to whom you gave the bills." "Do you? What's his name?" "Sir Henry Trevor." "Sir Henry Trevor? Harry Trevor? Do you venture to affirm that Harry Trevor says he got forged bills from me, or any bills?" "He took them to the discounters; when they asked where he got them from, he said they came from you. What he got for them, or what share you had of the plunder, I can't say; at present I'd rather not know; these are details which may come out at the Old Bailey." Up to then Frank Clifford had kept his countenance to a wonderful degree; but when Mr. Morgan spoke of the Old Bailey his lips flickered, as they might have done had he been suddenly attacked by St. Vitus' Dance; the movement passed, he was calm again. "Will you let me look at that bill you're holding? I'll not touch it; I merely want to look." "I'll take care you don t touch it. You can look at an old friend. "What is the signature it bears?" "Don't know? I'll tell you. Donald Lindsay, of Cloverlea." "Donald Lindsay, of Cloverlea? And who is Donald Lindsay, of Cloverlea?" "Really, Mr. Clifford, when you didn't become an actor what the stage lost! and now-a-days there are so few actors who are to the manner born. It's the very gist of your offending, you sly scamp, that you made such use of the knowledge you had surreptitiously obtained that Joseph Oldfield, of Peter Piper's Popular Pills, was Donald Lindsay, of Cloverlea." Clifford stared, as if the other had been speaking in a foreign language. "What's that? Would you mind saying that again?" "I'll not say it again; I'll not pipe to your dancing, you brazen vagabond!" "Are you hinting that Joseph Oldfield is, or was, I don't know which it ought to be, a pseudonym? that he had, or has, another name?" "Is that the trick you're trying to play? You wish it to be believed that you didn't know there was such a person as Donald Lindsay; that he and Joseph Oldfield were one and the same; and that in putting the name upon a bill stamp you did it innocently, in ignorance that was childlike and bland. The idea is ingenious; as, I fancy, Mr. Clifford, most of your ideas are; but you won't find a judge or jury quite so simple." Ignoring Mr. Morgan, Frank Clifford, to the unprejudiced observer, seemed to be engaged in reflections of his own; to which he presently gave shape in disconnected words. "Donald Lindsay? I seem to have heard the name." "I shouldn't be surprised." "Donald Lindsay? Why--it can't be!" "That conscience is pricking you at last? No, it can't be that." "Harry Trevor wouldn't--couldn't--he couldn't do a thing like that; and yet----" "And yet? So it's Harry Trevor now; as usual, everybody's guilty except the man who did it." "Mr. Morgan, I'm willing to believe that you don't realize what a confused nightmare I seem all at once to be moving in, and that that explains your attitude. If you did realize how wholly you have taken me by surprise----" "I do realize that; I quite think that you're altogether the most surprised man I've lately met. I don't know what you did expect when you rang that bell, but I don't suppose that you expected this." "I did not; though you speak in one sense, and I in another. With reference to what you say about those bills, a horrible--I can only call it fear, has come into my mind, of which I scarcely dare to think, lest I should be guilty of heinous injustice; and before I speak of it----" "You would like to have time to think it over?" "I should." "Then you shall have it; that's what I'm coming to. You will be at the office to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock." "I will." "You had better." "You need not tell me that." "Needn't I? I think I need. Mr. Nash and I are administering Mr. Oldfield's estate." "Are you an executor?" "I am; the only executor. I do not know that I ought to say so, but you will understand that I am not committing myself, and that I speak without prejudice; but, at present, it is our wish--Mr. Nash's and mine--not to prosecute." "Prosecute!" "Prosecute. Do you wish me to believe that you were unaware that forgers are occasionally prosecuted? Our first consideration is, and must be, the business; we fear that it may do the business no good to have the manager sent to penal servitude for forgery. These bills have been taken up, in the first place under a misapprehension, at a very heavy cost; we will tell you all about that to-morrow; you will have to make that loss good." "I shall!" "You will; do you imagine that you are to escape scathless? You are a truly remarkable person. But, as I have said, we will discuss that in the morning. I only trust that no further irregularities may be brought to light." "Mr. Morgan!" "Please drop that tone; it makes me sick; nothing is so nauseous as a futile hypocrite. My advice to you is, think things over, carefully, seriously; in the morning make a clean breast of everything; the more candid we find you the better it will be. Now, as Mr. Nash and I have much to attend to, I must ask you to leave us." "That I am willing to do; but so far you have done all the talking; but, before I go, there are some remarks which I wish to make." "We wish to hear nothing now--nothing; think first, Mr. Clifford, think." "It is not necessary to think before making simple statements dealing with plain facts, and you will have to listen, willingly or not; I have had to listen, now it is your turn. What I have to say is this; that I did not know Mr. Oldfield was dead; that I did not know that he had any name but Oldfield; that I had no knowledge of his connection with Donald Lindsay, of Cloverlea; that this is the first time I have been made aware that there ever was such a person as Donald Lindsay; that I never before saw the bill of exchange which you showed me just now." "I have proof to the contrary." "That's impossible. That there may be a mystery about that bill, and about the others of which you have spoken, I admit; between this and to-morrow I may be able to institute inquiries which will throw light on it; but I assure you, Mr. Morgan, I am as incapable of forgery as you are. If Mr. Oldfield really did believe that I was capable of such conduct he was a much worse judge of character than I believed he was. Now, Mr. Morgan, I will go." "With a lie upon your lips." "No, sir, not with a lie upon my lips. You will either give your authorities for the statements you have made, or, in the morning, you will apologize. You will find that you will have to make many apologies, Mr. Morgan. I notice, Mr. Nash, that you have not associated yourself with the charges Mr. Morgan has made, nor with the language he has used; when I lay the facts before you in the morning, as I hope to be in a position to do, you will have no cause to regret your attitude." With that Mr. Clifford marched out of the room, and through the front door. When he had gone Mr. Morgan leaned against a corner of a table, with his hands in his trousers pockets, and whistled; then he looked at Mr. Nash, and smiled. "Got a face, hasn't he? He can bluff. We may find him rather a harder nut to crack than I imagined; it's just possible that we may have to change our plan of operations; the line he has taken up is a little unexpected. What do you think?" "I don't think, Mr. Morgan; I know." Mr. Morgan purposely ignored the peculiarity of the other's tone. "What do you know, my dear Nash?" "I know one thing; that if you do go to Mr. Clifford's office in the morning you will go alone." "Shall I? How's that? Got a previous engagement?" "Here, and now, you and I part company; you go your way, I go mine; under no circumstances will I associate myself with you again." "Steady, Nash, steady; do you know where talk like that will lead you?" "It will lead to honesty." "It will lead you to jail, and pretty soon." "Will it? I'll take the risk. It is not necessary for you to remind me that on a certain occasion I behaved like a blackguard, and perhaps worse; I have only regretted it once, and that's been ever since." "Regrets, in a case like yours, are useless; they simply mean that you regret that you're found out. Of course you do." "You'll find that my regrets mean more than that. I've behaved badly since; I've acted like a coward in allowing you to use your guilty knowledge." "Guilty knowledge?" "Yes, your guilty knowledge, as you'll discover if you're not careful; I've let you use it as a lever to drive me into further misdoing. You've threatened me with the consequences of my misconduct; I've been afraid to face them. That's over now; I'm going to face them, if only as the lesser of two evils." "Tell me, Nash, what's started you in this conversational strain?" "What's brought me to the sticking-point is your conduct to Mr. Clifford. He's an innocent man; of that I'm absolutely certain; every insult you flung at him stung me; it shamed me to feel that I was your associate. I'll be your associate no longer. I'll have no part or parcel in your attempts to entangle Mr. Clifford as you've entangled me. I believe they'll fail; but if they do or don't, I'll have no share in them. Henceforward you and I are strangers; I'm going; if you stay, you stay alone." "Going, are you? Oh no, you're not!" Morgan moved between Nash and the door. The two men confronted each other; there was something on Herbert Nash's face which made of him a new man. "Mr. Morgan"--even in his voice there was a new tone--"more than once my fingers have itched to take you by the throat, and choke the life half out of you. If you are wise, you will not attempt to detain me, or I may find the temptation too strong." Possibly Mr. Morgan was conscious that there was something unusual about Herbert Nash; his manner continued to be so conciliatory. "Come, my dear fellow, don't let us fall out about nothing at all. I'm quite ready to listen to anything you have to say; only, before you take a step there's no retracing, do listen to reason." "No, thank you; I've heard too much of what you call reason already; I'll hear no more. Stand out of my way." "Nash, Nash, don't be hasty! If you'll only let me speak a dozen words, you'll view the situation in quite a different light." "Shall I? Then I'll not let you speak them. I see the situation now in the only light I mean to see it. Stand out of my way." Nash, moving forward, gripped Morgan by the shoulders; either the assault was unexpected, or he used great force. Swinging Morgan round, he sent him reeling backwards half across the room; until, coming into unlooked-for contact with a chair, he fell heavily on to the floor. Before he could recover Nash had gone from the room, and was out of the flat. Picking himself up, although he seemed a trifle dazed, Morgan went rushing after him. When he reached the landing he heard Nash's voice come up the well of the staircase, from the floor below. "Porter, the man Morgan, whom I have left in Mr. Oldfield's flat, has no right whatever to be there." "Hasn't he, sir? How's that? He seems to have done something to upset Mr. Clifford." "When he comes down, if you find that he has anything on him belonging to the flat--papers, letters, anything--they have been stolen. If you allow him to leave the building with them on him, possibly you will be held responsible." "Shall I? He shan't leave here with anything on him that doesn't belong to him, I promise you; there are two or three people about the place who'll see to that." Mr. Morgan waited to hear no more. He slunk back into the flat and shut the door. CHAPTER XXXI HUSBAND AND WIFE When Herbert Nash quitted Bloomsbury Mansions he went straight back to Littlehampton, by the last train of the day to reach that primitive place. When he arrived at Ocean Villas it was past ten o'clock. His wife had gone to bed; or, at least, she had retired to her bedroom. As a matter of fact, she felt as if she never wanted to go to bed again; unless going to bed was synonymous with eternal sleep. If only she could go to sleep and never wake! She was of opinion that she was the most miserable woman; many women think themselves that with less cause than she had. She was half-undressed, and, crouching on the floor, rested her head against the bed. In her hands was a telegram, which she had read again, and again, and again, until it seemed to have branded itself upon her throbbing brain so that she could not get it out of her sight even for a second. It had come to her earlier in the day, and, as telegrams are apt to be, was curt. "Send another five hundred immediately. No excuses will be accepted. "MORGAN." Only a day or two ago she had given him a hundred pounds; then sent him another four hundred, and here already he was demanding five hundred more. The inference was plain; he would persist in his demands until he had wrung from her all that she had found on Donald Lindsay's table. Though he stripped her of every penny she would still be at his mercy; what would he demand from her then? Whatever it might be, how would she dare refuse him then, if she dare not refuse him now? In a sense, indeed, she had refused him, as it was. He had bade her send the cash "immediately." That she had not done; she had purposely not sent it by the night's post; and now was racked by fears of the measures he might take to show her his resentment. Suppose he told her husband, as he had threatened to do? If he did! if he did! Had she not better hide in the sea before Herbert came back again? His opportunities for telling were so numerous; he and Herbert were away together at that moment. That was another of her burdens. What was the meaning of this sudden, ill-omened connection which had sprung up between them? Why, all at once, had her husband become the inseparable companion of the man who had been wont to stand behind her chair? He had resented, so hotly, the fellow's presumption in even venturing to write to him; yet now they might be bosom friends; he even expected her to receive him as an equal. What did it mean? Nothing kindles the imagination like a coward conscience. All sorts of hideous surmises had tormented her. A dozen explanations had occurred to her; every fresh one more unsavoury than the last. She could see that her husband had changed; in himself, as well as to her. He was not the same man; he was always brooding, irritable, depressed. Of late, not only had he not spoken to her a tender word, he had only addressed her when compelled, and then with scant civility. What did such conduct on his part portend? All kinds of doubts afflicted her; yet among them one was foremost. Was it not possible that Morgan had poisoned her husband's mind against her? He, perhaps, had not told him everything, she did not believe he had; but, with diabolical ingenuity, he might have hinted just enough to make Herbert afraid of hearing more. In that case her husband might be working Morgan's will under the delusion that, by so doing, he was protecting her; and all the while the man was wresting from her all that she had risked so much to gain--for Herbert's sake. As, on the floor in the bedroom there, she wrestled with wild beasts of her own creation, on a sudden she heard the front door open, and a familiar step come into the house. It was her husband. She sprang to her feet, not with joy, but with terror. Why had he come back? He had told her that he would not return that night; perhaps not on the morrow. Why had he returned--when he had said that he would not return--without notice, at that hour of the night? for it seemed to her that she had been in her bedroom hours. She heard him go into the sitting-room; finding it in darkness, no one there, he came towards where she was. As she heard him take the half-dozen steps which divided the two rooms, she stood by the bedstead, trembling from head to foot; it might have been her executioner, not her husband, who was coming. A wild, frenzied impulse came to her to turn the key in the lock, and so gain time; but before she could do it he had opened the door, and was standing in the room. It did not need such a rarefied vision as hers was then to perceive that with him all was not well. She seemed to see him in a blaze of lightning, phantom-haunted, as she was. It was borne in on her that he saw her as the hideous thing she saw herself to be, and that that was why he stood there, white and terrible. If she could she would have dropped to the floor, and crawled to him, and hung about his knees, and cried for mercy; but she could not; she had to stand there, straight and rigid, waiting for him to speak. When he spoke his voice sounded strange in her ears, as indeed, though she was not aware of it, it did in his own. "I see you guess why I am here!" "Guess? How--how can I guess?" "Has Morgan told you nothing?" "Morgan? What--what could Morgan tell me?" "Hasn't he told you that I'm a blackguard and a thief?" The words were so wholly different from any she had expected him to utter that, in the stress of her agitation, they conveyed no meaning to her mind; she stared at him like one bereft of her senses, as, in fact, for the moment she was. He misconstrued her look entirely. "Elaine," he cried, "don't look at me like that, don't! If you only knew what I have suffered, what I've gone through, you'd pity me, you wouldn't look at me as if I was something wholly outside the pale. I know you've guessed that there was something wrong ever since that--that brute came; you knew I wouldn't breathe the same air with him if I could help it; but it mayn't be, Elaine, it mayn't be so bad as you suppose. I don't ask you to forgive me; I don't even ask you to continue to regard me as your husband; I know I've forfeited all claims I may have had on you. All I ask of you is to believe that, at last, I'm going to try to be a man. I've come to tell you that, and to tell you that chiefly. I'm not going to stay; you need not fear that I'll contaminate the house which shelters you; but before I go I think I ought to tell you just what I've done, and what the temptation was; not to excuse myself, but so that, whatever happens, you, at least, may know the truth. I felt that I could not let the night pass without telling you the truth, if only because I have kept it from you so long, and in the morning it may be too late; I may not have the chance of telling it to you, face to face, again." The longer he spoke, the more her bewilderment grew. "I--I--don't understand," she stammered. He made her understand, telling his tale as straightforwardly, as clearly, as it could be told; as it might have been told even by an impartial witness; the man that was in him was coming to the front at last. "You see," he said, "I was at Morgan's mercy, or he thought I was; and, for a time, I thought so too; I was such a coward! And before long I should have been wholly at his mercy, had not the sight of that man, Clifford, roused me to a consciousness of what a coward I really was; then I knew that the only way to be free was to tell the truth, and let Morgan do what he likes. I've come to tell you the truth, first of all; and to-morrow I'm going to tell Frank Clifford the truth; and when I've found Miss Lindsay, I'll tell her the truth. If I have to suffer for it, I'll suffer; but at any rate I've escaped from Morgan. What a weight would have been off my mind if I'd escaped from him before!" As she began to grasp the drift of what it was that he was telling her, she had sunk on to the edge of the bed, and, with distended eyes and gaping mouth, sat staring at him as if at some thing of horror. He mistook the meaning of her attitude. "I don't wonder you look at me as if I were some repulsive object; I couldn't be more repulsive to you than I am to myself; I understand what you feel, what you think; I know I deserve it. I know you never would have married me if you had known me to be the thing I am; I have wronged you more than any one. I can't undo the bonds which bind us, that is not in my power, and I'm afraid the law will not help you. But this I can do, and I will; I'll take myself out of your life as completely as I can. Your aunt left you enough to live on; I think you had better sink it in an annuity; you'll be safer that way; and when I can I'll contribute what I can. I don't wish to be released from any of my obligations; on the contrary, I wish to fulfil them both in the letter and the spirit, and I will. So soon as I am earning money you shall have your proper share; but in any case it will be a comfort to me to feel that, in any case, you are provided for. And, in time, when I've done something towards regaining my self-respect, and--and you send for me, I'll come to you again, if only for just long enough to show that I am still alive. But you're rid of me till then. Good-bye." He moved towards the door, as if the whole thing was at an end; as if husband and wife could be sundered quite so easily. She stopped him as he was going. "Herbert!" She spoke in the queerest whisper, as if something had gone wrong with her vocal chords, the effect of which was to leave her partially strangled. She held out the telegram she had still in her hand. "Look at that." He took it reluctantly, as if he feared it was a weapon which she aimed at him. Glancing at it, he read it aloud. "'Send another five hundred immediately. No excuses will be accepted. 'MORGAN.' What--what does this mean?" "It means that I'm worse than you; much worse than you." "Elaine!" She tried to speak, but could not; her voice was strangled in her throat; it was not nice to watch her struggles to regain the use of it. He moved towards her, startled. "Elaine! what's the matter?" "I'm--I'm--I'm going to tell you, only I--I---- Give me--something--to drink--there's some water--in the bottle." She pointed to the washstand. He brought her some water; but she could not drink it. She could not hold the glass in her own hand; she could not swallow when he raised it to her lips. He put the glass down on the floor. Her condition frightened him. Although he had just been speaking of leaving her for an indefinite period, now he knelt beside her on the floor, and, putting his arms about her, held her close, soothing her as best he could. It was while he held her that she told him; she confessed in her agony; the words being wrung from her as if they had been gouts of blood. He continued to hold her all the time. When, in his turn, he began to understand her story, he was man enough to realize that it was only his support which gave her the strength she needed; that but for his encircling arms, and the consciousness that they were his arms, she would collapse. As, by degrees, her meaning was borne in on his understanding, the fashion of his countenance was changed, and he kept his face averted, but he never moved. When, in disconnected sentences, the root of the matter had been told, she did what he had not done; she began, in a manner, to excuse herself. "It was--because you said that you wanted money, and--that we couldn't be married without it, that I went back and took the money--which was on the table. And Morgan saw me." "Morgan saw you!" It was the first time he had spoken; there was a curious contrast between his voice and hers. "He was in the room all the time--but in the darkness--I never knew it." "So Morgan has held us in the hollow of his hand; both of us!" "I gave him five hundred pounds the other day, and now he's telegraphed for more." "Poor Elaine! It seems, after all, that we're a well-matched pair, both thieves and cowards." "Herbert!" She spoke as if she shrieked. "My dear, do let us look facts in the face now that we are trying to make ourselves known to each other." "I--shouldn't have taken the money--if I hadn't thought--Nora was rich--and it would make no difference." "I'm afraid that the question of Miss Lindsay's wealth or poverty could make no difference to the thing you did." "I know that--now." "When it seemed that Miss Lindsay was a pauper did you give her back any of the money you had taken under a misconception?" "I meant to--but I never did--I meant to give her a thousand pounds." "It's a pity you didn't; it might have caused the residue to appear a little less dingy. We're a pair of beauties! God help us both; we need His help!" "I--haven't dared to ask for it." But she did dare that night; they both of them dared. Already, since they had been married, they had had some strange days and nights; but that was the strangest night of their strange honeymoon. CHAPTER XXXII A FORGOTTEN COAT Lady Jane Carruthers was one of those elderly ladies who are never quite well, yet seldom actually ill. She was a great believer in what she called "air." "If you breathe the right air you're all right; and if you breathe the wrong air you're all wrong, and there's the whole science of medicine in a nutshell; believe me, my dear, because I know; mine's the teaching of actual experience. So long as I'm well in a place I stay there; I know the air's right; but so soon as I begin to feel a little out of sorts I know the air has ceased to be right, I go away at once; the consequence is that there are very few people who move about as much as I do." It chanced that, in one of her pursuits after the right air, Lady Jane went to Littlehampton; and, being there, with nothing to do except breathe the right air, by way of doing something she sent for her nephew, the Hon. Robert Spencer. She dispatched to him this telegram-- "Come down to me this afternoon. I wish to speak to you." When he received the telegram the Honourable Robert pulled a face; he happened to have a good deal to do. His impulse was to wire back-- "Can't come. Speak on." However, he felt that the result of such a message might be disastrous; so, instead of sending it, he obeyed his aunt's commands, and went down to Littlehampton. On his arrival, in response to his inquiries, Lady Jane informed him that the local air was still on its trial; she was not yet quite sure if it was, or was not, all right. It was true that she had had a touch of indigestion; but she was not certain if that had anything to do with the lobster salad she had had for luncheon three days running, or with some peculiarity in the neighbouring atmosphere. It was true that too much ozone was a disturbing influence; on the other hand she admitted that yesterday she had eaten rather more of the salad than she had meant to eat. Certainly the local lobsters were delicious; she had determined so much; but, for the present, the question of the quality of the local air was in suspense. The nephew knew his aunt. He was aware that if he asked her if there actually was anything which she wished to speak to him about she would look at him with chilly gaze, and inquire if she had not been speaking to him on matters of the most serious import already. Was he a Christian? Was he void of all human feeling? Did he take no interest in her health? Then what did he mean? As he did not wish to be asked what he meant in a tone of voice he had heard before, he listened to her ladyship doubting, now the lobsters, now the air, with the best grace in the world; for the Honourable Robert Spencer really was an excellent fellow. And, in course of time, his virtue was rewarded. After dinner--at which there was no fish at all, as if it had been he who had suffered from the lobsters--she assumed a portentous air, and requested him to bring a dispatch-box, which stood on a side table, and place it in front of her; which he did. "Robert," she began, "I regret to have to tell you that you are one of the most careless persons I have ever encountered." He admitted it; inwardly wondering of what act of carelessness he had been guilty this time, and what the dispatch-box had to do with it anyhow. Her ladyship went on. "When you were staying with me in Cairo, after you left me, you lost a suit-case; or, at least, you said you lost a suit-case." "My dear aunt, I not only said, I actually did lose a suit-case; and a most important loss it was; for all I can tell it may have transformed the whole course of my life; and--and somebody else's life as well. By some stroke of good fortune you haven't come across it, have you?" "No, Robert, I have not; nor do I imagine that anybody ever will, in this world." Whether she thought it likely that somebody would in another world was not quite clear. "I do not know if you are aware that, apart from your suit-case, you lost something else when you were staying with me at Cairo. I imagine, from your manner, that you have not discovered your loss even yet." "It's very possible; I seem to have such a genius for losing things that sometimes I don't know what I do lose." "I am grieved to hear you say so; it amazes me. It only shows how incapable a man is of looking after his own belongings; as I have always maintained. I never lost anything in my life, except a pair of house-shoes, which I left at Horsham House, and which have never been returned to me to this hour." "I hope it was nothing very important I left." "It depends upon what you call important. There are different standards in such matters; though you appear to have none. I should call it important; but then my wardrobe is limited. You left a coat and waistcoat." "Well, I rather fancy that my wardrobe is more limited than yours; but--I don't recall that coat and waistcoat." "I am not surprised; after what you have just said, nothing would surprise me. Baker brought them to me after you had gone; an admirable servant, Baker. Were I to repeat to her what you have admitted she would credit it with difficulty; she knows my ways. In the inside pocket of the coat were some papers." "Papers? Aunt! What papers?" Lady Jane unlocked the dispatch-box; took from it a small packet; and, placing her glasses on her nose, proceeded to read what was written on half-a-sheet of note-paper. "This is an inventory of what was contained in the pockets of your two garments. Unlike you, fortunately, or I don't know where I should be, I am a creature of method; I do everything by rule. I drew up this list after Baker had searched the garments in my presence. In the waistcoat were three pockets; which contained, one penknife; two toothpicks--which I threw away; one pencil, or, rather, part of a pencil; three wax matches, loose, which were most dangerous, and which I had destroyed; a cigar-cutter, or, rather, what I presume is a cigar-cutter, Baker didn't know what it was; four visiting-cards, three of them your own, and the fourth somebody else's, and all of them shockingly untidy; and the return half of a ticket from Brighton to London, which was then more than three months old. In the coat were five pockets; it has always been a mystery to me what men want with so many pockets; judging from what was in yours I am inclined to think that they use them merely as receptacles for rubbish. Some of the things which were in yours I had thrown away; the following are what I have kept. One pocket-handkerchief; one pair of gloves; one tobacco-pouch; one pipe, a horrid, smelling thing which I had boiled in soapy water, but which still smells; one matchbox--empty. I suppose it was meant to contain the matches which were loose in your waistcoat; a cigar-case; a golf ball; while in the inside pocket were the papers of which I have told you." "I don't suppose they're anything very serious, after what you've just been reading." "Don't you? Then you must have your own ideas of what is serious; if I had thought they were of no interest I shouldn't have troubled you to come to Littlehampton." "But, my dear aunt, what are they? You--you do keep a man on tenter-hooks." "I don't know why you say that. I am going to tell you what they are; but, as you are of opinion that they are not serious, I should have imagined that you were in no hurry. There are letters written to you by Miss Lindsay; there are nine of them; some men would have thought them serious." As he took the packet which she held out to him his countenance changed in a manner which was almost comically sudden. "Letters written by---- Why, they're Nora's! But--I thought----" "Never mind what you thought, Robert; you see what they are. As this envelope is sealed, and is inscribed that it is not to be opened till after the writer's death, some persons might have thought that that was of interest also." He regarded the envelope she offered as if he found it difficult to believe that his eyes were not playing him a trick. "Aunt, it's--it's the envelope which Donald Lindsay sent me, and---- But I don't understand; it's incredible! Aunt, why didn't you let me know this before?" "Why should I? It was in a coat of which you thought so little that you didn't even know you'd lost it; the natural inference was that you were hardly likely to leave anything of the least importance in the pocket of a coat which you valued at nothing." "But--I thought I put it in my suit-case--I've chased the case half round the world. Aunt, what have you done?" "What have I done? You mean, what have you done? If anything has been done I trust it is something from which you will learn a lesson. I said to myself, if these are of the least consequence, he will ask for them; since he has been guilty of such culpable carelessness I'll wait till he does ask. But I waited, and I waited, and you never asked, you never once alluded to them. What could I conclude? At last they slipped my memory, as sometimes trifles will do; I came upon them, by mere accident, as I was looking through this dispatch-box last night; so I sent for you that I might give them to you in person, though, naturally, I had long ago come to the conclusion that they were not of the slightest importance." He drew a long breath. "Well, this is the most extraordinary thing that ever has happened to me!" "If that is the case I can only hope that it will teach you not to leave papers in the pockets of a coat which you fling down anywhere, anyhow, and instantly forget." "I--I hope it will teach me something of the kind. As this envelope may contain a communication of much consequence, may I ask you to excuse me while I go to examine it at once? "Why is it necessary that you should leave me? Why can't you examine it here? You know what an interest I take in all that concerns you. Sit down; open your envelope; see what's inside; you need fear no interruption from me." "Then--if you don't mind--I will." Inside the envelope were two sheets of large letter paper, closely covered, on all eight sides, with Donald Lindsay's fine handwriting. Robert Spencer had not read far before he broke into exclamation. "What the--I beg your pardon, aunt--I didn't quite--but this is most extraordinary." As he read on, more than once he punctuated his reading with interjectional remarks; evidently what he read occasioned him profound surprise. When he had finished he looked about him as if he was not quite sure where he was. When he perceived Lady Jane he started from his chair in evident perturbation; as good as her word, she had not interrupted him by so much as a movement, and now sat eyeing him grimly. He turned to her with a laugh which did not sound very natural. "Well, aunt, we've done it, you and I, between us!" "Pray attribute nothing to me; I decline to accept any responsibility for your criminal carelessness." "I can only say that while Nora Lindsay has been treated like a fraudulent pauper, turned out of house and home, sent out into the world to earn her bread, she may be starving for all I know; I've left no stone unturned, but I've been able to find no trace of her; all the time the letter has been lying in your desk which shows that she is one of the richest women in England, and I verily believe that her father owed no man anything." "If that is so, Robert, then I don't envy you your feelings when you reflect that Miss Lindsay's sufferings are solely and entirely the result of your own misconduct." "If you had only let me know you had the letter!" "Are you attempting to fasten blame on me? For your monstrous and incredible negligence in doing nothing, and less than nothing, to safeguard a document which you now assert is of such importance!" "Well, what's done's done! And Nora has had her home taken from her, and the things she cared for scattered to the four winds; it's been one of the greatest steals on record! and she's been shamed in the face of all the world, and she may be eating out her heart in some last refuge of the destitute, and all the while---- It's a pretty story, on my word!" "It all comes from your mother and father taking it for granted that the girl was a beggar; I nearly had a serious quarrel with your mother because I told her I shouldn't be surprised if, after all, she was mistaken; but your mother's like her son." "Thank you, aunt; my mother only took for granted what others took for granted. I've heard you say some severe things about Miss Lindsay." "I've simply said that you're not in a position to marry a penniless girl; and you're not." "If I could only have found her I'd have made her marry me, though she hadn't a shoe to her foot, nor a penny in her pocket; I'd not have let her go until she did. Thank God, she knew it, and that's why she's hidden herself. Poor Nora! Will she--will she ever forgive any of us! It's a tragedy I've never heard the like of; and all through some one's blundering. But, as I've said, talk's no healer. I can't go to-night, there's no train; but I shall go up to town in the morning to investigate some of the statements which are contained in this letter; and now, if you don't mind, aunt, I must get out of doors; I must have what you're so fond of--air." He wanted something more than air; he wanted a vent for the feelings which filled his breast, as it seemed to him, to bursting point. He tore up and down the front; he had it to himself at that hour, so that the unusual pace at which he strode along did not attract inconvenient attention. The promenade at Littlehampton is not a very long one, but he walked ever so many miles before he had done with it. It was easy enough to blame Lady Jane; he felt strongly that that lady had not behaved so well as she might have done; keeping a letter from him while the weeks stretched out into months seemed to him to be a course of action for which there was no excuse; but, all the same, he was perfectly well aware that the fault was originally his. The parable of the grain of mustard-seed came into his mind as he thought of the Upas-tree of disaster which had sprung from a beginning which was apparently so insignificant; he thought he had put the letter in his suit-case and he had left it in one of his pockets instead; because of that slight misadventure ruin had come to Nora; such ruin! His aunt had punished him severely. He could not recall the coat even then; the only explanation of which he could think was that he had supposed he had packed the coat itself in his suitcase. If Lady Jane had but dropped so much as a hint! He did not know how much cause he had to rejoice because the letter was not where he had believed it to be; if Mr. Morgan had only found it when he reclaimed the suit-case it might have provided him with the means of keeping Nora Lindsay out of her own for an indefinite length of time; the tragedy might have become a tragedy indeed. In the morning, when Mr. Spencer reached the station, on the platform were two familiar figures. He advanced to greet them. "Why, Mr. Nash, and Miss Harding! this is an unexpected pleasure; I didn't expect to find such pleasant memories of Cloverlea at Littlehampton." "Miss Harding," exclaimed the gentleman, "is now my wife; she is Mrs. Nash. We"--he hesitated, and then went on--"we are just finishing our honeymoon." Mr. Spencer's face expressed astonishment which was hardly flattering to either of the parties concerned. "You--don't say so; then--that's another unexpected pleasure. Mrs. Nash, you must allow me to offer you my congratulations." He was about to go with some of the banal remarks which are made on such occasions when he was struck by the look which was on the young wife's face, and by the singularity of her attitude. She seemed to be in mortal terror. Shrinking back, cowering, she clung to her husband's arm, as if she was afraid that Spencer would have struck her. Nor did Herbert Nash wear the expression of beatitude which is supposed to be proper to a bridegroom who is returning from his honeymoon. It was apparently with an effort that he said to Robert Spencer-- "If you are going up by this train, Mr. Spencer, will you allow my wife and me to travel with you? If--if we can get a compartment to ourselves we have something to tell you, touching Miss Lindsay's affairs, which--which I think we ought to tell you." The separate compartment was found; and, as a consequence, between Littlehampton and London, Robert Spencer read human nature, as it were, by flashes of lightning. Both husband and wife laid bare their breasts to him; and what they left unsaid he saw between the lines. It was a journey neither of the trio ever forgot. By the time the train entered the terminus his soul shuddered at the thought of the mountain of wrong which had been laid upon the woman he loved; who, after all, was the merest girl. Yet, acutely though he felt for her, he felt also for the miserable pair who were in front of him; already they had probably suffered even more than Nora; and the worst of their sufferings were still to come. The three got into a four-wheeled cab and drove to Memorial Buildings. Mr. Clifford was out. Then, the clerk who received them asked if they were Messrs. Morgan and Nash. "This is Mr. Nash," explained the Honourable Robert, "but my name's Spencer. Has Mr. Morgan been here?" No, he had not. Mr. Clifford had been at the office till eleven o'clock; and had then left word that if Messrs. Nash and Morgan called in his absence they were to be informed that he had gone to Mr. Hooper, of Fountain Court, Temple, where they would find him if they liked to follow. CHAPTER XXXIII THE AUTOGRAPH ALBUM Mr. Hooper, leaning back in his chair, surveyed his cousin as if he were some strange animal. "Although your conduct strikes me as--shall I say?--abnormal, I don't wish to insinuate anything disagreeable, my dear Frank; still, if you are sane I wish you'd prove it." Mr. Clifford passed his handkerchief across his brow, as if he found the temperature trying. "It's all very well to laugh--if you're supposed to be laughing--but, if you were in my position, you'd find it no laughing matter. I'm to be married next week." "That is a prospect calculated to turn the strongest brain; granted!" "Look here, Jack, I'll throw something at you if you talk like that; I've come for sense, not idiocy. Under the circumstances Mr. Oldfield's continued absence--and silence--was pretty bad to bear; and now to be told he's dead----" "Dead? you don't mean to say that Oldfield's dead!" "So I was informed last night by two men, one named Nash, and the other Morgan. Nash introduced himself as Oldfield's solicitor, and Morgan said he was his sole executor. A more unclubable man than Morgan I never met; he's not even a good imitation of a gentleman; how Oldfield came to appoint him as his sole executor is beyond my comprehension." "What can you expect from a pill-man? I should take anything as a matter of course from the proprietor of Peter Piper's Popular Pills." "They're a sound, wholesome medicine." "Of course; we won't flog a dead donkey. And when did Oldfield die? and what of? did you know that he was ill?" "I hadn't the ghost of a notion. And the best--or rather the worst--of it is that Messrs. Nash and Morgan seem to take it for granted that I knew all about it; especially the man Morgan." "Why should he do that? And what's the harm if he does?" Clifford was drumming on the table with his finger-tips, nervously; as a rule he was one of the coolest and most collected of men; now his embarrassment was obvious. "That's one of the charms of the position; showing that one man may know another for a long time, and yet know nothing at all about him. According to the two gentlemen Joseph Oldfield lived a double life, and his name wasn't Oldfield at all." "There you are again, the pill-man! It at least looks as if he had the saving grace of being ashamed to have it known that he was connected with his own pills." "I admit it does make it look as if he were ashamed, though I don't see why he should have been; since, as I say, they are a sound and wholesome medicine." "No doubt; the elixir of life; cure all ills; see advertisements." "There is no reason why a man should be more ashamed of being associated with an honest medicine than with the profession of the law, which is not all honesty." "True, O king! Still, however, let's pass on. If his name wasn't Oldfield, what was it?" "Can't you guess?" "Can't I--would you mind saying that again; only let me warn you that if you've come here to ask riddles there'll be ructions." "Don't be an ass, if you can help it! I saw the girl who's in the next room in his room, yesterday." "You saw her? I don't believe it." "At least I saw her likeness; it was on his writing-table. She seemed to be looking at me during the whole of a very unpleasant scene; it was odd how the feeling that she was looking at me affected me; the excellence of the likeness is proved by the fact that I recognized her as the original the moment I saw her." "Then do you mean----" "I mean that, according to Messrs. Nash and Morgan, Oldfield's real name was Lindsay, Donald Lindsay, of Cloverlea. What's Miss Lindsay doing here?" It was Mr. Hooper's turn to look surprised. As was his custom, when at all moved, getting up from his chair, he began to wander about the room. "Why--she's typing, very badly, some absolutely worthless rubbish, for the magnificent payment of two guineas a week, which I can't afford to pay her." "That sounds involved. Do you mean that she acts as your typewriter?" "No, sir; she's my jobbing secretary; though I don't know what that is; nor does she. And in that position she's earning two guineas a week; which is more than I am." "What's the idea?" "The idea is that she's a lady; and that she wanted to earn her daily bread, desperately badly. Mind, you're not to breathe a word of this to her, or she'll go away at once, and probably never forgive me into the bargain." "It strikes me that you've been entertaining an angel unawares. She says she's the daughter of Donald Lindsay, of Cloverlea." "What she says goes. That girl wouldn't tell a lie--well, she wouldn't." "Then in that case she must be worth piles of money. I don't understand why she's here; unless---- Is it possible that she doesn't know of the connection between Lindsay and Oldfield?" "Frank, there's a mystery about that girl; I've suspected it all along; now suspicion's growing to certainty. Let's ask her to come in, and we'll put her in the box. I'd give--more than I am ever likely to have, to be to her a bearer of good tidings." "Jack! Is it like that?" "You idiot! I've only known her about two minutes; besides, she'd never look at the likes of me; I feel it in the marrow of my bones. But that's no reason why, if you have good news for her, she shouldn't know them." "One moment! The point on which I've come to consult you I haven't yet reached; and a very nasty one it is; all the same, my dear Jack, we must leave Miss Lindsay till we've discussed it. I'm accused of having committed forgery." "Frank! you're jesting!" "It would be a grim jest if I were; but I'm not. Yesterday Mr. Morgan charged me, point-blank, with having forged--and uttered--bills, for over forty thousand pounds; more, he seemed amazed because I did not at once confess my guilt and throw myself upon his mercy." "The man's a lunatic!" "Mr. Nash did not directly associate himself with Mr. Morgan's charges; on the other hand, he did not dissociate himself. His attitude puzzled me. I fancy that he had no doubt about my guilt until he met me, and that, afterwards, his judgment was in suspense." "But what foundation had either of these men for such a monstrous accusation?" "That's the difficulty; Morgan professes to believe he has a sound one." "Whose name are you supposed to have forged?" "Donald Lindsay's." "But you never heard it till yesterday." "That is so; but Morgan called me a liar, right out, when I said so; and appearances may be against me. Jack, I'm in an awkward position." "I don't see why; you can bring Mr. Morgan to book, and there's an end of him." "There's more in it than you suppose; it's not so simple. Let me explain; or at least try to. You've heard me speak of a man named Trevor, Harry Trevor?" "I know! Sir Henry Trevor! He's a blackguard!" "I'm afraid he's not all that he might be, but that has only begun to dawn upon me lately. At one time he and I were intimate. When I was last in Paris I met him one day on the Boulevard. Although, somehow, we'd drifted apart; our paths in life lay in different directions; still I was very glad to see him, and we chummed up at once. He was living in Paris; had an apartment on the Champs Elysée, at the top there, near the Arch. He knew everybody; took me about; I had a royal time. One night I dined with him in his rooms, he and I alone together. Now I'm reluctant to make a direct charge, because I've no proof to offer, but I wondered then, and I've wondered still more since, if he hadn't done something to his wine." "How--done something?" "You know I'm an abstemious man, I don't care for wine; as a rule I drink nothing at meals, not even water. But on an occasion like that it was different. I had one glass of champagne, one of those small tumblers; when the servant began to fill it up I stopped him; not that there was anything wrong with the champagne, I feel sure there wasn't. After dinner, with our fruit, we had some port; I wanted neither the port nor the fruit, but Trevor insisted. The servant had left the room; he himself took a bottle out of a cupboard; he laid it in a cradle; he drew the cork; you know the fuss some men make about drawing a cork of what they allege is a remarkable bottle of wine. He made all that fuss, he insisted upon my sampling it; of course after all the business he had gone through, I had no option; he poured me out a glassful. Now I believe that wine was not all he pretended." "What makes you think it?" "As soon as I tasted it I didn't like it, I told him so. He said I should change my opinion by the time I'd finished the glass; so--merely to get rid of it--I finished the glass in a hurry, and I liked it less than ever." "How did it affect you?" "It upset me; I was conscious that I was not in a condition in which I should care to do business." "Did you say anything?" "I told him that I thought the wine had a very funny taste; but he only laughed and said it was evident that I was no judge of port." "You only had one glass?" "One only; nothing short of physical force would have induced me to touch another drop." "Then what did you do?" "We went into the other room, his sitting-room. He took out an autograph album, it seemed that he collected autographs; though that was the first I'd heard of it. He began to talk about imitating people's handwriting, how good some were at it. Now it's a fact that I've always had an unfortunate facility for imitating handwriting." "It is, as you say, an unfortunate facility; one not overmuch to be desired." "When I was at school I used to imitate the masters' writing, the other fellows' writing, anybody's writing; it used to give me a sort of importance in the eyes of the other boys, and I'm afraid I sometimes used my gift in ways which weren't altogether to my credit; you haven't forgotten what boys are. Trevor was at school with me, so he knew all about it. As he turned over page after page of his album, he kept saying that I couldn't imitate this writing, and I couldn't imitate that; I hadn't tried my hand since I had left school; I didn't know if he was right or wrong, and I didn't care. Finally he came to a signature which, so far as I remember, was on a scrap of paper which might have been torn off the bottom of a letter; the name itself was recalled to my memory with unpleasant vividness yesterday--it was Donald Lindsay." "Frank!" "We are fearfully and wonderfully made. It had gone clean out of my mind till Mr. Morgan showed it to me yesterday on a bill of exchange; then it came back with a rush of recollection which frightened me. Wasn't that an extraordinary thing?" "Go on; I don't see yet what you are coming to." "Trevor made a special point of this signature. He sat down and imitated it himself, and then challenged me to do better. His imitation was a bad one; and--I did better." "What did you write on?" "I have a vague impression that it was on a blank sheet of paper; but I was in such a state of muddle that I couldn't positively affirm. Had I been myself I should have changed the conversation before, but I was in such a condition that I could only sit and listen, with but a dim appreciation of his meaning." "But you do remember copying Donald Lindsay's signature on what you believe was a blank sheet of paper?" "Unfortunately I do; the name meant nothing to me; I had never heard of such a person; I acted on Trevor's persistent suggestion practically like a man might do who was in a mesmeric trance. When I had finished, Trevor, taking it up, declared it wasn't a bit like, and, if I couldn't do better than that, he'd beaten me. So I tried again." "You mean that you copied Donald Lindsay's signature a second time?" "I did." "On the same sheet of paper?" "I couldn't positively say, but it wouldn't surprise me to be told that it was on a fresh sheet. I've a hazy notion that I copied it a third and fourth time; Trevor each time declaring that it was not a bit like. By that time my brain was torpid, all I could do was move my fingers; presently I could no longer move those. I lost consciousness. The next thing I can recollect is waking up in bed at my hotel feeling very ill. I rang for the waiter. When he appeared he told me, with a grin, that I had been brought to the hotel in a cab; that I had had to be carried out, borne up-stairs, undressed, and put to bed; the inference being that I was drunk. But I knew better. There happened to be staying in the hotel a doctor who practises at Karlsbad, with whom I had some acquaintance, Dr. Adler, a man of cosmopolitan reputation. I sent for him, and when he came he at once pronounced that I had been poisoned." "Poisoned? Actually poisoned?" "Actually poisoned. Adler saved my life; I believe that without him I should have died. It was three days before I could get out of bed; and then I was so weak that I had to be helped across the room." "What did you do?" "I sent a note to Trevor, by hand. The messenger returned with it, saying Trevor had left Paris the day after I had dined with him, and his apartment was shut up." "And then?" "I returned to London. I had already overstayed my time; I was wanted at the office; I resumed my duties, and forgot all about it; or, at least, I tried to. What could I do? The conclusion to which I came was that there had been something wrong with the wine. I had known Trevor the greater part of his life; I had never known him to be guilty of a disreputable action; I could conceive of no motive which might induce him to play tricks with an old friend, at his own table; I resolved that, when occasion offered, I would tell him the tragic tale of how his port had affected me; until yesterday I supposed that it was by sheer accident that so far an opportunity had not arisen, and that I had heard and seen nothing of Trevor from that day to this; and there you are!" "That's not all the story." "So far as I've actual knowledge it is; the rest is mere surmise, based on what Mr. Morgan told me yesterday. He says that bills for over forty thousand pounds, purporting to be signed by Donald Lindsay, have been discounted by Trevor, who asserted that he had them from me. If that's true it looks as if those pieces of paper on which I copied Lindsay's signature were bill stamps." "Have you no recollection of them whatever?" "None. If that is so then the possibility is that Trevor knew of the connection between Lindsay and Oldfield; and that that is why he hocussed me--Oldfield's managing man--into copying Lindsay's name; which points to a plot, on Trevor's part, of the most iniquitous kind." "Where is Sir Henry Trevor now?" "That I don't know. After leaving Morgan last night I hunted for him everywhere; wired to Paris, searched all over London. Nothing has been heard of him at any of his old haunts for at any rate the last three or four months; he seems to have vanished." "Who discounted the bills?" "That, also, I can't tell you; we shall probably hear all about that from Mr. Morgan. What I want to learn is, legally, in what position do I stand?" "It's not easy to say. To begin with they'll have to prove that the bills were forged." "And then?" "Then they'll have to produce Trevor. A man who is capable of behaving as he has done is quite likely to be willing to swear that he received the bills in their completed state from you." "Which means?" "Your word against his; to clear yourself you'll have to convict him, which mayn't be easy, or agreeable for you." "Sounds cheerful; especially as I'm to be married next week!" "There's one hope for you." "Only one? Let's have it." "The fact that Miss Lindsay is in the next room. If she has anything to do with it she'll even forgive you for allowing yourself to get mixed up with such a scamp as Trevor; I know more about him than it seems you do. That girl could forgive anybody anything, she's a saint in embryo. I suggest that we invite her to come in here, and that we then put to her some leading questions." CHAPTER XXXIV UNTO THE LIGHT When Nora entered she looked from one man to the other, as if she wondered by which of them her presence was desired. She declined the chair which Mr. Hooper offered. On his persisting in his request to her to be seated she observed, with the naïve mixture of humility and pride which became her so well, that she would rather not sit, as she was engaged in copying a passage which was more than usually involved, and to which she would like to return as soon as she could. Mr. Hooper, at her back, directed a glance at Mr. Clifford, of which, had she intercepted it, she would probably have required a prompt explanation. "I think, Miss Lindsay," he said, "that it is possible that you will do no more copying for me, and that the passage of which you speak may remain unfinished." She turned quickly round to him, alarm on her face. "Mr. Hooper! Why do you say that? What have I done?" "Everything you have done, Miss Lindsay, you have done excellently; if you will permit me to ask you a few questions, you will understand why I say it. Please sit down." "Thank you; I much prefer to stand." "You, of course, are at liberty to please yourself; but, in that case, Mr. Clifford and I must also continue to stand, and that may be inconvenient." Thereupon she subsided on to the chair which he had placed for her, glancing as she did so at the two men in front of her as if she suspected them of having conspired together to compel her to seat herself against her will. Mr. Hooper assumed an air which was almost judicial. "I beg you to believe, Miss Lindsay, that in putting to you the questions I am about to put I am actuated only by considerations of your own interests. If they seem at all impertinent, I assure you that it is in appearance only; as, if you will answer them frankly, you will immediately perceive. To begin with, how many children had your father beside yourself?" It is possible that she looked as surprised as she felt; she could hardly have felt more surprised than she looked. She hesitated; then briefly answered-- "None." "Then--pardon me if I pain you--were you not on good terms with your father when he died?" Her eyes opened wider; it seemed that her amazement grew. "Of course I was; what do you mean? If you had ever known my father you wouldn't have dreamt of asking such a--such a silly question; I don't wish to be rude, but you wouldn't. My father never said an angry word to me in the whole of his life." "But, in that case, to whom did he leave his money?" "To me." "To you?" "He left everything he had in the world to me absolutely; I don't know quite what it means, but I know that's what they said, absolutely." "Then now it's my turn not to understand you. Your father was an immensely wealthy man. If you are his heiress, how is it I have the honour, and happiness, of seeing you here, in receipt of a modest weekly salary?" "Every one thought papa was rich; I did; I understood him to tell me himself that he was; but it seemed, after all, that he wasn't. Indeed, as soon as he was dead, some man said he owed him a great deal of money, for bills." "Bills!" The interruption came from Clifford. "I don't know what kind of bills they were; but I know they were bills of some kind, because I was told so; then they came and sold everything to get money to pay the bills, and I was left with nothing." The two men eyed each other as if the significance of what the girl said surpassed their comprehension. Mr. Clifford continued his interposition. "Miss Lindsay, Mr. Hooper has told you my name; it is Clifford--Frank Clifford. I believe I knew your father for many years, and am indebted to him for many kindnesses. Did he never mention my name to you?" "Clifford? No, I don't remember his ever having done so." "I saw your portrait in his rooms yesterday, and when I saw you this morning I recognized you at once." "His rooms? What rooms?" "His rooms in town." "I didn't know he had any; we couldn't find out that he had an address in town." "You couldn't find out that he had an address in town? I don't understand; there is something very strange here. Do you know a Mr. Nash?" "Herbert Nash? He acted as my solicitor after my father was dead." "Your solicitor, or your father's?" "Mine. He went through my father's papers with a friend, and it was he who discovered that he had left no money." "This is stranger and stranger. How many executors did your father appoint?" "Executors?" "How many executors did your father appoint in his will?" "I never heard that he appointed any." "Then did you ever hear of a Mr. Morgan?" "Morgan? Stephen Morgan? Stephen Morgan was our butler at Cloverlea." Mr. Clifford gave what seemed like a gasp of astonishment. "Your butler! Miss Lindsay, would you mind describing your butler?" She did it so minutely that he identified his visitor of yesterday beyond a doubt. "I have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Morgan, Miss Lindsay; but he did not introduce himself as your father's butler. Would it be asking too much to ask you to describe your father?" "I can do better than that. He never would be photographed by a professional, but I managed to snap him two or three times with my own camera; I have a print of the very last snapshot I took of him here. It's not much as a photograph, but it's not a bad likeness." She took an old-fashioned gold locket from the bosom of her dress, and, opening it, held it out for Mr. Clifford to see. On one side was the portrait of her father; on the other was the portrait of some one else. "That," she explained, rather lamely, "is a portrait of--of some one I used to know." "This," declared Mr. Clifford, looking at the likeness on the other side, "is the portrait of the man I have known for many years as Joseph Oldfield." "As who? That's my father!" "Do you not know he had a business in town?" "I did not know he had a business anywhere." "He had; he carried on that business under a pseudonym; I have always known him as Joseph Oldfield; for the first time yesterday I heard the name of Donald Lindsay. It seems to have been his wish that his commercial and his private lives should be wholly distinct, overlapping at no point; he appears to have succeeded in carrying out that wish almost too well." "How--how extraordinary; and yet I'm not surprised. That is what he has been trying to tell me all the time." "All what time?" There was something in her tone and manner which struck the two men as curious; a sort of exaltation. "He has been coming to me, night after night, in my dreams, always in such trouble; always trying so hard to tell me something; but he never could. Now I know what it was. If he comes again he'll understand that I know, and his trouble will have gone. You mustn't laugh at me; in my dreams his coming has been so real." Judging from their faces neither of her hearers was inclined for laughter. She turned to Mr. Clifford. "What was my father's business?" "He was the proprietor of Peter Piper's Popular Pills, of which you have probably heard." "Why"--her face was illumined by a smile--"he always had a stock of them in the house; it was a standing joke. He used to give a box to nearly every one who came, declaring that they were a simple, safe medicine for what he called 'common complaints.'" Mr. Clifford bestowed on Mr. Hooper what might be described as a glare of triumph. "So they are, Miss Lindsay; it is only ignorant people who doubt it. No one was in a better position to know than your father was, and he was their sole proprietor. If he left you all his property, then I am fortunate in being the first to tell you that, of my own knowledge, you are the owner of at least a million." "A million! Mr. Clifford! Then--then----" She had the locket still open, and was looking at the likeness which she had described as the portrait of some one she used to know; as she looked her sentence came to a premature end, and her face was dyed with blushes. Mr. Clifford went on, a little heatedly. "You have been badly used, Miss Lindsay; monstrously used; and by those who should have made it their first aim to use you well." Her radiant face contrasted oddly with his warmth. "What does it matter? It has done me no harm. All the while I've felt that God was leading me through the darkness unto the light; and that's what He has done. So see how much I have to thank Him for." The door was opened by Mr. Gibb. "Two gentlemen and a lady to see Mr. Frank Clifford." Without waiting for further announcement the visitors came in; in front Robert Spencer; behind him Herbert Nash, with Elaine at his side. When the lovers saw each other, each stood gazing as if fearful that the other was some entrancing vision which might resolve itself into air and vanish. Both cried, as if it was the most delightful and wonderful thing in the world that it should be so-- "You!" They advanced, and only just in the nick of time remembered that there were others there; they could not have got closer and kept out of each other's arms. Mr. Spencer spoke as if in an ecstasy. "You queen of dear women, I've ransacked all the stray corners of the world for you! Where have you been hiding?" "Why," she replied, "I've been trying to earn my living." "My Lady Quixote! all the while you've been a millionaire!" "So Mr. Clifford has just told me. I haven't had time to realize it yet; but I think I'm glad." "You only think?" "I'm sure." She added--they were so close!--these words, which reached his ear only, "For your sake!" As she whispered her face crimsoned. Before he could answer she had moved forward. "Elaine!" When she advanced the other shrank back. "Why, Elaine, what's the matter?" Mr. Spencer spoke. "Miss Harding is now Mrs. Nash. If you will go with her into the next room I think you will find that she has something which she wishes to say to you." So Nora went with Elaine into the adjoining chamber. The four men, left to themselves, began, with each other's aid, to piece together, into a comprehensible whole, the scattered parts of Donald Lindsay's strange history. While in the little room, where she had had such struggles with the typewriter, in the hour of her happiness, Nora had to listen to a tale of sin; and even while she listened, her one thought was how to comfort the sinner, to lead her, through the darkness, unto the light. CHAPTER XXXV BREAD UPON THE WATERS Although so recently returned to the House of Commons, Robert Spencer has already made his mark; discerning judges on both sides of the House prophesy that ere long he will become a power in the State. If he does he will owe his success in no slight measure to his wife. Few things help a man more than a happy marriage; about the happiness of his marriage there can be no question. His wife is one of the loveliest women in London; one of the most charming, in the best sense of the word. All decent folk are proud to know she is their friend; the other sort know she is not their enemy. She has help and sympathy for all. Peter Piper's Popular Pills still belong to Nora. Mr. Clifford not only continues to manage them; he has a share in the fruits of their prosperity. He was married on the appointed day, to Miss Ross's relief. Nora and Mr. Spencer were both present at the wedding, and Mr. Hooper was the groom's best man. The honeymoon tour was carried out on the lines originally planned. Nothing was done in the business of the forged bills. When matters were explained to Nora she insisted that nothing should be done. Probably hers was the part of wisdom; it is difficult to see how good would have resulted. Sir Henry Trevor still continues vanished; but it seems not unlikely that he is flourishing somewhere on the other side of the world. Occasionally remittances are received, sometimes for considerable sums, posted from different towns on the American continent, in envelopes which contain, beside the remittances, nothing but a half-sheet of paper, on which is always the same line, "Towards the discharge of a debt due to Donald Lindsay's estate." The inference is that these amounts come from Sir Henry Trevor, who has chosen this method of salving an obligation of which he alone knows the precise history. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Nash are in Canada, where they have not done badly. Nash is an honest and hard-working man; if anything, a trifle hard and stern. His wife is a good mistress of his home. She is the mother of three children. It is her continual prayer that they may not be led into temptation, but delivered from evil. Stephen Morgan died in a London hospital on the day before Frank Clifford was married. He was knocked down by a motor omnibus. When he was taken to the hospital he was already unconscious, and already dying. On his return to consciousness, he was plainly near the end. With what seemed to be almost his last breath he begged that they would send for Mr. Clifford. Before, however, Mr. Clifford reached the hospital, he was dead. His ill deeds died with him. Mr. and Mrs. Spencer have a house in the country, but not at Cloverlea. Nora had no desire to renew associations which had suffered so severe an interruption. The lodge at the gate of the new house is in the occupation of Mrs. Gibb and Miss Gibb--Angel Gibb. Miss Gibb is engaged to the second gardener. A question has lately arisen as to whether, on the occasion of their approaching marriage, he shall go and live with his wife and her mother, or whether his wife and her mother shall come and live with him. The point has been referred by both parties to Mrs. Spencer, who finds it rather a difficult one to decide. Mr. Gibb is still with Mr. Hooper. He reports that business is looking up. It is a fact that of late several briefs have found their way into Mr. Hooper's hands. It is whispered that he is indebted for them to influence in certain quarters. However that may be, it is beyond doubt that he has handled them as well as could possibly be desired. THE END * * * * * _Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay_ 
5797	----	Youth Challenges By CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND AUTHOR OF "The Little Moment of Happiness," "The High Flyers," "Sudden Jim," "The Source," "The Hidden Spring," etc. CHAPTER I Bonbright Foote VI arose and stood behind the long table which served him as a desk and extended his hand across it. His bearing was that of a man taking a leading part in an event of historic importance. "My son," said he, "it gratifies me to welcome you to your place in this firm." Then he smiled. When Bonbright Foote VI smiled it was as though he said to himself, "To smile one must do thus and so with the features," and then systematically put into practice his instructions. It was a cultured smile, one that could have been smiled only by a gentleman conscious of generations of correct antecedents; it was an aristocratic smile. On the whole it was not unpleasant, though so excellently and formally done. "Thank you, father," replied Bonbright Foote VII. "I hope I shall be of some use to you." "Your office is ready for you," said his father, stepping to a door which he unlocked with the gravity of a man laying a corner stone. "This door," said he, "has not been opened since I took my place at the head of the business--since I moved from the desk you are to occupy to the one in this room. It will not be closed again until the time arrives for you to assume command. We have--we Footes--always regarded this open door as a patent token of partnership between father and son." Young Foote was well acquainted with this--as a piece of his family's regalia. He knew he was about to enter and to labor in the office of the heir apparent, a room which had been tenantless since the death of his grandfather and the consequent coronation of his father. Such was the custom. For twelve years that office had been closed and waiting. None had ventured into it, except for a janitor whose weekly dustings and cleanings had been performed with scrupulous care. He knew that Bonbright Foote VI had occupied the room for seventeen years. Before that it had stood vacant eleven years awaiting for Bonbright Foote VI to reach such age and attainments as were essential. Young Foote realized that upon the death of his father the office would be closed again until his son, Bonbright Foote VIII, should be equipped, by time and the university founded by John Harvard, to enter as he was entering to-day. So the thing had been done since the first Bonbright Foote invested Bonbright Foote II with dignities and powers. Father and son entered the long-closed office, a large, indeed a stately room. It contained the same mahogany table at which Bonbright Foote II had worked; the same chairs, the same fittings, the same pictures hung on the walls, that had been the property of the first crown prince of the Foote dynasty. It was not a bright place, suggestive of liveliness or gayety, but it was decorously inviting--a place in which one could work with comfort and satisfaction. "Let me see you at your desk," said the father, smiling again. "I have looked forward to seeing you there, just as you will look forward to seeing YOUR son there." Bonbright sat down, wondering if his father had felt oppressed as HE felt oppressed at this moment. He had a feeling of stepping from one existence into another, almost of stepping from one body, one identity, to another. When he sat at that desk he would be taking up, not his own career, but the career of the entity who had occupied this office through generations, and would occupy it in perpetual succession. Vaguely he began to miss something. The sensation was like that of one who has long worn a ring on his finger, but omits to put it on one morning. For that person there is a vague sense of something missing throughout the day. Bonbright did not know what he felt the lack of--it was his identity. "For the next month or so," said his father, "about all you can hope to do is to become acquainted with the plant and with our methods. Rangar will always be at your disposal to explain or to give you desired information. I think it would be well if he were to conduct you through the plant. It will give you a basis to work from." "The plant is still growing, I see," said Bonbright. "It seems as if a new building were being put up every time I come home." "Yes, growing past the prophecy of any of our predecessors," said his father. He paused. "I am not certain," he said, as one who asks a question of his inner self, "but I would have preferred a slower, more conservative growth." "The automobile has done it, of course." "Axles," said his father, with a hint of distaste. "The manufacturing of rear axles has overshadowed everything else. We retain as much of the old business--the manufacturing of machinery--as ever. Indeed, THAT branch has shown a healthy growth. But axles! A mushroom that has overgrown us in a night." It was apparent that Bonbright Foote VI did not approve of axles, as it was a known fact that he frowned upon automobiles. He would not own one of them. They were too new, too blatant. His stables were still stables. His coachman had not been transmuted into a chauffeur. When he drove it was in a carriage drawn by horses--as his ancestors had driven. "Yes... yes..." he said, slowly, with satisfaction, "it is good to have you in the business, son. It's a satisfaction to see you sitting there.... Now we must look about to find a suitable girl for you to marry. We must begin to think about Bonbright Foote VIII." There was no smile as he said this; the observation was made in sober earnest. Bonbright saw that, just as his ancestors looked to him to carry on the business, so they looked to him to produce with all convenient dispatch a male successor to himself. It was, so to speak, an important feature of his job. "I'll send in Rangar," said his father, not waiting for Bonbright to reply to the last suggestion, and walked with long-legged dignity out of the room. Bonbright rested his chin on his palm and stared gloomily at the wall. He felt bound and helpless; he saw himself surrounded by firm and dignified shades of departed Bonbright Footes whose collective wills compelled him to this or prohibited that course of action. Adventure, chance, were eliminated from his life. He was to be no errant musician, improvising according to his mood; the score he was to play was before him, and he must play it note for note, paying strict attention to rests, keys, andantes, fortissimos, pianissimos. He had been born to this, had been made conscious of his destiny from babyhood, but never had he comprehended it as he did on this day of his investiture. Even the selection and courting of a mate, that greatest of all adventures (to the young), was made humdrum. Doubtless his mother already had selected the girl, and presently would marry him to her. ... Somehow this was the one phase of the situation that galled him most. "I'll see about that," he muttered, rebelliously, "I'll see about that." Not that marriage was of importance to him yet, except as a thing to be avoided until some dim future. Women had not assumed consequence to him; his relations with them had been scant surface relations. They were creatures who did or did not please the eye, who did or did not dance well, who did or did not amuse one. That was all. He was only twenty-three. Rangar, his father's secretary, and the man who stood as shield between Bonbright Foote VI and unpleasant contacts with his business and the world's business, entered. Rangar was a capable man whose place as secretary to the head of the business did not measure his importance in the organization. Another man of his abilities and opportunity and position would have carried the title of general manager or vice president--something respect-carrying. As for Rangar, he was content. He drew the salary that would have accompanied those other titles, possessed in an indirect sort of way the authority, and yet managed to remain disentangled from the responsibilities. Had he suddenly vanished the elder Foote would have been left suspended in rarefied heights between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a competent, efficient man, if peculiar in his ambitions. "Your father," said he, "has asked me to show you through the plant." "Thank you--yes," said Bonbright, rising. They went out, passing from the old, the family, wing of the office building, into the larger, newer, general offices, made necessary by the vastly increased business of the firm. Here, in a huge room, were bookkeepers, stenographers, clerks, filing cabinets, desks, typewriters--with several cubicles glassed off for the more important employees and minor executives. "We have tried," said Rangar, "to retain as far as possible the old methods and systems. Your father, Mr. Foote, is conservative. He clings to the ways of his father and his grandfather." "I remember," said Bonbright, "when we had no typewriting machines." "We had to come to them," said Rangar, with a note of regret. "Axles compelled us. But we have never taken up with these new contraptions--fads--like phonographs to dictate to, card indices, loose-leaf systems, adding machines, and the like. Of course it requires more clerks and stenographers, and possibly we are a bit slower than some. Your father says, however, that he prefers conducting his business as a gentleman should, rather than to make a mere machine of it. His idea," said Rangar, "of a gentleman in business is one who refuses to make use of abbreviations in his correspondence." Bonbright was looking about the busy room, conscious that he was being covertly studied by every occupant of it. It made him uncomfortable, uneasy. "Let's go on into the shops," he said, impatiently. They turned, and encountered in the aisle a girl with a stenographer's notebook in her hand; indeed, Bonbright all but stepped on her. She was a slight, tiny thing, not thin, but small. Her eyes met Bonbright's eyes and she grinned. No other word can describe it. It was not an impertinent grin, nor a familiar grin, nor a COMMON grin. It was spontaneous, unstudied--it lay at the opposite end of the scale from Bonbright Foote VI's smile. Somehow the flash of it COMFORTED Bonbright. His sensations responded to it. It was a grin that radiated with well wishes for all the world. Bonbright smiled back, awkwardly, and bobbed his head as she stepped aside for him to pass. "What a grin!" he said, presently. "Oh," said Rangar. "Yes--to be sure. The Girl with the Grin--that's what they call her in the office. She's always doing it. Your father hasn't noticed. I hope he doesn't, for I'm sure he wouldn't like it." "As if," said Bonbright to himself, "she were happy--and wanted everybody else to be." "I'm sure I don't know," said Rangar. "She's competent." They passed outside and through a covered passageway into the older of the shops. Bonbright was not thinking about the shops, but about the girl. She was the only thing he had encountered that momentous morning that had interested him, the only thing upon which Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, had not set the stamp of its repressing personality. He tried to visualize her and her smile that he might experience again that sensation of relief, of lightened spirit. In a measure he was able to do so. Her mouth was large, he saw--no small mouth could have managed that grin. She was not pretty, but, somehow, attractive. Her eyes were bully; intelligent, humorous sort of eyes, he decided. "Bet she's a darn nice kid," he concluded, boyishly. His father would have been shocked at a thought expressed in such words. "The business has done wonders these last five years," said Rangar, intruding on Bonbright's thoughts. "Five years ago we employed less than a thousand hands; to-day we have more than five thousand on the payroll. Another few years and we shall have ten thousand." "Axles?" asked Bonbright, mechanically. "Axles," replied Rangar. "Father doesn't approve of them--but they must be doing considerable for the family bank account." Rangar shot a quick glance at the boy, a glance with reproof in it for such a flippancy. Vaguely he had heard that this young man had done things not expected from a Foote; had, for instance, gone in for athletics at the university. It was reported he had actually allowed himself to be carried once on the shoulders of a cheering mob of students! There were other rumors, also, which did not sit well on the Foote tradition. Rangar wondered if at last a Foote had been born into the family who was not off the old piece of cloth, who might, indeed, prove difficult and disappointing. The flippancy indicated it. "Our inventory," he said, severely, "five years ago, showed a trifle over a million dollars. To-day these mills would show a valuation of five millions. The earnings," he added, "have increased in even greater ratio." "Hum," said Bonbright, his mind already elsewhere. His thought, unspoken, was, "If we've got so blamed much, what's the use piling it up?" At noon they had not finished the inspection of the plant; it was well toward five o'clock when they did so, for Rangar did his duty conscientiously. His explanations were long, careful, technical. Bonbright set his mind to the task and listened well. He was even interested, for there were interesting things to see, processes requiring skilled men, machines that had required inventive genius to devise. He began to be oppressed by the bigness of it. The plant was huge; it was enormously busy. The whole world seemed to need axles, preferably Foote axles, and to need them in a hurry. At last, a trifle dazed, startled by the vastness of the domain to which he was heir apparent, Bonbright returned to the aloof quiet of his historic room. "I've a lot to learn," he told Rangar. "It will grow on you.... By the way, you will need a secretary." (The Footes had secretaries, not stenographers.) "Shall I select one for you?" "Yes," said Bonbright, without interest; then he looked up quickly. "No," he said, "I've selected my own. You say that girl--the one who grinned--is competent?" "Yes, indeed--but a girl! It has been the custom for the members of the firm to employ only men." Bonbright looked steadily at Rangar a moment, then said: "Please have that girl notified at once that she is to be my secretary." "Yes, sir," said Rangar. The boy WAS going to prove difficult. He owned a will. Well, thought the man, others may have had it in the family before--but it has not remained long. "Anything more, Mr. Foote?" "Thank you, no," said Bonbright, and Rangar said good evening and disappeared. The boy rested his chin on his hand again, and reflected gloomily. He hunched up his shoulders and sighed. "Anyhow," he said to himself, "I'll have SOMEBODY around me who is human." CHAPTER II Bonbright's father had left the office an hour before he and Rangar had finished their tour of the works. It was always his custom to leave his business early and to retire to the library in his home, where daily he devoted two hours to adding to the manuscript of The Philosophical Biography of Marquis Lafayette. This work was ultimately to appear in several severe volumes and was being written, not so much to enlighten the world upon the details of the career of the marquis as it was to utilize the marquis as a clotheshorse to be dressed in Bonbright Foote VI's mature reflections on men, events, and humanity at large. Bonbright VII sat at his desk motionless, studying his career as it lay circumscribed before him. He did not study it rebelliously, for as yet rebellion had not occurred to him. The idea that he might assert his individuality and depart from the family pattern had not ventured to show its face. For too many years had his ancestors been impressing him with his duty to the family traditions. He merely studied it, as one who has no fancy for geometry will study geometry, because it cannot be helped. The path was there, carefully staked out and bordered; to-day his feet had been placed on it, and now he must walk. As he sat he looked ahead for bypaths--none were visible. The shutting-down whistle aroused him. He walked out through the rapidly emptying office to the street, and there he stood, interested by the spectacle of the army that poured out of the employees' entrances. It was an inundation of men, flooding street from sidewalk to sidewalk. It jostled and joked and scuffled, sweating, grimy, each unit of it eager to board waiting, overcrowded street cars, where acute discomfort would be suffered until distant destinations were reached. Somehow the sight of that surging, tossing stream of humanity impressed Bonbright with the magnitude of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, even more than the circuit of the immense plant had done. Five thousand men, in a newspaper paragraph, do not affect the imagination. Five thousand men in the concrete are quite another matter, especially if you suddenly realize that each of them has a wife, probably children, and that the whole are dependent upon the dynasty of which you are a member for their daily bread. "Father and I," he said to himself, as the sudden shock of the idea impacted against his consciousness, "are SUPPORTING that whole mob." It gave him a sense of mightiness. It presented itself to him in that instant that he was not a mere business man, no mere manufacturer, but a commander of men--more than that, a lord over the destinies of men. It was overwhelming. This realization of his potency made him gasp. Bonbright was very young. He turned, to be carried on by the current. Presently it was choked. A stagnant pool of humanity formed around some center, pressing toward it curiously. This center was a tiny park, about which the street divided, and the center was a man standing on a barrel by the side of a sign painted on cloth. The man was speaking in a loud, clear voice, which was able to make itself perfectly audible even to Bonbright on the extreme edge of the mass. "You are helpless as individuals," the man was saying. "If one of you has a grievance, what can he do?... Nothing. You are a flock of sheep.... If ALL of you have a grievance, what can you do? You are still a pack of sheep.... Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, owns you, body and soul.... Suppose this Foote who does you the favor to let you earn millions for him--suppose he wants to buy his wife a diamond necklace.... What's to prevent him lowering your wages next week to pay for it?... YOU couldn't stop him!... Why can an army beat a mob of double its numbers? Because the army is ORGANIZED! Because the army fights as one man for one object!... You are a mob. Capital is organized against you.... How can you hope to defend yourselves? How can you force a betterment of your conditions, of your wage?... By becoming an army--a labor army!... By organizing.... That's why I'm here, sent by the National Federation--to organize you. To show you how to resist!... To teach you how to make yourselves irresistible!..." There were shouts and cheers which blotted out the speaker's words. Then Bonbright heard him again: "Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, is entitled to fair interest on the money it has invested in its plant. It is entitled to a fair profit on the raw materials it uses in manufacture.... But how much of the final cost of its axles does raw material represent? A fraction! What gives the axles the rest of their value?... LABOR! You men are paid two, three, some of you even four dollars a day--for your labor. Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, adds a little pig iron to your labor, and gives you a place to work in, and takes his millions of dollars a year.... Do you get your fair share?... You do NOT, and you will never get a respectable fraction of your fair share till you organize--and seize it." There was more. Bonbright had never heard the like of it before and it fascinated him. Here was a point of view that was new to him. What did it mean? Vaguely he had heard of Socialism, of labor unions, of the existence of a spirit of suspicion and discord between capital and labor. Now he saw it, face uncovered starkly. A moment before he had realized his power over these men; now he perceived that these men, some of them, realized it even better than he.... Realized it and resented it; resented it and fought with all the strength of their souls to undermine it and make it topple in ruin. His mind was a caldron into which cross currents of thought poured and tossed. He had no experience to draw on. Here was a thing he was being plunged into all unprepared. It had taken him unprepared, and shaken him as he had never been shaken before. He turned away. Half a dozen feet away he saw the Girl with the Grin--not grinning now, but tense, pale, listening with her soul in her eyes, and with the light of enthusiasm glowing beside it. He walked to her side, touched her shoulder.... It was unpremeditated, something besides his own will had urged him to speak to her. "I don't understand it," he said, unsteadily. "Your class never does," she replied, not sharply, not as a retort, but merely as one states a fact to give enlightenment. "My father," she said, "was killed leading the strikers at Homestead. ... The unions educated me." "What is this man--this speaker--trying to do? Stir up a riot?" She smiled. "No. He is an organizer sent by the National Federation. ... They're going to try to unionize our plant." "Unionize?" "Bonbright Foote, Incorporated," she said, "is a non-union shop." "I didn't know," said he, after a brief pause. "I'm afraid I don't understand these things.... I suppose one should know about them if he is to own a plant like ours." Again he paused while he fumbled for an idea that was taking shape. "I suppose one should understand about his employees just as much as he does about his machinery." She looked at him with a touch of awakened interest. "Do you class men with machinery?" she asked, well knowing that was not his meaning. He did not reply. Presently he said: "Rangar told you you were to be my secretary?" "Yes, sir," she said, using that respectful form for the first time. The relation of employer and employee had been re-established by his words. "Thank you for the promotion." "You understand what this is all about," he said. "I shall want to ask you about it.... Perhaps you even know the man who is speaking?" "He boards with my mother," said she. "That was natural," she added, "my father being who he was." Bonbright turned and looked at the speaker with curiosity awakened as to the man's personality. The man was young--under thirty, and handsome in a black, curly, quasi-foreign manner. Bonbright turned his eyes from the man to the girl at his side. "He looks--" said Bonbright. "How?" she asked, when it was apparent he was not going to finish. "As if," he said, musingly, "he wouldn't be the man to call on for a line smash in the last quarter of a tough game." Suddenly the speech came to an end, and the crowd poured on. "Good night," said the girl. "I must find Mr. Dulac. I promised I would walk home with him." "Good night," said Bonbright. "His name is Dulac?" "Yes." Men like Dulac--the work they were engaged upon--had not fallen within the circle of Bonbright's experience. Bonbright's training and instincts had all been aristocratic. At Harvard he had belonged to the most exclusive clubs and had associated with youths of training similar to his. In his athletics there had been something democratic, but nothing to impress him with democracy. Where college broadens some men by its contacts it had not broadened Bonbright, for his contacts had been limited to individuals chipped from the same strata as himself.... In his home life, before going to college, this had been even more marked. As some boys are taught arithmetic and table manners, Bonbright had been taught veneration for his family, appreciation for his position in the world, and to look upon himself and the few associates of his circumscribed world as selected stock, looked upon with especial favor and graciousness by the Creator of the universe. Therefore this sudden dip into reality set him shivering more than it would another who entered the water by degrees. It upset him.... The man Dulac stirred to life in him something that was deeper than mere curiosity. "Miss--" said he, and paused. "I really don't know your name." "Frazer," she supplied. "Miss Frazer, I should like to meet this Dulac. Would you be willing?" She considered. It was an unusual request in unusual circumstances, but why not? She looked up into his boyish face and smiled. "Why not?" she said, aloud. They pressed forward through the crowd until they reached Dulac, standing beside his barrel, surrounded by a little knot of men. He saw the girl approaching, and lifted his hand in acknowledgment of her presence. Presently he came to her, casting a careless glance at Bonbright. "Mr. Dulac," she said, "Mr. Foote has been listening to your speech. He wants to meet you." "Foote!" said Dulac. "Not--" "Mr. Bonbright Foote," said the girl. Evidently the man was nonplussed. He stared at Bonbright, who extended his hand. Dulac looked at it, took it mechanically. "I heard what you were saying, Mr. Dulac," said Bonbright. "I had never heard anything like it before--so I wanted to meet you." Dulac recovered himself, perceived that here was an opportunity, and spoke loudly so that the staring, interested workingmen, who now surrounded them, could hear distinctly. "I'm glad you were present," said he. "It is not often we workingmen catch the ear of you employers so readily. You sit apart from your men in comfortable offices or in luxurious homes, so they get little opportunity to talk straight from the shoulder to you.... Even if they had the chance," he said, with a look about him, "they would not dare. To be respectful and to show no resentment mean their bread and butter." "Resentment?" said Bonbright. "You see I am new to the business and to this. What is it they resent?" "They resent being exploited for the profit of men like yourself.... They resent your having the power of life and death over them...." The girl stood looking from one man to the other; from Dulac, tall, picturesquely handsome, flamboyant, conscious of the effect of each word and gesture, to Bonbright, equally tall, something broader, boyish, natural in his unease, his curiosity. She saw how like he was to his slender, aristocratic father. She compared the courtesy of his manner toward Dulac with Dulac's studied brusqueness, conscious that the boy was natural, honest, really endeavoring to find out what this thing was all about; equally conscious that Dulac was exercising the tricks of the platform and utilizing the situation theatrically. Yet he was utilizing it for a purpose with which she was heart and soul in sympathy. It was right he should do so.... "I wish we might sit down and talk about it," said Bonbright. "There seem to be two sides in the works, mine and father's--and the men. I don't see why there should be, and I'd like to have you tell me. You see, this is my first day in the business, so I don't understand my own side of it, or why I should have a side--much less the side of the men. I hadn't imagined anything of the sort.... I wish you would tell me all about it. Will you?" The boy's tone was so genuine, his demeanor so simple and friendly, that Dulac's weapons were quite snatched from his hands. A crowd of the men he was sent to organize was looking on--a girl was looking on. He felt the situation demanded he should show he was quite as capable of courtesy as this young sprig of the aristocracy, for he knew comparisons were being made between them. "Why," said he, "certainly.... I shall be glad to." "Thank you," said Bonbright. "Good night." He turned to the girl and lifted his hat. "Thank YOU," said he, and eyes in which there was no unfriendliness followed him as he walked away, eyes of men whom Dulac was recruiting for the army of the "other side" of the social struggle. He hurried home because he wanted to see his father and to discuss this thing with him. "If there is a conflict," he said to himself, "in our business, workingmen against employer, I suppose I am on the employer's side. THEY have their reasons. We must have our reasons, too. I must have father explain it all to me." His mother called to him as he was ascending the stairs: "Be as quick as you can, Bonbright. We have guests at dinner to-night." "Some one I know?" "I think not," His mother hesitated. "We were not acquainted when you went to college, but they have become very prominent in the past four years.... Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Lightener--and their daughter," Bonbright noticed the slight pause before the mention of the daughter, and looked quickly at his mother. She looked as quickly away. "All right, mother," he said. He went to his room with another disturbance added to the many that disquieted him. Just as certainly as if his mother had put it into words he knew she had selected this Lightener girl to be Mrs. Bonbright Foote VII--and the mother of Bonbright Foote VIII. "Confound it," he said, "it's started already.... Dam Bonbright Foote VIII!" CHAPTER III Bonbright dressed with a consciousness that he was to be on exhibition. He wondered if the girl had done the same; if she, too, knew why she was there and that it was her duty to make a favorable impression on him, as it was his duty to attract her. It was embarrassing. For a young man of twenty-three to realize that his family expects him to make himself alluring to a desirable future wife whom he has never seen is not calculated to soothe his nerves or mantle him with calmness. He felt silly. However, here HE was, and there SHE would be. There was nothing for it but to put his best foot forward, now he was caught for the event, but he vowed it would require more than ordinary skill to entrap him for another similar occasion. It seemed to him at the moment that the main object of his life thenceforward would be, as he expressed it, "to duck" Miss Lightener. When he went down the guests had arrived. His mother presented him, using proudly her formula for such meetings, "Our son." Somehow it always made him feel like an inanimate object of virtue--as if she had said "our Rembrandt," or, "our Chippendale sideboard." Mrs. Lightener did not impress him. Here was a quiet, motherly personality, a personality to grow upon one through months and years. At first meeting she seemed only a gray-haired, shy, silent sort of person, not to be spoken of by herself as Mrs. Lightener, but in the reflected rays of her husband, as Malcolm Lightener's wife. But Malcolm Lightener--he dominated the room as the Laocoon group would dominate a ten by twelve "parlor." His size was only a minor element in that impression. True, he was as great in bulk as Bonbright and his father rolled in one, towering inches above them, and they were tall men. It was the jagged, dynamic, granite personality of him that jutted out to meet one almost with physical impact. You were conscious of meeting a force before you became conscious of meeting a man. And yet, when you came to study his face you found it wonderfully human--even with a trace of granite humor in it. Bonbright was really curious to meet this man, whose story had reached him even in Harvard University. Here was a man who, in ten years of such dogged determination as affected one almost with awe, had turned a vision into concrete reality. In a day when the only mechanical vehicles upon our streets were trolley cars, he had seen those streets thronged with "horseless carriages." He had seen streets packed from curb to curb with endless moving processions of them. He had seen the nation abandon its legs and take to motor-driven wheels. This had been his vision, and he had made it reality. From the place of a master mechanic, at four dollars a day, he had followed his vision, until the world acknowledged him one of her richest men, one of her greatest geniuses for organization. In ten years, lifting himself by his boot straps, he had promoted himself from earnings of twelve hundred dollars a year to twelve million dollars a year.... He interested Bonbright as a great adventurer. To Hilda Lightener he was presented last. He had expected, hoped, to be unfavorably impressed; he had known he would be ill at ease, and that any attempts he made at conversation would be stiff and stilted. ... It was some moments after his presentation when he realized he felt none of these unpleasant things. She had shaken hands with him boyishly; her eyes had twinkled into his--and he was at his ease. Afterward he studied over the thing, but could not comprehend it.... It had been as if he were encountering, after a separation, a friend of years--not a girl friend, but a friend with no complications of sex. She was tall, nearly as tall as Bonbright, and she favored her father. Not that the granite was there. She was not beautiful, not even pretty--but you liked her looks. Bonbright liked her looks. At table Bonbright was seated facing Hilda Lightener. His father at once took charge of the conversation, giving the boy a breathing space to collect and appraise his impressions. Presently Mr. Foote said, impressively: "This is an important day in our family, Lightener. My son entered the business this morning." Lightener turned his massive, immobile face toward the boy, his expression not inviting, yet the seeing might have marked the ghost of a twinkle in his gray eyes. "Um.... Any corrections, amendments, or substitutions to offer?" he demanded. Bonbright looked at him, obviously not comprehending the sarcasm. "Most young spriggins I take into MY business," said Lightener, "think a whole day's experience equips them to take hold and make the whole thing over.... They can show me where I'm all wrong." Bonbright smiled, not happily. He was not accustomed to this sort of humor, and did not know how to respond to it. "It was so big," he said. "It sort of weighed me down--yet--somehow I didn't get interested till after the whistle blew." Lightener grunted. "That's what interests most of 'em--getting out of the place after the whistle blows." "Dad!" said Hilda. "What was it interested you then, Mr. Foote?" "The men," said Bonbright--"that great mob of men pouring out of the gates and filling the street.... Somehow they seemed to stand for the business more than all the buildings full of machinery.... I stood and watched them." Interest kindled in Lightener's eyes. "Yes?" he prompted. "It never occurred to me before that being at the head of a business meant--meant commanding so many men... meant exercising power over all those lives.... Then there were the wives and children at home...." Bonbright's father leaned forward icily. "Son," he said, coldly, "you haven't been picking up any queer notions in college?" "Queer notions?" "Socialistic, anarchistic notions. That sort of thing." "I don't believe," said Bonbright, with utter honesty, "that I ever gave the workingman a thought till to-day.... That's why it hit me so hard, probably." "It hit you, eh?" said Lightener. He lifted his hand abruptly to motion to silence Mr. Foote, who seemed about to interrupt. "Leave the boy alone, Foote.... This is interesting. Never saw just this thing happen before.... It hit you hard, eh?" "It was the realization of the power of large employers of labor--like father and yourself, sir." "Was that all?" "At first.... Then there was a fellow on a barrel making a speech about us.... I listened, and found out the workingmen realize that we are sort of czars or some such thing--and resent it. I supposed things were different. This Dulac was sent here to organize our men into a union--just why I didn't understand, but he promised to explain it to me." "WHAT?" demanded Bonbright Foote VI, approaching nearer than his wife had ever seen him to losing his poise. "You talked to him?" asked Hilda, leaning forward in her interest. "I was introduced to him; I wanted to know.... He was a handsome fellow. Not a gentleman, of course--" "Oh!" Lightener pounced on that expression. "Not a gentleman, eh?... Expect to find the Harvard manner in a man preaching riot from a potato barrel?... Well, well, what did he say? How did HE affect you?" "He seemed to think the men resented our power over them. Just how correctly he stated their feeling I don't know, of course. They cheered his speech, however.... He said father had the power to buy mother a diamond necklace to-morrow, and cut their wages to pay for it--and they couldn't help themselves." "Well--could they?" "I don't know. I didn't understand it all, but it didn't seem right that those men should feel that way toward us. I want to talk to father about it--have him explain it to me." Lightener chuckled and turned to Mr. Foote. "I don't suppose you appreciate the humor of that, Foote, the way I do. He's coming to you for an unbiased explanation of why your employees--feel that way.... Young fellow," he turned to Bonbright again--"I could come closer to doing it than your father--because I was one of them once. I used to come home with grease on my hands and a smudge on my nose, smelling of sweat." Mrs. Foote repressed a shudder and lowered her eyes. "But I couldn't be fair about it. Your father has no more chance of explaining the thing to you--than my wife has of explaining the theory of an internal-combustion engine.... We employers can't do it. We're on the other side. We can't see anything but our own side of it." "Come now, Lightener, I'm fair-minded. I've even given some study to the motives of men." "And you're writing a book." He shrugged his shoulders. "The sort of philosophical reflections that go in books aren't the sort to answer when you're up against the real thing in social unrest.... In your whole business life you've never really come into contact with your men. Now be honest, have you?" "I've always delegated that sort of thing to subordinates," said Mr. Foote, stiffly. "Which," retorted Mr. Lightener, "is one of the reasons for the unrest.... That's it. We don't understand what they're up against, nor what we do to aggravate them." "It's the inevitable warfare between capital and labor," said Mr. Foote. "Jealousy is at the root of it; unsound theories, like this of socialism, and too much freedom of speech make it all but unbearable." "Dulac said they must organize to be in condition to fight us." "Organize," said Mr. Foote, contemptuously. "I'll have no unions in my shop. There never have been unions and there never shall be. I'll put a sudden stop to that.... Pretty idea, when the men I pay wages to, the men I feed and clothe, can dictate to me how I shall conduct my affairs." "Yes," said Lightener, "we automobile fellows are non-union, but how long we can maintain it I don't know. They have their eyes on us and they're mighty hungry." "To-morrow morning," said Mr. Foote, "notices will appear in every department stating that any man who affiliates with a labor union will be summarily dismissed." "Maybe that will end the thing this time, Foote, but it'll be back. It 'll be back." Hilda leaned forward again and whispered to Bonbright, "You're not getting much enlightenment, are you?" Her eyes twinkled; it was like her father's twinkle, but more charming. "How," he asked, slowly, "are we ever to make anything of it if we, on the employers' side, can't understand their point of view, and they can't understand ours?" Mrs. Foote arose. "Let's not take labor unions into the other room with us," she said. Bonbright and Hilda walked in together and immediately engaged in comfortable conversation; not the sort of nonsense talk usually resorted to by a young man and a young woman on their first meeting. They had no awkwardness to overcome, nor was either striving to make an impression on the other. Bonbright had forgotten who this girl was, and why she was present, until he saw his mother and Mrs. Lightener approach each other, cast covert glances in their direction, and then observe something with evident pleasure. "They seem attracted by each other," Mrs. Foote said. "He's a nice boy," replied Mrs. Lightener. "I think you're right." "An excellent beginning. Propinquity and opportunity ought to do the rest.... We can see to that." Bonbright understood what they were saying as if he had heard it; bit his lips and looked ruefully from the mothers to Hilda. Her eyes had just swung from the same point to HIS face, and there was a dancing, quizzical light in them. SHE understood, too. Bonbright blushed at this realization. "Isn't it funny?" said Hilda, with a little chuckle. "Mothers are always doing it, though." "What?" he asked, fatuously. "Rubbish!" she said. "Don't pretend not to understand. I knew YOU knew what was up the moment you came into the room and looked at me. ... You--dodged." "I'm sure I didn't," he replied, thrown from his equilibrium by her directness, her frankness, so like her father's landslide directness. "Yes, you dodged. You had made up your mind never to be caught like this again, hadn't you? To make it your life work to keep out of my way?" He dared to look at her directly, and was reassured. "Something like that," he responded, with miraculous frankness for a Foote. "Just because they want us to we don't have to do it," she said, reassuringly. "I suppose not." "Suppose?" "I'm a Foote, you know, Bonbright Foote VII. I do things I'm told to do. The last six generations have planned it all out for me.... We do things according to inherited schedules.... Probably it sounds funny to you, but you haven't any idea what pressure six generations can bring to bear." He was talking jerkily, under stress of emotion. He had never opened his mouth on this subject to a human being before, had not believed it possible to be on such terms with anybody as to permit him to unbosom himself. Yet here he was, baring his woes to a girl he had known but an hour. "Of course," she said, with her soft, throaty chuckle, "if you really feel you have to.... But I haven't any six generations forcing ME. Or do you think yours will take me in hand?" "It isn't a joke to me," he said. "How would you like it if the unexpected--chance--had been carefully weeded out of your future?... It makes things mighty flat and uninteresting. I'm all wrapped up in family traditions and precedents so I can't wriggle--like an Indian baby.... Even THIS wouldn't be so rotten if it were myself they were thinking about. But they're not. I'm only an incident in the family, so far as this goes.... It's Bonbright Foote VIII they're fussing about.... It's my duty to see to it there's a Bonbright Foote VIII promptly." She didn't sympathize with him, or call him "poor boy," as so many less natural, less comprehending girls would have done. "I haven't the least idea in the world," she said, "whether I'll ever want to marry you or not--and you can't have a notion whether you'll want me. Suppose we just don't bother about it? We can't avoid each other--they'll see to that. We might as well be comfortably friendly, and not go shying off from each other. If it should happen we do want to marry each other--why, all right. But let's just forget it. I'm sure I sha'n't marry you just because a lot of your ancestors want me to.... Folks don't fall in love to order--and you can put this away carefully in your mind--when I marry it will be because I've fallen in love." "You're very like your father," he said. "Rushing in where angels fear to tread, you mean? Yes, dad's more direct than diplomatic, and I inherit it.... Is it a bargain?" "Bargain?" "To be friends, and not let our mammas worry us.... I like you." "Really?" he asked, diffidently. "Really," she said. "I like you, too," he said, boyishly. "We'll take in our Keep Off the Grass signs, then," she said. "Mother and father seem to be going." She stood up and extended her hand. "Good night, chum," she said. To herself she was saying what she was too wise to say aloud: "Poor kid! A chum is what he needs." CHAPTER IV Bonbright's first day in the plant had carried no suggestion from his father as to what his work was actually to be. He had merely walked about, listening to Rangar's expositions of processes and systems. After he was in bed that night he began to wonder what work would fall to him. What work had it been the custom for the heir apparent to perform? What work had his father and grandfather and great-grandfather performed when their positions were his position to-day?... Vaguely he recognized his incompetence to administer anything of importance. Probably, little by little, detail by detail, matters would be placed under his jurisdiction until he was safely functioning in the family groove. His dreams that night were of a reluctant, nightmarish passage down a huge groove, a monotonous groove, whose smooth, insurmountable sides offered no hint of variety.... As he looked ahead he could see nothing but this straight groove stretching into infinity. Always he was disturbed and made wretched by a consciousness of movement, of varied life and activity, of adventure, of thrill, outside the groove, but invisible, unreachable.... He strove to clamber up the glassy sides, only to slip back, realizing the futility of the EFFORT. He breakfasted alone, before his father or mother was about, and left the house on foot, driven by an aching restlessness. It was early. The factory whistle had not yet blown when he reached the gates, but already men carrying lunch boxes were arriving in a yawning, sleepy stream.... Now Bonbright knew why he had arisen early and why he had come here. It was to see this flood of workmen again; to scrutinize them, to puzzle over them and their motives and their unrest. He leaned against the wall and watched. He was recognized. Here and there a man offered him good morning with a friendliness of tone that surprised Bonbright. A good many men spoke to him respectfully; more regarded him curiously; some hopefully. It was the occasional friendly smile that affected him. One such smile from an older workman, a man of intelligent face, of shrewd, gray eyes, caused Bonbright to move from his place to the man's side. "I don't know your name, of course," he said, diffidently. "Hooper," said the man, pleasantly. "The men seem to know me," Bonbright said. "I was a little surprised. I only came yesterday, you know." "Yes," said Hooper, "they know who you are." "They seemed---almost friendly." Hooper looked sharply at the young man. "It's because," said he, "they're pinning hopes to you." "Hopes?" "Labor can't get anywhere until it makes friends in the ranks of the employers," said Hooper. "I guess most of the men don't understand that--even most of the leaders, but it's so. It's got to be so if we get what we must have without a revolution." Bonbright pondered this. "The men think I may be their friend?" "Some saw you last night, and some heard you talk to Dulac. Most of them have heard about it now." "That was it?... Thank you, Mr. Hooper." Bonbright went up to his office, where he stood at the window, looking down upon the thickening stream of men as the minute for the starting whistle approached.... So he was of some importance, in the eyes of the workingmen, at least! They saw hope in his friendship. ... He shrugged his shoulders. What could his friendship do for them? He was impotent to help or harm. Bitterly he thought that if the men wanted friendship that would be worth anything to them, they should cultivate his dead forbears. Presently he turned to his desk and wrote some personal letters--as a distraction. He did not know what else to do. There was nothing connected with the plant that he could set his hand to. It seemed to him he was just present, like a blank wall, whose reason for existence was merely to be in a certain place. He was conscious of voices in his father's room, and after a time his father entered and bade him a formal good morning. Bonbright was acutely conscious of his father's distinguished, cultured, aristocratic appearance. He was conscious of that manner which six generations of repression and habit in a circumscribed orbit had bestowed on Bonbright Foote VI. Bonbright was unconscious of the great likeness between him and his father; of the fact that at his father's age it would be difficult to tell them apart. Physically he was out of the Bonbright Foote mold. "Son," said Bonbright Foote VI, "you have made an unfortunate beginning here. You have created an impression which we shall have to eradicate promptly." "I don't understand." "It has been the habit of our family to hold aloof from our employees. We do not come directly into contact with them. Intercourse between us and them is invariably carried out through intermediaries." Bonbright waited for his father to continue. "You are being discussed by every man in the shops. This is peculiarly unfortunate at this moment, when a determined effort is being made by organized labor to force unionism on us. The men have the notion that you are not unfriendly toward unionism." "I don't understand it," said Bonbright. "I don't know what my feelings toward it may be." "Your feelings toward it," said his father with decision, "are distinctly unfriendly." Again Bonbright was silent. "Last evening," said his father, "you mingled with the men leaving the shops. You did a thing no member of our family has ever done--consented to an interview with a professional labor agitator." "That is hardly the fact, sir.... I asked for the interview." "Which is worse.... You even, as it is reported to me, agreed to talk with this agitator at some future time." "I asked him to explain things to me." "Any explanations of labor conditions and demands I shall always be glad to make. The thing I am trying to bring home to you is that the men have gotten an absurd impression that you are in sympathy with them.... Young men sometimes come home from college with unsound notions. Possibly you have picked up some socialistic nonsense. You will have to rid yourself of it. Our family has always arrayed itself squarely against such indefensible theories.... But the thing to do at once is to wipe out any silly ideas your indiscretion may have aroused among our workingmen." "But I am not sure--" "When you have been in this business ten years I shall be glad to listen to your matured ideas. Now your ideas--your actions at least-must conform to the policy we have maintained for generations. I have called some of our department heads to my room. I believe I hear them assembling. Let us go in." Bonbright followed his father mechanically. The next room contained some ten or twelve subordinate executives who eyed Bonbright curiously. "Gentlemen," said the elder Foote, "this is my son, whom you may not have met as yet. I wish to present him to you formally, and to tell you that hereafter he and I share the final authority in this plant. Decisions coming from this office are to be regarded as our joint decisions--except in the case of an exception of immediate moment. ... As you know, a fresh and determined effort is afoot to unionize this plant. My son and I have conferred on the matter, but I have seen fit to let the decision rest with him, as to our policy and course of action." The men looked with renewed curiosity at the young man who stood, white of face, with compressed lips and troubled eyes. "My son has rightly determined to adhere to the policy established many years ago. He has determined that unionism shall not be permitted to enter Bonbright Foote, Incorporated.... I state your sentiments, do I not, my son?" At the direct challenge Bonbright raised his eyes to his father's face appealingly. "Father--" he said. "I state your position?" his father said, sternly. Against Bonbright's will he felt the accumulated power of the family will, the family tradition. He had been reared in its shadow. Its grip lay firm upon him. Struggle he might, but the strength to defy was not yet in him.... He surrendered, feeling that, somehow, his private soul had been violated, his individuality rent from him. "Yes," he said, faintly. "The first step he has decided upon," said his father, "and one which should be immediately repressive. It is to post in every room and department of the shops printed notices to the effect that any man who affiliates himself with organized labor, or who becomes a member of a so-called trade-union, will be summarily dismissed from his employment.... That was the wording you suggested, was it not?" "Yes," said Bonbright, this time without struggle. "Rangar," said Mr. Foote, "my son directs that these cards be printed AT ONCE, and put in place before noon. It can be done, can it not?" "Yes, sir," said Rangar. "I think that is all, gentlemen.... You understand my son's position, I believe, so that if anyone questions you can answer him effectively?" The department heads stirred uneasily. Some turned toward the door, but one man cleared his throat. "Well, Mr. Hawthorne?" said the head of the business. "The men seem very determined this time. I'm afraid too severe action on our part will make trouble." "Trouble?" "A strike," said Hawthorne. "We're loaded with contract orders, Mr. Foote. A strike at this time--" "Rangar," said Mr. Foote, sharply, "at the first sign of such a thing take immediate steps to counteract it.... Better still, proceed now as if a strike were certain. These mills MUST continue uninterruptedly.... If these malcontents force a strike, Mr. Hawthorne, we shall be able to deal with it.... Good morning, gentlemen." The men filed out silently. It seemed as if they were apprehensive, almost as if they ventured to disagree with the action of their employers. But none voiced his disapproval. Bonbright stood without motion beside his father's desk, his eyes on the floor, his lips pressed together. "There," said his father, with satisfaction, "I think that will set you right." "Right?... The men will think I was among them last night as a spy!... They'll despise me.... They'll think I wasn't honest with them." Bonbright Foote VI shrugged his shoulders. "Loyalty to your family," he said, "and to your order is rather more important than retaining the good will of a mob of malcontents." Bonbright turned, his shoulders dropping so that a more sympathetic eye than his father's might have found itself moistening, and walked slowly back to his room. He did not sit at his desk, but walked to the window, where he rested his brow against his hand and looked out upon as much of the world as he could see.... It seemed large to him, filled with promise, filled with interests, filled with activities for HIM--if he could only be about them. But they were held tantalizingly out of reach. He was safe in his groove; had not slipped there gradually and smoothly, but had been thrust roughly, by sudden attack, into it. His young, healthy soul cried out in protest against the affront that had been put upon it. Not that the issue itself had mattered so much, but that it had been so handled, ruthlessly. Bonbright was no friend to labor. He had merely been a surprised observer of certain phenomena that had aroused him to thought. He did not feel that labor was right and that his father was wrong. It might be his father was very right.... But labor was such a huge mass, and when a huge mass seethes it is impressive. Possibly this mass was wrong; possibly its seething must be stilled for the better interests of mankind. Bonbright did not know. He had wanted to know; had wanted the condition explained to him. Instead, he had been crushed into his groove humiliatingly. Bonbright was young, to be readily impressed. If his father had received his uncertainty with kindliness and had answered his hunger's demand for enlightenment with arguments and reasoning, the crisis probably would have passed harmlessly. His father had seen fit not to use diplomacy, but to assert autocratically the power of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Bonbright's individuality had thought to lift its head; it had been stamped back into its appointed, circumscribed place. He was not satisfied with himself. His time for protest had been when he answered his father's challenge. The force against him had been too great, or his own strength too weak. He had not measured up to the moment, and this chagrined him. "All I wanted," he muttered, "was to KNOW!" His father called him, and he responded apathetically. "Here are some letters," said Mr. Foote. "I have made notes upon each one how it is to be answered. Be so good as to dictate the replies." There it was again. He was not even to answer letters independently, but to dictate to his secretary words put into his mouth by Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. "It will help you familiarize yourself with our routine," said his father, "and your signature will apprise the recipients that Bonbright Foote VII has entered the concern." He returned to his desk and pressed the buzzer that would summon Ruth Frazer with book and pencil. She entered almost instantly, and as their eyes met she smiled her famous smile. It was a thing of light and brightness, compelling response. In his mood it acted as a stimulant to Bonbright. "Thank you," he said, involuntarily. "For what?" she asked, raising her brows. "For--why, I'm sure I don't know," he said. "I don't know why I said that.... Will you take some letters, please?" He began dictating slowly, laboriously. It was a new work to him, and he went about it clumsily, stopping long between words to arrange his thoughts. His attention strayed. He leaned back in his chair, dictation forgotten for the moment, staring at Ruth Frazer without really being conscious of her presence. She waited patiently. Presently he leaned forward and addressed a question to her: "Did you and Mr. Dulac mention me as you walked home?" "Yes," she said. "Would it be--impertinent," he asked, "to inquire what you said?" She wrinkled her brows to aid recollection. "Mr. Dulac," she replied, "wondered what you were up to. That was how he expressed it. He thought it was peculiar--your asking to know him." "What did YOU think?" "I didn't think it was peculiar at all. You"--she hesitated--"had been taken sort of by surprise. Yes, that was it. And you wanted to KNOW. I think you acted very naturally." "Naturally!" he repeated after her. "Yes, I guess that must be where I went wrong. I was natural. It is not right to be natural. You should first find how you are expected to act--how it is planned for you to act. Yourself--why, yourself doesn't count." "What do you mean, Mr. Foote?" "This morning," he said, bitterly, "cards with my name signed to them have been placed, or will be placed, in every room of the works, notifying the men that if they join a labor union they will be discharged." "Why--why--" "I have made a statement that I am against labor unions." She looked at him uncomprehendingly, but somehow compelled to sympathize with him. He had passed through a bitter crisis of some sort, she perceived. "I am not interested in all those men--that army of men," he went on. "I don't want to understand them. I don't want to come into contact with them. I just want to sit here in my office and not be bothered by such things.... We have managers and superintendents and officials to take care of labor matters. I don't want to talk to Dulac about what he means, or why our men feel resentment toward us. Please tell him I have no interest whatever in such things." "Mr. Foote," she said, gently, "something has happened to you, hasn't it? Something that has made you feel bitter and discouraged?" "Nothing unusual--in my family--Miss Frazer. I've just been cut to the Bonbright Foote pattern. I didn't fit my groove exactly--so I was trimmed until I slipped into it. I'm in now." A sudden tumult of shouts and cheers arose in the street under his window; not the sound of a score of voices nor of a hundred, but a sound of great volume. Ruth looked up, startled, frightened. Bonbright stepped to the window. "It's only eleven o'clock," he said, "but the men are all coming out.... The whistle didn't blow. They're cheering and capering and shaking hands with one another. What does that mean, do you suppose?" "I'm afraid," said Miss Frazer, "it's your placard." "My placard?" "The men had their choice between their unions and their jobs--and they've stood by their unions." "You mean--?" "They've struck," said Ruth. CHAPTER V There are family traditions among the poor just as there are among the rich. The families of working-men may cling as tenaciously to their traditions as the descendants of an earl. In certain families the sons are compelled by tradition to become bakers, in others machinists; still other lowly family histories urge their members to conduct of one sort or another. It is inherent in them to hold certain beliefs regarding themselves. Here is a family whose tradition is loyalty to another family which has employed the father, son, grandfather; across the street may live a group whose peculiar religion is to oppose all constituted authority and to uphold anarchism. Theories and beliefs are handed down from generation to generation until they assume the dignity of blood laws. Bonbright was being wrenched to fit into the Foote tradition. Ruth Frazer, his secretary, needed no alterations to conform to the tradition of HER family. This was the leveling tradition; the elevating of labor and the pulling down of capital until there was a dead level of equality--or, perhaps, with labor a bit in the saddle. Probably a remote ancestor of hers had been a member of an ancient guild; perhaps one had risen with Wat Tyler. Not a man of the family, for time beyond which the memory of man runneth not, but had been a whole-souled, single-purposed labor man--trade-union man--extremist--revolutionist. Her father had been killed in a labor riot--and beatified by her. As the men of her family had been, so were the women--so was she. Rights of man, tyranny of capital, class consciousness had been taught her with her nursery rhymes. She was a zealot. A charming zealot with a soul that laughed and wanted all mankind to be happy with it--a soul that translated itself by her famous grin. When she thought of capital, of moneyed aristocracy in the mass and in the abstract, she hated it. It was a thing to be uprooted, plotted against, reviled. When she met a member of it in the body, and face to face, as she was meeting Bonbright Foote, she could not hate. He was a man, an individual. She could not withhold from him the heart-warming flash of her smile, could not wish him harm. Somehow, in the concrete, he became a part of mankind, and so entitled to happiness. She was sincere. In her heart she prayed for the revolution. Her keen brain could plan for the overthrow of the enemy and her soul could sacrifice her body to help to bring it to pass. She believed. She had faith. Her actions would be true to her faith even at a martyr cost. But to an individual whom she saw face to face, let him be the very head and front of the enemy, and she could not wish him personal harm. To a psychologist this might have presented a complex problem. To Ruth it presented no problem at all. It was a simple condition and she lived it. She was capable of hero worship, which, after all, is the keystone of aristocracies. But her heroes were not warriors, adventurers, conquerors of the world, conquerors of the world's wealth. They were revolutionists. They were men who gave their lives and their abilities to laboring for labor.... Already she was inclining to light the fires of her hero worship at the feet of the man Dulac. Ruth Frazer's grin has been spoken of. It has been described as a grin. That term may offend some sensitive eye as an epithet applicable only to something common, vulgar. To smile is proper, may even be aristocratic; only small boys and persons of slack breeding are guilty of the grin.... Ruth Frazer's grin was neither common nor vulgar. It was warming, encouraging, bright with the flashing of a quick mind, and withal sweet, womanly, delicious. Yet that it was a grin cannot be denied. Enemies to the grin must make the most of it. The grin was to be seen, for Dulac had just entered Ruth's mother's parlor, and it glowed for him. The man seemed out of place in that cottage parlor. He seemed out of place in any homelike room, in any room not filled by an eager, sweating, radical crowd of men assembled to hang upon his words. That was the place for him, the place nature had created him to become. To see him standing alone any place, on the street, in a hotel, affected one with the feeling that he was exotic there, misplaced. He must be surrounded by his audience to be RIGHT. Something of this crossed Ruth's mind. No woman, seeing a possible man, is without her sentimental speculation. She could not conceive of Dulac in a HOME. "It's been a day!" he said. "Yes." "Every skilled mechanic has struck," he said, with pride, as in a personal achievement. "And most of the rest. To-night four thousand out of their five thousand men were with us." "It came so suddenly. Nobody thought of a strike this morning." "We were better organized than they thought," he said, running his hand through his thick, black hair, and throwing back his head. "Better than I thought myself.... I've always said fool employers were the best friends we organizers have. The placard that young booby slapped the men in the face with--that did it....That and his spying on us last night." "I'm sure he wasn't spying last night." "Bosh! He was mighty quick to try to get our necks under his heel this morning." "I don't know what happened this morning," she said, slowly. "I'm his secretary, you know. Something happened about that placard. I don't believe he wanted it to go up." "You're defending him? Of course. You're a girl and you're close to the throne with a soft job. He's a good-looking kid in his namby-pamby Harvard way, too." "Mr. Dulac!...My job--I was going to ask you what I should do. I want to help the men. I want them to feel that I'm with them, working for them and praying for them. Ought I to quit, too--to join the strike?" Dulac looked at her sharply, calculatingly. "No," he said, presently, "you can do a lot more good where you are." "Will there be trouble? I dread to think of rioting and maybe bloodshed. It will be bad enough, anyhow--if it lasts long. The poor women and children!" "There'll be trouble if they try to turn a wheel or bring in scab labor." He laughed, so that his white teeth showed. "The first thing they did was to telephone for the police. I suppose this kid with a whole day's experience in the business will be calling in strike breakers and strong-arms and gunmen....Well, let him bring it down on himself if he wants to. We're in this thing to win. It means unionism breaking into this automobile game. This is just the entering wedge." "Won't the automobile manufacturers see that, too?" she asked. "Won't the men have all their power and wealth to fight?" Dulac shrugged his shoulders. "I guess the automobile world knows who Dulac is to-night," he said, with gleaming eyes. Somehow the boast became the man. It was perfectly in character with his appearance, with his bearing. It did not impress Ruth as a brag; it seemed a natural and ordinary thing for him to say. "You've been here just two weeks," she said, a trifle breathlessly; for he loomed big to her girlish eyes. "You've done all this in two weeks." He received the compliment indifferently. Perhaps that was a pose; perhaps the ego of the man made him impervious even to compliments. There are men so confident in their powers that a compliment always falls short of their own estimate of themselves. "It's a start--but all our work is only a start. It's preliminary," His voice became oratorical. "First we must unionize the world. Now there are strong unions and weak unions--both arrayed against a capital better organized and stronger than ever before in the world's history. Unionism is primary instruction in revolution. We must teach labor its power, and it is slow to learn. We must prepare, prepare, prepare, and when all is ready we shall rise. Not one union, not the unions of a state, of a country, but the unions of the world...hundreds of millions of men who have been ground down by aristocracies and wealth for generations. Then we shall have such an overturning as shall make the French Revolution look like child's play....A World's Republic--that's our aim; a World's Republic ruled by labor!" Her eyes glistened as he talked; she could visualize his vision, could see a united world, cleansed of wars, of boundary lines; a world where every man's chance of happiness was the equal of every other man's chance; where wealth and poverty were abolished, from which slums, degradation, starvation, the sordid wickednesses compelled by poverty, should have vanished. She could see a world of peace, plenty, beauty. It was for this high aim that Dulac worked. His stature increased. She marveled that such a man could waste his thoughts upon her. She idealized him; her soul prostrated itself before him. So much of accomplishment lay behind him--and he not yet thirty years old! The confidence reposed in him by labor was eloquently testified to by the sending of him to this important post on the battle line. Already he had justified that confidence. With years and experience what heights might he not climb!...This was Ruth's thought. Beside Dulac's belief in himself and his future it was colorless. Dulac had been an inmate of the Frazer cottage two weeks. In that time he had not once stepped out of his character. If his attitude toward the world were a pose it had become so habitual as to require no objective prompting or effort to maintain. This character was that of the leader of men, the zealot for the cause of the under dog. It held him aloof from personal concerns. Individual affairs did not touch him, but functioned unnoticed on a plane below his clouds. Not for an instant had he sought the friendship of Ruth and her mother, not to establish relations of friendship with them. He was devoted to a cause, and the cause left no room in his life for smaller matters. He was a man apart. Now he was awkwardly tugging something from his pocket. Almost diffidently he offered it to Ruth. It was a small box of candy. "Here..." he said, clumsily. "For me!" Ruth was overpowered. This demigod had brought HER a gift. He had thought about her--insignificant her! True, she had talked with him, had even taken walks with him, but those things had not been significant. It had seemed he merely condescended to the daughter of a martyr to his cause. He had been paying a tribute to her father. But a gift--a personal gift such as any young man might make to a girl whose favor he sought! Could it mean...? Then she saw that he was embarrassed, actually embarrassed before her, and she was ashamed of herself for it. But she saw, too, that in him was a human man, a man with fears and sensations and desires and weaknesses like other men. After all, a demigod is only half of Olympus. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you SO much." "You're not--offended?" He was recovering himself. In an instant he was back again in character. "We men," he said, "who are devoted to the Cause have little time in our lives for such things. The Cause demands all. When we go into it we give up much that other men enjoy. We are wanderers. We have no homes. We can't AFFORD to have homes....I," he said, it proudly, "have been in jail more than once. A man cannot ask a woman to share such a life. A man who leads such a life has no place in it for a woman." "I should think," she said, "that women would be proud to share such a life. To know they were helping a little! To know they were making one comfortable spot for you to come to and rest when you were tired or discouraged...." "Comforts are not for us," he said, theatrically, yet he did not seem theatrical to her, only nobly self-sacrificing. "It isn't right," she said, passionately. "The poorest laborer has more than you. He has his home and his family. No matter how poor he is, no matter what he suffers, he has some compensations....And you--you're giving your life and everything in life that's bright and beautiful for that laborer." "The happiness of one man buying the happiness of millions," he said, his black eyes glowing. "Yet sometimes we have our weak moments. We see and we desire." "And are entitled to possess," she said. His eyes glowed upon her hungrily--she read the hunger in them, hunger for HER! It frightened her, yet it made her heart leap with pride. To be looked upon with favor by such a man! "Some women," he said, slowly, "might live through it. There are women big enough and strong enough--a few, maybe. Big enough to endure neglect and loneliness; to live and not know if their husbands would sleep at home that night or in a jail or be in the middle of a riot on the other side of the world! They could not even depend on their husbands for support....A few might not complain, might be able to endure....You, Miss Ruth--I believe you are one of them!" Her cheeks paled. Was he--could he be about to ask her to share his life? It was impossible! Yet what else could he mean? To what else could his words be tending? She was awed, frightened--yet warmed by a surge of pride. She thought of her father....If he could see and know! If knowledge could only pass to him that his daughter had been thought worthy by such a man to play her part for the Cause!...She waited tensely, hand pressed to her bosom. Dulac stepped toward her, barbarically handsome. She felt the force, the magnetism of him. It called to her, compelled her....She could not lift her eyes. Slowly he approached another step. It was as though he were forced to her against his will. The silence in the room was the tense silence of a human crisis....Then it was broken ruthlessly. There came a pounding on the door that was not a knock, but an alarm. It was imperative, excited, ominous. "Oh..." Ruth cried. Her mother was opening the door. "Dulac! Where's Dulac?" a man's voice demanded. "Here," he replied. "What is it?" "O'Hagan's in town," the man panted, rushing into the room. "They've brought in O'Hagan and his gang of bullies." O'Hagan, king of strike breakers! Ruth knew that name well, and what the arrival of the man of evil omen foretold. It promised violence, riot, bloodshed, suffering. "They're going to try to run, then," said Dulac, calmly. "The police have escorted a mob of scabs into the mill yards. They've tried to drive away our pickets. They've locked up Higgins and Bowen. Got Mason, too, but the crowd took him away from the police." "It's on their own heads," said Dulac, solemnly. "I'll come with you." He turned to Ruth and took her hand. "You see," he said, "it calls me away--even from a moment like that...." CHAPTER VI Malcolm Lightener was not a man to send messages nor to depend upon telephones. He was as direct as a catapult, and was just as regardful of ceremony. The fact that it was his and everybody else's dinner hour did not hold him back an instant from having himself driven to the Foote residence and demanding instant speech with Mr. Foote. Mr. Foote, knowing Lightener, shrugged his shoulders and motioned Bonbright to follow him from the table. "If we asked him to be seated and wait," said he, "Lightener would burst into the dining room." They found their visitor not seated, but standing like a granite monolith in the center of the library. "Well," he said, observing no formalities of greeting, "you've chucked a brick into the hornets' nest." "Won't you be seated?" asked Mr. Foote, with dignified courtesy. "Seated? No, I've got no time for seats, and neither have you, if you would wake up to it. Do you know what you've done with your bullheadedness? You've rammed the automobile manufacturers up against a crisis they've been dodging for years. Needlessly. There was no more need for this strike at this time than there is for fur overcoats in hell. But just when the hornets were stirred up and buzzing, you had to heave your brick.... And now we've got to back your play." "I am not aware," said Mr. Foote, icily, "that we have asked assistance." "If the house next to mine catches fire the owner doesn't have to holler to me for help. I've got to help to keep the blaze from spreading to my own house.... You've never thought beyond the boundaries of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated--that's what's the matter with you. You're hidebound. A blind man could see the unions look at this thing as their entering wedge into the automobile industry. If they break into you they'll break into us. So we've got to stop 'em short." "If we need any help--" Mr. Foote began. "Whether you need it or whether you want it," said Lightener, "you get it." "Let me point out to you," said Mr. Foote, with chilly courtesy, "that my family has been able to manage its business for several generations--with some small success.... Our relations with our employees are our own concern, and we shall tolerate no interference. ... I have placed my son in complete charge of this situation, with confidence that he will handle it adequately." "Huh!" grunted Lightener, glancing at Bonbright. "I heard about THAT. ... What I came to say principally was: This thing can be headed off now if you go at it with common sense. Make concessions. Get to this Dulac. You can get your men back to work--and break up this union thing." "Mr. Lightener, our course is decided on. We shall make no concessions. My son has retained O'Hagan, the strike breaker. To-morrow morning the mills start up as usual, with new men. We have them camped in the yards now. There shall be no compromising. When we have the strikers whipped into their places we'll talk to them--not before." "What's the idea of putting up the boy as stalking horse? What do you expect to get by hiding behind him?" "My son was indiscreet. He created a misapprehension among the men as to his attitude toward labor. I am merely setting them right." "And sewing a fine crop of hatred for the boy to reap." Mr. Foote shrugged his shoulders "The position of my family has not been doubtful since the inception of our business. I do not propose that my son shall make it so. Our traditions must be maintained." "If you'd junk a few traditions," said Lightener, "and import a little modern efficiency--and human understanding of human beings--you might get somewhere. You quit developing with that first ancestor of yours. If the last hundred years or so haven't been wasted, there's been some progress. You're wabbling along in a stage coach when other folks use express trains.... When I met the boy here last night, I thought he was whittled off a different stick from the rest of you.... I guess he was, too. But you're tying a string of ancestors around his neck and squeezing him into their likeness." "My son knows his duty to his family," said Mr. Foote. "I didn't have a family to owe duty to, thank God," said Lightener, "but I spent quite some time figuring out my duty to myself.... You won't listen to reason, eh? You're going to bull this thing through?" "My son will act as my son should act," said Mr. Foote. Lightener turned to where Bonbright stood with set face and eyes that smoldered, and studied him with an eye accustomed to judging men. "There'll be rioting," he said. "Probably there'll be bloodshed. There'll certainly be a devil of a lot of suffering. Your father is putting the responsibility for it on your shoulders, young fellow. Does that set comfortably on your mind?" Bonbright was slow to answer. His position was difficult, for it seemed to him he was being asked by a stranger to criticize his father and his family. His own unrest under the conditions which were forced upon him was not to be mentioned. The major point--the conflict between capital as represented by Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, and labor--as represented by the striking employees--he did not understand. He had wanted to understand it; he had felt a human interest in the men, but this was forbidden to him.... Whatever he felt, whatever he thought, whatever dread he might have of the future as it impended over himself--he must be loyal to his name. So when he spoke it was to say in a singularly unboyish voice: "My father has spoken for me, Mr. Lightener." For the first time Lightener smiled. He laid a heavy hand on Bonbright's shoulder. "That was well done, my boy," he said. Bonbright was grateful for his understanding. A servant appeared. "Mr. Bonbright is wanted on the telephone," she said. It was Rangar. "There's rioting at the plant," the man said, unemotionally. "I have notified the police and taken the necessary steps." "Very well," said Bonbright. He walked to the library, and, standing in the door, stirred by excitement so that his knees quivered and a great emptiness was within him, he said to his father, "There's rioting at the plant, sir." Then he turned, put on his coat and hat, and quietly left the house. There was rioting at the mills! Bonbright was going to see what rioting was like, what it meant. It was no impulse, no boyish spirit of adventure or curiosity, that was taking him, but a command. No sooner had Rangar spoken the words over the telephone than Bonbright knew he must go. "Whatever is happening," he said to himself, "I'm going to be blamed for it." With some vague juvenile notion of making himself unrecognizable he turned up the collar of his coat and pulled down his cap.... When still some blocks from the mills a patrol wagon filled with officers careened past him, its gong emitting a staccato, exciting alarm. Here was reality. Bonbright quickened his step; began to run. Presently he entered the street that lay before the face of the factory--a street lighted by arc lamps so that the scene was adequately visible. As far as the main gates into the factory yards the street was in the possession of the police; beyond them surged and clamored the mob, not yet wrought to the pitch of attack. Bonbright thought of a gate around the corner. He would enter this and ascend to his office, whence he could watch the street from his window. Before the gate a man sat on a soap box, a short club dangling by a thong from his wrist. As Bonbright approached he arose. "What you want?" he demanded, taking a businesslike grip on his weapon. "I want to go in," said Bonbright. "I'm Mr. Foote." The man grinned. "To be sure, Mr. Foote. Howdy, Mr. Foote. You'll be glad to meet me. I'm Santa Claus." "I tell you I'm Mr. Foote. I want to go inside." "And I tell you," said the man, suddenly dropping his grin, "to beat it--while you're able." Youthful rage sent its instant heat through Bonbright. For an instant he meditated jerking the man from that gate by the nape of the neck and teaching him a lesson with his athletic foot.... It was not fear of the result that deterred him; it was the thought that this man was his own employee, placed there by him for this very purpose. If the guard made HIM bristle with rage, how would the sight of the man and his club affect the strikers? He was a challenge and an insult, an invitation to violence. Bonbright turned and walked away, followed by a derisive guffaw from the strike breaker. Bonbright retraced his steps and approached the rear of the police. Here he was stopped by an officer. "Where you goin'?" "I'm Mr. Foote," said Bonbright. "I want to see what's happening." "I can't help it if you're Mr. Roosevelt, you can't go any farther than this.... Now GIT." He gave Bonbright a violent and unexpected shove, which almost sent the young man off his feet. He staggered, recovered himself, and stood glowering at the officer. "Move!" came the short command, and once more burning with indignation, he obeyed. Here was another man acting in his behalf, summoned to his help. It was thus the police behaved, roughly, intolerantly, neither asking nor accepting explanations. It did not seem to Bonbright this could be the right way to meet the emergency. It seemed to him calculated only to aggravate it. The application of brute force might conquer a mob or stifle a riot, but it would leave unquenched fires of animosity. A violent operation may be necessary to remove a malignant growth. It may be the only possible cure; but no physician would hope to cure typhoid fever by knocking the patient insensible with a club. True, the delirium would cease for a time, but the deep-seated ailment would remain and the patient only be the worse for the treatment.... Here the disease was disagreement, misunderstanding, suspicion, bitterness of heart between employer and employees. Neither hired strike breaker nor policeman's baton could get to the root of it.... Yet he, Bonbright Foote VII, was the man held out to all the world as favoring this treatment, as authorizing it, as ordering it! He walked quite around the block, approaching again on a side street that brought him back again just ahead of the police. This street was blocked by excited, restless, crowding, jeering men, but Bonbright wormed his way through and climbed upon a porch from which he could see over the heads of the foremost to where a line of police and the front rank of strikers faced each other across a vacant space of pavement, the square at the intersection of the streets. Behind him a hatless man in a high state of excitement was making an inflammatory speech from a doorstep. He was urging the mob to charge the police, to trample them under.... Bonbright leaned far over the railing so he could look down the street where the main body of the mob was assembled. There was another speaker. Bonbright recognized Dulac--and Dulac, with all his eloquence, was urging the men to disperse to their homes in quiet. Bonbright listened. The man was talking sense! He was pointing out the folly of mob violence! He was showing them that it achieved nothing.... But the mob was beyond the control of wise counsel. Possibly the feet of many had pressed brass rails while elbows crooked. Certainly there was present a leaven of toughs, idlers, in no way connected with the business, but sent by the devil to add to the horror of it. One of these, discreetly distant from the front, hurled half a brick into the line of police. It was a vicious suggestion. Other bricks and missiles followed, while the crowd surged forward. Suddenly the line of patrolmen opened to let through a squad of mounted police, who charged the mob.... It was a thing requiring courage, but a thing ordered by an imbecile. Horses and men plunged into that dammed river of men.... It was a scene Bonbright could never erase from his memory, yet never could have described. It was a nightmare, a sensation of dread rather than a scene of fierce, implacable action. The police drew back. The strikers hesitated.... Between them, on the square of pavement, lay quiet, or writhing in pain, half a dozen human forms.... Bonbright, his face colorless as those who lay below, stared at the bodies. For this that he saw he would be held responsible by the world.... He ran down the steps and began struggling through the mob. "Let me through.... Let me through," he panted. He broke through to the front, not moved by reason, but quivering with the horror of the sight of men needlessly slain or maimed.... He must do something. He must stop it! Then he Was recognized. "It's young Foote," a man shouted, and snatched at his shoulder. He shook the man off, but the cry was taken up. "It's Foote--young Foote.... Spying again." Men sprang upon him, but he turned furiously and hurled them back. They must not stop him. He must not be interfered with, because he had to put an end to this thing. The mob surged about him, striking, threatening, so that he had to turn his face toward them, to strike out with his fists. More than one man went down under his blows before he could break away and run toward the police. "See what you've done," he shouted in their faces. "This must stop." He advanced another step, as if to force the mounted officers to retreat. "Grab him," ordered a sergeant. Bonbright was promptly grabbed and hauled through the line of mounted police, to be thrown into the arms of waiting patrolmen. He fought as strength was given him to fight, but they carried him ungently and hurled him asprawl upon the floor of a patrol wagon, already well occupied by arrests from the mob. "Git 'em to the station," the driver was ordered, and off lurched the patrol wagon. That rapid ride brought cooling to Bonbright's head. He had made a fool of himself. He was ashamed, humiliated, and to be humiliated is no minor torture to a young man. Instead of giving his name to the lieutenant on the desk he refused to give a name, and was entered as John Doe. It was his confused thought to save his family from publicity and disgrace.... So he knew what it was to have barred doors shut upon him, to be alone in a square cell whose only furnishing was a sort of bench across one end. He sank upon this apathetically and waited for what morning should bring. CHAPTER VII The world owes no small part of its advancement to the reflections of men in jails. Bonbright, alone in the darkness of his cell, was admirably situated for concentrated thought. All through the sleepless night he reviewed facts and theories and conditions. He reached few definite conclusions, and these more boyish than mature; he achieved to no satisfaction with himself. His one profound conclusion was that everything was wrong. Capital was wrong, labor was wrong; the whole basis upon which society is organized was wrong. It was an exceedingly sweeping conclusion, embracing EVERYTHING. He discerned no ray of light. He studied his own conduct, but could convince himself of no voluntary wrongdoing. Yet he was in a cell.... In the beginning he had merely tried to understand something that aroused his curiosity--labor. From the point of view of capital, as represented by his father, this had been a sin. How or why it was a sin he could not comprehend.... Labor had been willing to be friendly, but now it hated him. Orders given in his name, but not originating in his will, had caused this. His attitude became fatalistic--he was being moved about by a ruthless hand without regard to his own volition. He might as well close his eyes and his mind and submit, for Bonbright Foote VII did not exist as a rational human individual, but only as a checker on the board, to be moved from square to square with such success or error as the player possessed. Last night.... He had been mishandled by the employees of capital and the guardians of society; he had been mobbed by labor. He resented the guard and the police, but could not resent the mobbing. ... He seemed to be dangling between two worlds, mishandled by either that he approached. But one fact he realized--labor would have none of him. His father had seen to that. There was no place for him to go but into the refuge of capital, and so to become an enemy to labor against which he had no quarrel.... This night set him more deeply in the Bonbright Foote groove. There was nothing for him now but complete submission, apathetic submission. If it must be so, it must be so. He would let the family current bear him on. He would be but another Bonbright Foote, differentiated from the others only by a numeral to designate his generation. Singularly, his own immediate problem did not present itself insistently until daylight began to penetrate the murk of the cell. What would the authorities do with him? How was he to get his liberty? Would the thing become public? He felt his helplessness, his inadequacy. He could not ask his father to help him, for he did not want his father ever to know what had happened the night before, yet he must have help from some one. Suddenly the name of Malcolm Lightener occurred to him. After a time the doorman appeared with breakfast. "Can I send a message?" asked Bonbright. The doorman scrutinized him, saw he was no bum of the streets, but quite evidently a gentleman in temporary difficulty. "Maybe," he said, grudgingly. "Gimme the message and I'll see." "Please telephone Mr. Malcolm Lightener that the younger of the gentlemen he called on last evening is here and would like to see him." "Malcolm Lightener, the automobile feller?" "Yes." "Friend of your'n?" "Yes." "Um!..." The doorman disappeared to return presently with the lieutenant. "What's this about Malcolm Lightener?" the officer asked. "I gave the man here a message for him," said Bonbright. "Is it on the level? You know Lightener?" "Yes," said Bonbright, impatiently. "Then what the devil did you stay here all night for? Why didn't you have him notified last night? Looks darn fishy to me." "It will do no harm to deliver my message," said Bonbright. "Huh!... Let him out." The doorman swung wide the barred door and the lieutenant motioned Bonbright out. "Come and set in the office," he said. "Maybe you'd rather telephone yourself?" "If I might," said Bonbright, amazed at the potency of Lightener's name to open cell doors and command the courtesy of the police. It was his first encounter with Influence. He was conducted into a small office; then the lieutenant retired discreetly and shut the door. Bonbright made his call and asked for speech with Malcolm Lightener. "Hello!... Hello!" came Lightener's gruff voice. "What is it?" "This is Bonbright Foote.... I'm locked up in the Central Station. I wonder if you can't help me somehow?" There was a moment's silence; then Bonbright heard a remark not intended for his ears but expressive of Lightener's astonishment, "Well, I'm DARNED!" Then: "I'll be right there. Hold the fort." Bonbright opened the door and said to the lieutenant, "Mr. Lightener's on his way down." "Um!... Make yourself comfortable. Say, was that breakfast all right? Find cigars in that top drawer." The magic of Influence! In twenty minutes Lightener's huge form pushed through the station door. "Morning, Lieutenant. Got a friend of mine here?" "Didn't know he was a friend of yours, Mr. Lightener. He wouldn't give his name, and never asked to have you notified till this morning.... He's in my office there." Lightener strode into the room and shut the door. "Well?" he demanded. Breathlessly, almost without pause, Bonbright poured upon him an account of last night's happenings, making no concealments, unconsciously giving Lightener glimpses into his heart that made the big man bend his brows ominously. The boy did not explain; did not mention accusingly his father, but Lightener understood perfectly what the process of molding Bonbright was being subjected to. He made no comment. "I don't want father to know this," Bonbright said. "If it can be kept out of the papers.... Father wouldn't understand. He'd feel I had disgraced the family." "Doggone the family," snapped Lightener. "Come on." Bonbright followed him out. "May I take him along, Lieutenant? I'll fix it with the judge if necessary.... And say, happen to recognize him?" "Never saw him before." "If any of the newspaper boys come snoopin' around, you never saw me, either. Much obliged, Lieutenant." "You're welcome, Mr. Lightener. Glad I kin accommodate you." Lightener pushed Bonbright into his limousine. "You don't want to go home, I guess. We'll go to my house. Mother'll see you get breakfast. ... Then we'll have a talk.... Here's a paper boy; let's see what's doing." It was the morning penny paper that Lightener bought, the paper with leanings toward the proletariat, the veiled champion of labor. He bought it daily. "Huh!" he grunted, as he scanned the first page. "They kind of allude to you." Bonbright looked. He saw a two-column head: YOUNG MILLIONAIRE URGES ON POLICE The next pyramid contained his name; the story related how he had rushed frantically to the police after they had barbarously charged a harmless gathering of workingmen, trampling and maiming half a dozen, and had demanded that they charge again. It was a long story, with infinite detail, crucifying him with cheap ink; making him appear a ruthless, heartless monster, lusting for the spilled blood of the innocent. Bonbright looked up to meet Lightener's eyes. "It--it isn't fair," he said, chokingly. "Fairness," said Lightener, almost with gentleness, "is expected only when we are young." "But I didn't.... I tried to stop them." "Don't try to tell anybody so--you won't be believed." "I'm going to tell somebody," said Bonbright, his mind flashing to Ruth Frazer, "and I'm going to be believed. I've got to be believed." After a while he said: "I wasn't taking sides. I just went there to see. If I've got to hire men all my life I want to understand them." "You've got to take sides, son. There's no straddling the fence in this world.... And as soon as you've taken sides your own side is all you'll understand. Nobody ever understood the other side." "But can't there ever be an understanding? Won't capital ever understand labor, or labor capital?" "I suppose a philosopher would say there is no difference upon which agreement can't be reached; that there must somewhere be a common meeting ground.... The Bible says the lion shall lie down with the lamb, but I don't expect to live to see him do it without worrying some about the lion's teeth." "It's one man holding power over other men," said Bonbright. As the car stopped at Malcolm Lightener's door, sudden panic seized Bonbright. "I ought not to come here," he said, "after last night. Mrs. Lightener... your daughter." "I'll bet Hilda's worrying you more than her mother. Nonsense! They both got sense." Certainly Mrs. Lightener had. "Just got him out of the police station," her husband said as he led the uncomfortable Bonbright into her presence. "Been shut up all night.... Rioting--that's what he's been doing. Throwing stones at the cops." Mrs. Lightener looked at Bonbright's pale, weary, worried face. "You let him be, Malcolm.... Never mind HIM," she said to the boy. "You just go right upstairs with him. A warm bath and breakfast are what you need. You don't look as if you'd slept a WINK." "I haven't," he confessed. When Bonbright emerged from the bath he found the motherly woman had sent out to the haberdashers for fresh shirt, collar, and tie. He donned them with the first surge of genuine gratefulness he had ever known. Of course he had said thank you prettily, and had thought he felt thanks.... Now he knew he had not. "Guess you won't be afraid to face Hilda now," said Lightener, entering the room. "I notice a soiled collar is worn with a heap more misgiving than a soiled conscience.... Grapefruit, two soft-boiled eggs, toast, coffee.... Some prescription." Hilda was in the library, and greeted him as though it were an ordinary occurrence to have a young man just out of the cell block as a breakfast guest. She did not refer to it, nor did her father at the moment. Bonbright was grateful again. After breakfast the boy and girl were left alone in the library, briefly. "I'm ashamed," said Bonbright, chokingly. "You needn't be," she said. "Dad told us all about it. I thought the other night I should like you. Now I'm sure of it." She owned her father's directness. "You're good," he said. "No--reasonable," she answered. He sat silent, thinking. "Do you know," he said, presently, "what a lot girls have to do with making a fellow's life endurable?... Since I went to work I--I've felt really GOOD only twice. Both times it was a girl. The other one just grinned at me when I was feeling down on my luck. It was a dandy grin.... And now you..." "Tell me about her," she said. "She's my secretary now. Little bit of a thing, but she grins at all the world... Socialist, too, or anarchist or something. I made them give her to me for my secretary so I could see her grin once in a while." "I'd like to see her." "I don't know her," said Bonbright. "She's just my secretary. I'll bet she'd be bully to know." Hilda Lightener would not have been a woman had she not wondered about this girl who had made such an impression on Bonbright. It was not that she sensed a possible rival. She had not interested herself in Bonbright to the point where a rival could matter. But--she would like to see that girl. Malcolm Lightener re-entered the room. "Clear out, honey," he said to his daughter. "Foote and I have got to make medicine." She arose. "If he rumbles like a volcano," she said to Bonbright, "don't be afraid. He just rumbles. Pompeii is in no danger." "You GIT," her father said. "Now," he said when they were alone, "what's to pay?" "I don't know." "Will your father raise the devil? Maybe you'd like to have me go along when you interview him." "I think I'd rather not." Lightener nodded with satisfaction. "Well, then--I've kind of taken a shine to you. You're a young idiot, all right, but there's something about you.... Let's start off with this: You've got something that's apt to get you into hot water. Either it's fool curiosity or genuine interest in folks. I don't know which. Neither fits into the Bonbright Foote formula. Six generations of 'em seem to have been whittled off the same chip--and then the knife slipped and you came off some other chip altogether. But the Foote chip don't know it, and won't recognize it if it does.... I'm not going to criticize your father or your ancestors, whatever kind of darn fools I may personally think they are. What I want to say is, if you ever kick over the traces, drop in and tell me about it. I'll see you on your road." "Thanks," said Bonbright, not half comprehending. "You can't keep on pressing men out of the same mold forever. Maybe you can get two or three or a dozen to be as like as peas--and then nature plays a joke on you. You're the joke on the Foote mold, I reckon. Maybe they can squeeze you into the form and maybe they can't.... But whatever happens is going to be darn unpleasant for you." Bonbright nodded. THAT he knew well. "You've got a choice. You can start in by kicking over the traces--with the mischief to pay; or you can let the vanished Footes take a crack at you to see what that can make of you. I advise no boy to run against his father's wishes. But everybody starts out with something in him that's his own--individual--peculiar to him. Maybe it's what the preachers call his soul. Anyhow, it's HIS. Whatever they do to you, try to hang on to it. Don't let anybody pump it out of you and fill its room with a standardized solution. Get me?" "I think so." "I guess that's about, all from me. Now run along to your dad. Got any idea what will happen?" Bonbright studied the rug more than a minute before he answered. "I think I was right last night. Maybe I didn't go about it the way I should, but I INTENDED right. At least I didn't intend WRONG. Father will be--displeased. I don't think I can explain it to him... " "Uh!" grunted Lightener. "So I--I guess I sha'n't try," Bonbright ended. "I think I'll go along and have it over with." When he was gone Malcolm Lightener made the following remark to his wife, who seemed to understand it perfectly: "Some sons get born into the wrong families." CHAPTER VIII Bonbright entered his office with the sensations of a detected juvenile culprit approaching an unavoidable reckoning. If there was a ray of brightness in the whole episode it was that the newspapers had miraculously been denied the meatiest bit of his night's adventure--his detention in a cell. If that had been flaunted before the eyes of the public Bonbright felt he would never have been able to face his father. He was vividly aware of the stir his entrance caused among the office employees. It was as though the heart of the office skipped a beat. He flushed, and, with eyes straight before him, hurried into his own room and sat in his chair. He experienced a quivering, electric emptiness--his nerves crying out against an approaching climax. It was blood-relative to panic. Presently he was aware that his father stood in the door scrutinizing him. Bonbright's eyes encountered his father's. They seemed to lock ... In that tense moment the boy was curiously aware how perfectly his father's physical presence stood for and expressed his theory of being. Tall, unbending, slender, aristocratic, intellectual--the pose of the body, the poise of the head, even that peculiar, slanting set of the lips expressed perfectly the Bonbright Foote idea. Five generations had bred him to be the perfect thing it desired. "Well, sir," he said, coldly. Bonbright arose. There was a formality about the situation which seemed to require it. "Good morning," he said, in a low tone. "I have seen the papers." "Yes, sir." "What they printed was in substance true?" "I prefer not--to discuss it, sir." "And _I_ prefer TO discuss it... Do you fancy you can drag the name of Foote through the daily press as though it were that of some dancing girl or political mountebank, and have no reference made of it? Tell me exactly what happened last night--and why it was permitted to happen." "Father--" Bonbright's voice was scarcely audible, yet it was alive and quivering with pain. "I cannot talk to you about last night." The older man's lips compressed. "You are a man grown--are supposed to be a man grown. Must I cross-examine you as if you were a sulking schoolboy?" Bonbright was not defiant, not sulkily stubborn. His night's experiences had affected, were affecting him, working far-reaching changes in him, maturing him. But he was too close to them for their effect to have been accomplished. The work was going on each moment, each hour. He did not reply to his father immediately, but when he did so it was with a certain decision, a firmness, a lack of the old boyishness which was marked and distinct. "You must not cross-question me. There are things about which one's own father has not the right to ask.... If I could have come to you voluntarily--but I could not. In college I have seen fellows get into trouble, and the first thing they thought of was to go to their fathers with it... It was queer. What happened last night happened to ME. Possibly it will have some effect on my family and on the name of Foote, as you say... But it happened to ME. Nobody else can understand it. No one has the right to ask about it." "It happened to YOU! Young man, you are the seventh Bonbright Foote--member of a FAMILY. What happens to you happens to it. You cannot separate yourself from it. You, as an individual, are not important, but as Bonbright Foote VII you become important. Do you imagine you can act and think as an entity distinct from Bonbright Foote, Incorporated?... Nonsense. You are but one part of a whole; what you do affects the whole, and you are responsible for it to the shops." "A man must be responsible to himself," said Bonbright, fumbling to express what was troubling his soul. "There are bigger things than family..." His father had advanced to the desk. Now he interrupted by bringing his hand down upon it masterfully. "For you there is no bigger thing than family. You have a strange idea. Where did you get it? Is this sort of thing being taught in college to-day? I suppose you have some notion of asserting your individuality. Bosh! Men in your position, born as you have been born, have no right to individuality. Your individuality must express the individuality of your family as mine has done, and as my father's and HIS father's did before me... I insist that you explain fully to me what occurred last night." "I am sorry, sir, but I cannot." There was no outburst of passion from the father; it would have been wholly out of keeping with his character. Bonbright Foote VI was a strong man in his way; he possessed force of character--even if that force were merely a standardized, family-molded force of character. He recognized a crisis in the affairs of the Foote family which must be met wisely. He perceived that results could not be obtained through the violent impact of will; that here was a dangerous condition which must be cured--but not by seizing it and wrenching it into place... Perhaps he could make Bonbright obey him, but if matters were as serious as they seemed, it would be far from wise. The thing must be dealt with patiently, firmly. Here was only a symptom; the disease went deeper. For six generations one Bonbright Foote after another had been born true to tradition's form--the seventh generation had gone askew! It must be set right, remolded. "Let me point out to you," said he, "that you are here only because you are my son and the descendant of our forefathers. Aside from that you have no right to consideration or to position. You possess wealth. You are a personage... Suppose it were necessary to deprive you of these things. Suppose, as I have the authority to do, I should send you out of this office to earn your own living. Suppose, in short, I should find it necessary to do as other fathers have done--to disown you... What then? What could you do? What would your individuality be worth?... Think it over, my son. In the meantime we will postpone this matter until you revise your mood." He turned abruptly and went into his own room. He wanted to consider. He did not know how to conduct himself, nor how to handle this distressing affair... He fancied he was acting wisely and diplomatically, but at the same time he carried away with him the unpleasant consciousness that victory lay for the moment with his son. Individuality was briefly triumphant. One thing was clear to him--it should not remain so. The Bonbright Foote tradition should be continued correctly by his son. This was not so much a determination as a state of mind. It was a thing of inevitability. Bonbright's feeling as his father left him was one of utter helplessness, of futility. He had received his father's unveiled threat and later it would have its effect. For the moment it passed without consideration. First in his mind was the fact that he did not know what to do--did not even know what he WANTED to do. All he could see was the groove he was in, the family groove. He did not like it, but he was not sure he wanted to be out of it. His father had talked of individuality; Bonbright did not know if he wanted to assert his individuality. He was at sea. Unrest grappled with him blindly, urging him nowhere, seeming merely to wrestle with him aimlessly and maliciously... What was it all about, anyhow? Why was he mixed up in the struggle? Why could not he be left alone in quiet? If he had owned a definite purpose, a definite ambition, a describable desire, it would have been different, but he had none. He was merely bitterly uncomfortable without the slightest notion what event or course of action could bring him comfort. One thought persisted through the chaos of his surging thoughts. He must call in Ruth Frazer and explain to her that he had not done what the papers said he did. Somehow he felt he owed her explanation, her of all the world. She entered in response to the button he pushed, but there was not the broad smile--the grin--he looked up eagerly to see. She was grave, rather more than grave--she was troubled, so troubled that she did not raise her eyes to look at him, but took her seat opposite him and laid her dictation book on the desk. "Miss Frazer--" he said, and at his tone she looked at him. He seemed very young to her, yet older than he had appeared before. Older he was, with a tired, haggard look left by his sleepless night. She could not restrain her heart from softening toward him, for he was such a boy--just a boy. "Miss Frazer," he said again, "I want to--talk to you about last night--about what the papers said." If he expected help from her he was disappointed. Her lips set visibly. "It was not true--what they said... I sha'n't explain it to anybody else. What good could it do? But I want you to understand. It seems as if I HAVE to explain to you.... I can't have you believing--" "I didn't read it in the papers," she said. "I heard from an eyewitness. "Mr. Dulac," he said. "Yes, he would have seen. Even to him it might have looked that way--it might. But I didn't--I didn't! You must believe me. I did not run to the police to have them charge the strikers again... Why should I?" "Why should you?" she repeated, coldly. "Let me tell you... I went there--out of curiosity, I guess. This whole strike came so suddenly. I don't understand why strikes and troubles like this must be, and I thought I might find out something if I went and watched... I wasn't taking sides. I don't know who is right and who is wrong. All I wanted was to learn. One thing... I don't blame the strikers for throwing bricks. I could have thrown a brick at one of our guards; a policeman shoved me and I could have thrown a brick at him.... I suppose, if there are to be strikes and mobs who want to destroy our property, that we must have guards and police... But they shouldn't aggravate things. I went around where I could see--and I saw the police charge. I saw them send their horses smashing into that crowd--and I saw them draw back, leaving men on the pavement,... There was one who writhed about and made horrible sounds!... The mob was against us and the police were for us--but I couldn't stand it. I guess I lost my head. I hadn't the least intention of doing what I did, or of doing anything but watch... but I lost my head. I did rush up to the police, Miss Frazer, and the strikers tried to mob me. I was struck more than once... It wasn't to tell the police to charge. You must believe me--you MUST.... I was afraid they WOULD charge again, so I rushed at them. All I remember distinctly is shouting to them that they mustn't do it again--mustn't charge into that defenseless mob.... It was horrible." He paused, and shut his eyes as though to blot out a picture painted on his mind. Then he spoke more calmly. "The police didn't understand, either. They thought I belonged to the mob, and they arrested me.... I slept--I spent the night in a cell in Police Headquarters." Ruth was leaning over the desk toward him, eyes wide, lips parted. "Is--is that the TRUTH?" she asked; but as she asked she knew it was so. Then: "I'm sorry--so sorry. You must let me tell Mr. Dulac and he will tell the men. It would be terrible if they kept on believing what they believe now. They think you are--" "I know," he said, wearily. "It can't be helped. I don't know that it matters. What they think about me is what--it is thought best for them to think. I am supposed to be fighting the strike." "But aren't you?" "I suppose so. It's the job that's been assigned to me--but I'm doing nothing. I'm of no consequence--just a stuffed figure." "You caused the strike." "I?" There was genuine surprise in his voice. "How?" "With that placard." "I suppose so," he said, slowly. "My name WAS signed to it, wasn't it?... You see I had been indiscreet the night before. I had mingled with the men and spoken to Mr. Dulac.... I had created a false impression--which had to be torn up--by the roots." "I don't understand, Mr. Foote." "No," he said, "of course not.... Why should you? I don't understand myself. I don't see why I shouldn't talk to Mr. Dulac or the men. I don't see why I shouldn't try to find out about things. But it wasn't considered right--was considered very wrong, and I was--disciplined. Members of my family don't do those things. Mind, I'm not complaining. I'm not criticizing father, for he may be right. Probably he IS right. But he didn't understand. I wasn't siding with the men; I was just trying to find out..." "Do you mean," she asked, a bit breathlessly, "that you have done none of these things of your own will--because you wanted to? I mean the placard, and bringing in O'Hagan and his strike breakers, and taking all these ruthless methods to break the strike?... Were you made to APPEAR as though it was you--when it wasn't?" "Don't YOU misunderstand me, Miss Frazer. You're on the other side--with the men. I'm against them. I'm Bonbright Foote VII." There was a trace of bitterness in his voice as he said it, and it did not escape her attention. "I wasn't taking sides.... I wouldn't take sides now--but apparently I must.... If strikes are necessary then I suppose fellows in places like mine must fight them.... I don't know. I don't see any other way.... But it doesn't seem right--that there should be strikes. There must be a reason for them. Either our side does something it shouldn't--and provokes them, or your side is unfair and brings them on.... Or maybe both of us are to blame.... I wanted to find out." "I shall tell Mr. Dulac," she said. "I shall tell him EVERYTHING. The men mustn't go on hating and despising you. Why, they ought to be sorry for you!... Why do you endure it? Why don't you walk out of this place and never enter it again?..." "You don't understand," he said, with perplexity." I knew you would think I am siding with the men." "I don't think that--no!... You might come to side with us--because we're right. But you're not siding with yourself. You're letting somebody else operate your very soul--and that's a worse sin than suicide.... You're letting your father and this business, this Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, wipe you out as if you were a mark on a slate--and make another mark in your place to suit its own plans. ... You are being treated abominably." "Miss Frazer, I guess neither of us understands this thing. You see this business, for generations, has had a certain kind of man at the head of it. Always. It has been a successful business. Maybe when father, and his father, were young, they had to be disciplined as I am being. Maybe it is RIGHT--what I have heard called TRAINING." "Do you like it?" He did not answer at once. "I--it disturbs me. It makes me uneasy. ... But I can do nothing. They've got me in the groove, and I suppose I'll move along it." "If you would own up to it, you're unhappy. You're being made miserable.... Why, you're being treated worse than the strikers--and by your own father!... Everybody has a right to be himself." "You say that, but father and the generations of Footes before him say the exact opposite.... However, I'm not the question. All I wanted to do was to explain to you about last night. You believe me?" "Of course. And I shall tell--" He shook his head. "I'd rather you didn't. Indeed, you mustn't. As long as I am here I must stick by my family. Don't you see? I wanted YOU to know. My explanation was for you alone." Rangar appeared in the door--quietly as it was his wont to move. "Pardon," he said. "Your father wishes to speak to you, Mr. Foote." "One moment, Miss Frazer. I have some letters," Bonbright said, and stepped into his father's office. "Bonbright," said his father, "Rangar has just discovered that your secretary--this Miss Frazer--lives in the same house with Dulac the strike leader.... She comes of a family of disturbers herself. Probably she is very useful to Dulac where she is. Therefore you will dismiss her at once." "But, father--" "You will dismiss her at once--personally." A second time that day the eyes of father and son locked. Bonbright's face was colorless; he felt his lips tremble. "At once," said his father, tapping his desk with his finger. Bonbright's sensation was akin to that of falling through space--there seemed nothing to cling to, nothing by which to sustain himself. How utterly futile he was was borne in upon him! He could not resist. Protestation would only humiliate him. He turned slowly and walked into his own room, where he stood erect before his desk. "Miss Frazer," he said in a level, timbreless voice, "the labor leader Dulac lives in your house. You come of a family of labor agitators. Therefore you are discharged." "WHAT?" she exclaimed, the unexpectedness of it upsetting her poise. "You are discharged," he repeated; and then, turning his back on her, he walked to the window, where he stood tense, tortured by humiliation, gazing down upon a street which he could not see. Ruth gathered her book and pencils and stood up. She moved slowly to the door without speaking, but there she stopped, turned, and looked at Bonbright. There was neither dismay nor anger in her eyes--only sympathy. But she did not speak it aloud. "Poor boy!" she whispered to herself, and stepped out into the corridor. CHAPTER IX Ruth Frazer had passed her twentieth birthday, and now, for the first time, she was asking herself that question which brings tearful uncertainty, vague fears, disquieting speculations to the great majority of women--should she give herself, body and soul, into the hands of a definite man? It was the definiteness, the identification of the man, that caused all her difficulty. All women expect to be chosen by, and to choose, some man; but when he arrives in actual flesh and blood--that is quite another matter. Some, perhaps many, have no doubts. Love has come to them unmistakably. But not so with most. It is a thing to be wept over, and prayed over, and considered with many changes of mind, until final decision is made one way or the other. Dulac had been interrupted in what Ruth knew would have been a proposal of marriage; the scene would be resumed, and when it was what answer should she give? It is no easy task for a girl of twenty to lay her heart under the microscope and to see if the emotion which agitates it is love, or admiration, or the excitation of glamour. She has heard of love, has read of love, has dreamed of love, possibly, but has never experienced love. How, then, is she to recognize it? With Ruth there had been no long acquaintanceship with this man who came asking her future of her. There had been no months or years of service and companionship. Instead, he had burst on her vision, had dazzled her with his presence and his mission. Hers was a steady little head, and one capable of facing the logic of a situation. Was her feeling toward Dulac merely hero worship? The cause he represented was dear to her heart, and he was an eminent servant in that cause. It thrilled her to know that such a man as he could want HER for his wife. It quite took her breath away. Present also was the feeling that if Dulac wanted her, if she could bring happiness, ease, help to him, it would be her duty to give herself. By so doing she would contribute her all to the cause.... Behind that thought were generations of men and women who had sacrificed and suffered for labor. If her father had given his life, would he not expect his daughter to give HER life? If she could make Dulac stronger to carry on his work for social revolution, had she a right to withhold herself?... But, being a girl, with youth singing in her heart, it was impossible that anything should take precedence of love. That was the great question. Did she love?... At noon she was sure she did; at one o'clock she was sure she did not; at two o'clock she was wavering between the two decisions; at six o'clock she had passed through all these stages half a dozen times, and was no nearer certainty. Being who she was and what she was, her contacts with the world had not been those of the ordinary girl of her age and her station in life. In her earlier years she had been accustomed to radical words, radical thought, radical individuals. The world she was taught to see was not the world girl children are usually taught to see. And yet she retained her humor, her brightness of spirit, the joy of life that gave her her smile.... She had known boys and men. However, none of these had made marked impression upon her. They had been mere incidents, pleasant, uninteresting, wearying, amusing. None had thrilled her.... So she had less experience to call to her aid than the average girl. Dulac occupied her mind as no man had ever occupied it before; the thought of him thrilled her.... He wanted her, this magnetic, theatrically handsome man wanted her.... When we make a choice we do so by a process of comparison. We buy this house because we like it better than that house; we buy this hat because we prefer it to that other;... it is so we get our notions of value, of desirability. It is more than possible that some effort at comparison is made by a woman in selecting a husband. She compares her suitor with other men. Her decision may hinge upon the result. ... Dulac was clearly superior to most of the men Ruth had known.... Then, unaccountably, she found herself thinking of Bonbright Foote, who had that morning discharged her from her employment. She found herself setting young Foote and Dulac side by side and, becoming objectively conscious of this, she felt herself guilty of some sort of disloyalty. What right had a man in Foote's position to stand in her thoughts beside Dulac? He was everything Dulac was not; Dulac was nothing that Foote was. She realized she was getting nowhere, was only confusing herself. Perhaps, she told herself, when Dulac was present, when he asked her to be his wife, she would know what to answer. So, resolutely, she put the matter from her mind. It would not stay out. She dreaded meeting Dulac at supper--for the evening meal was supper in the Frazer cottage--and yet she was burningly curious to meet him, to be near him, to verify her image of him.... Extra pains with the detail of her simple toilet held her in her room until her mother called to know if she were not going to help with the meal. As she went to the kitchen she heard Dulac moving about in his room. When they were seated at the table it was Mrs. Frazer who jerked the conversation away from casual matters. "Ruth was discharged this morning, Mr. Dulac," she said, bitterly, "and her as good a typewriter and as neat and faithful as any. No fault found, either, nor could be, not if anybody was looking for it with a fine-tooth comb. Meanness, that's what I say. Nothing but meanness.... And us needing that fifteen dollars a week to keep the breath of life in us." "Don't worry about that, mother," Ruth said, quickly. "There are plenty of places--" "Who fired you?" interrupted Dulac, his black eyes glowing angrily. "That young cub?" "Young Mr. Foote," said Ruth. "It was because I live here," said Dulac, intensely. "That was why, wasn't it? That's the way they fight, striking at us through our womenfolks.... And when we answer with bricks..." "I don't think he wanted to do it," Ruth said. "I think he was made to." "Nonsense! Too bad the boys didn't get their hands on him last night--the infernal college-bred whipper-snapper!... Well, don't you worry about that job. Nor you, either, Mrs. Frazer." "Seems like I never did anything but worry; if it wasn't about one thing it was another, and no peace since I was in the cradle," said Mrs. Frazer, dolefully. "If it ain't the rent it's strikes and riots and losin' positions and not knowin' if your husband's comin' home to sleep in bed, or his name in the paper in the morning and him in jail. And since he was killed--" "Now, mother," said Ruth, "I'll have a job before tomorrow night. We won't starve or be put out into the street." Mrs. Frazer dabbed at her eyes with her apron and signified her firm belief that capital was banded together for the sole purpose of causing her mental agony; indeed, that capital had been invented with that end in view, and if she had her way--which seldom enough, and her never doing a wrong to a living body--capital should have visited on it certain plagues and punishments hinted at as adequate, but not named. Whereupon she got up from the table and went out into the kitchen after the pie. "Mrs. Frazer," said Dulac, when she returned, "I've got to hurry downtown to headquarters, but I want to have a little talk with Ruth before I go. Can't the dishes wait?" "I did up dishes alone before Ruth was born, and a few thousand times since. Guess I can get through with it without her help at least once more." Dulac smiled, so that his white, even teeth showed in a foreign sort of way. In that moment Ruth thought there was something Oriental or Latin about his appearance--surely something exotic. He had a power of fascination, and its spell was upon her. He stood up and walked to the door of the little parlor, where he stood waiting. Ruth, not blushing, but pale, afraid, yet eager to hear what she knew he was going to say, passed him into the room. He closed the door. "You know what I want to say," he began, approaching close to her, but not touching her. "You know what life will be like with a man whose work is what mine is.... But I'd try to make up for the hardships and the worries and the disagreeable things. I'd try, Ruth, and I think I could do it.... Your heart is with the Cause. I wouldn't marry you if it wasn't because you couldn't stand the life. But you want to see what I want to see.... If I'm willing to run the risks and live the life I have to live because I see how I can help along the work and make the world a better place for those to live in who need to have it a better place... if I can do what I do, I've thought you might be willing to share it all.... You're brave. You come of a blood that has suffered and been willing to suffer. Your father was a martyr--just as I would be willing to be a martyr...." Somehow the thing did not seem so much like a proposal of marriage as like a bit of flamboyant oratory. The theatrical air of the man, his self-consciousness--with the saving leaven of unquestionable sincerity--made it more an exhortation from the platform. Even in his intimate moments Dulac did not step out of character.... But this was not apparent to Ruth. Glamour was upon her, blinding her. The personality of the man dominated her personality. She saw him as he saw himself.... And his Cause was her Cause. If he would have suffered martyrdom for it, so would she. She raised her eyes to his and, looking into them, saw a soul greater than his soul, loftier than his soul. She was an apostle, and her heart throbbed with pride and joy that this man of high, self-sacrificing purpose should desire her.... She was ready to surrender; her decision was made. Standing under his blazing eyes, in the circle of his magnetism, she was sure she loved him. But the surrender was not to be made then. Her mother rapped on the door. "Young gentleman to see you, Ruth," she called. She heard Dulac's teeth click savagely. "Quick," he said. "What is it to be?" The spell was broken, the old uncertainty, the wavering, was present again. "I--oh, let me think. To-morrow--I'll tell you to-morrow." She stepped--it was almost a flight--to the door, and opened it. In the dining room, hat in hand, stood Bonbright Foote. Dulac saw, too. "What does he want here?" he demanded, savagely. "I don't know." "I'll find out. It's no good to you he intends." "Mr. Dulac!" she said, and faced him a moment. He stopped, furious though he was. She stopped him. She held him.... There was a strength in her that he had not realized. Her utterance of his name was a command and a rebuke. "I know his kind," Dulac said, sullenly. "Let me throw him out." "Please sit down," she said. "I want to bring him in here. I know him better than you--and I think your side misunderstands him. It may do some good." She stepped into the dining room. "Mr. Foote," she said. He was embarrassed, ill at ease. "Miss Frazer," he said, with boyish hesitation, "you don't want to see me--you have no reason to do anything but--despise me, I guess. But I had to come. I found your address and came as quickly as I could." "Step in here," she said. Then, "You and Mr. Dulac have met." Dulac stood scowling. "Yes," he said, sullenly. Bonbright flushed and nodded.... Dulac seemed suddenly possessed by a gust of passion. He strode threateningly to Bonbright, lips snarling, eyes blazing. "What do you mean by coming here? What do you want?" he demanded, hoarsely. "You come here with your hands red with blood. Two men are dead.... Four others smashed under the hoofs of your police!... You're trying to starve into submission thousands of men. You're striking at them through their wives and babies.... What do you care for them or their suffering? You and your father are piling up millions--and every penny a loaf stolen from the table of a workingman!... There'll be starving out there soon.... Babies will be dying for want of food--and you'll have killed them.... You and your kind are bloodsuckers, parasites!... and you're a sneaking, spying hound.... Every man that dies, every baby that starves, every ounce of woman's suffering and misery that this strike causes are on your head.... You forced the strike, backed up by the millions of the automobile crowd, so you could crush and smash your men so they wouldn't dare to mutter or complain. You did it deliberately--you prowling, pampered puppy...." Dulac was working himself into blind rage. Bonbright looked at the man with something of amazement, but with nothing of fear. He was not afraid. He did not give back a step, but, as he stood there, white to the lips, his eyes steadily on Dulac's eyes, he seemed older, weary. He seemed to have been stripped of youth and of the lightheartedness and buoyancy of youth. He was thinking, wondering. Why should this man hate him? Why should others hate him? Why should the class he belonged to be hated with this blighting virulence by the class they employed?... He did not speak nor try to stem Dulac's invective. He was not angered by it, nor was he hurt by it.... He waited for it to subside, and with a certain dignity that sat well on his young shoulders. Generations of ancestors trained in the restraints were with him this night, and stood him in good stead. Ruth stood by, the situation snatched beyond her control. She was terrified, yet even in her terror she could not avoid a sort of subconscious comparison of the men. "Mr. Dulac!... Please!... Please!..." she said, tearfully. "I'm going to tell this--this murderer what he is. and then I'm going to throw him out," Dulac raged. "Mr. Foote came to see ME," Ruth said, with awakened spirit. "He is in my house.... You have no right to act so. You have no right to talk so.... You sha'n't go on." Dulac turned on her. "What is this cub to you? What do you care?... Were you expecting him?" "She wasn't expecting me," said Bonbright, breaking silence for the first time. "I came because she didn't get a square deal.... I had to come." "What do you want with her?... You've kicked her out of your office--now leave her alone.... There's just one thing men of your class want of girls of her class...." At first Bonbright did not comprehend Dulac's meaning; then his face reddened; even his ears were enveloped in a surge of color. "Dulac," he said, evenly, "I came to say something to Miss Frazer. When I have done I'm going to thrash you for that." Ruth seized Dulac's arm. "Go away," she cried. "You have no right. ... If you ever want an answer--to that question--you'll go NOW... If this goes on--if you don't go and leave Mr. Foote alone, I'll never see you again.... I'll never speak to you again.... I mean it!" Dulac, looking down into her face, saw that she did mean it. He shot one venomous glance at Bonbright, snatched his hat from the table, and rushed from the room. Presently Ruth spoke. "I'm so sorry," she said. Bonbright smiled. "It was too bad.... He believes what he says about me...." "Yes, he believes it, and thousands of other men believe it.... They hate you." "Because I have lots of money and they have little. Because I own a factory and they work in it.... There must be a great deal to it besides that.... But that isn't what I came to say. I--it was about discharging you." "Yes," she said. "I knew it wasn't you.... Your father made you." He flushed. "You see... I'm not a real person. I'm just something with push buttons. When somebody wants a thing done he pushes one, and I do it.... I didn't want you to go. I--Well, things aren't exactly joyous for me in the plant. I don't fit--and I'm being made to fit." His voice took on a tinge of bitterness. "I've got to be something that the label 'Bonbright Foote VII' will fit.... It was on account of that smile of yours that I made them give you to me for my secretary. The first time I saw you you smiled--and it was mighty cheering. It sort of lightened things up--so I got you to do my work--because I thought likely you would smile sometimes...." Her eyes were downcast to hide the moisture that was in them. "Father made me discharge you.... I couldn't help it--and you don't know how ashamed it made me.... To know I was so helpless. That's what I came to say. I wanted you to know--on account of your smile. I didn't want you to think--I did it willingly.... And--sometimes it isn't easy to get another position--so--so I went to see a man, Malcolm Lightener, and told him about you. He manufactures automobiles--and he's--he's a better kind of man to work for than--we were. If you are willing you can--go there in the morning." She showed him her smile now--but it was not the broad, beaming grin; it was a dewy, tremulous smile. "That was good of you," she said, softly. "I was just trying to be square," he said. "Will you take the place? I should like to know. I should like to know I'd helped to make things right." "Of course I shall take it," she said. "Thank you.... I--shall miss you. Really.... Good night, Miss Frazer--and thank you." She pitied him from her heart. His position was not a joyful one.... And, as people sometimes do, she spoke on impulse, not calculating possible complications. "If--you may come to see me again if you want to." He took her extended hand. "I may?" he said, almost incredulously. "And will you smile for me?" "Once, each time you come," she said. CHAPTER X Day after day and week after week the strike dragged on. Daily strength departed from it and entered into Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. The men had embarked upon it with enthusiasm, many of them with fanatic determination; but with the advent in their home of privation, of hunger, their zeal was transmuted into heavy determination, lifeless stubbornness. Idleness hung heavily on their hands, and small coins that should have passed over the baker's counter clinked upon mahogany bars. Dulac labored, exhorted, prayed with them. It was his personality, his individual powers over the minds and hearts of men, that kept the strike alive. The weight rested upon his shoulders alone, but he did not bend under it. He would not admit the hopelessness of the contest--and he fought on. At the end of a month he was still able to fire his audiences with sincere, if theatrical, oratory; he could still play upon them and be certain of a response. At the end of two months he--even he--was forced to admit that they listened with stolidness, with apathy. They were falling away from him; but he fought on. He would not admit defeat, would not, even in his most secret thoughts, look forward to inevitable failure. Every man that deserted was an added atom of strength to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Every hungry baby, every ailing wife, every empty dinner table fought for the company and against Dulac. Rioting ended. It requires more than hopeless apathy to create a riot; there must be fervor, determination, enthusiasm. Daily Dulac's ranks were thinned by men who slunk to the company's employment office and begged to be reinstated.... The back of the strike was broken. Bonbright Foote saw how his company crushed the strike; how, ruthlessly, with machinelike certainty and lack of heart, it went ahead undeviatingly, careless of obstructions, indifferent to human beings in its path. There was something Prussian about it; something that recalled to him Bismarck and Moltke and 1870 with the exact, soulless mechanical perfection of the systematic trampling of the France of Napoleon III.... And, just as the Bonbright Foote tradition crunched the strike to pieces so it was crunching and macerating his own individuality until it would be a formless mass ready for the mold. The will should be a straight steel rod urged in one undeviating direction by heart and mind. No day passed upon which the rod of Bonbright's will was not bent, was not twisted to make it follow the direction of some other will stronger than his--the direction of the accumulated wills of all the Bonbright Footes who had built up the family tradition. No initiative was allowed him; he was not permitted to interest himself in the business in his own youthful, healthy way; but he must see it through dead eyes, he must initiate nothing, criticize nothing, suggest nothing. He must follow rule. His father was not satisfied with him, that he realized--and that he was under constant suspicion. He was unsatisfactory. His present mental form was not acceptable and must undergo painful processes of alteration. His parents would have taken him back, as a bad bargain, and exchanged him for something else if they could, but being unable, they must make him into something else. Humiliation lay heavy on him. Every man in the employ of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, must realize the shamefulness of his position, that he was a fiction, a sham held up by his father's hands. Orders issued from his lips to unsmiling subordinates, who knew well they were not his orders, but words placed in his mouth to recite parrot-like. Letters went out under his signature, dictated by him--according to the dictation of his father. He was a rubber stamp, a mechanical means of communication.... He was not a man, an individual--he was a marionette dancing to ill-concealed strings. The thing he realized with abhorrence was that when he was remade, when he became the thing the artisans worked upon him to create--when at last his father passed from view and he remained master of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, it would not be Bonbright Foote VII who was master. It would be an automaton, a continuation of other automatons.... It is said the Dalai Lama is perpetual, always the same, never changing from age to age. A fiction maintained by a mystic priesthood supplying themselves secretly with fresh Dalai Lama material as needful--with a symbol to hold in awe the ignorance of their religionists.... Bonbright saw that he was expected to be a symbol.... He approached his desk in the morning with loathing, and left it at night without relief. Hopelessness was upon him and he could not flee from it; it was inescapable. True, he sought relief. Malcolm Lightener had become his fast friend--a sort of life preserver for his soul. In spite of his youth and Lightener's maturity there was real companionship between them.... Lightener knew what was going on, and in his granite way he tried to help the boy. Bonbright was not interested in his own business, so Lightener awakened in him an interest in Lightener's business. He discussed his affairs with the boy. He talked of systems, of efficiency, of business methods. He taught Bonbright as he would have taught his own son, half realizing the futility of his teaching. Nor had he question as to the righteousness of his proceeding. Because a boy's father follows an evil course the parenthood does not hallow that course.... So Bonbright learned, not knowing that he learned, and in his own office he made comparisons. The methods of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, he compared with the methods of Malcolm Lightener. He saw where modern business would make changes and improvements--but after the first few trampled-on suggestions he remained silent and grew indifferent. Once he suggested the purchase of dictating machines. "Fol-de-rol," said his father, brusquely--and the matter ended. In Lightener's plant he saw lathes which roughed and finished in one process and one handling. In his own plant castings must pass from one machine to another, and through the hands of extra and unnecessary employees. It was economic waste. But he offered no suggestion. He saw time lost here, labor lavished there, but he was indifferent. He knew better. He knew how it should be done--but he did not care.... The methods of Bonbright Foote I not only suited his father, but were the laws of his father's life. Not only had Bonbright established sympathetic relations with Malcolm Lightener, but with Lightener's family. In Mrs. Lightener he found a woman whose wealth had compelled the so-called social leaders of the city to accept her, but whose personality, once she was accepted, had won her a firm, enduring position. He found her a woman whose sudden, almost magical, change from obscurity and the lower fringe of salary-drawers to a wealth that made even America gasp, had not made her dizzy. Indeed, it seemed not to have affected her character at all. Her dominant note was motherliness. She was still the housewife. She continued to look after her husband and daughter just as she had looked after them in the days when she had lived in a tiny frame house and had cooked the meals and made the beds.... She represented womanhood of a sort Bonbright had never been on terms of intimate friendship with.... There was much about her which gave him food for reflection. And Hilda.... Since their first meeting there had been no reference to the desire of their mothers for their marriage. For a while the knowledge of this had made it difficult for Bonbright to offer her his friendship and companionship. But when he saw, as the weeks went by, how she was willing to accept him unaffectedly as a friend, a comrade, a chum, how the maternal ambition to unite the families seemed to be wholly absent from her thoughts, they got on delightfully. Bonbright played with her. Somehow she came to represent recreation in his life. She was jolly, a splendid sportswoman, who could hold her own with him at golf or tennis, and who drove an automobile as he would never have dared to drive. She was not beautiful, but she was attractive, and the center of her attractiveness was her wholesomeness, her frankness, her simplicity. ... He could talk to her as he could not talk even to her father, yet he could not open his heart fully even to her. He could not show her the soul tissues that throbbed and ached. He was lonely. A lonely boy thrown with an attractive girl is a fertile field for the sowing of love. But Bonbright was not in love with Hilda.... The idea did not occur to him. There was excellent reason--though he had not arrived at a realization of it, and this excellent reason was Ruth Frazer. He had ventured to accept Ruth's impulsive invitation to come to see her. Not frequently, not so frequently as his inclinations urged, but more frequently than was, perhaps, wise in his position.... She represented a new experience. She was utterly outside his world, and so wholly different from the girls of his world. It was an attractive difference.... And her grin! When it glowed for him he felt for the moment as if the world were really a pleasant place to spend one's life. He learned from her. New ideas and comprehensions came to him as a result of her conversations with him. Through her eyes he was seeing the other side. Not all her theories, not even all her facts, could he accept, but no matter how radical, no matter how incendiary her words, he delighted to hear her voice uttering them. In short, Bonbright Foote VII, prince of the Foote Dynasty, was in danger of falling in love with the beggar maid. So, many diverse forces and individualities were at work upon the molding of Bonbright Foote. One, and one only, he recognized, and that was the stern, ever-apparent, iron-handed wrenching of his father. There were times, which grew more and more frequent, when he fancied he had surrendered utterly to it and had handed over his soul to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. He fancied he was sitting by apathetically watching the family tradition squeeze it into the desired form.... After a wretched day he had called on Ruth. The next morning soft-footed Rangar had moved shadowlike into his father's office, and presently his father summoned him to come in. "I am informed," said the gentleman who was devoting his literary talents to a philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds, friend of Liberty and Equality, "that you have been going repeatedly to the house of that girl who formerly was your secretary--whose mother runs a boarding house for anarchists." The suddenness, the unexpectedness of attack upon this angle, nonplussed Bonbright. He could only stand silent, stamped with the guilty look of youth. "Is it true?" snapped his father. "I have called on Miss Frazer," Bonbright said, unsteadily. Mr. Foote stood up. It was his habit to stand up in all crises, big or little. "Have you no respect for your family name?... If you must have things like this in your life, for God's sake keep them covered up. Don't be infernally blatant about them. Do you want the whole city whispering like ghouls over the liaison of my son with--with a female anarchist who is--the daughter of a boarding-house keeper?" Liaison!... Liaison!... The foreign term beat again and again against Bonbright's consciousness before it gained admission. Used in connection with Ruth Frazer, with his relations with Ruth Frazer, it was dead, devoid of meaning, conveyed no meaning to his brain. "Liaison, sir!... Liaison?" he said, fumblingly. "I can find a plainer term if you insist." For a moment Bonbright felt curiously calm, curiously cold, curiously detached from the scene. He regarded the other man.... This man was his father. His FATHER! The laws of life and of humanity demanded that he regard this man with veneration. Yet, offhand, without investigation, this man could jump to a vile conclusion regarding him. Not only that, but could accuse him, not of guilt, but of failing to conceal guilt!... Respectability! He knew he was watching a manifestation of the family tradition. It was wrong to commit an unworthy act, but it was a sin unspeakable to be caught by the public in the commission. His mind worked slowly. It was a full half minute before the thought bored through to him that HE was not the sole nor the greatest sufferer by this accusation. It was not HE who was insulted. It was not HE who was outraged.... It was HER! His father could think that of her--casually. The mere fact that she was poor, not of his station, a wage-earner, made it plain to the senior Foote that Ruth Frazer would welcome a squalid affair with his son.... The Sultan throwing his handkerchief. Bonbright's calm gave place to turmoil, his chill to heat. "It's not true," he said, haltingly, using feeble words because stronger had not yet had time to surge up to the surface. "Bosh!" said the father. Then Bonbright blazed. Restraints crumbled. The Harvard manner peeled off and lay quivering with horror at his feet. He stepped a pace closer to his father, so that his face was close to his father's face, and his smoldering eyes were within inches of his father's scornful ones. "It's a lie," he said, huskily, "a damned, abominable, insulting lie." "Young man," his father shipped back, "be careful...." "Careful!... I don't know who carried this thing to you, but whoever did was a miserable, sneaking mucker. He lied and he knew he lied. ... And you, sir, you were willing to believe. Probably you were eager to believe.... I sha'n't defend Miss Frazer. Only a fool or a mucker could believe such a thing of her.... Yes, I have been to see her, and I'll tell you why.... I'll tell you why, good and plenty! ... My first day in this place she was the only human, pleasant thing I met. Her smile was the only life or brightness in the place.... Everything else was dead men's bones. The place is a tomb and it stinks of graveclothes. Our whole family stinks of graveclothes. Family tradition!... Men dead and rotten and eaten by worms--they run this place, and you want me to let them run me.... Every move you make you consult a skeleton.... And you want to smash and crush and strangle me so that I'll be willing to walk with a weight of dead bones.... I've tried. You are my father, and I thought maybe you knew best.... I've submitted. I've submitted to your humiliations, to having everything that's ME--that is individual in me--stamped out, and stuff molded to the family pattern rammed back in its place. ... She was the only bright spot in the whole outfit--and you kicked her out.... And I've been going to see her--just to see her smile and to get courage from it to start another day with you.... That's what my life has been here, and you made it so, and you will keep on making it so.... Probably you'll grind me into the family groove. Maybe I'm ground already, but that doesn't excuse what you've just said, and it doesn't make it any less an abominable lie, nor the man who reported it to you any less a muck-hearted sewer..." He stopped, pale, panting, quivering. "How dare you!... How dare--" "Dare!"... Bonbright glared at his father; then he felt a great, quivering emotion welling up within him, a something he was ashamed to have the eye of man look upon. His lips began to tremble. He swung on his heel and ran staggeringly toward his door, but there he stopped, clutched the door frame, and cried, chokingly, "It's a lie. ... A lie.... A slimy lie!" CHAPTER XI Mr. Foote stood motionless, staring after his son as he might have stared at some phenomenon which violated a law of nature; for instance, as he might have stared at the sun rising in the west, at a stream flowing uphill, at Newton's apple remaining suspended in air instead of falling properly to the ground. He was not angry--yet. That personal and individual emotion would come later; what he experienced now was a FAMILY emotion, a staggering astonishment participated in by five generations of departed Bonbright Footes. He was nonplussed. Here had happened a thing which could not happen. In the whole history of the Foote family there had never been recorded an instance of a son uttering such words to his father or of his family. There was no instance of an outburst even remotely resembling this one. It simply could not be.... And yet it was. He had witnessed it, listened to it, had been the target at which his son's hot words had been hurled. For most occurrences in his life Mr. Foote could find a family precedent. This matter had been handled thus, and that other matter had been handled so. But this thin--it had never been handled because it had never happened. He was left standing squarely on his own feet, without aid or support. Mortification mingled with his astonishment. It had remained for him--who had thought to add to the family laurels the literary achievement of portraying philosophically the life of the Marquis Lafayette--to father a son who could be guilty of thinking such thoughts and uttering such words. He looked about the room apprehensively, as if he feared to find assembled there the shades of departed Bonbrights who had been eavesdropping, as the departed are said to do by certain psychic persons.... He hoped they had not been listening at his keyhole, for this was a squalid happening that he must smother, cover up, hide forever from their knowledge. These sensations were succeeded by plain, ordinary, common, uncultured, ancestorless anger. Bonbright Foote VI retained enough personality, enough of his human self, to be able to become angry. True, he did not do it as one of his molders would have done; he was still a Foote, even in passion. It was a dignified, a cultured, a repressed passion... but deep-seated and seething for an outlet, just the same. What he felt might be compared distantly to what other men feel when they seize upon the paternal razor strop and apply it wholesomely to that portion of their son's anatomy which tradition says is most likely to turn boys to virtue.... He wanted to compel Bonbright to make painful reparation to his ancestors. He wanted to inflict punishment of some striking, uncommon, distressing sort.... His anger increased, and he became even more human. With a trifle more haste than was usual, with the studied, cultured set of his lips less studied and cultured than ever they had been before, he strode to his son's door. Something was going to happen. He was restraining himself, but something would happen now. He felt it and feared it. ... His rage must have an outlet. Vaguely he felt that fire must be fought with fire--and he all unaccustomed to handling that element. But he would rise to the necessities.... He stepped into Bonbright's room, keyed up to eruption, but he did not erupt. Nobody was there to erupt AT. Bonbright was gone.... Mr. Foote went back to his desk and sat there nervously drumming on its top with his fingers. He was not himself. He had never been so disturbed before and did not know it was possible for him to be upset in this manner. There had been other crises, other disagreeable happenings in his life, but he had met them calmly, dispassionately, with what he was pleased to call philosophy. He had liked to fancy himself as ruled wholly by intellect and not at all by emotion. And now emotion had caught him up as a tidal wave might catch up a strong swimmer, and tossed him hither and thither, blinded by its spray and helpless. His one coherent thought was that something must be done about it. At such a moment some fathers would have considered the advisability of casting their sons loose to shift for themselves as a punishment for too much independence and for outraging the laws requiring unquestioning respect for father from son. This course did not even occur to Mr. Foote. It was in the nature of things that it should not, for in his mind his son was a permanent structure, a sort of extension on the family house. He was THERE. Without him the family ended, the family business passed into the hands of strangers. There would be no Bonbright Foote VIII who, in his turn, should become the father of Bonbright Foote IX, and so following. No, he did not hold even tentatively the idea of disinheritance. Something, however, must be done, and the something must result in his son's becoming what he wanted his son to become. Bonbright must be grasped and shoved into the family groove and made to travel and function there. There could be no surrender, no wavering, no concession made by the family.... The boy must be made into what he ought to be--but how? And he must have his lesson for this day's scene. He must be shown that he could not, with impunity, outrage the Family Tradition and flout the Family Ghosts.... Again--how? What Bonbright intended in his present state of boyish rage and revolt, his father did not consider. It was characteristic of him that he failed to think of that. All his considerations were of what he and the Family should do to Bonbright.... A general would doubtless have called this defective strategy. To win battles one must have some notion of the enemy's intentions--and of his potentialities.... His determination--set and stiff as cold metal--was that something unpleasant should happen to the boy and that the boy should be brought to his senses.... If anyone had hinted to him that the boy was just coming to his senses he would have listened as one listens to a patent absurdity. He pressed the buzzer which summoned Rangar, and presently that soft-footed individual appeared silently in the door--looking as Mr. Foote had never seen him look before. Rangar was breathing hard, he was flustered, his necktie was awry, and his face was ivory white. Also, though Mr. Foote did not take in this detail, his eyes smoldered with restrained malignancy. "Why, Rangar," said Mr. Foote, "what's wrong?" "Wrong, Mr. Foote!... I--It was Mr. Bonbright." "What about Mr. Bonbright?" "A moment ago he came rushing out of his office--I use the word rushing advisedly.... He was in a rage, sir. He was, you could see it plain. I--I was in his way, sir, and I stepped aside. But he wouldn't have it. No, sir, he wouldn't.... He reached out, Mr. Foote, and grabbed me; yes, sir, grabbed me right before the whole office. It was by the front of the shirt and the necktie, and he shook me.... He's a strong young man.... And he said, 'You're the sneak that's been running to father with lies,' and then he shook me again. 'I suppose,' he says in a second, 'that I've got to expect to be spied on.... Go ahead, it's a job that fits you.' Yes, sir, that's exactly what he said in his own words. 'Fits me,' says he. And then he shook me again and threw me across the alleyway so that I fell over on a desk. 'Spy ahead,' he says, so that everybody in the office heard him and was snickering at me, 'but report what you see after this--and see to it it's the truth.... One more lie like this one,' he says, and then stopped and rushed on out of the office. It was a threat, Mr. Foote, and he meant it. He means me harm." "Nonsense!" said Mr. Foote, holding himself resolutely in the character he had built for himself. "A fit of boyish temper." Rangar's eyes glinted, but he made no rejoinder. "He rather lost his temper with ME," said Mr. Foote, "when I accused him of a liaison with that girl.... He denied it, Rangar, or so I understood. He was very young and--tempestuous about it. Are you sure you were right?" "What else would he be going there for, Mr. Foote?" "My idea exactly." "Unless, sir, he fancies he's in love with the girl.... I once knew a young man in a position similar to Mr. Bonbright's who fell in love with a girl who sold cigars in a hotel.... He fairly DOGGED her, sir. Wanted to marry her. You wouldn't believe it, but that's what he did, and his family had to buy her off and send her away or he'd have done it, too.... It might happen to any young man, Mr. Foote." "Not to a member of my family, Rangar." "I can't agree with you, sir.... Nobody's immune to it. You can't deny that Mr. Bonbright has been going to see her regularly. Five or six times he's been there, and stayed a long time every visit.... It was one thing or the other he went for, and you can't deny that. If he says it wasn't what you accused him of, then it was the other." "You mean that my son--a Foote--could fall in love, as you call it, with the daughter of a boarding house and a companion of anarchists?" "I hate to say it to you, sir, but there isn't anything else to believe.... He's young, Mr. Foote, and fiery. She isn't bad looking, either, and she's clever. A clever girl can do a lot with a boy, no matter who he is, if she sets her heart on him. It wouldn't be a bad match for a girl like her if she was to entice Mr. Bonbright into a marriage." "Impossible, Rangar.... However, you have an eye kept on him. I want to be told every move he makes, where he goes, who he sees. I want to know everything about him, Rangar. Will you see to it?" "Yes, sir," said Rangar, a gleam of malice again visible in his eyes. "What do you know about this girl? Have you had her looked up?" "Not fully, sir. But I've heard she was heart and soul with what these anarchists believe. Her father was one of them. Killed by the police or soldiers or somebody.... The unions educated her. That's why Dulac went to live there--to help them out.... And it's been reported to me, Mr. Foote, that Dulac was sweet on her himself. That came from a reliable source." "My son a rival of an anarchist for the favor of the daughter of a cheap boarding house!" exclaimed Mr. Foote. "This Dulac was seen, Mr. Foote, with reference to the strike. He's a fanatic. Nothing could be done with him. He actually offered violence to our agent who attempted to show him how it would be to his benefit to--to be less energetic. We offered him--" "I don't care to hear what we offered him. Such details are distasteful, Rangar. That's what I hire you for, isn't it?" "Yes, sir.... Anyhow, Mr. Foote, he couldn't be bought." "Yes.... Yes. Well, we'll have to continue along the lines we've been following. They have been not unsuccessful." "True enough. It's just a question of time now. It might do some good, Mr. Foote, to have the rumor get about that we wouldn't take back any men who did not apply for reinstatement before the end of next week.... There's considerable discontent, due largely to insufficient nourishment. Yes, we can lay it to that, I imagine. It's this man Dulac that holds the strike together. If only every laboring man had a dozen babies there'd be less strikes," Rangar finished, not exactly callously, but in a matter-of-fact way. If he had thought of it he might have added, "and a sick wife." Rangar would not have hesitated to provide each striker with the babies and the wife, purely as a strike-breaking measure, if he could have managed the matter. "They're improvident," said Mr. Foote, sagaciously. "If they must strike and cut off their earnings every so often, why don't they lay up savings to carry them through?" "They seem to have the notion, sir, that they don't earn enough to save. That, while it isn't their main grievance, is an important one. But the idiots put nonsensical, immaterial grievances ahead of money matters mostly.... Rights! Rights to do this or not to do that--to organize or to sit at board meetings. They're not practical, Mr. Foote. If it was just money they wanted we might get on with them. It's men like this Dulac putting notions into their heads that they haven't brains enough to think of themselves. Social revolution, you know--that sort of thing." "Do what you like about it. You might have notices tacked up outside the gates stating that we wouldn't take back men who weren't back by the date you named. And, Rangar, be sure Mr. Bonbright's name is signed to it. I want to rid the men thoroughly of any absurd ideas about him." "You have, sir. If Dulac is a fair sample, you have. Why, he seems regularly to HATE Mr. Bonbright. Called him names, and that sort of thing.... Maybe, though, there's something personal mixed up in it." "That girl?..." "Very likely, sir." "You know her, Rangar. She worked under you. What sort of girl is she?... I mean would you consider it wise to approach her with a proposition--delicately put, of course--to--say--move to another city, or something of the sort?" "My observation of her--while not close--(you understand I have little opportunity for close observations of unimportant subordinates)--was that it would be unwise and--er--futile. She seemed to have quite a will. Indeed, I may say she seemed stubborn ... and no fool. If she's got a chance at Mr. Bonbright she wouldn't give it up for a few dollars. Not her, sir." "I don't recall her especially. Small--was she not? Not the--ah--ripe--rounded type to attract a boy? Eh?" "Curves and color don't always do it, Mr. Foote, I've observed. I've known scrawny ones, without a thing to stir up the imagination, that had ten boys running after them to one running after the kind they have pictures of on calendars.... I don't know if it's brains, or what, but they've got something that attracts." "Hum!... Can't say I've had much experience. Probably you're right. Anyhow, we're faced by something definite in the way of a condition. ... If the thing is merely a liaison--we can break it up, I imagine, without difficulty. If my son is so blind to right and wrong, and to his position, as to want to MARRY the girl, we'll have to resort promptly to effective measures." "Promptly," said Rangar. "And quietly, Mr. Foote. If she got an idea there was trouble brewing, she might off with him and get married before we could wink." "Heavens!... An anarchistic boarding-house girl for a daughter-in-law! We'd be a proud family, Rangar." "Yes, sir. I understand you leave it with me?" "I leave it with you to keep an eye on Bonbright. Consult with me before acting. My son is in a strange humor. He'll take some handling, I'm afraid, before we bring him to see things as my son ought to see them. But I'll bring him there, Rangar. I should be doing my duty very indifferently, indeed, if I did not. He's resentful. He wants to display a thing he calls his individuality--as if our family had use for such things. We're Footes, and I rather fancy the world knows what that means.... My son shall be a Foote, Rangar. That's all.... Stay a moment, though. Hereafter bear in mind I do not care to be troubled with squalid details. If things have to be done, do them.... If babies must be hungry--why, I suppose it is a condition that must exist from time to time. The fault of their fathers.... However, I do not care to hear about them. I am engaged on an important literary work, as you know, and such things tend to distract me." "Naturally, sir," said Rangar. "But you will on no account relax your firmness with these strikers. They must be shown." "They're being shown," said Rangar, grimly, and walked out of the office. In the corridor his face, which had been expressionless or obsequious when he saw the need, changed swiftly. His look was that of a man thinking of an enemy. There was malice, vindictiveness, hatred in that look, and it expressed with exactness his sentiments toward young Bonbright Foote.... It did not express all of them, for, lurking in the background, unseen, was a deep contempt. Rangar despised Bonbright as a nincompoop, as he expressed it privately. "If I didn't think," he said, "I'd get all the satisfaction I need by leaving him to his father, I'd take a hand myself. But the Foote spooks will give it to him better than I could.... I can't wish him any worse luck than to be left to THEM." He chuckled and felt of his disarranged tie. As for Bonbright Foote VI, he was frightened. No other word can describe his sensations. The idea that his son might marry--actually MARRY--this girl, was appalling. If the boy should actually take such an unthinkable step before he could be prevented, what a situation would arise! "Of course it wouldn't last," he said to himself. "Such marriages never do.... But while it did last--And there might be a child--a SON!" A Bonbright Foote VIII come of such a mother, with base blood in his veins! He drew his aristocratic shoulders together as though he felt a chill. "When he comes back," Mr. Foote said, "we'll have this thing out." But Bonbright did not come back that day, nor was he visible at home that night.... The next day dragged by and still he did not appear. ... CHAPTER XII Ruth Frazer had been working nearly two months for Malcolm Lightener, and she liked the place. It had been a revelation to her following her experience with Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. It INTERESTED her, fascinated her. There was an atmosphere in the tremendous offices--a tension, a SNAPPINESS, an alertness, an efficiency that made Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, seem an anachronism; as belonging in an earlier, more leisurely, less capable century. There was a spirit among the workers totally lacking in her former place of employment; there was an attitude in superiors, and most notable in Malcolm Lightener himself, which was so different from that of Mr. Foote that it seemed impossible. Foote held himself aloof from contacts with his help and his business. Malcolm Lightener was everywhere, interested in everything, mixing into everything. And though she perceived his granite qualities, experienced his brusqueness, his gruffness, she, in common with the office, felt for him something that was akin to affection. He was the sort to draw forth loyalty. Her first encounter with him occurred a couple of days after her arrival in the office. She was interrupted in the transcription of a letter by a stern voice behind her, saying: "You're young Foote's anarchist, aren't you?" She looked up frightened into the unsmiling eyes of Malcolm Lightener. "Mr. Foote--got me my place here," she said, hesitatingly. "Here--take this letter." And almost before she could snatch book and pencil he was dictating, rapidly, dynamically. When Malcolm Lightener dictated a letter he did it as though he were making a public speech, with emphasis and gesture. "There," he said, "read it back to me." She did, her voice unsteady. "Spell isosceles," he demanded. She managed the feat accurately. "Uh!... That usually gets 'em.... Needn't transcribe that letter. Like it here?" "Yes, sir." "Why?" She looked up at him, considering the matter. Why did she like it there? "Because," she said, slowly, "it doesn't seem like just a--a--big, grinding machine, and the people working here like wheels and pulleys and little machines. It all feels ALIVE, and--and--we feel like human beings." "Huh!..." he grunted, and frowned down at her. "Brains," he said. "Mighty good thing to have. Took brains to be able to think that--and say it." He turned away, then said, suddenly, over his shoulder, "Got any bombs in your desk?" "Bombs!..." "Because," he said, with no trace of a smile, "we don't allow little girls to bring bombs in here.... If you see anything around that you think needs an infernal machine set off under it, why, you come and tell me. See?... Tell me before you explode anything--not after. You anarchists are apt to get the cart before the horse." "I'm not an anarchist, Mr. Lightener." "Huh!... What are you, then?" "I think--I'm sure I'm a Socialist." "All of the same piece of cloth.... Mind, if you feel a bomb coming on--see me about it." He walked away to stop by the desk of a mailing clerk and enter into some kind of conversation with the boy. Ruth looked after him in a sort of daze. Then she heard the girls about her laughing. "You've passed your examination, Miss Frazer," said the girl at the next desk. "Everybody has to.... You never can tell what he's going to do, but he's a dear. Don't let him scare you. If he thought he had he'd be tickled to death--and then he'd find some way to show you you needn't be at all." "Oh!" said Ruth. More than once she saw laboring men, machinists, men in greasy overalls, with grimy hands and smeared faces, pass into Malcolm Lightener's office, and come out with the Big Boss walking beside them, talking in a familiar, gruff, interested way. She was startled sometimes to hear such men address him by his first name--and to see no lightning from heaven flash blastingly. She was positively startled once when a machinist flatly contradicted Lightener in her hearing on some matter pertaining to his work. "That hain't the way at all," the man said, flatly. Ruth waited for the explosion. "Landers planned it that way." Landers was chief engineer in the plant, drawing a princely salary. "Landers is off his nut. He got it out of a book. I'm DOIN' it. I tell you it won't work." "Why?" Always Lightener had a WHY. He was constantly shooting it at folks, and it behooved them to have a convincing answer. The machinist had, and he set it forth at length and technically. Lightener listened. "You win," he said, when the man was done. That was all. More than once Ruth saw Hilda Lightener in the office. Usually the girls in an office fancy they have a grudge against the fortunate daughter of their employer. They are sure she snubs them, or is a snob, or likes to show off her feathers before them. This was notably absent in Hilda's case. She knew many by name and stopped to chat with them. She was simple, pleasant, guiltless of pomp and circumstance in her comings and goings. "They say she's going to marry young Foote. The Foote company makes axles for us," said Ruth's neighbor, and after that Ruth became more interested in Hilda. She liked Bonbright Foote and was sorry for him. Admitting the unwisdom of his calls upon her, she had not the heart to forbid him, especially that he had shown no signs of sentiment, or of stepping beyond the boundary lines of simple friendship.... She saw to it that he and Dulac did not meet. As for Dulac--she had disciplined him for his outbreak as was the duty of a self-respecting young woman, and had made him eat his piece of humble pie. It had not affected her veneration for his work, nor her admiration for the man and his sincerity and his ability.... She had answered his question, and the answer had been yes, for she had come to believe that she loved him.... She saw how tired he was looking. She perceived the discouragements that weighed on him, and saw, as he refused to see, that the strike was a failure in spite of his efforts. And she was sensible. The strike had failed; nothing was to be gained by sustaining the ebbing remnants of it, by making men and women and children suffer futilely. ... She would have ended it and begun straight-way preparing a strike that would not fail. But she did not say so to him. He HAD to fight. She saw that. She saw, too, that it was not in him to admit defeat or to surrender. It would be necessary to crush him first. And then, at five o'clock, as she came out of the office she found Bonbright Foote waiting for her in his car. It had never happened before. "I--I came for you," he said, awkwardly, yet with something of tenseness in his voice. "You shouldn't," she said, not unkindly. He would understand the reasons. "I had to," he said. "I--all day I've done nothing but wait to see you. I've got to talk to you.... Please, now that I'm here, won't you get in?" She saw that something was wrong, that something out of the ordinary had happened, and as she stepped into the car she shot a glance at his set face and felt a wave of sympathy for him. "I want you to--to have something to eat with me--out in the country. I want to get away from town. Let me send a messenger to your mother. I know you don't want to, and--and all that, but you'll come, won't you?" Ruth considered. There was much to consider, but she knew he was an honest, wholesome boy--and he was in trouble. "This once," she said, and let him see her grin. "Thank you," he said, simply. It was but a short drive to an A. D. T. office, where Bonbright wrote a message to Mrs. Frazer: I'm taking your daughter to Apple Lake to dinner. I hope you won't mind. And I promise to have her home safe and early. A boy was dispatched with this, and Bonbright and Ruth drove out the Avenue with the evening sun in their faces, toward distant, beautiful Apple Lake. Bonbright drove in silence, his eyes on the road. Ruth was alone in her appreciation of the loveliness of the waning day. The messenger left on his bicycle, but had not gone farther than around the first corner when a gentleman drew up beside him in an automobile. "Hey, kid, I want to speak to you," said Mr. Rangar. The boy stopped and the car stopped. "You've got a message there that I'm interested in," said Rangar. "It isn't sealed. I want a look at it." He held out a five-dollar bill. The boy pocketed the bill and handed over the message, which Rangar read and returned to him. Then Rangar drove to the office from which the boy had come and dispatched a message of his own, one not covered by his instructions from Mr. Foote. It was a private matter with him, inspired by an incident of the morning having to do with a rumpled necktie and a ruffled dignity. The malice which had glittered in his eyes then was functioning now. Rangar's message was to Dulac. "Your girl's just gone to Apple Lake with young Foote in his car," it said. That was all, but it seemed ample to Rangar. Bonbright was not a reckless driver, but he drove rapidly this evening, with a sort of driven eagerness. From, time to time Ruth turned and glanced at his face and wondered what could have happened, for she had never seen him like this before, even in his darkest moments. There was a new element in his bearing, an element never there before. Discouragement, apathy, she had seen, and bitterness. She had seen wistfulness, hopelessness, chagrin, humiliation, but never until now had she seen set determination, smoldering embers of rage. What, she wondered, could this boy's father have done to him now? Soon they were beyond the rim of industry which banded the city, and, leaving behind them towering chimneys, smokeless for the night, clouds of released working-men waiting their turns to crowd into overloaded street cars, the grimy, busy belt line which extended in a great arc through the body of the manufacturing strip, they passed through sprouting, mushroomlike suburban villages--villages which had not been there the year before, which would be indistinguishable from the city itself the year after. Farther on they sped between huge-lettered boards announcing the location of real-estate developments which as yet consisted only of new cement sidewalks, immature trees promising future shade, and innumerable stakes marking lot boundaries. Mile after mile these extended, a testimonial to the faith of men in the growth of their city.... And then came the country, guiltless of the odors of gregarious humanity, of gasses, of smokes, of mankind itself, and of the operations which were preparing its food. Authentic farms spread about them; barns and farmhouses were dropped down at intervals; everywhere was green quiet, softened, made to glow enticingly by the sun's red disk about to dip behind the little hills.... All this Ruth saw and loved. It was an unaccustomed sight, for she was tied to the city. It altered her mood, softened her, made her more pliable. Bonbright could have planned no better than to have driven her along this road.... Presently they turned off at right angles, upon a country road shaded by century-old maples--a road that meandered leisurely along, now dipping into a valley created for agriculture, now climbing a hillside rich with fruit trees; and now and then, from hilltop, or through gap in the verdure, the gleam of quiet, rush-fringed lakes came to Ruth--and touched her, touched her so that her heart was soft and her lashes wet.... The whole was so placid, so free from turmoil, from competition, from the tussling of business and the surging upward of down-weighted classes. She was grateful to it. Yet when, as she did now and then, she glanced at Bonbright, she felt the contrast. All that was present in the landscape was absent from his soul. There was no peace there, no placidity, but unrest, bitterness, unhappiness--grimness. Yes, grimness. When the word came into her mind she knew it was the one she had been searching for.... Why was he so grim? Presently they entered upon a road which ran low beside Apple Lake itself, with tiny ripples lapping almost at the tire marks in the sand. She looked, and breathed deeply and gladly. If she could only live on such a spot!... The club house was deserted save by the few servants, and Bonbright gave directions that they should be served on the veranda. It was almost the first word he had uttered since leaving the city. He led the way to a table, from which they could sit and look out on the water. "It's lovely," she said. "I come here a good deal," he said, without explanation, but she understood. "If I were you, I'd LIVE here. Every day I would have the knowledge that I was coming home to THIS in the evening.... You could. Why don't you, I wonder?" "I don't know. I can't remember a Foote who has ever lived in such a place. If it hasn't been done in my family, of course I couldn't do it." She pressed her lips together at the bitter note in his voice. It was out of tune. "Have the ancestors been after you?" she asked. She often spoke of the ancestors lightly and jokingly, which she saw he rather liked. "The whole lot have been riding me hard. And I'm a well-trained nag. I never buck or balk.... I never did till to-day." "To-day?" "I bucked them off in a heap," he said, with no trace of humor. He was dead serious. "I didn't know I could do it, but all of a sudden I was plunging and rearing--and snorting, I expect.... And they were off." "To stay?" He dropped his eyes and fell silent. "Anyhow," he said, presently, "it's a relief to be running free even for an hour." "When they go to climb back why don't you buck some more? Now that they're off--keep them off." "It's not so easy. You see, I've been trained all my life to carry them. You can't break off a thing like that in an instant. A priest doesn't turn atheist in a night... and this Family Tradition business is like a religion. It gets into your bones. You RESPECT it. You feel it demanding things of you and you can't refuse.... I suppose there is a duty." "To yourself," she said, quickly. "To THEM--and to the--the future.... But I bucked them off once. Maybe they'll never ride so hard again, and maybe they'll try to break me by riding harder.... Until to-day I never had a notion of fighting back--but I'm going to give them a job of it now.... There are things I WILL do. They sha'n't always have their way. Right now, Miss Frazer, I've broken with the whole thing. They may be able to fetch me back. I don't know.... Sometime I'll have to go. When father's through I'd have to go, anyhow--to head the business." "Your father ought to change the name of the business to Family Ghosts, Incorporated," she said, with an attempt to lighten his seriousness. "I'll be general manager--responsible to a board of directors from across the Styx," he said, with an approach to a smile. "Here's our waiter. I telephoned our order. Hope I've chosen to please you." "Indeed you have," she replied. "I feel quite the aristocrat. I ought not to do this sort of thing.... But I'm glad to do it once. I abhor the rich," she said, laughing, "but some of the things they do and have are mighty pleasant." After a while she said: "If I were a rich man's wife I'd be something more than a society gadabout. I'd insist on knowing his business... and I'd make him do a lot of things for his workmen. Think of being a woman and able to do so much for thousands of--of my class," she finished. "Your class!" he said, sharply. "I belong to the laboring class. First, because I was born into it, and, second, because my heart is with it." "Class doesn't touch you. It doesn't concern you. You're YOURSELF." For the first time in her acquaintance with him he made her uneasy. His eyes and the way he spoke those sentences disturbed her. "Nonsense!" she said. Neither spoke for some time. It was growing dark now, and lights were glowing on the veranda. "When we're through," Bonbright said, "let's walk down by the lake. There's a bully walk and a place to sit.... I asked you to come because I wanted to take you there--miles away from everybody...." She was distinctly startled now, but helpless. She read storm signals, but no harbor was at hand. "We must be getting back," she said, lamely. "It's not eight. We can go back in an hour.... Shall we walk down now? I can't wait, Ruth, to say what I've got to say...." It was impossible to hold back, futile to attempt escape. She knew now why he had brought her and what he wanted to say, but she could not prevent it.... If he must have his say let it be where he desired. Very grave now, unhappy, her joy marred, she walked down the steps by his side and along the shore of the lake. "Here," he said, presently, drawing her into a nook occupied by a bench. She sat down obediently. Was it fortunate or unfortunate that she did not know an automobile was just turning into the lake road, a hired automobile, occupied by her fiance, Dulac? Rangar's note had reached his hands and he had acted as Rangar had hoped.... CHAPTER XIII Until a few moments before Ruth had never had a suspicion of Bonbright's feeling for her; she had not imagined he would ever cross that distinct line which separates the friend from the suitor. It was an unpleasant surprise to her. Not that he was repugnant to her, but she had already bestowed her affections, and now she would have to hurt this boy who had already suffered so much at the hands of others. She recoiled from it. She blamed herself for her blindness, but she was not to blame. What she had failed to foresee Bonbright himself had realized only that morning. He had awakened suddenly to the knowledge that his sentiment for Ruth Frazer was not calm friendship, but throbbing love. He had been awakened to it rudely, not as most young men are shown that they love.... When he flung out of his father's office that morning he had recognized only a just rage; hardly had his feet carried him over the threshold before rage was crowded out by the realization of love. His father's words had aroused his rage because he loved the woman they maligned! Suddenly he knew it.... "It's SO," he said to himself. "It's so--and I didn't know it." It was disconcerting, but he was glad. Almost at once he realized what a change this thing brought into his life, and the major consequences of it.... First, he would have her--he must have her--he would not live without her. It required no effort of determination to arrive at that decision. To win her, to have her for his own, was now the one important thing in his life. To do so would mean--what would it mean? The Family, dead and living, would be outraged. His father would stand aghast at his impiousness; his mother, class conscious as few of the under dogs are ever class conscious, would refuse to receive this girl as her daughter.... There would be bitterness--but there would be release. By this one step he would break with the Family Tradition and the Family Ghosts. They would cast him out.... But would they cast him out? He was Bonbright Foote VII, crown prince of the dynasty, vested with rights in the family and in the family's property by family laws of primogeniture and entail.... No, he would not be cast out, could not be cast out, for his father would let no sin of his son's stand in the way of a perpetuation of the family. Bonbright knew that if a complete breach opened between his father and himself it must be his hand that opened it. His father's would never do so.... He wondered if he could do so--if, when he was calm, he would desire to do so. Once he recognized his love he could not be still; office walls could not contain him. He was in a fever to see Ruth with newly opened eyes, with eyes that would see her as they had not seen her in the days before.... He rushed out--to encounter Hangar, and to experience a surging return of rage.... Then he went on, with no aim or purpose but to get rid of the time that must pass before he could see Ruth. It was ten o'clock, and he could not see her until five. Seven hours.... Now she was here, within reach of his hand, her face, not beautiful by day, very lovely to his eyes as the rising moon stretched a ribbon of light across the lake to touch her with its magic glow... and he could not find words to say what must be said. He had seated her on the bench and now paced up and down before her, struggling to become coherent. Then words came, a torrent of them, not coherent, not eloquent, but REAL. Ruth recognized the reality in them. "I want you," he said, standing over her. "I didn't know--I didn't realize... until to-day. It's so.... It's been so right along. That's why I had to come to you.... I couldn't get along without seeing you, but I didn't know why.... I thought it was to see you smile. But it was because I had to be near you.... I want to be near you always. This morning I found out--and all day I've waited to see you.... That's all I've done--thought about you and waited. It seems as if morning were years away.... I don't know what I've done all day--just wandered around. I didn't eat--until to-night. I couldn't. I couldn't do anything until I saw you--and told you.... That's why I brought you here.... I wanted to tell you HERE--not back there.... Away from all that. ... I can't go on without you--that's what you mean to me. You're NECESSARY--like air or water.... I--Maybe you haven't thought about me this way. I didn't about you.... But you MUST... you MUST!" It was pitiful. Tears wet Ruth's cheeks and she caught her breath to restrain a rising sob. He became calmer, gentler. "Maybe I've surprised you," he said. "Maybe I've frightened you--I hope not. I don't mean to frighten you. I don't want you ever to be frightened or worried.... I want to keep all kinds of suffering out of your life if you'll let me. Won't you let me?..." He stood waiting. "Mr. Foote," she said, presently, "I--" then she stopped. She had intended to tell him about Dulac; that she loved him and had promised to marry him, but she could not utter the words. It would hurt him so to know that she loved another man. She could refuse him without that added pain. "Don't you see," she said, "how impossible it is? It wouldn't do--even if I cared for you." "If you cared for me," he said, "nothing could make it impossible." "We belong in different worlds.... You couldn't come down to mine; I wouldn't fit into yours. My world wouldn't have you, and your world wouldn't have me.... Don't you see?" "I don't see. What has your world or mine to do with it? It's just you and me." "When you saw that your family wouldn't have me, when you found out that your friends wouldn't be friends with me, and that they didn't want to be friends with you any longer just because you married me ..." "I don't want any friends or family but you," he said, eagerly, boyishly. "Be reasonable, Mr. Foote.... You're rich. Some day you'll be the head of a great business--with thousands of men working for you.... I belong with them. You must be against them.... I couldn't bear it. You know all about me. I've been brought up to believe the things I believe. My father and grandfather and HIS grandfather worked and suffered for them.... Just as your ancestors have worked and planned for the things you represent.... It wouldn't ever do. We couldn't be happy. Even if I--cared--and did as you ask--it wouldn't last." "It would last," he said. "I KNOW. I've been trying to tell you, to make you believe that you have crowded everything else out of my life. There's just you in it.... It would last--and every day and every year it would grow--more wonderful." "There must be agreement and sympathy between a husband and his wife, Mr. Foote.... Oh, I KNOW. In the bigger things. And there we could never agree. It would make trouble--trouble that couldn't be avoided nor dodged. It would be there with us every minute--and we'd know it. You'd know I hated the things you stand for and the things you have to do.... No man could bear that--to have his wife constantly reproaching him." "I think," he said, "that your word would be my law...." She sat silent, startled. Unasked, unsought, a thought had entered her mind; a terrifying thought, but a big and vital thought. HER WORD WOULD BE HIS LAW. Her influence would be upon him.... And he was master of thousands of her class. He would be master of more thousands.... If she were his wife--if her word might become his law--how would those laboring men be affected? Would her word be his law with respect to them?... She did not love him, but she did love the Cause she represented, that her promised husband, Dulac, represented.... Her father had given his life for it. She had given nothing. Now she could give--herself.... She could sacrifice herself, she could pass by her love--but would it avail anything?... This boy loved her, loved her with all his strength and honesty. He would continue to love her. She believed that.... If, not loving him, she should marry him, she would be able to hold his love--and her word would be in some sort his law. She could influence him--not abruptly, not suddenly, but gradually, cleverly, cunningly. She could use him for her great purpose. Thousands of men might be happier, safer from hunger and misery, closer to a realization of their hope, if she gave herself to this boy.... She was filled with exaltation--a Joan of Arc listening to her Voices.... It was possible--possible.... And if it were possible, if she could accomplish this great thing for the Cause, dared she avoid it? Was it not a holy duty? Remember her parentage, her training; remember that she had drawn into her being enthusiasm, fanaticism with the air she breathed in the very cradle. She was a revolutionist.... Greater crimes than loveless marriages have been committed in the name of Enthusiasm for a Cause. She hesitated. What should she say?.... She must think, for a new face was upon the matter. She must think, and she must talk with Dulac. Dulac was stronger than she--but he saw eye to eye with her. The things she set up and worshiped in their shrines he worshiped more fervently.... She must put the boy off with evasion. She must postpone her answer until she was certain she saw her duty clearly. Love of humanity in the mass was in her heart--it shouldered out fairness to an individual man. She did not think of this. If she had thought it might not have mattered, for if she were willing to immolate herself would she not have been as ready to sacrifice one man--for the good of thousands? "I-" she began, and was dimly conscious of shame at her duplicity. "I did not know you--wanted me this way.... Let me think. I can't answer--to-night. Wait.... Give me time." His voice was glad as he answered, and its gladness shamed her again. "Wait.... I'd wait forever. But I don't want to wait forever.... It is more than I hoped, more than I had the right to hope. I know I took you by surprise.... Let me have time and the chance to make you love me--to let you get used to the idea of my loving you. But try not to be long. I'm impatient--you don't know how impatient...." "I-I sha'n't be long," she said. "You mustn't build too many hopes...." He laughed. She had never heard him laugh with such lightness, with such a note of soul-gladness, before. "Hope.... I shall eat and drink hope--until you--come to me. For you will come to me. I know it.... It couldn't be any other way." He laughed again, gayly. And then from out the blackness of the surrounding shrubbery there plunged the figure of a man.... Before Bonbright could lift a hand to shield himself blows began to fall, blows not delivered with the naked fist. Once, twice, again the man struck with the strength of frenzy. Ruth sat silent, stunned, paralyzed by fright, and uttered no scream. Then she saw the face of Bonbright's assailant. It was Dulac--and she understood. She sprang to him, clutched at his arm, but he hurled her off and struck again.... It was enough. Bonbright stood wavering a moment, struggling to remain upright, but sagging slowly. Then he slumped to the ground in a sort of uncanny sitting posture, his head sunk upon his knees. Ruth stood looking down upon him with horror-widened eyes. Dulac hurled his weapon into the bushes and turned upon her furiously, seizing her arm and dragging her to him so that his eyes, glowing with unreason, could burn into hers. "Oh--" she moaned. "I've taught him," Dulac said, his voice quivering with rage. "It was time... the vermin. Because he was rich he thought he was safe. He thought he could do anything.... But I've taught him. They starve us and stamp on us--and then steal our wives and smirch our sweethearts." Ruth tried to bend over Bonbright, to lift his head, to give him assistance, but Dulac jerked her away. "Don't touch him. Don't dare to touch him," he said. "He doesn't--move," she said, in a horrified whisper. "Maybe you've-killed him." "He deserved it.... And you--have you anything to say? What are you doing here--with him?" "Let me go," she panted. "Let me see--I must see. He can't be--dead. ... You--you BEAST!" she cried, shrilly. "He was good. He meant no harm.... He loved me, and that's why this happened. It's my fault--my fault." "Be still," he commanded. "He loved you--you admit it. You dare admit it--and you here alone with him at night." "He asked--me--to--marry--him," she said, faintly. "He was not--what you think.... He was a good--boy." Suddenly she tried to break from him to go to Bonbright, but he clutched her savagely. "Help!... Help!..." she cried. Then his hand closed over her mouth and he gathered her up in his arms and carried her away. He did not look behind at Bonbright huddled there with the ribbon of moonlight pointing across the lake at his limp body, but half staggered, half ran to his waiting car.... A snarled word, and the engine started. Ruth, choking, helpless, was carried away, leaving Bonbright alone and still.... CHAPTER XIV Bonbright was on his hands and knees on the edge of the lake, dizzily slopping water on his head and face. He was struggling toward consciousness, fighting dazedly for the power to act. As one who, in a dream, reviews the events of another half-presented dream, he knew what had happened. Consciousness had not fully deserted him. Dulac had attacked him; Dulac had carried Ruth away.... Somehow he had no fears for her personal safety, but he must follow. He must KNOW that she was safe.... Not many minutes had passed since Dulac struck him down. His body was strong, well trained to sustain shocks and to recover from them, thanks to four years of college schooling in the man's game of football. Since he left college he had retained the respect for his body which had been taught him, and with golf and tennis and gymnasium he had kept himself fit... so that now his vital forces marshaled themselves quickly to fight his battle for him. Presently he raised himself to his feet and stood swaying dizzily; with fingers that fumbled he tied his handkerchief about his bruised head and staggered toward his car, for his will urged him on to follow Dulac. To crank the motor (for the self-starter had not yet arrived) was a task of magnitude, but he accomplished it and pulled himself into the seat. For a moment he lay upon the steering wheel, panting, fighting back his weakness; then he thrust forward his control lever and the car began to move. The motion, the kindly touch of the cool night air against his head, stimulated him; he stepped on the gas pedal and the car leaped forward as though eager for the pursuit. Out into the main road he lurched, grimly clutching the steering wheel, leaning on it for support, his aching, blurred eyes clinging to the illuminated way before him, and he drove as he had never ventured to drive before. Beating against his numbed brain was his will's sledge-hammer demands for speed, and he obeyed recklessly.... Roadside objects flicked by, mile after mile was dropped behind, the city's outskirts were being snatched closer and closer--and then he saw the other car far ahead. All that remained to be asked of his car he demanded now, and he overhauled the smaller, less speedy machine. Now his lights played on its rear and his horn sounded a warning and a demand. Dulac's car veered to the side to let him pass, and he lurched by, only turning a brief, wavering glance upon the other machine to assure himself that Ruth was there. He saw her in a flashing second, in the tonneau, with Dulac by her side.... She was safe, uninjured. Then Bonbright left them behind. The road narrowed, with deep ditches on either hand. Here was the place he sought. He set his brakes, shut off his power, and swung his car diagonally across the way, so that it would be impossible for Dulac to pass. Then he alighted, and stood waiting, holding on to his machine for support. The other car came to a stop and Dulac sprang out. Bonbright saw Ruth rise to follow; heard Dulac say, roughly: "Get back. Stay where you are." "No," she replied, and stepped to the road. Bonbright could see how pale she was, how frightened. "Don't be afraid," he said to her. "Nothing is going to--happen." He stood erect now, free from the support of the car, waiting for Dulac, who approached menacingly. "Dulac," he said, "I can't--fight you. I can't even---defend myself--much.... Unless you insist." The men were facing each other now, almost toe to toe. Dulac's face was stormy with passion under scant restraint; Bonbright, though he swayed a bit unsteadily, faced him with level eyes. Ruth saw the decent courage of the boy and her fear for him made her clutch Dulac's sleeve. The man shook her off. "I know--why you attacked me," said Bonbright, slowly, "what you thought.... I--stopped you to--be sure Miss Frazer was safe... and to tell you you were--wrong.... Not that you have a--right to question me, but nobody must think--ill of Miss Frazer.... No misunderstanding...." "Get that car out of the way," said Dulac. Bonbright shook his head. "Not till I'm--through," he said. "Then you may--take Miss Frazer home.... But be kind to her--gentle.... I shall ask her about it--and I sha'n't be--knocked out long." "You threaten me, you pampered puppy!" "Yes," said Bonbright, grimly, "exactly." Dulac started to lift his arm, but Ruth caught it. "No.... No," she said, in a tense whisper. "You mustn't. Can't you see how--hurt he is? He can hardly stand.... You're not a COWARD...." "Dulac," said Bonbright, "here's the truth: I took Miss Frazer to the lake to--ask her to--marry me.... No other reason. She was--safe with me--as with you. I want her for--my wife. Do you understand?... You thought--what my father thought." Ruth uttered a little cry. So THAT was what had happened! "All the decency in the world," Bonbright said, "isn't in--union men, workingmen.... Because I have more money than you--you want to believe--anything of me.... You're even willing to--believe it of her.... I can--love as well as if I were poor.... I can--honor and respect the girl I want to marry as well as if I--carried a union card.... That is TRUE." Dulac laughed shortly; then, even in his rage, he became oratorical, theatrical. "We know the honor and respect of your kind.... We know what our sisters and daughters have to expect from you. We've learned it. You talk fair--you dangle your filthy money under their eyes--you promise this and you promise that.... And then you throw away your toys.... They come back to us covered with disgrace, heart-broken, marked forever, and fit to be no man's wife.... That's your respect and honor. That's your decency.... Leave our women alone.... Go to your bridge-playing, silly, husband-swapping society women. They know you. They know what to expect from you--and get what they deserve. Leave our women alone.... Leave this girl alone. We men have to endure enough at your hands, but we won't endure this.... We'll do as I did to-night. I thrashed you--" "Like a coward, in the dark, from behind," said Bonbright, boyish pride insisting upon offering its excuse. "I didn't stop you to argue about capital and labor. I stopped you--to tell you the truth about to-night. I've told it." "You've lied the way your kind always lies." Bonbright's lips straightened, his eyes hardened, and he leaned forward. "I promised Miss Frazer nothing--should happen. It sha'n't. ... But you're a fool, Dulac. You know I'm telling the truth--but you won't admit it--because you don't want to. Because I'm not on your side, you won't admit it.... And that makes you a fool.... Be still. You haven't hesitated to tell me I lied. I've taken that--and you'll take what I have to say. It isn't much. I don't know much about the--differences between your kind and my kind.... But your side gets more harm than good from men like you. You're a blind fanatic. You cram your men on lies and stir them up to hate us.... Maybe there's cause, but you magnify it.... You won't see the truth. You won't see reason.... You hold us apart. Maybe you're honest--fanatics usually are, but fanatics are fools. It does no good to tell you so. I'm wasting my breath.... Now take Miss Frazer home--and be careful how you treat her." He turned his back squarely and pulled himself into his car. Then he turned to Ruth. "Good night, Miss Frazer," he said. "I am sorry--for all this.... May I come for--your answer to-morrow?" "No...." she said, tremulously. "Yes...." Bonbright straightened his car in the road and drove on. He was at the end of his strength. He wanted the aid of a physician, and then he wanted to lie down and sleep, and sleep. The day that had preceded the attack upon him had been wearing enough to exhaust the sturdiest. The tension of waiting, the anxiety, the mental disturbance, had demanded their usual wages of mind and body. Sudden shock had done the rest. He drove to the private hospital of a doctor of his acquaintance, a member of his club, and gained admission. The doctor himself was there, by good fortune, and saw Bonbright at once, and examined the wounds in his scalp. "Strikers get you?" he asked. "Automobile mix-up," said Bonbright, weakly. "Uh-huh!" said the doctor. "I suppose somebody picked up a light roadster and struck you over the head with it.... Not cut much. No stitches. A little adhesive'll do the trick--and then.... Sort of excited, eh? Been under a bit of a strain?... None of my business, of course.... Get into bed and I'll send up something to tone you down and make you sleep. You've been playing in too high a key--your fiddle strings are too tight." Getting into that cool, soft bed was one of the pleasantest experiences of Bonbright's life. He was almost instantly asleep--and he still slept, even at the deliberate hour that saw his father enter the office at the mills. Mr. Foote was disturbed. He had not seen his son since the boy flung out of the office the morning before; had had no word of him. He had expected Bonbright to come home in the evening and had waited for him in the library to have a word with him. He had come to the conclusion that it would be best to throw some sort of sop to Bonbright in the way of apparent authority, of mock responsibility. It would occupy the boy's mind, he thought, while in no way altering the conditions, not affecting the end to be arrived at. Bonbright must be held.... If it were necessary to administer an anaesthetic while the operation of remaking him into a true Foote was performed, why, the anaesthetic would be forthcoming. But Bonbright did not come, even with twelve strokes of the clock. His father retired, but in no refreshing sleep.... On that day no progress had been made with the Marquis Lafayette. That work required a calm that Mr. Foote could not master. His first act after seating himself at his desk was to summon Rangar. "My son was not at home last night," he said. "I have not seen him since yesterday morning. I hope you can give me an account of him." "Not home last night, Mr. Foote!" Manifestly Rangar was startled. He had not been at ease before, for he had been unable to pick up any trace of the boy this morning; had not seen him return home the night before.... It might be that he had gone too far when he sent his anonymous note to Dulac. Dulac had gone in pursuit, of that he had made sure. But what had happened? Had the matter gone farther than the mere thrashing he had hoped for?... He was frightened. "I directed you to keep him under your eye." "Your directions were followed, Mr. Foote, so far as was possible. I know where he was yesterday, and where he went last night, but when a young man is running around the country in an automobile with a girl, it's mighty hard to keep at his heels. He was with that girl." "When?... What happened?" "He waited for her at the Lightener plant. She works there now. They drove out the Avenue together--some place into the country. Mr. Bonbright is a member of the Apple Lake Club, and I was sure they were going there.... That's the last I know." "Telephone the Apple Lake Club. See if he was there and when he left." Rangar retired to do so, and returned presently to report that Bonbright and a young lady had dined there, but had not been seen after they left the table. Nobody could say when they went away from the club. "Call Malcolm Lightener--at his office. Once the boy stayed at his house." Rangar made the call, and, not able to repress the malice that was in him, went some steps beyond his directions. Mr. Lightener was on the wire. "This is Rangar, Mr. Lightener--Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Mr. Foote wished me to inquire if you had seen Mr. Bonbright between six o'clock last night and this morning." "No.... Why does he ask me? What's the matter?" "Mr. Foote says Bonbright stayed with you one night, and thought he might have done so again. Mr. Foote is worried, sir. The young man has--er--vanished, so to speak. He was seen last at your plant about five o'clock. In his automobile, Mr. Lightener. He was waiting for a young woman who works for you--a Miss Frazer, I understand. Used to be his secretary. They drove away together, and he hasn't been seen since.... Mr. Foote has feared some sort of--er--understanding between them." "Huh!" grunted Lightener. "Don't know anything about it. Tell Foote to look after his own son... if he knows how." Then the receiver clicked. Lightener swung away from the telephone and scowled at the wall. "He don't look it," he said, presently, "and I'm darned if SHE does.... Huh!..." He pressed a button. "Send in Miss Frazer," he said to the boy who answered the buzzer. In a moment Ruth stood in the door. He let her stand while he scrutinized her briefly. She looked ill. Her eyes were dull and marked by surrounding darkness. She had no color. He shook his head Like a displeased lion. "Miss Frazer," he said, gruffly, "I make it a practice always to mind my own business except when there's some reason for not minding it--which is frequent." "Yes, sir," she said, as he paused. "Yes, sir.... Yes, sir. What do YOU know about it? Come in and shut the door. Come over here where I can look at you. What's the matter? Ill? If you're sick what are you doing here? Home's the place for you." "I'm not ill, Mr. Lightener." "Huh!... I liked your looks--like 'em yet. Like everybody's looks who works here, or I wouldn't have 'em.... You're all right, I'll bet a dollar--all RIGHT.... You know young Foote got you your job here?" He saw the sudden intake of her breath as Bonbright's name was mentioned. "Yes," she said, faintly. "What about him?... Know him well? LIKE HIM?" "I--I know him quite well, Mr. Lightener. Yes, I--like him." "Trust him?" She looked at him a moment before replying; then her chin lifted a trifle and there came a glint into her eyes. "Absolutely," she said. "Um!... Good enough. So do I.... Enough to let him play around with my daughter.... Has he anything to do with the way you look to-day?... Not a fair question--yet. You needn't answer." "I shouldn't," she said, and he smiled at the asperity of her tone. "Mr. Bonbright Foote seems to be causing his family anxiety," he said. "He's disappeared.... I guess they think you carried him off. Did you go somewhere with him in his car last night?" "You have no right to question me, Mr. Lightener." "Don't I know it? I tell you I like you and I like him--and I think his father's a stiff-backed, circumstantial, ancestor-ridden damn fool.... Something's happened or Foote wouldn't be telephoning around. He's got reason to be frightened, and good and frightened. ... A girl, especially a girl in your place, hasn't any business being mixed up in any mess, much less with a young millionaire.... That's why I'm not minding my own business. You work for me, don't you--and ain't I responsible for you, sort of? Well, then? Were you with Bonbright last night?" "Yes, sir." "Huh!... Something happened, didn't it?" "Nothing that--Mr. Foote had anything to do with--" "But something happened. What?" "I can't tell you, Mr. Lightener." He shrugged his shoulders. "Where is he now?" "I don't know." "When did you see him last?" "A little after nine o'clock last night." "Where?" "Going toward home--I thought." "He didn't go there. Where else would he go?" "I don't--know." Her voice broke, her self-control was deserting her. "Hey!... Hold on there. No hysterics or anything. Won't have 'em. Brace up." "Let me alone, then," she said, childishly. "Why can't you let me alone?" "I--Confound it! I'm not deviling you. I'm trying to haul you out of a muss. Quit it, will you?" She had sunk into a chair and covered her face. He got up and stood over her, scowling. "Will you stop it? Hear me? Stop it, I tell you'... What's the matter--anyhow? If Bonbright Foote's done anything to you he hadn't ought to I'll skin him alive." The door opened and Hilda Lightener tripped into the room. "Hello, dad!" she said. "Surprise.... I want to--" She stopped to look at her father, and then at Ruth, crouched in her chair. "What's the matter, dad?" Hilda asked. "You haven't been scaring this little girl? If you have--" She paused threateningly. "Oh, the devil!... I'll get out. You see if you can make her stop it. Cuddle her, or something. I've done a sweet job of it.... Miss Frazer, this is my daughter. Er--I'm going away from here." And he went, precipitately. There was a brief silence; then Hilda laid her hand on Ruth's head. "What's dad been doing to you?" she asked. "Scare you? His bark's a heap sight worse than his bite." "He--he's good," said Ruth, tearfully. "He was trying to be good to me.... I'm just upset--that's all. I'll be--all right in a moment." But she was not all right in a moment. Her sobs increased. The strain, the anxiety, a sleepless night of suffering--and the struggle she had undergone to find the answer to Bonbright's question--had tried her to the depths of her soul. Now she gave quite away and, unwillingly enough, sobbed and mumbled on Hilda Lightener's shoulder, and clung to the larger girl pitifully, as a frightened baby clings to its mother. Hilda's face grew sober, her eyes darkened, as, among Ruth's broken, fragmentary, choking words, she heard the name of Bonbright Foote. But her arm did not withdraw from about Ruth's shoulders, nor did the sympathy in her kind voice lessen.... Most remarkable of all, she did not give way to a very natural curiosity. She asked no question. After a time Ruth grew quieter, calmer. "I'll tell you what you need," said Hilda. "It's to get away from here. My electric's downstairs. I'm going to take you away from father. We'll drive around a bit, and then I'll run you home.... You're all aquiver." She went out, closing the door after her. Her father was pacing uneasily up and down the alley between the desks, and she motioned to him. "She's better now. I'm going to take her home.... Dad, she was muttering about Bonbright. What's he got to do with this?" "I don't know, honey. Nothing--nothing ROTTEN.... It isn't in him--nor HER." Hilda nodded. "Bonbright seems to have disappeared," her father said. "DISAPPEARED?" "His father's hunting for him, anyhow. Hasn't been home all night." "I don't blame him," said Hilda, with a flash in her eyes. "But what's this girl got to do with it?" "I wish you'd find out. I was trying to--and that blew up the house." "I'll try nothing of the kind," she said. "Of course, if she WANTS to tell me, and DOES tell me, I'll listen.... But I won't tell you. You run your old factory and keep out of such things. You just MESS them." "Yes, ma'am," he said, with mock submissiveness, "it looks like I do just that." Hilda went back into the room, and presently she and Ruth emerged and went out of the building. That day began their acquaintance, which was to expand into a friendship very precious to both of them--and one day to be the rod and staff that sustained Ruth and kept her from despair. CHAPTER XV Hilda Lightener represented a new experience to Ruth. Never before had she come into such close contact with a woman of a class she had been taught to despise as useless and worse than useless. Even more than they hated the rich man Ruth's class hated the rich man's wife and daughter. Society women stood to them for definite transgressions of the demands of human equality and fairness and integrity of life. They were parasites, wasters, avoiding the responsibilities of womanhood and motherhood. They flaunted their ease and their luxuries. They were arrogant. When their lives touched the lives of the poor it was with maddening condescension. In short, they were not only no good, but were flagrantly bad. The zealots among whom Ruth's youth had lain knew no exceptions to this judgment. All so-called society women were included. Now Ruth was forced to make a revision.... All employers of labor had been malevolent. Experience had proven to her that Bonbright Foote was not malevolent, and that a more conspicuous, vastly more powerful figure in the industrial world, Malcolm Lightener, was human, considerate, respectful of right, full of unexpected disturbing virtues.... Ruth was forced to the conclusion that there were good men and good women where she had been taught to believe they did not exist.... It was a pin-prick threatening the bubble of her fanaticism. She had not been able to withhold her liking from Hilda Lightener. Hilda was strongly attracted by Ruth. King Copetua may occasionally wed the beggar maid, but it is rare for his daughter or his sister to desire a beggar maid's friendship. Hilda did not press Ruth for confidences, nor did Ruth bestow them. But Hilda succeeded in making Ruth feel that she was trustworthy, that she offered her friendship sincerely.... That she was an individual to depend on if need came for dependence. They talked. At first Hilda carried on a monologue. Gradually Ruth became more like her sincere, calm self, and she met Hilda's advances without reservation.... When Hilda left her at her home both girls carried away a sense of possessing something new of value. "Don't you come back to the office to-day," Hilda told her. "I'll settle dad." "Thank you," said Ruth. "I do need--rest. I've got to be alone to--think." That was the closest she came to opening her heart. She did have to think, though she had thought and reasoned and suffered the torture of mental conflict through a nearly sleepless night. She had told Bonbright to come on this day for her answer.... She must have her answer ready. Also she must talk the thing over with Dulac. That would be hard--doubly hard in the situation that existed. Last night she had not spoken of it to him; had scarcely spoken to him at all, as he had been morosely silent to her. She had been shocked, frightened by his violence, yet she knew that his violence had been honest violence, perpetrated because he believed her welfare demanded it. She did not feel toward him the aversion that the average girl might have felt for one who precipitated her into such a scene.... She was accustomed to violence and to the atmosphere of violence. When she and Dulac arrived at the Frazer cottage, he had helped her to alight. Then he uttered a rude apology, but a sincere one--according to his lights. "I'm sorry I had to do it with you watching," he said. Then, curtly, "Go to bed now." Clearly he suspected her of no wrongdoing, of no intention toward future wrongdoing. She was a VICTIM. She was a pigeon fascinated by a serpent. Now she went to her room, and remained there until the supper hour. When she and her mother and Dulac were seated at the table her mother began a characteristic Jeremiad. "I hope you ain't coming down with a spell of sickness. Seems like sickness in the family's about the only thing I've been spared, though other things worse has been aplenty. Here we are just in a sort of a breathing spell, and you begin to look all peeked and home from work, with maybe losing your place, for employers is hard without any consideration, and food so high and all. I wasn't born to no ease, nor any chance of looking forward like some women, though doing my duty at all times to the best of my ability. And now you on the verge of a run of the fever, with nobody can say how long in bed, and doctors and medicines and worry...." "I'm not going to be ill, mother," Ruth said. "Please don't worry about me." "If a mother can't worry about her own daughter, then I'd like to know what she can do," said Mrs. Frazer, with the air of one suffering meekly a studied affront. Ruth turned to Dulac. "Before you go downtown," she said, "I want to talk to you." Dulac had not hoped to escape a reckoning with Ruth, and now he supposed she was demanding it. Well, as well now as later, if the thing had to be. He was a trifle sulky about it; perhaps, now that his blind rage had subsided, not wholly satisfied with himself and his conduct. "All right," he said, and went silently on with his meal. After a time he pushed back his chair. "I've got a meeting downtown," he said to Ruth, paving the way for a quick escape. "Maybe what I have to say," she said, gravely, "will be as important as your meeting," and she preceded him into the little parlor. His attitude was defensive; he expected to be called on for explanations, to be required to soothe resentment; his mental condition was more or less that of a schoolboy expecting a ragging. Ruth did not begin at once, but walked over to the window, and, leaning her elbow against the frame, pressed her forehead against the cool glass. She wanted to clear and make direct and coherent her thoughts. She wanted to express well, leaving no ground for misunderstanding of herself or her motives, what she had to say. Then she turned, and began abruptly; began in a way that left Dulac helplessly surprised, for it was not the attack he expected. "Mr. Foote asked me to marry him, last night," she said, and stopped. "That is why he took me out to the lake.... I hadn't any idea of it before. I didn't know... He was honest and sincere. At first I was astonished. I tried to stop him. I was going to tell him I loved you and that we were going to be married." She stopped again, and went on with an effort. "Then something came to me--and it frightened me. All the time he was talking to me I kept on thinking about it... and I didn't want to think about it because of--you.... You know I want to do something for the Cause--something big, something great! It's hard for a woman to do such a thing--but I saw a chance. It was a hard chance, a bitter chance, but it was there.... I'm not a doll. I think I could be strong. He's just a boy, and I am strong enough to influence him.... And I thought how his wife could help. Don't you see? He will own thousands of laboring men--thousands and thousands. If I married him I could do--what couldn't I do?--for them. I would make him see through my eyes. I would make him UNDERSTAND. My work would be to make him better conditions, to give those thousands of men what they are entitled to, to give them all men like you and like my father have taught me they ought to have.... I could do it. I know. Think of it--thousands of men, and then--wives and children, made happier, made contented, given their fair share--and by me!... That's what I thought about--and so--so I didn't refuse him. I didn't tell him about you.... I told him I'd give him my answer--later...." His face had changed from sullenness to relief, from relief to astonishment, then to black anger. "Your answer," he said, passionately. "What answer could you give but one? You're mine. You've promised me. That's the answer you'll give him.... You THOUGHT. I know what you thought. You thought about his money--about his millions. You thought what his wife would have, how she would live. You thought about luxuries, about automobiles, about jewels.... Laboring men!... Hell! He showed you the kingdoms of the earth--and you wanted them. He offered to buy you--and you looked at the price and it was enough to tempt you.... You'll give him no answer. I'll give it to him, and it'll be the same kind of answer I gave him last night.... But this time he won't get up so quick. This time..." "Stop!... That's not true. You know it's not true.... I've promised to marry you--and I've loved you. Yes, I've loved you.... I'm glad of that. It makes the sacrifice real. It makes all the more I have to give.... Father gave his life. You're giving your life and your strength and your abilities.... I want to give, too, and so I'm glad, glad that I love you, and that I can give that.... If I didn't love you, if I did care for Mr. Foote, it would be different. I would be afraid I was marrying him because of what he is and what he has. ... But I am giving up more than he can ever return to me with all his money.... Money can't buy love. It can't give back to me that happiness I would have known with you, working for you, suffering with you, helping you. It's my chance.... You must see. You must believe the truth. I couldn't bear it if you didn't--if you didn't see that I am throwing away my happiness and giving myself--just for the Cause. That I am giving all of myself--not to a quick, merciful death. That wouldn't be hard.... But to years of misery, to a lifetime of suffering. Knowing I love you, I will have to go to him, and be his wife, and pretend--pretend--day after day, year after year, that I love him.... I'll have to deceive him. I'll have to hold his love and make it stronger, and I'll--I'll come to loathe him. Does that sound easy? Could money buy that? Look into your heart and see...." He strode to her, and his hands fell heavily on her shoulders, his black, blazing eyes burned into hers. "You love me--you haven't lied to me?" he demanded, hoarsely. "I love you." "Then, by God! you're mine, and I'll have you. He sha'n't buy you away if I have to kill him. You're mine, do you hear?--MINE!" "Who do you belong to?" she asked. "If I demanded that you give up your work, abandon the Cause, would you do it for me?" "No." "You belong to the Cause--not to me.... I belong to the Cause, too. ... Body and soul I belong to it. What am I to you but a girl, an incident? Your duty lies toward all those men. Your work is to help them.... Then you should give me willingly; if I hesitate you should try to force me to do this thing-for it will help. What other thing could do what it will do? Think! THINK!... THINK!" "You're mine.... He has everything else. His kind take everything else from us. Now they want our wives. They sha'n't have them.... He sha'n't have them.... He sha'n't have you." "It is for me to say," she replied, gently. "I'm so sorry--so sorry--if it hurts you. I'm sorry any part of the suffering and sorrow must fall on you. If I could only bear it alone! If I can help, it's my right to help, and to give.... Don't make it harder. Oh, don't make it harder!" He flung her from him roughly. "You're like all of them.... Wealth dazzles you. You fear poverty.... Softness, luxuries--you all--you women--are willing to sell your souls for them." "Did my mother sell her soul for luxuries? If she did, where are they? Did your mother sell her soul for them?... Have the wives of all the men who have worked and suffered and been trampled on for the Cause sold their souls?... You're bitter. I--I am sorry--so sorry. If you care for me as I do for you--I--I know how bitterly hard it will be--to--give me up--to see me his wife...." "I'll never see that. You can throw me over, but you'll never marry him." "You're big--you're big enough to see this as I see it, and big enough to let me do it.... You will be when--the surprise and the first hurt of it have gone. It's asking just one more thing of you--when you've willingly given so much.... But it's I who do the harder giving. In a few months, in a year, you will have forgotten me.... I can never forget you. Every day and every hour I'll be reminded of you. I'll be thinking of you.... When I greet HIM it will be YOU I'm greeting.... When I am pretending to--to care for him, it will be YOU I am loving. The thought of that, and the knowledge of what I am doing for those poor men--will be all the happiness I shall have... will give me courage to live on and to GO on.... You believe me, don't you, dear? You must, you must believe me!" He approached her again. "Look at me!... Look at me," he demanded, and she gave her eyes to his. They were pure eyes, the eyes of an enthusiast, the eyes of a martyr. He could not misread them, even in his passion he could not doubt them.... The elevation of her soul shone through them. Constancy, steadfastness, courage, determination, sureness, and loftiness of purpose were written there.... He turned away, his head sinking upon his breast, and when he spoke the passion, the rancor, the bitterness, were gone from his voice. It was lower, quivering, almost gentle. "You sha'n't.... It isn't necessary. It isn't required of you." "If it is possible, then it is required of me," she said. "No.... No...." He sank into a chair and covered his face, and she could hear the hissing of his breath as he fought for self-control. "If it were you," she said. "If you could bring about the things I can--the good for so many--would you hesitate? Is there anything you wouldn't do to give THEM what I can give?... You know there's not. You know you could withhold no sacrifice.... Then don't make this one harder for me. Don't stand in my way." "I HATE him," Dulac said, in a tense whisper. "If you--married him and I should meet him--I couldn't keep my hands off him.... The thought of YOU--of HIM--I'd KILL him...." "You wouldn't," she said. "You'd think of ME--and you'd remember that I love you--and that I have given you up--and all the rest, so I could be his wife--and rule him.... And you wouldn't make it all futile by killing him.... Then I'd be helpless. I've got to have him to--to do the rest." She went to him, and stroked his black, waving hair--so gently. "Go now, my dear," she said. "You've got to rise to this with me. You've got to sustain me.... Go now.... My mind is made up. I see my way...." Her voice trembled pitifully. "Oh, I see my way--and it is hard, HARD...." "No," he cried, struggling to his feet. "Yes," she said, softly. "Good-by.... This is our good-by. I--oh, my dear, don't forget--never forget--Oh, go, GO!" In that moment it seemed to her that her heart was bursting for him, that she loved him to the very roots of her soul. She was sure at last, very sure. She was certain she was not blinded by glamour, not fascinated by the man and his part in the world.... If there had been, in a secret recess of her heart, a shadow of uncertainty, it was gone in this moment. "Good-by," she said. He arose and walked toward the door. He did not look at her. His hand was on the knob, and the door was opening, yet he did not turn or look.... "Good-by.... Good-by," she sobbed--and he was GONE... She was alone, and through all the rest of her years she must be alone. She had mounted the altar, a sacrifice, a willing sacrifice, but never till this minute had she experienced the full horror and bitterness and woe that were required of her.... She was ALONE. The world has seen many minor passions in the Garden. It sees and passes on, embodying none of them in deathless epic as His passion was embodied.... Men and women have cried out to listening Heaven that the cup might pass from their lips, and it has not been permitted to pass, as His was not permitted to pass. In the souls of men and of women is something of the divine, something high and marvelous--a gift from Heaven to hold the human race above the mire which threatens to engulf it.... Every day it asserts itself somewhere; in sacrifice, in devotion, in simple courage, in lofty renunciation. It is common; wonderfully, beautifully common... yet there are men who do not see it, or, seeing, do not comprehend, and so despair of humanity.... Ruth, crouching on the floor of her little parlor, might have numbered countless brothers and sisters, had she known.... She was uplifting man, not because of the thing she might accomplish, but because she was willing to seek its accomplishment.... Her eyes were dry. She could not weep. She could only crouch there and peer into the blackness of the gulf that lay at her feet.... Then the doorbell rang, and she started. Eyes wide with tragedy, she looked toward the door, for she knew that there stood Bonbright Foote, come for his answer.... CHAPTER XVI Bonbright had disobeyed the physician's orders to stay in bed all day, but when he arose he discovered that there are times when even a restless and impatient young man is more comfortable with his head on a pillow. So until evening he occupied a lounge with what patience he could muster. So it was that Rangar had no news of him during the day and was unable to relieve his father's increasing anxiety. Mr. Foote was not anxious now, but frightened; frightened as any potentate might be who perceived that the succession was threatened, that extinction impended over his line. Bonbright scarcely tasted the food that was brought him on a tray at six o'clock. He was afire with eagerness, for the hour was almost there when he could go to Ruth for her answer. He arose, somewhat dizzily, and demanded his hat, which was given him with protests. It was still too early to make his call, but he could not stay away from the neighborhood, so he took a taxicab to Ruth's corner, and there alighted. For half an hour he paced slowly up and down, eying the house, picturing in his mind Ruth in the act of accepting him or Ruth in the act of refusing him. One moment hope flashed high; the next it was quenched by doubt.... He saw Dulac leave the house; waited another half hour, and then rang the doorbell. Mrs. Frazer opened the door. "Evening, Mr. Foote," she said, without enthusiasm, for she had not approved of this young man's calls upon her daughter. "Miss Frazer is expecting me," he said, diffidently, for he was sensitive to her antagonism. "In the parlor," said she, "and no help with the dishes, which is to be expected at her age, with first one young man and then another, which, if she gets any pleasure out of it, I'm not one to deny her, though not consulted. If I was starting over again I'd wish it was a son to be traipsing after some other woman's daughter and not a daughter to have other women's sons traipsing after.... That door, Mr. Foote. Go right in." Bonbright entered apprehensively, as one might enter a court room where a jury was about to rise and declare its verdict of guilty or not guilty. He closed the door after him mechanically. "Ruth..." he said. Her face, marked with tears, not untouched by suffering, startled him. "Are you--ill?" he said. "Just--just tired" she said. "Shall I go?... Shall I come again to-morrow?" "No." She was aware of his concern, of the self-effacing thoughtfulness of his offer. He was a good boy, decent and kind. He deserved better than he was getting.... She bit her lips and vowed that, giving no love, she would make him happy. She must make him happy. "You know why I've come, Ruth," he said. "It has seemed a long time to wait--since last night. You know why I've come?" "Yes." "You have--thought about me?" "Yes." He stepped forward eagerly. "You look so unhappy, so tired. It hasn't been worrying you like this? I couldn't bear to think it had.... I--I don't want you ever worried or tired, but always--glad.... I've been walking up and down outside for an hour. Couldn't stay away.... Ruth, you haven't been out of my mind since last night--since yesterday morning. I've had time to think about you.... I'm beginning to realize how much you mean to me. I'll never realize it fully--but it will come to me more every day, and every day I shall love you more than I did the day before--if your answer can be yes. ..." He turned away his head and said, "I'm afraid to ask...." "I will marry you," she said, in a dead voice. She felt cold, numb. Her body seemed without sensation, but her mind was sharply clear. She wanted to scream, but she held herself. His face showed glad, relieved surprise. The shine of his eyes accused her.... She was making capital of his love--for a great and worthy purpose--but none the less making capital of it. She was sorry for him, bitterly sorry for herself. He came forward eagerly, with arms outstretched to receive her, but she could not endure that--now. She could not endure his touch, his caress. "Not now.... Not yet," she said, holding up her hand as though to ward him off. "You mustn't." His face fell and he stopped short. He was hurt--surprised. He did not understand, did not know what to make of her attitude. "Wait," she said, pitifully. "Oh, be patient with me.... I will marry you. I will be a good--a faithful wife to you.... But you must be patient with me. Let me have time.... Last night--and all to-day-have been--hard.... I'm not myself. Can't you see?..." "Don't you love me?" he asked. "I--I've said I would marry you," she replied. Then she could restrain herself no longer. "But let it be soon--soon," she cried, and throwing herself on the sofa she burst into tears. Bonbright did not know what to do. He had never seen a woman cry so before.... Did girls always act this way when they became engaged? Was it the usual thing, or was something wrong with Ruth? He stood by, dumbly waiting, unhappy when he knew he should be happy; troubled when he knew there should be no cloud in his sky; vaguely apprehensive when he knew he should be looking into the future with eyes confident of finding only happiness there. He wanted to pick her up and comfort her in his arms. He could do it, he could hold her close and safe, for she was so small. But he dared not touch her. She had forbidden it; her manner had forbidden it more forcefully than her words. He came closer, and his hand hovered over her hair, her hair that he would have loved to press with his lips-he, he did not dare. "Ruth," he said.... "Ruth!" Suddenly she sat up and faced him; forced herself to speak; compelled herself to rise to this thing that she had done and must see through. "I'm--ashamed," she said, irrepressible sobs interrupting her. "It's silly, isn't it--but--but it's hard to KNOW. It's for so long--so LONG!" "Yes," he said, "that's the best part of it.... I shall have you always." Always. He should have her always! It was no sentence for a month or a year, but for life. She was tying herself to this boy until death should free her.... She looked at him, and thanked God that he was as he was, young, decent, clean, capable of loving her and cherishing her.... For her sake she was glad it was he, but his very attributes accused her. She was accepting these beautiful gifts and was giving in return spurious wares. For love she would give pretense of love. ... Yet if he had been other than he was, if he had been old, seeking her youth as some men might seek it, steeped in experience to satiety as some rich man might have been, she knew she could not have gone through with it. To such a man she could not have given herself--even for the Cause.... Bonbright made his own duping a possibility. "I--I sha'n't act this way again," she said, trying to smile. "You needn't be afraid.... It's just nerves." "Poor kid!" he said, softly, but even yet he dared not touch her. "You want me? You're very, very sure you want me? How do you know? I may not be what you think I am. Maybe I'm different. Are you sure, Bonbright?" "It's the only thing in the world I am sure of," he said. "And you'll be good to me?... You'll be patient with me, and gentle? Oh, I needn't ask. I know you will. I know you're good...." "I love you," was his reply, and she deemed it a sufficient answer. "Then," she said, "let's not wait. There's no need to wait, is there? Can't it be right away?" His face grew radiant. "You mean it, Ruth?" "Yes," she said. "A month?" "Sooner." "A week?" "Sooner.... Sooner." "To-morrow? You couldn't?... You don't mean--TO-MORROW?" She nodded, for she was unable to speak "Sweetheart," he cried, and again held out his arms. She shook her head and drew back. "It's been so--so quick," she said. "And to-morrow comes so soon.... Not till then. I'll be your wife then--your WIFE." "To-morrow morning? I will come to-morrow morning? Can it be then?" "Yes." "I--I will see to everything. We'll be married, and then we will go away--somewhere. Where would you like to go, Ruth?" "Anywhere.... I don't care. Anywhere." "It 'll be my secret," he said, in his young blindness. "We'll start out--and you won't know where we're going. I sha'n't tell you. I'll pick out the best place in the world, if I can find it, and you won't know where we're going till we get there.... Won't that be bully?... I hate to go now, dear, but you're all out of sorts--and I'll have a heap of things to do--to get ready. So will you." He stopped and looked at her pleadingly, but she could not give him what his eyes asked; she could not give him her lips to-night.... He waited a moment, then, very gently, he took her hand and touched it with his lips. "I'm patient," he said, softly. "You see how patient I am.... I can wait... when waiting will bring me so much.... At twelve o'clock? That's the swell hour," he laughed. "Shall I drag along a bishop or will an ordinary minister do?" She tried to smile in response. "Good night, dear," he said, and raised her hand again to his lips. "Good night." "Is that all?" "All." "No--trimmings? You might say good night to the groceryman that way." "Good night--dear," she said, obediently. "It's true. I'm not dreaming it. Noon TO-MORROW?" "Noon to-morrow," she repeated. He walked to the door, stopped, turned, hesitated as if to come back. Then he smiled at her boyishly, happily, wagged his head gayly, as though admonishing himself to be about his business and to stop philandering, and went out.... He did not see her drag herself to the sofa wearily; he did not see her sink upon it and bury her face again in the cushions; he did not hear the sobs that wrenched and shook her.... He would then have understood that this was not the usual way for a girl to enter her engagement. He would have understood that something was wrong, very wrong. After waiting a long time for her daughter to come out, Mrs. Frazer opened the door determinedly and went in. Ruth sat up and, wiping her eyes on a tear-soggy handkerchief, said: "I'm going to marry Bonbright Foote to-morrow noon mother." Mrs. Frazer sat down very suddenly in a chair which was fortunately at hand, and stared at her daughter. "Of all things..." she said, weakly. Bonbright was on the way to make a similar announcement to his parents. It was a task he did not approach with pleasure; indeed, he did not look forward with pleasure to any sort of meeting with his father. In his heart he had declared his independence. He had broken away from Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, had clambered out of the family groove--had determined to be himself and to maintain his individuality at any cost.... Ruth would make it easier for him. To marry Ruth was the first great step toward independence and the throwing off of the yoke of the Foote tradition. As he walked home he planned out what he would say and what he would do with respect to his position in the family. He could not break away from the thing wholly. He could not step out of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, as one steps out of an old coat, and think no more of it. No.... But he would demand concessions. He would insist upon being something in the business, something real. He would no longer be an office boy, a rubber stamp, an automaton, to do thus and to do so when his father pressed the requisite buttons.... Oh, he would go back to the office, but it would be to a very different office and to function in a very different manner. The family ghosts had been dissatisfied with him. Well, they could go hang. Using his father as the working tool, they had sought to remake him according to their pattern. He would show them. There would be a row, but he was buoyed up for whatever might happen by what had just happened.... The girl he loved had promised to marry him--and to-morrow. With a consciousness of that he was ready for anything. He did not realize how strongly he was gripped by the teaching that had been his from his cradle; he did not realize how the Foote tradition was an integral part of him, as his arm or his skin. It would not be so easy to escape. Nor, perhaps, would his father be so ready to make concessions. He thought of that. But he banished it from his mind. When his father saw how determined he was the concessions would follow. They would have to follow. He did not ask himself what would happen if they did not follow. Of course his father and mother would resent Ruth. Because Bonbright loved her so truly he was unable to see how anybody could resent her very much. He was blinded by young happiness. Optimism had been born in him in a twinkling, and set aside a knowledge of his parents and their habits of thought and life that should have warned him. He might have known that his father could have overlooked anything but this--the debasing of the Foote blood by mingling with it a plebeian, boarding-house strain; he might have comprehended that his mother, Mrs. Bonbright Foote VI, no less, could have excused crime, could have winked at depravity, but could never tolerate a daughter-in-law of such origin; would never acknowledge or receive her. As a last resort, to save Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, his father might even submit to Bonbright's wife; his mother did not bow so low before that god; her particular deity was a social deity. If Bonbright's argosy did not wreck against the reef of his father, it never could weather the hidden rock of his mother's class consciousness. Bonbright went along, whistling boyishly. He was worried, but not so worried but that he could find room also to be very happy. Everything would come out all right.... Young folks are prone to trust implicitly to the goodness of the future. The future will take care of troubles, will solve difficulties, will always bring around a happy ending. He was not old enough or experienced enough to know that the future bothers with nobody's desires, but goes on turning out each day's work with calm detachment, continues to move its endless film of tomorrow's events to the edge of its kingdom and to give them life on the screen of to-day. It does not change or retouch the film, but gives it to to-day as it is, relentlessly, without pity and without satisfaction. Bonbright saw the future as a benignant soul; he did not realize it is a nonsentient machine. CHAPTER XVII Bonbright stopped in the library door, for he saw there not only his father, whom he had expected to see, but his mother also. He had not foreseen this. It made the thing harder to tell, for he realized in an instant how his mother would receive the news. He wished he had been less abrupt, but here he was and there could be no drawing back now. His mother was first to see him. "Bonbright..." she said, rising. He walked to her and kissed her, not speaking. "Where have you been? Your father and I have been terribly worried. Why did you stay away like this, without giving us any word?" "I'm sorry if I've worried you, mother," he said, but found himself dumb when he tried to offer an explanation of his absence. "You have worried us," said his father, sharply. "You had no business to do such a thing. How were we to know something hadn't happened to you--with the strike going on?" "It was very inconsiderate," said his mother. There fell a silence awkward for Bonbright. His parents were expecting some explanation. He had come to give that explanation, but his mother's presence complicated the situation, made it more difficult. There had never been that close confidence between Mrs. Foote and Bonbright which should exist between mother and son. He had never before given much thought to his relations with her; had taken them as a matter of course. He had not given to her that love which he had seen manifested by other boys for their mothers, and which puzzled him. She had never seemed to expect it of him. He had been accustomed to treat her with grave respect and deference, for she was the sort of person who seems to require and to be able to exact deference. She was a very busy woman, busy with extra-family concerns. Servants had carried on the affairs of the household. Nurses, governesses, and such kittle-cattle had given to Bonbright their sort of substitute for mother care. Not that Mrs. Foote had neglected her son--as neglect is understood by many women of her class. She had seen to it rigidly that his nurses and tutors were efficient. She had seen to it that he was instructed as she desired, and his father desired, him to be instructed. She had not neglected him in a material sense, but on that highest and sweetest sense of pouring out her affection on him in childhood, of giving him her companionship, of making her love compel his love--there she had been neglectful.... But she was not a demonstrative woman. Even when he was a baby she could not cuddle him and wonder at him and regard him as the most wonderful thing in creation.... She had never held him to her breast as God and nature meant mothers to hold their babies. A mercenary breast had nourished him. So he grew up to admire her, perhaps; surely to stand in some awe of her. She was his mother, and he felt vaguely that the relationship demanded some affection from him. He had fancied that he was giving her affection, but he was doing nothing of the sort.... His childish troubles had been confided to servants. His babyish woes had been comforted by servants. What genuine love he had been able to give had been given to servants. She had not been the companion of his babyhood as his father had failed to be the companion of his youth. ... So far as the finer, the sweeter affairs of parenthood went, Bonbright had been, and was, an orphan.... "Have you nothing to say?" his father demanded, and, when Bonbright made no reply, continued: "Your mother and I have been unable to understand your conduct. Even in our alarm we have been discussing your action and your attitude. It is not one we expected from a son of ours.... You have not filled our hopes and expectations. I, especially, have been dissatisfied with you ever since you left college. You have not behaved like a Foote.... You have made more trouble for me in these few months than I made for my father in my life.... And yesterday--I would be justified in taking extreme measures with you. Such an outburst! You were disrespectful and impertinent. You were positively REBELLIOUS. If I had not more important things to consider than my own feelings you should have felt, more vigorously than you shall, my displeasure. You dared to speak to me yesterday in a manner that would warrant me in setting you wholly adrift until you came to your senses.... But I shall not do that. Family considerations demand your presence in our offices. You are to take my place and to carry on our line.... This hasn't seemed to impress you. You have been childishly selfish. You have thought only of yourself--of that thing you fancy is your individuality. Rubbish! You're a Foote--and a Foote owes a duty to himself and his family that should outweigh any personal desires.... I don't understand you, my son. What more can you want than you have and will have? Wealth, position, family? Yet for months you have been sullen and restless-and then openly rebellious.... And worse, you have been compromising yourself with a girl not of your class...." "I could not believe my ears," said Mrs. Foote, coldly. "However," said his father, "I shall overlook what has passed." Now came the sop he had planned to throw to Bonbright. "You have been in the office long enough to learn something of the business, so I shall give you work of greater interest and responsibility.... You say, ridiculously enough, that you have been a rubber stamp. Common sense should have told you you were competent to carry no great responsibilities at first.... But you shall take over a part of my burden now.... However, one thing must come first. Before we go any farther, your mother and I must have your promise that you will discontinue whatever relations you have with this boarding-house keeper's daughter, this companion of anarchists and disturbers." "I have insisted upon THAT," said Mrs. Foote. "I will not tolerate such an affair." "There is no AFFAIR," said Bonbright, finding his voice. His young eyes began to glow angrily. "What right have you to suppose such a thing--just because Miss Frazer happens to be a stenographer and because her mother keeps a boarder! Father insulted her yesterday. That caused the trouble. I couldn't let it pass, even from him. I can't let it pass from you, mother." "Oh, undoubtedly she's worthy enough," said Mr. Foote, who had exchanged a glance with his wife during Bonbright's outburst, as much as to say, "There is a serious danger here." "Worthy enough!" said Bonbright, anger now burning with white heat. "But," said his father, "worthy or not worthy, we cannot have our son's name linked in any way with a person of her class. It must stop, and stop at once." "That you must understand distinctly," said Mrs. Foote. "Stop!" said Bonbright, hoarsely. "It sha'n't stop, now or ever. That's what I came home to tell you.... I'm not a dumb beast, to be driven where you want to drive me. I'm a human being. I have a right to make my own friends and to live my own life.... I have a right to love where I want to--and to marry the girl I love.... You tried to pick out a wife for me.... Well, I've picked out my own. Whether you approve or not doesn't change it. Nobody, nothing can change it.... I love Ruth Frazer and I'm going to marry her. That's what I came home to tell you." "What?" said his father, in a tone of one who listens to blasphemy. Bonbright did not waver. He was strong enough now, strong in his anger and in his love. "I am going to marry Ruth Frazer," he repeated. "Nonsense!" said his mother. "It is not nonsense, mother. I am a man. I have found the girl I love and will always love. I intend to marry her. Where is there nonsense in that?" "Do you fancy I shall permit such a thing? Do you imagine for an instant that I shall permit you to give me a daughter-in-law out of a cheap boarding house? Do you think I shall submit to an affront like that?... Why, I should be the laughingstock of the city." "The city finds queer things to laugh at," said Bonbright. "My son--" began Mr. Foote; but his wife silenced him. She had taken command of the family ship. From this moment in this matter Bonbright Foote VI did not figure. This was her affair. It touched her in a vital spot. It threatened her with ridicule; it threatened to affect that most precious of her possessions--the deference of the social world. She knew how to protect herself, and would attend to the matter without assistance. "You will never see that girl again," she said, as though the saying of it concluded the episode. Bonbright was silent. "You will promise me NOW that this disgraceful business is ended. NOW.... I am waiting." "Mother," said Bonbright, "you have no right to ask such a thing. Even if I didn't love Ruth, I have pledged my word to her..." Mrs. Foote uttered an exclamation indicative of her disgust. "Pledged your word!... You're a silly boy, and this girl has schemed to catch you and has caught you.... You don't flatter yourself that she cares for you beyond your money and your position.... Those are the things she had her eye on. Those are what she is trading herself for.... It's scandalous. What does your pledged word count for in a case like this?... Your pledged word to a scheming, plotting, mercenary little wretch!" "Mother," said Bonbright, in a strained, tense voice, "I don't want to speak to you harshly. I don't want to say anything sharp or unkind to you--but you mustn't repeat that.... You mustn't speak like that about Ruth." "I shall speak about her as I choose..." "Georgia!..." said Mr. Foote, warningly. "If you please, Bonbright." She put him back in his place. "_I_ will settle this matter with our son--NOW." "It is settled, mother," said Bonbright. "Suppose you should be insane enough to marry her," said Mrs. Foote. "Do you suppose I should tolerate her? Do you suppose I should admit her to this house? Do you suppose your friends--people of your own class--would receive her--or you?" "Do you mean, mother," said Bonbright, his voice curiously quiet and calm, "that you would not receive my wife here?" "Exactly that. And I should make it my business to see that she was received nowhere else.... And what would become of you? Everyone would drop you. Your wife could never take your position, so you would have to descend to her level. Society would have none of you." "I fancy," said Bonbright, "that we could face even that--and live." "More than that. I know I am speaking for your father when I say it. If you persist in this we shall wash our hands of you utterly. You shall be as if you were dead.... Think a moment what that means. You will not have a penny. We shall not give you one penny. You have never worked. And you would find yourself out in the world with a wife to support and no means of supporting her. How long do you suppose she would stay with you?... The moment she found she couldn't get what she had schemed for, you would see the last of her.... Think of all that." "I've thought of all that--except that Ruth would care for my money. ... Yesterday I left the office determined never to go into it again. I made up my mind to look for a job--any job--that would give me a living--and freedom from what Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, means to me. I was ready to do that without Ruth.... But the family has some claims to me. I could see that. So I came back. I was going to tell father I would go ahead and do my best.... But not because I wanted to, nor because I was afraid." "You see," his mother said, bitingly, "it lasted a whole day with you." "Mother!" Bonbright turned to his father. "I am going to marry Ruth. That cannot be changed. Nothing can alter it.... I am ready to come back to the office--and be Bonbright Foote VII... and you can't guess what that means. But I'll do it--because it seems to be the thing I ought to do.... I'll come back if--and only if--you and mother change your minds about Ruth.... She will be my wife as much as mother is your wife, and you must treat her so. She must have your respect. You must receive her as you would receive me... as you would have been glad to receive Hilda Lightener. If you refuse--I'm through with you. I mean it.... You have demanded a promise of me. Now you must give me your promise--to act to Ruth as you should act toward my wife.... Unless you do the office and the family have seen the last of me." He did not speak with heat or in excitement, but very gravely, very determinedly. His father saw the determination, and wavered. "Georgia," he said, again. "No," said Mrs. Foote. "The Family--the business." said Mr. Foote, uncertainly. "I'd see the business ended and the Family extinct before I would tolerate that girl.... If Bonbright marries her he does it knowing how I feel and how I shall act. She shall never step a foot in this house while I live--nor afterward, if I can prevent it. Nor shall Bonbright." "Is that final, mother?... Are you sure it is your final decision?" "Absolutely," she said, her voice cold as steel. "Very well," said Bonbright, and, turning, he walked steadily toward the door. "Where are you going?" his father said, taking an anxious step after his son. "I don't know," said Bonbright. "But I'm not coming back." He passed through the door and disappeared, but his mother did not call after him, did not relent and follow her only son to bring him back. Her face was set, her lips a thin, white line. "Let him go," she said. "He'll come back when he's eaten enough husks." "He's GOT to come back.... We've got to stop this marriage. He's our only son, Georgia--he's necessary to the Family. HIS son is necessary." "And hers?" she asked, with bitter irony. "Better hers than none," said Mr. Foote. "You would give in.... Oh, I know you would. You haven't a thought outside of Family. I wasn't born in your family, remember. I married into it. I have my own rights in this matter, and, Family or no Family, Bonbright, that girl shall never be received where I am received.... NEVER." Mr. Foote walked to the window and looked out. He saw his son's tall form pass down the walk and out into the street--going he did not know where; to return he did not know when. He felt an ache in his heart such as he had never felt before. He felt a yearning after his son such as he had never known. In that moment of loss he perceived that Bonbright was something more to him than Bonbright Foote VII--he was flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. The stifled, cramped, almost eliminated human father that remained in him cried out after his son.... CHAPTER XVIII As Bonbright walked away from his father's house he came into possession for the first time of the word RESPONSIBILITY. It was defined for him as no dictionary could define it. Every young man meets a day when responsibility becomes to him something more than a combination of letters, and when it comes he can never be the same again. It marks definitely the arrival of manhood, the dropping behind of youth. He can never look upon life through the same eyes. Forever, now, he must peer round and beyond each pleasure to see what burden it entails and conceals. He must weigh each act with reference to the RESPONSIBILITY that rests upon him. Hitherto he had been swimming in life's pleasant, safe, shaded pools; now he finds himself struggling in the great river, tossed by currents, twirled by eddies, and with no bottom upon which to rest his feet. Forever now it will be swim--or sink.... To-morrow Bonbright was to undertake the responsibilities of family headship and provider; to-night he had sundered himself from his means of support. He was jobless. He belonged to the unemployed.... In the office he had heard without concern of this man or that man being discharged. Now he knew how those men felt and what they faced. Realization of his condition threw him into panic. In his panic he allowed his feet to carry him to the man whose help had come readily and willingly in another moment of need--to Malcolm Lightener. The hour was still early. Lights shone in the Lightener home and Bonbright approached the door. Mr. Lightener was in and would see him in the office. It was characteristic of Lightener that the room in the house which was peculiarly his own was called by him his office, not his den, not the library.... There were two interests in Lightener's life--his family and his business, and he stirred them together in a quaintly granite sort of way. For the second time that evening Bonbright stood hesitating in a doorway. "Well, young fellow?" said Lightener. Then seeing the boy's hesitation: "Come in. Come in. What's happened NOW?" "Mr. Lightener," said Bonbright, "I want a job. I've got to have a job." "Um!... Job! What's the matter with the job you've got?" "I haven't any job.... I--I'm through with Bonbright Foote, Incorporated--forever." "That's a darn long time. Sit down. Waiting for it to pass will be easier that way.... Now spit it out." He was studying the boy with his bright gray eyes, wondering if this was the row he had been expecting. He more than half hoped, as he would have expressed it, "that the kid had got his back up." Bonbright's face, his bearing, made Lightener believe his back WAS up. "I've got to have a job--" "You said that once. Why?" "I'm going to be married to-morrow--" "What?" "I'm going to be married to-morrow--and I've got to support my wife--decently..." "It's that little Frazer girl who was crying all over my office to-day," said Lightener, deducing the main fact with characteristic shrewdness. "And your father wouldn't have it--and threw you out...or did the thing that stands to him for throwing out?" "I got out. I had gotten out before. Yesterday morning.... Somebody told him I'd been going to see Ruth--and he was nasty about it. Called it a liaison....I--I BURNED UP and left the office. I haven't been back." "That accounts for his calling me up--looking for you. You had him worried." "Then I got to thinking," said Bonbright, ignoring the interruption. "I was going back because it seemed as if I HAD to go back. You understand? As if there was something that compelled me to stick by the Family...." "How long have you been going to marry this girl?" "She said she would marry me to-night." "Engaged to-night--and you're going to marry to-morrow?" "Yes....And I went home to tell father. Mother was there--" Lightener sucked in his breath. He could appreciate what Bonbright's mother's presence would contribute to the episode. "--and she was worse than father. She--it was ROTTEN, Mr. Lightener--ROTTEN. She said she'd never receive Ruth as her daughter, and that she'd see she was never received by anybody else, and she--she FORCED father to back her up....There wasn't anything for me to do but get out....I didn't begin to wonder how I was going to support Ruth till it was all over with." "That's the time folks generally begin to wonder." "So I came right here--because you CAN give me a job if you will--and I've got to have one to-night. I've got to know to-night how I'm going to get food and a place to live for Ruth." "Um!...We'll come to that." He got up and went to the door. From thence he shouted--the word is used advisedly--for his wife and daughter. "Mamma.... Hilda. Come here right off." He had decided that Bonbright's affairs stood in need of woman's counsel. Mrs. Lightener appeared first. "Why, Bonbright!" she exclaimed. "Where's Hilda?" asked Lightener. "Need her, too." "She's coming, dear," said Mrs. Lightener. There are people whose mere presence brings relief. Perhaps it is because their sympathy is sure; perhaps it is because their souls were given them, strong and simple, for other souls to lean upon. Mrs. Lightener was one of these. Before she knew why Bonbright was there, before she uttered a word, he felt a sense of deliverance. His necessities seemed less gnawing; there was a slackening of taut nerves.... Then Hilda appeared. "Evening, Bonbright," she said, and gave him her hand. "Let's get down to business," Lightener said. "Tell 'em, Bonbright." "I'm going to marry Ruth Frazer to-morrow noon," he said, boldly. Mrs. Lightener was amazed, then disappointed, for she had come to hope strongly that she would have this boy for a son. She liked him, and trusted in his possibilities. She believed he would be a husband to whom she could give her daughter with an easy heart.... Hilda felt a momentary shock of surprise, but it passed quickly. Like her father, she was sudden to pounce upon the concealed meaning of patent facts--and she had spent the morning with Ruth. She was first to speak. "So you've decided to throw me over," she said, with a smile.... "I don't blame you, Bonbright. She's a dear." "But who is she?" asked Mrs. Lightener. "I seem to have heard the name, but I don't remember meeting her." "She was my secretary," said Bonbright. "She's a stenographer in Mr. Lightener's office now." "Oh," said Mrs. Lightener, and there was dubiety in her voice. "Exactly," said Lightener. "MOTHER!" exclaimed Hilda. "Weren't you a stenographer in the office where dad worked?" "It isn't THAT," said Mrs. Lightener. "I wasn't thinking about the girl nor about Bonbright. I was thinking of his mother." "That's why he's here," said Lightener. "The Family touched off a mess of fireworks. Mrs. Foote refuses to have anything to do with the girl if Bonbright marries her. Promised to see nobody else did, too. Isn't that it, Bonbright?" "Yes." "I don't like to mix in a family row..." "You've GOT to, dad," said Hilda. "Of course Bonbright couldn't stand THAT." They understood her to mean by THAT the Foote family's position in the matter. "He couldn't stand it.... I expect you and mother are disappointed. You wanted me to marry Bonbright, myself..." "HILDA!" Mrs. Lightener's voice was shocked. "Oh, Bonbright and I talked it over the night we met. Don't be a bit alarmed. I'm not being especially forward.... We've got to do something. What does Bon want us to do?" "He wants me to give him a job." She turned to Bonbright. "They turned you out?" "I turned myself out," he said. She nodded understandingly. "You WOULD," she said, approvingly. "What kind of a job can you give him, dad?" "H'm. THAT'S settled, is it? What do you think, mother?" "Why, dear, he's got to support his wife," said Mrs. Lightener. Malcolm Lightener permitted the granite of his face to relax in a rueful smile. "I called you folks in to get your advice--not to have you run the whole shebang." "We're going to run it, dad....Don't you like Ruth Frazer?" "I like her. She seems to be a nice, intelligent girl....Cries all over a man's office...." "I like her, too, and so will mother when she meets Ruth. I like her a eap, Bon; she's a DEAR. Now that the job for you is settled--" "Eh?" said Lightener. Hilda smiled at him and amended herself. "Now that a very GOOD job for you is settled, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. First thing, I'm invited to the wedding, and so is mother, and so are some other folks. I'll see to that. It isn't going to be any justice-of-the-peace wedding, either. It's going to be in the church, and there'll be enough folks there to make it read right in the paper." "I'm afraid Ruth wouldn't care for that," said Bonbright, dubiously. "I know she wouldn't." "She's got to start off RIGHT as your wife, Bon. The start's everything. You want your friends to know her and receive her, don't you? Of course you do. I'll round up the folks and have them there. It will be sort of romantic and interesting, and a bully send off for Ruth if it's done right. It 'll make her quite the rage. You'll see. ...That's what I'm going to do--in spite of your mother. Your wife will be received and invited every place that _I_ am....Maybe your mother can run the dowagers, but I'll bet a penny I can handle the young folks." In that moment she looked exceedingly like her father. "HILDA!" her mother exclaimed again. "You must consider Mrs. Foote. We don't want to have any unpleasantness over this...." "We've got it already," said Hilda, "and the only way is to--go the limit." Lightener slammed the desk with his fist. "Right!" he said. "If we meddle at all we've got to go the whole distance. Either stay out altogether or go in over our heads.... But how about this girl, Hilda, does she belong?" "She's decently educated. She has sweet manners. She's brighter than two-thirds of us. She'll fit in all right. Don't you worry about her." "Young man," growled Lightener, "why couldn't you have fallen in love with my daughter and saved all this fracas?" Bonbright was embarrassed, but Hilda came to his rescue. "Because I didn't want him to," she said. "You wouldn't have MADE me marry him, would you?" "PROBABLY not," said her father, with a rueful grin. "I'm going to take charge of her," said Hilda. "We'll show your mother, Bon." "You're--mighty good," said Bonbright, chokingly. "I'm going to see her the first thing in the morning. You see. I'll fix things with her. When I explain everything to her she'll do just as I want her to." Mrs. Lightener was troubled; tears stood in her eyes. "I'm so sorry, Bonbright. I--I suppose a boy has the right to pick out his own wife, but it's too bad you couldn't have pleased your mother.... Her heart must ache to-night." "I'm afraid," said Bonbright, slowly, "that it doesn't ache the way you mean, Mrs. Lightener." "It's a hard place to put us. We're meddling. It doesn't seem the right thing to come between mother and son." "You're not," said Hilda. "Mrs. Foote's snobbishness came between them." "HILDA!" "That's just what it is. Ruth is just as nice as she is or anybody else. She ought to be glad she's getting a daughter like Ruth. You'd be....And we can't sit by and see Bon and his wife STARVE, can we? We can't fold our hands and let Mrs. Foote make Ruth unhappy. It's cruel, that's what it is, and nothing else. When Ruth is Bon's wife she has the right to be treated as his wife should be. Mrs. Foote has no business trying to humiliate her and Bon--and she sha'n't." "I suppose you're right, dear. I KNOW you're right.... But I'm thinking how I'd feel if it were YOU." "You'd never feel like Mrs. Foote, mother. If I made up my mind to marry a man out of dad's office--no matter what his job was, if he was all right himself--you wouldn't throw me out of the house and set out to make him and me as unhappy as you could. You aren't a snob." "No," said Mrs. Lightener, "I shouldn't." Malcolm Lightener, interrupted. "Now you've both had your say," he said, "and you seem to have decided the thing between you. I felt kind of that way, myself, but I wanted to know about you folks. What you say GOES....Now clear out; I want to talk business to Bonbright." Hilda gave Bonbright her hand again. "I'm glad," she said, simply. "I know you'll be very happy." "And I'll do what I can, boy," said Mrs. Lightener Bonbright was moved as he had never been moved before by kindliness and womanliness. "Thank you.... Thank you," he said, tremulously. "I--you don't know what this means to me. You've--you've put a new face on the whole future...." "Clear out," said Malcolm Lightener. Hilda made a little grimace at him in token that she flouted his authority, and she and her mother said good night and retired from the room. "Now," said Malcolm Lightener. Bonbright waited. "I'm going to give you a job, but it won't be any private-office job. I don't know what you're good for. Probably not much. Don't get it into your head I'm handing a snap to you, because I'm not. If you're not worth what I pay you you'll get fired. Understand?" "Yes, sir." "If you stick you'll learn something. Not the kind of rubbish you've been sopping up in your own place. I run a business, not a museum of antiquity. You'll have to work. Think you can?" "I've wanted to. They wouldn't let me." "Um!...You'll get dirt on your hands....Most likely you'll be running Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, one of these days. This thing won't last. Your father'll have to come around....I only hope he lets you stay with me long enough to teach you some business sense and something about running a plant. I'll pay you enough to support you and this girl of yours--but you'll earn it. When you earn more you'll get it...Sounds reasonable." "I--I can't thank you enough." "Report for work day after to-morrow, then. You're a man out of a job. You can't afford honeymoons. I'll let you have the day off to-morrow, but next morning you be in my office when the whistle blows. I always am." "Yes, sir." "Where are you going to live? Got any money?" "I don't know where we shall live. Maybe we'd better find a place to board for a while. I've got a hundred dollars or so." "Board!...Huh! Nobody's got any business boarding when they're married. Wife has too much time on her hands. Nothing to do. Especially at the start of things your wife'll need to be busy. Keep her from getting notions....I'll bet the percentage of divorces among folks that board is double that it is among folks that keep house. Bound to be....You get you a decent flat and furnish it. Right off. After you get married you and your wife pick out the furniture. That's what I'm giving you the day off to-morrow for. You can furnish a little flat--the kind you can afford, for five hundred dollars.... You're not a millionaire now. You're a young fellow with a fair job and a moderate salary that you've got to live on. ...Better let your wife handle it. She's used to it and you're not. She'll make one dollar go as far as you would make ten." "Yes, sir." Lightener moved awkwardly and showed signs of embarrassment. "And listen here," he said, gruffly, "a young girl's a pretty sweet and delicate piece of business. They're mighty easy to hurt, and the hurt lasts a long time....You want to be married a long time, I expect, and you want your wife to--er--love you right on along. Well, be darn careful, young fellow. Start the thing right. More marriages are smashed in the first few days than in the next twenty years....You be damn gentle and considerate of that little girl." "I--I hope I shall, Mr. Lightener." "You'd better be....Where you going to-night?" "To the club. I have some things there. I've always kept enough clothes there to get along on." "Your club days are over for some time. Married man has no business with a club till he's forty....Evenings, anyhow. Stay at home with your wife. How'd you like to have her running out to some darn thing three or four nights a week?...Go on, now. I'll tell Hilda where you are. Probably she'll want to call you up in the morning....Good night." "Good night...and thank you." "Huh!" said Malcolm Lightener, and without paying the slightest bit of attention to whether Bonbright stayed or went away, he took up the papers on his desk and lost himself in the figures that covered them. Bonbright went out quietly, thankfully, his heart glad with its own song....The future was settled; safe. He had nothing to fear. And to-morrow he was going to enter into a land of great happiness. He felt he was entering a land of fulfillment. That is the way with the very young. They enter upon marriage feeling it is a sort of haven of perpetual bliss, that it marks the end of unhappiness, of difficulties, of loneliness, of griefs...when, in reality, it is but the beginning of life with all the diverse elements of joy and grief and anxiety and comfort and peace and discord that life is capable of holding.... CHAPTER XIX Hilda Lightener had found Ruth strangely quiet, with a manner which was not indifference to her imminent marriage, but which seemed more like numbness. "You act as if you were going to be hanged instead of married," Hilda told her, and found no smile answering her own. Ruth was docile. She offered no objection to any suggestion offered by Hilda, accepted every plan without demurring. Hilda could not understand her, and was troubled. Wholly lacking was the girlish excitement to be expected. "Whatever you want me to do I will do, only get it over with," seemed to be Ruth's attitude. She seemed to be holding herself in, communing with herself. A dozen times Hilda had to repeat a question or a statement which Ruth had not heard, though her eyes were on Hilda's and she seemed to be giving her attention. She was saying to herself: "I must go through with it.... I can't draw back.... What I am doing is RIGHT--RIGHT." She obeyed Hilda, not so much through pliancy as through listlessness, and presently Hilda was going ahead with matters and acting as a sort of specially appointed general manager of the marriage. She directed Ruth what to wear, saw it was put on, almost bundled Ruth and her mother into the carriage, and convoyed them to the church, where Bonbright awaited them. She could not prevent a feeling of exasperation, especially toward Mrs. Frazer, who had moved from chair to chair, uttering words of self-pity, and pronouncing a constant jeremiad.... Such preliminaries to a wedding she had never expected to witness, and she witnessed them with awakened foreboding. A dozen or so young folks and Malcolm Lightener and his wife witnessed the brief ceremony. Until Ruth's appearance there had been the usual chattering and gayety, but even the giddiest of the youngsters was restrained and subdued by her white, tense face, and her big, unseeing eyes. "I don't like it," Lightener whispered to his wife. "Poor child!... Poor child!" she whispered back, not taking her eyes from Ruth's face. After the rector pronounced the final words of the ceremony Ruth stood motionless. Then she turned slowly toward Bonbright, swaying a trifle as if her knees were threatening to fail her, and said in a half whisper, audible to those about: "It's over?... It's all over?" "Yes, dear." "It can't be undone," she said, not to her husband, but to herself. "We are--married." Hilda, fearing some inauspicious act or word, bustled forward her bevy of young folks to offer their babel of congratulations. As she presented them one by one, Ruth mustered a wan smile, let them take her cold, limp hand. But her mind was not on them. All the while she was thinking: "This is my HUSBAND.... I belong to this man.... I am his WIFE." Once in a while she would glance at Bonbright; he seemed more a stranger to her than he had done the first time her eyes had ever rested on him--a stranger endowed with odious potentialities. ... Mrs. Lightener took Ruth into her arms and whispered, "He's a dear, good boy...." There was comfort in Mrs. Lightener's arms, but scant comfort in her words, yet they would remain with Ruth and she would find comfort in them later. Now she heard Malcolm Lightener speaking to her husband. "You be good to that little girl, young man," he said. "Be mighty patient and gentle with her." She waited for Bonbright's reply. "I love her," she heard Bonbright say in a low voice. It was a good answer, a reassuring answer, but it stabbed Ruth with a new pang, for she had traded on that love; she was a cheat. Bonbright was giving her his love in exchange for emptiness. Somehow she could not think of the Cause now, for this was too intimate, too individual, too personal.... Presently Bonbright and Ruth were being driven to their hotel. The thought of wedding breakfast or of festivities of any sort had been repugnant to Ruth, and Hilda had not insisted. They were alone. Ruth lay back against the soft upholstery of Malcolm Lightener's limousine, colorless, eyes closed. Bonbright watched her face hungrily, scrutinizing it for some sign of happiness, for some vestige of feeling that reciprocated his own. He saw nothing but pallor, weariness. "Dear," he whispered, and touched her hand almost timorously. Her hand trembled to his touch, and involuntarily she drew away from him. Her eyes opened, and in them his own eager eyes read FEAR.... He was startled, hurt. Being only a boy, with a boy's understanding and a boy's pride, he was piqued, and himself drew back. This was not what he had expected, not what the romances he had read had led him to believe would take place. In stories the bride was timid, yet eager; loving, yielding, happy. She clung to her husband, her heart beating against his heart, whispering her adoration and demanding whispered adoration from him.... Here all of this was lacking, and something which crouched at the opposite pole of human emotion was present--FEAR. "You must be patient and gentle with her," Malcolm Lightener had said with understanding, and Bonbright was wise enough to know that there spoke experience; probably there spoke truth, not romance, as it is set down on the printed page. Even if Ruth's attitude were unusual, so the circumstances were unusual. It was no ordinary marriage preceded by an ordinary, joyous courtship. In this moment Bonbright took thought, and it was given him to understand that now, as at no other moment in his life with Ruth, was the time to exercise patience and gentleness. "Ruth," he said, taking her hand and holding it with both his own, "you mustn't be afraid of ME.... You are afraid. You're my wife," he said, boyishly. "It's my job to make you happy--the most important job I've got--and to look after you and to keep away from you everything that might--make you afraid." He lifted her fingers to his lips; they were cold. "I want to take you in my arms and hold you... but not until you want me to. I can wait.... I can do ANYTHING that you want me to do. Both of us have just gone through unpleasant things--and they've tired and worried you.... I wish I might comfort you, dear...." His voice was low and yearning. She let her hand remain in his, and with eyes from which the terror was fading she looked into his eyes to find them clear, honest, filled with love and care for her. They were good eyes, such as any bride might rejoice to find looking upon her from her husband's face. "You're--so good," she whispered. Then: "I'm tired, Bonbright, so tired--and--Oh, you don't understand, you CAN'T understand.... I'll be different presently--I know I shall. Don't be angry..." "Angry!" "I'll be a good wife to you, Bonbright," she said, tremulously, a bit wildly. "I--You sha'n't be disappointed in me.... I'll not cheat. ... But wait--WAIT. Let me rest and think. It's all been so quick." "You asked that," he said, hurt and puzzled. "Yes.... It had to be--and now I'm your wife... and I feel as if I didn't know you--as if you were a stranger. Don't you understand?... It's because I'm so helpless now--just as if you owned me and could do what you wanted to with me... and it makes me afraid...." "I--I don't understand very well," he said, slowly. "Maybe it's because I'm a man--but it doesn't seem as if it ought to be that way." He stopped and regarded her a moment, then he said, "Ruth, you've never told me you loved me." She sensed the sudden fear in his voice and saw the question that had to be answered, but she could not answer it. To-day she could not bring herself to the lie--neither to the spoken lie nor the more difficult lying action. "Not now," she said, hysterically. "Not to-day.... Wait.... I've married you. I've given myself to you.... Isn't that enough for now?... Give me time." It was not resentment he felt, not doubt of her. Her pitiful face, her cold little hands, the fear that lurked in her eyes, demanded his sympathy and forbearance, and, boy though he was, with all a boy's inexperience, he was man enough to give them, intuitive enough to understand something of the part he must play until she could adjust herself to her new condition. He pressed her hand--and released it. "I sha'n't bother you," he said, "until you want me.... But it isn't because I don't want you--don't want to hold you--to LOVE you... and to have you love me.... It will be all right, dear. You needn't be afraid of me...." The car was stopping before the hotel. Now the doorman opened the door and Bonbright helped his bride to alight. She tottered as her feet touched the sidewalk, and he took her arm to support her as he might have helped an invalid. The elevator carried them up to the floor on which were the rooms that had been prepared for them, and they stopped before the door while he inserted the key and turned the lock for their admission. On the threshold she halted, swept by a wave of terror, but, clenching her hands and pressing shut her eyes, she stepped within. The door closed behind them--closed out her girlhood, closed out her independence, shut away from her forever that ownership of herself which had been so precious, yet so unrecognized and unconsidered. It seemed to her that the closing of that door--even more than the ceremony of marriage--was symbolical of turning over to this young man the title deeds of her soul and body. ... Bonbright was helping her to rid herself of her wraps, leading her to a sofa. "Lie down," he said, gently. "You're tired and bothered. Just lie down and rest." "Are we going away?" she asked, presently. "Have I got to get ready?" He had promised her they would go away--and had not seen her since that moment to tell her what had happened. Hilda would not let him go to her that morning, so she was in ignorance of the change in his condition, of his break with his family, and of the fact that he was nothing but a boy with a job, dependent upon his wages. Until this moment he had not thought how it might affect her; of her disappointment, of the fact that she might have expected and looked forward to the position he could give her as the wife of the heir apparent to the Foote dynasty.... It embarrassed him, shamed him as a boy might be shamed who was unable to buy for his girl a trinket she coveted at some country fair. Now she must be told, and she was in no condition to bear disappointments. "I promised you we should go away," he said, haltingly, "but--but I can't manage it. Things have happened....I've got to be at work in the morning. Maybe I should have told you. Maybe I should have come last night after it happened--" She opened her eyes, and at the expression of his face she sat up, alarmed. It told her that no ordinary, small, casual mishap had befallen, but something vital, something which might affect him--and her tremendously. "What is it?" she asked. "What has happened?" "I went home last night," he said, slowly. "After--you promised to marry me--I went home to tell father....Mother was there. There was a row--but mother was worse than father. She was--rather bad." "Rather bad--how, Bonbright?" "She--didn't like my marrying you. Of course we knew neither of them would like it, but I didn't think anything like this would happen. ...You know father and I had a fuss the other day, and I left the office. I had thought things over, and was going back. It seemed as if I ought to go back--as if that was the thing to do.... Well, mother said things that made it impossible. I'm through with them for good. The Family and the Ancestors can go hang." His voice grew angry as recollection of that scene presented itself. "Mother said I shouldn't marry you..." "You--you don't mean you're not going to--to have anything to do with Bonbright Foote, Incorporated--and all those thousands of men?" "That's it....I couldn't do anything else. I had to break with them. Father was bad, but it was mother....She said she would never receive you or recognize you as my wife--and that sort of thing--and I left. I'm never going back.... On your account I'm sorry. I can't give you so much, and I can't do the things for you that I could.... We'll be quite poor, but I've got a job. Mr. Lightener gave me a job, and I've got to go to work in the morning. That's why we can't go away...." "You mean," she said, dully, trying to sense this calamity, "that you will never go back? Never own--that--business?" "It was a choice of giving you up or that. Mother made that clear. If I married you I should never have anything from them...." She did not see the happiness that might lie for her in the possession of a husband whose love was so great that he could give up the kingdoms of the earth for her. She could not see the strength of the boy, his loyalty, his honor. All she saw was the crushing of her plan before it began to germinate.... She had given herself for the Cause. She was here, this young man's wife, alone in these rooms with him, because she loved the Cause and had martyred herself for it.... Her influence was to ameliorate the conditions of thousands of the Bonbright Foote laborers; she was to usher in a new era for them--and for that she had offered herself up.... And now, having bound herself forever to this boy that she did not love--loving another man--the possibility of achievement was snatched from her and her immolation made futile. It was as if she plunged into a rapids, offering her life to save a child that struggled there, to find, when she reached the little body, and it was too late to save herself, that it was a wax figure from some shop window.... But her position was worse than that; what she faced was worse than swift, merciful death.... It was years of a life of horrid possibilities, tied to a man whose chattel she was. She stood up and clutched his arm. "You're joking," she said, in a tense, metallic voice. "I'm sorry, dear. It's very true." "Oh!" Her voice was a wail. "It can't be--it can't be. I couldn't bear that--not THAT...." Bonbright seized her by the arms and peered into her face. "Ruth," he said, "what do you mean? Was THAT why you married me? You're not like those women I've heard about who married--for MONEY." "No....No..." she cried. "Not that--Oh, don't believe that." She spoke the truth, and Bonbright could not doubt it. Truth was in her words, her tone, her face....It was a thing she was incapable of, and he knew it. She could not be mean, contemptible. He drew her to him and kissed her, and she did not resent it. A surge of happiness filled him....She had been dismayed because of him. There was no other interpretation of her words and actions. She was conscience stricken because she had brought misfortune upon him. He laughed boyishly. "Don't worry about me. I don't care," he said, gayly, "so long as I have you. You're worth it a dozen times....I'm glad, Ruth--I'm glad I had to pay for you dearly. Somehow it makes me seem worthier--you understand what I mean...." She understood--understood, too, the interpretation he had put on her words. It brought a flush to her white cheeks....She disengaged herself gently. "If we're not going away," she said, "I can lie down--and rest." "Of course." "Alone? In the next room?" He opened the door for her. "I'll be as quiet as a mouse," he said. "Have a good sleep. I'll sit here and read." She read in his eyes a plea for affection, for another kiss, as she left him, but she had not the strength to give it. She went into the adjoining room, and shut the door after her. Then she stood there silently regarding the door--regarding the KEY.... If she locked it she was safe from him. He could not come in.... She could lock him out. Her hand went to the key, but came away without turning it. No.... She had no right. She had made her bargain and must abide by it. Bonbright was her husband and she was his wife, and as such she must not turn locks upon him.... Marriage gave him the right of free access. Dressed as she was, in the suit that had been her wedding dress, she threw herself upon the bed and gave up her soul to torment. She had taken her all and paid it for a thing desirable in her eyes--and her all had bought her nothing. She had wrenched her love from the man to whom she had given it, and all her life must counterfeit love for a man whom she did not love--and in return she would receive--nothing. She had seen herself a Joan of Arc. That dream was blown away in a breath.... But the bargain was made. That she did not receive what she had thought to receive was no fault of Bonbright's--and she must endure what was to be endured. She must be honest with him--as honesty showed its face to her. To be honest with him meant to her to deceive him daily, hourly, to make her life a lie. He was cheated enough as matters stood--and he did not deserve to be cheated. He was good, gentle, a man. She appreciated him--but she did not love him. ... And appreciating him, aware of his strength and his goodness to her, she could not keep her eyes off the door. She lay there eying it with ever increasing apprehension--yet she did not, would not, could not, rise to turn the key.... CHAPTER XX In every formation of a fresh family group there must be readjustments of habit and of thought. Two people who fancy they know each other intimately discover that they are in reality utter strangers. They start a new acquaintanceship at the moment of marriage, and the wonder of it is that so many millions of them manage the thing with success. It is true that a man and woman who join their hands and their fortunes because of a deep-seated, genuine, calm affection have a greater chance of lasting happiness than those who unite because of the spur of sudden, flaring passion. There are those who contend that friendship and mutual confidence are a firmer foundation for marriage than the emotion that we call love. Thousands of men and women have married because prudence told them a certain other individual would make a trustworthy, efficient, comfortable husband or wife, and as days and weeks and years passed this respect and trust and regard has blossomed into a beautifully permanent flower of love....Doubtless happiness has resulted from marriages which resulted from motives purely mercenary, for human beings are blessed by Heaven with a quality called adaptability. Of no marriage can one predict happiness surely. At the altar the best one can do is to hope for the best....But what can be said of a marriage brought about by the causes and motives that led Bonbright Foote to Ruth Frazer and Ruth Frazer to Bonbright Foote? Of the two, Bonbright's reasons most nearly approached the normal, and therefore the safe; Ruth had been urged by a motive, lofty perhaps, visionary, but supremely abnormal. Therefore the adjustments to be made, the problems to be mastered, the difficulties in their road to a comfortable, reasonably happy future, were multiplied many times. Instead of being probable, the success of their little social entity became merely possible, doubtfully possible. Ruth, being a woman, understood something of this. Bonbright, being a boy, and a singularly inexperienced boy, understood it not at all, and as he sat alone, a closed door between him and his wife, he wearied his brain upon the puzzle of it. He came to the conclusion that the present difficult situation was the natural thing. It was natural for the bride to be timid, frightened, reluctant, for she was entering a dark forest of strange, new experiences. He understood that his own case might be exaggerated because their marriage had been preceded by no ordinary courtship, with the opportunity which a courtship gives to begin the inevitable readjustments, and to become accustomed to intimacy of thought and act. The ordinary man has little intuition, but a world of good intentions. Men blunder woefully in their relations with women, not because of innate boorishness in the sex, not because of willful brashness, but because of lack of understanding. They mean well, but their performance is deplorable.... In that moment Bonbright's most valuable possession was a certain intuition, a fineness, a decency, a reserve, a natural modesty. As he sat there alone he reached a conclusion which was, probably, the most profoundly wise conclusion he was to arrive at in his life. It came not so much from taking thought, as by blessed inspiration. This conclusion was that he must court Ruth Frazer as a sweetheart, not approach her as a husband.... It was a course that would require infinite patience, forbearance, fineness. In his love for Ruth he felt himself capable of it; felt that it would bring its reward. So he sat and waited. He did not approach the door which she had watched with apprehensive eyes until weariness had closed them in sleep.... The luncheon hour had passed when he heard Ruth moving about within. "Hungry?" he called to her, boyishly. His voice reassured her. It was comradely. There was nothing in it that menaced her security....The sleep and the rest had bettered her. She was less tense, more calmly resigned to events. She had marshaled her will; had set it to bear her up and to compel her to carry on bravely and without hysteria the part of a wife. "I am hungry," she said, and presently she appeared in the door, stood there a moment, and then walked across the room to Bonbright. "Thank you," she said, simply, and he understood. "You don't mind being poor for a while?" he asked. "I've always been poor," she said, with something that approached her old smile. "Because," he said, "we are poor. I am going to earn about thirty dollars a week. So, you see, we can't afford to live here. We've got to find a little house or flat...." "Let's begin," she cried. It was not the delight of a woman at the thought of hunting for her first home, but the idea of having something to do, of escaping from these rooms. "Let's go right out to look." "First," he said, with pretended severity, "we eat." So they went down to the dining room, and after they had eaten they inaugurated their house hunting. Perhaps Providence intervened at this difficult moment to give them occupation. If so, Providence acted with amazing wisdom and kindness. Ruth found an interest in the search. She forgot. Her mind was taken from morbid breedings as they climbed stairs and explored rooms and questioned agents. Bonbright was very happy--happier because he was openly and without shame adapting his circumstances to his purse.... They found a tiny flat, to be had for a fourth of their income. Ruth said that was the highest proportion of their earnings it was safe to pay for rent, and Bonbright marveled at her wisdom in such matters. ... Then there were the furnishings to select. Bonbright left the selection and the chaffering wholly to Ruth--and she enjoyed it. The business rested, refreshed, stimulated her. It pushed her fears into the dim background and brought again to the light of day her old self that Bonbright loved. More than once she turned the light of her famous grin upon him or upon some thrice lucky salesman. But the end was reached at last; everything was done that could be done, and there was nothing to do but to return to the hotel. Ruth did her best to keep up her spirits, but by every block that they approached the hotel, by so much her lightness vanished, by so much her apprehension, her heartache, the black disappointment of the failure of her great plan, returned. Bonbright saw the change and it grieved him--it strengthened the determination he had made. When they reached their rooms he drew her over to the sofa. "Let's sit here together, dear," he said. "We haven't had a decent talk, and there are a heap of things to talk about, aren't there?" She forced herself to sit down close to him, and waited icily, steeling herself to yield to his demonstrations of affection if he offered them, but he did not. "I've an idea," he said. "I--I hope you'll like it. It'll be sort of--fun. Sort of a game, you know.... While I sat here this afternoon I was thinking about us--and--how I want to make you happy....We were married--suddenly. Most folks play along and get to know each other, and grow to love each other gradually, I guess....I didn't grow to love you gradually. I don't know how it was with you. But, anyhow, we missed our courtship. We started right in by being husband and wife. Of course I'm glad of that....Don't think I'm not. I wanted you--right away. But--but my idea was that maybe we could--have our courtship now--after we are married....Mayn't we?" "What--what do you mean?" she asked, fearfully, hopefully. "We'll pretend we aren't married at all," he said. "We'll make believe we're at a house party or something, and I just met you. I'm no end interested in you right off, of course. I haven't any idea how you feel about me....We'll start off as if we just met, and it's up to me to make you fall in love with me....I'll bring out the whole bag of tricks. Flowers and candy and such like, and walks and rides. I'll get right down and pursue you....After a while you'll--maybe--get so far as to call me by my first name." He laughed like a small boy. "And some day you'll let me hold your hand--pretending you don't know I'm holding it at all....And I'll be making love to you to--to beat the band. Regular crush I'll have on you....What do you think?" "You mean REALLY?...You mean we'll LIVE like that? That we won't be married, but do like you said?" She was staring at him with big, unbelieving eyes. "That's the idea exactly....We won't be married till I WIN you. That's the game....And I'll try hard--you haven't any notion how hard I'll try." There was something pleading, pathetic in his voice, that went to her heart. "Oh," she said, breathlessly, "that's DEAR of you.... You're good--so GOOD.... I--I hate myself.... You'll do THAT?... I didn't--know anybody--could be--so--so good." She swayed, swayed toward him in a storm of tears, and he drew her face down on his shoulder while with awkward hand he patted her shoulder. "There.... There..." he said, clumsily, happily. She did not draw away from him, but lay there wetting his coat with her tears, her heart swelling with thanks-giving; fear vanished, and something was born in her breast that would never die. The thing that was born was a perfect trust in this man she had married, and a perfect trust is one of the rarest and most wonderful things under the sun. For so young a man, Bonbright felt singularly fatherly. He held his wife gently, silently, willing that she should cry, with a song in his heart because she nestled to him and wept on his shoulder. If he deluded himself that she clung to him because of other, sweeter emotion than grief, relief, it did not diminish his happiness. The moment was the best he had known for months, perhaps the best he had ever known. Ruth sat up and wiped her eyes. He looked into them, saw them cleared now of dread, and it was a sufficient reward. For her part, in that instant, Ruth almost loved Bonbright, not as lovers love, but as one loves a benefactor, some one whose virtues have earned affection. But it was not that sort that Bonbright asked of her, she knew full well. "Now--er--Miss Frazer," he said, briskly, "I don't want to appear forward for a new acquaintance, but if I suggested that there was a bully play in town--sort of tentatively, you know--what would happen to me?" "Why, Mr. Foote," she replied, able to enter into the spirit of the pretense, "I think you'd find yourself in the awkward position of a young man compelled to buy two seats." "No chaperons?" "Where I come from," she said, "chaperons are not in style." "And we'll go some place after the play....I want to make the most of my opportunity, because I've got to work all day to-morrow. It's a shame, too, because I have a feeling that I'd like to monopolize you." "Aren't you going a bit fast for a comparative stranger?" she asked, merrily. He pretended to look crestfallen. "You sha'n't have to put me in my place again," he promised; "but wait--wait till we've known each other a week!...Do you know, Miss Frazer, you have a mighty charming smile!" "It has been remarked before," she said. "We mustn't keep our hostess waiting. I'm afraid we'll be late for dinner, now." He chuckled at the idea. "I never have eaten dinner with a man in evening dress," she said, with a touch of seriousness. "In the country I come from the men don't wear them." How true that was--in the country she came from, the country of widows who kept boarding houses, of laborers, of Dulac and their sort! She was in another land now, a land she had been educated to look upon with enmity; the land of the oppressor. Little revolutionist--she was to learn much of that country in the days to come and to know that in it bad men and good men, worthy women and trifling women, existed in about the same ratio as in her own familiar land....Bonbright insisted upon buying her violets--the first costly flowers she had ever worn. They occupied desirable seats--and the few plays Ruth had seen she had seen from gallery heights! Fortunately it was a bright play, brimming with laughter and gayety, presenting no squalid problems, holding up to the shrinking eyes of the audience no far-fetched, impossible tangles of sex. They enjoyed it. Ruth enjoyed it. That she could do so is wonderful, perhaps, but then, so many human capabilities are wonderful! Men about to be hanged eat a hearty meal with relish.... How much more might Ruth find pleasure since she had been granted a reprieve! When the curtain descended they moved toward the exits, waiting for the crowd to clear the way. Bonbright's attention was all for Ruth, but her eyes glanced curiously about, observing the well-fed, well-kept, brilliantly dressed men and women--men and women of the world to which she belonged now. As one approached them and saw them, they were singularly human. Their faces were not different from faces she was accustomed to. Cleaner they were, perhaps, with something more of refinement. They were better dressed, but there she saw the same smiles, the same weariness, the same charm, the same faces that told their tales of hard work and weary bodies.... They were just human beings, all of them, HER sort and these.... Suddenly her fingers tightened on her husband's arm. He heard her draw a quick, startled little breath, and looked up to see his father and mother approaching them, from the opposite direction. Bonbright had not expected this. It was the last place in the world he had thought to encounter his parents--but there they were, not to be avoided. He stopped, stiffened. Ruth stole a glance at his face and saw it suddenly older, tenser. Mr. and Mrs. Foote approached slowly. Ruth knew the moment Mrs. Foote saw her husband, for the stately woman bit her lip and spoke hurriedly to Bonbright's father, who glanced at Bonbright and then at her uncertainly. Ruth saw that Mrs. Foote held her husband's arm, did not allow him to turn aside, but led him straight toward them.... Bonbright stood stiff, expectant. On came his father and mother, with no quickening of pace. Bonbright's eyes moved from one face to the other as they approached. Now they were face to face. Mrs. Foote's eyes encountered Ruth's, moved away from the girl to her son, moved on--giving no sign of recognition. Mr. Foote looked stonily before him....And so they passed, refusing even a bow to their son, the only child that had been given them....That others had seen the episode Ruth knew, for she saw astonished glances, saw quick whisperings. Then she looked up at her husband. He had not turned to look after his parents, but was staring before him, his face white, his eyes burning, little knots of muscle gathered at the points of his jaw. She pressed his arm gently and heard his quick intake of breath--so like a sob. "Come," he said, harshly. "Come." "It was cruel--heartless," she said, fiercely, quickly partisan, making his quarrel her own, with no thought that the slight had been for her as well as for him. "Come," he repeated. They went out into the street, Bonbright quivering with shame and anger, Ruth not daring to speak, so white, so hurt was his face, so fierce the smolder in his eyes. "You see..." he said, presently. "You see...." "I've cost you THAT," she said. "That," he said, slowly, as if he could not believe his words, "that was my father and--my mother." Ruth was frightened. Not until this moment did she realize what she had done; not until now did the teeth of remorse clench upon her. To marry her--because he loved her--this boy at her side must suffer THIS. It was her doing....She had cheated him into it. She had cost him this and was giving nothing to pay for it. He had foreseen it. Last night he had cut adrift from his parents because of her--willingly. She knew he would have made, would make, any sacrifice for her....And she had married him with no love in her heart, married him to use him for her own ends! She dared not doubt that what she had done was right. She dared not question her act, nor that the end justified the means she had used. ...But the end was not to be attained. By the act of marrying Bonbright she had made it impossible for herself to further the Cause....It was a vicious circle of events. As she watched his face she became all woman; revolutionist and martyr disappeared. Her heart ached for him, her sympathy went out to him. "Poor boy!..." she said, and pressed his arm again. "It was to--be expected," he said, slowly. "I'm glad it's over....I knew what would happen, so why should the happening of it trouble me?...There have been six generations in my family that would do that thing.... Ruth, the Foote Tradition is ended. It ended with me. Such things have no right to exist.... Six generations of it...." She did not speak, but she was resolving silently: "I'll be good to him. I'll make him happy. I'll make up to him for this...." He shook himself. "It doesn't matter," he said. "We sha'n't let it interfere with our evening....Come, Miss Frazer, where shall we lunch?" CHAPTER XXI All of Ruth's life had been spent in contact with the abnormal, the ultraradical. The tradition which time had reared about HER family--as powerful in its way as the Foote Tradition, but separated from it by a whole world--had brought acquaintanceship and intimacy with strange people and strange cults. In the parlor of her home she had listened to frank, fantastic discussions; to lawless theories. These discussions, beginning anywhere, ended always with the reform of the marriage relation. Anarchist, socialist, nihilist, atheist, Utopian, altruist--all tinkered with the family group, as if they recognized that the civilization they were at war with rested upon this and no other foundation. So Ruth was well aware how prone the individual is to experiment with the processes of forming and continuing the relations between men and women which have for their cardinal object the peopling of the earth. But in spite of the radicalism which was hers by right of inheritance and training, she had not been attracted by any of them. A certain basic sense of balance had enabled her to see these things were but vain gropings in the dark; that they might flower successfully in abnormal individual cases--orchid growths--but that each was doomed to failure as a universal solution. For mankind in bulk is normal, and its safety lies in a continuance of normality. Ages had evolved the marriage relation as it existed; ages might evolve it into something different as sudden revolution could not. It was the one way, and she knew it to be the one way. Therefore she recognized that Bonbright and herself were embarked on one of these unstable, experimental craft. She saw, as he did not, that it was unseaworthy and must founder at the first touch of storm. She pinned no false hopes to it; recognized it as a makeshift, welcome to her only as a reprieve--and that it must soon be discarded for a vessel whose planking was reality and whose sails were woven of normal stuff. As the days went by and they were settled in their little flat, living the exotic life which temporarily solved their problem, she knew it could not last; feared it might dissolve at any moment. Inevitable signs of the gust that should destroy it had been apparent...and her dread returned. Even Bonbright was able to see that his plan was not a perfect success. If it had not been for Dulac.... He complicated the thing unendurably.... If Bonbright were still heir apparent to the Foote dynasty, and her plan might be carried out.... She felt a duty toward Dulac--she had promised to hold him always in her thoughts, felt he was entitled to a sort of spiritual loyalty from her. And, deprived of him, she fancied her love for him was as deep as the sea and as enduring as time.... Long days alone, with only the slightest labor to occupy her hands and mind, gave her idle time--fertile soil for the raising of a dark crop of morbid thoughts. She brooded much, and, brooding, became restless, unhappy, and she could not conceal it from Bonbright when he came home eagerly for his dinner, ready to take up with boyish hope the absurd game he had invented. She allowed herself to think of Dulac; indeed, she forced herself to think of him.... Five days she had been married, when, going to the door in answer to the bell, she opened it, to find Dulac standing there. She uttered a little cry of fright and half closed the door. He held it open with his knee. Sudden terror, not of him, but of herself, caused her to thrust against the door with all her strength, but he forced it open slowly and entered. "Go away," she said, shrinking from him and standing with her back against the wall. "Go away...." "I stayed away as long as I could," he said. "Now I'm not going away--until we've had a talk." "There's nothing for us to--say," she whispered. "You must be crazy--to come here." He was laboring under excitement. She could see the smoldering fire in his black eyes; it was plain that he was worn, tired, a man fighting in the last ditch. His hold upon himself was not secure, but she could not be sorry for him now. The possibilities his presence suggested terrified her and excluded all other thoughts. He stood with his burning eyes upon her face, not speaking; staring. "Go away," she begged, but he shook his head. "You've been cheated," he said, hoarsely. "It doesn't matter if you gave yourself to HIM for the reason you said you did--or for his money. You're cheated.... His kind always cheats. You're getting NOTHING.... Are you going to stand it? That's what I came to find out.... Are you going to stand it?" She could make no reply. "What are you going to do about it?" he demanded. "What can I do?... It's too late." "Look here, you married him to get something--to be able to do something.... You didn't have any other reason. You didn't love him. ... You loved ME. He's been kicked out by his family. He doesn't own anything. He's out for good, and you can't get anything or do anything. I want to know what you're going to do about it." "Nothing." "Nothing?... You're not going to stick to him. You don't love him--probably you hate him by this time.... You couldn't help it." "I married him," she said. "It isn't his fault if his family put him out.... It was MY fault. They did it because he married me.... It was I who cheated HIM--and you can see--what it's--cost him.... I've got to make it up to him--someway. I--I don't hate him.... He's been good.... Oh, he's been wonderfully good." "Do you want to live with him?" "No," she said. "No...." "What about me?... I love you, don't I? Wasn't I before HIM?... Didn't you give yourself to me? What about me?..." "That's all--over," she said. "Oh, please go away. I mustn't talk about that....I'm MARRIED...." "Listen," he said, feverishly. "I love you. This fellow you've married doesn't know what love is.... What does he know about it? What would he do for you?..." He leaned forward, his face working, his body quivering with passion. She let her eyes fall, unable to support his gaze, and she trembled. His old fascination was upon her; the glamour of him was drawing her. He poured out a flood of passionate words, bared his soul to her starkly, as he talked swiftly, burningly of his love, and what his love meant to him and what it would mean to her. She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of him; she summoned all the strength of her will to preserve her from his fascination, to resist his temptation.... "I'd have left you alone," he said, "if you'd got what you paid for. ...But when you didn't--when you got nothing--there was no reason for me to stay away.... You belonged to me. You do belong to me.... Why should you stick to him? Why?" She could not answer him. The only reason she should cling to her husband was because he WAS her husband, but she knew that would be no reason to Dulac. "There's been a marriage ceremony," he said, scornfully. "What of it? It isn't marriage ceremonies that unite men and women.... It's love--nothing else.... When you told me you loved me you married me more really than any minister can marry you. That was a real marriage--but you didn't think you were breaking any laws or violating any morals when you left me and married HIM. Just because we hadn't gone to a church.... You're married to ME and living with him--that's what it amounts to.... Now I'm here demanding you. I'm after my wife." "No..." she said, weakly. "Yes, my wife.... I want you back and I'm going to have you back. ... With the bringing up you've had, you're not going to let this CONVENTION--this word--marriage--hold you.... You're coming with me." The thing was possible. She saw the possibility of it, the danger that she might yield. The man's power drew her. She WANTED to go; she WANTED to believe his sophistry, but there was a stanchness of soul in her that continued to resist. "No..." she said, again. "You'll come," he said, "because you can't stand it. I know.... Every time he touches you you want to scream. I know. It's torture. ... He'll find out. Don't you think he'll find out you don't love him--how you feel when he comes near you? And what then?... You'll come to me willingly now--or you'll come when he pushes you out." "He'll--not--find out." Dulac laughed. "Anybody but a young fool would have known before this....But I don't want to wait for that. I want you now." He came toward her eagerly to take her in his arms. She could not move; her knees refused to carry her from him....Her senses swam. If he touched her it would be the end--she knew it would be the end. If he seized her in his arms she would never be able to escape. His will would master her will. Yet she could not move--she was under his spell. It was only subconsciously that she wanted to escape. It was only the true instinct in her that urged her to escape. His arms were reaching out for her now; in an instant his hands would touch her; she would be clutched tightly to him--and she would be lost.... Her back was against the wall....In that supreme instant, the instant that stood between her and the thing that might be, the virtue in her recoiled, the stanchness asserted itself, the command to choose the better from the worse course made itself heard to her will. She cried out inarticulately, thrust out with terrified arms, and pushed him from her. "Don't touch me," she cried. "What you say is not true. I know. ...I'm his wife--and--you must go. You must--never come back. ...Bonbright is my husband--and I'll--stay with him....I'll do what I've got to do. I sha'n't listen to you. Go--please, oh, please go--NOW." The moment had come to Dulac and he had not been swift enough to grasp it. He realized it, realized he had failed, that nothing he could do or say would avail him now....He backed toward the door, never removing his eyes from her face. "You're MY wife," he said. "You won't come now, but you'll come. ...I'll make you come." He stopped a moment in the door, gazing at her with haggard eyes.... "And you know it," he said. Then he closed the door, and she was alone. She sank to the floor and covered her face with her hands, not to hide her tears--for there were no tears to flow--but because she was ashamed and because she was afraid....She knew how close she had been to yielding, how narrow had been the margin of her rescue--and she was afraid of what might happen next time, of what might happen when her life with Bonbright became unbearable, as she knew it must become unbearable. She crouched and trembled...and then she began to think. It was given her to perceive what she must do. Instead of fondling Dulac in her thoughts, she must put him out of her heart, she must not permit him in her dreams....She had promised him he should be always present in her thoughts. That promise she must break. Daily, hourly, she must steel herself against him in preparation for his next appearance, for she knew he would appear again, demanding her....It was not in the man to give her up, as it was not in him to surrender any object which he had set his soul to attain. In spite of cults and theories and makeshifts and sophistries, she knew where her duty lay, where the safety of her soul lay--it was in fidelity to her husband. She resolved that fidelity should be his, and as she resolved it she knew that he deserved it of her. She resolved that she would eject Dulac from her life, and that, with all the strength of her will, she would try to bring herself to give that love to Bonbright which she had promised him by implication, but never by word. She did not know that love cannot be created by an effort of the will.... Before she arose from her pitiful posture she considered many plans, and discarded them all. There was no plan. It must all be left to the future. First she believed it was required that she should tell Bonbright she had married him without love, and beg of him to be patient and to wait, for she was trying to turn her love to him. But that, she saw, would not serve. He was being patient now, wonderfully, unbelievably patient. What more could she ask of him? It would only wound him, who had suffered such wounds through her. She could not do that. She could do nothing but wait and hope--and meet her problems as best she could when they arose. It was not an encouraging outlook. Resolve as she would, she could not quiet her fears. Dulac would come again. He might find her in a weaker moment. Now, instead of one terror she harbored two.... CHAPTER XXII Bonbright, in his business experience, had been like a man watching a play in a foreign language, from a box seat--with an interpreter to translate the dialogue. Now he found himself a member of the cast; very much a member, with abundant lines and business. In his old position as heir apparent to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, he had been unhappy. Time had hung heavily on his hands. He had not been allowed to participate in actual affairs except as some automatic machine or rubber stamp participates. There every effort of his superiors had been directed to eliminating his individuality and to molding him to the Bonbright Foote type. He had not been required to use his brains--indeed, had been forbidden to do so. In his new employment the condition was reversed. It seemed as if everything his father had desired him to do was interdicted in Malcolm Lightener's vast organization; everything that had been taboo before was required of him now. He was asked to think; he was taught to make his individuality felt; he was encouraged to suggest and to exercise his intelligence independently. There were actually suggestion boxes in every department where the humblest laborer might deposit a slip of paper telling the boss any notion he had which he deemed of service to the enterprise. More than that--any suggestion accepted was paid for according to its value. In Bonbright's father's plant change and invention were frowned upon. New devices were regarded as impious. The typewriter was tolerated; the telephone was regarded with shame. The Ancestors had not made use of such things....Malcolm Lightener let no instrument for adding efficiency pass untried. It was the same in office and in shop. The plant was modern to the second--indeed, it was a stride ahead of the minute. There was a large experimental laboratory presided over by an engineer of inventive trend, whose business it was to eliminate and combine processes; to produce machines which would enable one man to perform the labor of three; to perform at one process and one handling the work that before required several processes and the passing of the thing worked upon from hand to hand. If Bonbright had been interested in any phase of his father's business it had been in the machine shops. Now he saw how costly were those antique processes, how wasteful of time and labor. His father's profits were large; Bonbright saw very quickly how a revolution in methods would make them enormous. But he knew that revolution would not take place--the Ancestors forbade.... The thing had started at the first moment of his connection with Malcolm Lightener as an employee. He had reported promptly at seven o'clock, and found Lightener already in his office. It was Lightener's custom to come down and to go home later for breakfast. "Morning," said Lightener. "Where's your overalls?" "Overalls?" said Bonbright. "Didn't I tell you to bring some? You'll need 'em. Wait, I'll send a boy out for some--while we have a talk....Now then, you've got a job. After six o'clock you and I continue on the same basis as before; between seven in the morning and six at night you're one of the men who work for me--and that's all. You get no favors. What they get you get....There aren't any soft jobs or hangers-on here. Everybody earns what he's paid--or he finds he isn't getting paid. Clear?" "Perfectly," said Bonbright, not wholly at his ease. "The object of this plant is to make automobiles--to make GOOD automobiles, and to make the most of them that can be made. If one man falls down on his job it delays everybody else. Suppose one man finishing THIS"--he held up a tiny forging--"does a botch job.... There's just one of these to a car, and he's held up the completion of a car. That means money.... Suppose the same man manages to turn out two perfect castings like this in the time it once took to turn out one.... Then he's a valuable man, and he hustles up the whole organization to keep even with him. Every job is important because it is a part of the whole operation, which is the turning out of a complete automobile. Understand?" "Yes." "Some men are created to remain laborers or mechanics all their lives. Some are foreordained bookkeepers. A few can handle labor--but that's the end of them. A very few have executive and organizing and financial ability. The plums are for them.... Every man in this plant has a chance at them. You have.... On the other hand, you can keep on earning what you're getting now until you're sixty. It's up to you.... I'm giving you a start. That's not sentiment. It's because you've education and brains--and there's something in heredity. Your folks have been successful--to a degree and in their own way. I'm making a bet on you--that's all. I'm taking a chance that you'll pay back at the box office what you're going to cost for some months. In other words, instead of your paying for your education, I'm sending you to school on the chance that you'll graduate into a man that will make money for me. But you've got to make good or out you go. Fair?" "Yes," said Bonbright. "All right. Remember it....You've got the stuff in you to make a man at the top--maybe. But you don't start at the top. You've got to scramble up just like anybody else. Right now you're not worth a darn. You don't know anything and you can't do anything. Day labor's where you belong--but you couldn't stand it. And it wouldn't be sense to put you at it, or I would. I'd set you to sweeping out the machine shops if I thought you needed it....Maybe you figured on sitting at a mahogany desk?" "I came to do whatever you put me at," Bonbright said. "I've been fed up on sitting at a mahogany desk." "Good--if you mean it. I hear a lot of four flush about what men are willing to do. Heaps of them repeat copybook platitudes....You're going to wear overalls and get your hands dirty. If you don't like it you can always quit....I know how to do darn nearly everything that's done in this place. The man who gets up near me has got to know it, too." Here was a hint for Bonbright of the possibilities that Malcolm Lightener opened up to him. "This morning you're going into the machine shop to run a lathe, and you're going to stay there till you KNOW how it's done. Then we'll move you some place else. Your place is in the office. But how soon you get there, or whether you ever get there, is up to you. Like the looks of it?" Bonbright was silent a moment. When he spoke it was not in reply to Lightener's question, but to put into words a fear that had become apparent. "The men," he said; "how about them?...You know, father sort of advertised me as a strike breaker and that kind of thing. Our men hate me. I suppose all laboring men feel that way about me." "We don't have any unions here. I run my own plant, and, by gracious! I always will. I give my men fair pay--better than most. I give them all the opportunity they ask for. I give them the best and safest conditions to work in that can be had. I figure a good crew in a plant is a heap more valuable than good machinery--and I keep my machinery in repair and look after it mighty careful. But no union nonsense.... You won't have any trouble with the men." Bonbright was not so sure.... Presently the boy returned with the overalls. Lightener wrote a note and handed it to the boy. "Take this man to Shop One and give this note to Maguire," he said; then he turned to Bonbright and jerked his thumb toward the door. Bonbright got up without a word and followed the boy. In a moment the boy opened a big door, and Bonbright stepped through. The sight took away his breath--not that he had never seen this room before, but that he was now seeing it through other eyes, not merely as a spectator, but as a participant. It seemed to him as if the dimensions of the room should be measured not in feet, but in acres. It was enormous, but huge as it was it was all too small for the tangle of machinery it contained. To Bonbright's eyes it seemed a tangle. A labyrinth of shafting, countershafting, hung from the high ceiling, from whose whirring pulleys belts descended to rows upon rows of machines below. It looked like some strange sort of lunar forest, or some species of monstrous, magic banyan tree. Here were machines of a hundred uses and shapes, singly, in batteries--a scrambled mass it seemed. There were small machines--and in the distance huge presses, massive, their very outlines speaking of gigantic power. Bonbright had seen sheets of metal fed into them, to be spewed out at another point bent and molded to a desired form. Overhead conveyers increased the scrambled appearance. Men with trucks, men on hurried errands, hurried here and there; other men stood silently feeding hungry contrivances--men were everywhere, engrossed in their work, paving scant attention to anything outside their task. And rushing up to Bonbright was a wave of composite sounds, a roar, a bellow, a shriek, a rattle, a whir, a grind.... It seemed the ultimate possibility of confusion. But as he walked down the aisle, dodging from time to time men or trucks that regarded him not at all, but depended on him to clear the way and to look out for himself, he was able to perceive something of the miraculous orderliness and system of it. He was given a hint of the plan--how a certain process would start--a bit of rough metal; how it would undergo its first process and move on by gradual steps from one machine to the next, to the next, in orderly, systematic way. No time was lost in carrying a thing hither and thither. When one man was through with it, the next man was at that exact point, to take it and contribute his bit to its transformation.... Something very like a thrill of pride passed over Bonbright. He was a part of this marvel.... Through this room they walked--the room would have sufficed in extent for a good-sized farm--and into another, not smaller, and into another and another. His destination, Shop One, was smaller, but huge enough. The boy led Bonbright to a short, fat man. in unbelievably grimy overalls and black, visored cap. "Mr. Maguire," he shouted, "here's a man and a note from the boss." Then he scurried away. Maguire looked at the note first, and shoved it into his pocket; then he squinted at Bonbright--at his face first; then, with a quizzical glint, at his clothes. Bonbright flushed. For the first time in his life he was ashamed of his clothes, and for a reason that causes few men to be ashamed of their clothes. He wished they were of cheaper cloth, of less expensive tailoring. He wished, most of all, that the bright new overalls in the bundle under his arm were concealing them from view. "You're a hell of a looking machinist," said Maguire. Bonbright felt it to be a remarkably true saying. "The boss takes this for a darn kindergarten," Maguire complained. "Ever run a lathe or a shaper or a planer?" "No." "He said to stick you on a lathe.... Huh! What's he know about it?... How's he expect this room to make a showing if it's goin' to be charged with guys like you that hain't nothin' but an expense?" Bonbright got the idea back of that. Maguire was personally interested in results; Maguire wanted his room to beat other rooms in the weekly reports; Maguire was working for something more than wages--he was playing the game of manufacturing to win. "You go on a planer," Maguire snapped, "and Gawd help you if you spoil more castings than I figger you ought to.... The boys here'll make it hot for you if you pull down their average." So the boys were interested, too. The thing extended downward from the bosses! "Goin' to work in them clothes?" asked Maguire, with a grin. "Overalls," said Bonbright, tapping his parcel. Maguire went to his desk and took a key from a box. "I'll show you your locker," he said; and presently Bonbright, minus his coat, was incased in the uniform of a laborer. Spick and span and new it was, and gave him a singularly uncomfortable feeling because of this fact. He wanted it grimed and daubed like the overalls of the men he saw about him. A boyish impulse to smear it moved him--but he was ashamed to do it openly. Maguire led him to a big contrivance which was called a shaper. A boy of eighteen was operating it. On its bed, which moved back and forth automatically, was bolted a great cake of iron--a casting in the rough. The machine was smoothing its surfaces. "Show him," Maguire said to the boy, "then report to me." The boy showed Bonbright efficiently--telling him what must be done to that iron cake, explaining how the machine was to be stopped and started, and other necessary technical matters. Then he hurried off. Bonbright gazed at the casting ruefully, afflicted with stage fright. ... He was actually about to perform real labor--a labor requiring a certain measure of intellect. He was afraid he would make a mistake, would do something wrong, and possibly spoil the casting. He started the planer gingerly. It had not seemed to move rapidly when the boy was operating it, but now the bed seemed fairly to fly forward and snap back. He bent forward to look at the cutting he had made; it was right. So far he was all right.... Surreptitiously he laid his palm in a mass of grease and metal particles and wiped it across his breast.... It was an operation which he repeated more than once that morning. Gradually his trepidation passed and he began to enjoy himself. He enjoyed watching that casting move resistlessly under the tool; watched the metal curl up in glittering little curlicues as the tool ate its way across. He looked with pleasure at the surface already planed and with anticipation of the surface still in the rough.... It was interesting; it was fun. He wondered vaguely if all men who worked at tasks of this kind found pleasure in them, not appreciating that years of doing the same thing over and over might make it frightfully monotonous. The truth was the thing had not yet become work to him. It was a new experience, and all new experiences bring their thrill. Until the noon whistle blew he hardly took his eyes off his work. He did not know that Maguire passed him a dozen times, not stopping, but watching him closely as he passed.... With the stopping of work about him he realized that he was tired. He had lifted weights; he had used unaccustomed muscles. He was hot, sweaty, aching. He was hungry. "Where do we eat?" he asked the man who stood at the next machine. "Didn't you bring no lunch?" "No." "Some doesn't," said the man, as if he disapproved exceedingly of that class. "They feed at the hash house across the street.... Hain't broke, be you?" Bonbright understood the kindly offer implied. "Thank you--no," he said, and followed to the big wash room. He ate his lunch from the top of a tall stool. It was not the sort of food he was accustomed to, and the coffee was far from being the sort that had been served to him in his home or in his club--but he hardly noticed it. When he was through he walked back across the street and stood awkwardly among his mates. He knew none of them. An oldish, smallish man looked at him and at his overalls, and grinned. "New man?" he asked. "Yes." "Thought them overalls wasn't long off the shelf. You done a good job, though, considerin'." Bonbright blushed. "Where you been workin'?" How was Bonbright to answer? He couldn't tell the truth without shaming himself in this man's eyes, and all at once he found he greatly desired the good opinion of this workingman and of the other workingmen about him. "I--The last place I worked was Bonbright Foote, Incorporated," he said, giving his father's institution its full name. "Urn.... Strikin', eh?" Bonbright nodded. He had struck. Not with a union, but as an individual. "'Bout over, hain't it, from all I hear tell?" "I think so," said Bonbright. "Bad business.... Strikes is always bad--especially if the men git licked. Unions hain't no business to call strikes without some show of winnin'..... The boys talk that this strike never had no chance from the beginnin'.... I don't think a heap of that Foote outfit." "Why?" "Rotten place to work, I hear. A good machinist can't take no pleasure there, what with one thing and another. Out-of-date machines, and what not.... That young Foote, the cub, is a hell winder, they say. Ever see him?" "I've seen him." "His father was bad enough, by all accounts. But this kid goes him one better. Wonder some of them strikers didn't git excited and make him acquainted with a brick. I've heard of fightin' strikes hard--but never nothin' like this one. Seems like this kid's a hard one. Wants to smash hell out of the men just to see them smash.... How'd he strike you?" "I was sorry for him," said Bonbright, simply. "Sorry?... What's the idea?" "I--I don't believe he did what people believe. He didn't really have anything to do with the business, you know. He didn't count.... All the things that he was said to do--he didn't do at all. His father did them and let the men think it was his son." "Sounds fishy--but if it's so somebody ought to lambaste the old man. He sure got his son in bad.... What's this I hear about him marryin' some girl and gettin' kicked out?" "That's true," said Bonbright. "Huh!... Wonder what he'll do without his pa. Them kind hain't much good, I notice.... Maybe he's well fixed himself, though." "He hasn't a cent," said Bonbright. "Appears like you know a heap about him.... Maybe you know what he's doin' now?" "Working." "Friends give him a soft job?" "He's working in a--machine shop," said Bonbright. "G'wan," said the man, incredulously. Then he looked sharply at Bonbright, at his new overalls, back again at his face. "What's your name?" he asked, suspiciously. "Foote," said Bonbright. "HIM?" "Yes," said Bonbright. The man paused before he spoke, and there was something not kindly that came into his eyes. "Speakin' perty well of yourself, wasn't you?" he said, caustically, and, turning his back, he walked away. ... That action cut Bonbright more deeply than any of the few affronts that had been put upon him in his life had cut. He wanted to call the man back and demand that he listen to the truth. He wanted to explain, to set himself right. He wanted that man and all men to know he was not the Bonbright Foote who had brought on the strike and fought it with such vindictive ruthlessness. He wanted to prove that he was innocent, and to wring from them the right to meet and to be received by his fellow laborers as one of themselves.... He saw the man stop beside a group, say something, turn, and point to him. Other men turned and stared. Some snickered. Bonbright could not bear it. He jostled his way through the crowd and sought refuge in the shop. The morning had been a happy one; the afternoon was dismal. He knew he was marked. He saw men pointing at him, whispering about him, and could imagine what they were saying. In the morning he had been received casually as an equal. Nobody had welcomed him, nobody had paid particular attention to him. That was as it should be. He was simply accepted as another workman.... The attitude of the men was quite the opposite now. He was a sort of museum freak to them. From a distance they regarded him with curiosity, but their manner set him apart from them. He did not belong. He felt their hostility.... If they had lined up and jeered him Bonbright would not have felt the hurt so much, for there would have been something to arouse his fighting spirit. One remark he overheard, which stood aptly for the attitude of all. "Well, he's gettin' what's comin' to him," was the sentence. It showed him that the reputation his father had given him was his to wear, and that here he would find no friends, scant toleration, probably open hostility.... He got no pleasure that afternoon from watching his cake of metal move backward and forward with the planer-bed. When the whistle blew again he hurried out, looking into no man's face, avoiding contacts. He sneaked away.... And in his heart burned a hot resentment against the father that had done this thing.... CHAPTER XXIII Such pretense as Bonbright's and Ruth's is possible only to the morbid, the eccentric, or the unhealthy. Neither of them was morbid, neither eccentric, both abundantly well. Ruth saw the failure of it days before Bonbright had even a hint. After Dulac burst in upon her she perceived the game must be brought to an end; that their life of make-believe was weighted with danger for her. She determined to end it--but, ironically enough, to end it meant to enter upon another make-believe existence far harder to live successfully than the first. One can make believe to love on the stage, uttering skillfully the words of an author and carrying out the instructions of a stage director. An audience may be taken in.... A play is brief. But to begin a spurious love scene which is to last, not twenty minutes, but for a lifetime, is a matter of quite different color. She determined to begin it.... But with the sound of Bonbright's footfall on the stairs her resolution vanished. "To-morrow," she whispered to herself, with sudden dread. "To-morrow...." And so she put it off from day to day. In the beginning Bonbright had been optimistic. He had seen her reluctance, her reserves, vanishing in a few days. But they did not vanish. He found himself no nearer his wife than he had been at the beginning. Optimism became hope, hope dwindled, became doubt, uneasy wonder. He could not understand, and it was natural he should not understand. At first he had believed his experience was the experience of all bridegrooms. Days taught him his experience was unique, unnatural. Ruth saw him often now, sitting moodily, eyes on the floor--and she could read his thoughts. Yet he tried to bolster up the pretense. He had given his promise, and he loved Ruth. He could not, would not do as most men would have done.... What neither of them saw was that pretense had made a sudden change to reality impossible.... Bonbright was unhappy at home, unhappy at work. Just as he was outside his wife's real life, so he was excluded from the lives of the men he worked with. He was not, to them, a fellow laborer; he was Bonbright Foote VII. But he made no complaint or appeal to Malcolm Lightener.... He did not know how unnecessary an appeal to Lightener would be, for Lightener kept himself well acquainted with the facts, watched and waited, and the satisfaction of the automobile king grew and increased. "He's no squealer," he said to his daughter. "He's taking his medicine without making a face." "What's the good, dad? It's mean.... Why don't you take him into the office?" "We have a testing department," he said. "Every scrap of metal that goes into a car is tested before we use it.... Bonbright's in the testing department." "Isn't it possible to keep on testing a piece of metal till it's all used up?" she said. "H'm!... Suppose you mind your own business," he said, in his gruff, granite way--not rudely nor offensively. "How's his wife? How are they getting along?" Hilda shook her head. "They're queer, dad. Somehow I don't believe things are working out the way they should. I can't understand HER." "Squabbling?" "Never.... Bonbright's so gentle with her. He has a sort of wistful way with him as soon as she comes near. It makes me want to cry. Somehow he reminds me of a fine, affectionate dog watching a master who doesn't give back any affection. You know." "Doesn't she?" "Give back affection?... That's just it. I don't know. I've been there and seen him come home. She acts queerly. As soon as she hears him coming up the stairs she seems to shut up. It's as if she turned out the lights.... Where the ordinary girl would be running to kiss him and make a fuss over him she--doesn't do anything.... And she keeps watching him. And there's something in her eyes like--well, like she was blaming herself for something, and was sorry for him. ... She seems, when she's with him, as if she were trying to make up to him for something--and didn't know how." "Readjustment," Lightener grunted. "They jumped into the thing kerplunk. Queer start-off." "I don't know.... She's a dear--and he's a dear.... It isn't like anything I've ever seen. It's something peculiar." "Must be his fault. I told him--" "It isn't his fault." Hilda spoke with certainty. "If you could see him you'd know it. His manner toward her--why, dad, I never saw a man so sweet and gentle and patient." "Maybe that's the trouble. Too much patience is as bad as too much raising the devil." "No.... It's something." She turned to leave the room, when her father called after her: "Bonbright quit chawing castings to-night. He doesn't know it, but to-morrow he gets a new job.... Has all of that he needs. Knows how it feels." "What's he going to do now?" "Nice, light, pleasant job.... He'll be passing rear axles--made by his father--down a chute to the assembling track. Bet he'll need Saint Jacob's oil on his back to-morrow night. Give his wife a job." "Why," she scolded, for she was on intimate terms with the factory, "that's common labor. He'll be working with Wops and Guineas and Polacks." He nodded. "If he stands the gaff I'll ease up on him." "If he doesn't?" Lightener shrugged his shoulders. "Dad," said Hilda, "sometimes you make me MAD...." When the factory heard what had become of Bonbright it laughed. Bonbright was aware it laughed, and he set his teeth and labored. Beside what he was doing now the machine shop had been play. Rear axles are not straws to be tossed about lightly. Nor are Wops, Guineas, Polacks, smelling of garlic, looking at one with unintelligent eyes, and clattering to one another in strange tongues, such workfellows as make the day pass more quickly.... Bonbright had to pass down a certain number of axles an hour. At definite, brief intervals a fragment of an automobile would move along the assembling track and pause beneath his spout--and his axle must be ready. There was a constant procession of fragments, and a second's delay brought up to his ears pointed commentary from below. ... The more pointed that those below knew who was above them. He worked feverishly. After a while it became acute torture. He felt as if every axle he handled was the last he could manage--but he forced himself to just one more and then just one more--and another. He worked in a daze. Thought-processes seemed to stop. He was just a mechanism for performing certain set acts. The pain was gone--everything was gone but the stabbing necessity for getting another axle on that chute in time. He wanted to stop at a certain stage, but there was something in him which would not allow it. After that he didn't care. "Another.... Another.... Another..." his brain sang over and over endlessly. He was wet with perspiration; he staggered under the weights; he was exhausted, but he could not stop. It was as if he were on a treadmill where he had to keep stepping on and on and on whether he could take another step or not.... After a century the noon whistle blew. Bonbright did not leave his place. He simply sagged down in his tracks and lay there, eyes shut, panting. Gradually his brain cleared, but he was too weary to move. Then thirst drove him to motion and he dragged himself to the wash room, cramped, aching, and there he drank and sopped himself with cold water.... So this was what men did to live! No wonder men were dissatisfied; no wonder men formed unions and struck and rioted!... Bonbright was getting in an efficient school the point of view of the laborer. In the afternoon Malcolm Lightener stood and watched Bonbright, though Bonbright did not see, for he was working in a red haze again, unconscious of everything but that insistent demand in his brain for "another.... Another.... Another...." Lightener watched, granite face expressionless, and then walked away. Bonbright did not hear the evening whistle. He placed another axle on the chute, but no one was below to take it. He wondered dimly what was the matter.... A Guinea from the next chute regarded him curiously, then walked over and touched his shoulder with dirty hand, and wafted garlic in his face. "Time for quit," said the man. Bonbright sat down where he was. It was over. That day was over. Not another axle, not another, not another. He laid his head against the chute and shut his eyes.... Presently he staggered to his feet and walked blindly to the stairway. At the bottom stood Malcolm Lightener, not there by accident, but with design to test Bonbright's metal to the utmost. He placed himself there for Bonbright to see, to give Bonbright opportunity to beg off, to SQUEAL. Bonbright, shoulders drooping, legs dragging, face drawn, eyes burning, would have passed him without recognition, without caring who it was he passed, but that did not suit Lightener's purpose. "Well, Bonbright?" he said. Sudden fire flashed in Bonbright's brain. He stopped, and with the knuckles of a hand that was torn and blistered and trembling, he knocked on Lightener's broad chest as he would have knocked on a door that refused to open. "Damn your axles," he said, thickly. "I can get them there--another--and another--and another--and another.... They're too slow below.... Make 'em come faster. I can keep up...." And all the time he was rapping on Lightener's chest. He was conscious of what he did and said, but he did not do and say it of his own volition. He was like a man who dimly sees and hears another man. Subconsciously he was repeating: "Not another one till to-morrow.... Not another one till to-morrow...." Abruptly he turned away from Lightener and, setting down each foot heavily with a clump, he plodded toward the wash room. He was going to rest. He was going to feel cool water on his head and his neck; he was going to revel in cool water... and then he would sleep. SLEEP! He made toward sleep as one lost in the desert would make toward a spring of sweet water.... Lightener stood and looked after Bonbright. His granite face did not alter; no light or shade passed over it. Not even in his gray eyes could a hint of his thoughts be read. Simply he stood and looked after Bonbright, outwardly as emotionless as a block of the rock that he resembled. Then he walked to his office, sat down at his desk, selected and lighted a cigar, and tilted back in his chair. "There's something to that Bonbright Foote formula," he said to himself. "It's all wrong, but it could produce THAT." Then, after a few moments of puffing and of studying the thing, he said: "We'll see if he comes back to-morrow.... If he DOES come back--" At home that evening Hilda asked him about Bonbright. He was ashamed to confess to her what he had done to the boy--yet he was proud of having done it. To his own granite soul it was right to subject men to such tests, but women would not understand. He knew his daughter would think him a brute, and he did not want his daughter to think any such thing. "If he comes back in the morning--" he promised. Bonbright came back in the morning, though he had been hardly able to drag himself out of bed. It was not strength of body that brought him, but pure will. He came, looking forward to the day as a man might look down into hell--but he came. "I'll show THEM," he said, aloud, at the breakfast table, as he forced himself to drink a cup of coffee. Ruth did not understand. She did not understand what was wrong with him; feared he was on the verge of an illness. He had come home the night before, scarcely speaking to her, and had gone directly to bed. She supposed he was in his room preparing for dinner, but when she went to call him she found him fast asleep, moaning and muttering uneasily. "What did you say?" she asked, uneasily. "Didn't know I spoke," he said, and winced as he moved his shoulders. But he knew what he had said---that he would show THEM. It wasn't Malcolm Lightener he was going to show, but the men--his fellow laborers. The thing that lay in his mind was that he must prove himself to be their equal, capable of doing what they could do. He wanted their respect--wanted it pitifully. Ruth watched him anxiously as he left the apartment. She knew things were not well with him and that he needed something a true wife should give. First, he needed to tell some one about it. He had not told me. If she had been inside his life, where she belonged, he must have told her. Second, he needed her sympathy, her mothering.... She might have been able to give him that--after a fashion.... She felt how it should be done, knew how she would have done it if only she loved him. "I could be the right kind of a wife," she said, wistfully. "I know I could...." Bonbright went doggedly to his place at the mouth of the chute and was ready with the whistle, an axle poised to slide downward to the assembling car below. He was afraid--afraid he would not be able to get through the day--absurdly afraid and ashamed of his physical weakness. If he should play out!... A boy tapped him on the shoulder. "You're wanted in the office," he heard. "I've got to--keep up," he said, dully. "Cars are coming along below," he explained, carefully, "and I've got to get the axles to them." "Here's a man to take your place," said the boy--and so strange is man created in God's image!--he did not want to go. He wanted to see it through till he dropped. "If you keep the boss waiting--" said the boy, ominously. Bonbright walked painfully to Lightener's office. "Well?" said Lightener. "I can do it--I'll harden to it," Bonbright said. "Huh!... Take off those overalls.... Boy, go to Mr. Foote's locker and fetch his things...." "Am--am I discharged?" "No," said Lightener, bestowing no word of commendation. Men had little commendation from him by word of mouth. He let actions speak for him. When he gave a man a task to perform that man knew he was being complimented.... But he knew it in no other way. "That's the way a laborer feels," said Lightener.... "You got it multiplied. That's because you had to jam his whole life's experience into a day...." "Poor devils!" said Bonbright. "I'm going to put you in the purchasing department--after that, if you make good--into the sales end.... Able to go ahead to-day?" "Yes." "Before you amount to a darn as a business man you've got to know how to buy.... That's the foundation. You've got to be able to buy right. Then you've got to learn how to make. Selling is easiest of all--and there are darn few real salesmen. If you can buy, you can do anything." "I--I would rather stay out of the shops, Mr. Lightener. The men--found out who I was...I'd like to stay there till they--forget it." "You'll go where I put you. Men enough in the purchasing department. Got a tame anarchist there, I hear, and a Mormon, and a Hindu, and a single-taxer. All kinds. After hours. From whistle to whistle they BUY." Lightener took Bonbright personally to his new employment and left him. But Bonbright was not satisfied. Once before he had sought contact with men who labored, and he had landed in a cell in police headquarters. That had been mere boyish curiosity to find what it was all about. Now his desire to know was real. He had been--very briefly, it is true--one of them. Now he wanted to know. He wanted to know how they thought, and why they thought that way. He wanted to understand their attitude toward themselves, toward one another, toward the class they largely denominated as Capital. He had caught snatches of conversation--interesting to him, but none had talked to him. He wanted to get on a footing with them which would permit him to listen, and to talk. He wanted to hear arguments. He wanted to go into their homes and see their wives and find out what their wives thought.... All this had been brought to him by a few days in overalls. He had no idea that Lightener had intended it should be brought to him.... However, that must lie in the future; his present business was to do as he was told and to earn his wages. He must earn his wages, for he had a family to support.... It was his first experience with the ever-present fear of the wage earner--the fear of losing his job. But he determined to know the men, and planned accordingly. With that end in view, instead of lunching with men in his department, he went to the little hash house across the road to drink vile coffee and rub elbows with laborers in greasy overalls. He would go there every day; he would seek other opportunities of contact.... Now that he felt the genuine, sympathetic hunger for an understanding of them and their problems, he would not rest until it was his.... CHAPTER XXIV Bonbright found himself a layman in a department of specialists. On all sides of him were men who knew all about something, a few who knew a great deal about several things, and a man or two who appeared to have some knowledge of every element and article that went into a motor car. There was a man who knew leather from cow to upholstery, and who talked about it lovingly. This man had the ability to make leather as interesting as the art of Benvenuto Cellini. Another was a specialist in hickory, and thought and talked spokes; another was a reservoir of dependable facts about rubber; another about gray iron castings; another about paints and enamels, and so on. In that department it would not have been impossible to compile an encyclopedia. It was impossible that Bonbright should not have been interested. It was not business, it was a fascinating, enthralling debating society, where the debates were not of the "Resolved that the world would be better" sort, but were as to the essential qualities of concrete things. It was practical debate which saved money and elevated the standards of excellence. The department had its own laboratories, its own chemists, its own engineers. Everything was tested. Two articles might appear to the layman equal in virtue; careful examination by experts might not disclose a difference between them, but the skill of the chemist would show that this article was a tenth of one per cent, less guilty of alloy than that, or that the breaking strength of this was a minute fraction greater than that.... So decisions were reached. Bonbright was to learn that price did not always rule. He saw orders given for carloads of certain supplies which tested but a point or two higher than its rival--and sold for dollars more a ton. Thousands of dollars were paid cheerfully for those few points of excellence. ... Here was business functioning as he did not know business could function. Here business was an art, and he applied himself to it like an artist. Here he could lay aside that growing discontent, that dissatisfaction, that was growing upon him. Here, in the excitement of distinguishing the better from the worse, he could forget Ruth and the increasingly impracticable condition of his relations with her. He had come to a realization that his game of make-believe would not march. He realized that Ruth either was his wife or she was not.... But he did not know what to do about it. It seemed a problem without a solution, and it was--for him. Its solution did not lie in himself, but in his wife. Bonbright could not set the thing right; his potentiality lay only for its destruction. Three courses lay open to him; to assert his husbandship; to send Ruth home to her mother; or to put off till to-morrow and to-morrow and still another to-morrow. Only in the last did hope reside, and he clung to hope.... He tried to conceal his unrest, his discontent, his rebellion against the thing that was, from Ruth. He continued to be patient, gentle. ... He did not know how she wept and accused herself because of that gentleness and patience. He did not know how she tried to compel love by impact of will--and how she failed. But he did come to doubt her love. He could not do otherwise. Then he wondered why she had married him, and, reviewing the facts of his hurried marriage, he wondered the more with bitterness and heartache. Against his will his affairs were traveling toward a climax. The approaching footsteps of the day when something must happen were audible on the path. The day after his installation in the purchasing department he lunched at the little hash house across the street. Sitting on his high stool, he tried to imagine he was a part of that sweating, gulping crowd of men, that he was one of them, and not an outsider, suspected, regarded with unfriendly looks. Behind him a man began to make conversation for Bonbright's ears. It had happened before. "The strike up to the Foote plant's on its last legs," said the man, loudly. "So I hear," answered another. "Infernal shame. If it was only the closed-shop question I dunno's I'd feel so. We're open shop here--but we git treated like human bein's.... Over there--" The man shrugged his shoulders. "Look at the way they've fought the strike. Don't blame 'em for fightin' it. Calc'late they had to fight it, but there's fightin' and fightin'. ... Seems like this Foote bunch set out to do the worst that could be done--and they done it." "Wonder when it 'll peter out--the strike?" "Back's busted now. Nothin's holding it up but that man Dulac. There's a man for you! I've knowed labor leaders I didn't cotton to nor have much confidence in---fellers that jest wagged their tongues and took what they could get out of it. But this Dulac--he's a reg'lar man. I've listened to him, and I tell you he means what he says. He's in it to git somethin' for the other feller.... But he can't hold out much longer." It was true; Dulac could not hold out much longer. That very noon he was fighting with his back against the wall. In Workingman's Hall he was making his last fierce fight to hold from crumbling the resolution of the strikers who still stood by their guns.... He threw the fire of his soul into their dull, phlegmatic faces. It struck no answering spark. Never before had he spoken to men without a consciousness of his powers, without pose, without dramatics. Now he was himself, and more dramatic, more compelling than ever before. ... He pleaded, begged, flayed his audience, but it did not respond to his pleadings nor writhe under the whip of his words. It was apathetic, stolid. In its weary heart it knew what it was there to do, and it would do it in spite of Dulac.... He would not admit it. He would not submit to defeat. He talked on and on, not daring to stop, for with the stoppage of his harangue he heard the death of the strike. It lived only with his voice. In the body of the hall a man, haggard of face, arose. "'Tain't no use, Mr. Dulac," he said, dully. "We've stuck by you--" "You've stuck by yourselves," Dulac cried. "Whatever you say.... But'tain't no use. We're licked. Hain't no use keepin' up and stretchin' out the sufferin'.... I hain't the least of the sufferers, Mr. Dulac--my wife hain't with me no more." The dull voice wabbled queerly. "There's hunger and grief and sufferin'--willin'ly endured when there was a chance--but there hain't no chance.... 'Tain't human to ask any more of our wimmin and children.... It's them I'm a-thinkin' of, Mr. Dulac... and on account of them I say this strike ought to quit. It's got to quit, and I demand a vote on it, Mr. Dulac." "Vote!... Vote!... Vote!..." roared up to Dulac from all over the hall.... It was the end. He was powerless to stay the rush of the desire of those weary men for peace. Dulac turned slowly around, his back to the crowd, walked to a chair, and, with elbows on knees, he covered his face with his hands. There was a silence, as men looked at him and appreciated his suffering. They appreciated his suffering because they appreciated the man, his honesty to their cause, and to his work. He had been true to them. For himself he would gain nothing by the success of the strike--for them he would have gained much.... It was not his loss that bowed his head, but their loss--and they knew it. He was a Messiah whose mission had failed. The vote was put. There was no dissenting voice. The strike was done, and Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was victor. Men clustered about Dulac, wringing his hands, speaking words of comfort with voices that broke, and the number of those who turned away with tears was greater than of those whose eyes could remain dry. Dulac spoke. "We'll try again--men.... We'll start to get ready--to-day--for another--fight." Then, hurriedly, blindly, he forced his way through them and made his way out of the hall. Grief, the heaviness of defeat, was all that he could feel now. Bitterness would come in its time. Dulac was a soul without restraints, a soul in eternal uproar. His life had been one constant kicking against the pricks, and when they hurt his feet he was not schooled to stifle the cry of pain. He could not endure patiently and in silence; the tumult of his suffering must have an outlet. Now was the time for an overwrought, overtired man, clothed in no restraint, to try what surcease was to be found in the bottom of a glass. But Dulac was not a drinking man. So he walked. As he walked bitterness awoke, and he cursed under his breath. Bitterness increased until it was rage, and, as man is so constituted that rage must have a definite object, Dulac unconsciously sought a man who would symbolize all the forces that had defeated him--and he chose Bonbright Foote. He chose Bonbright the more readily because he hated the boy for personal reasons. If Dulae and Bonbright had met at this moment there would have happened events which would have delighted the yellower press. But they did not meet. Bonbright was safe in Lightener's purchasing department, learning certain facts about brass castings. So Dulac walked and walked, and lashed himself into rage. Rage abated and became biting disappointment and unspeakable heaviness of heart. Again rage would be conjured up only to ebb again and to flood again as the hours went by. There is an instinct in man which, when his troubles become too weighty to bear alone, sends him to a woman. Perhaps this is the survival of an idea implanted in childhood when baby runs to mother for sure comfort with broken doll or bruised thumb. It persists and never dies, so that one great duty, one great privilege, one great burden of womankind is to give ear to man's outpourings of his woes, and to offer such comfort as she may.... Dulac was drawn to Ruth. This time she did not try to close the door against him. His first words made that impossible. "I'm--beaten," he said, dully. His flamboyance, his threatricality, was gone. He was no longer flashily masterful, no longer exotically fascinating. He sagged.... He was just a soul-weary, disappointed man, looking at her out of hollow, burning eyes. He had spent himself magnificently into bankruptcy. His face was the face of a man who must rest, who must find peace.... Yet he was not consciously seeking rest or peace. He was seeking her.... Seeking her because he craved her, and seeking her to strike at her husband, who had become a symbol of all the antagonists he had been fighting. His appearance disarmed her; her fear of him and herself was lured away by the appearance of him. She felt nothing but sympathy and tenderness and something of wonder that he--Dulac the magnificent--should be brought to this pass. So she admitted him, regardless even of the lateness of the afternoon hour. He followed her heavily and sank into a chair. "You're sick," she said, anxiously. He shook his head. "I'm--beaten," he repeated, and in truth beaten was what he looked, beaten and crushed.... "But I'll--try again," he said, with a trace of the old gleam in his eyes. She clasped and unclasped her hands, standing before him, white with the emotions that swayed her.... Here was the man she loved in his bitterest, darkest moment--and she was barred away from him by unwelcome barriers. She could not soothe him, she could not lighten his suffering with the tale of her love for him, but she must remain mute, holding out no hand to ease his pain. "I came for you," he said, dully. "No," she said. "Ruth--I need you--now...." This man, who had wooed her boldly, had demanded her masterfully, now was brought to pleading. He needed her. It was plain that he did need her, and, realizing it, she saw the danger of it. It was a new, a subtle attack, and it had taken her unawares. "I can't.... I can't.... I mustn't..." she said, breathlessly. "I must have you," he said, with dead simplicity, as one states a bare, essential fact. Then Bonbright was visualized before him, and rage flooded once more. "He sha'n't keep you!... You're mine--you were mine first.... What is he to you? I'm going to take you away from him.... I can do THAT...." He was less dangerous so. Perhaps instinct told him, for his passion stilled itself, and he became tired, pitiful again. "We've got a right to be happy," he said, in his tired voice. "You're not happy--and I'm--beaten.... I want you--I need you.... You'll come with me. You've got to come with me." She was moved, swayed. He needed her.... She had cheated Bonbright in the beginning. She was not his wife.... He had none of her love, and she believed this man had it wholly.... She had wronged Bonbright all she could wrong him--what would this matter? It was not this that was wrong, but the other--the marrying without love.... And she, too, was beaten. She had played her game and lost, not going down to defeat fighting as Dulac had gone down, but futilely, helplessly. She had given herself for the Cause--to no profit.... And her heart yearned for peace, for release. "I'm his wife," she said, still struggling flutteringly. "You're MY wife." He lifted his arms toward her, and she swayed, took a step toward him--a step toward the precipice. Suddenly she stopped, eyes startled, a deeper pallor blighting her face--for she heard Bonbright's step on the stairs.... She had forgotten the lateness of the hour. "Oh'." she said. "What is it?" "HE is--here." She was awakened by the shock of it, and saw, saw clearly. She had stood upon the brink--and HE had come in time.... And then she was afraid. Neither of them spoke. Dulac got to his feet, his breath coming audibly, and so they waited. Bonbright opened the door. "Ruth," he called, putting what pretense of gayety he could into his voice. "You've got company. The chronic visitor is here." He was playing his game bravely. She did not answer. "Ruth," he called again, and then stood in the door. She could not see him, but she felt his presence, felt his silence, felt the look of surprise changing to suspicion that she knew must be in his eyes. For a moment he stood motionless, not comprehending. Then the attitude of his wife and of Dulac spoke eloquently, and he whitened. "I don't understand," he said. The words were meaningless, pointless, perhaps, but they stabbed Ruth to the heart. She turned to him, saw him step forward slowly, looking very tall, older than she had ever known him. He had drawn within himself, and there manifested itself his inheritance from his ancestors. He was like his father, but with an even more repressed dignity than was his father's. "You don't understand," snarled Dulac. "Then I'll tell you. I'm glad you came.... I'm after your wife. She's going away with me." "No.... No..." Ruth whispered. "Be still.... She's mine, Foote--and always was. You thought she was yours--well, she's one thing you can't have. I'm going to tell you why she married you...." Ruth cried out in incoherent fright, protesting. "She married you to use you.... Not even for your money. She married you because her heart was with the men your kind is grinding down. ... She saw you were the kind of man a woman could twist around her finger--and you owned five thousand men.... Get the idea?... She was going to do things for them--with you. You were nothing but a button she would push. So she married you--and you cheated her.... So she's done with you. You can't give what she paid for, and she's going away with me.... She LOVES me. She was promised to marry me--when she saw what she could do with you--and I let her go.... If she could give, so could I.... But I loved her and she loved me--and we're going away." It was true. Bonbright knew it was true, but he would not admit his belief until he had confirmation from his wife's lips. "Is this true?" he asked, quietly. She was shaking with sobs, crouching against the wall. "Don't be afraid," Bonbright said again, in a strange, quiet, courteous voice. "Is it true?" "Yes," she whispered, for she could not lie with his eyes upon her. "I knew there was--something," he said, with a little halt in his voice.... That was all. He did not look at Dulac, but stood looking at her for a moment steadily, almost with grave inquiry.... She looked from him to Dulac. Subconsciously she compared them.... Bonbright did not speak again, but turned slowly and walked steadily out of the room.... Ruth heard the outer door close behind him and knew he was gone.... Gone! Dulac laughed shortly. "That settled HIM," he said. "Now you'll come." She stood regarding him as she might have regarded some strangely endowed person she had never seen before. Then with a sudden, passionate vehemence she burst out upon him: "Never.... Never.... I'll never go with you. I'm his wife--his wife.... Oh, what have you done?... I hate you--I hate you! Don't ever dare--come near me again.... I hate you...." She turned and fled to her room and locked the door. Though he knocked and called, though he pleaded and threatened, she made no reply, but sat dry-eyed, on her bed, until she heard him go away raging.... CHAPTER XXV Hilda Lightener's electric stopped before the apartment house where Bonbright Foote lived, and Hilda alighted. She ignored bell and speaking tube and ran upstairs to Bonbright's door, on which she knocked as a warning. Then she opened the door and called: "It's me. Anybody home?" Nobody replied. She called again, and walked into the little living room where Ruth and Bonbright and Dulac had faced one another an hour before.... She called again. This time she heard a sound, muffled, indistinct, but recognizable as a sob. "Ruth!" she called, and went to the bedroom door. Now she could hear Ruth within, sobbing alarmingly. "Ruth Foote," said Hilda, "what's the matter?... Where's Bonbright?... I'm coming in." She opened the door, saw Ruth outstretched on the bed, face buried in her pillow, sobbing with a queer, startling dryness. It was not the sob of a woman in an attack of nerves, not the sob of a woman merely crying to rest herself, nor the sob of a bride who has had a petty quarrel with her husband. It was different, alarmingly different. There was despair in it. It told of something seriously awry, of stark tragedy. Hilda's years were not many, but her intuition was sure. She did not demand explanations, did not command Ruth to stop crying and tell what ailed her, but sat down quietly on the bed and stroked the sobbing girl's hair, crooning over her softly. "There!... There!..." Gradually the tenseness, the dry, racking, tearing quality of Ruth's sobs, softened, ameliorated. Presently she was crying, quietly, pitifully.... Hilda breathed with relief. She did not know that for an hour Ruth had sat on the edge of her bed, still, tearless, staring blindly before her--her soul drying up and burning within her for lack of tears. She had been unable to cry. She had uttered no sound until Hilda's voice came in to her. Then she had thrown herself prone in that paroxysm of wrenching sobs.... "There!... There!..." Hilda crooned. Ruth's hand crept out fumblingly, found Hilda's dress, and clutched it. Hilda laid her warm hand over Ruth's cold fingers--and waited. "He's--gone," Ruth sobbed, presently. "Never mind, honey.... Never mind, now." Ruth mumbled incoherently. After a time she raised herself on her arms and crouched beside Hilda, who put her arms around her and held her close, as she would have held a troubled child. "You'll--despise me," Ruth whispered. "I guess not." Hilda pressed Ruth's slenderness against her more robust body reassuringly. "I don't despise folks, as a rule.... Want to talk now?" She saw that the time for speech had come. "He won't come back.... I saw it in his eyes." "Who won't come back, dear?" "Bonbright." Ruth drew a shuddering breath. Then haltingly, whimperingly, sobs interrupting, she talked. She could not tell it fast enough. It must be told, her mind must be relieved, and the story, pent up so long within her, rushed forth in a flood of despairing, self-accusing words. It came in snatches, fragments, as high lights of suffering flashed upon her mind. She did not start at the beginning logically and carry through--but the thing as a whole was there. Hilda had only to sort it and reassemble it to get the pitiful tale complete. "You--you don't mean you married Bonbright like some of those Russian nihilist persons one hears about--just to use him and your position--for some socialist or anarchist thing? You're not serious, Ruth?... Such things aren't." "I--I'd do THAT again," she said. "It was right--to do that--for the good of all those men.... It's not that--but the rest--not keeping to my bargain--and--Dulac. I would have--gone with him." Hilda shook her head. "Not farther than the door," she said. "You couldn't--not after Bonbright has been such--such an idiotic angel about you." "I would have--THEN." "But you wouldn't now?" "I--I can't bear to THINK of him...." "Um!..." Hilda's expressive syllable was very like her father's. It was her way of saying, "I see, and I'll bet you don't see, and I'm not surprised particularly, but you'll be surprised when you find it out." It said all that--to Hilda's satisfaction. "He's been gone hours," Ruth said, plaintively, and Hilda understood her to refer to Bonbright. "Time he was coming back, then," she said. "He--won't come back--ever.... You don't know him the way I do." There was something very like jealousy in Ruth's tone. "He's good--and gentle--but if he makes up his mind--If he hadn't been that way do you think he could have lived with me the way he HAS?" "He must have loved you a heap," Hilda said, enviously. "He did.... Oh, Hilda, it wasn't wrong to marry him for what I did. ... I hadn't any right to consider him--or me. I hadn't, had I?" "I don't belong," said Hilda. "If I wasn't a wicked capitalist I might agree with you--MAYBE. I'm not going to scold you for it--because you THOUGHT it was right, and that always makes the big difference.... You thought you were doing something splendid, didn't you--and then it fizzled. It must have been tough--I can get that part of it.... To find you'd married him and couldn't get out of it--and that he didn't have any thousands of men to--tinker with.... Especially when you loved Mr. Dulac." Hilda added the last sentence with shrewd intent. "I don't love him--I don't.... If you'd seen him--and Bonbright..." "But you did love him," Hilda said, severely Ruth nodded dumbly. "You're sure Bonbright won't come back?" "Never," said Ruth. "Then you'd better go after him." Ruth did not answer. She was calmer now, more capable of rational thought. What SHOULD she do? What was to be done with this situation?... Her brief married life had been a nightmare with a nightmare's climax; she could not bear a return to that. Her husband was gone. She was free of him, free of her dread of the day when she must face realities with him.... And Bonbright--she felt certain he would not want her to run after him, that, somehow, it would lower her even farther in his eyes if she did so. There was a certain dignity attaching to him that she dared not violate, and to run after him would violate it. There would, of necessity, be a scene. She would have to explain, beg, promise--lie. She did not believe she could lie to him again--nor that she could make him believe a lie. ... Pretense between them had become an impossibility.... She wanted him to know she had not gone with Dulac, would not go with Dulac. It seemed to her she could not bear to have him think THAT of her. She had made his love impossible, but she craved his respect. That was all.... She was freed from him--and it was better so. The phase of it that she did not analyze was why her heart ached so. She did not study into that. "I don't want him--back," she said to Hilda. "It would be just like it was--before." "What ARE you going to do, then? You've got to do something." "I don't know.... Why must I do something? Why can't I just wait--and let him do what--whatever is done?" "Because--if I know anything about Bonbright--he won't do a thing. ... He'll just step aside quietly and make no fuss. I'm afraid he's--hurt. And he's been hurt so much before." "I'm--sorry." The words sounded weak, ineffectual. They did not express her feelings, her remorse, her self-accusation. "Sorry?... You haven't cut a dance with him, you know, or kept him waiting while you did your hair.... You've more or less messed up his life. Yes, you have. There isn't any use mincing words. Your motives may have been lofty and noble and all that sort of thing--from your point of view. But HIS point of view is what I'm thinking about now.... Sorry!" "Don't scold. I can't--bear it. I can't bear anything more.... Please go away. I know you despise me. Leave me alone. Go away..." "I'll do nothing of the kind. You're all upset, and you deserve a heap more than scolding.... But I like you." Hilda was always direct. "You're more or less of a little idiot, with your insane notions and your Joan of Arc silliness, but I like you. You're not fit to be left alone. I'm in charge.... So go and dabble cold water on your eyes, so you don't look like Nazimova in the last act, and come along with. me. We'll take a drive, and then I'm coming back to stay all night with you.... Yes, I am," she said, with decision, as Ruth started to object. "You do what I say." Hilda drove Ruth to her own house. "I've got to tell mother I'm going to stay with you," she said. "Will you come in?" "No--please," Ruth answered. "I won't be but a jiffy, then." And Hilda left Ruth alone in the electric. Alone! Suddenly Ruth was afraid of being alone. She was thankful for Hilda, thankful Hilda was going to see her through. Hilda's father and mother were in the library. "Thought you were going some place with Bonbright and his wife," said Malcolm Lightener. "Dad," said Hilda, with characteristic bluntness and lack of preface, "they're in a dickens of a mess." "Bonbright?" "And Ruth." "Huh!..." Lightener's grunt seemed to say that it was nothing but what he expected. "Well--go ahead." Hilda went ahead. Her father punctuated her story with sundry grunts, her mother with exclamations of astonishment and sorrow. Hilda told the whole story from the beginning, and when she was done she said: "There it is. You wouldn't believe it. And, dad, Bonbright Foote's an angel. A regular angel with wings." "Sometimes it's mighty hard to tell the difference between an angel and a damn fool," said Lightener. "I suppose you want me to mix into it. Well, I won't." "You haven't been asked," said Hilda. "I'm doing the mixing for this family. I just came to tell you I am going to stay all night with Ruth--and to warn you not to mix in. You'd do it with a sledge hammer. I don't suppose it's any use telling you to keep your hands off--for you won't. But I wish you would." "You'll get your wish," he said. "I won't," she answered. "Poor Bonbright," Mrs. Lightener said, "it does seem as if about every misfortune had happened to him that can happen.... And he can't go to his mother for sympathy." "He isn't the kind to go to anybody for sympathy," said Lightener. "Then don't you go to him with any," said Hilda. "I told you I wasn't going to have anything to do with it." "I haven't any patience with that girl," said Mrs. Lightener. "Such notions! Wherever did she get them?... It's all a result of this Votes for Women and clubs studying sociology and that. When I was a girl--" "You wore hoop skirts, mammy," said Hilda, "and if you weren't careful when you sat down folks saw too much stocking.... Don't go blaming Ruth too much. She thought she was doing something tremendous." "I calc'late she was," said Malcolm Lightener, "when you come to think of it.... Too bad all cranks can't put the backbone they use in flub dub to some decent use. I sort of admire 'em." "Father!" expostulated Mrs. Lightener. "You've got to. They back their game to the limit.... This little girl did.... Tough on Bonbright, though." Hilda walked to the door; there she stopped, and said over her shoulder: "Tell you what I think. I think she's mighty hard in love with him--and doesn't know it." "Rats!" said her father, elegantly. At that moment Bonbright was writing a letter to his wife. It was a difficult letter, which he had started many times, but had been unable to begin as it should be begun.... He did not want to hurt her; he did not want her to misunderstand; so he had to be very clear, and write very carefully what was in his heart. It was a sore heart, but, strangely, there was no bitterness in it toward Ruth. He found that strange himself, and marveled at it. He did not want to betray his misery to her--for that would hurt her, he knew. He did not want to accuse. All he wanted to do was to do what he could to set matters right for her. For him matters could never be set right again. It was the end.... The way of its coming had been a shock, but that the end had come was not such a shock. He perceived now that he had been gradually preparing himself for it. He saw that the life they had been living could have ended in nothing but a crash of happiness.... He admitted now that he had been afraid of it almost since the beginning.... "My Dear Ruth," he wrote. Then he stopped again, unable to find a beginning. "I am writing because that will be easier for both of us," he wrote--and then scratched it out, for it seemed to strike a personal note. He did not want to be personal, to allow any emotion to creep in. "It is necessary to make some arrangements," he began once more. That was better. Then, "I know you will not have gone away yet." That meant away with Dulac, and she would so understand it. "I hope you will consent to stay in the apartment. Everything there, of course, is yours. It is not necessary for us to discuss money. I will attend to that carefully. In this state a husband must be absent from his wife for a year before she can be released from him. I ask you to be patient for that time." That was all of it. There was nothing more to say. He read it, and it sounded bald, cold, but he could not better it. At the end he wrote, "Yours sincerely," scratched it out, and wrote, "Yours truly," scratched that out, and contented himself by affixing merely his name. Then he copied the whole and dispatched it to his wife by messenger. It arrived just after Ruth and Hilda returned. "It's from him," said Ruth. "Open it, silly, and see what he says." "I'm afraid...." Hilda stamped her foot. "Give it to me, then," she said. Ruth held the note to her jealously. She opened it slowly, fearfully, and read the few words it contained. "Oh..." she said, and held it out to Hilda. She had seen nothing but the bareness, the coldness of it. "It's perfect," said Hilda. "It's BONBRIGHT. He didn't slop over--he was trying not to slop over, but there's love in every letter, and heartache in every word of it.... And you couldn't love him. Wish _I_ had the chance." "You--you will have," said Ruth, faintly. "If I do," said Hilda, shortly, "you bet I WON'T WASTE it." CHAPTER XXVI Hilda knew her father. He could not keep his hands off any matter that interested him, and most matters did interest him. He had grown to have an idea that he could take hold of almost any sort of tangle or enterprise or concern and straighten it out. Probably it was because he was so exceedingly human.... Therefore he was drawn irresistibly to his purchasing department and to Bonbright Foote. "Young man," he said, gruffly, "what's this I hear?" Bonbright looked up inquiringly. "Come over here." Lightener jerked his head toward a private spot for conversation. "About you and that little girl," he said. "I would rather not talk about it," said Bonbright, slowly. "But I'm going to talk about it. It's nonsense...." Bonbright looked very much like his father; tall, patrician, coldly dignified. "Mr. Lightener," he said, "it is a thing we will not mention--now or later." Seven generations contributed to that answer and to the manner of it. It was final. It erected a barrier past which even Malcolm Lightener could not force his way, and Lightener recognized it. "Huh!..." he grunted, nonplused, made suddenly ill at ease by this boy. For a moment he looked at Bonbright, curiously, appraisingly, then turned on his heel and walked away. "Young spriggins put me in my place," he said to Mrs. Lightener that evening. "I wish I knew how to do it--valuable. Made me feel like he was a total stranger and I'd been caught in his hen house.... That Bonbright Foote business isn't all bad by a darn sight." From that day Bonbright tried to work himself into forgetfulness. Work was the only object and refuge of his life, and he gave himself to it wholly. It was interesting work, and it kept him from too much thinking about himself.... If a man has ability and applies himself as Bonbright did, he will attract notice. In spite of his identity Bonbright did attract notice from his immediate superiors. It was more difficult for him, being who he was, to win commendation than it would have been for an unmarked young man in the organization. That was because even the fairest-minded man is afraid he will be tempted into showing favoritism--and so withholds justice.... But he forced it from his laborers--not caring in the least if he had it or not. And word of his progress mounted to Malcolm Lightener. His craving for occupation was not satisfied with eight hours a day spent in the purchasing department. It was his evenings that he feared, so he filled them with study--study of the manufacture of the automobile. Also he studied men. Every noon saw him in the little hash house; every evening, when he could arrange it so, saw him with some interested employee, boss, department boss, or somebody connected with Malcolm Lightener's huge plant, pumping them for information and cataloguing and storing it away in his mind. He tried to crowd Ruth out of his mind by filling it so full of automobile there would be no room for her.... But she hid in unexpected crannies, and stepped forth to confront him disconcertingly. Gradually the laboring men changed their attitude toward him and tolerated him. Some of them even liked him. He listened to their talk, and tried to digest it. Much he saw to call for his sympathy, much that they considered vital he could not agree with; he could not, even in a majority of things, adapt his point of view to theirs. For he was developing a point of view. On that evening when he had gone down to see what a mob was like he had no point of view, only curiosity. He had leaned neither toward his father's striking employees nor against them.... His attitude was much the same now--with a better understanding of the problems involved. He was not an ultracapitalist, like his father, nor a radical like Dulac.... One thing he believed, and that was in the possibility of capital and labor being brought to see through the same eyes. He believed the strife between them, which had waged from time immemorial, was not necessary, and could be eliminated.... But as yet he had no cure for the trouble. He did not lean to socialism. He was farther away from that theory than he was from his father's beliefs. He belonged by training and by inheritance to the group of employers of labor and utilizers of capital.... Against radicalism he had a bitter grievance. Radicalism had given him his wife--for reasons which he heard expressed by laboring men every day. He had no patience with fanaticism; on the other hand, he had little patience with bigotry and intolerance. His contact with the other side was bringing no danger of his conversion. ... But he was doing what he never could have done as heir apparent to the Foote dynasty--he was asserting in thought his individuality and forming individual opinions.... His education was being effectively rounded out. News of the wrecking of Bonbright's domestic craft came to his father quickly, carried, as might have been anticipated, by Hangar. "Your son is not living with his wife, Mr. Foote," Rangar announced. "Indeed!" said Mr. Foote, concealing both surprise and gratification under his habitual mask of suave dignity. "That, I fear, was to have been anticipated.... Have you the particulars?" "Only that she is living in their apartment, and he is boarding with one of the men in his department at Lightener's." "Keep your eye on him, Rangar--keep your eye on him. And report." "Yes, sir," said Rangar, not himself pleased by the turn affairs had taken, but resolved to have what benefit might lie thereabouts. His resentment was still keen to keep him snapping at Bonbright's heels. The breach between himself and his son had been no light blow to Mr. Foote. It threatened his line. What was to become of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, with no heir to hand the business over to when his hands could drop it? He wanted his son, not as a father wants his son, but because a Bonbright Foote VII was requisite. He had hoped for this thing that had happened; indeed, had felt confident it would happen, and that he would have Bonbright back unencumbered, purged of nonsense. He spoke of it with satisfaction to his wife when he returned to his home that afternoon to take up the important matter of adding to the manuscript of his philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette. "Perhaps I should see Bonbright," he suggested. "No," said Mrs. Foote. "He must come to you. He's got to have all his wildness crushed out of him. He'll come. He must have had enough of it before this." But Bonbright did not come, showed no signs of coming, and Mr. Foote grew impatient, so impatient that he disregarded his wife's advice. He could not bring his pride to allow him to seek out Bonbright in person, but sent Rangar as his ambassador. Rangar found Bonbright in his room, reading a book devoted to the ailments of the internal-combustion engine, and acquitted himself of his mission with that degree of diplomacy which his desire for success dictated. "Well?" said Bonbright, as the door opened to admit the ambassador. "Your father sent me, Mr. Foote." "Yes." "He has heard that--er--the marriage which caused your--er--estrangement has ended as he feared." Bonbright arose slowly and walked toward Rangar, who appeared in two minds whether to remain or to depart to other places. "Tell my father," Bonbright said, "that I can appreciate his satisfaction. Tell him also that if he has anything to say to me to say it in person.... That is all." "Your father--" "That is all," repeated Bonbright, and Rangar made up his mind. He slammed the door after him. In the morning he reported to Mr. Foote, who compressed his lips at the recitation of his son's words. Let his son come to him, then, when he had eaten his fill of husks. But Bonbright did not come. After several days had elapsed Mr. Foote considered his duty, and interpreted it to impel him to call in person upon his son--clothed in dignity and with the demeanor of outraged parenthood. Mrs. Foote was not privy to the project. He met his son descending the steps of the house where he boarded. Bonbright could not have evaded his father if he would. He stopped and waited for his father to speak. "I have come to talk to you, Bonbright," he said, severely. "Very well, sir," Bonbright said. "I have come, not from inclination or delight in an interview which must be distasteful to both of us, but because I believe it my duty to point out the thanklessness of your conduct and to see if you cannot be brought to a proper sense of your obligations." "Our ideas of my obligations are rather far apart, sir." "They shouldn't be. You're a mere boy--my son. You should derive your ideas from me until you are capable of formulating correct ideas yourself." "I'm afraid we can never agree on that," said Bonbright, patiently. "Your marriage has ended the way such marriages are fated to end," said Mr. Foote. "We will not discuss that, please," said Bonbright. "You made your own bed--" "And am not complaining about the discomfort of it." "It is essential that you return to your duty. Your unpleasant experience is over. You are old enough to understand your position as my son, and the responsibilities and duties of it. You are Bonbright Foote VII and the future head of our family. I am being very patient and lenient with you.... You have defied me openly, but I am willing to overlook that, and I am sure your mother will overlook your conduct toward her, providing you return to your place in a frame of mind proper for my son. I think you understand what that is." "Perfectly, sir. It means to be jammed back in a mold that will turn me out to the family pattern. It means a willingness to give up thinking for myself and accept YOUR thoughts and shape my life by them. It means being a figurehead as long as you live and a replica of yourself when you are gone. That's it, isn't it?" "That is it," said Mr. Foote, shortly. "You are rid of that woman. ... I am willing to give you another chance." Bonbright's hold upon himself was firm. "If you wish to continue this conversation you will not speak in that way of my wife. Let me make that very clear.... As to coming back to the office--there is nothing under heaven that would bring me back to what I escaped from. Nothing.... If I were ever to come it would have to be on terms of my own making, and you would never agree to them. And whatever terms you agreed to I should not come until you and mother--both of you--went to my wife and made the most complete apology for the thing you did to her in the theater that night.... I am not thinking of myself. I am thinking of her. My mother and father passed my wife and myself on our wedding night, in a public place, and refused to recognize us.... It was barbarous." Bonbright's voice quivered a trifle, but he held himself well in hand. "That apology must come before anything else. After you have made it, we will discuss terms." "You--you--" Mr. Foote was perilously close to losing his dignity. "No," said Bonbright; "on second thought, we will not discuss terms. You can have my final reply now.... You have nothing to give me that will take the place of what I have now. I will not come back to you. Please understand that this is final." Mr. Foote was speechless. It was moments before he could speak; then it was to say, in a voice that trembled with rage: "In the morning I shall make my will--and your name will not appear in it except as a renegade son whom I have disowned..., Probably you regarded the property as under entail and that it would come to you after me.... For six generations it has gone from father to son. You shall never touch a penny of it." "I prefer it that way, sir." Mr. Foote glared at his son in quite unrestrained, uncultured rage, and, whirling on his heel, strode furiously away. Bonbright looked after him curiously. "I wonder how the thing missed out with me," he thought. "It worked perfectly six generations--and then went all to smash with me.... Probably I'd have been a lot happier...." It had been a month since he saw Ruth. He had not wanted to see her; the thought of seeing her had been unbearable. But suddenly he felt as if he must see her--have a glimpse of her. He must see how she looked, if she had changed, if she were well.... He knew it would bring refreshed suffering. It would let back all he had rigidly schooled himself to shut out--but he must see her. He set his will against it and resolutely walked away from the direction in which her apartment lay, but the thing was too strong for him. As a man surrenders to a craving which he knows will destroy him, yet feels a relief at the surrender, he turned abruptly and walked the other way. The apartment in which they had lived was on the second floor of a small apartment house. He passed it on the opposite side of the street, looking covertly upward at the windows. There was a light within. She was there, but invisible. Only if she should step near the window could he see her.... Again and again he passed, but she did not appear. Finally he settled himself guiltily in the shadows, where he could watch those windows, and waited--just for that distant sight of her. There was a lamp on the table before the window. Before she retired she would have to come to shut it off.... He waited for that. He would then see her for a second, perhaps. At last she came, and stood an instant in the window--just a blur, with the light behind her, no feature distinguishable, yet it was her--her. "Ruth..." he whispered, "Ruth...." Then she drew down the shade and extinguished the light. For a moment he stood there, hands opened as if he would have stretched them out toward her. Then he turned and walked heavily away. He had seen her, but It had not added to his happiness. He had seen her because he must see her.... And by that he knew he must see her again and again and again. He knew it. He knew he would stand there in the shadows on innumerable nights, watching for that one brief second of her presence.... And she loved another man. In a year she would be free to marry Dulac! He returned to his room and to his book on the ailments of internal-combustion engines; but it was not their diagrams his eyes saw, but only a featureless blur that represented a girl standing in an upper window---forever beyond his reach.... CHAPTER XXVII Malcolm Lightener's plant, huge as it was, could not meet the demands of the public for the car he manufactured. Orders outran production. New buildings had been under construction, but before they were completed and equipped their added production was eaten up and the factory was no nearer to keeping supply abreast with demand than it had been in the beginning. Lightener was forced to make contracts with other firms for parts of his cars. From one plant he contracted for bodies, from another for wheels. He urged Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, to increase their production of axles by ten thousand a year--and still dealers in all parts of the country wrote and telephoned and telegraphed for more cars--more cars. Hitherto Lightener had made his own engines complete. From outside manufactories he could obtain the other essential parts, but his own production of engines held him back. The only solution for the present was to find some one to make engines to his specifications, and he turned to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Whatever might be said of the Foote methods, their antiquity, their lack of modern efficiency, they turned out work whose quality none might challenge--and Malcolm Lightener looked first to quality. He reached his determination at noon, while he was eating his luncheon, and to Mrs. Lightener's amazement sprang up from the table and lunged out of the room without so much as a glance at her or a word of good-by. In some men of affairs this might not be remarkable, but in Malcolm Lightener it was remarkable. Granite he might be; crude in his manner, perhaps, more dynamic than comfortable, but in all the years of his married life he had never left the house without kissing his wife good-by. He drove his runabout recklessly to his office, rushed into the engineering department, and snatched certain blue prints and specifications from the files. He knew costs down to the last bolt or washer on the machine he made, and it was the work of minutes only to determine what price he could afford to pay for the engines he wanted. His runabout carried him to the entrance to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, and he hurried up the stairs to the office. "Mr. Foote in?" he snapped. "Just returned, Mr. Lightener." "Want to see him--right off--quick." "Yes, sir." The girl at the switchboard called Mr. Foote and informed him. "He says to step right in, sir," she said, and before she was done speaking Lightener was on his way down the corridor. Mr. Foote sat coldly behind his desk. He held no kindness for Malcolm Lightener, for Lightener had befriended Bonbright in his recalcitrancy. Lightener had made it possible for the boy to defy his father. Lightener's wife and daughter had openly waged society war against his wife in behalf of his son's wife.... But Mr. Foote was not the man to throw away an enormous and profitable business because of a personal grudge. Lightener paused for no preliminaries. "Foote," he said, "I want ten thousand engines complete. You can make 'em. You've got room to expand, and I can give you approximate figures on the costs. You make good axles and you can make good engines. What d'you think about it?" Mr. Foote shrugged his shoulders. "It doesn't attract me." "Huh!... You can have that plant up in six months. I'll give you a contract for five years. Two years' profits will pay for the plant. Don't know what your profits are now, but this ought to double them. ... Doesn't half a million a year extra profit make you think of anything?" "Mr. Lightener, this business was originally a machine shop. It has grown and developed since the first Bonbright Foote founded it. I am the first to deviate in any measure from the original plan, and I have done so with doubt and reluctancy. I have seen with some regret the manufacturing of axles overshadow the original business--though it has been profitable, I admit. But I shall go no farther. I am not sure my father and my grandfather would approve of what I have done. I know they would not approve of other changes.... More money does not attract me. This plant is making enough for me. What I want is more leisure. I wish more time to devote to a certain literary labor upon which I have been engaged..." "Literary flub-dub," said Lightener. "I'm offering you half a million a year on a silver platter." "I don't want it, sir.... I am not a young man. I have not been in the best of health--owing, perhaps, to worries which I should not have been compelled to bear.... I am childless. With me Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, comes to an end. Upon my death these mills close, the business is to be liquidated and discontinued. Do I make myself clear?... I am not interested in your engines." "What's that you said?" Lightener asked. "Childless? Wind up this business? You're crazy, man." "I had a son, but I have one no longer.... In some measure I hold you responsible for that. You have taken sides with a disobedient son against his father..." "And you've treated a mighty fine son like a dog," said Lightener, harshly. "I have done my duty.... I do not care to discuss it with you. The fact I want to impress is that my family becomes extinct upon my death. My wife will be more than amply provided for. I may live ten years or twenty years--but I shall live them in such comfort as I can obtain.... Is there anything else you wish to talk to me about?" It was a dismissal, and Malcolm Lightener was not used to being dismissed like a troublesome book agent. "Yes," he said, getting to his feet. "There is something, and I'll be short and sweet about it. You have a son, and if I'm any judge, he's about four times the man his father is. You don't want him!... Well, I do. I want him in my business, and he won't lose such a lot by the change. It's your ledger that shows the loss, and don't you forget it. You did what you could to warp him out of shape--and because he wouldn't be warped you kicked him out. Maybe the family ends with you, but a new Foote family begins with him, and it won't be any cut-and-dried, ancestor-ridden outfit, either. One generation of his kind will be worth more to this country than the whole six of yours.... I hope you live to see it." Lightener stuffed his blue prints and specifications into his pocket and left the office truculently. Once more in his own office he summoned a boy. "Fetch Mr. Foote from the purchasing department," he said. Malcolm Lightener was acting on impulse again. He had no clear idea why he had sent for Bonbright, nor just what he should say when the boy came--but he wanted to talk to him. Lightener was angry--angry because Bonbright's father had rejected his proposition to manufacture engines; more angry at the way Mr. Foote had spoken concerning his son. In the back of Lightener's mind was the thought that he would show a Foote.... Just what he would show him was not determined. Bonbright came in. He was not the Bonbright of six months before. The boy in him was gone, never to return. He had lost none of his old look of breeding, of refinement, of blood--but he had lost that air which rich young men bear about with them. It is an air, not of carelessness, precisely, but of absence of care; a sort of nonchalance, bred of lack of responsibilities and of definite ambitions. It is an air that makes one think of them that they would fit better into the scenery of a country club or a game of golf than into an office where men strain their intelligence and their bodies to attain important aims. This was gone with his boyishness. In its place was an alertness, an awakeness, born of an interest in affairs. His eyes were the eyes of a man who concentrated much, and was keenly interested in the object of his concentration. His movements were quicker. He seemed to see and catalogue more of what was going on about him. If one had seen him then for the first time, the impression received would have been that here was a very busy young man who was worth watching. There was something aggressive about him. He looked competent. One could not question that his new life had improved him, but it had not made him happy. It would be absurd to say that he looked sad. A boy of his age cannot look sad continually, unless sadness is a pose with him, which he is enjoying very much indeed. But Bonbright was no poser.... And he did not look happy. There were even times when there was a worn, haggard look about his eyes when he came down in the morning. This was when he had allowed himself to think too much. "Just came from your father's office," said Lightener. "I offered him a chance to clean up half a million a year--and he turned it down... because his great-grandfather might not like it." Bonbright understood perfectly. He knew how his father would do such a thing. Lightener's statement seemed to call for no reply, so he made none. "I wanted to look at you," said Lightener, "to make sure you aren't anything like him.... But you ARE like him. You stand like him and you look like him--only you don't. If I thought you'd grow to think the way he does I'd send you to the cashier for your pay, in a second. But I don't believe it." He scowled at Bonbright. "No, by Jove! you don't LOOK it." "I don't think father and I are much alike," said Bonbright, slowly. Lightener switched the subject. "You ought to know considerable about this business. Been here six months. From what I hear you've picked up quite a lot outside of office hours." "I've been studying hard. It gave me something to do." "Darn it all, why couldn't you and Hilda have taken to each other!..." Lightener stopped, and stared at his desk. Perhaps it was not too late yet. Bonbright's marriage had been no success; Bonbright was young; and it was not thinkable that he would not recover from that wound in time to marry again. Of course he would.... Then why should he not marry Hilda? Not the least reason in the world. In the affair Bonbright was guiltless--merely unfortunate. The thing was worth bearing in mind. Perhaps something might be done; at any rate, he would talk it over with his wife. "I want you to put in another six months learning this business," he said. "If you pan out I'll have a job for you.... I haven't heard of your falling down any place yet.... Know what I told your father? He said the Foote family ended with him--became extinct. Well, I said the family just started with you, and that one generation of your kind was worth the whole six of his. And I hoped he lived to see it." "Somehow I can't feel very hard toward father, Mr. Lightener. Sometimes I'm--sorry for him. To him it's as bad as if I'd been born with a hunchback. Worse, maybe, because, hunchback and all, I might have been the sort he wanted.... He doesn't understand, that's it. I can understand him--so I don't have any hard feelings-except on HER account.... He said the family was extinct?" "Yes." "I guess it is," said Bonbright. "The family, as he thought of it, meant something that went on and on as he and his ancestors went.... Yes, it's extinct. I don't know why I was different from them, but I was. Always. I'm glad." "He must be worth five millions, anyhow, maybe more." "I don't know," said Bonbright. "You won't get a cent of it, from what he says." "I suppose not.... No, I won't get a cent." "You don't make much fuss about it." "I had that out with myself six months ago. It was hard to give it up.... Nobody wants to be poor when he can be rich. If it hadn't been for Ruth I suppose I should have been there yet--pretty well made over to fit by this time." As Bonbright and Malcolm Lightener talked, Mr. Foote sat in his office, his head upon his desk, one arm stretched out across the blotter, the other shielding his face. He did not move.... After Malcolm Lightener left the room he had sat for a time staring at the door. He did not feel well. He was troubled. None but himself knew how deep was his disappointment, his bitterness, because of his son's failure to stand true to his type. It was not the grief of a father at the loss of a son; it was the suffering of a man whose supreme motive is the carrying on of family and of family traditions. He had just told Lightener the family became extinct with his passing. Now he reaffirmed it, and, reaffirming it, he felt the agony of ultimate affliction. Six generations the family and the family's business had endured honorably according to its beliefs and tenets; with the sixth generation it ended because of the way-wardness of a boy--his boy! Mr. Foote felt a trifle dizzy, a bit oppressed. He leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. He would go home for the day as soon as the dizziness passed, he said to himself.... It passed. He opened his eyes and leaned toward his desk, but he stopped suddenly, his right hand flying to his breast. There was a sudden pain there; such a pain as he had never experienced before. It was near his heart. With each heartbeat there came a twisting stab of agony. Presently the spasm passed, and he sank back, pale, shaking, his forehead damp with clammy moisture.... He tried to pull himself together. Perhaps it would be best to summon some one, but he did not want to do that. To have an employee find him so would be an invasion of his dignity. Nobody must see him. Nobody must know about this.... The spasm returned-departed again, leaving him gasping for breath. ... It would come again. Something told him it would come again-once more. He KNEW.... A third time it would come, but never again. He forced himself to rise. He would meet it standing. For the honor of the Foote family he would meet it on his feet, looking into its eyes. He would not shrink and cringe from it, but would face it with dignity as a Foote should face it, uttering no cry of pain or fear. It was a dignified moment, the most dignified and awful of his life. ... Five generations were looking on to see how he met it, and he was conscious of their eyes. He stared before him with level eyes, forcing a smile, and waited the seconds there remained to wait. It was coming. He could feel its first approach, and drew himself up to the fullness of his slender height. Never had he looked so much a Foote as in that instant, never had he so nearly approached the ideal he had set for himself--for he knew. The spasm came, but it tore no cry from him. He stood erect, with eyes that stared straight before him fearlessly until they became sightless. He held his head erect proudly.... Then he sighed, relaxed into his chair, and lay across his desk, one arm outstretched, the other protecting his face.... The telephone on Malcolm Lightener's desk rang. "Hello!" said Lightener. "What is it? Who?... Yes, he's right here." He looked up to Bonbright. "Somebody wants to speak to you." Bonbright stepped to the instrument. "Yes," he said, "this is Bonbright Foote.... Who is it? Rangar?..." Suddenly he turned about and faced Malcolm Lightener blankly. He fumbled with the receiver for its hook. "My father is dead," he said, in a hushed voice. "They just found him--at his desk...." CHAPTER XXVIII Ruth had continued to live in the apartment. It had not been her intention to do so. From the moment of reading Bonbright's succinct note she was determined to go back to the little cottage and to her mother. But she put it off for a day, then for another day, and days grew into weeks and months. "To-morrow I'll move," she told herself each night, but next day she was no nearer to uprooting herself than she had been the day before. She gave herself no reasons for remaining. If she had been asked for a reason she might have said it was because Dulac still boarded with her mother. He had not left the city with the breaking of the strike, but had remained. He had remained because he had asked the union he represented to let him remain and had been able to show them reasons for granting his request. He wanted to stay on the ground to work quietly underground, undoing the harm that had been done by the strike; quietly proselyting, preaching his gospel, gaining strength day by day, until he should have reared an organization capable of striking again. The courage of the man was unquenchable.... And he wanted to be near Ruth. Just as he had set his will to force Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, to bow to the will of the men, so he had set his will to force Ruth to bow to his will.... So he remained and labored. But his presence at her mother's was not the real reason that impelled Ruth to continue in the home Bonbright had made for her. It was something more intangible. She found the thought of leaving that spot unendurable, but she did not, dared not, seek in her heart for what made it unendurable. For a week she scarcely ventured outside the door; then the loneliness, the lack of occupation, drove her out. She must be busy, for when she sat idly in a room her thoughts became torture. There were many sides to her affliction. First in her mind she placed the failure of her great project. She had wrecked her life for it without accomplishment. Second in the rank of her griefs stood the fact that she had been on the point of giving herself to Dulac. She would have gone with him, disregarding convention, breaking her vows of marriage. For that she despised herself... despised herself the more because she knew now that she did not love Dulac, that she had never loved Dulac. That discovery had shocked and shaken her, and when she thought of what might have happened if she had gone with him a numbness of horror crept over her, leaving her cold and trembling. ... She would have gone, and she did not love him. She would not have known she did not love him until it was too late to draw back... and then she would have lived, but her soul would have died! She accused herself bitterly for mistaking glamour for love. She knew now that Dulac had called from her nothing deeper than a foolish, girlish fascination. His personality, his work, his enthusiasm had enmeshed her, blinded her--and she had mistaken her feelings for love! Of this she was certain.... There were moments when she felt she must tell Bonbright. Once she actually took writing materials to do so, but she did not tell him.... She wanted him to know, because, she thought, it would be a sort of vindication in his eyes. But she was wrong. She wanted him to know for quite another reason than that. Third in the order of her griefs was the consciousness that she had caused Bonbright grief. She dealt ungently with herself because of it, for Bonbright had not deserved it at her hands. She could appreciate how good he had been to her, how solicitous, how patient, how tender. If a man ever deserved well of a woman, he deserved it. She told herself that a hundred times daily. She remembered small thoughtfulnesses which had been a part of his daily conduct to her. She recalled small forbearances. She pictured to herself the life they had lived together, and saw how it was only the character of her husband that had made it possible at all.... And in the end he had not uttered one word of censure; had not even looked at her with just anger.... There had been no pretense about him, no labored effort to be kind. He had simply been himself. These were her thoughts; this is how she remembered him.... The house was unbearably lonely. As evening approached she found herself more than once listening for Bonbright's step on the stairs and his hand on the door.... At such times she cried. She puzzled herself. She did not understand why she should be so lonely, nor why the expectation of Bonbright's step--with quick awakening to the knowledge that no foot of his would ever sound at her door again--should bring her tears.... She knew she should have been glad, relieved. With Bonbright she had lived in daily dread. She had not loved him, and the fear that his restraint would break, that he would force his love upon her, had made her days a ghastly dream.... She should be crying out with the joy and relief of his removal. But she felt no relief, felt no joy.... She could not understand it. If Hilda Lightener, who came often and stayed long, had asked her if she missed Bonbright or were lonely without him, she would have denied it hotly. But Hilda did not ask.... Ruth did not ask that question of herself. She knew she was lonely, miserable, and she thought she knew why--but Bonbright's absence had nothing to do with it. Hilda watched, she did not talk about Bonbright, for she saw her task was to help Ruth over these first few days. Her suspicions were her own, but, being a woman, she understood the baffling psychology of another woman and what harm a premature word might work.... If the thing she believed were true, then time would bring its realization to Ruth. Ruth must discover the truth for herself.... "I can't stand this," Ruth said one evening. "I can't bear to stay here alone in these rooms. If there were work enough to keep me busy--but there's nothing." "If you'd only go the places I ask you to," said Hilda. "I don't want to meet people--your sort of people. They must know what has happened.... I couldn't have them looking at me with their catty, curious eyes." "Most of them would be very kind," Hilda said. "No.... I'm going to work. I'm going to find a place and work...." "But--" Hilda wondered what Bonbright would think of that. She imagined he would not like it. "I know what you were going to say. He wouldn't want me to. Maybe he wouldn't--but if he knew he'd let me do it. I tell you I've got to, Hilda." "You've got to decide for yourself," Hilda admitted, so Ruth became a job hunter, and because intelligent stenographers are by no means as plentiful as daisies in a July field, she was not long in finding employment.... From that day life was easier. She found her wages were ample to support herself and pay the rent of her apartment. Ample, in that they sufficed. There was no surplus. So she folded and put away the weekly checks she received from Bonbright. She did not send them back to him because, to her mind, that would have been a weekly slap in his face. But she would not cash them. There was a difference to her; probably there was a real difference. Of a Sunday Ruth often went driving with Hilda, and Hilda noticed how closely her companion watched the sidewalks, how she scrutinized the passing crowds. It was as though Ruth were trying to catch sight of somebody.... While daylight lasted Hilda saw that Ruth was drawn to her windows to sit looking down at the street. Once Hilda ventured dangerously. "Why do you always sit there watching folks go by?" she asked. Ruth turned and looked at her strangely. "I--why, I don't know," she said. Of herself Ruth rarely mentioned Bonbright; never unless in some recollection of him, or if Hilda meddled with some portion of the household that had been peculiarly Bonbright's. As, for instance: "Why don't you move that leather chair out of the other bedroom?" Hilda asked. "It's doing no good there and it looks mighty comfortable." "That was HIS chair," Ruth said, quickly. "He used to sit there and read after--after I had gone to bed." Once Ruth asked for news of Bonbright. After that Hilda brought her news voluntarily. Not too frequently, but often enough according to her notion. Betweentimes she gave Ruth plenty of time to wonder what was happening to her husband. Ruth knew Hilda saw him often. She wondered if they talked about her, and what they said, but that she never asked, nor did Hilda refer to such conversations. Indeed, these were few and sparing, for Bonbright could not be made to talk about his wife--even to her. But she gave Bonbright news of Ruth just as she gave Ruth news of Bonbright. Sometimes Hilda tormented Ruth with set purpose. "Bonbright looks mighty thin," she said. "I think he's working too hard. If he keeps it up he'll make himself sick." "Oh..." said Ruth--nothing more, but for the rest of that Sunday she was quiet--very quiet. Once Hilda found Ruth in a passion of tears, and when she sought the reason she learned that Ruth had met Dulac on the street, face to face, and that he had spoken to her. He had told Ruth that he was staying in the city because of her; that he would not go without her. ... He had been careless of listening ears, not concealing his emotions. "Well, he didn't hurt you, did he?" "No," said Ruth. "You weren't afraid of him?" "No." "You--didn't want to go away with him?" "No.... No...." "Then what are you making all the fuss about? He can't carry you off" 'HE might have seen us together," said Ruth. "And--and it made me--remember--that horrid afternoon." "What if Bonbright did see you together? Don't you suppose Bonbright thinks you are seeing him? Of course he does. What else would he think? Naturally he supposes you are going to have your divorce when the year is up, and marry Mr. Dulac." Hilda was merciless. "Does he think that? Are you sure?" Hilda shrugged her shoulders. "He mustn't think it," Ruth said, affrightedly. "Why, he--If he thought that--" "If he thought that--what?" Ruth bit her lips and turned away. "Nothing," she said. Then: "Can't you let him know?... Not tell him, you know, but--sort of let him understand." "If I can see a good chance," Hilda said; but in her mind was the resolution that she would never see the chance. "Does he--seem cheerful?" Ruth asked. "It's been quite a long time now--months.... He--must have gotten over--caring for me now. Do you think so?" Her voice was anxious, pleading. Hilda could not hold out against that appeal. "No, silly, he hasn't. He isn't that sort.... It's too bad." "Yes--it's too bad," said Ruth, but it was not sympathy that put the tiny thrill into her voice. "He's just a boy.... He can't go on all his life loving a girl that doesn't want him. Some day he's going to fall in love again. It's natural he should." "Has he--Do you think--" "No, I haven't seen any signs of it yet.... And I'd be jealous if he did. I think I could manage to fall in love with him myself if--" "--he wasn't tied to me," interrupted Ruth, with a little whimper. "I--I wish he knew--about Mr. Dulac.... He wouldn't think so--hard of me, maybe... if he knew I didn't--never did--love Mr. Dulac...." "The only thing that would make any difference to him would be to know that you loved him," said Hilda. Ruth had no answer, but she was saying to herself, with a sort of secret surprise: "If I loved him.... If I loved him...." Presently she spoke aloud: "You won't be angry with me, Hilda?... You won't misunderstand, but--but won't you please--go away?... Please.... I--I don't want to see anybody. I want to be alone." "Well, of all things!" said Hilda. But she was not offended. Her resemblance to her father was very faint indeed, at that moment. She looked more like her mother, softer, more motherly. She put on her hat and went away quietly. "Poor Bonbright!" she was thinking. Then: "It's come to her.... She's got a hint of it. It will come now with a rush...." Ruth sat in her chair without movement. "If I loved him..." she said, aloud, and then repeated it, "... loved him...." She was questioning herself now, asking herself the meaning of things, of why she had been lonely, of why she had sat in her window peering down into the street--and she found the answer. As Hilda had said in her thoughts, it was coming with a rush.... She was frightened by it, dared not admit it.... She dared not admit that the biggest, weightiest of her woes was that she no longer had Bonbright with her; that she was lonesome for him; that her heart had been crying out for him; that she loved him! She dared not admit that. It would be too bitter, too ironically bitter.... If she loved him now she had loved him then! Was her life to be filled with such ironies--? Was she forever to eat of Dead Sea fruit? Did she love Bonbright? At last she dared to put the question squarely.... Her answer came quickly. "Oh, I do... I do!" she cried, aloud. "I love him...." A surge of happiness welled up from her heart at the words. "I love him," she repeated, to hear the sound of them again. The happiness was of short life. "I love him--but it's too late.... It's always too late," she sobbed. "I've lost him.... He's gone. ..." The girl who could give herself to a man she did not love for the Cause was not weak; she did not lack resolution, nor did she lack the sublimity of soul which is the heritage of women. She had lost her happiness; she had wrecked her life, and until this moment there seemed no possibility of recovering anything from the wreckage.... But she loved.... There was a foundation to build from. If she had been weak, a waverer, no structure could have risen on the foundation; it must have lain futile, accusing. But there was strength in her, humility, a will that would dare much, suffer much, to fight its way to peace. "If he loves me still," she thought; and there hope was born. "If I go to him.... If I tell him--everything?" she asked herself, and in asking made her resolution. She would venture, she would dare, for her happiness and for his. She would go, and she would say: "Bonbright, I love you.... I have never loved anybody but you.... You must believe me." He would believe her, she knew. There was no reason why he should not believe her. There was nothing for her to gain now by another lie. "I'll make him believe," she said, and smiled and cried and smiled again. "Hilda will tell me where he lives and I'll go to him--now...." At that instant Hilda was coming to her, was on the stairs, and Hilda looked grave, troubled. She walked slowly up the stairs and rapped on the door. "Ruth," she called, "it's Hilda.... May I come in now?" Ruth ran to the door and threw it open. "Come in.... Come in." Her voice was a song. "Oh, Hilda..." "Honey," said Hilda, holding her at arm's length, '-his father is dead. They found him dead just after noon...." "Oh!..." said Ruth. It was an instant before the full significance of this news was shown to her. Then she clutched Hilda with terror-stricken fingers. "No.... No!..." she cried. "It can't be.... It mustn't be...." "Why--what is it? I--I didn't think you'd take it like this...." "I love him.... I love Bonbright," Ruth said, in a blank, dead voice. "I was going to him.... I was going to tell him... and he would have believed. But now---he wouldn't believe. He would think I came--because his father was dead--because he--he was what I thought he was when I married him.... Don't you see? He'd think I was coming to him for the same reason.... He'd think I was willing to give myself to him--for that...." Hilda took the slight form in her arms and rocked her to and fro, while she thought.... "Yes," she said, sorrowfully, "you can't go to him now.... It would look--oh, why couldn't his father have made a will, as he was going to?... If he'd left his old money to charity or something.... We thought he had.... But there has been no will. Everything is Bonbright's...." "I'm always--too--late..." Ruth said, quietly. CHAPTER XXIX Bonbright was in his own home again--in the house that had been his father's, and that was now his. He stood in the room that had been his since babyhood. He had not thought to stand there again, nor did he know that the room and the house were his own. He had come from the shops but a half hour before; had come from that room where his father lay across his desk, one arm outstretched, the other shielding his face. There had been no time to think then; no time to realize. ... What thought had come to him was one of wonder that the death of his father could mean so little to him. Shock he felt, but not grief. He had not loved his father. Yet a father is a vital thing in a son's life. Bonbright felt this. He knew that the departing of a father should stand as one of the milestones of life, marking a great change. It marked no change for him. Everything would go on as it had gone--even on the material side. It was inevitable that he should remember his father's threat to disinherit him. Now the thing had come--and it made little difference, for Bonbright had laid out his life along lines of his own.... His father would be carried to the grave, would disappear from the scene--that was all. He saw that the things were done which had to be done, and went home to his mother, dreading the meeting. He need not have dreaded it, for she met him with no signs of grief. If she felt grief she hid it well. She was calm, stately, grave--but her eyes were not red with weeping nor was her face drawn with woe. He wondered if his father meant as little to his father's wife as it did to his father's son. It seemed so. There had been no affectionate passage between Bonbright and his mother. She had not unbent to him. He had hardly expected her to, though he had been prepared to respond.... Now he was in his room with time to think--and there was strangely little to think of. He had covered the ground already. His father was dead. When Bonbright uttered that sentence he had covered the episode completely. That was it--it was an EPISODE. A servant came to the door. "Mr. Richmond wishes to speak with you on the phone, Mr. Bonbright," the man said, and Bonbright walked to the instrument. Richmond had been his father's counsel for many years. "Bonbright?" asked Mr. Richmond. "Yes." "I have just had the news. I am shocked. It is a terrible thing." "Yes," said Bonbright. "I will come up at once--if you can see me. The death of a man like your father entails certain consequences which cannot be considered too soon. May I come?" "If you think it is necessary," said Bonbright. "It is necessary," said Mr. Richmond. In twenty minutes Richmond was announced and Bonbright went to meet him in the library. Richmond extended his hand with the appropriate bearing for such an occasion. His handshake was a perfect thing, studied, rehearsed, just as all his life was studied and rehearsed. He had in stock a manner and a handshake and a demeanor which could be instantly taken off the shelf and used for any situation which might arise. Richmond was a ready man, an able man. On the whole, he was a good man, as men go, but cut and dried. "Your father was a notable man," he declared. "He will be missed." Bonbright bowed. "There will be a great deal for you to look after," said the lawyer, "so I will be brief. The mass of detail can wait--until after--er--until you have more leisure." "I think, Mr. Richmond, it is my mother you wish to see, not myself. I thought you would understand my position. I am surprised that you do not, since you have been so close to my father.... My father and I did not agree on matters which both of us considered vital. There were differences which could not be abridged. So I am here merely as his son, not as his successor in any way." "I don't understand." "My father," said Bonbright, with a trace of impatience, "disowned me, and--disinherited, I believe, is the word--disinherited me." "Oh no! No!... Indeed no! You are laboring under a misapprehension. ... You are mistaken. I am glad to be able to relieve your mind on that point. Nothing of the sort was done. I am in a position to know. ... I will admit your father discussed such action, but the matter went no farther. Perhaps it was his intention to do as you say, but he put it off.... He seemed to have a prejudice against making a will. As a matter of fact, he died intestate..." "You mean--" "I mean that your father's wealth--and it was considerable, sir--will be disposed of according to the statutes of Descent and Distribution. In other words, having failed to dispose of his property by testament, the law directs its disposition. With the exception of certain dower rights the whole vests in yourself." Here was something to think of. Here was a new and astounding set of circumstances to which he must adapt himself.... He experienced no leap of exultation. The news left him cold. Queerly, his thoughts in that moment were of Ruth and of her great plan. "If she had waited..." he thought. No, he was glad she had not waited. He did not want her that way.... It was not her he wanted, but her love. He thought bitterly that he would willingly exchange all that had become his for that one possession. He could have anything--everything--he wanted now but that.... "I am glad to be able to give you such news," said Mr. Richmond. "I was thinking of something else," said Bonbright. Richmond looked at the young man obliquely. He had heard that Bonbright was queer. This rumor seemed not without foundation. Richmond could not comprehend how a young man could think of anything else when he had just learned that he was several tunes a millionaire. "Sit down," said Bonbright. "This, of course, makes a difference." Richmond seated himself, and drew documents from his green bag. For half an hour he discussed the legal aspects of the situation and explained to Bonbright what steps must be taken at once. "I think that is all that will be necessary to-day," he said, finally. "Very well.... There is no reason why affairs may not go on for a couple of days as they are--as if father were alive?" "No, I see no reason why they should not." "Very well, then.... Will you see to it? The--the funeral will be on Saturday. Monday I shall be in the office." "I hope you will call upon me for any assistance or advice you find necessary.... Or for any service of whatsoever nature.... Good afternoon.... Will you convey my sympathy to Mrs. Foote?" The rest of that day, and of the days that followed it, Bonbright was trying to find the answer to the question, What does this mean to me? and to its companion question, What shall I do with it? One paper Richmond had left in Bonbright's hands, as Richmond's predecessors had left it in the hands of preceding Bonbright Footes. It was a copy of the will of the first Bonbright Foote, and the basic law, a sort of Salic law, a family pragmatic sanction for his descendants, through time and eternity. It laid upon his descendants the weight of his will with respect to the conduct of the business of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Five generations had followed it faithfully, deviating only as new conditions made deviation necessary. It was all there, all set forth minutely. Bonbright could visualize that first of his line from the reading of it--and he could visualize his father. His father was the sort of man that will would create.... He considered himself. He was not off that piece.... His father had tried to press him in the family mold, and he remembered those unbearable days. Now, from his remote grave the first Bonbright Foote reached out with the same mold and laid his hands on the hope of the line.... Bonbright read the words many times. His was the choice to obey or to disobey, to remain an individual, distinct and separate from all other individuals since the world began, or to become the sixth reincarnation of Bonbright Foote I.... The day following his father's burial he chose, not rashly in haste, nor without studied reason. To others the decision might not have seemed momentous; to Bonbright it was epoch-marking. It did mark an epoch in the history of the Foote family. It was the Family's French Revolution. It was Martin Luther throwing his inkpot at the devil--and overturning the ages. Bonbright's decision required physical expression. Most human decisions require physical expression to give them effect. He had a feeling as though six disembodied Bonbright Footes stood about in an agony of anxiety, watching to see what he would do as he took the emblematical paper in his hands. He tore it very slowly, tore it again and again into ribbons and into squares, and let them flutter into his wastebasket.... If others had been present to assert that they heard a groan he would not have denied it, for the ancestors were very real to him then... their presence was a definite fact. "There..." he said. The king was dead. Long live the king! It was after that he had his talk with his mother. Perhaps he was abrupt, but he dreaded that talk. Perhaps his diplomacy was faulty or lacking. Perhaps he made mistakes and failed to rise to the requirements of the conditions and of his relationship with her. He did his best. "Mother," he said, "we must talk things over." She sat silently, waiting for him to speak. "Whatever you wish," he said, "I shall do... if I can." "There is a qualification?" she said. "Suppose you tell me what you want done," he said. "I want you to come to your senses and realize your position," she said, coldly. "I want you to get rid of that woman and, after a decent interval, marry some suitable girl...." "I was discussing your affairs, mother, not mine. We will not refer to my wife." "All I want," she said, "is what I am entitled to as your father's widow." "This house, of course," he said. "You will want to stay here. I want you to stay here." "And you?" "I prefer to live as I am." "You mean you do not care to come back here?" "Yes." "You must. I insist upon it. You have caused scandal enough now.... People would talk." "Mother, we might as well understand each other at once. I am not Bonbright Foote VII. Let that be clear. I am Bonbright Foote. I am myself, an individual. The old way of doing things is gone.... Perhaps you have heard of the family law--the first Bonbright's will. ... I have just torn it up." She compressed her lips and regarded him with hostility. Then she shrugged her shoulders. "I suppose I must make the best of it. I realize I am powerless." She realized it fully in that moment; realized that her son was a man, a man with force and a will, and that it would be hopeless to try to bring him to submit to her influence. "There is nothing for us to discuss. I shall ask for what I need...." "Very well," he said, not coldly, not sharply, but sorrowfully. There was no need to try to approach nearer to his mother. She did not desire it. In her the motherly instinct did not appear. She had never given birth to a son; what she had done was to provide her husband with an heir, and, that being done, she was finished with the affair. ... He went from his mother to his own room, where he sat down at his desk and wrote a brief letter to his wife. It was not so difficult to compose as the other one had been, but it was equally succinct, equally barren of emotion. Yet he was not barren of emotion as he wrote it. MY DEAR RUTH [he said],-My father is dead. This makes a very material change in my financial condition, and the weekly sum I have been sending you becomes inadequate. Hereafter a suitable check will be mailed you each week until the year expires. At that time I shall make a settlement upon you which will be perfectly satisfactory. In the meantime, should you require anything, you have but to notify me, or, if you prefer, notify Mr. Manley Richmond, who will attend to it immediately. This letter he mailed himself.... Not many days later it was returned to him with "Not Found" stamped upon it in red ink. Bonbright fancied there must be some error, so he sent it again by messenger. The boy returned to report that the apartment was vacant and that no one could furnish the present address of the lady who had occupied it. Bonbright sent to Ruth's mother, who could only inform him that Ruth had gone away, she did not know where, and such goings-on she never saw, and why she should be asked to bear more than she had borne was a mystery..-- There was but one conclusion for Bonbright. Ruth had been too impatient to wait for the year to expire and had gone away with Dulac.... Hilda could have corrected that belief, but he did not see Hilda, had not seen her, for his new duties and new problems and responsibilities occupied him many more hours a day than any labor union or legislature would have permitted an employee to be required to work. His hours of labor did not stop with the eighth nor with the tenth.... There were days when they began with daylight and continued almost to daylight again. Ruth had gone with Dulac.... She was hidden away. Not even Hilda Lightener knew where she was, but Hilda knew why she had gone.... There is an instinct in most animals and some humans which compels them to hide away when they suffer wounds. Hilda knew Ruth had crept away because she had suffered the hardest to bear of all wounds--and crushing of hope.... She had gone the morning after Bonbright's father died, leaving no word but that she was going, and she had not gone far. It is simple to lose oneself in a city. One may merely move to the next ward and be lost to one's friends. Only chance will cause a meeting, and Ruth was determined to guard against that chance. She found a cheap, decent boarding house, among laboring people; she found a new position... that was all. She had to live; to continue was required of her, but it must be among strangers. She could face existence where there were no pitying eyes; where there was none to remind her of her husband.... She hid away with her love, and coddled it and held it up for herself to see. She lived for it. It was her life.... Even at her darkest moment she was glad she loved. She devoted herself wholly to that love which had been discovered just too late--which was not the wise nor the healthful thing to do, as any physician could have informed her. CHAPTER XXX For a few days after the commencement of his reign Bonbright remained quiescent. It was not through uncertainty, nor because he did not know what he was going to do. It was because he wanted to be sure of the best way of doing it. Very little of his time was spent in the room that had been his father's and was now his own; he walked about the plant, studying, scrutinizing, appraising, comparing. He did not go about now as he had done with Rangar on the day his father inducted him into the dignity of heir apparent and put a paper crown on his head and a wooden scepter in his hand. He was aware that the men eyed him morosely. Bitterness was still alive in their hearts, and the recollection of suffering fresh in their minds. They still looked at him as a sort of person his father had made him appear, and viewed his succession as a calamity. The old regime had been bad enough, they told one another, but this young man, with his ruthlessness, his heartlessness, with what seemed to be a savage desire to trample workingmen into unresisting, unprotesting submission--this would be intolerable. So they scowled at him, and in their homes talked to their wives with apprehension of dark days ahead. He felt their attitude. It could not be helped--yet. His work could not be started with the men, it must start elsewhere. He would come to the men later, in good time, in their proper order. His third morning in the office he had called Malcolm Lightener on the telephone. "Is your proposition to manufacture ten thousand engines still open?" "Yes." "I'll take the contract--providing we can arrive at terms." "I'll send over blue prints and specifications--and my cost figures. Probably our costs will be lower than yours...." "They won't be," said Bonbright, with a tightening of his jaw. "Can you lend me Mershon for a while?" Mershon was Lightener's engineer, the man who had designed and built his great plant. "I can't, but I will." "As soon as he can arrange it, please. I want to get started." "He'll be there in half an hour." Mershon came, a gray, beefy, heavy-faced man--with clear, keen, seeing eyes. "Mr. Lightener has loaned you to me, Mr. Mershon. It was a tremendous favor, for I know what you can do." Mershon nodded. He was a man who treasured up words. He must have had a great store of them laid by, for in his fifty years he had used up surprisingly few. "This is what I want," Bonbright said. "First, I want a plant designed with a capacity of twenty thousand Lightener engines. You designed Lightener's engine plant--so you're about the one man to give me one that will turn out more engines with less labor and at lower cost than his. That's what I want." Mershon's eyes lighted. "It will cost money," he said. "I'll find the money; you give me the plant," Bonbright said. "And second, I want a survey made of this present plant. I know a lot of it is junk, but I'm not competent to say how much. You will know what to do. If I have to junk the whole outfit I'll do it. I don't want to waste money, but I want these mills to be the equal of any mills in the country.... Not only in efficiency, but as a place to work. I want them safe. You will understand. I want the men considered. Give them light and air. Wait till you see our wash rooms!" He shrugged his shoulders. "It isn't enough to have the best machines," he said. "I want the men to be able to do the best that's in them.... You understand?" Mershon nodded. "The next room is yours." Bonbright pointed toward his old office, the one it had been the family custom to close on the accession of the heir apparent, and never to reopen until a new heir was ready to take up his duties. He felt a sort of pleasure in this profanation. "You'll find it large enough. If you need more room, ask for it.... Get what assistants you need." "No more interruption of production than necessary," said Mershon. "Exactly.... And we need that new plant in a hurry. I've taken a contract to make ten thousand engines for Mr. Lightener this year." It was that day that he called Rangar into the room. Rangar had been uneasy, fearful, since his old employer had died. He had been an important figure under the old order; a sort of shadow behind the throne. He wondered what would happen to him now. More especially if Bonbright had a notion of some of his duties under Bonbright's father. He was not kept in suspense. "Mr. Rangar," said Bonbright, "I have been looking through the files. Some of your duties have become clear to me. I was familiar with others.... Perhaps my father required a man like yourself. I do not. The old way of doing things here is gone, and you and I could not be happy together. I shall direct the cashier to give you a check for six months' salary..." "You mean--" "Exactly what I say." "But--you don't understand the business. Who is going to run it while you learn?" "I don't want to know how this business was run. It's not going to be run that way.... There's nothing you could teach me, Mr. Hangar.... Good afternoon." Rangar went white with rage. Animosity toward this young man he had harbored since the beginning; it flowered into hatred. But he dared not voice it. It was not in Hangar's nature to be open, to fight without cover. If he spoke, the check for six months' salary might be withdrawn, so, uttering none of the venom that flooded to his lips, he went away.... Rangar was the sort of man who vows to get even. ... That evening Bonbright sat in his window and watched the army of his employees surge out of the big gate and fill the street. Five thousand of them.... It was a sight that always fascinated him, as it had that first evening when he saw them, and came to a realization of what it meant to be overlord to such a multitude. More than ever he realized it now--for he was their overlord. They were his men. It was he who gave them the work that kept them alive; he who held their happiness, their comfort, their very existence in the hollow of his hand.... And he knew that in every one of those five thousand breasts burned resentment toward him. He knew that their most friendly feeling toward him was suspicion. It was easy to rebuild a plant; it was simple to construct new mills with every device that would make for efficiency. That was not a problem to awe him. It needed but the free expenditure of money, and there was money in plenty.... But here was a task and a problem whose difficulty and vastness filled him with misgiving. He must turn that five thousand into one smooth-running, willing whole. He must turn their resentment, their bitterness, their suspicion, into trust and confidence. He must solve the problem of capital and labor.... An older, more experienced man might have smiled at Bonbright--at his daring to conceive such a possibility. But Bonbright dared to conceive it; dared to set himself the task of bringing it about. That would be his work, peculiarly. No one could help him with it, for it was personal, appertaining to him. It was between Bonbright Foote and the five thousand. It was inevitable that he should feel bitterness toward his father, for, but for his father, his work would now be enormously more simple. If these men knew him as he was--knew of his interest in them, of his willingness to be fair--he would have had their confidence from the start. His father had made him appear a tyrant, without consideration for labor; had made him a capitalist of the most detestable type. It was a deep-seated impression. It had been proven. The men had experienced it; had felt the weight of Bonbright's ruthless hand.... How could he make them believe it was not his hand? How could he make them believe that the measures taken to crush the strike had not been his measures; that they had been carried out under his name but against his will? It sounded absurd even to himself. Nobody would believe it. Therefore he must begin, not at the beginning, but deeper than the beginning. He could not start fairly, but under a handicap so great as to make his chances of winning all but negligible.... It would be useless to tell his men that he had been but a figurehead. For him the only course was to blot out what had gone--to forget it--and to start against odds to win their confidence. It would be better to let them slowly come to believe he was a convert--that there had been a revolution in his heart and mind. Indeed, there was no other way. He must show them by daily studied conduct that he was not what they feared he was.... He did not know what he was himself. His contact with Malcolm Lightener's workingmen had given him certain sympathies with the theories and hopes of labor; but they had made him certain of fallacies and unsoundness in other theories and ambitions. He was not the romantic type of wealthy young man who, in stories, meets the under dog and loves him, and is suddenly converted from being an out-and-out capitalist to the most radical of socialists. It was not in him to be radical, for he was steadied by a quietly running balance wheel.... He was stubborn, too. What he wanted was to be fair, to give what was due--and to receive what was HIS due.... He could not be swayed by mawkish sentimental sympathy, nor could he be bullied. Perhaps he was stiff-necked, but he was a man who must judge of the right or wrong of a condition himself. Perhaps he was too much that way, but his experiences had made him so. If his men tried to bulldoze him they would find him immovable. What he believed was right and just he would do; but he had his own set notions of right and justice. He was sympathetic. His attitude toward the five thousand was one of friendliness. He regarded them as a charge and a responsibility. He was oppressed by the magnitude of the responsibility.... But, on the other hand, he recognized that the five thousand were under certain responsibilities and obligations to him. He would do his part, but he would demand their part of them. His father had been against unions. Bonbright was against unions. His reason for this attitude was not the reason of his father. It was simply this: That he would not be dictated to by individuals who he felt were meddling in his affairs. He had arrived at a definite decision on this point: his mills should never be unionized.... If his men had grievances he would meet with them individually, or committees sent by them--committees of themselves. He would not treat with so-called professional labor men. He regarded them as an impertinence. Whatever differences should arise must be settled between his men and himself--with no outside interference. This was a position from which nothing would move him.... It will be seen he was separated by vast spaces from socialism. He called together his superintendents and department foremen and took them into his confidence regarding his plans for improving and enlarging the plant. They came, if not with an air of hostility, at least with reserve, for they were nearer to the men than they were to Bonbright. They shared the prejudices of the men. Some of them went away from the meeting with all of their old prejudices and with a new belief that Bonbright added hypocrisy to his other vices; some withheld judgment, some were hopeful. Few gave him implicit belief. When he was done describing the plans for the factory, he said: "There is one more thing I want to speak about. It is as vital as the other.... We have recently gone through a strike which has caused bitterness toward this institution on the part of the men. There has been especial bitterness toward myself. I have no defense of myself to make. It is too late to do that. If any of you men know the facts--you know them. On that point I have nothing to say.... This is what I want to impress on you men who are in authority. I want to be fair to every man in this plant. I am going to give them a fit place to work. Many parts of this plant are not now fit places. From every man I shall demand a day's work for a day's pay, but no more. You are in direct authority. I want each of you to treat his men with consideration, and to have an eye for their welfare. Perhaps I shall not be able to make the men feel toward me as I want them to feel, but if it can be brought about, I want them to know that their interests are my interests.... That is all, except that to-morrow notices will be posted in every department stating that my office door is open to any man who works for me--any man may come to me with complaint or with suggestion at any time. The notices will state that I want suggestions, and that any man who can bring me an idea that will improve his work or the work in his department or in the plant will be paid for it according to its value. In short, I want the co-operation of every man who draws wages from this concern...." As they went back to their departments the men who left the meeting discussed Bonbright, as he knew they would and hoped they would. "It's a four flush," declared one old fellow, hotly. "I don't know.... Wait and see," said another. "He looked like he meant it." Wait and see! That was the general attitude. They took nothing on trust, but put it squarely up to Bonbright to prove himself by his actions. Mershon came into the office. "How about this construction work?" he asked. "Need an army of bricklayers. What about the unions?" Was this question coming up so quickly? Bonbright frowned. His attitude toward the unions must become public and would inevitably raise another obstacle between himself and the men, but he was determined on the point. "A man has a right to join the Masons or the Knights of Columbus, or the Bricklayers' Union," he said, presently. "That's for him to say, but when he comes to work here he comes as an individual." "Open shop?" "Yes." "You won't recognize any union? I want to know how I stand with them at the beginning." "I'll recognize no union," said Bonbright. The card of a young man from Richmond's office was brought in. Bonbright sent word for him to be admitted. "I came about that Hammil accident case," said the young man. "Hammil was hurt yesterday, pretty badly, and the report makes it look as if we'd be stuck if the thing goes to a jury." "I know nothing about it," said Bonbright, with a little shock. It was possible, then, for a man to be maimed or killed in his own plant and news of it to reach him after days or perhaps never. He made a note to rectify THAT state of affairs. "You mean that this man Hammil was hurt through our fault?" "I'm afraid a jury would say so." The young man explained the accident in detail. "He complained about the condition of his machine, and his foreman told him he could stick to his job there or quit." "Forced him to work on an unsafe machine or quit?" "Yes." Bonbright stared at his blotter a moment. "What did you want to see me about?" "We'd better settle. Right now I can probably run up and put a wad of bills under Hammil's nose and his wife's, and it'll look pretty big. Before some ambulance-chaser gets hold of him. He hasn't been able to talk until awhile ago, so nobody's seen him." "Your idea is that we could settle for less than a jury would give him?" The young man laughed. "A jury'd give him four or five thousand, maybe more. Doctor says the injury is permanent. I've settled more than one like it for three or four hundred." "The man won't be able to work again?" "Won't be good for much." "And we're responsible!" Bonbright said it to himself, not to the young man. "Is this thing done often--settling these things for--what we can squeeze them down to?" "Of course." The young man was calloused. His job was to settle claims and save money. His value increased as his settlements were small. "Where's Hammil?" "At the General Hospital." Bonbright got up and went to the closet for his hat. "Come on," he said. "You're not going up there, are you?" "Yes." "But--but I can handle it all right, Mr. Foote. There's no need to bother you." "I've no doubt you can handle it--maybe too well," said Bonbright. They were driven to the hospital and shown up to Jim Hammil's room. His wife was there, pale, tearless, by his bedside. Jim was bandaged, groaning, in agony. Bonbright's lips lost their color. He felt guilty. It was HE who had put this man where he was, had smashed him. It was HIS fault. He walked to the bedside. "Jim," he said, "I am Mr. Foote." "I--know--you," said the man between teeth set to hold back his groans. "And I know you," said his wife. "I know you.... What do you want here?" "I came to see Jim," said Bonbright. "I didn't know he was hurt until a few minutes ago.... It's useless to say I'm sorry." "They made him work on that machine. He knowed it wasn't safe.... He had to work on it or lose his job...." "I know that NOW, Mrs. Hammil.... What was he earning?" "Two-seventy-five a day.... And now.... How'll we live, with him in the hospital and maybe never able to work again?" "Here..." protested Hammil, weakly, glaring at Bonbright. "We'll come out all right. He'll pay.... You'll pay, that's what you will. A jury'll make you pay. Wait till I kin see my lawyer...." "You won't need any lawyer, Jim," said Bonbright. It was hard for him to talk. He could not speak to these people as he wanted to, nor say the words that would make their way through their despair and rage to their hearts. "You won't need any lawyer," he repeated. "If you think I'm--goin'--to sign--one of them--releases--you're damn--mistaken," moaned the man. "Jim," said Bonbright, "you needn't sign anything.... What's done can't be mended.... It was bad. It was criminal..." "Mr. Foote," protested the young lawyer. "I'll attend to this," said Bonbright, shortly. "It's between Jim and me.... I'll make it as nearly right as it can be made.... First we'll have you out of this ward into a room.... As long as you are laid up your wife shall have your full pay every week, and then you and I will have a talk to see what can be done. Only don't worry.... Don't worry, Mrs. Hammil...." Hammil uttered a sound that was intended for a laugh. "You can't catch me," he said, in a dreadful voice. "I'm--up to--them sharp tricks.... You're lyin'.... Git out of here, both of you.... You're--jest here--to cheat me." "You're wrong, Jim." "I know--you and--your kind," Jim said, trying to lift himself on his elbow. "I know--what you--done durin'--the strike.... I had a baby--and she--DIED.... You killed her!" His voice rose almost to a scream. "Better go, sir," said a nurse. "He's hurting himself." Bonbright gazed at her blankly. "How can I go?" he asked. "He won't believe me. He's got to believe me...." "You lie!... you lie!..." Hammil cried. "I won't talk to you.... My lawyer'll--do my talkin'." Bonbright paused a moment. Then he saw it would do no good to remain. The man's mind was poisoned against him; was unable to conceive of a man in Bonbright's place meaning him otherwise than treachery.... It went deeper than suspicion of an individual; it was suspicion of a class. "I'll do what I promised, Jim.... That'll prove it to you." "You--lie.... You lie..." the man called after him, and Bonbright heard the words repeated again and again as he walked down the long corridor. CHAPTER XXXI Bonbright worked feverishly. These were the best days he had known since he left college, but they were not happy days. He could not forget Ruth--the best he could do was to prevent himself from remembering too much, and so he worked. He demanded of himself more than it is in a single man to give, but he accomplished an astonishingly large part of it. Day and night he drove himself without relaxation and without pause. If he stopped, the old feeling of emptiness, of the futility of his existence, and the bitterness of his fortune returned. His nature might have become warped, but for the labor. The building of the new shops he left to Mershon, knowing himself incompetent. He knew what sort of shops he wanted; Mershon knew how to produce them, and Mershon was dependable. Bonbright had implicit confidence in the engineer's ability and integrity, and it was justified. The new mills were rising.... Bonbright's part in that was enough to keep one man occupied, for, however much he might leave to Mershon, there were countless details that he must decide; innumerable points to be referred to him and discussed. But his chief interest was not in producing a plant to manufacture engines, but in producing a crew of men to operate the plant; not merely hiring capable workingmen, but producing a condition where himself and those working-men would be in accord; where the men would be satisfied, happy in their work; a condition millennial in that the known as labor unrest should be eliminated. He had set himself to find a solution to the age-old problem of capital and labor.... He had not realized how many elements entered into the matter, and what a high degree of specialized knowledge must be brought to the task. In the beginning he had fancied himself as capable of working out the basis for ideal relations between him and his employees as any other. He soon discovered himself to be all but unequipped for the effort.... It was a saving quality of Bonbright's that he would admit his own futilities. Therefore he called to conference the country's greatest sociologist, Professor Witzer. The professor, a short, wabbling individual, with watery eyes that could read print splendidly if it were held within six inches of them, and who, when he did read, moved book or paper back and forth in front of his spectacles in a droll, owlish, improbable way, instead of letting his eyes travel across the lines of print, was skeptical at first. He suspected Bonbright of being a youth scratching the itch of a sudden and transient enthusiasm. But he became interested. Bonbright compelled his interest, for he was earnest, intense, not enthusiastic, not effervescing with underdone theories. "What you want to do, as I understand it," said the professor, "is merely to revolutionize the world and bring on the millennium." "What I want to do," said Bonbright, "is to formulate a plan that will be fair to labor and fair to me. I want a condition where both of us will be satisfied--and where both will know we are satisfied. It can be done." "Um!..." said the professor. "Are you, by chance, a socialist?" "Far from it." "What are your theories?" "I haven't any theories. I want facts, working facts. There's no use palavering to the men. What they want and what I want is something concrete. I want to know what they want, and how much of it will be good for them. I want something that will work in dollars and cents, in days' work, in making life more comfortable for the women and children at home. If merely paying wages will do it, then I'll pay the wages...." "It won't," said the professor. "But it 'll go quite some distance." "It isn't a matter of sentiment with me," Bonbright said. "It's a matter of business, and peace of mind, and all-around efficiency. I don't mean efficiency in this plant, but efficiency in LIVING.... For the men and their families." "It can't be done by giving them rest rooms with Turkish rugs nor porcelain bathtubs, nor by installing a moving-picture show for them to watch while they eat lunch," said the professor. "It can't be done with money alone. It would work in isolated cases. Give some men a sufficient wage and they would correct their ways of living; they would learn to live decently, and they would save for the rainy day and for old age. I don't venture an estimate of the proportion.... But there would be the fellows whose increased pay meant only that much more to spend. Mighty little would filter through to improve the conditions of their actual living.... In any scheme there will have to be some way of regulating the use of the money they earn--and that's paternalism." "Can it be made to work? It's your honest opinion I'm after." "I don't believe it, but, young man, it will be the most interesting experiment I ever engaged in. Have you any ideas?" "My basic idea is to pay them enough so they can live in comfort. ..." "And then you've got to find some machinery to compel them to live in comfort." "I'd like to see every employee of this concern the owner of his home. I'd like to feel that no man's wife is a drudge. An astonishingly large number of wives do washing, or work out by the day.... And boarders. The boarder is a problem." "You HAVE been thinking," said the professor. "Do I understand that you are offering me the chance to work with you on this experiment?" "Yes." "I accept.... I never dreamed I'd have a chance to meddle with human lives the way you seem to want to meddle with them...." So they went to work, and day after day, week after week, their plan grew and expanded and embraced unforeseen intricacies. Bonbright approached it from the practical side always. The professor came to view him with amazement--and with respect. "I'm sticking my finger into the lives of twenty thousand human beings!" the professor said to himself many times a day, with the joy of the scientist. "I'm being first assistant to the world's greatest meddler. That young man is headed for a place as one of the world's leaders, or for a lamp-post and a rope.... I wonder which...." The thing that Bonbright asked himself many, many times was a different sort of question. "Is this the sort of thing she meant? Would she approve of doing this?" He was not embarked on the project for Ruth's sake. It was not Ruth who had driven him to it, but himself, and the events of his life. But her presence was there.... He was doing his best. He was doing the thing he thought would bring about the condition he desired, and he hoped she would approve if she knew.... But whether she approved or not, he would have persisted along his own way.... If he had never known her, never married her, he would have done the same thing. Some day she would know this, and understand it. It would be another irony for her to bear. The man she had married that she might influence him to ameliorate the conditions of his workingmen was doing far more than she had dreamed of accomplishing herself--and would have done it if she had never been born.... Neither she nor Bonbright realized, perhaps would never realize, that it is not the individual who brings about changes in the social fabric. It is not fanatics, not reformers, not inspired leaders. It is the labored working of the mass, and the working of the mass brings forth and casts up fanatics, reformers, leaders, when it has gestated them and prepared the way for their birth. The individual is futile; his aims and plans are futile save as they are the outcome of the trend of the mass.... Ruth was not so fortunate as Bonbright. Her work did not fill her time nor draw her interest. It was merely the thing she did to earn the necessities of life. She was living now in a boarding house on the lower side of the city, where a room might be had for a sum within her means. It was not a comfortable room. It was not a room that could be made comfortable by any arrangement of its occupant. But it was in a clean house, presided over by a woman of years and respectable garrulity. Six days of the week Ruth worked, and the work became daily more exhausting, demanding more of her nervous organism as her physical organism had less to give. She was not taking care of herself. It is only those who cling to life, who are interested in life and in themselves, who take care of their bodies as they should be taken care of. She had been slight; now she was thin. No one now would have dreamed of calling her the Girl with the Grin. She looked older, lifeless, almost haggard at times. Her condition was not wholly the result of unhappiness. It was due to lack of fresh air and exercise, for she went seldom abroad. It was fear of meeting acquaintances that shut her in her room--fear of meeting Bonbright, fear of encountering Dulac. It was loneliness, too. She made no new acquaintances, and went her way in solitude. She had not so much as a nodding acquaintance with most of her fellow lodgers. Not one of them could boast of conversation with her beyond the briefest passing of the day.... At first they gossiped about her, speculated about her, wove crude stories about her. Some chose to think her exclusive, and endeavored to show her by their bearing that they thought themselves as good as she--and maybe better. They might have saved themselves their trouble, for she never noticed. Lack of proper nourishment did its part. Women seem prone to neglect their food. The housewife, if her husband does not come home to the midday meal, contents herself with a snack, hastily picked up, and eaten without interest. Ruth had no appetite. She went to the table three times a day because a certain quantity of food was a necessity. She did not eat at Mrs. Moody's table, but "went out to her meals...." She ate anywhere and everywhere. Mrs. Moody alone had tried to approach Ruth. Ruth had been courteous, but distant. She wanted no prying into her affairs; no seekers after confidences; no discoverers of her identity. For gossip spreads, and one does not know what spot it may reach.... "It hain't healthy for her to set in her room all the time," Mrs. Moody said to the mercenary who helped with the cooking. "And it hain't natural for a girl like her never to have comp'ny. Since she's been here there hain't been a call at the door for her--nor a letter." "I hain't seen her but once or twict," said the mercenary. "If I was to meet her face to face on the street, I hain't sure I'd know it was her." "She didn't look good when she come, and she's lookin' worse every day. First we know we'll have her down on her back.... And then what?... S'pose she was to be took sudden? Who'd we notify?" "The horspittle," said the mercenary, callously. "She's sich a mite of a thing, with them big eyes lookin' sorry all the while. I feel sort of drawed to her. But she won't have no truck with me... nor nobody.... She hain't never left nothin' layin' around her room that a body could git any idee about her from. Secretive, I call it." "Maybe," said the mercenary, "she's got a past." "One thing's certain, if she don't look better 'fore she looks worse, she won't have a long future." That seemed to be a true saying. Ruth felt something of it. It was harder for her to get up of mornings, more difficult to drag herself to work and hold up during the day. Sometimes she skipped the evening meal now and went straight home to bed. All she wanted was to rest, to lie down.... One day she fainted in the office.... Her burden was harder to support because it included not grief alone, but remorse, and if one excepts hatred, remorse is the most wearing of the emotions.... As she became weaker, less normal, it preyed on her. Then, one morning, she fainted as she tried to get out of bed, and lay on the floor until consciousness returned. She dragged herself back into bed and lay there, gazing dully up at the ceiling, suffering no pain... only so tired. She did not speculate about it. Somehow it did not interest her very much. Even not going to work didn't bother her--she had reached that point. Mrs. Moody had watched her going and coming for several days with growing uneasiness. This morning she knew Ruth had not gone out, and presently the woman slap-slapped up the stairs in her heelless slippers to see about it. She rapped on Ruth's door. There was no response. She rapped again.... "I know you're in there," she said, querulously. "Why don't you answer?" Inside, Ruth merely moved her head from side to side on the pillow. She heard--but what did it matter? Mrs. Moody opened the door and stepped inside. She was prepared for what she saw. "There you be," she said, with a sort of triumphant air, as of one whose prophecy had been fulfilled to the letter, "flat on your back." Ruth paid no attention. "What ails you?" No answer. "Here now"--she spoke sharply--"you know who I be, don't you?" "Yes," said Ruth. "Why didn't you answer?" "I am--so--tired," Ruth said, faintly. "You can't be sick here. Don't you go doin' it. I hain't got no time to look after sick folks." She might as well have spoken to the pillow. Ruth didn't care. She had simply reached the end of her will, and had given up. It was over. She was absolutely without emotion. Mrs. Moody approached the bed and felt of Ruth's hand. She had expected to find it hot. It was cold, bloodless. It gave the woman a start. She looked down at Ruth's face, from which the big eyes stared up at her without seeming to see her. "You poor mite of a thing," said Mrs. Moody, softly. Then she seemed to jack herself up to a realization that softness would not do and that she could not allow such goings-on in her house. "You're sick, and if I'm a judge you're mighty sick," she said, sharply. "Who's goin' to look after you. Say?" The tone stirred Ruth.... "Nobody..." she said, after a pause. "I got to notify somebody," said Mrs. Moody. "Any relatives or friends?" Ruth seemed to think it over as if the idea were hard to comprehend. "Once I--had a--husband..." she said. "But you hain't got him now, apparently. Have you got anybody?" "... Husband..." said Ruth. "... husband.... But he--went away.... No, _I_--went away... because it was--too late then.... It was too late--THEN, wasn't it?" Her voice was pleading. "You know more about it than me," said Mrs. Moody. "I want you should tell me somebody I can notify." "I--loved him... and I didn't know it.... That was--queer--wasn't it?... He NEVER knew it...." "She's clean out of her head," said Mrs. Moody, irritably, "and what'll I do? Tell me that. What'll I do, and her most likely without a cent and all that?... Why didn't you go and git sick somewheres else? You could of...." She wrung her hands and called Providence to witness that all the arrows of misfortune were aimed at her, and always had been. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself--a growd woman like you--makin' me all this nuisance. I sha'n't put up with it. You'll go packin' to the horspittle, that's what you'll do. Mark my word." Mrs. Moody's method of packing Ruth off to the hospital was unique. It consisted of running herself for the doctor. It consisted of listening with bated breath to his directions; it consisted of giving up almost wholly the duties--A conducting her boarding house, and in making gruels and heating water and sitting in Ruth's room wielding a fan over Ruth's ungrateful face. It consisted in spending of her scant supply of money for medicines, in constant attendance and patient, faithful nursing--accompanied by sharp scoldings and recriminations uttered in a monotone guaranteed not to disturb the sick girl. Perhaps she really fancied she was being hard and unsympathetic and calloused. She talked as if she were, but no single act was in tune with her words.... She grumbled--and served. She complained--and hovered over Ruth with clumsy, gentle hands. She was afraid somebody might think her tender. She was afraid she might think so herself.... The world is full of Mrs. Moodys. Ruth lay day after day with no change, half conscious, wholly listless.... It seemed to Mrs. Moody to be nothing but a waiting for the end. But she waited for the end as though the sick girl were flesh of her flesh, protesting to heaven against the imposition, ceaselessly. CHAPTER XXXII If Bonbright's handling of the Hammil casualty created a good impression among the men, his stand against the unions more than counterbalanced it. He was able to get no nearer to the men. Perhaps, as individuals became acquainted with him, there was less open hostility manifested, but there remained suspicion, resentment, which Bonbright was unable to convert into friendship and co-operation. The professor of sociology peered frequently at Bonbright through his thick spectacles with keen interest. He found as much enjoyment in studying his employer as he did in working over his employer's plan. Frequently he discussed Bonbright with Mershon. "He's a strange young man," he said, "an instructive psychological study. Indeed he is. One cannot catalogue him. He is made up of opposites. Look you, Mershon, at his eagerness to better the conditions of his men--that's why I'm abandoning classes of boys who ought to be interested in what I teach them, but aren't--and then place beside it his antagonism to unionism...." Mershon was interested at that instant more in the practical aspects of the situation. "The unions are snapping at our heels. Bricklayers, masons, structural steel, the whole lot. I've been palavering with them--but I'm about to the end of my rope. We've needed men and we've got a big sprinkling of union men. Wages have attracted them. I'm afraid we've got too many, so many the unions feel cocky. They think they're strong enough to take a hand and try to force recognition on us.... He won't have it." Mershon shrugged his shoulders. "I've got to the end of my rope. Yesterday I told him the responsibility was one I didn't hanker for, and put it up to him. He's going to meet with the labor fellows to-day.... And we can look for fireworks." "If I were labor," said the professor, "I think I should leave that young man alone--until I saw where he headed. They're going to get more out of him than organization could compel or even hope for. If they prod him too hard they may upset things. He's fine capacity for stubbornness." The labor representatives were on their way to the office. When they arrived they asked first for Mershon, who received them and notified Bonbright. "Show them in," he said. "We may as well have it over." There were four of the men whom Mershon led through the door into Bonbright's office, but Bonbright saw but one of them-Dulac! The young man half rose from his chair, then sat down with his eyes fixed upon the man into whose hands, he believed, his wife had given herself. It was curious that he felt little resentment toward Dulac, and none of that murderous rage which some men might have felt.... "Mr. Dulac," he said, "I want to--talk with you. Will you ask these--other gentlemen if they will step outside for--a few moments.... I have a personal matter to discuss with--Mr. Dulac." Dulac was not at his ease. He had come in something like a spirit of bravado to face Bonbright, and this turn to the event nonplused him. However, if he would save his face he must rise to the situation. "Just a minute, boys," he said to his companions, and with Mershon they filed into the next room. "Dulac," said Bonbright, in a voice that was low but steady, "is she well and--happy?" "Eh?..." Dulac was startled indeed. "I haven't kept you to--quarrel," said Bonbright. "I hoped she would--wait the year before she went--to you, but it was hers to choose. ... Now that she has chosen--I want to know if it has--made her happy. I want her to be happy, Dulac." Dulac came a step nearer the desk. Something in Bonbright's voice and manner compelled, if not his sympathy, at least something which resembled respect. "Do you mean you don't know where Ruth is?" he asked. "No." "You thought she was with me?" "Yes." "Mr. Foote, she isn't with me.... I wish to God she was. I've seen her only once since--that evening. It was by accident, on the street. ... I tried to see her. I found the place empty, and nobody knew where she'd gone. Even her mother didn't know. I thought you had sent her away." "Dulac," said Bonbright, leaning forward as though drawn by spasmodic contraction of tense muscles, "is this true?" For once Dulac did not become theatrical, did not pose, did not reply to this doubt, as became labor flouting capital. Perhaps it was because the matter lay as close to his stormy heart as it did to Bonbright's. "Yes," he said. "Then where..." "I don't--know." "She's out there alone," said Bonbright, dully. "She's been out there alone--all these months. She's so little.... What made her go away?... Something has happened to her...." "Haven't you had any word--anything?" Dulac was becoming frightened himself. "Nothing--nothing." Bonbright leaped to his feet and took two steps forward and two back. "I've got to know," he said. "She must be found.... Anything could have happened...." "It's up to us to find her," said Dulac, unconsciously, intuitively coupling himself with Bonbright. They were comrades in this thing. The anxiety was equally theirs. "Yes.... Yes." "She wasn't the kind of a girl to--" "No," said Bonbright, quickly, as if afraid to hear Dulac say the words, "she wouldn't do THAT.... Maybe she's just hiding away--or hurt--or sick. I've got to know." "Call back the boys.... Let's get this conference over so we can get at it." Bonbright nodded, and Dulac stepped to the door. The men re-entered. "Now, gentlemen," said Bonbright. "We just came to put the question to you squarely, Mr. Foote. We represent all the trades working on the new buildings. Are you going to recognize the unions?" "No," said Bonbright. "More than half the men on the job are union." "They're welcome to stay," said Bonbright. "Well, they won't stay," said the spokesman. "We've fiddled along with this thing, and the boys are mighty impatient. This is our last word, Mr. Foote. Recognize the unions or we'll call off our men." Bonbright stood up. "Good afternoon, gentlemen," said he. With angry faces they tramped out, all but Dulac, who stopped in the door. "I'm going to look for her," he said. "If you find anything--hear anything--" Dulac nodded. "I'll let you know," he said. "I'll be--searching, too," said Bonbright. Mershon came in. "Here's a letter--" he began. Bonbright shook his head. "Attend to it--whatever it is. I'm going out. I don't know when I shall be back.... You have full authority. ..." He all but rushed from the room, and Mershon stared after him in amazement. Bonbright did not know where he was going, what he was going to do. There was no plan, but his need was action. He must be doing something, searching.... But as he got into his machine he recognized the futility of aimlessness. There was a way of going about such things.... He must be calm. He must enlist aid. Suddenly he thought of Hilda Lightener. He had not seen her for weeks. She had been close to Ruth; perhaps she knew something. He drove to the Lightener residence and asked for her. Hilda was at home. "She's LOST," said Bonbright, as Hilda came into the room. "What? Who are you talking about?" "'Ruth.... She's not with Dulac. He doesn't know where she is; she was never with him." "Did you think she was?" Hilda said, accusingly. "You--you're so--Oh, the pair of you!" "Do you know where she is?" "I haven't seen nor heard of her since the day--your father died." "Something must have happened.... She wouldn't have gone away like that--without telling anybody, even her mother...." "She would," said Hilda. "She--she was hurt. She couldn't bear to stay. She didn't tell me that, but I know.... And it's your fault for--for being blind." "I don't understand." "She loved you," said Hilda, simply. "No.... She told me. She never--loved--me. It was him. She married me to--" "I know what she married you for. I know all about it.... And she thought she loved him. She found out she didn't. But I knew it for a long time," Hilda said, womanlike, unable to resist the temptation to boast of her intuition. "It all came to her that day--and she was going to tell you.... She was going to do that--going to go to you and tell you and ask you to take her back.... She said she'd make you believe her...." "No," said Bonbright, "you're--mistaken, Hilda. She was my wife.... I know how she felt. She couldn't bear to have me pass close to her. ..." "It IS true," Hilda said. "She was going to you.... And then I came and told her your father was dead.... That made it all impossible, don't you see?... Because you knew why she had married you, and you would believe she came back to you because--you owned the mills and employed all those men.... That's what you WOULD have believed, too. ..." "Yes," said Bonbright. "And then--it was more than she could bear. To know she loved you and had loved you a long time--and that you loved her. You do, don't you?" "I can't--help it." "So that made it worse than anything that had gone before--and she went away. She didn't tell even me, but I ought to have known...." "And you haven't even a trace?" "Bonbright, if you find her--what?" "I don't know.... I've just got to find her. I've got to know what's happened...." "Are you going to tell her you love her--and take her back?" "She wouldn't want me.... Oh, you think you are right, Hilda. But I know. I lived with her for weeks and I saw how she felt. You're wrong.... No, I'll just FIND her...." "And leave her as bad off as she was before." "I'll do anything for her--you know that." "Except the one thing she can't do without...." "You don't understand," he said, wearily. "And you're dense and blind--and that's what makes half the cruelty in the world." "Let's not--talk about that part of it, Hilda. Will you help me find her?" "No," said Hilda. "She's where she wants to be. I'm not going to torture her by finding her for you--and then letting her slip back again--into hopelessness. If you'll promise to love her and believe she loves you--I'll try to find her." Bonbright shook his head. "Then let her be. No matter where she is, she's better off than she would be if you found her--and she tried to tell you and you wouldn't believe.... You let her be." "She may be hurt, or sick...." "If she were she'd let somebody know," said Hilda, but in her own mind was a doubt of this. She knew Ruth, she knew to what heights of fanaticism Ruth's determination could rise, and that the girl was quite capable, more especially in her state of overwrought nerves, of dying in silence. "I won't help you," she said, firmly. Bonbright got up slowly, wearily. "I'm sorry," he said. "I thought you--would help.... I'll have to hunt alone, then...." And before she could make up her mind to speak, to tell him she didn't mean what she said, and that she would search with him and help him, he was gone. The only thing he could think of to do was to go once more to their apartment and see if any trace of her could be picked up there. Somebody must have seen her go. Somebody must have seen the furniture going or heard where it was going.... Perhaps somebody might remember the name on the van. He did not content himself with asking the janitor and his wife, who could tell him nothing. He went from tenant to tenant. Few of them remembered even that such a girl had lived there, for tenants in apartment houses change with the months. But one woman, a spinster of the sort who pass their days in their windows and fill their lives meagerly by watching what they can see of their neighbors' activities, gave a hint. She was sure she remembered that particular removal on account of the young woman who moved looking so pale and anxious. Yes, she was sure she did, because she told herself that something must have happened, and it excited her to know that something had happened so close to her. Evidently she had itched with curiosity for days. "It was a green van--I'm sure it was a green van," she said, "because I was working a centerpiece with green leaves, and the van was almost the same shade.... Not quite the same shade, but almost. I held my work up to the window to see, and the van was a little darker...." "Wasn't there a name on it? Didn't you notice the name?" The spinster concentrated on that. "Yes, there was a name. Seems to me it began with an 'S,' or maybe it was a 'W.' Now, wasn't that name Walters? No, seems more as if it was Rogers, or maybe Smith. It was one of those, or something like it. Anyhow, I'm sure it began with a 'B.'..." That was the nearest Bonbright came to gleaning a fact. A green van. And it might not have been a green van. The spinster's memory seemed uncertain. Probably she had worked more than one centerpiece, not all with green leaves. She was as likely to have worked yellow flowers or a pink design.... But Bonbright had no recourse but to look for a green van. He drove to the office of a trucking and moving concern and asked if there were green vans. The proprietor said HIS vans were always yellow. Folks could see them farther and the paint wore better; but all men didn't follow his judgment. Yes, there WERE green vans, though not so good as his, and not so careful of the furniture. He told Bonbright who owned the green vans. It was a storage house. Bonbright went to the huge brick storage building, and persuaded a clerk to search the records. A bill from Bonbright's pocketbook added to the persuasion.... An hour's wait developed that a green van belonging to the company had moved goods from that address--and the spinster was vindicated. "Brought 'em here and stored 'em," said the young man. "Here's the name--Frazer. Ruth Frazer." "That's it," said Bonbright. "That's it." "Storage hain't been paid.... No word from the party. Maybe she'll show up some day to claim 'em. If not, we'll sell 'em for the charges." "Didn't she leave any address?" "Nope." It had been only a cul de sac. Bonbright had come to the end of it, and had only to retrace his steps. It had led him no nearer to his wife. What to do now? He didn't see what he could do, or that anybody could do better than he had done.... He thought of going to the police, but rejected that plan. It was repulsive to him and would be repulsive to Ruth.... He might insert a personal in the paper. Such things were done. But if Ruth were ill she would not see it. If she wanted to hide from him she would not reply. He went to Mrs. Frazer, but Mrs. Frazer only sobbed and bewailed her fate, and stated her opinion of Bonbright in many confused words. It seemed to be her idea that her daughter was dead or kidnapped, and sometimes she appeared to hold both notions simultaneously.... Bonbright got nothing there. Discouraged, he went back to his office, but not to his work. He could not work. His mind would hold no thought but of Ruth.... He must find her. He MUST.... Nothing mattered unless he could find her, and until he found her he would be good for nothing else. He tried to pull himself together. "I've got to work," he said. "I've got to think about something else...." But his will was unequal to the performance.... "Where is she?... Where is she?.." The question, the DEMAND, repeated itself over and over and over. CHAPTER XXXIII There was a chance that a specialist, a professional, might find traces of Ruth where Bonbright's untrained eyes missed them altogether. So, convinced that he could do nothing, that he did not in the least know how to go about the search, he retained a firm of discreet, well-recommended searchers for missing persons. With that he had to be content. He still searched, but it was because he had to search; he had to feel that he was trying, doing something, but no one realized the uselessness of it more than himself. He was always looking for her, scanned every face in the crowd, looked up at every window. In a day or two he was able to force himself to work steadily, unremittingly again. The formula of his patent medicine, with which he was to cure the ills of capital-labor, was taking definite shape, and the professor was enthusiastic. Not that the professor felt any certainty of effecting a permanent cure; he was enthusiastic over it as a huge, splendid experiment. He wanted to see it working and how men would react to it. He had even planned to write a book about it when it should have been in operation long enough to show what its results would be. Bonbright was sure. He felt that it would bridge the gulf between him and his employees--that gulf which seemed now to be growing wider and deeper instead of disappearing. Mershon's talk was full of labor troubles, of threatened strikes, of consequent delays. "We can finish thirty days ahead of schedule," he said to Bonbright, "if the unions leave us alone." "You think I ought to recognize them," Bonbright said. "Well, Mr. Mershon, if labor wants to cut its own throat by striking--let it strike. I'm giving it work. I'm giving it wages that equal or are higher than union scale. They've no excuse for a strike. I'm willing to do anything within reason, but I'm going to run my own concern. Before I'll let this plant be unionized I'll shut it down. If I can't finish the new shops without recognizing the unions, then they'll stand as they are." "You're the boss," said Mershon, with a shrug. "Do you know there's to be a mass meeting in the armory to-night? I think the agitator people are going to try to work the men up to starting trouble." "You think they'll strike?" "I KNOW they will." "All the men, or just the steel workers and bricklayers and temporary employees on the new buildings?" "I don't know.... But if any of them go out it's going to make things mighty bad." "I'll see what can be done," said Bonbright. The strike must be headed off if possible. It would mean a monstrously costly delay; it might mean a forfeiture of his contract with Lightener. It might mean that he had gone into this new project and expended hundreds of thousands of dollars to equip for the manufacture of engines in vain.... The men must not strike. There seemed no way to avert it but to surrender, and that Bonbright did not even consider.... He called in the professor. "The plan is practically complete, isn't it?" he asked. "I'd call it so. The skeleton is there and it's covered with flesh. Some of the joints creak a little and maybe there's an ear or an eyebrow missing.... But those are details." Bonbright nodded. "We'll try it out," he said. "To-night there's a mass meeting--to stir our men up to strike. They mustn't strike, and I'm going to stop them--with the plan." "Eh?" said the professor. "I'm going to the meeting," said Bonbright. "You're--young man, you're crazy." "I'm going to head off that strike. I'm going there and I'm going to announce the plan." "They won't let you speak." "I think they will.... Curiosity will make them." The young man did understand something of human nature, thought the professor. Curiosity would, most likely, get a hearing for him. "It's dangerous," said he. "The men aren't in a good humor. There might be some fanatic there--" "It's a chance," said Bonbright, "but I've got to take it." "I'll go with you," said the professor. "No. I want to be there alone. This thing is between my men and me. It's personal. We've got to settle it between ourselves." The professor argued, pleaded; but Bonbright was stubborn, and the professor had previous acquaintance with Bonbright's stubbornness. Its quality was that of tool steel. Bonbright had made up his mind to go and to go alone. Nobody could argue him out of it. Bonbright did go alone. He went early in order to obtain a good position in the hall, a mammoth gathering place capable of seating three thousand people. He entered quietly, unostentatiously, and walked to a place well toward the front, and he entered unobserved. The street before the hall was full of arguing, gesticulating men. Inside were other loudly talking knots, sweltering in the closeness of the place. In corners, small impromptu meetings were listening to harangues not on the evening's program. Already half the seats were taken by the less emotional, more stolid men, who were content to wait in silence for the real business of the meeting. There was an air of suspense, of tenseness, of excitement. Bonbright could feel it. It made him tingle; it gave him a sensation of vibrating emptiness resembling that of a man descending in a swift elevator. Bonbright was not accustomed to public speaking, but, somehow, he did not regard what he was about to say as a public speech. He did not think of it as being kindred to oratory. He was there to talk business with a gathering of his men, that was all. He knew what he was going to say, and he was going to say it clearly, succinctly, as briefly as possible. In half an hour the chairs on the platform were occupied by chairman, speakers, union officials. The great hall was jammed, and hundreds packed about the doors in the street without, unable to gain admission.... The chairman opened the meeting briefly. Behind him Bonbright saw Dulac, saw the members of the committee that had waited on him, saw other men known to him only because he had seen their pictures from time to time in the press. It was an imposing gathering of labor thought. Bonbright had planned what he would do. It was best, he believed, to catch the meeting before it had been excited by oratory, before it had been lashed to anger. It was calmer, more reasonable now than it would be again. He arose to his feet. "Mr. Chairman," he said, distinctly. The chairman paused; Bonbright's neighbors turned to stare; men all over the hall rose and craned their necks to have a view of the interrupter. "Sit down!...Shut up!" came cries from here and there. Then other cries, angry cries. "It's Foote!... It's the boss! Out with him!... Out with him!" "Mr. Chairman," said Bonbright, "I realize this is unusual, but I hope you will allow me to be heard. Every man here must admit that I am vitally interested in what takes place here to-night.... I come in a friendly spirit, and I have something to say which is important to me and to you. I ask you to hear me. I will be brief..." "Out with him!... No!... Throw him out!" came yells from the floor. The house was on its feet, jostling, surging. Men near to Bonbright hesitated. One man reached over the shoulders of his fellows and struck at Bonbright. Another shoved him back. "Let him talk.... Let's hear him," arose counter-cries. The meeting threatened to get beyond control, to become a mob. The chairman, familiar with the men he dealt with, acted quickly. He turned to Dulac and whispered, then faced the hall with hands upheld. "Mr. Foote is here uninvited," he said. "He requests to be heard. Let us show him that we are reasonable, that we are patient.... Mr. Dulac agrees to surrender a portion of his time to Mr. Foote. Let us hear what he has to say." Bonbright pushed his way toward the aisle and moved forward. Once he stumbled, and almost fell, as a man thrust out a foot to trip him--and the hall laughed. "Speak your piece. Speak it nice," somebody called, and there was another laugh. This was healthier, safer. Bonbright mounted the platform and advanced to its edge. "Every man here," he said, "is an employee of mine. I have tried to make you feel that your interests are my interests, but I seem to have failed--or you would not be here. I have tried to prove that I want to be something more than merely your employer, but you would not believe me." "Your record's bad," shouted a man, and there was another laugh. "My record is bad," said Bonbright. "I could discuss that, but it wouldn't change things. Since I have owned the mills my record has not been bad. There are men here who could testify for me. All of you can testify that conditions have been improved.... But I am not here to discuss that. I am here to lay before you a plan I have been working on. It is not perfect, but as it stands it is complete enough, so that you can see what I am aiming at. This plan goes into effect the day the new plant starts to operate." "Does it recognize the unions?" came from the floor. "No," said Bonbright. "Please listen carefully.... First it establishes a minimum wage of five dollars a day. No man or woman in the plant, in any capacity, shall be paid less than five dollars a day. Labor helps to earn our profits and labor should share in them. That is fair. I have set an arbitrary minimum of five dollars because there must be some basis to work from...." The meeting was silent. It was nonplused. It was listening to the impossible. Every man, every employee, should be paid five dollars a day! "Does that mean common labor?" "It means everyone," said Bonbright. "It means the man who sweeps out the office, the man who runs the elevator, the man who digs a ditch. Every man does his share and every man shall have his share. "I want every man to live in decent comfort, and I want his wife and babies to live in comfort. With these wages no man's wife need take in washing nor work out by the day to help support the family. No man will need to ask his wife to keep a boarder to add to the family's earnings...." The men listened now. Bonbright's voice carried to every corner and cranny of the hall. Even the men on the platform listened breathlessly as he went on detailing the plan and its workings. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the world's history. No such offer had ever been made to workingmen by an employer capable of carrying out his promises.... He told them what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it. He told them what he wanted them to do to co-operate with him--of an advisory board to be elected by the men, sharing in deliberations that affected the employees, of means to be instituted to help the men to save and to take care of their savings, of a strict eight-hour day.... No union had ever dreamed of asking such terms of an employer. "How do we know you'll do it?" yelled a man. "You have my word," said Bonbright. "Rats!" "Shut up... shut up!" the objector was admonished. "That's all, men," Bonbright said. "Think it over. This plan is going into effect. If you want to share in it you can do so, every one of you.... Thank you for listening." Bonbright turned and sat down in a chair on the platform, anxious, watching that sea of faces, waiting to see what would happen. Dulac leaped to his feet. "It's a bribe," he shouted. "It's nothing but an attempt to buy your manhood for five dollars a day. We're righting for a principle--not for money.... We're--" But his voice was drowned out. The meeting had taken charge of itself. It wanted to listen to no oratory, but to talk over this thing that had happened, to realize it, to weigh it, to determine what it meant to them. Abstract principle must always give way to concrete fact. The men who fight for principle are few. The fight is to live, to earn, to continue to exist. Men who had never hoped to earn a hundred dollars a month; men who had for a score of years wielded pick and shovel for two dollars a day or less, saw, with eyes that could hardly believe, thirty dollars a week. It was wealth! It was that thirty dollars that gripped them now, not the other things. Appreciation of them would come later, but now it was the voice of money that was in their ears. What could a man do with five dollars a day? He could live--not merely exist.... The thing that could not be had come to pass. Dulac shouted, demanded their attention. He might as well have tried to still the breakers that roared upon a rocky shore. Dulac did not care for money. He was a revolutionist, a thinker, a man whose work lay with conditions, not with individuals. Here every man was thinking as an individual; applying that five dollars a day to his own peculiar, personal affairs.... Already men were hurrying out of the hall to carry the amazing tidings home to their wives. Dulac stormed on. One thing was apparent to Bonbright. The men believed him. They believed he had spoken the truth. He had known they would believe him; somehow he had known that. The thing had swept them off their feet. In all that multitude was not a man whose life was not to be made easier, whose wife and children were not to be happier, more comfortable, removed from worry. It was a moving sight to see those thousands react. They were drunk with it. An old man detached himself from the mass and rushed upon the platform. "It's true?... It's true?" he said, with tears running down his face. "It's true," said Bonbright, standing up and offering his hand. That was the first of hundreds. Some one shouted, hoarsely, "Hurrah for Foote!" and the armory trembled with the shout. The thing was done. The thing he had come to do was accomplished. There would be no strike. Dulac had fallen silent, was sitting in his chair with his face hidden. For him this was a defeat, a bitter blow. Bonbright made his way to him. "Mr. Dulac," he said, "have you found her?" "You've bribed them.... You've bought them," Dulac said, bitterly. "I've given them what is theirs fairly.... Have you found any trace of her?" Even in this moment, which would have thrilled, exalted another, which would have made another man drunk with achievement, Bonbright could think of Ruth. Even now Ruth was uppermost in his mind. All this mattered nothing beside her. "Have you got any trace?" he asked. "No," said Dulac. CHAPTER XXXIV Next morning the whole city breakfasted with Bonbright Foote. His name was on the tongue of every man who took in a newspaper, and of thousands to whom the news of his revolutionary profit-sharing or minimum-wage plan was carried by word of mouth. It was the matter of wages that excited everyone. In those first hours they skipped the details of the plan, those details which had taken months of labor and thought to devise. It was only the fact that a wealthy manufacturer was going to pay a minimum wage of five dollars a day. The division between capital and labor showed plainly in the reception of the news. Capital berated Bonbright; labor was inclined to fulsomeness. Capital called him on the telephone to remonstrate and to state its opinion of him as a half-baked idiot of a young idealist who was upsetting business. Labor put on its hat and stormed the gates of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, seeking for five-dollar jobs. Not hundreds of them came, but thousands. The streets were blocked with applicants, every one eager for that minimum wage. The police could not handle the mob. It was there for a purpose and it intended to stay.... When it was rebuked, or if some one tried to tell them there were no jobs for it, it threw playful stones through the windows. It was there at dawn; it still remained at dark. A man who had an actual job at Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was a hero, an object of admiring interest to his friends and neighbors. The thing touched him. There had been a miraculous laying on of hands, under which had passed away poverty. So must the friends and acquaintances of a certain blind man whose sight was restored by a bit of divine spittle have regarded him. Malcolm Lightener did not content himself with telephoning. He came in person to say his say to Bonbright, and he said it with point and emphasis. "I thought I taught you some sense in my shop," he said, as he burst into Bonbright's office. "What's this I hear now? What idiocy are you up to? Is this infernal newspaper story true?" "Substantially," said Bonbright. "You're crazy. What are you trying to do? Upset labor conditions in this town so that business will go to smash? I thought you had a level head. I had confidence in you--and here you go, shooting off a half-cocked, wild-eyed, socialistic thing! Did you stop to think what effect this thing would have on other manufacturers?" "Yes," said Bonbright. "It'll pull labor down on us. They'll say we can afford to pay such wages if you can." "Well," said Bonbright, "can't you?" "You've sowed a fine crop of discontent. It's damned unfair. You'll have every workingman in town flocking to you. You'll get the pick of labor." "That's good business, isn't it?" Bonbright asked, with a smile. "Now, Mr. Lightener, there isn't any use thrashing me. The plan is going into effect. It isn't half baked. I haven't gone off half cocked. It is carefully planned and thought out--and it will work. There'll be flurries for a few days, and then things will come back to the normal for you fellows.... I wish it wouldn't. You're a lot better able than I am to do what I'm doing, and you know it. If you can, you ought to." "No man has a right to go ahead deliberately and upset business." "I'm not upsetting it. I'm merely being fair, and that's what business should have been years ago. I'm able to pay a five-dollar minimum, and labor earns it. Then it ought to have it. If you can pay only a four-dollar minimum, then you should pay it. Labor earns it for you.... If there's a man whose labor earns for him only a dollar and seventy-five cents a day, and that man pays it, he's doing as much at I am..." "Bonbright," said Malcolm Lightener, getting to his feet, "I'm damn disappointed in you." "Come in a year and tell me so, then I'll listen to you," said Bonbright. "This nonsense won't last a year. It won't pan out. You'll have to give it up, and then what? You'll be in a devil of a pickle, won't you?" "All you see is that five dollars. In a day or two the whole plan will be ready. I'm having it printed in a pamphlet, and I'll send you one. If you read it carefully and can come back and tell me it's nonsense, then I don't know you. You might let me go under suspended sentence at least." Lightener shrugged his heavy shoulders. "Take one chunk of advice," he said. "Keep away from the club for a few days. If the boys feel the way I do they're apt to take you upstairs and drown you in a bathtub." That was the side of the affair that Bonbright saw most during the day. Telephone messages, letters, telegrams, poured in and cluttered his desk. After a while he ceased to open them, for they were all alike; all sent to say the same thing that Malcolm Lightener had said. Capital looked upon him as a Judas and flayed him with the sharpest words they could choose. He read all the papers, but the papers reflected the estimated thought of their subscribers. But to all of them the news was the big news of the day. No headline was too large to announce it... But the papers, even those with capitalistic leanings, were afraid to be too outspoken. Gatherers of news come to have some knowledge of human nature, and these men saw deeper and farther and quicker than the Malcolm Lighteners. They did not commit themselves so far but that a drawing back and realignment would be possible... No little part of Bonbright's day was spent with reporters. The news came to every house in the city. It came even to Mrs. Moody's obscure boarding house, and the table buzzed with it. It mounted the stairs with Mrs. Moody to the room where Ruth lay apathetically in her bed, not stronger, not weaker, taking no interest in life. Mrs. Moody sat daily beside Ruth's bed and talked or read. She read papers aloud and books aloud, and grumbled. Ruth paid slight attention, but lay gazing up at the ceiling, or closed her eyes and pretended she was asleep. She didn't care what was going on in the world. What did it matter, for she believed she was going to leave the world shortly. The prospect did not frighten her, nor did it gladden her. She was indifferent to it. Mrs. Moody sat down in her rocker and looked at Ruth triumphantly. "I'll bet this'll interest you," she said. "I'll bet when I read this you won't lay there and pertend you don't hear. If you do it's because somethin's wrong with your brains, that's all I got to say. Sick or well, it's news to stir up a corpse." She began to read. The first words caught Ruth's attention. The words were Bonbright Foote. She closed her eyes, but listened. Her thoughts were not clear; her mental processes were foggy, but the words Mrs. Moody was reading were important to her. She realized that. It was something she had once been interested in--terribly interested in... She tried to concentrate on them; tried to comprehend. Presently she interrupted, weakly: "Who--who is it--about?" she asked. "Bonbright Foote, the manufacturer. I read it out plain." "Yes... What is it?... I didn't--understand very well. What did he--do?" Mrs. Moody began again, impatiently. This time it was clearer to Ruth ... Once she had tried to do something like this thing she was hearing about--and that was why she was here... It had something to do with her being sick... And with Bonbright... It was hard to remember. "Even the floor sweepers git it," said Mrs. Moody, interpreting the news story. "Everybody gits five dollars a day at least, and some gits more." "Everybody?..." said Ruth. "HE'S--giving it to--them?" "This Mr. Foote is. Yes." Suddenly Ruth began to cry, weakly, feebly. "I didn't help," she wailed, like an infant. Her voice was no stronger. "He did it alone--all alone... I wasn't there..." "No, you was right here. Where would you be?" "I wonder--if he did--it--for me?" Her voice was piteous, pleading. "For you? What in goodness name have YOU got to do with it? He did it for all them men--thousands of 'em.... And jest think what it'll mean to 'em!... It'll be like heaven comin' to pass." "What--have I--got to do--with it?" Ruth repeated, and then cried out with grief. "Nothing... Nothing.... NOTHING. If I'd never been born--he would have done it--just the same." "To be sure," said Mrs. Moody, wondering. "I guess your head hain't jest right to-day." "Read... Please read... Every word. Don't miss a word." "Well, I swan! You be int'rested. I never see the like." And the good woman read on, not skipping a word. Ruth followed as best she could, seeing dimly, but, seeing that the thing that was surpassed was the thing she had once sacrificed herself in a futile effort to bring about... It was rather vague, that past time in which she had striven and suffered... But she had hoped to do something... What was it she had done? It was something about Bonbright... What was it? It had been hard, and she had suffered. She tried to remember.... And then remembrance came. She had MARRIED him! "He's good--so good," she said, tearfully. "I shouldn't have--done it ... I should have--trusted him... because I knew he was good--all the tune." "Who was good?" asked Mrs. Moody. "My husband," said Ruth. "For the land sakes, WHAT'S HE got to do with this? Hain't you listenin' at all?" "I'm listening... I'm listening. Don't stop." Memory was becoming clearer, the fog was being blown away, and the past was showing in sharper outline. Events were emerging into distinctness. She stared at the ceiling with widening eyes, listening to Mrs. Moody as the woman stumbled on; losing account of the reading as her mind wandered off into the past, searching, finding, identifying... She had been at peace. She had not suffered. She had lain in a lethargy which held away sharp sorrow and bitter thoughts. They were now working their way through to her, piercing her heart. "Oh!..." she cried. "Oh!..." "What ails you now? You're enough to drive a body wild. What you cryin'about? Say!" "I--I love him... That's why I hid away--because I--loved him--and--and his father died. That was it. I remember now. I couldn't bear it..." "Was it him or his father you was in love with?" asked Mrs. Moody, acidly. "I--hated his father... But when he died I couldn't tell HIM--I loved him... He wouldn't have believed me." "Say," said Mrs. Moody, suddenly awakening to the possibilities of Ruth's mood, "who was your husband, anyhow?" Ruth shook her head. "I--can't tell you... You'd tell him... He mustn't find me--because I--couldn't bear it." The mercenary came to the door. "Young woman at the door wants to see you," she said. "Always somebody. Always trottin' up and down stairs. Seems like a body never gits a chance to rest her bones.... I'm comin'. Say I'll be right downstairs." In the parlor Mrs. Moody found a young woman of a world with which boarding houses have little acquaintance. She glanced through the window, and saw beside the curb a big car with a liveried chauffeur. "I vum!" she said to herself. "I'm Mrs. Moody, miss," she said. "What's wanted?" "I'm looking for a friend... I'm just inquiring here because you're on my list of boarding houses. I guess I've asked at two hundred if I've asked at one." "What's your friend's name? Man or woman?" "Her name is Foote. Ruth Foote." "No such person here... We got Richards and Brown and Judson, and a lot of 'em, but no Foote." The young woman sighed. "I'm getting discouraged.... I am afraid she's ill somewhere. It's been months, and I can't find a trace. She's such a little thing, too.... Maybe she's changed her name. Quite likely." "Is she hidin' away?" asked Mrs. Moody. "Yes--you might say that. Not hiding because she DID anything, but because--her heart was broken." "Um!... Little, was she? Sort of peaked and thin?" "Yes." "Ever hear the name of Frazer?" "Why, Mrs. Moody--do you--That was her name before she was married ..." "You come along with me," ordered Mrs. Moody, and led the way up the stairs. "Be sort of quietlike. She's sick..." Mrs. Moody opened Ruth's door and pointed in. "Is it her?" she asked. Hilda did not answer. She was across the room in an instant and on her knees beside the bed. "Ruth!... Ruth!... how could you?..." she cried. Ruth turned her head slowly and looked at Hilda. There was no light of gladness in her eyes; instead they were veiled with trouble. "Hilda..." she said. "I didn't--want to be found. Go away and--and unfind me." "You poor baby!... You poor, absurd, silly baby!" said Hilda, passing her arm under Ruth's shoulders and drawing the wasted little body to her closely. "I've looked for you, and looked. You've no idea the trouble you've made for me... And now I'm going to take you home. I'm going to snatch you up and bundle you off." "No," said Ruth, weakly. "Nobody must know... HE--mustn't know." "Fiddlesticks!" "Do you know?... He's done something--but it wasn't for me... I didn't have ANYTHING to do with it... Do you know what he's done?" "I know," said Hilda. "It was splendid. Dad's all worked up over it, but I think it is splendid just the same." "Splendid," said Ruth, slowly, thoughtfully--"splendid... Yes, that's it--SPLENDID." She seemed childishly pleased to discover the word, and repeated it again and again. Presently she turned her eyes up to Hilda's face, lifted a white, blue-veined, almost transparent hand, and touched Hilda's face. "I"--she seemed to have difficulty to find a word, but she smiled like a tiny little girl--"I--LIKE you," she said, triumphantly. "I'm--sorry you came--but I--like you." "Yes, dear," said Hilda. "You'd BETTER like me." "But," said Ruth, evidently striving to express a differentiation, "I--LOVE him." Hilda said nothing; there was nothing she could say, but her eyes brimmed at the pitifulness of it. She abhorred tears. "I'm going now, dear," she said. "I'll fix things for you and be back in no time to take you home with me.... So be all ready." "No..." said Ruth. "Yes," Hilda laughed. "You'll help, won't you, Mrs. Moody?" "Hain't no way out of it, I calc'late," said the woman. "I won't be half an hour, Ruth... Good-by." But Ruth had turned away her face and would not answer. "Say," said Mrs. Moody, in a fever of curiosity which could not be held in check after they had passed outside of Ruth's room, "who is she, anyhow?... SOMEBODY, I'll perdict. Hain't she somebody?" "She's Mrs. Foote... Mrs. Bonbright Foote." "I SWAN to man!... And me settin' there readin' to her about him. If it don't beat all... Him with all them millions, and her without so much as a nest like them beasts and birds of the air, in Scripture. I never expected nothin' like this would ever happen to me..." Hilda saw that Mrs. Moody was glorifying God in her heart that this amazing adventure, this bit out of a romance, had come into her drab life. "Is that there your auto?" Mrs. Moody asked, peering out with awe at the liveried chauffeur. Hilda nodded. "And who be you, if I might ask?" Mrs. Moody said. "My name is Hilda Lightener, Mrs. Moody." "Not that automobile man's daughter--the one they call the automobile king?" "They call dad lots of things," said Hilda, with a sympathetic laugh. She liked Mrs. Moody. "I'll be back directly," she said, and left the good woman standing in an attitude suggestive of mental prostration, actually, literally, gasping at this marvel that had blossomed under her very eyes. As Hilda's car moved away she turned, picked up her skirts, and ran toward the kitchen. The news was bursting out of her. She was leaking it along the way as she sought the mercenary to pour it into her ears. Hilda was driving, not to her home, but to Bonbright Foote's office. CHAPTER XXXV Dulac was on his way to Bonbright's office, too. He had started before Hilda, and arrived before she did. If he had been asked why he was going, it is doubtful if he could have told. He was going because he had to go... with fresh, burning hatred of Bonbright in his heart. Bonbright was always the obstacle he encountered. Bonbright upset every calculation, brought his every plan to nothing. He believed it was Bonbright who had broken the first strike, that strike upon which he had pinned such high hopes and which meant so much to labor. It had been labor's entering wedge into the automobile world. Then Bonbright had married the girl he loved. Some men can hate sufficiently for that cause alone... Ruth had loved him, but she had married Bonbright. He had gone to take her away, had seen her yielding to him--and Bonbright had come. Again he had intervened. And now, better equipped than for the first strike, with chances of success multiplied, Bonbright had intervened again--with his plan. Dulac did not consider the plan; did not perceive virtues in it, not the intent that was behind it. He did not see that labor was getting without effort benefits that no strike could bring. He did not see the happiness that it brought to thousands... All he saw was that it had killed the new strike before birth. He regarded it as sharp practice, as a scheme for his undoing. The thing he fought for was the principle of unionization. Nothing else mattered; not money, not comforts, not benefits multiplied could weigh against it... He was true to his creed, honest in its prosecution, sincere in his beliefs and in his efforts to uplift the conditions of his fellow men. He was a fanatic, let it be admitted, but a fanatic who suffered and labored for his cause. He was stigmatized as a demagogue, and many of the attributes of the demagogue adhered to him. But he was not a demagogue, for he sought nothing for himself... His great shortcoming was singleness of vision. He fixed his eyes upon one height and was unable to see surrounding peaks. So he was going to see the man who had come between him and every object he had striven for... And he did not know why. He followed impulse, as he was prone to follow impulse. Restraints were not for him; he was a thinker, he believed, and after his fashion he WAS a thinker.... But his mind was equipped with no stabilizer. The impulse to see Bonbright was conceived in hatred and born in bitterness. It was such an impulse as might, in its turn, breed children capable of causing a calloused world to pause an instant on its way and gasp with horror. He brushed aside the boy who asked his business with Mr. Foote, and flung open Bonbright's door. On the threshold he stood speechless, tense with hatred, eyes that smoldered with jealousy, with rage, burning in hollows dug by weariness and labor and privation. He closed the door behind him slowly. Bonbright looked up and nodded. Dulac did not reply, but stared, crouching a little, his lips drawn a trifle back so that a glint of white showed between. "You wanted to see me?" said Bonbright. "Yes," said Dulac. The word was spoken so low, so tensely, that it hardly reached Bonbright's ears. That was all. He said no more, but stood, haggard and menacing. Bonbright eyed him, saw his drawn face, saw the hatred in his eyes. Neither spoke, but eye held eye. Bonbright's hand moved toward a button on his desk, but did not touch it. Somehow he was not surprised, not startled, not afraid--yet he knew there was danger. A word, a movement, might unleash the passions that seethed within Dulac.... Dulac stepped one step toward Bonbright, and paused. The movement was catlike, graceful. It had not been willed by Dulac. He had been drawn that step as iron is drawn to magnet. His eyes did not leave Bonbright's. Bonbright's eyes did not leave Dulac's. It seemed minutes before Dulac made another forward movement, slowly, not lifting his foot, but sliding it along the rug to its new position.... Then immovability.... Then another feline approach. Step after step, with that tense pause between--and silence! It seemed to Bonbright that Dulac had been in the room for hours, had taken hours to cross it to his desk. Now only the desk separated them, and Dulac bent forward, rested his clenched fists on the desk, and held Bonbright's eyes with the fire of his own.... His body moved now, bending from the waist. Not jerkily, not pausing, but slowly, slowly, as if he were being forced downward by a giant hand. ... His face approached Bonbright's face. And still no word, no sound. Now his right hand moved, lifted. He supported his weight on his left arm. The right moved toward Bonbright, opening as it moved. There was something inexorable about its movement, something that seemed to say it did not move by Dulac's will, but that it had been ordained so to move since the beginning of time.... It approached and opened, fingers bent clawlike. Bonbright remained motionless. It seemed to him that all the conflict of the ages had centered itself in this man and himself; as if they were the chosen champions, and the struggle had been left to them... He was ready. He did not seek to avoid it, because it seemed inevitable. There could never be peace between him and Dulac, and, strangely enough, the thought was present in his brain that the thing was symbolical. He was the champion of his class, Dulac the champion of HIS class--between which there could never be peace and agreement so long as the classes existed. He wondered if himself and Dulac had been appointed to abolish each other... In those vibrating seconds Bonbright saw and comprehended much. The hand still approached. Bonbright saw a change in the fire of Dulac's eyes, a sudden upleaping blaze, and braced himself for the surge of resistance, the shock of combat. The door opened unheeded by either, and Hilda stood in the opening. "I've found her..." she said. Dulac uttered a gulping gasp and closed his eyes, that had been unwinking, closed his eyes a moment, and with their closing the tenseness went out of him and he sagged downward so that his body rested on the desk. Bonbright shoved himself back and leaped to his feet. "Hilda..." he said, and his voice was tired; the voice of a man who has undergone the ultimate strain. "I've found her. She's ill--terribly ill. You must go to her." Dulac raised himself and looked at her. "You've found--HER?" he said. "We must go to her," said Bonbright. He was not speaking to Hilda, but to Dulac. It seemed natural, inevitable, that Dulac should go with him. Dulac was IN this, a part of it. Ruth and Dulac and he were the three actors in this thing, and it was their lives that pivoted about it. They went down to the car silently, Dulac breathing deeply, like a man who had labored to weariness. In silence they drove to Mrs. Moody's boarding house, and in silence they climbed the stairs to Ruth's little room. Mrs. Moody hovered about behind them, and the mercenary sheltered her body behind the kitchen door, her head through the narrow opening, looking as if she were ready to pop it back at the least startling movement. The three entered softly. Ruth seemed to be sleeping, for her eyes were closed and she was very still. Bonbright stood at one side of her bed, Dulac stood across from him, but they were unconscious of each other. Both were looking downward upon Ruth. She opened her eyes, saw Bonbright standing over her; shut them again and moved her head impatiently. Again she opened her eyes, and looked from Bonbright to Dulac. Her lips parted, her eyes widened... She pointed a trembling finger at Dulac. "Not you..." she whispered. "Not you... HIM." She moved her finger until it indicated Bonbright. "I don't--believe you're--really there... either of you," she said, "but I--like to have--YOU here.... You're my husband.... I LOVE my husband," she said, and nodded her head. "BONBRIGHT!" whispered Hilda. He did not need the admonition, but was on his knees beside her, drawing her to him. He could not speak. Ruth sighed as she felt his touch. "You're REAL," she whispered. "Is he real, too?" "We're all real, dear," said Hilda. "Ask HIM--please to go away, then," Ruth said, pointing to Dulac. "I don't want to--hurt him... but he knows I--don't want him...." "Ruth!" Dulac's utterance was a groan. "YOU know--don't you, Hilda?... I told you--a long time ago... I never loved--HIM at all. Isn't that--queer?... I thought I did--but--I didn't know... It was something else... You won't feel too bad ... will you?" Ruth looked up at Dulac. "I think you--better--go," she said, gently. He looked at Ruth, looked at Bonbright. Then he turned and, stumbling a little as he went, fumbling, to open the door, he obeyed. They listened in silence to the slow descent of his footsteps; to the opening and closing of the door, as Dulac passed out into the street. "Poor--man!" said Ruth. "Bonbright," said Hilda, "do you believe me now?" He nodded. Hilda moved toward the door. "If you want her--cure her ... Nobody else can. You've got the only medicine." And she left them alone. "I--loved you all the time, but... I didn't know... I was going... to tell you... and then HE died. Hilda knows. You'll... believe me, won't you?" "Yes," was all he could say. "And you... want me back? You... want me to be your... wife?" "Yes." She sighed happily. "I'll get... well, then... It wasn't worth the--the BOTHER before." Neither of them spoke for a time; then she said: "I saw about it... in the papers. It was... splendid." She used proudly the word Hilda had found for her. "I was... proud." Then: "You haven't... said anything. Isn't there... something you ... ought to say?" He bent over closer and whispered it in her ear, not once, but many times. She shut her eyes, but her lips smiled and her fragile arms drew his head even closer, her white hand stroked his cheek. "If it's all... REAL," she said, "why don't you... KISS me?" Words were not for him. Here was a moment when those symbols for thoughts which we have agreed upon and called words, could not express what must be expressed. As there are tones too high or too low to be sounded on any instrument, so too there are thoughts too tender to be expressed by words. "Do you really... WANT me?" She wanted to be told and told again and again. "I'll be a... nice wife," she said. "I promise... I think we'll be... very happy." "Yes," he said. "I'll never... run away any more... will I?" "No." "You'll--keep me CLOSE?" "Yes." "Always?" "Always." "And you won't... remember ANYTHING?" "Nothing you don't want me to." "Tell me again... Put your... lips close to my ear... like that ... now tell me... "I think I'll... sleep a little now... You won't run away--while my eyes are shut?" "Never," he said. "Let me put my head... on your arm... like that." She closed her eyes, and then opened them to smile up at him. "This is... so nice," she said. When she opened her eyes again Bonbright was still there. He had not moved... Her smile blossomed for him again, and it was something like her old, famous smile, but sweeter, more tender. "I didn't... dream a bit of it," she said to herself. Hilda came in. "We're going to take her to our house, Bonbright, till she gets well. That's best, isn't it?" "Yes." "You'll come, won't you, Ruth--now?" "If my... husband comes, too," she said. CHAPTER XXXVI Ruth's strength returned miraculously, for it had not been her body that was ill, but her soul, and her soul was well now and at peace. Once she had thought that just to be at peace would be perfect bliss. She knew better now, for she was at peace, and happiness was hers, besides.... It was pitiful how she clung to Bonbright, how she held him back when he would be leaving in the morning, and how she watched the door for his return. Bonbright knew peace, too. Sometimes it seemed that the conflict was over for him and that he had sailed into a sure and quiet haven where no storm could reach him again. All that he had lacked was his; independence was his and the possibility of developing his own individualism. The ghosts of the ancestors were laid; Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was no longer a mold that sought to grasp him and turn him into something he was not and did not wish to be. The plan was proving itself, demonstrating its right to be. Even Malcolm Lightener was silenced, for the thing marched. It possessed vitals. Nor had it upset business, as Lightener once predicted. After the first tumult and flurry labor had settled back into its old ways. The man who worked for Bonbright Foote was envied, and that man and his family prospered and knew a better, bigger life. The old antagonism of his employees had vanished and he had become a figure to call out their enthusiasm. He believed every man of them was his friend, and, more than that, he believed he had found the solution to the great problem. He believed he had found a way of bringing together capital and labor so that they would lie down together like the millennial lion and lamb... All these things made for peace. But in addition he had Ruth's love, and that brought back his old boyishness, gave him something he had never had before, even in his youth--a love of life, a love of living, a gladness that awoke with him and accompanied him through his days. When Ruth was able to sit up they began to lay out their future and to plan plans. Already Bonbright was building a home, and the delight they had from studying architect's drawings and changing the position of baths and doors and closets and porches was unbelievable. Then came the furnishing of it, and at last the moving into it. "I'm almost glad it all happened," Ruth said. "Yes," said Bonbright. "We'd have been just ordinarily happy if we'd started like other folks... But to have gone through that--and come into all this!..." "Let's not remember it," he said. Then: "Ruth, you never make any suggestions--about the men. You know lots more about them than I do. You were born among them. But you just listen to me when I talk to you, and never offer a word." "I--I've been afraid to," she said. "Afraid?" "Yes... Don't you remember? It might look as if..." He silenced her, knowing what was her thought. "I'll never think anything about you that isn't so," he said. "Then I'll suggest--when I think of anything. But I couldn't have suggested any of it. I couldn't have dreamed it or hoped it. Nothing I could have asked for them would have been as--as splendid as this." "You believe in it?" "More than that. I've been into their homes. They were glad to see me. It was wonderful... Enough to eat, cleanliness, mothers at home with their babies instead of out washing, no boarders... And no worries. That was best. They showed me their bank accounts, or how they were buying homes, and how quickly they were paying for them... And I was proud when I thought it was my husband that did it." "Lightener says it looks all right now, but it won't last. He says it's impractical." "He doesn't know. How could he know as well as you do? Aren't you the greatest man in the world?" She said it half laughingly, but in her heart she meant it. She loved to talk business with him; to hear about the new mills and how they were turning out engines. She discussed his project of enlarging further, perhaps of manufacturing automobiles himself, and urged him on. "It will give work to more men, and bring more men under the plan," she said. That was her way of looking at it. Hilda came often, and laughed at them, but she loved them. "Just kids," she jeered, but she envied them and told them so. And then, because she deserved it, there came a man into her own life, and he loved her and she loved him. Whereupon Bonbright and Ruth returned her jeers with interest. More than a year went by, a year of perfection. Then came a cloud on the horizon. Even five dollars a day and the plan did not seem to content labor, and Bonbright became aware of it. Dulac was active again, or, rather, he had always been active. Discontent manifested itself.... It grew, and had to be repressed. In spite of the plan--in spite of everything, a strike threatened, became imminent. Ruth was thunderstruck, Bonbright bewildered. His panacea was not a panacea, then. He studied the plan to better it, and did make minor improvements, but in its elements it was just, fair. Bonbright could not understand, but Malcolm Lightener understood and the professor of sociology understood. "I can't understand it," Bonbright said to them. "Huh!" grunted Lightener. "It's just this: You're capital, and they're labor. That's it in a nutshell." "But it's fair." "To be sure it's fair--as fair as a thing can be. But the fact remains. Capital and labor can't get together as long as they remain capital and labor." The professor nodded. "You've said the thing that is, Mr. Lightener. But it's deeper than that. It's the inevitable surge upward of humanity. You rich men try to become richer. That is natural. You are reaching up. Labor has a long way to climb to reach you, but it wants to reach you. Perhaps it doesn't know it, but it does. As long as a height remains to be climbed to, man will try to climb... Class exists. The employer class and the employed. So long as one man can boss another; so long as one man can say to another, 'Do this or do that,' there will be conflict. Everybody, whether he knows it or not, wants to be his own boss, and by as much as he is bossed he is galled ... It can never be otherwise..." "You knew from the beginning I would fail," said Bonbright. "You haven't failed, my boy. You've done a fine thing; but you haven't solved a problem that has no solution... You are upset by it now, but after a while you'll see it and the disappointment will go. But you haven't failed... I don't believe you will ever understand all you have accomplished." But Bonbright was unhappy, and he carried his unhappiness to his wife. "It's all been futile," he said. She was wiser than he. "No," she said, hotly, "it's been wonderful ... Nothing was ever more wonderful. I've told you how I've visited them and seen the new happiness--seen women happy who had never been happy before; seen comfort where there had been nothing but misery ... It's anything but futile, dear. You've done your best--and it was a splendid best... If it doesn't do all you hoped, that's no sign of failure. I'm satisfied, dear." "They want something I can't give them." "Nobody can give it to them... It's the way things are. I think I understand what the professor said. It's true. You've given all you can and done all you can.... You'd have to be God and create a new world... Don't you see?" "I see..." he said. "I see..." "And you won't be unhappy about it?" He smiled. "I'm like the men, I guess. I want more than the world has to give me... I don't blame them. They're right." "Yes," she said, "they're right." It was not many weeks after this that Bonbright sat, frightened and anxious, in the library--waiting. A nurse appeared in the door and motioned. She smiled, and a weight passed from his heart. Bonbright followed into Ruth's room, pausing timidly at the door. "Come in, come in, young man. I have the pleasure to announce the safe arrival of Bonbright Foote VIII." Bonbright looked at Ruth, who smiled up at him and shook her head. "Not Bonbright Foote VIII, doctor," said Bonbright, as he moved toward his wife and son. "Plain Bonbright Foote. There are no numerals in this family. Everyone who is born into it stands by himself... I'll have no ancestors hanging around my boy's neck..." "I know it," Ruth whispered in his ear, "but I was a--a teeny bit--afraid. He's OURS--but he's more than that. He's HIS OWN... as God wants every man to be." THE END